Few things warm the heart of a scientist more readily than a query from a young, curious mind, eager to learn about our universe. Why, just now I received this inquiring email:
R xxxxxx xxxxxx@hotmail.com to me
Sean,
Neutrons have no chemical properties and reflect no light, but they do have mass and occupy space =matter, and clouds of them will never be visible in space!
I find it difficult to believe people who are supposed to be so smart are suck fucking retards!
Cheers Retard ,
Robert
For the curious:
Always happy to help a fellow seeker of knowledge.
You might want to invest in a spam filter, the space=matter bit should be a trigger all by itself.
To quote the Doctor, “What. What? WHAT?!”
How very thoughtful of Robert. Any idea what brought that on?
And here we see the infant crank, being kept down by The Man for the first time. In but a few years, he will have matured into a truly conceited beast, convinced that his theory of vortex energy makes him the one true successor of Einstein and Newton.
The reward for any scientist who has accomplished something noteworthy enough that it reaches beyond the confines of academia will be a slew of letters from crackpots, each one insisting that the recipient is a hide-bound drone too cowardly and unimaginative to understand the real truth of the Universe.
you should have posted his email. perhaps it was attached to a facebook account?
Depressing.
Perhaps he was confusing neutrons with neutrinos… though I don’t exactly see how you could have clouds of neutrinos either…. well perhaps held together by gravitational attraction.
This reminds me of the last episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage (http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/timc). I swear I could hear Brian Cox grinding his teeth when Billy Bragg insisted that since you couldn’t taste it, touch it, see it or smell it then believing in dark energy/matter (he doesn’t realize they’re different) is just the same as believing in god.
Yeah, that’s the quality I have come to expect from “alternative theories”.
Brilliant!
Wait… what was the point he was trying to make?
At least he said “cheers”.
He probably got his PhD from Liberty University.
Judging from the language, odds are that the person was just a Troll trying to provoke a response. Best to ignore such people. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Troll
It is frustrating when you find = people you think are so smart are really … it happens !
Sean, please reveal his email address so I can add him to my “Personal Idols” circle on Google+. Also, this “Clamski” person in comment 15 sounds like a troll.
Sean, you should have pointed him to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Enjoy the human interaction.
So….Robert thinks that it never occurred to astrophysicist types to consider neutrons as a source of dark matter.
It’s like those creationist rants that revolve around how evolution violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Never thought of that, did you, biologists?
That’s a real intellectual challenge, Sean. Can you possibly answer that question?
Somehow I got through four years of a minor in physics without learning (or not remembering) that neutrons decay that quickly, so at least I learned something interesting as a result of Robert being a jerk.
My first reaction was the same as RK’s, that I would have published his email address so that all civilized bloggers could have proactively banned it, but on reflection, your choice was classier.
I think perhaps he misplaced a comma. His closing was meant to be:
Cheers,
Retard Robert
There, all fixed.
“That’s DOCTOR Retard to you, young man.”
Ed (and others), the ‘R’ word is a derogatory slur on the order of the ‘N’ word:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T549VoLca_Q
Do you really want to reduce yourself to that level?