Monday, December 31, 2007

Provo scams

I see that mathematical quack Mark Provo is back with a new paper about how his theories "explain" the large-scale structure of galaxies. Needless to say, this is complete and utter quackery, and a complete joke. His "theories" explain no such thing, except in the first-grade sense that he wrote a sentence with "galaxy" and "spiral" in it, and there happen to be some spiral galaxies. His paper, PROVOGALAXIES.PDF, does not contain a single equation, hypothesis, or conclusion.

Naturally, he thinks it's quite profound.

Warning: do not give money to this charlatan.

I have tried for months to ask journalistic questions about his work: where he's given the talks he claim have received great acclaim, why he doesn't attempt to publish in the peer-reviewed literature, why he won't even submit his work to the ArXiv. He ignores my questions because it's much easier for him to simply proclaim that I'm crazy.

I know, he's just another quack. That's OK, there are lots of quacks. But I'm concerned that people are actually giving him hard-earned money, thinking that he's on to something. That'd be a huge waste, and people need to be warned.

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