勿忘我

From the Wikipedia article on FORTRAN (emphasis mine):

The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.” —Early FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers

Another thing I learnt from the Wikipedia article was that the arbitrary and somewhat arcane syntax of early versions of FORTRAN was blamed, among other things, for the crash of the Mariner I space probe. It appears to have been merely a tall tale, one that has since been superseded by the much more expensive error of neglecting to convert between English and metric units¹ which plagued the NASA expedition to Mars in 1999. It’s not often to witness a software error result in a physical crash, but in this case this bug caused the Mars Climate Orbiter to deorbit and plunk itself on the surface of Mars, resulting in catastrophic failure of the entire Mars mission and wasting a cool $190m in funding.

1. Not by NASA itself, it seems, but from contracted software written by Lockheed-Martin↩

Also new to 2007 will be the irregular posts on crackpot science. John Baez’s Crackpot Index checklist will be very useful to evaluate the websites posted here critically.

This post focuses on the website entitled Towards a Grand Unified Field Theory based on Phi Recursion and Quantum Gravity, where it claims that it contains

some of the equations I have derived with regards to infinite Phi-recursion and the gFactor of the electron. I will give a much more complete and in- depth mathematical and conceptual formalism of these ideas as the website progresses towards its ultimate destiny, A Grand Unified Field Theory (GUFT) based on Phi-recursion and Quantum gravity.

Apparently, the Theory of Everything comes from mixing links to several dozen freely available Word documents with a generously huge SU(55) X SU(34) X SU(21) X SU(13) X SU(8) X SU(5) symmetry group, the Da Vinci Deception, meditative mandalas, Ter-Dragon fractals, a child born in the Flower Power Era of American hedonism, and artwork depicting Calabi-Yau manifolds¹. Of course, only a genius could figure out that one…

Technobabble, check. Buzzwords, check. Incoherence, check. Extra credit is in order for the incredibly psychadelic science-art.

1. strictly speaking, these are only 3D projections of, since Calabi-Yau shapes are really manifolds in n complex dimensions.↩