As promised, here's one last example what separates pseudo-scientists from real ones, although true believers of the former presumably continue to ignore all actual evidence.
As should be already clear, torsion "scientist" Claude Swanson belongs to that group of snake oil salesmen who may actually manage to damage not just people's understanding of science but their health as well by spreading ideas of whatever distance energy healing, similarly how torsion field pseudo-science has been used to sell homeopathy. There are already too many examples what can happen when gullible and vulnerable people replace real health care with those kinds of miracle cures. It should be obvious why advertising such nonsense is highly immoral. Additionally that Swanson is making blatant and ridiculous lies about scientific research, so it should be pretty obvious what kind of man he is.
But let's take one more example from that paper by Mark Krinker (which is not peer-reviewed or published in any journal, and his credentials are also highly questionable), submitted to arxiv on 28 Apr 2010. Here's a part from the introduction, plus the relevant references from the end, that refers specifically to Kozyrev, who seems to have several fans/worshippers here:
The special role of rotation was then shown by Soviet physicists N.A Kozyrev in his theoretical and experimental works with gyroscopes [2] and later by A.I.Veinik in his study of chrono-related effects [3]. It’s important to stress that Kozyrev and his colleagues observed variation of the weight of gyroscopes with non-stationary spinning. The results of Kozyrev’s experiments on the high-speed non-stationary gyroscopes were confirmed by other researchers [4]. The theory and practice of the torsion fields got a powerful development in works of G.I Shipov and A.E. Akimov in 90’s and our days.
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2. N.A Kosyrev. Possibility of Experimental Study of Properties of Time. Original title: O Vozmozhosti Experimental’nogo Issledovaniya Svoistv Vremeni. Pulkovo, September 1967.
3. Veinik A.I. "Termodinamika rjealnyh processov.", Minsk, Nauka i Tehnika, 1991, 576 p. (Russian) ("Thermodynamics of real processes.")
4. Hayasaka H., Takeuchi S. "Anomalous weight reduction on a gyroscope's right rotation around the vertical axis of the Earth. //Phys.rev.lett., 1989, # 63, p.2701-2704.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1004/1004.5161.pdf
So they make the claim that spinning gyroscopes are losing weight and that has been even confirmed by research by Hayasaka in 1989.
So fans of pseudo-science, take a pause, and try to think if it is realistic to expect that the scientific community at large would have ignored such groundbreaking result for more than half a century and decades after it had been validated? If you really believe so, you obviously don't understand how scientists all over the world are really trying to find phenomenon that would challenge existing theories in hopes of revealing ways to move forward. Do you really expect that understanding of fundamental physics, experimental protocols and equipment have just got worse during all those years, so that the best available information would have been attained in Russia decades ago? Such thoughts indicate quite a bit of disrespect towards the whole scientific community, just like ignoring for example the aforementioned stance of the Russian Academy of Sciences among others in favor of a few scammers.
So what about that research by Hayasaka? Here's the paper, published 18 December 1989:
Phys. Rev. Lett. 63, 2701 (1989) - Anomalous weight reduction on a gyroscope's right rotations around the vertical axis on the Earth
So what do you think would happen if someone actually manages to pass peer-review of a reputable scientific journal with such extraordinary claims? Do you expect some sort of scientific conspiracy to silence it or that they would be ignored? Or do you expect scientists would just believe whatever is published in such journals?
Here's a couple of examples how it hit the news pretty much instantly, both in mainstream and scientific media:
New York Times, December 28, 1989
Two Men and a Gyroscope May Rewrite Newton's Law
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Japanese scientists have reported that small gyroscopes lose weight when spun under certain conditions, apparently in defiance of gravity. If proved correct, the finding would mark a stunning scientific advance, but experts said they doubted that it would survive intense scrutiny.
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Unlike the exaggerated claims made for low-temperature, or ''cold,'' nuclear fusion this year, the current results are presented with scientific understatement. The authors do not claim to have defied gravity, but simply say their results ''cannot be explained by the usual theories.''
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''It's an astounding claim,'' said Dr. Robert L. Park, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland who is director of the Washington office of the American Physical Society, which publishes Physical Review Letters. ''It would be revolutionary if true. But it's almost certainly wrong. Almost all extraordinary claims are wrong.''
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Dr. Robert L. Forward, a consultant who helps the Air Force investigate advanced forms of propulsion, including claims of anti-gravity devices, said: ''It's a careful experiment. But I doubt it's real, primarily because I've seen so many of these things fall apart.''
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They reported no experimental errors. They also offered no explanation for the effect and no speculation on the possibility of creating anti-gravity engines for planes and spaceships. In their one concession to vivid language, they called the phenomenon ''extraordinary.''
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Dr. Forward, who aids the Air Force in its propulsion work, said the sheer volume of bogus anti-gravity claims threw doubt on the validity of the new finding. About a dozen extraordinary claims are made for rotating devices each year, he said, and in nearly all of them the effect turns out to be caused by stray vibrations.
Two Men and a Gyroscope May Rewrite Newton's Law
Side note: Robert Forward is one of those scientists who is often quoted in matters related to anti-gravity, yet his expectation was also some kind of error, as is usual for such claims.
Here's a continuation of the story from New York Times on February 8, 1990
Antigravity Theory of Researchers Is Challenged in Two New Studies
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Scientists are challenging on theoretical and experimental grounds a recent report by Japanese researchers that small gyroscopes lose weight when spun under certain conditions, apparently in defiance of gravity.
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But an article today in the journal Nature cast doubt on the Japanese findings, saying subtle errors could account for them.
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''It is possible to construct an argument to show that vibration in the gyro would lead to a misleading result,'' wrote Dr. S. H. Salter, a mechanical engineer at the University of Edinburgh. For instance, he said, the vibration could be caused by slight differences in the tracks that house the ball bearings at the two ends of the spinning gyroscope, throwing off the experimental readings.
Vibrations Could be Factor
Dr. Salter calculated that the force of such vibrations would be enough to account for the Japanese results.
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The Japanese work has also been challenged by Dr. James E. Faller, a physicist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He tried to duplicate the Japanese experiment, with some minor differences, but found no losses in gyroscope weight. In an interview, Dr. Faller said a report on his experiment had been accepted by Physical Review Letters. It is to appear Feb. 19, he said.
'Somebody Has to Turn This Off'
''People have shied away from replicating the experiment because they think it's not worth doing,'' he said. ''But somebody has to turn this off before it goes wild.''
He said his apparatus had a sensitivity 35 times that needed to see the reported Japanese effect. ''We got nothing - flat out nothing,'' Dr. Faller said. ''We had the sensitivity and there's nothing. So the question is, Should the world of physics do more and more precise experiments? Surely not.''
At least one other major attempt at replication, this one by a team of United States Government scientists, has failed to get positive results. A member of the team said he could make no comment on the work until it had been accepted for publication by a journal.
Antigravity Theory of Researchers Is Challenged in Two New Studies
Similar story from NewScientist on 17 February 1990:
The Japanese results received so much publicity in the US that Robert Park of the American Physical Society (which publishes Physical Review Letters) said: ‘We have been flooded with calls from around the world. Most are from people claiming to have had the idea first; some say they have a patent on it; several have pointed out that flying saucers work that way.’
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Several pieces of evidence suggest that Hayasaka and Takeuchi had to counter a series of critical reports by referees before their paper was accepted. Physical Review Letters published their paper 18 months after receiving it, which is an exceptional delay for a journal of scientific letters. And the two researchers devote the second half of their paper to anticipating and answering possible criticisms.
Most scientists are sceptical of the claims. They cannot explain the size of the observed weight loss by any of the corrections to Newton’s theory of gravity that they normally apply. And there is no other physical effect that they know of that depends on the direction of spin of a gyroscope.
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The real test of the experiment will of course come when other groups repeat it. The first such reports are now coming in. A team at the highly-respected joint Institute for Laboratory Astro physics and the National Institute of Standards and Technology at Boulder, Colorado, has repeated the experiment. Jim Faller and his colleagues report no anomalous reduction in the weight of their gyroscopes.
If the results from Japan are true, the consequences would be profound. An explanation for flying saucers remains unlikely, though, because the gyroscope would need to spin at 200 million revolutions per minute to counterbalance all its weight! The main consequence would be the overthrow of our present understanding of the force of gravity. Effects that are based on spin are not new; Einstein himself foresaw their possibility.
The embarrassing part about the present claims would be that the effect is much larger than existing theories with spin effects could plausibly accommodate. Indeed, if the same effect applied to spinning elementary particles, there might be an observable contribution in experiments testing Einstein’s ‘equivalence principle’: that all bodies experience the same gravitation acceleration. Similarly, there could be effects in atomic spectra.
Science: Does a spinning mass really lose weight?
So the experiment was repeated with higher sensitivities and just like most expected, it turned to be some kind of experimental error. Here are the papers of 3 attempts to replicate it, all with null results:
Gyroscope-Weighing Experiment with a Null Result (J. E. Faller, W. J. Hollander, P. G. Nelson, and M. P. McHugh), 19 FEBRUARY 1990
A recent experiment reporting an anomalous weight reduction for a spinning gyroscope weighed on a pan balance has been repeated in our laboratory. We find no anomalous weight changes of the magnitude reported that depend on rotor speed and/or rotational sense about the vertical axis.
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We cannot say what possible systematic error or errors would account for the results of Hayasaka and Takeuchi. What we can say is that for our spinning rotor and to the limit of our experimental sensitivity, there is no observed weight change that depends on either the angular speed or sense of rotation.
https://www.researchgate.net/profil...pe-Weighing-Experiment-with-a-Null-Result.pdf
Null result for the weight change of a spinning gyroscope (J. M. Nitschke and P. A. Wilmarth), 30 April 1990
A null result was obtained for the weight change of a right-spinning gyroscope, contradicting the results recently reported by Hayasaka and Takeuchi. No weight change could be observed under a variety of spin directions for rotational frequencies between 0 and 2.2×10^4 rpm. Our limit of -0.025±0.07 mg is more than 2 orders of magnitude smaller than the effect reported by Hayasaka and Takeuchi.
Phys. Rev. Lett. 64, 2115 (1990) - Null result for the weight change of a spinning gyroscope
Null Result for the Violation of Equivalence Principle with Free-Fall Rotating Gyroscopes (J. LUO, Y. X. Nie, Y. Z. Zhang, Z. B. Zhou), June 20, 2001
The differential acceleration between a rotating mechanical gyroscope and a non-rotating one is directly measured by using a double free-fall interferometer, and no apparent differential acceleration has been observed at the relative level of 2×10-6. It means that the equivalence principle is still valid for rotating extended bodies, i.e., the spin-gravity interaction between the extended bodies has not been observed at this level. Also, to the limit of our experimental sensitivity, there is no observed asymmetrical effect or anti-gravity of the rotating gyroscopes as reported by hayasaka et al.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0111069.pdf
Note that all this happened
a couple of decades before pseudo-scientist Krinker was still trying to claim that an invalid result confirms the work of Kozyrev. He makes no mention that the result has been invalidated, and since that is easy to find with a single google search, it is pretty obvious it's not just a matter of ignorance but most likely purposeful dishonesty. So fans of pseudo-science, once again you are trusting liars. And by the way, his paper also references his work on dowsing and feng shui, which once again shows how such people tend to believe all sorts of pseudo-science instead of just one.
NASA has also published a document (December 2006) showing how they need to deal with all sorts of anti-gravity claims all the time, and it also references that paper by Hayasaka:
Based on the experiences of the NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, suggestions are
offered for constructively responding to proposals that purport breakthrough propulsion using mechanical
devices. Because of the relatively large number of unsolicited submissions received (about 1 per
workday) and because many of these involve similar concepts, this report is offered to help the would-be
submitters make genuine progress as well as to help reviewers respond to such submissions. Devices that
use oscillating masses or gyroscope falsely appear to create net thrust through differential friction or by
misinterpreting torques as linear forces. To cover both the possibility of an errant claim and a genuine
discovery, reviews should require that submitters meet minimal thresholds of proof before engaging in
further correspondence; such as achieving sustained deflection of a level-platform pendulum in the case
of mechanical thrusters.
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Another category of commonly purported mechanical breakthroughs consists of a system of
gyroscopes. A famous example is from the 1973 demonstration by Eric Laithwaite, where a spinning gyro
is shown to rise upward while it is forced to presses (ref. 18). Although such upward motion is a
consequence of conservation of angular momenta, it is easily misinterpreted as an “antigravity” effect
(ref. 19). Laithwaite, a Professor of Applied Electricity at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 1967–
1975 (ref. 20), went on to patent a device (fig. 7), that claims to produce linear force from such torques
(ref. 21).
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In 1989 there were reports where a flywheel appeared to lose weight when rotating clockwise (when
viewed from above) when its axis was aligned parallel to the earth’s gravitational field. Oddly, no weight
change was observed during counterclockwise rotation under otherwise identical circumstances (ref. 27).
Two separate attempts to replicate these observations, using higher degrees of sensitivity, failed to
confirm any such effect (refs. 28 and 29). Since this concept does not involve changing the position or
orientation of the gyro’s axis, it is not in this category of “gyroscopic antigravity”
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20070004897.pdf
As far as science is concerned, that was the end of that story.
But of course none of this matters to true believers, they don't care if their idols are exposed as charlatans one after another. It's the exact same thing with religious fundamentalists, creationists etc. They have their prophets and other holy men, who can't do science, but they are to believed no matter what, even when they obviously lie, most likely because the lies give the sort of comfort that reality doesn't. And if they had to abandon some, there's always the next one and next excuse and next conspiracy.
Just remember that by doing so you earn and deserve the same amount of credibility as those other religiously motivated groups etc. That is basically none. And you are giving a similar contribution to the society in hindering the progress of real science and public understanding of it. You should also understand what kind of damage you are causing for efforts of making UFOs a subject that could be taken seriously and approached scientifically. It doesn't exactly help if the so called UFO community has widespread tendencies for anti-science attitudes, lack of critical thinking, and advertises all sorts of old scams and pseudo-sciences that rational people laugh at.
I have been trying to make the point that the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence doesn't belong to the same category as all sorts of pseudo-scientific and superstitious claims, but it's pretty hard to do that in light of the various common beliefs within that community. It's bad enough when high visibility targets like TTSA have linked themselves to telepathy, ESP etc., and even worse when their supporters so widely accept it.
It really isn't a surprise that real scientist generally do not want to be associated with the subject as it's so likely to bring along those other associations to all kinds of nonsense. In principle, rational discussion about UFOs shouldn't be that far away from SETI, since they are basically searching the same thing. But at the moment SETI scientists hardly have any more interest in having being associated with UFOs in any way. Here's one good example of why. It's a blog post by Jason Wright, known for his work on Tabby's Star, who posted that just a couple of days ago. I will only quote a couple of parts from the beginning and from the end, and I recommend reading that whole post:
SETI tends to get media attention, at an amount disproportionate to the amount of SETI work actually done. There are many reasons for this. One is that it is a topic of genuine interest to much of the lay public. Another is that it is easily sensationalized and conflated with UFOlogy and science fiction by the yellow press.
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SETI astronomers have had to deal with conflation with UFOlogy and fringe psuedoscience for decades; I hope that more of our colleagues will recognize that we share their disdain for sensationalism and are pulling in the same direction on the issue of sober science communication about good science.
SETI is Not About Getting Attention | AstroWright
