Stuffing a Turkey: Another Round With Rountree.

So I've been waiting awhile for David Rountree to respond to my criticism of his "academic paper", I've been waiting even longer for him to actually direct me to his doctoral thesis, which is still, as far as I'm concerned, non-existent. He has responded, in exactly the way a man of his academic stature would be expected to.


By telling me to engage in fellatio with multiple penises on facebook.

Sweet.

Frankly, David, I'd rather snack on a thousand sacks of genitals than swallow an ounce of the bullshit you feed your followers.

But I don't blame Rountree for gloating, noted physicist Michael Robishaw totally agrees with his research and findings. Wait did I say "noted physicist"? I meant "self-proclaimed Psychic healer, shamen and spiritual warrior", none of which qualify him to verify theories in physics. In fact lets be honest, the only reason a person surrounds himself with so many self-appointed bullshit titles is because he or she is fundamentally unremarkable otherwise.

So what was the cause of Rountree's gloating anyway? It turns out he'd read this article: Magnetic Wormhole created in lab published on IB times August 22nd 2015. Unfortunately for Rountree, he either didn't bother to read the article fully or didn't understand it... or there's a third possibility which I'll get to in a second.

The first line of the article Dave shared states: "A wormhole for magnets has been created by scientists in a laboratory. The wormhole is not of the space-time variety, but rather it tunnels a magnetic field from one point to another." So its not the type of wormhole which Rountree's theory relies on. This magnetic wormhole is a wormhole in name alone. Of course I let Rountree know this on Twitter, which resulted in him immediately blocking me after telling me to "get a life".

Blocking opponents of his, is nothing new for Rountree, and he's clearly avoiding a discussion regarding his wormhole theory. But there is something more insidious at work here in my opinion. Dave is protecting the fragile web of lies he has constructed around his scientific credentials. He knows that a public debate with anyone (quite literally anyone in his case) with the ability to punch holes in this faux "man of science" image risks the admiration and respect he has lied to garner. Rountree fears exposure more than anything else, that's why he claims to be a quantum physicist on YouTube and Twitter, but not on Research Gate a site for academics (see here). He knows that an actual academic would expose him as a fraud in seconds.

His opinion of his followers and fan's intelligence must be very low indeed. I think he's fairly confident that they won't understand the research he linked to and why it doesn't support his wormhole bullshit.

Rountree clearly thrives in an echo-chamber, and he has a few dotted around. For example, I was recently directed to this thread in the "Keeping the Paranormal Friendly" forum. Here Rountree exposes more of his bullshit pseudo-science. Laughably one particular section of Rountree's first post shows how fundamentally dishonest Rountree is. He plagiarises the following section but can't bare leave it in its original form. Check out the one adjustment:

Rountree:

"Researchers have no observational evidence for wormholes, until now. The equations of the theory of general relativity have valid solutions that contain wormholes. Because of its robust theoretical strength, a wormhole is one of the great physics metaphors for teaching general relativity."

Original source, Planetary science.org

"Researchers have no observational evidence for wormholes, but the equations of the theory of general relativity have valid solutions that contain wormholes. Because of its robust theoretical strength, a wormhole is one of the great physics metaphors for teaching general relativity."

Laughably his addition of "until now" not only makes no grammatical sense, it's  directly contradicted by what follows!

Needless to say, Rountree's entire post plagiarises this source wholesale, unfortunately, he fails to perform a further edit and omit the following.

" Physicists have not found any natural process that would be predicted to form a wormhole naturally in the context of general relativity..."

Err... whoops...

Rountree is very much in his element in this forum, he clearly feels this is a safe space in which his bullshit is unlikely to be challenged. He's probably right. The moderator and some other posters fawn all over Rountree. He responds to this adulation by adopting a professorial tone, congratulating his mock students for not challenging his bullshit, such praise as "Yes, that's right Paige. Good memory."

But my favourite line is the following, the one utterance that should scream to anyone who has studied physics, that Rountree is not only a sham, but he literally doesn't have doesn't a blind clue. Really, this is a doozy.

"Well ignore the math. The math is used mearly for scientific verification of the concepts discussed. When you see the equations, just mentally say "Oh, this is the justufucation for the statement""

"Ignore the maths," said no physicist EVER.  Remember Dr Matt Hunt's words when he took a look at Rountree's quantum physics pdfs?

"There are no equations when talking about quantum mechanics which suggests he doesn't have the skills to understand them."

Rountree dismisses the importance of the mathematical foundations of physics because he can't do the maths. This is why there isn't a single use of mathematics in his "wormhole" paper.

 But Rountree doesn't just preach to the faithful to social media and forums, he also blogs to them mocking critics of his theory. In a post entitled "The Next Level" he writes:

"I will be doing my first attempt at artificially opening a wormhole this weekend..... This is a serious experiment based on my thesis work, so the outcome is very important to me. oh wait, i forget i lied about my educational credentials thus i am uneducated. Lol."

The level of arrogance here is astounding considering Rountree categorically DID lie about his education.

Much of the article focuses on the casimir effect, in the discussion of this Rountree massively misrepresents one of the main arguments of his critics:

"...the Casimir effect plays an important role in the chiral bag model of the nucleon; in applied physics, it is significant in some aspects of emerging microtechnologies and nanotechnologies.This is not theoretical. This is a proven and measured effect...."

Yes, that's true. But no-one is arguing this! Rountree's critics point out to him that WORMHOLES are theoretical not the casimir effect.

Speaking of the Casimir effect, Rountree laughably spells "casimir" and "resonances" wrong at several points throughout the piece. Now I think its pretty low to focus on an opponents spelling and grammar in a debate, its usually a fair sign that you haven't got much else to focus on, but there is a really good reason for my to focus on spelling here. Roundtree, you see, doesn't spell Casimir wrong throughout the account. In fact he switches between spellings.

This implies the Rountree is up to his old plagerism tricks, remember how I showed that his "paper" published on Research Gate was made up of a huge amount of text copy and pasted from Wikipedia? Well after I wrote that some inspired soul ran it through Grammarly and found that a whopping 44% of it was plagiarised! Take a look at the PDF here. Anyway back to this post. A quick scan on Plagscan of the first half of the post alone shows a staggering amount of plagiarism. Most comes from Rountree's go to source Wikipedia, other sites he has STOLEN from include Yahoo answers, the Anderson Institute and laughably Youtube comments sections!

If this doesn't persuade you that  Rountree has none of the expertise he claims nothing will, these aren't even legitimate scientific sources. If he is going to plagiarise, why Wikipedia and Yahoo answers? Why not published papers and peer reviewed journals? I suspect Rountree is so deluded, and crucially, not scientifically literate, that he can't identify a legitimate source. 

He further reveals this in his closing words:

I will at this time refrain from revealing any further details of the work, incuding protocols and equipment identification, configuration, and experiment protocols. Simply because its my work. I own it. And i want the stalkers and trolls to melt down from curiosity. Because…well….I can. More to come. Hopefully….

Sorry Dave that's not how legitimate science works, you have to reveal your methodology! Also you critics aren't stalkers and trolls, Criticism is a vital part of the scientific methods. What are you going to do when your research is actually brought before your peers for peer review? Tell them to get a life if they critique it? What about the projects which endeavour to replicate your results if they fail? Will they also be told to eat a bag of dicks?

Speaking of said interesting meal suggestion, mine has just arrived.

Merry Christmas Everyone!