Maurice Cotterell is wrong about everything

        Maurice Cotterell is the dude who made me giggle back in 2011 by saying that if you lined up all the elements in the periodic table, in a row in little containers, you'd get "all the energy you'd ever need." Well, it turns out that this anti-science clown can be catastrophically wrong about more than just the periodic table. He was on Coast to Coast AM last night, and the station published a kind of cheat-sheet to help us all follow along.

        A thorough critical review of this hilarious nonsense would be fun to do but ultimately boring, so I'm just going to pick out two simple elements to mock. First, look at the text at the bottom of page 1:

"[T]here's also a problem with Newton's equation that is just too embarrassing for modern Science to talk about. It goes like this: Galileo showed that all objects fall to the ground at exactly the same acceleration and speed—which is not what Newton's equation says; for example, if we change the apple [m1] with a cannonball [M3], then his equation says that the Force must go up. And if the Force goes up then—given that Force = Mass × Acceleration—the acceleration, and the speed, must increase. Newton couldn't answer this question because he never understood how gravity works."

        So a self-taught engineer with a humanities degree thinks he knows more about gravity than Isaac Newton? Many quite young schoolboys and girls would see the flaw in this argument quite quickly. Cotterell increases the mass in his imaginary experiment from m1 to M3, then says that the force of attraction between the mass and the planet we stand on increases pro rata, and that the equation F = ma then requires that a increase. But you see, dear Maurice, since you've increased the value of m, there is no requirement for a to increase as well.

        Expressed mathematically, the force of attraction of a mass m by a planet of mass M and radius r is:

F = GmM/r² where G is Newton's gravitational constant

        The acceleration of that mass toward the planet, when any support is removed, is given by:

a = F/m
a = GmM/mr²
a = GM/r²

        Since the m's cancel out, a is independent of the mass you're dropping off the leaning tower of Pisa in  the case of a cannonball, or your kitchen table in the case of a falling jam butty. It's a different law that dictates that a jam butty lands jammy side down.

Gyros
        Cotterell is awfully wrong about gravity, but last night he went even one step more wrong than that, declaring that "when you spin an object, it becomes weightless." He cited the renowned engineer Eric Laithwaite who, according to Cotterell, demonstrated that a spinning gyroscope levitates. However, that's not what Laithwaite showed at all. He showed that if you apply a twisting force to a gyroscope, the reaction is offset by 90°. That's what gyroscopes do. Here's Laithwaite's demo, and here's a very simple confirmation that a gyro doesn't get any lighter when you spin it up. Never mind that Laithwaite himself was fooled by this phenomenon for a while—he understood it eventually. Note that if he had twisted the gyro in the other direction it would have reacted by going down, not up.

        I don't expect George Noory to be a genius at physics, but when a guest on his show makes a statement like that which is so obviously in error, I think we might at least expect something like "Are you sure about that Maurice?"