#1949: Miles Mathis

Miles Mathis is an artist, poet and writer, and one of the more colorful pseudoscientists – and insane conspiracy theorists – of the whole wide Internet.

Pseudomath

He is probably most famous for his claim that π is actually 4, though with the caveat that it be a “kinematic situation”, which sort of misses some important points about how mathematics works and π is calculated. Mathis also thinks that standard mathematical derivatives are false, and consequently that most of math and science is wrong well, predictive success to the contrary. (“Quantitatively, this may be THE biggest error in all of math and physics, since every single physical equation with π in it must now be thrown out”.) Mathis’s ideas have not been accepted by anyone minimally affected by reason and rationality (there is a good critique here). Part of the reason is that he doesn’t quite seem to grasp how mathematical proofs work, which is a bit of a drawback if you are trying to do one. Nor does he even remotely grasp the use–mention distinction or the distinction between a thing and a representation of that thing, or between a graph and what it can be used to represent. Needless to say, the inability to draw these distinctions is not conducive to doing good mathematics. There’s a good discussion of his work here, and a very courteous refutation here. An example (Mathis’s writings contain long passages like this): “Now let us return to the geometric circle. All the equations of geometry are created by assuming that time is not a factor. You can’t really just ignore time, so what the geometry does is assume that all underlying time intervals are equal. What does that mean, specifically? Well, it must mean that all the lines are understood to have been drawn with the same velocity. We can ignore the velocity since we define it as equivalent. What does that mean? It means that the radius is a velocity itself.” This is incorrect.

Of course, this is just the doorway to the rabbit hole. Since calculus is wrong and the derivatives have been calculated wrong (he shows this primarily by trying to redefine the derivatives), and any physical experiment that relies on them wrong as well, Mathis has developed his own unified field theory, which for the most part is an esoteric model based on extravagant and untestable hypotheses and confusions, but from which he draws some notable conclusions, e.g.:

“This means that if the Earth were denser, you would weigh less, not more. You weigh less on the Moon not because it is less dense, or because it has less mass, but because its foundational E/M field is stronger. And its foundational E/M field is stronger because the Moon’s radius is smaller than the Earth’s.”

Or:

“This means that the dark matter math is also a type of modified Newtonian dynamics. It is modified in that it takes the definitions and turns them upside down. We could call it a FFAND: a falsified and fudged Newtonian dynamics.”

Conspiracy theories

Mathis’s writings extend beyond math and science, however. Given that he claims to have overturned more or less all of science and mathematics, it is hardly surprising that he thinks scientists are in a conspiracy to suppress the truth and block information (paywalls, for instance, is a measure to hide information).

And from there, it is a short step to adopting virtually any other conspiracy theory you could dream of as well. Mathis has claimed that the Boston Marathon bombing was faked and that the Sandy Hook mass shooting was a “scripted tragedy”, and he is both a birther and a 9/11 truther; indeed, according to Mathis the Lincoln assassination was faked as well. Moreover, all the major Internet sites, including NASA’s or those devoted to mainstream physics, are infiltrated by the CIA, and John Lennon is still alive in Canada after faking his own death, whereas Stephen Hawking is not but has been replaced by an impostor. 

As with most of those who subscribe to ranges of conspiracy theories like this, his writings eventually devolves into anti-semitism. Among the people Mathis has accused of being Jewish are Jack Nicklaus, C.S. Lewis, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Adolf Hitler, Napoleon Bonaparte and Pierre-Simon de Laplace.

Diagnosis: One of the most hysterically delusional cranks on the whole of Internet. And as with so many promoters of garbled, incoherent insanity, Mathis actually enjoys a number of followers ready to display anger, lack of comprehension and general idiocy in comment sections across the web. He must nevertheless be counted among the Internet’s curious splashes of color rather than as a serious threat to anything whatsoever.

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki (Mathis does not seem to like his rationalwiki article or hesitate to accuse its editors of being in part of a conspiracy to suppress him and his insights).