Biswajit, 

Is there anything specific on this guy's website that you think is of interest?  I have glanced at some of the papers and I am not sure where I would start in pointing out the flaws.  One example is that he claims that the continuity equation "has the side effect that energy is conserved".  Have you looked at this?  Do you understand where these comments are coming from?  At first glance I cannot imagine how he has gotten these papers past review.

Chad 

Although I doubt Mr. Koenemann will read this post, I thought I might try to address some of the questions he posts on his site.  These are very short answers, and in some cases there is a deeper discussion that may be required.  The numbered questions are his, and the answers are mine.

For his comments on these questions go to: 

http://www.elastic-plastic.de/Hp-5point.htm 

It actually might be a good exercise for students to think about these questions and how to answer them. 

1.  Why do you use an equation of motion and not an equation of state?

Ans: In continuum mechanics one uses both an equation of motion and an equation of state.

2.  Why do you use Newton's equilibrium condition and not the thermodynamic equilibrium condition which distinguishes system and surrounding?

Ans: Newton's equilibrium condition and what I believe you mean by "thermodynamic equilibrium" are independent concepts.  Again, continuum mechanics uses both.

3.  There are bonds in solids, but there's no mention of bonds in this theory. Aren't bonds important for the understanding of a solid?

Ans: Certainly bonds are important for understanding the behavior of solids.  With the appropriate assumptions the stored energy in the bonds can be related to the strain energy of the solid (i.e. the equation of state of the solid).

4.  Newton defined a rotating force as being perpendicular to the radius of a body. Here you define a shear force as being perpendicular to the normal of a planar element, which is an unit vector. These definitions are incompatible with one another because the magnitude of the radius vector can vary with direction whereas the unit vector cannot. Why do you believe that Newton's definition is wrong?

Ans: Although I am not familiar with Newton's definition of a rotating force (did he really define this?), these definitions appear to be independent and so are not incompatible.  I do not see what the issue is here.

5.  If you deform a body, say, a circle, by stretching it in X, work is done upon the body in X. Let's say this is negative work. But the body will contract in Z, so positive work is done in Z. If the volume remains constant, the work in X and the work in Z must balance, so no net work is done. Isn't this impossible?

Ans: First, if you stretch a body, the work done to stretch it will not be negative unless the body is unstable.  The contraction in "Z" has no work associated with is unless there is a force in the "Z" direction during the "X" stretching process.

It's certainly interesting to challenge our understanding of these underlying parts of our discipline. However, I really have trouble understanding what is being talked about. I thought the poster and ultra-short five-point summary would help me get what Koenemann was saying, but they proved unhelpful to me.

The math on the poster page will not display right, and I just have to guess too much. I was glad to see a link to a .doc file at the bottom that I might be able to view and was glad when I saw it was missing but there was a similar PDF file posted. However, this was only for a small part of the page containing only images and plain text, which are easily displayed on the web.

The five point summary leaves me without any real answers. I am very sad if no one tried to express Konemann's concerns, but I have a hard time believing that is really the case. Perhaps no one addressed them to his satisfaction. (In a more cynical mood, I might just say that no one told him he was right.) Forgive me for being harsh, but Konemann was very harsh as well.

His five points are

1. Why do you use an equation of motion and not an equation of state?
2. Why do you use Newton's equilibrium condition and not the thermodynamic equilibrium condition which distinguishes system and surrounding?
3. There are bonds in solids, but there's no mention of bonds in this theory. Aren't bonds important for the understanding of a solid?
4. Newton defined a rotating force as being perpendicular to the radius of a body. Here you define a shear force as being perpendicular to the normal of a planar element, which is an unit vector. These definitions are incompatible with one another because the magnitude of the radius vector can vary with direction whereas the unit vector cannot. Why do you believe that Newton's definition is wrong?
5. If you deform a body, say, a circle, by stretching it in X, work is done upon the body in X. Let's say this is negative work. But the body will contract in Z, so positive work is done in Z. If the volume remains constant, the work in X and the work in Z must balance, so no net work is done. Isn't this impossible?

This doesn't really help me.

Number 3 confuses me. It's hopelessly vague. It has nothing to do with whether continuum mechanics presents a reasonable way to understand the behaviour of materials.

Number 4 is equally confusing. There are several differences between Newtonian mechanics and continuum mechanics, why isn't this one of them? If I understand the criticism correctly, this is indeed a simplification of physics we take at the infinitesimal level to be able to solve problems.

Number 5 is not helpful for me. Firstly, the description is poor. I suppose we are talking about a disc in the X-Z plane? Secondly and more importantly, I don't understand how the problem exists. What work is done in Z? There's no force spoken of in Z? The work done in X balances with the internal work of the body, if I understand. The only external work is done by the place there is external force.

Numbers 1 and 2 are more the key parts of what he is saying, I think. I don't really understand where continuum mechanics is supposed to have erred, though. Certainly, some equilibrium conditions are enforced, but perhaps not the right ones?

Maybe I need to read the papers.

This guy is a joke.  Don't waste time.  You find only preprints in Archiv http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0103/0103010.pdf

and there the few citations are self-citations.

Maybe the guy is real and is just playing with you.  Now he had his 5 minutes celebrity, that's it !

Regards Mike

Query: "Koenemann FH": all
Summary: <<
Papers:    9    Cites/paper:    1.00    h-index:    2    AWCR:    1.00
Citations:    9    Cites/author:    9.00    g-index:    3    AW-index:    1.00
Years:    16    Papers/author:    5.83    hc-index:    2    AWCRpA:    1.00
Cites/year:    0.56    Authors/paper:    1.44    hI-index:    2.00
                hI,norm:    2

Hirsch a=2.25, m=0.13
Contemporary ac=1.00
Cites/paper 1.00/0.0/0 (mean/median/mode)
Authors/paper 1.44/1.0/1 (mean/median/mode)

1 paper(s) with 0 author(s)
4 paper(s) with 1 author(s)
3 paper(s) with 2 author(s)
1 paper(s) with 3 author(s)
>>

Cites,Authors,Title,Year,Source,Publisher,ArticleURL,CitesURL
4,"FH Koenemann","Cauchy stress in mass distributions",2001,"Arxiv preprint physics/0103010","arxiv.org",

"http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0103010",

"http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=100&hl=en&lr=&cites=2571967473311119441"
3,"FH Koenemann","Unorthodox Thoughts about Deformation, Elasticity, and Stress",2001,"Zeitschrift für Naturforschung. A, A Journal of physical …","znaturforsch.com","
http://znaturforsch.com/aa/v56a/56a0794.pdf","http://scholar.google.com/...
2,"FH Koenemann","Tectonics of the Scandian orogeny and the Western Gneiss Region in southern Norway",1993,"International Journal of Earth Sciences","Springer","
http://www.springerlink.com/index/Q8520JU4TK523267.pdf","http://scholar....
0,"FH Koenemann, I Johannistal","On the systematics of energetic terms in continuum mechanics, and a note on Gibbs (1877)",0,"elastic-plastic.de","","
http://www.elastic-plastic.de/Gibbs.pdf","http://scholar.google.com/scho...
0,"H Forster, FH Koenemann, U Knittel","Regional framework for gold deposits of the Odzi-Mutare-Manica greenstone belt, Zimbabwe-Mozambique",1996,"Transactions of the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy. …","","","
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=Forster+Regional+framework+*+go...
0,"","Linear Elasticity and Potential Theory: a Comment on Gurtin (1972)",0,"","","","
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=100&hl=en&lr=&q=related:xa3JQfIzLW...
0,"FH Koenemann, I Johannistal","A Reevaluation of the Cauchy Stress Hypothesis",0,"elastic-plastic.de","","
http://www.elastic-plastic.de/re-eval.pdf","http://scholar.google.com/sc...
0,"FH Koenemann, I Johannistal","An approach to deformation theory based on Boyles law. IV. Application to a discrete body problem",0,"elastic-plastic.de","","
http://www.elastic-plastic.de/Theo4.pdf","http://scholar.google.com/scho...
0,"FH Koenemann","Origin of Oblique Microfabric Orientation in Simple Shear Zones",2000,"","agu.org","
http://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/wais?q=T11C-04","http://66.102.1.104/scholar?...

PDF] Unorthodox Thoughts about Deformation, Elasticity, and Stress - all 5 versions »
FH Koenemann - Zeitschrift für Naturforschung. A, A Journal of physical …, 2001 - znaturforsch.com
The nature of elastic deformation is examined in the light of the potential
theory. The concepts and mathematical treatment of elasticity and the choice of
equilibrium conditions are adopted from the mechanics of discrete bodies, ...
Cited by 3 - Related Articles - View as HTML - Web Search - BL Direct

[CITATION] Linear Elasticity and Potential Theory: a Comment on Gurtin (1972)
FH Koenemann
Related Articles - Web Search

[PDF] On the systematics of energetic terms in continuum mechanics, and a note on Gibbs (1877)
FH Koenemann, I Johannistal - elastic-plastic.de
The systematics of energetic terms as they are taught in continuum mechanics
deviate seriously from the standard doctrine in physics, resulting in a profound
misconception. It is demonstrated that the First Law of Thermodynamics has ...
Related Articles - View as HTML - Web Search

[PDF] A Reevaluation of the Cauchy Stress Hypothesis
FH Koenemann, I Johannistal - elastic-plastic.de
The theory of stress is solidly based on the cut model of Euler which was used
by Cauchy to derive the stress tensor. The cut model considers a group of planes
passing through a given point Q in space, and the system of forces acting ...
Related Articles - View as HTML - Web Search
 
PDF] An approach to deformation theory based on Boyles law. IV. Application to a discrete body problem
FH Koenemann, I Johannistal - elastic-plastic.de
The approach to deformation theory is used to model the distribution of the
failure potential in a discrete body subjected to a specific loading
configuration in 2 dimensions. The Fourier series method is applied, and it ...
Related Articles - View as HTML - Web Search

[CITATION] Linear Elasticity and Potential Theory: a Comment on Gurtin (1972)
FH Koenemann
Related Articles - Web Search

[PDF] On the systematics of energetic terms in continuum mechanics, and a note on Gibbs (1877)
FH Koenemann, I Johannistal - elastic-plastic.de
The systematics of energetic terms as they are taught in continuum mechanics
deviate seriously from the standard doctrine in physics, resulting in a profound
misconception. It is demonstrated that the First Law of Thermodynamics has ...
Related Articles - View as HTML - Web Search 

michele ciavarella
www.micheleciavarella.it

I fully understand that it would be good to discover something great of the past that has been completely misunderstood or neglected.

So the entire Chauchy stress framework is flawed and only this guy knows it.

I also understand that there is some kind of annoyment to be aligned like number 12500 who cites the "fractal geometry of nature" from Benoit Mandelbrot

Similar pattern is found for the great Benoit Mandelbrot (H=62)

Yet, I suspect it is much more profitable to read Benoit Mandelbrot despite 12500 papers have already found and cited him (so I suspect at least 100 000 have read it), rather than following the chimera that Chauchy was wrong and that this guy who maybe does not even exist, and who has no previous record, nor present record, claims.

So why not finding the 10 000+ books and papers that really matter, and start discussing, or perhaps mixing them up?

I have provided 2 examples. The discovery of Carbon Nanotubes, and the "discovery" of fractals.  Please provide other examples, and we shall make progress. I do not beleive in Holy Graal!

Actually, if you really want to hope to discover something, there is more chance to do it in Leonardo da Vinci.  His latest books were found in Madrid in 1970, and contain a lot of mechanics.  Roberto Ballarini recently wrote that in this codes, Leonardo clearly had already solved Beam Theory, well before Euler and Bernoulli, let alone the wrong theory of Galileo, and before not only Chauchy concept of stress, but even Hooke's concept of Elasticity!

"The Da Vinci-Euler-Bernoulli Beam Theory," ME Online Web ...

 I challenge you then to go to Madrid and read Leonardo -- you may discover, like Ballarini, that he had something there.

 I have for example just finished reading Capra's book on Leonardo

Fritjof Capra - The Science of Leonardo

It is a good book, and opens the mind.  There is a lot of Leonardo that is being rediscovered and is still not yet appreciated, particularly his ideas about ecology.

New Book: The Science of Leonardo

From the Preface:
Leonardo da Vinci, perhaps the greatest master painter and genius of
the Renaissance, has been the subject of hundreds of scholarly and
popular books. His enormous oeuvre,
said to include over 100,000 drawings and over 6,000 pages of notes,
and the extreme diversity of his interests have attracted countless
scholars from a wide range of academic and artistic disciplines.

However,
there are surprisingly few books about Leonardo's science, even though
he left voluminous notebooks full of detailed descriptions of his
experiments, magnificent drawings, and long analyses of his findings.
Moreover, most authors who have discussed Leonardo's scientific work
have looked at it through Newtonian lenses, and I believe this has
often prevented them from understanding its essential nature.

Leonardo
intended to eventually present the results of his scientific research
as a coherent, integrated body of knowledge. He never managed to do so,
because throughout his life he always felt more compelled to expand,
refine, and document his investigations than to organize them in a
systematic way. Hence, in the centuries since his death, scholars
studying his celebrated Notebooks have tended to see them as
disorganized and chaotic.  In Leonardo's mind, however, his science was
not disorganized at all. It gave him a coherent, unifying picture of
natural phenomena — but a picture that is radically different from that
of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton.

Only
now, five centuries later, as the limits of Newtonian science are
becoming all too apparent and the mechanistic Cartesian worldview is
giving way to a holistic and ecological view not unlike Leonardo's, can
we begin to appreciate the full power of his science and its great
relevance for our modern era.

My
intent is to present a coherent account of the scientific method and
achievements of the great genius of the Renaissance and evaluate them
from the perspective of today’s scientific thought. Studying Leonardo
from this perspective will not only allow us to recognize his science
as a solid body of knowledge. It will also show why it cannot be
understood without his art, nor his art without the science.

As
a scientist and author, I depart in this book from my usual work. At
the same time, however, it has been a deeply satisfying book to write,
as I have been fascinated by Leonardo da Vinci's scientific work for
over three decades. When I began my career as a writer in the early
1970s, my plan was to write a popular book about particle physics. I
completed the first three chapters of the manuscript, then abandoned
the project to write The Tao of Physics, into which I
incorporated most of the material from the early manuscript. My
original manuscript began with a brief history of modern Western
science, and opened with the beautiful statement by Leonardo da Vinci
on the empirical basis of science that now serves as the epigraph for
this book.

Since
paying tribute to Leonardo as the first modern scientist (long before
Galileo, Bacon, and Newton) in my early manuscript, I have retained my
fascination with his scientific work, and over the years have referred
to it several times in my writings, without, however, studying his
extensive Notebooks in any detail. The impetus to do so came in the
mid-1990s, when I saw a large exhibition of Leonardo's drawings at The
Queens Gallery at Buckingham Palace in  London.

As
I gazed at those magnificent drawings juxtaposing, often on the same
page, architecture and human anatomy, turbulent water and turbulent
air, water vortices, the flow of human hair and the growth patterns of
grasses, I realized that Leonardo's systematic studies of living and
nonliving forms amounted to a science of quality and wholeness that was
fundamentally different from the mechanistic science of Galileo and
Newton. At the core of his investigations, it seemed to me, was a
persistent exploration of patterns, interconnecting phenomena from a
vast range of fields.

Having
explored the modern counterparts to Leonardo's approach, known today as
complexity theory and systems theory, in several of my previous books,
I felt that it was time for me to study Leonardo's Notebooks in earnest
and to evaluate his scientific thought from the perspective of the most
recent advances in modern science.

Although
Leonardo left us, in the words of the eminent Renaissance scholar
Kenneth Clark, "one of the most voluminous and complete records of a
mind at work that has come down to us," his Notebooks give us hardly
any clues to the author's character and personality. Leonardo, in his
paintings as well as in his life, seemed to cultivate a certain sense
of mystery. Because of this aura of mystery and because of his
extraordinary talents, Leonardo da Vinci became a legendary figure even
during his lifetime, and his legend has been amplified in different
variations in the centuries after his death.

Throughout history, he personified the age of the Renaissance, yet each era "reinvented" Leonardo according to the zeitgeist
of the time. To quote Kenneth Clark again, "Leonardo is the Hamlet of
art history whom each of us must recreate for himself." It is
therefore  inevitable that in the following pages I have also had to
reinvent Leonardo. The image that emerges from my account is, in
contemporary scientific terms, one of Leonardo as a systemic thinker,
ecologist, and complexity theorist; a scientist and artist with a deep
reverence for all life, and as a man with a strong desire to work for
the benefit of humanity.

Click here for the book tour schedule.

(0.0) I went through some of Mr. Koenemann's papers / documents / Web pages today. Here are my initial impressions (which are unlikely to change much).

(1.0) Initial impression gathered from his writing style: Even in his serious papers, he seems to jump from topic to topic far too easily---even carelessly. For example, see the "Conclusion" part of his paper "Gibbs.pdf," the one which is supposedly accepted for pub. in IJMPB. (BTW, I checked the site of this journal, but they do not list any of their forthcoming papers.) It is next to impossible to even guess what he might be thinking in going from one step to another step---if the statements can be called "steps".

(2.0) His "Logic": In his easiest to read (for me) paper, i.e. "Systematics.pdf" (published in 2004), the "position" from which his arguments flow began to become somewhat clearer. The way I understand his position, his essential logic seems to be the following:

(2.1) He says in this paper (and I quote) that "div \vec{f} is a measure of the work done by/upon a system."

Hello? My understanding is that for certain vector fields like the static electric field, \vec{f} can be given as the gradient of a scalar potential function, say, \phi. (This, of course, is not universally true though that's what he seems to assume.) In the cases where this condition holds, it is \phi which represents work/energy---not div \vec{f}. What does divergence of \vec{f} have to do with __work__? I fail to see this. In fact, in electrostatics, div \grad\phi would give you the stored __electric charge density__, not the stored __work__. But still, in this paper, work, it becomes. Why? Apparently, simply because he thinks so.

I wonder why none noticed such a prominent and so simple a mistake in the review process... (Has anyone checked whether these papers were even actually published in those journals?)

(2.2) He then tries to apply this (wrong) premise of his to the div of the stress vector. Now, in stress analysis, div \vec{T} = 0 (using momentum and torque balance). On this basis, he concludes (using his above-mentioned wrong idea) that no __work__ is done during a volume-constant deformation....

Now that is some conclusion to draw!!

(3.0) In another paper: "thoughts.pdf" (published in 2001), he says:  "General solutions for the Poisson equation exist only for reversible processes, e.g. the Helmholtz equation." [sic]

Phew! At this point, I stopped reading all the __published journal papers__ of his.

(4.0) The interesting part is not whether what he has written is right or wrong (i.e. true or false). That issue is relatively simple to settle: obviously, what he writes is so absolutely false.

But a more interesting part is: What does it say about the review process of today's journal articles? ... You see, it was only yesterday that I was talking to some gentleman who mentioned to me: "But all that you have published during your PhD studies are conference papers, no journal papers... Your conference papers will not be counted..." And I found myself wondering aloud, once again: How does it matter? I even remembered the Bogdanov brothers incidence (which I had come to know from David Harriman's article). I mean, it does not seem likely, but still, it is possible that some journal might publish such articles...

If the journal review system also is not going to provide that gentleman with any guaruntees or assurances of the kind that he was seeking and presuming, why does he insist on that? Now, that is one issue which is much more interesting to me.

(5.0) However, the most interesting issue, for me, is that when a piece of writing like this does come along, what does it do to you.... Doesn't it force you to examine the clarity of your own fundamentals, even if only for an hour or two---before you find the author out? Even if only because the speaker has been using the terms so casually and indiscriminately? Not as a matter of some naive or honest mistake, but out of a deliberate kind of gliding over of the relevant facts? One is not accostomed to that kind of writing in science, and so, simply because the author throws a lot of incommensurate concepts together in a rapid succession, it begins to challenge your mind. So, there is a value to it in a weird, even humorous, sort of way...

I mean, in a way, a "paper" of this kind does serve to expose the weak spots in your own understanding, too...

For instance, have a look at these concepts/ideas which come up repeatedly while going through some of Mr. Koenemann's published journal papers.... Some aspects of these basic concepts have stumbled me quite a lot in the past... Why, some aspects have stumped me even in a very recent past---as late as a year or two back:

-- What is the essential difference between a field theory and a particle theory? (This question is relevant because what he describes as Newton's theory actually seems to refer to the "particle" kind of description. This, he seems to want to differentiate from the field abstraction.)

-- Why is pressure generally regarded as a scalar quantity when it is well known that the air actually is forcing the rubber walls of a balloon out?

-- What conceptual steps are involved before the Newtonian idea of force (something which acts on a particle to change the course of its motion) can be brought into the analysis of a continuum phenomenon, i.e. a field? For example, a vector field? A scalar field? How about tensor fields? Is particle really a point-phenomenon? Or does it, too, represent a differential-element-based abstraction?

-- What precisely are the physical dimensions of the potential functions used in the analytical stress theory? More important: Why do respectable authors never mention this in their books? (Here, feel free to pick any book/paper you like.)

-- What, precisely, is the difference between the meaning of the term "potential" when this term is used in electrostatics as against in stress analysis?

-- Can you reduce (3D) stress, a tensor, to a "collection" of three vectors? Why? Why not?

(6.0) All in all, an interesting Web site!!

... about the clarify of our "fundamentals" and indeed this guy has been asking himself so much that he is now all confused!  ;)