http://fermat.nap.edu/openbook/0309074061/gifmid/19.gif
Who is to deny that such processes incorporated into our views of today would not have drawn the cosmologist and the deeper intracies of physics, to point to our nature and it's beginnings in our universe . To raise questions about how such families were to arise from that place and time, specified and leading from one science inclination to another?
The Universe is governed by cycles of matter and energy, an intricate series of physical processes in which the chemical elements are formed and destroyed, and passed back and forth between stars and diffuse clouds. It is illuminated with the soft glow of nascent and quiescent stars, fierce irradiation from the most massive stars, and intense flashes of powerful photons and other high energy particles from collapsed objects. Even as the Universe relentlessly expands, gravity pulls pockets of its dark matter and other constituents together, and the energy of their collapse and the resulting nucleosynthesis later work to fling them apart once again.
This all fell under the arrow of time, yet would it not recognize, that such exchanges between the cycles of energy and matter to take place in that process? That such exchanges would define the natures of galaxies in there beginnings and ends, as a geometrical consistancies born out of the beginnings of this universe? How so? Could such links be made to indicate, that this universe so unique, as to arise from the first inceptions as phase transitions? Some first principle?
Connecting Quarks with the Cosmos: Eleven Science Questions for the New Century (2003)
Board on Physics and Astronomy (BPA)
Two essential conceptual features of the Standard Model theory have fundamentally transformed the understanding of nature. Already in QED the idea arose that empty space may not be as simple a concept as it had seemed. The Standard Model weak interaction theory takes this idea a step further. In formulating that theory, it became evident that the equations did
Dear Plato,
ReplyDeleteSo you talked on cosmic variance about the "crackpotism which follows aether rejuveniation".
‘It has been supposed that empty space has no physical properties but only geometrical properties. No such empty space without physical properties has ever been observed, and the assumption that it can exist is without justification. It is convenient to ignore the physical properties of space when discussing its geometrical properties, but this ought not to have resulted in the belief in the possibility of the existence of empty space having only geometrical properties... It has specific inductive capacity and magnetic permeability.’ - Professor H.A. Wilson, FRS, Modern Physics, Blackie & Son Ltd, London, 4th ed., 1959, p. 361.
That was in 1959.
‘It seems absurd to retain the name ‘vacuum’ for an entity so rich in physical properties, and the historical word ‘aether’ may fitly be retained.’ – Sir Edmund T. Whittaker, A History of the Theories of the Aether and Electricity, 2nd ed., v1, p. v, 1951.
That was in 1951.
‘… with the new theory of electrodynamics [vacuum filled with virtual particles] we are rather forced to have an aether.’ – Paul A. M. Dirac, ‘Is There an Aether?,’ Nature, v168, 1951, p906. (If you have a kid playing with magnets, how do you explain the pull and push forces felt through space? As ‘magic’?) See also Dirac’s paper in Proc. Roy. Soc. v.A209, 1951, p.291.
That was also in 1951.
‘Looking back at the development of physics, we see that the ether, soon after its birth, became the enfant terrible of the family of physical substances. … We shall say our space has the physical property of transmitting waves and so omit the use of a word we have decided to avoid. The omission of a word from our vocabulary is of course no remedy; the troubles are indeed much too profound to be solved in this way. Let us now write down the facts which have been sufficiently confirmed by experiment without bothering any more about the ‘e---r’ problem.’ – Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, Evolution of Physics, 1938, pp. 184-5; written quickly to get Jewish Infeld out of Nazi Germany and accepted as a worthy refugee in America.
That was 1938.
‘The idealised physical reference object, which is implied in current quantum theory, is a fluid permeating all space like an aether.’ – Sir Arthur S. Eddington, MA, DSc, LLD, FRS, Relativity Theory of Protons and Electrons, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1936, p. 180.
That was 1936.
‘Some distinguished physicists maintain that modern theories no longer require an aether… I think all they mean is that, since we never have to do with space and aether separately, we can make one word serve for both, and the word they prefer is ‘space’.’ – A.S. Eddington, ‘New Pathways in Science’, v2, p39, 1935.
That was 1935.
‘The Michelson-Morley experiment has thus failed to detect our motion through the aether, because the effect looked for – the delay of one of the light waves – is exactly compensated by an automatic contraction of the matter forming the apparatus…. The great stumbing-block for a philosophy which denies absolute space is the experimental detection of absolute rotation.’ – Professor A.S. Eddington (who confirmed Einstein’s general theory of relativity in 1919), MA, MSc, FRS, Space Time and Gravitation: An Outline of the General Relativity Theory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1921, pp. 20, 152.
That was 1921.
‘Recapitulating, we may say that according to the general theory of relativity, space is endowed with physical qualities... According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable.’ – Albert Einstein, Leyden University lecture on ‘Ether and Relativity’, 1920. (Einstein, A., Sidelights on Relativity, Dover, New York, 1952, pp. 15, 16, and 23.)
That was 1920.
The tragedy is really in the first quotation above on the vacuum. Heaviside found that for conductors of low resistance and as wide as they are separated, the electric current which flows when they are connected to a 1 volt battery is 1/377 amps, until the energy flowing at light speed completes the circuit (determining the complete circuit resistance). Hence Ohm's law is wrong.
Taken literally, Ohm's law would prevent all electric current, because then current would be unable to flow until the current completed the circuit, which the current would be unable to do instantly because it only moves at light speed. It is like a paradox of Zeno.
Heaviside showed that Maxwell's "displacement current" idea from the capacitor problem also applies to transmission lines, and he did that in 1875. In 1976, Catt, Dr Walton and Davidson showed that an exponential capacitor charging curve is false but approximates well the true series of steps if the capacitor is small in size so that energy bounces around inside it at light speed many times as it charges up.
The fact that the permeability and permittivity of free space are both non-zero has never been disproved by special relativity. In fact, Einstein rejected the crackpotism of special relativity when he extended it to general relativity:
'The special theory of relativity ... does not extend to non-uniform motion. The laws of physics must be of such a nature that they apply to systems of reference in any kind of motion. Along this road we arrive at an extension of the postulate of relativity. The general laws of nature are to be expressed by equations which hold good for all systems of co-ordinates, that is, are co-variant with respect to any substitutions whatever (generally co-variant).' - Albert Einstein, 'The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity', Annalen der Physik, v49, 1916.
Current teaching of general relativity, as causing a flat surface like a rubber sheet to curve into a manifold, is unhelpful to further progress in unifying quantum space with gravitation, since physical space fills volume, not surface area.
Hi Nigel
ReplyDeleteCurrent teaching of general relativity, as causing a flat surface like a rubber sheet to curve into a manifold, is unhelpful to further progress in unifying quantum space with gravitation, since physical space fills volume, not surface area.
In Grue and Bleen. I saw the conversation of some who participate in this question. I have some thoughts about this, that lead from such states (what geometry?) and holes.It's potential.
While I might have inclined to the questions of space travel, it also had some insight to point out path integrals in langrangan perspective? This came from intuitve pursuates, and all of a sudden the past can become part of the future?
Shall we dismiss how we see such equilibrium points in our assessment of the cosmo then?
Luis Alvarez-Gaume and Miguel A. Vazquez-Mozo, Introductory Lectures on Quantum Field Theory, arXiv.org hep-th/0510040 v1, 5 October 2005.
ReplyDeleteThese guys have now made a major step indeveloping a classical model of QFT, see pp 70-71, 83-85: p71: "... the electromagnetic coupling grows with energy... the polarisation of the vacuum [ether] ... electron-positron pairs around the location of the[core of the] charge. These virtual pairs behave as dipoles that, as in a dielectric medium, tend to screen this charge ... decreasing its value at long distances (i.e. lower energies)."
This has been known for a while (see for example Koltick's 1997 PRL paper on the electron-positron collision experiments at high energy, which partly penetrated the polarised shield).
p85: "Here we have illustrated the creation of particles [pair-production as quantum tunnelling] by semiclassical sources in Quantum Field Theory... what one observer calls the vacuum will be full of particles for a different observer [hence special/restricted relativity is horse ****, giving way to the absolute motion implicit in accelerations and general motion, hence general relativity is an ether theory not a non-ether theory]."
It is curious to see restricted/special relativity being abandoned on page 85 with the technically obscure words: The breaking of such invariance, as happened in the case of coupling to a time-varying source analyzed above, implies that it is not possible anymore to define a state which would be recognised as the vacuum by all observers.
So special relativity is ditched because of quantum field theory! Didn't Dirac do this in his paper sating quantum field theory implies an ether, published in Nature in 1951? Or did he make the error of talking clearly?
The cause of particle-wave duality is the use of the ether, called the Dirac sea. An individual particle, say electron, has a real spinning core, electromagnetic energy normally going around in a loop at light speed (we also need allow for orbit speed, etc.). Surrounding this core is the infinite Dirac sea of virtual charges, the ether. The positive virtual charges in the ether are attracted toward the real core, causing a polarisation of the ether, and this polarisation acts as a veil or attenuating shield for the core's electric field strength.
The magnetism of an electron from crude experimental data and also Dirac's theory is defined as 1 Bohr magneton, but better experiments by Polykarp Kusch (I think they simply flipped electrons in an alternating magnetic field and measured radio emission or some such idea) gave a more precise result of 1.00116 Bohr magnetons. Schwinger came up with renormalisation for a simple interaction (now called the first Feynman coupling correction), which predicted 1 + 1/(2Pi.137) = 1.00116 Bohr magnetons, so QFT was at last starting to work.
However, when you look at the maths, as Dr Chris Oakley and Dr Peter Woit points out, it is not clear what renormalisation and path integrals QED is really representing. Using classical physics, it seems clear to me that the 1 [in the simple result 1 + 1/(2Pi.137)] is the magnetic moment from the electron core, unshielded, while the small correction is suggesting to us that the electron core is associating - perhaps by Pauli's exclusion process - with a virtual charge in the vacuum. The 2Pi is is wavelength or spin effect, and the 137 is the shielding factor of the polarised virtual charge, which gives rise to the coupling with a virtual charge in the surrounding spacetime fabric. (Only the core's electric field is shielded by radially polarised virtual charge, and not the core's magnetic field.)
This is why the observed electric charge of the electron at great distances is 137 times weaker than the core charge. This attenuation factor of 137 is validated by a discrepancy in the apparent spin of the core as calculated from the measured magnetism (Zeeman effect and Stern-Gerlach experiment), as well as by nuclear physics which shows that nuclei approaching 137 protons cannot be formed as there would be zero stabilility; this and other evidence indicated that the short-range strong nuclear force is about 137 times theelectromagnetic force. The only way to reconcile all the facts is to say that the electric force is the residual of the strong nuclear force once the latter has penetrated the veil of polarised virtual particles in the surrounding vacuum.
Double slit experiment explanation, 'central paradox in QM' (Feynman): (1) diffraction (wave effect) is only detectable if the slits are sufficiently close together that the disturbance in the ether created by the motion of the electron or photon can be affected by both of the slits, (2) the weird 'explanations' don't even discuss what happens in thedark fringes on the screen, between bright stripes. Do these guys claim, like Young, that two out of phase photons arrive at the dark fringes 'cancelling out' and violating the conservation of energy? Or do they simply ignore physics altogether and issue a lot of patronising metaphysics which 'justifies itself' by shrugging shoulder and claiming 'nature is weird'? Very convenient too, for string theory ...
Hi Nigel,
ReplyDeleteI think one had to understand the inception of bubble nucleation and the relation to the very ideas mulitverse might have indicated.
Yet it arose out of something very profound? Superfluid or dirac's sea?
This wasn't inconsistant, with supersymmetrical ideas was it? It took us back to the beginning did it not? What happened before that? Who cares? :)
So one had to try and encapsulate the whole thing would you not, while looking at the intricacies of geometrical propensities of cycles of energy and matter?
You have to understand Nigel that I will always wrap your information from my perspective.