... going on with charged particles. That's what makes them especially tricky. When I will pick up the threads in the next installment this will be centerpiece.

Thank you for the link. Carver Mead takes some interesting stances and a lot of what he said resonates with me.

... I think this includes many scientists - is that earth atmosphere is an incredibly complicated and modeling resistant system.

It'll be surprising not to observe strange phenomena in our skies but attributing them to ETs will usually always be the least likely explanation. For instance I have little doubt that ball-lightning is a real phenomenon but science has been dismissing it for the longest time because there is no good explanation for it and it's freakish and rare occurrences make it pretty impossible to study.

It reminds me of how monster waves have always been dismissed as seamen spinning a yarn. No one took their accounts serious until satellite radar recorded that monster waves are fairly common occurrences in our oceans.

Nice cat BTW :)

, because we and all life, are atmospheric phenomena. Think of a lightening bolt as an energy transfer between the sky and ground. Now consider that trees are as well and they have similar branching above ground and likely below ground as well. We are tranfers of energy from the past into the future, with a constant contraction of input and expansion of output.
Our politics and economics follow convective cycles of rising energy and consolidating order. Expanding assets and precipitating benefits.

brodix:

we and all life, are atmospheric phenomena

lose it and fall back down again.

For instance I have little doubt that ball-lightning is a real phenomenon but science has been dismissing it for the longest time because there is no good explanation for it and it's freakish and rare occurrences make it pretty impossible to study.

Ahem...

UCM.es: Antonio Fernández-Rañada

Ball lightning

• Antonio F. Rañada and José L. Trueba, “Is ball lightning an electromagnetic knot?”, Nature 383, 32, 1996.

• Antonio F. Rañada,  Mario Soler and José L. Trueba, “A model of ball lightning as a magnetic knot with linked streamers, Journal of Geophysical Research (Climate and Physics of the Atmosphere), 103,  D18, 23309-23313, 1998.

• Antonio F. Rañada, Mario Soler and José L. Trueba,  “Ball lightning as a force-free magnetic knot”, Physical Review E 62, 7181-7190, 2000.

• Antonio F. Rañada,   José L. Trueba and José M. Donoso, "Ball lightning", Encyclopedia of Nonlinear Science", A. Scott ed., Fitzroy Dearborn, London in press.

• José Manuel Donoso, Antonio F. Rañada and José Luis Trueba, "Comment on Magnetic geometry and the confinement of electrically conducting plasmas" (unpublished).

• José Manuel Donoso, Antonio F. Rañada and José Luis Trueba, "Ball lightning: A review" , TheScientificWorldJournal (2006) 6, 254-378

A Phys. Rev. E and a Nature doesn't sound like "ignoring" to me...

... but without some passing attention from Tesla all serious scientific scrutiny that I am aware off has been very recent. Which is why I compared it to the account of monster waves that have been similarly dismissed until very recently. In the science context anything within the last 20 years I regard as recent.

My understanding is that ball lightning for the longest time was about as career advancing and reputable a topic for a physicist as hunting the Sasquatch for a biologist.

... Rañada didn't exactly have to worry about career advancement, being a tenured professor close to retirement.

When thinking about how physics started to get strange I came to the conclusion that you really need to sketch out the development starting with electrodynamics.

As I set down to write this I realized there is just no way to condense this into one diary entry. Next week I will take a look at how Einstein turned the physics world up side down and why I think he really is an almost tragic hero in this tale.

If I don't run out of steam I will then take a look at the titans of classical QM de Broglie, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schroedinger etc. then I will move on to Feynman.

I will keep the ritualistic string theory bashing to the very end.

String theory is controversial, its critics claim it does not make testable predictions...

here's some things to discuss (a nasty list):

1. The twins paradox in relativity.
2. Dark energy & Dark Matter
3. Quantum coupling

All poorly explained with current theories.

I respect Carver Mead's views on the subject of quantum phenomena because he has been at the forefront of applying it in a practical way, not just competing with other academics to develop theories which fulfill all the written and unwritten rules by which it will be taken seriously by other academics. Consider how he describes the interaction of waves in the section I posted above and then consider how mathematicians might require them to be geometrically described. I suspect the result would be tiny vibrating strings, with ever more geometric dimensions wrapped up inside to explain their activity.

Here is an interesting article in NewScientist from last year;

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16095-its-confirmed-matter-is-merely-vacuum-fluctuations.html

The last few paragraphs. Consider the implications of the last sentence;

"Although physicists expected theory to match experiment eventually, it is an important landmark. "The great thing is it shows that you can get close to experiments," says Davies. "Now we know that lattice QCD works, we want to make accurate calculations of particle properties, not just mass."

That will allow physicists to test QCD, and look for effects beyond known physics. For now, Dürr's calculation shows that QCD describes quark-based particles accurately, and tells us that most of our mass comes from virtual quarks and gluons fizzing away in the quantum vacuum.

The Higgs field is also thought to make a small contribution, giving mass to individual quarks as well as to electrons and some other particles. The Higgs field creates mass out of the quantum vacuum too, in the form of virtual Higgs bosons. So if the LHC confirms that the Higgs exists, it will mean all reality is virtual."

So won't it make sense to describe them as their own waves and not call them "strings?"

... results for the proton mass running his algorithm on regular 1980s hardware.

BTW I just order a copy of Mead's book. As far as usual textbook prices go it's dirt cheap. It'll be a nice addition to my collection of curious physics books. Very much looking forward to it.

It's only about 130 pages. Mostly lots of math, which was beyond me. Though there are lots of interesting observations.

... doesn't seem to require differential geometry like GR and Heim's theory. Not that there's anything wrong with that I am just not very good at it. Didn't need to take that math for my Masters in Physics and very much regret that now. It would help me greatly in making some progress with Heim's books.

my perspective is mostly historical and political. I only really got into physics because it really does provide the conceptual foundation that underlies other disciplines. My suspicion though, in viewing the discipline of physics from a psychological perspective, is that it's allowed its own natural blind spots to lead it off course. The inherent focus on expertise at the expense of a broader and more generalized view has fragmented it and leads to too many wild goose chases. And it seems to be getting worse, with the multi-worlds scenario gaining credibility. The fact is that nature is no more generous with the necessary energy to sustain multi-worlds, just because we can't agree on how the process sorts itself, than she is to provide the resource wealth to sustain a monetary bubble. So we have these expansions of imagination that eventually crash on the rocks of reality. The Tower of Babel effect. Star Trek physics, if you prefer.

Is absolutely right. Came across this highly amusing flame fest between an astronomer and a theoretical physicist with a strong focus on GR. For the longest time they totally talked past each other. Reading the entire threat is really quite worthwhile. Even if you can not follow the mathematical arguments it will give you a feel for how charged these debates get and how hard it is to establish a common basis. This is all the more astounding when considering that this is with regards to two areas of physics that are closely related.

Flandern unfortunately passed away earlier this year he certainly had some eccentric ideas and was refreshingly outspoken about them.

On the other hand it is just incredibly depressing to learn from Prof. Carlips homepage that he feels it necessary to waste time on refuting creationists. A worthy dirty work but really depressing.

Is its propagation really instantaneous?

It raises questions about the ultimate connectedness of all mass/energy and certainly explain why entropy doesn't just distribute everything evenly, but that it collapses into gravity wells, thus creating usable energy.

Doctrinaire atheism only serves as a counterpoint for faith based movements. That's why I think it may be more effective not to argue God doesn't exist, but that the source is not an ideal, but an essence. That way, you are not arguing with the true believers in the pews who will go to their death believing Jesus is waiting for them, but with the theologians directly. It's like steering a big ship. You don't go running around telling the passengers, but go to the pilot house and talk to who is doing the steering. Yes, it might take a few generations, but the bigger they are, the slower they turn. The fact is that the monotheistic religions, being narrative based, are date stamped. They are all focused on the End Times. After this coming ecological and economic deluge passes and those of us left are trying to put things back together, not floating in the clouds with Abraham, Jesus and Mohammed, it will be time to turn the page.

Will add this to the questions to look at and discuss a bit in more depth in my next essay. In order to keep my focus I will try to stick with history and science. If I throw any philosophy in there at all it might be a bit of Immanuel Kant‘s Critique of Pure Reason. He was a lousy physicist but I think he gave the authoritative analysis of the human condition with regards to space and time. I will try to stay away from religion and in my mind doctrinaire atheism is essentially a religion as well. Although it would be fun to map out the impact that science had on religion throughout history (and vice versa). It'll be the quintessential tale of misunderstandings.

...most emphatically not instantaneous. It propagates at the speed of light. At least according to Einstein's theory. That's why the theory predicts gravitational waves.

but Van Flandern seems to be arguing otherwise. Maybe you can read the link and give an informed comment.

...you can inform yourself about The Confrontation between General Relativity and Experiment and then come back.

The status of experimental tests of general relativity and of theoretical frameworks for analysing them is reviewed. Einstein's equivalence principle (EEP) is well supported by experiments such as the Eotvos experiment, tests of special relativity, and the gravitational redshift experiment. Future tests of EEP and of the inverse square law are searching for new interactions arising from unification or quantum gravity. Tests of general relativity at the post-Newtonian level have reached high precision, including the light deflection, the Shapiro time delay, the perihelion advance of Mercury, and the Nordtvedt effect in lunar motion. Gravitational-wave damping has been detected in an amount that agrees with general relativity to better than half a percent using the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar, and other binary pulsar systems have yielded other tests, especially of strong-field effects. When direct observation of gravitational radiation from astrophysical sources begins, new tests of general relativity will be possible.

Newtonian gravity is instantaneous action-at-a-distance. Maxwell's electromagnitism and Einsteinian gravity are field theories with a finite speed of propagation (the speed of light).

I was wondering what Van Flandern was talking about. He seemed to be losing the debate, but posted it like he'd made a point.

... consensus view. Gave it all away :) I doubt Van Flandern would have conceded the point though. I really like the suggestion posted to the same thread how to settle this question experimentally. Like the author I'd be very surprised to find a contradiction with GR but it'll be a good additional test and hasn't been performed to my knowledge.

have a deep psychological need to disagree. It gives further dimension and perspective to find other ways of looking at things.

I do think gravity and light are opposite sides of the cycle of expanding energy and contracting mass, so I was trying to figure how Van Flandern's point might alter the relationship. Possibly with space having some direct effect on organizing structure. Guess it's back to the original relative correlation.

... back Prof. Carlip's position in the argument with Dr. Van Flandern that I linked to and that prompted brodix question.

It is really quite remarkable how profoundly Einstein reshaped physics and how much this is still reverberating. Without Einstein there wasn't QM nor GR and here we are after all these years with still no validated unification of these two realms.

but I do think the point I keep making about time has some bearing. Time past to future has us, as points of reference, moving through the series of events. Time going future to past makes us an integral part of the events, so the issue of observer dependence isn't there. We are not actually pushing that wall of quantum probability. It is collapsing and carrying us along with it. Past and future do not physically exist, as it is just what is present creating events, with each replacing the previous, so the only perceived motion of time is these events reeling away into the past.

... by the order of events. This order can look different from different frames of references. This is really a very straightforward consequence of lightspeed being constant in all frames of reference. The event of perception i.e. a photon hitting your retina is always local - the relativity effects manifest only with inferred order of time looking at the run time of light signals. It can be understood without higher math by just looking at Minkowski diagrams. I plan to use this approach in my next diary entry and will try to show how you can unriddle the twin paradox this way.

Say you are listening to two radio stations, one out of Baltimore and one out of DC, both playing the same program, such as PBS news. If you're near Baltimore, that station's broadcast comes through first, while in Washington, that one comes through first and in between, they come through about the same time.

If you were in the spot that they come in at the same time a stationary recipient there would conclude that a particular annoying ad would have been broadcast at the same time. A fast moving observer on the other hand would have to conclude that they were broadcast at different times. This little flash animation that illustrates exactly this case. (In this case the guy Jasper at rest even triggers the signale himself to make sure it is executed at the same time for him). This is a direct consequence of c always being constant.

since I really thought it through. There is no such thing as an objective perspective.

Doesn't lightspeed as a constant means there must be a constant to space as well?

a thought experiment to explain. everything is in motion and clocks in motion run slower than clocks which are not, but how would you decide which is which. Since the solar system is spinning around the galaxy and the galaxy presumably has some motion through space, what if we used lots of other galaxies as coordinates to establish a measure of stability as best we could, then released a satellite so that it was stable with respect to all the other galaxies. Now if we have a clock on that satellite, wouldn't it run faster than all other clocks? If so, wouldn't this mean that space is a form of constant, or equilibrium state and not just a function of the geometry of its contents? It would seem that if space were just a function of this geometry, the speed of light would not be a constant, but affected by the velocity of its sources.

... to such elaborate means to pick a preferred inertial reference frame. At the time that Einstein created special relativity it was supposed there is really no such thing but since then the background radiation was discovered. Pick a system that has nor red shift for the background radiation and voila you have a preferred reference frame. But it doesn't matter. SR is only concerned with transforming from one inertial reference system relative to another. The fact that there is a special reference frame that is affixed relative to the background radiation doesn't change how an observer will perceive things that zip around close to light speed and vice versa.

SR is really not about clocks clicking slower but about how this clock looks from a distance for a particular observer. Everything is always relative to the observers frame of reference. In different reference systems the clock will look to slow down or speed up differently.

Doesn't lightspeed as a constant means there must be a constant to space as well?

No quite to the contrary. If two space ships of equal length pass each other with something close to c and they measure the length of the other craft they will calculate it to be smaller. Calculating because the way that they can measure it will be by recording at what time the tip and the end of the other craft passed them and that time difference multiplied by the relative speed will be what they conclude the length of the other craft will be.

Key in getting comfortable with SR is to let go of the idea that time is an absolute thing outside of your immediate vicinity (SR is concerned with big things so this is still gives you a pretty big space). Time is perceived different by different observers.

You can come up with a thought experiment to try to get them to compare their craft's length "at the time that they are passing" by having a sensor record with laser precision when their respective ships bow and stern overlap. Can you guess how SR resolves this paradox?

BTW Check out this treat (unfortunately requires MS Silverlight to be installed but I promise it is worth it)

The question for me, is space? Yes, according to relativity, space and time are interchangeable, so if time is, than space must be also. The point I keep making about time is that if it's a consequence of motion, i.e. energy/motion constantly reformulating configurations, thus not block time, but an emergent property, like temperature. Space, on the other hand, remains the vacuum/void in which this fluctuation occurs. So time is reduced to third order effect of motion, while space remains the basis for it. That the motion of light is a constant would seem to require space is an absolute frame. You push the clock close to the speed of light and the clock slows down, so that light still takes as long and thus distances are shortened, etc. The point is that if space were not an absolute, why would lightspeed be a constant? It would seem that light fired from a moving source would just go that much faster. There seems to be a factor of space which sets this limit to energy and its motion. The vacuum is the basis of the fluctuation.

... when you are stating that

There seems to be a factor of space which sets this limit to energy and its motion.

Then you are making the case for an aether. When you have a medium of whatever nature that mediates the transport of waves you get exactly these kind of qualities.

It is a common misconception that space and time are interchangeable in SR. Time is still the odd one out. It is always was facilitates dynamics and the time dimension doesn't follow the same rules as the space dimension in terms of what defines closeness in the 4 dim spacetime. You may have heard of the concept of spacecones. They are a visual representation of the absolute light speed limits. If you draw the spacecone at any given point in the space time continuum you capture all the possible coordinates that can be in a causal past to our current position and you capture all the future events that can be plausibly affected by an event at this particular point. The space cone in invariant to Lorentz transformations i.e. the coordinate transformation of SR. Only within the confines of a space cone can space and time "commingle" if we want to entertain the idea of space and time merging into each other.

My view of SR is really much more mundane. I see it more like a looking glass distortion - it captures what you could observe first hand if we had fast interstellar travel. In the latter case I think people would get used to time dilation very quickly just like they got used to adjusting their watches after a long flight.

One last quibble - you write:

There seems to be a factor of space which sets this limit to energy and its motion.

This is all good if you drop the energy in this sentence. The energy increases "exponentially" for any ponderable matter as you get ever closer to light speed. (To be precise 1/(1-v²/c²)^0.5 becomes infinite as v approaches c) This is probably the best confirmed prediction of SR because getting particles ever closer to c is what large accelerators like the ones in CERN are all about.

Ever increasing energy/mass is what "enforces" the speed limit. Figuring out how space/vacuum facilitates this is a huge open question and probably closely related to the question where the heck inertia comes from to begin with.

What I'm thinking of would be more like a geometry. If you more of something, such as speed, then you have something to counter it, such as drag. Thus increasing to lightspeed increases the drag/energy. Since there is no measurable aether, is there an equilibrium state to space which causes this balance? The question of inertia.

...was thought to be some kind of physical medium but even Eistein at the beginning was still clinging to some looser idea of an aether. It took a while to really let the idea go.

Your ideas remind me of how some approaches try to get at the problem looking at interaction of matter with vacuum fluctuations and since there's no vacuum without space it may as well be considered a property of space.

Now it's true that if you take a proton and you put it together with an electron, you get something that we call a hydrogen atom. But what that is, in fact, is a self-consistent solution of the two waves interacting with each other. They want to be close together because one's positive and the other is negative, and when they get closer that makes the energy lower. But if they get too close they wiggle too much and that makes the energy higher. So there's a place where they are just right, and that's what determines the size of the hydrogen atom.

What if the drag on the electron becoming light is the proton, since pushing matter to the speed of light is just a hypothetical anyway. So if you de-couple them, the electron expands as far out as possible and becomes light, while the protons go the other way and become gravity......

And when light contacts matter, the existence of protons drags the wave back down to a point and it becomes a photon. ?

... you can get electrons to about 99.999999995% of light speed in state of the art accelerators. Accelerating charged particles very,very close to c is absolutely routine for particle physicists.

Decoupling electrons from protons is routine. It happens in any old fashioned (not-flat) TV or computer screen. They can already easily approach 10% of light speed in such a cathode ray tube.

Protons i.e. H+ also regularly dissociate in water and fortunately don't show any tendency to become gravity :) on the other hand electrons also have never been observed to just turn into light. They only do that when they encounter their anti-matter adjunct particle the positron. If that happens *puff* there's nothing left but light. One really cool experiment recently managed to produce some anti hydrogen. It is very interesting and important to find out if it is fully equivalent with regular matter.

a very complex puzzle. That's why I just try to stick to that point about time.

Though it does raise issues about space......

and fluctuations of the vacuum...

and....

as a member of the human species, I find I'm unable to fully isolate myself from those members with whom I profoundly disagree. Though I do try and often succeed, I like to be prepared. I long ago came to the conclusion that guns and group membership provided little defense, as the feedback from guns tends to be overwhelmingly negative(I shot my little sister in the finger with a BB gun, many years ago. Though in defense it might be noted that her daughter shot her son in the face with a pellet gun and that at his instigation, not mine.) and groups tend to be dominated by age, obsession, ruthlessness, or some combination thereof.
So I try arming myself with ideas.

... is always a good idea. Nowadays I just find the hard work to make religious zealots see their circular logic extremely tedious. It also only works in a non confrontational setting and if there mind is not too petrified. I neither have the time nor inclination to engage these kind of people anymore. Back when I was a bored teenager when a jehovah's witness stopped by the house I would always invite them in for some coffee and engage them in a long discussion. Mostly just having them talk and just steer ever so slightly by questions.

It is hard for me not to engage these kind of people because they annoy me and I usually confront what annoys me. Problem is in the US these kind of people are everywhere and totally in your face (the redder the state the worse). It just becomes irritating. One more reason I left the country. The Toronto area works great for me because you can find any religion under the sun here. Breeds tolerance.

That why politicians cater to it.

The inherent focus on expertise at the expense of a broader and more generalized view has fragmented it and leads to too many wild goose chases.

Physics only goes into wild goose chases in the absence of unexplained empirical evidence. Until the 1970's experimental high energy physics was ahead of theory, so no wild goose chases there. Cosmology has a lot of new data coming in still. And the foundations of quantum mechanics used not to have much by the way of experimental exploration, but that has changed with quantum optics.

And it seems to be getting worse, with the multi-worlds scenario gaining credibility.

The "many worlds" is a misnomer, as one can see from reading Everett's original paper which was titled "the relative state interpretation". Relative to what? Relative to the observer.

By the way, are you familiar with decoherence? That's one of the very seriosu research programmes within which people are taking the "coherent histories" approach seriously.

I shouldn't get my science from mainstream media.

The fact is that nature is no more generous with the necessary energy to sustain multi-worlds

the necessary energy? What are you talking about?

just because we can't agree on how the process sorts itself, than she is to provide the resource wealth to sustain a monetary bubble.

What do asset bubbles have to do with the interpretation of quantum mechanics?

too many facile descriptions of quantum decoherence leading to multiple realities. It gets under my skin.

If there wasn't quite so much to read and so little time, I would try studying the subject a little more carefully, but it's not where I derive my income.

After having a PhD in physics you can professionally declare that you do not comprehend anything on your field's modern research.

Luckily, even if a PhD in physics doesn't comprehend his own field, he believes in that he comprehends all other fields, in which he has no training or experience.

Because the math of physics is so difficult, it is completely possible that somebody has already published a good modern theory of physics but very few or nobody has bothered to comprehend it.

_{--Devil's advocate for meta research from hell}

... could indeed be overlooked. The fragmentation in the field is very disconcerting. Although I think if something gets published in a peer reviewed journal it usually will get some scrutiny. The problem with Burkhard Heim was that due to his physical handicaps he went into almost total seclusion and never bothered to publish in a meaningful way. His work may very well be a candidate.

Have you, or have you seen Roger Penrose's "The Road to Reality, A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe" ISBN 0-224-04447-8. It may not be dirt cheap but it does not skimp on the math either - probably good value for money in that regard.

I very much enjoyed "The Emperor's New Mind" mostly because of its physics content (e.g. the black hole in a box thought experiments). Given my busy schedule I may hold out for a paperback copy though - Heim and Mead will leave little of my precious spare time as it is.

Happy to add the twins paradox.

Project Tuva

---

_{They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.}

Only watched the first one yet and will pace the others because they are just to good to be rushed.

edit

... you get e=mc^2 without any expansion of an underlying function so I am curious to learn what you are referring to.

Hopefully you'll enjoy the next installment as well. It'll start out a bit more biographically but ultimately my goal - unattainable maybe - is to give a reader some sensibility for what is credible when it comes to science news. I think most Agonistas know that you can not rely on main stream media for the interpretation of news. It is the same with science but few have the necessary background to sort things out for themselves.

"I'm with stoopid." :)

I read a bit, stop to slap my head on the keyboard a couple of times, then read some more, thinking I'm understanding (which I'm not.) Brodix:"energy goes past to future. Information goes future to past." Slap. Quax: "The event of perception i.e. a photon hitting your retina is always local - the relativity effects manifest only with inferred order of time looking at the run time of light signals." Slap. Slap. Fascinating.

Like Umberto Eco on steroids. You physics dudes are awesome.

In fact, since you began this interesting thread, I note that I've casually subscribed to nearly every myth about physics outlined here, so you see I'm not completely ignorant about the subject. :)

I do take issue with the last disproved myth referenced above, though. Sound waves require a medium through which to travel. This means they can travel through air, water, or even solid objects, such as a window (though it gets muffled), but in space it is essentially a complete vacuum. I know that to be untrue through personal observation. My neighbor's teenager has ipod earphones more or less permanently imbedded in his ears, so that his preferred heavy metal rock can hammer away inside his head all day. Obviously, this would not be possible if sound can't exist in a complete vacuum. Like duh.

Anyway. Apologies for the digression. Carry on.

... comes up with some interesting ideas but he is not a physicist in the formal sense of the world. He very much has the sensibilities of great natural philosophers of the ancient world. When he says that "energy goes past to future. Information goes future to past." I really have not the slightest idea what he means either. But I try to keep an open mind about it. What is intriguing is that you can relate some physics concepts to this cryptic statement and that is what makes this worthwhile for me. This whole diary got only started because I feel brodix has a keen interest in fundamental physics questions but if we want to talk about this we will need to get our vocabulary in sync.

Very much like your link to physics myth by the way. The fact that these kind of notions could take hold really points to a failure of public education on an epic scale.