Wangler
Master Poster
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Null Physics anyone?
- Thread starter Stir
- Start date
Another flaw in the "tired light" theory is that it doesn't predict the observed time dilation in the light curves of distant supernovas. Try to Google "Tired Light" and see for example "Errors in Tired Light Cosmology"...
(apologies if somebody has already mentioned this - but this thread is so dreadfully long that I didn't bother checking through all the posts...)
(apologies if somebody has already mentioned this - but this thread is so dreadfully long that I didn't bother checking through all the posts...)
New Physics Theory - James A. Putnam
I just came across a website by James A. Putnam called "Life, Intelligence and New Physics Theory" (my blood is too new for directly posting links, but it's newphysicstheory).
Like Mr. Witt's Null Physics theory, this seems to be an alternative to the Standard Model - and it's the work of one man.
Has anyone had a look a this? You don't need to buy an expensive book!! It's available online...
I just came across a website by James A. Putnam called "Life, Intelligence and New Physics Theory" (my blood is too new for directly posting links, but it's newphysicstheory).
Like Mr. Witt's Null Physics theory, this seems to be an alternative to the Standard Model - and it's the work of one man.
Has anyone had a look a this? You don't need to buy an expensive book!! It's available online...
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hehehe... 200-ish posts is dreadfully long? NEWBIE!. But seriously, welcome to the forum.
zosima
Muse
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- Mar 1, 2008
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- 536
FIT & Astrophysics
I heard a rumor from someone at FIT, that Witt doesn't really work with anyone at the physics department(quite probably because they think he is a crank), but that they were happy to give him the visiting scientist position because he is a billionaire(yes, I heard billions...) who is willing to fund his own research. Anyone who knows much about how science works on the university level, knows that as far as universities are concerned the more dollars you bring in the better, in terms of prestige, power, and rankings, etc... So as far as I'm concerned FIT made a very smart and rational decision in giving him a meaningless position. I guess it works for him too 'cause he can use the title to trick people who don't know the details into thinking he's more legitimate than he is.
Despite their hiring of Witt,however, FIT does have one of the best astrophysics departments in the nation. With the amount of money Witt has they might even be able to get Witt to pay for a spacecraft to validate his theory. That would be totally awesome because, one it would quite probably invalidate his theory, two the satellite could also carry other instruments that could help scientists do real research.
W/R/T astrophysics, it seems like that is what Witt is claiming his theory is best at explaining, and that he has confidence it can be applied particle physics at some point in the future. So I'd just like to point out that his theory is completely unable to explain cosmic microwave background radiation(CMB). As I understand it, he claims that as light gets tired it emits microwave radiation(in some direction, I'm not really sure which). He would claim this microwave radiation from 'lumetic decay' is the CMB that we observe.
The thing with CMB isn't just that there is a lot of microwave radiation, but that its frequency vs power distribution and its small directional anisotropies are very peculiar. The CMB frequency vs. power distribution and anisotropies are consistent with blackbody radiation emitted from a single event. If we take normal physics to be true, then this is light from the big bang, red shifted by the expansion of the universe. What is so brilliant about this discovery is that the shape of the curve and the anisotropies were predicted before it was measured by COBE and the experiment and prediction match so damn perfectly that when you see the two plotted simultaneously you can't even tell that there are two curves.
"Lumetic decay" explains none of this. As far as I can tell since the microwave radiation is being emitted in this theory by any light that happens to be traveling around, its power spectrum should probably be flat or possibly normal, but definitely not a blackbody distribution. I guess he might try to claim that 'lumetic decay' emits with a blackbody distribution. Despite the fact that this seems like tailoring the theory to fit the data, it still wouldn't explain the near isotropic distribution of CMB. If 'lumetic decay' is true we would expect huge directional anisotropies in microwave radiation that are consistent with the direction of the major light emission sources. We absolutely do not see this.
p.s. Like many others I stumbled upon this forum as a result of my inquiries into Null Physics, but since I had the 411 on this fellow from a personal connection as well I thought ya'll might appreciate the info.
I heard a rumor from someone at FIT, that Witt doesn't really work with anyone at the physics department(quite probably because they think he is a crank), but that they were happy to give him the visiting scientist position because he is a billionaire(yes, I heard billions...) who is willing to fund his own research. Anyone who knows much about how science works on the university level, knows that as far as universities are concerned the more dollars you bring in the better, in terms of prestige, power, and rankings, etc... So as far as I'm concerned FIT made a very smart and rational decision in giving him a meaningless position. I guess it works for him too 'cause he can use the title to trick people who don't know the details into thinking he's more legitimate than he is.
Despite their hiring of Witt,however, FIT does have one of the best astrophysics departments in the nation. With the amount of money Witt has they might even be able to get Witt to pay for a spacecraft to validate his theory. That would be totally awesome because, one it would quite probably invalidate his theory, two the satellite could also carry other instruments that could help scientists do real research.
W/R/T astrophysics, it seems like that is what Witt is claiming his theory is best at explaining, and that he has confidence it can be applied particle physics at some point in the future. So I'd just like to point out that his theory is completely unable to explain cosmic microwave background radiation(CMB). As I understand it, he claims that as light gets tired it emits microwave radiation(in some direction, I'm not really sure which). He would claim this microwave radiation from 'lumetic decay' is the CMB that we observe.
The thing with CMB isn't just that there is a lot of microwave radiation, but that its frequency vs power distribution and its small directional anisotropies are very peculiar. The CMB frequency vs. power distribution and anisotropies are consistent with blackbody radiation emitted from a single event. If we take normal physics to be true, then this is light from the big bang, red shifted by the expansion of the universe. What is so brilliant about this discovery is that the shape of the curve and the anisotropies were predicted before it was measured by COBE and the experiment and prediction match so damn perfectly that when you see the two plotted simultaneously you can't even tell that there are two curves.
"Lumetic decay" explains none of this. As far as I can tell since the microwave radiation is being emitted in this theory by any light that happens to be traveling around, its power spectrum should probably be flat or possibly normal, but definitely not a blackbody distribution. I guess he might try to claim that 'lumetic decay' emits with a blackbody distribution. Despite the fact that this seems like tailoring the theory to fit the data, it still wouldn't explain the near isotropic distribution of CMB. If 'lumetic decay' is true we would expect huge directional anisotropies in microwave radiation that are consistent with the direction of the major light emission sources. We absolutely do not see this.
p.s. Like many others I stumbled upon this forum as a result of my inquiries into Null Physics, but since I had the 411 on this fellow from a personal connection as well I thought ya'll might appreciate the info.
zosima
Muse
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2008
- Messages
- 536
1a time dilation
Oh ya,
Witt doesn't explain time dilation of type 1a supernovae. If we look at distant supernovae we don't only notice that their light is red shifted, but also that the light curves from the supernova appear to be wider along the time axis the more distant a supernova appears to be. This would indicate that either #1 type 1a supernovae proceed slower when they are more distant or further in the past or both or #2 that they are moving very quickly relative to us and thus show time dilation due to relativity, moreover the more distant they are the faster they are going.
Despite the fact that it does not appear that Witt is claiming any problems with relativity, he can't use it as an explanation for this phenomena. Witt accepts a static universe where distant things are not moving particularly quickly with respect to us, so relativity does not apply to explain this. So if Witt wants to explain this he would have to come up with some as yet uninvented mechanism to duct tape onto his theory.
Oh ya,
Witt doesn't explain time dilation of type 1a supernovae. If we look at distant supernovae we don't only notice that their light is red shifted, but also that the light curves from the supernova appear to be wider along the time axis the more distant a supernova appears to be. This would indicate that either #1 type 1a supernovae proceed slower when they are more distant or further in the past or both or #2 that they are moving very quickly relative to us and thus show time dilation due to relativity, moreover the more distant they are the faster they are going.
Despite the fact that it does not appear that Witt is claiming any problems with relativity, he can't use it as an explanation for this phenomena. Witt accepts a static universe where distant things are not moving particularly quickly with respect to us, so relativity does not apply to explain this. So if Witt wants to explain this he would have to come up with some as yet uninvented mechanism to duct tape onto his theory.
If that's true, then they have to balance the increase of prestige that comes with more funding ("FIT earns accolades as birthplace of unique microwave satellite") versus the decrease that comes with having your good name splashed across a bunch of crank web pages. Seriously, when you think of the name of Baylor University, one of the first things that comes to mind is "Home of William Dembski, notorious anti-science propagandist"---which is a shame because it's a good school that takes academics and research seriously. Schools do have reputations, and those reputations guide how people react to them. It's difficult to imagine selling that reputation.
Schools do turn down money to defend their academic integrity; Yale gave some donor back $20M rather than change a small part of their humanities program in what they perceived as a non-academic way. I suspect that this happens a lot "behind the scenes"---the University has a lot of contact with donors, they can usually communicate their needs ahead of time ("We'd love to have your help hiring another sociologist, but we really can't promise that the slot will go to your brother. Maybe you'd prefer to help build the new library?").
I also don't want to condemn FIT based on rumors. It's possible that Witt gave a really good presentation on the foundations of quantum mechanics and didn't make any crazy astro statements; that he's a nice guy who asks good questions in colloquia; that they have an official policy of fostering ties between academia and industry.
zosima
Muse
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- Mar 1, 2008
- Messages
- 536
Fit & Witt
>>Ben M
I think thats a good point and I imagine the truth is somewhere is between. I hardly think he'll have the destructive effect that Dembski had. It's not like like this guy is anti-science. His theories aren't harmful to physics, only to the public perception of physics, which is already so confused and mislead that he probably can't do that much more harm. Perhaps my previous post had a more negative tone than the situation warrants.
I think its reasonably open minded that FIT has given him an opportunity to see his theories play out. It will give a forum for people to evaluate what he has said in a way that is closer to peer review and if Witt has a shred of integrity, when they don't play out he will agree and not delve deeper into the realm of conspiracy theories. It just doesn't hurt that he is incredibly rich.
From what I've gathered, the problem he is having it that any scientist on the university level is incredibly busy and they really don't have the time to spend on a fellow who is not trained in the field and whose theory has some very apparent problems.
In other words, since he's not harmful there is no reason not to take his money., but just because the university administration made this decision, doesn't mean the faculty are going to cooperate.
>>Ben M
I think thats a good point and I imagine the truth is somewhere is between. I hardly think he'll have the destructive effect that Dembski had. It's not like like this guy is anti-science. His theories aren't harmful to physics, only to the public perception of physics, which is already so confused and mislead that he probably can't do that much more harm. Perhaps my previous post had a more negative tone than the situation warrants.
I think its reasonably open minded that FIT has given him an opportunity to see his theories play out. It will give a forum for people to evaluate what he has said in a way that is closer to peer review and if Witt has a shred of integrity, when they don't play out he will agree and not delve deeper into the realm of conspiracy theories. It just doesn't hurt that he is incredibly rich.
From what I've gathered, the problem he is having it that any scientist on the university level is incredibly busy and they really don't have the time to spend on a fellow who is not trained in the field and whose theory has some very apparent problems.
In other words, since he's not harmful there is no reason not to take his money., but just because the university administration made this decision, doesn't mean the faculty are going to cooperate.
I lead a very busy life, and have precious little time for such pleasures as investigating a curious ad in Popular Science, or contributing posts to threads such as this. It's quite obvious some other folks have more time for such endeavors, and three cheers for you. I simply don't have it.
Given such constraints, I've been away for a while, and (upon returning) I have found very troublesome the suggestion by Yllanes (Post # 185) that I (among no less than ten others) may be a "sock puppet."
It seems almost to reek of the elitism that crackpots claim wrongly excludes their ideas.
Come on.
Do you really mean to assert that, just because we (those listed in that post) have not contributed to other threads, we are suspect? In other words, it's only you cool guys that contibute to lots of different threads that qualify as being free from suspicion.
Where's the rationale?
If you look, not one of the eleven whom you implicate (except some evident juvenile way back, and I'm NOT going to take the time to find and reference him) have even come close to defending Witt's ideas.
How is it sensible, in that context, even to suggest we are sock puppets?
Maybe Witt is not the only one exercising irrationality.
Aside from such ill directed inuendo toward me and other first-time contributors, I want to say this thread has really been terrific.
On seeing Witt's first ad (I, too, have seen several others since), I felt it was very probably a bunch of rubbish, but I was curious to know more definitely if so, and to know of what kind. Without wasting money on the book, I've learned a lot here -- not only about the initial object of my concern, but I've learned a fair amount more about physics, too. I've ordered and read some added books in consequence (good ones, not Witt's), and expanded my horizons overall. I've been impressed by the knowledge, erudition, curiosity and intelligence of many contributors. I've been proud to know I am of the same "race" as the outstanding contributors here. I've revelled in the feeling that, to some extent, I've rubbed shoulders with folks such as you.
Thank you, all you great guys who've contributed (I'm asssuming "guys," because none here have seemed to evoke a female persona).
And please, Yllanes, without better evidence, don't even suggest me and other exclusive-to-this-thread contributors may be sock puppets. I assure you, I am not. And, I'm betting not one other contributor to this thread is, either (that particular, and evidently juvenile, defender was too inarticulate to qualify).
Given such constraints, I've been away for a while, and (upon returning) I have found very troublesome the suggestion by Yllanes (Post # 185) that I (among no less than ten others) may be a "sock puppet."
It seems almost to reek of the elitism that crackpots claim wrongly excludes their ideas.
Come on.
Do you really mean to assert that, just because we (those listed in that post) have not contributed to other threads, we are suspect? In other words, it's only you cool guys that contibute to lots of different threads that qualify as being free from suspicion.
Where's the rationale?
If you look, not one of the eleven whom you implicate (except some evident juvenile way back, and I'm NOT going to take the time to find and reference him) have even come close to defending Witt's ideas.
How is it sensible, in that context, even to suggest we are sock puppets?
Maybe Witt is not the only one exercising irrationality.
Aside from such ill directed inuendo toward me and other first-time contributors, I want to say this thread has really been terrific.
On seeing Witt's first ad (I, too, have seen several others since), I felt it was very probably a bunch of rubbish, but I was curious to know more definitely if so, and to know of what kind. Without wasting money on the book, I've learned a lot here -- not only about the initial object of my concern, but I've learned a fair amount more about physics, too. I've ordered and read some added books in consequence (good ones, not Witt's), and expanded my horizons overall. I've been impressed by the knowledge, erudition, curiosity and intelligence of many contributors. I've been proud to know I am of the same "race" as the outstanding contributors here. I've revelled in the feeling that, to some extent, I've rubbed shoulders with folks such as you.
Thank you, all you great guys who've contributed (I'm asssuming "guys," because none here have seemed to evoke a female persona).
And please, Yllanes, without better evidence, don't even suggest me and other exclusive-to-this-thread contributors may be sock puppets. I assure you, I am not. And, I'm betting not one other contributor to this thread is, either (that particular, and evidently juvenile, defender was too inarticulate to qualify).
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Listen, I'm sorry, I didn't realise this forum came up so high in the list of Google results for the book, or how big the publicity campaign for it had been. It's just that I can't understand what is so interesting about this stupid book that people prefer to talk about it instead of about real science.
ErkDemon
Scholar
- Joined
- Feb 2, 2008
- Messages
- 88
descriptions are useful
No, that's not all that matters. Qualitative predictions and descriptions of relationships are often necessary before quantitative work can proceed as anything other than an ad hoc method of arranging and extrapolating data.
"Qualitative" gives the broad brushstrokes of a picture, "quantitative" fills in the fine detail. If you try to paint on a very large canvas, filling in a little section at a time without any overview or masterplan for what you're doing, you can end up with intricate gibberish, or with different sections that are locally consistent but don't from a larger logically-consistent picture. Imagine trying to get a group of people to paint a view of Manhattan, where each worker paints one window without seeing any of the rest of the canvas. You're going to end up with a lot of beautifully-painted rectangles, but you won't be able to use the resulting painting to tell you anything about the geography of Manhattan.
You won't be able to use the picture to navigate.
Hopefully, if the basic structure is good, the details get filled in later.
Descriptions in physics can be powerful. For instance, take Einstein's general theory of relativity. It's a geometrical description of gravity. Now, currently, there's no obvious engineering application that actually //requires// a geometrical description of gravity, and at the time that GR was written, the theory made no solid predictions that were easily distinguishable from those of other theories. You could instead imagine a non-particulate aether permeating space, and you could apply dragging coefficients and the like to make it fit astronomical data.
But the concept of obtaining these results from geometrical relationships was considered more efficient, more precise, and more concise. Similarly Special Relativity supplanted Lorentzian Ether Theory, because SR was considered to provide a more fundamental justification for the same basic equations, and therefore to be the more efficient description.
Descriptions are also valuable in situations where the math is deterministic, but the correct //application// of the math isn't always easy to determine. In quantum field theory, descriptions (even artificial ones) can act as useful mnemonics for how the math ought to operate in certain situations, and help an operator to make sure that they are carrying out the right set of calculations (or whether they should be doing the calculations at all). Descriptions are useful for "sanity-checking" calculations.
Descriptions also help when the fine details aren't yet worked out. A basic idea (e.g. "The Big Bang") can be a broad concept that encompasses a range of different theories, models and implementations. When you hit on one of these descriptions, it can often be important //not// to quantify the thing too early, in case you end up defining the idea according to a bad implementation, and the disproof of that implementation then leads to the basic idea being unfairly dismissed, when it might actually be right. Early models of the atom were wrong, but the notion that "atoms exist" has continued to be useful. We didn't just disprove the first model that came along, and then declare that the general concept of the atom was dead. Mathematicians sometimes have a tendency to jump in and inappropriately over-define and over-specify concepts at an early stage. Concepts and their potential mathematical implementations should be kept separate. It's sometimes better to be correctly vague than incorrectly precise. Avoid premature calculation.
Descriptions can also act as a guide for where a theory or group of theories may be going: two descriptions that appear to produce equally-good matches to current data may well lead to diverging predictions in other regions that we can't yet test, or haven't yet had time to study. By looking at these divergences, we can make more informed decisions about how we're going to allocate future research resources. For instance, while Witt's model may (quite understandably) have vague spots that haven't yet been worked out regarding particle physics, it seems to predict some quite broad qualitatively-different behaviours in cosmology that we should be able to look at and compare against the available evidence without having to know precise figures to umpteen decimal places.
If someone produces a broad system that (if correct) would have have a wider range of applicability than current theory, and appears to make predictions that diverge qualitatively (and seemingly unambiguously) from current theory in ways that aren't too difficult to understand, then I think its sensible to concentrate on those areas when assessing the model. Fine-focusing on other areas where the model's predictions are arguably in roughly the same ball-park as current theory, and where the lack of development of the model means that its difficult to narrow the potential differences down further ... that doesn't seem to me to the the best way to go about things.
When you look at how much "bare-bones" general relativity gets wrong (before we patch it up with invented things like dark matter and dark energy), and we consider that GR1915 doesn't seem to attempt to say //anything// definitive about particle physics, I think that if Witt's model was even //approximately// right in such a wide range of situations, that'd be impressive. But look how long it took to develop the standard model, or quantum mechanics, or some aspects of GR: to insist that Witt's model handles everything that was previously done by a //range// of earlier, incompatible stand-alone theories, and that the first publication of the theory has all the details already perfectly fully worked out, with no mistakes or ambiguities or areas needing further work, I think that's unreasonable. Especially since only one guy's been working on it.
It took more than a hundred years to find the mistakes in Newton's original model, and fifty years to flush out basic user-errors in special relativity (Terrell & Penrose), so I think we should expect to find a few gaps and mistakes and nasty ambiguities should be expected.
======
IMO what we probably //should// be asking is: does there seem to be something here that's interesting, does it have the potential for further development, does it give an alternative view of current data that may offer some new perspectives and inspire possibly better models, how impressive (or not) is what it already manages to do from its initial assumptions, and does it get anything badly, unambiguously wrong?
If it //does// get anything unambiguously wrong, are these things due to the basic idea or to a flawed implementation? Can these reasonably be fixed without overcomplicating the model? Is the investment worthwhile? And if not, are there any unusual questions or concepts used in this model that we can steal and put into the common ideas-pool for other future models?
Even "wrong" theories have worth if they are wrong in an interesting way, or if they introduce methods or concepts that can be recycled and reused by future researchers. Expanding our conceptual vocabulary is valuable, even if it's only so that we can put names to more approaches that don't seem to work.
But saying, "theory X is automatically rubbish because it doesn't agree with our current system", that seems to me to be a cheap copout.
No, that's not all that matters. Qualitative predictions and descriptions of relationships are often necessary before quantitative work can proceed as anything other than an ad hoc method of arranging and extrapolating data.
"Qualitative" gives the broad brushstrokes of a picture, "quantitative" fills in the fine detail. If you try to paint on a very large canvas, filling in a little section at a time without any overview or masterplan for what you're doing, you can end up with intricate gibberish, or with different sections that are locally consistent but don't from a larger logically-consistent picture. Imagine trying to get a group of people to paint a view of Manhattan, where each worker paints one window without seeing any of the rest of the canvas. You're going to end up with a lot of beautifully-painted rectangles, but you won't be able to use the resulting painting to tell you anything about the geography of Manhattan.
You won't be able to use the picture to navigate.
Hopefully, if the basic structure is good, the details get filled in later.
Descriptions in physics can be powerful. For instance, take Einstein's general theory of relativity. It's a geometrical description of gravity. Now, currently, there's no obvious engineering application that actually //requires// a geometrical description of gravity, and at the time that GR was written, the theory made no solid predictions that were easily distinguishable from those of other theories. You could instead imagine a non-particulate aether permeating space, and you could apply dragging coefficients and the like to make it fit astronomical data.
But the concept of obtaining these results from geometrical relationships was considered more efficient, more precise, and more concise. Similarly Special Relativity supplanted Lorentzian Ether Theory, because SR was considered to provide a more fundamental justification for the same basic equations, and therefore to be the more efficient description.
Descriptions are also valuable in situations where the math is deterministic, but the correct //application// of the math isn't always easy to determine. In quantum field theory, descriptions (even artificial ones) can act as useful mnemonics for how the math ought to operate in certain situations, and help an operator to make sure that they are carrying out the right set of calculations (or whether they should be doing the calculations at all). Descriptions are useful for "sanity-checking" calculations.
Descriptions also help when the fine details aren't yet worked out. A basic idea (e.g. "The Big Bang") can be a broad concept that encompasses a range of different theories, models and implementations. When you hit on one of these descriptions, it can often be important //not// to quantify the thing too early, in case you end up defining the idea according to a bad implementation, and the disproof of that implementation then leads to the basic idea being unfairly dismissed, when it might actually be right. Early models of the atom were wrong, but the notion that "atoms exist" has continued to be useful. We didn't just disprove the first model that came along, and then declare that the general concept of the atom was dead. Mathematicians sometimes have a tendency to jump in and inappropriately over-define and over-specify concepts at an early stage. Concepts and their potential mathematical implementations should be kept separate. It's sometimes better to be correctly vague than incorrectly precise. Avoid premature calculation.
Descriptions can also act as a guide for where a theory or group of theories may be going: two descriptions that appear to produce equally-good matches to current data may well lead to diverging predictions in other regions that we can't yet test, or haven't yet had time to study. By looking at these divergences, we can make more informed decisions about how we're going to allocate future research resources. For instance, while Witt's model may (quite understandably) have vague spots that haven't yet been worked out regarding particle physics, it seems to predict some quite broad qualitatively-different behaviours in cosmology that we should be able to look at and compare against the available evidence without having to know precise figures to umpteen decimal places.
If someone produces a broad system that (if correct) would have have a wider range of applicability than current theory, and appears to make predictions that diverge qualitatively (and seemingly unambiguously) from current theory in ways that aren't too difficult to understand, then I think its sensible to concentrate on those areas when assessing the model. Fine-focusing on other areas where the model's predictions are arguably in roughly the same ball-park as current theory, and where the lack of development of the model means that its difficult to narrow the potential differences down further ... that doesn't seem to me to the the best way to go about things.
When you look at how much "bare-bones" general relativity gets wrong (before we patch it up with invented things like dark matter and dark energy), and we consider that GR1915 doesn't seem to attempt to say //anything// definitive about particle physics, I think that if Witt's model was even //approximately// right in such a wide range of situations, that'd be impressive. But look how long it took to develop the standard model, or quantum mechanics, or some aspects of GR: to insist that Witt's model handles everything that was previously done by a //range// of earlier, incompatible stand-alone theories, and that the first publication of the theory has all the details already perfectly fully worked out, with no mistakes or ambiguities or areas needing further work, I think that's unreasonable. Especially since only one guy's been working on it.
It took more than a hundred years to find the mistakes in Newton's original model, and fifty years to flush out basic user-errors in special relativity (Terrell & Penrose), so I think we should expect to find a few gaps and mistakes and nasty ambiguities should be expected.
======
IMO what we probably //should// be asking is: does there seem to be something here that's interesting, does it have the potential for further development, does it give an alternative view of current data that may offer some new perspectives and inspire possibly better models, how impressive (or not) is what it already manages to do from its initial assumptions, and does it get anything badly, unambiguously wrong?
If it //does// get anything unambiguously wrong, are these things due to the basic idea or to a flawed implementation? Can these reasonably be fixed without overcomplicating the model? Is the investment worthwhile? And if not, are there any unusual questions or concepts used in this model that we can steal and put into the common ideas-pool for other future models?
Even "wrong" theories have worth if they are wrong in an interesting way, or if they introduce methods or concepts that can be recycled and reused by future researchers. Expanding our conceptual vocabulary is valuable, even if it's only so that we can put names to more approaches that don't seem to work.
But saying, "theory X is automatically rubbish because it doesn't agree with our current system", that seems to me to be a cheap copout.
The Standard Model goes way beyond the descriptive stage. Any idea that intends to replace it must be quantitative and very precise. If it isn't it is worthless.
Of course a single person can't be expected to construct a whole theory that replaces all the Standard Model. But science does not work like that. What Witt should do if he had something would be to work out a particular problem to the end, with precise predictions, not try to build a new theory of everything from scratch. A theory of all of phsyics without numbers is worthless, a small model that solved one particular problem within the Standard Model would be science.
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sol invictus
Philosopher
- Joined
- Oct 21, 2007
- Messages
- 8,613
I agree with everything in the part I quoted above. BUT (and that's a big but), we already have a theory which does an astoundingly good job of explaining our data. So we have both a qualitative and quantitative description, and one which fits into everything we've learned and understood about mathematics and the physical world over the last 2,000+ years.
When someone comes along with a proposal that throws almost that entire structure away, and offers only vague qualitative assurances that it will work, how seriously should we take it? Such a thing has never before happened in the history of science. The closest analogs would be Einstein and the various people involved in the shift to a heliocentric model, but in both cases they built on data painstakingly accumulated by others, they fully understood the old model and its failings, and they constructed coherent quantitative models that explained the data where the old models did not.
This theory has neither intellectual coherence, quantitative predictions, or any justification in a failure of the old theory. It throws away nearly everything we have learned, and therefore it must contend with all the vast quantities of experimental data the old theory explained perfectly. The odds that it could succeed at that are very close to zero, so nobody is going to waste their time checking.
And bear in mind that there are hundreds of such crackpot (I use that term in a technical and specific sense) theories proposed every year - it would be a full time job for a significant fraction of all the physicists in the world to carefully check each of them. Instead, those physicists use their rather well-informed judgment to decide what to study.
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Thanks, Yllanes. I appreciate your acknowledgement.
And now, please let me retreat slightly. Since my post, ErkDemon has defended a concept, a pigeon hole of argument into which perhaps Witt would like to fit himself, with sufficent vigor (and with arguments sufficiently well-stated) as to make it reasonable to wonder, at least, if he (ErkDemon) might potentially be a sock puppet. I don't at all guess that he is, but at least there's someone's whose arguments might be consistent with that position.
As it is, I like ErkDemon's aguments. I don't believe that when the detailed facts about Witt are examined, those arguments end up supporting him (Witt) at all. But I am personally fond of the notion that a conceptual ("qualitative") view of matters has enormous value.
Take plain old heliocentricity. We could have all the equations down with perfection (and I presume we do), but without the concept, they'd be nothing but very successful numbers/predictions. On the other hand, without any numbers at all, the concept alone is a wonderful thing we can all easily wrap our heads around. It's a thing of beauty.
I guess both the numbers and concepts are beautiful.
Anyway, to this very non-expert person, it seems to be a mistake to think numbers alone rule, or even that they are super preeminent. I don't think the importance of a coherent and optimum conceptualization (optimum in the sense it's the best explanation for the numbers) should be minimized. I also think ErkDemon argues the matter well.
And now, please let me retreat slightly. Since my post, ErkDemon has defended a concept, a pigeon hole of argument into which perhaps Witt would like to fit himself, with sufficent vigor (and with arguments sufficiently well-stated) as to make it reasonable to wonder, at least, if he (ErkDemon) might potentially be a sock puppet. I don't at all guess that he is, but at least there's someone's whose arguments might be consistent with that position.
As it is, I like ErkDemon's aguments. I don't believe that when the detailed facts about Witt are examined, those arguments end up supporting him (Witt) at all. But I am personally fond of the notion that a conceptual ("qualitative") view of matters has enormous value.
Take plain old heliocentricity. We could have all the equations down with perfection (and I presume we do), but without the concept, they'd be nothing but very successful numbers/predictions. On the other hand, without any numbers at all, the concept alone is a wonderful thing we can all easily wrap our heads around. It's a thing of beauty.
I guess both the numbers and concepts are beautiful.
Anyway, to this very non-expert person, it seems to be a mistake to think numbers alone rule, or even that they are super preeminent. I don't think the importance of a coherent and optimum conceptualization (optimum in the sense it's the best explanation for the numbers) should be minimized. I also think ErkDemon argues the matter well.
sol invictus
Philosopher
- Joined
- Oct 21, 2007
- Messages
- 8,613
I just posted this in another thread, but it's equally relevant here:
http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/06/19/the-alternative-science-respectability-checklist/
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/06/19/the-alternative-science-respectability-checklist/
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
zosima
Muse
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2008
- Messages
- 536
3 points
3 comments:
>> Rossman:
I too agree that a qualitative view of science can be incredibly useful, but I also tend to believe that recent results in quantum theory indicate that such an intuitive view is impossible. Non-locality results(spooky action at a distance), wave/particle duality(two slit experiments), and indeterminacy (a la schrodinger's cat) imho make any sort of qualitative theory that is intelligible to human intuition essentially incoherent as an explanation.
>> Hermine:
Although I have no doubt that this primal therapy stuff has a place on JREF
I'm not sure it is anything more than tangentially related to this discussion. But I did have a little trouble understanding the post so maybe I'm missing something obvious. If not, perhaps the mods can move the post into its own thread.
>>To all:
The jref result for the search "null physics" on google is the number one result as of ~11:00 PST 2008/03/06(yyyy/mm/dd) above the null physics site itself. If that isn't a prime exemplar of reason triumphing in the fact of adversity, I don't know what is.
3 comments:
>> Rossman:
I too agree that a qualitative view of science can be incredibly useful, but I also tend to believe that recent results in quantum theory indicate that such an intuitive view is impossible. Non-locality results(spooky action at a distance), wave/particle duality(two slit experiments), and indeterminacy (a la schrodinger's cat) imho make any sort of qualitative theory that is intelligible to human intuition essentially incoherent as an explanation.
>> Hermine:
Although I have no doubt that this primal therapy stuff has a place on JREF
I'm not sure it is anything more than tangentially related to this discussion. But I did have a little trouble understanding the post so maybe I'm missing something obvious. If not, perhaps the mods can move the post into its own thread.>>To all:
The jref result for the search "null physics" on google is the number one result as of ~11:00 PST 2008/03/06(yyyy/mm/dd) above the null physics site itself. If that isn't a prime exemplar of reason triumphing in the fact of adversity, I don't know what is.
Last edited:
ErkDemon
Scholar
- Joined
- Feb 2, 2008
- Messages
- 88
Yes, new theories are still needed
Are you sure?
Two of our biggest theories of the C20th are quantum mechanics and general relativity. Both are claimed by some of their adherents to be quite excellent and not requiring any fixing. But the two theories refuse to "play nice" together.
They aren't compatible. GR lets us "prove", unambiguously, that information can't possibly seep out through a gravitational horizon, while QM lets us "prove", equally unambiguously, that it must.
This problem has occupied some of our most brilliant theoretical physicists for the last thirty-something years, and they still don't have an agreed solution, even though they've now tried pretty much every reasonable-looking approach. They simply don't know how to fix it (a couple of them claim that they've managed it, but their colleagues don't agree). Hawking's approach was originally to say that since GR couldn't possibly be wrong, QM had to be rewritten to accommodate it ("loss of microcausality"), then he switched tack in 2004, and argued that since QM had to be right, something else had to give ("detour into obscure many-worlds arguments").
So not only do we not have an agreed solution, we don't even have an agreed concept for the shape of the future theory that can manage to incorporate the best bits of GR and QM. We are slowly piecing together a possible consensus over which conflicting parts should probably be given priority. So, "Quantum Gravity" (QG) isn't yet a theory, it's a research programme to try to devise an outline of the basic specifications that a future theory of QG should eventually address.
If anyone involved in theoretical physics honestly believes that we aren't sorely in need of a new theory, I'd suggest that they consider giving up physics and getting a job in finance instead. A lot of the statistics are the same, and the money's better.
I guess we make a private, personal assessment of the odds, and publicly reserve judgement until more reliable details are available. Expressing opinions (as opinions) is fine.
Special relativity threw away aether theory, and QM threw away classical mechanics. Phlogiston theory was the most successful and most beautiful theory of chemistry that we'd ever had ... but this didn't stop it being wrong, and we dumped that too.
No, Einstein's special theory wasn't motivated by the need to make new predictions that fitted unexplainable data – it produced basically the same predictions as Lorentz's aether model, but put those predictions on a new philosophical basis (under more modern physics-journal acceptance procedures, this would, in itself, have been grounds for rejecting Einstein's 1905 electrodynamics paper).
BTW, on the subject of Einstein, I think that his most critical contribution to classical theory wasn't so much SR or E=mc^2 (which would probably have happened a few years later without him), or even general relativity (Schwarzchild and others were already snapping at his heels with their own, similar research), but his 1911 paper on the action of gravity on light.
This result really have been discovered and published a century earlier, but somehow it wasn't.
Then Einstein comes along in 1911, calculates the existence of gravity-shifts (much as Michell had done in the C18th), recognises that the exercise leads to a contradiction, but declares that his calculation is correct regardless. In an impressive display of arrogance(!), Einstein gives the calculation, predicts gravity-shifts, declares the failure of the usual associated logic, and then declares that the failure isn't his fault, its the fault of Nature, and of our usual assumptions. If gravity-shifts produced nonsensical results when we assumed that time passed at the same rate in all gravitational environments, then (argued Einstein) since his gravity-shift calculation must be correct, timeflow must necessarily vary as a function of gravitational field strength. It was a trivial, naïve calculation, and his conclusions totally set aside all previous theoretical work and conventions. He simply ignored everything that anyone else had ever done on the subject of and wrote what he thought, bypassing all the historical arguments and counterarguments. And he was essentially correct. So you'd had these brilliant mathematicians beating their heads against a brick wall for decades, trying and failing to get curved-space models of gravity to work, and along comes this Einstein bloke who looks like a math newbie, and says, sorry guys, you've been spending your entire professional lives working on the wrong problem. It's not curved space, it's curved spacetime. After that ... boom ... it's a race to see who can put together a general theory of relativity first. Einstein wins, partly because he works himself into the ground, and partly because some of his competitors have their research schedules wrecked by WW1.
The key point that Einstein spotted, and which none of the more highly-trained experts before him had been able to see, was that our basic project specifications for the development of a curvature-based model of gravity had been fundamentally wrong. If you used the standard, conventional approaches, you couldn't possibly get the right answer. People who went through the system and learnt the history of the subject, and the “right” way to attack these problems all ended up stuck, whereas Einstein apparently didn't have a clue about (or particularly care about) how anyone had tried to tackle the problem before him. He didn't seem to know the relevant work by Soldner, or Cavendish, or Michell, or even Newton (he didn't seem to know the contents of Newton's “Opticks”), and the only person that he cited in his paper for for any previous relevant theoretical work on the subject of the effect of gravity on light was himself (self-citing is sometimes presented as being a “red flag” for crackpottery).
Now, although I consider the 1911 piece to have been one of the most important physics papers of the last three hundred years, if I was a modern mainstream journal reviewer, and was doing my job properly and following the set rules, I'd have been forced to reject it as not fit for publication. It doesn't meet modern journal quality-control criteria. Neither, arguably, do his 1905 electrodynamics paper or his 1905 E=mc^2 paper. None of them display the “proper” acknowledgement or discussion of previous research by other workers, or demonstrate an understanding and appreciation of the history of the subject being discussed. I think that perhaps 50% he didn't actually know all the background, and 50% he probably didn't really care. His attitude seemed to be that his papers contained his arguments, and if you wanted someone else's, you should be reading their papers instead. But you'd have to find them yourself.
Well, it does actually make some predictions that are qualitatively different to existing theory, and it does try to address the failure of Einstein's general theory to handle energy conservation in a universe that Hubble-shifts light.
Einstein's early presentation of general relativity assumed an infinite, static, pseudo-Euclidean universe (something like Witt's), and did seem to conserve energy ... in order to stop the thing collapsing under its own gravity, Einstein introduced a compensating, repulsive, "Cosmological Constant" that was meant to exactly counter the long-range effect of gravitation, and as a bonus, the CC would also have been expected to blueshift light as a function of distance travelled, compensating for gravitational effects that might be expected to produce a cumulative redshift.
So Einstein's early implementation of the theory tried to explain why we wouldn't see distance-dependent cosmological redshifts. Unfortunately, just a few years later, Hubble noticed that these redshifts (which Einstein had eliminated from the model) were real. So Einstein went back, declared that he'd screwed up by inventing his CC, and agreed that a Friedmann-style expanding universe made more sense. But switching to an expanding model meant that energy conservation no longer obviously worked.
As far as I can see, Witt's tried to fix this energy-conservation problem, in a constant-size universe that still shows Hubble-oid redshifts, by relating the energy lost through redshifting to the energy that appears in the microwave range, which would otherwise seem to be anomalous in his sort of steady-state model.
Now, speaking strictly personally, I really hate his suggested solution (!), but then again, the only potential alternative that I could suggest (a broader conservation principle that encompasses mass-energy-space) would require an expanding universe, and that's explicitly ruled out by Witt's initial design brief , since he's limited himself to explanations that might work in a steady-state universe.
So I think Witt should be given credit for correctly spotting a potential problem with current GR, and trying to address it, even though I very much dislike his suggested solution. By comparison, most of the GR guys not only don't seem to have a solution to offer ... they usually don't seem to acknowledge that this issue even requires a solution.
Hmm ... So maybe what Witt should do, instead of hassling physicists to assess his model for him, is to try to mug up on the relevant theory himself, and then to set himself apart from the letter-writing brigade by going away and organising and compiling his ideas and arguments in permanent book form, and, then (when he's sure that he's ready) to show his own commitment to the idea by publishing the thing himself, and then publicising the thing on the internet for people to read (or not read) as they see fit ...
... which is what he's done.
I personally don't like Witt's steady-state cosmology, but I didn't like Einstein's, either (shrugs), so I guess that's not something that he should take as a personal criticism.
I do suspect that maybe he's slightly hyped parts of the book, but then again, there seem to be hordes of mainstream physics and math guys regularly committing worse offences to try to get publicity for their research, too. I mean, every fortnight New Scientist and the news agencies seem to be carrying some new claim about someone's research being about to discover “the key to the universe” or somesuch, and those are all mainstream guys, working on the inside. So maybe the accusation that one could level at Witt is that in publicising his book, he might be behaving almost as badly as some mainstream researchers.
=====
The problem that I think Witt's likely to have trouble overcoming is that I thought that the HST had been accumulating photographic evidence that showed galaxies and stars seeming to be younger (on average) with distance, or at least showing some sort of visible orderly evolution over time. In a constant, immortal universe, we'd tend to expect to see the same basic mix at all distances and ages, unless we were somehow in an anomalous evolving "bubble" or fluctuation attached to the larger surface, in which the wider rules were temporarily broken, locally.
But if that was the case, and there was something anomalous about our own visible region that allowed evolution in its contents, then one way of producing a local change in properties with time within the bubble is to have the bubble changing size, and that brings us back to "Big Bang" models again.
Are you sure?
Two of our biggest theories of the C20th are quantum mechanics and general relativity. Both are claimed by some of their adherents to be quite excellent and not requiring any fixing. But the two theories refuse to "play nice" together.
They aren't compatible. GR lets us "prove", unambiguously, that information can't possibly seep out through a gravitational horizon, while QM lets us "prove", equally unambiguously, that it must.
This problem has occupied some of our most brilliant theoretical physicists for the last thirty-something years, and they still don't have an agreed solution, even though they've now tried pretty much every reasonable-looking approach. They simply don't know how to fix it (a couple of them claim that they've managed it, but their colleagues don't agree). Hawking's approach was originally to say that since GR couldn't possibly be wrong, QM had to be rewritten to accommodate it ("loss of microcausality"), then he switched tack in 2004, and argued that since QM had to be right, something else had to give ("detour into obscure many-worlds arguments").
So not only do we not have an agreed solution, we don't even have an agreed concept for the shape of the future theory that can manage to incorporate the best bits of GR and QM. We are slowly piecing together a possible consensus over which conflicting parts should probably be given priority. So, "Quantum Gravity" (QG) isn't yet a theory, it's a research programme to try to devise an outline of the basic specifications that a future theory of QG should eventually address.
If anyone involved in theoretical physics honestly believes that we aren't sorely in need of a new theory, I'd suggest that they consider giving up physics and getting a job in finance instead. A lot of the statistics are the same, and the money's better.
I guess we make a private, personal assessment of the odds, and publicly reserve judgement until more reliable details are available. Expressing opinions (as opinions) is fine.
Special relativity threw away aether theory, and QM threw away classical mechanics. Phlogiston theory was the most successful and most beautiful theory of chemistry that we'd ever had ... but this didn't stop it being wrong, and we dumped that too.
No, Einstein's special theory wasn't motivated by the need to make new predictions that fitted unexplainable data – it produced basically the same predictions as Lorentz's aether model, but put those predictions on a new philosophical basis (under more modern physics-journal acceptance procedures, this would, in itself, have been grounds for rejecting Einstein's 1905 electrodynamics paper).
BTW, on the subject of Einstein, I think that his most critical contribution to classical theory wasn't so much SR or E=mc^2 (which would probably have happened a few years later without him), or even general relativity (Schwarzchild and others were already snapping at his heels with their own, similar research), but his 1911 paper on the action of gravity on light.
This result really have been discovered and published a century earlier, but somehow it wasn't.
Then Einstein comes along in 1911, calculates the existence of gravity-shifts (much as Michell had done in the C18th), recognises that the exercise leads to a contradiction, but declares that his calculation is correct regardless. In an impressive display of arrogance(!), Einstein gives the calculation, predicts gravity-shifts, declares the failure of the usual associated logic, and then declares that the failure isn't his fault, its the fault of Nature, and of our usual assumptions. If gravity-shifts produced nonsensical results when we assumed that time passed at the same rate in all gravitational environments, then (argued Einstein) since his gravity-shift calculation must be correct, timeflow must necessarily vary as a function of gravitational field strength. It was a trivial, naïve calculation, and his conclusions totally set aside all previous theoretical work and conventions. He simply ignored everything that anyone else had ever done on the subject of and wrote what he thought, bypassing all the historical arguments and counterarguments. And he was essentially correct. So you'd had these brilliant mathematicians beating their heads against a brick wall for decades, trying and failing to get curved-space models of gravity to work, and along comes this Einstein bloke who looks like a math newbie, and says, sorry guys, you've been spending your entire professional lives working on the wrong problem. It's not curved space, it's curved spacetime. After that ... boom ... it's a race to see who can put together a general theory of relativity first. Einstein wins, partly because he works himself into the ground, and partly because some of his competitors have their research schedules wrecked by WW1.
The key point that Einstein spotted, and which none of the more highly-trained experts before him had been able to see, was that our basic project specifications for the development of a curvature-based model of gravity had been fundamentally wrong. If you used the standard, conventional approaches, you couldn't possibly get the right answer. People who went through the system and learnt the history of the subject, and the “right” way to attack these problems all ended up stuck, whereas Einstein apparently didn't have a clue about (or particularly care about) how anyone had tried to tackle the problem before him. He didn't seem to know the relevant work by Soldner, or Cavendish, or Michell, or even Newton (he didn't seem to know the contents of Newton's “Opticks”), and the only person that he cited in his paper for for any previous relevant theoretical work on the subject of the effect of gravity on light was himself (self-citing is sometimes presented as being a “red flag” for crackpottery).
Now, although I consider the 1911 piece to have been one of the most important physics papers of the last three hundred years, if I was a modern mainstream journal reviewer, and was doing my job properly and following the set rules, I'd have been forced to reject it as not fit for publication. It doesn't meet modern journal quality-control criteria. Neither, arguably, do his 1905 electrodynamics paper or his 1905 E=mc^2 paper. None of them display the “proper” acknowledgement or discussion of previous research by other workers, or demonstrate an understanding and appreciation of the history of the subject being discussed. I think that perhaps 50% he didn't actually know all the background, and 50% he probably didn't really care. His attitude seemed to be that his papers contained his arguments, and if you wanted someone else's, you should be reading their papers instead. But you'd have to find them yourself.
Well, it does actually make some predictions that are qualitatively different to existing theory, and it does try to address the failure of Einstein's general theory to handle energy conservation in a universe that Hubble-shifts light.
Einstein's early presentation of general relativity assumed an infinite, static, pseudo-Euclidean universe (something like Witt's), and did seem to conserve energy ... in order to stop the thing collapsing under its own gravity, Einstein introduced a compensating, repulsive, "Cosmological Constant" that was meant to exactly counter the long-range effect of gravitation, and as a bonus, the CC would also have been expected to blueshift light as a function of distance travelled, compensating for gravitational effects that might be expected to produce a cumulative redshift.
So Einstein's early implementation of the theory tried to explain why we wouldn't see distance-dependent cosmological redshifts. Unfortunately, just a few years later, Hubble noticed that these redshifts (which Einstein had eliminated from the model) were real. So Einstein went back, declared that he'd screwed up by inventing his CC, and agreed that a Friedmann-style expanding universe made more sense. But switching to an expanding model meant that energy conservation no longer obviously worked.
As far as I can see, Witt's tried to fix this energy-conservation problem, in a constant-size universe that still shows Hubble-oid redshifts, by relating the energy lost through redshifting to the energy that appears in the microwave range, which would otherwise seem to be anomalous in his sort of steady-state model.
Now, speaking strictly personally, I really hate his suggested solution (!), but then again, the only potential alternative that I could suggest (a broader conservation principle that encompasses mass-energy-space) would require an expanding universe, and that's explicitly ruled out by Witt's initial design brief , since he's limited himself to explanations that might work in a steady-state universe.
So I think Witt should be given credit for correctly spotting a potential problem with current GR, and trying to address it, even though I very much dislike his suggested solution. By comparison, most of the GR guys not only don't seem to have a solution to offer ... they usually don't seem to acknowledge that this issue even requires a solution.
Hmm ... So maybe what Witt should do, instead of hassling physicists to assess his model for him, is to try to mug up on the relevant theory himself, and then to set himself apart from the letter-writing brigade by going away and organising and compiling his ideas and arguments in permanent book form, and, then (when he's sure that he's ready) to show his own commitment to the idea by publishing the thing himself, and then publicising the thing on the internet for people to read (or not read) as they see fit ...
... which is what he's done.
I personally don't like Witt's steady-state cosmology, but I didn't like Einstein's, either (shrugs), so I guess that's not something that he should take as a personal criticism.
I do suspect that maybe he's slightly hyped parts of the book, but then again, there seem to be hordes of mainstream physics and math guys regularly committing worse offences to try to get publicity for their research, too. I mean, every fortnight New Scientist and the news agencies seem to be carrying some new claim about someone's research being about to discover “the key to the universe” or somesuch, and those are all mainstream guys, working on the inside. So maybe the accusation that one could level at Witt is that in publicising his book, he might be behaving almost as badly as some mainstream researchers.
=====
The problem that I think Witt's likely to have trouble overcoming is that I thought that the HST had been accumulating photographic evidence that showed galaxies and stars seeming to be younger (on average) with distance, or at least showing some sort of visible orderly evolution over time. In a constant, immortal universe, we'd tend to expect to see the same basic mix at all distances and ages, unless we were somehow in an anomalous evolving "bubble" or fluctuation attached to the larger surface, in which the wider rules were temporarily broken, locally.
But if that was the case, and there was something anomalous about our own visible region that allowed evolution in its contents, then one way of producing a local change in properties with time within the bubble is to have the bubble changing size, and that brings us back to "Big Bang" models again.
Null Physics!
Ok...here's a disclaimer: I am most definitely NOT an expert on advanced theoretical physics and the mathematics that go along with it, but I LOVE steeping myself in knowledge that is over my head and trying my hardest to understand it.
I too stumbled across a two-page spread advertisement for Witt's book in a Discover magazine, the one about Einstein. It is kind of ironic that I find it in this issue, however not surprising now that I know how much money Terry Witt has poured into the advertising of his self-published work.
I know I'm gonna get repetitive here (kinda reiterating what others have said) but bear with me. I think that our standard model is absolutely terrific. I don't think that there are any words that can accurately describe the important role it has played in changing the lives of those of us in the scientific community as well as the general community. From technological advancements employing quantum tunneling to the inspiration of new, exciting theories like string theory/M-theory, etc, the standard model is everywhere we look. It is irrefutable as the most experimentally sound physics model we have today.
That being said however, and don't lose me here, we're all still scientists. Science demands skepticism. It demands it. Though the standard model is all of the things I've already said, it is NOT perfect. Quantum mechanics and general relativity are still at odds. How then can we truly and I mean TRULY refer to it as the be all and end all? How can we make statements that it is impossible to find a better theory? Just because we haven't found it yet? This is just an excuse.
I just finished reading one of the articles on Einstein's work in my Discover magazine. It reminded me and all other readers that Einstein, in fact, repeatedly changed his mind regarding his theories. He had HUGE problems with various implications of his equations over the years, many of which he had to concede to being wrong about. Though Einstein was at an odds with his own theories (at times), we must not think of this as silly. This is the very quality which made him such a great scientist. I must refer to a quote from the article I read:
"...if Einstein had lived longer he might have come to accept quantum mechanics, making peace with his most unwelcome scientific progeny. 'It's difficult to say, because Einstein changed his mind so many times on so many subjects...that's a sign of a great scientist. A great scientist is not somebody who believes his own ideas; it's somebody who does not believe his own ideas. He's ready to change his mind. What Einstein did was bring back science to its true soul, which is to change our view of the world, not just explain things. Einstein reminded us that what we don't know is much more than what we know." (Folger, 2008, p. 57).
Furthermore, previously in the article, it is said that
"Einstein's missed connections serve as a warning to today's physicists...are they...working with an incomplete understanding of some fundamental aspect of nature? 'Yes, it's perfectly possible...the history of physics [has shown that] almost every epoch has the feeling that "we know everything now."...what we don't know is probably huge. We are still far away from knowing all the ingredients.'" (Folger, 2008, p. 57).
So ok, there it is, what we're missing, or what we don't know, to state verbatim, is huge. If it's huge, then a complete overhaul of how we understand the universe at a fundamental level (i.e. the null physics level...don't freak out, more on this in a sec...) could definitely be what we need to discover our Unified Theory of Everything.
Ok. Null physics. MEH! WRONG ANSWER...at least insofar as I can tell from a skimming of one or two excerpts and reading this thread. Clearly Terry Witt does not have his wits about him (ha! I love puns and play-on words..) by trying to argue his physics theory (yes, a theory, even if it is not respectable) which, even if it could be something, is definitely still a sperm seeking the egg. I mean, we don't have a good basis for a scientific theory until it can concretely explain something we observe in the real world. In this way Witt and his theory are like sperm pals, swimming in the great womb of science, trying to find the proverbial golden egg (or ovum, I guess, in order to maintain the analogy) that links the word of philosophy with the world of science: experiment.
So is Witt a woo or a crackpot? I seriously can't tell, and it's all but impossible for me to determine this (or perhaps I don't care enough to pursue it...). I think that his type of boldness, in the hands of a good scientist (see my quotes above) is really what we need to find our UTE.
Wow, sometimes I amaze myself with how long winded I am.
The only specific thing that I wanted to discuss about Null Physics itself is Witt's statement that the universe is zero or is the sum of zero, whatever. Now, I know that some of the things I say here may be sweeping generalizations and so on, but I just figured it as an interesting thought experiment.
We've all but confirmed that all forms of matter (electrons, protons, etc.) all have anti-matter counterparts (positrons, etc.). When these particles collide with each other, they annihilate releasing energy, right? Well isn't that kind of like having two equal and opposite added variables on opposite sides of an equation meet on one side of the equation, negating each other? It seems to me (remember that I am a layman) that with the standard model (awesomeness in model form) and it's love children (string theory for example..and I don't know if the love child analogy works here, I just like it) seem to be indicating more and more different and exotic particles, and what's more that every single one of them has an antimatter partner. This does kind of seem like that equation that Witt talked about...kinda. Isn't that neat?
Anyhoo, this has been a long 'first official post' and my eyes are tiring. I have no intentions of challenging modern conventional theory, as you should be able to tell from my love of all things physics and science, so please to not misunderstand me. Neat thought experiments are not a replacement for experimentally tested and reliable theories, but sometimes, if you remember the people who came before you, they might be a good place to start looking for missing pieces to the puzzle.
G'night
Terry (not Witt...)
Reference:
Folger, T. (2008). Patently absurd. Discover, March 2008.
Ok...here's a disclaimer: I am most definitely NOT an expert on advanced theoretical physics and the mathematics that go along with it, but I LOVE steeping myself in knowledge that is over my head and trying my hardest to understand it.
I too stumbled across a two-page spread advertisement for Witt's book in a Discover magazine, the one about Einstein. It is kind of ironic that I find it in this issue, however not surprising now that I know how much money Terry Witt has poured into the advertising of his self-published work.
I know I'm gonna get repetitive here (kinda reiterating what others have said) but bear with me. I think that our standard model is absolutely terrific. I don't think that there are any words that can accurately describe the important role it has played in changing the lives of those of us in the scientific community as well as the general community. From technological advancements employing quantum tunneling to the inspiration of new, exciting theories like string theory/M-theory, etc, the standard model is everywhere we look. It is irrefutable as the most experimentally sound physics model we have today.
That being said however, and don't lose me here, we're all still scientists. Science demands skepticism. It demands it. Though the standard model is all of the things I've already said, it is NOT perfect. Quantum mechanics and general relativity are still at odds. How then can we truly and I mean TRULY refer to it as the be all and end all? How can we make statements that it is impossible to find a better theory? Just because we haven't found it yet? This is just an excuse.
I just finished reading one of the articles on Einstein's work in my Discover magazine. It reminded me and all other readers that Einstein, in fact, repeatedly changed his mind regarding his theories. He had HUGE problems with various implications of his equations over the years, many of which he had to concede to being wrong about. Though Einstein was at an odds with his own theories (at times), we must not think of this as silly. This is the very quality which made him such a great scientist. I must refer to a quote from the article I read:
"...if Einstein had lived longer he might have come to accept quantum mechanics, making peace with his most unwelcome scientific progeny. 'It's difficult to say, because Einstein changed his mind so many times on so many subjects...that's a sign of a great scientist. A great scientist is not somebody who believes his own ideas; it's somebody who does not believe his own ideas. He's ready to change his mind. What Einstein did was bring back science to its true soul, which is to change our view of the world, not just explain things. Einstein reminded us that what we don't know is much more than what we know." (Folger, 2008, p. 57).
Furthermore, previously in the article, it is said that
"Einstein's missed connections serve as a warning to today's physicists...are they...working with an incomplete understanding of some fundamental aspect of nature? 'Yes, it's perfectly possible...the history of physics [has shown that] almost every epoch has the feeling that "we know everything now."...what we don't know is probably huge. We are still far away from knowing all the ingredients.'" (Folger, 2008, p. 57).
So ok, there it is, what we're missing, or what we don't know, to state verbatim, is huge. If it's huge, then a complete overhaul of how we understand the universe at a fundamental level (i.e. the null physics level...don't freak out, more on this in a sec...) could definitely be what we need to discover our Unified Theory of Everything.
Ok. Null physics. MEH! WRONG ANSWER...at least insofar as I can tell from a skimming of one or two excerpts and reading this thread. Clearly Terry Witt does not have his wits about him (ha! I love puns and play-on words..) by trying to argue his physics theory (yes, a theory, even if it is not respectable) which, even if it could be something, is definitely still a sperm seeking the egg. I mean, we don't have a good basis for a scientific theory until it can concretely explain something we observe in the real world. In this way Witt and his theory are like sperm pals, swimming in the great womb of science, trying to find the proverbial golden egg (or ovum, I guess, in order to maintain the analogy) that links the word of philosophy with the world of science: experiment.
So is Witt a woo or a crackpot? I seriously can't tell, and it's all but impossible for me to determine this (or perhaps I don't care enough to pursue it...). I think that his type of boldness, in the hands of a good scientist (see my quotes above) is really what we need to find our UTE.
Wow, sometimes I amaze myself with how long winded I am.
The only specific thing that I wanted to discuss about Null Physics itself is Witt's statement that the universe is zero or is the sum of zero, whatever. Now, I know that some of the things I say here may be sweeping generalizations and so on, but I just figured it as an interesting thought experiment.
We've all but confirmed that all forms of matter (electrons, protons, etc.) all have anti-matter counterparts (positrons, etc.). When these particles collide with each other, they annihilate releasing energy, right? Well isn't that kind of like having two equal and opposite added variables on opposite sides of an equation meet on one side of the equation, negating each other? It seems to me (remember that I am a layman) that with the standard model (awesomeness in model form) and it's love children (string theory for example..and I don't know if the love child analogy works here, I just like it) seem to be indicating more and more different and exotic particles, and what's more that every single one of them has an antimatter partner. This does kind of seem like that equation that Witt talked about...kinda. Isn't that neat?
Anyhoo, this has been a long 'first official post' and my eyes are tiring. I have no intentions of challenging modern conventional theory, as you should be able to tell from my love of all things physics and science, so please to not misunderstand me. Neat thought experiments are not a replacement for experimentally tested and reliable theories, but sometimes, if you remember the people who came before you, they might be a good place to start looking for missing pieces to the puzzle.
G'night
Terry (not Witt...)
Reference:
Folger, T. (2008). Patently absurd. Discover, March 2008.
sol invictus
Philosopher
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- Oct 21, 2007
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Yes.
I disagree with that completely. And yes, I know very well what I'm talking about.
Nonsense. Science just doesn't work that way. You don't throw old theories in the trash and start from scratch, ever. Why? Because the old theories worked really really really well, but when you figured out how to test them extremely precisely, you discovered they weren't quite exactly right. So you replace them with a better theory, but one which includes the old theory as a limit.
It is totally impossible that general relativity and quantum mechanics are wrong. They are simply inexact - but at a level that's undectable right now, and may well remain so for the forseeable future of the human race. While unifying QM with gravity is an extremely interesting topic intellectually, it's hardly a burning issue practically speaking.