Null Physics anyone?

[Reality Check]

A couple more problems with Null Physics

• NP states that electrons do not have intrinsic magnetic moments. Rather the magnetic moments measured for electrons is due to their orbits around the nucleus. This is classical orbits (not QM) but he argues that electrons can only emit photons because it takes a certain time to do so and this time is the time for a complete orbit.
  But he has forgotten about the Stern-Gerlach experiment of 1922 which showed that elections (not in an orbit) have intrinsic angular momentum. Angular momentum + a charged particle = magnetic moment.
• A prediction from NP:

  The Milky Way’s core - a massive black hole with a radiant output of ~6(10)^31 W, peaking in the infrared near ~0.06 mm.

  The total power output of the sun is 4 x 10^26 Watts so the Sag A black hole should be brighter than 100,000 suns in the infrared band. This would be obvious in the many infrared observations of the galactic center.
  Terry is trying to back out of this prediction a bit:
  The prediction depends on a (non-gravty red-shifted) temperature of 28,000 K but the assumptions generating this may be wrong and so the actual peak may be elsewhere. But the galactor center is well observed in all frequencies including radio, x-ray, infrared and visible (maybe not gamma).
  Something is absorbing the radiation. But that something would then heat up, radiate energy and be just as visible.
  Some sort of graviational lensing hiding the source.

Another weird feature of NP from a posting of Terry's

Vortical disk motion is the inward flow of a galaxy's disk material to its core where it is disassociated into hydrogen to reverse fusion as a nececssary consequence of treating our universe as an eternal, equilibrium system. It is a new astrophysical concept that is described in detail in Chapter 16 of the OUU book.

I wonder how much energy it would take to disassociate helium into hydrogen?

 

[Perpetual Student]

The context of

Quote:

infinity + 1 > infinity
infinity (infinity + 1 ) = infinity2 + infinity

is the statement that "infinity = the magnitude of the diameter of the universe" a few pages earlier. This assigns infinity a "magnitude" which he then uses to justify the 2 statements.

One first has to establish that assigning infinity a magnitude leads to a consistent mathematics, otherwise what follows has no meaning.

 

[Paulhoff]

The context of

Quote:

infinity + 1 > infinity
infinity (infinity + 1 ) = infinity2 + infinity

I have joked about infinity + 1, but there is no such thing, but there are different infinities.

Infinity Comes in Different Sizes

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true-infinity-comes-in-different-sizes

Paul

 

[Perpetual Student]

Yes infinities have ben studied and classified. These infinities have been subjected to rigorous mathematical analysis, including proofs that their existence is included in a consistent mathematics. One cannot simply define a new mathematical object and put it to use without first establishing its consistency, associated theorems and any algorithms. Simply giving infinity a "magnitude," (thereby defining a new kind of infinity) and then expecting meaningful results is naive and cannot produce verifiable results.
Suppose I were to define a new square root of two that is rational, simply by saying it is rational: a/b. Now if I created proofs in the area of physics using the a and the b of my rational square root of two, would anyone trust my results?

 

[sol invictus]

His white papers are fairly tame mathematically. For some reason he has not submitted his null geometry theory to any mathematics or physics journal.

"Some reason"?

But his "Einstein's Nonphysical Geometry" white paper is in the process of being peer reviewed. It states that the Schwarzschild metric (and so GR in general) is "nonphysical" beacuse he calculates a divergence in the % change in lengths as you get further way from the black hole.

The Schwarzschild metric has been around for approximately 90 years. It is in every general relativity textbook, it is studied by every student that takes a course on the topic, and there is even a theorem that it is the unique asymptotically flat spherically symmetric vacuum solution to Einstein's equations. I am extremely familiar with it personally, and I can assure you there is no such problem (in fact, far from the hole the metric becomes simply the flat metric in spherical coordinates).

Some mild degree of mathematical sophistication is required to understand it (or any solution to GR for that matter) - something around what a bright 3rd-year undergraduate in physics or math would have. You need vector calculus and a little differential geometry. That's far beyond Witt, based on what I've seen, so my guess is he has made some elementary mistake and derived some nonsense. Good luck to him getting it published.

 

[ben m]

based on what I've seen, so my guess is he has made some elementary mistake and derived some nonsense. Good luck to him getting it published.

I think it's worse than that. The "white paper" http://www.nullphysics.com/whitepaper1.pdf does not "derive some nonsense". At first glance, it appears to work through some perfectly-normal Schwarztschild-metric geometry. He eventually finds something that varies as 1/r, which surprises no one; he defines a definite integral of this and finds that it varies as log(r), which also surprises no one.

Then he says, more or less,

But it is intuitively impossible that a finite object should have any effect which doesn't have an asymptote at large r. Therefore GR, though experimentally correct, has (some ill-defined distinction between geometry as cause and as effect) which means (some carefully hedged statement about GR being wrong.)

Ugh. It's not even a mathematical mistake (though I didn't check for those), it's just a mathematical version of "if the second twin comes home older but he should have been the same age OMG PARADOX!!!11!"

 

[sol invictus]

I guess he must think electromagnetism and Newtonian gravity are wrong too. After all, electric and gravitational potentials from point charges/masses fall off like 1/r in those theories too (and for exactly the same reason as in GR).

 

[Reality Check]

"Some reason"?
The Schwarzschild metric has been around for approximately 90 years. It is in every general relativity textbook, it is studied by every student that takes a course on the topic, and there is even a theorem that it is the unique asymptotically flat spherically symmetric vacuum solution to Einstein's equations. I am extremely familiar with it personally, and I can assure you there is no such problem (in fact, far from the hole the metric becomes simply the flat metric in spherical coordinates).

Some mild degree of mathematical sophistication is required to understand it (or any solution to GR for that matter) - something around what a bright 3rd-year undergraduate in physics or math would have. You need vector calculus and a little differential geometry. That's far beyond Witt, based on what I've seen, so my guess is he has made some elementary mistake and derived some nonsense. Good luck to him getting it published.

To be fair he knows about the asymptotically flat behaviour of the Schwarzschild metric. Instead he looks at the % change in the distance between 2 points in the metric divided by the radial distance. He skips the math in the exact solution and uses an approximation which is the problem.
He may get it published since he reported that the peer reviewer had no problems with the approximation.

 

[sol invictus]

To be fair he knows about the asymptotically flat behaviour of the Schwarzschild metric. Instead he looks at the % change in the distance between 2 points in the metric divided by the radial distance.

Sorry, but that makes no sense. I don't even know what you mean - change with respect to what? What two points? Holding what fixed? Which definition of distance?

The metric is flat space far from the hole. Nothing strange can possibly happen there.

 

[sol invictus]

To be fair he knows about the asymptotically flat behaviour of the Schwarzschild metric. Instead he looks at the % change in the distance between 2 points in the metric divided by the radial distance. He skips the math in the exact solution and uses an approximation which is the problem.
He may get it published since he reported that the peer reviewer had no problems with the approximation.

OK, just for a laugh I decided to take a look at that "white paper". The quantity defined there is meaningless. Rather than the Schwarzschild metric, I could take flat space and write it in funny coordinates (for example, rescale the radial coordinate by 5). Then I could compare it to flat space in ordinary coordinates and (using Witt's definition) get an even more divergent result than he gets.

Or I could re-define the radial coordinate in the Sch. metric to make it "flat", and get zero - or literally anything else. The radial function means nothing at all by itself, because I can change it to anything by a redefiniion of coordinates.

You could, I suppose, ask about the fractional difference in length between radial geodesics in Scw. and flat space, starting and ending on spheres of fixed radius (that would nail down the radial coordinate). That's actually Witt's eq. (12). Notice that it goes to zero at large R.

Or you could ask that about the absolute difference, and indeed, far away it would get large. So what? There are many random quantities which diverge when you integrate them like that - the electric potential of a point charge, for example. Does that mean Gauss' law is wrong?

The quantity Witt defines is meaningless, because it is not coordinate invariant. It does not measure the deviation of Scw. from flat space in any useful way. If he manages to get it published I will be ashamed of the journal and the reviewer.

 

[ben m]

To be fair he knows about the asymptotically flat behaviour of the Schwarzschild metric. Instead he looks at the % change in the distance between 2 points in the metric divided by the radial distance. He skips the math in the exact solution and uses an approximation which is the problem.
He may get it published since he reported that the peer reviewer had no problems with the approximation.

Like I said---Witt took the Schwarzschild metric, throws random algebra at it until he generates an expression with a log(r) term. He labels this as unreasonable, according to some incoherent intuition about geometry.

Oh, and he also declares that the negative sign in the Minkowski metric means that

Although time is often interpreted in relativity theory as a fourth dimension external to space, the Minkowski metric actually demonstrates this is not true. If time were truly an extension of space then the distance between any two events would have the form:

ds^2 = c^2 dt^2 + dr^2

where differences in space and time compound and compliment each other. This is not the case. A difference of time occurs at the expense of a difference in distance, because time is a
contextual difference of space.

(italics are Witt's.)

He then goes on to use the conventional negative sign in his "derivation". Make of that what you will. I'm reading it as "Clearly you GR fanatics have adopted this space-time geometry thing without even thinking about it. Feh! Anyway, watch me as I deftly guide your negative sign into the bowels of a reductio ad absurdium."

 

[zosima]

Howdy, ya'll

I think I should try to steer clear of Witt's site for a while, we're starting to get on each others' nerves.

If nothing else I'm impressed that he learned the value of the internet after just one encounter with JREF. I guess he figured that rather than persuade people on these forums he had the resources to manufacture consensus by building his own forum.

One thing that's got me is where did that The Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada quote come from? Is this published somewhere or is it just something that someone told him over the phone. From what he's said about FIT, its pretty obvious that Witt is willing to exaggerate the amount of praise and consensus that there is for the theory.

ETA: To Witt's credit, he could have used his powers of moderation to silence opposition on the forum and he hasn't. The whole time I've been posting there I've been just cringing in expectation of the moment the BanHammer comes down and it hasn't. (Which is more than I can say for many more 'respectable' sites like BoingBoing).

 

[Vorpal]

Just for kicks, I did the same calculation for the metric ds² = (1/r^4)[ dr² + r²dΩ² ]. Following his approach exactly, I got δ'(r) = 1/r²-1, Int[ δ'(r) dr ] = C-(r+1/r), and therefore the "spatial deflection field increases without bound with distance." (If we massage the sign, anyway.) Therefore, as his approach leads us to the same place, all of his peculiar conclusions should follow for this metric as well. But in reality, the metric represents ordinary Euclidean space (just in unusual coordinates).

The entire "problem" is that that r-coordinate does not represent the proper radial length... but neither this r nor the Schwarzschild r were ever claimed to do so in the first place. This actually undercuts any meaning of this approach in the first place, as the numerical coordinate differences have no physical apart from the metric.

I honestly don't think T. Witt has even an undergraduate-level understanding of GTR. If he did, he would simply introduce a coordinate whose differences represent the proper radial length (as seen by a stationary observer at infinity), transform the Schwarzschild metric into those coordinates, and call it a day. None of this is conceptually difficult (although it is fairly ugly, with implicitly defined functions).

 

[rainbowcanyon]

I believe that Mr. Witt has either stumbled upon or independently derived the central theorem of idempotency, that every thing is equal to itself. While this is a great truth, it is not worth $59.95.

 

[ben m]

ETA: To Witt's credit, he could have used his powers of moderation to silence opposition on the forum and he hasn't. The whole time I've been posting there I've been just cringing in expectation of the moment the BanHammer comes down and it hasn't. (Which is more than I can say for many more 'respectable' sites like BoingBoing).

So much for that. I spent a while arguing with him there (under, as i my habit, a random pseudonym, but my compulsive overuse of italics is probably recognizable---Hi Terry!) and the admins just deleted a post for having an "antagonistic tenor".

I was hoping to be, as Skwinty reported, "surprised with his answers". I'll give him credit for knowing what cosmology data looks like, which was unexpected---he's not unaware of major cosmology facts like supernova time dilation. However, his response to this knowledge is to invent epicycle upon epicycle upon epicycle to explain every new detail. Believe it or not, he actually gets around to full-on Plasma Cosmology tropes---the way he prevents Olber's Paradox from overtaking his steady-state Universe is this: optical photons "decay" to microwaves (becoming the CMB), then get absorbed by electrons which power giant electrical currents which flow to galactic centers---sound familiar?---and there (with the help of mumble-mumble-nonlinear-physics) they dissociate heavy nuclei back into hydrogen.

I was unpleasantly unsurprised by his knowledge of quantum/atomic/optical physics, which is the familiar semi-classical/semi-Bohmian morass that 50% of crackpots come up with.

And he's got a library of excuses, ranging from "it's going to give exactly QM/GR predictions ... once I work out the impossible nonlinear geometry ... so stop asking whether it agrees with old experiments" to "it's not a mathematical theory, so stop asking for equations" to "I'm hoping to replace abstract math with new math---based on physics".

So much for that.

 

[DrRocket]

I have joked about infinity + 1, but there is no such thing, but there are different infinities.

Infinity Comes in Different Sizes

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true-infinity-comes-in-different-sizes

Paul

Yes, there are indeed different sizes of infinity. There are infinitely many different sizes ;-). For a nice discussion of cardinal numbers see the book Naive Set Theory by Paul Halmos. One of the more interesting questions about cardinal numbers is the continuum hypothesis. Wikipedia has a reasonable discussion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_hypothesis

 

[Skwinty]

I was hoping to be, as Skwinty reported, "surprised with his answers". I'll give him credit for knowing what cosmology data looks like, which was unexpected---he's not unaware of major cosmology facts like supernova time dilation.

Hi face a palm at them

Sure sounds like you were surprised that he actually knows something.

I received my free book 2 days ago and starting to read with anticipation.
Now, I will most probably not understand a great deal of the book, but I tend to view this book as a popular science book and not a replacement for the last hundred years of scientific endeavour.

I must say that I am interested in the existence from non-existance idea and to be honest the concept of infinity (anyones concept of infinity) is mind boggling. Especially when it is stated that some infinities are bigger than others. This is not, I believe a Null Physics invention. As I understand, there is a difference between mathematical and physical infinities and mathematicians like to rid their equations of infinities via renormalisation.

It strikes me that infinity is a subject that could be studied ad infinitum and still not produce a sensible solution, much like the measuring of the diameter of the universe.

All in all a great philosophical, mathematical and scientific puzzle.

 

[sol invictus]

I must say that I am interested in the existence from non-existance idea and to be honest the concept of infinity (anyones concept of infinity) is mind boggling. Especially when it is stated that some infinities are bigger than others. This is not, I believe a Null Physics invention.

It is true that one can carefully define a sense in which there is a hierarchy of sizes of infinities. That was done about a century ago by some very smart mathematicians.

As I understand, there is a difference between mathematical and physical infinities and mathematicians like to rid their equations of infinities via renormalisation.

That is not correct. In quantum field theory (which is a branch of physics) infinities arise in places where they should not (for example, in the computation of physical quantities which we know are finite). The infinities can be dealt with by a process known as renormalization.

It strikes me that infinity is a subject that could be studied ad infinitum and still not produce a sensible solution, much like the measuring of the diameter of the universe.

Defining infinity as the diameter of the universe is totally absurd. Diameters have units of length; infinity is dimensionless. Depending on what you mean by "diameter", the diameter of the universe may be finite, which would then be a rather strange definition of the infinite, or it may in fact be infinite, in which case it is impossible to define in any meaningful sense.

I could go on ad infinitum in this vein, but the existence (on Witt's website, and presumably in his book) of statements such as "infinity+1>infinity", which any school-child knows are inconsistent (try dividing both sides by infinity, for example) suffice to demonstrate the total lack of witt there...

 

[Skwinty]

Defining infinity as the diameter of the universe is totally absurd. Diameters have units of length; infinity is dimensionless. Depending on what you mean by "diameter", the diameter of the universe may be finite, which would then be a rather strange definition of the infinite, or it may in fact be infinite, in which case it is impossible to define in any meaningful sense.

Hi Sol
If there are varying sizes of infinity, then surely one infinity plus some value returns another infinity. This implies then that the one infinity is greater than the other.
ie infinity(1) + x > infinity(1) or infinity(1) + x = infinity(2).

This is how I interprete Witts definition.

With respect to the dimensioned versus dimensionless, if one was to try and measure the diameter of an infinite universe, one would never get a dimension as the tape measure would never stop reeling out, so the unit of dimension, ie meters,kilometres parsecs etc is irrelevant.

 

[sol invictus]

Hi Sol
If there are varying sizes of infinity, then surely one infinity plus some value returns another infinity.

It returns the same infinity.

This implies then that the one infinity is greater than the other.

No, not at all.

The difficulty here is that you (and Witt) are using a naive (witless, one might say) definition of "greater than". Defining relative sizes of infinities is tricky precisely because the size of an infinite thing is a very slippery concept.

ie infinity(1) + x > infinity(1) or infinity(1) + x = infinity(2).

This is simply inconsistent. As I said, just divide both sides by infinity(1). If x is finite, x/infinity(1)=0 (if not, infinity(1) is not infinite in any sense). But infinity(1)/infinity(1)=1 (if not, you'd better carefully define what you mean by "/" and "+"). Then your expression becomes 1>1, which is false.

With respect to the dimensioned versus dimensionless, if one was to try and measure the diameter of an infinite universe, one would never get a dimension as the tape measure would never stop reeling out, so the unit of dimension, ie meters,kilometres parsecs etc is irrelevant.

What does infinity+1 mean, if infinity is a length? "1" what? Worse, what do you even mean by the diameter of an infinite universe? If you can't measure it, can't change its units (as you said), what is it? What's the point of defining the mathematical concept "infinity" in terms of something you can't measure or manipulate?