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Null Physics anyone?

sol invictus said:
The photon is a particle - it just happens to be massless. Until recently it was believed that neutrinos were massless as well.

The energy comes from the kinetic energy of the electron, proton, etc. The sum of their masses is less than the mass of the neutron (as we've been discussing). That difference must therefore be carried away in the kinetic energy of the products of the decay - in other words they fly away from where the neutron was rather than just sitting there. Some of that kinetic energy can be converted into photons without violating any laws of physics (well, you have to be careful with angular momentum since the photon is spin 1, but it works out).
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Ok, I understood the photon to behave as a paticle or a wave and that it has relativistic mass (and no rest mass). Are you saying that a free neutron decays with different kinetic energies for each decay, or is something else involved that causes this.
 
Skwinty said:
Ok, I understood the photon to behave as a paticle or a wave and that it has relativistic mass (and no rest mass). Are you saying that a free neutron decays with different kinetic energies for each decay, or is something else involved that causes this.
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It's just that the excess energy can be distributed in many different ways among the kinetic energies of the three final-state particles - or some of it can be "used" to make a photon in addition. The total energy is fixed (it's just the neutron mass, at least if we are talking about an isolated neutron at rest) but how it is shared among the three particles is not determined by any conservation law.

It's like a bomb (which is a bound state of smoke - did you know that?) exploding. The total energy yield is fixed, but precisely how the smoke and other particles behave - like how much energy a given particle ends up with - will be different in each explosion.
 
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sol invictus said:
By the way, I know of at least one interesting example of a guy - he had a degree in physics, but from years before, and had spent 20 years or so working a blue collar job in a factory. As a hobby he reads the physics archives online, and occasionally writes papers. He wrote one a few years ago which scooped one some very famous physicists were working on - it wasn't quite right, but it had the right idea and most of the correct math. That got their attention. .
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Can you give a link to this story. Sounds like a very interesting read.
 
Skwinty said:
I apologise if I seem a bit dense here, but, when I look at a digital watch tick over, bearing in mind the analogy that I am primitive and memorising a pattern, I will never see a 12 followed by a 99. How could I maintain my credibility as a shaman and predict that 99 follows 12?

The nothing bit, I think, stems from the fact that the watch, under infinite magnification, would reveal more nothing (empty space) than something.
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You are right - you could not maintain your credibility. But Witt is doing the equivalent of predicting that 99 will come after 1 - what does this say about his credibility?

Some examples:
  • He states that an electron has no intrinsic magnetic moment. But anyone in physics would have quickly told him about the Stern–Gerlach experiment done in 1922 (and repeated many times since then) that shows that electrons have intrinsic angular momentum and so have intrinsic magnetic moment since they are charged.
  • He states that the super-massive black hole at the center of our galaxy is actually a "galactic core" that recycles stars to make new hydrogen. This means that it is very energetic and eats stars.
    He was unaware that the galactic center has been under observation for decades. The energy he predicted has never been detected. Oddly enough no one has observed that stars are disappearing from the vicinity of the black hole, even though monitoring the positions and motions of these stars is a technique for determining the mass of the black hole.
  • He redefines infinity to have a magnitude so that he can say suff like "infinity + 1 > infinity".
    He forgets that this basically invalidates some (all?) of the mathematics that he is about to use in the rest of the book.
  • He redefines a line ("one-demensional space" in his terminology) as "0 = (...0+0+0...)" where "0" is a point which he has defined as nothing.
    He never actually defines what the operation of addition is for his "points".
    He never defines how to measure a length in his "geometry" given that all of the points are nothing.
 
Reality Check said:
[*]He states that an electron has no intrinsic magnetic moment. But anyone in physics would have quickly told him about the Stern–Gerlach experiment done in 1922 (and repeated many times since then) that shows that electrons have intrinsic angular momentum and so have intrinsic magnetic moment since they are charged.
[*]He states that the super-massive black hole at the center of our galaxy is actually a "galactic core" that recycles stars to make new hydrogen. This means that it is very energetic and eats stars.
He was unaware that the galactic center has been under observation for decades. The energy he predicted has never been detected. Oddly enough no one has observed that stars are disappearing from the vicinity of the black hole, even though monitoring the positions and motions of these stars is a technique for determining the mass of the black hole.
[*]He redefines infinity to have a magnitude so that he can say suff like "infinity + 1 > infinity".
He forgets that this basically invalidates some (all?) of the mathematics that he is about to use in the rest of the book.
[*]He redefines a line ("one-demensional space" in his terminology) as "0 = (...0+0+0...)" where "0" is a point which he has defined as nothing.
He never actually defines what the operation of addition is for his "points".
He never defines how to measure a length in his "geometry" given that all of the points are nothing.
[/LIST]
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It should be obvious by now to readers of this forum that he is a nothing more than a semi-educated "flat-earth" type crackpot!
 
Reality Check said:
You are right - you could not maintain your credibility. But Witt is doing the equivalent of predicting that 99 will come after 1 - what does this say about his credibility?
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Hi Rc

You are changing the analogy by introducing a malfunctioning digital watch.

I get every one's point about not agreeing with Witt's theories.
The fact that I don't have the education in physics and mathematics as the rest of you folk, probably makes his theories sound plausible to me.

At the end of the day, for all mankinds knowledge and wisdom, can it be said that every thing we know is actually correct. Sure we can say that observation agrees with theories and predictions, but does that make it true?
 
Skwinty said:
You are changing the analogy by introducing a malfunctioning digital watch.
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No, only a "malfunctioning" prediction.

At the end of the day, for all mankinds knowledge and wisdom, can it be said that every thing we know is actually correct.
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Not everything we think we know is correct, sure, but noone here has claimed that, and that observation has no bearing on this discussion.

Sure we can say that observation agrees with theories and predictions, but does that make it true?
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It makes it tentatively the best approximations we have. Science never claimed that we are at the end of the road, and neither does this have any bearing on the Witt discussion.
 
Skwinty said:
Hi Rc

You are changing the analogy by introducing a malfunctioning digital watch.

I get every one's point about not agreeing with Witt's theories.
The fact that I don't have the education in physics and mathematics as the rest of you folk, probably makes his theories sound plausible to me.

At the end of the day, for all mankinds knowledge and wisdom, can it be said that every thing we know is actually correct. Sure we can say that observation agrees with theories and predictions, but does that make it true?
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I am not saying that the watch is malfunctioning. The watch is working normally and displays 1 after 12. But Witt's shaman would predict that 99 will appear after 12 and redefine 99 as 1 when 1 actually appears.

It is not about agreeing with Witt's theories. It is just that they are wrong as shown by our observations of the universe.

Science is never true as in "absolute truth" because science is about observations and these are never absolutely true. Science is about getting as close to the truth as we can.
 
sol invictus said:
A thorough (and rather entertaining) review of Witt's book has appeared here.

Enjoy ;).
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Hi Sol, read the review and can only say


Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when I grasp it - in a decade, a century, or a millennium - I will say to myself, how could it have been otherwise? How could I have been so stupid for so long?
 
sol invictus said:
A thorough (and rather entertaining) review of Witt's book has appeared here.

Enjoy ;).
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Thanks for the link. I have been patiently waiting for someone who has read the book and has the formal education to point out its various flaws. I still am left to ponder his concept that the universe is self sustaining and has existed for infinity because of his "energy conservation" conclusions for galaxies. I find this much more probable than a tiny spec of matter with infinite density and infinite brightness exploding and creating everything. I seem to have read somewhere that " matter can neither be created nor destroyed"
 
BRENTEFS said:
Thanks for the link. I have been patiently waiting for someone who has read the book and has the formal education to point out its various flaws. I still am left to ponder his concept that the universe is self sustaining and has existed for infinity because of his "energy conservation" conclusions for galaxies. I find this much more probable than a tiny spec of matter with infinite density and infinite brightness exploding and creating everything. I seem to have read somewhere that " matter can neither be created nor destroyed"
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It would be nice if the universe catered to the personal wishes of people and was eternal, static, infinite, etc. However it has the nasty habit of allowing observations that show that it is definitely not eternal, changes with time and may not even be infinite.

Matter can be destroyed - collide any particle and its anti-particle together and they convert to energy. It can also be created, e.g. the creation of pairs of virtual particles, Hawking radiation, etc.


As the review points out Witt has ignored thermodynamics and especially the second law which makes his ""energy conservation" conclusions for galaxies" invalid. Personally I am amazed that he was not aware (until I pointed it out) that the center of the Milky Way has been under observation for decades and:
  1. We do not see the radiation from the hot "galactic core" he uses to recycle stars.
  2. We have not seen stars vanishing from the vicinity of the galactic center (to be recycled). He even calculates a figure of ~18 solar masses that have to be converted per year for his cycle to be valid in the Milky Way! Astronomers have been plotting the positions and motions of stars within a few lightyears of the galactic center for a dozen years now. They have never noticed any vanishing stars.
The real problem for the crackpots that try to create new fundemental theories of physics is that they have no idea of the extent and volume of data from observations and experiments that is the basis for our current picture of the universe. It is highly unlikely that an individual's theory will overthrow much of current physics.
 
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