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Merged Puzzling results from CERN

Anders Lindman said:
I tried to explain that there may not be any seasonal variation, depending on how Earth is moving through the vacuum energy. I seemed to have failed.
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That's because you are wrong.

Ok, one last try in trying to explain why seasonal changes may not affect the motion through the vacuum energy. Imagine the solar system as a frisbee moving around the center of the galaxy. Then, yes there would be seasonal changes, but as the source I posted suggested, the solar system is perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy. This means that you can think of the frisbee orbiting around the center as a flat pancake always facing the flat side towards the orbital motion.
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1) The frisbee is spinning (the earth goes around the sun).
2) The earth is spinning on its axis, which is not parallel or perpendicular to the plane of the frisbee.
3) The rest frame of the galaxy doesn't have to be the rest frame of the ether.
4) If the ether affects anything other than neutrinos, it is ruled out by many, many, many orders of magnitude by Michelson-Morley type experiments (experiments that compare the travel time along two perpendicular directions and don't rely on seasonal or daily variations at all).

Anders Lindman said:
I doubt the existence of an absolute aether. The vacuum energy in empty space however is real and it's not nothing. Perhaps the vacuum energy could be considered a relative 'aether'?
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Then it would be an ether.

Vacuum energy of the type physicists believe exists does not have a rest frame. It is the same in all rest frames; hence there is no "friction" for linear motion, or any way to detect whether you are moving (linearly) with respect to it.
 
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Anders Lindman said:
That's three points. There were more points than that.
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hm, is every single point to be refuted? What is the most significant point in the article you cite? If that's shown to be erroneous, is it necessary to show all the other lesser points are?

I mean, if I want to buy a car for £15000.42, the most important issue is whether I've got the £15000, not whether I've got the 42 pence.
 
nathan said:
hm, is every single point to be refuted? What is the most significant point in the article you cite? If that's shown to be erroneous, is it necessary to show all the other lesser points are?

I mean, if I want to buy a car for £15000.42, the most important issue is whether I've got the £15000, not whether I've got the 42 pence.
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I'm not sure that's quite the right approach. It's possible for someone to claim that results a, b, c, d, e, f, g and h disprove theory X. While the statement that all such results disprove theory X may be flase, it is still true that theory X could potentially be disproved by any subset of the results.
The real point is that there are so many claims on that page that it would take some amount of time to address them all. However, one can tell from a much briefer overview that a large number of the claims are complete rubbish. From this I concluded that the author hasn't much of a clue what he is talking about. The chances that he has thus found a result that does actually undermine the foundations of theory X are correspondingly pretty small.
 
sol invictus said:
That's because you are wrong.



1) The frisbee is spinning (the earth goes around the sun).
2) The earth is spinning on its axis, which is not parallel or perpendicular to the plane of the frisbee.
3) The rest frame of the galaxy doesn't have to be the rest frame of the ether.
4) If the ether affects anything other than neutrinos, it is ruled out by many, many, many orders of magnitude by Michelson-Morley type experiments (experiments that compare the travel time along two perpendicular directions and don't rely on seasonal or daily variations at all).



Then it would be an ether.

Vacuum energy of the type physicists believe exists does not have a rest frame. It is the same in all rest frames; hence there is no "friction" for linear motion, or any way to detect whether you are moving (linearly) with respect to it.
Click to expand...

It's true that Earth's axis has an angle relative to the plane of the solar system, but I thought it was small. I read now that it is 23.4 degrees which is pretty much and would result in some measurable difference perhaps (such as time of day the experiment is done in the 24 hour cycle, which must be included in the seasonal test). But not only the motion of the solar system around the galaxy center has to be taken into account. Also the motion of the Milky Way galaxy itself through space is a component of the total motion.

Can't every point in the vacuum energy be considered a rest frame? And vacuum energy may have friction:

"In the Casimir effect, vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field exert a force on closely spaced metal plates, a phenomenon that is well understood theoretically and detectable experimentally. Can a related effect occur for rotating systems, in which vacuum fluctuations alter the spin rate of a particle, resulting in rotational drag? Writing in Physical Review A, Alejandro Manjavacas and Javier García de Abajo of the Instituto de Óptica, Madrid, Spain, show theoretically that this should be an experimentally observable effect." -- http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/02/vacuum-has-friction-from-effect-similar.html
 
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Belz... said:
Ever heard of "seasons" ? :rolleyes:
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Yes, but for the movement through the vacuum energy seasons are simply different positions of Earth around its orbit around the sun. Think of the solar system as a flat pancake that is moving upwards. The position around the sun doesn't make any difference in relation to that movement. Actually now that I think about it, not even the tilt of Earth's axis (which causes the experience here on Earth of spring, summer, autumn and winter) makes any difference in relation to that movement.

Then you may ask: is that really how the solar system moves around the galaxy? Yes, perhaps! As the source I posted earlier said, the plane of the solar system is perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy.
 
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Anders Lindman said:
It's true that Earth's axis has an angle relative to the plane of the solar system, but I thought it was small. I read now that it is 23.4 degrees which is pretty much and would result in some measurable difference perhaps (such as time of day the experiment is done in the 24 hour cycle, which must be included in the seasonal test). But not only the motion of the solar system around the galaxy center has to be taken into account. Also the motion of the Milky Way galaxy itself through space is a component of the total motion.
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It doesn't matter. The only way for the earth to remain stationary with respect to some physical ether is if the ether (at least locally) is rotating with the earth's spin, the earth's motion around the sun, the earth's motion around the galaxy, AND the galaxy's motion. I find this so obvious that I simply cannot understand what is confusing you, so this will be my last comment on it.

Can't every point in the vacuum energy be considered a rest frame?
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"Points" and "rest frames" are totally different things, so no. The question is whether when you move with respect to the vacuum energy you feel a "wind", or whether the physic is exactly the same as before. For linear motion, it's exactly the same.

"In the Casimir effect, vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field exert a force on closely spaced metal plates, a phenomenon that is well understood theoretically and detectable experimentally. Can a related effect occur for rotating systems, in which vacuum fluctuations alter the spin rate of a particle, resulting in rotational drag? Writing in Physical Review A, Alejandro Manjavacas and Javier García de Abajo of the Instituto de Óptica, Madrid, Spain, show theoretically that this should be an experimentally observable effect." -- http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/02/vacuum-has-friction-from-effect-similar.html
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As I already told you, this doesn't happen for linear motion, and the rotation effects have been known for decades. They are also totally irrelevant for this neutrino experiment, so I don't know why you keep bringing them up.
 
sol invictus said:
As I already told you, this doesn't happen for linear motion, and the rotation effects have been known for decades. They are also totally irrelevant for this neutrino experiment, so I don't know why you keep bringing them up.
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But don't neutrinos spin? I'm just guessing here, but if so then the vacuum energy could affect the speed of the neutrinos. And the vacuum friction idea is very new, not decades old as you say. Their paper is from 2010: http://pra.aps.org/abstract/PRA/v82/i6/e063827
 
Anders Lindman said:
But don't neutrinos spin? I'm just guessing here, but if so then the vacuum energy could affect the speed of the neutrinos.
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No, not in that sense. They are elementary particles as far as we know.

And the vacuum friction idea is very new, not decades old as you say. Their paper is from 2010: http://pra.aps.org/abstract/PRA/v82/i6/e063827
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No, it is decades old. I've known about it for years, and I learned about it from some old papers. Maybe the authors of this didn't know about the old work or maybe they did, I can't be bothered to check.

There's a related phenomenon for spinning black holes.
 
Dancing David said:
The term spin in QM is different, Sol's post addressed your idea of the vacuum energy directly.
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"The strength of the effect depends on the object's make-up and size. Objects whose electronic properties prevent them from easily absorbing electromagnetic waves, such as gold, may decelerate little or not at all. But small, low-density particles, which have less rotational momentum, slow down dramatically." -- http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927994.100-vacuum-has-friction-after-all.html

That sounds like something that could relate to neutrinos if they have rotational momentum. So when the neutrinos move in a straight line, then the vacuum energy could slow them down or speed them up when their rotational momentum is other than strictly perpendicular to the forward linear movement.
 
Anders Lindman said:
The key thing is the velocity of Earth relative to the vacuum energy, not to the center of the galaxy. If the vacuum energy can cause friction on particles then that could affect the CERN experiment.

Is the vacuum energy moving with Earth? No I don't think so. Earth is moving through the vacuum energy, and so is the solar system and so is the Milky Way galaxy. The vacuum energy is not exactly like an aether, but it's not nothing, and it may even cause friction according to Alejandro Manjavacas and F. Javier García de Abajo of the Institute of Optics at the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927994.100-vacuum-has-friction-after-all.html
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Anders, have you ever heard of something called the luminiferous ether (which wasn't claimed to "be nothing" by its proponents)? It seems to be what you're talking about, and it has never been detected. Theoretical speculation about the "vacuum energy/ether/etc" is one thing, but detecting it is another.

Come back when you have experimental confirmation of your claims.
 
Anders Lindman said:
Probably. But I would still like to know exactly how Earth is moving through the vacuum energy, because there is a slight possibility that seasonal variations will not change that direction much. Imagine a bullet rotating as it moves through the air. The rotation does not change the direction of how the bullet moves through the air. Now think of two bullets attached to each other via a wire. A small bullet representing Earth and a larger bullet representing the sun. As they travel through the air the tips of the bullets are always pointing forward even as the smaller bullet orbits the larger bullet (representing seasonal change).
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Wrong.

Why do you think rifle bullets are made to spin?

:rolleyes:
 
Anders Lindman said:
Ok, one last try in trying to explain why seasonal changes may not affect the motion through the vacuum energy. Imagine the solar system as a frisbee moving around the center of the galaxy. Then, yes there would be seasonal changes, but as the source I posted suggested, the solar system is perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy. This means that you can think of the frisbee orbiting around the center as a flat pancake always facing the flat side towards the orbital motion.
Click to expand...

You keep saying that, Anders, but I think it's wrong. The relative angle between the plane of our solar system and the galactic plane is about 60 degrees - link.
 
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