Universe's expansion may be understood without dark energy

[Perpetual Student]

Farsight:
Science is not kind to theories that don't work. When someone comes up with a new idea it is scrutinized and re-scrutinized until it is either rejected or accepted. When someone like Annila comes up with something so easily shown to be wrong, what do you expect? When he does some mathematics to support his theory and publishes it, and it has obvious errors that are important to the argument, how tolerant do you expect the audience to be? He didn't even take the time and make the effort for some minimal (competent) review before publishing. For a professional, it is inexcusable!

 

[Vorpal]

If so, then "Maupertuis' form of the principle of least action" (whatever that is) is not equivalent to the standard form or the known laws of physics. So the first thing you'd need to do is check that it's consistent with all the much more prosaic stuff we know, like precision solar system data, gravitational lensing by the sun, etc.

It's rather strange. A quick check on wiki gives Maupertuis' principle as stationary paths of
[latex]$S_0 = \int{\mathbf{p}}\cdot{\mathrm{d}}{\mathbf{q}}$[/latex]
Which is strange until reversing the Legendre transformation as
[latex]${\mathcal{L}} = p_k{\dot{q}}^k - {\mathcal{H}}$[/latex]
so if the Hamiltonian is time-independent and the constraints are fixed, the usual action principle of variations of ℒ are exactly the same paths as those determined by Maupertuis' principle.

The definition above agrees with what the author says about it but makes his reasons puzzling:

Therefore, rather than using the conserved Lagrangian form of the action principle (Kovner 1990), its original form á la Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis will be used here. In the general form of the action principle kinetic energy is integrated over time, or equivalently momentum is integrated over the path.

Since p·dq = 2Tdt, this makes sense, but geodesics γ on the any pseudo-Riemannian manifold, the kinetic term 2T = v² = g(γ˙,γ˙) is all there is, which makes the distinction between action principle and Maupertuis' principle almost nonsensical--they're equivalent. I can't find any way in which this makes sense.

Unless the author is giving up any locally-STR spacetime at all, in which case distant supernovae should be the least of his concerns.

 

[sol invictus]

I can't find any way in which this makes sense.

I have a guess as to why that is.

 

[Farsight]

Science is not kind to theories that don't work. When someone comes up with a new idea it is scrutinized and re-scrutinized until it is either rejected or accepted.

Science is not kind to new ideas, Perpetual Student. If you've got a copy of Graham Farmelo's The Strangest Man, read page 53 which tells you how the guys at DAMTP were still sneering at Einstein in 1923. Also see The Confrontation between General Relativity and Experiment at http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0510072. Check out page 6 where it says "the steady accumulation of experimental support, together with the successful merger of special relativity with quantum mechanics, led to its being accepted by mainstream physicists by the late 1920s".

When someone like Annila comes up with something so easily shown to be wrong, what do you expect?

I expect that you demand a clear explanation of why it's wrong rather than accepting the say-so of somebody slinging mud who purports to justify it with something you don't understand. I expect you to be skeptical, not just of some new idea, but of people who would tell you what to think.

 

[Farsight]

The important link is, what, that light bends because the gravitational potential acts somewhat analogously to a variable index of refraction?

No, the variable speed of light that Einstein referred to repeatedly whilst formulating GR.

Take a look at this wikipedia page. All those theories of gravity...

And you take a look at PPN and pay attention to the bit that says:

The speed of light remains constant in PPN formalism and...

Spot the problem? And do note that Einstein got the deflection of light wrong initially. It didn't make him some crazy crackpot who should thereafter have been ignored.

 

[Roboramma]

I expect that you demand a clear explanation of why it's wrong

Which is what Vorpal offered in this thread...

 

[Farsight]

Then Perpetual Student will doubtless offer to restate Vorpal's explanation in simple English. When he can't, perhaps we can then get back to talking about what ought to be an interesting topic instead of sneering at the author. Here's the link again:

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-10-supernovae-universe-expansion-understood-dark.html

 

[Wudang]

Then Perpetual Student will doubtless offer to restate Vorpal's explanation in simple English. http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-10-supernovae-universe-expansion-understood-dark.html

"He did his sums wrong."

 

[sol invictus]

Science is not kind to new ideas, Perpetual Student.

You need to amend that statement. Science is not kind to wrong and unsupported new ideas.

If you've got a copy of Graham Farmelo's The Strangest Man, read page 53 which tells you how the guys at DAMTP were still sneering at Einstein in 1923.

Thanks for the example - it quite nicely proves a point. Unfortunately for you, the point it proves is precisely the opposite of the one you're trying to make.

Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921, Farsight. He had been director of the premier physics institute in the world since 1914 (9 years after completing his degree at the age of 26 or so), and was famous across the world. Were some people still "sneering" at his ideas in 1923? Quite possibly - but they were obviously the exceptions.

Even though it was very radical and new, Einstein's work was recognized essentially immediately as very important. Why? Because it was logical, it was consistent with previous work and experimental results (which is all but a requirement for being right), and because physicists are actually pretty good at physics. Rather than being ignored or suppressed, Einstein became the most famous physicist in the world. That's what happens to physicists with good new ideas.

Was his work accepted immediately as correct? Of course not, and it shouldn't have been - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it took some time for experimental evidence to accumulate, particularly in the case of GR.

 

[Kuko 4000]

I contacted the author and linked him this thread and some of the criticism seen here. He replied very quickly and in quite a bit of detail, unfortunately I have no higher education in math or physics so his very considerate reply did not help me much. I should've asked for comments in english, my bad.

Anyways, he says that he keeps an updated version of the paper in his homepage (the one in arXiv is out of date), here's a link to the PDF:

http://www.helsinki.fi/~aannila/arto/light.pdf

He did make one important point that I can understand and translate without too much distortion:

"I am not a mathematician or a physicist of any special area or an expert in any other branch of science. My lack of knowledge is the key here."

I guess this is the end of the show, but nevertheless, it would be interesting to hear your thoughts about the math and physics related comments that he made, but unfortunately I have no expertise to even try to translate them.

 

[Perpetual Student]

Science is not kind to new ideas, Perpetual Student. If you've got a copy of Graham Farmelo's The Strangest Man, read page 53 which tells you how the guys at DAMTP were still sneering at Einstein in 1923. Also see The Confrontation between General Relativity and Experiment at http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0510072. Check out page 6 where it says "the steady accumulation of experimental support, together with the successful merger of special relativity with quantum mechanics, led to its being accepted by mainstream physicists by the late 1920s".

I expect that you demand a clear explanation of why it's wrong rather than accepting the say-so of somebody slinging mud who purports to justify it with something you don't understand. I expect you to be skeptical, not just of some new idea, but of people who would tell you what to think.

Then Perpetual Student will doubtless offer to restate Vorpal's explanation in simple English. When he can't, perhaps we can then get back to talking about what ought to be an interesting topic instead of sneering at the author.

Yes, I am not a physicist, however I am familiar enough with this area to make reasonably good judgements about new claims -- especially ones that are extraordinary. Further, I did study mathematics at the graduate level, so claims made about the Riemann hypothesis are not beyond my understanding. Perhaps a LINK might help you understand the significance of his one page "proof." Yes, there are some obvious errors in his paper, which have already been discussed here.
The wonderful thing about science is that its practitioners are relentless in seeking empirical evidence to support or reject new ideas. In the remote chance that there is anything to these new claims, eventually Annila will be vindicated and you can return here to confront Vorpal and sol invictus and laugh at me.

 

[Vorpal]

No, the variable speed of light that Einstein referred to repeatedly whilst formulating GR.

Einstein was talking about the coordinate speed of light, which is exactly what I calculated above.

And you take a look at PPN and pay attention to the bit that says:

The speed of light remains constant in PPN formalism and...

Spot the problem?

No. In GTR, spacetime is locally STR, so there is also a very real sense in which speed of light is constant, and that's what the wiki is referring to. Like I said in post 42, if Annila is giving that up, there are going to be much more problems than any distant supernovae, because pretty much all of twenty-first century physics directly contradicts that. (Moreover, if that's what you or Annila are talking about, then this directly contradicts Einstein to the highest degree possible.)

I'm very puzzled by your position. One doesn't even need to know much math to see that it's self-inconsistent. Einstein talked about variable light speed and concluded GTR. The PPN formalism applies to GTR and assumes the exact same kind of locally-STR spacetime structure that GTR does. "The speed of light remains constant in PPN...". Therefore, the speed that Einstein was talking about in that passage and the speed the wiki is talking about are different things. I know Sol has already explained to you how they are related in a different thread.

You're equivocating what "speed" is referring to. Take any solution of GTR whatsoever, and calculate what you think the speed of light is.

Then Perpetual Student will doubtless offer to restate Vorpal's explanation in simple English.

I dunno, it's already in plain algebra. The only part that's not just algebraic gymnastics would be explaining why the 2Φ term has to be there to reproduce Newtonian orbits.
1. Stare at PPN. Stare at Annila's prediction about index of refraction.
2. Plug in ds = 0 for light and conclude that γ = -1/2 is the only thing that makes sense.

Now if you think Annila means something else by the speed of light, please elaborate. But this is the only possible interpretation that I can see that does not break the locally-STR nature of spacetime. If we're going to go Newtonian/Galilean here, forget it, there's no hope.

 

[Cheetah]

Now here comes another odd one (which has been hinted at in the past), might need its own thread. Seems that the speed of light is possibly not constant across space-time. Might be relevant to this discussion.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-10-nature-laws-vary-universe.html

"The study found that one of the four known fundamental forces, electromagnetism - measured by the so-called fine-structure constant and denoted by the symbol ‘alpha' - seems to vary across the Universe."

"In one direction - from our location in the Universe - alpha gets gradually weaker, yet in the opposite direction it gets gradually stronger."



Evidence for spatial variation of the fine structure constant
J. K. Webb, J. A. King, M. T. Murphy, V. V. Flambaum, R. F. Carswell, M. B. Bainbridge
(Submitted on 23 Aug 2010)

We previously reported observations of quasar spectra from the Keck telescope suggesting a smaller value of the fine structure constant, alpha, at high redshift. A new sample of 153 measurements from the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT), probing a different direction in the universe, also depends on redshift, but in the opposite sense, that is, alpha appears on average to be larger in the past. The combined dataset is well represented by a spatial dipole, significant at the 4.1 sigma level, in the direction right ascension 17.3 +/- 0.6 hours, declination -61 +/- 9 degrees. A detailed analysis for systematics, using observations duplicated at both telescopes, reveals none which are likely to emulate this result.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.3907

 

[Farsight]

Good paper that one, Cheetah. What's a bit surprising when it comes to the fine structure "constant", is that not enough people know that it isn't constant. Have a look at http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Constants/alpha.html where you can read:

Thus α depends upon the energy at which it is measured, increasing with increasing energy, and is considered an effective or running coupling constant. Indeed, due to e+e- and other vacuum polarization processes, at an energy corresponding to the mass of the W boson (approximately 81 GeV, equivalent to a distance of approximately 2 x 10^-18 m), α(mW) is approximately 1/128 compared with its zero-energy value of approximately 1/137. Thus the famous number 1/137 is not unique or especially fundamental.

So the next time you hear somebody talking about the multiverse and Goldilocks fundamental constants, take it with a pinch of salt.

 

[Dancing David]

Now here comes another odd one (which has been hinted at in the past), might need its own thread. Seems that the speed of light is possibly not constant across space-time. Might be relevant to this discussion.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-10-nature-laws-vary-universe.html

"The study found that one of the four known fundamental forces, electromagnetism - measured by the so-called fine-structure constant and denoted by the symbol ‘alpha' - seems to vary across the Universe."

"In one direction - from our location in the Universe - alpha gets gradually weaker, yet in the opposite direction it gets gradually stronger."



Evidence for spatial variation of the fine structure constant
J. K. Webb, J. A. King, M. T. Murphy, V. V. Flambaum, R. F. Carswell, M. B. Bainbridge
(Submitted on 23 Aug 2010)

We previously reported observations of quasar spectra from the Keck telescope suggesting a smaller value of the fine structure constant, alpha, at high redshift. A new sample of 153 measurements from the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT), probing a different direction in the universe, also depends on redshift, but in the opposite sense, that is, alpha appears on average to be larger in the past. The combined dataset is well represented by a spatial dipole, significant at the 4.1 sigma level, in the direction right ascension 17.3 +/- 0.6 hours, declination -61 +/- 9 degrees. A detailed analysis for systematics, using observations duplicated at both telescopes, reveals none which are likely to emulate this result.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.3907

If that is the study that I think it is the methodology is totally suspect. And unreplicated. The procedure used is lacking in many serious ways.

 

[Dancing David]

Good paper that one, Cheetah.

So Farsight , how exactly did they derive the alleged metric, do you know? In what you cite as a good paper?

Do you even know what error bars are?

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1008/1008.3907v1.pdf

 

[Farsight]

You need to amend that statement. Science is not kind to wrong and unsupported new ideas.

There's all sorts of unsupported stuff out there Sol. Things like string theory, which dominated theoretical physics for decades. And it's not even wrong.

Thanks for the example - it quite nicely proves a point. Unfortunately for you, the point it proves is precisely the opposite of the one you're trying to make.

No it doesn't. Here's the important excerpt:

"At that time, Cunningham and Eddington were streets ahead of the majority of their Cambridge colleagues, who dismissed Einstein's work, ignored it, or denied its significance".

Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921, Farsight. He had been director of the premier physics institute in the world since 1914 (9 years after completing his degree at the age of 26 or so), and was famous across the world. Were some people still "sneering" at his ideas in 1923? Quite possibly - but they were obviously the exceptions.

Cambridge was at the forefront of theoretical phyiscs in 1923. Eddington had championed Einstein, who talked about inhomogeneous space in his 1920 Leyden Address, and In 1920, Eddington[26] suggested that the light deflection in the solar gravitational field can be conceived as a refraction effect of the space (actually the vacuum) in a flat spacetime.

Even though it was very radical and new, Einstein's work was recognized essentially immediately as very important. Why? Because it was logical, it was consistent with previous work and experimental results (which is all but a requirement for being right), and because physicists are actually pretty good at physics. Rather than being ignored or suppressed, Einstein became the most famous physicist in the world. That's what happens to physicists with good new ideas.

Don't underestimate the resistance he encountered. It's been airbrushed out of the history that is presented to the public.

Was his work accepted immediately as correct? Of course not, and it shouldn't have been - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it took some time for experimental evidence to accumulate, particularly in the case of GR.

Remember things like "the steady accumulation of experimental support, together with the successful merger of special relativity with quantum mechanics, led to its being accepted by mainstream physicists by the late 1920s". If we were sitting here in 1923 talking about some guy called Einstein, I suspect there would be people saying he made a mistake once and telling people to ignore everything he says.

 

[Farsight]

He did make one important point that I can understand and translate without too much distortion:

"I am not a mathematician or a physicist of any special area or an expert in any other branch of science. My lack of knowledge is the key here."

I guess this is the end of the show...

I'd hazard a guess that he's saying he's looked at this with fresh eyes and is gobsmacked at how people too close to their subject can miss the bleedin' obvious.


Dancing David: Let's talk about that paper on another thread. But meanwhile look at the title again. It starts with the word evidence. Please don't try to dismiss it, or the fact that the fine-structure constant isn't constant, by throwing ad-hominem abuse at me.

 

[Farsight]

Einstein was talking about the coordinate speed of light, which is exactly what I calculated above.

He was simply talking about the speed of light. Here's the quotes again:

1911: If we call the velocity of light at the origin of co-ordinates co, then the velocity of light c at a place with the gravitation potential Φ will be given by the relation c = co(1 + Φ/c²).

1912: On the other hand I am of the view that the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light can be maintained only insofar as one restricts oneself to spatio-temporal regions of constant gravitational potential.

1913: I arrived at the result that the velocity of light is not to be regarded as independent of the gravitational potential. Thus the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light is incompatible with the equivalence hypothesis.

1915: the writer of these lines is of the opinion that the theory of relativity is still in need of generalization, in the sense that the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light is to be abandoned.

1916: In the second place our result shows that, according to the general theory of relativity, the law of the constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo, which constitutes one of the two fundamental assumptions in the special theory of relativity and to which we have already frequently referred, cannot claim any unlimited validity. A curvature of rays of light can only take place when the velocity of propagation of light varies with position. Now we might think that as a consequence of this, the special theory of relativity and with it the whole theory of relativity would be laid in the dust.

What he actually said in 1916 was die Ausbreitungs-geschwindigkeit des Lichtes mit dem Orte variiert which translates to the speed of light varies with the locality. The word velocity appears in the translation, but this is the common usage rather than the vector quantity.

No. In GTR, spacetime is locally STR, so there is also a very real sense in which speed of light is constant, and that's what the wiki is referring to. Like I said in post 42, if Annila is giving that up, there are going to be much more problems than any distant supernovae, because pretty much all of twenty-first century physics directly contradicts that. (Moreover, if that's what you or Annila are talking about, then this directly contradicts Einstein to the highest degree possible.)

No it doesn't, you do. And the evidence proves it. The Shapiro delay is a delay. Here's what I think really brings it home. See this report on a super-accurate optical clock? It's so precise that you can see two of these clocks losing synchronisation when they're separated by only a foot of vertical elevation. Now take a look at wiki re time dilation, and note the bit that says consider a simple clock consisting of two mirrors A and B, between which a light pulse is bouncing. When you simplify those optical clocks to parallel-mirror light clocks, they lose synchronisation when they're separated by a vertical foot too. This is what's happening:

|--------------|
|--------------|

Now think about what Einstein said, and think of the two light beams like they're racehorses. Are they really going at the same speed?

I'm very puzzled by your position. One doesn't even need to know much math to see that it's self-inconsistent. Einstein talked about variable light speed and concluded GTR. The PPN formalism applies to GTR and assumes the exact same kind of locally-STR spacetime structure that GTR does. "The speed of light remains constant in PPN...". Therefore, the speed that Einstein was talking about in that passage and the speed the wiki is talking about are different things. I know Sol has already explained to you how they are related in a different thread.

My general position is that expert skeptics can behave like creationists at times, abusing their authority to discredit scientific evidence that challenges their position. My particular position with GR is Einstein's position: that the speed of light varies and space is inhomogeneous. The "modern interpretation" of GR takes a different position.

You're equivocating what "speed" is referring to. Take any solution of GTR whatsoever, and calculate what you think the speed of light is.

There is no calculating it. We use the motion of light to define the second and the metre. Or electromagnetic phenomena if you prefer, see NIST F1 Cesium Fountain Atomic Clock. Then we use the metre and the second to measure the speed of light, and end up saying that two "racehorses" are travelling at the same speed.

I dunno, it's already in plain algebra. The only part that's not just algebraic gymnastics would be explaining why the 2Φ term has to be there to reproduce Newtonian orbits.
1. Stare at PPN. Stare at Annila's prediction about index of refraction.
2. Plug in ds = 0 for light and conclude that γ = -1/2 is the only thing that makes sense.

Now if you think Annila means something else by the speed of light, please elaborate. But this is the only possible interpretation that I can see that does not break the locally-STR nature of spacetime. If we're going to go Newtonian/Galilean here, forget it, there's no hope.

See above. It's the other way round - there's an issue with the "locally-STR nature of spacetime" in that it's of infinitesimal extent. I'm not happy with Einstein's usage of this, but nobody's perfect. It means it's actually of zero extent. So it isn't actually there at all. If it was, it would mean that according to Einstein space was locally homogeneous, so things wouldn't fall down.

Maybe we need a new thread on this. Or at least try to get back to what Annila was actually saying and how it relates to Einstein and Eddington in circa 1920. Like I was saying I don't think he's got it all right, but this paper deserves better than crazy crackpot.

 

[sol invictus]

Good paper that one, Cheetah. What's a bit surprising when it comes to the fine structure "constant", is that not enough people know that it isn't constant. Have a look at http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Constants/alpha.html where you can read:

Thus α depends upon the energy at which it is measured, increasing with increasing energy, and is considered an effective or running coupling constant. Indeed, due to e+e- and other vacuum polarization processes, at an energy corresponding to the mass of the W boson (approximately 81 GeV, equivalent to a distance of approximately 2 x 10^-18 m), α(mW) is approximately 1/128 compared with its zero-energy value of approximately 1/137. Thus the famous number 1/137 is not unique or especially fundamental.

The fine structure constant changes with energy, yes. The paper Cheetah linked to suggests that it might change with position.

Those are two completely different things. The former is bog standard in quantum theories, the latter would be revolutionary.

So the next time you hear somebody talking about the multiverse and Goldilocks fundamental constants, take it with a pinch of salt.

Huh?

There's all sorts of unsupported stuff out there Sol. Things like string theory, which dominated theoretical physics for decades. And it's not even wrong.

First of all, your views on string theory appear to be as wide of the mark as your views on just about everything else in physics. Second, how in the world do you think that supports your contention that "Science is not kind to new ideas"? If anything, it undermines it even more.

Don't underestimate the resistance he encountered. It's been airbrushed out of the history that is presented to the public.

[sarcasm]Yes, it's all a conspiracy to hide the fact that Einstein's ideas were rejected. People back then were in on it too. Things like awarding him the Nobel prize were done just to obscure the record.[/sarcasm]