Superconductivity at room temperature??

[johanfprins]

No, Johan, I've looked at Dingle's anti-relativity argument and it is wrong.

Of course Dingle' arguments are wrong!

That's why I say you're like Dingle.

This is what I have pointed out above: You argue that since Dingle's arguments were wrong, the arguments of a person that leads to the same conclusion must also be wrong. If a person agrees with a conclusion that the Commmunists have reached, this person must also be a communist. As I have already pointed out many times on this thread: You are a dogmatic bigot!

PLEASE do something useful for a change and explain Einstein's two postulates on which he based SR.

Merry Xmas to you all!!!

 

[ben m]

First formulate Einstein's two postulates on which he based SR, and then explain it in terms of these two postulates.

Johan, I do it exactly the same way everyone else does it. The three events involved are A=departure, B=traveler-turns-around, C=re-arrival. In the stay-home twin's frame, write down the 4-coordinates xA, xB, xC. The stay-home twin experiences proper time (xA-xC). Lorentz transform to find the coordinates according to the outgoing frame (x'A, x'B, x'C). The traveling twin experiences proper time (x'A-x'B) during this leg. Lorentz transform again to find the coordinates according to the homecoming frame (x''A, x''B, x''C). The traveling twin experiences proper time (x''B-x''C) during this leg. Thus the traveling twin experiences a total of (x''B-x''C) + (x'A-x'B), which (do the math yourself) is smaller than (xA-xC).

Given that the Lorentz transforms are derived from the two postulates (Einstein 1905), this completes the proof.

 

[sol invictus]

Note added after reading about Dingle: Quote: "He came to focus his technical criticism of special relativity on one particular scenario, which he claimed was proof that special relativity entails a self-contradiction." So you immediately assume that I must be a Dingle, instead of reading what I am arguing. I have never claimed that special relativity is self-contradicting. In fact, it is one of the masterpieces of physics and Einstein is one of my heroes.

Dingle too said the same in his earlier phase. It was only after he learned that SR does in fact predict that the traveling twin is younger that he shifted his focus to attempting to show that SR is inconsistent.

You're very much a Dingle, except not as bright. Dingle was eventually able to realize that SR predicts the traveling twin is younger. Not so in your case.

All I am claiming is that some of the derivations made from this beautiful piece of physics, violate the very two postulates on which Einstein based this masterful theory.

Precisely Dingle's argument at one time, and equally wrong.

To compare me with Dingle is absurd: Only a real crackpot, who is as much a crackpot as Dingle was, will come to such a conclusion.

The similarities are quite striking, actually.

The very next thing will be that they will claim that they actually proved my arguments wrong while not giving the proof that they really did so, or not being willing to go step by step from the accepted postulates to actually prove that I am wrong.

We've done that, over and over and over and over again. It's completely pointless.

First formulate Einstein's two postulates on which he based SR, and then explain it in terms of these two postulates. You cannot if you have ANY logic in your head; which sadly you have proved time and again on this thread that you have not.

Dingleingalingaling...

 

[ben m]

Of course Dingle' arguments are wrong!

This is what I have pointed out above: You argue that since Dingle's arguments were wrong, the arguments of a person that leads to the same conclusion must also be wrong.

No, I found a mistake in your calculation. I said your argument is wrong because it contains a mistake, setting a=b in a situation where relativity says a =/= b. Remember? Of course not.

 

[johanfprins]

Johan, you were right about the mass and the length-contraction, but I have to say you're wrong about this one.

Give me a bit of slack to explain my logic. I am sure that you have an open mind and will thus try and understand it without condemning me to eternal damnation. I am sure that we will be able to argue our points on logic and admit it when logic proves either one of us wrong. That is why you are a breath of fresh air on this thread.

 

[excaza]

This is what I have pointed out above: You argue that since Dingle's arguments were wrong, the arguments of a person that leads to the same conclusion must also be wrong.

No, he's saying that the person who uses the same wrong arguments must also be wrong.

Reading for comprehension, I hear there's a great video series to help out.

 

[sol invictus]

Here's another link on Dingle.

In his final letter, Dingle presented his “irrefutable proof” as follows...

Sound familiar?

 

[johanfprins]

No, I found a mistake in your calculation. I said your argument is wrong because it contains a mistake, setting a=b in a situation where relativity says a =/= b. Remember? Of course not.

I do not agree with you: So let us go back to basics and start afresh by agreeing on Einstein's two postulates and what they mean. Please try and play the ball and not the man.

Finally, bye now for Xmas.

 

[ben m]

I do not agree with you:

Wow! Disagreeing with me! That's a breath of fresh air, compared to your first reaction to this statement:

: You argue that since Dingle's arguments were wrong, the arguments of a person that leads to the same conclusion must also be wrong. ...

. As I have already pointed out many times on this thread: You are a dogmatic bigot!

On this thread, the same has happenned: Dingle said the same about the twin paradox, and therefore I must be a Dingle, no matter how much I differ from this crackpot for different reasons.

 

[sol invictus]

More oddly familiar sounding Dingleology. Choice bits bolded.

Initially Dingle argued that, contrary to the usual understanding of the famous twin paradox, special relativity did not predict unequal aging of twins, one of whom makes a high-speed voyage and returns to Earth, but he then came to realize and acknowledge that his understanding had been mistaken. He then began to argue that special relativity was empirically wrong in its predictions, although experimental evidence showed he was mistaken about this. Ultimately Dingle re-focused his criticism to claim that special relativity was logically inconsistent: "The theory [special relativity] unavoidably requires that A works more slowly than B and B more slowly than A --which it requires no super-intelligence to see is impossible." Hence he asserted that the well-known reciprocity of the Lorentz transformation is self-evidently impossible.
...
This culminated in his 1972 book, Science at the Crossroads in which Dingle stated that "a proof that Einstein's special theory of relativity is false has been advanced; and ignored, evaded, suppressed and, indeed, treated in every possible way except that of answering it, by the whole scientific world." He also warned: "Since this theory is basic to practically all physical experiments, the consequences if it is false, modern atomic experiments being what they are, may be immeasurably calamitous."

Dingle argued that time dilation was a conventional effect arising from our manner of defining distant simultaneity and, as such, should not be exhibited when the twins are back together.
....
the controversy of 1958 was only a small part of
Dingle’s lone saga in opposition to common interpretations of special rela-
tivity, starting from at least 1939 and lasting until his death in 1978 at the age
of 88. The amount of energy and time he spent in this crusade is striking; he
devoted to it one whole book, parts of two books, over thirty articles and
letters in various journals, and many more that were denied publication, not to
mention the extensive private correspondence. All this only resulted in a
complete destruction of Dingle’s own scientific reputation.
...
Dingle states his physical argument that
there cannot be any asymmetric ageing. Here he seems to be granting for the
sake of argument that human beings are ideal clocks, who tick as the Lorentz
Transformation formulae dictate. Dingle’s basic conception is simple: since the
principle of relativity implies that absolute motion or rest is meaningless, we
are free to regard either observer R or observer M to be at rest and the other
one to be moving; therefore, there is no inherent asymmetry in the pheno-
menon that could be responsible for the purported effect of asymmetric ageing.

The bolded paragraph at the end is precisely Johan's argument, such as it is.

 

[Farsight]

Give me a bit of slack to explain my logic. I am sure that you have an open mind and will thus try and understand it without condemning me to eternal damnation. I am sure that we will be able to argue our points on logic and admit it when logic proves either one of us wrong. That is why you are a breath of fresh air on this thread.

Will do, Johan. That's why we discuss things.

 

[Farsight]

I'm trawling back through the thread to respond to a few things. Sorry if this is old news. I'll try to keep it brief and focus on the important points. Here's one, concerning mass:

You mentioned that the energy of an electron bound to a hydrogen atom, since it's 13.7 eV less than a free electron, has a reduced mass. That's actually irrelevant here.

No Ziggurat, it isn't irrelevant. This relates to what Johan was saying about mass. We have an electron and a proton bound together, and together their mass is less than that of the electron and the proton before they were bound. The system radiates a photon, it's a radiating body losing mass just as in Einstein's 1905 paper.

The point is that you cannot get this energy from calculating the potential alone. If you only calculate the binding potential of the wave function, <V>, you don't get -13.7 eV, you get -26.4 eV. So a bound electron has MORE energy than simply its rest mass energy plus the electrostatic potential energy.

It really isn't more energy Zig, it's less energy. That radiated photon proves it. It's that simple.

Again, if you really want to, you can call this extra energy something else, but everyone in the field calls it kinetic energy.

This relates to what I said in post #2549 on page 64. Hence the electron has mass-energy rather than kinetic energy. There's an underlying dynamical nature to the electron, kinetic energy is in there, but once you've said it's a massive particle you've accounted for your kinetic energy. You can't have your cake and eat it. And whatever you say everyone in the field calls it, we don't call it the mass defect for nothing.

That's an incorrect inference I'm afraid. An electron bouncing around in a potential well is a 511keV electron plus kinetic energy. It isn't like the electron's 13.7ev mass-deficit in the hydrogen atom.

Actually, it's exactly like that. In both cases, the kinetic energy is calculated from <p²>/2m, and it's positive in both cases.

It really isn't, Ziggurat. The electron in the hydrogen atom is the equivalent of rapidly jiggling a box containing a light wave. As the light wave approaches the left of the box you move it to the left. As the light wave approaches the right of the box you move it to the right. You thus accommodate a longer-wavelength wave with less energy. It's the other way round to giving the box a kick like it gets from Compton scattering wherein the electron absorbs a slice of the photon and gains kinetic energy.

 

[D'rok]

I see Ziggurat talking about physics. I see Farsight talking about his personal mental picture of phenomena.

Guess which one I think is more compelling?

 

[ben m]

Farsight, you make a series of mistakes.

No Ziggurat, it isn't irrelevant. This relates to what Johan was saying about mass. We have an electron and a proton bound together, and together their mass is less than that of the electron and the proton before they were bound. The system radiates a photon, it's a radiating body losing mass just as in Einstein's 1905 paper.

It is irrelevant in a very important sense: keeping track of that missing mass does not tell you anything about the bound electron. An electron that falls into the 1s state of hydrogen radiates 13.6 eV. An electron that falls into the 4d state of Be^{3+} also radiates 13.6 eV. Quantum mechanical measurements of these states will tell you that they're very different. Make repeated measurements of positions (or electrostatic potentials) momenta (or kinetic energies) etc., and you'll find two totally different situations. By saying "it's all just mass" you're ...

... well, frankly, what you're doing is waiting for people like Ziggurat to actually apply the laws of physics that tell us these numbers. Then you're taking the number, saying "Look, I know this number", and behaving as though that's all anyone ever needs to know to understand everything.

It's like going into a Chevrolet office, grabbing some car designs, and saying: "Aha! All of your cars are horizontal. This is very simple." And an engineer tries to show you that the car has to be engineered to be horizontal, because the engine's weight pushes down and the shocks push up, and if you perturb that you can see, etc., and ... "Look,", you interrupt, "You're making it complicated when it's simple. The car is horizontal to begin with. End of story."

 

[sol invictus]

It really isn't more energy Zig, it's less energy. That radiated photon proves it. It's that simple.

It is indeed simple, but you have it entirely wrong. As Zig says, the electrostatic part of the energy is -26.4eV, or exactly twice the actual binding energy. (How do I know that? Because I can calculate it using QM.)

On the other hand, quantum mechanics predicts that the binding energy is -13.6eV. So what makes up the difference? Why, the kinetic energy of the electron.

It's (not coincidentally) analogous to a planet orbiting a star - the average gravitational binding energy is -2 times the average kinetic energy of the planet in its orbit, and their sum is the total binding energy.

You see, these quantities can be calculated precisely - and then checked against experiment. And they match. QM is correct. And QM says, unequivocally, that the electron in ground state hydrogen has an average kinetic energy that's +13.6eV.

 

[Farsight]

I should add that I'm looking at posts on page 65. Like I said, sorry if this is old news, but I think it's worth getting this mass thing right.

A wave of the type I posted has <p>=0 but <p²> > 0. It's much like a gas confined to a box, where each molecule has a momentum, the average (vector) momentum is zero, but the average of momentum squared is not.

No problem, I gave an example involving two cannonballs going past you in opposite directions.

Just like a gas, if the electron is inside a box and you open the box, it leaks out (i.e., experimentally you sometimes find the electron outside, even far outside after some time). Opening the box (carefully) doesn't add or subtract any momentum from the electron. So the fact that the electron is sometimes found outside the box after you open it tells you that <p²> > 0, because if both <p> and <p²> were zero, the electron wouldn't move - it would stay in the box even after you opened it.

There's no problem with an electron in a box, but again, Johan was talking about a light wave in a box, and that's what the electron equates to, only there is no actual box. It's just a wave, that's why we can diffract it, and annihilation opens the box. See what I was saying to Zig above. Jiggle this wave just right and you effectively make it bigger. Its wavelength is lower, it has less energy.

That's exactly what the wavefunction I posted describes. Johan denies there is any kinetic energy. But in fact there is kinetic energy, and it increases the smaller you make the box.

And it decreases when you make the box bigger. That's what's happening in the 1s hydrogen atom orbital. You're "jiggling the wave", not back and forth, not round and round, but spherically: round and round and round. There's now less energy. Johan called it mass-energy, that's what it is. There's a mass-defect. We start with the energy-momentum of a massless 1022keV photon. It was moving at c, it makes things move, it has unequivocal kinetic energy. But then we put it through pair production, lose the positron, and now we've got an electron just sitting there. Not with kinetic energy, but with mass. Sling in a photon like with Compton scattering and you move it. Pull out a photon like with electron-proton binding and you spread it around. Yes, the mass of an isolated hydrogen atom is less than the mass of an isolated electron plus the mass of an isolated proton. Yes, the electron loses mass. Particles like electrons can lose mass. They do lose mass. All you have to do to reduce an electron's mass is drop it. Gravitational potential energy is transformed into kinetic energy, and that gravitational potential energy was in the electron. If you don't believe me throw an electron up at +11km/s, and all that kinetic energy is transformed into gravitational potential energy, and the electron takes it away into interstellar space. Mass isn't invariant. An electron just sitting there in free space comprises more energy than an electron just sitting there at the surface of the earth.

That's why two electrons in two boxes (or metals) can have different energies even if both have <p>=0 and both are at the same electrostatic potential.

No problem with that. A free electron has different energy to a bound electron, and there's a sliding scale between the two.

 

[ben m]

Jiggle this wave just right and you effectively make it bigger. Its wavelength is lower, it has less energy.

That tells you something about how relativity will treat this box. Yes, the box as a whole will behave like the binding energy is just part of the mass.

Please stop bringing it up. The fact is that there is something going on inside the box, and that there are laws of physics that tell you about the different things that can happen inside the box. We can put things in the box that have kinetic energy, or mass energy, or binding energy, and they can be different. A microgram of uranium, a microgram of graphene, a microgram of cold 4f-excited hydrogen atoms, and a microgram of photons-trapped-in-a-hot-cavity? Yes, they all weigh a microgram. Thank you.

Saying "they all weigh a microgram" does not mean they're all the same thing.

Saying "think about jiggling the microgram and finding that it weighs a microgram" does not mean that there are no differences between the uranium and the hydrogen and the photons.

Saying "well, whatever's in the cavity, it has a wavelength, and it weighs a microgram" does not mean we can't talk about the laws of physics that determine what goes on. There are laws of physics that we can apply inside the box---without jiggling it---that let us talk about details of this box in addition to, but including, what it weighs. The behavior of the box-of-uranium (in contexts other than 'its mass when jiggling it') is different than the behavior of the box-of-photons.

To talk about those differences, we have to talk about laws of physics inside the box, laws detailed enough to tell us something other than the total mass. Please, please, please stop telling us to jiggle the box. Jiggling the box helps you measure the total mass, independent of whether it is rest mass or bouncing particles or a standing wave. I know. I don't care. That's not what we are talking about. Please stop.

 

[Farsight]

I'll presume Johan is away for Christmas:

The simple fact is that for objects, like a cannon ball, its rest mass energy is the same at every position in space and also within any gravitational field.

All: it isn't true I'm afraid. Throw a cannonball up in the air and you do work on it. You give it energy. We call it gravitational potential energy, and it's in the cannonball. Throw it up at +11km/s and it takes it away, moving slowly off into interstellar space, eventually being so far away that the Earth's gravitaional field is no longer significant. (We're ignoring the sun here). The gravitational mass of the earth is diminished by the original mass of the cannonball plus the mass-equivalence of the kinetic energy you gave it. Inertial mass and gravitational mass are equivalent, so the mass of the earth is diminished. Yes conservation of momentum applies, but most of the energy went into the cannonball since KE = ½mv² and the Earth hardly moved, so forget about it. The point is that that cannonball took its gravitational potential energy away with it.

But when it comes to an electron within an electric field, this is not true anymore. An electron within the lowest energy state of a hydrogen atom has LESS energy than its rest mass energy. Therefore you cannot assume that you can neglect rest mass as the baseline energy for an electron that is quantum mechanically bound within an electric potential-field, as you can for a cannon ball within a gravitational field.

There's not much difference between the electron and the cannonball. Conservation of energy always applies. Our cannonball is just sitting there in free space when the earth comes trundling along. It falls down, impacting at 11km/s. It's a tough old cannonball, so it survives, and the kinetic energy is dissipated as heat and radiates away into space. Then the cannonball's mass is less than it was. That kinetic energy came from the gravitational potential energy locked up in the cannonball when it was sitting there in free space. It's important to note that the kinetic energy didn't come from the Earth's gravitational field. It came from the cannonball. The kinetic energy dissipates as photons, and now there's more energy in the earth's gravitational field, not less, because now the cannonball is there too.

 

[Farsight]

Rest mass is an absolute, Lorentz-invariant, gauge-invariant quantity.

No it isn't. That's maybe what you've been taught, but it isn't true.

The missing mass is not missing from the electron, it's missing from the entire system.

Yes it is, it's missing from the electron and the proton, but the proton doesn't lose much. It's like the cannonball and the earth. The canonball loses 11km/s worth of mass. The earth hardly loses any. The two objects have masses x and y when they're separate. Let them bind and emit photons and the two object have masses x' and y'. The system is the two objects. They don't keep their original masses whilst some magic negative binding energy appears out of nowhere. It's not called the mass defect for nothing.

 

[ben m]

No it isn't. That's maybe what you've been taught, but it isn't true.

What?

A common synonym for rest mass is invariant mass. Look it up. It doesn't change under the Lorentz transformation. (Another quantity---formerly called "relativistic mass" but now more commonly called "energy"---does change under a Lorentz transform, and I hope that's what you're thinking of.)

Other than "look it up" I don't really know what to say.

Yes it is, it's missing from the electron and the proton, but the proton doesn't lose much.

In electromagnetism, the binding energy is energy missing from the total electromagnetic field configuration, not from either of the particles. Work out (i.e., do a volume integral of E^2) the field energy of the 1/r^2 field of an isolated proton; work out the 1/r^2 field of an isolated electron. (The renormalization cutoff is irrelevant here.) Then work out the field energy of a classical proton+electron dipole separated by d. There's a small region with increased E^2, but a very large region with decreased E^2. The difference in total field energy between the isolated+isolated and the "dipole of size d" is precisely U = q1 q2/(4 pi e0 d), the potential energy gained by bringing the two particles together.

It's true that some of the mass of the isolated electron (or proton) is due to the energy in this field, so it's indeed possible to ascribe the binding energy to "mass"---but if you were to treat it that way, there'd be equal amounts of mass/self-energy missing from each particle.

The gravitational case is much subtler---that field integral difference, if you treat it like an attractive EM field, has the wrong sign---and I wouldn't be on very firm ground discussing it.