Reality Check
Penultimate Amazing
Who cares - he was shown to be wrong (he basically assumed the result in his reasoning)
What Special Relativity states is that the rest mass and energy of a body are equivalent.
Why is there so much crackpot physics?
- Thread starter Perpetual Student
- Start date
What Special Relativity states is that the rest mass and energy of a body are equivalent.
Reality Check
Penultimate Amazing
Lots of word salad that states nothing about the Higgs mechanism or E=mc2.
Once again Farsight you expose your basic ignorance of the subject. You deny the obvious, i.e. that Higgs mechanism is a relativistic QFT and thus includes E=mc²
Farsight: What does Higgs mean by Lorentz-covariant and relativistic?
First asked 19 November 2012
165 days and counting, Farsight!
Reality Check
Penultimate Amazing
I agree with you, Farsight!
It is not really a theologian's argument to refer to a E=mc² paper (not the E=mc² paper because Einstein does not derive that there and there are several others).
It is mostly a delusional argument so it would be a maniac's argument
.The delusion is your denial of the what the equation means - that energy and mass are equivalent.
It is also a theologian's argument because you are obsessing about this one (probably wrong) paper and every thing that has happened after 1905.
Reminds me of a sign of the crackpot that I do not think has been mentioned before - argument by semantics.
Any relativistic theory
- contains E=mc²
- is consistent with E=mc²
- does not violate E=mc²
- agrees with E=mc²
- etc.
Farsight: What does Higgs mean by Lorentz-covariant and relativistic?
First asked 19 November 2012
165 days and counting, Farsight!
Farsight, I'm well aware of your idea that electrons are trapped photons. However, nothing in the above has anything to do with the Higgs mechanism, and certainly doesn't demonstrate a contradiction between the Higgs mechanism and E=mc2.
You don't just claim that the Higgs mechanism isn't a correct description of reality, you claim that it contradicts E=mc2. The former may or may not be true. The latter is an assertion that seems to me to be completely baseless, and the above attempt to demonstrate it which was a complete non-sequiteur only strengthens that view for me.
If I'm wrong, please explain what the above has to do with the connection between the Higgs mechanism and E=mc2.
As, sadly, are we all.
I'm amazed that he continues to trot out this trapped-photon gibberish pretending that it's mainstream physics. Over and over again.
It's as though his brain has misfiled the trapped photon hypothesis, placing it in the Einstein factoids collection. He's filed his own trapped-photon sketch among "things I'll make fun of people for not knowing, like E=mc^2", rather than in the embarrassing-mistakes file as "obscure factoids, laughed at in every forum I've floated them, that I derived in my even-more-obscure vanity press book."
Perpetual Student
Illuminator
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I asked by what mechanism does a photon become and electron. You have provided no mechanism. Do you not understand the question?
Your comment, "It's just displacement current and that double-loop configuration I mentioned. The photon displaces its own path into a closed path." does not provide a mechanism.
Why does one photon move along at c but another is stuck in the "double-loop" you describe? By what means does the double-loop occur? Why and how? Why are not all photons in a "double-loop"? Why are any in a "double-loop"?
Here are common beliefs over at the Natural Philosophy Alliance | A New Vision for the Universe, summarized from Problems in Mainstream Science | Natural Philosophy Alliance:
Dr. David Dixon claims that the ether theorists are the dominant ones there, that it's the ether theorists who set the agenda and stuff like that. He's the one who delivered that "pathological physics" talk mentioned earlier.
Earlier-mentioned links with titles added:
Pathological Physics: Tales from "The Box" - YouTube
Pathological physics
- The big bang theory is fundamentally flawed.
- Relativity has flawed assumptions and when the proof for such is closely examined, it is not proof at all.
- Expansion tectonics (the earth is expanding / growing) is a much better model than modern-day plate tectonics.
- The properties of water go way beyond our current understanding.
- The universe is much more electrical than currently thought.
- Terminology is really a big problem in mainstream science. (energy only a concept, space-time absurd, ...)
- Infinity is very important to science.
- Science in the mainstream is dominated by politics, not science. (criticism of mainstream theories not allowed, ...)
- The NPA is where the Galileos, Aristotles, and Newtons are working today.
- Most all NPA scientists agree that science took a huge wrong-turn in the early part of the 20th century.
- The mainstream believes the NPA members do not understand or study the mainstream and this could not be further from the truth.
- The mainstream also believes the NPA members are not qualified to do science, this also cannot be further from the truth.
Dr. David Dixon claims that the ether theorists are the dominant ones there, that it's the ether theorists who set the agenda and stuff like that. He's the one who delivered that "pathological physics" talk mentioned earlier.
Earlier-mentioned links with titles added:
Pathological Physics: Tales from "The Box" - YouTube
Pathological physics
catsmate
No longer the 1
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- Messages
- 34,767
Excellent post. I work with PMs daily, several of them as my current project has around 130 fulltime staff, and most of them are fine. On occasion you get one who doesn't understand that they don't know enough of the technical background to make certain decisions.
I've seen this with a few PMs, have had to reprimand a couple (and have one removed) because of the degree to which were wasting the time of my subordinates.
Yep, still nothing whatsoever to do with actual science. Somewhat telling that you didn't even pretend to address half of my post or any of ben m's post.
Speaking from the contractor side of things, we generally get pretty much no say in why things are constructed (I don't recall EVER having any say in that). We get told what will be constructed, and if we're hired out to help with the design we may have some say in how things will be constructed, but every report, protocol, and design goes through client review before we do anything. In other words, the person proposing the building has the final say in what gets built, why, and how.
And God help a PM that tries to mess with my technical work.
A few have. I'm not very high up in the company; however, it tends to make other technical specialists who are VERY nervous, and they tend to let the PMs know that this isn't acceptable. I've walked away from a few projects because the PM pulled that crap. If the PM ever even CONSIDERED doing that to a client they'd be out of my company so fast they'd go backwards in time.Dancing David
Penultimate Amazing
Dancing David said:
So BurntSynapse, what are the answers?
"I ask, what tool specifically are you thinking of. You made the claim, what tool, cognitive of technological should be considered that isn't?"
[iteration 0]
Hellbound
Merchant of Doom
Sorry, but that was bugging me for some reason. Especially since it's a good question.
*twitch*
The Man
Unbanned zombie poster
Except when your "vision of success" depends explicitly on "A state of nature", FTL travel being both in this case and not some "vision of "balance"". Though fertilizer certainly does come to mind in reading your response.
Isn't believing one might win the lottery "a vision of success"? At least there is historical evidence that people have won to support said vision.
Advice you should take to heart.
Perhaps you should be more concerned with what I actually say and cite rather than some "tone" you perceive.
I have neither said nor implied anything about "risk indicators". I have said explicitly and cited examples that you are presenting your position to be self-contradictory.
I have provided specifics, one of which you (apparently deliberately) truncated out of what you quoted from me. You asked for the critiques, whether you actually use them or not is entirely up to you. Unfortunately current information doesn't indicate "a vision of success we might use to frame and plan productive work". I sincerely hope that changes.
Ah, there you go, that train is never late. After the strawmaning and the removal of specifics in a quote to try to imply "specific flaws" haven't been cited comes the "outside their current depth" accusation. Perhaps if you would look around instead of just looking down (on others) you might realize you are the one who was calling for help.
godless dave
Great Dalmuti
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- Jul 25, 2007
- Messages
- 8,266
I'm sorry to tell you this yet again, but the loopy photon model of the electron has been comprehensively refuted. That has nothing to do with the Higgs mechanism, either. If the recent Higgs candidate is what it seems to be, it is merely putting a redundant nail into a coffin that was buried long ago.
OK, Farsight. Let me first describe a very simplified picture of the mechanism, before we even think about moving on to anything more complex.
Let's start with two fields: a neutral massless spin-1/2 field ψ (a spinor) and a neutral massless spin-0 field φ (a scalar). The equations of motion of both fields are Lorentz-covariant (the Dirac equation and the Klein-Gordon equation, respectively).
We can write down a simple Lagrangian (actually a Lagrangian density) for this two-field theory:
L = (Dirac kinetic term) + (Klein-Gordon kinetic term)
This Lagrangian business is really just a shorthand for the field equations, at least as far as we're concerned for now. You can get the Dirac and K-G field equations from L by a basically mechanical mathematical process.
I hope you have followed this well enough so far to appreciate that the simple two-field theory we've constructed is, at least so far, Lorentz-covariant, i.e. compatible with SR.
Now let's introduce the simplest possible non-trivial Lorentz-invariant interaction between the two fields. We change the Lagrangian like so:
L ---> L - gφψ'ψ
The symbol g here is our coupling constant. The field ψ' is (basically) the antiparticle field corresponding to ψ (technically it's the Dirac adjoint of ψ; normally denoted differently, but LaTeX isn't working, so...). The interaction term -g.φ.ψ'ψ is a product of Lorentz-invariant terms, and so we're still compatible with SR.
Now we introduce some "potential energy" terms for the φ field, an interaction between the φ particles if you like, like so:
L ---> L - W(φ).
Here, W is just some Lorentz-invariant scalar function with the special property that it is minimized at some positive value of φ. Before introducing these terms, the energy of the scalar field was minimized at φ = 0. Now, however, it is minimized at some non-zero value of φ, let's call it k.
Note that all we've done so far is take our original Lorentz-invariant simple Lagrangian and add a few Lorentz-invariant terms to it. The end result is still, clearly, Lorentz-invariant.
Now, when we observe particles, we're really observing small disturbances of the fields around their vacuum states, and vacuum states are just those states where the field has minimum energy. With the introduction of W above, the vacuum is no longer at φ = 0, but rather φ = k. So when we observe particles associated with the φ-field, we'll actually be looking at small oscillations of the field around φ = k. We say that the φ field has acquired a non-zero vacuum expectation value of k.
So, in experiments we'll see that φ = k + (a small oscillation). For our own convenience we can define a new field, call it ρ, equal to (φ - k). This field ρ has a zero vacuum expectation value, by construction. If we rewrite the Lagrangian in terms of ρ, we find:
- The kinetic terms are trivial to work out, as they depend only on the derivatives of the scalar field.
- The interaction term -gφψ'ψ is equal to -gρψ'ψ - gkψ'ψ. This is important, as we'll see.
- There is still a "potential energy" term which, by construction, is now some function V(ρ) which is minimized at ρ = 0 (this was the whole point of introducing ρ).
In other words,
L = (Dirac kinetic term) - gkψ'ψ + (ρ-field kinetic term) - V(ρ) - gρψ'ψ.
Look at this closely:
- The first two terms, as you can check for yourself, are the Lagrangian for a massive spinor field with mass gk.
- The second two terms are the Lagrangian for a scalar field ρ with a mass and self-interactions depending on the details of the function V(ρ).
- The last term describes an interaction between the spinor and scalar fields with a coupling constant g.
- Each term is Lorentz invariant, and so the whole thing is Lorentz invariant.
In conclusion, we started with a theory of a massless fermion coupled to a scalar field, where the scalar field acquired a non-zero V.E.V. As a result of the coupling between the scalar and the fermion, we find that the observable particles of the theory actually appear to be massive fermions interacting with a (different) scalar field.
At no point did we break the Lorentz invariance of the Lagrangian. I'm sure you understand what that implies.
------------
To the physicists here: if I made any errors above (algebraic or logical), I apologise unreservedly. Please point them out (gently) and I promise to try harder next time
Most of this goes over my head but I would like to thank you for posting it.
Personally I found the Wikipedia on the Higgs boson very informative, but I don't know how accurate it is.
Dancing David
Penultimate Amazing
Sorry to cause twitches, i was using an open ended format.
So, the project-manager consensus is that PMs shouldn't attempt to override domain-specific expert technical decisions. Meanwhile, BurntSynapse claims that he's making valid abstract risk assessments, not overriding physics expertise. Let's review the tape.
Experts are well aware of Smolin's anti-string-theory complaints and have resoundingly rejected them on technical grounds. The experts are, similarly aware that quantum reality differs from classical reality, and have a century of experience discussing and testing the distinction.
Insofar as that's even applicable to science (which is not very far), remember that the acceptance criteria are to be defined by experts. If the experts say "it's important to figure out whether Type IIB string theory false vacua are enumerable", then that's what the PMs should be looking at. If the experts say "there is nothing we can do about FTL" then the PM shouldn't make that a milestone.
The experts, not the PM, decide what methods to use. The experts have resoundingly agreed on "math that obeys to laws of math" as the appropriate methodology for physics; all progress whatsoever in physics has used math, including math that strikes laypeople as "weird" (Remember when Newton came up with the nonsensical idea of summing an infinite number of infinitesimal intervals?). And here's our erstwhile Project Manager telling the experts to use a different method, one he prefers and understands personally.
And now the Project Manager is telling the experts what sources are "reliable", and to determine the difference between "sound" and "unsound" reasoning---normally the domain of experts. Is this standard project-management practice? Were the project managers on Gravity Probe B responsible for reading, e.g., the electrostatic patch-effect literature and deciding which papers were "reliable"?
Once again, you're removing your project-manager hat and trying to do the work of experts. There's a huge amount of expert work (experimental and theoretical) on the laws of, and dimensionality of, spacetime. We understand better than ever what it means to talk about "4D"---how 4D might be the low-energy limit of a larger number of dimensions, how 4D might a holographic dual of 3D, etc. What's up? Are you doing "risk assessment" on our knowledge of spacetime, without knowing anything about expert's actual work on spacetime? Or are you trying to independently reject that expert work---again, not usually the PM's job---as part of your claim of "no progress"?
Can you show me the project-plan for the philosophers tell scientists what to do subtask? Because that one has a pretty bad record. Scientists had to tell philosophers that the Earth went round the Sun. Scientists had to tell philosophers that moving clocks would disagree with stationary ones. Scientists had to tell philosophers that electrons could undergo wave diffraction; that an electron's diffraction pattern might be altered by the value of a magnetic field in a region the electron never actually went to; that Bell's Inequality would not hold experimentally.
In fact, I can't think of one example of a philosopher-of-science predicting, or directing, or having any foresight at all, of an upcoming paradigm shift.
If I were a project manager, I sure wouldn't declare that physicists are failing to make progress but that philosophers and science historians are. Oh, unless you're not making project-management judgements at all, but rather are making inroads into technical topics.
It's very frequently been true. Remember when we discovered that the Sun was a million times more massive than the Earth, but had no idea what mysterious substance it was made of, or what utterly-unguessable energy source kept it hot? Practically screaming out for a paradigm shift, right? If we had simply dropped the "sun is far away and very massive" paradigm, and made a paradigm shift to thinking of the Sun as "small and 400km overhead", we could have dispensed with the silly speculation about ultra-powerful energy source, which are so unmeasurable as to be outside the domain of science.
There's something out there responsible for the dark-matter-related data. It is a flat experimental fact, in seven or eight independent observables, that all the data (a) disagrees with all simple non-dark-matter models, and (b) agrees with the simplest dark matter models. (i.e. "hypothesize that a stable neutral particle exists but hasn't been detected yet"---not too much of a stretch.) The project-management fact, the relevant one, is that (a) tens of thousands of people know about these two facts and (b) thousands of different hypotheses are under careful study, ranging from "let's try to detect the particle if it exists and looks like X" to "let's reevaluate the astro data errors" to "let's hypothesize non-GR spacetime laws and forces".
An actual project-manager should be fairly happy with the dark-matter study, because we're quite good at trying to cover all the bases, entertain new ideas, perform quick and adaptable and cross-checkable experiments.
Do project managers usually "vet" the expert studies, instead of having the experts vet them themselves? Did the Gravity Probe B PM team read all the papers on electrostatic patch effects, then choose the ones they thought important and draw the conclusions?
In dark matter (to pick one example), in the past 20 years, there's been immense progress. The concordance between Planck data, galaxy data, modern galaxy-formation supercomputer simulations, and the (now numerous) Bullet Cluster analogues, are really new and informative. To me this looks like incredible progress---we're really zooming in on where the dark matter is and how it got there, how it affects baryons, how baryons affect it---but you have inserted your own ill-informed milestone; you've decided to ignore progress on expert-led milestones, allowing you to declare the project a failure, and prioritize progress on a milestone you're inventing yourself. (What, exactly? "You must either observe a dark-matter/baryon interaction experimentally, or find a new law of spacetime?" I thought that experts, not the PMs, were supposed to name the milestones. And that's an unreasonable milestone, because "dark matter exists but the DM/baryon coupling is very small" is a perfectly plausible hypothesis. Nature did not engineer herself to make all discoveries possible. It's like someone saying, "Black hole research is a failure; we have not created them in the lab, nor launched space probes to visit them.")
Experts are well aware of Smolin's anti-string-theory complaints and have resoundingly rejected them on technical grounds. The experts are, similarly aware that quantum reality differs from classical reality, and have a century of experience discussing and testing the distinction.
Insofar as that's even applicable to science (which is not very far), remember that the acceptance criteria are to be defined by experts. If the experts say "it's important to figure out whether Type IIB string theory false vacua are enumerable", then that's what the PMs should be looking at. If the experts say "there is nothing we can do about FTL" then the PM shouldn't make that a milestone.
The experts, not the PM, decide what methods to use. The experts have resoundingly agreed on "math that obeys to laws of math" as the appropriate methodology for physics; all progress whatsoever in physics has used math, including math that strikes laypeople as "weird" (Remember when Newton came up with the nonsensical idea of summing an infinite number of infinitesimal intervals?). And here's our erstwhile Project Manager telling the experts to use a different method, one he prefers and understands personally.
And now the Project Manager is telling the experts what sources are "reliable", and to determine the difference between "sound" and "unsound" reasoning---normally the domain of experts. Is this standard project-management practice? Were the project managers on Gravity Probe B responsible for reading, e.g., the electrostatic patch-effect literature and deciding which papers were "reliable"?
Once again, you're removing your project-manager hat and trying to do the work of experts. There's a huge amount of expert work (experimental and theoretical) on the laws of, and dimensionality of, spacetime. We understand better than ever what it means to talk about "4D"---how 4D might be the low-energy limit of a larger number of dimensions, how 4D might a holographic dual of 3D, etc. What's up? Are you doing "risk assessment" on our knowledge of spacetime, without knowing anything about expert's actual work on spacetime? Or are you trying to independently reject that expert work---again, not usually the PM's job---as part of your claim of "no progress"?
Can you show me the project-plan for the philosophers tell scientists what to do subtask? Because that one has a pretty bad record. Scientists had to tell philosophers that the Earth went round the Sun. Scientists had to tell philosophers that moving clocks would disagree with stationary ones. Scientists had to tell philosophers that electrons could undergo wave diffraction; that an electron's diffraction pattern might be altered by the value of a magnetic field in a region the electron never actually went to; that Bell's Inequality would not hold experimentally.
In fact, I can't think of one example of a philosopher-of-science predicting, or directing, or having any foresight at all, of an upcoming paradigm shift.
If I were a project manager, I sure wouldn't declare that physicists are failing to make progress but that philosophers and science historians are. Oh, unless you're not making project-management judgements at all, but rather are making inroads into technical topics.
It's very frequently been true. Remember when we discovered that the Sun was a million times more massive than the Earth, but had no idea what mysterious substance it was made of, or what utterly-unguessable energy source kept it hot? Practically screaming out for a paradigm shift, right? If we had simply dropped the "sun is far away and very massive" paradigm, and made a paradigm shift to thinking of the Sun as "small and 400km overhead", we could have dispensed with the silly speculation about ultra-powerful energy source, which are so unmeasurable as to be outside the domain of science.
There's something out there responsible for the dark-matter-related data. It is a flat experimental fact, in seven or eight independent observables, that all the data (a) disagrees with all simple non-dark-matter models, and (b) agrees with the simplest dark matter models. (i.e. "hypothesize that a stable neutral particle exists but hasn't been detected yet"---not too much of a stretch.) The project-management fact, the relevant one, is that (a) tens of thousands of people know about these two facts and (b) thousands of different hypotheses are under careful study, ranging from "let's try to detect the particle if it exists and looks like X" to "let's reevaluate the astro data errors" to "let's hypothesize non-GR spacetime laws and forces".
An actual project-manager should be fairly happy with the dark-matter study, because we're quite good at trying to cover all the bases, entertain new ideas, perform quick and adaptable and cross-checkable experiments.
Do project managers usually "vet" the expert studies, instead of having the experts vet them themselves? Did the Gravity Probe B PM team read all the papers on electrostatic patch effects, then choose the ones they thought important and draw the conclusions?
In dark matter (to pick one example), in the past 20 years, there's been immense progress. The concordance between Planck data, galaxy data, modern galaxy-formation supercomputer simulations, and the (now numerous) Bullet Cluster analogues, are really new and informative. To me this looks like incredible progress---we're really zooming in on where the dark matter is and how it got there, how it affects baryons, how baryons affect it---but you have inserted your own ill-informed milestone; you've decided to ignore progress on expert-led milestones, allowing you to declare the project a failure, and prioritize progress on a milestone you're inventing yourself. (What, exactly? "You must either observe a dark-matter/baryon interaction experimentally, or find a new law of spacetime?" I thought that experts, not the PMs, were supposed to name the milestones. And that's an unreasonable milestone, because "dark matter exists but the DM/baryon coupling is very small" is a perfectly plausible hypothesis. Nature did not engineer herself to make all discoveries possible. It's like someone saying, "Black hole research is a failure; we have not created them in the lab, nor launched space probes to visit them.")
It does. It demonstrates that mass arises from an interaction, but that this interaction is an electromagnetic self interaction rather than with the Higgs field.Roboramma said:
I'll repeat what I said again, this time with some bolding.Roboramma said:
Farsight said:
Try to pick through the above and point out where I'm wrong. When you can't, perhaps you'll appreciate that I'm not wrong. Then when you try to explain the Higgs mechanism and can't, you'll further appreciate that I'm not wrong, and nor was Einstein. Think it through, for yourself. In gamma-gamma pair production the only field we're dealing with is the electromagnetic field, and mass arises because it interacts with itself. Whereupon the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content. It's a measure of how much energy is present with no aggregate motion with respect to you. It isn't a measure of an interaction with a field which is magically turned on and off by pair production and annihilation. The electron is not some "fat boy" struggling through "cosmic treacle". Surely you're skeptical of that rather than E=mc². Come on Robo, are you a skeptic or a sucker?
That's a pop-science myth for kids. The electron has its electromagnetic field. Its field is part of what it is. In QED it's described as an excitation of the electron field, and in case it's escaped your notice, it's Quantum Field Theory, not Quantum Point-Particle Theory.
Robo pay attention. I said I'd rip it to shreds, and this ain't pretty.
Write it like this:
[img]http://www.forkosh.com/mimetex.cgi?\bar\psi[/img]
No it hasn't.
You wish.
No. Stop right there. The electron is a spinor. It's a spin ½ particle, it has its field. And it is not massless. We can create it along with the positron in pair production. So that's where we start. So start again. I have immediately cut your argument off at the knees and exposed your sleight-of-hand. The rest of your argument is thereby reduced to smoke and mirrors which you know Robo will not understand. Don't try the Emperor's New Clothes trick next time. Capiche?
Latex is working. I've shown you how to make LaTeX work. Here's your Dirac adjoint:ctamblyn said:
Write it like this:
[img]http://www.forkosh.com/mimetex.cgi?\bar\psi[/img]
In your dreams. Read the book. Giudice is a big fan of relativity.
Don't forget Particle headache: Why the Higgs could spell disaster where you can read this:
"The minimal standard model Higgs is like a fairy tale," says Guido Altarelli of CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. "It is a toy model to make the theory match the data, a crutch to allow the standard model to walk a bit further until something better comes along."
Oh, and by the way, we don't do science by popular vote, edd. It's science. Not the X-factor.
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