dafydd
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You speak a mouthful. I still have no idea what this 'revolutionary paradigm change' is. For all I know it could be a solicitous metaphor transformation.
Why is there so much crackpot physics?
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You speak a mouthful. I still have no idea what this 'revolutionary paradigm change' is. For all I know it could be a solicitous metaphor transformation.
W.D.Clinger
Philosopher
Here are two examples of what most scientifically literate people mean when they talk about "revolutionary paradigm shift" or change:
- Einstein's theory of relativity says the non-Euclidean geometry of our universe is constrained/influenced by the masses and energy within it. Before Einstein, space and time were thought to be separate things, both were thought to be independent of objects moving through space, and space was believed to be Euclidean.
- Quantum mechanics says the observable future of systems (up to and including the universe itself) may be described using probabilities but cannot be known with certainty. Before quantum mechanics, most scientists believed the future of closed systems (including the universe itself) could in principle be predicted with certainty from complete knowledge of their current states; Einstein gave voice to this pre-quantum prejudice when he said God does not play dice with the universe.
BurntSynapse isn't the only person who believes the Einsteinian revolution is incomplete, but his apparent reasons for that belief are somewhat unusual.
Here's an essay of his that makes as much sense as any of his others I've read:
Buck Field. Revolution in the Understanding of Space-Time: a Project. Online at http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/387 . Possibly written in December 2008, this was his contribution to the FQXi Forum's The Nature of Time Essay Contest ( http://fqxi.org/community/forum/category/10 ).
You might recognize some of the other people who contributed essays to that contest. George F R Ellis's essay, for example, is at http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/361 .Reality Check
Penultimate Amazing
Communicating in coherent English stating exactly what your opinion would be a good start as a basis of communication, BurntSynapse
!Giving a clear example of how your opinion would make scientific research more productive would be a good start as a basis of communication, BurntSynapse. For example a team of N scientists researching subject X will get to their goal G in a time Y% faster by changing to management practice/"revolutionary paradigm change"/? P.
dafydd
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Thank you for the detailed answer. Hasn't he heard of dilithium crystals?
BurntSynapse
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If you will provide a link, then I will definitely want to renounce (or something) wherever I "assert [my] faith" as you describe.
Thanks!
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Reality Check
Penultimate Amazing
!W.D.Clinger
Philosopher
I'm sure he has. In a blog post less than two months ago, Buck Field (aka BurntSynapse) acknowledged "Star Trek and other science fiction" as a source:
The problem with using "Roddenberry's vision" to guide research in physics is that Roddenberry's warp drive was a fictional device. Its purpose was literary: to project humans into a new age of exploration.Buck Field said:
Roddenberry wasn't making any kind of sober prediction concerning what might become possible. Using "Roddenberry's vision" to argue that "revolutionary, warp enabling theory" might be achieved through "better math" is, like Star Trek, a form of entertainment.
In Buck Field's writings, that entertainment takes the form of comedy. Consider, for example, the paragraph that follows the last excerpt I quoted above:
Had Buck Field known anything about the non-Euclidean nature of relativity and its role in modern cosmology, he wouldn't have written that paragraph.Buck Field said:
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W.D.Clinger
Philosopher
To spare BurntSynapse (and others) from having to read that essay, here's an example of Buck Field asserting his faith in a future "revolutionary time paradigm":
Buck Field said:
The Man
Unbanned zombie poster
To spare BurntSynapse (and others) from having to read that essay, here's an example of Buck Field asserting his faith in a future "revolutionary time paradigm":
Buck Field said:
Well, "almost certainly" "When complete" how could one argue with that? Jargonomics or jargonastics may be something one could make a career in (particularly in project management) but what is the time table for that projected completion or risks associated with that "almost" certainty, PM wise that is?
Buck Field said:
Quite the contrary. Nature appears to have fractal structures in a limited list of cases---certain types of plant growth, certain crystals, certain coastlines, a certain subrange of galaxy distributions---where an underlying phenomenon applies iteratively in a certain fractal-friendly way. There is no evidence, none whatsoever, for reliably fractal-like behavior in (or in comparisons between) cosmology, galaxies, nebulae, stars, planets, materials, atoms, nuclei, particles, or spacetime. Not the slightest fragment. Nothing.
Indeed, if you took the crackpot "fractal" claim to a real project manager---or a real paradigm-shift-anticipator---they'd identify it as an epicycle. The only thing the "physics is a fractal" idea has produced, in 40 years of speculation, is a repeated series of (a) the claim that <phenomenon X> is a fractal and (b) admission that it's not actually a fractal, precisely, but maybe close if you pick the right way of looking at it, and (c) a request that we ignore the "anomaly" and concentrate on the part that works.
"Fractal physics" is poised for a paradigm shift! When will the ossified old guard realize that all these "anomalies" they're ignoring (like the fact that galaxy cluster correlations turn over at large scales) are in fact pointers to the non-fractal truth that lies outside of their cognitive frame?
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More quotes from Buck Field's essay. Oddly enough, after his multi-month project of insisting that JREFfers failed to understand his point, I'm pretty sure that he's saying exactly what I thought he was saying.
Yep. "Devote sufficient resources to areas ... of the kind needed" is the part where a project manager walks into Ed Witten's office and says "We will not fund you to do X, but we will fund you to do Y," an aspect of things BS really didn't want to discuss earlier. Here he says what the PM says next: " ... because historical analysis says Y has the properties identified by historians of science as distinguishing of revolutions".
This is a pretty dumb idea for several reasons. First, the idea that you can identify those "properties" reliably without the benefit of hindsight. This is nonsense, and BS has provided no defense of it whatsoever. Second, insofar as historians can identify and flag productive-looking research paths ... well, you have to contrast that with physicists' toolkit for identifying productive-looking research paths.
a) I have no idea where BS got his ideas about how we currently "regard" space and time.
b) I do not recognize BS's description of the current paradigm as a belief that anyone actually holds.
c) BS is guessing that "space and time" are the problem with the current paradigm and will be modified. This is ... well, it's just guesswork. It's BS working backwards from his desire for starships.
I repeat (for the Nth time) that I don't think BS, or anyone else, can look at a research portfolio and tell me which proposals include "generative", "iterative", or "interactive" concepts. They're vague to identify at all, and their connection to "revolutions" is even more vague.
Oy.
Yep. "Devote sufficient resources to areas ... of the kind needed" is the part where a project manager walks into Ed Witten's office and says "We will not fund you to do X, but we will fund you to do Y," an aspect of things BS really didn't want to discuss earlier. Here he says what the PM says next: " ... because historical analysis says Y has the properties identified by historians of science as distinguishing of revolutions".
This is a pretty dumb idea for several reasons. First, the idea that you can identify those "properties" reliably without the benefit of hindsight. This is nonsense, and BS has provided no defense of it whatsoever. Second, insofar as historians can identify and flag productive-looking research paths ... well, you have to contrast that with physicists' toolkit for identifying productive-looking research paths.
a) I have no idea where BS got his ideas about how we currently "regard" space and time.
b) I do not recognize BS's description of the current paradigm as a belief that anyone actually holds.
c) BS is guessing that "space and time" are the problem with the current paradigm and will be modified. This is ... well, it's just guesswork. It's BS working backwards from his desire for starships.
I repeat (for the Nth time) that I don't think BS, or anyone else, can look at a research portfolio and tell me which proposals include "generative", "iterative", or "interactive" concepts. They're vague to identify at all, and their connection to "revolutions" is even more vague.
Oy.
Perpetual Student
Illuminator
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Just a few really good quaternions should turn the trick!
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Just a few really good quaternions should turn the trick!BS said:
Perhaps Garrett Lisi will discover that all the necessary fields (algorithms, dimensional analysis, cosmology, etc.) can be mapped to nodes(?) on a Lie Algebra!
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Actually, wait a moment. I'm just a layman. Can one of the physicists in this thread tell me if including "dimensional analysis" in the list of fields the new time paradigm will "cross and draw upon" really is as hilariously ignorant as I think it is?
metacristi
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Just heard about him on another site (he published in the meantime another book 'The Higgs Fake'). Being rather sympathetic with Smolin and Woit views I thought at first that maybe it deserves to read it but a quick search about him on the net changed my mind. Apparently even the Standard model is totally unjustified. I don't think so. But since I am rather sceptical by nature and a fallibilist in non trivial ways I think that it is not totally unjustified to have doubts about the haste in which the Higgs boson was declared 'found'. I do not see why it is impossible to see a retraction in the future.
Finally we should always be prepared to drop even large parts of what we call knowledge at this time if strong reasons are found for that so that I don't think that remaining open to the possibility that modern physics may be on the totally wrong 'branch' is a greater mistake than having too strong commitments that we are approaching truth. Unzicker definitely has the wrong approach but he still may be (albeit for the wrong reasons) up to something.
Starting from the bottom:
The authors are science journalists. If you have "naive questions" to which you believe general-public-accessible "answers should exist", you have any number of productive ways to address that rather than attempting to upload them to the ArXiV.
There was an experimental constraint requiring a standard-model Higgs to be on the light end of the scale (closer to 114 than to 200 GeV, say), but a SUSY Higgs could have been heavier. There was no specific mass prediction, which is why you have to search such a broad region.
This is simply untrue. First, particle-antiparticle pairs created at LHC energy typically fly in opposite directions into your detectors. The familiar "fact" about antimatter, that it meets matter and annihilates into photons, is familiar only from positrons at low energies. Nonetheless, there are lots of two-photon events at the LHC, but these occur at random energies with a characteristic broad distribution. The Higgs signal (just one of several complementary signals) is a photon pair at 125 GeV, which is an extremely specific signature of a 125 GeV boson.
You're talking about, like, 0.5-sigma fluctuations. This is equivalent to flipping a coin 10 times, getting 7 heads and 3 tails, and complaining that you were told to expect 50/50 results.
They built an accelerator and it works. The protons go round and round the way the accelerator engineers told them to. If you don't think the protons are going around the accelerator, or if you don't think we know enough E&M to accomplish this---notice the difference between "enough E&M" and "all E&M up to the Planck scale"---then your problem is not with the Higgs discovery but rather with all modern engineering. Did you know that your microwave oven also works by accelerating electrons? AT LEAST THAT'S WHAT THEY TELL US.

Using computers.
Yes.
The LHCs have detectors with finite resolution; everything looks at least about 8 GeV wide when you measure it with calorimeters. (It's like: if your car's speedometer reports that you are driving at 65 +/- 1 mph, does this tell you anything about the quantum-mechanical uncertainty in the position of your car? No, it just tells you that your speedometer has a 1mph error bar. If you want a direct measurement of the Higgs width, please write your Congressman and ask for funding for the ILC, an electron-positron collider.
The "riddle of mass" is not "why is the top mass 173 GeV and the muon 0.1 GeV and the tau mass 1.8 GeV and ... ". The riddle of mass is "how can these masses be anything other than zero"? The Higgs mechanism answers the latter question. It does not answer the former.
Experimentalists use standard modern statistics tools, and awareness that the number-of-constraints must be smaller than the number of degrees-of-freedom is ... well, it's extremely elementary.
Three clicks on the CMS web page got me to a list of 53 papers in the category "Standard Model Physics".
First: the LHC dataset is one of the largest datasets ever amassed on Planet Earth; storing it and making it available to the scientists was only barely possible.
Second: the events are more complex than you think they are. You want a list of "what energy was deposited in what detector at what time" and you think you can get physics out of it? This is like going to the Hubble Space Telescope, asking "what voltages were on what wires at what times", and thinking you can use this to cross-check Hubble's dark-energy data.
Third: if you have an idea for an analysis you want to do, write up your idea. Figure out what data you would like to plot (and with what cuts/triggers); figure out what the Standard Model predicts for that plot (including uncertainties); if you have non-SM ideas, figure out what those ideas predict too, and whether the differences are detectable. Write it up, post to hep-ph, talk to some experimentalists, and see if anyone wants to do it. This happens all the time.
The authors are science journalists. If you have "naive questions" to which you believe general-public-accessible "answers should exist", you have any number of productive ways to address that rather than attempting to upload them to the ArXiV.
There was an experimental constraint requiring a standard-model Higgs to be on the light end of the scale (closer to 114 than to 200 GeV, say), but a SUSY Higgs could have been heavier. There was no specific mass prediction, which is why you have to search such a broad region.
This is simply untrue. First, particle-antiparticle pairs created at LHC energy typically fly in opposite directions into your detectors. The familiar "fact" about antimatter, that it meets matter and annihilates into photons, is familiar only from positrons at low energies. Nonetheless, there are lots of two-photon events at the LHC, but these occur at random energies with a characteristic broad distribution. The Higgs signal (just one of several complementary signals) is a photon pair at 125 GeV, which is an extremely specific signature of a 125 GeV boson.
You're talking about, like, 0.5-sigma fluctuations. This is equivalent to flipping a coin 10 times, getting 7 heads and 3 tails, and complaining that you were told to expect 50/50 results.
They built an accelerator and it works. The protons go round and round the way the accelerator engineers told them to. If you don't think the protons are going around the accelerator, or if you don't think we know enough E&M to accomplish this---notice the difference between "enough E&M" and "all E&M up to the Planck scale"---then your problem is not with the Higgs discovery but rather with all modern engineering. Did you know that your microwave oven also works by accelerating electrons? AT LEAST THAT'S WHAT THEY TELL US.

Using computers.
Yes.
The LHCs have detectors with finite resolution; everything looks at least about 8 GeV wide when you measure it with calorimeters. (It's like: if your car's speedometer reports that you are driving at 65 +/- 1 mph, does this tell you anything about the quantum-mechanical uncertainty in the position of your car? No, it just tells you that your speedometer has a 1mph error bar. If you want a direct measurement of the Higgs width, please write your Congressman and ask for funding for the ILC, an electron-positron collider.
The "riddle of mass" is not "why is the top mass 173 GeV and the muon 0.1 GeV and the tau mass 1.8 GeV and ... ". The riddle of mass is "how can these masses be anything other than zero"? The Higgs mechanism answers the latter question. It does not answer the former.
Experimentalists use standard modern statistics tools, and awareness that the number-of-constraints must be smaller than the number of degrees-of-freedom is ... well, it's extremely elementary.
Three clicks on the CMS web page got me to a list of 53 papers in the category "Standard Model Physics".
First: the LHC dataset is one of the largest datasets ever amassed on Planet Earth; storing it and making it available to the scientists was only barely possible.
Second: the events are more complex than you think they are. You want a list of "what energy was deposited in what detector at what time" and you think you can get physics out of it? This is like going to the Hubble Space Telescope, asking "what voltages were on what wires at what times", and thinking you can use this to cross-check Hubble's dark-energy data.
Third: if you have an idea for an analysis you want to do, write up your idea. Figure out what data you would like to plot (and with what cuts/triggers); figure out what the Standard Model predicts for that plot (including uncertainties); if you have non-SM ideas, figure out what those ideas predict too, and whether the differences are detectable. Write it up, post to hep-ph, talk to some experimentalists, and see if anyone wants to do it. This happens all the time.
I forgot to paste in the link that made it clear who I was quoting. That post is quoting Unzicker, viXra:1212.0100, "The Discovery of What? Ten Questions About the Higgs to the Particle Physics Community".
catsmate
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Ah, ViXra, for papers too crankish even for arXiv.
AU's paper on the Higgs-particle discovery seems remarkably amateurish. Most of the difficulties that he cites can easily be resolved with a little research, something that raises serious questions about the quality of AU's research.
As to a background of 1 trillion pairs, I think that AU got mixed up somewhere. That seems like the total number of particles that the LHC's collisions have produced. The large majority of them are actually fairly easy to subtract out. They are not very energetic.
AU makes this bizarre claim:
However, the overall theory of protons colliding at 4 TeV kinetic energies is reasonably well-understood, at least if one leaves out the hadronization of the collision products. It's far from the classical limit; one needs quantum mechanics. But the quantum field theory involved in the Standard Model and various extensions of it is well-understood.
Even in the classical limit, there isn't any real problem. The slow-acceleration limit is almost always a good-enough approximation, even if it has certain conceptual problems.
As to a background of 1 trillion pairs, I think that AU got mixed up somewhere. That seems like the total number of particles that the LHC's collisions have produced. The large majority of them are actually fairly easy to subtract out. They are not very energetic.
AU makes this bizarre claim:
He referred to some discussions of radiation damping in the classical limit. Discussions in Feynman's book, and Landau and Lifshitz's book.
However, the overall theory of protons colliding at 4 TeV kinetic energies is reasonably well-understood, at least if one leaves out the hadronization of the collision products. It's far from the classical limit; one needs quantum mechanics. But the quantum field theory involved in the Standard Model and various extensions of it is well-understood.
Even in the classical limit, there isn't any real problem. The slow-acceleration limit is almost always a good-enough approximation, even if it has certain conceptual problems.