Merged Relativity+ / Farsight

Farsight said:
It did work Geemack. For example I've done my bit to explain why time travel is woo. Keep an eye out for people saying things like "time is change". There's a lot more of them around these days. Of course there's still other people trying to peddle woo and profit by it, but the balance has shifted, and nowadays they get resistance instead of people just lapping it up.
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So you're subtly changing things behind the scenes?
 
Added on 25th April. What a coincidence, catsmate. And there's an IP address on there. Dublin. Shucks, shame it's been on there for a month before I found out about it.
 
DazzaD said:
This could be interpreted to mean that you were responsible for this outlook on the nature of time.
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No it couldn't. I keep on referring to A World without Time and Presentism and the "time is change" idea that goes back to the ancient Greeks. I've just help spread the word to combat the time-travel woo-mongers. Most of what I come out with isn't my original idea, but instead comes from things I've read that people don't usually get to hear about.

DazzaD said:
I dont believe that the scientific communities opinion on the nature of time itself has changed very significantly at all in almost 100 years. There is still the root philosophical problem of what "time is" (as you could argue for "energy" and other things) but what the leading thinkers of 100 years ago mused upon the nature of time itself has not changed dramatically.
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Keep tabs on it, and see how it pans out.

DazzaD said:
This is in part due to the fact you do not need to have a deep philosophical underpinning in order to make practical use of the concept (as defined a priori) in physics... It is also because it is a damn difficult problem to make headway with, if only because of the problems one encounters within the language barrier and the philosophy aspect.
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However it is easy to look at what a clock does. There's no "time flowing" in there, just things moving. The clock shows you some kind of display of "the time" generated from some count of some kind of regular motion. Pendulum clocks, quartz wristwatches, atomic clocks, that's what clocks do. And there's no such thing as negative motion.

DazzaD said:
The reason why I mention philosophy so often is that all the "formulations" of what time is that I have seen do not change established results one bit nor do they add anything extra of any practical use at present.
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You could say that about half of physics. Understanding time is crucial, believe me. It leads to an understanding of other things. You also come to appreciate just how much woo is pumped out by celebrities with a book to flog.

DazzaD said:
Nothing wrong with striving to understand the very foundations but I think most physicists and mathematicians have a very practical approach to their understanding of time when it comes down to calculating a problem in their field.
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There's quite a big issue with black holes as it happens. We were talking about that recently, and I was opposing the crackpot notion that space is falling inwards in a gravitational field. Then you come to an issue with Hawking radiation. You start looking at it with a more skeptical eye. Here's a bit from wiki:

"A slightly more precise, but still much simplified, view of the process is that vacuum fluctuations cause a particle-antiparticle pair to appear close to the event horizon of a black hole. One of the pair falls into the black hole whilst the other escapes. In order to preserve total energy, the particle that fell into the black hole must have had a negative energy (with respect to an observer far away from the black hole). .."

Do you know of any particles or antiparticles with negative energy? Because I don't. And in gravitational time dilation goes infinite at the event horizon, how come those vacuum fluctuations don't seem to be affected?
 
xtifr said:
There is no God but Einstein, and Farsight is his prophet.
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Not so. Einstein is something of a tarnished hero. He didn't credit Voigt, FitzGerald, or Poincaré, there's the Gerber controversy, and the Hilbert priority issue, see wikipedia. And he made mistakes, and didn't do much after 1920. But he said what he said, and when you're talking about things like time and gravity and relativity, IMHO it's best to pay attention to what he said rather than just dismissing it because it isn't in line with "the bible" of general relativity.

ETA:

That's MTW of course. Once you understand time you understand that time travel is bunk. It makes you skeptical of things you read on the internet. Gotta go!
 
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Farsight said:
... the Copenhagen Interpretation is shot to pot, and only fit for popscience hereon. It's on the way out, and I'm pleased to say I've done my bit.
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Hilites by Daylightstar
Daylightstar said:
...
Which bit exactly do you believe you have done to contribute to 'the Copenhagen Interpretation being on the way out'?
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Let's try yet another time.
Which bit exactly do you believe you have done to contribute to 'the Copenhagen Interpretation being on the way out'?
 
Farsight said:
He lost the debates,
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:D You seem to have forgotten that many of them are still there to see. You lost every single one completely. Some of them are very entertaining. You link to things that say the opposite of your position, quote mine, get confused about the maths. You are a great insight into the methods and madness of a woo who can actually string half an argument together.
 
Note the continued battle being waged against "time travel" by our intrepid warrior Farsight. The only problem is that I have yet to see any serious claim on these threads that time travel is possible.
Perhaps he should also wage war against the Easter Bunny.
 
Perpetual Student said:
Note the continued battle being waged against "time travel" by our intrepid warrior Farsight. The only problem is that I have yet to see any serious claim on these threads that time travel is possible.
Perhaps he should also wage war against the Easter Bunny.
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That's been puzzling me. Who is saying that time travel into the past is possible?
 
Croydon Bob said:
:D You seem to have forgotten that many of them are still there to see. You lost every single one completely. Some of them are very entertaining. You link to things that say the opposite of your position, quote mine, get confused about the maths. You are a great insight into the methods and madness of a woo who can actually string half an argument together.
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Yep.

abaddon said:
I am in Dublin. How do you know it wasn't me?
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It could have been. Or it could have been by niece (studying physics, I sent her a link to Farsight). Or any of the other 1.3 million people in Dublin. Or, given the accuracy of IP geolocation, many millions of other people.......
Of course if I had done it I could have used a proxy.
Anyway, time to dredge out my RW logon and give Farsight his own page.
 
dafydd said:
That's been puzzling me. Who is saying that time travel into the past is possible?
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If he doesn't understand the theory he's supporting, why would you expect him to understand the theories he's trying to argue against? ;)

My guess would be that he thinks he's disproved the notion of spacetime with that argument, but he could be going off on almost anything from QM to some episode of Dr. Who he saw last week. One thing he has never managed to master in all these years is an ability to communicate clearly or well. Oh, and relativity.
 
xtifr said:
If he doesn't understand the theory he's supporting, why would you expect him to understand the theories he's trying to argue against? ;)

My guess would be that he thinks he's disproved the notion of spacetime with that argument, but he could be going off on almost anything from QM to some episode of Dr. Who he saw last week. One thing he has never managed to master in all these years is an ability to communicate clearly or well. Oh, and relativity.
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Well the last ep of Doctor Who I watched didn't have any time travel in the usual sense, just hibernating humanoid lizard people.
And Liz Shaw.:)
 
Farsight's Claim: The Electromagnetic Field is not a Field

Farsight said:
I know what field means. I've been telling you guys about the electromagnetic field remember? You know, putting Clinger straight on his electric field and his magnetic field, that aren't fields, but instead just the linear and rotational forces that result from electromagnetic field interactions. You know I'm right about that. You cannot offer any criticism of Maxwell and Minkowski's screw nature of electromagnetism. So don't try to suggest I'm guessing. I'm not, and you know it.
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Well, I confess the language here has me a bit baffled. Certainly I have never run across the serious claim that the electromagnetic field is not a field, especially from someone who calls it a "field" while claiming it is not a field. And what's all this about Maxwell? One of many famous papers from Maxwell is the one entitled "A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field" (1865; I have a copy of the paper in my 2-volume set of Maxwell's papers). I somehow doubt that he would have used this title if he thought that it was not a field, so I am obliged to assume, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that Mr. Farsight is the one arguing with Maxwell. Be that as it may ….

So I wonder if Mr. Farsight might enlighten me with the answer to a couple of questions.

1) Please define what a field is, as rigorously or non-rigorously as you think necessary.

2) Please explain, in light of the answer to (1) how the electromagnetic field is, in reality, not a field.

Merci Beaucoup.
 
Tim Thompson said:
1) Please define what a field is, as rigorously or non-rigorously as you think necessary.
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A field is typically a spatial disposition or structure. It isn't something separate from space. It's a "state of space". When that state is uniform and homogeneous, we usually say there's no field present. However a wave or field variation can propagate linearly through such space. A wave can also take the form of a standing wave whereupon the field-variation is now a standing field. These can combine in a variety of ways, altering the state of space away from the origin in a fashion that is different from a single linear or standing wave. See Einstein's 1929 history of field theory and note this:

"The two types of field are causally linked in this theory, but still not fused to an identity. It can, however, scarcely be imagined that empty space has conditions or states of two essentially different kinds, and it is natural to suspect that this only appears to be so because the structure of the physical continuum is not completely described by the Riemannian metric".

Tim Thompson said:
2) Please explain, in light of the answer to (1) how the electromagnetic field is, in reality, not a field.
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As Simon pointed out, I'm afraid you've misunderstood what I was saying here. I said the electromagnetic field is a field, but that the electric field and the magnetic field aren't. Instead E and B denote the forces that result from electromagnetic field interactions. See section 11.10 of Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics where he says "one should properly speak of the electromagnetic field Fuv rather than E or B separately".

Tim Thompson said:
And what's all this about Maxwell? One of many famous papers from Maxwell is the one entitled "A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field" (1865; I have a copy of the paper in my 2-volume set of Maxwell's papers). I somehow doubt that he would have used this title if he thought that it was not a field, so I am obliged to assume, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that Mr. Farsight is the one arguing with Maxwell.
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See above. I'm not arguing against Maxwell, others are. See wiki page 53 of On Physical Lines of Force where he says this:

"A motion of translation along an axis cannot produce a rotation about that axis unless it meets with some special mechanism, like that of a screw.

To depict the electromagnetic field one combines the radial lines of an "electric field" depiction with the concentric lines of a "magnetic field" depiction, like this. Note the "screw" nature. Try to imagine two electrons as dynamical spinors in frame-dragged space. If you set them down with no relative motion they move linearly apart. If you throw one past the other they also circle around each other as they move apart. Repeat with an electron and a positron, which has the opposite chirality: if you set them down with no relative motion they move linearly together. If you throw one past the other they also circle around each other as they move together, forming ortho or para positronium for a while before annihilating. Note that Maxwell's page title refers to "Molecular vortices", which wasn't quite right. But the linear and/or rotational motion can be considered to be the result of "vorticial" interaction. You can also see references to "vortex" in gravitomagnetism, as per this (slightly inaccurate) NASA page.

I hope that clarifies the situation.
 
In classical physics the electromagnetic field was thought of in terms of waves travelling through some medium (the luminiferous aether).

In QED, the electromagnetic force between two electrons is thought to be caused by an exchange of photons.
 
Racklever: it's worth having a read of Matt Strassler's blog about virtual particles. Those electrons don't actually exchange photons. Nor does the electron and the proton in the hydrogen atom. Hydrogen atoms don't literally twinkle, and magnets don't shine. A virtual particle isn't a short-lived real particle, it's a "field quanta". People sometimes refer to such as a "chunk" of field.
 
I need to remind Farsight again that uniformity and homogeneity are not sufficient conditions for a field to be zero.
 
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