Merged Relativity+ / Farsight
- Thread starter Farsight
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About Reality Check,
Farsight, those "arguments" are both ad hominems.
Empty assertion. How would you be able to tell whether it is or not?
Quite correct.
Let's consider space and time.
Farsight:
Space is primary
Motion is primary
Time is secondary, being derived from space
Relativity:
Space and time are coequal, part of a space-time continuum
However, there are five types of direction:
- Forward timelike
- Backward timelike
- Forward null (lightlike)
- Backward null (lightlike)
- Spacelike
So Farsight's beliefs about space and time are contrary to relativity.
Perpetual Student
Illuminator
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So, you have succeeded in providing a demonstration of my point. You are not able to distinguish scientific speculation (the multiverse conjecture as described by Sussking -- an acomplisded physicists and cosmologist) from woo. This inability is a definitive characteristic of crackpots. Good job!
ctamblyn
Data Ghost
Reality Check
Penultimate Amazing
Wow - a Nobel prize waits for you Farsight with your amazing proof that the universe is not a computer simulation
!Oh ... you do not have one
.Why is it that JREF is infested by at least one cuckoo-in-the-nest crank who cannot even read?
Farsight: There exists a common speculation about the universe is a computer simulation.
Simulated reality
The fact is that computer simulations can be run in parallel with differing parameters so the simulated reality hypothesis implies a multiverse.
This is related to Max Tegmark's Mathematical universe hypothesis.
Reality Check
Penultimate Amazing
These questions are still outstanding Farsight
These questions are still outstanding Farsight:
These questions are still outstanding Farsight:
ctamblyn
Data Ghost
It beginning to look like the promised response will never materialise, almost two weeks having passed since John Duffield claimed he could "nail" me on my "curved space error".
On a different Relativity+-related note, John Duffield, author of the 200-odd page self-published book after which this thread is named, has begun writing about his ideas on physics (its theories and its execution) in a regular Sunday spot on bogpaper.com:
Science Sundays with John Duffield - Fairytale Physics
Science Sundays with John Duffield - Bankrupting Physics
It's the usual mix of rants against the establishment, multiverse theories and Higgs mechanism, combined with his pet ideas about general relativity and electrodynamics.
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ctamblyn
Data Ghost
Reality Check
Penultimate Amazing
A quick look does see the usual rants, e.g. thinking that an established scientists like Jim Baggott does not know about the purpose of peer-review (as a filter of obviously wrong science). Instead John Duffield gets a bit paranoid by accusing peer-review of "muzzling the press"!
The Fairytale Physics gives a good list of the fairy tales that John Duffield believes in.
- A delusion that that mathematics of GR and waterfalls being similar cannot lead to the waterfall analogy.
- The usual obsession with Einstein (as if scientific progress in relativity stopped with him)!
- Lying about Einstein, e.g. "He said the speed of light was constant in 1905, but retracted that in 1911 and never went back".
As any undergraduate physics student knows, Special Relativity (1905) has the postulate that the speed of light is constant in an inertial frame of reference. General Relativity (1915) has the same postulate locally and allows the coordinate speed of light to vary globally. - John Duffield is mistaken about Wikipedia where Pair production does not contain his quoted text. The Wikipedia article is faithful to the actual physics:
. - What does contain his quoted text is Two-photon physics
This is basic physics - the uncertainly principle means that any particle can become a particle-anti-particle pair. - Based on this ignorance, he then goes onto a rant about virtual particles (not involved in actual particle production!). This is just a semantic argument. People who know what virtual particles are know that they are not actually particles - they are excitations of the underlying field.
- Later John Duffield has a similar rant about electrons being point particles.
QED treats electrons as point particles -that is the physics, John Duffield, it works - live with it
!
"How persecuted I am!"
From his 1952/1956 book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.Martin Gardner said:
There's a lot of issues with the Standard Model, more than people appreciate. lpetrich's summary doesn't even come close to getting this across. That's not to say the standard model is all wrong, it's more like it's woefully, abysmally, incomplete.
For an example of this, take a look at two-photon physics on Wikipedia. It concerns something called gamma-gamma pair production, where we convert light into matter. The article is faithful to the standard model when it says this: “A photon can, within the bounds of the uncertainty principle, fluctuate into a charged fermion-antifermion pair, to either of which the other photon can couple”.
But think about it. That’s saying pair production occurs because pair production occurs, spontaneously, like worms from mud. And that a photon of light, a single wave, spends its time constantly morphing into an electron and a positron, which then magically morph back into a single photon, which nevertheless manages to keep on going at the speed of light! It just isn’t true. QED and the standard model employ virtual particles as “field quanta”, they’re like accounting units. They’re virtual particles, not real particles. A photon doesn’t really turn into a real electron-positron pair all on its own all the time.
The upshot is that the standard model doesn't offer any explanation of how pair production works, and it doesn't tell you what the electron is. Instead it cops out with "the electron is an excitation of the electron field" along with "the electron is a fundamental particle". This is like a hole you can drive a coach and horses through. Fill this hole and you reduce the number of free parameters by deriving electron mass, and you improve the model, and take it from there. But for some strange reason this sort of thing tends to be totally overlooked, and theoretical physicists then build on non-existent foundations and propose things like SUSY along with selectrons etc. This is futile when you don't have an electron model in the standard model. It's "fairytale physics".
For an example of this, take a look at two-photon physics on Wikipedia. It concerns something called gamma-gamma pair production, where we convert light into matter. The article is faithful to the standard model when it says this: “A photon can, within the bounds of the uncertainty principle, fluctuate into a charged fermion-antifermion pair, to either of which the other photon can couple”.
But think about it. That’s saying pair production occurs because pair production occurs, spontaneously, like worms from mud. And that a photon of light, a single wave, spends its time constantly morphing into an electron and a positron, which then magically morph back into a single photon, which nevertheless manages to keep on going at the speed of light! It just isn’t true. QED and the standard model employ virtual particles as “field quanta”, they’re like accounting units. They’re virtual particles, not real particles. A photon doesn’t really turn into a real electron-positron pair all on its own all the time.
The upshot is that the standard model doesn't offer any explanation of how pair production works, and it doesn't tell you what the electron is. Instead it cops out with "the electron is an excitation of the electron field" along with "the electron is a fundamental particle". This is like a hole you can drive a coach and horses through. Fill this hole and you reduce the number of free parameters by deriving electron mass, and you improve the model, and take it from there. But for some strange reason this sort of thing tends to be totally overlooked, and theoretical physicists then build on non-existent foundations and propose things like SUSY along with selectrons etc. This is futile when you don't have an electron model in the standard model. It's "fairytale physics".
edd
Master Poster
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From another thread
Farsight, if you can derive the electron mass then I think people would sit up and take notice a bit more. Please, go ahead. I trust you won't try to use Worsley numerology.
I can't add much to what Andrew Worsley came up with, edd. And if I could, people wouldn't sit up and take notice. lpetrich would call me a theologian, ctamblyn would call me a crackpot, and Reality Check would accuse me of ranting. There's always some diversionary ad-hominems from the fairy-tale quacks to deter you from the real physics.
I hope you liked my little articles by the way. Farewell to Reality and Bankrupting Physics are two books that I'd definitely recommend.
I hope you liked my little articles by the way. Farewell to Reality and Bankrupting Physics are two books that I'd definitely recommend.
ctamblyn
Data Ghost
Another approach to avoid would be "the electron mass is 511 keV because it is a self-trapped photon of a particular frequency, and it has to be that particular frequency because otherwise the energy wouldn't be 511 keV." Yes, that argument has been used in this very thread.
ETA:
I don't think anyone can add anything constructive to Worsley's numerology. It makes Eddington's numerology look halfway respectable.
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edd
Master Poster
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Indeed. I mean I have come to expect some pretty bad physics from Farsight, but refusing to distance himself from that boggling standard of wrongness for such an extended period of time really takes the biscuit. It's not hard to understand why Worsley cannot be right.
It is damning evidence against you, Farsight, that you cannot see why the chance of Worsley's formula being correct is precisely zero.
It is damning evidence against you, Farsight, that you cannot see why the chance of Worsley's formula being correct is precisely zero.
We'll have to agree to differ on this, edd. To restate my position, Wheeler referred to the geon, which is "an electromagnetic or gravitational wave which is held together in a confined region by the gravitational attraction of its own field energy". But as we know, he was confused about curved space v curved spacetime, and didn’t follow it through using displacement current.
The typical electromagnetic sine wave is the spatial and time derivatives of a “hump” of four-potential, see this picture. Midway along the hump where the E and M sine waves go to zero, four-potential is at a maximum. You can liken it to a guitar-string wire. The elastic properties of the wire are analogous to ε0 and μ0 which combine as c=√(1/ε0μ0) akin to the mechanics expression v=√(G/ρ). The reduced Planck's constant ħ relates to the "pluck" or displacement, since action is momentum times distance. The fine structure constant α=e²/4πε0ħc gives the ratio of electromagnetic versus strong coupling, and is like “how easy it is to bend the wire versus stretching it”. Note that α includes the Coulomb constant 1/4πε0 which relates to the area of a sphere. Because what you need to do is not just bend a wire into a circle, but curve a lattice of wires representing space into something resembling a sphere. Then it's something like a "closed string".
You know from atomic orbitals that "electrons exist as standing waves". And you know that Planck length is l=√(ћG/c³). Replace √(ћG) with 4πn where n is a suitable value. Now set n to 1, and work out 4πn/√(c³). There’s a bit of a binding energy adjustment to make related to the g-factor, but there's the electron Compton wavelength. Take the usual steps from that to frequency to energy to mass. Note that changing your definition of c to furlongs per annum doesn't actually change the Planck length, and nor does it change the speed of light, or Planck's constant, or the electron Compton wavelength.
Have a read of the Watt balance section of the wikipedia kilogram article, wherein the proposal is to define the kilogram using h and c and not much else. If you can do that for the kilogram, you should be able to do something similar for electron mass too. As I've said before, Andrew Worsley might not have everything quite right, but the wave nature of matter is beyond doubt, as is spherical harmonics. I think the guy is onto something, and that we're dealing with spherical harmonics* and thus ratios for the particles themselves. After all, a particle is sometimes called a "resonance".
* Or toroidal harmonics. See Dirac's belt along with rounding the electron, which indicates that it has a toroidal topology and a spherical geometry. Something like a twisted inner tube inflated so much it looks not just apple-like, but spherical. Only it has no surface, it's just field variation going at c in a standing-wave or stationary configuration that yields a standing field. Guys like lpetrich will call me a crackpot for this, and then he'll tell you all about the multiverse.
The typical electromagnetic sine wave is the spatial and time derivatives of a “hump” of four-potential, see this picture. Midway along the hump where the E and M sine waves go to zero, four-potential is at a maximum. You can liken it to a guitar-string wire. The elastic properties of the wire are analogous to ε0 and μ0 which combine as c=√(1/ε0μ0) akin to the mechanics expression v=√(G/ρ). The reduced Planck's constant ħ relates to the "pluck" or displacement, since action is momentum times distance. The fine structure constant α=e²/4πε0ħc gives the ratio of electromagnetic versus strong coupling, and is like “how easy it is to bend the wire versus stretching it”. Note that α includes the Coulomb constant 1/4πε0 which relates to the area of a sphere. Because what you need to do is not just bend a wire into a circle, but curve a lattice of wires representing space into something resembling a sphere. Then it's something like a "closed string".
You know from atomic orbitals that "electrons exist as standing waves". And you know that Planck length is l=√(ћG/c³). Replace √(ћG) with 4πn where n is a suitable value. Now set n to 1, and work out 4πn/√(c³). There’s a bit of a binding energy adjustment to make related to the g-factor, but there's the electron Compton wavelength. Take the usual steps from that to frequency to energy to mass. Note that changing your definition of c to furlongs per annum doesn't actually change the Planck length, and nor does it change the speed of light, or Planck's constant, or the electron Compton wavelength.
Have a read of the Watt balance section of the wikipedia kilogram article, wherein the proposal is to define the kilogram using h and c and not much else. If you can do that for the kilogram, you should be able to do something similar for electron mass too. As I've said before, Andrew Worsley might not have everything quite right, but the wave nature of matter is beyond doubt, as is spherical harmonics. I think the guy is onto something, and that we're dealing with spherical harmonics* and thus ratios for the particles themselves. After all, a particle is sometimes called a "resonance".
* Or toroidal harmonics. See Dirac's belt along with rounding the electron, which indicates that it has a toroidal topology and a spherical geometry. Something like a twisted inner tube inflated so much it looks not just apple-like, but spherical. Only it has no surface, it's just field variation going at c in a standing-wave or stationary configuration that yields a standing field. Guys like lpetrich will call me a crackpot for this, and then he'll tell you all about the multiverse.
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edd
Master Poster
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That's an understatement.
No, don't do that. It won't work.
I will work out 4πn/√(c³) for you though. It's 2.418x10-12 s1.5/m1.5. Does that look like a wavelength to you?
It certainly doesn't to me. The Compton wavelength is 2.426x10-12 m. Do you see the difference? Hint: it's not 8x10-15.
You are right that
This is because the formulae for them aren't dimensionally incorrect, like Worsley's are.
ctamblyn
Data Ghost
Let's remove all the obfuscation. What you're saying amounts to this: if you invent a new parameter (n = 1.0 m2.5s-1.5) you can almost write another parameter (the electron Compton wavelength) in terms of it (ETA: ) and a hand-picked selection of other constants. However, even with the unlimited powers of nonsense in play you (or Worsley) got the value wrong and had to pretend that one can fudge it into correctness with a "binding energy adjustment", which you know full well you can't calculate. This is about as underwhelming as things get.
ETA: I see I was more generous than edd, in putting the units of n in for you. As written, your argument is even wronger than I took it to be.
ETAA:
n = 3.1 x 107 mm2.5s-1.5.
Somehow, that doesn't look as special in terms of millimetres, does it?
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ctamblyn
Data Ghost
I'm not sure whether this has been posted in this thread before, but here xkcd demonstrates just what you can achieve by mucking around with factors of e, pi and so forth. The electron/proton mass ratio approximation, good to 1 part in 5,000,000, puts Worsley's effort to shame:
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