Why is there so much crackpot physics?

[Reality Check]

No they can't, I explained the tautology that Magueijo and Moffat referred to.

Farsight - try reading at least the title of what you cite!
Comments on "Note on varying speed of light theories"
The comment is about Variable speed of light theories. This is not General Relativity (note how they are spelt differently!).
They state the obvious - the current definitions of the meter and second involve the speed of light and thus you cannot use the standard definitions of meter or second to measure the speed of light. Isn't it lucky that everyone knows this and no one does this to measure the local speed of light !
They go on to speculate about how to measure c in VSL theories.

What makes the speed of light vary in GR is that the speed of light need not be constant in a non-inertial frame of reference. This is what Einstein stated in 1915.

Clinger correctly said things like The coordinate velocities of light within a GR frame are therefore equally arbitrary. That is because GR is built so that you can select any equally arbitrary coordinate system you like. In each coordinate system, the coordinate speed of light will depend on the coordinate system - amazing !
The Baez article confirms this without explicitly mentioning coordinate systems (these are the various rulers and clocks)

Sorry, Farsight, but the topic remains the same:
* hero worship of Einstein,
* inability to understand the scientific literature (including Einstein's work!),
* belaboring the obvious over and over again,
* assertions that other posters are ignorant,
* assertions that are invalid,
* dependence on cartoons,
* etc.
are typical symptoms of a crackpot.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

Only I'm not. See this post on the other thread. And you know I'm not lying.

Sure, you link to yet another post where you lie. Whenever you write, "It isn't my theory," you are clearly lying. One calls it "lying" because you are promoting a very specific set of claims that no other person is promoting. Even you admit that Einstein does not agree with your theory, since you admit that Einstein disagreed with your position in cosmology and you admit that Einstein did not use a variable speed of light in his equations. So it would be a lie for you to claim that you are merely trying to promote Einstein's work.

Only with this thread we're poised for a breakthrough, because Perpetual Student has just cottoned on to the fact that the speed of light varies in the room you're in. And that I'm not the crackpot. And if I'm not, then who is? Duh duh duh!

This is classic crackpot behaviour: to accept a small agreement as a sign of global agreement. Your theory of gravity, to the small extent that you have worked it out, calls for a change in the speed of light at all points over all distances in an absolute reference frame which we cannot access. The general theory of relativity calls for a change in the speed of light when we define a speed over distant coordinates in some specific coordinate systems but not for infinitesimal distances at any well-founded coordinate system. The difference between these theories could be vast, if the Farsight Alternative Theory (FAT) was capable of describing any physical system.

However, since it cannot actually function as physics, we need to trim the fat.

 

[Reality Check]

When the Higgs mechanism contradicts E=mc²?

Oh dear, Farsight: This delusion raises its ugly head yet again !
The Higgs mechanism is a Relativistic Quantum Field theory - it explicitly obeys E=mc².
Anther crackpot symptom - the inability to learn even after years of knowing what the science is:

Farsight: (1 November 2012) Is the Higgs mechanism a relativistic quantum field theory?
i.e. is it is based on special relativity and is thus consistent with E=mc^2.

Farsight: (19 November 2012) What does Higgs mean by Lorentz-covariant and relativistic?
Farsight: (20 November 2012) It is delusional to think that a relativistic QFT violates SR

Alexander Unzicker studied physics and law in Munich and received his doctorate in neuroscience. So we have an vixra PDF from an person too lazy to find out the answers to their questions.

"The Higgs Fake" is a crackpot book just by the title - a new boson was discovered, it fits what we expect for a Higgs boson (but we need its spin to be absolutely sure) thus a Nobel Prize is justified.

 

[Reality Check]

Farsight: What does Higgs mean by Lorentz-covariant and relativistic

Oh no I'm not.

Yes you are wrong and have been since November 2012 when this ignorance was first mentioned on the forum:
Farsight: (1 November 2012) Is the Higgs mechanism a relativistic quantum field theory?
Farsight: (19 November 2012) What does Higgs mean by Lorentz-covariant and relativistic?
Farsight: (20 November 2012) It is delusional to think that a relativistic QFT violates SR

 

[Reality Check]

So regardless of how you move or where you go, you always measure the local speed of waves to be the same.

That remains wrong, Farsight.
You do not need an standard clock or meter to measure the speed of light - you can do it roughly with a microwave oven and even more accurately with a cavity resonator:

A household demonstration of this technique is possible, using a microwave oven and food such as marshmallows or margarine: if the turntable is removed so that the food does not move, it will cook the fastest at the antinodes (the points at which the wave amplitude is the greatest), where it will begin to melt. The distance between two such spots is half the wavelength of the microwaves; by measuring this distance and multiplying the wavelength by the microwave frequency (usually displayed on the back of the oven, typically 2450 MHz), the value of c can be calculated, "often with less than 5% error".[99][100]

If you interested in whether the local speed of light changes then you definitely do not need a standard clock or meter - just make up your own units.

Juts because the standard SI second and meter was defined in terms of the speed of light in 1983 does not mean that experiments measuring the speed of light magically stopped in 1983.
For example: A one-way speed of light experiment 10/2009 .

 

[lpetrich]

So again, I'm the expert, not the crackpot.

Seems rather arrogant.

Do your own research on electromagnetic geometry.

Describe what you found in your own words. Go into detail.

Have a read of The Role of the Potentials in Electromagnetism and see the last page where Percy Hammonds talks about curvature.

Describe it in your own words.

LOL, he's made no argument at all. There's various internet sites where people refer to the positive and negative field variation. ...

Positive and negative relative to some direction.

And I quote: "The incident, reflected, and transmitted waves are shown in Fig.29 (the vertical displacement in the figure is meaningless). We have arbitrarily defined all three electric fields to be positive if they point upward on the page. A negative value of Ei, Er, or Et simply means that the vector points downward".

Like this, complete with the direction conventions that it used.

Er, the discovery of the Higgs boson? When the Higgs mechanism contradicts E=mc²?

Demonstrably false.

You should take a look at The Discovery of What? It's on vixra because the Unzicker wasn't allowed to put it on arXiv.

Given what worthless kvetching it was, I'm not surprised. If one stumbles over elementary issues, one is not exactly making a great "contribution to knowledge".

Also see The Higgs Fake and arXiv for other papers by Unzicker, including the VSL discussion.

More content-free bellyaching.

 

[lpetrich]

On the subject of this thread, has anyone here read any of Alexander Unzicker's books?

Peter Woit did, and he described his experience in Bankrupting Physics | Not Even Wrong.

After a while though, it became clear that Unzicker is just a garden-variety crank, of a really tedious sort. ...

The first half is about gravitation, cosmology and astrophysical observations. Unzicker’s obsessive idea, shared with innumerable other cranks, is that any scientific theory beyond one intuitively clear to them must be nonsense. Similarly, any experimental result beyond one where they can easily understand and analyze the data themselves is also nonsense. ...

When he gets to particle physics, we learn that things went wrong back when physicists started invoking a symmetry that wasn’t intuitively obvious, isospin symmetry.

AU is a bit unusual in not proposing his own theories, though in ▶ Unzicker interview about "Bankrupting Physics" - YouTube he proposes looking at some old ideas of Einstein and Dirac.

 

[Farsight]

Look it's quite simple. The 'energy content' comes from the interaction, and so therefore does the mass. The ideas are not mutually exclusive.

Not so. See Light is Heavy by van der Mark and 't Hooft, not the Nobel 't Hooft. Trap a photon in a mirror box, and you increase the mass of that system. Because the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content. Open the box and it's a radiating body that loses mass. Now remember your pair production. You start with a photon or two, and you finish with a body or two. Each is like a photon in a mirror-box, minus the box. Then you do your annihilation, and it's like opening one box with another. A radiating body loses mass. Only these radiating bodies lose all their mass, and then they're not there any more. Photon momentum is a measure of resistance to change-in-motion for a wave propagating linearly at c. Electron mass is a measure of resistance to change-in-motion for a wave going round and round at c. It's that simple edd, and it's only a matter of time before everybody knows it.

Your final argument is a straw man - no one believes that light is made up of billiard-ball particles.

But there's plenty of people who think photons are point particles, google it. And despite electron diffraction, here's Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek saying "Quarks are spin-1/2 point particles, very much like electrons..."

It's made up of quantum particles that have a wave and a particle nature. But you don't seem to understand the mainstream physics view of anything

I do. I understand far more of that than most people here.

With that out of the way, the "amplitude of the pluck" varies based on how hard I pluck the string. Cartoon diagrams, however, are often normalized to the same amplitude in order to easily visualize other concepts.

You know what I mean. Action h really can be defined in terms of momentum x distance. It's the same h regardless of wavelength. So something is the same for all those waves.

When you get back, then, am I correct to understand that you're saying that any conceivable way to measure a local speed of light would always return the same value, and yet it's a crackpot idea to think that the local speed of light always has the same value?

Yes. It's like measuring the length of your shadow using the shadow of your ruler, and then claiming your shadow is always the same length be it noon or dusk. But see what I said about laser gyros. See this re "A certain rate of rotation induces a small difference between the time it takes light to traverse the ring in the two directions according to the Sagnac effect."

Speed is always time vs. distance. How do you know that it's not local time that's varying, rather than local speed?

Because you define the second using the motion of light. The second is 9,192,631,770 periods of radiation. It's like these microwaves are coming past you, you count them, and when you get to 9,192,631,770 you say a second has elapsed.

A more "can do" attitude is needed. Take a strong decay like Δ+ --> p + π0 and see how long it takes, on average, in the rest frame of the Δ+. That's your time standard. In the same reference frame, how far do the produced protons travel...

The + on the Δ+ denotes charge, protons are charged particles, we aren't getting away from electromagnetism with this.

...The Higgs mechanism is a Relativistic Quantum Field theory - it explicitly obeys E=mc²...

No it doesn't See A Zeptospace Odyssey: A Journey into the Physics of the LHC by Gian Francesco Giudice. He's a physicist at CERN with a hundred-plus papers to his name. There's a search-inside on Amazon, and if you search on Higgs sector you can read pages 173 through 175. He calls the Higgs sector the "toilet" of the standard model and says it's "frightfully ad-hoc". He castigates the "God particle" nickname and says "The name gives the impression that the Higgs boson is the central particle of the Standard Model, governing its structure. But this is very far from the truth.” He says: “It is sometimes said that the discovery of the Higgs boson will explain the mystery of the origin of mass. This statement requires a good deal of qualification.” He gives a good explanation, and ends up with “In summary, the Higgs mechanism accounts for about 1% of the mass of ordinary matter, and for only 0.2% of the mass of the universe. This is not nearly enough to justify the claim of explaining the origin of mass.” The other 99.8% is down to E=mc². Do excuse me for not responding in full to your er, 8 posts.

 

[edd]

Not so. See Light is Heavy by van der Mark and 't Hooft, not the Nobel 't Hooft. Trap a photon in a mirror box, and you increase the mass of that system. Because the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content. Open the box and it's a radiating body that loses mass. Now remember your pair production. You start with a photon or two, and you finish with a body or two. Each is like a photon in a mirror-box, minus the box. Then you do your annihilation, and it's like opening one box with another. A radiating body loses mass. Only these radiating bodies lose all their mass, and then they're not there any more. Photon momentum is a measure of resistance to change-in-motion for a wave propagating linearly at c. Electron mass is a measure of resistance to change-in-motion for a wave going round and round at c. It's that simple edd, and it's only a matter of time before everybody knows it.

Even the bits of that that are correct don't have any particular relevance to what I was trying to get across.

Look, take the proton. It's got a mass, and it's got an energy from that mass of E=mc². But you know that most of that mass isn't from the Higgs mechanism (you've referred to that fact before) - it comes from the binding energy of the strong interaction. The fact there's an explanation of how the proton has that energy doesn't mean that the energy does not follow E=mc² or violate relativity. In the same way, the explanation for the origin of a given fundamental particle's mass does not change that it still follows E=mc². That's all I'm trying to get across.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

Not so. See Light is Heavy by van der Mark and 't Hooft, not the Nobel 't Hooft. Trap a photon in a mirror box, and you increase the mass of that system. Because the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content. Open the box and it's a radiating body that loses mass. Now remember your pair production. You start with a photon or two, and you finish with a body or two. Each is like a photon in a mirror-box, minus the box. Then you do your annihilation, and it's like opening one box with another. A radiating body loses mass. Only these radiating bodies lose all their mass, and then they're not there any more. Photon momentum is a measure of resistance to change-in-motion for a wave propagating linearly at c. Electron mass is a measure of resistance to change-in-motion for a wave going round and round at c. It's that simple edd, and it's only a matter of time before everybody knows it.

Your claim is that all mass is photons. This is not the thread to discuss that bizarre claim for which you have so much less evidence than the standard model that it is embarrassing. Especially since you refuse to produce a means of doing physics applications.

I do. I understand far more of that than most people here.

I wish I could have access to the mystery power that Farsight has to understand physics without studying it and without being able to do any physics problems.

Perhaps "Farsight Physics" would be better called, "Homeopathy Physics".

 

[dasmiller]

Yes. It's like measuring the length of your shadow using the shadow of your ruler, and then claiming your shadow is always the same length be it noon or dusk. But see what I said about laser gyros. See this re "A certain rate of rotation induces a small difference between the time it takes light to traverse the ring in the two directions according to the Sagnac effect."

To be honest, I'm not seeing the connection to the Sagnac effect, but I shall ponder that further.

Because you define the second using the motion of light. The second is 9,192,631,770 periods of radiation. It's like these microwaves are coming past you, you count them, and when you get to 9,192,631,770 you say a second has elapsed.

That doesn't address my question. How do you know it's c that's varying, rather than the passage of time? Suppose we had two universes, one in which c varied and one in which time varied. What would be the difference between the two, and why do you conclude that we're in the first one?

 

[Farsight]

To be honest, I'm not seeing the connection to the Sagnac effect, but I shall ponder that further.

Best forget about that. I wasn't going to mention it, it just muddies the waters.

That doesn't address my question. How do you know it's c that's varying, rather than the passage of time?

Because time doesn't literally pass. That's just a figure of speech. A clock counts some kind of regular cyclical motion and shows some cumulative display that we call "the time". Think of a mechanical clock, or a quartz wristwatch, or an atomic clock. There isn't actually any time flowing inside a clock. A clock isn't some kind of cosmic gas-meter measuring "the flow of time". It has a "movement". It "clocks up" some kind of motion. And when the clock goes slow, it's because the motion is going slow.

And of course because Einstein said the speed of light varies with position, and because of this book. And because of Magueijo and Moffat and Ned Wright and Don Koks and others.

Suppose we had two universes, one in which c varied and one in which time varied. What would be the difference between the two, and why do you conclude that we're in the first one?

There is no actual thing called time that can vary. Things move, that's all. Pendulums move. They oscillate. So do quartz crystals. The hyperfine transition in an atomic clock is a spin flip. Something moved. Light moves. Hold your hands up a foot apart and look at the gap, the space between them. You can see it. Waggle your hands, and you can see motion. You can't see time. So it doesn't make any sense to say time varies.

 

[Farsight]

Even the bits of that that are correct don't have any particular relevance to what I was trying to get across.

It's all correct. E=mc² is correct.

Look, take the proton. It's got a mass, and it's got an energy from that mass of E=mc². But you know that most of that mass isn't from the Higgs mechanism (you've referred to that fact before) - it comes from the binding energy of the strong interaction. The fact there's an explanation of how the proton has that energy doesn't mean that the energy does not follow E=mc² or violate relativity. In the same way, the explanation for the origin of a given fundamental particle's mass does not change that it still follows E=mc². That's all I'm trying to get across.

The story goes that the Higgs mechanism is responsible for the quark masses, which is 1% of the mass of the proton, and E=mc² is responsible for the rest. Only we've never seen a free quark. But we have seen low-energy proton-antiproton annihilation to gamma photons. So the proton is just another example of light in a box. Light in a box of own making. Light in a box, minus the box. Hence the wave nature of matter. It ain't rocket science.

 

[Perpetual Student]

The story goes that the Higgs mechanism is responsible for the quark masses, which is 1% of the mass of the proton, and E=mc² is responsible for the rest. Only we've never seen a free quark. But we have seen low-energy proton-antiproton annihilation to gamma photons. So the proton is just another example of light in a box. Light in a box of own making. Light in a box, minus the box. Hence the wave nature of matter. It ain't rocket science.

Gibberish!

 

[Cuddles]

Hilariously, ctamblyn (other thread) read a little further in your hand-picked source, the source you chose (out of millions available) to use to tell me that me and all my textbooks are wrong. My bold:

Awesome. Most people would probably take it as something of a hint when their own sources tell them to go and read a basic physics textbook.

 

[Farsight]

Gibberish!

Only it isn't. The mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content. A radiating body loses mass. That's what E=mc² is all about. If you were to hug an antimatter version of yourself, you'd be a radiating body. You'd lose mass. All of it.

 

[Perpetual Student]

Gibberish!

Only it isn't. The mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content. A radiating body loses mass. That's what E=mc² is all about. If you were to hug an antimatter version of yourself, you'd be a radiating body. You'd lose mass. All of it.

Another poor attempt at deflection. The above is not gibberish, but the following (my bolding) is:

The story goes that the Higgs mechanism is responsible for the quark masses, which is 1% of the mass of the proton, and E=mc² is responsible for the rest. Only we've never seen a free quark. But we have seen low-energy proton-antiproton annihilation to gamma photons. So the proton is just another example of light in a box. Light in a box of own making. Light in a box, minus the box. Hence the wave nature of matter. It ain't rocket science.

Somehow, I guess you believe such deflections are fooling people -- but, trust me -- no one here is fooled!

 

[ben m]

The story goes that the Higgs mechanism is responsible for the quark masses,

And the electron, muon, and tau masses. And electroweak symmetry breaking, i.e. the masses of the W and Z. Also, the Higgs mechanism is responsible for the existence of a heavy scalar boson with pretty much the exact production cross section and decay scheme seen in a tentatively-identified 125 GeV boson found at LHC.

which is 1% of the mass of the proton, and E=mc² is responsible for the rest.

I see, you're thinking of the up and down quarks. The s quark is, something like 30% of the mass of the kaon. The c quark masses are about 80% of the mass of the J/psi, the b quark mass is nearly 100% of the mass of the b-mesons, and the top quark is basically a free quark; it's extremely massive and doesn't bother hadronizing---they're basically free quarks.

But we have seen low-energy proton-antiproton annihilation to gamma photons. So the proton is just another example of light in a box.

No we haven't. Proton-antiproton annihilation proceeds to pions and kaons, consistent with the mainstream theory of the strong interaction. Most such pions and kaons decay weakly, i.e. to high-energy muons and neutrinos.

Great argument, Farsight! In a universe with no heavy quarks, no Higgs boson, no electroweak symmetry breaking, and in which proton-proton annihilation had some properties you just made up, the Higgs mechanism would sound pretty silly! Great story. Want to talk about the real world?

 

[dasmiller]

Best forget about that. I wasn't going to mention it, it just muddies the waters.

Okay.

Because time doesn't literally pass. That's just a figure of speech. A clock counts some kind of regular cyclical motion and shows some cumulative display that we call "the time". Think of a mechanical clock, or a quartz wristwatch, or an atomic clock. There isn't actually any time flowing inside a clock. A clock isn't some kind of cosmic gas-meter measuring "the flow of time". It has a "movement". It "clocks up" some kind of motion. And when the clock goes slow, it's because the motion is going slow.

<snip>

There is no actual thing called time that can vary. Things move, that's all. Pendulums move. They oscillate. So do quartz crystals. The hyperfine transition in an atomic clock is a spin flip. Something moved. Light moves. Hold your hands up a foot apart and look at the gap, the space between them. You can see it. Waggle your hands, and you can see motion. You can't see time. So it doesn't make any sense to say time varies.

<sigh>

Okay, imagine a cellular automata universe. In this version, the states of the cells change asynchronously; that is, there's no requirement that all cells update simultaneously. In such a universe, the sequence of state changes is time, and you could certainly have regions of the universe in which the cells experienced more or fewer state changes, on average. In such a universe, time really would be passing at different rates in different regions.

How do you know our universe isn't like that?

(to be honest, I'm not clear on how you'd ever the speed of light to look constant in a cellular automata universe. But that's another topic.)

 

[Farsight]

What's with the snip and the sigh? You asked the question, I answered it. I've seen footballers pass, I've seen buses pass. But you've never seen time pass. It's just a figure of speech. A convention. Nay, a conviction.

Okay, imagine a cellular automata universe. In this version, the states of the cells change asynchronously; that is, there's no requirement that all cells update simultaneously. In such a universe, the sequence of state changes is time, and you could certainly have regions of the universe in which the cells experienced more or fewer state changes, on average. In such a universe, time really would be passing at different rates in different regions. How do you know our universe isn't like that?

Our universe is like that. Change and motion is occurring at different rates in different places. Time isn't really passing at all. Light moves, things move, **** happens, that's it.

(to be honest, I'm not clear on how you'd ever the speed of light to look constant in a cellular automata universe. But that's another topic.)

Use the refresh rate to calibrate your rods and clocks, then use them to measure the refresh rate.