If you are uninterested in quantum physics, bail out now.
This is an interesting video about the current state of the art of the Physics Standard Model. It seems the Large Hadron Collider has been trying for 2 years to stir the pot, but nothing has happened after the Higgs Bozon.
Here’s the video:
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So what’s next? Well, I’d be inclined to something not involving the Standard Model, but only time will tell.
FWIW: I got to this video as I was watching Feynman videos about Quantum Mechanics. He didn’t have anything I’d not heard / learned before, but the way he presented it was very entertaining.
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Yeah… what kind of crazy person watches Feynman on QM “for fun” 8-)
By the standards of today, his lecture is pretty simple. Basic intro to the 2 slit experiment problem. But it does cause you to think, just a little bit, about the difference between what we sense and what is real…
Musings from the Chiefio 
Yes Feynman has a gift for lecture delivery of physics. I wish my instructors in college had been half as good as he was at explaining fundamental concepts of physics and engineering.
Thanks for the links :)
My best Physics lecturer at TCD was Ernest Walton who was amazing. (John Cockroft (1897-1967) and Ernest Walton (1903-1995) are credited with ‘splitting the atom’ for which they received a Nobel Prize)
I’m about half-way through the first video. I didn’t know a field was associated with each fundamental particle and force. I wonder if there isn’t some way other than a field to describe what goes on with particles and forces.
At any rate, we poor bumpkin chemists have known about and understood Larmor precession for some time now. To a chemist it is the basis of NMR spectroscopy, to a doctor the basis of MRI, and to our friend the poor physicist the only fundamental process he can model with any skill whatsoever. :)
@Jim2:
It is looking like pervasive “fields” are all that is real, and “particles” are just what you get when something pokes the field. (So a photon hitting the “electron field” causes the “electron particle” to come into being and changes the “2 slot” outcome to the particle form… )
Basically, if we don’t look then everything is a field. It is when we look that it becomes particles…
Isn’t QM fun? 8-} /sarc;
“Basically, if we don’t look then everything is a field. It is when we look that it becomes particles…”
yup! pretty much sums it up. K.I.S.S. ! 8-) …pg
Maybe a lot of the problem with QM is that we can visualise waves OK, and we know about particles and how they collide, and neither the maths nor the visualisation work that well for something that is both at the same time. This isn’t helped by the Copenhagen interpretation, which tells us that it’s only when we look that the wave functions “collapse” into a single result from being indeterminate before we look. Given the age of the universe, and the lack of people to look and measure, it makes sense that things happen whether we look or not. That problem of only having a real result when someone measures it was got over with Bohmian Mechanics, where a “guiding wave” determines the position and direction of a real particle (which makes the wave and the particle there at the same time, and thus things can happen without anyone to measure them). However, this explanation wasn’t chosen, possibly because it effectively posits an Aether (the medium that the guiding wave exists in), and people were trying to go away from anything Aether-like. As I’ve said before, though, if you’re going to have waves of any sort, then as far as we can tell *something* will be waving, and a model with inertial minuscule particles with springs between them is bound to work for a lot of the properties. Basically, you can’t get away from some sort of Aether, even if you rename it as spacetime and say there can be waves in spacetime, unless of course you try to make a model where waves don’t exist and it’s only particles. Since a particle model isn’t going to match reality when it comes to diffraction unless you give the particles some wave properties, and again that implies something being waved, finding a non-paradoxical description has so far escaped us.
At the heart of QM we thus have paradox, which tells us we haven’t yet got a good description of what is actually happening. The models we’ve got mostly work pretty well despite the paradox, though, so it’s the best we’ve got at the moment and mostly we ignore the paradoxes and choose the description of particle or wave depending on which one gives the right answer. Another problem with current theory is that it has inconvenient infinities turning up in the maths. Where these turn up, the technique of “renormalisation” is used, which basically means we ignore the infinities and take them out of the equations, and the rest of the equation then gives the right answer. It’s a fudge, and wasn’t liked at the time it was introduced (can’t remember who by), but sorts the problem. http://www.volkerschatz.com/science/renorm.html . Wikipedia has a nice explanation, too, that goes quite a bit deeper.
One thing that bugs me about all this complex maths is that it’s logical that the particles/waves themselves don’t have the capacity to do all the partial derivatives and integrations to work out where they ought to be. They really should simply react to the forces they see at any point in time (here and now forces and what happens as a result) and though the resultant path may be a little complex such as a conic section, it still ought to be calculable using numerical simulation where we use timesteps and the configuration/forces at each point and thus step through positions of the constituent parts.
Of course, all these theories assume momentum is absolutely conserved in an interaction, and that apart from borrowing/returning to the Heisenberg energy bank, that energy is conserved too. That may not be a valid assumption. It’s almost certainly the net result after an interaction (we normally see energy and momentum conserved), but may not be valid during the interaction. If inertia is quantised (as seems to be true from cosmological observations) then this will apply at the particle level too, and rather than being a continuous range, momentum can only be exchanged (or changed) in quanta. It’s possible that this may change the maths quite a lot. A small force won’t thus affect the velocity (below the necessary force to jump to the next momentum level), and the path of a particle won’t be a smooth curve but instead a series of straight lines as the momentum has step-changes. I figure that might make some difference to the calculations….
Feynman was required reading when I was learning physics. He was good at explaining things, and where he found things that didn’t make sense he changed them so they did make sense. Probably killed a few sacred cows on the way, and his personal life was unconventional too. I see nothing wrong in watching his lectures for entertainment. I haven’t the time this morning, so I’ll watch them somewhat later. More fun than a Marvel blockbuster with fights between groups of people with magic powers.
@Simon; Excellent essay on the logic of the problem of waves that appear to be particles, particles that behave as waves. Quantaize the medium, Call it what you want. I prefer Aether and this results in Mass/Inertia being external to Mater, the thing that matters to me…pg
If you “kick” the Aether hard enough (voltage) and fast enough (frequency) It will kick back hard. Just like the results in a Tesla coil operation. If you are operating a cone shape field by pulsing a signal over a cone or saucer shape within the high voltage/high frequency field you are operating a linear motor within the activated Aether. Electronic Propulsion!…pg
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I wonder… Is it really “when we look at it”, or is it “when a photon interacts with it” ?
The usual presentation is couched as though it is the act of an intelligence observing that causes the result; yet we know that the detectors have no intelligence and are just counting arrival of electrons (or photons or whatever). But, those detectors act differently when the photon has hit the electron… So isn’t it the interaction of photon and electron-wave-function that causes the “particle” aspect to become dominant?
When you have a wave in a pond and toss another rock in near it, you get an interference pattern with peaks. Could it not just be that “particles” are the peaks that show up when two wave fields interact?
I’m not seeing “observation” as a necessary part at all, only wave function collisions…
@ All; I grabbed part of the above discussion and posted it along with Roger Shawyer’s EmDrive thruster first unveiled back around 2003, and tested by NASA in 2013. It really works! sort of?
https://pgtruspace.wordpress.com/2018/09/25/physics-discussion-on-aether-propulsion/
@EMSmith; all test devices/ sensors require a unit of energy to be detected. To move an Electron of energy so we know an event happened. Even the “tracks” in a cloud chamber “see” the passage of an organized field ergo a “particle” through the chamber. Our particles may well be an artifact of our detectors….pg
The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was formulated when physicists were struggling to relate the quantum world to the classical one. I don’t believe they took literally the idea that a human observer had to “observe” in order for the wave function to collapse. Otherwise, how would the Universe gotten along without us? They were trying to figure out how a physicist related to a quantum experiment – what exactly was measurable by a classical being?
There is a helpful book is more recent than Copenhagen and it offers a good bit more insight.
I thought it was a good book and intend to read it again.
I hope I wasn’t led to this from the CIO blog as I would be greatly embarrassed, but …
Feynman has never given the calculations up. He knew that the physically correct result isn’t infinite. So if the infinity appears at some point of the calculation employing the formally correct path integrals, what is wrong is the way how we calculate these expressions, not the theory! In particular, the intermediate “infinity” is just a sloppy excuse not to care about the detailed form of the infinity. Some terms or factors within the “infinite number” still matter – you simply can’t forget about them. Forgetting about some numbers that clearly do reflect the dependence on the question or initial or final conditions means to kill the calculation. A set theorist may be happy with a final answer “aleph zero” to a complex question but a physicist must never do it. For a physicist, it’s clearly the finite parts that must matter – and the infinite parts or factors that are spurious and may be eliminated and/or ignored. The infinity is “numerically greater” than a finite number (also in the sense of ordinals and cardinals) but it is much less important in natural sciences because the infinity, like “E”, doesn’t carry any detailed verifiable information about the physical phenomena!
https://motls.blogspot.com/2018/09/how-path-integral-mirrors-feynmans.html
There is a branch of math, called “non standard mathematics” IIRC, where infinity is valid in calculations. So let INF be the infinity symbol:
2 x INF / 3 x INF = 2/3
2 x INF^2 / INF = 2 x INF
etc.
Essentially you treat it as a constant and proceed in the usual way. I wonder how much the physics standard calculations would have their results change if instead of “renomalizing” to remove the infinities, they were simply calculated as above?…
Re: infinity. There are a bunch of different kinds of infinity, the aforementioned Aleph Zero being the simplest.
http://www.alephzero.co.uk/what.htm
And then there is The Hospitals rule ;)
http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/Classes/CalcI/LHospitalsRule.aspx
@Jim2:
Yeah, I vaguely remember L’Hospital’s Rule from Calculus classes… (Golly, about 45 years ago now…) It’s a useful work-around.
The Aleph-zero just looks like they are naming the different infinities, like INF vs INF^2 etc. etc.
Just a bunch of techno-babble to dazzle with BS.
GOD is not a Mathematician. God is an Engineer that works in Applied Science.
Every thing in GOD’s Universe is inside of spheres. Spheres next to spheres. Spheres inside of spheses, Spheres connected to spheres. Nothing is exact, It just works because it HAS to. Plenty of fudge to make up for a bit of misalignment. Energy fields moving in 3 dimensions do not need perfect fit or alignment to function…pg
When I brought up the problem of “what happened before there were people to measure” with my tutor around 45 years ago, the answer was that all the wavefunctions going back to the Big Bang suddenly collapsed and thus had a single result rather than an indeterminate result. Unsatisfactory, I know, but logically it would work. Bohm’s version of quantum mechanics doesn’t have that indeterminacy, however, and things happen whether they are observed or not, so is philosophically somewhat nicer.
If a man does something wrong in the woods, and there’s no woman there to see it, is he still wrong?
On the infinities and removing them when they can’t be calculated, re-factoring the equation (or using derivatives) so it doesn’t produce infinities in the first place is a good idea and gets around some problems. The infinities we’re talking about can’t however be removed. A particle is considered as a geometrical point, so gravitational attraction can reach infinity and so can the electrostatic forces. Zero-point energy has the same problem, in that how it is defined produces an infinite amount – incidentally I suspect ZPE doesn’t actually exist anyway, so the mathematical point here point may be moot.
If you regard particles as a higher concentration of waves, then there is no longer a point where you can say the particle is – it’s something more like a Gaussian bell-curve in 3 dimensions and the centre is more particle-like and the outskirts more wave-like, and there is no hard border between the two but a gradation. No ZPE, and no inconvenient infinities either apart from the theoretical edge of the wavefunction at infinity as is standard in quantum mechanics. If the limit to the wavefunction is also not infinite, but stops (has a zero node) at the Hubble radius, then not only is another inconvenient infinity removed but that also implies that the momentum (inertia) of that particle will be changed from a continuous range to one with levels – it becomes quantised. If you look at Mike’s latest article at http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.com/2018/09/wide-binaries-20.html you’ll maybe get a better idea of why the Dark Matter hypothesis can’t be true, based on observations of binary stars.
This is why I’m somewhat enthusiastic about Alzofon’s UFT, in that it fits with Mike’s theory nicely and there is experimental evidence that Mike is more right than the other theories. It thus seems worth doing the experiments to find out if the other predictions pan out – maybe we really can control inertia and gravity if this description is close-enough to the truth. Add in Ron Hatch’s evidence from the equations for time that GPS actually uses (that goes against what GTR says) which shows that there are “preferred” frames of reference that will give the right answers for time-delays in relativistic time calculations, and that this also fits in with Alzofon and McCulloch, and we might have a useful description that gives the right answer in most, if not all, situations. From my point of view, not being a mathematician, it also gives an engineering solution for how to actually make things happen that seem like magic at the moment. If you know why inertia and gravity are there in the first place, then it’s a bit easier to figure ways to control them.
Simon. It is interesting you say a particle in QM is modeled as a point. In the Schrodinger equation, there are position variables x and y, but no description I see of the structure of the particle proper. What am I missing?
Jim2 – The Schrödinger equation says the probability of the point particle being at a particular position. A point of course has no structure. As such, it gives much the same results as a spread-out particle, except for being regarded as a point whose position is uncertain. If instead you regard it as actually being a spread-out particle, then it makes more sense (as I see it, anyway) but removes the comfort of having a point to work with.
I’m approaching an understanding of this, but not yet clear enough that I can explain it to someone else (preferably a kid) in a way that can be grokked. May take a while to reach that state.
The SE uses x and y for the position of the particle, but does not specify the extent of the particle. So, the center of an extended particle could still be at x and y, and the uncertainty in position dictated by the wave equation would still apply.
Jim2 – if you use the idea of a spread-out particle, then where ‘the particle” is becomes necessarily fuzzy. If you then use the Schrödinger equation to provide a fuzzy description of where “the particle” is, then we have two layers of fuzziness and the uncertainty would be around twice as large. That’s why the SE is based on a point particle. That’s at least my understanding.
As far as I can tell, there aren’t any real infinities, and there aren’t any geometrical point particles either. There are also no step-functions where a force suddenly appears (such as hitting the surface of a billiard-ball type particle), but instead forces have ranges over which they change. The pictorial representations we grew up with of little balls hitting each other or atoms similar to the Solar system are really only first-level approximations, and the reality is somewhat different and much more fuzzy.
@Simon; In electronics/electrics we are taught that as we push against the Universe it pushes back. A seeming perfect elastic, the stronger the electrical effort, the more powerful the rebound. Mass/Inertia is a storage of energy that must be dealt with. We use this as a tool to create and manage electrical/electronic effects. Time to use these effects to manage Mass/Inertia.
Think of a wave form as bubble of density, most dense at the center and least dense at the surface of that bubble.
The higher the frequency the smaller the bubble.
The greater the voltage the more dense the bubble.
The more dense the bubble the more Mass/Inertia.
From what I can see you are doing better at explanation to others then I,..pg
We model gravity as originating from a point in the center of the Earth, just to make the math easy, but that doesn’t make it right…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_theorem
IIRC, while I was in high school and experiment was conducted on the face of Half Dome. A line was dropped from top to bottom, It was bowed 1/2 inch from straight toward the mass of the mountain, or at least that was the claim. :-) …pg
The behavior of a force or other field that obeys the inverse square law also depends on the relative scale of the source and the particle (or observer) being acted on.
For a practical example, if a light source is small compared to your distance from it the light fall off (or the field if some force) would vary as the inverse square law, but as noted by EM if you are very close to a very large source inverse square law breaks down. If you are close to an infinite surface that radiates light, there is no drop off in light intensity as you move away, as the farther back you go, the more surface area is illuminating your point of observation. The same sort of behavior would apply to forces.
The force of gravity at the center of the Earth would be zero, or pretty darn close. Not because it is the center per se, but that gravity from surrounding mass cancels out.
Jeremy – thanks for the reference to the standard derivation of the shell theorem. That’s something I absorbed a very long time ago, but I think there has to be an error in it somewhere. It seems true inside the shell, but maybe not outside it. The reason for that is that just outside the shell a lot of the mass is pulling off-axis, so it seems that the result of the whole mass acting as if it as the centre should be an approximation that is valid for a separation quite large relative to the radius of the shell. The derivation implies that it is exact for all separations. May be a mismatch between the angle subtended by the rings at the external point and the area/mass of the ring subtended from the centre of the shell, but I’ll need to spend some time on this to be certain I haven’t made a mistake.
pg – I wonder how they knew it was 1/2″ out? It’s not as if you can tell using a spirit-level or any normal way of checking vertical. For inertia, the explanation of why it happens may give us a way to change the effects of it. If my logic is correct, then momentum is not a conserved quantity but in most situations is actually conserved because the fields that transfer it are not changing quickly. That has some pretty far-reaching consequences, and also implies that energy is not absolutely conserved either. For something like this we need solid experimental evidence, so I’m working on that.
Larry – also works for the gravity produced from an infinite plane, or at least a good approximation on a very large almost-flat surface. Also fun looking at what happens with a ring-shaped planet where a moon could have an “orbit” passing through the middle of the ring in a straight line, or two rings like a Helmholtz coil.
Jim2 – though the gravitational attraction at the centre would be zero, it seems to me that the gravitational field would be high and thus time would run slower the nearer to the centre you went. Much the same at the Lagrange points where gravitational force is zero (so according to GTR space isn’t curved and thus time should run at full rate), but I think that time should in fact run slower. This can be experimentally verified, and the data might be around already, but I haven’t found it yet. Maybe when one of the GPS satellites passes near to the Moon on its orbit there is an extra correction needed. If such correction is for the clock running faster, then GTR is correct, but if it runs slower then GTR is wrong.
@Simon; Actual data indicates “time” slows as energy density increases.
This concept seems to me to be an artifact of our definition of time rather then actuality.
Atomic process speed changes as energy density changes, rather then actual time as an absolute. I would prefer to think of time as absolute and look to the causes of the process speed changes as the thing of interest. The results in our actual world would be the same but a change in POV give different results in logic.
This artifact in atomic process speed that has been observed as well as the apparent artifact that Galaxies rotate as a solid that infers that a great deal of the Mass of the Universe is unaccounted for, indicate to me that Mass/Inertia must be an external effect that is based on the stuff of space “Aether” under stress, a thing that is there even if we can’t touch it. Local density of Mater increases, local density of gravity increases, and the speed of atomic processes slow. Absolute time becomes a measuring tape rather then an elastic line as we examine cause and effect…pg.
pg – yep, I agree that there’s a problem with our definition of time, and that what we really mean when we say time slows is that all the processes (including swinging pendula or any other method of measuring time) run slower. I also see time as an absolute, and that it’s just things taking longer to happen, but that’s not the way it’s normally described. It seems that the more mass/energy there is in a location, the slower those processes will run, and since that seems to happen for all processes we know of then it’s simply described as time running slower.
The apparent problem with galaxy rotation can either be explained by saying there’s a lot of gravitational matter we can’t see (the Dark Matter theory) or instead we might notice that there’s a minimum acceleration visible (around 10e-10m/s²) that implies that inertia isn’t what we thought it was. If you check Mike McCulloch’s latest blog about wide-spaced binary stars, there’s the same problem there and it seems having some Dark Matter lump carefully positioned between those stars might be somewhat difficult to arrange. I thus think inertia isn’t what we thought it was, and that it seems most likely that it is quantised. There’s thus a minimum acceleration possible, and this is related to the current size of the universe. This is a bit like the Copernican revolution – the new idea is a lot simpler and doesn’t need a lot of fudging to make it work (such as smaller and smaller epicyles on the earlier epicycles as measurements get better and we need to correct things, but there’s no reason for the epicycles and you find what they are by measurement). Mike’s reason for inertia is a lot simpler to calculate, and doesn’t need any fudging. As such, and given the fact that so far no sign of Dark Matter has turned up despite a lot of expensive searching, I’d relegate Dark Matter to the same status as fairies at the bottom of the garden. In any case, at the moment it cannot be predicted how much Dark Matter a particular galaxy must contain – it’s found by measuring the galaxy and seeing how much Dark Matter is needed to make it work the way it’s seen to work. Since Mike’s idea also gives us the possibility of being able to manipulate inertia (and Alzofon gives us a method to do so), then it seems worth exploring the ideas somewhat further and seeing how far they hold up. I’ve little doubt that Mike’s calculations will work for all galaxies including those way back in time when the universe was a lot smaller – it’s been checked for a few already.
Relating what happens here and now to the size of the current universe seems a little far-fetched. How can some boundary around 13.8 million light-years distant affect us? However, that seems to fit what we see, and we’ve known (and struggled with the idea) of “spooky action at a distance” for a long time. That in itself implies that there’s a universal clock, and that the relativistic changes to clock rate can be compared to this clock if we want to. It also implies instantaneous exchange of some (quantum) data, and that in turn may help explain the Pauli exclusion Principle which effectively states that the wave-functions of all the electrons (and other Fermions) in the universe must be different. If the wave-function of each electron does in fact spread to the Hubble radius, then in order to see an electron then it must be different from all other electrons. Gets a bit mind-bending, really. This apparent instant transmission goes against our normal experience of everything having a definite velocity, which is maybe why a lot of this stuff is non-intuitive.
You can’t have time without motion.
Time is the reflection of motion.
And the before and the after was the first epoch. ;p. Time must exist where there are mutable things. A before and an after. For immutable things, time does not exist, functionally. Change is the key, I say, not so much motion. Motion is a subset of change. Hmm, that raises a question. Is time self similar at all scales?
@Simon I have deliberately Ignored examining the work of others to independently arrive at a model from facts apparent to me. From your descriptions it appears there are a number of people that have arrived at a similar conclusion from their examinations. I will leave it to you to look over everyone’s shoulder for your own insight. I will continue my own independent path and hopefully help you in your’s. Someone will get lucky and get real dependable results and this thing will take off. Once demonstrated, anyone can do it! Of that I am sure. 8-) The key is in RF, a field that you are much more familiar then I …pg
pg – I’ve looked at a lot of models. If you look at what they predict that is different to standard models, and look to see what experiments have been done and whether the standard models or the alternatives got closer, in general the alternatives don’t do that well (Mike McCulloch’s ideas being a notable exception, and maybe Alzofon’s being a major step forward). It remains though that in order to get a different result, you need to do something that hasn’t been tried before. As such, your disc may produce some interesting results – a lot of stuff isn’t known or is imperfectly known, but the current theories generally work well-enough to the limits they have been tested. You find out new stuff by going beyond the previously-tested limits, and maybe the theories are still good, maybe they aren’t. The disc definitely goes beyond what’s been done previously.
Yep, the key for violating CoM is in RF, and I’m lacking the necessary decades of experience to get the designs right first time. Still, once it’s shown to work, there are people with the experience that can be brought in. Gravity and inertia control also need to be shown to work (if they do) after which it can be developed by people who are more competent in RF design.
There may be something odd with scalar (longitudinal) waves. So far the stuff I’ve looked at isn’t conclusive, and the experimental evidence conflicts with my experience of never seeing doubled signals (one at light-speed, and an earlier FTL one) in any situation. It would be surprising if such a thing would be missed by all the communications engineers that have worked over the years. Achieving the right antennae for launching such a wave and receiving it is a little difficult, but not majorly so – took me a few days of thinking of the needs of such an antenna to get a good design.
It’s interesting that FTL data transmission is built-in to quantum mechanics (entanglement), so really it’s mainstream thought even though it’s regarded as fringe when taken on its own. As such, I expect that mainstream physics will at some point find a way to use it. In some ways, that’s built in to the structure of a quantum computer anyway, though at the moment that’s only a small distance of operation. It’s a strange universe when you start digging in the foundations, and it seems likely that some of the things we used to think were impossible will turn out to be possible after all. I think the future will likely have FTL transmissions of data, teleportation, energy produced from nothing, interstellar travel, and quite a lot of the stuff that is currently a sci-fi dream. Maybe we’ll even see some of that come true.
@H.R.:
So if a rock sits still in space it stops time?… (rhetorical – I know the atoms still move…)
@C.D.Q:
Fractal time? How would one test it…
@P.G.:
IIRC, one of the things about Tesla’s work was the extremely high frequency you can get with a spark gap. Now we regularly make GHz gear without such a gap (and it is showing a tendency to screw with things like our genes… so be careful…) There are also THz amplifiers and such on the horizon. I wonder if we’re near the point where a non-spark model of his gear could be built…
If “whatever” he ran into is frequency dependent, increasing at higher speeds, I’d think there would be hints in the way extremely HF gear must be designed (as in perhaps they must design it to avoid some of the odd bits he saw…)
@Simon:
Saw a demo of QM entanglement and some other exotic stuff. Spookiest one was a superconducting disk, positioned over a magnetic track. Does Not Fall. Nudge it, it proceeds to skim along the track maintaining height above it. Then the wacky bit, turn the track upside down, it “hangs” in mid air below the track. Neither rising nor falling. But will still race around the track if nudged. So it isn’t being just stuck there but being unable to move in the mag field, nor is it being attracted. It’s just “wrong” given all the expectations of gravity and magnetism. Yet it moves…
This looks like the video.. Quantum Locking:
About testing time for fractal properties, I don’t know; given that I am a finite being that is mutable and I exist within the system. There was a Scientific American article many years ago where a 3-D being moved through a 2-D space, with the question being: “What would a 3-D being moving through 2-D space look like to an intelligent being that was limited to 2-D experience?”, which I found fascinating, at the time.
How does that saying go? Yes, “Think outside of the box”, so that’s where I was going. Recall, when you change the axioms (which we know are true by faith, by the way, via induction), and/or change the conditions, you change the results.
@cdquarles – I’m having a difficult time thinking of something that changes without motion. Yes, because there are quarks, muons, gluons, and poo-ons (OK, I made that one up.) something moved or there wouldn’t be a change.
Now there’s a $64,000 question: “Is time self similar at all scales?”
As you pointed out, it’s the interval between before and after. People a lot smarter than me have pondered time in the absence of an observer of an interval. They have also come up with ways to describe how a given interval looks different to observers watching the interval from different positions. But in the end, the observers are just reporting on an interval and an interval is an interval is an interval,
Where ‘time’ got interesting to me was in that quantum levitation video that E.M. posted. Does time exist in the field between the locked objects? Time exists for the object, but what about in the field? I dunno… but if you were in the field between the objects, could you be just anywhere you wanted to be? If the locked objects were on either side of the universe, would instantaneous travel to any point be possible?
@cdquarles; I remember reading that article. Interesting effort of representing a 2dimension visualization of a 3dimension world on a 2dimension medium. 8-)
As to thinking outside the box. I find most people have no problem visualizing the box. But, what is inside the box is the thing that escapes them.. ;-) …pg
@cdquarles and p.g.: I saw that 3-D object through 2-D space demonstrated in a yoo-tube video just last week. At the end of one of the videos posted here, the pop-up follow-on videos had that demonstration. I didn’t bookmark the video and cannot recall the title or presenter. 😞
SD and PGS! Darpa has funded your guys!!! Let’s hear some whoopin’ and hollerin’!!!
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently awarded a $1.3 million contract to an international team of researchers to study quantized inertia, a controversial theory that some physicists dismiss as pseudoscience.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x3ed9/darpa-is-researching-quantized-inertia-a-theory-of-physics-many-think-is-pseudoscience
@ H. R., about something that changes without motion, well, define motion. Consider a state change that does not change the total kinetic energy of a sample of matter.
jim2; I would not consider these as our guys. Looks more like a deliberate waste of Grant money. They make some of the right buzz words but are wandering off in the wrong direction. Their proposed experiment will fail because of their fundamental error…pg
Whoop Whoop Holler holler…
And hoping they can do it right…
Sorry, I thought Mike McCulloch was one of “your”guys??
Mike McCulloch in 2007, but it is still considered a fringe theory by many, if not most, physicists today. McCulloch has used the theory to explain galactic rotation speeds without the need for dark matter, but he believes it may one day provide the foundation for launching space vehicles without fuel.
The DARPA grant will allow McCulloch and a team of collaborators from Germany and Spain to undertake a series of experiments that will apply QI in a laboratory setting for the first time.
Jim2 – “SD and PGS! Darpa has funded your guys!!! Let’s hear some whoopin’ and hollerin’!!!”
I thought we’d discussed that a bit earlier. Mike says he’ll use the money initially to employ a maths grad student to help him sort out the theory side, and is planning for a year on that task. Once they’ve sorted that task, they’ll be going on to experimental tests. I’ve made sure Mike is aware of Alzofon’s UFT, and understanding that and using it properly will need a pretty good mathematician, so if Mike is lucky and manages to find someone with a sufficiently-open mind and also good at the maths, we might see some amazing results. If I get interesting results on my experiments, he’s said he’d like to know about them, so there’s also a chance he’ll replicate them with somewhat more credibility than I’ll have.
Mike’s theory is fringe because it gives a totally different reason for things happening the way they do. The reason also isn’t intuitive. Let’s face it, Dark Matter is a simple solution that’s easily understandable – there’s some extra stuff we can’t see, and we know that there’s likely a lot we can’t see anyway. Still, if you look at the wide binary stars, they have the same minimum measured acceleration, and the Dark Matter hypothesis requires therefore that they also have a lump of Dark Matter between them without spilling outside the mutual orbit. That gets difficult to explain why it’s only there and not elsewhere. MoND gives a good fit to the experimental data too, but has adjustable parameters to make it fit and no basic reason why it works. It’s a bit like using epicycles to describe the movements of the planets – it gives the right answers but no explanation for those epicycles.
Mike’s theory makes testable predictions. It’s thus falsifiable if the predictions don’t match the experimental results. That also applies to Alzofon. Dark Matter is by its nature not falsifiable – if the experimental evidence doesn’t match, they have parameters they can fudge to make it match. That’s why it’s taken so long to find the stuff – it’s somewhat hard to show the existence of something that isn’t there. Lots of grants available to try to find Dark Matter, though, so it will take a while to kill off the idea even if Mike starts showing good results.
Dark matter does seem a kludge. But it could be those stars were trapped by a glob of dark matter and same explanation for galaxies. Dark matter certainly doesn’t spring from fundamentals.
Jim2 – agreed that Dark Matter is a possible explanation, but though you can get it to work for galaxies I think it’s a lot more difficult for the binary stars. I think there are a few ternary stars around, too. You really need to say that the Dark Matter captured those stars and thus that the orbit is around the Dark Matter and not each other, but then you should have the two orbits decoupled from each other too and other phase-locking than 180°.
QI is very much cleaner, and predicts far more anomalies, but requires us to consider inertia as quantised whereas before we’d always considered it continuous. The relative simplicity of the equations involved makes QI more likely as the explanation IMHO, and it also fits nicely into the rest of QM. You no longer have one explanation for small distances and a different and incompatible one for very large distances.
Hmm, a question. Is velocity quantized? That’s possible, under certain conditions. We need to remember that just like a map of a territory isn’t the territory, a mathematical relation about real entities (which don’t always have to be physical/material) isn’t the same thing as real entities.
CDQ – it’s actually the acceleration that is quantised as such, which implies that velocity can’t be quantised too. The map/territory problem is always there, though, and it’s possible that we’re using a different logic than nature does. About the only guide that is reliable is that we can’t have a paradox, and that different observers will see the same actual things happen (though not necessarily in the same time-order). Since I’ve recently had to dump a couple of axioms that I’d thought were always true (momentum and energy both being conserved) and made them conditional on circumstances, the map at the moment seems somewhat unreliable. With enough people working on it, I think we’ll arrive at a better map though. As regards CoM, I hope to have some news fairly soon. For the next bits, testing out whether we can control inertia and gravity, maybe early next year. They both throw a fairly large spanner into our understanding of the fundamentals, so it may take a while after that before it gets accepted. If it works, of course….