Dear Vladimir,
You should have the prize for best title so far for sure! I loved your analogy with a modern building, too true! The doodles were very pleasing and reminded me of my own techniques when discussing on open forums. Fantastic work. Well done and a very worthy essay for the competition.
Thanks Georgina for your kind words. Demolition trucks are a bit premature! Perhaps the best policy is to encourage building a separate model building nearby and if it works as advertised people will go there first to check it out. In time the Physics Building will be revamped or the model expanded! Or not..who knows?
Yes FQXI seems to be doing an excellent job and an important one at that.
Best of luck with your own remarkable essay - we have arrived at several similar conclusions.
Thanks Alan. At first I had the title start with "Occupy Physics!" but I am not really that sort of activist. The title is much too long though - the emails from fqxi announcing posts are double the length of the email page! Are you sending in an essay this time? I look forward to that. I just did a google of your doodles - very nice they are less self-conscious than the ones I made.
Vladimir,
Some interesting "out-of-the-box" ideas. I would be interested in knowing how your BU theory would deal with the concept of anti-gravity.
Jim
Vladimir,
I very much like both your style and skepticism. I would point out that it you do away with spacetime as causation, then the whole foundation premise of a big bang universe is out the window, so there is no need to explain dark matter and energy as anything other than fudges to a flawed concept. Once you do away with photons as point particles, there are potential explanations for redshift as some form of lensing effect, rather tham just recession, so you are on your way to splvong that.
I also think gravity might be due to the creation of mass from energy, not just its existence. M=e/c2.
Trying to write this on a phone, so will continie later.
Thanks James
Having read your paper it is you who excel at out-of-the box ideas!
I have answered your interesting question on your FQXI essay page.
Vladimir
Thanks John for your appreciation and encouragement. I have downloaded your essay and will read it anon and respond to it and to your observations here. These FQXI discussions do take up time don't they! I do not envy your reading pdfs on your phone, although I do a lot of my reading an artwork on an ipod touch myself!
Vladimir
Thanks Vladimir,
The point about time that I focus on in my entry originally grew out of questions about cosmology. Simply, if gravity and expansion are inversely proportional, as both theory and observation show them to be, ie, flat space, where is the additional expansion? In Relativity terms, space, or rather the measure of it, contracts in gravitational fields and expands between them. Since the only old light we can detect is that which necessarily traveled between the galaxies, it would be most affected by this "expansion." The more layers of assumption I peeled away, the more the whole "fabric of spacetime" seemed to be a modern epicycles. Correlations mistaken for causation.
As for where the crack in the physics building will first occur, it's currently my prediction that finding the Higgs will prove to be the apex of this current paradigm, for the very practical reason that it provided a focus that cannot be replicated for the foreseeable future and so the most likely path of exploration for young theorists will be examine the many issues that have been fudged over in the last century.
Unfortunately my current work is limiting my time to really read many of these papers.
John I've read your interesting paper. You base your speculations on time as an 'active' factor in the universe, but to follow the ads I "think different". I believe time is just a way to keep track of 'now' states - it has no independent existence or effect on anything on the level of physics. In my theory action takes place locally and causally and the evolution of the now state into the 'next' now state is enacted. There is no tomorrow involved! Best,
Vladimir
Vladimir
Well my essay has now appeared on the list, rather more quickly than I exoected, but it was a resubmission having abided by the page limit but unlnowingly blown out the character count. Apart from the essay I have posted two shorter ones relating to these points about Einsrein which keep occurring.
Paul
Lol. Yes, my essay is here if you'd care to take a look, Newton's Isotropy and Equivalence... I can't imagine what doodles you managed to google! What did you enter as the search words? I guess that they might have been my tongue-in-cheek ones about my other pet subject of mysteries, crpytozoology, the study of unknown animals to science.
I will read your essay. The doodles were pencil sketches showing three quarks rotating about - reminded me of Maxwell's diagram of ether 'gears'. Hmm cryptozoology do you mean like the cat's smile in Alice In Wonderland?
Vladimir,
As I see it, time is a measure of change and change is an effect of action, just like temperature is a scalar measure of activity. It's not a fundamental dimension as relativity treats it, nor is there an external vector of time, as is used by QM.
If I was to differ with your position it would be to question the concepts of "now" and "states." The term "now" tends to have connotations of an instantaneous point between past and future states, while I see the reality is as what is physically extant activity in space. It is our efforts to capture and define the events arising from this activity which creates the notion of time and thus various configurations of "now." So the concept of "now" becomes a frame imposed onto action.
"State" has the same root connotations as "static," which is also a framing device used to define particular emergent configurations of this underlaying activity.
John, Now that you explain it this way perhaps we do not differ about time that much, but may have different notions about a universal state. I agree with you that 'action' is the key term here - it is the unit of action in Planck's constant, and in the angular momentum I envisage as acting to create all interactions and conditions in the Universe. As such I do not see the "state of the Universe" as static at all but full of potential energy to create the 'next' state all across the board, so to speak.
Vladimir,
Just to be super nit-picky, the problem I have with Planck scale measurements is that in order for them to be units, there must be some smaller scale in order to structure and define them. So then it becomes a recurrent issue of defining that ever smaller scale. There is an inherent fuzziness to action and definition which our desire for mathematical absolutes doesn't appreciate. I dealt with various other aspects of this in my essay, specifically about how points, lines and planes are mathematical contradictions, because if they have a zero dimension, they don't exist, but math accepts contradictions better than fuzziness. Also about time being a measure of action means an object and its action cannot be separated, because there is no dimensionless point of time where it exists absolutely motionless.
This is something of a meta-uncertainty principle.
Vladimir
Most excellent essay, clear, to the point, relevant and right 'on the nail'. And thank you most kindly for the credit at the bottom.
Your building analogy is brilliant, and as an Architect I'm humbled. Bucky would have been proud of you. In fact it's equivalent to but better than my ugly 'painted scenery' screening us from the truth, which is removed piece by piece to reveal the beautiful simplicity of reality.
I've been working on a replacement ontological construction, or at least the structural framework. I know you have some brilliant insights so perhaps we could work together to replace that dilapidated mess with one that works on all levels. The most elegant structure I have so far is an em toroid extended by motion in time into a multiple helix, but tapered, so a causal multiple spiral. Can your atomic mechanism keep the grid in place?
I do hope you'll like mine. I've now identified a mechanism of my own to implement Minkowski's conception with more certainly as suggested by Heisenberg, as you point out, with diffraction. I think we should find they fit nicely.
Well done, and best of luck.
Peter
Thank you most kindly Peter.
I am glad you have the background both in physics and architecture to appreciate my little bit of fun in that analogy. No doubt people will find it incomplete or wrong here and there but its purpose was to literally emphasize standing outside the box to be able to see another way of building is possible.
I will now have a look at your essay and read about your tapered multiple helix and will comment on it there. In my essay I have posed my doubts as questions, but I could say here emphatically that I disagree with Minkowski's 4-D flexible spacetime and prefer an absolute universe with no time at all! Not to be confused with our FQXI friend Minkowski of last year's contest of course.
Again thank you for your encouragement and good luck to you too.
Vladimir
John
I appreciate your doubts about being able to define the smallest units. When I referred to Planck units I meant the 'raw' units of action or angular momentum (h) not Planck scales or units which are hypothetical smallest distances, units of time and mass and so forth. Those of course are derived by combining (c) (G) and other constants. BTW according to my theory I think that the 'actual' (G) at the smallest scales is smaller than the macroscopic gravitational constant (G) measured on the Earth's surface. Yes I rather appreciate your objections about the 'now' term but used it because it is very easy to understand as an everyday analogy.
Cheers, Vladimir
Dear Vladimir Tamari,
Thank you for a good read. I am glad to see so many people reconsidering the existence of an aether. I believe it is essential. Many of the essays either challenge time or the lack of an aether.
There is a website that might interest you. It concerns the Wave Structure of Matter (WSM). It is a theory offered by Milo Wolff. My essay in this contest is an extension of his work.
There are also two very good papers written by Don Hotson that concern the aether. They were published by Infinite Energy Magazine.
Good Luck in the contest and please continue to think and write.
Regards,
Gary Simpson
Houston, Tx
Thanks Gary Simpson
Yes the Ether (or the classier spelling Aether) and Time are making a good and well deserved showing in these essays! I have had occasion to admire Milo Wolff's ideas, mainly as they were championed and expanded by my longtime email friend Gabriel LaFreniere's by correspondence or on his website www.glafreniere.com . The website is so full of amazing developmentsbut unfortunately I see that the website does not work. I just did some googling and was shocked to learn of Gabriel's death last April ...RIP ...he was a brilliant and indefatigable researcher expert at modelling standing wave simulations of many phenomena in Relativistic and atomic physics. Fortunately Gabriel La Frenier's must-read website is preserved in an internet archive . The physics community will do well to make sure this website is kept alive online.
I shall check your essay and will look at those of the ones you mentioned. Best wishes and good luck from Vladimir