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
Vladimir,
Nature does operate on scales. I just think we focus too much on them. Knowledge is a function of distinctions, but reality is a consequence of connections.
Good luck in the contest.
Regards,
John
Thanks for that Vladimir. Of course, my doodles from the last essay competition! I'd better keep my cryptonaturalism hobby to myself. At the moment it involves using a 'no-glow' IR trail cam to be hidden inside a hollowed out log. It should arrive from the U.S any day now. I'm trying to film the local big cats around the Land's End area. There's plenty of evidence and I've seen the local 5ft puma myself. They're crafty as &*%! and so it takes a lot of skill. I'm still learning. Wish me luck.
Vladimir,
I would add my views on this come from first appreciating many of the yin/yang type dichotomies of reality. Nodes and networks would be one, but probably the most insight has come from considering Complexity theory and the relationship of order to chaos. I would significantly amend this to say the opposite of order is energy, rather than chaos. Energy naturally adds to ordered systems at their points of weakness. This can serve to both increase the size of the system, or break it down. Think of a tree, where the growth pushes out the bark, expanding the cracks. Or it could be grass pushing up through a sidewalk, where the system/sidewalk, is breaking down. I think this also applies at the atomic level, when energy/quanta are that tipping point you refer to, where the structure snaps open as it is absorbing energy. With the size of the quanta more a function of the breaking point of the atomic structure than energy being a point particle. Rather than light being a bunch of dimensionless particles, it is more of a gas, that expands to fill its space. When the space is open, it acts like a spreading wave, but when it encounters matter, it builds up into the structure and pushes in the weak points.
The reason it seems chaotic in because of this tendency to push at points of least resistance and thus those least structured. Which causes distinctly non-linear reactions.
Dear Vladimir F. Tamari,
The abstract of your essay says it all. I agree to the same in totality. But where can we begin? When I started to think about these issues I was just about to be introduced to physics as a subject in high school (1965). I have an alternative approach which runs parallel to mainstream physics, and is not in conflict with experimental results or in fact mathematical formulations. The difference is only interpretation of mathematical equations. For example uncertainty principles are interpreted as binding of space by energy instead of probability or uncertainty in measurements without negating this interpretation under certain conditions. Similarly dealing with big bang, origin of universe, dark matter etc is seen as corollaries and extension of statement 'Space Contain Energy'.
This thought process takes mainstream formulations (laws and knowledge about universe) as facts to be linked into a uniform knowledge framework while minimising hypotheses and concepts. We have given a name Pico-Physics to the thought process that integrates physics known to us. The basic concepts are available at http://picophysics.org/ for review and comments.
I am participating with an essay '5-Dimensional Universe' . I invite you to have a look. I will consider it an honour to answer any comments you may leave for me. I will appreciate, if you can evaluate and rate my essay as well.
Thanks and best regards,
Vijay Gupta
Dear Vijay Gupta
Thank you for honoring me with your views. I have looked at your interesting blog, and see that you have been thinking hard about physics for so many years. Your intuitions are interesting and original. I like the name "Pico-physics" . Very small nodes of dielectric ether energy are the basic building block of my Beautiful Universe theory of physics. I will read your essay and comment there.
With best wishes
Vladimir
Vladimir Tamari
I went through your interesting text exorting the recasting of the existing overall structure of Theoretical Physics. However, to see how the things really are, one has to dig deeper beyond the enjoyable artistic caricaturing.
1. General points:
- Scientific process. In scientific work, the appropriate hypotheses, assumptions are necessary to set up the calculational apparatus. The results of the calculations are confronted with the hard nuts and bolts of the experimental work. If this test does not work, one has to start all over again in a different way. Science moves bit by bit most of the time in an iterative manner based on "reasonable assumptions". The whole of science does not appear as a total revelation. It is a dynamical process. Moreover, a known scientific truth is always considered to be just as a relative truth.
- Geometry and Algebra. Since the dawning of the discipline of Algebra almost a thousand years back, the Algebraic Equation has been the most potent instrument for scientific work in spite of the almost deification of this Geometry by the Ancient Greeks. Of course, one can represent geometrically a theme with a few dimensions, but the treatment of a large number of dimensions, for example, in the Hilbert vector-space is impossible. In fact, one can say without any hesitation that without this Algebraic Equation, quite likely, we shall still be in the stone age of Physics.
2. Specific points
1: The search of scientific truth - Nature's laws, has to move via different groping ways. Of course, the endgame has to be one Algebraic Equation that unifies all the interactions/ forces of Nature in a testable way. In this context, the things seem to moving in the right direction. After the unification of the E and M fields by the Maxwell's equations, one has managed to unify the EM with the nuclear weak interaction in the Particle SM that also deals with the strong interaction via the QCD. One has found interaction mediating bosons for all of them: Photons (EM), W^+-, Z° (weak interaction) and gluons (strong interaction). They have just found a scalar boson that may be the Higgs boson of the Higgs field that massifies the different particles.
2. Nature of time. This has been a controversial point since the confrontation of Leibniz and Newton: one believed in the physical reality of time, while for the other, it was just a relation between the different things around. In QM, if one considers that the total energy: normal energy + gravity as negative energy, in the universe is zero, it becomes a timeless configuration space with all of its eigenvalues: past, present and future, present. However, the things are different in the classical domain of SR and GR with spacetime, where this time is integral part of them. We live the daily tribulations of this time coordinate. Let us see how one resolves this contradiction between the two sides.
3. Speed of light. This speed in vacuum is constant. Due this constant speed, the time coordinate has to suffer the dilation that we live and use every day via clocks. There is a bundle of theories that contest this constancy of c, but a lot of experimental work done so far to test these theories, shows that Δc/c is < 10^-13.
4. Gravity. In GR, the gravity is the curvature of spacetime. Moreover, the local GR is relative because it obeys the fundamental Local Gauge symmetry. Moreover, the red shift work in the gravitational field shows a change in energy of radiation, but not any change in its speed. Hence, the concept of refractive index suggested by Eddington cannot treat the problem.
5. Photon. The idea of wave-particle for the Photon led de Broglie to his particle-wave relation for massive particles. This relation is the only basis for QM. Now, if one supposes following Planck, that this photon behaves as a particle only when it is absorbed or emitted and it is a wave when in flight, then, what does happen to the massive particles in flight? Will they be also only waves? Will then QM apply only to objects in flight?
6. Quantum probability. In QM one uses operators that operate on the wavefuction that represents the system under treatment. The measurement on the system tells one in which of the (sub)state of the system's basis states it is. This, in the context of QM, leads directly to the quantum probability concept. As QM is nonlocal in nature, the entanglement of particles in a wavefunction is independent of time and their separation distance - now, reached more than 400km! As to the system of dipoles, first one has to treat them via QM and define their overall wavefuction and then see their behavior under different relevant operators. A CM treatment of this problem is not sufficient
7. Standard Model of particles. The SM is a highly complex QM model obeying, like the GR, the local gauge symmetry, where, as said before, different interactions are mediated by different and known bosons: Photons, W^+-, Z ° and gluons. They have to deal with 6 types of quarks, 3 types of leptons and three types of neutrinos through a particular group of symmetry. To say anything significant, your dipole-based system has to pass through all these highly controlled quantum stages.
8. Dark energy and dark matter. The DE is supposed to be repulsive and DM attractive relative the normal gravity. The CMB results from the Planck instrument in space along with the other activity with different types of telescopes, may give a clue as to their nature in the near future.
9. Ether. One has to find and pin down this Ether in some way, first, before riding the horses of ethereal conjectures.
Finally, as we move forwards, due the nature of things - conspiracy of Nature?, Physics is becoming more and more complex to deal with , but not at all a Gordian knot that can be cut with some classical sword.
Dear Professor Asghar
Thank you for your reasoned and detailed response to my paper. Most professional physicists of your accomplishment and standing might have dismissed my sweeping calls for 'fixing physics' without my providing the necessary foolproof plan how to do so. Instead you kindly took it seriously and gave a much-appreciated detailed rebuttal. I will try to answer your objections:
1. Your General Points:
Agreed that hypothesis are essential to build physics on- but in my view the assumptions that have led to how physics is practiced could be recast. The FQXI essay rules discouraged us putting forth our own theories, but I have a vision of a possible 'new physics' . Perhaps my Beautiful Universe (BU) theory is an outline of a dream - or a mirage? at this stage. But that theory gave me some confidence to cast a critical eye on present day assumptions. As you say starting out with new assumptions requires a lot of patient nuts-and-bolts work by expert mechanics before judging if the new structure works at all and if so if it is better than the current methods.
- I disagree however that algebra precedes and is superior to algebra. Al-Hassan Ibn Al-Haythm's establishment of the scientific method and his discoveries about vision and light where described in pure geometrical language. Newton's calculus in the Principia was derived by purely geometrical methods. And Einstein revered geometry and was totally ignorant of tensor algebra when he invented General Relativity. His geometrical intuitions had to be famously cast in algebraic language with the help of others. In his lecture on "Geometry and Experience" Einstein shows his preoccupation with geometry. Late in his life Dirac too declared he had a geometrical vision behind his physics but alas did not give details. Algebra makes geometrical insights easier to express but they are not more basic.
2: Your Specific Points
1. I was careful to insist on the success of the various branches of physics today - but stressed that they are based on incongruous assumptions making further progress difficult or impossible - for example between QM and GR. Algebra has shown a pattern, but I feel some effort can be diverted to search for possible new approaches, and gave my reasons for doing so with the limits of my knowledge and the 9-page essay limit. In this essay I was merely trying to encourage searching in new ways - nothing wrong in that- right?
2. The hypothesis that time is not a dimension but a record of experience of different universal states links with my suggestion that flexible space-time (considered as dimensions) is an unnecessary and distracting basic assumption to SR and beyond. This is my intuition based on thoughts of interactions in a universal ether in which matter (using Fresnel's great expression) is permeable to the ether. This view of matter and ether was just being developed for example by a late essay by Hertz when Einstein blasted the whole thing away by his too -clever assumption about constant c in an etherless world.
3. The measured constancy of c is because measuring rods contract at the same rate as clocks slow down in inertial frames.
4. I cannot myself rebut your learned objections to describing gravity in terms of Eddington's (n) , but the concept of (n) is too beautiful to be wrong, so to speak, and all I am saying is that is is worthy of further analysis.
5. The photon as a wave is different from massive particles. As I have suggested in my (BU) matter nodes affect the surrounding nodes (ie the combined gravitational / em field) creating de Broglie waves in that field - as I sketched in the illustration accompanying Q5 in my essay.
6. As with my other ideas here and elsewhere my suggestion that Quantum Probability is an artifact of the neoclassical geometry of a dipole field has to be seen in context with my (BU) theory. It makes a lot of sense there.
7. Sadly you are absolutely right that my (BU) model of ether dielectric nodes needs a lot of work to build a meaningful explanation of SM relations. I feel it can be done by studying polyhedral node configurations, but that is work enough for another lifetime! All I am saying is for some smart young prison to try it out - is the electron a tetrahedral arrangement of magnetic like ether elements in an attractive-repulsive linkage?
8. In (BU) theory the acceleration of the universe is due to the repulsion between the vacuum ether nodes, and the same acts to 'compress' matter it surrounds. Its just a theory and of course I hope one day it may prove right.
9. How do you pin down the horse you are riding on? If everything is made of a universal ether its granularity may well be impossible to prove experimentally - although in my (BU) paper I have suggested some ways such as the diffraction of one light beam by a 'grating' made up of standing light wave. I know this has been done experimentally, but if it is done in an absolute vacuum it is a strong indication that 'something' in the standing wave acts to diffract the incoming light.
The Gordian simile was made by my friend David when he proofread the essay - he is a great poet (like you are) and summed it up in this way. Physics is the result of patient detailed work, but maybe mentally cutting wrong assumptions as in brainstorming sessions is the first step to any progress.
Again I really thank you for your reasoned and honest assessment of my little piece. Can I hope that in your next post you can give your opinion in the form of an expressive haiku?
With kind regards, Vladimir
Professor Asghar
Re "nature of time". The concept of time is false, because there is no corresponding physically existent phenomenon. In a sequence there can only be one at a time. Timing rates change, per se (ie irrespective of type). It compares numbers of changes in sequences and identifies difference. So this concept relates to difference between physically existent states, not of them. Physically, there is alteration. Humans have a measuring system (timing) to calibrate the rate at which alteration occurs.
Paul
Dear Vladimir,
It is always a bit tearing apart to get away from oneself and its musings simply because:
In the scheme of things,
There is a tussle of forces
For dice balancing