My goodness, you are persistent.

1. Binding energies are indeed an example of topdown effects: I mention this in section 5.2.3 of my article here . If you want to discuss binding energies further please take it up with any nuclear or particle physicist, not with me. It's a standard part of what they deal with on an every day basis, using standard special relativity theory, which works perfectly.

2. The Lorentz transformation equation you want to alter -- which means you are indeed a special relativity denier -- is verified every day by the operation of electric motors and generators, because Maxwell's equations are Lorentz invariant. Please see 348 to 354 of Flat and Curved Spacetimes, where Ruth Williams and I show how the standard relations between electric and magnetic field due to relative motion follow from the standard Lorentz transformation laws, and specifically the equation you complain about and want to alter.

This relation is tested millions of times every day by the way standard electrical equipment operates.

George

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    • Post #389

    Dear George Ellis,

    If someone is persistent then she or he may be stupid or correct. I am hesitating to assume anybody stupid.

    Being an old EE, I cannot confirm that the Lorentz transformation "is verified every day by the operation of electric motors and generators". Well, Maxwell's equations were made Lorentz invariant because Michelson failed to detect the medium in which light propagates as a wave.

    I gave you hints to belonging papers by Phipps Jr.

    Didn't you read them?

    You might judge yourself the appropriateness of statements like: "This relation is tested millions of times every day by the way standard electrical equipment operates."

    What about binding energies, I am quoting your whole section 5.2.3 Binding energies:

    "When there are such extra terms in the interaction, this will result in changes in energies. A crucial example is nuclear binding energies, the cost of putting emergent nuclear structures together, which can be reclaimed on dismantling the structure. These energies would not be there if the structure (a nucleus) was not there, so it is a direct result of the existence of the higher level structure, nucleons on their own have no such energy term. Molecular binding energies are another example, of crucial importance in chemistry."

    This reminds me of making negative (differential) resistance an issue.

    Sincerely,

    Eckard Blumschein

    Hi Eckard

    "Maxwell's equations were made Lorentz invariant because Michelson failed to detect the medium in which light propagates as a wave." Not so: Maxwell did not in any way use Michelson's results when he derived his equations, indeed this could not have been possible. He died 1879. The Michelson Morley experiment was conducted in 1887.

    Maxwell's equations are Lorentz invariant because of their structure; indeed they are the only part of standard physics Einstein did NOT have to alter when he developed special relativity theory, precisely because of this fact.

    The way a moving charge generates a magnetic field follows directly from the standard Lorentz transformation matrix L^a_b applied to the electromagnetic field tensor Fab, see page 349-353 of Flat and Curved Spacetimes for an explicit derivation of this relation. This is a valid derivation of the theory underlying all use of electromagnets in electric motors and relays. My statement is correct.

    I have no idea what your point about binding energies is. They underlie the stability of nuclei, nucleosynthesis in stars and the early universe, and the possibility of nuclear energy. Their existence and implications are uncontentious.

    I can't believe I'm having to debate special relativity issues now. PLEASE will you all take the time to thoroughly read and understand any standard textbook on special relativity. I do not intend to continue this debate.

    George Ellis

    .

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    • Post #391

    Dear George Ellis,

    May I kindly suggest to you for the third time, please read "On Hertz's Invariant Form of Maxwell's Equations" in Physics Essays, vol.6, number 2, 1993 and also subsequent papers by Thomas E. Phipps, Jr.?

    My own knowledge is limited because I was just pointed to the matter by discussions here at fqxi. Nonethelees, I did my best reading and understanding the many belonging textbooks and original papers which were available to me. Unfortunately, I did not manage getting your "Flat and Curved Spacetime".

    While your argumentation is understandable, it is incomplete according to Wikipedia:

    As early as 1877, while still serving as an officer in the United States Navy, Michelson started planning a refinement of the rotating-mirror method of Léon Foucault for measuring the speed of light, using improved optics and a longer baseline. He conducted some preliminary measurements using largely improvised equipment in 1878. At Helmholtz's laboratory in Berlin Michelson designed and built a fundamental experiment. He had in mind a new sort of interferometer, sensitive enough to measure the second-order effects depending on the velocity of the earth's motion through the ether--that odd, stiff fluid which physicists of the day required as a medium to carry the vibrations of light. Michelson got a null result, and was disappointed. He felt that he had failed to measure the ether. Strictly speaking, the experiments were performed in Potsdam near Berlin because Berlin was too noisy. While the result was published in America in 1881, the European community was certainly earlier aware of it. If I recall correctly Stachel mentioned that Maxwell was skeptical.

    The four modern Maxwell's equations can be found individually throughout his 1861 paper, derived theoretically using a molecular vortex model of Michael Faraday's "lines of force" and in conjunction with the experimental result of Weber and Kohlrausch. But it wasn't until 1884 that Oliver Heaviside, concurrently with similar work by Willard Gibbs and Heinrich Hertz, grouped the four together into a distinct set. This group of four equations was known variously as the Hertz-Heaviside equations and the Maxwell-Hertz equations, and are sometimes still known as the Maxwell-Heaviside equations.

    Heaviside's notation is still used today. Other important contributions to Maxwell's theory were made by George FitzGerald, Joseph John Thomson, John Henry Poynting, Hendrik Lorentz, and Joseph Larmor.

    Both Larmor (1897) and Lorentz (1899, 1904) derived the Lorentz transformation (so named by Henri Poincaré) as one under which Maxwell's equations were invariant.

    In the usual formulation Maxwell's equations, their consistency with special relativity is not obvious; it can only be proven by a laborious calculation that involves a seemingly miraculous cancellation of different terms.

    It is often useful to rewrite Maxwell's equations in a way that is "manifestly covariant"--i.e. obviously consistent with special relativity, even with just a glance at the equations--using covariant and contravariant four-vectors and tensors.

    I assume, you do not like continuing the debate here. More than 400 postings are perhaps already too much.

    If you have anything to add, I consider 1364 a more appropriate place because I claim having made Michelson's mistake obvious and hence the block-univere inapt.

    Thank you for giving me the opportunity to reveal widespread mistakes.

    Sincerely,

    Eckard Blumschein

    Eckard

    I have no interest whatever in reading Phipp's paper. If you want to read it, that is your concern; there are hundreds of similar papers out there, and no reason to choose any one of them over all the others. The time would be much better spent reading Feynmann's Lectures in Physics. I am happy to accept your correction of the history of Maxwell's equations. The result is unchanged: they are Lorentz invariant, are extraordinarily well tested, and were derived long before the Michelson result. Yes the covariant 4-dimensional way of writing them is by far the best.

    I am not interested in entering into any further debate about special relativity and will delete any further postings on this thread that pursue this issue.

    George

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    • Post #393

    Dear George Ellis,

    I would never recommend to you a paper that I did not read myself thoroughly and a copy of which I have at hands. Its introduction begins: "There is considerable confusion in the literature about invariance and covariance of the equations of electromagnetism."

    You seem to believe that Dr. Thomas R. Phipps Jr. is someone without the due qualification. Well, some of his papers were published in journals you might consider mediocre: Phys. Essays and Apeiron.

    Phipps also published in Phys. Letter A, and his style is flawless as far as I can judge.

    While I feel hurt by your recommendation to read the famous Feynman lectures, I would never lower my standard and behave disrespectful to you. Perhaps I have to apologize for annoying you to an extent that you even misspelled Feynman. I beg your pardon.

    Sincerely,

    Eckard

    Dear Eckard

    you are quite wrong to be hurt by my comment that the time would be much better spent reading the Feynman lectures. I often read them for elucidation.

    You'll find the relativistic derivation of the transformation laws for electric and magnetic fields on pages 26-1 to 26-10 in Volume II, and that of the Lorentz equations of motion on pages 26-11 to 26-13. They clearly show (Table 26-3) both why motion of an electron generates a magnetic field, and motion past a magnetic field generates an electric field (and hence a current). Basic stuff for electrical engineers.

    George Ellis

    The theme of this essay and this thread is the existence of both bottom-up and top-down causation in science in general, and in physics in particular.

    Some interesting issues have arisen from the postings on this thread that have addressed this theme. To avoid confusion I'll deal with them in separate postings. Here is the first.

    Issue 1: Contextual Logic

    Frederico Pfrimer's posting on September 14th at 17:18 GMT lead me to read his interesting essay, which contains the following statement:

    ".. the main wrong assumption of physics is not a physical assumption, but a millenary logical assumption: the principle of excluded middle .... This principle says that a proposition is either true or false, in other words, either the proposition or its negation is true"

    I responded on September 24th at 19:23 GMT "I think that you might be saying that the truth or falsity of a proposition may depend on its context. That is very close to the concept of contextual effects that I discuss in my essay." I believe this is a key idea: that the way the logic at the lower level operates may depend on the higher level context within which it is imbedded. This is one way of cashing out Frederico's proposal.

    At each level of the hierarchy, there is a set of logical and causal relations that operate. In first order logic , a predicate P(a) is a statement that may be true or false depending on the values of its variables a. The issue then is whether those variables can be determined purely at that level of the hierarchy, or whether they depend on variables defined at lower or higher levels. In the first case, the logic at the level considered is affected by bottom up causation, and hence is not determined purely by the variables at that level. In the latter case, it is affected by top-down causation, with the same outcome. Thus whether a specific proposition is true or not depends on parameters defined at other levels --- which means the principle of the excluded middle for logic at that level is in effect modified: truth or falsity is contingent on context.

    The process is particularly clear in the case of conditional branching or looping in computer programs. The program continues on one path if a condition T(a) is true, and on another one if it is false. If T(a) is based on variables that are evaluated in other subroutines, it depends on criteria evaluated in the program as a whole rather than in the subroutine where the condition is evaluated. This logical difference then goes on to cause different flows of electrons at the physical gate level (cf.the discussion of computers in my essay). The underlying physics of course allows this, indeed it enables it to happen. Essentially the same conditional branching happens in many cases in molecular biology (see Gilbert and Epel: Ecological Developmental Biology for details).

    Accordingly I believe Pfrimer's and my essays are in sympathy with each other in a profound way (even though this was not what he had in mind!)

    George

    Dear Professor Ellis,

    Regarding the global aspects of causality and the connection with quantum mechanics, which I barely mentioned in my previous comment, I would like to submit to your attention the slides of a talk titled "Global and local aspects of causality", which I will deliver in 2-3 weeks at a conference. I think is that this has strong connections both with top-down causation and with your EBU. I would appreciate any feedback.

    Best wishes,

    Cristi Stoica

      In view of the interaction above, here is a note on how special relativity interacts with bottom up and top down causation in the case of electromagnetism:

      The electromagnetic field is described by an anti-symmetric tensor F, made up of electric and magnetic field components. The micro level laws are (i) Maxwell's equations for the electromagnetic field, including the Gauss law, with particles such as electron and protons as sources; (ii) the Lorentz force law for the effect of electric and magnetic fields on charged particles such as protons and electrons.

      The transformation laws for electric and magnetic fields under change of velocity v in the x-direction follow from the nature of Lorentz transformations, see Feynman Lectures in Physics Volume II, pages 26-5 to 26-10. They are

      [math]E'_x = E_x,\,\, B'_x = B_x,\,\,\\

      E'_y = \frac{E_y - v B_z}{\sqrt{1-v^2}},\,\, B'_y = \frac{B_y vE_z}{\sqrt{1-v^2}},\,\, \\

      E'_z = \frac{E_z v B_y}{\sqrt{1-v^2}},\,\, B'_z = \frac{B_z - vE_y}{\sqrt{1-v^2}}.\,\,

      [/math]

      With the Gauss law, these show why an electron in motion generates a magnetic field. They also show why an electron moving in a magnetic field will experience a transverse electric field that will then affect its motion.

      The bottom level dynamics is the way the micro level electric and magnetic fields interact with each other according to Maxwell's equations, with the charged particles as sources, and these fields in turn exert forces on those particles via the Lorentz force law, that cause them to move if they are free to do so.

      Bottom up effects are the way that billions of electrons in motion at the micro level generate measurable electric currents at the macro level, such as in a generator, and the way that forces on billions of charged particles at the micro level can add up to generate macroscopic forces, such as in an electric motor.

      Top down effects are for example the way that electric coils (macro entities, not describable in terms of micro level variables) constrain the motion of electrons in specific directions. This is why the micro fields they generate add up to macro level fields (see for example Feynman Lectures in Physics Volume II pages 13-5 to 13-6); without the constraints exerted by the wires, no such macro fields would be generated. Similarly the constraints generated by the design of the electric motor ensure that the individual forces on electrons and protons are channelled so as to add up to measurable macro level forces. This constraning effect is top down action from the level of machine components to the level of protons and electrons.

      How does special relativity fit in? Magnets in the generator create magnetic fields. It is the motion of the generator coils in these fields that creates the local relative velocity v that (via the above equations) then causes an electric field to act on the electrons and make them move to form a current. In an electric motor, it is the motion of electrons in coils that generates local magnetic fields that are utilised to generate rotation. The above equations are at the heart of what happens in both cases. And they result because of the application of the full set of Lorentz Transformation laws --- the heart of special relativity --- to the electromagnetic field.

      It is for this reason that the daily operation of electric motors and generators, via their design (thanks to the good offices of electrical engineers - a top-down effect from the human mind into the physical world), is a demonstration of and confirmation of both special relativity theory, and the efficacy of the combination of bottom up and top down effects.

      George

        And I so carefully previewed those equations! Oh well, here they are:

        [math]E'_x = E_x,\,\, B'_x = B_x,\,\,\\

        E'_y = \frac{E_y - v B_z}{\sqrt{1-v^2}},\,\, B'_y = \frac{B_y vE_z}{\sqrt{1-v^2}},\,\, \\

        E'_z = \frac{E_z v B_y}{\sqrt{1-v^2}},\,\, B'_z = \frac{B_z - vE_y}{\sqrt{1-v^2}}.[/math]

        I give details below in my posting of Sep. 28, 2012 @ 07:41

        The equations are

        [math]E'_x = E_x,\,\, B'_x = B_x,\,\,\\

        E'_y = \frac{E_y - v B_z}{\sqrt{1-v^2}},\,\, B'_y = \frac{B_y vE_z}{\sqrt{1-v^2}},\,\, \\

        E'_z = \frac{E_z v B_y}{\sqrt{1-v^2}},\,\, B'_z = \frac{B_z - vE_y}{\sqrt{1-v^2}}.

        [/math]

        [they probably won't display properly as there is a fault in the system; they preview correctly]

        George

        One further comment: hidden macro assumptions

        If one looks for example at the Feynman derivation of the magnetic field due to electrons flowing in a wire coil, the wire is represented as a structureless macro entity, even though it is made up of atoms and electrons. We just take this macro structure (the physical wire) for granted in all such derivations. This is analogous to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is the de facto way things are thought of by experimentalists: detectors and mirrors for example are indicated in their diagrams as structureless macro entities, because their nature and mode of operation is taken for granted. It's not what the experiment is about.

        Thus the causal effectiveness of macro entities is taken for granted in both cases (the way the wire channels the flow of electrons, the way the mirror transmits and reflects light and the detector records incoming photons). Yes of course they are made up of atoms and electrons at the micro level, but that is irrelevant to their role in the experiment, which role is due to the macro organisation embedded in these structures. These structural constraints act down to organise micro events (as is very clear in the case of the wire: its physical structure prevents electrons moving sideways out of the wire).

        This top-down aspect of what is going on is hidden because we take it for granted. It's just part of what we assume to be the case, so we don't notice it.

        George

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        • Post #402

        It would seem that to make mathematical sense the universe should exhibit strong patterns at the local level and in bulk, thus bottom up and top down - the Planck spectrum of the CBR being the most striking bulk pattern we know of - as if things must add up this way.

          Hi Joel

          Indeed. The calculations leading to understanding of this spectrum are basically the present day version of the resolution of Olber's paradox (why the is the night sky not as bright as the surface of the Sun): one of the oldest calculations of global to local effects. My paper here makes that link. The divergence underlying Olber's paradox is also essentially the divergence that prevented Newton from ever creating a cosmological model based on his gravitational theory. Ted Harrison's books Cosmology: The Science of the Universe is a great source on all this.

          Gworge

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          • Post #404

          Dear George Ellis,

          Thank you for urging me to reread Feynman vol. 2. When I looked into it for the last time several years ago, I was only interested in the question whether it shares lacking care with almost all other textbooks on electricity by introducing the complex calculus like an Ansatz as if it was a given fact instead of a step by step distinction between reality and different levels of modeling. While I may confirm that Feynman used complex calculus always correctly, I didn't find where he devoted the due attention to this issue.

          When I had earlier read Feynman I skipped his relativity related stuff for two reasons. I did not doubt that Einstein's relativity is correct, and I did know that it is irrelevant for electrical engineering.

          Feynman's lectures are distinguished by the author's readiness to frankly reveal the often speculative basis of his reasoning. So far I found in vol.1 only successful efforts to incorporate relativity into electromagnetism. Maybe, I will find in vol. 1 how Feynman dealt with the foundation of relativity.

          Anyway, I appreciate your hint and consider it more valuable than utterances of agreement with my essay.

          Thank you,

          Eckard

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          • Post #405

          Thanks much for the link to your paper. I was just thinking that a really annoying top down problem is how on earth a proton can have spin 1/2 with all this stuff going on with valence and sea quarks of all kinds, not to mention gluons and photons and weak bosons. It is just amazing that there could be any simple quark model at all. Some bigger symmetry must be herding these cats. And an even weirder symmetry must require that electrons hang around these messy protons - and this is supposed to be 'the simplest atom in the universe'. I bet that a crucial ingredient in hierarchy is being able to 'chunk' 3 quarks into 1 proton, and 4 fermions into 1 atom as a 2 body problem. Parentheses do that in a fairly natural way, at least at this elementary level. Hence to look at octonions. Now I must dig up my copy of Large Scale Structure - it has been quite a while.

            Dear Crisit

            your presentation is very nicely done. I agree completely with your emphasis on the importance of global conditions, which of course is fully in agreement with my essay. I also agree about quantum theory maybe having influences into the past.

            As to wave function collapse: you state "But we can assume that the interaction with the measurement device (and the environment, as the decoherence program requires) only disturbed the unitary evolution, and the collapse is only apparently discontinuous" This is pretty close to my concept of the apparatus acting down on the particles to cause an effective collapse. "The measurement of O1 in fact refi nes both the initial conditions of the system \psi, and those of the apparatus \eta". I think I agree: this is a case of what I call adaptive selection (which occurs in state vector preparation).

            Where we disagree is that you want to preserve unitarity: I think its clear you can't. The top down action from the apparatus causes non-unitary behavior at the particle level. I think that's clear in the case of state vector preparation.

            Best wishes

            George

            Frank

            "what do you think is the legitimate and true goal of modern physics and modern science?"

            It is to understand the mechanisms whereby physical things work (the natural sciences) and how livings beings exist and function (the life sciences), together with understanding the historical process whereby they came into being (the historical sciences.)

            Science cannot deal with issues of aesthetics, ethics, or meaning. This is because it deals either with issues that can be tested by replicable experiment that any community of scientists should be able to reproduce,or with observations of things that exist historically where any scientist can examine these historical remains and test the theories about them that others have proposed. The core of science is testability by observation or experiment of proposed theories.

            Things like television sets are the product of technology, which utilises science to create useful artefacts. They are the outcome of abstract thought, and exist because of top-down action from the human mind to the physical world. No scientific theory can either predict or explain the existence of television sets, because they are not predicted by Maxwell's equations, Newton's laws of motion, or any other set of fundamental equations that describe how physics works.

            George