Israel,
In all fairness, I'm actually proposing an aether medium made of waves. I think that pretty much puts an end to preferred frames of reference. Everything is really just a trick of light.
I wish you luck in the contest. :)
The Preferred System of Reference Reloaded by Israel Omar Perez
Hi Jason
You: If you could come up with an experiment for a gravity drive, a warp drive or something spectacular like that, but you had to question an assumption or a postulate of physics, then it could lead somewhere. Unless I have overlooked something...
Like I said, the aim of this contest is not to propose a theory or experiment but to point out which assumption is wrong. I argue that the assumption that there is no PSR and that there is no aether is wrong. If you want a theory considering these two assumptions, it is already developed and waiting for experiments to prove it. Certainly, you do not see the utility because you have some other ideas in mind. If you have developed an aether theory then you have to consider that the aether itself is the PRS. The theory I mentioned also argues that everything is fundamentally a wave.
I just want to ask you if your theory makes new predictions, and if so, what are they?
Good luck too.
Israel
Hi Vijay,
I will answer on your essay thread.
Dear Israel Omar Perez,
My view on Ether & 'The Preferred System of Reference'
Arguments on ether may begin with carryover of Pre-Newtonian concept of space as extension of matter. Cartesian physics considered everything extended to be corporeal, thus rejecting the idea of empty space. Observation of interference and diffraction of light made some theoretician to relate light with sound. In parallel to this, conservation of energy led to unify kinetic energy, heat, light and sound to be collectively and inter-convertibly called energy.
As sound can not travel without a medium, it was argued by some theoreticians that a medium is required for light to travel. However, light travels through space devoid of any matter. For space to act as a medium for propagation of light a host of properties shall be assigned to space. Considering the fact the value of these properties are unreasonable and sound does not propagate through space, it was a dead concept at the origin it-self. So ether as an all prevailing medium concept was dead at birth. But as usual, in human nature, we prefer not to be negative in our conversations. This makes different thought processes co-exist in a given period of time. The ether concept continued to exist for some time. The argument in favour of ether was a possibility of providing it a unique characteristic of being at absolute rest. (Though, absolute rest was not defined clearly). In terms of Newtonian frame of reference, it was seen as a universal reference frame that assigns each object a value in each of three dimensions of space representing rate of change of position. This association of Ether with absolute rest was turned down by Michelson-Morley experiment. This was as big an effort as recent discovery of Higgs-Bosons. The proposed defining characteristic of ether at absolute rest was negated by observations by in 1887 by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley. So ether as a concept similar to a medium that is essential for sound waves died as a result of Michelson-Morley experiment.
During the time interval between Newton (& Galileo) to Einstein, science was in formative state. From flat earth, to universe with sun as center to doing away with any preferential location or reference was completed in this period. This purified concept of space from all the baggage it carried due to limitations of human intuition and observations.
In PicoPhysics, we define realities of Knergy and Space as host realities for two opposite concepts. Knergy of Konservation and space is antidote to Konservation. The unary law 'Space contains Knergy' describes the interaction between the two.
In PicoPhysics we can establish only three dimensions of space. So space has only three dimensions. There is no fourth or fifth dimension of space. Let us consider what a dimension means. Dimension is one of the observable aspects of reality. The universe includes both Space and Knergy. While Space has 3-Dimensions, Knergy has 2-Dimensions. This gives the universe its five dimensions.
Science also deals with degrees of freedoms in relation of dimensions. Though universe has five dimensions, the degree of freedom is less than four. The dimension of Time is maps conformal to space dimension in drift direction. The dimension of energy is less than one, since it does not allow for negative values. Thus degrees of freedom are at best four for universe.
Thanks and Regards,
Vijay Gupta
Dear Vijay
Thanks for leaving your comments I appreciate them and I will take a look at your essay as soon as possible. I just like to make clear that neither the Michelson-Morley experiment nor any other experiment can rule out the immovable aether assumption. None of these experiments proves that there is no aether. The aether was rejected only on epistemological grounds. I invite you to read my essay, there I elucidate these points.
Best regards
Israel
[deleted]
Israel,
"I argue in my essay that most of the problems in physics can be "easily" solved if one accepts both the PSR and the notion that "empty" space is not only composed of gravitational potentials (as relativity holds) but that space is a material fluid a la Descartes. This is the benefit for physics.'
I'm trying to figure out how space could be a "fluid," yet not be some form of causal spacetime.
It seems to me that to make space a true PSR, all dynamic properties would have to be washed out, leaving it as an equilibrium state, in which matter/energy/action interacts. There seems to be this insistence on some measurable function, aether, etc, filling it up. It seems to me the most irrefutable argument for space as the elemental frame, is centrifugal force. Once you rotate any defined frame and the component contents seek to follow a straight line, requiring some attractive property of the frame(gravity) to hold them in, that is evidence of the Euclidian equilibrium of space. Aether certainly wouldn't cause centrifugal force.
Yes, all of space is either dominated by energy radiating outward, or mass/gravity contracting inward, but they seem, according to measurement(COBE, WMAP) and theory, to be in balance, resulting in an overall flat space.
The only alternative to space as some form of elemental void, is the notion it emerges as a consequence of the singularity, which is a whole additional can of worms, one which incidentally grew out of the idea of "spacetime" in the first place.
Hi John
Thanks for your stimulating comment. I have a long story to tell so you can understand my view. I am going to summarize it as much as possible but I need to divide it into two parts, because the space is limited here. This is part 1.
You should understand that the reality that we grasp through our senses is very related to intuition. The way we perceive reality is highly complex and therefore it is a titanic task to model it as we perceive it. For this reason physicists prefer to model a cow as a point. Ancient thinkers use to philosophize a lot on all known hitherto phenomena. Their only tool were their senses and their reason. So, they knew very well the feeling of the intuitive world. Descartes was a typical case. In his work "the world" he presents the well known astronomical model. In this model Descartes realized that the notion of space arises from the notion of extension of material bodies (today most people think in the opposite way, that bodies live in space). He then denied total emptiness and assumed that all the universe was composed of a fine fluid, of an aethereal matter, certainly not observable by the eyes but by intuition. To explain the motion of celestial bodies he considered that planets were drag by the flow of this continuous fluid; the spinning of planets, etc. were due to the rotation of what he called vortices. His theory was so harmonious and beautiful that many philosophers and physicists considered very plausible, however there was a big problem. It was only qualitative. Then Newton appeared in the scene. In summary, Newton agreed that Descartes's model was very plausible but for quantitative matters, it would turn out to be impossible to make a practical model. Although Newton conducted himself with reservation about the nature of space and gravity he seemed to agree that space was some kind of aethereal substance. With respect to gravity he once wrote to Bentley in 1693:
"Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether this agent be material or immaterial, I have left to the consideration of my readers"
So, we see here that Newton had the idea that gravity was related to some physical agent (now we call it field, what is a field made of?). He later confessed, in his work Gravitation, that space was obviously an aethereal substance. However, to model "reality" and intuition, he simply decided to keep space immovable and "empty". This simplification would help him to apply the principles of geometry and mechanics to study an astronomical problem. As consequence of the the elimination of this substance he was severely criticized. Many physicists and philosophers questioned him how two planets could interact without a medium. The reply to these critics was the famous phrase:
I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.
to be continued...
Israel
This is part 2
...From ~1710 to ~1760. Astronomical problems were solved in England a la Newton and in France a la Descartes. Once Bernoulli confessed that in continental Europe most people were Cartesian, but in England Newtonian. Bernoulli was Cartesian but after returning from a trip to England he became Newtonian... This is indeed the case. The Cartesian model was so complex to deal with that its used started to decline during the rest of the century. Then Newtonian empty space became a prejudice for most physicists of the XVIII and XIX centuries. Celestial bodies were in communication with each other by an action at a distance, that is, no medium and infinite speed. Clearly this is non-sense and is the result of disregarding in the mathematical model the intuitive part of Descartes. During the development of electromagnetism Poisson-like equations were found. And here again action at a distance was also non-sense. So physicists were forced again to resort to the aethereal substance in order to get rid of this intuitive inconsistency. This substance was also material. To explain the mechanical effects on material bodies caused by electromagnetic phenomena Maxwell developed a model of vortices, but once again his model was so complex. Maxwell knew that his equations were valid despite the non existence of the aether but if there was no aether, we also have the problem of how electromagnetic bodies communicate. Unfortunately, in 1879 Maxwell died and left his work imcomplete. The so called Maxwellians (FitzGerald, Lodge, Heaviside, Hertz, Larmor, etc.) came to rescue Maxwell's work and gave shape to Maxwell electrodynamics. Actually, Hertz modified electrodynamics in way that would lead to new unobservable predictions (besides transversal waves, also longitudinal waves in the aether). But however there were still some problems to fix. It was Lorentz who finally get rid of Maxwell vortices and assumed the aether at rest. Again, this was just to simplify the physics. Everything was ok. Lorentz found the Lorentz transformations, Poincaré the principle of relativity and relativistic kinematics was developed. At this point Lorentz and Poincaré realized that no experiment could tell whether there is aether or not. But despite of that one can hold it. Then Einstein appeared in 1905 with an axiomatization of Lorentz' work. In this work he established two important things. First, he claimed that there is no aether. This not only means that he was leaving space again TOTALLY empty but also that he was depriving the universe of aethereal MATTER. And second, he argued that the real quantities are the fields. In analogy with the case of Newton this affirmation has become some sort of prejudice for intuition. Since then most physicists believe that material objects interact through fields that need no other medium than "EMPTY" space itself. Clearly this TOTALLY EMPTY space is non-sense for intuition, how could nothingness exist? In my essay I argue that no experiment can rule out the aether assumption so Einstein was just reinterpreting the physics in the language of fields. Ok, I have no problem with reinterpretation. Then we have no medium for electromagnetic fields, but what about gravity? Here the action at a distance persists. It is clear that there most be a medium, the medium that Newton rejected to simplify his theory. To solve this complication Einstein then developed the general relativity and argued that the new aether are the gravitational fields. The problem is that this new aether is not made of matter, but only of energy and momentum.
Since space was deprived of matter and conceived as a flexible geometrical vessel, the paradigm of relativity led physicists to believe in the expansion of the universe, the big bang theory and the interpretation that the Microwave background radiation are the remnants of the radiation emitted during the big explosion. This interpretation is ok, according to this paradigm. But it seems to me that it has led physics to a dead end. From my view, the crisis in physics was guided by wrong assumptions such as there is no PSR and no aether. How to explain the horizon problem? Physicists resort to assumptions such as the inflationary model or the varying speed of light theory in which it is assumed that in the early stages of the universe the speed of light was much faster than now.
to be continued...
Israel
Well, I thought 2 parts, but they are actually, 3. Sorry
...So to avoid all of these complications, I'm reconsidering Descartes notion of space. Empty space does not exist. Space is a material dynamical fluid. Light travels through this medium and bends near the vicinity of massive objects because the object causes the density of the fluid to vary which means that the index of refraction changes from place to place within the gravitational field. Gravity is nothing but a flow of this subtle matter that points towards the center of a vortex. This causes all the celestial bodies to spin around its axis: the earth, the moon, the sun the galaxies etc.. The vortices of the fluid drag other objects around the sun; dark matter is part of this fluid; macroscopic objects (actually they can be model as solitons) are in a condensed state of this fluid and deformed when forces are applied (Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction); the cosmic background radiation is simply the temperature of the fluid, etc, etc... This theory is developed but not recognized by the mainstream of physicists.
In summary, to simplify the calculations one can assume this aether at rest a la Lorentz and place a PSR there. There is no problem with centrifugal forces. The complex option is a la Descartes, but as you say the notion of PSR appears to be lost if you think of objects as particles. Indeed the notion of particle is another issue that, from my view, has also caused noise to our understanding of reality. From this notion arises the problem of wave-particle duality at the microscopic level. The wave-particle duality is another assumption which one has to get rid of to see the physics with more clarity. It is obvious that something cannot be two things at the same time, particle and wave. To solve this problem one has to assume that either everything is a wave or a particle. The second option appears to be more complex. So one may conceive particles as waves, actually as solitons moving in the fluid and therefore the PRS concept is still valid.
I hoped I have clarified your doubts, some of your doubts.
Israel
Dear Israel:
Thanks for your reply and after you have had a chance to read my paper, please post any comments on my paper under my post.
1. You asked - "I just wonder whether your theory besides explaining some of the most important problems in physics makes new unobservable predictions. "
Answer_
Yes, some new predictions of my model include the evidence of substantial matter or large galaxies in the far far field ie beyond 10-14 billion-yrs (see figure 8 and 10 in my paper). This has been already confirmed via recent observations (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48230452) . Another unobservable prediction of my theory is that no stable and sustained anti-matter can be observed in the amount of observable matter in the universe counter to the predictions of the quantum mechanics.
2. Your comment - "....... This leads me to reach the plausible conclusion that humans will never understand how nature really works. I wish you were right but I cannot overlook the previous statements. I may be wrong, in such case, I would appreciate also if you could persuade me of changing this belief."
Response
I had similar belief about ten years ago until the belief started to bother me and I began to search for the right answers thru science. Our beliefs are mostly inherited and are like our own self-made prison. Just as a particle decays at its own free will and attains the speed of light in the form of light photons, we must decay our beliefs and attain enlightenment of our innate consciousness or awareness capabilities to realize the underlying implicit realities that are not measurable or seen with naked eye. Scientific instruments cannot reveal these realities. Science today is lost in dissecting its materialistic measurements made in fixed Newtonian space-time (PSR), which is like dissecting hair in the tail of the elephant to predict the elephant. Science today is lost in trees and has lost the vision of the forest.
You are right that humans will never be able to dissect each tree in the forest to understand the forest. But my point is that we should try to envision the forest and not get entangled in the fruitless pursuits of the trees. Chasing and dissecting individual particles, in my view, is such an exhausting approach to science. Even if the battles of understanding the individual few particles are won, the war may never be won in revealing the wholesome universal reality from an integrated wholesome approach to science not fragmented by limited local (PSR) (howsoever billions of dollars' worth) experiments. There may be a lot of declared victories in individual battles, but war will remain un-won until the beliefs and mindsets are won to envision the elephant or forest as a whole. I would call this wholesome approach to physics a "holistic science" as opposed to the well-known and weird quantum or particle physics.
Bottom line, you will have to spontaneously decay your beliefs at your own free will (even if I tried, I cannot persuade you, just as I cannot persuade a particle to decay) to realize the wholesome reality of the universe rather than piecemeal reality revealed by quantum particles in a PSR framework, which are no more than peepholes giving extremely fragmented and limited view (worldly and utilitarian materialistic view) of the universal reality.
To me, a science that cannot reveal purpose to the universe and life in it, is a purposeless science; a science that cannot reveal beauty is an ugly science; and a science that is limited to the inanimate matter (particles) alone is a science of the dead. Science is ready for the next frontier - consciousness or free will if it has to progress any further. Consciousness or free will is the fundamental reality that must be the foundation of science, until then it is all building castles in the air. Free-willed decaying of the beliefs and mindset is essential to realize this fundamental reality of the universe.
Best wishes
Avtar
[deleted]
Dear Israel
I looked at your ref. 19 and see you have taken the aether seriously. Excellent.
You ask about predictions of my theory..I was hard-pressed just to show it is feasable in explaining known pohenomena in a new way. But some experimental proofs I suggested in section 3 of Beautiful Universe Theory can be taken as new phenomena or perhaps suggest other experiments. I think diffraction of light by a 'grating' made up of standing waves (Sec. 3.2) has in fact been demonstrated. Another idea is that neutrinos are produced as discussed in Sec. 3.4.
Vladimir
Israel,
After sending the above reply I realized that I have indeed predicted a new physical phenomena based on my Beautiful Universe theory that was not mentioned in my paper: that interference of particles in a double-slit experiment is possible even if the particles themselves are larger than the slits and do not pass through- only their gravitational fields pass through and interfere.
See the attached figure, taken from my Physics Forum comment as valavel Apr17-12, 05:26 AM
By the way the PF discussion was with Eric Reiter (unquntum) please read his impressive fqxi essay proving another assumption of my theory - that the photon is not a point particle.
[deleted]
Israel,
Thank you for the in depth and clear reply.
I don't doubt space is rather full of substance, but that doesn't negate an underlaying Euclidian space, which amounts to an equilibrium state. The reason C appears constant in any frame is that in accelerated frames, atomic activity is slowed in the direction of travel, so as not to exceed C, thus a slower clock is used to measure it. This, like centrifugal force, strongly suggests a inertial frame. I don't know if you happen to read my entry, as it explains why I view spacetime as simply correlation of distance and duration, not an underlaying geometry of a fluid spacetime. (Because time is explained as effect, not basis of action.) It also goes into why particles are also waves, since without a dimensionless point in time, the particle cannot be completely isolated from its motion. Like fast shutter speed on a camera, it may appear almost motionless, but that is only a function of how it is observed.
I see radiant energy and gravitational mass as opposite sides of the same coin. Further up this thread, I made a comment, "Dark matter might be due to gravity being a consequence of radiation condensing into mass and becoming ever more dense(M=e/c2)." To continue that thought; When we release energy from mass, we get an explosion. So why wouldn't the opposite be true; When energy condenses into mass, there is effectively, an "implosion?" Say we start on the very perimeter of galaxies and have cosmic rays coalescing into interstellar gases, to photons being absorbed by atoms, all the way down into the core of stars, where protons, neutrons, etc, collapse into the heavy metals. The resulting creation of voids, as these energies and structures become ever more dense would be a continuous process, creating enormous galactic vortices, populated by innumerable star clusters, with stellar, planetary objects as an intermediate stage between light and total implosion, resulting in all infalling mass ejected out as jets of cosmic rays, for billions of lightyears.
As for intuition, physicists are not neurologists. Intuition is a function of how our entire body of knowledge responds to a given situation. Intuition for someone living a thousand years ago, vs someone today, or a five year old, a farmer, a doctor, an artist, a scientist, a politician, a preacher, would all be quite different. Most people today intuitively know the earth spins relative to the sun, but up till 500 years ago, the difference between the sun moving across the sky, versus a cloud or bird doing the same, was not completely clear. This idea of physics not being intuitional has been taken to the point of meaning it is not even rational and that is faith, not science. I would also point out the observation of my essay, that time is observed as a sequence of events and by treating it as a measurement, physics only re-enforces this intuitive impression, but the actual physical dynamic is the events emerging from action and thus the events going future to past, rather than the present moving along some apparent vector, from past to future. So we never know what intuitions might still be deeply imbedded in physics.
Dear Vladimir
Thank you for your feedback. So, from your posts I could figure out that you have work out a different interpretation of the physics that may lead to different and new insights, which it sounds good to me. But actually, the theory does not predict unknown phenomena. It seems to me that the interference of particles is already known for many particles even relatively large particles like fullerenes. Actually the phenomenon becomes highly intuitive if we assume that particles travel through the aether as if they where moving in a fluid and, as you show in your picture, the particles perturbed the aether, so, what we see in the screen is the interference of the aether waves produce by the motion of the particle near the slit. It is natural to think that the screen has to be placed relatively close to the slit otherwise the aether would dissipate the waves avoiding to reach the screen. As you can see assuming the aether makes the physics very intuitive and natural. Einstein insisted that a field is a physical reality that requires no bearer. Since then most physicists think that fields require no medium. I disagree with this. Fields are states of a medium, this simplifies enormously the physics. The next step is to get rid of the concept of particle and think of particles as if they were in reality solitons (solitary waves). At once, this eliminates the wave-particle duality. Thus, if "particles" are really waves the slit experiment can be explained very easily and intuitively.
Israel
Dear John
Thanks for you reply. Indeed you have touched very important points. Your assumption that matter may create from an implosion sounds plausible. Unfortunately, I haven't read your essay, there are so many entries that it is impossible to make comments in them as one could wish but I'll do it as soon as I possible.
As for intuition I may have exaggerated, this perhaps gave rise to the impression that I put a lot faith on it. However, one cannot deny that intuition is highly connected with experience. For instance, String theory considers 10 spatial dimensions. This makes the theory to appear incredible even for physicists. In this case intuition and experience are playing an important role judging the acceptance of the theory. The theory appears so abstract, exotic and with so much metaphysical content that instead of attracting followers, it repels them...
Best regards
Israel
[deleted]
Hi Israel,
Funny you should mention, "If you have developed an aether theory then you have to consider that the aether itself is the PRS. The theory I mentioned also argues that everything is fundamentally a wave. "
I define an aether as the set of waves that obey
[math]c = \lambda f[/math]
Then it struck me that this is an absolute reference frame. So 3Gz,0.1m in the absolute frame will be time dilated/Length contracted to some other relative inertial frame of reference. So, uh, I think we agree and I can tell you what the PSR is, in terms of frequency and wavelength.
Hi Jason
I do not know what kind of aether you have in mind. Any new unobservable prediction in your theory?
Israel
[deleted]
Hi Israel,
I picked an aether that would easily satisfy the first and second postulates of relativity. It is an amazing trick that nature is able to make the speed of light the same (c for a vacuum) in all inertial reference frames. Here we are with our clocks and our measuring sticks trying to take an honest measurement of the speed of light, and somehow, the speed of light (speed of photons) is the same for all observers. That's when length contraction and time dilation appear. It looks like something funny is going on, like a scam is being perpetrated. The scam is this: distance and time are measured by nature in such a way that the speed of light is always c. So how does nature pull it off? Well this is only the half of it.
I'm sure you know about the Schrodinger equation; its solution is the wave-function. There are plenty of complicated wave-functions. But when the potential energy is zero, you get quantum waves of the form,
[math]\psi = Ae^{i\omega t}[/math]
It's just an oscillating plane wave at some frequency w=2pi*f. It vaguely looks like the electric (or magnetic) component of electromagnetic radiation,
[math]E(t) = E_0 cos(\omega t)[/math]
I am far less mathematically adept than most others who have submitted essays. But I can spot very subtle patterns. The pattern is this: the laws of physics, in their simplest form, behave like a support system for light, the speed of light and the waviness of light. But light (photons) are not the only things that are wavy. Matter waves/de Broglie waves try to be wavy too. They have a wavelength,
[math]\lambda = \frac{h}{mv}[/math]
I saw a pattern, and I decided not to resist it. I decided to embrace the idea that the ontological foundation of physics was nothing more complicated than a set of aether waves that obey
[math]c = \lambda f[/math]
Basically, everything you can conceive of is made of aether waves that obey c. Everything including leptons, hadrons, bosons, fermions, the quantum vacuum, gravity, time itself and even the space-time continuum. The space-time continuum just this 3D Fourier series of aether waves. For lack of a better word, particles are kinks or knots of a frequency range of aether waves. It doesn't matter if the math of quarks or gluons tries to look different from aether waves. I'll simply argue that aether waves have wavelength and frequency as a primary characteristic, but they have more subtle characteristics that allow for particle behavior.
How can I go wrong with aether waves that are defined to have a wavelength-frequency pair that equal c? If the laws of physics are built upon these waves, then the postulates of SR can never be untrue.
Israel,
You asked: "Any new unobservable prediction in your theory? "
There is one important prediction. Aether waves and light are mutually causal: one causes the other to exist.
Gravity and acceleration fields have a specific aether wave configuration that, in one dimension, looks like a linear frequency chirp. But if you generate a frequency chirp as EM radiation, you will reproduce the aether configuration of a gravity field. If you do that, you will reproduce a very weak version of that gravitational acceleration. If you refine your technique, you can use it as a form of propulsion.
[deleted]
Israel,
Keep in mind that for theoretical physicists, experience is manipulating a lot of abstract symbols. As the old saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In this case, bits of information. When you have a lot of competitive people with the same predilections, it is a classic recipe for getting seriously off track.
Remember that epicycles were quite accurate and could have been made completely accurate, for the very simple reason that were are the center of our perspective of the rest of the universe, so it would be mathematically modelable. The problem arose when they tried to define the physical reality within the context of this model. Yet we still have this belief that math represents some underlaying structure to reality, rather than a best model of it. So today, they still do what the ancient cosmologists did; Whenever observation and theory diverge, figure out what new epicycle/particle/dimension/field is causing it, rather than question the assumptions built into the theory, because for theorists, theory is the reality. Theory is their intuition.