Dear Colin Walker,

Excellent work on your essay. I am glad to read "Black holes and an expanding universe stand out as absurd". I completely agree about black holes but don't have the mathematical wizardry to challenge those who decree the "authorized version" of physics (quoting Jim Baggott in his excellent book, "Farewell to Reality: How Fairytale Physics Betrays the Search for Scientific Truth"). I'm not sure I fully understand it, but thanks for bringing up the idea of tired light, which I was not familiar with. I may want to reference it and your essay in my research, but I humbly disagree about expansion of the universe. I think I have a good model, called the space-time-motion model, (posted at http://vixra.org/abs/1402.0045), that represents space and time as mathematical, conformal projections of motion onto 2 dimensions (also mathematical conceptual models). As such, space is potential that is being transformed into actual units of energy, which give rise to expansion of consciousness. You may enjoy it if you get a chance to read it.

I went a different route for this essay and wrote what I consider a more entertaining twist - sort of a blend of Knights of the Round Table and Lord of the Rings (See Doctors of the Ring - The Power of Merlin the Mathematician to Transform Chaos into Consciousness). It is based on my space-time-motion model, which I invite you to read and let me know what you think (email to stjohntheodore@gmail.com). Of course, I also invite you to read and rate Doctors of the Ring if you get the chance.

Respectfully,

Ted St. John

    Dear Basudeba,

    Thanks for your comment and suggestions. The link between mathematics and physics is sustained by experimental and observational data. My approach to the essay topic was to deal with a specific example, the interpretation of supernova data.

    These data are commonly considered to be evidence of accelerating expansion. I did notice considerable scatter in the luminosity-redshift data shown in ref 6 which might be due to some of the effects you discuss. An examination of outliers (misfit data) could be interesting.

    With respect, if I was to associate something with a "universal background structure" it would not be the CMB, but accumulated zero-point energy (Hh/2) associated with the photon.

    Best regards

    Colin

    -

    Dear Ted,

    Thanks for giving it a read and commenting. At least we agree that black holes are dubious. My attempt in the Endnotes at exposing a flaw in general relativity is fairly primitive, but hopefully someone more skilled than I would be able to incorporate an improvement which avoids black holes.

    By the way, your essay really was entertaining, and a welcome relief.

    Best regards,

    Colin

    11 days later

    Dear Colin,

    I just want to bring to your attention that the energy ratio (hH /me c^2), where me is mass of the electron, = (Compton wavelength of the electron / radius of the universe)= (G me mp / h c). This may be found useful. May be you are already aware of these relations.

    Best regards,

    Hasmukh K. Tank

      Dear Hasmukh,

      A formula relating the Hubble constant to well-known physical constants would be interesting, but something is wrong. Here is a printout showing that the quantities (in MKS units) are far from equal.

      h: 6.626070e-34 .... c: 2.997925e+08 .... G: 6.674230e-11 .... H: 2.280000e-18 .... me: 9.110000e-31 .... mp: 1.670000e-27

      H*h/me/c/c: 1.845147e-38

      G*me*mp/h/c: 5.111629e-43

      They are both dimensionless, so it is not a matter of units. I took mp to be proton mass. Inverse of Hubble constant corresponds to about 14 billion years.

      I hope this helps. Best to you,

      Colin

      Good work Colin!

      You make a very unconventional claim sound quite plausible. Of course; I've heard some of the stories firsthand, or already know about the evidence. I got to hear Paul Steinhardt give the 'Inflationary Cosmology on Trial' lecture at FFP11 in Paris, half a year before his article appeared in Scientific American. I heard Prof. Assis speak at CCC-2 in Port Angeles - as well as Paul Marmet and others who explained a bit about quantum tired light. But you make a good case for Hh being a fundamental constant of sorts.

      I have read that one proposed mechanism involves the production of virtual particle pairs possessing unequal velocity, as a quantum relativistic correction for local gravity fields. Perhaps there is a mechanism where this occurs quasi periodically, as an effect of traversing great distances. This would respect the coherency or monotonicity of quantum mechanical systems (a single frequency), but allow for the degradation of energy over time.

      Regards,

      Jonathan

        I wanted to add this..

        I wrote a song lyric after CCC-2 about the Big Bang. Here's the first verse:

        There was a man named Hubble, who said he had his doubts,

        but all the other scientists said 'you've got it figured out.'

        A universe expanding; that's the way it's gotta be.

        At least that is the picture that we think we want to see.

        Have Fun!

        Jonathan

        Dear Colin,

        Thank you very much for correcting me; i am very poor in numerical work.

        Would you please veryfy the third ratio: whether the energy ratio is correct? i.e. whether (hH /me c^2), where me is mass of the electron, = (Compton wavelength of the electron / radius of the universe) ? By taking: Radius of the universe R = c / Hubble Constant.

        With my Best Regards,

        Hasmukh K. Tank

          Dear Hasmukh,

          This one is fine numerically (ratios are the same) but you would get equal ratios for any mass instead of electron mass. It is a tricky business looking for hidden relations among the physical constants.

          Best wishes,

          Colin

          Thanks Gary. That is an interesting observation. I don't have an application for a quaternion derivative yet, but I can see it would be a requirement for your Calculus 2.0.

          Best wishes

          Colin

          Thanks Jonathan! And thanks again for pointing out Paul Steinhardt's lecture in your 2013 essay blog. Without that link, it would not have occurred to me that a second-order failure of general relativity would also undermine inflation. It was about that time when I made the plot of supernova models versus representative data and concluded tired light could not be ruled out, and then finding consistency with observed time dilation of supernova light curves.

          The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio program "Quirks and Quarks" recently featured particle physicist Jon Butterworth talking about the search for the Higgs boson and how the search now is for the smallest particle. If matter is composed of ever smaller turtles, what is the smallest turtle? If we follow the redshift energy, it could be a pair of turtles whose energy adds up to Hh, each perhaps with energy Hh/2. The smallest particle would be the ultimate wave. Beyond that, there is not much more I can guess about the mechanism.

          Maybe someday you can work Fritz Zwicky and Walther Nernst into the song. Zwicky was one of the first to propose energy loss. Anyway, let's see how it goes.

          Best wishes,

          Colin

          Dear Colin,

          Your essay is excellent, innovative and original. I was not involved in explaining the redshift, because it is explained, from you and others, without any expansion of the universe. On irrational explanations, of course I did not waste my time. In your essay also has perhaps the most useful information from all the others. So it is not surprising that there are errors that I would like to draw your attention, in good faith.

          In (6) and (7) the value of Planck's not good which a misprint is probably.

          Beyond that is the sentence "The mass of spherical universe ..." which for me is greater mistake than to say that the Earth is flat.

          In (8) is the result of c^2/2G which means that in natural units (c = 1, G = 1), matching an unnatural value ½.

          In my essay is just 1. I also have no need for the Hubble parameter, but I use the time cycle of the universe 4.30849E Tu =10^17 sec. This way I get the mentioned "four hundred octaves" value 2^401.976959236=1.01653490569 * 10^121, not like you close to 10^120. I call 2*pi times bigger value: the number of Planck's oscillators.

          I would like especially, if you write a comment on my essay.

          Sorry for poor translation.

          Regards,

          Branko

            Dear Branko,

            Thank you for your encouraging comment. I tend to agree with your assessment of expansion, but it is important to try to point out the difficulties.

            I am glad that you noticed the discrepancy with eqs (6)-(8). That was not a misprint but a clumsy attempt on my part to show the symmetry of scale by redefining the Planck scale as the geometric mean of the largest and smallest mass assuming they were known. Unfortunately, I could not arrive at the usual expressions for Planck units by assuming a mass of the universe given by a steady state cosmological model. As well, I wanted (8) to be the same as for Einstein's original cosmology, but I do not know whether these models are compatible or applicable.

            Taking the inverse of your cycle time as Hubble parameter, I see you get 2*pi times the number of oscillators, and mass of the universe twice what I get. That would make each oscillator have energy Hh/(2*pi) instead of Hh/2 which is what the zero-point energy would be in a quantum harmonic oscillator. If the 2*pi was missing in your eq (16) for the number of oscillators, your Planck oscillator would have energy Hh. This would seem more reasonable to me than either of the above, since it would be the smallest energy transition.

            You have an interesting way of addressing the symmetry of scale, among other things. Please give me a day or two to comment on your essay.

            Best regards,

            Colin

            Dear Colin,

            You write:

            If the 2*pi was missing in your eq (16) for the number of oscillators, your Planck oscillator would have energy Hh. This would seem more reasonable to me than either of the above, since it would be the smallest energy transition.

            I say:

            Then it is quantum mechanical oscillator.

            Regards,

            Branko

            Dear Colin,

            Your views on the photon and the normal distribution are interesting. Require a complete separate article. The rest of the text, refer to my place. Best regards,

            Branko

            12 days later

            Dear Mr. Walker

            I thought that your engrossing essay was exceptionally well written and I do hope that it fares well in the competition.

            I think Newton was wrong about abstract gravity; Einstein was wrong about abstract space/time, and Hawking was wrong about the explosive capability of NOTHING.

            All I ask is that you give my essay WHY THE REAL UNIVERSE IS NOT MATHEMATICAL a fair reading and that you allow me to answer any objections you may leave in my comment box about it.

            Joe Fisher

            Dear Colin,

            You have written a thought-provoking essay. Here are my comments:

            "Black holes and an expanding universe stand out as absurd."

            i think having such a strong assertion at the beginning of your paper may turn off some readers from reading the rest, which I think would unfortunate because you present the subject matter sensibly. I think it would have been better to soften the statement a little, for isn't possible that the apparent absurdity of these notions merely reflects our incomplete understanding?

            "The objection is founded on the classical notion of causality." Thank you for pointing this out, it implies that this would be considered a very strong objection, since causality is one of the sacred principles of physics. If I wanted to address this objection I would probably try to do more than quote a couple of (albeit well-respected) physicists and philosophers of science and appeal to a quasi-philosophical principle to support my argument. Could you, for example, have given examples of other situations in which are analogical to the one you discuss? Is there any remotely analogous situation in condensed matter physics, for example?

            "Scattering would be detectable as smearing of images"

            Wouldn't scattering also affect the speed of light? I'm surprised I could not find a discussion of this, for this might potentially suggest a way of falsifying the idea. If you can derive values for the fluctuations in the speed of light, you could compare it to some recent experimental results. See, for instance

            http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v11/n4/full/nphys3270.html

            (Although they were not testing the tired light hypothesis it seems their experiment might be relevant to it)

            "Readers who are willing to reconsider their faith in the

            basis of inflationary cosmology may suspect they have been tricked, seduced..."

            Well, based on what you wrote it seems a commitment to the tired light hypothesis entails more than just abandoning inflationary cosmology, namely a commitment at least to:

            1. A particular interpretation of the complementarity principle which I'm not sure is mainstream

            2. A particular process for matter creation for which I am uncertain to what degree it is supported by established physics

            3. A particular mechanism for circumventing the second law of thermodynamics.

            So, I would say that for a mainstream physicist that is quite a lot to swallow. If you really believe this, then finding more evidence and stronger evidence along all these fronts would be helpful to your cause.

            "It can be shown that a reformulation of potential energy using special

            relativity provides an exponential potential energy function that can be appropriately

            normalized to the rest energy of a test object, thus setting a limit to the

            energy available from changing elevation in the gravitational field of a massive

            object".

            I don't remember if we had ever talked about it, but there is a paper I wrote a while back and revised more recently about the relation between gravitational and kinetic Energy you might find interesting:

            http://xxx.tau.ac.il/abs/1003.4824

            All in all, you offer an intriguing alternative to the way we currently frame our cosmological observations in terms of Dark energy. But to be very frank, I'm afraid that more will be needed to sway people toward this paradigm.

            Best wishes,

            Armin

              Dear Armin,

              Thanks for your thoughtful comments, links and questions. And for your frank assessment.

              Yes, the word "absurd" might be a bit strong. The context is "reductio ad absurdum" but the use of the word in logic does not translate well to physics. If saying that black holes and inflation are absurd stops people from reading my essay then I have probably done them a favour by saving their time. Attitudes have hardened since Kip Thorne's book on black holes came out in 1994 subtitled "Einstein's outrageous legacy". Not so outrageous these days, it seems. Considering accelerating expansion requires unlimited energy, there is no cosmology which is not absurd.

              Complementarity is part of quantum mechanics that physicists have admitted to being unable to understand. This aspect of quantum mechanics apparently presents an exception to the demand for causality. Complementarity at astronomical scale is the only pill that needs to be swallowed for quantum tired light, which is after all exponential decay of light. Commitments to matter creation and balancing entropy are not needed if the universe ends in heat death, which is to me a far less interesting possibility than Nernst's vision of an ageless universe.

              Physics is reactionary in the sense that new theories supplant old ones as a reaction to new evidence. I believe a paradigm shift in cosmology ought to come about from the failure of a second order test of general relativity in an experiment such as the proposed LATOR mission. The evidence from supernova presented in the essay are merely consistent with quantum tired light, and do not demonstrate a failure of the present theory.

              I think deflection of light does not involve a change in light speed. I expect that the speed of light is presumed to be unaltered. Under this assumption, arrival times would vary because of differing path lengths. The variability of arrival times might be interpreted as variability in the speed of light. The speed of light is supposed to change in a gravitational field as in the Shapiro experiment. Making an observational test is an excellent idea.

              I just read your paper on gravitational and kinetic energy, and appreciated the straightforward treatment. The section on gravitons was particularly interesting. I can't help wondering if gravitons might involve the quantum energy Hh.

              Best regards,

              Colin