Lessons from failures to achieve what was possible in the twentieth century physics by Vesselin Petkov

Is the vacuum isotropic in the massed sector? Do (metaphoric) left and right shoes falsify the Equivalence Principle? Nobody has ever looked. Physics does not include opposite geometric parity atomic mass distributions as tests. If the vacuum is demonstrably and selectively anisotropic in the massed sector (an empirical left foot): 1) Einstein's elevator has a massed exception, 2) Angular momentum is not conserved (Noether's theorems), 3) BRST invariance uniting the effects of an accelerated inertial frame of reference and the effects of a massive body in perturbational string fails. The whole of physical theory, classical gravitation and quantum mechanics, is reduced to a heuristic given a devastating empirical footnote immune to all prior observations.

The "shoes" are macroscopically and chemically identical, maximally enantiomorphic atomic mass distributions: Single crystals of left- versus right-handed quartz (berlinite and analogues, cinnabar, benzil, tellurium, selenium...) or single crystals of left- versus right-handed glycine gamma-polymorph computationally qualify. The apparatus is an Eotvos balance, http://www.npl.washington.edu/eotwash/experiments/equivalencePrinciple/newWashPendulum.jpg

You need not complain about the stultifying ossification of contemporary physics. You need only look where nobody else dares - breaking the political logjam. Attached glycine3.png is a section of of space group P3(2) gamma-glycine crystal structure as a stereogram, two turns of the threefold left-handed screw axis. Space groupP3(1) is the right-handed mirror image. Glycine packs 127 atoms/nm^3, quartz 79.6 atoms/nm^3.Attachment #1: glycine3.png

Well, well! It is certainly nice to hear someone define and discuss the relevant problems with theoretical physics so candidly and accurately.

No doubt the "confederacy of you-know-whats" will close ranks against you.

Regarding the question you ask at the end of your paper, I have a somewhat radical answer. You can find it by going to the following website and choosing the paper: "The Hidden Meaning Of Planck's Constant".

http://independent.academia.edu/RobertLOldershaw/Papers

Congratulations! Simplex signilum veri.

RLO

www.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw

Vesselin

I agree strongly with your emphasis on philosophy - but philosophy is mainly rhetoric; therefore subjective. Logic is also important and less subjective.

You emphasize the physical reality of the four dimensional continuum and that this was somehow "proven ? " by Minkowski & Mermin. One cannot prove physical reality; one can only observe/measure it. Minkowski can't, and Mermin can't, prove it is 4D. They can express their philosophical preference for a 4D representation.

ALL measurements are in the "NOW". It is impossible to measure Duration (see the winning essay of the previous competition). Measurements of duration are actually measurements of spatial changes of configuration, e.g. the sun was there at that-now, now its here at this-now. We can of course map multiple nows to an extended time if we find that useful mentally, but we cannot observe such a thing.

You write "Unlike Poincare, Minkowski appears to have realized that special relativity, particularly relativity of simultaneity (which IMPLIES the existence of MANY spaces) ..." etc. - my emphasis.

The logic here is faulty. Special Relativity mandates that because of a finite velocity of (electro-magnetic) observation = physical experience, each observer (unless co-located like quantum superpositions) has (a) a different observable part of the same one physical universe, and (b) each observer's measurements of the same events will differ. However SR also mandates that because of the constant speed of e-m all the different measurements can be rationally correlated by the Lorentz transforms so that their is no conflict, i.e. all observers are observing the same set of absolute events = the same space or universe.

So it is OK in SR to assume there is one common space that we all exist in (don't we ? ) - BUT it is not possible to impose one absolute co-ordinate system (preferred observer). SR gets rid of absolute space but not our shared space. That is why he called it a theory of Relativity. Scientifically our measurable experience of the same universe is relative to the observer.

Taking Minkowski's logic for empirical reality is not a philosophic choice I could - reasonably - recommend. That it is very useful mathematically is - rationally - very true.

Dear Anonymous,

You wrote : "ALL measurements are in the NOW." In my understanding exactness of physics allows only to distinguish between past and future. The NOW has no duration. I see notions like today a deliberate and often reasonable blur. So we seem to have problem to understand each other. I called my essay G., G., R. - votes for ultimate realism, and I hope to find others who confirm my attitude.

Dear Vesselin,

The title of your essay evokes the hope you gave examples for failures to achieve practical results like for instance quantum computers and SUSY. Reading your essay, I got the impression you blamed the physicists of a century for they did not consequently enough follow the excitement of Minkowski. Unfortunately Minkowski died soon after his sensational claim, maybe related to it. How would he judge it decades later?

If you will read my essay please do it with care as to avoid mistakes.

What about set theory, I am a German and studied the original papers. Dedekind, Hausdorff, Fraenkel, even Hilbert and indirectly Ebbinghaus admitted the ultimately missing basis. The late Fraenkel restricted his preference for set theory: It is just more exotic, not so boring as the mathematics before. I know that I will lose any support here when I do not unconditionally obey the mandatory belief. So is science, so is life.

Regards, Eckard

The "anonymous" post was mine.

Dear Vesselin,

I would like to comment on one of your main points that

"the views which might prevent physicists who hold them from arriving at new results are those that regard our theories only as good descriptions of the world and that insist on not considering the 'most successful abstractions to be real properties of our world' ".

I believe that the situation is not as straightforward as you suggest. These, as you call them, "unproductive views" are also responsible for moving us forward, because they also allow some researchers who hold them to move on to a new paradigm much easier compared to those who have *convinced* themselves that the paradigm they learned during their formative scientific period is the "real thing" and hence cannot be seriously questioned. Since we are not Gods, we must approach 'the reality' via some formalism which may or may not be the final one.

In other words, it is important to keep in mind that our physical models are as good as the quality of the match between our underlying formalism and the reality.

Incidentally, regarding your "second example", I do not believe that Minkowski (or in general a pseudo-Euclidian) space has much to do with 'reality'. ;─)

I gradually arrived at this point and discussed it in several of my earlier papers (addressing information science perspective) when I realized that the introduction of a negative sign (for time) into the quadratic form measuring the inner product is a quite desperate but still inadequate attempt to address the reality of time. Moreover, such step immediately raises the following important question: If time (- sign) is incommensurable with space (+ signs), what about the commensurability of many other variables? On which basis do we decide on the issue of commensurability?

So, in this sense, the great Poincaré was not quite wrong. ;─)

Thank you All for the comments and please forgive me for being unable to respond so far. I have been struggling to meet two deadlines (during the semester!).

Vesselin Petkov

P.S. In fact, just a quick note: Dear Lev, regarding your "I do not believe that Minkowski (or in general a pseudo-Euclidian) space has much to do with ‘reality’." I hope you will examine the essence of Minkowski's argument in the italicized sentence on p. 3 as I suggested there. Now, a hundredth years after Minkowski we owe him a careful examinations of his arguments.

Dear Vesselin:

There are some good ieas in this paper. On the other hand, there are also some serious category errors, as Terry Padden points out. Not only would I have to say I stand in the same camp with Terry as regards discourse, but you don't have to read my paper (and I hate guys who use the posts as a way to shoehorn in advertising of their work) to understand that Minkowski is just as guilty of the Lorentz error as Lorentz himself was. In this case, it has to do with proper time and the notional measurement of a particle along a world-line where "nothing happens". Minkowski's error (as Julian Barbour pointed out in last year's essay) is that he still tries to derive time and worldlines exogenously. I think if you take a look at what John Baez and Jeffrey Morton are doing with quantum categorification and n-category theory you might find stronger tools for solving some of the problems which have held back progress in quantum field theory and quantum gravity for the last several decades.

Cheers,

Phil

'In this sense, I think, Einstein was right that quantummechanics is essentially incomplete. It is unrealistic to assume that an electron, for example, does not exist between measurements. But if it exists, it is something and we should know what that something is.'

Einstein's problem was that he supposed that objects can have an existence outside, independent of interactions. If, as quantum field theory says, particles are as much the source as the product of their interactions, then we cannot ask how they are 'from themselves', as they have no such independent existence. Though we can ask 'what that something is', we can only answer it by acknowledging that

it has no reality outside the continuously varying interactions it takes part in, which define it, and concentrate on why nature needs its specific properties to be able to create itself.

Dear Vesselin,

Congratulations with your essay. I really liked reading it. It discusses some taboo topics very candidly. I only missed a conclusion at the end.

I do have some problems with your literal interpretation of Minkowski:

Take for instance a car (or rocket in case you want something closer to lightspeed). It is able to accelerate in a straight line. How is that possible with Minkowski's interpretation of time? It should curve. For me that is a falsification of his postulate that the time vector is pointing in a orthogonal imaginary dimension and following Karl Poppers' scientific method his theory should be dropped. Maybe I could pose the point differently: what physical proof do we have that time moves in an orthogonal imaginary dimension?

(Please don't start about wordlines or Pythagoras, I'm just simply talking one dimensional distance, velocity and acceleration vectors here).

Good luck with the contest!

Steven Oostdijk

Dear Dr. Petkov

I read your paper and see that you think space-time being physical reality. According to my and some other researcher space-time is math model only, quantum space itself is timeless. Time is run of clocks in quantum space.

Do we have any experimental data space-time being physical reality ?

yours amrit

Dear Dr. Vesselin Petkov,

I see you are busy with semester deadlines and with answering other messages that precede mine. However, should you find the time, I chose one item from your essay to pose a question. You said:

"Moreover, Einstein himself described the realization that a person falling from the roof of a house does not feel the force of gravity as the happiest though(t) in his life. ... A conceptual analysis of Newton's gravitational theory could and should have revealed, long before Einstein realized it, that a falling body offers no resistance to its acceleration. This means that the body is not subjected to any gravitational force, which would be necessary if the body resisted its fall. Therefore, the falling body moves non-resistantly, by inertia. But how could that be since it accelerates?"

Even during Newton's time, why would anyone expect that a person in free fall should feel the force of gravity? It appears to me that Newton's theory predicts that no falling object should experience any sensation of a force acting on it even while the force of gravity is acting on it. The force of gravity acts evenly on all parts of the object. If there is no compression or other type of physical distortion, then why would anyone feel an effect due to falling freely due to the force of gravity. Thank you.

James

Hi,

I must concurr with the criticism of some of the participants above.

First of all, there is no reason to expect that discoveries of the scale of quantum physics and relativity can be made every 20 years. For the discovery of the experimental method it took some 2000 years.

Second, there has been in the last 30 years or so a more "quiet" progress in many areas of physics - maybe less in particle physics. But there it's very likely because of instrumentation (more and more difficult to get to higher energies) rather than lack of imagination.I don't think "believing" in the reality of virtual states would help this community. Ultimately, what guides theorists is experiment, and if this is not available the problem is not that there are no theories but quite the opposite. (It is possible that this constant progress for instance in solid-state physics would lead to better and better detectors, allowing us to peek deeper in the Universe.)

About the lack of reality of the electron at some times: sounds good, but the problem is that you can choose to detect the electron at any moment or point in space. And it's there where it should be according to the standard theory. So, hard to escape the conclusion that it exists all the time there - even if you don't look. Otherwise one has to admit that the electron knows about our intention of detecting it and it materializes in the right point in space-time, whenever/wherever we do choose to put a detector.

To conclude, if the solution would be that some kind of strong belief in the reality of certain concepts is needed, I am sure we would have say a unified theory by now, simply because out of that many smart stringers around I bet there must be some who believe in the reality of Calabi-Yau manifolds :-).

I will start addressing the critical comments and answering the questions.

Dear Terry,

"One cannot prove physical reality; one can only observe/measure it. Minkowski can't, and Mermin can't, prove it is 4D"

1. Mermin is in the opposite camp.

2. Please read carefully Minkowski's explanation of length contraction given on pp. 3-4 of the essay. It is also explained there that length contraction is impossible if the contracted body is three-dimensional (3D); the worldtube of the body must be a real 4D object in order that length contraction be possible. So experiment does prove the dimensionality of physical objects (length contraction was experimentally tested in the muon experiment in the muon frame; see G. F. R. Ellis and R. M. Williams, Flat and Curved Space Times (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1988) p. 104).

"So it is OK in SR to assume there is one common space that we all exist in (don't we ? )"

I am afraid it is not OK at all. Again, please read Minkowski's own argument given on p. 3 of the essay. The essence of his argument is that one space implies a preferred observer - see Minkowski's quote on p. 3.

"SR gets rid of absolute space but not our shared space."

That is incorrect - see Minkowski's paper if you question the representation of his arguments in my essay.

Vesselin Petkov

Dear Terry,

I am sorry for this follow up. I believed it was evident, but in order to avoid any misunderstanding let me say this as well.

I do not know what you mean by "there is one common space that we all exist in (don't we ? )". However, I hope you do not base this statement on what we perceive, because what we believe we " perceive" as one common space (through the distances between objects) does not constitute even a space - at the moment 'now' we "perceive" a mixture of volumes of spaces corresponding to different past moments of time (the volume of space around the sun we "perceive" now is 8 minutes old - the time it takes light emitted from the sun to reach us).

Space constitutes a class of simultaneous events. That is why, if space were one, there would exist a single class of simultaneous events in contradiction with relativity.

Vesselin Petkov

Dear Eckard,

Thank you for your comments. Concerning:

"The title of your essay evokes the hope you gave examples for failures to achieve practical results like for instance quantum computers and SUSY"

one should ask, I think, more fundamental questions first. For example "What is the quantum object?" And then, and if necessary, questions of the type you mentioned.

Regarding your essay and set theory, I will do my best - I have just started to have some time mostly during the weekends.

Best regards,

Vesselin Petkov

Dear Phil,

Thanks for the comments. I must say I have never heard of Minkowski's error (would you tell me where exactly in his essay Julian Barbour pointed out such an error?).

I do not think Minkowski made any error on spacetime related issues. This is not just my personal opinion - try to analyze the kinematic relativistic effects by assuming that Minkowski did make a mistake about issues involving proper time and worldlines and you will see that those effects would be impossible.

Best,

Vesselin Petkov

Dear Anonymous (who wrote on Oct. 12, 2009 @ 03:01 GMT),

Thank you for your comments with which I, unfortunately, disagree. Here are the reasons. You wrote:

"it has no reality outside the continuously varying interactions it takes part in, which define it".

What about a free electron, for example? Say an electron approaching the double-slit screen in interference experiments with single electrons. The electron is something and we have the right to ask "what is it?"

Even if I agree with you that the electron is in constant interactions, the question is still valid - "What is that thing that interacts?"

The major failure of the 20th century in quantum physics, I think, is not pursuing the answer to the question "What is the quantum object?"

Best regards,

Vesselin Petkov

Dear Vesselin,

If an electron cannot express its charge if there would be no other charge in the universe, then it cannot be charged itself, so a property is something which is shared and communicated between particles. If in a self-creating universe particles have to create each other plus the spacetime to be in, then they are as much the product as the source of their interactions -which is the origin of quantummechanics. If real particles are virtual particles which by alternately borrowing and lending each other the energy they need to exist, force each other to keep reappearing again and again after every disappearance and so oscillate between opposite states, then they preserve each other's properties and at the same time express them as a force between them by exchanging the energy they need to exist.

This means that though an electron certainly can live far from protons, it never is free, isolated from the continuous energy exchange it owes its existence to, so its behaviour always will depend on every object inside its universe, it exchanges energy with, however subtle their influence may be on its behaviour. If we were to isolate it from its interactions, cut off its energy exchange, then we annihilate it. It is because the observer or his probe is usually such a tiny part of the environment which defines the particle, that he assumes it to have an autonomous, interaction-independent existence. However, the idea of an object having such an absolute kind of reality is a religious notion, as it refers to a creator creating it for once and all, provide it with all its properties to happily live ever after, which, besides being far outdated in the age of quantummechanics, for other reasons (Laplace) is a problematic notion. It is because we still cling to the classical idea of particles as some kind of tiny pebbles autonomously acting only as the source of their interactions, their field, why quantummechanics seems so weird -and will remain incomprehensible as long as we do. What an electron is can only be answered by investigating its behaviour, requiring the observer to specify his relation to the particle, the interaction, the field he observes it from, its distance, velocity etcetera. The task of the physicist is to find out why it interacts the way it does, whether he can find some mechanism or evolutionary process which explains its behaviour, its apparent properties. A quantum object, then, can be defined as something which is as much the source as the product of its interactions.