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Robert,

"The correct answer to the inadequate question you pose above is: BOTH are right. You assume there is a contradiction, but the question is so vague that I do not think there is a contradiction. One is free to use the 4-d modelling or a motion-based approach, depending on how you set up the problem."

True and it's utterly irrelevant to 99% of the people on this planet whether the sun revolves around the earth, or the earth rotates relative to the sun. It's just those pesky astronomers worrying over anomalies in the motion of stars. The reason we have a device, called a clock, with hands to denote the present that go left to right across the top, is because the sun goes east to west in the northern hemisphere. Just as the reality is that it is the earth rotating west to east, it is the units of time, marked on the face of the face of the clock, which go counterclockwise, relative to the hands. Of course such little fudge factors as multi worlds and block time to explain how time functions in that 4-d model are no problem to modern physics, given all the other fantastical features of nature that have been discovered. I am bowing to your wisdom.

JM,

If you view the Earth from above the North pole, it is rotating counterclockwise.

If you view the Earth from above the South pole, it is rotating clockwise.

Right?

In simple direct words, what exactly is the problem that you perceive?

RLO

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RO,

As objective as we like to think we are, the basis of knowledge is anthropocentric. Civilization did largely develop in the northern hemisphere. If you consider the history of the evolution of the clock, from the sundial on, it originates as a representation of the sun traveling across the sky. Had civilization developed in the southern hemisphere, it's likely the hands would go the other way.

The process of of thinking and accumulating knowledge is inherently reductionistic, in that we take a large quantity of information and deduce patterns from it. Consider how this applies to the calendar; The rotation of the earth which produces days, the phases of the moon that are the basis of months and the revolution of the earth around the sun that produces years have no correlation to one another, yet we have pruned them down to fit one another, to the extent months have little bearing on the cycles of the moon as well as having to add a day every four years. So we have taken all these complex motions and reduced them to a single narrative dimension.

In fact, Einstein isn't generally credited with first relating space to time. Some accounts give it to Edgar Allen Poe, as first arguing space and duration are one and the same. Poetic justice, given his ability to distill narrative from an extremely chaotic life and disturbed mind.

There are also natives of South America who view the past as in front of the observer and the future as behind. This is actually more objective than our understanding of traveling from past to future and equating it spatially, as the event occurs before it is observed.

In your studies of nature, you may want to consider adding a little history and anthropology.

From COSMOCOFFEE Blog, 10/26/2009

The following paper is about to be published:

The Proton As A Kerr-Newman Black Hole

Electronic Journal of Theoretical Physics, 6(22), 167−170, 30 Oct 2009.

Available soon at: http://ejtp.com/latest.html

A first draft of the paper can be found at www.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw if you click on "New Developments" and choose #2 "The Proton...".

Unfortunately the first draft does not report the retrodiction of the proton's mass and radius using the full Kerr-Newman treatment, but the paper does. Also available in "Technical Notes", #3 "Modeling Subatimic..."

I would welcome comments/questions relating to the scientific aspects of this paper.

Important note: Emotion has a bad influence on objective reasoning. This is part of the human condition, and in other respects emotion plays an important and highly beneficial role [like avoiding injury and procreating]. However, when a scientist wants to understand nature, he/she turns the emotion dial way down. Claro que si, eh?

Anger is rarely [never?] appropriate; it usually backfires and harms the source [and others] even more than the intended target. Understanding is harder but more appropriate and more likely to lead to intelligent responses.

Yours in the new paradigm,

RLO

www.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw

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Robert,

Unfortunately emotion is the basis of the intellect, not adjacent to it. The primordial binary code of good and bad, the attraction to the beneficial and repulsion of the detrimental, is objectified as yes and no. The on/off switch of the mind. In this hyper-obsessive world, where everyone lives in their shell of expertise, so as not to be overwhelmed by the incredible vastness of reality, it can be difficult to find those willing to engage, because the tendency is to look for support for one's position, rather than risk becoming ungrounded.

Now I'm obviously not an expert on black holes, Kerr-Newman, or otherwise, nor on protons, but my default response to any observation is to hold it up to a mirror and consider the opposite. If the proton is a black hole, does that make the electron a white hole?

JM,

If you use Discrete Scale Relativity in oonjunction with the Kerr-Newman solution of the Einstein-Maxwell equations, you can find out the answer to this question for yourself. "White holes" is a very unimaginative guess!

If the above presents difficulties, i.e., you have not a clue what I am talking about, you can try the folowing.

(1) Go to www.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw

(2) Click on "Technical Notes"

(3) Click on #3 "Modelling Subatomic Particles..."

(4) Read carefully.

(5) Ask questions when confused.

(6) If this simple exercise is a bust, maybe it would be best to focus on horses.

Yours in the new paradigm,

RLO

www.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw

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Robert,

You're right, it's way beyond my level. It's just that the idea of protons as black holes brought to mind this line from Carver Mead's American Spectator interview:

http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/People/CarverMead.htm

"Because point particles are assumed to occupy no space, they have to be accompanied by infinite charge density, infinite mass density, infinite energy density. Then these infinities get removed once more by something called "renormalization." It's all completely crazy.. But our physics community has been hammering away at it for decades. Einstein called it Ptolemaic epicycles all over again."

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Is it true that string theorists wear slippers with bells on the toes?

Dear Anon,

I am so glad you asked.

Yes, they do, and they also have bells on their floppy pointed hats.

However, only the Grand Twits are allowed to juggle the Glass Beads.

The sycophants have to sit around them in a circle and clap.

Otherwise they are branded "cranks" and ostracised.

Good observing Anon,

RLO

JM,

Carver Mead is right.

There are horrendous problems that are largely being ignored.

1. Vacuum Energy Density crisis

2. Hierarchy Problem

3. Renormalization epicycles

4. No ID for the Dark Matter, or Dark Energy [which is virtually the whole universe]

5. Loads of thoroughly untestable theory.

Sigh,

RLO

www.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw

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Robert,

The essence of your theory seems to be that in the scalability of the universe, there are three primary crests, the atom, the stellar system and the galaxy. Your projection would seem to be that since the same properties are at work, the attributes of one can be applied to the others, so since black holes are at the center of galaxies, possibly something similar is at the heart of atoms. What if it's not black holes at the center of galaxies? Consider the following sections from that interview:

"Central to Mead's rescue project are a series of discoveries inconsistent with the prevailing conceptions of quantum mechanics. One was the laser. As late as 1956, Bohr and Von Neumann, the paragons of quantum theory, arrived at the Columbia laboratories of Charles Townes, who was in the process of describing his invention. With the transistor, the laser is one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century. Designed into every CD player and long distance telephone connection, lasers today are manufactured by the billions. At the heart of laser action is perfect alignment of the crests and troughs of myriad waves of light. Their location and momentum must be theoretically knowable. But this violates the holiest canon of Copenhagen theory: Heisenberg Uncertainty. Bohr and Von Neumann proved to be true believers in Heisenberg's rule. Both denied that the laser was possible. When Townes showed them one in operation, they retreated artfully."

"The electrons were real, the voltages were real, the phase of the sine-wave was real, the current was real. These were real things. They were just as real as the water going down through the pipes. You listen to the technology, and you know that these things are totally real, and totally intuitive.

But they're also waves, right? Then what are they waving in?

It's interesting, isn't it? That has hung people up ever since the time of Clerk Maxwell, and it's the missing piece of intuition that we need to develop in young people. The electron isn't the disturbance of something else. It is its own thing. The electron is the thing that's wiggling, and the wave is the electron. It is its own medium. You don't need something for it to be in, because if you did it would be buffeted about and all messed up. So the only pure way to have a wave is for it to be its own medium. The electron isn't something that has a fixed physical shape. Waves propagate outwards, and they can be large or small. That's what waves do.

So how big is an electron?

It expands to fit the container it's in. That may be a positive charge that's attracting it--a hydrogen atom--or the walls of a conductor. A piece of wire is a container for electrons. They simply fill out the piece of wire. That's what all waves do. If you try to gather them into a smaller space, the energy level goes up. That's what these Copenhagen guys call the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. But there's nothing uncertain about it. It's just a property of waves. Confine them, and you have more wavelengths in a given space, and that means a higher frequency and higher energy. But a quantum wave also tends to go to the state of lowest energy, so it will expand as long as you let it. You can make an electron that's ten feet across, there's no problem with that. It's its own medium, right? And it gets to be less and less dense as you let it expand. People regularly do experiments with neutrons that are a foot across.

A ten-foot electron! Amazing

It could be a mile. The electrons in my superconducting magnet are that long.

A mile-long electron! That alters our picture of the world--most people's minds think about atoms as tiny solar systems.

Right, that's what I was brought up on-this little grain of something. Now it's true that if you take a proton and you put it together with an electron, you get something that we call a hydrogen atom. But what that is, in fact, is a self-consistent solution of the two waves interacting with each other. They want to be close together because one's positive and the other is negative, and when they get closer that makes the energy lower. But if they get too close they wiggle too much and that makes the energy higher. So there's a place where they are just right, and that's what determines the size of the hydrogen atom. And that optimum is a self-consistent solution of the Schrodinger equation."

So what if what is going on in the center of galaxies isn't some monopole black hole into some other dimension, but effectively a laser that is synchronizing the waves of all the energy falling into them and shooting it out as those electron jets out the poles of the galaxies? What would that imply for a model of the atom?

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JM,

(1) My research indicates that the strange things at the centers of galaxies are singularities.

(2) The 1st half of the portion of the interview that you reprint is interesting, but the discussion rapidly goes downhill at that point. Which only goes to show that the true nature of the elecromagnetic field is still not understood.

I make my own effort at understanding EM in the "Technical Notes" section of the website [#6 "EM and the SSCP]. This is presented at a very simplistic level. Give it a try.

RLO

www.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw

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Robert,

Low on time to read at the moment, but a question.

What is a singularity?

Another question; In geometry, would zero be the point at the center of the graph, or would it be blank space?

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Basically what I'm suggesting is that any point would constitute something, even just a location, so it would be one, not zero and to get to zero, it would have to vanish, leaving only blank space. Now a singularity would be such a point of vanishing, but rather than some hole into another dimension, that which it consists is projected back out across space, as when all the energy falling into the black hole becomes a single wave and is projected as a beam back out into space. So yes, there would be a singularity, but what is its effect?

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RO,

My math skills are not good enough. I don't even like reading the Racing Form that much. Tactile is about where I'm at. Basic space, time and temperature.

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The first question I want to ask,regarding this article, is "are there Strings?".If one cannot prove their existence then,how are they going to build theories on it? Much less to talk about their relation to Cosmology.Such an attempt could be like building 'house of cards'.Remember the fate of GUTs and SUSYs.Then why so much of money spent on conferences of string theories across the globe? Are present day physicists in the days of Aristotle?

B N Sreenath

Good Morning Readers!

And it is a bright and shining day today!

I think we all want to give Fluffy [CosmoCoffee Blog] a big hand for his dogged efforts. Heckuva job Fluffy.

Be sure to see the Oct. 28 issue of Nature: classical GR vindicated. Spin foams and other quantum gravity fantasies falsified.

On the subject of gravitation, here is a nice example of a particle physicist using his anti-Midas touch to turn gold into poop:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0910/0910.5167v1.pdf .

Does the Perimeter Insitute have anyone who is interested in anything besides Glass Bead Games, like maybe, reality?

Reading of the Day: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0708/0708.3501.pdf

Omigod, can that possibly be right? Oh Ya!

Yours in the new paradigm,

RLO

www.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw

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B N Sreenath,

Your question has two components to it. The first is whether consequences of string theory, and M-theory, are detectable. The answer here is yes, there are empirical tests which can be applied here. The next question is whether strings can be directly observed. In principle yes, but in practice this is extremely difficult. The scale of observation is extremely small, and requires enormous energy to directly probe.

A rather recent test was made of string theory, indirectly though. The Fermi satellite has found that very different wave lengths of light traveled at the same light speed from a 7.3 billion years distant gamma ray burst event. This boosts up a prediction of string theory and knocks down a loop quantum gravity prediction. String theory indicates that violent quantum fluctuations of the spacetime vacuum are valenced from the exterior world by string world sheets. Loop quantum gravity predicts these violent fluctuations or "quantum foam" break Lorentz symmetry near the Planck length. This would produce subtle changes in light speed for electromagnetic radiation with different wavelengths. Due to their different wavelengths they effectively sample the quantum foam with different strengths.

Cheers LC

Last night I was reading [2nd or 3rd time] Ivars Ekeland's excellent book "The Best Of All Possible Worlds" and the revolutionary changes wrought by nonlinear dynamical systems theory.

I was moved once again the ask the following impertinent question:

Is Perfect Reversibility/Integrability A Myth?

Did Poincare discover this revolutionary idea already during the 1892−1899 period when modern chaos theory was founded in his "The New Methods of Celestial Mechanics"?

Are the examples of "reversibility" that physicists frequently cite actually one of two basic varieties: (1) artificial idealizations that do not exist in the real world [nature], or (2) systems that are briefly maintained in periodic states, but whose full, and unmanipulated, range of behavior includes periodic, semi-periodic, quasi-static and fully chaotic states.

Bottom line: Are reversible/integrable "systems" very limited artificial idealizations of true systems found in nature, which are nonlinear dynamical systems?

What are the best examples of real world systems that appear to be ideally reversible/integrable?

-----------------------------------------

On a related note, it seems to me that the SubStandard paradigm is tottering around like an embarrassing drunk. It's going down, and the sooner the better.

The ingredients of the new paradigm are: (1) Classical EM, (2) Classical GR, (3) Discrete Scale Relativity, and (4) Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Theory. These ingredients cannot be combined randomly or with force. They must be carefully integrated by those who study nature and have developed the intuition to do so.

Yours in the new paradigm,

RLO

www.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw