Evolving Time's Arrow

The point is that quantum waves need to evolve by unitary quantum mechanics. Unitarity is preserved with cosmological red shift by expanding space. This is not the case with a nonlinear wave equation.

Cheers LC

John,

One has to study classical mechanics in order to understand quantum mechanical unitarity. I tried to make the point as simply as possible in my FQXi 2008 essay, that volume preserving is energy conserving.

Seriously, if you would please just get a good grasp on the basics, theorists would not seem as wacky as you imagine. Your intuition cannot fill the gaps in knowledge.

Tom

A huge population of unbound planetary-mass objects was predicted in the Astrophysical Journal in 1987 [vol. 322(1), pgs. 34-36]. Pulsar-planets were also later predicted in a published paper.

A discussion of this form of dark matter ,and its detection via microlensing was published in:

http://arxiv.org/ftp/astro-ph/papers/0002/0002363.pdf

[Fractals 10(1), 27-38, 2002]

It is a great pleasure to see this population finally being revealed to us. The stellar-mass MACHOs and the planetary-mass unbound objects discovered via microlensing may constitute the galactic dark matter, and its specific two-peak mass spectrum was predicted definitively almost 25 years ago. It has been a long wait, but better late than never.

Robert L. Oldershaw

http://www3.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw

Discrete Scale Relativity; Fractal Cosmology

Tom,

I agree I'm an idiot on the subject, but the gaps I keep having problems with are those which keep popping up between theory and observation, that get filled in with increasingly bizarre ideas, supposedly supported by ever more complex math.

While you keep telling me I have no idea what I'm talking about, you seem to have no recognition that it is a fairly classic social phenomena for belief systems not to question core principles when reality does not cooperate, but to blame the problems on everything else, rather than reconsider those core assumptions.

I don't doubt that reality is far more strange than our basic, normal human perception thinks of it as, but it does seem as though physics is also susceptible to making up answers when it really doesn't know, then not being able to let go of those fabrications as they become ever more imbedded in the network of knowledge.

Exactly.

John,

Physics is a science, not a "belief system." When ideas don't work (e.g., luminiferous ether, phlogiston, planetary atomic model, etc.) they are thrown out, modified or ignored.

The mathematics that supports leading edge theories seems complicated to you because one has to be grounded in fundamental physics, as I have emphasized, to see that the connection is complete and the extensions are reasonable. Whether these particular techniques and methods are the best ways to deal with the problems is an entirely different question with which researchers wrestle every day.

You do your intellect a great disservice, however, to simply dismiss the solutions as "fabrications" of a society subset that has some mysterious power to determine the course of physics knowledge for the whole population.

One cannot effectively question "core principles" that one hasn't studied. You have the capacity -- it's beyond me why you don't use it.

Tom

LC,

When I heard lessons on probability about 50 years ago, I was told without explanation that ergodicity is a hypothesis. Well, unitarity is also considered essential to a lot of theory. However if used in physics, is it really more than a hypothesis?

There are crowds of those who do not trust in Cantor's and Einstein's admittedly paradoxical ideas. Maybe, their criticism is even largely correct. Nonetheless I wonder why almost nobody thoroughly deals with pre-runners like Bolzano, Weierstrass, Dedekind, Voigt, Lorentz, Poincaré, etc., and I got not aware of someone who put the unitarity of the world in question.

I was educated from engineers who were convinced that the world is not a closed system. If I understood you correctly, then inflation is required as to maintain the perhaps arbitrarily chosen hypothesis of an unitary (closed) world?

Eckard

Tom Ray,

Being left-handed, I nonetheless consider myself more even-handed as compared with what you offered "an even-handed treatment of special relativity experimental results".

While I did not at all intended any criticism of SR until recently, I am increasingly sure that the FQXi is a necessary complement to experimental physics because the latter alone seems to be unable to solve most foundational questions.

Unfortunately, the rest of my lifetime will not suffice as to clarify the matter.

At least, the textbook by Bohm I have at hands is among the three recommended by Roberts. What would such a cheeky guy like Einstein say in front of so many "evidence"? Didn't he ridicule the pamphlet "100 arguments (or professors?, I am sorry for my shaky memory) against Einstein" by arguing that they altogether are void and cannot replace a single compelling conter-argument?

With such cheekiness I may also easily invert the biased meaning of what I quote here from Roberts:

"Experimenter's bias is a phenomenon caused by the inability of human participants in an experiment to remain completely objective, in which the human experimenter directly influences the experiment's outcome based upon his or her personal desires or expectations." and "Unpopular or unexpected results may not be published."

I would like to add something essential to the first sentence: I learned not just form Nimtz's consistently measured superluminal signals that the community is obviously not in position or not willing to realize theoretical flaws in the used methods, and this problem gets increasingly worse with procedures and tools that can less and less be checked for plausibility.

While Roberts did not mention Van Flandern he could not deny that Van Flandern was correct: "At this time there are no direct tests of length contraction."

A lot of references are difficult to attribute to the core question. Others were bewildering, e.g., I quote: "Marinov, Progr. in Physics, 1 (2007), pg 31; (posthum. reprint from "Deutscher Physik" 1992). This is a series of experiments using mechanically rotating mirrors and apertures that claim to measure a local anisotropy in the one-way speed of light. Marinov thinks his rotating mirrors and apertures provide an "absolute synchronization" which can be used to measure the one-way speed of light; this is not so, and is a major conceptual error in his design: they merely provide synchronization in the rest frame of his lab." Was Marinov an idiot?

A second example, I quote:"Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) results have been a puzzle for several years, as they appear to be inconsistent with other experiments. Just recently they were directly contradicted by the Mini-BooNE results from Fermilab (May 2007, no reference yet)."

Interesting to me was the following comment by Roberts: "Lorentz Invariance is the technical term for the statement that SR is valid. Any violation of CPT invariance implies a violation of Lorentz invariance; theories without Lorentz invariance need not have CPT invariance."

In all, I did not yet find any convincing evidence that could refute the numerous serious arguments against the alleged logical consistency of SR. This does not imply that possibly GR is correct at least to some extent. It is not my business to investigate whether or not a re-installation of absolute simultaneity will already provide a way out of notorious trouble. Nonetheless I will appreciate any genuine support for my strict distinction between the usual abstract and infinite to both sides notion of time and what I consider its traceable unilateral basis.

Eckard Blumschein

Tom,

Thank you for the compliment. I am a bit of the product of my environment. Lots of emphasis on work and not so much on education. I respect the total commitment it takes to become truly professional at many areas of expertise, but I also recognize that it distorts one's perspective. I grew up around horsepeople and that's the major subject of discussion. Occasionally I can get a conversation going about economics, especially since the recession, but that's about as deep as it gets. My interest in physics is due to the understanding of the laws and processes governing everything. So for me, physics is profoundly intuitional. I know that sounds like heresy, but I really don't have problems with viewing reality as fundamentally illusionary and that even coming to some degree of understanding is itself something of a contradiction, since knowledge is necessarily reductionistic. To the extent I live my life as a flash of light, I'm living it as I understand it. Thus it's more an intuitive juggling act, than a course of singular study.

"Physics is a science, not a "belief system." When ideas don't work (e.g., luminiferous ether, phlogiston, planetary atomic model, etc.) they are thrown out, modified or ignored."

Yet you don't think that various of today's theories might also be scales that will eventually fall from our eyes? The problem is that many of them are interconnected in ways that dropping one will raise problems for others and few in the theoretical community want to start pulling that string. Yet it seems that many with strong professional interests in these ideas(computers, electrical engineering, etc.) do think there are serious conceptual problems, but make do, without making a huge issue of it.

It does bear some resemblance to a priesthood, with a laity that is not quite as committed, but still need and like the community.

Unitarity just means that any operator which transforms a quantum state Uψ = ψ' is such that its transpose in a matrix representation and complex conjugate, denoted by † is such that U^† = U^{-1} and for an operator H which is the generator of U, U = exp(iH) then

U^† = exp(iH^†) = U^{-1} = exp(-iH)

And so H^† = H. The theory of quantum mechanics based on this has been experimentally tested thousands of times. So unitarity is more than a hypothesis.

Ergodic theory is more hypothetical because it is based on a certain interpretation of statistic. This is a form of frequentism.

Cheers LC

John,

You wrote, "Yet you don't think that various of today's theories might also be scales that will eventually fall from our eyes?"

It doesn't matter what I (or anyone) thinks. I can't emphasize enough that personal belief plays no role in science. I cited previously the example of phlogiston as a once widely accepted physical principle that we now know is superfluous. Where chemists once thought that an unknown substance (phlogiston) was necessary to make fire, because they couldn't understand combustion otherwise, after Lavoisier demonstrated that combustion is simply a process of rapid oxidation, phlogiston ceased to be an issue. It hardly serves science to look back and say "How stupid could one have been to accept such an idea in the first place?" when patient researchers were producing results step by step regardless of their innocence of the correct solution. And it's only the crankiest of accusers who would say before or after Lavoisier's discovery, "I told you that you were wasting your time on that idea," based on nothing more than some vague intuition, and having invested no intellectual toil and sweat in trying to produce the correct result themselves.

Scientists make conjectures and offer refutations based on the state of knowledge as it is, not on what they personally believe. The overwhelming proliferation of information today has made it all but impossible for an individual to hold all the knowledge, so debates are more intricate and sophisticated than they ever were. Nevertheless, facts and theorems still rule, and a counterexample is worth a thousand words.

Tom

John,

Apropos what Tom is talking about regarding how science has progressed over the course of history, in case you've not already read Thomas S. Kuhn's book 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' it's a wonderful read, imo. Puts some of the history of science in an interesting and useful light. Paradigms play an important role in shaping the way we think about the things we observe empirically, and Kuhn's book addresses the issue of paradigm change. Fascinating stuff.

In our discussions here at FQXi I've attempted to focus on the fundamental paradigms we're using when we talk about slippery topics such as "time." I continue to believe that this focus on paradigms is a potentially fruitful avenue to pursue. Paradigms are necessary to permit the creation of scientific theories, but paradigms also can tend to create tunnel vision in the way we think about the things we observe. It's something to be mindful of. Anyway, I can't recommend Kuhn's book too highly. I've read it several times and will undoubtedly revisit it for a refresher.

jcns

I have to second TH Ray's comment. A theoretical physicist might get some idea about things and work hard to develop a hypothesis. Even though that person might really hope their work is found in nature there is no believing. This is not about wanting nature to uphold one's hopes, for we should not equivocate truth with hope.

Cheers LC

While I cannot see from Stachel's presentation that Einstein gave up constant speed of light, the late Einstein did indeed explicitly utter that the NOW worried him seriously.

As indicated by Stachel, several physicists already looked for ways out of some problems by elaborating the idea of discrete spacetime. Such approach seemed to be promising because it could be declared a legacy of the idol.

I wonder if someone was courageous enough as to create a non-tense-less physics which will presumably indeed render a lot of "contemporary physics" a "castle in the air".

Eckard

jcns,

There was a book written in the 70's called Paradigm Shift, that was one of the first books on physics I read and it was influential to my thinking. I tried looking it up, but having forgot the author and it likely being out of print, it didn't show up. The term gets lots of use these days. I tried writing a blog when they first became common, and titled it Peeling Paradigms. There definitely seems to be something of a cyclical nature to the process, as old paradigms age and congeal, which creates the need and space for fresh paradigms to rise.

Unfortunately I'm working two jobs lately and the time to read much of anything has become quite limited.

Tom and Lawrence,

"I cited previously the example of phlogiston as a once widely accepted physical principle that we now know is superfluous."

So spacetime as a "physically real model" is irrefutable. And blocktime and wormholes and all the other fantastical ideas springing from it.

"This is not about wanting nature to uphold one's hopes, for we should not equivocate truth with hope."

TH,

I was recently trying to work out what maths means for the universe by opposition to what it means to us. For example, if I have $5 in the bank and $5 in my pocket and "have" a total of $10. This is about adding some knowledge. But if we look at planets, they increase or add mass by getting matter closer to their surface. So, I figure that the natural equivalent to addition is grouping or getting things closer together. Subtraction would be the reverse, again distancing two things apart. But what happens is we increase the distance between all the parts of a group? We dilute its concentration and that would be a "natural" division. A multiplication would amount to a general volume reduction or concentration.

How could one make some sense of this kind of maths? First, it would seem that natural maths is intrinsically tied to geometry. In our minds we may make calculations, but in the real world of real stuff ... addition of things that exists requires a place for those things to exist before we get to add them.

Secondly, my earlier exploration was meant to explain why nanometre size light photons have "more energy" than kilometre long radio photon... In that context, it was explained that both photons have the same "energy", the Planck. Their real difference was their power. The nanometre photon just delivers more quickly its Planck than the radio photon. In other words, in a universe where time passing is the basic canvas, how quickly something happen does matters. So, a grouping could be associated with an increase of power of the whole group... ?? Power of what? Power of existence? Maybe (for whatever it means). Because the background is passing time, existence (matter existing) is not state! It is an actual dynamic process that can therefore be associated with a time rate and a kind of power of existence, of sort. ...

Strangely, while the universe is expanding (in division), everything existing in it is in a grouping mode (multiplication a.k.a. universal gravitation.)

Just having fun!

Marcel,

LC,

You argued: "The theory of quantum mechanics based on this has been experimentally tested thousands of times. So unitarity is more than a hypothesis."

While QM is a rather confirmed theory, its application to cosmic scales might be a rather wild guess, at least to me. Is it not a bit far fetched to absolutely exclude the possibility that CMB radiation can be explained without cosmic inflation on this basis?

Eckard

Eckard,

The irony is that the math is likely far more comprehensible for a non-inflationary cosmology. Einstein originally proposed a Cosmological Constant to maintain a stable universe and expansion has shown to resemble a CC. So it would seem "space" expands between galaxies proportional to the rate it collapses within them and this is not coincidence, but two sides of the same process. Yet it seems the case has been closed and cannot be reopened, because this generation of theorists were raised to this view.

The CMB exists without inflation. It is predicted by the standard FLRW spacetime model of the big bang. What inflation does indicate is how the CMB is smooth with small anisotropy. It also tells us how different regions of the CMB originated from the same initial conditions.

The quantum aspect of inflation is the vacuum energy stretched out space enormously, about 63 efolds. The vacuum energy just defines an energy density

T_{00} = Λg_{00} = (8πG/c^2)ρ,

for ρ the energy density of the vacuum. So the vacuum energy provides the energy for the dynamics of space, where that dynamics is purely classical.

Cheers LC