Null Physics anyone? [Archive] - Page 2

ben m

31st March 2008, 12:12 PM

Talk is cheap and accomplishments speak volumes.

If you think talk is cheap, then online message boards are clearly not the place for you. Anonymity is a system with both virtues and faults; in my opinion, its usual faults have not been on display in this thread. You are welcome to disagree, but the general attitude of "I don't converse with anyone until I have looked them in the eye" isn't going to be productive. You are also welcome to go start a thread on a non-anonymous message board somewhere.

You're reading a conversation about the ads, the web page, the excerpts. Witt himself participated in the conversation. Imagine that you just walked into a bar, and twenty people you've never met are sitting around with a copy of "Discover" and access to Witt's web page and to Physical Review Letters. They're talking about the ad. Some of them sound like they know what they're talking about, and are saying things you can confirm for yourself. Some of them are saying things you know to be incorrect. You're free to make your own judgments---so and so seems to have a point, so and so keeps refusing to cite sources, so and so is evading questions. I'm sure you make such judgements all the time, although perhaps not on life-or-death questions like "will I get into a plane with this person"---but this isn't one of those questions. You're also welcome to chime in---with criticism, counterarguments, requests for clarification, whatever.

But you're not free to smash a bottle on the bar and demand that the conversation conform to your standards. :)
As an amateur I can not understand your arguments.
Anyway. There's no substitute for actually knowing physics when it comes to amateur assessment of physics. If you're inclined to trust credentials, though, your task is easy: most credentialed physicists agree on the big stuff. Anyone saying that the following things are "wrong" is going to be in explicit disagreement (and know, and admit, that they're in disagreement) with the vast majority of Ph.Ds: quantum mechanics, special relativity, general relativity, the Big Bang, "standard model" particle physics, "standard model" lambda-CDM cosmology. If you're going to run on credentials alone, then you should be even quicker to dismiss Witt than we are, because he only has a BSEE, and the mainstream physics that Witt rails against obviously have lots of Ph.Ds. The "accomplishments" of mainstream physics should speak volumes, if that's the way you're judging.

So, you're going to have to clarify your goals a bit. You're looking for a credentialed Ph.D. physicist to tell you, on the record, whether a BSEE software CEO has solved all of physics or not. I think Witt himself can give you an honest answer to that: he'll probably say, "No, obviously no mainstream physicists have adopted my paradigm yet, that's why I haven't been able to publish a paper."

Of course, if you want to be an amateur physicist and still be open to the idea of finding theories in defiance of mainstream physicists ... well, then you're in the same bind as "amateur stock pickers" and "amateur art buyers" and "amateur currency traders". You'll be bombarded by 1000 mutually-contradictory theories, then try to pick the right one with fairly little information and analysis to guide you. Full-time professional brokers/buyers/traders will be bombarded by the same theories, but they've got a huge amount of experience with the analysis. Go ahead and make your picks, but your lack of information is going to make you prone to mistakes. You might get lucky, but you don't sound like the kind of person who wants to rely on luck.

ben m

31st March 2008, 12:18 PM

double post

skepticalone

31st March 2008, 03:21 PM

Third Eye Open

31st March 2008, 03:28 PM

Wow. I feel like I'm in a high school pissing contest, yet no one has the balls to forward a single credential, even privately. Major lack of Cred.
And I thought the punk devs at MacRumours had issues.
I won't be back to bother you guys, you have bigger issues to deal with.
I'll be sure to pass the good word on Randi's site here in SoCal.

You're the only one doing any pissing so far. And who are you that anyone
should want to waste their time trying to convince you of their credentials?

As you said, you are already a skeptic, and would probably be skeptical of any credentials shown anyway.

Paul

31st March 2008, 04:32 PM

Wow. I feel like I'm in a high school pissing contest, yet no one has the balls to forward a single credential, even privately.Isn't it terrible when physicists won't play 'look at the size of my diploma' with a pilot.

I won't be back to bother you guys,Bye :w2:

I'll be sure to pass the good word on Randi's site here in SoCal.If you behave the same way as you did here, I'm sure they'll take it as a recommendation.

crashman

31st March 2008, 09:13 PM

Discovery Changes Understanding of Neutrons

Since 1947, physicists have thought the neutron, an electrically neutral elementary particle and a primary component of an atom, actually carries a positive charge at its center and an offsetting negative charge at its outer edge.

But new research shows the setup is more complex.

The neutron has been found to have a negative charge both in its inner core and its outer edge, with a positive charge sandwiched in between to make the particle electrically neutral.

"Nobody realized this was the case," said Gerald A. Miller, a University of Washington physicist. "It is significant because it is a clear fact of nature that we didn't know before. Now we know it."

The discovery changes scientific understanding of how neutrons interact with negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons. Specifically, it has implications for understanding the strong force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature (the others are the weak force, electromagnetism and the weakest of allâ€”gravity).

The strong force binds atomic nuclei together, which makes it possible for atoms, the building blocks of all matter, to assemble into molecules.

"We have to understand exactly how the strong force works, because it is the strongest force we know in the universe," Miller said.

The findings are based on data collected at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Va., the Bates Linear Accelerator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Mainz Microtron at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany.

The three labs examine various aspects of the properties and behavior of subatomic particles, and Miller studied data they collected about neutrons. His analysis was published online Sept. 13 in Physical Review Letters. The work was funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Since the analysis is based on data gathered from direct observations, the picture could change even more as more data are collected, Miller said.

"A particle can be electrically neutral and still have properties related to charge. We've known for a long time that the neutron has those properties, but now we understand them more clearly," he said.

ben m

31st March 2008, 09:42 PM

zosima

1st April 2008, 12:02 PM

Here's a quote from a review that Witt recently added to his website:
"It makes 1000% more sense than anything I've ever been taught about these topics in the past..."
lol....
The review in general are hilarious and not one from a person with a doctorate in any marginally relevant field... but never fear, the guy who I quoted above apparently got a 3.5 GPA when he got his BS, in engineering....

zosima

1st April 2008, 12:25 PM

Oh ya, in addition to adding that review, he has also updated his journal and added two faqs where he takes a few potshots at jref(not explicitly...but...).

The fact that he is irked enough to edit responses to jref into his website lends credence to the supposition that there have been a few sock puppets here.

Amongst other things he notes that his fantastically expensive add campaign has been getting him some sales...I really hope he's exaggerating there is enough ignorance in the world without this guy paying to increase it. When you really think about it this guy really is much more menacing than the run-of-the-mill crackpot that just has a cable modem and a prescription to thorazine.

roSSman

2nd April 2008, 12:09 PM

In his on-line "Author's Journal," Witt writes:

I'm not sure how to explain the explosive growth of this book

Hmmm.

Here's a guy who's unraveled the mysteries of the universe. He's has sufficient IQ for that. But after most deliberately and carefully orchestrating a multi-million dollar advertising campaign, directly targeted at book sales, he's mystified that some (evidently significant) quantity has sold.

I've heard that a genuis can be brilliant in one area, while dumb-ass stupid in another.

Can this be Witt?

Seriously, it's interesting that Witt cites the number of countries in which his book has (allegedly) sold, while denying us knowledge of any raw numbers. If sales were truly brisk, one has to believe, he'd be intent on citing the latter?

When I first looked at Witt's website a few months back, I don't think it yet contained the following:

Null Physics is derived from the concept that our entire universe is the internal structure of nothingness. In other words, physical reality is an intricate, four-dimensional geometric equation that adds to zero because it exists within zero. There is no beginning or end to our universe because there is no beginning or end to nothingness. Reality is composed of space and curvatures of space (energy), both of which are composed of geometric points, which are the physical representation of nothingness. In short, there is no difference between a universe whose sum is zero and a universe that exists as a formulation of zero.

It's hard to imagine a more nonsensical set of assertions. For expert or layman, the above should be sufficient to convince Witt's work has the same worth as the universe he describes. In short, its worth quotient is "an equation that adds to zero."

ben m

2nd April 2008, 01:01 PM

On indicator of how well his ad campaign works is ... this thread. According to the front page, it got over 28,000 views, making it the fourth most-viewed thread on the whole forum. I suspect that's a product of Witt and his amazing ad budget. (Thanks, Terry!)

That's kind of a nice statement about money and ideas on the Internet. $1M buys a lot of first glances at something dumb, but authentic good sense (even via simple media like geeks chatting on the message board of an educational nonprofit) can still find its way into the light (http://www.google.com/search?q=Terence+Witt). It doesn't always, but it can. We've made it just a little bit harder for bad ideas to masquerade as good.

Hermine

3rd April 2008, 10:04 PM

I've always believed that in the beginning there was "nothing", as even in "nothingness" there is balance and believe that the whole business of life is about balance, about finding the right balance.

I haven't read his book but on the site in Excerpts Chapter 15 he writes:

"The lumetic decay rate of any celestial object's prior luminous output will eventually balance its current luminous output."

Coming from a primal perspective (my plan P6) the more early pain and repression an individual holds, the less balanced (physically, mentally, socially etc) the individual is likely to be and energy is likely to come out in unhealthy ways. By the same token, the less early pain and repression in the system the more balanced the individual is likely to be and energy comes out in healthier ways.

This coming from a "one theory which explains everything" perspective.

zosima

10th April 2008, 07:32 PM

Hermine

13th April 2008, 01:48 AM

Zosima - you heard me!

What is it that you don't understand?

That decay rate=early pain?

And to understand the concept of early repressed pain, you may like to check out and explore Dr Arthur Janov's Primal Centre website.

Good Luck

zosima

13th April 2008, 03:42 AM

That decay rate=early pain?

Wha?
Why?
Uh?
:hb:

roSSman

14th April 2008, 09:48 AM

Perhaps I can help you, Zosima.

Hermine is probably a very nice person. However, based on his/her comments, it's evident he/she is not living in quite the same world as you and me.

I think everyone else on this thread just ignored Hermine, which was likely the best we could do.

No offense toward you is intended, Hermine. It's simply that the concepts you're embracing are of a type that likely everyone else here would refer to as "mysticism." This is not a bunch that has any interest in that, or even sympathy for it. There are indeed folks who like to combine talk about physics with mystical ideas, but you're in the wrong thread for that.

zosima

14th April 2008, 04:02 PM

Anaxes

14th April 2008, 08:01 PM

Greetings from newbie. During the last two days, I followed this thread; it was exceedingly addictive. I followed 25-30% (I hope to get to really understand QED before I die). When I finally got caught up, it was at post 275--I was almost rolling on the floor. Got about 60% through a math major (nearly 40 years ago)--any suggestions for review and easy path into Feynmanland? Better path for me is cognitive psychology and epistemology--may try threading in that direction as time passes. Many thanks

blobru

15th April 2008, 06:03 AM

A-way back on page 2, terrywitt responded to the standard criticism of tired light I'd posted; then ben_m debunked Witt's response:

... The next thing to account for is the loss of energy. Photons lose about half of their energy every ~10 billion years. This means that the universe’s entire legacy luminous output is halved every ~10 billion years. This is a prodigious energy loss. Where do you suppose it goes? Microwaves. Deep space photons, when exposed to the expansion of dv/dx, emit microwaves. Since the microwaves are emitted parallel to the photon’s trajectory, energy and momentum are conserved. ...... Aha, the decay photons are collinear with the source photons? That means that the microwave "decay" photons must point back to their sources. In other words, you're not predicting a microwave background, you're predicting that all high-redshift objects are microwave point sources. This is experimentally not true. You're predicting that higher-redshift sources should *always* have higher microwave-to-primary-light ratios. This is also experimentally not true. ...

So with higher redshifts we simply don't find the extra microwaves Witt's theory for photon decay requires.

The problem for Witt is those darned collinear microwaves from the photon's decay pointing back to the red-shifted object.

I notice there's now a "reply" from Witt that tries to fudge the collinear microwave gap (from his website's faq):
If photons lose energy in intergalactic redshift, where does this energy go?

Since the universe is not expanding, the energy lost by photons through intergalactic redshift has to go somewhere. The universe's primary luminosity is the optical band (UV-red), and when these photons are redshifted they release microwaves directly into the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Although these microwaves are initially colinear with their source photons (in order to conserve energy and momentum) they are quickly (by astronomical standards, at least) scattered by the next link in what is referred to in Our Undiscovered Universe as the cosmic fusion cycle. The CMB's power spectrum is consistent with this scattering mechanism, but there is far more direct evidence of this process, and it is presented in detail in Part IV of Our Undiscovered Universe. [added bolding]

What is the CMB "scattering mechanism"? Could it erase the photon-decay microwaves? Witt says the scattering is quick, but only by astronomical standards. So shouldn't we still observe unscattered microwaves pointing back to the red-shift source (assuming a microwave’s frequency is dependent on how ‘decayed’ the emitting photon is, shouldn't red-shift objects still have a sort of microwave signature: the farther away the source, the more red-shift, the more photon decay, the longer the microwavelength...)?

Etc. Likely a lot of other problems with it that are over my head. Interesting to see this indirect response to those earlier posts in Witt's faq; thought I'd pass it along.

zosima

15th April 2008, 02:18 PM

What is the CMB "scattering mechanism"? Could it erase the photon-decay microwaves? Witt says the scattering is quick, but only by astronomical standards. So shouldn't we still observe unscattered microwaves pointing back to the red-shift source (assuming a microwave’s frequency is dependent on how ‘decayed’ the emitting photon is, shouldn't red-shift objects still have a sort of microwave signature: the farther away the source, the more red-shift, the more photon decay, the longer the microwavelength...)?

Etc. Likely a lot of other problems with it that are over my head. Interesting to see this indirect response to those earlier posts in Witt's faq; thought I'd pass it along.

Ya, Witt is saying "Buy my book and I'll show you how my improbable theory magically explains this evidence." Who knows what its mechanism is? He claims something about the "Cosmic Fusion Cycle" explaining CMB. This is just obfuscation. Why wouldn't he explain this in his FAQ too? If he wants to get the word out on his theory he doesn't do himself any favors by keeping his "magical mechanism" secret. So the fact that he chooses not to share it indicates either he's a snake-oil salesman, trying to profit off his silly ideas, or that not even he is confident that his "magical mechanism" will stand up to scrutiny.

The bottom line is that the COBE results are some of the strongest results in the history of science. COBE matches almost perfectly the prediction of a single event blackbody emission, emitted evenly from everywhere. The evidence matches both the predicted power spectrum and the predicted directional anisotropy.

If CMB were emitted from the light of stars, which in turn are in varying directions and at varying distances, then the CMB spectrum would, at best, match a many event blackbody emission and would show anisotropy that is consistent with the direction of cosmic radiation sources.

Your point about red-shift is great too. Does light red-shift and lumetic decay? Why doesn't the CMB lumetic decay? How can we even separate this hypothetical decay mechanism from the well measured and well understood doppler shift mechanism? Why do we need both?

There are just too many questions, too many inconsistencies, just too much duct tape holding Witt's theory together. It isn't worth anyone's time or the purportedly expensive paper upon which it is printed. On the other hand, if Witt is willing to donate a lot of his cash to a university so that they can do real research, then I think they are smart to repay him with a pittance in legitimacy.

ben m

15th April 2008, 06:44 PM

Although these microwaves are initially colinear with their source photons (in order to conserve energy and momentum) they are quickly (by astronomical standards, at least) scattered by the next link in what is referred to in Our Undiscovered Universe as the cosmic fusion cycle.

The strange thing is that, in Witt's actual book excerpt (ch. 15) he explicitly says that light decays in a way that loses energy---that's how he wants to avoid Olbers' Paradox. Does this make sense? Is a lucid explanation forthcoming? Do pigs fly?

zosima

15th April 2008, 07:33 PM

The strange thing is that, in Witt's actual book excerpt (ch. 15) he explicitly says that light decays in a way that loses energy---that's how he wants to avoid Olbers' Paradox. Does this make sense? Is a lucid explanation forthcoming? Do pigs fly?

Ya, seriously, and somehow stars recycle the energy lost via decay....its gibberish.
If he had half a tick of integrity he would post his book online. He obviously has the resources and then he could really get his idea out to many more people. He claims the money from the book sales go to spread null physics but the only expense for null physics is the expense of publishing his book. Its not like he's funding null physics experiments or anything. Anyway its not like online publication would eat into his sales of paperweights, err...books, the people who would read online are probably the people who would be disinclined to buy the book, especially since it is recommended by no one who is qualified to recommend it.

zosima

17th April 2008, 02:05 AM

I thought people might be interested that Witt has published a couple of white papers:
http://www.nullphysics.com/menu_whitepapers.cfm?menustate=whitepapers&pgtitle=White%20Papers

In the second of the two he tries to explain his tired light theory. Apparently there is an invisible gravity field that exactly imitates expansion. I think insofar as it is a piece of duct tape slapped on to his theory it seems to explain, at least at a glance, why things at greater distance might appear to be moving with respect to us, but not be....It was nice to be weird, 'cause I was curious how he was gonna talk himself out of his hole, but...

Just off the top of my head I can think of a couple things it doesn't explain. The lack of observable gravitational field for one. It doesn't explain CMB temperature or anisotropy. It doesn't explain the apparent acceleration of more distant objects. It doesn't explain the coincident age of the CMB and the oldest stars.

It's not the worst woo I've seen, he certainly tries hard, but ultimately, it doesn't work. I hope everyone has as much fun with it as I did.

:)

Hermine

20th April 2008, 05:52 AM

Zosima, for the white papers, thank you.

BTW feel free to NOT read my stuff if that is your wish.

Blobru asks what is the CMB “scattering mechanism”?

Some information on primal – from “Prisoners of Pain” p10

“Primal pain is felt when the system experiences some kind of trauma. Primal pain is an overload – more information than the system can integrate. It is not simply a psychological reaction but literally a transmission of energy.”

P13 “If a Pain in early childhood is felt in its full intensity when it happens, it will not become an unconscious force, and there will be no neurosis. But when there is too much pain, the child is rendered mercilessly unconscious. The mercy has a price. Pain is repressed, but it remains within the child’s system precisely because it was too great to be experienced, resolved, and understood. The Pain now takes on a life of its own, out of awareness, exerting a continuous force. While it remains unfelt it takes an endless toll. While repression saves, it also begins to destroy.”

P17 “ When we block Pain, we do not block its effects. We block only the conscious experience of it. The effects of blocked pain are expressed in the form of energy. By analogy, each trauma is very much like the “big bang” origin of the universe in which the energy from the original explosion still reverberates through the cosmos. The energy of the original traumas – and they are electrical storms – also permanently reverberate through the human biologic system.

Energy is an electrochemical force which can be measured. It is not mystical, not an élan, or an id. It derives from specific events which have had an explosive effect on the organism. An explosive effect which, now contained, continues to emanate from specific stored early experiences. The reverberating energy will be found decades later in musculature as well as in the brain. Both show increased electrical activity.”

Key words: energy from early experiences is stored, continues to emanate and reverberates through the whole system.

CMB is the imprint

Blobru writes: “Could it erase the photon decay…… So should we still observe unscattered microwaves pointing back to the red-shift source (assuming a microwave frequency is dependant on how “decayed” the emitting photon is, shouldn’t redshift objects still have a sort of microwave signature: the farther away the source, the more red-shift, the more photon decay, the larger the microwavelength…)?”

Redshift, cosmological constant, CMB, black matter…….are all connected, no?

This from “Astronomy – Collector’s edition” (Jan 16 2007)

Dark Energy

“ One of the strongest arguments in favour of string theory’s landscape relates to the energy of empty space – the vacuum energy or “dark energy”. The standard explanation for this energy is that it maintains a single, unwavering value throughout space – thus becoming what Einstein called the cosmological constant.

The problem is that physicists don’t know how to calculate the cosmological constant from first principles, the hallmark of a robust theory…….

The answer may come from combining the string-theory landscape, which shows how the cosmological constant can vary, with the “anthropic principle”. The latter suggests the cosmological constant may be variable like the weather – something that changes from place to place in the universe, rather than a true constant of nature.

If a broad range of values for the constant is possible, it’s not surprising we live in a universe with a small cosmological constant, one where stars and planets can exist. In the same way, it’s not surprising we live on Earth, rather than on Venus or Pluto, where we’d either roast or freeze.”

Terence Witt – Paper 2

Lumetic Decay – Intergalactic Redshift is caused by the Universal Gravitational Field

“This effectively eliminates the matter, neutrinos and radiation in intergalactic space, leaving only space and a weak universal gravitational field as possible redshift agent.

A transformative photon experience must be facilitated by an external agent and the only weak mechanism able to act over billions of light years of neutral space is gravity.”

My point: A WEAK gravitational field is responsible for creating WEAK tired light. Why WEAK, if not from some kind of trauma, like the Big Bang? What happens in places where there is less trauma, where there’s balance between WEAK and STRONG? (see PT and see mag. Article)

Remember, we are of the universe, the universe is of us. What we observe in us we must observe out there.

Paper 1 – Einstein’s Non-Physical Geometry.

Terence Witt writes: “ The General Theory does not contain a single questionable or unreasonable assertion, and it results in a spectacularly accurate portrayal of gravitational interaction. But it also fails to show us the source of the fields it describes. It can never access this information because it is isolated from deep reality by its own postulate. Gravitational phenomenon are an indirect consequence of the underlying physical geometry, they do not define this geometry.”

In my plan ( P6 which obviously has been removed) I wrote: All visible matter first of all is made up of electrons, protons, neutrons etc along with their positive and negative charges (there is a neatly balanced package of these) which combined with weak and strong forces, gives you gravity.

zosima

22nd April 2008, 11:25 AM

@Hermine
I said this after your first post. This stuff needs to go in another thread. If you want to talk about this, start a new thread that explains your theory. Otherwise I'm not going to read what you say, I'm just going to mock you. If you post it in another thread, then I'll read what you have to say. I'm not going to promise I won't mock you then either, but at least I won't apply contempt prior to investigation.
So, please, stop spamming out this thread and make a new thread.

Hermine

23rd April 2008, 06:32 AM

zosima

24th April 2008, 01:27 AM

Hi Zosima, I appreciate the honesty and acknowledge your point of view, but I also have mine.

About starting a new thread, I’m not interested but more to the point I wouldn’t have a clue what to do with one. As for my theory, I don’t really want to talk about it or necessarily have anyone else talk about it, I’m only interested in presenting and comparing what I’m reading on here (which is very important to me) with what I’ve come up with (in fact it’s more for my own benefit than anyone else’s).

I’m not equipped to carry out a debate in the way you people have been doing, I don’t have the expertise, I only “see” into these things from a primal perspective.

Having said that, I feel there’s plenty in my post that is relevant to the topic, leaving aside my theory and the primal bits. For eg I asked “Redshift, cosmological constant, CMB, black matter…. are all connected, no?”

Then there’s my quote from the magazine on the cosmological constant, I’d be interested in hearing views on that one. I believe it’s relevant to the discussion in more ways than one, for eg it also links back to Blobru’s query about scattered, unscattered microwaves pointing back to the red-shift source etc.

So there you are, I’m not begging to stay on here btw, that’s just how it is, your point of view as opposed to mine.

Well I see this primal stuff as complete woo. I honestly don't see how its related to anything.

As to your questions on physics, I don't think they have anything to do with this thread's topic. If you don't want to talk about your theory and you want to ask questions about physics, then post those in a new thread. Although I'd recommend just looking this stuff up online and perhaps even learning some basic physics that doesn't involve primal theory and isn't from Terrence Witt or new scientist.

I don't mean to rude, but if you don't even understand the simple stuff in physics then you won't grasp the more complex issues that you're asking about. Plus its really the least you can do to demonstrate that you have an honest and genuine interest in understanding these topics.

Hermine

24th April 2008, 04:49 AM

Zosima, thanks once again for your honesty and I guess that's the end of that!

thubbathubba

12th May 2008, 01:09 AM

I've done it!

After years of lonely research, solitary contemplation, inumerable false-starts, dead-ends, and blind-alleys, I have finally reduced the origin of our universe into one single, simple, comprehensive theory. My theory is unassailable in its logic, irreducible in its expression; it is perfect.

Here it is: "Nothing Cannot Exist."

OK. It just came to me in the shower about twenty minutes ago. I may need some help with the math.

phlogiston

13th May 2008, 06:38 PM

Like many I was drawn to this excellent forum out of curiosity provoked by the null physics ads that are apparently in every even vaguely science-oriented publication. Curiosity led to google and google led straight to JREF. Thanks Terry Witt.

However, it is not the questions of physics, pro or con, that interest me. I am not qualified to evaluate them. Since the standard model seems to satisfy a lot of smart people, and since its application has led to most of what we enjoy, and most of what we dread as well in the modern world, it's good enough for me.

I was drawn to Terry's claim that "Null Physics tells us why the universe exists, how the universe exists, and why it is the way it is. The mystery of our existence has beaten scientists and philosophers for so long that they are utterly convinced that reality's underpinnings are beyond human comprehension." It's the 'why' part that gets me.

I'm always interested in such speculations, but not used to paying for them. Usually they come unbidden and for free; sometimes you'd even pay not to get them. I plowed through all these posts (thanks, guys - educational and entertaining) in hopes of finding someone who actually had read the book and would tell me why, according to Mr. Witt, the universe exists. What is his null metaphysics?

Is there anyone out there who has actually read the book, even through gritted teeth, and can tell me that. I'd like to know, but I'm unlikely to buy the book until it shows up on a table at Goodwill.

joe90

14th May 2008, 11:17 PM

The de Sitter spacetime - towards our universe is apparently approaching asymptotically - can be cast in terms of a static metric. See for example the arxiv paper 0704.3265.
Hence, at least asymptotically, the notion of expanding spacetime is, by itself, empty of physical content, being a coordinate-dependent description (i.e. peculiar to the Robertson-Walker system) and fungible via a coordinate transformation with a static universe.

In the latter, cosmological redshift is explained as due to work done by light as it propagates in a static isotropic potential that is the same for all co-moving - 'fundamental' - observers. One is free to call this effect 'tired light' if one wishes. No new physics is implied here.

I do not know the extent to which this overlaps with Terry Witt's own view of cosmology. But it should serve as a reminder that due to the general coordinate invariance of GR many alternative but equally viable (albeit coordinate-dependent) 'explanations' for the same observed phenomenon are possible, each being 'internally consistent', i.e., within its own particular coordinate system.

sol invictus

15th May 2008, 06:49 AM

In the latter, cosmological redshift is explained as due to work done by light as it propagates in a static isotropic potential that is the same for all co-moving - 'fundamental' - observers. One is free to call this effect 'tired light' if one wishes. No new physics is implied here.

It's not at all like tired light. Photons moving away from the origin of the coordinates you are talking about blueshift - they gain energy, because they are moving down the slope of the potential. In tired light theories all photons lose energy over time; here instead nothing is time dependent, and the gain or loss of energy is only a function of the direction of motion.

As for your larger point, de Sitter space is maximally symmetric, which means you can choose many different sets of coordinates equally naturally - static, expanding, even contracting. But the universe we live in is not like that, and will only approximate it at very late times when the density of matter and stars has gone to zero. In our universe now there is a preferred coordinate system defined by the matter, and that coordinate system is expanding.

joe90

15th May 2008, 12:50 PM

It's not at all like tired light. Photons moving away from the origin of the coordinates you are talking about blueshift - they gain energy, because they are moving down the slope of the potential.

Not if you choose the sign of the potential incorrectly. In de Sitter spacetime written in static coordinates (i.e. with a static metric) obviously you must choose the sign of the potential (actually, the coefficient of the r^2 term in g_{tt} and g_{rr}) to match observation. In doing so, the photons red-shift as they propagate. Look at it this way: There can be no observable consequences of a coordinate change, hence the static reformulation is mandated to give the same predictions.

As for your larger point, de Sitter space is maximally symmetric, which means you can choose many different sets of coordinates equally naturally - static, expanding, even contracting.

Coordinate freedom in GR has nothing to do with a particular spacetime such as de Sitter. One has the freedom to choose alternative coordinates regardless of whether or not the spacetime is maximally symmetric.

But the universe we live in is not like that, and will only approximate it at very late times when the density of matter and stars has gone to zero.

It is true that the de Sitter is a perfect match only when the vacuum term completely dominates the Friedmann equation (compared to matter and radiation). However, considered from the point of view of Robertson Walker coordinates, the universe is observed to be expanding exponentially to a fair degree of accuracy (q_0 ~ -1), so we are already in the vacuum dominated phase of the expansion. And this is exactly the characteristic of the Sitter spacetime which therefore permits characterization in terms of a static metric.

I do not want to make a dispute over how close is close (to the asymptotic behavior). The point is that to some degree - depending on your definition of closeness - the universe can be characterized as both expanding exponentially (in traditional Robertson-Walker coordinates) AND (simultaneously) static (in static de Sitter coordinates).

And I wanted to make the more general point: 'cosmological expansion' is not always a physical statement, since it is coordinate dependent.

In our universe now there is a preferred coordinate system defined by the matter, and that coordinate system is expanding.

The distribution of matter and the presence of the cosmic microwave background establishes a 'preferred coordinate system' in the sense of special relativity only. It does not establish a preferred coordinate system from the perspective of GR. There remain an infinite number of equally viable coordinate systems in GR available to describe observational cosmology, regardless of the presence of matter and CMB, and regardless of whether or not the universe is in a de Sitter phase.

sol invictus

15th May 2008, 09:04 PM

Not if you choose the sign of the potential incorrectly.

What?

In de Sitter spacetime written in static coordinates (i.e. with a static metric) obviously you must choose the sign of the potential (actually, the coefficient of the r^2 term in g_{tt} and g_{rr}) to match observation.

That coefficient is the Hubble constant squared. If you choose it to be positive, you are in de Sitter. If you choose it to be negative, you are in anti de Sitter. In neither case does light behave as you claim.

In doing so, the photons red-shift as they propagate.

No, that's false, as I just explained. Do you want me to prove it?

Look at it this way: There can be no observable consequences of a coordinate change, hence the static reformulation is mandated to give the same predictions.

Sure - but the predictions are not what you seem to think they are.

Coordinate freedom in GR has nothing to do with a particular spacetime such as de Sitter. One has the freedom to choose alternative coordinates regardless of whether or not the spacetime is maximally symmetric.

Obviously, yes. That doesn't conflict with what I said. Try reading it again.

And I wanted to make the more general point: 'cosmological expansion' is not always a physical statement, since it is coordinate dependent.

That's true, but it's not at all like tired light.

The distribution of matter and the presence of the cosmic microwave background establishes a 'preferred coordinate system' in the sense of special relativity only. It does not establish a preferred coordinate system from the perspective of GR. There remain an infinite number of equally viable coordinate systems in GR available to describe observational cosmology, regardless of the presence of matter and CMB, and regardless of whether or not the universe is in a de Sitter phase.

You're wrong. While it's true that one can choose whatever bone-headed coordinates one insists on, in an FRW cosmology (with the exception of exact de Sitter, anti de Sitter, and Minkowski) there is a preferred choice defined by the symmetries of the spacetime. There is only one choice of time slicing which coincides with those symmetries, and it is not static (again, except in certain trivial cases).

joe90

16th May 2008, 02:19 PM

That coefficient is the Hubble constant squared. If you choose it to be positive, you are in de Sitter. If you choose it to be negative, you are in anti de Sitter.
Correct.

In neither case does light behave as you claim.
You seem to accept that observational physics as described by GR is coordinate independent. But you do not seem to accept the immediate consequence that a change of coordinates from RW k = 0 with a(t) = exp(Ht) to static de Sitter cannot possibly change whether or not we see light as reddened from distant sources. The static de Sitter explanation for red-shift is not the same as the RW-based explanation, yet the prediction is mandated to be the same.

Let me give you another example that might be clearer. If you are familiar with the traditional RW metric, then you will know that all k = [-1,0,1] can be written in conformally flat (conformal to Minkowski) form. arxiv.org/abs/0704.2788. Because Maxwell's equations are unchanged in conformally flat spacetime, no one usually would bother trying to solve the equations in RW coordinates. They would first transform to conformal coordinates, solve Maxwell there, and transform back if required. In the k=0 case this just means redefining the RW time dt = a(\eta)d_\eta. Now, in the conformal coordinates, precisely because Maxwell is unchanged from its Minkoski form, EM radiation is not red-shifted at all; it is completely unaffected by the curvature of spacetime! Note this is true for all RW cosmologies for arbitrary sign of curvature and scale factor variation.

But it follows form coordinate invariance that there must be a satisfactory explanation for cosmological red-shift in conformal coordinates. The conformal explanation for cosmological red-shift is that matter is blue-shifted (Compton wavelengths are shrinking) whilst radiation remains unchanged by the expansion. (You can show this by writing eg Dirac equation in conformal spacetime.) Distant starlight propagates from H-atoms emitting Lyman-alpha, the energy of which lines are proportional to the electron mass. On arriving at Earth sometime later, the matter has changed so that electrons are more massive. Correspondingly, local H-atoms have higher energy Lyman-alpha transitions compared to those that sourced the radiation from distant stars. Hence that radiation looks redder than the same Lyman alpha produced locally.

Hopefully you can now see that red-shifting of starlight in transit as for example described by MTW in Gravitation is only one out of any number of possible explanations.

No, that's false, as I just explained. Do you want me to prove it?
Yes! Write down the homogeneous Maxwell's equations in de Sitter spacetime and try solving for the vector potential.

But don't bother - you'd be wasting your time! Solve the equations in Minkowski spacetime (eg plane waves) and then, using conformal invariance, transform the result to static de Sitter.

Don't need to do that either! Just introduce the metric into the Minkowski result. Each Fourier component in a plane-wave expansion in Minkowski and therefore conformal spacetimes will no longer be a single Fourier mode. The exponent is
i*k*r -> i*g(r)_{ab}*k^{a}*r^{b}
where g(r) is the static de Sitter metric.

Hence waves get red-shifted as they propagate in the static de Sitter space!

Obviously, yes. That doesn't conflict with what I said. Try reading it again.
It's still wrong the second time I read it!

That's true, but it's not at all like tired light.
Depends on your definition of tired light.

You're wrong. While it's true that one can choose whatever bone-headed coordinates one insists on, in an FRW cosmology (with the exception of exact de Sitter, anti de Sitter, and Minkowski) there is a preferred choice defined by the symmetries of the spacetime.

I generally do not write to boards such as this because it often ends up with people calling each other names, with more interest in being right than in exploring the physics.
Either be civil or else I will not reply to you further.

Don't confuse 'preferred' on the basis of mathematical expediency with 'preferred' on the basis of establishing a reference frame. CMB does the latter. The Cosmological Principle invites the former, but not the latter. There is no physical content in choosing different systems in the former case. In the latter case there is a physical reason restricting the choice of equivalent frames of reference. I wrote the original post to point out the distinction between the physical content of cosmological red-shift and its representation in terms of coordinates. The two are often confused.

Even within general RW spacetime many systems are in use - it depends to some degree on the application which is the more expedient. Traditional, harmonic, isotropic, and conformal coordinate are the systems that spring to mind. None of these does any violence to the inherent symmetry of the spacetime. Indeed, one might argue that the less-used isotropic form is more faithful in that regard.

sol invictus

16th May 2008, 03:41 PM

I can't respond in full now. Let me just say two things:

A) I apologize if I insulted you by referring to your choice of coordinates as "boneheaded". No offense was intended.

B) What you are saying is not correct. Light does NOT redshift in de Sutter any more often than it blue shifts. The simplest way I can think of to show that to you is to point out that the expanding flat FRW coords, in which a(t) is a growing exponential, are no better than the contracting flat FRW coords, where a(t) is a decreasing exponential. But in those contracting coords, the same incorrect logic you are employing would indicate that all light blueshifts.

Perhaps an even simpler way to say it is just that since there is a time translation invariance (which follows from the existence of a static coord system) there cannot be a preferred direction of time, or any preference for red over blueshifts.

If that doesnt convince you, I will provide more detail when I can.

kevin mcd

16th May 2008, 05:19 PM

ok so i saw the two page ad in popular science, and as someone who has always liked to learn about "modern" physics, i decided to do some research on this guy, and it led me here. from what ive read, his stuff sounds pretty much made up (esp the proton + electron = neutron part. im in high school physics, and i am pretty sure i have never even heard my teachers make a joke about that--- although i think the onion did something along those lines). so in anyones honest opinion, whether they have read it or not, should i go out and spend 60 bucks, or are there other more respectable relativity/quantum books (besides a brief history) i should get?

Third Eye Open

16th May 2008, 05:27 PM

joe90

16th May 2008, 11:25 PM

@sol invictus:
What you are saying is not correct. Light does NOT redshift in de Sutter any more often than it blue shifts. The simplest way I can think of to show that to you is to point out that the expanding flat FRW coords, in which a(t) is a growing exponential, are no better than the contracting flat FRW coords, where a(t) is a decreasing exponential. But in those contracting coords, the same incorrect logic you are employing would indicate that all light blueshifts.

We need to be clear about the distinction between a spacetime and a coordinate
system. A spacetime admits any number of coordinate systems. Two different spacetimes are distinguished over some domain by the fact of not being coverable by the
same coordiante system.

Schwarzschild is a spacetime.

'Conformal' can refer either to a class of spacetimes coverable by a (set of) coordinate systems, or to the coordinate systems themselves.

De Sitter is a spacetime.

De Sitter can be written in conformal form, and therefore belongs to the class of conformal spacetimes, even if it is not written in conformal form (but in static or Rw form say).

The point of my original post is that in general one cannot say whether or not light red-shifts, blue-shifts or does neither without stating a coordinate system (not a spacetime), which statement thereof is not physics. More specifically, there is no physical meaning to the statement that light red-shifts in de Sitter spacetime, since red-shift depends on the coordinate system, which is not specified just by naming the spacetime.

Expressed in conformal coordinates plane waves do not change their wavelength or frequency in any of the RW spacetimes, including de Sitter spacetime.

In de Sitter spacetime expressed in RW coordinates (to use a shorthand) light red-shifts as it propagates due to the expansion of space due to the scale factor a(t) in the metric.

In de Sitter spacetime expressed in static de Sitter coordinates light red-shifts as it propagates due to a distant-dependent radial term in the metric.

Perhaps an even simpler way to say it is just that since there is a time translation invariance (which follows from the existence of a static coord system) there cannot be a preferred direction of time, or any preference for red over blueshifts.

The effect of the static de Sitter metric on erstwhile Minkowski spacetime plane waves (if you will) is not due to the present of an expanding scale factor, for of course there is none here. But this is not the only means by which a red-shift can occur. In this case the red-shift (or blue shift in anti-de Sitter) arises because the metric has a spatial part - which, BTW, is not space-translation-invariant.

It is enough to know that the phase factor changes as

i*k*r -> i*g(r)_{ab}*k^{a}*r^{b}

We can write this as

i*k*r -> i*k'(r)_{a}*r^{a}

where now we have a pseudo-Minkowski 4-vector (with metric g = diag(1,-1,-1,-1)) k'(r):

k'(r)_{a} = g(r)_{ab}*k^{b}

that is a function of distance. That is, frequencies and wavelengths are continuously changing as the wave propagates.

(Actually, there is a metric-induced change in the potential amplitude also, but this is hardly likely to undo the red-shift induced in the phase factor.)

Wangler

17th May 2008, 12:08 AM

@sol invictus:

We need to be clear about the distinction between a spacetime and a coordinate
system. A spacetime admits any number of coordinate systems. Two different spacetimes are distinguished over some domain by the fact of not being coverable by the
same coordiante system.

Schwarzschild is a spacetime.

'Conformal' can refer either to a class of spacetimes coverable by a (set of) coordinate systems, or to the coordinate systems themselves.

De Sitter is a spacetime.

De Sitter can be written in conformal form, and therefore belongs to the class of conformal spacetimes, even if it is not written in conformal form (but in static or Rw form say).

The point of my original post is that in general one cannot say whether or not light red-shifts, blue-shifts or does neither without stating a coordinate system (not a spacetime), which statement thereof is not physics. More specifically, there is no physical meaning to the statement that light red-shifts in de Sitter spacetime, since red-shift depends on the coordinate system, which is not specified just by naming the spacetime.

Expressed in conformal coordinates plane waves do not change their wavelength or frequency in any of the RW spacetimes, including de Sitter spacetime.

In de Sitter spacetime expressed in RW coordinates (to use a shorthand) light red-shifts as it propagates due to the expansion of space due to the scale factor a(t) in the metric.

In de Sitter spacetime expressed in static de Sitter coordinates light red-shifts as it propagates due to a distant-dependent radial term in the metric.

The effect of the static de Sitter metric on erstwhile Minkowski spacetime plane waves (if you will) is not due to the present of an expanding scale factor, for of course there is none here. But this is not the only means by which a red-shift can occur. In this case the red-shift (or blue shift in anti-de Sitter) arises because the metric has a spatial part - which, BTW, is not space-translation-invariant.

It is enough to know that the phase factor changes as

i*k*r -> i*g(r)_{ab}*k^{a}*r^{b}

We can write this as

i*k*r -> i*k'(r)_{a}*r^{a}

where now we have a pseudo-Minkowski 4-vector (with metric g = diag(1,-1,-1,-1)) k'(r):

k'(r)_{a} = g(r)_{ab}*k^{b}

that is a function of distance. That is, frequencies and wavelengths are continuously changing as the wave propagates.

(Actually, there is a metric-induced change in the potential amplitude also, but this is hardly likely to undo the red-shift induced in the phase factor.)

Woohoo!

Some new action on this thread!

joe, welcome to jref. you can post latex on jref, if you would like. Just use 'latex' and '/latex' in brackets around your entries, thusly:

k'(r)_{a} = g(r)_{ab}*k^{b}

sol invictus

17th May 2008, 02:09 AM

We need to be clear about the distinction between a spacetime and a coordinate
system. A spacetime admits any number of coordinate systems. Two different spacetimes are distinguished over some domain by the fact of not being coverable by the
same coordiante system.

I am quite clear on that, thank you.

De Sitter can be written in conformal form, and therefore belongs to the class of conformal spacetimes, even if it is not written in conformal form (but in static or Rw form say).

You are not using the terminology in a standard way. "Conformal" is a property of a transformation, not of a spacetime. What you probably mean to say is that de Sitter space is conformal to Minkowski space, or equivalently that it is conformally flat.

The point of my original post is that in general one cannot say whether or not light red-shifts, blue-shifts or does neither without stating a coordinate system (not a spacetime), which statement thereof is not physics.

That did not seem to be the point of your original post. It sounds as though you have come around to agreeing with me, though, which is good. Notice that this is not at all like tired light, where the claim was that light always redshifts with time.

More specifically, there is no physical meaning to the statement that light red-shifts in de Sitter spacetime, since red-shift depends on the coordinate system, which is not specified just by naming the spacetime.

There is no physical meaning to that statement in general, but there certainly is once you specify the trajectory of the source and the receiver. That's why it's important that the universe picks a particular coordinate system (the one in which the matter density depends only on time). In our universe all matter is close to comoving (i.e. at rest in those special coordinates) and essentially all radiation is emitted from surfaces at rest in those coordinates, and therefore there IS a physical meaning to the statement that light redshifts - and the redshift occurs because the universe is expanding. There is no way around that.

In de Sitter spacetime expressed in static de Sitter coordinates light red-shifts as it propagates due to a distant-dependent radial term in the metric.

Now we're back to where we started... that statement is incorrect, as I keep trying to explain to you. It is impossible that there could be any preference towards redshifting in static coordinates (precisely because the coordinates are static). In fact, light redshifts with respect to static time only if it propagates towards the origin. If it propagates away, it blueshifts.

joe90

17th May 2008, 12:00 PM

You are not using the terminology in a standard way. "Conformal" is a property of a transformation, not of a spacetime. What you probably mean to say is that de Sitter space is conformal to Minkowski space, or equivalently that it is conformally flat.

It is in quite general use. Indeed I have used it in several publications with no problem.

Conformal is not really a property of a transformation in GR, it is a relationship between two systems. By conformal one usually means shorthand for related to Minkowski spacetime by a common overall factor. But one can have 'conformal to Einstein coordinates' also. It use does not (directly) imply a transformation, since there is no transformation from Minkowski (written in Minkowski-Lorentz coordinates) to RW with k = -1 or k = +1 (written in conformal coordinates).

That did not seem to be the point of your original post. It sounds as though you have come around to agreeing with me, though, which is good.
I am not sure we have yet reached agreement. Nothing you have said so far has changed my view.

Notice that this is not at all like tired light, where the claim was that light always redshifts with time.

I cannot speak with confidence in general for those who advocate 'Tired Light'. It is my impression that they intend to replace metric-induced 'stretching of light waves' if you will, as for example illustrated in MTW, with some propagation-dependent behavior that reddens light, all the while in a static universe.

My point is that this criterion can be met in a de Sitter spacetime written in static coordinates whilst remaining compatible with GR.

(The MTW picture is a RW k = +1 written in 'RW coordinates', though the conformal coordinate system is discussed also.)

As far as I can tell from Terry Witt's postings, he does not contradict this particular tired-light type interpretation of cosmological redshift (and which is compatible with GR). But I am happy to be corrected on this if you can point to something he said.

There is no physical meaning to that statement [that light red-shifts in de Sitter spacetime], in general, but there certainly is once you specify the trajectory of the source and the receiver.

I assumed all along we were talking about so-called 'fundamental observers'. These are static in the RW coordinate system, and static in the static de Sitter system. If you are talking about observers moving with respect to these systems then we have been talking past each other. The Cosmological Principle, from which the RW metrics are derived, is valid only for fundamental observers.

Now we're back to where we started... that statement is incorrect, as I keep trying to explain to you. It is impossible that there could be any preference towards redshifting in static coordinates (precisely because the coordinates are static). In fact, light redshifts with respect to static time only if it propagates towards the origin. If it propagates away, it blueshifts.
There seems to be a major problem of communication here. As far as I can see, the case is decided and closed, just by consideration of how the exponential phase varies in static de Sitter coordinates. If you do not find that explanation satisfying, please say exactly what is wrong with it.

Use that the de Sitter metric in static isotropic form has line element

ds^2 = \left( {\left( {1 + {\bf{x}}^2 } \right)^2 {\text{d}}{\kern 1pt} t^2 - {\text{d}}{\kern 1pt} {\bf{x}}^2 } \right)/\left( {1 - {\bf{x}}^2 } \right)^2

(units are all normalized with respect to the Hubble constant), then the exponential phase factor in a plane-wave decomposition of the potential is

A \propto \exp \left( {i\frac{{\left( {1 + {\bf{x}}^2 } \right)^2 }}
{{\left( {1 - {\bf{x}}^2 } \right)^2 }}\omega {\kern 1pt} t - i\frac{1}
{{\left( {1 - {\bf{x}}^2 } \right)^2 }}{\bf{k}}{\bf{.}}{\kern 1pt} {\bf{x}}} \right)

where the dot product is Euclidean, and \omega ^{\left( 0 \right)} ,{\bf{k}}^{\left( 0 \right)} are constants. Hence the frequency changes as it propagates according to

\omega \left( {\bf{x}} \right) = \frac{{\left( {1 + {\bf{x}}^2 } \right)^2 }}
{{\left( {1 - {\bf{x}}^2 } \right)^2 }}\omega ^{\left( 0 \right)}

and the wavelength changes according to

\lambda \left( {\bf{x}} \right) = \left( {1 - {\bf{x}}^2 } \right)^2 \lambda ^{\left( 0 \right)}

That's why it's important that the universe picks a particular coordinate system (the one in which the matter density depends only on time).

No. Humans (not the universe) may pick a coordinate system in which matter density depends only on time.

More specifically, the coordinate density of matter depends on time in the RW coordinate system. But that is not a physical statement. The proper density of matter is constant in this system - which is a physical statement.

By contrast, in the static de Sitter system, the coordinate density of matter depends only on distance, not time!

In our universe all matter is close to comoving (i.e. at rest in those special coordinates) and essentially all radiation is emitted from surfaces at rest in those coordinates,

Agreed.

and therefore there IS a physical meaning to the statement that light redshifts

There is a physical meaning to the statement that we observe red-shifted starlight.

- and the redshift occurs because the universe is expanding.

The reason you give is coordinate dependent, and therefore does not have a genuine physical meaning.

There is no way around that.

There is, and I gave it above for the static de Sitter system. Please address that mathematics directly.

sol invictus

17th May 2008, 01:48 PM

It is in quite general use. Indeed I have used it in several publications with no problem.

That usage is both imprecise and ambiguous. I would probably know what was meant in context (as in this case), but it is not in general use. See my comment below for the general usage.

Conformal is not really a property of a transformation in GR, it is a relationship between two systems. By conformal one usually means shorthand for related to Minkowski spacetime by a common overall factor. But one can have 'conformal to Einstein coordinates' also. It use does not (directly) imply a transformation, since there is no transformation from Minkowski (written in Minkowski-Lorentz coordinates) to RW with k = -1 or k = +1 (written in conformal coordinates).

A conformal transformation is any transformation that preserves angles locally. That is the definition used in every field from mathematics to statistical mechanics to string theory to general relativity. Two metrics in GR are conformal to each other if they are related by a conformal transformation (which means one metric can be written as other times an overall function).

Anyway I'm not interested in semantics, so I'm not going to continue discussing this.

I am not sure we have yet reached agreement. Nothing you have said so far has changed my view.

Well it certainly sounds like your position has changed, but then again, it's hard to tell exactly what your position is, so I can't be sure.

I assumed all along we were talking about so-called 'fundamental observers'. These are static in the RW coordinate system, and static in the static de Sitter system.

If by "static" you mean that the trajectory is at constant spatial coordinates, that is impossible. There is only one observer who is at rest ("static") in both the RW and static coordinates - that's the one at the origin - but we must specify the trajectory of both the emitter and the receiver in order to compute the observed redshift.

If you are talking about observers moving with respect to these systems then we have been talking past each other. The Cosmological Principle, from which the RW metrics are derived, is valid only for fundamental observers.

There is no (unique) cosmological principle in pure de Sitter. There is no such thing as a unique set of "fundamental observers" in dS (by the way, the correct term is "comoving"). That's probably what's causing your confusion.

Ask yourself this - "fundamental" with respect to which RW coordinate system? Expanding flat? Contracting flat? Closed? Contracting or expanding open? All those sets of observers are different and in relative motion with respect to each other, and all are equally "fundamental" in pure dS.

There seems to be a major problem of communication here. As far as I can see, the case is decided and closed, just by consideration of how the exponential phase varies in static de Sitter coordinates. If you do not find that explanation satisfying, please say exactly what is wrong with it.

What's wrong with it is (in part) that you haven't specified the trajectory of both the receiver and the emitter.

Here's a concrete physical question. Consider an object at x=0 in your coordinates which is emitting light of frequency w. Now consider a receiver sitting at constant x which receives the light. Question - what frequency will the receiver measure?

The answer is that the light will be blueshifted by an amount which depends on x (and which goes to infinity at x=1). If you can't figure out how to compute what the factor is I'll do it later and show you.

If you don't agree the frequency is blueshifted, that's a definite and precise claim which we can evaluate. In that case I suggest we focus on that point, since clearly one of us is correct and one is wrong.

No. Humans (not the universe) may pick a coordinate system in which matter density depends only on time.

You're not getting the point. It is an extremely special property of the universe that allows us to do that. The greatest mysteries of cosmology are all tied up in the question of why that is possible.

The reason you give is coordinate dependent, and therefore does not have a genuine physical meaning.

It sounds like you suffer from a rather profound confusion over coordinate dependence. All statements which depend on coordinates are physical if you specify the coordinates. That is obvious. Imagine putting down a coordinate system on spacetime. Now that it's there, you can use it to measure things, and your results are clearly physical. That's why we need coordinates in the first place.

The analogous statement in gauge theory is that anything expressed in a completely fixed gauge is manifestly gauge invariant and physical. This point often causes confusion, so you're not alone.

joe90

17th May 2008, 03:58 PM

Oh dear, with each response another confusion arises. I'm sure this would be cleared up more easily in an interactive exchange rather than by email.

If by "static" you mean that the trajectory is at constant spatial coordinates, that is impossible.

The observers in question are at constant spatial coordinates in RW coordinates- not the trajectory!

There is only one observer who is at rest ("static") in both the RW and static coordinates - that's the one at the origin

Yes. That is true. I misspoke when I said the fundamental observer is static in static de Sitter: she is not.

- but we must specify the trajectory of both the emitter and the receiver in order to compute the observed redshift.
That is true. The trajectory of the fundamental observer written in static dS in general is moving (with the origin being an exception). This would induce a Doppler component. But that is in addition to the red-shift incurred by light during propagation. From one fundamental observer to another.

Here's a concrete physical question. Consider an object at x=0 in your coordinates which is emitting light of frequency w. Now consider a receiver sitting at constant x which receives the light. Question - what frequency will the receiver measure?

The answer is that the light will be blueshifted by an amount which depends on x (and which goes to infinity at x=1). If you can't figure out how to compute what the factor is I'll do it later and show you.

Don't be patronizing. You are not qualified, and it does not engender a friendly exchange.

I'm sorry, the metric I gave above was (mistakenly) for anti-de Sitter. I honestly did not mean to mislead you. De Sitter is the same but with signs reversed:

<br /> ds^2 = \left( {\left( {1 - {\bf{x}}^2 } \right)^2 {\text{d}}{\kern 1pt} t^2 - {\text{d}}{\kern 1pt} {\bf{x}}^2 } \right)/\left( {1 + {\bf{x}}^2 } \right)^2 <br />

Now apply your own reasoning for large x and find that Omega->0 at the Hubble radius whilst the wavelength increases but stays finite. Hence the light red-shifts.

If you don't agree the frequency is blueshifted, that's a definite and precise claim which we can evaluate.
In that case I suggest we focus on that point, since clearly one of us is correct and one is wrong.
Agreed. I do not mind being wrong. But here I am correct.

However, thank you for drawing my attention to the fact that the metric induced red-shift (with distance) is not the full story. There is some Doppler for the fundamental observer also in static de Sitter. But the fact remains that red-shift takes place during propagation and is not due to expansion but due to the effects of the de Sitter r^2 potential on EM waves.

I do not want to argue the Tired Light case for Mr Witt ad nauseam. But the tired light advocates may say that a component of Doppler is quite acceptable since their goal was simply to do away with 'expansion of space' and effects thereof as an explanation for observed Cosmological red-shift. The static de Sitter achieves that aim.

joe90

17th May 2008, 09:28 PM

@sol invictus
It sounds like you suffer from a rather profound confusion over coordinate dependence.

How about we stick to the issue and you stop trying to diagnose me with some malady?

All statements which depend on coordinates are physical if you specify the coordinates.

OK: here we agree! Cosmological expansion and red-shift of radiation due to expansion of spacetime are coordinate dependent explanations. They are correct explanations of the observational state of affairs in the traditional RW coordinate system. Again: my point is that if one simply says "cosmological red-shift due to expansion" without saying what coordinate system then the claim is meaningless. Realizing that, one sees that there are other explanations consistent within other coordinate systems for the same observed phenomena. In the particular case of de Sitter spacetime, one may legitimately say that cosmological red-shift is due to an expansion factor a ~ exp(Ht) in RW coordinates. And equally one may say that cosmological red-shift is not due to expansion at all, but due to a radial gravitational potential - plus some Doppler component.

The analogous statement in gauge theory is that anything expressed in a completely fixed gauge is manifestly gauge invariant and physical.

Maxwell expressed in Lorenz gauge is \partial ^2 A = j . The original gauge invariance before choosing the Lorenz gauge was that the equations are unchanged if A \to A + \partial \chi where chi is a completely arbitrary scalar function. The new equation does not have that invariance.

Consequently what you say above that "anything expressed ..." is incorrect. The vector potential does not have that invariance.

The analogy with the discussion above is that expansion-induced cosmological red-shift is like the vector potential in that it depends on the coordinate 'gauge' in GR.

By contrast, observed phenomena such as red-shift of starlight - stripped of course of an 'explanation' for how it comes about - is a physical outcome of the theory, and therefore must be independent of gauge choice. This is analogous to the Faraday Tensor which is a direct observable in classical EM and therefore insensitive to the choice of gauge. That is, F is gauge-invariant, even after having chosen a gauge for the potential.

This point often causes confusion, so you're not alone.

Again: why the sly attack? What is the point? Even if I was wrong or confused (which of course I am not :)) it adds nothing and only subtracts from the exchange.

sol invictus

18th May 2008, 01:30 AM

The observers in question are at constant spatial coordinates in RW coordinates- not the trajectory!

Right - that's what I asked you. So OK, understood.

I misspoke when I said the fundamental observer is static in static de Sitter: she is not.

But then what is her trajectory? You can't tell me it's that of the fundamental RW observer, because there are at least five different sets of fundamental RW observers. I think this is the central point - I don't think you appreciate how large the symmetry group of dS is.

Now apply your own reasoning for large x and find that Omega->0 at the Hubble radius whilst the wavelength increases but stays finite. Hence the light red-shifts.

Agreed. I do not mind being wrong. But here I am correct.

Very well then. That solution is (probably, I didn't check the signs) a solution to Maxwell's equations using the static dS coordinates. The fact that w->0 at the horizon is nothing more than the standard "freezing of time" which occurs at any horizon.

However w->0 in these coordinates does NOT mean that our observer near the horizon will measure w->0. Remember, clocks carried by the observer are moving very slowly as well. And since the observer is non-inertial (fixed x requires an acceleration towards x=0) the slowdown is actually greater for her clocks than it is for the lightwave.

How best to see this? I could solve the equations and type them up, but you seem to know something at least about this stuff (and I'm lazy), so I'm going to try to convince you verbally. Forget light for a minute, and imagine our observer Andy at x=0 gently tossing a rock to Betty at x=.9. Since you like the static potential, you know it's sloping down towards minus infinity at the horizon. Therefore, when Betty catches the rock it's moving very fast (relative to her), and she will therefore measure its energy to be very large. By the same token, she will have to throw it very very hard to get it back to Andy.

From that it should be obvious that light exchanged between the two blueshifts when going from x=0 to x=.9 (downhill), and redshifts going up.

So: do you agree with that and admit you were wrong before?

I do not want to argue the Tired Light case for Mr Witt ad nauseam. But the tired light advocates may say that a component of Doppler is quite acceptable since their goal was simply to do away with 'expansion of space' and effects thereof as an explanation for observed Cosmological red-shift. The static de Sitter achieves that aim.

We do not live in pure de Sitter space. Cosmological redshifts - the ones we measure, not the ones in some hypothetical and ill-specified universe - cannot be explained without cosmological expansion. The dark energy dominated phase we are now entering has almost no effect on the observed redshifts (why else was it not discovered until 10 years ago?). Nearly all the observations arise from radiation followed by matter domination. If you want to argue the tired light hypothesis, you must find a static metric which describes that.

Good luck.

Consequently what you say above that "anything expressed ..." is incorrect. The vector potential does not have that invariance.

Actually it does, although my statement was a little unclear. It is true that if you make a gauge transformation some things change. But what I said was that in a fixed gauge everything is physical. The whole point is that you're not allowed to change the gauge - you must fix a gauge and stick to it.

Gauge invariance is not a symmetry - it's a redundancy in the variables used. It's often convenient to keep it, but if instead you fix the redundancy everything you calculate will be physical. Precisely the same goes for coordinates.

joe90

18th May 2008, 04:02 PM

The fundamental observer (FO) due to Milne is logically prior to the discovery of the RW metrics and is based upon The Cosmological Principle. It is not derived from or dependent upon a metric - RW or DS - or even upon the validity of GR. The FO in RW coordinates is at x = constant. The coordinate transformation from RW to static isotropic de Sitter (see for example arxiv.org/abs/0704.3265) will then give the trajectory of the FO there.
However w->0 in these coordinates does NOT mean that our observer near the horizon will measure w->0.
I'm sure you understand that observers 'near the horizon' do in fact measure omega -> zero; we are at some significant fraction of the Hubble radius of distant galaxies as they are relative to ours, so we should infer that they will see the light of the Milky way as redshifted just as we see theirs as red-shifted. I presume that you really mean something different (?)
We do not live in pure de Sitter space. ...Good luck.
True: No we don't. I think this is the best GR can do to agree with Tired Light. See arxiv.org/abs/0704.3265 for a proof that there are no other static systems compatible with RW.

It is true that if you make a gauge transformation some things change. But what I said was that in a fixed gauge everything is physical.
But you did not say that. What you said was:
The analogous statement in gauge theory is that anything expressed in a completely fixed gauge is manifestly gauge invariant and physical.
Hence my correction.

Gauge invariance is not a symmetry - it's a redundancy in the variables used. It's often convenient to keep it, but if instead you fix the redundancy everything you calculate will be physical. Precisely the same goes for coordinates.
I 100% agree.

As I said, I have no great interest in defending tired light. I do have an interest in exposing coordinate-based and gauge-based predjudices (i.e. having no intrinsic physical meaning) since I have found this to be a fruitful area of study in its own right, leading to new insights, for myself at least!

sol invictus

19th May 2008, 12:45 AM

The fundamental observer (FO) due to Milne is logically prior to the discovery of the RW metrics and is based upon The Cosmological Principle. It is not derived from or dependent upon a metric - RW or DS - or even upon the validity of GR. The FO in RW coordinates is at x = constant. The coordinate transformation from RW to static isotropic de Sitter (see for example arxiv.org/abs/0704.3265) will then give the trajectory of the FO there.

Which RW coordinates? I've asked you that three times and you keep ignoring it. I mentioned five different sets of RM coordinates for dS - each one has a different set of "fundamental" observers, none of which can be preferred. That's one way to see why it's nonsensical to think that there can be any preference for redshifts in pure dS.

I'm sure you understand that observers 'near the horizon' do in fact measure omega -> zero; we are at some significant fraction of the Hubble radius of distant galaxies as they are relative to ours, so we should infer that they will see the light of the Milky way as redshifted just as we see theirs as red-shifted. I presume that you really mean something different (?)

I thought we were going to focus on the specific, physical, and concrete example I proposed. Do you or do you not think that an observer at fixed non-zero x in the static coordinates (note that such an observer is NOT at rest in any of the RW coordinate systems) will measure a redshift for signals sent by an observer at rest at x=0?

The correct answer is that she will measure a blueshift.

True: No we don't. I think this is the best GR can do to agree with Tired Light. See arxiv.org/abs/0704.3265 for a proof that there are no other static systems compatible with RW.

No need to look - that's totally obvious.

thubbathubba

19th May 2008, 09:53 AM

The mystery of our existence has beaten scientists and philosophers for so long that they are utterly convinced that reality's underpinnings are beyond human comprehension." It's the 'why' part that gets me.

I already solved that for you. No charge.

joe90

19th May 2008, 12:07 PM

@sol invictus
Which RW coordinates? I've asked you that three times and you keep ignoring it. I mentioned five different sets of RM coordinates for dS - each one has a different set of "fundamental" observers, none of which can be preferred. That's one way to see why it's nonsensical to think that there can be any preference for redshifts in pure dS.
I honestly do not understand your uncertainty. If it helps, let us have k = 0 and line element
ds^2 = dt^2 - a^2 \left( t \right)d{\mathbf{x}}^2
The fundamental observers are at x = constant. Recall, the notion of fundamental observer belongs originally to the RW spacetimes predicated on the Cosmological Principle. The maximally symmetric dS is predicated on the 'Perfect Cosmological Principle'. If one were to generalize 'fundamental observer' to dS, then yes, there would be others - more than those simply obtained from transforming the fundamental observer of RW k = 0 with an exponential, i.e. having line element
$ds^2 = dt^2 - \exp \left( {2Ht} \right)d{\mathbf{x}}^2
But let's just stick with the original meaning of fundamental observer introduced by Milne, valid for RW in general.
I thought we were going to focus on the specific, physical, and concrete example I proposed. Do you or do you not think that an observer at fixed non-zero x in the static coordinates (note that such an observer is NOT at rest in any of the RW coordinate systems) will measure a redshift for signals sent by an observer at rest at x=0?

Such an observer is not fundamental as generally accepted (see above) and not of interest to me here.

cybermanikan

20th May 2008, 04:38 PM

As a long time reader of this forum (tho I rarely post) I had to chime in on how much fun this thread has been for me. My background is cognitive psychology, not physics, so watching the crazy debate is actually very enlightening--the extremes of crazy claims versus rational explanations really helps me understand just a tad more than I did.

And... OT (I yup, after all these years not 15 posts!):
http (://) youtube(dot)com/watch?v=DQaF4YXCXsc&feature=related

sol invictus

21st May 2008, 07:23 AM

I honestly do not understand your uncertainty. If it helps, let us have k = 0 and line element
ds^2 = dt^2 - a^2 \left( t \right)d{\mathbf{x}}^2

Why pick k=0? de Sitter can be written as an FRW spacetime with k=0, +1, or -1.

The fundamental observers are at x = constant.

For which a(t)? And for which k?

Such an observer is not fundamental as generally accepted (see above) and not of interest to me here.

Total nonsense. You started by claiming we could ignore the matter in the universe and approximate it as dS. But if we do so, there is no preference whatsoever for a(t) = exp(2 H t) over a(t) = exp(-2 H t). If we do NOT ignore the matter, than we cannot use pure dS.

And you STILL haven't answer the question you agreed we should focus on three or four posts back: do you or do you not agree that an observer at fixed static coordinate in dS will observe a blue shift in signals sent by the inertial observer at the origin?

joe90

21st May 2008, 02:10 PM

@sol invictus
Why pick k=0? de Sitter can be written as an FRW spacetime with k=0, +1, or -1.
You asked for the trajectory of the fundamental observer. I have given you my answer. It is x = constant in RW coordinates for any k. This has nothing to do with the extra symmetries in de Sitter spacetime.

I suggested we concentrate on k = 0 because there appears to be some sort of misunderstanding between us. Focusing on one case might help. We can include all three is you wish, but the answer is unchanged: the fundamental observer is at x = constant if the metric is written in the standard RW form.

The notion of fundamental observer is coordinate independent and is well-documented. Can we move on from this point?

For which a(t)? And for which k?
Again: fundamental observers are at x = constant for any k and for any RW system, and therefore for any a(t) in

ds^2 = dt^2 - a^2 \left( t \right)\left( {dr^2 + \sin ^2 \left( {\sqrt k r} \right)d\Omega ^2 /k} \right)

Total nonsense. You started by claiming we could ignore the matter in the universe and approximate it as dS. But if we do so, there is no preference whatsoever for a(t) = exp(2 H t) over a(t) = exp(-2 H t). If we do NOT ignore the matter, than we cannot use pure dS.

See my previous postings for what I said about asymptotic convergence of present RW universe towards De Sitter. You will find an adequate motivation for the fundamental observer there. If you object to applying that definition in the limit that RW -> dS then OK, I am not going to try to change your mind. I really don't think there is any confusion on your part here. It seems then that there is nothing left to debate about the physical content of GR on this topic and therefore nothing of interest for me. But if you have a different and interesting point to make I will respond to it.
[/QUOTE]

And you STILL haven't answer the question you agreed we should focus on three or four posts back: do you or do you not agree that an observer at fixed static coordinate in dS will observe a blue shift in signals sent by the inertial observer at the origin?

My answer is the same as it was: this is not the trajectory of a fundamental observer so is of no interest to me.

Since it appears to remain of interest to you, then I must say that I believe you are mistaken. Rather than deal with Alice and Bob, I prefer to deal with things more concretely, using the metric to do the math. de Sitter in static isotropic coordinates is

\[
ds^2 = \left( {\frac{{1 - {\mathbf{x}}^2 }}
{{1 + {\mathbf{x}}^2 }}} \right)^2 dt^2 - \frac{1}
{{\left( {1 + {\mathbf{x}}^2 } \right)^2 }}d{\mathbf{x}}^2
\]

The curved-space generalization of the incremental Minkowski phase factor for a plane wave \[k^a dx^b \eta _{ab} \] is

\[
d\varphi = k^a dx^b g_{ab} = \omega \left( {\frac{{1 - {\mathbf{x}}^2 }}
{{1 + {\mathbf{x}}^2 }}} \right)dt - \frac{1}
{{\left( {1 + {\mathbf{x}}^2 } \right)^2 }}{\mathbf{k}}{\mathbf{.dx}}
\]
.
If the transmitter and receiver are both static, and choosing coordinates such the the transmitter is at the origin and the receiver is at z, and considering only waves that propagate with momentum entirely in the z direction, then
But the effective position-dependent frequency and momentum are simply the metric adjusted Minkowski values:

\[
\omega \left( z \right) \propto \frac{{d\varphi }}
{{dt}} = \omega \left( 0 \right)\left( {\frac{{1 - z^2 }}
{{1 + z^2 }}} \right),

k\left( z \right) \propto \frac{{d\varphi }}
{{dz}} = k\left( 0 \right)\frac{1}
{{\left( {1 + z^2 } \right)^2 }}

You can compute the total phase 'elapsed' in the ray-optics approximation by carrying out the integration if you wish:

\varphi = \omega \left( {\frac{{1 - z^2 }}
{{1 + z^2 }}} \right)t - \frac{1}
{2}k\left( {\tan ^{ - 1} z + \frac{z}
{{1 + z^2 }}} \right)

But in any case, the frequency and momentum fall, hence the wavelength gets longer.

If you still object, then please point out what you think is wrong with this simple mathematics.

Wangler

21st May 2008, 02:33 PM

If the transmitter and receiver are both static, and choosing coordinates such the the transmitter is at the origin and the receiver is at z, and considering only waves that propagate with momentum entirely in the z direction, then
But the effective position-dependent frequency and momentum are simply the metric adjusted Minkowski values:

Joe90,

I think that there is a sentance, and possibly an expression, missing after "z direction, then" and before "But the effective position-dependent frequency........."

sol invictus

21st May 2008, 04:18 PM

You asked for the trajectory of the fundamental observer. I have given you my answer. It is x = constant in RW coordinates for any k. This has nothing to do with the extra symmetries in de Sitter spacetime.
<snip>
Again: fundamental observers are at x = constant for any k and for any RW system, and therefore for any a(t) in

Which part of "there are five DIFFERENT sets of 'fundamental' observers in de Sitter" do you fail to understand?

The five FRW metrics are different from each other. The sets of observers at constant spatial coordinate are different - very different. But since you say it doesn't matter, fine - I pick contracting k=0 FRW with a(t)=exp(-2 H t) (note the minus sign).

According to your logic, all signals will blueshift, since the space is contracting.

Do you see the problem now?

My answer is the same as it was: this is not the trajectory of a fundamental observer so is of no interest to me.

OK, so you admit you were wrong before. Fine.

If the transmitter and receiver are both static, and choosing coordinates such the the transmitter is at the origin and the receiver is at z, and considering only waves that propagate with momentum entirely in the z direction

Do you not realize that you've just contradicted yourself in your own post? You said you weren't interested in observers at rest in static coordinates (contradicting an earlier post), and then a few lines later you present a computation for observers at rest in static coordinates.

I'm afraid you're just another of the crackpots that seem to haunt these forums...

sol invictus

22nd May 2008, 12:21 AM

If you still object, then please point out what you think is wrong with this simple mathematics.

By the way, I already told you what is wrong with this. You are computing the frequency in the frame of the observer at x=0. As I tried to explain to you, the fact that omega goes to zero as z goes to 1 is the standard freezing of time at a horizon. But to compute the redshift as seen by Bob you must make a transformation to his frame, and the transformation factor will invert the function of x you have multiplying omega.

But that's unnecessary to illustrate my point, which was that this is not like tired light. You could just ask this (closely related) question, which can be answered immediately using your result: suppose there is a mirror at fixed z rather than an observer. Alice (at the origin) beams a laser against the mirror. According to you, the laser redshifts as it approaches the mirror, and blueshifts on its way back. In a tired light theory it would redshift both ways.

thubbathubba

22nd May 2008, 02:27 PM

... My background is cognitive psychology...

A nice change. Researchers with a deviant psychology background are more common here.

thubbathubba

22nd May 2008, 02:37 PM

....Alice (at the origin) beams a laser against the mirror. According to you, the laser redshifts as it approaches the mirror, and blueshifts on its way back. In a tired light theory it would redshift both ways.

From now on can you guys *start* your like arguments like this, so we simpler minds don't have to wade through all the equations to get to them? ;)

kevin mcd

26th May 2008, 09:34 AM

thanks a lot

Paulhoff

27th May 2008, 06:42 PM

Gee joe90, how come the light from the Andromeda Galaxy is not getting so-called tired and is blue-shifted.

Paulhoff

:) :) :)

cybermanikan

13th June 2008, 12:18 PM

I work at Oregon State University... and to my dismay I found the following this morning on their campus newsletter:

Null physics declared a ''significant contribution'' to modern physics (Forbes)

People are doubting the most fiercely held paradigm of modern physics - the Big Bang. According to the June 7-13 issue of New Scientist magazine, author Michael Brooks concludes that physicists may be forced to go back to the drawing board to develop better models to describe cosmic events. Null Physics may be the undoing of the Big Bang. With Null Physics, Terence Witt (founder and former CEO of Witt Biomedical Corporation, BSEE from Oregon State University) presents an intricate, four-dimensional expression of our universe in which energy and space constitute existence. Most importantly, the universe is infinite and eternal; it did not begin with a bang nor will it end with a whimper. With his analysis, Witt hopes to increase the public's awareness of fatal flaws in the Big Bang theory and to propel them to ask questions that lead to logical conclusions.

Soon I'll be able to post URLs. Until then, though, the article in Forbes is quite easy to find. I always ***KNEW*** new realms of physics would emerge in a business rag.

ben m

13th June 2008, 02:59 PM

That's not a Forbes article, it's a press release. Witt wrote it up fed it into the maw of the Automated Press Release, and it got auto-posted on dozens of press release auto-feeds. Look around and you'll see the same thing all over the Web: "Null physics website hailed for amazing theory", "Terence Witt awes world", etc., on sites like pr-inside.com, pr.com, businesswire.com. Note the lack of a journalist's byline, the fawning language, and the words BUSINESS WIRE - PRESS RELEASE at the top.

As I've said before: Null Physics is a crackpot theory with a multi-million-dollar ad budget. I noticed this garbage on the Web feeds a few weeks ago---I wonder if he's given up on Smithsonian, Pop. Sci., etc.?

cybermanikan

14th June 2008, 04:26 AM

Null Physics is truly an amazing waste of money... I'm surprised it hasn't be featured on Opera. I'm anxiously awaiting it to be adopted by TM groups wanting to legitimize The Secret and other pseudo-physics scams.

I will laugh and cry.

zosima

15th June 2008, 01:05 AM

zosima

15th June 2008, 01:47 AM

New info on Null Physics.

#1 Terry has a new site, and it has forums!
I don't want to give him the page rank, but the site is called
www dot ourundiscovereduniverse dot com
It isn't technically open yet, but if you do some creative searching on google you can get into the forums.(You can pm me if you want a link that will get you there)

#2 I found this site that definitely establishes that Witt created Aridian publishing just for the purpose of his book. I've attached the associated pdf that has Witt listed as the signatory and owner of Aridian. It notes that he is doing business under a company name called Biotec....don't know what that is about.

(I know we all already knew that Aridian was a front for pushing his ideas, but having the evidence doesn't hurt.)
Also the site I found the fictitious name filing on
http://sunbiz.org/scripts/ficidet.exe?action=DETREG&docnum=G06338900432&rdocnum=G99188900052

zosima

15th June 2008, 02:59 AM

And you can sign up for the forums! And Terrywitt has posted to the forums. Since we don't have any other sources on his theory, I thought I post one of his claims from there to here.

Great questions

Ultrastasis

This is one of the most counterintuitive concepts in null physics; even more so than the summation to zero, because change is overwhelmingly manifest whereas our universe's composition at the level of infinite smallness is not visible.

The premise here is that the universe, in its entirety does not change. The local change we experience is just as real as the material in which the change is obvious. This, and the full extent of what we call 'reality' is available only because we are a part of the system, within the universe. So now take that whirling galaxy. It is a tiny bit of the total universal pattern, and it is reasonable to think that if we could be outside of the universe looking at this tiny bit, change would be evident. However, outside of the universe, this galaxy simply does not exist, nor does anything else. Existence is contextual, so it is not possible to make any comparisons across the summation to zero.

However, we can, from within the universe, compare the local universal pattern of an hour or billion years ago with the current pattern, and they are clearly different. If you extend this comparison to infinite distance in all directions, an interesting thing happens. The volume where you are performing your comparison becomes infinite, before you reach the entirety of the universe. In other words, the universe's volume is inf^3. It is so vast that it contains an infinite number of an infinite number of infinite volumes. Null physics refers to this property as ultraunboundedness. Once infinite volume is reached, it is no longer possible to do a direct one-to-one comparison between any two patterns, because they have no edges. In short, three-dimensional space is so large that it is big enough to contain its own history.

The other way to look at ultrastasis is that it is inevitable in any context. Even if our universe were flowing down some additional dimension of time (which it is not), this space-time construct, when taken in its entirety, is static. There could be any number of universes flowing the same direction, (there are not) but the total system would be static because each state is present from one moment of this gestalt 'space-time' to the next. So the difference between this inevitable stasis and ultrastasis is that the universes flowing through time, from state to state, are much smaller than three-dimensional space (omnielements versus omnipattern). Ultraunboundedness allows these vast distributions (moments) to move inexorably from one state to the next, clicking along.

If there were no causal relationship between omnielements (moments), three-dimensional space would be too small. In other words, in the absence of causality, where matter and energy could be distributed into space in any permutation, inf^3 is not big enough to hold them all. However, since states are determined by pre-existing states (and so on), causality reduces permutational variability so severely that our universe is large enough to contain its own history.

I've posted a response, insofar as I think his arguments from varying sizes of infinities are deeply flawed. For the most part his forums only contain a couple of posters and they all treat Terry like he is infallible. It seems like mainly they are patting each other on the back and praising Terry's virtues.

Reality Check

15th June 2008, 08:27 AM

The reason that he is doing business under a company name called Biotec is that is the company he founded. From the nullphysics site:
Terence Witt is the founder and former CEO of Witt Biomedical Corporation, which during his tenure became the gold standard for cardiac hemodynamic software. He holds a BSEE from Oregon State University and began his professional career in semiconductor physics, where he wrote computer simulations for thin-film electromagnetic phenomena and held a patent for submicron electron beam lithography. He lives in Florida with his wife Ginny.

Terence has recently accepted the faculty position of Visiting Scientist at the Florida Institute of Technology, a school known for its exemplary astrophysics program. In his capacity as Visiting Scientist, to commence in January 2008, he will lecture on many of the concepts presented in Our Undiscovered Universe and pursue his Null Physics research.

What really worries me is the Florida Institute of Technology. Do they accept any crackpot as a Visiting Scientist?
I certainly hope that he did not buy the position. There are plenty of PR releases stating that he will be lecturing on Null Physics (I wonder where they came from?)

ETA: Maybe the FIT is more sensible than I thought. I can find no sign of Terence Witt as a current faculty member. Every reference in Google to him being at FIT seems to be the result of a press release!

zosima

15th June 2008, 05:35 PM

The reason that he is doing business under a company name called Biotec is that is the company he founded. From the nullphysics site:

What really worries me is the Florida Institute of Technology. Do they accept any crackpot as a Visiting Scientist?
I certainly hope that he did not buy the position. There are plenty of PR releases stating that he will be lecturing on Null Physics (I wonder where they came from?)

ETA: Maybe the FIT is more sensible than I thought. I can find no sign of Terence Witt as a current faculty member. Every reference in Google to him being at FIT seems to be the result of a press release!

I was curious, Biotec, is a different name than Witt Biomedical, I guess I was hoping that Witt had gotten interested in some other sort of woo.

I have a friend that went to FIT and my friend verified that Witt really does(at least did) have a position there. From what I heard 'faculty member' is a bit of an exaggeration. The indication I got was that Witt's position was 'peripheral'....I believe they said the rumor over at FIT was that 'Null Physics' was a very appropriate name for Witt's theory.

So I wouldn't worry about whatever Witt is doing over there, its not like he has collaborators in the department, I don't think they're gonna help him publish any papers. The people at FIT have a very accurate idea of what Witt is about.

ben m

15th June 2008, 07:54 PM

Several months ago, I telephoned the FIT physics department to ask about Witt's status. According to the department, Witt was given (and I quote) "a courtesy 'visiting scientist' position" with "no research or teaching responsibilities".

kevin mcd

17th June 2008, 12:16 PM

"a courtesy 'visiting scientist' position" with "no research or teaching responsibilities".

wow... well its a good thing i came here before that man scammed me out of $60.

Skwinty

17th June 2008, 01:55 PM

In spite of the Standard models success it is unlikely to be the final theory.
Why the local gauge interactions?
Why the different state transformations?
Why no fractionally charged hadrons?
What is the origin of quark and lepton masses?
Why no gravity?
Why no detection of the Higgs boson?
Perhaps if this was understood then the origin of CP violations, the strong CP problem, the origin of cosmological matter/antimatter and the nature of dark matter would be solved.

The standard model has 19 arbitrary parameters which are chosen to fit the data.
Three arbitrary gauge couplings and thirteen parameters associated with 9 charged fermion masses.
The remaining three are the Higgs vacuum expectation value, quartic coupling and the QCD theta parameter.
In addition, there are at least nine additional parameters in the neutrino sector, these being three masses, three mixing angles and three phases.
Clearly there are too many arbitrary parameters and too many unresolved issues for the standard model to be considered complete. Many aspects of the standard model seem unnatural.
The present model sets neutrino masses equal to zero which requires a fine tuning conspiracy and in general makes the theory unnatural and unsatisfactory.
The only hope is for a unified theory.

Within the context of the standard model, big bang nucleosynthesis becomes a zero parameter theory (null physics???).
Big bang nucleosynthesis is the boundary between the established and speculative cosmology.
CMB data puts limits on parameters which are relevant for particle physics models.
It is quite possible that the “new physics” lying beyond the standard model may lie well beyond the reach of direct accelerator experiments.
Now, I could go on and on about these issues, but I wont.
Just consider the “arrogant self professed experts” who can’t ask the question “WHY” and can only dismiss Terry Witt as a crackpot.
I am not his or any ones sock puppet, just a free thinker and I would side with Witt on the statements he makes in his adverts.
Theoretical physics has been stagnant for many years, String theory has produced nothing testable in thirty years other than 10^500 possible solutions.
Quantum physics and General Relativity are still incompatible and mathematical symmetries becomes numerology, not science.
No telescope or particle accelerator of any size is going to provide the required answers and when no-one asks WHY then there will be no understanding.
So, I will buy his book and read it, which is more than any of you self proclaimed experts are prepared to do. I mean is 60 bucks going to break the bank. If it is then you should be more worried about where your next meal is coming from rather than the state of physics.
I doubt if Witts motivation is money, whereas JREF makes no secret of its financial aims.
How many thousand dollars for a meeting with Randi?
People who live in precarious glass houses shouldn’t really throw stones!

Third Eye Open

17th June 2008, 02:01 PM

^^^

Hey hey look!! There are problems with *Established Theory*!! That means that you should pay attention to *Underdog Theory* even though it can't stand on it's own merits!!

Skwinty

17th June 2008, 03:22 PM

^^^

Hey hey look!! There are problems with *Established Theory*!! That means that you should pay attention to *Underdog Theory* even though it can't stand on it's own merits!!
Well the problems with the established theories are real problems.
Now as far as the underdog theory goes, I guess I will read it before dismissing it as crackpot.

Perhaps it is time to think out the box.:boxedin: I wouldnt dismiss it based on what I have read so far on this forum. Even Einstein made some mistakes and look what he produced.

The point is that so far this forum has dismissed him as a crackpot based on arguments which are rely on incomplete theories. I dont think that its fair to say that Witts theories cant stand on its own merits if you havent read the theory. Just his advert is a truthful indictment of the current state of physics and based on that I am prepared to spend the 60 bucks and at the current exchange rate that is about 500 ZAR.

Not a great deal of money for an alternative opinion, even it it does turn out to be incorrect. I dont understand how Witt can be construed as a scam artist. He by all accounts doesn't need the money. Incidentally the ad came to my attention in the june 2008 edition of Astronomy

Reality Check

17th June 2008, 04:13 PM

You are correct that current physics is incomplete and there are a number of questions left to answer.

I do not know what several of your questions are about but:
Why no fractionally charged hadrons? Answer: Quantum chromodynamics
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_chromodynamics)What is the origin of quark and lepton masses? Answer: The Higgs boson.
Why no gravity? Answer: Coming real soon now - look up string theory, especially M-theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-theory)
Why no detection of the Higgs boson? Answer: Coming real soon now: Large Hadron Collider.

The problem with null physics is that it is even more incomplete than standard physics. OUU is basically about cosmology with some quantum stuff mixed in. Even the author states that it is not a replacement for some theories (I forget which)

Skeptics note that

This is a book that is published by a company set up by the author for that purpose.
There is a large PR campaign promoting the book.
There are no known peer reviews of the book or null physics.
This does not make null physics invalid. But it does make them wonder whether it is worth investing time (or money) looking at it.

Skwinty

18th June 2008, 12:54 AM

Why no fractionally charged hadrons? Answer: Quantum chromodynamics
[/URL]What is the origin of quark and lepton masses? Answer: The Higgs boson.
Why no gravity? Answer: Coming real soon now - look up string theory, especially M-theory[/URL]
Why no detection of the Higgs boson? Answer: Coming real soon now: Large Hadron Collider.

The problem with null physics is that it is even more incomplete than standard physics.

But it does make them wonder whether it is worth investing time (or money) looking at it.

Hi Reality Check

QCD does not answer the fractionally charged hadron issue.
the Higgs boson is yet to be discovered so I fail to understand how it can explain anything.
M theory probably has as many holes in it as null physics and string theory really explains nothing.
If the LHC does not discover the Higgs boson, Do we build an accelerator between Sirius and earth? Whats the next step from LHC?

Any theory that could possibly provide some insight in how to advance theoretical physics should be invested in and not dismissed out of hand in this manner.
Terry Witt has invested a load of money into it.
What for? To make a fool of himself? ?.Make more money when he doesn't need it?

Reality Check

18th June 2008, 02:23 AM

Hi Skwinty
Hi Reality Check
QCD does not answer the fractionally charged hadron issue.

It does:
Quantum chromodynamics (abbreviated as QCD) is a theory of the strong interaction (color force), a fundamental force describing the interactions of the quarks and gluons found in hadrons (particles made of quarks or gluons, such as the proton, neutron or pion). It is the study of the SU(3) Yang–Mills theory of color-charged fermions (the quarks). QCD is a quantum field theory of a special kind called a non-abelian gauge theory. It is an important part of the Standard Model of particle physics. A huge body of experimental evidence for QCD has been gathered over the years.
QCD enjoys two peculiar properties:

Asymptotic freedom, which means that in very high-energy reactions, quarks and gluons interact very weakly. This prediction of QCD was first discovered in the early 1970s by David Politzer and by Frank Wilczek and David Gross. For this work they were awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Confinement, which means that the force between quarks does not diminish as they are separated. Because of this, it would take an infinite amount of energy to separate two quarks; they are forever bound into hadrons such as the proton and the neutron. Although analytically unproven, confinement is widely believed to be true because it explains the consistent failure of free quark searches, and it is easy to demonstrate in lattice QCD.

the Higgs boson is yet to be discovered so I fail to understand how it can explain anything.
M theory probably has as many holes in it as null physics and string theory really explains nothing.
If the LHC does not discover the Higgs boson, Do we build an accelerator between Sirius and earth? Whats the next step from LHC?

That is right - the Higgs boson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson) has not been dicovered yet. The theory of the Higgs boson explains the origin of the mass of everything.
The next step from the LHC is the the upgrade due in the next decade.

Any theory that could possibly provide some insight in how to advance theoretical physics should be invested in and not dismissed out of hand in this manner.
Terry Witt has invested a load of money into it.
What for? To make a fool of himself? ?.Make more money when he doesn't need it?
Null physics has not been dismissed out of hand. People are just waiting for it to be peer reviewed.

Tubbythin

18th June 2008, 02:49 AM

Hi Reality Check

QCD does not answer the fractionally charged hadron issue.
As RC says, yes it does.

the Higgs boson is yet to be discovered so I fail to understand how it can explain anything.
You're question was "why no detection of the Higgs boson?"
As if that is an SM failure. But the SM limits are perfectly consistent with us not having reached high enough energy yet.

M theory probably has as many holes in it as null physics and string theory really explains nothing.
If the LHC does not discover the Higgs boson, Do we build an accelerator between Sirius and earth? Whats the next step from LHC?
IF, and its a big IF, the LHC doesn't find the Higgs then someone may have to come up with another theory. But one that's consistent with what we do observe. From what I've read, Null Physics is not such a theory.

Any theory that could possibly provide some insight in how to advance theoretical physics should be invested in and not dismissed out of hand in this manner.
Thats correct. I'm sure when we see such a theory it'll get a lot of attention.

Skwinty

18th June 2008, 06:41 AM

Hi Reality Check

You are missing my point wrt fractionally charged hadrons.

The SM gauge interactions of quarks and leptons are totally fixed by their gauge charges. If we understood the origin of this charge quantization, we would understand why there are no fractionally charged hadrons.

Hi Tubbythin

You are optimistic about reaching the required energy levels.
I doubt that this energy level is achievable with out making the accelerator the size of the universe.

At no time did I intimate that the null physics theory is the theory to replace all theories. What I did intimate that it may help to get us to think outside the box and consider something else. Please remember, I , like everyone else on this forum have not read the theory and have just looked at the excerpts.

The problem is when the "right theory" arrives, how will you recognise it with out dismissing it as crackpot. The chances are it will be way out of the current paradigm just as null physics is.

As far as the statement that null physics is not rejected out of hand, what does crackpot , nutcase woo woo imply?

Reality Check

18th June 2008, 08:24 AM

Hi Reality Check

You are missing my point wrt fractionally charged hadrons.

The SM gauge interactions of quarks and leptons are totally fixed by their gauge charges. If we understood the origin of this charge quantization, we would understand why there are no fractionally charged hadrons.

Hi Skwinty

I think I see your point now. Confinement means that we cannot create fractionally charged hadrons by removing quarks. But why do quarks not form hadrons that are already fractionally charged?

I think that the simple answer is that the charges (-1/3 and +2/3) for the quarks and the gauge group of QCD means that quarks always form hadrons with non-fractional charges.
However that leaves the questions of why the quarks have the charge that they have and why does QCD have that gauge group?

ben m

18th June 2008, 09:21 AM

At no time did I intimate that the null physics theory is the theory to replace all theories. What I did intimate that it may help to get us to think outside the box and consider something else. Please remember, I , like everyone else on this forum have not read the theory and have just looked at the excerpts.

The problem is when the "right theory" arrives, how will you recognise it with out dismissing it as crackpot. The chances are it will be way out of the current paradigm just as null physics is.

Look at it this way: the Standard Model can't tell you why the QCD gauge group is what it is. String theory might do so someday. Some heretofore-unimagined theory might do so instead. Meanwhile, "Null Physics", the theory that you hope will provide some insights, comes from a guy who thinks that hadrons are just excitations of a proton-electron bound state---which is as much as to say that he doesn't think that quarks, confinement, color, or flavor have any meaning at all. What sort of excitations? He has no idea, but he can sort of draw a semiclassical mental picture of it, and he's optimistic that if he figures out the details he'll be proven right. He wants nuclei to be semiclassical, crystal-like structures with rigid geometries. Ugh.

Tell me, in what possible circumstance is this going to help us think outside the box about QCD? While I don't know what the outlines of Grand Unified Theory will be, I'm pretty darn sure that it will include some relativistic quantum mechanics, rather than ignoring it as an unimportant detail which can be added later; I'm pretty darn sure that the Final Theory won't claim that "quarks" are a misconception which was massaged out of the data by adding free parameters. (Seriously, read Witt's posts here, his book excerpts and "whitepapers" on his web page, and you'll see what I'm talking about.)

Imagine saying, "I know that Flat Earth theory isn't the ultimate theory, but since modern solar-system-formation theories are flawed too, maybe Flat Earthers will help us think outside the box." Sure, thinking outside the box is great, but ... well, if your source-of-inspiration is going to be some body of work with no connection to the relevant data, I don't see why Terence Witt is any more inspirational than, say, Jackson Pollack, or Salman Rushdie, or Mozart.

sol invictus

18th June 2008, 09:42 AM

In spite of the Standard models success it is unlikely to be the final theory.
Why the local gauge interactions?

Actually we have a very good answer for that - symmetries are fundamental.

Why the different state transformations?

Huh?

Why no fractionally charged hadrons?

Because of the gauge groups and the matter content. Did you mean to ask about those instead?

What is the origin of quark and lepton masses?

Probably the Higgs, but we'll know for sure in a year or so.

Why no gravity?

Classical gravity couples to the standard model quite nicely, actually, and (with one additional parameter, the cosmological constant) explains everything we've ever observed.

Why no detection of the Higgs boson?

Ever heard of LHC?

Perhaps if this was understood then the origin of CP violations,

We do - the CKM matrix.

the strong CP problem,

Axions, probably.

The standard model has 19 arbitrary parameters which are chosen to fit the data.

Wrong - it has over 20 now that we know neutrinos are massive. And of course they are chosen to fit the data - that's how science works. You make observations, you use a few of them to build a theory, and then all the billions of data points that remain are explained and/or predicted by your theory - if it works, that is. Like the SM does.

I doubt if Witts motivation is money,

If it is, he's very bad at accomplishing his goals. But I suspect you're correct on this one - his motivation is the same as all the other hundreds of physics cranks out there: megalomania or some other kind of mild mental illness.

whereas JREF makes no secret of its financial aims.
How many thousand dollars for a meeting with Randi?
People who live in precarious glass houses shouldn’t really throw stones!

Don't be ridiculous. Almost none of the posters on this forum have ever attended such an event, or have any connection to Randi or JREF other than posting here.

Tubbythin

18th June 2008, 10:56 AM

Hi Tubbythin

You are optimistic about reaching the required energy levels.
I doubt that this energy level is achievable with out making the accelerator the size of the universe.
Reaching the required energy level for what? The Higgs boson? Then yes. If the Higgs exists then, as I understand it the LHC should find it. If it doesn't find it then either the LHC doesn't work or the Higgs boson doesn't exist (or at least the theory needs a large modification). Why do you think the accelerator needs to be that size?

At no time did I intimate that the null physics theory is the theory to replace all theories. What I did intimate that it may help to get us to think outside the box and consider something else. Please remember, I , like everyone else on this forum have not read the theory and have just looked at the excerpts.
By forgetting what we know about nuclear and particle physics and replacing it with a theory that is inconsistent with innumerbale bits of data? That is your idea of thinking outside the box?

The problem is when the "right theory" arrives, how will you recognise it with out dismissing it as crackpot. The chances are it will be way out of the current paradigm just as null physics is.
Sure, but it will also be consistent with observations we already have. Which null physics isn't.

As far as the statement that null physics is not rejected out of hand, what does crackpot , nutcase woo woo imply?
Ermm. You want definitions?

Skwinty

18th June 2008, 02:51 PM

Ben M:
To put Bens opinion in perspective.

1st October 2007, 11:41 AM

October 2007 Smithsonian has a full page ad for "Our Undiscovered Universe" by Terence Witt (the advertised web site reveals no particular qualifications for him to write about astrophysics) ... has anyone looked at the book? I'm guessing he's a total nut-case.

1st October 2007, 12:48 PM

Just looked at the web page at nullphysics.com. Crackpot crackpot crackpot.

Well done Ben 67 minutes and you have sussed it all out.
Nothing like engaging your brain before shooting your mouth off.
How can I take anything you say seriously.

Sol Invictus:

skwinty:Why the local gauge interactions SU(3)cXSU(2)LXU(1)y and why 3 families of quarks and leptons

Sol:Actually we have a very good answer for that - symmetries are fundamental.

skwinty:What kind of good answer is that?

skwinty:Why no fractionally charged hadrons?

Sol:Huh?

skwinty:Read post 339

skwinty:What is the origin of quark and lepton masses?

Sol:Probably the Higgs, but we'll know for sure in a year or so.

skwinty:Yeah, Maybe and pigs can probably fly.

skwinty:Why no gravity?

Sol:Classical gravity couples to the standard model quite nicely, actually, and (with one additional parameter, the cosmological constant) explains everything we've ever observed.

skwinty: On which planet does this occur?

skwinty:Why no detection of the Higgs boson?

sol:Ever heard of LHC?

skwinty:Probably but we'll know for sure in about a year when pigs on the wing deliver the mail.

skwinty:Perhaps if this was understood then the origin of CP violations,

Sol:We do - the CKM matrix.

skwinty: The quark mixing matrix reveals the CP violations but does it explain the origin.

skwinty:the strong CP problem,

Sol:Axions, probably.

skwinty:Yes, axions were postulated to explain away lots of phenomena.(probably)

skwinty:The standard model has 19 arbitrary parameters which are chosen to fit the data

Sol:Wrong - it has over 20 now that we know neutrinos are massive. And of course they are chosen to fit the data - that's how science works. You make observations, you use a few of them to build a theory, and then all the billions of data points that remain are explained and/or predicted by your theory - if it works, that is. Like the SM does.

skwinty:Sure and in two years time there will be forty arbitrary parameters to add to the fine tuning conspiracy.Every time another artifact appears another arbitrary parameter will be postulated to explain the artifact.Sure its one thing to fit the data and another to select specific values for your arbitrary parameters.

skwinty:I doubt if Witts motivation is money,

Sol:If it is, he's very bad at accomplishing his goals. But I suspect you're correct on this one - his motivation is the same as all the other hundreds of physics cranks out there: megalomania or some other kind of mild mental illness.

skwinty: Lets face it its obvious that you know something about physics but how much you know about commerce is debatable.Witt has probably made more money in the last year than you will make in ten lifetimes.
The average intelligent and curious person has had it up the ying yang with the arrogant, condescending and chauvinistic attitude of modern physicists. If you think that the numbers of dissenters on this forum will have any impact on the sale of his books then I suspect that you are deluding yourself.
If you were around in the 1900's you probably would have said Einstein was a crackpot.

skwinty:whereas JREF makes no secret of its financial aims.
How many thousand dollars for a meeting with Randi?
People who live in precarious glass houses shouldn’t really throw stones!

Sol:Don't be ridiculous. Almost none of the posters on this forum have ever attended such an event, or have any connection to Randi or JREF other than posting here.

skwinty:of course you are correct here. The posters on this thread could't spring 60 bucks for a book, never mind joining JREF as a paid up member or sponsor. Check the Join JREF page for prices.

Tubbythin:

skwinty:You are optimistic about reaching the required energy levels.
I doubt that this energy level is achievable with out making the accelerator the size of the universe.

Tubbythin:Reaching the required energy level for what? The Higgs boson? Then yes. If the Higgs exists then, as I understand it the LHC should find it. If it doesn't find it then either the LHC doesn't work or the Higgs boson doesn't exist (or at least the theory needs a large modification). Why do you think the accelerator needs to be that size?

skwinty:One just has to look through a telescope to realise that the energy levels produced on earth would never in a billion years hope to match the energy levels that abound in the universe.

skwinty:At no time did I intimate that the null physics theory is the theory to replace all theories. What I did intimate that it may help to get us to think outside the box and consider something else. Please remember, I , like everyone else on this forum have not read the theory and have just looked at the excerpts.

Tubbythin:By forgetting what we know about nuclear and particle physics and replacing it with a theory that is inconsistent with innumerbale bits of data? That is your idea of thinking outside the box?

skwinty: At no stage did I say we should forget about any of the lessons we have learned. I am only suggesting that an open mind is a good thing and to at least make a token effort to understand what Witt is trying to say. Sure, he may not be 100% correct but at least he makes an effort to ask the WHY question rather than fudging his equations with arbitrary parameters and specifically selected values for those parameters.

skwinty:The problem is when the "right theory" arrives, how will you recognise it with out dismissing it as crackpot. The chances are it will be way out of the current paradigm just as null physics is

Tubbythin:Sure, but it will also be consistent with observations we already have. Which null physics isn't.

Skwinty:Yes and you bought the book and validated all the math and theory.

The fact of the matter is that any self respecting physicist would be honest enough to realise that his pet theory is not the last word on anything and is ripe for a coup detat.

As far as the neutron proton electron argument goes it should be remembered that particle bombardment, fission, fusion and radioactive decay are different and therefore not equal. No amount of time reversal or other quantum trickery will ever make them the same, so expect different results and outcomes for each of them.With all the arbitrary parameters and chosen values in an equation you can prove that the moon is made of green cheese.
I'm not convinced that Witt has it all sewn up, but then I'm not so sure that the current physics paradigm has it all sewn up either. But at least I try to have an open mind about it.

Cheers and thanks for the discussion but it is like banging your head against the wall. It's so nice when it stops.So I'll stop for a while and revisit over the weekend. I do have to work as well as pursue these esoteric discussions.:boxedin:

ben m

18th June 2008, 03:20 PM

Well done Ben 67 minutes and you have sussed it all out.
Nothing like engaging your brain before shooting your mouth off.
How can I take anything you say seriously.

Eh? What were the excerpts, 12-15 pages total? Witt's writing (and typography) isn't exactly PRL-like in density. Yes, I read the excerpts. They were full of baloney.

Seriously, Skwinty---there are thousands of random New Physics Theories available on the Internet, ranging in quality from Time Cube (low) to Autodynamics (featuring actual equations whose physics consequences can be evaluated.) All of the non-content cues---the non-journal publication, the big ads, the big claims---are quite precisely characteristic of crackpots. All of the content cues---the excerpts, the white papers, and Witt's posts here---contain exactly zero convincing physics.

Was there some positive feature of the content of Witt's ads---not "it offers a new paradigm", but "Witt's specific theory has features XYZ"---that makes you look twice? I sure didn't see any.

Reality Check

18th June 2008, 03:44 PM

skwinty: The point is that "the current physics paradigm has it all sewn up" is not a claim of the current physics paradigm. The current physics paradigm admits that it is not complete.

Nor for that matter is it a claim of Null Physics that it is complete. Terrence Witt in his forum has stated that Null Physics is not a replacement:

OUU isn't about a direct mathematical replacement of QM or GR; it's about foundational issues wrt space, time, energy, etc, and how they can be resolved with a new geometry.

For example he uses GR in his chapter about lumetic decay.

Any theory has to be consistent with all of the existing observations that are included in the scope of the theory. This includes the "current physics paradigm" and any new physics paradigm. Thus a theory that is about gravity has to make predictions that match the observations that we have, e.g. the orbits of planets, gravitational lensing, etc. If any prediction is wrong then the theory is wrong. The theory will then be discarded or restricted to a scope where its predictions are valid. For example Newton's law of gravity is wrong since it does not predict the precession of Mercury's orbit but it is still valid in the appropriate scope (and easier to use than GR).

New physics paradigms have risen several times in the past and been accepted. The process of becoming accepted has often been long and contentious. However that makes it likely that the accepted theory is correct and that non-accepted theories are wrong.

Tubbythin

18th June 2008, 04:15 PM

skwinty:One just has to look through a telescope to realise that the energy levels produced on earth would never in a billion years hope to match the energy levels that abound in the universe.

Depends what you mean. We'll probably never make the energy of the Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, sure. But the LHC will accelerate protons to 7TeV. Thats equivalent to a temperature of ~ 1016 K! That is, for example, roughly a billion times hotter than the core of the Sun.

skwinty: At no stage did I say we should forget about any of the lessons we have learned. I am only suggesting that an open mind is a good thing and to at least make a token effort to understand what Witt is trying to say. Sure, he may not be 100% correct but at least he makes an effort to ask the WHY question rather than fudging his equations with arbitrary parameters and specifically selected values for those parameters.
There's an open mind and then there's letting your brains fall out.

Skwinty:Yes and you bought the book and validated all the math and theory.

No. Why would I pay for a book with no peer review. If his theory is so great it'd be in one of the top journals.

The fact of the matter is that any self respecting physicist would be honest enough to realise that his pet theory is not the last word on anything and is ripe for a coup detat.
And any self respecting physicist would attempt to get his work published in a top journal.

As far as the neutron proton electron argument goes it should be remembered that particle bombardment, fission, fusion and radioactive decay are different and therefore not equal.
And none of them give any evidence for the neutron being composed of a proton and an electron. So its fail to the power of 4.

No amount of time reversal or other quantum trickery will ever make them the same, so expect different results and outcomes for each of them.With all the arbitrary parameters and chosen values in an equation you can prove that the moon is made of green cheese.
You can add as many arbitrary parameters as you want. The neutron is still not a proton plus an electron.

I'm not convinced that Witt has it all sewn up, but then I'm not so sure that the current physics paradigm has it all sewn up either. But at least I try to have an open mind about it.
The fact that I understand that the theory is rubbish and you do not does not mean I have a closed mind and you do not.

godless dave

18th June 2008, 04:21 PM

In spite of the Standard models success it is unlikely to be the final theory.

There isn't a physicist alive who would disagree with that statement.

Why the local gauge interactions?
Why the different state transformations?
Why no fractionally charged hadrons?
What is the origin of quark and lepton masses?
Why no gravity?
Why no detection of the Higgs boson?

What do you think theoretical and experimental physicists are working on? They're actually investigating these issues while Witt self-publishes a book and promotes it with press releases.

Paulhoff

18th June 2008, 04:58 PM

How many thousand dollars for a meeting with Randi?
None, as in no money, I see him about once a month, and hope to see him again next Wednesday.

Paul

:) :) :)

sol invictus

18th June 2008, 10:09 PM

skwinty:Why no fractionally charged hadrons?

Are you asking about electric charge? Non-Abelian charges? There's no mystery either way.

skwinty:Yeah, Maybe and pigs can probably fly.

Were you aware that LHC is currently cooling down, on the verge of starting up?

skwinty: On which planet does this occur?

All of them.

skwinty: The quark mixing matrix reveals the CP violations but does it explain the origin.

It's quite clear that you have no idea what the word "explain" means.

If you were around in the 1900's you probably would have said Einstein was a crackpot.

Nonsense. Einstein's theories were recognized to be correct within a very short time, and not long after that he was the most famous physicist in the world.

Why? Because he was right. Witt, on the other hand, is one of the countless loonies that think they can overturn all of modern science. They're a dime a dozen - I'm seen literally hundreds of such theories over the last decade. The only difference here is that Witt has more money to waste than most.

Skwinty

19th June 2008, 01:47 AM

Hi Sol, Tubbythin,Ben m,Godless Dave , PaulHoff and Reality check

Well this is what I mean about condescending.
Here we are discussing particle physics ,cosmology and nuclear physics and I get asked if I know about LHC.

Yes I do, I am not a complete idiot, some parts are missing.

Seriously though, you keep splitting hairs as if nuclei werent enough.
The neutron decays in a few minutes to a proton + electron + electron anti-neutrino.
So wheres there no proton and electron?
I have yet to see where Witt makes the claim that the neutron only consists of a proton and electron.

In a neutron star, electrons and protons will fuse to neutrons.
My point about energies and accelerators is this:
Sure you will get instantaneous temperatures of 10^16 Kelvin, but for how long can you sustain those temperatures? Can you sustain the neccessary pressures as well?

Thats why I made the point about particle bombardment, fission , fusion and radioactive decay. Time reversals dont work for me in the classical sense, however in the quantum sense time reversal has merit.

As far as me not understanding the word explain, you must have the same problem with the word origin. This refers to the fractionally charged hadron and CP violations.

I am not a particle or any other kind of physicist but I do know the difference between this is how it happens and this is why it happens.

With regards to James Randi, the point I was trying to make is that Witt is accused of trying to make money and this coming from posters on a forum that solicits money from the public ranging from $25 to $25000.
Now making money is integral to life so whats good for the goose is good for the gander.

I also understand that the work on theoretical physics continues albeit with an incessant request for bigger and better colliders and equipment.
It seems as the philosophy of science died with Einstein.

With regard to gravity: There is no Grand Unified Theory, but by saying
"Classical gravity couples to the standard model quite nicely, actually, and (with one additional parameter, the cosmological constant) explains everything we've ever observed." indicates that you already have this theory.

With regards to having an open mind and no brains is a good example of facetiousness.:boxedin:

Tubbythin

19th June 2008, 02:35 AM

Hi Sol, Tubbythin,Ben m,Godless Dave , PaulHoff and Reality check

Well this is what I mean about condescending.
Here we are discussing particle physics ,cosmology and nuclear physics and I get asked if I know about LHC.

Yes I do, I am not a complete idiot, some parts are missing.
And you seem certain it won't discover the Higgs boson. So either you know something that all the wrold's greatest particle physicists don't, or you don't know what you're talking about?

Seriously though, you keep splitting hairs as if nuclei werent enough.
I'm not sure what you mean. We keep saying that null physics is wrong because it doesn't match with our observations of nuclei? That's splitting hairs?

The neutron decays in a few minutes to a proton + electron + electron anti-neutrino.
So wheres there no proton and electron?
I have yet to see where Witt makes the claim that the neutron only consists of a proton and electron.
That fist sentence is correct. The second sentence doesn't make any sense.

In a neutron star, electrons and protons will fuse to neutrons.
Fuse is the wrong word. Or at least misleading.

My point about energies and accelerators is this:
Sure you will get instantaneous temperatures of 10^16 Kelvin, but for how long can you sustain those temperatures? Can you sustain the neccessary pressures as well?
Necessary for what?

Thats why I made the point about particle bombardment, fission , fusion and radioactive decay. Time reversals dont work for me in the classical sense, however in the quantum sense time reversal has merit.
Please elaborate. I don't know what you're trying to say.

With regards to having an open mind and no brains is a good example of facetiousness.:boxedin:
Ok. Put it another way. Having an open mind to theories that explain all the evidence already explained by the current theory and explain something new or more precisely is good. Having an open mind to theories which contradict numerous observations is just foolish.

Skwinty

19th June 2008, 04:10 AM

Reality Check

19th June 2008, 04:28 AM

...snip...
You trash Witt because you say that a neutron doesnt contain a proton and an electron.
A neutron will decay to a proton , electron and electron antineutrino in about 10 minutes.

It does not contain a proton and an electron. It does contain quarks - see Free neutron (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_neutron) and its decay.

I also stated that there is a difference between particle bombardment,fission,fusion and radioactive decay and therefore different results to the processes.
Sure when you smash particles together you can count and describe the bits and end up with quarks etc.
This is not the case in fission,fusion or decay.So, where is the fail to the power of four come into the equation.

With respect to neutron stars, what would the correct term in your opinion be? Fuse is good enough for me.

As far as the LHC is concerned, it has not smashed anything as yet,but the upgrades are already planned.The fact of the matter is that no LHC will ever be large or energetic enough to emulate the conditions in the cosmos.

Existing high energy physics experiments already "emulate the conditions in the cosmos", e.g. CERN and FermiLab.

The upgrades to LHC are being planned now because it takes a long time to do the upgrade (the construction of LHC was approved in 1995). They are not because the LHC is not expected to produce new physics such as the Higgs boson. It is to explore new physics at even higher energies.

Skwinty

19th June 2008, 04:45 AM

It does not contain a proton and an electron. It does contain quarks - see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_neutron Free neutron and its decay.

Existing high energy physics experiments already "emulate the conditions in the cosmos", e.g. CERN and FermiLab.

The upgrades to LHC are being planned now because it takes a long time to do the upgrade (the construction of LHC was approved in 1995). They are not because the LHC is not expected to produce new physics such as the Higgs boson. It is to explore new physics at even higher energies.

Reality check
Please read your own references

A free neutron is a neutron that exists outside of an atomic nucleus. While neutrons can be stable when bound inside nuclei, free neutrons are unstable and decay with a lifetime of just under 15 minutes (885.7 ± 0.8 s).[1] Because the neutron consists of three quarks, the only possible decay mode without a change of baryon number requires the flavour changing of one of the quarks via the weak nuclear force. The neutron consists of two down quarks with charge -1/3 and one up quark with charge +2/3, and the decay of one of the down quarks into a lighter up quark can be achieved by the emission of a W boson. By this means the neutron decays into a proton (which contains one down and two up quarks), an electron, and an electron antineutrino (antineutrino), with the proton and electron potentially forming a hydrogen atom

Reality Check

19th June 2008, 05:28 AM

Reality check
Please read your own references

A free neutron is a neutron that exists outside of an atomic nucleus. While neutrons can be stable when bound inside nuclei, free neutrons are unstable and decay with a lifetime of just under 15 minutes (885.7 ± 0.8 s).[1] Because the neutron consists of three quarks, the only possible decay mode without a change of baryon number requires the flavour changing of one of the quarks via the weak nuclear force. The neutron consists of two down quarks with charge -1/3 and one up quark with charge +2/3, and the decay of one of the down quarks into a lighter up quark can be achieved by the emission of a W boson. By this means the neutron decays into a proton (which contains one down and two up quarks), an electron, and an electron antineutrino (antineutrino), with the proton and electron potentially forming a hydrogen atom

Skwinty
Please read the text.

There no actual proton or electron or electon antineutrino before the decay. The sequence is

Start with a neutron containing two down quarks with charge -1/3 and one up quark with charge +2/3. Note that there is no proton, electron or for that matter an electon antineutrino.
A down quarks decays into a lighter up quark by the emission of a W boson
The proton forms and the remaining energy converts to a electron and electon antineutrino

Skwinty

19th June 2008, 05:42 AM

There no actual proton or electron or electon antineutrino before the decay. [/LIST]

Yes, thats because before the decay its a neutron.
The neutron contains the building blocks of a proton and an electron with a antineutrino.

See, this is what I call splitting hairs.

Reality Check

19th June 2008, 06:14 AM

If the neutron contained the exact building blocks of a proton and an electron with a antineutrino then I would agree with you. But the intermediate decay of a down quarks into a lighter up quark by the emission of a W boson means that it is not splitting hairs - just making the actual situation clearer.

Skwinty

19th June 2008, 06:33 AM

I think the issue really stems from the fact that Witt chose to represent the neutron pictorially with round circles representing the proton and the electrons as little circles bound into the circle representing the neutron.
You must admit it is easier to draw that than the up/down quarks etc.
Now to use that issue to dismiss him as a crackpot is really splitting hairs.

I understand that every has their own opinions and interpretations of these matters, but one needs to allow some leeway when putting these ideas on paper.

As far as peer review goes, did Leonard Susskind, lee Smolin, David Greene etc etc put their books on physics through peer review.
Were they dismissed as cranks.

It strikes me that the issue is more that Witts theories are in opposition to the established paradigm that causes all the consternation. As I have said previously ,it is easier to dismiss him as a crank than to rebutt with logic and fact.

Dont say that people dont have the time or interest to do this. Just look at this forum and how many people invested time and energy on this subject.

Paulhoff

19th June 2008, 06:52 AM

So then Skwinty, explain a proton turning into a neutron, which can happen, so how can a proton be a so-called building block.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron

Paul

:) :) :)

Skwinty

19th June 2008, 07:10 AM

Reality Check

19th June 2008, 07:28 AM

I agree that on this point Witt has been misinterpreted. The extract only talks about bound electrons in the nucleus (not free neutrons). It does not state that neutrons are protons and electrons. It is strange though that the last diagram for a neutron star is described as "two protons and two bound electrons, a neutron doublet".

Leonard Susskind, lee Smolin, David Greene etc etc did not need to put their books through peer review. Peer review is not for books, it is for scientific papers. But the contents of their books are based on scientific papers with a bit of speculation mixed in as is proper for popular books.

There are other issues with null physics. When I get his book I will be in a position to comment better. The issues I can see now are:

There is no zero-point energy in null physics.
But there are experimentally verified effects (Casmir Effect, Lamb Shift) that rely on there being a zero-point energy.

No black holes in null physics. It does not allow matter to compress further than the "core repulsion" of neutrons.

There is a lot of evidence for things that look like supermassive black holes in the center of many galaxies including ours. Null physics does have hypermassive objects. From my last posting in his forum:
The point of the quote from Wikipedia was not really about the supermassive black hole in our galaxy. It was that any mass with the density of water over 150,000,000 solar masses will have a Schwarzschild radius that is greater than its radius. Supermassive objects up to 18 billion solar masses have been observed. Many of these objects have masses over 150,000,000 solar masses and so are counter-examples to your calculation for Sag A* in that they do not have mass that extends outside of their Schwarzschild radius.

So now we have 2 types of supermassive objects: hyperdense objects with mass outside of the Schwarzschild radius (and no event horizon?) and supermassive black holes whose mass lies inside their Schwarzschild radius and thus have event horizons.

The null physics explanation for the cosmological redshift ("intergalactic redshift" in the book is lumetic decay. This is the gravitational redshift caused by the universal gravitational field in a flat universe.

But gravitational redshift depends on the gravitation field changing (see Wikipedia).
Thus we would need a non-uniform gravitational field of the universe that increases in all directions from the observer to give a redshift that increases with increasing distance. This allows the light to climb "uphill" out of a gravity well to the observer and thus redshift in all directions. This makes that observer privileged which is not allowed in GR.
Alternately every observer will deduce that the density of matter in the universe increases as distance increases from them.

He has a white paper called "Einstein's Nonphysical Geometry" where he derives an equation stating that the % change in radial length diverges far from a Schwarzschild radius.

I think that he is using infinity improperly since using the exact solution (http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-ph/pdf/0511/0511217v2.pdf) (see equation 8) for the change in the Schwarzschild coordinate r gives the percentage change as (infintity - infinity)/infinity.

He uses an approximation that starts with the statement "In the limit (R2 − R1) → dr" where R1 and R2 are 'radial lengths' and dr is an infintesimal change in the Schwarzschild coordinate r. This looks incorrect since it assumes that r is a radial length which is is not.
Just below equation 8 in the above paper:
The coordinate r is an “areal” radius — it labels spherical surfaces of area 4πr2, but it does not label proper distance in a simple way.

Paulhoff

19th June 2008, 07:31 AM

A proton can change into a neutron by electron absorption.
It's not wrong to say that the proton and electron are building blocks.
Whats your point?
For goodness sake the hydrogen atom is the basic building block, add electrons one by one and you get the list of elements
You don't read do you, that is not the only way......

Inside of a bound nucleus, protons can also transform via beta decay into neutrons. In this case, the transformation may occur by emission of a positron (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron) (antielectron) and neutrino (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino) (instead of an antineutrino):

It is wrong to say that protons and neutons are building blocks when you know about quarks.

Paul

:) :) :)

Skwinty

19th June 2008, 07:48 AM

Sure, I never read the article. I answered off the cuff.
Yes, you are right quarks are the preferred building blocks.
It is just a more complex and convoluted way of describing things.
What does a quark consist of?
We know that a quark is a hypothetical particle but what makes a quark.
And then when you know that particle you can ask what makes that particle ad infinitum.

So what at the end of the day is the true building block?
Another hypothetical particle?

sol invictus

19th June 2008, 08:01 AM

sol invictus

19th June 2008, 08:16 AM

The neutron decays in a few minutes to a proton + electron + electron anti-neutrino.
So wheres there no proton and electron?
I have yet to see where Witt makes the claim that the neutron only consists of a proton and electron.
(my emphasis)

SH: No, I'm saying that the conversion of an electron from its free state to its neutronic bound state requires the absorption of an (anti)neutrino. This is mentioned in the book that no one on this blog has read yet.

Sh: The decay of a neutron involves the emission of a proton, electron, and (anti)neutrino. I trust you agree that spin is conserved during this beta decay process. The formation of a neutron would necessarily, by time symmetry, involve the combination of an electron, proton, and absorption of a (anti)neutrino as part of the electron binding process.
<snip>

By the way, in quoting that I noticed something rather interesting...

Sh: The decay of a neutron involves the emission of a proton, electron, and (anti)neutrino.

<snip>

LL: If you read the prior posts, it should answer most of your questions.

Ben M:
To put Bens opinion in perspective.

<snip>

Sol:Actually we have a very good answer for that - symmetries are fundamental.

How interesting - a new poster suddenly appears and starts promoting Witt's book. Oddly, our new friend uses an unusually quoting style, strangely reminiscent of the one used by Mr. Witt himself....

Anyone smell dirty socks?

Skwinty

19th June 2008, 08:25 AM

How typical of you Sol.
Trash any opposition. You are the epitomy of an arrogant ,chauvinistic and self hailed expert.
The only reason I quoted like that was because I was offline when i composed the post.
I had save the thread pages earlier.
I had never heard of Witt until last week, have not bought his book and am not defended him.I am taking issue with people like you who feel that it is your duty to trash any one whose opinion is not in line with your own

Skwinty

19th June 2008, 08:27 AM

also, where does he say that the neutron consists only of a proton and an electron??

sol invictus

19th June 2008, 08:36 AM

also, where does he say that the neutron consists only of a proton and an electron??

Are you incapable of reading? As I said, add the antineutrino if you like: It doesn't make any difference.

The formation of a neutron would necessarily, by time symmetry, involve the combination of an electron, proton, and absorption of a (anti)neutrino as part of the electron binding process.

If this were correct, the decay of the neutron would violate conservation of energy. This is high school level physics - evidently Mr. Witt doesn't understand the meaning of "bound".

sol invictus

19th June 2008, 08:41 AM

How typical of you Sol.
Trash any opposition. You are the epitomy of an arrogant ,chauvinistic and self hailed expert.

When someone comes here with garbage, it gets put right where it belongs - in the trash. That's just as it should be. If you can't take it, leave.

I had never heard of Witt until last week, have not bought his book and am not defended him.

Sure.

I am taking issue with people like you who feel that it is your duty to trash any one whose opinion is not in line with your own

It's not an opinion. Ever heard of facts? Science? Basic Aristotelian logic?

Skwinty

19th June 2008, 09:00 AM

These are the facts about neutron decay.
Perhaps you should take your own advice!

The present understanding of the decay of the neutron is
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particles/imgpar/neutrondec.gifThis decay illustrates some of the conservation laws (http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particles/parint.html#c1) which govern particle decays. The proton in the product satisfies the conservation of baryon number (http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particles/parint.html#c2), but the emergence of the electron unaccompanied would violate conservation of lepton number (http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particles/parint.html#c3). The third particle must be an electron antineutrino to allow the decay to satisfy lepton number conservation. The electron has lepton number 1, and the antineutrino has lepton number -1.

sol invictus

19th June 2008, 09:08 AM

These are the facts about neutron decay.

Yes, your cut and paste is correct - and it immediately proves that the neutron cannot be a bound state of a proton and an electron (or of a proton, electron, and antineutrino). A bound state - by definition - has less energy than the sum of its constituents. If the neutron were such a bound state, that decay would violate conservation of energy.

As I mentioned, this has been understood at least since 1934 when the mass of the neutron was measured accurately. But it's news to Mr. Witt, apparently.

ben m

19th June 2008, 10:11 AM

Skwinty, there are lots of reasons to say a neutron is not a proton+an electron. First of all, accelerator experiments show that the following reactions all have the exact same probability (modulo a universal phase-space factor):

antineutrino + proton -> neutron + positron
neutrino + neutron -> proton + electron
neutron + positron -> antineutrino + proton
proton + electron -> neutrino + neutron

If the electron is somehow "already" inside the neutron, doesn't the above data suggest that the positron is (in the same way) "already" in the proton?

If there's already an electron inside the neutron, shouldn't it be possible to get it out by smashing something into it? Unfortunately, although reactions like :

p+ p+ --> n0 p+ pi+
n0 p+ --> n0 n0 pi+
n0 p+ --> p+ p+ pi-
n0 n0 --> n0 p+ pi-

are extremely high-probability and have identical cross sections, reactions like this:

p+ n0 --> p+ p+ e- antineutrino
p+ p+ --> p+ n0 e+ neutrino

are extremely rare ... but again have identical cross sections. (Replace that p+ projectile with an electron beam, and you're looking at some of the most-precise nuclear physics experiments ever performed.) Why should the first reaction---which Witt's theory would describe as "knocking an electron out of a neutron"---have exactly the same cross-section as the second one, which Witt could only describe as "creating a positron out of thin air"? The standard quark-model (or the predecessor isospin model) said: "except for something carrying a charge difference, protons and neutrons have exactly the same constituents"; that's a good answer. "Neutrons are different than protons because there's an electron inside them, and I'll invent something later that explains why they look identical in every possible process except neutron decay" is a really bad answer.

This is the standard crackpot mistake, Skwinty. You (and Witt) behave as though the standard model is a complex explanation for a simple phenomenon; that the "phenomenon" in need of explaining is the simple thing you learned in high school (in this case "the neutron is slightly heavier than, and decays to, p+ e-"); and that all of the additional information gathered by Mainstream Physicists is a heap of trivia ("splitting hairs" as you say) that can be dealt with later by some pedant or another.

You're declaring that your neutron model is a reasonable one without, to all appearances, having read one single article or textbook chapter on actual measurements involving neutrons. That's what makes it crackpottery---the complete disconnect from what ought to be relevant data.

godless dave

19th June 2008, 11:00 AM

I also understand that the work on theoretical physics continues albeit with an incessant request for bigger and better colliders and equipment.

That's because hypotheses have to be tested to be accepted.

Yes, you are right quarks are the preferred building blocks.

Preferred? Reality isn't subject to our preferences.

It is just a more complex and convoluted way of describing things.

It's also more accurate.

Tubbythin

19th June 2008, 11:33 AM

Hi Tubbythin
The splitting hairs comes about from this.(I thought my previous post was clear though)

You trash Witt because you say that a neutron doesnt contain a proton and an electron.
A neutron will decay to a proton , electron and electron antineutrino in about 10 minutes.
Yes. Which in itself is very good evidence for the neutron not being composed of a proton and an electron (and an antineutrino). The fact that it takes so long is because the Q value is pretty small and it is a weak interaction. It is a weak interaction because there is a quark flavour change from d to u. If there were no quark flavour change (eg if the neutron was a proton and an electron stuck together) then the decay would proceed much much faster.

I also stated that there is a difference between particle bombardment,fission,fusion and radioactive decay and therefore different results to the processes.
Sure when you smash particles together you can count and describe the bits and end up with quarks etc.
This is not the case in fission,fusion or decay.So, where is the fail to the power of four come into the equation.
Actually, studies using fusion-evaporation reactions often do precisely that. If you're looking for an exotic nucleus with a small production cross-section one of the best ways to remove contamination from competing channels is to observe the evaporated particles (protons, neutrons, alphas).
The point I was making was that none of bombardment, fission, fusion or radioactive decay give any evidence whatsoever for the neutron being composed of a proton and an electron.

With respect to neutron stars, what would the correct term in your opinion be? Fuse is good enough for me.
In a normal nucleus its called electron capture. Fuse implies a bound state of the initial constituents.

As far as the LHC is concerned, it has not smashed anything as yet,but the upgrades are already planned.The fact of the matter is that no LHC will ever be large or energetic enough to emulate the conditions in the cosmos.
Which conditions? The cosmos is at ~3 K so you need to be a little more specific.

I will believe the existence of the Higgs when and if it is discovered.
Fair enough.

You may find it easier to rebutt arguments by implying that I do not know what I'm talking about as it is easier than using logic and fact.
The facts I am using are that there is no evidence to suggest the neutron is a composite of proton and electron and that there is plenty of evidence to suggest it is not. The logic I am using is that given the previous sentence, it is a waste of time considering Witts book.

You say that Witts theory contradicts observation.
Given that you have read the excerpts, I think that Witt is offering a different interpretation of these observations and not disputing the observations.

You dont specify what your profession is in your public profile.
Would you like to share this information?
I'm a nuclear physics PhD student.

Tubbythin

19th June 2008, 12:05 PM

Yes, you are right quarks are the preferred building blocks.
It is just a more complex and convoluted way of describing things.
No. Its the simplest way of describing observations.

What does a quark consist of?
We know that a quark is a hypothetical particle but what makes a quark.
And then when you know that particle you can ask what makes that particle ad infinitum.
As far as we can measure, nothing. And no, the quark has been more than just hypothetical since the late 1960's.

So what at the end of the day is the true building block?
Another hypothetical particle?
Thats one of the questions particle physicists are trying to answer. By building new accelerators that you seem to have a thing against.

Skwinty

19th June 2008, 01:41 PM

Hi All
First of all I want to restate a few things again.

1. I have no connection whatsoever with Witt, so to be called a smelly sock puppet doesn't go down well with me. What would I stand to gain by trying to promote his book amongst all you learned folk.
2. I am not a physicist of any kind, merely an electrical engineer in the nuclear instrumentation and control arena.
3. My questions and sometimes hostile statements come from the fact that the dismissing of Witt as a crank seems to be unfair.
He clearly states that he is presenting a philosophical theory that wants to get away from the standard model and then work towards a scientific theory.
4. The issue of the neutron beta decay clearly is one pertaining to the unbounded neutron. Now if the neutron consists of quarks of different flavours and protons consist of quarks of different flavours there is huge commonality between them. ie the same components with different characteristics. Therefore the assumption that the neutron has the building blocks of the proton electron and electron antineutrino is not unreasonable.
5.At last you folk are beginning to rebutt using logic and fact instead of facetious one liners. I appreciate that.
6.Some of you may or may not buy his book for further investigation.
It is not fair to trash him based on the excerpts. But there again as he says, any theory presented for peer review that is not consistent with the current paradigm will be rejected poste haste.
7. I dont have anything against the LHC or any scientific endeavours, merely some scepticism that these are going to produce the answers to everything or even most of every thing.
8.As I said in a previous post, it seems as though the philosophy of science died with Einstein.
9. When it comes to energies that can be generated on earth, even the simultaneous explosion of all the nuclear bombs ever created would pale in comparison to the energies that exist in the cosmos.

Thanks for the discussion:boxedin:

DeiRenDopa

19th June 2008, 01:57 PM

... snip ...

6.Some of you may or may not buy his book for further investigation.
It is not fair to trash him based on the excerpts. But there again as he says, any theory presented for peer review that is not consistent with the current paradigm will be rejected poste haste.

... snip ...(emphasis added)

Really? :jaw-dropp

Do you happen to recall the two 'high-z' supernova teams (of astronomers), who published independent papers that (in effect) announced the discovery of 'dark energy'?

Do you happen to know what the (then) "current paradigm" was, in cosmology? (HINT: someone's 'greatest blunder')

Do you happen to know the names of the journals these teams' papers were published in, and whether they are peer-reviewed?

Have you heard of Halton Arp and/or Jayant Narlikar? of the 'variable mass hypothesis' that has their names associated with it (as in 'the Arp-Narlikar VMH')? Do you happen to know whether this VMH is "consistent with the current paradigm"? (HINT: it isn't) or where this was first published?

How many more examples like this do you need to be made aware of before you can appreciate just how silly (not to mention wrong) your statement is?

Skwinty

19th June 2008, 02:15 PM

(emphasis added)

How many more examples like this do you need to be made aware of before you can appreciate just how silly (not to mention wrong) your statement is?

Correction. This was Witts statement not mine.
How can you say that Dark Energy is not consistent with the cosmological constant. Surely they are different interpretations of the same set of observations.:boxedin:

PS These individuals who wrote these papers were well known in Astronomy, they were not unknowns.

godless dave

19th June 2008, 02:26 PM

Hi All
First of all I want to restate a few things again.
3. My questions and sometimes hostile statements come from the fact that the dismissing of Witt as a crank seems to be unfair.
He clearly states that he is presenting a philosophical theory that wants to get away from the standard model and then work towards a scientific theory.

6.Some of you may or may not buy his book for further investigation.
It is not fair to trash him based on the excerpts. But there again as he says, any theory presented for peer review that is not consistent with the current paradigm will be rejected poste haste.

The phrases I bolded are precisely what makes Witt a crank.

7. I dont have anything against the LHC or any scientific endeavours, merely some scepticism that these are going to produce the answers to everything or even most of every thing.

No one claims that it will! The LHC is being built to test certain hypotheses. How do you suggest we test hypotheses, by writing books and press releases?

8.As I said in a previous post, it seems as though the philosophy of science died with Einstein.

What do you mean by that? What approach did Einstein take that you think has been abandoned? Remember, Einstein wrote papers, including the math he did, and submitted them to the appropriate journals. They were published even though they weren't consistent with the current paradigm.

Skwinty

19th June 2008, 02:54 PM

The phrases I bolded are precisely what makes Witt a crank.

No one claims that it will! The LHC is being built to test certain hypotheses. How do you suggest we test hypotheses, by writing books and press releases?

What do you mean by that? What approach did Einstein take that you think has been abandoned? Remember, Einstein wrote papers, including the math he did, and submitted them to the appropriate journals. They were published even though they weren't consistent with the current paradigm.

Witt is an unknown and his theory rejects the current paradigm in favour of his. The odds are totally against him regardless of the validity of his theory.

Back to the facetious one liners sigh

Einstein studied philosophy and his approach was philosophical.
Once again his theories were based on the current paradigm.
Newton , Maxwell , Mach , Bohr, Brown , de Broglie to name a few

Tubbythin

19th June 2008, 02:55 PM

4. The issue of the neutron beta decay clearly is one pertaining to the unbounded neutron. Now if the neutron consists of quarks of different flavours and protons consist of quarks of different flavours there is huge commonality between them. ie the same components with different characteristics. Therefore the assumption that the neutron has the building blocks of the proton electron and electron antineutrino is not unreasonable.

Given the last hundred years of progress in science you are wrong. It is entirely unreasonable. Consistently repeating that it is reasonable does not make it so.

ETA: Its a bit like saying Earth is a bit like Mars. Therefore the Earth is a bound state consisting of Mars and the Moon.

Tubbythin

19th June 2008, 03:00 PM

Einstein studied philosophy and his approach was philosophical.
Once again his theories were based on the current paradigm.
Newton , Maxwell , Mach , Bohr, Brown , de Broglie to name a few

de Broglie was 13 in 1905. Niels Bohr was 17.

Skwinty

19th June 2008, 03:04 PM

Given the last hundred years of progress in science you are wrong. It is entirely unreasonable. Consistently repeating that it is reasonable does not make it so.

ETA: Its a bit like saying Earth is a bit like Mars. Therefore the Earth is a bound state consisting of Mars and the Moon.

What does a neutron and a proton consist of?

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particles/imgpar/neutrondec.gif
Are you then saying that this equation is incorrect?
Are you saying that if the arrow was reversed the equation would be incorrect?

Skwinty

19th June 2008, 03:07 PM

de Broglie was 13 in 1905. Niels Bohr was 17.

Einstein still collaborated with these people. His life did not come to an end in 1905.

Tubbythin

19th June 2008, 03:15 PM

What does a neutron and a proton consist of?

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particles/imgpar/neutrondec.gif
Are you then saying that this equation is incorrect?

No. The equation is correct. But the proton is not preformed inside the neutron. The decay requires the emission of a virtual W- boson which then gives the electron and antineutrino.

Are you saying that if the arrow was reversed the equation would be incorrect?
You'd be hard pushed to get a neutrino to interact with anything, let alone at the same time as an electron.

Tubbythin

19th June 2008, 03:20 PM

Einstein still collaborated with these people. His life did not come to an end in 1905.

Granted. But his first two paradigm shifting papers were published then.

DeiRenDopa

19th June 2008, 03:32 PM

Correction. This was Witts statement not mine.Correction noted.

For the record, the post of yours I quoted begins (emphasis added): "Hi All
First of all I want to restate a few things again."

How can you say that Dark Energy is not consistent with the cosmological constant. Huh?

Did I say otherwise?!? :confused:

Perhaps you are not aware of the relevant history of cosmology?

The statement was about "the current paradigm"; at the time of the landmark papers (on high-z supernovae), that paradigm was, crudely, that Einstein's cosmological constant was, indeed, a curious historical blunder.

Surely they are different interpretations of the same set of observations.:boxedin:Perhaps, perhaps not.

It's irrelevant ... you (or as we now know Witt) were making a bald statement concerning the reception an idea ("theory") outside the current paradigm would receive; I cited a specific example of something that falsified your claim.

Period.

PS These individuals who wrote these papers were well known in Astronomy, they were not unknowns.So?

Your (or Witt's) claim said nothing about being known, unknown, Martian, or gnome ...

Perhaps you wrote in haste? Perhaps you'd like to revise your claim (or maybe Witt would)?

ben m

19th June 2008, 03:48 PM

Skwinty, your notion of what particles "consist of" won't hold up to scrutiny. What does a kaon consist of? It has a dozen or two dozen decay modes:

K+ --> mu+ nu_mu
K+ --> e+ nu_e
K+ --> pi+ pi0
K+ --> pi0 mu+ nu_mu
K+ --> pi0 e+ nu_e
K+ --> pi+ pi+ pi-
K+ --> pi+ pi0 pi0
and so on, down to the ultra-rare
K+ --> pi+ e+ e-
and the ultra-ultra-rare (and exciting)
K+ --> pi+ nu nubar

(That was an easy one; the lists get longer and longer for heavier particles.)

Decays don't tell you directly what the decaying particle was "made of". A muon isn't "made of" an electron and two neutrinos; a pi+ isn't "made of" a muon and a neutrino; a pi0 isn't "made of" two photons. It just doesn't work that way, and you will make exactly zero progress in predicting particle properties unless you can shake that notion.

Decays can tell you about conservation laws; note that all of my K decays (as well as the one neutron decay) conserve charge, baryon number, lepton number, and lepton flavor, which is why those all seem to be exact conservation laws. The exact rates/probabilities of these decays tells you even more, about the conservation (or lack thereof) of quantities like C, P, CP, CPT, spin, and flavor. And so on.

Reality Check

19th June 2008, 03:49 PM

Witt is an unknown and his theory rejects the current paradigm in favour of his. The odds are totally against him regardless of the validity of his theory.

Back to the facetious one liners sigh

Einstein studied philosophy and his approach was philosophical.
Once again his theories were based on the current paradigm.
Newton , Maxwell , Mach , Bohr, Brown , de Broglie to name a few

I agree that the odds are against him. The problem is that Witt is not even trying to win against the odds. He must know that papers that reject the paradigm in existence at the time have been published before.
I dislike saying this but the phase "courage of his convictions" comes to mind. As far as I know he has not even tried to get a paper published on null physics.

Einstein studied philosophy, mathematics and physics and his approach was mathematical.

Your generalization in the next sentence is definitely wrong. de Broglie and Bohr had no effect on his 1905 papers nor on his first scientific work (1894) nor on his first publication (1901).
Newton's law of gravity had little effect on General Relativity except as a neccessary solution in the appropriate limit.

Oddly enough an unknown (before 1905 he had only published 1 paper) could publish several theories that rejected the current paradigm:

The Special Relativity paper argued that the current paradigm (luminiferous aether) was superfluous.
Mass–energy equivalence was against the current paradigm (mass and energy are two separate concepts).
His paper on the particulate nature of light introduced quanta as physical entities rather than the previous mathematical treatment by Planck. This was against the current paradigm (wave theories of light).

sol invictus

19th June 2008, 03:52 PM

6.Some of you may or may not buy his book for further investigation.
It is not fair to trash him based on the excerpts.

What nonsense. If he wants his theory to be taken at all seriously, he should publish it for free. Science isn't for sale.

What does a neutron and a proton consist of?

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particles/imgpar/neutrondec.gif
Are you then saying that this equation is incorrect?

No one is saying that.

Are you saying that if the arrow was reversed the equation would be incorrect?

Essentially, yes. The inverse process basically never occurs - the kinetic energies of the three incoming particles would have to be precisely right.

More importantly (as I have already explained three times), if the neutron was a bound state of those three particles, it could not decay into them without violating conservation of energy.

Look - when that decay occurs, the three particles all come out with some kinetic energy. That means the neutron, at rest, has MORE energy than all three of those particles at rest put together. Therefore it is not a bound state of them. This is totally obvious - I don't know how to make it any clearer.

ben m

19th June 2008, 04:00 PM

Are you saying that if the arrow was reversed the equation would be incorrect?
You'd be hard pushed to get a neutrino to interact with anything, let alone at the same time as an electron.

The half-reversed reaction nu_e + n --> p + e- occurs routinely; that's one of the ways that neutrinos are detected at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, via the sudden appearance of an electron in a neutron-rich target.

godless dave

19th June 2008, 04:04 PM

"Decays into" != "consists of"

Reality Check

19th June 2008, 04:17 PM

What nonsense. If he wants his theory to be taken at all seriously, he should publish it for free. Science isn't for sale.
I agree that science is not for sale. But the works of authors are, even if their subject is science.

In fact there are a limited number of copies of the book available for free through his forum. Send a PM to percygrail at the forum www(dot)ourundiscovereduniverse(dot)com/dev/forum/

godless dave

19th June 2008, 04:40 PM

I don't expect him to publish his research for free. What I would expect him to do, if he were a serious physicist, would be to submit his research to a peer-reviewed physics journal.

ben m

19th June 2008, 04:52 PM

Look - when that decay occurs, the three particles all come out with some kinetic energy. That means the neutron, at rest, has MORE energy than all three of those particles at rest put together. Therefore it is not a bound state of them. This is totally obvious - I don't know how to make it any clearer.

You have to make some allowance for casual usage, Sol. It obviously wouldn't be a bound state, but it could be a long-lived unstable state. If someone had said "The 238U atom is made of a 234Th atom with an extra two protons and two neutrons bound to it" ... well, it wouldn't be far from the truth. Ditto if someone described the delta resonance as a "proton and a pion bound together". No, it's not the physics definition of "bound" but it's easy enough to see what they're talking about.

Anyway, there's no shortage of non-pedantic ways to show that Terence Witt is a crackpot, so I'd prefer to stick to those ...

sol invictus

19th June 2008, 06:05 PM

You have to make some allowance for casual usage, Sol. It obviously wouldn't be a bound state, but it could be a long-lived unstable state.

No, it couldn't. The Coulomb potential has no positive energy unstable states, full stop. And by the way, it was precisely by this logic that it was proven that the neutron is NOT a bound state of proton and electron: http://npg.nature.com/physics/looking-back/chadwick2/index.html

If the "electron" and "proton" which are supposedly inside the neutron act totally unlike unbound electrons and protons, then sure, it's possible. Come to think of it, I have a great model where they act like three quarks in a long-lived unstable state...

Anyway, the whole idea is incredibly childish. There are many particles that have lots of different decay modes. For example the neutral pion usually decays to two photons, but sometimes to an electron, a positron, and a photon. So what's it made out of? Two photons? An electron and a positron?

Wangler

19th June 2008, 11:19 PM

(emphasis added)Do you happen to recall the two 'high-z' supernova teams (of astronomers), who published independent papers that (in effect) announced the discovery of 'dark energy'?

Do you happen to know what the (then) "current paradigm" was, in cosmology? (HINT: someone's 'greatest blunder')

DRD, This is a bad example of your point. The "current paradigm" needed dark energy to make the paradigm work.

Rather than being criticized, they were looked on rather as heroes.

Wangler

19th June 2008, 11:22 PM

What nonsense. If he wants his theory to be taken at all seriously, he should publish it for free. Science isn't for sale.

Alright, what is the secret: How do you get your journal subscriptions for free?

:D

Skwinty

19th June 2008, 11:46 PM

Okay, so let me see what I have learned here.

1.neutrons and protons consist of quarks. A different variety of flavours etc.
2.Quarks consist of nothing.
3.So then it would be true to say that the neutron and proton after the free neutron decays have nothing in common.
Sounds like lots of null physics here.

Its a bit like saying "Last night my car was stolen, but thats okay because it was replaced by an exact duplicate before I woke up"

I suppose that there is only one member of each of the particles in the particle zoo that are shared throughout the universe.
I believe it was Richard Feynman who suggested this about the electron.

It's no wonder that Mark Twain had this to say about science.
"Wholesale returns of conjecture on such a trifling investment in fact"

He forgot about the financial investment here.

It strikes me that particle physics is a self fulfilling prophecy.
Someone postulates a hypothetical particle to explain an effect in a billion dollar cloud chamber. Another few billion dollars are spent to prove the existence of this particle. Lo and behold the particle is discovered. No one can peer review the discovery other than a citizen of Planet Erudite.
If it wasnt, the gravy train would grind to a halt and the physicists would be doing nothing instead of postulating nothing.

I realise that this is a cynical view of things, but it explains why people write books like Null Physics and The Problem with Physics.:dig:
Yep, thats me digging a fallout shelter:D

sol invictus

19th June 2008, 11:54 PM

Alright, what is the secret: How do you get your journal subscriptions for free?

:D

Journals? Who needs journals?

http://arxiv.org/
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/hep/
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html
http://www-lib.kek.jp/KISS/kiss_prepri.html

sol invictus

20th June 2008, 12:01 AM

If it wasnt, the gravy train would grind to a halt and the physicists would be doing nothing instead of postulating nothing.

Crackpots are so entertaining.

Notice that computer you're reading this post on? Who do you think made that possible? Do you know how it works? Why it works? Because some people actually do know, and without those people we wouldn't be having this exchange, now would we?

As for the "gravy train"... do you have any idea how difficult it is to have a career in physics? How few jobs there are? How much more money any Ph.D. physicist can make in industry or finance than s/he can in academia?

Gravy train?? What a load of trollish and self-serving BS. Bye bye, Mr. Witt.

Skwinty

20th June 2008, 12:25 AM

Sol,
You chose academia.Don't have a sense of humour failure because of it.
By the way, isn't denigrating other peoples qualifications and intelligence one of the signs of crankism.

Maybe its better that you say goodbye and go back to perfecting the Quantum computer so the we can spend some more of our hard earned cash on another piece of junk technology.

PS who needs journals? Perhaps Witt feels the same way.

Tubbythin

20th June 2008, 02:26 AM

Okay, so let me see what I have learned here.

1.neutrons and protons consist of quarks. A different variety of flavours etc.

No, the same 2 flavours, just with the numbers of each reversed. This is where isospin symmetry comes from. You may want to look that up.

2.Quarks consist of nothing.
To the best of our knowledge, quarks are point like particles with no substructure.

3.So then it would be true to say that the neutron and proton after the free neutron decays have nothing in common.
No, they have rather a lot in common. Like the same quarks (just in reversed numbers).

Sounds like lots of null physics here.
Thats because the above statements are wrong.

Its a bit like saying "Last night my car was stolen, but thats okay because it was replaced by an exact duplicate before I woke up"
No it isn't. Its more like, if anything, saying my range rover was stolen but they replaced it with a supermini, a scooter and a pair of trainers.

I suppose that there is only one member of each of the particles in the particle zoo that are shared throughout the universe.
I believe it was Richard Feynman who suggested this about the electron.
You've lost me.

It's no wonder that Mark Twain had this to say about science.
"Wholesale returns of conjecture on such a trifling investment in fact"
Are you Jerome da Gnome?

He forgot about the financial investment here.
I suppose its a conspiracy and its just BIG Science doesn't want to admit its wrong.

It strikes me that particle physics is a self fulfilling prophecy.
Someone postulates a hypothetical particle to explain an effect in a billion dollar cloud chamber. Another few billion dollars are spent to prove the existence of this particle. Lo and behold the particle is discovered.
Utter rubbish. The need for the s quark came from observations made using cosmic rays made in cloud chambers and similar which cost, probably at most, a couple of hundred dollars. You could probably make one your self. The existence of the strange quark itself pretty much makes your neutron is proton plus electron theory wrong.

No one can peer review the discovery other than a citizen of Planet Erudite.
If it wasnt, the gravy train would grind to a halt and the physicists would be doing nothing instead of postulating nothing.
Yet more nonesense. Identical phenomena are regularly found at different accelerators. Just type J/psi in to your favourite search engine. So either it is correct, improbably coincidental, or there's a whole BIG Science conspiracy. Which is it?

I realise that this is a cynical view of things, but it explains why people write books like Null Physics and The Problem with Physics.:dig:
Yep, thats me digging a fallout shelter:D
Yep... because they don't understand the physics they think is wrong.

Skwinty

20th June 2008, 03:17 AM

skwinty:I suppose that there is only one member of each of the particles in the particle zoo that are shared throughout the universe.
I believe it was Richard Feynman who suggested this about the electron.
Tubbythin:You've lost me.

You may want to look that up

You may also want to read between the lines of what i said in the post too

Tubbythin,
This is what I asked yesterday and this is what you answered

skwinty: What does a quark consist of?

Tubbythin: As far as we can measure, nothing.

skwinty: Now if the neutron consists of quarks of different flavours and protons consist of quarks of different flavours there is huge commonality between them. ie the same components with different characteristics. Therefore the assumption that the neutron has the building blocks of the proton electron and electron antineutrino is not unreasonable.

Tubbythin: Given the last hundred years of progress in science you are wrong. It is entirely unreasonable.

This is what I state today and this is what you answer

skwinty:2.Quarks consist of nothing.

Tubbythin:To the best of our knowledge, quarks are point like particles with no substructure.

Skwinty: So then it would be true to say that the neutron and proton after the free neutron decays have nothing in common.

Tiubbythin:No, they have rather a lot in common. Like the same quarks (just in reversed numbers).

Now you cant have it both ways

Tubbythin

20th June 2008, 03:37 AM

Ok. I don't know whether this was a genuine misunderstanding or not but you should really give the full extent of your quote. Here goes...

Your quote I responded to was

What does a quark consist of?
We know that a quark is a hypothetical particle but what makes a quark.
And then when you know that particle you can ask what makes that particle ad infinitum.

In this context, you seem to me to be asking what substructure does a quark have. To which the answer is none that we know of. We have no evidence to suggest it is made of any more fundamental particle. That does not mean they do not have propeties, eg. mass, spin, charge.

zosima

20th June 2008, 03:40 AM

Crackpots are so entertaining.

Notice that computer you're reading this post on? Who do you think made that possible? Do you know how it works? Why it works? Because some people actually do know, and without those people we wouldn't be having this exchange, now would we?

As for the "gravy train"... do you have any idea how difficult it is to have a career in physics? How few jobs there are? How much more money any Ph.D. physicist can make in industry or finance than s/he can in academia?

Gravy train?? What a load of trollish and self-serving BS.

Agreed

Bye bye, Mr. Witt.

Reality Check and I have actually been picking holes in Witt's theory on the new board he set up just recently. If you want to criticize his theory(and there is ample room for criticism), he's been more than willing to talk about it in that venue. I mentioned how to find it in an earlier post in this thread. I'm not going to repeat it.

To his credit he has been polite under his own name. Although he still frustratingly refuses to describe a lot of details(making frequent reference to his book). Speaking of which, they must be piling up because he's offering to give them away. So anyone who wants a free copy can probably just ask him on his forum. I think Reality is even getting one mailed out, so soon Witt'll no longer be able to resort to the 'well you haven't read the book excuse'. Personally, I'm waiting for Reality's review before I decide if I want to get a free a copy.

@Swinty
I think the big reason that people don't feel the need to investigate Witt's theory are. (excluding the topical objections already mentioned)
#1 Too large a scope. There are a number of different things that need to be proven to make the theory useful and consistent. Proof, evidence, or theory suggesting any single one of these things would be sufficient to make a career in physics and for some of them to earn a Nobel prize.

#2 Lack of mathematical formalism. Modern physics has abstracted many of the notions that are common in less advanced physics. It gives a level of power and flexibility that you cannot get without that level of formalism. When someone claims they have intuited their way past the droves of incredibly smart physicists working on these problems it screams crackpot.

#3 Unwilling to clarify. Generally, rather than explaining the most important details, Witt refers people to his book. If he truly has the answer to these questions, there should be no reason to avoid clarification. As mentioned above, if he proved any one of his claims, I think everyone on the forum would be quite wowed. For example. I still have no idea what this 'underlying geometry' is that somehow elegantly ties together what appears to be a series of ad-hoc rules. He's never explained the details of the "Cosmic fusion cycle" which apparently simultaneously prevents the heat death of an infinite static universe and scatters the CMB in such a way that it emulates the anisotropies of the WMAP data with as good or better precision as the explanation by the big bang. I've asked him directly about how he explains the apparent correlation between frequency and distance of quasars, he tells me to read the book. I've asked him how he prevents the apparent contradiction that his conception of quantum physics makes with bell's theorem. He tells me to read the book. I can't imagine any rational reason why he would want not to tell me if he had an adequate answer. It seems he has plenty of time to dedicate to posting on forums, but doesn't have the time to answer any of the questions sufficiently.

#4 As has already been mentioned. Lack of peer review. I can remember one instance where he claimed an astrophysical organization in Canada had "given him the nod". These vague statements do not help his case. As far as I'm concerned 'giving him the nod' would be giving him a cover publication, given the claims that he is making. Peer review is how science works. Even the most talented physicist alive today is only an expert in his(her) particular area of study, for everything else (s)he has to rely on the opinions of the experts in their particular field of study. In other words, modern physics has no renaissance (wo)men.

Skwinty

20th June 2008, 03:56 AM

Hi Zosima
Yes you are correct in what you say about Witt.
The truth of the matter is that I am not qualified to judge him or his theory or any other physicist's theory for that matter.
What my point was that he did not ,I believe, get a fair treatment on this forum and I was responding to that.

I also took exception to the implication that I was his smelly sock puppet and the intractible and uncompromising views of some of the posters.

Also some of the posters views are confusing and contradict themselves from day to day. I also have signed on to his forum as I am interested in the views from both sides and playing devils advocate can sometimes bring out the best and worst in people.

All in all I thank everyone who has responded to my posts including Sol Invictus. I dont mean to upset him but he should be able to take what he dishes out.

I wont hassle you folk any more on this subject. Thanks once again for your views and opinions.

PS I will ask Witt for a free copy and if any of you wish to donate a decent physics textbook in the spirit of free science please send me a pm and I will give you my address and deposit some money in your account to cover postage. Thanks again.:boxedin:

DeiRenDopa

20th June 2008, 04:25 AM

DRD, This is a bad example of your point. The "current paradigm" needed dark energy to make the paradigm work.

Rather than being criticized, they were looked on rather as heroes.It did?

I'll check, but I recall the 1998 (?) papers as being rather a surprise ...

In any case, there is no shortage of examples of a "theory" "not consistent with the current paradigm" being presented for publication in a relevant peer-reviewed journal ... and being published (you'll notice that Skwinty chose to not comment on my Arp-Narlikar VMH example ...)

Skwinty

20th June 2008, 05:35 AM

Correction. This was Witts statement not mine.
How can you say that Dark Energy is not consistent with the cosmological constant. Surely they are different interpretations of the same set of observations.:boxedin:

PS These individuals who wrote these papers were well known in Astronomy, they were not unknowns.

Hi Deirendopa

I made a general comment about the people and papers you quoted

ObjectiveResponse

20th June 2008, 10:22 AM

By the way, isn't denigrating other peoples qualifications and intelligence one of the signs of crankism.

I don't think it the best scientific approach to discrediting the questionable individuals theories or assumptions. It's a bit of a slippery slope that could lead an isolated community to GroupThink.

Lets Explore this.
According to Wikipedia's definition the following are symptoms of Group Think:

1. Illusions of invulnerability creating excessive optimism and encouraging risk taking.
2. Rationalising warnings that might challenge the group's assumptions.
3. Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions.
4. Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as weak, evil, disfigured, impotent, or stupid.
5. Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group, couched in terms of "disloyalty".
6. Self censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus.
7. Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement.
8. Mindguards — self-appointed members who shield the group from dissenting information.

This is going to turn into a long post but lets check each point versus the community response here. I have emphasized parts of the quotes that I think fit the Symptom.

1) Illusions of invulnerability creating excessive optimism and encouraging risk taking.
Page 1
No, I have determined from the excerpts published above that your ideas conflict with the SM, and since the SM is strongly based on experimental results, that means that your ideas conflict with reality.
Page 2
The unsolved problems, like large nuclei, are limited not by SM failures but by computational power.
page 6
The Standard Model goes way beyond the descriptive stage. Any idea that intends to replace it must be quantitative and very precise. If it isn't it is worthless.
page 6
It is totally impossible that general relativity and quantum mechanics are wrong. They are simply inexact - but at a level that's undectable right now, and may well remain so for the forseeable future of the human race.
page 7
As for QM, it's by far the best-tested and most predictive theory in the history of science. I repeat - it is utterly impossible that it is flat-out wrong.
page 4
On the topic of modern physics: Moebus, we've seen thousands of theories come and go. We've noticed some patterns among these theories; in many cases, we've found general proofs validating those patterns. With those patterns in mind, we're actually really quick at deciding whether a theory is workable or not.
page 3 (on the concept of a possible simpler alternate to SM)
There is no antipathy to such; if it were possible in such a simplistic manner, however, it would already exist.

2. Rationalising warnings that might challenge the group's assumptions.
page 6
When someone comes along with a proposal that throws almost that entire structure away, and offers only vague qualitative assurances that it will work, how seriously should we take it? Such a thing has never before happened in the history of science.
page 7 (Rationalising contradictions in the standard model)
In other words the contradiction that we might imagine is completely unscientific insofar as we are unable to test it. When we/if we are able to test it, the results themselves should make it possible to generate a theory.
page 4 (Rationalising dismissing alternatives without full investigation)
And bear in mind that there are hundreds of such crackpot (I use that term in a technical and specific sense) theories proposed every year - it would be a full time job for a significant fraction of all the physicists in the world to carefully check each of them. Instead, those physicists use their rather well-informed judgment to decide what to study.
page 7 (Rationalizing SM's lack consistency)
As to your point about logical consistency, I think that your point is generally valid, but...
1. Logical consistency is really a very tricky thing. <...> So I think a 21st century standard of logic encourages us to be very skeptical.
2. The type of consistency you are talking about, however, goes well beyond logical consistency or even mathematical consistency, but is in fact physical consistency which deals with a lot of complications that make derivations of truths very subject to interpretation, as least in absence of hard evidence.
page 3 (justification as to why the harsh treatment of Witt)
Perhaps you're not familiar with the sheer number of people who have done exactly the same thing as Witt:
* [#]Decide they don't like modern physics
[#]Spend years in isolation writing up their own theory
[#]Make the theory qualitatively agree with reality in a few thought-experiments
[#]Submit these early sketches to physics journals, and get rejected
[#]Become very facile at claiming "agreement" with real experiments---by describing, in words ("well, the nucleus recoils leftwards, then stops, and the braking-radiation must be what you mistook in your detector") without actually making concrete predictions.
[#]Self-publish a book or web page and start advertising it.

3. Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions.
page 7
You seem to be making quite a few unverifiable absolutist statements. That's usually a bad sign.
Usually, yes. But in this case it's because I know exactly what I'm talking about.
page 3
We don't have a great deal of patience with posers here, in case you hadn't noticed it so far.
page 2
There are several people who participate on this forum who are either gifted amateur or professional physicists. I pay attention to what they have to say. I also have a functioning woodar (and gaydar) and have learned to pay attention when it chirps.
page 6
I disagree with that completely. And yes, I know very well what I'm talking about.
page 4
Yet based on not reading this book, and having read the opinions of people qualified to comment, you feel justified in rushing to Witt's defence.
page 4
Don't mind us if we're a bit snappish sometimes. I assume, from the tone of your post, that you're (a) unfamiliar with what's expected of a modern physics theory and (b) unfamiliar with the vast number of 'physics crackpots' out there.
page 4
If you had read the thread, instead of just posting to tell us how rich your friend is, you would know that qualified individuals have already responded.
page 6
It throws away nearly everything we have learned, and therefore it must contend with all the vast quantities of experimental data the old theory explained perfectly. The odds that it could succeed at that are very close to zero, so nobody is going to waste their time checking.

4. Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as weak, evil, disfigured, impotent, or stupid.
page 1
Just looked at the web page at nullphysics.com. Crackpot crackpot crackpot.
page 1
"Deliberate misinterpretation" is another of those subtle little digs that woos like you use when you get exposed. Perhaps if your ideas didn't have so many holes, you wouldn't have so much trouble.
page 3
What crackpots forget is that scientific revolutions rarely (if ever) happen by showing that the current theory is wrong. ... Crackpots try to throw out everything that came before (often because they don't know what it was) and replace it all with something brand new
page 4
However, Witt posted enough of his book online to prove he is a crackpot using those concepts he included.
page 4
On other boards I've dealt with or witnessed threads with many a crank who self-published a book of their nonsense. Witt is not special with the exception that he spent a lot more money on it.
page 4
I suspect there is a specific psychological illness (one which can be present in varying degrees) that leads to this. Megalomania isn't a bad word for it, but it's rather more specific than that.
page 4
Perhaps one key to the apparent megalomania is that these are (often) reasonably smart people who have had reasonable success in other fields---engineering, or entrepreneurship, or medicine.
page 4
So, we are left with
'Witt good, write big book, lots of words. Me not understand words, me not read book, but people say bad things about book, they wrong. Big book, lots of words, big book good.'
page 4
On the topic of crackpots, I might suggest that you visit ... and .... The latter page lists ... what, 400 crackpots? Each one with a different, homegrown, idiosyncratic theory of physics. I would guess that 2/3rds of them have written books. Mr. Witt's general idea---"Hey, I may be an outside, but I'm smart and my thought-experiments are as valid as Einstein's"---is extraordinarily common.
page 6
And bear in mind that there are hundreds of such crackpot (I use that term in a technical and specific sense) theories proposed every year
page 7
When you really think about it this guy really is much more menacing than the run-of-the-mill crackpot that just has a cable modem and a prescription to thorazine.
page 9
As I've said before: Null Physics is a crackpot theory with a multi-million-dollar ad budget.
page 9
What really worries me is the Florida Institute of Technology. Do they accept any crackpot as a Visiting Scientist?

5. Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group, couched in terms of "disloyalty".
(There seemed to be pressure to only offer comments counter to Witt and to not read at all what he has to say. A somewhat "you're with us or against us" mentality)
page 4
You suggest that I'm defending Witt? Nonsense, I am neither defending Witt, nor debunking anyone else here.
You are taking a de facto position in favour of Witt by berating those in opposition and praising his dedication and hard work.
page 4
For myself, I trust NO MAN who can make a conclusion based on excerpts!
Yet based on not reading this book, and having read the opinions of people qualified to comment, you feel justified in rushing to Witt's defence.
page 5
I was told to stop wasting time, and put on a black-list of potential sock puppets.
... gave you good advice: there are plenty of good books on physics at all leves of difficulty. You would make a better use of your time reading them. Remember: new physics are never first exposed in a several hudred pages long book. People write papers, which are peer reviewd and read by the physical community.

Dissenters that do not conform are accused of being on the payroll of Mr Witt or Mr Witt himself anonymously (IE a sock puppet):
page 10
How interesting - a new poster suddenly appears and starts promoting Witt's book. Oddly, our new friend uses an unusually quoting style, strangely reminiscent of the one used by Mr. Witt himself....
Anyone smell dirty socks?
page 6
Since my post, ... has defended a concept, a pigeon hole of argument into which perhaps Witt would like to fit himself, with sufficent vigor (and with arguments sufficiently well-stated) as to make it reasonable to wonder, at least, if he (...) might potentially be a sock puppet.
page 4
Prediction: ... is a sock of Witt. (Can I have the $1,000,000 now?)
page 4
What, we got little kids coming on here with opinions about 400 page physics books now?
<sniff sniff> I thinks I smells a sock-puppet.
page 5
Nobody else finds damm curious the amount of people who have registered in this forum just to post in this thread and who haven't posted anywhere else?"
page 7
The fact that he is irked enough to edit responses to jref into his website lends credence to the supposition that there have been a few sock puppets here.

6. Self censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus.
Page 1
I have some rather unconventional ideas myself, but I don't go so far as to reject the Standard Model or relativity.

7. Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement.
I couldn't find any really good examples of this either.

8. Mindguards — self-appointed members who shield the group from dissenting information.
page 5
My advice - stop trying to make sense of nonsense written by insane crackpots. Buy a real book on cosmology and/or fundamental physics if you're interested.
page 10
How typical of you ... .
Trash any opposition. You are the epitomy of an arrogant ,chauvinistic and self hailed expert.
When someone comes here with garbage, it gets put right where it belongs - in the trash. That's just as it should be. If you can't take it, leave.

A lot of the quotes that fell into the first 5 may also cross into the last 3. I tried not to list a quote more than once. I initially had the names of who the made the quote but I decided to remove them. I think the behavior, NOT the individual, should be the focus. I keept the page number of where I got the quote so that the context was available if you wanted to search a little for it. However it is important to note that a few individuals are responsible for most the quotes above so this may not be a very accurate example of Group Think.

This seems a somewhat positive indicator of Group Think but hardly conclusive all on its own. There were a few other comments that ran counter to the norm:

page 7
I wouldn't mean to imply that this line of inquiry is not academic or even incredibly important to the faculty of human reasoning in general, but until we have some evidence to work with there really isn't any *scientific* problem. Moreover I think it is both common and dangerous to take discussion and dispute within the scientific community as evidence of scientific fact, despite the fact that that is pretty much the bread and butter of scientific news reporting.

There were also many detractors that attempted to halt this progression by pointing it out:
page 5
That being said, I feel as if the criticisms of Witt's null physics at various points in this thread are a bit overzealous, and almost seem "panicky". The critiques were pointed, persistent, and sometimes persnickety.

These types of critiques prove to Witt that he is hitting near the mark, and the "establishment" is beginning to worry about null physics. Of course, that couldn't be further from the truth.

I can't find a valid way of proving my objectivity but I will say (for what its worth) that I came to this thread looking for valid reasons NOT to trust what Witt had to say. I expected a critical response but one without the emotional defensiveness.

Objective

Third Eye Open

20th June 2008, 11:33 AM

I don't think it the best scientific approach to discrediting the questionable individuals theories or assumptions......

*Long list of arbitrary labels placed on random quotes*

What is not the best scientific approach? Noticing that a hypothesis does not match up with observations and therefor disregarding it? That sounds like the definition of science to me.

Tubbythin

20th June 2008, 11:41 AM

ben m

20th June 2008, 12:11 PM

All of the newcomers are criticizing my (and Sol's, and Zos's, and RC's, etc.) quick reaction to Witt; they're criticizing the Standard Model of particle physics. I'm curious that they're not reading Witt's book and saying, "Witt is right about X", nor "Witt's Y is a good description of the data", nor "Your criticism of Witt is misguided because equation Z is correct."

It's all, "Wow, you sure jumped on him and called him wrong awfully fast, isn't that inappropriate?" You're acting as though Witt's actual theory is immaterial to our response. It isn't.

Imagine for a second that someone came in and started making statements in your personal field of expertise---someone walked into a plumbers' discussion and said, "My theory says that shower drains clog up because of water, which spontaneously turns into a hairlike substance under pressure. Copper pipes melt in the summer and PVC isn't actually waterproof, it leaks like a sieve but the water turns invisible on the way out. I recommend using unsalted butter as a solder flux." Imagine that someone walked into a biology meeting and announced that amino acids didn't exist, that proteins are made of distorted nucleic acids.

Would you laugh them out of the room? Would you say, "Baloney, I've got fifteen different ways to prove that PVC is watertight; butter isn't a flux, butter is the sort of thing flux is meant to remove; defend yourself or go away, moron?" It wouldn't be parochial, defensive, or "groupthink" to say that. It'd be reasonable and correct. Witt's physics claims are just as stupid, from an experimental physicist's perspective, as the claim "amino acids don't exist" would be to a biochemist or "copper melts at 100F" would be to a plumber.

Thanks to Witt's wide advertising net, I suspect that some of his defenders haven't heard of the physics crackpot world in general. There is a whole subculture of ambitious-loner-amateur physicists out there. Every one of them has done more or less the same thing: 1) Read a few popular physics books (Hawking, Smolin, Greene, Weinberg) and thought something "felt wrong". 2) Came up with their own theory, working in isolation, without reading any experimental data beyond the sketches they got from Hawking or whatever. 3) Decided that their theory Had To Be Right, and wrote it up in book/webpage form. (Some submit to mainstream journals and get rejected.) The books get mailed to random physicists. 4) Gotten angry at "the mainstream" that tells them they're wrong.

Seriously, I'm talking about (probably) a thousand really dedicated people. You can learn about some of them from www.crank.net. Some that I've encountered: Autodynamics, Gyron Aether Theory, Common Sense Science, Basic Particle Theory, GEM Unification Theory, Infinite Hierarchical Fractal Theory, Photon Structure, Theory of Elementary Waves (all on the Web); five or ten people at the APS April meeting every year; if I rack my brain I can probably come up with a few more. So please don't think that Witt qualifies as an especially brave and deep thinking individual simply because he's challenged Big Science by writing a whole book. It happens all the time. If there's anything different in Witt's deep thinking, it has to be in the detailed contents of his new theory, not simply the fact that he has one.

So: is Witt right about physics? We have a bunch of reasons to think NOT and no one rebutting them. Was our gut-reaction response to Witt---that he's a crackpot---correct? Again, all indicators point to Yes, and no one has suggested any contraindication. Were we rude and snappish at Mr. Witt when he showed up? Well, that's a matter of opinion---this tends to be a pretty snappish board---but think about it in the context, not of Terence Witt the first Gentle Soul to Innocently Question Physics, but of Witt being #997 in an endless parade of crackpots. They get kind of tiresome, especially the evasive ones.

godless dave

20th June 2008, 12:13 PM

Sure you have the facts on your side, but you're so meeeeeeeeeeeean.

http://www.velvetglove.org/misc/macros/wahmbulance.jpg

Wangler

20th June 2008, 12:45 PM

It did?

I am pretty sure, yes.

Regardless, I think Witt would have been better served publishing his null physics ideas in peer-reviewed journals.

And, if they had merit, they would have been published had they been submitted.

Wangler

20th June 2008, 12:57 PM

I'm curious that they're not reading Witt's book and saying, "Witt is right about X", nor "Witt's Y is a good description of the data", nor "Your criticism of Witt is misguided because equation Z is correct."

That's funny, because I'm curious why the folks on this thread aren't reading Witt's book and saying "Witt is wrong about X", or "Witt's Y in Chaper 12 is a poor description of the data", or "Equation Z on page 234 is incorrect, so null physics has a big problem."

Heck, Witt's now giving the book away, and some on this thread still won't look at it.

ben m

20th June 2008, 01:21 PM

godless dave

20th June 2008, 01:23 PM

DeiRenDopa

20th June 2008, 01:36 PM

I am pretty sure, yes.
I think you'll find that the findings published were somewhat surprising, and generated a flurry of new work (observations, analyses).

Of particular interest to this thread is that the discoveries announced in those two landmark papers have been subject to some pretty severe scrutiny, as well as a great deal of independent verification/validation ... and that they are now part of mainstream observational cosmology.

It could so easily have been otherwise, as quite a few examples from the last decade or several of astronomy will show ... (and no, the authors of the papers presenting something outside the then astronomy/astrophysics mainstream apparently had little difficulty getting them published in relevant peer-reviewed journals).

Regardless, I think Witt would have been better served publishing his null physics ideas in peer-reviewed journals.

And, if they had merit, they would have been published had they been submitted.Aye ...

That's the key point which Skwinty, ObjectiveResponse, (and others?) don't seem to be interested in even acknowledging, much less discussing ...

godless dave

20th June 2008, 01:52 PM

And they make the same excuses as intelligent design creationists - they don't bother submitting papers because the biased journal editors would reject them for not adhering to the current paradigm.

sol invictus

20th June 2008, 03:22 PM

I don't think it the best scientific approach to discrediting the questionable individuals theories or assumptions. <big snip>

Let me ask you something, first-time-poster number 15 or so in this thread:

suppose somebody came along claiming to have a new theory of medicine.

Listen, she said, all this overly complicated nonsense with "bacteria", "viruses", surgery, etc. it's all garbage. I have a new theory that's much simpler and better, and you just have to pay me $60 and I'll send you my book about it. I haven't been able to publish it in journals because the Establishment is infected by groupthink and is suppressing it.

Oh and by the way, here are a few excerpts - letting blood is good for you (it balances the humors), colds are best cured with leeches, and drilling holes in your skull will let you think more freely.

What do you think the reaction would be? What do you think the reaction should be?

Paulhoff

20th June 2008, 03:45 PM

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-self-organizing-quantum-universe

Paul

:) :) :)

Wangler

20th June 2008, 03:53 PM

I think you'll find that the findings published were somewhat surprising, and generated a flurry of new work (observations, analyses).

Dark energy was needed to make the universe flat, or nearly so.

Way before the publication of the paper you refer to, cosmologists were aware of the shortcoming of ordinary and dark matter to sum to the critical density needed to make the universe flat.

Dark energy was needed, you see. Their published report claimed to have found direct evidence of dark energy. Woohoo! The current model was apparently vindicated, and there was a whole bunch of new work generated. Of course, everybody is happy.

As I mentioned before, the publication of this paper was a poor example of "publication of ideas outside the paradigm"

zosima

20th June 2008, 08:53 PM

That's funny, because I'm curious why the folks on this thread aren't reading Witt's book and saying "Witt is wrong about X", or "Witt's Y in Chaper 12 is a poor description of the data", or "Equation Z on page 234 is incorrect, so null physics has a big problem."

Heck, Witt's now giving the book away, and some on this thread still won't look at it.

You should look at my last post. I mention several specific problems with his theory that I've asked him about directly. Its kind of funny, in any other circumstance actually talking to the author would be considered a better source of info than reading the book. The author can clarify things that may not have been clear in the text, they can make sure the ideas proposed are 100% up to date(even Witt admits that there are new results that his book would do well to incorporate), and honestly, even though Witt may not like to admit it, I think he's advocating a slightly different position than he did initially*. The importance of meeting in person is why scientists go to conferences so much. But in this case, apparently, we're criticized because the ideas are so complex and awesome that they can only be communicated in this book. They just can't possibly come across in an interactive format....That is suspicious. Good scientific ideas are generally simple things that people missed or overlooked, from which you can derive amazing, complex, and far reaching conclusions. If he can't get this idea of the elegant geometry of null physics across, then it is a problem.

*I think the fact that he has shifted his position somewhat is actually a good thing. Modifying and improving a theory in response to criticism is always good, no matter how wild the theory is.

Seriously, I'm talking about (probably) a thousand really dedicated people. You can learn about some of them from www.crank.net. Some that I've encountered: Autodynamics, Gyron Aether Theory, Common Sense Science, Basic Particle Theory, GEM Unification Theory, Infinite Hierarchical Fractal Theory, Photon Structure, Theory of Elementary Waves (all on the Web); five or ten people at the APS April meeting every year; if I rack my brain I can probably come up with a few more. So please don't think that Witt qualifies as an especially brave and deep thinking individual simply because he's challenged Big Science by writing a whole book. It happens all the time. If there's anything different in Witt's deep thinking, it has to be in the detailed contents of his new theory, not simply the fact that he has one.

Seriously. This person keeps spamming my entire department. Even the secretaries. It always begins the same way "Attiyah's Sun theory is the most revolutionary theory of astronomy."
http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=120544&st=0

Ugggg....

Skwinty

21st June 2008, 07:20 AM

I'm lost because I don't think your first sentence makes any grammatical sense.

While we're on the subject of Feynman, perhaps this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Beta_Negative_Decay.svg) might help.

Hi Tubbythin
Yes, I am aware of the quoted Feynman diagram.
Perhaps this will make my sentence a bit clearer. sorry for the poor grammar.
Feynman once postulated that the reason all electrons are identical was because there is only one of them.
This electron whizzes around the universe becoming part of everything, thus only one electron required in the entire universe.
I was suggesting that this is true for all particles in the particle zoo.
also remember that the specific post was made tongue in cheek and I saisd that I was being cynical. Just as Jeremy Bernstein was being cynical when he likened life as an academic to a perpetual motion machine.It just sits there working away with no additional infusion of energy.

I am going to start a new post with regards to Philosophy, science and cranks sometime later this week.
I hope you will participate.

I also note that some posters on this forum are posting on the null physics forum and are being replied to by Witt himself.
surprisingly, some of them are actually agreeing that they may have be mistaken about their initial assumptions.

I think that that is a fair way to go about your reservations rather than baying for blood and appealing to mob instinct to brand the man as a crank.

The other issue I had when I said you cant have it both ways( you only commented on the first one)

1.If the quark was made of nothing then the neutron and proton have something in common (the something being nothing)
When I suggested that the neutron and proton have commonalities wrt the building blocks you told me I was wrong and 100 years of science proved that. now you say that there is commonality, namely quarks, albeit of different spins.

The other issue, you aked if I am Jerome de Gnome.
Who the *#@% is he?

Wangler

21st June 2008, 11:19 AM

You should look at my last post.

I did...where do you think my "but some people aren't even interested in his book if it's free" comment came from?

Tubbythin

21st June 2008, 01:53 PM

Hi Skwinty,

Hi Tubbythin
Yes, I am aware of the quoted Feynman diagram.
Perhaps this will make my sentence a bit clearer. sorry for the poor grammar.
Feynman once postulated that the reason all electrons are identical was because there is only one of them.
This electron whizzes around the universe becoming part of everything, thus only one electron required in the entire universe.
I was suggesting that this is true for all particles in the particle zoo.
also remember that the specific post was made tongue in cheek and I saisd that I was being cynical. Just as Jeremy Bernstein was being cynical when he likened life as an academic to a perpetual motion machine.It just sits there working away with no additional infusion of energy.
Ok. Its sometimes difficult to tell.

I am going to start a new post with regards to Philosophy, science and cranks sometime later this week.
I hope you will participate.
I probably will.

I also note that some posters on this forum are posting on the null physics forum and are being replied to by Witt himself.
surprisingly, some of them are actually agreeing that they may have be mistaken about their initial assumptions.

I think that that is a fair way to go about your reservations rather than baying for blood and appealing to mob instinct to brand the man as a crank.

Possibly. Though I don't actually recall calling him a crank.

The other issue I had when I said you cant have it both ways( you only commented on the first one)

1.If the quark was made of nothing then the neutron and proton have something in common (the something being nothing)
When I suggested that the neutron and proton have commonalities wrt the building blocks you told me I was wrong and 100 years of science proved that. now you say that there is commonality, namely quarks, albeit of different spins.
I don't think I've ever denied they have a lot in common. As far as "we" can tell, the strong force doesn't know the difference between them! I was saying the last 100 years of science has shown us that the neutron is not a bound state consisting of a proton and an electron (with or without an antineutrino).

The other issue, you aked if I am Jerome de Gnome.
Who the *#@% is he?
Nevermind. The quote I was responding to sounded like the sort of thing another poster on this board might say. Particularly use of the word conjecture.

Skwinty

22nd June 2008, 02:48 AM

Hi Tubbythin
I didn't mean to imply that you said Witt was a crank, just that the majority of opinions on this thread do imply that he is a crank.

robheus

1st July 2008, 10:25 PM

In commenting on this "new" physics theory (soon to be educated in the physics dept. in the universitie near you), let us first see what this "new physics" is aimed at, as explained by it's author.

Null Physics attacks the problem from the other pole, starting with the toughest question of all: “why does the universe exist?”. Its premise is that if you can’t provide a rational, complete answer to this question, your physical theories will always contain gaping philosophical holes, and you will forever be unable to explain the universe to any great depth.

So, the thoughest question of all, mankind has stumbled upon read like: "why does the universe exists". This question is not brought up for the first time in history, and most often the question is put forward in the following format: "why is there something (anything at all) instead of nothing?".

This question, coined by some people as "The fundamental question of Philosphy" and attributed (amongst others) to Leibnitz, has been brought up by different people during the course of history, and is in no way a "new" question to be asked. The only "new" thing about it is perhaps that the term is asked in the context of a physics theory, although in fact, the question itself is not of any relevance to physics, and does not even belong there, since physics explains the physical world purely and solely at the basis of what physics can (empirically) testify and verify through experiment.

So, for example, the law of gravity is something that physics can explore, because we have material mass-having bodies to our disposal of which we can experimentally testify what kind of laws govern their motion. Laws, as in the case of the law of gravity, are not products of pure thought, and are not made up from thin air, but are definately rooted upon experimentally verifiable facts, which is, they express a certain fact or aspect of reality, which can be experimentally verified. Physics can not be the result of pure thought (how well formed and formulated that thought may or may not be expressed) alone, since in all cases the outside, objective existing material / physical world is both the source for physical descriptions and ultimate arbiter of descriptions we find usefull for expressing a certain fact or aspect of physical reality.

That said, it can be pretty obvious that phyics can only describe objectively existing physical realities. Which excludes and dismisses the physicist from having to describe non-existing, non-physical realities. This off course limits the task of physics.
In most general terms it is not the task of physics to respond any ponderable or unponderable question the human mind can come up with, unless it definately is in the domain of physics. And being bound to that, the only way physics can describe the objective physical world is in terms of physical entities. As for instance the law of gravity can only be explained in terms of mass-having bodies, and all attempts to make physical laws without those real existing physical bodies, would be rather fruitless. Since physical laws have no seperate existing onto themselves, but from the motion of bodies they describe.
This short introduction is deemed necessary I think to get us focussed on what the task of physics is, and thereby also discriminate against those kind of questions, physics should be silent on, as it has nothing to say on it.
That said it might be quit obvious that - in all instances - the working assumption (and most often a priori assumed) and basic condition is that we have the context of an existing physical reality, which is open for investigation, which means: it has observables (and which are themselves physical entities) and observers, which also means that observables and observers can interact.
This means that types of questions, which by their nature divert from these a priori assumptions/context, are not the type of questions physics should have a word on.
So, physics is the study of how material entities and physical observables interact, as can be experimentally (by observation and/or experimentation) verified and testified.

As to the nature of the question put forward of the author of the "null hypothesis" as to "why does the universe exists" is can be pretty clear that such a question does not in any way belong to the questions physics should be concerned with, and even if it would, is able of answering.
This can be made clear as the question most often reads like: "why does something (the universe, anything at all) exists instead of nothing".

Put in physics terms, this could be translated to: what physical law, or entity, caused the universe to exist, instead of not-exist. This then immediately reads into explain me the origin or cause (in terms of physical forces, bodies, entities, laws) were responsible for the existence of the universe, with the implicit assumption that none of those physical entities, bodies, laws and whatever there can exist physically can be assumed to exist.
And it is of course necessary to see that (although not explicitly mentioned in the original formulation of the question as put forward of the author of the "null physics" theory) the added assumption of not assuming there is any physical reality, is of course an implicit assumption which was hidden in the question.
The necessity of adding this is to reveal the hidden assumption implicit in the question, as to ask a "why" question (as in the general form of "why is it the case that X?") this realy is only a meaningfull question if it can be assumed that (given certain conditions/circumstances) X was not the case (i.e. can not be ruled out by definition).
For example, if the question was stated as: "why is it the case that earth has a moon?", one could without too much difficulty ascertain that the negation of that (earth without a moon) could have been the case, and can not be ruled out completely or by definition.
So, in general there are numerous cases in which the question of the form: "Why is it the case that X?" is a meaningfull question, since X need not necessarily be the case.

The case of the question where X reads "there is a universe" however has the remarkable property that it's negation (there not be a universe) must be ruled out by definition, as such can not possible have been, be or ever be the case.
So, in that case, X is true by definition, and not at the basis of any physical fact, entity or law, they have simply nothing to do with it.
Even in the case one is not totally convinced of that fact, try to think of any possible physical entity, body or law, which could be proposed as a possible answer to the question, and then realise that as soon as we introduce any physical entity at all - which we may name P, we already introduced the thing we needed to explain, namely that there is a universe (instead of none), which by the same question, needs to be explained, which then reads as: why does P exist (and for which then we might introduce another physical entity Q, and then be asked the same question again: why does Q exist, etc.etc.).
So in other words, there is no entity of physical nature that can ever explain that fact, because the truth of the conditional X does not depend on any specific physical entity/condition, but is "true by definition". (*)
[ Or perhaps, we could state in a somewhat retarded way that the universe is or contains it's own (physical) causes of existence, and needs no (or can have no) outside (physical) causes (since, if they existed, they would already be part of the universe), but such a way of answering this question ("Why is it the case that X?" "Because X!" is not commonly seen as a sensible answer, since we request the answer to be stated in terms different then the posited 'thing' (however, the universe is not a 'thing').]

In other words, within the domain of physics, there is no possibility of answering this type of question, and the very nature of the question, already disqualifies the question of being answerable at the basis of physics, since the basic premise, that there is a physical reality which is observable with physical means, has been ruled out by the question itself, which has the result that the question disqualifies itself as being answerable within the physics domain.

Whatever the answer to that question may be in any other knowledge domain, any answer that might fit as an answer to that question, is definately not part of physical reality and not expressible in terms of physical entities, and therefore should not be of any concern for physics.

And as to the theory, which states itself as a physics theory, which proclaims about itself that it's main purpose is to answer such non-physical questions, it can be already clear that it can not bring us any new "physics" as it has in fact nothing to base itself on.

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

(*) a more "physical" expression of this would be that since the universe contains matter/energy, and which are by conservation laws never created/destroyed but only transformed/changed, matter/energy has been always there and will be always there.

For those that still want to engage in unponderable questions, here is some other question, this time belonging to the field of computation.

A. Please show the result of the computation of the sum of the numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4, which are to be read from file X, assuming no such file X exists.

Or, the more difficult variant:

B. Same as in A. but this time, assume the computer does not exist.

zosima

1st July 2008, 11:57 PM

I did...where do you think my "but some people aren't even interested in his book if it's free" comment came from?

And I responded to it in my previous post: If the author cannot provide any indication of how they deal with the common major physical problems which their theory entails in conversation, then there is no reason to delve any further into the explanation by reading the book.

XLDS03

2nd July 2008, 12:20 AM

Wow! Take some months off and... I'm used to small, more private forums so I forget that these threads can grow to this size.

I thought I'd jump in not quite on the topic of Null physics at hand, but on the topic of physics crackpots. I've spent some of my precious young adult years searching woo-woo for answers. I've spent a good effort making a final cut with it all, and now I'm catching up on more rational, and personally suitable, areas of study, physics being among them. The pop science books, particularly physics, have peaked my interest and given me some ideas. But, given my experience with woo-woo, I've made damned sure that I don't fall into the pit of half-assed effort producing half-baked claims. The solution, of course, is an education. (Smart people gather into groups to share ideas for a reason. Peer review means a reality check, as we know. I've known a few smart people who have shunned peer review as well as social lives. They tend to be crackpots.)

I have made a few observations that I thought I'd share. I hope they are in some way helpful. Perhaps redundant. Either way, I'd like to let the career physicists on this forum know that they are being heard. I may be wrong in what I'm about to write, but I'll write it anyway.

1- Intuition does not equal clairvoyance. I'm no neurologist, but my intuition on intuition is that it is, more or less, a subconscious response anticipating environmental patterns learned about directly through sensory experience. Quantum particles don't operate on macroscopic patterns and are thus counter-intuitive. To add to that, particles aren't people. We can't intuit particle interactions based upon human interactions.

2- One's native language is not an adequate substitute for mathematics. Language contains nuances and double-meanings which are subject to individual interpretation, so long as we're all speaking the same language. Equations, while symbolic like language, while nuanced like language, while telling a story of relations like language, is precise in that the symbols for the nuances and double-meanings are agreed upon as meaning certain things in certain situations by mathematicians world-wide. At least, that's what I've understood from the math books I'm studying. Equations are pretty straightforward. I feel it safe to say that equations aren't likely to lie.

3- The world of physics is not American Idol. No Simon. No Randy. No Paula. No record contract. No Hollywood. There's a little bit more to academia than seeking Einstein-level fame. (And wouldn't it be fun if physicists had their own groupies?) Let's say that turning in the final theory to a credible peer-reviewed journal does grant access to career avenues. I don't know the reality of this scenario, but let's say it does. Congratulations! What will the next decades be? Research or teaching? Or any of the other lines of, well, work that the rest of the body of scientists are busy doing? From my vantage point as a layperson, my best guess is that position is earned more than it is awarded, if it is awarded at all.

4- The final theory better damn well be the final theory! My father once warned me against creating invisible deadlines. Meaning, it's not wise to pit yourself in a race with imagined variables thinking that you must be at a certain point at a certain time, especially if the course of your life is altered. If you were chasing a sunset but your trail curves back to the east, you aren't going to find a sunset. Likewise, do... the... math! Give it time. Go back. Do the math again. Repeat. I'm guessing that's how the pro's do it. (Am I wrong in guessing that?) The final theory may not be the final theory, if such a thing is possible. It won't be the final theory if the math is insufficient. Comparisons to Newton, Maxwell, Feynman, Einstein, or... Galileo in the court of the Inquisition aren't in any way a substitute.

After saying all this, let me repeat: I'm a layperson. I'm not a trained physicist, but these are my observations reading about the world of physics. Please correct me if I am wrong, and I apologize in advance for any undue offense simply because I admit my lack of ability to debate key points with hard data that I simply don't have at my disposal. If any of you I may have offended in any way are an independent theoretical physicist with a proposal for the theory of everything who avoids clairvoyance, language over math, fame for fame's sake, and competes only with your own ignorance for a deeper understanding of the natural world rather than against real or imagined contestants for the title of Einstein's successor, then all power to you!

robheus

2nd July 2008, 12:55 PM

Additional comment:

I think that almost no real physicist would be deeply inspired by a type of question like "why is there a universe" and do not think that a large number of physicists - from the point of view of physics - would find such a question worth spending much time on, and is for sure not the toughest question current physicists ponder about (more reasonable candidates would be: the origin of dark matter/energy, how to reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity, and/or wether there is super-symmetry, as some of the more urgent questions current physics is occupied with), let alone that the question itself is not really a physics question at all (but belongs more to philosophy/meta-physics).
However, despite my reasoning in the post above, there exists of course a perfectly viable reasoning why there is a universe, which I already partly explained as based on the conservation of matter/energy. Since matter/energy are neither destroyed nor created, and no mechanism in nature has been ever detected that realy violates this conservation rule, the case of virtual particles as an aside being just the exception that affirms the rule, and which has the explenation that it is very likely that the vacuum does contain some energy to make it possible for such particles to exist.
In physical terminology that is pretty much everything that can be explained about that question.
Perhaps in addition one should say that the notion that matter/energy can only be transformed, but never destroyed or created does not contradict the Big bang theory, since that theory does not make any statement - in so far it stays strictly within the boundaries of what scientific theories can describe - about some ultimate origin of the universe, and as a whole, the Big bang theory does not state that the Big bang was the origin of matter/energy, space and time, and merely just describes how the universe evolved from an initial hot and dense state with unknown origin into a much larger and cooler present state. The Big bang theory therefore does not form the reason or origin of the universe, as the universe was already in existence then, and - based on the conservation of matter/energy - had in fact been in existence for an indefinite time before that and will be in existence for an indefinite time past that. Physics in general tries not to discriminate between points in space and/or points in time, to which it is to say that the laws of physical apply equally well in all points of space and all points of time and has no specially formed manifolds for space-time that contain special points like boundaries or edges, which is to say space extends in all 3 dimensions without any known limit, and also extends in time in both directions without limit.
This may not be a view that physics has univocally adapted (although the no-boundary proposal is commonly adapted), since theoretically speaking no measurement can realy distinguish between a realy flat (=infinite spatial extend) and almost flat (=finite but very large spatial extend) universe, but to the least, is not in contrast with any current scientific theory.

Billo

4th July 2008, 01:38 PM

Just a few quick questions from a "newbie" to this website, -- though hardly such a newbie to the debunking of pseudoscience. 1.] Is Witt actually giving away FREE copies of the book? 2.] What do I have to do to get said free copy? [After all, learning the secret to the species-stumping "cosmic riddle" of why the universe exists at all should at least be worth THAT price!] 3.] Who is bankrolling the ENORMOUS promotion of this book? By my quick, and hardly scientific, calculations, no publisher in the world can be currently spending as much on advertising one of its new releases as Witt and Co. The ads are popping up in virtually EVERY American science magazine I've read. He even has a two page COLOR spread in the lastest Scientific American. That must cost a bundle in itself! 4.] If I write him a glowing review of the FREE copy I receive -- should I receive it, that is -- can I get MY hands on some of that fortune myself? After all, even my humble credentials would bring him more clout than the plugs he currently has proudly listed on his website from such qualified folks as "a retired engineer," "sales manager," "RN," and surely most impressive of all, a genuine "Physics student"!! 5.] With all the promotion, why are no copies turning up on the new and used book search engines? I just checked Amazon and Addall and neither one has any copies, new or used, for sale. 6.] Is the answer to 5.] simply that everyone who buys a copy is so thoroughly convinced by Witt's irrefragable logic and thoroughly comprehensive explanation of the vexing enigmas of the cosmos that no one can bear to part with such a philosopher's stone?

Reality Check

4th July 2008, 11:15 PM

sol invictus

5th July 2008, 05:15 AM

Many people will stop reading about page 44 when he states that infinity has a magnitude, that this is preserved under addition, subtraction, multiplication and division and then gives equations 2.8 and 2.9

infinity + 1 > infinity
infinity (infinity + 1 ) = infinity2 + infinity

Wow - what a genius! If only the centuries of mathematicians that struggled to formalize the concept of infinity and cardinalities could have had access to Witt's incredible mathematical insights. Now they'll have to go back and re-do most of the last two centuries of mathematics...

This whole story might be a little sad, except that the way I see it this is just an efficient transfer of wealth from some rich guy to science magazines, and that isn't a bad thing.

sol invictus

5th July 2008, 05:23 AM

Just took a look at Witt's forum:

3. NP defines infinity as a magnitude equal to the universe's diameter. It is not a magical thing; it is a real thing.

So infinity has dimensions of length? If so, the equation above (with infinity+1) is a little problematic, isn't it? (But then, Witt has never demonstrated much understanding of the advanced concept of "units".) Or is he measuring everything in, say, feet? I wonder what would happen if he measured infinity in inches instead...

Perpetual Student

9th July 2008, 09:50 AM

Skwinty

9th July 2008, 12:16 PM

Hi Perpetual Student

Check out the Null Physics forum.
A few of the posters on this thread are asking Witt lots of questions and he is answering them. Patiently and politely.
I think some of them are actually being surprised with his answers.
Some of these posters are logging in excess of 140 posts.

Just a thought!

Perpetual Student

9th July 2008, 02:16 PM

I will, thanks

Reality Check

9th July 2008, 06:02 PM

Like so many others, I was drawn to this forum after doing an Internet search motivated by an ad for the book in "Science News."
As a matter of background, I am merely a mathematician, but I am an avid reader about science -- magazines (e.g.: "Scientific American,") and books (e.g.: Brian Greene, Richard Dawkins). So, I am by no means qualified to judge Terrence Witt's theses. The mathematics I saw in his "white papers" seemed to be innocuous enough, neither revealing nor condemning, however I lack the background to judge any questions about consistency with experimental results.
I have read numerous books and articles about relativity, the "standard model" and the big bang thesis. I must admit, over many decades, I have reluctantly accepted the big bang thesis. Ad hoc stuff like "inflation" and the question of what existed before, "something out of nothing," etc. have left me skeptical. But the evidence appears to be overwhelming.
Consequently, Witt's comments about explaining the cosmological red shift as a consequence of gravity and not expansion peaked my interest. The arguments about the "standard model" did not get my initial attention, even though it has been a hot topic on this forum, and has proven for some people to be a revealing area of weakness for Witt.
So, I came here with high hopes of finding an alternative to the "big bang." I have read virtually all the posts here and found myself at times straddling the middle. The are a lot of very knowledgeable people posting here, but it's difficult to make judgements without knowing the specifics of the credentials of the posters. (Terrence Witt's credentials are certainly questionable).
Now, I see a few posts ago the claim that on page 44 of his book the statements are made:

infinity + 1 > infinity
infinity (infinity + 1 ) = infinity2 + infinity

Is that really true? Is there any context that would forgive these statements? Am I missing something? If these statements were actually made in any meaningful context, and not some kind of joke or intentional goof, unfortunately, Witt is reduce to a crank, a looney, a fraud!
Thank all of you for a very entertaining day reading 11 pages of posts.
His white papers are fairly tame mathematically. For some reason he has not submitted his null geometry theory to any mathematics or physics journal. But his "Einstein's Nonphysical Geometry" white paper is in the process of being peer reviewed. It states that the Schwarzschild metric (and so GR in general) is "nonphysical" beacuse he calculates a divergence in the % change in lengths as you get further way from the black hole.
I personally have doubts about it since he uses an approximation rather than the exact solution for distance between two spatial points. Whether an equation diverges in a limit is depends stringly on the exact form of the equation.
If you are interested then he looks at the integration of a 1/r function between R and infinity which he equates to ln(infinty) - ln(R) to get infinity. This seems reasonable.
But the exact solution (see equation 8 in this PDF (http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-ph/pdf/0511/0511217v2.pdf)) is much more complex. My guess is that it varies as the reciprocal of the square root of r. This would then be divided by r to get a % change in lengths. I am not mathematically savvy enough to see if the exact solution diverges faster then 1/r or not.

The context of

infinity + 1 > infinity
infinity (infinity + 1 ) = infinity2 + infinity
is the statement that "infinity = the magnitude of the diameter of the universe" a few pages earlier. This assigns infinity a "magnitude" which he then uses to justify the 2 statements.

Reality Check

9th July 2008, 06:30 PM

A couple more problems with Null Physics

NP states that electrons do not have intrinsic magnetic moments. Rather the magnetic moments measured for electrons is due to their orbits around the nucleus. This is classical orbits (not QM) but he argues that electrons can only emit photons because it takes a certain time to do so and this time is the time for a complete orbit.
But he has forgotten about the Stern-Gerlach experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern-Gerlach_experiment) of 1922 which showed that elections (not in an orbit) have intrinsic angular momentum. Angular momentum + a charged particle = magnetic moment.
A prediction from NP: The Milky Way’s core - a massive black hole with a radiant output of ~6(10)^31 W, peaking in the infrared near ~0.06 mm.

The total power output of the sun is 4 x 10^26 Watts so the Sag A black hole should be brighter than 100,000 suns in the infrared band. This would be obvious in the many infrared observations of the galactic center.
Terry is trying to back out of this prediction a bit:
The prediction depends on a (non-gravty red-shifted) temperature of 28,000 K but the assumptions generating this may be wrong and so the actual peak may be elsewhere. But the galactor center is well observed in all frequencies including radio, x-ray, infrared and visible (maybe not gamma).
Something is absorbing the radiation. But that something would then heat up, radiate energy and be just as visible.
Some sort of graviational lensing hiding the source.
Another weird feature of NP from a posting of Terry's

Vortical disk motion is the inward flow of a galaxy's disk material to its core where it is disassociated into hydrogen to reverse fusion as a nececssary consequence of treating our universe as an eternal, equilibrium system. It is a new astrophysical concept that is described in detail in Chapter 16 of the OUU book.

I wonder how much energy it would take to disassociate helium into hydrogen?

Perpetual Student

9th July 2008, 11:35 PM

The context of

Quote:

infinity + 1 > infinity
infinity (infinity + 1 ) = infinity2 + infinity

is the statement that "infinity = the magnitude of the diameter of the universe" a few pages earlier. This assigns infinity a "magnitude" which he then uses to justify the 2 statements.

One first has to establish that assigning infinity a magnitude leads to a consistent mathematics, otherwise what follows has no meaning.

Paulhoff

10th July 2008, 06:41 AM

The context of

Quote:

infinity + 1 > infinity
infinity (infinity + 1 ) = infinity2 + infinity
I have joked about infinity + 1, but there is no such thing, but there are different infinities.

Infinity Comes in Different Sizes

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true-infinity-comes-in-different-sizes

Paul

:) :) :)

Perpetual Student

10th July 2008, 08:27 AM

Yes infinities have ben studied and classified. These infinities have been subjected to rigorous mathematical analysis, including proofs that their existence is included in a consistent mathematics. One cannot simply define a new mathematical object and put it to use without first establishing its consistency, associated theorems and any algorithms. Simply giving infinity a "magnitude," (thereby defining a new kind of infinity) and then expecting meaningful results is naive and cannot produce verifiable results.
Suppose I were to define a new square root of two that is rational, simply by saying it is rational: a/b. Now if I created proofs in the area of physics using the a and the b of my rational square root of two, would anyone trust my results?

sol invictus

10th July 2008, 08:53 AM

His white papers are fairly tame mathematically. For some reason he has not submitted his null geometry theory to any mathematics or physics journal.

"Some reason"?

But his "Einstein's Nonphysical Geometry" white paper is in the process of being peer reviewed. It states that the Schwarzschild metric (and so GR in general) is "nonphysical" beacuse he calculates a divergence in the % change in lengths as you get further way from the black hole.

The Schwarzschild metric has been around for approximately 90 years. It is in every general relativity textbook, it is studied by every student that takes a course on the topic, and there is even a theorem that it is the unique asymptotically flat spherically symmetric vacuum solution to Einstein's equations. I am extremely familiar with it personally, and I can assure you there is no such problem (in fact, far from the hole the metric becomes simply the flat metric in spherical coordinates).

Some mild degree of mathematical sophistication is required to understand it (or any solution to GR for that matter) - something around what a bright 3rd-year undergraduate in physics or math would have. You need vector calculus and a little differential geometry. That's far beyond Witt, based on what I've seen, so my guess is he has made some elementary mistake and derived some nonsense. Good luck to him getting it published. :rolleyes:

ben m

10th July 2008, 09:48 AM

based on what I've seen, so my guess is he has made some elementary mistake and derived some nonsense. Good luck to him getting it published. :rolleyes:

I think it's worse than that. The "white paper" http://www.nullphysics.com/whitepaper1.pdf does not "derive some nonsense". At first glance, it appears to work through some perfectly-normal Schwarztschild-metric geometry. He eventually finds something that varies as 1/r, which surprises no one; he defines a definite integral of this and finds that it varies as log(r), which also surprises no one.

Then he says, more or less, But it is intuitively impossible that a finite object should have any effect which doesn't have an asymptote at large r. Therefore GR, though experimentally correct, has (some ill-defined distinction between geometry as cause and as effect) which means (some carefully hedged statement about GR being wrong.)

Ugh. It's not even a mathematical mistake (though I didn't check for those), it's just a mathematical version of "if the second twin comes home older but he should have been the same age OMG PARADOX!!!11!"

sol invictus

10th July 2008, 09:56 AM

I guess he must think electromagnetism and Newtonian gravity are wrong too. After all, electric and gravitational potentials from point charges/masses fall off like 1/r in those theories too (and for exactly the same reason as in GR).

Reality Check

10th July 2008, 02:01 PM

"Some reason"?
The Schwarzschild metric has been around for approximately 90 years. It is in every general relativity textbook, it is studied by every student that takes a course on the topic, and there is even a theorem that it is the unique asymptotically flat spherically symmetric vacuum solution to Einstein's equations. I am extremely familiar with it personally, and I can assure you there is no such problem (in fact, far from the hole the metric becomes simply the flat metric in spherical coordinates).

Some mild degree of mathematical sophistication is required to understand it (or any solution to GR for that matter) - something around what a bright 3rd-year undergraduate in physics or math would have. You need vector calculus and a little differential geometry. That's far beyond Witt, based on what I've seen, so my guess is he has made some elementary mistake and derived some nonsense. Good luck to him getting it published. :rolleyes:
To be fair he knows about the asymptotically flat behaviour of the Schwarzschild metric. Instead he looks at the % change in the distance between 2 points in the metric divided by the radial distance. He skips the math in the exact solution and uses an approximation which is the problem.
He may get it published since he reported that the peer reviewer had no problems with the approximation.

sol invictus

10th July 2008, 02:53 PM

To be fair he knows about the asymptotically flat behaviour of the Schwarzschild metric. Instead he looks at the % change in the distance between 2 points in the metric divided by the radial distance.

Sorry, but that makes no sense. I don't even know what you mean - change with respect to what? What two points? Holding what fixed? Which definition of distance?

The metric is flat space far from the hole. Nothing strange can possibly happen there.

sol invictus

10th July 2008, 03:34 PM

To be fair he knows about the asymptotically flat behaviour of the Schwarzschild metric. Instead he looks at the % change in the distance between 2 points in the metric divided by the radial distance. He skips the math in the exact solution and uses an approximation which is the problem.
He may get it published since he reported that the peer reviewer had no problems with the approximation.

OK, just for a laugh I decided to take a look at that "white paper". The quantity defined there is meaningless. Rather than the Schwarzschild metric, I could take flat space and write it in funny coordinates (for example, rescale the radial coordinate by 5). Then I could compare it to flat space in ordinary coordinates and (using Witt's definition) get an even more divergent result than he gets.

Or I could re-define the radial coordinate in the Sch. metric to make it "flat", and get zero - or literally anything else. The radial function means nothing at all by itself, because I can change it to anything by a redefiniion of coordinates.

You could, I suppose, ask about the fractional difference in length between radial geodesics in Scw. and flat space, starting and ending on spheres of fixed radius (that would nail down the radial coordinate). That's actually Witt's eq. (12). Notice that it goes to zero at large R.

Or you could ask that about the absolute difference, and indeed, far away it would get large. So what? There are many random quantities which diverge when you integrate them like that - the electric potential of a point charge, for example. Does that mean Gauss' law is wrong?

The quantity Witt defines is meaningless, because it is not coordinate invariant. It does not measure the deviation of Scw. from flat space in any useful way. If he manages to get it published I will be ashamed of the journal and the reviewer.

ben m

10th July 2008, 03:48 PM

To be fair he knows about the asymptotically flat behaviour of the Schwarzschild metric. Instead he looks at the % change in the distance between 2 points in the metric divided by the radial distance. He skips the math in the exact solution and uses an approximation which is the problem.
He may get it published since he reported that the peer reviewer had no problems with the approximation.

Like I said---Witt took the Schwarzschild metric, throws random algebra at it until he generates an expression with a log(r) term. He labels this as unreasonable, according to some incoherent intuition about geometry.

Oh, and he also declares that the negative sign in the Minkowski metric means that
Although time is often interpreted in relativity theory as a fourth dimension external to space, the Minkowski metric actually demonstrates this is not true. If time were truly an extension of space then the distance between any two events would have the form:

ds^2 = c^2 dt^2 + dr^2

where differences in space and time compound and compliment each other. This is not the case. A difference of time occurs at the expense of a difference in distance, because time is a
contextual difference of space.

(italics are Witt's.)

He then goes on to use the conventional negative sign in his "derivation". Make of that what you will. I'm reading it as "Clearly you GR fanatics have adopted this space-time geometry thing without even thinking about it. Feh! Anyway, watch me as I deftly guide your negative sign into the bowels of a reductio ad absurdium."

zosima

10th July 2008, 08:50 PM

Howdy, ya'll

I think I should try to steer clear of Witt's site for a while, we're starting to get on each others' nerves.

If nothing else I'm impressed that he learned the value of the internet after just one encounter with JREF. I guess he figured that rather than persuade people on these forums he had the resources to manufacture consensus by building his own forum.

One thing that's got me is where did that The Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada quote come from? Is this published somewhere or is it just something that someone told him over the phone. From what he's said about FIT, its pretty obvious that Witt is willing to exaggerate the amount of praise and consensus that there is for the theory.

ETA: To Witt's credit, he could have used his powers of moderation to silence opposition on the forum and he hasn't. The whole time I've been posting there I've been just cringing in expectation of the moment the BanHammer comes down and it hasn't. (Which is more than I can say for many more 'respectable' sites like BoingBoing).

Vorpal

12th July 2008, 01:05 AM

Just for kicks, I did the same calculation for the metric ds² = (1/r^4)[ dr² + r²dΩ² ]. Following his approach exactly, I got δ'(r) = 1/r²-1, Int[ δ'(r) dr ] = C-(r+1/r), and therefore the "spatial deflection field increases without bound with distance." (If we massage the sign, anyway.) Therefore, as his approach leads us to the same place, all of his peculiar conclusions should follow for this metric as well. But in reality, the metric represents ordinary Euclidean space (just in unusual coordinates).

The entire "problem" is that that r-coordinate does not represent the proper radial length... but neither this r nor the Schwarzschild r were ever claimed to do so in the first place. This actually undercuts any meaning of this approach in the first place, as the numerical coordinate differences have no physical apart from the metric.

I honestly don't think T. Witt has even an undergraduate-level understanding of GTR. If he did, he would simply introduce a coordinate whose differences represent the proper radial length (as seen by a stationary observer at infinity), transform the Schwarzschild metric into those coordinates, and call it a day. None of this is conceptually difficult (although it is fairly ugly, with implicitly defined functions).

rainbowcanyon

14th July 2008, 10:57 PM

I believe that Mr. Witt has either stumbled upon or independently derived the central theorem of idempotency, that every thing is equal to itself. While this is a great truth, it is not worth $59.95.

ben m

23rd July 2008, 07:52 PM

ETA: To Witt's credit, he could have used his powers of moderation to silence opposition on the forum and he hasn't. The whole time I've been posting there I've been just cringing in expectation of the moment the BanHammer comes down and it hasn't. (Which is more than I can say for many more 'respectable' sites like BoingBoing).

So much for that. I spent a while arguing with him there (under, as i my habit, a random pseudonym, but my compulsive overuse of italics is probably recognizable---Hi Terry!) and the admins just deleted a post for having an "antagonistic tenor".

I was hoping to be, as Skwinty reported, "surprised with his answers". I'll give him credit for knowing what cosmology data looks like, which was unexpected---he's not unaware of major cosmology facts like supernova time dilation. However, his response to this knowledge is to invent epicycle upon epicycle upon epicycle to explain every new detail. Believe it or not, he actually gets around to full-on Plasma Cosmology tropes---the way he prevents Olber's Paradox from overtaking his steady-state Universe is this: optical photons "decay" to microwaves (becoming the CMB), then get absorbed by electrons which power giant electrical currents which flow to galactic centers---sound familiar?---and there (with the help of mumble-mumble-nonlinear-physics) they dissociate heavy nuclei back into hydrogen.

I was unpleasantly unsurprised by his knowledge of quantum/atomic/optical physics, which is the familiar semi-classical/semi-Bohmian morass that 50% of crackpots come up with.

And he's got a library of excuses, ranging from "it's going to give exactly QM/GR predictions ... once I work out the impossible nonlinear geometry ... so stop asking whether it agrees with old experiments" to "it's not a mathematical theory, so stop asking for equations" to "I'm hoping to replace abstract math with new math---based on physics".

So much for that.

DrRocket

24th July 2008, 07:02 PM

I have joked about infinity + 1, but there is no such thing, but there are different infinities.

Infinity Comes in Different Sizes

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true-infinity-comes-in-different-sizes

Paul

:) :) :)

Yes, there are indeed different sizes of infinity. There are infinitely many different sizes ;-). For a nice discussion of cardinal numbers see the book Naive Set Theory by Paul Halmos. One of the more interesting questions about cardinal numbers is the continuum hypothesis. Wikipedia has a reasonable discussion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_hypothesis

Skwinty

26th July 2008, 03:18 AM

I was hoping to be, as Skwinty reported, "surprised with his answers". I'll give him credit for knowing what cosmology data looks like, which was unexpected---he's not unaware of major cosmology facts like supernova time dilation.

Hi face a palm at them :D

Sure sounds like you were surprised that he actually knows something.

I received my free book 2 days ago and starting to read with anticipation.
Now, I will most probably not understand a great deal of the book, but I tend to view this book as a popular science book and not a replacement for the last hundred years of scientific endeavour.

I must say that I am interested in the existence from non-existance idea and to be honest the concept of infinity (anyones concept of infinity) is mind boggling. Especially when it is stated that some infinities are bigger than others. This is not, I believe a Null Physics invention. As I understand, there is a difference between mathematical and physical infinities and mathematicians like to rid their equations of infinities via renormalisation.

It strikes me that infinity is a subject that could be studied ad infinitum and still not produce a sensible solution, much like the measuring of the diameter of the universe.

All in all a great philosophical, mathematical and scientific puzzle.

sol invictus

26th July 2008, 04:48 AM

I must say that I am interested in the existence from non-existance idea and to be honest the concept of infinity (anyones concept of infinity) is mind boggling. Especially when it is stated that some infinities are bigger than others. This is not, I believe a Null Physics invention.

It is true that one can carefully define a sense in which there is a hierarchy of sizes of infinities. That was done about a century ago by some very smart mathematicians.

As I understand, there is a difference between mathematical and physical infinities and mathematicians like to rid their equations of infinities via renormalisation.

That is not correct. In quantum field theory (which is a branch of physics) infinities arise in places where they should not (for example, in the computation of physical quantities which we know are finite). The infinities can be dealt with by a process known as renormalization.

It strikes me that infinity is a subject that could be studied ad infinitum and still not produce a sensible solution, much like the measuring of the diameter of the universe.

Defining infinity as the diameter of the universe is totally absurd. Diameters have units of length; infinity is dimensionless. Depending on what you mean by "diameter", the diameter of the universe may be finite, which would then be a rather strange definition of the infinite, or it may in fact be infinite, in which case it is impossible to define in any meaningful sense.

I could go on ad infinitum in this vein, but the existence (on Witt's website, and presumably in his book) of statements such as "infinity+1>infinity", which any school-child knows are inconsistent (try dividing both sides by infinity, for example) suffice to demonstrate the total lack of witt there...

Skwinty

26th July 2008, 05:06 AM

Defining infinity as the diameter of the universe is totally absurd. Diameters have units of length; infinity is dimensionless. Depending on what you mean by "diameter", the diameter of the universe may be finite, which would then be a rather strange definition of the infinite, or it may in fact be infinite, in which case it is impossible to define in any meaningful sense.

Hi Sol
If there are varying sizes of infinity, then surely one infinity plus some value returns another infinity. This implies then that the one infinity is greater than the other.
ie infinity(1) + x > infinity(1) or infinity(1) + x = infinity(2).

This is how I interprete Witts definition.

With respect to the dimensioned versus dimensionless, if one was to try and measure the diameter of an infinite universe, one would never get a dimension as the tape measure would never stop reeling out, so the unit of dimension, ie meters,kilometres parsecs etc is irrelevant.

sol invictus

26th July 2008, 05:20 AM

Hi Sol
If there are varying sizes of infinity, then surely one infinity plus some value returns another infinity.

It returns the same infinity.

This implies then that the one infinity is greater than the other.

No, not at all.

The difficulty here is that you (and Witt) are using a naive (witless, one might say) definition of "greater than". Defining relative sizes of infinities is tricky precisely because the size of an infinite thing is a very slippery concept.

ie infinity(1) + x > infinity(1) or infinity(1) + x = infinity(2).

This is simply inconsistent. As I said, just divide both sides by infinity(1). If x is finite, x/infinity(1)=0 (if not, infinity(1) is not infinite in any sense). But infinity(1)/infinity(1)=1 (if not, you'd better carefully define what you mean by "/" and "+"). Then your expression becomes 1>1, which is false.

With respect to the dimensioned versus dimensionless, if one was to try and measure the diameter of an infinite universe, one would never get a dimension as the tape measure would never stop reeling out, so the unit of dimension, ie meters,kilometres parsecs etc is irrelevant.

What does infinity+1 mean, if infinity is a length? "1" what? Worse, what do you even mean by the diameter of an infinite universe? If you can't measure it, can't change its units (as you said), what is it? What's the point of defining the mathematical concept "infinity" in terms of something you can't measure or manipulate?

sol invictus

26th July 2008, 05:30 AM

Since this keeps coming up, here's my attempt at a concise description for how to define sizes of infinity.

Consider two sets (a set is a collection of objects, or numbers, or anything else). We want to determine which set is bigger - meaning which contains more elements. So we do the following - we find a rule that identifies the elements of one set with the elements of the other. We try to find a rule so that each and every element in set 1 identified with a different element of set 2. If we succeed, we know set 1 is smaller than or equal to set 2. If we fail to find any such rule, it means there were more elements in set 1 than in set 2.

For example, X = {1,2}, and Y = {a, b, c}. If my rule is 1->a, 2->b, I've shown |X| <= |Y| (<= is "less than or equal to", |X| means the size of X). If I can prove that there is no rule going from Y->X which satisfies the above (which I could, but won't bother), it shows that |X| < |Y|. That's correct, since in this case |X|=2 and |Y|=3.

Now we try to do exactly the same, only starting from set 2. If we succeed in finding such a rule in both directions, we know the two sets have exactly the same number of elements.

For example, if Z={j,k}, I can take the first rule to be 1->k, 2->j, and the second to be k->2, j->1, which shows |X| = |Z|.

This definition is overkill for finite sets where we can just count how many elements there are. But it's very useful when applied to infinite sets. It immediately tells us, for example, that there are the same number of integers as there are rational numbers (ratios of integers), but there are (infinitely) more real numbers between 0 and 1 than there are integers or rationals.

Skwinty

26th July 2008, 05:42 AM

Hi Sol
did you read this article http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true-infinity-comes-in-different-sizes.
I understand this to mean that real infinity was larger than natural infinity and that the idea of > (larger than) was a break through mathematically.
So, were Cantor's ideas also fallacious.

It doesn't make sense from a layman's point of view, to then say that the 2 infinities are the same, as one is larger than the other hence there must be a difference.

Indeed a slippery slope.

Skwinty

26th July 2008, 06:00 AM

Hi Sol
Okay, I posted my last post before I saw your last post.
So, what Cantor is saying is, If your filled an infinite space with footballs and compared it to an infinite space filled with golf balls, there would be infinitely more golf balls than footballs

sol invictus

26th July 2008, 07:31 AM

So, what Cantor is saying is, If your filled an infinite space with footballs and compared it to an infinite space filled with golf balls, there would be infinitely more golf balls than footballs

Not necessarily - you have to define the question more carefully, and then we could apply "my" rule and check. There might be exactly the same number.

Infinities are very counter intuitive - for example there are the same number of rational numbers as integers even though there are an infinite number of rationals between 0 and 1 (or in any other finite interval).

Witt's central mistake - and that of most crackpots like him - is thinking that because he doesn't understand these facts they must be wrong. On the contrary, they are the only rules that make sense, at least that have been found by centuries of very, very smart mathematicians.

Skwinty

26th July 2008, 07:42 AM

Not necessarily - you have to define the question more carefully, and then we could apply "my" rule and check. There might be exactly the same number.

Now I am really confused.

Lets for arguments sake let 1 cubic metre hold 10 footballs and 1 cubic metre hold 1000 golf balls.
now lets take an infinite number of 1 cubic metre containers. how could there be the same amount of golf balls as footballs.

I apologise if I seem obtuse, I am not one of those very clever mathematicians.

sol invictus

26th July 2008, 08:44 AM

I apologise if I seem obtuse, I am not one of those very clever mathematicians.

Don't worry - it is very counter-intuitive.

Lets for arguments sake let 1 cubic metre hold 10 footballs and 1 cubic metre hold 1000 golf balls.
now lets take an infinite number of 1 cubic metre containers. how could there be the same amount of golf balls as footballs.

Because infinity is infinite.

Suppose we start with these two infinite collections of 1 cubic meter containers. I take 1 golf ball container and put it off to the left, and then I take 100 football containers and put them off to the right. I repeat that 10 times, and now I have 10,000 footballs in the collection to the right and 10,000 golfballs in the other. But I can keep doing that infinitely many times. In the end it sure sounds like I'll have two infinite collections, each with exactly the same number of balls.

The moral is, you must be more careful than that. Given an infinity you can re-arrange it to get anything you want, unless you're careful to follow the correct rules. Here's another example:

0 = 0+0+0+0+... = (1-1)+(1-1)+(1-1)+... = 1-1+1-1+1-1+... = 1+ (-1+1)+(-1+1)+(-1+1)+... = 1+(0)+(0)+... = 1. Oops!!

Do you see which equality is false? (Hint: there are actually two.)

Skwinty

26th July 2008, 09:02 AM

uppose we start with these two infinite collections of 1 cubic meter containers. I take 1 golf ball container and put it off to the left, and then I take 100 football containers and put them off to the right. I repeat that 10 times, and now I have 10,000 footballs in the collection to the right and 10,000 golfballs in the other. But I can keep doing that infinitely many times. In the end it sure sounds like I'll have two infinite collections, each with exactly the same number of balls.

Okay, I'll go with that, except that the golf ball set will always be spatially smaller than the football set and so will be infinitely smaller as we progress towards infinity.
My reasoning here is we start with one cube on the one hand compared to ten cubes on the other. The golf ball set lags by a factor of ten.

sol invictus

26th July 2008, 09:27 AM

Okay, I'll go with that, except that the golf ball set will always be spatially smaller than the football set and so will be infinitely smaller as we progress towards infinity.

How do you know? They'll both be infinitely big, and comparing infinities is very tricky, as I've been trying to get across to you.

My reasoning here is we start with one cube on the one hand compared to ten cubes on the other. The golf ball set lags by a factor of ten.

By the same logic there are many more rational numbers than integers. After all, for every pair of sequential integers there are more than 10 (actually, an infinite number) rationals in between. And yet (using the perfectly reasonable - and correct - definition I gave above) I can prove that there are exactly as many rationals as integers.

Skwinty

26th July 2008, 09:53 AM

Thanks Sol,
Will have to continue at a later stage.
My guests are arriving now so will have to cut our discussion short.

ben m

26th July 2008, 05:04 PM

Skwinty, there are two online resource with good descriptions of "infinity" and its mathmatical properties. One is Wikipedia; the other is "Mathworld" at mathworld.wolfram.com. You can read about various infinities there; look for "Hilbert hotel" for a situation exactly parallel to your basketballs/golf balls paradox.

Vorpal

26th July 2008, 07:12 PM

Minor note: Sol's method of comparing sets implicitly assumes the axiom of choice. Without AC, we cannot guarantee things like the trichotomy property of set sizes (cardinalities). There's an even nicer axiom, the generalized continuum hypothesis, which makes cardinal arithmetic even nicer (and also implies AC). The comments below about cardinalities also assume AC.
If there are varying sizes of infinity, then surely one infinity plus some value returns another infinity. This implies then that the one infinity is greater than the other.
ie infinity(1) + x > infinity(1) or infinity(1) + x = infinity(2).
Thing is, if you have two infinite cardinalities κ<λ, then κ+α = λ is true if, and only if, α = λ. In other words, to get the higher infinity by addition, you need to add as much as the next infinity is in the first place. We also have κ² = κ and κλ = λ, so the same is true for multiplication as well.

That's not to say that we cannot make sense of "infinity + 1 > infinity" or "infinity² > infinity", just that those kinds of things no longer talk about cardinalities, but something else. For example, cardinal numbers answer "how many?" (one, two, three, ...); ordinal numbers answer "which place?" (first, second, third, ...). And for transfinite ordinals, we do have true inequalities in those forms, and for other exotic number systems, we can even have "1/κ > 0" (for transfinite κ) and so on.

However, it's very hard to see how such things--either ordinal numbers or surreal numbers or whatnot--have any direct applications to physics. If Mr. Witt is talking about sizes of things, then he's simply wrong; if he's talking about something else, then he needs to (1) define a consistent system of arithmetic, and (2) explicitly connect it to something physical and show how it mirrors his system. I haven't read his book, so I've no idea if he even tries to do that, but I have the inductive hypothesis based on his webpage that the answer is "no" to both.

Reality Check

27th July 2008, 01:45 AM

To give you a taste of Wiit's logic:
The first thing any investigation of space requires is a consistent mathematical framework for handling infinities. Since the universe is the only infinite reference we have, its extent will be used to define infinity.
The universe's diameter is the invariant width of nonexistence. It constitutes a fixed, exact level of linear largeness, and is therefore the absolute metric of unboundedness.
THEOREM 2.1 - INFINITY
INFINITY IS THE UNIVERSE'S INVARIANT DIAMETER

The universe is the source of all data and all knowledge. The only meaningful generalization within this context are not human creations; they are direct reflections of reality's underlying structure. The most accurate definition of infinity is therefore a property of the universe, no an assertion of our mathematics.
Note his use of "theorem" to give his statements some credibility. All his statements are presented as "theorems". There are no axioms quoted or a reference to the axioms that his theorems are based on.

He does not know that there is an existing consistent mathematical framework for handling infinities.

The charitable interpretation of theorem 2.1 is that infinity is infinity since the diameter of the universe in infinite. But then there is the problem of assigning infinity the units of length.

Skwinty

27th July 2008, 02:59 AM

There are no axioms quoted or a reference to the axioms that his theorems are based on.

hi RC

From my brief reading of Null Physics, there is only one axiom and all theorems are based on that axiom.

AXIOM 1 Null Axiom

Existance sums to Nonexistance

See page 28

sol invictus

27th July 2008, 03:25 AM

AXIOM 1 Null Axiom

Existance sums to Nonexistance

Does that mean anything to you? It certainly doesn't to me (even if I correct the spelling). I don't know what any of the words in that sentence mean (in their context), particularly "sums".

If it does mean something, perhaps you can explain the proof of the theorem quoted by RC above, which must follow directly from this "axiom"?

Vorpal

27th July 2008, 03:34 AM

That's what I would like to know as well, because right now I'm starting to feel that my comment of "simply wrong" was incorrect--this appears to go into the not even wrong territory instead.

Skwinty

27th July 2008, 04:23 AM

Does that mean anything to you? It certainly doesn't to me (even if I correct the spelling). I don't know what any of the words in that sentence mean (in their context), particularly "sums".

If it does mean something, perhaps you can explain the proof of the theorem quoted by RC above, which must follow directly from this "axiom"?

Sure, the a should have been an e. You must admit though it goes with distance.:D
Is this a spelling bee competition?

I said in a previous post that I have started reading the book and that I probably will not understand most of it. I got a free copy. Did you?

Dont say you dont want to invest time in it as you have invested quite a lot of time re: Null Physics on this forum.

However, for some one to go to great length and detail in arguing against an idea as has RC, (Currently at 191 posts om Witts forum), it shows lack of attention to detail if he misses the fact that there is only one axiom.

As for me explaining the proofs of any of his theorems, that is as I have stated many times beyond me.

Vorpal

27th July 2008, 05:15 AM

Sure, the a should have been an e. You must admit though it goes with distance.:D
Is this a spelling bee competition?
Well, swell. But it does indeed show a lot that although you've had the book for a while, you cannot explain what this lone axiom even means.

However, for some one to go to great length and detail in arguing against an idea as has RC, (Currently at 191 posts om Witts forum), it shows lack of attention to detail if he misses the fact that there is only one axiom.
Mind the context, please--we were discussing arithmetic regarding infinite quantities, and it follows from your own statements that whatever system Mr. Witt is using for that, if any, he has not provided any axioms for it.

As for me explaining the proofs of any of his theorems, that is as I have stated many times beyond me.
If they are of the same sort as his infinite arithmetic or fumbles with the Schwarzschild metric, then this quite understandable: nonexistent things cannot be reached.

sol invictus

27th July 2008, 06:09 AM

I said in a previous post that I have started reading the book and that I probably will not understand most of it. I got a free copy. Did you?

No, although I wouldn't mind. I could start a collection of self-published crackpot monographs.

Dont say you dont want to invest time in it as you have invested quite a lot of time re: Null Physics on this forum.

Not really - most of the discussion even in this thread hasn't been about "null physics", whatever that is. Anyway, at least from my point of view this is purely for entertainment purposes, so I will do exactly as much as I feel like and no more.

However, for some one to go to great length and detail in arguing against an idea as has RC, (Currently at 191 posts om Witts forum), it shows lack of attention to detail if he misses the fact that there is only one axiom.

It's very difficult to argue coherently against nonsense on its own ground. When there are so many inconsistencies and "not even wrong" statements, it's hard to address one without temporarily accepting some others, and that tends to get you into trouble.

As for me explaining the proofs of any of his theorems, that is as I have stated many times beyond me.

Then answer a simpler question - do you understand what that "axiom" means?

I don't - and I think that's because it's utterly meaningless. Axioms are used to define a logical structure from which one can build something interesting. They must be very precise, and there must be a consistent set of rules with which one can manipulate them. Witt's "axiom" doesn't come anywhere near that - it's just schizophrenic gibberish.

Reality Check

27th July 2008, 06:36 AM

Sure, the a should have been an e. You must admit though it goes with distance.:D
Is this a spelling bee competition?

I said in a previous post that I have started reading the book and that I probably will not understand most of it. I got a free copy. Did you?

Dont say you dont want to invest time in it as you have invested quite a lot of time re: Null Physics on this forum.

However, for some one to go to great length and detail in arguing against an idea as has RC, (Currently at 191 posts om Witts forum), it shows lack of attention to detail if he misses the fact that there is only one axiom.

As for me explaining the proofs of any of his theorems, that is as I have stated many times beyond me.
You are right - there is a total of 1 axiom in the book. However it is nonsense and anything based on it is nonsense.

In fact I have ignored most of the "geometry" in his book because it is not geometry. I have instead concentrated on the Null Physics statements of fact, several of which are badly researched, e.g.

Electrons do not have an intrinsic magnetic moment.
But the Stern–Gerlach experiment done (and repeated many times since) in 1922 shows that electrons (and other particles) have an intrinsic angular momentum and thus an intrinsic magnetic moment.
One NP prediction is that the Milky Way's core is a massive black hole with a radiant output of ~6(10)^31 W peaking in the infrared near ~0.06 mm.
But there are plenty of observations in the infrared of the galactic center and no sign of the radiation (~100,000 suns). Terry Witt and his team are currently trying to hide the radiation by some sort of new? gravitational effect of the mass of 3.7 million solar masses.
The Lyman-alpha forest allows astronomers to measure the density of neutral hydrogen between us and distants galaxies and quasars. They see that it increases as we look further back in time. This means that the universe is not static and is indirect evidence for the Big Bang.
Null Physics relies on an infinite (conventional meaning not NP meaning) and static universe.
Oddly enough in the 30 years that Terry has been formulating Null Physics he seems to have never heard of the Stern–Gerlach experiment. Nor did he have his theory reviewed by anyone (e.g. an real physicist) who knows about the experiment.

Skwinty

27th July 2008, 10:26 AM

Well, swell. But it does indeed show a lot that although you've had the book for a while, you cannot explain what this lone axiom even means..

If having the book for 3 days equates to quite a while, then a year must be close to infinity. I do have a real job in the real world.
Apart from the fact that you expect me to explain something to you, which once again, I have stated quite clearly that I probably do not understand.
I am however interested in learning a bit more before consigning it to the trash can.

Mind the context, please--we were discussing arithmetic regarding infinite quantities, and it follows from your own statements that whatever system Mr. Witt is using for that, if any, he has not provided any axioms for it..

This thread is called "Null Physics Anyone".
My post related to this comment of RC's

"Note his use of "theorem" to give his statements some credibility. All his statements are presented as "theorems". There are no axioms quoted or a reference to the axioms that his theorems are based on."

How is this out of context?

If they are of the same sort as his infinite arithmetic or fumbles with the Schwarzschild metric, then this quite understandable: nonexistent things cannot be reached.

From what I have gathered so far is that space, which is infinite, is an infinite set consisting of nothingness. Existence is a subset of this nothingness.

Now, my logic tells me, if you magnify any particle sufficiently, you will find a great deal of nothing. A point here and a point there, with a great deal of nothing in between.

An example would be, if a split pea on the floor of the Basilica Dome represented the nucleus of an atom, the first electron would be a speck of dust on the ceiling. A great deal of empty space would lie between them.

Now, take matter/antimatter, infinite space as a set of nothingness, why could one not think that existence sums (adds) to nonexistence.
Or "Something is a subset of Nothing"
This is why I asked for a free book, so that I could actually read it before calling anyone a crackpot. It's called "Giving the benefit of doubt"

Heres what Blaise Pascal said a few hundred years ago.

"For in fact what is man in Nature
A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite
an All in comparison with the nothing
a mean between nothing and everything"

This is also why I believe that Philosophy of Science is still valid today, even if the sole outcome of philosophical musing is just another point of view.

Reality Check

27th July 2008, 02:01 PM

From what I have gathered so far is that space, which is infinite, is an infinite set consisting of nothingness. Existence is a subset of this nothingness.

Now, my logic tells me, if you magnify any particle sufficiently, you will find a great deal of nothing. A point here and a point there, with a great deal of nothing in between.

An example would be, if a split pea on the floor of the Basilica Dome represented the nucleus of an atom, the first electron would be a speck of dust on the ceiling. A great deal of empty space would lie between them.

Now, take matter/antimatter, infinite space as a set of nothingness, why could one not think that existence sums (adds) to nonexistence.
Or "Something is a subset of Nothing"
This is why I asked for a free book, so that I could actually read it before calling anyone a crackpot. It's called "Giving the benefit of doubt"

Heres what Blaise Pascal said a few hundred years ago.

"For in fact what is man in Nature
A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite
an All in comparison with the nothing
a mean between nothing and everything"

This is also why I believe that Philosophy of Science is still valid today, even if the sole outcome of philosophical musing is just another point of view.
Hi Skwinty:
Infinity is actually a really funny thing. There happen to be an infinite number of points between all pairs of points. So there is a sense in which there is no empty space between points.
There is also the question of whether we really consider a point to be nothing? In your example it does not matter how big a volume your atom occupies - there is always something in that volume. Likewise there will always be a point in any any volume.
Terry Witt defines a point to be nothing and so comes up with his null axiom. This ignores the fact that a point has a location in space and so contains information. Information is not nothing.

You are correct that Philosophy of Science is still valid today. But it still needs a basis in valid mathematics.

Perpetual Student

27th July 2008, 03:09 PM

Paulhoff

27th July 2008, 03:48 PM

Isn’t it funny how 1 plus and infinity small number that is raised to the power of infinite is not an infinite number.

(1 + infinity small number) ^ infinity = 2.7182818284590452353602874713527 or e.

Vorpal

27th July 2008, 05:46 PM

"Note his use of "theorem" to give his statements some credibility. All his statements are presented as "theorems". There are no axioms quoted or a reference to the axioms that his theorems are based on." How is this out of context?
Mea culpa. I apologize.

From what I have gathered so far is that space, which is infinite, is an infinite set consisting of nothingness. Existence is a subset of this nothingness. Now, my logic tells me, if you magnify any particle sufficiently, you will find a great deal of nothing. A point here and a point there, with a great deal of nothing in between. ...
You know, probably the most charitable interpretation of that is something like "physical structure (matter, etc.) is spacetime structure." But this is something that was done more than ninety years ago: stress, energy, and momentum are all identified with a certain kind of spacetime curvature through Einstein's field equation. However, GTR by itself says absolutely nothing about the whether the universe is finite or infinite (cf. his previously quoted theorem), and it's no boon to understanding to state things in such an obfuscated way if that was what he meant.

This is why I asked for a free book, so that I could actually read it before calling anyone a crackpot. It's called "Giving the benefit of doubt"
You appear to believe that this was not given. I've read his website, including his "white papers", and frankly I don't believe that anyone who misunderstands the topics at such a fundamental level can teach anything about physics. If you came across a book about medicine and you observed from its own website that the author misunderstands the basic workings of the immune system--not overly simplifies it for the audience, but gets it utterly wrong--would you really believe that anyone who dismisses his works in or about medicine are not justified?

"For in fact what is man in Nature
A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite
an All in comparison with the nothing
a mean between nothing and everything"

This is also why I believe that Philosophy of Science is still valid today, even if the sole outcome of philosophical musing is just another point of view.
It helps if the philosophy is based on actual science, however. Otherwise, it would be guilty of the same sin you're referring to: a Nothing telling the Universe how to be.

Perpetual Student

27th July 2008, 08:26 PM

Paulhoff

27th July 2008, 08:57 PM

And the point is?
And your point is.

Paul

:) :) :)

I guess you're not a Perpetual Student

Skwinty

28th July 2008, 04:45 AM

My last post on the "Null Physics" forum (concerning “infinity”) was substantially altered (presumably by Witt) by deleting critical comments about Witt's so called "premises" and leaving only a final fragment of what I said. My comments criticizing his “premises” as not being self evident and being merely quasi-mystical assertions seem to have rattled Mr. Witt. In my view altering my statements redefines Mr. Witt as a charlatan, and not merely a crackpot as I had suspected. Put a fork in him -- he is done!

Hi PS
Did Witt edit your original post or did he just quote certain bits in his reply.
If he only quoted certain bits in his reply, whats the problem?
However, if he censored your original post then you have a point, unless of course he was removing derogatory ad hominem statements.

Please clarify.

Skwinty

28th July 2008, 04:58 AM

Mea culpa. I apologize..

No sweat, apology accepted.

You know, probably the most charitable interpretation of that is something like "physical structure (matter, etc.) is spacetime structure." But this is something that was done more than ninety years ago: stress, energy, and momentum are all identified with a certain kind of spacetime curvature through Einstein's field equation. However, GTR by itself says absolutely nothing about the whether the universe is finite or infinite (cf. his previously quoted theorem), and it's no boon to understanding to state things in such an obfuscated way if that was what he meant..

Well, when Einstein wrote GTR, it was assumed that the universe was static hence the cosmological constant. GTR as I understand was primarily about gravity and not the size of the universe. This theory initiated relativistic cosmology.

You appear to believe that this was not given. I've read his website, including his "white papers", and frankly I don't believe that anyone who misunderstands the topics at such a fundamental level can teach anything about physics. If you came across a book about medicine and you observed from its own website that the author misunderstands the basic workings of the immune system--not overly simplifies it for the audience, but gets it utterly wrong--would you really believe that anyone who dismisses his works in or about medicine are not justified?.

Bear in mind, the statements about the benefit of doubt relate to myself.
I said I wanted to read the book to determine its validity.

It helps if the philosophy is based on actual science, however. Otherwise, it would be guilty of the same sin you're referring to: a Nothing telling the Universe how to be.

What sin was I referring to?
I dont read in your innuendo what you are expecting me to.

Skwinty

28th July 2008, 05:12 AM

Hi Skwinty:
Infinity is actually a really funny thing. There happen to be an infinite number of points between all pairs of points. So there is a sense in which there is no empty space between points.
There is also the question of whether we really consider a point to be nothing? In your example it does not matter how big a volume your atom occupies - there is always something in that volume. Likewise there will always be a point in any any volume.
Terry Witt defines a point to be nothing and so comes up with his null axiom. This ignores the fact that a point has a location in space and so contains information. Information is not nothing.

You are correct that Philosophy of Science is still valid today. But it still needs a basis in valid mathematics.

Hi RC

My understanding of a point is

"In geometry, topology and related branches of mathematics a spatial point describes a specific point within a given space that consists of neither volume, area, length, nor any other higher dimensional analogue. Thus, a point is a 0-dimensional object. " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_%28geometry%29

Doesn't this imply that a point is nothing.

The location information that a point contains is relative to whose view point.
Ours, inside space or outside space?

In any event , the point only occupies the location in space so why should it record and memorise that location. If the point moves, does it update this information?

With regards to Witt's mathematics, have you seen any math errors or only conceptual errors? I am not a mathematician so I wouldn't know.

Reality Check

28th July 2008, 06:40 AM

Hi RC

My understanding of a point is

"In geometry, topology and related branches of mathematics a spatial point describes a specific point within a given space that consists of neither volume, area, length, nor any other higher dimensional analogue. Thus, a point is a 0-dimensional object. " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_%28geometry%29

Doesn't this imply that a point is nothing.

The location information that a point contains is relative to whose view point.
Ours, inside space or outside space?

In any event , the point only occupies the location in space so why should it record and memorise that location. If the point moves, does it update this information?

With regards to Witt's mathematics, have you seen any math errors or only conceptual errors? I am not a mathematician so I wouldn't know.
A point is a zero-dimensional object. This does not mean that it is "nothing". It also has location information but the exact nature of that informaiton is imposed by a coordinate system, e.g. using (x,y,z) versus radial coordinates. That makes it more than nothing, i.e. something. This can be relative to anyone's point of view.
I don't think that points "record and memorise that location". They merely exist at a location at a certain time.

Here is a fundemental mathematical error with Witt's concept of infinity:
Consider the concept of the point at infinity as used in the definition of the Riemann sphere.
In conventional mathematics we know that there is a point at infinity because trying to go beyond infinity leaves you at infinity (infinity + 1 = infinity).

In null mathematics the situation is more complex. If you have a point at infinity then there is an infinity that is bigger than that infinity since infinity + 1 > infinity. So to get to infinity you have to move the point to the new infinity. But that infinity is also smaller than infinity + 1. Thus null mathematics definition of infinity means that either the point at infinity does not exist or that there are a infinite number of points at infinity.
Either definition means that the Riemann sphere does not exist in null mathematics.

This definition of infinity may also cause problems with limits, e.g. what is the limit as a point tends to the point at infinity (which either does not exist or consists of an infinite number of points)?
Do improper integrals with infinite limits exist in null geometry?

sol invictus

28th July 2008, 07:53 AM

To amplify on what RC said:

<snipped>
Doesn't this imply that a point is nothing.

No. For example in modern physics we know how to write down theories of point particles, which have mass, charge, angular momentum, momentum, energy, etc. In fact in the standard model of particle physics all matter is made of point particles. Whether they are truly points is impossible to say, but they are incredibly small if they are not, and the model in which they are treated as points is the most precisely accurate in the history of science.

The location information that a point contains is relative to whose view point.
Ours, inside space or outside space?

I don't understand the question.

In any event , the point only occupies the location in space so why should it record and memorise that location. If the point moves, does it update this information?

If by "point" you mean "point particle", it obeys the law of physics, which tell you (among other things) that it moves continuously through space.

With regards to Witt's mathematics, have you seen any math errors or only conceptual errors? I am not a mathematician so I wouldn't know.

The statement infinity+1>infinity is mathematically false, as I have already proven for you.

ben m

28th July 2008, 09:06 AM

There's no point debating whether Witt's claims disagree with modern mathematics. We know they do, and Witt knows it too. Witt, however, thinks that math needs to be rewritten to do what he wants it to do. I quote:

I think that our mathematics ought to be a reflection of reality, not a thought project with no blueprint. The tie goes to reality, because reality is built far better, with far greater eloquence, than our mathematics. This is not an opinion; this is based on an understanding of the many implications of the null axiom, such as ultrastasis. My redefinition of infinity in NP is intended as a call to action to revise its mathematical formulation. I didn't expect the suggestion to be welcomed with open arms, coming as it is from outside the mathematics community.

There's no point trying to make sense of it. Witt's infinity is not Aleph-Null, it's a yet-to-be-defined quantity with whatever properties Witt wants it to have such that his physicsy statements appear true.

It's sort of an eigeninfinity.

Skwinty

28th July 2008, 09:46 AM

No. For example in modern physics we know how to write down theories of point particles, which have mass, charge, angular momentum, momentum, energy, etc. In fact in the standard model of particle physics all matter is made of point particles. Whether they are truly points is impossible to say, but they are incredibly small if they are not, and the model in which they are treated as points is the most precisely accurate in the history of science..

What,to the best of current knowledge does a point particle consist of?
I recall TT saying that it consists of nothing.

I don't understand the question. .

A co-ordinate system has a reference point.
what I am asking is, if you are for example on Mars or 3000 light years away, would your co-ordinate system's point of origin be the same?
ie x,y,z or x1,y1,z1

If by "point" you mean "point particle", it obeys the law of physics, which tell you (among other things) that it moves continuously through space..

I mean a mathematical or geometric point as described by a co-ordinate system

The statement infinity+1>infinity is mathematically false, as I have already proven for you.

This goes back to the golf ball / football paradox.

1 cubic metre with 1000 golf balls is not equal to 100 cubic metres with 1000 footballs.(other than the quantity of balls). So if you continued ad infinitum, the one would always be bigger than the other.
I'm sorry, I cant see it any other way.
I will read about the Hilbert hotel and see if it becomes any clearer.
Who said philosophical musing had no meaning in science?

Skwinty

28th July 2008, 09:49 AM

There's no point debating whether Witt's claims disagree with modern mathematics.

He is only saying that infinity needs to be re-defined surely.
He cant mean the whole of mathematics.

Skwinty

28th July 2008, 10:40 AM

Here's a bunch of quotes from Victor Stenger, particle physicist (retired).

"The laws of physics are the laws of nothing"

"If the laws of physics are the same laws as the laws of an empty void, the transition from nothing to something may not have been as difficult as people have assumed. Our universe may be no more than re-arranged, re-structured nothingness"

"On the face of it, symmetry appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with modern physics"

Now , I understand that "nothing" the "void" is the very epitomy of symmetry.

Isn't this precisely what Witt is saying.
Does this make Stenger a crackpot as well.

sol invictus

28th July 2008, 10:41 AM

What,to the best of current knowledge does a point particle consist of?
I recall TT saying that it consists of nothing.

The goal of elementary particle physics is to answer that question. Our current paradigm includes various possibilities. The simplest one (and that of our best model, which is incredibly accurate) is that there exist truly elementary point particles which cannot be divided further. So they consist only of themselves, if you want.

A co-ordinate system has a reference point.
what I am asking is, if you are for example on Mars or 3000 light years away, would your co-ordinate system's point of origin be the same?
ie x,y,z or x1,y1,z1

I think you may be a little confused about the concept of coordinate system. It's just an arbitrary set of labels for points. You can put the origin wherever you choose, regardless of where you are.

I mean a mathematical or geometric point as described by a co-ordinate system

In physics we often include time in the specification of points. Such a thing can't move, since it exists only at an instant of time. A point particle, as time passes, sweeps out a line of such points.

1 cubic metre with 1000 golf balls is not equal to 100 cubic metres with 1000 footballs.(other than the quantity of balls). So if you continued ad infinitum, the one would always be bigger than the other.
I'm sorry, I cant see it any other way.

I don't think I explained that very well. The point is, you have to be very careful how you define things. There is a valid sense in which if you built up your collection the way you describe the football collection would always be larger in volume. But you cannot simply compare infinities without knowing how you arrived at them. Once both are volumes are infinite, they can no longer be compared without the information about how you got there. This is called taking a "limit" in mathematics.

That should be obvious, since we could also arrive at infinite volume for both collections by using 100 cubic meters of golf balls for every one of footballs, and then your logic would say the golfballs are bigger... even though in both cases, both are infinite. See the problem?

I will read about the Hilbert hotel and see if it becomes any clearer.
Who said philosophical musing had no meaning in science?

Philosophy is the set of things too vague to be science. This, on the other hand, is mathematics.

sol invictus

28th July 2008, 10:45 AM

Isn't this precisely what Witt is saying.

Doesn't sound like it to me.

But regardless, I'm sure Stenger doesn't try to "prove" "theorems" starting from those "axioms". Nor does he ignore logical consistency, experimental results, mathematics, and the real world.

So no, that doesn't make him a crackpot.

Perpetual Student

28th July 2008, 11:54 AM

Hi PS
Did Witt edit your original post or did he just quote certain bits in his reply.
If he only quoted certain bits in his reply, whats the problem?
However, if he censored your original post then you have a point, unless of course he was removing derogatory ad hominem statements.

Please clarify.

OK, he did not respond to my post. He edited (censored) it -- specifically by deleting most of it. After seeing my post (in full) after I posted it, it was altered some hours later. He is a charlatan! The critical parts deleted were my comments concerning the validity of what he calls "premises" that lead to his definition of infinity. I said that his premises are not self evident as he claims and that they are merely quasi-mystical statements. By the way, how "premises" lead to a "definition" is also an interesting sidestep in his logic. But, it doesn't matter; I am done with "null physics."

Tubbythin

28th July 2008, 12:19 PM

What,to the best of current knowledge does a point particle consist of?
I recall TT saying that it consists of nothing.

Just to get this in to context (we've been here before), my response was to:
:
What does a quark consist of?
We know that a quark is a hypothetical particle but what makes a quark.
And then when you know that particle you can ask what makes that particle ad infinitum.

ie I was saying that to the best of our knowledge a quark has no substructure. I'm not really sure what you mean by "consists of" now though. In the context of the above quote it looked like you were talking about substructure in which case I stand by my original answer. If not, could you elaborate what you do mean?

Skwinty

28th July 2008, 01:02 PM

The goal of elementary particle physics is to answer that question. Our current paradigm includes various possibilities. The simplest one (and that of our best model, which is incredibly accurate) is that there exist truly elementary point particles which cannot be divided further. So they consist only of themselves, if you want..

So then a quark consists of a quark, as far as the current paradigm is concerned. Some would say it's substructure consists of nothing

I think you may be a little confused about the concept of coordinate system. It's just an arbitrary set of labels for points. You can put the origin wherever you choose, regardless of where you are..

My point here was, when someone says and I quote

"This ignores the fact that a point has a location in space and so contains information. Information is not nothing."

and I say

"The location information that a point contains is relative to whose view point.
Ours, inside space or outside space?"

and then you say

"I don't understand the question"

and then I say

"what I am asking is, if you are for example on Mars or 3000 light years away, would your co-ordinate system's point of origin be the same?
ie x,y,z or x1,y1,z1"

and then you say

"I think you may be a little confused about the concept of coordinate system. It's just an arbitrary set of labels for points. You can put the origin wherever you choose, regardless of where you are."

I am not confused about co-ordinate systems, I know that the point of origin can be anywhere.
However,if the point as some would say contains information of location, my question is which co-ordinate system would it be, and if the point of origin moved would it update its information. If not, then how could the point hold its location information.

In physics we often include time in the specification of points. Such a thing can't move, since it exists only at an instant of time. A point particle, as time passes, sweeps out a line of such points..

This line of points. What do they consist of? Particles? Nothing? What?

I don't think I explained that very well. The point is, you have to be very careful how you define things. There is a valid sense in which if you built up your collection the way you describe the football collection would always be larger in volume. But you cannot simply compare infinities without knowing how you arrived at them. Once both are volumes are infinite, they can no longer be compared without the information about how you got there. This is called taking a "limit" in mathematics.

This is what my argument is about about the 1 cubic metre of golfballs and 100 cubic metres of footballs. When you get to infinity, which you never do, the golfball sets volume is always is smaller because the volumes were different when you started.

That should be obvious, since we could also arrive at infinite volume for both collections by using 100 cubic meters of golf balls for every one of footballs, and then your logic would say the golfballs are bigger... even though in both cases, both are infinite. See the problem?.

How could the golfballs be bigger than the footballs, they were smaller when you started the infinite sets. Its not about the size of an individual golf or football, its about the size of the container 1 cubic metre versus 100 cubic metres. The spatial volume of the initiating sets.

I think you are messing with my brain for your entertainment:D

Philosophy is the set of things too vague to be science. This, on the other hand, is mathematics.

So far we have discussed this in philosophical terms and not in mathematical terms.

As far as Witt and Stenger --

Stenger says "Our universe may be no more than re-arranged, re-structured nothingness"

Witt says "Everything is constructed of nothing"

Whats different?

Witt also says the following --

1. Matter and antimatter are always created in equal, yet opposite amounts, whose electrical sum is zero.

2. Positive and negative electrical fields sum to a neutral universe with zero net electrical charge.

3. Energy is conserved in all interactions: the magnitude of of the universes energy has zero change.

4. Space is a collection of points, little bits of nothingness itself, embodiments of the geometric zero.

5. Charge must be conserved in particle interactions, the sum of charge differences is zero.

6. Momentum is conserved, so the universe's net momentum remains constant at zero.

What are your comments on these points as they sound quite reasonable to me.