Ask any question you want about Physics

a reply to: delbertlarson
I agree with most of what you wrote, including your interpretation of the Lorentz notes I cited. However in the other paragraph I still find his use of the expression "my failure" to sound like somewhat of a concession, though maybe the concession is only that he realizes that it is relativity that gained acceptance and not his beliefs in an absolute ether, so maybe he sees his failure as the failure to get his theory accepted like Einstein's was which more or less did away with the aether. However I recall Einstein talking about a "new aether" which now that I think of it may have been intended as a concession to Lorentz adhering to his belief in aether, though of course Einstein's term "new aether" didn't stick and it's now called "space-time".

The only main point of disagreement is the reliability of third party sources. In some cases they could be more reliable I suppose if there's reason to believe the first party source isn't being truthful, but on the relativity topic there seems to be a lot of disagreement in third party literature about the dynamics over time. Here's an interesting example of a couple of third party sources explaining what happened with Feynman's appendix to the report on the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, in brief news reports. They are followed by about a 9 minute interview with Feynman where he explains how the third party sources are not accurate and he explains his first party version of events.

CNN, Feynman and the Challenger disaster


I think most of us realize the media likes to sensationalize things to increase their viewership, and in the modern internet era we've even coined the term "click bait" to refer to this phenomenon. Maybe some non-media sources have other motivations but I still see some bias.

originally posted by: EnkiEa
And Arbitrageur I gave you proof! The OM symbol for a start. And the frequency patterns.

This information is RE-PROVIDED to this world every 'age'', and every time ... they manage to f#$k it all up!

I'm not seeing how the OM symbol proves anything. I see the topic "frequency patterns" come up quite a bit in crank literature but I never understand what it means because it's usually not explained very well as is the case in your post. I've observed frequency patterns such as a correlation between photon energy and frequency, and a correlation between the amount of liquids I drink and the frequency of my toilet flushes, but in prior "ages" as I would use that term neither photons not water closets were known so I don't see how these these frequency patterns could have been understood for unknown objects in prior ages.

originally posted by: IAmTheRumble
Let's make a list of BS that science has come up with.
• Things traveling magically through space
• Time travel
• Time speeding up and slowing down
• Other dimensions that allow access to new physics
• Things existing in more than one place at the same time.
• More than one thing existing in the same place at the same time
• other universes that can be accessed by unsolved problems in phsics...
• Distances being reduced because the universe magically warps itself to do so

The "other universes" claim is speculative and I'm not aware of evidence to support it but most if not all of the other items which you choose to deny because they seem unbelievable to you have experimental evidence backing them up. Physicists are aware of the reluctance of some people to accept things they're not comfortable with, which is why Richard Feynman addressed this issue in one of his lectures. Of course he wasn't speaking to you personally but his message certainly seems applicable in your case:

Richard Feynman, the QED Lecture at University of Auckland


Time Index 4:23

"And then there's the ... kind of thing which you don't understand. Meaning "I don't believe it, it's too crazy, it's the kind of thing I'm not going to accept."

Eh. The other part well... this kind, I hope you'll come along with me and you'll have to accept it because it's the way nature works. If you want to know the way nature works, we looked at it, carefully, [Look at it] that's the way it looks.

You don't like it..., go somewhere else!

To another universe! Where the rules are simpler, philosophically more pleasing, more psychologically easy. I can't help it! OK! If I'm going to tell you honestly what the world looks like to the... human beings who have struggled as hard as they can to understand it, I can only tell you what it looks like.

And I cannot make it any simpler, I'm not going to do this, I'm not going to simplify it, and I'm not going to fake it. I'm not going to tell you it's something like a ball bearing inside a spring, it isn't.

So I'm going to tell you what it really is like, and if you don't like it, that's too bad."

The odd thing is you didn't even list the "crazier" stuff Feynman talks about. What's even more odd is all this denial of time travel from someone who has a time-traveling science fiction spaceship as their avatar.

But hey, I'm no physicist (yet). What do I know? I'm just choosing to open my eyes rather than accept what I'm told.

What was your question? Anyway when you become one of the "human beings who have struggled as hard as they can to understand" the world, then you'll be in a better position to explain where physicists went wrong, but until then it's apparent you haven't struggled very hard to understand why physicists think what they think whether it's wrong or right. What they need is for someone to explain what is wrong and what instead is right and then they can change their point of view. It happened in 1998 in cosmology in a dramatic way and can happen again the same way if someone has good evidence to convince them otherwise, but there's really no substance in your post to convince them otherwise.

originally posted by: Nochzwei
ques:
a dull yellow painting vs a bright yellow painting. which one reflects a higher freq light?

As Phage suggested, "dull" is not well defined in your question. If you want me to take a guess at my interpretation of "dull", it would be that there are other frequencies mixed in with the yellow so it's not pure yellow, while pure monochromatic yellow in a narrow frequency band is fairly bright looking to me.

Is it possible that there have been multiple Big Bangs in space? Think of an earthquake map; what if we're inside the circumference of the nearest Big Bang, and the effects of an adjacent one have not yet overlapped with our cosmological location. The only Bang we could measure would be our own, and we'd be oblivious to the existence of the others until we observed them interacting. Possible?

Thanks in advance.

a reply to: humanityrising
Some researchers claimed to have found evidence for such an interaction between our universe and another universe, in the form of matter apparently "flowing" toward another universe called "dark flow". However other research has disputed such claims, as explained here, but even if the evidence doesn't support the claim I suppose it's still possible that there could be other "universes" where as you say there's just no interaction yet:

Blow for ‘dark flow’ in Planck’s new view of the cosmos

A potential portal to other universes seems to have closed. The sharpest map yet made of light from the infant universe shows no evidence of dark flow–a stream of galaxy clusters rushing in the same direction that hinted at the existence of a multiverse.

That is the conclusion of 175 scientists working with data from the Planck spacecraft. But champions of dark flow are not ready to give up yet, including one Planck scientist who says his team's analysis is flawed.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

I suppose it is a bit odd that I have the Enterprise as my avatar. I think it looks cool and its got a 'mystifying' look to it. You're absolutely right when you say I don't have enough evidence to prove physicists wrong. But I assure you, I'm looking.

When one considers the aether, it's quite easy to explain, physically, what it is that's occuring. I just find it extremely odd that physics came to a halt after the Michaelson-Morley experiment. Then Einstein changed the face as we knew it. Now we're trying to figure out why we only understand 4-5% of the universe. I guess my question is, why not make sure all of our foundation for physics is correct?

a reply to: IAmTheRumble
I think the fact that we don't know what 95% of the universe is made of already tells us that either something isn't correct or there are some pieces of the puzzle missing. There are several searches going on right now for missing pieces of the puzzle, but if something is wrong, what is it? I don't think assuming there's a aether will make the missing 95% of the universe appear, the differences in predictions resulting from aether would be subtle so I don't know why you're so hung up on that.

The bottom line question is, if we need to look at something differently, what is it, and how do we do that? There's a physicist who said we have modern day "epicycles" in particle physics. Maybe so, but where is the better theory or model that takes out the epicycles? If that can't be delivered, even if epicycles weren't physically correct, at least they could make predictions, and so can our modern models even if they may not be perfect. Most scientists aren't going to throw out our current models that make good predictions unless they have a better model to replace it, and in 1998 they got new data and revised their cosmological model significantly as a result. If we get more new data which revises our views the models can certainly change again to accommodate the new data. That's the way science works.

By the way physics didn't come to a halt after the Michelson-Morley experiment.

originally posted by: Bedlam

originally posted by: EnkiEa
a reply to: Bedlam

No!

The Barium isn't peptide, so there is no way for it to form the soluble aqueous transit state required for this to be true.

Barium is never a peptide, since a peptide is a sequence of amino acids. You've got My Big Book O' Chemical Terms you're randomly pulling from, right?

I know a new way to pass the Turing test!

Train a generative neural network and pretend to be a physics crankpot!

Expert, texpert choking smokers
Don't you think the joker laughs at you
(Ho ho ho hee hee hee hah hah hah)
See how they smile like pigs in a sty
See how they snide
I'm crying

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: Nochzwei

What do you mean by the terms dull and bright?
Please define the wavelength of the color "yellow."

In any case, the painting in which the "yellow" is more toward the blue end of the visible spectrum (greenier rather than orangier) would be reflecting light of a higher frequency.

there should be a range of wavelengths rather than one discreet wavelength. so in the spectrum the yellow band goes from bright to dull yellow eventually becoming orange

a reply to: Nochzwei
Yes there's always a range of wavelengths but if you shine white light through a prism, you can select a range of wavelengths as wide or as narrow as you choose from the colors that come out.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Then, too, since we're talking about dry paint, 'bright' and 'dull' could be descriptions of the surface smoothness - matte or gloss, as it were, and not a matter of colorimetry at all.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Truth is hard to achieve. I watched the entire Feynmann video you embedded. My thought is that media almost certainly exaggerates differences for drama, but also that participants will likely wish to tamp down disagreements being aired in public. We cannot really know which side is being more accurate. But I certainly accept that first party reports should be given substantially more weight than third party reports.

But of course the most important point is what is the right science. And on that score, I will again bang the drum that the absolute theories have the far better position of explaining the Bell's theorem results. I am not sure why more physicists haven't joined in that observation.

On a later post I see you mention that some physicist claimed that the standard model are the new epicycles. Was that me? I know that I have indeed made that claim, and I will stick by it. For the better way you seek, I have proposed the ABC Preon Model - have you looked at it yet? It is much simpler, dovetails with the standard model in its limit, yet makes firm predictions for physics beyond the standard model. It provides a vast simplification of our view of nature.

I can't link to it here, but there is google, of course.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
a reply to: IAmTheRumble

The bottom line question is, if we need to look at something differently, what is it, and how do we do that? There's a physicist who said we have modern day "epicycles" in particle physics. Maybe so, but where is the better theory or model that takes out the epicycles? If that can't be delivered, even if epicycles weren't physically correct, at least they could make predictions, and so can our modern models even if they may not be perfect. Most scientists aren't going to throw out our current models that make good predictions unless they have a better model to replace it, and in 1998 they got new data and revised their cosmological model significantly as a result. If we get more new data which revises our views the models can certainly change again to accommodate the new data. That's the way science works.

I want to add to my above post, by further noting that I think it has been rather disgraceful what has become of the reputation of the original epicycle theory. It was actually a rather monumental achievement of mankind. It took years, if not decades, for scientists of the time to master. There was meticulous attention to detail. The experimental apparatus was the best of its day. The mathematical complexity was quite intricate for the times. And most important of all - it agreed quite accurately with all available data!

Of course, I do side with Kepler. To me, simplicity not only reveals an advance in the underlying understanding, but it also allows us to delve further and deeper into science. Rather than spending a career learning hundreds of cycles and epicycles, we can just learn a few simple laws and turn our attention elsewhere.

In my opinion, it was the enormous achievement of the epicycles that made it so hard for it to be set aside. People spent careers learning it, and it all worked. Of course they totally believed in it. When something so simple came along that had vastly less math, it would appear to be the work of a simpleton in comparison to the tomes of calculations mastered by the experts of the day. I speculate that there were dozens of crank theories proposed during that time, making it even harder for the solitary genius to be heard.

And with so many cranks drowning out the genius, leading experts of the time could not be bothered to waste their time on nonsense. They wouldn't even use Galileo's telescope to look at the moons of Jupiter, as they already knew the truth of the cycles and epicycles.

Switching to today, I have been repeatedly censored or shut down whenever I bring up my ABC Preon Model for public consideration. It is so simple that it pales in comparison to the magnificent calculational abilities of the Standard Model. There is always someone who believes they are defending the honor of science who will shout louder than I will speak, while at the same time refusing to even look at my vastly simpler alternative. The discourse becomes a cage match to see who is more firm, strong and loud in their convictions, rather than a reasoned search for truth.

Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?

originally posted by: delbertlarson
On a later post I see you mention that some physicist claimed that the standard model are the new epicycles. Was that me?

No, it wasn't you. There was a post just over a year ago in this thread of a video with no comments (which violates the site terms and conditions) but I watched it anyway. It was by Alexander Unzicker, and I'll give a brief description of the video that was lacking in the original post.

Unzicker presents his "7 deadly sins of particle physics",

1. Overwhelming Complication
2. Suppression of Basic Problems
-doesn't predict masses, mas ratios,etc
-relation to gravity
3. Historical Ignorance-Kuhnian crisis.
4. The "There is always a signal" illusion
5. Theoretical Wishful Thinking
6. The Big Parroting (groupthink)
7. Lack of Transparency

The first one, extreme complexity, is something you've mentioned:

Unzicker Slams Particle Physics


In point 7 about transparency, he suggests that the data from accelerator experiments should be made publicly available to the taxpayers who are funding the research, which since the time he made that video, I noticed that lots of CERN data has been made available so perhaps he got what he asked for (The video is from 2014).

After his talk, I think it's in the Q&A session where he draws a parallel between particle physics and epicycles. One of the audience members isn't very articulate so I can't understand exactly what they are saying but I think it's along the same lines as my view that if you don't have anything better, an epicycles model isn't so bad because at least it makes useful predictions. Unzicker's response to that is something like "If you're happy working on the epicycles, let it be". If I had a better model I'd use it, but if an epicycles model that makes good predictions is all I've got, yes I'm happy to use that until I have something better to work with.

That was right near the end where he also suggests the standard model isn't falsifiable because any conceivable future discovery can be shoehorned in the model in some way with an extension of the model.

So after comparing particle physics to an epicycles model, it would be nice if he would present the better model which doesn't use epicycles but of course he doesn't do that, so it's unclear how he expects us to use something better than the epicycles model if that's all we've got at the moment. I think I've heard another physicist other than you also make that epicycles comparison, but I don't recall the name.

I know that I have indeed made that claim, and I will stick by it. For the better way you seek, I have proposed the ABC Preon Model - have you looked at it yet? It is much simpler, dovetails with the standard model in its limit, yet makes firm predictions for physics beyond the standard model.

No I haven't looked at it yet. I may do that, but frankly since I don't work at CERN I'm not the person you need to persuade; The CERN folks are the ones running the experiments. So how do these firm predictions of your model compare to experiment? Can they be compared to the data CERN made available to the public recently? Speaking of that, Unzicker comments on the size of the datasets in the above video (in general, not speaking of the latest public release of data). I'm thinking of getting a bigger hard drive to be able to look at the CERN data, the datasets really are quite large. Unzicker talks about needing a stack of hard drives as tall as a mountain, well they aren't quite that large, at least not the datasets made available to the public.

originally posted by: Bedlam
a reply to: Arbitrageur

Then, too, since we're talking about dry paint, 'bright' and 'dull' could be descriptions of the surface smoothness - matte or gloss, as it were, and not a matter of colorimetry at all.

Yes that very thought also occurred to me when I commented that "dull" wasn't well-defined.

a reply to: delbertlarson

Interesting, you seem to have figured it out. We're screwed! LOL

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Hi.
I would like to ask two questions about physics.

If you took a large enough ferromagnetic iron ball into space and rotated it at near the speed of light(1/5 the speed of light) how would it deform the space around it as the rotation of the iron ball increases.

Oh and can you use seawater as a electrolytic battery with two unlike giant conductive plates in the ocean spaced close together with a small amount of moving sea water through the two conductive plates. Will this do anything?

originally posted by: John_Rodger_Cornman
If you took a large enough ferromagnetic iron ball into space and rotated it at near the speed of light(1/5 the speed of light) how would it deform the space around it as the rotation of the iron ball increases.

You can't rotate ordinary matter as we know it nearly that fast. What will happen as you speed up the rotation is it will have a tendency to fly apart long before the tangential velocity at the surface gets anywhere near 1/5 the speed of light.

There are however objects in nature that rotate at such velocities, but they are not made of ordinary matter as we know it. The matter they are made of is so dense, a spoonful would have the same mass as a mountain. They are called neutron stars, and here's one that rotates at near that velocity:

PSR J1748-2446ad

PSR J1748-2446ad is the fastest-spinning pulsar known, at 716 Hz,[2] or slightly more than 700 times a second...

It has been calculated that the neutron star contains slightly less than two times the mass of the Sun, within the typical range of neutron stars. Its radius is constrained to be less than 16 km. At its equator it is spinning at approximately 24% of the speed of light, or over 70,000 km per second.

"Frame Dragging" from the Earth's rotation has been measured at the much lower rotational velocities of the Earth according to the equations in Einstein's theory of relativity, and from these measurements we can infer the neutron star will also experience frame-dragging to a much greater extent.

Oh and can you use seawater as a electrolytic battery with two unlike giant conductive plates in the ocean spaced close together with a small amount of moving sea water through the two conductive plates. Will this do anything?

They don't have to be giant plates, you'll get about the same voltage per cell regardless of the size of the plate but if you want more current then you'd need larger plates. This is a patent from 1969 using seawater as the electrolyte in a simple electrolytic battery. The aluminum version generates about 1.5 volts per cell so in this application to power the 12V electrical systems of buoys you'd need 8 cells in series:

Seawater battery having magnesium or zinc anode and manganese dioxide cathode

They also mention a magnesium version with 2 volts per cell but the magnesium is so aggressive it can create problems in saltwater applications like hydrogen embrittlement. Of course aluminum and magnesium aren't all that cheap so it's not like "free energy" but it can be useful, or the electrochemical process can be destructive, which is why many ships have galvanic anodes made of zinc or aluminum to slow down corrosion on the important parts of the ship by focusing the corrosion on the galvanic anodes.

ques:

what kind of radiation would a time machine produce?

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Thanks for sharing the Unzicker video. I watched it all. I agree with most of it. I do think he is more critical than I am about the present situation, although not by much. I suspect that additional signals for the ABC Preon Model are presently just buried as background, but of course I can't be certain. Note too, that data cuts mean that even if you are given data, you may not be given what you need if it was cut before it even hit a disk. It used to be (as I recall) that the data was so large that cuts were made on the fly if the data didn't pass certain filters, and that the amount kept was some very small percent of the total. Perhaps things are different now.

since I don't work at CERN I'm not the person you need to persuade; The CERN folks are the ones running the experiments. So how do these firm predictions of your model compare to experiment?

I was hoping you did work at CERN. But even if you at least work in the field it would be helpful to have a second serious voice point out that the ABC Preon Model is a serious alternative to the standard model. A solitary voice is usually dismissed. Even a second voice would help enormously.

How the predictions work is this - The A and B combine to form leptons. The C and either an A or a B form what are known as quarks, more or less. The W signature is what you get when you form a free A and free B. The Z signature is what you get when you form two free A's. There should be another signature when you form two free B's, and that is a prediction at a specific mass that I don't believe has been identified yet; the signal should be identical to the Z, but at a lower mass. (It may be that it has been mis-identified as a Z with some radiative energy lowering of the products.) There are other signals that one can see when other combinations of free A, B and C particles are made. The predictions are at specific masses and have specific signatures. The top quark isn't a quark in the usual sense, as it is one of the free combinations allowed. The Higgs is also one of the free combinations allowed. In both cases the original ABC Preon Model explains the signatures at the mass seen without any tweak to any parameters of the original model. In fact it was the announcement of these that made me very confident that the ABC Preon Model is likely correct. There are several other such combinations that should also be seen over time.

At lower energies, when things are all bound up, you get things explained in terms of the standard model - with quarks and leptons. But the ABC Preon Model has many advantages, as it reduces the number of free parameters greatly and explains the "generation problem".

I have done what I believe to be a very good explanation of the ABC Preon Model on videos I posted at YouTube as well as a site I have, but again, I believe I am not supposed to link to them here. Perhaps you've already found it via Google? I see that the whole series of videos runs about 95 minutes. Not too long really to present a paradigm shift!

a reply to: delbertlarson

According to your theory; are photons made of preons? Are gravitons (gravity substance medium particle) made of preons?

What are the main differences between A, B and C; fundamental mass, spin, charge?


Can A's turn into B's and C's and vice versas? Or when the universe was created, x amount of A's were created, y amount of B's were created, z amount of C's were created; and they cannot be created or destroyed or transform completely into new particles, but depending on momentum and proximity, they combine to form larger conglomerations of matter?

What is the meaning of charge in relation to the preons (I guess to further ask anything about that, I need to know your answer to the first question, if preons make up photon; interestingly you mentioned preons make up leptons; which means you believe electron is not fundamental but made up by preon?)

originally posted by: Nochzwei
ques:

what kind of radiation would a time machine produce?

Radiation which would instantly kill anything within a radius of 10 miles.

originally posted by: Phage

originally posted by: Nochzwei
ques:

what kind of radiation would a time machine produce?

Radiation which would instantly kill anything within a radius of 10 miles.

so you mean beta or gamma/cosmic rays?