In addition to the shell structure magic numbers, it is supposedly impossible to get to element number 137 for theoretical reasons: the short range attractive strong force between nucleons will be exactly balanced by the long-range electromagnetic repulsion of 137 protons!

This assumes that the strong force coupling for inter-nucleon forces is indeed exactly 137. The whole reason for radioactivity of heavy elements is linked to the increasing difficulty the strong force has in offsetting electromagnetism as you get towards 137 protons, accounting for the shorter half-lives. So here is a derivation of the 137 number in the context of strong nuclear force mediated by pions:

Heisenberg’s uncertainty says p*d = h/(2.Pi), if p is uncertainty in momentum, d is uncertainty in distance.

This comes from the resolving power of Heisenberg’s imaginary gamma ray microscope, and is usually written as a minimum (instead of with “=” as above), since there will be other sources of uncertainty in the measurement process. The factor of 2 would be a factor of 4 if we consider the uncertainty in one direction about the expected position (because the uncertainty applies to both directions, it becomes a factor of 2 here).

For light wave momentum p = mc, pd = (mc)(ct) = Et where E is uncertainty in energy (E=mc^2), and t is uncertainty in time. OK, we are dealing with massive pions, not light, but this is close enough since they are relativistic:

Et = h/(2*Pi)

t = d/c = h/(2*Pi*E)

E = hc/(2*Pi*d).

Hence we have related distance to energy: this result is the formula used even in popular texts used to show that a 80 GeV energy W+/- gauge boson will have a range of 10^-17 m. So it’s OK to do this (ie, it is OK to take uncertainties of distance and energy to be real energy and range of gauge bosons which cause fundamental forces).

Now, the work equation E = F*d (a vector equation: “work is product of force and the distance acted against the force in the direction of the force”), where again E is uncertainty in energy and d is uncertainty in distance, implies:

E = hc/(2*Pi*d) = Fd

F = hc/(2*Pi*d^2)

Notice the inverse square law resulting here!

This force is 137.036 times higher than Coulomb’s law for unit fundamental charges! This is the usual value often given for the ratio between the strong nuclear force and the electromagnetic force (I’m aware the QCD inter quark gluon-mediated force takes different and often smaller values than 137 times the electromagnetism force).

I first read this amazing 137 factor in nuclear stability (limiting the number of elements to a theoretical maximum of below 137) in Glenn Seaborg’s article ‘Elements beyond 100′ (in the Annual Review of Nuclear Science, v18, 1968 by accident after getting the volume to read Harold Brode’s article – which was next after Seaborg’s – entitled ‘Review of Nuclear Weapons Effects’).

I just love the fact that elements 99-100 (Einsteinium and Fermium) were discovered in the fallout of the first Teller-type H-bomb test at Eniwetok Atoll in 1952, formed by successive neutron captures in the U-238 pusher, which was within a 25-cm thick steel outer case according to some reports. Many of the neutrons must have been trapped inside the bomb. (Theodore Taylor said that the density of neutrons inside the bomb reached the density of water!)

‘Dr Edward Teller remarked recently that the origin of the earth was somewhat like the explosion of the atomic bomb…’ – Dr Harold C. Urey, The Planets: Their Origin and Development, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1952, p. ix.

‘It seems that similarities do exist between the processes of formation of single particles from nuclear explosions and formation of the solar system from the debris of a supernova explosion. We may be able to learn much more about the origin of the earth, by further investigating the process of radioactive fallout from the nuclear weapons tests.’

– Dr P.K. Kuroda, ‘Radioactive Fallout in Astronomical Settings: Plutonium-244 in the Early Environment of the Solar System,’ Radionuclides in the Environment (Dr Edward C. Freiling, Symposium Chairman), Advances in Chemistry Series No. 93, American Chemical Society, Washington, D.C., 1970.

Posted by: nc | October 19, 2006 at 05:04 PM

For updates see latest comments at:

http://asymptotia.com/2006/10/16/not-in-tower-records/#comment-2182

and

http://discovermagazine.typepad.com/horganism/2006/10/the_end_of_stri.html

Robert Knop (Assistant professor of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University) says in his “Nutmail” post:

If anybody wants to read what island has to say, I encourage you to go to his site. Be aware, however, that his comments are very much fringe stuff that are completely out of touch with modern physics.

Muller, R. A., ‘The cosmic background radiation and the new aether drift’, Scientific American, vol. 238, May 1978, p. 64-74, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1978SciAm.238…64M

nc Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.

October 18th, 2006 at 2:37 am
Is it true that the CBR is the most perfect blackbody radiation spectrum ever observed? I heard that claim somewhere. I’m not sure if it is true because I know how Planck got his theory, and it was fiddling the theory to meet the already known curve, which was fairly precisely known even in 1900 from lab measurements. Before Planck’s formula, there were various attempts to construct semi-empirical equations to fit the curve (which failed because the underlying theory couldn’t be rigorously constructed). Basically the Rayleigh-Jeans law came first but fails due to UV problems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh-Jeans_law . Also, what about the ‘new aether drift’ in the CBR spectrum? Why don’t people popularize it as a reference frame for measuring absolute motion? Muller, R. A., ‘The cosmic background radiation and the new aether drift’, Scientific American, vol. 238, May 1978, p. 64-74, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1978SciAm.238…64M :

“U-2 observations have revealed anisotropy in the 3 K blackbody radiation which bathes the universe. The radiation is a few millidegrees hotter in the direction of Leo, and cooler in the direction of Aquarius. The spread around the mean describes a cosine curve. Such observations have far reaching implications for both the history of the early universe and in predictions of its future development. Based on the measurements of anisotropy, the entire Milky Way is calculated to move through the intergalactic medium at approximately 600 km/s.”

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Herbert_Dingle#Disgraceful_error_on_article_page

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

http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/10/emperor-of-math.html

Dear NC,

according to the normal definitions, a higher number of time dimensions than one implies the existence of closed time-like curves that violate causality and allow you to convince your mother to have an abortion before you’re born, which is a contradiction, using the terminology of Sidney Coleman.

That’s one of the problems with Danny Ross Lunsford’s 3+3D theories as well as all other theories with two large times or more.

Even if the signature of the Universe were 7+3, you would have to compactify or otherwise hide 4+2=6 dimensions to get realistic physics.

Jacques is right that all 4-real-dimensional Calabi-Yau manifolds are homeomorphic to a K3 manifold: it’s a proven theorem. The only other smooth topology, if you have a more tolerant definition of a CY manifold, would be a 4-torus.

The possible Ricci-flat geometries on a K3 manifold form a 57-real dimensional moduli space isomorphic to SO(19,3,Z)SO(19,3)/SO(19) x SO(3). All of the solutions are continuously connected with each other.

Dear Charles, I probably mismeasured the measurement of the sign of your correction of Overbye’s sentence . Thanks anyway.

All the best
Lubos
Lubos Motl | Homepage | 10.17.06 – 5:26 pm | #

——————————————————————————–

Dear Lumos,

Thanks for the 4-torus idea! The 3 time time dimensions are the orthagonal dimensions of empty and expanding space between masses, so they can’t form closed loops. The 3 distance like dimensions describe the dimensions of matter which is non expanding and indeed contractable

Best,
nc
nigel cook | Homepage | 10.17.06 – 5:39 pm | #

nc
Oct 17th, 2006 at 2:19 pm

Second correction to my comment: “Do you agree with Feynman’s claim that path integrals are due to interference by virtual charges in the loops…” should read: “Do you agree with Feynman’s claim that the chaotic nature of sub-atomic sized path integrals are due to interference by virtual charges in the loops…”

Sorry again!

http://asymptotia.com/2006/10/16/not-in-tower-records/#comment-2182

nc Oct 17th, 2006 at 12:52 pm

Congratulations! Sounds very interesting.

In the post about the DVD you touch on spirituality and quantum theory a bit. Do you agree with Feynman’s claim that path integrals are due to interference by virtual charges in the loops which occur out to 10^-15 m from an electron (the [IR] cutoff, distance corresponding to 0.51 MeV electron collision energy closest approach)?

‘… when the space through which a photon moves becomes too small (such as the tiny holes in the screen) … we discover that … there are interferences created by the two holes, and so on. The same situation exists with electrons: when seen on a large scale, they travel like particles, on definite paths. But on a small scale, such as inside an atom, the space is so small that … interference becomes very important.’ – R. P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1985.

Also, there is news of a new film about 11 dimensions starring Stephen Hawking:

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/city/2006/10/16/2367bc3d-644d-42e9-8933-3b8ccdded129.lpf

Hawking’s Brief History of Time sold one copy for every 750 men, women and children on the planet and was on the Sunday Times bestseller list 237 weeks, according to page 1 of A briefer History of Time which seems to be the same text but has beautiful illustrations of photon and electron interference (pp 96, 98), and a nice simple illustration of the Yang-Mills recoil force mechanism (p 119).

Pages 118-9 state: “… the forces or interactions between matter particles are all supposed to be carried by particles. What happens is that a matter particle, such as an electron or a quark, emits a force-carrying particle. The recoil from this emission changes the velocity of the matter particle, for the same reason that a cannon rolls back after firing a cannonball. The force-carrying particle then collides with another matter particle and is absorbed, changing the motion of that particle. The net result of the process of emission and absorption is the same as if there had been a force between the two matter particles.

“Each force is transmitted by its own distinctive type of force-carrying particle. If the force-carrying particles have a high mass, it will be difficult to produce and exchange them over a large distance, so the forces they carry will have only a short range. On the other hand, if the force-carrying particles have no mass of their own, the forces will be long-range…”

Do you agree with popularization of the Yang-Mills theory by the cannon ball analogy? I do, but that’s because I’ve worked out how attractive forces can result from this mechanism, and how to predict stuff with it. However, I know this makes some people upset, who don’t want to deal with a Rube-Goldberg machine type universe because it gets rid of God.

Best,
nc

Dear Lumo,

Suppose once upon a time in a fairytale, in a distant parallel universe codenamed “DRL” there were was a GR theory with 3 contractable matter dimensions and 3 expanding time dimensions, ie 6 dimensions.

Suppose they discovered 10-d supersymmetry and needed to roll up the remaining 4-d into a Calabi-Yau manifold. Would this work? I mean presumably the landscape would be smaller than 10^500 because the Calabi-Yau manifold is then 4-d not 6-d?

Is there any list anywhere of the number of solutions for different numbers of dimensions in the Calabi-Yau manifold? Jacques has pointed out that 4-d Calabi Yau manifolds are well studied as K3:

http://asymptotia.com/2006/10/16/manifold-yau/#comment-2156

Unfortunately, I can’t understand any of the Wiki papers very easily, because I haven’t been trained in that type of maths.

Best,
nigel cook | Homepage | 10.17.06 – 2:44 pm | #

——————————————————————————–

Actually Jacques says there is ONLY ONE manifold of that type, but I don’t know how many solutions that one manifold actually has?
nigel cook | Homepage | 10.17.06 – 2:46 pm | #

Jacques Distler
Oct 17th, 2006 at 7:52 am

There is precisely one Calabi-Yau manifold of real dimension 4. It’s called K3.

It is very well studied, both in physics and mathematics.

3 nc
Oct 17th, 2006 at 8:08 am

Hi Jacques,

Thank you very much for this K3 name. It is stated on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K3_manifold that:

“In mathematics, in the field of complex manifolds, a K3 surface is an important and interesting example of a compact complex surface (complex dimension 2 being real dimension 4).

“Together with two-dimensional complex tori, they are the Calabi-Yau manifolds of dimension two. Most K3 surfaces, in a definite sense, are not algebraic. This means that, in general, they cannot be embedded in any projective space as a surface defined by polynomial equations. However, K3 surfaces first arose in algebraic geometry and it is in this context that they received their name — it is after three algebraic geometers, Kummer, Kähler and Kodaira, alluding also to the mountain peak K2 in the news when the name was given during the 1950s. …

“K3 manifolds play an important role in string theory because they provide us with the second simplest compactification after the torus. Compactification on a K3 surface preserves one half of the original supersymmetry.”

It also refers to http://www.cgtp.duke.edu/ITP99/morrison/cortona.pdf which is almost unintelligible [to my level of maths] and http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9611137 which looks similar. I’ll take a closer look when I have time.

Many thanks,
nc

http://discovermagazine.typepad.com/horganism/2006/10/why_brian_josep.html#comment-23970903

Thanks for this post, which is very interesting. So it was the Copenhagen Interpretation to blame?

The Josephson Junction led to practical high-sensitivity magnetic field sensors, SQUIDs,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQUID , but the quantum weirdness based on Cooper pairs and quantum tunnelling doesn’t validate ESP.

The failure is ultimately in classical physics, which should be formulated with inbuilt indeterminancy for the 3+ body problem (which leads to chaos as Poincare discovered). The whole myth of classical physics being somehow deterministic (Maxwell and GR) is based on ignoring this:

‘… the ‘inexorable laws of physics’ … were never really there … Newton could not predict the behaviour of three balls … In retrospect we can see that the determinism of pre-quantum physics kept itself from ideological bankruptcy only by keeping the three balls of the pawnbroker apart.’ – Tim Poston and Ian Stewart, Analog, November 1981.

Professors David Bohm and J. P. Vigier in their paper ‘Model of the Causal Interpretation of Quantum Theory in Terms of a Fluid with Irregular Fluctuation’ (Physical Review, v 96, 1954, p 208), showed that the Schroedinger equation of quantum mechanics arises as a statistical description of the effects of Brownian motion impacts on a classically moving particle. However, the whole Bohm approach is wrong in detail, as is the attempt of de Broglie (his ‘non-linear wave mechanics’) to guess a classical potential that mimics quantum mechanics on the small scale and deterministic classical mechanics at the other size regime.

The actual cause for the Brownian motion is explained by Feynman in his QED lectures to be the vacuum ‘loops’ of virtual particles being created by pair production and then annihilated in the small spaces in intense fields within the atom. Feynman

‘… when the space through which a photon moves becomes too small (such as the tiny holes in the screen) … we discover that … there are interferences created by the two holes, and so on. The same situation exists with electrons: when seen on a large scale, they travel like particles, on definite paths. But on a small scale, such as inside an atom, the space is so small that … interference becomes very important.’ (Feynman, QED, Penguin, 1985.)

It is tragedy is that Bohm ignored the field fluctuations when he tried to invent “hidden variables” which were unnecessary and false, and failed when tested by the Aspect check on Bell’s inequality. The Dirac sea corrected predicted antimatter. It is clear from renormalization of charge and mass in QFT that the Dirac sea only appears to become real at electric fields over 10^20 volts/metre, which corresponds to the “infrared (IR) cutoff”, ie the threshold field strength to create an electron + positron pair briefly in vacuum. The existence of pairs charges being created and annihilated in quantum field theory only appears real between the IR cutoff and an upper limit “ultraviolet (UV) cutoff” which is needed to stop the charges in the loops being having so much momenta that the field is unphysical. All this is just a mathematical illusion, due to QFT ignoring discontinuities and assuming Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is metaphysical (creating something from nothing) instead of describing the energy of a discrete background Dirac sea of particles which gain energy from the external field they are immersed in:

‘What they now care about, as physicists, is (a) mastery of the mathematical formalism, i.e., of the instrument, and (b) its applications; and they care for nothing else.’ – Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, R.K.P., 1969, p100.

‘… the Heisenberg formulae can be most naturally interpreted as statistical scatter relations, as I proposed [in the 1934 German publication, ‘The Logic of Scientific Discovery’]. … There is, therefore, no reason whatever to accept either Heisenberg’s or Bohr’s subjectivist interpretation of quantum mechanics.’ – Sir Karl R. Popper, Objective Knowledge, Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 303.

Hence, statistical scatter gives the energy form of Heisenberg’s equation, since the vacuum is full of gauge bosons carrying momentum like light, and exerting vast pressure; this gives the foam vacuum.

Posted by: nc | October 16, 2006 at 02:12 PM

http://asymptotia.com/2006/10/16/manifold-yau/#comment-2155

nc
Oct 17th, 2006 at 7:46 am

Howdi Clifford,

I’m [widely regarded as] a moronic crackpot, so maybe you can help with a question on the Calabi-Yau manifold?

Suppose GR is as Lunsford investigates 6 dimensional (3 distance-like dimensions, 3 time-like dimensions).

All I need is know is whether 10-d superstring is compatible with 6-d GR instead of the usual 4-d GR, ie, what if anything is known about 4-d Calabi-Yau manifolds?

Chees,
nc

Reference links

Lunsford 6-d unification of Maxwell and GR: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/search.py?recid=688763&ln=en

Suppression of peer-reviewed published paper on 3 time dimensions from arXiv: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=128#comment-1932

Interpretation of Lunsford’s finding that CC = 0 in terms of a Yang-Mills exchange radiation theory of gravity: http://discovermagazine.typepad.com/horganism/2006/10/the_end_of_stri.html#comments

(1) Over short distances, any Yang-Mills quantum gravity will be unaffected because the masses aren’t receding, so exchange radiation won’t be upset.

(2) But over great distances, recession of galaxies will cause problems in QFT gravity that aren’t physically included in general relativity.

I don’t know if gauge boson’s are redshifted with constant velocity or if they are slowed down due to recession, being exchanged less frequently when masses are receding from one another.

It doesn’t matter: either way, it’s clear that between two masses receding from one another at a speed near c, the force will be weakened. That’s enough to get gravity to fade out over cosmic distances.

This means G goes to zero for cosmology sized distances, so general relativity fails and there is no need for any cosmological constant at all, CC = 0.

Lambda (the CC) -> 0, when G -> 0. Gravity dynamics which predict gravitational strength and various other observable and further checkable phenomena, are consistent with the gravitational-electromagnetic unification in which there are 3 dimensions describing contractable matter (matter contracts due to its properties of gravitation and motion), and 3 expanding time dimensions (the spacetime between matter expands due to the big bang according to Hubble’s law). Lunsford has investigated this over SO(3,3): http://cdsweb.cern.ch/search.py?recid=688763&ln=en

BTW Clifford, if this is off-topic I’m copying this comment to my blog so you are free to discuss there if you prefer (and delete this comment naturally). I’ve some experimental evidence (rejected by Nature) that supersymmetry is flawed because the correct way to achieve unification is through a representation of energy conservation of the various fields, but I don’t want to rule out supersymmetry completely until I know what the Calabi-Yau is like if it is 4-d and not 6-d.

Now another:

http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/10/jihad-on-mass-ave.html

Quantoken,

You are right about the Stefan-Boltzmann radiation law, but in a nuclear explosion 80% of the light/heat is emitted after the shock wave has cooled below 3000 K. The reason is that the initial flash of x-rays from the bomb heats compresses nearby air so much before it can expand that red-brown colored nitrogen dioxide forms (this gives the fireball its rust-like color), which absorbs most further heat and light. Hence the nitrogen dioxide formation cuts out the initial pulse, and it is only after the fireball cools (by expanding until it is below 3000 K) that the nitrogen dioxide stops being formed and is engulfed by the expanding fireball edge so thermal radiation peaks again.

In the Mike H-bomb, a 10 megaton bomb, it took 3.25 seconds until the final flash peak occurred. The time scales in proportion to the square-root of the bomb power.

The result is, there isn’t as much difference between a chemical and a nuclear explosion as you might expect regards light/heat, although chemical explosions do emit slightly less light/heat, it is not a vast difference in %.

Lubos,

Regards God mythology, I’m planning to give my revised paper on SM and GR mechanism the title:

Loop Quantum Gravity and QFT: The Universe as Rube-Goldberg Machine, so Goodbye Mr God!

Do you think people will like it?

nigel cook | Homepage | 10.17.06 – 4:28 am | #

According to the Foreword of Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, A Briefer History of Time, Bantam, 2005, p1:

“A brief History of Time was on the London Sunday Times best-seller list for 237 weeks and has sold about one copy for every 750 men, women, and children on earth.”

Where would string be without him?

nigel cook | Homepage | 10.16.06 – 3:57 pm | #

http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/10/beyond-horizon-hawking-in-imax-cinemas.html

Excellent post!

nigel cook | Homepage | 10.16.06 – 1:07 pm | #

BTW, will real string be used, or props? Also, will real Hawking radiation be demonstrated?

nigel cook | Homepage | 10.16.06 – 1:10 pm | #

http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/10/beyond-horizon-hawking-in-imax-cinemas.html

In Mlodinow’s book Feynman’s Rainbow, in chapter 13, with Feynman hating stringy s***:

“This whole discussion is pointless! It’s getting on my nerves! I told you – I don’t want to talk about string theory!”
Censored Lubos Motl fan | Homepage | 10.16.06 – 12:33 pm | #

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=89#comment-1037

JC Says:

October 11th, 2004 at 1:50 pm

From some folklore stories I vaguely recall, allegedly Richard Feynman finally gave in and decided to learn string theory in the last few months of his life in 1987-1988.

D R Lunsford Says:

October 11th, 2004 at 2:15 pm

And I thought it was cancer. Live and learn!

Chris Oakley Says:

October 12th, 2004 at 11:25 am

No it wasn’t … String theory is what killed him.

Censored Lubos Motl fan | Homepage | 10.16.06 – 12:39 pm | #

Dear Lumo,

Thanks for this exciting news!

It should brane-wash the few remaining string disbelievers out there, and do-in physics completely.

Actually, believing in 11 dimensions is probably less dangerous than Muslim beliefs in killing all critics. (No offense to Islamic extremists, so don’t now crash planes in my neighbourhood please.)

So I’m quite tolerant towards Hawking. I don’t think he should be arrested for insanity.

Best,
nc | Homepage | 10.16.06 – 11:16 am | #

nc on Oct 15th, 2006 at 4:50 pm

BTW, Dirac’s sea CORRECTLY PREDICTED ANTIMATTER! It isn’t speculative, see comment at Lubos Motl blog about wave-particle duality due to effects in the Dirac sea http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/10/rube-goldberg-machine-video.html : Zephir’s link shows how the transverse wavelength in the Dirac sea depends on the speed of the particle (represented by ship): http://superstruny.aspweb.cz/

Frequency of wave = speed of wave / wavelength

This is the wave axiom for the de Broglie wave-particle duality and is obeyed as illustrated by the Dirac sea at http://superstruny.aspweb.cz/ where the faster the ship, the shorter the wavelength, so the girl on the raft bounces up and down faster (higher frequency)!

Dear Lumos,

Regards your last comment, you are unaware that Dirac used the Dirac sea to CORRECTLY PREDICT ANTIMATTER!

For “special relativity” maths from Dirac sea structure see for example http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/10/03/the-trouble-with-physics/#comment-124894

There are probably other ways. Notice Zephir’s link shows how the transverse wavelength in the Dirac sea depends on the speed of the particle (represented by ship): http://superstruny.aspweb.cz/

Frequency of wave = speed of wave / wavelength

This is the wave axiom for the de Broglie wave-particle duality and is obeyed as illustrated at http://superstruny.aspweb.cz/ where the faster the ship, the shorter the wavelength, so the girl on the raft bounces up and down faster (higher frequency)

Lee Smolin doesn’t claim “LQG is the language in which God wrote the world.” (Lubos Motl said that about string.) LQG is not a useless idea controlling arXiv and blocking ideas like Lunsford’s model, which was censored from arXiv see http://cdsweb.cern.ch/search.py?recid=688763&ln=en , SO(3,3), ie 3 distance-like dimensions for matter and 3 time-like dimensions, unifies GR and electromagnetism in the limit where the CC -> 0 (see comment 29). The physical interpretation here is that the 3 distance like dimensions describe contractable matter (ie, matter shrinks in the direction of its motion by the Lorentz factor, and the Earth’s gravity shrinks its radius 1.5 mm), while the 3 timelike dimensions can be interpreted as the cosmological dimensions which are expanding and non-contractable in the way that matter/energy field contract. Then you see the Hubble recession should be written as velocity variation with time (cosmological distances are already measured as time past since you’re seeing the earlier universe), which is analogous to an acceleration (useful if you want to think about the outward force of the BB, F=ma, and try to model gravity as an inward reaction force). See also http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=128#comment-1932 This is likely COMPATIBLE with LQG.

Regards the physics of the metric: in 1949 some kind of crystal-like Dirac sea was shown to mimic the SR contraction and mass-energy variation, see C.F. Frank, ‘On the equations of motion of crystal dislocations’, Proceedings of the Physical Society of London, A62, pp 131-4:

‘It is shown that when a Burgers screw dislocation [in a crystal] moves with velocity v it suffers a longitudinal contraction by the factor (1 – v^2 /c^2)^1/2, where c is the velocity of transverse sound. The total energy of the moving dislocation is given by the formula E = E(o)/(1 – v^2 / c^2)^1/2, where E(o) is the potential energy of the dislocation at rest.’

Specifying that the distance/time ratio = c (constant velocity of light), then tells you that the time dilation factor is identical to the distance contraction factor.

Thanks! Regards explanation, it just infuriates people:

From Nature Editor Dr Philip Campbell’s 25 November 1996 letter to me: ‘… we are not able to offer to publish … we have not communicated the contents of your paper to any person outside this office.’

From Nature Physical Sciences Editor Karl Ziemelis’ 26 November 1996 letter to me (don’t ask why I got separate replies from two Nature editors dated consecutive days, but I have them and can publish them if needed): ‘… a review article on the unification of electricity and gravity … would be unsuitable for publication in Nature.’

From Galileo’s letter to Kepler: ‘Here, at Padua, is the principal professor of philosophy, who I have repeatedly and urgently requested to look at the moon and planets through my glass, which he pertinaciously refuses to do.’

- Oliver Lodge, Pioneers of Science, 1893, p. 106.

Just found an expanded online version of this: http://history-world.org/galileo_overthrows_ancient_philo.htm which reads:

‘Oh, my dear Kepler, how I wish that we could have one hearty laugh together! Here, at Padua, is the principal professor of philosophy whom I have repeatedly and urgently requested to look at the moon and planets through my glass, which he pertinaciously refuses to do. Why are you not here? What shouts of laughter we should have at this glorious folly! And to hear the professor of philosophy at Pisa laboring before the Grand Duke with logical arguments, as if with magical incantations, to charm the new planets out of the sky.’

So the food fight is vital, I think. Maybe you can do something regards explanation… I’ve been in this game for a decade and it is hopeless for me to even try to convince anyone to review their ideas.

Best,
Nigel

Don’t waste all that energy on a silly food fight (and I’m referring to the first part of your post here). I almost missed the good parts – and I certainly didn’t read everything – blogger’s low attention span and all that.

Of course, it is an exciting time. But that’s all the more reason to direct one’s energies into constructive explanation. The food fights are there for amusement.

I don’t know what your question is! Is the sentence you have put in bold supposed to be a quote of me (it is not), or a statement by you (if it is a statement by you, then you are opposing the anthropic principle)!  You can’t possibly be quoting Dr Woit or me, because we can spell grown-up words like “conducive”!

Regarding Dr Woit, he is a true genius, not an idiot: he has reproduced the standard model particles using representation theory, see page 51 of http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0206135

If you are going to call me idiot, go ahead, but don’t do it to others. Dr Woit may be elitist, but he at least stands for something, and doesn’t look the other way when people like you try to kick objective physics in the teeth to pander to your religious metaphysics.

Now be good and run along. Nothing more for you to see here.

The fact that the conditions are condicive to life doesn’t make for a cosmological principle.

Was that your idea of physics…????

FYI: I knew that this was your page, but I thought that you were still quoting woit… the other anti-anthropic idiot.

The diatribe here is mostly illegible anyway, so I guess that was your idea of physics.

Take a look in the mirror next time you yell “idiot”. Thanks!

Go back to being stupid.

Jacques Distler’s comment is at http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/10/03/the-trouble-with-physics/#comment-124610

Basically, there has to be an aether mechanism in LQG that will cut off short range gauge bosons and allow long range gravity! It will be amusing to see Smolin’s response! As you can see from my post, I think there is string evidence from the masses of all observable particles that the aether of LQG will be composed of a sea of particles with the mass and electromagnetic nature (zero overall charge, but electric dipole field, which is polarizable because the mass means they go below c speed) of Z_o gauge bosons.

(2) Comment on black hole “singularities” of electron size:

http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/10/precision-black-hole-measurements.html

A particle has a black hole area for gravitational interactions: proof at http://feynman137.tripod.com/#h

I calculate gravity two ways, but two different versions of the same mechanism (radiation pressure and Dirac sea perfect fluid type pressure). One method (fluid pressure) uses a mathematical trick which gets around needing to put into the calculation the cross-section for gravity interactions, but predicts G accurately.

The shielding area of an electron so calculated equals Pi(2GM/c^2)^2.

This is the cross-section of a black hole event horizon.

This does not prove what an electron is at the black hole level, but it gives some clues: it is possibly an electromagnetic Heaviside energy wave trapped in a small loop by gravity (obviously all negative electric field Heaviside energy, not an oscillating light wave).

This means that we have to look at Dr Thomas Love’s theorem. Love (California State Uni) shows that if you set the kinetic energy of a planet equal to the gravitational potential energy, ie, (1/2)mv^2 = mMG/R, that gives Kepler’s law!!!

See http://nige.wordpress.com/2006/0…kinetic-energy/

Extending this to the electron as a c-speed Heaviside wave gravity-trapped loop and we get mc^2 = mMG/R where M is mass of universe and R is a fraction of the radius of the universe which corresponds to the effective distance of the mass radially outward from us.

Anyway, there are no singularities in black hole electrons: nothing exists below that size!
nc | Homepage | 10.13.06 – 4:53 pm | #

By the way, I get the shielding area by effectively comparing the fluid mechanism prediction (which predicts G without needing shielding area) to the Yang-Mills radiation mechanism.

The radiation mechanism does NOT predict G unless the shielding cross-section is put in by hand.

Normalizing the radiation mechanism to give the value of G that the fluid mechanism gives, yields the shielding area Pi(2GM/c^2)^2.

So the gravity mechanism calculations immediately give two independent predictions: G and the gravitational size of the electron “core”.

The two mechanisms are duals in so much as the gauge boson radiations will spend part of their existence as charged particle pairs in loops in space (Dirac sea).

Each mechanism (the fluid of charged particles, and the radiation) in my calculation is assumed to be 100% responsible for gravity, so they are a dual of one another. In reality, if the contribution to gravity from radiation pressure is 100f %, the contribution from Dirac sea pressure will be 100(1-f) %, so the sum of both mechanisms in practice is the same as either mechanism considered to be the complete cause separately.

Nigel
nc | Homepage | 10.13.06 – 5:01 pm | #

{Nigel Cook}, you prove yourself to be a cluelessly pre-motivated idiot when you make statements like that.

The Anthropic Principle is a cosmological principle, so you can falsify it if you can show that the otherwise completely unexpected structure of the universe isn’t contingent on the existence of carbon-based life as is indicated by the physics that drove PHYSICISTS to formalize the observtion.

RESPONSE added in moderation: Island, the owner of this blog is Nigel Cook, so get your facts straight!  You can’t falsify the anthropic principle because we exist!!  It is non-falsifiable!  Why do you think Sir Fred Hoyle never got a Nobel Prize for using the anthropic principle to “predict” the nuclear physics which allow 3 alpha particles or helium nuclei to fuse into carbon?  He didn’t get the prize because it was non-falsifiable, LACKED PHYSICS, LACKED DYNAMICS, LACKED MECHANISM, LACKED ANY CONTRIBUTION TO HUMAN UNDERSTANDING WHATSOEVER.  Similarly, I can “predict” from the width of a railway line roughly the width of a train.  That shows no physical understanding, and doesn’t deserve a prize.  Thanks for calling me a “cluelessly pre-motivated idiot”.  Why don’t you go back to singing your nursery rhymes now?  Nigel

http://sciencewriter.org/2006/10/peter-woits-book/#comment-122

I wish you would mention the POSITIVE ideas Woit explains at the end of the book: symmetry groups, and LQG! Woit’s use of representation theory to generate the Standard Model in low dimensions. This is the really big problem if gravity is successfully modelled by Lunsford’s approach (which I’ll summarise below).

Wikipedia gives a summary of representation theory and particle physics:

‘There is a natural connection, first discovered by Eugene Wigner, between the properties of particles, the representation theory of Lie groups and Lie algebras, and the symmetries of the universe. This postulate states that each particle “is” an irreducible representation of the symmetry group of the universe.’

Woit’s historical approach in his course notes is very clear and interesting, but is not particularly easy to read at length on a computer screen, and ideally should be printed out and studied carefully. I hope it is published as a book with his arXiv paper on applications to predicting the Standard Model. I’m going to write a summary of this subject when I’ve finished, and will get to the physical facts behind the jargon and mathematical models. Woit offers the promise that this approach predicts the Standard Model with electroweak chiral symmetry features, although he is cautious about it, which is the exact opposite of the string theorists in the way that he does this, see page 51 of the paper (he is downplaying his success in case it is incomplete or in error, instead of hyping it).

Woit’s paper producing the Standard Model particles on page 51: http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0206135

Lunsford’s paper on gravity: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/search.py?recid=688763&ln=en

‘It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of space/time is going to do? So I have often made the hypothesis that ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed, and the laws will turn out to be simple, like the chequer board with all its apparent complexities.’

- R. P. Feynman, Character of Physical Law, November 1964 Cornell Lectures, broadcast and published in 1965 by BBC, pp. 57-8.

Nothing works because of a mathematical model which so-and-so invented to describe something in the natural world. For example, until quantum gravity is included in general relativity, the latter won’t even be a complete mathematical model for gravity, let alone the cause for all gravitational phenomena.

You might as well claim that that people meet and marry because of the equation 1 + 1 = 2.

Underlying general relativity, there are real dynamics. If it is analogous to a Yang-Mills quantum field theory, exchange radiation will behave differently in the universe than in an atom or nucleus, due to redshift.

Smolin et al. show in LQG that a path integral is a summing over the full set of interaction graphs in a Penrose spin network. The result gives general relativity without a metric (ie, background independent). Next, you simply have to make gravity consistent completely with standard model-type Yang-Mills QFT dynamics to get predictions:

(1) Over short distances, any Yang-Mills quantum gravity will be unaffected because the masses aren’t receding, so exchange radiation won’t be upset.

(2) But over great distances, recession of galaxies will cause problems in QFT gravity that aren’t physically included in general relativity.

I don’t know if gauge boson’s are redshifted with constant velocity or if they are slowed down due to recession, being exchanged less frequently when masses are receding from one another.

It doesn’t matter: either way, it’s clear that between two masses receding from one another at a speed near c, the force will be weakened. That’s enough to get gravity to fade out over cosmic distances.

This means G goes to zero for cosmology sized distances, so general relativity fails and there is no need for any cosmological constant at all, CC = 0.

Lambda (the CC) -> 0, when G -> 0. Gravity dynamics which predict gravitational strength and various other observable and further checkable phenomena, are consistent with the gravitational-electromagnetic unification in which there are 3 dimensions describing contractable matter (matter contracts due to its properties of gravitation and motion), and 3 expanding time dimensions (the spacetime between matter expands due to the big bang according to Hubble’s law). Lunsford has investigated this over SO(3,3):

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=128#comment-1932:

‘… I worked out and published an idea that reproduces GR as low-order limit, but, since it is crazy enough to regard the long range forces as somehow deriving from the same source, it was blacklisted from arxiv (CERN however put it up right away without complaint). … my work has three time dimensions, and just as you say, mixes up matter and space and motion. This is not incompatible with GR, and in fact seems to give it an even firmer basis. On the level of GR, matter and physical space are decoupled the way source and radiation are in elementary EM. …’ – D. R. Lunsford.

Nobel Laureate Phil Anderson:

“… the flat universe is just not decelerating, it isn’t really accelerating …”

- http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/01/03/danger-phil-anderson

Hence Lunsford’s model is right. Note that this PRECEDES experiment. I got a publication in Electronics World Oct 96, which is for a dynamical model.

When you think about it, it’s obviously correct: GR deals with contractable dimensions describing matter, and one time dimension. Lunsford simply expands the time to three dimensions hence symmetry orthagonal group (3,3). The three expanding time dimensions give the cosmological recession! The Hubble expansion then becomes a velocity variation with time, not distance, so it becomes an acceleration.

Newton’s laws then tell us the outward force of the big bang and the inward reaction, which have some consequences for gravity prediction, predicting G to within experimental error.

We already talk of cosmological distances in terms of time (light years). The contractable dimensions always describe matter (rulers, measuring rods, instruments, planet earth). Empty space doesn’t contract in the expanding universe, no matter what the relative motion or gravity field strength is. Only matter’s dimensions are contractable. Empty spacetime volume expands. Hence 3 expanding dimensions, and 3 contractable dimensions replace SO(3,1).

Lunsford’s paper:

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/search.py?recid=688763&ln=en

Thanks,
nigel

BTW, I tried to shut down string theory in the Oct. 2003 issue of Electronics World, but discovered that there is a lot of public support for string theory, because string theorists and (fellow travellers like Hawking) have had sufficient good sense to censor viable alternatives, including Lunsford’s paper from arXiv even after it was published in a peer-reviewed journal. So Woit is making a mistake by not discussing alternatives at all. String theory will last forever with trash like http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0312012 on arxiv when other stuff is censored off within seconds (including my paper, uploaded 2002 from Uni. Gloucestershire). The stringers are dictatorial ——–.

Comment by nigel cook — October 13, 2006 @ 3:14 pm

http://discovermagazine.typepad.com/horganism/2006/10/the_end_of_stri.html#comment-23822761

‘It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of space/time is going to do? So I have often made the hypothesis that ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed, and the laws will turn out to be simple, like the chequer board with all its apparent complexities.’

- R. P. Feynman, Character of Physical Law, November 1964 Cornell Lectures, broadcast and published in 1965 by BBC, pp. 57-8.

Nothing works because of a mathematical model which so-and-so invented to describe something in the natural world. For example, until quantum gravity is included in general relativity, the latter won’t even be a complete mathematical model for gravity, let alone the cause for all gravitational phenomena.

You might as well claim that that people meet and marry because of the equation 1 + 1 = 2.

Underlying general relativity, there are real dynamics. If it is analogous to a Yang-Mills quantum field theory, exchange radiation will behave differently in the universe than in an atom or nucleus, due to redshift.

Smolin et al. show in LQG that a path integral is a summing over the full set of interaction graphs in a Penrose spin network. The result gives general relativity without a metric (ie, background independent). Next, you simply have to make gravity consistent completely with standard model-type Yang-Mills QFT dynamics to get predictions:

(1) Over short distances, any Yang-Mills quantum gravity will be unaffected because the masses aren’t receding, so exchange radiation won’t be upset.

(2) But over great distances, recession of galaxies will cause problems in QFT gravity that aren’t physically included in general relativity.

I don’t know if gauge boson’s are redshifted with constant velocity or if they are slowed down due to recession, being exchanged less frequently when masses are receding from one another.

It doesn’t matter: either way, it’s clear that between two masses receding from one another at a speed near c, the force will be weakened. That’s enough to get gravity to fade out over cosmic distances.

This means G goes to zero for cosmology sized distances, so general relativity fails and there is no need for any cosmological constant at all, CC = 0.

Lambda (the CC) -> 0, when G -> 0. Gravity dynamics which predict gravitational strength and various other observable and further checkable phenomena, are consistent with the gravitational-electromagnetic unification in which there are 3 dimensions describing contractable matter (matter contracts due to its properties of gravitation and motion), and 3 expanding time dimensions (the spacetime between matter expands due to the big bang according to Hubble’s law). Lunsford has investigated this over SO(3,3):

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=128#comment-1932:

‘… I worked out and published an idea that reproduces GR as low-order limit, but, since it is crazy enough to regard the long range forces as somehow deriving from the same source, it was blacklisted from arxiv (CERN however put it up right away without complaint). … my work has three time dimensions, and just as you say, mixes up matter and space and motion. This is not incompatible with GR, and in fact seems to give it an even firmer basis. On the level of GR, matter and physical space are decoupled the way source and radiation are in elementary EM. …’ – D. R. Lunsford.

Nobel Laureate Phil Anderson:

“… the flat universe is just not decelerating, it isn’t really accelerating …”

- http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/01/03/danger-phil-anderson

Hence Lunsford’s model is right. Note that this PRECEDES experiment. I got a publication in Electronics World Oct 96, which is for a dynamical model.

When you think about it, it’s obviously correct: GR deals with contractable dimensions describing matter, and one time dimension. Lunsford simply expands the time to three dimensions hence symmetry orthagonal group (3,3). The three expanding time dimensions give the cosmological recession! The Hubble expansion then becomes a velocity variation with time, not distance, so it becomes an acceleration.

Newton’s laws then tell us the outward force of the big bang and the inward reaction, which have some consequences for gravity prediction, predicting G to within experimental error.

We already talk of cosmological distances in terms of time (light years). The contractable dimensions always describe matter (rulers, measuring rods, instruments, planet earth). Empty space doesn’t contract in the expanding universe, no matter what the relative motion or gravity field strength is. Only matter’s dimensions are contractable. Empty spacetime volume expands. Hence 3 expanding dimensions, and 3 contractable dimensions replace SO(3,1).

Lunsford’s paper:

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/search.py?recid=688763&ln=en

I’d be keen for you to ask Peter Woit about Lunsford, and also about Woit’s use of representation theory to generate the Standard Model in low dimensions. This is the really big problem if gravity is successfully modelled by Lunsford’s approach.

Wikipedia gives a summary of representation theory and particle physics:

‘There is a natural connection, first discovered by Eugene Wigner, between the properties of particles, the representation theory of Lie groups and Lie algebras, and the symmetries of the universe. This postulate states that each particle “is” an irreducible representation of the symmetry group of the universe.’

Woit’s historical approach in his course notes is very clear and interesting, but is not particularly easy to read at length on a computer screen, and ideally should be printed out and studied carefully. I hope it is published as a book with his arXiv paper on applications to predicting the Standard Model. I’m going to write a summary of this subject when I’ve finished, and will get to the physical facts behind the jargon and mathematical models. Woit offers the promise that this approach predicts the Standard Model with electroweak chiral symmetry features, although he is cautious about it, which is the exact opposite of the string theorists in the way that he does this, see page 51 of the paper (he is downplaying his success in case it is incomplete or in error, instead of hyping it).

Lunsford’s paper on gravity: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/search.py?recid=688763&ln=en

Woit’s paper producing the Standard Model particles on page 51: http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0206135

Maybe you can find out why these ideas are being neglected by string theorists!

Try to get a rational and reasonable response from Lubos Motl, Jacques Distler, Sean Carroll (who is not a string theorist but a cosmologist, so he should be willing to make a comment on the cosmological effects of Lunsford’s paper – the end of the cosmological constant in particular), and also Clifford Johnson who is a string theorist.

Since the string theorists have been claiming to have the best way to deal with gravity, it would be interesting to see if they will defend themselves by analysing alternatives, or not.

(I predict you will get a mute reaction from Woit, but don’t let him fool you! He is just cautious in case he has made an error somewhere.)

nc

BTW, I tried to shut down string theory in the Oct. 2003 issue of Electronics World, but discovered that there is a lot of public support for string theory, because string theorists and (fellow travellers like Hawking) have had sufficient good sense to censor viable alternatives, including Lunsford’s paper from arXiv even after it was published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Posted by: nigel cook | October 12, 2006 at 05:31 PM

http://discovermagazine.typepad.com/horganism/2006/10/who_believes_in.html#comment-23856027

Hi John,

This is a very nice post, but you missed the background to the ESP theory which lies in string theory, according to Nobel Laureate Brian D. Josephson of Cambridge University, England.

Josephson has worked out a vital insight about how the special mathematical skills of string theorists are derived from a “mental vacuum state” and “shared vacuum bubbles” of ESP.

His research is on the Cornell arXiv.org (quoted below”. I remember you attacking in the Scientific American some poor military scientific project guy a few years back, just because he believed in UFOs or paranormal.

Strange that you are now not mentioning that Brian Josephson is doing the same thing? Maybe you are secretly being bribed by him to keep quiet? Or maybe arXiv.org is too threatening, and you can’t bear to condemn a paper deposited on arXiv.org because of its [false] reputation of rigor, based on stringy stuff?

Please let me know if your exclusion of Josephson’s research (below) is a genuine oversight, or whether you are a secret Josephson supporter!

Cheers,
nc

http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0312012

Physics, abstract
physics/0312012
From: Brian D. Josephson [view email]
Date (v1): Tue, 2 Dec 2003 20:47:29 GMT (7kb)
Date (revised v2): Tue, 2 Dec 2003 23:15:12 GMT (7kb)
Date (revised v3): Tue, 9 Dec 2003 18:25:38 GMT (8kb)

String Theory, Universal Mind, and the Paranormal

Authors: Brian D. Josephson
Comments: 20KB HTML file. To appear in the Proceedings of the Second European Samueli Symposium, Freiburg, October 2003. In this version minor errors have been corrected, and a concluding comment added concerning classification. Keywords: ESP, string theory, anthropic principle, thought bubble, universal mind, mental state
Subj-class: General Physics

A model consistent with string theory is proposed for so-called paranormal phenomena such as extra-sensory perception (ESP). Our mathematical skills are assumed to derive from a special ‘mental vacuum state’, whose origin is explained on the basis of anthropic and biological arguments, taking into account the need for the informational processes associated with such a state to be of a life-supporting character. ESP is then explained in terms of shared ‘thought bubbles’ generated by the participants out of the mental vacuum state. The paper concludes with a critique of arguments sometimes made claiming to ‘rule out’ the possible existence of paranormal phenomena.

Posted by: nigel cook | October 13, 2006 at 09:17 AM

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2006/10/does-string-theory-explain-heavy-ion.html#c116068693237410359

At 3:02 PM, nigel said…

Hi Bee,

“… to say that the GPS work because of General Relativity is not wrong, but it is not the whole story: It is a catch phrase to show that GR is not some abstract mathematics, but plays indeed a role in the real world.”

On the topic of mathematical models in general, see Feynman:

‘It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of space/time is going to do? So I have often made the hypothesis that ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed, and the laws will turn out to be simple, like the chequer board with all its apparent complexities.’

- R. P. Feynman, Character of Physical Law, November 1964 Cornell Lectures, broadcast and published in 1965 by BBC, pp. 57-8.

Now you want me to explain a candidate mechanism I suppose…

Nothing works because of a mathematical model, and until quantum gravity is included general relativity won’t even be a complete mathematical model

You might as well claim that that people meet and marry because of the equation 1 + 1 = 2.

Underlying general relativity, there are real dynamics. If it is analogous to a Yang-Mills quantum field theory, exchange radiation will behave differently in the universe than in an atom or nucleus, due to redshift

Smolin et al. show in LQG that a path integral is a summing over the full set of interaction graphs in a Penrose spin network. The result gives general relativity without a metric (ie, background independent). Next, you simply have to make gravity consistent completely with standard model-type Yang-Mills QFT dynamics to get predictions:

Over short distances, any Yang-Mills quantum gravity will be unaffected because the masses aren’t receding, so exchange radiation won’t be upset. But over great distances, recession of galaxies will cause problems in QFT gravity that aren’t physically included in general relativity.

I don’t know if gauge boson’s are redshifted as or slowed down (background independence upsets SR, and Maxwell’s model is hogwash since his displacement current equation which depends on vacuum polarization can’t occur in a QFT unless the electric field strength exceeds the IR cutoff, which corresponds to about 10^18 v/m, FAR higher than the field strengths of Hertz’ radio waves which he lying claimed to prove Maxwell’s equations correct), but that simply doesn’t matter: either way, it’s clear that between two masses receding from one another at a speed near c, the force will be weakened. That’s enough to get gravity to fade out over cosmic distances.

This means G goes to zero for cosmology sized distances, so general relativity fails and there is no need for any cosmological constant at all, CC = 0.

Lambda (the CC) -> 0, when G -> 0. Gravity dynamics which predict gravitational strength and various other observable and further checkable phenomena, are consistent with the gravitational-electromagnetic unification in which there are 3 dimensions describing contractable matter (matter contracts due to its properties of gravitation and motion), and 3 expanding time dimensions (the spacetime between matter expands due to the big bang according to Hubble’s law). Lunsford has investigated this over SO(3,3):

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=128#comment-1932:

‘… I worked out and published an idea that reproduces GR as low-order limit, but, since it is crazy enough to regard the long range forces as somehow deriving from the same source, it was blacklisted from arxiv (CERN however put it up right away without complaint). … my work has three time dimensions, and just as you say, mixes up matter and space and motion. This is not incompatible with GR, and in fact seems to give it an even firmer basis. On the level of GR, matter and physical space are decoupled the way source and radiation are in elementary EM. …’ – drl

Nobel Laureate Phil Anderson:

“… the flat universe is just not decelerating, it isn’t really accelerating …”

- http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/01/03/danger-phil-anderson

Hence Lunsford’s model is right. Note that this PRECEDES experiment. I got a publication in Electronics World Oct 96, which is for a dynamical model.

When you think about it, it’s obviously correct: GR deals with contractable dimensions describing matter, and one time dimension. Lunsford simply expands the time to three dimensions hence symmetry orthagonal group (3,3). The three expanding time dimensions give the cosmological recession! The Hubble expansion then becomes a velocity variation with time, not distance, so it becomes an acceleration. Newton’s laws then tell us the outward force of the big bang and the inward reaction, which have some consequences for gravity prediction, predicting G to within experimental error!
We already talk of cosmological distances in terms of time (light years). The contractable dimensions always describe matter (rulers, measuring rods, instruments, planet earth). Empty space doesn’t contract in the expanding universe, no matter what the relative motion or gravity field strength is. Only matter’s dimensions are contractable. Empty spacetime volume expands. Hence 3 expanding dimensions, and 3 contractable dimensions replace SO(3,1).

The question is, how long will stringers with only hype be defended by non-falsifiable predictions about soft scatter of heavy ions? Similar to predictions of large extra dimensions?

BTW, if you want to contribute a cent to determining experimentally whether redshifted light suffers a velocity change, go over to LM’s blog.

Best,
nc

http://christinedantas.blogspot.com/2006/10/quantum-mechanics-foundations.html

nigel said…
Hi Christine,

Thanks for these links, the first on p2 quotes Dr Shahriar S. Afshar:

“Zero point field and the energy density associated with it are tricky subjects. It is clear that ZPF becomes physically real, or measurable, when there is radiation reaction. But what about when it is not measured in that sense, when it does not contribute to the physical properties of a test particle? Its just an empty space. The treatment is different, because with radiation reaction I have to treat this energy as real, contributing to the dynamics of the system. Otherwise, without its manifestation as radiation reaction, it cannot be seen as real, because the energy density would be too
high, leading to numerous problems such as a cosmological constant many orders of magnitude lager than the value supported by observations.”

- http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0610052 p2

This acceptance that someone has measured the cosmological constant (dark energy) effect makes the paper seem like a piece of science fiction to me. I can’t go on reading that sort of sad science discussion (the author really should not confuse a mathematical model for reality when the cosmological constant/dark energy has not been checked properly, it has not made predictions shown to be true, it is just ad hoc epicycle-type stuff, it is not physics, it is not deserving of any respect as physics).

On Cosmic Variance, Professor Sean Carroll seems equally to hold on to the cosmological constant Lambda as obtained by fitting the Lambda-CDM model to observations.

I think I have a serious problem in knowing how to deal with what I regard as a false model. I can write all I want on my blog, but that won’t change anything.

My understanding of general relativity is that it’s an energy accountancy package: the Einstein field equation says that curvature is created by the energy density of fields and matter, and the contraction is required to make it mathematically and physically self-consistent.

There is no mechanism for adding a cosmological constant, and it is sad that people try to do this.

Think about Nobel Laureate Professor Phil Anderson’s comment:

“the flat universe is just not decelerating, it isn’t really accelerating …”

- http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/01/03/danger-phil-anderson#comment-10901

I’ve tried to point out the facts on Cosmic Variance:

‘In loop quantum gravity, the basic idea is … to … think about the holonomy [whole rule] around loops in space. The idea is that in a curved space, for any path that starts out somewhere and comes back to the same point (a loop), one can imagine moving along the path while carrying a set of vectors, and always keeping the new vectors parallel to older ones as one moves along. When one gets back to where one started and compares the vectors one has been carrying with the ones at the starting point, they will in general be related by a rotational transformation. This rotational transformation is called the holonomy of the loop. It can be calculated for any loop, so the holonomy of a curved space is an assignment of rotations to all loops in the space.’ – P. Woit, Not Even Wrong, Cape, London, 2006, p189.

Surely this is compatible with Yang-Mills quantum field theory where the loop is due to the exchange of force causing gauge bosons from one mass to another and back again.

Over vast distances in the universe, this predicts that redshift of the gauge bosons weakens the gravitational coupling constant. Hence it predicts the need to modify general relativity in a specific way to incorporate quantum gravity: cosmic scale gravity effects are weakened. This indicates that gravity isn’t slowing the recession of matter at great distances, which is confirmed by observations.

- http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/10/03/the-trouble-with-physics/#comment-123080

Despite this, Professor Sean Carroll just answered by saying that:

“nc, I am pretty sure that the prediction of gravity is not likely to be contradicted by experiment.”

- http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/10/03/the-trouble-with-physics/#comment-123096

It really is impossible to get anyone to listen. People have their own way of thinking about what general relativity means, and it is impossible overcome it.

As for the second paper you link to, http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0610047, I can’t get past the abstract it is so sad:

“We then show that in order to include the evolution of observer’s reference frame in a physically sensible way, the Heisenberg picture with time going backwards yields a correct description.”

How can time going backwards be a “physically sensible” solution?

Feynman’s diagrams show that a positron is like an electron going backwards in time. But nothing is really going backwards in time, it is just a symmetry, not a real property. Maybe I’m just totally insane now.

Best wishes,
Nigel

10/11/2006 06:14:51 PM

http://christinedantas.blogspot.com/2006/09/interesting-links.html

nigel said…
Thank you, particularly for the second link:

astro-ph/0609591, 20 Sep 2006

“Report of the Dark Energy Task Force

“Dark energy appears to be the dominant component of the physical Universe, yet there is no persuasive theoretical explanation for its existence or magnitude. The acceleration of the Universe is, along with dark matter, the observed phenomenon that most directly demonstrates that our theories of fundamental particles and gravity are either incorrect or incomplete. Most experts believe that nothing short of a revolution in our understanding of fundamental physics will be required to achieve a full understanding of the cosmic acceleration. For these reasons, the nature of dark energy ranks among the very most compelling of all outstanding problems in physical science. These circumstances demand an ambitious observational program to determine the dark energy properties as well as possible.”

Christine,

Ten years ago (well before Perlmutter’s discovery and dark energy), the argument arose that if gravity is caused by a Yang-Mills exchange radiation quantum force field, where gravitons were exchanged between masses, then cosmological expansion would degenerate the energy of the gravitons over vast distances.

It is easy to calculate: whenever light is seriously redshifted, gravity effects over the same distance will be seriously reduced.

At that time, 1996, I was furthering my education with some Open University courses and as part of the cosmology course made some predictions from this quantum gravity concept.

The first prediction is that Friedmann’s solutions to GR are wrong, because they assume falsely that gravity doesn’t weaken over distances where redshifts are severe.

Whereas the Hubble law of recessionis empirically V = Hr, Friedmann’s solutions to general relativity predicts that V will not obey this law at very great distances. Friedmann/GR assume that there will be a modification due to gravity retarding the recession velocities V, due effectively to the gravitational attraction of the receding galaxy to the mass of the universe contained within the radius r.

Hence, the recession velocity predicted by Friedmann’s solution for a critical density universe (which continues to expand at an ever diminishing rate, instead of either coasting at constant – which Friedmann shows GR predicts for low density – or collapsing which would be the case for higher than critican density) can be stated in classical terms to make it clearer than using GR.

Recession velocity including gravity

V = (Hr) – (gt)

where g = MG/(r^2) and t = r/c, so:

V = (Hr) – [MGr/(cr^2)]

= (Hr) – [MG/(cr)]

M = mass of universe which is producing the gravitational retardation of the galaxies and supernovae, ie, the mass located within radius r (by Newton’s theorem, the gravity due to mass within a spherically symmetric volume can be treated as to all reside in the centre of that volume):

M = Rho.(4/3)Pi.r^3

Assuming as (was the case in 1996 models) that Friedmann Rho = critical density = Rho = 3(H^2)/(8.Pi.G), we get:

M = Rho.(4/3)Pi.r^3

= [3(H^2)/(8.Pi.G)].(4/3)Pi.r^3

= (H^2)(r^3)/(2G)

So, the Friedmann recession velocity corrected for gravitational retardation,

V = (Hr) – [MG/(cr)]

= (Hr) – [(H^2)(r^3)G/(2Gcr)]

= (Hr) – [0.5(Hr)^2]/c.

Now, what my point is is this. The term [0.5(Hr)^2]/c in this equation is the amount of gravitational deceleration to the recession velocity.

From Yang-Mills quantum gravity arguments, with gravity strength depending on the energy of exchanged gravitons, the redshift of gravitons must stop gravitational retardation being effective. So we must drop the effect of the term [0.5(Hr)^2]/c.

Hence, we predict that the Hubble law will be the correct formula.

Perlmutter’s results of software-automated supernovae redshift discoveries using CCD telescopes were obtained in about 1998, and fitted this prediction made in 1996. However, every mainstream journal had rejected my 8-page paper, although Electronics World (which I had written for before) made it available via the October 1996 issue.

Once this quantum gravity prediction was confirmed by Perlmutter’s results, instead of abandoning Friedmann’s solutions to GR and pursuing quantum gravity, the mainstream instead injected a small positive lambda (cosmological constant, driven by unobserved dark energy) into the Friedmann solution as an ad hoc modification.

I can’t understand why something which to me is perfectly sensible and is a prediction which was later confirmed experimentally, is simply ignored. Maybe it is just too simple, and people hate simplicity, preferring exotic dark energy, etc.

People are just locked into believing Friedmann’s solutions to GR are correct because they come from GR which is well validated in other ways. They simply don’t understand that the redshift of gravitons over cosmological sized distances would weaken gravity, and that GR simply doesn’t contains these quantum gravity dynamics, so fails. It is “groupthink”.

Kind regards,
nigel

9/29/2006 09:08:27 AM

‘Small CCs are achieved by very delicate cancellations, and it appears to be a thoroughly calculationally intractable problem to even identify a single state with small enough CC.’ – Peter

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=473

Another problem. As Philip Anderson, Nobel Laureate, suggests:

Lambda (the CC) -> 0, when G -> 0

“… the flat universe is just not decelerating, it isn’t really accelerating …”

- http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/01/03/danger-phil-anderson

All you need to do to make gravitational strength to fall toward zero over cosmic distances is to recognise the very plain, simple fact that any exchange of force causing gauge boson radiation between receding masses will suffer redshift related problems not seen in the QFT of nuclei and atoms.

Over short distances, any Yang-Mills quantum gravity will be unaffected because the masses aren’t receding, so exchange radiation won’t be upset. But over great distances, recession of galaxies will cause problems in QFT gravity that aren’t physically included in general relativity.

I don’t know if gauge boson’s are redshifted as or slowed down, but it’s clear between two masses receding from one another at a speed near c, the force will be weakened. That’s enough to get gravity to fade out over cosmic distances.

This means G goes to zero for cosmology sized distances, so general relativity fails and there is no need for any cosmological constant at all, CC = 0.

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/search.py?recid=688763&ln=en shows that CC = 0 if gravity and electromagnetism are unified by having three expanding time dimensions instead of one.

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=128#comment-1932

‘…I worked out and published an idea that reproduces GR as low-order limit, but, since it is crazy enough to regard the long range forces as somehow deriving from the same source, it was blacklisted from arxiv (CERN however put it up right away without complaint). … my work has three time dimensions, and just as you say, mixes up matter and space and motion. This is not incompatible with GR, and in fact seems to give it an even firmer basis. On the level of GR, matter and physical space are decoupled the way source and radiation are in elementary EM. …’ – drl

When you think about it, it’s obviously correct: GR deals with contractable dimensions describing matter, and one time dimension. Lunsford simply expands the time to three dimensions hence symmetry orthagonal group (3,3). The three expanding time dimensions give the cosmological recession! The Hubble expansion then becomes a velocity variation with time, not distance, so it becomes an acceleration. Newton’s laws then tell us the outward force of the big bang and the inward reaction, which have some consequences for gravity prediction.

We already talk of cosmological distances in terms of time (light years). The contractable dimensions always describe matter (rulers, measuring rods, instruments, planet earth). Empty space doesn’t contract in the expanding universe, no matter what the relative motion or gravity field strength is. Only matter’s dimensions are contractable. Empty spacetime volume expands. Hence 3 expanding dimensions, and 3 contractable dimensions replace SO(3,1).

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=128#comment-1932

‘… I worked out and published an idea that reproduces GR as low-order limit, but, since it is crazy enough to regard the long range forces as somehow deriving from the same source, it was blacklisted from arxiv (CERN however put it up right away without complaint). … my work has three time dimensions, and just as you say, mixes up matter and space and motion. This is not incompatible with GR, and in fact seems to give it an even firmer basis. On the level of GR, matter and physical space are decoupled the way source and radiation are in elementary EM. …’ – Lunsford

Lunsford’s prediction is correct: he proves that the cosmological constant must vanish in order that gravitation be unified with electromagnetism. As Nobel Laureate Phil Anderson says, the observed fact regarding the imaginary cosmological constant and dark energy is merely that

:“… the flat universe is just not decelerating, it isn’t really accelerating …”-

http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/01/03/danger-phil-anderson

Since it isn’t accelerating, there is no dark energy and no cosmological constant: Lunsford’s unification prediction is correct, and is explicable in terms of Yang-Mills QFT.

See for example the discussion in a comment on Christine Dantas’ blog: ‘From Yang-Mills quantum gravity arguments, with gravity strength depending on the energy of exchanged gravitons, the redshift of gravitons must stop gravitational retardation being effective. So we must drop the effect of the term [0.5(Hr)^2]/c. Hence, we predict that the Hubble law will be the correct formula.

‘Perlmutter’s results of software-automated supernovae redshift discoveries using CCD telescopes were obtained in about 1998, and fitted this prediction made in 1996. However, every mainstream journal had rejected my 8-page paper, although Electronics World (which I had written for before) made it available via the October 1996 issue.

‘Once this quantum gravity prediction was confirmed by Perlmutter’s results, instead of abandoning Friedmann’s solutions to GR and pursuing quantum gravity, the mainstream instead injected a small positive lambda (cosmological constant, driven by unobserved dark energy) into the Friedmann solution as an ad hoc modification…

LQG is a modelling process, not a speculation. Smolin et al. show that a path integral is a summing over the full set of interaction graphs in a Penrose spin network. The result gives general relativity without a metric (ie, background independent). Next, you simply have to make gravity consistent completely with standard model-type Yang-Mills QFT dynamics to get predictions

‘In loop quantum gravity, the basic idea is … to … think about the holonomy [whole rule] around loops in space. The idea is that in a curved space, for any path that starts out somewhere and comes back to the same point (a loop), one can imagine moving along the path while carrying a set of vectors, and always keeping the new vectors parallel to older ones as one moves along. When one gets back to where one started and compares the vectors one has been carrying with the ones at the starting point, they will in general be related by a rotational transformation. This rotational transformation is called the holonomy of the loop. It can be calculated for any loop, so the holonomy of a curved space is an assignment of rotations to all loops in the space.’ – P. Woit, Not Even Wrong, Cape, London, 2006, p189.

Surely this is compatible with Yang-Mills quantum field theory where the loop is due to the exchange of force causing gauge bosons from one mass to another and back again.

Over vast distances in the universe, this predicts that redshift of the gauge bosons weakens the gravitational coupling constant. Hence it predicts the need to modify general relativity in a specific way to incorporate quantum gravity: cosmic scale gravity effects are weakened. This indicates that gravity isn’t slowing the recession of matter at great distances, which is confirmed by observations.

For the empirically-verifiable prediction of the strength of gravity, see the mathematical proofs at http://feynman137.tripod.com/#h which have been developed and checked for ten years. The result is consistent with the Hubble parameter and Hubble parameter-consistent-density estimates. Putting in the Hubble parameter and density yields the universal gravitational constant within the error of the parameters. Since further effort is being made in cosmology to refine the estimates of these things, we will get better estimates and make a more sensitive check on the predicted strength of gravity in consequence. Another relationship the model implies is the dynamics of the strength of electromagnetism relative to that of gravity.

As regards the Standard Model, I’m reading Woit’s course materials on Representation Theory as time permits (this is deep mathematics and takes time to absorb and to become familiar with). Wikipedia gives a summary of representation theory and particle physics:

‘There is a natural connection, first discovered by Eugene Wigner, between the properties of particles, the representation theory of Lie groups and Lie algebras, and the symmetries of the universe. This postulate states that each particle “is” an irreducible representation of the symmetry group of the universe.’

Woit’s historical approach in his course notes is very clear and interesting, but is not particularly easy to read at length on a computer screen, and ideally should be printed out and studied carefully. I hope it is published as a book with his arXiv paper on applications to predicting the Standard Model. I’m going to write a summary of this subject when I’ve finished, and will get to the physical facts behind the jargon and mathematical models. Woit offers the promise that this approach predicts the Standard Model with electroweak chiral symmetry features, although he is cautious about it, which is the exact opposite of the string theorists in the way that he does this, see page 51 of the paper.

By contrast, Kaku recently hyped string theory by claiming that it predicts the Standard Model, general relativity’s gravity, and lots more, but in no case has the string theory – even once fiddled to a number of dimensions that makes it work “ad hoc” – then managed to make even a single checkable physical prediction! It makes loads of metaphysical, non-falsifiable predictions about large extra dimensions, supersymmetric partners, soft scattering spectra, but in each case the experiments are not looking to make a falsifiable test. String theory has been either born or engineered (I don’t care which) into a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose theory which risks nothing and instead defending itself by kicking in the teeth all alternative explanations which do take risks by making checkable predictions. String theory is therefore, as Pauli said, Not Even Wrong.

NOTE TO SCIENCE HATERS: Pauli’s neutrino wasn’t a non-testable prediction but a FACT from experimental data on beta decay spectra: http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/10/03/the-trouble-with-physics/#comment-124189

(Actually, beta decays give antineutrinos, not neutrinos, just as electricity, or at least the slow drift current of electrons induced by the light speed gauge boson electric field, flows from the negative battery terminal around the circuit to the positive terminal, i.e., in the opposite direction to the conventional current which is drawn as an arrow from positive to negative. The latter fact has nothing to do with a human error made by Benjamin Franklin who guessed wrong. It is instead a deliberate policy to confuse silly people which is being forced on the world by a conspiracy of physicists.) 

Here are some bits that for space reasons were chopped off by this WordPress blog from the latest attempt to revise and improve the “about” section (the right hand side bar).  There is apparently a limit to the number of characters it will contain unless I find the time to modify the blog template, and I don’t have any spare time:

“It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of space/time is going to do? So I have often made the hypothesis that ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed, and the laws will turn out to be simple, like the chequer board with all its apparent complexities.”

- R. P. Feynman, Character of Physical Law, November 1964 Cornell Lectures, broadcast and published in 1965 by BBC, pp. 57-8.

The comments of science haters quoted who have not read the facts are not scientific reviews, just sneers based upon ignorance and arrogance. For example, they “believe” things because they think some equations or books are “beautiful” instead of relying on AGREEMENT WITH NATURE, EXPERIMENTAL FACTS, SCIENTIFIC OBJECTIVITY. The “belief in beauty” these people have is religious and ties in with their ranting that facts should be dismissed as “personal pet theories”, that they don’t have time to read science from little people, or that they think authors of “alternatives” should be put against a wall and shot. For example, I predicted the lack of observed gravitational retardation using the model via the October 1996 Electronics World issue, which was subsequently discovered experimentally by Perlmutter in 1998. In 1996, Nature’s editor Philip Campbell wrote a letter claiming he was ‘unable’ to publish the paper, as did his physical sciences editor, Karl Zemelis.

They refused to have the proof reviewed, as did the editor Classical and Quantum Gravity (who later published and then retracted a paper by Bogdanov), which Dr Bob Lambourne of Open University suggested as the ideal journal to submit to. (Lambourne however was pro-string, awed by the stringy mathematics more than by the simple EXPERIMENTALLY CONFIRMED proof.)

Disclaimer: everything on this site and the links seems to be correct so far as we have tested it to date, but since string theory has made it impossible to get the material properly discussed and peer-reviewed, you should check it yourself.

The additional momentum delivered if the light is reflected is presumably (to me) due to RECOIL when the absorbed light is re-emitted.

The wall recoils backwards away from the re-emitted (reflected) photon.

HOWEVER, the subtle thing is that we get into Ivor Catt’s problem with a rigid wall: if the wall is 100% rigid, then NO momentum can be delivered to the wall at all!

The wall can only receive momentum from the light if the wall is yielding. This means that the whole question of what the momentum of light is, is subjective to what happens to the light:

(1) If the light is absorbed, it delivers a total momentum of p = E/c.

(2) If light is reflected at normal incidence, it delivers a total momentum
of p = 2E/c.

(3) If light is reflected at an angle less than A = 90 degrees, it delivers a momentum between p = E/c and p = 2E/c, presumably p = (1 + sin A)E/c.

(4) If light is reflected by a rigid wall, presumably it delivers zero momentum.

Possibility (4) is not real, because in principle a totally rigid wall would need to have infinite mass to prevent any recoil, and you can’t have infinite mass in a finite BB universe.

Maybe photon, in the photon’s frame of reference (ie, riding along with a light wave, as Einstein tried to imagine) has 50% of its total internal momentum in the forward direction and 50% in the backward direction, a
little like a sound wave with a compression (overpressure) phase up front (outward force = overpressure times area) and a rarefaction (under ambient pressure) phase behind (inward force = under pressure amount times area):
the two forces are in balance in a sound wave due to Newton’s 3rd law (action and reaction are equal and opposite)

One more interesting problem I emailed to Dr Love: ENERGY is relative, not absolute! My claim that energy is relative and should be treated as a relative quantity is simple. If you run away from a bullet fired at you, it
imparts less energy when it hits you:

(1) Consider two cars of M kilograms each moving at V m/s speed each. When they collide head-on, the energy release is E = 2 * (1/2)MV^2 = MV^2.

(2) Consider two cars of M kilograms each, one stationary and one approaching it at 2V m/s. When they collide, the energy release is E = (1/2)M(2V)^2 = 2MV^2.

Comparing (1) and (2) we see that you can DOUBLE the energy release by having two cars collide with the same impact speed if one is in absolute motion and one stationary, than if each is moving, even if the combined
speeds are identical.

Absolute motion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Herbert_Dingle#Disgraceful_error_on_article_page