Tag: physics

Betelgeuse to Provide Fireworks for My Grandchildren to See (Maybe Me?)

photog Uncategorized , , ,

Some astro-physicists have calculated that the bright red giant star Betelgeuse in the shoulder of Orion will probably reach its supernova event within a few decades.

And I quote:

“CONCLUSION
We have found carbon-burning models that excite the radial fundamental mode, as well as the first, second, and third overtones. The
periods excited pulsation modes agree with periods of 2190, 417,
230, and 185 d that had been detected in Betelgeuse. On the HR diagram, these models are located within the allowed range of effective
temperature and luminosity of Betelgeuse. Beginning with a mass
of 19 𝑀⊙ at ZAMS (with a rotation velocity of 0.2 or 0.4 𝑣crit), the
models lose significant mass mainly in the core-He burning stage to
MNRAS 000, 1–11 (2023)
Pulsations of Betelgeuse 7
have a mass of 11 ∼ 12 𝑀⊙ in the core carbon-burning stage. A large
radius of about 1300 𝑅⊙ (needed for the long-period fundamental
mode) is supported by interferometric measurements of the angular
diameter combined with the distance. We conclude that Betelgeuse
should currently be in a late phase (or near the end) of the core carbon burning. After carbon is exhausted in the core, a core-collapse
leading to a supernova explosion is expected in a few tens (of) years.”

Note that last line, IN A FEW TENS OF YEARS.

So even an old guy like me may live to see a close supernova in the sky.  That’s pretty exciting.  Apparently Betelgeuse has reached the stage where it is fusing carbon into magnesium and based on the pulsations in the size and brightness of the star, it’s about to run out of carbon.  Since it’s not big enough to go through another higher round of fusion it’s going to collapse into a neutron star via an incredibly violent supernova.  It will be as bright as the half moon and will be seen even during the day.  Sounds pretty exciting.

What’s Worse, Dark Energy or Non-Metric Gravity?

photog Current Events, Science , , , ,

Regular readers are aware of my disdain for Dark Energy and Dark Matter.  These are hypothetical entities that apparently can’t be detected but which allow astrophysicists to pretend they understand why physical measurements of the universe don’t correlate with the estimates they make about things like the mass of the galaxies and the expansion of the universe.

Well I’m happy to report they’ve come up with another theory that at least allows them to get rid of dark energy.  It’s called non-metric gravity.  Of course I’m glad they’re getting rid of dark energy.  Getting rid of something that doesn’t exist is a helpful idea.  But I can’t say that the exercise they’ve gone through to “measure” the parameters in their new model is all that inspiring.  They take the gravitational constant and make it a function of the form:

F(Q) = α + βQn

And all three parameters are determined by curve fitting, using the available data from astrophysical observations like the red shift and microwave radiation densities.  And unsurprisingly they are able to make the hypothesis fit the data.

Now does this prove anything?  Certainly not.  But at least it doesn’t require inventing ubiquitous non-existent particles that are indetectable and inexplicable.  And to my way of looking at things it’s the beginning of an approach that may start to unravel the baffling problems that astrophysicists are confronted with when they look at the universe on the grand scale.

Now if only they can man up and admit there’s no such thing as dark matter they might start to gain my respect back again.  Sir Isaac forgive them.  They’re not very bright.

Way Too Smart for Their Own Good

photog Fake Science, Science , , ,

I feel it’s time for another physics rant.

Somebody named Paul Sutter wrote an article in Ars Technica called “ Requiem for a string: Charting the rise and fall of a theory of everything.  String theory was supposed to explain all of physics. What went wrong?”

I have some excerpts from the article that indicate the thrust of the problem with string theory.

“Like most revolutions, string theory had humble origins. It started in the 1960s as an attempt to understand the workings of the strong nuclear force, which had only recently been discovered.”

“A group of physicists took a mathematical technique developed (and later abandoned) by quantum godfather Werner Heisenberg and expanded it. In that expansion, they found the first strings—mathematical structures that repeated themselves in spacetime. Unfortunately, this proto-string theory made incorrect predictions about the nature of the strong force and also had a variety of troublesome artifacts (like the existence of tachyons, particles that only traveled faster than light). Once another theory was developed to explain the strong force—the one we use today, based on quarks and gluons—string theory faded from the scene.”

So, look at this.  They borrow a technique from someone who was extremely smart.  But it was a technique that was discarded because it doesn’t work.  They ignore the fact that it produces crazy answers and they try to nurse it along by expanding it into more dimensions and other complications.  Shades of Ptolemy’s epicycles!

“Unlike its quantum cousins, when it comes to string theory, we have no fundamental theory—we have only a set of approximation and perturbation methods. We’re not exactly sure if our approximations are good ones or if we’re way off the mark. We have perturbation techniques, but we’re not sure what we’re perturbing from. In other words, there’s no such thing as string theory, just approximations of what we hope string theory could be.”

Wow.  It’s useless and wrong and yet it lives on decade after decade.

“To be clear, our inability to understand string theory isn’t limited by experiment. Even if we could build a super-duper-collider experiment that achieved the energies necessary to unlock quantum gravity, we still wouldn’t be able to test string theory because we have no string theory. We have no mathematical model that can make reliable predictions, only approximations that we hope accurately represent the true physics. We can test those approximations, I guess, but it won’t help us determine the inner workings of the true model.”

They’re paying these people!  No one’s forcing them to pay them but they keep on paying them.

“The beams of the LHC began their first test operations in 2008 with two main science goals in mind: finding the elusive Higgs boson and finding evidence of supersymmetry.  Four years later, the Higgs was found. Supersymmetry was not. It’s now 15 years later, and there are still no signs of supersymmetry.”

Can we get our money back?

“The dearth of evidence has slaughtered so many members of the supersymmetric family that the whole idea is on very shaky ground, with physicists beginning to have conferences with titles like “Beyond Supersymmetry” and “Oh My God, I Think I Wasted My Career.””

You sure have!  And our billions in funding for this clap-trap!

“Most string theorists of the modern era don’t work on string theory directly but instead mostly on the AdS/CFT correspondence and its implications, hoping that continuing to probe that mathematical relationship will unlock some hidden insight into the workings of a theory of everything.  I wish them luck.”

I don’t!

We really need to restrict the funds available to really smart people such that only the one really smartest guy in the field is allowed to waste his whole life doing this kind of mental masturbation.  This is not physics.  It has the same relation to physics as rhythmic gymnastics has to power-lifting.  I mean should I get tenure for coming up with the new variant called string cheese theory?  Does my background in mozzarella qualify me to expound my theory that the universe is really a large amorphous blob of Italian dairy product?  I think not!

The rest of them should be forced to do this crap in their spare time if they want to when no one can see them and during working hours force them to do something that pays the electric bill.  Maybe they can get an engineering degree on the side and design quantum screw drivers or something.

Look at this quote again:

“To be clear, our inability to understand string theory isn’t limited by experiment. Even if we could build a super-duper-collider experiment that achieved the energies necessary to unlock quantum gravity, we still wouldn’t be able to test string theory because we have no string theory. We have no mathematical model that can make reliable predictions, only approximations that we hope accurately represent the true physics. We can test those approximations, I guess, but it won’t help us determine the inner workings of the true model.”

These guys have been futzin’ around with this thing for fifty years and they still haven’t got a theory to justify their paychecks.  In China they would have been taken out behind the building and shot and their families would be forced to pay for the bullets they were shot with.  Here they should have been tarred and feathered and ridden out of Princeton on a rail.

Camera Girl has often told me off for being, in her words, “scholastic-asstic.”  By this she means too smart for my own good or more precisely an educated dope.  And often she is exactly right.  I wouldn’t dare tell her about this outrage to common sense because she would hit me for trying to waste her time listening to this nonsense.  She would equate it with ecclesiastical scholars  attempting to calculate the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.  That is if she had ever heard of that concept before, which I’m fairly certain she has not.

So instead, I’m bringing this here for the larger audience to hear.  Albert Einstein figured out relativity while working as a patent clerk.  That should be the model.  When someone figures out anti-gravity or faster than light pizza delivery then we can talk about a cushy office in the physics department at Cal Tech and maybe tenure.  But if they’re going to spend forty years of academic salary and perks for this drivel, we need to break out the Chinese model.  Who knows, maybe we can throw in the cost of the bullets for free.  After all we are reasonable people.

Trans-Planckian Problems with Hawking Radiation in Evaporating Black Holes

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner, Science , , ,

https://orionscoldfire.com/index.php/2020/02/14/behold-arrokoth-the-jeb-bush-of-the-solar-system/

 

Good golly Miss Molly!  I was reading an article about the highest possible energies that a particle accelerator could accelerate a proton to and the author started throwing around terms like the Planck energy and the Planck distance and pretty soon it was Planck this and Planck that and Planck the other thing.  Now I dimly remembered that expressing a physical measurement in terms of its Planck equivalent was a way of normalizing the units so that the fundamental constants like the speed of light; c and the gravitational constant; G were rendered as unity in these measurements and thus the Planck units were the fundamental expressions for these concepts.  But I never remembered what sizes these Planck versions came out to.

So, I looked them up in Wikipedia (of course):

 

Table 1: Modern values for Planck’s original choice of quantities
Name Dimension   Value (SI units)
Planck length length (L) 1.616255(18)×10−35 m
Planck mass mass (M) 2.176434(24)×10−8 kg
Planck time time (T) 5.391247(60)×10−44 s
Planck temperature temperature (Θ) 1.416784(16)×1032 K

Now the Planck mass is a perfectly ordinary number.  10−8 kg is quite a large number compared to the mass of a proton or a neutron.  But look at the Planck time; 10−44 s or Planck temperature; 1032 K.  What exactly does 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 degrees K even mean?  What would the velocity of the atoms at that temperature be?  Would they be traveling at 0.99999999999999999999999999999999 of the speed of light?

So, I shake off this feeling that I’ve entered the silly season and read on.  Apparently at these Planck conditions the gravitational force becomes equivalent to the stronger forces like electromagnetism and the nuclear strong force and that allows for “interesting” effects.  Reading on into this miasma of confusing ideas I gathered that these Planck units were considered the limits of these measurements.  In other words, trying to define a time period less than 10−44 seconds was meaningless in our quantum system.  And possibly temperatures above the Planck temperature would just create micro-black holes.

Pretty soon they were talking about how evaporating black holes run into problems with these “trans-Planckian” conditions and pretty soon I was experiencing full blown transphobia.  After all, when I had first read about evaporating black holes back before fake news it had sounded kind of bogus to me.  Stephen Hawking was one of those characters from the world of science that seems to approach the edges of science fiction.  A man with a super genius intellect trapped in an almost completely disabled body who can only move a couple of his fingers and can only communicate with the world via the most painfully slow interface imaginable.  If it turns out Hawking is mistaken about evaporating blackholes I’m sure the world will cut him some slack.  Other than a few physics PhD’s that might get yanked, I’m pretty sure that the practical damages from evaporating black holes getting blown out of the water will be pretty close to 10−44 dollars.

And speaking of which have we finally found the limits of US federal spending?  If Dopey Joe Biden tries to print more than 1 Planck dollars will Washington DC be ripped right out of space time and returned to Cthulhu’s dimension where the Democrats came from?  Boy I hope so.

Doubts Building Up About the Existence of Dark Energy and Dark Matter. Duh!

photog Fake Science, Science , , ,

Even girls are starting to doubt the existence of forms of matter and energy for which there is no direct observable reality.  The good old expansion of the universe has ceased to be this reliable reason for making up phantom particles that can’t be detected, measured or explained.  Maybe now the physics nerds can try to sharpen their pencils and do the hard observational work that will be needed to obtain accurate data needed to make the next valid discoveries needed to expand our understanding of the cosmos.

 

So Now Physicists Are Saying the Big Bang is Just a Local Burp

photog Current Events, Fake Science ,

Just reading this stuff makes me wonder if the scientific enterprise should be put on hold for a few millennia until we’ve usefully used the knowledge we accumulated before the twenty first century.  I mean nuclear and solid state physics have enough wonders to keep technology busy for fifty thousand years.  Maybe we should put our “geniuses” to work doing practical stuff for a good long time before we let them wallow in arrays of big bangs stretching into infinities of infinities in every dimension.

But if you like reading this stuff then have at it.  Einstein backed up his relativity theory with easily tested predictions.  When these bozos can point to a glob of dark energy then I’ll get interested.

Modern Astrophysicists Are Hacks

photog Current Events, Fake Science , , ,

I’m sure most people are familiar with the CBS network comedy The Big Bang Theory.  In it a group of young physicists (and a spacecraft engineer) who are friends display their sexual and social dysfunction around a pretty blonde girl.  As amusing as that was (for a short time) the real takeaway should have been that what passes for astrophysicists today should disqualify this discipline from inclusion in the modern academy.

Now you may think I’m being ridiculous.  But I’m not.  Currently the astrophysical community believes in things called dark matter and dark energy because it’s the only way to explain why their models of the universe don’t correspond to their observations.  To me this means that they are hacks who would rather pretend that making up whole pantheons of fictitious and undetectable matter and energy particles without a shred of evidence is preferable to junking unproven assumptions like the Cosmological Principle.

This German lady physicist goes over the recent measurements that basically invalidate the Cosmological Principle.  And this basically invalidates the conclusions of the 2011 Nobel Prizes in Physics that went to the astrophysicists that supposedly demonstrated that the accelerating expansion of the universe.is caused by dark energy.  So I hope the Nobel committee is going to demand back their million dollars or whatever it is today.

Honestly, these people are an embarrassment to science.  I guess considering what passes for science today i shouldn’t be surprised.  Global warming pseudoscience gets a pass from governments and universities.  Why shouldn’t astrophysics be mumbo jumbo with string theory, dark matter and dark energy taking the place of actual thought.  If Einstein or Planck were alive today they’d slap the collective face of these mental midgets.  I guess it just confirms the general decline of our civilization.  Okay rant over.

 

 

 

 

 

Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Dim Bulbs

photog Current Events, Fake Science ,

They just don’t make physics geniuses the way they used to.  Einstein, Heisenberg and de Broglie took classical Newtonian physics and advanced it to a relativistic quantum mechanical model whose predictions have been confirmed experimentally for a hundred years.  Our current field of Sheldon Coopers have posited string theory, dark matter and dark energy to account for their not being able to predict cosmic expansion rates and other astronomical claptrap and not a single observation or experiment has born out any of these pseudoscientific fumblings.  They might as well re-introduce the phlogiston theory.

They tell us that the STEM fields are relatively unaffected by the decay that is currently laying waste to academia under the forces of critical race theory and feminism.  But I don’t think it’s true.  I think theoretical and experimental physics are both suffering from a dearth of high-end talent.  Mediocrity seems to have laid claim to science in all its departments and all its geographic locations.

You might think, “So what?  We already know so much about the universe why do we need to solve every question?”  You’re right we don’t.  But what it means is that we’re coasting.  It is one of the signs of a decaying civilization when scientific discovery dries up.  A more advanced symptom is when we start to lose existing technology.

Both of these symptoms appeared in classical civilization.  The Greeks were the beginning of scientific research and the Romans were masters of engineering techniques but both of these pursuits decayed and then slowly were abandoned.  We have a long way to go before we are 5th century A.D. Rome but these things happen one step at a time.

Some very smart people have told me that the best minds are being siphoned off to work on artificial intelligence research and hedge fund operations.  Maybe this is true.  But either way it’s a bad sign when intellectual curiosity has dried up in a society.

Alright enough of the old guy rant.  Yes, our current crop of scientists is kind of lame but I have a theory that even though the Renaissance civilization is running out of steam there will be new shoots popping up here and there, wherever innovation and intelligence is rewarded.  It won’t be in Harvard or MIT.  They have decided to only reward diversity so they’ll be rewarded with plenty of diversity.  But it will happen somewhere.  And when it does it will sweep the rest of the dying order away very quickly.  The West has decided to self-destruct and it will slowly devolve into a medieval feudalism.  A new civilization won’t at first be worried about dark energy and dark matter but at some point it will divert some of its wealth and intellect into solving fundamental questions.  When that happens I’m sure they’ll bring abler minds to that pursuit than the doofuses we have produced.  It is emblematic of our times that the tv show, “The Big Bang Theory” showcases four scientists who spent over a decade working on these theories and accomplished nothing at all except possibly overcoming a few of their long lists of neuroses.