Tag: quantum theory

Stop the Presses.  Gravity is a Force and Space is not Curved.

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So I get most of my physics from YouTube and the latest news flash is that Einstein’s belief that mass warps space-time may be put aside for a theory where gravity is a force again and space-time isn’t curved.  In fact, maybe it’s not space-time anymore just space and time.

Uh, okay.  Personally, I never understood why (or how) space could be curved.  I didn’t see why light couldn’t just be affected by gravity the same as everything else.  I mean what does it mean to say space is curved?  Space, per se, is nothing.  It is the lack of something and all it has is location so how can a bit of nothing be curved?  Now the fact that matter and even light can be deflected in their motion through space makes sense.  We can see it all the time with magnets and projectiles in a gravity field.  It’s Newton’s law extended by all the other theories that identify the other forces; electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear forces.  So why say space is curved?  According to the report (and I’m not saying I can fathom this) this new way of looking at gravity also eliminates the current paradox between quantum theory and Einstein’s conception of gravity.  In your face Albert!

Now to be fair to Professor Einstein later on he had been thinking about a similar system he called Teleparallel Gravity.  So maybe all of this is just more reviewing old ideas because nothing new has been discovered.  But I think it makes sense to bring the best minds to bear on these fundamental questions.  Of course, if there’s no space-time then all of the science fiction that used the term becomes dated and passe.  Such is life.

Now, if there is no warping of space does that mean Black Holes can’t tear a hole in it?  Is there no such thing as a singularity?  Are there no worm holes and no way to go from one universe to another?  Next thing you know they’ll be telling me that the speed of light isn’t the fastest speed possible and faster-than-light travel is perfectly achievable if only I can buy enough dynamite from the ACME company and strap it to the back of my rocket sled.

Okay, now the inertialess drives of Doc Smith’s Skylark and Lensman series are science again and jungle worlds with naked red-haired amazon warrior women who can become part of the federation are totally realistic again.  I just hope that the ultra-intelligent but hopelessly-evil amoeboid Eddorians don’t find out about this quantum gravity thing before the Arisians do, so we will still have a chance to perfect a way to destroy Ploor with an inertialess planet that we’ve somehow translated from another dimension and then restored its inertia in time to use it as an irresistible planet wrecker.  Oh wait, I just said there are no alternate dimensions.

Okay, forget that last bit.  But otherwise, I’m completely on board with this new quantum gravity/non-curved space rigamarole.  Let’s just try and give it a cooler name.

Throwing Light on Dark Matter

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I was rooting around on X and I saw a link to a review of a physics book, “Quantised Accelerations: From Anomalies to New Physics” by Michael McCulloch that Hans G. Schantz reviewed on his substack.  What caught my attention was that this book attempts to explain the observed higher velocity of stars on the outer edges of galaxies without resorting to “dark matter.”

I confess that the review describes concepts of quantum behavior that I am unqualified to evaluate but I liked the analogy of dark matter to the mythical existence of planet “Vulcan” to explain the perturbations of the planet Mercury that was required before relativity was proposed by Einstein.

It makes sense to me that before accepting that the majority of matter in the universe is indetectable it would make sense to probe a little deeper into all of the effects of the physical phenomena we’ve already confirmed.

This one is for those who enjoy contemplating the brain-twisting weirdness of the very large and the very small.

Quantum Mechanics, Consciousness, Intelligence and Life

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Roger Penrose is a Nobel prize winning mathematical physicist whose most important contribution was work on black holes in relation to the theory of general relativity.  But he’s getting old and so he decided to think about the nature of consciousness and he has come to the conclusion that the phenomenon of human consciousness is caused by quantum effects generated in the cells of the human brain.

Wow!

 

 

If you watch the video, you’ll get a little information how the flow of chemicals in the microtubules or even the shaping of the atoms in the tubulin that makes up the tubules might be responsible for the quantum effects that provide the indeterminacy necessary to make human brain more than just a computer running a program.  Penrose equates that quantum indeterminacy with the basis of human consciousness.

Wow!

Okay, maybe that’s an interesting idea.  Is it true?  Damned if I know.

But I do like the fact that it gives us a way of saying that computers won’t have consciousness.  Lots of people think that if we just make a computer big enough, then it will suddenly develop consciousness because humans have consciousness and we have the best brains in the biological hierarchy.

Of course maybe if we can build indeterminacy into computers maybe they’ll become conscious.  Will that happen when the size of the circuits on the chips become so small that the actual paths that the electrons take become indeterminate?  I guess that’s possible.  We can make the AI as flawed as we ourselves are.  Maybe we’ll be able to make them neurotic or bi-polar or even psychotic if we want.  That’s kind of what happened to HAL 9000.  He became psychotic because he was forced to lie about the mission that was such an important part of his self-image.

And maybe that’s possible.  But somehow I don’t think complexity makes consciousness.  We “know” we have consciousness.  But is that because we have giant brains?  Dogs don’t have giant brains but try to convince any dog owner that his pet isn’t conscious.  He’ll laugh you out of the room.  I don’t think consciousness is a synonym for intelligence.  I think consciousness is a synonym for life.  We’re conscious.  Dogs are conscious.  Even mice are conscious.  Are mosquitoes conscious?  How about protozoans.  What about our individual cells?

I’m guessing the all are.  Obviously, a rotifer isn’t spinning around a pond saying, “I rotifer, therefore I am.”  But I think he knows he’s there in some sense.  Does that mean he has indeterminate microtubules providing him with agency?  Well, maybe it has nothing to do with quantum effects but for whatever reason, In some minimal sense, I think the answer is yes!  Consciousness equals life.

Now don’t ask me if viruses have consciousness.  I’m not going to bring this down to individual DNA and RNA molecules.  That would make my head hurt.  But I believe that life is life and it is all of a piece.  And whatever we have that is called consciousness is only the most exquisite version of what every other creature has writ small.

Whether God created quantum mechanics to allow us to have agency or whether the actual mechanism of our souls is completely impossible to reverse engineer by any human intelligence is unknown and probably unknowable.  What has already become apparent over the course of the last four hundred years of scientific investigation is that the more we learn the more we learn that we know absolutely nothing.

Isaac Newton “knew” what kept the Moon in orbit and how to calculate the orbits of the planets to whatever accuracy he needed.  He had discovered God’s textbook for his creation.

James Clarke Maxwell knew what the equations were that governed electromagnetism and ushered in the modern age of electric power.

Albert Einstein decoded time-space and “corrected” Newton’s laws.

But a generation later, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle forever locked the door on our knowledge of the quantum world.  We invented quarks and gluons and muons and who knows what else.  But every time we learn something new we find out that ten other things are just illusions.  Dark matter and dark energy and string theory and who knows what else crowd around the dark corners of the forefront of our knowledge and we still know less than nothing about ourselves and why we’re here.

Well, I’m okay with that.  Just as long as we’re not kidding ourselves about where we stand with respect to our dogs.  They’re our friends meant to keep us from taking ourselves too seriously.

Fifteen Years to Proxima Centauri

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How’s that for a cool title!

H/T to Hans G. Schantz for the retweet on this that brought it to my attention.

This guy is researching a propulsion system based on “quatised inertia” that he says would allow a probe to reach the Oort Cloud in a year and Proxima Centauri in 15 years.

That’s a pretty bold statement.  Watch his video if you’re interested.  He says he was given a million dollar grant from DARPA  to study it.

I wonder if they’ll give me ten million to do my research on cold fusion.  My data looks pretty good.

Seriously, he says there’s company putting an experiment into space to test this thing out.  I guess we’ll know if it works.

 

Do You Just Put Quantum in Front of Everything?

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H/T to Hans G. Schantz.

Is the Universe really all just one thing?  Huh?

“If we do find evidence to support this idea, it would dramatically alter the way we conceive of the cosmos. It would mean we could not only see a world in a grain of sand, as the poet William Blake once said, but we could also quite literally see the entire universe in its tiniest pieces and particles. While this might sound like just a different way of going about physics, it is much more than that. I believe that we are on the way to a completely new understanding of how the universe is put together.”

What will this do to Ant Man?

 

 

 

Trans-Planckian Problems with Hawking Radiation in Evaporating Black Holes

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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.

String Theorists – The Snake Oil Salesmen of Theoretical Physics

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This video is a “debate” between a string theorist and two actual physicists (including a Nobel Laureate) over the legitimacy of the multiverse model of reality.  It’s really quite embarrassing.  The string guy sounds like a penny stock broker trying to hawk his wares by touting the “research” that is just around the corner and right at the edge of proving all the ridiculous tenets of his unprovable or inconsistent or even haphazard concepts.

The other two physicists and the moderator all seem exasperated by repeatedly slapping down both the substance of his argument and the sleight of hand attempts to conflate the standard understanding of quantum mechanics with the string theory basis for the multiverse model.  In fact, these physicists provide arguments against both of these things separately and still the string guy keeps on coming up with cutesy analogies for using space-based probes to look for the equivalent of the “ultrasound image of the gestating baby universe in the first microseconds after the Big Bang.”  He even manages to talk about the umbilical cord of this fetal universe.  It’s beyond silly.

If you’re interested in watching a string theorist getting slapped around this video might be of interest to you.  I know I enjoyed it.  String theory seems to be the physics equivalent of communism.  It’s a theory that has never worked but provides its practitioners with a funhouse version of reality that they can bloviate about and if they manage to get put in charge of resources waste them endlessly until they bankrupt their host.

Highly amusing.  I was especially amused to hear that the string guy works at my alma mater.  Ah, the pride is back.

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

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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.