The last post for ‘braney’ superstring theory…
Dr Lisa Randall’s string theory fantasy/propaganda in books and interviews (based on her popularity on arXiv.org, which deleted my factual paper after 2 minutes in 2002) is brilliant comedy.
Let’s hope that when the string theory band falls off its over-funded wagon, she continues to make people cry with laughter.
The physics world will be a horribly sad place without stringy theory. The clowns of the world are those who bring in the laughter, and God knows how valuable that laughter is. Keep overdoing that lipstick!
Just to show I’m not sexist, here’s another female physicist: http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/
Caroline Thompson's page says:
'This site is about what is wrong with Fundamental Physics. It started with the discovery that we have been misled. We have been told that experiments agree with all the predictions of quantum theory, including those that involve the impossible - the Bell test experiments, that are supposed to show totally incomprehensible effects of separated particles on each other. I have looked at the evidence. The "loopholes" that they know are present are large enough to allow for perfectly straightforward explanations, with no sign of "non-locality". I am led to suggest that perhaps there is other currently-accepted "evidence" for both quantum theory and Einstein's relativity theories that needs re-investigation. (There is! See Forgotten History .) I am not talking of "re-interpretation", but of recognising that if we want to understand nature, not just produce "predictions", the first step is to re-assess the facts, reject falsehoods.'
'New! Additions, 1999 onwards. Very Latest:
12:10:05: Now might be a good time to join in the battle in wikipedia to get a fair deal for local realism in the pages Bell's Theorem, Bell Test Experiments and related pages. I notice that a Google search on "Bell test loopholes" give quite a bit of prominence to a certain C H Thompson and to wikipedia. Unsurprisingly, other sites easily beat wiki on Bell's Theorem.
Added link to Bibhas De in People and Places . He gives a brilliant satirical criticism of current physics. Replacement ideas include a photon with mass, and other concepts I dispute. His teacher was Hannes Alfven ... perhaps they both could have learned from my Phi-Wave-Aether.
'I'm still working on revisions to my paper "Homodyne detection and parametric down-conversion: a classical approach applied to proposed “loophole-free” Bell tests", intending now to submit to J Opt B. Parts of my "classical approach" have turned out (thankfully) to be already well known.
'The Chaotic Ball and the Bell test loopholes: For newcomers.
'Wikipedia pages on Bell tests: I've added some pages of my own to this online encyclopaedia.
'My Papers (and a few others), with notes.
'Progress Report on Realism versus Quantum Weirdness (written July 31, 2000).
'Challenges to Quantum Optics, inspired by EPR and other "entanglement" experiments. These cover the nature of light, atomic cascades and low-intensity "parametric down-conversion" (PDC).
'Suggestions for experiments: Some test fundamental ideas, others check realist explanations.
'Experiments in the headlines: Realist ideas on experiments that have hit the headlines -- primarily those claiming quantum entanglement. Which "loopholes" are relevant? What facts do we need before we can explain them? Most of my requests for additional data etc have gone unanswered.
'Letters to magazines: I've taken to writing to New Scientist, Physics World and such like, trying to persuade them to change their tone. Why do they have to present material as if quantum theory were universally accepted? It is not. Why don't you write too? One success! 'Physics World, November 2001, p17
'Comments on my work: This file covers only 1998-9. It's just to remind me that I'm not on my own.
'The Aether, Relativity, Cosmology: For those more interested in the structure of the universe than quantum magic. Should we be thinking in terms an all-pervading aether whose oscillations of state are responsible for everything? Could the universe be in a steady state after all, as was commonly assumed before anyone heard of a cosmological red shift? See my ideas for the basis of a Theory of Everything, the latest version of which (October 2004) is in "The Phi-Wave Aether: a Wave Theory of Everything" (.pdf (two-column compact format) or HTML)
'Forgotten History: The Einstein-Miller aether drift scandal, Millikan's condemnation of Einstein's photon hypothesis, and other interesting facts the establishment seems to have forgotten! Additions welcome.
'Book list: Just a few ideas, gleaned from my friends. If you have ideas for additions please let me know.
'FAQ: a small beginning, answering a few questions on light, the aether, "phi-waves" and forces.
'Who am I?
'People and Places: Links to other sites (not complete!)
'Discusson groups I belong to
'Contact me '
posted by nige @ 2:26 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
It is sad that female physicists like Caroline H. Thompson (see http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/ ) are being effectively suppressed by other female physicists who work in different branches like string theory. She writes at http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/CHT2000.htm :
"I was born in England in 1943. I was quiet and studious as a child, and remained so until I entered an area of controversial physics, at age 50. I remain studious, but am not by any means so quiet! I have acquired a mission, to tell the world the hard facts about the “EPR” experiments that are being reported as showing that the world we live in obeys weird quantum laws: “entangled” particles are supposed to be able to influence each other instantaneously however far apart they are. The experiments have been misinterpreted. The theory is crazy, but there is no sign that the universe is.
"To return to my story, the 1939-45 war meant the our family at first had no permanent home, with my father, an air-line pilot, moving from one RAF base to another and then, for a year or more, out to Baghdad. We lived in Cairo for some time, and my elder sister and I were sent to a French-speaking school. I do not remember having managed to learn any French (later I did learn some, enabling me to read Alain Aspect’s PhD thesis, a landmark in my self-appointed challenge). I became exceedingly introverted, too shy to ask questions. I learned to work things out for myself.
"Back in England, I had a very conventional education, always gaining high grades at school, loved by the teachers, musical, a nature lover, but with few friends. I won a scholarship to Cambridge to read mathematics, but here was not so successful. I could no longer score 90% in tests! I was up against boys for the first time in my life, and they had been taught more than me. Still, I persevered and later (much later, in 1992 or so) discovered that my Director of Studies had thought highly of me, saying that she considered me capable of original thought. I gained a 2-1, and enough of an introduction to the ideas of mathematical physics to know that there was something odd going on. Neither relativity nor quantum theory seemed reasonable."
It is funny that another freethinking "crackpot" also had a father in the RAF. The one I'm thinking of now only escaped a Japanese POW camp in 1942 by a whisker... He also had a scholarship to Cambridge, but did electronic engineering, and he writes:
"I entered the computer industry when I joined Ferranti (now ICL) in West Gorton, Manchester, in 1959. I worked on the SIRIUS computer. When the memory was increased from 1,000 words to a maximum of 10,000 words in increments of 3,000 by the addition of three free-standing cabinets, there was trouble when the logic signals from the central processor to free-standing cabinets were all crowded together in a cableform 3 yards long. ... Sirius was the first transistorised machine, and mutual inductance would not have been significant in previous thermionic valve machines...
"In 1964 I went to Motorola to research into the problem of interconnecting very fast (1 ns) logic gates ... we delivered a working partially populated prototype high speed memory of 64 words, 8 bits/word, 20 ns access time. ... I developed theories to use in my work, which are outlined in my IEEE Dec 1967 article (EC-16, n6) ... In late 1975, Dr David Walton became acquainted ... I said that a high capacitance capacitor was merely a low capacitance capacitor with more added. Walton then suggested a capacitor was a transmission line. Malcolm Davidson ... said that an RC waveform [Maxwell's continuous "extra current" for the capacitor, the only original insight Maxwell made to EM] should be ... built up from little steps, illustrating the validity of the transmission line model for a capacitor [charging/discharging]. (This model was later published in Wireless World in Dec 78.)"
- Ivor Catt, "Electromagnetic Theory Volume 2", St Albans, 1980, pp207-15.
The problem for everyone is the paradox of being refrained enough to get publicity without offending the powerful has-been big-mouths who like Saddam still think they control the universe by their "big branes". Personally, I'm a failure at this. People are better consulting Caroline and Ivor.
Just to round off this attack, I quote R.S. Westfall (author of the major Newton biography, "Never at rest" published by Cambridge University Press in 1980):
"The forces of attraction and repulsion between particles of matter, including gravitational attraction ... were primarily the offspring of alchemical active principles."
- R.S. Westfall, "The Role of Alchemy in Newton's Career", pp 189-232 of B. Righini and W.R. Shea (eds.), "Reason Experiment and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution", Science History Publications, New York, 1975.
Now Newton wrote more horses*** on alchemy than anything else it seems, 650,000 words of manuscripts like "Alchemical writers" (a list of 113 alchemists and their stuff), "De Scriptoribus" (a bibliography of 80 alchemical books", and Newton's own experiments are described in his unpublished manuscripts "Alchemical propositions", "Clavis", "Praxis", "Vegetation of Metals", and the weird "Essay on the Preparation of Star Reguluses".
Newton chose the term "force" from the love/hate alchemical theory of magnetism. After his alchemical experiment of Feb 1696, Newton wrote in "Praxis" that he had discovered the "philosopher's stone" and had created mercury out of nothing, "multiplying" metallic mercury by a factor of four by using ammonium chloride!
See also B.J.T. Dobbs, "The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy", C.U.P., 1975, and K. Figala, "Newton as Alchemist", in History of Science, v15, 1977, pp 102-37.
Now please will someone email me to tell me that a physicist who writes some nonsense is always rightly ignored and suppressed for other beneficial work. Ta!
Here's a nice bit of official "heresy" from M.E. Rose, in his book "Relativistic Electron Theory" published by John Wiley in NY and London, 1961. (At that time, Rose was chief physicist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where Glasstone went in retirement.)
Rose writes in p76: "Although the prediction of the positron is certainly a brilliant success of the Dirac theory, some rather formidable questions still arose. With a completely filled 'negative energy sea' [ether] the complete theory (hole theory) can no longer be a single-particle theory.
"The treatment of the problems of electrodynamics is seriously complicated by the requisite elaborate structure of the vacuum. The filled negative energy states need produce no observable electric field. However, if an external field is present the shift in the negative energy states produces a polarisation of the vacuum and, according to the [wrong] theory, this polarisation is infinite. In a similar way, it can be shown that an electron acquires infinite inertia (self-energy) by the coupling with the electromagnetic field which permits emission and absorption of virtual quanta."
He then goes on to explain how J. Schwinger (Phys. Rev. v74, 1948, p1439 and v75, 1949, p651) and S. Tomonaga (Progress in Theoretical Physics, Kyoto, v1, 1946, p27) managed to fiddle [renormalise] the calculations to get the right answers to fit experiment neatly!
Rose summarises on the same page: "No rigorous justification for such a cut-off [renormalisation] has yet been proposed. All this means that the present theory of electrons and fields is not complete. This is, of course, a characteristic of many theories in physics. The particles - the electron and its antiparticle the positron, or positive and negative mu mesons - are treated as "bare" particles."
Now I've explained on Motl's blog that the reality is that Pauli's exclusion principle keeps the electron core from interacting with the infinite number of virtual charges in the ether! What happens is that the core "pairs up" with a single virtual particle to produce the first Feynman coupling correction (the 1948 Schwinger calculation).
Am I really the only person who can see the blindingly obvious? I doubt it. The situation reminds me of the "Planet of the Monkeys" 1968 film. Go in search of truth, but don't expect the result to be applauded by the audience. Rather, expect them to see you as an irritating embarrassment or eccentric nutter. What about all the rich "science fiction" authors? A better film analogy is the 1950 British dry-humour, the "Man in the White Coat". This guy comes up with a fabric invention that is so good it stays clean and puts a lot of washer-women out of work, who nearly murder him for losing them their jobs. Luckily for him, his fabric is unstable and falls apart just in time...
Another nice tale comes from Eddington the aether and pro-Einstein physicist. Eddington somewhere writes this scientific detective yarn where this "mystery footprint" needs identification. After the guy spends a lifetime checking everyone in the world without success, he discovers it was actually his own footprint after all... slightly disappointing!
Copy of a new post to Dr Peter Woit's blog:
QM and GR: the "stupid" physicist may be at an advantage in spending more time on this stuff, when brighter students are getting stuck into the delights of renormalised QED and ST.
"Dissident", are you sure that QM and GR need modification? Could be the maths is fine but GR can't be applied to cosmology (universe) because there is a gravity mechanism within the universe. This keeps GR maths intact, and perhaps makes the maths more clear physically.
As for QM and QFT, we know the fabric of space is filled with virtual particles. Normally particles like gas molecules can't carry transverse waves, only a solid normally allows transverse waves. But suppose the virtual particles have a spin, like real ones? Then you get transverse waves. Dr John Baez has some ideas on this for quantum gravity here http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/loops05/ which seem to account for the light speed of gravity while preserving a pressure mechanism?
My understanding is that this is reinventing the wheel, since Maxwell's 1873 Treatise section 822-3:
"The ... action of magnetism on polarised light [discovered by Faraday not Maxwell] leads ... to the conclusion that in a medium ... is something belonging to the mathematical class as an angular velocity ... This ... cannot be that of any portion of the medium of sensible dimensions rotating as a whole. We must therefore conceive the rotation to be that of very small portions of the medium, each rotating on its own axis... The displacements of the medium, during the propagation of light, will produce a disturbance of the vortices ... We shall therefore assume that the variation of vortices caused by the displacement of the medium is subject to the same conditions which Helmholtz, in his great memoir on Vortex-motion, has shewn to regulate the variation of the vortices of a perfect fluid."
Am I alone in thinking we are going round in circles here?
Post a Comment
<< Home