Farsight
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I realise it. Emphatically so.
How do you define action? Momentum times distance. Or energy times time. See post above. Or see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_constant
Ah. I see I've been censored again. Remember I've been working on relativity, I'm in line with Einstein, this had to come in the end. I can step up to the plate and tell you why we observe light quanta, why quantum mechanics is not spooky after all, and why this means teleportation is pseudoscience. But I'm booted into pseudoscience. Sorry, I will not carry on a conversation with this label stuck to my head.
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No problem. Here's an excerpt from the book version. PM me and I'll send you the whole thing or point you at the paper, which is online. The book's better. But note there's a lot of background you need to understand before you can appreciate how it works. You have to understand the photon, and to understand the photon you have to understand other things too.
QUANTUM MECHANICS
Quantum mechanics evolved during the early years of the twentieth century in response to the black body problem' date=' where the energy distribution of light from a cavity oven was charted as a hump rather than increasing continuously with frequency. Max Planck got the ball rolling in 1901, establishing that there was some kind of cutoff that prevented what’s now called the ultraviolet catastrophe. The emission of light seemed to be subject to some kind of discreteness or packeting. The energy was quantized in its relationship to frequency, such that E=hf always applied, where h was Planck's Constant.
But nobody knew why, and progress was slow. Einstein wrote his photoelectric paper in 1905. It was called [i']On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light[47][/i], and said the ability of light to knock electrons out of a metal plate depended on the energy of individual quanta rather than the intensity of the incident beam. This meant that light itself that was quantized, not its emission and absorption, and thus light was particle-like in its nature. But many were not convinced. Planck himself wasn't persuaded until 1911, and then the first world war put everything back. It wasn't until 1918 that Planck won his Nobel prize, followed by Einstein in 1921. Then Arthur Compton proved Einstein right in 1922 via Compton Scattering, and light really did seem to consist of particles rather than waves.
Hence in 1923 when Louis De Broglie proposed that matter is made of waves, it was totally revolutionary. De Broglie's hypothesis made a massive difference to the earlier Bohr model of the atom. Instead of billiard-ball electrons orbiting like planets, you move to an integer number of electron waves round the nucleus, like derailleur gears. Next came Heisenberg and Born with matrix mechanics in 1925, a purely mathematical approach which gave no picture of the underlying phenomena. Then Schrodinger came up with his wave equation in 1926, the name “photon” was coined by Gilbert Lewis, and then De Broglie's hypothesis was confirmed experimentally by Davisson and Germer via electron diffraction. At the same time Dirac was coming onstream with a relativistically invariant form of Schrodinger's wave equation, predicting electron spin and the existence of the positron. It was was a time of great excitement, but De Broglie got sidetracked by pilot waves, Schrodinger got talked out of classical wave mechanics, and everything went pear shaped.
The Solvay Congress of 1927 was perhaps the greatest meeting of great minds ever. There's Einstein centre stage, in the middle of the front row, sitting next to Lorentz on our left. That's Marie Curie next to Lorentz, then Max Planck. Sitting behind Einstein there's Paul Dirac and Arthur Compton, looking like brothers. Just to their right is Louis de Broglie, and on the back row behind them, there's Erwin Schrodinger.
Figure 90 – Solvay congress 1927
The Solvay Congress of 1927 was a great meeting of great minds, but it wasn't a meeting of minds. Because whilst Einstein and Schrodinger and Planck were in one camp, Bohr and Pauli and Heisenberg and Born were in a different camp. The wrong camp won, and the probabilistic Copenhagen Interpretation set in. It comes with the idea of the collapse of the wavefunction, leading to the notion that nothing exists until it is measured, and the fantasy of parallel worlds that we can never see. It also comes with the delusion that nobody can ever understand what's really going on, and that all attempts to grasp a picture of reality are doomed because they're classical and outdated, and can be dismissed out of hand.
That's not what we're seeking. That's no scientific dream. That's a nightmare of belief, of mathematical abstraction, one that has taken us on a random walk for eighty years. But it's over now...
Objects in the quantum world are "actions". This is why we have Planck's constant. When we talk about a photon, we express energy as hf and momentum as hf/c. The h is Planck’s constant of action, being 6.63 x 10-34 Joule-seconds. Action is energy multiplied by time, and also momentum multiplied by distance. The f is of course frequency per second, and the speed of light c is distance divided by time, which converts a measure of energy into a measure of momentum.
What's important is that the photon isn't some "billiard-ball" particle. It isn't an object. It's an action. It's akin to a kick. OK now, try measuring a kick. You know it isn't an object, you don't expect it to have a shape or a surface. Because it's an action. And an action is only an action if there's some motion involved, so you can never pin down the location of a kick. You can only say where you detected it. Ouch! Another action is a shout. There's no specific place where it can be located at some point in time. It's a spherical compression wave in air expanding outwards, and whilst it has a centre, you can't go and stand next to my mouth and say "this is where the shout is". Instead, when you hear it, you say "the shout is here". And then somebody else hears it and says "the shout is here", and it's like it's in two places at once.
That's what the quantum world is like. Everything is like this. Not just the "objects", but the things you detect them with too. That's why things are uncertain. Once you understand that you aren't dealing with objects, it isn't mysterious at all.
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Wrong. There is no mass term in F= dp/dt. The mass of an object is to do with how difficult it is to change its speed. That's why the photon has no mass. You can't change its speed. Because if you do, it isn't a photon any more. Did you even read what I said yesterday? When you look at E²=p²c² + (mc²)² and think about the electron prior to annihilation, imagine it's not moving, whereupon it has no momentum, so E²=(mc²)². After annihilation the electron has been converted into a 511KeV photon moving at c, and a photon has no mass but it does have energy/momentum E=hf or p=hf/c, so by conservation E²=p²c². Note that what we've basically got here is E² = (mc²)² = p²c², and that demonstrates the relationship between momentum and inertial mass. In essence momentum and inertia are the same thing. It depends on who you say is moving.
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Hello, what's this?
It certainly is.You are treading on dangerous ground, it is a simple matter to take experimental results and published data and construct a theory that explains rather than predicts, but getting such work published or debated is impossible. Reviewers refuse to explain why the work is rejected and forum administrators move the work too to forums with demeaning titles knowing that no one of merit will visit them. But, if you read the comments of senior physicists you will find that there is a growing dissatisfaction with the current state of particle and atomic physics and the Standard model, so hopefully change is on the way...
It does rather seem that way.You are, of course correct, in saying that everything must have a cause but that is science, it is not the view of many QT experts who insist that some things are beyond explanation. Do not expect a clean fight; at present mathematicians (not scientists) are in control of the madhouse.
I know how Quantum mechanics works. I can explain it. Radioactive decay is not causeless.My (amateur) view is that QT is a collection of brilliant mathematical shortcuts, we need science to understand why they work...0 -
I think it's good that Georgi has been thinking about particles and gauge, but I also think that this really is the wrong approach:
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String Theory is dead.
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Mass is all to do with how difficult it is to change the speed of something. You know, F=ma. Photons travel at c. You can't change the speed of a photon to c+x or c-x. That's why mass doesn't apply to a photon.
But put that photon in the box bouncing back and forth, and the box has more mass. Because there's more energy in the box, because E=mc², and because you can move the box. It's to do with the symmetry between momentum and inertia.
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It doesn't sound right. I find the question a bit confusing. Are you talking about the gravitational field of a large mass, and asking if the gravitational field of that mass increases if the mass begins to move very quickly?How does special relativity affect a gravitational field? I'd think that because the radius becomes smaller and the masses become bigger, the field is magnified by a factor of gamma^4. Is that right?=Uncool-
Apologies in advance, but I'll presume yes. The "active gravitational mass" of a body is proportional to the energy of that body. A stationary object has its "invariant mass", which has an E=mc² energy equivalence. A moving object also has kinetic energy. So it has more energy, and the total is known as "relativistic mass". As a result, it has more active gravitational mass, and causes more gravity.
But the object would have to be moving very fast before you noticed a difference, and it would have flashed past before you could even tell. You have to get very hypothetical and think in terms of a huge rod of superdense material. If this was shooting past you at an enormous rate, you'd fall towards it faster.
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Obelix: in his last paper, Einstein admitted that perhaps the concept of field was inadequate. The fields go, and you're left with a Unified Theory rather than a Unified Field Theory. It's all in the geometry.
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I haven't told you the details swanson, but I've broken quantum mechanics. It's all classical after all. There's no multiverse. Things don't pop into existence just because you look at them. There is zero chance that a baseball can materialise on the other side of a brick wall. Strong stuff I know, hard to believe, but I'm not fooling...Quantum teleportation is a way of sending the information no matter which way the paper is facing. (and even this addition to the analogy still doesn't explain the whole issue, which is the trouble with analogies. One has to know when they stop being analogies.)
And then when we also "teleport" it to another new location? And another? And another? And that molecule is one of a billion that is me? I'm sorry Skeptic, I think we'll just have to agree to differ on this one.If a molecule is teleported (not yet achieved, but it will be), then the end result is a molecule in a new location that is absolutely identical in every way to the original. This is exactly the same as if we had teleported the molecule, which makes your distinction somewhat meaningless.0 -
No. You're just moving them.Farsight, are you saying that at this very moment I am teleporting my hands across this keyboard?
No, teleportation is where you go from A to C without having to go through B. Here, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleportation where it says Teleportation is the movement of objects from one place to another, more or less instantaneously, without traveling through space. The concept has been widely used in science fiction. It should not be confused with quantum teleportation. Follow the link on quantum teleportation and it says Quantum teleportation or entanglement-assisted teleportation is a quantum protocol by which quantum information can be transmitted utilizing a classical communication channel... Hence my "fax machine" remark.Teleportation evidently has more than one meaning, and your perception - if probably closer to the original concept than anything else here - seems essentialy to be the common travel we undertake at every moment of our lives, in some form or another, though the subject is dismantled for the sake of speed (please correct me if I am wrong).
The teleportation you're talking about isn't actually teleportation. The original object hasn't been sent anywhere at all. It hasn't travelled an inch. I could send the data to three destinations and make multiple copies. Then I could make more multiple copies. Limiting myself to one copy along with the destruction of the original doesn't mean it's been "teleported" to the destination.This manner of doing so would be utterly illogical, as one would have to transmitt the matter, and the information to assemble it. And there is the fact you would lose matter whilst it was journeying (at sub-light speeds). Simply sending the data to recreate an object using matter at the destination would be far more efficient. And it would have the same effect, allowing subjects to 'travel' across vast distances at speed, whilst being in such a state as would allow immense speed. So, again, more than one meaning, more than one perception.
Yes, I suppose so. You could call it "free" energy. It comes from somewhere, but it isn't immediately obvious. For example think of a car that doesn't need fuel. I'm not saying that this is actually doable. Instead I'm saying it' a whole lot more feasible than teleportation. And it's a lot closer to the spirit of a perpetual motion machine, than quantum teleportation is to the spirit of the teleportation of science fiction.Perpetual motion - are you simply referring to renewable energy? Perpetual motion is impossible, as for anything to do work it must come into contact with something else, which will cause it to lose E. Perhaps you could totally isolate a single body from any other, and their gravatational effects in order to preserve a constant E level, but it would be of no use , and would still radiate E.0 -
Thank you Swanson.
I'm sorry Skeptic, but quantum teleportation is just a fancy name for what is in essence is a fax machine. It doesn't really send an atom from A to B.Believe it or not, teleportation is not only possible, but has been achieved. It is a consequence of the quantum physics property of entanglement. So far, the only teleportation that has occurred has been a photon or two, or an atom or two. However, with advancing technology, there is no reason in theory why larger objects cannot be teleported.
Sure, that's why I said there is no free lunch. But think about tidal power. The moon causes tides. We can extract energy from those tides. And the moon's orbit is increasing anyway. OK, it isn't a conventional "over unity" perpetual motion machine, but this simple example is enough to make me say a perpetual motion machine is a darn sight less impossible than teleportation. I reiterate that the energy has to come from somewhere, even if that somewhere is not obvious.The Earth's movement through space is not a perpetual motion machine. It continues because no energy is being removed from its movement. A machine, by definition, does work. This means that energy is extracted. If the Earth's movement was used as a machine (meaning that energy is removed), the movement would slow down, and eventually the Earth would spiral into the sun.0 -
Let's not get confused about mass. Mass is invariant mass. An electron exhibits this property, a photon does not. Annihilation "destroys" mass. That invariant mass has gone.
Yourdadonapogos: charged black holes don't exist. Yes, we can see charge and dramatic magnetic flux whilst a black hole is swallowing matter, but once it's swallowed it, the charge has gone. Think about it. A black hole is black because light cannot escape it. A photon cannot escape a black hole. The photon is the "mediator" of electromagnetic force. If that can't escape a black hole, nor can electromagnetic force. This renders the Resner-Nordstrom concept invalid. The Kerr concept of a rotating black hole with angular momentum is also invalid, but I'd rather not go into it.
Klaynos: yes, black holes exhibit mass. When a black hole swallows a photon, its mass increases. But again it's only by virtue of E=mc². It's because mass and energy are merely two different ways of measuring energy. When you look at E²=p²c² + (mc²)² and think about the electron prior to annihilation, imagine it's not moving, whereupon it has no momentum so E²=(mc²)². After annihilation the electron has been converted into a 511KeV photon moving at c, and a photon has no mass but it does have energy/momentum E=hf or p=hf/c, so by conservation E²=p²c². Note that what we've basically got here is E² = (mc²)² = p²c², and that demonstrates the relationship between momentum and inertial mass. In essence momentum and inertia are the same thing. It depends on who you say is moving. The photon isn't quite pure energy because it's got a polarization and is moving at c. The black hole stops it. It acquires the photon energy/momentum and grows. Note that I say energy/momentum because they are two different measures of the same thing. One is distance based, the other is time based. That's why you divide by c (distance over time) to go from one to the other.
You'll have heard the saying "a black hole has no hair". It doesn't have much else either. That's why the black hole is pure energy.
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1. That which will be done within decades, or 100 years at latest. Examples include teleportation of small items - up to virus size, and invisibility.
Teleportation is impossible. You can contrive a kind of "fax machine", but it isn't genuine teleportation.
2. That which will happen hundreds or thousands of years in the future. Examples include teleportation of large objects, including humans.
Impossible. Honestly, how he gets away with this sort of garbage just beats me. And the wormholes and the time travel. Tosh.
3. That which is totally impossible. Examples include precognition and perpetual motion machines.
Precognition is impossible.
I wouldn't say a perpetual motion machine is impossible. The earth moves perpetually. But there's no free lunch. If you get energy out of it, that energy has to come from somewhere. And think about it. If you could teleport an object, you could repeat it continuously, and use that to drive a perpetual motion machine.
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Yes.Im a bit new to this and ive been asking this question to a few people but I havent had an answer yet. Can any one help?
I can.Im asking if any one can give me a definition for pure energy?
Definitely. Energy is the one thing that you cannot create or destroy. An electron has mass only because it has energy, by virtue of E=mc². If you destroy an electron by annihilating it with a positron, you destroy the mass and the charge, the the result is photons. They have energy.Does it even exist?However a photon is not pure energy. It's fairly close, but the motion and the polarization mean it doesn't quite fit the bill.
What does, is a black hole.
There is something else, something much more common, but people who don't understand this subject will accuse me of speculation or worse, so I'll leave it at that.
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It isn't. Let me repeat a quote from Einstein:Or more mathematically, we assume that space-time is homogeneous.“Mach’s idea finds its full development in the ether of the general theory of relativity. According to this theory the metrical qualities of the continuum of space-time differ in the environment of different points of space-time, and are partly conditioned by the matter existing outside of the territory under consideration. This space-time variability of the reciprocal relations of the standards of space and time, or, perhaps, the recognition of the fact that ‘empty space’ in its physical relation is neither homogeneous nor isotropic....”0 -
Well said Obelix.
Steve, here's another quote from Einstein's Leyden Address:
“Mach’s idea finds its full development in the ether of the general theory of relativity. According to this theory the metrical qualities of the continuum of space-time differ in the environment of different points of space-time, and are partly conditioned by the matter existing outside of the territory under consideration. This space-time variability of the reciprocal relations of the standards of space and time, or, perhaps, the recognition of the fact that ‘empty space’ in its physical relation is neither homogeneous nor isotropic....”Swanson, that's Einstein talking about the ether of General Relativity. Your "piece of granite" jibe was uncalled for.
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Objects in the quantum world are "actions". This is why we have Planck's constant. When we talk about a photon, we express energy as hf and momentum as hf/c. The h is Planck’s constant of action, being 6.63 x 10-34 Joule-seconds. Action is energy multiplied by time, and also momentum multiplied by distance. The f is of course frequency per second, and the speed of light c is distance divided by time, which converts a measure of energy into a measure of momentum.what are some similarities and differences between measuring an object in the quantum world and measuring an object in the macroscopic world? Any input is appreciatedWhat's important is that the photon isn't some "billiard-ball" particle. It isn't an object. It's an action. It's akin to a kick. OK now, try measuring a kick. You know it isn't an object, you don't expect it to have a shape or a surface. Because it's an action. And an action is only an action if there's some motion involved, so you can never pin down the location of a kick. You can only say where you detected it. Ouch! Another action is a shout. There's no specific place where it can be located at some point in time. It's a spherical compression wave in air expanding outwards, and whilst it has a centre, you can't go and stand next to my mouth and say "this is where the shout is". Instead, when you hear it, you say "the shout is here". And then somebody else hears it and says "the shout is here", and it's like it's in two places at once.
That's what the quantum world is like. Once you understand that you aren't dealing with objects, it isn't mysterious at all.
Edit: I should add that everything is like this. Not just the "objects", but the things you detect them with too. That's why things are uncertain.
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Print that out and frame those words. Then in a little while, you can eat them.I am reminded of Farsight with all these meaningless pictures...0 -
Can I make it clear that the idea of parallel worlds is an unproven hypothesis. It has no foundation on fact, and as such should be classed as pseudoscience. And yet it's peddled as something real and given legitimacy by respected physicists. Hanlon also wrote critically in New Scientist about a Lawrence Krauss idea that the life of the universe might be shortened by merely looking at it. I agree with Hanlon that there's some total garbage out there masquerading as science. I say this as the guy who can offer a clear description of what the quantum of quantum mechanics actually is.
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It's on the way. And it's really simple. But the maths isn't. See "Maths of Möbius strip finally solved" from New Scientist magazine 21 July 2007:You know, i don't think we will ever discover a grand unfied theory of physics. I simply don't believe the universe will allow us to simplify all of its complexities so simply.http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19526133.500-maths-of-m%F6bius-strip-finally-solved.html
It took seventy seven years! See Starostin, E.L.,van der Heijden,G.H.M. (2007). The shape of a Möbius strip Nature Materials 6, 563-567. You can find this paper online on Eugene Starostin's home page http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucesest/ and on Gert van der Heijden's home page http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucesgvd/ where he says: "We study the mechanics of inextensible strips with applications to paper crumpling, fabric draping as well as general sheet processing. Geometrically this leads to the study of developable surfaces (surfaces flat in one direction). As part of this work we solved the long-standing problem of finding the shape of a Möbius strip". What's interesting is that Eugene Starostin is a research fellow at UCL in the Department of Civil, Environmental, & Geomatic Engineering, whilst Gert van der Heijden is also a also a research fellow at UCL, in the Centre for Nonlinear Dynamics and its Applications. These guys are not regular mathematicians with long-established track records.
It's coming from left field, and these are exciting times, graviphoton.
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Steve, if you haven't already, you should read Einstein's Leyden Address of 1920. See:
http://www.zionism-israel.com/Albert_Einstein/Albert_Einstein_Ether_Relativity.htm
"Recapitulating, we may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether. According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time... "
The thing to note is that this ether doesn't fill space, nor is it a "field". It is space. And like swanson was saying, it has properties:
One issue here is that the aether was defined in a certain way, and falsified, but there is a continual parade of concepts using the same term.Space has properties, or to be more specific, the vacuum has properties. And yes, it gets investigated — the Casimir force measurements jump immediately to mind...
Unfortunately "ether" is something of a dirty word. Almost taboo. There's been a great deal of research in this area, but it has tended to suffer sneering dismissal or even censorship and suppression from what you'd describe as the "accepted school", who are not in line with Einstein.
But things are now changing. See Focus magazine issue 183 http://www.focusmag.co.uk/viewIssue.asp?id=879 for an article called "The science of nothing" involving research into the vacuum. It talks about aether quite freely. Sorry, I can't find the full text online, this is just a stub: Victorian scientists used the mysterious 'luminiferous aether' to explain how light is propagated through empty space. But now the idea is making a resurgence and could transform medical treatments.
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Antimatter: your science teacher was right. That rotating frame doesn't really "exist", it's just a way of describing an environment subject to an ongoing circular motion. That means the centripetal force doesn't really "exist" either. But the inertia definitely does. Hence people call it an "inertial force". Check this out:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1511/is_n7_v16/ai_17040768
All: gravity is a pseudoforce too. Einstein told us that. Search google to learn more:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=gravity+pseudoforce+einstein&hl=en&start=30&sa=N
All sorts of interesting things pop up:
It's all to do with geometry.
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Now that is mere hypothesis. At best.
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Is it true?
in Classical Physics
Posted
The thing is that you can't touch a reference frame, or smell it, weigh it, et cetera, because it's an abstraction. It isn't a quale like vision, which is emphatically "real" to you. It's just a term associated with what you measure and observe because of your motion. People say "in your reference frame" as if it's a place, or something real, but all it really means is "in your state of motion".
It's simple to understand this when you think of constant linear motion and and an inertial reference frame. It gets a little more complicated when you introduce acceleration, and more complicated again when you introduce gravity. But the same ontological principle applies. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_of_reference