newts

Judging by your excellent post on the 'how radio works' thread, I presume your expertise lies in electrical engineering. I think your question might be about how atmospheric conditions affect tide heights. That would presumably be the case, but it is not something I know much about. My page is about calculating the basic force behind the tides, whose heights can be calculated hundreds of years into the past and future, based on the position of the moon and sun. The mass of the water is not usually included in the calculations, as the basis of the tide-raising force is the difference in the force of gravity on different parts of the earth; and as Galileo said 'all bodies fall at the same rate', or as modern physicists say, gravitational and inertial mass are equivalent. However once a tidal bulge forms, the gravitational attraction of the bulge itself increases its own size. Because water is only about 1/5.5 times the average density of the earth, this factor is not very large, and would perhaps increase tide heights by about 1/10. But if the seas were made of mercury, this would be a major factor, and if my calculations are right then these mercury tides would be enormous.

It is a lot easier to do maths than to explain to somebody else what one is doing. What I should have said is that I have ignored terms containing m²/I². If m/I was a millionth, then m²/I² would be a trillionth, the moment of inertia of the drop of water is very small compared to the moment of inertia of the whole earth.

I have had difficulty finding webpages that accurately describe the tide-raising force, and that show how to calculate it. So I have now produced my own. http://squishtheory.wordpress.com/the-tides/?preview=true&preview_id=210&preview_nonce=69cba02793 I show how to calculate the tide-raising force, both by differential gravity, and also by the difference between centrifugal forces and gravitational potentials. Once I had figured out exactly what needed to be calculated, the maths was quite straightforward. It would be helpful if anybody who has struggled with the concept of the tides, would like to tell me if my explanations are sufficiently clear; and also if any tidal experts would like to check it for errors.

I was trying to convey the fact that you did identify an error in the maths I posted above. Also that the terms I ignored were ones that contain m² , which are insignificant because the mass of the water drop (m) is such a tiny fraction of the mass of the earth. Thanks for your criticism. I originally thought that nobody would be much interested the details of the maths, but perhaps that is wrong, so if I revise the page I may include some more algebra. Imatfaal's maths may well be sound, but he was under the misapprehension that I was ignoring terms which had I² on the denominator. Probably my fault for not explaining things properly, but it is not a particularly easy calculation, which is probably why not many other webpages deal with it.

Since humans are religious rather than rational creatures, the only way to find out whether something is classy is by experiment. I thought a theory that unifies the electric force with the strong nuclear force, might be classy; but it turns out that it is actually "no theory" and "not even wrong". I have also discovered that "nobody thinks the standard model is the final answer", but that criticising quarks and gluons is still a heresy, because they have been "proved by experiment" and "proved by maths". So I am left wondering whether physicists actually realise that quark theory is too complicated to be correct, but are still unable to tolerate criticism; or whether they are really hoping for a 'new Einstein' to come along and make the standard model even more exciting by adding an extra half dozen super-quarks all stuck together with super-gluons. The walrus and the physicist, They spoke of many things, Of quarks, and branes, and anti-quarks, And nonsense stuff like strings, And of magnetic monopoles, And whether Higgs have wings. The physicist was quite convinced, That time could travel fast, The future was already there, But he could change the past. The walrus was not really sure, That time was really there, But the physicist, he proved the maths, To width of a human hair. The physicist, he also knew, That time curved like a ball. The proof, he said, lay in fact, That Einstein knew it all. The walrus said, that made no sense, And asked him to explain; But he, replied the fault must lie, Within the walrus's brain. Anybody who thinks that poem is classy, can read the rest at http://squishtheory.wordpress.com/

Yes, I can never do maths without including errors, I do not know why I squared the I. m is the mass of the drop of water, so all I have ignored is two terms which include m2 .

I think understanding maths is hard work, I find following other people's maths almost impossible, even when I have calculated the same answer myself. Here is the algebra relating to ½[w (1-mR² /I)]² multiplies out to give ½w ² [(1-2mR² /I)+(mR² /I)² ]. The final term in the brackets is insignificant. ½w ² (1-2mR² /I) times I+mR² , multiplies out to give ½w ² [(I+mR² ) - 2mR² - (2m² R^4/I²)]. Again the final term in the brackets is insignificant. The rest is just addition/subtraction.

Sorry, I did not check last time. It actually reduces to minus [latex]\frac{1}{2}mr^2 \omega^2[/latex], as it is a loss of energy. Is that what you got? I approximated by ignoring all terms including an m^2

Santa left a note to say he could not fill my stockings with any more quantifiable predictions based on my ideas, as my ideas are already overflowing with quantifiable predictions. However he did grant my new year's wish, and has promised that early next year: Cern will apologise for wasting billions of dollars on the search for the imaginary Higgs; will acknowledge that it is a nonsense theory; and will vow to devote all their efforts to measuring the mass of as many particles as possible, as accurately as possible, so that a proper theory of particle physics can be developed. I have added an avatar that shows what a proton might look like. I wondered whether a standard-modelist might post a picture of some of their creatures, as I am still unsure how many legs a quark has, if a gluon has a tail, and whether Higgs have wings?

Yes, it was a few lines of algebra, but I did not include it. If I get round to rewriting the page perhaps I should do? If Saturn had a comparable mass distribution to Jupiter, it would have a bulge of 1/8.8 rather than 1/10.2, so Saturn must on average have a lot more of its mass nearer the centre. It also is puzzling that Saturn and Jupiter should have such different average densities, when they are both thought to be made mostly of hydrogen.

To try to keep the story flowing, i have ommitted most of the algebra; on the basis that anybody sufficiently interested could do it themselves. I calculated for Saturn, with a rotation period of 10.57 hours and a mean density of .687. It should have a bulge 41.3 times that of the earth. If all saturn's mass was at the centre, its bulge would be 1/14, if its mass was uniformly distributed its bulge would be 1/5.6, in fact its bulge is 1/10.2; this suggests that even more of Saturn's mass is situated near the centre than is the case for Jupiter. So perhaps Saturn has more of a solid core than Jupiter.

The idea is that the drop has negligible moment of inertia when at the pole, because the radius there is virtually 0.

When I first read Michel's comment, I thought he was saying the error came from using 6378 km, instead of 6357 km. It is so easy to misinterpret what people are saying, especially when one does not read things carefully. What I did originally was just guess the value of 2/3, though it can easily be obtained by integration. But following your line of thinking, I could amend the article to point out that increasing the polar radius would involve increasing the radius in only 1 dimension, so would only increase it by 1/300; whilst increasing the equatorial radius involves increasing it in 2 dimensions, so is 2/300. What I am doing is working out the energy of the final drop of water making the journey from the pole, so yes. What my calculations show, is that if for instance the top ¼ of the radius was very light, then there would be no need for a heavy core. I would guess that what is considered to be the surface of Jupiter would need to be liquid, otherwise would it not be transparent like the earth’s atmosphere? According to Wikipedia, the variation of the density of the earth is known fairly accurately, but my calculations do not seem to agree with their assumptions. If my calculations are correct, it looks like more of the earth’s density must be nearer the centre than is commonly thought. Actually I am pretty ignorant about physics, other than those things I have figured out for myself. I only did the calculations in the first place, because I wanted find out why Newton got the wrong answer in the Principia. The main reason for publishing the page, was to try to lure people to my blog, to introduce them to my theory of particle physics, but as expected it has not worked.

This is what i calculated: [latex]\frac{4}{3} \pi R^3 < \frac{4}{3} \pi \left( \frac{301R}{300} \right)^3[/latex] but because the new shape is an ellipse not a sphere i only added 2/3 of that. maybe i have not explained what i have done very well, but i do not see how less explanation would make it easier. The equation is the last one under the heading: Accurate calculation of bulge, assuming the mass of the earth to be evenly distributed

Since this is the season of goodwill, I thought I would wish my fellow speculator, and anti-speculators, a happy Christmas; or a happy Higgs-mass, quark-mass, anti-quark-mass, gluon-mass, or whatever you celebrate. Hopefully Santa will fill your stockings full of dark matter, or at least some 'evidence' that it exists.

I certainly got that calculation wrong, I have no idea how I got 11.6. The correct calculation for the numbers i used is 12.3. you seem to have calculated half that value. thanks for finding the error, but 12.3 is certainly right for what i was calculating, which is probably why i did not recheck the value of 11.6. It would not really affect my results anyway, because that bit is just a rough calculation to try to make it easier for people with little knowledge of maths to follow my method.

I am not sure how I could put that on a graph. I did research Jupiter to see if it would be possible to do a useful calculation, but it appears that Jupiter is mostly made from metallic hydrogen, which is liquid in nature. Since the density of metallic hydrogen is not really known, there is no way to calculate whether Jupiter has a rocky core. It would seem likely that somebody who had studied maths and the earth's equatorial bulge, would have come up with a better way to calculate than I did; but it was only after I published my page, that Wikipedia even included a formula for calculating the bulge. So maybe experts are not that keen to share their expertise. Because I have not studied the subject, what I have done is figure out a solution from first principles. You are quoting a formula which I do not know, but I would assume that it takes into account both the centrifugal effect, and the fact that once a bulge has been created by centrifugal forces its size is increased by its own gravity. Newton's value is the same as my final value for an earth of uniform density. Because my method is quite basic, it can be adjusted to take account of the fact that the centre of the earth is denser than the crust; I do not know if that is the case with Newton's method. Following somebody else's maths is never easy, that is why I tried to describe in careful detail what I doing; but even so anybody who really wanted to understand my method would probably need to actually do the calculations themselves. If you read to the end, you will see that the answers I come up with are not far off the measured value.

I have added an extra sentence to try to explain what I am calculating a bit better. You are absolutely right that the ratio does not change; but I am not using ratios, all I am doing is summing up the total centrifugal force, and then balancing that with the extra height of the column.

What I wrote does not make sense, but the value of 11,035 km is correct because I calculate it later using a valid method. Everything you wrote does make sense and is correct, but I do not think it leads directly to a method of calculating the bulge. I need to rethink and rewrite that bit.

Thanks for advice, I have put in an index with page jumps. Errors probably lie in the section titled Calculation of the core bulge. You are welcome to look for them, but you will probably need to read some of the rest to understand my method. I had been thinking that I should have given Jupiter a mention. Here is what I added to my blog. Hopefully it answers some of your questions: Jupiter's equatorial bulge Since Jupiter has irregular features on its surface, the fact that is spins, was presumably noticed soon after the invention of the telescope in 1608. With an equatorial diameter greater by about 1/15 than the polar diameter, its elliptical shape should also have been soon apparent; certainly in the Principia Newton refers to measurements of this. It was of course Newton who had the imagination to correlate the two things, and realise that the elliptical profile resulted from the planet's rotation. The size of an equatorial bulge depends on the inverse of a planet's density, and the square of its rotation speed. The average density of the earth is 4.15 times as great as that of Jupiter. Also Jupiter rotates once in 9.9 hours. (24/9.9)² = 5.87, multiply that by 4.15 = 24.4. Therefore Jupiter should have a bulge 24.4 times that of the earth. The earth's bulge based on centrifugal force alone is 1/578. So if all the mass of Jupiter were situated at the centre, and the surface had negligible mass, then Jupiter's bulge would be 24.4/578 = 1/24 of its radius. The earth's bulge if its mass was uniformly distributed would be 1/230; so if Jupiter's mass was uniformly distributed then its bulge would be 24.4/230 = 1/9.4. The earth's actual bulge is close to 1/300, so if Jupiter had a similar mass distribution to the earth, it would have a bulge of 24.4/300 = 1/12.3. Since Jupiter's actual bulge is 1/15, we must conclude that on average much more of Jupiter's mass is situated close to the centre than is the case for the earth. Using the equation: bulge due to centrifugal forces alone + surface density (3/5 bulge) = bulge, we get 1/24 + surface density (3/5 times 1/15) = 1/15, which solves to give a surface density of 45/72 that of the average density. Since Jupiter's average density is 1.33, the surface density would be about 0.83 that of water; assuming that all the upper crust of Jupiter is of uniform density, and that the remaining dense core of the planet is situated very close to the centre, things which are probably not even approximately true.

My claim to be penitent was meant ironically, certainly I am impenitent and impertinent too. Your assessment is very near the mark, except that I am not displaying knowledge, rather I worked out a solution myself from very basic physics principles. In my book I wrote a chapter pointing out that Newton's achievements far outstripped Galileo's; one example being that Galileo thought, in so far as he was capable of thinking, that the rotation of the earth caused the tides; whilst Newton correctly figured out both problems. Then I started wondering why Newton predicted a bulge of 17 miles instead of the correct value of 13 miles or 21 km. I then did the calculation myself, and came up with 11 km based on centrifugal forces alone, so I searched the web to find my error, but mostly came up with people suffering from the same problem. Eventually I got to Lubos Motl's site where he pointed out that the gravity of the bulge increases its size; but he used a computer program to calculate, and reached no positive conclusions about the mass distribution of the earth from his calculations. My calculation based on a uniform distribution of matter, does actually agree with an expression that has subsequently appeared on Wikipedia, so is almost certainly correct. Wikipedia gives a link to a site which derives it much more succinctly than I do, but it probably only makes sense to people with a high degree of mathematical knowledge. My calculation of how the mass would have to be distributed in order to give the correct value, is probably not completely right, but nobody else on the web has tried to calculate it at all, so at least I made an attempt. On Speculations I was recently accused of being incapable of passing physics 101, and of being no match for a physics PhD, so drawing attention to the fact that I solved a problem that other physicists could not, is part of the propaganda war.

On the contrary, for some Catholics miracles do exist, like for some science-believers time travel exists. It is all a matter of what people choose to believe. Briedenbach did not observe quarks, rather he must have observed something like flashes on a screen, or computer data, and it would be much more useful to have that data rather than somebody's interpretation of it. It sounds like a fascinating experiment, and here is my guess as to what may have happened: Since the lightest exotic particle is a muon with a mass of about 200 electrons, I presume that any electrons of lower energy than that would have bounced off the proton elastically. Since the next lightest particle is a pion at nearly 300 electron-masses, I would assume that an electron with an energy of 280 electron-masses, would produce a muon and then bounce off with the remaining energy of about 80 electron-masses. I also assume that to justify the conclusion of 3 points, the electrons would have been deflected in three separate directions. According to my theory, a proton is a solid sphere of electric charges, so it agrees with the elastic scattering result. As to why an electron with an energy of 190 electron-masses, would scatter of three point particles, as if off a sphere, is hard to fathom, but doubtless somebody has come up with an excuse. When a high energy electron collides inelastically, it is sure to rebound differently, because it must be bouncing off both the proton and the newly created particle. It would be interesting to know the scattering pattern, but I have no way of predicting it. Can anybody explain what physicists think happens in the experiment?

The expression 'the pot calling the kettle black', derives from bygone times when both vessels were heated over open fires, so each got equally blackened by soot. Therefore the expression should only really be used when two people are equally bad. For instance I would not apply it to Obama calling Cameron a 'lightweight', since Obama is substantially more stupid even than the fool Cameron. Nor would I apply it to Gell-Mann calling Heisenberg a 'crank', as Heisenberg did actually do some proper science. I have experimented to see whether people on here are interested in an alternative to quarks, and the result is negative. I suppose I could keep repeating the same experiment, at higher and higher energies, hoping for a different result, like the Higgs-hunters; but I would rather not run the risk of being thought a hypocrite. So I think it is time I tried a new experiment. I got my information from the same interview where Gell-Mann slags off his colleagues. http://discovermagaz..._start:int=0&-C= " How many types of elementary particles are there? We have a thing called the standard model, which is based on about 60 particles, but there may be many more. These are just the ones that have a low energy, so we can detect them. " Maybe the reporter got it wrong, perhaps Gell-Mann did actually say 16? Or maybe the standard model is such a mess that even the people who invented do not really have a clue what is going on? Anyhow it is a bit sly not to include the antiparticles in the final figure. Yes, and you stopped mentioning it after I gave this reply: "Having had a month to think about scattering, I can provide an answer of sorts. My understanding is that if high speed electrons are fired at protons, then they scatter as if off a solid sphere. It is only if the electrons are accelerated to hundreds of times their rest mass, that scattering is inelastic and a pattern is observed. My interpretation is that in high energy collisions, the energy of motion is turned into particles. I would assume that when an electron collides with the surface of a proton, it creates new particles such as muons, so my first guess would be that what is actually happening is that the electron is scattering off the muons. I do not see how anybody can really argue that the electrons are scattering off the internal structure of the proton, unless they can first answer the question as to whether the muons are created before, during, or after the electrons hit the quarks; and nowhere have I seen this question addressed."

uncool, on 2 December 2011 - 09:06 PM, said: You think they are open-minded enough to mindlessly take quark theory without seriously examining it in any way. That seems to demonstrate a contradiction in your views of physicists. If somebody claims to have witnessed a miracle, the Pope does not just shout "God be praised! A miracle!". Instead he sends out learned cardinals to investigate the evidence, and only if, after extensive research, the cardinals find that a miracle has really taken place, will the church and its followers accept it. But to an unbeliever none of that is of any relevance. Obviously I respect scientific data. I checked my particle theory against the masses of exotic particles, I checked my theory of nuclear fusion against nuclear binding energies, and my theory of the neutron would not work if it was not about 2½ electron masses heavier than a proton. But just because physicists have created amazing technology, and done brilliant experiments, does not mean that all their theories are necessarily right. Doubtless quarks and gluons do agree with experiments, that is what they were designed to do. My theory was designed to explain the universe in terms of only one type of ultimate unit, so it does not have the same flexibility. You accuse me of ignoring your comments, but you continually ignore the evidence I present, especially the fact that the accurate measurement of particle masses would test my theory but not quarks. Is that what you mean by pot and kettle, that you feel I am as bad in this regard as you?

In response to what you said here and on the 'final theory' thread, I would say that you are more optimistic about how open-minded physicists are than I am. Cern seems to put most of its resources into hunting mysterious things and trying to prove existing theories right; as in magnetic monopoles, dark matter and especially the Higgs. To me that is a waste of resources, because the result of the experiment is merely going to be to prove what was obvious at the outset, that these things do not exist. On the other hand if they were to do the experiment I suggest, that is accurately measure the masses of particles; then even if it proved my theory wrong, they would still have gathered useful data on which to devise an alternative theory. I knew comparing quarks to phlogiston would annoy people, but the reason it annoys them so much, is that they like to think that physics was wrong in the past, but is now correct. Really they should consider the present state as advancement on the past, but still far from complete. Phlogiston did agree with experiment, but is no longer needed as burning is now known to essentially involve electrons rearranging themselves to be nearer protons, and emitting photons in the process. Similarly my theory replaces gluons with the idea that the energy of nuclear fusion comes from negative and positive charges ending up closer together. People should not rush to declare my theory correct, but anybody genuinely interested in scientific progress ought to want to see it tested, but nobody apparently does. This thread has been very useful in helping me develop my ideas, but not a lot of use in garnering interest in my ideas, in fact nobody other than Uncool has followed the link to my website http://squishtheory.wordpress.com/. You are right that I should improve my theory, and increase my knowledge of physics, but in a sense that is pointless if nobody is going to accept my theory whatever I do. On BBC science programs, nobody expresses much dissatisfaction with particle physics. On the other hand astrophysicists do say that they do not like dark matter, and that they hope it goes away. So I think my next experiment should be to try publicising my theory of gravity, to discover whether that is really the case, or whether physicists are actually as attached to dark matter as they are to quarks and gluons.