Markus Hanke

A recent problem with that has been the advent of AI - cranks can now produce maths that look, on the surface, genuine and bona-fide, though of course once you look closely at it, it generally falls apart rather quickly. Likewise, one can start with a desired result (eg aforementioned orbit), and get AI to generate maths from a crank idea that on the surface appears to produce said result. All in all, it has become more labour intensive to debunk woo because of this.

I actually have that same issue - wanted to change my display name, but was unable to contact admin (my message wasn’t read). Any suggestions?

I think this was badly formulated on my part, apologies. What I meant was really that, when talking about conservation laws, the energy content of the gravitational field itself must be taken into account. This energy content is unfortunately not by itself a covariant quantity. At the same time, the covariant divergence also introduces curvature-related terms (as you correctly pointed out), which, when taken in isolation, are also not covariant. The only way around this is to introduce a new quantity that accounts for both energy-momentum of sources, and the energy content of gravity itself - it is only that particular combination that can be said to be conserved. This can be done, but I don’t know if this construction is unique.

You won’t ever see one, at least not within the domain of Newtonian and SR physics. There are fundamental reasons why this conservation must hold. In GR however, the situation is a little more subtle, as in regions of substantially curved spacetime there is no simple “law of energy conservation”. It’s possible to still formulate something along these lines, but one has to account for the self-interaction of gravity.

“Rate of time” is a meaningless concept. This is a discussion forum. If you don’t wish to debate your personal theory, then you have no valid reason for being here. While some things certainly can be expressed in terms of a single quantity like eg the gamma factor (not “rate of time”), gravity is an explicit counterexample - you need at least a rank-2 tensor field to correctly capture its dynamics. And since gravity is the dominating factor on large scales, this has a bearing on cosmology too.

You are right, people don’t understand the concept, and most are too shy and reluctant to approach me and ask. At one point in history, there were also some Christian monastic orders who lived based on alms mendicancy, but I don’t think they exist anymore, so people are no longer familiar with the archetype. But just to be clear - we don’t accept money (only food and material necessities), and we never approach people ourselves asking for stuff. We basically just stand there silently, hoping someone will come up to us. We have very strict rules of behaviour and conduct around the whole thing.

Just wanted to throw to other points into this discussion, which I think are pertinent: What do we actually mean when we use the term ‘poverty’; and Wealth is not necessarily the same as well-being. Of course, citizens need to have their basic needs met first; but beyond that, a society that is wealthy on paper may still not enjoy a high level of general well-being. This discussion shouldn’t just revolve around money.

I must admit I haven’t heard of this. Could you briefly explain the basic distinction here?

Exactly.

I think it's worth looking at this phenomenon a little more closely. In general, an antenna's dipole field is mainly made up of terms like \[e^{i(kr-\omega t)}\] But in the near field, there are also extra terms involving powers of \(\frac{1}{kr}\). Thus, the total phase of the field isn't just \(kr-\omega t\). Now, the velocity of the phase fronts (!) in the near field regime next to the antenna is \[v_{\phi}=\frac{\omega}{d\phi/dr}\] which can exceed c. It can, in fact, become arbitrarily large. This is quite a common phenomenon in areas like X-ray spectroscopy, quantum tunneling (see Hartmann effect), radio wave guides etc. It's often called evanescence in the literature. The important point to understand is that the phase velocity of the near field is not the same as the signal velocity of the overall EM field - the superluminal phase velocities are just a mathematical property of the field's phase structure, but you cannot use this to transmit any kind of information, and the Poynting vector (net energy flow) associated with these phases is zero. If you start to modulate the current in the antenna, then this disturbance propagates outward at c, and a new near field configuration is established as a result. This is entirely consistent with SR, which forbids superluminal propagation of causal influences, but not superluminal phase velocities. The situation is analogous to gravity - stationary fields act instantaneously even though they are spatially extended, but changes in gravity propagate at c.

I think this is just meant as a rough schematic. But regardless, top and bottom quarks don’t contribute to ordinary stable nucleons, as all their bound states are highly unstable.

No. Thus has already been explained multiple times now - yes, the experimental setup shows an apparent superluminal speed, but what is measured here is the phase velocity of the entire packet due to anomalous dispersion, not signal velocity of individual waves in a medium. There is no upper limit to phase velocity, and you can’t use this to transmit information. This is a well known phenomenon in the literature (often called “evanescent waves”), and is perfectly compatible with Maxwellian EM, which is Lorentz invariant. See here for example: PubMedOn the apparent superluminality of evanescent waves - PubMedThere have been many recent theoretical and experimental reports on the propagation of light pulses at speeds exceeding the speed of light in vacuum $c$ within media with anomalous dispersion, either

An important topic indeed I would just like to add here that “emergent gravity” is a term from existent literature, I merely used it since it seems to fit with the research program in question. I don’t agree with this. For example, one wouldn’t expect to see emergence in a simple harmonic oscillator; but if you had eg a very large ensemble of double pendulums all somehow influencing one another, it might be a different story. I think the complexity of the systems plays a role, and perhaps also the types of dynamics within it (linear? Non-linear? Chaotic?). Of course these terms need to be made precise. I think we must carefully distinguish weak from strong emergence here. There are no known examples of strong emergence, but plenty of examples of weak emergence - also gravity would fall into this latter category.

Hm, this is also a tough issue…I have never myself been in one of those “Emergency Accomodation” units, but I have heard accounts from homeless people who say that conditions in many of those places are deplorable, to the point that they feel safer sleeping outside. Depends what kind of “monk” you mean, specifically. In my particular case, our entire tradition is based on alms mendicancy, meaning we live exclusively on material donations freely given by others. We do not use, receive or own money in any form. So we stand outside this system. But perhaps this might be interesting in the context of this thread: we keep up the tradition of going on “alms round”, meaning a few times a week we walk into town with our alms bowls in the hope of receiving some form of edibles for our (one and only) daily meal. In my experience here in the West, and purely statistically: out of every 100 people I encounter, 96 simply ignore me and walk past; 2 are curious and ask questions, but don’t give anything; 1 will be actively critical, on rare occasions even hostile; and 1 will actually donate food. The same exercise done in a SE Asian country might yield a very different result. In my experience there are also differences between traditionally catholic and Protestant areas, even within the same country. So, culture does play a role in this question also. PS. Here’s another interesting observation I’ve made - those who are evidently well to do (ie arrive in expensive cars, have fancy clothes, watches etc) almost never give anything. On the other hand, I’ve gotten alms from rough sleepers on occasion. Go figure.

Good question. For one thing, all current systems that I know of have at least some qualifying conditions before a given individual is in fact covered by it. For example, I am based in the EU, and while I can freely move to any other EU country if I feel like it anytime I want, that does NOT mean that I automatically become resident there and get access to the social welfare system in that country - that's linked to certain conditions, which sometimes can be quite difficult to fullfil, even if you're there legally. Right now I am having that precise issue - I am legally resident in a certain EU country, but due to my rather unusual personal circumstances have not managed to gain access to the social security system here, because I don't fit into any of the usual categories of that system. So what I am trying to say is that there will always be people who fall through the cracks for one reason or another. More fundamentally, when it really comes down to it, altruism is a broad spectrum ranging from those who actively work at helping others in need, to those who are in it for themselves only. Most participants of any given system (ie those who elect the decision makers) will be somewhere in between those extremes. To ensure that no one falls through the cracks, the only viable solution would be some form of unconditional income that everyone gets, regardless of their personal circumstance, and without qualifying conditions ("universal basic income"). Even then, there's always going to be a small number who fail to manage themselves regardless. So this is a difficult problem. The only other option I could think of is to physically remove people from circumstances that are deemed detrimental to them, if necessary against their own will - not a good way to go, for obvious reasons that hopefully I don't need to explain. Note that the idea of a UBI has been trialled in places, but there seems to be no widespread political will or broad enough public support to implement such a system. Perhaps also it simply isn't possible to make it work in practice, I don't know (I'm no expert on this).