Markus Hanke

Neurophysiology is definitely not my area of expertise, but it seems evident that consciousness isn’t localisable to any specific area in the brain; it’s a global phenomenon. Of course, there will be some local areas the proper functioning of which is a prerequisite for having ordinary consciousness; but that’s not the same thing. If you were to take that old radio in your kitchen, open it, and remove any random piece from its main board, then chances are there won’t be any more music playing - but that does not imply that that random piece was what generated the music. How exactly is consciousness a “frequency”? Frequency of what?

First of all, YouTube videos are not valid sources of scientific information - not even if the information given happens to be correct. So I did some quick research on the current state of affairs in the field (this isn’t my area of expertise), and here’s a good summary: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.06229.pdf The upshot is that the current indications for there being some violation of LU come in at a statistical significance of, on average, around \(4 \sigma\), and are seen only for the case of b-quark decays. Other quark decay processes are perfectly in line with SM predictions. This is not sufficient evidence yet to call a new discovery, since the statistical significance level is not high enough. At the very least this will require more such experiments in order to acquire a larger data set. All this being said, there are indeed tantalising hints that some new physics may perhaps be going on, pending further investigation. However, should this turn out to be the case, then this would in no way invalidate the Standard Model, which quite evidently works very well - it would simply require an extension to the model which provides a suitable mechanism to explain these findings. Note also that it is just as possible that these findings are not due to new physics at all, but could arise from our mathematical difficulties in treating QCD non-perturbatively. On a very high level, let me reiterate that we have known for a long time already that the SM in its current form is in all likelihood merely an effective field theory that provides an approximation to something more fundamental. As such no physicist in their right mind would expect the current SM to be the final word on the matter of particle physics. However, when such a more fundamental model is found, this still will not mean that SM is abandoned; after all, we know it works extremely well within the energy levels we can currently probe. This is similar to the situation in classical mechanics - Newtonian physics is still successfully used (and taught in schools), even though it’s just a low-energy low-velocity approximation.

As others here have said. I can generally follow the main ideas and steps of a paper within my own area of “expertise” (I’m self-taught and haven’t formally studied physics), being General Relativity; which does not necessarily imply that I understand every single thing and detail (I don’t), but generally speaking that isn’t needed in order to grasp the general ideas and conclusions. Nonetheless, on occasion there will be publications which I can only follow with great difficulty - in the world of modern physics, one can spend many years specialising and studying a specific area, and yet not know everything there is to know about it. It is not rare that I come across GR-related things which I have never heard of before. In either case, it will never be as easy as reading the newspaper, the subject matter just requires deeper thought, knowledge and attention. Once I leave my area of expertise and interest though I get lost pretty quickly - for example, most papers on quantum field theory and the Standard Model tend to be beyond me, since I’m not sufficiently knowledgeable about the intricate details, methodologies, and maths of those areas.

Well ok, point taken I guess it’s ultimately just a convention of terminology anyway.

This is not true, because it is possible to construct topologies that are unbounded in space and time, yet finite in extent - analogous to (e.g.) the surface of a sphere, which has no boundary, but nonetheless a finite and well defined surface area. The Hartle-Hawking state (a valid solution to the Wheeler-deWitt equation) is one such example for the universe as a whole; it describes a spacetime that is finite in temporal (and possibly spatial) terms, and yet has no boundaries in either space nor time. Even the reverse is possible - one can conceive geometric constructs that have a finite and well-defined boundary in all spatial directions, and at the same time infinite surface area enclosing zero volume, such as the Sierpinski cube. The global geometry and topology of the universe is a question that is nowhere near as straightforward as you seem to think it is, so be careful about making claims such as the above.

The notion of ‘gravitational potential’ can be meaningful defined only in spacetimes which are (among other requirements) stationary, i.e. in spacetimes that, in mathematically precise terms, admit a time-like Killing vector field. The universe in its entirety is approximately described by an FLRW spacetime, which does not fulfil this crucial condition. So the concept of ‘gravitational potential of the universe’ is meaningless, which is why you weren’t able to find anything on this topic.

Many results and papers first appear on freely accessible pre-print servers such as arXiv before they go to peer-review journals, so the short answer is yes. The problem though is that such papers are almost always very technical in nature, so unless they have the requisite background knowledge it is very unlikely that a random member of the general public would understand such articles. It’s usually only later that easier to understand corollaries of these findings appear in various pop-sci publications aimed at the general public.

On the most abstract level (I have little interest in specific setups tbh) I can tell you for a fact that electromagnetism locally conserves energy-momentum, just like any other interaction in nature: \[\triangledown \cdot T_{(EM)} =0\] As such, it is not possible to get “free energy” from a magnetic field on fundamental grounds, irrespective of how the apparatus functions in detail. At the very least you would need to invest the same amount of energy as you need to propel the spacecraft, into making the magnets in the first place.

The is what the peer review process is there for. If someone arrives at a new result that is potentially relevant to science, it is published in a peer review journal - other scientists who work in the area will then review that paper (methodology, results, interpretation etc). If the results seem valid, and important enough, someone will eventually want to repeat the experiment. So what protects against falsification of experimental results is that these results are made public, and that they must be repeatable and thus independently verifiable - simply meaning if someone else performs a similar experiment, they should obtain the same results.

I just gave you a link for this, did you even look at it? Lorentz invariance automatically implies the invariance of c. The solutions to the inhomogeneous wave equations are retarded Lorenz potentials - which physically represent spherical wave fronts propagating away (future-oriented) from the source, just as expected. I’ll skip typesetting this here, you can Google it if you want to see the actual expression. The solution to the homogenous equations is any function f of the form \[\vec{E} =f( \omega t-\vec{k} \cdot \vec{r})\] and similarly for the B field. This can literally be any function at all, so long as it is smooth and differentiable within the relevant domain. It doesn’t even need to be sinusoidal. So the wave equation is only a very general constraint on what form the wave function can have, and not all of its solutions are plane waves. Of course there are plane wave solutions (both in 1D and in 3D), and these prove very useful for many applications. What do you mean by “definition of the fields”? The gamma factor is only meaningful as a relation between frames, i.e. it appears in how quantities transform. Locally within the same frame it is always unity. This is inconsistent with the Standard Model. So you see, nothing in physics stands in isolation - if you radically redefine just one aspect, you will find that it is no longer consistent with everything else we already know.

You didn’t respond to my request for clarification as to what the scenario you are talking about actually is, so no, I didn’t know. But it doesn’t matter, because if we are not in a flat spacetime then this isn’t a Special Relativistic scenario, and you need to use the usual General Relativistic relations between frames. Either way, it is no problem to do this. But then, why do you keep talking about Lorentz transformations? As I have pointed out, we already know the source of the Pioneer anomaly, and it doesn’t have anything to do with gravity or new physics.

To be honest, I did not consider any specific scenario (but the author of the paper I linked earlier did), I was thinking only about general principles with this. So I don’t have any specifics to offer. What I will say though is that, in order to bring one of the particles to rest at a different gravitational potential wrt to the other one, some form of acceleration needs to be applied, which is (assuming constant a) already locally equivalent to a uniform gravitational field. So even before the final state is achieved, the question of what effect gravity has here already arises. So do you mean to say that subjecting an (already) entangled system to the influence of gravity will break the entanglement? Of course entanglement means non-separability of the wave function, so perhaps my earlier comment was misleading - I did not mean that the two parts of the system evolve separately (in that they have separate propagators), only that the 2-particle system as a whole must evolve in a different way than the one that isn’t subject to gravity. Simply on account of them not sharing the same notion of time. I think I didn’t express this very well. I am not clear though what this would really mean mathematically, since the spatiotemporal embedding of such a system would span a region of spacetime that is now no longer necessarily Minkowskian. This should have an impact on the wave function itself (does the tensor product reference the metric?), as well as on its propagator (how to formulate this, if time is a local notion?).

The problem is that both the stone and the mountain are classical objects and as such share the same fundamental properties. The same is not true, however, for the chair I am sitting on and the elementary particles of which it is ultimately composed - you can’t describe the properties and interactions of these particles with Newtonian mechanics, and conversely the chair as a whole will not exhibit any quantum effects. So these are distinct categories of objects, even though there is a definite relationship between them.

I’m struggling to follow you on this one - if you do this, then the system is no longer entangled. It is precisely the non-separability of the wave function that is the essence of what ‘entanglement’ means. I think this is a matter of degrees, i.e. it depends on what ‘significant’ means for a specific scenario. In principle, I would argue the following: let’s say you prepare two identical entanglement pairs, both of which consisting of two entangled particles each. Keep one of these entangled pairs in a locally inertial frame, simply for reference purposes. For the other pair, place the system such that there is a gravitational gradient present between the two particles that make up the entanglement pair, i.e. there is relative acceleration between their geodesic world lines as they age into the future. Both of these pairs will now have wave functions that are of the same form and are both non-separable; however, the evolution of these wave functions must differ, because in the presence of gravity the propagator is a purely local operator, so the two parts of the non-separable wave function subject to gravity will evolve differently, as compared to the reference pair that is not subject to gravity. So clearly, gravity must have some effect on the entanglement relationship. But of course I agree with you in that for most real-world scenarios such effects should be entirely negligible - unless you are in a spacetime with extreme tidal gravity, such as near the event horizon of a microscopic black hole.

Ok, but the problem then is that such a universe would not permit any (tidal) gravity in the vacuum outside of massive bodies. This is contrary to both observational evidence in the real world, as well as Maxwell’s equations. All of these, and many many more. But you are getting this backwards, because, since you are the one proposing a new idea, it is up to you to show experimental evidence that there exists electromagnetic radiation that propagates at v > c. This is simply not true. The EM wave equation follows directly from Maxwell’s equations, and its solutions are precisely the kind of wave forms we find in the real world. The entire field of electrical engineering relies on this, and it evidently works very well - in everything from aircraft avionics to microwave ovens. There is really only one field, the electromagnetic field \(F_{\mu \nu}\); the E and B fields are merely observer-dependent aspects of this, and thus make up the various components of the field tensor. When you look at how these fields transform, you will see that they already contain the gamma factor, so this is nothing new. What is this? You are essentially giving us the finger here, by saying that you are not prepared to look at any evidence that might contradict what you believe. That’s not how science is done.

I have no idea what you mean by this, you need to explain some more. A Lorentz transformation is a relationship between inertial frames; if one of the frames is not inertial, or if spacetime in between the frames isn’t flat, then the relationship will be more complicated. Note also that Special Relativity encompasses not just inertial frames, but any situation so long as the respective region of spacetime is approximately flat. The Pioneer “anomaly” has nothing to do with relativity, it’s simply due to uneven heat loss from the probe. There is no mystery here. What curve?

I think this is an interesting question, and the answer is certainly not obvious. I would expect that, if you were to place one part of an entangled system into a different gravitational potential, then this should have a measurable effect on the entanglement relationship, simple because the two parts of the system no longer evolve in time in the same way, meaning something would need to change in the overall wave function describing that pair. At the same time though I don’t see how this could possibly affect the fundamental non-separability of that wave function, so some notion of entanglement should persist. I have no idea what this would really mean in physical terms, though. I did a Google search, but this was the only thing I could find on the subject. The experiment hasn’t been performed yet, but clearly the author also expects there to be an observable effect of some kind (he talks about “entanglement degradation”). No, because a) entanglement is usually discussed on the premise of the entire system being in the same inertial frame, and b) even if gravity does have an effect, there would still be entanglement, though aspects of it might be subtle different.

Time dilation - both the kinematic and gravitational kinds - is arguably the single most extensively tested phenomenon in the history of physics, and is being directly utilised/accounted for in a large number of engineering applications, some of which are common household items which we all use. Also, some features of our everyday world are direct results of special relativity, such as the colour of some metals for example. Given this, why do you think the idea is “indefensible”? To me, that’s kind of like saying that the idea that the best shape for car tyres is “round”, is indefensible. It doesn’t make any sense to me to claim such a thing.

If you have two inertial frames in spacetime with non-zero relative velocity between them, then these frames will be related via a hyperbolic rotation in spacetime. That’s the meaning of Lorentz transformations - they are rotations (and boosts) in spacetime. The hyperbolic angle of that rotation is \[\varphi =arctanh\left(\frac{v}{c}\right)\] which means that the gamma factor is \[\gamma=cosh \varphi \] So the actual meaning of the gamma factor is that it is an expression of the hyperbolic rotation angle by which the Lorentz frames are related. It is thus fundamentally a geometric entity.

Thanks! I do have a copy of Griffiths “Introduction to Quantum Mechanics” here, he goes through the maths in quite some detail. I’d look at the SE as an eigenvalue equation for the system’s Hamiltonian though, not so much as an equation of motion.

Indeed, and that’s the crux - there simply is no meaningful notion of the “shape” of the atom until such time when it is interacted with in some way. Yes, this makes sense now, and it is essentially what I was thinking about in my last post. Also, it’s important to remember that the wave function is a probability density distribution, so it needs to be volume-integrated first in order to become a probability distribution; and for an isolated atom in free space, one is free to choose the orientation of the volume form in whatever way one wants. Indeed.

This is as interesting as it is confusing to me - maybe I should just stick to my good old simple GR, atomic physics is too complicated Let’s take the normalised wave function of the H atom for example: \[\Psi _{nlm}( r,\theta ,\phi ) =\sqrt{\left(\frac{2}{na}\right)^{3}\frac{( n-l-1) !}{2n[ n+l) !]^{3}}} e^{-\frac{r}{na}}\left(\frac{2r}{na}\right)^{l}\left[ L^{2l+1}_{n-l-1}\frac{2r}{na}\right] Y^{m}_{l}( \theta ,\phi )\] wherein L are the associated Laguerre polynomials, and Y are the spherical harmonics, as usual. When you plot this function for some possible choices of n,l,m (see e.g. Griffiths) then it is pretty obvious that only \(\Psi_{100}\) and \(\Psi_{200}\) are actually spherically symmetric. So when you say that the “shape of the atom” is spherically symmetric, then you can’t mean this analytic wave function. But as you quite rightly say, obtaining (and plotting) this wave function implicitly involves a specific choice of coordinate system; since there are no preferred coordinate choices in the real world, and since the components of the angular momentum and spin vectors don’t commute, the overall atom cannot have any specific shape until we effectively impose a coordinate system by measuring any which one of the angular momentum components as well as the total angular momentum (since each of the vector components commutes with the magnitude of the vector). So to make a long story short, the atom exists in a linear superposition of all possible “shapes” (which would add up to something that is approximately spherical) until we perform a suitable measurement on it that establishes a definite orientation in space - at which point the wave function resolves into a definite shape as in the plots above, which won’t in general be spherical. Is this the right way to look at it? I can’t make the conceptual connection at the moment, so help needed here please.

Fair enough. The point though was to contrast it against “subatomic particles” as mentioned in the OP, which clearly this isn’t. This really isn’t my area of expertise (I’m much more of a relativity guy), but I question if this is actually true. Assuming for a minute that this is a non-relativistic situation, the solutions to Schroedinger’s equation for a 3D potential well with electrons that themselves interact electromagnetically would need to involve products of associated Laguerre polynomials and spherical harmonics, which in the general case don’t yield anything like a spherical distribution. The issue I have is that the analytic expression for this can be derived only for hydrogen, and even then only \(\Psi_{100}\) appears to be spherically symmetric - so how do we know that the distribution is spherically symmetric for something as complicated as strontium? I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m just trying to understand how you know this.

That’s because once you fix r to any exact value, the associated momentum of the particle in question becomes infinite, because this isn’t a classical system. So attempting to define the field energy in this way is meaningless, which is why it’s not done that way in QFT. You can’t calculate the vacuum energy of a quantum field simply by integrating over a volume, as you would in classical field theory. It’s very much more complicated than that, I’m afraid.

I haven’t read the book myself, but it seems obvious to me that this is a figure of speech; it would never occur to me to grant this title the status of a scientific claim, most especially not since this isn’t a technical text but a pop-sci presentation. I would assume that the actual content of the book makes this abundantly clear. It’s kind of like seeing an ad for the movie “The China Syndrome”, and then complaining that the storyline has nothing to do with either China nor any syndroms. Pretty silly, if you ask me. Pop-sci is full of such figures of speech - they talk about “black holes” (though they are neither black nor are they holes), “wormholes” (no worms involved), “vacuum” (though it’s not empty), “Big Bang” (though it was neither big nor noisy), and any number of other such terms. We could replace all these with more accurate technical terms, but then the general public wouldn’t know what it is we are on about any longer. The other thing of course is that this is a commercial publication, so it needs to sell and make money, otherwise you have a bunch of really unhappy people (not just the author!). As such, marketing is an important consideration, and “A Universe from Nothing” piques people’s interests a lot more than “A Universe From The Hartle-Hawking State, Being A Solution To The Wheeler-deWitt Equation” (the technically correct version, because “something” is just as wrong!) would do. It simply sells better, and that matters if you are in a market economy and need to at the very least recoup the costs of printing and distribution, and hopefully have some left over afterwards. I don’t consider this a malicious intent, or attempt at intentional deception in any way. It’s simply an attempt to capture the target audience’s attention. My question to you would be why this bothers you so much? This seems perfectly harmless to me, especially once you actually read the contents of the book, which, I assume, make it clear what it is the author intents to present.