Eise

Oh no, not again!

Right, that confirms my intuition. It is time to publish 'important' results, otherwise we have built the LHC only for the Higgs. Thanks for your explanations.

At least in the news article at CERN itself this is not mentioned.

That touches a point I was wondering about again when I read this yesterday. There are several mesons that are a combination of a quark and its anti-quark. And as another example, there seems to be a (short-lived of course) system like 'positronium'. How must I imagine this? Are most of these states excited states? And when in the ground state, the particles have the biggest chance to annihilate? But especially those mesons astonish me. They interact via colour force, the strongest force. Shouldn't these quarks annihilate immediately? Yes, and the reason that we obviously had an excess of matter was the quandary that worried physicists and cosmologists. Hmmm. I wouldn't say 'yes' on QuantumT's questions. See my positronium example, it is not made up of quarks. The most important is that there is a small asymmetry between matter and anti-matter. But if that explains the domination of matter over anti-matters is still not sure. Until now it is the only possible explanation, but if these slight asymmetries are enough to explain this, is AFAIK still an open question.

Well, isn't it confusing? You say it already: most adults get confused when discussing infinity, even if it is in one of the simplest examples, mathematically, with natural numbers. I don't agree. The rubber sheet and bowling ball are real things that can be shown, but are a bad illustration of relativistic gravity. Infinity in natural numbers is mathematically real, but the Hilbert Hotel isn't. However, I still think it is a nice illustration to show that our conception of 'infinity' as 'a great number' is wrong. And there is a direct relationship with the examples of the Hilbert Hotel (the hotel is full, but you still can add (1) one guest, (2) an infinite number of guests, etc) and the mathematical operation (1 + infintiy = infinity, infinity + infinity = infinity, etc). You do not need a mathematical argument: you only need a 1 to 1 relationship between the mathematical operations and the example. (In this of course the rubber sheet analogy miserably fails: it already presupposes gravitation). OTOH, I was never in the situation to explain infinity to somebody. So I have no empirical and didactic experience with it. Infinity and nothing have nothing in common. (If you understand that sentence, you have understood 'nothing'. But can still be confused about 'infinity'... ) In what way exactly then is the Hilbert Hotel confusing? That is, more confusing than the abstract concept of 'infinity'? Then it should be easy to explain to a 5 year old... So taeto's problem isn't a problem at all?

What about (some variation of) the Hilbert hotel?

Well, there might be about 100 text fragments in the book. As I showed, most are very short, some are more than 10 years old and just quotations. Some of these authors might not even have known that a text fragment of them was inserted in the book, and even changed their minds in the meantime. And this is a telling citation from your link: There we have it all: people who can't understand relativity, or people who are so stuck in Kantianism (last sentence), virtually no physicists. Maybe they did not even sign, but were just quoted. Full ack.

Hmm. It may have. Or it may not have. Even in 1931, the year the book was published, the Nazis were not in power yet. That took another 2 years. This is from the article you linked. But it describes thing that happened in 1920, not in 1931. Wikipedia had an interesting observation here: I think the easiest explanation, that most authors believe that RT is wrong, is that they firmly stand in the Newtonian tradition. Also, as an example, the text that should have been included from Ehrenfest, was from 1912. Somehow, I do not believe he was still a relativity-skepticist in 1931. As said, this is about the situation in 1921. Certainly, I agree antisemitism should be on the table, because it might have played a role, but if we do not discover that, then we cannot confirm that antisemitism was the motivation to publish the book. Again from Wikipedia: So only 28 authors really wrote something for the book. And 'people who only for some time were opposed to relativity' does not point exactly to antisemitism. Probably they just learned the RT better a few years later.

You forgot something... Italics by me. No. The 'laws of nature' are not 'laws', but abstract descriptions of how nature behaves.

Maybe your reputation wouldn't keep dropping if you were willing to learn, instead of displaying your ignorance so confidently. Or read books...

I nowhere denied that there were antisemitic critiques on Einstein. But 'A Hundred Authors Against Einstein' doesn't seem to be a symptom of it. If some of the authors were antisemitically motivated, they do not show it in the book. I do not see why one would do that, except one knows more about the motivations of the authors and/or editors. I think you should apply the same rigidity to history as to any other science. Maybe there is more behind the book, but until now I did not find any hint in that direction. Hmmm. Wouldn't it be a little bit too speculative for Lasker to suppose that a 'real' vacuum has a magnetic permeability and electric permittivity of zero?

Then why should he say that the speed of light in absolute vacuum would be infinite? Didn't he know that the speed of light also rolls out of Maxwell's theory of elektromagnetism? where e0 is the magnetic permeability constant and u0 is the electric permittivity constant, both of the vacuum. I do not see the connection you make with Einstein's ideas about QM.

That is not true: some things are unstable.

That is obvious...

I got curious, and now did a (very) quick read through the book as a whole. In the first place, it is not complete. The second part of the book consists of citations of articles from a lot of authors, which are all listed at the beginning of the second part, in alphabetical order. But the citations start with 'Fricke', leaving out all the about 15 authors beginning with A until E (and Poincaré is also missing). And no, the pages are not just missing, the page numbering just continues. A sign that the editor was not working very attentive? A few points I found several times: Many authors think that Einstein's idea of the invariance of the speed of light only goes back to the Michelson-Morley experiment. As many authors claim, there might be other, much more intuitive explanations of that: e.g. that the aether is also attracted by gravity, and so locally stands still, more or less like air. No single author goes back to Einstein's real starting point: that Newton and Maxwell are not compatible. Many authors do as if the philosophy of Immanuel Kant is the last word on the 'Anschauungsformen' space and time. One author is sure Einstein had never heard of Kant. (AFAIK, Einstein knew of Kant's Critique of pure Reason, maybe even read it.) Critique on positivism: that theories that 'work' are not necessarily true. E.g. that Einstein replaces the essence of what space and time are by the operations how we measure them. Misunderstandings about SR, that e.g. a train making an emergency break should be treated the same as if the earth makes an emergency break (buildings should fall when a train brakes): in the end, it does not matter if the train moves or the earth. These authors obviously do not understand that SR is strictly valid only for uniform motion. I got also curious about Ehrenfest, who I thought was a very serious physicist (several important contributions to quantum physics). Happily enough, the article mentioned (but is not in the book, it is before the 'F') is also online: it is his inaugural lecture (About the crises of the light-ether hypothesis, 1912). It shows that the physics community was not totally convinced yet of SR. But it shows doubts about the aether, but cannot (yet) completely accept SR as the solution. I already identified the part that should have been published in the anti-Einstein book (my translation): This is of course impossible in a Newtonian framework. So all together, I can fully second what Wikipedia says here: And there we also have the point of antisemitism: I also did not find a trace of it in the texts themselves. So I really think there was no Nazi background to the book. It shows how conservative scientists could not get used to these ideas, not yet strongly supported by empirical evidence. PS. Neokantianism was strong those days. PPS. Found this: I assume Einstein had a more than superficially knowledge of Kant.

I had a quick glance into the (German) original. Nobody explicitly references 'Jewish physics' or something, or even 'Jew'. Many of the contributions are really small, also e.g. Lasker's. This is all: (Pity enough I cannot copy the text as text from this site. Summary: the universe might not be be an absolute vacuum: in absolute vacuum the speed of light would be infinite.) Some are really bad, and seem to be only put in the book, because it is from a scientist, and believes Einstein is wrong. This is a fine example: In my translation: * This might be old German for 'index of refraction'. It might be interesting to read the whole stuff, but it is my impression of this quick glance that the main motivation is that people just can't believe that their intuitions, are wrong.

I think one should read the Wikipedia page carefully. There might be many examples of an observer effect in QM, but the HUP isn't one of them, as the article itself clearly states:

Did somebody already said this is nonsense? Oh, I see, Strange already did. Listen, it is obvious to us all that you lack the most elementary understanding of QM, and still you go on spouting wrong ideas. You are a victim of your tendency to make concepts vaguer than they are in science and philosophy, replacing real understanding with a feeling of understanding. You throw different meanings of concepts in one concept, like you did with scattering, Doppler effect, 'theory', etc. Nothing is gained by that. What a nonsense again. Studiot told you why, and you gave no explanation of why you viewpoint would be correct. You also gave no explanation of the band spread in radio waves: These questions might help you in answering the question: what is the exact frequency of a wave pulse of 2 seconds? what is the exact position of a wave pulse of 2 seconds? what is the consequence of this, given that quantum particles have wave character? Remember: the observer effect is based on the fact that measurement always implies a causal relationship, and understanding this causal relationship might help in lessening the effect, or in some situations compensate for it by calculating the effect and subtracting it. The HUP can principally not be removed from the measurement, because it is not due to the measurement. E.g. one can give a pretty well estimation of the size of the hydrogen atom based on the fact that the HUP does not allow for an energy state being exactly 0, which would mean you have exact information about its energy. Now do you think that the energy of the electron in hydrogen, and therefore the size of its orbital, is dependent on our measurement? How does the spectrum of hydrogen depend on our measuring of the light, that already appeared independent of our measuring (ups, just realise this is a similar question Studiot asked). As suggestion to the administrators: I would move every posting von Itoero immediately into 'Speculations' when it is in a science topic and is wrong or highly speculative. Just think about people like druS, who might not know who is talking nonsense, and who is an expert.

That is your error. HUP says that momentum and position together are not precise, not just that we cannot measure them precise.

First, despite the fact that it is all electromagnetic radiation, their effects can be radically different. Long radio waves can only move nearly-free electrons, e.g. the electrons in an antenna. From about the microwave domain, the waves can warm-up substances, so they can warm us up too. We probably feel it first on our skin, but then we cannot detect the exact direction from which the radiation comes, so we cannot make a 2 (or 3 dimensonal) picture of what radiates the microwaves. Infrared is invisible, but we definitely can feel it as warmth with our skin. We can detect light waves with our eyes, but we have already no sensors for ultra-violet. Only after a sunburn we know we have been exposed to ultraviolet radiation. With higher energies, it becomes worse. Where light already can have chemical influence (so it can effect electron orbitals in molecules), this is stronger with ultraviolet, even stronger in X-Rays (risk of cancer!), and gamma radiation can even trigger nuclear reactions. This is all explained by the energy of the respective photons: long waves have very low energy, gamma waves very high. So from there follows the first problem in your idea: we cannot have a single sense organ that could cover the complete radiation spectrum. The effects of the different frequencies are too different. Now we come to the second point. You could speculate that if we would have such a variety of sensors, but all connected to the same brain area, would give an 'overall view'. I doubt that that would be possible. From the 'qualia-point-of-view', I would speculate that the input from different sense organs will also 'feel' differently, as different as hearing, smelling, seeing etc. In the end, I do not think that neurons in the auditory cortex and visual cortex are very different. However, how they are organised depends on what kind of input they get. And even if we could see the whole spectrum, what suggest that these colours would be different than the colours we already see? Maybe we would 'see' long waves as red, and gamma rays as violet? Maybe, I've heard of people who have used LSD, and said they had seen colours that one normally never sees.

No. And you should have known that nobody here that knows his/hers physics agrees with you. It was pointed to you many times, that the HUP has nothing to do with our methods of measurement. And this was done by real physicists, and a few others, who cited several reliable sources. Explain to us how you, at least principally, could overcome the limits of frequency spread in wave mechanics due to Fourier transformation. (Do not forget, the uncertainty principle is valid for any wave phenomenon, not just QM).

As some others already said, these ideas are highly speculative, and are far from established science. Therefore you should not use them to understand phenomena that are already explained very well otherwise. If it helps you to learn, then it is OK, in my point of view. But you must accept the view of seasoned physicists (like Swansont in this thread) when they tell you there is no meat in your speculation.

No, you did not misinterpret me. And 3. is the case, more or less. The problem with QM is that it does not obey the logic we are used to when working with macro, i.e. classical objects. On one side, as long as a quantum particle does not interact with other objects (particles or measuring devices) many of its properties are not (exactly) determined. On the other side (within the bounds of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle), some conservation laws apply just as rigidly as in classical mechanics, like conservation of momentum, angular momentum, energy, etc. Applied to entanglement: in the first place one must create an entangled pair of particles. Here is the 'Something else causes A and B' part. Classically, one would be ready with this: the particles have exactly the same value for some observable, (or exactly the opposite depending on the property you are observing, or the way you entangle the particles), because the particles have this property that is observed. But in QM that is not the case: the exact values of what you observe are only definitely determined at the moment of measurement. But still the conservation laws must hold. And this leads to the classically not understandable situation that on one side the measurements are correlated, but are not (completely) fixed by some property that the particles posses in themselves. And even stronger, and this makes the weird situation empirically provable, QM predicts a stronger correlation than all possible classical theories.

Quantum entanglement does not 'work'. Sounds maybe as nitpicking, but it is not meant like that. 'Working' generally suggests a causal relationship. But there isn't one in entanglement. FTL is not just FTL, it's also 'FTC': faster than causality. Entanglement is a relationship of correlation. It means a.o. that it is the way nature is, not how it works. In my opinion there can't be an answer, because there simply is no way that entanglement 'works'. Entanglement follows directly from the formalism of Quantum mechanics, and so was derived before it was empirically proven.

I know. The idea is derived from the fact that, because simultaneity is relative to the movement of the observer, so automatically past, present and future must be too. (Of course only when events do not lie in each others light cones.) But this does not follow: Changes are differences when we follow the timeline. But timelines do not disappear suddenly when we look at the universe as a 'block universe'. And as you see, it is notoriously difficult to talk about such things and not using time-like concepts again: in your sentence the word 'pass'.