Lorentz Jr

Apparently the part about Schrödinger's cat being a joke (along with the Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation) hasn't gotten through the wall.

Science + action? Robocop Total Recall The Hunt For Red October Burn Notice ... and of course the Terminator, Alien, MIB, and BTTF series (of movies)

Neither is non-realism. If you have non-locality, you don't need non-realism. Please don't tell me what to do. Nothing about the Lorentzian interpretation of physics has been scientifically disproved.

Objective collapse of individual particle wave functions. With the same caveat that it's possible but not proven. Non-locality is needed if one wants to retain realism. Non-realism is needed if one wants to retain locality.

Entanglement may be an example of non-locality. It hasn't been proven to be an example of non-locality.

The bead would fall down immediately if the bird weren't attached to it. The torque from the bird's weight pushes two points on the inner face of the bead against the pole: the upper edge on the far side and the lower edge on the near side. The only thing holding the bead up is static friction from that contact. When the bird is bouncing, it gets upward momentum (and inward rotation) from the spring and goes into free-fall every time its beak about to hit the pole. Then its weight and the resulting torque are temporarily removed from the bead, so the bead loses contact with the pole and falls until the bird stops rising. It should fall even faster when the spring gets curved the other way (concave up) and pushes it down, although that may also limit how far it moves on each swing by pushing it against the pole the other way. EDIT: You can see the bead alternately leaning both ways in the slow-motion section toward the end of the video. The guy says the impact of the beak pushes the pole away from the bead, but I think that's just an entertaining effect. It speeds up the oscillation, but I don't see why it would affect the bead in any other way. Now they just need to make a bird that goes up the pole. 😁

That's true. I was trying to point out that the general concept of extracting useful energy from heat is already built into the design of the engine itself, just in case the OP didn't know that. Well, heat is already extracted from the engine by the cooling system, so I thought the OP meant using the heat instead of throwing it away.

I'm not sure I understand the relevance of that. My point was that one high-temperature/high-pressure heat engine (improved cylinders) is more efficient than two low-temperature/low-pressure heat engines in tandem (the OP's proposal).

That's how the internal-combustion engine works in the first place (it's a heat engine). If it were practical to insulate the cylinders better and they could tolerate more pressure, the extra energy could be extracted from the air-fuel mixture directly (and more efficiently) without heating up the rest of the engine block and peripheral parts so much.

I know. That's why I introduced it. The video is ancillary material in support of a footnote, not the main topic of the thread. How is this implied by anything you wrote in the rest of your post? It all seems like a humongous non sequitur. That's okay, I do it all the time. 😏

And the relationship between the clock on Earth and the ones on the spaceships is that the latter run more slowly on average than the former. That will be true as measured by any observer in any inertial reference frame, as long as they use the same reference frame for all measurements, i.e. compare apples to apples. ???????????????????????????? Is that the Relativity Police? Are they going to arrest me for calling them out on an elementary Physics 101 mistake? 😱

Who cares? Clocks are also motionless in their own frames. One of the most important lessons of Physics 101 is that you can't directly compare quantities measured in different reference frames. It's apples and oranges. Right. That's my point. So is Lorentz's "aether" theory, but everybody says that's been "discredited". Feel free to ask that this thread be moved to the Speculation category if you want, Markus. Thanks for answering. 🙂 So time dilation is the explanation of time dilation. Okay, thanks. 😉

A geometry with no negative terms in the metric (and only real-valued coordinates). I started a new thread for the topic. Thanks for asking. 🙂

I'm interested in why less time passes on the spaceship than on Earth in the twins paradox of special relativity, and the only explanation I've ever seen is that the spaceship takes a "shorter path through spacetime". By "explanation", I mean a proposal for a physical mechanism that would slow down the time evolution of the spaceship's wave function, or some other theory that provides a framework for understanding the phenomenon. I'm not interested in the quantitative aspects of the problem; I take Lorentz's transformation equations as given. I may be dumb, but I'm not that dumb! 😄 The only reason I use the twins paradox as an example is because it eliminates the argument that time dilation is an artifact of the measurement process. If you consider the three-observer variant of the paradox,* the synchronization events define a triangle in spacetime, so the total elapsed times are for paths between the same two points (the Earth fly-byes). So, what does the word "shorter" mean in in the context of Minkowski space? I know what it means in ordinary Euclidean space: It means "not as long", and length is a measure of how many physical objects can be packed into the space between two points, i.e. how many units of distance are required to span the gap between the points. Even in a curved space, length is reasonably intuitive if we use units that are small enough that the space appears flat locally. No problem. So what about Minkowski space? The phrase "shorter path" is typically presented without explanation, as though it's intuitively obvious because we all learned what it means when we were children. But what does it mean in Minkowski space? Technically speaking, there are different ways to formulate Minkowski space. Minkowski originally added ict as the fourth dimension and calculated intervals in the normal way, as a sum of squares, but nowadays we use ct as the fourth axis and a metric tensor with -1 for the time element. But these conventions make our geometric intuition irrelevent. There's no such thing as packing blocks or rulers or meter sticks into a negative length. In Minkowski space, "length" and "shortness" are purely mathematical concepts with no intuitive physical or geometric meaning. They're not physics. Anyway, I don't want to start the umpteen millionth flame war about the twins paradox. I'm too old for flame wars. I just want to register my disapproval of the language that physicists and/or physics popularizers use to "explain" time dilation. I think it's a cop-out, I think it's misleading wordplay, I think the only real scientific answer early in the 21st century is "Nobody knows". Which is okay. Maybe someone will figure it out sometime in the future. 🙂 * In the three-observer variant of the twins paradox (the triplets paradox?🤔), one spaceship handles the outbound leg of the journey and another handles the return leg. There's no need for acceleration anywhere in the experiment. The three events in the experiment are (1) the outbound ship flies by Earth, (2) the two ships cross paths somewhere out in space, and (3) the inbound ship flies by Earth. Each spaceship can be assumed to travel at constant velocity during its part of the experiment, and the total time elapsed in the spaceships (i.e. along the path 1-2-3) is defined as the time on the first ship between 1 and 2 plus the time on the second ship between 2 and 3. Dr. Lincoln doesn't actually provide an explanation for anything, but he does describe the triplets version of the paradox.

Well, I don't know. I have my own intuitive guesses about what entanglement might be, but I can't prove them. Along the lines of what you were saying, Sabine Hossenfelder has a youtube video about the delayed-choice quantum eraser, which is a version of the double-slit experiment: As for relativity, you need to distinguish between the Lorentz transformations and how they're interpreted. You can't measure an interpretation. Statistical correlations compiled from individual observations. They slow down the flow rates until they can observe one particle at a time, and they have to synchronize their clocks to make sure they're not mixing up particles from different pairs. For entangled electrons, the spin correlation is -1 when the two measurements are along the same axis and 0 when they're perpendicular to each other. To test Bell's inequality, they do funky things like comparing spin measurements along axes that are diagonal to each other.

Sorry about the last couple posts; I went a little overboard. I'm an unreconstructed realist in the 19th-century mold, for whatever that's worth, so I find a lot of the modern ideas horrifying. But I can't disprove anything you've said, so I'll try to keep my mouth shut for a while. Thanks for chatting.

Fixed. 🙂 Okay, my bad. I guess that's my own stupidity showing. 🙄

Have you come across reaction-diffusion dynamics ? Sorry, I meant heat diffusion. Maybe there should be a third term for "oscillatory equations". Thanks studiot. I'll try not to post too much nonsense. 🤔😶😏 I hope I don't wear out my welcome here with too much speculation and criticism of mainstream theory. I've been reading books by Peter Woit, Sabine Hossenfelder, Lee Smolin, and Jim Baggott, that are critical of modern physics, and I have some similar ideas of my own. I'll try not to be too argumentative. I can also start a "this is me" thread in the lounge if that would help. Thanks for the editing tips too. I'll look into them as needed. +1 😋

It's not obvious to me that the future of the entire universe can be packed into a wave function using any mathematical formalism that doesn't reproduce the abilities of an omniscient being. I haven't seen any experimental evidence that limits what can affect an entangled particle when its partner interacts with other physical systems.

I don't see an answer to my question. I see a few details of your idea, but I don't see a motivation for preferring it. Why not just eliminate the criterion altogether? Why not just say God watches over the world and adjusts particle properties however he sees fit? How would that be any less scientific than "beables"?

But the current formalism is clearly incomplete, and the 2015 experiments are evidence of extra correlation one way or another. Why do you favor hidden variables so much? What if Alice keeps making repeated measurements of mutually non-commuting observables on her particle before Bob measures his? The wave function would have to be packed with a crystal ball that can foresee the future.

Not directly, no. But entanglement suggests the possible occurrence of FTL communication within coherent systems, and that suggests at least the conceivability of harnessing such a process in some other way. Speculation isn't the same thing as magic. Lots of theoretical research introduces new concepts. An example of magic would be the relativistic explanation for time dilation in the twins paradox (or at least the only explanation I've ever seen from mainstream sources), which is attributed to the "geometry" of Minkowski space. A space with a complex metric isn't real geometry, so the idea that the physical explanation for time dilation is the spaceship's "shorter path through spacetime" is magical thinking.

Didn't Hensen's 2015 experiment* show that the state of Bob's electron is correlated with the final state of Alice's electron after she measures two mutually non-commuting properties (spin states along different axes), even though (a) the state of Bob's electron must have been correlated with the intermediate state of Alice's electron between the two measurements she made, and (b) the final measurements were separated by spacelike intervals? I'm struggling to fit that into the socks-and-widows analogy. * Nature volume 526, pages 682–686, Loophole-free Bell inequality violation using electron spins separated by 1.3 kilometres

Disregarded. 🙂

To use something is to employ it or utilize it or take advantage of it, in order to accomplish some task or goal or objective. In the "Sending an instantaneous signal" thread, the goal in question was sending instantaneous signals.