Farsight

Ah but neutrinos don't couple to photons, so it is impossible for them to annihilate into photons.

 

If you doubt me, check the Standard Model Lagrangian yourself:

http://nuclear.ucdavis.edu/~tgutierr/files/sml.pdf

Oh LOL. A whole page of mathematics without a word of explanation. Now that's really a Science-based criticism of Farsight's theories. This is getting embarrassing. You're absurd. Do you really think nobody notices that your "criticism" is a facile pretence? No rational person can give criticism of a model without referring to it. Remember I put neutrinos in a separate box. There was a reason for that. But I'm not going to give you NEUTRINOS EXPLAINED. You wouldn't read it, you'd just skip on to the next red herring and try to find something I can't explain, then prance about trumpeting that you've proven me wrong. Pathetic.

I've never hidden the fact that I am demanding this. And if your theory is correct, then you shouldn't be scared of explaining an experiment with it.

They annihilate into photons. But what about the eight gluons? Farsight is wrong in so many ways that I lose count.

No I'm not wrong. And gluons don't prove me wrong. Show me a gluon. Perhaps you can point out an experiment that displays gluons. I can show you an experiment for proton/antiproton annihilation.

This is ANOTHER problem with Farsight's ideas that we haven't gotten to yet---specifically spin. Of course, if he wants bound states of photons, then he also has to explain orbital angular momentum of these states as well. But spin alone is enough to kill it---there's just no way that any number of photons can make an electron. The Lorentz group tells us as much---the spinor and the vector of SO(4) are DIFFERENT representations, which means that bosons and fermions are DIFFERENT particles. But Farsight doesn't understand Lorentz Invariance at a rudimentary level, so what's the use of using these arguments?

That's a weak assertion. Where's the spin gone in an electron/positron annihilation? It's gone the same way as charge. The geometrical configurations that we label as fermions are simply de-configured back into the things we label as bosons. And saying I don't understand Lorentz Invariance at a rudimentary level is quite pathetic. I'm explaining the deep reason for it. It's quite simple: the real fundamental "particle" isn't a pion, or a gluon, or anything else that lasts a nanosecond or we can never observe. It isn't even the proton or the electron. It's the photon. Get used to it Ben. And stop making a fool of yourself.

All: don't think that I claim that the Standard Model is "wrong". It isn't a black and white world. An error or omission in a theory or model doesn't have to mean that the whole theory or model is wrong. I tend to take the view that interpretations will change and the Standard Model will evolve. Whether revisions will mean it's no longer the Standard Model isn't up to me.

No. I'm not explaining decay channels. The decay modes are irrelevant. The result is photons, or leptons that can be annihilated to result in photons, or neutrinos (still leptons) that can also be annihilated to result in photons. Or something else that can be annihilated to result in photons. All decay channels lead back to photons. There is no set number of photons whirling around in an ephemeral pion to break out via decay or subsequent annihilation. A photon is fundamental, and very different to a hadron. A photon can be divided, as in pair production. But you cannot annihilate photons to produce other particles. I repeat: other particles are but configurations of the fundamental entity we label as photons.

For other readers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pion

It's not a red herring, it's the very reason this thread was split off. It can't possibly be censorship, because the thread exists.

This is a scattergun of red herrings. Ben is demanding THE STANDARD MODEL EXPLAINED, and if there's one little thing that I don't cover, he'll claim he's proven that RELATIVITY+ is wrong. Without examining it! This is definitiely censorship. He doesn't want to talk about the thing he's trying to disprove. He wants it smothered. Where is it now? You even said:

No, let's leave the toy model out of it. I don't want to delve into areas where you have not made something that passes as a testable prediction. Those can't be critiqued appropriately.

Let's roast Farsight's toy model, but let's leave the toy model out of it? How do you work that one out? On a discussion forum? And Ben would rather believe in time travel than sit down and actually read and critique TIME EXPLAINED? It's pathetic Swanson. It's Kafkaesque.

i have to say farsight.....with your views on black hole physics. it is true that science has proven c to be the fastest speed. but then again has not science said that these same laws do not apply once a black hole is added to the equation. for science has said that space time is warped in a black hole. furthermore as far as i understand a black hole is not an actual hole, as you earlier stated it was, but is in actuality a warping of space time.....the name black hole being a misnomer. id like to hear both Ben's and Faraights views on this.....as im not actually a scientist merely an amatuer interested greatly in learning more.

It's a bit off topic here joshua. And whilst I can tell you my thoughts, I'm afraid they will be viewed as speculation, and to utterly justify them I'd have to reveal something that I'd rather not. So please can we save this one for another day?

You haven't addressed any of the main questions!

I'm not dealing with this continual scattergun of red herrings, Swansont. I made a bona-fide effort to answer Ben's earlier questions, and instead of a sincere dialogue, all I get is more. This isn't proving me wrong. This is burn the heretic censorship. He's clutching at straws, trying to put words into my mouth, dishing out ad hominems, and putting up distractions. Like demanding that I explain every facet of the Standard Model. All this when he won't actually look at the geometrical qualitative model that is RELATIVITY+, and will not engage in sincere debate on the concepts therein.

I'll respond faithfully to questions. But one at a time, comprehensively, with relevance to the time travel issue that brought us here. Please examine my post above responding to Ben's question on pion decay, and take another look at this:

In very simple terms Lorentz Invariance can be stated as "The laws of physics are always the same for all observers regardless of their motion". We can take one aspect of this to be "you always measure the speed of light to be the same". This is what got Einstein started on Special Relativity. The deep reason that this postulate is true is that our atoms are governed by electromagnetic phenomena. Boil it right down to the golden nugget, and what you end up with is we're made out of light, along with all our electrons, atoms, brains, spaceships, rulers, and clocks.

OK. In the light of Lorentz Invariance and my post responding to pion decay, which of the two options below sounds like the least crackpot thing to believe?

1. We're made out of light or

2. Time Travel.

LOL. I've got you nailed down here, and you know it. Remember the crucial point?

Ben said my ideas violate Lorentz Invariance. They don't, and to show this I'll have to explain what I said earlier about a deeper truth. In very simple terms Lorentz Invariance can be stated as "The laws of physics are always the same for all observers regardless of their motion". We can take one aspect of this to be "you always measure the speed of light to be the same". This is what got Einstein started on Special Relativity. The deep reason that this postulate is true is that our atoms are governed by electromagnetic phenomena. Boil it right down to the golden nugget, and what you end up with is we're made out of light, along with all our electrons, atoms, brains, spaceships, rulers, and clocks. Imagine you've got a clock that works by sending a beam of light back and forth between two mirrors. Using this clock, you will always measure the speed of light to be the same. Hence you observe Lorentz Invariance. The thing is this: when there's time dilation, it is simply because the speed of light is different, but you couldn't see that it was different, because you measured it using a clock, or a body clock, that was running slower because the speed of light was reduced.

Now you're flailing around clutching at every straw you can find, spewing red herrings in all directions. I'm going to stay on the point, and hammer you totally to the floor.

OK, a neutral pion, It's a rubbish particle. In less than a nanosecond it has decayed into an electron, a positron, and a photon. You want a link? Here’s a link:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particles/hadron.html#c2

On our gedanken workbench we can put the photon in a box labelled "photons". Now we can give our electron and positron a nudge or two to bring them together, using other photons, via the Compton effect:

Then what happens? What happens is annihilation:

And we’ve got more photons to put in the photon box. So, what’s left of that pion? Photons. Because all it ever was, was a configuration. It’s the geometric configuration of the fundamental thing that we normally label as "photons" that yielded the properties of that pion, and of the intermediary electron and positron. You want more of the same? How about a neutron? Let’s have a picture of neutron decay.

There’s another photon for our “photon” box. And hello, an antineutrino. Just for the time being, let’s put that in a box called “neutrinos”. The electron is familiar to us. We can annihilate it with a spare positron and add more photons to our collection. And the proton? What can we do with the proton?

http://authors.library.caltech.edu/3172/

My oh my, photons electrons and positrons again. Into the box we go.

How's that Lorentz Invariance looking? Starting to sweat a little yet?

Now’s the time you start getting abusive and changing the subject. Or how about another dozen red herrings? What makes me laugh is that all this started again because you believe in time travel. Time travel is crackpot. And you think you can disprove RELATIVITY+, a geometric "pure marble" qualitative model, without actually reading it? And without referring to it? Now that's really rational. And look, you said roast. You're showing your true colours there. You know what all this reminds me of? I'm like the heretic saying the earth goes round the sun. You really don't want anybody to hear it, and you pretend you can "prove" me wrong with crystal spheres. LOL. Bah, you're just a string theorist. That's pseudoscience. Not science.

Hi elas. We are barking up the same tree. These guys have never seen CHARGE EXPLAINED. And if they did, they wouldn't read it. They won't read your stuff either. Weird isn't it? The way so-called rational scientists will not approach things with an open mind. They won't actually think about the physics. Instead they believe in crackpot garbage like time travel, wormholes, parallel universes, and boltzman brains. Like I was saying, that's why it was 13 years before General Relativity was accepted into mainstream science. The history of science is littered with similar examples of hostile, stubborn, blinkered, irrational, denial. LOL. And people moan about religion. They don't realise it's all down to people and their psychological inability to examine a belief.

Let's select one point to discuss at length without red herrings, then move on to another. For your starter for ten, let's start with the decay of a neutral pion. OK what are the products?

PS: They're not Farsight's Theories. It's Farsight's toy model RELATIVITY+.

Swanson: your post above noted. I am trying to stay on topic. IMHO the established theory has been corrupted by a change in interpretation involving "curved spacetime" which came in with Robert Dicke in the sixties. Broadly speaking I’m with Einstein, who was going in a different direction. Here's my position in a nutshell. I don't think there's any more I can add to this thread:

There is no scientific evidence for time travel, or the wormholes that permit it. Time travel results in the absurdities of paradox, yielding impossible contradictary results. We cannot conduct an experiment to perform time travel, and we do not observe it. Any person who claims that mathematics provides evidence for time travel is confusing mathematics with science. It might indicate a possibility, but it does not provide evidence. Current mathematically-based claims that time travel is possible are IMHO flawed, involving false proofs based upon an axiom that assumes 4 dimensions of spacetime instead of 3+1 dimensions. This axiom builds in the presumption that we continually travel through time just as we can demonstrably travel through space. There is no scientific evidence for this presumption. A clock measures or counts motion through space, not in an abstract “forward” time “direction” at the rate of one second per second. With no scientific evidence whatsover, I class time travel as pseudoscientific conjectural speculation based on misinterpretation of General Relativity.

Someguy, sorry not to have gotten back to you as yet. I'll will reply later. Edit: I replied to your PM.

Note to moderator: All of the stuff below is tangential. But I have to respond to it to avoid the accusation that I've been disproven. It then takes me into territory that is off topic. There's a catch-22 here. We're talking about time travel and wormholes, which are totally speculative, with absolutely no experimental evidence of any kind. Then when I'm called to back up why they're pseudoscience, people will then quite deliberately accuse me of speculation.

And here we have it. This is wrong, depending on the scale. What about the weak force? What about the strong force? The interactions of atoms are goverened by electromagnetic phenomena, outside the neucleus. Inside the neuclus, things are different. If what you said were true, we'd HAVE no nuclei, except for (possibly) hydrogen. The reason is simple---how do a bunch of positive protons and neutral neutrons stick together via electromagnetic interactions? This is something a slightly above average student in American high school knows.

Geddoutofit. I was giving a brief explanation. You're asserting I'm wrong by omission, because my explanation wasn't detailed. If it was, you'd merely find something else I hadn't covered, and we'd go all round the houses forever instead of focussing on the moot point.

Again, this cannot be correct. I could point out so many problems with this, it's not even funny. But here's a few for giggles:

 

=>Standard Model decay modes. See my earlier post. Neutral pions decay into two, three, or four photons.

If a pion decays into photons, what is it, in essence, made out of? Something fundamental that cannot be reconfigured as one or more photons? No. The opposite. You're agreeing with me bud.

=>Spins. How can two spin 1 particles (photons) combine to form a spin 1/2 particle?

I don't know. But one can employ pair production to create an electron and a positron from a +1022KeV gamma photon. You want a picture?

=>Mass. Photons are massless. Electrons are not.

As you doubtless are aware, I can explain mass. It's very simple, and no Higgs Bosons are required. See page 105 of The Trouble with Physics for backup.

=>Charge. Photons are not charged under any force (strong, weak, or em), but electrons and quarks are.

Ditto. I can explain charge. It's a piece of cake.

=>Electroweak physics. The electromagnetic force doesn't even exist in our universe for a finite time. This means photons don't exist. But quarks do. So how can quarks in the early universe be made of something that doesn't exist yet?

There is no electromagnetic force. It's a pseudoforce. You create it when you create fermions out of bosons. It's easily explained in terms of geometry.

This statement is seriously flawed. You don't "observe Lorentz Invariance''. You test locally the speed of light and find it to be the same always.

This tells me that you don't understand special relativity. Time dilation happens when you are comparing things between two frames, not within the same frame. So if you are doing the experiment in the lab, there is no time dilation. It's only if you observe the experiment from outside the lab, with a velocity different from the lab's.

Bah, discrediting assertion. I understand it utterly. You don't.

Farsight---you will brush off these accusations, no doubt. Or you will address them in a half-assed manner---I will hold out hope though. Physics is very intricate, and if you change one little thing by just a bit, then the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

No, it won't come tumbling down. The Standard Model needs reinterpretation and repair, improving, not scrapping.

The idea that we are made of photons is just not right. Experiments prove it wrong. Mathematical consistency proves it wrong. But most of all, what insight have you added? What do you know that Einstein didn't know, when he was trying (and failing) to do the same thing at Princeton? What great intellect you must have to succeed where he has failed! Einstein failed for a very good reason, he was completely wrong, and for some of the reasons I showed you above.

What experiments? The simplest one you can do is pair production and annihilation. And what's the mathematical consistency of proton/antiproton annihilation? Oh you've shown nothing above. As for what I know, you'll have to wait and see. But get this: a photon is not a "particle", and it isn't what you think. Now can we get back to time travel and wormholes?

Note to moderator: All of the stuff below is tangential. But I have to respond to it to avoid the accusation that I've been disproven. It then takes me into territory that is off topic. There's a catch-22 here. We're talking about time travel and wormholes, which are totally speculative, with absolutely no experimental evidence of any kind. Then when I'm called to back up why they're pseudoscience, people will then quite deliberately accuse me of speculation.

And here we have it. This is wrong, depending on the scale. What about the weak force? What about the strong force? The interactions of atoms are goverened by electromagnetic phenomena, outside the neucleus. Inside the neuclus, things are different. If what you said were true, we'd HAVE no nuclei, except for (possibly) hydrogen. The reason is simple---how do a bunch of positive protons and neutral neutrons stick together via electromagnetic interactions? This is something a slightly above average student in American high school knows.

Geddoutofit. I was giving a brief explanation. You're asserting I'm wrong by omission, because my explanation wasn't detailed. If it was, you'd merely find something else I hadn't covered, and we'd go all round the houses forever instead of focussing on the moot point.

Again, this cannot be correct. I could point out so many problems with this, it's not even funny. But here's a few for giggles:

 

=>Standard Model decay modes. See my earlier post. Neutral pions decay into two, three, or four photons.

If a pion decays into photons, what is it, in essence, made out of? Something fundamental that cannot be reconfigured as one or more photons? No. The opposite. You're agreeing with me bud.

=>Spins. How can two spin 1 particles (photons) combine to form a spin 1/2 particle?

I don't know. But one can employ pair production to create an electron and a positron from a +1022KeV gamma photon. You want a picture?

=>Mass. Photons are massless. Electrons are not.

As you doubtless are aware, I can explain mass. It's very simple, and no Higgs Bosons are required. See page 105 of The Trouble with Physics for backup.

=>Charge. Photons are not charged under any force (strong, weak, or em), but electrons and quarks are.

Ditto. I can explain charge. It's a piece of cake.

=>Electroweak physics. The electromagnetic force doesn't even exist in our universe for a finite time. This means photons don't exist. But quarks do. So how can quarks in the early universe be made of something that doesn't exist yet?

There is no electromagnetic force. It's a pseudoforce. You create it when you create fermions out of bosons. It's easily explained in terms of geometry.

This statement is seriously flawed. You don't "observe Lorentz Invariance''. You test locally the speed of light and find it to be the same always.

This tells me that you don't understand special relativity. Time dilation happens when you are comparing things between two frames, not within the same frame. So if you are doing the experiment in the lab, there is no time dilation. It's only if you observe the experiment from outside the lab, with a velocity different from the lab's.

Bah, discrediting assertion. I understand it utterly. You don't.

Farsight---you will brush off these accusations, no doubt. Or you will address them in a half-assed manner---I will hold out hope though. Physics is very intricate, and if you change one little thing by just a bit, then the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

No, it won't come tumbling down. The Standard Model needs reinterpretation and repair, improving, not scrapping.

The idea that we are made of photons is just not right. Experiments prove it wrong. Mathematical consistency proves it wrong. But most of all, what insight have you added? What do you know that Einstein didn't know, when he was trying (and failing) to do the same thing at Princeton? What great intellect you must have to succeed where he has failed! Einstein failed for a very good reason, he was completely wrong, and for some of the reasons I showed you above.

What experiments? The simplest one you can do is pair production and annihilation. And what's the mathematical consistency of proton/antiproton annihilation? Oh you've shown nothing above. As for what I know, you'll have to wait and see. But get this: a photon is not a "particle", and it isn't what you think. Now can we get back to time travel and wormholes?

That's actually not much time at all---people just refused to take things on faith (as they should). Once GR was confirmed (by doctored experiments, mind you), many people accepted it.

That's back to front. They refused to accept it on grounds of faith. And your "doctored experiments" insinuation illustrates this. The Foundation of General Relativity was out in 1916. Arthur Eddington observed the solar eclipse in 1919 to demonstrate that light really was bent by the sun. It was in all the newspapers. But it wasn't accepted into mainstream for another ten years. Now listen up: you believe in time travel and wormholes. You take them on faith. There are no experiments, "doctored" or otherwise. And as a result you believe in pseudoscience notions like time travel and wormholes. They are the speculations. Has the penny dropped yet?

editing

Ben said my ideas violate Lorentz Invariance. They don't, and to show this I'll have to explain what I said earlier about a deeper truth. In very simple terms Lorentz Invariance can be stated as "The laws of physics are always the same for all observers regardless of their motion". We can take one aspect of this to be "you always measure the speed of light to be the same". This is what got Einstein started on Special Relativity. The deep reason that this postulate is true is that our atoms are governed by electromagnetic phenomena. Boil it right down to the golden nugget, and what you end up with is we're made out of light, along with all our electrons, atoms, brains, spaceships, rulers, and clocks. Imagine you've got a clock that works by sending a beam of light back and forth between two mirrors. Using this clock, you will always measure the speed of light to be the same. Hence you observe Lorentz Invariance. The thing is this: when there's time dilation, it is simply because the speed of light is different, but you couldn't see that it was different, because you measured it using a clock, or a body clock, that was running slower because the speed of light was reduced.

Time travel must be possible if time exists because that's what time is. if nothing traveled through time there wouldn't be time at all. time must move forward in order for motion to exist. or rather motion makes time move forward whichever way you wanna look at it.

The latter. You don't need time to have motion. You need motion to have time. The motion is in space. It's there, happening, now. You can see things travelling through space, you can see motion. You can't see any travelling through time.

the mere fact we can speak type move and think are evidence that time ticks by. how do you suppose you could do these things without time? in a 3 dimensional world nothing moves. in a 4 dimensional world. things can move. the faster they move the faster they are carried through time. traveling through time backwards is a whole other story. i will never ask you for math or anything more than simple words. but i guarantee you won't find the words to convince me time doesn't exist. but if you did what a great day that would be because i'd be blown away.

Time does exist, someguy. It exists like heat exists. It's an emergent property, a derived effect of motion. But you can't literally climb to a higher temperature. You can run through a fire, but you can't travel through heat. And likewise you can't travel through time. It's a 3+1 dimensional world, not a 4-dimensional world, and the difference is enormous. Sadly this stuff is so groundbreaking I'm not allowed to elaborate fully. It's not in accord with the current consensus, so it's classed as "speculation". That's how it is in physics. It's self-censoring. That's why it took thirteen years for General Relativity to become accepted as mainstream.

I am still stuck on at what point does time become physical. I mean I can understand time in the sense of a framework for understanding, much like the need for an operating system in computers, but as far as outside of human perception or what not alone, where is time actually a physical entity like an electron. I try as I may to digest such from GR, but it does not always work out for me. As in I can fire a round through the air and get some effects, cold air or hot air having an impact, or fire it into some gel and get different effects, so basically I am at a lose as to where time is physical and no necessarily just something that comes to exist so we can make sense of something like reality/nature. I mean stuff that exists in the material world, aka reality has a physical presence, I mean we are even finding this for stuff like dark matter and dark energy right? To me to travel back in time, well then all of the mass or energy in the universe would have to do such also right?

It just isn't physical. It's just a relative measure of motion. In essence you count the motions of something to compare against the motions of something else. The arrow of time has as much reality as the direction of your counting. Try travelling to 42, and you should get a handle on why time travel is garbage. To "travel back in time" makes as much sense as paying a visit to minus 42. Alternatively, since I said time is a relative measure of motion, you need to be able to do some negative motion. And motion is motion. Negative motion doesn't make sense.

Then maybe you should study math more carefully, because it is something that CAN be proved unequivocally...

Then prove it mathematically. At some point you will effectively say that a negative length is not real because a length is defined as never being negative, which I will agree with. This assertion is akin to my assertion that a length of time is not real, which you disagree with. There is no evidence for time travel, and you can only assert that my logic is flawed by employing an axiomatic error that my logic demolishes. And don't claim that you've "proved" me wrong via some "law" of physics such as Lorentz Invariance where I've already offered a deeper truth of why we observe this.

If you'll read someguy's post, this isn't quite what he's said. And besides, time travel is possible in the quantum world... t--> -t is a symmetry of the metric, and anyone who's read the third chapter of Peskin (and understood it) can tell you that a good quantum field theory must be invariant under the discrete symmetry CPT, which includes, among other things, t -->-t.

OK, it isn't quite what he said, perhaps I presumed too much and he can clear up whether I presumed correctly. But you are again employing an axiomatic error regarding charge/parity/time that ends up with QED positrons portrayed as electrons travelling backwards in time when they quite simply are not. It's "possible in the quantum world" is simply not a proof.

Then take information loss. What is wrong---GR or QFT as formulated on a curved space-time?

Swansont: granted re "anything goes". I was injecting a caution because there's a significant number of conjectures underlying the subject of discussion, and a dearth of actual evidence.

BenTheMan: OK let's drop the God stuff. But take your line unless someone can find a reason why something shouldn't happen then it is taken as evidence.. and you end up with the Boltzman Brains article in New Scientist this week.

Can I add that I think the information paradox is an artefact rather than a genuine mystery. Can I also say that IMHO a black hole destroys information utterly.

Depends on how you set up your coordinate system. You can put it at the upper right and measure -4 and -4, it's just that nobody seems to do it that way

Physics has examples of things that had not been observed were predicted by equations. That's what told the scientists where to look, and then they went off and found them. (the neutrino pops immediately to mind)

"I assert that time travel is not possible, along with wormholes that permit time travel" is something that lacks science, because there is no scientific framework you have set up to support it.

Thanks Phil.

Ben, re fully consistent solution: If a solution to an equation suggests a contradiction such as that posed by a time travel paradox, then we need to look again at the equation or our interpretation of it. The equation might be correct, but there may be something that we've assumed or omitted that would allow us to rule out a non-real solution.

A trivial example is a negative carpet. I might need sixteen square metres of carpet to furnish a square room. There are two solutions to √16. One solution is 4, the other is -4. But I can find no actual evidence to support the latter solution. I cannot literally buy a carpet measuring -4 metres by -4 metres. The "existence" of this non-real solution does not count as evidence. The problem I overlooked in this trivial example is that you can't have a negative length.

IMHO there's a similar issue when it comes to treating time as a direction in Minkowski's mathematical spacetime. It is not a real direction. You cannot actually travel in such a direction. There is no actual evidence for it. Any travel in this "direction" is notional only. You might claim that we travel forward in time by one second per second, but you have no evidence for this axiomatic concept. I assert that time travel is not possible, along with wormholes that permit time travel.

Aparently you're not familiar with how physics works. Unless someone can find a reason why something shouldn't happen.. then it is taken as evidence that it should happen. In this respect, there is as much evidence for information loss as there was for light bending in a gravitational field at the turn of the century. The only difference is that one experiment is easy to perform, and the other is not.

I can't believe I heard that. Whatever next, I can't disprove the existence of God, so you take that as evidence that God exists? Don't be so utterly ridiculous. Watch my lips: there is no evidence for the black hole information paradox. And it looks like there never ever will be. It's an issue of hypothesis. Now get a grip and read what I actually said:

Can I remind you all that the "accepted science" here is speculation with no evidential proof, and no prospect of the same. What is considered to be the "actual" answers today might not, in the fullness of time, turn out to be correct.

Sigh. And they're still not supported by evidence or experiment.

No, I said what I said. Calculations do not provide evidence of hypothesis. And don't put words into my mouth.

Time travel and wormholes anybody? Can I reiterate: they are abstractions that are not supported by evidence or experiment. Thus IMHO they belong in the realm of pseudoscience.

Wrong, Lockheed. There is no evidence regarding the black hole information paradox. You might claim that some mathematical proof is evidence, but it is not. It might one day be shown to be based upon a flawed axiom.

wiki Black hole information paradox

Interesting thread. Thanks Martin.

As I had recently pointed out in another thread, if you have an explanation that is an alternative to accepted science (physics, in this case) then the appropriate area to post it is in speculations. People asking questions here want actual answers, not WAGs.

Can I remind you all that the "accepted science" here is speculation with no evidential proof, and no prospect of the same. What is considered to be the "actual" answers today might not, in the fullness of time, turn out to be correct.

I have a better argument for why time travel is impossible. It's an essay called TIME EXPLAINED. But whatever better argument one might come up with, pseudoscientist quacks like Ben will always dismiss it as "arm waving" without actually engaging in the rationale and logic. They do anything they can to prevent open debate, such as starting arguments, and they PM moderators to lock a thread or move it into some trashcan. Then they come out with lies such as I showed you how your theory fails. It's what they do to rubbish the competition so they can push garbage like String Theory. The latter is not background independent, isn't about strings any more, and since it doesn't predict anything it doesn't actually qualify as a theory. (I have a model, not a theory) String Theory comes with bookums and snarks such as time travel and the Higgs Boson for which there is absolutely no scientific evidence. Then we get garbage such as "mass is not understood", when it is. Lee Smolin, the author of The Trouble with Physics says what mass is on page 105. However Lee Smolin is also a contributor to Loop Quantum Gravity, which Ben sees as a competitor and has been trying to rubbish on this forum.

Just to get back on topic: I think time travels and wormholes are abstractions for which there is no evidence, and a considered rationale can readily explain why these abstractions can not possibly exist in the real world.

It's impolite, and I like to think of myself as a responsible poster.

Note that "flat" means it doesn't mean flat like a pancake. Read this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/727073.stm

And do read that pair production link and understand that you really can create matter out of light. I'm sorry, but talking further on mass is getting too far off topic.

well the big bang started as maximum density energy. you can only achieve that with mass or gravity. the entire mass of the universe. if all matter is made of light, then light needed to come first. because in order to reach maximum density you would need to separate all the universe into its most basic element. it would be more concentrated energy than matter. if you propose that light is this most basic element of which matter and mass is made of, i think you would need to explain how mass can be produced by light

Just read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_production

In pair production a gamma photon, which is light, is converted into an electron and a positron. They're matter, OK we call the positron antimatter. But they've both got mass.

and also how the big bang managed to compress itself to maximum density if it was composed purely of massless light, the most elemental energy by your hypothesis, if i understand correctly.

i cannot explain how the universe could just pop into existence either. personally i believe this is not possible. either the universe will one day recompress, which the scientific community seems to have discovered cannot be possible, or perhaps the universe is the 3d version of what a line is to a circle and the universe could expand and still comeback to itself. in both of these cases you need not answer where the universe came from. it just is there and goes in and out of cycles. starting time and ending time.

I don't know where you got that from, someguy. It isn't right. The universe is what you call "flat". It doesn't curve round on itself. The trouble is that when I explain things, people who can't get annoyed and give me a hard time. And we are getting a little off topic so I'll leave it there.