BenTheMan

You'll have to find a better example. I would say the area is positive definite. Whether you call the length +4 feet or -4 feet is convention. Your ideas violate Lorentz Invariance, and you've shown no way to reconcile your ideas with the precision experiments. I also showed that you were wrong above, when you couldn't answer my charges about the standard model. One doesn't have to dig long before they find contradictions. The QED lagrangian is written down in terms of operators which are renormalizable and Lorentz invariant. The theory is tested to 13 decimal places, more accurately than any theory man has ever conceived. Pleae show where the theory is wrong. It wasn't a proof, just a statement. Please to be quoting me in context sir. I said that Einstein was more or less useless after General Relativity. He didn't contribute much to science, and if you would read his new biography, you would learn this. So your beef is with Quantum Field Theory?

So the Boltzmann Brain stuff is generally by a guy named Don Page, who is as intelligent as they come. He educated himself during high school (his parents were missionaries or some such in Alaska) and then went to Cambridge to get a PhD with Hawking. See this (serious) paper by him: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0708/0708.0573v2.pdf. Page is a very nice man (and a Christian, coincidentally), but he certainly pushes science as far as it possibly can go. Anyway, my line is the line taken by ALL scientists, I promise. See Sverian's comment, for example: he says something like ``It's not a problem because we don't know how to quantize gravity''. This is correct---no one expects there to be any information paradox once we figure out how to quantize gravity. Then there should be a symmetry which forbids it, or some more general explanation as to why it LOOKS like information is lost in the semi-classical calculation. This is how we know that something else has to pop up---the physics isn't consistent. But saying that something shouldn't happen because it doesn't make sense is introducing a bias into the science. This is just as bad as saying ``God did it'', whether you are willing to admit it or not. There are many things in science which doesn't make sense, and the best discoveries are the unexpected ones. A professor here who works on the problem, Samir Mathur, has elevated the Information Loss ``Problem'' to a theorem, as I recall when I saw him lecture on it. It is absolutely an artifact of not having the correct theory of gravity, you are certainly correct about this. (If you want, I can explain Hawkings current position on the problem.) As for black holes destroying information utterly, this is in no way consistent with quantum mechanics. One can show (as I said earlier) that unitary operators forbid information from being lost. This means that, if you want a good interpretation of probabilities, the evolution of the system has to be governed by unitary operators. If information is lost, the evolution is unabiguously non-unitary---a stronger statement is that a pure state can never evolve into a mixed state when that evolution is goverened by unitary operators. Again, the calculation is like three lines long, and I can show it to you if you want. It's a problem in Sakurai's QM textbook, I think in Chapter 3.

Then maybe you should study math more carefully, because it is something that CAN be proved unequivocally. This is all that I have ever told you, at least, about your ideas. They are wrong because you haven't studied the problem enough. It doesn't mean that you can't understand, it just means that you haven't worked hard enough. But your logic is flawed 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. Then take information loss. What is wrong---GR or QFT as formulated on a curved space-time?

Aside from this being terribly outside the scope of this discussion, it is never a question that science can answer, because it is not an objective question---it is a subjective question. If you think that science disproves the idea of God, then you have too narrow a scope of what ``God'' means. Specifically, the concept of ``God'' has no meaning in science---it's like asking if the sun in female. The correct statement would be that there is no evidence for God's existence, however, one could imagine a God that is consistent with all that we can test. Whether or not that God is somehting that people believe in (i.e. the same God of the Koran or the Bible) is the topic of another thread in another forum. Anything more than that and you're just stating your beliefs.

The evidence is that they are fully consistent solutions to fully consistent equations. What about this is hard to understand?

Aparently you're not familiar with how physics works. Unless someone can find a reason why something shouldn't happen (other than trying to EXPLAIN it with hand waving and optical illusions), 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 preform, and the other is not. I didn't think I needed to tell you this.

That's fair. It may be a long time before anyone figures out what string theory is, exactly, if it's not a framework for understanding how to quantize gravity. But it certainly isn't numerology.

Also remember---particles are pointlike, at least in normal QFT. And when you expand a point, you get...a point.

You're wrong Farsight---we've been over this. Can I reiterate? There are fully consistent solutions to Einstein's equations which involve wormholes and closed time-like curves.

Lockheed---have YOU done any of the calculations?

Farsight--- It is a semi-classical calculation, and very general. Either you are claiming that the classical theory (GR) is wrong, or that quantum field theory is wrong. I stress this again for your benefit---I know because I've done the calculation. It seems that your only contributions to this thread are to make wrong comments and to link to wikipedia articles that don't support your points.

Perhaps you should have a look at this article: http://www.fau.edu/divdept/schmidt/theatre/gamble/among_the_inept.htm

Seeing as this is a science-themed discussion board, why don't we start a forum for members to discuss their (peer-reviewed) publications. It could work like this: when a member publishes a paper or gives a talk at a conference, or writes a thesis or something, they can advertise it here, and link to the slides/publication, and engage the other members by answering questions, etc. They would serve as a moderator for the discussion, and the threads would be strictly professional---i.e. no flaming, trolling, etc. The moderator of the forum would have the right to delete off-topic posts. It wouldn't be a HUGE job, because (I'm assuming) there wouldn't be THAT many threads. I think that this is a good idea to foster some interdisciplinary discussion---I know very little about, say, biology, but would certainly like to have the chance to engage in discussions. What do you guys think?

You and about a thousand other people Are you grad student, post doc or faculty?

WAG = ``Wild Ass Guess''?

Well, it's because they never took the time to learn how to do the SUSY calculations. If you use words like ``collective unconscious'', you don't have to do any calculations. You can just spout bullshit and wave your hands.

So, if you assume that the thing is unique, just put it into a system of equations and solve for x. you should be able to take the inverse of a 26x26 matrix with pencil and paper:)

Actual quote from the article: Awesome. We are truly in the Age of Enlightenment.

Pioneer this makes no sense. The information paradox is an artifact of a classical calculation not applying when quantum effects are considered. The Hawking calculation is completely classical (I know because I've done it). The space-time across an horizon is absolutely smooth, and a point-like observer won't even know he's crossing an horizon unless he tries to communicate with an outside observer. However, because the black hole is growing, it means that the space-time aroud the black hole is changing. When one takes into account the quantum field theory on a curved space-time, one finds that when the metric changes (i.e. it is dynamic), particles are generically created. I know because I have done the calculation. If you don't believe me, look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogoliubov_transformation The information pradox is exactly what I said, and it is painfully obvious to me that you don't know what you're talking about. There is no``compression of information''---information, in a quantum system, is a very abstract concept. You a.so cut and paste a quote from Hawking's speech at the GR17 conference without giving him credit, and I can explain to you what it means if you want. And there is no ``solid truth'' and ``fuzzy truth''. Please don't try to pass tripe like this as an explanation.

SO MANY PEOPLE don't understand that, classically, the two forces are VERY similar. pioneer---I am telling you... This was a question on my Classical Mechanics final in my first year of grad school, and is a canonical upper level mechanics question. One can formulate gravity in terms of a potential and a field, just like Maxwell's equations. The only difference is that the constants are different. If you STILL don't believe me, check out this article: http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/health/011800hth-behavior-incompetents.html

Do you have any better arguments? Or just a bunch of hand waving?

joshuam--- There is no law of conservation of matter. I don't know what you're talking about. Consider this process---electron + positron to photons. The information paradox is a problem because it kills unitarity, i.e. the idea that probabilities add up to one. More technically, one can imagine making a pure quantum mechanical state, and throwing it in to a black hole. One can (easily) show that a pure quantum mechanical state can never be turned into a mixed quantum mechanical state by a unitary hermitian operator. But when the black hole decays via hawking radiation, all states are equally likely (i.e. thermal spectrum), so the state is maximally mixed. But quantum mechanics only consists of unitary (hermitian) operators, so the fact that the state is mixed is a paradox. The calculations are correct, and are compeletely classical. They are completely consistent if one neglects quantum effects. This is a sign that something strange happens inside a black hole.

Gauss' law. Spooky. If you believe that there is not electric field inside a spherical shell, why is it so hard to believe there is no gravitaitonal field either.

Well, the correlation between mass at a macroscopic level and mass at a quantum level is not understood at all, as far as I know. One could just as well say that gravity should be attached to the higgs field in some way:) As for frame dragging, I don't think that this could be classified as ``stirring'' space-time, and it certainly can't make particles in the manner someguy was proposing. But I don't know for sure---I am not an expert in these things. When someone who studies particle physics says ``mass'', and someone who studies general relativity say ``mass'', it may be that they aren't even talking about the same thing. In terms of particle physics, mass is just a dimensionful parameter in the lagrangian. The higgs mechanism says that everything in the SM couples to a particle which takes on a classical expectation value that isn't zero. The way that particles couple to that field determines what the mass parameter is in the lagrangian. And we don't understand why some particles couple to the higgs field so weakly (the electron, which has a mass of 511keV) and some couple so stronly (the top quark, which has a mass of 175,000,000 keV). There are a lot of interesting open questions in physics, waiting for smart people to solve them.

I think he's been sniffing paint.