My idea makes me feel overwhelmed and alone

[MyFaceIsACorner]

Hi.  I am new, here.  I am posting this, because I just wanted to get this off my chest.  I am not looking to convince anybody, and, in fact, I won't even describe my idea, here.  I just want to lament.

Nonetheless, I have an idea, and personally, I find it fascinating enough to investigate.  The problem is that I feel increasingly overwhelmed by the amount of work required to fully investigate it.

Simply put, two years ago, I discovered an identity in classical field theory (not necessarily novel), which, to me, indicates a way to construct a certain physical theory.  My ideas on this matter have matured enough so that I have actually written a crude simulation of one possible candidate theory.

Please understand that I don't make any claim of physical correctness to this theory.  The reason for this, of course, is that I haven't analyzed my own ideas enough to be confident in them.  In turn, this is because the equations involved are highly nonlinear, and so, it is difficult for me to wrap my head around them.  This is not for lack of trying.  Even numerically simulating them in a nontrivial manner has proven to be very difficult, for a number of technical reasons, including making sure that the boundaries of my simulation don't increase the total energy of the system.  It's just that there a daunting number of things to try.  For example, I am currently considering a kind of asymptotic analysis, and another approach, where I use symmetry to extract information without having to solve the equations (which is pretty difficult, considering that I understand very little about Lie Group Theory).

This places me in the awkward situation, where I can construct a theory, but am not yet able to make concrete, testable, predictions.  At best, I can set up a simulation, watch it run, and enjoy the show, but, otherwise, feel unenlightened.  I feel like getting useful information from this, either to reject the idea, or to modify it so that it more closely approximates reality requires more free time than I could ever have (I work full time as a software engineer, and cannot currently afford to go back to school).

The point is that I am feeling very overwhelmed and alone with my idea.  Almost nobody in my life understands enough math/physics to meaningfully respond to its contents, and those who can don't have time to care about my idea, enough to contribute anything meaningful beyond, essentially, recommending I make a toy model that emulates some aspect of reality .  And why should they?  It's not like I am making specific, testable, compelling, predictions.

Don't get me wrong.  Obviously, I find this idea an object of worthy study, in its own right, even if it isn't ultimately physical, which is why I spend time on it.  I just wish I had somebody who could help me, or provide better guidance on this than that which I've been given.

Anybody else have this problem?

Edited November 28, 2018 by MyFaceIsACorner
I thought I could have said something better.

[Phi for All]

It's only a problem if you can't give us an overview of what your idea explains (hopefully better than mainstream physics) to start a discussion thread. You should post it in the Speculations section and let us whack it with a stick. You'll have everyone from working professionals to knowledgeable amateurs dissecting your idea to make sure it matches observation and current best explanations. Best way to cure you feeling overwhelmed and alone is to separate yourself from your idea, then let us isolate it, gang up on it, and show no mercy. If it's still alive after that, you may be on to something.

[quiet]

4 hours ago, MyFaceIsACorner said:

I have an idea

Except for gravitation, the standard model encompasses everything, with admirable perfection. There is only room to formulate gravity compatible with the standard model and, consequently, achieve the theory of everything.

Have you achieved the TOE in the context of the standard model? In case of negative answer you are dedicating effort and time to an obvious error.

Edited November 29, 2018 by quiet

[MyFaceIsACorner]

@Phi for All

Thanks for responding.  I started doing that, earlier, but got cold feet.  I was concerned primarily about two things: my lack of physical testable predictions I can be confident in, and, less reasonable, that somebody might scoop my idea.  Yes, I know that's silly of me, but emotions aren't always rational.  Note that I can actually make predictions--lots of them.  It's just that my ideas aren't at a point, yet, where I think that they make correct predictions.

I'll certainly let you know, in this thread, if I do post it, so that you all can have your way with it.

@quiet

I hear you.  I'm not really working on a TOE, though.  I mean, it could turn into a TOE, but that isn't my goal.  It's more like a way of extending classical theory to exhibit--let's just call it--a form of wave-particle duality.  Think about it as similar in motivation (though not strategy) to the recent (failed) efforts to model quantum effects using water droplets on surfaces.  I hesitate to call them quantum effects, because that presupposes that my ideas naturally lead to Schrodinger, Dirac, or Yang-Mills type equations, which I can't say, yet.

At any rate, your point is well taken, and, for what it's worth, I don't spend all my time on my own wild-eyed ideas.  I actually have 3 years of formal physics training, and have trained myself further, outside of school.  Currently, I am slowly making my way through Rindler's Relativity, and Lancaster's Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur.  I also finally managed to wrap my head (mostly) around Noether's Theorem, recently (though, I still feel like I need to get a better geometric sense of it, rather than understanding it as the somewhat superficial Euler-Lagrange + Product Rule route.  I feel like it might have something to do with from the tangent space of the gauge transformation projecting onto the local space-time inertial frame, but I digress.)

Of course, gravity is a huge missing piece of the puzzle, and I would hope that any theory, which modifies the Standard Model would at least provide a sensible way to incorporate gravity.  I also feel it is not the only thing, but that ventures into speculation territory, so it is best to keep my mouth shut, here.

[MigL]

Not to worry.
String Theory has the same problems with making testable predictions.
Yet hundreds ( if not thousands ) of Physicists and Mathematicians are actively researching the field.

And contrary to what Quiet says, Gravity is not the only missing piece of the puzzle.
All we have is models. And models can always be improved.

[quiet]

There is no wave / particle without quantum. Nobody has managed to deduce the quantum from a classical model.

[studiot]

8 hours ago, MyFaceIsACorner said:

It's more like a way of extending classical theory to exhibit--let's just call it--a form of wave-particle duality.

 

13 hours ago, MyFaceIsACorner said:

This places me in the awkward situation, where I can construct a theory, but am not yet able to make concrete, testable, predictions

I'm glad to hear your are looking for ways to test out your hypotheses.

Early successes of the Quantum Theory was the explanation of work functions and spectroscopic phenomena and prediction of the numeric data.

Since these are known and yours is a quantum type hypothesis, perhaps you could start here and see if you can calculate the correct values?

 

As to the link between classical and quantum theory, there is no clear boundary but a smooth merging from one into the other.
Quantisation arises naturally out of the solution of many classical physical equations, as does an uncertaintly principle.

 

 

[quiet]

Are the same discrete variables and quantum properties?

[studiot]

11 minutes ago, quiet said:

Are the same discrete variables and quantum properties?

 

?

[Phi for All]

10 hours ago, MyFaceIsACorner said:

@Phi for All

Thanks for responding.  I started doing that, earlier, but got cold feet.  I was concerned primarily about two things: my lack of physical testable predictions I can be confident in, and, less reasonable, that somebody might scoop my idea.  Yes, I know that's silly of me, but emotions aren't always rational.  Note that I can actually make predictions--lots of them.  It's just that my ideas aren't at a point, yet, where I think that they make correct predictions.

I'll certainly let you know, in this thread, if I do post it, so that you all can have your way with it.

You can at least have the membership test your science with a Speculations thread. I wouldn't be worried about amateur ideas being stolen; the bigger emotional risk is that you've filled in the gaps in your knowledge with custom ideas you've made up to fit the situation. THOSE are particularly difficult to get rid of with an intellectual process like peer review (and we're a very casual form of such). Ideas like that are persistent because they make perfect sense, but only to you. But if you can explain your ideas to others and let them find any inconsistencies/errors/misunderstandings, it's like when a sculptor removes what's not needed from the block of stone to reveal the real work beneath. 

And it could be that the whole block shatters when you really start to work it. Wrong ideas outnumber right ones by quite a large margin. Welcome to science!

[MyFaceIsACorner]

 

 

@MigL

On 11/29/2018 at 2:14 AM, MigL said:

Not to worry.
String Theory has the same problems with making testable predictions.
Yet hundreds ( if not thousands ) of Physicists and Mathematicians are actively researching the field.

Haha.  Yeah, this is a refrain that I hear from lots of people.  I am personally biased towards that, but seeing as I don't understand anything about String Theory, my opinion on that matters not.  I just have found the school of thought espoused by Peter Woit, Sabine Hossenfelder, and Lee Smolin pretty compelling.  The way they frame things, it certainly sounds hopeless to me.  On the other hand, I think that Matt Strassler has made some good points, on the matter, too, and he definitely seems to be String Theory proponent.

@studiot

On 11/29/2018 at 6:03 AM, studiot said:

 

I'm glad to hear your are looking for ways to test out your hypotheses.

Early successes of the Quantum Theory was the explanation of work functions and spectroscopic phenomena and prediction of the numeric data.

Since these are known and yours is a quantum type hypothesis, perhaps you could start here and see if you can calculate the correct values?

I hear you.  I actually thought I had cause for celebration the night before, because I thought I had found an asymptotic argument to remove the nonlinearity, which allowed me to prove that anything massive would have a frequency proportional to its mass.  Then, I found a serious flaw in the argument.

Quote

As to the link between classical and quantum theory, there is no clear boundary but a smooth merging from one into the other.
Quantisation arises naturally out of the solution of many classical physical equations, as does an uncertaintly principle.

 

I don't doubt the correspondence principle, and am well aware of things like coherent states, however, that doesn't concern me so much.

At the risk of venturing into speculative territory, the question, for me, is not whether classical theory can be modeled by QM--it's the reverse--can QM be modeled by a reasonable classical theory?  To me, classical theory presents a simpler model of reality than QM, a theory, which requires all kinds of elaborate, axiomatic constructs--high, or infinite-dimensional Hilbert space, the Born Rule, Canonical Quantization, Spin, Dirac Matrices, Fermi-Dirac, or Bose-Einstein statistics, and so on.  Yes, these are necessary for the theory to work (and fascinating, to boot), but they are, nonetheless, strangely elaborate for a universe that is dominated, at classical, to large scales, by none of those formalisms. To wit, QM has always struck me as ad-hoc; as if its postulates really shouldn't be accepted as such, but rather, as originating from deeper principles--almost like discovering the the Fourier Coefficients of a dynamical system, fist, rather than its differential equation, but never even bothering to find the latter.

Please permit me to elaborate on this impression, by addressing a specific, mysterious, aspect of QM--Canonical Quantization.  I regard it as mysterious, because, to my knowledge, either you explain it as a fundamental aspect of reality, or any of your attempts to explain it are circular, in an unsatisfying way.  To wit, you do it by tracing through a sequence of ideas, each originating from an equally mysterious postulate, as the last: from the Debroglie relations all the way back to the discovery of Photons, and Planck's solution to the Ultraviolet catastrophe.  But, therein lies the problem, for neither empirical results, nor a guess, are satisfying as deep explanations.  Unfortunately, if you want to go deeper than that, you then have to appeal to Modern Quantum Theory, but, now, we have come full circle!  Could it simply be fundamental?  Of course!  But, there is no reason to believe this, any more than there is to believe that Fourier Coefficients are all there needs to be known about a dynamical system.

Taking this analogy to its breaking point, it's as if we analyzed data in a finite interval, found a systematic way of calculating most Fourier Coefficients we have observed, with the exception of a few, and then claimed that we're finished, because Fourier Coefficients give you all you need to know to calculate this function in this small window, and those extraneous coefficients "just are." (Furthermore, anybody, who wishes for a deeper explanation--say a set of differential equations--is admonished with "shut up, and calculate," or, lectured on how lots of smart people have already tried to find a deeper explanation, and failed, or discouraged with, "These coefficients [developed over years, and years, through grants, volumes of research, and experiments] is the only game in town.  Can your fledgling idea about differentials fully reproduce this [towering edifice born of decades of human labor]?"  Yes, I know I am a crackpot.  After all, my face **is** a corner.)

Ultimately, my concern with this circularity is that the way that history of Physics is presented, it seems to me like the quantum revolution swept most people up so quickly in its thrall, that they might have missed studying some aspects of classical theory, which emulate quantum mechanical effects.  Indeed, it wasn't until fairly recent that non-radiating conditions, exhibiting discrete energy levels, had finally been formally shown to be consistent with Classical Electromagnetism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonradiation_condition).  However, by now, I have probably gone too far, and so I will stop, here.

On 11/29/2018 at 8:47 AM, Phi for All said:

You can at least have the membership test your science with a Speculations thread. I wouldn't be worried about amateur ideas being stolen; the bigger emotional risk is that you've filled in the gaps in your knowledge with custom ideas you've made up to fit the situation. THOSE are particularly difficult to get rid of with an intellectual process like peer review (and we're a very casual form of such). Ideas like that are persistent because they make perfect sense, but only to you. But if you can explain your ideas to others and let them find any inconsistencies/errors/misunderstandings, it's like when a sculptor removes what's not needed from the block of stone to reveal the real work beneath. 

And it could be that the whole block shatters when you really start to work it. Wrong ideas outnumber right ones by quite a large margin. Welcome to science!

I am working on it.  There is a lot to cover.  Lots of mathematics, and lots of self doubt.  I will let you know, once I am done.

[studiot]

8 minutes ago, MyFaceIsACorner said:

I don't doubt the correspondence principle, and am well aware of things like coherent states, however, that doesn't concern me so much.

At the risk of venturing into speculative territory, the question, for me, is not whether classical theory can be modeled by QM--it's the reverse--can QM be modeled by a reasonable classical theory?  To me, classical theory presents a simpler model of reality than QM, a theory, which requires all kinds of elaborate, axiomatic constructs--high, or infinite-dimensional Hilbert space, the Born Rule, Canonical Quantization, Spin, Dirac Matrices, Fermi-Dirac, or Bose-Einstein statistics, and so on.  Yes, these are necessary for the theory to work (and fascinating, to boot), but they are, nonetheless, strangely elaborate for a universe that is dominated, at classical, to large scales, by none of those formalisms. To wit, QM has always struck me as ad-hoc; as if its postulates really shouldn't be accepted as such, but rather, as originating from deeper principles--almost like discovering the the Fourier Coefficients of a dynamical system, fist, rather than its differential equation, but never even bothering to find the latter.

Please permit me to elaborate on this impression, by addressing a specific, mysterious, aspect of QM--Canonical Quantization.  I regard it as mysterious, because, to my knowledge, either you explain it as a fundamental aspect of reality, or any of your attempts to explain it are circular, in an unsatisfying way.  To wit, you do it by tracing through a sequence of ideas, each originating from an equally mysterious postulate, as the last: from the Debroglie relations all the way back to the discovery of Photons, and Planck's solution to the Ultraviolet catastrophe.  But, therein lies the problem, for neither empirical results, nor a guess, are satisfying as deep explanations.  Unfortunately, if you want to go deeper than that, you then have to appeal to Modern Quantum Theory, but, now, we have come full circle!  Could it simply be fundamental?  Of course!  But, there is no reason to believe this, any more than there is to believe that Fourier Coefficients are all there needs to be known about a dynamical system.

Taking this analogy to its breaking point, it's as if we analyzed data in a finite interval, found a systematic way of calculating most Fourier Coefficients we have observed, with the exception of a few, and then claimed that we're finished, because Fourier Coefficients give you all you need to know to calculate this function in this small window, and those extraneous coefficients "just are." (Furthermore, anybody, who wishes for a deeper explanation--say a set of differential equations--is admonished with "shut up, and calculate," or, lectured on how lots of smart people have already tried to find a deeper explanation, and failed, or discouraged with, "These coefficients [developed over years, and years, through grants, volumes of research, and experiments] is the only game in town.  Can your fledgling idea about differentials fully reproduce this [towering edifice born of decades of human labor]?"  Yes, I know I am a crackpot.  After all, my face **is** a corner.)

Ultimately, my concern with this circularity is that the way that history of Physics is presented, it seems to me like the quantum revolution swept most people up so quickly in its thrall, that they might have missed studying some aspects of classical theory, which emulate quantum mechanical effects.  Indeed, it wasn't until fairly recent that non-radiating conditions, exhibiting discrete energy levels, had finally been formally shown to be consistent with Classical Electromagnetism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonradiation_condition).  However, by now, I have probably gone too far, and so I will stop, here.

 

Unfortunately you have entirely missed my point

[MyFaceIsACorner]

1 minute ago, studiot said:

 

Unfortunately you have entirely missed my point

Actually, you are right.  I did miss your point, having read it, again.  Sorry about that.

Do you have links for this claim, of yours?  I would be very interested in it.

[quiet]

15 hours ago, MyFaceIsACorner said:

Ultimately, my concern with this circularity is that the way that history of Physics is presented, it seems to me like the quantum revolution swept most people up so quickly in its thrall, that they might have missed studying some aspects of classical theory, which emulate quantum mechanical effects.  Indeed, it wasn't until fairly recent that non-radiating conditions, exhibiting discrete energy levels, had finally been formally shown to be consistent with Classical Electromagnetism

If you want, take a look on post number 11 of the thread entitled Vacuum dynamics, in this forum.

[Phi for All]

23 minutes ago, quiet said:

If you want, take a look on post number 11 of the thread entitled Vacuum dynamics, in this forum.

!

Moderator Note

Our rules against advertising include plugging your own threads and posts. Knock it off.

 

[studiot]

21 hours ago, MyFaceIsACorner said:

21 hours ago, studiot said:

 

Unfortunately you have entirely missed my point

Actually, you are right.  I did miss your point, having read it, again.  Sorry about that.

Do you have links for this claim, of yours?  I would be very interested in it.

 

Sure, though most of my material lies in published and vetted hard copy, not ephemeral links.

 

First and foremost, when we calculate a 'quantum' of something it is a something with a classical definition.

Most usually, that something is Energy.

But not any old energy.

Quantum theory does not restrict 'any old energy' to specific values, say 1 unit or 2 units , but never 1.5 or 1.3 or 1.86742 units.

What is does do is make such a restriction for a specific system.

And of course, the energy is the same ML2T^-2 quantity that appears in 'classical' theory.

We still have to multiply a classical force by a classical distance to obtain it.

So when we analyse the quantum mechanics of vibration of the carbon dioxide molecule to obtain its infra red spectrum we still consider little balls on springs.

The point is that the solutions have special characteristics at certain frequencies, leading to 'quantisation' of response.

We can even introduce Relativity and calculate a relativistic Doppler shift due to the oscillation of the little balls about a mean centre of mass.

 

Again consider Boltzman, Statistical Mechanics, the Partition theorem and classical Thermodynamics.

They all offer analysis of a system in standard states, with fixed transition energies in terms of the  distribution of the energy carriers in the system throughout those states.

Does that sound at all like QM to you?

Edited December 1, 2018 by studiot

[MyFaceIsACorner]

On 12/1/2018 at 4:28 PM, studiot said:

 

Sure, though most of my material lies in published and vetted hard copy, not ephemeral links.

That's what I meant.  As a caveat, I am aware of some things that take quantum to classical, like noting that the Lie Bracket is the Quantum Form of the Poisson Bracket.

Quote

First and foremost, when we calculate a 'quantum' of something it is a something with a classical definition.

Is this really true?  Spin doesn't really have a classical definition, at all.  Though, I acknowledge that it has many similarities to angular momentum--but it really isn't spinning in a classical sense, because classical rotation isn't really represented by spinors.  Also, Colour Charge also doesn't seem to have any classical analogue, to me.
 

Quote

Most usually, that something is Energy.

But not any old energy.

Quantum theory does not restrict 'any old energy' to specific values, say 1 unit or 2 units , but never 1.5 or 1.3 or 1.86742 units.

What is does do is make such a restriction for a specific system.

And of course, the energy is the same ML2T^-2 quantity that appears in 'classical' theory.

We still have to multiply a classical force by a classical distance to obtain it.

I don't understand why this should be true.  My understanding is that, in QM, force plays a secondary, to nil role, when doing calculations, especially in consideration of energy.  For example, to calculate energy of a system, you would take the the inner product of the energy operator with the state vector.  Are you talking about something like the Ehrenfest theorem?  

I suppose, given my incomplete understanding of QM/QFT, it is unfair of me to dismiss this observation.  Can you be more specific about how force is applied?

Quote

So when we analyse the quantum mechanics of vibration of the carbon dioxide molecule to obtain its infra red spectrum we still consider little balls on springs.

If you are talking about second quantization, here?  If so, I don't know how much I agree that representing things as a set of harmonic oscillators, through a Fourier Transform, yields any physically meaningful idea of force.

Quote

The point is that the solutions have special characteristics at certain frequencies, leading to 'quantisation' of response.

We can even introduce Relativity and calculate a relativistic Doppler shift due to the oscillation of the little balls about a mean centre of mass.

 

Again consider Boltzman, Statistical Mechanics, the Partition theorem and classical Thermodynamics.

They all offer analysis of a system in standard states, with fixed transition energies in terms of the  distribution of the energy carriers in the system throughout those states.

Does that sound at all like QM to you?

Unfortunately, it still does.  It sounds like you are just taking classical concepts, and quantizing them, or taking Quantum Mechanical effects, and predicting how classical measurements should be affected by them.  All of this requires the assumption that, ultimately we must replace classical quantities with their quantum operators, which, as I mentioned in my diatribe, is a very mysterious thing that, at this point, can only ultimately be attributed to a guess, or a measurement.

 

[studiot]

On 03/12/2018 at 6:22 PM, MyFaceIsACorner said:

Unfortunately, it still does.  It sounds like you are just taking classical concepts, and quantizing them, or taking Quantum Mechanical effects, and predicting how classical measurements should be affected by them.  All of this requires the assumption that, ultimately we must replace classical quantities with their quantum operators, which, as I mentioned in my diatribe, is a very mysterious thing that, at this point, can only ultimately be attributed to a guess, or a measurement.

 

That is not what I said, but I agree that I have been very brief and QM is a huge subject.

Take a look at these four pages from Atkins book and see how you get on.

At the end of page 44 and into page 45 he makes the important point that the quantisation arises as a result of the boundary conditions imposed on a classical equation.

As to the issue of 'operators' Heisenbeg's Principle arises from the same inequality as Cauchy-Schwarz or the triangle inequality when considering the product of two distributed (spread out ) properties.

 

Edited December 5, 2018 by studiot