A Quick Glance at "Brian Cox is Full of **it"

[Xittenn]

I must say I am the least aware of who Brian Cox is and I believe the only reason I know the name is because of #SFN--I lead a sheltered life apparently, and am illiterate (I simply don't read magazines or newsprints.) At any rate this was one time I had passed on the reading of a post from Swanson as I tend to avoid anything that relates to this sort of material, especially when it involves concepts that are much beyond me. I took a second look, and the comments made me watch the video; I mean hey 'Prof. Cox' took the moment to address, the least I can do is watch the video. Useless facts aside and having had no intention with the above . . . .

 

I think the idea is amazing and for very obvious reasons, and for very obvious reasons I am extremely skeptical about what has been stated. I have never seen anyone state in print anywhere, or even remotely suggest, that the Pauli Exclusion Principle in anyway (I love how he says Pauli) extended beyond the states within a given atom. The idea being presented is enormous and I'm curious where on earth it came from. Are these Brian Cox's ideas or is this something that has been developing in the pockets of some of the more knowledgeable theoretical physicist? In all of the comments I did not see any mention of literature, present or past, that supported or validated these claims in anyway. Are there any journal entries? Is this something that can be found on the arXiv? I very much respect Swansons opinion and I understand if this thread is move to speculations at this point!

 

My most immediate thoughts on the matter were around how the internal distribution of an electron manifests itself--which coming from me means very little, meaning what distribution. . . I have already being trying to come to grasps with the state of an electron so adding this to the puzzle sort of makes it a little exciting. He keeps referring to how bonding could not be explained without this truth being upheld, where on earth is that coming from? How might this relate to entanglement--another concept I barely understand, no funnin' me now. The implications of this idea are pretty crazy. My problem with objecting to the statement outright is in many ways it makes a lot of sense. I can see something like this manifesting itself as an emergent property of the physical processes. It just begs the question, what is under the hood, and how are we going to observe these properties in our future research and advancement.

 

Not_A_Journalist A.K.A. Xittenn <3

 

I'll really try hard to stop spelling it Swanson. I just generally avoid referencing your name, or anyone else from the forum's name for that matter, but especially yours.

 

I want to retract my silliness, again. :/

 

After rereading the response by 'Brian Cox' I think I took the whole idea out of context. I think, based on the comment made, that all that is being said is Pauli states what we normally associate with Pauli and that in addition because each electron exists at a distance from each other Pauli continues to be satisfied, and as we all have come to conclude a moving charge with infinitely reaching effect will ensure the change in state of all other electrons. This isn't a very exciting idea, it is rather boring. But it is kind of an interesting way of wording it. I hate it when that happens so I am going to up the anti.

 

Xittenn's Hypothesis:

 

I hereby speculate that in fact the wavefunction of an electron in it's localized frame forms a symmetry with all other electrons in the universe with respect to their localized frames such that no two electrons can exist with the same wavefunction in their localized frame! And so if the wavefunction of one electron is perturbed, all wavefunctions must change to be dissimilar relative to their local frames. I further hypothesize that this occurs instantaneously and is a property incurred at a scale that we have yet to have observed.

 

 

He might not have said, but I just did. . . . I still don't see why he says the propagation is instantaneous, unless of course he had put his foot in his mouth and was back peddling in his reply.

 

 

If this gets deleted . . . . . I meant no harm.

 

Nope he was rebutting another comment . .. . . what the hell is he saying, buy my book?

Edited February 23, 2012 by Xittenn

[ajb]

I did not really understand what Prof. Cox was saying.

 

We have energy degenerate states and so even within an atom electrons are not connected in that way.

 

 

I think, without putting words into Prof. Cox's mouth, that he took something from quantum mechanics and pushed the interpretation to the extreme.

[swansont]

I think, without putting words into Prof. Cox's mouth, that he took something from quantum mechanics and pushed the interpretation to the extreme.

 

Maybe he goes into more detail elsewhere which changes the context, but his statement, in the video and WSJ article about affecting all other electrons, is wrong. We simply don't observe the band structure in individual atoms that must occur if he is right, and we do observe effects of individual atoms being identical in how they follow the predicted statistics.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Cox's idea is explained in some detail here:

 

http://www.hep.manchester.ac.uk/u/forshaw/BoseFermi/Double%20Well.html

[ydoaPs]

Heh..........cox.......

[ajb]

Maybe he goes into more detail elsewhere which changes the context, but his statement, in the video and WSJ article about affecting all other electrons, is wrong. We simply don't observe the band structure in individual atoms that must occur if he is right, and we do observe effects of individual atoms being identical in how they follow the predicted statistics.

 

I watched the lecture on TV and was very confused about what he meant.

 

Can we in anyway estimate how wide this band structure would have to be if this idea is right? Lets say for the hydrogen atom. In particular could it be small enough that we just can see it? (My gut feeling is no, but I have not calculated anything)

 

Cox's idea is explained in some detail here:

 

http://www.hep.manchester.ac.uk/u/forshaw/BoseFermi/Double%20Well.html

 

 

I may be missing something, but this really only tells me that the energy of a double well is not the same as a single well. I would see this simply as instantons contributing to the ground state energy.

[Xittenn]

Can't we simply make an approximate calculation of the band gap by taking a guess at how many electrons there are within a narrow energy state and dividing that band gap into pieces? From reading Cap's link his argument is far more convincing than mine; I didn't give one. I like the abstraction formed, but the reasoning according to the link is too conforming, and I'm sure ajb will debunk it soon enough. I don't believe a lot of questions currently being asked are going to be answerable through anything less than the introduction of new physics, something Prof. Cox seems to be avoiding. I have my ideas about what these new physics will be and I believe that this idea of a symmetry that prevents charge from existing universally in the same state as observed locally--I still use this word here--might have more meaning than we are currently observing. For me it fits and I'll leave my little girl comments from here on in my pocket! This was a pretty interesting event for me, I've never seen this sort of a clash of ideas before coming from 'men of science' (no sexism implied in either comment, for real).

 

Thanks as always guys! <3

[ajb]

... and I'm sure ajb will debunk it soon enough.

 

Thank you for the vote of confidence!

 

Anyway, what I am uncomfortable with is using the spinless one dimensional non-relativistic Schrödinger wave equation with a double well to extrapolate to the entire Universe.

 

 

The plot at the end of the webpage Cap'n gave us is nice. It shows a single particle tunnelling back and fore between the wells.

[Schrödinger's hat]

Not to be presumptuous, or to say I have anywhere near the same level of knowledge as swansont, but I think I see where Professor Cox is coming from. Other than the 'instantaneously' comment. But talking about instantaneously, and causality when it comes to anything even tangentially related to entanglement is a whole 'nother kettle of cats.

 

Let's start with a box with a single electron in it.

The idea of a delta doesn't exist in nature to my knowledge, only increasingly good approximations of one.

No matter how big the box is, the wave function of the electron is non-zero everywhere inside it (Edit: I suppose 'except at nodes' should be here in case of nit-picking).

Even if it's insignificant in most of the box.

 

So now we add another electron.

No matter how complicated your Lagrangian/Hamiltonian, as long as you have some kind of interaction term, the resultant wavefunction isn't just going to be wavefunction 1 + wavefunction 2 so the contribution of your new particle to the overall wavefunction depends on what the original wavefunction was.

We ignore contributions from the electrons in atoms outside of our laboritory/clock/whatever because they're so insignificant, but a full-universe Lagrangian (or all-particle equation for any finite subset of the universe) would include them and all of the interaction terms.

 

Repeat for N electrons and/or other particles.

 

 

Possible faulty assumptions:

I am not completely talking out of my posterior

Reasoning is based on finite box.

Interaction always implies non-linearity.

Professor Cox was glossing over other quantum numbers for the sake of talking to the general public and would intend people who understood more to include them.

The equations behind principles (not just the most common applications thereof) I'm using aren't already ignoring larger terms than the ones I speak of. In which case speaking of them at all is absurd.

 

 

Other notes:

The empirical data on which modern physics relies definitely does not have the level of detail required to confirm or deny this. So extrapolating quantum theory to this level is possibly a bit silly.

 

It seems odd to talk about the exlusion principle here. Although you could consider the whole system a very complicated potential. Once you have two electrons at one energy/spin/etc you can not have another.

 

 

Re. clocks:

1. As stated, the bandwidth could be beyond the range of our instruments.

2. Even the electrons in two clocks (or even atoms) sitting next to each other are in slightly different momentum states (the Earth is turning, this so is any box on Earth). You get consistent energies between distant clocks because you always measure in a lab co-moving with and in the same potential as the clock you are measuring.

Edited February 23, 2012 by Schrödinger's hat

[DrRocket]

Cox's idea is explained in some detail here:

 

http://www.hep.manch...ble%20Well.html

 

In a nutshell that says that when one considers as the total quantum system two atoms that the Pauli exclusion principlle applies to the system as a whole and not just to each atom individually, but that when the interaction is weak, the splitting is small.

 

This is based on elementary, non-relativistic quantum mechanics and the Schrodinger equation.

 

Yep. That is pretty obvious.

 

But that has absolutely nothing whatever to do with an assertion that heating up the atoms in some material instantaneously affects every atom in the universe.

 

Brian Cox's subsequent, lame, attempt (in comments at the blog) to justify nonsense by invoking EPR phenomena and quantum entanglement, merely demonstrates that he is desperately trying to shohw that through some twist of logic that he is "right".

 

In short the rock star is more concerned about his image than truth. He has inserted his foot in his mouth and cannot get it out. At the moment he appears to be chewing on his knee cap.

 

An position of integrity would be for him to simply admit that he made some unfounded statements and retract them. But his ego will not let him do that.

 

Hoist by his own petard.

[Appolinaria]

He just asked you what the domain of applicability is for qft.

 

DrRocket vs. Brian Cox. I'll be watching that closely.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Sean Carroll posted another interpretation of Cox's words on his blog:

 

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/02/23/everything-is-connected/

 

Seems like Cox isn't going to get out of this easily.

[Xittenn]

So what happens if suddenly he realizes that what he said was inappropriate, can he simply retract his statements or state that in fact it wasn't thought through well enough and reevaluate his position? Would this result in the entirety of his works being discredited. Right or wrong the idea is a fresh thought and suggests quite a bit in terms of higher thinking. We will never answer questions if we never pose new postulates; we must first assume, to prove. He even asks us to review and correct!

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

He doesn't claim to be proposing new science; he claims to represent what already-accepted science says, and apparently instead misrepresented it.

[Xittenn]

Yes, my mistake. .. .

[DrRocket]

He just asked you what the domain of applicability is for qft.

 

DrRocket vs. Brian Cox. I'll be watching that closely.

 

Thanks for the heads up telling me that he had replied.

 

I have provided what I hope will be the last reply to him. This is getting silly.

 

Any respect that I might have harbored for Brian Cox in some deep recess has evaporated.

 

Sean Carroll posted another interpretation of Cox's words on his blog:

 

http://blogs.discove...g-is-connected/

 

Seems like Cox isn't going to get out of this easily.

 

He inserted his foot in his mouth, proceeded to nibble on his knee cap and is rapidly approaching his hip.

 

 

For future reference:

 

That particular blog entry is rapidly falling to the bottom of the pile and becoming a bit difficult to find. For purposes of easier access here is the llink

 

http://blogs.science...1#comment-82145

Edited February 24, 2012 by DrRocket

[A Tripolation]

...my, oh my. Which Ph.D to believe?

[Appolinaria]

Just a layman's question here; Is there any relation to what Mr. Cox is saying and conservation of energy?

[D H]

Any respect that I might have harbored for Brian Cox in some deep recess has evaporated.

It evaporated for me quite some time ago.

 

Popularizes of science should do their best to explain, insofar as a lay person can understand. Cox, along with several others (e.g., Brian Greene, Michio Kaku), instead seem to hellbent to mysticizing physics. This episode iced the cake for me. He himself apparently misundersands the exclusion principle.

 

Just a layman's question here; Is there any relation to what Mr. Cox is saying and conservation of energy?

No. He was trying to (mis)use the Pauli exclusion principle, which says that two fermions cannot occupy the same quantum state. There's more to state than just energy. He also apparently (mis)used quantum entanglement; how else did he get the instantaneous bit? Finally, he apparently used one particular sub-interpretation of one particular interpretation of quantum mechanics in getting to that "everything is connected" bit. That's the "wave function of the universe" nonsense that comes out of the multiple worlds interpretation. Quantum Woo.

[ajb]

I still respect Prof. Cox and think the work on publicising physics is great. The trouble is trying to communicate deep mathematical ideas to a general audience. One always risks at best saying something misleading or at worse just wrong. In this case Prof. Cox said something wrong in the lecture, which may or may not have some other more meaningful interpretation. Carroll has spoken in his blog about this.

 

That's the "wave function of the universe" nonsense that comes out of the multiple worlds interpretation. Quantum Woo.

 

This is what sprung to my mind, but this was not said in the lecture. Nor really was any meaningful explanation of this "Cox-Forshaw" shift other than naively extrapolating what we know to be true form atomic and condensed matter physics. But this is the nature of public lectures...

[StringJunky]

I still respect Prof. Cox and think the work on publicising physics is great. The trouble is trying to communicate deep mathematical ideas to a general audience. One always risks at best saying something misleading or at worse just wrong. In this case Prof. Cox said something wrong in the lecture, which may or may not have some other more meaningful interpretation. Carroll has spoken in his blog about this.

 

 

 

This is what sprung to my mind, but this was not said in the lecture. Nor really was any meaningful explanation of this "Cox-Forshaw" shift other than naively extrapolating what we know to be true form atomic and condensed matter physics. But this is the nature of public lectures...

 

It would seem he's broken the 'rule' of keep it simple but no simpler and as a consequence come out wrong. That's if my interpretation of the (paraphrased) Einstein quote is correct.

[ajb]

It would seem he's broken the 'rule' of keep it simple but no simpler and as a consequence come out wrong.

 

I think most people here will agree with that sentiment.

[swansont]

The disappointing part for me is he's defending his position, and not being particularly nice about it. I offered up a snarky title for my blog post, so I'm not going to complain too much about his comments toward me, but he's projecting attitude toward others. He has a book out, which probably says the same thing as his lecture, so maybe he feels more invested in the idea than if this were only a discussion of the physics. I don't know.

 

ajb, I don't know exactly how to calculate the width of band structure since I'm not a solid-state physicist, but I suspect it scales with the number of electrons in the band. But scaling with N immediately nullifies his argument, since if he's right, those electrons were already "staking out their energy" regardless of whether they were in one sample or another. The size of the individual sample shouldn't matter. So why don't we see band structure in atoms? We have many times Avogadro's number of individual atoms, but we only see band structure in individual solids that have some kind of lattice structure. There's no evidence of it in atoms, as I pointed out with the clock example. Atomic clocks work on the notion that the atoms are identical, and the clocks work.

 

The other objection I raised (int he comments) was that composite Fermionic systems still act like identical particles. If Cox is right, these atoms are not identical anymore, because the electrons are in slightly different energy levels. A Fermi gas in its ground state should have all the atoms drop to the lowest energy level, but that's not what happens - you get one atom per state, just as you expect from identical spin-1/2 particles. Cox says they aren't identical, and nature disagrees. Nature has the final say.

[imatfaal]

This thread, Tom Swanson's blog and the replies/counters have, I believe, been rather edifying for science. It clearly demonstrates the fallacy of those who regularly claim that there is a monolithic dogmatism about science. Tom may have been rather salty in his initial post/title (blame the navy experience) - but the public event of real heavyweights duking it out beautifully demonstrates that no one is above reproach. I wish I knew enough to come down firmly on one side or another - although the Sean Carroll article seems to confirm that Tom was right to raise a flag of caution.

[swansont]

It also reminds us that nobody is perfect, and I hope it cautions us that one error should not undermine the credibility of anyone — this doesn't change all of the correct things that he's said — especially if (as I hope Cox eventually does) one acknowledges their mistakes. And I can be convinced that I'm wrong, I will acknowledge it. But so far, there have been no examples presented that seem relevant, and my counterexamples haven't really been challenged.

 

If I had know the level of scrutiny this would get I would have put more thought into the title, but then, a tamer title might not have brought the same level of scrutiny. Quite a conundrum.