The second Black Body Problem.

[Ronald Hyde]

When I was a kid the Sunday paper always had a little quiz problem. It would have a picture with all kinds of things messed up in it, with the question 'What is wrong with this picture?'.

 

Quantum theory was invented when Max Planck solved the first Black Body problem. In a fairly short paper filled with a beautiful example of 'reasoning among the facts' he laid out a solution, that he later interpreted as energy being in the form of Quanta.

 

Make a little ( hypothetical ) metal box painted black on the outside and inside, and with a small hole so that you can observe the inside. Now heat it to the surface temperature

of the Sun which is 5800K. The reason it's hypothetical is no such box would stand that temperature. The box will glow an extremely bright white and radiate a great deal of heat.

I remember and engineer describing an attempt to melt molybdenum which melts at exactly half that temperature. The whole room gets hot and still it doesn't melt!

 

No look inside the box. You will see that the inside of the box is a dark red, which is exactly what it should be by the Planck Equation. Now the suns temperature corresponds

to almost exactly .5 ev ( electron volt ) which is pretty far into the infrared. Visible light ranges from 1.5 to 3.5 ev, and the outside of the box is above visible light in color.

 

What is wrong with this picture?

[MigL]

Maybe an introductory course in QM would help as most lead in with the black body UV catastrophy. Your concept of black body radiation is flawed as you assume a common everyday approximation of a black body should be able to work at uncommon temperatures such as that of the sun. You not understanding the concept does not imply a problem with the concept.

[Ronald Hyde]

Maybe an introductory course in QM would help as most lead in with the black body UV catastrophy. Your concept of black body radiation is flawed as you assume a common everyday approximation of a black body should be able to work at uncommon temperatures such as that of the sun. You not understanding the concept does not imply a problem with the concept.

 

If your reply is an attempt to 'solve' the puzzle, as it is a genuine puzzle and begs of a resolution, it is failure. My aim of posing the puzzle is to increase people's understanding of Nature. An introductory course in QM would help, but only to define the riddle better, and we know well of the UV catastrophe.

 

A correct reply would have involved introducing more concepts, the concepts of QM, including the solutions of Planck's Equation would indeed be part of it, but by no means all of it.

You would also have to introduce other parts of thermodynamics, and the everyday concept of Color too, and how Nature uses it. You see color has an algebra associated with it, as

everyone who works with it will tell you, and that algebra is as much a law of Nature as the laws of QM and QCD and Relativity. Wait a minute, I just mentioned QCD, so I gave you part of the correct answer, so did you with Introductory QM. But please do not trivialize this very deep puzzle by trying to 'solve' it with a shallow answer.

 

There is a very deep connection with Color and thermodynamics and quantum mechanics. The Blue of the Sky, the light Yellow of the Sun's disk, the Whiteness of the Sun's light,

the Green of grass, the Red of Blood, the Brown of Decay, the colors of flowers, the three primary colors, the seven secondary colors, the three complementary colors.

The correct answer will incorporate all of those and more.

 

You see Planck's equation and QM only see the world in shades of Grey. If you don't think color is important in the world, I beg you to do this. Search the web for pictures

of 'nebulae' and look at at least 100 images of them. And riddle yourself this, why do all those colors appear in Nature? The answer to that riddle will be as deep as the Ocean, as high as the sky, as far as the Sun, and as deep as the inky Blackness of Space. And your understanding of Nature will increase thereby.

[ACG52]

You see color has an algebra associated with it, as

everyone who works with it will tell you

 

There is a very deep connection with Color and thermodynamics and quantum mechanics. The Blue of the Sky, the light Yellow of the Sun's disk, the Whiteness of the Sun's light,

the Green of grass, the Red of Blood, the Brown of Decay, the colors of flowers, the three primary colors, the seven secondary colors, the three complementary colors.

The correct answer will incorporate all of those and more.

 

 

This kind of nonsense belongs somewhere other than a science forum.

[MigL]

There is NO problem with black body radiation !

 

I'll repeat, colour in QCD is just a label, nothing more. Just like 'strangeness' is a label in QCD. Or are you going to tell me its related to some abnormal behavioral properties of the particles ???

Edited September 16, 2012 by MigL

[Ronald Hyde]

This kind of nonsense belongs somewhere other than a science forum.

You're wrong!

 

There is NO problem with black body radiation !

 

I'll repeat, colour in QCD is just a label, nothing more. Just like 'strangeness' is a label in QCD. Or are you going to tell me its related to some abnormal behavioral properties of the particles ???

You're wrong too.

 

You're both very, very wrong. And you're pushing my buttons.

 

Do either of you know who the most cited person in all of Physics is. Philip Warren Anderson. And he won a Nobey for his work, well deserved too. He's the one who suggested the spontaneous symmetry breaking mechanism to Peter Briggs. Brigg's '64 paper is available on the web. You will find Anderson's name right there in it. You have read Brigg's paper,

right? Anderson is one of my 'true life heroes', along with a few dozen others. A lot of people have heard of Briggs, few of Anderson. He's solved many problems, none more thorny

than Ferromagnetism.

 

One of my observations is that you can judge the quality of a Physicist by the depth of their dictums. Dirac has some good ones, look for beauty in your equations is one. Feynman

has some too. So what is Anderson's favorite dictum, by his own words and in his own words? The whole is greater than the sum of it's parts. This is in complete contradiction to the

KISS approach, if you haven't noticed. It's what you get automagically, so to speak, when you combine the laws of thermodynamics with quantum mechanics. When you add Color

Algebra, which you MUST, because it is a natural part of the SU(3) group, and if Nature has a religion it must be Unitary. And why must we enforce Unitarity? Because it represents the

logically necessary requirement that any physical system, or any part of it, has a probability of One to occur.

[ACG52]

Again, this nonsense does not belong in a physics discussion.

 

 

[Ronald Hyde]

Again, this nonsense does not belong in a physics discussion.

 

In Physics, a label is a charge. If it's a conserved charge it has to meet one very simple requirement imposed by Lorentz invariance, it has to have an associated current which is also conserved. It does not have to be associated with with a vector field, a common mistake people make when they try to apply the notions of Maxwell's equations to other interactions,

causing them no end of problems. Number charges and currents like Baryon number, Strangeness, etc. are a kind of charge. They are part of Natures bookkeeping, if you wish, and they have physical manifestations. An example of this is the beautiful little Mandelstam Relations where the charge is the rest energy of the two currents.

 

This requires very little more than high school algebra to fully understand it. So what part of it don't you get? And it's Physics, spelled with a capital P. What part of that do you not get?

 

Nature, unlike Lucy, doesn't have any 'splainin' to do. We have to figure it out all by ourselves. And she may speak with all the fury of a hurricane, or in the beauty of a rainbow.

Listen to what she has to tell you, she is the first and last authority or what constitutes Physics.

[MigL]

I doubt very much Anderson is the most cited person in physics.

And, no, I haven't read Peter Briggs paper on spontaneous symmetry breaking and the Higgs mechanism.

I've only read Peter Higgs paper on the same subject.

 

Must be his cousin or something.

 

Oh, and thanks for the simplistic explanation of gauge invariance.

[John Cuthber]

What is wrong with the picture described in the first post is that it's simply not true.

This bit "look inside the box. You will see that the inside of the box is a dark red" is wrong.

It won't look red, it will look pretty much like the sun i.e. white hot.

 

The inside of the box will look like a better approximation to black body radiation than the outside because the effect of multiple reflections makes it a better absorber and therefore a better reflector.

[imatfaal]

!

Moderator Note

As a question this was acceptable for the main forum - but the supposed answer from the OP is well into the Speculations catchment. Let's keep this as recognized and accepted physics please.

Ronald - if you wish to write further on your own ideas please do so in the Speculations forum. It might also help other member if you were to include a few citations or links when you make claims for important papers that everyone should have read.

[Enthalpy]

And the inside of a 6000K "box" will look white like our Sun, which is an approximation of a black body, because the strongest emitted colour doesn't have a photon energy of kT but a multiple of it.

[Ronald Hyde]

I doubt very much Anderson is the most cited person in physics.

And, no, I haven't read Peter Briggs paper on spontaneous symmetry breaking and the Higgs mechanism.

I've only read Peter Higgs paper on the same subject.

 

Must be his cousin or something.

 

Oh, and thanks for the simplistic explanation of gauge invariance.

I never said that it was a complete description, and you gave me a simplistic explanation. Do you have the patent on simplistic explanations?

If you want a complete overview of Lie groups, Lie algebras, tangent spaces, and all that stuff, I can give you that too. It just wasn't needed there.

 

I doubt very much Anderson is the most cited person in physics.

And, no, I haven't read Peter Briggs paper on spontaneous symmetry breaking and the Higgs mechanism.

I've only read Peter Higgs paper on the same subject.

 

Must be his cousin or something.

 

Oh, and thanks for the simplistic explanation of gauge invariance.

I got the name wrong, sorry about that baby. Forgot to pay my syntax.

Edited September 16, 2012 by Ronald Hyde

[John Cuthber]

What you said was "Do either of you know who the most cited person in all of Physics is. Philip Warren Anderson."

I think that's simply not true.

I know Google isn't God but "Albert Einstein" gets 10 or 20 times more hits than "Philip Warren Anderson".

 

 

You also said " You will see that the inside of the box is a dark red, which is exactly what it should be by the Planck Equation. "

which is also not true.

 

Being careless with names isn't a big deal, but being careless with facts is.

[Ronald Hyde]

What is wrong with the picture described in the first post is that it's simply not true.

This bit "look inside the box. You will see that the inside of the box is a dark red" is wrong.

It won't look red, it will look pretty much like the sun i.e. white hot.

The inside of the box will look like a better approximation to black body radiation than the outside because the effect of multiple reflections makes it a better absorber and therefore a better reflector.

You must read and understand the original papers and Planck's in particular to understand that this is a genuine puzzle that still has question to be answered.

You need to know the methods of measurements employed for one thing. Something that people still do not seem to understand is that by the rules of Quantum

Mechanics every aspect of every experiment must be included so that the full context is defined. Planck's paper is really a beautiful one, an excellent example

of reasoning among the facts. PS: Yeah, I'm not quite right there, it was the way it was measured, not when it was looked inside that gave the distribution. I've

got to reread the paper again myself. I know it was all about the partition function for the energy. I know that you can deduce Plancks equation by assuming scale invariance for the radiation for one thing.

 

!

Moderator Note

As a question this was acceptable for the main forum - but the supposed answer from the OP is well into the Speculations catchment. Let's keep this as recognized and accepted physics please.

 

Ronald - if you wish to write further on your own ideas please do so in the Speculations forum. It might also help other member if you were to include a few citations or links when you make claims for important papers that everyone should have read.

 

Please respect me on this. This is in no wise an 'alternative theory'. What I intend to do is show how to fit the 'accepted theories' into a seamless whole, which is exactly what

Nature is. And it is very mathematical. When you see how this works you will see an amazing and beautiful World in its full context.

 

I won't be getting noise from the crank audience on this one, they won't understand it enough. All the boos will come from the people who think they know it all, but really don't.

One of the hardest parts of learning something new is getting rid of some of your old ways of thinking. So give me a little time, I would like to post in the appropriate section

and not the speculation section. It may take three or four posts to get enough out so people will start to understand it. I have about two dozen of these little 'puzzles' BTW,

some a bit more sharply defined than this, maybe that will quite the noise down a bit. But a little patience please.

Edited September 16, 2012 by Ronald Hyde

[John Cuthber]

"You must read and understand the original papers and Planck's in particular to understand that this is a genuine puzzle "

 

Are you saying that, if I read those papers, the sun changes colour?

 

If not then you are still flat out wrong about the assertion that the hole in the box will look red.

 

You can't expect to get "the 'accepted theories' into a seamless whole" by ignoring reality.

 

As for "Please respect me on this."

Why, what have you done to earn our respect to the extent that we should let you ignore the rules?

[Ronald Hyde]

"You must read and understand the original papers and Planck's in particular to understand that this is a genuine puzzle "

 

Are you saying that, if I read those papers, the sun changes colour?

 

If not then you are still flat out wrong about the assertion that the hole in the box will look red.

 

You can't expect to get "the 'accepted theories' into a seamless whole" by ignoring reality.

 

As for "Please respect me on this."

Why, what have you done to earn our respect to the extent that we should let you ignore the rules?

I'll explain to you the problem. What we have here is failure to communicate. And you and your compatriots

are completely in control in as much as you have placed a barrier up and are the only ones who can take it down.

One of the difficulties is that all of you, to a person, seem to believe that you can correctly describe Nature

by using a set of disconnected, uncoupled, or whatever you want to call it, equations models or whatever you

want to call them. I and Philip Warren Anderson, and I don't know how many others, know that assumption,

which is what it is, is not correct. I'm not an important person, I don't feel that I'm an important person, you

probably know more than I do, both in fact and in theory, but I've been placed in the position of being a

messenger, and I have a very important message. You all know about the Olympics, and how the messenger is

honored because he recognized that the message is more important than the messenger.

 

The message that I have is a systematic procedure for tying all the 'little' theories into one big theory that

will faithfully represent Nature and increase our understanding thereby. It's still in development, it will always

be in 'some kind of development' because Nature is a very large ( but not infinite ) hierarchy. I don't know all

the parts of the procedures, but I'm at the point where it takes me by the hand and teaches me where to look

and how the physical picture fits into it, and when I look I see that it tells me correctly. The perception that

Color is a deep part of Nature is an important example, just search for images of nebulae and look at a hundred

or so and see all the colors. That will be better proof of its validity than any words I can use, and it's real

experimental evidence, the kind that Physics is supposed to be about.

 

Sorry about all the problems and not getting the Black Body correct, I have to find Plancks paper and go over it

again. There will be mistakes and difficulties, I think we're all Human ( no robots allowed ) but if we can get that

barrier down we can begin to make some progress.

[ACG52]

This is word salad, and more than a little nonsensical.

 

It certainly doesn't belong in the mainstream forums.

 

How about Speculation? (or the Trash would be fine for it).

[MigL]

"The perception that Color is a deep part of Nature is an important example" ???????

 

Again with the colour nonsense.

QCD also has the label of 'flavour'. So tell me is it choccolate, vanilla or garlic flavour ??

 

Do you really think that at the quark/gluon scale colour has the same meaning that we associate with the evryday colours we see ( wavelengths of visible light ) ?

Edited September 17, 2012 by MigL

[John Cuthber]

I'll explain to you the problem. What we have here is failure to communicate.

 

No, it was not a communication failure.

You got your message across well enough.

The problem is that what you said was plain wrong.

Nothing to do with me or my compatriots.

The problem lies entirely with you.

You need to realise that.

[imatfaal]

!

Moderator Note

Moved to Speculations. Please take a moment to check the special rules that apply to that forum

[Ronald Hyde]

!

Moderator Note

Moved to Speculations. Please take a moment to check the special rules that apply to that forum

So far on this forum I have found only one person who actually understood what I am saying, and he did so without any detailed explanation of the underlying concepts.

By coincidence he is located about 60km from where I am. He made some enormously positive suggestions which helped me greatly. Unfortunately he did not find

this topic and hasn't posted on it, so I don't know what he would have added. However one of the suggestions he made on another topic was related to what this

topic evolved to. He is an inventor and uses Physics in his line of work. His inventions employ thermodynamics with whatever physical theories are required, and his

inventions work as physical models of systems of mathematical models. The inventions employ the concepts that I was asking about on the topic he was posting in.

By all definitions he is a successful working Real Life Physicist, someone who understands things in a deep way, intuitively and mathematically.

 

No one else on that topic or this has understood at all. Some have made a small effort but failed, some have fought any new ideas tooth and nail, largely because it

threatens their enormous bloated egos ( think red-giant here ), their negativity is appalling, you can read it directly in their signatures. Others simply don't recognize

how or where a new idea connects with the old ideas, and is therefore not entirely new, but a revision or addition to the old ideas. They can't 'connect the dots' so they

can't see the underlying picture. Well, not everyone has every logical skill, so even someone like a Feynman, ( a long list should be here ) who was very nearly

'Turing complete' can see all of the picture.

 

So on this topic the Forces of Darkness have won over the Forces of Light, at least temporarily.

[John Cuthber]

That's still gibberish and you were still wrong about what a hole in a heated box looks like.

[Ronald Hyde]

That's still gibberish and you were still wrong about what a hole in a heated box looks like.

 

I'll freely admit that I'm wrong about what the hole is the heated box looks like. The problem needs

to be reformulated. Do you notice that the box color grades from black to red to yellow to white? It

needs to include color to be fully formulated, because you need to explain the changes in color to have

a complete theory.

 

As for it being gibberish, that means you are not as perceptive or insightful as the inventor I was talking about, or as you think you are. Plain and simple.

But you're not one of the red giant characters, you're a more positive and less angry one, but annoyed that I made a basic mistake.

 

I have plenty of these puzzles, some you can test yourself, without any black boxes or special equipment. And since anyone can conduct them and observe

the results they would probably have been a better choice. Maybe you will see that this is not gibberish, that it shows how to put a valid picture of the world

together.

[John Cuthber]

Just a thought.

How can colour be so important when many animals don't have it at all.

Some people and plenty of animals of people have different colour perception

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Possibility_of_human_tetrachromats

or

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

 

And in poor lighting we all have pretty much monochrome vision?

 

What is so bloody marvellous about a simple side effect of the way in which a tiny, and arbitrary, portion of the electromagnetic spectrum interacts with a handful of molecules that we happen to synthesise in the backs of our eyes?

 

That's what makes your post word salad.

 

The fact is that the radiation from hot objects is very well understood by modern (and by that I mean 20th C) physics.

 

Do you really think you have anything to add?

 

http://xkcd.com/675/