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No, seriously, it's totally okay Isaac Send a noteboard - 29/06/2012 12:21:40 PM
Here, let me demonstrate what the messages look like when you never prune:

It makes my head hurt trying to wade through those strings of overlapping quotes and I end up replying to something I've already replied to messages back, or sometimes even myself, probably missed some of those in previews too.

I am with you on branes, and string theories where they preclude verification. I have no problem with metaphysics (quite the reverse,) but we must recognize it as that lest we reduce rather than advance understanding. Your final statement leads back to your earlier one: "Can't do science assuming we experience an abnormal number of improbabilities in anything we do." Bearing in mind that "abnormal" is somewhat subjective, until there is reason to believe anti-gravity or balls thrown through the Earth practically probable, I accept the mountain of counterevidence against both, however theoretically possible. From what I have read, balls thrown through the planet are actually more plausible, since physics admits the possibility, however improbable; I am aware of no basis for anti-gravity. That may simply be the limit of my knowledge again, but my perspective is a function of my knowledge, however limited, and until/unless someone augments it with evidence for anti-gravity my view will not change.

Well science is often about pinning down the abnormal, or trying to figure out which abnormal things caused the freak result, the types of abnormalities I'm referring to aren't subjective. They'd either have a clear cause and effect that generated the abnormality, like all of the particles bouncing around inside a room suddenly ending up outside of the room, not because of quantum teleportation but because someone opened the airlock in the room onto the void. Or they'd simply be genuinely improbable, like winning the lotto, someone generally will in a large enough sample. Those aren't really subjective abnormalities. I'm talking more about the sort of effect where a town hires an extra cop, or a detective or psychiatrist go for a summer vacation somewhere, and you could get escalating rates of crime or insanity for two reasons. 1) Someone is now there actively looking for it, and 2) The actual existence of the observer might generate it, like someone deciding to try to pull of the crime of the century because Sherlock is vacationing there, or the presence of the psychiatrist makes people start questioning about their and their neighbor's sanity, or the observer is consciously or subconsciously falsifying data. All of those can pretty much apply to science at some level, and you might spot something like that when you say 'Hey, this region seems to have twelve times the unique species as the average' and have to wonder if it's the local Nuclear reactor making 3-eyed fish, the fact that the local university's etymologists and botanists all do field trips there, if you happen to be in a genuinely freaky place like Madagascar, or if there's a zoo or a lot of importation. What I'm getting at is just the reminder re: Anthropic Principle, essentially that no place effectively in a vacuum or under a spotlight should be assumed to actually be unique, until you can compare it to others.

The problem lies in determining what is "probable" or "average" from a limited sample, and lacking even a ballpark estimate on how much there is to sample exacerbates that. We cannot assume that sample is or is not unique, only that it IS. Without a reliable baseline, there is no way to distinguish objective abnormalities from apparent ones. We cannot progress unless we accept what appears normal to BE normal until/unless we have contrary evidence, but must remain vigilant for that evidence to turn our whole understanding on its head, like retrograde orbits did to geocentrism.


Well as mentioned it's not that an assumption of normality is correct, it's that its an assumption, an unproven basic statement utilized to allow one to progress with a logic chain. "Our area is relatively normal and acts, overall, like the rest of the Universe" may or may not be true but you can't do much science without that, since our area is the only one we can check on. If the laws of physics and reality change a light year from Earth, there's precious little we can do to study the Universe.

I see. You are correct I had the wrong impression; I took "The evidence suggests that the ejection was caused when the black hole collided with the supermassive black hole of another galaxy, producing an immense recoil force" to mean they bounced off each other rather than merged. Full merger makes it sound less like "recoil" than like the cross product of two large magnitude vectors (which would explain why that third vector is largest for black holes with opposing spins.)

That's basically the sum of vectors concept, yeah, the 'weird' aspect is the lack of emission or method of propulsion, in any Newtonian-Normal fashion. Presumably a line or cone or otherwise non-symmetric burst of 'gravitons'.

*shrugs* If it is moving it should continue moving unless acted upon by an outside force. If moving faster than it should that is certainly something worth investigating, but nothing as outrageous as two large gravitation sources repelling rather than attracting each other.


Well, 'outside force' isn't required. Objects like rockets start or stop without being acted upon externally by expelling mass and energy.

Right, I was speaking figuratively in saying Sol is within the singularity at the Milky Ways heart, just at it is not literally within the event horizon. Something powerful enough (e.g. another, closer, galactic core) could still come streaking by and rip it free. Unless that happens first, however, our sun is destined to cross the event horizon at the Milky Way heart, and eventually join its singularity.

The words you're looking for is 'Gravity Well' or 'Dominant Mass', and galaxies don't really have dominant masses which is really more when everything local is moving in approximate ellipses around a foci that has something really big right about there. Most galaxies, like Nebula, don't really have those. Hence the generally queer orbital motion. Now, presumably everything in the local galactic cluster should end up, eventually in some big mega black around 10x Milky way masses but that's minus some ejections and that's it, red shift prevents us being gravitationally bound to the other crap in the Supercluster or the universe over all. We could easily end up ejected, many Milky-Andromeda collision models indicate a lot of ejections, and either way the sun shouldn't even be a warm cinder by the time we'd decay to the core without very heavy exterior effort, like something basically throwing us right on an intercept course. We have truly absurd levels of angular momentum relative to the galactic core, and the loss rate is very, very small compared tot he total, even on trillion year time scales.

Yes, what I was talking about is more properly a gravity well; again, I was being somewhat figurative. Barring significant outside interference, the Solar system will eventually cross the event horizon of the Milky Ways singularity core; it is only a question of when. That does not, in itself, place us in its accretion disk unless the pull of its gravity causes us to emit, but we can play semantic games with that, too, and say we emit because the sun fuzes hydrogen, and it does that because a gravity well drew enough it into one volume to commence fusion.


There is very little semantic in physics, or rather, outside of subatomic level virtually everything is. Galaxies aren't particularly discreet object, there really is no clearly delineated boundary between us and Andromeda, and galactic spacing is like continental spacing, whereas solar system spacing is more akin to two solar systems being one palm tree islands in the Pacific. The difference between a Gas Giant and a Terrestrial planet is itself a hazy term, most gas giants probably have terrestrial planet cores and mass can't be the factor because there's no practical upper end on the size of those, they can actually be larger than a gas giant. Further a 'well something whose mass is mostly gas' doesn't work because there's no such worlds, Jupiter is mostly liquid, and the things should really be called 'Fluid Giants'

Even if that potential "something" happens by, all the universes mass is constantly pulling all its other mass, so a supergalactic singularity is logical. Accelerating expansion is a big counterargument, but I am waiting for ya'll to discover and disseminate more knowledge of Dark Energy. Since I am aware of no reason it should be any more immune to entropy than anything else is, I remain ignorant of why it should cause accelerating universal expansion. The only thing that makes sense to me at present is that the sum of all Dark Energy is greater than the sum of all gravitational energy, a disparity whose effect entropy constantly increases. That, again, is logical enough, since the Big Bangs kinetic energy must necessarily have exceeded the primordial singularitys gravitational energy (assuming energy even existed in either form then.) Just for the record: That is amateur speculation, belief, not assertion, though in line with my broader speculation gravity may be the equal and opposite of all other fundamental forces.

Well, regardless of what causes the Hubble Red Shift, it clearly is happening, and outside of the handful of galactic neighbors near us everything else is already receding at greater than out escape velocity. Now, without knowing where all that energy came from to give those speeds, we can't actually rule out some weird ass universals witch that throws crap backwards, and you do get weird stuff like the Great Attractor, but at this time there's no reason to think we'd every have a super-galactic blackhole with our galaxy in it that was much more than a few times more massive then our galaxy, our gravitationally bound region is pretty sparse.

Also I'm not a huge fan of most of the current ex nihilo or 'mere instant after' theories, nor Dark Energy even. I consider them too thin for public discourse as implied fact... Dar Matter is much more solid, we can at least look at some place and say 'oh, there's a lot crap there'

I am more interested in why red shifts preclude us being gravitationally bound to extra-cluster (if that is a word) masses. I mean, gravitys range is infinite and entropy should reduce ultimately reduce EM and the other forces to stasis, so unless we find that elusive graviton gravity should then take over by default, however distant the various masses are. In other words, I still believe in the Big Cruch, at least for the universes natural components. The article you posted yesterday, of course, gives reason to believe that may remain viable, and that our understanding of what we are actually perceiving as red shifts may as subjective as I feared.


I can explain that one, 'gravitationally bound' implies an orbit, and if an object's motion exceeds the other objects escape velocity it isn't bound. Red shift, and specifically Hubble Shift, mean that as objects get further from us they pick up speed... ~70 km/s per Megaparsec. The escape velocity of most galaxies is on an order of mid-hundreds to low thousands of km/s inside themselves. Take our galaxy, mass of about a trillion suns. The escape velocity of the sun at about Mercury's distance is ~70 km/s too. Escape process has an inverse relation to mass and distance from, double mass, and double the radius to have the same escape velocity. Our galaxy therefore exerts a ~70 km/s escape velocity at one trillion times the distance of Mercury from the sun. Trillions of light minutes, or about 6-7 Million light years, 2 Megaparsecs... but at 2 megaparsecs the Hubble Expansion would impart ~140 km/s of new velocity, just from the distance, hence it wouldn't be gravitationally bound. Now ten Milky Way massed galaxies in a cluster, ~10 trillion solar masses, would have about 70 million light years to get to that 70 km/s but the red shift there will be ~1400 km/s. At the solar, or even intra-galactic level, red shift plays no major role because hubble expansion is 25 millimeters per second per light year of distance, approximate an ant's walking speed, whereas galactics speeds are usually on an order of low km/s, around a million times greater. Still there though. At the galactic grouping level, single or double digit galaxies, gravity and hubble expansion are roughly tied, whereas gravity dominates out at the in-galactic scale and loses out at the supercluster scale.

I find it hard to see alternatives to ex nihilo creation; the problem is they almost necessarily violate the First Law of Thermodynamics, and thus require a literally supernatural basis. I do not consider that a true problem, but many physicists do; unfortunately, a satisfactory alternative remains lacking. Even Hawking Radiation and the Casimir Effect are not true ex nihilo events, but a consequence of preexistent of vacuum energy, whose postulation seems to largely rest on that necessity. As with Dark Energy, I again find myself confronting an otherwise undetectable and previously unsuspected new class of energy whose existence rests on no more or less than a theorys requirement for it. Such scenarios worry me. ;)


I'm not a big Ex Nihilo or fan or the alternatives either. The universe exists, it has energy (probably on both at least), this presumably came from somewhere, but that core piece of philosophical wrangling hasn't made any progress IMO since our ancestors were erecting megaliths. Paradox, thus, doesn't bug me much, on encountering one I ponder it for a while, annotate it, and move on to something else, as do most scientists. Some will pick a specific one to wrestle with, more luck to them.

Frankly, I believe there is a limit to how far metaphysics can advance with physics alone, just as there is a limit to how far physics can advance confined to biology.


Well, Joel, considering my grad work was on Theoretical Biophysics I'm disinclined to agree with that latter. Biology, beyond certain direct chemical interactions which can be assessed, is purely mechanical. Though that's somewhat debatable regarding neurons, kinda maybe sorta.

Gravity drives require no anti-gravity, per se, but gravity mirrors and recoil almost necessitate it. Hence I sought an explanation involving neither. Would you prefer I simply said, "Ooo, anti-gravity; neat-o!" until/unless I got a physics doctorate? My impression from further detail I requested, and you provided, is that recoil was no more involved than anti-gravity so, unless I am still misunderstanding, thanks for the clarification I sought.

Physicists are notoriously bad at naming crap, we've discussed that before. As to mirrors, not really, picture for a moment a circular sheet of paper someone has marked out all the 360 degree lines on, as little jets each spewing out 1 widget of stuff every time interval. Now picture someone pinching say, 330-360 between their fingers so that whole area now was condensed down to about 5 degrees, effectively making an apparent 335 degree circle. In this somewhat sucky analogy, the object at the center is still spewing out it's 360 widgets per moment symmetrically but 30/360ths of it is emerging from 1 5/360th sector while the other 330/360's are distributing over 355/360ths of it. It will start moving in the opposite direction from our pinch. Well, gravity, especially the kind you get right between to supermassive objects in close proximity, can do weird shit like that to space.

Right, I get that, but it is gravity compression rather than reflection like a mirror. There is some redirection going on, but nothing like an angle of incidence=angle of reflection, "only" distortion. We know high gravity distorts space, so perhaps the explanation is as simple as that: The effect is not asymmetrical, but appears so from our vantage, perhaps an extreme form of gravitational red shift (I am not sure how they are observing the merged singularities, so not sure if that phenomenon is relevant.) In no sense is any gravitational repulsion occurring, or gravity being transmitted to an object that then emits in an inverted direction.


If space is no longer classically symmetric, terms like 'redirect' are not necessarily applicable. I hate to use this analogy but think of soda can, a string stretching between to points on it's surface might move in a classic straight line, going from top to bottom only, but in most places the vector it begins on is different then the one it ends on, even though it's traveling in the shortest path. If I replace that string with a thin piece of pipe instead, and shoot water into it, it emerges at a different direction. Now if you forget the can itself, and merely say that space warped to make that a straight line, no 'redirection' ever occurred.

"Can't do science assuming we experience an abnormal number of improbabilities in anything we do." ;) I DO sympathize; reading Weinbergs "Perfect Symmetry" in HS is perhaps the biggest reason I am so leery of exotic (and often esoteric) cutting edge "cosmology." Long before "God particle" entered the vernacular, that book convinced me the success of explaining everything from electromagnetism to the strong force convinced a disturbing number of physicists to spend careers postulating and pursuing particles as a panacea for every anomaly. Lack of experimental evidence is PROOF—that we need experiments of more rigor and precision. :rolleyes: Even then Weinberg quoted the aphorism that "we know in our bones proton half-lifes must be >10^31 years" else the phosphorous protons in them would decay so often life would be impossible.

Personally I just have an almost fanatic hatred of attempts at over simplification of systems, I used to try it a lot as a kid and it drives me nuts. Like fantasy genealogies where some family manages to go hundreds of generations without a break or any cousins. Or pop psych. Our issue with calculating universal size for instance, often misunderstood but something Weingberg has addressed IIRC is the dual dillemma of not being able to see beyond a certain point as the light hasn't gotten here yet, and the infiinte measurement problem. If I take a teaspoon and a cup of water and dump a rule in the water, I can remove a teaspoon and measure a drop in the water height and say 'Ah, this cup has the following volume, base don this drop.' In theory you could do this with a large bucket, but you'd need to be pretty accurate, in theory you could do it to a swimming pool but you'd need to be very, very accurate. A teaspoon is .3 cu.in., there are 5600 in a cubic foot, a pool could easily have 3000 cu.ft., if it's 10 foot deep you'll need to remove 17 million teaspoons, or 140,000 per inch, a drop then of a mere 7 millionths of an inch will occur... even assuming you have tools able to measure that various effects from wind or evaporation all the way down to the slight tidal effect of your body's pull are going to be screwing with things. Knock that up to an ocean, potentially ~10^15 teaspoons per inch of depth, and you might need a device accurate to a proton's diameter to even try, making it effectively impossible even if you could find some place you could do it in. An infinite ocean and a normal sized one could never be differentiated from each other by the teaspoon test, however you could still set a minimum size on it, by seeing that it didn't measurably drop. If you have something accurate to 1/10,000th of an inch and 10 foot deep, then you know that if you can't measure a change with the teaspoon your minimum size is ~200 cubic feet, but it could be our 3000 cu/ft example from earlier, or the pacific, or the infinite elemental plane of water. No idea, just bigger than 200. Most guesses at Universal Size, which could factor into the cosmological constant, are like my teaspoon test... only degree of sophistication and accuracy varies, my teaspoon test being less of one and more of the other :P

Simplification holds two appeals for me, the most obvious being Occams Razor, but the other that phenomena with a common origin have, well, a common origin. If we are dealing with products of a single Big Bang, it is logical to expect they have the same underlying basis, since their ultimate basis is the same underlying event. I do not object to complexity where warranted, but object very strongly to needless complexity.


Occam's Razor, a lot like Descartes "I think therefore I am", are actually both idiotic statements the way people tend to interpret them. The former really means you should examine the simplest explanations first before widening out your search, 'my keys are on the floor because I dropped them' before assuming quantum teleportation for instance, and the latter merely means that at the end of the day, right or wrong, a thinking individual has no real choice but to assume they are actually thinking and existing, not because it's definitely true, but because without that core assumption no additional reasoning or action serves any purpose. The universe is what it is, we base it's presumed history off nothing more complicated than that everything is getting further away at an increasingly faster speed, indicating that in the past it was all much closer together, lacking any indicator of some classic cause for this, now or in the past, we assume universal expansion from a single original point or effective point, nothing else.

Twenty years later, we have nearly ruled out proton decay within any time scale allowing practical reproducible detection, yet proton decay remains officially "theoretical" primarily because 1) numerous GUTs require it and 2) one cannot prove a negative. I am predisposed to agree "cosmology takes GUTs," but distressed by the elaborate strained attempts to vindicate the statement. The Higgs boson is simply the MOST RECENT God particle reminder, and I am not holding my breath waiting for its confirmation, though obviously not ruling it out either.

Honestly I don't give a damn about the Higgs Boson and never really have, or GUT, I simply take for granted we lack sufficient data for a complete theory and that sufficient data will probably tip the scales to something new. I applaud the efforts to find both, with a comfortable air of indifference and the certain knowledge that if it is discovered within my lifetime I will know within 48 hours. Excluding undergrads, newer grad students, and the small number of physicists actually employed in particle or astro, that's pretty much the majority viewpoint. Physics is a huge field, we all have our pet areas and semi-hobbies, I just don't inflict mine on people like astro/particle kind tend to, albeit it's not exactly entirely of their own accord.

Perhaps they could benefit from more people familiar but not obsessed with their speciality looking over their shoulder. The trouble with leaving it to the very old, young and/or specialized is that can mean leaving it to those unwilling to question the discoveries with which they revolutionized the field and those who were taught those discoveries as incontrovertible facts of life. Established theories retain the novel cache they have always held for old timers who devised them while simultaneously being unquestioned gospel to orthodox newcomers.


The purpose of peer review is exactly that, as are having multiple specialty departments and generalists in the same academic department. Most scientists, at least most physicists I know, have a one or more colleagues they use as sounding boards, familiar enough with the matter but not their own specialty. This is also the purpose of one's supervisor, post-docs, and grad students, very especially the latter. This is a classic problem of every field though, from politics and business to science, and why people use terms like 'we need to think outside the box' and 'let's go back to first principles on this one'

Fair enough, but once again, "Can't do science assuming we experience an abnormal number of improbabilities in anything we do." Personally, I think it wise to conduct science with that assumption, but recognizing any non-discernible effect as practically non-existent even if real. That maniacal obsession you referenced, however, promotes blind spots and blind alleys that can obscure discernible effects. All other fundamental forces are carried by particles with various types of positive and negative charges, each with their own anti-particle (even if the Z boson must provide its own,) so OF COURSE gravity is, too. Perhaps the big surprise is not postulating a theoretical unverifiable graviton, but that the possibility of an anti-graviton producing anti-gravity has been almost completely rejected. Note: Still not arguing for anti-gravity, as such, only noting that if reinventing the wheel is to be a perpetual motion machine, we should reinvent them with axles each time. ;)

Well it's not about whether or not there are an abnormal number of improbabilities, this is a philosophical statement same as how one deals with solipsism. You can't be sure things are real, there is literally no meaningful counter-argument to that, and "I think therefore I am" is actually a pretty assinine statement as is, when it should be "I shall take as a core assumption to all of my actions that I do exist, that my memory is a meaningful recording of a reality around me which I can interact with and observe in a meaningful fashion", that doesn't make it true, the alternative is just simply variations on apparently futile modes of thought. Same applies with my comment. We can't do any science unless we work under that assumption, broadly anyway, doesn't make it true.

No, just the best thing going. Ironically, I place a lot more stock in assertions by those who make clear they are not absolute affirmations.

What challenge? My commentary on the article consisted of seven sentences, four of which were questions, most conceding the incompleteness of my knowledge. Occams Razor makes me suspicious of elaborate explanations, and Weinbergs book reinforced that where cosmology is concerned.

I'm including prior conversations, with me and others, as I said.

Alright then, but the big one that comes to mind is that Dark Matter debate I invited, and I think I largely conceded the point there. I just took some convincing, and undoubtedly more than I had any business demanding, but the unexamined position is not worth holding and all that. ;)


That's a nice sounding statement but there's a difference between challenging the orthodoxy on general principle and sticking to your guns even when they're unloaded. You asked for evidence, it was presented, it did not sway you even as you conceded points. That's not really proper academic behavior.

Case in point: Gravitons. The general public is often told the Higgs boson is the last piece in the Standard Models puzzle, but the graviton is every bit as theoretical. The main difference seems to be its discovery would represent a further complication rather than confirmation of the Standard Model. Yet the "Theory" section of Wikipedias article on it begins thus:

Meh, 'graviton' is just a place holder for a particle, group of particles, or effect that has to exist and needs a description. Gravity is a force, forces must be transmitted somehow, nobodies ever suggested an alternative to the normal particle/wave that was meaningful, thus we assume that is the probable means of interaction and we call it graviton. One doesn't necessarily need particles and waves, that's a Quantum thing and well we don't know jack shit about gravity at the quantum level. If one has a graviton, then one can expect it to obey quantum in some fashion. If the graviton doesn't exist, then it may be impossible to rectify it with QM for a QG. Personally I'm not a huge graviton as real particle fan or enemy, as I'm not cheerful with some of the handwaves explaining how gravitons would, for instance, escape a black hole (which they obviously must do if real) while that represents zero problem in GR.

Yeah, I kept thinking about that as we discussed them. I have repeatedly been struck in this thread by how little we know about our old pervasive friend gravity. How does gravity escape black holes to draw in other mass? Can gravity survive heat death? Finding a gravitational particle would answer, and create, a great many fundamental questions; until we find conclusive evidence for or against one we are still left with a lot of guessing.


See... this is why I don't like week old replies. I actually started replying 'That's an excellent question' and was about start going in on how this doesn't represent a problem in GR.

Gravitons are postulated because of the great success of quantum field theory (in particular, the Standard Model) at modeling the behavior of all other known forces of nature as being mediated by elementary particles: electromagnetism by the photon, the strong interaction by the gluons, and the weak interaction by the W and Z bosons.[6][7][8]
Is that not cause for pause? Does it not sound very like the old argument "every anomaly encountered for a century has been explained by assigning all its attributes to a particle then sought and found, so this one must have the same solution"? This notwithstanding Wikipedias later observation that
Unambiguous detection of individual gravitons, though not prohibited by any fundamental law, is impossible with any physically reasonable detector.[12] The reason is the extremely low cross section for the interaction of gravitons with matter. For example, a detector with the mass of Jupiter and 100% efficiency, placed in close orbit around a neutron star, would only be expected to observe one graviton every 10 years, even under the most favorable conditions. It would be impossible to discriminate these events from the background of neutrinos, since the dimensions of the required neutrino shield would ensure collapse into a black hole.

It's cause for doubt, hence the 'theoretical' at the front of it, nobody's ever come up with a more graded scale then 'hypothetical/theoretical/factual' and it's comfortably beyond hypothetical. Also, much as I hate to disagree with the font of all knowledge that is wiki, it is entirely possible we might be able to find a way to shield/reflect neutrinos at some stage in fashion that don't require light-year thick sheets of lead.

Anything is possible, and here is hoping, but I am not hearing a lot of practical suggestions of how. But, yeah, cause for doubt, cause for pause, that was all I was saying. Gravity sure does behave like entropy itself in a lot of ways, and no one is looking for an "entropy particle" (the Congrion, no doubt. :P)


The nickname is 'Adminsitratium' actually :P

Then again, perhaps that is no great obstacle; quarks have not been and cannot be directly observed either, but no one (including me) questions their reality. Indirect observation is valid so far as it goes (IIRC, proton decay has never allowed another option.) I am only illustrating why I remain skeptical of particles not only undetected, but undetectable, when the chief argument for them is "we proposed, sought and found carrier particles to explain every other inexplicable fundamental force." Every highly specific event under highly specific circumstances is caused and carried by its own unique particle/anti-particle set; flip-flopping public healthcare mandates are carried by Romnions and Obamons, which collide in a flash of mutually annihilating absurdity. :P

I always preferred the theoretical particles of mindon and moron, the transfer particles for knowledge. Keep in mind that a lot of stuff is 'placeholder terms', you don't need to know the specifics to quantify something, you don't have to know why Y=MX² yields the right answer for a given value of M, you can figure out why M is M later.

Yes, but in a way placeholder terms are precisely the problem: They presuppose the existence of something to fill the place. Sometimes that is valid, and there has been a great deal of success ascribing various phenomena to an x particle, further determining what properties it must have then finally finding it by looking for a particle with those properties in an environment where it is likely to be found. That does not mean we can pound every square peg through that round hole. Trying that a generation or two ago produced a particle zoo that made the current one look more like a small pet store.


You can't solve most problems in one clean swoop, you attakc a piece and if it leaves you with F=-GMm/r² and you've no idea why G is G but you know what G is, you're still better off then when you had F=?

A little over a century ago physics was widely regarded a virtually dead field, with nothing left to do but refine the final, already known, pieces of the puzzle. Then quantum mechanics and relativity came along and it sometimes seems like everyone is obsessed with finding entirely novel forces, particles, even whole other universes (even though the universe is, by definition, all inclusive.) Is it still about science, or novelty? Do we really comprehend the past centurys discoveries well enough to say they cannot explain any still unexplained phenomena, and that we must therefore devise wholly new and unexplored bases for those? It says little for technicolor particles and quantumchromodynamics if we must forever expand the spectrum to account for every observation. Assigning each grain of sand on the beach its own unique category is not really categorizing anything, and needlessly complicates the issue. How does it go? "If you can't dazzle them with dexterity, baffle them with BS." ;)


Physics has always been very philosophical and metaphysical.

That does not mean I think I am smarter or more knowledgable than Hawking, only that I am frequently frustrated by the realization whatever program he hosts reaches the limits of my exiting knowledge in its last five minutes. It would be nice to find a happy medium between "star are not angels holding lanterns" and a schematic of the VLA, but apparently that is why bachelors programs exist.

I'm actually not a huge Hawking fan, not even including my contempt for the sorts of mysticism and cults of personality some scientists seem content to perpetuate. Also, bachelor's degrees exist as a way of pounding at least some useful knowledge into people too young and lazy to learn without babysitting. Look up a schools physics program in terms of courses, go to youtube and look for videos on the subject, watch in order, work along with a textbook, solve all the problems in the back. Complete.

Well, if it is that simple perhaps I will then.


It really is.

However, here is a thought to entertain so long as gravitons and Higgs bosons alike remain purely theoretical: What if there IS no anti/graviton, and gravity is simply Newtons Third Law rearing its ugly head in an equal and opposite force to the cross product of all kinetic energy? Is an inverse relation between kinetic and potential energy so unprecedented? From my admittedly limited perspective, it seems common in cosmology. I know relativity has a tendency to shred classical mechanics, but is it not suggestive that an objects kinetic energy, 0.5mv², just HAPPENS to be exactly half what it would if traveling at c? I learned that about the time I read Weinbergs book, so the two have remained closely linked in my mind.

If you're talking about some variation of the various Zero Sum ideas, I'll refer you to those. It is entirely believable to me that the Universes' net charge is zero, or very nearly, that it's momentum is (which is kind of trivial) that it's angular momentum is (which wouldn't be) or even that maybe some how the net energy was zero. There's no evidence of the latter and as mentioned, I don't like discussing the fringe stuff.... hypothesis, experiment, data, proof. Rinse, repeat. We have five types of energy, Potential, Kinetic, Thermal, Light, and Mass, which really boil down to 2 currently, potential and kinetic, since thermal is just locally random kinetic and light is all kinetic really and mass is just a type of potential. You're basically talking about Dark Energy anyway, since as I've mentioned before 'dark' merely means 'unknown'. Congratulations, you've proposed a Dark Energy theory.

Believe it or not, I would be more comfortable equating gravity with entropy. At least those are known and well established concepts; we may not know everything about them, but we know a great deal, and can be fairly certain they are more than just some hypothetical phantasm concocted less as a viable theory than as a desperate substitute for one.


Well, I wouldn't have posted about it if I thought it was absolute nonsense, though I'm not entirely comfortable with it either. Personally I'm very attached to the notion that expansion is some sort of byproduct of information storage, which is tightly bound to entropy conceptually. Hence, why I hold my skepticism rigidly, I'm very fond of anything that associates spacetime to information-entropy.

Also no, a things mass energy is not half of what it would be when traveling at c. Spec Rev is not very complex, Gen Rev is, Special isn't. K = 0.5mv²γ is the corrected form, where gamma is the Lorentz factor. A one kilogram baseball has a mass energy of 9E16 Joules. In classic mechanics at .5 c it has a K of a quarter of that, and at 1 c a K of that. In special relativity the γ is 1.15, at .6 c of 1.25, at .7 of 1.4 at .8c of 1.67, and so on, increasing exponentially. Half mass energy occurs at around .45c or so, 44-45% of light speed, not 50%.

Ah, right; I got hung up on the energy cost of acceleration, and tried to avoid that by positing an object already traveling at c, knowing that is not possible. Of course, there is a very good reason it is not possible, which does not change even when positing an object already traveling at c; it just means the object has infinite kinetic energy. The ratio of the classical kinetic energy equation to the matter-energy equivalence one remains tantalizing, but I guess the bottom line is that classical mechanics and relativity do not mix, and I cannot avoid the need for the Lorentz factor. Sorry. :<img class=' /> That balance between gravity and angular momentum is still suggestive and absurdly common in cosmology, however.


It is, especially when one ponders if angular momentum for the entire universe might need to cancel out to zero... meaning it would need to cancel out to zero from everyone's reference frame, including accelerated ones... but that's one of those 'Oh crap' ones because the follow up is whether or not it would need to do that only inside the Observable Universe and if not then its unprovable and if so then something weird has to happen when a galaxy red shifts outside the observable Universe.

Those are not challenges, but sincere questions, just as with the others. They are strong suspicions, but if you or some other qualified person tells me, on the basis of those qualifications, my suspicions are impossible, I can accept that. I just have no reason to do so until then.

Might be better if you phrased them as questions

For the most part, I did.


The exceptions still exist, but forget about it, a week into the dust, I can't properly recall what I was irritated about and thus if it was justified.

I am not trying to play Schliemann (really,) but cannot help remembering how when that amateur discovered the supposedly "mythical" Troy of whose reality he was certain, cutting edge physics was equally certain light is propagated through the medium of æther (AKA quintessence, a term that probably should have been left abandonded.) Dreaded Anomaly is right science eventually corrects its mistakes, by nature, but "eventually" can waste a LOT of time if respected leaders become too invested in the wrong questions for the field to ask the right ones while they live. We ultimately figured out Aristotle and Ptolemy, despite being right about many other scientific observations, were dead wrong about geocentrism—and it only took 1800 years! :|

There's a lot I could say about that on a lot of fronts, and won't.

Alright then.


Excellent, now if you reply to this, which is fine by me as I do enjoy this subject of course, and you don't edit some of it out, I swear to God, I shall do such things I know not what, but they shall be the terror of the Earth.
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
- Albert Einstein
King of Cairhien 20-7-2
Chancellor of the Landsraad, Archduke of Is'Mod
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Elvis Back from Space; Reveals It Is Giant Black Hole Cannon Randomly Firing at Irregular Intervals Joel - 08/06/2012 01:48:40 AM 731 Views
I think you're drawing some bad conclusions off this Isaac - 08/06/2012 04:57:03 AM 465 Views
A real possibility. Joel - 09/06/2012 01:30:49 AM 404 Views
Re: A real possibility. Isaac - 09/06/2012 06:33:54 PM 528 Views
<3 Ghavrel - 10/06/2012 12:46:36 AM 404 Views
I'm afraid not, you're assuming particles with negative mass, those may exist but aren't involved Isaac - 10/06/2012 01:48:30 AM 373 Views
I genuinely forgot your antipathy to the Disney film, sorry. Joel - 11/06/2012 04:36:42 AM 434 Views
I trimmed some, I need to know what you just said to reply to it. Isaac - 11/06/2012 08:20:35 AM 549 Views
Fair enough; I just do not want to make that decision for you. Joel - 29/06/2012 04:02:32 AM 554 Views
No, seriously, it's totally okay Isaac - 29/06/2012 12:21:40 PM 547 Views
Re: I think you're drawing some bad conclusions off this Yunalesca - 09/06/2012 04:43:50 PM 382 Views
Ah, but that has a simple answer Isaac - 09/06/2012 04:51:12 PM 313 Views
Contract with me and become a Puella Magi /^_^\ *NM* Yunalesca - 09/06/2012 07:09:44 PM 235 Views
Chewt abides. Kuke - 30/06/2012 08:59:14 PM 415 Views
Hey, necroing old threads is Very Very WRONG! Joel - 30/06/2012 09:37:12 PM 358 Views
Not if you keep it brief. *NM* TaskmasterJack - 01/07/2012 02:48:31 AM 142 Views
Duly noted. Joel - 01/07/2012 04:27:03 AM 322 Views
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