Planck units are an attempt to create units which are based on physical constants, rather than arbitary values, which are therefore dimensionless. Time and space do not appear to be quantized.
Energy can exist in any quantity it wantsa, for example there’s no limits to the energy of a photon and an unbound electron can have ay kinetic energy that takes it’s fancy.
Ok, don’t yell at me too much. But, from what I have understood about the speed of light there is no constant. That the constant we are using is actually an average speed found by Einstein. That the speed of light flucuates (spelling). If this is wrong please explain it a little more. As this is a subject that has always been confusing to me.
:dubious:
I am not a physicist, but I am a mathematician and would like to make some comments that may bear on this. Before the 19th century, the so-called real line was not considered to consist of points, but to be merely a continuum (whatever that is). During that century, various mathematicians (Cauchy in France, Weierstrass and Cantor in Germany come to mind) axiomatized the real line as consisting of points with various properties and thereby put calculus on a rigorous basis. This worked well. Nonetheless there are mathematicians even now who say that while these axioms model the real line, they do not represent all the properties and that there is a real number continuum that has more properties than just its points.
All I can say is that if someone wished to rebuild physics on the basis of this continuum, something like this might result. I would not dismiss it out of hand. IMHO, current quantum mechanics is computationally valid, but utterly lacking in explanatory power and if someone is attempting to find a deeper theory with better explanatory power, let him try. Don’t dismiss it out of hand. It certainly doesn’t sound like the Sokal affair.
Remember, all physical theories are only models of reality. And models never capture all features of reality.
And Occam’s razor is a guiding principle, not a law of nature.
Whoa, slow down there, big fella. I dropped outta highschool, so I don’t understand any of that gobble-de-gook.
I find it interesting that every book I’ve read on theoretical physics* explicitly states that the uncertainty principle is a fundamental aspect of reality and is emphatically not a consequence of our inability to measure, yet you claim it is a human limitation. But I may have misunderstood, so here’s some clarifying questions that, if you would do me the courtesy of using layman’s terms, could clear this up for me.
Given that the uncertainty principle is a human limitation…
…how do you explain that Renninger-style measurements (in which no actual detections take place) increase the uncertainty in conjugate attributes?
…do you expect that a sufficiently advanced alien intelligence is capable of precisely measuring the exact values of two conjugate attributes such as position and momentum? If so, why can’t we? If not, why can’t they?
Given that photons (et. al.) can have any energy they please…
…can that energy be infinitesimally small?
…does that mean that the energy is unrelated to the particle’s frequency?
Or are you simply saying that particles can have any frequency they please? I would agree with that. My understanding is that particles can indeed have any frequency they please, but due to Planck’s constant of action, the particle’s energy is constrained to certain multiples of its frequency.
Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics, Nick Herbert
Faster Than Light: Superluminal Loopholes In Physics, Nick Herbert
A Brief History Of Time, Stephen Hawking
Black Holes and Baby Universes, Stephen Hawking
The Dancing Wu Li Masters, Gary Zukav
Cosmic Code, Heinz R. Pagels
Assuming I don’t know anything about anything, can you recommend any books (that I could understand) that can help shed light on my misconceptions?
Interesting, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see as to whether Lynd’s thesis becomes generally accepted or is relegated to an interesting but misguided paper by an amateur physicist.
I think it’s pretty cool that a non-specialist can come up with something like this and get published.
The energy of a particle is not constrained to “certain multiples of its frequency.” It’s constrained to one single multiple of frequency - in other words, energy is proportional to frequency. Most scientists don’t even think of them as separate quantities - “energy” and “frequency” are just two different ways of expressing the same quantity. When someone says “energy of a particle is quantized,” that is generally taken to mean “its frequency/energy is constrained to integer multiples of a certain value.” Which, I think you’ll agree, is not correct.
I’m still confused. I thought “quantized energy” in its simplest form meant exactly that…energy was limited to integer multiples of Planck’s constant. (I know, action isn’t the same as energy, but that’s the gist of it.)
Yes, that’s how I would interpret the phrase “quantized energy.” And photon energy is not quantized in this sense. If frequency isn’t quantized (which you seem to accept), then energy can’t be quantized since they are proportional.
So a photon can have an infinitesimally small energy?
This almost certainly not what Ring is saying, IIRC he has a physics background and therefore would be fully aware that the Heisenburg Unceratinty Principle is not a human limitation and that Bell inequalites disprove local hidden variable theories.
The energy of a photon is simply given by E = hv, where h is Planck’s constant and v is the frequency of the photon, there is no limitation to the frequency of the photon and so there is no limitations to the energy of a photon. Therefore, for a light wave of any given frequency, the energy must be an integer mutiple of hv.
It’s better to say that a photon can have an arbitrarily small energy, but this means what you meant, I’m almost sure. And someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this necessary if the E-M force has an arbitrarily large range?
A theoretical photon emitted at the big bang (of course the oldest photons date from 300,000 years after the big bang and are as observed as the CMBR) would be infintely red shifted by now. No it’s not necessary for the EM field to have an infintely large range redshifitng excepted photons don’t lose energy just by travelling through space.
(unless you’re an advocate of tired light cosmology).
I agree with your last two statements: it does mean that light’s speed can vary, but doesn’t mean it must. And it doesn’t make sense that time is quantized, but space is not. But there we part company. If space is quantized, is it quantized in three axis, or in every direction? In other words:
Space is three-dimensional. Another way saying that is that there are three directions which are all perpendicular to each other. If space is quantized, does that mean that it is quantized for a particular set of such directions, or all such set of directions?
Cite?
The reason that black bodies do not glow blue is not because the color blue does not exist (which is what you seem to be saying, if you think through the implications), the reason black bodies do not glow blue is because blue photons have more energy than red ones, so at low temperatures blue photons are extremely unlikely. If light were not quantized, a black body could get around the higher energy of blue photons by releasing a fractional blue photon instead of a whole one.
No, the uncertainty principle is not a human limitation. But this is not the uncertainty principle. This is energy quantization. Two completely different issues.
If that were the case, wouldn’t any energy be possible?
MC Master of Ceremonies
That’s not quite correct. Planck units allow us to dispense with stating the units in most cases (they can be determined by context), but that doesn’t make the units dimensionless. If I say that something has a length of 10^30, then it has a dimension of length, even though I didn’t explicitly name a length unit.
That’s not quite correct, either. There is a set of axioms which together contradict Bell’s inequalities. Therefore, if Bell’s inequalities are true, we must discard at least one of those axioms. Hidden variables could be the axiom discarded, but there’s no reason it must be.
Moeman
I’m curious as to where you got that. c is a constant derived from the properties of electromagnetism. All electromagnetic waves travel at exactly c (in a vacuum).
scr4
With the modification of replacing “Planck’s constant” with “Planck energy”, I take it?
This is what I was taught by my high school physics teacher. Thank you for the information. I have a lot reading to do it sems.