Could Physics Be *Terrifically* Wrong?

Great Debates
41

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This is your problem right here. The maximum expected effect is precisely nothing. What you really mean to say is that this is the maximum possible effect because, were this “effect” any greater, it would have already been detected.

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Why? Given limited resources for research, why should someone test this hypothesis rather than devoting their time and effort testing some other hypothesis that is actually tied to a theory and will be certain to yield a valuable result? Do you think there is a conspiracy to suppress this research?

42

When engaging in an interdisciplinary forum like SDMB, it helps to explain some of the points you’re making in terms that can be understood outside your field. If you’re not interested in what other disciplines have to say, then I would suggest posting in a more specialized message board. Which would be an unfortunate example of academic insularism. Communicating across borders help us all evaluate our ideas in a larger framework.

The idea that terms of one language (in this case the language of physics) can’t be translated into the terms of another language is absolutely ridiculous. As if specific semiotic signs were inherently embedded in the phenomenon they represent. I can just sigh at such a pathetic notion.

Will the efficiency of communicating in another language be the same? Certainly not. Will some subtle nuances be lost? Sure. But most of us here are not 5th graders with a reduced referential frame, so the loss of efficiency and subtlety will not be such that the effort to communicate your ideas becomes an insurmountable task.

Your insistence UncleAl0 that certain terms within physics can’t be expressed in other ways stinks suspiciously of obfuscatory rhetoric.

Now, though I am not a physicist, I offer these definitions to help those like myself who are obscured from evaluating your claims by our inability to speak fluent “physilese”:

chirality: When the mirror image of something is not superposable with the thing itself. Like a Rorschach inkblot where the figures on either side of the center fold oddly don’t mirror each other perfectly. For a short description of chirality in quantum states see http://www.mpi-halle.mpg.de/~theory/pro/t_project_jber/chirality.html (which is a good example of how it’s possible to communicate beyond your specialty!!!)

parity: A characteristic that represents a fundamental binary distinction of particulars in a set (like odd vs. even for integers). In quantum mechanics the property of + or - of the quantum value (eigenvalue). A system where a parity transformation (inverting the spatial coordinates through the point of origin) results in the same system is said to have “even parity”. A transformation that results in a negation of the original system is said to have “odd parity”. (http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/quantum/parity.html)

eigenvalue: The value of a special type of wavefunction (eigenfunction) that will always return the same value. Wavefunctions that are not eigenfunctions can be treated as composites of several eigenfunctions. (http://newton.ex.ac.uk/people/jenkins/mbody/mbody2.html, http://www.adi.uam.es/Docs/Knowledge/Fundamental_Theory/quantrev/node20.html)

wavefunction: A function describing the variations of a particle system over space and time.

I hope this is accurate. If I’ve made any mistakes JS Princeton, please make the necessary corrections.

If I understand correctly, UncleAl0 is claiming that it’s reasonably conceivable that large objects which are mirror images of each other on the molecular level but exhibit different optical properties (i.e. are optically chiral), will fall at different rates in a vacuum. Is that roughly accurate?

43

Hey, feel free to get right on that. Get a grant, start a lab, and test away. No one is stopping you. As has already been mentioned, researchers don’t have much incentive to test theories they don’t believe, and I for one find both your arguments and your tone to be very, very unconvincing. If you really were the professional scientist you claim, you would actually know how to talk science with people. You also probably wouldn’t post your theories to message boards in the first place, and if you did you wouldn’t demand that the random members therein prove you wrong if they didn’t believe you. You absolutely wouldn’ t keep making references to previous theories that people thought were right. (Only crackpots use Galileo/Newton as justification for their theories.)

JS Princeton is clearly far more qualified to argue the analytical theory with you, but I’d be interested to hear the details of your ab initio simulations. What systems did you simulate, what methods/programs did you use, with what parameters, and what exactly did you calculate?

44

What’s bad with using SDMB as a resounding board for your ideas? Interdisciplinary efforts should be encouraged, Giraffe. After all, we are fighting ignorance here. Other people’s ignorance as well as our own!

But I agree that UncleAl’s Galileo analogy is getting a little tired. I think it want to go to bed…

45

ethic, in general I think it’s great to use the SDMB as a sounding board for one’s ideas, but in practice it’s not a very productive method for proving/disproving a physics theory. Theory typically requires a strong background in multiple specialized fields and specific problems. Randomly fishing for responses with a message board (even one as fine as this one) is inefficient, to say the least.

I have to question the OP’s motivations, which currently look more to me more like trying to get attention and feel smart than trying to further physical understanding. To do the latter, one publishes papers, goes to conferences, talks to other physicists and actually listens to their responses. Science is based on skepticism – the burden of proof is entirely on the person who says that our current understanding is wrong.

46

That sounds a bit like anti-skepticism to me. or Bizarro-world-skepticism?

47

If you say “red balls fall faster than green balls”, you have to give a reason why you think that, as people will be naturally skeptical of such a statement. See?

48

Sorry, the statement I made does not really fit into this thread, but more into the “science and faith” thread. Though in that thread you probably wouldn’t have made the statement you made.

Scratch it from the record. :slight_smile:

49

I agree, Giraffe. I don’t think UncleAl is really intested in “fishing for responses” anyway. I think he’s more interested in showing how big his genitalia are on a large public forum. A case of intellectual exhibitionism perhaps?

Anyway, I hope UncleAl actually has something interesting to say about optical chirality and how it effects the macroscopic level. It seems odd to me why anyone would think it effects the Equivalence Principle. Is it really all just another “red balls fall faster” theory? Are there other strange characterists of optical chirality that would inficate things are askew in world of science?

So far all I see is a lot of rambling. There’s no focus on any specific critical issue. Every post contains a littany references and supposed indicators that something is amiss. Navigating them is like trying to find reasonable symetric patterns in the OED that would produce the equivalent of MacBeth. The burden of proof is indeed continuously on us. …

50

UncleAl0 You have now begun to repeat yourself. You’re so-called “proof” that optical chirality is not the same as geometric chirality holds no water. I’m pleased that you have your four points, but you have not shown how they lead to that conclusion. Simply repeating what you have written before does not help your case in the least. You have yet to satisifactorally answer how FUNDAMENTALLY a left-handed and right-handed photon is different from one of your chiral molecules. Your discussion of optical chirality is uninspiring and doesn’t say what you claim it says. The details of optical chirality are interesting, but they do not change the fundamental question of HOW EXACTLY the symmetry is fundamentally parsed between any given pair of entropically similar, axis-alligned particle and another. I’m happy to hear your explanation, but if you repeat your four points again without any attempt at explaining how they “prove” what you say they prove, I’m afraid that you’re only convincing me more that you don’t have a case. It’s nice to see you’re wide read, but you need to be able to provide more convincing evidence than simply, a) we haven’t looked at this particular set of symmetries, b) EP violation means that I can be free of considering any consequence of GR and some selected parts of SR, c) BWS.

Your attempt to describe falsification isn’t as simple as you’d like. Consider Copernican vs. Ptolemeic astronomy. When the copernican model emerged it was falsified by the ptolemeic model because the ptolemeic model could explain the orbits to a much higher precision and accuracy than the copernican. That didn’t make heliocentricity right. Falsification works in two ways. One way is Ockham’s Razor. Another way is deviant observation. You put a lot of faith in falsification method number two without even beginning to address number one. Frankly, falsifications of GR have already occurred in some senses from cosmology and large-scale structure theory. We know right now that physics is incomplete and we don’t know why that is. I maintain that your experiment does not shed any light on that problem, other than being in the right scale-ballpark. Unfortunately, many things are in the right scaling ballpark and are just as arbitrary as your “geometrical chirality”.

Also troubling is that you are posting some nonsense. “Classical physics is not a valid theory outside its postulates of c=infinity, h=zero, G=G.” is a totally meaningless statement and also false.

51

By the by, UncleAl0, I’m not simply talking about optically chiral molecules here (as you seem to enjoy obsessing over). I’m talking about polarized light IN GENERAL.

52

Regarding Ethic,

“If I understand correctly, UncleAl0 is claiming that it’s reasonably conceivable that large objects which are mirror images of each other on the molecular level but exhibit different optical properties (i.e. are optically chiral), will fall at different rates in a vacuum. Is that roughly accurate?”

No. Geometric parity pairs are NOT mirror images,

http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/invert.gif

Optical properties are IRRELEVANT - as I painfully protractedly punctiliously detailed to intellectually refractory JS Princeton in more than three kilobytes of theory and real world examples, posted above. Try reading the scholarly text as well as the random spew.

http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/eotvos.htm
lays it all out with historical, theoretical, practical, and graphical excesses.

Here is another summary in little words. Read it (especially JS Princeton, who ignores explicit refutation of his straw men then resurrects what has been killed and complains some more):

The Equivalence Principle (EP) is the founding postulate of all metric theories of gravitation. “All bodies fall identically regardless of composition and internal structure,” photons to lead shot. Demonstrating an exception to the EP reduces metric theories of gravitation to heuristics. There is no learned dissent here. (Affine theories of gravitation may take over. They give the same real world answers without claiming spacetime curvature.)

Why should we look at parity pair test masses? All conserved physical properties must emerge form mathematical symmetries through Noether’s theorem. Geometric parity is the last remaining unexamined physical variable from the last remaining unaddressed symmetry. Can the EP be broken? Over the past 400+ years we have looked everywhere anybody can look except here. Is the big red flashing arrow ambiguous as to where it is pointing?

Optical chirality is not coupled to geometric structure. A chiral object does not have to be a parity pair. There are exactly 230 different geometric self-similar crystal lattices (quasicrystals don’t qualify here). 65 are chiral. Of those, 22 are 11 parity pairs. Of the 11 parity pairs, only three pairs can contain a unique parity configuration (as opposed to a mixture of both). Even within those three pairs,opposite parity nearest-neighbor paths can sometimes be traced (e.g., alpha-quartz). Only single crystal tellurium meets all criteria. (Selenium is also OK, but it is not physically obtainable to experimental specifications.)

Calculated extreme parity pair test masses may not pursue local parallel free-fall trajectories. Expected deviation is around one in a trillion relative, which is entirely detectable within satisfactory experimental uncertainty in a contemporary Eotvos balance. Such non-null output explicitly violates the EP. The non-point nature of geometric parity (emergent phenomenon) then brings down the rest of physics.

Since composition Eotvos experiments are being constantly run - with invariant null results - it would be no big whoop to substitute parity pair single crystal tellurium test masses (calculated optimum case) for a lump of nickel steel vs a lump of basalt (an actual published Eotvos experiment done by Adelberger).

Was that so hard? Somebody should look.

Regarding JS Princeton,

Let us begin by noting that

  1. You lodged a series of objections;
  2. Said objections were quashed, crushed, and strangled to death one by one with real world counter-examples;
  3. You now resume the same objections whining about “repetition.”

If you have something to say, say it. If you have refutation to my counter-examples, state it. You whined on and on about photons and optical chirality restricting geometric chirality.

  1. Achiral (“no chirality”) silver thiogallate has a whopping optical rotation. Optical chirality is unrelated to chiral geometric structure.

  2. Optical chirality is in the same sense as tellurium helices but the opposite sense to cinnabar helices. Optical chirality is unrelated to chiral geometric structure.

  3. Sodium chlorate and sodium bromate are isomorphous (identical crystal structures). Epitaxial growth of sodium chlorate onto a sodium bromate crystal gives a continuous lattice structure with sudden reversal of optical rotation at the composition interface. Optical chirality is unrelated to geometric structure.

  4. Literature references were provided, one dating to 1856.

Either admit you don’t know what you are talking about, or provide scholarly rebuttal. As for the rest of your spew, it is of the same quality as your chiral photon spew. Do you have something to say? Say it - and provide references substantiating your claims.

–
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/eotvos.htm
(Do something naughty to physics)

53

UncleAl0,

I have been following this thread and have attempted to keep up. I’ll admit that I understand practically nothing on your site, and your posts aren’t really clearing much up. But that’s not the reason I’m addressing you.

I have chosen to give you the benefit of the doubt. If I follow that your theory is correct, and that you are looking to recruit others in the scientific community (and assumably anyone who is interested in the dynamics in physics) so that this theory could be put through it paces, it seems to me that the method you are using is counter-productive.

Your posts read like you have a chip on you shoulder that, should it fall, would quite readily crush your foot. People are rightfully challenging you and you seem to have taken on an extremely defensive position. If I read between the lines (and I’m aware that your professed talent shows your acumen at that skill as well) I get the sense that you are basically telling anyone who challenges you that they are stupid and incapable of understanding that which is so clear to you. How does that help your cause? Personally I think that behavior hurts your cause and minimizes your credibility. For sure, many great moments in science were pushed through by those who had a decidedly poor ability to impress their ideas on others in a diplomatic way. You could very well be someone who is correct, but not the best at enlightening the masses, so to speak.

I guess that people are asking you to tone down the rhetoric, explain things in a vernacular that is more accessible to those outside of this particular discipline, and loose the attitude. I want to believe that you have something important to add to our knowledge and understanding of the physical world, but I think you are becoming your own worst enemy in this particular forum.

I hope you take this as constructive criticism, and not a personal attack on you. You obviously have a very logical mind and I assume that will lead you to a course that embodies “the path of least resistance”, even if that goes against your natural reaction.

I look forward to being elucidated by you, or your critics, and that the ultimate goal is some clarity on the issue in the OP.

Cheers,

54

Uncle Al, where does this disclaimer stop and your groundbreaking physics begin? Or, does this disclaimer explain the whole thing?

55

A clarrification regarding chirality: The analogy of the Rorschach inkblot was wrong. A better example is a golf club vs. a baseball bat. A golf club is in fact chiral because inverting it produces an object which is noticably the mirror image of the object (they are in effect dissimilar). A left-handed person will have trouble wielding a club for the rigth-handed. A baseball bat is, on the other hand, achiral. Inverting it, producing its mirror image, results in exactly the same object! It doesn’t matter if you’re left- or right- handed when wielding it. The word chiral appearantly comes from the greek cheir, which means “hand”.

Source: http://www.cem.msu.edu/~reusch/OrgPage/VirtualText/sterism2.htm

56

This is all getting a bit obsessive and word salady for me. I also not that the OP has a tendency to ignore points he doesn’t like.

Nonetheless, I’ll take one stab at encapsulating this discussion using the OP’s own words.

**
Note the language “photons to lead shot.” Now, photons have helicity, yet they do not demonstrate this “effect.” NOTE THAT THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH OPTICAL CHIRALITY.

If photons with different helicity don’t show this effect, why should anything else?

57

My theory is that UncleA is producing anti-gravitons, becuase I’m starting to feel repelled by him and his deliberate obscurity.

58

Sounds like a band, a CD, or a bad habit.

OK, correct me please, but he wants to drop tellurium (Eotvos experiment) to show that it may fall one trillionth of a whatever from the predicted trajectory thus disproving equivalence which has never been done, right? He picked tellurium because of the chirality, yada, yada, yada.

In the ballpark, or not even in the zip code?

59

Um, will this theory tell me how to build a better tin-foil hat? Or will it just tell me to wear it jauntily to the right this season?

Oh, and three kilobyte posts make the baby Jesus cry.

Obviously I’ve got nothing to contribute here, carry on.

60

Regarding Beagle,

The disclaimer on my homepage obviously refers to the five essays posted each week and the 20 previous essays toward the bottom. Would you apply said statement to BlackICE Defender? It is a superb, inexpensive, set-and-forget firewall for anybody connected to the Net. BTW, Outrageous On-Line Uncle Al was hit three times by the Clinton administration. Clinton is now in Harlem and Uncle Al is still on the Web.

Regading Ethic,

You don’t grasp the difference between chirality and parity. Chirality is a mirror-image (one coordinate axis inverted) that is not superposable upon the original. A chiral object or array may not contain Sn improper rotation axes as symmetry elements - no inversion point (S2), reflection planes (S1), or higher Sn (a baseball seam is S4). Parity is inversion of all three coordinate axes with the same symmetry constraints. All parity pairs are chiral. Not all chiral objects are parity pairs.

http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/invert.gif

A mirror-imaged achiral space group is the same space group. A mirror-imaged chiral (but not parity) space group is the same space group. An inverted parity space group is a different space group. Parity is a more rigorous constraint - a restricted subset - than mere chirality.

Chirality of single points or particles (axial vector) is distinct from chirality of a 3-space array. Different maths, different physical requirements.

Regarding Truth Seeker,

Helicity, chirality, and parity are distinct maths. Parity of a point is not the same math as parity of an array subtending volume. In Creative Writing or wine tasting you can emit any words you please and endow them with any random meanings the mob will swallow. Everything and its opposite are true; local reality is subject to majority vote. This does not occur in the sciences. Meanings are objective and truth is empirical black and white. There is no vote.

The helicity of a vector field defined on a domain in 3-space, introduced by Woltjer in 1958 and named by Moffatt in 1969, is the standard measure of the extent to which the field lines wrap and coil around one another. It plays important roles in fluid mechanics, magnetohydrodynamics and plasma physics.

Regarding Beagle again,

If parity pair single crystals of tellurium obey the Equivalence Principle (EP), they will sit at opposite sides of an Eotvos balance rotor suspended from a fiber 1/10 the thickenss of a human air and fall identically - pursue parallel minimum action trajectories - around the sun as they spin with the Earth day to night to day. There will be no torque exerted. Everything will sit there. (The Earth’s gravity and gravitation per se are inert in the experiment.)

If they violate the EP they will fall in non-parallel minimum action trajectories. One test mass will fall “sideways” relative to the other by about one part in a trillion. They will have slightly different orbits around the sun. (Anything bigger violates other things.) As the two masses pursue slightly non-parallel paths there will be a varying torque exerted on the rotor. (Torque varies as the phase angle between inertial acceleration of Earth’s spin and gravitational acceleration of free-fall around the sun). The rotor will twist on its fiber ever so slighty until counter-torque from the elastically deformed fiber pushes back in balance. The maximum peripheral rotor movement is the width of an atom or so. There is a mirror attached to the rotor that forms one leg of an interferometer. As the mirror moves about an atom’s diameter there will be detected a fringe shift in the interferometer’s output. The system starts exactly nulled. Any fringe shift will leak photons into the detector. As we can reliably detect single photons… and the optical lever arm balance rotor to detector is meters long… there is a lot of gain given the signal starting from a very small physical movement. Random thermal vibration of the rotor’s own atoms is a major source of noise.

Regarding JS Princeton,

Only massed parity systems are a parity test of the EP. Diddling massless photon 4-momentum requires other properties:

  1. The Sagnac effect in ring laser gyroscopes is a spacetime topological probe proportional to the scalar product of area and angular velocity vectors, and inversely to perimeter length (proportional to subtended area and compactness).

  2. The Aharonov-Bohm (magnetic) and Aharonov-Casher (charge) effects are also areal - Electromagnetic potentials, rather than the electric and magnetic fields, are the fundamental quantities in quantum mechanics. Gravity is not an electromagnetic phenomenon. Photon polarization doesn’t care about gravitation.

Class. Quantum Grav. 17 4125-4157 (2000)
It is possible to obtain exactly the Maxwell equations from the Einstein field equation, but there is a long list of caveats that inevitably breaks the analogy with electromagnetism.

The source of monopole radiation is a changing monopole moment for a charge q or for a mass m. Since charge and mass are conserved, there can be neither monopole electromagnetic radiation nor monopole gravitational radiation.

The source of dipole radiation is a changing dipole moment. (Punctiliously, you need a second time derivative of the dipole moment.) For a pair of charges

d = qr + q’r’

and there’s nothing special about the derivatives. For a pair of masses, the gravitational dipole moment is

d = mr + m’r’

and its time derivative is

mv + m’v’ = p + p’

By conservation of momentum the second time derivative of the gravitational dipole moment is zero, and you can go to a center of momentum frame and set the first derivative to zero as well. There is no gravitational “electric dipole” radiation.

Consider the analog of “magnetic dipole” radiation. The gravitational equivalent of the magnetic dipole moment for a pair of charges is

M = mv x r + m’v’ x r’
(“x” is the cross product, “mv” is the “mass current”)

But M is the total angular momentum, which is also conserved. There is no gravitational “magnetic dipole” radiation.

The next moment up is quadrupole, with no relevant conservation laws, so gravitational quadrupole radiation is permitted. You
can use this argument to advocate that gravity must be a tensorial (spin-2) interaction. Electromagnetism is mediated by spin-1 photons.

Photon polarization doesn’t care about gravitation.

–
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/eotvos.htm
(Do something naughty to physics)