Could Physics Be *Terrifically* Wrong?

[g8rguy]

A TOE or GUT must incorporate c, G, and h. Gravitation (which is not gravity) must be a quantum field theory or other quantized theory. This isn’t even debatable.

Sure it is! Incorporating Planck’s constant is not equivalent to quantizing everything. In standard lore, yes, we’d need to quantize gravity, but whether standard lore itself is correct or not is debatable; you’re debating it yourself.

I am an experimentalist. If there is a non-null output from

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

it isn’t my problem to model it within or without extant physics. My job is to consider an anomaly and devise a rational experiment to maximally exploit it. Experiment leading theory is technically called “discovery.”

This is an unbelievably misguided view of science! Was the neutrino not a discovery because it was predicted before it was found? And of course, it is not the realm of experiment to think of any crazy idea it can and test it; otherwise we really would be testing whether or not things fall faster on Tuesdays. There needs to be some reason to think that something might result from the test as well. Otherwise, all you’ve got is taxpayer funded mental masturbation.

Empirical trial is science.

Empirical trial without theory is database entry, not science, just as theory without empirical trial is philosophy, not science. Trying to divorce the one from the other is sheer idiocy.

If local parity pair test masses fall with trajectories non-parallel by one part in ten trillion - which quantity we can measure - all of physics is incorrect as formulated. The problem would appear right at the very start, that all interactions are fundamentally point interactions.

I must have missed in your technobabble the part where you showed that violation of the equivalence principle would make all the centuries of physics incorrect… Why again was it that gravitational mass not equalling inertial mass made QED wrong?

[UncleAl0]

Regarding JS Princeton,

“Likewise, it’s not possible to say because we don’t see how to arrive at TOE there must be an inherent contradiction in gravity. We just don’t have enough information at this time to say that yet.”

If quantized gravitation or gravitation at Planck distances were cryptically incorporated within extant theory - as Maxwell’s equations were shown to be covariant despite being based on a mechanical model long before Einstein diddled - you’d still need an experiment to show it. Physical theory has been torn apart at the roots and rebuilt innumerable times in innumerable ways - Ashtekar’s chiral formalism, for instance - and no hint of testable quantization has emerged. General covariance is a continuous and deterministic geometry without a coordinate background.

http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/eotvos.htm
proposes to test general covariance and the Equivalence Principle with calculated test mass discrete geometry wherein coordinates irreducibly exist: geometric parity. This is a natural and appropriate challenge - a monkey wrench thrown into the gears - and has never reported.

You load the Eotvos balance apparatus with parity pair single crystals (self-similar) of tellurium and run SOP. There is either SOP null output consistent with the past 410 years of testing, or there is a net signal. The first possiblity is unremarkable, the second brings down all physics. It’s a cheap and easy question with a possibly profound answer. You don’t endlessly debate faery dust minutia. You verify the calculations that quantified the test mass of choice, then you try the parity Eotvos experiment and discover the real world answer.

If you roll identically dimensioned ball bearings down an inclined plane you find composition doesn’t make any difference at all in the bottom results. Try balls vs cones. Geometry interacts with geometry at scale.

“There are about 490 million people in Latin America. Of them, about 160 million speak Portuguese.”

The Pope drew a line of longitude, demonstrating the power of abusive authority and human ignorance. How many of the 490 million speak English? All we had to do was wave a pair of jeans and let reality proceed. The Vatican refused to look through Galileo’s telescope at Jupiter’s moons displaying the audacity not to orbit the Earth as center. Does NASA use epicycles?

Regarding g8rguy,

“Was the neutrino not a discovery because it was predicted before it was found?”

It worked the other way. In beta decays there had to be an invisible particle emitted to balance the books or conservation of momentum (spin and linear momentum; lepton number, too) had to be tossed in violation of Noether’s theorem. The experiments and observations came first. Enrico Fermi then postulated the necessary bookkeeping with an undetectable “the little neutral one.” It was not enthusiastically received. However, Amalie Noether cannot be dismissed.

If the parity Eotvos experiment has non-null output there is no existing theory to explain it. 24 hours after it is announced there will be lots of theories to choose from. That is what theoreticians do, they build theories consonant with observed facts using pencil, paper, and a wastebasket. Sometimes they pluck stuff out of the air and experimentalists attempt some pruning afterward. Remove the wastebaskets and experiments and you have philosophers.

“otherwise we really would be testing whether or not things fall faster on Tuesdays.”

In point of fact, a non-null Eotvos experiment would depend on the time of day and the geographic orientation of the test masses - the phase angle between impressed inertial (Earth’s spin) and gravitational (free-fall around the sun) accelerations. Latitude also matters. To a much smaller extent the time of year matters. These effects are calculated and tabulated on my Web page. Remember that the maximum expected effect is one part in a trillion relative. That is roughly the ratio between the length of a nice living room and the diameter of the solar system.

Do you worry that the sum of two velocities V1 and V2 coming right at each other is not (V1+V2)? Of course not. If you design big color TV picture tubes, you sure do worry about the relativistic correction {1+[(V1V2)/c^2)]} in the (otherwise invisible) denominator. They won’t work well if you trust Newton.

“Empirical trial without theory is database entry, not science, just as theory without empirical trial is philosophy, not science. Trying to divorce the one from the other is sheer idiocy.”

How is discovery made in your neat little universe? Look up the discoveries of Super Glue (seeking bomber windows), penicillin, Teflon (contaminated gas storage cylinder), poly(ethylene oxide) (contaminated gas storage cylinder, polycarbonate (forgotten steel stir rod), nylon (Carrothers and his molecular still), Valium (started as a dye intermediate - with the wrong assigned molecular structure), cryopreservation of living cells (label fell off a bottle; glycerin was tried instead of sugar solution) the atomic nucleus (“like a 6-inch shell bouncing off tissue paper”), Gunn diodes, most of the elements, Platformate (noble metal in zeolite reforming catalysts; I know the engineer who did it. Shell fired him for insubordination), high temperature ceramic superconductors (IMB/Zurich threatened Bednorz and Muller with criminal prosecution for embezzlement of lab funds - there were supposed to be doing high specific heat cryogenic wire insulation), British tars being called “limeys,” pulsars, quasars… and poor genius wog Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar being shat upon by proper British gentleman Sir Arthur Eddington for 20 years. Chandra did the math in 1930. He got the Nobel Prize for it in 1983 - black holes.

Oh yes - Edison’s lightbulb, too, soon to be universally replaced by LEDs. Junction rectification was discovered by accident, and Schottky hadn’t anticipated Schottky junctions. Ohnes discovered superconductivity (mercury) with an irrelevant supposition. He nearly missed liquefying helium for the first time before an invited upper crust crowd. Liquid He hs a very low refractive index. He half-filled the inner dewar and didn’t know it. One of the wags whacked the thing in disgust and the faint miniscus was seen to jiggle.

Science is development within validated rule of engagement. Science is helpless seeking discovery. Discovery is made by people.

Nuclear magnetic resonance (Zeemann splitting of nuclear spins) was calculated to a fare-thee-well by Felix Bloch, who then went looking for it and found nothing. Nada, zip, zilch, flat line. Null output. Against all rational and proper procedure he turned off his huge magnet pair before he turned off his amplifier. As the field decayed the signal marched across his oscilloscope. He turned it back on and it marched the other way. He had miscalibrated the magnet.

The Creutz-Taube ion was discovered because grad student Creutz went to lunch and forgot her UV/Vis Carey spectrophotometer was running. It marched into the IR (never buy cheap tools) to discover the sought mammoth optical absorbance. Prof Taube is a Nobel Laureate now. Benzene contamination in Perrier was discovered because a national ultratrace analytical lab used degassed Perrier instead of ungodly expensive HPLC water. One day it wasn’t clean enough. PCB contamination was first discovered when a guy went to lunch and left his gas chromatograph running.

Ya gotta look. Not stupidly or randomly, mostly, but ya gotta look.

“Why again was it that gravitational mass not equalling inertial mass made QED wrong?”

1. Almost all physics is purely point phenomena. The Earth orbiting the sun is two dimensionless points. Quantum phenomena are point phenomina, point leptons or point quarks and vector bosons in hadrons, and everything else.

2. A point fundamentally spans the Planck distance, [(h/2(pi))G/c^3)^(1/2) or 1.616x10^(-26) nm and thus implies a spherical volume approximating 2.21x10^(-78) nm^3. Geometric parity is an emergent phenomenon. It does not exist at a scale smaller than a crystallographic unit cell in tellurium, or 0.1018 nm^3. Everything else about the two test masses will be identical.

3. If the parity Eotvos experiment does not null, then “point phenomenon” is violated by a volume factor of 10^77. If Jupiter were composed only of hydrogen it would contain 10^54 atoms. Even a small piece of 10^77 is a big number.

Somebody should look.

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

[JS_Princeton]

First the obligatory correction of your fast-and-loose physics:

Almost all physics is purely point phenomena.

What kind of formulation are you referring to? Am I to believe that radio waves are point phenomena? Interference patters? Wavefunctions in general? We don’t need to appeal to point phenomena in metric formulations of GR. Okay, so you like being dismissive with your TOE WAGs. Any conversation with you turns out to be like talking to a skipping phonograph.

So, UncleAl0, the only conclusion I can come to is that we’ve reached the inevitable impasse. I’ve presented my case which you blithely ignore either because your caught up in your own mind games or because you don’t understand what I’m writing or because you’re just trolling. I’m not going to guess at your motivations at this point. You have done a good job at repeating yourself over and over and over again in a variety of ways. If nothing else, it has convinced me I could explain to someone your idea in my sleep and tell them why I don’t buy it.

The following response, while a hijack, illustrates BRILLIANTLY the reason why I am of the opinion you are full of hot air:

The Pope drew a line of longitude, demonstrating the power of abusive authority and human ignorance. How many of the 490 million speak English? All we had to do was wave a pair of jeans and let reality proceed. The Vatican refused to look through Galileo’s telescope at Jupiter’s moons displaying the audacity not to orbit the Earth as center. Does NASA use epicycles?

instead of simply addressing the issue (you were trying to make a sweeping generality about Latin America that wasn’t justified), you sidestep it entirely, play fast and loose with history (ignoring the fact that Portugal and Spain were ready to go to all out war over territorial interests and negotiated amongst themselves the Treaty of Tordesillas 12 years before it was sanctioned by Julius II), pull out the Galileo card (who had absolutely nothing to do with the Treaty of Tordesillas… it wasn’t even the same pope), and blame the establishment over a preceived slight? What on Earth are you talking about? Well, that evil pope has gone and done it again! I bet John Paul is on the phone right now to PRL bribing them into ignoring your Galileo-like work. It’s clear to me all your interested in is egging people on. Forget it, I’m not interested.

[Truth_Seeker]

JS Princeton “JS” stands for “Just a Saint,” doesn’t it? Between this and Blahman, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a display of patience, not to mention an almost boundless faith in the innate goodness of man. You’re only now concluding that the OP is full of hot air? The OP has a fixation, he doesn’t want to debate, he wants to validate

I wonder if it occurred to the OP that even if someone were to test this to a sensitivity of one part in 10[sup]-12[/sup] that he still wouldn’t be happy. Maybe the effect is only one part in 10[sup]-15[/sup]!

[sleestak]

[hijack]

UncleAl tries to order a cheeseburger. He walks into a Burger King.

UncleAl: Hello, I would like to masticate a fermented lactose surfaced bovine based nourishment.
Clerk: Huh?
UncleAl: I painfully protractedly punctiliously detailed my craving. Are you unaware that Einstein is wrong and fermented lactose surfaced bovine based nourishment exists? I want one now.
Clerk: Huh?
UncleAl: Try reading the scholarly texts because you obviously do not understand the difference between a fermented lactose surfaced bovine nourishment and a non-chiral non-fermented lactose surfaced bovine product.
Clerk (Aside to manager: “Call the cops”): Huh? Do you want a Whopper or a Whopper with cheese?
UncleAl: That’s what I said, the second one.
Clerk (shuddering): Would you like fries with that…

[/hijack]

Slee

[g8rguy]

It worked the other way. In beta decays there had to be an invisible particle emitted to balance the books or conservation of momentum (spin and linear momentum; lepton number, too) had to be tossed in violation of Noether’s theorem. The experiments and observations came first. Enrico Fermi then postulated the necessary bookkeeping with an undetectable “the little neutral one.”

Yes, yes, there was a disparity in the experimental measurements; so what? That is not the same thing as the discovery of the blasted particle. All the observation said is “gee, guys, we can’t conserve p[sup][symbol]m[/symbol][/sup].” The neutrino was a way of answering that difficulty[sup]1[/sup]; it was predicted first, and later observed. You’re simply flat out wrong to suggest otherwise. Or, then, if you don’t like the neutrino, try the positron. Was that not a discovery because it was predicted first?

[sup]1[/sup] Also possible, of course, was that p[sup][symbol]m[/symbol][/sup] isn’t conserved, and I seem to recall that some people were giving thought to this possibility. Nonconservation of p[sup][symbol]m[/symbol][/sup] does not violate Noether’s theorem, which merely states that to every continuous symmetry of the Lagrangian there corresponds a conserved current; it was possible that the Lagrangian was not in fact Lorentz invariant, in which case p[sup][symbol]m[/symbol][/sup] would not be conserved.

How is discovery made in your neat little universe?

The same way it’s made in any other reputable scientist’s universe; experimenters do their bit, theorists do theirs. Sometimes, indeed, discovery happens by happenstance; do you then propose that we should just sit around waiting for fortuitous accidents to happen? Normally, however, someone decides, aided either by intuition or by theoretical prediction, to examine some particular phenomenon, and after months or years of research, finds something.

Now that I’ve explained the idea of “discovery” to you, though, would you mind telling me why you even asked the question? What does this have to do with the contention that experimentation without any attempts to give a predictive theoretical explanation (whether these attempts are made by the experimentalist or someone else is immaterial) is mere database entry? I see that you’re willing to concede that a theorist who makes no reference to experiments is wasting his time; magnanimous of you, if also patently obvious.

In point of fact, a non-null Eotvos experiment would depend on the time of day and the geographic orientation of the test masses - the phase angle between impressed inertial (Earth’s spin) and gravitational (free-fall around the sun) accelerations.

Which is not at all what I meant. Any experimentalist with even the vaguest hint of intelligence would presumably correct for other known effects. What I’m wondering is: why don’t we go out into deep space, keep an accurate clock running so that we know what day it is in the vessel in which we’re doing our experiment, and then check to see whether things gravitate more strongly on Tuesdays? This would be, if anything, far more profound that the mere discovery that things gravitate differently depending on their chirality (because it would be so totally unexpected and would indicate that the cosmos has a twisted sense of humor), and we have just as much reason to believe it’s true.

most all physics is purely point phenomena. The Earth orbiting the sun is two dimensionless points. Quantum phenomena are point phenomina, point leptons or point quarks and vector bosons in hadrons, and everything else.

Issues that the sainted JS raised aside, of course, there are two little details:

1. mathematically, point phenomena merely imply delta functions; ergo, anything can be modeled with points and appropriate envelope functions. This has what to do with anything?
2. I suppose we’ll ignore the experimental evidence that suggests that to within the accuracy we can find in particle accelerators, electrons and the like are in fact point particles. (I can’t do a literature search from home, but try looking up anything to do with deep inelastic scattering off electrons.)

A point fundamentally spans the Planck distance, [(h/2(pi))G/c^3)^(1/2) or 1.616x10^(-26) nm and thus implies a spherical volume approximating 2.21x10^(-78) nm^3.

Well, okay, so you don’t understand the Planck length either. It’s only a combination of three fundamental constants that happens to have dimensions of length and is therefore a useful scale on which to consider quantum effects on gravitation. Other than that, it doesn’t mean diddly. In particular, there is no a priori reason to believe that a point is confined to be of that size. Obvious illustration of this: why use h/2[symbol]p[/symbol] instead of h, or 15[symbol]p[/symbol][sup]2[/sup]h? What’s the justification to ignore possible factors of 10? It’s simply that (a) physicist’s like h/2[symbol]p[/symbol] better than h, and (b) inserting other multiplicative constants would clutter up the expression.

Having said all that, you haven’t answered the question one whit. Even were we to accept that physics is currently modeled by point phenomena, you haven’t begun to explain why this would mean that QED (or, to give a better example yet, Statistical Mechanics) is wrong if we discover that gravitational mass is not in fact equal to inertial mass, which is of course the relevant question.

[UncleAl0]

Regarding Truth Seeker,

“I wonder if it occurred to the OP that even if someone were to test this to a sensitivity of one part in 10-12 that he still wouldn’t be happy. Maybe the effect is only one part in 10-15!”

The EP violation region 10^(-12) to 10^(-13) relative is interesting because it is just below null limits set by chemical calorimetry on enantiomer differential enthalpies of combustion, enthalpies of racemization (e.g., glucose mutarotation), or enthalpies of solution of chiral lattices built of achiral formula units (sodium nirite, chlorate, bromate; lithium iodate). It is also a good threshhold for generating observed biological homochirality without appealing to extreme recursive amplification mechanisms. It is also reliably detected to a few sigma.

If you go to much smaller effects you start seeing expected echoes of gravitomagnetic and gravitoelectric effects e.g.,

Int. J. Ther. Phys. 27 1395 (1988)
http://stacks.iop.org/0264-9381/17/4125

Gravito-electromagnetism

Generalized Reissner-Nordström solution in Metric-Affine Gravity

The is a lot of elegant theory here, certainly because it is protected by internal complexity and external untestability. The very small magnitude of these effecs make them uninteresting in non-(extreme )relativistic circumstances.

The parity Eotvos experiment is a facile test in existing apparatus of an obvious omission. Uncle Al doesn’t worry about theory until there is something to explain. What is the theory behind high temp ceramic supercons? Behind MgB2 being a BCS superconductor at 39 K? There isn’t any useful theory in either case. Do the phenomena exist absent theory to describe them? Have they been commercially exploited ad hoc? You bet your sweet bippy they have.

Regarding gr8guy,

“Yes, yes, there was a disparity in the experimental measurements; so what?”

So if there weren’t a disparity there would be nothing to explain. Subsequent discovery of neutrinos would then falsify the original observation. The universe does not tolerate contradictions.

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

[g8rguy]

Al, you’re missing the point. Not getting the expected result in experiment X is not the same thing as discovering why you didn’t get the expected result in said experiment, and it’s in answering the why (whether experimentally or theoretically) that discoveries are made and science advances. Until you’ve done that, all you can say is that you get inexplicable results from your experiment and there’s something missing from the present understanding; you haven’t added anything, but rather have pointed out that something needs to be added.

[jshore]

*Originally posted by UncleAl0 *
I submitted 2000 words, four Tables, and one Figure to “Physical Review Letters” this (Thursday) morning. We’ll see.

Good! Now we will see how it flies. But, if things don’t go your way, do you pledge to take the referee reports and editorial decision to heart rather than just deciding that you are some misunderstood genius?

I mean, I’ll be the first to admit that the refereeing process isn’t perfect [except for those PRLs that I referee ], but remember this: For every person who makes a brilliant new discovery who is persecuted, or at least not immediately embraced, by the scientific community, there are probably 1000 or more who think they have made a brilliant new discovery and are being persecuted.

[P.S.—Your apparent lack of understanding expressed in this essay http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/serve.htm regarding environmental issues such as global warming and ozone depletion, along with my brief reading of this thread, makes me pretty sure that you don’t fall into the 1 in a 1000 category…But that’s just my opinion.]

[UncleAl0]

Regarding g8rguy,

“Not getting the expected result in experiment X is not the same thing as discovering why you didn’t get the expected result in said experiment, and it’s in answering the why (whether experimentally or theoretically) that discoveries are made and science advances.”

A theory is destroyed by one reproducible contradiction. We sweat blood looking for outlier phenomena that open new vistas - antihystamines from antidepressants, or the idiot discovery of valuable anti-epileptic med valproic acid (used as an animal delivery solvent for the real project). Theory comes after observation. Very few breakthroughs - major paradigm shifts - exist that were predicted before they were observed.

Theory has come first in some cases. Transistors, lasers, SR, and GR arose from theory before being demonstrated. We have apparently rock-solid theory (GR) that must be incomplete because it does not include quantized phenomena or Heisenberg Uncertainty. We can search for different/better theory,

http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/eotvos.htm#b25 and following

or seek an anomly between observation and existing theory to point a direction for inquiry where a boundary condition or founding postulate fails.

Since Equivalence Principle volation has been keenly sought for 410 years, it is a fool’s errand to say it is not important. It is important by common acclamation of the cognoscenti. There is no debate here,

http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/eotvos.htm#b22

Whether a given experiment is a valid inquiry is debatable. Nothing tried in the past 410 years has worked. DIt makes sense to looking at a computable variable that has never been examined. It is consistent in origin (mathematical symmetries through Noether’s theorem) with all the tested variables. It is simply not the sort of thing physicists think about, but chemists do.

Nature doesn’t care what you think. Parity is the last remaining unexamined test mass variable. Somebody should look. My proposal tells them how to look, and with what.

Regarding jshore,

“For every person who makes a brilliant new discovery who is persecuted, or at least not immediately embraced, by the scientific community, there are probably 1000 or more who think they have made a brilliant new discovery and are being persecuted.”

I do not claim either discovery or persecution. I propose a rational unambiguous experiment in existing apparatus to examine the last remaining unobserved test mass computable property. I provide theory and calculated numbers in support of an extreme test mass example (and numbers and theory eliminating a large number of alternatives). Any justification of past experiments includes justification for this one. Except…

Has there been a technical error committed? Is there a statement of theory, a collection of data, or a computation that is fundamentally or empirically invalid? Referees volunteer insight, experience, and disinterested (mostly) criticism. I’ve informally presented the parity Eotvos experiment to a rather large number of professionals in many fields. Many have been very kind to volunteer what I could not do. The proposal has substantially changed in content over the three years I have pursued my hobby.

Overall physical theory is by the book. The crystallography was done by hand by a very gifted academic crystallographer pursuing is own interests long before I asked. The math is provided by an academic mathematician validated by his peer group. The crystal data is from the literature and is consistent with earlier measurements. If there is a flaw, none of us and our associates have detected it. I certainly want a referee to point to an error. Kill the thing or make it better.

Or publish it as is, debate it overall, and try it. One of the most extreme composition test mass contrasts, scheduled by Riley Newman to shake down his cryogenic Eotvos balance, is nuclear binding energy Be vs Mg. The calculated relative difference per nucleon is 0.0019 of rest mass. They aren’t different! It’s aritmetic:

Be = 6.4628 MeV/baryon nuclear mass deficit
Mg = 8.2643 MeV/baryon nuclear mass deficit
(Mg-Be)/[(n+p)/2] = 0.0019

where “n” and “p” are the rest masses of a proton and neutron respectively. This stuff is reported to 12 decimal places. That won’t change the leading 0.0019. I’ll give you 0.002 without a peep. 0.2% relative difference.

The calculated parity divergence (CHI) of parity pair tellurium single crystals is >99% of nuclear rest mass. The most recent number from France: A 5666-atom Te sphere had CHI=0.994601; the new number is for a 7954-atom sphere, CHI=0.995302. Perfect parity divergence is CHI=1.00000. CHI is nonlinear; like infinity, it gets interesting toward the high end. A test mass will contain about 10^23 atoms.

(Nuclear coordinates alone ultimately determine CHI says Petitjean, but CPU time depends on arbitrary connectivity. We’re talking 60-200 CPU-hrs in an RS6000/Power3. Because I am a chemist not a mathematician, these last two datasets will be resubmitted with a different optimum speed connectivity. It has never made a difference in CHI in the past, but chemists don’t entirely trust mathematicians when the numbers are consistently good.)

The only argument against trying something calculated but different is “we have never done that before - there is no precedent.” As nothing has ever succeeeded, I cannot comprehend how my experiment can do any worse. Being tremendously different - employing divergent test mass geometry instead of composition, with 500X the relative rest mass divergence - it might work.

I look forward to receiving concrete technical objections. Neither Adelberger nor Newman have volunteered any. This isn’t Podkletnov. Load SOP objects into qualified academic apparatus run by qualified people SOP. Get a number (that may be zero, again, or not). Somebody should look.

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

[g8rguy]

A theory is destroyed by one reproducible contradiction. We sweat blood looking for outlier phenomena that open new vistas - antihystamines from antidepressants, or the idiot discovery of valuable anti-epileptic med valproic acid (used as an animal delivery solvent for the real project). Theory comes after observation. Very few breakthroughs - major paradigm shifts - exist that were predicted before they were observed.

Thank you for the lesson in how theorists do their jobs. I am deeply grateful for this new and stunning revelation about the scientific process. If only it answered the objection I’m raising to your description of things, which, boiled down to a nutshell, is that the goal of science is to develop theories which explain all observations. Falsifying existing theories is important, but falsifying existing theories and stopping, as opposed to falsifying existing theories and devloping their replacements, is hardly useful science. It is useful, but it is not the goal. We need both experimental measurements and theoretical predictions, and when we have only one, we cannot be said to understand the phenomenon, which is, I trust, what both of us want.

At least, though, I’ve managed to get you to agree that there are some major breakthroughs that theorists have made, and that they do play an important role in the scientific process, which is a step in the right direction.

Since Equivalence Principle volation has been keenly sought for 410 years, it is a fool’s errand to say it is not important.

Fortunately for me, I haven’t said that it would be unimportant, merely that it would not invalidate all of physics, as you have claimed. In fact, since measurements to date suggest that the EP is correct, any effect you would discover from this experiment of yours would be a pretty minor perturbation which most probably could be accomodated by small adjustments to the existing theory. Einstein showed that Newtonian mechanics was incomplete; he did not show that in the realm in which classical mechanics applies it is incorrect. Presumably, a similar result would hold if you found a reproducible but inexplicable non-null result in your experiment; our present understanding would be the correspondence limit of the correct theory just as Newtonian gravity is the correspondence limit of GR. It is principally to this aspect of your suggestion (i.e. the gleeful “heh heh, watch me invalidate all of physics” tone) that I object.

[UncleAl0]

Regarding gr8guy,

“I haven’t said that it would be unimportant, merely that it would not invalidate all of physics, as you have claimed.”

All physics - relativity, quantum mechanics, classical physics - reduces to point phenomena. A point spans a Planck distance, {[h/2(pi)]G/c^3}^(1/2), where all physics breaks down. A “point” therefore has a volume approximating a sphere with Planck distance diameter, or 2.2x10^(-78) nm^3. You can add Yukawa fringing if you like, but the following answer doesn’t meaningfully change.

Geometric parity is an emergent phenomenon. In single crystal tellurium it does not exist on scales below a unit cell, or 0.1018 nm^3. If the parity Eotvos experiment does not null, “point” is violated by a volume factor of 10^77. The entire philosophical structure of physics would need to be recreated, not just a tiny correction added to accomodate the outlier case. The leverage of a putative one part-per-trillion anomaly is remarkable - 89 orders of magnitude!

The parity Eotvos expriment is incredibly naughty and is trivially performed in existing academic apparatus. Given a universe obsessed with the explosive nucleosynthesis of element 26, irony is rife. Somebody should look.

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

[g8rguy]

Several quick comments:

1. A point is most emphatically not limited in size to the Planck length. Somehow, you’ve managed to conflate “we don’t know how to treat things at or below the Planck scale” with “there is nothing below the Planck scale.” Obviously, these are distinct claims. One of them is true. The other is mere conjecture. I’ve already explained this once.

2. Physics does not reduce to point phenomena. In this case, it’s JS who’s already explained this once.

3. You’ve conveniently forgotten two of the major branches of physics.

4. You’ve failed to understand the difference between “shows to be incomplete” and “invalidates.” Quite obviously, the current structure of physics is not wrong by dozens of orders of magnitude, given that the accuracy with which we can make predictions is phenomenal. Put bluntly, even were there to be a new effect which we miss by a factor of 10[sup]77[/sup], it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference when there’s a factor of 10[sup]-100[/sup] (number pulled out of thin air) suppressing it.

5. I give up. For a while, I was willing to slog through trying to correct the assorted misconceptions in lieu of JS, but the 4 days I spent trying to do that were evidently 4 days too many.

[Liberal]

Remove the wastebaskets and experiments and you have philosophers.

Scientists and pseudo-scientists alike have performed experiments for centuries. Freud performed lots of them. So did Marx. So do astrologers, and palm readers, and people who rid your home of ghosts.

It was a philosopher, Karl Popper, who explained and defined the difference between scientific and pseudo-scientific experimentation and theory. Remove the philosophers and you have Neanderthals.

[Jaakko]

Just out of curiosity, what would the “revised physics” be like, should UncleAl be right?

Could you elaborate on that a bit UncleAl?

[UncleAl0]

Regarding Jaako,

Physics is reduced from theory to heuristic, but nothing operationally changes. Most of us use Newton day to day and that is entirely adequate (unless you design large color TV tubes). General Relativity loses its basis if the Equivalence Principle is counter-demonstrated. Its generated numbers are still just as good. We set out to wonder what more valid theory should look like.

Epicycles did an entirely fine job of predicting observed planetary positions in the sky - accurate within all observational data, equally good at predicting future observations. Introduction of a heliocentric solar system was certainly easier computationally, but it gave crappy answers. The One True Church insisted that planets orbited in divinely perfect circles. They don’t. The Copernican model looked nothing like the math of the Aristotelian model. NASA models for predicting spaceflight are much more celestially sophisticated than astrologers’ spews.

What would parity Eotvos experiment EP violation would do to theory? We could add a set of minor perturbative terms to take up the slack in what we’ve got. It’s a very small very special case, after all, and does not obtain in common observation. It would be more elegant to reformulate theory in terms of known non-falsified postulates. Weitzenböck/affine theories do not contain spacetime curvature. Teleparallelism has torsion acting as a force, analogous to electrodynamics’ Lorentz force equation, without geodesics. Torsion is consjstent with chirality. That might be a better starting point.

It is not productive to speculate without facts. The parity Eotvos experiment is SOP to execute in existing apparatus run by its academic keepers. It is no more expensive than 410 years of composition test mass examinations run. My goal is not to stick a rod into the ant hill and stir as an act of deliquency. My goals are simple:

1. Hey guys, you missed a possibility.
2. Hey guys, I’ve provided theoretical basis and computed the numbers.
3. Hey guys, there is an optimal case commercially available.
4. Hey guys, somebody should look.

What can it do, fail? One more test mass property does not affect the EP. I fail to see how it is less valuable than the next unsuccessful composition test. It is their only new chance to succeed. Is there value in that?

When you stop looking you stop being a scientist. Theory must be challenged not only in its substance but in its postulates. Everything originally issues from scientific wild-ass guesses. A guess could be wrong.

Somebody should look.

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

[Liberal]

Somebody should look.

You say that with quite some regularity and frequency. Why not volunteer yourself?

[David_Simmons]

*Originally posted by g8rguy *
**5) I give up. For a while, I was willing to slog through trying to correct the assorted misconceptions in lieu of JS, but the 4 days I spent trying to do that were evidently 4 days too many. **

I admire all of you guys who have been slogging through this to this point. I gave up on this long ago, and since I have been retired for 22 years my time has no value at all which can’t be true of the rest of you. I think you have finally found the correct formula. It is the three words of your first sentence.