måndag 14 februari 2011

Interview with Claes Johnson by Ken Coffman

Ken Coffman, Stairways Press, publisher of the controversial book Slaying the Sky Dragon, has made an interview with me, as a follow-up on the 2k comments in a discussion of my two articles in the book on Judy Curry's Climate Etc. The interview is published by John O'Sullivan and on the book home page.

The inteview summarizes some of my experiences with climate science and academia. The censorship of my scientific mathematics work by KTH is particularly remarkable and is bound to have some aftermath. The Faculty of KTH is not even considering this case, despite my repeated requests to do so, and thus treats me as non-existing, although I am a professor at KTH and one of the few Swedes on ICIHighlyCited. This is Sweden in 2011, not 1984.

21 kommentarer:

  1. Claes, the greatest scandal is that KTH chose to ban your teaching then waste a huge amount of time and money throwing away your carefully planned BodyandSoul course. All because you dared to apply mathematics correctly; but not in the way that fitted the political dogma that haunts our age.

    SvaraRadera
  2. Claes this article, from an engineer with experience may interest you, http://www.worldsci.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_5711.pdf
    keep strong
    cementafriend

    SvaraRadera
  3. for what i understand what /forces/ the corpuscolar view of the photons is the fact that in the photoelectric effect not the intensity but only the frequency of incident light decides whether or not an atomic exitation occurs.
    there's no alternative explanation of that in the article quoted by cementafriend

    SvaraRadera
  4. You don't need particles to explain the photoelectric effect: I suggest a wave explanation in the upcoming book http://www.csc.kth.se/~cgjoh/ambsblack.pdf

    SvaraRadera
  5. i read the paper and to my understanding you "hide" quantisation when you introduce the parameter h. once that parameter is in your model you can discuss PE in terms of the "relative sharpness of the absorbed wave".
    but the problem is the origin of h, where does it come from?

    SvaraRadera
  6. The parameter h is a "smallest mesh size" which is of atomic size in analog physical computation and in digital simulation the mesh size of e g
    finite elements.

    SvaraRadera
  7. yes i understand that. but still the choice of the mesh size should not change the basic physics of a phenomenon.
    in FEM if you make a finer mesh your result will be a better approximation (to the cost of computation efficiency) or it will show that your simulation is /converged/ for what the mesh choice is concerned (i believe at least, but i know little about FEM).
    in this case the choice of a different "mesh" completely changes the physics, the limit for the mesh going to zero is the UV-catastrophe!

    or am i missing something?

    SvaraRadera
  8. The mesh size does not go to zero: This is the absolute finite precision set
    by the atomic scale of the vibrating system.

    SvaraRadera
  9. i know the mesh size does not go to zero!
    my point was another.
    my point was that if h is just a mesh parameter then, if you choose a mesh size of h/2 your fundamental physics should not change, otherwise it is clear that the mesh size is not just a computational parameter but it has a physical meaning.

    could you elaborate on your statement: "set by the atomic scale of the vibrating system", that is: how do you get h from the atomic scale of the vibrating system?

    SvaraRadera
  10. Of course this is a complex issue in reality, but in principle I define a
    "smallest coordination length" as delta = h / T where h is an absolute scale
    set by the atomic scale and delta decreases with increasing temperature
    that is more vivid oscillation able to sustain a radiation/resonance with wave length larger than delta, but not smaller because dissipative damping.

    I thus consider a conceptual model and its relevance for real physics remains to be explored.

    SvaraRadera
  11. i think your conceptual model is very interesting and i think you should try to investigate the consequences for our physical model in details because maybe you have some new physics here.
    but at the present stage you should just present your work as a new mathematical framework for treating black-body radiation without any clear consequences for our view of the photons' particle-wave duality.
    in particular, it is not sufficient to say that h is an absolute scale set by the atomic scale, because the fact that h is an absolute scale set by the atomic scale is just what has brought quantisation and statistics into physics. if you have a model for introducing h without that, than you'll win a nobel prize, otherwise you have an alternative computational framework, which is definitely a great achievement but it won't change our view of the physical world.
    you should therefore not claim that it does!

    SvaraRadera
  12. I am not claiming my model is more than it is: A deterministic model giving a Planck Law. It is up to you to value its merits, if you want to do so. I don't think statistics explains anything, so I don't want to resort to such arguments.

    SvaraRadera
  13. well it's not a deterministic model until you have a justification for h, it's just a different mathematical computation of the same physics.
    that's what i am trying to say.

    SvaraRadera
  14. Of course the real physics is the same, but the math model is different and so the physics of the model is different.

    SvaraRadera
  15. i do not see how.
    you claim that h is the absolute scale for atomic vibrations.
    light is produced by atomic vibrations ==> photons are quantised and you're back to exactly the same physics of the model.
    you just like to solve DE instead of making a statistical treatment.

    SvaraRadera
  16. Statistics is not physics, but a deterministic finite precision comutation can be physics. Further study and computation with the model will show its capability.

    SvaraRadera
  17. --Statistics is not physics--

    Why do you keep on repeating that mantra? That physics at microscopic scales follow quantum mechanics has been verified by many experiment, testing different aspects of quantum mechanical behavior. It is also well known that quantum mechanics can not be recast in a deterministic way unless you want to give up basic physical principles like locality, and the finite propagation speed of information.

    Have you read up on the Kochen-Specker theorem? This theorem proves that unless you throw away some of the basic physical principles quantum mechanics can not be made deterministic.

    SvaraRadera
  18. Yes I repeat what I think is a motivated criticism of statistics, and I am not alone with this view, but I speak for myself and do not claim that this is the only view, I have exposed my ideas in the books Many-Minds Relativity and
    QM available for inspection on the top left of this blog.

    SvaraRadera
  19. I think the late Richard Feynman has met these objections, based on what we "like", in a short but good way

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMDTcMD6pOw

    SvaraRadera
  20. Well, RF says that if you don't like what you see in Nature, go somewhere else. Fair enough. But I am not sure that what you see is particles playing dice. If this is what you believe you see, then maybe you should go to some casino somewhere else. And this is not where you would find Schrodinger and Einstein around the roulette.

    SvaraRadera