Galileo's Dialogue Revisited

Simplicio: I am told that Einstein's special/general theory of relativity together with quantum mechanics are the two pillars of modern physics, which however are incompatible. Isn't this strange? But I am probably too stupid to understand. It seems that very few people can understand relativity theory?

Salvatio: Yes, this is the standard view propagated by the physics community, but as you say it is strange. No, you are not too stupid. It seems that nobody really understands relativity, because there is nothing to understand. It is empty! It is a non-physical theory, which says nothing about physics.

Simplicio: Empty? You must be kidding? How can I understand that it does not say anything about physics?

Salvatio: You see this from the fact that there is no physics input, and thus there can be no physics output. Einstein's special theory of relativity is based on the following two assumptions:

• (i) There is no aether (aether = material medium for light propagation).
• (ii) The speed of light is 1 (lightsecond/second).

To understand the nature of these axioms, let us compare with a theory of economy based on the following axioms:

• (i) There is no free lunch.
• (ii) There are 100 cents on each dollar.

We understand that (i) is a negative statement stating the non-existence of something, and that (ii) is a definition. There is no physics/economics input in these assumptions, just absence or non-existence of physics/economics.

Simplicio: I see what you are driving at: You ask if a theory about physics can come out from two basic axioms stating non-existence of something + a definition, which have no positive content of physics? It seems to me that you need something more substantial, something positive and not just non-existence? 

Salvatio: Very clever! You are right, you cannot get something out of nothing. No physics input means that there is no physics output. Einstein's special theory of relativity is non-physical. 

Simplicio: I am shocked, but I see what you are saying! But is there then some alternative theory of relativity based on something instead of nothing. A physical theory which can accomodate the Michelson-Morley experiment indicating that the same Maxwell equations should hold for all observers independent of motion.

Salvatio: Yes, you can develop various positive alternative theory of relativity: An example is many-minds relativity based on the following basic axiom:

• All observers assume that light propagates according to the same Maxwell's equations in a vacuum fixed to the observer.

In a theory of economy, this could be like an agreement among all actors to follow the Bretton Woods system.

Simplicio: I see that the basic axiom has a substantial positive physical content, and I understand that in this theory the Michelson-Morley experiment will turn out the same for all observers, as was observed. In this theory there are many vacui, one attached to each observer. In the same way as each economic actor has an individual perspective, while following Bretton Woods.

Salvatio: Exactly! And this was suggested already in 1914 by the British mathematician Ebenezer Cunningham, which unfortunately was overshadowed by Einstein's non-physical theory.

Simplicio: Is many-minds relativity compatible with quantum mechanics?

Salvatio: Yes, it so seems. 

Simplicio: Well, I now have something to think about.. Replacing Einstein by Cunningham can help modern physics out of its 20th century trauma? I will return with some questions after studying the documents...I will start with Theory of Relativity...

Interview with NASA

CJ: NASA presents three incorrect theories of flight 

Incorrect Theory #1 

Incorrect Theory #2

Incorrect Theory #3

but no theory claimed to be correct. What is the logic of this presentation? Is the correct theory classified, or is NASA not aware of any correct theory?

NASA: As NASA moves forward, it is paramount that we hear from and respond to you the general public. Weekly, NASA receives thousands of inquiries from the United States and abroad and is committed to providing you with a response as timely as possible. 

NASA believes sharing information with the public increases awareness of and appreciation for our Nation's history and inspires others to get involved in America's space program.  Please visit www.nasa.gov to learn more about the exciting work NASA is doing to contribute to America's economic recovery.

You are also encouraged to frequently check www.recovery.gov the Web site that empowers Citizens to hold the government accountable for every dollar spent.  NASA, along with every other federal agency is required to provide spending and performance data on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and as required basis. Again, your interest in NASA and America's space program is greatly appreciated.

CJ: This is fine, but what about my question? The only information offered by NASA to an inquiring student or general public is:

• To truly understand the details of the generation of lift, one has to have a good working knowledge of the Euler Equations.
  

Is this all NASA can say? What does it mean? 

NASA: ???

CJ: Despite several reminders, NASA refuses to answer. What signal to the general public does this send?

A Paradoxical Paradox Resolution

On Dec 10 2008 my article coauthored with Johan Hoffman Resolution of d'Alembert's Paradox was published in JMFM Journal of Mathematical Fluid Mechanics. In the article we resolve a fundamental paradox of mathematical fluid mechanics unresolved for 256 years, acknowledged by the leading journal of mathematical fluid mechanics to be correct. 

Mathematics predicts zero drag of a body moving through a fluid with vanishing/small viscosity like air or water with a symmetric flow pattern as indicated in the above figure, while observation shows most substantial drag from an unsymmetric flow pattern with a turbulent wake. Something is wrong with the mathematics and the enigma for 256 years has been, what is wrong?

You probably say, great! This must be of interest to the community of fluid mechanics! A community, which in the words of the Chemistry Nobel Laureate Sir Cyril Hinshelwood, has been troubled for 256 years by an unfortunate split into a field of hydraulics, observing phenomena which cannot be explained, like substantial drag, and mathematical fluid mechanics, explaining phenomena which cannot be observed, like zero drag. In other words, a complete collapse of fluid mechanics as rational science.

The number of readers of the journal article is unknown, but the knol-version of the article has 4000 pageviews and thus the resolution of d'Alembert's paradox must now be known to many.

But the reaction from the fluid dynamics community, except the couple of referees of the article in JMFM,  is zero. No response whatsoever! As if the article had neither been written nor been published. In particular, there is no fluid dynamicist who claims that the resolution is not correct.

But what is paradoxical is that there is no fluid dynamicist who acknowledges the existence of the article. As if the article had neither been written nor been published. 

 

Is this the way science is supposed to function? If a community of scientists collectively denies the existence of a certain fact, does it mean that the fact does not exist? What do you think? 

Is it reasonable to ask leading fluid dynamicists about their views on d'Alembert's paradox and expect to get an answer? Do you want to try? To help advance science? You could start with the Editors of Journal of Fluid Mechanics competitor to JMFM:

• S.H Davis
• M.G. Worster

To get some perspective, read the Wikipedia article on d'Alembert's Paradox illustrating the confusion of the fluid mechanics community identified by Hinshelwood and the complete denial of the existence of the resolution published in JMFM. After going through the evidence, maybe you will feel an urge to correct the Wikipedia article, to help advance science?

Note that the resolution of d'Alembert's paradox opens to uncovering the secrets of Why it is Possible to Fly and Why it is Possible to Sail to which I will return in a later blog. Until then, you may if you like, ask yourself and your favorite pilot or flight company what keeps an airplane in the air? Do we know more than the birds, which apparently can fly without mathematics?

Note that the authority NASA presents three incorrect theories for flight:

• Incorrect Theory #1 
  
• Incorrect Theory #2
• Incorrect Theory #3

but 

• no theory claimed to be correct!
  

Is NASA's logic that three incorrect theories sum up to one correct? Is this something to have in mind next time you lean back for take-off?

The Fabric of SpaceTime

The code words of a 20th century physicist are:

• spacetime,
• curved spacetime
• fabric of curved spacetime.
  

The idea that space and time are united into something called spacetime, was put forward by the young patent clerk Albert Einstein in a short article in 1905 later referred to as the special theory of relativity. The special theory was generalized by Einstein after 10 years of thinking with the help of the mathematicians Minkowski and Grossman into the general theory of relativity connecting curvature of a spacetime to mass-energy density, as expressed by Einstein's field equations.

Einstein's thought experiment to mix time and space into space-time, has in 20th century physics been elevated to a religion to which all physicists have to confess, even without understanding. A physicist will have to give the impression to understand that we live in a four-dimensional curved spacetime, usually with reference to an illustration like the one above indicating masses distorting some form of flexible spacetime net. But when asked to explain what this means and why this is so in more detail, the physicist will usually back off and admit to not really be familiar with the details of general relativity. You can test the truth of this statement yourself. Just ask! Both a physicist and yourself!

The unfortunate result is a degeneration of science, where rationality is replaced by mysticism, as expanded in my previous blog. The reader who wants some medication or relief from this disease, is wellcome to browse my knols on Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics.

Time is not like another space dimension. Any quality which can measured by a scale in space, like time or mass or frequency, is not itself a dimension in space. Elementary, my dear Watson!

Right?

A few statements about space-time:

• Ed Witten: On the other hand, we don't understand the theory too completely, and because of this fuzziness of spacetime, the very concept of spacetime and spacetime dimensions isn't precisely defined. 
• Hannes Alfven, Nobel Prize in Physics 1970: Many people probably felt relieved when told that the true nature of the world could not be understood except by Einstein and a few other geniuses who were able to think in four dimensions. They had tried to understand science, but now it was evident that science was something to believe in, not something which should be understood.
• David Gross: Can we imagine physics with more than one dimension of time? What are the rules of physics without spacetime?

Physics without spacetime? Any clue? Is this trivial model physics with all variables being constant in both space and time? Witten and Gross are supposed to be smarter than all of us, but why do they argue as if the opposite was true?

Is Crazy-Physics = Pseudo-Science?

The more prominent a physicist you are, the more likely it is that you express that modern physics is crazy:

• Einstein: Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore....A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?
• Bohr: We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.
  
• Feynman: I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.
  
• Bohr: If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them...There are some things so serious you have to laugh at them.
  
• Gell-Mann: If someone says that he can think or talk about quantum physics without becoming dizzy, that shows only that he has not understood anything whatever about it.
• Hannes Alfven: Many people probably felt relieved when told that the true nature of the world could not be understood except by Einstein and a few other geniuses who were able to think in four dimensions. They had tried to understand science, but now it was evident that science was something to believe in, not something which should be understood.
• Max Tegmark in The Second Law and Cosmology: If we categorically reject ideas in science just because they feel crazy, we will probably reject whatever the correct theory is, too...One crazy sounding answer is inflation...
• David Gross: However our construction of string theory has proceeded in an ad hoc fashion, often producing, for apparently mysterious reasons, structures that appear miraculous.
  
• Ed Witten: The M in my M-theory stands for Magic, Mystery or Matrix, according to taste...The Big Question to me, looking ahead, is whether with our new understanding we are finally placed to answer the Big Question: What is string theory? If we really understood that, I feel sure a lot of things would become clear...
• Michael Atiyah: Very mysterious! If orthodox view correct, final theory emerges soon from strings: We will discover universe built of fantastically intricate mathematics. 

How can this be? Why is modern physics so crazy that you get dizzy and cannot understand? Isn't science supposed to be rational and understandable, the opposite of crazy? Is this the reason for the decreasing interest in science? For an answer, see Scientists and Science in Cartoons.

The flavor of modern physics is given in the Opening Lecture of Strings09 by David Gross asking:

• Why, for example, don't we live in ten dimensions?
• It would be nice to predict a phenomenon which would be accessible at observable energies and is uniquely characteristic of string theory.
• It is evident that we are far from understanding the deep symmetries and physical principles that underlie string theories.
• How many more string revolutions are required?
• Can we imagine physics with more than one dimension of time?
• What are the rules of physics without spacetime?
• What are the rules, of the Universe?
• What will we learn from the Large Hadron Collider LHC?

David Gross was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004.

We can also learn from LHC and the Future of Particle Physics:

• The LHC was designed to answer one question: Is electroweak symmetry broken as postulated in the Higgs mechanism of the Standard Model?
• Within 2-3 years from startup we should have an answer.
• It is unlikely it will take less than 30 years to clarify and consolidate the understanding of new phenomena to be unveiled by the LHC.
• Progress in the field will be 100% driven by new and better experimental data. We are running out of ideas and tools to make progress based on first principles only.

The LHC has so far costed $10billion, while its annual operating cost is secret.

Teaching the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Listening to the MIT World Distributed Intelligence panel debate on Teaching the Second Law, we hear the moderator Robert J. Silbey setting the platform:

• I have taught thermodynamics for 40 years at MIT and I must say that whenever we get to the Second Law, I always am very nervous. Toscanini always said to the orchestra when conducting Beethoven's 9th Symphony: Courage, have courage! It's the same with the Second Law.

Teaching a subject which is not understood by the teacher, is of course difficult, and makes the teacher nervous and the student unsatisfied. 

To all nervous teachers and unhappy students we have a good message: Entropy as a thermodynamic concept is not needed and thus does neither have to be understood nor be taught. The Second Law can be expressed in terms of heat, potential and kinetic energies, without reference to entropy! This is explained in the knol The Second Law of Thermodynamics and the related The Direction of Time. Compare with the confusing messages of the MIT panel:

Joseph Smith:

• What is entropy and why is it neeed?
  
• Entropy measures the degradation of energy.
• Entropy is not really needed when energy is separated into heat energy and other energies...
• Need to define the idealizations of isolation, equilibrium and boundaries...
• If we don’t get those straight in the beginning student’s mind, then there’s a lot of confusion.
• The teaching approach depends on the application, and applications are both theoretical and practical. 

Howard Butler:

• Teaching the Second Law is much more difficult and challenging a task than teaching Newton’s Second Law of Motion, both because the concepts involved are so much more complex and abstract, and because the Second Law takes on very different forms depending on which thermodynamic domain is being considered.
  

Andrew Foley:

• The whole concept as is an accounting problem with money being moved through a mint. We can shove the property of energy instead of money, and produce a form of accounting for energy equations. First Law, Second Law -- it’s all accounting.
  

Kim Hamad- Schifferli:

• Entropy is very difficult for students to grasp viscerally, and that one thing that helps greatly is the lattice model -- the entropy of mixing two gases, for example.
  

Bernhardt Trout:

• We owe it to our students to teach them about these most fundamental issues to try to reengage the original questions in the original context in which they existed.
  

Jeffery Lewin: 

• In the great book, Professor Keenan uses the energy-entropy volume space quite late to discuss equilibrium. More can be made of this space in teaching.
  

Enzo Zanchini:

• A rigorous definition of entropy valid also for nonequilibrium states is needed.

Michael von Spakovsky:

• There are so many textbooks on thermodynamics, so many schools of thought.
• There is not a whole lot of agreement on a lot of things.
• I propose a broader, self-consistent quantum kinematics and dynamics, where entropy becomes an intrinsic property of matter, including single particles.
  

What do you get out of this, but confusion? If you need more confusion, listen to Foundations of the Second Law, The Second Law and Quantum Physics, The Second Law and Statistical Mechanics and The Second Law and Cosmology as an expression of Distributed Intelligence:

• Bedeaux: There is as yet no fully satisfactory derivation of the Second Law, in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. 
• Tegmark: Why is entropy so low? Because of inflation. Why is entropy so high? Because we live in a multiverse. If we categorically reject ideas in science just because they feel crazy, we will probably reject whatever the correct theory is, too. The Universe has to be so that we like it. As Feynman said: If you don't like it, go somewhere elese.

Interview with Lars Brink: String Physicist

Dear Lars: I hope you are willing to give a little interview with me as an amateur physicist. I tried with Ulf Danielsson but got no response.

CJ: Is the equivalence of intertial and heavy/gravitational mass a matter of definition, which I believe with inertial mass the only mass there is, or is it a deep fact of physics revealed by Einstein? Is the constancy of the speed of light likewise a matter of definition, which I believe, or is it a deep physical fact revealed by Einstein?

LB: I will return with answers after my vacation is over.

Does GPS Give Experimental Support to Theories of Relativity?

You often hear physicists claiming that the fact that GPS works so well gives experimental evidence that Einstein's theory of relativity with clocks being affected by gravitation and motion, is correct: Stephen Hawking states in his bestseller A Brief History of Time that without relativistic corrections, your GPS would be off by kilometers.

But is this true? The facts are: GPS-satellites carry identical atomic cesium clocks adjusted at launch to 10.22999999543 MHz from the 10.23 MHz of the reference ground clock, which corresponds to 38 nanoseconds per day. Physicists claim that this results from a gravitational effect of general relativity making the satellite clocks tick 45 nanoseconds fast and a velocity effect in the opposite direction by special relativity of 7 nanonseconds giving 38 = 45 -7. Voila: Both general and special relativity verified at the same time!?

But Ron Hatch, chief designer of the GPS, seriously questions this statement.  I do the same in Many-Minds Relativity.

Satellite clocks are continuously synchronized to a refernce ground clock and thus any small initital adjustment of clock frequency would get compensated by the synchronization. In particular, even without initial adjustment, GPS would work fine, as far as I can understand at least.

The fact that a certain combination of special and general relativity suggest exactly the 38 nanosecond offset claimed to be what is required to make GPS work, seems a bit too good to be true, in particular since all 24 GPS satellites follow different trajectories. It seems more plausible to believe that any small offset would be compensated by continuous synchronization so that just about anything could be proved by GPS. Or what do you think?

The Torture of the Big Bang of LHC

Physicists hope to see matter reveal its true nature by smashing protons into each other by "recreating the conditions just after the Big Bang" in the new Large Hadron Collider LHC, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world.

This is like the torture practised in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib to get human beings to reveal their true nature according to the simple principle: Under sufficiently high pressure the truth will get squeezed out.

Maybe there is some truth to this principle, in coffee making for example, but there is also a high risk that anything but the truth comes out: that only what is requested gets confirmed, whether true or not.

If a Higgs boson is squeezed out under certain extreme smashing conditions in the LHC, does that mean that the Higgs boson is a fundamental building block of the world? If a prisoner under torture confesses that he is a terrorist, does that mean that he is a fundamental building block of global terrorism? Any answer?

Perplexion and Collapsing Illusions

A physicist, philosopher of science, physics teacher or writer of popular science usually gives the impression of understanding both the curved space-time of relativity theory and the collapse of the wave function of quantum mechanics, while a Nobel Laureate of Physics like Richard Feynman can pride himself of not really understanding any of the two pillars of modern physics: relativity and quantum mechanics. How can this be? Who is right? Is the highest degree of understanding in modern physics, to not understand?

Seeking an answer I have become increasingly astonished and alarmed, and I am not alone: Physicists like Peter Voit in Not Even Wrong and Lee Smolin in The Trouble with Physics claim that modern physics dominated by string theory, is a science in a state of serious crisis.

I get the impression that the worst aspect of Einstein's science, or pseudo-science, which met so much opposition when it was first presented, has spread like a pandemi with the following symptoms:

• mathematics as magics
• no contact with reality and experiment
• closure to inspection for non-believers.

Physics is the science of reductionism per se in charge of the Basic Principles of Everything in a heroic search after a Grand Unified Theory GUT or Theory Of Everything TOE. The answer is presented as a string theory in a 10-dimensional space-time on a scale 20 orders of magnitude smaller than atomic scales.

But small scale extra space dimensions is the opposite of reductionism: If increasing the magnification of a microscope, you do not see the picture simplifying, but on the contrary you see increasingly complex structures appearing, like extra space dimensions, then your reductionist approach is leading nowhere and you cannot just continue pretending that things are in order:Microscopics upon microscopics is contradictory.

But physicists continue further and further out on a branch that seems to have lost connection to the tree of science, steadily increasing the bet to Big Bang, which cannot be called. Listen for example to

• The Universe on a String by Brian Greene
• Mystery Theory by Edward Witten.
• DNA of the Universe by Leonard Susskind
• Beyond Einstein at World Science Festival.

In Superstrings and the Search for The Theory of Everything by David Peat, this is with reference to Yoichiro Nambu, the creator of the original string theory and awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2008, described as "postmodern physics" in which

• rather than thinking in terms of crucial experiments and observations, physicists have to begin by investigating the theory's formal mathematical structure
• the theory and its mathematical language are probed, recast and related to other theories.

Lee Smolin states in a CBC-interview:

• This idea that some thousand very gifted very highly placed people around the world have worked on something passionately for two decades without a hint of how to test it experimentally, that is unlike anything that has ever happened before in the history of physics.
  

2004 Nobel Laureate David Gross expresses at Stringso7 the failure of string theory as follows:

• We still do not understand what string theory is. We do not have a formulation of the dynamical principle behind ST. All we have is a vast array of dual formulations, most of which are defined by methods for constructing consistent semiclassical (perturbative) expansions about a given background (classical solution).

In The Coming Revolution in Physics David Gross says: 

• We need new rules of physics, because we are faced with new questions, which we have not had the tools to address before. We are forced to discuss the whole Universe, the beginning, the boundaries, the end. You can´t avoid them in a theory of quantum gravity... What are the rules to construct a space-time history of the Universe? We may not have the right framework to discuss these rules...Ed Witten said that space and time may be doomed... which scares some people...We have evidence that space is an emergent phenomenon, that somehow it is not fundamental....String theory, whatever it is, cannot be based on space as a fundamental concept...How would you start formulating physics without the concept of time? String theory has many hopes for the future...
  

What are we ordinary scientists, mathematicians and taxpayers supposed to get out from such messages, but complete perplexion? Goodbye to experiments and observations. Wellcome to pseudo-science. How can we on this ground maintain a belief that physics is the basis of science? Are your illusions like mine collapsing like wave functions? Any answer?