There is a special Edition of Scientific American titled The Frontiers of Physics.

Barnes & Noble and other retailers first displayed it about 27 December 2005 and it will be available until 20 February 2006.

I intend to start with an article titled The Search For Relativity Violations. Contrary to the belief system of some people, Relativity is not viewed as sacred by the Scientific establishment.

That's news to me.

Why doesn't that surprise me?

Contrary to the belief system of some people, Relativity is not viewed as sacred by the Scientific establishment.

That is correct and I'm sure most scientists would agree with you. Those who form those belief systems usually know very little about science.

excellent!
what can i supernaturally divine from here?
yes!
the retreat, the backtracking, from dogma and superstition, has begun.
the mad dash to cover tracks is underway for........

the crackpots have won!

so ahh...
where are the confessions?
who wants to go first?
lay out the violations and attempt an explanation
in layman terms
i need to get educated

ps: of course perhaps you physicists rather bash..."...the belief system of some people".. instead ;)

I intend to start with an article titled The Search For Relativity Violations. Contrary to the belief system of some people, Relativity is not viewed as sacred by the Scientific establishment.

something to look forward to.....am waiting!!

I have the issue and have read the section dedicated to Loop Quantum Gravity. I like the description given about spin networks: each node of the spin network represents a volume of space, and each line represents an area. By drawing a spin network you can represent a quantized space in an easy and convenient way.

I've looked superficially the section dedicated to Relativity violations, written by Alan Kostelecky. He says that relativity violations could occur if something called "spontaneous Lorentz violations" take place
In the issue there's also an interview with Brian Greene, and well, I'm looking forward to read the whole issue when I have the time

excellent!
what can i supernaturally divine from here?
yes!
the retreat, the backtracking, from dogma and superstition, has begun.
the mad dash to cover tracks is underway for........

the crackpots have won!

Put the cork back in the bottle, Gustav, it's not time for you to celebrate yet because you must have missed the key phrase that included the word "sacred."

Science holds nothing sacred and considers everything subject to revision. It's only the crackpots who think science believes that.

Put the cork back in the bottle, Gustav, it's not time for you to celebrate yet because you must have missed the key phrase that included the word "sacred."

Science holds nothing sacred and considers everything subject to revision. It's only the crackpots who think science believes that.

what? not even a sip? ;)

"It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built." (einstein)

"a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." (plank)

"novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation."(Kuhn)

perhaps you imagine the "scientific community" to possess a consistent, rational and mature outlook. i do not. science is a social and political process. look around. you see it in the topic post when dinosaur cannot make a simple point without bashing the crackpots

Science holds nothing sacred

The scientific community holds nothing sacred

Scientists hold nothing sacred

Individual scientists, functioning as biased humans, hold nothing sacred

Each of these statements is different. It is possible for one or more to be true, whilst one or more are false. The discussion is about the first point. This is true.
By accident or design you are erecting a strawman, based upon one of the alternative statements.
It is rather obvious, and even more pointless.

hmm, interesting
science is an objective and mechanical process unless otherwise defined by its practitioners. to say science per se, holds, does not hold, seems fallacious because that would then imply it possesses sentience.

in any case, dinosaur referred to a "Scientific establishment." they do hold stuff to be "sacred." even a casual reading on the history of science would easily show this.

??

hmm
it does seem a bit pointless

Keep up the contemplation. I'm sure some insight will come to you ..... eventually.

poor ophiolite
such a dwarf of a man ;)

It's a pity that in the article about relativity violations, Kostelecky keeps using the old idea of mass of particles increasing with velocity. One would think that that concept had been repudiated by the physics community

For a non-physicist could you summarise the character of the repudiation and provide one or more sources.

Yup, i think that I was too severe employing the word "repudiate", but I get the impression that the use of relativistic mass is actually "démodé". i use to read the physics faq that can be found in the webpage of John Baez, that is a professor at Riverside. This is his opinion about the use of relativistic mass:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/mass.html

"As particle physics became more important to physicists in the 1950s, the invariant mass of particles became more significant, and inevitably people started to use the term "mass" to mean invariant mass. Gradually this took over as the normal convention, and the concept of relativistic mass increasing with velocity was played down"

He quotes a passage of the book "Spacetime physics", by Wheeler:
"Ouch! The concept of `relativistic mass' is subject to misunderstanding. That's why we don't use it. First, it applies the name mass--belonging to the magnitude of a four-vector--to a very different concept, the time component of a four-vector. Second, it makes increase of energy of an object with velocity or momentum appear to be connected with some change in internal structure of the object. In reality, the increase of energy with velocity originates not in the object but in the geometric properties of space-time itself."

Also, an affirmation by Einstein;
"It is better to introduce no other mass than `the rest mass' m"

Also, another stab to the use of relativistic mass:
"The experience of answering confused questions in the news groups suggests that the use of relativistic mass in popular books and elementary texts is not helpful. The fact that relativistic mass is virtually never used in contemporary scientific research literature is a strong argument against teaching it to students who will go on to more advanced levels"
And, take the two Relativity books possibly more used by students: Wald and MTW. None of them uses the term relativistic mass

So, I'm not again the use of relativistic mass, in fact some persons still use it, so it must be a useful concept. i'm against the thing that Kostelecky did when he wrote that the mass of particles increases with velocity. He should have said that the relativistic mass increases with velocity, because the word mass alone should mean rest mass

Gustav: It is the crackpots with fiercely held beliefs.in any case, dinosaur referred to a "Scientific establishment." they do hold stuff to be "sacred." even a casual reading on the history of science would easily show this.In the late 19th century, the scientific establishment knew that they had some unexplained problems whch were evidence of either errors or incompletelness in their scientific knowledge.Olber's Paradox was contrary to the Classical concept of the universe.


There had to be some unknown energy producing process which was orders of magitude more productive than any known process. We now know that nuclear fusion does this job. At the end of the 19th century, Sol was known to have been radiating ernergy for millions (we now know billions) of years at a rate that could not be sustained for more than perhaps 50 to 100 thousand years usiing the most energetic chemical process known at the time.


The 1887 Michaelson / Morley experiment with the speed of light could not be expalinesd by classical physics.


The ultrviolet catastrophe (which did not happen) could not be explained without Quantum theory.At least the establishment at the end of the 19th century was not claiming that they knew it all or that their view was sacred. I have heard that some considered physics a done deal at that time, but they had to be high school physics teachers or dummies, like the ones who claimed that Goddard had to be wrong in the 1920's when he claimed that a rocket engine would work in the absence of an atmosphere. His critics thought that a rocket engine needed something to push against and would not work in space.

In the middle of the 20th century, the Big Bang was one of three or more competing theories. For at least the last 20 years, members of the establishment have been working on some Grand Theory of Everything becasue they are not satisfied with the current state of knowledge.

I find it difficult to determine what the establishement considers sacred, unless you think they should acknowledge some sort of nonsense like cold fusion or ESP.

IMO "science" is the scientific method. So then science holds nothing sacred (except possibly the scientific method itself). Individual scientists are obviously free to hold whatever beliefs they wish, just like any other humans.

However, I think that many non-scientists have a very distorted view of the "scientific community" as a whole (I would define the scientific community as the group of people currently actively publishing in scientific journals). The fact is that it is a very diverse community with lots of disagreements, lots of competing egos, and lots of ambitions. I consider all of this disagreement and discussion is generally to be very healthy and important. The scientific community is nowhere near as united and monolithic as many on this forum seem to think.

-Dale

I consider all of this disagreement and discussion is generally to be very healthy and important. The scientific community is nowhere near as united and monolithic as many on this forum seem to think.

-Dale


Touche'

Thanks for the explanation Lucas. My rock addled brain actually managed to understand most of what you said. That was probably more a reflection on the quality of the exposition than on my intellect.

Why am I not surprised?

“ Originally Posted by DaleSpam
I consider all of this disagreement and discussion is generally to be very healthy and important. The scientific community is nowhere near as united and monolithic as many on this forum seem to think.

-Dale ”

Though it does appear that some consider themselves monolithic erratics of a 'scientific persona' as perceived in their own mines.
Geistlkiesel

Why am I not surprised?Because you lack the imagination necessary to experience surprise.