Too often people with pseudoscientific opinions they proclaim to be 'science' make comments like "I'm an ideas person, someone else can fill in the mathematics". It's so common it's entry 15 on the Crackpot Index. Farsight has definitely described himself as an ideas or concepts person in the past, ie he likes to think he has a good conceptual or geometric grasp of something (see his fundamentally flawed take on 'curl' in electromagnetism). It's easy to daisy chain any sequence of unrelated statements together. For example, the sky is blue because Neptune is predominantly blue, as a result of it lacking the gene which produces pigmentation, just like blue eyed people (like myself) lack a protein (melanin) in our irises. Now I could argue till I'm blue in the face (warning, the preceding pun was awesome) that I'm an ideas person and all I need is someone familiar with optics, astrophysics and biochemistry to 'fill in the details' but is anyone going to take me seriously? Hardly! Would it be reasonable of me to say to people pointing out how Neptune's colour has nothing to do with melanin and genes that they should spend less time criticising my ideas and more time working out how to fix them? Of course not, the basic idea is so fundamentally broken any 'fix' would start by just binning the whole thing. That's pretty much how most of the crackpots here work too, their ideas are so fundamentally flawed they can't be fixed. We should just nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure. Some hacks throw in mentions of papers in the literature but almost invariably its because they like the concept, not because they have constructed a similar mathematical formalism or developed the work further, ie a "My idea isn't nonsense, someone else had a similar idea once too!". Yes, except they actually based it on something formally derived, not just plucked from nowhere. They used some semblance of logic to go from their initial assumptions to their conclusions, rather than just assuming their conclusions followed from their assumptions. Look at Farsight, he argues about things in electromagnetism based on his gut feeling and limited experience of electromagnetism (both theory and experiment). He has no idea if his assumptions logically lead to his conclusions, he just states they do. If he could do the formal sequence of logic decently he'd be able to answer my question. Then, wh
That was a good and fair post, AN. It's offensive to you that someone without proper credentials would display an unwarranted ego. I'd like to say that I overlook that stuff and simply concentrate on the information content...but I'm certain that isn't true. Also, I admit that I occasionally cringe at the brash nature of some posts I've personally made in the past. I used to be intentionally provocative to an extent, perhaps I still am. Anyway...this may be offensive to you, but I've personally read Relativity+ written by Farsight. In fact, I read almost anything I can find including any papers written by or referred to by posters on this forum, by george. (Come on, that was pretty good Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!) My opinion of Farsight is that some of his ideas may be off the mark but he really does a good job explaining things via analogy. His gelatin-in-a-pool explanation of gravity is wonderful. I think it helps to get as many perspectives as possible because they all represent different ways of thinking. I followed MotorDaddy's theory for example, not because I thought it had merit, but because I wanted to "see" his perspective. I also asked Pincho Paxton to explain his theory to me. At some point I identify where my perspective differs from theirs, and it helps develop my own critical thinking based on my limited knowledge, which in some ways I believe has value beyond rote memorization of current theories. I don't know if that makes any sense to you at all, but it is what it is...
This is absolutely not what AN was saying. Think about it like this: Your car suddenly stops working so you need to take it to a garage. There are two garages for you to choose from. One has a large selection of various tools, diagnostic systems, manuals and people that have experience in fixing cars. The second has no tools, but lots of books about cars that they have presumably read. Both may claim to know what is wrong with your car, but I know which one I would pick to actually fix it. The same principle goes for physics - if you haven't got the mathematical tools at your disposal then you are really not doing physics despite how revolutionary you think your ideas are. In the majority of cases, people that do know about the required maths have the "credentials" to go with it but this is not always the case, and credentials do not a physicist make.
Actually I find unwarranted egos in general not very nice but 'offensive' might be an overly strong word. To make it clear Farsight doesn't strong emotions in me. He hasn't distinguished himself from the 'background noise' of other hacks in anything other than his willingness to pump money into his endeavours. None of his ideas I find 'threatening' or invoke fear or any other negative emotion Farsight might think he induces in the research community. The strongest emotions he invokes are when he engages is his "I'm right, you're wrong and I'm going to ignore all evidence to the contrary or evidence showing I'm a hypocrite" nonsense. At the time it's irritating, particularly when he does it in a thread which otherwise would have been a good science discussion. Afterwards the memory of it just becomes amusement. A joke with a friend who also knows of Farsight about Farsight's latest claims of greatness, because they are laughable. Everyone has the right to be an idiot. Deliberately plastering your refuted and/or unsupportable arm waving in threads after you've been told not to is not everyone's right. The problem is that he only has the analogy. When a professor writes a book and uses analogies he is looking at the details and saying "What simple system displays the properties I'm interested in explaining?". He tailors it to what he wants to say. Farsight doesn't have any details in his own work and he doesn't understand or doesn't read the details in mainstream work. As such all the information he has about actual mainstream work, theory or experiment, is already in analogy form. Analogies, by their very nature, are less than perfect examples. They are used to highlight specific things of interest in a simple manner but anything else about them might be completely wrong. Farsight tries to argue from these analogies as if they are bang on. Look at his electromagnetism stuff. He doesn't understand Maxwell's equations and his level of understanding amounts to little more than the whole "Right hand rule" thing taught to 15 year olds in school. Those properties are derivable from Maxwell's equations but, and this is critical, in that derivation you also highlight the conditions for those properties to be true. Why is the magnetic field written using the curl operator? It's immediate from Maxwell's equations. Farsight argues, via analogies and interpretations, this is a sign of something fundamental. However, anyone capable when it comes to Maxwell's equations can show likewise can be done with the electric field in some circumstances. I can see why laypersons (no offence) might swallow what he says. If laypersons only ever learn about science (once they leave school) via analogies and pop science shows/books it might be hard to tell the difference between the analogies Hawking gives and the analogies Farsight gives. But, to use an analogy, this is akin to someone who can't speak Japanese or Chinese listening to a Chinese person and a Japanese person speak out loud, being told it's and then concluding "Yep, they are speaking the same language". So is invisible fairies pushing planets around or the creationist parody of 'intelligent falling'. Does that make their claims science? Why should I hold Farsight's interpretation/explanation in any more regard than those? Well if he could demonstrate his initial postulates lead, clearly and methodically, through to an accurate model of gravity then I'd sit up and listen. In the case of gravity it's particularly ironic that for all Farsight's slamming of string theory as unable to say anything about the real world we can test gravity is precisely the thing string theory makes testable statements about and it says gravity should behave, at long range, in the same manner as general relativity. If it had spat out different equations from the Einstein field equations string theory would never have made it out of the 80s. But you have to be rational at the same time. Should science classes 'teach the controversy' and give equal time to creationism as evolution? What about all the other religions? Should science classes teach every possible idea anyone can come up with to explain something, no matter how little it actually can be tested or worked through? I can pull an idea out of my backside right now to 'explain' gravity and I'm sure I could make it sound superficially viable but it would have zero details. As my last post explained, that's the hard part. PP is as delusional as Farsight. I'm not advocating stopping original idea generation. As part of my job I pitch loads of ideas which are just ideas, with minimal details, and only a few get further developed down the line but in all cases I'm motivating it using knowledge rather than just random personal preference. Every one of them I could start doing the details on if required. Simply slapping together random nonsense doesn't mean it deserves the time of day, never mind 4 Nobel Prizes as Farsight believes.
How did that go for you? I also asked him to explain. What I got was a random bunch of scattergun statements and tangential comments, none of which addressed any of the direct questions I asked him. I tried for 3 posts or so, then wrote him off as somebody who is probably borderline insane.
Prom: ohhh a car analogy! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Nevertheless, I'm still getting the vibe from AN that if Farsight wasn't proclaiming that he deserves 4 Nobel prizes on his work then AN would be less critical of it. The "ego" in this case goes hand-in-hand with "refusal to accept criticism". Once things become personal (as they have between AN and FS) I think any possibility of granting points to the other side is gone even if they are possibly deserved. AN: Yes, you are right that it would be a waste of resources to give all points of view equal time or equal credibility. I try to discount things accordingly, though. Unless it's from a traditional source, I think "this is likely bullshit but let's see where it leads". The gelatin-in-a-pool works because it exposed to me that a gradient of resistance through a medium coupled with certain types of motion naturally causes the appearance of attraction. It's a mental tool I use. We can relate that description to the soldiers-in-a-field (when trying to understand direction change due to refraction) who, upon hitting muddy ground at an angle, have their columns turned inward toward the mud. Where refraction typically behaves as a surface effect, gravity is a gradient, but their relation is now made explicit in my mind. If I want to further test this relation, I reason that a gradient-index would curve light in the same manner that a gravity field would attract mass. I research it and find that this is exactly what happens. Can I draw any other conclusions from this? Perhaps. The point is that it's a top-down approach for building my intuition in conjunction with formal courses. (Unfortunately, I can work on intuitive understanding at any time of day, while making it back to campus requires Life to cooperate accordingly) James R: Unfortunately, I concur with your assessment. Although I was grateful to be forced to learn about "kissing spheres". Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
No, this is pretty clear cut: Maxwell's equation's are linear differential equations. That means that if you have two EM waves that are solutions of Maxwell's equations, then the sum of the two is also always a solution. So if Maxwell's equations say that a certain kind of EM pulse can exist and move from right to left or left to right, it also predicts the sum of the two situations, where the two pulses approach one another, pass through each other, and each emerges from the "collision" as if the other pulse had never been there. No. I don't know what you mean by an EM wave having a "path", but if you mean something like the periodicity condition of spherical harmonics then scaling doesn't change that. The scaling symmetry in electrodynamics also involves scaling time by the same factor. The symmetry is with respect to \(\bar{x} \rightarrow \lambda \bar{x}\), \(t \rightarrow \lambda t\), which preserves the speed of light. So what are the ideas? That isn't residing in the wave itself? In any case I wasn't trying to refute anything specific here. I just get the impression a lot of people hear the word "wave" used in quantum physics, and seem to automatically respond with "Hey, electromagnetism also has waves!". So I think it's important to point out that not all superpositions are "wavelike" in quantum physics. As I said, those comments apply if one sticks to working in the framework of quantum physics as is. I included them because Farsight has previously said he accepts QED (a quantum theory) and was "explaining" it rather than trying to replace it. Though obviously this is something that has to be dealt with whether you accept quantum physics or not. If you don't accept quantum physics it "only" becomes a serious obstacle rather than a logical impossibility. In quantum physics, no. Internal orbital angular momentum can contribute to the "spin" of a composite particle, but only by an integer amount. The fact that we actually have experience with both electrodynamics and quantum physics, and think the idea doesn't look very promising, doesn't count for anything? We could be right too, you know.
Serious question: let's suppose you proposed an idea (a new theory or new interpretation of quantum physics or whatever) that became generally accepted by the physics community and became mainstream. So it became the new current theory. Would you expect future students to learn it by rote memorisation?
The answer is no. Einstein is capable of explaining the logical paths he took to reach the conclusions he did in SR, such that a student can appreciate them (e.g. trains, spinning wheels with rulers, etc). If I were to personally provide a new interpretation of quantum physics, I would be capable of describing the journey leading me to the conclusions that I had reached (example: Presume a single reality...add SR + QM => CFD => persistent particle existence => retrocausality => block time => etc) [I'll respond to your previous post when I have more time]
If it's not clear to you why I asked the question I did, it's because I'm wondering why you keep talking about current theories as if the only thing anyone could do with them is memorise them.
Very generally, that't not too far off the mark of my opinion. The math works, now shut up and calculate! I see Einstein's SR as explanatory of observation, while QM theories are merely descriptive of it.
So how do you think I got through five years of university physics, including QM, despite having no patience whatsoever for rote memorisation? What, exactly, is the difference? And why did you choose to attack QM in this way instead of, say, electrodynamics or Newtonian mechanics?
Alcohol? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I only bring this up so often because it's apropos so often: the stochastic analysis of throwing dice is descriptive but not explanatory of our observation of the results of repeated rolls. I disagree with your contention that, because dice do not generalize to other processes, its a false analogy. The description would generalize to any other well-behaved apparently random process consisting of 6 outcomes. We can have a separate stochastic analysis description of coin tossing and apply that to all well-behaved apparently random processes with 2 outcomes. The difference between wavefunctions and dice is not in the descriptions, it resides in 1) what we can physically observe and 2) entanglement. I'm just not sure that these two issues are enough to declare that QM is a different beast altogether. I "attack" QM only because it leaves me the least satisfied. In addition, a satisfactory* explanation of QM would also explain QED; they're parts of the same beast. *Satisfactory to me. We've already established that this means nothing to you unless it provides an objective improvement to current theories so there's no need to point this out (again)
I read your responses as if the idea is bumping up against a fundamental impossibility. I feel a bit weird posting this by AN because he later deleted it, but:
Hard work. Where, presumably "well-behaved apparently random process" means that all the outcomes occur with equal probability. What you're saying is tautologically true: the rules of dice throwing apply wherever the rules of dice throwing apply. Quantum physics isn't so circular or discriminate. It works everywhere we've tested. So it's a false comparison. If you forget about dice and just consider general probability theory, you're still making a bad comparison. Probability theory is generic and intended to apply to diverse situations. It's so general that you can consider just about anything a special case of probability theory. Quantum physics by contrast is more narrowly focused and more readily falsifiable. It predicts specific behaviour, which experiments could contradict. You're ignoring another important distinction here too. Quantum physics isn't just a catalogue of probability distributions. It's a model many (but not all) of whose predictions come in the form of probabilities. Where it gives probabilistic results, it predicts the actual probability distribution and how that depends on time, initial conditions, interactions and environmental influences, and what measurement is performed. In other words, it's pretty much just like any other theory in physics, except that many of its predictions come in the form of probabilities. You can't say the same about the probabilistic outcomes of dice throwing. Again, given that we can make drastically more sensitive physical observations than we could in 1920, that's not a small difference. And in addition to the differences I explained above: 3) non trivial behaviour, like interference and discrete atomic energy spectra. Comparing quantum physics with dice throwing is superficial rhetoric that breaks down after even a little consideration. If you know anything about the probabilistic description of dice and quantum physics, you'll quickly find that "probabilities are involved" is just about the only thing they have in common.
Well, do you know a way of adding integers and getting half-integers out of that? Do you know a way of making an antisymmetric state out of symmetric states? I don't. Only AlphaNumeric can tell you what he had in mind when he said that, assuming he still stands by it.
I didn't realise I'd deleted it. Must have been a slip up during my editing of the post (copy/pasting/undo combinations gone bad). It's possible to construct bosonic operators out of fermionic ones easily, typically pairs of fermionic operators behave boson-like due to picking up pairs of sign changes. It's harder to construct things from bosons which behave like fermions but it's not unknown in the literature. As for what I was talking about in reference to what I was doing I wasn't constructing something which had fermionic statistics in the sense of {a,b} = 0, rather than [a,b]=0 for bosonic stuff, but operators whose anticommutator when acting on the vaccum state have the same effect as you'd expect from fermion operators. I'm not really going to go into any more detail than that but suffice to say the concept isn't unheard of in the literature.
Ok, thanks. But does this extend to constructing something that looks like a half-integer spin state out of integer spin states? That's mostly what I had in mind when making my earlier comments. I know it's easy the other way around.
I have some vague feeling that it's possible in a very elaborate way. One of the guys I work with is much more up to speed on that area of gauge theory and due to what I'm doing at the moment we've been talking about this sort of stuff and he definitely mentioned something about it. He also mentioned a weird construct in 2+1 dimensional field theory known as anyons, which pick up a general phase under commutation rather than just the \(\pm 1\) of standard particles. The methods I was looking at involved having something whose action on the vacuum state squared to zero, even if the operator itself didn't vanish in general as happens with actual fermionic operators. It didn't really lead anywhere other than tons of fiddling expressions because lots of operator expressions didn't come out nice until you acted them on something.... Of course there's also ghosts, where you can have bosonic particles pick up a -1 factor under commutation and the verse for fermionic particles but one could argue whether they fall under the same heading as 'normal' particles, even anyons, since they manifest themselves via gauge fixing, thus making their existence dependent on a calculation specific method and also never appear as external legs in scattering processes. /edit The method of combining fermions to make a bosonic state is known as 'bosonization'. If you google for 'fermionization' (yes, American spelling with z rather than s) you get plenty of hits. As I half expected, something to do with Bose-Einstein condensates comes up a lot, like here. They are all pretty extreme situations, like cases where the Helium 4 nucleus has integer spin due to having 4 lots of 1/2 spin particles.
Very superficially, yes. We label fermionic spin as the number of times its constituent boson spins during its orbit. If we consider the EM wave's path as a mobius strip of paper, for example, then it takes two orbits to complete its "internal rotation". That's spin 1/2. It would also be trivial to come up with integer spins, etc, by this definition.
