Wizard of Whatever
Registered Senior Member
Entangled particles only seem to be instantaneous, the information transfer is just too fast to measure.
The Universe as a Hologram (my interpretation)
- Thread starter cyberdyno
- Start date
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
: people incorrectly correcting other people :
Entangled particles do not involve information transfer, whether "too fast to measure" or otherwise.
Does it have detectable effects?
What experiment(s) can we do to try to falsify the notion that there is an aether?
If there aren't any, then you are proposing something akin to an undetectable dragon who lives in my garage. Which might be real, of course, but it would have no impact at all on anybody's life, or on anything else in the universe.
If it is real, how do you propose we go about detecting or measuring it?
You have a theory that explains how this aether of yours causes inertia, gravity, magnetism, etc?
How can we test it against theories that do not require an aether, to decide which theory is correct?
No. From the MMX results we should conclude that no aether was detected. We can also draw the conclusion that the MMX results give us no grounds for believing that any aether exists.
A "classical vacuum" is the absence of substance. You're asking about observing nothing, in effect. If I take a bell jar and pump out all the air, then you might say there is a "vacuum" inside. But what we're talking about is really just an absence of gas molecules.
In contrast, your aether is supposed to have properties of its own. Isn't it? Are those amenable to investigation, or not?
I have a ruler. I can use it to measure distances, which are not matter. Is that the kind of thing you have in mind?
The MMX is evidence that the proposed "ether wind" does not exist. Hence the idea that the universe has a "background substance" that exists throughout and is needed to carry electromagnetic waves becomes far less plausible.
We can't measure an object's momentum, directly. We can measure its speed and (indirectly) its mass, and calculate the momentum, but there's no such thing as a "momentum detector". We can operationally define "force" and measure it, but I don't see how you get from there to "it's caused by aether drag".
The metric is not the same as a manifold. The metric is used the measure distances and times on the manifold. Point is: matter exists in the manifold of spacetime, not in the metric. A technical point, but it's important to use terms correctly, don't you agree?
Gravity?
I don't understand your claim about space flowing.
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A space that contains the universe, then?
A space outside the universe?
Is your aether supposed to be the substrate of a multiverse, then, or something like that?
Nobody disputes that, as far as I am aware. Matter exists in space.
I don't know what that means. Can you explain, please?
Also, why didn't you answer the question I asked you?
Do you think that your concept of the aether is identical to Einstein's concept of an aether/ether? If it isn't, can you please tell me what the differences are between your idea and his, as you see them?
You're not just trying to borrow Einstein's scientific reputation or to rely on his presumed authority to try to prop up your notion of the aether, are you? I hope not.
That's a contradiction in terms, as far as I can tell. How can a substance that "does not exist" be an "immaterial substance from which the universe emerged"?
We're back to religion again.
Is your belief in an aether a religious belief, then?
You are talking about gods, there. Are you saying that aether is your idea of god?
The guys who detected the CMBR weren't looking for god, or for anything "immaterial". Among their first thoughts was the hypothesis that the "noise" in their microwave receiver was due to an accumulation of pigeon poo in the antenna.
Contradictory notions about what? What do they contradict?
As far as I can tell, it is you who is postulating the existence of an unmeasurable background substance to the universe.
Which "reductionists" are you referring to, specifically, and what unmeasurable thing are you talking about that those reductionists are so desperate to quantify? You're being very vague.
By "everywhere", do you mean on the interwebs, among people who are not trained in physics? Or do you have some peer-reviewed scientific papers you can reference?
Interesting!
And do you agree with these unnamed people? Or not?
Okay.
And do you agree with Relativity, or not?
Does it?
Er... okay. Does that include the existence of the aether, or not?
Are you saying the aether is explained by some quantum schenanigans, then?
So existence doesn't start with the quantum, but with the aether. Did you make a mistake, just above?
Are you saying that the quantum is explained by some aether shenanigans, then?
Please explain how the aether causes the quanta.
Can you please unpack that for me?
Matter needs an energy supply because .... ?
And matter gets its energy supply from the aether ... how?
And this is related to wave-particle complementarity because ...?
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Which leading cosmologists? Can you name, say, three of them who hold this view, and point me towards their writings or a summary of their views?
Ignoring, eh? Bad, Western science! Bad!
But I imagine there is some other science that does a better job, that the West doesn't know about? Secret, special, smart science that doesn't just ignore stuff like Western Science does.
Is it Eastern Science? Northern Science? What?
I was under the mistaken impression that science is a global enterprise, these days. How wrong I was!
Please tell me about your non-Western science.
That all sounds like Western science, to me! It's good that it got some things right.
Maybe, but you have yet to make the argument. Are you planning on making it, at some point in this discussion?
Oldness doesn't necessarily imply rightness. It has been argued before that the Earth flat. That's a very old idea, too. But it's not correct.
Maybe you meant we learned about what we now call inflation.
Einstein never learned about what we now call inflation. He was dead when the idea was introduced, like I said.
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
The problem with the idea of an energy “supply” from zero point energy is that by definition zero point energy cannot be extracted from the system. It is the residual energy of the ground state, and as there is no energy level below the ground state, this residual energy is unavailable for extraction. If it can’t be extracted from the system, how can it constitute an energy supply?
God is a thing, not a person.
In most aether views, whether material or immaterial, the aether is seen as an all knowing creative force, but not in this view. I compare the aether to God in the sense that it is one, omnipresent, and eternal, but at the same time I argue that it is not all knowing, that it is a thing which can neither think, nor see without a brain. That it sees, thinks, and exists through matter.
Matter is 99.9999...% empty space. Reduce yourself to the size of the smallest particle and you will still see nothing more than empty space. Matter is made of fields and fields are little more than apparitions. Fields are shapes in empty space, lines of force. Matter seems like an illusion, but that is reality, and matter in spacetime is the one drawing the shapes, not some creator or designer. The universe designs itself. Particle creation occurs according to local spacetime's energetic or thermodynamic requirements. Reality is process and process happens as spacetime.
Matter is condensed space and energy is space in motion. Matter is the same as energy, hence E=mc^2. Whether there is an aether or not is finally answered: the aether is but does not exist until it turns into matter.
Gravity Being Described as Space Flow
Excerpt from Brian Cox's "Wonders of the Universe"
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByfoRemtwEkpQUE5MF9xWkR6UWc/edit?usp=sharing
Tensor Networks Initiative
From entangled quantum matter to emergent space time
Tensor Networks Initiative | Perimeter Institute
Tensor networks study collective phenomena in condensed matter to providing a discrete realization of the holographic principle in quantum gravity.
Search: Tensor Networks + perimeter institute
cyberdyno:
I have already asked you for more detail and for clarification on some of them. Are you going to provide anything more, or is this the sum total of your response to my posts, above?
Why not just link us directly to their pages in the first place?
Is God the aether?
Why invoke God at all, if the aether is a purely natural "substance", or similar?
These are all claims that really need supporting arguments.
I have already asked you for more detail and for clarification on some of them. Are you going to provide anything more, or is this the sum total of your response to my posts, above?
Are you saying that you're just telling us about the work of scientists in the Tensor Networks Initiative, then?
Why not just link us directly to their pages in the first place?
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
Some of the ideas read like a garbled version of some of Einstein's early descriptions. For instance when Einstein put forward general relativity in his 1920 Leiden lecture, he conceived of spacetime as a new kind of non-corporeal aether:
"Recapitulating, we may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether. According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense. But this ether may not be thought of as endowed with the quality characteristic of ponderable media, as consisting of parts which may be tracked through time. The idea of motion may not be applied to it".
Einstein also seems to have a concept of God similar to that of Spinoza, viz. what we call God is a shorthand for the laws of nature. cyberdyno seems to have reserved that designation to the "aether" of spacetime, which doesn't make much sense to me, but the idea of using the term God in relation to the structure of nature appears to be the same basic concept.
exchemist:
I find it strange that so many people seem fixated on what Einstein said and did back in the 1900s to 1920s. It's like they aren't aware that the theory of relativity has been extensively elaborated and applied to new problems for 100 years since then. There are physicists alive today who have a far better understanding of the General Theory of Relativity than Einstein did, if for no other reason than because they have the benefit of 100 more years of people working on and with the theory, its consequences and its applications.
Physics didn't stop in 1920.
As a historical study, it is interesting to look at Einstein's early efforts to explain his theory and to articulate how it was different from what came before. But those early efforts at getting to grip with the implications of the theory are just that: early efforts.
Nothing Einstein said in the part of the Leiden lecture that you quoted is incorrect, of course. His words are entirely consistent with the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment failing to detect a "luminiferous aether". That aether was thought to have qualities similar to "ponderable media"; it was supposed to be like a sort of fluid medium. In the lecture, Einstein makes the point that the GR picture of spacetime does not use that kind of "aether". In more modern times, that kind of aether is considered an unnecessary hypothesis.
I am aware that Einstein often referred to God when he was talking about the laws of nature, as in his well-known expression of distaste for quantum theory, that "God does not play dice". As far as I am aware, Einstein's belief in God did not extend beyond using the term "God" as a shorthand for the natural order. When he was asked about God, he stated that he believed in "Spinoza's God".
I find it strange that so many people seem fixated on what Einstein said and did back in the 1900s to 1920s. It's like they aren't aware that the theory of relativity has been extensively elaborated and applied to new problems for 100 years since then. There are physicists alive today who have a far better understanding of the General Theory of Relativity than Einstein did, if for no other reason than because they have the benefit of 100 more years of people working on and with the theory, its consequences and its applications.
Physics didn't stop in 1920.
As a historical study, it is interesting to look at Einstein's early efforts to explain his theory and to articulate how it was different from what came before. But those early efforts at getting to grip with the implications of the theory are just that: early efforts.
Nothing Einstein said in the part of the Leiden lecture that you quoted is incorrect, of course. His words are entirely consistent with the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment failing to detect a "luminiferous aether". That aether was thought to have qualities similar to "ponderable media"; it was supposed to be like a sort of fluid medium. In the lecture, Einstein makes the point that the GR picture of spacetime does not use that kind of "aether". In more modern times, that kind of aether is considered an unnecessary hypothesis.
I am aware that Einstein often referred to God when he was talking about the laws of nature, as in his well-known expression of distaste for quantum theory, that "God does not play dice". As far as I am aware, Einstein's belief in God did not extend beyond using the term "God" as a shorthand for the natural order. When he was asked about God, he stated that he believed in "Spinoza's God".
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
Surely it’s in Canada, isn’t it? Or are there two organisations with the same name?
The aether, as described over four thousand years ago, is materially non-dimensional. It is not matter, therefore not directly observable. You can measure the properties of fields, but you cannot take a direct measurement of the aether.
Motion is not one of the aether's properties, neither is time, nor change. This makes it immutable, or eternal. Since it lacks the property of motion and cannot be described as containing parts that follow a time-line, we can conclude that it is not matter. At the sub-quantum level, the level at which energy is before it turns into multiple entities, motion loses meaning. Any material substance will occupy space, but this physical non-material substance does not. It becomes matter as fields vibrate, or pulsate at very high speeds. Creating material properties like volume, extension, motion, time, mass, gravitation and solidity, eventually causing the formation of objects in spacetime. Once we have the limits, the boundaries, we can talk about notions like size, extension, motion, time, and process.
In this view, the aether has no capacity to hold any active information, just passive information, the constants, which are used by active information as energy is turned into quantities, or quantized... in spacetime.
The aether gives the universe properties like wholeness, interconnectedness, continuity, and non-locality. There are no parts when you refer to the aether, but you can look at electric and magnetic fields as different things, or parts of a greater whole. All made from the same continuous and non-fragmentable aether. Everything is connected to the aether because everything is made from it. This is where wave-particle complementarity comes from.
Contemporary Quantum Field Theory supports the idea that the ontology is in the process which matter undergoes as it fluctuates in and out of nothingness. Classical Physics being a description of what the world appears to be, and Quantum Field Theory a description of what the world is.
According to Louis de Broglie, et al., every object exists as a body coupled to a matter wave, or pilot wave, and its displacement through space can be described by a wave-function. Information about the object's relation to its surroundings and the rest of the universe is picked and brought in by each object's particular pilot wave.
Bodies in motion need to continuously reset their energy requirements. As we now know, particles are not these space independent billiard ball-like objects floating in space, they are wave-particle systems in constant motion. Cloud-like standing waves which require a continuous energy flow from the substrate to the particle. This is why position and momentum cannot be known at the same time. This is where the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle comes from.
According to Louis de Broglie, et al., every object exists as a body coupled to a matter wave, or pilot wave, and its displacement through space can be described by a wave-function. Information about the object's relation to its surroundings and the rest of the universe is picked and brought in by each object's particular pilot wave.
Bodies in motion need to continuously reset their energy requirements. As we now know, particles are not these space independent billiard ball-like objects floating in space, they are wave-particle systems in constant motion. Cloud-like standing waves which require a continuous energy flow from the substrate to the particle. This is why position and momentum cannot be known at the same time. This is where the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle comes from.
Matter is continuously changing, becoming. What was a second ago is no longer, and the only things real or meaningful to us are the information and processes through which things become and now are. But the immutable, the eternal, the real, is the empty space in which the universe sits. Matter and fields are little more than apparitions, active information, as David Bohm called it. Basil Hiley, one of David Bohm's collaborators, is correct when he says that being is a relative invariant in the overall process of becoming. The fundamental laws, that which remains unchanged, is what is real.
Can you be without materially existing? Logic tells us that creation ex nihilo is physically impossible. And from electromagnetic phenomena and gravitation we get that, physically speaking, to be, you don't need to be material, all you need is to be able to act as a force. Existing is not the same as being, you can be without existing, but you cannot exist without being.
Is empty space real? Can we prove it? Can we measure it? Can we mathematically describe the rotation or acceleration of an object in empty space without assuming empty space to be real? I mean, if you were the only particle in space, how could you tell when spinning or accelerating? Is the only time we can have space, rotation, and acceleration when we have more than one object to consider? Empty space may be empirically untenable, but it is already considered as real by present theory. Which is why we have spacetime metrics.
The aether is not in spacetime, spacetime is in the aether. Empty space and spacetime are not the same thing. Einstein's spacetime is material, empty space is not. There can be no space without time nor motion, this is why Einstein called it spacetime. As Einstein once said: if we had no time (process), everything would have to happen at once. That is why Einstein described reality as a spacetime continuum where he saw process as the weaver of the fabric of space, a fabric made from space and time. Reality is process... spacetime is process.
Time, space, and matter start with the quantum, and quanta can exist only when in motion. Field motion, or energy, turns into matter. If we could stop the motion, matter would go back to being just empty space. Outside of time, quantum events are not possible. There is time and space because there is motion, and there is motion because there is energy. The aether itself does not move, matter does, the quantum does. As Einstein used to say: energy is space in motion. In this sense, aether is synonymous to energy, it is pure energy.
In this view, the aether is the substrate to all matter, including Wheeler's Quantum Foam. It is before geometry. Everything depends on this substrate, this is where the laws of gravity and electromagnetism are administered from.
Electromagnetic fields should not appear as ultimate, irreducible realities. Existence starts with the field, and before that there is what we call empty space, or aether, which is neither big, nor small: extension is not one of its properties. Spacetime and geometrization happen after the aether. The aether, unlike spacetime, is primary. Matter, space, and time are not. Empty space which is not really empty but full of pure energy. Energy which exists before EMR, and therefore is neither hot, nor bright.
Can you be without materially existing? Logic tells us that creation ex nihilo is physically impossible. And from electromagnetic phenomena and gravitation we get that, physically speaking, to be, you don't need to be material, all you need is to be able to act as a force. Existing is not the same as being, you can be without existing, but you cannot exist without being.
Is empty space real? Can we prove it? Can we measure it? Can we mathematically describe the rotation or acceleration of an object in empty space without assuming empty space to be real? I mean, if you were the only particle in space, how could you tell when spinning or accelerating? Is the only time we can have space, rotation, and acceleration when we have more than one object to consider? Empty space may be empirically untenable, but it is already considered as real by present theory. Which is why we have spacetime metrics.
The aether is not in spacetime, spacetime is in the aether. Empty space and spacetime are not the same thing. Einstein's spacetime is material, empty space is not. There can be no space without time nor motion, this is why Einstein called it spacetime. As Einstein once said: if we had no time (process), everything would have to happen at once. That is why Einstein described reality as a spacetime continuum where he saw process as the weaver of the fabric of space, a fabric made from space and time. Reality is process... spacetime is process.
Time, space, and matter start with the quantum, and quanta can exist only when in motion. Field motion, or energy, turns into matter. If we could stop the motion, matter would go back to being just empty space. Outside of time, quantum events are not possible. There is time and space because there is motion, and there is motion because there is energy. The aether itself does not move, matter does, the quantum does. As Einstein used to say: energy is space in motion. In this sense, aether is synonymous to energy, it is pure energy.
In this view, the aether is the substrate to all matter, including Wheeler's Quantum Foam. It is before geometry. Everything depends on this substrate, this is where the laws of gravity and electromagnetism are administered from.
Electromagnetic fields should not appear as ultimate, irreducible realities. Existence starts with the field, and before that there is what we call empty space, or aether, which is neither big, nor small: extension is not one of its properties. Spacetime and geometrization happen after the aether. The aether, unlike spacetime, is primary. Matter, space, and time are not. Empty space which is not really empty but full of pure energy. Energy which exists before EMR, and therefore is neither hot, nor bright.
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
“Pure energy” is Star Trek, not physics. Energy is an attribute of a physical system. You cannot have “pure” energy, on its own, any more than you can speak of “pure velocity”. It is meaningless.
Energy is not stuff. It is a property of something.
Right, like teleportation. I know...