Re: process physics (was Re: Aether is the empty space in which the Universe sits)

From: Bilge (dubious_at_radioactivex.lebesque-al.net)
Date: 07/30/04 

Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 10:32:04 -0000

 mountain man:
>"Bilge" <dubious@radioactivex.lebesque-al.net> wrote in message
>news:slrncgd83p.5ur.dubious@radioactivex.lebesque-al.net...
>> >mountain man:
>>
>> >Cahill shows that relativistic effects and absolute motion are not
>> >mutually incompatible ---- see the process physics directory.
>> >
>> >Experiments are critical and are turning points in the history of
>> >science.
>>
>> Actually, he doesn't show much of anything. I read several of the
>> articles. Basically, his ``process physics'' amounts to taking a lot of
>> snippets of ideas which are found in the current literature and then
>> making a lot of assertions without ever really saying a whole lot of
>
>
>The important point he makes is that absolute motion is not incom-
>patible with the relativistic effects.

  Only if by ``relativistic effects'' you mean the most trivial
phenomeology associated with a lorentz boost. Even then, there's
no physical effect which could depend on that absolute motion,
so any existence it has addresses philosophical satisfaction,
not physics.

>One could always have chosen one frame of reference as the actual or real
>observable frame.

  No, one cannot. At least, not unless you want to assume all of the
conservation laws you could otherwise prove rigorously by assuming no such
frame exists. I'd be able to take this absolute frame argument more
seriously if someone arguing in favor of an absolute frame took thier own
concept seriously enough to develop a theory using that concept rather
than simply declare whatever follows from assuming the opposite applies to
them too.

>Einstein rejected, in the end, absolute motion
>because he believed that none had been detected, and therefore that
>it was a spurious concept.
 
  Actually, I really don't care too much what einstein's opinion was
with respect to an ether or absolute motion, etc. Einstein died
before anyone really recognized the extent to which the existence
of a symmetry reduces an explanation of very complex phenomena as
nothing but a consequence of the symmetry.

>At a technical level, and this is shown in Cahill's papers, the
>Einstein measurement protocol (using radar etc), and which leads
>to the invariant interval, is compatible with absolute motion.
 
  That isn't the issue. In fact, the speed of light, per se, or the
clock synchronization ritual is pretty much irrelevant to relativity.
The fundamental basis of relativity is the concept of spacetime.
The number `c' is nothing but the line at 45 degrees in a plane
defined by the time axis with each of the space axes. That line is
invariant, for the simple reason that it's the line at 45 degrees
to those axes. I have a hard time seeing how so much attention gets
focussed on a line in the x-t, y-t and z-t planes while trying to
make the exact same argument for the same line drawn in the x-y, x-z
and y-z planes would be considered ridiculous.

>Cahill and Kitto first realised in 2002 how a Michelson interferometer
>actually works. It can detect absolute motion only if a gas is
>present in the light path. That analysis uses the special
>relativistic length contraction, again showing the coexistence of
>absolute motion and relativistic effects.
>
>So far data from 5 Michelson interferometer and two co-axial cable
>experiments have been analysed, and shown to be consistent with
>respect to speed and direction of absolute moion of the solar system
>(approximately 420 +/-30 km/s in direction RA=+5hr, Dec=-60deg).
 
  I haven't seen the data, nor the experimental set up. In any case,
the reesult is consistent with any value the error bars overlap.

>At a more technical level there is as yet no derivation of why absolute
>motion causes the special relativistic effects, such as length contractions
>and time dilations etc.
 
  More importantly, it would un-exaplain most of the conservation laws.

>
>Cahill's work began well before wolfram's book was published.
>Perhaps people should ask Steve Wolfram for his detailed, ie
>checkable, predictions re dark matter lab experiments, the nature of
>the observed gravitational waves, the gyro precessions for the GP-B
>experiment, the massess of the black holes in globular clusters, etc
>etc...
 
  I think wolfram got carried away, so I mention him only as an
example the same sort of idea with better execution.

[...]
>> He repeats this exact statement later in the article and then repeats
>bits
>> and pieces of it, but never makes that statement any more meaningful than
>> a jumble of words. I sort of expected to find out precisely what that
>> was supposed to mean beyond what it is obviously intended to mean if
>> one sort of reads it as a general theme rather than for literal meaning.
>
>
>
>For the first time we are seeing the beginning of a totally
>different way of understanding the origin of space, the quantum etc.
>This is far from complete as even Cahill readilly admits.
 
  I don't think so. I think understanding quantum mechanics in terms
of information theory is the most sensible way to understad it.
It's not new. I have a book with the conference proceedings from
a 1989 meeting given at the sante fe institute addressing quantum
mechanics using those same ideas. My point is that cahill throws
a lot stuff together indescriminantly and simply asserts that it
means what he says it means.

>But at least someone has begun the enormous task of putting together
>a theory not plagued by the older paradigms. One prediction from
>this Process Physics was the realisation that absolute motion had to
>be real and observable. With that prediction Cahill went looking at
>the existing experimental data, discovered that absolute motion had
>been in the data for over 100 years.
 
  I'd have to say that idea was experimentally ruled out by gisin
and suarez in several papers in which they demonstrate that
it is not possible to give any definite time order for the
measurements made in an epr experiment. They demonstrate that
even when both polarizers in different moving frames can
claim the measurement occurred before the measurement in the
other frame (which they call a before-before measurement),
there is no frame in which one of the measurements unambiguously
occurs before the other. A list of publications, including
the experimental papers is available at:

http://www.quantumphil.org/publications.htm

[...]
>Another prediction from Cahill's work is an explanation for the `dark
>energy' effect. Its not an energy at all but a feature of the `space' that
>arises in Cahill's theory. A spatial dynamics explanation for the `dark
>matter' effect is also put forward.
 
  I'm still rather dubious about any particular claims about dark
matter, so I really put no credence on any claim of one explanation
of dark matter being better than another at the moment. At least
not until it looks less like a dark matter panacea bandwagon.

>Its not matter after all but a self-interaction of space. The strength of
>that is set by the fine structure constant. (see the Greenland bore hole
>g anomaly data.)
 
  I'd be a lot more impressed if someone actually chose a constant
other than the fine structure constant as the solution to some
mystery. My first impression upon reading that sort of thing
is that the author is unaware of anything but E&M and even
then doesn't attach the right significance to \alpha. \alpha is
just the electromagnetic coupling constant. Whatever it has
to do with space, so does the weinberg angle, the strong coupling
constant, and every other constant.

>
>> The general theme is not particularly uncommon. Making a real theory
>> which explains something would be unique. What he says about time also
>> doesn't make any sense as he's attempted to explain it. He refers to time
>> as something which emerges from a growing fractal structure. Well, what
>
>I take it you don't understand what Cahill says about time.
 
 No. What he said about time didn't say anything.
 
>
>The simple point is that Cahill models time as a process (actually an
>iterative process), and not by a static piece of geometry.
 
  Since he models geometry as a process, in particular, a fractal,
all he's done is supress the time dimension when showing iterations
of the fractal. Plot the fractal as a function of time. You'll see
the same thing except it will grow along the time axis. That doesn't
explain the growing part.

>The process model then captures the concept of the difference
>between the past, present and future. The geometrical model of
>time simply couldn't do that. The fractal stuff refers to the structure
>of the emergent space.
 
  I know what he's trying to do. I'm saying that he hasn't done it.
I also think he's missing the entire point of the general idea
he advoactes.
 
[...]
>
>Objects are affected by motion through something with structure, and
>which causes dynamical effects. So if space has structure, then what
>theory do you have for that structure? Cahill has been developing the
>Quantum Homotopic Field Theory for that, and for matter also.
 
  That about sums up my every one of my objections to cahill's papers.
That paragraph is completely void of any meaningful content. It
basicallly says that ``something happens to things because of some
effects that occur as a result''.

>This is very technical at a mathematical level, but Cahill has a fair
>background in the quantum field theory of elementary particles (do a
>check at the SLAC libarary site), so he has considerble expertise in
>this kind of maths.
 
  It's not really all that technical. Nothing indicated he had any
familiarity with any of those subjects.

>By the way, has wolfram developed his model to the stage where he
>is getting at very detailed emergent quantum behaviour??
 
  Like cahill, wolfram certainly thinks so. Personally, I think
wolfram got carried away.

[...]
>
> Ehrenfest's theorem does not state that classical physics is the
>limit of quantum mechanics. Total nonsense!
 
  It most certainly does and it's trivial to show. That's the point
of the theorem. It states explicitly that the quantum operators
become the classical variables in the limit that the operators
may be replaced by their expectation values.

>It is easy to show that the Schrodiinger equation say for a 10^23
>atoms has solutions that are not seen experimentally.
>The problem
>is that this equation predicts that even this number of atoms will
>display gross quantum behaviour, whereas experimentally they
>don't, they behave classically.
 
  You don't understand quantum mechanics. The schroedinger equation
for a many body system gives the same result as the classical equations
of motion when the temperature is high enough such that fermions
and bosons have mostly different occupation numbers, which for a gas,
room temperature is easily high enough.

>This is the `classicality problem'.

  There is no such thing as the `classicality problem''. What you mean
is the measurement problem and it has nothing to do with eherenfest's
theorem or the fact that quantum mechanics becomes classical mechanics
in the limit that the difference in an operator and it's expectation
value becomes irrelevant.

>For most of the last 80 years this
>problem was swept under the carpet, and is not even discussed in
>most QM textbooks. But in the last 10 years or so a lot of new ideas
>have emerged. One of the most promising are the ideas within
>Quantum State Diffusion (QSD). This gives a neat dynamical
>explanation for the emergence of classical rather than quantum
>behaviour for systems with many degrees of freedom.

 Quantum state diffusion changes the question and removes it a level.
That also brings up another problem I have with cahill. He seems to
have tried to incorporate every fashionable concept making the
rounds, but bassically offers no explanation as to what they have
to do with each other beyond some handwaving.

>So this finally appears to explain the "quantum measurement problem"...
>but you will have to master that technical details of that in the science
>literature. Cahill has realised that the mathematical tricks in QSD, that
>make it work, appear to have a natural occurence in Process Physics,
>where reality is modelled as a `semantic information' system (don't go
>beserk over that term if you don't kow what it means) with an internal
 
  It means more jargon.
 
>`noise' (Self-Referential Noise SRN) that is used to model the limitations
>of self-referencing in the information system.
>
>These are obviously very different ideas than the standard physics,
 
  I beg to differ. See ``Complexity and the Physics of Information'',
W. Zurek, et al. The textbook, ``An Introduction to Kolomogorov
Cpmplexity and Its Applications'', by vitanyi and li contains
all sorts of ideas that are applicable to quantum mechanics, (but
doesn't address quantum mechanics in any detail). Look up papers
written by preskill, schor, bennett, zurek, wheeler, zeh, and
numerous others.

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