Those who wish to muse within physics pointing to future physics

[Richard Hull]

Once again, a great piece by Sabine Hossenfelder appears that is very good. It deals with her talking to a physician who, to my amazement, offers some really good questions of her related to physics. He is no dummy and has thought deeply about physics and realizes its importance.

In the video, he and she talk of dark matter and she notes it is sort of a joke name to explain what we don't know. Likewise she is asked about what is new in physics. She notes, as I have, there is no stunning new physics. We are just squeezing the last juice for major breakthroughs of 20th Century major physics discoveries. The talk falls obliquely on utilizing physics in experiment that I feel relates directly to fusion. Useful fusion is still just an experiment do not think for one minute that it isn't. Sabine notes that in physics all experiments dig deeper on already known processes to learn more. In this effort we are just building bigger and bigger experiments that really just chases known processes, and these with size, get more and more costly. We spin our wheels in muddy and ever more costly efforts that are at the tail of a fading exponential curve of advancement.

I am reminded of 19th century physics hitting the wall in physics related to how the universe works, the sun's energy issue, and many other things that just were mysteries across the board in science. We hit a wall. Between 1889 and 1939 the wall was punched open and in those 50 years....
We created Radio and crude early TV. We discovered nuclear physics which literally made the 20th century with quantum mechanics, a full understanding of the atom, discovery of the electron, proton and neutron, fusion and fission. This alone revolutionized chemistry and physics, The elemental table was expanding, the concept of isotopes was discovered. I could go on and on. The crux is that this 50 year period opened up nearly a full century of nothing more than new technologies and understandings. Fuzzy nebulae became galaxies of billions of stars, etc.

All of the above was due to one great experiment to discover the electron and two lucky donkeys Roentgen, and Becquerel who smashed the wall. opening up all of the 20th century marvels and learning in a myriad of disciplines and created entirely new disciplines, as well.

Sabine notes again, obliquely, that we need a new lucky donkey to really push our static physics forward.

Watch this video carefully and weigh and consider, if you are a deep thinker with a good physics history background. What's really new?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIT8_lS4vRY

Richard Hull

[Dennis P Brown]

I gave up on the ridiculous idea of "Dark Matter" many years ago the minute I heard that they had no idea what it could be: only what it couldn't be (that is, anything 'real'.) Now, endless experiments later supporters have either failed to find just even a hint of it or experiments have shown that any current idea on Dark Matter does not hold up at all for most its 'claims' about far too many galactic structures.

Modified Gravity certainly is holding up and has numerous experimental evidence that it either supports or had predicted. Looks like gravity isn't a one over "r" squared 'force' (of course, gravity as viewed as a force is 100% fiction and no physicist would argue with that point.)

[Richard Hull]

For me gravity and inertia are mere potential energies when handled within physics and relate to some as yet unknown relational mime of potential force between the universe and ponderable mass. Both of these are forces at large scales; ponderable scales. Also ponderable at only large scales are electrostatic forces again of potential energy only, much like gravity and inertia.

There is so much we do not know and our knowledge, as it supposedly grows, we find out more about what we don't know and with new experiment suspect that presupposed ideas and theories related to nicely bundled and understood physics are either called into question or a huge rethink is needed. (Standard model)

I feel we will soon see some sort of revolution in physics that might match that of the late 19th century which saw our thoughts on matter develop into a whole new branch of physics. We are already seeing grumblings of doubt that would not take much more work to turn the standard model into a special case, just like relativity turned the Newtonian physics into a special case.

We learned that we, and all things which are solid and ponderable in our world exist only because of electrons and their charge creating impenetrable, fixed, interlinked, electric fields around atoms. Atoms are nuclear with particles in them held together by yet other forces dreamed up and called up to explain their violation of all electrostatic force laws found in the bigger outside world. We learned that the nuclear particles only exist in a quantum world of fields and probabilities now somewhat quantified to keep us and our theories happy and tidy. The smaller we go, the less we know.

I worry that, in the end, everything will be condensed vaporware where everything is just a series of special case conditional assemblages with laws and codifications piled high upon them. Much like the old saw....." Dogs have fleas which bite 'em, and fleas have fleas, and so on, ad infinitum"

Richard Hull

[Paul_Schatzkin]

Looks like gravity isn't a one over "r" squared 'force' (of course, gravity as viewed as a force is 100% fiction and no physicist would argue with that point.)

Um, Dennis, can you elaborate on that, or link me to a source where I can read up?

As I trust you know, I think about 'gravity' a lot – though I can't say I have any particular insight into the subject.

www.ttbrown.com

--P

[Paul_Schatzkin]

There is so much we do not know and our knowledge, as it supposedly grows, we find out more about what we don't know and with new experiment suspect that presupposed ideas and theories related to nicely bundled and understood physics are either called into question or a huge rethink is needed. (Standard model)

I am lately enamored of a line of dialog in the first season of the Netflix series 'Dark' (a time-travel narrative):

What we know is... a drop. What we don't is... the ocean.

That's all the profound wisdom I have to offer today. Your mileage my vary.

--PS

[Richard Hull]

Dare I speak for Dennis? Here goes......

Dennis refers to the classic "inverse square law", (1/r^2), an icon of physics for some forces, (gravity) and all point sources of radiation. This states that the force or intensity of radiation at any point, falls off as the inverse square of the distance, (r) of separation between that point and the source.

Example: You are at 1 foot and you radiation instrument measures an exposure rate = 1mrem/hr. Double the distance to 2 feet (two times farther away),1mrem/2^2 = 1/4 or .25mrem/hr now. At 5 times the original distance (5 feet) 1/5^2 =1/25 so 1mr/hr/25 = .04mrem/hr. This is why we say that the inverse square law can save your life rapidly as you move away from a dangerous source of radiation.

Same is measured for gravity. The apparent force of gravity measured at 100 miles above the earth would be only 1/25 of that force at 500 miles.

Dennis speaks to his doubt that such is not the case perhaps at all places in the universe, but is a local case for us. Certainly this relationship for gravity holds for calculating all orbits and slingshot assists for 100% of all craft and satellites ever launched by man in this solar system. That is why we consider the inverse square relationship for gravity to be a law.

Interestingly, being uncharged matter, neutron beams are seen, on earth, to fall under earths gravitational attraction much like a rifle bullet.

Richard Hull

[Frank Sanns]

The distance for the gravity calculation sums up all of the disks of a sphere from surface to centre. Even though the density of the earth changes with depth, the same calculations apply.

For the earth the centre is around 3,950 miles from the surface. An object 100 miles up is really 4,050 miles from the centre and an object 500 miles up would be 4,450 miles from earth's centre. R^2 holds.

Of course there are different ways to describe the fields and the magnitude of forces. One is 1/r while the other is 1/r^2 but they are different metrics for sphere, cylinders, etc.

Gravity is of course not a force but its equations are empirically accurate for what is observed. Until of course there are singularities and unexplained regions of space often affectionally called dark matter and energy.

[Dennis P Brown]

If I ever manage to get all the things done required to retire, I will finally be free to start focusing on a few home scientific projects. I subjected you all at the Fusor get together on my completed work on how to safely get crews to/back from Mars (almost two years back). I've talked to some on how in my Thesis I developed flexible glass (still need to get back to that - it was shown at the time to be a super superior armor on a mass bases after heavy testing by the Navy and Army against high end weapons.)

So, I been of late musing on this issue of no dark matter but the problem of galaxy rotation not following theory is an extreme problem for modern physics. I have considered a few ideas to explain this problem using current known physics and my approach appears to unite gravity and quantum mechanics (the current 'Holy Grail' for physics.) This approach also does away with the Black Hole singularity problem (that one is also a killer), explains inertia, why ions radiate on acceleration but not in a gravity field, what the curvature of space really is, why the Universe must expand and why the start of the Universe isn't a singularity either. I hope to get it into better mathematical rigor and maybe provide an outline talk at the next Fusor get together - assuming I don't give up on all the work required to do just in order to retire

[Richard Hull]

Dennis I hope you get to speak at a future HEAS October conference and flea market. I said I might end it at the one third of a century mark, but after the 33rd year in 2022, I have decided that in spite of being 76 and getting bone lazy, I will continue to hold the event until such time as I just can't do it anymore. When is that? All I can say is it will be the year they still have not done Q>10 fusion! I am hoping that will not be real soon now for the sake of those who attend our October gatherings.

Richard Hull

[Frank Sanns]

Perhaps the error in the early part of the 20th century that has constipated physics will finally be straighten out.

It is preposterous to think it could have gone on so long.

The entire concept of the fields and mass energy stalled sometime in the early 1900's and every college student studies those ways and cannot see things the way they really are.

[Paul_Schatzkin]

Perhaps the error in the early part of the 20th century that has constipated physics will finally be straighten out.

It is preposterous to think it could have gone on so long.

Is it really preposterous, or do we just need to observe the problem from an entirely different angle to see the sense of it?

There was a story in the NYTimes this week that asks,

"What Happened to All of Science’s Big Breakthroughs?"
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/17/scie ... ption.html

... and says, among other things,

The three analysts found a steady drop from 1945 through 2010 in disruptive finds as a share of the booming venture, suggesting that scientists today are more likely to push ahead incrementally than to make intellectual leaps.

I find that date – 1945 – curious. I'll come back to that presently.

First... Stay with me as I try to venture out on a metaphysical limb...

These are ideas that I circle and try to find adequate words for every day, as I try to make sense of the Philo Farnsworth and Townsend Brown stories – and find the thread of knowledge and un-knowledge (that's an old expression I just made up) that ties the two stories together.

I find it curious that both Farnsworth and Brown arrived at their seminal inspirations at roughly the same age and at roughly the same time in history – in their mid-teens, and early in the 1920s - a few years after Albert Einstein etal moved the boundary between known and unknown in the first two decades of the century past.

The Big Idea is – which, to my sensibilities, Frank obliquely alludes to is: there is much more to know about how the Universe works; there is also a higher intelligence that meters that information out to species like Homo Sapiens as they prove worthy and capable.

Actually, Farnsworth himself put it best:

I know that God exists. I know that I have never invented anything. I have been a medium by which these things were given to the culture as fast as the culture could earn them. I give all the credit to God.

I am not religious and neither was Phil, but substitute 'higher power in the Universe' for 'God' and we're on the same wavelength.

I think that higher power saw where humanity was headed once we began to get a handle on electricity. I am trying elsewhere to make the case that it was messing about with electricity in the early 19th century that led ultimately to the foundations of theoretical physics established in the 20th century - relativity and quantum mechanics. Like Farnsworth in the quote above, Einstein was the vessel of that next level of knowledge.

And then the Higher Power sat back and said, "let's see what they do with that..."

Which brings me back to what might have happened here on Earth in 1945 that would have slowed the progress of 'disruptive' breakthroughs. I think the answer is found in two words: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

At which point those 'controlling unknowns' (a phrase somebody used in the ttbrown.com/forum a while back) folded their arms and said, "OK, that's enough for now."

One more dip into pop-culture metaphysics and I'll find something constructive to do with the rest of my day...

Who remembers the first scene of '2001: A Space Odyssey'? You know, the one where the apes encounter the monolith?

https://youtu.be/U2iiPpcwfCA
(there are better cuts, but this one doesn't start with an f'ing ad)

I look at that scene, and I think about what Frank posted above, and my mind goes to:

We are still apes, we are still staring at the monolith, and the best we can do with the knowledge it has passed on to us beat each other with thigh-bones.

And we wonder why we can't have nice things – like useful fusion energy.

That's why.

Or, at least, that's why in my weird metaphysical universe.

Which, come to think of it, is why this website / resource is even here in the first place.

We now return to you to your regular skeptical / cynical / pessimistic programming.

--PS

[Richard Hull]

We await the lucky donkey. Man has always bungled his way into such scientific revolutions. The last was the quantum revolution in the 20's and early 30's. With out quantum theory, no transistors, no lasers, no computers or cell phones. What started Quantum theory? The lucky donkeys Roentgen and Becquerel. Quantum theory was not stumbled into, no lucky donkeys here! It was a product of the mind extending what the lucky donkeys did in the late 1890's.

The A-bombs and H bombs were just a natural extension of it all. Once the genie was out of the bottle, man always examines all aspects of what the lucky donkey stumbled onto. The world changed with the discovery of radioactivity, which came within months of x-rays due to Becquerel trying to make x-rays from phosphorescent rocks exposed to sunlight! Ha! What a stupid man! He was grasping at straws and changed the world. The 1890's was also the discovery of the electron which at once made chemistry a real thing based on the illusory charge/valence business. We have nuclear power flowing out of our outlet now, today! All due to the lucky donkeys and the follow-on incremental work they bungled into.

Truly! Research is what you are doing when you don't know what you are doing. Note the key word here is "doing"!

A guiding intelligence? Go for it! I put my trust in lucky donkeys and the bungling nature of mankind. This shows entropy's arrow can point onward and upward on a biological scale, always downward and degrading on the scale measured in physics. Everything dies in the end, be it 3 score and ten or Billions of years.

Richard Hull

[Paul_Schatzkin]

Thank you, Richard, for affirming the last line of my previous post.

--P

[Richard Hull]

Again, thanks also for the metaphysical journey related to a guiding intelligence dispensing stuff to us, as it feels we can handle or deserve.

Richard Hull