Monday, November 18, 2013

Lorentz explained the physics

A reader refers to Einstein historians Isaacson and Holton, and writes:
Lorentz, for example, simply used the equations found in Special Relativity purely as a mathematical formulation with no actual physical reference.
Just read Lorentz's 1895 paper where he explicitly uses those equations to explain the Michelson-Morley experiment (MMX) and other experiments.

The consensus of physics textbooks is that the MMX was the crucial experiment for special relativity. Those Einstein historians say that Einstein was not influenced by the MMX and may not have even known about it.

When Lorentz, Poincare, and Minkowski argued for the correctness of the Lorentz transformations, they all cited the MMX. When Einstein wrote his first paper on the subject in 1905, he did not specifically mention the MMX. Einstein did write a 1909 survey paper where he credited Lorentz with using the Lorentz transformations to explain MMX.

Thus Lorentz's special relativity was certainly not a purely mathematical formulation with no actual physical reference. He explained the physics much better than Einstein, and did it 10 years earlier. Among those who credit Einstein, it is largely for giving an alternative mathematical derivation of the Lorentz transformation, and avoiding the physics.

Those who credit Einstein must somehow explain the undisputed fact that Lorentz and Poincare had published all the equations for special relativity before Einstein. So they make silly arguments about how Lorentz and Poincare did not understand what they were doing, or that "Lorentz and Einstein were great friends", or that anyone who does not recognize that "Einstein is the greatest mind of the 20th century" must be "some kind of neo-nazi or anti-semite".

The reader asks:
Can you even explain how GR predicts blackholes, and why? Do you even understand the theory?
Einstein is the one who did not. The Wikipedia article on black hole explains:
Considering the exotic nature of black holes, it may be natural to question if such bizarre objects could exist in nature or to suggest that they are merely pathological solutions to Einstein's equations. Einstein himself wrongly thought that black holes would not form, because he held that the angular momentum of collapsing particles would stabilize their motion at some radius.[70] This led the general relativity community to dismiss all results to the contrary for many years. However, a minority of relativists continued to contend that black holes were physical objects,[71] and by the end of the 1960s, they had persuaded the majority of researchers in the field that there is no obstacle to forming an event horizon.
Einstein was famously wrong about the big bang and gravity waves, the other big consequences of general relativity.

The reader also writes:
Planck wrote (and there are many sources for this info) that he did NOT believe that light was truly a particle! I give up.
That is correct. I said:
Planck's view is closer to the modern view that light is quantized when absorbed or emitted (ie, observed), but has wave properties otherwise.
It was proved in 1801 that light was not truly a particle, and that has been the dominant view ever since. If it were truly a particle then it would have localized position and momentum, and quantum mechanics teaches that is impossible.

I realize that A. Douglas Stone is an expert on lasers and surely understands this, but he is not correct in the way that he promotes Einstein.

11 comments:

  1. Quantum mechanics is probabilistic (or just statistical), saying that anything is impossible in such said system is quite amusing. Then again, QM is infinitely wrong since it requires the transformation of infinite numbers into finite numbers using renormalization, which is just heuristic device to perform integral butchery (hand waving with BS adjectives pasted on) which is hardly mathematically valid. Feynman even said so. There actually is no 'mechanism' in QM, just a lot of gooey terms like "probability decoheres into reality, and observation causes the decoherence." What a circular load of crap. A theory which pretends to make predictions but can not actually lay claim to a single mechanism which determines which state it's precious 'wave function' will collapse into. It does not take genius to realize the choice of math affects the form of the answer it will generate, if you use an irrational mélange of various flavors of solipsism to make a determination, you get equally silly and irrational statements from the creators of QM like "Mars does not exist until you look at it". Ummm, I would like to thank God gravity doesn't even exist at all in quantum mechanics or we would fly out of flipping orbit and right off the planet every time we forgot to think the damn gravity back on.
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    P.S. It was not proved any such thing in 1801. It was data interpreted a certain way that people such as yourself have agreed with, not proved. You might want to consider being a tad more skeptical of other physicists and mathematicians besides just Einstein. I think you let your grudges against him cloud your thinking about a lot of other fudging going on down though the centuries.

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  2. I am skeptical about a lot of other physicists. I say that the wave properties of light were proved, and I mean that they were proved to the satisfaction of the leading physicists, and that is how light is understood today.

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  3. I am skeptical about black holes, because they involve infinity. There is an opinion that they don't actually solve Einstein's equations. Read the stuff by Stephen J Crothers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_J._Crothers

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    1. All of Stephen Crothers' mathematics has been shown to be riddled with errors, as detailed in the following papers:

      1) “The Mathematics of Black Hole Denialism” – Dr. William D. Clinger (PhD in Mathematics from MIT)

      http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=231833

      2) “Coordinate Transformations and Metric Extension: a Rebuttal to the Relativistic Claims of Stephen J. Crothers” – Dr. Jason J. Sharples (PhD in pure Mathematics and Mathematical Physics from the University of Canberra, Australia)

      http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2010/PP-20-L1.PDF

      3) “A clarification on the debate on the original Schwarzschild solution" – Dr. Christian Corda (PhD in Physics from Pisa University, Italy)

      http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.6031

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    2. www.sjcrothers.plasmaresources.com/Clinger.html

      Crothers, S.J., On Corda's 'Clarification' of Schwarzschild's Solution, Hadronic Journal, Vol. 39, 2016, http://vixra.org/pdf/1602.0221v4.pdf

      Crothers, S.J., Reply to the Article ‘Watching the World Cup’ by Jason J. Sharples,
      http://vixra.org/pdf/1603.0412v1.pdf

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  4. Niels Bohr, Heisenberg, and a few others created a serious mess with their sloppy definitions, logic, inability to mechanically visualize, and inability to resolve problems with their illogical conclusions. They conflated math with reality: Thus, Math is reality. This is logically, physically, and philosophically untrue. Applied mathematics at best REPRESENTS reality, it is not the reality itself, it never was, and never can be. The only thing a probability wave represents is the Math, not the reality. The math can represent the reality, but it can not logically be equivalent to reality like some kind of sympathetic magic. That QM's paradoxes are considered 'proved to the satisfaction of leading physicists' and claimed 'understood' is indication of just how far the rigor of science has fallen into pseudo(fill in the blank) and mysticism.
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    Whoever figures out what is really going on is not going to be part of the mainstream, that much is obvious for logical reasons; When you can't diverge from the herd mentally without being expelled physically you have little chance of convincing others. From the perspective of the physics community, the person who discovers the next step closer to the truth will be seen as a crazy crackpot...much like today's democrats see anyone who does not agree with their 'progressive' agenda and conclusions as radical, extremist, anarchist, racist...(fill in the pejorative), etc. Long story short, check out some of the crackpots if you want to see a glimmer of the future... they are not all crazy, they are not all actually crackpots. Some of them are actually trying to understand reality, not memorize the latest mathematic esoterica du jour , and make better logical arguments and interpretations of experimental data than the mainstream.

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  5. Infinity is not a number, and you can't treat it as one in calculations, or like a measureable quantity. Infinity is basically a pure abstraction pertaining to be unending. When mathematicians start throwing it around, check your BS detector very carefully. As for Stephen Crothers, I enjoy his style, and his honesty and candor about what happens when you cross the line of heresy in the physics community...and don't look the other way while your peers are dividing by zero and claiming the get infinity as a byproduct, or claiming they can insert additional matter into the highly non-linear equations GR is made up of. This is also where I finally gave up on the entire BS concept of a physical singularity...gee, I have a zero sized object and I magically assign it mass with a few hand waves of jargon and...look, its magic!! Instant black hole! You will have to give Einstein a break on this one though, he did not think up the black hole nonsense nor did he really support it... I think that was Hilbert screwing about with Ric=0 in space-time nonsense, which makes no sense and describes nothing that remotely resembles our universe...unless you believe our universe contains no matter, exists eternally unchanging, and is asymptotically flat (which means no curved spaces or big bang allowed).
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    I was very interested in science as a child, and had tremendous respect for the cosmological and physics luminaries. Then I actually scratched the surface of what allowed such amazing things such as black holes, white holes, time travel, uncertainly dead/alive cats, multi-dimensions, and superstrings to function...and just about threw up. I have seen more rigor and better logical reasoning in B rated science fiction novels...which almost seemed highbrow compared to some of the actual things being said by many of the HEP luminaries. I also scratched Hawking off my Xmas list. Permanently.
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    I will now commit absolute blasphemy and mention an accused crackpot you should take a look at. Please bear in mind, anyone who ever made a contribution worth knowing about to science or math isn't correct about everything, they are just closer to the truth. Beloved Isaac Newton was a slob and a somewhat crazed alchemist (the proto science of chemistry) before he had a nervous breakdown and became the neat freak mathematician and thinker we attribute the theory of gravity to, Copernicus was closer to correct in his model of the universe, but still wrong, as everything does not orbit about the sun outside of our solar system... unless you believe the sun is sitting still and the universe is actually rotating about sol like a lopsided wheel.
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    My 'mad man' of choice is Miles Mathis. I do not agree with everything he says...which is perfectly fine, since no one telling the truth agrees with anyone else all the time, but my gods!!! The man can think, reason, analyze, synthesize, and look at things with a fresh perspective that does true credit to the idea of a creative Renaissance Man of antiquity. Don't bother reading what the mainstream experts say about Mathis (they most definitely don't like him), Just read his stuff first and draw your own conclusions about his ideas.

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    1. I did read his stuff and the obvious conclusion is this: Miles Mathis is a crank and crackpot. He claims that pi=4, for crying out loud.

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    2. The articles of Miles Mathis are full of errors, wildly mistaken premises, and wild goose chases which have their origin in his poor reading comprehension and carelessness.
      Her has not produced anything useful in more than a decade of typing on his toy website.
      Mathis is no different from any other crackpot.

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  6. Sorry, CFT, but Miles Mathis is nothing but a crank. What he is doing is not science, he is just bloviating on a personal cranksite which is chock full of years of errors and bungled thinking he is too much of a crackpot to acknowledge or correct.
    He is a sloppy, lazy, dishonest, halfway auto-didact sitting and typing out nonsense in a hovel in New Mexico amidst clutter and filth and mouse droppings and the odor of failure.
    He hasn't contributed anything at all to science.
    He is quite honestly just a worthless kook.

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  7. https://archive.org/details/historyoftheorie00whitrich

    http://www.amazon.com/History-Theories-Aether-Electricity-Vol/dp/B000GGX4LU

    https://www.aip.org/history/gap/PDF/michelson.pdf

    http://www.bartleby.com/173/

    https://archive.org/details/fourlecturesonre00stei

    http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Extras/Einstein_ether.html

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