Monday, February 15, 2016

Krauss tries to explain how Einstein was wrong

A reader points out that the NY Times has corrected itself, and admitted that Einstein was wrong about gravity waves. It is 1 of 4 errors in When Einstein Was Wrong:
Lawrence M. Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, walked us through four of Einstein’s notable blunders.

1. Quantum Entanglement
Einstein referred to this physical phenomenon, which suggests that objects separated by great distances can affect one another, as “spooky action at a distance.” He rejected the possibility, refusing to believe that objects could influence each other no matter how far apart they were.

“He didn’t think the spooky action at a distance would be verified, but it was,” Dr. Krauss said. “He thought that was somehow unphysical. He presented this as an example of why quantum mechanics is probably wrong, but in fact it’s right.” ...

[another physicist said] “Now we have confirmed that there is spooky action at distance.”
I am actually going to defend Einstein here. He was right that spooky action at a distance is unphysical.

The quantum mechanics experiments show that observing one electron can affect our best prediction for another electron. And they are consistent with observations making an instaneous effect to the wave function. But there is no proof that an action on one electron can have an immediate physical effect on a distant electron.

It is not that complicated.

People have their beliefs in reality or ontology of the wave function, parallel universes, ideal point particles, Bayesianism, and all sorts of other things. Depending on such beliefs, they may or may not believe in spookiness. But Krauss and the other physicist are dead wrong when they say that spooky action at a distance was confirmed. It has not. No Nobel prize has ever been given for it, and textbook quantum mechanics does not require it.

I look forward to the day when today's physicists are mocked for all their silly beliefs that were proved dead wrong. Spooky action at a distance. Many worlds interpretation. Supersymmetry. Unified field theory. Black hole firewalls. Proton decay. Magnetic monopoles. Quantum cryptography. Quantum computing. 10-dimensional strings. Black hole holographic universes. Boltzmann brains. Tegmark multiverses. Entropic gravity.

Krauss also has a NY Times article explaining LIGO:
Ultimately, by exploring processes near the event horizon, or by observing gravitational waves from the early universe, we may learn more about the beginning of the universe itself, or even the possible existence of other universes.
See also Michio Kaku in the WSJ:
This may also have philosophical implications. Right now the big-bang theory doesn’t tell us what banged, why it banged, and what caused it to bang. It only tells us that there was a bang. But if space-based gravity-wave detectors similar to LIGO’s detectors can measure the radiation emitted an instant after the big bang, then, using mathematics, one can run the equations backward to determine what set off the big bang in the first place, in effect answering the biggest question of all: What banged and why?

8 comments:

  1. Roger,
    I do believe LIGO did not detect gravity waves, for several reasons.

    First of all, The sensory device itself is on the Earth. Each arm is about 2.5 miles long. There is no way to isolate this apparatus from the Earth's vibrations, temperatures, and various radiations to the precision of the width of a proton. This is pure and utter ridiculous bullshit. I like the fact they keep bringing up the fact that their tunnels have a tube like chamber that contains a vacuum, with mirrors suspended from threads (to reduce vibration). So flipping what. Any physical connection will conduct some vibration, and there is a relative vacuum between the planet we are on and the sun we orbit and ...ooooooo, lookey lookey, we still are heated and irradiated by same said sun, so vacuums don't do much to isolate anything from surrounding radiation. I might also add, there is no such thing as a vibration dampener that can prevent a vibration anywhere near as small as the width of a proton, especially when a mirror suspended from threat like connections is involved. If anyone believes this boasted claim of such absolute isolation for the testing equipment I have a an entire continent I'd like to sell to you.

    Second, there is no mechanical or physical force in GR that can compress anything gravitationally. In GR there is Curved math, and that is the best it can do. Curved math can not actually do anything physical since physical forces are not conveyed by math, curved or otherwise. To use the ridiculous metaphor of a map, a curve of the road line on the map does not make a road curved. Reality must inform the model, or it is useless.

    Third, I do not believe any explanation has been given as to why they know they detected a 'black hole', much less two of them, or where these supposed black holes were located. Saying you got a 'chirp' sound out of your massaged data does not really prove anything, and comparing your manipulated data results with computer generated models is not even evidence.

    Fourth. BICEP claimed seven sigma certainty with their dust fiasco. Well, what that result from a calculation actually proved is that the people working on BICEP doing the calculations did not know how to do statistics very well, apparently, and that much of the surrounding scientific community wanted the results to be true so badly, they forgot to be properly skeptical. It also put a lot of egg on the establishments face, and so here we are once again hearing how certain the results are, no question about it. HA.

    I really don't care how many sigmas of certainty they claim. With such a shoddy track record as of late in HEP, I suspect the threat of having funding cut for future boondoggle science projects has more to do with this 'discovery' than actual evidence of space being compressed by distant black holes by the width of a proton.

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  2. I am assuming that they have not been tricked by an earthquake in South America. But yes, the details about the black hole collision seem a little fishy.

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  3. Roger,
    Also consider that the supposed black holes they detected are further away than the center of our own galaxy, in fact, are in another galaxy altogether. Considering how current theory likes to say there are black holes in the center of our own galaxy, don't you find it more than a bit odd to have the claims for a detection coming from over one billion light years away? IF there were black holes in the center of our own galaxy, I would find it far more likely we would detect the gravitational impact of something much closer by, as " gravitational force is inversely proportional to the square of the separation distance between the two interacting objects, more separation distance will result in weaker gravitational forces..."
    So we basically have something in another galaxy (too far away to actually see or detect except by this magic gravity detector) purportedly having a significant effect on the detector greater than the core of our own galaxy which according to the mainstream purportedly has all kind of black holes at the center.

    I am seeing very little questioning of these gravity waves LIGO supposedly found. So, where are all the skeptical scientists worth their salt? They should speak up.

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    1. "I am seeing very little questioning of these gravity waves LIGO supposedly found. So, where are all the skeptical scientists worth their salt? They should speak up." - institutional physicists have integrity of a jelly fish and they have zero civic courage, besides most of them is brainwashed with their own BS.

      Check this out about the blind injection:
      http://www.nature.com/news/has-giant-ligo-experiment-seen-gravitational-waves-1.18449
      The original blind-injection exercises took 18 months and 6 months respectively. The first one was discarded, but in the second case, the collaboration wrote a paper and held a vote to decide whether they would make an announcement. Only then did the blind-injection team ‘open the envelope’ and reveal that the events had been staged.

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  4. If the LIGO folks are correct, then these events should be happening ever few months or so. If so, we should soon see whether the new events fit this black hole collision theory. I think the skeptics are waiting to see if that happens.

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  5. "I look forward to the day when today's physicists are mocked for all their silly beliefs that were proved dead wrong."

    I would like to see SRT and GRT go down but I do not think I will live long enough to see it. It is really amazing how entrenched and how guarded these believes are. Recently I have tried to find by googling about variable speed of light in GRT that as we know accounts for results of Eddington and Shapiro experiments, at least if the results of the experiments are what they say they are. And it is very hard to find a text that would explicitly state that c is not constant in GRT. They talk around it and BS you with metrics and curvatures. I guess they are afraid that new adepts would suffer a fatal cognitive dissonance if they found out that their idol abandoned the 2nd postulate in GRT. It is worse than Stalinism in terms of the cult of personality and dogma.

    I begin to suspects that scientist (hard science) are the biggest sheeples there are. They are very easy to fool because they have far too strong belief in the integrity of science and they do not appreciate the sociology of science. They are totally uncritical about themselves.

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  6. My best argument against detecting gravitational wave (not against their possible existence!), is this :

    All over the universe these mergers produce gravitational waves, ok.
    So then all of these waves, randomly occurring on any given time and location, they have to interfere all the time while travelling across the universe.

    So they travelled over distances of billions of lightyears, interfering with each other.

    So how on earth (indeed on earth), would any such single merger signal reach our detectors in a distinct and clear way ? No way, no-way.

    And nly 4 people know if a given signal is a selffabricated fake ('to test the crew'), or not, as we've read in interviews from the operators.

    Draw your own conclusions.

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  7. The speed of light is only constant for a given gravitational potential. Further, Einstein himself claimed explicitly that light cannot bend around heavy bodies if it does not change speed at the location closer to the body.(Talking about the front end of a beam of light). That's responsible for half of the bending angle, and the other half comes from the spacially curved nature of the field, due to the curvature of the body.

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