A collider the size of a galaxy

NewScientist has an article on The limits of knowledge: Things we'll never understand. It mentions quantum mechanics, black holes, origin of life, consciousness, Goedel, cosmic horizon, etc. Also:

Proof of string theory faces other, even bigger obstacles. Even with the extra dimensions in place, there remains the problem of getting to the energies at which string theory could be tested. Probing things on such small scales requires working at extremely high energies - to smash them into ever-smaller pieces takes ever more energy. That is why particle accelerators need to get more powerful to delve deeper into the nature of matter. "To test string theory you'd need a collider the size of a galaxy," Stannard says. The chances of building such a machine are slim.

Slim? It is worse than that. String theory does not make any testable hypotheses even if we had a galaxy-sized collider.

CCD chip inventor dies

The NY Times reports:

Willard S. Boyle, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for helping to develop a device that is at the heart of virtually every camcorder, digital camera and telescope in use, died on Saturday in Truro, Nova Scotia. He was 86. ...

But nothing eclipsed his invention — in only an hour — of the charge-coupled device, or CCD, with George E. Smith, his colleague at Bell Laboratories.

The device, smaller than a dime, has become ubiquitous. It is the eye behind every picture on the Internet, every digital and video camera, every computer scanner, copier machine and high-definition television. ...

It works by taking advantage of what is called the photoelectric effect, which was explained by Einstein and brought him the Nobel in 1921. The photoelectric effect is the name given to the observation that when light is shined onto a piece of metal, a small current flows through the metal.

Not really. Boyle and Smith just invented a CCD memory chip, and had nothing to do with imaging. Furthermore the image sensor of today can be either CCD or CMOS, where CMOS is the technology used for microprocessors and most other chips.

Einstein did get the 1921 prize (in 1922), and the citation said the photoelectric effect and not relativity. At that time, he was famous for relativity, but many physicists felt that he did not deserve a prize for that. The prize appeared to be some sort of political compromise. The photoelectric effect had really been explained by Planck and Lenard, who got Nobel prizes for it in 1918 and 1905.

Einstein supposed showed that light must be quantized into photons to explain the photoelectric effect. A 1968 paper by Lamb and Scully showed that photons are not needed at all for this explanation, altho there is some controversy about this and it is criticized here. Lenard's experiment only showed that the absorption of light by the metal is quantized, but that could be a property of the metal, not the light.

Satellite detects aether drag

Francis Everitt, the leader of the Gravity Probe B, described below, was interviewed on Science Friday. He talks about how it took years to model the errors that ruined the precision of the gyroscopes, and that they only found a way to confirm relativity after subtracting out those modeled errors.

He also makes an analogy to a ball submerged in honey, and to the discredited Aether drag hypothesis. Supposedly relativity eliminated the aether, but as he acknowledges, that is not really true. The motion of the Earth has a very slight effect in dragging the structure of spacetime along with it. In a sense, the Gravity Probe B is the modern aether drag experiment.

Computers and Many Worlds

I commented on this New Yorker article:

Deutsch believes that if a quantum computer were built it would constitute near-irrefutable evidence of what is known as the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. A number of respected thinkers in physics besides Deutsch support the Many Worlds Interpretation, though they are a minority, and primarily educated in England, where the intense interest in quantum computing has at times been termed the Oxford flu. But the infection of Deutsch’s thinking has mutated and gone pandemic. Other scientists, although generally indifferent to the truth or falsehood of Many Worlds as a description of the universe, are now working to build these dreamed-up quantum computing machines.

They are indifferent to the concept because it is a meaningless fantasy.

Computer scientist Scott Aaronson writes:

However, reading this article also depressed me, as it dawned on me that the entire thing could have been written fifteen years ago, with only minor changes to the parts about experiment and zero change to the theoretical parts.  I thought: “has there really been that little progress in quantum computing theory the past decade and a half —- at least progress that a New Yorker reader would care about?” ... A good analogy would be an article about the Web, published today, that described the strange and exciting new world of Netscape, HotBot, and AltaVista.

There may never be any such progress. The whole subject has been greatly oversold.

Einstein was Jewish

Wikipedia is having a debate on whether the Albert Einstein page should prominently identify him as Jewish. An editor says that his ethnicity is not notable.

I think that Einstein's Jewishness is a significant part of his notability. His parents were Jewish. He strongly identified with being a Jew throughout his adult life. He is mainly famous for being a physicist, but he is also frequently quoted for his opinions on God, religion, and peace. He was an active Zionist and a Nazi refugee. He is especially popular among Jews. As another editor says:

He described his 1923 visit to Palestine, where he was mobbed by Jewish throngs as "the greatest day of my life". He was on the first Board of Governors of Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

He left his assets to Hebrew U. People are fascinated with the details of Einstein's life, and his Jewishness is one of the first things they learn. Saying he was Jewish is as important as saying that he was German-born.

The strongest counter-argument is that the Martin Luther King, Jr. page does not say that he was black. I think that is a little strange. My guess is that King's fans are trying to make some sort of point by ignoring the color of his skin, since King was famous for opposing racial discrimination. But I am not sure what the point would be to ignoring Einstein's Jewishness.

Kuhnian nature of dark matter and energy

This comment was just posted on Wikipedia:

Role of Dark Matter/Energy in the Kuhnian development of physics

My strong sense is that dark matter/energy are a reification of fundamental problems in modern physics, i.e. gravity + the Standard Model. As I've put on Higgs Boson and it's never been challenged, dark matter/energy is not (except as a metonym for the observed discrepancy between that theory and observation) a part of any accepted (or FTM, SFAIK proposed) theory of physics, although there are various conjectures and speculations which fall short of same. This aspect doesn't seem to be fully enough developed in the article as it stands now nor do I see commentary in the talk archives about same but may have missed something. Lycurgus (talk) 16:08, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

This is nonsense, of course. I will be interested to see if the point makes it into the main article.

Dark matter is not some Kuhnian untestable idea. There is an active search for a dark matter particle, and a hot dispute over whether a 7-8 GeV dark matter particle has already been discovered.

Frame dragging confirmed

Today's science news is that Einstein was right:

Four superconducting ping-pong balls floating in space have just confirmed two key predictions of Einstein’s general relativity, physicists announced in a press conference May 4.

“We have completed this landmark experiment testing Einstein’s universe, and Einstein survives,” said physicist Francis Everitt of Stanford University, the principal investigator on NASA’s Gravity Probe B mission.

The probe, which launched in 2004, was designed to test the effect Earth’s gravity has on the space-time around it. According to Einstein, the Earth warps its local space-time like a bowling ball sitting on a trampoline, a phenomenon called the geodetic effect. This effect means that a circle of fabric with the Earth’s circumference, about 24,900 miles, would be pulled into a shallow cone with a circumference 1.1 inches shorter.

The Earth also swirls the nearby space-time around with it as it rotates, like water spiraling around a drain, in an effect called frame-dragging.

An amazing amount of work went into this experiment. There was a lot of serious doubt as to whether it would produce any measurable results. Apparently there is still some dispute about how precisely the theory has been confirmed. The satellite stopped functioning in 2005, and NASA shut the team down in 2008. So how is it that they suddenly have some results, in 2011? It sounds like a desperately attempt to justify their funding by reinterpreting some old data.

Einstein did not have much to do with this. He did not write any papers on frame-dragging, as far as I know. He did write a lot of papers on relativity, and frame-dragging uses relativity, but not the relativity that he contributed.

Gravity Probe B is one of the longest-running NASA projects ever. It started in 1963, ...

Physicist Clifford Will of Washington University in St. Louis, head of the external review board for Gravity Probe B, called the research team’s efforts “heroic” and stressed the importance of testing fundamental theories of nature, not just taking them for granted.

“It is popular lore that Einstein was right, but no such book is ever completely closed in science,” he said. “While the result in this case does support Einstein, it didn’t have
to.”

Will is a big Einstein idolizer.

Dennis Overbye at the NY Times explains:

Einstein’s theory relates gravity to the sagging of cosmic geometry under the influence of matter and energy, the way a sleeper makes a mattress sag. One consequence is that a massive spinning object like Earth should spin up the empty space around it, the way twirling the straw in a Frappuccino sets the drink and the whole Venti-size cup spinning around with it, an effect called frame dragging. Astronomers think this effect, although minuscule for Earth, could play a role in the black hole dynamos that power quasars.

Overbye is another Einstein idolizer. He wrote a whole biography of Einstein.