Eye in London
(Detainment has ended, though too late for the party at Imperial College. Though this week's events were disappointing, we must keep a stiff upper lip. Yesterday 4 times as many people read my talk online than would have seen it in Blackett Hall. My experience was a nuisance, but not that bad. It was nothing like the 3600 nights Galileo spent under house arrest, or the treatment given to Aung Suu Kyi and political prisoners worldwide. I am still more concerned about Faye Turney and the British servicemembers held in Iran.)
Here are Slides 2-3, with the accompanying text:
We can illustrate Special Relativity if we keep time t vertical and compress dimensions x, y, and zed into this line. An interval outside this cone is spacelike —an event here cannot affect an event there. An interval inside the light cone is timelike, literally a matter of time. Space and Time are related by factor c, called the speed of light. From this principle can be derived the useful equations of the Lorentz transformation.
Just as this is just one capsule of the London Eye, these local conditions are part of the larger Universe of General Relativity. Again x, y and zed are compressed into the screen. There is no centre in space; every bit resembles every other bit. There is a centre in time, what we call a “Big Bang”. Near that initial singularity, mass M of the Universe was occupied a small volume. Though separated from the Big Bang by 13 thousand million years, we are within its cone and that huge mass influences even the propagation of light.
Space/Time can be Unified by a simple principle. Scale R of the Universe is distance from that origin, age t multiplied by c. That is why as t increases, Space expands. It can’t expand at a constant rate, for mass and gravity slow it down. We’ll skip some math here. GM=tc^3. (Gravitational constant, Mass of Universe, 1 dimension of Time and 3 of Space.) Both sides are constant. When t was tiny c was enormous and the Universe expanded like a Bang. As t increased that expansion slowed due to gravitation and continues asymptotically to this day. This equation made the heretical prediction that c slows at a rate too tiny to detect, until now. Today we can compare prediction with experiment.
First we can solve for c and R. This is the metric of Einstein-de Sitter expansion, tracitionally the cosmologists' favourite model. Any cosmology should solve the Einstein-Friedmann equations. These simple expressions form an exact solution of k = 0 and density (Omega = 1) . This so-called critical density of mass is in fact a stable density. Below this density, quantum mechanics predicts that matter will form via pair production.
(More coming soon.)
posted by L. Riofrio at 7:22 AM
25 Comments:
Hello Louise,
I agree with you that these very annoying events should be prevented from affecting your mood negatively. I was really, really sorry to be unable to meet you and listen to your talk. I agree with you that you did get exposure nonetheless, but the exposure your talk deserved was at the conference, amidst the people who hold a different opinion on how the Universe works.
Cheers,
T.
Thanks, Louise. I am very relieved to see that you are out and about again. I might manage to give a seminar about cosmology next week.
Thanks to you both. Actually I think this conference would have contained people who questioned the Concorde cosmology and might listen to an alternative. I hesitate to use the term "standard model," because the Concorde model is not nearly as well-founded as your particle physics.
Kea, this week made me look forward to Sydney even more. Australia and the Pacific are much more welcoming places..
I think you're taking this wonderfully -- better than I am. I'm still a little pissed.
Louise,
over on Tommaso's blog where your talk was being discussed by commenters including Guess Who,
I posted a comment in which I stated, among other things, some points about your model that bother me. I hope that it is OK for me to repeat that here on your blog so that you might tell me how you see those points.
Also,
I stated concern about your detention near Gatwick.
Have you found out why you were detained, and in particular whether it might have been due to malicious action by those who have been attacking you personally ?
You said that your "... experience ... was nothing like the 3600 nights Galileo spent under house arrest ...".
I disagree.
You were detained by official police and prevented from expressing your ideas.
Whether it was 3 nights or 3600 nights, it was still a detention by official police to prevent expression of ideas.
The use of police detention is a quantum leap beyond arXiv blacklisting,
and it is not so far from a knock at your door and confiscation of your computers,
so I think that it is important to find out for sure exactly why you were detained, and exactly who was involved in any way in your detention.
Anyhow,
the substance of my comment over on Tommaso's blog was like the following:
Louise has posted her “Talk submitted for March 29Åç on her blog, saying in part:
“… Scale R of the Universe is distance from that origin, age t multiplied by c. That is why as t increases, Space expands. It can’t expand at a constant rate, for mass and gravity slow it down. … When t was tiny c was enormous and the Universe expanded like a Bang.
…
Since the evidence … to detect alpha changing … is still non-conclusive, we can stipulate that product h c is indeed constant …
…
According to astrophysics, life should not have evolved here at all because at Earth’s formation the Sun was only about 70% as bright. Our average temperature would have been 10° below zero centigrade, frozen solid. … This is called the “Faint Young Sun” paradox.
Here’s a hot young solution. The Sun also turns fuel to energy according to E=mc^2. Adjusting for change in c at various epochs, solar luminosity becomes a nearly level line. …”.
Guess Who said:
“… if you vary c … you do not only affect the expansion history; you affect just about all natural phenomena …”.
In line with Guess Who’s comment, consider:
If Louise varies c and keeps h c constant, then h must vary as 1/c
and
we have E = m c^2 (energy in terms of mass as used by Louise),
and also E = h c / lambda (energy in terms of wavelength lambda),
and also E = h nu (energy in terms of frequency nu).
My simple mind has a hard time figuring out how to reconcile those three formulae for E :
In terms of mass (and Louise’s solar energy production), E varies as c^2 .
In terms of wavelength (recalling that Louise uses h c constant) E is constant .
In terms of frequency, E varies as h and therefore (with h c constant) as 1 / c .
I am not saying that it is impossible to construct a consistent physics model with those characteristic,
but
I am saying that my simple mind is unhappy with such characteristics,
Even though I am not happy with the physics of her model,
I still advocate Louise's right to work on it and to present it to conferences and to post it on arXiv.
If it were to turn out that some of her personal enemies had a role in getting her detained around Gatwick, then I think that they should suffer severe consequences for that role.
Tony Smith
Louise, it appears that I have achieved retirement, so I will have more time on my hands than usual.
And that means that, if I keep my expenses reasonable, I will have time to go to the gravitation thingy in Australia.
I can hardly wait to meet you and Kea in person. As far as avoiding detention, well, uh, maybe this time you can leave three days early. I hope that they fed you better than Galileo.
Meanwhile, in other news, sometimes numerology is just numerology. The Plank mass in GeV is 1.221 x 10^19 = 3.00032^40 GeV. Now ain't that a coincidence!
Dear Louise,
I looked at
GM= tc^3
and realized that TGD could provide an interpretation for this kind of equation or something analogous to it formulated in terms of mass density in case of Robertson-Walker cosmology and in terms of induced metric of space-time sheet in the general case.
The basic observation is that naximal signal velocity at space-time surface slows down in the sense that the path between points A and B along 4-surface is longer along the space-time sheeet than along lightlike geodesic of imbedding space H=M^4xCP_2. This because space-time surface is curved and warped and it takes longer time to move along space-time surface from point A to B than in H. Thus topologically condensed photons travel slower than free ones.
Using proper time coordinate a of future lightcone as a Lorenz invariant time coordinate for the space-time surface one obtains a Lorentz invariant formulation of this notion. From the expession of the induced line element obtained by projecting the line element
ds^2= h_{kl}d^kdh^l
of the imbedding space to spacetime surface with coordinates (a,x^i) using h^k = h^k(a,x^i) one has
ds^2= g_{aa}c^2da^2+...
and one can identify reduced light velocity as
c1= sqrt(g_{aa})c .
The stronger the curvature of space-time sheet is, the larger the reduction of the maximal signal velocty in this sense is. For Robertson- Walker cosmology one can relate g_{aa) to the density of gravitational mass and one obtains the analog of your equation relating mass density and c1. I would however guess that c1c^2 rather than c1^3 appears in it since the density of gravitational mass is proportional to sqrt(g_aa).
One prediction is each space-time sheet has its own Hubble constant. This might relate to the long debate about value of Hubble constant.
What is interesting is that it is also possible to have a reduction of light velocity and time dilation also in absence of gravitational field. One can consider warped imbeddings of M^4 for which one CP_2 coordinate, call it s, depends on linear M^4 time t in arbitrary manner. The simplest situation corresponds to s= omega*t. The resulting induced metric is manifestly flat but the time component is given by
g_tt= (1-R^2omega^2)c^2
so that light velocity is reduced
to
c1= sqrt(1-R^2omega^2)c
There is a warping induced time dilation which is observable by a many-sheeted physicist having all the equipment of many-sheeted laboratory. The time dilation by warping might relate to the claim that electrons in graphene behave as massless particles but with reduced light velocity about 10^(-3)c (if I remember correctly).
Cheers,
Matti
Carl, it is quite annoying but we can't get distracted. In Planck units "the equation" is just M/M_P = t/t_P, or just M = t! That must be the simplest equation ever, and undiscovered too. Personally I prefer not to use Planck units because they can be misleading.
Tony, there was no satisfying explanation, though I have better things to do than seek conspiracies. It is enough to know that opposition is real and not a writer's delusion.
Changing c does affect a lot of natural phenomena, but for the better. It explains Type Ia supernovae, the "Faint Young Sun," ultra-high energy cosmic rays, early supermassive Black Holes, and even Time's arrows. As for photon energy, E + U = 0 applies to photons too. It is a lot for anyone to wrap around.
Matti, that is a fascinating comment that will take time to digest. There may indeed by a way to link this with what you describe. At this rate we will solve all these details before the world even notices.
well you might not want to pursue conspiracy theories but this reeks
Louise, in trying to understand your varying c, I have some questions:
A flat spacetime would be everywhere described by Minkowski coordinates in which c is everywhere the same, just the ratio between the time dimension scale and space dimension scale.
In general relativity, spacetime is curved (curvature related to energy/mass density) and there is no global Minkowski coordinate system that covers the entire spacetime with a single c,
however,
locally at every point of spacetime there is a locally valid (like a tangent spacetime) Minkowski coordinate system.
What is the difference, if any, between your c that varies over the curved spacetime, say being different at point A and at point B,
and
the difference between the local Minkowski coordinates at point A and at point B ?
Can your varying c be viewed as an alternative formulation of general relativistic curvature of spacetime ?
If so,
should you distinguish between the spacetime curvature use of c (for which c should be variable)
and
the special relativistic use of c (for which c should be constant) ?
Tony Smith
PS - I agree with mog that the circumstance of your detention "reeks".
If you do not investigate and complain and hold the responsible parties accountable,
then they will feel that they are free to treat others similarly, and maybe even push the limits of their actions to new depths,
so I hope that you will change your mind and decide to not drop the matter.
However, it is your life and your decision, and you should do what you feel is right, and not necessarily what I (or anyone else) recommend.
Tony, I will try to answer your questions:
1) What is the difference, if any, between your c that varies over the curved spacetime, say being different at point A and at point B,
and the difference between the local Minkowski coordinates at point A and at point B ?
This c doesn't vary over Space, just for different time t coordinates.
2) Can your varying c be viewed as an alternative formulation of general relativistic curvature of spacetime ?
Yes, it conforms to GR as much as possible.
3) If so, should you distinguish between the spacetime curvature use of c (for which c should be variable) and the special relativistic use of c (for which c should be constant) ?
No need to distinguish between them. This is a lot to swallow, so I don't expect to change any minds right away. I appreciate your thoughtful questions.
Hi Louise,
I just have a couple of questions on the last two paragraphs for slide 3.
In the first, you say
"Scale R of the Universe is distance from that origin, age t multiplied by c"
What's the physical significance of R in your model? Perhaps that's a stupid question because you say it's 'Scale of the Universe', I'm trying to understand whether R is the particle horizon or some other spatial scale that's important (It doesn't seem to be the particle horizon because you have a varying c).
In the second paragraph you say
"This so-called critical density of mass is in fact a stable density. Below this density quantum mechanics predicts that matter will form via pair production"
What's your model for matter creation? You say pair production, but I'm not aware of the (cosmological) critical density determining the threshold for this process (e.g. photon->e-e+). IIRC, the critical density also varies with time?
Thanks for posting the slides though, I'm sure the rest will be interesting!
Cheers,
Mendo.
Radius R has little significance for you or me, unless you have survived since the Big Bang. It is a characteristic scale for the overall geometry. If the Universe is spherical, it would have volume of $2 /pi^2 R^3$. Relating to your second question, density of baryons is in fact highly dependent on geometry.
The answer to the second question is in a paper titled "Formation of Large Structures in Space/Time" which for some reason arxiv has not published. You may refer to the Albrecht-Maguiejo paper for more thoughts on matter creation.
"A flat spacetime would be everywhere described by Minkowski coordinates in which c is everywhere the same, just the ratio between the time dimension scale and space dimension scale.
"In general relativity, spacetime is curved (curvature related to energy/mass density) and there is no global Minkowski coordinate system that covers the entire spacetime with a single c,
however,
locally at every point of spacetime there is a locally valid (like a tangent spacetime) Minkowski coordinate system.
"What is the difference, if any, between your c that varies over the curved spacetime, say being different at point A and at point B,
and
the difference between the local Minkowski coordinates at point A and at point B ?
"Can your varying c be viewed as an alternative formulation of general relativistic curvature of spacetime ?
"If so,
should you distinguish between the spacetime curvature use of c (for which c should be variable)
and
the special relativistic use of c (for which c should be constant) ?
"Tony Smith"
Tony, if I can comment, Einstein writes:
‘... [special relativity contains] the law of the constancy of the velocity of light. But ... the general theory of relativity cannot retain this law. On the contrary, we arrived at the result according to this latter theory, the velocity of light must always depend on the coordinates when a gravitational field is present.’ - Albert Einstein, Relativity, The Special and General Theory, Henry Holt and Co., 1920, p111.
‘... the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo must be modified, since we easily recognise that the path of a ray of light ... must in general be curvilinear...’ - Albert Einstein, The Principle of Relativity, Dover, 1923, p114.
‘The special theory of relativity ... does not extend to non-uniform motion ... The laws of physics must be of such a nature that they apply to systems of reference in any kind of motion. Along this road we arrive at an extension of the postulate of relativity... The general laws of nature are to be expressed by equations which hold good for all systems of co-ordinates, that is, are co-variant with respect to any substitutions whatever (generally co-variant). ...’ – Albert Einstein, ‘The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity’, Annalen der Physik, v49, 1916.
General covariance is the background independence. The background is determined by the metric, which is a solution to general relativity for particular conditions. Since with different (plausible) assumptions you get different metrics as solutions, Louise's varying c idea is just an assumption to feed into general relativity.
My understanding of Louise's equation GM=tc^3 is that it is a varying-constant theory, not a replacement to the basic framework general relativity, the tensor formulation of spacetime curvature and it's cause by the energy-stress tensor.
There are questions with trying to feed Louise's equation for c into general relativity, at least from my point of view. Taking G_uv - (1/2)Rg_uv = 8*Pi*(G/c^2)T_uv, the inclusion c is just a units conversion factor from E=mc^2, to convert energy units included in T_uv into mass units.
Louise's GM=tc^3 rearranges to give c = (GM/t)^{1/3},
but the meaning of c here needs some clarification. As far as I can understand the situation, from trying various ways that can derive GM=tc^3, one way to understand c is as is a measure of the expansion rate of the universe.
According to some, the universe should be slowing down due to gravity. If this is true, then Louise's solution c = (GM/t)^{1/3} may be really a description of the expansion rate of the universe, rather than the general speed of light.
In ther words, maybe c, defined as the rate of expansion of the universe, is slowing due to gravity. However, from observational data, the universe seems to show no signs of slowing, although you might expect slowing from gravitational effects if the general relativity:
(1) contains a complete description of long-range gravitation (which I don't think it is, because I think "gravitons" would be redshifted and thus degraded in energy when exchanged between distant, rapidly receding masses, causing a weakened gravity constant G in that situation), and
(2) contains Lambda = 0 (no cosmological constant, no dark energy).
So I might be wrong, but I don't see how c can vary either theoretically, or on the basis of gravitational effects on the expanding universe.
Louise can do a lot with GM=tc^3. However, I think it would pay off to examine the possibility that that M and c are constant, and that G increases linearly with t. It's a good default and it is easy to put varying G into general relativity: you just plug it in. Metrics come out the same, you just scale G in direct proportion to the age of the universe. This particular variation of G is predicted by a simple mechanism that predicts G fairly accurately. In addition, it means that gravitation is weaker early in the universe, so the gravitational seeding of galaxies seen in the CBR was smaller, explaining that without inflation.
I think the mechanism fits into Lunsford's 6-d unification of gravitation of electrodynamics, which has 3 spatial and 3 time dimensions of concern to gravity.
The overall expansion of the universe is described by the 3 orthagonal time dimensions. The expansion of the universe occurs in time, so the increasing Hubble recession speeds with "distance" are really a variation of speed with time, or acceleration. This gives an outward force to the big bang we observe in spherical symmetry around us. From Newton's 3rd law, you get an equal inward force, which - from the possibilities implied by quantum field theory - may be the force of gauge boson radiation that causes the radial contractions of matter (curvature and gravity).
The curvature locally (caused either by gravity or acceleration), is a radial contraction in one dimension but not in others. This physically causes the non-Euclidean geometry, where you can say that spacetime is curved.
The pressure of exchange radiation (or whatever caused curvature) results in contraction of gravitational radius by the small amount (1/3)MG/c^2. Because only the radius is contracted (not a transverse direction, like circuference), you need curvature to avoid a variable value of Pi.
The mainstream conception of curvature is more arcane. But there's no reason why the entirity of general relativity can't come about simply, from a physical mechanism (exchange radiation).
Because Lunsford shows that gravitation and electromagnetic force can be unified this way, you'd expect any variation in G to be mirrored by a change in the electromagnetic coupling constant. Hence, increasing gravitation-caused pressure in stars due to rising G doesn't vary fusion rates, because Coulomb's law (which causes repulsion of protons) also rises, so there's an increased electromagnetic repulsion to offset the increased gravitation, and keep fusion rates from massive changes inside stars. (This overcome's Teller's objection to Dirac's changing G hypothesis, although Dirac's theory said G ~ 1/t, instead of G ~ t, which Louise's theory and my argument apply to, if a variation of c is not occurring.)
"PS - I agree with mog that the circumstance of your detention "reeks".
If you do not investigate and complain and hold the responsible parties accountable,
then they will feel that they are free to treat others similarly, and maybe even push the limits of their actions to new depths,
so I hope that you will change your mind and decide to not drop the matter.
However, it is your life and your decision, and you should do what you feel is right, and not necessarily what I (or anyone else) recommend." - Tony Smith
Tony, it's like Hooke's law, where the force increases with the extension when you pull a rubber band: the effect you get is proportional to the pressure or force you exert.
The effort of the mainstream to censor ideas that try to steal into the mainstream's limelight (in any subject including engineering, not just science) is proportional to the size of the "problem" the new idea causes to the mainstream:
If the innovation is trivial and is not pushed, then there will be little resistance (the innovation won't get anywhere in any case).
If the innovation is allegedly major and is strongly promoted, then there will be greater resistance. Because any resistance to innovation would obviously seem to make the bigots seem like nutcases, they dress the censorship in terms of personal abuse. Ignoring the actual facts, they will make ad hominem attacks on the people involved in the innovation. For example, stereotyping the innovators as being members of groups whose ideas are "always" a waste of time.
This attack, translated into plain English, is saying that they are too lazy to try to analyze and check the new ideas. That this is a real problem can be seen when the mainstream itself is under attack.
Presumably the elastic limit is very high. To actually defeat the mainstream successfully would be extremely difficult. One example of the mainstream specialists of a subject getting into trouble and retreating into ambiguity and groupthink is radiation effects (health physics).
I think that nuclear energy is unfairly under attack because radiation effects analysis was fouled up in 1957 by Professor E. B. Lewis. By the time the protein P53 repair mechanism for DNA breaks was discovered and the Hiroshima-Nagasaki effects of radiation were accurately known, the nuclear and health physics industries had been hyping inaccurate radiation effects models which ignored non-linear effects (like saturation of the normal P53 repair mechanism of DNA) and the effects of dose rate for twenty years.
The entire industry had become indoctrinated in the philosophy of 1957, and there was no going back. Some 99% of health physicists are employed by the nuclear or radiation industry at reactors or in medicine/research, so all these people have a vested interest in not rocking their own boat. The only outsiders around seem to politically motivated in one direction only (anti-nuclear), so there's a standoff. Everyone who enters the subject of health physics gets caught in the same trap, and so there is no mechanism in place to allow for any shift of consensus. It's similar to modern physics today. Dr Witten hasn't taken back his claim,
‘String theory has the remarkable property of predicting gravity.’ - Dr Edward Witten, M-theory originator, Physics Today, April 1996.
Instead, he has issued a strategy to nature which means ignoring specific criticisms,
‘The critics feel passionately that they are right, and that their viewpoints have been unfairly neglected by the establishment. ... They bring into the public arena technical claims that few can properly evaluate. ... Responding to this kind of criticism can be very difficult. It is hard to answer unfair charges of élitism without sounding élitist to non-experts. A direct response may just add fuel to controversies.’ - Dr Edward Witten, M-theory originator, Nature, Vol 444, 16 November 2006.
I feel, with all due respect for Dr Witten as a mathematician, that he has led some physicists into a dead end with his hype that string theory predicts gravity, when of course it doesn't make a scientific prediction at all (no numbers = no science).
I think Dr Woit and Dr Smolin will never push Dr Witten into retraction; Dr Witten has a right to write what he wants, and if he is wrong/not-even-wrong, then so be it.
One thing that makes me particularly uneasy is Dr Smolin's remarks in footnotes to "The Trouble with Physics". Example: on page 370 of the U.S. edition, footnote 9 reads:
"I have here to again emphasize that I am talking only about people with good training all the way through to a PhD. This is not a discussion about quacks or people who misunderstand what science is."
Is Dr Smolin suggesting, here, that anyone who doesn't have a PhD is a quack or misunderstands what science is about? If so:
"Einstein took his PhD at Zurich and in 1909 became a lecturer in theoretical physics at the university. He also taught at Prague (1911-12) before Max Planck invited him to become director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute in Berlin in 1914."
- http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAeinstein.htm
Hence, Planck published Einstein's papers in 1905, four years before Einstein had a PhD. Is Dr Smolin saying that Einstein was a quack who didn't understand what science is about in 1905? Certainly some loud mainstream aether theorists in 1905 would have thought (and did think!) Einstein a quack.
I don't think Dr Smolin is making a point about Einstein being a quack because he didn't have a PhD in 1905.
I hope he isn't. It's difficult or very expensive to do a PhD if you can't get sponsorship, and if your interests lie in some subjects which are non-mainstream, that will be the case.
In addition, Einstein didn't use advanced mathematics in 1905, as Professor Morris Klein explains:
‘Up to this time [1911] Einstein had used only the simplest mathematical tools and had even been suspicious of the need for "higher mathematics", which he thought was often introduced to dumbfound the reader. However, to make progress on his problem he discussed it in Prague with a colleague, the mathematician Georg Pick, who called his attention to the mathematical theory of Ricci and Levi-Civita. In Zurich Einstein found a friend, Marcel Grossmann (1878-1936), who helped him learn the theory; and with this as a basis, he succeeded in formulating the general theory of relativity.’
- M. Kline, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times, Oxford University Press, 1990, vol. 3, p. 1131.
I think Einstein's approach was very successful here, not the quack. I worry what will happen when some Einstein (1905 version, no PhD) sends Smolin a paper, and because of Smolin's statement that apparently all none-PhD physicists are ignorant quacks, gets ignored.
Maybe I'm misreading Smolin's statement:
"I have here to again emphasize that I am talking only about people with good training all the way through to a PhD. This is not a discussion about quacks or people who misunderstand what science is."
If I'm not misreading it, then Smolin's book is a defence of the freedom of PhD's to do what they want. There's a serious problem with this.
If Smolin was defending science no matter who it comes from, not just one subset of people with costly elite education, I'd be a lot happier. Otherwise, goodbye to all future Faraday's, Einstein's, etc.
What really is annoying is that the mainstream censors out all alternatives, and then is disingenious enough to claim that the evidence of their having censored out alternatives, is evidence that alternatives don't exist.
It's a bit like a Monty Python sketch. The mainstream shoots all rivals, then claims that no rivals exist.
Then it claims it must be a success because it is the only idea left around! (It really reminds me of the tactics of a group of thugs running Germany from 1933-45: first get delusions that others are a threat which need to be exterminated, then exterminate them for the sake of "purity", all the while hyping a false genetic science as being the godforsaken truth.)
Correction to my comment above: Einstein's PhD thesis was accepted in July 1905. This was AFTER four of his five revolutionary papers of 1905:
1. March 17: "On a heuristic point of view concerning the production and transformation of light."
2. April 30: "A new determination of molecular dimensions." (PhD dissertation published before being accepted by University of Zurich accepted in July.)
3. May 11: "On the motion of small particles suspended in a stationary liquid."
4. June 30: "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies." (1st paper on special relativity.)
So without having a PhD, Einstein wrote and had published by Planck 4 out of 5 of his major papers of 1905. The fifth, published after he had a PhD, contains a rather weak derivation of E=mc^2 (already known from electromagnetic theory, since the mass increase is obtained in Lorentz' theory from the fact that the mass of a charge depends on its radius, so length contraction is accompanied by an increase in mass) which was improved by Planck in 1910:
5. September 27: "Does an object's inertia depend on its energy content?" (E = mc^2 paper.)
Louise, thanks very much for your patience in trying to explain to me your idea.
nige, thanks also for your comment giving many details.
If it is OK, I will try to ask more questions.
If you feel my comments are not useful, please feel free to delete them.
Louise, you say that your "... c doesn't vary over Space, just for different time t coordinates ..."
and
nige says "... Louise's solution c = (GM/t)^(1/3) may be really a description of the expansion rate of the universe ...
the mechanism fits into Lunsford's 6-d unification of gravitation of electrodynamics,
which has 3 spatial and 3 time dimensions of concern to gravity.
The overall expansion of the universe is described by the 3 orthogonal time dimensions ...".
Since Danny Ross Lunsford's model based on Spin(3,3) and
the gravity sector of my model based on Spin(2,4) are versions of the Conformal Group that acts non-linearly on 4-dim Minkowski spacetime,
I wonder what connection might exist between Louise's variable c and conformal transformations.
In particular,
the Conformal Group is 15-dimensional, roughly corresponding to the 10 dimensions of the Poincare Group
plus 4 Special Conformal dimensions plus a 1-dimensional Dilation.
The 1-dimensional Dilation seems that it might correspond to Louise's variable c,
because the variable c seems to describe scale changes in the spatial coordinates.
If so, maybe the variable c is used in the same way that Laurent Nottale uses the Dilation in his Scale Relativity and Fractal Space-Time.
You can read about his work in such papers as astro-ph/0310036 and hep-th/0307093 and hep-th/0112213 and other papers on arXiv and on the web.
The models that Danny Ross Lunsford and I work on use not only the Dilation but also the 4 Special Conformal dimensions,
so although I find Nottale's work interesting, I think that he does not go as far as I would like in some respects.
Tony Smith
PS - about the Faint Young Sun:
An article in 2001 by Govert Schilling on www.govertschilling.nl indicates that there may be no Faint Young Sun problem.
Schilling said:
"... Gunther Wuchterl of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching ...[around 2001 produced]... results [that] could change the way scientists think about other young stars and Earth's early climate.
At an age of 1 million years (1/4600th of its current age), Wuchterl says, the sun was still a protostar -- a ball of gas in which the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium was just about to start. It's no surprise that this protostar shone more brightly than today's sun, because its contracting gases temporarily released more energy than fusion does now. But whereas current evolutionary models peg its luminosity at just twice the present value, the new simulations estimate that the young sun was four times as bright as it is now and that its surface was 500 degrees hotter.
Using a special-purpose supercomputer called GRAPE ... Wuchterl and his colleague Ralf Klessen simulated the entire star-forming process, starting with a fragmenting interstellar molecular cloud and continuing through the formation of protostellar "embryos" and the accretion of gas onto the young protostar. ...
The results, which have been accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters, ... may be that the faint young sun wasn't so faint after all. ...".
The paper by Wuchterl and Klessen is at astro-ph/0109051 and was published in Astrophys.J. 560 (2001) L185-L188
Their paper was used approvingly in the recent review at astro-ph/0703724 entitled "Structure and Evolution of Low-Mass Stars: An Overview and Some Open Problems" by M. Catelan.
Tony, I am very interested in your comments about the arxiv. Under what authority is it owned by Cornell? Who funds it? Since arxiv is a forum for most US physics research, should it be controlled by anti-Americans and communists?
A quick search could find astro-ph/0109051 but no 0703724. (I'm not going to use that as an excuse to dismiss the author.) The first paper only covers the Sun's first 100 millions years, when Earth had barely formed. Note in the next post that the "hot young solution" explains the problem over Earth's entire history.
The Catelan paper can be found (at least by my web browser) at the URL
arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0703724
Its abstract says that it gives an "... overview of the evolution of low-mass stars ... from the cloud collapse phase all the way to the white dwarf cooling curve.
Here is some material about arXiv and my involvement with it. I apologize for it being so long, so please feel free to delete it if you want to do so.
From 1991 to 2001, the arXiv was a public forum primarily based on USA government property at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL). Using USA government property and funding, the arXiv grew to be the dominant medium through which physicists all over the world posted preprints and so communicated their ideas.
I first posted there in 1993, and continued to do so throughout the 1990s.
A factor in achieving that dominant position was the fact that during most of the 1990s the arXiv submission policy was, as it stated on its web site, "... submission policy ... Open but with some moderation of appropriateness to archives and subject classes. Restrictions on size and
format; submissions required to be complete. ...". Note that there was NO restriction as to substantive physics content.
During the year 2001, well after the arXiv had achieved its dominant position in physics communication, the administration of the e-print archives moved from LANL to Cornell, coincident with Paul Ginsparg and Simeon Warner also moving from jobs at Los Alamos to jobs at Cornell. Within about a year from the move to Cornell, the blacklisting started.
As to my situation, the Cornell arXiv said that I was in "... a large pool ... typically flagged by reader complaints ...". Although I have asked the Cornell arXiv administrators to
"... Please tell me who has complained about me, and exactly what they have said about me, and
please give me a reasonable opportunity to reply to any such complaints. ...",
I have yet to receive a substantive reply.
Since the arXiv grew to dominance as a USA federal government entity, and since Cornell continued to receive USA federal funding (and still does, according to its web site), and since the arXiv web site was accessible in Georgia as well as the rest of the world,
I filed a suit in my home district here in Georgia alleging that the arXiv was denying my right to speak through its publicly funded public forum.
I also sued some USA government entities with connections to the Cornell arXiv, but the court dismissed them, their involvment in the blacklisting being indirect at most.
Cornell replied, one of its assertions being "... academic freedom has included not merely liberty from restraints ... but also the idea that universities and schools should have the freedom to made [sic] decisions about how and what to teach ...".
In short,
Cornell argued that academic freedom justifies censorship and blacklisting.
The court dismissed my suit against Cornell only as to jurisdiction, saying that the arXiv web site availability in Georgia did not give courts in Georgia jurisdiction over the matter.
The court did not rule one way or the other on whether or not the Cornell arXiv had violated my rights, so I was (and still am) free to file suit against the Cornell arXiv in their home state of New York.
Since I am a Georgia lawyer I can sue in my home state relatively easily and inexpensively.
When the court ordered that the suit should be in New York, I contacted some law firms with New York offices. Although I had some degree of personal contact with those firms, and I offered to pay market-rate legal fees. they all refused to take my case. One person in a firm rejecting my case told me frankly, from their point of view:
even though I might pay a good fee for my case, I am only a one-shot client with not much prospect of other cases in the future; and
Cornell is a major New York institution, with many contacts with many other New York institutions, and they don't want to alienate major prospective possible future clients.
So, as of now, I have not gone to the substantial personal inconvenience of virtually moving to New York to sue the Cornell arXiv, effectively giving up most other aspects of my life.
As to how vicious the Cornell arXiv folks are, you already know yourself.
In my case, for example, in 2003 Steve Farrar investigated the situation and wrote an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES). The THES article said:
"... Mr Smith insisted each paper should be judged by researchers on its individual merits. His argument has been backed by Nobel laureate Brian Josephson, professor of physics at Cambridge University, who also investigates quantum consciousness. ...
An archive moderator said both claims would "only result in wasted time".
"Someone who has neither current institutional affiliation nor has ever published in a conventional journal is indistinguishable from a middle-school student writing on a perpetual-motion machine or a refutation of special relativity," he [the unnamed arXiv moderator] said. ...".
When I complained that the statement about me by "unnamed arXiv moderator" was inaccurate ( I had published in the International Journal of Theoretical Physics ) and libelous ( in saying that I am "... indistinguishable from a middle-school student writing on a perpetual-motion machine or a refutation of special relativity ..." ),
THES refused to print a correction, altough they did say that they would file my complaint with "library copies" of the article and that they would remove the article from their on-line edition.
I guess in some sense the Cornell arXiv is winning, because I remain blacklisted, and it is unlikely that my work will ever be posted for posterity in anything more permanently accesible than my web site.
That is why I am so sensitive to your situation, and so alarmed at the fact that you were actually detained by authorities for a time sufficient to prevent you from speaking at Imperial.
Tony Smith
Hi Louise,
Thank you for the reply to my questions!
O.k. so your R is actually the radius of curvature of the universe (analogous to the radius of a 2-sphere being the radius of curvature of the 2-sphere's surface)?
Regarding the Albrecht-Magueijo paper, this derives the Freidman and fluid/continuity equations for their VSL model. They get a source term in the fluid equation proportional to k*c*dc/dt, so do you get a similar term (if so, what form does it have?)? You only seem to have written about the k=0 case, in which (whilst stable as you say) the source term goes to zero in the Albrecht-Magueijo model.
Regarding arxiv, could your colleagues at James Cook provide the neccessary recommendation to get papers posted there? If that's not enough (perhaps Tony Smith's experience is relevant here), why not just submit directly to the published journals?
Cheers,
Mendo.
Nige, you are dead-on right as usual.
Tony, I appreciate your thoroughness in describing this matter. Obviously it has been a source of frustration for you. I have been affected by this childishness at Cornell and my family has homes in New York. If there is any way I can help, just email me at Sailorstarfightr@yahoo.com. As you know, the threat of legal action can make people modify their behaviour.
Mendo, you've got it about R being a radius of curvature. (Many physicists just can't visualise that.) We may also replace a(t) with R(t) in the following derivation. Your question is addressed in one of those papers I would love to get published.
I think you are referring to equation (5) in Albrecht-Maguiejo. Skipping ahead to equation (10), we define (w = 0) and e = (Omega) -1:
edot = (1 + e)e(adot/a) + 2 (cdot/c)e
edot = (1 + e)e(2/3t) + 2(-1/3t)e
edot = e^2 * (2/3t)
An initially high value of e will lead to a high edot. At higher values of t, edot is driven to 0. Proper choice of functions for a and c leads to a stable density (Omega) = 1 and e = 0.
Actually I am quite close to publishing a new paper in a major journal, which for obvious reasons I should not yet identify. Publishing papers about c change is quite difficult.
Louise, Tony, and all; I also had arXiv pull a couple papers. My feeling on this is that my work is either right or wrong. If it's wrong, it doesn't matter much. If it's right, then a failure to publish simply gives me the right to claim precedence, and the lack of exposure makes it easier for me to continue pushing the ideas.
Nige, that was a beautiful write up on scientific inertia and needs to be posted somewhere where it is more visible.
Carl Brannen said that he "... also had arXiv pull a couple papers. My [Carl's] feeling on this is that my work is either right or wrong.
If it's wrong, it doesn't matter much.
If it's right, then a failure to publish simply gives me the right to claim precedence, and the lack of exposure makes it easier for me to continue pushing the ideas. ...".
However, if it's right, and if Carl is like me in that he is the only person on the planet working on his model, then the problem is what happens if he or I drop dead of a heart attack today?
If his work were on the arXiv, it would be preserved in a form easily accessible on the web for any curious person to find, for as long as the world-wide (arXiv has mirrors in many places) community of physicists, and the web, exist.
Until October 2004, the CERN EXT preprint server allowed external people (including me) to put papers there, which allowed them to be preserved so long as CERN exists and maintains it. That might not have been quite as good a preservation for posterity as arXiv, but it was still pretty good.
However (I suspect under pressure from the Cornell arXiv, but I do not have court-room type proof), in October 2004 CERN terminated its EXT preprint service (although the last time I checked, they did not remove papers already posted prior to termination).
So, with no arXiv of CERN EXT archive, how is the work of sole individuals like Carl and me to be preserved for posterity? I put my work on the web, on the web site of a Historical Society in Valdosta,
Georgia, but such things may not be as long-lived as arXiv, and my guess is that after 50 or 100 years it will be very difficult for a curious Chinese physics student to study work done by Carl or me.
That means to me that Cornell's blacklist is probably successful in exterminating theories that Cornell does not like, and that physics of the future will be only what the establishment consensus, and their Cornell enforcers, want it to be.
As Carl said, if he and I are wrong, that would be OK,
but if either he or I are right (even in part) in our original independent approaches, then the losers are the physicists of the future.
That is why I would be OK if the Cornell arXiv would put my work in a separate section labelled something like "speculation",
but
Cornell has resisted such suggestions, perhaps because they fear that preservation of independent ideas might lead to some of the independent ideas being some day perceived as correct and useful.
Tony Smith
Tony, I am no attorney, but a New York court might think that your and Carl's freedom of speech has been restricted.
Nige, I love your thoughtful posts and think that they should be published somewhere.
"When t was tiny c was enormous and the Universe expanded like a Bang. As t increased that expansion slowed due to gravitation and continues asymptotically to this day. This equation made the heretical prediction that c slows at a rate too tiny to detect, until now."
The natural process of expansion, varies. The Universe has not always been in expansion, well at least there are certain locations that are in expansion, and there are locations that can be deemed to be in contraction.
The best analogy for understanding is to inflate a ordinary party balloon, using regular (constant) breaths. You will notice that the very first breath inflates the balloon rapidly, that is for yourself, looking at the balloon inflate as a "outside" observer.
Now maintain your breaths at a constant rate, you will notice that the balloon starts to inflate at a decreased rate, if one was to increase the breath "input", to produce a observed expansion rate as with the very first breath, then the balloon goes POP!
If the Universe is "open", then the constraints one see's within the balloons volume should be varying, as opposed to a "closed" Universe, which may still produce varying_constants.
How so?..if the balloon is inserted into a box with a specific volume, the surface's will eventually meet, and the constraining box will maintain the balloon's (rubber) for a longer period, whilst causing an increase pressure "inside" the balloon, which will produce the effect, as far as internal observations are concerned, an experience of CONTRACTION!
Just as the fact of expansion, produces a location of central emergence (big bang), in a contracting sense, there is also a focal point, what everything collapses towards.
Neatly, any observer close to the Big_Crunch, will experience a slowing down of relative processes such at time_dependancy. Time will be restrained by the compact force, or space density.
As far as this observer is concerned, light is also slowed, because the density produces a function the same as it does in "our" everday natural substances, like light through glass?, liquids..solids all produce a varying speed of light!
It does not matter how much you experiment with light, a photon travelling across an empty vacuum,ZERO_DENSITY, may be a good calibration medium, but do not expect the same result if one sends a photon through a medium of HIGH_DENSITY, such as a many atom solid?
Spacetime close to the big crunch, is not like spacetime close to the big bang, or simplistically, the balloon inflates at a faster rate at early times?
thanks for information
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