Science — the kind that requires evidence and reason.

[PopeBeanieModerator]

No need to click on the links I provide here, unless you’re really interested in going deeper into the physics. In fact I recommend non-geeks to just skim down to “Deterministic Quantumness: Probable Baloney”.

I’m not a physicist, nor have I ever passed a calculus class. (Statistics, yes, and my father and I made a “wave machine” at home, like the one below. It starts at 3:23 where it gets interesting, so then you can watch as much of the rest of it as you can stand. I found the whole video nostalgic, and I rarely feel nostalgic. I still have issues, and, well, … blah blah, never mind. Shutup, Pope.)

No, the lecturer is not my father. 🙂

Quantum Entanglement: The big hurdle for me wrt quantum mechanics is in not being able to understand Bell’s Inequality that purportedly proves that there are no “hidden variables” that can explain the connection between entangled particles that can exist long after they split and travel far away from each other. As a probably-myopic-armchair-physicist, I just can’t buy that there is no hidden variable. So now I want to learn more about Pilot Wave propositions, even though they’re so out of style.

Deterministic Quantumness: Probable Baloney

See, I’m trying to be humble here (“probable baloney), in spite of acting so sure that my brilliant proposition will eventually Trump the mainstream, expert physicists. (EUers, does this sound like a familiar place to be?)

My idea is simply this: Let’s say that, just as we don’t yet understand Dark Energy, maybe we’re not seeing a bajillion different waves of various kinds passing through us this way and that way, every nanunanosecond. Maybe some of those waves are sooooo tiny that when they pop ever so slightly into our dimension, they can invisibly carry away a couple of entangled particles that just happened to be waiting for a dark energy wave [sic] to come along, going in the right direction.

And so there’s our hidden variable… the wave that we can’t detect or understand yet, because our physics just haven’t advanced enough yet, plus there are those Neanderthal-like physicists who can’t think creatively enough to let go of their Einstein-Rosen-Whoever theories in Casablanca or CopenhagenDaas or Banger dogmas.

Cheshire-Schroedinger cats in a box ftw, right @toms? Let’s DO this!

Summary: If you think about how physicists describe “empty space” as actually full of stuff popping in and out of existence, how could there not be hidden variables that sometimes can interact with (say) the polarity of a photon, or exactly when an electron can be measured as a particle instead of a cloudy wave function? What if the only time an electron can become known as a particle can only happen exactly when a dark energy wave passes by, in the right direction, and closely enough?

That’s my current armchair even-deterministic-quantum-behavior will come true fantasy. Science–the kind that requires evidence–often has to wait for enough evidence to accumulate. Let’s go surfing now.

One more link to a “Nature of Reality” article.

 

[tom sarbeckParticipant]

Aw-ww, Beanie. Quantum entanglement? Stuff popping in and out of existence?

Einstein did not start the anti-empiricism of our time but with his thought-experiments, his hatred of laboratory work, and his arbitrary limit on the speed of light, he gave scifi a boost. Isaac Newton’s religiosity may have blinded him to a speed of gravity that is orders of magnitude faster than Einstein’s speed of light.

 

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Your Holiness, I hope by “EUers” you mean “European Union members” and not “Electric Universe” proponents 🙂

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Particles do pop in and out of existence, if only for an instance (or a Planck unit of Time). This has been observed and tested. Introduction here.

I am not sure what you mean Tom by the “speed of gravity”. Gravity is the “warping” caused by SpaceTime which happens when massive objects (or subatomic particle) stop traveling in a straight line.

For Example the Earth “thinks” it is traveling in a straight line through space but in reality it is trapped by the Sun, whose mass has warped the Spacetime it sits in and the moon is trapped by the mass of the Earth. That is why the Earth spins around the sun and the Moon around the Earth.

Dan Dennett was once asked by a Christian why he did not believe a force more powerful than himself existed in the Universe that could be responsible for our existence. He said, “But I do. I just call it Gravity.”

Here is a very good video on Gravity.

[PopeBeanieModerator]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

Your Holiness, I hope by “EUers” you mean “European Union members” and not “Electric Universe” proponents

Haha, nooooo. I hope you have that backwards!

Tom, thank you, I didn’t know that about Newton and the speed of gravity. However, you do know (of course) because of the consistently physical nature of waves, that LIGO detectors spread far apart can easily measure the speed of gravity waves?

I’ll add, for the sake of some readers, sound waves arrive at our ears at slightly different times (think milliseconds), which is how the brain can determine which direction each sound is coming from. The wider apart the ears, the more accurate a sound’s origin can be determined.

Underwater, you’ll notice you cannot accurately determine direction of sound, and that’s because the speed of sound in water is about six times that of in air. For a Marine Biology class once I placed underwater microphones about two feet apart, and the spatial spread of the cacaphony of sounds (like shrimp and some fish) was amazing! What a community.

Same for LIGO, in that widely separated detectors can determine the direction from which gravity waves are coming. Having three sensors instead of two provides three dimensions to the the measurement, so (e.g. if we had three ears) we can determine direction of the source not just left/right, but up/down. (Meanwhile brains connected to 2D have evolved an ability to make an educated guess wrt 3D, based on the tone of sounds, and subtle echoes off of objects we’re often not even conscious of.)

• This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by  PopeBeanie. Reason: added audio wave & 3D spiel

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

The LIGO detectors are covered in the video I linked (about 23 minutes in but watch it all).

[PopeBeanieModerator]

Aw-ww, Beanie. Quantum entanglement? Stuff popping in and out of existence?

My apologies for a couple of things.

True, I need to avoid the “in and out of existence” meme. It’s too hyperbolic and smacks of the same attention-grabbing meme as “something from nothing”, which too easily misrepresents the physics to lay people.

Secondly, I posted my weak understanding of pilot wave theory to illustrate what scientists, or at least amateur scientists face when theories lack enough evidence to have credibility. I think that both EU and BB are both in this category of underdeveloped research, and prefer BB as a framework of understanding and further research because it makes the most sense to me, even if incomplete. In this “evidenced-based science” group, any evidence or research ideas that you provide should be just as valid as mine.

Second apology here for completely (but accidentally) ignoring what (I think?) is the EU proposal of “tired light”, which could also of course apply to gravity, in my particular example, I hadn’t thought of “tired gravity” or a faster-than-light gravity.

So in trying to have productive dialog in this kind of venue, I ask you, what kind of evidence or tests should we be spending money on? What (if anything) would you expect future LIGO data to show us wrt supporting EU hypotheses? In particular, I’m interested in how widely separated LIGO instruments will (IMO) or won’t (in your opinion) prove (say) the distance and/or recession of (e.g.) pairs of very very distant, colliding black holes.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by  PopeBeanie. Reason: forgot that word "colliding"

[_Robert_Participant]

Some galaxies are blue-shifts…so you besides tired light we need red-bulled light.

[PopeBeanieModerator]

red-bulled light

Starbucks!

[_Robert_Participant]

Yes !

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Here is an article worth a read. The idea of being able to determine the location of the particle is interesting. It does make it less random – or more deterministic. I try to think of everything as being expressed in waves and that all fields are made up of waves. If a wave stretched across the entire Universe (and why not?) then “spooky action  at a distance” would not be so “spooky”. It would also mean that at the quantum level “information” could be passed between particles faster than the speed of light. Now head hurty.

[tom sarbeckParticipant]

This discussion on the kind of science that requires evidence and reason is becoming a discussion on science fiction. No thanks, PB, Reg and Robert.

 

[PopeBeanieModerator]

All of it is science fiction? Even LIGO measurements and blue-shift? These are softball questions!

You say EU is up against a vast conspiracy of institutionally entrenched scientists pushing BB. That’s not fair, when I can’t even get you to say what you’d like us to be researching. I’ve asked a few times now, which is fair, because we’re sharing the same political & tax system.

Is there any EU-worthy scientific research you can suggest? In reading about EU, it seemed to me that we can agree at least on researching with larger telescopes. Agree or disagree?

• This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by  PopeBeanie. Reason: Frustrating edits & re-edits...must just let it go now

[tom sarbeckParticipant]

PB, you ask softball questions. I play hardball and ignore them.

You want fair?

Click on the Chris Reeves article I linked to a while ago. To the right on the page you will see is a menu on which you can start your own personal journey.

 

[_Robert_Participant]

I think Tom does make a valid point that cosmology has become very dependent on mathematical models and we do have to remember that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I have seen ample empirical evidence in my own working fields of GPS navigation and weather RADAR that supports relativistic and doppler effects but after reading some of the skeptical material I will reserve a sliver of doubt and keep an open mind.

I have found I tend to believe people I like and people who communicate effectively. It’s a flaw. I recall a history teacher who was a Southern advocate and racist. He was a very effective communicator. He had the whole class believing that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. It took me until my 20’s to realize that was bullshit. And then there is Plato’s cave. Something that must be remembered because even tons of good evidence can lead you to the wrong conclusions.

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