It'll probably pop up in the next Marvel movie.
Beware, after reading this you may suffer from the Anholonomic Observer Syndrome:
Beware, after reading this you may suffer from the Anholonomic Observer Syndrome:
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I had a feeling this was one of your cosistently "out-there" bits of Fundamental Physics that you have feverishly examined for MEANING!
(As you do with Philosophical attempts to understand EVERYTHING merely by thinking about it. The Red Flag is always that it ends in ...ISM.)
I fear there is NONE. Sabine Hossenfelder would be applying her red pencil to every other word:
I know what Holonomy is, Being that strange observation that 3 straight paths drawn on the globe around the Equator and up to the Poles form a triangle of 3 right angles or 270 degrees.
Thus telling us that we live on a Curved Globe! Flat-Earthers eat your hearts out.
Here goes:
WTF is that about? I am a bit Perturbed myself. Lets find out what Colour Gravity is.
Ah, perhaps it is Lorentz Covariant. Always a good sign.
I am impatient to learn more. Lets rush to the Conclusion:
Double Helix? Ah, the Universe and SpaceTime is a vast living organism then, That's how Spock regenerated in Star Trek.
As ever, m'learned friend @Galu will explain it for those of you who lack my Newton-like intellect and Philosophy.
I shall be reading Quantum Behaviour by Feynman today. THE FINAL CHAPTER. If I find any nuggets of wisdom on that particular mountain, I shall bring them down to you immediately.
(As you do with Philosophical attempts to understand EVERYTHING merely by thinking about it. The Red Flag is always that it ends in ...ISM.)
I fear there is NONE. Sabine Hossenfelder would be applying her red pencil to every other word:
I know what Holonomy is, Being that strange observation that 3 straight paths drawn on the globe around the Equator and up to the Poles form a triangle of 3 right angles or 270 degrees.
Thus telling us that we live on a Curved Globe! Flat-Earthers eat your hearts out.
Here goes:
WTF is that about? I am a bit Perturbed myself. Lets find out what Colour Gravity is.
Ah, perhaps it is Lorentz Covariant. Always a good sign.
I am impatient to learn more. Lets rush to the Conclusion:
Double Helix? Ah, the Universe and SpaceTime is a vast living organism then, That's how Spock regenerated in Star Trek.
As ever, m'learned friend @Galu will explain it for those of you who lack my Newton-like intellect and Philosophy.
I shall be reading Quantum Behaviour by Feynman today. THE FINAL CHAPTER. If I find any nuggets of wisdom on that particular mountain, I shall bring them down to you immediately.
Is a double helix the fabric of spacetime?
Ah, memories of Francis Crick imaging the double helix of DNA while tripping on LSD in 1953!
The paper from Robert Monjo attempts to unify gravity and electromagnetism by building on Einstein’s work to provide an alternative interpretation of gravity that considers both the curvature and torsion of spacetime.
The graviton would be described in this framework as an entity with spin 2, meaning it has a double spin that resembles the double helix of DNA.
However, I've written in this thread before that, if the graviton were actually to exist, it would be unique since it would be the only "tensor boson" and would have a spin value of 2 because the tensor field has particles with a spin value of 2.
https://www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2024/10/dna-like-geometric-structure-discovered-in-space-time/
Gravitons are fiercely difficult things IMO. But if Monjo is saying we don't need extra dimensions of Space (String Theory?!?!) to understand them, that is a plus for me.
I know all that Spin 2 stuff and the 180 degree rotation back to initial state. Vague estimates that they must have incredibly tiny mass, if any at all. Compton Wavelength of around 1.6 LY.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave
Issues that they can be drawn with Feynman Diagrams, but impossible to renormalise and calculate. A QUAGMIRE!
Funny effects on matter too:
Not your usual wave at all. 🤔
Lightening up. Can you spot which popularly quoted image is BUNK and which one is CORRECT? After all, this is the very basis of understanding the Quantum.
Hover the old rodent to find out.
EDIT: I have just noticed a misleading Statement in the Second. The World we inhabit is undoubtedly THE QUANTUM WORLD from top to bottom. Get used to it.🤣
I know all that Spin 2 stuff and the 180 degree rotation back to initial state. Vague estimates that they must have incredibly tiny mass, if any at all. Compton Wavelength of around 1.6 LY.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave
Issues that they can be drawn with Feynman Diagrams, but impossible to renormalise and calculate. A QUAGMIRE!
Funny effects on matter too:
Not your usual wave at all. 🤔
Lightening up. Can you spot which popularly quoted image is BUNK and which one is CORRECT? After all, this is the very basis of understanding the Quantum.
Hover the old rodent to find out.
EDIT: I have just noticed a misleading Statement in the Second. The World we inhabit is undoubtedly THE QUANTUM WORLD from top to bottom. Get used to it.🤣
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The second version is the one employed in this trusty reference source: https://phys.libretexts.org/Bookshe...cs/7.03:_The_Heisenberg_Uncertainty_Principle
Einstein never accepted Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as a fundamental physical law.
Title of the attached document: "Encounters and Conversations with Albert Einstein".
Followers of this thread will be aware that Einstein wasn't completely convinced of quantum mechanics.
He countered Heisenberg's uncertainty principle with quantum entanglement where the positions and the momenta for two particles are perfectly correlated, no matter how far apart the two particles are.
Einstein believed there could be no immediate disturbance to the second particle as a result of anything that was done to the first particle. He called this “no-spooky-action-at-a-distance”.
However, all experimental results so far support quantum mechanics. It seems that when two particles undergo entanglement, whatever happens to one of the particles can instantly affect the other, even if the particles are separated!
Unfortunately, entanglement experiments to date focus on photons and not larger particles such as electrons or atoms - so perhaps Einstein would simply say that the laws have not yet been confirmed for real particles.
I disentangled (see what I did there?) the above information from this article: https://theconversation.com/einstein-vs-quantum-mechanics-and-why-hed-be-a-convert-today-27641
He countered Heisenberg's uncertainty principle with quantum entanglement where the positions and the momenta for two particles are perfectly correlated, no matter how far apart the two particles are.
Einstein believed there could be no immediate disturbance to the second particle as a result of anything that was done to the first particle. He called this “no-spooky-action-at-a-distance”.
However, all experimental results so far support quantum mechanics. It seems that when two particles undergo entanglement, whatever happens to one of the particles can instantly affect the other, even if the particles are separated!
Unfortunately, entanglement experiments to date focus on photons and not larger particles such as electrons or atoms - so perhaps Einstein would simply say that the laws have not yet been confirmed for real particles.
I disentangled (see what I did there?) the above information from this article: https://theconversation.com/einstein-vs-quantum-mechanics-and-why-hed-be-a-convert-today-27641
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I read slack Roland's "Encounters and Conversations with Einstein" and was scratching my head who the young and later scientist was.
Not Ronald W. Clarke asterixed in a footnote, but Werner Heisenberg. Himself!
Usual "God Does Not Play Dice" thought experiments from incomprehensibly stubborn old Einstein. And quickly disproven by all and sundry. We have discussed all that before.
Quantum Entanglement is so simple that I don't know what the fuss is about. Or why people care. You prepare 2 cats in boxes and all that.
They each get one of two PREPARED electrons. But the electrons have the property of being the SAME spin, which is easy enough to do. Call it half a unit of information as prior knowledge. The sender doesn't actually know which way up, but the same.
When you open one box, you then know everything about that electron, but also about the other box's electron. Call that one and a half units of information gained in total. Not two units. That's how I think about it. Nothing spooky, it's a card trick with a stacked deck.
The Schrodinger Wave function is a clumsy way of doing things, IMO, but was initially more familiar than Heisenberg's and Dirac's Matrix Mechanics and emphasis on "Observables", which is not the same as ideas of what is totally going on.
You can measure the (squared) Envelope, and that is the position of the Particle. Measure the Wavelength, and that is the Momentum of the Matter wave and is also a squared thing.
But each one is a DIFFERENT experiment, which is how people get in a muddle. And you really have to choose one or the other beforehand, because you've only got one particle and it will be affected.
At no stage do you really know the exact PHASE of the Wave Function, which is lost in the squaring process. This is the real uncertainty.
The SPIN of an Electron, which was unknown to Bohr, is a pure consequence of Lorentz Covariance (Special Relativity) and has quantum units of h / 4 Pi or h-bar / 2 or plain HALF, which can be Up or Down by convention.
Dirac loses me on the details.... it's fierce and long and in his BRA / KET notation.
Not Ronald W. Clarke asterixed in a footnote, but Werner Heisenberg. Himself!
Usual "God Does Not Play Dice" thought experiments from incomprehensibly stubborn old Einstein. And quickly disproven by all and sundry. We have discussed all that before.
Quantum Entanglement is so simple that I don't know what the fuss is about. Or why people care. You prepare 2 cats in boxes and all that.
They each get one of two PREPARED electrons. But the electrons have the property of being the SAME spin, which is easy enough to do. Call it half a unit of information as prior knowledge. The sender doesn't actually know which way up, but the same.
When you open one box, you then know everything about that electron, but also about the other box's electron. Call that one and a half units of information gained in total. Not two units. That's how I think about it. Nothing spooky, it's a card trick with a stacked deck.
The Schrodinger Wave function is a clumsy way of doing things, IMO, but was initially more familiar than Heisenberg's and Dirac's Matrix Mechanics and emphasis on "Observables", which is not the same as ideas of what is totally going on.
You can measure the (squared) Envelope, and that is the position of the Particle. Measure the Wavelength, and that is the Momentum of the Matter wave and is also a squared thing.
But each one is a DIFFERENT experiment, which is how people get in a muddle. And you really have to choose one or the other beforehand, because you've only got one particle and it will be affected.
At no stage do you really know the exact PHASE of the Wave Function, which is lost in the squaring process. This is the real uncertainty.
The SPIN of an Electron, which was unknown to Bohr, is a pure consequence of Lorentz Covariance (Special Relativity) and has quantum units of h / 4 Pi or h-bar / 2 or plain HALF, which can be Up or Down by convention.
Dirac loses me on the details.... it's fierce and long and in his BRA / KET notation.
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What have I told you Steve!
Electrons do not orbit.
Electrons do not spin.
We know not where they're going.
We know not where they’ve been.
Physicists have no imagination or they would have named an intrinsic quantum property with no analogue in the everyday world anything but "spin"!
P.S. I've found an interesting history of spin: https://www.liquisearch.com/spin_physics/history
It appears that Wolfgang Pauli was the first to propose the concept of spin, but he did not name it.
I am pretty sure SPIN has a measurable effect on Angular Momentum in Electrons and Photons, after all that is how it is conserved, but can be vague on the details which brainier Sommerfeld and Pauli would eat for breakfast.
I often ponder if the fundamental photon is linearly or circularly polarised, as well as having linear momentum. Also that there is no axis in 4 dimensions, only rotation around up to 2 of 4 planes, and spin can look like a turning inside-outness to us.
Which would be "Cue The Tesseract".
It matters even with the hypothetical Graviton, plus polarised:
And cross polarised:
Whatever is going on? Would I feel queasy if absorbing a Graviton, which incidentally has a very small interaction cross-section, so mostly should whizz through us undetected like a Neutrino.
I often ponder if the fundamental photon is linearly or circularly polarised, as well as having linear momentum. Also that there is no axis in 4 dimensions, only rotation around up to 2 of 4 planes, and spin can look like a turning inside-outness to us.
Which would be "Cue The Tesseract".
It matters even with the hypothetical Graviton, plus polarised:
And cross polarised:
Whatever is going on? Would I feel queasy if absorbing a Graviton, which incidentally has a very small interaction cross-section, so mostly should whizz through us undetected like a Neutrino.
Everybody knows that one of the great tests of Einstein General Relativity is the correct modification of the Precession of the Perihelion of Mercury, which is a tiny 43 Arcseconds per century from the overall value which is much larger, due to Jupiter and whatnot.
But however is this tiny measurement done? I find no simple answer on the Google Search Engine. Maybe someone like Urban Le Verrier the mathematician took the secret to his grave? 🤔
Pictures or it didn't happen. I did however locate the famous Google Chicxulub Meteor Easter Egg in my backups, which wasn't lost, just I didn't know where it was.:
My advanced "Lunix" operating system's Spectacle Screenshot application can capture moving images, from which I can get a still.
I have also found an entertaining and new 10 minute mini Star Trek thing called "765874 Unification", which seems an uninteresting number:
As usual, I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what is going on, but seems to involve alternate Universes in which Kirk is dead, or Spock is alive, or something, and it all gets a bit sentimental, and everything is resolved in the remarkably tidy and litter-free Star Trek fantasy.
But however is this tiny measurement done? I find no simple answer on the Google Search Engine. Maybe someone like Urban Le Verrier the mathematician took the secret to his grave? 🤔
Pictures or it didn't happen. I did however locate the famous Google Chicxulub Meteor Easter Egg in my backups, which wasn't lost, just I didn't know where it was.:
My advanced "Lunix" operating system's Spectacle Screenshot application can capture moving images, from which I can get a still.
I have also found an entertaining and new 10 minute mini Star Trek thing called "765874 Unification", which seems an uninteresting number:
As usual, I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what is going on, but seems to involve alternate Universes in which Kirk is dead, or Spock is alive, or something, and it all gets a bit sentimental, and everything is resolved in the remarkably tidy and litter-free Star Trek fantasy.
Some background:
According to general relativity, the elliptical orbit of a planet is obliged to precess because of the curvature of spacetime.
By precess, we mean the orbit advances a little with each rotation round the Sun.
Einstein's theory accounts for a discrepancy in the precession of 43 seconds of arc per century compared to Newton's equations.
Einstein's theory also accounts for a smaller discrepancy of 8.6'' per century in the precession of Venus. The value is smaller than that of Mercury because Venus is further from the Sun and the curvature of spacetime is less.
Steve asks how this tiny measurement is done and the answer would appear to lie in this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/0712.3709
Extract:
"Let us calculate the numerical value of the angle of precession. The semimajor axis of the elliptical orbit of Mercury is a = 5.8 × 10^12 cm and its eccentricity is e = 0.206. Thus p = 5.55 × 10^12 cm.
The mass of the Sun in centimetres is M (cm) = (G/c^2)M (g), which yields (with M = 2×10^33 g) M = 1.5 × 10^5 cm. Thus ∆φ = 5 × 10^−7 radian/revolution = 0.103”/revolution
Knowing that there are 415 revolutions per century we conclude that the advance of the perihelion amounts to ∆φ = 43” per century."
Good luck with all the mathematics behind that calculation!
I don't know what you made of that Star Trek nonsense, but if I had been forced into scriptwriting this total hoey, full of meaningful looks, but little dialogue, I would have given the audience what they expect, and had the two old gunslingers boldly ride off into the Sunset, having "stunned" a few last baddies.
Back to Physics, which we expect to be built on the solid foundations of EXPERIMENT.
Any fool can calculate the effects of Einstein's Theory of Gravity. But HOW WAS IT TESTED FOR MERCURY?
Turns out it was largely the efforts of the sinister Urbain Le Verrier, as I thought:
By some strange coincidence, it was he who speculated on the existence of the planet VULCAN! Which we now know to be true. At least in the Star Trek Universe.
Tales of him regaining his Astronomy position by nefarious means abound:
But the Science is sure. It was done by observations of Transits of the Planet Mercury, clocks being a bit better than you might expect in those days:
It is therefore unlikely I shall be able to confirm this with "Operation Mercury" next fortnight. Which is a bit disappointing really.
Back to Physics, which we expect to be built on the solid foundations of EXPERIMENT.
Any fool can calculate the effects of Einstein's Theory of Gravity. But HOW WAS IT TESTED FOR MERCURY?
Turns out it was largely the efforts of the sinister Urbain Le Verrier, as I thought:
By some strange coincidence, it was he who speculated on the existence of the planet VULCAN! Which we now know to be true. At least in the Star Trek Universe.
Tales of him regaining his Astronomy position by nefarious means abound:
But the Science is sure. It was done by observations of Transits of the Planet Mercury, clocks being a bit better than you might expect in those days:
It is therefore unlikely I shall be able to confirm this with "Operation Mercury" next fortnight. Which is a bit disappointing really.
Le Verrier became famous by discovering Neptune from its effect on the orbit of Uranus.
As you allude, he first attributed the precession discrepancy of Mercury to the presence of a small, never to be discovered, planet he called Vulcan.
Le Verrier's precession results of 1859 were corrected in 1895 by Simon Newcomb then explained by Einstein in his 1912 paper on General Relativity.
There has been a reanalysis of Le Verrier's Mercury transit data that reduces his precession discrepancy to 15.2" +/- 0.1" per century.
This leads some to question whether or not the discrepancy has been properly explained in terms of General Relativity.
https://www.naturalphilosophy.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_5232.pdf
Der Wolfgang...
Undoubtedly one of the greatest minds of modern physics and underrated compared to 'hyped icons' like Einstein (a distracter?).
“Every true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist,” Einstein wrote as he contemplated the human passion for comprehension in the final years of his life. He may well have been thinking about the great Austrian-Swiss theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli (April 25, 1900–December 15, 1958), who first postulated the neutrino and was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the Pauli exclusion principle — a monumental leap in our understanding of the structure of matter. Decades earlier, 21-year-old Pauli had published a critique of Einstein’s groundbreaking theory of general relativity. It greatly impressed the elder physicist, who wrote in astonishment:
"No one studying this mature, grandly conceived work could believe that the author is a man of 21. One wonders what to admire most, the psychological understanding for the development of ideas, the sureness of mathematical deduction, the profound physical insight, the capacity for lucid systematic presentation, the complete treatment of the subject matter, or the sureness of critical appraisal."
His long-term collaboration with Carl Gustav Jung is groundbreaking, linking quantum physics to the spiritual domain.
"In spite of later deep philosophical disagreement, Einstein always held Pauli in high esteem, and in an address in 1946, on the occasion of Pauli's Nobel prize, the old Einstein called Pauli his spiritual son."
There is an enormous amount of literature available on the collaboration between Pauli and Jung, including Suzunne Gieser's extensive reference work, but I will limit myself to a paper on the Pauli–Jung conjecture:
Undoubtedly one of the greatest minds of modern physics and underrated compared to 'hyped icons' like Einstein (a distracter?).
“Every true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist,” Einstein wrote as he contemplated the human passion for comprehension in the final years of his life. He may well have been thinking about the great Austrian-Swiss theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli (April 25, 1900–December 15, 1958), who first postulated the neutrino and was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the Pauli exclusion principle — a monumental leap in our understanding of the structure of matter. Decades earlier, 21-year-old Pauli had published a critique of Einstein’s groundbreaking theory of general relativity. It greatly impressed the elder physicist, who wrote in astonishment:
"No one studying this mature, grandly conceived work could believe that the author is a man of 21. One wonders what to admire most, the psychological understanding for the development of ideas, the sureness of mathematical deduction, the profound physical insight, the capacity for lucid systematic presentation, the complete treatment of the subject matter, or the sureness of critical appraisal."
His long-term collaboration with Carl Gustav Jung is groundbreaking, linking quantum physics to the spiritual domain.
"In spite of later deep philosophical disagreement, Einstein always held Pauli in high esteem, and in an address in 1946, on the occasion of Pauli's Nobel prize, the old Einstein called Pauli his spiritual son."
There is an enormous amount of literature available on the collaboration between Pauli and Jung, including Suzunne Gieser's extensive reference work, but I will limit myself to a paper on the Pauli–Jung conjecture:
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The Pauli-Jung Conjecture suggests that related events may have common underlying factors of a spiritual nature outside of observable physics laws.
I must admit to not really being into metaphysics, a term which translates as "post physics", i.e., "that which comes after physics".
And I certainly wouldn't wish to stray into matters religious, as such discussions are against the rules of this forum.
https://www.britannica.com/summary/metaphysics
I must admit to not really being into metaphysics, a term which translates as "post physics", i.e., "that which comes after physics".
And I certainly wouldn't wish to stray into matters religious, as such discussions are against the rules of this forum.
https://www.britannica.com/summary/metaphysics
The famous Wolfgang Pauli had many good things going for him.
Short of stature but high in achievement. Here he is keeping up with the latest in Quantum Mechanics from the mighty Dirac.
He coined the phrase "Not Even Wrong" when confronted with very bad Physics. Meaning it was beyond Wrong!
Why am I thinking of @Ro808 here? 🙄
But even he had his off days. He declared, in the face of the Feynman evidence, that CP Violation was impossible.
Once he went off into the mystic with Carl Jung, he was bound for a considerable fall.
Amusingly, when gravely ill in hospital, he insisted on having ROOM 137 as a sort of conversation opener about the Fine Structure Constant, with which he became obsessed, for the purveyors of grapes and flowers and cards who visited.
I am unsurprised that he and Einstein got on so well. Two crackpots together in their dotage. 🤣
However, you are keen to know how Chapter 6 "Quantum Behaviour" by Feynman turned out. TBH, I learned nothing that was not already familiar to me.
The Momentum measurement of the Electron.
The Position measurement of the Electron.
The details hardly matter, but the second is shining a light on the slits to try and see the electron passing, and they only go through one slit or the other.
Here you see that the first is measuring the wavelength or momentum of the Electron Wave Function.
The second is measuring the envelope of the Wave Function, or position of the electron.
JUST AS I EXPLAINED EARLIER. 👍
There was a little discrepancy when Feynman described the Uncertainty Principle as being Dx Dp = h.
But I would take that as applying to linear Photons, rather than Spherical Particles where a 4 Pi factor appears for convenience and because Matter is very different from massless Photons..
Feynman emphasises that without the Uncertainty Principle, everything in the Universe would collapse. So it is a GOOD THING.
It appears I know everything there is to know, because Feynman says if you fully understand the Double Slit experiment, you understand Quantum Mechanics, 😎
Short of stature but high in achievement. Here he is keeping up with the latest in Quantum Mechanics from the mighty Dirac.
He coined the phrase "Not Even Wrong" when confronted with very bad Physics. Meaning it was beyond Wrong!
Why am I thinking of @Ro808 here? 🙄
But even he had his off days. He declared, in the face of the Feynman evidence, that CP Violation was impossible.
Once he went off into the mystic with Carl Jung, he was bound for a considerable fall.
Amusingly, when gravely ill in hospital, he insisted on having ROOM 137 as a sort of conversation opener about the Fine Structure Constant, with which he became obsessed, for the purveyors of grapes and flowers and cards who visited.
I am unsurprised that he and Einstein got on so well. Two crackpots together in their dotage. 🤣
However, you are keen to know how Chapter 6 "Quantum Behaviour" by Feynman turned out. TBH, I learned nothing that was not already familiar to me.
The Momentum measurement of the Electron.
The Position measurement of the Electron.
The details hardly matter, but the second is shining a light on the slits to try and see the electron passing, and they only go through one slit or the other.
Here you see that the first is measuring the wavelength or momentum of the Electron Wave Function.
The second is measuring the envelope of the Wave Function, or position of the electron.
JUST AS I EXPLAINED EARLIER. 👍
There was a little discrepancy when Feynman described the Uncertainty Principle as being Dx Dp = h.
But I would take that as applying to linear Photons, rather than Spherical Particles where a 4 Pi factor appears for convenience and because Matter is very different from massless Photons..
Feynman emphasises that without the Uncertainty Principle, everything in the Universe would collapse. So it is a GOOD THING.
It appears I know everything there is to know, because Feynman says if you fully understand the Double Slit experiment, you understand Quantum Mechanics, 😎
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