…And Now, For Something Completely Different
by KrauzeIt seems we're having some good discussions in the comments (so good, in fact, that other blogs are linking to it). It also seems as if we're sometimes straying from the topic of the original post, which can either be viewed as a result of a lively discussion or derailing commenters, depending on your perspective. In either case, I'm opening up this thread to discussions that, although interesting, doesn't quite fit in elsewhere. So, if a post or a comment makes you think of something, but you aren't sure if it would derail the flow of the discussion, go post it here, preferably with a link to what it was that inspired you. This will also decrease the risk of one of us having to move your comment to the Memory Hole.
June 29th, 2005 at 2:50 pm
Joy Says: June 29th, 2005 at 2:14 pm
Hi, Island! Einstein has been "˜vindicated' in more than a few ways since his death, including on the cosmological constant they're now calling "dark energy" because they don't know what the heck else to call it, and they don't want to be seen "˜vindicating' GR.
Well, you're close, but the reason that they're calling it "dark energy" is because it isn't the same thing as Einstein's Cosmological Constant, which included a negative pressure component that the popular vacuums do not.
That's because everybody including Dr. Einstein thought that his static model was unstable after it was discovered that the universe is expanding, because they thought that this meant that it would run-away via exponetially increasing expansion.
Einstein didn't know that particle creation in his static model causes expansion, while holding the universe flat and stable, or we'd be living in a much different universe right now that doesn't include infinities and uncertainty.
In Einstein's static model, G=0 when there is no matter.
The cosmological constant came about because we do have matter, so in order to get rho>0 out of Einstein's matter-less spacetime structure, you have to condense the matter density from the zero pressure metric, and in doing so the pressure of the vacuum necessarily becomes less than zero, P
You can understand this from this very clear treatment at Ned Wright's website:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wri...
It is plainly evident from this that most natural way to create new matter in Einstein's model, ("the most compatible with the spirit of general relativity"), also holds it flat and stable, so any other conclusions that have been made since Einstein abandoned his finite universe without this knowledge, are therefore subject to suspect review.
So, until this has been done, we live in a mostly flat finite spherical
k=-1 universe until somebody proves otherwise, where expansion occurs
via particle pair creation, but this effect gets offset by the increase
in mass energy, so tension between the vacuum and ordinary matter
increases with expansion.
This will eventually compromise the integrity of the forces and cause
the stucture to have a Big Bang, so… causality is not violated when the effect is the cause of the effect.
This being the case, then Einstein didn't lose in Copenhagen either,
because he wasn't wrong in 1917… and so it wasn't he who was "telling
"God" what to do", it was his most accurate reflection of nature that
the world had ever seen that was doing the telling.
So Einstein wins, hands down!… which brings us to another point that
he was probably right about, as well:
In 1921, in an address to the Berlin Academy of Sciences… Dr. Einstein
said:
I must not fail to mention that a theoretical argument can be
adduced in favor of the hypothesis of a finite universe. The general
theory of relativity teaches that the inertia of a given body is greater
as there are more ponderable masses in proximity t o it; thus it seems
very natural to reduce the total effect of inertia of a body to action
and reaction between it and the other bodies in the universe… From the
general theory of relativity it can be deduced that this total reduction
of inertia to reci procal action between masses - as required by E.
Mach, for example - is possible only if the universe is spatially
finite. On many physicists and astronomers this argument makes no
impression…
In order for this to be a real theory, some better person than I needs to write down the basis of wave functions in this background, including an expansion of the field in corresponding creation and annihilation operators. Then they need to compute the stress-energy tensor in that background, while quantitatively describing the vacua, and then work out the matrix elements of the stress-energy tensor between Einstein's static vacuum and the one-particle states.
Do that, and you own the world. Apparently, I have nothing to gain since I can't do that.
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr...
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr...
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr...
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr...
Comment by island — June 29, 2005 @ 2:50 pm
June 29th, 2005 at 2:54 pm
The html code messed this up:
"and in doing so the pressure of the vacuum necessarily becomes less than zero, P"
Should have read:
and in doing so, the pressure of the vacuum necessarily becomes less than zero, P
Comment by island — June 29, 2005 @ 2:54 pm
June 29th, 2005 at 2:55 pm
Unbelievable
P
Comment by island — June 29, 2005 @ 2:55 pm
June 29th, 2005 at 2:56 pm
Forget it, there's supposed to be a less-than sign after P
So that it reads P (less-than) zero.
Comment by island — June 29, 2005 @ 2:56 pm
June 29th, 2005 at 4:21 pm
Hi again, Island. Thanks for the link to Ned Wright's site and to the ongoing discussion. I've got them up and will take some time to read and digest so I don't sound too stupid, see if Wright's got something in there about G[ravity] in a GR manifold that does not rely upon mass/matter. Given that RQFT has reached all the way to genuine 'Unitary Crisis' on this very issue, and I'm a bit skeptical that vacuums real or virtual, in actual or imaginary time are going to save the day.
P.S. There must be an html override or something that's interfering with non-tag uses of the brackets. I did get the "less than" designation okay, though.
Comment by Joy — June 29, 2005 @ 4:21 pm
June 29th, 2005 at 5:06 pm
Yeah, apparently this joint doesn't like negative pressure…
Joy Says:
see if Wright's got something in there about G[ravity] in a GR manifold that does not rely upon mass/matter.
From Ned Wright's site, and hold your breath that it comes out right:
The magnitude of the negative pressure needed for energy conservation is easily found to be P = -u = -rho*c^2 where P is the pressure, u is the vacuum energy density, and rho is the equivalent mass density using E = m*c^2.
But in General Relativity, pressure has weight, which means that the gravitational acceleration at the edge of a uniform density sphere is not given by…
g = GM/R2 = (4*pi/3)*G*rho*R
…but is rather given by
g = (4*pi/3)*G*(rho+3P/c2)*R
Now Einstein wanted a static model, which means that g = 0, but he also wanted to have some matter, so rho > 0, and thus he needed P
rho(vacuum) = 0.5*rho(matter)
…he had a total density of 1.5*rho(matter) and a total pressure of -0.5*rho(matter)*c2 since the pressure from ordinary matter is essentially zero (compared to rho*c2). Thus rho+3P/c2 = 0 and the gravitational acceleration was zero,
g = (4*pi/3)*G*(rho(matter)-2*rho(vacuum))*R = 0
…allowing a static Universe.
Einstein's Greatest Blunder
However, there is a basic flaw in this Einstein static model: it is unstable - like a pencil balanced on its point. For imagine that the Universe grew slightly: say by 1 part per million in size. Then the vacuum energy density stays the same, but the matter energy density goes down by 3 parts per million. This gives a net negative gravitational acceleration, which makes the Universe grow even more! If instead the Universe shrank slightly, one gets a net positive gravitational acceleration, which makes it shrink more! Any small deviation gets magnified, and the model is fundamentally flawed.
In addition to this flaw of instability, the static model's premise of a static Universe was shown by Hubble to be incorrect. This led Einstein to refer to the cosmological constant as his greatest blunder, and to drop it from his equations. But it still exists as a possibility — a coefficient that should be determined from observations or fundamental theory.
Comment by island — June 29, 2005 @ 5:06 pm
June 29th, 2005 at 6:38 pm
Joy says:
Given that RQFT has reached all the way to genuine "˜Unitary Crisis' on this very issue…
Speaking of QFT, my last post to the moderated research group touched on just that:
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr...
Dirac's was able to unify Quantum Theory and Special Relativity via the Dirac equation, but his hole theory failed to unify QM and General Relativity.
"Dirac's sea of electrons" has an infinite charge density, and that's why it failed, but he didn't have any reason to use Einstein's abandoned model, because everybody alread "knew" that it was flawed…
Einstein's vacuum doesn't have Dirac's problem because you have to condense his negative pressure vacuum energy down over a finite region of space in order to achieve positive matter density, pressure, and gravitational curvature, so both particles leave real "holes" in the vacuum, which creates a void that increases negative pressure.
That's why we don't observe antimatter until we isolate the release of enough energy to achieve and "island" of positive gravitational curvature in space-time, more commonly known as "virtual particles".
Hit this "island" of condensed vacuum energy with a 1.2 MeV photon and you'll make it a real particle pair, with positive mass, matter density, and gravitational curvature, but with opposite sign… which is exactly what we observe.
Comment by island — June 29, 2005 @ 6:38 pm
June 29th, 2005 at 7:01 pm
Thanks, Island. I have gone through Wright's whole article (minus pencil work, which I refuse to do this close to the 4th of July on general principles). Hoping to get through some of his other site pages this after dinner to see if I can glean an overview.
Seems at first glance that he's trying to salvage Einstein's original idea. Which may prove more parsiminous than the endless add-ons and gymnastics mathematicians have been playing with for so long. On that level (if you believe Hawking), all this fun with symbols doesn't describe 'reality' - it just has to agree with what comes out at the back end of the accelerator's target zone.
What comes out the back end of the target zone, btw, no longer agrees with the predictions. Even when they 'cheat'.
You're never going to meet a strange quark or a colored gluon in 'real' life, though they might be good names for rock bands. It is possible to meet a singularity (very unpleasant), and if they can manage a strangelet, we may never even know what hit us before everything that 'is' is suddenly 'not'. I find that rather cavalier and presumptuous, but then, I value my life in time a lot more than the atom-smashers do.
The Unitary Crisis is a serious blow to the symmetry/supersymmetry models. Wiggly Higgly is still MIA at ~2TeV when it should have shown up (or at least a redheaded stepchild should have) a long time ago. CERN, Fermilab and even Brookhaven think they're all the way to mini-holes from heavy ion collisions, for Pete's sake! How the heck can you get to singularity without ever encountering Higgs?
The sheer volume of Nobels awarded for virtual beasties in the 'hood should not be allowed to fool us into thinking the model is correct - for all its predictive power at lower energies. If mass isn't a property of matter, the good ol' Standard Model and its symmetric dreams are in serious trouble. It could be that the geometry - all the way to Planck - is dynamic all by its lonesome. Meaning that we may have been going about things backwards.
I could definitely be way off-base, of course. But the idea has been intriguing to me for about 25 years. There is still some incompleteness in GR, but it's not nearly as incomplete as RQFT. A step back for the broader view might just be an excellent step to take at this point in spacetime.
[NOTE: I see you've added something about Dirac's equation, which I'll address later - I think he was wrong about unification, right about monopoles. Been having some storms here and my ISP keeps getting whacked.]
Comment by Joy — June 29, 2005 @ 7:01 pm
June 29th, 2005 at 7:21 pm
Joy says:
Seems at first glance that he's trying to salvage Einstein's original idea.
Not he, me… ;)… I accidentally fell onto the "holes in the vacuum" discovery quite a while before I realized that this wasn't the commonly accepted model for General Relativity with a cosmological constant:
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr...
Regardless, the implications to gravity theory were clear.
And then, in a separate and apparently unrelated discussion, it was noted that an entropic interpretation of the anthropic principle is most natural in an expanding universe, since this predominant tendency is a grand scale expression for "purpose" in our universe, because every action is ultimately made in an effort to satisfy the grand scale imbalance.
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr...
Course, that was before I had a ton of evidence that proves that both are intricately related via evolutionary theory:
http://www.anthropic-principle...
Talk about teleology… you don't know how much this bumbling scientist hates the anthropic principle now that I know what people think they "know" about it. You can't imagine how satisfied this honest student of nature is tho…
Comment by island — June 29, 2005 @ 7:21 pm
June 29th, 2005 at 7:41 pm
Joy says:
There is still some incompleteness in GR, but it's not nearly as incomplete as RQFT. A step back for the broader view might just be an excellent step to take at this point in spacetime.
It fell apart when Dirac failed to uniy QM and GR after sucessfully unifying SR and QM.
That should have clued them, but instead, they rationalized their way around it, and carried the Dirac's flaw right through QFT to Loop Quantum Gravity and String theory, rather than to fix the problem where it originated.
Modern Quantum Field Theory is not by any means a replacement of Dirac's hole theory, as the difference lies in the treatment of the Boson fields, where the positive spectrum condition doesn't have Dirac Sea analogue, but the net charge density still exists as the zero-point charge, only, it's cancelled out! The cancellation represents an anomaly removal condition which defines the restriction on the charge spectrum, where…
4(nu)+4(e)+12(up)+12(down)=0
The condition is said to be a consequence of quantum gravity but in reality it's a direct consequence of the requirement that the zero-point charges must all be finite. Dirac's subtraction argument has not been removed by quantum field theory, it has only been shifted into a different place…
…the operator, as normal ordering of QED.
General Relativity tells us that gravitation is essentially curvature due to the energy contained in a region, so the condensation of enough vacuum energy over a region of space effectively convertes this energy to the positve mass density of real particles, and so this 'departure' is maintained in this manner. These departures will no longer produce negative curvature, so they cannot have negative pressure, because the energy density of these condensed particles is significantly greater than the background negative pressure vacuum energy density is.
In terms of the Entropy of a Black Hole, the emmited anti-electron has the same gravitational properties as an electron and the electron has a greater chance for survival, (thus maintaining the departure, indefinitely), since it might be a long time before it meets an antiparticle if its counterpart antiparticle gets sucked into the black hole.
There will be a contribution -e for each occupied state of positive energy and a contribution -e for each unoccupied state of negative energy, because negative pressure increases in proportion to the holes that the departures represent.
That fixes Dirac's hole theory to work by the same mechanism in both, the gravitational and electromagnetic fields, so it also fixes his flawed cosmological model as well as his "Large Numbers Hypothesis", thereby shedding a clarifying light on the previously incomplete and tautologous, Anthropic Principle.
Comment by island — June 29, 2005 @ 7:41 pm
June 29th, 2005 at 8:15 pm
Just so you know, the code for less than is & lt; (without the space). It looks like this: <
- Giff
Comment by thegiffman — June 29, 2005 @ 8:15 pm
June 30th, 2005 at 1:13 pm
Island, I'm not asleep or even totally lost, despite on-off electricity after serious storms and flooding (had to sleep with the dogs last night, still trying to salvage the basement and clouds are moving in again…). I am working on response, but also have come to realize this thread deserves a blog-spot of its own. I'm working on making that happen to, so please bear with me.
Thanx!
Comment by Joy — June 30, 2005 @ 1:13 pm
June 30th, 2005 at 8:19 pm
Island -
I have some questions about the material I've reviewed so far, the answers to which may aid my understanding. I sincerely apologize if they seem stupid - and readily admit they may well be stupid. You have probably answered these specifically in the links you've provided and material you've posted. But it's hot, my printer is out of ink, the rain keeps coming, the dogs are grumpy, the basement is still knee-deep, and now the fridge has conked out. Worse, we're expecting at least 20 people for the holiday. Please help…
You assign "weight" [inertial mass? virtual mass? gravitational potential?] to negative vacuum energy, and suggest this "weight" is quantizable - particularity to Dirac 'holes' [positrons?], a correlation to QED[?]. Do I understand correctly? If so or somewhere close….
1. You seem to be separating mass from matter here and assigning it to the zero-point field ['lattice'?]. Is this Higgs or equivalent to Higgs?
2. If Higgs, what is the specific relationship to gravitation - through matter itself or through a matter-accumulation/creating field? Is there an exchange boson [at what energy level]?
3. Is the field scalable? If so, what spacetime metric are you working with?
4. How many dimensions are you factoring?
5. Are you limited to electron/positron extremals in your zero-point field?
6. Does directional time [thermodynamic, Prigogene's edge of chaos, "irreversibility") play a role, and if so, what/when/where/how - and how big? (Or are you working in time symmetry?)
As you can see, I might be lost. But I am honestly going to try to grok your model, and fit it to what else I've managed to pick up here and there. Please don't be offended by the sheer density of my skull. I earned it the hard way!
I've been following 8 dimensions in multi-tiered euclidian spacetime w/scalar hierarchies and a hedgehog extremal using a math based on P-adic primes for about 5 years now, and may have fried my poor brain - what there was of it...
P.S. It might be best for me to have a good understanding before we take this further, you can email me with details so I can ask these dumb questions directly. Click on my "profile" link [right side of main page] and the addy is there.
Comment by Joy — June 30, 2005 @ 8:19 pm