Caltech: The Mechanical Universe

Many Internet forums have carried discussion of the Electric Universe hypothesis. Much of that discussion has added more confusion than clarity, due to common misunderstandings of the electrical principles. Here we invite participants to discuss their experiences and to summarize questions that have yet to be answered.

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allynh
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Re: Caltech: The Mechanical Universe

Unread post by allynh » Fri Jul 14, 2017 10:46 pm

When I watched:

Wallace Thornhill: The Long Path to Understanding Gravity | EU2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkWiBxWieQU

He mentioned the Christmas Lectures from 1974 with Eric Laithwaite.

http://richannel.org/christmas-lectures ... laithwaite

These Lectures will burn your brain. You will need to watch them over and over to get the full impact. The importance of these lectures are profound on many levels. I just wish there was a way for me to harvest the videos rather than depend on some website.

Notice in episode 3, there are film clips of Velikovsky, but never mentioned.

Episode 4 has the stuff about the gyroscope that is in Thornhill's video. Deeply disturbing.

Episode 5 hits to the heart, the power of "analogies".
Last edited by nick c on Fri Feb 14, 2020 5:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: added link to 3.0

allynh
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Re: Caltech: The Mechanical Universe

Unread post by allynh » Wed Jan 10, 2018 9:27 pm

I just watched the NOVA episode:

Black Hole Apocalypse
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/blac ... lypse.html

This is what they beLIEve to be true. How, sad.

If the Team gets the chance, they should have one of the guys take the video apart.

allynh
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Re: Caltech: The Mechanical Universe

Unread post by allynh » Sun Jun 24, 2018 3:18 pm

Over the years I have tried to get people to see many different things, and I would find it impossible to get them to even read books or watch video on the topics.

- The more I would push them to see what I was saying, the more bizarre the pushback. HA!

I found the book Factfulness that comes close to what I'm talking about.

Factfulness
by Hans Rosling

Rosling gave lecture after lecture and found that the more educated, the more informed, his audience was the less able they were to realize that they were wrong and learn what was right.

This is a YouTube series discussing Factfulness.

Hans Rosling on factfulness (2015)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6iAhU2 ... LD4k8aXZfE

I do not see a solution to this problem. The more facts and information you present, the more people resist changing their mind.

It is a clear example of the Zen concept of the need for The Beginner's Mind. Most people are not willing to start from the beginning to actually learn something that contradicts everything that they already think that they know.

From wiki:
Shoshin is a word from Zen Buddhism meaning "beginner's mind." It refers to having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner would. The term is especially used in the study of Zen Buddhism and Japanese martial arts.

The phrase is also discussed in the book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki, a Zen teacher. Suzuki outlines the framework behind shoshin, noting "in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few."
I'm sure you guys have come across this many times. Watch the YouTube series and maybe read the book just to realize that it happens all the time and not just with "Fringe" stuff. HA!

allynh
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Re: Caltech: The Mechanical Universe

Unread post by allynh » Mon Jun 25, 2018 11:06 am

I love the synchronicity.

This is a book review by Michael Shermer about a book by Alan Lightman. You have Alan Lightman as the blindfolded man trying to describe an elephant, and Michael Shermer saying what a good job Lightman has done. HA!

Both authors walk around with a "full cup". Neither is able to come at something with "Beginner's Mind" and see what's really there.

Must Science Conflict With Spirituality?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/book ... maine.html
By Michael Shermer
June 25, 2018
Nonfiction

Chloé Poizat
SEARCHING FOR STARS ON AN ISLAND IN MAINE

By Alan Lightman
226 pp. Pantheon Books. $24.95.

In 1801, Samuel Taylor Coleridge calculated the impact ratio of scientists to poets like this: “The souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton.” Defending his 1820 poem “Lamia,” John Keats growled that Isaac Newton had “destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism,” lamenting that natural philosophy (in other words, science) will, as his poem put it, “unweave a rainbow.”

Does a scientific understanding of the world erase its emotional impact or spiritual power? Of course not. Science and spirituality are complementary, not conflicting. The physicist Richard Feynman reflected on this in a 1981 BBC interview, “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out,” recalling a conversation with an artist about appreciating a flower: “The beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. … At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. … The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower.”

Spirituality is a way of being in the world, a sense of one’s place in the cosmos, a relationship to that which extends beyond ourselves. I call this sciencuality, a neologism that echoes the sensuality of discovery. “Our contemplations of the cosmos stir us,” the astronomer Carl Sagan declared, waxing poetic in the opening scene of his documentary series “Cosmos,” one of the most spiritual expressions of science ever produced. “There is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory of falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries.”

Science needs its poets, and Alan Lightman is the perfect amalgam of scientist (an astrophysicist) and humanist (a novelist who’s also a professor of the practice of humanities at M.I.T.), and his latest book, “Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine,” is an elegant and moving paean to our spiritual quest for meaning in an age of science. The book consists of 20 tightly composed essays on a variety of topics (stars, atoms, truth, transcendence, death, certainty, origins and so on) with a single narrative thread running through them: the search for something deeper in the materialist worldview of the scientist.

Take death. “For a materialist,” Lightman writes, “death is the name that we give to a collection of atoms that once had the special arrangement of a functioning neuronal network and now no longer does so.” But this is unsatisfying. Of his parents, Lightman wonders: “Where are they now, my deceased mother and father? I know the materialist explanation, but that does nothing to relieve my longing for them, or the impossible truth that they do not exist.” Lightman doesn’t fear death. “Despite my belief that I am only a collection of atoms, that my awareness is passing away neuron by neuron, I am content with the illusion of life. I’ll take it. And I find a pleasure in knowing that a hundred years from now, even a thousand years from now, some of my atoms will remain on Lute Island.”

Lute Island, Maine, is where Lightman’s journey begins. On a clear moonless night in a tiny motorboat on his way to this summer retreat, sensing something special about the moment, he turned off the running lights and engine, lay down on his back to take in the ocean of stars, and let himself go. “The boat disappeared. My body disappeared. And I found myself falling into infinity. A feeling came over me I’d not experienced before.” Mystics and meditators aim for this sense of oneness with the universe, but Lightman’s just happened. “I felt an overwhelming connection to the stars, as if I were part of them. And the vast expanse of time — extending from the far distant past long before I was born and then into the far distant future long after I will die — seemed compressed to a dot. I felt connected not only to the stars but to all of nature, and to the entire cosmos. I felt a merging with something far larger than myself, a grand and eternal unity, a hint of something absolute.” When he returned to an awareness of his body and boat, he “had no idea how long I’d been lying there.”

What is a scientist to make of such mystical experiences? Lightman begins with absolutes, “ethereal things that are all-encompassing, unchangeable, eternal, sacred.” Absolutes “refer to an enduring and fixed reference point that can anchor and guide us through our temporary lives.” Absolutes go beyond science and are “rooted in personal experience, but they involve beliefs beyond that experience.” The problem, he admits, is that “the tenets of the absolutes” can’t be proved, “certainly not in the way that science has proven the existence of atoms,” so we are left with internal truths, those that are by definition out of the realm of science, to be understood solely through experience.

And then there’s faith. What Lightman calls the central doctrine of science — that “all properties and events in the physical universe are governed by laws, and those laws hold true at every time and place in the universe” — is an article of faith because “it cannot be proved.” It “must simply be accepted.” In support of this, he cites no less a luminary than Albert Einstein, who “believed in a beautiful and mysterious order underlying the world.”

Ultimately, scientists must convince other scientists that their theory of the absolute is true (or at least not false), and to do so they must leave the mystical realm of personal experience and return to the lab. But Lightman’s aim in this insightful and provocative musing is to remind us of the centrality of subjectivity in all human endeavors, including those of science.

Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American and a presidential fellow at Chapman University. His latest book is “Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia.”

Follow New York Times Books on Facebook and Twitter, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.

allynh
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Re: Caltech: The Mechanical Universe

Unread post by allynh » Sat Aug 31, 2019 3:56 pm

I've been finding out tons of stuff about Donald Hoffman and his new book, The Case Against Reality. I'm putting a post together about his stuff, it begins to answer the question I started upstream about how people can't seem to learn new things, The Beginner's Mind concept I've been trying to understand. More on that in another post.

Along the way Hoffman mentioned a fun lecture about replacing Feynman diagrams with something called the Amplituhedron. Instead of a hundred pages of Feynman diagrams to solve a collision, you have one page of Amplituhedron.

Wiki - Amplituhedron

Public Lecture | The End of Spacetime
by Nima Arkani-Hamed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-C5RubqtRA

In the lecture Nima said many times that virtual particles do not exist. That essentially, virtual particles are an artifact of the Feynman diagram. The concept is useful for solving the equations, but only exist on the page, not in reality.
wiki, Feynman diagram wrote:In theoretical physics, Feynman diagrams are pictorial representations of the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles. The scheme is named after its inventor, American physicist Richard Feynman, and was first introduced in 1948. The interaction of sub-atomic particles can be complex and difficult to understand intuitively. Feynman diagrams give a simple visualization of what would otherwise be an arcane and abstract formula. As David Kaiser writes, "since the middle of the 20th century, theoretical physicists have increasingly turned to this tool to help them undertake critical calculations", and so "Feynman diagrams have revolutionized nearly every aspect of theoretical physics".[1] While the diagrams are applied primarily to quantum field theory, they can also be used in other fields, such as solid-state theory.
This is what I was taught in High school in the 70s.
wiki, Zero-point energy wrote:Physicists Richard Feynman and John Wheeler calculated the zero-point radiation of the vacuum to be an order of magnitude greater than nuclear energy, with a single light bulb containing enough energy to boil all the world's oceans.
No virtual particles, no vast amounts of Zero-point energy. That means all my favorite Stargate SG-1 episodes are simply fantasy, and all those con artists trying to sell ZPE devices will be out of business.

The other critical point I saw in the lecture:

- Without virtual particles, black holes do not evaporate. Hawking was wrong.

Yes, I know, there are no black holes, but if the Amplituhedron replaces the Feynman diagram, all hell will break loose. Everything Hawking was credited with will be thrown out, yet they will still teach about Hawking radiation for decades to come.
wiki, Hawking radiation wrote:Physical insight into the process may be gained by imagining that particle–antiparticle radiation is emitted from just beyond the event horizon. This radiation does not come directly from the black hole itself, but rather is a result of virtual particles being "boosted" by the black hole's gravitation into becoming real particles.[9] As the particle–antiparticle pair was produced by the black hole's gravitational energy, the escape of one of the particles lowers the mass of the black hole.

An alternative view of the process is that vacuum fluctuations cause a particle–antiparticle pair to appear close to the event horizon of a black hole. One of the pair falls into the black hole while the other escapes. In order to preserve total energy, the particle that fell into the black hole must have had a negative energy (with respect to an observer far away from the black hole). This causes the black hole to lose mass, and, to an outside observer, it would appear that the black hole has just emitted a particle. In another model, the process is a quantum tunneling effect, whereby particle–antiparticle pairs will form from the vacuum, and one will tunnel outside the event horizon.
Wiki has a nice animation of what Quantum fluctuation for virtual particles should be. All that is now gone, because it never was. HA!

BTW, Virtual particles are a classic example of the dogma pushed by Scientism on people. That's 70 years of preaching something as "Fact" with zero physical evidence. It will take decades before it is finally labeled as BS and deleted by the Wiki Police.

crawler
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Re: Caltech: The Mechanical Universe

Unread post by crawler » Sat Aug 31, 2019 6:27 pm

allynh wrote:.........Along the way Hoffman mentioned a fun lecture about replacing Feynman diagrams with something called the Amplituhedron. Instead of a hundred pages of Feynman diagrams to solve a collision, you have one page of Amplituhedron.
Wiki - Amplituhedron
Wikileaks...... The geometric nature of the theory suggests in turn that the nature of the universe, in both classical relativistic spacetime and quantum mechanics, may be described with geometry.[7]
I dont like the look of theories that start & finish with geometry, with more geometry in the middle, to try to explain things that aint geometry. Even if they are basically only models, not reality. But i suspect that amplituhedrons are meant to be reality. At least they hav ditched spacetime, thats a good start. Pretty soon they will ditch quantum stuff, after which we will make better progress.

Myron Evans too used geometry to try to explain lots of physics, with some goodish results i think, but there must be limits.

I must hav a good look at thems mechanical universe videos in the OP.

allynh
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Re: Caltech: The Mechanical Universe

Unread post by allynh » Sun Sep 01, 2019 12:43 am

Yikes!

When you mentioned the Caltech videos I went to check them again online, and the links don't work. Luckily the whole series is on YouTube as a list.

The Mechanical Universe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtMmeAj ... dk-XGtA5cZ

Glad that they are still available. Lucky I harvested copies for myself when I could.

Many of the earlier links are dead. I will have to go page by page and see if I can find alternates.

Bit rot has set in. HA!

allynh
Posts: 919
Joined: Fri Aug 22, 2008 5:51 pm

Re: Caltech: The Mechanical Universe

Unread post by allynh » Thu Oct 31, 2019 1:46 pm

When Scientific American starts seeing something, then you know that it's getting bad.

We’re Incentivizing Bad Science
Current research trends resemble the early 21st century’s financial bubble
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/ob ... d-science/
James ZimringOctober 29, 2019
We're Incentivizing Bad Science
Credit: Gillian Blease Getty Images

Whatever you might want to say about humans, our behavior is profoundly affected by the incentive structures we encounter. Imagine what might happen if banks that issued home loans no longer made money off the interest, but rather made money by blending the loans into investment bonds that they then sold to investors. There are a limited number of people fortunate enough to afford a home. Once all those people had mortgages, the banks would then become a mortgage-backed–security factory that had run out of raw materials to make its product.

The banks could simply stop making money—or they could start making loans to anyone who applied, regardless of people’s ability to pay. After all, once the loans were sold to investors, the risk was no longer the bank’s. Of course, the rating agencies are designed to alert us to risk, but they get paid to do so by the banks, and angering your only customer base is not good business. Prior to 2008, without the intention of doing so, the system had evolved such that the bankers were specifically incentivized to inflate a massive bubble in the economy, built upon bad loans and unsustainable debt, and make a fortune doing it at no risk to themselves—and this is precisely what they did.

So, let’s imagine what might happen if the rules of professional science evolved such that scientists were incentivized to publish as many papers as they could and if those who published many papers of poor scientific rigor were rewarded over those who published fewer papers of higher rigor? What would happen if scientists weren’t rewarded for the long-term reproducibility and rigor of their findings, but rather became a factory that produced and published highly exciting and innovative new discoveries, and then other scientists and companies spent resources on the follow up studies and took all the risk?

Just as banks in 2008 made money from selling the loans, not holding the loans, the quality of the loan ceased to be meaningful to them. Likewise, once published, the innovators of novel science often move onto the next new innovation, and because of publication bias and the “file drawer effect,” we never hear about it if their findings fail in the hands of others. Of course, reputations for good work affect scientists as much as anyone else, but one or two “real” advances by a researcher will erase any downside to even a litany of other findings that disappeared into the trash pile of time since no one else can reproduce them. Indeed, in a now famous report from Bayer Pharmaceuticals, 65 percent of published scientific findings were not reproducible by Bayer scientists when they tried to use them for drug development.

This is not an issue of scientific fraud or misconduct where scientists invent data or purposefully lie; the data are real and were really observed. However, the fiercely competitive environment leads to a haste to publish and a larger number of less rigorous papers results. Careful and self-critical scientists who spend more time and resources to carry out more rigorous and careful studies may be promoted less often, receive fewer research resources and get less recognition for their work.

Of course, scientific publication is subjected to a high degree of quality control through the peer-review process, which despite the political and societal factors that are ineradicable parts of human interaction, is one of the “crown jewels” of scientific objectivity. However, this is changing. The very laudable goal of “open access journals” is to make sure that the public has free access to the scientific data that its tax dollars are used to generate.

However, open access journals charge the authors of articles a substantial fee to publish, in order to make up for the dollars lost from not requiring subscriptions. So, instead of making more money the more copies of the journal they sell, open access journals make more money as a function of how many articles they accept. Authors are willing to pay more to get their articles published in more prestigious journals. So, the more exciting the findings a journal publishes, the more references, the higher the impact the journal, the more submissions they get, the more money they make.

Self-regulation by scientists of decades and centuries past has created modern science with all its virtues and triumphs. However, much like the bankers of the early 21st century, we risk allowing new incentives to erode our self-regulation and skew our perceptions and behavior; similar to the risky loans underlying mortgage-backed securities, faulty scientific observations can form a bubble and an unstable edifice. As science is ultimately self-correcting, faulty conclusions are remedied with ongoing study, but this takes a great deal of time.

Unless and until leadership is taken at a structural and societal level to alter the incentive structure present, the current environment will continue to encourage and promote wasting of resources, squandering of research efforts and delaying of progress; such waste and delay is something that those suffering diseases for which we have inadequate therapy, and those suffering conditions for which we have inadequate technological remedies, can ill afford and should not be forced to endure.


<Moderator Note> this thread is continued here:
https://www.thunderbolts.info/forum3/ph ... p=346#p346
Last edited by nick c on Fri Feb 14, 2020 5:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: added link to 3.0

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