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 summarise questions that have yet to be answered.
allynh
Posts: 1115
Joined: Sat Aug 23, 2008 12:51 am

Caltech: The Mechanical Universe

Unread post by allynh » Thu Jan 16, 2020 2:51 am

<Moderator Note> this thread is a continuation from here:
https://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/php ... 3&start=75




Here is a link to the original thread.

https://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/php ... 579#p18505

As you read the old thread, you will find many broken links. If that happens, then access:

The Way Back Machine
https://archive.org/web/

Simply copy the broken link from the Forum page, and paste it into the Way Back Machine to see if it was ever archived. Find a valid copy of the missing web site and read the article.

- Learn how to use the Way Back Machine.

- The Way Back Machine is your friend.

When I started the original thread in the old Forum, it was to have the entire series available to watch. It is the consensus dogma of science, from the viewpoint of The "Mechanical" Universe when in reality we are in The Electric Universe.

- You can't really understand the difference until you can see what is consensus.

It is also a great series showing what can be done with lectures of YouTube. I still would like to see a series that equals it showing everything that we have found so far.

Luckily the whole series is on YouTube as a list.

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

I also used the thread to mention everything that would help open up ways of thinking, videos, books, articles. I will keep adding to the list as I stumble across things.

Have fun.
Last edited by nick c on Sat Feb 15, 2020 12:17 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: link to 2.0 added

allynh
Posts: 1115
Joined: Sat Aug 23, 2008 12:51 am

Re: Caltech: The Mechanical Universe

Unread post by allynh » Mon Feb 03, 2020 6:47 pm

A clueless friend of mine sent me this link about TRex because it mentions "Harris Hawks". He's clueless because the article is on a political "click bait" site and he is not aware of that. The only reason he saw the article is because family sends him anything that appears on the web that mentions "Harris Hawks", no matter the context. When you read through the article, you will see that this has nothing to do with "Harris Hawks". HA!

- I have not included the link so that you don't get hit by unwanted cookies. I routinely "clear history" and clear the browser many times a day when I'm roaming through the web, but I digress.

Read through the article. When you do, notice the politics at play rather than the fossils found.

The various fossil finds are amazing, but instead of simply reporting the finds, they have to include an "opinion", a "narrative", describing what the find implies. Opinion leads to politics as others vie against changing their own narratives. The narratives they create controls their status and funding in the system.

This is the heart of what the "soft" sciences do. This is the opposite of what "hard" science is like. "Hard" science is all about things you can build. That if you understand materials then you can build amazing things like jet planes and skyscrapers.

The "soft" sciences are all about opinion, which leads to politics; for publication, for power, for funding. Which leads to the problem that we find ourselves in today.

Museum Pieces: T Rex's Family Life
One of the unique exhibits at the LA County Natural History Museum is the “T rex series”—a display of three skeletons of Tyrannosaurus rex ranging from a youngster to a “teenager” to a fullsize adult. The trio of skeletons illustrates a debate which has been raging since the 1990s, when paleontologist Philip Currie of the Royal Tyrell Museum in Canada made a series of discoveries which set off a still-running controversy about the social and family life of Tyrannosaurus rex.

"Museum Pieces" is a diary series that explores the history behind some of the most interesting museum exhibits and historical places.

DSCN6443
T rex skeletons

In 1910, Barnum Brown, from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, was canoeing down a river in Alberta, Canada, when he came upon some fossils eroding from the banks. Brown had just become world-famous several years previously for his discovery of a nearly-complete T rex skeleton in Montana, and now he identified these new finds as Albertosaurus, a close but slightly-smaller relative of the Tyrannosaurus. Although he noted that there appeared to be a large number of skeletons, he was only able to collect a few bones and bring them back to New York. There the fossils stayed in the Museum’s vaults, mostly forgotten, until 1996 when they were examined by Currie.

Intrigued by Brown’s field notes that described the large number of skeletons that he had left behind, Currie thought that the site may still hold some scientific interest. By painstakingly studying a few photographs taken by Brown, he was finally able to identify the spot where the bones had been found—in what was now the Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park. He began excavating the site.

It quickly became apparent that Brown had been right—there were a lot of skeletons here. Over the next ten years, in an area just fifty yards wide, Currie uncovered over a thousand bones from at least 26 identifiable individual Albertosaurus, ranging in size from large to small. “The indications are very clear in this bonebed,” he concluded, “that the tyrannosaurs were here because they died together at the same time and almost certainly were living together at the time of their death.” In other words, they were a pack.

This was a controversial assertion. Since most tyrannosaurids (a group of large meat-eaters that included Tyrannosaurus, Albertosaurus and Tarbosaurus) had been found as individual skeletons, it had always been assumed that they were solitary hunters, like bears or jaguars, coming together only occasionally for mating. So the idea that Albertosaurus—and by extension the other tyrannosaurids too—were pack hunters that lived in social groups, like wolves or lions, was a contentious one.

More evidence arrived. In 2006, Currie began five years of field work in the Gobi Desert as part of the Korea-Mongolia International Dinosaur Project. Scattered over several dozen sites, the team found almost 100 skeletons and bones of Tarbosaurus, an Asian tyrannosaurid. But one of these sites was particularly important—it contained the skeletons of six individuals ranging from juvenile to adult. Once again, Currie concluded that this was a family group that had died together.

Then, in October 2011, a hunting guide in British Columbia, Canada, found some dinosaur footprints. When Richard McCrea from the Peace Region Palaeontology Center investigated, he found three sets of tracks that, from the size and shape, came from one of the tyrannosaurids of the time (Albertosaurus, Gorgosaurus or Daspletosaurus). The trackways ran for about 200 feet and consisted of three individuals. The footprints all faced in the same direction, were parallel to each other, and were all pressed to the same depth in the mud—indicating that they had crossed together at the same time, as a group. One of the individuals had suffered a previously-healed injury and had lost the tip of one of the toes on its left foot.

Based on all this, Currie now offered a more detailed hypothesis which speculated on the possible family life of the tyrannosaurids. Comparing the skeletons of the juvenile Albertosaurus and Tarbosaurus, he noticed that they changed significantly as they got older. The “teenage” tyrannosaurids were slenderly built with longer legs and lighter skulls. The adults, on the other hand, were heavier and bulkier, with huge robust skulls that were capable of much more powerful bites. So Currie speculated that perhaps they hunted together in a pack that took advantage of each other’s strengths: the faster and agile youngsters may have driven prey animals into an ambush where the adults were waiting to deliver the killing bites. The entire pack could then feed on the downed prey.

Debate followed, with several different options offered as models for tyrannosaurid pack behavior. The basic problem is that we have no way of fossilizing “behavior”, so the only thing we can do is look at the behavior of modern animals as a model. The closest living relatives to the predatory dinosaurs are birds, but, with the sole exception of the Harris Hawk, no birds are known to hunt together cooperatively (and the Harris Hawks fly). The best models we have are pack animals like wolves and lions, but these are mammals, and their physiology and biology are completely different. In wolves, all of the pack members (except the cubs) participate in the hunt. In lions, however, it is only the adult females who do all of the hunting, but the adult males always get first pick at the resulting kill. Did T rex follow one of these models, or did it live in a different manner entirely? Perhaps, for example, the teens did all the hunting and both the adult males and females used their bone-crunching jaws on prey that had already been killed. We have no way of knowing.

All of this, in turn, fed into another controversy that had also been going on for many years. In 1946, a bone-hunter named Charles Gilmore found a skull in Montana which he identified as a young Gorgosaurus. But when paleontologist Bob Bakker examined it in 1988 at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, he re-identified it as a Tyrannosaurus rex. But then he noticed something odd—some of the bones appeared to be fused together, a normal process which occurs during growth and appears in individuals which are fully-grown and “osteologically mature”. Strangely, although this skull appeared to belong to an adult, it was less than half the size of a typical T rex. It also had a different number of teeth, and some small differences in the skull structure. After much thought, Bakker decided that it was not a young T rex after all, but was an adult of a new species, a sort of miniature version of T rex that he named Nanotyrannus. When others examined the same skull, however, they concluded that it was really a juvenile tyrannosaurid, most likely a T rex.

Enter “Jane”. In 2001, an expedition from the Burpee Museum of Natural History, in Rockford IL, uncovered a nearly-complete skeleton at the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, not far from where the Cleveland skull had been found. Named “Jane” after a financial benefactor, this find was almost identical to the Cleveland skull but was much more complete, allowing a much more detailed analysis. Although most of the bones in the skeleton were unfused, indicating that it was still a juvenile, Jane was already over 20 feet long, about half the size of the adult T rex specimens. Some of the bones in Jane’s skull also seemed to be closer to those of adult specimens than the Cleveland skull. And the rest of the skeleton demonstrated the light build and long legs that had been seen in the juvenile Tarbosaurus and Albertosaurus. Although Bakker and a few others continue to hold out, the majority view today is that the species Nanotyranus is invalid, and that these actually are juvenile T rex specimens.

NOTE: As some of you already know, all of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of books I am working on. So I welcome any corrections you may have, whether it's typos or places that are unclear or factual errors. I think of y'all as my pre-publication editors and proofreaders. ;)

allynh
Posts: 1115
Joined: Sat Aug 23, 2008 12:51 am

Gravity Probe B

Unread post by allynh » Fri Feb 14, 2020 6:29 pm

A number of threads have mentioned "frame dragging", without going in to details. I've hesitated to post this on those threads, I did not want to derail the subject with a discussion of the politics of scientism, but I digress.

Gravity Probe B was hailed as the most "Extraordinary Technology" that they had designed to test "frame-dragging".

After all of the press hoopla, and the launch, I waited for the results, and there was only silence. NASA had abandoned it because the results were not confirming consensus. Then it got other funding to process the suspect data. When the data was forced to fit theory, NASA acknowledged it again.

This is a video giving a summary about the experiment. It's Brian Greene of course, cheerleader extraordinaire.

Gravity probe B Beyond The Cosmos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsu0DRsvQiA

They basically massaged the data to force it to fit predictions. This is the NASA press release. Notice the Saudi prince who paid for the extra work was in the audience. I suspect his presence is why they made the announcement.
NASA's Gravity Probe B (GP-B) spacecraft has confirmed two key predictions derived from Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. Launched in 2004, GP-B was designed to test Einstein using four ultra-precise gyroscopes to measure the hypothesized geodetic effect, which is the warping of space and time around a gravitational body, and frame-dragging, which is the amount a spinning object pulls space and time with it as it rotates. (News briefing held May 4, 2011 at NASA Headquarters in Washington.)
Watch the press conference, the arrogance on display is astonishing.

Einstein Passes Tests by NASA's Gravity Probe B
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBiY0Fn1ze4

If frame-dragging is actually like the "Earth moving in honey", you would have orbital decay, and the Earth would not be in orbit. Yikes!

This is from the Stanford site:

The Extraordinary Technologies of GP-B
https://einstein.stanford.edu/TECH/technology1.html

This is the FAQ page from the Stanford site:

Gravity Probe B
http://einstein.stanford.edu/content/fa ... l#tracking

This is background wiki:

Gravity Probe B
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Probe_B

This is the picture that they kept using on every article, showing the amazingly precise spheres that they made.

File:Einstein gyro gravity probe b.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eins ... robe_b.jpg

Be sure to look at the external links to articles on the wiki page.

Frame-dragging
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame-dragging

User avatar
Zyxzevn
Posts: 1117
Joined: Wed Dec 11, 2013 11:48 pm
Location: Earth

Gravity Probe B

Unread post by Zyxzevn » Fri Feb 14, 2020 11:54 pm

It was clearly too big to fail.

The magical correction from the NULL-result, shows the sad
state of the science around it.

Another bad magical correction is found with the Plank satellite, where
no consistent background radiation was fond. Instead there were millions of point
sources.
To correct this null result, the teams mixed the data from earth and earth based satellite with
the data from the Plank. Subtracted and added some bits, depending on the data, and "magically"
created the chart that is now shown everywhere.
(See Robitaille's lecture about it)

For some reason the astronomers can not deal with null results.
It is holding science backwards.
More ** from zyxzevn at: Paradigm change and C@

allynh
Posts: 1115
Joined: Sat Aug 23, 2008 12:51 am

Paradox Lost

Unread post by allynh » Mon Feb 24, 2020 10:19 pm

Watch this video.

Relativity: how people get time dilation wrong
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svwWKi9sSAA

It's part of a series of beautiful videos from Fermilab, that are absolutely wrong. You need to watch them, and you will see the problem. He keeps pointing out that things don't make sense, that they create a "Paradox".

That's the point.

- If you have a "Paradox" then you are not looking at all of the information.

- If their is a "Paradox" it is wrong, and you have to find what is wrong in your experiment.

- If after all of your experiments, and the "Paradox" is still there, then you are missing something, or adding something that is not there.

Does this guy actually believe what he is saying? Possibly, but "belief" is not science.

Don't get me wrong, a "Paradox" is a great starting point for experimentation, so they are very useful things.

Example:

Look at Olbers' Paradox, asking why is the night sky dark instead of being filled with light. There is no "Paradox" because if you look at the night sky, with the right equipment, you will see light everywhere. They had a "Paradox" in the past, because they did not have enough information, or the right equipment.

There is nothing wrong with Olbers' Paradox as a great starting point for experiment to find out if there are any dark regions of the sky, but it is just a starting point.

Now, let's get to the "Twins Paradox" and "time dilation".

I can't remember which EU lecture I watched, but one guy who worked at CERN pointed out that when grad students show up for work, the first thing the professor has to tell them, is:

- Time dilation does not occur.

CERN accelerates particles close to the speed of light, and time does not "dilate" for those particles. The energy built up in the particles become other particles when they collide, but I digress.

- Too many people are invested in "Twins Paradox" and "time dilation" to let it go.

The example that people always give is of high energy mesons living longer than low energy mesons as being evidence of "time dilation", and that contains the actual answer. High energy particles simply have a different "lifespan" than low energy particles. It does not mean that time "dilates". That is a leap too far.

- "Time dilation" is a fun concept that is used in fiction, like elves and dragons, but does not exist in reality. ex., Tau Zero by Poul Anderson is great science fantasy.

So no matter how fun the "thought experiment" seems, "time dilation" is still simply imagination, not reality, until it is shown to occur by experiment.

Now, hold on, you say, "time dilation" has been proven by experiment, time and again. (See what I did there. HA!)

Actually, no it has not.

PBS NOVA had a great program about atomic clocks and "time dilation":

Inside Einstein's Mind.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/ins ... eins-mind/

Look at the transcript on the page. Here is the main part:
NARRATOR: Today, 100 years after general relativity was first presented, new technology is allowing us to explore the most remarkable predictions of the theory: an expanding universe; black holes; ripples in space-time; and perhaps the most bizarre, the idea that not just space, but time, itself, is distorted by heavy objects.

NARRATOR: To prove it, a team of physicists is carrying out a remarkable experiment. They're using two atomic clocks that are in near perfect sync, accurate to a billionth of a second. The master clock remains at sea level while they take the second clock to the top of New Hampshire's Mount Sunapee.

General relativity tells us that as you move away from the mass of the planet, time should speed up. After four days at the top of the mountain, the test clock is taken back to the lab for comparison. There, they compare it to the sea level master clock. Four days ago they were in ticking in unison. But what about now?

DAVID SCHERER (Microsemi Corporation): You guys ready? This is it, right here. The time interval counter is going to show us the time difference between these two clock ticks.

Twenty nanoseconds!

You can see the time difference between them represented here, graphically: the clock that was up at the mountain for four days and our master clock.

NARRATOR: Gravity, the distortion of space and time, becomes weaker as you move away from the surface of the planet, so while the test clock was up the mountain, time sped up. It's now 20 nanoseconds, 20 billionths of a second, ahead of the sea level clock.

DAVID SCHERER: This is awesome.

NARRATOR: This distortion of time has surprising consequences. The Global Positioning System, something we all take for granted, wouldn't work without taking this into account. The engineers who built the G.P.S. system we use every day to pinpoint locations, had to ensure it adjusted for the time difference between clocks on satellites and receivers on the ground. If they didn't, G.P.S. would be off by six miles every day.

JIM GATES (University of Maryland): Your G.P.S. units use the results of general relativity. When you navigate in your car, you perhaps should give a word of thanks to Uncle Albert.
They had two atomic clocks sitting side-by-side in the lab. They synchronized the atomic clocks. They then took one atomic clock to the top of a mountain, left it there a few days, then brought it back down and compared the time shown on each atomic clock, and they did not match! The moved atomic clock was running faster than the stationary atomic clock.

- This shows that time moves slower based on gravity.

No, sorry, it does not.

The atomic clock that was taken to the top of the mountain was shaken by the journey. To test that, they should have one atomic clock on a shake table, shake it a while, then compare the time shown. That would be an experiment.

The other experiment they did was have an atomic clock in the lab and compare that to atomic clocks in the GPS satellites in Earth orbit(12,247 miles). Over time, the measured time starts to diverge, with the GPS atomic clocks running "faster" than the lab.

- This shows that time moves slower based on gravity.

Wow, that is so wrong.

The GPS atomic clock is moving at high speed, that means it should slow down, not get faster. Remember that stunt, decades ago, of flying atomic clocks in jet planes to show that they would slow down, and they did! Really? no, they didn't, they just got shaken, a lot!.

Yes, they took the speed of the GPS satellites into account, slowing down the clocks, and the height of the GPS satellite, and "declared" their results.

The real experiment would be to have an atomic clock sitting in geostationary orbit(22,236 miles) above the Earth, another atomic clock in a lab on the Earth, and compare those to the GPS satellites.

Guess what, the atomic clock in geostationary orbit is moving way faster than the GPS satellites, and is actually far enough away from the Earth to be in an even lower gravity than the GPS satellites, with the inverse-square law reduction.

- Earth radius, 3,950 miles

- GPS satellites, 12,247 miles

- geostationary orbit, 22,236 miles

Now that would be an experiment. The trouble is, they keep resetting the atomic clocks to synchronize them.

- That constant tweaking of the atomic clocks invalidates the experiment.

- No matter how well each atomic clock matches the other, they are not the same, will not work the same, will "drift" no matter what.

Every step along the way error is introduced into the system. Measuring the atomic clocks, transmitting the data, etc... So many errors built into the experiment itself. The "result" that they come up with floats within that "error". That makes it noise. They need to develop an experiment that gives results outside that "error" before they can claim a "result".

I was at University in the 1970s, getting my BS in Civil Engineering. (Yes, go ahead and play with the "BS" part. I'll wait. HA!)

In Chemistry, they had us do a deeply disturbing experiment that apparently these guys forgot, and is part of what is wrong with all the experiments mentioned.

We had electronic scales to measure weights at incredible accuracy for the day. They sat in their own little enclosures because a puff of air could change the results.

We took brass weights, a test weight. The scales were so accurate that we could not touch the weight with our fingers because it would weigh our fingerprints. We measured each test weight on two different electronic scales, and saw with precision that each scale measured a different value for each weight.

Think of it.

- Identical instruments, giving different values for the same test weight.

Even day to day, using only one electronic scale, the values will change over time because the instrument "drifts".

- When they report experiments on science programs, or you read the papers, if they do not report the "error" within the experiment, then they are not reporting science.

Remember, you can use "Paradox" to inspire experiments, that's awesome. But if all you have is "Paradox" then you do not have an answer.

allynh
Posts: 1115
Joined: Sat Aug 23, 2008 12:51 am

The Case Against Reality

Unread post by allynh » Wed Feb 26, 2020 7:32 pm

I can see what Mel Acheson is trying to do in his TPOD, but things are actually stranger than what he's talking about.

Really?
https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2020/02/26/really/

Donald Hoffman has a book out, The Case Against Reality, that shows we are not evolved to see reality. So when people talk about "seeing the real world" sorry that doesn't happen.

Essentially:

- consciousness is fundamental and physical reality is not fundamental

I first stumbled across Hoffman's work with his book review and TED talk. It's been falling down the rabbit hole ever since as I watched all of the videos and read his stuff.

Review of the book:

The case against reality
https://www.socsci.uci.edu/newsevents/n ... eality.php
The scientific method has been spectacular in terms of helping us to see where we’re wrong. And that’s the key. That’s my attitude about science. Be precise so we can find precisely where we’re wrong. We need to learn what ideas are useful and which are wrong so we can evolve on all fronts.
Start with his TED talk. Notice at the end the head of TED is deeply upset by the talk.

Do we see reality as it is? | Donald Hoffman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY

A clip from Through the Wormhole:

Can We Handle The Truth?
https://www.sciencechannel.com/tv-shows ... -the-truth

This is his website:

Donald D. Hoffman
http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/

Read this paper once you have watched all of the videos:

Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem
http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ConsciousRealism2.pdf

Watch all of the videos first, it really does help understand the book.

Closer to the Truth series:
The host, Robert Lawrence Kuhn, is having real trouble with what Hoffman is saying, that consciousness is fundamental and physical reality is not fundamental.

Donald Hoffman - Does Consciousness Cause the Cosmos?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv25EcaUQBo

Donald Hoffman - Can Religion Survive Science?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbyRrFUncAw

Donald Hoffman - Does Human Consciousness Have Special Purpose?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_zaMO3vdDA

Donald Hoffman - Does Evolutionary Psychology Explain Mind?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIGcRLAYSoM

Donald Hoffman - Computational Theory of Mind
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUhrK82seVY
Science and Nonduality lectures:
Reality is a User Interface: Donald Hoffman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSrzlkfA0jk

The Mystery of Free Will: Donald Hoffman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT7hf8NOEk4

The Death of SpaceTime & Birth of Conscious Agents, Donald Hoffman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oadgHhdgRkI

Entangling Conscious Agents, Donald Hoffman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eWG7x_6Y5U

Conscious Agents A Theory of Consciousness, Donald Hoffman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E-MwJgy2lI

Consciousness and The Interface Theory of Perception, Donald Hoffman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqDP34a-epI

Notice, Chopra has problems dealing with the conversation. It's almost too far out even for him.

Deepak Chopra and Donald Hoffman: Reality is Eye Candy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxWkwy8z-Jg
I'll end this post with one of my favorite quotes:

The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.

-- Robert Anton Wilson

allynh
Posts: 1115
Joined: Sat Aug 23, 2008 12:51 am

How Fundamental Physics Lost Its Way

Unread post by allynh » Tue Mar 17, 2020 7:11 pm

I'm halfway through reading Einstein's War, it's deeply disturbing so far, and now I read this book review on the NYTimes for, The Dream Universe.

Has Physics Lost Its Way?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/book ... ndley.html
By Jim Al-Khalili
March 17, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET
Nonfiction
Joanna Neborsky

THE DREAM UNIVERSE
How Fundamental Physics Lost Its Way
By David Lindley

The title of David Lindley’s new book, “The Dream Universe,” may be unprepossessing, but his subtitle — “How Fundamental Physics Lost Its Way” — tells you what to expect: a polemical argument from a writer who won’t be pulling his punches.

I was keen to discover whether Lindley, an astrophysicist and the author of several well-regarded books, including “Uncertainty” and “The Science of Jurassic Park,” follows a line of reasoning that we’re beginning to see more frequently in popular science writing today: another full-throated critique of the more exotic speculations in theoretical physics like superstring theory, parallel universes, the properties of black hole event horizons and the hidden dimensions of space and time. Progress in our understanding of these phenomena seems lately to have stalled. Maybe Lindley, I thought, would offer some guidance as to how “fundamental physics” could find its way back to the right path.

Wider discussions about the nature of science and how it works are vitally important in our world of shouty social media, conspiracy theories, fake news, confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance. We need to trust the scientific method when it comes to issues like climate change or vaccines. But the multiverse theory? Is that even proper science?

Lindley begins with the Greek philosophers, notably Plato, who he says was not interested in the physical world, only in theorizing about it from on high, contemplating its mathematical (geometrical) beauty. Even worse, he looked with disdain at observational science. By contrast, his student Aristotle, interested in examining the world around him and trying to explain it, is a better fit as a precursor to the modern-day scientist. But Aristotle too came unstuck, for, as Lindley explains, he would come up with a hypothesis about some aspect of nature, then sift through his data to cherry-pick those that agreed with it — committing what we would now call confirmation bias, which, by the way, is how a lot of pseudoscience and conspiracy theories on the internet work.

Of course, Lindley reminds us, what constitutes a good scientific theory depends on the scientific context of its time. Surely not, you might think; don’t proper scientific theories have to satisfy timeless criteria such as explaining all the phenomena the theories they displace are able to, being able to make testable predictions, being repeatable, and so on? Well, yes, but here is where we get to Lindley’s central thesis: Contemporary theoretical physicists seem to have reverted to the idealized philosophy of Platonism. As he puts it, “The spirit of Plato is abroad in the world again.” Is this true? Plato’s stance was that it was enough to think about the universe. Surely, we can do better than that today, with our far more powerful mathematical tools and an abundance of empirical data to test our theories against. No physicist I know would say that to understand the laws of nature it is sufficient to think about them.

While it’s clear that nature obeys mathematical rules, a happy middle ground between Plato and Aristotle would seem to be preferable: to make the math our servant, not our master. After all, mathematics alone cannot entirely explain reality. Without a narrative to superimpose on the math, the equations and formulas lack a connection with physical reality. Lindley makes this point forcefully: “I find it essentially impossible to think of physical theories and laws only in mathematical terms. I need the help of a physical picture to make sense of the math.” About this, I am in total agreement. The mathematics can be as pretty and aesthetically pleasing as you like, but without a physical correlative, then that is all it is: pretty math.

According to Lindley, something happened in 20th-century theoretical physics that caused some in the field to “reach back to the ancient justifications for mathematical elegance as a criterion for knowledge, even truth.” In 1963, the great English quantum physicist Paul Dirac famously wrote, “It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit an experiment.” To be fair, Dirac was a rather special individual, since many of his mathematical predictions turned out to be correct, such as the existence of antimatter, which was discovered a few years after his equation predicted it. But other physicists took this view to an extreme. The Hungarian Hermann Weyl went as far as to say, “My work always tried to unite the truth with the beautiful, and when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.” Lindley argues that this attitude is prevalent among many researchers working at the forefront of fundamental physics today and asks whether these physicists are even still doing science if their theories do not make testable predictions. After all, if we can never confirm the existence of parallel universes, then isn’t it just metaphysics, however aesthetically pleasing it might be?

But Lindley goes further by declaring that much fundamental research, whether in particle physics, cosmology or the quest to unify gravity with quantum mechanics, is based purely on mathematics and should not be regarded as science at all, but, rather, philosophy. And this is where I think he goes too far. Physics has always been an empirical science; just because we don’t know how to test our latest fanciful ideas today does not mean we never will.

Lindley is engaging and very nearly persuasive. He believes we should continue to ask deep questions about reality but concludes that science will be unable to answer them. I am not nearly as pessimistic. Maybe we just need to try harder.
Go to Amazon and download the book sample. Read it, then compare the sample to the book review, and you will see that the person doing the book review is confusing "Theoretical Physics" with actual science, and is acting as an apologist for "Theoretical Physics" rather than looking at reality.

I forget who said it, but they said clearly:

- "Physics" is not theoretical.

Over the past century science and technology has leapt forward in astonishing ways, yet "Theoretical Physics" has simply gotten bizarre. I went to University in the 1970s and "Theoretical Physics" made no sense even then. Over the decades since it has made less and less sense.

I'm definitely buying this book.

allynh
Posts: 1115
Joined: Sat Aug 23, 2008 12:51 am

How the sun shines

Unread post by allynh » Wed May 13, 2020 5:33 am

This is one of those posts that no one will read the links or understand what I'm pointing out. If people read all of the links they will see the evolution of the "narrative" of how the Sun works. Notice as you read along, that the current dogma was arrived at by editorial fiat, not by actual science.

Basically, after reading through the old physics texts, watching them build their narratives with what they thought was valid science, I am not comfortable with the current dogma of consensus science.

- I have not seen any proof that "neutrinos" even exist

- I have not seen any proof that "fusion" occurs

Those have been the most shocking insights that I've had while reading this stuff.

BTW, I'm not interested in arguing or reading anything "theoretical", I've read enough of that. One hundred years of "claiming" that "neutrinos" and "fusion" is real -- with no physical proof -- is enough for me.

- If anybody has links to papers actually showing "physical proof" of "neutrinos" or "fusion" I will be glad to read them.

Here are the links:

First off, look at this cartoon, and understand the implications.

Answers
https://i.imgur.com/ZiTPzYl.png

If you can't acknowledge what the cartoon is saying, then don't bother reading the links. HA!

This is Lord Kelvin talking about the Sun being powered by compression due to gravity. They did not know about radioactivity.

On the Age of the Sun’s Heat
https://zapatopi.net/kelvin/papers/on_t ... _heat.html

- Read the article, and follow his "logic" and compare it to any modern description of the Sun.

Compare that to now, when they assume that "fusion" powers the Sun. Yet no one has ever proven that "fusion" is valid. No one has ever taken hydrogen and made helium, despite all the claims.

This is Bohr's Nobel Prize lecture from 1922 about the atom. They first published the model in 1913.

The structure of the atom
https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018 ... ecture.pdf

This is Eddington's 1920 essay:

- Notice, he thought stars started as red giants, then over time compressed into dwarf stars. Now the dogma says that red giants are the oldest.

- The key point to notice, is that they are still working under the assumption that Lord Kelvin pushed on them, that the stars were powered by gravity compression.

- Also, Eddington keeps pushing "ethereal heat" as part of the process.

- Only at the end of the paper does he mention "sub-atomic energy" and "transmutation" rather than Lord Kelvin's theory. He leaves it up to the reader to decide if the source is better than gravity compression, still trying not to upset people who follow Lord Kelvin.

- He mentions about the discrepancy of four hydrogen atoms being heavier than one helium atoms, and that no other atom has that occur.

The Internal Constitution of the Stars
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi- ... etype=.pdf

This is Eddington's 1926 book:

The Internal Constitution of the Stars
by A.S.Eddington
https://archive.org/details/TheInternal ... s/mode/2up

- In just six years they felt that "sub-atomic energy" answered the question, yet still used gravity compression as part of the process to generate energy.

- Read Chapter 1 and be amazed at how speculative everything is.

- He also talks about "aether waves", meaning "light".

The first sentence of Chapter II is:

"Radiant energy or radiation consists of electromagnetic waves in the aether."

This was 1926, and if you didn't take aether seriously, and mention it in your work, you were not doing "science".

BTW, In reading Einstein's War, Einstein started with the "ether" as well. As far as everybody was concerned "ether" was established science.

Now read the original paper by Hans Bethe. Compare what he is saying to Lord Kelvin, and tell me that either makes sense.

Energy Production in Stars

H. A. Bethe
Phys. Rev. 55, 434 – Published 1 March 1939
https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10 ... Rev.55.434

- They took the concept that four hydrogen atoms weigh more than one helium atom, and spun the fantasy of "fusion" powering the Sun from there, with imaginary "neutrinos" making up the balance.

- What's worse, is that larger stars go through the "CNO cycle" to generate helium. Complexity on complexity.

- Notice: Even in 1938 Bethe was having to discuss gravity compression as a power source. Lord Kelvin had a massive impact all this time later.

- He also had to refer to Eddington's work or he would be ignored.

Those are the original texts, these are articles discussing the historical texts.

The Age of the Sun: Kelvin vs. Darwin
http://rhig.physics.wayne.edu/~sean/sea ... insunf.pdf

- This is Lord Kelvin talking about the Sun being powered by compression due to gravity.

The Source of Solar Energy, ca. 1840-1910:
From Meteoric Hypothesis to Radioactive Speculations
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.02834.pdf

This is a deeply disturbing article showing how the politics of science forced how the concepts were presented. It was only after the fact that she was declared "right".

EXTRAORDINARY CLAIMS REQUIRE EXTRAORDINARY EVIDENCE
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi- ... etype=.pdf

All the above leads to the current dogma in this article from the Nobel Prize people.

How the sun shines
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/theme ... n-shines-2

When you read through everything you can see how the "narrative" was developed, with no actual science.

BTW, I'm still trying to finish reading Einstein's War where Eddington, along with others of the day, made Einstein into a rock star.

allynh
Posts: 1115
Joined: Sat Aug 23, 2008 12:51 am

Steel man

Unread post by allynh » Fri May 22, 2020 9:11 pm

Oh, this is such a fun concept, I've never heard the phrase before.

I've heard of "straw man", and seen a ton of people basically lie and distort what the other person was saying, but I'd never heard the counter phrase, "steel man".

Steel man

From Lesswrongwiki
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man
Sometimes the term "steel man" is used to refer to a position's or argument's improved form. A straw man is a misrepresentation of someone's position or argument that is easy to defeat: a "steel man" is an improvement of someone's position or argument that is harder to defeat than their originally stated position or argument.
I've done that for decades without realizing that there was a term for it.

I will take a concept that makes no sense and show how to make it better. I have no fear of embracing something, trying to understand what is being said, and then deciding if it makes sense, even if I have to go so far as to rephrase things to have it make sense.

I won't give examples because they are outside the limits of this Forum, but I would like to see people actually try to get inside somebody else's argument and make it better rather than just blatantly "straw man" somebody.

When I was a kid in Silver City, about third grade, I came across a high school debate club. I have never seen anything similar since.

The debate club would have everybody learn a subject, completely. Then they would break into two teams, and the audience. They would then flip a coin at the last minute to decide who was "pro" and who was "con".

- The two teams would face off and debate, with the audience scoring how well each side did.

- Each side had to honestly embrace their side of the debate.

If you had one team taking a side that they did not like, and proceeding to trash their side with "straw man" arguments, they would be scored down.

The debate was about making sure everyone knew the subject being debated. There was none of the nonsense of using the debate to "inform" the audience, since the audience was scoring the debate they had to know everything as well as the debaters.

I have never seen a debate like that since. Most so called "debates" are simply "arguments" in front of an audience that was not informed.

- An "argument" is when one or both sides is ignorant of the facts.

Whenever I see someone want to "debate" someone, they really want to "argue".

Watch any of the so called "debates" by Intelligence Squared on YouTube and you will see how it is rigged by how the audience votes. They have the audience vote at the beginning and at the end. Whichever side has the greatest change in the vote "wins".

What the audience will do is vote counter to their real position at the start, then vote what they really believed, thus their side "wins". The audience thus "rigs" the debate.

IntelligenceSquared Debates
https://www.youtube.com/user/IntelligenceSquared/videos

Don't get me wrong, I love watching Intelligence Squared, the way John Donvan runs the whole thing -- he's got style -- but they are not debates.

allynh
Posts: 1115
Joined: Sat Aug 23, 2008 12:51 am

Does dark matter exist?

Unread post by allynh » Thu Jul 02, 2020 2:50 am

This is another example of how a "narrative" develops from nothing to define reality. If you read the article and the supporting documents, all the while knowing that the answer is "No", because they ignored electricity, then you will have a better understanding of how far people will go to create a "narrative".

It is important to see what consensus "beLIEves".

Does dark matter exist?
https://aeon.co/essays/why-its-time-to- ... -seriously
Dark matter is the most ubiquitous thing physicists have never found: it’s time to consider alternative explanations

Ramin Skibba25 June, 2020

In 1969, the American astronomer Vera Rubin puzzled over her observations of the sprawling Andromeda Galaxy, the Milky Way’s biggest neighbour. As she mapped out the rotating spiral arms of stars through spectra carefully measured at the Kitt Peak National Observatory and the Lowell Observatory, both in Arizona, she noticed something strange: the stars in the galaxy’s outskirts seemed to be orbiting far too fast. So fast that she’d expect them to escape Andromeda and fling out into the heavens beyond. Yet the whirling stars stayed in place.

Rubin’s research, which she expanded to dozens of other spiral galaxies, led to a dramatic dilemma: either there was much more matter out there, dark and hidden from sight but holding the galaxies together with its gravitational pull, or gravity somehow works very differently on the vast scale of a galaxy than scientists previously thought.

Her influential discovery never earned Rubin a Nobel Prize, but scientists began looking for signs of dark matter everywhere, around stars and gas clouds and among the largest structures in the galaxies in the Universe. By the 1970s, the astrophysicist Simon White at the University of Cambridge argued that he could explain the conglomerations of galaxies with a model in which most of the Universe’s matter is dark, far outnumbering all the atoms in all the stars in the sky. In the following decade, White and others built on that research by simulating the dynamics of hypothetical dark matter particles on the not-so-userfriendly computers of the day.

But despite those advances, over the past half century, no one has ever directly detected a single particle of dark matter. Over and over again, dark matter has resisted being pinned down, like a fleeting shadow in the woods. Every time physicists have searched for dark matter particles with powerful and sensitive experiments in abandoned mines and in Antarctica, and whenever they’ve tried to produce them in particle accelerators, they’ve come back empty-handed. For a while, physicists hoped to find a theoretical type of matter called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), but searches for them have repeatedly turned up nothing.

With the WIMP candidacy all but dead, dark matter is apparently the most ubiquitous thing physicists have never found. And as long as it’s not found, it’s still possible that there is no dark matter at all. An alternative remains: instead of huge amounts of hidden matter, some mysterious aspect of gravity could be warping the cosmos instead.

The notion that gravity behaves differently on large scales has been relegated to the fringe since Rubin’s and White’s heyday in the 1970s. But now it’s time to consider the possibility. Scientists and research teams should be encouraged to pursue alternatives to dark matter. Conferences and grant committees should allow physicists to hash out these theories and design new experiments. Regardless of who turns out to be right, such research on alternatives ultimately helps to crystallise the demarcation between what we don’t know and what we do. It will encourage challenging questions, spur reproducibility studies, poke holes in weak spots of the theories, and inspire new thinking about the way forward. And it will force us to decide what kinds of evidence we need to believe in something we cannot see.

We have been here before. In the early 1980s, the Israeli physicist Mordehai ‘Moti’ Milgrom questioned the increasingly popular dark matter narrative. While working at an institute south of Tel Aviv, he studied measurements by Rubin and others, and proposed that physicists hadn’t been missing matter; instead, they’d been wrongly assuming that they completely understood how gravity works. Since the outer stars and gas clouds orbit galaxies much faster than expected, it makes more sense to try to correct the standard view of gravity than to conjure an entirely new kind of matter.

Milgrom proposed that Isaac Newton’s second law of motion (describing how the gravitational force acting on an object varies with its acceleration and mass) changes ever so slightly, depending on the object’s acceleration. Planets such as Neptune or Uranus orbiting our sun, or stars orbiting close to the centre of our galaxy, don’t feel the difference. But far in the outlying areas of the Milky Way, stars would feel a smaller gravitational force than previously thought from the bulk of matter in the galaxy; adjusting Newton’s law could provide an explanation for the speeds Rubin measured, without needing to invoke dark matter.

Developing the paradigm of a dark-matter-less universe became Milgrom’s life project. At first, he worked mostly in isolation on his proto-theory, which he called Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). ‘For more than a few years, I was the only one,’ he says. But slowly other scientists circled round.

He and a handful of others first focused on rotating galaxies, where MOND accurately describes what Rubin observed at least as well as dark matter theories do. Milgrom and colleagues then expanded the scope of their research, predicting a relationship between how fast the outside of a galaxy rotates and the galaxy’s total mass, minus any dark matter. The astronomers R Brent Tully and J Richard Fisher measured and confirmed just such a trend, which many dark matter models have struggled to explain.

When space-time gets curved in a particular way it creates the illusion of dark matter

Despite these successes, Milgrom’s modification of Newton’s second law remained just an approximation, causing his ideas to fall short of requirements for a full-fledged theory. That began to change when Milgrom’s colleague Jacob Bekenstein at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem extended MOND to show it could be consistent with Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which predicts that gravity has the power to bend light rays, an idea proven just over a century ago, during a solar eclipse in 1919, and today known as ‘gravitational lensing’.

Around the same time, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble noticed that his colleagues had considered that close groups of gas clouds were actually far more distant galaxies. Building on Hubble’s discovery, other astronomers demonstrated the existence of larger cosmic structures now known as galaxy clusters, which have the power to act like powerful lenses, strongly bending light rays. Using formulas based on predictions by Einstein, it’s possible to infer the mass of a cosmic lens. Based on this mathematics, many physicists used gravitational lensing as an argument for the existence of dark matter. But Bekenstein showed that general relativity and MOND could also explain at least some lensing measurements that have been made.

Even so, these ideas were only partly formed. Indeed, Milgrom and Bekenstein still didn’t know what in physics could create a modified law of gravity.

MOND lacked much of a foundation until a few years ago, when the Dutch physicist Erik Verlinde began developing a theory known as ‘emergent gravity’ to explain why gravity was altered. In Verlinde’s view, gravity, including MOND, emerges as a kind of thermodynamic effect, related to increasing entropy or disorder. His ideas build on quantum physics as well, viewing space-time and the matter within it as originating from an interconnected array of quantum bits. When space-time gets curved, it produces gravity, and if it’s curved in a particular way, it creates the illusion of dark matter.

Verlinde’s research is still waiting to be fleshed out. It’s still not clear, for instance, how modified or emergent gravity can make sense of the structure of the young Universe, discerned from relic radiation left behind from the Big Bang. Astrophysicists have used space telescopes to map out that radiation in incredible detail, but they haven’t yet found a way to make models without dark matter consistent with the measurements. ‘It’s not like this idea of emergent gravity can compete yet,’ Verlinde says, but in time it could become a real alternative to dark matter.

Dark matter theories make predictions too: if this form of matter exists, numerous subatomic dark matter particles should be frequently whizzing through our solar system, through the Earth, and even occasionally zipping through our bodies. But if huge amounts of dark matter indeed exist, enshrouding every galaxy in the Universe while being unseen and unfelt everywhere, then the elusive little particles typically won’t interact with normal matter in a way that anyone would notice. That makes actually detecting them a formidable task.

While astrophysicists kept their eyes trained on the heavens, particle physicists sought to shed light on dark matter by creating plausible particles in their accelerators, like the powerful Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. Intended to recreate such conditions as at the Big Bang, the LHC smashes particles together at great speeds so that, in bursts of energy, it produces new particles. Those particles pass through a series of detectors, which allow physicists to identify them.

With the LHC and its predecessors, for example, at Fermilab west of Chicago, scientists managed to find all 17 particles predicted by the ‘standard model’ of particle physics, which includes all of the fundamental forces other than gravity. (They spotted the last standard particle, the Higgs boson, with the LHC in 2012.) Because of this string of successes, physicists were bullish about soon discovering dark matter particles as well, writes Dan Hooper, a Fermilab physicist, in his book At the Edge of Time (2019).

Interest in dark matter spawned a new generation of experiments, which Hooper and his colleagues hoped would finally pin down the mysterious particles. Scientists around the world built detectors deep beneath the Earth, often repurposing old mines, with the aim of finding dark matter particles while avoiding the cacophonous noise of cosmic rays and solar particles that would bombard any detector above ground. Dark matter particles could silently flit through a detector made of xenon or other materials and leave a sign of their passing in the form of heat, the researchers hypothesised. If the experiments fared as planned, scientists would finally spot dark matter particles and herald a new era of cosmology and particle physics.

If dark matter particles exist, it will be extremely difficult to catch any glimpse of them

But the experiments haven’t turned up any positive signs, and researchers’ initial hopes have been dashed. In fact, experiments unable to find a hint of dark matter have ultimately shown evidence only of what dark matter is not. With each new experiment, the range of not-dark-matter has grown. Physicists have begun to understand that, if dark matter particles exist, it will be extremely difficult to catch any glimpse of them.

In particular, the situation looks bleak for WIMPs, which had been the most popular dark matter candidate. Researchers kept broadening their search, seeking ever-lower mass particles, and then even smaller particles, but continued to find nothing. A few teams continue the hunt for WIMPs with ever-more sensitive detectors, but in a few years they’ll reach the tiniest mass range, when any putative dark matter particle would interact with a detector similarly to how wispy neutrinos from the Sun do, effectively bringing the WIMP search to a screeching halt. ‘Then we will be done. You can see the end is in sight for the WIMPs. That may make people try to think of new things,’ says Peter Graham, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University in California.

But if the end is nigh for WIMPs, it’s certainly not the end of the story for dark matter searches, Graham argues. Scientists are already beginning to flock to other viable particles, especially axions. If they exist, axions would be billions of times less massive than WIMPs, and so they’d have to be incredibly abundant to add up to the expected mass of dark matter. Other, arguably more exotic candidates include so-called ‘sterile neutrinos’ and tiny primordial black holes, a version of MACHOs (for ‘massive compact halo objects’).

A few scientists, including Hooper, have even proposed hypothetical particles that experience hidden forces. These dark particles, if they exist, would annihilate and then decay into other particles that might somehow be coupled to known particles such as the Higgs boson. It’s plausible, but no one has made a clear detection of any of these hidden particles or forces yet.

As searches for dark particles falter, Milgrom has seen more physicists open to modified gravity in recent years. ‘People are not quite disillusioned, but there is a lot of disappointment with the fact that dark matter has not been detected,’ he said. ‘To me, that’s not the best reason to work on MOND, but I’m glad to see more interest.’ Whether this interest eventually translates into expanding research on modified gravity remains to be seen.

Hundreds if not thousands of astrophysicists, astronomers and particle physicists now study every aspect of dark matter and every imprint it might have on the cosmos, with state-of-the-art computers, telescopes and particle accelerators. Dark matter research has dwarfed modified gravity research for decades, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that dark matter is that much more convincing a theory. Instead, early on, some scientists thought it was a natural solution, others followed their view, and the scales tilted to their side.

Today’s seeming dominance of dark matter wasn’t inevitable. The processes through which scientists develop theories are heavily influenced by all sorts of historical and sociological factors, a point eloquently made by Andrew Pickering, emeritus philosopher of science at the University of Exeter and the author of Constructing Quarks (1984), a 36-year-old book that’s still relevant today.

It’s important to pay attention to who decides which phenomena to study, which research earns major government grants, which big experiments get funded, who gets speaking opportunities at scientific conferences, who is media savvy, who wins prominent fellowships and awards, and who gets promoted to high-profile faculty positions. Different choices sometimes can shape the future trajectory of science. And when choices by theorists and experimentalists coincide symbiotically, Pickering argues, it can be challenging for an upstart theory – such as modified gravity – to get a fair hearing.

The enterprise of science isn’t a particularly efficient or straightforward path toward ‘the truth’. Nevertheless, we need not despair, argues Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University in Massachusetts and the author of the book Why Trust Science? (2019). Though individual scientists are fallible and have their own values and goals and, occasionally, axes to grind, science as a collective affair goes on. Researchers might make missteps here and there, they might take a long time to rigorously vet some claims and establish others, and maybe a seemingly promising research programme reaches a dead end, but over time, scientists gradually build a consensus. It usually takes a while, but they eventually figure out which research paths should be left behind, and which ideas need to be studied further and refined.

For dark matter versus modified gravity, this process hasn’t finished playing out. Dark matter is currently ascendant but the debate’s not over. The stakes are large, since the future of cosmology depends on the choices that astrophysicists make next.

Modified gravity scientists such as Milgrom and Verlinde face daunting challenges before having a real chance of developing their ideas into a valid alternative to dark matter. The biggest obstacle comes from the beginning of the Universe.

The astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in the 1960s at first misinterpreted their radio telescope’s faint static as noise – perhaps due to pigeons roosting and leaving droppings on it. But the signal turned out to be real, and they confirmed their discovery of relic radio waves that date back to soon after the Big Bang. Then in the 1980s and ’90s, Soviet and NASA scientists used their own space telescopes, RELIKT-1 and COBE, to spot tiny wiggles in that radiation. John Mather and George Smoot, the physicists who led the COBE research, won the Nobel Prize in Physics 2006 for measuring those little radiation variations, which translate into early density differences that determined where the matter in the Universe collected and structures of galaxies formed.

They predict far more dark matter clumps than suggested by the meagre number of satellite galaxies spotted so far

Mather and Smoot’s successors have now measured the wiggles in relic radio radiation to exquisite precision, and any successful theory has to offer an explanation of them. Dark matter physicists have already shown that their theory could reproduce all of those wiggles quite well, but modified or emergent gravity has failed that critical test – so far. Bekenstein died in 2015, but his successors are still trying to make his modified gravity theory consistent with at least some of the measurements. That would be a big leap forward and a compelling one for skeptics of modified gravity, but it’s a major task that has yet to be done.

Of all the pieces of evidence, those wiggles are the strongest. Dark matter is clearly winning. It took decades of work by hundreds of dark matter scientists and huge investment in their research programmes to develop models that could explain all those measurements. Modified and emergent gravity, with lower levels of funding, remain far behind, but that doesn’t mean they should be abandoned. ‘My contention is that it’s very unlikely that emergent gravity is responsible for the phenomena we currently attribute to dark matter,’ Hooper says, ‘but it doesn’t mean that gravity isn’t emergent or that it’s not something worth exploring.’

Furthermore, dark matter researchers such as White and Hooper have their own problems to grapple with. Giant galaxies, including our own, typically have a handful of smaller galactic companions orbiting them like satellites. If dark matter physicists are right, each of those galaxies should be embedded within a huge clump of dark matter since dark matter particles and the galaxies’ stars should be drawn together by the same gravitational forces. But the latest computer simulations developed by White and his colleagues have some glaring differences with astronomers’ observations: they predict far more dark matter clumps than suggested by the meagre number of satellite galaxies spotted so far. Physicists tellingly call this the ‘missing satellites problem’, since reality doesn’t seem to match those theorists’ expectations.

At much larger, cosmic scales, astrophysicists are also trying to explain a recent, puzzling discrepancy: that the Universe today seems to be expanding dramatically more rapidly than it did in its infancy. Physicists had expected the rate of expansion (called the Hubble constant) to be the same everywhere, but now they need to explain the disparity. With dark matter theorists unable to resolve the conundrum, Verlinde says perhaps emergent gravity will offer a path ahead.

Verlinde, Milgrom and their colleagues are still a small minority, but cosmology will benefit if their ranks grow. They’re already finding a few scientists in the dark matter community to be receptive to their ideas. At a recent conference he attended, Verlinde noticed a palpable shift in acceptance. ‘I felt like there was more communication and more willingness to discuss alternatives than years before,’ he says.

Beyond this theoretical work, physicists expect bigger, better telescopes and experiments to bear fruit, including the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, being built in the dry mountains of northern Chile. This year, scientists renamed it the Vera C Rubin Observatory, and it will have ‘first light’ next year. Inspired by Rubin’s work, researchers will peer wider and deeper into the heavens, mapping the light of billions of galaxies. If they keep an open mind, their studies could illuminate both dark matter and dark forces of gravity. Rubin’s namesake will continue provoking healthy debates about the vast hidden universe we yearn to further explore.

This Essay was made possible through the support of a grant to Aeon from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation. Funders to Aeon are not involved in editorial decision-making.
This is the paper by Rubin that started this nonsense.

ROTATION OF THE ANDROMEDA NEBULA FROM A SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY OF EMISSION REGIONS
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/ ... .159..379R

These are most of the links that the article referenced. Those links that went to a paywall I found alternate links instead. This was quite a harvest to show what happens when you ignore electricity when looking at the universe. You get twisted into "nots". HA!

Core condensation in heavy halos: a two-stage theory for galaxy formation and clustering.
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1978M ... W/abstract

Deep science at the frontier of physics
https://sanfordlab.org

IceCube
https://icecube.wisc.edu/about/overview

A modification of the Newtonian dynamics as a possible alternative to the hidden mass hypothesis
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1983A ... M/abstract

Reprint of 1977A&A....54..661T. A new method of determining distance to galaxies
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1977A ... T/abstract

Relativistic gravitation theory for the MOND paradigm
https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0403694

Curving the Universe
https://aeon.co/essays/einstein-v-newto ... al-eclipse

Emergent Gravity and the Dark Universe
https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02269

A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4080 Mc/s
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1965A ... P/abstract

The Real Problem with MOND
https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.1320

Where are the missing galactic satellites?
https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9901240

crawler
Posts: 823
Joined: Sun Oct 28, 2018 5:33 pm

Re: Caltech: The Mechanical Universe

Unread post by crawler » Fri Jul 10, 2020 1:28 am

The streamlines of aether flowing into a star converge in 3 dimensions hencely the aether acceleration relates to 1/rr & hencely gravity relates to 1/rr.

The 1/r behavior of orbiting stars in flattish spiral galaxies is what u would expect in a disc shape. In a disc galaxy the aether in the near field in effect converges in 2 dimensions not 3, giving a 1/r aether acceleration, hencely a 1/r gravity. No dark matter needed.

And i suppose that the spiral arms are leaning/curving forward because gravity has a finite speed (do they lean/curve forward??)(if they lean back then i am wrong).
STR is krapp -- & GTR is mostly krapp.
The present Einsteinian Dark Age of science will soon end – for the times they are a-changin'.
The aether will return – it never left.

allynh
Posts: 1115
Joined: Sat Aug 23, 2008 12:51 am

Re: Caltech: The Mechanical Universe

Unread post by allynh » Tue Jul 20, 2021 6:01 pm

In Forum 2.0 I talked about a lecture replacing Feynman diagrams with the Amplituhedron.

Re: Caltech: The Mechanical Universe
https://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/php ... 11#p128523
wiki - Amplituhedron wrote: Implications

The twistor approach simplifies calculations of particle interactions. In a conventional perturbative approach to quantum field theory, such interactions may require the calculation of thousands of Feynman diagrams, most describing off-shell "virtual" particles which have no directly observable existence. In contrast, twistor theory provides an approach in which scattering amplitudes can be computed in a way that yields much simpler expressions. Amplituhedron theory calculates scattering amplitudes without referring to such virtual particles. This undermines the case for even a transient, unobservable existence for such virtual particles.

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.

Calculations can be done without assuming the quantum mechanical properties of locality and unitarity. In amplituhedron theory, locality and unitarity arise as a direct consequence of positivity. They are encoded in the positive geometry of the amplituhedron, via the singularity structure of the integrand for scattering amplitudes. Arkani-Hamed suggests this is why amplituhedron theory simplifies scattering-amplitude calculations: in the Feynman-diagrams approach, locality is manifest, whereas in the amplituhedron approach, it is implicit.

Since the planar limit of the N = 4 supersymmetric Yang–Mills theory is a toy theory that does not describe the real world, the relevance of this technique for more realistic quantum field theories is currently unknown, but it provides promising directions for research into theories about the real world.
I did not realize that the concept destroys the concept of the "Inflationary" universe that Lawrence Krauss talks about in his book.

wiki - A Universe from Nothing

I stumbled on this Colbert Report episode on YouTube.

STEPHEN COLBERT HUMILIATES LAWRENCE KRAUSS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXK5avcaJiY

Krauss points out many times that his "Nothing" is actually space filled with "virtual particles" which is why space is expanding at high speed.

"Virtual particles" are an "artifact" of the Feynman diagrams. They only exist on paper, they do not exist in reality.

allynh
Posts: 1115
Joined: Sat Aug 23, 2008 12:51 am

Re: Caltech: The Mechanical Universe

Unread post by allynh » Tue Aug 24, 2021 9:46 pm

This is another book that has it backwards, claiming that the "discovery" of the "background radiation" proved the big-bang theory was right and Hoyle's "Steady State" was wrong.

Hoyle was right, The "consensus" was wrong.

When the Big Bang Was Just a Theory
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/book ... lpern.html
Aug. 24, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
Nonfiction

From left: George Gamow in 1961 and Fred Hoyle in 1958. At midcentury, the two engaged in a spirited debate about the origins of the universe.
From left: George Gamow in 1961 and Fred Hoyle in 1958. At midcentury, the two engaged in a spirited debate about the origins of the universe.Associated Press; Evening Standard/Getty Images
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

FLASHES OF CREATION
George Gamow, Fred Hoyle, and the Great Big Bang Debate
By Paul Halpern

The universe is changing. But scientists didn’t realize that a century ago, when astronomers like Edwin Hubble and Henrietta Leavitt discerned that other galaxies exist and that they’re hurtling away from the Milky Way at incredible speeds. That monumental discovery sparked decades of epic debates about the vastness and origins of the universe, and they involved a clash of titans, the Russian-American nuclear physicist George Gamow and the British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle.

In his new book, “Flashes of Creation,” Paul Halpern chronicles the rise of Gamow and Hoyle into leaders of mostly opposing views of cosmology, as they disputed whether everything began with a Big Bang billions of years ago.

Halpern, a physicist himself at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, skillfully brings their fascinating stories to light, out of the shadow of the overlapping quantum physics debates between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, which Halpern has written about in an earlier book. Halpern also poses fundamental questions about how science should be done. When do you decide, for example, to abandon a theory? Ultimately, his book seeks to vindicate Hoyle, who in his later years failed to admit his idea had lost.

Until these two bold theoreticians arrived, astrophysics had been stuck at an impasse. Scientists weren’t sure how to interpret Hubble’s observations, and no one understood how the universe created and built up chemical elements. “It is clear that the intuitive, seat-of-the-pants styles shared by Gamow and Hoyle were absolutely needed in their time,” Halpern writes.

Gamow and Hoyle make for a challenging “joint biography,” Halpern acknowledges, in part because their parallel stories so rarely intersected. They had only one significant in-person meeting, in the summer of 1956 in La Jolla, Calif., where Gamow had briefly served as a consultant for General Dynamics, the aerospace and defense company. They discussed many ideas in that coastal town, hanging out in Gamow’s white Cadillac, but for the most part, their debates took place in the pages of physics journals, newspapers and magazines, including Scientific American.

They also frequently appeared on early television and radio programs, becoming among the first well-known science communicators, paving the way for Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Carolyn Porco, Pamela Gay and others today. Hoyle wrote the science fiction novel “The Black Cloud” and the television screenplay “A for Andromeda,” while Gamow produced “One, Two, Three … Infinity” and the Mr. Tompkins series, whose main character’s predicaments illustrated aspects of modern science.

For years, their dueling theories — a Big Bang origin of matter and energy (championed by Gamow) versus a steady-state universe that created matter and energy through quantum fluctuations (championed by Hoyle) — remained highly speculative. Initially, the Big Bang theory predicted a universe only a couple billion years old, which conflicted with observations of the sun and other stars, known to be much older. Physicists were evenly divided between the two.

But that changed as more evidence emerged, and a key discovery eventually seemed to settle the debate. In 1964, the astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson noticed a constant signal of radio static with the Holmdel Horn Antenna in New Jersey. After ruling out possible experimental sources of noise (including pigeons and their droppings on the antenna), they deduced that the radio hiss had a cosmic origin. They and their colleagues eventually realized the signal came from relic radiation from the hot fireball of the early universe.

Paul HalpernUniversity of the Sciences

After that, the Big Bang theory quickly became consensus in the field. While Hoyle’s steady-state idea eventually failed, he made many other significant contributions, especially involving stellar processes and supernova explosions, which he showed could fuse chemical elements into heavier atoms and produce nitrogen, oxygen, carbon and more. In explaining this, and throughout the book, Halpern provides many helpful metaphors and analogies. He also reminds readers that Hoyle, Gamow and their fellow theoretical physicists made these accomplishments well before the heyday of supercomputers.

Halpern doesn’t shy away from the characters’ flaws. In particular, he shows how Hoyle’s work later in life lay on the fringes of physics, including his controversial “panspermia” hypothesis, that organic material and even life on Earth came from colliding comets, and his unsuccessful attempts to revive steady-state theory. But this shouldn’t cast a pall over his legacy.

Hoyle’s investment in the theory raises important philosophical and sociological questions about when we should consider an idea proven. It’s also the sort of quandary that threads its away through contemporary debates among physicists: about dark matter versus modified gravity theories; about what dark energy is and how the universe’s “inflation” happened moments after the Big Bang; and about a persistent discrepancy in measurements of the universe’s expansion rate, known as the “Hubble tension.” Halpern unfortunately gives only brief mention to these active areas of research, which owe a lot to Gamow and Hoyle.

At one point in the book, Halpern relates a conversation he had with Geoff Burbidge, a colleague of Hoyle’s who also continued to support a steady-state model. Cosmology needed alternatives, he argued, not lemmings following their leader over a cliff.

allynh
Posts: 1115
Joined: Sat Aug 23, 2008 12:51 am

NOVA The Universe: Age of Stars

Unread post by allynh » Thu Oct 28, 2021 4:38 pm

This episode of NOVA was on last night, and it was deeply disturbing to watch the modern day fantasy of Scientism. I would like to see the whole episode be "Fact Checked", point by point.

What was interesting, is that they did not start with the big bang, or even mention black holes but they do mention neutron stars.

They mention plasma but focus of dark matter and gravity to explain everything.

This nihilistic view of reality is what they are pushing now.

BTW, the episode reminded me the most of the Lord Kelvin papers about the Sun that I mentioned up thread. Having the universe fade into darkness is exactly what Lord Kelvin was saying would happen when the Sun goes dark.

We've come full circle back to Lord Kelvin.

The Universe: Age of Stars
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/nov ... -of-stars/
PREMIERED OCTOBER 27, 2021 AT 7PM ON PBS
The sun is our life-giving source of light, heat, and energy, and new discoveries are unraveling its epic history. Join NOVA on a spectacular voyage to discover the sun’s place in a grand cycle of birth, death and renewal that makes this the age of stars. Witness how stars of every size and color came to populate our universe; how stars stage a dramatic exit when they explode as supernovae, which can outshine an entire galaxy; and how, billions of years in the future, the age of stars will lead ultimately to an age of darkness. (Premiered October 27, 2021)

TRANSCRIPT
The Universe: Age of Stars

PBS Airdate: October 27, 2021

NARRATOR: In a universe that shines with innumerable stars, born from countless more stars that have come and gone before them, rages the life-giving fire of our sun.

GIBOR BASRI (University of California, Berkeley): The sun is the king of the solar system. It has, essentially, all the mass and all the energy.

NARRATOR: Familiar and yet unknown.

EMMA CHAPMAN (Imperial College London): Even though we’ve looked at it for a really long time, the sun is still full of mysteries. Why is it hotter in its atmosphere than on its surface? What drives the solar wind?

NARRATOR: Only now, we take our first steps closer to understanding our star.

KELLY KORRECK (Co-Investigator, Parker Solar Probe): It’s the first time that we’re actually going in to touch the sun.

GRANT TREMBLAY (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian): And it’s already really started to truly transform our understanding for how the sun works.

NARRATOR: Uncovering the secret power of all stars….

RANA EZZEDINE (University of Florida): As you can imagine, when you have a huge blob of flaming gas, the coreis usually the hottest, and it is where the magic is happening.

NARRATOR: …perhaps even finding clues to the stars that came before it…

PAYEL DAS (University of Surrey): If we understand where the sun comes from, we can understand a little bit moreabout where life has come from.

NARRATOR: …and, ultimately, its fate.

RAMAN PRINJA (University College London): It has about another 4.6-billion years of nuclear fusion left. And thenit will start to change. It will start to evolve.

GHINA M. HALABI (University of Cambridge): We really need to understand what will happen to our own sun,because that will impact Earth.

NARRATOR: The sun is just one among hundreds of billions of stars, in a galaxy among trillions. We live in theAge of Stars, right now, on NOVA.

Ninety-three-million miles from Earth, our nearest star: the sun, a permanent fixture for life onour planet.

KELLY KORRECK: Humans have always been fascinated by the sun, I think, because it is so constant, compared toour daily life.

NIA IMARA (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian): It’s been rising and setting since the day that wewere born. We keep time by it. We keep our calendars by it. Without it, life wouldn’t be possible,here on Earth.

NARRATOR: The sun is just one of more than a billion-trillion stars in the universe. Why is it around our starthat life has emerged?

ANJALI TRIPATHI (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian): We want to know, “Where do we comefrom?” And, “What are our cosmic origins?”

PAYEL DAS: If we understand where the sun comes from, we can understand a little bit more about where lifehas come from.

NARRATOR: But our star is an enigma.

EMMA CHAPMAN: The sun is still full of mysteries. Why is it hotter in its atmosphere than on its surface? Whatdrives the solar wind?

NARRATOR: We’ve spent millennia studying from afar, but only now are we getting close enough to trulyreveal its secrets.

RAMAN PRINJA: The sun’s not a very nice environment. It’s not easy to get up close to the sun.

GIBOR BASRI: It’s an enormous ball of hydrogen, and it’s putting out a tremendous amount of energy.

NARRATOR: Its surface is a bubbling cauldron of 10,000-degree plasma.

RAMAN PRINJA: We can actually see cells of hot gas rising and falling into incredible imagery.

GIBOR BASRI: And then, above that, you have this very thin atmosphere that’s a million degrees, super hot.

EMMA CHAPMAN: Seeing these images is like revealing something that’s been right in front of us but hidden, for solong.

RAMAN PRINJA: Occasionally, you might see this enormous coronal mass ejection erupting from the star.

NARRATOR: We now stand on the threshold of being able to survive a close encounter, with a new heat-resistant probe that’s giving us an up-close look at our sun, for the first time.

MISSION CONTROL: Status check. Do delta. Go P.S.P.

T minus 15.

KELLY KORRECK: Launch night, I was sick to my stomach.

MISSION CONTROL: Five, four, three, two, one, liftoff of the Might Delta IV Heavy rocket, with NASA’s ParkerSolar Probe. And there we go.

KELLY KORRECK: The Delta IV Heavy is a very slow rocket compared to the other launches I’ve seen. So, I justsaw fireballs and was very, very frightened for a while.

MISSION CONTROL: Twenty-five seconds into flight.

CHRIS CHEN (Queen Mary University of London): It is quite scary to think about all that power in the rocket,underneath that, you know, relatively small spacecraft sitting on top.

KELLY KORRECK: Then realizing that this was all okay, as it slowly made its way up into the sky.

MISSION CONTROL: Fifty seconds into flight.

KELLY KORRECK: And then just watched it…

MISSION CONTROL: Ejecting strap on boosters.

GRANT TREMBLAY: Parker is just an exquisite mission. It will be the closest that our species has thus far come to,literally, touching the sun, itself.

NARRATOR: The Parker Solar Probe is travelling to a place that has been completely unexplored up close, until now.

ARCHIVE: NASA’s Parker Solar Probe: a daring mission to shed light on the mysteries of our closest star.

EUGENE PARKER: This is a journey into never-never land, you might say.

NARRATOR: During its seven-year mission, the Parker Solar Probe will attempt a series of dives towards thesurface of the sun. Its goal is to understand how the sun sheds its energy. Orbiting a total of 24times, each pass taking it perilously closer, so close, it will enter the sun’s atmosphere, bravingtemperatures no spacecraft has ever endured and travelling faster than any other human-madeobject has before.

The mission is still in its early days, but in the coming years, the Parker Solar Probe will help usunlock, not only the secrets of our own sun, but all stars, including those that hold the key to thesun’s origins and our own.

EMMA CHAPMAN: We can look at the processes, look at what’s inside the sun, and understand how it had tobecome that. What were the generations of stars before that? What was its ancestry?

NARRATOR: The sun’s story can be traced back to its most distant stellar ancestors, the very first stars in theuniverse. Almost 100-million years after the Big Bang, the universe is dark and cold, not a singlestar shining. But this universe is far from empty. Something is growing in the void, stretching outtendrils.

ANJALI TRIPATHI: The early universe was largely hydrogen and helium and only small amounts of other materials.

GHINA HALABI: None of the elements we see these days, no carbon, oxygen, iron, none of that.

SOWNAK BOSE (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian): Even though the name the “Cosmic Dark Ages”suggests that there might not have been anything particularly interesting going on, it was really,kind of, laying the groundwork for the construction of the cosmic web.

GRANT TREMBLAY: The cosmic web is, literally, the structure of the universe itself.

NARRATOR: The cosmic web is unimaginable in scale. Huge clouds of gas are drawn together by the gravityof a mysterious, invisible form of matter, called “dark matter,” creating a great network offilaments, a web the size of the cosmos.

The gas in these tendrils is made up of mostly hydrogen and helium. Where these great filamentscross, are the places where the first stars will one day be born.

The cosmic web has been shaping our universe for 13.8-billion years, and it’s still doing sotoday. But it’s only recently that we’ve actually been able to see it.

PAYEL DAS: The image that we have here is absolutely amazing. It’s one of the most fundamental pictures thatwe can take in our universe. And it’s actually a direct image of some of the largest structures thatexist, the filaments of the cosmic web. Now, the bright white dots that you see over here, they’reentire galaxies. Now, if I take those away, what you can see much more clearly is the faint glowof the hydrogen and helium that exists on the tendrils of the cosmic web. And it’s on this cosmic web that the story of our sun and the stars in our night sky begins.

NARRATOR: As time passes in the early universe, the cosmic web continues to grow. Gas, rushing along thesegreat tendrils, travelling down towards the intersections…it is being pulled to these points bygravity. And as more gas joins, this force becomes ever stronger, creating great clouds,staggering in size.

They grow denser, hotter, as gas is relentlessly added, until, at last, the conditions become soextreme that there is a sudden moment of ignition: the birth of the very first star in the universe, born 17-times hotter than the sun. This star is a “blue monster.”

EMMA CHAPMAN: The first stars were unlike anything we can see around us today, which is what makes them soincredible.

COURTNEY DRESSING (University of California, Berkeley): When the very first stars formed, these stars ended upwith giant masses of 500- to 600-times the mass of the sun.

GIBOR BASRI: Stars today are perhaps as hot as 100,000 degrees, and these stars were nearly twice as hot asthat. The very hot color tends to also make them look blue.

NARRATOR: But this first star is not alone for long. At intersections across the cosmic web, it’s soon joined byothers, an entire generation of first stars, lighting up the universe.

But this isn’t all they do. These stars are forging new elements, creating the ingredients for all theplanets and, ultimately, even for life to exist.

PAYEL DAS: The birth of the first stars signaled a complete transformation in the makeup of the universe. Before they existed, all we had was hydrogen and helium, but nuclear fusion completely changedall of that.

NARRATOR: The cores of the first stars were so hot, they reached more than 100-million degrees. And thatforced hydrogen atoms to change.

PAYEL DAS: Now, under the very high temperatures and pressures that you find in the core of these stars, theywere smashed together, fusing a heavier element, helium.

NARRATOR: But the first stars didn’t stop there.

PAYEL DAS: After a few million years, the hydrogen completely runs out. So, instead, the helium atoms areforced to be smashed together, creating even heavier elements, elements such as carbon, oxygenand iron.

NARRATOR: The new elements these first stars forged are the elements that seed other types of stars, planetsand even us, in other words, the elements for life.

But the era of blue giants can’t last…

ANJALI TRIPATHI: Fusion at the center of a star eventually ends, as it runs out of fuel, so the process can’t go onforever.

EMMA CHAPMAN: When fusion stops, you lose that internal pressure which pushes against gravity. You lose a tug-of-war, and the gravity starts to push down on the star.

GRANT TREMBLAY: You know that, that saying, “Live fast, die young?” That, that really applies to stars, right?And so the most massive luminous stars have the shortest lifetimes.

NIA IMARA: Even though they have much more hydrogen fuel than an ordinary star like our sun, they burn itso quickly that they only live a few million years before they burn out. In a few million years, inastronomy time, that’s the blink of an eye.

NARRATOR: With its fuel spent, fusion reactions stop and gravity takes over. The core collapses. Gas suddenlyfalls inwards and then rebounds in a colossal explosion, called a “supernova,” a shockwave ofenergy followed by material hurtling outwards into space.

RAMAN PRINJA: Supernovae explosions rocked the universe. They are amongst the most explosive events that wenow know about. Briefly, a single supernova can outshine an entire galaxy.

RANA EZZEDDINE: This was a very important moment in the history of the universe. It allowed the universe to,kind of, start evolving.

GHINA HALABI: After the first stars exploded, the material that has been forged in their interiors was spewn outinto space.

NIA IMARA: They seeded the universe with these heavy elements and paved the way for subsequentgenerations of stars.

NARRATOR: Generations of stars that we can see in the night sky. The Hubble Space Telescope has beenstudying them for more than 30 years, showing us this epic cycle of cosmic death and renewal.

EMMA CHAPMAN: It’s not only the first stars which enriched the universe. As you go on for the second, the third,the fourth generation of stars, they’re all creating more and more heavy elements which getexpelled into the universe.

NARRATOR: Hubble reveals to us how stars have evolved, from a primitive universe dominated by blue stars, to our universe today, populated by stars of every color, size and configuration: neutron stars,violently spinning up to 700 times a second, spitting out jets of radiation; stars so huge that morethan a billion suns could fit inside them.

COURTNEY DRESSING: There are many types of stars, Wolf-Rayet stars, red giant stars, white dwarf stars. All ofthem have their own unique characteristics.

NARRATOR: And some that aren’t alone. They are kept company by systems of planets, including rocky worldsbuilt of ingredients like carbon, silicon and iron.

GRANT TREMBLAY: So, stars really are the engines of higher order complexity in the universe. They’re thefactories that make up the heavier elements that are the seeds of things like planets.

NARRATOR: Stars have changed the entirety of the universe, filling it with all manner of wondrous celestialobjects and, ultimately, paving the way for a star that has all the right conditions to make us.

RAMAN PRINJA: The sun must have relied on many, many generations of previous stars for the material that’sthere today in our solar system, probably thousands of other stars that would have had to explode.

NARRATOR: Nine-billion years after the birth of the first star, the universe has been enriched with dozens ofnew elements. Here, gravity draws one cloud together, and our own star is born.

But not all of the material is used to create the sun. Some remains in orbit. And it’s from theseleftovers that eight extraordinary planets form: our solar system.

RAMAN PRINJA: The sun has a very tight relationship with all the planets in the solar system, not just because ofits enormous gravity, but because of the light that it provides.

NARRATOR: Some of these worlds seem just too far away from the sun for complex life to take hold. Deprivedof light, they may be devoid of any life at all. These are the gas and ice giants. In contrast, othersare too close to the sun. They are relentlessly blasted, until they become scorched deserts. Butthere is a sweet spot, neither too far, nor too close to the sun. It’s in this place that the chemicallegacy of generations of long-gone stars would form something astonishing.

KELLY KORRECK: We are, on the earth, on kind of this special sweet zone. They call it the “Goldilocks” zone.

PHILIP MUIRHEAD (Boston University): This exciting distance from a star, where a planet could conceivably haveliquid water on its surface.

GHINA HALABI: Water is the medium that facilitates the biochemical reactions that are responsible for life.

EMMA CHAPMAN: Earth’s relationship with the sun is the most important relationship there is.

NARRATOR: The sun is constantly reaching out to our planet, something the Parker Solar Probe is helping usunderstand.

KELLY KORRECK: What makes Parker so great is the fact that it has a great set of instruments that work together inorder to look in all directions.

GRANT TREMBLAY: So, there’s this sun-facing part of the probe that peaks above the heat shield and, literally,looks directly at the sun.

NARRATOR: The Parker Solar Probe is spotting holes in the sun’s atmosphere, vents that release a blizzard ofcharged particles, at more than a million miles an hour, what we call the “solar wind.”

KELLY KORRECK: We can tell how the energy flows, where the wind is coming off, how much of the wind iscoming off.

NARRATOR: The solar wind travels billions of miles, bombarding the planets with radiation.

COURTNEY DRESSING: The charged particles in the solar wind can be detrimental to life. On Earth, we’reprotected by the Earth’s magnetic field, which deflects the particles.

GIBOR BASRI: So, it’s kind of like we have our shields up, and our shield is our magnetic field.

NARRATOR: Earth has defenses that protect life from our star’s violent tendencies, but the sun also providessomething essential to our planet.

RANA EZZEDDINE: At the core of the of it, the sun is forging hydrogen into helium, which is what is releasing theenergy that we see or that we get here on Earth.

GHINA HALABI: The photons, these packets of energy, when they are formed, they don’t go straight from thecenter, rushing through to the surface. They go through a very bumpy ride. They get tossed fromone atom to the other. They get absorbed and spit out, absorbed and spit out.

EMMA CHAPMAN: So, it takes a really convoluted path out of that sun, and that can take millions of years.

NARRATOR: Once these photons arrive at the surface, they’re liberated as sunshine. The light races across thesolar system. Unobstructed, it flashes past the planets at 180,000 miles per second.

GIBOR BASRI: If you could take all the energy that humans are producing and store it in batteries, the entirecivilization, for 50,000 years, you could make the sun shine for one second.

NARRATOR: It takes just over eight minutes for the sun’s light to reach Earth.

LUCIE GREEN (University College London): That stream of light is like an umbilical cord of energy, coming downto us, here on Earth. And it has been pretty much constant and unbroken for nearly five-billionyears.

And it’s this combination of the stability of light, stability of energy, over billions of years, thatmeans complex life that we see around us, here on the earth, has been able to form and has beenable to thrive.

NARRATOR: We don’t know exactly how life emerges on early Earth, but what we do know is that primitivecells, living in the ocean, begin to use the sun’s energy to power life-giving chemical reactions.

These cells are the bridge between sun and Earth, tiny machines that harness the power of ourstar. The cells use sunlight to turn carbon dioxide and water into food in the form of sugar.

This process, “photosynthesis,” is a direct use of the sun’s power. It has driven the evolution ofcomplexity on Earth, from primitive bacteria, to plants and trees, an unbroken line of livingthings, all connected to the power source in the sky.

GHINA HALABI: Everything, from the little blade of grass to the biggest oak tree, they use the sunlight tophotosynthesize and produce the energy that we later consume to sustain ourselves. So, in a way,we have been feeding on starlight.

NARRATOR: Trillions of stars have existed since the universe began, but ours is the only one we know of thathas nurtured that wonderful thing, life, not only nourished by the sun’s light, but also grantedprotection and the time to grow and change, eventually creating complex life.

NIA IMARA: The sun is connected to our very existence. It provides the light and the energy that’s necessary tosustain life.

GRANT TREMBLAY: There would absolutely be no life on Earth if there was no sun.

NARRATOR: The sun is a creator, bringing together atoms forged in generations of ancient stars, to create us: beings capable of exploring the cosmos, and uncovering our own stellar ancestry.

GHINA HALABI: It’s a wonderful thing how we share this intimate connection with stars, because they are part ofour cosmic heritage. We are the children of these stars.

NARRATOR: There are up to 400-billion stars in our galaxy, and there are two-trillion galaxies in ouruniverse. But it wasn’t always that way. We are living in the age of stars, an era of light in theuniverse.

GHINA HALABI: Stars have always been important to us. They have helped us navigate the land and the open seasfor millennia.

SONAK BOSE: If you just think back at the countless sonnets and poems and songs, there is always some kind ofcelestial connection.

NIA IMARA: One of the reasons why looking up into the stars is so significant is because we realize that othersare doing the same exact thing. And so, in a very real way, we feel connected to, to people both,both past and present.

NARRATOR: From our fleeting human perspective, the stars seem everlasting, a constant in our night sky. Butseen across the age of the universe, the picture changes, because this era cannot last. The starswill eventually wane. And as they go, they once again change the character of the universe. Theircores, where fusion once raged, cool and eventually solidify, locking precious elements away,beneath the surface, and starving the universe of the material needed to make new stars andplanets.

GRANT TREMBLAY: The chance that a star is going to be born nowadays is, is much, much lower than it was,billions of years in the past.

RAMAN PRINJA: Just as there was a very first star in the universe, there will come a time when the era of stars willcome to an end.

NARRATOR: The age of stars is not as enduring as it might seem.

LUCIE GREEN: I have a timeline of the universe, and I’m here, at the start, when the universe formed 13.8-billion years ago, during the Big Bang. Now, it took a while for the first stars to form, in fact, afew hundred million years. Let’s call that 400-million years. So, on my scale, stars start to formhere. And those stars carried on forming, and then we reach this point, four-billion years sincethe Big Bang and a time when the most stars are forming in the universe. Our sun, though, didn’tform until nine-billion years had passed. And that’s my marker here.

And then we move forwards again, and we get to this point, here, which is the present day, 13.8-billion years since the formation of the universe.

Now, our sun won’t live forever, and, in fact, it will start to die and end its life in around five-billion years’ time. But the sun will be outlived by the least massive stars in the universe. Theyhave lifetimes of a few hundred billion years and that’s about 200 meters on my scale. But evenwhen those stars die, that doesn’t mark the end of the universe. The universe could live forever,with the timeline stretching far off into the distance. And that means that the age of starlight thatI’ve mapped out here is like the blink of an eye to the universe. It’s the age of darkness that goeson and on and on.

NARRATOR: Stars won’t suddenly disappear of course, they’ll be here for hundreds of billions, perhaps eventrillions of years to come.

But slowly, over time, the universe will become darker, emptier. As it expands, the distancesbetween these little islands of light become greater and greater, until, one day, only one type ofstar will remain: red dwarfs, the longest lived of all stars in the universe.

Trappist 1 is one of these near immortals. This ancient star is likely more than seven-billionyears old, almost twice as old as our Sun. But Trappist is tiny: a similar size to Jupiter and lessthan one percent as bright as our sun. It is a cool star, slow-burning. And that is the secret of itslongevity.

DAVID CHARBONNEAU (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian): The lifetime of a star is determined byits reservoir of hydrogen, of nuclear fuel. As long as it has something to burn, it will continue tosurvive. But, paradoxically, the stars with the least amount of hydrogen live the longest. Andthat’s because they are miserly. They spend their fuel so slowly.

GRANT TREMBLAY: And so it’s those smaller, more quiescent, less energetic stars that, ultimately, become thegreatest historians of the universe.

PHILIP MUIRHEAD: It’s especially exciting, because this particular star is going to continue fusing hydrogen intohelium in its core and continue shining for, potentially, hundreds of billions of years.

NARRATOR: Like the sun, Trappist has its own planets, seven worlds, each roughly the size of Earth. Somemay have atmospheres and even oceans, but there the similarities end, because these are strangeworlds.

Just as one side of the moon always faces Earth, these planets may be what we call “tidallylocked” in their orbits. One side permanently looking towards the red dwarf Trappist 1, soakingup what light and warmth it can from the faint star, the other side permanently frozen, facing thecold void of space.

These planets are witnesses to much of the life of the universe. They were born near the start andthey will survive to near the end of the age of stars.

They will see entire galaxies merge and eventually begin to fade in their night skies. They watchas countless stars come and go, bearing witness to the time, about five-billion years from now,when a distant star begins to fade and vanishes from the night sky as our sun finally exhausts itsfuel and disappears forever.

NIA IMARA: Ultimately, once the fusion process is over in the sun, it will begin to expand into whatastronomers call a “red giant.” And the outer envelope of the sun will expand.

RANA EZZEDDINE: It’s going to gulp up some of the planets around it. Unfortunately, Earth is one of them.

NARRATOR: And as the sun dies, so too will many others like it.

The age of stellar creation in the universe is waning.

GRANT TREMBLAY: The universe is like a slow-motion fireworks show and we’re kind of watching the end of it.

NARRATOR: It’s unlikely that Trappist 1 will be the very last star in the universe, but we do believe the laststar will be a red dwarf. As its fuel runs out, fusion comes to an end. The last star slowly coolsand fades away.

With its passing, the universe becomes cold and dark, without light, and, most likely, without life.

RAMAN PRINJA: When the last red dwarf stars die out, that will be the end of stars in the universe. And it wasstarlight that really lit up its story.

NARRATOR: A universe without light may be unfathomable to us humans. Stars made us and our planet. Theydefine the universe, as we know it, today.

GHINA HALABI: It was like a gift given to humanity that it took a cosmos to make you.

NARRATOR: A cosmos eventually defined more by darkness than by light. But for now, we exist and learn andgrow, as tiny sparks, within the bright and light-filled childhood of our universe.

We live in the Age of Stars.

jacmac
Posts: 890
Joined: Wed Dec 02, 2009 7:36 pm

Re: Caltech: The Mechanical Universe

Unread post by jacmac » Fri Oct 29, 2021 2:11 am

PAYEL DAS (University of Surrey): If we understand where the sun comes from, we can understand a little bit more about where life has come from.
The sun comes from the abundance of plasma in the universe, AND
the ability of the plasma to self organize
EMMA CHAPMAN: The sun is still full of mysteries. Why is it hotter in its atmosphere than on its surface?
The trapped plasma inside the chromosphere double layer (DL) rises , then gets turned back,,,,,,
disappointed hot, but not angry hot.
The incoming charged particles are moving fast and want to join the action.
The chromosphere lets some in and some not.
Those that get in are orderly, happy to march in line, keeping the temperature low.
Those kept out are not happy, turning about in all manner of ways interfering with each other and the newer arrivals.
all hell breaking loose; thus the temperature soars.
RAMAN PRINJA: We can actually see cells of hot gas rising and falling into incredible imagery.

GIBOR BASRI: And then, above that, you have this very thin atmosphere that’s a million degrees, super hot.

EMMA CHAPMAN: Seeing these images is like revealing something that’s been right in front of us but hidden, for so long.
Well....er.... never mind.
NARRATOR: The cosmic web is unimaginable in scale. Huge clouds of gas are drawn together by the gravityof a mysterious, invisible form of matter, called “dark matter,” creating a great network offilaments, a web the size of the cosmos.
The web IS the cosmos actually.
-----
-----
-----
-----
-----
-----
Yadda, Yadda, Yadda.....
NARRATOR: The Parker Solar Probe is spotting holes in the sun’s atmosphere, vents that release a blizzard ofcharged particles, at more than a million miles an hour, what we call the “solar wind.”
NARRATOR: The solar wind travels billions of miles, bombarding the planets with radiation.
WOW.....could you tell that to the climate guys please !
primitivecells, living in the ocean,
the “Goldilocks” zone.
“photosynthesis,”
up to 400-billion stars in our galaxy,
13.8-billion years
“tidallylocked”
the age of stellar creation in the universe is waning.
A cosmos eventually defined more by darkness than by light.
We live in the Age of Stars.
Oh no !......it's a bad ending.
But I liked the beginning.

Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest