The Crisis That Hit Physics 100 Years Ago
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The Crisis That Hit Physics 100 Years Ago
The Crisis That Hit Physics 100 Years Ago
By Adam Mann Email Author
October 28, 2011
Categories: Physics [not irony?]
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/ ... -congress/
[Image 'hotlinked' from wired.com, with thanks]
One hundred years ago, the greatest scientific minds of Europe met to address a perilous state of affairs. During the previous 20 years, curious scientists had uncovered new phenomena — including X-rays, the photoelectric effect, nuclear radiation and electrons — that were rocking the foundations of physics.
While researchers in the 19th century had thought they would soon describe all known physical processes using the equations of Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell, the new and unexpected observations were destroying this rosy outlook. Leading physicists, such as Max Planck and Walther Nernst, believed circumstances were dire enough to warrant an international symposium that could attempt to resolve the situation.
It was the start of the quantum revolution.
Reverberations from this meeting are still felt to this day. Though physics may still sometimes seem to be in crisis, with researchers yet to find the Higgs boson and lacking a complete understanding of dark matter and dark energy, what we do know about these mysteries is only possible thanks to the foundations laid down at the first Solvay Council.
From Oct. 30 to Nov. 3, 1911, 18 luminaries came together as part of the invite-only conference in Brussels, Belgium known as the Solvay Council. Funded and organized by the wealthy chemist Ernest Solvay, the guest list is an impressive collection of top scientists from the time.
Along with Max Planck, often called the father of quantum mechanics, there was Ernest Rutherford, discoverer of the proton, and Heike Kamerlingh-Onnes, discoverer of superconductivity as well as the chemist Marie Curie and mathematician Henri Poincaire. The youngest member of this group was a 32-year-old Albert Einstein.
As scientists sometimes tend to do, the assembled members spent their time arguing about their field.
“The congress in Brussels resembled the lamentations on the ruins of Jerusalem,” Einstein later wrote to his friend, the engineer Michele Besso. “Nothing positive came out of it.”
The “temple” whose destruction many of the researchers were lamenting was the theories of classical physics, which had dominated scientific thinking in the previous century. Classical mechanics had managed to describe the movement of the planets, the behavior of electricity and magnetism and the relationship between solid, liquids and gases. But newly observed phenomena were pointing to problems. Light, for instance, had been heretofore described as a wave yet some experiments were suggesting this was an inadequate model.
Einstein himself was firmly in favor of the new tide, the way of quantum mechanics. Based on a theory of Planck’s, he advocated for the then-radical idea that light could behave as both a wave and a particle (or quantum). While we now know such a position to be true, observations at the time were not strong enough to wholeheartedly support this conclusion. It would not be until the 1920s that particles of light would be called photons.
Proceedings from the Solvay Council show how different physicists’ worldview was from our modern understanding. The gathered members “probably all agree that the so-called quantum theory is, indeed, a helpful tool but that it is not a theory in the usual sense of the word, at any rate not a theory that could be developed in a coherent form at the present time,” wrote Einstein.
At the time, theories describing light quanta and particle-wave duality had no rigorous experimental justification. Many of the scientists at the conference likely still believed in the now-outdated concept of a luminiferous ether, which supposedly was the medium through which light waves traveled, just as water waves travel through the ocean.
Einstein took issue with the conservatism of his fellow conference goers. Planck, he wrote, “stuck stubbornly to some undoubtedly wrong preconceptions,” while Poincare “was simply negative in general, and, all his acumen notwithstanding, he showed little grasp of the situation.”
Despite its goals, the 1911 meeting accomplished little. At its conclusion, Ernest Solvay addressed the scientists, saying, “In spite of the beautiful results achieved at this congress, you have not solved the real problems that remain at the forefront.” It would take at least two decades before experimental evidence and scientific debates firmly established quantum mechanics as a true theory.
But this first conference led to Solvay establishing an annual meeting for leading scientists to gather and discuss the issues of the day. The famous Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927 saw Einstein sparring once again with attendees, though this time with Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg about how quantum mechanics had gone too far and reduced the behavior of subatomic particles to probabilities. (“God does not play dice with the universe,” Einstein supposedly declared.)
Image: Couprie/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Seated (L-R): Walther Nernst, Marcel Brillouin, Ernest Solvay, Hendrik Lorentz, Emil Warburg, Jean Baptiste Perrin, Wilhelm Wien, Marie Curie, and Henri Poincaré.
Standing (L-R): Robert Goldschmidt, Max Planck, Heinrich Rubens, Arnold Sommerfeld, Frederick Lindemann, Maurice de Broglie, Martin Knudsen, Friedrich Hasenöhrl, Georges Hostelet, Edouard Herzen, James Hopwood Jeans, Ernest Rutherford, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, Albert Einstein, and Paul Langevin.
[b]http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20 ... gress/[/b]
By Adam Mann Email Author
October 28, 2011
Categories: Physics [not irony?]
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/ ... -congress/
[Image 'hotlinked' from wired.com, with thanks]
One hundred years ago, the greatest scientific minds of Europe met to address a perilous state of affairs. During the previous 20 years, curious scientists had uncovered new phenomena — including X-rays, the photoelectric effect, nuclear radiation and electrons — that were rocking the foundations of physics.
While researchers in the 19th century had thought they would soon describe all known physical processes using the equations of Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell, the new and unexpected observations were destroying this rosy outlook. Leading physicists, such as Max Planck and Walther Nernst, believed circumstances were dire enough to warrant an international symposium that could attempt to resolve the situation.
It was the start of the quantum revolution.
Reverberations from this meeting are still felt to this day. Though physics may still sometimes seem to be in crisis, with researchers yet to find the Higgs boson and lacking a complete understanding of dark matter and dark energy, what we do know about these mysteries is only possible thanks to the foundations laid down at the first Solvay Council.
From Oct. 30 to Nov. 3, 1911, 18 luminaries came together as part of the invite-only conference in Brussels, Belgium known as the Solvay Council. Funded and organized by the wealthy chemist Ernest Solvay, the guest list is an impressive collection of top scientists from the time.
Along with Max Planck, often called the father of quantum mechanics, there was Ernest Rutherford, discoverer of the proton, and Heike Kamerlingh-Onnes, discoverer of superconductivity as well as the chemist Marie Curie and mathematician Henri Poincaire. The youngest member of this group was a 32-year-old Albert Einstein.
As scientists sometimes tend to do, the assembled members spent their time arguing about their field.
“The congress in Brussels resembled the lamentations on the ruins of Jerusalem,” Einstein later wrote to his friend, the engineer Michele Besso. “Nothing positive came out of it.”
The “temple” whose destruction many of the researchers were lamenting was the theories of classical physics, which had dominated scientific thinking in the previous century. Classical mechanics had managed to describe the movement of the planets, the behavior of electricity and magnetism and the relationship between solid, liquids and gases. But newly observed phenomena were pointing to problems. Light, for instance, had been heretofore described as a wave yet some experiments were suggesting this was an inadequate model.
Einstein himself was firmly in favor of the new tide, the way of quantum mechanics. Based on a theory of Planck’s, he advocated for the then-radical idea that light could behave as both a wave and a particle (or quantum). While we now know such a position to be true, observations at the time were not strong enough to wholeheartedly support this conclusion. It would not be until the 1920s that particles of light would be called photons.
Proceedings from the Solvay Council show how different physicists’ worldview was from our modern understanding. The gathered members “probably all agree that the so-called quantum theory is, indeed, a helpful tool but that it is not a theory in the usual sense of the word, at any rate not a theory that could be developed in a coherent form at the present time,” wrote Einstein.
At the time, theories describing light quanta and particle-wave duality had no rigorous experimental justification. Many of the scientists at the conference likely still believed in the now-outdated concept of a luminiferous ether, which supposedly was the medium through which light waves traveled, just as water waves travel through the ocean.
Einstein took issue with the conservatism of his fellow conference goers. Planck, he wrote, “stuck stubbornly to some undoubtedly wrong preconceptions,” while Poincare “was simply negative in general, and, all his acumen notwithstanding, he showed little grasp of the situation.”
Despite its goals, the 1911 meeting accomplished little. At its conclusion, Ernest Solvay addressed the scientists, saying, “In spite of the beautiful results achieved at this congress, you have not solved the real problems that remain at the forefront.” It would take at least two decades before experimental evidence and scientific debates firmly established quantum mechanics as a true theory.
But this first conference led to Solvay establishing an annual meeting for leading scientists to gather and discuss the issues of the day. The famous Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927 saw Einstein sparring once again with attendees, though this time with Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg about how quantum mechanics had gone too far and reduced the behavior of subatomic particles to probabilities. (“God does not play dice with the universe,” Einstein supposedly declared.)
Image: Couprie/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Seated (L-R): Walther Nernst, Marcel Brillouin, Ernest Solvay, Hendrik Lorentz, Emil Warburg, Jean Baptiste Perrin, Wilhelm Wien, Marie Curie, and Henri Poincaré.
Standing (L-R): Robert Goldschmidt, Max Planck, Heinrich Rubens, Arnold Sommerfeld, Frederick Lindemann, Maurice de Broglie, Martin Knudsen, Friedrich Hasenöhrl, Georges Hostelet, Edouard Herzen, James Hopwood Jeans, Ernest Rutherford, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, Albert Einstein, and Paul Langevin.
[b]http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20 ... gress/[/b]
99.999+% of everything can't be that simple, can it?
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Re: The Crisis That Hit Physics 100 Years Ago
While Wired, like nearly all magazines running articles on science, tends to follow consensus ideas closely, so far I think that quantum theory comes a lot closer to being a "true theory" than a lot of other stuff in the Standard Model in astronomy and astrophysics, with their big bang and dark placeholders.
I am interpreting the phrase "true theory" here to mean a well-organized set of logical connections and experimental results that appear to have good mathematical support that permits some degree of predictability. That is a rather narrow definition, and it is part of what presently keeps the EU paradigm from being recognized in the mainstream as a "true theory", and therefore unpublishable.
However, standing back a few paces and taking a longer look at this theory, it has a couple of shortcomings that are disturbing to me. It is so far completely divorced from gravitational interactions within the scale domain where it seems to be effective, yet we routinely observe the force of gravity in action in simultaneity with quantum phenomena - the Sun, for instance. What glue holds all this smoothly together while the applicable theories stumble in the dark when it comes to describing the other?
Moreover, while it has assembled (predicted) a zoo full of heavier particles that should be detectable and that carry out very specific roles in the mathematical edifice of QCD, most of those predictions are not verified by observation. The Higgs boson is one example of that. If that not-cheap experiment fails, through going undetected by the LHC at the energy levels at which it should be, there's gonna be a whole lotta shufflin' goin' around.
So, while quantum mechanics seems to work okay on certain problems, it is far from a part of a unified theory that is able to describe the scale spectrum of phenomena from Planck or less up to the clumpy clustering of galaxies all the way out to the limits of our vision in the Universe.
That crisis, started about 100 years back, is with us still, despite reassurances to the contrary in the press.
We are fortunate to be looking through a different glass in contemplating these early days through the EU paradigm. That is not to have the hubris that the EU way is the only way, or that it is the final answer. That isn't what science is about. It is about critically assessing options and alternatives, using skill and intuition both, to cut through as much irrelevance as possible. The best we can hope for is that it will help provide, in time, a more complete, comprehensive and common sense answer to how a complex and confusing Universe might work. "Paradigm: a set of linked ideas"
Jim
I am interpreting the phrase "true theory" here to mean a well-organized set of logical connections and experimental results that appear to have good mathematical support that permits some degree of predictability. That is a rather narrow definition, and it is part of what presently keeps the EU paradigm from being recognized in the mainstream as a "true theory", and therefore unpublishable.
However, standing back a few paces and taking a longer look at this theory, it has a couple of shortcomings that are disturbing to me. It is so far completely divorced from gravitational interactions within the scale domain where it seems to be effective, yet we routinely observe the force of gravity in action in simultaneity with quantum phenomena - the Sun, for instance. What glue holds all this smoothly together while the applicable theories stumble in the dark when it comes to describing the other?
Moreover, while it has assembled (predicted) a zoo full of heavier particles that should be detectable and that carry out very specific roles in the mathematical edifice of QCD, most of those predictions are not verified by observation. The Higgs boson is one example of that. If that not-cheap experiment fails, through going undetected by the LHC at the energy levels at which it should be, there's gonna be a whole lotta shufflin' goin' around.
So, while quantum mechanics seems to work okay on certain problems, it is far from a part of a unified theory that is able to describe the scale spectrum of phenomena from Planck or less up to the clumpy clustering of galaxies all the way out to the limits of our vision in the Universe.
That crisis, started about 100 years back, is with us still, despite reassurances to the contrary in the press.
We are fortunate to be looking through a different glass in contemplating these early days through the EU paradigm. That is not to have the hubris that the EU way is the only way, or that it is the final answer. That isn't what science is about. It is about critically assessing options and alternatives, using skill and intuition both, to cut through as much irrelevance as possible. The best we can hope for is that it will help provide, in time, a more complete, comprehensive and common sense answer to how a complex and confusing Universe might work. "Paradigm: a set of linked ideas"
Jim
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Re: The Crisis That Hit Physics 100 Years Ago
so i'm not the only one....Poincare , - showed little grasp of the situation.
"It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong."
"Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one."
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." Voltaire
"Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one."
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." Voltaire
- tayga
- Posts: 668
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Re: The Crisis That Hit Physics 100 Years Ago
Far from it.Sparky wrote:so i'm not the only one....Poincare , - showed little grasp of the situation.
tayga
It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.
- Richard P. Feynman
Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.
- Thomas Kuhn
It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.
- Richard P. Feynman
Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.
- Thomas Kuhn
- Jarvamundo
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Re: The Crisis That Hit Physics 100 Years Ago
imo this hits the nail on the head
Here is a home video from one Irving Langmuir of the event: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GZdZUouzBY
imo the 50 years from the Maxwellians to this period is very worthy of investigation. Find the physical arguments of when, where and by whom it was derailed. Hertz was part of doing away with the ether, he was brilliant and died very young, but there were warning signs in his letters to the Maxwellians. Einstein ended up calling the Maxwell equations (Heavisides 4 Equations) the "Maxwell-Hertz" equations. Hertz was well on his way to developing the same... but Heaviside wrote letters to Hertz pointing out his errs in physical reasoning and adaptation to his work. Did Einstein's countryman indirectly obscure The Man who made engineering sense from Maxwells quaternions? Where did the physical reasoning derail? I dunno... but the period to investigate is right there.
Physical reasoning, was done away with. Einstein had doubts, at least he had a grasp on what might represent a physical argument and saw weaknesses. So now we are left with tools to quantify, but there is a great void in the physical argument we can provide, and so the art has been set free to speculate the existence of any number of magical entities, strings sticking to colliding branes, and dark ghosts peppering statistics. They are simply not physical arguments. A particle-wave duality of an event is not physically reasoned. Giving properties of permittivity etc to a vaccum or coordinate system is not physically reasoned, but the remnants of such words (permittivity) are only quantitative tools that 'work'. But is that how they were originally cast? Whether you take Mathis' arguments or not, on benefit of exposing yourself to his work is to challenge your physical reasoning constitution. To see past the smooth drawn out hand-slide of the existence of singularities.The famous Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927 saw Einstein sparring once again with attendees, though this time with Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg about how quantum mechanics had gone too far and reduced the behavior of subatomic particles to probabilities. (“God does not play dice with the universe,” Einstein supposedly declared
Here is a home video from one Irving Langmuir of the event: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GZdZUouzBY
imo the 50 years from the Maxwellians to this period is very worthy of investigation. Find the physical arguments of when, where and by whom it was derailed. Hertz was part of doing away with the ether, he was brilliant and died very young, but there were warning signs in his letters to the Maxwellians. Einstein ended up calling the Maxwell equations (Heavisides 4 Equations) the "Maxwell-Hertz" equations. Hertz was well on his way to developing the same... but Heaviside wrote letters to Hertz pointing out his errs in physical reasoning and adaptation to his work. Did Einstein's countryman indirectly obscure The Man who made engineering sense from Maxwells quaternions? Where did the physical reasoning derail? I dunno... but the period to investigate is right there.
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Re: The Crisis That Hit Physics 100 Years Ago
Exactly Miles Mathis' point. In reading his papers I am led to believe the corrections Miles makes is to identify the mistake in applying our LOCAL experimental outcomes to any cosmic space outside our sun's heliosphere. My theory is that our local space is not the same as outside out local space (heliosphere).
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