It seems to me that too many of our latest 'breakthroughs' in physics have been in what I think of as Theoretical Physics and IMHO tends to give the religious fanatics ammo in their 'it's only theory' argument that the masses, especially their flocks, will buy into. The media seems to lack the subtlety to distinguish the two.

Or Feynman? Or Gell-Mann? Or Weinberg? Or Isaac Fucking Newton? Or, indeed, Peter Higgs?

What makes a good theory is one which makes successful predictions, which are born out by experiment. That is why theoretical physics is so fucking awesome and why screeching about it being theoretical is a bit lame.

Sorry.

An example:
I think it was Plato who postulated that it was the man and the man alone whose traits decided what traits the children would have. The woman would have no contribution to that.

Then came Mendel and discovered the concept of genetic inheritance, then came the discoveries of DNA and genes...

Should we keep using Plato's theory because its elegant and because some unexplained and unknown variables make it SEEM as if male and female contribute when it's only the male which contributes? After all, if those unexplained, unknown, magical variables are sufficiently removed from our technical abilities, we have no way of telling one theory from the other.



Another example:
You cannot find your car-keys. They are not where you remember them to be. The most elegant explanation is that somebody hid them from you, provided this perpetrator was able to break into your appartment without leaving traces.
Conclusion: A malicious person broke into your appartment, hid the car-keys to mess with you, and now the keys are gone forever. There is no point in keeping looking for them.
Oops, they were in the other jacket. Turns out your memory was wrong. OR that malicious person put the car-keys in that jacket to mess with you. Your memory would be correct while SEEMING to be wrong...



Need I really elaborate why "making sense" is not good enough when picking an explanation?


EDIT: There was an exchange in TBBT. It went something like this.
Leonard: How do you know whether your theory is correct if you didn't conduct experiments?
Sheldon: Of course it's correct! It's my theory!

They simply didn't have the tools for proper experiments back then and explored the world in the way religious people do: Using the mind only. Once they added the real world, their beautiful explanation became worthless.

Quantum mechanics and the theory of gravity are fundamentally incompatible. This has been known for decades yet we can't seem to overcome the problem no matter how many minds and resources are thrown at it. IMO a lot of the obstacle is institutional academia being unwilling to consider theories divergent from the "standard model" and its close relatives. The experience of Halton Arp is a great illustration of this problem.

There are new ideas out there which aren't being touched by institutional science but probably should be - ideas like the Electric Universe or Primer Fields. Maybe neither will turn out to be anything but both show more than enough promise to be worth serious investigation. But just try to get a grant to study a physics theory that contradicts the standard model!

There is no grant money or Nobel Prizes for defending the existing model. Science advances by breaking the existing model.

And some ideas, like the electric universe, have elements that have already been falsified. Apparently the only argument left for such kook theories is that the world of physicists is conspiring against them because nothing new isn't allowed.

(Hint: that would be a failed theory, too.)

Sheesh!

I would very much like to see said falsification of EU theory. I have specifically searched for it several times and found nothing substantial.

Do you have anything that has actually rigorously dealt with the topic? Anyone can put up a page in a wiki but dealing with serious scientific issues is another matter entirely.

That you think that page demonstrates something is part of the problem. All it is is a statement of orthodoxy, when there is a real question of what degree electrical and magnetic forces are at play in the large-scale (and small-scale) structure of the cosmos. The orthodox view has huge problems it needs to plug with things like black holes and dark matter energy, and a ton of hand-waving of the inconsistency between quantum physics and gravity - clearly insufficient explanations of many behaviors that we can observe.

Yes, there is quite a bit that physics has not solved. But that does not give one an excuse to shove pseudo-scientific claptrap into the gap because although there are gaps, science has a rather good idea about how the universe works in those areas where we do have theories substantiated by a rather complete experimental history that support those theories.

The electric universe is utter tosh because it doesn't just try to insert a new theory into a gap, it has all the elements of a pseudo-science, that is to throw out much of established theory for utter claptrap.

And where are the peer reviewed electric universe theory papers? That's right. There aren't any. Because electric universe advocates don't do science. They do post a lot on the Internet, though.

To summarize what Wolfgang Pauli might have said, "The electric universe isn't even wrong."

The sun is not an anode. Stars work by gravity, and nuclear fusion, not electricity. Hans Bethe won a Nobel Prize for solving that particular problem.

I have only ridicule for the electric universe. And that is all the attention it deserves.

It's not scientific to discard a theory by calling it a bunch of names. I would certainly discard it if I had a solid scientific basis to do so. Are you able to provide one or not?

Such is the electric universe.

Again. No peer reviewed articles in the scientific literature supporting it. Not one. One can not say that it is science with that sad record.

And the Sun is an anode????

Hans Bethe rolls in his grave, undoubtedly laughing his head off as well.

on edit: in case you missed it, this is the DU Science Group, not the "Some Shit Some Dude Made Up Late at Night" Group.

I would treat Neal Adams' growing hollow earth similarly.

I presume that you don't get your science from random blogs, so the results of your 3-second Google search are not adequate to the task. What else ya got? Seems should be so easy, just say whatever it is specifically about the theory that has you so convinced it's not worth investigating further.

Let's just start with that.

Here is Hans Bethe's Nobel page: 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics. And the committee's Presentation Speech.

And since you obviously love WikiPedia, here is their page on Stellar nucleosynthesis which should have enough detail for most people. If not, there are citations to follow there as well.

Or one could merely believe the electric universe and that the Sun is an anode, turning everything we've learned about how the Sun works on its head.

BTW, what is the electric universe theory on Asymptotic freedom in QCD?

Surely such an expansive theory as the electric universe explains that as well.

The lesson here is that there are all sorts of kooks who claim to have the next best theory of everything. But science never, ever claims such things. Although it may strive toward that goal, science is humble enough to understand, even if such a theory even exists, it may never be found.

The electric universe does not even get to first base and does not belong in a science forum any more than Neal Adams' kookery, or Creationism, does.

The primary claim that the Sun is an anode is falsified by current theory and experiment. So the theory falls right there.

And again, zero articles in the peer reviewed science literature, just like with the rest of pseudoscience claptrap.

I think I am done with this.

Thanks for the little colloquy. I apologize for being so direct, but some things deserve such a treatment.

My best to you.

You could have saved yourself all the time it seems you're so put off to spend here by simply making one. You've again made an institutional argument in place of a scientific one, and moreover proposed a false choice in "believing" one or the other.

Science isn't a matter of belief, as you should be well aware.

I think it quite reasonable to propose that there may be electromagnetic forces acting in ways we are not yet aware, on large and very large scales, if for no other reason than we evidence of forces not accounted for in existing models. I don't see how that's kooky or crazy in any way at all - at least, no kookier and crazier than believing in the big bang, black holes, neutron stars, dark matter and dark energy, etc., all of which are wild-ass guesses and very incomplete explanations, themselves.

If we're being rigorous here, quantum mechanics falsifies gravity, yet that doesn't seem to bother people who believe both are true, yet scientifically they cannot both be true. Thus the crisis that I initially mentioned. You can't compartmentalize the continuity of existence... either it is continuous or not!

It demands a different solution and I think it's kooky and crazy to never consider any idea that contracts the basis of conventional explanations.

Last edited Mon Jun 8, 2015, 11:58 PM - Edit history (3)

The reason why gravity and the core theory of quantum physics do not unify yet is that gravity is fucking weak -- really, really fucking weak.

If you understood that you would understand why there are different theories for them, and why General Relativity is not a quantum theory. And for Christ sakes! Why quantum field theory no more falsifies general relativity than glazed doughnuts do.

(For those who are scientifically illiterate, the reason why the weakest force of gravity can dominate the universe is because it is always attractive. Not true about electromagnetism where opposites attract, but same charges repulse, and on average the universe has balance between the two. And Yup! That includes the Sun, and Earth, and every fucking other body in the universe. That allows gravity to dominate. On large scale.)

It is all in the standard model of particle physics, the general theory of relativity (gravity), and ALL the experimental evidence.

Still waiting for the peer reviewed electric universe explanation of stellar nucleosynthesis. And how about asymptotic freedom in quantum chromodynamics? And since general relativity is apparently falsified by quantum field theory (your claim), why don't you throw in the electric universe calculation of the orbit of Mercury for good measure.

I know. You've got nothing. Butkus! Not one fucking peer reviewed paper. And you have the balls to accuse me of not making a scientific argument. When you have nothing?

Buh-bye my friend.

and still provided nothing in the way of actual scientific argument

but you have provided enough information for me to assess that you haven't the foggiest idea of what you're talking about

I am not that familiar with electric universe, but I'm gonna give it a try.

So, EU means that stuff attracts each other because of electromagnetism rather than gravity, right?



One of my first counter-points is this: the Cavendish-experiment

You have two heavy balls made from lead or something like that. In the experiment, you can measure their mutual (supposed gravitic) attraction by measuring how the force creates a torsion-movement of the lever one of the balls is fixed to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_experiment
1. If the balls attract each other electrostatically, they must have opposite charges to each other. (Lead is paramagnetic at room-temperature.)
2. At the same time, both balls are attracted to Earth. That means, ball 1 has the opposite charge to Earth and ball 2 has the opposite charge to Earth. -> There must be more than 2 electric charges.
3. Noether-theorem + the simplest electromagnetic radiator being a dipole -> there can be no more than 2 electric charges

1+2+3 -> the attractive force cannot be electrostatic (and lead isn't magnetic)



Second counter-point: gravity-lensing and gravitic red-shift

Photons carry no electric charge, otherwise the Maxwell-equations would be totally different. That means that there are no electromagnetic means to change the frequency and the momentum of a photon after it has been emitted. That means that stellar bodies wouldn't be able to interact with the light flying by them. But they do.
-> Gravity and electromagnetism aren't the same.



You are hereby invited to explain these two experimental findings with Electric Universe. Have fun.

The real problem might arise because general relativity appears in the study of rather large objects, whereas the quantum theories arise from the study of very small ones, and the gravitational forces are very weak compared to the interactions studied by the accelerator physicists. I think this means that a graviton would be a very weakly interacting particle:

... Even if gravitons exist, it’s likely that we’d never be able to detect them. As one recent paper demonstrated, gravitons would interact so weakly with masses that you’d need something like a Jupiter-mass detector orbiting a neutron star. Even then it would take more than a decade to detect a single graviton. Even then the noise from things like neutrinos would wash out your signal ....

Moreover, the conceptual set-up of general relativity is rather different from our theories of the elementary particle world: Einstein's accomplishment with gravity was to reduce it somehow to geometry; whereas the interaction of elementary particles often seems to be conceptualized by particle exchange, as in Feynman diagrams. These are rather different pictures and it's entirely unclear how one could cobble them together

Gravity is really, really fucking weak by a rather large number of orders of magnitude. So at subnuclear (approaching Planck) scales gravity fields are rather meaningless. That's why we can still solve all sorts of quantum field problems in spite of the fact that they ignore the gravitational field.

This NYT article is a peculiar one. I don't know whether to think "DUH!" or to throw my computer across the room in disgust. Maybe I will do both. I am waiting for somebody to invoke Thomas Kuhn in the thread. Then I will throw my computer across the room. We've already had the electric universe... So why not a little post-modernism.

Well, on the other hand maybe one should chalk it up to pure entertainment value.

Regards.

During scientific revolutions, scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before.

- Familiar objects are seen in a different light and joined by unfamiliar ones as well.
- Rabbit or Duck?Scientists see the world of their research-engagement differently.
- Scientists see new things when looking at old objects.
- In a sense, after a revolution, scientists are responding to a different world.

This difference in view resembles a gestalt shift, a perceptual transformation—"what were ducks in the scientist's world before the revolution are rabbits afterward." But caution—there are important differences.

- Something like a paradigm is a prerequisite to perception itself (recall G. H. Mead's concept of a predisposition, or the dictum it takes a meaning to catch a meaning).
- What people see depends both on what they look at and on what their previous visual-conceptual experience has taught them to see.
- Individuals know when a gestalt shift has taken place because they are aware of the shift—they can even manipulate it mentally.
- In a gestalt switch, alternate perceptions are equally "true" (valid, reasonable, real).
- Because there are external standards with respect to which switch of vision can be demonstrated, conclusions about alternate perceptual possibilities can be drawn.
- But scientists have no such external standards
- Scientists have no recourse to a higher authority that determines when a switch in vision has taken place.
- As a consequence, in the sciences, if perceptual switches accompany paradigm changes, scientists cannot attest to these changes directly.
- A gestalt switch: "I used to see a planet, but now I see a satellite." (This leaves open the possibility that the earlier perception was once and may still be correct).
- A paradigm shift: " I used to see a planet, but I was wrong."
- It is true, however, that anomalies and crises "are terminated by a relatively sudden and unstructured event like the gestalt switch" (122).

/... http://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/Kuhn.html

My response to such an argument is simple. The centuries long meta-experiment of science supports the value of the scientific method, no matter what Kuhn wrote in the 60's or no matter how that is (mis?)interpreted today, or any day.

And that is enough for me, and should be enough for anybody except the most hard core.

Science improves itself because it ever compares itself to reality. The extent that they differ is the extent that the science is wrong. It is really simple if one merely defines science as methodological naturalism, that the methods of science presume natural causes/effects and therefore that limits what science can discover to nature. (Unless one wants to get bogged down in philosophy, which I prefer not to do.) Note: that is not the same thing as philosophical naturalism which might claim that there are only natural things. Science cannot make claims on such things because its domain is limited to nature by its very methods.

Now there could be quibbles about this argument, and even I could make an argument against the last point. But my answer to that would be that science presumes natural causes and whether there are unnatural causes or not appears to be outside science's domain. But that is as philosophical as I am willing to stick my neck out. My crucial point is that it certainly is appropriate for scientists to act as if this is how things are. And who can argue with the results? I hope I am making myself clear.

Thanks for your interesting response.

Regards.