cosmological theory

[Aloysius]

so perhaps you remember a couple months or so back when I posted a topic "Eureka" about how I had come up with an amazing revolutionary physics theory... well I've been working on it here and there as a little pet project since then (actually had the unique and exiting experience of madly writing out and solving formulas ON MY WALLS... and then having to scrub them out before room inspections of course! haha)

anyway, I typed up a bit of a summary of my conclusions so far... there are about 3 or 4 equations in there that, if this isn't something revolutionary, I'd like to see an explanation for why the numbers work out in them... but other than that it's about six pages single spaced with 1" margins reasoning away out of a single concept (the one that caused me to shout "Eureka" so many months ago)

and so yesterday I asked my physics teacher to look at it. if he hasn't already whited out my name and ran off to the presses, I am interested in hearing what he has to say about it. it's really funny too, because I really haven't participated nearly enough in his basic physics class this semester so this little ditty really shot up out of the blue from a student likely to get a C in the class since he never does any of the homework and misses so many classes.

ah the perils of eccentricity....

[Aloysius]

hmm... I wonder what he thought of it... I suppose I'll find out tomarrow in class.

[Snarf]

Would you like me to look at it and tell you my thoughts?

[morostheos]

Al is very protective of his little theory, I'd be surprised if he let you look at it. :

I can't wait to hear what your prof said!

[Aloysius]

haha yeah, seriously... especially since Snarf has already published (self-published, but still published mind you) a book... one phone call he could probably have it to the presses!

[MC IMaGiNaZUN]

America Magazine had an article... dont roll your eyes at me on this one, its good. It had an article that modern theories in Physics support St. Augustines view on Creatio ex Nihilo.

Thought it was worth mentioning.

SHALOM

[Snarf]

Well, if I can't offer any rebuttals or affirmations, I'll just offer some vague advice in dealing with physics.

When Isaac Newton wrote his [i]Principia Mathematica[/i], his objective was to formulate rules that apply to anything and everything under all circumstances. By the time of Maxwell it was realized that you do have to make certain assumptions for Newtonian Mechanics to have any validity, and Maxwell didn't know how to handle the situation. So, the aether theory was born by his contemporaries. It was something of an embarrassment when aether failed miserably again and again in the experimental world. Michelson and Morley were outright hated for their toy interferometer by many, mainly because it's easier to believe in aether than not to.

When Einstein corrected this picture, the breath taken by the physics world was both a sigh of relief and a gasp of astonishment. Einstein's math as employed in Special Relativity (high school algebra) is much easier on the eyes than Maxwell's laws of electromagnetism (differential equations in one form, reconstructed for most students as integrals), but unless you have a love of migraines it's much more pleasant to ruminate on electric charge becoming magnetic charge than it is to imagine three seconds for me equaling two minutes for someone else. With Einstein came a realization that physics has different realms of applicability. When you talk about momentum in the world of billiard balls, you use p=mv. If you're talking about a proton moving at relativistic speeds, I think the equation you use is p=mv(1-Beta), with Beta being shorthand for a long but mathematically straight-forward equation relating v to c. Technically speaking you're perfectly free to use the latter equation to describe billiard balls (assuming you know its mass, velocity, the table's coefficient of friction, air viscosity, and probably some other constants to an impossible degree of certainty), but you'd be wasting your time and valuable paper. For instance, if twins were pre-ordinated to live exactly 80 years each with one living on land and the other in an airplane in perpetual flight, the flying twin could expect to live every bit of 1/10000 of a second longer than his terrestrial brother. So, drawing line between the realm of Newtonian mechanics versus that of Relativistic mechanics is something of a judgment call. When Einstein augmented relativity a decade after his 1905 publication, General Relativity more or less abided by those rules. It simply ammended that not only to you have to arbitrarily decide where high speeds introduce the need for different equations, you have to account for extreme mass as well.

Quantum mechanics, however, made things only worse. When talking about particles at relativistic speeds, you HAVE to use special relativity or your results will be nonsensical. It seems perfectly reasonable, then, to apply general relativity as well to the quantum world. As it turns out, to do this incurs more nonsense than is even comfortible. My math skills are too lacking to entertain you with dazzling equations, but one example I've read spoke of meshing general relativity and quantum mechanics to make the probability of a certain quantum event to be roughly 1000%. When probability refers to anything over 100%, the meaning is not that it's a safe bet but that somebody goofed up their math somewhere. When I studied barrier tunneling, my professor talked about it in terms of moving a conventional automobile through a 10 meter wide hill. While not a time-effective means of transport, the point my professor made was that its probability of [i]not[/i] happening was in fact less than 100%. Relating to experiment, if I tell you that I'm going to eat more hotdogs than is even possible, my claim would be debunked when I die of hotdog-related illness with a sizable number of hotdogs remaining, ever possible of being eaten.

Physics right now is doing several things. What garners the most attention, however, is the circle of TOEs, "theories of everything". You have string theory, M-theory, super-symetry, and probably others. The weirdness entailed with many of these theories makes Einstein's time dilation and Lorentz contractions look perfectly sensible in comparison. Compounded by the youth of such theories, the theories are so esoteric that literally nobody on Earth understands all facets of them in whole. For instance, M-theory could not have been compiled outright; it was an amalgamation of several doctors who've devoted their lives to string theory physics with several doctors who've devoted their lives to string theory mathematics. For laymen like myself to take any semblance of a stance, one has to rely entirely on the soundness of approach in dumbed-down literature as well as aesthetic concerns. Someone in M-theory asked ex nihilo "if the universe is made of branes, what if it's really just ONE GIGANTIC BRANE!?" It seems to be a fringe stance at best, but while I side against such an idea for theological reasons I'm not going to pretend that I have a fraction of sufficient understanding of the subject as do those who invented the idea.

The greatest physics minds of the past century have sternly admitted that if post-aether physics makes sense, you're not thinking hard enough. Until a TOE is established, there will be realms of applicability with any equation that actually means anything. This is the context under which I would approach any claim that some permutation of equations from an entry-level physics course leads to revolutionary cosmic insight. In the 1970s Stephan Hawking presented some really far-out mathematic contortions to lead to the idea of black hole entropy, and when you look at the argument it seems downright stupid (it's something of a proof that an elephant can hang from a cliff by a dandelion root), but it provides hope because it unifies general relativity with quantum mechanics without incuring impossible statements. I'm not too proud to admit that I'm intimidated by Fourrier Series and gave up before even getting to Laplacian Transforms, but that's a wall between me talking conceptually about cosmology and making quantitative arguments about it. While "nihil novum sub sole" is obviously something you've more than likely considered, having taken my fair share of introductory physics classes I can tell you that everything you've been taught refers exclusively to the realm of physics relevant to an introductory physics course. Galaxies aren't billiard balls, and quarks aren't either.

Physics teachers love to bait students in introductory courses with a taste of current events. In my first week of Newtonian mechanics, gravity was presented as an equal among four forces of physics. I didn't hear about a second force of nature until the next semester, and the remaining two I've still never dealt with formally. In the middle of the course on introductory electricity and magnetism, (all three times I took it, gotta love beauracracy in transfering credits) magnetic monopoles were brought up. Monopoles are a thorn in the toe of anyone in physics today, and when I approached one of my professors (a member of a team at Columbia that lost the patent to the laser by two weeks) for his opinion off the record, he laughed and warned me that nobody can talk about monopoles without seriously upsetting someone else, so I really shouldn't bother. A less romanticized approach was when my professor this semester talked about being one of like 160 collaborators on a three-decade accelerator project that is probably never going to see the ink of the last page in a newspaper.

So, as you continue to learn, your teleology should be to better understand the universe and not to revolutionize it. Physics is a harsh mistress, and it should come as no offense that it's not everyone's calling. What I feel to be my calling requires keeping up to date on its concepts, but at this point I find it improbable that I'll ever leave a dent in physics for physics' sake.

[Aloysius]

haha thanks for the longwinded advice... I already know the basic history of modern physics well enough though

I made a "TOE" and if it doesn't work out I'd at least like someone to explain to me what kind of kinky coincidence it is that all the numbers seem to work out and correspond to some that have been produced through observation...

we'll just see what my physics professor has to say about it today...

[Snarf]

[i]I made a "TOE" and if it doesn't work out I'd at least like someone to explain to me what kind of kinky coincidence it is that all the numbers seem to work out and correspond to some that have been produced through observation.[/i]

Then why the elusive behavior? It's perfectly reasonable to not take an undergraduate kid you know on the internet as canonical authority, but then why post that you may have solved some great mystery with a handful of equations? That doesn't sound like a TOE at all. I'm kind of entertaining the idea that it's something like those calculator games we learned in middle school where you enter your year of birth, divide or multiply by a series of random variables, and then you end up with your aunt's social security number or something like that.

I guess what I really mean is that I can barely withold my suspense. You're such a tease, Aloysius. I don't know how to most accurately convey my feelings with an emoticon, so here's one with a hat.

[philothea]

I tried, Snarf, I tried. Al ignored me too.

For a TOE you need a formula or system which produces all the various masses, energy levels, and forces which are known to exist, at all differente scales. (We already have theories that work perfectly within fairly broad, but limited, ranges.) This same formula or system will then naturally make predictions which experimenters can test.

Mathematical tricks are only interesting if you're using fundamental units, and there aren't a whole lot of those in the universe. I still want to know what unit system Al is using...

[Snarf]

If a two score and twain hogshead object with a weight of 60,000 troy ounces moves at a quarter fathom per second, what is its kinetic energy?

[Aloysius]

hahaha I know I know... but I do love to tease you all so. and I still don't trust you, especially SNARF, not to go and publish my ideas!!! :

mwahahahaha

it's TOEness has not been developed to its fullest, but I do feel I've been able to connect a lot of forces and such to one universal thing that can be used to explain everything from the force of gravity to the speed of light to the density of the universe to the hubble constant to well... a whole bunch of other things I've been able to predict that come out to accepted values. it explains all masses, all energy levels, et cetera... it'll predict the force of gravity of the earth on a rock or the speed of a galaxy...

but I'm not revealing my formulas or concepts!

[ardillacid]

well, its been a day, what did he say?

[Deeds]

Bump. Updates?

[Cow of Shame]

[quote name='Snarf' post='960845' date='Apr 25 2006, 06:33 PM']
Would you like me to look at it and tell you my thoughts?
[/quote]

For a sec, I thought you wrote, "and [i]yell[/i] you my thoughts"....which sounded much more appropriate.