Is Mass Caused By Curved Spacetime?

[Moronium]

 if one day somebody can think up testable predictions from these speculations, then they will at that point become science.

 

 

 

Best pack a lunch if you're waiting for that, eh?  From what I hear-tell, we would have to build a particle accelerator with a diameter the size of the solar system to even think about detecting "strings."

 

In the meantime, the string theorists, like communists and Freudian psychoanalysts, have free reign to tout their "science" with no fear of being contradicted.

 

Yet literally many billions of dollars in research funds have been devoted to the pursuit of string theory.  Why the fascination?  Personally, I would find it more interesting to hear medieval scholastics debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

Edited May 28, 2018 by Moronium

[Moronium]

A few excerpts from an interesting article:

 

String theory strutted onto the scene some 30 years ago as perfection itself, a promise of elegant simplicity that would solve knotty problems in fundamental physics—including the notoriously intractable mismatch between Einstein’s smoothly warped space-time and the inherently jittery, quantized bits of stuff that made up everything in it.

 

For a time, many physicists believed that string theory would yield a unique way to combine quantum mechanics and gravity. “There was a hope. A moment,” said David Gross, an original player in the so-called Princeton String Quartet, a Nobel Prize winner and permanent member of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “We even thought for a while in the mid-’80s that it was a unique theory.”

 

“After a certain point in the early ’90s, people gave up on trying to connect to the real world,” Gross said. “The last 20 years have really been a great extension of theoretical tools, but very little progress on understanding what’s actually out there.”

 

...Inflationary models get tangled in string theory in multiple ways, not least of which is the multiverse—the idea that ours is one of a perhaps infinite number of universes, each created by the same mechanism that begat our own. Between string theory and cosmology, the idea of an infinite landscape of possible universes became not just acceptable, but even taken for granted by a large number of physicists.

 

It’s the kind of work that makes people such as Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, wonder if the field has strayed too far from its early ambitions—to find, if not a “theory of everything,” at least a theory of quantum gravity. “Answering deep questions about quantum gravity has not really happened,” he said. “They have all these hammers and they go looking for nails.” That’s fine, he said, even acknowledging that generations might be needed to develop a new theory of quantum gravity. “But it isn’t fine if you forget that, ultimately, your goal is describing the real world.”

 

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/09/the-strange-second-life-of-string-theory/500390/

Edited May 28, 2018 by Moronium

[Moronium]

The problem isn't really just any one fictional speculation, it's the large number (often a majority) of mainstream physicists who believe them.  They've lost their bearings.  They've become gullible instead of maintaining the skepticism required by science.  It seems that nothing is too absurd to discourage would-be believers.

 

It all started with special relativity and just got worse with time.  Einstein often expressed his regret for encouraging and inspiring the Heisenberg's of the world with his early, naive, approach to "science" (positivism, which he later called "nonsense," even while admitting to having previously adhered to it).

 

Max Bohr himself cited special relativity as the start of it all, as did Heisenberg.  A few excerpts from  David Mermin's famous paper about the Bohr/Einstein debates over the Copenhagen interpretation, entitled "Is the moon there when nobody looks? Reality and the quantum theory"

 

Born, pained by Einstein’s distaste for the statistical character of the quantum theory, repeatedly fails, both in his letters and in his later commentary on the correspondence, to understand what is really bothering Einstein. Einstein tries over and over again, without success, to make himself clear. 

 

At a dramatic moment Pauli appears in the Born-Einstein Letters, writing Born from Princeton in 1954 with his famous tact on display: 

 

“Einstein gave me your manuscript to read; he was not at all annoyed with you, but only said you were a person who will not listen. This agrees with the impression I have formed myself insofar as I was unable to recognize Einstein whenever you talked about him in either your letter or your manuscript. It seemed to me as if you had erected some dummy Einstein for yourself, which you then knocked down with great pomp."

 

Pauli goes on to state the real nature of Einstein’s “philosophical prejudice” to Born, emphasizing that “Einstein’s point of departure is ‘realistic’ rather than ‘deterministic’.

 

 

https://cp3.irmp.ucl.ac.be/~maltoni/PHY1222/mermin_moon.pdf

 

According the the Copenhagen interpretation, the answer is "No, the moon isn't there when nobody looks."  The same answer George Berkeley, the quintessential solipsist, would give.

 

It is amazing that those adopting solipsism cannot even understand any other point of view.  The idea of an objective reality seems to be so foreign to them as to be completely beyond their comprehension.  Bohr rejected any distinction between objective and subjective matters.

 

Einstein did of course question "spooky action at a distance" (entanglement); the claim (by Heisenberg) that if we can't know it, then it doesn't exist; and the claim that probability tables represent 'true reality."  But those particular arguments were incidental to his basic point, which was the rejection of the doctrine that physical properties have in general no objective reality independent of the act of observation.

 

Einstein maintained that "physics" couldn't and wouldn't exist without the assumption that there is a mind-independent "objective world" to be investigated and described.

 

Many claim that the experimental confirmation of Bell's theorem "proves" that the Copenhagen interpretation is "correct," but even Bell disagreed with that stance.  His theorem merely rules out "local" hidden variables, but not non-local ones.  His suggested solution was to abandon special relativity and revert to a form of Lorentzian relativity.  Seeing as how special relativity started the whole misguided solipsistic trend to begin with, that would be fitting.

Edited May 29, 2018 by Moronium

[OceanBreeze]

Jim Baggott, a former physics professor who has written 10-12 of books  on physics topics wrote one called "Farewell to Reality: How Fairy-tale Physics Betrays the Search for Scientific Truth."  He notes that

 

 

 

Even Einstein recognized the tendency to "do physics" by metaphysical speculation, and he should know, eh?

 

. 

 

https://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Reality-Physics-Betrayed-Scientific/dp/1605985740

 

Math is not physics.  Many physicists don't seem to realize this.

 

 

I don't believe it is possible to "do physics" without some math; at least including the basic calculus functions.

I do agree that abstract mathematics is for the most part, not physics.

[Moronium]

I don't believe it is possible to "do physics" without some math; at least including the basic calculus functions.

I do agree that abstract mathematics is for the most part, not physics.

 

 

Yeah math is an indispensable tool of physics. No question there.  But that's all it is--a tool.  Math alone can tell you nothing about the physical world.  Someone should tell the string theorists that, eh?

 

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. (Einstein)

 

 

 

Newton, when asked how he derived the law of gravitational attraction, answered that he did so by '"thinking about it constantly."  He analyzed decades worth of highly accurate empirical observations compiled by Tycho Brahe.  He looked for patterns, and used a lot of math to discern them.  Still, he was making the math fit the data, not using the math to "divine" the data. Of course he had a head start since Kepler had already used the same data to ascertain his "laws" of planetary motion (equal areas in equal times, etc.).

Edited May 29, 2018 by Moronium