The Neck of God


On Feb 8, 2005, at 5:32 PM, Jack Sarfatti wrote:

The Neck of God

On Feb 8, 2005, at 12:56 PM, iksnileiz@earthlink.net wrote:

Jack Sarfatti wrote:


On Feb 8, 2005, at 11:36 AM, iksnileiz@earthlink.net wrote:

"You simply cannot have Einstein special relativity and also have a preferred inertial frame that is empirically
detectable."


J: That is wrong Paul. The SR dynamics remain unchanged even when there is a preferred frame.

Z: But the *physical reasons* for this invariance of the dynamics are then totally different.

J: So what?

Z: This goes to the heuristic core of Einstein's 1905 theory and its differences with respect to the Lorentzian model.

J: Too vague. Paul give brief explanations of your understandings of the Lorentzian and Einsteinian different interpretations (informal language of Bohm) of the same equations, so we get the nuance of what you are talking about.

J earlier: ONLY A TRIVIAL INTERPRETATIONAL INFORMAL LANGUAGE PROVISO CHANGES. YOU ARE FOCUSED ON THE TRIVIAL!

Z: But I would say that *you* are focussing on the trivial, since you only seem to be concerned with formal O(1,3) symmetry of the field dynamics at the micro-level.

J: What else is important? Physics is an empirical science. We are interested in elegance of formulation of course - the Zen (Dirac) Ideal of More Empirics with Less Excess Verbal and Mathematical Baggage. Not math for math's sake, or long-winded reconstructionist post-modern verbosities that are neither here nor there, and that dull the mind with little contact with observation and experiment. We are not interested in beautiful rigorous mathematical proofs unless they are directly relevant to the proper understanding of some important phenomenon - or better yet unify seemingly different phenomena under one insight. Let a thousand flowers bloom, but there are too many mathematical weeds in The Garden of Theoretical Physics that has grown decadent with the advent of string theory. Quite a tangled wood.

J earlier: The laws of nature either classical or quantum do not change their form, nor do they change their transformations under O(1,3). There are no explicit dynamical terms in any of the laws of nature that violate O(1,3) (not talking GR, if GR then I mean local O(1,3)).

Z: Would you say that this is also true in Lorentz's theory? If not, why not?

J: Of course it is! But I am not sure what YOU mean by "Lorentz's theory"? Spell out exactly what you mean as best you can and as concretely as you can.

J earlier: The detection of the preferred frame is strictly in that isolated class of measurement like Cahill alleges. There is no contamination of other battle-tested effects.

Z: You are ignoring or discarding the classic Machian basis for Einstein's classic 1905 treatment. Which is OK, as long as you acknowledge it.

J: What are you talking about? Spell it out. I do not want to argue over undefined buzz words. Spell out what you mean here? Operationalism? Mach's idea that distant matter there makes inertia here? What?

J earlier: Paul, you still do not understand the difference between dynamics and the vacuum.

Z: Of course I do. Your field dynamics at the micro-level (as determined by a field Lagrangian) is Lorentz-invariant, while your physical vacuum ground state solution at the macro-level has less than full O(1,3) symmetry, and thus admits a preferred
inertial frame.

J: OK, so that is the end of the story! There is nothing more of interest there. You are chasing Phantoms like WMD in Iraq.

J earlier: Your remark is amateurish,

Z: It seems that anything that addresses the deep interpretation of formal dynamical invariance at the micro-level will be considered "amateurish" according to the current professional standards of modern physics.

J: Nice in a court room perhaps. But what are you talking about? You are much too "deep" for me.

Z: I'm trying to approach these issues from a very different neo-classical angle.

J: For Art stopped short in the cultivated Court of The Empress Josephine. (Patience G&S) Pardon me while I straighten my glasses. Neo-classical? Who ordered that? BTW I hope you understand by now that the "classical world" "neo" or not is a fiction. It's a delusion like Our Man of La Rancha charging The Windmill thinking it was WMD and that Iraq was Iran. What a difference the "M" and the "n" make. We do not live in the classical world. Bohr was wrong! We live in the MACRO-QUANTUM WORLD on spontaneous broken vacuum symmetry. The local smooth Einsteinian warped geometrodynamics, the rumpled twisted inelegant fabric of space-time emerges from the MACRO-QUANTUM "multi-layered multi-colored" Coat of Jacob the Cosmic Super Conducting Vacuum Field from the partial cohering of the virtual ZPF "PV" electron-positron plasma.

Z: But I can see that you are simply concerned with developing a workable Andersonian ODLRO formalism that gives sensible results at the macro level, while preserving Lorentz invariance of the field dynamics at the micro-level -- which is fine as far as it goes.

J: That's right. No need to go further than that! No excess verbal baggage allowed. Keep it as simple as possible, but not simpler than is possible. Puthoff makes that mistake. His "PV without PV" is simpler than is possible and your "meta-theoretics" is more complex than is desirable as is most of the disembodied theories today most likely.

J earlier: the equivalent statement would be that the existence of ferromagnetism requires an explicit breaking of O(3) in the Hamiltonian of the ferromagnet. These phenomena are NOT like the Zeeman and Stark effects in atomic physics, nor is it like the Stern-Gerlach. This is a subtle idea that escapes your comprehension.

Z: Of course I'm not saying anything of the kind. Of course I understand that you are talking about a macro-solution of the micro- field equations that has less than the full O(1,3) symmetry of the underlying dynamics. I am not saying that there is a formal mathematical problem with this.

J: Your point has completely evaporated with a whimper like the pop of a tiny black hole at The End of Ordinary History.

On Feb 8, 2005, at 3:57 PM, Jack Sarfatti wrote:

Thanks Brian. I think Anderson's paper is in "A Career in Theoretical Physics". I will look when I get back to my office. Anderson writes that even Eugene Wigner did not get this same idea at first.

On Feb 8, 2005, at 2:01 PM, Brian Josephson wrote:

--On Tuesday, February 8, 2005 12:24 PM -0800 Jack Sarfatti wrote:


On Feb 8, 2005, at 11:36 AM, iksnileiz@earthlink.net wrote:

"You simply cannot have Einstein special relativity and also have a preferred inertial frame that is empirically detectable."

That is wrong Paul. The SR dynamics remain unchanged even when there is a preferred frame. ..

Paul is in good company, as C.N. Yang, co-discoverer of parity violation in the weak interaction, was in 1966 completely unable to understand my explanation of weakly superconductors in terms of states where phase invariance is broken even though the underlying symmetry is not. He maintained if the dynamics is symmetrical the states have to be also, which is of course wrong.

The description of this dates actually back to a paper by Anderson in Phys. Rev. in 1961 or 1962 (try vol. 112, p 1900), where he explained his pseudospin model for superconductivity. Possibly this can be seen on Google scholar, which has some classic papers on it.

Brian

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Appendix: The Meaning of Special Relativity: Einstein vs Lorentz

Z: This is conceptually orthogonal to the question of *universality* of the contraction/dilatation phenomena, i.e., the hypothesis that all physical objects are affected in exactly the same way when they are in relative uniform motion.

J: I think Lorentz and Einstein both would say they are universal. No significant difference there and no evidence to suggest otherwise. Why dig up this Red Herring?

J previously: I don't know what this means operationally or mathematically. What are you talking about?

Z: What am I talking about?

J: Yeah Dude, what are you talking about?

Z: I'm talking about 1905 special relativity, as argued by Einstein. That's what.

J: How can you decide this? Give a procedure.

Z: Since the immediate empirical predictions of Lorentz's and Einstein's theories are identical, the choice between them is to that extent empirically undecidable.

J: If that were really true, then the problem would be of no interest to a blue collated metric engineer like me. Crank 'er up and see why she don't fly Hal! But, in fact, you contradict what you say below.

Z: It looks like you don't acknowledge how Einstein's 1905 paper fundamentally differs from Lorentz's theory. After all, both involve the same "Lorentz" transformation formulas, but obviously those formulas have very different physical meanings in the two theories.

J: What is the meaning of "physical meanings"?

Z: Einstein's rationale for building the Lorentz transformations into the kinematics -- thus forcing the formal expression of the dynamical laws to be Lorentz invariant -- was the supposed universality of the contraction and dilatation effects, which was in turn supported by Einstein's version of the relativity principle according to which the physical distinction between the apparent uniform motion of a system resulting from observer motion, and objective uniform motion of the system, was erased.

J: You are too vague here Paul. Give an example what you mean. In Einstein's picture, only the relative velocity between Alice and Bob (both inertial frame observers) matters. From Alice's POV Bob moves at v and from Bob's PV Alice moves at -v.

But suppose Cahill and the Catanians are correct. Suppose the O(1,3) Lorentz group is spontaneously broken in the "empty" space that Earth moves in. Let Eve's inertial frame, be the preferred frame of not so "empty" space in the Earth's neighborhood. "There goes the neighborhood!" says Einstein. v(Alice) and v(Bob) are Alice's and Bob's absolute velocities relative to Eve's preferred inertial frame of rest that is like the preferred direction of the ferromagnetic pseudo-vector H (H3 = F12, H1 = F23, H2 = F13, F is the 4D curl of the A connection field from locally gauging U(1)) in a finite domain (permeability)H = B where the rotation group O(3) is spontaneously broken in the ferromagnetic ground state that is the analog of the vacuum for the spontaneous breaking of the Lorentz group O(1,3) connecting Alice, to Bob, to Eve etc.

Then, the relative velocity between Alice and Bob, from Einstein's kinematics that is identical in mathematical form to Lorentz's, is

v(Alice - Bob) = [v(Alice) - v(Bob)]/[1 - v(Alice)v(Bob)/c^2]

Note there is no change in rest energy measured locally, i.e. if Alice is a detector and Bob is an electron, then when v(Alice) - v(Bob) = 0, v(Alice - Bob) = 0.

Z: Clearly, the existence of an empirically detectable preferred frame in a vacuum breaks this Einsteinian conceit.

J: It is an inconsequential conceit that you blow out of all proportion. It is a small mound that you make into a mountain. A tiny pimple, not the huge goiter on the Neck of God that you make it out to be!