info
Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable.
Dismiss
DEAD PHYSICS
6 views
Skip to first unread message
Pentcho Valev
Mar 13, 2012, 4:24:01 PM3/13/12
to
http://archives.lesechos.fr/archives/2004/LesEchos/19077-80-ECH.htm
"Physicien au CEA, professeur et auteur, Etienne Klein s'inquiète des relations de plus en plus conflictuelles entre la science et la société. (...) « Je me demande si nous aurons encore des physiciens dans trente ou quarante ans », remarque ce touche-à-tout aux multiples centres d'intérêt : la constitution de la matière, le temps, les relations entre science et philosophie. (...) Etienne Klein n'est pas optimiste. Selon lui, il se pourrait bien que l'idée de progrès soit tout bonnement « en train de mourir sous nos yeux »."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/nov/22/schools.g2
"But instead of celebrating, physicists are in mourning after a report showed a dramatic decline in the number of pupils studying physics at school. The number taking A-level physics has dropped by 38% over the past 15 years, a catastrophic meltdown that is set to continue over the next few years. The report warns that a shortage of physics teachers and a lack of interest from pupils could mean the end of physics in state schools. Thereafter, physics would be restricted to only those students who could afford to go to posh schools. Britain was the home of Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and Paul Dirac, and Brits made world-class contributions to understanding gravity, quantum physics and electromagnetism - and yet the British physicist is now facing extinction. But so what? Physicists are not as cuddly as pandas, so who cares if we disappear?"
That was written in 2004-2005. Is the situation worse now? Is physics already dead? Let us see. Here are two recent texts which, if published, say, 50 years ago, would have turned the scientific world into a pandemonium:
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27625/
"Graphene Battery Turns Ambient Heat Into Electric Current. (...) So the energy generated by this device comes from ambient heat. These guys say there were able to increase the current by heating the solution and also by accelerating the copper ions with ultrasound. They even claim to have kept their graphene battery running for 20 days on nothing but ambient heat."
http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/148
"Many physicists argue that time is an illusion. Lee Smolin begs to differ. (...) Smolin wishes to hold on to the reality of time. But to do so, he must overcome a major hurdle: General and special relativity seem to imply the opposite. In the classical Newtonian view, physics operated according to the ticking of an invisible universal clock. But Einstein threw out that master clock when, in his theory of special relativity, he argued that no two events are truly simultaneous unless they are causally related. If simultaneity - the notion of "now" - is relative, the universal clock must be a fiction, and time itself a proxy for the movement and change of objects in the universe. Time is literally written out of the equation. Although he has spent much of his career exploring the facets of a "timeless" universe, Smolin has become convinced that this is "deeply wrong," he says. He now believes that time is more than just a useful approximation, that it is as real as our guts tell us it is - more real, in fact, than space itself. The notion of a "real and global time" is the starting hypothesis for Smolin's new work, which he will undertake this year with two graduate students supported by a $47,500 grant from FQXi."
How did today's scientific world react to these hyperrevolutionary texts? No reaction at all. The situation couldn't be worse. Physics couldn't be deader.
Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com
"Physicien au CEA, professeur et auteur, Etienne Klein s'inquiète des relations de plus en plus conflictuelles entre la science et la société. (...) « Je me demande si nous aurons encore des physiciens dans trente ou quarante ans », remarque ce touche-à-tout aux multiples centres d'intérêt : la constitution de la matière, le temps, les relations entre science et philosophie. (...) Etienne Klein n'est pas optimiste. Selon lui, il se pourrait bien que l'idée de progrès soit tout bonnement « en train de mourir sous nos yeux »."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/nov/22/schools.g2
"But instead of celebrating, physicists are in mourning after a report showed a dramatic decline in the number of pupils studying physics at school. The number taking A-level physics has dropped by 38% over the past 15 years, a catastrophic meltdown that is set to continue over the next few years. The report warns that a shortage of physics teachers and a lack of interest from pupils could mean the end of physics in state schools. Thereafter, physics would be restricted to only those students who could afford to go to posh schools. Britain was the home of Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and Paul Dirac, and Brits made world-class contributions to understanding gravity, quantum physics and electromagnetism - and yet the British physicist is now facing extinction. But so what? Physicists are not as cuddly as pandas, so who cares if we disappear?"
That was written in 2004-2005. Is the situation worse now? Is physics already dead? Let us see. Here are two recent texts which, if published, say, 50 years ago, would have turned the scientific world into a pandemonium:
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27625/
"Graphene Battery Turns Ambient Heat Into Electric Current. (...) So the energy generated by this device comes from ambient heat. These guys say there were able to increase the current by heating the solution and also by accelerating the copper ions with ultrasound. They even claim to have kept their graphene battery running for 20 days on nothing but ambient heat."
http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/148
"Many physicists argue that time is an illusion. Lee Smolin begs to differ. (...) Smolin wishes to hold on to the reality of time. But to do so, he must overcome a major hurdle: General and special relativity seem to imply the opposite. In the classical Newtonian view, physics operated according to the ticking of an invisible universal clock. But Einstein threw out that master clock when, in his theory of special relativity, he argued that no two events are truly simultaneous unless they are causally related. If simultaneity - the notion of "now" - is relative, the universal clock must be a fiction, and time itself a proxy for the movement and change of objects in the universe. Time is literally written out of the equation. Although he has spent much of his career exploring the facets of a "timeless" universe, Smolin has become convinced that this is "deeply wrong," he says. He now believes that time is more than just a useful approximation, that it is as real as our guts tell us it is - more real, in fact, than space itself. The notion of a "real and global time" is the starting hypothesis for Smolin's new work, which he will undertake this year with two graduate students supported by a $47,500 grant from FQXi."
How did today's scientific world react to these hyperrevolutionary texts? No reaction at all. The situation couldn't be worse. Physics couldn't be deader.
Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com
Tonico
Mar 13, 2012, 5:56:08 PM3/13/12
to
Pentcho Valev
Mar 15, 2012, 7:56:11 AM3/15/12
to
Let us imagine an unrealistic event: All the Einsteinians all over the world, suddenly and simultaneously, declare that the speed of light varies as predicted by Newton's emission theory of light. What would happen after the declaration? Nothing. The falsehood ("the speed of light is invariable") is an integral part of our civilization and will disappear together with the disappearance of the civilization. Many Einsteinians know that and feel safe to hint at the truth from time to time, driven by various motives:
http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Its-Roots-Banesh-Hoffmann/dp/0486406768
"Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann: "Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had suggested in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one, the second principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding train can do far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the speed of the particle is not independent of the motion of the object emitting it. And if we take light to consist of particles and assume that these particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to Newtonian relativity and thus automatically account for the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as we have seen, Einstein resisted the temptation to account for the null result in terms of particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian ideas, and introduced as his second postulate something that was more or less obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether."
https://webspace.utexas.edu/aam829/1/m/Relativity.html
Alberto Martinez: "Does the speed of light depend on the speed of its source? Before formulating his theory of special relativity, Albert Einstein spent a few years trying to formulate a theory in which the speed of light depends on its source, just like all material projectiles. Likewise, Walter Ritz outlined such a theory, where none of the peculiar effects of Einstein's relativity would hold. By 1913 most physicists abandoned such efforts, accepting the postulate of the constancy of the speed of light. Yet five decades later all the evidence that had been said to prove that the speed of light is independent of its source had been found to be defective."
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/companion.doc
John Norton: "These efforts were long misled by an exaggeration of the importance of one experiment, the Michelson-Morley experiment, even though Einstein later had trouble recalling if he even knew of the experiment prior to his 1905 paper. This one experiment, in isolation, has little force. Its null result happened to be fully compatible with Newton's own emission theory of light. Located in the context of late 19th century electrodynamics when ether-based, wave theories of light predominated, however, it presented a serious problem that exercised the greatest theoretician of the day."
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1743/2/Norton.pdf
John Norton: "In addition to his work as editor of the Einstein papers in finding source material, Stachel assembled the many small clues that reveal Einstein's serious consideration of an emission theory of light; and he gave us the crucial insight that Einstein regarded the Michelson-Morley experiment as evidence for the principle of relativity, whereas later writers almost universally use it as support for the light postulate of special relativity. Even today, this point needs emphasis. The Michelson-Morley experiment is fully compatible with an emission theory of light that CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT POSTULATE."
http://www.springerlink.com/content/l720v8hv51p290gt/
Einstein and the Changing Worldviews of Physics, Einstein Studies, 2012, Volume 12, Part 1, 23-37, The Newtonian Theory of Light Propagation, Jean Eisenstaedt: "It is generally thought that light propagation cannot be treated in the framework of Newtonian dynamics. However, at the end of the 18th century and in the context of Newton's Principia, several papers, published and unpublished, offered a new and important corpus that represents a detailed application of Newton's dynamics to light. In it, light was treated in precisely the same way as material particles. This most interesting application - foreshadowed by Newton himself in the Principia - constitutes a relativistic optics of moving bodies, of course based on what we nowadays refer to as Galilean relativity, and offers a most instructive Newtonian analogy to Einsteinian special and general relativity (Eisenstaedt, 2005a; 2005b). These several papers, effects, experiments, and interpretations constitute the Newtonian theory of light propagation. I will argue in this paper, however, that this Newtonian theory of light propagation has deep parallels with some elements of 19th century physics (aberration, the Doppler effect) as well as with an important part of 20th century relativity (the optics of moving bodies, the Michelson experiment, the deflection of light in a gravitational field, black holes, the gravitational Doppler effect). (...) Not so surprisingly, neither the possibility of a Newtonian optics of moving bodies nor that of a Newtonian gravitational theory of light has been easily "seen," neither by relativists nor by historians of physics; most probably the "taken-for-granted fact" of the constancy of the velocity of light did not allow thinking in Newtonian terms."
Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com
http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Its-Roots-Banesh-Hoffmann/dp/0486406768
"Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann: "Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had suggested in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one, the second principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding train can do far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the speed of the particle is not independent of the motion of the object emitting it. And if we take light to consist of particles and assume that these particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to Newtonian relativity and thus automatically account for the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as we have seen, Einstein resisted the temptation to account for the null result in terms of particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian ideas, and introduced as his second postulate something that was more or less obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether."
https://webspace.utexas.edu/aam829/1/m/Relativity.html
Alberto Martinez: "Does the speed of light depend on the speed of its source? Before formulating his theory of special relativity, Albert Einstein spent a few years trying to formulate a theory in which the speed of light depends on its source, just like all material projectiles. Likewise, Walter Ritz outlined such a theory, where none of the peculiar effects of Einstein's relativity would hold. By 1913 most physicists abandoned such efforts, accepting the postulate of the constancy of the speed of light. Yet five decades later all the evidence that had been said to prove that the speed of light is independent of its source had been found to be defective."
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/companion.doc
John Norton: "These efforts were long misled by an exaggeration of the importance of one experiment, the Michelson-Morley experiment, even though Einstein later had trouble recalling if he even knew of the experiment prior to his 1905 paper. This one experiment, in isolation, has little force. Its null result happened to be fully compatible with Newton's own emission theory of light. Located in the context of late 19th century electrodynamics when ether-based, wave theories of light predominated, however, it presented a serious problem that exercised the greatest theoretician of the day."
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1743/2/Norton.pdf
John Norton: "In addition to his work as editor of the Einstein papers in finding source material, Stachel assembled the many small clues that reveal Einstein's serious consideration of an emission theory of light; and he gave us the crucial insight that Einstein regarded the Michelson-Morley experiment as evidence for the principle of relativity, whereas later writers almost universally use it as support for the light postulate of special relativity. Even today, this point needs emphasis. The Michelson-Morley experiment is fully compatible with an emission theory of light that CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT POSTULATE."
http://www.springerlink.com/content/l720v8hv51p290gt/
Einstein and the Changing Worldviews of Physics, Einstein Studies, 2012, Volume 12, Part 1, 23-37, The Newtonian Theory of Light Propagation, Jean Eisenstaedt: "It is generally thought that light propagation cannot be treated in the framework of Newtonian dynamics. However, at the end of the 18th century and in the context of Newton's Principia, several papers, published and unpublished, offered a new and important corpus that represents a detailed application of Newton's dynamics to light. In it, light was treated in precisely the same way as material particles. This most interesting application - foreshadowed by Newton himself in the Principia - constitutes a relativistic optics of moving bodies, of course based on what we nowadays refer to as Galilean relativity, and offers a most instructive Newtonian analogy to Einsteinian special and general relativity (Eisenstaedt, 2005a; 2005b). These several papers, effects, experiments, and interpretations constitute the Newtonian theory of light propagation. I will argue in this paper, however, that this Newtonian theory of light propagation has deep parallels with some elements of 19th century physics (aberration, the Doppler effect) as well as with an important part of 20th century relativity (the optics of moving bodies, the Michelson experiment, the deflection of light in a gravitational field, black holes, the gravitational Doppler effect). (...) Not so surprisingly, neither the possibility of a Newtonian optics of moving bodies nor that of a Newtonian gravitational theory of light has been easily "seen," neither by relativists nor by historians of physics; most probably the "taken-for-granted fact" of the constancy of the velocity of light did not allow thinking in Newtonian terms."
Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com
Tonico
Mar 15, 2012, 7:59:50 AM3/15/12
to
Pentcho Valev
Mar 15, 2012, 6:12:02 PM3/15/12
to
Let us imagine an unrealistic event: All the thermodynamicists all over the world, suddenly and simultaneously, declare that the second law of thermodynamics is false. What would happen after the declaration? Nothing. The falsehood ("Heat cannot be converted into work cyclically and isothermally") is an integral part of our civilization and will disappear together with the disappearance of the civilization. Many scientists know that and feel safe to hint at the truth from time to time, driven by various motives:
http://www.kostic.niu.edu/2ndLaw/2011SecondLaw-frontmatter.pdf
AIP Conference Proceedings, Volume 1411, Second Law of Thermodynamics: Status and Challenges, San Diego, California, USA 14-15 June 2011: "No physical principle holds greater sway in the natural world than the second law of thermodynamics. It is widely regarded as the quintessential scientific truth, in large part because no exception to it has been recognized by the scientific community during its 150-year history. Over the last 20 years, however, this situation has changed. More than two dozen challenges to it have entered the mainstream scientific literature, the majority of which remain unresolved. (...) Competitions are most exciting when the stakes are high and the competitors evenly matched. After 150 years of preeminence, the second law finds itself in such a contest, where challenges have put its absolute status at risk. The outcome is uncertain, but for the first time it plays in an 'evenly split game.' That is, the second law is in a jeu parti: it is in jeopardy."
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-03/09/230-percent-efficient-leds
"However, while MIT's diode puts out more than twice as much energy in photons as it's fed in electrons, it doesn't violate the conservation of energy because it appears to draw in heat energy from its surroundings instead. When it gets more than 100 percentelectrically-efficient, it begins to cool down, stealing energy from its environment to convert into more photons. In slightly more detail, the researchers chose an LED with a small band gap, and applied smaller and smaller voltages. Every time the voltage was halved, the electrical power was reduced by a factor of four, but the light power emitted only dropped by a factor of two. The extra energy came instead from lattice vibrations."
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/48889
"Researchers at Hong Kong Polytechnic University claim to have invented a new kind of graphene-based "battery" that runs solely on ambient heat. The device is said to capture the thermal energy of ions in a solution and convert it into electricity."
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27625/
"Graphene Battery Turns Ambient Heat Into Electric Current. (...) So the energy generated by this device comes from ambient heat. These guys say there were able to increase the current by heating the solution and also by accelerating the copper ions with ultrasound. They even claim to have kept their graphene battery running for 20 days on nothing but ambient heat."
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1203/1203.0161.pdf
"The energy of ionic thermal motion presents universally, which is as high as... (...) Moreover, the thermal velocity of ions can be maintained by the external environment, which means it is unlimited. However, little study has been reported on converting the ionic thermal energy into electricity. Here we present a graphene device with asymmetric electrodes configuration to capture such ionic thermal energy and convert it into electricity. An output voltage around 0.35 V was generated when the device was dipped into saturated CuCl2 solution, in which this value lasted over twenty days. (...) Full Methods and any associated references are available in the online version of the paper at www.nature.com/nature."
Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com
http://www.kostic.niu.edu/2ndLaw/2011SecondLaw-frontmatter.pdf
AIP Conference Proceedings, Volume 1411, Second Law of Thermodynamics: Status and Challenges, San Diego, California, USA 14-15 June 2011: "No physical principle holds greater sway in the natural world than the second law of thermodynamics. It is widely regarded as the quintessential scientific truth, in large part because no exception to it has been recognized by the scientific community during its 150-year history. Over the last 20 years, however, this situation has changed. More than two dozen challenges to it have entered the mainstream scientific literature, the majority of which remain unresolved. (...) Competitions are most exciting when the stakes are high and the competitors evenly matched. After 150 years of preeminence, the second law finds itself in such a contest, where challenges have put its absolute status at risk. The outcome is uncertain, but for the first time it plays in an 'evenly split game.' That is, the second law is in a jeu parti: it is in jeopardy."
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-03/09/230-percent-efficient-leds
"However, while MIT's diode puts out more than twice as much energy in photons as it's fed in electrons, it doesn't violate the conservation of energy because it appears to draw in heat energy from its surroundings instead. When it gets more than 100 percentelectrically-efficient, it begins to cool down, stealing energy from its environment to convert into more photons. In slightly more detail, the researchers chose an LED with a small band gap, and applied smaller and smaller voltages. Every time the voltage was halved, the electrical power was reduced by a factor of four, but the light power emitted only dropped by a factor of two. The extra energy came instead from lattice vibrations."
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/48889
"Researchers at Hong Kong Polytechnic University claim to have invented a new kind of graphene-based "battery" that runs solely on ambient heat. The device is said to capture the thermal energy of ions in a solution and convert it into electricity."
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27625/
"Graphene Battery Turns Ambient Heat Into Electric Current. (...) So the energy generated by this device comes from ambient heat. These guys say there were able to increase the current by heating the solution and also by accelerating the copper ions with ultrasound. They even claim to have kept their graphene battery running for 20 days on nothing but ambient heat."
"The energy of ionic thermal motion presents universally, which is as high as... (...) Moreover, the thermal velocity of ions can be maintained by the external environment, which means it is unlimited. However, little study has been reported on converting the ionic thermal energy into electricity. Here we present a graphene device with asymmetric electrodes configuration to capture such ionic thermal energy and convert it into electricity. An output voltage around 0.35 V was generated when the device was dipped into saturated CuCl2 solution, in which this value lasted over twenty days. (...) Full Methods and any associated references are available in the online version of the paper at www.nature.com/nature."
Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com
0 new messages