Friday 25 October 2013

Physics and the Authoritarian Need for Control


I believe that the principle that guided early scientists was the belief that all things needed control. As examples:

                Animals must be tethered or retained by fenced fields

                Soldiers must be disciplined

                Workers must be (micro)managed

                Machines must be controlled

                God controls the Universe

                Etc

I’m sure you get the point.

Thus Newton’s mechanics are full of control.

A body remains in a state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an external FORCE.

Bodies remain in orbit because of the gravitational FORCE.

STANDARDIZED measures were proclaimed.

Thus laboratory experiments, naturally, were performed within constraints. Gas would be in a container so its volume, pressure and temperature were CONTROLLED.

One can, of course, argue the necessity of all this, because experimental proof requires repeatability, and so on.

That’s all well and good. The question is: has this deprived us of a whole lot of understanding about the behaviour of space/time/matter/forces in uncontrolled situations? There are no fixed containers around newly forming stars. Have we got a false idea of the constant arrow of time?

Relativity has given us (among other things) an inkling of the need to think about different spacetime reference frames. In daily life we think readily of changes in spacial dimensions versus time, but always regard the passage of time as unvarying. What if it is spacetime that is fixed in its progression and the rate of passage of time is variable? If time “stood still”, space would have to expand, in order to compensate. (That might account for the inflation epoch in “Big Bang” theory).

What if there are no rules?

Personally I think chaos theory is misnamed. For me, “chaos” means “no rules”. Imagine if gravity was randomly variable versus time? Now that would cause real chaos!

While I admit I tend to think of probabilistic approaches to problems as being cop-outs for not understanding some underlying process, it does appear that there’s a lot of probability “going on” in the universe. Could it be that the laws of physics that we hold to be true are, themselves, random in nature, and we just happen to be enjoying a spell of apparent consistency?

Hold on to your hats folks!

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Wednesday 2 October 2013


One for My Memoirs
Theoretical research is a mixture of highs and lows. I’ve been labouring away at the logical discussion; looking for the counter arguments and the means to counter them. “Ah but have you considered the effect of….”

One particular area was very logical and clear to me, but was missing a vital factor. Yesterday, for a break from something else, I did some of the Maths. I had already done some work on this before using figures interpreted from somebody else’s work, but since then I had acquired the empirical data and the re-plotted graph had confirmed the previous, rough, findings.
Looking anew at the graph, I then realised it also, apparently, supported a well-known physical theory, which had, so far, gone uncorroborated. If that theory was shown to be accurate, one of my last remaining logical hurdles was passed! The moment had arrived to do the statistical regression analysis and provide the equation that was the main purpose of the plot.

Maple did its work, and once a couple of terms had been dismissed, because their value was well within experimental limits of error, I was left with a simple expression containing just one independent variable and one constant. Up till that moment I had not really looked at the numbers, just the form of the expression. I suddenly twigged that the one remaining numerical constant was in fact “c”, the speed of light: a totally unexpected outcome.
Rewriting the expression gave me such a beautiful equation; I just sat back in amazement. I now fully understand what all those eminent scientists had meant about beautiful equations. Result: corroboration for part of my theory, corroboration for another man’s work, and one of the most beautiful equations I’ve ever seen.

Sorry but you’ll have to wait for publication to find out what it is.
Meanwhile, what’s “c” doing there? That’ll be another new chapter, then.


There is a real danger that the BBC's Sky at Night will be discontinued after December this year.  Please support the campaign to save  the programme by signing our petition at: www.change.org/SkyAtNight  When on Twitter please use hashtag #saveskyatnight. For more information join our facebook group: "BBC, please don't cancel the Sky at Night"