Speed of Light

Howdy! Please excuse me skipping past all the philosophy and geometry whatnot and just asking you straight out: are you asserting that there isn't any photon?If so, this leaves an unpleasant gap in my chart of the Standard Model. It's rather as if someone pointed at my Periodic Table and said "there is no krypton". Please advise, in detail.* special points to whoever names the comic book writer/editor I'm thinking of right now ...

Lots of luck with that! Here's a bit of him complaining about a prior site to chase him off http://www.bautforum.com/...feedback/55184-future-atm-2.htmlAfter reading a hundred pages or so of self-pollution like this I tried to get a straight answer out of him about the existence of the photon. Unlike what he says about Relativity, his sideswipes at the Standard Model at least sound like they might entail something we don't already know. But look more closely, he's still talking about "quantum units" and pointing out that they are massless. If we are willing to waste enough pages I'm sure we can get him to agree that they don't have charges either, or a need for fractional spin.So while he's happy to pee all over my chart and compare it to turtles-turtles-turtles-all-the-way-down, with a side whiz at classical mythology, he doesn't actually disagree with anything on it! We know that waveforms aren't really waves or particles. We know that spacetime is geometry. We know that light doesn't perceive itself as traveling.The main selling point for his new paradigm seems to be that, if you hold C and spooky-action-at-a-distance in your head together long enough to realize that they are the same thing, this will give you a big enlightenment experience. Sounds intriguing, huh? But it isn't. If you meditate on a brick and bicycle long enough to experience their innate oneness, you will by definition have a little satori. And not even a useful one, as uniting two objects doesn't get you past dharana, it takes a subject-object experience to do that. So his yoga isn't new or significant, either!Speaking as a great admirer of Bishop Berkeley on his own terms, I strongly suspect that this man is pretending to smoke imaginary dope ....

More about this, please. This is exactly the sort of thing I would love to understand better. If light is just perception, why does the sun warm my face? What is happening in a photo-electric cell? Where does solar power come from?

Yes thanks, I do love this stuff. My understanding of n-dimensional geometry is pretty satisfactory to me, I don't see anything in this part of your material that is confusing or improper. But I've picked up a problem student who isn't getting it, who seems to admire your posts; so now I have some hope that he will be able to understand, by hearing it from you, that another dimension is just another orthogonal measurement like length, width and depth, rather than another universe like the one that Captain Kirk and his away team beamed over to accidentally where Mr Spock had a beard. But what I was really hoping to hear more about, whenever you get the chance, is this business of angular momentum. I am currently trying to study fractional spin, and quantized spin in general, and relate it to things we can use as examples in the macro scale or "real world".In this blurb for example Angular momentum - Wikipediathey seem to be saying that all the variables and measurements can be modeled using some large spinning object in motion. This sounds whatever, vaguely similar to some of the things you are saying. So I was thinking that understanding what your philosophy expects angular momentum to have to do with the measurement of gravity might help me understand these concepts better, or at least see where I might be going wrong. That clarifies things. It's not just observation, like God-on-the-Quad or Von Neumann's Catastrophe. It's actual energy, which you are saying (I think) is getting from one point to another without passing through the intervening points.Let me see if I can talk through it using semantics you might like better than the ones that I would prefer normally. The heat on my face is energy that was part of the sun 8 minutes and change ago. It has jumped from the sun, directly to my face. It hasn't moved through any vacuum at all. Some of its neighbor energy there on the sun, has jumped instead to random hydrogen molecules between the sun and the earth. Some of it has jumped to various parts of the atmosphere between me and the sky. Some of the heat on my face has jumped to me from the atmosphere. But none of it has ever existed in a vacuum, not the unreal vacuum between me and the sun somewhere and not the real vacuum between molecules or particles. There was never any traveling through, there was always a quantum-jumping across. Yeah?This line of thinking is interesting, but I'm not sure I understand how useful it is. There seem to be some theoretical problems here, too. We know that gravity is subject to the c limit, it doesn't happen instantaneously. Your material seems to be implying that spooky-action-at-a-distance effects like those involved in entanglement would also be subject to the limit, ie there would be a delay between one end of the waveform collapse and the other. This doesn't seem to correspond to the results of the actual experiments, but I will have to do more research to dig out examples and see if I am understanding them correctly.This whole discussion reminds me of the Ensemble Interpretation, which says that the effects that the Copenhagen is struggling with only apply statistically, never to single particles. They have this same problem with experiments which seem to isolate single quanta and show the same effects. One solution to this might be to say that even these singular quanta are in fact statistical, composed of some even smaller parts in some sub-universal dimensional matrix of some kind.But I strongly doubt that you subscribe to any such wacky sub-sub-atomic mayhem

Yes of course, I understand perfectly. Please keep in mind though, that if you have a knee-jerk reaction to these kinds of criticism that is more entertaining than your actual lectures, the foul play is going to escalate rather than subside. A better approach might be to deal patiently with the actual issues that are being confused and accept responsibility gracefully for places where that confusion may be attributable to you. Yes?For example, the portion of your last substantial post between the n-dimensional geometry and the sun-on-my-face exposition, the middle part, is pretty muddled. I don't mean just the whole math-in-print-wtf-is-latex part, I mean specifically: when you use phrases like "pre-Einstein, pre-Minkowskian, pre-modern" while introducing formulas that turn out to be e=mc² and t²=-t_R²+s² ...WELL, that certainly sounds like you are claiming that the bomb-pusher and his nuncle didn't do the work that is credited to them, doesn't it? And this would be a very serious charge, given without evidence, and such things provoke people to outrage. So what someone has cleverly done is, to flip the whole muddle back over on to you, and let you see how it feels. Turnabout is fair play!Now of course, I didn't interpret what you are saying this way. It's obvious to me that what you mean is to start with Pythagoras, work your way up to Minkowski, and show how all the math works without the language artifacts treating c as a speed. The part of it that is the math, is the math of the people to whom it is attributed. The part of it that is pre-modern et al, is the part that you have already talked out in getting up to the work of those people. The part of it that is your work and/or Mach's and/or that of some other people you have worked with, who are not Einstein and Minkowski, is the philosophy part, the part about light not being a speed and avoiding any phrasing that implies it is, to the best of your ability.This isn't obvious to most of your audience here, though. The only reason it's obvious to me is because, well, let's not try to go into detail about that, it wouldn't be helpful. Suffice it to say that I am perfectly happy to make tentative conclusions without sufficient facts to justify them. If I'm wrong, I could just guess again. But I'm not wrong, am I?

I believe so, here is what the faQ says EvC Forum: FAQ

I'm assuming Percy has already done what he was talking about earlier, and it still hasn't stopped. To get yourself some relief, please consider going into your profile and changing the email address stored there to something like quitit@nospam.com until the ownership gets their database back to doing what they tell it to. Don't worry about not being able to get your password, you could always join again and let on who you are, they tend to jump up and merge the id's post haste.

Right, I'm taking a huge beating in the String thread because I dare to post quotes from minority physicists and ask what the hell they are talking about, my job in that thread. I don't care, cost of doing business.I probably got the 1 you just saw for being off-topic and/or bypassing moderation a little, I still don't care. I'm not here to get a good rating, I'm here to find out what quantum spin may have to do with gravitation, expansion, and duration. The rest is just cake

Attacks ad hominem and "being nasty to the other guy" are not the same thing. For example, suppose you come up to me and say excitedly "I have discovered that e=mc² !!!"If I were to say to you "Shut up, your discovery is obviously useless as you are not a real physicist, only a humble patent clerk!" That would be a genuine ad hominem attack. Your occupation or background, or my interpretation of it, has no bearing on the value of your discovery. This is a logic error, which goes beyond a mere violation of good debating style.On the other hand, if I were to say "Shut up, Urkel, you little homo!" This would be a simple ungrounded attack, having nothing to do with the value of your information at all, entirely on your person. No logic involved, though still very bad form.However, if I were to respond with "No you didn't! Einstein did!" Then I would be attacking your claim to discovering the information, rather than the information itself. If you were kind of thin-skinned, you might interpret that as a charge of plagiarism. But a charge of plagiarism is not an ad hominem attack in this case.Finally, if I were to ask "Where did you discover that? In class, or on tv, or in a book, or where?" Then I would be showing insight into your conditional use of the word "discovered" in this particular instance. The only one of these 4 situations that is a genuine ad hominem attack is the first, the one where I disparage your information based on unrelated facts about you.We run into this all the time in this forum. Normally it comes in the form of fundamentalists advancing the claim that because someone is an unbeliever or heretic, none of their insights into scripture or theology (or biology! or physic!) should be given any credence. But it goes the other way too sometimes, the examples I have seen lean toward pushing the idea that having a degree is more convincing than making sense. Simply untrue, either way.Anyway, I'm not seeing these attacks you claim to be experiencing. What I'm seeing is someone asking you questions, that seem hard for you to answer. Maybe it will be easier if I ask one of them. I'm having trouble understanding what could justify expressing t_R as integers. Assuming I followed your derivation correctly, the math we are doing here is essentially a reformulation of the Pythagorean Theorem, which takes the form a²+b²=c² in modern terms. Yes?But this is the exact equation where we start learning about irrational numbers! If a and b happen to be equal, and are expressed as an integer, then there is no way that c can be expressed as an integer no matter what numbers you use! Exponential roots are where irrational numbers come from!If I change it so that c is an integer, a and b go irrational. It can't be helped, if we are using real right angles. Thankfully, in quantum mechanics we aren't, our angles are bent in a curved spacetime and we have no perfect circles, only very good ellipses. But this takes a lot more work than just poofing it so on the chalkboard, half the people I talk to still think pi is something we really have in the world that is. *shrugs*If you are just using integers here because you already know what you are going for is quantum mechanics, that's not science or education, it's apologetics. If I am missing some important point well, imagine how many other people must be missing it too then, all things considered.

I expect you mean the second law (increase of entropy). The first law (conservation of energy) is the one used to prove that A-bombs are impossible. The third (absolute zero) shows a finite limit to decrease in temperature. Heat of the moment, I'm sure, but it gives me an excuse to talk about Laws in science and philosophy, which are subject to a lot more misinterpretation and misunderstanding than even Theories.Various Laws often tend to be confused with others, both in the same set and in similar groupings. This usually isn't a problem for sane people, as they tend to be the same principles, and correlaries thereof, applied to different fields and conditions.For example Newton's third law of motion, "for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction", which gives us rocketry Newton's laws of motion - Wikipediais functionally equivalent to the first law of magic, "as above so below", attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, which gives us relativity ... Emerald Tablet - WikipediaIn all these cases, we are pointing at conservation / symmetry and applying it to apparent asymmetries in nature on the principle that all such appearances must balance out somewhere.This relates to the difference between an equation and a function, and the Boolean representation of logic. All proper equations, like 2+2=4, must be balanced. The difference between the two sides, in other words, must be 0, producing a Boolean value of 1, or True. For a function, however, such as A=A+1, to be effective, it must be imbalanced. The two sides must be unequal, a positive (or negative) difference, producing a value of 0, or False.Thus all equations, or Laws, are true or balanced, and show symmetry. All functions or Theories point at something that is unbalanced or shows asymmetry, and describe how this state is balanced out over time and space to be true. The second law of thermodynamics vs the theory of evolution is an excellent example of this process in action: On the one hand, entropy always increases, overall. On the other hand, on earth we have artifacts like life and stupidity, which seem to increase their energy-levels in ever-more-complex ways over time.Obviously, energy must be being added to the system from some outside source. As it happens, this source is the sun, the energy comes in the form of light, and it seems to make the trip extremely quickly. It never travels "through a vacuum" however, as there is no such thing. The area between the sun and the earth is occupied by diffuse hydrogen. The area between atoms, molecules, and particles is occupied by fields, forces, waveforms, or "virtual particles" of some kind.If there ever were a real vacuum, that is if the hydrogen molecules acquired a distance and velocity such as to no longer have any effect on one another, for example in the Big Freeze scenario; then the space between them, being unmediated and resolving to genuine flatness, would become a genuine zero-pressure vacuum and innumerable such "virtual particles" would come swarming out of it into reality, competing to see which field could supersede one another in the first 10^-43 second of the new spacetime, and presumably resolving thereafterward into an immeasurably large, not quite flat, widely dispersed, thingamajig . . . Stoop not down, therefore, unto the Darkly-Splendid World; wherein continually lieth a faithless Depth, and Hades wrapped in clouds, delighting in unintellible images, precipitous, winding, a black ever-rolling Abyss; ever espousing a Body unluminous, formless and void.-- Chaldean Oracles of Zoroaster

More about this, please. This is exactly the sort of thing I would like to understand better. If there is no spooky-in-the-sky, why do so many people seem to believe that they can rub two particles together, evoke an equation or two, and then do read-a-lot-of-Frazer-but-never-seemed-to-get-the-point kind of things with them?Edited by Iblis, : have you seen the Yellow Sign?

I'm still reading, BUTThis seems pretty spooky after all. You appear to be demonstrating that the results at the other end will differ statistically depending on whether we observe our end or not. This implies that superposition and the collapse of the wave function are real things and they aren't bound by the speed of light. Am I getting this right?If so, this seems to defeat Wheeler's idea that each possibility is true in some world and all our observation is doing is telling us which one happened to be true in our own world.If this business about affecting the statistics is correct, why can't we use it to send messages FTL? What I mean is, send pulses of large statistical groups of entangled particles off to Alpha Centauri (some day) to some future human colony there. Then later, just before the wavicles arrive, observe all the groups we want to mean "1" and fail to observe all the groups that we want to mean "0"? Then when the colonists get them they can see which groups are 50/50 and which are 55/45 and decrypt them into letters from home telling them how the folks are doing just last week?

We are here to debate. If every time someone debates you, instead of offering any refutation you just throw a tantrum and accuse people of persecuting you and threaten to take your bat and ball and go home, then guess what? You lose the debate.This part isn't rocket science, is it? You have a hypothesis, for example, that limiting yourself to integers in an equation involving exponents will work. When I insist that it doesn't work, because solving for the roots leads to irrational numbers, you call me a bonehead and claim that the result of your hypothesis is a lovely picture of the spectrum. You jump from the hypothesis, to the result, without passing through the vacuum (real experiments, explanations, specification of these "certain algebraic" thingies) in between.

Ok, I think I get it. I don't know how I missed it the first few dozen times I read that thread, maybe it was all those gyroscopes in plain brown envelopes that distracted me. But I read it again in light of what you've said, and meditated on it for a while, and now I've read it again, and I do think I get it.There isn't any information jumping from one end to another. The information is at both ends, and only at both ends. There aren't two events, in different places, happening at one time. There is only one event, happening once. Until we see this whole event, however far away the farthest part of it is, we don't know about it.

You, may be giving me more credit than I am due. What I managed to finally get was something about a series of experiments cavediver had linked me to, and why even the statistical anomalies used to demonstrate "quantum leaps" cannot be used to communicate or otherwise break causality.I still don't understand what this has to do with c. In a previous message I believe you indicated that one end of such a quantum event would be separated from the other by a minimum time interval. That doesn't appear to be what the math that predicts the quantum events says, nor what the experiments that confirm the math say. But no one appears to have done these tricks at a great enough distance to be really sure.So perhaps that would be a good place to start up again. Why do you think quantum leaps take place limited by c, rather than "instantaneously" as the math seems to imply. By this I mean, they are predicted to take place, for example, one end on the earth and the other at the sun, at say 3 pm period full stop, rather than from 3 to 3:08:20ish.