A rant against trained stupidity

 Here is a video of two prominent physics YouTubers talking to each other about the problems in fundamental physics, or the fundamental problems in physics. It’s a half hour long, and hosted by the Institute for Art and Ideas.

Watching this leads me to today’s rant. These are intelligent people who have been taught to be stupid. Indoctrination works.

Let’s begin with Bell’s strawman theory, AKA Bell’s inequality. This paper supposedly proves that theories of locally real, “hidden variable” particles are incompatible with experimental results. Balderdash! The paper contains not one but two baseless assumptions.

1. The paper insists that a “locally real” particle, when measured to have a spin in the “up” direction, is and was 100% up from the moment of creation.

2. The paper insists that the “locally real” entangled partner particle has a straight (linear) percentage chance, based on degrees off of “down”, of being detected as down. This looks like a triangle wave when plotted.

As Einstein supposedly said, opens paper to proper page and points, “We have no reason to believe any of this is true.”

These assumptions are not made for the particle using standard quantum mechanics. Bell made up these stipulations out of whole cloth. And they have gone mostly unchallenged for 60 years.

The spin of entangled particles is 180 degrees apart from the moment of their (very local) entangling. (90 degrees for photon polarization.) No more, no less. This is true no matter when or where you measure them. No spooky action at a distance required or allowed. We simply can’t know, even in principle, what the direction of spin of a particle is before we measure it. Naturally, our means of measuring the angle of spin alters it.

Measuring a particle depends upon the angle of the measuring device, in a very statistical way that follows a (non-linear) sine curve when plotted. Bell then goes on to decry, Lo, behold the inequality! A sine wave is different from a triangle wave, in an experimentally verifiable way!

The straw man is then beaten repeatedly over the following decades, resulting in the granting of the Nobel Prize to three physicists in 2022.

Millions of dollars and 60 years wasted punching a straw man.

On the nature of motion

To get the right answers, you must first ask the proper question. I started this journey wanting to know about relativity. After years of reading through pop science bafflegarble, I started gaining an understanding of the actual issues. After years of that, and many false starts, I finally came to understand that the true question, apparently unasked by science, was “What is motion?”

You’d think such a simple, fundamental question would have been asked and answered decades if not centuries ago. You would be incorrect. Scientists have asked and answered the questions “How do objects move?” and “Why does motion change?” But the central question remained. What is motion in and of itself? What causes it? What is the mechanism?

The answer, like many things in science, to be at once quite simple and devilishly complex. Motion is caused by a gradient in the potential energy field. A gradient in the field causes a self-perpetuating gradient in a particle. The particle’s energy causes gradients in the field.

The particle’s gradient in blue. The field’s gradients in red. Flat Euclidean space is at the top.

We interpret the gradient’s velocity at any point by taking the sine of the angle compared to the flat spacetime of the horizontal axis. 0 degrees is stationary (sin 0° = 0). 90 degrees is the speed of light (sin 90° = 1).

But what does that really mean? What is velocity but motion in a direction at a speed? How does the speed of light enter into this?

Velocity, speed, motion, they’re all essentially the same thing: change in distance per change in time. Distance and time. Time and distance. Wait - doesn’t the gradient also have something to say about distance and time?

Indeed it does. The cosine of the gradient’s angle gives the contraction of both space and time. They are always balanced so that the speed of light remains a constant 1. But so what? Why is this important?

Distance is time. Time is distance. It’s not space or time, it’s space and time. Spacetime.

The speed of light, 299,792,458 meters per second, is a conversion factor.

When you are sitting still reading this, you are still moving through time at the rate of one second per second. (We’ll ignore the earth’s rotation, etc.) The gravitational force near the earth’s surface (the angle of the curve) is approximately 9.8 meters per second per second. How much of that is due to motion through space, and how much is motion through time? (Remember, your subjective motion through time is not your objective motion through time.)

Well, you’re not moving (relatively speaking), so all of it is due to the time factor.

That figure of 9.8 meters per second is entirely due to the temporal gradient. None of it is due to the spacial gradient. Even if you were falling instead of sitting still, the spacial gradient is so small as to be nearly irrelevant. 9.8 divided by 299,792,458 is about 0.000,000,003. In the course of normal existence, you can’t tell the difference between that and nothing. It’s lost in the weeds.

Newtonian mechanics works very well in normal, every-day situations.

Relativistic mechanics is for when you can’t ignore the tiny difference. It’s even more important when you are moving so quickly, or being accelerated so strongly, that the spacial component is no longer tiny.

Light from a distant star passing close to the sun is shifted by twice the amount Newton predicted. This is because light travels at, well, the speed of light, so the spacial effects equal the temporal effects. Plus, with radio telescopes, we can measure this effect rather precisely and very close to the sun.

In general, the spacial effects of a force are important if the force is either large or exerted over a very long distance and/or time.

The anomalous perihelion of Mercury (43 arc-seconds per century) is another phenomenon explained by general relativity. See also the two body problem.

The differences caused by the finite speed of the propagation of change in the field are also present, but different. You have to account for the direction and speed the sun is traveling around the galaxy and the amount of time its change of position takes to reach an orbiting planet. The curve contracts and steepens before the sun, and extends and flattens behind it.

And then there’s the frame dragging caused by the sun not actually being a point object, but a rather large, not completely spherical, rotating body.

Physics is hard.

The difference between energy and work

Work and energy have the same units: the joule. Joules are a derived unit of measure in the SI system, being comprised of kg⋅m²/s². Why do we have two different terms for the same thing? What’s the difference?

The potential energy field, source of gravity and motion. The wellspring from which all others flow.

Work is bound. It’s being used. It exists in actuality.

Energy is free. It’s available to be used. It exists in potential.

Work is change. Energy is the ability to cause change.

Work deforms the field. Energy is the deformation of the field.

Here’s one of the secrets of science: That free, potential energy? It never gets used up. It’s always there, whether you use it or not, because of the nature of the field. That’s not to say that whatever’s using the potential energy won’t have an effect on the source doing all the work. It probably will. All those gravitational waves LIGO has detected? Their passages through the earth, each energetic enough to squeeze reality for a brief moment, didn’t use up any of their energy at all. The earth and the moon have held each other in a gravitational embrace for billions of years, at no cost in energy. The atoms in my desk hold up the monitor and keyboard through electromagnetic repulsion, fighting against the gravitic attraction of the entire earth at every moment, at no cost in energy.

If energy actually got used up, all the matter in the universe would have evaporated billions of years ago.

Energy and work are not conserved. They are continuously recreated. Energy density, on the other hand, is strictly conserved. You can’t ever withdraw more energy than the universe provides, and you can’t use less than nothing. The potential energy field pictured above shows zero energy at the top. It has a bottom, far, far below, at some unimaginable yet finite amount of energy. You can’t go above the top. You can’t go below the bottom. You must color within the lines.

Which to choose?

The bounded potential energy field model is both powerful and simple enough to model either Newton or Einstein’s laws of motion and gravity through choosing between basic assumptions.

1. Newton:

   1. Changes to the field propagate instantly.

   2. Angles (velocities) add.

   3. Every particle’s perception of time and space are equivalent.

2. Einstein:

   1. Changes to the field propagate at a finite speed.

   2. Gradients add.

   3. The cosines of angles represent every particle’s perception of time and space.

That’s it. Those are the only changes you need to go from one model to the other.

Which should you choose? That depends on what sort of system you are modeling. For most every day purposes, the Newtonian model suffices. Either way, action arises naturally as a fundamental principle.