[General] double photon cycle, subjective v objective realities

[Adam K]

Hi Vivian,

It's refreshing to have someone assume I don't understand what they are
talking about. Perhaps I also don't understand your clarification, but it
seems to say the same thing your rhetorical flourish I was replying to
seems to have said. Neither statement seems mysterious, since you place
such an emphasis on experimentation in all your emails.

I, too, believe in the empirical method, but I think you are not grasping
the significance of my gnomic line. I am well aware of retrograde motion,
as were the Renaissance philosophers. You did not mention the dominant
explanation for retrograde motion in Copernicus' time, which was the theory
of epicycles. The reason I mentioned Copernicus was precisely because of
epicycles (retrograde motion), the point you raise to brush my line aside.
So you seem to be the one who does not understand.

The theory of epicycles explained the observed motion of the planets
perfectly. Indeed, as we learned later from Fourier, the theory of
epicycles can explain *any* motion perfectly, so long as you can add enough
epicycles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVuU2YCwHjw

Copernicus' model made the same predictions as the Ptolemaic one for the
motion of the planets. Thus the situation around the 1600s was that you had
two theories, both matching the evidence. This is an epistemological
situation called underdetermination.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underdetermination

Your position seems to commit you to not choosing between Ptolemy and
Copernicus until further evidence is available. As John H has just pointed
out (while I am writing this), in some ways Copernicus was inferior to
Ptolemy. So maybe your position commits you to throwing in with Ptolemy.
Neither of these routes is correct, in my opinion: the latter because
Ptolemy was wrong, and the former because to say "Experimental measurement
is the only reality when it comes to verifying a theory" is just too
strong. It neglects one of the most important aspects of knowledge
generation.

We must take all evidence into account, but we do not generate theories
explaining phenomena from the evidence. Theories are generated internally
using our intuition, which is inscrutable, and a combinatorial, exploratory
method which gives us the sensors of a blind cave prawn. It is possible to
generate an enormous number of theories, all of which accord with the
presently known facts. I would wager there has been philosophy of science
work showing that the number is infinite. The search for theories takes
place in an enormous search space, and there are a wide number of
constraints we place on our theories to help us reduce the space. The
empirical facts are the strongest such constraint, but thankfully not the
only one. Others include things like the principle of least action, the
energy principle, and other such 'laws' which are not directly measurable.

Probably the strongest non-measurable constraint is that of elegance,
beauty, simplicity. In other words, Copernicus. If a theory of the universe
is not beautiful, it is very difficult to believe, and I think this is more
than a species-specific psychological quirk. We are made of the universe,
someplace in our deepest selves we understand exactly what the universe is.
The constraint of elegance cannot be measured, but it is a strong influence
in theory selection. The better the intuition, the harder it is to believe
ugly theories. People with crap intuition can do it, which is a mystery to
me. But think of Einstein, the paragon of intuition. (He never bought the
Copenhagen Evasion of quantum physics, for which history will grant him
even greater accolades.) Think of the way general relativity was created:
by a man alone with a few pieces of paper, in an attic in Europe, with a
toy telescope incapable of resolving much of anything. I know that the
theory was verified by experiment, that is not my point. My point is that *pure
thought* was capable of generating internally from its own insights a
system which matched experiments, predicted unimagined experiments, and
created entirely new concepts, one of which explained the hearts of
galaxies.

If pure thought is capable of such a feat, and underdetermination exists,
then surely your position is too strong.

This is a highly interesting topic, though not one I have ever thought much
about. I just know the story is more complicated than you allow. For
example, you might check out this amazing book:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/genesis-copernican-world


Adam




On Thu, Jul 21, 2016 at 3:06 AM, Vivian Robinson <viv at universephysics.com>
wrote:

> Adam K,
>
> One of the easiest astronomical observation to make - it doesn't need a
> telescope - is to map the position of the brightest lights in the night
> sky. It was something the ancients did. They noticed most of them were
> fixed with respect to each other the stars. The Greeks called those that changed
> their position plantetes, meaning wanderers. We call them planets. It was
> known from ancient times that the planets occasionally "backtracked"
> against the fixed star background. Explanations for that were sought since
> ancient times, see
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliocentrism
> According to that site, suggestions of a heliocentric system were first
> forwarded over two thousand years ago. Copernicus was the first to use
> mathematics (geometry) to calculate planetary trajectories as observed. He
> was trying to give a theory that matched the observed planetary
> trajectories. He did not work out the trajectories from first principles
> with no knowledge of the real situation. The planetary motions are the
> reality. Copernicus explained that reality in a manner that
> enabled predictions of positions of the planets in the future.
>
> Perhaps it would have been easier to understand if I wrote "Experimental
> measurement is the only reality when it comes to verifying a theory". I
> maintain that position.
>
> Vivian
>
> On 20/07/2016, at 10:46 PM, Adam K <afokay at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> "Experimental measurement is the only reality."
>
> Someone should tell Copernicus.
>
>
> Richard G,
>
> It is good to see that you are using an experimental observation to
> support or otherwise a model of the electron. My model does predict a
> radius decrease with increasing electron energy and hence velocity. And
> yes, it must match observation if it has any validity, "*like
> experimentally measured electrons, a very small (<10^-18m) size at highly
> relativistic velocities and energies (around 30GeV)*".
>
> One experimental result available to me was due to Bender et al., (1984),
> "Tests of Mass at 29 GeV Centre-of-mass Energy, Physical Review, *D30*, p
> 515. It is a while since I read it and I don't have ready access to the
> journal. My recollection of that paper was that the authors found that 29
> GeV electrons scattered as if they had a scattering cross section (I am not
> sure if that was radius or diameter) of < 10^-17 m. My model indicates a
> electron has a rest radius of 1.93 x 10^-13 m. Calculations using my radius
> reduction with velocity equation indicates a 29 GeV electron would have a
> radius of just under 0.5 x 10^-17 m and a diameter of just under 10^-17 m.
> In either definition, my model fits the value measured by Bender et al. To
> get a value of 10^-18 m requires an energy approaching or exceeding 1 TeV
> (10^12 eV).
>
> For that reason I am prepared to consider that my model does match
> observation, although it does not match the observation reported by
> Richard. I am unaware of any experiment that shows around 30 GeV electrons
> having a dimension of ≈ 10^-18 m.
>
> FYI, my background is that of a PhD physicist who spent 15 years in
> academia and over thirty years working in industry, running my own high
> technology companies. I have made a successful living researching,
> developing, manufacturing and marketing high technology products, including
> electron detectors, that world's experts in the fields told me they would
> never work or were of no value. I performed experiments, evaluated the
> available data, developed a theory, made predictions and built equipment to
> test my theory. The equipment worked as per my predictions. I have done
> that in different fields with the same success. As far as I am concerned I
> have demonstrated to the satisfaction of myself and many others that I can
> develop theories, back them with science and mathematics and successfully
> predict significant outcomes.
>
> Not that such a background means I am right. I learned a long time ago
> that if I was wrong, I wanted to be the first person to know, not the last.
> My idea of being wrong is when my theory doesn't match observation. Like
> any other theorist, my work is only right if it agrees with observation. So
> far, magnetic moment excluded, no one has pointed out where my work is
> wrong because it doesn't match observation. That is the only thing that
> counts. A theory with a physical explanation and appropriate mathematics
> that matches experiment is usually considered to have some merit. Replacing
> or reclassifying such a description on theoretical grounds by one that
> doesn't match experiment would not pass as good science in the real world.
>
> Richard, I am quite happy to have errors pointed out to me. I can then
> correct my error and move on, as I did when you pointed out my magnetic
> moment error. But an error must be differences between theory and
> observation. If an error was due to theory alone, standard model physicists
> would tell us we are all wrong and we should all give up. I do hope this is
> the end of why I am wrong on theoretical grounds. Experiment is the only
> reality when it comes to testing a theory.
>
> Hi Chip, Grahame, and Vivian,
>
>
>    Thanks to you all for your further comments.
>
>      I appreciate that we are all in a way working towards a common goal.
> But different personalities are involved and I think than none of us are
> ego-less. No one much likes having their physics mistakes pointed out
> publicly, and there is a psychological need to “save face” sometimes by
> people whose mistakes are pointed out. But if critical mistakes of active
> researchers remain unnoted and uncorrected due to fear of pinching someone
> else's tender ego, the result is I think not good for scientific progress
> as a whole, nor for the person whose mistakes, if any, are not pointed out.
> A lot of other peoples’ time can also  be wasted unnecessarily when
> mistakes are not pointed out in a timely way. Most first class researchers
> I think appreciate having their mistakes pointed out in a friendly and
> constructive way so they can correct them and also to avoid future public
> embarrassment, and to produce a better result later. My feeling is that
> egos should be expanded to be come more universal, rather than suppressed
> into insignificance. Scientific creativity is not really a team sport,
> though group interactions can stimulate creativity. Group scientific
> projects requiring creative outputs (like at CERN) are more like “herding
> cats” than creating “group minds”.
>
>     As for Vivian’s electron model, I now put it (in its corrected form)
> in the category that Grahame’s model is in, where the electron’s transverse
> radius doesn’t reduce with electron speed, because this is the result if
> the mistake I pointed out in Vivian's calculation of the radius of his
> electron model with increasing speed is corrected. This is not a bad
> category, and this electron model category actually gains some support from
> Gouaniere’s electron experiments, though these experiments have not been
> replicated as far as I know, and may also be subject to multiple
> interpretations. In quantum mechanics, higher energy electrons are always
> associated with higher quantum wave function frequencies, not lower
> frequencies. Those Schroedinger equation higher quantum frequencies could
> correspond to frequency differences above or below an electron's
> circulating-photon rest energy frequency f=mc^2/h ,  as I show in one of my
> articles. But then Vivian's corrected model has the same challenges that
> Graham’s model has about how to keep the spin of the circulating-photon
> model to be hbar/2 at all electron speeds, as this is the accepted
> experimental fact about electron spin, despite Grahame’s reservations. Also
> a good electron model needs to show, like experimentally measured
> electrons, a very small (<10^-18m) size at highly relativistic velocities
> and energies (around 30GeV).
>
>      Richard
>
>
> All,
> I know a lot of you have your own version of confined, rotating, toroidal
> or whatever nomenclature you chose to give your model of an electron being
> composed of a photon. But so far I have seen very few indications of how
> your model matches more than one or two known electron properties, let
> alone predicting unknown and testable properties. It would make the
> acceptance of your model by others much easier if you gave clear
> indications of how your model matches known electron properties.
>
> Vivian
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> If you no longer wish to receive communication from the Nature of Light
> and Particles General Discussion List at afokay at gmail.com
> <a href="
> http://lists.natureoflightandparticles.org/options.cgi/general-natureoflightandparticles.org/afokay%40gmail.com?unsub=1&unsubconfirm=1
> ">
> Click here to unsubscribe
> </a>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.natureoflightandparticles.org/pipermail/general-natureoflightandparticles.org/attachments/20160721/addace80/attachment.htm>