Is Light Particle or Wave in Einstein's Schizophrenic World?

Chad Orzel: "Another not-really historical parallel that gets cited a bunch is the idea of John Michell's "dark stars" as a precursor to black holes. Michell, working in the late 1700's with Newton's corpuscular theory of light as a stream of tiny particles, theorized that light leaving massive stars ought to be slowed down by the...

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Is Light Particle or Wave in Einstein's Schizophrenic World?

Chad Orzel: "Another not-really historical parallel that gets cited a bunch is the idea of John Michell's "dark stars" as a precursor to black holes. Michell, working in the late 1700's with Newton's corpuscular theory of light as a stream of tiny particles, theorized that light leaving massive stars ought to be slowed down by the influence of gravity... [...] Of course, Michell's idea isn't really connected to the modern notion of black holes. His reasoning (and a similar argument from his contemporary Pierre-Simon Laplace) was based on the theory of light as a particle. At the end of the 1700's, though, experiments by Thomas Young, François Arago, and Augustin-Jean Fresnel, showed pretty conclusively that light is a wave..."

Richard Feynman says light behaves like particles - if that is correct, Michell was right and light IS slowed down by the influence of gravity (this explains the gravitational redshift):

Richard Feynman, "QED: The strange theory of light and matter", p. 15: "I want to emphasize that light comes in this form - particles. It is very important to know that light behaves like particles, especially for those of you who have gone to school, where you probably learned something about light behaving like waves. I'm telling you the way it does behave - like particles. You might say that it's just the photomultiplier that detects light as particles, but no, every instrument that has been designed to be sensitive enough to detect weak light has always ended up discovering the same thing: light is made of particles."

The variable speed posited by the particle theory of light is directly compatible with the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment. The constant speed of light posited by the ether theory was incompatible with the experiment - in order to make it compatible, FitzGerald, Lorentz, Poincaré and Einstein had to introduce miracles ("contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations"):

Banesh Hoffmann, Relativity and Its Roots, p.92: "There are various remarks to be made about this second principle. For instance, if it is so obvious, how could it turn out to be part of a revolution - especially when the first principle is also a natural one? 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. If it was so obvious, though, why did he need to state it as a principle? Because, having taken from the idea of light waves in the ether the one aspect that he needed, he declared early in his paper, to quote his own words, that "the introduction of a 'luminiferous ether' will prove to be superfluous."

Pentcho Valev

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Why Theoretical Physicists Produce Models

Theoretical physicists produce models "literally because they can make money with it":

Sabine Hossenfelder: "The problem that nobody seems to want to talk about is that rather than trying to find a minimal model that explains the data and leave it at this, there are many hundreds of models for inflation all of which are almost certainly...

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Why Theoretical Physicists Produce Models

Theoretical physicists produce models "literally because they can make money with it":

Sabine Hossenfelder: "The problem that nobody seems to want to talk about is that rather than trying to find a minimal model that explains the data and leave it at this, there are many hundreds of models for inflation all of which are almost certainly wrong because they contain too many details that aren't supported by data. As the philosophers have it, these models are severely underdetermined. Theoretical physicists produce these models literally because they can make money with it. They make money with it by getting them published and then using the publications to claim it's relevant research so it'll get funded and they can hire more postdocs to crunch out more papers. It's the same reason why theorists invent dark matter particles and extensions of the standard model. It's a way to make a living."

Theoretical physicists' models are not deductive constructions. Just like the prototype, Einstein's general relativity, they are not-even-wrong empirical concoctions able to predict anything because their parameters can be tweaked "in seemingly endless ways":

Sabine Hossenfelder: "Many of my colleagues believe this forest of theories will eventually be chopped down by data. But in the foundations of physics it has become extremely rare for any model to be ruled out. The accepted practice is instead to adjust the model so that it continues to agree with the lack of empirical support."

"So what about the second criticism, that inflation is too flexible to be tested? It's true that while the idea behind inflation is simple, its parameters can be tweaked in seemingly endless ways... [...] In other words, the critics say, go out and measure almost anything and someone will say, "hey, that's evidence for inflation." Theories that can predict anything predict nothing. Inflation, they say, isn't science." http://nautil.us/issue/48/chaos/the-inflated-debate-over-cos
mic-inflation

For instance, conventional dark matter models based on general relativity "need four free parameters to be adjusted to explain the data" (how many fudge factors LIGO conspirators needed in order to model the nonexistent gravitational waves is a deep mystery):

"Verlinde's calculations fit the new study's observations without resorting to free parameters – essentially values that can be tweaked at will to make theory and observation match. By contrast, says Brouwer, conventional dark matter models need four free parameters to be adjusted to explain the data."

Pentcho Valev

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LIGO conspirators in trouble (the world is gullible but not infinitely gullible):

Sabine Hossenfelder: "Was It All Just Noise? Independent Analysis Casts Doubt On LIGO's Detections. A team of five researchers - James Creswell, Sebastian von Hausegger, Andrew D. Jackson, Hao Liu, and Pavel Naselsky - from the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, presented their own analysis of the openly...

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LIGO conspirators in trouble (the world is gullible but not infinitely gullible):

Sabine Hossenfelder: "Was It All Just Noise? Independent Analysis Casts Doubt On LIGO's Detections. A team of five researchers - James Creswell, Sebastian von Hausegger, Andrew D. Jackson, Hao Liu, and Pavel Naselsky - from the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, presented their own analysis of the openly available LIGO data. And, unlike the LIGO collaboration itself, they come to a disturbing conclusion: that these gravitational waves might not be signals at all, but rather patterns in the noise that have hoodwinked even the best scientists working on this puzzle. [...] A few weeks ago, Andrew Jackson presented his results in Munich. A member of the local physics faculty (who'd rather not be named) finds the results "quite disturbing" and hopes that the collaboration will take the criticism of the Danes to heart. "Until LIGO will provide clear scientific(!) explanation why these findings are wrong, I would say the result of the paper to some extent invalidates the reliability of the LIGO discovery."

It wasn't "just noise". It was a FAKE:

"On September 16, 2010, a false signal - a so-called "blind injection" - was fed into both the Ligo and Virgo systems as part of an exercise to "test ... detection capabilities". [...] But take a look at the visualisation of the faked signal, says Dr Kiriushcheva, and compare it to the image apparently showing the collision of the twin black holes, seen on the second page of the recently-published discovery paper. "They look very, very similar," she says. "It means that they knew exactly what they wanted to get and this is suspicious for us: when you know what you want to get from science, usually you can get it." The apparent similarity is more curious because the faked event purported to show not a collision between two black holes, but the gravitational waves created by a neutron star spiralling into a black hole. The signals appear so similar, in fact, that Dr Kiriushcheva questions whether the "true" signal might actually have been an echo of the fake, "stored in the computer system from when they turned off the equipment five years before"."

Sinisa Lazarek: "One thing that struck me as very odd ( don't wanna use a harsher word) is this part:

"A major shortcoming of the Danish group's analysis that they [LIGO] pointed out to me is that the Danes use methods based on tutorials from the LIGO Website, but these methods do not reach the quality standard of the - more intricate - data analysis that was used to obtain the published results."

what the hell... ?! You gather the data... you make that data available to the rest of the world... you give the instructions on how to analyse that data, and now you say that the methods you gave are not the methods you yourself used?! This alone should be a huge red flag. Regardless of weather the detection was real, regardless if Danes did or did not make a mistake... what kind of b.s. is this?" [end of quotation]

Pentcho Valev

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Not Even Wrong Concepts in Physics: Entropy

The following argument is obviously valid:

If there is no evidence that the entropy is a state function for ANY system, then the concept of entropy is not even wrong.

Is there any evidence that the entropy is a state function for ANY system? No. If you define the entropy S as a quantity that obeys the equation dS=dQrev/T, you will...

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Not Even Wrong Concepts in Physics: Entropy

The following argument is obviously valid:

If there is no evidence that the entropy is a state function for ANY system, then the concept of entropy is not even wrong.

Is there any evidence that the entropy is a state function for ANY system? No. If you define the entropy S as a quantity that obeys the equation dS=dQrev/T, you will find that, so defined, the entropy is a state function FOR AN IDEAL GAS. Clausius was very impressed by this statefunctionness and decided to prove that the entropy (so defined) is a state function for ANY system. So "Entropy is a state function" became a fundamental theorem in thermodynamics. Clausius deduced it from the assumption that any cycle can be disintegrated into small Carnot cycles, and nowadays this deduction remains the only justification of "Entropy is a state function":

"Carnot Cycles: S is a State Function. Any reversible cycle can be thought of as a collection of Carnot cycles - this approximation becomes exact as cycles become infinitesimal. Entropy change around an individual cycle is zero. Sum of entropy changes over all cycles is zero."

"Entropy Changes in Arbitrary Cycles. What if we have a process which occurs in a cycle other than the Carnot cycle, e.g., the cycle depicted in Fig. 3. If entropy is a state function, cyclic integral of dS = 0, no matter what the nature of the cycle. In order to see that this is true, break up the cycle into sub-cycles, each of which is a Carnot cycle, as shown in Fig. 3. If we apply Eq. (7) to each piece, and add the results, we get zero for the sum."

The assumption on which "Entropy is a state function" is based - that any cycle can be subdivided into small Carnot cycles - is obviously false. An isothermal cycle CANNOT be subdivided into small Carnot cycles. A cycle involving the action of conservative forces CANNOT be subdivided into small Carnot cycles.

Conclusion: The belief that the entropy is a state function is totally unjustified. Any time scientists use the term "entropy", they don't know what they are talking about.

"My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it 'information', but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty'. When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons: In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, nobody knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage."

Pentcho Valev

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LIGO Conspirators Still in Trouble

"How Uncertain Are LIGO's First Gravitational Wave Detections? The ripples were so powerful, they stretched and compressed the entire Earth by the width of a few atoms, allowing the LIGO apparatus to directly detect gravitational waves for the first time. This confirmed Einstein's General Relativity in an entirely new way, but a new study has cast doubt on...

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LIGO Conspirators Still in Trouble

"How Uncertain Are LIGO's First Gravitational Wave Detections? The ripples were so powerful, they stretched and compressed the entire Earth by the width of a few atoms, allowing the LIGO apparatus to directly detect gravitational waves for the first time. This confirmed Einstein's General Relativity in an entirely new way, but a new study has cast doubt on whether the detection is as robust as the LIGO team claims it is. Despite a detailed response from a member of the LIGO collaboration, doubts remain... [...] The source of the recent controversy is that a group from Denmark has taken LIGO's public data, their public procedure, and executed it for themselves. But when they analyzed the removed noise, they found that there were correlations between the noise found in the two detectors, which shouldn't be the case! Noise is supposed to be random, and so if the noise is correlated, there's a danger that what you're calling your extracted signal may actually be contaminated by noise."

My comment in Forbes:

Both signal and noise are fake, so noise correlations have the same origin as signal correlations.

"On September 16, 2010, a false signal - a so-called "blind injection" - was fed into both the Ligo and Virgo systems as part of an exercise to "test ... detection capabilities". [...] But take a look at the visualisation of the faked signal, says Dr Kiriushcheva, and compare it to the image apparently showing the collision of the twin black holes, seen on the second page of the recently-published discovery paper. "They look very, very similar," she says. "It means that they knew exactly what they wanted to get and this is suspicious for us: when you know what you want to get from science, usually you can get it." The apparent similarity is more curious because the faked event purported to show not a collision between two black holes, but the gravitational waves created by a neutron star spiralling into a black hole. The signals appear so similar, in fact, that Dr Kiriushcheva questions whether the "true" signal might actually have been an echo of the fake, "stored in the computer system from when they turned off the equipment five years before"."

Pentcho Valev

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