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Electromass (Astrophysics)
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Boreades


In: finity and beyond
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I commend this article to my honourable colleagues:
http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/People/CarverMead.htm

It's dated 2001 but still topical in terms of our (mis)understanding of physics as wot it is taught in our schools and universities.

e.g. (my emphasis in bold)

Perhaps more than any other man, Mead has spent his professional life working on intimate terms with matter at the atomic and subatomic levels. He spent ten years exploring the intricacies of quantum tunneling and tunnel diodes, the first electronic devices based on an exclusively quantum process. Unlike most analysts, Mead does not regard tunneling as a mysterious movement of particles through impenetrable barriers. He sees it as an intelligible wave phenomenon, resembling on the microcosmic level the movement of radio waves through walls.

and

Central to Mead's rescue project are a series of discoveries inconsistent with the prevailing conceptions of quantum mechanics. One was the laser. As late as 1956, Bohr and Von Neumann, the paragons of quantum theory, arrived at the Columbia laboratories of Charles Townes, who was in the process of describing his invention. With the transistor, the laser is one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century. Designed into every CD player and long distance telephone connection, lasers today are manufactured by the billions. At the heart of laser action is perfect alignment of the crests and troughs of myriad waves of light. Their location and momentum must be theoretically knowable. But this violates the holiest canon of Copenhagen theory: Heisenberg Uncertainty. Bohr and Von Neumann proved to be true believers in Heisenberg's rule. Both denied that the laser was possible. When Townes showed them one in operation, they retreated artfully. In Collective Electrodynamics, Mead cites nine other experimental discoveries, from superconductive currents to masers, to Bose-Einstein condensates predicted by Einstein but not demonstrated until 1995. These discoveries of large-scale, coherent quantum phenomena all occurred after Bohr's triumph over Einstein.

and

Bohr insisted that the laws of physics, at the most fundamental level, are statistical in nature. Physical reality consisted at its base of statistical probabilities governed by Heisenberg uncertainty. Bohr saw these uncertainties as intrinsic to reality itself, and he and his followers enshrined that belief in what came to be known as the "Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum theory. By contrast Einstein famously argued that "the Lord does not throw dice." He believed that electrons were real and he wrote, in 1949, that he was "firmly convinced that the essentially statistical character of contemporary quantum theory is solely to be ascribed to the fact that this [theory] operates with an incomplete description of physical systems."

So how did Bohr and the others come to think of nature as ultimately random, discontinuous? They took the limitations of their cumbersome experiments as evidence for the nature of reality. Using the crude equipment of the early twentieth century, it's amazing that physicists could get any significant results at all. So I have enormous respect for the people who were able to discern anything profound from these experiments. If they had known about the coherent quantum systems that are commonplace today, they wouldn't have thought of using statistics as the foundation for physics.

Statistics in this sense means what? That an electron is either here, or there, or some other place, and all you can know is the probability that it is in one place or the other. Bohr ended up saying that the only statements you can make at the fundamental level are statistical. You cannot grasp the reality itself, only probabilities related to it. They really, really, wanted to have the last word, and the only word they had was statistical. So they made their limitations the last word, saying, "Okay, the only knowledge that there is down deed is statistical knowledge. That's all we can know." That's a very dangerous thing to say. It is always possible to gain a deeper understanding as time progresses. But they carried the day.

What about Schrodinger? Back in the 1920s, didn't he say something like what you are saying now? That's right. He felt that he could develop a wave theory of the electron that could explain how all this worked. But Bohr was more into "principles": the uncertainty principle, the exclusion principle--this, that, and the other. He was very much into the postulational mode. But Schrodinger thought that a continuum theory of the electron could be successful. So he went to Copenhagen to work with Bohr. He felt that it was a matter of getting a "political" consensus; you know, this is a historic thing that is happening. But whenever Schrodinger tried to talk, Bohr would raise his voice and bring up all these counter-examples. Basically he shouted him down.

It sounds like vanity. Of course. It was a period when physics was full of huge egos. It was still going on when I got into the field. But it doesn't make sense, and it isn't the way science works in the long run. It may forestall people from doing sensible work for a long time, which is what happened. They ended up derailing conceptual physics for the next 70 years.


and

So how big is an electron? It expands to fit the container it's in. That may be a positive charge that's attracting it--a hydrogen atom--or the walls of a conductor. A piece of wire is a container for electrons. They simply fill out the piece of wire. That's what all waves do. If you try to gather them into a smaller space, the energy level goes up. That's what these Copenhagen guys call the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. But there's nothing uncertain about it. It's just a property of waves. Confine them, and you have more wavelengths in a given space, and that means a higher frequency and higher energy. But a quantum wave also tends to go to the state of lowest energy, so it will expand as long as you let it. You can make an electron that's ten feet across, there's no problem with that. It's its own medium, right? And it gets to be less and less dense as you let it expand. People regularly do experiments with neutrons that are a foot across.


and more.

http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/People/CarverMead.htm
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Boreades


In: finity and beyond
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As much of the fundamentals of the physics of the Electric Universe are post-Newton and pre-Einstein, I commend this to the house:


Professor Iain Stewart reveals the story behind the Scottish physicist who was Einstein's hero; James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell's discoveries not only inspired Einstein, but they helped shape our modern world - allowing the development of radio, TV, mobile phones and much more.

Despite this, he is largely unknown in his native land of Scotland. On the 150th anniversary of Maxwell's great equations, scientist Iain Stewart sets out to change that, and to celebrate the life, work and legacy of the man dubbed 'Scotland's Forgotten Einstein'.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06rd56j
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