Reply To: T-shirt designers unite and take over

[dash]

dash wrote: Might it take an infinite amount of information just to represent the equations themselves?

I wanted to share one other thought while I’m thinking of it. In BBNH there is discussion of the problem of black body radiation. It is presented that when one derives the blackbody radiation as a function of temperature from maxwell’s equations, one gets an ever increasing amount of energy radiated as the wavelength goes down. An infinite amount of energy would be blasted off from every black body!

The problem was “solved” by Planck arbitrarily asserting that energy is quantized. Presumably if EM radiation can only be emitted in integer multiples of Planck’s constant amount of energy, the black body equation can be utilized and there is now perfect agreement between theory and experimental evidence.

So therefore EM radiation is quantized, and thus quantum theory is born and 100 years later people are still building on top of this foundation.

And yet we’re at an impasse at our understanding. String theory is a monstrosity. The Big Bang theory is a joke! We’re at a dead end.

It occured to me that it is ridiculous how we believe EM radiation is quantized just because it allows an arbitrary equation to be used. It’s like humans are notorious confusing the equation that describes the underlying behaviour with the real behaviour itself! BBNH makes this point many times. Yet BBNH didn’t criticize Planck and quantum theory itself as being an instance of this. Perhaps the foundations of quantum theory are themselves untenable.

Who says that EM radiation has to be quantized? Why is it even necessary. When you come down to the underlying nuts and volts of why black bodies emit radiation, you will come down to some finite number of particles in the black body that are jiggling with random thermal motion. There is a spectrum of energy levels of the particles in the black body, at any given temperature. The radiation emitted prsumably comes from thermal collisions between particles. Because the temperature offers an array of energy levels of particles, there is a broad spectrum of energy levels of collisions. Yet no particle has infinite energy!

It is a statistical thing. At any temperature a body composed of particles has particles of varying speeds. Some are slow, some are fast. Faster and faster particles get rarer and rarer. An equation might say that no matter how high a particle’s energy level is, you would epect _some_ particles to exist at that energy level. Meaning a simple equation might demand _some_ tiny percentage of particles with truly vast amounts of energy.

Yet coming back to the real world, we deal with statistics. You only have a finite (yet very large) number of particles in any black body. The drop off in population as a function of energy level means that pretty soon you actually have zero particles with very migh energy level. The likelihood of finding such a particle in the body with vast energy becomes vanishingly small. A black body itself is not infinitely divisible. It is ITSELF quantized because it consists of a finite number of discrete particles.

One does not have to quantize the energy that a particle interaction can throw off. Things are already quantized because there are always an integer number of particles, in the real world. Matter itself is not infinitely divisible. Yet the equations that demand infinite energy emitted by a black body — they inherently must describe matter as being composed of an infinite number of particles!

This is ridiculous! And quantum theory is built on top of this assumption? Why not toss it all out and start over? Why not devise better equations that relate to real matter, composed of discrete particles?

Oh well. I’m out of steam writing this down. Sorry if I bored anyone.

-Dave