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texaslabrat wrote: Regardless if you believe it or not…it’s true 😉

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18725103.700 is just one of many studies confirming it.

Speaking of this one article, because a group of scientists conducted an experiment detecting anti-neutrinos and they claim they come from the planet’s core, you automatically accept this as proof?

“Science is the belief in the fallability of experts.” — Richard Feynman

This same scientific establishment believes in the Big Bang. Do you?

Later in the article, one fellow says “this will require a whole network of detectors.” Meaning big dollars, funding, profits, etc. Do you see?

Whether neutrinos are even real are not is debatable.

Just think about the premise of uranium decay being the cause. Uranium is 19.1 grams/cc, iron is 7.874 grams/cc. Wouldn’t uranium sink to the center of the earth, through the molten iron, and once it’s concentrated wouldn’t it all burn up through fission very quickly?

Meanwhile we see the tides due to the moon rising and falling every day. We see the earth itself deformed by the moon. And the gravity gradient penetrates the earth’s interior also.

Anyway I’m not convinced radioactive decay is the cause.

-Dave

ETA – I looked on Wikipedia about Venus, Venus has no active volcanoes but there were signs of volcanic activity in the past. Venus is about the same size as the earth. If radioactive decay is causing the heat, why aren’t there active volcanoes on Venus? Moreover, Venus rotates very slowly, its day is similiar to its year. Therefore tidal activity from the sun would be miniscule. And Venus has no big moon. Solution? Venus used to rotate faster. Tidal action from the sun slowed it down. The heat generated volcanic activity in the past, but this has now died out.

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I can’t read “Cap and Trade” without thinking “Cap and Gown”. The name seems cute and ridiculous.

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texaslabrat wrote: Indeed…however if the predictions on the ultra-low cost per unit and per kWh hold true…you can bet that there will be millions of them built and then much more overall waste heat will be produced as we consume orders of magnitude more power in our society due to the near-free cost of it 😉 That old supply-and-demand curve thing.

No one would ever need more than a megawatt.

Just as no one would ever need more than 640K bytes of memory in their computer.

-Dave

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Brian H wrote: That’s why I suggested doing the math. Get the cost of the “add-on”, and you will discover that the price per kwh is HUGE compared to ¼¢.

Wouldn’t waste heat be a problem at some point? If 20% of the energy comes out as useful work, and 80% is lost as heat (I’m just making up numbers), as civilization expands, won’t that waste heat become a serious issue?

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dash wrote: I’m trying to figure out how special relativity can fall out of this approach. I don’t believe in general relativity, actually. I don’t believe space is warped. Rather, I like a uniform aether that actually does have a fixed reference frame. The question is how to have such a universe yet explain the observed effects.

Turns out this is a recurring theme in Theories of Everything.

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Grand_Unified_Theories

If “particles” are made of something that is always travelling at lightspeed, then when the “particles” are in motion the internal speed must decrease, and so time dilation and the ‘c’ speed limit and all of Special Relativity just fall out.

I especially like the one by Natarajan T.S. http://www.tardyon.de/mirror/natar/1701.html

“POSTULATE I: Every micro particle is endowed with two types of motion, an Internal Motion and an External Motion. … POSTULATE II: The internal motion is a circular motion in a plane with a radius characteristic of the mass of the particle. … POSTULATE III: When a particle has external motion, the internal (circular ) motion is always in a plane normal to the external motion. … POSTULATE IV: The magnitude of the instantaneous velocity of the particle, which is the resultant of its internal and external velocities, is always equal to ‘c’ … POSTULATE V: The angular momentum and the radius of the internal motion are unaffected by the external motion and are therefore the same for all observers. POSTULATE VI: Physical laws are the same in all inertial frames (postulate I of STR).”

Interesting point is all the referenced sites seem to fit a pattern. They pick some set of experimental evidence and ignore the rest, and come up with an intuitive model to describe what’s going on at the bottom level. Then there are varying degrees of equations and math to back it up. Then they make very few predictions. No claims of cheap & easy energy sources, for example.

So — these people are more devoted to the pursuit than I am, and they are much further along. No point in my investing more time in trying to come up with an original approach when it probably isn’t original at all.

-Dave

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Glenn Millam wrote: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1916055,00.html

Sounds like this guy isn’t sold either.

After reading that article I located a copy of “Dead of Night” and watched it. Good movie.

It also inspired the movies “Magic” and perhaps “Groundhog Day”.

-Dave

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Phil’s Dad wrote: I wonder why you stop at the particle level in your discussion. Can not an infinitely large Universe also be infinitely small?

Along those lines recently I was trying to figure out if an infinite universe can actually “move forward” where every particle in the universe depends on the influence of every other particle in the universe. By “move forward” I mean where every particle progresses in whatever it ought to be doing. If the “next step” of a particle depends on the influence of every other particle in an infinite universe, how can an infinite amount of information be brought to bear on each particle. I’m still uncertain as to whether it’s possible, even with infinite computational ability.

Anyway as I was considering that, I realized that there is the issue of locality. A particle near me does not care what a particle in the crab nebula is doing “right now”. Whatever that distant particle is doing takes years to propagate here, due to the speed of light limitation. As such the influence of the crab nebula on particles in my local vicinity only depends on what was happening in the distant past “over there”.

Specifically it seems possible to have an infinite universe, provided the “aether” or fabric of the universe propagates effects at the speed of light. Every particle affects the aether, and those effects spread outwards. As such each region of the aether is dependent on the rest of the universe, but the problem is mitigated because you only have to be concerned with the immediate vicinity.

Now I’m trying to figure out if it’s possible to have no particles at all, only the “aether” and its characteristic properties. Might an electron not be a particle that exists on its own, and then has an influence on an electric field? Rather, could the “electron” be a stable phenomenon in the “aether” that has the effect of propagating outwards in all directions an effect on the aether like the electric field? So you have only the aether, plus stable “constructions” within that aether that we confuse as being particles. The question is, why have a particle, and then also have its effect on a separate field? Why not dispense with the particle and only have the field?

The way I visualize this is similiar to computer demo effects. There is a “fire” effect where you have a hot spot on a video window, and the “heat” propagates from hot to cold pixels. It’s accomplished with an averaging of neighboring pixels. If you simulate this you get a situation where “heat” bleeds away in a nice circular manner. An electron could be a stable source of “heat” that then bleeds off in 3 dimensions, the heat dissipating in an inverse square manner. Here is a link showing an image of such a “fire” simulation. http://www.xdr.com/dash/fire.html

It occured to me that perhaps there really are only two fundamental “particles” in this aether, the electron and the positron. Maybe somehow there is a stable mode where you get some 900 electrons and 901 positrions together and this blob forms a proton. Or 901 of each forms a neutron. In each case the overall “charge” on the heavy particle is correct, and its mass would be correct also.

Also I was wondering if a stationary electron is a perfectly symmetric structure in the aether, meaning it has a perfectly uniform effect on the aether spreading out in all directions. Perhaps a moving electron is no longer symmetric. It has a different effect on the aether, and this effect is itself moving through the aether.

I’m trying to figure out how special relativity can fall out of this approach. I don’t believe in general relativity, actually. I don’t believe space is warped. Rather, I like a uniform aether that actually does have a fixed reference frame. The question is how to have such a universe yet explain the observed effects.

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Aeronaut wrote: Even if I had read BBNH, I wouldn’t be able to follow most of it.

Two things we don’t want to do with FF is interrupt electrical or magnetic flows. Those are the machine.

Why wouldn’t you be able to follow most of it?

Anyway the principle of focus fusion is to start a big current flowing, which gives rise to a magnetic field, then cut off the current, which causes a collapse in the magnetic field, which causes the pinching effect which creates the fusion. The whole thing is pulsed, isn’t it?

Maybe my understanding is completely wrong — sorry!

-Dave

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Aeronaut wrote: What’s really easy to miss in this machine is how fast everything happens and that the plasmoid is measured in microns. (!) When you stop to think about it, a smaller plasmoid is easier to compress. As long as it encapsulates enough fuel to get the desired energy output per pulse, we should be good(er) to go. A large, low density plasma (and electromagnets) are some of ITER’s major challenges.

Thanks for your response, it does make more sense now.

I remember in Big Bang Never Happened Eric talks about a power company in Sweden or somewhere that called in some plasma experts because their DC power switch or whatever was failing and a massive electrical spike was blowing out circuits. The problem turned out to be some widget had too low ion pressure so all the ions were forced to one side of the chamber and this killed the current flow, which collapsed the magnetic field that had built up, causing the massive voltage spike.

I wonder if such a mechanism could be used intentionally to pulse the high current.

-Dave

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Aeronaut wrote: I began understanding FF as a series of electromagnets that culminate in (hopefully) around 12 GG, stronger than any other fusion reactor’s field. But the only way to get there is to dump around 2-3MA into the anode for that brief 10pS(?) of every cycle. More input current means more energy gets transferred into the plasmoid.

I’m hearing that the period of current flow is so brief that no physical spinning fan-type insulator could actually serve.

However I want to make sure I’m understanding this. Are you saying 10pS (10 picoseconds) of current must flow each cycle? Let’s examine that.

1 picosecond is 1/1000th of a nanosecond. According to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picosecond light travels 1mm in 3.3 picoseconds (but it’s a simple calculation anyway). So in 10pS light can travel 3mm. Is this the size of the focus fusion pinching involved?

It’s like the whole thing can fit inside an almond.

-Dave

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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

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dash wrote: The truth is you don’t need space to be infinitely divisible in order to make it impossible to run the simulation into the future. Space could be quantized, it could take a finite amount of information to describe a particle’s position. Yet because we’re in the universe and every particle of the universe is interacting with every other particle, we can never be able to model the universe perfectly.

Anyway I wanted to make a point about humanity’s approach to understanding the physics of the universe.

Einstein was always trying to fathom “The Mind of God”. Or “The Old One”. He felt that at the bottom level the principles of the universe must be elegant. Einstein — smart guy, right? Yet did he really believe in A Divine Creator? Can any scientist really believe there is a God and truly be scientifically open minded? I’m convinced Einstein failed because whether or not he did believe in Intelligent Design, his approach essentially was no different than if there was a designer.

Specifically if Einstein intentionally ruled out “inelegant” theories in favor of “elegant” ones, that conscious choice itself presupposes that the universe was designed by an intelligence that itself deliberately chose elegance over inelegance. The expectation of elegance inherently is thinking within the box. As such, einstein failed in his attempts to understand the universe. He was doomed to failure. Understanding can only come by abandoning all preconceptions, including the requirement for elegance, simplicity, an intentional design, purpose, and indeed meaning itself.

I would like to share a link to my own theory of why we exist, or why this universe we live in exists. Here it is:

http://www.xdr.com/dash/essays/TheUniverse.html

Basically even if you start from the premise that “God created the universe” you have to ask, “Why does god exist? Where did He come from?” Eventually there is a requirement for spontaneous reality to come into existence. I believe that the infinity of all possible universes, with all possible physical laws, with all possible initial conditions, all exist and are real — each to itself. We’re just in one of the myriad possible universes out of all of those. All the others are imaginary. The mere potential for a universe to exist gives rise to it. It is real to itself. There is no Big Machine computing any universe. There is no creator. If anything universes are a spontaneous outcome of Information itself.

From that point of view the only thing special about our universe is that it is suitable for the evolution of life intelligent enough to wonder why it exists. There is no requirement that the physical principles of our universe are computable, elegant or even especially simple. They DO appear to be pretty simple, however. That’s also a bit of a surprise, when you think about it.

Let me give one more example of the Thinking Inside The Box. Newton realized gravity fell off in an inverse square manner. We know that any function can be exactly reduced to a Taylor Series expansion, as in
f(x) = a + b/x + c/x^2 + d/x^3 + e/x^4 …

Newton noted that gravity appeared to fall off as the square of distance. As such there is only a term for (c) in the Taylor Series. a, b, d, e and all the rest are zero. Why must they be exactly zero? Why must c’s coefficient be exactly 1? Here is the subconscious expectation of simplicity. Of elegance.

Might there be non-zero terms for the other members? Are we (as a species) even looking for such things? “Gravity falls off as the square of distance. Therefore our equation is f=Gm1m2/r^2.QED”. That is really ridiculous, when you really stop and think about it. Who said the physical laws operating in this universe must have integer coefficients? Might the coefficients be, instead, irrational numbers? Might it take an infinite amount of information just to represent the equations themselves?

-Dave

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Lerner wrote: See The Emperor’s New Clothes. ..It will be on our website http://www.cosmology.info very soon.

I had wanted to interact with Eric Lerner, author of BBNH, ever since I read the book the first time. I wanted to interact with Taleb after reading “The Black Swan” but that didn’t work out. Someone named “Lerner” posted the response I quoted above. I’ll behave as if that is the real Eric Lerner, because I still would like to engage in a back and forth discussion.

Note about a year ago I sent an email to Eric offering my services as a programmer in the focus fusion effort. I suggested using video graphics boards, say by NVIDIA, as computational resources. The focus fusion effort would perhaps be helped by doing complex simulations. While I don’t know enough math to assist, I had thought I could contribute programming services. I was also fired up to invest in the focus fusion effort.

Then the economy tanked. My portfolio fell by 50% and so I was no longer in a mood to invest, and put money at risk. I was scheduled to call Eric on a Monday, but I chickened out and never made the call. This is just by way of background. The concepts in BBNH come back to me upon occasion, and since I recently reread the book I’ve been thinking about related matters again. Sorry I’m so long winded…

There is a recurring theme which appears in BBNH regarding why is time only moving forward. Meaning since the laws of physics appear to function equally well forward or backward, why is there a direction of time. Eric you devote a lot of time to this question, and I’ve never understood why there is such a mystery. You cite the example of balls bouncing around on a billiard table, running a film backwards is just as believable as forwards, once the balls are in motion.

This is a convenient example that illustrates the problem of why time is one directional. But the example is a tiny subset of physical interactions that take place. Consider a box up on a shelf that tips over and falls to the ground. It is now in a lower energy state. This scenario is certainly not reversable. The box on the ground can no longer summon enough energy up to vault itself back up to the shelf. Things fall into lower energy states and are more stable. Things cannot enter higher energy states without some external source of energy.

Consider the lens of the human eye. The lens is made up of some transparent protein that can be deformed easily, so it can change its focus. The lens is formed in the womb along with the rest of the infant’s body. Upon entering the outside world, the lens is now subject to ultra violet radiation. Sometimes a UV light hits the lens in just the right way as to cause cross linking, or perhaps some damage to the lens protein itself. I’m unsure of the details. But suppose it is cross linking between two sulfur atoms in different protein layers of the lens. Suddenly this cross link exists and it’s a strong bond. Those layers can no longer slide relative to each other. The lens is no longer as pliable as it once was. The individual experiences trouble focusing the eye as well. And this is a typical manifestation of aging.

There is no mystery in this case why time proceeds in one direction only. The lens started out in a perfect, pristine state, then little by little acquired cross links and they persist. Once the sulfer atoms form their chemical bonds, they persist. They’re more stable than non-linked sulfur. QED. It’s like a lock snapping into place.

Or atomic nuclei bonding to form more stable nuclei, leading up to iron. Certainly each fusion is not reversable! At least without some external source of energy to break the bond.

Anyway I’ve never really understood why so much attention is placed on the question of why time is one direction only. Oh well.

Another point I wanted to make concerns the question of predictability. An argument is made that it is impossible to predict the future because space is infinitely divisible. One can never know exactly where all the particles are in order to model a system, because it would take infinite precision to even record the position of a single particle. And without knowing the exact positions, the errors will accumulate until the simulation will diverge from reality, inexorably, in increasing amount.

Why is it even a question? It feels like a sop to the religiously minded. They want the future to be uncertain. Free Will and all. Claiming that the universe can be deterministic in its principles, yet “we” can’t ever predict its outcome because we can’t ever get an accurate enough model of its current state — it sounds like a lame attempt to pacify religious people who wish that We Can Never Know The Mind of God. That is, writing out the physical laws of this universe would imply predictability and as such would imply that god himself is predictable, and as such is heresy. So in order to get past this obstacle (religious zealots that will sabotage efforts at achieving understanding) basically the assertion is, “Don’t worry — even if we do figure out the underying laws, we won’t be able to predict the future because we can’t know the current state accurately enough. You have nothing to fear!”

The truth is you don’t need space to be infinitely divisible in order to make it impossible to run the simulation into the future. Space could be quantized, it could take a finite amount of information to describe a particle’s position. Yet because we’re in the universe and every particle of the universe is interacting with every other particle, we can never be able to model the universe perfectly. CONT

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Rezwan wrote: Were you hoping for specific, causal factors in response to your post?

The message in BBNH as an alternative explanation for star and galaxy formation is overwhelmingly more reasonable than the big bang. Yet 18 years later the book might as well not exist at all.

The question is has anything happened in the intervening 18 years to refute BBNH?

The big bang theory was on the ropes in 1991. Now it seems to be unshakable. What rabbit did they pull out of their hat to cement their control of mainstream science?

-Dave

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Rezwan wrote: Don’t ask me. I live in Iran. Things get trumped. Faith rules! Stop whining and accept the results.

Why exactly did you bother responding at all?

-Dave

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