David Albert kills the new book A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing by Lawrence Krauss in the NYT review On The Origin of Everything with Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from? Krauss is more or less upfront, as it turns out, about […]
Category archives for physics
The central problem of physics at the turn to the 20th century concerned the emission and absorption of radiation as interaction between matter and light, formulated as the problem of blackbody radiation. This is analogous to the interaction between a loudspeaker as matter and sound waves in the surrounding air. There are two approaches to this […]
The recent sequence of posts on about Max Planck and Planck’s Radiation Law connects to an earlier sequence on my other blog: Two-Way Transfer of Heat as OLR/DLR Violates the 2nd Law Picture of CMB from Resonance, Not Radiative Heating Radiative Heat Transfer: History Do Living Physicists Support DLR/Backradiation? The posts tell a Faustian story […]
r This is a direct continuation of the previous post Planck’s Proof vs New Proof. The idea of “backradiation” which serves to motivate CO2 alarmism, can be traced back to Planck’s monumental treatise The Theory of Heat Radiation from 1914, where Planck on page 1 describes the physics of radiative heat transfer as follows: All heat rays […]
Absorption spectroscopy can be used as experimental support of the new derivation of Planck’s Law presented in Mathematical Physics of Blackbody Radiation and Computational Blackbody Radiation and discussed in the recent post Two Proofs of Planck’s Law vs Backradiation. The experimental setup is illustrated in the above picture showing the recording of two spectra: An absorption line spectrum […]
Einstein’s theory of relativity is based on a Principle of Relativity: In physics, the principle of relativity is the requirement that the equations describing the laws of physics have the same form in all admissible frames of reference. For example, in the framework of special relativity the Maxwell equations have the same form in all inertial frames of reference. In the […]
Modern physics, both quantum mechanics and relativity theory, is obsessed with a narcissistic observer perspective in which the World only goes around when observed by human observers. The upshot of special relativity was a perceived difficulty for different observers moving with a speed close to the speed of light with respect to each other, to […]
What is the mass of Stephen Hawking? What difference does it make? Einstein explained The Equivalence Principle of his general theory of relativity as follows: A little reflection will show that the law of the equality of the inertial and gravitational mass is equivalent to the assertion that the acceleration imparted to a body by a […]
Most physicists are ready to pay lip service to relativity theory by stating that they do not understand it, but there are quite a few dissidents who are critical because they do not understand. Below are some examples of these attitudes. More of the same is given in Many-Minds Relativity. R. Feynman (Nobel Prize in Physics […]
A basic postulate of Einstein’s general theory of relativity named general covariance, states that the mathematical representations of a law of physics in different coordinate systems must be connected by the mathematics of coordinate transformations. With this interpretation general covariance is a postulate which is vacuous of physical content and does not say anything about […]
RRelativity of velocity and position in Newtonian mechanics. There is an aspect of relativity of Planck’s Law of blackbody radiation which connects to relativity of motion or velocity and position. We shall compare these aspects of relativity with the aspect of absolutism of absolute temperature and absolute motion. We recall that Newtonian mechanics is commonly […]
The Equivalence Principle EP states that inertial mass is equal to gravitational (or heavy) mass. In Newtonian mechanics EP can be seen as a definition of inertial mass in terms of gravitational mass and a definition of force in terms of gravitational force via Newton’s 2nd Law Force = Mass x Acceleration, or F = […]
The special theory of relativity is defined by the Lorentz transformation between two systems of of space-time coordinates and defined by (normalizing the speed of light to 1): , , . This transformation is supposed to connect observations in two coordinate systems with space-axes moving with velocity with respect to each other as indicated in […]
Modern physics is deeply troubled by the incompatibility of Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, which has resisted almost 100 years of fruitless efforts of forming a unified theory of gravitation and electro/quantum mechanics. Einstein’s (special and general) theory of relativity was widely questioned from start in 1905 into the 1950s but the criticism […]
I have drafted the cosmological model presenting itself in recent posts in more precise terms in the article: Newtonian Gravitation of Matter and Antimatter which is now available for inspection. Computational simulations are awaiting. Compare with Computational Thermodynamics, Chap 32.
In recent posts we have met the following differential equation, referred to as Poisson’s or Laplace’s equation in mathematics literature: where is a gravitational potential and represents the presence of matter (where and antimatter (where ). This equation is the basis of Laplace’s monumental treatise in 5 volumes on Celestial Mechanics (1799-1825) and thus may […]
Matter and antimatter propelled nearly to the speed of light by the Crab pulsar, from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope/Getty Images. The previous post on God’s equation connects to the recent article (2011) on antigravity and antimatter by M. Villata CPT symmetry and antimatter gravity in general relativity. Villata derives mutual […]
Here is a clue to a solution of the Christmas and New Year puzzle in the previous post in the form of the Euler equations for a self-gravitating gas: God’s Equation: Matter and Antimatter According to the mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, the World is governed by the differential equation: where is the gravitational potential depending on space-time […]
Here is a little Christmas and New Year puzzle to all readers of The World as Computation: There is a strong connection between turbulence black body radiation expansion of the Universe driven by dark energy the European economical crisis which all share the phenomenon of local collapse balanced by global expansion as explained in Computational […]
Is it possible to explain by energy conservation the apparent expansion of the Universe with galaxies seemingly repelling each other, as a compensation for the potential energy lost in the formation of galaxies by gravitational implosion? In short: Local implosion balanced by global explosion. Let us explore this natural and simple idea. Let us thus […]
The recent book The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of Cosmos by Brian Greene is presented as follows: The possibility of other universes existing alongside our own like holes in “a gigantic block of Swiss cheese” seems more likely every day. Beginning with relativity theory, the Big Bang, and our expanding universe, Greene […]
I am not the only one to question The Cosmological Principle (CP) that the Universe must look the same in all directions from all points of observation. CP is presented as the logical extension of the Copernican Principle that the Earth does not have a central favored position: If the Earth does not have a central […]
The previous post Is the Cosmological Principle (CP) Valid? suggests the following scientific method to get a Nobel Prize: Make an ad hoc unphysical assumption like CP: The Universe is isotropic and homogeneous. Make observations indicating that CP is not valid. Insist that CP anyway is valid, because a Principle is a principle. To fit […]
The FLWR Cosmological Model The basic mathematical model of cosmology is the FLWR model which is the very simple model resulting from Einstein’s equations assuming the validity of the Cosmological Principle (CP) stating that the Universe on large scales is isotropic (the same in all directions) homogeneous (the same at all locations) or in the formulation […]
The Truth of Cartoons: What Is So Funny? A cartoon can tell a truth in a drastic funny way, a truth which cannot be told bluntly without comic, because that would violate social conventions. The cartoon is funny because it is true: If a person is fat, it is funny to depict the person as very […]
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