I am a physics graduate who spent 20 years teaching maths before getting early retirement. Returning to the study of physics nearly 30 years after graduating, I found much of modern physics hard to believe. When I started delving into the mysteries, I found what I thought were mistakes. As the years passed and I began to tackle more and more of the problems, I slowly became more confident in my own ability and less intimidated by the reputations of the great and good.
I do not think that we should be critical of science, just critical of the way it is taught and the overconfidence of its exponents. Modern Physics started with Rutherford's discovery that atoms are mainly empty space and J.J. Thompson's discovery of the electron. The English physicists believed in a real world with solid objects and even if the atom had now lost its solidness, its electrons, protons and neutrons were real enough and obeyed Newton's laws of motion and James Clerk Maxwell's equations. Unfortunately, on the continent, physics was done in mathematics departments by men who were trained in philosophy before they learnt any science. The discovery of radioactivity and its random nature seemed to sow distrust in the physics of Newton and Maxwell and from this rarefied atmosphere emerged the two great ideas of modern physics; relativity and quantum theory.
Spurred on by the philosophy they had half learnt at school, they were happy to think that reality lay in the observation. While philosophers mused whether or not a tree ceased to exist when no one was looking at it, the worlds leading physicists decided that if a cat was placed in a box with a device which would kill it if a Geiger counter detected the emission of a radioactive particle, the cat would remain in limbo, neither dead nor alive until the moment when a scientist opened the lid and peeped in. At that moment, nature would work backwards through time doing vast numbers of probability calculations and decide whether or not to have killed the cat at a certain time.
What we have to understand is that in science, the accidents of history do not present the discoveries in the right order or at the right time for the scientists to piece together the jigsaw puzzle. We humans are evolved to make decisions on the basis of limited and doubtful information, so before all the relevant facts are known, we come up with our theories. The so called scientific method prescribed by Newton means that the first person to produce a theory giving an equation which gives the right answers gets the prize. If the equations are bazaar enough and the explanation impossible to understand, rather than laugh at his stupidity, we deify the scientist, Einstein being the prime example.
But we should not doubt science, because scientists who have been properly educated are continually asking questions, repeating experiments and reworking theory to allay their own doubts. If our present science contains errors, they will be corrected. We may have to wait for a whole generation of professional scientists to retire, but the scientific spirit will win out.
Let us take a look at Einstein's relativity. He pinched the equations from Lorentz an Poincaré and made up a mathematical fudge of a proof to disguise their origin. He then went after the great prize of unifying the three forces of gravity, electricity and magnetism. His theory of gravity is really a theory of no gravity. He wrote "I realized that if I jumped from the window, I would no longer feel the force of gravity". So he equated gravity with the centrifugal force that he would have felt if he lived on gramophone turntable and the maths came up with the right number. Since it could only have come up with 1 or ½, he had a fifty-fifty chance of being right. The whole idea of space-time and the idea that it could be curved came mainly from Minkowski.
Einstein's theory of gravity is wrong and while the equations it produces work well enough in weak gravitational fields, they fall down in the region of the intense gravitational field of neutron stars. The result is the prediction of a black holes and the event horizons which are said to surround them. There is a very interesting video sequence on Youtube (watch) showing the stars at the centre of our galaxy and the orbits which reveal the presence of an unseen object of 3 or 4 million times the mass of our sun which the commentary describes as a black hole.
Youtube allows people to post comments and the exchange:
Scunkhunt comments: "Good thing black holes aren't real, cause
we'd be in alot of trouble! The only black hole that actually exists
is the Federal Reserve"
To which Palafico3 replies: "F*** you ***hole. How else would the
galaxy stay together? Black holes ARE real. There are none that are
REALLY close to us."
This is typical of the intellectual qualities of those who discuss such
matters on the internet.
So what does lie at the centre of our universe. My calculation of its
size is somewhat speculative and makes the wild assumption that whatever
it is, it could well have the same density as a neutron star. Now it
is not easy to say how big it is because the effect of gravity is to
make everything shrink and that includes any rulers and tape measures
we might use to measure it. General relativity states that space-time
is curved and defines a way of describing this called a "metric".
I prefer to retain the concept of Euclidean space and imagine nice Cartesian
co-ordinates drawn in space. They are just imaginary and so they are
unaffected by gravity and we can use them to measure the size of the
object. It is small.
The intense gravitational field slows down all time dependant processes,
so it is still in the process of shrinking and might well have a radius
of about 0.0004 mm. But lets imagine that it had had time to shrink
down to its minimum size, its radius would be 0.000 ....... (1,711 noughts
in all) ....04245 metre. ( Based on 3,700,000 solar masses)
That is small, but suppose we could wonder around on its surface with
a ruler and measure its circumference, we would get an answer of about
8,700 km which is a bit bigger that one fifth of the size of the earth.
A recent BBC horizon program "Who's is afraid of the big black
hole" suggested that the group who produced the video are looking
to see if they can see an event horizon. So I put some numbers into
Einstein's equations and calculated that if an even horizon exists,
it will have a radius of about 11,000,000 km. That is about one tenth
of the size of the orbit of Venus. Looking at the video, the image of
the star orbits said to be of the order of 10 light years seems rather
small. They would need to increase the magnification factor by about
9,000,000 to see if an event horizon existed. Well it made good television,
but it is easy to see how the attempt to make an interesting program
can result in claims being made which are not supported by the science.
Other television programs have included imagery of event horizons which
are no more than an artists impression, but the palificos of this world
are easily convinced.
Objects with the outward appearance of black holes certainly exist,
but it is far more likely that they are of finite size. The effect of
the gravitational potential of our sun on the light emitting atoms of
its surface can be seen as a slight red shift. The light emitted from
these black hole like objects will be so far red shifted as to be undetectable.
Not so much black holes as very dark brown holes.
In more recent times Feynman produced his theory of quantum electro
dynamics most excellently unexplained in his book QED the strange theory
of light and matter. He says to the lay reader "No you're not going
to be able to understand it. ........ You see, my physics students don't
understand it either. That is because I don't understand it. Nobody
does."
Having made every effort understand what he claims as the way in which
nature exerts a force from one electron upon another, I am unable to
understand why anyone could take him seriously. There is a principle
named after Heisenberg (The man who took charge of Hitler's nuclear
program and made sure it progressed slowly enough not to give him the
bomb). Microscopes are limited in their magnification by the wave length
of light. Higher magnification needs photons with more energy and a
point is reached when although the magnification is great enough to
see an atom, the photon knocks it for six. This uncertainty principle
grew in meaning until it was asserted that it allowed energy to be borrowed
from nowhere, just so long as it could be paid back within a given time.
Feynman's QED asserts that electrons exert forces on each other by borrowing
the energy for a photon under the uncertainty principle an using it
to make a photon which it sends to the other electron. Now it needs
to know just how much energy to borrow and that depends on how far away
the other electron will be when the photon gets there. So it sends out
a quantum wave to look for other electrons. When the quantum wave finds
an electron, according to Feynman, it collapses backwards through time
to convey this information to the electron which then does a division
sum to find what must be borrowed, borrows it, makes it into a photon
and sends it off somehow knowing what direction in which to send it.
The receiving electron needs to know where it was sent from so that
it can return a photon allowing the sending electron to pay back the
energy.
Unfortunately, when we do the sums, the force generated is 137 times
too big. That is the same 137 that comes in the speed of an electron
around a hydrogen atom as being 1/137 of the speed of light, so it is
a well known physical constant and can be introduced add hoc to give
the right answer.
If the reader has followed me so far without any doubts and is happy
to believe that the humble electron can do the sums and handle information
about directions, let me point out a further flaw. You see, if our humble
electron is sitting on the surface of a balloon helping to stick it
too the ceiling, it must exchange photons with billions of billions
of other electrons and quarks at the same time. Needless to say, in
the Alice in Wonderland world of modern physics, there are not only
physicists who claim to believe that the humble electron has this unbelievable
computing power, they have actually applied for and received research
grants to try to capture the electron's computing power!
One of the properties of language is that we tend to take words out
of context and apply them to everything happily carrying across the
properties of one thing to another. The word quantum originated from
the study of the light emitted by atoms. While white light is split
into the colours of the rainbow by a prism, the light from a hydrogen
is split into a number of distinct spectral lines. These reveal that
the energy levels of the orbiting electrons can only have certain values.
They are said to be quantised. This is the original quantum theory.
Now the word is applied to all manor of weird and wonderful theories.
If I say that Quantum Electro Dynamics is nonsense, whole herds of physics
students and lecturers will spring the woodwork to tell me in the language
of Palafico3 that I am an idiot for doubting quantum theory because
everybody knows the energy levels inside atoms are quantised.
Modern physics contains a vast body of incompatible bits and pieces
which together are called the Standard Model. When universities started
springing up everywhere and academics were told that they must produce
so many original papers every year, it was obvious that once the finite
truth has been discovered the result would be profusion of plausible
fiction and down right nonsense.
Most science is beyond the understanding of the layman, but it is reasonable
for the layman to expect the scientist to explain his conclusions in
terms which the layman can comprehend. Feynman's theory depends on the
electron being able to divide. Most ordinary people know how difficult
division is and have enough intelligence to doubt whether or not an
electron can do division sums. They also know that they can't do two
division sums at the same time, so it would be obvious to them that
even if it could do division, an electron would have difficulty in doing
billions of billions of sums at the same time.
Occasionally, a scientist does explain something quite clearly. The
UK Astronomer Royal, having read too much physics, happily appears on
television programs explaining that we live in a Multiverse. It makes
good television, but is any layman stupid enough to believe that if
they toss a coin, the whole universe will split into two new universes,
one in which the coin came down heads and the other in which it came
down tails. Fortunately, this web-site (Science Doubts) does not allow
people to post comments, otherwise, numerous Stargate fans would be
posting accounts of SG1's visits to alternative universes.
The best rule of thumb for a layman is this. "Never believe a scientist
until an engineer has turned his theory into a product you can buy off
the shelf."
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