Subscribe 08 Dec
General relativity, quantum physics, freely-falling planes and Bayesian statistics
We’re famous: the work that concluded my PhD is now picked up by the press http://www.physorg.com/news179481148.html
I hadn’t realized before reading this journalist’s version of the story, but we have all the proper buzz words:
- general relativity
- quantum physics
- freely-falling planes
- Bayesian statistics.
This kind of stuff makes great headlines, but the way we are judged on this “success” is actually harmful (I believe), as there is so much interesting research that lies away of the trendy words and that needs to be done.
Posted
on
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 10:20 pm under
Hi Gael
Excellent and much needed work.
You may dismiss this (or give me a credit if not!) but some thoughts from some work I’ve done that may give you another view angle.
Have you considered the gyroscopic effects of particle spin? (including oscillatory gyroscopics). Inertia is proportional to spin, which is indeed effective mass at the quantum level. A smaller group of particles will contain much less inertial energy than a large one.
When the lead ball is sitting on the weighing scales, next to the balsa wood ball on it’s scales, inertia counts for nothing, but, like a gyroscope, (or billions of small ones) try to move it and you can tell the difference!
In a way you should maybe be asking different questions. Not; “If I was in a metal box how could I tell if the box was being pulled by a magnet or pushed by something else”.
The key to why the lead ball weighs more ‘at rest’ is of course simply in it’s greater self gravity, trying to ‘pull’ the earth towards itself.
We know mass is simply spin energy, and it looks more and more like Einstein was right considering it as perturbation or ‘focus’ of energy from what we know know as the dark energy field making up over 70% of the mass/energy of the universe.
Thes is just a small part of the Discrete Field Model (DFM) I’m testing, which seems to prove a slightly more fundamental adjustment to SR that’s needed to resolve it’s anomalies. (without changing the postulates) If you’d like more information just ask.
Peter
December 9th, 2009 at 12:17 pmHi Peter,
Interesting. If I understand you right, you are talking about an extension to SR to take in account spin effects. First of all, I believe that to have multiple-particle spins, we would need to have a coherent gas, in other words a BEC or a Fermi sea. The spin energy should manifest itself as a phase shift in the interferometer, just like interaction energy between particles does.
Right now, we are using non-condensed gazes to avoid these problems, and interaction problems, as they are not what we are trying to measure. The experiment is still in its infancy, and it will take years and years before all the systematics are measured, understood, and canceled, so that we can have access to real gravitational physics measurements. I am talking of “trivial” problems such as stray magnetic fields, laser noise, measurement offsets in the phase-reading electronics… The ‘observatoire de Paris’ are world-wide experts in these problems, so I am confident that they will get there, but it will take time.
As for me, I am now doing entirely different things, as my current research is focused on modeling spontaneous activity in the brain, so I will not be following this up.
December 9th, 2009 at 12:30 pm