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New Theories / Split: Bell's paradox: Does the string break?

« on: 31/07/2020 17:46:57 »

[Mod note: This topic was split from the "Is angular momentum frame dependent?" thread,
https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=80177.msg611143 ]

Halc,
that's the answer I expected.

Mamalute Lover,
if you deny Bell's spaceship 'paradox' then you are going against Einstein and his original 1905 paper.
He starts his paper with a definition of simultaneity:
http://hermes.ffn.ub.es/luisnavarro/nuevo_maletin/Einstein_1905_relativity.pdf

If you deny the simultaneity then you have nothing to back up your statements.
You cannot argue this is like this because the relativity says so. You denied the relativity.
Do you have your own math? Do you have your own hypothesis?
Jano

You failed to quote the important part of Einstein’s paper.

“So we see that we cannot attach any absolute signification to the concept of simultaneity, but that two events which, viewed from a system of co-ordinates, are simultaneous, can no longer be looked upon as simultaneous events when envisaged from a system which is in motion relatively to that system.”

Are the two space ships in motion relative to each other? In fact, yes.

Assume they start off with synchronized clocks and turn on their engines at an agreed time and begin to accelerate.

Spaceship 1 (in the lead) sees Spaceship 2 start up its engine a little bit later because it took a little time for the light from SP2 to reach SP1. As a result, as long as the engines are on SP1 will always see SP2 going slower, having started acceleration later. This implies that the distance between them is getting longer. A string connecting them should be under increasing tension.

However, SP2 sees SP1 start up its engine later than SP2 because of the lightspeed delay. That is, SP2 will always see SP1 going slower because SP2 started its engine first. The implies that the distance between them is getting shorter. A string connecting them should go increasingly slack.

The two spaceships are not in the same reference frame and their clocks are not synchronized. They will not agree on what they see.

Now what about that string?

SP1 thinks the string is under tension. That means that a force is being transmitted down the string at the speed of sound in the string, lightspeed at most.  Assuming identical strength for the string all along its length, the string will not snap until the force wave hits the end of the string and cannot be passed on to the next segment.

SP2 thinks the string is slack, and will not snap at all. We might imagine SP1’s force wave meeting SP2’s slack somewhere in the middle, resulting in a string with neither slack nor tension. But that is assigning absolute reality to perceptions.

How can SP1 and SP2 agree on what is happening to the string? By turning off their engines at an agreed time by their originally synchronized clocks and getting back into an inertial frame of reference. SP1 will see SP2 turn off its engine a little late and catch up in speed, restoring the distance gap. SP2 will also see SP1 turn off its engines a little late and take up the slack. Once they are in a common inertial frame of reference again, they will discover that they are separated by the original length of the string, which suffered no harm.

 A side note: SP1 thinks SP2 is going slower and therefore has a faster clock. SP2 thinks SP1 is going slower and has a faster clock. The perceived time difference between engine shutoffs will be the same on each side.

But what about Lorentz contraction on the string?

If SP1 and SP2 each look straight along the length of the string, they will be unable to judge its length. If each looks at the string from enough to the side to judge its length, they will observe the string to be curved because of the aforementioned perceived speed differences and the time it takes for the light to reach them from different points along the length of the string.

Once they are in a common inertial frame of reference, an outside observer in inertial motion relative to them will observe Lorentz contraction of the entire system, SP1 and SP2 and the string.  No broken string, no slack string.

Lorentz contraction is relative. It is not real.

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Guest Book / Are there rules on reviving old threads?

« on: 17/07/2020 13:17:56 »

I came across a thread that has been inactive for about two years. There are a number of posts in this thread that asked questions or offered speculations that were not answer. I have information to offer on these.but some of the posts I would address are over a decade old. Is it legitimate to post on this thread quoting posts that old?

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Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Is B meson oscillation a viable explanation for predominance of normal matter

« on: 08/07/2020 22:58:02 »

First let me make it clear that I am asking a question concerning physics as presently known and have no theory of my own to present here. I am openly inviting constructive criticism on my perceptions here even if it amounts to Man, you really blew it!

Oh and please excuse the use of Excel style math expressions. That is all my fingers know how to do.

Normal matter and antimatter are produced in equal proportions in particle collider events. Why then does the universe at large consist of normal matter? Should not the two kinds have existed in equal proportions in the early universe? And since normal matter and anti-matter annihilate each other, producing photons, why does the universe today not consist entirely of photons with no matter? The peculiar behavior of the B meson has been proposed as the answer, giving a slight advantage to normal matter.

In accordance with the Standard Model the B meson is not only its own antiparticle, it oscillates between normal matter and antimatter states. Furthermore, the B meson spends a bit more time as normal matter than as antimatter. This has been experimentally confirmed at Fermilab and with the LHCb detector. Fermilab reported a 1% advantage of matter over antimatter, far in excess of the Standard Model prediction of near zero. LHCb obtained a result much closer to the value predicted by theory.

Due to their opposite quantum numbers, matter/antimatter collisions of the same type result in energetic photons. These photons can decay into particles but again of matter/antimatter pairs. More collisions, more photons. Ultimately there are only photons. But introduce a slight bias toward normal matter and in the end only normal matter will be left. Plus a lot of photons.

Side note: Notice that this would require all matter/antimatter to ultimately pass through the B meson phase because that is the only way to generate excess normal matter. With annihilations creating photons that decay into particles that is possibly feasible over time. It is another question whether a rigorous model of this would yield the preponderance of heavy particles that we see today, that is, whether the B meson decays would be energetic enough to make all these protons and neutrons. But that is way out of my league.

If we take the 1% figure reported by Fermilab, then 99% of the original matter mass of the universe (both types) has become energy in the form of photons. This is primordial photons, not the output of stars or the like. 

Being a newbie, I cannot link to sources for the following figures but they are readily available on an internet search.

The mass of the matter in the observable universe is estimated at 10^53 kg, excluding dark matter or dark energy.

The estimated volume of the observable universe (assuming it is approximately Euclidean) is 4*10^80 cubic meters.

 By E=mc^2, the energy content of a kilogram of matter is 9*10^16 Joules/kg.

Fermilab estimates that 1% of the original matter mass survived as normal matter. That is the 10^53 kg of the observable universe. That leaves 99% turned into photons.

Combining these figures gives a primordial photon energy of over 10^71 joules compared to a volume of 4*10^80 m^3 or a density greater than 10^(-9) J/m^3

By comparison the energy density of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is 4 x 10^(-14) J/m^3. The amount calculated above from primordial matter annihilation is roughly 5 orders of magnitude higher than that. Seems that something 100,000 times as strong as the CMB would have been noticed.

And recall that both theory and LHCb provide values much lower than Fermilab’s 1%. I have not been able to find a source that quantifies ‘near zero’ but it must be at least a few more orders of magnitude added on to the expected energy density.

One might invoke red shifting to explain the lack of expected but undetected energy. But that is already accounted for in the math above. At some time in the past, what is now the observable universe occupied a much smaller volume, with a certain amount of CMB energy. All of that CMB energy is still there, it is simply at a much lower density. The math above generated the total expected amount of energy from primordial matter/antimatter annihilation based on existing mass of matter versus the present volume. The original density would have been much higher and now it is lower just like with CMB. No energy just up and vanished.
 
Alternatively, one might say that the excess energy heated the matter. But that is the CMB, the heat radiation that was able to get uncoupled from matter when the density dropped enough. If heat energy is going to be invoked to make the photon energy go away, then the CMB energy density (temperature) should be much higher. 

If I have had my head on straight in all of the above, it would appear that the peculiar properties of the B meson cannot account for the universe of today being (virtually) all normal matter.

So what did I get wrong?

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New Theories / Why is the Second Law of Thermodynamics (SLOT) time asymmetric?

« on: 06/07/2020 00:16:34 »

Why is the Second Law of Thermodynamics (SLOT) time asymmetric? 

Why is it that the hot coffee gets cooler instead of hotter or just staying the same? With the exception of SLOT, the laws of Physics are time symmetric. Run the time parameter backward and you will reproduce the past conditions.  Why is the Second Law of Thermodynamics uni-directional? Because, we are told, of the Arrow of Time. Things develop in one direction in time. Why is that? Because of the Second … um, what was the question?

Why is SLOT different from other laws of Physics? Why the time asymmetry?

The coffee cools off over time, an obvious fact. How come it was hot in the first place? It got heated on the stove, via some kind of energy, gas or electricity or whatever. Where did that energy come from? Ultimately from the sun, or if it is nuclear then it resulted from a supernova that created the uranium. Why are there stars? Why do they put out energy? Planets, galaxies, dust clouds – where did they come from? None of this came fully formed with the Big Bang.

The answer is Gravity of course. And Gravity is always ‘down’, so to speak. It ‘pulls’ instead of ‘pushing’. The asymmetry is still there if you phrase it in General Relativity theory instead of Newtonian mechanics. The coffee cools because it was made hot by energy that ultimately derives from gravity. Local entropy can decrease such as stars forming and starting to shine or a cup of coffee getting heated as long as overall entropy increases. That is all that SLOT requires.

But why is gravity asymmetric in time? Gravitational force is related to the mass of the gravitating bodies. Which leads to the simple idea that gravity being ‘down’ results from the mass sign being positive. And guess what? If we look around at the universe, we notice that all of the mass is positive. There is no negative mass. All of the other physical properties – charge, spin etc. – exist in positive and negative forms. Why not mass?

If mass had a negative sign, gravity would be ‘up’ instead of ‘down’. Entropy would decrease instead of increasing. Now flip your point of view and you will see that a negative mass universe would work the same as ours just backward in time. Of course the inhabitants of such a universe would think of their SLOT (TOLS?) in terms of entropy increasing just like we do. They would imagine us as the ones going backward in time.

The direction of the Arrow of Time, in which overall entropy increases, appears to be related to all mass in a universe having the same sign. Whether it is labeled positive or negative does not matter, as long as it is all the same. That allows SLOT to be a universal unbreakable law, in terms of overall entropy increasing.

OK but why is mass always the same sign? Perhaps at the origin of the universe, whatever that might be like, both positive and negative mass arose in equal proportions. If the shape of space-time is related to the sign of mass (and isn’t it?) maybe all the positive mass went one way in time and all the negative mass went the other way. In this (very definitely hypothetical) scenario, there would be a pair of universes, mass-positive and mass-negative, both originating from the origin. Notice that the sum of the masses in the two universes is zero. No net excess of mass to explain.