Naked Science Forum
On the Lighter Side => New Theories => Topic started by: Phaedrus on 28/04/2015 20:03:09
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Greetings. I am not a physicist, but I am a buff of science and science history. Contemplating the troubles with physics, such as the irreconcilability of GR and QM, and the fact that we still don't know what gravity is, led me to suspect that a basic assumption, that charge is an inherent property of elementary particles, may be wrong.
And so I overturned this assumption and proceeded to deduce what the universe would be like if basic charge required a cause. The result was an entire alternative cosmology based on a bipolar, flowing aether. This medium is incompressible, non-viscuous, and under constant pressure. As it flows neutrally into massive bodies it causes the phenomenon we call gravitation.
As it flows into its final destination, protons and electrons, it is forcibly separated, or sheared, into its component parts, resulting in electromagnetic fields. Elementary particles are, in essence, condensations of the medium.
Radiant energy, suffused throughout space, suffers frictional effects as it propagates through the medium, in effect heating and pressurizing it so that it can flow, hence supplying demand. This is the cause of intergalactic redshift.
This is of course just a thumbnail sketch. Anyone wishing to read more can download a pdf version at http://www.hydrocosmica.com (http://www.hydrocosmica.com) or http://vixra.org/abs/1504.0023 (http://vixra.org/abs/1504.0023). There are equations, diagrams, and images.
Basically I'm putting this up as a target. Part of me would love to see it blown full of holes. I have tried and failed.
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Is charge really an inherent property of protons and electrons?
Yes.
The rest is poppycock.
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This is of course just a thumbnail sketch. Anyone wishing to read more can download a pdf version at http://www.hydrocosmica.com (http://www.hydrocosmica.com) or http://vixra.org/abs/1504.0023 (http://vixra.org/abs/1504.0023). There are equations, diagrams, and images.
Basically I'm putting this up as a target. Part of me would love to see it blown full of holes. I have tried and failed.
There's something you should understand. No physicist would read something so long when your main theme has been demonstrated to be wrong. I.e. we're not going to read something so long just to find out why you think charge is not an inherent property when you should be able to justify it in one paragraph. We have much better things to do with our time. It's not as though you're a well-known first rate scientist whom we'd love to hear what he has to say on any subject. The only theories that are posted in this forum are crackpot theories.
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Poppycock! What a fun word!
Can either of you two gentlemen cite proof that charge is inherent? Or is it just convention? As far as I can tell there was never much debate about it. H. A. Lorentz seems to be the person most responsible for codifying charge as an intrinsic aspect of elementary particles, back in the first decade of the last century as he was formulating his electron theory. Of course at that time the proton was yet to be discovered.
Doesn't it seem as though pretending that each elementary particle possesses what is the equivalent of a forever battery inside kind of smacks of perpetual motion? Not to mention conservation of energy. The whole universe of matter and motion depends upon that tiny charge. Where does it come from? God?
Look, I don't want to ruffle any feathers, but I would like to start a conversation that's more enlightening than POIS or "is light a gravitational wave." I'm only raising the possibility that maybe a mistake was made back in the past. It's happened before.
Re my larger work, you'd only need to read the first chapter to decide whether or not the rest was indeed poppycock. And of course it's a crackpot theory; that's why it's posted here.
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Can either of you two gentlemen cite proof that charge is inherent? Or is it just convention? As far as I can tell there was never much debate about it. H. A. Lorentz seems to be the person most responsible for codifying charge as an intrinsic aspect of elementary particles, back in the first decade of the last century as he was formulating his electron theory.
As you know, the phenomenon we call charge was discovered long before Lorentz. It had been studied a great deal and Lorentz was working on the equations of Maxwell which deals with interactions between charge and electric/magnetic fields. When he applied these equations to the atom and in particular the idea of an electron as being fundamental to understanding light and radiant heat, he and his coworkers were also able to describe and predict the behaviour of a whole range of properties of matter.
Later the electron was identified in what were known as cathode rays, their behaviour as predicted by Lorentz's and Maxwell's equations. Even later the charge on the electron was measured.
It's a bit like the old saying, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck .....
Same with charge on the electron.
As to what causes the electron to have a charge, I'll let the other 2 address that although I think it is a basic property. However, adding an aether as a cause doesn't seem to explain anything.
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Greetings. I am not a physicist, but I am a buff of science and science history. Contemplating the troubles with physics, such as the irreconcilability of GR and QM, and the fact that we still don't know what gravity is, led me to suspect that a basic assumption, that charge is an inherent property of elementary particles, may be wrong.
And so I overturned this assumption and proceeded to deduce what the universe would be like if basic charge required a cause. The result was an entire alternative cosmology based on a bipolar, flowing aether. This medium is incompressible, non-viscuous, and under constant pressure. As it flows neutrally into massive bodies it causes the phenomenon we call gravitation.
As it flows into its final destination, protons and electrons, it is forcibly separated, or sheared, into its component parts, resulting in electromagnetic fields. Elementary particles are, in essence, condensations of the medium.
Radiant energy, suffused throughout space, suffers frictional effects as it propagates through the medium, in effect heating and pressurizing it so that it can flow, hence supplying demand. This is the cause of intergalactic redshift.
This is of course just a thumbnail sketch. Anyone wishing to read more can download a pdf version at http://www.hydrocosmica.com (http://www.hydrocosmica.com) or http://vixra.org/abs/1504.0023 (http://vixra.org/abs/1504.0023). There are equations, diagrams, and images.
Basically I'm putting this up as a target. Part of me would love to see it blown full of holes. I have tried and failed.
Welcome to new theory forum! i am not scientist, just a science love.
yes. charge really IS an inherent property of protons and electrons. nature made it that way.
maybe aether is negative charged? i have my own theory about matter/atom.
there are 3 building blocks in nature, proton carries 900 + charges, electron carries -1 charge, enertron carries -10^-16 charge.
proton attracts all negative charged stuff, therefore a ball of electron and enertron will form around proton. because enertron is denser than electron ( charge to volume ratio), it condensed around proton by electromagnetic force, density from the proton outward decay at 1/r^3. electron also attracted by proton and stable at atom radius where the proton electron attraction force is equal to the electron enertron repelling force.
proton is like core of earth, enertron is the land and atmosphere, electron is like giant beach ball. atom's force field is far beyond radius, earth's gravitational field is also far beyond atmosphere.
atom in fact is so dense build, that's why atoms are not compressible, that's why electron cannot discharge into proton.
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Doesn't it seem as though pretending that each elementary particle possesses what is the equivalent of a forever battery inside kind of smacks of perpetual motion? Not to mention conservation of energy. The whole universe of matter and motion depends upon that tiny charge. Where does it come from? God?
Look, I don't want to ruffle any feathers, but I would like to start a conversation that's more enlightening than POIS or "is light a gravitational wave." I'm only raising the possibility that maybe a mistake was made back in the past. It's happened before.
there is no perpetual motion in atoms, electron is not circling the nucleus, but rest at fixed position around the atom ball.
the only motion atom has is vibrating with the force imputing, such as ambient heat, fiction, impact, current or light.
if you think my theory of light is entertaining, i be happy to know the reason.
hopefully a good 1, logic and fact backed.
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Can either of you two gentlemen cite proof that charge is inherent?
In the first place, I didn't notice that you were a new member when I posted my last post so let me say Welcome to the forum! [:)]
In the second place, since you are new you need to know that jccc is a major crackpot and nothing he says and be trusted. So you'd be wise to ignore everything he says.
What exactly do you mean by "proof"? I.e. what would you consider as counting as proof? Theoretical? Experimental?
First of all it's unclear what you mean by "inherent". Please state precisely what you mean by it other than requiring us to guess. I'm going to assume that by inherent you mean that it's constant in time and independent of the particles frame of reference.
If you're interested in experimental evidence then I'll use the electron and proton as examples. Basically we know it's "inherent" because particle physicists have observed this to be true in all of their research. Also if, say, the charge of an electron was a function of the particles frame of reference then it'd be a function of speed. If that was true the charge of a the electrons moving around the nucleus of an atom would not balance the charge of the protons in the nucleus because they're moving faster and even an incredibly small change in charge with speed would mean a large change in charge due to the large number of atoms in any macroscopic sample of matter. We can also argue that if it wasn't true then energy wouldn't be conserved because the energy in a capacitor is a function of the amount of charge that it holds. If the total amount of charge changes then the total energy inside the capacitor would change thus violating the law of conservation of energy.
You can learn more about this at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_conservation#Experimental_Evidence
You'll notice in that webpage that conservation of charge can also be understood as a consequence of symmetry through Noether's theorem.
Or is it just convention?
No. Not at all. Far from it in fact.
As far as I can tell there was never much debate about it. H. A. Lorentz seems to be the person most responsible for codifying charge as an intrinsic aspect of elementary particles, back in the first decade of the last century as he was formulating his electron theory.
On what are you basing that assertion?
Doesn't it seem as though pretending that each elementary particle possesses what is the equivalent of a forever battery inside kind of smacks of perpetual motion?
Not at all? Why would you think of it as perpetual motion?
Not to mention conservation of energy. The whole universe of matter and motion depends upon that tiny charge. Where does it come from? God?
Where do you think all of the matter in the universe came from? Hint: Nobody knows. See:
https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/seuforum/bb_whycare.htm
No one knows how the first space, time, and matter arose. And scientists are grappling with even deeper questions. If there was nothing to begin with, then where did the laws of nature come from? How did the universe "know" how to proceed? And why do the laws of nature produce a universe that is so hospitable to life? As difficult as these questions are, scientists are attempting to address them with bold new ideas - and new experiments to test those ideas.
Look, I don't want to ruffle any feathers, but I would like to start a conversation that's more enlightening than POIS or "is light a gravitational wave." I'm only raising the possibility that maybe a mistake was made back in the past. It's happened before.
You'd be surprised how careful physicists are both individually and as a community.
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jccc;
Thank you for the kind welcome. After reading the first two replies my first thought was to tuck my tail between my legs and slink away. Maybe someday you can explain to me what an enertron is. If you read my theory you will see that I did not have to invent any new entities. All I did was resurrect the notion of an aether.
Colin2B;
Thank you for the mini-lesson. I love science history.
"It's a bit like the old saying, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck .....
Same with charge on the electron."
Of course anyone on Earth prior to the enlightenment could use this same logic to infer that the Sun orbits the Earth. Appearances can be deceiving.
"As to what causes the electron to have a charge, I'll let the other 2 address that although I think it is a basic property. However, adding an aether as a cause doesn't seem to explain anything."
Adding the aether as a cause explains practically everything. Aether is pure energy. It is a neutral blend of opposite polarities. It flows into massive bodies neutrally, causing gravity. At the level of protons and electrons it is forcibly sheared into its component parts, creating electromagnetic fields. That's a terse answer. For more detail please see Hydrocosmica.
PmbPhy;
Thanks for the welcome.
"In the second place, since you are new you need to know that jccc is a major crackpot and nothing he says and be trusted. So you'd be wise to ignore everything he says."
You mean like:
"yes. charge really IS an inherent property of protons and electrons. nature made it that way."
Just kidding! I appreciate the warning. jccc and theBox remind me of a couple of overly exuberant puppies who won't stay down. I doubt that they'll have anything of value to add to this thread, but you never know. I also know that if I (and probably you) tried to convey my thoughts to them in their native language I would sound like a total idiot.
"What exactly do you mean by "proof"? I.e. what would you consider as counting as proof? Theoretical? Experimental?"
(Sorry, I haven't figured out yet how to do that quote in a box stuff yet. When it comes to IT I am a total idiot). Well, since there probably isn't anything like actual proof either way, I was hoping for something in the way of a historical debate or something. I have looked and looked, and except for the brief mention of Lorentz in Bruce Hunt's book, The Maxwellions, the cupboard seems bare. Convention doesn't constitute truth. Convention is just whatever is convenient.
Inherent: intrinsic; innate; built-in; native; basic; organic. Antonym is acquired. That's my position. As far as what has been observed by physicists, see the above example concerning geocentrism/ heliocentrism. Appearances can deceive. Frame of reference adds unneeded complexity at this point.
PmbPhy; I doubt that you and I are going to agree about much of anything. That's fine. If you would like to disprove my ideas the best place to start would be with the modified gravitational equations in chapter one of Hydrocosmica.
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Inasuch as proton is the name we give to a hadron with a single positive charge, and a electron to a lepton with a single negative charge, charge is as inherent to these particles as a nose in inherent to a human. Uncharged hadrons and leptons are called something else.
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Inasuch as proton is the name we give to a hadron with a single positive charge, and a electron to a lepton with a single negative charge, charge is as inherent to these particles as a nose in inherent to a human. Uncharged hadrons and leptons are called something else.
While I agree that the proton has that property I don't think that it should be thought of as how it got its name. There are other hadrons with charge +e and other leptons with charge -e.
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Hence my use of the indefinite article! a hadron, not any hadron or all hadrons
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Hence my use of the indefinite article! a hadron, not any hadron or all hadrons
I understood that, Alan. It's still wrong. For example; suppose a proton is defined as a hadron with properties {A, B, C, ...., Q}.
If someone were to say that the term proton is the name we give to a hadron with properties {A, B} then they'd be wrong.
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I haven't listed all the defining properties of a proton, because the question only asked about charge. As every medical physicist knows, protons are also red, have arrows coming out of them to indicate the spin vector, and sing in chorus at 42 MHz in a 1 tesla magnetic field, when they are not causing or curing cancer.
Anyway, enough of me: what's your definition of a proton?
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...what's your definition of a proton?
A proton is a baryon made up of two up quarks, one down quark. We could also define it by its properties. I.e. a proton is a subatomic particle with a positive electric charge of +1e elementary charge and mass 1.672621777×10−27 with a magnetic moment μp = 1.410606743×10−26 J·T−1. is the nuclear magneton.
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I'm sure you guys wouldn't be the least surprised if I told you I thought that the only elementary particles necessary for the world to function are protons, electrons, and neutrons. Of course that leaves only two if we consider the neutron to be a proton-electron combination. Quarks are every bit as imaginary as unicorns. And yes I am aware of the scattering experiments that went on at the SLA and elsewhere. Doesn't matter. They've never been observed. They're completely conjectural and quite unnecessary.
All the other members of the particle zoo are likewise chimeric. If a particle can't hang around for at least a few seconds, it isn't real. All those short lived "particles" are nothing but disorganized (smashed) energy being re-insinuated into the universal energy field. The aether. Which is flowing straight down into the Earth at 11,200 meters per second.
Which is also why the famous Michelson- Morley experiment of 1887 failed to detect the aether. The interferometer arms could only look out laterally, while the medium was flowing straight down.
By the way; can MathType equations be pasted in?
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Greetings. I am not a physicist, but I am a buff of science and science history. Contemplating the troubles with physics, such as the irreconcilability of GR and QM, and the fact that we still don't know what gravity is, led me to suspect that a basic assumption, that charge is an inherent property of elementary particles, may be wrong.
And so I overturned this assumption and proceeded to deduce what the universe would be like if basic charge required a cause. The result was an entire alternative cosmology based on a bipolar, flowing aether. This medium is incompressible, non-viscuous, and under constant pressure. As it flows neutrally into massive bodies it causes the phenomenon we call gravitation.
As it flows into its final destination, protons and electrons, it is forcibly separated, or sheared, into its component parts, resulting in electromagnetic fields. Elementary particles are, in essence, condensations of the medium.
Radiant energy, suffused throughout space, suffers frictional effects as it propagates through the medium, in effect heating and pressurizing it so that it can flow, hence supplying demand. This is the cause of intergalactic redshift.
This is of course just a thumbnail sketch. Anyone wishing to read more can download a pdf version at http://www.hydrocosmica.com (http://www.hydrocosmica.com) or http://vixra.org/abs/1504.0023 (http://vixra.org/abs/1504.0023). There are equations, diagrams, and images.
Basically I'm putting this up as a target. Part of me would love to see it blown full of holes. I have tried and failed.
Welcome to new theory forum! i am not scientist, just a science love.
yes. charge really IS an inherent property of protons and electrons. nature made it that way.
maybe aether is negative charged? i have my own theory about matter/atom.
there are 3 building blocks in nature, proton carries 900 + charges, electron carries -1 charge, enertron carries -10^-16 charge.
proton attracts all negative charged stuff, therefore a ball of electron and enertron will form around proton. because enertron is denser than electron ( charge to volume ratio), it condensed around proton by electromagnetic force, density from the proton outward decay at 1/r^3. electron also attracted by proton and stable at atom radius where the proton electron attraction force is equal to the electron enertron repelling force.
proton is like core of earth, enertron is the land and atmosphere, electron is like giant beach ball. atom's force field is far beyond radius, earth's gravitational field is also far beyond atmosphere.
atom in fact is so dense build, that's why atoms are not compressible, that's why electron cannot discharge into proton.
A proton is negative and positive and neutral, charge is product of process and not a something on itself.
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I'm sure you guys wouldn't be the least surprised if I told you I thought that the only elementary particles necessary for the world to function are protons, electrons, and neutrons.
If that is your contention then please provide the logical reasoning that forced you to make that conclusion. Science isn't merely making statements about what you contend to be the case but what you can logically demonstrate to be the case. I'm assuming that you know how to construct a logical argument. Is that assumption correct?
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...what's your definition of a proton?
A proton is a baryon made up of two up quarks, one down quark. We could also define it by its properties. I.e. a proton is a subatomic particle with a positive electric charge of +1e elementary charge and mass 1.672621777×10−27 with a magnetic moment μp = 1.410606743×10−26 J·T−1. is the nuclear magneton.
jccc;
Pay attention here and you may learn something. PmbPhy is defending the dominant paradigm. I am trying to topple it (same as you I think). PmbPhy and I will tend to disagree on most points, but not on this one. There is no debate about this fact. A proton carries exactly one unit of charge, not 900. How many times has PmbPhy told you that you can't just make up whatever "facts" you want? But do you listen? No. Your behavior is atrocious. Have you no shame? You're making an utter fool of yourself.
You complain that he treats you poorly. I think he deserves some kind of commendation for putting up with your nonsense. The Naked Scientist doesn't have to have a "new theories" forum. Most others don't, probably because then they would have to put up with people like you and Thebox. Heck, they were even nice enough to call it "new theories" instead of the "crackpot forum," which is what it really is.
You're going to ruin it for others, like myself, who have legitimate ideas to air. I realize I have to spend time in this basement asylum if I expect my theory to get moved upstairs onto a regular forum. You make me feel like I'm wasting my time. A science forum isn't a place to learn about science, it's a place to talk about science. Why don't you log out, go read a few hundred books, wear out a couple of engineering calculators, learn how to construct an intelligible english sentence, and then come back.
End of rant.
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I'm sure you guys wouldn't be the least surprised if I told you I thought that the only elementary particles necessary for the world to function are protons, electrons, and neutrons.
If that is your contention then please provide the logical reasoning that forced you to make that conclusion. Science isn't merely making statements about what you contend to be the case but what you can logically demonstrate to be the case. I'm assuming that you know how to construct a logical argument. Is that assumption correct?
If it's ok with you, PmbPhy, I'd like to backtrack a bit so as to avoid losing the main thread. But first, yes, I believe I can construct a logical argument, but perhaps not in one paragraph. That's why Hydrocosmica is 80 pages long. But then you haven't read it, have you?
Little sound bites and single sentences taken out of context, quoted, and then proclaimed upon isn't logical refutation either. That seems to be your favorite modus operandi. Done serially the usual result is sniping and petulance.
Anyway, I'd like to recapitulate my main theme. (It is, by the way, just a hypothesis).
I think that not accounting for the cause of basic charge back when it was discovered may have been a mistake. Scientists took the easy way out and just assumed, by convention, that charge "just is." First cause. God given. No accounting necessary.
Charge isn't a "thing." It's an action. Atoms are never still. Things are always moving. Work is being done continuously. Energy is being expended. Energy has to be resupplied. All I did with Hydrocosmica is recast the world using this new assumption, to see if it makes sense. It does. I have math that proves it. I think you are unwilling to check it, for fear that your comfortable world-view may be shattered.
You are a member of a group of elitists not unlike the Church back in the dark ages. Dogma. Faith. Righteousness. Heretics be damned. That was a stultifying world view then and it's no different now.
All I want is a fair and impartial airing of an idea. Perhaps an idea whose time has come. Perhaps not. But science isn't dogma. Science is open and ongoing. Truth is the only thing to be served.
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If it's ok with you, PmbPhy, I'd like to backtrack a bit so as to avoid losing the main thread. But first, yes, I believe I can construct a logical argument, but perhaps not in one paragraph. That's why Hydrocosmica is 80 pages long. But then you haven't read it, have you?
That's right. I didn't read it because when I skimmed through it I didn't see much of an argument in it.
Little sound bites and single sentences taken out of context, quoted, and then proclaimed upon isn't logical refutation either. That seems to be your favorite modus operandi. Done serially the usual result is sniping and petulance.
So. This is how you respond to someone who asks you for a proof? I DID give a logical refutation in post #7. It's not my fault that you neither acknowledged that fact, never mind prove my refutation wrong.
I think that not accounting for the cause of basic charge back when it was discovered may have been a mistake. Scientists took the easy way out and just assumed, by convention, that charge "just is." First cause. God given. No accounting necessary.
A typical comment from a non-physicist. One can say the same thing about gravitational mass too. Charge is the basic phenomena rooted in the Coulomb force between certain particles such as between electrons and electrons, electrons and protons, protons and protons, etc. We know the source of that force. It's described as being caused by the exchange of photons. Photons are said to mediate the electromagnetic interaction. So your claim is bogus and rooted in ignorance.
I think you are unwilling to check it, for fear that your comfortable world-view may be shattered.
I won't waste my time reading something that long due to my experience with people like yourself. You think that you're some sort of genius who has thought of that which real physicists seem to have ignored. In ALL cases of this, i.e. pseudoscience, that I've looked into over the last 20 years have been pure garbage and from your responses and your poor attitude and arrogant demeanor I know that whatever is in your paper is worthless. And
I can promise you that I'm no different than any physicist in the world. None of us would waste our time with such a poorly written paper.
So, now that you've resorted to childish whining and immature insults I will never respond to your presence again, ever.
Keep it civil - Moderator
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All the other members of the particle zoo are likewise chimeric. If a particle can't hang around for at least a few seconds, it isn't real.
How long does a particle have to exist in order to be real, in your book? The positrons I use at work seem to hang around for a bit.
The aether. Which is flowing straight down into the Earth at 11,200 meters per second.
down from where? And unless you are a flat-earther, what's your definition of down?
Which is also why the famous Michelson- Morley experiment of 1887 failed to detect the aether. The interferometer arms could only look out laterally, while the medium was flowing straight down.
But the experiment has been done many times, principally using other frequencies of electromagnetic radiation, on all sorts of scales from a few centimeters (ring lasers) to the moon and back, in every conceivable direction (including, presumably, "down", if you allow that the moon, an aircraft, or an orbiting satellite, is "up") and to my great delight (since I rely on radar, ring laser accelerometers and satellite navigation to get from A to B without hitting anything) the speed of light appears to be entirely independent of direction.
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PmbPhy; I doubt that you and I are going to agree about much of anything. That's fine.
Unfortunately I doubt that you and I are going to agree about much of anything also. That's a pity. I always read the New Theories as it would be exciting to be in on the beginning of something radical. You have obviously put a lot of work into your paper and it is a cut above the standard pseudoscience as it avoids esoteric, meaningless word strings (see MichaelMD, Michdelf and TonyLang) and does include some maths!
However, I find it full of misunderstandings about physics. To go through all the misunderstandings would take considerable time, so I will briefly go over some examples, from the Light chapter, that are easy to explain.
"What is truly exasperating, however, is that there is no consistency—when assuming light is a wave—about what kind of wave light is, that is, longitudinal or transverse.
Light simply does not behave in a longitudinal manner. "
Phaedrus, there is no confusion in mainstream science on the nature of the EM wave, it is transverse. Both transverse and longitudinal waves can propagate spherically and both will display refraction/diffraction when passed through a slit.
"light waves are always represented as a sine wave ....... which is itself a representation, an abstraction, of a transverse wave"
Not so, the sine wave is a representation of all types of wave. Time is always along the horizontal axis, but what is graphed on the vertical axis depends on the wave. For water it is surface height, sound it is pressure and velocity, AC electricity voltage or current, for a guitar string displacement, for EM electric and magnetic field strengths, etc. Yes, in general anything we write or draw is a representation, or abstraction, including these words and the descriptions and diagrams you use in your paper, but that doesn't mean they don't represent real things!
You seem to assume only longitudinal waves can diffract. The most easily seen diffraction in transverse waves is water waves. When learning physics one of the early demonstrations is using a water tank where the waves spread out when the size of the slit is comparable to or smaller than the wavelength. When the waves reach a narrow slit, the water in the slit vibrates like a point source, the diffracted wave resembles a circular wave with centre at the slit. These patterns can also be seen in sea waves where they pass through pier pilings and bridge supports.
"Some examples of transverse waves are ocean waves, plucked guitar strings, or a rope tied to a doorknob that you oscillate left and right (horizontal polarization), or up and down (vertical polarization). Note that these three examples share something in common—they are all bound in one way or another. Ocean waves are each bound to the wave in front and the wave behind, and are actually one member of a train of waves. Guitar strings are obviously attached mechanically to the guitar, and placing a finger on a fret just takes the place of the end connection."
With the rope and guitar string you are actually describing a very different case to the water wave. In the case of a guitar string, the ends are securely fixed (compare this to a water wave where they are not). The guitar string wave is quite complex, briefly, when it is plucked 2 waves travel longitudinally in opposite directions down the string to bounce off the saddle/nut and they then oscillate from end to end. Take the example of plucking at the center point, 2 symmetrical waves travel to the ends, are reflected and pass through each other at the center, here they superimpose (superposition, interference) giving the characteristic appearance of the transverse wave and a standing wave is formed. In reality, the longitudinal pulses are still there, but travelling so fast that all we see is the resultant transverse displacement. This is similar to the standing sound wave in a stopped tube where the longitudinal wave is constrained at the end and reflected to superimpose on the waves travelling down the tube. This superposition can be seen using the famous Kundt's tube experiment whose pronunciation is beloved of school children everywhere!
The water wave is not constrained at each end, but due to standard fluid motion the water molecules 'rub' against each other so that momentum is transferred from trailing part to leading part of the wave - again very simplified description of what happens as the true motion is circular and has horizontal components.
"These wave- lets are often shown bending completely around the corner—a full 180o arc. This is impossible. Light simply does not behave in a longitudinal manner. "
All this statement tells me is that you have never performed a single slit experiment. I have, and I can assure you that light behaves just like the water waves, it bends. I have also done the experiment with other EM waves in the radio and microwave range. Incidentally with radio waves, because of their longer wavelength, it is easier to measure the electric and magnetic fields, their orientation and phase relationships so when you do that it is much easier to understand EM. Also you get to understand why light and sound waves do interfere all around us and why we don't see it.
It seems to me that you often confuse the atomic level single photon with the macro effect of masses of photons moving together. We all accept that water is made of molecules, but when waves are crashing in the beach it is better to consider the massed effect; whereas when considering interactions between water and other chemicals the consideration of molecule and electrons is more appropriate.
You may decide that all the above is irrelevant to your arguments. However, I have put these items as examples of the disagreements we have in only the first 11/2 pages of one chapter, there are far more disagreements in the rest of your paper including the maths and your interpretation of it. Although the above examples are easy to describe the others are not and you would need to understand a lot more physics before I could attempt to explain. It is not possible on a forum like this for anyone to spend the time giving what would be a 3 year course in physics (and that assumes prior education in the subject). Even this post is far longer than is reasonable.
You clearly have a very active and analytical mind, can I suggest you take a course in physics, or better still engineering (which is about the real world rather than the theory [:)]).
I leave you with a final thought:
"Even though many or most scientists continued to believe in an aether, the null result was a blow to aether theories in general. It’s almost tragicomic to picture Michelson there, squinting through the eyepiece of his exquisite device as it slowly rotates, looking for the very thing that was flow- ing down, through his body, on its way to the center of the Earth. If only he could have pointed one of the arms up or down he might have gotten a different result."
I'm sorry to tell you, but physicists have already done the experiment vertically and no effect was found - they actually performed it in a whole variety of directions with equipment far more sensitive than M&M's. There are many physicists who would love to overturn relativity or discover an aether, for there lies fame and fortune. It's always exciting to be in at the beginning.
As we will never agree, we will have to agree to disagree. I will leave this now, but wish you well for the future and hope you are able to use your thinking skills to good effect.
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re - "What is truly exasperating, however, is that there is no consistency—when assuming light is a wave—about what kind of wave light is, that is, longitudinal or transverse. ...Light simply does not behave in a longitudinal manner. "
It's comments like this that made me not want to read his paper. Every single physicist in existence knows that light is a transverse wave.
re - light waves are always represented as a sine wave ....... which is itself a representation, an abstraction, of a transverse wave"
A comment made from not fully understanding the math and the physics. The reason sine waves are used so often is that according to Fourier's Theorem any periodic wave can be represented by a sum of sines and cosines. Any non-periodic wave can be represented by an integral of the same. So for simplicity and to focus on the physics rather than the math sine waves are used.
You seem to assume only longitudinal waves can diffract. The most easily seen diffraction in transverse waves is water waves. When learning physics one of the early demonstrations is using a water tank where the waves spread out when the size of the slit is comparable to or smaller than the wavelength. When the waves reach a narrow slit, the water in the slit vibrates like a point source, the diffracted wave resembles a circular wave with centre at the slit. These patterns can also be seen in sea waves where they pass through pier pilings and bridge supports.
re - "Even though many or most scientists continued to believe in an aether, the null result was a blow to aether theories in general."
Incorrect. That was only true until physicists came to accept relativity. Now it's unlikely to find even one who believes that there is a luminiferous ether .
re - "If only he could have pointed one of the arms up or down he might have gotten a different result."
Odd comment since he doesn't say what direction "up" or "down" is and what his justification for it is. The plane of the interferometer did not lay in the plane of the orbit of the earth. That would only be true if he ran the experiment at one of the poles. Otherwise the normal to the plane of the interferometer depends on the latitude of where the experiment is carried out. So he's wrong in his assumption, again! In any case that most certainly wasn't the only experiment to find the ether. There have been many more. Anyway, his hypothesis about the direction of flow of the ether is without justification.
As we will never agree, we will have to agree to disagree. I will leave this now, but wish you well for the future and hope you are able to use your thinking skills to good effect.
Good luck with that. People like him never agree to disagree.
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All the other members of the particle zoo are likewise chimeric. If a particle can't hang around for at least a few seconds, it isn't real.
How long does a particle have to exist in order to be real, in your book? The positrons I use at work seem to hang around for a bit.
An excellent point. It was stupid of me to not include anti-particles.
The aether. Which is flowing straight down into the Earth at 11,200 meters per second.
down from where? And unless you are a flat-earther, what's your definition of down?
From space, normal to the surface.
Which is also why the famous Michelson- Morley experiment of 1887 failed to detect the aether. The interferometer arms could only look out laterally, while the medium was flowing straight down.
But the experiment has been done many times, principally using other frequencies of electromagnetic radiation, on all sorts of scales from a few centimeters (ring lasers) to the moon and back, in every conceivable direction (including, presumably, "down", if you allow that the moon, an aircraft, or an orbiting satellite, is "up") and to my great delight (since I rely on radar, ring laser accelerometers and satellite navigation to get from A to B without hitting anything) the speed of light appears to be entirely independent of direction.
I wasn't referring to the speed of light but to the degree of redshift. Light traveling down with the aether would be less redshifted than light traveling up against the aether. With the relatively weak gravitational field of the Earth the difference would probably be undetectable. I should have left out that bit entirely.
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Good luck with that. People like him never agree to disagree.
That's OK I can keep my side, mainly due to lack of time and many other interesting things to think about.
I must say however, if he turned his mind to mainstream he is a much more connected thinker than jccc or Box. It's just that he is starting with a disadvantage, many school textbooks and most web sites have to summarise information and try to make it 'accessible' (hate that word, same with 'dumbing down') and quite often their explanations are somewhat lacking. This is even more so in the history of science, they rarely give a good explanation of why thinking has moved on.
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Good luck with that. People like him never agree to disagree.
This is even more so in the history of science, they rarely give a good explanation of why thinking has moved on.
That's a very astute observation, Colin2B. Clerk Maxwell was aware of this tendency way back when. When he refereed a paper and sent it back for corrections, he would see that it was published with the mistakes and corrections, as opposed to a redone "clean" version, precisely so that future historians of science could see the step by step progression. Very commendable.
PmbPhy; I doubt that you and I are going to agree about much of anything. That's fine.
Unfortunately I doubt that you and I are going to agree about much of anything also. That's a pity. I always read the New Theories as it would be exciting to be in on the beginning of something radical. You have obviously put a lot of work into your paper and it is a cut above the standard pseudoscience as it avoids esoteric, meaningless word strings (see MichaelMD, Michdelf and TonyLang) and does include some maths!
However, I find it full of misunderstandings about physics. To go through all the misunderstandings would take considerable time, so I will briefly go over some examples, from the Light chapter, that are easy to explain.
Surely you must realize, Colin2B, that if some new theory came along that was correct, it would naturally, at least at first, be branded as radical or heretical, as it would be in disagreement with the current dominant paradigm, the one that the current crop of practitioners were taught. So naturally we would not agree on much. It's to be expected.
I'm not saying that my model is correct, only that it presents an interesting alternative. And, all due respect, but it might take someone who was not taught the current system to see something familiar from a different angle. As I say in the prologue and the epilogue, there are sure to be mistakes and contradictions in a work of such scope, especially if written by an uneducated nobody like me.
I appreciate your input immensely.
Phaedrus.
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New "heretical"models are welcome in science only if they can account for an observed phenomena that could not be explained by canonical theories, or if the new theory can produce the same answers more easily....
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The aether... is flowing straight down into the Earth at 11,200 meters per second. Which is also why the famous Michelson- Morley experiment of 1887 failed to detect the aether. The interferometer arms could only look out laterally, while the medium was flowing straight down.
Historically, we didn't have to wait until the Michelson Morley experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment) was repeated vertically, or even to the Moon to detect any "downward" flow of the aether.
It was performed on the site of today's Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, which is at Latitude 41.5 degrees North. The original apparatus was sensitive enough to detect the orbital motion of the Earth through the supposed aether.
At this latitude, "lateral" points in different directions at different times of the day. Even if the Aether were undetectable because it was coming straight down 9am, due to the rotation of the Earth, it would be coming in horizontally at 3pm, and a moving aether would be quite measurable.
To be undetectable, they would have had to conduct the experiment at the North or South poles - and the aether would have to be traveling in a North-South direction.
Maxwell's equations (now 150 years old) were originally interpreted assuming some aether, but we now know that they work perfectly well in a vacuum.
Is charge really an inherent property of protons and electrons?
Historically, charge was studied long before the invention of the high-voltage vacuum tube.
It was known to the ancient Greeks that if you rubbed amber on cloth, it could attract small pieces of lint. This is the original definition of electric charge.
We now know that this action results in transferring electrons from one material to the other, leaving a deficit of electrons (or, equivalently, an excess of protons) on the other material. (This method does not produce muons, positrons or other charged particles - you need cosmic rays, a radioactive material or a particle accelerator to produce these...)
So we can say that historically:
- electrons and protons are inherent in charge, and that
- charge is inherent in electrons and protons
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New "heretical"models are welcome in science only if they can account for an observed phenomena that could not be explained by canonical theories, or if the new theory can produce the same answers more easily....
Produce the same answers more easily; that's what the flowing aether model does.
It relates gravity, inertia, and electromagnetism as different aspects of the same thing.
It provides a basis for light propagation.
It explains the large scale structure of the cosmos.
It eliminates the need for any and all kinds of bosons, or force carriers, as there are no voids to conduct forces across. No "action-at-a-distance." All is connected, or contiguous.
Dark matter and dark energy are rendered moot. The universe is not expanding. It is eternal and infinite. There was no big bang.
Redshift is explained in a simple manner, one that Hubble would have endorsed. Hubble was never comfortable with the notion of receding galaxies.
The particle zoo is reduced to protons, electrons, their anti-particles, and neutrons.
Indeed, what makes this model hard to prove is that it predicts basically the world as it is currently perceived, but does so in a far more simple way. Occam's Razor and all that.
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Too bad the particle zoo already includes neutrinos muons and many types of quarks (and their antiparticles), all of which have been observed directly. You can't just assert that protons and neutrons are elementary particles and the other particles don't exist, when there is so much experimental evidence of other particles and of the internal structure of hadrons.
I am open to theories that rely on some sort of aether, but I don't see this particular theory (as presented thus far) as a realistic alternative to currently accepted physics.
Occam's Razor alone will not suffice...
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The aether... is flowing straight down into the Earth at 11,200 meters per second. Which is also why the famous Michelson- Morley experiment of 1887 failed to detect the aether. The interferometer arms could only look out laterally, while the medium was flowing straight down.
Historically, we didn't have to wait until the Michelsom Morley experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment) was repeated vertically, or even to the Moon to detect any "downward" flow of the aether.
It was performed on the site of today's Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, which is at Latitude 41.5 degrees North. The original apparatus was sensitive enough to detect the orbital motion of the Earth through the supposed aether.
At this lattitude, "lateral" points in different directions at different times of the day. Even if the Aether were undetectable because it was coming straight down 9am, it would be coming in at a considerable angle by 3pm, and would be quite measurable if the Earth was passing through it.
To be undetectable, they would have had to conduct the experiment at the North or South poles - and the aether would have to be traveling in a North-South direction.
You're missing the point entirely, evan_au. The aether is flowing into the Earth radially, normal to the surface. Latitude and time would have no effect. Spin might have a small effect. The Earth is not moving "through" the aether. This was one of the main problems with all those earlier aether theories.
Incidentally, Bernhard Riemann postulated an inflowing aether just like mine, only he had his eventually flowing into another dimension, whereas mine flows into "charged" particles, providing their "charge," and at the same time creating the electromagnetic field associated with that particle.
"Maxwell's equations (now 150 years old) were originally interpreted assuming some aether, but we now know that they work perfectly well in a vacuum."
Those are Oliver Heaviside's equations. Maxwell firmly believed in the aether, and his equations were formulated to reflect this. Heaviside (and others) did not like the potential functions; they made calculations more difficult, and so they "killed" them. Bruce Hunt explains all this in his book "The Maxwellions."
Re your last thought, about charge, my main theme, and the focus of the thread, is that charge requires a "cause." To say that "it just is" says nothing. Might as well say god is responsible.
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Too bad the particle zoo already includes neutrinos muons and many types of quarks (and their antiparticles), all of which have been observed directly. You can't just assert that protons and neutrons are elementary particles and the other particles don't exist, when there is so much experimental evidence of other particles and of the internal structure of hadrons.
I am open to theories that rely on some sort of aether, but I don't see this particular theory (as presented thus far) as a realistic alternative to currently accepted physics.
Occam's Razor alone will not suffice...
To the best of my knowledge, no sub-atomic particle has ever been observed directly. They are all inferred.
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I suppose we could get into a semantic argument about what "direct observation" is, but I would say that the detectors in particle accelerators/smashers that can measure the mass to charge ratio and some can also measure kinetic energy (can calculate mass from this) or charge, represent fairly direct observations of these particles.
for instance, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_chamber
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_chamber
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_detector
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To the best of my knowledge, no sub-atomic particle has ever been observed directly. They are all inferred.
No tree has ever been observed directly. You infer its existence from the activity in your brain (which has never been observed directly) caused by the impingment of photons (ditto) reflected from the tree, on your retina (likewise). Except that the origin of the photons must be the sun, which has never been observed directly.....and of course you don't believe in photons.
Or you could abandon philosophy and get interested in science. It's much more fun.
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Atoms are "doing" stuff all the time. Spinning; orbiting; vibrating; whirring; pulling; pushing.
No they aren't. We describe some properties of atoms using words that also describe mesoscopic actions and properties, but
[quiote]Is it unreasonable to assume that energy is being continuously expended? [/quote] no it isn't.
That also smacks of perpetual motion.
Nothing wrong with perpetual motion of an unconstrained particle in an infinite universe. It's only objectionable when you try to extract energy from such a system, because energy is, as far as we can see, conserved.
Hydrocosmica overturns both of these assumptions and shows how they both have a part in a universal cycle of energy transport and transformation. The aether is presented as an entirely different level of reality. It is what charged particles and hence the world of things is made from. It is the substrate of what we call reality. All is energy.
Why make things more complicated than they are? One objective of physics is to provide the simplest explanatory and predictive model we can. That distinguishes physics from philosophy and religion, which are the constructs of human vanity.
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Goodness gracious; how on earth did you come to the conclusion that I don't believe in photons? I devoted an entire chapter to them. They're as real as anything else.
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Because photons don't require aether, and nothing else does either, so if we apply a litle Occam, you can't rationally believe in the existence of both. But in my world you can see photons, ergo no aether.
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What's going on here? My post #35 was taken down or edited beyond recognition by alancalverd. That's not at all what I wrote. Post #20 has also been edited. What is this, 1984?
I give up. You win. Keep your silly world.
Phaedrus.
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Not guilty re #20 - nuffink to do wiv me, guv. But in attempting to reply to #34 I pushed a wrong button somewhere and ended up deleting a chunk of it.
Humble apologies, and if you'd care to restore it, I'll be delighted to respond.
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And, all due respect, but it might take someone who was not taught the current system to see something familiar from a different angle.
I understand what you are saying, but where do such people come from?
Although for new science there are always early adopters and followers (to use the marketing terms), all have tended to come from the science community. As ChiralSPO says, the ideas rarely came from nowhere but were part of the discussions between leading figures. Galileo supported Copernicus; Kepler, a student of Tycho Brahe, wrote to Galileo, they were at the heart of the science community and had been educated in the old geocentric theories. Bear in mind that even for educated people the heliocentric view was not fully accepted until 200 yrs later, mainly due to religious ideology. Even today surveys show between 16 and 20% of people in Western countries believe the geocentric model.
If you look at the OPs in New Theories, very few have the background in maths, fluid dynamics, cosmology, wave and particle physics to understand the points you are making (JefferyH and David Cooper are exceptions).
The aetherists await a messiah who will bring them a fixed aether through which light and astronomical bodies move. They will consider you a heretic with your relativistic aether moving within the frame of reference of a mass.
Me, I'm an engineer so I will use what works to help me design, change or fix. If it doesn't work I ask the physicists why. If something else comes along which is better, I'll use that. My experience of scientists is that they have a similar outlook, just don't try to fob them off with something that is clearly wrong.
Maybe your best hope is to use this forum to refine your ideas. My previous comments were based on obvious issues and, as I said, there are many more that would take too long to go over in detail. I will however, give bullet points on a few of them (I'll stick to light as I know a small amount about EMR):
- You have shown the interactions between your helicoid and dielectrics and this can explain diffraction, reflection, faraday effect etc and these explanations are similar to those of accepted theory, however you do need to go deeper into these to refine your ideas.
- Your use of 90 phase shift between E&M fields should be measurable in radio waves or should explain or predict an effect, I've never seen it. I have no problem with the current view, similar in my mind to the 0 phase angle between Voltage and Current in an AC cct, they are in phase for resistive loads despite the fact the volts are the motive force for the electrons - no lag except in inductive loads.
- Your rejection of photon spin -1 means you only have the equivalent of RH Circ light, so you need to explain LH and plane polarisation.
- You need to explain the power loss between a vert polarised Tx antenna and horiz Rx.
- Review your comments on least action, to me at its simplest it's just a neat maths way of saying light travels in a str line, a restatement of Newtons Laws, the photon travels in str line until something makes it do otherwise, it doesn't need to see ahead!
One final comment, I never view anyone as a nobody. Also, education comes in many forms including experience and reading. I would never have taken the trouble to write this or the previous post if I didn't think you capable of understanding. But, don't let your emotional responses steer you away from clear thinking.
Maybe we will see you back with a revised paper?
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Colin2B;
Thank you for the kind words and the thoughtful input. Since I first wrote Hydrocosmica a little over a year ago I have been revising it continuously, mostly the math part. The version you have is less than a month old. It's far from finished.
I do have answers to most of your bullet points, however, I won't be airing them on this forum or any other. I'm kind of a sensitive person, and I have found this whole experience to be both degrading and humiliating. Also I had no idea that one's post could be altered at will by others. I can't remember all of my post #35 that alancalverd deleted, but the gist was that I bungled the phraseology of the thread title; I should not have used the word property, as that implies a dualism, whereby I believe that "charge" and "charged particle" are actually the same. So I sowed confusion with my poorly worded title.
I can remember the part of #36 that alancalverd deleted. It was a reply to his admonition that I quit philosophy and get interested in science, as science is more fun.
My reply was: "Science without philosophy is just measurement. All the great scientists were also philosophers. And no, I don't include myself in this group. I'm just a simple carpenter."
Why would he delete that?
And, all due respect, but it might take someone who was not taught the current system to see something familiar from a different angle.
I understand what you are saying, but where do such people come from?
Although for new science there are always early adopters and followers (to use the marketing terms), all have tended to come from the science community. As ChiralSPO says, the ideas rarely came from nowhere but were part of the discussions between leading figures. Galileo supported Copernicus; Kepler, a student of Tycho Brahe, wrote to Galileo, they were at the heart of the science community and had been educated in the old geocentric theories. Bear in mind that even for educated people the heliocentric view was not fully accepted until 200 yrs later, mainly due to religious ideology. Even today surveys show between 16 and 20% of people in Western countries believe the geocentric model.
If you look at the OPs in New Theories, very few have the background in maths, fluid dynamics, cosmology, wave and particle physics to understand the points you are making (JefferyH and David Cooper are exceptions).
The aetherists await a messiah who will bring them a fixed aether through which light and astronomical bodies move. They will consider you a heretic with your relativistic aether moving within the frame of reference of a mass.
You ask: "Where do such people come from"?
In my case, I had been seeking an alternate interpretation of redshift for a decade or more. I read anything I could get my hands on. Then one day, out of the blue, I had an epiphany. I read, or heard, or maybe dreamed (I can't remember), that the total energy of all the charged particles in the Earth was equal to the Earth's gravitational potential, and I just saw it; the flowing aether. It was like stepping through the looking-glass. An inverted perspective. It dovetailed perfectly with the theory of "tired light."
Then just a few weeks later I was struck with the notion that if the aether consisted of opposite polarities, electromagnetism could be accounted for. At this point I had the feeling that some superior intelligence had taken over my brain. I was possessed. It became an obsession. I have been living off my savings for the past 18 months, working on this project full-time. Along the way I had to acquire and learn how to use a computer (I was a total Luddite), learn how to type, learn how to use a word processor, learn the internet, and learn the metric system, all this at 60 years of age. I have never written anything before this. I wrote the first version down in about 6 weeks, on paper, right out of my head (except for quotes). I haven't had a chance to revisit the bulk of it because of the continual refining of the math part.
So there's a synopsis of where this person comes from. I'm in way over my head, but I can't let go.
Like I said, I won't be posting here any more, but if you would like to email me I would be most gratified.
Phaedrus
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Greetings. I am not a physicist
Say no more. Over and out.
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You can PM me when next draft is ready.
I can't promise to agree with you but I'll be interested in your reasoning.
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One question: If all this aether is continuously flowing into the Earth, is it building up or is it going somewhere?
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One question: If all this aether is continuously flowing into the Earth, is it building up or is it going somewhere?
I'm not sure he is coming back. Probably upset that lots of comments but no one read his paper. Although PmbPhy said he did skim.
I went through it and my interpretation is that the aether goes into matter to provide the energy to run atomic particles eg charge on electron etc. His assumption is that charge etc requires energy to keep it running. His aether is not the std fixed, but flows down the geodesic into mass, so a bodies movement through aether does not affect direction of aether flow.
What was interesting is that his view of the photon is of a helical movement with E & B 90 out of phase. I don't know if this is something he worked out or borrowed from circ polarised light, but E & B are 90 out of phase in the near field for radio waves, I assume it is the same for light but need to read up.
I will be interested in his reasoning as he develops his ideas - just as an exercise in thinking. Personally, I don't see any advantage in abandoning spin -1 for the photon, but we'll see what he makes of it all. At least he is thinking, unlike most other New Theorists - JefferyH and David Cooper excepted!
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Good luck with that. People like him never agree to disagree.
That's OK I can keep my side, mainly due to lack of time and many other interesting things to think about.
I must say however, if he turned his mind to mainstream he is a much more connected thinker than jccc or Box. It's just that he is starting with a disadvantage, many school textbooks and most web sites have to summarise information and try to make it 'accessible' (hate that word, same with 'dumbing down') and quite often their explanations are somewhat lacking. This is even more so in the history of science, they rarely give a good explanation of why thinking has moved on.
What I find very irritating is how little some people think about mainstream physics. They make it appear as though the workers in the field aren't thinking and are unable to think differently and are stuck in their ways merely because they were taught it that way and aren't willing to think or something equally as silly. In fact that's the furthest thing from the truth that one can get. There's a huge mistake in that assumption. The mistake being that we're just as curious as anybody else, are always/constantly on the lookout for possible problems with well-known and widely accepted theories. For some crazy reason they surely must believe that we don't want to hear of errors in these theories. However if you were to think about it very closely one would realize that there is a great deal to be gained for any physicist who finds a theory to be wrong. If there is enough experimental evidence to demonstrate that in all likely-hood their correct then they'd win the Nobel Prize in Physics which comes with a money award of over 1 million dollars. There is also a great deal of prestige that comes with it.
So frankly there is no basis for the idea that good profession mainstream physicists don't think "out of the box" or in any other way challenge mainstream physics.
I myself challenged the following claim: Gravitation is a curvature in spacetime
If you were to say this to any expert in general relativity (GR) they'd all say that you're off you're rocker and don't know what you're talking about. However in the end I was right. In fact Einstein agreed with me. The notion that gravitation is a curvature in spacetime came a while after GR was created. Einstein himself never thought of GR or gravity that way. In fact he wrote a letter to Max von Laue stating that the opposite is true. And just to make sure I was right I contacted the worlds leading expert on the history of Einstein and general relativity, John Stachel from Boston University. He told me I was correct and pointed me the quote that I mentioned. He was the former editor of the Einstein Papers Project.
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What I find very irritating is how little some people think about mainstream physics. They make it appear as though the workers in the field aren't thinking and are unable to think differently and are stuck in their ways merely because they were taught it that way and aren't willing to think or something equally as silly. In fact that's the furthest thing from the truth that one can get.
I've seen this idea so often, mainly in New Theories, that I thought of starting a thread. I've worked with quite a few scientists and have found them amazingly open minded. They have an idea, test it, if it doesn't work modify idea, often going back to reexamine the theory it is based on - sometimes adding to the theory or it's interpretation.
The other theme, which I and ChiralSPO mention above, is the mistaken belief that radical new scientific advances come from an amazing genius working in total isolation. Truth is, the genius is in the thick of discussion and experiment and builds on what others are doing and have done before. The genius is in putting ideas together and identifying the path forward.