Sunday, March 13, 2011

Praeternatural Anomalies in Physics


Praeternatural Anomalies in Physics

( maybe: The Clone Paradox )


This post is a fanciful looking back at certain notions discussed here or there in the earlier days of physics in my generation when we were enamored of the generation before us but had not yet understood enough to solve the paradoxes we were presented with in our rap sessions or bull sessions.

The term anomaly has been used on these blogs as it " The anomalies are piling up". Yet that is a specific and natural term. We felt we could take on most any of the new science ideas back then, if others were smarter or more qualified, a lot of work and a little more time would have our speculations in the race for new insights. To question certain things, with this sense of independent and being there at the frontier to discover new ideas- I find myself planning to write about the concept of notions already with a vast literature and with now conventional psychological concerns.

Even the basic questioning of the breakdown in cherished principles- namely that of symmetry wherever the anomaly of "action"- is there, is probably assumed I or an author knew it was there, and thus not seen for the difficult and fearful step to challenge the faith of the day- but this is telling the readers nothing new.

Even to point out by these own researches that a system of physics may be so standardized that what we learn and teach to others tells us nothing new, makes little difference in the reaction to or adapting to growing anomalies. Yet, sometimes I have found of alternative methods that my naive charts concerning things like the symmetric groups are clearer and superior to the alternatives in the public domain.

So consider this post one of the more creative ones only as it goes back so far that some of the nature of math and logic may not make clear sense- even if such hidden faith might underlay existing standards of science and its methods.

Perhaps, it was only a partial dream before those who cannot deal with the real world cannot sleep without medication and ritual- who tolerate no light or sound, stamp their feet with indignant energies before the next cycle when they cringe in the corner fleeing their own voices in their meditations.

I heard once a statement that "What sort of idiots would build a nuclear plant near an earthquake fault.?" For all practical purposes it may have been like the anomalous voices in my roommates head.

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In my dream of last night- it was a beautiful dream really, I was able to sleep a little longer, rebuild energy lost from the disturbing sounds of bubble wrap exploding serial in the bowl. Two regions of certain values on my calculator, cells very much incommensurable when in an operation together, even if it were a transcendental value, became a perfect balance or zero. (I did question to myself last night if this idea of zero-point energy in the face of yesterday's post meant anything at all- I add that to my doubts of tools some faithfully now use). But awakened from the dream too soon- and trying to see if there were any sense to it- I decided to think about what if anything at all it meant. What else would I have to write about today that may be of some use to the world? What but some few consequences and many of these seemingly so beyond sane logic? The idea of zero point energy, quantum anomalies aside, falls when we have the issues of a minimum region if things do become more discrete and finite. We could imagine some minimum action value could be deeper or some things deeper than that or that they form some sort of hierarchy. We in effect try to balance the world again with the insistence that we have but one world or universe.

I took a look at the braid links yesterday and had a passion thought I could place them in a sort of classification on the quasic grid but I did not get very far in this direction. Where these remotely connect to such quasic fundamental polygon regions will have to be explored. But the braid terminology is really an abstract concept and formal one. From this gymnasium level mentality in issue today I am more concerned with anomaly in the logic itself rather than insistence on some model as the cause of the anomaly. The treatment of braids on the link reminds me somewhat of the color coding of the various I Ching hexagrams and the internal reading where they cross and so forth. But in the following the links so many of the mathematicians who from the high school or young adult abstracts and summary all seem in the game very much wider each in their depth and explorations than hinted at by even a late undergraduate study of them.

Still, other conversations entered the events of the day for a dream. One was he discussion of time- the old question of Carroll- When does the day begin? Today we push the clock forward in this hemisphere.

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So, waiting for jobs or background checks, doing the busy work, keeping grounds, kitchen police, some of the MIT graduates spend hours in the game of this or that theory- is ESP possible? What about this kids flying saucer principle would show it cannot work? Hey, it beat the endless game of Crazy Eights that continued between shifts and sleep and played with several decks.

So, some cleaver arguments as to why Special Relativity was wrong debated- "If light goes at the speed of light and you shine from two flashlights photons in opposite directions what is the relative speed between them? Is it not twice the speed of light?"

"If a twin leaves the earth near the speed of light and for him time slows down when he comes back why has he aged when in fact the earth was leaving him also at the speed of light?"

It may be that our physics are a lot more complicated than these early concepts but some of the same primitive (well preternatural at least) notions of the logic can apply- in any case despite all these advanced degree debaters they could not agree and made passionate cases for one simple question (and it is enough to lead me to think that after all Zeno is still right but on steroids in the sense that in the one universe Motion is impossible! In any case the simple idea and question when does the day begin applies here even in the more modern view of these questions of where rotation and so on meets the idea of translation and such effects at light velocity.

Of course, the twin that accelerates is the one who does not age. And the bigger picture converts time like into space like to solve the ideas of how it may appear invariant even at that maximum speed- and so on. But some of the ideas are a little more complicated but are the same simple preternatural paradoxes if not contradictions.

It can be rationally seen if we treat the question of twins as that of clones- that is the uniqueness of patterns duplicated and so on- what after all does it mean that things are the same.

So, let us think of a photon as a spinning thing and like Dirac ask what happens if we involve the velocity of light with it. Let us say that it take one day to make a complete spin. Now, another such particle is spinning the other way or alternatively fleeing at light velocity. Relative to an outside or third viewer how many such days are on the spinning of a particle?

Someone near the blogs have quoted Greene, the old saying that what is above amazingly is as it is below- a very vague and mystical principle- and a scientific one asked by Hoyle, Dirac, Eddington, Newton and so on... Tides are rather complex locally as to certainly seem anomalies. But I am sure this feeling or question was intended to be asked awake and from a scientific stance.

One Consequence (BTW... the question of cosmic rays, of certain types like Hessian and Rossian long ago were understood as having differences than the usual single proton fare- it was thought then and maybe now that such rays did not come from novas as much as we were observing those from quasars) is that such thoughts as a sort of preternatural physics undermine most of our any foundations we might choose to explore or erect if we follow the logic or illogicality of it- but we seem to assume in matters of science such anomalies have a paradoxical but rational explanation. Certainly in these mirror or hidden like symmetries of things science reaches for the intelligible. In these questions of action and symmetry- hypotheses as working ones to which we hold a benchmark for the question of the day- that is in the original goal of the Unitary Field Theory have we unified those forces at SO(32) but that is not spectacular in the face of other forces to unify? The anomalies serve as a benchmark too.

* * *

So, one interpretation of the dream, perhaps disturbing, is that in a world where the operations of multiplication and addition have subtle differences in the logic of it all- thus how we treat say division by zero where division is in a sense indistinguishable from subtraction- the preternatural logic of it all with special names for anomalies derived from our methods and mathematical notation, that at some place, maybe only where in a wider sense the algebra of it all does indeed generalize and extend the scope in the physical world of the distributive law, we see to subtract some equal things from both sides of an equation can be equivalent to division by zero in its forbidden sense. To imagine a cosmological constant to balance things can in effect be a zero division and does so in a sense that the effects are dynamic and hidden if seen at all. For while we cling to the idea of action as a reversible and symmetrical relation as all laws of physics strive to be in our models, we can question the logic of what it may mean if we cannot really subtract zero from both sides of some physically meaningful equation.

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Toward a Hyperlink History of Our Mathematical Achievements

Every once in awhile, as I thought about doing in philosophy, to make a sort of classification or time-line of those who made a contribution and when- and idea debated as to being very useful if not something that impedes the prospects of new directions if it can even work at all. But such things are part of a picture and usually those who object to it do so on general principles more outside the hubris of the spirit of science, science perhaps the distillation and waste product of those who put social theory first as if it the only good foundation for knowing.

In reading various links I found it helpful to at least put a name on some discovery or method of doing things, who inspired whom, who was later pointed out to have some form of a theory early on but it was forgotten or not part of the common awareness.

Those who came just before well known names are among the most interesting and knowing their chronology in the place of things does aid the general learning. I do not see why such a general picture with the links and parallels could do harm especially if we always keep a little skepticism of the picture in mind. But such contributions with latent effects on our world views show that there is on one hand greater depths of the meaning of what was researched than we have time to explore in real time, in living, in resources. On the other hand perhaps we all have to recreate the wheel anyway in order to say we have learned something and that one sense of things we get from all this is that regardless of who says what when that in general there is an overall unity to what can be discovered. The deeper question is then, if we can make such tools for making a more universal science accessible, is that given this context and linking can it make reliable predictions as to what from various realms of say mathematics some trend can hold intelligible and worthwhile directions so as to enable us, collectively and individually to direct or safely conserve out evolving in itself. While reductionism in the raw is a method claimed by science and sociology, the form and style of it has no necessary claims to what is prior and real- at least in the struggle to engage the mysteries of the physical. But to leave the personal element out of a formal presentation makes it harder to convey the meaning and the learning of the content. Some people can play music very well mechanically and yet have no sense of the dramatic and emotional content of the music and the act of making music.

Feynman was mentioned in the science magazines today as his seeing letters and numbers synthetically. To see two colors at once, the inked one and the synaethetic one. I must wonder if this natural ability as part of our human brain organization was a roundabout way to become aware of the need for simpler diagrams or an analog if we tried to solve some of the relations of say Greek and Latin squares.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110309082341.htm

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http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2011/03/friday-illusion-mind-bending-checkerboard.html

after seeing Cayley's treatment of multiplication of certain groups I had a vague desires to go back to this illusion imagining a link of sorts with the placement of the dots. While such diagrams work they do not seem as clear enough in the logic of it all for me to convey it in an easily accessible vision.

* * *

"Standing on the shoulder of Giants"- Newton said of his teacher half jokingly as his teacher was a man of very short stature- and so again the old lost City of Wisdom is found in the digs and tels- that after all what happens around singularities is not a radical idea but one that was worked on by the teacher of the great intuitionist. (I find it most interesting that there are certain equations that depend on there being varieties of all the senses of singularities as 1 zero infinity of his teacher- how did this lead him to a sense of the "God made the integers and all else the work of man?"

Human consciousness seems to remain the greatest and most persistent of the universe's singular anomalies.

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