Heim Theory Falsified...this is depressing

[djolds1]

Why is the physics community seemingly ignoring this profound work?

Hard-sell triumphalism of this type is precisely the style of approach I don't like.

Maybe I was a little over the top (I'm only an engineer, after all), but if Sachs is just 50% or 20% right, I'd say "profound" still applies.

In any event, what you or I like or dislike has no bearing on what is.

1) I have more respect for the engineers than for most of the theorists produced over the last two generations or so; at least the engineers are forced to refer back to the real world from time to time. The vast majority of the theorists gaze at their own navels and declare their stares profound.

2) Its entirely true that neither of our opinions will impact the fundamental physical nature of the world. But credibility does impact how humans pursue their investigations of that fundamental physical nature. In that, I have been entirely disaffected by the grandiose scientific claims made over the course of my nearly 40 years of life, not a one of which has reliably proven out. Give me quiet competence over pomposity, every time.

Then, there are the questions of how exactly the Higgs mass exclusions were determined (would proton "mass doublets" be properly detected?) and how exactly did Sachs determine his 190 GeV value. I'm not qualified to answer.

I do perceive an unwarranted psychological bias among some scientists/mathematicians, giving preference to "translation" over "rotation" and to "center" over "circumference" or "surface" (echoes of the Great Quaternionic War of the 1890s).

An apparently deep-rooted, zero-centric, Cartesian bias (the "Origin", sort of like Sun worship), exemplified by the surface area of a sphere typically being presented in texts as 4*pi*R^2 instead of the simpler pi*D^2, or the even simpler (pi*D)*D = C*D, which leads directly to the area equivalence between same-height spheres and cylinders discovered by Archimedes, and to the so-called equal area zones property.

Anything involving quaternions is rotation-related in some sense, and everbody knows that you can't get pure "translation" from "rotation"... unless the radius of curvature is infinite... or a variable... or you let an axial (pseudo) vector be a substitute for a (polar) displacement vector.

Energy and torque having the same physical dimensions (force*distance) must just be a random accident. The same must be true in regard to things like MacCullagh's 1839 roto-elastic aether model (embodying rotational but not translational resistance to motion) yielding Maxwell's equations and the laws of Snell and Fresnel.

On a philosophical level, I'm not quite ready to abandon analytical reductionism in favor of holism. Also, the Sachs methodology seems... abstruse. My own suspicions focus on a profound simplicity at the core of everything, and Sachs seems a bit too complex. Still, I will be reviewing his work. A new way to reinject the old philosophical perspectives into inquiry.

Could this be why physics has stagnated and turned to things like String Theory, and why engineers are forced to prowl internet forums looking for new paths forward?

Forty years of unproductive non-results fueled by an endless font of bullheaded certainty.

The current generation of "eminences" needs to die. They are the Lord Rutherfords of our age, confidently proclaiming the impossible without basis and the unverified as reality.

[DeltaV]

Give me quiet competence over pomposity, every time.

The pomposity was mine, not Sachs'. He's been quietly competent for decades, IMHO.

Still, I will be reviewing his work. A new way to reinject the old philosophical perspectives into inquiry.

Excellent. It seems that humans (including physicists) have a tendency to go with the first thing that works (optimally or not), to the point where it becomes cast in stone, like current physics dogma.

Sachs' work has roots in this paper from 1932:
A.Einstein and W. Mayer, "Semi-Vektoren und Spinoren", Preussiche Akademie der Wissenschaften Phys.-Math. Klasse Sitzungsberichte, 1932, p. 522

Apparently Einstein started down a similar path in his search for a UFT, but couldn't let go of the unnecessary spacetime reflection covariance.
Sachs' response to a forum question from a few years ago:

Q:
Considering his brilliant work from 1905 - 1915 and his being on track toward unification, however vaguely, by 1945, nothwithstanding the mathematics, I would be happy to hear any thoughts you might have on how Einstein could have missed the physics of, now that you've pointed it out, what seems such a blatant oversight!?

A:
By Mendel Sachs on Monday, November 14, 2005 - 03:03 pm:
This is a very important question. As far as I know, Einstein did not point out the fact that the covariance of his field equations, in their tensor form, contains not only the continuous, analytic transformations - the Lie group that is required - but also the discrete reflections in space and time - which is not required. I did talk with Nathan Rosen about this a number of years ago, since he worked with Einstein in the 1930s. I asked him why Einstein eventually rejected a quaternion formulation of his theory. He said that it was because Einstein still had one foot in the classical domain of Newton, where (especially) time reversal invariance still holds true, while the quaternion formulation is not covariant under reflection in space or time. It was a (mistaken) feeling he had that reflection symmetry should still be maintained, even though it is not a reqirement of GR. He made a few other mistakes like this in his research, though infinitesimal in importance compared with his contributions!
I think that we see this (mistaken) holding onto some of the earlier requirements by other great physicists in history, who made important strides forward, such as Galileo and Maxwell. It is a psychological/emotional reaction of the great innovators in science - who are also human beings!- to hold onto at least a part of the past ideas that they 'feel' must still be valid.

[TDPerk]

So what does that mean for Mach's Conjecture or the consequently posited Woodward Effect?

Someone over at ...they will work.”

a) Aha
b) Thank you

[GeeGee]

Any of you ever looked into McCulloch's work? Thoughts?

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-gyr ... ertia.html

[DeltaV]

Link to the paper, free until mid-August if you register.
http://iopscience.iop.org/0295-5075/95/3/39002/

[djolds1]

Any of you ever looked into McCulloch's work? Thoughts?

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-gyr ... ertia.html

New to me. Thanks. Multiple papers are free on ARXIV.

http://arxiv.org/find/astro-ph/1/au:+Mc ... /0/all/0/1

M. Simon might find it interesting fodder for his "origins of inertia" webpage.

[djolds1]

Any of you ever looked into McCulloch's work? Thoughts?

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-gyr ... ertia.html

New to me. Thanks. Multiple papers are free on ARXIV.

http://arxiv.org/find/astro-ph/1/au:+Mc ... /0/all/0/1

M. Simon might find it interesting fodder for his "origins of inertia" webpage.

In semi-related work, we now have metamaterials used to manipulate Hawking radiation and mimic a "Big Crunch."

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/07/metama ... .html#more

I wonder if metamaterials could be used to cloak an object from the Unruh radiation McCulloch thinks causes inertia? Would that make an object partially to fully "free" of inertia (to steal a turn of phrase from E.E. "Doc" Smith), or allow other quasi-gravitational manipulations? McCulloch specifically references the ZPF-inertia work of Haisch-Rueda-Putoff as similar to his own, tho the McCulloch approach putatively involves a Hubble-scale Casimir effect. IIRC, the ZPF-inertia hypothesis supposed a similar polarized-radiation effect being the cause of gravity.

[DeltaV]

I wonder if metamaterials could be used to cloak an object from the Unruh radiation McCulloch thinks causes inertia?

Interesting idea. Reminds me of that movie involving gravity-shielding paint, forgot the title.

Feasibility would depend primarily on what the wavelength is. Too small or too large and metamaterial fabrication would be impractical.

[rjaypeters]

Interesting idea. Reminds me of that movie involving gravity-shielding paint, forgot the title.

Cavorite. "The First Men in the Moon" H.G. Wells, 1901.

The idiots who made Avatar called theirs Unobtainium. Though it may not have been paint.

[Betruger]

Isn't the Avatar material not naturally anti gravity but room temp superconductive? The chunk of it the industry yuppie keeps in his office floats because it's sat over a magnetic plate. The hallelujah islands (or whatever they were called) floated because of it, same deal with scrambled ships sensors.

.. the useless stuff one accumulates from these movies..

[DeltaV]

Cavorite. "The First Men in the Moon" H.G. Wells, 1901.

That's it. It was also a 60's movie.

Another benchmark is Flubber.

[rjaypeters]

Isn't the Avatar material not naturally anti gravity but room temp superconductive?

I'll allow that interpretation because I'm not sure.

EDIT: Though I must say that planet must have some truly awesome magnetic fields to suspend thousands of tons of (unobtainium-laced) rock in mid-air!