Forks in the Road

Newton had his prism, and knew just what it meant.
Darwin saw some finchs' beaks, differently bent.
Einstein had Lenard's data, Michelson-Morley's too.
Reading these anomalies, they worked out what is true.

The cosmos has an imagination, greater than anyone.
It is difficult to outguess it, so what is to be done?
Rather: set up crucial experiments, like forks in a road.
The direction nature takes, will reveal the cosmic code.

The Irrelevance of Craziness

There's a interesting discussion going on over at Backreaction over a craziness factor for new theories. The proposal is that one should check how crazy (different to the standard model) is a new theory, and if it is a bit crazy that's good, but if it is very crazy it is bad. As I've said in a few comments over at Backreaction, I think this is misguided, since in my opinion the sole criteria for judging a new theory should be whether it "predicts nature better and is simpler" than the old models. These things can be determined objectively, whereas the agreement of the theory with human expectations is subjective, and should not be used to judge it.

There's a song, by Seal, that contains the line: "but we're never going to survive, unless we get a little crazy", and that's right in my view. The deeper workings of the cosmos probably would seem mad, if suddenly revealed, relative to our quaint conceptions, so our minds are going to have to learn to 'think crazy' relative to our current modes of thought, to understand the universe as we move out into new regimes, as we already do a little to understand relativity and quantum mechanics. Our world view is better than that of the ancient Greeks, but they would see our worldview as bizarre. Plato would have difficulty imagining that people are standing upside down in the antipodes. Who knows what parochial views we are a victim to?

Some will always try to fit the universe into our present notions of sanity, or stay close to them, by adding patches where they can, but this will eventually be inadequate. I'm not saying that we should deliberately try to be crazy, but I am saying that subjective measures like apparent craziness should not be considered when judging theories. Crazy or not, if they predict nature, and are simpler, then let them stand.

There is a pleasure sure, in being mad, which none but madmen know.
- John Dryden.

The Star Trek London Convention

This last Sunday I went to the Star Trek Destination London convention. It is only the second Star Trek meeting I have been to, but it was extremely interesting, also when I assess my own reaction to it: I wandered around in awe. There was Chekov (Walter Koenig) walking around smiling broadly with a cap on, Data (Brent Spiner) looking out of this world with his bright white hair, all five Captains in booths, hidden by autograph queues. I paid particular interest to the characters from Enterprise (Bakula, Keating, Mongomery, Trineer). I like that series since in many ways it is more realistic, and closer to home timewise, and I like Scott Bakula's portrayal of Captain Archer, I saw his blond hair and big nose from afar. Archer is less decisive and passionate than Kirk, less Professional than Picard, maybe less caring then Janeway, who I also saw from afar (I haven't seen much DS9), but for me Scott Bakula gave the most realistic portrayal of all the captains of an explorer: someone trying to push the human envelope despite huge obstacles, and trying to work out how to do something right, that has never been done or imagined (note: I had only seen Enterprise Seasons 1 & 2 at this time).

I paid to get the autograph of William Shatner, who I have adored since childhood, and paid to see his talk, which was characteristically entertaining. When asked which film was his favourite he said of course: his own Star Trek V. For this film he'd ordered a rock monster breathing fire, but after paying $250,000 a guy in a monster suit showed up with a couple of rocks on his back and instead of breathing fire he emitted a wisp of smoke that blew away in the desert wind. I've read this story before, but Shatner's telling of it was as white-hot passionate as ever. His final comment was that he'd tried to play Kirk with "Awe and Wonder" at the universe, even when faced with death. I looked down at my four year old son, who was asleep draped across me and my dear wife (who reluctantly, but kindly, accompanied me to the convention). Awe and wonder: that is indeed what the universe deserves... No, Shatner didn't dissapoint me. Earlier in the day I got his autograph, and after thanking him I said I'd written a paper (and submitted it to a journal) suggesting that faster than light travel is possible, but he just said "You're very welcome". He was probably in a daze having thousands of people traipse past his booth.

I was certainly in awe and wonder, but also at my own reaction. I am well aware that these are actors and are paid to pretend to be explorers, so why do they affect trekkies this way? Well, sometimes as children we see a situation that we'd love to be in when we grow up. Like my son, who'd love to drive a train. Maybe Star Trek is like that for humanity (the technically-minded part of it anyway). It is a good future for us, with decent morals, interesting explorations and the possibility of healthy growth, and these actors remind us of this future. We are fooled by it, of course, because it is just imaginary, but we allow ourselves to be fooled, since it makes us happy.

There's a saying by Johnny Cash: "You gotta be what you are. Whatever you are, you gotta be it". I think this means that, while feelings may indeed seem to be based on rubbish or even illogic, if it makes you happy: go with the flow. This is like going with the grain of your internal nature instead of across it. More importantly, feelings can be wise in ways that logic can never hope to follow. The initial impulse for research can be irrational too, and although ultimately logic and data must be shown to agree, it may be true that if we believe in the possibility first, it may just be the thing needed to make it all come true.

Anyway, I had a good few hours wandering around in my irrational nirvana.

Relativity & the GPS

Yesterday I gave my first lecture of term, all about the Global Positioning System (GPS), and managed to cover some very interesting things with the students. For example, special (SR) and general relativity (GR), which is important for GPS satellites which are fast moving, so time slows for them (SR), and higher up in the Earth's gravity well, so time speeds up for them (GR).

To explain relativity, I talked about a couple of mirrors with light bouncing between them to form a clock: say, each bounce is a second. Now if the mirrors move sideways relative to you the light has further to travel along the diagonal, but because the speed of light is supposed to be the same in all reference frames the light can't speed up, so the mirror-clock ticks more slowly for the moving mirrors: time dilation.

As I told my students (who were healthily sceptical of all this!): you might think that the slowness of the clock is just an apparent thing because we are seeing it from afar, but no! This has been tested. Some scientists (Hafele and Keating, 1971) left one atomic clock at home and took one for a ride on a fast and high plane to slow it down and speed it up by relativity. When they brought the clocks back together the effects of relativity were still there. This is amazing, because it means that the slowing down of time, is "real" (whatever that means) and not just apparent. This has a huge implication: that reality is what you can observe. It seems that because it is impossible in our reference frame to ever perceive the clock going at the 'normal' speed, then it doesn't go at the normal speed, it goes at the only speed we can perceive it to go.

Similarly, in MiHsC, the idea is that because we can never in principle measure the longer Unruh waves that don't fit exactly within the Hubble scale, they cannot exist. It's not particularly that we as humans cannot see them (it's not subjective), but rather that they cannot be seen "in principle", a more objective view. I'm suggesting that relativity should be modified very slightly, by MiHsC, based on this kind of thinking. It may seem strange that the world works in this Wycsiwyg (What you can see is what you get) manner, but the cosmos is no stranger to strangeness (sometimes it seems about as sane as a Penrose triangle). The point is that thinking like this does make correct predictions of nature, and that's the important thing.

Gravity beyond Einstein

Last Thursday I presented a talk at a "Gravity beyond Einstein" workshop at the Institute of Physics in London. First of all, the fact that the IoP's Gravity Group set up this workshop shows that they are open to new ideas, which is great. There were also many talented young physicists there, who I think only lacked the freedom to create, which means the freedom the "break" things, if justified. The impression I got was that the other speakers were trying to get beyond Einstein by bending his field equations using extra terms, tensors & dimensions, but without breaking anything. The resulting theories were full of adjustable parameters, like Ptolemy's epicycles.

Einstein was aware that general relativity (GR) was not the final word (see Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman, page 80, lines 12-14). He spent his last years trying to replace it, but was working without the help of the 'anomalies' (experimental signposts) that he had had before for special relativity (the Michelson-Morley experiment) and quantum mechanics (Lenard's photoelectric experiment). The relevant clues for the next generation theory: the galaxy rotation problem, the supernova data and spacecraft trajectories, only appeared much later in the 1970s, 1980s & 1990s and the replacement of machine-based thinking with information technology has occured recently too. GR is still rather entrenched, but all theories are flawed. They are like mathematical cartoons of nature, not the thing itself, and theorists sometimes forget that.

I think my attitude is better. In my talk I started from an anomalous observation: the galaxy rotation problem, tested a simple new physical principle that has no adjustable parameters (MiHsC) on this problem, obtained good agreement and made further predictions that can be tested.

It is time we had the confidence to replace GR, and that cannot be done by bending it, it must be done at a deeper level. I think MiHsC (quantised inertia) is a step towards that because, to summarise: it agrees with the data without adjustable parameters, it is simple, it makes predictions from parameters that can be fairly directly observed like baryonic matter, the speed of light and the Hubble scale rather than things that cannot be directly observed like dark matter, curved space and extra dimensions, and rather than the old machine-based physics, it points towards a new way of thinking based on information.

For further details see: http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.7007 (Published in Astrophysics and Space Science, online early) and a more accessible account of it is here.

QI & MoND vs the data: new figure.

Someone helpfully suggested that I should redo the Figure that I published in this paper (in Astrophysics and Space Science) using a vertical log scale, and the result is much clearer and is shown below. This Figure shows the baryonic mass of the astronomical system in Solar masses along the x axis, from the light dwarf galaxies, through gas discs and spiral galaxies and up to galaxy clusters. The vertical log axis shows the rotation speed of the system in km/s. The black circles are the observations (from McGaugh et al., 2010).

MoND predicts the two dotted lines, but to do this you must "tune" its adjustable parameter (a0) by hand to be 1.2x10^-10 m/s^2 or 2x10^-10 m/s^2. Quantised inertia (MiHsC) predicts the dashed line without any adjustable parameters. See here or the preprint for more details. So both MoND and MiHsC agree with the data within its uncertainty but MoND has to be "tuned" to fit, whereas MiHsC works as it is.

Quantised inertia in galaxies

This is a short summary of a paper I have just published in Astrophysics and Space Science (here). Galaxies and galaxy clusters have been seen to rotate so fast that the (inertial) centrifugal forces should tear them apart. Yet, they sit there obviously a stable collection of bound stars. Therefore, the small amount of matter we can see lit up in fusion (ie: stars) seems to hold them together. How?

Some have proposed that matter that we cannot see is responsible: dark matter. This sounds fair enough, but dark matter is needed only in the outer edges of galaxies, and no particles have been detected that could provide the very specific new physics, and the extended distribution (the halo), needed to account for the observed galactic rotations. Dark matter is also not a satisfying theory because it is not falsifiable. Given any galaxy you can add dark matter wherever you want to fit your predicted rotation curve to that observed.

Instead of increasing the gravitational mass in the galaxy to hold it in by force, one can also decrease the inertial mass of the stars in it to make them more easily bind. I have suggested a model called "Modified inertia due to a Hubble-scale Casimir effect" (MiHsC), or quantised inertia (QI) for short, that does this. In QI the inertial mass decreases in a specific new way for low accelerations. Stars at the edge of galaxies have low accelerations, so QI predicts they have less inertial mass, for the same gravitational mass. A lower inertial mass means the stars can be more easily bent into a bound orbit, even by the small amount of stellar mass we see in the galaxy. In the paper I have shown that QI predicts the rotation speeds of galaxies and galaxy clusters without needing any fitting parameters or dark matter. QI also predicts the change from the Newtonian behaviour in the galactic centre, to the anomalous rotation near the edge.

The main controversy with QI is that it violates the equivalence principle (very slightly), but as I have discussed in another paper (in the discussion of the paper here) this violation could not have been detected by the torsion balance experiments that have been used to test this principle so far.

The journal paper is here, and an arxiv preprint is here.