classical physics vs relativity: parallel electron beams

[Aristarchus]

Aristarchus - I notice that you didn't respond to my points - however if you do so I'd still be delighted to discuss the speed of light in GR with you.

Yeah. When you get around to it, go ahead and discuss whatever you wish, you're do pretty well at it so far - I mean, the discussing whatever you wish part. For now, I'll go with Warren Davis PhD from M.I.T., but thanks anyways.

"So, it is absolutely true that the speed of light is _not_ constant in a gravitational field [which, by the equivalence principle, applies as well to accelerating (non-inertial) frames of reference]."

I suspect that if Mr Hynecek had tried to publish this one in a real journal, the referees would have been good enough to point out that his problem has been thought about, solved (correctly) and written up.

Physics Essays where Hynecek has been published is an international peer-reviewed journal. However, you better inform NASA that it gave three disguised awards to someone you consider is exploring pseudoscience, and you better inform IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices.

http://philica.com/about.php

http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/images/f/ff ... evices.pdf

In 1983 AdCom approved a new award named after Paul Rappaport, who had served on the committee during the early 1970s and as EDS President in 1975. He had worked on photovoltaics research at RCA before becoming Director of the National Renewable Energy Center in the late 1970s. This award is given annually at the IEDM to the author or authors of the best paper that appeared in one of the Society’s publications during the previous year. At the 1984 San Francisco meeting, Jaroslav Hynecek of Texas Instruments received the initial Paul Rappaport Award for his article on “Electron-Hole Recombination Anti-blooming for Virtual-Phase CCD Imager,” which had been published in the August 1983 issue of Transactions–ED.

I'm sure this society would love to hear from you about a pseudoscientist in their mist that is dealing with such subjects as the following:

To describe the movement of electrons and holes in such tightly confined spaces requires use of quantum
mechanics, hence these structures are often called quantum wells. Practical applications of these heterostructures
began to emerge in the 1980s. With the thin-layer control that had become available, multiplecavity quantum-well lasers and vertical- cavity surface-emitting lasers were now possible. In the latter devices, cavity mirrors are formed by alternating layers of compound semiconductors with substantially different refractive indices. These heterostructure-growth technologies also permitted a rich field of device research and the production of a new family of highfrequency transistors.

Meanwhile, you better inform CTU just what kind of assistant professor in physics they made the mistake hiring. Good luck. Godspeed.

[Physicist]

I'm a little confused by this experiment. They're talking about a pair of charged plates that are allowed to freely spin. If current is induced to flow (i.e.- that suspended capacitor is allowed to become a part of a circuit with the Earth) then is it not going to start spinning from Lorentz force, behaving as a homopolar motor?

Mike - The basic idea is that you just have a charged parallel capacitor sitting all by itself in empty space. It is not charging or discharging - unless you want to make things more complicated!

Now if special relativity is correct, there should be no torque on the capacitor, since its energy should be independent of its orientation. Obviously.

However if special relativity is NOT correct, and the capacitor is moving through the "ether", there will be a net torque on the capacitor since its energy when parallel to the ether velocity will be different from its energy when perpendicular to the ether velocity.

The experiment was (first) done in 1902 and no torque was detected.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trouton%E2 ... experiment

If you look at the Hynecek paper above - you'll find that different energies are implied for the parallel and perpendicular orientations - giving a net torque. So the paper is dead wrong not only from a theoretical standpoint - it's immediately contradicted by experiment too.

[Aristarchus]

If you look at the Hynecek paper above - you'll find that different energies are implied for the parallel and perpendicular orientations - giving a net torque. So the paper is dead wrong not only from a theoretical standpoint - it's immediately contradicted by experiment too.

Instead of directing your fellow EU forum members to look at the paper, it will expedite the flow of the discussion and provide a seamless transition from one response to the other if you would quote from the paper. The latter will assist the reader in matching your claims to the actual statements from the paper that your allegations seek to address. This is customary for proper discourse.

[Nereid]

There's a lot in this post of yours jjohson, far more than I can respond to in a single post, so I hope you don't mind if I split it across several.

@ Nereid,
You asked, "What are they (the laws governing electromagnetic forces)?"
Some, possibly many, plasma physics textbooks start out with just that discussion. I have but 5 because that's about all I can afford to own, but I wanted to look at them and draw comparisons and see where they overlap and where they could supplement each other.

What you then went on to outline (though it was many paras long, of necessity) seemed to me to be a good encapsulation of classical electromagnetism, as applied to plasmas.

Just to put my question into context though, it came as a response to part of a post by Grits: "The laws governing electromagnetic forces don't change with scale".

Lorentz's equation(s) covering particle motion and Maxwell's equations governing electromagnetic field interactions, and their interdependent relationship, ARE the laws which are basic to the study of cosmic plasma, and other types of plasmas as well, although in this forum most are primarily interested in the cosmic application to better understand the phenomena which are, so far, mostly based on an electrodynamic interpretation of the phenomena and and data gathered by astronomers and astrophysicists. There is a lot of often very difficult math which goes into descriptions and modeling of plasmas, but fundamentally the laws were written down in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

As I understand it, the only significant tweaking to classical electromagnetism, as applied to plasmas, is the addition of certain aspects of special relativity, to handle cases in which one or more of the particle types (called 'species', I think) that comprise the plasma are moving at relativistic speeds (e.g. perhaps in the shock fronts which may produce at least some cosmic rays).

There is one respect in which 'Maxwell's equations' (to give your response an oversimplified two-word description) is inadequate, with respect to Grits' statement; namely, at the microscopic level of individual atoms and ions.

As I understand it, classical electromagnetism ('Maxwell's equations') faced a crisis when experimental results pointed to not only the atomic nature of matter but also a 'small nucleus surrounded by electrons' structure for all such atoms. Classically, the electrons would be accelerating, so would emit electromagnetic radiation, and in a trice end up merging with (or worse) the nucleus; i.e. atoms could not possibly be stable! Quantum mechanics (QM) resolved the crisis, but at the expense of Maxwell's equations, which became 'merely' increasingly accurate as the scale expanded (above/beyond the level of atoms).

There were loose ends however; spectroscopy revealed atomic transitions whose energies did not match the predictions from the then QM-based models, suggesting that something was missing.

That something was, again, special relativity, which when added into the QM of electromagnetism produced Quantum Electrodynamics (QED for short), and earned some brilliant physicists Nobels.

And QED went on to become the most precisely tested theory in physics (12? 14? decimal places), with only the weakest of hints that it might not be an accurate description of how the observable universe works.

But I think the real take-away from this is that Grits' statement is unlikely to be right for the next few hundred or thousand years, in the sense that QED may not be a law governing electromagnetic forces for all scales. Of course, Grits may be right in the sense that there is such a law; however, if we don't know what it is, it isn't much help to us!

[Nereid]

(continued)

@ Nereid,
You asked, "What are they (the laws governing electromagnetic forces)?"

Again, the context is a response to part of a post by Grits: "The laws governing electromagnetic forces don't change with scale".

Similarly, those who bother to read probably understand that QCD and its associated mathematics have produced a very accurate model in terms of subatomic particle interactions, energies, and other phenomena at the quantum or sub-atomic level. We know that not all its predictions have been borne out yet (else the LHC wouldn't be drawing as much power as it is, looking for Master Higgs's boson!) Being of a scientific mind-set, my own opinion is that science is never "finished", and that today's theories and models are just awaiting the next improvement or breakthrough or "aha!" moment at the hands and minds of humans. Knowledge expansion is what we seem to be built to do, in part.

There's a good example of the 'never finished' nature of science (well, of physics at least), implicit in what you wrote, namely the electroweak interaction.

Many readers know that the 1979 Nobel Prize for physics went to Sheldon L. Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg for "their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles" (and the 1999 one went to 't Hooft and Veltman for "having placed particle physics theory on a firmer mathematical foundation", which includes the math needed for the theory of the electroweak interaction; the 1999 Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences anouncement of that Nobel Prize is here).

At first sight electromagnetism and the weak interaction (a.k.a. the weak force) seem completely unrelated; however, Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg - building on work by other physicists, going back to the 1930s - developed a theory in which these two can be seen as just different aspects of the same thing ... and at high enough energies, there is (apparently) no way to distinguish between them (The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 1979 Press Release, and related material accessible from it, give a fuller description).

So, in two ways Maxwell's equations - which can be considered to be a law governing electromagnetic forces (per Grits) - do change with scale; at very small distances QED seems to govern them, and at high energies electroweak theory does.

What you point to, jjohnson, is the possibility that the electroweak and strong interactions may also be simply two different manifestations of just one 'force', which, at sufficiently high energies, become indistinguishable (finding, and characterising, the Higgs would likely enable us to test the various unified theories on this subject, and would not doubt also lead to several new Nobel Prizes).

[mharratsc]

@Nereid-

I just wanted to say how much I personally appreciate the tone of your discussion here. The civility in your replies and questions, and the obvious knowledge you have accumulated on these various subjects, is most impressive, and I would like to thank you for your courteous treatment of our 'favorite model'.

I felt that this should be acknowledged during this relative moment of 'calm', before anyone gets 'worked up' about something again...

@Physicist-

So in regards to what you had stated about the Hynecek paper:

If you look at the Hynecek paper above - you'll find that different energies are implied for the parallel and perpendicular orientations - giving a net torque. So the paper is dead wrong not only from a theoretical standpoint - it's immediately contradicted by experiment too.

The way I see it- we have an old experiment that had placed a conducting capacitor (otherwise it wouldn't be a capacitor) into the Earth-circuit (atmospheric) and in the Earth's EM field. I am by no means competent to argue the 'theoretical' aspect of this experiment, but aren't the results of this experiment suspect (either for/against either argument, actually) since we're talking about using a capacitor of all things to look for some effect that would conceivably be considered weak outside of the Earth's plasmasphere... but was actually conducted in it, rather?
I don't see how it stands that we can consider this a valid experiment, as far as my understanding of it goes. It doesn't seem like all of the variables induced by other influences were adequately filtered out of the scenario... or am I missing something again? :\

[Harry Costas]

G'day

Love the reading, love the discussion.

[seb]

If, as some aether-proponents hypothesised, the aether is stationary relative to every observer, wouldn't the capacitor experiment be expected to show zero torque if the aether exists? Since nothing moves through the aether, not even photons despite travelling at 'c' relative to it (I think I might have spotted a flaw in that version of the theory... ), then it will be pretty difficult to detect.

[Physicist]

The way I see it- we have an old experiment that had placed a conducting capacitor (otherwise it wouldn't be a capacitor) into the Earth-circuit (atmospheric) and in the Earth's EM field. I am by no means competent to argue the 'theoretical' aspect of this experiment, but aren't the results of this experiment suspect (either for/against either argument, actually) since we're talking about using a capacitor of all things to look for some effect that would conceivably be considered weak outside of the Earth's plasmasphere... but was actually conducted in it, rather?
I don't see how it stands that we can consider this a valid experiment, as far as my understanding of it goes. It doesn't seem like all of the variables induced by other influences were adequately filtered out of the scenario... or am I missing something again? :\

Without knowing anything about the specifics of the experiment, I would think that if "other influences" were significant, you'd just see the capacitor twirling all over the place. Unless the "other influences" conspired to exactly cancel out the torque from the ether. Seems a bit unlikely, no?

If, as some aether-proponents hypothesised, the aether is stationary relative to every observer

Hmm that doesn't make any sense to me. Do you have a reference?

[engineer]

I have looked at the Hynecek's paper but the energies for the perpendicular and parallel capacitor motion are the same. So, he does not predict the capacitor rotation. Why the physicist claims something that the paper does not say?

[Jarvamundo]

Why the physicist claims something that the paper does not say?

... and then the 'mathematician' walks into the room....? surely... ?

[engineer]

Mathematician would say:
Motion parallel to plates: W=(QQa/2eWL)*Sqrt(1-vv/cc) this includes the Lorentz plate length contraction and the mag. field energy between the plates. (e=epsilon, a=plate distance)
Motion perpendicular to plates: W=(QQa/2eWL)*Sqrt(1-vv/cc) this includes the Lorentz plate distance contraction and only the electrostatic energy between the plates, since there is no mag. field there.
So, in both cases it seems that the EM mass transforms as: m=mo*Sqrt(1-vv/cc).
Why this way and not as the inertial mass should: m=mo/Sqrt(1-vv/cc)? says mathematician.
By the way the "capacitor" in the paper does not have conducting plates. Also, the charge plates attract and the plates with bouncing photons between them repel. So, physicist, what is your answer?

[Aristarchus]

I have looked at the Hynecek's paper but the energies for the perpendicular and parallel capacitor motion are the same. So, he does not predict the capacitor rotation. Why the physicist claims something that the paper does not say?

I'm still waitng for that answer. Previously, I posted in regards to Physcist's accusation:

Instead of directing your fellow EU forum members to look at the paper, it will expedite the flow of the discussion and provide a seamless transition from one response to the other if you would quote from the paper. The latter will assist the reader in matching your claims to the actual statements from the paper that your allegations seek to address. This is customary for proper discourse.

[Nereid]

continued, and concluded.

To sum up, there are laws governing plasma phenomena, which are the basis for EU observations and ideas gathered and deduced from the flood of broadband, high-accuracy data and observations which flood in daily to observers all over the world.

The way you have described it sounds very much like part of the aim of the recent WOPA conference (actually a workshop); if so, what, then, makes EU ideas different from plasma astrophysics?

When these observations continue to, as the press releases are unfortunately fond of trumpeting, "amaze, puzzle and surprise" the astronomical community,

One of these days someone will do a report, based on surveys and extensive interviews, on the similarities and differences between what's in those press releases (often written by people with marketing, not science, degrees) and what the scientists directly involved in the research covered actually think. Myself, I suspect that those three words would be well down the list (of researchers' responses), with 'interesting', 'intriguing', 'great', and 'wonderful' being more common.

it seems to me that perhaps they should take a look at some of the observations, reasoning and predictions being put forth by the nascent EU interpretations.

While I cannot claim to be one of "them", I can claim - objectively I think - that I have taken many long, hard looks at these. No surprise, of course, that I have many, many questions; if you are able to continue helping me find answers, I shall be most appreciative.

It could be a useful tool set. —And there are mysteries and surprises enough yet to go around.

Jim Johnson

There are indeed; it is perhaps both a curse and a blessing that we live in times when it seems the daily output of high quality astronomical data - from superb facilities both on the ground and in space - exceeds the entire output of the many centuries' of observation before this one.

Jim Johnson/jjohnson, I've responded to what I think are the most important parts of your long, and excellent, post. Of course, there are several parts I did not respond to (this is already my third, long, post on it!); if you feel I have neglected a part that is more important than any I have covered, please say so (and I'd be glad to continue with these posts).

[Physicist]

Motion parallel to plates: W=(QQa/2eWL)*Sqrt(1-vv/cc) this includes the Lorentz plate length contraction and the mag. field energy between the plates. (e=epsilon, a=plate distance)

Let's write gamma = g = 1/Sqrt(1-vv/cc) to save some typing

No, I disagree. When the boost is parallel to the plates, the only dimension changing is one of the sides of the plates. That reduces the capacitance by a factor of g and therefore INCREASES the electrostatic energy by a factor of g. If you include the energy stored in the magnetic field, the total energy will go up again.

Agree?

Motion perpendicular to plates: W=(QQa/2eWL)*Sqrt(1-vv/cc) this includes the Lorentz plate distance contraction and only the electrostatic energy between the plates, since there is no mag. field there.

Agreed. The energy DECREASES by a factor of g.

So, in both cases it seems that the EM mass transforms as: m=mo*Sqrt(1-vv/cc).

So I disagree with this conclusion.

I have looked at the Hynecek's paper but the energies for the perpendicular and parallel capacitor motion are the same. So, he does not predict the capacitor rotation. Why the physicist claims something that the paper does not say?

Well, he doesn't predict capacitor rotation because he didn't consider the parallel motion (correct me if I'm wrong). Had he done so he might have caught his mistake.

Which is [for the benefit of Aristarchus] to use his equation (5) for the energy without transforming it properly into the boosted frame.