On Monday, August 25, 2025 at 2:53:45 PM UTC-6 John Clark wrote:
On Mon, Aug 25, 2025 at 2:01 PM Alan Grayson <[email protected]> wrote: *> the insufficiency involves the fact that a photon is a point particle, with no length* *A photon is a point particle that has a wave LENGTH. In the early days of Quantum Mechanics they called something that has both particle and wave properties a "wavicle" but for some reason the term never caught on, I think that's a pity because "wave" and "particle" are just words and thanks to Quantum Mechanics we now know that some things don't fit in with either of those words. If that seems strange and confusing it's only because it is strange and confusing. * *Nevertheless it remains true that a photon is a point particle that has a wave LENGTH, and if you know the wave LENGTH of that wavicle then you can calculate its energy, and the longer the LENGTH the less energy it has. And if space is expanding then everything that has LENGTH will expand with it unless there is a force available to counteract it; and in the case of the photon, unlike our local group of galaxies, there is not. * *Clearly, you're seduced by a word, and that word is "length". In the context of a passing train, or classical E&M, there is a measureable wave with peaks and valleys, but not for a point particle. And, as I've repeatedly stated, the "wave" of a photon is an ENSEMBLE property, and simply not detectable for single events. I corrected your error on this issue a few posts previously, with no response from you. You can persist in referring to a photon's wave being "stretched" by the expansion of space, but upon close examination you have no model to explain what you allege. The King has no clothes. AG * * > As far as axioms are concerned, you have an unstated axiom which is the negation of mine, namely that Something can become Nothing, and Nothing can become Something.* *That is not an axiom that is a theorem, that is a statement that can be derived from the existing axioms of General Relativity. * *The idea of photons increasing or decreasing their energies due to red or blue shifting likely pre-dated GR, with Zwicky's Tired Light theory, with Planck's solution of the Blackbody problem (1900), and Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect (1905). If GR implies what I call axioms, and you affirm those axioms, which IMO are operationally equivalent to magic, then honesty requires that you entertain the possiblility that GR is incomplete. AG* *> But I can point out that mine has an empirical basis, say in the principle of conservation of energy, whereas yours, I submit, just affirms magic.* *It affirms the principles of General Relativity. As for magic, some branches of magic are logical, repeatable, consistent, and describable, there is a name for that type of magic, it's called science. IF voodoo could predict how variations in doll manufacture affected performance of the curse, and IF a Fundamental Theorem Of Voodoo could determine the shape of the "needle penetration of doll versus distress of victim" plot, THEN voodoo would be as much a science as Quantum Mechanics. The important difference between magic and science is NOT that one deals in chants, incantations and crystal balls and the other deals in equations, lines of computer code and electron microscopes. The fundamental difference is that one works and the other doesn't. * *> Einstein affirmed conservation of energy, at least locally,* *Einstein says if you're dealing with small distances, less than a few million light years, then the concept of energy almost makes sense and that slightly fuzzy thing is almost conserved, but as the distance gets larger the very concept of energy gets fuzzier and the approximation of that fuzzball gets lousier. * *> so if it fails globally, an explanation is begging. AG* *Begging?! We're talking about cosmological redshifts that have occurred over billions of light years! * *>> We've made calculations using General Relativity to make predictions, and observations have confirmed those predictions; hell it even correctly predicted what the complicated waveform gravitational waves would have when two black holes collide, and it even enabled us to determine what the mass and the spin of those two black holes were. And General Relativity also predicted that space was expanding so photons would lose significant amounts of energy if they travel over cosmological distances. * *> How could Einstein have predicted that, when Eddington showed in 1930 that GR just established that the static universe was unstable. When did Einstein add the CC to his equations?* *As I already mentioned in a previous post, Einstein finished General Relativity in 1915 and he knew his theory's equations said the universe must be expanding, * *Are you sure? How could he know that in 1915, if it wasn't until 1930 that Eddington proved that a static universe was unstable, and could be expanding or contracting? AG* *and he could've predicted that** 14 years before Hubble discovered empirically that it was indeed expanding in 1929, however Einstein did not do that because he trusted astronomers, who told him the universe was static, more than he trusted his equations. * *So instead of sticking with his guns and saying the astronomers must be wrong, in 1917 he attempted to "fix" his theory by pasting on a cosmological constant; a classic example of fixing something it didn't need fixing, which is why Einstein called it the greatest blunder of his life. And in the 1930s Arthur Eddington proved that if the universe had been static then, even with the cosmological constant, General Relativity would have done a poor job at producing it because it would only have made an unstable equilibrium, like balancing a pencil on its tip. So if Hubble had found in 1929 that the universe was static then General Relativity would've been in deep trouble, but that's not what he found. * *> But entropy for a closed system can never decrease -- that's the correct statement of the 2nd law.* *I know I'm being pedantic but it's actually "entropy for a closed system can *almost* never decrease".* *I don't claim to be an expert in thermodynamics, but I did take a course in that very subject, and I recall quite clearly that your revision of the 2nd law is false. Check any text of the subject to verify what I am writing. AG * *> So when are you assuming the egg is scrambled?* *For the film not to look ridiculous, unscrambled must be in the first half of the film and scrambled must be in the second half of the film. * *> It's unclear what contradiction you were referring to; that entropy could be higher yesterday and tomorrow, than today?* *The second law of thermodynamics alone is sufficient to explain why the state of the universe called "tomorrow" will have a higher entropy than the state of the universe called "today", but to explain why the state of the universe called "yesterday" had a lower entropy than the state of the universe called "today" you need more than the second law, you also need an axiom that says the universe started out in a state of very low entropy. * *It seems obvious that entropy does not decrease from yesterday to today. It can remain constant or increase, so I don't see any problem here. What exactly is the problem you allege? Also, maybe more important, there is no upper bound for entropy, so it can begin at any level after the BB, and remain the same or increase over time. AG * * John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>* 6xx -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/9e0120d9-49d3-49e3-a622-4cc15d776b69n%40googlegroups.com.
