7 Reasons to Abandon Quantum Mechanics-And embrace this New Theory

[Erasmus00]

Things I have missed in this discussion

So why the surprise to find my skepticism when you probe a neutron or a proton by annihilating it with anti-protons with a GaZeV (gazillion eV's)? We see some pieces come out after the anti-proton "atomic bomb" is dropped on it, but so what? In the same way with Aunt Mary, this does not give a picture of how it was before the bomb. So how do you know that a neutron wasn't a proton and an electron if you blasted it into pieces, and you saw "some stuff" come out? You don't.

I'm not talking about experiments at the tevatron, I'm talking about deep inelastic scattering off of nucleons. I believe SLAC still does this, and the first experiments were done in the 50s/60s. By scattering a high energy lepton (like an electron) off a nucleon you can get a good idea of its structure in much the same way we use electrons to probe crystal structures. This in no way requires "blasting to pieces" the proton, though sometimes the proton comes apart in much the same crystal lattices can be damaged by spectroscopy.

Now, Andrew, I'd also suggest, in regards to your stance on neutrinos, you should read up on modern neutrino experiments, such as miniBOONE. I think the evidence is extremely hard to ignore.
-Will

[andrewgray]

Will,

Thanks for bringing these points up:

Originally Posted by Erasmus

. . . the reason you assume a "black" body is so that you don't have to deal with reflected light, only emitted.

It is very interesting that Planck & Rayleigh-Jeans assumed no reflected light. Yet they also assume standing waves, which directly implies reflected light. (??) There can be no standing waves without reflections. Random thermal emissions are not coherent, and will not form "standing waves".

Originally Posted by Erasmus

As to the cavity you put the object into . . .

Will, the original blackbody experiments were on the black cavity itself, and not "an object placed in it".

Originally Posted by Erasmus

. . .what you are suggesting is a model of continuum electromagnetic radiation interacting with a "quantized" electron/atom.

Close. I am suggesting a model of continuum radiation interacting with atoms that have resonant orbital frequencies.

. . . you had better be experimenting with something "black" in the frequency regions you are considering.

But consider my example of a chunk of steel. It is a reflector of almost all frequencies up to x-rays. It still follows the typical thermal radiation pattern without being an absorber ("black") in any of the frequencies being considered.

Andrew A. Gray

[Erasmus00]

Originally Posted by andrewgray

Will, the original blackbody experiments were on the black cavity itself, and not "an object placed in it".

I am unfamiliar with the original experiment, though I am familiar with a number of derivations, including one in Schroeder's book, one in Sethna's book, and one in the Feynman lectures. In these derivations, a black object is placed in a metal/reflecting cavity. The object is in thermal equilibrium with the radiation in the box. The box, in this case, is merely a visualization device to count radiation modes.

The experimental technique might be to use hohlraum, which is a reflecting cavity with a hole in it. Any light that enters the hole will be reflected many, many times and as such it is almost certain to be absorbed by the box before it finds its way back out the hole. This would be used in a lab setting because there is no perfect black body.
-Will
Edit- forgive me for the misunderstanding, I am a theorist who often defaults to the theoretical and not the experimental. Since we were talking about the Rayleigh Jeans formula I defaulted to thinking of the standard derivation and not the experimental motivation.

Edit(further): To respond to the above

But consider my example of a chunk of steel. It is a reflector of almost all frequencies up to x-rays. It still follows the typical thermal radiation pattern without being an absorber ("black") in any of the frequencies being considered.

I don't know if you have performed this experiment yourself, but to get the "ideal" spectrum you have to subtract off your reflected background to get the low power (very short, very long wavelength) areas, they get swamped out by reflections.

[coldcreation]

Originally Posted by Qfwfq

Magically? The conjecture is that a neutrino changes from one flavour to another, and I believe it contemplates the same basic mechanism of RQFT as for other phenomenology. The only trouble conceptually is that of supposing a particle to be not perfectly massless while it is known to be chiral. Personally, I've thought of my own Alternative Theory to that and it would seem much more reasonable, but I won't discuss it here and probably no time soon.

lol that's a good one!!!

You'll be needing to hire Michelangelo, Tiziano, Raffaello, Dalì, Picasso, Van Gough, Vermeer, Klee, Mirò, Kandinsky... the whole works of them!

I would not have left out Leonardo di Ser Piero da Vinci (1452 – 1519) from the list above. One of his best works in unfinished. But that take nothing away from its beauty, elegance or value (which is of course priceless). It is hanging in the Louvre. If anyone was an observer of nature as well as a discoverer-creator-inventor himself it was he.

There is one other artist that I would add to the list: Marcel Duchamp, aka, R. Mutt, for a variety of reasons. I can elaborate if anyone would like. And, oh, the deviation from the topic at hand (quantum reality) will only be slight.

CC

[andrewgray]

Originally Posted by Erasmus

I don't know if you have performed this experiment yourself, but to get the "ideal" spectrum you have to subtract off your reflected background. . .

Will,

I have performed this experiment myself in that I have heated steel, copper, and other metals and seen them turn red hot, then white hot. As far as subtracting reflected light, all that would be necessary to do this would be to turn off the torch and turn off the lights. They would still glow, of course, from the thermal emissions within.

I am curious as to why you had no comment on the apparent self-contradiction contained in both the Planck and Rayleigh-Jeans theories. That is, they assume no reflections, yet they assume standing waves which require reflections. (??)

Now that we are thinking about it, what is your opinion on self-contradictory theories that match experiment in general? They match, isn't that good enough?

Andrew A. Gray

[andrewgray]

Originally Posted by Erasmus

. . . in regards to your stance on neutrinos, you should read up on modern neutrino experiments, such as miniBOONE. I think the evidence is extremely hard to ignore.

Just a quick scan of Wikipedia revealed:

MiniBoone Neutrino Result

Here they say that:

"Detecting Neutrino Interactions"

". . . For example, an electron neutrino interaction will produce an electron, and a muon neutrino interaction will produce a muon."

Will, I have no doubt that these experiments produce electrons and muons. However, there's really no way to jump from electron/muon detections to neutrinos except through the neutrino hypothesis. If the neutrino hypothesis goes away, there are absolutely no consequences. This experiment produced electrons and muons. So what?

Andrew A. Gray

[Erasmus00]

Originally Posted by andrewgray

I am curious as to why you had no comment on the apparent self-contradiction contained in both the Planck and Rayleigh-Jeans theories. That is, they assume no reflections, yet they assume standing waves which require reflections. (??)

I think we are confusing two things here. My initial post on this subject was on the standard derivation used today, which is a black object in thermal equilibrium with radiation in a cavity. Hence, reflections. I believe this is nice pedagogically.

Now, the original result (I'm guessing) was problem done on an empty hohlraum. This is probably less pedagogically sound, but is exactly what is looked at in a standard experiment (at least today, I don't know the originals, as I've said). In this case the cavity was also reflective (we've removed the black object as it doesn't really matter anyway. If it was in equilibrium it radiated as much as it absorbed).

Now

I have performed this experiment myself in that I have heated steel, copper, and other metals and seen them turn red hot, then white hot. As far as subtracting reflected light, all that would be necessary to do this would be to turn off the torch and turn off the lights. They would still glow, of course, from the thermal emissions within.

There is much more to thermal radiation then the color of the thing radiating! What you are describing is (more or less) the peak frequency of emission at a given temperature. I want to calculate (and compare) the entire spectrum of radiation! For this, we have to do more than turn the lights off because nearly everything is radiating in the infrared, which will get reflected, etc. Hence, the use of reflecting cavities as nearly ideal generators of black body radiation.
-Will

[Erasmus00]

Originally Posted by andrewgray

Will, I have no doubt that these experiments produce electrons and muons. However, there's really no way to jump from electron/muon detections to neutrinos except through the neutrino hypothesis. If the neutrino hypothesis goes away, there are absolutely no consequences. This experiment produced electrons and muons. So what?

I think you miss how this works- first its not a few detections (not like SNOW) but in fact measures off the Tevatron line. If the neutrino theory is correct, we should see a large increase in the number of events, we do.

Now, if we remove the neutrino hypothesis we are left with the unsettling conclusion that electrons (and muons) can simply pop into existence all by themselves, without an anti-particle present. This violates any number of conservation laws macroscopically.
-Will

[andrewgray]

OK,

Here are the miniBOONE diagrams from Cosmic Variance

Setup:


Data:


So let me make sure that I am seeing this correctly. In the first column of the graph, the background (BG) event count is about 200 (per .1 GeV) and the miniboone event count was about 260. This leaves about 60 events vs. 200 background noise. Correct? So in the first column, we are talking about the background being 3 times the supposed reactor event count, correct?

In the third column, the background is about 5 times the reactor events. Correct?

Then, starting with the 4th column, the background measurements and the miniboone measurements become indistinguishable. That is, no reactor events can be seen at all statistically in columns 4-9. Correct?

So, if we actually plot the reactor data on the graph, it might look like this (shown in red):



So we see that most of the events are way below background noise levels, and that electrons and muons are "mysteriously appearing out of nowhere" more than they are supposedly appearing from the reactor neutrinos.

Dr Ray goes on to say that this experiment disagrees with the "LSND" experiment, and that . . .

Quote from Ray
If LSND’s observation is found to be a true fact of nature, the Standard Model of physics cannot fully accommodate/explain neutrino interactions! This “breaking” of the Standard Model is very exciting to physicists, and indicates there is new physics that we haven’t previously thought possible. Many things could be true - there could be new allowed interactions for neutrinos (Lorentz Violation, CP/CPT violation, the list goes on!), or there could be additional particles - sterile neutrinos, which don’t interact with other matter but only can been seen through mixing with other neutrinos.

And we see that we are probably on the verge of adding "sterile neutrinos" to the theory to accommodate new data.

However, confirmation bias may keep "sterile neutrinos" out for a time, while other experimentalist try to discredit LSND.

Andrew A. Gray

[Erasmus00]

Originally Posted by andrewgray

So let me make sure that I am seeing this correctly. In the first column of the graph, the background (BG) event count is about 200 (per .1 GeV) and the miniboone event count was about 260. This leaves about 60 events vs. 200 background noise. Correct? So in the first column, we are talking about the background being 3 times the supposed reactor event count, correct?

I think you misunderstand. The background is the total number of electrons and muons being dumped (along with neutrinos) into the detector. This background is well known theoretically and well measured experimentally. The extra 60 or so events make up electrons/muons that have appeared through neutrino decays. Its also worth noting that the background is NOT noise.

So we see that most of the events are way below background noise levels, and that electrons and muons are "mysteriously appearing out of nowhere" more than they are supposedly appearing from the reactor neutrinos.

Again, you misunderstand what a background is. It is not noise, its the standard electrons/muons from the beam that hit the detector.

Dr Ray goes on to say that this experiment disagrees with the "LSND" experiment, and that . . .

And we see that we are probably on the verge of adding "sterile neutrinos" to the theory to accommodate new data.

However, confirmation bias may keep "sterile neutrinos" out for a time, while other experimentalist try to discredit LSND.

I think you misunderstand again. LSND had a very small signal that they thought MIGHT indicate new neutrino types. MiniBOONE was designed to see if they could obtain the same results- they did not and there signal and sheer volume of data put to rest the issues LSND had brought up. Hence, we don't need sterile neutrinos or anything else to explain the current data. Once again (unfortunately) the standard model prevails.

Also, as a side note- getting rid of neutrinos means getting rid of conservation of momentum, conservation of angular momentum, conservation of energy, etc. I'm not sure thats prudent.
-Will