Slashdot Mirror
The Energy of Empty Space != Zero
Raindeer writes "Lawrence Krauss (well-known physicist and author of The Science of Star Trek) invited a group of 21 cosmologists, experimentalists, theorists, and particle physicists and cosmologists. Stephen Hawking came; three Nobel laureates, Gerard 'tHooft, David Gross, Frank Wilczek etc. He wrote about the conclusions of this session in Edge; in short: 'there appears to be energy of empty space that isn't zero! This flies in the face of all conventional wisdom in theoretical particle physics. It is the most profound shift in thinking, perhaps the most profound puzzle, in the latter half of the 20th century. And it may be the first half of the 21st century, or maybe go all the way to the 22nd century. Because, unfortunately, I happen to think we won't be able to rely on experiment to resolve this problem.'"
It will eventually be found that this energy was the egg in the proverbial chicken and the egg dilemma.
More
Sorry, after reading this headline, I have the following going through my head:
What shall we use
to fill the empty spaces
where we used to talk?
How shall I fill
The final places?
How can I complete the wall?
I thought that this was previously known - isn't the Higgs field (http://hepwww.ph.qmul.ac.uk/epp/higgs1.html) supposed to endow empty space with a non-zero energy? (Or maybe it was postulated but not observed)
Cool, now the space in most peoples head can be put to good use.
"Oh boy"
It sounds like they are talking about zero-point energy, the energy in the quantum vacuum. This has been known about by theoretical physicists for some time, and has even made it into popular science fiction. There is some debate, I believe, as to whether it is possible to extract this energy in a usable form, but its existence is hardly new.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
...Hawking hole.
/2 guesses as to who said that.
For politicians, they have much empty space, yet have energy to be able to move around and such.
Is there any way for us to use that energy? I guess we should find an efficient way to use the sun's energy before we turn to outer space, though.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
I know, as a scientist I should be objective. But..
Lisa Randall is a babe!!
Ho hum, back to the numbers.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines
"...21 cosmologists, experimentalists, theorists, and particle physicists and cosmologists"
Guys, it's early Monday morning here. When I see a fragment like that, my very-tired brain makes be go back and read it again until it makes sense. Then, because I'm not awake, I don't catch that the only thing wrong is that there are two "cosmologists" in there. Then I have to go back and read it again... then, because I'm not awake, I don't catch that there's two "cosmologists" in there and I have to go back and read it again...
You get the picture. I was going to make a point or say something a little more witty, but it's early Monday morning here.
. . .invited a group of 21 cosmologists, experimentalists, theorists, and particle physicists and cosmologists.
Still, this doesn't explain why the editors always miss the obvious goofs when posting.
And I thought "Zero Point Energy" was just technobabble.
Fact: what you know that you have proven to yourself
Belief: what you know that you could prove to yourself but have not
Faith: what you know that you can not prove to yourself
Is there a distinction between faith you can't prove to yourself because it's not proveable (metaphysics), and faith you're too dumb to prove?
--
make install -not war
Tom Bearden thinks it is.
Where did they think all that suction comes from in a vacuum?
Pfft! Stupid scientists.
Meta will eat itself
...in the face of all conventional wisdom in theoretical particle physics...
In which other web page do you think you will ever find a phrase like that? I really love Slashdot today. Talking about "conventional wisdom" in "theoretical particle physics".
Dr. Krauss's book is actually called The Physics of Star Trek and has a forward written by Stephen Hawking.
I got half way through the article and stopped. He isn't saying anything really at all.
:)
I don't think this is a discovery of any sort.. I think it is just a guy bragging that he had a nice audience at some conference for which he gave a presentation regarding the non-zero energy of empty space.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this has been known for some time and is even explained our current models.
His presentation seemed to be very anecdotal, I don't think he's claiming to have discovered anything - in fact, I don't think he is claiming to even understand what he is talking about, he's just providing some anecdotal perspective on it.
P.S. I don't claim to understand it myself..
..mork
I have built a machine in my back yard that harnesses this amazing, free source of energy. The government, however, wants to keep it under wraps, and the oil companies have a contract out on my head.
I can't show you how it works - that's a secret I want to keep until things cool off enough for me to patent it. But rest assured, it works. You can drop by and see the spinning plates attached to it. They've been spinning for eight months with no added power.
Yes, I did build it entirely on my own, using the vast knowledge I gleaned by sitting in on engineering classes two or three times a month.
The perfect demonstration of zero point energy is the Casimir effect, which has actually been observed in a laboratory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect
E = m c^3 Don't drink and derive E = m c^3
I didn't RTFA of course but the quote "...I happen to think we won't be able to rely on experiment to resolve this problem." while only one man's opinion, sounds a lot like _faith_
More music, fewer hits
Wake me up when you can boot Linux using that energ... Oh, wait.
getSexySig();
well.. hawkings radition is based on the idea that space is filled with virtual particles that materialize and reconverge...
As others have noted, the idea of the energy of empty space being nonzero isn't an new idea. The quantum zero-point vacuum energy is nonzero. However, our predictions of its value are ridiculously large, which led some to speculate that either we should redefine the zero point of energy to equal the zero-point energy so that the energy of space exactly equals zero. It's also possible that our ways of doing the accounting are naive (e.g., ignoring quantum gravity), or that some kind of cancellation is going on (e.g. bosons cancelling out fermions in supersymmetry).
This is related to what may be the biggest open question in cosmology, the cosmological constant problem. The energy of space is intimately related to the "cosmological constant". We now know from the accelerating expansion of the universe that there appears to be a nonzero cosmological constant, implying a nonzero vacuum energy. Its experimentally measured value is many orders of magnitude smaller than a naive calculation of zero-point energy based on the Planck scale, however. Another possibility is that the cosmological constant is actually zero, and the accelerating expansion is actually due to the energy/pressure content of some kind of dynamical "dark energy" field (as opposed to the static cosmological-constant form of dark energy).
More on vacuum energy and the cosmological constant, plus a tutorial.
P.S. Contrary to some science fiction applications (cough-StargateAtlantis-cough) and crank physics (cough-Puthoff-cough), you can't extract free energy as work from the zero-point energy. The zero-point energy is by definition the lowest energy state that a system can have; to extract usable energy, you'd have to decrease the energy of the rest of the system below that minimum value, which is by definition impossible.
... doesn't mean it is usable. The pen sitting on your desk has energy, but I don't see you jumping to extract energy from it.
The exciting thing here is that empty space has **some** energy potential. Less energy potential than a lump of mass just sitting on a desk or a burning coal in a fire, but **some** energy potential.
The interesting part is not that it exists, but that if you apply the theory empty space has 120 orders of magnitude more energy than the visible universe. Still, you can take the same theory and apply it to a hydrogen atom and get a number that is validated by experiment to nine decimal points. So the big question is, how do you use the same theory (relativity and quantum mechanics) to make a great prediciton about hydrogen atoms and a terrible prediction about vaccuum energy?
Still, the point of the article isn't about vaccuum energy, but rather the anthropic principle. The concept is that there's a constant in our universe that almost precisely cancels out this vaccuum energy. This is purely by chance and we see it because if it didn't happen, we wouldn't be around to talk about it.
Am I the only one that's confused about the statement? If there is energy in empty space - then that means only one thing - the space by definition isn't empty...
... It opened up a new world - but it didn't relly change the physics that dealt with the higher levels...
We thought that there was nothing in water - then they found minerals and all other kinds of stuff... we thought there was nothing smaller than an atom - we were proven wrong... So why is everyone so surprised that we found yet another thing that we didn't know existed? Why does it have to conflict with physics? If the particles are so small we just didn't see them before - then they don't have to influence things strongly enough to make a difference to our current physics. Just like when they discovered that the atom wasn't the smallest piece of matter
Peter.
Wow! What a dead party.
Not a beer can in sight and crappy finger food.
Matter and energy are the same thing. Space is a byproduct of that.
Space is a way of measuring the configuration of matter/energy.
There fore I ask the question: Can so-called empty space even exist?
How would we know?
Just like string theory being a mathematical contrivance so is 'empty space'
All space that we know has electromagnetic fields running through it continuously.
I once asked a theoretical physicists if the energy assumed to be in 'dark matter' was actually locked into all the fields that are running through everything, ie as light travelling through space. She said that the energy in 'free-space' is accounted for and the mystery of dark-matter continues. I wasn't sure and she didn't give any references (this was at the Geophysics Lab in Massachusetts some time in the 1990's)
It must be wonderful to spend billions on investigating quantum physics, go sit on a beach somewhere, get fat and rich on the money that we all spend because physicists have this sincere seeming ernast confusion.
Seriously, though, it took meteorologists to discover Chaos theory.
I am not sure but I think that modern high-energy physics is a wasteland of closed minds.
So sad so much is wasted in this rat whole trying to define the undefinable.192.6.1.155/
They seek to measure the ruler with itself.
That never works.
Matter is energy and distance and time are merely byproducts of this.
Get it right: Empty space doesn't exist because space is a tool (a conceptual tool) that we use to explain matter/energy.
It is the same thing that happened with math where we write equations as functions of time when it is much easier to understand when we write them as functions of frequency.
How can people so highly placed and so well-paided and compenstated be so clueless?
Nice, now we can have a near infinate Energy Source and a convenient way to Move Crates around.
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
Somebody finally thought to ask both Cosmologists AND Cosmologists! This is where breakthroughs come from.
Wish I could throw a party, and Stephen Hawking rocks up. "Invitation, Hawkings will be there, and free beer"
It took me awhile going through the article, but the author seems to be trying to prove that Vacuum Energy is the source of Dark Energy.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
The average energy of a vacuum can be zero. The deviation of the average amount of energy cannot be zero. The average is not the deviation from the average. State that clearly, and there is no issue. Blur the line, make BS.
Doug
TheStandUpPhysicist.com
ps. There is no need for the Higgs field. When mass gets introduced correctly into a unified field theory, it will break symmetry not spontaneously (ie hyper-convenient, uber-sophisticated BS), but break symmetry in a way directly wired into gravity, which is what mass is all about. One has to connect the graviton to the scalar field so that the equivalence principle works on the quantum level.
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
Sounds like the void ship from the end of the last season of Doctor Who.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
One point he is correct. We are pretty sure there are virtual particles that pop in and out of existance, and by the nature of their existance they do may not add to the energy of the vacuum. These particles are created and destroyed around us all the time. They are so short lived that the universe "does not notice", in the heisenberg sense. OTOH, we also know that QM states minimum energy levels, and this might indicate a minimum energy of the universe. After all, waves are not localized, and thier energy presumable spreads throughout the cosmos. I believe most of this stuff has been at least suspected for most of my lifetime. How to interpret this stuff is the trick, because enchanted perfect particles and magical waves are not that confortable to physicists.
I was most disappointed becuase there are interesting questions. The energy of the vacuum is likely nonzero, and it seem pretty clear that if the energies are added you come up with a huge number, reminiscent of the Ultraviolet catastrophe. Likewise we have black holes, which form another disturbing infiintiy. And then we have the reemergence of the Eistein gravity hack. This does not even get into the wierd copenhagen interpretation of QM, most recently discussed in the FPS, a publication of the APS.
From what I can tell, most of this involves a bunch of old line physicist complaining about string theory, and there is nothing wrong with that as this is what old line physicists are supposed to do. But we always have had, and will continue to have, issues in the interpretation of our physical models. Instead of going around saying what we know, it seems more useful to look at where what we think we know does not mesh with the observables, and how that effects our assumption. Are constants constant? Do observations collaps waves in particles, or are the wave and particle one in the same? Is the universe one of three structures? These are why being a scientist is going to cool for the kids entering college today.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Someone at the meeting said, well, you know, don't we understand gravity? Things fall.
Who invited THAT guy?
So empty space actually holds some energy content.
In that sence I wonder if you could relate space to energy in much the same way Einstein relates matter and energy. If that were the case, utilizing this energy would destroy space. Good thing we seem to have an abundance of empty space in our universe.
I'd just be worried about too many people using it here at home. They say the world is always getting smaller. ZPE would mean it really was.
Energy is valuable. If Bearden really could obtain it from the vacuum, he wouldn't need to sell books to make a living. It's not really that hard to be a small profitable power plant - look at the farmers burning methane and selling electricity. Anyone claiming "free energy" needs to put out or shut up. A friend of mine loaned me a book by Bearden - what a crock. Nothing there but technobable and conspriacy theories. He'd rather you buy his books than do anything worthwhile. He'd probably prefer to produce useful energy, but of course he can't.
Everyone knows that the dark energy comes from the turtles that are smaller than the Plank distance.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I'd hit it!
As an armchair physicist, the concept of energy in the nothingness of space is interesting to me. My crackpot guess is that all matter is just a complex ripple of whatever the universe is made of. Where you see a vaccuum, it's really just "flat" matter. The planets (as an easy example) are sort of twists and molds in the material of the universe. It's a bit hard to picture in three dimensions, but take a block of jello (or for the tried and true geeks, a 10x10 gelatinous cube) as the universe, and the imperfections inside (more dense areas, less dense areas, churned areas, etc) represent the planets and stars.
:-)
It sort of makes sense in terms of gravity as well - you can "stretch" this material to some extent (sort of like winding up taffy to make a piece of candy) and that essentially makes the trip from point A to B take a shorter amount of time (because the effective time between A and B is the same, but since they are now farther apart, you get there "faster", ie, gravitational pull).
Not saying it makes sense, but it's fun to think about.
Well, it seems to me that if space itself has a nonzero energy, you may be able to stop looking for that extra matter/energy that is missing from the big bang. Most of the universe is...well, space. That might account for that missing 90%, right?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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So where is my Zero Point Module?
At least that whole Google-jumbo-jet thing from yesterday was something I could understand!
Someone break this down for me and/or tell me where I'm wrong. You know, for all of us laymen-astrocosmoscientists.
Are they saying that there's energy where we don't expect there to be energy, and that because it's so difficult to prove, we won't be able to prove that there's energy where we don't expect energy to be?
I mean, I haven't even seen an "I, for one, welcome..." or a "Think of the children!" post in this thing yet. What is this...real science on Slashdot?
Oi. Head...spinning...empty space in brain swelling with energy!
42?
foreword
Scene: A scientist (Albert) and a zero-point-energy fan (Crackpot) are at the bottom of a very deep well.
Albert: Well, it may be cold and wet here, but at least we can't get any lower! I guess that is some sort of consolation.
Crackpot: What are you talking about? We're still filled with potential energy! If we could harvest the potential energy we could get from going a foot lower, we could use it to boost our way out of here!
Albert: Um... no.
Crackpot: What do you mean? Do you work for the oil companies or something?!
Albert: The amount of potential energy you have depends on where you define your lowest point. Typically we set the "zero" point to be the point where you can't fall any further. Since you can't obtain any energy by any means at that point, that means there is no potential energy left.
Crackpot: But what if we dig down another foot?
Albert: Do you have any idea how much energy that would require to do that?
Crackpot: Fine, we'll dig down 20 feet to extract more energy, and that will pay for the energy expense of digging.
Albert looks confused. He thinks he might be missing a subtle joke. He decides that he isn't deficient in humor -- his companion is deficient in brainpower. Albert unfurrows his brow and tries to talk some sense into his friend.
Albert: Ok. Let's consider two situations. We've got our situation right now -- we're at the bottom of a well with no way out -- and another situation. In the other situation an evil man is dangling two jet-packs on a fishing line right above our heads. The man will always pull the jet packs out of our reach whenever we try to grab them. The man will never get tired and he will never let us have the jet packs no matter what we do. No matter how long or hard we try, we won't get the jet packs. Question: is it easier to get out of the well in the first situation, or in the second situation?
Crackpot: What does this have to do with getting access to our latent potential energy?
Albert: (sighs)
Crackpot: I have a shovel and some rubber bands. You try to talk to the guy with the jet packs while I dig.
Albert drowns himself. Fin.
It's funny that I happened to think about this subject last week for no apparent reason (thoughts like this just pop into my mind, damn that astronomy minor,) and I thought wouldn't it make sense if gravity had polarity?
:)
A gravitational well possesses some energy, which at minimum depends on its mass, the gravitational pull towards the center of that mass can be seen as one pole of a gravitational 'magnet', if that were the case, where would be the opposite pole of that mass? It could be that the entire space/time in the universe has to stretch to accomodate the difference in gravitational potential. So it stretches enough to counterbalance the energy of the gravitational well. There must be some sort of communication between the opposite poles, either by 'gravitational waves' or some gravitational particles (gravitons?) or maybe both. If it were waves, it would have looked as if ripples on the surface of a pond were moving out in 2 dimensional space from the center of the gravity well, and the further these ripples move away from the center of the well, the more they subside.
But these ripples have to be absorbed by something, this something is the normal space, and the more mass there is in the universe, the more of this 'normal empty' space there must be to balance out that mass.
Based upon all of these assumptions, which I admit are nothing more than speculations at this point, I could even introduce some ideas on the creation of the universe:
Imagine a totally empty space. Suddenly there was an influx of mass at one point in this space. This influx created a gravitational imbalance in the space and forced the space to balance out this potential by 'creating' more empty space. If any of the above makes sense, I would say that appearence of 'empty space' is actual property of non-empty space, but it takes much more of this 'empty space' to balance any small amount of non-empty space. So while the amount of non-empty space was not very large, the amount of 'empty space' had to be astronomically greater.
So the more of the non-empty space appears in the universe, the more empty space is provided as a balancer.
-
This is all my own conjectures and should not be taken too seriously. yet
You can't handle the truth.
With a space, that is. His name is 't Hooft, not 'tHooft. The guy even has a webpage about it, so this means people are getting his name wrong all of the time...
- webpage how to spell his name: http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/ap.html
Mark
Where or what was it that Lawrence Krauss invited all of these people to, and were there any cosmologists there?
-- dR.fuZZo
people have been talking about aether for centuries.
Seriously though, philosophically speaking vacuum != nothing, the fact that we can measure and quantify it implicitly gives it substance.
This must be old as they apparently relied on the Pentium FDIV to compute a non-zero result. Had they used the newer AMD processors, they would have had a much higher resolution of a non-zero result.
I think most of use would probably agree that we are slower, dumber, and more surly on Monday mornings, especially before the caffeine begins to sink into our nervous systems.
Some of us get caught up in simple things, like badly edited sentences in the slashdot blurbs. Heh, nothing wrong with that.
Some of us get high and mighty and start criticizing the observations of theoretical physicists with crackpot and at best amateur comments that such things are obvious or inconsequential.
Honestly, between this article and the Van Gogh accurately representing some of the deep mathematics of turbulence, with people going "So what that's obvious and stupid" I have to wonder what...
Fuck I can't remember what I was wondering. I'm just being surly on a Monday.
The enemies of Democracy are
I am just a new boy,
Stranger in this town.
Where are all the good times?
Who's gonna show this stranger around?
Ooooh, I need a dirty woman.
Ooooh, I need a dirty girl.
Will some cold woman in this desert land
Make me feel like a real man?
Take this rock and roll refugee
Oooh, baby set me free.
Ooooh, I need a dirty woman.
Ooooh, I need a dirty girl.
[Phone rings..Clink of receiver being lifted]
"Hello..?"
"Yes, a collect call for Mrs. Floyd from Mr. Floyd.
Will you accept the charges from United States?"
[clunk! of phone being put down]
"Oh, He hung up! That's your residence, right? I wonder why he hung up?
Is there supposed to be someone else there besides your wife there to answer?"
[Phone rings again...clunk of receiver being picked up]
"Hello?"
"This is United States calling, are we reaching...
[interrupted by phone being put down]
"See he keeps hanging up, and it's a man answering."
[whirr of connection being closed]
And it may be the first half of the 21st century, or maybe go all the way to the 22nd century. Because, unfortunately, I happen to think we won't be able to rely on experiment to resolve this problem.
I don't think so. Actually, if one applies the law of causality to its fullest, one is forced to conclude that we are moving in an immense multi-dimensional lattice of energetic particles. Why? Because, contrary to current belief, movement is causal. That is to say, nothing can move unless it is caused to move. This means that a particle's movement can only be sustained by a series of interactions, one for each discrete jump. See Nasty Little Truth About Motion for more on the causality of motion. My point is that one does not need esoteric physics experiments to see that we are moving in a sea of energy. Every observed movement is the existence proof we need! One day soon, we will understand the composition and properties of the lattice and we will use our newfound knowledge for such purposes as energy generation and vehicle propulsion. Won't be long now. ahahaha...
which expands to the approximation
and recovers the classical kinetic energy equation (that second term) from the Lorenz contraction formulae.
Einstein is reputed to have worked for a while to try to explain away the mc^2 constant term on the front (which doesn't affect classical motion since it is constant), but it was not measurable until nuclear decay was characterized. Chemical reactions don't release enough energy for the binding-energy mass loss to be measurable, but nuclear reactions due. Every (non-failing) chemistry student is familiar with the mass deficit in bound nuclei (the atomic mass of hydrogen is more than 1/12 the atomic mass of C-12, because the C-12 nucleus is tightly bound and lost some mass/energy when it stuck together).
My point is that the mere fact that something is not measurable today does not make it completely senseless. The fact that nuclear mass deficits and corresponding energy loss during radioactive decay agreed with Einstein's relation was a major early win for Einsteinian relativity.
so maybe this energy that fills empty space is the aether that other alternative theories are looking for...
Most profound, serious shit, it is.
(in a positive way; I'm curious what interesting conclusions will be drawn from this, if it's true)
Marge: I'm worried about the kids, Homey. Lisa's becoming very obsessive. This morning I caught her trying to dissect her own raincoat.
Homer: [scoffs] I know. And this perpetual motion machine she made today is a joke! It just keeps going faster and faster.
Marge: And Bart isn't doing very well either. He needs boundaries and structure. There's something about flying a kite at night that's so unwholesome. [looks out window]
Bart: [creepy voice] Hello, Mother dear.
Marge: [closing the curtains] That's it: we have to get them back to school.
Homer: I'm with you, Marge. Lisa! Get in here.
[Lisa walks in, chuckling nervously]
In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
Developers: We can use your help.
This is already known in theoretical quantum physics. In fact NASA has funded research into it with the long range goals of achieving propellant-less propulsion.
The Casimir Effect is also an experiment that is touted as ultra-precise proof of the phenomenon.
And there are a number of tantalizing theories that are built on its existence and have been published in the usual top ranking physics journals. Some suggesting that vacuum energy is responsible for the very structure (and hence stability) of the physical universe.
For example: http://www.calphysics.org/ explores the possibility that vacuum energy fluctuations account for mass (even particle mass!), inertial forces and [through an elegant corrolary] gravity. This opens up possibilities that go well beyond star trek.
Wow, it took all those people to "reinvent" a Zero-Point Module (ZPM) device:
;)
"A ZPM is capable of generating immense amounts of energy by utilizing zero point energy which derives from a phenomenon known as the quantum foam (subatomic wormholes opening and closing constantly in and out of subspace). A ZPM contains an artificially created region of subspace from which this power is drawn. Since this process is thermodynamically irreversible, every ZPM (if used) will eventually reach maximum entropy, at which point it is depleted and can no longer provide power."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Point_Module
We knew all along that Dr. Samantha Carter is the brightest of all to figure this one out,
while it took all those people to figure that out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samantha_Carter
http://www.scifi.com/atlantis/tech/
P.S. I know, I know, it's just a sci-fi show... still! =)
"Everyone calls it the Gravity Gun. You can call it the 'Zero-point Energy Manipulator' -- if you really want."
It's quite simple you see. As shown by Ramanujan;
.... = -1/12
1 + 2 + 3 + 4
So getting energy out of empty space should be a snap!
May the Maths Be with you!
Krauss is always pulling stunts like this. I was a physics undergrad in his dept., and recall hearing about a huge prank that was pulled on a class he taught:
In Rockefeller 301, the main lecture room, there are maybe a hundred old uncomfortable desks bolted to the floor. One night, some students from his class came in, unbolted all the desks, turned them around, then bolted them back down. One of them wrote on the chalkboard in big letters, "Krauss's big head turns students away!" They had to cancel several classes early the next day, as maintenance rushed in to turn all the desks back around. The funny thing is that the comment remained on the chalkboard for a week or so after the incident--apparently everyone was in agreement about it.
Another interesting incident... at the Stephen Hawking lecture a few years ago, when the school randomly decided to give him the Michelson Morley award (basically because they would never get another person so esteemed to talk at the school), the interim president (Hundert) of the school was giving a lecture, holding the award, and getting ready to present it. As he was about to bring the award over to Hawking, Krauss does some sort of stunt in grabbing the award away from Hundert without looking weird, and takes it over to Hawking. He then gets his photo opportunity with Hawking.
I also recall earlier that day, during Krauss's lecture, and later quoted in the school paper, him mentioning that he was one of the key figures behind dark matter research, which is total nonsense.
One final example that I remember way back as a freshman: I was sitting outside the professors' offices waiting for someone, and heard some yelling, then saw Krauss's secretary run out in a total fit, tears streaming from her eyes, face bright red. She's still around today though, so they must be paying her a lot. I don't think anyone could handle him on a daily basis for less than $60k a year.
The only points I could see where gravity would be cancelled would be where multiple opposing fields intersect. Alternately - it seems that gravity from our understanding diminishes based on distance. That is to say, it gets exponentially smaller, to the effect that at some point it is lower than we can read, but it still exists at minute levels over perpetuity.
At least that's my understanding, but really such a generalization could probably be applied to many things, with the diminished effect not visible to any instrumentation we might use, but possibly existing nonetheless (heat for example).
This is fundamental Clown Theory:
Every group has a comedian hiding in their midst.
[to one who seeks to understands the universe in terms of physics alone]...
recourse has to be taken to the atoms, which are considered to be firmly fixed realities.
And because man cannot free himself in his thoughts from these firmly fixed realities,
one lets them mingle with each other, now in this way, now in that. At one time they
mingle to form hydrogen, at another, oxygen; they are merely differently grouped.
This is simply because people are incapable of any other belief than that what has
once been firmly fixed in thought must also be as firmly fixed in reality.
It is nothing else than feebleness of thought into which one lapses when he accepts
the existence of fixed, ever-enduring atoms. What reveals itself to us through thinking
that is in accordance with reality is that matter is continually dissolved away to nullity
and continually rebuilt out of nullity. It is only because whenever matter dies away,
new matter comes into being, that people speak of the conservation of matter.
They fall into the same error into which they would fall, let us say, if a number of
documents were carried into a house, copied there, but the originals burned and
the copies brought out again, and then they were to believe that what was carried in
had been carried out -- that it is the same thing.
The reality is that the old documents have been burned and new ones written.
It is the same with what comes into being in the world, and it is important for
our knowledge to advance to this point. For in that realm of man's being,
where matter dies away into semblance and new matter arises,
there lies the possibility of freedom...
this post must be rated as 'foolishness'; 'troll'.
the zero point exploit!
When the density of bugs on the inside of the trap equals the density
of bugs on the outside, then the likelyhood of a bug entering the
trap is the same as the likelyhood of a bug exiting. So no, no free power
there.
And if the trap has some sort of guidance mechanism (like a funnel) to
guide the bug into the trap, then that guidance consists of energy being
expended BY the trap ON the bug. So again, no free energy.
As science progresses it stumbles upon knowledge that was revealed in Genesis thousands of years ago.
[to one who seeks to understands the universe in terms of physics alone]...
recourse has to be taken to the atoms, which are considered to be firmly fixed realities.
And because man cannot free himself in his thoughts from these firmly fixed realities,
one lets them mingle with each other, now in this way, now in that. At one time they
mingle to form hydrogen, at another, oxygen; they are merely differently grouped.
This is simply because people are incapable of any other belief than that what has
once been firmly fixed in thought must also be as firmly fixed in reality.
It is nothing else than feebleness of thought into which one lapses when he accepts
the existence of fixed, ever-enduring atoms. What reveals itself to us through thinking
that is in accordance with reality is that matter is continually dissolved away to nullity
and continually rebuilt out of nullity. It is only because whenever matter dies away,
new matter comes into being, that people speak of the conservation of matter.
They fall into the same error into which they would fall, let us say, if a number of
documents were carried into a house, copied there, but the originals burned and
the copies brought out again, and then they were to believe that what was carried in
had been carried out -- that it is the same thing.
The reality is that the old documents have been burned and new ones written.
It is the same with what comes into being in the world, and it is important for
our knowledge to advance to this point. For in that realm of man's being,
where matter dies away into semblance and new matter arises,
there lies the possibility of freedom...
(December 19, 1920)
this post must be rated as 'foolishness'; 'troll'.
All these physicists
Might be very clever, but they
Don't left-justify!
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
Now get me a friggen ZedPM!
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
This sounds like a classic setup. A star trek "scientist" wants to find a favorable answer to reconcile the real world with his fantasy, so he:
And the end result - a nice juicy "yeah..sure.. align the phase.. inverters" answer that he sought in the first place. Call me a skeptic, but that sounds like the classic T.S.F. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fa llacy . By tampering with the normal course of the scientific method, a non-scientific answer was produced. Anyone else see a problem here?
I love imagination as much as the next guy..but c'mon...
You were such fools to doubt me.
Isaac Newton President, Royal Society
I was always fascinated with rock 'n' roll, or girls, or something like that when I was a kid. - Gary Sinise
It took all those brains to just now discover something that has been known for over 100 years?
According to Tesla's Dynamic Theory of Gravity space was never empty and could be explained by an Aether. Apparently he thought you could get energy out of space. Considering this is a hot topic on Wikipedia it would seem to me that a paradigm shift is what we need next.
Your message has content that is not, in fact, non-redundant. In fact, it is non-non-redundant.
very much willfully overlooked. As is that longitudinal electromagnetic waves are demanded as well as the transverse variety we are familiar with. As is that the electromagnetic fields we know of descend from vector and scalar potential fields.
Scientists are like cops with cases. Grounded in preconceptions and given to following ideas they like while ignoring ones they don't.
While we might end up with the wrong person in jail, scientists engaging in this sort of tunnel vision may cost us our survival because these things obviously must be integrated into our overall framework of scientific knowledge for us to progress to things like warp drive, gravity manipulation, etc. if ever. Refusing to, and trying to come up with mathematical tricks to make them go away is like trying to go straight from horse and cart to V-1 rocket while still denying vehemently the idea of lifting surfaces and ignoring airplanes and maple tree seed pods.
I don't see anyone changing their views to include things they've already ruled out publicly any time soon. Too much ego is on the line really. How can they say that something can't be done only to have something else show them to be full of it? We're not talking Vannevar Bush being shown wrong by the moonshot or Soviet bomb here. We're talking all the people VB was opposed to being shown that THEY were wrong. Not one or two, but the establishment.
So we might be waiting a while until someone creates a homebrew warp drive and antigravity system and lands their own spacecraft on the White House lawn and hands it over to the government saying, "NOW will you believe you don't know everything?!"
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
since nothing apparently equals something, when doing nothing, I am actually doing something what now mom!
- Spacey
Many physicists claim that, yes, there's such a thing as ZPE. What they don't
agree upon is that it's tappable- that the net available energy
is usable and that it's very probably sumable to zero. I've not RTFA yet, but
I suspect that all of this hullabaloo is about the fact that either we need to
rework our Physics models of the universe (yet again...), or account for what appears
to be a "small" but potentially measureable amount of net positive energy available
out of the vacuum as Physics defines it- at least that would explain the writeup
we got out of this and why it's "news". Now, whether or not we can tap this energy
or safely use it (Hey, that'd be tapping into the wheelworks- we've NO idea what
that'd do to reality as we know it...)- I suspect that he doesn't go into that
but that would be what the ZPE researchers (legitimate AND crackpot...) are trying
to find out.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Of course, Remote Viewing had already been proven to work in the U.S. government's various "psychic spy" programs...
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
I found the author to ramble and repeat himself a bit. I kept scrolling back going, "Wait, didn't I just read this?" thinking I had hit the wheel button or something.
/are/ the center of the universe? Sure makes me think twice about the whole God thing...
The thing I found most interesting out of the whole TFA, though, was this last bit:
"That is, we live in one universe, so we're a sample of one. With a sample of one, you have what is called a large sample variance. And maybe this just means we're lucky, that we just happen to live in a universe where the number's smaller than you'd predict. But when you look at CMB map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That's crazy. We're looking out at the whole universe. There's no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun -- the plane of the earth around the sun -- the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe."
Wow. What if we really
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Duh, this idea has been around and pretty much proven for a couple of years now. Sometime in the 90's I think. There's even a sci-fi book written that utilizes the phenomena. http://www.webscription.net/chapters/0743488628/07 43488628.htm?blurb
After contemplating some crazy-ass calculations that go past the realms of possibility and rationality, I have decided that this situation must be left well alone, as cracking the balance of two opposing non-energy forces will break the barrier of reality and begin a cataclysmic chain reaction which shall unleash a force of 'EVERYTHING' from 'NOTHING' causing a hideous side-effect of entropy which will destroy the very fabric of the universe at a molecular level upwards, in a very short time. Earth will vanish in less time than we can say 'blip'. In other words, abandon universe or perish!
Now if only I could put that into a reasonably lengthed mathematical formula, I could back up my mad, raving loony words.
Until then, I'll just repeat myself by saying 'Stay Away from This' and concentrate on the world's greatest and most ambitious project yet:
The Fusion Reactor. (http://www.iter.org/)
This has been known since before Tesla. He actually experimented with it. So there IS an ether after all. Like I said... this is all old news.
in my opinion empty space is defined by having no energie included. so this just proves that no empty space exists but not that empty space has energie.
I don't know, seems like the author was rambling to me. Maybe they just aren't good at compressing heady science into layman's terms without going down lots of side roads that don't appear to be relevant to the main subject.
:)
I DO NOT claim to be a physicist --- and I am not sure I would with what has been coming out of that camp lately, even I was a actual bonified physicist
TurboD
Hey, we already clean with it...
thegodmovie.com - watch it
"Stephen Hawking came"
C'mon... am I the ONLY one who thought that was funny?
Maybe gravity is a pushing force and maybe this energy this article is talking about is the one that's pushing. They're both pretty weak forces/energies right?
Big slabs of matter like planets could act like filters that filter out the pushing force. More pushing from the space side means humans stick to planets etc.
Can a mathematician check this please? do the angles etc. work out? I'm too busy handling my rent to learn enough geometry to test it myself.
If it's a valid theory, you can call it the Louis Tan theory of gravity.
Thanks in advance.
- -- Truth addict for life.
The closest I can think of is a column of water: Leave it alone and the hotter molecules should go to the top leaving the cooler ones near the bottom.
It still seems like you could extract useful work from the two ends, maybe with a heat pipe or wheel or some column of fluid that expands when it cools.
I didn't read past the intro initially, until I read your comment. I vaguely remember someone else claiming that there was a correlation in the CMB data with the ecliptic a few years back. A quick search on google brought up some published claims that the correlation exists even in the latest map. If it's a real correlation, that would suggest the CMB isn't a universal background effect, but some effect on the scale of the solar system.
Or... what you said.
sounds like a description of black hole radiation??
That structure? That's God's smile (he's probably trying not to chuckle too loud at the moment).
;).
That said, could our motion actually influence the observation?
But yeah, I found that bit quite interesting. And the other bit about x*10^120 and y*10^120 _nearly_ cancelling each other out.
Maybe we are really that exceptional, but if so, are we exceptionally significant or exceptionally insignificant?
Or we are a superposition of both and whether we end up constructively interfering with God or destructively interfering with God determines the final "observation".
I think a lot of people underestimate just how much of the Universe's energy is in the form of light. As an analogy, I remember hearing about an early spacecraft with an early computer. It had a tape drive with reels of tape. When they played the tape, it rotated and the Spacecraft rotated in the opposite direction. To fix the problem they had to rewind to zero.
The point is that little effects can add up after a while. A star burning over a few billion years can pump out some serious mass in the form of light over it's lifetime. In theory, you could calculate the amount of energy released by the ratio of helium to hydrogen and similar factors, but I suspect that this way underestimates the true number because there will be many different pathways from matter to energy in this soup, and opportunities in the extreme heat in the center for mass values to make much larger jumps than would otherwise be possible.
I would be curious to see if this has been fully taken into account.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics has an unfortunate name - people seem to perceive it as something related only to "warmness and motors and stuff", while it actually conveys an important phylosophic truth: if something is abundant and available everywhere, it takes work to pile it up in order to use it. In other words, the gradient, the inequalities of places, the existence of "piles" and empty places is what creates the action, the motion. Therefore, nothing is "tappable" which is fairly uniformly distributed everywhere and consequently, neither is ZPE.
The above poster gives the classic example for why you should not pretend that reading popularized arguments teaches you a damned thing about the actual physics. http://evolutionarydesign.blogspot.com/2006/05/ant hropic-dogma.html
www.anthropic-principle.ORG
I have two thoughts and wonder if you might take a moment to consider
them.
I loved quantum mechanics in college. I had a teacher who loved it as
well and he put significant energy into it. However, as physics
progressed mathematically outside what I could relate to physical (3D)
reality, I found it challenging to progress, and drifted away.
Anyway... the thoughts:
It would seem that there are limits on the complexity of what
different types of minds can understand. Lower life forms show some
intelligent behaviors, such as gathering food and finding mates. As
you move up the evolutionary chain, brain size increases, and the
degree of complexity of the models and capabilities a creature can
manipulate correspondingly increase. Cats and dogs can understand
some spoken words, and follow hand signals. Similarly, larger animals
have complex models of terrain and social dynamics. Elephants,
dolphins, and many primates have all been shown to have complex
language systems. However, I expect dogs can't do linear algebra or
calculus. I expect that a worm can never understand spoken words.
Even the great ape, with several hundred word vocabulary will probably
never understand the resolution of the twin paradox.
(1)
So what if the real nature of the universe is simply a model that is
too complex for the capacity of a (single) human brain to understand?
What if each human studying the physical reality of the universe is
like the dog who listens to the spoken words of a group conversation -
who probably understands a few words out of context, but really has no
chance of understanding why everyone is laughing?
---
So I do a lot of work with computers now. Humans are moving rapidly
forward making our machines more functional, and the rate of that
progress is also increasing.
Many projects (for example, Ruby on Rails) is promoting extensive
"metaprogramming" - where code dynamically generates more code. We
have programming systems that are quickly (on ~5 year horizons)
approaching novel language creation simultaneous with application
development, that then enables significant leaps in functionality with
respect to human interactions with computers. I am following and
participating in these trends with great excitement.
These and other trends make me feel strongly that computers will
approximate and exceed human modeling capacity within my lifetime
(another ~60 years). My best guess would be that within 15 years we
will see computers that exhibit all outward verbal signs that they are
conscious and "understand". It is a philosophical debate as to
whether a machine will ever really be conscious, but I think they will
eventually be indistinguishable from conscious behavior, which is close
enough.
One could assert that even now, computers can manage models of
information much more complex than any human can manage (a 5 MB
spreadsheet, as a trivial example). Over time, I would posit that
computers' models will continue to conform more closely to ones we
humans care about and consider important for "intelligent behavior".
I'm being very vague, (as I'm sure you're quite busy) -- but... to
jump forward,
(2)
Maybe the solution to figuring out the underlying nature of the
universe will only occur once we have more intelligent computers that
can manage information models far more complex than the human mind can
manage?
It appears that I was wrong about the prank, although I place the blame on the person from whom I heard it second-hand; I clearly recall him saying it was in Rock 301, and that it was a class of Krauss's, and that those exact words were written on the board. It was inappropriate for me to jump to this conclusion without more evidence.
As for the Hawking lecture, I was there, and whether it was intentional or not, I remember thinking immediately that Krauss had "swiped" the award from Hundert to present to Hawking.
As for the dark matter quote in the school paper, it sounded much more exaggerated than reality, and I recall several students in the dept saying the statement was ridiculous; I myself have not looked at Krauss's published papers. It was inappropriate for me to jump to this conclusion without more evidence.
As for the secretary, I only assumed that it had something to do with Krauss, since I had seen him go into the office, and I didn't see any evidence that she was physically hurt; regardless, I found that whole event quite appalling, and it stuck with me. It was inappropriate for me to jump to this conclusion without more evidence.
So, in the end, it's obvious I'm quite bitter, more about the entire school than just the physics dept, and I apologize for jumping to conclusions, and trusting hearsay.