Why is our universe so complicated?

[Kasuha]

I have accidentally found this somewhat aged (2003) talk by Stephen Wolfram. Mr. Wolfram is somewhat controversial person and part of his talk is clear advertisement but I found some of his ideas and observations very interesting.

[Tim_BandTechDotCom]

I'll take a stab at your fundamental question.

The reason is that we've expressed our understanding of the universe through the wrong basis, and when we get the basis correct it will not appear so complicated.

This is an optimistic viewpoint that declares the problems(all of them) open. Not so long ago thermodynamics was considered mysterious, and I think it would be wise to keep it so. Any who accept that heat is atoms vibrating are failing to distinguish acoustic properties from heat, and will ignore the rates of propagation of each. How these details come to be overlooked... the weakness of the human mind... mimicry as the basis of our language and understanding... the possibility of falsification which these behaviors will not automatically generate...

The divorce of physics from philosophy and mathematics is not realistic. We are humans practicing these things, and we come from a blank slate. Is it any wonder that the first attempts are wrong? That future attempts will remain open to reassessment? Yes, the problems remain open to superior future solutions. The old fundamentals are not dead and done, though the modern academic system will paint them that way. Likewise it is the best mimics who are the most rewarded within the academic system. Such behaviors are highly unscientific and nonmathematical, and this is the human state.
We are social animals of limited character, and are only just coming to understand ourselves better. Some of our strongest abilities are in the manipulation of materials, and not in the theoretical explanation of those manipulations, and hence experimental physics leads the theoretical by leaps and bounds.

[tswsl1989]

The reason is that we've expressed our understanding of the universe through the wrong basis, and when we get the basis correct it will not appear so complicated.

And yet so many things work and we can predict so much. What is the "correct" basis for understanding the universe?

Any who accept that heat is atoms vibrating are failing to distinguish acoustic properties from heat, and will ignore the rates of propagation of each.

I suggest you take a course in condensed matter physics, where these two properties are dealt with. There's a good book by Kittel that should address most of that point.

[Tim_BandTechDotCom]

I have Kittel, and no, he does not address the discrepancy between the rate of propagation of heat versus the rate of propagation of acoustic vibration in matter. The book that I have is Introduction To Solid State Physics, 5th edition.

He shows experiments of heat into the gigahertz, or at least that is the claim. I propose a simple experiment on a bar of steel one meter long:

Compare two sources:
1. a pin vibrates at 1000 Hertz at one end of the steel bar; whatever power you like.
2. a hot soldering iron touches the end of the steel bar; pencil tip for best equivalence comparison, but to get any decent propagation it'll have be some powerful iron.

To what degree heat is vibrating atoms is readily exposed within the awareness of this experiment, which I have never found a discussion of in the thermodynamics texts or on the web. I do recall recently reading something about group velocity in an advanced text that seemed to wash the subject clean, but you see these point sources in the experiment, and we are left with such a large lag time to measure any heat signal along a meter of steel. These cannot both be vibrating atoms. It just does not make any sense, and so I declare thermodynamics an open problem.

[tswsl1989]

Sound = transmission of pressure through the structure of the material
Heat = motion of atoms due to energy

[Kasuha]

I'll take a stab at your fundamental question.

There was no fundamental question. The name of the thread is rhetorical, an attempt to answer is in the talk.

Sure there are cases where we can make good predictions, but these appear to be very special cases. The more common cases are in fact things like weather forecasts ... or predictions like what seed you will meet next while drilling a granite block.

[Tim_BandTechDotCom]

I'll take a stab at your fundamental question.

There was no fundamental question. The name of the thread is rhetorical, an attempt to answer is in the talk.

Sure there are cases where we can make good predictions, but these appear to be very special cases. The more common cases are in fact things like weather forecasts ... or predictions like what seed you will meet next while drilling a granite block.

Well, I still think it's a great question.

I'll stand by my answer as a positive and enlightening approach, though it may go unwelcome. I did just catch most of the talk, though I missed the spot on Diophantine equations and nearly rewound the thing to get the gist.

Wolfram introduces a principle of emergence within NKS, and I do find that context enlightening. In fact when married to spacetime this search will lead to the work of Klinger and quantum gravity theories. I myself happen to have some mathematics with spacetime support, and the results challenge numerous assumptions that have been made within existing mathematics and physics.

Wolfram quickly dismisses unified spacetime and never looks back. This is fine, but at the end of the talk he is likewise dodging the question of metastability, whose full definition I know not, but the lack of confession from Wolfram is disappointing. Still, much of what he says is very sensible, and his principle of computational correspondence can be sited as support of what I've stated on a malbasis. Each time that we pick a value due to an experimental criterion, such as to pick three dimensions since we observe a three dimensional space, then the boundary between theoretical and experimental physics has been crossed, so that all of 'theory' which relies upon such a choice without any theoretical basis is flawed.

The position is completely defensible, for what else is one to do, until the support arises? The string theorists find it convenient to approach the problem in higher dimension, all the while never explaining how the lower three come to be. Then there is that standout, time, whose behavior is hardly one dimensional.

Within the problem of thermodynamics as I have posed it, we see a simple geometrical puzzle. As I see it there are two ways out:
1. remain in 3D space: this solution will likely require the treatment of rotational principles as orthogonal to translational principles, thereby acquiring room for both thermal conduction and acoustical conduction; the thermal conduction being a rotational form, and thus coming into chorus with the states of matter as rotational degrees of freedom; the solid state being that of atomic rotations as springs which return as the spring of a clock can oscillate with fair isolation from its surroundings, thence upward to a liquid form, whereby that spring's surroundings can no longer fully support its isolation; thereby allowing unending rotational freedom rather than a standard spring return; thence onward to the gas state, whereby the rotational behaviors have become strong enough to causate translational reactions, as would two balls spinning in opposition to one another which are suddenly brought into contact, though they were spinning peacefully nearby each other prior to contact.
2. head for higher dimension: though this portion of theory does not seem to be necessary(in light on 1.) it may nevertheless be a convenience in terms of computation, and if that computation does form a coherency beyond that of 1., then by this correspondence 2. may be regarded as superior to 1. It would be wise to recover spacetime within this interpretation rather than obey the old assumption, for that assumption is broken within the new theory.

Here I would stress that the divorce of the physicist from the philosopher is a weakness that has been schooled out of many, and while we all are mimics by nature, we must grant ourselves some freedom at some point in order to break out of that state of mimicry.

[Tim_BandTechDotCom]

Here is Richard Feinman, whom I do love, but whom I am likewise not afraid to challenge:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3pYRn5j ... re=related

This description of 'jiggling atoms' is a topic that I attempt to address within this thread, mainly to substantiate the malbasis of modern physics. So long as there is no discernment between the acoustic motions within matter and the thermal motions, then the huge discrepancy of their rates of propagation cannot be addressed, and this I site as Feynman's own weakness of interpretation, and the finest instance that even the finest humans do suffer the mimicry problem. Were He to approach this problem from a blank slate, then I suspect He would bump into this problem, and call it out, just as I do.

Simply consider a steel rod, or better yet a glass rod, and the jiggling that Feynman describes. The rate of thermal propagation is extraordinarily slow, and he fails to explain this slowness, especially in light of how rapidly acoustic disturbances of the slightest form will propagate so rapidly through the same rod. Please consider point sources for each disturbance, so as to maintain some symmetry of thought.

I submit that rotational properties of atoms and molecules will suffice to isolate thermal conduction, and that these properties will lead into the study of the rotational moment of the atom itself, which under the standard model can only be slight, but under this new thermodynamic model must be greater, and such a flaw in the basis corrupts much of existing physics, and this sort of behavior is beyond the ability of the entrenched system to deal with. I await falsification of this statement, and welcome such. Further, I am open to being corrected, yet I am not open to cloned responses of old, where this discussion does not seem to have taken place, or has been wiped away because of its inconvenience.

[Kasuha]

I don't see any problem with difference of speed of thermal diffusion compared to speed of sound waves propagating through the same material. Imagine you have a bucket and put two viscous paint colors to it. To make them completely mixed will take a while even though every molecule of each needs to travel relatively short distance (all within limits of the bucket). And halfway through that process you can take the whole bucket to the other side of the town and then wonder how comes transporting it for such a long distance did not really improve anything on the ratio how much the two paints are mixed.

[Tim_BandTechDotCom]

I don't see any problem with difference of speed of thermal diffusion compared to speed of sound waves propagating through the same material. Imagine you have a bucket and put two viscous paint colors to it. To make them completely mixed will take a while even though every molecule of each needs to travel relatively short distance (all within limits of the bucket). And halfway through that process you can take the whole bucket to the other side of the town and then wonder how comes transporting it for such a long distance did not really improve anything on the ratio how much the two paints are mixed.

You've gone to the liquid state here, and I'd prefer to remain in the solid form. Still, I agree that even if you travelled 1000 km at 1000 km/hr there will be little mixing, other than that caused during the acceleration phases of your trip. I don't see this analogy as a fit to the problem.

Let's consider a position at one end of a one meter rod of crystal whose motion is
0.000001 sin( 1000(2pi) t ) meters
relative to the table that the crystal sits on, padded by a thick blanket of itchy fiberglass insulation, so as to provide both thermal and acoustic insulation from the table. This sinusoidal motion is intended to be along the length of the crystal.

Is this motion heat or is this motion sound? How do we distinguish the two if they are both the same thing? Is this material jiggling as Feynman describes? Isn't sound too?
Now really, how on earth can we give the same material these two freedoms of translation, yet get such wildly different behaviors from each property?

Heat applied at the end of a crystal rod will not necessarily destroy the crystalline nature, and will pass very slowly through the rod relative to sound which will propagate many orders of magnitude faster. In the case of a glass rod you may never even witness a change at the other end of the rod. Meanwhile just as soon as you ding one end at the other end the sound will come out.

There is a lack of distinction between heat and acoustic phenomenon within the modern interpretation that is not acceptable. Yes, these behaviors are carefully described by experimental values, but the idea that heat is 'jiggling atoms' is inconsistent. Sound is jiggling atoms, and especially in a solid such jigglings conduct rapidly. Heat is too slow to fit this description. Heat conduction is really sloooowwww.

[Kasuha]

I don't see any lack of terminology. Sound is coherent motion, heat is chaotic motion if you want. Maybe even more sophisticated definition exists, real physicists don't have problems finding proper terms to describe what they have on mind. And don't forget there are at least two 'modes' of sound that could propagate through solid bodies and each of them even has different speed of propagation: transverse and longitudinal. Which of them do you think is the "true" speed of sound?
If you think about it the only thing you realize is that "sound" is proprietary definition - it says sound is everything we can hear, i.e. any wave from 16 Hz to 22 kHz represented by coherent matter motion that can propagate through our hearing system. But if fact matter can move many other ways we can hardly call sound - does it mean that motion doesn't exist or is worse than others?
By the way, you should read a bit about plasma speakers - they are pretty nice example of hearable sound generated by heat.

[Tim_BandTechDotCom]

Alright, Kasuha, I've looked at the wiki on plasma speakers a bit and thank you for the suggestion, though I don't honestly understand the plasma state very well yet. I understand that electromagnetic constraints are claimed to dictate plasma behavior, and that high frequency RF is enough to generate it, but also see it in my woodstove. Still, this is more exotic than the heat of a solid, so I would like to return to the problem, and stress that the falsification of my statements should be quite easy given the well established theory, which is being contradicted by me.

There is more distinction needed, and I see that you struggle to make that distinction by naming heat 'chaotic'. Now, I know that this could be seen as insulting, but what I would most like an explanation for is the extraordinarily slow propagation of heat.

This detail is the detail that I hinge my argument upon. I do not mean to state that sound is heat. No, not at all, and that is more what the ordinary interpretation is. I agree that there are multiple modes of sound, and that both sound and heat can pass through a crystal of arbitrary dimensions. I mention crystal here so that we observe an ordered state of matter that is not so easily manipulated as a gas or a liquid, where the ordinary definition of heat seems most believable in the gas state(and your own reliance upon a chaotic motion), though there we should admit that gases are considered to be very good insulators, even while their kinetic properties are more active than are the solid form's, at least within the modern interpretation.

I agree that there is an issue of coherency, and that the theory that I suggest could derive coherent heat, and that the ordinary interpretation is providing a false mechanism. This mechanism was once regarded as an utter mystery, as was electromagnetics, and Maxwell's own work did intend to unite them. His own interpretations of magnetic fields went so far as to consider that magnetic flux was a circulation of space itself; an interpretation that has been filtered out. I don't mean to cause another tangent here, but am willing to flow a bit. Rotation is in the heart of electromagnetics, and I am claiming that rotation resolves heat as well. Can you see the level of isolation that is available under rotation? It better fits the rate of propagation, and even bolsters your chaotic consideration, for a chain of such rotational interactions will be a function of delays which are strongly internetworked. Within a crystalline structure these rotations can be a degree of freedom, whereas translations cannot be, unless they fracture the crystal. For you to achieve the thermal state within a crystal will be like claiming the crystal to be a liquid. Elastic? yes, marginally, but liquid? No! Upon perturbing one crystal location (an atom) you should admit that these forces propagate extremely quickly to the nearest neighbors, and further that the level of dissipation will be extemely high; this is a fast rate of propagation and we need a slow rate of propagation. As I understand it the acoustic properties go onward into the gigaHertz range, and while heat does become radiant and has predictable curves in terms of radiance versus frequency, that the properties that we are discussing are in a much slower range far beneath the speed of light. We are discussing the rate of propagation of heat, at least that is what I would like, but now I've altered your thread, and if you'd like we could take it up elsewhere. I merely meant it as an argument on the basis.

[Kasuha]

If you keep heating a crystal it will melt (unless it undergoes another kind of transition, e.g. chemical). So you can only speak about heat in solids up to their melting temperature, above which the forces keeping individual pieces of the crystal mass (atoms or molecules) are no more strong enough to keep them in place. Makes sense to me.

If heat was rotation, the crystal molecules would have to break by heating up before the crystal structure would break but that is not what is happening in reality, whatever matter you use in your solid (ice and resin are good examples I believe, ice with very small and resin with very large molecules).

[Tim_BandTechDotCom]

Your argument does not falsify my falsification of existing theory. Thermal conductivity in solids is known and quantified, and does not require a reconfiguration of the atomic structure. By using a crystalline structure the effect is most impressive, and again you have dodged the fundamental crux of my argumentation: the rate of heat propagation is extremely slow; with no interpretation as to why this is so. The lack of distinction between acoustic conduction and thermal conduction is not satisfactory.

You say

"If heat was rotation, the crystal molecules would have to break by heating up before the crystal structure would break but that is not what is happening in reality, whatever matter you use in your solid (ice and resin are good examples I believe, ice with very small and resin with very large molecules)."

This is fair thinking, and I am offering a replacement theory for a flawed interpretation of thermodynamics. If I am correct, then numerous mistakes of interpretation have taken place. For instance, the rotational moment of an individual atom should be miniscule according to the standard model, but I suspect that the measure will be greater when this theory is fully stated. What does this mean? In some ways it means that your interpretation above is sort of correct, but that you haven't gone far enough with it.

Let's just consider a spinning nucleus, and that a finite amount of energy can be attributed to this nuclear rotation; its own freedoms of rotation somewhat independent of the electron shells and their geometry, but still with some freedom. Now we have interactions between this rotational moment and those shells, but not necessarily strong interactions; somewhat as an incandescent substance can glow for quite some time before dissipating its radiant energy.

This above interpretation attempts to stay within the standard model, but if we are to truly get sizable energy out of the nuclear rotation, then it cannot be minuscule. It is easy to still get rotational moment out of molecular rotations, but then wouldn't we be into the liquid state? With the exception of coherent molecular rotations that will still retain a crystalline structure I believe we would be crossing the boundary. Here again it is so important to maintain the solid state and challenge the interpretation of heat flow within it, where the behavior is well behaved, but the mechanistic interpretation of vibrating atoms cannot quite stand freely.

[Kasuha]

Well, I am not coming here to disprove your fantasies, so if you prefer them to reasonable explanations of physical phenomena, have fun with them.