BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 02:10 PM

I can't give you a reference yet, but you can see two clocks, your own and that of the particle as indicated by it's decay rate.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 02:00 PM

That's just the theory I've already outlined. I repeat: who proved it by experiment, and where were the results published?

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 01:28 PM

Susan was correct. If particles of a radioactive isotope are accellerated to relativistic speeds, their decay rate becomes slower than predicted by the formulae because of time dilation
Keith.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 11:58 AM

Yes gnu, and I'm about to give it up for the real thing.

I went on a clean-up rampage about 3 months ago, so I could store more books on folk songs and music and other old songs and music (The next step is to go naked, because my clothes closet is the only space left). I tossed out old notebooks of physics and chem lab experiments, and the lecture notes of Marcell Ries' short course on relativity theory, and the translations of early German articles on quantum mechanics. I kept the more modern works ones on quantum mechanics, chemistry, spectroscopy and math (methods including Fourier transform and convolution theory, polynomial transforms, Shannon's 'Information Theory', 1954, noise in measurments-basically stuff I still use)

Also missing is an old Dover reprint that had translations of Einstein's original articles on Brownian motion (basically the foundations of noise theory), photoelectric effect, and relativity theory, and I don't seem to have anything left on relativity.

I'm soon to be off here for a while, as I'm again a temporarily unretired physicist with an optical design job to do for a high resolution Fourier transform system. The long path absorption cell will be the same as that descibed in paper #53 in the VITA on my website. [Basic design equations are in pper #34.] It's still working beautifully according to the fellow that has it now. We'll just copy it for the new system, and the blue prints are in (ASCII) CAD files already sent. I'm waiting for JEPGs or GIFs of the lab so I see where I have space to put the transfer optics, and design a vacuum tank to put around them. [One on my retired co-workers came back to NIST and stuck up his nose at my White cell. He had gotten excellent data from the one at the Justus Liebig Institute at Giessen. The builder of the one at Giessen told me in an email Monday that she had bigger mirrors, surplus and for free, so she just scaled up my design to fit with their mirrors, even copying my zero astigmatism White cell image arrangement. If B. W. isn't the best in the world in that business, she's probably tied for it. Such is life some times. Some body else gets most of the credit for your work.]

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: gnu
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 10:46 AM

What Do Physicists Think About What ? or is that a philosophical question ?

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 10:38 AM

Susan, whot reported the effects of relativity on radioactive decay rate, and where was it published (details please)

The obvious effect is trivial. Take your radioactive sample, and your Gieger counter (or whatever you measure with. It depends on what the decay products are, as to how you detect them) and your clock for measuring the time and run with all of it at about 99% of the speed of light. Now just what time do you use in that t/tau? You can only see one clock, and what other clock agrees with it?.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Liam's Brother
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 10:23 AM

It doesn't matter what they think about, I can't understand it.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Wolfgang
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 09:56 AM

The last time I heard a lecture on special relativity was more than 30 years ago.
If someone single-handely in one article (1) revises one of the best-tested theories of a century, (2) performs an experiment that defies all standard predictions and (3) derives some new math for ellipses, if this person has no university affiliation, if he is given the last possible time slot in a German physics conference in a subgroup titled 'alternative approaches' (if you have ever organised a conference you know what that means) then the probability is extremely high that he's a crank, a maverick, a quack.

I haven't tried to understand all he writes, but my quack detector has sounded alarm:
(1) Feist's way of citing is quite unconventional (only very old articles and of recent times only more or less popular books).
(2) His way of formulating hypotheses is not that of someone open to refutation but of someone who knows beforehand what he'll find.
(3) He doesn't ask the obvious questions (assuming for the sake of argument he is right) like why the myons arising from cosmic radiation reaching the outer atmosphere can be detected by counters on earth when they on the average only travel for about 600 m without the benefit of relativistic time dilation (I think that is what is alluded to in Susan's post).

There are many lively debates about relativity and some alternative theories (relativity has won all tests yet except for those theories making identical predictions), but this is from a tiny subgroup of relativity revisionists. They are about as right as holocaust revisionists, though I guess much nicer on a personal level.

Wolfgang

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 01:16 AM

Einstein's Theory of Relativity is far from my area of specialty. I had a course in it, but at that time I was still a chemist, and didn't understand much of it.

I don't know that radioactive decay had anything to do with relativity. So far as I know it's the simple first order decay found in many chemical and physical processes. The basic statement leading to the equation below is that the rate of decay is proportional to the amount you have.

A = A₀e^-t/tau

where (Greek) tau is just a constant times the half-life. (half-life is really an awkward way to specify the decay parameter, and I think it's done that way so a layman can get a sort of feel for it) A is the amount that was radioactive at time = t and A₀ was the amount that was radioactive at time t=0, and when you start is arbitrary as long as you measure t from the time you start (A being measured in number of atoms (or units of mass) in your fixed sized sample, no matter what the actual size is as long as it's constant (previously decayed + undecayed).) I think you can probably find tables (the most up-to-date ones) of half-lifes on the NIST website, if not, then almost any handbook of physics will have such a table.

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Susan from California
Date: 18 Apr 01 - 12:40 AM

Hi Bruce O

And another thing: the thing Amos quoted says that Einstein's relativity is wrong, but given that radioactive decay of accelerated particles seem to be slowed down as predicted by relativity, wouldn't a refutation of relativity call into question a whole lot of what we know about physics in other areas?

your "not a physicist, just a physics teacher" friend Keith

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 17 Apr 01 - 10:45 PM

I'm not sure that Norbert Feist stuff isn't quackery. Some sleuthing on the web turns up an abstact of a paper he gave which goes back to even more ancient history. He's at a small town, Gersthofen, a few miles north of Augsburg (NW of Munich).

I might get a read on him if I could locate a friend, Prof. E. S. at Technical University, Munich, but can't find his email address, and he's apparently back in the USA giving a talk at Wesleyan Univ. this week, but their website calendar is screwed up- at least I can't find him on the page that Google turns up for him [his father was German and his mother was American (as is his wife Angela) but I'm not sure whether he consider himself a German or an American]. We studied together to get through the French reading exams as grad students. He pronounced French as if it were German, and I did it as if it were English, and it got pretty funny at times. We got through the exam, because we didn't have to pronounce any French for it.

The Michelson-Morley (ether drift) experiment has already been reanalyzed to death, without turning up anything new of any importance. Michelson was a really great experimentalist, and not many would want to try to duplicate his work in order to do the experiment over.

[My last specialty of high resolution Fourier transform spectroscopy is based on the insrument's Michelson interferometer. You move the moving Michelson mirror, then measure the light intensity, you move it again by the same amount and again measure the light intensity. After 100,000 to a million such move/measure cycles you have the interferogram]

Subject: RE: BS: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Amos
Date: 17 Apr 01 - 09:34 PM

Part I of this stimulating scientifistic thread can be found over here.

Regards,

A

Subject: What Do Physicists Think About? II
From: Amos
Date: 17 Apr 01 - 09:31 PM

And sometimes they go back scores of years in time just to think about things in a new series or a new direction, as here:

Title: A speech for the luminiferous ether
Authors: Norbert Feist
Comments: 20 pages in German, inclusive of 15 figures
Subj-class: General Physics
\\
  There is no aberration of terrestrial sources, because the light-vector has
an inertial component. A new analysis of the Michelson Morley experiment shows:
Light propagates anisotropically relative to a moving system, dependent on the
velocity and the angle between the velocity and the direction of motion. The
two way (back and forth) velocity is isotropic, but also dependent on the
velocity of the frame. There is no Lorentz contraction. - A real ultrasonic
experiment shows: Also the propagation of sound follows the given general
conical section equation and an acoustical Michelson Morley experiment gives
the same zero result as the optical experiment in contrast to the school of
thought. - The theory of relativity is incorrect and the existence of a
luminiferous ether as a propagation medium and an absolute frame of reference
is again obvious. Some properties of the ether and a fundamental cause of the
dependency of the velocity on the mass and the frequency are presented.
\\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/physics/0104047 ,  184kb)