Hello:

Time will never have an arrow. Spacetime will, from the space part. If you take Minkowski's advice, that one should only think about spacetime, not time or space, then Carroll's question is poorly formed. It is good English, bad mathematical physics. Since Minkowski's observation was based on work with special relativity, people presume is observation applies only for relativistic systems. Sorry, Nature is more consistent than that: one needs to think about spacetime always, even if it contributes squat. Newton's 2nd law can be written F = m (d/dt. 0, 0, 0)^2 (0, x, y, z). What makes it classical are all the zeroes that appear in the spacetime operators.The handedness of times arrow comes from the space part whose contributions are stupidly small, but add up enough of them, and they are irreversible.

Hello: Time for me to fight the LHC propaganda machine with my own efforts. The unified standard model doesn't need the Higgs mechanism. http://www.zazzle.com/the_stand_up_physicist_said_tshirt-235942932145293980

Just like car racing, I want to watch.

It is Storytelling versus the Scientific Method, both done by people.

People have been telling stories - meaning making shit up - since the advent of language. If I was a storyteller, I would say that happened 120,000 years ago on a grassy plane when when one guy hunting warned his buddy about a lion on his left. A scientist would give a huge range of years, large tracks of land, and a long list of other qualifiers to describe when storytelling began.

The modern scientific method began about 400 years ago. A historian of science could give important events and dates. Nature doesn't want to give up her answers. It takes training to learn how to question.

There are many profitable storytelling businesses: movies, music, and the news. News organizations tell stories. Some try to make sure the story is accurate, an art called editing. Some try to get lots of attention. That can be done using pretty woman or hyping conflict.

In science, you can tell someone they are wrong. You can write out the reason they are wrong. And that wrong person can continue to claim they are correct. I have done that with someone who claims to have shown Einstein's special theory of relativity is wrong, all it takes is a little algebra. He is paying Google to advertise his message to the world. I looked into his math. If you only have a little algebra, you would not recognize a linear system of equations. I wrote him, making an effort to explain the idea that Nature sometimes uses 4 equations in place of 1 for spacetime, and it is wrong to think one of those four should say exactly the same thing as the others. He did not accept this idea, and ads to Google's sales to this day. Accepting a critique is rare.

There will always be many places for storytellers to complain about the process and results of the scientific method. These conflict can get personal, they can get ugly. Storytellers can profit from that situation.

Doug Sweetser
Telling stories of new visual math at visualphysics.org

Hello:

I don't know about your unified field theory, but mine predicts there is no Higgs particle. The standard model works so long as no particle has mass. That is silly. To get around the problem, there is the Higgs mechanism. The standard model + the Higgs mechanism says not a thing about gravity. Oops.

Why I do is rewrite the Maxwell action using quaternions. The scalar is exactly the same as the tensor approach, B^2 - E^2. Because I am using quaternions which can form products (unlike tensors), I can represent SU(2) - also know as the unit quaternions with quaternions (duh). It is a simple exercise to write the gauge invariant action with all the symmetries of the standard model (U(1), SU(2), and SU(3)).

To get to gravity, switch out the rules of multiplication. These types of numbers are known as hypercomplex numbers, and are even less popular that quaternions. Crank through Euler-Langrange, and out pops the field equations which in the static case is Newton's law.

What is particularly fun is that one can combine the gauge-invariant Maxwell action with the gauge-invariant relativistic gravity action in a way where both of the field strength tensors are gauge-dependent, but those cancel each other out, leaving the action gauge-invariant. It is all up on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrVW4QG8ei4 for a talk I gave last weekend at an APS meeting.

Doug

One needs U(1) symmetry, SU(2), SU(3), and a way to do oh-so-symmetric gravity. SU(2) is known as the unit quaternions, or one way to write a representation is exp(q - q*). That uses 3/4 degrees of freedom in a quaternion.

U(1) is Abelian, usually taught to people who accept what they are given as a normalized complex number. Note that q/|q| exp(q - q*) = exp(q - q*) q/|q| because the normalized quaternion commutes with its exponential. Hello electroweak symmetry.

Take two of these, multiply them together, and you get another element of the group because that is group theory. Toss in a conjugate operator, that changes the multiplication table, but the norm stays the same. Eight numbers go in, something with a norm of 1 comes out. Sounds like a way to represent SU(3). You are so right, it ain't associative, a huge pain, but that is how the strong force behaves.

The road to gravity will not be paved with quaternions. It requires the hypercomplex numbers. Drop that into a Maxwell-like action, and out pops a version of Newton's law that has a time dependent term, and thus no need for general relativity. It is gauge invariant in only one special case: for a massless particle. Otherwise it will politely break gauge symmetry without messing up the U(1), SU(2), and SU(3) symmetries that appear when using quaternions in the action. No Higgs mechanism needed.

For the record, I refused to take my meds while certified.

Doug
visualphysics.org
hoping to animate any expression in mathematical physics

The Higgs will not be necessary when gravitational theory is correctly unified with the other 3 forces of Nature. Think about it. The standard model is about 3 of the 4 known forces of Nature: EM, the weak, and the strong force. Problem is all that is done for particles with Zero mass. The Higgs mechanism fixes this obvious problem without breaking the symmetries of the other 3 (U(1), SU(2), and SU(3)) using a cute Mexican hat trick.

When gravity is unified with the other 3 forces, there will be no need for the Mexican hat trick because gravitational mass will break the symmetry politely. Of course I know how to do this by first writing the Maxwell equations using quaternions, then doing a rewrite using hypercomplex numbers to nab gravity because Nature uses two sets of division algebra, thus outfoxing the string theory clowns by being clever in 4D.

Doug
visualphysics.org

Hello:

Thanks for spending about an hour at the site :-) No one has played analytically with animations since infancy, so these images are odd. I find I have to spend 10 minutes with people explaining the 4D wire cube, that the vertices are traveling in time.

I hope that the rhetoric was limited to the "slams" page. One motivator in physics is putting another serious camp down. The one pathologically rude person I know promotes work on strings. As long as the harsh critiques are about areas of study and not people, I will let them remain on the slams page. When looking at other sections of the site, I hope to make sure it stays technical. Some of that tone may get into the forums, but that might be unavoidable. I will be more aware of that now.

Professors are absurdly busy. The only ones I do email from time to time are folks I have chatted with in person (1-2/year, rarely get replies, don't expect them either). I get the fringe emails too, and always look into the work. My first screen is to see if it has any math. Half do not have any. The second screen is to see if they talk about actions, Hamiltonians, or Lagrangians. None has passed the second test.

There was a web site a while ago that had collected a list of fringe sites, including the fellow who claims TIME IS MASS, always in capital letters. My site was in a special section of odd-and-not-quite-fringe (I forget how he phrased it, or the URL for that matter).

One dream I have is going through Needham's book and animating everything he writes about. That would be quite the mountain time, and I can only do this work after the 9-5 job and family effort are done and some lunch time. Those are my time constraints.

After an hour on VisualPhysics, and some time on quaternions.com, you get a sense of what I am working on. That is too much to reasonably ask from technical people. I don't know how to solve the social riddle - "I'm the one fringe guy that is not utterly-useless fringe" - so I don't worry too much about it. All I can do is make more content. My current focus is on simple harmonic oscillators. Once again the result was not what I expected, but so it goes.

Again, thanks for your time and effort.
Doug, sweetser@alum.mit.edu

Just turn all your math into movie, and the crowds will follow (someday).

Doug
VisualPhysics.org

Minkowski, Einstein's teach wrote:

What physicists do now is put spacetime into a 4-vector, to be added or multiplied by a scalar. They do not multiply one event in spacetime by another, or take the sine of an event in spacetime. My money says no one here knows what the sine of spacetime events looks like. When you take Minkowski seriously and start doing math beyond addition to spacetime, everything changes.

Doug

Hello:

Sentences like this are silly: "His theory states that the known universe is only a 2D construct in anti-de-Sitter space, projected into 3 dimensions."

No, the Universe has 3 spatial dimensions and one for time. If you take spacetime seriously, writing software to animate equations in 3D space + time, then you can get visual insights into physics that make sense.

Take EM. It has a symmetry called U(1), but non-technical people can understand it as a circle (in the complex plane for the technical folks). If you have an electrical charge, then you have a circle in a complex plane so you have the symmetry U(1), visualphysics.org/forums Why is electric charge quantized? Because you can count circles.

Doug
http://VisualPhysics.org

Hello: I just launched the web site http://visualphysics.org/ last week. See if they can download the software, install it, and make animations of physics problems. The number of animations are countable. Anything with 3 spacial dimensions and time can be animated, no exceptions.

Doug

The Schwarzschild solution assumes the source is static, spherically symmetric, non-rotating, and uncharged. There are other solutions that have rotation and electric charge. A small volume of spacetime with an enormous amount of mass is not going to be static, as in not changing in time. The Einstein field equations are too tough to solve exactly for a metric changing in both time and space, so people try to approximate a solution. Most people who work on black hole physics don't even do that much, sticking with Schwarzschild to see what that manifestly innappropriate metric implies.

Yes, there are small places with LOTS of mass, but no, we don't describe the math correctly at this time.

Hello:

Been working on my own unified field theory in the basement. It is a variation on the Maxwell equations, the ones that are cow-roped to quantum mechanics unlike GR which doesn't play the game. The trick is to write the Maxwell action using quaternions, then swap in hypercomplex numbers for the quaternions (use wikipedia, those are real math terms).

To make the hypercomplex numbers a division algebra, that can be done by removing zero and all Eigenvalues of their matrix representation. That has consequences for quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics one looks for what all the Eigenvalues of a particular equation can be - those are the only values that can be observed. The calculation one does is to determine the odds of being at each particular value.

In my work with hypercomplex numbers, the system cannot ever be at its Eigenvalue. I have no idea how it is going to pan out, but it will not be like the other three known forces of Nature.

Doug

Is it possible to make videos to show on all this hardware? I also did not see anything about what OS was required. "Gaming" often implies PCs.