We're back to needing an ether?
July 5, 2010 12:23 PM Subscribe
I just finished Before the Big Bang by Ernest Sternglass. What's the other side of his argument?
As I understand it, the single most contentious claim the author is making is that there exists an ether. I'm of two minds about this: on the one hand, I don't like using a thing for which evidence can neither be prevented for or against as an explanation. On the the other, if gravity is the deformation of space caused by matter, then... isn't that pretty much the ether?
I'm pretty incapable of evaluating whether or not his models explain and predict observed results as well as he claims they do, but he's pretty persuasive on that front.
Are there any sort of lay summaries of objections to his model of matter? The only one I could come up with on my own is that, AFAIK, astronomers have observed what they consider to be collisions between two galaxies. It seems to me that Sternglass's model for the universe would make such collisions unlikely, but that's just my intuition. Does anyone know if he's ever addressed that question?
I don't have an especially vested interest in rejecting or accepting his model, I just thought it was a neat book and (especially since he repeatedly states that his view is unpopular among theoretical physicists) I figure there's another side to the coin.
Thanks in advance to anyone willing to attempt a lay explanation of thing, I know it's often a fruitless quest.
As I understand it, the single most contentious claim the author is making is that there exists an ether. I'm of two minds about this: on the one hand, I don't like using a thing for which evidence can neither be prevented for or against as an explanation. On the the other, if gravity is the deformation of space caused by matter, then... isn't that pretty much the ether?
I'm pretty incapable of evaluating whether or not his models explain and predict observed results as well as he claims they do, but he's pretty persuasive on that front.
Are there any sort of lay summaries of objections to his model of matter? The only one I could come up with on my own is that, AFAIK, astronomers have observed what they consider to be collisions between two galaxies. It seems to me that Sternglass's model for the universe would make such collisions unlikely, but that's just my intuition. Does anyone know if he's ever addressed that question?
I don't have an especially vested interest in rejecting or accepting his model, I just thought it was a neat book and (especially since he repeatedly states that his view is unpopular among theoretical physicists) I figure there's another side to the coin.
Thanks in advance to anyone willing to attempt a lay explanation of thing, I know it's often a fruitless quest.
Response by poster: At no point does the author claim that something rotates without a frame of reference. Quite the opposite in fact, as he at one point gives the example of a universe consisting solely of a bucket with water in it and points out that, in such a universe, you couldn't rotate the bucket and cause the water to rise along the walls. That's part of why his theory requires an ether: it serves as an absolute frame of reference. The reading comprehension of your one-star reviewer was not very good.
I don't want to sound bitchy, but answers without being familiar with Sternglass's theory are just not going to be very productive, useful, or true.
posted by kavasa at 1:15 PM on July 5, 2010
I don't want to sound bitchy, but answers without being familiar with Sternglass's theory are just not going to be very productive, useful, or true.
posted by kavasa at 1:15 PM on July 5, 2010
Best answer: Haven't read it, but apparently even his physicist friend of four decades wasn't convinced:
"I'm very skeptical," said Allen Janis, a theoretical physicist at Pitt who has ruminated and argued with his friend Sternglass for four decades. "He's a very imaginative person ... but I'm not convinced ... There is a coherent, well-verified body of knowledge and this just doesn't fit with that at all."
posted by dd42 at 2:20 PM on July 5, 2010
"I'm very skeptical," said Allen Janis, a theoretical physicist at Pitt who has ruminated and argued with his friend Sternglass for four decades. "He's a very imaginative person ... but I'm not convinced ... There is a coherent, well-verified body of knowledge and this just doesn't fit with that at all."
posted by dd42 at 2:20 PM on July 5, 2010
The bucket thing sounds like a reference to Mach's principle (or conjecture).
I haven't read Sternglass' book, but the thing that ether theories tend to have is that the ether provides a privileged reference frame for any point in space (the frame that is comoving with the ether there), and physics behaves differently depending on how you're moving wrt that frame. This is intuitively pleasant for humans to think about, but it really doesn't match with experimental evidence at all. I assume Sternglass talks about this, though, if he's bringing up Mach's principle.
posted by hattifattener at 2:27 PM on July 5, 2010
if gravity is the deformation of space caused by matter, then... isn't that pretty much the ether?Not really. The ether is a fluid; I don't think there's a way to treat the deformation of spacetime as a fluid. I mean, you could decide to call any properties of space, or fields, or etc., "the ether", but that's stretching the term into near-uselessness.
I haven't read Sternglass' book, but the thing that ether theories tend to have is that the ether provides a privileged reference frame for any point in space (the frame that is comoving with the ether there), and physics behaves differently depending on how you're moving wrt that frame. This is intuitively pleasant for humans to think about, but it really doesn't match with experimental evidence at all. I assume Sternglass talks about this, though, if he's bringing up Mach's principle.
posted by hattifattener at 2:27 PM on July 5, 2010
Response by poster: Under Sternglass' view, electrons and positrons are the artifacts of the disruption of vortices in the fluid that is the ether. Gravity and field lines are analogous to the dimples created by vortices in the surface of a fluid (his favorite example is dragging a spoon through a coffee cup).
And yeah, he's very open about the fact that his theory is unpopular. That does not make it untrue, of course: I'm sure we can all think of a half-dozen revolutionary ideas that had to wait for the old guard to die off before they were accepted by a younger generation.
That said, dd42, your link had good information. Specifically WRT the Higgs boson: if they can find it with the LHC, then Sternglass is wrong. Other than that, at least according to Janis, there's nothing currently known that directly contradicts his theories.
posted by kavasa at 2:46 PM on July 5, 2010
And yeah, he's very open about the fact that his theory is unpopular. That does not make it untrue, of course: I'm sure we can all think of a half-dozen revolutionary ideas that had to wait for the old guard to die off before they were accepted by a younger generation.
That said, dd42, your link had good information. Specifically WRT the Higgs boson: if they can find it with the LHC, then Sternglass is wrong. Other than that, at least according to Janis, there's nothing currently known that directly contradicts his theories.
posted by kavasa at 2:46 PM on July 5, 2010
"Other than that, at least according to Janis, there's nothing currently known that directly contradicts his theories."
That's a very odd way to read this:
"There is a coherent, well-verified body of knowledge and this just doesn't fit with that at all."
I'd read that as meaning that there's a lot of observations it doesn't fit - that basically directly contradict his ideas.
Take this idea that the accelerating universe is somehow due to rotation. How do you get an isotropic expansion from a rotation? Centrifugal force points away from the axis of rotation - that's not isotropic. And why has the acceleration only recently turned on if the universe has always been rotating, and if it hasn't, why has it recently started?
I doubt that's the only difficulty it will have.
posted by edd at 5:22 PM on July 5, 2010
That's a very odd way to read this:
"There is a coherent, well-verified body of knowledge and this just doesn't fit with that at all."
I'd read that as meaning that there's a lot of observations it doesn't fit - that basically directly contradict his ideas.
Take this idea that the accelerating universe is somehow due to rotation. How do you get an isotropic expansion from a rotation? Centrifugal force points away from the axis of rotation - that's not isotropic. And why has the acceleration only recently turned on if the universe has always been rotating, and if it hasn't, why has it recently started?
I doubt that's the only difficulty it will have.
posted by edd at 5:22 PM on July 5, 2010
Response by poster: edd, I took that from reading this:
"If most physicists aren't ready to embrace Sternglass' view, they might have trouble dismissing it, admitted Pitt's Janis. "As far as specific predictions he makes, there is nothing at the moment that could convincingly demonstrate that his ideas are wrong."
One important piece of evidence might come once a new particle accelerator, called the Large Hadron Collider, is completed at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, or CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. Scientists say the machine might produce a particle called the Higgs; if this particle is proven to exist, scientists believe it will confirm much of the standard model. Sternglass' theory predicts no such particle exists."
posted by kavasa at 6:15 PM on July 5, 2010
"If most physicists aren't ready to embrace Sternglass' view, they might have trouble dismissing it, admitted Pitt's Janis. "As far as specific predictions he makes, there is nothing at the moment that could convincingly demonstrate that his ideas are wrong."
One important piece of evidence might come once a new particle accelerator, called the Large Hadron Collider, is completed at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, or CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. Scientists say the machine might produce a particle called the Higgs; if this particle is proven to exist, scientists believe it will confirm much of the standard model. Sternglass' theory predicts no such particle exists."
posted by kavasa at 6:15 PM on July 5, 2010
This thread is closed to new comments.
Also, some of the positive reviews praise the book for making subatomic physics intuitive. This is not possible without a Nobel worthy discovery, lying, or being just plain wrong.
posted by idiopath at 12:35 PM on July 5, 2010