OT: Christian relativity - in which I mangle philosophyof science

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 26 Apr 2006, 17:59 · from 2006-April.txt.gz

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From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2006 10:59:59 -0700
Subject: (urth) OT: Christian relativity - in which I mangle
	philosophyof science
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On 4/26/06, Iorwerth Thomas <iorweththomas at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Well, Bell's inequality is a property (as far as I know; I'm a
> computational field theorist turned condensed matter theorist who
> needs to bone up on his foundations)

Heh. Back in my days at Berkeley, one of their Nobel winners in
Physics insisted on sitting on all doctoral defenses. He would
inevitably ask "What is the definition of force?" and similar
questions -- if you couldn't come up with F=MA, you were hosed.
Some of the candidates, who hadn't touched "that stuff" in ten
years or more, had to cram before their oral

> _General_ relativity is the hard case, partly because the maths is
>quite horrid, but mostly because of the conceptual problems (to do
>with time - canonical quantum gravity has none

Okay I didn't know that there was a canonical version of quantum
gravity yet... I clearly need to catch up on my science mags. (There's
a huge pile by the bed...)

> The degree to which Bell's inequalities affect relativistic causality is
> somewhat up in the air, because you can't transmit information
> faster than light,

Ummm ... I have this idea that you can, by exploiting exclusion.

Consider three points, A, B, and C. B is between A and C,
but one light-microsecond closer to A. B emits photon-pairs
towards both A and C, at regular intervals.

At C, you set up a device to detect photons coming from B as
waves.

At A, I measure every other (odd-numbered) photon as a particle. If
I'm understanding exclusion and the inequality correctly, this means
that you can't measure these photons as waves, so your wave-
measuring doodad misses every odd-numbered photon, which gives
us a kind of synchronization. Then I measure the even-numbered
photons as waves for 1 and as particles for 0. You will only be able
to detect the ones paired to the ones I measure as waves. So no
matter how far A and C are from each other, the information I
encode in this way will reach you in one microsecond.

True? False? I'm not sure -- I don't have the maths to understand
why I'm wrong, if I am.

> >I'm pretty sure that the whole point of relativity is _not_ to have
> >a preferred frame of reference. But, ZPF theory may mess that
> >up pretty good (if it ever amounts to anything).
> >
>
> Well, yes...  But in the case of the universe you get a
> Machian 'background of fixed stars' effect (I think); I'm not sure
> Lee Smolin is happy with that but he's a bit of a purist in this regard.

Mmmm. I see the point while not conceding it -- if I move an
inch, my position relative to the farthest actual star _has_
changed, even if the change is below any conceivable threshold
of measurement. I don't think this creates an actual preferred
frame of reference, but a difference of scales in which certain
effects become smaller than quanta and effectively disappear.

> ZPF theory?

Zero point field theory, which (aside from offering a nifty source
of hypothetical free energy, at least in science fiction) seems
to propose an actual reason why inertial mass is related to
gravitational mass.

--Dan'l

--
I do not fear Satan half so much as I fear those who fear him.
                        -- St Teresa of Avila
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer

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