Understanding electromagnetism

[Brain Man]

Where do you get this information on the use of physics papers?

You can see the reader count in the journal information, citation count in google scholar and there are commentators out there who will give you overviews on whats occuring with activity in a given area.

Why do you say this? If his work pans out, then he will be lauded by the physics community. So far he has received quite a bit of grant money, so he is hardly marginalized. Unlike Farsight, Lisi is doing what one should in science: attempting to address the important details and, yes, doing this with the proper mathematical representation of these details.

Ill return to this in more depth. This hardly represents what happend with Garret. Briefly he had to become an outsider to do what he did and might have got nowhere without a peer like lee smolin. His grant money is small and from a non mainstream source and has dried up. If he didnt have the maths done just right, he would have been ridiculed, so we should be looking to give all that wasted mathematic expertise to people that can think creatively in this manner, not expecting them to educate themselves to this degree.

The whole single person fighting against everybody else for their idea in science if you look at it logically is actually a defunct one in todays overcrowded scientific community. That was fine when it was a small world a scientist had to deal with. Today It becomes as hard as it was for a lone voice to question any aspect of religion. The pruning of what we could know must be massive, and the expectation placed on a scientist (to be creative) far too high. In this sense farsight is right, groupthink has taken over science in the past 20 years, due to the massive employment in it. And hes not the only one. Ive heard this coming from the top.

In the interest of time, I'm only going to address the second question. Any model of the electron that has come kind of physical turning of the electron over some distance (as required by a vortice) cannot work because it cannot reproduce the quantum spin measurements of an electron. An electron behaves in a very particular way when going through a Stern-Gerlach device, a way that rules out that it is a spinning thing. If electrons spun like a vortice, then they would end up going in an angle after passing through a S-G device as determined by the relative orientation of the S-G device to the rotation. However, regardless of the orientation of a S-G device, an electron always ends up going either upwards at a set angle or downwards at a set angle. No theory of a spinning electron can recapture this behavior. If someone tells you that they have a theory of a spinning electron, they should be prepared to have a detailed explanation of the behavior of theS-G device, one that addresses the specifics of our observations with this device.

Just because some things in physics behave in one way does not mean that everything in physics behaves in the same way. What you are offering here is equivalent to saying that since water boils at 100 degrees Celcius, then everything voils at 100 degrees Celcius.

Im glad you said that, as thats the point, there are exceptions. I am sure thats farsights point. That if the electron is able to spin freely there are circumstances in which a vortice could occur, perhaps in concert with other electrons or in the poles of magnets themselves. We dont know everything on electrons. You cant tell me that for sure what the structure of an electron might be at the poles of a magnet exposed to another magnetic force.

If the electromagnetism that Farsight explains doesn't act like the electromagnetism we find in our experiments and applications, how much is his explanation worth?

that sounds very much like the original argument for quantum vs classical physics. Im not saying farsight is an einstein, but maybe garret could be. The entire physics community practically rejected him on the basis he was a new age hippie with no publication recored outside the system promoting advanced versions of sacred geometry as the solution to integrate subatomic connections.

Then you would ask us to throw away all the decades of research that has been done in describing the electron in detail because you, and seemingly Farsight, cannot follow the mathematics in which our description of the electron is written?

im saying that the mathematicians should be utilized to take on intutive theories like Farsights and borgais which offer explanations for charge, gravity and magnetic force. There are many other examples out there left unexplored.

[Farsight]

So who proposed the electron was a vortice previously?

The guys I came across first were Williamson and van der Mark. See the second post and http://www.cybsoc.org/cybcon2008prog.htm#jw. They're are ex-CERN, and it took them six years before they got this paper into a journal in 1997. I don't know if they were the first, see google for other instances, such as this undated Electron Ring Vortex Model by William Hamilton with some historical information. IMHO it's a great pity that James Clerk Maxwell didn't know about electrons, because On Physical Lines of Force is entitled "the theory of molecular vortices". He thought the vortices were in the intervening space rather than being what the particles are.

Any model of the electron that has come kind of physical turning of the electron over some distance (as required by a vortice) cannot work because it cannot reproduce the quantum spin measurements of an electron. An electron behaves in a very particular way when going through a Stern-Gerlach device, a way that rules out that it is a spinning thing. If electrons spun like a vortice, then they would end up going in an angle after passing through a S-G device as determined by the relative orientation of the S-G device to the rotation. However, regardless of the orientation of a S-G device, an electron always ends up going either upwards at a set angle or downwards at a set angle. No theory of a spinning electron can recapture this behavior. If someone tells you that they have a theory of a spinning electron, they should be prepared to have a detailed explanation of the behavior of theS-G device, one that addresses the specifics of our observations with this device.

This assertion is incorrect. See the wiki Stern-Gerlach article which says:

If the particles are classical, "spinning" particles, then the distribution of their spin angular momentum vectors is taken to be truly random and each particle would be deflected up or down by a different amount...

The experiment shows that this doesn't happen, so we know the particles aren't spinning spheres. However the article, which is in line with the current consensus, uses this as a straw-man argument to invoke mystery. It goes on to say:

Electrons are spin-1⁄2 particles. These have only two possible spin angular momentum values, called spin-up and spin-down. The exact value in the z direction is +ħ/2 or −ħ/2. If this value arises as a result of the particles rotating the way a planet rotates, then the individual particles would have to be spinning impossibly fast. The speed of rotation would be in excess of the speed of light, 2.998×108 m/s, and is thus impossible.

There's actually nothing wrong with that, but here comes the non-sequitur:

Thus, the spin angular momentum has nothing to do with rotation and is a purely quantum mechanical phenomenon. That is why it is sometimes known as the "intrinsic angular momentum."

Whoa! We've established that the particle isn't rotating like a planet, but why can't it be rotating in some other fashion? There is no justification here for asserting that spin angular momentum has nothing to do with rotation, particularly since the Einstein-de Haas effect demonstrates that "spin angular momentum is indeed of the same nature as the angular momentum of rotating bodies as conceived in classical mechanics".

Imagine a a whole bunch of globes, like this:



Now give them an earth-style spin to give yourself a set of "classical particles". Next, jumble them around so that the spin axes point in a variety of directions, then throw them through the inhomogeneous magnetic field. You'd see a line on the screen as per the classical prediction:



Now collect all your classical particles together again, and set them down on the table like a bunch of spinning globes. Now give them another spin in another orientation. Spin the spin axis. You have two choices as regards this new spin direction, this way ↓O↑ or that way ↑O↓. Now throw them through the inhomogeneous magnetic field and ask yourself what you'd see. Two spots, because there are two chiralities to the two compound spins. Apart from that, you can't say which way they're spinning. Spin a glass clock like a coin, and the rotation of the hands is clockwise when its face-on, anticlockwise when its rear-on, clockwise when its face-on, anticlockwise when its rear-on, ad-infinitum. It's spinning both clockwise and anticlockwise. Spin the glass clock with your other hand and the compound rotation is different, but you can only describe the difference by using vague terms like spin-up and spin-down.

The spheres and clocks examples don't cover the spin 1/2 of course. You need one spin to be twice the rate of the other for that. A moebius strip is an everyday example of this, where two rotations around the strip occur for every rotation of the strip. The electron rotation is akin to this, only we talk of a "moebius doughnut" rather than a moebius strip:

[ChildInAZoo]

If the electromagnetism that Farsight explains doesn't act like the electromagnetism we find in our experiments and applications, how much is his explanation worth?

that sounds very much like the original argument for quantum vs classical physics.

I'm not sure what this means QM is incredibly well tested and shows amazing accuracy to results and it successfully predicts things that classical electromagnetism does not. Farsight is saying things that contradict the best tested parts of both QM and classical electromagnetism.

Im not saying farsight is an einstein, but maybe garret could be. The entire physics community practically rejected him on the basis he was a new age hippie with no publication recored outside the system promoting advanced versions of sacred geometry as the solution to integrate subatomic connections.

Given the time and effort that one has to go through to master the relevant details, are you surprised? Can you blame physicists for doubting the ability of someone who has not met the standards of his peers?

[ChildInAZoo]

This assertion is incorrect. See the wiki Stern-Gerlach article which says:

If the particles are classical, "spinning" particles, then the distribution of their spin angular momentum vectors is taken to be truly random and each particle would be deflected up or down by a different amount...

The experiment shows that this doesn't happen, so we know the particles aren't spinning spheres. However the article, which is in line with the current consensus, uses this as a straw-man argument to invoke mystery.

This passage above is so wrong, I don't know where to begin.

Let's start with "straw man argument". A straw man argument is when one attacks a weaker version of one's opponents position than the opponent actually offers. In this case, Farsight is the person offering a straw man argument because rather than actually addressing the science, he is addressing wikipedia.

The constant reference to Wikipedia is a bad sign on its own.

The argument from the SG device is not used to "invoke mystery", it is used to demonstrate a physical behavior. A behavior that quantum mechanics explains in painstaking detail.

It goes on to say:

Electrons are spin-1⁄2 particles. These have only two possible spin angular momentum values, called spin-up and spin-down. The exact value in the z direction is +ħ/2 or −ħ/2. If this value arises as a result of the particles rotating the way a planet rotates, then the individual particles would have to be spinning impossibly fast. The speed of rotation would be in excess of the speed of light, 2.998×108 m/s, and is thus impossible.

There's actually nothing wrong with that, but here comes the non-sequitur:

Thus, the spin angular momentum has nothing to do with rotation and is a purely quantum mechanical phenomenon. That is why it is sometimes known as the "intrinsic angular momentum."

Whoa! We've established that the particle isn't rotating like a planet, but why can't it be rotating in some other fashion? There is no justification here for asserting that spin angular momentum has nothing to do with rotation, particularly since the Einstein-de Haas effect demonstrates that "spin angular momentum is indeed of the same nature as the angular momentum of rotating bodies as conceived in classical mechanics".

Sigh. Ok, let's go through this more closely. There are two reasons why electrons are not spinning like classical particles. One is that they have defined spins. The other is that if they did have a spin, then they would be spinning faster than the speed of light. One cannot just confuse these two things like Farsight has.

Nor does the Einstein deHaas effect change the quantized nature of electron spin, as Farsight should also claim if he is going by what is written in his citation. But if one has been paying attention, one finds that Farsight always uses sources that support claims inconsistent with his theories and he never addresses this inconsistency.

Imagine a a whole bunch of globes, like this:

Now give them an earth-style spin to give yourself a set of "classical particles". Next, jumble them around so that the spin axes point in a variety of directions, then throw them through the inhomogeneous magnetic field. You'd see a line on the screen as per the classical prediction:

Now collect all your classical particles together again, and set them down on the table like a bunch of spinning globes. Now give them another spin in another orientation. Spin the spin axis. You have two choices as regards this new spin direction, this way ↓O↑ or that way ↑O↓. Now throw them through the inhomogeneous magnetic field and ask yourself what you'd see. Two spots, because there are two chiralities to the two compound spins. Apart from that, you can't say which way they're spinning. Spin a glass clock like a coin, and the rotation of the hands is clockwise when its face-on, anticlockwise when its rear-on, clockwise when its face-on, anticlockwise when its rear-on, ad-infinitum. It's spinning both clockwise and anticlockwise. Spin the glass clock with your other hand and the compound rotation is different, but you can only describe the difference by using vague terms like spin-up and spin-down.

If one does this experiment, one will simply recover the classical distribution again. Can we please see your work showing otherwise, Pope Farsight? Should we accept it on faith that these particles will behave as you say, or should we demand evidence that these particles will behave as you claim.

[lpetrich]

im saying that the mathematicians should be utilized to take on intutive theories like Farsights and borgais which offer explanations for charge, gravity and magnetic force. There are many other examples out there left unexplored.

Intuitive??? More like pretty pictures to me.

Brain Man, Farsight, why don't you try learning the appropriate mathematics? Or do the recruiting yourself?

[Farsight]

If one does this experiment, one will simply recover the classical distribution again.

No you won't. When you spin the spin axis, there is no random distribution of spin axes during flight. But there are two different ways to spin that spinning globe. This way: ↓O↑ or that way ↑O↓. Hence you see two dots. It's simple, a child can understand it. I've explained the Stern-Gerlach experiment, and you're still in denial, dodging and carping.

Can we please see your work showing otherwise, Pope Farsight? Should we accept it on faith that these particles will behave as you say, or should we demand evidence that these particles will behave as you claim.

The Stern-Gerlach experiment is the evidence, along with spin 1/2, pair production, electron angular momentum, electron magnetic dipole moment, and the Einstein-de Haas effect. What "work" do you want? Mathematics? Ah, you're seeking refuge in mathematics to keep the faith and avoid facing up to the scientific evidence. It's not me who resembles the Pope round here.

Brain Man, Farsight, why don't you try learning the appropriate mathematics?

I am, but the problem is that isn't appropriate. It doesn't portray the underlying reality.

[ChildInAZoo]

If one does this experiment, one will simply recover the classical distribution again.

No you won't. When you spin the spin axis, there is no random distribution of spin axes during flight.

Don't make a Papal decree. Show us the physics. You want to say that the bulk of contemporary quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and quantum electrodynamics is incorrect, so you should have the decency to show us your physics. You are attacking very accurately measured results with nothing but your claim. the trajectories that you vaguely describe with words are very accurately described with equations, so use them. If you cannot provide the details, then we cannot take your assertions as anything more serious than fantasy.

[Brain Man]

If one does this experiment, one will simply recover the classical distribution again.

No you won't. When you spin the spin axis, there is no random distribution of spin axes during flight.

Don't make a Papal decree. Show us the physics. You want to say that the bulk of contemporary quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and quantum electrodynamics is incorrect, so you should have the decency to show us your physics. You are attacking very accurately measured results with nothing but your claim. the trajectories that you vaguely describe with words are very accurately described with equations, so use them. If you cannot provide the details, then we cannot take your assertions as anything more serious than fantasy.

the maths for the vortice model of the electron is in the paper by the EX cern guy. From what i could make out he didnt say QED was wrong but incomplete

http://www.cybsoc.org/electron.pdf

Can you tell us where Dr williamsons maths is wrong ?

[lpetrich]

When you spin the spin axis, there is no random distribution of spin axes during flight. But there are two different ways to spin that spinning globe. This way: ↓O↑ or that way ↑O↓.

Don't make me laugh. There's no way that you can get that out of classical mechanics and statistical mechanics.

Hence you see two dots. It's simple, a child can understand it. I've explained the Stern-Gerlach experiment, and you're still in denial, dodging and carping.

The Stern-Gerlach effect is a pure QM effect - in the classical limit, one will see a continuous strip. In fact, one can get that result by taking (angular momentum) -> (infinity).

spin 1/2

The Dirac equation -- the electron field contains the two spinor representations of the Lorentz group.

pair production

Quantum Electrodynamics 101.

electron angular momentum

The Dirac equation again.

electron magnetic dipole moment

QED 101

and the Einstein-de Haas effect

Interchangeability of spin and orbit angular momentum.

What "work" do you want? Mathematics? Ah, you're seeking refuge in mathematics to keep the faith and avoid facing up to the scientific evidence. It's not me who resembles the Pope round here.

Farsight, you have yet to prove that mainstream quantum mechanics and quantum field theory cannot possibiy account for the effects that you have listed.

Brain Man, Farsight, why don't you try learning the appropriate mathematics?

I am, but the problem is that isn't appropriate. It doesn't portray the underlying reality.

Farsight, why do you think that mainstream quantum field theory does not reflect the "underlying reality"? The experimental results that you list are all accounted for without much trouble in mainstream QFT.

[Brain Man]

Back to the point about whats going on here in this thread. See this is an example of what is said of new ideas in science being held back. You will have to register to read this. I doubt you will so ill start quoting from it if necessary. Most telling though is that i am a bioscientists entering into depths of todays physics and i was thinking something is not right..it seems like big theorists are actually being punished, and disposed off as quickly as possible, with no interest in the fundamental ideas they propose. This article resonated with everything i had been percieving. So we do have a problem and you guys are part of it.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/38468


Science was always hard, but now its splintered into itself completely.

First sacred geometry was considered fringe new age lunacy. Anybody that had anything scientific to state on the subject was labelled a crackpot. Garret Lisi saw something in it, but took it to the stage where he qualified himself. Now its almost getting to the stage of being conceded as self evident answer to subatomic connections.


However (and I have spoken to garret personally about this) he found that todays academic system has become too tight, too many hoops to jump through, that 50 years ago, you could qualify then mess around with projects freely. (just about his own words here). So he became an odd job man, living in a campervan and produced E8 in his free time. That’s todays academia for you. Mostly he was rejected, and was lucky to find lee smolin get the ball rolling. Somethings not working. Garrets an example of a new ager going after complete models. You don’t get this in academica anymore, due to the intense mathematical battles, over fragments, creating more fragments, more demand for more intensity and resources over the fragments. Like black holes appearing everywhere in that system itself, sucking everybody in.

My area is bioscience, but we need better understanding of basic aspects in physics for that. These dont appear to be around so i am putting my trust in the fringe guys. For two main reasons.

There should never be a default paradigm for finding truth and that applies to science. There is something about humans that corrupts anything no matter how good, when there are too many people interested in the same thing. So even with scientific methods, academic systems, and all that was fought for in the enlightenment against religion, its happening again. Religion was a great thing when it first arrived in the context of its age..but lets not get into a debate on that. The self organizing tightness when too many people are playing in any area kills creativity and new ideas. And if you cant see it, you have to ask yourself just where are you in all this, because everybody else outside can see something’s going wrong, and many inside science at the top level can see this as well.


I also don’t buy the trumping of the reason card anymore. Its almost like todays educated are an autopilot, shut out mode. Play card reason, quote this and that, destroy the new idea, go home happy without it appears caring if there are some nuggets of possible truth in what you just kicked around. If I come on the internet, I will find plenty like yourself obviously educated on physics to a degree of depth, will slate these people, say john duffield, milo wolff, Harley borgais, Leo Vuyk, by nitpicking where they find weakness, but importantly whats most revealing is never admitting to the overall point or aim. You would have slated Lisi if he had just told you he thought that sacred type geometry can resolve the connections in subatomic physics had he not had the maths skills to write his papers. You can have technical professional excellence but a terrible script..say a Michael bay movie.

That’s like physics today. That’s why these maths experts should be the ones working for this new breed. What if Garret never got so far as to complete the maths, have all the personality qualities to fight outside the academic system. We might never have this. It should be the other way around, we should be welcoming these people for trying. Being open minded, giving them assistance. Trying to be decent in spite of the fact that the internet allows us no consequences if we behave like assholes.

These people attempt to provide more complete rough and ready means to put things together than anybody in the system we all pay taxes to is bothering to do. And they usually work free for the love of it, and in spite of taking crap all the time. Its clear the quality goes from B movie right up to the high level of lisi. So what ? Some home made movies have more to say than hollywood productions. The point is that what these people attempt to do is provide a completely intutitive script for physics which is something nobody really wants to accommodate. And why not. Physics is a fraction of the complexity in comparison to the biosciences, and even the biosciences have ways to provide narratives such as evolution and complexity theory.

I say stop the crap. Give these people a break, you clearly have no appreciation how lucky we are to have them.

[Brain Man]

Ill just post the whole article. Seeing as you guys are not going to take an interest in anything anti conservative unless its shoved in front of your noses. The important thing is that i percieved nearly all this as a newcomer, i thought it was just me, maybe this is how it has always been, but not so.. and here the experts are saying it all clearly and better than i could.

In search of the black swans

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/38468

The publish-or-perish ethic too often favours a narrow and conservative approach to scientific innovation. Mark Buchanan asks whether we are pushing revolutionary ideas to the margins.

The Black Swan

In 1890 an electricity company enticed the German physicist Max Planck to help it in its efforts to make more efficient light bulbs. Planck, as a theorist, naturally started with the fundamentals and soon became enmeshed in the thorny problem of explaining the spectrum of black-body radiation, which he eventually did by introducing the idea — a “purely formal” assumption, as he then considered it — that electromagnetic energy can only be emitted or absorbed in discrete quanta. The rest is history. Electric light bulbs and mathematical necessity led Planck to discover quantum theory and to kick start the most significant scientific revolution of the 20th century.

Serendipity

Around the same time, Planck’s colleague Wilhelm Röntgen was experimenting with cathode rays when he noticed an odd glow coming from a fluorescent screen some distance away that was not part of the intended experiment; in so doing he discovered X-rays, and helped propel medicine into the modern era. Of course, it is not just German scientists who make world-changing discoveries by unexpected paths. In 1964 US physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson famously detected the cosmic microwave background radiation in annoying noise that they could not eliminate from their cryogenic microwave receiver at Bell Labs.


This is how discovery works: returns on research investment do not arrive steadily and predictably, but erratically and unpredictably, in a manner akin to intellectual earthquakes. Indeed, this idea seems to be more than merely qualitative. Data on human innovation, whether in basic science or technology or business, show that developments emerge from an erratic process with wild unpredictability. For example, as physicist Didier Sornette of the ETH in Zurich and colleagues showed a few years ago, the statistics describing the gross revenues of Hollywood movies over the past 20 years does not follow normal statistics but a power-law curve — closely resembling the famous Gutenberg— Richter law for earthquakes — with a long tail for high-revenue films. A similar pattern describes the financial returns on new drugs produced by the bio-tech industry, on royalties on patents granted to universities, or stock-market returns from hi-tech start-ups.

What we know of processes with power-law dynamics is that the largest events are hugely disproportionate in their consequences. In the metaphor of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s 2007 best seller The Black Swan, it is not the normal events, the mundane and expected “white swans” that matter the most, but the outliers, the completely unexpected “black swans”. In the context of history, think 11 September 2001 or the invention of the Web. Similarly, scientific history seems to pivot on the rare seismic shifts that no-one predicts or even has a chance of predicting, and on those utterly profound discoveries that transform worlds. They do not flow out of what the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn called “normal science” — the paradigm-supporting and largely mechanical working out of established ideas — but from “revolutionary”, disruptive and risky science.
Squeezing life out of innovation

All of which, as Sornette has been arguing for several years, has important implications for how we think about and judge research investments. If the path to discovery is full of surprises, and if most of the gains come in just a handful of rare but exceptional events, then even judging whether a research programme is well conceived is deeply problematic. “Almost any attempt to assess research impact over a finite time”, says Sornette, “will include only a few major discoveries and hence be highly unreliable, even if there is a true long-term positive trend.”

This raises an important question: does today’s scientific culture respect this reality? Are we doing our best to let the most important and most disruptive discoveries emerge? Or are we becoming too conservative and constrained by social pressure and the demands of rapid and easily measured returns? The latter possibility, it seems, is of growing concern to many scientists, who suggest that modern science is in danger of losing its creativity unless we can find a systematic way to build a more risk-embracing culture.

The voices making this argument vary widely. For example, the physicist Geoffrey West, who is currently president of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in New Mexico, US, points out that in the years following the Second World War, US industry created a steady stream of paradigm-changing innovations, including the transistor and the laser, and it happened because places such as Bell Labs fostered a culture of enormously free innovation. “They brought together serious scientists — physicists, engineers and mathematicians — from across disciplines”, says West, “and created a culture of free thinking without which it’s hard to imagine how these ideas could have come about.”

Unfortunately, today’s academic and corporate cultures seem to be moving in the opposite direction, with practices that stifle risk-taking mavericks who have a broad view of science. At universities and funding agencies, for example, tenure and grant committees take decisions based on narrow criteria (focusing on publication lists, citations and impact factors) or on specific plans for near-term results, all of which inherently favour those working in established fields with well-accepted paradigms. In recent years, tightening business practices and efforts to improve efficiency have also driven corporations in a similar direction. “That may be fine in the accounting department,” says West, “but it’s squeezing the life out of innovation.”
The black swans of science

[b]A key problem, suggests mathematical physicist Eric Weinstein of the Natron Group, a hedge fund in New York, is that it is too easy for scientists in the “establishment” of any field to cut down new ideas, and to do so without really putting anything at risk, thereby leading to a culture that is systematically biased toward caution. “High-risk science is much more associated with figures from the past,” he says. [/b]

The result, he suggests, is that science is becoming less a “bottom-up” enterprise of free-wheeling exploration — energized by the kind of thinking that led Einstein to relativity — and more a “top-down” process strongly constrained by social conformity, with scientific funding following along fashionable lines. The publish-or-perish ethic, in particular, strongly rewards those scientists doing more or less routine technical work in established fields, and punishes more risky work exploring unproven ideas that may take a considerable period of time to reach maturity.

This is especially damaging given the disproportionate benefits that come from the most important discoveries, which seem to be inherently unpredictable in both timing and nature. As Taleb argues persuasively in The Black Swan, any sensible long-term strategy in a world dominated by extreme and unpredictable events has to accept, and even embrace, that unpredictability. He illustrates the idea in the financial context. People investing in venture-capital start-ups, for example, have to expect continual losses in the short term, and bank on the fact that they will ultimately make up for those losses by hitting on a few really big winners in the long run.

More generally, Taleb’s basic investing strategy — which could easily be translated into research terms — is to put a fair fraction of funds into very conservative processes that will not lose their value, even if they have little chance of producing big gains; and to put a small but reasonable fraction into high-risk, high-reward settings, thereby gaining exposure to the potentially enormous gains from these investments. These may be unpredictable in detail, but the statistics makes the expected long-term pay-off very high.

Even so, it takes discipline and fortitude to stick with this strategy. As Taleb points out, if everyone around you believes in the dominance of normal statistics, then they will think that you are foolish, and the short-term evidence will probably back them up. You will be losing money in the short run, seeing no returns, and this may go on for a considerable time. The same goes for high-risk science relative to research pursuing more short-term goals. In the short run, what the mavericks do will almost always seem less successful, perhaps even like wasting their time, and it is easy to think that this is the kind of research we should not pursue, even if this is actually very much mistaken.

This is a trap, West suggests, into which modern science planning has fallen. “My fear”, he says, “is that by eliminating the mavericks we end up hobbling our ability to discover the big, new ideas — the next transistor. That’s a serious and tragic error.”

Back to basics
Hill climbers and valley crossers

What is to be done? Some funding agencies, of course, have long recognized the need to fund “blue sky” research — work that may be high risk but may also be high reward. In the US, for example, the National Science Foundation has high-risk programmes in areas ranging from basic physics through to anthropology. Similarly, the European Commission, even in the decidedly practical area of information and communications technology, has a programme in future and emerging technologies that only funds research identified as having the potential to overturn existing paradigms. Perhaps the most famous centre that supports high-risk science demanding long-term commitment and transdisciplinary involvement is the SFI, which is privately funded. In the past few years, the SFI has been joined by a host of new centres, such as the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, a public–private initiative strongly aided by the Canadian government and founded in 1999 by Mike Lazaridis, chief executive of Research in Motion, which created the BlackBerry.

But physicist Lee Smolin, currently at the Perimeter Institute, suggests that science overall requires a much broader and more coherent approach to risky science. To see the kinds of policies needed, he suggests, it is useful to note that scientists, at least in some rough approximation, follow working styles of two very different kinds, which mirror Kuhn’s distinction between normal and revolutionary science.

Some scientists, he suggests, are what we might call “hill climbers”. They tend to be highly skilled in technical terms and their work mostly takes established lines of insight that pushes them further; they climb upward into the hills in some abstract space of scientific fitness, always taking small steps to improve the agreement of theory and observation. These scientists do “normal” science. In contrast, other scientists are more radical and adventurous in spirit, and they can be seen as “valley crossers”. They may be less skilled technically, but they tend to have strong scientific intuition — the ability to spot hidden assumptions and to look at familiar topics in totally new ways.

To be most effective, Smolin argues, science needs a mix of hill climbers and valley crossers. Too many hill climbers doing normal science, and you end up sooner or later with lots of them stuck on the tops of local hills, each defending their own territory. Science then suffers from a lack of enough valley crossers able to strike out from those intellectually tidy positions to explore further away and find higher peaks.

“This is the situation I believe we are in,” says Smolin, “and we are in it because science has become professionalized in a way that takes the characteristics of a good hill climber as representative of what is a good, or promising, scientist. The valley crossers we need have been excluded or pushed to the margins.”

Smolin suggests that we need to shift the balance to include more valley crossers, and that this should not really be too hard to do if we take a determined approach. What we need, in general, is to put policies in place that will judge young scientists not on whether they are linked into programmes established decades ago by now-senior scientists, but solely on the basis of their individual ability, creativity and independence. Some specific steps that might be taken, he suggests, include ensuring that departments strong in any established field also include scientists with diverging views. Similarly, conferences focusing on one research programme should be encouraged to include participants from competing rival programmes.

In addition, funding agencies should develop a means of penalizing scientists for ignoring the really “hard” problems, and of rewarding those who attack long-standing open issues. Perhaps, Smolin suggests, an agency or foundation could create some really long-term fellowships to fund young researchers for, say, 10 years, thus allowing them the space to pursue ideas deeply without the pressure for rapid results.
The wisdom of crowds

Weinstein suggests another idea — that we should borrow some ideas from financial engineering and make scientists back up their criticisms by taking real financial risks. You think that some new theory is utterly worthless and deserving of ridicule? In the world Weinstein envisions, you could not trash the research in an anonymous review, but would buy some sort of option giving you a financial stake in its scientific future, an instrument that would pay off if, as you expect, the work slides noiselessly into obscurity. The money would come from the theory’s proponents, who would similarly benefit if it pans out into the next big thing.

Weinstein’s point is that markets, in theory at least, work efficiently and — putting the current financial meltdown to one side — lead to the accurate valuation of products. They exploit the “wisdom of crowds”, as a popular book of the same title recently put it. Take the famous electronic prediction markets at the University of Iowa, which pool the views of thousands of diverse individuals and consistently seem to give better predictions than any expert. For example, they predicted last year’s US presidential election correctly to within half a percentage point.

Could the same not be done for weighing up the likely value of scientific ideas? Those ideas, Weinstein argues, do not get weighed fairly today. As he points out, mavericks get their papers routinely rejected for what they feel are unfair reasons, and they often feel suppressed by the mainstream community, while mainstream scientists think it is perfectly obvious that the ideas in question are ludicrous and should not waste the community’s time. Current research practice lacks any mechanism that would arrange a fruitful meeting between the two — letting the maverick’s ideas gain free expression while at the same time letting the critics take a real stake based on their own knowledge.

“What do you do when you’re confronted with some maverick with a crazy idea?” he asks. “You’ve tried it, your students have tried it, and you know it’s almost certain to fail. Why can’t you use this knowledge to your own advantage? At the moment, you just can’t express your view in the market efficiently.”

The situation is directly akin to a trader on the stock market who has sound knowledge, for example, that a certain asset is currently undervalued, but, for whatever reason, cannot buy it and so benefit from that knowledge. In financial theory, a market of this kind of called “incomplete”, and its incompleteness leads to inefficiency, because all relevant knowledge does not get expressed in the market.

To counter the analogous inefficiency in the case of science, Weinstein suggests, it should be possible for the critic to take a position on the idea. “It would be more efficient,” he says, “if the maverick could demand of the critic, if my theory is so obviously wrong, why don’t you quantify that by writing me an options contract based on future citations in the top 20 leading journals secured by your home, furniture, holiday home and pension?”

That may be going a little over the top, but it makes the point. Bringing such possibilities into play, Weinstein suggests, would move research practice closer to the “efficient frontier” — the place where ideas get judged fairly based on all available knowledge, and risk takers, rather than being suppressed by social conformity, get encouraged by those taking a financial stake in the potentially enormous consequences of their success. Such mechanisms, Weinstein argues, would help avoid the effective censorship that often afflicts peer review, and that currently keeps research on the cautious side of the efficient frontier.

As one specific idea, Weinstein envisions something he calls synthetic tenure, which resonates with Smolin’s call for long-term fellowships. Today, he suggests, young researchers can easily be deterred from tackling really hard problems because they fear for their careers if they work on an issue for a decade and do not make significant progress. To give exceptional researchers the confidence to tackle hard problems, he suggests that an agency or foundation might make an agreement by which they would guarantee that person a good position in the future in some stimulating field, if their project does not work out.
The new Einsteins

It is precisely this kind of thing, Smolin argues, that could be helpful. If more scientists started pushing for a return to independent, curiosity-driven science, then this might also encourage the big funding agencies and the other new sources of private funds such as the Perimeter Institute or the Howard Hughes and Gates Foundations. Indeed, Weinstein suggests, these new structures may have similarities with recent developments in financial engineering with the new structures emerging as “intellectual hedge funds” in response to perceived inefficiencies of more traditional agents, which play the role of more risk-averse mutual funds.

The price to pay for not moving to re-establish such independence will lie in a failure to realize the huge and unpredictable discoveries that move science forward most in the long term — discoveries made possible only when individuals leap out of what is comfortable and accepted, and wander out into spaces unknown. It is the true enormity of the potential gains that makes this goal of reaching the “efficient frontier” so important. If today we seem to have a dearth of new Einsteins, Smolin suggests, this may just reflect that we have become a little too risk averse.

New Einsteins, he points out, will not be working in areas that have been well established for decades. They may not even work in an area linked to the name of any established, senior scientist. New Einsteins may be slipping out of view and out of science altogether just because our scientific culture currently simply has no way of encouraging them.

[ChildInAZoo]

Smolin also requires that these "new Einsteins" be able to actually do the math and the science. I know this because I watched him say this in a presentation about a week ago. Farsight cannot possibly meet the basic criteria here.

[Brain Man]

Smolin also requires that these "new Einsteins" be able to actually do the math and the science. I know this because I watched him say this in a presentation about a week ago. Farsight cannot possibly meet the basic criteria here.

Let the hill climbers do the maths, they are more technically proficient anyway.

What is math but modeling after the idea anyway. Einstein visualized everything then needed help with his maths which included his wife.

http://physics.suite101.com/article.cfm ... relativity

The Math of General Relativity
Albert Einstein's Trouble with Tensor Calculus


Feb 2, 2008 Isaac M. McPhee
While the world rightly perceives Albert Einstein as having been a brilliant physicist, the mathematics of General Relativity were so difficult as to be beyond even him.

Albert Einstein worked feverishly for more than a decade to develop the theory which would become perhaps his greatest legacy in the scientific community. General Relativity, that theory which defines the very shape of both space and time, and which finally begins to explain the phenomenon of gravity, was far more difficult than anything he had yet attempted in his career. The reason for this is that it required an entirely new method of thinking about mathematics.

The theory of General Relativity is constructed entirely around a perplexingly difficult form of math called “tensor calculus” (also known to mathematicians as Absolute Differential Calculus). It was math that even Einstein, with all of his scientific brilliance, was rather unfamiliar with in the years leading up to 1916 (the year he would first publish his theory).
What is a Tensor?

To keep things as simple as possible, tensors are mathematical formulas used to describe complex motion in uneven space. So where standard, linear calculus might be used to describe the straightforward motion of an automobile (providing the space it was moving through was perfectly even), the motion of a ship being tossed about by the ocean would require tensor calculus.

Tensors may be used to define space that is non-Euclidean (that is, not flat or “geometrically regular”). Obviously, the sheer number of possible shapes and motions show just why tensor calculus proves to be so difficult. It is necessary for General Relativity, however, which theorizes that the nature of space-time is not a flat, smooth three dimensional surface, but rather a changing and adapting place, curved in all manner of directions based on concentrations of mass. It is not hard to understand where the challenge lay.
Einstein’s Tensor Education

Einstein had so much difficulty in understanding the math required by his own theory that he was forced to seek help from greater mathematicians than himself. It is said that he received help from his friend, mathematician Mercel Grossman (who had been his friend for many years, and had been responsible for helping Einstein acquire his job at the Swiss patent office where he first developed his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905).

Between the years of 1915 to 1919, Einstein held a correspondence with the Italian mathematician Tullio Levi-Civita – who in 1900 published perhaps the most important work on tensor calculus to this very day - who desired to help him fix some mathematical errors he had found in Einstein’s work.

Because of this help, Einstein was able to give his work a solid mathematical foundation. Using this “relativistic” math, Einstein could use his theory to make predictions – tests that might help to confirm or deny his ideas. He developed tests regarding the curvature of light around the sun, about the orbit of the planet Mercury, and of the effects of gravity on time, all of which have been tested and found to be true to Einstein’s theory.

When it was first released, it was said that there were perhaps a dozen people in the world who truly understood it. It was surely an exaggeration, of course, but it is a testament to just how difficult Einstein’s theory was, and how remarkable it was that he, with just a little help from his friends, figured it out on his own.

The math of General Relativity goes a long way to prove Einstein’s genius.

References:

Einstein, A. (1961). Relativity: The Special and the General Theory - A clear Explanation that Anyone can Understand. New York, NY: Random House.

Einstein, A. (1922). The Meaning of Relativity: Including the Relativistic Theory of the Non-Symmetric Field, fifth edition. New York, NY: Barnes and Noble Books.

Feynman, Richard. “The Feynman Lectures on Physics.” 1971

Gardner, M. (1962). Relativity Simply Explained. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc.

[newolder]

What is math but modeling after the idea anyway.

Do you have a question?

Einstein visualized everything then needed help with his maths which included his wife.

[lpetrich]

Brain Man's main arguments are:

There is no ox so dumb as the orthodox

and

Why do I need mathematics?

As Bertrand Russell had noted in "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" (Unpopular Essays):

But if conformity has its dangers, so has nonconformity.

Some "advanced thinkers" are of the opinion that any one who differs from the conventional opinion must be in the right. This is a delusion; if it were not, truth would be easier to come by than it is. There are infinite possibilities of error, and more cranks take up unfashionable errors than unfashionable truths.