Must there be a base article of matter?

Quote:

Brandon9000 wrote:
Eorl wrote:
...and to take up your analogy, I probably could come up with 10 possible methods of removing a brain tumor other than the conventional method and I might just come up with something useful that the doctors had never thought to try. That is more analogous to what I have attempted here. Do you agree?

No, not really. Doctors all over the world have been looking at the problem of brain tumors for a long time, and some of them are people who have performed hundreds of surgeries. The odds of someone totally ignorant of the subject outsmarting everyone are pretty low, and even if you did, I was talking about you, yourself performing the surgery with no knowledge of medicine, or diagnostic instruments.

I know you were taking about me performing the surgery but that does not equate to me proposing a theory about the nature of matter. Perhaps if I was going to build a device to convert matter directly to energy, THAT would fit. What I did was on par with proposing a method for the removal of a tumor.

Besides which:
I suppose what I am trying to demonstrate is that I think the whole world, especially science, has become too "compartmentalised" in it's approach to solving problems, and it has led to a "carefully forward", millimeter advance in every direction, perhaps restricting the likelihood of sudden giant leaps forward. Which is OK. I just think the potential is there for highly intelligent and creative people to be more useful in areas outside of each narrow speciality.

How many times in history have the great leaps of knowledge been brought about by people on the "outside"?

Let's say you got the top creative directors of the top 20 advertising agencies in a room and gave them a list of some unsolved scientific problems. Give them a week to see how many theories they can come up with. Obviously, most will be useless...but maybe, they'll stumble on to something that, with closer scientific investigation AFTER the fact, proves to be sheer genius.

As for the odds of a lay person developing a cure the doctors haven't thought of, well the case of Lorenzo's oil occurs to me as just such an example (and I'm sure there are plenty more)

And after all that, I'm STILL saying I generally agree with you! If I may remind you of my very first sentence on this page "I have a naive personal theory with no justifiable position.." and this is in response to a survey asking if I "think" there is a smallest particle!

I think you are being just a little elitist in your attitude Brandon 9000, as of course, you have the right to be as an elite member of the scientific community.

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Eorl wrote:

I think you are being just a little elitist in your attitude Brandon 9000, as of course, you have the right to be as an elite member of the scientific community.

The particular area of physics that you initially discussed, cosmology is even above my head as someone with only an MS and BS in Physics. I took one class in General Relativity and frankly don't remember it. I know that the two current approaches to this sort of thing involve either Quantum Electrodynamics or else geometrical theories like GR. At least that is my impression. This is probably one of the most complex areas in a complex field.

I have encountered many people on the Web who, unlike you, make the most specific statements about cosmology without the faintest understanding of elementary physics or mathematics. I assure you that the idea that you can just walk in knowing nothing and outsmart a generation of scientists is an illusion resulting from lack of familiarity with the subject. In your thought experiment with the advertising executives, unless it was a very limited, straightforward question about how to build some machine or something, I think that the rate of the ignoramuses beating the world scientific community would be very close to zero. You cannot expect to walk into this field without knowledge of it and come up with a correct theory with no derivation or math behind it. It is theoretically possible, but extremely unlikely. Real Physics theories, although they may be explained to the general public verbally, are mostly math. Since you have studied a scientific field yourself, I presume you know this. If you think it is elitist not to want to live in a building constructed intuitively by someone who never studied mechanics, stress and strain, or properties of materials, then so be it.

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Again I principally agree, but you are totally shutting the door on my point.

Close to zero is not zero. A breakthrough is possible. Lorenzo's oil?

And the heads of the worlds best advertising agencies are not ignorami, most likely they have IQ's on par with scientists. (They definately earn more Smile

)

James Gleick in his book about chaos science discussed the "silo" problem of scienctists being ignorant of anything outside their immediate field, what I'm saying is not new, and what I'm suggesting is not as impossible as you make it seem. Feynman was one of those who was as creative as he was logical, true genius is rare and I promise you not all geniuses become scientists.

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Eorl wrote:

Feynman was one of those who was as creative as he was logical, true genius is rare and I promise you not all geniuses become scientists.

It has nothing to do with genius whatever. I am referring to training. If you are right, then there should already be some examples to look at. Give me an example of someone who knows almost no Physics or Math making a fundamental discovery in Physics theory during the last 100 years (not someone who noticed some specific physical phenomenon, or made a correct conclusion from experiments).

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Quote:

someone who knows almost no Physics or Math making a fundamental discovery in Physics theory

That is a tall order, mostly because of the word "fundamental", yet here are some examples that, while they don't fit your parameters are still examples of the possibilities.

Felix d'Herelle was a self-taught French-Canadian bacteriologist who had difficulty working with establishment scientists. Yet he made one of the most significant breakthroughs in 20th-century biology, discovering and naming bacteriophages, the viruses that attack bacteria.

Susan Hendrickson Grote ReberMichael Faraday was the son of a blacksmith and received only a grammar school education. Born in 1791, he was apprenticed to a London bookbinder at the age of 14. He set about educating himself, starting with a popular book on basic chemistry from which he cut the pages and rebound them with a blank page interleaved between each page of text so that he could take proper notes.
Faraday's gradual rise to the pinnacle of British science is a story of extraordinary perseverance in the face of great social and educational barriers.

Arthur C. ClarkeHenrietta Swan Leavitt

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Eorl wrote:

That is a tall order, mostly because of the word "fundamental", yet here are some examples that, while they don't fit your parameters are still examples of the possibilities.

You began this discussion by stating a theory of cosmology. Cosmology is an area of theoretical Physics. You have been unable to give an example of anyone who has done what you claim is reasonably possible, someone who is largely ignorant of physics and math, yet has, in the past century, made a fundamental contribution to theoretical Physics subject to the other terms I mentioned. Note that I will accept self-training as readily as formal training as a qualification to succeed in this work, as long as a person has learned the material.

Of the people you mention, let us look at Michael Faraday for a minute. He made some fundamental contributions to electrodynamics when much, much less was known about physics. But the way he did it was utterly different from the basis on which you appear to have arrived at your theory of cosmology. Faraday did numerous experiments for years at England's Royal Institution in order to arrive at his conclusions about the way electricity and magnetism interact. You, on the other hand, have just written down theory in accordance with your intuition with no sound basis at all. You are exceptionally unlikely to make a contribution to physics this way, since you are essentially discounting everything that has been previously learned about physics and math, and present yourself as just as likely to succeed as people who actually know what they are talking about. In fact, you present yourself as more likely, since you claim to be free of the narowness of thinking that knowledge brings.

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I wrote:

Quote:

And after all that, I'm STILL saying I generally agree with you! If I may remind you of my very first sentence on this page "I have a naive personal theory with no justifiable position.." and this is in response to a survey asking if I "think" there is a smallest particle!

You wrote:

Quote:

you are essentially discounting everything that has been previously learned about physics and math, and present yourself as just as likely to succeed as people who actually know what they are talking about. In fact, you present yourself as more likely, since you claim to be free of the narowness of thinking that knowledge brings.

I don't see where I have made such a claim. I don't think I even made an original claim but rather an interpretation of E=mc^2.

But OK. You win.

I will not offer any further opinions I am not qualified to have.

I'll make some room for people with genuinely new theoretical scientific research to present...(presumably they'll come here if the science journals are a bit slow getting them published.)

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Eorl wrote:

But OK. You win.

I will not offer any further opinions I am not qualified to have.

Eorl, I think you're gonna have to stick to your guns a little better than that, if you want to make it into the list of people you provided above Wink

And Good Luck. Smile

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I have no such aspirations rosbourne.

I was just sharing my personal theory, since it was asked for, and I'm not sure why I was trying so hard to defend having done so.

But thank you anyway.

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Eorl wrote:

I have no such aspirations rosbourne.

Neither do I, but it doesn't stop me from trying. I have a pet theory on Inertia which I have yet to get a clear answer on from anyone on this forum.

E_Brown was just about to give me his opinion (after I was finally able to describe my theory well enough to begin to make some sense), but then he dropped out and the thread died. Bummer.

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I've just replied on your thread rosbourne.

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I believe in a world that is slighty more complex than that you imply. For me Realtivistic Physics floats on the mysterious world of quantum mechanics - and you can't ignore it in such a question.

We observe a world of classical physics, but we observe realtivistic effects. Underlying all this science is our understanding that at its most reduced level classical science must transpose into quantum mechanics but we can't see how. You can't get from quantum mechanics into classical physics, but perhaps complexity is the key: possibly "a quantum system becomes classical when it is complex enough for (strong) emergent principles to augment the laws of quantum mechanics to the point of a projection event (from the quantum to the classical world)" whereby quantum mechanics imposes onto our reality. - Part of John Wheeler's ideas.

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g__day wrote:

We observe a world of classical physics, but we observe realtivistic effects. Underlying all this science is our understanding that at its most reduced level classical science must transpose into quantum mechanics but we can't see how. You can't get from quantum mechanics into classical physics, but perhaps complexity is the key: possibly "a quantum system becomes classical when it is complex enough for (strong) emergent principles to augment the laws of quantum mechanics to the point of a project event" whereby quantum mechanics imposes onto our reality. - Part of John Wheeler's ideas.

Interesting. I like it. Smile

Wheeler is a fun guy to listen to.

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Eorl wrote:

I've just replied on your thread rosbourne.

Thanks. Maybe it'll experience a brief revival Smile

I'll go look.

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I won't learn but let me ask anyway...if there is a base unit of matter, how can you have a singularity?

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Eorl wrote:

I won't learn but let me ask anyway...if there is a base unit of matter, how can you have a singularity?

I don't understand the question.

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a base unit of matter could not be broken down or compressed any further, true?

So two base particles has to be twice the size of one, making the singularity physically larger when new matter arrives (I'm not talking about mass, but about physical dimensions again, and for a base particle to exist it would have to have a measureable size, no?)

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Eorl wrote:

a base unit of matter could not be broken down or compressed any further, true?

So two base particles has to be twice the size of one, making the singularity physically larger when new matter arrives (I'm not talking about mass, but about physical dimensions again, and for a base particle to exist it would have to have a measureable size, no?)

Space and time break down in a Singularity. Our physics doesn't even suffice to describe conditions in a singularity, so I don't think you can make assumptions like "size".

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I think you have to realise that you are actually asking a question about how do classical / relativistic physics and quantum mechanical existences interact. You may think you are simply asking is there a smallest unit of matter - like a top quark for instance. But you need to put this into context of what governs reality at such a microscopic level of existence, you are asking a what happens as you approach the limits of where classical reality transitions into quantum mechanical reality.

But the classical and quantum mechancial worlds of surreal happenings at units of time, space and energy below Planck levels (10 ^ -42 - seconds, or cm^3 etc) interact in unknown ways all the time.

So QM and relativity transition against each other all the time in ways we don't fully understand. Your question is about the limits of relativity when we don't understand how at these limits these two complex systems interact.

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g__day wrote:

So QM and relativity transition against each other all the time in ways we don't fully understand. Your question is about the limits of relativity when we don't understand how at these limits these two complex systems interact.

I agree with g_day on this.

Quarks are currently considered the fundamental building blocks of matter, but I'm not sure they theyselves are considered to be "particles" in a physical sense.

I'm still not sure there's anything really "solid" in the Universe at all. I could be wrong, but I tend to think of things like quarks more as mathematical representations of point probabilities than anything really physical. At quark sizes, how would you even define a "particle"? A particle of what, energy, probability, difference? What would make it a particle other than our ability to differentiate it from any other place/time thing/event around it.

How "big" are quarks compared to the Plank length anyway?

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Must there be a base article of matter?

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