Prev: the deal with Maxwell theory deriving Principle of Least Action or Fermat's Principle but not vice versa Re: Re:
Next: yes us, it is jesus, jesus runs my asus and my asus is russ plus we'n'us
From: maxwell on 29 Oct 2009 14:11
This is the second part of the TEW Review – it covers chapters 3 and
4. Chapter 3 is the heart of this book where Dr Little provides his
answer to the paradoxes of QM and especially the two-slit experiment.
Drum-roll, sound of trumpets – the answer is: “the backward-wave
discovery” (not hypothesis, note). Unlike the standard interpretation
of QM, involving mathematical wave functions, Little’s waves are “of
course, real physical waves” - they must exist because “they have to
be able to do something” <p.26>. The real subatomic particle moves
(forwards through time) from a point A to a point B by following any
of the paths identified by the Little-waves previously emitted from B
to A. Indeed, the traveling particle is only emitted IF it is
stimulated by the arrival of such a Little-wave convergence. Without
any further evidence or references, Little claims that “A great deal
of experimental evidence confirms the existence of these waves – waves
that are real objects in their own right, separate from particles.”

Very surprisingly, Little does not discuss a very important
experimental observation about moving the screen further away from the
slits (this is left to Prechter in the Foreword) which indicates that
the particles must be taking different trajectories that are dependent
on the separation of the target screen from the slits. The obvious
(but unstated conclusion) is that this is a multi-body interaction
involving the source, the electrons around the slits, the traversing
particle AND the electrons in the screen – this is a much more complex
situation than simply harmonic waves going through a pair of slits:
whether forwards or backwards. Moving the screen, AFTER the moving
particle has been emitted, would demonstrate that it is the future
location of the screen that is important, not its location at the time
of emission (standard QM) or even prior to emission backwards from the
screen, as with Little-waves.

But to continue with the TEW theory: Little not only “discovers” this
new wave, he is convinced that all of “empty space is, in fact, filled
with these waves” <p.31>. These new entities form a veritable
plenum, fulfilling Descartes’ dream of an “aether” controlling the
whole of reality. Like all the classic aethers, these Little-waves
are also eternal, neither being created by the detectors nor destroyed
by the sources since they “are present at all times throughout all
space” <p.36>. The subatomic particles in the detector atoms
apparently only “organize” the waves that impinge on them (from some
earlier time) in some unknown manner. Little-waves can apparently
scatter elastically or inelastically but, according to Little, must
not be thought of as photons. It goes without saying that this whole
invention of an explanation of QM does not strike Little as
“weird” (but it does me). Unlike Newton (who was a natural
philosopher and a true follower of Bill Ockham), Little invents new,
elementary entities as fast as any string theorist in order to explain
the observed phenomena.

Little rejects the idea that his wave is just a “time-reversed”
standard forward moving QM wave because that wave diverges in all
directions towards the screen and his doesn’t <p. 34> (but why this
criticism is not applied to the Little-wave, which diverges on the
source side of the slits, is not mentioned). These Little-waves have
to preserve their own identity, so they each need to have a unique
“marker of some sort” so that waves carrying different markers do not
interfere with one another but they “do compete with one another (from
different detection points) in stimulating the emission of particles”
<p.35>. Little also never acknowledges that QM waves are represented
as complex harmonic functions while his are simply “real” but he still
claims (without demonstration) that his theory predicts all the same
results as standard QM <p.35>.

Little begins chapter 4 with a well-justified attack on one of the
central tenets of QM – the superposition of states: “Perhaps the
single most absurd claim of QM is that subatomic particles exist in no
state in particular until and unless they are observed, and that it is
the observer’s act of looking that puts the particle into the observed
state.” This is the ‘measurement problem’ or ‘collapse of the wave
function’ in a nutshell. Little’s criticism consists of the realist
view (which I accept) that “to exist is to be something in particular”
<p. 40>. Most of the rest of this chapter is dedicated to providing
an alternative explanation of polarized light but is fundamentally
flawed as Little explicitly (and mistakenly) supposes that “a photon
is a localized entity” <p.46>.
(… to be continued)

From: maxwell on 31 Oct 2009 19:22
This is the third part of the TEW Review – it covers chapters 5, 6 and
7. In his refreshing ‘non-academic’ style, Little opens his fifth
chapter with a blast at Heisenberg’s “alleged” uncertainty principle
(HUP) – dismissing it as “complete nonsense”. He points out
(correctly) that HUP is not usually offered just as a restriction on
the statistical accuracy of simultaneous measurements of a particle’s
position and momentum but that these two values together are
“uncertain in actuality”. Little, in effect, writes that all real
things must have real parameters with real values. However, his point
is weakened when he fails to notice (as do most commentators) that
velocity (and hence momentum) requires a finite limit process to both
define and measure any value; he also fails to distinguish the fact of
a particle’s real location with attempts by humans to measure that
location. Little’s mathematical derivation of the HUP requires that
he adopt the de Broglie momentum/wavelength equation but this begs the
question, as this was just the foundational step for developing wave
mechanics. The uncertainty originates in TEW from the “fact” that
many Little-waves compete to stimulate the source emission in any
measurement and the ‘winning wave’ is unknown to (and cannot be
predicted by) human beings until after each (statistical) measurement
is complete <p.59>. However, I do agree with Little’s analysis that
the uncertainty in measurements arises at the emitter and not at the
absorber but the context is never the same in the real world when so-
called ‘identical’ experiments are repeated, although simplifying
identical circumstances must always be proposed in all mathematical
models. I also agree with Little when he correctly concludes that QM
has over-extended the HUP to impose unjustified constraints on the
unobserved, internal dynamics of subatomic systems.

The sixth chapter focuses on EPR and on the debate between Bohr and
Einstein whether QM was the final theory of the micro-world. Again,
Little fails to distinguish between the communication of information
and energy, so his criticism is weak, relying on the assumption that
only real, physical “things” can communicate between real, interacting
objects <p.70>.

Little’s naïve realism is evidenced at the start of chapter 7 when he
illogically concludes (like most people) that the reality of nuclear
weapons means that Einstein’s theory of relativity is true. Little
does point out that an “object might appear to be different but it
cannot, in fact, be different” as “an object doesn’t change into
something else because an observer looks at it while one of them is
moving” <p.77> so that all the Lorentz-transformation effects on real
objects are just illusions. TEW’s explanation of Einstein’s light-
hypothesis is that the Little-waves always control the speed of the
photons relative to the observer. Obviously, this is a problem with
distant photons emitted before humans even existed! Little claims to
explain this paradox with typical hand-waving using the key word
“thus” <p.82>. Little is ‘therefore’ pleased to announce that
“relativity corroborates TEW”.

Little concludes this chapter with his ontological analysis of his
“elementary waves” that turn out not to be plane waves at all but one
dimensional “flux-lines” so they do not need a medium to propagate
(convenient!). “Oscillations are not actually physical motions back
and forth but represent a periodic variation of a property internal to
the flux.” <p. 87> . Unfortunately, Little provides no further
explanation of what is the nature of this ‘internal property’. Again,
using ‘only’ relativity results (and Einstein’s photo-electric
equation) Little ‘derives’ his required de Broglie momentum/wavelength
equation, so that his ‘wave’ is “quantitatively identical to the
corresponding QM wave” <p.89> - this ignores the historical fact that
Einstein’s photo-electric explanation used EM, not QM, waves. Little
proposes that: “every flux line corresponds to a particle at rest in
one frame of reference or another” <p.89> although no direction in 3D
space is preferred for particles at rest or that this model
contradicts his earlier view of ‘eternal waves’. Little’s resolution
of this contradiction is that his “elementary wave” is not really a
wave at all.
(… to be continued)


From: maxwell on 2 Nov 2009 16:39
This is the last part of the TEW Review – it covers the final chapters
8 through 13. Chapter 8 is the TEW interpretation of particle
diffraction (or Bragg scattering when using X-rays), which is used
(along with the double-slit experiment) to “prove that a (subatomic)
particle is a wave while interacting with a perfect crystal”. Since
TEW always involves real Little-waves, they have no problem
interfering with each other and scattering off all the atomic planes
as they travel backwards from the points on the detector to the
emitter.

Chapter 9 is Dr Little’s reinterpretation of classical mechanics based
on the Hamilton-Jacobi mathematical model of a ‘particle-following-a-
wave’. TEW simple supposes this model is ‘real’ with the wave going
backwards from the final destination. Of course, Little then must
reject the reality of Newtonian physics with its central concept of
very small (localized) particles with mass and momentum <p.101>. He
then logically rejects the final step, leading to QM, known as
‘canonical quantization’. Little proposes that mass as ‘quantity of
matter’ be rejected (now that TEW has been discovered) and all of
physics be restated in terms of ‘elementary waves’ <p.104>.

Dr Little applies his physical intuition in chapter 10 to the idea of
magnetism, especially the erroneous reification of the ‘magnetic
field’ (that is, interpreting mathematical symbols in the equations of
physics as one-to-one mappings to real objects or entities). In
section 10.2, he introduces the non-physicist reader to some of the
contradictions associated with the idea that EM fields are real.
However, since Dr Little believes that “behavior is necessarily the
behavior of something” he feels compelled to invent another new entity
in TEW to explain “correctly” the phenomena of magnetism – the
“vecton”. These new, “very small objects” are emitted continuously
from electric sources (under the influence of Little-waves) and then
follow the lines of electric flux. These “vectons must carry an
internal property of some kind so they can impart a ‘jolt’ to an
absorbing particle along a direction determined by this internal
property, not by the direction in which the vecton is moving.” <p.
110>. By page 118, Dr Little has decided that: “vectons are actually
photons” so that “electromagnetism should be renamed vecton mechanics”
especially as he has decided that: “Faraday’s law provides the real
confirmation that the vecton theory is correct.” Chapter 11 allows Dr
Little to repeat his ‘behavioral analysis’ to critique two rather
esoteric examples of modern physics: parity violation and ‘dark
matter’; no new insights here justify these extra pages. Chapter 12
tries to explain the atom in terms of TEW with considerable hand-
waving being used to explain electron fundamentals like the Pauli
exclusion principle thereby avoiding “an enormously complicated
mathematical formalism” (i.e. spinors). The final chapter attempts to
project TEW into other fields of science like neurobiology and
genetics; this is a gigantic leap across many layers of complexity
that few physicists would ever dream of attempting today but, at
least, these paragraphs contain several subjunctive qualifiers.
Finally, Dr Little rejects the notion of space and time as curving to
explain gravity since these ideas are only concepts and not real
objects but he does hope to find “a mechanism by which a massive body
might produce curvature in the elementary waves” <p.153>.

This reviewer is very sympathetic to Dr Little’s appeal to realistic
metaphysics but cannot accept that inventing new, fictitious entities
is any improvement on the ‘math only’ approach that now characterizes
mathematical (not theoretical) physics. So, this is one reader who
cannot agree with the closing claim that: “TEW provides the basis for
finally doing some real research on subatomic particles.” The actual
lack of any progress in TEW-based physics over the last 13 years does
not give one much confidence in the fruitfulness of this theory. The
extensive use of quotations in this review shows that Dr Little has no
problem with modesty. For readers who enjoy his ‘in-your-face’ style
of writing about science, this book can be recommended – for the rest
of us, we’ll just have to get over it.


First  |  Prev  | 
Pages: 1 2
Prev: the deal with Maxwell theory deriving Principle of Least Action or Fermat's Principle but not vice versa Re: Re:
Next: yes us, it is jesus, jesus runs my asus and my asus is russ plus we'n'us