see, this is why i gave up on physics. well, not exactly this, but basically this. there's a certain strain of analytic thought going back to descartes that suggests that photons are massless and move in a straight line, but i can't fathom how any atheist could stand on a podium in 2014 and declare a photon massless. the mass may be very, very, very small, but it defies all reason to suggest it doesn't exist at all. and, when the mass is experimentally verified as non-zero, physics is going to face an incredible crisis.
the unfortunate nature of relativity is that it's axiomatic. einstein was operating at precisely the moment that mathematicians were beginning to reject axiomatic systems as facile and naive. ironically, einstein had to reject the most praised axiomatic system of them all - euclid's - in order to get to where he got to. it's bizarre that he upheld the process, given what he knew. and, one has to wonder how different relativity would have been had godel got his ideas out before einstein did.
in the end, the religious have an absolutely valid point in claiming science is another religion. it's not because that's what science always is, or what science should be, or what science wants to be, it's just because it's all science can be once we get beyond the basic abstraction of what we can see and feel and otherwise experience directly. axiomatic systems are axiomatic systems, whether they're labeled with an S or an R.
i was skeptical about the lhc, too. but, i think it should be stressed a bit more loudly that it didn't provide that missing link the way the popular press has suggested. nor would it matter much if it did because we already know the standard theory is wrong, anyways. but, if you want to talk simple naivete? it doesn't get more simple or naive (or quasi-theological) than symmetry. and the lhc results have finally thrown symmetry in the trash can where it belongs....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGhUDByWdPQ
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jessica
"It always travels at the maximum velocity it can irrespective of how much energy it is carrying, which is a clear as day indication that a photon has... how much mass?"
that's an empirical question. however, modern physics treats it as an assumption. that is, there is no empirical evidence that what you're saying about light is actually true.
you kind of have to get into the philosophy of it. kant had this idea that "synthetic a priori" systems (he used euclidean geometry as his sacred example) are the most pristine type of knowledge. but, as kant was writing his epistemological treatises, various mathematicians were realizing that a geometry that negates the third postulate is potentially consistent with itself. the whole idea that space may be curved actually comes from that realization in geometry, which more or less throws kant's epistemology out the window. yet, einstein based his theory on a "synthetic a priori" axiomatic system, nonetheless, potentially carrying in the same kinds of problems that make euclidean geometry obsolete in all but the historical sense (or in a practical engineering sense).
the thing about light not having a mass (and moving in a straight line) actually comes from the history on the philosophical side of physics. and, if you follow the argument, it's actually theological.
now, i'm not saying that light must have mass. i'm saying it's an empirical question. currently, the best we can do is provide a bound for it. however, there would be a very simple test to demonstrate that light does indeed have mass: find a tachyon.
i don't pretend to understand the nature of light perfectly. i don't think anybody claiming such a thing would be speaking honestly. but, we know that light displays both particle and wave behaviour. that particle behaviour, in my opinion, provides strong evidence for a non-zero rest mass. it's not a scientific proof, but if it really had no mass then how could it actually display particle behaviour? see, this is where the thing defies reason at a really basic, intuitive level. we hold the massless photon as such a basic assumption due to so many years and such tradition in doing so that we don't really think that through carefully. high school teachers laugh at the student that suggests otherwise. but, that was exactly the case with the parallel postulate, as well.
it's not an assumption i was able to take seriously, and i had a hard time taking the theories built on it seriously as a result of it.
"As for the standard model being wrong. Uhm."
relativity and quantum theory are incompatible with each other (they can't both be right; it depends on the nature of space, another empirical question that is very difficult to understand how to experiment for), and the general way to dealing with this is in fact to contemplate physics "beyond the standard model". the lhc was supposed to help in sorting this out. i haven't heard anybody come out and say it yet, it's maybe a little too unsettling, but the fact that the lhc results agree so perfectly with the standard model actually merely indicates that its far more wrong than anybody could ever imagine.
"Making mathematical models is fun and all but without empiricism it's called making random shit up in a fantasy land."
that's right. that's why i switched from physics into math. i figured if i was going to be working in lala land, it would be more worthwhile to do so as a mathematician, rather than as a magician.
most of what passes as modern physics (from string theory to relativity itself) doesn't pass any meaningful definition of science. almost none of it is falsifiable, and there's virtually no experimental data underlying any of it. almost all of it is legitimately just mathematics. and, when you take into account what i said about euclid up there, that makes a lot of it more or less useless. they use all kinds of geometry in their models without having any kind of empirical basis as to the validity of the geometry itself.
worse, you get prominent scientists (like stephen hawking) taking outlandish positivist positions that declare that the model creates the reality. i've literally choked listening to these people talk, in absolute awe.
then, they confuse themselves misapplying godel. hawking actually published a paper a while back declaring that godel's math implies a theory of everything is impossible. that only makes sense under the assumption that the model and the reality are inseparable from each other.
so, yeah. you're right. and that's the exact reason i gave up on physics.
"Something tells me proving photons have non-zero rest mass is going to be a tricky one, however even if it were proven to be so it would be such a tiny tiny mass as to be negligible."
i couldn't see how to do it, other than finding a tachyon. but, i think the implications are more profound than you're realizing.
sahil
Present a hypothesis that backs up your claims. how does a photon with rest mass = 0 cause calamities for physics.? Photons are light quanta which travel at speed of light. A stationary photon does not exist. A lot of things may be feel wrong but until you present the mathematics backing up your feeling, we have to work with the theoretical framework that predicts the greatest number of things with the highest accuracy. You have a different opinion? Bring out the mathematics. You can be skeptical about the lhc and as for what they did find, how about you read the scientific publications instead of the media to find out what you are being skeptical about...
jessica
well, i'm not skeptical about the lhc results. and, my argument is purely rational. it's really so simple that you wouldn't expect it would even be controversial, once you think it through. i'd direct you to my previous response.
light does indeed travel at the speed of light, that's tautological. but, does the speed of light actually provide a speed limit?
i'm going to try not to take on your claims about mathematics too directly, other than to point out that the way you're thinking about this is actually the root of the problem in the way that physicists think, and it comes out of these philosophical treatises written in the previous centuries. something we've learned over the last century is that what we call mathematics is itself merely a model to try to understand numbers. despite hawking's sad and comical attempt to grapple with it (those are strong words, and i don't state them lightly), i don't feel that modern physics has really come to terms with godel's work and it's not going to get anywhere further until it does. i guess hawking gets credit for actually realizing there's a problem, there.
there are a number of geometric issues in mathematics that cannot be resolved by starting with a set of axioms and deducing things. these are empirical issues. and, until they're worked out, we're going to have to deal with a lot of nonsense in geometry like the banach–tarski paradox that reduces both fields to idle speculation.
mathematics is not the language of nature. i know physicists like to think that, but that thinking is obsolete. mathematics is merely another model, and it has some really serious problems in it.
stated another way, a lot of what mathematics models is not the reality we live in. you can't split a ball into two equal balls in reality. it defies conservation laws. when physicists take that mathematics and try to use it to develop physical theories, their results consequently do not apply to reality, either.
but, as for light? it has a particle nature. as far as i'm concerned, that implies it has a mass.
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jessica
well, i'm not going to stand here and argue that all physics is wrong, and i'm sorry if you got the impression that this is what i was saying. this computer i'm typing on, and the method used to communicate with you over a network, would belie such an outlandish statement. and, yes, science is a work in progress, and that's what makes it science. nor do i have anything to counter any of the points you just made. all these things are true enough.
it was more the epistemological basis that turned me off. and, the more i learned about math, the more dissatisfied i became with the whole hurrah. i didn't feel i was actually learning anything of any value, i was just following through on a lot of assumptions that i couldn't really swallow as accurate. so, i play guitar now.
i could pull the copenhagen consensus out as another head-scratcher. basically, it's this:
"we, the pre-eminent german scientists of the world, cannot figure this out. therefore, let it be decreed across the world that nobody shall ever figure this out for all of time eternal."
that is something i can sympathize with einstein on.
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jessica
yeah, i've seen that explanation before, but i believe it's just an interpretation. i don't think the duality is really settled in any authoritative way.
i haven't seen the matter-antimatter argument before, but allow me to be skeptical in pointing out that if the mass is small enough it will wash out in the error.
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jessica
well, the funny thing is i gave up on math when i came to the conclusion that it ought to be empirical, and everybody realized it, and nobody wanted to do anything about it, or seemed to even really care.
Atwa Jesper
Sorry if I'm intruding but I wanted to interject very quickly and bring up the fact that some 'debaters' get lost in the heat of the arguments and usually and unintentionally digress from the main topic.
We could spend days throwing theories and studies on the table that at the moment seem to be contradicting each other but the God discussion and Science, have not much to do with "what seems logic to me" or with the typical "it doesn't make sense". The universe doesn't care for what seems plausible or not, reality is reality and if a phenomenon behaves in a certain way, well, we test it and prove it with evidence and that's it. How many things that nowadays work and seem to make perfect sense, didn't seem logic or natural when they were being developed by those 'crazy thinkers'. Big masses of Metal are able to float on water and carry a lot a things, or we could have also leave the Skies to the birds but we still made it. With today's knowledge all of that seems normal because we know how it's done but again, those ideas didn't seem to be any logical.
Anyways, it seems I'm digressing myself. Regardless of the limited understanding that we have today of the natural world, we shouldn't fall again in the fallacies of "arguments from ignorance" or "the God of the gaps". The fact that many things are still unknown to humanity and Quantum physics doesn't seem to make much sense, doesn't mean therefore God.
The massless protons and other topics must be resolved for science advancement purposes, not to prove that any God does or does Not exist.
Btw, the ones making the assertion that a God exists are the ones obliged to prove it. The burden of proof is on the ones making the assertion, not the other way around.
jessica
that's all very true, but it doesn't really have anything to do with what i posted.
the value of science in my view is twofold: falsifiability and repeatability. but, when you look at the bulk of modern theoretical physics, very little of it meets either criteria.
that in no way implies a god must exist, and again, i'm sorry if you thought that's what i suggested. but it does place the two fields on a roughly equal footing. in my mind, that doesn't give religion more credibility, but it does give parts of modern physics less credibility.
in religion's defence, it's a bit of a strawman to argue it's rooted solely in faith. i'm simply not aware of analogues in other religions, but christianity has libraries and libraries worth of material that attempts to deduce aspects of morality using reason. we think of the "natural law" that defines what is roughly thought of as "secular humanism" as a modern, liberal idea but it in reality traces back to christian theologians like augustine and aquinas. it's use in the english legal tradition actually has more than a little bit to do with the feudal system. when the english scholars of centuries past deduced that natural law ought to be supreme to legislated law, what they really meant was that the church's law is supreme to the king's law, and for the precise reason that the king was still viewed as subservient to the pope, at least in moral purposes if no longer in political ones. it may have earlier roots in aristotle, but the reality is that secular humanism is the philosophical continuation of a branch of christian theology. both systems appeal to reason to determine moral value, rather than the dictates of human beings. the difference is merely that the christian theologians thought god acted through reason, and modern humanists tend to consider that to be a question that is not worth asking.
yes, you have to work in ideas like infallibility of the pope into the equation, and write them off as ridiculous on their face. however, it's not really fair to blame that on the religion itself - it's more of a consequence of human politics and the tendency of power to act as a corrupting influence. in christianity's further defence, it must be pointed out that the pope has never existed without theological opposition of some sort, and that the reformation is a historical event that actually did happen.
i'm losing a bit of focus. biology is quite different because it is far more empirical than modern physics - a situation that is the reverse of what it was 100 years ago and that i think most people haven't really come to terms with yet.
i was simply responding to a comment krauss makes at the beginning of the video about physics not being "just another story" because it makes testable predictions. but, this is largely untrue. physics does make some testable predictions, but it makes far more untestable claims by deducing things from a set of first principles, just as aquinas did. it follows that when the religionists argue that physics is mostly just another story, they are making a valid point.
but, no, that doesn't mean a god must therefore exist.
jessica
just throw an epsilon in there and see what happens. publish it if you want, i don't care, my aspirations are all in music.
(noting, of course, the conceptual change that light could be at rest in the first place.)
ok, i know physicists like to think in terms of consequences. it bugs me, but i'll go with it. it may actually make a few things make more sense.
consider the idea of determining the relativistic mass of a photon. you know the formula (hopefully), with the big M equal to the little m over the square root of one minus v/c squared. if you actually plug zeros into there, you get the lovely 0/0, so you take a limit. but think about what you're doing when you take a limit - you're setting them both to non-zero. if you were actually setting them to zero, you'd set them to zero. when you're taking a limit, you're getting as close to zero as you possibly can, without actually getting to zero. that is, you're assuming a non-zero rest mass.
mathematically speaking, you would actually formally even plug an epsilon into the m, and c-delta into the v. that is because m (epsilon) is approaching zero and v is approaching c (or delta is approaching 0). but, then you go and set it all to zero. that's really not consistent with itself.
now, on a graph, you might plug in an imaginary point to make the thing continuous, if you want it to be continuous. but it would be crazy to do that in the realm of physics. that's forcing reality to obey something that isn't even an arbitrary convention, but a pure fantasy that mathematicians create purely for the fun of it. plotting that point is carrying out magic. it's a magic point...
what the formula actually states is that light can never reach the speed of light. this is tautologically false.
if you just plugged a non-zero epsilon in there in the first place, set v equal to the speed of light and set a new speed limit of pure energy at "c+delta" (and you could maybe even come up with delta in terms of epsilon some other way, but be careful that you're not being circular) you'd get the same mathematical idea, but in a way that actually makes mathematical sense.
and i actually hope that example further demonstrates some of the problems in the way physicists use mathematics.
rr
Well, with respect, physics seems to have done very well so far. Sure, it is all model dependant, no one claims it as absolute truth do they. Yes you seem to know your stuff, mostly on the maths side. But I think I will put my confidence in the current prevailing views rather than a random Youtuber who looks like they have smoked enough weed to embarrass the biomass of the Amazon rainforest. Call me some sort of utilitarian if you wish, but these flawed theories you critique have done a great job of explaining many things. In any case, c is just the speed of a massless particle in a vacuum. Being called the speed of light is just a historical artifact. So even if it turns out a photon does have an incredibly small mass, I don't see how it breaks the theory. But most importantly, what the fuck's your problem with koalas?
jessica
the idea that nothing can move faster than pure quantized energy (massless particle strikes me as an undefined concept) strikes me as pretty rational, and not something i'm going to argue against. but, if we accept that light does have a mass, it opens up a lot of questions as to what that means, exactly. is it even defined? is it an imaginary limit, in the sense that nothing actually achieves it? is the difference between the speed light and the speed limit large or small? if it's large, what effects does that have on things like time dilation? space travel? as i mentioned before, i don't think you're really thinking through the possible ramifications. mathematically, it may only be a set of minor fixes. but this could have very large results, depending on the nature of those fixes.