A fellow name Oliver Heaviside, an English mathematician, rewrote Maxwell’s Equations so that they were able to be applied to real world problems.
Maxwell’s equations – as he, Maxwell wrote them – were just to difficult to be readily applied.
When you read about people like Maxwell, it makes you wonder what confluence of biological / personal influences could produce a brain like his (or that of an Einstein or Newton, etc).
IMHO, in high school, if not earlier, and certainly at the college level, students should be required to take “history of science” classes. I think this would be more beneficial than having students take classes in “physics for poets” type classes.
“Maxwell doesn’t get enough respect:”
Balderdash. As the video suggests, maybe not among the public, but in physics there’s no doubt about his standing. Not enough emphasis is given in the video about his contribution to thermodynamics and the statistical nature of gases. Also, Maxwell’s Equations (yes, in caps) is truly, to me, the 4 most important equations in classical physics. Yes, one needs a knowledge of vector calculus to really appreciate their beauty. However, it should also be noted, that 3 of 4 equations are based on other’s work: Faraday, Gauss, and Ampere. But it was Maxwell who brought it all together and unified the whole.
My favorite course to teach was always junior level Electromagnetic Theory. The course moves through building the 4 Maxwell Equations. Then in the later quarter of the course, the real fun begins. First, using the equations one can get the classical wave equation…hmm…something going on here. Then it soon becomes obvious one can calculate a wave speed, and suddenly in about 3-4 minutes, the number 2.98 x 10^8 m/s shows up on the blackboard! To watch junior physics majors suddenly see how the speed of light comes right out of the ME’s is truly fun. But we’re far from done. ME’s then shows how these EM waves form from accelerating charges and how both the electric and magnetic parts of the waves are mutually inducing. Once, that is done, it’s really just a matter of grinding through to produce all the laws of optics.
Even more: instead of using fields, one can use the vector potentials, and with a a bit of relativity, one can reduce EM to just a single equation.
If you can’t tell, I’m a big fan.
physicsguy:
I’m talking about the general public.
Another example of why checking in daily at neo’s blog is always time well spent!
And then there is the Beattle’s song with the line “…. Maxwell’s little deamons …”
Neo: great video, I am awed by the work of this mind.
Physicsguy: wish I could have taken your course. I admire physics but from a distance. The Feynman lectures are IMHO wonderful for giving something of the “feel” of things without forcing us to master all the math. Certainly, as you say, they show the beauty of the ME’s.
More like this!
om says, “Another example of why checking in daily at neo’s blog is always time well spent!”
Yep– in regard to people named Maxwell, I’d much rather read about James Clerk than Ghislaine (and yes, I know she’s not related to him in any way except by her Czech father’s choice of a British-sounding name).
One small detail of Maxwell’s personality that I found fascinating is his love of his fellow Scot Robert Burns’ poetry. He wrote a parody of Burns’ “Comin’ Through the Rye” in the same Scots dialect that Burns used:
Gin a body meet a body
Flyin’ through the air.
Gin a body hit a body,
Will it fly? And where?
Ilka impact has its measure,
Ne’er a ane hae I,
Yet a’ the lads they measure me,
Or, at least, they try.
Gin a body meet a body
Altogether free,
How they travel afterwards
We do not always see.
Ilka problem has its method
By analytics high;
For me, I ken na ane o’ them,
But what the waur am I?
Maxwell would accompany himself on a guitar while singing this and other poems he wrote in Burns’ style. Underneath the physicist and mathematician there may well have been a folk singer trying to get out.
JohnTyler…”IMHO, in high school, if not earlier, and certainly at the college level, students should be required to take “history of science” classes.”
Agree, IF such a course could be prevented into ‘science in society’ with a heavy overlay of Oppression Studies: ‘here’s how science and technology were used to oppress people in Babylon…in Ancient Rome…in the Middle Ages…in the British Empire….ec”
I also think everyone should take a lab science…involving actual experiments, NOT just computer simulations of experiments.
physics guy;
You would be hard pressed to find a non – STEM student and/or worker, who could name a scientist of note , other than Einstein or maybe Newton.
Sometime back some of these posts started appearing in the right-edge of my YouTube viewing…. “Kathy Loves Physics & History”. Interesting posts about the people who did things in physics and how these things fit into history. No math required, just some interest along the lines of “how did that happen…?”
Yes, Maxwell is in there, among many others. Names I recall from high school and Jr Coll science classes, with little recall of what they actually contributed.
A lot of what Einstein did for special relativity was just take Maxwell’s equations literally. In a way Maxwell anticipated special relativity without realizing it.
It’s worth seconding John Tyler that Maxwell’s equations as written are not those of today. They included statements of Ohm’s Law, for example. Nowadays Ohm’s Law is a special case of application of Maxwell’s equations to some kinds of materials.
This is not unusual. For Newton’s Laws it’s the same–he never wrote F=ma for example. Most working physicists have probably never read or even seen the original–by the time something has been around long enough to be in textbooks for introductory courses, thousands of people have worked on them and massaged them into something as easy to explain as they can think to, and they don’t go back to primary sources as a rule.
They wouldn’t get very far with the original. Newton’s Principia is all done in the form of geometric proofs. Nowadays it’s all stated as algebra and calculus.
Physicsguy “ the number 2.98 x 10^8 m/s shows up on the blackboard!“ The interesting thing is that the speed of light number does not specify the reference frame. It just depends on some physical constants that are independent of the reference frame. Physicist noted this and at first speculated it was with respect to the “ether.” But experimental physicists notably the American Albert Michelson tried to measure the effect of the earths motion around the sun relative to the ether on the speed of light and could not measure an effect. Einstein used this independence of the speed of light on the reference frame as the basis for the special theory of relativity. So indeed his theory owed a lot to Maxwell,
}}} Maxwell doesn’t get enough respect:
That’s because he stopped using his silver hammer on people’s heads.
Duh.
:-p
Owen:
My own fav from Feynman is this old one where he discusses how Science actually works:
The part ca. 5:00 identifies how it is that Climate “change” is anything but science.
It is a glaringly obvious example of a “vague theory” — Hurricanes? Climate Change! Heat Waves? Climate Change! Blizzards? Climate Change! Drought? Climate Change! Floods? Climate Change!
Whichever way the wind blows, it’s because of Climate Change!
ObloddyHell:
Thanks for fixing my misremembered reference to Maxwell by the Beatles.
I second JohnTyler. History of science classes in general education would be a great idea. They should include a section on Lysenko. (Although there is some benefit to physics for poets too. Anyone who drives a car can benefit from a basic class in Newtonian mechanics.)
neo – If you’re looking for another underappreciated scientist, I would recommend looking into Georges Lemaitre – a narrative-buster for sure.
Maxwell and Watt are largely responsible for the Industrial Revolution.
What has happened to the Scots since then? They have descended into leftist nonsense.
David Foster @ 11:41: “…I also think everyone should take a lab science…involving actual experiments, NOT just computer simulations of experiments.”
Totally agree. How else will kids get a sense of the boundary between numbers they write down, and the Real World about which they write numbers? How else will they develop a respect for how hard it is to pull good data out of the mess on the lab bench? How important it is *not to fake or alter* what emerges when the experimental method is faithfully applied?
Most will never be doing Science, but as citizens and consumers they should all know a little of how Science gets done; how much care and honesty it demands.
He certainly doesn’t, amongst the general public, even the ‘educated’. Early in the pandemic, I started reading one of the really good biographies of Maxwell recently published. I never finished it as my attention was distracted (it happens far too often!), but I enjoyed what I did read.
> What has happened to the Scots since then?
Chief Engineer on the starship Enterprise.
@OBloodyHell:The part ca. 5:00 identifies how it is that Climate “change” is anything but science.
If you are talking about how it is presented in the media after being filtered through activist press releases, sure, but what climate scientists are actually doing is trying to model an extremely complex system using simple physics and I’m not sure Feynman would disagree with their approach, since he’d probably not be able to suggest anything better.
Rather I think he’d disagree with the presentation in the media and perhaps he might disagree with the policy proposals being pushed–hard to say what a man long dead might think, if he’d been around the last 30-ish years and kept up on events.
I had a pet named Maxwell, and most people who asked about the name went with Maxwell’s silver hammer as a first guess as to its origin.
British pronunciation: It’s pronounced James “Clark” Maxwell.
No idea why. If you visit a clerk behind a counter, he/she is a “clark.”
I’d agree that Carl Sagan’s quote was nonsense. “A few academic scientists?” Probably the vast majority of people who have gotten some exposure to the theory of physical sciences at the college level (not a small group) know of Maxwell.
I’ve heard the story that Maxwell visited a then frail Faraday and informed him how his equations of electrical and magnetism predicted the speed of light (zounds!) before he went public with it.
In the kinetic theory of gases (mentioned about 60% into the video) the molecule distribution of velocities is known as a Maxwellian velocity distribution. You know your reputation has really arrived (perhaps posthumously) when your name is routinely converted into an adjective. (Like Jussie Smollett only much much better.)
This is not really directly related to Maxwell, but on a couple occasions I lectured classes on intro physics and early understandings of light. So the topic of Poisson’s spot comes up, and as I was preparing to talk about it, I thought “Damn it, I’ve never seen a Poisson spot.” (It predates Maxwell’s work by a few decades.)
In a couple hours I was able to grab a lens out of a drawer and a microscope slide with a ball bearing glued onto it, and hand holding a laser pointer and the lens the expanded laser beam striking the ball clearly shows the spot. Amazing. Fun times. Those early mathematical physicists were incredible.
Obloodyhell @ 12:34: Thanks for the Feynman clip. I am a Feynman fan from way back and somehow had missed that one. It’s a classic, with his wonderfully economical explanation of why experiment is embedded in, bound to, our theories. “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter who said it, if it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
And the bit at 5:00 is both brilliant (on how science works, and doesn’t) and wise (on how it can be made to mislead).
Finally: nice screen name. Bloody marvelous, in fact.
What has happened to the Scots since then?
Sir Alexander Fleming won the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of penicillin. In the early 2000s he was voted the third greatest Scot (after Robert Burns and William Wallace) in a public opinion poll conducted in the UK; and Time magazine named Fleming one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century. So the century after Maxwell wasn’t a total washout for Scotland.
“It just depends on some physical constants that are independent of the reference frame. ”
Yep. That’s epsilon naught and mu naught. Comparing to the standard wave equation you could almost say they have something to do with density (?) or viscosity (?) of space. An idea long discounted until recently when the notion that spacetime may be fluid has come up again.
IMHO, in high school, if not earlier, and certainly at the college level, students should be required to take “history of science” classes. I think this would be more beneficial than having students take classes in “physics for poets” type classes.
I don’t know. It seems as though a good portion of the time what’s taught in history class is utter myth and the last thing I’d want is more myth parading as history. I mean just for a history of science related example the whole “Galileo Affair”. I mean when I found out how it actually happened the main thing I learned is the version that’s normally presented is a agenda driven parody of what actually happened. (Pretty much the only thing they got right was he did get in trouble with the Church, pretty much everything after that is myth which is sad because I thought the real story was actually more interesting.)
I think the history of science is interesting but nothing seems to have happened in an order that made any sense.
A lot of what Einstein did for special relativity was just take Maxwell’s equations literally. In a way Maxwell anticipated special relativity without realizing it.
Einstein’s genius lay in picking out a result or observation and raising it to the level of an axiom from which the rest followed. Lorentz himself commented on that rare ability.
However, it should also be noted, that 3 of 4 equations are based on other’s work: Faraday, Gauss, and Ampere.
The way he discovered the displacement current was quite remarkable, based on a strange mechanical model. He himself said the model was not real, just an aid to thinking about the problem.
There are actually 8 equations, but I think Maxwell himself produced 20 in total. He didn’t try for a minimum number, leaving that to the future when things might become more settled. He also rewrote everything using quaternions on the advice of (IIRC) Tait. Oops 🙂 The modern version in geometric units is quite succinct: dF = 0, d*F = J. But not as intuitive as the vector version due to Heaviside.
…While John Durham, with the determined persistence of gravitational force, has actually gotten five of Hillary’s agents-provocateurs to plead the Fifth.
@Chuck: He also rewrote everything using quaternions on the advice of (IIRC) Tait. Oops ?
I’ve tried (not very hard) to learn quaternions; other than extremely compact notation (so compact you can’t understand what it means) I’m not sure what the advantage is for human brains. But I understand computers can make good use of them.
In the presentations by Maxwell that I’ve read he did not use quaternions; instead he wrote three copies of every equation permuting x, y, and z. The vector notation from Gibbs and Heaviside is much easier than either presentation.
Incidentally if we’re looking for undervalued in popular consciousness I’d nominate Gibbs. Like Maxwell, Gibbs can be said to have anticipated Planck’s constant before Planck, but he seems to have regarded it as just a constant you’d measure to make the units come out right and certainly wouldn’t have seen the quantum implications of it.
Barry, yes, Messi is a real “magician”. The amazing part to me is how he fights through deliberate fouls to keep his attack going. Pretty Boy Ronaldo would just flop right down and start whining and rolling around like his leg just got took off.
Yes, simply extraordinary….
I’m more than a bit pissed off at him, though…
…since he decided to go from being the best player of all time to a virtual non-entity.
For money.
As though he really needs it.
Never even consulted with me on this catastrophic decision…
What about his wife?
What about his kids?
For PSG?
Simply unfathomable….
No, I’m not very happy about it.
Actually, that’s an understatement….
Oh well…I’ll get over it. Maybe.
But it’ll take time….
What has happened to the Scots since then?
They emigrated? And the colonies are thankful.
After underpinning the British Empire for hundreds of years and getting f***-all for their efforts, they decided to focus on the really important stuff:
1. Caber tossing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caber_toss
2. Making the perfect haggis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haggis
3. Porting the bagpipes to Rock ‘n Roll.
4. Screwing the English.
Incidentally if we’re looking for undervalued in popular consciousness I’d nominate Gibbs.
Agree. Einstein called him the greatest American scientist and said that if he had been aware of Gibbs monograph (1902), he wouldn’t have written his own papers on statistical mechanics. Both Gibbs and Boltzmann corresponded with Maxwell, and Maxwell was the inspiration for Boltzmann’s work.
@bauxite & physicsguy,
About Lemaitre and viscous space-time. This is my short piece about the expanding universe. It is very much about electromagnetism.
That the Universe is expanding is based on one single premise: the Hubble Red Shift is due to a Doppler effect recessional velocity.
When Hubble published his observations of red shifted light from distant objects there were two possible explanations that came to the fore. One, originated by Georges Lemaitre, was that the Universe was expanding. The other, from Fritz Zwicky, was that light lost energy as it traveled, termed “tired light”. At that time, ca. 1930, interstellar and intergalactic space were assumed to be perfect vacuums and thus there was no mechanism to redden the light. Now, 90 years later, we have a much better understanding of reality. But more importantly, far more importantly, we have actual observational evidence that Zwicky was right.
In the radio astronomy of Pulsars we find that the shorter wavelengths of the leading edge of the pulse arrive before longer wavelengths. The velocity of light, c, is NOT constant but varies by wavelength. The dispersion is proportional to the distance from us of the pulsar. The observed effect is isotropic. The conventional explanation is that the dispersion measure is the “integrated column density of free electrons between an observer and a pulsar”. The mechanism matters not. What matters is that the interstellar medium is not a vacuum but rather affects light waves in a way best described as having an Index of Refraction greater than 1, unity. We find the same phenomenon in the observation of Fast Radio Bursts from other galaxies, thus indicating that the intergalactic media is not an electromagnetic vacuum.
This leads me to conclude that the Hubble red shift is the result of the light traversing a distance through a medium denser than Einstein’s “in vacuo” rather than a recessional velocity.
what climate scientists are actually doing is trying to model an extremely complex system using simple physics
And one of the problems is that they don’t understand the system, and use what can only be called fudge factors for phenomena that aren’t understood. My own sense as an outsider is that they are overfitting recent climate history and the models would perform better if they reduced the CO2 sensitivity from around 2.5+ to around 1.7. Each of the last three CMIPS models have performed worse than the previous version when predictions are compared against temperature data. The subject is so ridden with politics that it hinders scientific progress.
1. As a lay person I really appreciated all the comments and perspectives from the Physicists who wrote in on this post. Thanks!
B) As others have stated, I found the premise of “relatively unknown” attributed to Maxwell in the video confusing. Yes, he’s not a “household name,” but as someone wrote, how many scientists could the average American name, 5? When I think of scientists active in the mid-1800s Maxwell is the main name who comes to mind. I think asking any educated person with a passing knowledge of more than 10 historically significant scientists to list great scientists or physicists active between Newton and Einstein most all would mention Maxwell. Many may only mention Maxwell regarding that period of history. Or, ask the same group to list important scientists in the discovery of the nature of electricity or electromagnetism and Maxwell will certainly be mentioned*. Maxwell is well remembered and well regarded in the field of Physics and for his insights into the nature of electricity. He is famous. However he is famous in a field of study (mathematics and electromagnetism) that is out of the reach of most us mortals.
*And this is primarily an American thing. As others have mentioned, American education is weak on science and scientific history. We have great institutions specifically oriented towards scientific education; MIT, Caltech and many others. But other nations do a better job of including science and the history of science as part of all academic curricula.
@Chuck:And one of the problems is that they don’t understand the system, and use what can only be called fudge factors for phenomena that aren’t understood.
Both true, but it’s not as though there’s someone who DOES understand and they’re just not listening. It’s that NO ONE understands. And so they are trying to model something knowing it’s an oversimplification, instead of throwing up their hands and modeling nothing.
The history of science is full of kludges and fudge factors that took time to be understood by theory. Some of them held up and some of them didn’t.
Really good example, besides Ohm’s Law, is the periodic table. What I learned about the history there was a) there were a bunch of competing tables around roughly the same time, no one could really settle which was correct, and b) Mendeleev was using his (which later evolved into ours) not only to predict future elements which were discovered, but also to predict crazy and ridiculous elements that also filled slots in his table. Decades later we understood how to get the periodic table from physics, but the calculations are not as difficult as those that climate scientists are trying to do.
Someone suggested that “ History of science” should be taught . I would suggest that the broader “ History of technology” would be better and more attention keeping for the average student. While technology involves science, it also involves engineering, whether formal modern engineering with mathematical calculations or seat-of-the pants engineering without math.
BigD:
Here’s an article I wrote in 2011 on Galileo.
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Well that's better than the average take I've seen. So the whole story about Galileo is the reason that he published in the first place was his old college buddy asked him to do it. Here's the mind blower. The guy that asked him to publish on helicentrism that was his friend? It was the pope. (Yeah, he was literally friends with the pope.)
Anyway like you were saying there were 2 competing theories at the time which we call Tychonic and Copernican.(Geocentric and helicentric respectively.) The problem is mathematically they're the same theory and make the same predicitions, you can't differentiate between them by observing the sky. Tycho Brahe thought geocentric made sense because he couldn't observe stellar parallax and he figured either we're not moving or the stars are really far away and therefore huge. (When he did the math out he calculated how far the stars would have to be and how big to explain no observable parallax. What he calculated was the size of the orbit of Saturn and at the time he knew of nothing that was that big so he thought it was unlikely. Oddly enough he actually screwed that up because of an observation mistake about the atmosphere which meant he calculated stars to be far largely than they really were.)
Anyway to “prove” the earth moved Galileo came up with an explanation of the tides which basically has the sun/earth system work like a giant centrifuge. Not sure if he even knew what a centrifuge was but basically it would force heavy stuff like rock to the outside and light stuff like water to the inside. Slight problem with this theory, it gets nearly every predicition about the tides wrong. It predicts one tide a day, at noon, and it’s always the same height. People at the time pointed out there’s 2 a day, it varies in both height and time it occurs. If he had Newtonian mechanics/gravity that would pretty much explain both the tides and require the earth going around the sun but Newton was born in the year Galileo died so he couldn’t use that.
Anyway the thing that really cooked his goose. Apparently when the pope asked him to publish he apparently wanted him to publish formally in latin. Instead Galileo decided to publish informally as sort of a novel in Italian which far more people could read. In it there’s a character who basically who’s statements could be largely seen as the position of the church. Unfortunately that character is name Simplicio which can be translated as simpleton. (IE Mr. Stupid) Simplicio wins the argument in the end of the novel by pointing out that tides work the way because that’s what god wants. This was unfortunately taken as a rejection of the central catholic tennant of the omnipotence of god. (Yeah, that’s not something you should be writing at that point in history even if your friend is literally the pope.)
I’ve read 2 version of what happened after that. One was the pope took it personally that his friend was calling him stupid in public and took it out on him until he calmed down and had second thoughts. The other is that the pope actually knew Galileo could be a firebrand and didn’t take it personally but didn’t expect him to go that far and on top of it he was having his own problems with Spanish conservatives in the church.(Weakening his power even though he was the pope.) So to save his own position in the church he had to make an example out of Galileo but made sure to not actually go to extent of actually having him executed.
So yes, pretty much as you know the story about Galileo and the Church was a lot more involved and interesting than I was taught in history class. (Lots of politics and such, not a simple case of science v. religion as it was presented to me.)
And so they are trying to model something knowing it’s an oversimplification.
But using those results to justify revambing the economy and switching to solar, wind, algae, or even wood is silly. I have nothing against making models, but spending trillions on the basis of models known to be flawed and that make wrong predictions doesn’t make any sense at all. I’d rather spend more money on observation and the study of such things as clouds, ocean currents, and historical climate. Then at some point the models might be good for something.
But using those results to justify revambing the economy and switching to solar, wind, algae, or even wood is silly.
It’s an excuse. The whole point is to appropriate productive resources and distribute them according to the preferences of members of the New Class employed by public agencies and philanthropies. Politicians act as brokers. They do this reflexively. And we’ve been here before.
A good book on climate change for non-STEM types is Steven Koonin’s Unsettled.
Koonin has the advantage of being in the Obama administration, which makes him more difficult to discredit by the usual.
One issue with the models is that there in granularity in them that is required by our limited computing power. And due to the complex chaotic system they are modeling, small changes in input can have huge changes in results.
@Chuck:But using those results to justify revambing the economy
Well, yeah, but climate scientists don’t control the government, or agree on what would actually be effective. At this point you’re not really talking about them but about all the activists, NGOs, politicians, etc who want to revamp the economy.
@Art Deco:It’s an excuse. The whole point is to appropriate productive resources and distribute them according to the preferences of members of the New Class employed by public agencies and philanthropies. Politicians act as brokers.
I’ll second that. The whole point is to have an expensive boondoggle that enriches their friends and locks down votes. “Green energy” of course is only one of those and the Right has theirs too. They would change the justification on a dime if every climate scientist retired tomorrow.
@Don:One issue with the models is that there in granularity in them that is required by our limited computing power. And due to the complex chaotic system they are modeling, small changes in input can have huge changes in results.
Sure, but that’s true of a lot of things not just climate science, and not a reason to not make models. It’s a reason to be cautious about making large changes to your life based on models, but it’s not a reason to stop modeling.
A wiser person than I said: “Goofus treats new ideas as false until somebody provides incontrovertible evidence that they are true. Gallant does cost benefit analysis and reasons under uncertainty.” And this wise man himself does not perfectly follow it…
Mary Tyler Moore was a dancer who fell into acting. And she was lovely.
“You would be hard pressed to find a non – STEM student and/or worker, who could name a scientist of note , other than Einstein or maybe Newton.”
Ah, be fair JohnTyler: many would also name Neil deGrasse Tyson. And of course Fauci. The greatest doctor and scientist of our era! Maybe of any era!
Roy Lofquist – Very cool response – If I remember, c is constant in a vacuum, so what you’re describing doesn’t affect relativity.
The next question is what quantity of red shift would one expect from the properties of a non-vacuum in space based on the observed wavelength differences in apparent c? Shouldn’t it be possible to calculate the index of refraction based on that? From that, it should be possible to determine if the calculated index of refraction explains all of the observed red shift.
I have no idea, but it’s fun to think about.
Wouldn’t it come down to So if red shift is due to properties of space rather than the Doppler effect, are you of light, are the properties of light sufficient to explain/predict the full extent of the red shift and disprove that the universe is expanding?
@Bauxite,
It’s been almost 60 years since my last optics class so I am real fuzzy on the maths. You are suggesting that the red shift is a hybrid of expansion and density. I think not, but that is totally intuition.
The cult of the big bang is so entrenched that anyone who pursued this topic would either be ignored or burned at the stake. So far, I have been totally ignored. Lucky that.
@Roy Lofquist:The cult of the big bang is so entrenched that anyone who pursued this topic would either be ignored or burned at the stake. So far, I have been totally ignored. Lucky that.
Candidly, it’s probably not that you’re lucky. It’s that what you’re proposing breaks a number of other physical laws that you probably weren’t aware were connected, and unless you read a lot more cosmology and astronomy journals than I do, there’s probably a lot of experimental data your idea doesn’t explain.
The Maxwell equations have all been rewritten for different speeds of light in different directions, and rewritten to include magnetic monopoles (in case anyone ever finds another one), and lots of other situations you may not have heard of.
But have you been talking to professionals who study this? If you haven’t been, a) you’re not going to know what your idea is missing and b) you haven’t been “ignored”, it’s just you haven’t shared it with anyone in a position to know whether your idea has any merit.
At any rate no one is going to burn you at the stake if you are right. They will award you a Nobel and some sort of highly paid sinecure and put your name in all the textbooks, like the guys we’ve been talking about in this thread who ALSO overturned the current thinking in physics.
I will tell you that peer review in physics is quite real and you need a thick skin. In general they will be nicer to an outsider if you go in soliciting honest feedback rather than telling them you expect to be “burned at the stake” because you’re too revolutionary… In my case, they’d be less forgiving than to a curious outsider because they’d think I should have put in the work to understand what other people have been doing, and it’s not my field so I have not been, and that would very quickly show–and of course they’d get the same reaction from me if they started telling me some ideas that they didn’t put the right kind of work into.
@Frederick,
My introduction to cosmology was Gamow’s “One, Two, Three, Infinity” which I read sometime in the 1950s. In the course of my studies I worked solutions to the field equations of General Relativity – with a slide rule, which is a real slog. I closely followed the writings of Sir Fred Hoyle about his steady state theory. I read the original paper by Alan Guth where he proposed his inflation theory. I daresay the I have studied cosmology more than most.
You wrote: “It’s that what you’re proposing breaks a number of other physical laws that you probably weren’t aware were connected, and unless you read a lot more cosmology and astronomy journals than I do, there’s probably a lot of experimental data your idea doesn’t explain.”
This is the pro forma response that I always receive. Funny, nobody ever states which particular physical laws are broken or which experimental data contradict what I have written.
I’ll not recount how many physical laws are shattered nor outright contradictions comprise current big bang cosmology. I’ll just ask you to ponder why it is that everything in the universe, from particles to galaxies, spins.
Finally, to my original comment. I did not state any theories. I recounted observations that are well documented in the literature. If the consensus about the nature of pulsars is correct then photons travel at different velocities depending on their wavelength. This is exactly the behavior of light traveling through a dense medium as seen in the laboratory and observed in our mundane daily existence. This would seem to vindicate Zwicky’s proposal as to tired light.
@Roy Lofquist:This is the pro forma response that I always receive. Funny, nobody ever states which particular physical laws are broken or which experimental data contradict what I have written.
Because it would be a ton of work; much of which would require catching you up to where everyone else is. It’s easy to throw out words, it’s hard to show that those words do or do not accurately describe reality.
You’ve studied “more than most” but that is a very low bar: have you studied as much as the people who do it for a living? I have not, and I have also studied “more than most”. The names you are dropping are from decades ago. A lot of work has been done since then, are you current on it? It’s not that I expect you to tell me, but if you aren’t then you’re not going to revolutionize anything, that is the fact, and it will have nothing to do with anyone’s closed-mindedness.
I don’t study this for a living, but the first question I’d have does your dense medium allows galaxies to evolve correctly? Have you done the simulations and/or solved the equations? Have you compared them against all the other work been done on exotic kinds of matter and exotic laws of physics that are different from what you are proposing?
It’s not that I expect you to answer anything. I’m just saying, you have an idea. It may be sound, or not sound, but you’ll never know until you engage with the tens of thousands of people who do the work for a living and have tested all kinds of ideas much stranger than yours–and maybe someone in 1970 or 1990 or 2010 proposed exactly what you did and a lot of things were found wrong with it?
If all you want to do is play “Galileo at the stake” on the internet then you don’t have to do more than you are doing, but if you really think you have a good idea that the world would benefit from then you should really do the work of engaging with the professionals and getting caught up to where they are and what they have tried. If you’ve already done this and you’ve been published in journals and whatnot then carry on, obviously.
@Roy Lundquist: The index of refraction of your dense medium depends on a lot more than density. You should be able to predict some of the physical properties of this medium, and that will give people ideas about how to detect it. (Something like this was done for luminiferous aether and the kinds of answers that people got were so odd that it was a huge relief when Einstein showed it didn’t need to exist.) At any rate, I know some people in the non-linear optics community you could work with on it. My own work on index of refraction was only in the very simplest materials, but your dense medium probably doesn’t have a complex structure? (If it does you may have other phenomena to try to explain.)
But whether you follow up on that or not, somebody would. So it only makes sense to do the work ahead of time and find out that there’s nothing weird about the makeup of this dense medium that is a fatal objection. It could also lead to people actually finding it–like with the neutrino and with positrons–and there’s your Nobel.
There’s also a lot of other reasons besides red-shift why the Big Bang represents current thinking: does your dense medium also explain those other phenomena as well as the Big Bang does? I’m not the guy who can say, because while I put a lot of work into my own field, I didn’t put any into this one, and I’d need to put a lot of time in to catch up.
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Among us engineers who made a living on them he does.
Feynman lecture on Maxwell’s Equations – https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_18.html
Audio here – https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/flptapes.html
A fellow name Oliver Heaviside, an English mathematician, rewrote Maxwell’s Equations so that they were able to be applied to real world problems.
Maxwell’s equations – as he, Maxwell wrote them – were just to difficult to be readily applied.
When you read about people like Maxwell, it makes you wonder what confluence of biological / personal influences could produce a brain like his (or that of an Einstein or Newton, etc).
IMHO, in high school, if not earlier, and certainly at the college level, students should be required to take “history of science” classes. I think this would be more beneficial than having students take classes in “physics for poets” type classes.
“Maxwell doesn’t get enough respect:”
Balderdash. As the video suggests, maybe not among the public, but in physics there’s no doubt about his standing. Not enough emphasis is given in the video about his contribution to thermodynamics and the statistical nature of gases. Also, Maxwell’s Equations (yes, in caps) is truly, to me, the 4 most important equations in classical physics. Yes, one needs a knowledge of vector calculus to really appreciate their beauty. However, it should also be noted, that 3 of 4 equations are based on other’s work: Faraday, Gauss, and Ampere. But it was Maxwell who brought it all together and unified the whole.
My favorite course to teach was always junior level Electromagnetic Theory. The course moves through building the 4 Maxwell Equations. Then in the later quarter of the course, the real fun begins. First, using the equations one can get the classical wave equation…hmm…something going on here. Then it soon becomes obvious one can calculate a wave speed, and suddenly in about 3-4 minutes, the number 2.98 x 10^8 m/s shows up on the blackboard! To watch junior physics majors suddenly see how the speed of light comes right out of the ME’s is truly fun. But we’re far from done. ME’s then shows how these EM waves form from accelerating charges and how both the electric and magnetic parts of the waves are mutually inducing. Once, that is done, it’s really just a matter of grinding through to produce all the laws of optics.
Even more: instead of using fields, one can use the vector potentials, and with a a bit of relativity, one can reduce EM to just a single equation.
If you can’t tell, I’m a big fan.
physicsguy:
I’m talking about the general public.
Another example of why checking in daily at neo’s blog is always time well spent!
And then there is the Beattle’s song with the line “…. Maxwell’s little deamons …”
Neo: great video, I am awed by the work of this mind.
Physicsguy: wish I could have taken your course. I admire physics but from a distance. The Feynman lectures are IMHO wonderful for giving something of the “feel” of things without forcing us to master all the math. Certainly, as you say, they show the beauty of the ME’s.
More like this!
om says, “Another example of why checking in daily at neo’s blog is always time well spent!”
Yep– in regard to people named Maxwell, I’d much rather read about James Clerk than Ghislaine (and yes, I know she’s not related to him in any way except by her Czech father’s choice of a British-sounding name).
One small detail of Maxwell’s personality that I found fascinating is his love of his fellow Scot Robert Burns’ poetry. He wrote a parody of Burns’ “Comin’ Through the Rye” in the same Scots dialect that Burns used:
Gin a body meet a body
Flyin’ through the air.
Gin a body hit a body,
Will it fly? And where?
Ilka impact has its measure,
Ne’er a ane hae I,
Yet a’ the lads they measure me,
Or, at least, they try.
Gin a body meet a body
Altogether free,
How they travel afterwards
We do not always see.
Ilka problem has its method
By analytics high;
For me, I ken na ane o’ them,
But what the waur am I?
Maxwell would accompany himself on a guitar while singing this and other poems he wrote in Burns’ style. Underneath the physicist and mathematician there may well have been a folk singer trying to get out.
JohnTyler…”IMHO, in high school, if not earlier, and certainly at the college level, students should be required to take “history of science” classes.”
Agree, IF such a course could be prevented into ‘science in society’ with a heavy overlay of Oppression Studies: ‘here’s how science and technology were used to oppress people in Babylon…in Ancient Rome…in the Middle Ages…in the British Empire….ec”
I also think everyone should take a lab science…involving actual experiments, NOT just computer simulations of experiments.
physics guy;
You would be hard pressed to find a non – STEM student and/or worker, who could name a scientist of note , other than Einstein or maybe Newton.
Sometime back some of these posts started appearing in the right-edge of my YouTube viewing…. “Kathy Loves Physics & History”. Interesting posts about the people who did things in physics and how these things fit into history. No math required, just some interest along the lines of “how did that happen…?”
https://www.youtube.com/c/KathyLovesPhysicsHistory
Yes, Maxwell is in there, among many others. Names I recall from high school and Jr Coll science classes, with little recall of what they actually contributed.
A lot of what Einstein did for special relativity was just take Maxwell’s equations literally. In a way Maxwell anticipated special relativity without realizing it.
It’s worth seconding John Tyler that Maxwell’s equations as written are not those of today. They included statements of Ohm’s Law, for example. Nowadays Ohm’s Law is a special case of application of Maxwell’s equations to some kinds of materials.
This is not unusual. For Newton’s Laws it’s the same–he never wrote F=ma for example. Most working physicists have probably never read or even seen the original–by the time something has been around long enough to be in textbooks for introductory courses, thousands of people have worked on them and massaged them into something as easy to explain as they can think to, and they don’t go back to primary sources as a rule.
They wouldn’t get very far with the original. Newton’s Principia is all done in the form of geometric proofs. Nowadays it’s all stated as algebra and calculus.
Physicsguy “ the number 2.98 x 10^8 m/s shows up on the blackboard!“ The interesting thing is that the speed of light number does not specify the reference frame. It just depends on some physical constants that are independent of the reference frame. Physicist noted this and at first speculated it was with respect to the “ether.” But experimental physicists notably the American Albert Michelson tried to measure the effect of the earths motion around the sun relative to the ether on the speed of light and could not measure an effect. Einstein used this independence of the speed of light on the reference frame as the basis for the special theory of relativity. So indeed his theory owed a lot to Maxwell,
}}} Maxwell doesn’t get enough respect:
That’s because he stopped using his silver hammer on people’s heads.
Duh.
:-p
Owen:
My own fav from Feynman is this old one where he discusses how Science actually works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw
The part ca. 5:00 identifies how it is that Climate “change” is anything but science.
It is a glaringly obvious example of a “vague theory” — Hurricanes? Climate Change! Heat Waves? Climate Change! Blizzards? Climate Change! Drought? Climate Change! Floods? Climate Change!
Whichever way the wind blows, it’s because of Climate Change!
ObloddyHell:
Thanks for fixing my misremembered reference to Maxwell by the Beatles.
I second JohnTyler. History of science classes in general education would be a great idea. They should include a section on Lysenko. (Although there is some benefit to physics for poets too. Anyone who drives a car can benefit from a basic class in Newtonian mechanics.)
neo – If you’re looking for another underappreciated scientist, I would recommend looking into Georges Lemaitre – a narrative-buster for sure.
Maxwell and Watt are largely responsible for the Industrial Revolution.
What has happened to the Scots since then? They have descended into leftist nonsense.
David Foster @ 11:41: “…I also think everyone should take a lab science…involving actual experiments, NOT just computer simulations of experiments.”
Totally agree. How else will kids get a sense of the boundary between numbers they write down, and the Real World about which they write numbers? How else will they develop a respect for how hard it is to pull good data out of the mess on the lab bench? How important it is *not to fake or alter* what emerges when the experimental method is faithfully applied?
Most will never be doing Science, but as citizens and consumers they should all know a little of how Science gets done; how much care and honesty it demands.
He certainly doesn’t, amongst the general public, even the ‘educated’. Early in the pandemic, I started reading one of the really good biographies of Maxwell recently published. I never finished it as my attention was distracted (it happens far too often!), but I enjoyed what I did read.
> What has happened to the Scots since then?
Chief Engineer on the starship Enterprise.
@OBloodyHell:The part ca. 5:00 identifies how it is that Climate “change” is anything but science.
If you are talking about how it is presented in the media after being filtered through activist press releases, sure, but what climate scientists are actually doing is trying to model an extremely complex system using simple physics and I’m not sure Feynman would disagree with their approach, since he’d probably not be able to suggest anything better.
Rather I think he’d disagree with the presentation in the media and perhaps he might disagree with the policy proposals being pushed–hard to say what a man long dead might think, if he’d been around the last 30-ish years and kept up on events.
I had a pet named Maxwell, and most people who asked about the name went with Maxwell’s silver hammer as a first guess as to its origin.
British pronunciation: It’s pronounced James “Clark” Maxwell.
No idea why. If you visit a clerk behind a counter, he/she is a “clark.”
I’d agree that Carl Sagan’s quote was nonsense. “A few academic scientists?” Probably the vast majority of people who have gotten some exposure to the theory of physical sciences at the college level (not a small group) know of Maxwell.
I’ve heard the story that Maxwell visited a then frail Faraday and informed him how his equations of electrical and magnetism predicted the speed of light (zounds!) before he went public with it.
In the kinetic theory of gases (mentioned about 60% into the video) the molecule distribution of velocities is known as a Maxwellian velocity distribution. You know your reputation has really arrived (perhaps posthumously) when your name is routinely converted into an adjective. (Like Jussie Smollett only much much better.)
This is not really directly related to Maxwell, but on a couple occasions I lectured classes on intro physics and early understandings of light. So the topic of Poisson’s spot comes up, and as I was preparing to talk about it, I thought “Damn it, I’ve never seen a Poisson spot.” (It predates Maxwell’s work by a few decades.)
In a couple hours I was able to grab a lens out of a drawer and a microscope slide with a ball bearing glued onto it, and hand holding a laser pointer and the lens the expanded laser beam striking the ball clearly shows the spot. Amazing. Fun times. Those early mathematical physicists were incredible.
Obloodyhell @ 12:34: Thanks for the Feynman clip. I am a Feynman fan from way back and somehow had missed that one. It’s a classic, with his wonderfully economical explanation of why experiment is embedded in, bound to, our theories. “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter who said it, if it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
And the bit at 5:00 is both brilliant (on how science works, and doesn’t) and wise (on how it can be made to mislead).
Finally: nice screen name. Bloody marvelous, in fact.
What has happened to the Scots since then?
Sir Alexander Fleming won the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of penicillin. In the early 2000s he was voted the third greatest Scot (after Robert Burns and William Wallace) in a public opinion poll conducted in the UK; and Time magazine named Fleming one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century. So the century after Maxwell wasn’t a total washout for Scotland.
“It just depends on some physical constants that are independent of the reference frame. ”
Yep. That’s epsilon naught and mu naught. Comparing to the standard wave equation you could almost say they have something to do with density (?) or viscosity (?) of space. An idea long discounted until recently when the notion that spacetime may be fluid has come up again.
I don’t know. It seems as though a good portion of the time what’s taught in history class is utter myth and the last thing I’d want is more myth parading as history. I mean just for a history of science related example the whole “Galileo Affair”. I mean when I found out how it actually happened the main thing I learned is the version that’s normally presented is a agenda driven parody of what actually happened. (Pretty much the only thing they got right was he did get in trouble with the Church, pretty much everything after that is myth which is sad because I thought the real story was actually more interesting.)
I think the history of science is interesting but nothing seems to have happened in an order that made any sense.
Einstein’s genius lay in picking out a result or observation and raising it to the level of an axiom from which the rest followed. Lorentz himself commented on that rare ability.
The way he discovered the displacement current was quite remarkable, based on a strange mechanical model. He himself said the model was not real, just an aid to thinking about the problem.
There are actually 8 equations, but I think Maxwell himself produced 20 in total. He didn’t try for a minimum number, leaving that to the future when things might become more settled. He also rewrote everything using quaternions on the advice of (IIRC) Tait. Oops 🙂 The modern version in geometric units is quite succinct: dF = 0, d*F = J. But not as intuitive as the vector version due to Heaviside.
And a brief foray to “physics” on the football pitch (soccer field)…featuring Lionel Messi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jq4ZpjLBt4I
…While John Durham, with the determined persistence of gravitational force, has actually gotten five of Hillary’s agents-provocateurs to plead the Fifth.
No doubt there are plenty more where they came from…
“Durham: Five Witnesses Connected To The Clinton Campaign’s False Russian Claims Have Refused To Cooperate”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/durham-five-witnesses-connected-clinton-campaigns-false-russian-claims-have-refused
BigD:
Here’s an article I wrote in 2011 on Galileo.
@Chuck: He also rewrote everything using quaternions on the advice of (IIRC) Tait. Oops ?
I’ve tried (not very hard) to learn quaternions; other than extremely compact notation (so compact you can’t understand what it means) I’m not sure what the advantage is for human brains. But I understand computers can make good use of them.
In the presentations by Maxwell that I’ve read he did not use quaternions; instead he wrote three copies of every equation permuting x, y, and z. The vector notation from Gibbs and Heaviside is much easier than either presentation.
Incidentally if we’re looking for undervalued in popular consciousness I’d nominate Gibbs. Like Maxwell, Gibbs can be said to have anticipated Planck’s constant before Planck, but he seems to have regarded it as just a constant you’d measure to make the units come out right and certainly wouldn’t have seen the quantum implications of it.
Barry, yes, Messi is a real “magician”. The amazing part to me is how he fights through deliberate fouls to keep his attack going. Pretty Boy Ronaldo would just flop right down and start whining and rolling around like his leg just got took off.
Yes, simply extraordinary….
I’m more than a bit pissed off at him, though…
…since he decided to go from being the best player of all time to a virtual non-entity.
For money.
As though he really needs it.
Never even consulted with me on this catastrophic decision…
What about his wife?
What about his kids?
For PSG?
Simply unfathomable….
No, I’m not very happy about it.
Actually, that’s an understatement….
Oh well…I’ll get over it. Maybe.
But it’ll take time….
What has happened to the Scots since then?
They emigrated? And the colonies are thankful.
After underpinning the British Empire for hundreds of years and getting f***-all for their efforts, they decided to focus on the really important stuff:
1. Caber tossing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caber_toss
2. Making the perfect haggis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haggis
3. Porting the bagpipes to Rock ‘n Roll.
4. Screwing the English.
Agree. Einstein called him the greatest American scientist and said that if he had been aware of Gibbs monograph (1902), he wouldn’t have written his own papers on statistical mechanics. Both Gibbs and Boltzmann corresponded with Maxwell, and Maxwell was the inspiration for Boltzmann’s work.
@bauxite & physicsguy,
About Lemaitre and viscous space-time. This is my short piece about the expanding universe. It is very much about electromagnetism.
That the Universe is expanding is based on one single premise: the Hubble Red Shift is due to a Doppler effect recessional velocity.
When Hubble published his observations of red shifted light from distant objects there were two possible explanations that came to the fore. One, originated by Georges Lemaitre, was that the Universe was expanding. The other, from Fritz Zwicky, was that light lost energy as it traveled, termed “tired light”. At that time, ca. 1930, interstellar and intergalactic space were assumed to be perfect vacuums and thus there was no mechanism to redden the light. Now, 90 years later, we have a much better understanding of reality. But more importantly, far more importantly, we have actual observational evidence that Zwicky was right.
In the radio astronomy of Pulsars we find that the shorter wavelengths of the leading edge of the pulse arrive before longer wavelengths. The velocity of light, c, is NOT constant but varies by wavelength. The dispersion is proportional to the distance from us of the pulsar. The observed effect is isotropic. The conventional explanation is that the dispersion measure is the “integrated column density of free electrons between an observer and a pulsar”. The mechanism matters not. What matters is that the interstellar medium is not a vacuum but rather affects light waves in a way best described as having an Index of Refraction greater than 1, unity. We find the same phenomenon in the observation of Fast Radio Bursts from other galaxies, thus indicating that the intergalactic media is not an electromagnetic vacuum.
This leads me to conclude that the Hubble red shift is the result of the light traversing a distance through a medium denser than Einstein’s “in vacuo” rather than a recessional velocity.
And one of the problems is that they don’t understand the system, and use what can only be called fudge factors for phenomena that aren’t understood. My own sense as an outsider is that they are overfitting recent climate history and the models would perform better if they reduced the CO2 sensitivity from around 2.5+ to around 1.7. Each of the last three CMIPS models have performed worse than the previous version when predictions are compared against temperature data. The subject is so ridden with politics that it hinders scientific progress.
1. As a lay person I really appreciated all the comments and perspectives from the Physicists who wrote in on this post. Thanks!
B) As others have stated, I found the premise of “relatively unknown” attributed to Maxwell in the video confusing. Yes, he’s not a “household name,” but as someone wrote, how many scientists could the average American name, 5? When I think of scientists active in the mid-1800s Maxwell is the main name who comes to mind. I think asking any educated person with a passing knowledge of more than 10 historically significant scientists to list great scientists or physicists active between Newton and Einstein most all would mention Maxwell. Many may only mention Maxwell regarding that period of history. Or, ask the same group to list important scientists in the discovery of the nature of electricity or electromagnetism and Maxwell will certainly be mentioned*. Maxwell is well remembered and well regarded in the field of Physics and for his insights into the nature of electricity. He is famous. However he is famous in a field of study (mathematics and electromagnetism) that is out of the reach of most us mortals.
*And this is primarily an American thing. As others have mentioned, American education is weak on science and scientific history. We have great institutions specifically oriented towards scientific education; MIT, Caltech and many others. But other nations do a better job of including science and the history of science as part of all academic curricula.
@Chuck:And one of the problems is that they don’t understand the system, and use what can only be called fudge factors for phenomena that aren’t understood.
Both true, but it’s not as though there’s someone who DOES understand and they’re just not listening. It’s that NO ONE understands. And so they are trying to model something knowing it’s an oversimplification, instead of throwing up their hands and modeling nothing.
The history of science is full of kludges and fudge factors that took time to be understood by theory. Some of them held up and some of them didn’t.
Really good example, besides Ohm’s Law, is the periodic table. What I learned about the history there was a) there were a bunch of competing tables around roughly the same time, no one could really settle which was correct, and b) Mendeleev was using his (which later evolved into ours) not only to predict future elements which were discovered, but also to predict crazy and ridiculous elements that also filled slots in his table. Decades later we understood how to get the periodic table from physics, but the calculations are not as difficult as those that climate scientists are trying to do.
Someone suggested that “ History of science” should be taught . I would suggest that the broader “ History of technology” would be better and more attention keeping for the average student. While technology involves science, it also involves engineering, whether formal modern engineering with mathematical calculations or seat-of-the pants engineering without math.
Well that's better than the average take I've seen. So the whole story about Galileo is the reason that he published in the first place was his old college buddy asked him to do it. Here's the mind blower. The guy that asked him to publish on helicentrism that was his friend? It was the pope. (Yeah, he was literally friends with the pope.)
Anyway like you were saying there were 2 competing theories at the time which we call Tychonic and Copernican.(Geocentric and helicentric respectively.) The problem is mathematically they're the same theory and make the same predicitions, you can't differentiate between them by observing the sky. Tycho Brahe thought geocentric made sense because he couldn't observe stellar parallax and he figured either we're not moving or the stars are really far away and therefore huge. (When he did the math out he calculated how far the stars would have to be and how big to explain no observable parallax. What he calculated was the size of the orbit of Saturn and at the time he knew of nothing that was that big so he thought it was unlikely. Oddly enough he actually screwed that up because of an observation mistake about the atmosphere which meant he calculated stars to be far largely than they really were.)
Anyway to “prove” the earth moved Galileo came up with an explanation of the tides which basically has the sun/earth system work like a giant centrifuge. Not sure if he even knew what a centrifuge was but basically it would force heavy stuff like rock to the outside and light stuff like water to the inside. Slight problem with this theory, it gets nearly every predicition about the tides wrong. It predicts one tide a day, at noon, and it’s always the same height. People at the time pointed out there’s 2 a day, it varies in both height and time it occurs. If he had Newtonian mechanics/gravity that would pretty much explain both the tides and require the earth going around the sun but Newton was born in the year Galileo died so he couldn’t use that.
Anyway the thing that really cooked his goose. Apparently when the pope asked him to publish he apparently wanted him to publish formally in latin. Instead Galileo decided to publish informally as sort of a novel in Italian which far more people could read. In it there’s a character who basically who’s statements could be largely seen as the position of the church. Unfortunately that character is name Simplicio which can be translated as simpleton. (IE Mr. Stupid) Simplicio wins the argument in the end of the novel by pointing out that tides work the way because that’s what god wants. This was unfortunately taken as a rejection of the central catholic tennant of the omnipotence of god. (Yeah, that’s not something you should be writing at that point in history even if your friend is literally the pope.)
I’ve read 2 version of what happened after that. One was the pope took it personally that his friend was calling him stupid in public and took it out on him until he calmed down and had second thoughts. The other is that the pope actually knew Galileo could be a firebrand and didn’t take it personally but didn’t expect him to go that far and on top of it he was having his own problems with Spanish conservatives in the church.(Weakening his power even though he was the pope.) So to save his own position in the church he had to make an example out of Galileo but made sure to not actually go to extent of actually having him executed.
So yes, pretty much as you know the story about Galileo and the Church was a lot more involved and interesting than I was taught in history class. (Lots of politics and such, not a simple case of science v. religion as it was presented to me.)
And so they are trying to model something knowing it’s an oversimplification.
But using those results to justify revambing the economy and switching to solar, wind, algae, or even wood is silly. I have nothing against making models, but spending trillions on the basis of models known to be flawed and that make wrong predictions doesn’t make any sense at all. I’d rather spend more money on observation and the study of such things as clouds, ocean currents, and historical climate. Then at some point the models might be good for something.
But using those results to justify revambing the economy and switching to solar, wind, algae, or even wood is silly.
It’s an excuse. The whole point is to appropriate productive resources and distribute them according to the preferences of members of the New Class employed by public agencies and philanthropies. Politicians act as brokers. They do this reflexively. And we’ve been here before.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/earth_days_legacy_of_failed_apocalyptic_predictions.html
A good book on climate change for non-STEM types is Steven Koonin’s Unsettled.
Koonin has the advantage of being in the Obama administration, which makes him more difficult to discredit by the usual.
One issue with the models is that there in granularity in them that is required by our limited computing power. And due to the complex chaotic system they are modeling, small changes in input can have huge changes in results.
@Chuck:But using those results to justify revambing the economy
Well, yeah, but climate scientists don’t control the government, or agree on what would actually be effective. At this point you’re not really talking about them but about all the activists, NGOs, politicians, etc who want to revamp the economy.
@Art Deco:It’s an excuse. The whole point is to appropriate productive resources and distribute them according to the preferences of members of the New Class employed by public agencies and philanthropies. Politicians act as brokers.
I’ll second that. The whole point is to have an expensive boondoggle that enriches their friends and locks down votes. “Green energy” of course is only one of those and the Right has theirs too. They would change the justification on a dime if every climate scientist retired tomorrow.
@Don:One issue with the models is that there in granularity in them that is required by our limited computing power. And due to the complex chaotic system they are modeling, small changes in input can have huge changes in results.
Sure, but that’s true of a lot of things not just climate science, and not a reason to not make models. It’s a reason to be cautious about making large changes to your life based on models, but it’s not a reason to stop modeling.
A wiser person than I said: “Goofus treats new ideas as false until somebody provides incontrovertible evidence that they are true. Gallant does cost benefit analysis and reasons under uncertainty.” And this wise man himself does not perfectly follow it…
Mary Tyler Moore was a dancer who fell into acting. And she was lovely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2yqE6xOh38
And when you’ve savored that, treat yourself to Joey Heatherton’s longer and more complex routine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p6swrw-4Ew
“You would be hard pressed to find a non – STEM student and/or worker, who could name a scientist of note , other than Einstein or maybe Newton.”
Ah, be fair JohnTyler: many would also name Neil deGrasse Tyson. And of course Fauci. The greatest doctor and scientist of our era! Maybe of any era!
Roy Lofquist – Very cool response – If I remember, c is constant in a vacuum, so what you’re describing doesn’t affect relativity.
The next question is what quantity of red shift would one expect from the properties of a non-vacuum in space based on the observed wavelength differences in apparent c? Shouldn’t it be possible to calculate the index of refraction based on that? From that, it should be possible to determine if the calculated index of refraction explains all of the observed red shift.
I have no idea, but it’s fun to think about.
Wouldn’t it come down to So if red shift is due to properties of space rather than the Doppler effect, are you of light, are the properties of light sufficient to explain/predict the full extent of the red shift and disprove that the universe is expanding?
@Bauxite,
It’s been almost 60 years since my last optics class so I am real fuzzy on the maths. You are suggesting that the red shift is a hybrid of expansion and density. I think not, but that is totally intuition.
The cult of the big bang is so entrenched that anyone who pursued this topic would either be ignored or burned at the stake. So far, I have been totally ignored. Lucky that.
@Roy Lofquist:The cult of the big bang is so entrenched that anyone who pursued this topic would either be ignored or burned at the stake. So far, I have been totally ignored. Lucky that.
Candidly, it’s probably not that you’re lucky. It’s that what you’re proposing breaks a number of other physical laws that you probably weren’t aware were connected, and unless you read a lot more cosmology and astronomy journals than I do, there’s probably a lot of experimental data your idea doesn’t explain.
The Maxwell equations have all been rewritten for different speeds of light in different directions, and rewritten to include magnetic monopoles (in case anyone ever finds another one), and lots of other situations you may not have heard of.
But have you been talking to professionals who study this? If you haven’t been, a) you’re not going to know what your idea is missing and b) you haven’t been “ignored”, it’s just you haven’t shared it with anyone in a position to know whether your idea has any merit.
At any rate no one is going to burn you at the stake if you are right. They will award you a Nobel and some sort of highly paid sinecure and put your name in all the textbooks, like the guys we’ve been talking about in this thread who ALSO overturned the current thinking in physics.
I will tell you that peer review in physics is quite real and you need a thick skin. In general they will be nicer to an outsider if you go in soliciting honest feedback rather than telling them you expect to be “burned at the stake” because you’re too revolutionary… In my case, they’d be less forgiving than to a curious outsider because they’d think I should have put in the work to understand what other people have been doing, and it’s not my field so I have not been, and that would very quickly show–and of course they’d get the same reaction from me if they started telling me some ideas that they didn’t put the right kind of work into.
@Frederick,
My introduction to cosmology was Gamow’s “One, Two, Three, Infinity” which I read sometime in the 1950s. In the course of my studies I worked solutions to the field equations of General Relativity – with a slide rule, which is a real slog. I closely followed the writings of Sir Fred Hoyle about his steady state theory. I read the original paper by Alan Guth where he proposed his inflation theory. I daresay the I have studied cosmology more than most.
You wrote: “It’s that what you’re proposing breaks a number of other physical laws that you probably weren’t aware were connected, and unless you read a lot more cosmology and astronomy journals than I do, there’s probably a lot of experimental data your idea doesn’t explain.”
This is the pro forma response that I always receive. Funny, nobody ever states which particular physical laws are broken or which experimental data contradict what I have written.
I’ll not recount how many physical laws are shattered nor outright contradictions comprise current big bang cosmology. I’ll just ask you to ponder why it is that everything in the universe, from particles to galaxies, spins.
Finally, to my original comment. I did not state any theories. I recounted observations that are well documented in the literature. If the consensus about the nature of pulsars is correct then photons travel at different velocities depending on their wavelength. This is exactly the behavior of light traveling through a dense medium as seen in the laboratory and observed in our mundane daily existence. This would seem to vindicate Zwicky’s proposal as to tired light.
@Roy Lofquist:This is the pro forma response that I always receive. Funny, nobody ever states which particular physical laws are broken or which experimental data contradict what I have written.
Because it would be a ton of work; much of which would require catching you up to where everyone else is. It’s easy to throw out words, it’s hard to show that those words do or do not accurately describe reality.
You’ve studied “more than most” but that is a very low bar: have you studied as much as the people who do it for a living? I have not, and I have also studied “more than most”. The names you are dropping are from decades ago. A lot of work has been done since then, are you current on it? It’s not that I expect you to tell me, but if you aren’t then you’re not going to revolutionize anything, that is the fact, and it will have nothing to do with anyone’s closed-mindedness.
I don’t study this for a living, but the first question I’d have does your dense medium allows galaxies to evolve correctly? Have you done the simulations and/or solved the equations? Have you compared them against all the other work been done on exotic kinds of matter and exotic laws of physics that are different from what you are proposing?
It’s not that I expect you to answer anything. I’m just saying, you have an idea. It may be sound, or not sound, but you’ll never know until you engage with the tens of thousands of people who do the work for a living and have tested all kinds of ideas much stranger than yours–and maybe someone in 1970 or 1990 or 2010 proposed exactly what you did and a lot of things were found wrong with it?
If all you want to do is play “Galileo at the stake” on the internet then you don’t have to do more than you are doing, but if you really think you have a good idea that the world would benefit from then you should really do the work of engaging with the professionals and getting caught up to where they are and what they have tried. If you’ve already done this and you’ve been published in journals and whatnot then carry on, obviously.
@Roy Lundquist: The index of refraction of your dense medium depends on a lot more than density. You should be able to predict some of the physical properties of this medium, and that will give people ideas about how to detect it. (Something like this was done for luminiferous aether and the kinds of answers that people got were so odd that it was a huge relief when Einstein showed it didn’t need to exist.) At any rate, I know some people in the non-linear optics community you could work with on it. My own work on index of refraction was only in the very simplest materials, but your dense medium probably doesn’t have a complex structure? (If it does you may have other phenomena to try to explain.)
But whether you follow up on that or not, somebody would. So it only makes sense to do the work ahead of time and find out that there’s nothing weird about the makeup of this dense medium that is a fatal objection. It could also lead to people actually finding it–like with the neutrino and with positrons–and there’s your Nobel.
There’s also a lot of other reasons besides red-shift why the Big Bang represents current thinking: does your dense medium also explain those other phenomena as well as the Big Bang does? I’m not the guy who can say, because while I put a lot of work into my own field, I didn’t put any into this one, and I’d need to put a lot of time in to catch up.