The Last Word

[Cancer]

On one of her post-cancer-treatment albums, Melissa Ethridge has a rather spacey little cut that says, "All there is / Is atoms and space / Everything else is an illusion".

 

When I first heard it, my immediate reaction was, "It has been shown that that is incorrect." My wife hit me.

[L. Marcus]

No romance in your soul, much?

[Cancer]

Oh, there's romance, but whether she realized it or not, she was making a fallacious statement in my professional bailiwick, not hers.

[Pariah]

I tell my classes that the Universe is made up of three things: Matter, Energy, and Stuff We Don't Understand Real Well Yet.

[Bazza]

So where do fields fit in?

[Pariah]

Energy. Fields are a great way to store energy.

[Bazza]

Cool. Learnt something.

 

Now about these "magnetic atoms"...

[Cancer]

Most atoms have a magnetic moment, meaning that if you expose them to a magnetic field, they will tend to alter their orientation so as to align with the field. How collections of those atoms behave depends on details.

[Pariah]

You can Google the terms "diamagnetism" and "paramagnetism" if you're interested in some of the details.

 

tl;dr version: Atoms that have unpaired electrons behave differently in a magnetic field that those that don't.

[Cancer]

Alternately, you may be referring to the Stern-Gerlach experiment, which proved the quantization of the spatial orientation of angular momentum.

[L. Marcus]

How bad a migraine do you guys get from the people who claim that there is no gravity, and it's all a magnetic effect?

[Bazza]

The Magnetic Atom - Pier Luigi Ighina (co-operator of Guglielmo Marconi)

http://www.svpvril.com/ighina/magatom.html

[Pariah]

How bad a migraine do you guys get from the people who claim that there is no gravity, and it's all a magnetic effect?

None whatsoever, because I know such people are quacks and their statements can be dismissed without a second thought.

 

I seldom use that exact language in such conversations, of course.

[Cancer]

The Magnetic Atom - Pier Luigi Ighina (co-operator of Guglielmo Marconi)

http://www.svpvril.com/ighina/magatom.html

? Marconi's work was decades before the dates cited for this guy?

 

Other things in there set off my crackpot alarms, too.

[Cancer]

One of the things firing my crackpot alarm:

...there still was the problem of having a stronger microscope. He invented a microscope (see later) with which he was finally able to observe the atoms at a enlargement of 1.6 billion times.

No, he didn't. Or if he did, he didn't tell anyone about it, or meaningfully tell how he did it (and that is overwhelmingly likely because he didn't, in fact, do it). It would have made quite a splash if it had withstood scrutiny, and appear rather prominently in textbooks and historical accounts. That would entail producing meaningful images of, e.g., a hydrogen atom, that were about a meter across. Emphasis on meaningful, also. That picture of "a magnetic atom" is so obviously fake (flat? really? no hint of a third dimension? really?) that I would guess some third-grader scrawled it with chalk on blacktop.

 

There's no citation of him doing that, publishing results, reporting a discussion of how he tried it, etc. That lack of citations is a BIG FRICKIN RED FLAG that this is at least fallacious, and more probably fatuous. Whoever wrote that has no clue what they are writing about.

 

Then, back to physics: that feat of magnification can't be done with anything like conventional light microscopy. (The Wikipedia entry for "Limitations" under "Microscopy" is flagged as unsourced, so I'll do this myself.) Conventional light microscopy is subject to the limits of diffraction, one of the consequences of the wave nature of light. Your angular resolution, in radians, is limited angles no smaller than (wavelength) / (aperture of apparatus) or in this case, (wavelength) / (size of object being viewed). Atoms are hundreds of times smaller than the wavelength of visible light. You cannot make meaningful images of anything under those circumstances. If you go to x-rays, the wavelength is now comparable to the dimensions of an atom, so you can start getting information on that scale, but (1) not of an isolated atom and (2) that isn't conventional light microscopy. But there is the technique of x-ray crystallography, which uses diffraction of x-rays through crystals to learn the crystal structure, the atomic-scale 3-d structure of the molecules making the crystal; this was developed in a well-documented way in the 19-teens (including the Nobel prize in physics in both 1914 and 1915), and "everyone" uses it these days; it was the means by which Rosalind Franklin found the double helix structure of DNA in the mid-1950s.

 

Everything that follows at that site seems to hinge on that unsupported and impossible claim, so it's kind of analogous to the silly things you can "prove" if you divide by zero in some unobvious way. Everything after that equally meaningless.

[Bazza]

? Marconi's work was decades before the dates cited for this guy?

 

Other things in there set off my crackpot alarms, too.

From what I gather this guy was an assistant and later continually developed the work he observed/assisted with Marconi.

[Bazza]

One of the things firing my crackpot alarm:

No, he didn't. Or if he did, he didn't tell anyone about it, or meaningfully tell how he did it (and that is overwhelmingly likely because he didn't, in fact, do it). It would have made quite a splash if it had withstood scrutiny, and appear rather prominently in textbooks and historical accounts. That would entail producing meaningful images of, e.g., a hydrogen atom, that were about a meter across. Emphasis on meaningful, also. That picture of "a magnetic atom" is so obviously fake (flat? really? no hint of a third dimension? really?) that I would guess some third-grader scrawled it with chalk on blacktop.

 

There's no citation of him doing that, publishing results, reporting a discussion of how he tried it, etc. That lack of citations is a BIG FRICKIN RED FLAG that this is at least fallacious, and more probably fatuous. Whoever wrote that has no clue what they are writing about.

 

Then, back to physics: that feat of magnification can't be done with anything like conventional light microscopy. (The Wikipedia entry for "Limitations" under "Microscopy" is flagged as unsourced, so I'll do this myself.) Conventional light microscopy is subject to the limits of diffraction, one of the consequences of the wave nature of light. Your angular resolution, in radians, is limited angles no smaller than (wavelength) / (aperture of apparatus) or in this case, (wavelength) / (size of object being viewed). Atoms are hundreds of times smaller than the wavelength of visible light. You cannot make meaningful images of anything under those circumstances. If you go to x-rays, the wavelength is now comparable to the dimensions of an atom, so you can start getting information on that scale, but (1) not of an isolated atom and (2) that isn't conventional light microscopy. But there is the technique of x-ray crystallography, which uses diffraction of x-rays through crystals to learn the crystal structure, the atomic-scale 3-d structure of the molecules making the crystal; this was developed in a well-documented way in the 19-teens (including the Nobel prize in physics in both 1914 and 1915), and "everyone" uses it these days; it was the means by which Rosalind Franklin found the double helix structure of DNA in the mid-1950s.

 

Everything that follows at that site seems to hinge on that unsupported and impossible claim, so it's kind of analogous to the silly things you can "prove" if you divide by zero in some unobvious way. Everything after that equally meaningless.

Cheers.

[Cancer]

How bad a migraine do you guys get from the people who claim that there is no gravity, and it's all a magnetic effect?

It's modestly irritating, but not as much as statements emerging from the White House and Congress.

 

The no gravity but magnetism folks are completely ignorant, unlike most crackpots; the latter know a little, misunderstand somewhat more, and seem incapable of grasping that there is more to physics than what's taught in the freshman physics series.

[L. Marcus]

I got two paragraphs written last night! It's not very good, but it's something.

[Pariah]

Third Period have earned themselves a pop quiz. It should be fun. But not for them.

[Cancer]

Is it a pop quiz, or a check for brainwave activity?

[Pariah]

They have to do math.

[Cancer]

Wild cheering from the mathgeek section!

[Pariah]

...but probably not from my students.

 

[Cancer]

Well, yeah.