The Last Word

[Cancer]

All this reminds me of books from the 1960s, e.g. Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar.

[Bazza]

That novel has an eerie quality to it. 

[Cancer]

... That's among the adjectives I thought when I saw it back in 1971 or so.

[Bazza]

You can add Lord of the World (1907) by Robert Hugh Benson to the dystopian list. 

[Bazza]

Kneel. 

[Bazza]

Before Superman

[Bazza]

I’m a sensitive new age Zod. 

[Bazza]

I came in piece. 

[Bazza]

I’m really a hero, every one misunderstands me. 

[Cancer]

"A legend in your own mind"?

[Bazza]

Postmodernism. It’s the in thing.

The majority agrees with it. 

There was an election, and everything.

We won. 

[tkdguy]

I'm more of a neoclassical kind of guy myself.

[Bazza]

Is this it?

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassicism

[Bazza]

So when we expect dystopian non-fiction? 

[Bazza]

 

[Bazza]

Dark matter / dark energy is an apophatic hard science. 

[Cancer]

The case for dark matter is brutally simple; an upper-division physical science student should be able to look at Rubin and Ford's rotation curves for galaxies (and those data are from the 1970s) and once explained what those curves were, would conclude that something terribly anomalous is going on.  That the problem continues on scales larger than galaxies is slightly more subtle, but after the discovery of large angular scale gravitational lensing in the 1980s that, too, became simply obvious.

 

Dark energy is a more subtle issue, and hinges on some understanding of standard hot Big Bang cosmology.  Getting that at the undergrad level is uncommon.

[Bazza]

Q: what if gravity was redefined? 

[L. Marcus]

Massive Attack.

[Cancer]

Redefining gravity is kind of what Einstein did with general relativity. 

 

That said, never overlook that science is empirical and incremental.  Newtonian gravity described terrestrial phenomena, and Solar System phenomena, better than any previous intellectual construct, and allowed predictions and postdictions of astronomical events centuries out, but Newton did not make it up out of whole cloth: he had accommodate known data, like Kepler's Laws and Galileo's discovery of the moons of Jupiter, as well as the wealth of experience on Earth.  A problem appeared fairly early in that times predicted for the eclipses of Jupiter's moons varied in a way that Newton did not predict, but Romer looked at the timing data and pointed out that the variations could be understood if light traveled at a finite fixed speed, so that predictions for the times of eclipses had to include the light travel time from Jupiter to Earth, which varies as both planets revolve around the Sun.  Huygens (using a better telescope than Galileo) found that Saturn's weird distortion was a ring -- unimaginable at the time.  Laplace examined gravity on astronomical scales and assembled a working theory for tides, and showed that the ring could not be a solid object, and proposed it was a swarm of small bodies; this was confirmed much later by photographic spectroscopy. 

 

Relativity (both special and general) was proposed as a way to solve an embarrassing problem coming out of Maxwell's Equations, which were (and are) wildly successful in describing electromagnetism, and also cleared up some profoundly puzzling mysteries again involving both astronomical observations and the Michaelson-Morely experiment.  Relativity really comes from two simple hypotheses (the first is that the laws of physics are equally valid in all frames of reference -- that is, wherever you are and however you may be moving; the second is that the speed of light is a constant, the same in all frames), and the mathematics needed to work within those is pretty nasty.

 

My point here is that neither Newton nor Einstein just made up complicated math s--t because it suited them to do so (more accusingly and less politely, but often implied in some criticisms: because it let them feel like they were smarter than everyone else), which is a point persistently and willfully overlooked by those who don't like math.  Those mathematics were needed to work out the predictions made under a new conceptual/theoretical framework, and they would have been rejected if they were not successful in predicting observed phenomena.

 

So you can redefine gravity if you want (and there's a cottage industry in mainstream physics trying to work out new theories for gravity), but you have to be able to work with existing observations, and it may not be obvious when an observation is relevant; and when an observation refutes your theory, then you have to junk your theory and start again (Einstein: "A theoretician's most important tool is his wastebasket.").  Such things happen without warning.

 

[One class of MOND theories (Modified Newtonian Dynamics), for instance, implies or requires that the speed of light and speed of gravity can be different.  Those were dealt a crushing blow by the observations of GRB170817, the neutron star merger seen with gravity waves and with radiation (gamma rays, x-rays, visible light).  The detection of the gamma ray burst 1.7 seconds after the gravity wave event means that the difference between the speeds of light and gravity is less than one part in 10[sup]14[/sup], which is smaller than required in the MOND theories for their explanation of galactic rotation curves, etc.]

[Bazza]

Cheers 

[Bazza]

The world can be divided in to Soap Opera world, and normalcy. However most who believe in normalcy are in Soap Opera world. 

[Bazza]

The Vintage Beauty Of Soviet Control Rooms

https://designyoutrust.com/2018/01/vintage-beauty-soviet-control-rooms/

 

Spruce up your Zoom call with above backgrounds.

[Pariah]

On this subject, I can recommend Richard Wolfson's "Einstein's Relativity and the Quantum Revolution: Modern Physics for Non-Scientists". It's available in book and video form; I have it as a set of 12 CDs with a total of 24 lectures of half an hour each. It's probably available to stream somewhere, though I can't speak to that specifically.

 

In terms of the subject matter, it's exactly what it says on the tin. Wolfson starts with the question of what it would be like to play tennis on a cruise ship. He relates this to Galilean relativity, the idea that the laws of motion are the same in any uniform frame of reference. From there he brings in Faraday and Maxwell and question of whether there laws are similarly valid in all reference frames. From there we get the aforementioned Michelson-Morley experiment and the problems that couldn't be solved without relativity. It goes on from there, but to me that's the most interesting part.

 

It's a thorough and well-constructed explanation that doesn't require that you already know a lot of physics or advanced mathematics.

[Cancer]

I also admit I didn't know/appreciate many of the the issues surrounding the dawn of relativity and quantum physics until I had to teach a special relativity class about a dozen years ago.  In the rush to get students to the level where they can use the equations to compute stuff, lots of that background gets hurried over.

 

On my own initiative when I taught that class I included a discussion of apparent superluminal motion, where observations of moving blobs in the jets accompanying quasars, when interpreted simply, lead you to conclude that things in those jets are moving at several times the speed of light.  If you are looking almost directly into a highly relativistic flow, then there's some nonintuitive effects with special relativity that can give you angular "motion" on the sky that seems to be a factor of several times c.  Though nonintuitive, the mathematics needed to understand it are "only" at sort of the college sophomore/junior level.