World Science Scholars

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  • The words needed for humans to understand the true nature of physics may not exist in any language other than the language of mathematics. Physicists start with experiments and observations that tell them how the universe behaves in a repeatable manner, then they find mathematics that duplicates that, only then can they attempt to express it in other languages, and in quantum mechanics for example, nobody has succeeded in that final step after a century of trying. Still the equations work precisely and allow us to develop new technology that is reliable, even if we have only a mathematical understanding of how it works.

    A further point is that since this was made, a number of repeating FRBs have been found so it seems unlikely that these are his white holes.

    An untestable theory should never be accepted, it may though sit alongside the previous theory since they two give identical results, they are equally useful so take your pick. If in any way they differ then that provides a distinguishing feature and it is then just a question of designing an experiment to explore that difference.

    However, I do think Rovelli is avoiding another test which has been done and appears to go against his theory. He relies on the area of boundaries being of the order of the Planck length but dispersion, which is another anticipated effect and much more amenable to testing, has not been seen at a level far below that level:

    https://sci.esa.int/web/integral/-/48879-integral-challenges-physics-beyond-einstein

    To replicate GR or even SR, it should be possible to derive from the equations that time is also quantised at the same level, thus although it is the area of foam cell boundaries that takes discrete values, those should be seen as equally products of Planck lengths or with Planck times. In GR there is no preferred frame so we cannot say whether any area boundary is spatial or temporal, they are not inherently distinct.

    We know from relativity that what determines the speed of light is the geometry of spacetime (identified by Minkowski, not Einstein contrary to the earlier notes) but Rovelli hasn’t discussed that so far, maybe later.

    The experiments relating to Bell’s Inequalities suggest that interactions have a truly random component although to some degree constrained, hence giving “soft determinism”. However, I do have a suspicion that quantum phase might be the “hidden variable” that determines the otherwise unpredictable component, that would result in hard determinism despite requiring knowledge of the phase of every particle in the past light cone of any event to allow its prediction.

    The world is what it is so my preference is of no relevance, but I think that hard determinism would bother me more than a small degree of randomness that we can characterize as “free will”.

    My company had a problem trying to find a calibration technique for a direction finder mounted under a helicopter for search and rescue work with irregular manual sample ngles. I was able to solve it by realizing that the calibration offset function was cyclical and using a Discrete Fourier Transform then applying a low pass filter, finding the inverse transform to interpolate the correction at any angle. The performance exceeded the requirement.

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