Bearden - Tech papers - Engines and ...

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
The Tom Bearden Website
Engines and Templates: Correcting Effects Confused as Causes
Ó
2001 T.E. Bearden
Adapted from personal correspondence
Foreword:
Though deliberately informal, this is a very difficult paper, both to write and to read. We are
struggling to explain and correct one of the great, pervasive flaws in physics foundations,
which is the confusion of cause and effect, both in mechanics and particularly in
electrodynamics. The reader is likely to find the going very rough; indeed, one will need to
continually reflect very deeply on the "operational observation situation applying or not
applying to what is being discussed at this moment".
I apologize for the density of the subject matter and that in a single sentence it is necessary to
switch between two opposite operational situations. The "implicitly assumed" operational
situation has been largely hidden and misunderstood for more than a century, and is still vastly
confused in the extant physics literature. We attempt to point out how these assumptions
(often quite unconsciously) were included by the older pioneering physicists. Some
foundations quotations are added to show the problem and that it has not been solved.
So we advise patience if the reader is truly interested in this important foundations issue and a
possible resolution. We urge the reader to heed Einstein's excellent advice, which he stated so
beautifully as:
"...the scientist makes use of a whole arsenal of concepts which he imbibed practically
with his mother's milk; and seldom if ever is he aware of the eternally problematic
character of his concepts. He uses this conceptual material, or, speaking more exactly,
these conceptual tools of thought, as something obviously, immutably given; something
having an objective value of truth which is hardly even, and in any case not seriously, to
be doubted. ...in the interests of science it is necessary over and over again to engage in
the critique of these fundamental concepts, in order that we may not unconsciously be
ruled by them." [Albert Einstein, "Foreword," in Max Jammer,
Concepts of Space: The
History of Theories of Space in Physics
, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1969, p. viii.]
Lindsay and Margenau, in their noted
Foundations of Physics
, make the same point:
"[Hypotheses made without realizing that they are being made] …are what Poincaré has
called "unconscious" or "natural" hypotheses—a type which one hardly ever challenges,
for it seems too unlikely that we could make progress without them. Nevertheless it
should be the endeavor of the physicist always to drag them out into the light of day, so
file:///C|/bearden/The%20Tom%20Bearden%20Website.htm (1 of 53)24.11.2003 20:47:13
The Tom Bearden Website
that it may be perfectly clear what we are actually doing."
Physicists have indeed struggled with the "confusion of cause and effect" but usually under
different terminology—often speaking of "dual" use or of a "duality" theory. E.g., Sen states it
as particle and field (but note that field is usually intended to imply cause, and particle is
usually intended to imply effect). Quoting Sen:
"…it seems to be a strange characteristic of the human mind that it is forced to describe
the physical properties of matter either as fields or particles. The whole history of
physics appears as a struggle to either clarify or escape from this
either or
dichotomy."
"…a theory [is] dualistic if it supposes that the source of the field, i.e., the particles with
their characteristic masses and charge, etc., form a separate entity apart from the field
which they generate." [D. K. Sen,
Fields and/or Particles
, Academic Press, London and
New York, 1968, p. viii.].
Even in recognizing the duality of a theory, however, physicists often have not clearly
recognized that they confuse effect as cause in their use of the field concept itself. So they
have not resolved the issue, even with the "duality" principle which was just an agreement to
quit fighting and use either the particle view or the wave view, as one wished, if it worked. It
did not address or solve the confusion of wave and particle, and of cause and effect.
The field concept itself is perhaps the most primary example of dual use of a concept for two
precisely contradictory things. The concept of a force—which is an effect and never a cause,
but is used nearly universally as a cause—is also a fundamental part of the confusion. Force is
an observable, and all observables are effects of the observation process a priori. The d/dt
operation of the observation process was also not properly taken into account.
Insofar as questioning the "dual field concept" is concerned, the problem certainly has been
long debated, but not resolved. As we mentioned, there is fundamental duality involved even
in the notion of force itself. E.g., quoting Feynman:
"…in dealing with force the tacit assumption is always made that the force is equal to
zero unless some physical body is present… One of the most important characteristics of
force is that it has a material origin, and this is
not
just a definition. … If you insist upon
a precise definition of force, you will never get it!" [Richard P. Feynman, Robert B.
Leighton, and Matthew Sands,
Lectures on Physics
, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA,
Vol. 1, 1964, p. 12-2.]
Feynman and Wheeler also pointed out that the force field assumed in classical EM theory
only existed where charged mass was interacting. Hence it could not exist in empty space
where no observable charged mass exists. They did not include mass as a component of force,
but stopped short of it. They attempted to correct electrodynamics by advancing an EM model
based on absorber theory. However, the fields used in their theory still maintained their
file:///C|/bearden/The%20Tom%20Bearden%20Website.htm (2 of 53)24.11.2003 20:47:13
The Tom Bearden Website
unacceptable dichotomy, so the theory—though quite valiant—did not succeed.
In various places Feynman specifically pointed out that the field as conceived could not and
did not exist in mass-free space, but only the potential for the field existed there, should there
be some charged mass there to interact with. E.g., in Feynman, Leighton, and Sands, ibid., p.
1-3, Feynman states:
"We may think of E(x, y, z, t) and B(x, y, z, t) as giving the forces that
would be
experienced at the time t by a charge located at (x, y, z),
with the condition
that placing
the charge there
did not disturb
the positions or motion of all the other charges
responsible for the fields."
This
is actually a realization that the field is an effect (after interaction) rather than the cause
(what exists before the interaction occurs). It clearly reveals the dichotomy of using the word
"field" as both the entity existing in spacetime before the interaction and thus the cause, and as
the entity (the "effect field" existing after the interaction of that "causal field" with charged
mass. That is very much like saying the field—an effect—is also its own cause. Also note
that Feynman still uses the charges as the "cause" of the fields. Yet since charged mass is an
observable, it is an effect. Here again we meet the fact that an "effect" is considered to be a
cause. This problem of the "association of the field with its source" has long been recognized
as a formidable problem. Again quoting Sen ibid., p. viii:
"The connection between the field and its source has always been and still is the most
difficult problem in classical and quantum electrodynamics."
We solved this long-vexing problem in our
which is carried on this website. It is solved by reinterpreting and extending
(as between the ends of a dipole) and by treating the
charge with its clustered virtual charges of opposite sign as a set of composite dipoles.
Most electrodynamicists have taken a pragmatic approach to the "duality of the field concept"
and simply "bypassed" that tough problem. One can be very sympathetic to this view! After
all, eventually one must use the electrodynamics model to do practical things and get practical
results, i.e., effects. As an example, one of the finest electrodynamics books for two decades
is J. D. Jackson,
Classical Electrodynamics
, 2nd edition, Wiley, New York, 1975. Jackson
avoids confronting the field dichotomy in this fashion:
"...the thing that eventually gets measured is a force..." "At the moment, the electric
field can be defined as the force per unit charge acting at a given point. [p. 28].
"Most classical electrodynamicists continue to adhere to the notion that the EM force
field exists as such in the vacuum, but do admit that physically measurable quantities
such as force somehow involve the product of charge and field." [p. 249].
These statements recognize that the "field as it exists in charge-free spacetime" is not a force
file:///C|/bearden/The%20Tom%20Bearden%20Website.htm (3 of 53)24.11.2003 20:47:13
The Tom Bearden Website
field, but does not reconcile that position with the definition of the (e.g., electric) field itself as
E
d/dt(mv). But "adhering to the notion that the EM force field exists
as such in the vacuum" is where the problem lies. That is saying that the "effects" field after
observation is precisely the same thing prior to observation. Since observation is a d/dt
operator, actually the cause field has to differ in dimensionality by the unit of time.
º
For any reader to begin, an excellent treatise on physics foundations is Robert Bruce Lindsay
and Henry Margenau,
Foundations of Physics
, Dover, New York, 1963, previously quoted.
Lindsay and Margenau point out the difficulties in the causality concept itself, and on p. 18-19
they state:
"The proper definition of the term
cause
has been a controversial subject among
philosophers for a long time…" …All that the laws state is a relation among symbols
which represent well-defined operations in the laboratory, and no notion of precedence
or antecedence, or dynamic enforcement, is involved in them. … [Difficulties with
assumed certainty] …should by no means be interpreted as denying the importance of
a
principle of causality
in physics. …It is in itself a hypothesis concerning the behavior of
physical systems."
As this small cross-section of the foundations literature shows, the best physicists themselves
have great difficulty in clearly separating cause and effect, specifically as they involve more
terms. In the same sentence, one often finds the same entity stated in the front as a cause, yet
in the back as an effect! We merely have wished to show the extreme difficulty of properly
sorting out and clarifying one's own use of the terms "cause" and "effect", as well as one's
unconscious use of cause and effect richly intermingled and erroneously exchanged in one's
own daily conversation and writing. In Einstein's words, we imbibed this confusion with our
mother's milk!
This informal paper is certainly not intended to be the "definitive statement" on the matter!
Instead, it is intended to merely point the way to a deeper consideration of the field, and to its
present erratic and erroneous usage in a dualistic manner, and to how to solve the problem.
We use a simple "discriminating" notion: We use "observation" as a process occurring in
ongoing spacetime, involving a cause acting on (interacting with) a previously observed effect,
generating a change (effect) in that previously observed effect. Whenever one says the word
"effect," one assumes (usually unconsciously) a continual iteration of observation. In short,
we assume the continual iterative production of effects, each rigorously static and frozen,
much like the frames of a movie film. The "progress of change" is added by perception, by
our mind's normal operation which is innate. On the other hand, we point out the assumption,
in that notion of continual iterative observations, of "time-forward" motion through time. In a
time-reversed situation, the exact opposite happens, and we may think of the observation
interaction as reversed in direction in the iteration of the d/dt operator. In short, we go back
file:///C|/bearden/The%20Tom%20Bearden%20Website.htm (4 of 53)24.11.2003 20:47:13
F/q. It can be seen that mass is a component of the field-as-defined because mass is a
component of force by F
º
The Tom Bearden Website
along the movie film, so to speak, rather than forward. Thus perceptually we would "see" (not
observe!) the steady production of what had previously been the causal set, but backwards,
from what had previously been the effects set (but backwards). We may regard this as the
production of reversed time-forward "causes" from reversed time-forward "effects". Only the
reversed time-forward "effects" constitute observables; the stream of "produced causes" is not
observable. Nonetheless, that stream can be calculated, and in fact does appear in that manner
in general relativity.
One must be very careful when thinking "cause and effect" in reversed time. It is not that the
"cause becomes the effect and the effect becomes the cause," because cause and effect have
been named (standardized) in forward time. So what we actually perceive but cannot observe
is the causal interaction running backwards. So we perceive the usual ordering of effect and
cause reversed—but observation only sees that reversed ordering of effects. Since the
symmetry inherent in Newton's third law implies both time forward to produce the action
observed, and time-reversed to produce the equal reaction observed, it would seem that at the
most fundamental level there always exists a two-way symmetry between the ordering of
effects, and thus the so-called independence of physics to the direction of time (i.e., the
principal equations operate "backwards" as well as "forward").
In fact, general relativity does capture this very kind of symmetry between the ordering of the
continually observed effects, since a change in the curvature of spacetime in turn produces a
change in the mass-energy with which it interacts, and the change in the mass-energy
correspondingly produces a change in the curvature of spacetime. We have also constructed
our approach largely consistent with O(3) electrodynamics, which is an important subset of
Sachs' unified field theory. Hence time (and spacetime) do play primary roles in the approach.
We also encourage bright young doctoral candidates and post-docs to consider giving the
entire "duality of fundamental concepts which use effect as cause" problem a very rigorous
and extended treatment. Such is sorely needed in physics, because frankly the confusion of
cause and effect has been a wholesale epidemic for nearly four centuries. But sadly it is still
little noticed or emphasized, even today.
We are attempting in this informal paper to "point the way" to possibly how this long-vexing
confusion can be resolved. As the reader will appreciate as he or she goes through this paper,
the problem is complex. It will require enormous effort and time to ever get physics (and
scientists in general) scrubbed of this ubiquitous problem we have all inherited since our birth.
This reflection is related to the template and engine concepts, and it is related to other years of
reflection. The present stream of thoughts was stimulated by nanotechnology's more
mechanical use of the concept of template.
file:///C|/bearden/The%20Tom%20Bearden%20Website.htm (5 of 53)24.11.2003 20:47:13
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]