by Doug Coulter » Sun Oct 23, 2011 12:30 pm
Yes, the issue for any purveyor of "new physics" is that nasty back-test against all existing actual observations that has to be done. Lots of people come up with stuff that looks good at first, in their own field or a couple of related ones, but which fails miserably against "All known data" which was adequately described by what most call "the standard model". Or winds up looking like a curve fitting exercise that only fixes one thing (like MOND). Personally, I'm not yet convinced that either the "dark energy" or "dark matter" proposed by cosmologists is anything but that. For one thing, their own "data" needs real scrutiny as it tends to be circular in derivation - we think all such supernovas are such brightness, which implies it's this far away, which ignores a lot of things (like dust, Doppler shifts from other causes etc). The truth is, no one's radar-ranged any of that or been there and all such circular arguments have "problems" in my view.
When doing my own very amateur analysis of Schroedinger's wave function, I noted with interest that at the end of this fairly wild flight (much has to be just assumed along the way) that he took only the magnitude of a complex number pair, and ditched the angle. Anyone who has done an FFT knows that this is tossing out information, rendering the data not transformable back to the original domain to get the waveform back. And then quantum physicists argue we can't predict where in the probability wave we find our particle. Well, when you do this to an FFT, you lose that information there too - math is math, no matter to what applied. Doh! Maybe it was Schroedinger playing dice?
For fusion, most of that probably doesn't apply, other than at the very last instant when the reactants "tunnel" into fusion, even though they lack the energy to climb the Coulomb barrier. Getting things to that point is most of the problem, then you can presumably let the quantum magic take over.
Or not. I'm investigating the other conservation laws -- things that say net spin into a reaction has to equal the net spin of all the products for one important example. I could prove that this is operating in deciding which of the 3 possible DD fusion pathways by pre-preparing the reactant spins before the reaction, to see if I can alter the ratios of the resulting reactions from the random-thermal book values, and that's what I'm up to at present. You can argue all day whether there's really something spinning or not - but there is a magnetic dipole there that takes on orientation under quantum laws (odd enough as is -- why just up and down?) -- and we can select by orientation and show that there is a difference. So that would be an experimental test.
I tend to put theory under the Feynman microscope -- it's got to predict something new I can test, else it and 25c will get a cup of coffee (well these days, you need a couple bucks). And it can't imply that tons of existing observations are wrong. When they disagree, I tend to go with what comes repeatably out of some lab.
But since we've not completely mastered the universe empirically yet - we obviously need new theoretical insights to get where we want to be. But along the way I think we have to realize that there will be very many new theories tried for each one that actually turns out to be useful in describing what we see, and predicting what we might see and do.
My issue with most of the standard stuff is none of it is "feedforward". The old 3 body gravitational problem comes to mind, as does anything else fractal, where the next input to the system is its last output. A closed form solution to one of these would be pretty neat to come up with, rather than having to time-space quantize to arbitrary (never infinite and errors do accumulate at less than that) precision and just run things in little steps till you get to an answer of "where is Jupiter in 30 years". You can't say, I need some material with these properties, and go back to wavefunctions and design it from scratch either. You have to just try stuff, then try to explain why diamonds are hard and transparent to some wavelengths from the theory. Not very satisfying intellectually, but it's what we have so far.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.