Tag Archives: Bad Physics

Big Bang Bogosity

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One of my long-time mantras on this blog has been “The worst math is no math”. Today, I’m going to show you yet another example of that: a recent post on Boing-Boing called “The Big Bang is Going Down”, by a self-proclaimed genius named Rick Rosner.

First postulated in 1931, the Big Bang has been the standard theory of the origin and structure of the universe for 50 years. In my opinion, (the opinion of a TV comedy writer, stripper and bar bouncer who does physics on the side) the Big Bang is about to collapse catastrophically, and that’s a good thing.

According to Big Bang theory, the universe exploded into existence from basically nothing 13.7-something billion years ago. But we’re at the beginning of a wave of discoveries of stuff that’s older than 13.7 billion years.

We’re constantly learning more about our universe, how it works, and how it started. New information isn’t necessarily a catastrophe for our existing theories; it’s just more data. There’s constantly new data coming in – and as yet, none of it comes close to causing the big bang theory to catastrophically collapse.

The two specific examples cited in the article are:

  1. one quasar that appears to be younger than we might expect – it existed just 900 million years after the current estimate of when the big bang occurred. That’s very surprising, and very exciting. But even in existing models of the big bang, it’s surprising, but not impossible. (No link, because the link in the original article doesn’t work.)
  2. an ancient galaxy – a galaxy that existed only 700 million years after the big bang occurred – contains dust. Cosmic dust is made of atoms much larger than hydrogen – like carbon, silicon, and iron, which are (per current theories) the product of supernovas. Supernovas generally don’t happen to stars younger than a couple of billion years – so finding dust in a galaxy less than a billion years after the universe began is quite surprising. But again: impossible under the big bang? No.

The problem with both of these arguments against the big bang is: they’re vague. They’re both handwavy arguments made about crude statements about what “should” be possible or impossible according to the bing bang theory. But neither comes close to the kind of precision that an actual scientific argument requires.

Scientists don’t use math because they like to be obscure, or because they think all of the pretty symbols look cool. Math is a tool used by scientists, because it’s useful. Real theories in physics need to be precise. They need to make predictions, and those predictions need to match reality to the limits of our ability to measure them. Without that kind of precision, we can’t test theories – we can’t check how well they model reality. And precise modelling of reality is the whole point.

The big bang is an extremely successful theory. It makes a lot of predictions, which do a good job of matching observations. It’s evolved in significant ways over time – but it remains by far the best theory we have – and by “best”, I mean “most accurate and successfully predictive”. The catch to all of this is that when we talk about the big bang theory, we don’t mean “the universe started out as a dot, and blew up like a huge bomb, and everything we see is the remnants of that giant explosion”. That’s an informal description, but it’s not the theory. That informal description is so vague that a motivated person can interpret it in ways that are consistent, or inconsistent with almost any given piece of evidence. The real big bang theory isn’t a single english statement – it’s many different mathematical statements which, taken together, produce a description of an expansionary universe that looks like the one we live in. For a really, really small sample, you can take a look at a nice old post by Ethan Siegel over here.

If you really want to make an argument that it’s impossible according to the big bang theory, you need to show how it’s impossible. The argument by Mr. Rosner is that the atoms in the dust in that galaxy couldn’t exist according to the big bang, because there wasn’t time for supernovas to create it. To make that argument, he needs to show that that’s true: he needs to look at the math that describes how stars form and how they behave, and then using that math, show that the supernovas couldn’t have happened in that timeframe. He doesn’t do anything like that: he just asserts that it’s true.

In contrast, if you read the papers by the guys who discovered the dust-filled galaxy, you’ll notice that they don’t come anywhere close to saying that this is impossible, or inconsistent with the big bang. All they say is that it’s surprising, and that we made need to revise our understanding of the behavior of matter in the early stages of the universe. The reason that they say that is because there’s nothing there that fundamentally conflicts with our current understanding of the big bang.

But Mr. Rosner can get away with the argument, because he’s being vague where the scientists are being precise. A scientist isn’t going to say “Yes, we know that it’s possible according to the big bang theory”, because the scientist doesn’t have the math to show it’s possible. At the moment, we don’t have sufficient precise math either way to come to a conclusion; we don’t know. But what we do know is that millions of other observations in different contexts, different locations, observed by different methods by different people, are all consistent with the predictions of the big bang. Given that we don’t have any evidence to support the idea that this couldn’t happen under the big bang, we continue to say that the big bang is the theory most consistent with our observations, that it makes better predictions than anything else, and so we assume (until we have evidence to the contrary) that this isn’t inconsistent. We don’t have any reason to discard the big bang theory on the basis of this!

Mr. Rosner, though, goes even further, proposing what he believes will be the replacement for the big bang.

The theory which replaces the Big Bang will treat the universe as an information processor. The universe is made of information and uses that information to define itself. Quantum mechanics and relativity pertain to the interactions of information, and the theory which finally unifies them will be information-based.

The Big Bang doesn’t describe an information-processing universe. Information processors don’t blow up after one calculation. You don’t toss your smart phone after just one text. The real universe – a non-Big Bang universe – recycles itself in a series of little bangs, lighting up old, burned-out galaxies which function as memory as needed.

In rolling cycles of universal computation, old, collapsed, neutron-rich galaxies are lit up again, being hosed down by neutrinos (which have probably been channeled along cosmic filaments), turning some of their neutrons to protons, which provides fuel for stellar fusion. Each calculation takes a few tens of billions of years as newly lit-up galaxies burn their proton fuel in stars, sharing information and forming new associations in the active center of the universe before burning out again. This is ultra-deep time, with what looks like a Big Bang universe being only a long moment in a vast string of such moments across trillions or quadrillions of giga-years.

This is not a novel idea. There are a ton of variations of the “universe as computation” that have been proposed over the years. Just off the top of my head, I can rattle off variations that I’ve read (in decreasing order of interest) by Minsky (can’t find the paper at the moment; I read it back when I was in grad school), by Fredkin, by Wolfram, and by Langan.

All of these theories assert in one form or another that our universe is either a massive computer or a massive computation, and that everything we can observe is part of a computational process. It’s a fascinating idea, and there are aspects of it that are really compelling.

For example, the Minsky model has an interesting explanation for the speed of light as an absolute limit, and for time dilation. Minksy’s model says that the universe is a giant cellular automaton. Each minimum quanta of space is a cell in the automaton. When a particle is located in a particular cell, that cell is “running” the computation that describes that particle. For a particle to move, the data describing it needs to get moved from its current location to its new location at the next time quanta. That takes some amount of computation, and the cell can only perform a finite amount of computation per quanta. The faster the particle moves, the more of its time quantum are dedicated to motion, and the less it has for anything else. The speed of light, in this theory, is the speed where the full quanta for computing a particle’s behavior is dedicated to nothing but moving it to its next location.

It’s very pretty. Intuitively, it works. That makes it an interesting idea. But the problem is, no one has come up with an actual working model. We’ve got real observations of the behavior of the physical universe that no one has been able to describe using the cellular automaton model.

That’s the problem with all of the computational hypotheses so far. They look really good in the abstract, but none of them come close to actually working in practice.

A lot of people nowadays like to mock string theory, because it’s a theory that looks really ogood, but has no testable predictions. String theory can describe the behavior of the universe that we see. The problem with it isn’t that there’s things we observe in the universe that it can’t predict, but because it can predict just about anything. There are a ton of parameters in the theory that can be shifted, and depending on their values, almost anything that we could observe can be fit by string theory. The problem with it is twofold: we don’t have any way (yet) of figuring out what values those parameters need to have to fit our universe, and we don’t have any way (yet) of performing an experiment that tests a prediction of string theory that’s different from the predictions of other theories.

As much as we enjoy mocking string theory for its lack of predictive value, the computational hypotheses are far worse! So far, no one has been able to come up with one that can come close to explaining all of the things that we’ve already observed, much less to making predictions that are better than our current theories.

But just like he did with his “criticism” of the big bang, Mr. Rosner makes predictions, but doesn’t bother to make them precise. There’s no math to his prediction, because there’s no content to his prediction. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s empty prose, proclaiming victory for an ill-defined idea on the basis of hand-waving and hype.

Boing-Boing should be ashamed for giving this bozo a platform.

I get mail: Brown's Gas and Perpetual Motion

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In the past, I’ve written about free-energy cranks like Tom Bearden, and I’ve made several allusions to the Brown’s gas” crankpots. But I’ve never actually written in any detail about the latter.

Brown’s gas is a term used primarily by cranks for oxyhydrogen gas. Oxyhydrogen is a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen in a two-to-one molar ratio; in other words, it’s exactly the product of electrolysis to break water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. It’s used as the fuel for several kinds of torches and welders. It’s become a lot less common, because for most applications, it’s just not as practical as things like acetylene torches, TIG welders, etc.

But for free-energy cranks, it’s a panacea.

You see, the beautiful thing about Brown’s gas is that it burns very nicely, it can be compressed well enough to produce a very respectable energy density, and when you use it, its only exhaust gas is water. If you look at it naively, that makes it absolutely wonderful as a fuel.

The problem, of course, is that it costs energy to produce it. You need to pump energy into water to divide it into hydrogen and oxygen; and then you need to use more energy to compress it in order to make it useful. Still, there are serious people who are working hard on things like hydrogen fuel cell power sources for cars – because it is an attractive fuel. It’s just not a panacea.

But the cranks… Ah, the cranks. The cranks believe that if you just find the right way to burn it, then you can create a perfect source of free energy. You see, if you can just burn it so that it produces a teeny, tiny bit more energy being burned that it cost to produce, then you’ve got free energy. You just run an engine – it keeps dividing the water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then you burn it, producing more energy than you spent to divide it; and the only by-product is water vapor!

Of course, this doesn’t work. Thermodynamics fights back: you can’t get more energy out of recombining atoms of hydrogen and oxygen than you spent splitting molecules of water to get that hydrogen and oxygen. It’s very simple: there’s a certain amount of latent energy in that chemical bond. You need to pump in a certain amount of energy to break it – if I remember correctly, it’s around 142 Joules per gram of water. When you burn hydrogen and oxygen to produce water, you get exactly that amount of energy back. It’s a state transition – it’s the same distance up as it is back down. It’s like lifting a weight up a step on a staircase: it takes a certain amount of energy to move the weight up one step. When you drop it back down, it won’t produce more energy falling that you put in to lift it.

But the Brown’s gas people won’t let that stop them!

Here’s an email I recieved yesterday from a Brown’s gas fan, who noticed one of my old criticisms of it:

Hi Mark,

My name is Stefan, and I recently came across your analysis regarding split water technology to power vehicle. You are trying to proof that it makes no sense because it is against the physic low of energy conservation?

There is something I would like to ask you, if you could explain to me. What do you think about the sail boat zigzagging against the wind? Is it the classical example of perpetual motion?

If so, I believe that the energy conversion law is not always applicable, and even maybe wrong? Using for example resonance you can destroy each constructions with little force, the same I believe is with membrane HHO technology at molecular level?

Is it possible that we invented the law of impossibility known as the Energy Conservation Law and this way created such limitation? If you have some time please answer me what do you think about it? This World as you know is mostly unexplainable, and maybe we should learn more to better understand how exactly the Universe work?

The ignorance in this is absolutely astonishing. And it’s pretty typical of my experience with the Brown’s gas fans. They’re so woefully ignorant of simple math and physics.

Let’s start with his first question, about sailboat tacking. That’s got some interesting connections to my biggest botch on this blog, my fouled up debunking of the downwind-faster-than-the-wind vehicle.

The tacking sailboat is a really interesting problem. When you think about it naively, it seems like it shouldn’t be possible. If you let a leaf blow in the wind, it can’t possibly move faster than the wind. So how can a sailboat do it?

The anwser to that is that the sailboat isn’t a free body floating in the wind. It’s got a body and keel in the water, and a sail in the air. What it’s doing is exploiting that difference in motion between the water and the air, and extracting energy. Mathematically, the water behaves as a source of tension, resisting the pressure of the wind against the sail, and converting it into motion in a different direction. Lift the body of the sailboat out of the water, and it can’t do that anymore. Similarly, a boat can’t accelerate by “tacking” against the water current unless it has a sail. It needs the two parts in different domains; then it can, effectively, extract energy from the difference between the two. But the most important point about a tacking sailboat – more important than the details of the mechanism that it uses – is that there’s no energy being created. The sailboat is extracting kinetic energy from the wind, and converting it into kinetic energy in the boat. There’s no energy being created or destroyed – just moved around. Every bit of energy that the boat acquires (plus some extra) was removed from the wind.

So no, a sailboat isn’t an example of perpetual motion. It’s just a very typical example of moving energy around from one place to another. The sun heats the air/water/land; that creates wind; wind pushes the boat.

Similarly, he botches the resonance example.

Resonance is, similarly, a fascinating phenomenon, but it’s one that my correspondant totally fails to comprehend.

Resonance isn’t about a small amount of energy producing a large effect. It’s about how a small amount of energy applied over time can add up to a large amount of energy.

There is, again, no energy being created. The resonant system is not producing energy. A small amount of energy is not doing anything more than a small amount of energy can always do.

The difference is that in the right conditions, energy can add in interesting ways. Think of a spring with a weight hanging on the end. If you apply a small steady upward force on the weight, the spring will move upward a small distance. When you release the force, the weight will fall to slightly below its apparent start point, and then start to come back up. It will bounce up and down until friction stops it.

But now… at the moment when it hits its highest position, you give it another tiny push, then it will move a bit higher. Now it’s bounce distance will be longer. If every time, exactly as it hits its highest point, you give it another tiny push, then each cycle, it will move a little bit higher. And by repeatedly appyling tiny forces at the right time, the forces add up, and you get a lot of motion in the spring.

The key is, how much? And the answer is: take all of the pushes that you gave it, and add them up. The motion that you got from the resonant pattern is exactly the same as the motion you’d get if you applied the summed force all at once. (Or, actually, you’d get slightly more from the summed force; you lost some to friction in the resonant scenario.

Resonance can create absolutely amazing phenomena, where you can get results that are absolutely astonishing; where forces that really seem like they’re far to small to produce any result do something amazing. The famous example of this is the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse, where the wind happened to blow just right to created a resonant vibration which tore the bridge apart:

But there’s no free energy there; no energy being created or destroyed.

So, Stefan… It’s always possible that we’re wrong about how physics work. It’s possible that conservation of energy isn’t a real law. It’s possible that the world might work in a way where conservation of energy just appears to be a law, and in fact, there are ways around it, and that we can use those ways to produce free energy. But people have been trying to do that for a very, very long time. We’ve been able to use our understanding of physics to do amazing things. We can accelerate particles up to nearly the speed of light and slam them together. We can shoot rockets into space. We can put machines and even people on other planets. We can produce energy by breaking atoms into pieces. We can build devices that flip switches billions of times per second, and use them to talk to each other! And we can predict, to within a tiny fraction of a fraction of the breadth of a hair how much energy it will take to do these things, and how much heat will be produced by doing them.

All of these things rely on a very precise description of how things work. If our understanding were off by the tiniest bit, none of these things could possibly work. So we have really good reasons to believe that our theories are, to a pretty great degree of certainty, accurate descriptions of how reality works. That doesn’t mean that we’re right – but it does mean that we’ve got a whole lot of evidence to support the idea that energy is always conserved.

On the side of the free energy folks: not one person has ever been able to demonstrate a mechanism that produces more energy than was put in to it. No one has ever been able to demonstrate any kind of free energy under controlled experimental conditions. No one has been able to produce a theory that describes how such a system could work that is consistent with observations of the real world.

People have been pushing Brown’s gas for decades. But they’ve never, every, not one single time, been able to actually demonstrate a working generator. No one has ever done it. No one has been able to build a car that actually works using Brown’s gas without an separate power source. No one has build a self-sustaining generator. No one has been able to produce any mathematical description of how Brown’s gas produces energy that is consistent with real-world observations.

So you’ve got two sides to the argument about Brown’s gas. On one side, you’ve got modern physics, which has reams and reams of evidence, precise theories that are confirmed by observation, and unbelievable numbers of inventions that rely on the precision of those theories. On the other side, you’ve got people who’ve never been able to to do a demonstration, who can’t describe how things work, who can’t explain why things appear to work the way that they appear, who have never been able to produce a single working invention…

Which side should we believe? Given the current evidence, the answer is obvious.

The Return of a Classic: Neal Adams' Bad Physics

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Between work, trying to finish my AppEngine book, and doing all of the technical work getting Scientopia running smoothly on the new hosting service, I haven’t had a lot of time for writing new blog posts.

But in the process of doing my technical work around here, I was browsing through some archives, and seeing some of my old posts that I’d forgotten about. And odds are, if I forgot about it, then there are a lot of readers who’ve never seen it. So I’m going to bring back some of the classic old material.

For example, Neal Adams. Comic book fans will know about Neal: he’s a comic book artist who worked on some of the most famous comics in the 1970s: he drew Batman, Superman, Deadman, Green Lantern, the Spectre, the X-men. More recently, he’s done a lot of work in general commercial art – for example, he did the animated nasonex bee commercials a few years ago.

Adams' PMP image But he’s not just an artist. No, he’s so much more than that! He’s also a brilliant scientist. He’s much smarter than all of those eggheads with college degrees. They’re struggling to build giant particle accelerators to help understand things like mass. But Neal – he’s got them beat. He’s figured out exactly how things work!

According to Neal, there is no such thing as gravity – it’s all just pressure. People trying to figure out stuff about how gravity works are just wasting time. The earth (and all other planets) is actually a matter factory – matter is constantly created in the hollow center of the earth, and the pressure of all the new matter forces the earth to constantly expand. The constant expansion creates pressure on the surface as things expand – and that constant expansion is what creates gravity! You’re standing on a point on the surface of the earth. And the earth is expanding – the ground is pushing up on you because of that expansion. You’re not being pulled down towards the earth: the earth is pushing up on you.

And according to Neal, the best part is the math works!. In the original version of this post, I had a link to Neal’s page with his explanation of how the math works – but he has, since then, moved most of his science stuff behind a paywall – you now need to pay Neal $20 to get to see his material, so I can’t provide a direct link. But it’s in a video here, and you can see the original using the Wayback Machine.

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