It’s always frustrating when we have to find a way to make other people’s arguments make sense. I agree: it sounds like people mean “other universes” not “other dimensions.”
To date there’s no compelling reason to assume that there’s more than one universe, so empirical reasoning dictates that the existence of other universes should be given the same level of credence as the existence of unicorns.
I think it would be great if there were other universes. I also think it would great if there were mermaids. But at this point speculating about other universes is like speculating about which of the Infinity Stones can save Middle Earth from the army of Sauron.
One logical problem is this: to our best estimates (via the BOSS Collaboration) our universe is infinite in extent. If that’s true, then there’s no place for another universe to exist. I think that when people talk about other universes, they imagine those other universes to be co-existing somehow with our own like the Upside-Down in
Stranger Things. And until somebody can explain how that would work physically, the idea is nothing more than a fancy.
I also choose to “limit my options” by excluding Santa Clause and Elrond from my inventory of physical reality. I think it’s absurd to chide me for restricting my models of reality to credible data and tenable physical theories.
It’s fine if others choose to reject the method of empirical reasoning. But in doing so, they choose to reject the foundation of science and the Age of Reason itself. Allowing ourselves to construct belief systems based on nothing more than fancy and wishful thinking is how humankind ended up in the Dark Ages and the Inquisition – it’s not just reckless to allow such thinking to dominate one’s worldview; it’s actually dangerous.
Holy smokes: you start here by chiding me, and then go on to forward a completely buggered description of gravitational field propulsion. We’ve been discussing this topic for over a year; I thought you’d understand this by now.
The key reason why the theoretical physics of gravitational field propulsion (which is founded on general relativity, so it’s just as theoretically viable as gravitational waves were a few years ago before they were detected), is this: once the field is established
it requires zero expenditure of energy to accelerate the craft. That’s what “a self-accelerating reference frame” means. Gravitational field propulsion completely abolishes the energy-acceleration-distance problems associated with reaction propulsion, i.e., rocketry. In this respect, the physics of applied general relativity are at least as bizarre and counterintuitive as applied quantum field theory.
Also, you’re conflating the physics of special relativity where speed is limited to the speed of light and an exponential increase in energy is associated with acceleration, with the field propulsion physics of general relativity.
Gravitational field propulsion sidesteps both of those issues. First, there’s no need for an input of energy as the craft accelerates because the craft gains no net relativistic mass and gains no net momentum. There’s also no time dilation effect with this method of propulsion. This is because the craft is simply falling in freefall along a geodesic – at no time does it feel any force; the craft simply falls in the direction of travel because it’s riding on a distorted spacetime metric. Neither the craft nor any occupants would feel any sense of motion whatsoever.
And with gravitational field propulsion, there’s no upper limit to speed – not even the speed of light. This is because the magnitude of spacetime deformation is theoretically unlimited (we know from the inflationary era that spacetime can expand at billions of billions of trillions times faster than the speed of light). You could travel to Alpha Centauri and be back here on Earth in time for lunch, if you could produce the requisite level of metric distortion required to do that – and that’s a purely technological problem, not a theoretical one. Evidently, some other folks in our universe (probably within our galaxy) have already figured out how to do this, but we already understand the physics of it
And then you argue about gravity’s weakness as a force, relative to the other forces. I’ve said this before but apparently I have to say it again: we made the same (false) assumption about magnetism, before we learned how to technologically generate magnetism. In the Dark Ages, lodestone was the only source of magnetism, and lodestone has a very weak magnetic field. So if we had calculated how much lodestone would be required to generate a 1 Tesla magnetic field, we would’ve concluded that we would need to gather a mass of lodestone the size of the Moon, to produce a field that strong. Now we create a field that intense in every MRI machine on the planet. AAVs demonstrate that the same concept will apply to gravitational fields once we learn the trick to synthesizing them technologically, rather by simply accruing together more mass-energy.
Clearly the AAV phenomenon demonstrates that it’s technologically feasible to produce the same kind of dramatic amplification and polarization of the gravitational field, that we humans first achieved with the magnetic field just two centuries ago. Because these anomalous craft exhibit precisely all of the performance characteristics that we predict for gravitational field propulsion. According to our current physics, it requires a mass the magnitude of the Earth to produce 1 g of gravitational acceleration. Yet these craft are exhibiting accelerations of 5600 g’s or more (this is the minimum acceleration that I found for the anomalous devices seen on Kevin Day’s radar screen in the USS Nimitz CSG case). So evidently, strong gravitational field effects can be produced without huge magnitudes of mass-energy - we just haven't figured that part out yet.
So Dejan – how did we lose so much of the progress that we’ve made over the last year+ discussing all of this? I thought we were up to speed with this subject but suddenly I feel like we’re back at square one. Hopefully this is just a temporary lapse produced by an excess of eggnog this holiday season
It sounds like you’re talking about Cohl Furey’s intriguing work with octonions (the next order up from the quaternions). We just published a Physics Frontiers episode about that:
The Octonions | Free Podcasts | Podomatic"
She’s not suggesting the existence of additional physical dimensions. She’s exploring a purely numerical model of reality to see if a higher order complex number system can explain all of the physics of the Standard Model. She’s made some exciting progress, and for the first time I’m enamored with the idea that all of physics could be a pure manifestation of number theory. But if she’s on the right track, she still has a long way to go.
I appreciate Jacques Vallee’s intellect in many respects, but he and Keel have both fallen prey to a logical fallacy known as the conjunction fallacy. Lots of bright people succumb to this one. Basically, we humans like to have one explanation for a wide variety of different things – but logically, the more things you try to explain with one theory, the less likely your theory becomes. Let’s look at a mundane example to clear this up.
In the Dark Ages, people were mystified by all the things we saw in the skies; lightning, meteors, supernovas, eclipses, maybe even some UFOs from time to time. People wanted a single explanation for all of those different phenomena, and religion and superstitions offered that to them: all of these things were the going’s on of gods/fairies/demons/etc. And they devised all kinds of belief systems around that idea – if your church was struck by lightning, God was angry with you - bilge like that.
But eventually we learned that all of these phenomena were distinct, seperate phenomena, and each one had a completely different explanation. Our human impulse to seek one explanation for them all was logically fallacious. That’s the conjunction fallacy.
By trying to place everything under one umbrella ranging from psychic phenomena to UFOs, Vallee and Keel have succumbed to the conjunction fallacy. Logically, it’s far more likely that psychic phenomena and the UFO phenomenon are distinct phenomena which require distinct explanations.
Also, I see that you mentioned this deeply disappointing paper by Jacques Vallee and Eric Davis:
Incommensurability, Orthodoxy and the Physics of High Strangeness: A 6-layer Model for Anomalous Phenomena, 2003
http://www.jacquesvallee.net/bookdocs/Vallee-Davis-model.pdf
In this paper, they describe “Layer II” phenomena with the atrocious term “anti-physical,” and place these reported observations into that category:
* sinking into the ground
* shrinking in size, growing larger, or changing shape on the spot
* becoming fuzzy and transparent on the spot
* dividing into two or more craft, several of them merging into one object at slow speed
* disappearing at one point and appearing elsewhere instantaneously
* remaining observable visually while not detected by radar
* producing missing time or time dilatation
* producing topological inversion or space dilatation (object was estimated to be of small exterior size/volume, but witness(s) saw a huge interior many times the exterior size)
* appearing as balls of colored, intensely bright light under intelligent control
This is especially disappointing given my respect for Eric Davis’ wonderful body of work as a theoretical physicist. It boggles my mind that any physicist would permit the term “anti-physical” to be applied to any objectively observable phenomenon – everything observable has a physical explanation. Some things may remain physically unexplained
today, but history has time and time again shown us that today’s mysteries yield tomorrow’s clear and rational physical explanations: nothing physically observable is “anti-physical”
by nature.
Anyway, every item on that list can be explained with either current physics and technologies, or foreseeable physics and technologies. Let’s go through them:
* sinking into the ground
- Any sufficiently dense object will sink into the ground. There may also be technological means to create macroscopic quantum wavefunction effects such as quantum superposition which would permit a craft to occupy the same space as the matter of the earth – after all, most of the volume of matter is space, and quantum theory already predicts that there’s a nonzero probability that if you run toward a wall, you could tunnel to the other side. If a civilization is sufficiently advanced technologically, it’s reasonable to assume that they could engineer such an effect to pass a device through “solid” matter.
* shrinking in size, growing larger, or changing shape on the spot
- We only think of technological devices as constant in shape because to date most of our technology retains more or less the same shape and size. But we’re already working with materials that can change shape and volume via specific mechanisms like piezoelectricity. It’s reasonable to expect that one day we’ll build devices that can change shape and volume quite dramatically, like a balloon under changing pressure.
* becoming fuzzy and transparent on the spot
- We’re already achieving digital camouflage effects with simple video and LCD technologies, and physicists are currently exploring invisibility cloaks using metamaterials. Eventually we too will achieve high-quality optical invisibility tech. And anything sufficiently hot will appear to be fuzzy because of the atmospheric distortion effects.
* dividing into two or more craft, several of them merging into one object at slow speed
- Every time we launch a heat-seeking missile from an attack interceptor, one craft divides into two independent craft. And every time the shuttle returned to the Enterprise, two craft merged into one object. Today we even have yachts with smaller boats that exit the side. Eventually these processes will look pretty exotic to the contemporary human witness.
* disappearing at one point and appearing elsewhere instantaneously
- Without infinitely great temporal resolution, it’s impossible to claim that anything happened “instantaneously.” Consider a bullet leaving a gun and hitting a target: to the human eye, it appears that the bullet disappeared from the barrel and appeared at the target “instantaneously.” Because the threshold of simultaneity for the human eye is surprisingly large, roughly 55 milliseconds. At high accelerations a lot can happen in 55 milliseconds.
* remaining observable visually while not detected by radar
- This one’s downright absurd: we already have planes that are radar-invisible, but clearly observable by the eye.
* producing missing time or time dilatation
- Gravitational fields alter the rate of time. And these craft clearly appear to employ gravitational field propulsion technology. So it would be stranger to discover that no time effects were reported, than that they are.
* producing topological inversion or space dilatation (object was estimated to be of small exterior size/volume, but witness(s) saw a huge interior many times the exterior size)
- This effect has been discussed in the academic literature for decades. With metric engineering a craft could be much larger on the inside than the outside, like Dr. Who’s Tardis. Dr. Davis should know this; it’s common knowledge among relativists.
* appearing as balls of colored, intensely bright light under intelligent control
Any sufficiently hot body glows brilliantly where the color depends on the temperature, and we already have drones that are intelligently controlled. Also any sufficiently charged body with become shrouded in a glowing atmospheric plasma, producing a very similar optical effect. And we could build a craft right now that’s covered in sheets of electroluminescent material.
So with even casual scrutiny, all of these “anti-physical” effects can readily be understood as physical phenomena. To imply otherwise is shitty science, frankly.
Jacques Vallee is a computer scientist, not a physicist, so I can understand how he would be misled on some of this stuff. But Dr. Davis should’ve jumped in when Vallee categorized this stuff as “anti-physical.” Christ.
Sorry, but you lost me at "the cosmic trickster."