Any Physicists Here?

Physics questions that have given me brain damage.

1. A wave can’t propagate through a vacuum. If photons are waves how do we see distant stars? We can’t hear them explode and we know sound travels in waves.

A wave travels by energy transfer to the next particle it contacts. The photons that hit my retina when I look at a star originated at that star. They weren’t created when that energy hit a particle one atom away from my retina.

2. Time slows down as speed increases. At the speed of light time stops. From the photons point of view it is simultaneously being created on the surface of Sirius and being absorbed by my retina even though it took nearly nine years, as we measure time, to get here.

3. How does a particle know it’s being observed?

4. What is the missing 96% of mass in the universe?

We know how objects orbit the sun. The further out the slower the orbital speed. This doesn’t apply to Galaxies. The distant stars are locked in relation to the core stars. Think of a galaxy painted on a plate, then spinning the plate.

What is all the mass holding the galaxies together?

My wild guess,without any math chops for validation , is that it is energy and gravity leaking into our universe from infinite parallel universes.

Dark matter and dark energy could be gravity from parallel galaxies in the exact same spot that the matter is located in our universe.

Or I may just be a guitarist.
 
BaronVonGrim said:
The problem is it's a impractical theoretical approach.

Gravity obviously will attract matter, and if every action has a equal and opposite action, then gravity will attract antimatter at the same rate that matter attracts matter.
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Think about what you are saying. Matter attract matter. But matter attract anti-matter.

In the world of particles there is spin and charge.

Like charges repulse and opposite charges attract.

However with spin this is not the case. Like spins attract and unlike spins repel.

In matter we have positively, negatively, and neutrally charged particles. In anti-matter do we have the same particles bit with opposite charges?

I suspect that spin would drive attraction between matter and anti-matter, not charge.

Think about it. Is an electron anti-matter? No.

Also gravity is not a charge based attraction. It is about spin. An accretion disk forms, spinning faster, compressing the matter in the disk. This can ultimately form planets, stars, solar systems, and galaxies. The density of the mass of the accretion disk has a hige impact on the disks gravitational influence.
 
Capt Nasty said:
I argued that the missing matter/anti-matter is hiding in plain sight. That anti-matter and matter do not annihilate one another, they simply balance each other. Think along the lines of (+1) + (-1) = 0. That the void of space is not empty, but is filled with exactly the same amount of matter and anti-matter effectively nullifying one another and creating (to us) a perception of emptiness/nothingness.
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This is already widely accepted and proven in many experiments. Particle/anti-particle pairs constantly pop into existence from fluctuations in the vacuum of space, and they immediately annihilate each other. This is also a key fundamental of Hawking radiation.

As far as the rest of your post, I'd politely disagree for way too many reasons to list. But seeing how you didn't trust your professors to educate you, you probably wouldn't listen to a word I'd have to say anyway ;)
 
BaronVonGrim said:
Gravity obviously will attract matter, and if every action has a equal and opposite action, then gravity will attract antimatter at the same rate that matter attracts matter.
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Gravity itself does not attract matter... matter attracts matter. Rather, matter results in a gravitational field due to warping of space-time. But you are correct that antimatter would be equally affected by the known forces that affect regular matter.

Capt Nasty said:
Think about it. Is an electron anti-matter? No.

Also gravity is not a charge based attraction. It is about spin. An accretion disk forms, spinning faster, compressing the matter in the disk. This can ultimately form planets, stars, solar systems, and galaxies. The density of the mass of the accretion disk has a hige impact on the disks gravitational influence.
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An electron itself is not anti-matter, but it's partner positron is. Is a positron (or any anti-matter particle) fictional? No. Anti-matter exists the same as regular matter and can be created in the lab and even stored for brief periods of time (in extremely minute amounts).

Gravity has nothing to do with spin or even the electromagnetic force. This is where the graviton comes into play. Even on large scales like you mentioned, spin or motion has nothing to do with the actual force itself. A large cloud of stationary gasses will have the same gravitational effect on a a neighboring galaxy as a tightly spun accretion disc of the same amount of mass (at the same distance of course). Now, on the quantum scale, we don't truly know what role gravity really plays. As far as I'm aware we are still working on incorporating gravity into the quantum model. There is no wrong answer at this time.

This all reminds me of one of those mind fucks I learned early on in physics... that magnetic force/interaction is conveyed via virtual photons. Electricity and magnetism share the same gauge boson, the photon.
 
Cliffs idea withstanding the Dark Matter notion imo....is quite intriguing!

And I too would like to know how the particle knows it's being observed? LOL

The problem is with the notion of Dark Matter & Dark Energy ...which according to the standard model (lambdaCDM)...accounts for 96% of the universe. In spite of over 50 years of diligent searching....nada.

The notion of Dark Matter is a result of the observations of Galaxies spinning as a whole at the same rate. As Xrocker noted above "The distant stars are locked in relation to the core stars. Think of a galaxy painted on a plate, then spinning the plate."

And the notion of Dark Energy is a result of studies with supernovas. These studies say that the universe is expanding faster,....hence Dark Energy.

Dark Matter and Dark Energy must be introduced otherwise the standard model collapses in on itself. Cosmology has been in a state of crisis for over 1/2 a century...actually over a century. Alan Guth's 1980 Inflation theory is also one of those "boot strapped" fixes.

96% of the Big Bang Theory, the Standard Model is missing.

Yet the philosophical preference of the lambdaCDM standard model with it's calculated precision parameters needed for this universe to exist...ie..not collapse in on itself at the start, the flatness problem, the horizon problem...etc...may be what's hindering the solutions to these issues by not seriously considering other models because of a philosophical preference.
 
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Etudica said:
This is already widely accepted and proven in many experiments. Particle/anti-particle pairs constantly pop into existence from fluctuations in the vacuum of space, and they immediately annihilate each other. This is also a key fundamental of Hawking radiation.

As far as the rest of your post, I'd politely disagree for way too many reasons to list. But seeing how you didn't trust your professors to educate you, you probably wouldn't listen to a word I'd have to say anyway ;)
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I am sure you would. You accept the current scientific status quo. Fortunately Einstein did not lie down at the feet of the accepted scientific views of the time. Had he we would probably still use “ether” to explain that which we do not understand.

You completely missed my point. Professors should be there to promote curiosity, learning, and discovery. Perhaps I was wrong, perhaps I was right. They should have challenged me rather than shutting me down.

You are right about one thing. I would not take you seriously. You have the same arrogance that my professors had as well as an inability to step outside of the box that you don’t realize you are in. There are plenty of boring books for that.
 
FractalAudio said:
However... what if dark matter was a fluid that permeated the universe.
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I got a problem with the word "fluid". Seems more like a placeholder for a better term of a yet unknown particle.
That hypothesis would mean that quantum mechanics are dependant of the amount of dark matter, which is not equally distributed in our universe. Therefore quantum mechanics would not apply in galaxies without dark matter. And that is weird to me.
Dark matter seems to have no electromagnetic properties and just interacts with mass. And with what you are describing we should be able to "see" dark matter somehow ...
 
I'm completely lost. I have to show this thread to my wife, though. She's not a scientist, but she watches a lot of TED talks...and she's generally smarter than me. :D
 
FractalAudio said:
I have a theory about dark matter:

The double-slit experiment says that elementary particles can behave as both particles and waves. I've never been able to fully accept that. It means that a particle turns into a wave and then recombines to become a particle.

However... what if dark matter was a fluid that permeated the universe. All particles vibrate due to their energy. If you drop a rock into a pond it creates waves. In the same way if you shoot a particle into a fluid it will create waves.

So the particle is moving from the emitter towards the slits. There's a wave in front of it. The wavefront bounces off the solid area and also goes through the slits. This creates an interference pattern. The interference pattern is a complex wave with high and low pressure zones. The particle will follow the path of least resistance. Sometimes it will strike the plate. Sometimes it will go through the left slit and sometimes through the right.

So, yes, there's still wave-particle duality but it's because there's a wave around the particle. The particle is always a single particle and is never in two places at the same time. It's wavefront, however, is affected by the surrounding and dictates the path the particle will take. The path is randomized due to various factors so sometimes the path of least resistance is the left slit and sometimes it's the right slit. The wavefront behind the slits has all sort of peaks and nulls due to interference and the particle follows the troughs.

Therefore what I'm thinking is that wave-particle duality is actually due to a dark matter fluid that creates waves around particles.

It also explains the patterns with a single slit. The wavefront passes through the slit and there is diffraction off the edges of the slit. This causes lobing of the wavefront. Sometimes the particle will follow a sidelobe path due to random fluctuations.

IOW, there's a wave that propagates through the fluid and the particle follows the troughs in the wave.
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I didn't see how your theory explains how when they put a detector to see which slits the particles were going through it collapsed the wave function & they reverted to particles. Even if you explain the duality in terms of particles, how do you understand the duality for light?

I don't really understand this stuff, wish I did. Our brains have evolved to survive with the interpretation that the world is a linear cause/effect universe and we are probably locked-out of understanding the deeper structures of being.
 
I have a friend Brian Cox, he may be able to discuss I will send him a message to see if he’ll comment

Regards
 
crdark said:
I'm sure there is at least one hiding somewhere here ...
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I meant it to be funny :) This is a very interesting and fun subject to talk about imo. It's a little difficult to digest other's points of view at times but we need to remember, almost all (if not all) of these theories about reality and physics are made of thought as most can't be 100% proved or disproved. They are usually accepted if you can apply working math to back up what you believe, but that still doesn't prove much, when so much can't be explained with math. Human perception and intelligence may limit what we will ever know but I believe we get glimpses from time to time. After all we are made of the very stuff that we are contemplating.
 
Etudica said:
This is already widely accepted and proven in many experiments. Particle/anti-particle pairs constantly pop into existence from fluctuations in the vacuum of space, and they immediately annihilate each other.
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Actually, no ...it’s still all theoretical...no one has directly observed particles popping in and out of existence. The math implications seem to be astounding with quantum physics ...but Einstein’s “fudge factor “ blunder was astounding in the beginning as well till it was debunked. Today his blunder ...is being looked at again in a more acceptable light as a result of studies supposedly showing an accelerating universe. Something needs to hold it together?

In a desperate attempt to somehow account for a universe from “nothing” ...they now are trying to redefine what nothing means.

Lawrence Krauss’ “A universe from nothing” is one such attempt. The problem is his “nothing” is NOT actually “nothing“.
 
We are basically trying to model the universe with a very linear brain ascending from apes that can't properly grasp more than three (or four dimensions). On top of that we impute what we see with our mind and interact with the environment we experience so there's no way to get a truly objective result.
 
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