When a "bang" takes 30 years and costs 100 billion units of money, progress will be slow. "Something different" will have to be within the margin of error of all the successful "bangs". So this something won't likely be cheaper or faster. Physics is just at a state of sophistication where the scale of things to look at is so small or so vast that quick and cheap isn't possible anymore. At least for the last 100 years or so.
It was known at the time that elliptical orbitals or even more complex shapes are necessary, because certain atoms and molecules exhibit axes and binding angles. Water for example. That excludes spheres.
According to BLP for a molecule like water the electrons don't form distinct bonds or lone pairs in the quantum sense. Instead, they form a single, shared, physical electron shell (a prolate spheroidal orbitsphere) that encompasses all three nuclei. The bent shape and specific bond angle are the direct, deterministic result of the nuclei and this orbitsphere arranging themselves into the most stable, lowest energy configuration dictated by classical electrodynamics and mechanics, without any reference to quantum uncertainty, probability, or abstract orbital shapes.
> The bent shape and specific bond angle are the direct, deterministic result of the nuclei
That then contradicts the fact that ions form orbitals according to their number of electrons, not according to their nuclear properties. That was also known before quantum mechanics.
Not just nuclei - "result of the nuclei and this orbitsphere arranging themselves into the most stable, lowest energy configuration" - you cut off your quote too early.
In that case it could have worked maybe. But not every idea is known to every scientist, and often things are skipped or forgotten. I guess this is one of those instances then.
A flexible spherical shell of charge orbiting an atom necessarily has an axis of rotation and an angular momentum and would thus be oblate. Furthermore, if we neglect quantum effects or prefer to think of them as not real, such a shell would have a continuous set of possible angular momenta, which is not observed. In fact, the ground state, say, of the hydrogen atom, has zero angular momentum and thus, from that point of view, is simply not equivalent to any sort of orbit whatsoever, or perhaps we prefer to think of it as a superposition of orbits which has the property that the angular momentum is zero - but the BLP ontology does not admit superpositions.
Furthermore, the properties of these sheets of electron material seem quite outlandish. Consider the ground state spherical state. If we force it to have zero angular momentum to match observation, then the shell must be rigid, but as you know, a rigid shell does not actually have a stable orbit around a central charge (this is kindergarten physics, feel free to work it out).
Things get worse when we consider high energy states which do have angular momenta. Does the nucleus get stick in one lobe or the other of the charged sheet, which is now infinitely thin (and thus dense) at the center?
This doesn't even begin to get into the myriad other reasons we use quantum mechanics and reluctantly give up our classical ontology besides just the description of atomic orbitals. To meet all these other demands (eg, Bell experiments) with the "sheet of charge" ontology is at least a herculean task which BLP's material does not accomplish (I have read it) and at worst has even greater foundational challenges than quantum mechanics. After all, we know "wave function collapse" (which I use here to refer simply to the totally uncontroversial measured phenomenon without an interpretation given) indeed happens "instantaneously" over spacetime - for a totally classical ontology this phenomenon is beyond peculiar and would indeed involve genuine signals propagating faster than light. At least in quantum mechanics we can understand wave function collapse in alternative ways which do not involve the violation of the laws of special relativity.
And this doesn't even get into how one would formulate QFT in the BLP picture. QFT isn't without its challenges, of course, but its a basic generalization of the structures of quantum mechanics. I don't know of any place where BLP calculates scattering amplitudes correctly, but feel free to show me where he works out ABC scalar field theory or whatever.
In the end the appeal of any theory needs to be evaluated in the full context of human knowledge, not just against a narrow set of objections about some qualities of a given theory. BLP seems motivated by a basic distaste for some of the weirdness of QM but evaluated in total, against the total sum of experiments routinely carried out in the world and against basic physical intuitions from even classical physics, it doesn't hold up.
The orbitsphere proposed by BLP is a fluid (non-rigid) sphere with electron currents along great circle routes. It can have net zero angular momentum where all the currents cancel out or it can have angular momentum where some orbits are not used.
How could that work? First of all, a fluid confined to a sphere can not have independent great circle orbits, so the material he is describing is extremely exotic. And its still totally possible to have a continuum of angular momenta if we imagine such a weird substance could exist.
In any case, no where in his big weird book does he delineate the precise physics of such an exotic substance. Like literally show me in his text where he calculates the energy levels of say, helium, beyond a first approximation. Regular old quantum mechanics and perturbation theory is totally up to this fairly simple task, but I don't see any such calculations anywhere in BLP's textbook.
An electron is more flexible in its internal structure than a soap bubble so BLP claims it does all possible great circle orbits all at once. The charge distribution does not change over time so there is no radiating away of energy even though the charge is all moving and orbiting. There are a bunch of spreadsheets calculating Helium states on the Atomic Theory page. https://brilliantlightpower.com/atomic-theory/ has a table of contents that includes Excited States Of Helium in chapter 9 page 301.
There is nothing in these tables except a bunch of numbers. There is no development of the basic physical theory, no explanation of how the formulae or numbers are arrived at.
Its bullshit, dude.
Let me ask you: have you ever calculated the Helium energy levels in regular old Quantum Mechanics? If a student submitted these tables to me I'd give them a D.
Ironic that he confines his theory to classical EM. When a continuous band of charge goes around in a loop so that at all times there is the same amount of charge at any particular point, there is no radiation.
This isn't true. For example, at the bending magnets in a particle accelerator there is a constant current of electrons moving through the bend but those electrons still radiate. From far away the charge density at the turn is constant, but the current density is not constant. You cannot eliminate current density by squinting - classically accelerating charge radiates.
If we have a classical scale beam of electrons released into a constant magnetic field it radiates as it moves in a circle, even if the instantaneous charge density at any point on the circle is constant. In fact, speaking purely classically, the current density is instantaneously constant at a given point on the circle but it still radiates because in order to maintain itself on a circular path the charge must accelerate, even if the speed stays the same.
Of course as the action of the system approaches hbar (as it must as the energy radiates away) the system begins to have quantized energy levels, as quantum mechanics correctly predicts.
Discrete electrons accelerating radiate, but a single electron that is spread out around a spherical orbitsphere so that there is continuous charge flow in all great circle direction but no net movement of charge over time, does not.
This is probably the slowest branch of the sciences, not able to get out of labs even after a century. The fundamental problem appears to be that we are trying to control probabilistic nature using concrete real world things. I suspect this is not allowed, at least at an industrial scale. At some point humanity might need to stick what they need instead of what they can.
What do you mean? We have been profiting massively from the fruits of QM for the last five decades easily. Transistors, LEDs, Lasers, MRT imaging, solar panels, CCD cameras, etc. have arguably changed the world and would not have been possible without QM. It came out of the lab a long time ago.
Thought experiment: did we really need quantum mechanics to build an atom bomb? Couldn't we have built one with a model of the atom based on classical particles (with protons leading to a chain reaction)? Is either the quantized or the uncertainty aspect of QM necessary for this?
Most of the science going into the Manhattan Project was experimental measurements and phenomenological models, not fundamental physics at the QM level. There were no usable quantum-mechanical models of nuclear physics at that point.
It’s just a coincidence that they employed so many experts in quantum mechanics to do those nothing-to-do-with-quantum-mechanics experimental measurements.
>did we really need quantum mechanics to build an atom bomb?
Yes. Nuclear reactions require understanding and modeling of the strong force, you can't understand or even see what protons and neutrons are without understanding the strong force. The mixture of positively charged and neutral particles being stuck together with enormous force which essentially does not exist at all outside of the nucleus of an atom. (there is more than three pounds of force between every pair of protons inside every nucleus with the strong force counteracting the electrostatic force)
You couldn't design a bomb without being able to model the strong force and you couldn't get to that point of investigating the atom without coming up with QM.
You couldn't get the idea of isotopes and enriching U-235 to U-238 or transmuting uranium to plutonium without understanding QM.
Or the circumstances that would lead someone to blindly creating a controlled nuclear reaction without coming up with QM in the process would be pretty absurd.
The idea for the bomb came from the understanding of the strong force. Step one: notice that there's a crazy powerful force keeping positively charged particles stuck together in the nucleus. Step two: the eureka moment of realizing you can "release" that force by causing a chain reaction of fission in heavy elements.
Nature is probabilistic. And we know how to calculate those probabilities, that is one of the core ideas of quantum mechanics. Why is it "not allowed"? By whom? Since you are commenting on HN, you are already are using the very mature applications of QM out of laboratory. The proverbial cat (is it Schröedinger's?) is out of the bag!
I don't know dog, that is a pretty bold statement given everything we can presently firmly say about the universe.
Like we can imagine some kind of purely deterministic thing going on but when the rubber meets the road the best ways of working stuff out seem to very strongly imply some fundamental indeterminism. No one likes it, but thats the way it is.
When the rubber meets the road the best ways of working stuff out is to shut up and calculate, you don't figure out anything by assuming unobservable fundamental indeterminism.
Just came back from work to see all the battering and downvoting. Clam down. I meant Quantum computing using qubits. Apologies for not being specific. Quantum computing itself is also a century old (almost)? Where are we with this?
Jeez - HN is brutal. Even a bot could have understood the context I meant.
If this is the definition of offtopic then 90% of HN comments are offtopic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law at work!
Hard to respond to this unless you say specifically why! Which comment do you think should not have been treated as offtopic?
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When a "bang" takes 30 years and costs 100 billion units of money, progress will be slow. "Something different" will have to be within the margin of error of all the successful "bangs". So this something won't likely be cheaper or faster. Physics is just at a state of sophistication where the scale of things to look at is so small or so vast that quick and cheap isn't possible anymore. At least for the last 100 years or so.
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It was known at the time that elliptical orbitals or even more complex shapes are necessary, because certain atoms and molecules exhibit axes and binding angles. Water for example. That excludes spheres.
According to BLP for a molecule like water the electrons don't form distinct bonds or lone pairs in the quantum sense. Instead, they form a single, shared, physical electron shell (a prolate spheroidal orbitsphere) that encompasses all three nuclei. The bent shape and specific bond angle are the direct, deterministic result of the nuclei and this orbitsphere arranging themselves into the most stable, lowest energy configuration dictated by classical electrodynamics and mechanics, without any reference to quantum uncertainty, probability, or abstract orbital shapes.
> The bent shape and specific bond angle are the direct, deterministic result of the nuclei
That then contradicts the fact that ions form orbitals according to their number of electrons, not according to their nuclear properties. That was also known before quantum mechanics.
Not just nuclei - "result of the nuclei and this orbitsphere arranging themselves into the most stable, lowest energy configuration" - you cut off your quote too early.
In that case it could have worked maybe. But not every idea is known to every scientist, and often things are skipped or forgotten. I guess this is one of those instances then.
A flexible spherical shell of charge orbiting an atom necessarily has an axis of rotation and an angular momentum and would thus be oblate. Furthermore, if we neglect quantum effects or prefer to think of them as not real, such a shell would have a continuous set of possible angular momenta, which is not observed. In fact, the ground state, say, of the hydrogen atom, has zero angular momentum and thus, from that point of view, is simply not equivalent to any sort of orbit whatsoever, or perhaps we prefer to think of it as a superposition of orbits which has the property that the angular momentum is zero - but the BLP ontology does not admit superpositions.
Furthermore, the properties of these sheets of electron material seem quite outlandish. Consider the ground state spherical state. If we force it to have zero angular momentum to match observation, then the shell must be rigid, but as you know, a rigid shell does not actually have a stable orbit around a central charge (this is kindergarten physics, feel free to work it out).
Things get worse when we consider high energy states which do have angular momenta. Does the nucleus get stick in one lobe or the other of the charged sheet, which is now infinitely thin (and thus dense) at the center?
This doesn't even begin to get into the myriad other reasons we use quantum mechanics and reluctantly give up our classical ontology besides just the description of atomic orbitals. To meet all these other demands (eg, Bell experiments) with the "sheet of charge" ontology is at least a herculean task which BLP's material does not accomplish (I have read it) and at worst has even greater foundational challenges than quantum mechanics. After all, we know "wave function collapse" (which I use here to refer simply to the totally uncontroversial measured phenomenon without an interpretation given) indeed happens "instantaneously" over spacetime - for a totally classical ontology this phenomenon is beyond peculiar and would indeed involve genuine signals propagating faster than light. At least in quantum mechanics we can understand wave function collapse in alternative ways which do not involve the violation of the laws of special relativity.
And this doesn't even get into how one would formulate QFT in the BLP picture. QFT isn't without its challenges, of course, but its a basic generalization of the structures of quantum mechanics. I don't know of any place where BLP calculates scattering amplitudes correctly, but feel free to show me where he works out ABC scalar field theory or whatever.
In the end the appeal of any theory needs to be evaluated in the full context of human knowledge, not just against a narrow set of objections about some qualities of a given theory. BLP seems motivated by a basic distaste for some of the weirdness of QM but evaluated in total, against the total sum of experiments routinely carried out in the world and against basic physical intuitions from even classical physics, it doesn't hold up.
The orbitsphere proposed by BLP is a fluid (non-rigid) sphere with electron currents along great circle routes. It can have net zero angular momentum where all the currents cancel out or it can have angular momentum where some orbits are not used.
How could that work? First of all, a fluid confined to a sphere can not have independent great circle orbits, so the material he is describing is extremely exotic. And its still totally possible to have a continuum of angular momenta if we imagine such a weird substance could exist.
In any case, no where in his big weird book does he delineate the precise physics of such an exotic substance. Like literally show me in his text where he calculates the energy levels of say, helium, beyond a first approximation. Regular old quantum mechanics and perturbation theory is totally up to this fairly simple task, but I don't see any such calculations anywhere in BLP's textbook.
An electron is more flexible in its internal structure than a soap bubble so BLP claims it does all possible great circle orbits all at once. The charge distribution does not change over time so there is no radiating away of energy even though the charge is all moving and orbiting. There are a bunch of spreadsheets calculating Helium states on the Atomic Theory page. https://brilliantlightpower.com/atomic-theory/ has a table of contents that includes Excited States Of Helium in chapter 9 page 301.
Have you looked at these "calculations?"
There is nothing in these tables except a bunch of numbers. There is no development of the basic physical theory, no explanation of how the formulae or numbers are arrived at.
Its bullshit, dude.
Let me ask you: have you ever calculated the Helium energy levels in regular old Quantum Mechanics? If a student submitted these tables to me I'd give them a D.
Did you read chapter 9?
https://brilliantlightpower.com/GUT/GUT_Volume_1/
> do not radiate because there is no net movement of charge from an external viewpoint.
That's not how electromagnetic radiation works.
Perhaps Dr. Mills should study Mr. Maxwell.
Ironic that he confines his theory to classical EM. When a continuous band of charge goes around in a loop so that at all times there is the same amount of charge at any particular point, there is no radiation.
This isn't true. For example, at the bending magnets in a particle accelerator there is a constant current of electrons moving through the bend but those electrons still radiate. From far away the charge density at the turn is constant, but the current density is not constant. You cannot eliminate current density by squinting - classically accelerating charge radiates.
If we have a classical scale beam of electrons released into a constant magnetic field it radiates as it moves in a circle, even if the instantaneous charge density at any point on the circle is constant. In fact, speaking purely classically, the current density is instantaneously constant at a given point on the circle but it still radiates because in order to maintain itself on a circular path the charge must accelerate, even if the speed stays the same.
Of course as the action of the system approaches hbar (as it must as the energy radiates away) the system begins to have quantized energy levels, as quantum mechanics correctly predicts.
Aren't you literally describing the conditions that create synchrotron radiation?
Discrete electrons accelerating radiate, but a single electron that is spread out around a spherical orbitsphere so that there is continuous charge flow in all great circle direction but no net movement of charge over time, does not.
This is probably the slowest branch of the sciences, not able to get out of labs even after a century. The fundamental problem appears to be that we are trying to control probabilistic nature using concrete real world things. I suspect this is not allowed, at least at an industrial scale. At some point humanity might need to stick what they need instead of what they can.
What do you mean? We have been profiting massively from the fruits of QM for the last five decades easily. Transistors, LEDs, Lasers, MRT imaging, solar panels, CCD cameras, etc. have arguably changed the world and would not have been possible without QM. It came out of the lab a long time ago.
Not to mention the entire science of chemistry and everything made from it.
Quantum mechanics started with the description of electron orbitals around an atom; how they work is the foundation of chemistry.
I think GP was thinking of quantum computers, maybe?
I think they made a very uninformed comment, that's all.
That’s engineering not science
Engineering is how science gets out of the lab...
I think you just wrote that 'off the cuff' but it's really a brilliant quote that succinctly clarifies science vs engineering.
How else does science get 'out of the lab'?
>not able to get out of labs even after a century
It got out of labs in a quite spectacular way in the summer of 1945, eighty years ago.
Thought experiment: did we really need quantum mechanics to build an atom bomb? Couldn't we have built one with a model of the atom based on classical particles (with protons leading to a chain reaction)? Is either the quantized or the uncertainty aspect of QM necessary for this?
Most of the science going into the Manhattan Project was experimental measurements and phenomenological models, not fundamental physics at the QM level. There were no usable quantum-mechanical models of nuclear physics at that point.
No; they didn't really need it.
It’s just a coincidence that they employed so many experts in quantum mechanics to do those nothing-to-do-with-quantum-mechanics experimental measurements.
Coincidence. If you wanted to do something with elementary particles, you couldn't possibly ignore quantum physics.
Nucleon orbitals rely a little on Pauli exclusion principle, which you need to add as an ad hoc hypothesis every time in classical physics.
The very idea of matter and energy being quantized into particles and photons is the starting point of “quantum” mechanics.
>Planck discovers the quantum nature of energy in 1900
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dp00qu.html
It wasn’t developed into a mechanics until the 1920’s.
>did we really need quantum mechanics to build an atom bomb?
Yes. Nuclear reactions require understanding and modeling of the strong force, you can't understand or even see what protons and neutrons are without understanding the strong force. The mixture of positively charged and neutral particles being stuck together with enormous force which essentially does not exist at all outside of the nucleus of an atom. (there is more than three pounds of force between every pair of protons inside every nucleus with the strong force counteracting the electrostatic force)
You couldn't design a bomb without being able to model the strong force and you couldn't get to that point of investigating the atom without coming up with QM.
You couldn't get the idea of isotopes and enriching U-235 to U-238 or transmuting uranium to plutonium without understanding QM.
Or the circumstances that would lead someone to blindly creating a controlled nuclear reaction without coming up with QM in the process would be pretty absurd.
The idea for the bomb came from the understanding of the strong force. Step one: notice that there's a crazy powerful force keeping positively charged particles stuck together in the nucleus. Step two: the eureka moment of realizing you can "release" that force by causing a chain reaction of fission in heavy elements.
Nature is probabilistic. And we know how to calculate those probabilities, that is one of the core ideas of quantum mechanics. Why is it "not allowed"? By whom? Since you are commenting on HN, you are already are using the very mature applications of QM out of laboratory. The proverbial cat (is it Schröedinger's?) is out of the bag!
Theory is probabilistic, nature isn't.
Of course it is. What you are suggesting is classical determinism.
I don't know dog, that is a pretty bold statement given everything we can presently firmly say about the universe.
Like we can imagine some kind of purely deterministic thing going on but when the rubber meets the road the best ways of working stuff out seem to very strongly imply some fundamental indeterminism. No one likes it, but thats the way it is.
When the rubber meets the road the best ways of working stuff out is to shut up and calculate, you don't figure out anything by assuming unobservable fundamental indeterminism.
No one assume it.
Nature doesn't obey your opinions.
That's an argument against solipsism at best, not much else.
What a take. All of modern technology, materials, solid state, semiconductors, transistors... And uhhh did you forget chemistry itself?
What has physics ever done for us? Apart from computers, satellites, planes, communications, sensors, and health... What has physics ever done for us?
The roads?
Well obviously the roads go without saying!
Just came back from work to see all the battering and downvoting. Clam down. I meant Quantum computing using qubits. Apologies for not being specific. Quantum computing itself is also a century old (almost)? Where are we with this?
Jeez - HN is brutal. Even a bot could have understood the context I meant.
Quantum computing is very much not a century old