Zener diodes have coupled quantum noise that travels at c [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Zener diodes have coupled quantum noise that travels at c [pdf]

vixra.org

7 pointsgumby14 comments

I only skimmed the first page of the linked paper and got a bad vibe from the arguments it tries to establish against the validity of Special Relativity. I looked through the author's list of past publications and that proved enlightening: he published a lot of papers in Apeiron, a lesser online journal edited by people who are known in the community to support fringe ideas.

And another thing caught my eye: a paper by Cahill from 2006 which claims in its title that variations of the Michelson-Morley experiment show deviations that are caused by gravitational waves. The abstract of the paper goes on to explain that these waves supposedly have much stronger effects than predicted by BR because their physics are completely different than what GR describes. This claim of detecting gravitational waves (a decade before the massive LIGO effort made its first detection) alone shows that the author is "out there".

Take what this guy reads with a big pinch of salt. He seems to be on a crusade against relativity and the notion that space is not absolute.

Yeah, but LIGO invalidated popular interpretation of Michelson-Morley experiment results anyway.

Huh? How so?

It detected waves in something instead of nothing.

I do not understand what you are trying to say here. Gravitational waves are wave patterns existing inside the curvature of space-time. There is no separate medium that carries them. It is literally only space and time.

I strictly skeptical about any physical curvature of "space-time", because that requires extra-dimensions. Moreover, it's not clear what you name "space" or "space-time" here, due to ambiguity. If you referring to mathematical model, then "space-time" is just mathematical abstraction. I'm okay with that because it good for calculations. If you seriously believe that we have "space-time" as physical object, then we are in trouble.

LIGO detected waves in physical vacuum/quantum field/quantum foam/you name it. You can represent these waves in your favorite mathematical model and use your favorite tools for calculations, but don't mix mathematics and physics, please. For me, it's like "space is polygon because this predicted by OpenGL theory, which very accurately predicts our reality".

There is no "ambiguity" between space and space-time. They are clearly defined terms. Space means the 3d space that we experience around us. Space-time includes time as a fourth dimension.

While time as a dimenauon can be seen as a mathematical formality (it manifests as a different physical quantity in our observations), it does behave much (but not exactly) like the spatial dimensions.

The entirety of GR, especially the space curvature part is formulated without embedding space and time into a higher dimensional space of any kind. This avoids any speculation about extra dimensions "around" our universe. It also causes the enormous mathematical complexity of GR.

Back to the topic of gravitational waves: these arise out of Einsteins field equation which describes space-time curvature as a result of the distribution of mass and energy in space. These equations show the property that certain small deviations of curvature from their resting state propagate through space as waves. These curvature changes can be measured as changed in physical length of solid objects. This is what LIGO achieved. There is no room in current theories for any different kind of propagation medium for gravitational waves.

I seems to me that you have some difficulties understanding SR and GR. This is understandable because both describe phenomena that are not directly observable in our everyday lives.

You did this again. "Einstein field equation which describes space-time curvature" is mathematics. Formulas are correct, and they will stay correct long time after GR will be abandoned. You just need to do one more step: translate mathematics back into physics. Lets me quote very beginning of book about Quantum(Integer) Mechanics:

Chapter 2

The Formulation of Quantum Mechanics

2.1

Basic Theoretical Concepts

Every physical theory involves some basic physical concepts, a mathematical formalism, and set of correspondence rules which map the physical concepts onto the mathematical objects that represent them. The correspondence rules are first used to express a physical problem in mathematical terms. Once the mathematical version of the problem is formulated, it may be solved by purely mathematical techniques that need not have any physical interpretation. The formal solution is then translated back into the physical world by means of the correspondence rules.

I cannot measure space-time with ruler, not touch it, nor walk 10 seconds ago, nor curve it. It's just mathematical abstraction. When we translate space-time back into physics, we will have coordinates of points in 3D space and time points, which we can measure with ruler and clock.

Same for gravity waves. If we want to translate this back into physics, we will need to reinterpret results of Michelson experiment. He has two predictions: 1) ether is stationary, 2) ether is attached to planets and objects like atmosphere (see Master of Light book). He failed to find ether wind, thus theory of static ether was abandoned. But he also struggled to find any deviations of light travel time, so that led Einstein to think that c is constant, so he developed his GR theory. Michelson-Morley experiment was redone with precision of up to 1E-17 (distance to Alpha-Centaur is just 4E16m), which was good for GR. But then LIGO found that speed of light in vacuum is NOT constant. Thus, GR is not valid anymore. So we should return to theory of Ether, or you need carefully explain to me why you still think that c==constant and GR is valid.

I understand that you may be invested heavily into learning of mainstream theories, but every theory has limited life. If you think that I will change my mind if I will spend some more years on learning of SR and GR, then I should inform you that I think that formulas in these theories are mostly correct, but they lack interpretation, which lead to lack of intuition. I tested my theory on students and it's working well. I can explain what Ether, double slit experiment, atom, and many other things in short time. I hope, with intuition and formulas they will do much more than with just formulas.

Please point me to the publication from LIGO where they state that the measured speed of light is not constant. Any publication like this would be much more sensational than the apperntly superluminal neutrinos in the OPERA experiment (which turned out to be caused by faulty equipment).

I mean, I don’t understand any of this, but I doubt it’s worth trying to understand. At any rate, this is a strange HN submission title for a paper whose abstract claims to have unified quantum mechanics and gravity. Also, if a 2016 paper really did do what it claimed in the abstract, my untrained intuition tells me that it’s bunk because it’s languished for 2 years in obscurity. Oh, and he solved dark matter too. That’s a nice side effect.

This seems relevant: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304

At university one of the assignment was to create hybrid ic, I made white noise generator using zenner diode, it worked fine but when it was touched inappropriately it started playing music.

What is this?

The author mostly self-quotes and his articles are published on either vixra.org ("arxiv" reversed, in case you missed it; Physicist Gerard 't Hooft writes, "When a paper is published in viXra, it is usually a sign that it is not likely to contain acceptable results. It may, but the odds against that are considerable" from [0]) or in the - as it appears - questionable Progress in Physics Journal [1]. He even cites news sites.

These are more red flags than one should reasonably need to think it's BS, imo.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViXra [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_in_Physics

Check out figure 11 -- it doesn't look like instrumentation noise.

This was going to be my reply also. Seems it would be easy to set up a similar experiment with zener diodes and achieve the same results. In fact, with DSO's readily available these days, this should be reproducible in every university worldwide, and it would be cool to see attempted correlations across much greater distances.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com