bearbeitet: 11.02.2020     

What is going on in theoretical physics?

Some concerns from Dr. Manfred Pohl

Since I studied physics and philosophy in the 1960s, we can see substantial changes in the basic questions of both sciences. In philosophy, one of these basic questions is the substantive definition of the term "matter" and its relation to consciousness. In the broadest sense, the work of a natural scientist depends on this determination. Almost every natural science involves the study of matter, its states and its movement in the macro and micro cosmos. Therefore, this work is fundamentally shaped by the scientist's view of matter. In my opinion, the dialectical-materialistic concept of matter is an indispensable basic requirement for promising scientific work. In a simplified representation, this concept can be defined as follows:

Matter is the objective reality which exists independently of consciousness. Matter cannot be created out of nothing and it cannot disappear. Matter is the cause of itself. The conditions of existence of matter are the infinite space and the eternal time, the way of existence of matter is the movement.

Using successive editions of various lexicons and encyclopedias, I have observed a gradual dismantling of this concept of matter over the past 30 to 35 years in favor of religious, esoteric, empirical, sporadic and other non-materialistic conceptions:
http://hauptplatz.unipohl.de/Wissenschaft/Materiedefinition.htm.

In the 80s of the last century, there was still a generally accepted view of matter comprehensive over all sciences. Since then, more and more pseudo-scientific, metaphysical and religious influences have penetrated the concept of matter under the spurious argument of "further development". Some examples of these new representations or definitions of the matter concept: (a) Energy does not belong to matter; (b) Mass is a broader concept than matter, because it contains energy; (c) The explanation that space and time are independently existing material objects that can be bent or stretched; (d) A concept of matter that can be described as a purely mathematical structure; (e) Up to the bizarre assertion that we do not need any concept of matter at all because other terms are used in concrete science anyway. This last assumption would be similar to the belief that you can bake bread without flour. With a multitude of such distorting changes of meaning, which philosophers and physicists have agreed on in these years, a hopeless confusion was created, so that different, sometimes even wrong and contradicting conceptions about matter prevail over different natural sciences. It should be remembered that, for example, a physicist cannot carry out targeted research without a clear definition of the content of matter, because the object of his work is simply withdrawn or falsified. Without a clear concept of matter, physics must sink into a crisis, as is becoming increasingly apparent at the moment. For example, leaving the dialectical-materialistic concept of matter in favor of the view that matter can be created out of nothing or disappear, is analogous to the religious creation hypothesis: A God created the world and directs it from now on. There is no room for such views in physics. For the continued existence of physics as a science, such and similar influences that are opposed to materialistic dialectics must be removed from it. In the present, however, the opposite is observed. See also:
http://hauptplatz.unipohl.de/Wissenschaft/PM-Urknall.htm.

This problem can be clearly seen, for example, in the research of physics and cosmology. Many important physicists remain in substantial errors because they don't accept that the so-called standard model has many fundamental problems. For this reason, a theory has taken roots in cosmology that has caused doubts since its appearance, namely, the big bang theory. Its basic approach stems from the ideas of the Belgian Jesuit father Abbé Georges Edouard Lemaitre (1894 - 1966), who sought to bring science into line with the Catholic idea of creation - an undertaking that cannot succeed. Due to the persistent work of the clergy, especially by Pope Pius XII, this theory has gained a foothold in cosmology. I witnessed this process with disapproval since the 1960s. This theory has long been outdated and has been refuted by countless observational results and theoretical considerations. It is based on the erroneous assumption that cosmic matter originated out of nothing at an initial instant in time determined by mathematically doubtful calculations, an assumption that is incompatible with the dialectical-materialistic concept of matter. The experimentally and theoretically proven principle of energy conservation would thus be undermined and ultimately nullified. The principle of energy conservation, together with the mass-energy equivalence, leads to the clear statement that matter exists eternally in time and infinitely in space. Every attentive pupil in a general education school can easily recognize this fact..

And so, with an obeisance before the idea of creation, there is still talked about a point of infinite energy density (singularity) that is said to have started to expand at a specific moment, the causes of which no one knows, and the entire cosmic matter has arisen in this process. The energy of this singularity has of course no mass, it is "pure" energy, whatever that may be. It is hedged around the key message of mass-energy equivalence, according to which the ratio of energy to mass is always constant (E = m·c2), in other words, there is no energy without mass and vice versa, or this key message is simply omitted. It is postulated that the universe is constantly expanding - even accelerating - which clearly could follow from the big bang and the red shift of the starlight from distant objects. However, the fact that 75% of the necessary energy is missing for this kind of movement of matter, and no force can be identified that could cause accelerated expansion, does not lead to checking the theory. The Big Bang continues to be considered as an axiom, there is nobody willing to ask questions. They conclude that there must be another kind of energy in the universe, the dark energy that nobody knows what it is, but that should contain the missing energy. In addition, it is postulated the dark matter, which is also not observable, which is supposed to support the expansion of the universe through an unexplainable interaction with gravitation. These unsuitable speculations persist and prevent the search for the real movement criteria of the cosmic matter. Against better knowledge, they hold themselves in the face of countless observed cosmic objects, the movement of which cannot be explained with the Big Bang hypothesis. After decades of observation, the American astronomer Halton Arp (1927 -2013) has presented an Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies in which are measured and covered with photos 338 galaxies that do not move according to the rules of the Big Bang hypothesis. All of this is left unanswered and hushed up. Arp was slowed down, the observation times at the large observatories were withdrawn.

At the beginning of the expansion of the big bang singularity, there is a range up to the time 10^-43 s that cannot be explained by the laws of nature, the Planck era. At the moment, therefore, no further calculation is being made. This era, so they said, is to be followed by the GUT era (Grand Unified Theories), in which the expansion of the universe with natural laws cannot be represented too. But there is also a solution for the unconditional preservation of the Big Bang hypothesis: the so-called inflation phase. In this phase (within 10^-35 to 10^-32 s) the universe expanded by a factor between 10³⁰ and 10⁵⁰ with a multiple of the vacuum speed of light. This expansion of the universe, which is faster than light, so they said, is not to be in contradiction to the theory of relativity, since it only prohibits the movement faster of light-speed in space, but not the expansion of space itself. This concept will replace any scientific approach with absurdities. The "space itself" does not expand at all, because it is not an object to which a movement can be assigned. Only matter can be in motion. Incidentally, the theory of relativity "prohibits" nothing, it describes the relativity of the movement of matter in space and time. The vacuum speed of light is a natural constant, (c₀ = 1/sqrt(ε₀·μ₀)). However, this is circumvented with the extremely ridiculous argument that there were no natural laws at all, that they only "came into being" with the Big Bang. That would result in a completely new question: How natural laws "arise"?

All this together leads to curious terms such as "origin" or "beginning" of the universe, its "early phase", "expansion" of space, "beginning" of time, "origin" of space and many others that have no kind of relation to some science. A whole pseudoscience is concerned with this "beginning" of the universe, the so-called nucleosynthesis: At the beginning the universe was dark (plasma), and it only became translucent with the beginning of the formation of particles. Then later formed atomic nuclei and then elements. I cannot hide the fact that it reminds me very much of the Bible: God said let there be light and there was light. What a homage of physics to the Catholic creation! The space is declared as a kind of container that may may be empty or not, into which matter can be brought in or taken out. Last but not least, there is also a similar mistake: the recurring claim that you can "convert" energy into mass and vice versa (refutation in
http://hauptplatz.unipohl.de/Wissenschaft/MasseEnergieFehler1.htm).
Completely unusable theoretical approaches emerge from this stance, which speak of a "whole" universe (which would then logically be finite), and subsequently of the existence of "several universes", "parallel universes" or "multiverses" (this is already linguistic unsuitable, to form the plural of the term universe) and other curiosities, immortalized, for example, in the depictions of Frank Tipler (born 1947) or Max Tegmark (born 1967): http://hauptplatz.unipohl.de/Wissenschaft/Tegmark.htm.
But there is only the eternal and infinite universe that has no beginning and will have no end. All sayings about a "Big Crunch" or "Big RIP" and other oddities are useless fantasies.
http://hauptplatz.unipohl.de/Wissenschaft/PhysikerPhysik.htm

Another tragic error is the metaphysical (here the meaning cannot be grasped with the senses) dealing with gravitation. All of today's gravitational physics is based on a mistake by Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955), who had given a lecture at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1916 that the fields of gravitation could be treated with the same means as the retarded potentials of electrodynamics.
http://hauptplatz.unipohl.de/Wissenschaft/Anmerkungen_Einstein.pdf.
This was a fundamental mistake by Einstein, because the fields of electrodynamics are energy fields, those of gravity are force fields, that is, the former are material fields, the second are not. Therefore, you cannot treat them with the same means, because they are two essentially different entities. For this reason, using the matter tensor in the gravity field equations could not lead to a useful result. The calculation attempts that Einstein had carried out together with the Hungarian mathematician Marcel Großmann (1878 - 1936) could therefore only lead to correct results by assuming unproven initial information, which, however, could not lead to correct results at the end. These initial specifications assigned material properties to gravity by being emitted by a mass, spreading at the vacuum light-speed and thus having wave phenomena.

But because Albert Einstein, who is treated like an infallible super-god who can never be wrong, took such a view, nobody asks questions about this mistake to this day. And in this way they still search with considerable financial, material and technical effort for gravitational waves that cannot exist. The published results from these measurements are suspect, they have nothing to do with proven "gravitational waves". See also:
http://hauptplatz.unipohl.de/Wissenschaft/Gravitation.htm.
You puzzle about a mass "surrounded" by a gravitational field and about the fact that gravity is "radiated" from a mass into space and "spreads" at the speed of light. All of this made possible because gravity, which is nothing more than a force between exactly two masses at a distance, has been raised to the level of a material object. In fact, gravitation works instantaneously (immediately, not delayed, regardless of time), because in general one cannot apply the term movement to a force - a force is not a material object. Incidentally, it can be seen in a very elementary way that the representation of the movement of gravitation is wrong: Both the equations of Kepler's laws for calculating he planetary orbits and Newton's gravitational equation contain no reference elements or terms relating to a possible speed of radiation or time dependence of the gravity. The equations have been sufficiently proven and produce correct results in practice, assuming that gravitation has an instantaneous effect. If this were not the case, the propagation time of gravitation would have to be shown in the equations, because they are of considerable size and could not be neglected as small compared to other quantities. The running time for the propagation of the grabvitational force between the sun and the earth, for example, would be 8 minutes and 20 seconds (150 million km divided by 300,000 km/s). Newton's gravitational equation also shows something trivial: If one of the two gravitational masses is zero (meaning it does not exist), then the gravitational force is also zero. A gravitational force cannot be defined for an individually considered mass, and consequently this mass cannot be surrounded by a gravitational field. And another question arises that cannot be answered: If gravity did move in space, for example, would it move from the sun to then earth or from the earth to the sun? A closer look reveals that this supposed motion of gravitation is a nonsensical question.

However, the instantaneous effect of gravitational force is not a discovery of the modern age, and I also have not brought this knowledge to light, it was discovered as early as the 19th century by James Clerk Maxwell (1831 - 1879), written down in his work On Action at a distance, published in: The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, Volume II (pages 311 to 315) [From the Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Volume VII]. At the same place he also said that many scientists had dealt with this question before him. I translated this work from English into German in 2014 and made it available online:
http://hauptplatz.unipohl.de/Wissenschaft/Assis/Maxwell_Seiten_311_315.pdf.

Based on this work by Maxwell, the Brazilian physicist Prof. Dr. André Koch Torres Assis (Institute of Physics Gleb Wataghin, University of Campinas, Sao Paulo) elaborated and published further arguments on the correctness of the views on the action at a distance of bodies. In 2013, I provided a translation of this work from English to German at the Internet with the author's consent:
http://hauptplatz.unipohl.de/Wissenschaft/Assis/Fernwirkung.pdf.

Unfortunately, however, such papers are not included in current physics, moreover, it is knowingly ignored.

In the same way it is ignored that Albert Einstein, after extensive research works and calculations he carried out together with other physicists and mathematicians, recognized in 1938 that there can be no gravitational waves. This is documented in a paper by Galina Weinstein, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, based on Einstein's original sources.

The way out of this crisis in physics and in particular in cosmology with various solutions can be found in numerous articles on my Internet portal www.unipohl.de in the section Natural Science Articles. Many of my efforts to make such contributions in the scientific press have all been fruitless. With impertinent excuses, the editors reject critical contributions to the standard models through the internal system of their assessment. An independent expression of opinion is prevented. The Swiss economist Prof. Dr. Mathias Binswanger has analyzed this system in depth and publicly denounced in his book Meaningless Competitions. Why we produce more and more nonsense, Herder-Verlag, Freiburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-451-30348-7,
(quotes at the end of the article http://hauptplatz.unipohl.de/Wissenschaft/SackgasseUrknall.htm).

How should a person behave who is seriously interested in the problems but has no basic training in the main disciplines? First of all, he seems to be mercilessly conquered to the failures of the branch of trade, because he cannot evaluate them and probably believes that they can be trusted to the experts. We have seen above that this is extremely problematic. However, it cannot be ruled out in the progress of development that the relentless defense of such fundamental errors can shake trust in science in general. Quite similar to what happened to the Church a few hundred years ago, which unshakably proclaimed the geocentric world view, although after the work of Nicholas Copernicus (1473 - 1543) and Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642) it had long been common knowledge that the Earth is not the center of the world. It was only due to the waning public trust in church doctrine that the clergy was forced to give its public consent to the heliocentric view of the world. However, it was only around 300 years later, in 1992, that Pope John Paul II. officially rehabilitated the two scientists.

Do we have to expect similar processes in today's science? Do we have to wait until general popular knowledge mocks the credibility of science? How long does it have to take before a theory that has been outdated according to expert knowledge and common views is replaced by another that is closer to the truth? Albert Einstein once said: "Two things are necessary for our work: tireless endurance and the willingness to throw away something in which you have put a lot of time and work." Well, tireless endurance different physicists already seems to have.