How do you get an engineer to slap a mathematician?williaty wrote:Simply put NO.desert fox wrote:My whole point was:
The earth used to be flat. Now its not.
Perpetual motion couldn't be possible. Now they are thinking it might be.
First of all, do you have at least a Bachelor's degree in physics? If not, quite frankly you aren't going to understand the subtleties at play without literally hundreds of hours of intense, high level study. If you DO have a Bachelor's or higher in Physics, understanding that paper and the issues surrounding it will probably only take you a few tens of hours of intense, high level study. I'm not saying that to be insulting, to be elitist, or to call you stupid. I'm trying to point out that a lay-person's understanding of the words involved, the concepts involved, and the problem space are, in this case, completely inadequate to really get a handle on the meat of that paper. Let me provide some context by saying that: I majored in physics. I married a research physicist. My business partner is a research physicist. Of the group of friends I hang out with on a weekly basis, I am the only one that doesn't have an advanced (Master's or equivalent or higher) degree in a hard science. Discussing that paper today with people via email, I am basically only able to follow the peer-reviewed critique and commentary on the paper; the math and actual theory behind it are beyond me. It'd take a couple of weeks of working just on that paper to get to the point where I could feel I'd gotten around the whole thing. The PhD's I discussed it with both basically said that most of it was math they'd seen before but they'd need to set down for a couple of hours and work through it all to make sure that they understood it. Simply put, this is a specialist's topic in an already highly specialized field.
To address the paper directly though, here's my take on the issues:
1) It's theoretical only. And not in the sense that science uses the phrase "Theory of X". This is much more in line with the lay-person's use of theory as in "I thought this shit up and haven't tested it at all". Hypothetical would be another useful word to use instead in this case.
2) No one knows if it's even possible to build the apparatus to test this hypothesis, let alone what the results would be once the experiment was run. They're completely at the place where they're trying to convince people to throw tens of millions of dollars at them just so they can get to the point where they're sure they can actually build the thing.
3) There's valid criticism that the math for the hypothesis actually might describe an energized state vs ground state. That's HUGE. Saying there's motion in ground state is like saying you can fire and unloaded gun. Accidentally proving there's motion in an energetic state is like saying you can fire a loaded gun.
4) If all the hypothesis and math turns out to be correct, it still won't be a perpetual motion machine in the way the phrase is commonly used. What it will be is something that causes us to have to re-evaluate how we define time. The Laws of Thermodynamics aren't at risk here, the definition of time is.
5) Here's commentary on the paper by one of probably less than 100 people in the world really qualified to analyze the paper:Time crystals may sound dangerously close to a perpetual motion machine, but it is worth emphasizing one key difference: while time crystals would indeed move periodically in an eternal loop, rotation occurs in the ground state, with no work being carried out nor any usable energy being extracted from the system. Finding time crystals would not amount to a violation of well-established principles of thermodynamics. If they can be created, time crystals may have intriguing applications, from precise timekeeping to the simulation of ground states in quantum computing schemes. But they may be much more than advanced devices. Could the postulated cyclic evolution of the Universe be seen as a manifestation of spontaneous symmetry breaking akin to that of a time crystal? If so, who is the observer inducing—by a measurement—the breaking of the symmetry of time?
"Well it works on paper."