Science blog

Occam's (or Ockham's) razor is a principle named after the 14th century mathematician and friar, William of Occam. Ockham was the village in this English County where he was born. There are many resources to investigate this man and his theories. This is not about him but his thinking. Thinkers are important to the world. Over thinking something can be the death of it. Most people have never heard of this and yet with the logical thinkers of today it is almost built into our genetic code. We know things without realizing how or why we do. The universe as a whole is almost emanating this into our very souls. Our brains absorbing codes that alter our thinking giving the same idea to the masses at the same time. I don't completely understand everything. When I hear something my brain lets me know that logically the information is even viable. The brain will calculate out many different scenarios. You will start to evaluate your own opinions, theories and reason as to why one thing sounds right vs. the other. The Occam's razor is a logical way of thinking. Short excerpts from the 14th century theory: "If you have two theories which both explain the observed facts then you should use the simplest until more evidence comes along" "The simplest explanation for some phenomenon is more likely to be accurate than more complicated explanations." "If you have two equally likely solutions to a problem, pick the simplest." "The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct." "Keep things simple!" You have heard many of these concepts built in to many popular slogans and methods of achieving a goal. The Occam's Razor does not only have to applied to only scientific experiments but it can be applied to every day life. This is a great scholarly way of looking at things. The way you look at things dictates how you decipher, translate and learn things. Then if you can learn things you can implement them into discovering the worlds secrets.

It has been proposed that the quarks and leptons consist of more fundamental particles called rishons. The T rishon may be defined as having mass and charge e/3. The V rishon is neutral and has little or no mass. The rishons have spin 1/2, carry color charge, and combine in triplets or rishon-antirishon pairs. Thus the electron is a TTT, the neutrino VVV, the down quark TVV, and the up quark TTV. If the T has somewhat greater color charge than the V, the down quark would have a net excess of the color carried by the T. The antiup quark TTV would appear to have a net deficiency of the color carried by the V, or equivalently, an excess of anticolor, and behave as an antiparticle. Hence the TTV would appear to have an excess of color and behave as a particle, in agreement with observation. The leptons have no net color. There is no need for hypercolor. All particle interactions consist of rearrangements of rishons, or creation or annihilation of rishon-antirishon pairs. For example, beta-decay occurs when a down quark changes to an up quark, emitting an electron and neutrino: TVV --> TTV + TTT + VVV The massless particle was originally called a neutrino; it was later defined to be an antineutrino. This model favors the first choice. If the binding between rishons is much greater than the binding between quarks or leptons, then quarks and leptons could associate without losing their identity, just as atoms can form molecules. Lepton number is also conserved if the VVV is assigned a negative lepton number. The second and third generations of the electron and the quarks might be formed by adding one or two TT pairs to the first generation. The second and third generations of the neutrino might be formed by adding one or two VV pairs to the first generation. The force binding the rishons is evidently so great that the separate rishon wave functions “fall” together into just one wave function, in which case there would be no internal structure. The effective mass of the TTV is nearly equal to that of the TVV, which implies that the T-T bond has binding energy nearly equal to the bare mass of a T. The electron has three T's and three bonds and hence should have little mass compared to a quark, as observed. The muon obtains most of its mass from the added TT and should have a mass comparable to that of a quark, as observed. The boson carriers of the weak force presumably consist of the rishons required to form the decay products. The photon may consist of a colorless VV pair; for example red-antired. The gluon may consist of a colored VV pair, for example red-antiblue. Hence the weak force may simply be the color force carried by weak bosons; the electromagnetic force is the color force carried by photons, and the strong force is the color force carried by gluons, mesons, quarks, and possibly other hadrons. A real TT would annihilate, while a virtual pair might help carry the strong force. A bare rishon, a TV, TV, TT, or VV would carry net color and, like the quarks, would not be seen in isolation. The proton consists of two up quarks and a down quark, so the hydrogen atom has four T's, four T's, two V's, and two V's. If this typifies the whole universe, then there exist equal amounts of rishons and antirishons. One might speculate further that the emission and absorption of virtual particles is just Hawking radiation. The spacetime itself around a rishon might have quantum states. The large spin of a rishon would eliminate the spherically symmetric S states, leaving three P states with the time coordinate expanded, and three P states with the time coordinate compressed. These might be identified with the three colors and three anticolors. The difference in the time coordinate would cause a slight difference in the reaction rates of rishons and antirishons, explaining why hydrogen is more abundant than antihydrogen. Another possibility is that the rishons and antirishons have opposite handedness and parity violation causes a difference in the reaction rates. The rishons themselves may be just quanta of spacetime. The V rishon might be the lowest P state, and the T rishon the next-highest P state. Thus the T and V would be similar, but somewhat mismatched, as observed. If this sort of model is correct, it would be the basis of the long-sought unified field theory. The strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces are just the color force carried by intermediates, and the color force itself may be identified with quantum gravity of which ordinary gravity is the long-range limit. Reference Haim Harari, "The Structure of Quarks and Leptons," Scientific American, p.56, April 1983.

Just what on earth is foam? It is a question that has plagued mankind for centuries. Well, alright, maybe not. Nevertheless, foam has long been a mysterious material, yet useful in many ways, not least for insulation and packaging. Put simply, foam is plastic that has been melted, had bubbles of gas forced into it, and then been left to re-form. This produces a cheap, soft, spongy material, which can then be sliced into specific shapes or simply minced up into pellets. The kind of foam you’re probably familiar with is packing foam. Anytime you order something (or sometimes when you just buy it in a shop), it will come wrapped in a box surrounded by foam to protect it. This works because even relatively small amounts of foam are capable of taking the force of a large impact, preventing the object that is being protected from ever hitting a hard surface and being damaged. Packing foam comes in many forms: sheets, pellets (‘packing peanuts’), blocks, and more. If you want some, the best thing to do is probably buy it from an office supplies store or, in larger quantities, direct from a supplier. If you have things delivered in packing foam often, then you might also consider re-using that foam – after all, while foam is disposable, there’s absolutely no reason not to use it more than once. The other kind of foam that you might encounter at some point in your life is insulating foam. This foam might even be in your walls right now as you’re reading this article, without you even knowing it. The advantage of filling your walls with foam is that it can be easily squirted in through a relatively small hole, providing effective insulation without you having to do too much work on the wall. Like with packing, foam insulation is both cheap and effective, not to mention easy to use.

Is Albert Einstein's Special Relativity incompatible with the very equations upon which science's greatest theory is built? New observations made by many scientists and engineers appear to contradict the great scientist's ideas. Apparently there are implicit contradictions present within Relativity's foundational ideas, documents and equations. One individual has even pointed that quotations from the 1905 document and Einstein's contemporaries as well as interpretations of the Relativity equations clearly and concisely describe a confused and obviously erroneous theory. It is time therefore, for science to update its thinking on this theory with a comprehensive analysis of the history leading up to, during and after that revolutionary year of Special Relativity. As this is the 100 year anniversary of the original release of Special Relativity, a review of the original assumptions, documents and ideas which led to the acceptance of this theory is timely and warranted. Every year millions of students are taught this theory without a critical analysis of Relativity. Relativity Theory consists of its two variants Special Relativity and General Relativity and is considered the cornerstone of modern physics. Albert Einstein borrowed from the ideas of Fitzgerald, Lorentz and Voigt to create a new concept of the universe. His first work in this regard later came to be known as Special Relativity and contained many controversial ideas which today are considered axiomatic. Amongst these are Length Contraction, Time Dilation, the Twin Paradox and the equivalence of mass and energy summarized in the equation E=mc2. This equation became the shining capstone of the new theory along with its first & second postulates, namely, that the laws of nature are the same from all perspectives and that the speed of light 'c' is constant in a vacuum regardless of perspective. Further, the theory also predicted an increase in mass with velocity. Numerous examples have been given of the 'proof' of the validity of Special Relativity. Most notably, experiments using particle accelerators have sped particles to incredible velocities which apparently provide confirmation of Einstein's theory. However, doubts remain in the scientific community who have never totally given up the comfort of a Newtonian world view. This is readily apparent in that they refer to the Newton's 'Law' of Gravitation whilst Special Relativity (SR) and General Relativity (GR) are given the polite attribution 'The Theory of' or simply SR 'theory' and GR 'theory.' Einstein would continue working on the ideas of Special Relativity until producing the aforementioned even more controversial treatise. In his later more comprehensive work called the Theory of General Relativity (1916), Einstein proposed a major re-thinking of cosmology. He conceived of a space time continuum that is curved by mass; in other words, planets, stars, galaxies and other stellar objects cause a curvature of space time. The movement of these objects are determined by the aforementioned curvature. As a result of these ideas, our understanding of geometry, math, physics, science and the universe would never be the same. However, some scientists are reporting that speed of light is not constant from different experimental observations. One has even reported errors in the fundamental equations. If so, this would require a major rethinking of the known cosmological models and assumptions of modern physics.