Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum College advice needed

Hi guys/girls,

I'm saving money so in a few years I can try to get into a good college. Over the past year or so I have been strongly interested in topics such as electrogravity, exotic propulsion technology, nuclear reactor design/theory and plasma physics.
I do not know what direction to go, as I want to advance strongly in all those fields of possible.
Are some of these fields something I would have to just learn on my own, or do some places actually teach things like electrogravity and gravity field theory? I am interested in current knowledge, but I really am looking for theory for advancement, like ideas for containing matter/antimatter annihilation and effectively harnessing it's energy. Any advice as to where I should begin to look so I don't end up at the wrong place?
welcome all input

1) You will need a physics PhD. That's four years undergrad and 4-7 years graduate school.

2) You will need be facile with the most esoteric maths. How are you with differential equations and non-Euclidean geometries? That's a start.

http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/toe_frames.html
middle
http://graham.main.nc.us/~bhammel/physics.html#TOC
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/gr/gr.html
http://jdc.math.uwo.ca/spin-foams/

3) A hard sciences PhD requires about a 120 IQ. A physics PhD requires 130 IQ minimum.

Go to an American Chemical Society national meeting. On the second day a whole bunch of them are hungover and a few got laid. Go to an American Physical Society national meeting. It's an autist convention. The entire audience is dressed weirdly, doing repetitive motions and twitching, and every hat size is "Large." Nobody gets drunk at mixers and they are asexual.

3) "Electrogravity." Snigger.

http://www.electrogravity.com/
http://www.electrogravityphysics.com/
http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/electrog.htm

Definitely put that one on your application.

There are some 44,000 members of the American Physical Society, at least that many physicists outside the US, plus a planetary ocean of graduate students. What makes you suspect you can vividly out-think all of them? Any of them?

Here's a start:

http://www.physics.adelaide.edu.au/~dkoks/Faq/Relativity/SR/experiments.html
http://relativity.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrr-2001-4/index.html
Experimental constraints on Special and General Relativity

That is physics. Do you like it?

I know what physics is. I have the same potential of outsmarting them as they do anyone else. The difference is the mind of the person. I didn't see Einstein and Nikola Tesla follow the rules of traditional science, they changed it. That's because their minds were great and open. I have a different view as to how things work. The only way I will find out of they're true is to go learn what we currently "think" we know, and go into research for myself.

Einstein was very much in the main-stream of thinkers of his era. He certainly went far further, and saw more clearly in matters of symmetry, but he was well in tune with his times.

Your use of words like "outsmarting" indicates to me that you are well meaning and quite young.

Don't let anyone discourage you: Go for it. Give us an idea of where you are on the planet and we might be able to suggest a couple of good schools to consider.

Hi,

I'm located in Wisconsin. I've been looking into
the UW Milwaukee. I have a few ex-co worker friends that have gone there for Computer science.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind moving anywhere in the country to go to school. I guess what I'm looking for in a school is more hands-on experience with things. Like, I would rather not be told what a hydrogen atom does when exposed to microwaves. I'd rather have the resources to try to find the answer myself, you know? I guess that would give one more confidence in their work. I really have no idea if I would be allowed to do those things in a school, but people sure would benefit from it.

Your chosen competitors aren't "anyone else." They are the Severely and Profoundly Gifted. When Bach sat down at a keyboard he didn't see keys, he saw music. I've worked with a child prodigy mathematician, now middle aged. What she saw instantly took me three days of sweating blood to recreate after being given a hint. (She has a puckish sense of humor.) The stuff she sweats blood about is, ah, damned if I know what she does.

Physics is a self-consistent axiomatic system that survives falsification by empirical observation. It can only be altered in four ways,

1) Derive a more inclusive body of theory in which General Relativity and quantum field theory are subsets. Any predictive theory in which lightspeed "c," Newton's gravitational constant "G," and Planck's constant "h" are simultaneously assigned their empirical values will do it. Good luck.

2) Make a falsifying observation for which existing theory makes a bad prediction. That generally requires a large budget. Note that quantum feld theory is good to 14 decimal places and General Relativity is exact within experimental error at all scales in all venues, GPS satellites to binary pulsars, particle accelerators to the Harvard Tower and Hafele-Keating experiments. Gravity Probe B

http://einstein.stanford.edu/

is almost finished.

3) Counterdemonstrate a founding postulate, as Euclid fell to Riemann and Bolyai/Lobechevsky in the mid-1800s, then all of them to Thurston in 1982. Postulates cannot be defended or they would not be postulates. Uncle Al is 1/3 the way through his definitive parity violation test of the Equivalence Principle being conducted in Wuhan, PR China as you read this,

http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qz.pdf
EP parity violation test

http://wugrav.wustl.edu/people/CMW/update98.pdf
http://www.astro.northwestern.edu/AspenW04/Papers/lorimer1.pdf
Equivalence Principle testing in general.

The final answer is due in mid-September. Nearly five years of thought and then computation leading to reduction to practice had a budget of $0. I did it as a hobby and enjoyed some volunteered resources (almost 200,000 high-end CPU-hrs total). The (existing) apparatus costs over a $(US)million. I convinced an academic who is not eager to talk with outsiders. Our chance of succeeding with the running experiment is no better than 50:50.

4) Formulate theory not degenerately identical to existing theory (e.g., wave and matrix mechanics in the 1930s were shown to be the same theory), but simpler, more profound, or more elegant and with the same predictions. Good luck.

We're not saying you won't succeed at any of this. We are saying the top echelon of folks who do succeed at this sort of thing - Rabi, Wigner, Feynman, Witten, Hawking - are notable as prodigies very early in their careers. Second tier folks work their butts off continuously and from the get-go. It isn't something you walk into. Too many too good people have desperately seached too long for any crack in the armor, theory and experiment, fueled by munificent fundings and personal psychoses. Yer gonna have to be a whiz-bang to make a dent.

Are ya feelin' lucky, punk? Are you willing to sacrifice your whole life in the pursuit? (Uncle Al is an organic chemist. That is where his passions lay.)

You'll have to have this attitude also when studying theory. You have to find it interesting do derive the properties of, say, the hydrogen atom from first principles on paper. Quantum mechanics involves linear algebra. One of the first things you'll learn in linear algebra class is a proof of the fact that -1 times x equals -x.


So, you have to be patient, willing to do a lot of work just to find something you already knew was true. Don't expect that after a few years of hard work you will have invent something new. It takes that long just to get familiar with QFT and GR.

Aren't 1) and 4) equivalent? And if so, isn't that ironic?


In fact aren't 2) and 3) also pretty much equivalent up to semantics?

asm: My sister teaches at UW White Water so I checked out the system with her.

I'd suggest you look, in your region at University of Minnesota or, if grades permit, going further afield and looking at Harvey Mudd (Claremonth Colleges in California), and some of the other math and science schools.

Don't let the naysayers stop you. Don't get hung up with people that have a philosophical or theological agenda. Don't be discouraged if you sacrifice some social life for hard studies. Hard work before age 27 pays off thereafter.

I realize I may not make a dent in anything even after 40 years if I took it that far. But almost everybody probably goes into it knowing that, unless they have a lot of prior theory and just need resources to prove them. I have some theories about how things work as well, but I need resources to disprove them. I will know I have something if I and others can't disprove something. And when I begin to extend my theories, I will try to crush them as well. It's the only way to advanced IMO.

The four statements are absolutely independent.

1) If c=c, G=G, and h=h simultaneously you have a "theory of everything." Thermodynamics plus the Bekenstein bound equals General Relativity. Quantizing gravitation within a falsifiable predictive theory appears to be hopeless.

4) If you can propose a working theory of gravitation that is simpler, more elegant, or more fundamental than General Relavtivity without being degenerate with it, you have something. Ditto the Standard Model. Epicycles are entirely adequate for predicting planetary motion in a geocentric solar system. Newton in a heliocentric solar system is better. The two models do not default to a common construct.

(1) and (4) are different.

2) If your theory predicts "all swans are white" and Australian black swans are discovered, your theory is wrong. That is called "empirical falsification."

3) Euclid contains no mistakes. Everything in Euclidean geometry past its five founding postulates is perfectly correct given those five postulates, without exception or footnote, by rigorous derivation. However, the Fifth Postulate is wrong and so is everything based upon it. Euclid is a restrictive subset of more general geometry.

(2) is falsifed by a bad prediction vs. observation. (3) is falsified by a disproven founding postulate. (2) and (3) are different kinds of flaws.

General Relativity (Einstein, metric gravitation with spacetime curvature and even-parity mathematics) is apparently flawless prediction vs. observation. That does not mean it is correct! There is a much broader treatment that gives exactly the same answers while being irreconcilably different (Weitzenb?ck, affine gravitation with spacetime torsion and odd-parity mathematics).

Einstein postulated the Equivalence Principle - all local bodies free fall identically (same rate, parallel trajectories) in vacuum to add gravitation to Special Relativity. Weitzenb?ck made no additional postulate. If you can present two bodies that reproducibly free fall differently in vacuum, General Relativity is wrong. You killed it without its ever having made a bad prediction vs. observation. You cut it off at its roots.

We know to within one part in ten trillion difference/average that all examined bodies free fall identically in vacuum. That astounding sensitivity is achieved over three months' run in an Eotvos vertical torsion balance as the Earth inertially spins on its axis and gravitationally falls around the sun. Different chemical composition, physical spin (gyro balls), quantum spin (magnets), superconductors, binding energies... and hyper-bound, hyper-spinning, hyper-magnetized, superconducting neutronium (binary pulsars) all fall identically to the limits of experimental error.

Metric gravitation is even-parity math. Inversion of all coordinates through a point gives identical answers. Affine gravitation is odd-parity math. (x,y,z) and (-x,-y,-z) can give different answers. Einstein doesn't care if you turn a glove inside out, but Weitzenb?ck does. The obvious test between the two theories is then to observe whether opposite parity bodies free fall identically in vacuum. If they do not, General Relativity implodes. Pookie pookie.

Alas, there are no units of parity. Parity is not a physical measurement. How do you calculate whether a set of atoms and the set of its global sign inversion are maximally different? It's an incredibly difficult question to answer,

http://www.mdpi.net/entropy/papers/e5030271.pdf

A mathematician constructed the answer in 1999 and reduced to it software,

J. Math. Phys. 40(9) 4587 (1999)

Uncle Al worked with Dr. Petitjean for 18 months, found a small error in his software, and we started calculating reduction to practice. The "small error" also caused NIST to rewrite its commercial stereochemistry software, and crashed all systematic nomenclature assignment software in IUPAC and CAS. "That devilish molecule"

Macroscopically congruent solid single crystal left-handed versus right-handed quartz bodies that are everywhere convex and have three identical moments of inertia are maximally parity divergent. The parity Eotvos experiment is running in China. We will know if it is Einstein or Weitzenb?ck by mid-September.

If you like maximum simplicity, Einstein is the favorite. If you like maximum generality, Weitzenb?ck is the favorite. If there is an EP parity anomaly it is less than 10 parts-per-trillion relative by observation to date. By end of next week we'll have the answer sensitive to 1 ppt; by mid-September to 0.1 ppt. At that point the thermal jiggle of the apparatus' own atoms blanks out any deeper sensitivity to signal.

There is one Eotvos balance run at 2.2 kelvins that is theoretically 10-100X as sensitive, but its academic group is having years of problems debugging its operation down to those levels. It's in a deeply buried abandoned missile silo in the middle of no-access Federal land in Washington State. Walk softly and slowly or it will see you.

If you want another opinion on the "depth" of a idea,

http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/07/measuring-depth-of-ideas.html

Settle into a comfortable chair and read it all. Note the list of "Blogs led by science" to the right, down a couple of scrolls. Lubos is strongly opinionated, but he is neither ignorant nor stupid.

Whereas Uncle Al is... well, never mind.

As far as theory is concerned, you don't really need to go to college. I found it to be a waste of time to attend lectures at university.


Today there are thousands of free of charge downloadable textbooks/lecture notes on everything from basic special relativity to string theory on the internet. Most of these are readable for 15 year olds. So, it should be possible to do most of your MSc work before you turn 18. Then just choose any college, tell the Profs. there that you already know almost everything. They will then prepaire a few exams for you to test if you are indeed at MSc level. If you pass these exams you will be allowed to start to work on a PhD thesis.

You'll save a lot of money this way.

Uncle Al : Profoundly Gifted? I'll challenge you on that one. I come across article after article about the ones in the field. If you look at them you will see that there have been huge mistakes made ever since the beginning and still happen to this day. Constantly throughout history have people not believed that certain things were possible and laughed at them. Those were the "educated people." We will never land on the moon, split the atom, fly in a heavier than air craft, on and on.... yet the more we "advance" the harder it is to beat into these peoples heads that these "pseudo-sciences" could be real. Constantly throughout science we have always thought we were on the right track and knew what we were talking about, which has always always always been shot down eventually. This will continue to happen. I will not go to college
to be made to believe that laws of physics are carved into stone like some people seem to think they are. Those have been broken as well and it is only a matter of time before the others are broken. Fast foreward in human evolution, say, oh...800,000 years. Do you see the "laws" we have holding up and the things "science" said were impossible actually are? Lately science has become almost like a religion in terms of only trying to prove things "right." Which is wrong.
If someone has an idea or has come to a conculusion in an experiment, they themselves, and every other person should challenge it with other tests. I see we only do experiments that try to make our own conclusions right and not wrong. Then down the road someone does that and finds it's flawed or completely incorrect. Which again has happened countless times. But we don't seem to learn from that....we only seem to want to think we're smart and we know what's going on.
Look at almost ANY scientific topic and you will see those with PhD's and large degrees having huge differences of opinion in everything. Each topic seems to have 50 or 60 "educated" people all with different opinions, all thinking they are correct. Personally, this isn't the type of "education" I want and if the educational system were more correct these things wouldn't happen. The only thing that exists in the universe is absolute fact and infinite possibility. Yet we are the only ones that are extremely limited and have very very few actual fact.

''Uncle Al : Profoundly Gifted? I'll challenge you on that one. I come across article after article about the ones in the field. If you look at them you will see that there have been huge mistakes made ever since the beginning and still happen to this day. Constantly throughout history have people not believed that certain things were possible and laughed at them. Those were the "educated people." We will never land on the moon, split the atom, fly in a heavier than air craft, on and on.... yet the more we "advance" the harder it is to beat into these peoples heads that these "pseudo-sciences" could be real.''


But note that in most of these cases the sceptics were wrong because they had not fully understood the consequences of existing theories. E.g. flying in an heavier than air craft is fully consistent with the Navier Stokes equations of airodynamics. And making engines light enough does not contradict thermodynamical theories known since the early 1800s.


Einstein did not believe in nuclear energy in the 1920s because he didn't had the idea of a chain reaction at that time. Nothing about nuclear energy production contradicts Quantum Mechancs known to Einstein at that time.

''Constantly throughout science we have always thought we were on the right track and knew what we were talking about, which has always always always been shot down eventually. This will continue to happen. I will not go to college
to be made to believe that laws of physics are carved into stone like some people seem to think they are. Those have been broken as well and it is only a matter of time before the others are broken. Fast foreward in human evolution, say, oh...800,000 years. Do you see the "laws" we have holding up and the things "science" said were impossible actually are? Lately science has become almost like a religion in terms of only trying to prove things "right." Which is wrong.''


If you are talking about, say, what dark matter consists of and similar unknown things, you have point. There are a lot of people who put their fate in supersymmetry and then interpret experimental results accordingly. The results of an Italian experiment (DAMA) are controversial, because these seem to contradict the results of other dark matter experiments. But the thing is that you can only compare the different experiments by specifying a theory (because the other experiments are set up differently). The contradiction only exists if you assume that dark matter consists of a particle predicted by supersymmetry.

So, this could be a case of an unproven theory ruling out experimental results...