In the mid 1970s, there was a flurry about Quantum 1/f Noise, where physicist Peter Handel claimed to have found the quantum-mechanical underpinnings to
1/f noise generation in general, and Aldert van der Ziel (The Dean of the Flicker Noise community) backed Handel up, saying that Handel's theory fit all of Van der Ziel?s 1/f measurement data.
The Physics community said that Handel?s theory was incorect, and that the fit to data must be a coincidence, but nobody evey came up with a better theory, or explained the coincidence.
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On this newsgroup are a number of people with electronics background and interests, plus knowledge of QM, and I?m wondering if anybody has anything to offer on Handel?s theory and Van Der Ziel?s data.
My suspicion, given Van der Ziel's support, is that Handel is right, but for the wrong reasons.
On Mar 11, 2018, Kevin Aylward wrote (in article):
Kevin, read more slowly. There is a loose end, the fact that Handel?s theory fit the data, despite not being correctly derived. It struck me that people just dismissed this as mere coincidence, but proposed no alternative - that seems a bit cavalier. The history of Physics has many examples of fertile "coincidence?.
There does seem to be a small but steady stream of articles following the thread over the last 30 years, but I cannot say that the matter is settled in any sense.
Hmm those didn't help me much. I don't recall reading about
1/f noise in Van-der -Ziel, though I was more interested in other stuff, so most likely skipped those sections.
1/f noise is interesting, but it seems like there are lots of causes.
Simply not relevant. If the assumptions used to derive the results are wrong, the "theory" is wrong. Period.
There are millions of ways to derive the same result.It means nothing. Check out the nonsense some use to "derive" the fine structure constant. Its all twaddle.
and no, its not a coincidence, its someone pissing about with formulas until he happens to find one, that matches up. There are many ways to do so. Its nonsense. End of story.
Huh, guess we should revoke Bohr's Nobel prize then...
(Obvious troll being: he found a classical result, which happened to coincide with the empirical data. He _made no claim_ that it was anywhere near justified, and, fruitful research discovered and proved the underlying theory that gave rise to the result, and many others. These steps happen to be lacking in the present example.)
On Mar 11, 2018, Tim Williams wrote (in article ):
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Yes. Thanks for the example and the parallel.
To be pedantic, Bohr?s approach was semi-classical: He showed that for all stable orbits of electrons about a Hydrogen nucleus, an integer number of de Broglie wave periods of the electron fit exactly into the classical orbits of that electron around the nucleus. (Classical theory allowed all orbits, not just the few that were observed.) Transitions between these stable orbits yielded the observed emission spectrum of the Hydrogen atom. How curious.... The classical orbit part turned out to be nonsense, but this result was a pretty big clue on the way to Quantum Mechanics.
Sure, but it don't make the Bohr model any less wrong. It was basically, luck. The Bohr model forms a strait jacket to how things really work. One only has to look at all the interpretations of QM to see how most simply haven't cottoned on to the reality that QM has no classical understanding. Period.
On Mar 12, 2018, Kevin Aylward wrote (in article):
Coming at it with 20/20 hindsight. When Bohr made his proposal, QM did not exist, and what Bohr was doing was to invent a small piece of it. And the fact that this semiclassical approach worked at all this was a big clue. I seriously doubt that Bohr thought that he had found The Answer; he did what
came later.
I?ve read some of the history of that period, and they knew very well that they were groping in the dark, and were always looking for fruitful analogies and the like. As we now know, it did eventually work quite well. Not that anybody understands it, to this day.
I?ve been digging a bit, and Peter Handel is still grinding away, forty years on, and his tagline is simply that his theory is the simplest theory that can explain a vast bulk of experimental data, where ?explain? really means that allthose measurements fit into a single simple theoretical framework. I?m sure if anybody had found a better QM derivation of his result, we would have heard of it by now, so I?ll stipulate that this has not happened. I doubt anyone is looking all that hard these days, but eventually someone will get lucky. There are receent articles.
On Mar 12, 2018, Kevin Aylward wrote (in article):
All of this stuff at that time was done by working *backwards*, e.g. the black body radiation formula derivation, SR etc
They already *knew* the correct answers, they pissed about with 1000s of options until they found a derivation that, apparently gave the known result.
All the "derivations" are essentially horseshit. They only presented those that gave the known answers.
Actually, we do.
Once one understands that there is no such thing as "understanding" for anything. "Understanding" F=ma is at exactly the same level as "understanding" H|psi>=En|psi>
There is no deeper understanding to QM. Its just another Godel Axiom.
So, understanding is simply upstanding that, for example, the Schrodinger equation is the deepest level of understanding that there is. Its only when the delusionists slip back into this classical thinking twaddle again that problems arise.
On Mar 13, 2018, Kevin Aylward wrote (in article):
I rather doubt that things are quite that black and white, or that the founders of QM knew the answer before they started. The early papers are quite clear. Unless they all lied and it was all a vast conspiracy.
Addendum: One of my source books, that gives the early intellectual history of QM:
?Sources of Quantum Mechanics?, edited with a historical introduction by B. L. van der Waerden, University of Zurich, North-Holland 1967; Dover 1968 and 2007, ISBN-13 978-0-45892-2.
. Also, the best summary of Quantum theory of 1/f noise (including but not limited to Handel?s theory) I?ve found so far is:
"Quantum Theory of Flicker Noise in Metal Films?, Kirill A. Kazakov, Submitted on 19 May 2007, arXiv:0705.2818v1
On Mar 13, 2018, Kevin Aylward wrote (in article):
I think you you missed my point.
For example, it is a fact that Plank worked backward to "derive" the blackbody radiation formula. It is a fact that The Lorentz Transformations existed prior to Einstein. It was a fact that the (1/n^2 -1/m^2) line spectrum formula was known.
In all cases the task was to discover the simplest assumptions that could produce those results.
Unfortunately, physics is usually taught in a fairy tale logical sequence, rather than how it is actually done. People work backwards in real life.
The Schrodinger equation was trial and error from comparing with known results. Only later did symmetry considerations make it almost "self evident"
and...there are arguments as to why QM and SR must be so....
On Mar 14, 2018, Kevin Aylward wrote (in article):
[big snip]
Well, the fact that science is taught with a clean presentation, rather than the messy way it was actually discovered, is no fault of QM or its founders.
Thir reminds me of a coworker many years ago. He was very innovative, and would brief me on his discoveries. This would often take an hour or two, after which I would point out a shortcut that took one from his start to his conclusion far more simply and directly. He would hotly contest my conclusion, and I would prove the equivalence. (It was very rarely the case that he was wrong.)
What was happening was that he was recounting his thought process, with all manner of side trips - a travel writer - and couldn't see that he had ended up next door. That required fresh eyes.
Anyway, you would not wish to be taught the long convoluted way, as you struggle to hang on.
I?m sure that there was lots of trial and error there, both for Schrodinger (Wave Mechanics) and Heisenberg (Matrix Mechanics). When Schrodinger proved that Wave Mechanics and Matrix Mechanics were mathematically equivalent, I bet there was a great sigh of relief - the same thing, arrived at from very different directions, validating both.
While I do accept that the Anthropic Principle is by definition true (despite the appearance of circularity), I rather doubt that one can derive all of modern physics from theAnthropic Principle alone.
We don?t really understand how universes are constructed, and thus what must and must not be true for a universe to exist in the first place, and also for a universe to be suitable for us to exist as well.
Sure, but we can can deduce *some* of what must be true/false.
As I noted, quantisation must be true for us to exist. Atoms must be stable for billions of years, whoever they are, at whatever motion. Analog (continuous) structure cannot do this. This is trivial with hi-insight. There must also be a mechanism that creates a stable time process, hence one can conclude that there must be a maximum velocity etc...
It can be argued that the simplest way of generating multiple solutions to the same equation (quantisation) is what we should observe if the universe is one of many randomly generated one. The Eigenvalue equation is pretty much the default. Can't get much simpler that Ax=a.x
On Mar 16, 2018, Kevin Aylward wrote (in article):
While I?ll grant that quantization is most likely essential, it?s rather a big jump to say that for a ?stable time process? one must have a maximum velocity. Is this theory laid out in a peer reviewed journal anywhere?
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