Searching for Insight

Abstract

Is space-time only brought into being by its energy content? The jury is still out, but other questions that have been with me for much of my lifegiant black holes in galactic nuclei, the formation of the Galaxy, the connection between first-order phase transitions and negative specific heats, the cause of the large-scale flow of galaxies relative to the cosmic microwave background-have all received reasonable answers. I have found great fun in understanding the dynamical mechanisms underlying such phenomena as magnetohydrodynamic jets, relativistic disks, and the bars, spirals, and chemical evolution of galaxies. The great challenges for future astronomers will be the exploration of the 96% of the Universe now believed to be neither atomic nor baryonic but perhaps partially leptonic. However, most advances do not come via frontal attack but from "bread-and-butter" investigations in related areas where observation is possible today! SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHYGod is truth, so the truth is a way to God. So argued the late medieval monks and it opened the way to the support of study not only in theology but also in natural philosophy (the name science was coined later). William of Occam was a monk living in Surrey in the years 1285-1349. He devised one of the most important principles for the advancement of natural knowledge. Even today, Occam's razor is often too sharp for the most imaginative but it remains a vital tool in the development of science. It does not show us a direct way to truth, but its economy of hypotheses curtails theorists' wild castles in the air. Newton (Newton 1730) thought that his studies of natural philosophy revealed something about the nature of God. By contrast, Darwin was fearful of the religious reaction to his work, which did indeed lead to a mighty revolution in theological thought that has still not percolated to all of Christendom! As scientists, we must be led by curiosity over the mechanism of the natural world, but doing bread-and-butter science, straightforward extensions of what is known in order to elucidate new phenomena, is the main job. We should not spend all our time groping at great problems that may be beyond our capacity. Too often those of great intellect spend all their time so doing, achieve little, and become disillusioned when they could have achieved much. Although few of us now see the search for a deeper understanding of natural philosophy as a search for God, to which A.S. Eddington saw parallels in his work (Eddington 1929), many of us find those parts of science that have a bearing on philosophy to be among the most interesting (e.g., Penrose 2005).Ideas are not readily described through the positions and motions of particles and fields but, as in philosophy, ideas and questioning are the gist of all science. I am not ashamed to ask questions that others claim are nonsensical and have gathered some at the end of this review. Knowing how often I have not seen the obvious implications of my own work, I regard all mankind, myself included, as somewhat sho...

The Geometry of Thermodynamics III

“…The notion of complex time appears here as a simple mathematical extension of the dynamical laws (11) and ( 12) but the physical relevance of such an extension is far from trivial. Rather, Eq.…”

“…A possibility currently being actively explored (in the context of the fluctuation theorems) is the development of Riemannian theories for thermodynamics and statistical mechanics to introduce natural motions via the notion of geodesics [9]. In principle, this route opens the possibility of introducing a "thermo-statistical" counterpart of general relativity (GR) to describe non-equilibrium situations, including "hybrid" systems which display negative specific heats (see Thirring et al [10] and Lynden-Bell [11]), together with the appropriate thermo-statistics (see Gross [12] for example) and proper consideration of non-additive entropies (discussed in some detail by Tsallis [13]). We aim here to explore these arguments and their associated isomorphisms in the context of QGT and its explicitly geometrical approach: we will show that the consequences are very wide-ranging.…”

Robert Dicke and the naissance of experimental gravity physics, 1957–1967

“…Examples of thoughts along such directions are to be found in Sciama (1953Sciama ( , 1964, Brans and Dicke (1961), Lynden-Bell (2010), and articles in the book, Mach's Principle: From Newton's Bucket to Quantum Gravity (Barbour and Pfister 1995). The sense of the thinking may be captured in Sciama's (1953) proposal that "if local phenomena are strongly coupled to the universe as a whole, then local observations can give us information about the universe as a whole".…”

A note on dark matter and dark energy

“…In 'Searching for insight' [6] Lynden Bell wrote I still have hopes that thoughts based on Mach's Principle may lead us to a definite prediction of the cosmical repulsion. This note is about such a Machian taught.…”