Matter is neither created nor destroyed...because...?

[LegionOnomaMoi]

I've often read here arguments about the necessity of god or about determinism or materialism or whatever that involve so-called laws of physics. But recently I've noticed in discussions with students and even other researchers that these "laws" are generally misunderstood. So I wanted to know what members' reactions to the following are:
Concerning the law of the conservation of mass and/or energy:
1) This "law" was clearly violated with the introduction of special relativity in 1905, and so theories of the nature of physical systems were changed in order for the laws of conservation of mass and energy to remain true. We altered the nature of physical theory in order to retain the laws after they had proved false.
2) Virtually all experiments in particle/high energy physics violate the "laws" of the conservation of mass and energy, at least in practice. In theory they don't because these "laws" are used to infer the existence of fundamental/elementary particles. That is, many of the particles which are said to exist according to the standard model were "found" because the laws of the conservation of mass and energy were clearly violated and thus physicists inferred the existence of particles or their annihilation. The "laws" were contradicted by all experiments, and so experimental confirmation of these violations were made to fit the "laws".
3) Our best theories of physics predict that the mass and energy of fundamental particles like electrons are infinite. They clearly are not. So theorists introduced a mathematical trick. This "trick" allows the theories to agree with experimental findings, and the theories are then claimed to be successful because the agree with the findings they were forced to fit. The bare theories predict infinite masses and energies and nobody knows any way, rhyme, or reason to make them theoretically sound.
4) No experiment has ever shown that any conservation law is upheld because our mathematically rigorous theory of probability tells us that the probability of any outcome of measurement of any physical system is 0. That is, all outcomes will be wrong (and according to statistical mechanics/thermodynamics if they weren't all wrong, physics would basically collapse).
5) Matter is created constantly according to modern theory. It is created out of nothing. The notion that energy is converted into matter is false. Energy is made to be conserved in isolated systems, but this involves the creation of matter ex nihilo.

 

[Skwim]

What's your definition of matter?


.

 

[Brickjectivity]

4) No experiment has ever shown that any conservation law is upheld because our mathematically rigorous theory of probability tells us that the probability of any outcome of measurement of any physical system is 0.

I am having a little trouble reading this. Are you alluding to the statistical methods used to test particle accelerator experiments?

 

[BSM1]

5) Matter is created constantly according to modern theory. It is created out of nothing. The notion that energy is converted into matter is false. Energy is made to be conserved in isolated systems, but this involves the creation of matter ex nihilo.

But can't "nothing" be measured? For instance, in our concept of the universe isn't the "nothingness" between objects measurable? Therefore wouldn't the measurable "nothing" be "something", even if it's nothing by our definition?

 

[Brickjectivity]

Now I'm really confused!

 

[`mud]

It's hard to understand DOUBLE TALK,
even when said three times......
nooooo...that would be tripletalk...
~
Concisely: there is not a zero, cant divide zero by zero,
therefore: no nothingness !
But that third approach: no singularity !
~
Just kidding.....I don't understand also !
~
'mud

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

@LegionOnomaMoi, could you offer a few credible and readable articles that address this failure of the conservation laws?

 

[Twilight Hue]

It's interesting that something can be so small you can't see it, so its nothing.

Something can be so large you can't see beyond it. So there's nothing.

 

[`mud]

hey 'Now',
One must finally realize that nothingness is the 'soup' in which we all dissolve.
~
'mud

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

@LegionOnomaMoi, could you offer a few credible and readable articles that address this failure of the conservation laws?

It's not that there exists such a failure, but rather that the laws are used a priori.
"Conservation laws embody the idea that some quantities are fixed come what may, and have an honoured place in the history of physics. Particle physicists followed a traditional path in using them to make sense of their subject matter. One the one hand, they applied already established laws as definitions, more clearly to establish what was new in the interactions of elementary particles; on the other to systematize experimental data and characterize the fundamental interactions...By virtue of its definitional status, conservation of energy-momentum could also be used to extract information about the interactions of electrically neutral particles. Neutral particles leave no direct record in particle detectors, but experimenters routinely inferred their presence by insisting that energy-momentum was conserved...It was through such reasoning that neutral particles like the lambda were discovered."
Pickering, A. (1984). Constructing Quarks. University of Chicago Press.
As for the failure of conservation of energy, mass, or momentum, one need only cite the most fundamental method/theory underlying the entirety of modern fundamental physics: renormalization. All relativistic quantum theories (and many non-relativistic quantum frameworks) result in "ultraviolet catastrophes" and other instances of infinities in which the theories yield infinite masses or energies for measurements as simple as that of the energy of the electron. Mathematical trickery is used to obtain a finite value for e.g., the mass or energy of electrons and the various processes/interactions/particles violating conservation laws in particle physics are either explained by inferred particles or called "virtual". Feynman, who was awarded the nobel prize for ridding quantum electrodynamics of such infinities asserted in his lectures that this method (renormalization) was flawed, and in his Nobel speech award expressed doubt in its existence as anything other than trickery. Despite this, energy, mass, and momentum in particle physics are defined, conserved, and measured via the application of theories that yield infinities that are forced to be finite via mathematical tricks, and then declared to be in accordance with the experimental values obtained which they were manipulated to cohere with in the first place.

Determining which particles are supposed to be "virtual" requires the application of conservation laws. Virtual photons or similar virtual processes are held to be virtual because they violate conservation laws.

 

[Jonathan Ainsley Bain]

I've often read here arguments about the necessity of god or about determinism or materialism or whatever that involve so-called laws of physics. But recently I've noticed in discussions with students and even other researchers that these "laws" are generally misunderstood. So I wanted to know what members' reactions to the following are:
Concerning the law of the conservation of mass and/or energy:
1) This "law" was clearly violated with the introduction of special relativity in 1905, and so theories of the nature of physical systems were changed in order for the laws of conservation of mass and energy to remain true. We altered the nature of physical theory in order to retain the laws after they had proved false.
2) Virtually all experiments in particle/high energy physics violate the "laws" of the conservation of mass and energy, at least in practice. In theory they don't because these "laws" are used to infer the existence of fundamental/elementary particles. That is, many of the particles which are said to exist according to the standard model were "found" because the laws of the conservation of mass and energy were clearly violated and thus physicists inferred the existence of particles or their annihilation. The "laws" were contradicted by all experiments, and so experimental confirmation of these violations were made to fit the "laws".
3) Our best theories of physics predict that the mass and energy of fundamental particles like electrons are infinite. They clearly are not. So theorists introduced a mathematical trick. This "trick" allows the theories to agree with experimental findings, and the theories are then claimed to be successful because the agree with the findings they were forced to fit. The bare theories predict infinite masses and energies and nobody knows any way, rhyme, or reason to make them theoretically sound.
4) No experiment has ever shown that any conservation law is upheld because our mathematically rigorous theory of probability tells us that the probability of any outcome of measurement of any physical system is 0. That is, all outcomes will be wrong (and according to statistical mechanics/thermodynamics if they weren't all wrong, physics would basically collapse).
5) Matter is created constantly according to modern theory. It is created out of nothing. The notion that energy is converted into matter is false. Energy is made to be conserved in isolated systems, but this involves the creation of matter ex nihilo.

That is a fairly good generalization of the problems. But I feel that in order to answer it I would need to write ANOTHER 100000 word thesis.
Perhaps narrow it down to a single issue?

The ultraviolet catastrophe is the classic example, I think.
It resulted in Planck's giving us quantum energy.
By the same token I infer that when we examine Zeno's paradox we have to conclude that time is also in quanta.
This is totally at odds with any type of time dilation as per the relativities.

You see, if time is not in quanta, then a simple calculation of any normal velocity (m/s) where (s) gets closer to zero will
give an infinite velocity (infinite energy). So there must be a minimum fixed amount of time.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

It's not that there exists such a failure, but rather that the laws are used a priori.

"Conservation laws embody the idea that some quantities are fixed come what may, and have an honoured place in the history of physics. Particle physicists followed a traditional path in using them to make sense of their subject matter. One the one hand, they applied already established laws as definitions, more clearly to establish what was new in the interactions of elementary particles; on the other to systematize experimental data and characterize the fundamental interactions...By virtue of its definitional status, conservation of energy-momentum could also be used to extract information about the interactions of electrically neutral particles. Neutral particles leave no direct record in particle detectors, but experimenters routinely inferred their presence by insisting that energy-momentum was conserved...It was through such reasoning that neutral particles like the lambda were discovered."​

The map is not the territory but it is, best I can tell from the above, an extremely productive map.

 

[`mud]

Ahhhh...arrows+infinity / t<0
~
'mud

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

The map is not the territory but it is, best I can tell from the above, an extremely productive map.

I didn’t really understand the request for peer-reviewed literature on the “violations” of conservation laws, until I thought a bit about it after some sleep and realized that it was likely because I wasn’t clear enough. It seems as if my original post was taken to assert that modern experiments have repeatedly found fundamental conservation laws (the conservation of energy, mass, momentum, and energy-momentum), probably because that is more or less exactly what I said. However, I meant the claim to be understood within the context of my main point: that these “laws” no longer hold because they can be demonstrated either by theories or by experiments. Rather, they are made to hold by developing or altering theories or by interpreting experimental outcomes so that these quantities are conserved.

Thus one will not find, in the peer-reviewed literature, the kind of violations I am talking about. Rather, they exist both in this literature (and more so in textbooks) implicitly, couched in technical descriptions that refer to the ways in which theories were altered or developed either to make these conservation laws hold or by assuming they do.

For example, the technical literature is replete with references to virtual processes/particles, Feynman diagrams, groups and symmetries, renormalization, etc. These all relate in a fundamental way to the conservation of energy and mass. For example, diagrams and their corresponding processes in particle physics, such as the emission of a “virtual photon” by an electron, are called “virtual” rather than just “photons” because their creation and annihilation violate conservation laws:

“In the fully interactive theory of quantum electrodynamics, two electrons do not interact instantaneously across a distance. They interact via the electromagnetic field, which transmits the disturbance of one electron to the other with finite velocity. One electron excites the electromagnetic field, and the excitation is absorbed by the other. The quanta of electromagnetic field excitation are called photons. Thus the two electrons are said to exchange virtual photons in their interaction. The photons are called virtual because their creation and annihilation in the interaction do no conserve energy and momentum." (pp. 191-2)
Auyang, S. Y. (1995). How is Quantum Field Theory Possible? Oxford University Press.

Ironically, these “virtual particles” also serve to ensure conservation laws are valid: "(1) virtual particles are (in some sense) not observable, and (2) they are introduced merely to balance the "books" so conservation laws hold." (emphasis added)
Weingard, R. (1982, January). Do Virtual Particles Exist?. In PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association (pp. 235-242). Philosophy of Science Association.


There isn’t much of a consensus regarding the sense in which virtual particles exist, although most physicists (particularly those closer to experimentalists) think they do as they are clearly involved in fundamental processes described by our most fundamental theories. The point is that experimental outcomes in any experiments in particle physics do not violate conservation laws in part because the energy and other quantities that are supposed to be conserved are made to be so by distinguishing unconserved quantities as “virtual”.

Another example of a different way in which these conservation laws are made to hold is built into the most famous equation from physics E=mc^2: "During his life Einstein used different methods to derive his equation...Conservation of energy is the key to his derivation in all cases." (p. 139).
Veltman, M. (2003). Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics. World Scientific.

In other words, the definition of energy and mass itself was derived using the law of the conservation of energy.

Finally, in the example I gave in my previous post, there is the way that fundamental conservation laws were used to structure modern particle physics and argue for the existence of elementary particles. Violations of the conservation of mass and energy were not taken as evidence that these laws don’t hold, but rather interpreted as evidence for the existence of particles that can’t be observed directly but can be inferred because of non-conserved quantities of mass/energy.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

You see, if time is not in quanta, then a simple calculation of any normal velocity (m/s) where (s) gets closer to zero will
give an infinite velocity (infinite energy). So there must be a minimum fixed amount of time.

Velocity is a vector quantity determined by taking the derivative ("instantaneous rate of change") of the position function. It is defined by infinitesimal quantities, not by units of time and distance (i.e., velocity isn't "m/s"). In modern physics velocity (or changes that are functions of it, like momentum) includes a fourth coordinate for time in a non-Euclidean space. In classical physics, it is defined as the change in position over an infinitesimal increment of time duration.