
On Noether's theorem and conservation.
Date: Sunday, August 28, 2005 @ 18:08:02 UTC Topic: Science
Eric (ubavontuba) - Free_energy yahoo group writes: Group,
Newton's laws (paraphrased, with thanks to J.F.):
I. Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.
II. The relationship between an object's mass, m, its acceleration, a, and the applied force, F, is F = ma. Acceleration and force are vectors; in this law the direction of the force vector is the same as the direction of the acceleration vector.
III. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
These laws also happen to be interpreted as, or are related to, the laws of conservation. Emmy Noether is probably most famous for fully developing the laws of conservation.
Emmy Noether's theorem is a complex piece of math that basically boils down to a proof that symmetrical systems exhibit conservation and that conserved systems exhibit symmetry.
"Conservation" basically means that you have what you have and you can't get what you don't have without tapping an outside source.
This applies to matter/energy (cannot be created or destroyed), motion (both angular and linear) and force (all forces exhibit symmetry (i.e. action and reaction, positive and negative, etc.)).
It also means that in an isolated system, you cannot convert one form of conservation into another. That is that energy cannot be converted into a net momentum, angular momentum cannot be converted into a net linear momentum, linear momentum cannot be converted into a net angular momentum and momentum cannot be converted into net energy.
Of course common everyday systems totally violate the conservation laws on a local level and cause the appearance that these laws are counterintuitive. This is because on Earth, everything reacts with the Earth and is therefore not isolated. It's just hard to perceive this because the Earth is so vast that we forget that it suffers reactionary forces to all of our industry without apparent effect.
The interpretation and "proof" of these laws (including Newton's first law) are based on OBSERVATION. That is that symmetry and conservation are observed, and asymmetry and non-conservation have not been observed in isolated systems.
Well, except for one exception... one huge and obvious exception. In fact, it is the biggest exception possible, for it is the universe itself.
Supposedly, the Big Bang was an isolated system that one would expect the law of conservation to apply to... so much so that this has concerned scientists for some time now.
The universe is made of normal matter. Everywhere we look, we see normal matter. Conservation would demand that it be equal parts matter and antimatter (like with virtual particles). It isn't. This is called the Charge-Parity violation (CP violation).
At first, scientists supposed that about half of the galaxies we see must be predominately antimatter (supposedly due to a chaotic mass distribution during the Big Bang). Scientists have looked for telltale signs of this supposed antimatter. They have looked for gamma-ray signatures of matter/antimatter collisions... and found nothing.
This "problem" has led to the "multiverse" hypothesis that basically says that there may be other "bubble" universes of which ours is but one bubble. It is supposed that during the Big Bang the antimatter may have predominately gone the other way and formed its own bubble universe. They surmise this happened during a period of faster-than- light expansion.
Hmm, how could they know though? Maybe all the bubble universes are normal matter. What then? Maybe there are no bubbles. What then? All they are doing are forming non-provable hypothesis to "fix" this apparent inconsistency.
The universe is large enough that by itself it should have had an average and equal distribution of matter and antimatter. To assume otherwise would be to assume so much energy release from the Big Bang that our universe could not possibly have cooled as much as it has in its 13+ billion years of existence. The energy of the universe's expansion as it exists is mind boggling and pretty well fits what we would expect from extrapolation since the Big Bang. There just isn't room for that much more energy.
So, maybe there was an exception to the conservation laws. There certainly is an exception in the existence of our isolated universe "bubble." Of course this might only work under the enormous and poorly understood energies of the moment of the Big Bang, but perhaps it also means that asymmetry might just plain be possible in isolated systems. Perhaps we just haven't observed the right phenomenon/phenomena?
Free energy is everywhere! The whole universe is made of it!
Eric (ubavontuba)
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