Chronology | Current Month | Current Thread | Current Date |
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] | [Date Index] [Thread Index] | [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] | [Date Prev] [Date Next] |
The idea occurred to me as I was reading about the Bernoulli effect,
notably at Mark Mitchell's website:
http://home.earthlink.net/~mmc1919/venturi.html ;
and while pondering Mark's "jostling demo" at:
http://home.earthlink.net/~mmc1919/venturi_discuss_nomath.html
I happened upon Phys-L as I was searching Scirus for extant research onthe
relationship between the Bernoulli effect and relativistic timedilation,
in an attempt to confirm/disconfirm a recent "brainwave" of mine. Imembers
haven't yet found what I was looking for, so I turn to Phys-L list
for a little assistance.
I particularly liked the idea of describing the net (anisotropic)pressure
Armed with this "revelation", even a naive viewing of the "jostling demo"
leads directly to a visceral realisation that Bernoulli's principle is a
simple and direct consequence of the conservation of energy and momentum.
Perhaps a little too simplistically, I can imagine how matter particlesin
might be semi-permanent higher-order vortex-like structures in some or
other elastic, fundamentally particulate quantum 'foam'; the individual
Planck-sized corpuscles of which jiggle about more or less energetically
some quasi-random "Brownian" motion as might be described statisticallyby
Maxwell's kinetic theory and speed distribution equations. I can furthermight
imagine that these complex, feedback-reinforced solitonic structures
form local minima in the energy distribution within the quantum foam, andquantum
therefore be in more or less stable, local equilibrium states. And,
granted these imaginings, I can further imagine how these higher-order
structures might themselves move more or less randomly through this
substrate, both propelled and impeded only by the quasi-random Brownian
motion of other such structures, and the various motions of the quantum
foam itself. Although on the wrong scale and quite the wrong shape, this
is not too unlike how I imagine a tornado to move through the dynamic
substrate of atmospheric air molecules.
Anyway, my thoughts then wandered even further, to General Relativity. I
have recently read a little about how the apparent
lengthening of theof
lifetime of high-speed muons created in the upper atmosphere is evidence
relativistic time dilation. And, indeed, Einstein's relativisticto
description of the effect in terms of a Lorentzian transformation seems
fit the observed data.
But I note that this is just to describe the effect of time dilation, and
not to provide a causal mechanism for it.
And so I thought, what if the
apparent lengthening of the muon lifetime is not due to some or other
metaphysical stretching of time, but the rather more practical product of
some kind of Bernoulli effect?