His Fraudulency

Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.

All realistic hope lies in the audits, and perhaps the Lindell lawsuit (that will depend on how honestly the system responds to the suit).

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

Physics?

It looks like the next couple of months aren’t going to be as busy I had thought so I can do some physics posts. See below.

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

(Paper) Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $1788.30
Silver $26.53
Platinum $1094.00
Palladium $2874.00
Rhodium $19,400.00

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $1808.90
Silver $26.19
Platinum $1105
Palladium $2903
Rhodium $18,500

UPDATE: Apparently paper prices are getting closer to reality. I was quoted $125 over spot for an American Gold Eagle (the modern day one ounce bullion piece).

Gold is slowly climbing again, Silver down a touch, Platinum and Palladium up a bit, Rhodium is down. In fact at the beginning of the day today it was at $17,500 but jumped a grand sometime before close.

Max Planck: Physics Starts Getting Weird

Introduction

This is going to start to tie together a few dangling threads out there, notably Hertz’s discovery of the photoelectric effect (how even dim, weak ultraviolet light would help the spark jump the gap but glaringly bright visible light would not), and the puzzle of why black body radiation had a “hump” in its frequency distribution (instead of just going to infinity with higher frequency/lower wavelength).

To recap, we knew of the existence of X rays, ultraviolet, infrared and radio, in addition to “ordinary” visible light.

Also, to avoid getting bogged down in Spockian numbers specified to nine decimal places, I’m going to round a lot of things off.

Max Planck

Planck was born in 1858 in Kiel, Holstein (now the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, it’s the area immediately adjacent to modern-day Denmark).

He was raised as a geek, and ended up teaching at the Humboldt University in Berlin. In 1894 he decided to take up the black body radiation problem. Why did it behave the way it did?

To recap, black body radiation is the glow given off by hot objects (in the idealized case that the hot object is perfectly black). As shown in the figure below, if you plot the wavelength of the light versus intensity you get a hump that’s steep on the high frequency side (left side of the diagram), and less steep on the low frequency side. The peak of the curve tends towards blue (leftward) the higher the temperature, and the height of the curve increases very rapidly as the temperature increases.

The best physicists could do as of 1894 (when Planck put his shoulder to the wheel) is design a theory (the Rayleigh-Jeans law) that predicted the distribution should look like the black line in the figure. It’s not a bad match at the low frequencies (longer wavelengths, at the far right) but is totally, ridiculously wrong at higher frequencies/lower wavelengths; the prediction was basically that the higher the frequency the more should be radiated at that frequency. Since you can’t get a sunburn (caused by ultraviolet) off of a wood fire–because the wood fire is not super hot and emits no UV–we know that’s not actually what’s going on here.

An alternate law, Wien’s Law, was proposed by Wilhelm Wien in 1896 (after Planck began his work). It worked well at high frequencies and was wrong at low frequencies. It was a much better fit, but not perfect; it was a bit too low. Alas this diagram is “backwards” (compared to 10-1) with high wavelengths on the left.

Wien’s Law looks pretty close, but it’s not right-on, so there was still a problem here.

Max Planck’s goal was to solve the problem, to come up with a formula that gave results consistent with what was actually measured. And since the line that’s “true” in figure 10-3 is labeled “Planck” you can probably guess that he ultimately succeeded.

But not without some trials and tribulations. He tried to imagine the atoms in the glowing object as little oscillators, because that way he could apply entropy to an ideal oscillator. He came up with a proposed law (the Wien-Planck law) in 1899…that, alas, turned out not to match measurements either.

In October of the next year, 1900, he did succeed in writing a law that described experimental results well. This derivation avoided any sort of statistical mechanics, which Planck had an aversion to.

Statistical mechanics was a fairly new thing at the time, it studied large assemblies of microscopic units in a statistical manner; in fact modern thermodynamics relies heavily on it. But in 1900 it was still considered suspect by many, including Max Planck. It had philosophical and physical implications that were distasteful to many.

But Planck, having got a law that looked good on paper…couldn’t for the life of him explain why it worked–and without some explanation of that, it was interesting that his law could match what was seen, but not enlightening. Over the course of the next few months, he did finally, in desperation, decide to accept statistical mechanics as a tool, incorporating Boltzmann’s statistical interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics.

This is like a dedicated Marxist coming to the dawning realization that capitalism works and Marxism cannot. That is how desperate Planck was to try new things to figure this out. It was, as he said, “an act of despair … I was ready to sacrifice any of my previous convictions about physics.”

His derivation started with an assumption that seemed totally whacky, and had no obvious basis in reality, but it was: Energy could only be emitted in multiples of a certain base amount. That amount was:

E = h ν

(As a reminder ν is the lower case Greek letter “nu” and stands for the frequency of the light being emitted.)

This meant that there wasn’t just a minimum amount of energy, but that any amount of energy had to be an integer multiple of this amount. It’s sort of like money…you don’t see fractions of a cent. Any amount can be expressed as a whole number of cents, but never is there a fraction of a cent (not withstanding nominal US gasoline prices that end in 9/10 of a cent without fail).

This minimum amount was termed a “quanta.”

But note that it depends on the frequency. So at, say, 600 THz (yellow light) the minimum quanta would be one size, but at 300 THz (infrared), it would be half as much. It’s rather like exchanging your dollars for euros and now the minimum amount you can work with is the Euro cent rather than our cent.

The minimum “quanta” of energy not only depended on the frequency it would be radiated at, but also on this new number, h, which is a constant, now known as Planck’s constant, and it’s one of the most important numbers in physics:

h = 6.62607015×10⁻³⁴ J s

It’s going to turn up again, and again, and again from here on out.

The units are joule seconds, not joules per second (which is power measured in watts). When you multiply this by a frequency (which is cycles per second) the seconds cancel out and leave you with energy in joules.

In fact, it’s really joules per cycle or per hertz, i.e., one cycle of the wave of the light, but the cycle is expressed as one over seconds (1/s) so when you divide by that, you’re multiplying by seconds.

(As usual when a scientist brings a new constant into things, Planck didn’t actually know the value of h; he just realized that there had to be a value to this number. Today, of course, we know it precisely, because the latest iteration of the metric system actually defines a number of physical constants, including h, to have specific values, and the size of the units involved is set by that action. Thus we have the meter…which is defined to be the distance traveled by light (in a vacuum) in 1/299792458 of a second. Planck’s constant is set to the number above, and from that, we get a definition of the kilogram [because a joule second is a kg m²/s; we have a defined second and a defined meter, so that gives us a defined kilogram]. Before 2019, however, the kilogram was still defined as the mass of a certain metal cylinder kept in a vault in France…a definition which was starting to cause problems, because exact copies made decades ago were no longer the same mass, making one wonder if any of those cylinders was not changing.)

Even with typical visible light, yellow light in particular, having a frequency of about 600 THz, or 6×10¹⁴ Hz, you can see that doing the multiplication is going to leave you with a very small number, basically about 4×10^-19 joules. Given that a joule is very roughly the energy it takes to lift an apple a meter, this is a very small amount of energy. And as mentioned, the size of the “quanta” depends on the frequency; twice the frequency, twice as much energy in a quanta.

He wasn’t the only one who was skeptical nor was he the most skeptical, Lorentz, Rayleigh and Jeans tried setting h to zero in their work, i.e., meaning that there was no minimum energy unit. That was too conservative even for Planck, who compared Jeans’s inflexibility to Hegel’s: “I am unable to understand Jeans’ stubbornness – he is an example of a theoretician as should never be existing, the same as Hegel was for philosophy. So much the worse for the facts if they don’t fit.”

But, at the time (1900) Planck did regard this as a mere formalism with no real basis in reality, much as there were, at that time, still holdouts in chemistry who thought atoms didn’t really exist, but were convenient conceptual tools. The quantum concept was convenient but didn’t represent something that really existed.

That’s what he thought at the time. Today, we look upon Planck’s use of this concept as the birth of quantum mechanics–which, if it were wrong, would mean that semiconductors don’t work and you are not reading this on a computer screen.

One last wrinkle here; as I mentioned, the constant is “per cycle” which is regarded as analogous to going all the way around a circle. That’s 2π radians. But many formulas (like for angular momentum and rotation rate, when expressed in terms of angles) operate in radians, so there’s a version of Planck’s constant that accounts for this and is expressed in a “per radian” sense instead of a “per cycle” sense. It’s written ħ (a crossed h, called “h bar” in speaking), and is h/2π. This symbol is seen, if anything, even more often than h in modern physics.

But anyway, back to 1900.

Planck was banging on the door to modern physics, unwilling as yet to open it.

Soon, very soon, others would kick the damn thing down.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!