Merged Relativity+ / Farsight

[Tubbythin]

Look it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_production. Check it out:

I'm perfectly familiar with pair production thanks. But near threshold energies, Compton scattering is more likely by at least an order of magnitude. In high Z materials the photoelectric effect is also more important.

Some of the +1022keV is lost to the nucleus, but not much because it's so massive and conservation of momentum applies. Take out the 1022keV to make the electron and positron, and if there's not much left the electron and positron don't fly apart fast enough. Then they attract one another and annihilate.

Like I said, 1.022 keV photons will very rarely pair produce.

You started with light, you performed pair production then annihilation, so you ended up with light. In between you had this electron in front of you, with its magnetic dipole moment. You can't have magnetic dipole moment unless there's some kind of rotation going on. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_magnetic_dipole_moment#Magnetic_moment_of_an_electron and this bit:

"From classical electrodynamics, a rotating electrically charged body creates a magnetic dipole with magnetic poles of equal magnitude but opposite polarity."

And look a little further down at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_magnetic_dipole_moment#Spin_magnetic_dipole_moment

"The magnetic moment of an electron is approximately twice what it should be in classical mechanics. The factor of two difference implies that the electron appears to be twice as effective in producing a magnetic moment as the corresponding classical charged body."

What's rotating in there? Nothing? Because electron spin is mysterious and "intrinsic", incompatible with classical physics, and it surpasseth all human understanding. And you know this because that's what your textbook says, and that's what you've been taught.

Its my understanding that the Dirac equation explains the idea of intrinsic spin very nicely. The fact that it doesn't agree with your classical intuition is your problem. Hell, it even predicted the existence of the positron.

So much so, that you can't even consider that spin 1/2 might have something to do with a moebius strip, and you can't even consider pair production and annihilation to wonder if it might just conceivably be light that's rotating in there. Me, I'm skeptical.

I can consider it. I can also rule it out as ridiculous.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

No it doesn't. The electron has an electromagnetic field. A moving electron doesn't generate a magnetic field. This is trivially revealed by the simple expedient of saying it's not the electron moving, but you. This is why relativity applies. That's why Minkowski talked of one field and two forces. Please get to grips with this. It's important.

It is important. But you are cherry-picking one thing Minkowski said and ignoring what Minkowski slearly meant by his statement as shown by the mathematical details of his piece. Minkowksi clearly would agree that a moving electron generates a magnetic field. What he menas by the statement you have cherry-picked is that whether or not the electron is moving and how much it is moving depends on the frame of reference used. Thus the magnetic field or the electric field in place in the region is wholly determined by the frame of reference used to describe the electron (and other relevant entities).

How many times do I have to say it, and how many quality references do I have to give before this very basic point sinks home? There is only one field.

Minkowski's paper is amazing, but your citation of it is obviously flawed, since you are misrepresenting the conclusions that Minkowski draws in that paper. If you want to convince people, you will have to show the mathematics directly, not through poor references to the work of others.

No, it isn't produced. What's there is an electromagnetic field. When you're in motion through it you see it as a magnetic field.

When the electron is not in motion, it is not in motion. But you cannot escape that you are making a gross error in one frame of reference by attempting to discuss only another frame.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

No. It's like a whole different language. I can't even give you a decent mathematical description of the electron. The electron is a photon moving in totally-curved space. Then an electron moves in an electromagnetic field because there's another layer of curvature on top, plus maybe translation motion too. To be honest, I don't know where to start.

So you admit that there is no reason to suppose that your model matches the wealth of experimental data on the electron.

 

[readme.txt]

I don't believe in time.

 

[kalen]

A 1022 keV photon will never pair produce in the vicinity of a stationary nucleus.

Sure, there's enough energy there to produce 2 particles of 511 keV/c^2 mass each, but there's no energy left over (ie they will be stationary), and it can be seen that the total momentum of the system is not conserved.

Total p before: 1022 keV/c

Total p after: 0 keV/c

 

[ben m]

A 1022 keV photon will never pair produce in the vicinity of a stationary nucleus.

Sure, there's enough energy there to produce 2 particles of 511 keV/c^2 mass each, but there's no energy left over (ie they will be stationary), and it can be seen that the total momentum of the system is not conserved.

Total p before: 1022 keV/c

Total p after: 0 keV/c

You've got the right idea, but you can't make the distinction between "almost" and "never" at the casual three-digits-of-precision level we're using here. As a matter of kinematics, when scattering off of a really heavy nucleus (say, lead) 1,022,000 eV is indeed just a hair above threshhold. (This close to threshhold you have to worry about atomic physics affecting the final state electron phase space, but never mind.)

 

[kalen]

You've got the right idea, but you can't make the distinction between "almost" and "never" at the casual three-digits-of-precision level we're using here. As a matter of kinematics, when scattering off of a really heavy nucleus (say, lead) 1,022,000 eV is indeed just a hair above threshhold. (This close to threshhold you have to worry about atomic physics affecting the final state electron phase space, but never mind.)

Sorry, my casual illustration was meant to imply E_photon = 2 m_e/c^2 exactly, which I believe was the point.

Could be wrong...I was only scanning through the thread quickly. If we are concerned with what happens above threshold, of course the phase space starts to open up.

 

[The Man]

You're just shuffling terms here without getting to the bottom of it, and for the benrfit of other readers: this relation is usually expressed in terms of energy rather than force, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-structure_constant#Physical_interpretations and note "The ratio of two energies: (i) the energy needed to overcome the electrostatic repulsion between two electrons when the distance between them is reduced from infinity to some finite d, and (ii) the energy of a single photon of wavelength λ = 2πd...". You'll notice pair production and annihilation has been mentioned. In electron/positron annihilation the result is usually two 511keV photons. What I'm talking about on this thread is the geometry of the electromagnetic field, and this will lead on to the geometry of the electron in terms of a self-trapped photon. This relationship comes back to geometry. Read the thrad to catch up.

Well I’m not sure what you are referring to as “shuffling” and I certainly understand the basis for all those terms.

Yes they are expressing it in terms of energy. You do understand that a force applied through a distance is a change in energy, don’t you? So there is nothing inconsistent between that reference and what I stated. One could also refer to it in terms of momentum, charge and even the gravitational attraction of two Planck masses. However since I was specifically referring to the force between two charges it is simply consistent to put that in terms of, well, force. What I don’t see in that reference you cited is “kissing numbers”, your geometric contrivances or a “running” value.


I read this thread from the beginning prior to my first post here, so ‘catching up’ is not an issue for me. Perhaps if your geometric contrivances actually got you the correct value it wouldn’t be an issue for you either and your value would not have to be “running” to “catch up” to the actual value.

 

[Farsight]

Sorry guys, I've been busy. I can only give so much time to conversation.

In any given reference frame, the EM field breaks down uniquely into an E field and a B field. This is a perfectly clear way to discuss it and you have no grounds for objecting.

Read my opening posts, again, I do have grounds for saying it's one field with a dualism. I've got Minkowski and Maxwell and Jefimenko backing me up on this.

If you weren't singling out the electric component of the EM field, and singling it out in the electron's rest frame, then you'd never have used the word "isotropy" to begin with. Looking at it in any other frame, there's nothing even isotropic (except azimuthally) about the EM field at all. Heck, if you're close enough to the source, classically speaking, the magnetic dipole term dominates.

It's an aspect, not a component. When you're at rest with respect to the electron you see the EM field as an electric field. Move past the electron and you see it as a magnetic field. Yes if you're small and you're up close you'd notice the magnetic dipole term, but that's only apparent because the electron has its own internalised rotational motion which supports what I've been saying. The isotropy applies because we do not observe ovoid EM fields from point charges. They're spherical.

 

[Farsight]

Then, to put it bluntly, you have nothing of any scientific value whatsoever..

LOL. To put it bluntly, you just dismissed experimental physics. It amazes me how people dismiss evidence and Einstein and anything that isn't in the mathematics they know and isn't what they were taught. The parallel with YECs dismissing fossils and strata and continental drift is marked.

Edit:

I'm guessing your unfamiliar with Maxwell's equations which concern the divergence and curl of electric fields and magnetic fields.

No, I'm familiar with them. They're describing the forces you feel but there's only one causative field, not two. That's why it's the electromagnetic field. Note that "Maxwell's equations" are Heaviside's equations. I've read the original Maxwell. You should too, then you'll appreciate that what I've been saying here comes from Maxwell. He didn't get the vortexes right, he thought they were in the intervening space, but once you understand all this it's amazing how close he was.

 

[Farsight]

Farsight, I think my previous questions are worth thinking about in some depth. If you want your model to have a fighting chance, you need to demonstrate that it does indeed yield Maxwell's equations plus the Lorentz force law in the classical limit - or at least yields the same observable behaviour. Also, the scattering of light by charged particles needs to be considered. These are the two most fundamental aspects of electromagnetism.

Noted, ct. I don't disagree. But even then I'm not sure it would receive adequate attention. If you don't mind I'd prefer not to go into that. It isn't "my model" by the way - I like to think I've contributed something, but in large part it's a synthesis drawn from a range of little-publicised papers.

Pair production... well, its nice to have a visual model, but remember hard numbers are king. When you do come to consider particle creation/annihilation processes, remember that electron-positron annihilation doesn't always give two photons. Your model should be capable of predicting the correct branching ratios for the different outcomes. IMHO consideration of high-energy processes could probably come later in your analysis - park it for now by all means - but it can't be glossed over forever. Just my 2p-worth.

Thanks for the considered input. Point taken. It's just that there's so much to do here I felt it would be more productive to recruit sufficient interest to motivate others to pick it up and run with it.

Edit:

I'd like to add a little more to my previous point. If you really want your theory to be given serious consideration, the best thing to do is predict some phenomenon that has yet to be observed, and is not predicted by the standard model. Are there any candidates? E.g. it seems to me that if the electron is not point-like, this should show up at suitably high energies.

Again it's not "my theory", I've just made some kind of a contribution. I've got quite a few predictions actually, though not that much related to the electron, and they lack formalism. But here's an interesting one - the eversion of an electron into a positron. It sounds like it totally breaks the rules, and I wouldn't stake my reputation on it, but it's the Dirac string trick. Hence I keep a sharp eye out for any positrons turning up where they aren't expected.

This is bordering on a purely semantic argument. If I observe an electron moving past me with uniform velocity, I can measure a magnetic field. I can also define it rigorously as the axial vector obtained from the space-space components of the e/m tensor field. It's every bit as real as the notion of energy, or momentum, or indeed velocity. They're not Lorentz invariant concepts, sure, but directly relate to measurements I can make in a particular reference frame.

Yes, this is a semantic argument. It all about meaning. You don't actually measure a magnetic field, you measure a magnetic force. You then define your magnetic field as a "force field". But the magnetic force field is only as real as a centripetal force field. The electromagnetic field is real. As I said earlier, the important distinction is separating what it is from what it does.

 

[Farsight]

(Not nothing: you've transferred momentum and one unit of spin to the nucleus.)

Very little momentum is transferred to the nucleus, and let's come back to photon spin. When the electron and the positron annihilate the typical result is two 511keV photons. There's nothing left. What was an electron is now a 511keV photon. That's it.

Secondly: so what about "there's nothing else there"? I can also emit a photon from a radio antenna. It crashes into another radio antenna and makes some electrons move up and down. "There's nothing else there" in this case too.

Huh? Electrons are there. This relates more to Compton scattering rather than annihilation, wherein a photon loses energy and causes electron motion.

The only thing there is to grasp about this is that photons do not carry any conserved quantum numbers.

Not so. Quantum numbers don't tell you how pair production works, what the electron is, or how it and the positron vanish when annihilated. They're essentially labels covering up gaps in your understanding.

Again, I will note that QED has been keeping track of every measurable detail of pair production perfectly well for 60+ years.

So explain how pair production works. When you can't, take a look through this thread again and see if you can work it out.

 

[Reality Check]

LOL. To put it bluntly, you just dismissed experimental physics.

LOL. The pot is calling the kettle black. Lets look at the experimental physics you are ignoring:

1. The electron has a measured charge. A photon does not.
2. The electron has a measured mass. A photon has no mass.
3. The electron has a measured magnetic moment. A photon has no magnetic moment.
4. The electron has a measured quantum mechanical spin of 1/2. A photon has a quantum mechanical spin of 1. There is no way that a spin of 1 can be made into a spin of 1/2.
   You could be ignorant enough to treat the spin classically, put the photon into a path that includes a twist and think that the average spin is 1/2. You would be wrong:
   1. The opposite spin to +1 is -1. An average would be 0.
   2. Classical spins need a force to change their orientation.

And your continuing misconception about the electromagnetic field: Electric and magnetic fields are not "dual" as in one or the other which you seem to imply.
The electromagnetic field is experimentally measured to have electric and magnetic components. The theory of electromagnetic fields as introduced following the formalism of Hermann Minkowski explicitly states that the electromagnetic field tensor describing the field has electric and magnetic components.
You can for example have both an electric and magnetic field from an electron. The presence of magnetic fields due to the motion of a charge do depend on the selection of the observer's frame of reference. You can select a frame in which there is no motion and so no magnetic field. You can select a frame where there is motion and so a magnetic field.

 

[Reality Check]

So explain how pair production works. When you can't, take a look through this thread again and see if you can work it out.

I can answer this for ben m: pair production.
I am amazed that you are ignorant of Wikipedia and its many articles .

 

[Farsight]

I wasn't giving a lecture on relativistic energy-momentum conservation, I was pointing out that you misuse (or used oddly) the word "inertia".

There really is a symmetry between momentum and inertia.

But you're claiming to put one photon into a knot with itself and get a charge.

Conservation of charge applies because you can't impose a rotation without experiencing a counter-rotation. Hence pair production applies. One photon splits to form to knots with opposite chirality.

There's no current in a photon. Just fields.

Wrong. Think about magnetic dipole moment and my description of the electron as a self-trapped photon. The photon really is alternating current going this way ↑ then that way ↓ as it passes by.

I don't see any way in which that is relevant to your theory.[/QUOTE]How can you possibly dismiss Maxwell? The screw mechanism is crucial. Try out the right-hand-rule reamer and you'll see why it's relevant.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

Read my opening posts, again, I do have grounds for saying it's one field with a dualism. I've got Minkowski and Maxwell and Jefimenko backing me up on this.

Umm...no. You have cherry-picked quotations from them that seem to back you up if one doesn't actually read the mathematical statements of these three authors. You haven't made any attempt to address any of Minkowski's details, details clearly at odds with what you have said.

LOL. To put it bluntly, you just dismissed experimental physics.

Really? You are the one making grand claims that you admit you cannot back up with experiment.

Yes, this is a semantic argument. It all about meaning. You don't actually measure a magnetic field, you measure a magnetic force. You then define your magnetic field as a "force field". But the magnetic force field is only as real as a centripetal force field. The electromagnetic field is real. As I said earlier, the important distinction is separating what it is from what it does.

But how can we believe that your claims have anything at all to do with electromagnetism if we cannot use them to predict what anything does? As you seem to have admitted in this thread (as you have elsewhere) you have absolutely no idea how to do the proper mathematics.

 

[ben m]

Very little momentum is transferred to the nucleus, and let's come back to photon spin. When the electron and the positron annihilate the typical result is two 511keV photons. There's nothing left. What was an electron is now a 511keV photon. That's it.

Nope---it was both an electron and a positron, and now it's two photons. (Or three photons, or a neutrino-antineutrino pair, or mu mubar, or q qbar, etc., depending on the initial state.) You can't chop the initial state in half and expect it to make sense---it doesn't.

This relates more to Compton scattering rather than annihilation, wherein a photon loses energy and causes electron motion.

Yep. So why are you perfectly happy for photons to be created and destroyed in Compton scattering (having nothing to do with photons zipping into the internal structures of particles)---and at the same time insist that photon creation/destruction in e+e- pair processes must tell you something about the internal structure of the electron?

Not so. Quantum numbers don't tell you how pair production works, what the electron is, or how it and the positron vanish when annihilated. They're essentially labels covering up gaps in your understanding.

So explain how pair production works. When you can't, take a look through this thread again and see if you can work it out.

How pair production works? A quantum-mechanical photon wavefunction comes along and overlaps with another quantum-mechanical photon wavefunction. The two wavefunctions have some nonzero overlap with the quantum-mechanical wavefunction of an e+ e- pair so there is some probability that they collapse into that pair. (All of the Feynman diagram stuff you've ever seen---if indeed you've gotten that far---is in fact a shorthand way of organizing the algebra in otherwise-fairly-ordinary quantum mechanics.)

Sorry, Farsight, if you think that is gibberish than you also must think that Compton scattering is gibberish---it's the exact same process in every possible respect. (Calculate the QM wavefunction of an incoming photon and an incoming electron; if that overlaps with the wavefunction of an electron moving in a different direction, then the electron can collapse into that new wavefunction.) And everything else.

(This is the Nmpteenth time I've seen a mainstream-physics-is-wrong claim which reinvents the word "how" as a vague philosophical dunce-hat which placed on any physics claims whatsoever except the ones the crackpot himself is making.)

 

[ben m]

There really is a symmetry between momentum and inertia.

Momentum is momentum; I can measure it in any reference frame you like. I can measure p=0 in some frame and p != 0 in another. Inertia is ... well, it's basically rest mass, maybe you'd like to formulate it as relativistic mass, but whatever it is it's something that again you can measure in any reference frame you like.

Conservation of charge applies because you can't impose a rotation without experiencing a counter-rotation. Hence pair production applies. One photon splits to form to knots with opposite chirality.

It's odd that you're so confident of that for a theory that you have absolutely no way to evaluate. What you should be saying is "I think it will work out that conservation of charge applies because ..."

Anyway, it's gibberish. I can fire all sorts of probes into the center of an electron. I can scatter a neutrino off an electron (a process which flips its spin) and optionally turn it into a muon; I can scatter an electron off of a proton and make a neutrino plus a neutron; I can do all sorts of things which obviously deliver a swift kick---much swifter than mere e+ e- annihilation--- to whatever the heck was once inside the electron. Yet no experiment ever performed has managed to tweak charge conservation. You've invented some sort of knot structure completely arbitrarily guessed that this knot gives you charge. Then you equally arbitrarily say that the knot can't change signs under any stimulus whatsoever. Then you---again, completely arbitrarily, lacking any physical details whatesoever---guess that the knot can annihilate with an counter-knot.

You know what that is, Farsight? You're inventing a conserved quantum number. The same thing you were criticizing about mainstream physics. (Except your invention does not, as far as I can tell, actually yield the quantum number you want it to, nor does it conserve it.)

Wrong. Think about magnetic dipole moment and my description of the electron as a self-trapped photon. The photon really is alternating current going this way ↑ then that way ↓ as it passes by.

There is no current in a photon; there's an E field and B field. The time-dependencies make displacement currents, not real currents. But seriously, at this point you've already left Maxwell's Equations far, far behind. "A photon going in a circle" is not an actual solution for Maxwell's Equations to begin with. "a photon making AC currents which look like a monopole from far away" is explicitly forbidden by Maxwell's Equations.

 

[ben m]

Sorry guys, I've been busy. I can only give so much time to conversation.

Read my opening posts, again, I do have grounds for saying it's one field with a dualism. I've got Minkowski and Maxwell and Jefimenko backing me up on this.

Don't try to scare off criticism with big names. Everyone has agreed that it is "really one field"---not one field vector, rather one electromagnetic field tensor---which manifests in a perfectly clear and easy-to-discuss way as an E vector and a B vector. But any time someone mentions the E field you get all huffy. This is dumb.

It's an aspect, not a component. When you're at rest with respect to the electron you see the EM field as an electric field. Move past the electron and you see it as a magnetic field.

Actually, the moving observer sees both an E and a B field in this case.

 

[Farsight]

I'm not making myself understood, perhaps. For a given length L of closed twisted path, any wave with a wavelength L/n (for n=1, 2, ...) could wrap itself around that path without interfering destructively (assuming we can get photons to travel in such a way in the first place). The energy of the nth mode would be nhc/L (h is Planck's constant, c the speed of light). The mass of the system is given by this energy. Thus, if an electron-like particle is possible, with the correct mass, then so is a particle with n times the electron's mass for each n. There's no way to prevent it unless the higher-frequency photons somehow escape the binding mechanism.

You're perhaps missing the important "nothing else there" point - the photon makes the photon travel in that closed path. Planck's constant applies to photons as per E=hf, and h has the dimensionality of momentum x distance. Think of LIGO trying to measure a gravitational wave via the lengthening/shortening of the arms, and think of this extension as "displacement current". In a nutshell the extension is common, and it's a distance - photons have the same amplitude. So only one wavelength will do to make a photon travel entirely through itself. That's why electrons come in one size only. There are some issues with ultra high energy photons, but that's another one for another day.

Postulating tighter loops multiplies the issue - for each size loop you'll have another series of modes. This is, of course, assuming a one-dimensional loop. Presumably you envisage a 2- or 3-dimensional volume in which the photon moves. The number of modes increases accordingly - I'm sure Wiki has an article on waves in a 3d box, to get an idea - and each mode would be an observable particle in your model. Now, this would be a good thing if it meant your theory predicted the correct masses for the mu and tau leptons (relative to the electron mass, presumably), but the lepton masses don't follow such a simple progression AFAIK. So instead you need a mechanism for inhibiting these modes, and perhaps another mechanism for explaining the mu and tau.

Yes, this concerns 3-dimensional volumes, and I did mean to look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koide_formula. But remember how many stable static particles there are: Two, times two antiparticles. We haven't found a stable pentaquark yet, or anything else that corresponds to this: http://www.knotplot.com/knot-theory/torus_xing.html.