Merged Relativity+ / Farsight

[Farsight]

Indeed. I still look forward to an explanation of how a photon going round in a loop of any kind can give rise to something which resembles a point charge's field...

Here's something I prepared earlier:

I’ve talked about the electromagnetic field as twisted space, wherein the electric field is a “twist field”, and the magnetic field is a “turn field” view of the self-same thing whilst in motion through it. In order to effect a twist in space, we must change a distance in nearby space. For an electromagnetic wave to exist, there must be some transient change of distance in the local space. This will twist the surrounding space, effecting a simultaneous turning motion. Hence the photon is a propagating pulse of space in space moving through space. When we tie down the change of distance into the twist in space that we call charge, we’re creating the photon configuration that we call an electron. It’s like tying a knot in a string, only there is no string, just a distance variation travelling a knotted path so making for all-round twisted space.

The photon is an action, and an action cannot be an action without motion, just as a kick cannot be a kick if the leg is still. The action is still there, travelling continuously at c, but in a tight twisting loop. It’s going nowhere fast, with zero net motion with respect to the observer, so presenting momentum as inertia. This photon configuration is made out of massless intangible light, but it’s got mass, and it’s tangible too. It’s stable because it’s tied in a knot, and the möbius doughnut is such a knot. It’s the simplest knot, a trivial knot. A photon tied in such a knot now exhibits charge, mass, and spin ½ along with zitterbewegung jitter. So we call it an electron. Or a positron. And that’s all it takes to make matter out of energy.

To actually understand how the transient field-variation becomes a standing field, you will need paper, scissors, stickytape, and a pen. No kidding. Three-dimensional dynamical geometry is incredibly difficult to perceive without hands-on experience.

 

[Farsight]

You are stating that space is curved inside an electron.

Yep. Not that the electron has an inside or an outside. It's just a pulse of stress-energy going round and round through itself at c. This stress-energy is curved space. The dimensionality of energy is stress x volume. There's a curvature around the increase in volume.

My GR is rusty but as I recall any space that is curved enough that photons are in an orbit (caannot escape), is a black hole.

In GR, spacetime is curved, not space.

Sheesh, exactly like a crank tapping his head and proudly displaying his ignorance of scientific evidence.

No, exactly like the guy who's presenting scientific evidence instead of dismissing it. You should look up crank. Here it is on wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crank_(person) . Read what it says. You too Tubby. And sol. And KK. And others:

"this is the essential defining characteristic of a crank: No argument or evidence can ever be sufficient to make a crank abandon his belief."

Penny dropped yet? You're not the skeptics. I'm the skeptic. You're the cranks.

 

[Farsight]

Look, you just gave yet another answer that talks about evidence but doesn't give any. You're like a stuck record...

Irony was never your strong suit, was it? Here, dismiss this again along with the right-hand-rule, pair production and annihilation, creation and destruction of mass and charge, electron angular momentum, magnetic dipole moment, anomalous magnetic moment, etc etc:

"Then in the description of the field produced by the electron we see that the separation of the field into electric and magnetic force is a relative one with regard to the underlying time axis; the most perspicuous way of describing the two forces together is on a certain analogy with the wrench in mechanics, though the analogy is not complete".

 

[ctamblyn]

Yes and no. The photon is a distortion of space.

Spacetime curvature isn't the same as curved space. It's associated with a gradient in g_μv that results in curvilinear motion, the latter being labelled as curved spacetime. Did you read my cubic-lattice description of a photon? Think of the g_μv gradient as a pressure-gradient surrounding a small lemon-shaped region where space has been extended by 3.86 x 10 ^-13 m. This region is marked out by curved lattice lines: space is curved.

If there is an actual geometric "distortion" of space, there will be curvature associated with that (we could calculate this from the form of the metric tensor, for example). Using the GR field equations, we could then calculate the stress-energy tensor. It should then be a simple matter to see if this is consistent with the idea of a photon being a distortion of space.

But we can do some order-of-magnitude calculations straight away. As I showed before, if the photon has energy 511 keV, and we (just for a second) idealise it as a point particle, then the curvature produced by it will certainly be insignificant at distances much greater than 10^-57 m. Sol invictus then added that due to the spread-out nature of the photon - it is spread out over a distance of about 10^-12 m - the curvature would not become significant at any distance. The angular momentum would change the numbers only slightly.

So the geometric distortion (curvature) associated with a photon is extremely tiny - entirely negligible - at all scales, unless GR is wrong.

Therefore, I can only conclude that you must be talking about a purely topological distortion, with no actual curvature. Is this right?

 

[Kwalish Kid]

That'll be an embedded font problem. Try upgrading your Adobe Acrobat reader. I gave the background to demonstrate that "made of light" is serious physics. It goes back to Newton, who said "Are not gross bodies and light convertible into one another?" That's in Opticks, see query 30.

Yes, it is in the Opticks, in the alchemy section. There's serious science for you.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

Irony was never your strong suit, was it? Here, dismiss this again along with the right-hand-rule, pair production and annihilation, creation and destruction of mass and charge, electron angular momentum, magnetic dipole moment, anomalous magnetic moment, etc etc:

"Then in the description of the field produced by the electron we see that the separation of the field into electric and magnetic force is a relative one with regard to the underlying time axis; the most perspicuous way of describing the two forces together is on a certain analogy with the wrench in mechanics, though the analogy is not complete".

OK, but how does what Minkowski actually do, scientifically, have to do with your theory? All you have so far is one out-of-context quote where Minkowski brings up an analogy. What is the actual scientific evidence that you claim is on your side? Heck, what is the analogy, even?

 

[Farsight]

If the laws of physics take anything like the form they've been understood to take for the last two centuries, it can't. Period. End of story.

Nope.

Photons are quanta of the electromagnetic field.

But you can make two opposite electromagnetic fields out of a photon. And when it comes to messenger particles, have you actually seen any photons zipping back and forth between and electron and a proton in a hydrogen atom? What's that? No? Quel surprise.

They have exactly zero charge according to the classical Maxwell equations, according to experiment, and according to quantum field theory and the group theory it's based on.

Yep.

If photons in any configuration could carry charge it would mean nearly everything we thought we understood about physics is wrong - and we'd have no reason to call such a particle a "photon" at all, because it couldn't have anything to do with light.

That's why we call it an electron. The charge is the result of the configuration. And yes, everything you thought you understood about physics is wrong.

On the other hand we can (rather easily) measure the charge of an individual electron, and it's not zero. We know a lot about its charge - we can measure its electric field, the magnetic field it produces if it moves, its intrinsic magnetic dipole moment, it's lack of an electric dipole moment, etc. Those properties are totally inconsistent with it being made of photons.

LOL. You don't know anything about charge. You don't even know that the electron has an electromagnetic field. It doesn't have "an electric field", and it doesn't "produce" a magnetic field when it moves. An electric field is how you see an electromagnetic field when you have no relative motion. A magnetic field is how you see an electromagnetic field when you do. The electron's magnetic dipole moment is there because something is moving inside there. And the Dirac equation says it's moving at c. Now, what do we know that moves at c? What can it be? Seeing as the electron was created along with a positron in pair production, using light, what do you think it might be? Magic?

 

[Farsight]

Excellent analysis, and you're 100% correct. I would still have been interested in seeing at least an attempt at a mathematical justification from Farsight for his claim - perhaps show that with such-and-such a topology, with a fair wind, you can get something like a monopole field when field lines vanish down a conveniently-placed hole, or something (I'm making this up as I go - this isn't a serious proposal!). But as it stands, there's really nothing to get the teeth into here. Thus far it's just an idea, with neither a coherent mathematical foundation, nor quantitative contact points with experiment, and suffering with what appear to be rather serious consistency issues.

Read the papers I linked to, and get your teeth into them.

 

[edd]

No, exactly like the guy who's presenting scientific evidence instead of dismissing it. You should look up crank. Here it is on wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crank_(person) . Read what it says. You too Tubby. And sol. And KK. And others:

"this is the essential defining characteristic of a crank: No argument or evidence can ever be sufficient to make a crank abandon his belief."

Penny dropped yet? You're not the skeptics. I'm the skeptic. You're the cranks.

Wikipedia is not the dictionary. Regardless, Wikipedia says '"Crank" is a pejorative term used for a person who unshakably holds a belief that most of his or her contemporaries consider to be false.' - I don't think that applies to us. Most of our contemporaries don't accept your ideas, as you well know.

Watch it with the "crackpot" stuff - free speech in science does not protect you from libel.

I take it you're going to be retracting that now, given you've described everyone else in this thread as cranks and basically done exactly what you were telling other people to be careful of?

 

[Farsight]

It is still a bound state though, and there is still the unbound state - a normal photon. Can you show there is no amplitude for one to make a transition from one to the other? You'd have to show that the bound state was an eigenstate of the system's Hamiltonian.

Not offhand. I'd maybe start with Schrodinger's equation but say the wavefunction is the distortion rather than the probability of point-particle location.

Can you show that you get the right coupling between a free photon and a self-trapped one? Can you calculate scattering cross-sections? This is what you need to do to validate the model.

No. Not here and now. Maybe in a year. But noted. I'll pass this on.

On this point, I was hoping for a demonstration of how a self-trapped photon couples to itself to form a stable bound state. Photons don't directly interact with other photons - so what's the mechanism?

Photons do interact with photons, see http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PR/v155/i5/p1404_1 or search google. The mechanism is mutual rotation as one "spacewarp" passes another. I said something on this yesterday.

It seems to me that you need some pretty novel spatial topology to get something like the right spin, and to even have a hope of getting charge (even then there remain serious problems and further questions) but at the same time a 511 keV photon can't cause any signifiant spacetime distortion. I just don't see this happening with the laws of physics being anything like the ones we know and love.

The novely is in the E=hf where h is momentum x distance and the photon itself is a spatial distortion of 3.86 x 10^-13 m. It's symmetry that underlies the laws of physics - rotations and the like. For example we talk of Lorentz transformations that "rotate" time and space. Interesting little thing, the Lorentz group.

 

[edd]

Photons do interact with photons, see http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PR/v155/i5/p1404_1 or search google. The mechanism is mutual rotation as one "spacewarp" passes another. I said something on this yesterday.

ctamblyn said photons don't interact directly with photons. He's right. A vertex in a Feynman diagram in QED always has two fermions and one photon.

There's an inherent problem if you have fermions as a second-class citizen in your theory. QED is a powerful theory that is exceptionally difficult to compete with, you won't convince anyone that your idea works unless you can outdo it.

Also photons aren't spacewarps. The position of 'waves distorting space' has already been filled, and the job didn't go to a spin-1 boson.

 

[sol invictus]

Hostility towards a scientific consensus: A sign of a crank:

"... the mark of a true crank is hatred of the scientific consensus, be it consensus regarding the theory of evolution, the science that says homeopathy is impossible, anthropogenic global warming; various areas of science-based medicine; or the safety and efficacy of vaccines."

 

[Farsight]

Moreover, if the electron was "made" from other things (anything - whether we know of it or not), then excited states of these other things would also have to exist. There have been extensive and exhaustive searches for an excited electron state. And the results have been negative.

Interesting, Kalen. But maybe you're missing the quantum of quantum mechanics. The h in E=hf is action, action is momentum x distance, and it's always the same distance. It's an amplitude. It's the same regardless of frequency:

Only one wavelength works for the stable 2pi configuration that we call an electron. It's stable because it's essentially a knot. If it wasn't this configuration, it wouldn't be an electron.

Even if you want to talk about a single photon going around in a circle - looping on itself, with 2 pi phase difference from end-to-end - you would also have to have a state where a photon loops around with 4 pi phase difference - an excitation. Also, 6 pi, 8pi, .... What do these states correspond to?

Short-lived hadronic debris in the main. There are very few static stable particles with mass. What one might call knots. Set the neutrinos to one side because they're not knots, they're "running loops". You're left with the electron and the proton and their antiparticles. That's it. The next knot after the trivial knot is the trefoil knot, like the one below.

Trace it round starting from the bottom left and look at the directions of the crossing-over points. I say crossing-over rather just crossing points so you don't double-count. The crossing-over directions are up up and down. Now imagine it's made of rubber, and grab it, and pull at one of the loops. It gets harder and harder to stretch it out: bag model. Remind you of anything?

Some other things Farsight should read:

pdg.lbl.gov/2009/listings/rpp2009-list-quark-lepton-compositeness.pdf

http://pdg.lbl.gov/2009/reviews/rpp2009-rev-searches-quark-lep-compositeness.pdf

OK. The first one is a list, and the second one is more interesting, but I confess I only skimmed it. Quarks have no compositeness. They're just loops. So are leptons. See this bit?

"Phenomenologically, an excited lepton is defined to be a heavy lepton which shares leptonic quantum number with one of the existing leptons (an excited quark is defined similarly). For example, an excited electron e* is characterized by a nonzero transition magnetic coupling with electrons. Smallness of the lepton mass and the success of QED prediction for g–2 suggest chirality conservation, i.e., an excited lepton should not couple to both left- and right-handed components of the corresponding lepton."

I had a skim of this too: http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.0877. An electron's mass is there because that 511keV photon energy/momentum isn't travelling at c. It's moving at c, but it's like a photon in a mirror-box, it's "going nowhere fast". If the electron is heavier the wavelength is shorter, then it won't go twice round the amplitude. If it's a trivial knot, I don't know how you can excite it. It feels like trying to excite a rubber ring by giving it a kick. But I said a neutrino was a running loop. Think of loop in a whip. Its size isn't fixed. Sounds as if you could excite that. Cra-aack!

 

[ctamblyn]

Read the papers I linked to, and get your teeth into them.

I've read two of the papers you linked two, and I commented on them in the FTL thread. In summary, my criticism was that their calculations didn't show what they purported to show - especially with regard to the magnetic moment and charge.

When I get home from work perhaps I'll read through them again.

 

[Farsight]

Farsight, you sound like you're in need of an elementary relativity course.

In case you hadn't noticed, I'm giving the course.

The speed of a 3GeV neutrino is very high because 3 GeV is a lot of kinetic energy. Similarly, in the LEP accelerator at CERN, their 100 GeV electrons had speeds of 99.999999998% the speed of light because 100 GeV is a lot of kinetic energy compared to the rest mass.

At this point I throw the whiteboard eraser at you for not paying attention. Now listen up:

Rest mass is really "rest energy". It's a measure of the energy content of a system. In the simplest case, the system is motionless with respect to you, but it contains things that are moving. Again in the simplest case, it's a photon bouncing back and forth in a mirror box. The photon has no mass and it is not at rest, but it contributes to the "rest energy" of the system. This is because it is not moving in aggregate with respect to you, and hence its momentum appears as inertia. The latter concept is a very simple symmetry: if a moving cannonball impacts your midriff at 5mph, you say ooof because it has momentum. But if you impact a motionless cannonball at 5mph you say ooof because it has inertia. The difference depends on who is moving.

Following pair production the electron has mass for the same reason. As a system it is considered to be comprised of energy that is "at rest". When you add extra energy to move it, the kinetic energy is merely a measure of how fast this energy that is "at rest" is not at rest.

The speed of a few-eV neutrino is similar to the speed of a few x 10 MeV electron. (give or take depending on the neutrino mass, which has a large experimental uncertainty at present.)

Look at the bounds set by the photon and the electron. If the energy/momentum is moving at c, there is no mass, because the energy is not at rest. If the energy/momentum is not moving in aggregate, all of the energy/momentum appears as mass. Now take a 3GeV neutrino moving at close to c. What's going to happen to mass if it slows down?

The speed of an 0.01 eV-kinetic-energy neutrino---a typical tritium glow-stick or watch face will emit a handful of these per year---is low, just like the speed of a few-keV-kinetic-energy electron.

Mass is essentially a measure of how slow the energy is travelling, multiplied by the amount of energy.

The kinematics are exactly the same. When a neutrino (or electron) has E >> M it goes very fast, when it has E > M it goes sort of fast; when it has E = M it is at rest.

Show me a neutrino at rest. You can't. A neutrino can't be at rest, just like a photon can't be at rest. You know I said a neutrino is a running loop? A running loop can't be a running loop if it's not running.

 

[ctamblyn]

Photons do interact with photons, see http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PR/v155/i5/p1404_1 or search google. The mechanism is mutual rotation as one "spacewarp" passes another. I said something on this yesterday.

Edd's addressed this in post #351 - photons do not directly couple to photons, they only couple to charged particles (and gravity). That was what I was driving at.

The novely is in the E=hf where h is momentum x distance and the photon itself is a spatial distortion of 3.86 x 10^-13 m.

Personally I'd have said that a greater novelty was in having a photon trapping itself in a loop, in otherwise free space. YMMV.
But anyway, my point was that to get the correct transformation properties under SU(2), the electron (if we are to view it as a classical-type object like a looped path of light) can't just be an object sitting in normal, flat, simply-connected space. Hence the requirement for some pretty novel topology.

It's symmetry that underlies the laws of physics - rotations and the like. For example we talk of Lorentz transformations that "rotate" time and space. Interesting little thing, the Lorentz group.

Yes, the Lorentz group is fascinating, as is group theory (and representation theory) in general. The Lorentz group includes the usual spatial rotations - SO(3) - as a subgroup, and also contains other transformations called "boosts". Though boosts have certain formal similarities to rotations (but with an imaginary rotation angle), you shouldn't read too much into it. There's no "twisting" involved in a boost, it's more of a squash/stretch sort of transformation. Here's an example of a boost in the (x, t) plane (with c = 1 for the sake of readability):
[latex]
\begin{align*}
x' &= \gamma (x - vt) \\
t' &= \gamma (-vx + t) ,
\end{align*}
[/latex]
where gamma denotes (1 - v²)^1/2. If it were an actual rotation the off-diagonal coefficients would have opposite signs, but here they have the same sign. Also, if it were a rotation it would preserve x² + t², whereas (as we know) it actually preserves x² - t².

 

[Farsight]

Still waiting on that promised calculation of the electron rest mass/energy that was promised.

I can't calculate it. It varies, like the fine structure constant. I'm not joking about this. All the constants are running constants, and this even causes invariant mass to vary. Sounds odd I know, but it's simple once you see it. But you won't see it until you understand why things fall down and that factor of two difference between light and matter.

 

[ctamblyn]

I can't calculate it. It varies, like the fine structure constant. I'm not joking about this. All the constants are running constants, and this even causes invariant mass to vary. Sounds odd I know, but it's simple once you see it. But you won't see it until you understand why things fall down and that factor of two difference between light and matter.

I asked a question about this earlier. Here it is:

If you don't want to discuss it yet, OK. I'll get this question in in advance: there is a well-defined value for the effective alpha at a given energy scale. At which scale does your calculation apply?

 

[Farsight]

Did that. There's nothing wrong with what I wrote - I've written the equations for the situation where the charge and current density are zero, and I've used natural units. Or have I missed something?

The permittivity of free space. This is really important for when we get to gravity.

Goodness me, no. I've chosen to write the equations with E and B shown explicitly, as it's easier to follow the argument. If you'd prefer me to write it in terms of the e/m tensor field, fine - but it won't change the actual physical result at all. It's mathematically equivalent.

I don't want you to write it out in terms of the e/m tensor field, but I'd be grateful if you could refer to the electromagnetic field rather than separating out the E and B.

Your perhaps missing the point that in the absence of charged particles, Maxwell's equations possess a kind of symmetry between E and B. For every valid e/m wave solution (E(x,t), B(x,t)), there exists another equally valid, equally physically possible solution (B(x,t), -E(x,t)). Thus, wave solutions which look like electric monopoles are possible if and only if there also exist wave solutions which look like magnetic monopoles.

I dispute this. The E and the B are two aspects of the same field, you cannot have an electric monopole, it's an electromagnetic monopole. That's what an electron is.

 

[Farsight]

Sorry, you've misinterpreted that. The EM fine-structure constant is 1/137. That tells you the strength of E&M all by itself.

Another constant, alpha_s, gives the value of the strong coupling constant. It does that all by itself. The value runs to large values logarithmically at low energies---at the Q=100 GeV it's about 0.1, at Q=3 GeV it's about 0.3, so we commonly say that at low energies---the sort of MeV-scale energies we care about for hadron structure---it's in the ballpark of 1.0.

If you want to compare the strengths of the EM and strong interactions, you can compare the coupling constants. But 1/137 does NOT tell you anything about the strong interaction.

You said the fine structure constant has nothing whatsoever to do with the strong force. I pointed out that it tells you those relative strengths. It's not just a coincidence. But OK, maybe I misinterpreted what you said. Moving on...