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Why is there so much crackpot physics?

Farsight said:
And he knows full well that it doesn't predict integer spin,
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Yes it does. Google "orbital angular momentum in quantum mechanics".

Farsight said:
zero charge, ...
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Yes it does. Google "what charge does a neutral particle have".

All of which leaves aside the fact that photons don't do that. Theory says they can't, and no-one has ever observed them doing so. And forget pointing to that optics paper again, as you know perfectly well it doesn't support your claim.
 
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Luxon theory:

http://www.tardyon.de/

There are some familiar patterns, including the claim that (paraphrasing) "it's not my model, it's what the standard model really says", and the claim that massive particles are made of massless particles whizzing around at the speed of light in tiny loops. It even references the Williamson/van der Mark paper, though without accepting their model of the electron.

Unlike Relativity+, there is no outright Higgs-denial from what I can see - it is still taken to be the mechanism by which fundamentally massless leptons/quarks appear to have rest mass. Nor are all luxons taken to be photons (though photons are a type of luxon, there are others). It is a mystery to me how this world-view accommodates the Higgs' rest mass, though.
 
Kwalish Kid said:
Do you also endorse the remainder of Newton's alchemy?
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Oh give me strength. Newton was aware that there is conversion of matter to energy in something as simple as a fire. It isn't a high percentage, indeed it's very low, but that's what happens.

But Kwalish Kid dredges up a way to dismiss it, along with Newton himself, dissing the guy as an alchemist. The father of modern physics.

Thunk.

That's my head hitting my desk.
 
Farsight said:
Oh give me strength. Newton was aware that there is conversion of matter to energy in something as simple as a fire. It isn't a high percentage, indeed it's very low, but that's what happens.

But Kwalish Kid dredges up a way to dismiss it, along with Newton himself, dissing the guy as an alchemist. The father of modern physics.

Thunk.

That's my head hitting my desk.
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I find it funny that you respond to this post of mine, rather than any of my direct questions about your theories which we both know you cannot answer, and you still make yourself look like an ignorant fool

Farsight, all you have for your arguments is textual analysis and you have failed to do any on Newton or this particular passage you seem to like. It is well known that Newton was interested in alchemy. That the quote you love is from the alchemical remarks of Newton has been pointed out to you many times on the internet. A Google search (which you love) reveals many examples from many people.

In the last decade, Newton scholars have made available many, many more of Newton's alchemical notes.

So, despite your claims to be knowledgeable about Newton, you fail to know much about him. This is not surprising. Now we know that you are only endorsing this position of yours on Newton because of one single sentence, taken out of context. You clearly know nothing of Newton's work or thought. You have again revealed yourself as woefully ignorant, peddling your falsehoods with a false sense of superiority.

Newton was very careful to distinguish between (alchemical) speculation and scientific conclusions. He did this on the basis of evidence. All you appear to do is make a conclusion and pick out individual sentences or passages that appear (to you) to support your position while ignoring the work that it takes to produce evidence.
 
edd said:
Look, that's not evidence for the idea that electrons are actually photons.
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Electrons are electrons. Positrons are positrons. Photons are photons. And all the above is hard scientific evidence that we can make electrons and positrons out of photons. How do you think that happens edd? Do you think the photons just pop out of existence and the electron and positrons pop into existence? Like magic?

edd said:
Certainly not evidence when the competing idea is that electrons are fundamental particles
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It's certainly evidence that electrons aren't fundamental. You can create 'em.

edd said:
...that aren't made of photons, but which can be destroyed in interactions with other kinds of particles in certain conditions.
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What, you mean like in annihilation with a positron? And the typical result is two gamma photons? The electron and positron just pop out of existence and pop, hey presto, photons. Magic!

edd said:
You really do seem strangely obsessed...
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I'm not obsessed, I'm responding to some badmouthing.

edd said:
...with what some particles are made of - it could be the case that the things we think of as fundamental particles are not made of anything smaller and that the question 'what is an electron made of' simply does not have a useful answer.
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It isn't. It's crucial. People who don't understand the electron end up dreaming up fantasies like SUSY, then the public and politicians become disillusioned and feel that HEP is useless, and in the end physics suffers.

edd said:
Why not just accept them as first class citizens of the subatomic world, just like photons and all the other particles of the standard model?
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Because I'm not going to sit on my hands whilst physics withers on the vine. And because this is the key. It isn't some little metal thing lying on the ground. Hence ben doesn't recognise it. But sadly for BurntSynapse, it's the bullet. Matter can't travel faster than light because of the wave nature of matter. Because light can't travel faster than light.
 
Farsight said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_production
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_magnetic_dipole_moment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein–de_Haas_effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_diffraction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron–positron_annihilation
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Most amusing. Let's take the penultimate one, "atomic orbital". In particular, let's talk about the Lamb shift in hydrogen.

In the absence of an external magnetic field, the 2S1/2 - 2P1/2 energy difference in hydrogen is (expressed as a frequency) (1057.845 ± 0.003) MHz.

Using standard QED, you get a prediction of (1057.844 ± 0.004) MHz. To do this you need to take into account several classes of perturbations: vacuum fluctuations (contributing the lion's share, about +1086 MHz), vacuum polarisation (contributing about -27 MHz), and various other small effects (about another -1 MHz).

That's what it looks like when a real theory passes an experimental test.

So, your mission is: Explain how Relativity+ allows us to predict the Lamb shift to equal or better accuracy.
 
sol invictus said:
Photons travel faster than electrons. You say electrons are light, so that's light traveling faster than light. But you also say light can't to that. Oops!
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Oops yourself, and pay attention next time. I say electrons are made out of light as demonstrated by pair production, and their magnetic moment and the Einstein-de Haas effect demonstrates that something is going round and round. What could it be? Mathematics? Don't think so. It's light, sol. Or wavefunction if you prefer. Or energy. Whatever you want to call it, it propagates at c. Whether it's going round and round or not, it propagates at c. And when it's going round and round, it can't propagate linearly at c as well, now can it?
 
ctamblyn said:
Most amusing. Let's take the penultimate one, "atomic orbital". In particular, let's talk about the Lamb shift in hydrogen.

In the absence of an external magnetic field, the 2S1/2 - 2P1/2 energy difference in hydrogen is (expressed as a frequency) (1057.845 ± 0.003) MHz.

Using standard QED, you get a prediction of (1057.844 ± 0.004) MHz. To do this you need to take into account several classes of perturbations: vacuum fluctuations (contributing the lion's share, about +1086 MHz), vacuum polarisation (contributing about -27 MHz), and various other small effects (about another -1 MHz).

That's what it looks like when a real theory passes an experimental test.

So, your mission is: Explain how Relativity+ allows us to predict the Lamb shift to equal or better accuracy.
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No it isn't. My mission is to hold your nose to the grindstone and force you to examine the hard scientific evidence that's right there in front of you.
 
Farsight said:
No it isn't. My mission is to hold your nose to the grindstone and force you to examine the hard scientific evidence that's right there in front of you.
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It hardly surprises me that Relativity+ is not up to the task.

That's what it looks like when a theory fails.
 
Farsight: Speaking of unanswered questions, you still haven't addressed this:

ctamblyn said:
Incidentally, Farsight, you promised us a proper counterargument to the Higgs mechanism, a simplified version of which I described to you here:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=9196293#post9196293

Aside from what I presume was a little joke here...

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=9199511#post9199511

...in which you acted as though you'd misread both your original question and my reply, that response is still outstanding.
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Farsight said:
Oops yourself, and pay attention next time. I say electrons are made out of light as demonstrated by pair production, and their magnetic moment and the Einstein-de Haas effect demonstrates that something is going round and round. What could it be? Mathematics? Don't think so. It's light, sol. Or wavefunction if you prefer. Or energy. Whatever you want to call it, it propagates at c. Whether it's going round and round or not, it propagates at c. And when it's going round and round, it can't propagate linearly at c as well, now can it?
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Irrelevant, since photons don't do that.
 
ctamblyn said:
Incidentally, Farsight, you promised us a proper counterargument to the Higgs mechanism, a simplified version of which I described to you here:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=9196293#post9196293

Aside from what I presume was a little joke here...

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=9199511#post9199511

...in which you acted as though you'd misread both your original question and my reply, that response is still outstanding.
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No, I shot your "explanation" down from the off. It crashed and burned on take off. It never got off the ground. Starting with a neutral massless spin-1/2 field is a tautology. The electron isn't neutral, and it isn't massless. I said start again. So do it, and this time get it right.

No in fact, don't bother. You're merely trying to distract from the hard scientific evidence.
 
Farsight said:
There's no crackpottery on my part, ct. I'm giving you the hard scientific evidence. You're desperately avoiding it because you can't refute it. All you can do is throw ad-hominems and claim that "such models have been thoroughly refuted time and again" when they haven't. Nor has the hard scientific evidence. It seems quackery often involves irrational detachment from hard scientific evidence. Wouldn't you agree?
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The collection of links you posted all refer to phenomena which are accommodated by the standard model.

I've addressed atomic orbitals above. If we take another off your list, let's say pair production, you find that it is predicted to occur by QED as a consequence of the coupling between electrons and photons (and is only a particular instance of a far more general phenomenon, something we only understand because of QED). Not only that, but QED allows us to calculate in detail how often pair production occurs, what the produced particles can be (and how often different products are observed), their angular distribution etc.

That's how it looks when a theory is useful.

What does Relativity+ predict to match all of that? Nothing.

That's how it looks when a theory is useless.
 
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ctamblyn said:
...I've addresses atomic orbitals above.
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No you haven't.

ctamblyn said:
If we take another off your list, let's say pair production, you find that it is predicted to occur by QED as a consequence of the coupling between electrons and photons...
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OK then, let's hear your explanation of gamma-gamma pair production.

BOOM!
 
Farsight said:
No, I shot your "explanation" down from the off. It crashed and burned on take off. It never got off the ground. Starting with a neutral massless spin-1/2 field is a tautology. The electron isn't neutral, and it isn't massless. I said start again. So do it, and this time get it right.

No in fact, don't bother. You're merely trying to distract from the hard scientific evidence.
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Do you honestly feel that what you wrote there counts as a valid response?

You asked me to explain how I think mass generation works. I did, with what I clearly explained was a simple version of the mechanism (right near the top of the post). I showed how when a massless fermion couples to a scalar with non-zero VEV, the massless fermion acquires mass.

Had I started with a massive fermion, that would have been ridiculous. Cheating, even.

As for the charge, if you bring that in then several interesting issues arise, to do with how gauge fields couple to the Higgs and the appearance of Goldstone bosons. It's fascinating stuff, and if we ever get there you'll discover why the Higgs mechanism was proposed in the first place, but it detracts from the underlying simplicity of the mechanism itself. Remember, my purpose was to explain, and if you can't yet understand the simple version, it is not worth posting anything more complex.
 
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