Merged Relativity+ / Farsight

[ctamblyn]

...
http://latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?\mathcal{L}=\bar\psi(i\gamma^\mu D_\mu-m)\psi -\frac{1}{4}F_{\mu\nu}F^{\mu\nu}
...

Feel free to add your voice to the chorus:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=246584

 

[The Man]

Flipping it upside down doesn't work because they're chiral, because the rotation is "biaxial". Think bispinors, which "are used to describe relativistic spin-½ wave functions". See Dirac's belt and Dirac spinor.

For something you can grasp, imagine a disk standing on its edge rotating clockwise like a steering wheel. Now spin it like a coin with your left hand. Then imagine another disk standing on its edge rotating clockwise like a steering wheel, and spin it like a coin with your right hand. The spin of the two disks is not the same, and flipping one upside down doesn't change this. They have the opposite chirality.

Making it a bi-axial rotation doesn’t help, it just means that you may have to flip it along two axes to change the spin(s) to the same as the other.

 

[Reality Check]

But it isn't wrong. I can explain why the electron and positron attract one another.

A cartoon that is based on bad physics and your imagination is not an explanation, Farsight.
It is a fairy story .

You can't.

Everyone can - an electron is negative, a position is positive, opposite charges attract !
The QED explanation is more complex though.

 

[ben m]

Think bispinors, which "are used to describe relativistic spin-½ wave functions". See Dirac's belt and Dirac spinor.

The funny thing is that bispinors and Dirac spinors do change when you flip them over. In some cases, like the proton-neutron force, flipping one of the spins does flip the force from attractive to repulsive (that's there is no spin-0 hyperfine excitation of the deuterium nucleus.)

You're trying to come up with an intuitive model of interparticle forces, but that's at least three strikes on the simple question of what direction the spiral goes in and why does it matter. You don't have an mathematical model, you're striking out trying to sketch a pop-science representation, you've extracted exactly one Minkowski quote from of 100+ years of electrodynamics research and pedagogy. Not a very impressive record. Not a very compelling case for rejecting old-fashioned parity-conserving QED.

Your dislike of the "photon tennis" simplification has been noted. Don't like it? Don't use it. (Not that you have shown evidence of "using" QED at all, tennis-analogy or otherwise.) QED does the same thing whether or not you attempt to explain it that way.

 

[Reality Check]

Come on now, you don't seriously think the electron and the proton are playing catch with photons do you?

That question is ridiculous Farsight, since "playing catch with photons" is your personal description based on what seems to be ignorance of QED.

Feynman Diagrams and Forces Between Particles has an explanation in terms of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Very basically attractive forces are particles throwing photons away from each other (not playing catch!).

 

[Perpetual Student]

Mr. Duffield
Come on now, you don't seriously think the electron and the proton are playing catch with photons do you?

Your cartoons and simplistic analogies continue to lead you astray (and, sadly, are a source of amusement).
Here -- learn something!

Some field interactions which may be seen in terms of virtual particles are:

The Coulomb force (static electric force) between electric charges. It is caused by the exchange of virtual photons. In symmetric 3-dimensional space this exchange results in the inverse square law for electric force. Since the photon has no mass, the coulomb potential has an infinite range.

The magnetic field between magnetic dipoles. It is caused by the exchange of virtual photons. In symmetric 3-dimensional space this exchange results in the inverse cube law for magnetic force. Since the photon has no mass, the magnetic potential has an infinite range.

And please try to remember that this is a facet of a model of reality (whatever that reality may actually be) called Quantum Field Theory, which has been spectacularly successful.

 

[Farsight]

Then there is no sense in which these are analogous to vortices which either attract or repel because of their rotation direction, since flipping one of those really DOES work.

I'm sure others have noted this before, but it's worth pointing out again that you cannot attach any math to your ideas. All you can do is draw pictures, which you then end up basically saying are inaccurate anyways.

As you know full well they aren't my ideas and the maths is what's already there. And I've explained quite adequately that the "spiral" is a flat depiction of something that is in fact chiral.

So stop posting the depiction of the wrong thing. Stop using features of the depiction---you sure seemed to think that "opposite spirals attract" was a useful source of intuition; apparently not. Stop using non-electromagnetic analogies (like eddies) which have precisely the features you're telling us not to use.

No. You know full well that Maxwell referred to vortices in his page title, that the NASA gravitomagnetism article refers to vortices, and that the physicworld monopole article refers to vortices too.

You think there's something "chiral" with spirally features that's actually a good depiction of Heaviside's "screw"?

Heaviside's screw? I've referred to Maxwell and Minkowski talking about the screw mechanism. Not Heaviside. Did he refer to it too?

Go ahead, draw it and post it. (Or post equations and I'll draw it for you. I have Mathematica open already. In fact, I have a notebook full of electromagnetic field plotting routines.)

Draw me the spindle-sphere torus surrounded by lines depicting frame-dragging. Like a 3D version of the "spiral".

 

[Farsight]

So you'd rather not focus on what GR says? OK, but I struggle to see how you will make your point in that way.

In an analogy in which I was clearly using "gravitational charge" as a synonym for "mass", you said "I am not fond of the concept of gravitational charge" (my emphasis). Little more needs to be said.

Right, so something which is only valid for infinitesimal ranges of the parameters is not, in your view, something which applies at all. In other words, if you value self-consistency in your arguments, you should accept that gravitoelectromagnetism (which is only exact for infinitesimal perturbations) doesn't apply at all either. We're talking about exactly the same type of approximation in both cases.

Well, at this stage I don't hold out much hope that you will make your case successfully, but perhaps you could now make a start? To remind you, the point of my reviving this thread was to give you the opportunity to address this matter:

So, how about supplying those credible references and demonstrations of predictive power?

Start a new thread on gravity and I'll explain it to you. It's too confusing to talk about multiple subjects on one thread.

 

[Farsight]

I think that the Lagrangian density

is the correct way to predicting the electromagnetic force on a charged fermion.

I shall render your latex for you and comment thus:

If you say so. But think about it. If you have a single fermion, and that's all you've got, there is no force on it. There is force on it only when you add another charged fermion. The force is the result of electromagnetic field interactions. It takes two to tango. The force between two charged particles is not the same thing as the field that one of these particles has.

I furthermore know a good series-expansion of this formula---which is correct because it's algebraically the same thing as the above. Viewed a certain way, the 1st term in this expansion has some things in common with as "fermions playing catch with photons"

Well they don't. Hydrogen atoms don't twinkle. Magnets don't shine. There are no photons flying around. None. Zip. Zero. Zilch.

although there are many counterintuitive things about that statement. The "catch" analogy is good insofar as it correctly represents the flow of energy and of momentum through different terms in the Lagrangian. The catch analogy is bad insofar as a game of catch occurs in a certain time/space sequence (the Lagrangian interaction does not), and classical-behaving exchanged object (nope), and classically determinate events (nope, wavefunction amplitudes and phases). Do you want me to stop believing in the QED Lagrangian?

No. I just want you to stop believing in cargo-cult science and appreciate the correct reason why your equation works.

I welcome your suggestion of a better Lagrangian and a set of experimental tests thereof. Do you want me to do a different series expansion so I don't see the order-alpha term? Suggest one.

I'll have a look and get back to you. Give a reference which includes a list of terms.

Do you want me to agree that anything YOU can't understand about QED should be blamed on me? I can't agree to that. I blame most of your misunderstandings on you, and this is no exception.

No. I want you to stop believing in trash that makes no sense at all. Like the tautology in gamma-gamma pair production. Which should lead you to an understanding that there is indeed a photon-photon interaction. Which tells you that there is a photon-photon self interaction.

 

[Farsight]

*ponders*... if Farsight's model of electric charge has to do with the "chirality" of tiny whirlpools, how is CPT symmetry respected? It looks to me that applying all three operators might leave the whirlpools going the wrong way. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I'd like to see this worked out in detail. Farsight?

I haven't got time to give you details. But see the wikipedia article and note the bit that says this: "This defines a CPT transformation if we adopt the Feynman-Stueckelberg interpretation of antiparticles as the corresponding particles traveling backwards in time". Now look at your post #801 where you quote me saying this: "You have to reverse the direction of the arrowheads. Then it's a "time reversed electron". It isn't travelling backwards in time, it just has the opposite chirality". Hmmn, maybe I need to tell you about time as well as gravity. Start a thread, call it time travel is science fiction and I'll fill you in.

 

[Farsight]

Making it a bi-axial rotation doesn’t help, it just means that you may have to flip it along two axes to change the spin(s) to the same as the other.

I said this:

Imagine a disk standing on its edge rotating clockwise like a steering wheel. Now spin it like a coin with your left hand. Then imagine another disk standing on its edge rotating clockwise like a steering wheel, and spin it like a coin with your right hand. The spin of the two disks is not the same, and flipping one upside down doesn't change this. They have the opposite chirality.

You cannot flip it on two axes to give it the same spin as the other. Just as you cannot make your left hand look like your right. Because it has chirality. Handedness.


All: OK guys, I have to go now. And you know, I think we've covered the screw nature of electromagnetism enough for now. Talk among yourselves. Oh, and remember this: as you are to Anders Lindman, so am I to you.

 

[ctamblyn]

Start a new thread on gravity and I'll explain it to you. It's too confusing to talk about multiple subjects on one thread.

We don't need multiple "Relativity+" threads polluting the forum, John Duffield. Defend your ideas here.

ETA: Oh, and don't forget that you still haven't answered these requests...

How about you provide some credible references that support your assertion that the electromagnetic field is due to a twisting/turning of three dimensional space, instead of (a) references that don't support that assertion (but perhaps contain a couple of "magic words" like "screw" and "magnet"), (b) mere repetition of your unsupported assertions, and (c) Google search results?

...Have you found those references yet?

To return to another sub-topic which I'd prefer didn't get dropped just yet - perhaps when you return from your 2-week suspension you could get around to addressing the lack of predictive power of these loopy photon models?

...How about evidence of any predictive power?

Surely you have something to show. It has been more than four years since this thread started.

 

[ctamblyn]

I haven't got time to give you details. But see the wikipedia article and note the bit that says this: "This defines a CPT transformation if we adopt the Feynman-Stueckelberg interpretation of antiparticles as the corresponding particles traveling backwards in time". Now look at your post #801 where you quote me saying this: "You have to reverse the direction of the arrowheads. Then it's a "time reversed electron". It isn't travelling backwards in time, it just has the opposite chirality".
...

I had hoped you would treat my question as an opportunity to clear up all of the vagueness surrounding all of these ludicrous twisted photon models you've been promoting, but evidently you don't understand any of those models well enough to provide the answers. What little information you did give us in your non-answer above tends to reinforce my suspicion that applying all three operators C,P and T to one of those twisted photon states you claim represents an electron would actually yield a state representing (in your view) a positron, violating CPT symmetry. Each operation individually would simply reverse "the direction of the arrowheads" as you picturesquely put it, and so all three reversals combined would be equivalent to a single one.

Honestly, you say you don't have the time to give details, but you have spent four years (in this thread alone) promoting a vague and useless model. It seems to me that you have plenty of time, but very few answers.

 

[lpetrich]

(electrons and positrons)

Yes. They aren't throwing photons at one another. It isn't magic.

Trying to project a particle-limit feature on something that's clearly a field effect.

Flipping it upside down doesn't work because they're chiral, because the rotation is "biaxial". Think bispinors, which "are used to describe relativistic spin-½ wave functions". See Dirac's belt and Dirac spinor.

Except that the electromagnetic interaction does NOT work that way. The electrostatic limit is independent of particle spin. All this blathering about chirality and spinors seems to me like cargo cult science, using lots of words without understanding their meaning.

Farsight, using your understanding of electromagnetism, relativity, etc, what specific, concrete changes do you think should be made to practical things ...?

I've never thought about it.

All these years and you've never thought about it?

My impression is that you cannot answer this question, because you have not done the work necessary to convert your ideas and understandings into quantitative form, and without it being in such a form, you can't design any of the instruments, systems, tools, etc in my short list. Is that true?

No. The quantitative form isn't vital to propose some kind of device or improvement to an existing device. Check out Faraday.

Except that Michael Faraday lived about 150 years ago. That's not quite proving DeiRenDopa wrong with the higher-tech sort of device.

As you know full well they aren't my ideas

Then get some webspace somewhere and compose a page describing the sources of your ideas and how your claims follow from what those sources state. It should have no links to search-engine result pages. I repeat, it should have no links to search-engine result pages.

You know full well that Maxwell referred to vortices in his page title, that the NASA gravitomagnetism article refers to vortices, and that the physicworld monopole article refers to vortices too.

Irrelevant book-thumping. So like a theologian.

You should work out your claims of vortices from the theory, not do lots of thumping of references with dubious relevance at best.

Hydrogen atoms don't twinkle. Magnets don't shine. There are no photons flying around. None. Zip. Zero. Zilch.

Such illiterate nonsense. So much like a creationist ridiculing evolution. Or CHURCH FATHERS: Divine Institutes, Book III (Lactantius):

How is it with those who imagine that there are antipodes opposite to our footsteps? Do they say anything to the purpose? Or is there any one so senseless as to believe that there are men whose footsteps are higher than their heads? Or that the things which with us are in a recumbent position, with them hang in an inverted direction? That the crops and trees grow downwards? That the rains, and snow, and hail fall upwards to the earth? And does any one wonder that hanging gardens are mentioned among the seven wonders of the world, when philosophers make hanging fields, and seas, and cities, and mountains?

 

[ben m]

If you say so. But think about it. If you have a single fermion, and that's all you've got, there is no force on it.

Right. (What, do you think nobody but you has thought of that?) If you're talking about an interaction, you have one particle or collection of particles (not necessarily fermions) that generate a field, and the above Lagrangian tells you how the fermion responds. As it so happens, it also figures into the inverse problem---if you want to know how the "other particles" respond, the above tells you what fields are generated by this passing fermion.

But the above is the core of the calculation.

Well they don't. Hydrogen atoms don't twinkle. Magnets don't shine. There are no photons flying around. None. Zip. Zero. Zilch.

It's a good thing QED does NOT predict that magnets shine. Did you think otherwise? Why? By overstretching the tennis analogy? WHO CARES. If the analogy gives you confusing results, don't use it. I don't particularly care to debug whether you mis-learned the analogy, or learned it correctly and misused it, or whether you're in an unremarkable any-word-salad-is-good-enough-as-long-as-it-says-physicists-are-wrong mode. Don't care.

I'll have a look and get back to you. Give a reference which includes a list of terms.

Don't tell me you've never seen it before. My guess is that you've seen it plenty of times and you know exactly how to figure out the standard notation, but that you'd rather wait for me to explain it, then nitpick my explanation, then actually read a textbook and attempt to nitpick the textbook explanation.

Tell me what texts you have access to and I'll tell you where to find the QED chapter in those texts.

Which should lead you to an understanding that there is indeed a photon-photon interaction. Which tells you that there is a photon-photon self interaction.

(Derailing already? Yes, there is a photon-photon interaction. It's a higher-order effect, perfectly ordinarily and uncontroversially within the domain that QED is good at calculating. Let me guess: because photon-photon scattering is possible, you think you can infer that photons twist themselves into loop-shaped bound states, whatever that means. Let me correct you: you're wrong. There is no photon-photon bound state. The coupling is too weak. (There's no neutrino-antineutrino bound state either, for the same reason, even though there is neutrino-antineutrino coupling at tree level. I actually had to do that calculation once.)

 

[ctamblyn]

More on this:

...
Imagine a disk standing on its edge rotating clockwise like a steering wheel. Now spin it like a coin with your left hand. Then imagine another disk standing on its edge rotating clockwise like a steering wheel, and spin it like a coin with your right hand. The spin of the two disks is not the same, and flipping one upside down doesn't change this. They have the opposite chirality.
...

It would seem at first glance that in Farsight's model the mirror image of an electron is a positron (and vice versa), but let's look it in a bit more detail to see what really happens.

Consider the first spinning disk, which we can take to be the analogue of Farsight's electron. Centre the disk at the origin and set up a Cartesian coordinate system such that the axis of the "steering wheel" component of the motion rotates through the x,y-plane, while the axis of the "coin spin" component coincides with the z-axis. Note: the classical model which results is not ideal, but the important thing is that it has the same transformation properties under rotations/reflections as Farsight's model.

Given that set-up, here's the quick version of the argument which shows that the alleged "chirality" distinction to which Farsight alluded does not really exist:

Consider two "electrons" as above, but with one of the half a cycle ahead of the other in the "coin spin" component of motion. Looking at them, it will appear that they are actually in sync with respect to the "coin spin" component but with opposite "steering wheel" motions (one clockwise, the other anticlockwise). Take a while to picture this if it isn't obvious: it's just saying that if you view a steering wheel from the other side, it will seem to turn the other way. In short, two "electrons" or "positrons" that differ only in the sense of their "steering wheel" motion are actually undergoing the same motion, just out of phase.

Now take one of those "electrons" and rotate it by 180 degrees about the y axis (or indeed any axis perpendicular to the "coin spin" axis). This turns the "coin spin" axis upside-down (if we take the z-axis to be vertical), so that if you view the thing from above it will appear that the coin has gone from spinning clockwise to spinning anticlockwise.

Hey presto: we have transformed Farsight's electron into Farsight's positron by a series of rotations.

Here's a slightly more detailed version, starting with the same set-up:

Let's set the radius of the disk to 1 unit for simplicity, and take the above-mentioned rotating motions to be uniform.

A reference point (x(t), y(t), z(t)) on the disk's boundary will move like so (with the zero point of time suitably fixed):

x(t) = cos bt cos at
y(t) = sin bt cos at
z(t) = sin at
​

where a and b are constants which Farsight has not specified. Basically, a tells us how fast the "steering wheel" component of motion is, while b tells us how fast the "coin spin" component is.

According to Farsight's description, the second spinning disk (the positron) can be obtained by reversing the direction of the "coin spin" component, i.e. reversing the sign of b. This flips the sign of y(t) while leaving x(t) and z(t) unaltered:

x(t) = cos bt cos at
y(t) = -sin bt cos at
z(t) = sin at
​

Now, surely we were free to start the "spin like a coin" component of the motion slightly earlier relative to the "steering wheel" component. Without changing the orientation of either component, we could have chosen to start the "spin like a coin" component, say, half a cycle earlier, corresponding to replacing at by at + π. Using the trigonometric identities cos(θ + π) = -cos(θ) and sin(θ + π) = -sin(θ), this means another perfectly valid positron motion is:

x(t) = -cos bt cos at
y(t) = sin bt cos at
z(t) = -sin at
​

We can rotate this by 180 degrees in the x,z-plane without changing the type of particle, surely, so let's do that. This is equivalent to flipping the signs of both x and z, giving the motion:

x(t) = cos bt cos at
y(t) = sin bt cos at
z(t) = sin at
​

But observe, this is the same as the "electron" we started with. The "chirality" distinction was never there.

 

[The Man]

I said this:

Imagine a disk standing on its edge rotating clockwise like a steering wheel. Now spin it like a coin with your left hand. Then imagine another disk standing on its edge rotating clockwise like a steering wheel, and spin it like a coin with your right hand. The spin of the two disks is not the same, and flipping one upside down doesn't change this. They have the opposite chirality.

I know what you said, I even quoted it.

You cannot flip it on two axes to give it the same spin as the other. Just as you cannot make your left hand look like your right. Because it has chirality. Handedness.

In the description you gave, "I said this:", one can be flipped "to give it the same spin as the other". The thing that gives your hand, well, handedness is a lack of some rotational symmetry. Both your diagram and description, "I said this:", also lack some rotational symmetry such that one can be flipped "to give it the same spin as the other". Perhaps you mean your electromagnetic field of an electron lacks rotational symmetry in a way other than you have described or drawn. If that is the case you will have to describe or draw that particular lack of rotational symmetry with more specificity. Lack of symmetry has consequences and for a lack of rotational symmetry that explicitly means it looks different when rotated or flipped about some axis. Not as intuitive as you seem to have thought.

For your own edification your left hand does look like your right in your reflection (or when spatial coordinates are reversed). In fact when you are facing someone else your left is their right.

All: OK guys, I have to go now. And you know, I think we've covered the screw nature of electromagnetism enough for now. Talk among yourselves. Oh, and remember this: as you are to Anders Lindman, so am I to you.

Yep, I’m just another member on this forum to Anders Lindman, as you are just another member on this forum to me.

If it was something else you had in mind then remember this: personal attacks are against the membership agreement. So doubling down and attacking another member (whom I don’t recall is even on this thread), even going as far as naming them, to use as some poor inference at a personal attack on those members who are here on this thread, is doubly ill advised.

 

[ctamblyn]

Farsight - following on from my previous post, I now retract the following. You have a far bigger problem which makes this irrelevant.

...What little information you did give us in your non-answer above tends to reinforce my suspicion that applying all three operators C,P and T to one of those twisted photon states you claim represents an electron would actually yield a state representing (in your view) a positron, ...

 

[The Man]

More on this:



It would seem at first glance that in Farsight's model the mirror image of an electron is a positron (and vice versa), but let's look it in a bit more detail to see what really happens.

Consider the first spinning disk, which we can take to be the analogue of Farsight's electron. Centre the disk at the origin and set up a Cartesian coordinate system such that the axis of the "steering wheel" component of the motion rotates through the x,y-plane, while the axis of the "coin spin" component coincides with the z-axis. Note: the classical model which results is not ideal, but the important thing is that it has the same transformation properties under rotations/reflections as Farsight's model.

Given that set-up, here's the quick version of the argument which shows that the alleged "chirality" distinction to which Farsight alluded does not really exist:

Consider two "electrons" as above, but with one of the half a cycle ahead of the other in the "coin spin" component of motion. Looking at them, it will appear that they are actually in sync with respect to the "coin spin" component but with opposite "steering wheel" motions (one clockwise, the other anticlockwise). Take a while to picture this if it isn't obvious: it's just saying that if you view a steering wheel from the other side, it will seem to turn the other way. In short, two "electrons" or "positrons" that differ only in the sense of their "steering wheel" motion are actually undergoing the same motion, just out of phase.

Now take one of those "electrons" and rotate it by 180 degrees about the y axis (or indeed any axis perpendicular to the "coin spin" axis). This turns the "coin spin" axis upside-down (if we take the z-axis to be vertical), so that if you view the thing from above it will appear that the coin has gone from spinning clockwise to spinning anticlockwise.

Hey presto: we have transformed Farsight's electron into Farsight's positron by a series of rotations.

Here's a slightly more detailed version, starting with the same set-up:

Let's set the radius of the disk to 1 unit for simplicity, and take the above-mentioned rotating motions to be uniform.

A reference point (x(t), y(t), z(t)) on the disk's boundary will move like so (with the zero point of time suitably fixed):

x(t) = cos bt cos at
y(t) = sin bt cos at
z(t) = sin at
​

where a and b are constants which Farsight has not specified. Basically, a tells us how fast the "steering wheel" component of motion is, while b tells us how fast the "coin spin" component is.

According to Farsight's description, the second spinning disk (the positron) can be obtained by reversing the direction of the "coin spin" component, i.e. reversing the sign of b. This flips the sign of y(t) while leaving x(t) and z(t) unaltered:

x(t) = cos bt cos at
y(t) = -sin bt cos at
z(t) = sin at
​

Now, surely we were free to start the "spin like a coin" component of the motion slightly earlier relative to the "steering wheel" component. Without changing the orientation of either component, we could have chosen to start the "spin like a coin" component, say, half a cycle earlier, corresponding to replacing at by at + π. Using the trigonometric identities cos(θ + π) = -cos(θ) and sin(θ + π) = -sin(θ), this means another perfectly valid positron motion is:

x(t) = -cos bt cos at
y(t) = sin bt cos at
z(t) = -sin at
​

We can rotate this by 180 degrees in the x,z-plane without changing the type of particle, surely, so let's do that. This is equivalent to flipping the signs of both x and z, giving the motion:

x(t) = cos bt cos at
y(t) = sin bt cos at
z(t) = sin at
​

But observe, this is the same as the "electron" we started with. The "chirality" distinction was never there.

I actually did it by drawing visual references to the rotational motion on a translucent piece of paper and then flipping it on two different axes.

 

[Ziggurat]

As you know full well they aren't my ideas and the maths is what's already there.

No, it isn't. You refer to math for other things, but cannot say how that math for other things is actually applicable for your theory, or how you get something simple like Coulomb's Law from that math.

And I've explained quite adequately that the "spiral" is a flat depiction of something that is in fact chiral.

Since your "spiral" is not, in fact, a spiral, then why would results which derive from a spiral be applicable to your theory which isn't a spiral?