Merged Relativity+ / Farsight

[edd]

See my response to ctamblyn where I referred to the Williamson / van der Mark electron

I still think equation 5 is hilarious enough to warn most people off taking that thing seriously.

Of course as far as I can tell you still haven't backed off from supporting the Worsley stuff so I'm not surprised you haven't backed off from this one either.

 

[Farsight]

If I were to draw it, I'd show a standard radial field for the electric component, and I'd show the usual dipole field like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:VFPt_dipole_point.svg for the magnetic component,

Turn that dipole image onto its side. Looks like a torus, doesn't it?

and when combining the two I'd probably use one colour for one component, one colour for the other and just overlay the two. I'd not try to combine the field lines in any other way than superimposing one set upon the other, with some method of keeping them clearly distinct.

My bold. So in combining them you'd try not to combine them?

A bit like how an electromagnetic wave is commonly depicted. They don't show some weird nonsensical sum of E and B components - they show each as distinct.

Edd, my patience is wearing thin with words like "weird" and "nonsensical". And "hilarious". Now pay attention. Here's the Minkowski quote again:

"In the description of the field caused by the electron itself, then it will appear that the division of the field into electric and magnetic forces is a relative one with respect to the time-axis assumed; the two forces considered together can most vividly be described by a certain analogy to the force-screw in mechanics; the analogy is, however, imperfect".

It's the field. It's the electromagnetic field. It isn't an electric field, it isn't a magnetic field, it's an electromagnetic field. Now depict it.

 

[ctamblyn]

Ah, such cute abuse. Next.

Pointing out the deep problems in your ideas is not "abuse". Instead of dodging, why not address points I made regarding your mistake about chirality, or perhaps answer my questions from even earlier?

 

[edd]

Turn that dipole image onto its side. Looks like a torus, doesn't it?

Note that the field lines do not form concentric circles. No matter which way you turn it.

My bold. So in combining them you'd try not to combine them?

Your bold. You didn't bold "in any other way", which rather changes the meaning of what I said I think.

It's the field. It's the electromagnetic field. It isn't an electric field, it isn't a magnetic field, it's an electromagnetic field. Now depict it.

The electromagnetic field is a tensor field - a more complex object than a simple vector field. To depict it I'd prefer to use two distinct sets of lines rather than one. Maybe I'll draw a diagram for you later, but I don't think it's that hard for you to imagine what I mean.

 

[edd]

I still think equation 5 is hilarious enough to warn most people off taking that thing seriously.

I note Farsight didn't like me calling it hilarious. I guess he didn't see the funny side of it. The link as a reminder is http://www.cybsoc.org/electron.pdf and the equation I'm referring to is not the only questionable thing about it.

The equation is a prediction of the charge on an electron:

They note it is only approximately equal to the charge on the electron (it's 91% of the true value).

Of course if you look at that equation for a bit, and remember that

and substitute the former into the latter, remembering the relation between c and ε₀ and μ₀, and that h-bar is h/2pi, you realise what they're really saying is that they think

or 1/165.37

I note that the 2010 CODATA value of α is measured as
0.007297352698 +- 0.000000000024
As the predicted value here is 0.0060471627, I make that prediction wrong by a touch over 52 million sigma? Although I might have lost a factor of ten typing out all those zeros.

To be fair, we can't predict the fine structure constant ourselves, but I think 52 million sigma somewhat exceeds the traditional bounds for statistical significance even amongst particle physicists who tend to choose quite high bounds for such tests.

 

[Ziggurat]

Huh? It isn't my theory.

Yes, it is.

Didn't you read the Minkowski quote? Or the Maxwell quote?

Your ideas do not comport with either of them.

And what's Coulomb's Law...

[qimg]http://www.forkosh.com/mimetex.cgi?|\mathbf F|={|q_1q_2|\over (4\pi\varepsilon_0 r^2)}[/qimg]

...got to do with it?

You are claiming to explain the attraction of electrons and positrons. Coulomb's Law provides the quantitative description of this attraction. If your explanation does not lead to Coulomb's Law, then it does not actually explain the attraction. It's no better than the just so story of how the leopard got its spots.

Sigh. Because the real thing is a dynamical 3D version of the 2D depiction. And it isn't my theory. What's with all the "my theory" stuff? I'm telling you about the physics. I'm referring to the greats. Don't try to label it as "my theory" just because you've never heard about it before. I didn't invent the word spinor.

Spinors can be flipped upside down, and a force which is dependent upon a spinor will have angular dependence. You are claiming that you can't do that with your chiral vortices (or whatever you want to call them), and that they produce no angle dependence. You aren't using spinors.

 

[Roboramma]

My bold. So in combining them you'd try not to combine them?

When leaving the room I'd try not to do so in any other way than by going through the door.

I'm pretty stupid for leaving the room by not leaving the room aren't I?

 

[steenkh]

The equation is a prediction of the charge on an electron:
[qimg]http://www.texify.com/img/%5CLARGE%5C%21q%3D%5Cfrac%7B1%7D%7B2%5Cpi%7D%5Csqrt%7B3%5Cepsilon_0%20%5Chbar%20c%7D.gif[/qimg]
They note it is only approximately equal to the charge on the electron (it's 91% of the true value).

Of course if you look at that equation for a bit, and remember that
[qimg]http://www.texify.com/img/%5CLARGE%5C%21%5Calpha%3D%5Cfrac%7Be%5E2c%5Cmu_0%7D%7B2h%7D.gif[/qimg]

and substitute the former into the latter, remembering the relation between c and ε₀ and μ₀, and that h-bar is h/2pi, you realise what they're really saying is that they think

[qimg]http://www.texify.com/img/%5CLARGE%5C%21%5Calpha%20%3D%20%5Cfrac%7B3%7D%7B16%20%5Cpi%5E3%7D.gif[/qimg]
or 1/165.37

Not surprisingly it is over my head, but I really would like to know what you did here. q from equation 1 is not to be seen anywhere in equation 2, so how can you substitute it into equation 2? Perhaps there is a missing equation here?

 

[edd]

Sorry yes - notational change. q=e

 

[Ziggurat]

Not surprisingly it is over my head, but I really would like to know what you did here. q from equation 1 is not to be seen anywhere in equation 2, so how can you substitute it into equation 2? Perhaps there is a missing equation here?

e in equation 2 is the charge of an electron (not to be confused with epsilon, the vacuum permittivity, in equation 1), and so it should be equal to q in equation 1.

 

[steenkh]

Yes, thank you edd and Ziggurat. Now I understand. It is still way over my math abilities to work out, but I know what you did, and I rely on the other thread posters to point out any errors. Farsight, perhaps?

 

[ben m]

It's the field. It's the electromagnetic field. It isn't an electric field, it isn't a magnetic field, it's an electromagnetic field. Now depict it.

See, the electric field is a vector (3 components associated with each location). The magnetic field is a vector (3 components associated with each location). The electromagnetic field is an antisymmetric tensor (6 independent components).

If you restrict yourself to 2D, you can maybe justify ignoring 2 of the 6 tensor entries, leaving 4. To make a plot of the electromagnetic tensor, you need to go to each location on your plotting grid and convey four quantities. As edd suggests, you might do this by drawing two arrows---like, a red arrow whose components are F01 and F02, and a blue arrow whose components are F31 and F32. In other words, to make a visual representation of the actual electromagnetic field, you can draw two overlapping vector fields.

If you want to draw something that looks like a vector plot ... well, the EM tensor has four independent components, a 2D vector plot (or streamline plot) can only convey two, so you need to throw something away. Do you know what part of the electromagnetic field you want to throw away to make the plotting easier?

Your "spiral" is not a representation of the electromagnetic field tensor. If I want to answer the question "What is the electromagnetic field tensor at the location {x,y} = {0,1}?" there is no way for me to look at the {0,1} coordinate on your diagram and obtain this information. Nor, indeed, any information at all.

The only information contained in the spiral is "Farsight has drawn a spiral."

 

[lpetrich]

But remember that you are modelling the interaction between two fermions each with its electromagnetic field.

The electrostatic limit is independent of particle spin.

Remember that it takes two to tango, and that Minkowski distinguished between field and force and referred to a screw.

Pure book-thumping. So theologian-like. Farsight, you ought to evaluate the theories independently of who proposed them.

(irrelevant diagram snipped)

Well I care. I care for physics. And I do not care for people peddling garbage who dismiss Einstein.

So like a theologian. Science doesn't work by interpreting sacred books.

And who cannot explain why the electron and positron move together.

Yes we can, even if you are unwilling to accept the explanation.

The truth is that other readers turn off when presented with math, so I prefer not to get sucked into sub-discussions that involve complex equations.

That's a bad argument for rejecting math. All your heroes used math as part of their work, and if math is as superfluous as you seem to be implying, why didn't they agree?

It's a bit like Hawking saying every equation halves the readership.

That's irrelevant.

And it was Maxwell and Minkowski who referred to the screw mechanism. I didn't dream it up.

They were making an ANALOGY. That's grotesque literal-mindedness.

I can't even get him to appreciate that one should properly speak of the electromagnetic field Fuv rather than E or B.

Those are equivalent descriptions. F -- 4D with space and time coequal, E, B -- 3+1D with space and time split

Huh? It isn't my theory. Didn't you read the Minkowski quote? Or the Maxwell quote?

Pure book-thumping.

And what's Coulomb's Law...

[qimg]http://www.forkosh.com/mimetex.cgi?|\mathbf F|={|q_1q_2|\over (4\pi\varepsilon_0 r^2)}[/qimg]

...got to do with it? Charged particles result in force, there's an inverse square rule in 3D space with its vacuum permittivity wherein 4π relates to an all-round sphere. A simple little expression doesn't tell you why that force occurs.

It's a consequence of
(energy) = (charge) * (potential)
D²(potential) = (charge)

That's from
Lagrangian = (field)² + (potential) * (charge/current density)

I'm fuzzing over numerical factors and units factors and vector-index inner products and the like.

And it isn't my theory. What's with all the "my theory" stuff?

Farsight, it's your theory because to everybody but you, it looks like you are its inventor.

I'm telling you about the physics. I'm referring to the greats. Don't try to label it as "my theory" just because you've never heard about it before. I didn't invent the word spinor.

So you are interpreting the sacred scriptures rather than being a new prophet?

Here's the Minkowski quote again:

"In the description of the field caused by the electron itself, then it will appear that the division of the field into electric and magnetic forces is a relative one with respect to the time-axis assumed; the two forces considered together can most vividly be described by a certain analogy to the force-screw in mechanics; the analogy is, however, imperfect".

I've bolded an important word here: analogy.

 

[ben m]

To understand why, you have to read what guys like Maxwell and Minkowski said.

Maxwell and Minksowski didn't say anything about "screw electromagnetism" other than what you've already quoted. No equations, no diagrams, no discussion of chirality, no spinors, nothing. They used the word "screw" once each in one pop-culture description.

QED---the quantum-mechanical theory of fermion coupling to E&M---was invented in the 1940s and 50s; quantum mechanics itself was only developed convincingly in the late 1920s. Neither James Clerk Maxwell (1831--1879) nor Hermann Minkowski (1864-1909) wrote one word relevant to the argument for or against QED.

If there's something wrong with QED, look at QED and point out the errors. Please note that QED precisely reproduces (in the usual correspondence-principle limit) all the dynamics of Maxwell's Equations, so unless you can find an error in the correspondence-calculations, citations of Maxwell do not refute QED.

 

[ben m]

Then combine the radial electric field with a dipole magnetic field. What does a dipole look like, ooh, here's a picture of one.

"combine" how? Just add the E vectors to the B vectors? What a bizarre thing to do. Can you find any reference in your scriptures to the vector quantity E + B? That's not what the "electromagnetic field" is, obviously. Nor is it anything else that any physicist has ever referred to.

Also: In the plane perpendicular to the dipole, the in-plane magnetic field is zero. Your useless three-panel cartoon, for a dipole, actually looks like:

[box 1: radial lines] + [box 2: blank] = [box 3: still radial lines]

No spirals here.

But, hey, we work with what we've got. Here's another fun one: Consider a line of electrons moving out of the page. It has electric field lines like Farsight's radii (but pointing outwards, which Farsight forgets to specify). It has magnetic field lines going in circles (counterclockwise, which Farsight forgot to specify.) Add these two vectors together, the nonsense quantity "E+B" is a lefthanded spiral. Let's swap the electrons for protons. Electric field lines are now inpointing. Magnetic field lines are now clockwise. Oops---the nonsense quantity E+B has a lefthanded twist again. Since Farsight is telling us that the handedness of the E+B spiral "explains" attraction and repulsion, he's predicted that a line of electrons should repel a line of positrons. But only if they're moving in the same direction! In fact, we get (depending on their relative velocities) the very nice prediction that different observers will disagree on whether the lines attract or repel each other. Good one.

 

[Farsight]

Pointing out the deep problems in your ideas is not "abuse". Instead of dodging, why not address points I made regarding your mistake about chirality

Hardly a "deep" problem, but yes, sorry about that. I made a mistake saying the disks had the opposite chirality. These things happen from time to time. To clarify, I said you start with two disks both with a clockwise "steering wheel" rotation. You then spin one like a coin with your left hand, and you spin the other like a coin with your right hand. I then said they have the opposite chirality, I was wrong. These are "mirror image" things but you can rotate one to transform it into the other, so they aren't chiral. I know this because I spoke at length with Andrew Worsley about spheres and torii. We drew orthogonal lines around pingpong balls, with arrowheads. We concluded that whilst the electron and the positron are deemed to have a spherically-symmetric electric field, there has to be an underlying toroidal nature because electrons and positrons have opposite chiralities.

 

[Farsight]

Note that the field lines do not form concentric circles. No matter which way you turn it.

But it still looks like a torus, doesn't it? And as per Adrian Rossiter's torus animations you can inflate a torus until it looks like a sphere.

Your bold. You didn't bold "in any other way", which rather changes the meaning of what I said I think.

You said you'd combine the field lines by not combining them. Not too clever was it?

The electromagnetic field is a tensor field - a more complex object than a simple vector field. To depict it I'd prefer to use two distinct sets of lines rather than one. Maybe I'll draw a diagram for you later, but I don't think it's that hard for you to imagine what I mean.

Bah, stop prevaricating. Just get on and draw it. And by the way, a tensor is an abstract mathematical thing. A field isn't. A field is "a state of space" according to Einstein, and that's fine by me.

The equation is a prediction of the charge on an electron...

So they got it wrong. They wrote it in 1991. Cut them some slack. The charge of the electron is

with a binding energy adjustment. See the blue DNA torus here and compare with the image from their paper.

 

[ctamblyn]

Hardly a "deep" problem, but yes, sorry about that. I made a mistake saying the disks had the opposite chirality. These things happen from time to time. To clarify, I said you start with two disks both with a clockwise "steering wheel" rotation. You then spin one like a coin with your left hand, and you spin the other like a coin with your right hand. I then said they have the opposite chirality, I was wrong. These are "mirror image" things but you can rotate one to transform it into the other, so they aren't chiral. I know this because I spoke at length with Andrew Worsley about spheres and torii. We drew orthogonal lines around pingpong balls, with arrowheads. We concluded that whilst the electron and the positron are deemed to have a spherically-symmetric electric field, there has to be an underlying toroidal nature because electrons and positrons have opposite chiralities.

Thank you.

I will note that you didn't address the other half of my post (in which I linked back to these questions). Perhaps next time?

I'd also point out that electrons of both chiralities exist in nature, as do positrons of both chiralities, but there is an asymmetry between them.

All of that aside: You don't necessarily need an underlying toroidal nature to your electron to get chirality. If your disks had been oriented in some way (e.g. marked on one side with "heads" and the other with "tails") that would suffice to allow two distinct rotating states. Indeed, you could get away with uniform rotation about a single axis in that case.

If you do want to stick with unmarked disks, something which gets closer to the "torus" depicted in Williamson / van der Mark's paper is the following. Take a disk which rotates "like a steering wheel" as before. Instead of then spinning it like a coin, make it orbit the origin in such a way that centre of the disk traces out a circular path while the disk itself remains coplanar with the origin. The disk boundary traces out a 2-torus. A representative point on the disk boundary might move like so in a typical model (with some uninteresting parameters omitted):

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

The parameter a sets the speed of the "steering wheel" motion, b sets the rate of the orbital motion, and the positive parameter c sets the orbital radius. For such a set-up, you can identify five disjoint classes of model, which cannot be transformed into each other by rotations in 3D space:

1. Those for which the point never moves (relative to the torus).
2. Those for which the point passes through the hole but there is no "orbital" motion.
3. Those for which the point never passes through the hole but still orbits.
4. Those for which the point passes through the hole in the opposite direction to the vector defined by the "orbital" component of the motion (using the right-hand rule).
5. Those for which the point passes through the hole in the same direction as the vector defined by the "orbital" component of the motion.

The first category has a = b = 0. The second has non-zero a but b = 0. The third has a = 0 but non-zero b. The fourth has a and b both non-zero with the same sign. The fifth has a and b both non-zero with opposite signs. According to you (Farsight) on some occasions at least, electrons and positrons are described by the fourth and fifth classes of model (though maybe not that way around).

There is no reason why we should accept without exceedingly strong evidence that a photon would be moving along such a toroidal surface, as it would require significant alterations to the thoroughly tested laws of electromagnetism. If you could get it to do so it seems like the resulting states should actually be determined by solving a wave equation on the surface and finding the eigenvalues, rather than use the Bohr-model-like method of simply looking for closed paths of a certain length. You'd need to adjust the parameters to make the lowest-mass particle appear at 511 keV (the electron mass). At that point, you'd be left with the following problems (all of which have been mentioned before, early on in this thread):

1. There should be an infinite discrete series of excited states corresponding to the higher eigenvalues. These have never been observed, despite presumably being well within the range of accelerators.
2. Worse still, there should be a continuous infinity of states with higher and lower masses corresponding to similar systems with other values for the torus dimensions. Again, these have never been observed.
3. The resulting states are electrically neutral (so they have the wrong charge).
4. The resulting states are bosonic (so they have the wrong spin and collective behaviour).
5. Photon-photon interactions would need to be much stronger than observed to permit the bound state.
6. The resulting states would be unstable, decaying spontaneously into free photons.

 

[Farsight]

...Your ideas do not comport with either of them.

They aren't my ideas, I'm just telling you about the screw nature of electromagnetism. Which does "comport" with both of them. Go read the quotes. I didn't make them up either.

...It's no better than the just so story of how the leopard got its spots.

Phooey. You explain why the electron and the positron attract one another. Come on. How you going to do it? By referring to magical mysterious action at a distance? Or photons flitting around?

Spinors can be flipped upside down, and a force which is dependent upon a spinor will have angular dependence. You are claiming that you can't do that with your chiral vortices (or whatever you want to call them), and that they produce no angle dependence. You aren't using spinors.

Huh? There's no angular dependence in Coulomb's law. The Einstein de-Haas effect demonstrates that electron intrinsic spin is a real rotation. And the electron is said to have a spherically-symmetric electric field. But aw, you're just playing the naysayer aren't you? Anything to try to make out I'm mistaken. Yeah, I guess I was mistaken. About you being sincere.

Right, JREF is going slow so I'm off. We will continue with your physics education another time. Until then, remember this: as you are to Anders Lindman, so am I to you.

 

[ctamblyn]

...
You said you'd combine the field lines by not combining them. Not too clever was it?
...

What edd really said was this:

If I were to draw it, I'd show a standard radial field for the electric component, and I'd show the usual dipole field like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:VFPt_dipole_point.svg for the magnetic component, and when combining the two I'd probably use one colour for one component, one colour for the other and just overlay the two. I'd not try to combine the field lines in any other way than superimposing one set upon the other, with some method of keeping them clearly distinct.

A bit like how an electromagnetic wave is commonly depicted. They don't show some weird nonsensical sum of E and B components - they show each as distinct.

I don't read that as saying he objects to combining them into a single picture. In fact, he spells out very clearly how he'd combine them into a single picture.

I'm curious, incidentally. Using the same methodology which produced that spiral, how do you think the following three field configurations would look?

1. A uniform magnetic field in the x-direction.
2. A uniform electric field in the x-direction.
3. A linear superposition of the previous two fields.