ctamblyn
Data Ghost
I'll just add, that I've enjoyed reading lpetrich's posts on the thread topic. As far as I can follow them, they have been very interesting indeed. Thanks. 
What he says is not just wrong. It's nonsense. In the same way that if I said my blood cholesterol level was 73% I'd be wrong. If I said it was 73,000 Japanese Yen it'd be nonsense. He makes that kind of mistake.Yes. I don't think he's got everything right, but I think that in the fullness of time it will be acknowledged that he got some very important things right. Like (quasi) spherical harmonics underlie the electron itself, not just electron atomic orbitals.
Wrong, Farsight..This cosmic treacle nonsense from a guy at DAMTP see slide 17, and this Fermilab article: "The Higgs field is like a giant vat of molasses spread throughout the universe". It's garbage.
Huh? No. You create an electron in pair production, along with a positron. Charge is conserved like angular momentum is conserved. In our subatomic world of fields and waves there's nothing to "brace on". You can't make a spinor like this without making one with the opposite chirality. Have a browse on topological charge.
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!The hypothetical existence of a magnetic monopole would imply that the electric charge must be quantized in certain units; also, the existence of the electric charges implies that the magnetic charges of the hypothetical magnetic monopoles, if they exist, must be quantized in units inversely proportional to the elementary electric charge.
Farsight is obsessing about crank theories that have been already discussed and found failing in this forum on 25th March 2010.Sure, but a moebius strip involves tracing a surface. So far as I know anyway, particles don't have surfaces.
If anyone is interested: The Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology? paper came up almost 3 years ago and is fundematally flawed. This was exlained to Farsight in the Relativity+ / Farsight's thread, e.g. OK, I've read the Williamson and van der Mark paper again. (they should have got a charge of zero for an electron).
Quoting out of context. The context being a problem with the Standard Model with unbroken electroweak symmetry: everything would be massless in it, something that we clearly don't observe. "Massless" meaning zero rest mass.I've told you what physicists have said: that the Higgs mechanism is a "crutch", and "the toilet of the standard model", that it's said to be responsible for only 1% of the mass of matter and so doesn't solve "the mystery of mass".
How it's created is irrelevant.and the Higgs boson gets its mass from the kinetic energy given to the protons,
However, its interactionsthat the "bump" could be anything,
That's for turning Planck's constant into a units factor rather than something measured. The other quantities you mentioned, c, ɛ and μ are also officially units factors.Nor is the proposal for the kilogram. See the Watt balance section of the wiki kilogram article and note this: "By fixing the Planck constant, the definition of the kilogram would depend only on the definitions of the second and the meter." The second and the meter are defined using c which relates to ɛ and μ.
Even if you've misunderstood what they are saying and even if you've quoted them out of context. Just like what many theologians seem to do.My weapons are hard scientific evidence and references to papers and articles and what Einstein and others, including CERN physicists, actually say.
With a photon or a Z, yes, but a W produces an electron and a neutrino. In fact, pair production is very general.Huh? No. You create an electron in pair production, along with a positron. ...
A theologian's sort of argument. It's the theories that count, not the people.What makes you such a prophet of revealed truth that you dismiss what Einstein and Maxwell and Minkowski and others like Percy Hammond actually say?
That would not be very apparent.I don't disdain mathematics. I've said repeatedly that mathematics is a vital tool for science.
The same thing can be said about language more generally. Mathematics can be interpreted as a language.The point I've also made is that you can't use mathematics do define the terms you use in mathematics.
You are advocating them, and your overall theoretical picture seems to be original with you.They aren't my theories. I'm not some my-theory guy.
The way a theologian refers to sacred books. It's theories, rather than personalities, that I'm concerned with, and even worse, your heroes often advocate theories that you reject. Einstein stated rather plainly that he believed that space and time are part of a space-time continuum.I refer to Einstein and others remember? The people you dismiss.
So what?We argue here about the nature of intrinsic spin, but a moebius strip has a spin ½ feature. You go round twice to end up back as you started.
Whoops. Missed this nonsense and repeated ignorance from you, Farsight!I've told you what physicists have said: that the Higgs mechanism is a "crutch", and "the toilet of the standard model", that it's said to be responsible for only 1% of the mass of matter and so doesn't solve "the mystery of mass".
This is not hardly even physics. It is simple mathentaics, Farsight!A proton is made of 2 up quarks and a down quark (8 to 11 Mev) but has a mass of 938 Mev. Protons make up most of the mass of the universe.
Thus the Higgs mechanism providing ~1% of the mass is not surprising.
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Originally Posted by lpetrich![]()
Nucleons get most of their masses from color confinement. Their quarks and gluons cannot get more than about 10^(-15) m from each other without those particles' interactions getting superstrong. This means that those particles' wavefunctions cannot extend over a greater size, and thus that their masses should be about a few hundred MeV. Thus, the nucleons' masses.
Nothing has. And even the standard model isn't complete. I'm surprised you're attacking TQFT with this line. It's not some notion dreamt up by some amateur.(a) TQFT, in the version relevant to particle physics, is a hypothesis. There is no evidence it is true.
(b) TQFT, in the versions relevant to particle physics, is and incomplete hypothesis. TQFT has not actually predicted any masses successfully. It's not obvious that it would do so even if complete.
Michael Atiyah was at ABB50/25 talking to Qiu-Hong Hu about the electron knot.(c) The success of (mainstream, relativistic, quantum, stringy) TQFT has no bearing on the truth or falsehood of Farsightism. Just because it is "topological", and you daydream about your own theory being "topological", does not mean that you're talking about the same thing. TQFT is using topology a set of mathematical truths which can be applied to physics. Farsightism uses "topology" as a synonym for "I drew some geometrical pictures and I fancy myself pretty smart, so stop criticizing".
It isn't wrong. Go and read about it instead of launching into outraged denial because you've got nothing. If you had something you'd lay it out.This is comically, stupidly wrong. Do you have a face-to-face human relationship with a physicist? Ask them to explain this to you.
That maser is an optical device. It emits light waves at your detector. You can't refer to frequency which is cycles per second when you're defining the second. So you're effectively counting 9,192,631,770 microwaves and then declaring that a second has elapsed. Then you use the motion of light and the second to define the metre. And wherever you define the second and the metre, you then use them to measure the local speed of light. So you always measure it to be 299,792,458 m/s. Your definition makes the speed of light constant, despite the fact that light clocks at different elevations don't keep time.Either the meter or the second are chosen arbitrarily by humans. Once you choose one, you use the speed-of-light to define the other. We said "hey, let's choose the second to be 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the cesium maser". That's an arbitrary human choice; there is no way to derive 9,192,631,770 from the laws of physics. Once we make that choice, though, the laws of physics fix the length of the distance unit "light-second". The traditional "meter" is 1/299792458 of a light-second.
You still use the motion of light though, and you still end up measuring the local speed to be 299,792,458 m/s. NB: the length of the stick is 1/299792458 of a distance-unit, not a time-unit. I'm surprised nobody picked that up.You can do it the other way around. Declare, arbitrarily, that *this iridium stick* 1/299792458 of a time-unit. Then use the speed of light to figure out how long it takes to traverse the iridium stick. That determines your time unit.
That they don't. But a moebius strip does have a topology, and as per this mathspages article: "In this sense a Mobius strip is reminiscent of spin-1/2 particles in quantum mechanics, since such particles must be rotated through two complete rotations in order to be restored to their original state". And TQFT isn't some discredited amateur thesis like ben would have you think.Sure, but a moebius strip involves tracing a surface. So far as I know anyway, particles don't have surfaces.
Just look at picture. Note though that as you said there is no surface. The "onion-ring" contours showing on the slice through the torus should keep getting bigger.Haven't read it, can't at the moment being at work, but I can take a look later. But I'm quite sure it'll be above my minimal expertise in this area.
When it comes to spin 0 I'd say it doesn't matter as much. Helium-4 atom has spin 0, but it's composite. To get to the bottom of mass we focus on the "elementary" particle that we've actually seen and is common: the electron.That's what I hear. That's the part that confuses me, I suppose. What does it matter with spin if it always looks the same anyway? Then I tell myself I'm being far too literal and know too little about the subject.
I haven't made any specific errors. You have.How odd, then, that you haven't been able to identify any specific errors in what I've said about electromagnetism, while it's very easy to identify specific errors in what you've said about electromagnetism.
Aaargh! There is no such thing as a purely electric field! When you move through an "electric field" you start to see a "magnetic field" too. Not because you create it, but because you start to see another aspect of the electromagnetic field. Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism a hundred and fifty years ago. And how many times do I have to tell you what Minkowski said over a hundred years ago: "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 perspicious way of describing the two forces together is on a certain analogy with the wrench in mechanics, though the analogy is not complete"..." How many times do I have to tell you about Jackson's Classical Electromagnetism. Use the read online option and put double quotes around a phrase to search for it. See section 1.2 where he says "Although the thing that eventually gets measured is a force" and "At the moment the electric field can be defined as the force per unit charge acting at a given point". Then see section 11.10 where he says "one should properly speak of the electromagnetic field Fuv rather than E or B separately".For example:
Now stop all this huffing and puffing and crackpot naysaying, pay attention, and watch my lips: the field concerned is the electromagnetic field. Electromagnetic field interactions result in linear and/or rotational motion. When only linear motion is observed people speak of an electric field, when only rotational motion is observed people speak of a magnetic field
Your highlighted assertions are incorrect.
Coulomb's law has essentially the same form as Newton's law of gravitation, so a negatively charged particle can be in circular orbit around a positively charged body just as planets can have circular orbits around stars. That's circular motion caused by a purely electric field.
Aaargh! There's no such thing as a purely magnetic field. Each wire consists of moving electrons and static protons, all with their electromagnetic fields. Throw an electron past a wire and you see helical motion. That isn't linear motion. But two sets of helical motion result in linear motion. That's why Minkowski referred to a wrench and Maxwell referred to a screw.Ampère's force law (for the simple case of two parallel conductors) describes a Lorentz force that, left unopposed, results in linear motion caused by a purely magnetic field. This example of magnetic fields causing linear motion is the basis for our current definition of the ampere.
They won't say I'm right even though they know I'm right because they're not being sincere. Now go and look up what I've told you, and verify it for yourself.The physicists here would be a lot more likely to say Farsight is right about this if Farsight were right about this.
It was the same old same old. See below.Farsight mentioned that Williamson / van der Mark article in his first few posts in these forums (in a thread to do with FTL travel, started by someone else), and tried to defend that idea in his Relativity+ thread. It was not a successful endeavour.
That's specious ctamblyn, and you know it. We create an electron and a positron from a photon in pair production. Together they have no net charge. We can diffract the electron. It has a wave nature. Then we can annihilate the electron and positron and we typically get two 511keV photons. With no net charge. Charge is conserved. And don't try and make out that you've never heard of topological charge, or that Topological Quantum Field Theory is some crackpot junk.In simple terms, it boils down to this: a photon - even a photon forced to wrap itself around some tortuous path in space - cannot be a source or sink of electric field lines, because it is electrically neutral.
Pity I referred to mathspages about that. And don't give me perpetual motion machines. How do you think the electron's charge gets created? Magic?The entire counterargument to that simple point consists of distractions involving Mobius bands and topology, and papers about knotted interference patterns (which, to be fair, are interesting despite being irrelevant to the argument). It's almost exactly like watching someone try to defend an elaborate design for a perpetual motion machine, which works using large magnets and steam-power.
I'm here because Einstein said The mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content, and that a if a body gives off the energy L in the form of radiation, its mass diminishes by L/c². What do you think happens in annihilation, when there's no body left? Magic? To defend Einstein I have to tell you about the electron and electromagnetism, and much else.This idea seems to form the basis of a few crackpot "theories" (I use scare quotes, as these are often just incoherent collections of vague ideas). In the case of Relativity+, the hope was that the Higgs mechanism would not be needed, as you'd be able to prove that (a) photons could wrap themselves up and look like a massive particle, (b) that particle would appear to be charged, and (c) only photons of a particular wavelength would be capable of folding up in the right way. Whenever asked to show that these things are even possible (with actual calculations, rather than text-parsing and hand-waving), no adequate answers have ever been forthcoming, AFAIAA.
If you can follow them, perhaps you'd like to explain the to Mister Earl and others. But you can't. Emperor's New Clothes!I'll just add, that I've enjoyed reading lpetrich's posts on the thread topic. As far as I can follow them, they have been very interesting indeed. Thanks.![]()
Nothing has. And even the standard model isn't complete. I'm surprised you're attacking TQFT with this line. It's not some notion dreamt up by some amateur.
That maser is an optical device. It emits light waves at your detector. You can't refer to frequency which is cycles per second when you're defining the second. So you're effectively counting 9,192,631,770 microwaves and then declaring that a second has elapsed.
According to Einstein, I'm allowed to use a coordinate system that's at rest with respect to the charged body around which a negatively charged particle is moving in a circular orbit. In that Einstein-sanctioned coordinate system, the magnetic field is zero.Aaargh! There is no such thing as a purely electric field! When you move through an "electric field" you start to see a "magnetic field" too.
That book's in my personal library. Unlike Farsight, I can actually read some of its equations.How many times do I have to tell you about Jackson's Classical Electromagnetism. Use the read online option and put double quotes around a phrase to search for it.
Yet I passed the course, and Farsight's been giving proof he hasn't.You still don't understand even the first thing about electromagnetism, Clinger.
According to Einstein, I'm allowed to use a coordinate system in which the electric field is zero but the magnetic field is nonzero. In that Einstein-sanctioned coordinate system, I see linear motion resulting from a purely magnetic field.Aaargh! There's no such thing as a purely magnetic field.
Farsight's accusing the physicists of dishonesty.They won't say I'm right even though they know I'm right because they're not being sincere. Now go and look up what I've told you, and verify it for yourself.
No edd. It's all down to c and h and wave harmonics, which are not wholly different to the spherical harmonics in atomic orbitals where electrons exist as standing waves. There you've got an electron going round and round a proton. You can diffract an electron. It has a wave nature. You made it in pair production along with a positron, from an E=hf photon, which also has a wave nature. Photons travel linearly at c, electrons don't. They have a spin ½ feature and a magnetic moment and E=mc² mass and their topological charge instead. What was a wave, a field variation, is now a standing wave and a standing field. One day you'll hear about something similar from an authoritative source. You'll understand that an electron exists as a standing wave going round and round because it's interacting with itself. And you'll lap it up. You just heard it here first is all. This is where you were disabused of magic.What he says is not just wrong. It's nonsense. In the same way that if I said my blood cholesterol level was 73% I'd be wrong. If I said it was 73,000 Japanese Yen it'd be nonsense. He makes that kind of mistake. You should admit it cannot possibly be right.
No, Farsight. It is all down to your fantasies about c and h and wave harmonics. We cannot rely on these fantasies because you are so in denial of the Higgs mechanism that you cannot even acknowledge that it is a relativistic QFT (and so does not violate E=mc^2).No edd. It's all down to c and h and wave harmonics..
Wrong again, FarsightIt's all down to c and h and wave harmonics, which are not wholly different to the spherical harmonics in atomic orbitals where electrons exist as standing waves.
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!Originally Posted by Reality Check![]()
If anyone is interested: The Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology? paper came up almost 3 years ago and is fundematally flawed. This was exlained to Farsight in the Relativity+ / Farsight's thread, e.g. OK, I've read the Williamson and van der Mark paper again. (they should have got a charge of zero for an electron).
No edd. It's all down to c and h and wave harmonics, which are not wholly different to the spherical harmonics in atomic orbitals where electrons exist as standing waves.
That's specious ctamblyn, and you know it.
<snipped for brevity>
No edd. It's all down to c and h and wave harmonics, which are not wholly different to the spherical harmonics in atomic orbitals where electrons exist as standing waves.
One day you'll hear about something similar from an authoritative source.