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Internal structure of electrons, quarks and gluons

Andy_Ross said:
I'll tell you something. Something I've never told anyone.
When I was fifteen, I went to Macedonia on a school trip, to the site of Alexander The Great's palace. And for the first time in my whole life, I felt I was home. This place was where I belonged.
Years later, I got friendly with a hypnotherapist called Donald and told him about the Alexander the Great thing, and he said that he'd regress me back through my past lives. I was dubious, but I let him put me under.
It turned out my instincts were absolutely correct, I had lived a past life in Macedonia. That palace was my home. Because, believe it or not, he told me that, in a past incarnation, I was Alexander the Great's chief eunuch.
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Of course you belonged there! They have your knackers!
 
wise47 said:
We are presumably talking about empirical evidence here, and that would be hard to come by.
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It is not generally considered possible to observe and thereby detect the existence of any particles smaller than Planck size because of the energy it would take and the effects of that much energy on so small a space. However, the inability to observe the particles you say exist does not excuse you from the need to supply any evidence of their existence.

As currently formulated, the Standard Model expresses gauge bosons etc. as point particles and quarks as point masses. If you want to show that they are instead composed of smaller discrete entities, then you must show how the Standard Model is wrong on that point (pun intended). You previously alluded to loop quantum gravity (LQG), but you did not use it correctly. It too requires a field-theory formulation which you have not provided.

LQG speculates that some particles could travel faster than light but this has been shown empirically not to occur where expected, such as in gamma ray bursts. Hence that portion of LQG is not supported well by theory or at all by observation. There are other predictions from LCQ that have empirical contradiction, such as the absence of mirror particles.

You do not yet have a theory as physics uses the term. Instead you seem to be borrowing concepts from LQG but expressing them informally and inexactly. Can you confirm that you are talking about (or at least attempting to talk about) LQG? If so, can you specify which formulations you are using? If not, can you provide the basic mathematical elements of the field theory that describes your proposal?
 
wise47 said:
After I discovered the galactical model, the cosmical model emerged by itself as its natural extension.
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You don't have any sort of model as physics understands the term. You have instead some vague thoughts that could be developed into a model if you could apply suitable rigor. Some of it resembles loop quantum gravity (LQG), which is evidently where you got some of these ideas. But you seem to be telling us you're not talking about LQG and that this is something you came up with on your own.

No one is interested in the history of how you arrived at these ideas. They're interested in whether you can prove that any of these ideas has explanatory or predictive power in physics. You seem to admit you have no empirical verification. In fact some of your ideas are already contradicted by reliable empirical observation, yet you dismiss modern physics as "fulll of rubbish."

Further, you describe objects that recede as "contracting" and those that approach as "enlarging," and you seem to relate this to actual mass of the objects and to involve some operation of time. But in fact these are well understood optical properties owing solely to simple projective geometry. You take it instead as some kind of proof of the fundamentals of your ideas.

You seem unable to describe your model properly as clear quantitative relationships. As with all your other threads you seem incapable of even a simple conversation, resorting instead to pat single-sentence declarations. It is unlikely you will be able to succeed in defending your ideas if that's all you can manage.

Frankly you're giving all the signals of a typical crackpot. People are helping you know what it would take to prove you are not, but you seem unwilling or unable to engage them.
 
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wise47 said:
I do not have a mathematical analysis available, as my mathematical skills are not very strong.
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Then how do you know the rest of physics is rubbish? It is expressed almost exclusively as mathematics. Do you understand it?

Some parts of your linked article go back to 2011. Many go back to the mid-2010s. You have had several years to formulate a proper mathematical expression of them—either to learn the proper mathematics yourself or (as Faraday and Einstein did) to collaborate with mathematicians who can express the ideas properly so that other physicists can study them. Why have you not done so?
 
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Good post, Dr. Utah. Now say it again in one-syllable words. Like

"How you make up what you think is no good. You must work. Math is the right way to go.
You think far off is small, and big is up close. Not so.

"You need real things to show that you are right. You have no such things. But you say that all
smart men are full of junk.

"All you say is 'This is so.' No one can use that.

"You write like a krank."

The above is only a first draft. Like Pascal, I had no time to make it shorter.

Also, scrolling up & down on this toy screen to choose what to leave out gets goddamned
tiresome!
 
PSXer said:
Why stop there? Maybe those particles are made of even smaller particles.
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Why not? Atoms were once thought to be elementary, indivisible particles. Atomos means "indivisible" in Greek.

We discovered the electron empirically. We made a machine that separated electrons from the rest of the atom and manipulated them in a way that allowed us to observe that they had an electrical charge and a computable mass. The formulation of the rest of the structure of the atom proceeded empirically. But it also required a mathematical formulation, because such things as the inertiall masses of the particles and their charges had to balance. Because of the math we were able to deduce the existence of the neutron. Then more machines proved the existence of a massive nuclear particle that did not have an electrical charge.

This is the pattern by which physics discoveries have proceeded for 200 years—interleaved and mutually supportive observation and mathematical deduction.

Quarks et al. were discovered empirically as higher-energy machines were able to smash matter more violently and produce observations that could not be explained by the three known kinds of particles. As usual, this "zoo" of observed new particles was organized using mathematics into what we call today the Standard Model. The model proposes properties that exist as mathematical entities associated with measurable behavior in each of the "-ons."

Among other things, this model explains fundamental physical forces by proposing the existence of force-carrying, massless particles called bosons that carry force across spacetime by being exchanged among affected mass-having particles. Electromagnetic force, for example, is carried by the photon.

The problem with the math is that the simplest and most elegant equations only described the observed behavior if all the particles involved had zero mass, including the ones for which we knew empirically this was not true. The solution was the Higgs field, with which some particles interacted in a way that gave them the appearance of inertial mass. Interactions with fields (quantities that vary over spacetime) describes almost all of what we can observe about the universe, so this made intuitive sense.

But if this were true, then high-energy motion through the Higgs field would create something we could observe. If you have a boat moving slowly through the harbor, it generates little if any wake. But it still experiences hydrodynamic drag and so still exhibits behavior consistent with something moving through a fluid. But when the boat speeds up in open water, it creates a visible wake. In a sense, the observation of the wake proves the existence of water through which the boat moves. It's a localized disturbance in the fabric of water that looks different than the surrounding water and stands out so we can observe it.

In normal quantum field theory, such localized disturbances are called "particles." That is, when the various fields (descriptions of the change in some value over space and time) described in quantum field theory "kink up" and form localized "wakes," that's where a particle is. There's a field that describes quarks, for example. When a "wake" forms in it, a quark appears.

Planck's remarkable contribution to this knowledge was the observation that these kinks or wakes can only form in certain locations and times, like spots on the grid in the game Battleship. Your shots can only land in the named spots, and only when you take your turn. They don't show up in half-positions or in half-turns.

But I digress. How do we make particles move so fast that the Higgs field (the "water" that fills all of spacetime) will form a visible wake (i.e., "kink up" and make a particle appear there)?

You make a Large Hadron Collider.

You've seen the giant detectors it takes to observe these kinks, because they stand in for part of the Enterprise's warp drive in the J.J. Abrams Star Trek universe. Lo and behold, we observed a wake or kink—which we famously already gave the name of "Higgs boson." So we proved the Higgs field exists as predicted. The field that creates a Higgs boson under conditions of duress is what gives some particles inertia and therefore inertial mass.

So what does a Higgs field look like? What does any field look like? You know what a magnetic field looks like because the magnetic field lines are the characteristic graphical expression of a magnet. And we can draw similar field lines for electrical fields. And, it turns out, for gravity. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Those lines are the locations in space where the quantity in question, say, "the amount of magnetic attraction," are equal, like elevation lines on a topographical map. But it's the math that tells us where to draw those lines that is interesting to physicists. Math can be tested and manipulated and combined with other math to make predictions.

Imagine your teakettle full of water on the stove, heating up to make tea. Freeze time. Every tiny portion of the water in the kettle is at a different temperature. The water near the burner at the bottom is hotter than the water at the top. At every (x,y.z) coordinate inside your kettle, a different temperature value appears. This is a field, a "temperature field." You can compare the temperature at two points. The direction between the points is the direction part of a vector. The difference in temperature could be the magnitude of that vector. So you can overlay a field of vectors (several fields, in fact) that describes the difference in temperatures as vectors as you look in any direction from any point.

To simplify the mind-boggling complexity of that, we open up the field of "differential geometry," which uses the upside-down triangle operator ∇ in conjunction with vector math to concisely describe the ways in which quantities change through the field. A handful of such equations describes the shape and strength of all fields in physics. Solving them for specific values gives us those field lines that help you see the shape of the field without understanding the math. But it's the underlying math that physicists care about because they can manipulate the math algebraically to arrive at testable predictions and combine them with other fields. It's why you can't have physics without math.

Notably absent from any of this is gravity. Nothing in the Standard Model explains the apparent attractive force between two masses.

Einstein and his mathematician buddies wrote down some field equations that describe gravity accurately (i.e., we can observe that they work even under weird corner-case conditions), but their field equations have nothing whatsoever to do with the field equations that the Standard Model uses. It's not even apples-and-oranges. It's like comparing apples to brake pads.

The Standard Model could explain gravity by means of a new particle, the graviton. It would do for gravity what the photon does for electromagnetic force—if it could only be proven to exist. If it does exist, and if it does behave as required, then it has to have certain properties that apply to all particles in the Standard Model. You've heard of "spin" and "charge" and so forth. You would need to be able to describe a graviton in those terms and show that it participates in Standard Model equations through the mathematical expression of those properties.

To be sure, Einstein's model of gravity—curved spacetime—doesn't need any kind of particle at all. Gravity in his model isn't a force that needs a field or particle to make it happen. It's not a force at all. It's pure geometry.

@wise47 proposes that he has solved this problem, which is arguably the greatest open problem in physics—a so-called Theory Of Everything. He says the graviton exists and is a "bulges of space," which he vaguely describes as akin to spacetime curvature in Einstein's model. The Standard Model provides field equations that tell us how and where to find the "kinks" that we see as quarks, bosons, etc. Einstein's model provides field equations that tell us how spacetime curves in relation to masses and therefore how objects that think they're traveling in a straight line are actually bending to follow spacetime and thereby appear to be attracted to other masses. To be sure, there is a branch of physics called loop quantum gravity that is proposing one way to unify these two dissimilar visions of how matter behaves. They're working their way through different possibilities of field equations that might explain observable behavior, but so far they've had little luck. And while @wise47's explanation alludes to concepts in that physics, he won't actually embrace it.

Instead @wise47 proposes that he has figured it all out without all that pesky math or without borrowing from others' work. We're rightly suspicious because his presentation is copiously decorated with telltale phrases like "It can be assumed..." and "We can say that there is..." In other words, pure "shower thoughts," as someone observed. And the empirical foundation of his theory is his "observation" of a tiny "microgrid" (Planck on steroids?) through which his tiny conjectural galaxies of wise47-ons bob and weave. As has been done previously in physics, he just keeps slicing things up finer and finer. Only he can't do the slicing with the mathematical knives his predecessors know how to use, so we can't even being to study whether or not it would work.

He doesn't say how he observed his "microgrid," so we propose that he did so in the same magical way as he raises his own I.Q. to 1600 (claimed in his other threads). His pseudo-physics gibberish in the linked article is liberally mixed with assurances of his own personal prowess as a scientist, able to see beyond the conceptual blockade that pervades the entire field as it is now practice.

In other words, pure crackpottery.
 
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Jesus Christ, yet another ridiculous posit (that if I recall correctly was the premise of the movie Men in Black), and we get an interesting segue to actual learning that we might otherwise not have pursued.

Bravo, Mr Utah, for taking the time to turn silliness into something engaging.
 
Helen said:
Brah, maths? That's what they want you to use, we're working with vibes here, dude
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Deficiency in mathematics is not automatically a deal-breaker in physics. What we today praise as Maxwell's field equations for electromagnetism didn't originate with Maxwell. They originated with Michael Faraday, who seemed to have figured it out intuitively. But in order to make his intuition agree with quantities that could be measured, he needed help with the math. He didn't know differential geometry. Most people didn't, either then or now. It's not something most people need to know.

James Maxwell was also a physicist, but unlike Faraday he was better at the math. Faraday was the kind of guy you'd hire to fix your car because he was an absolute intuitive whiz at the way things worked. Faraday was able to wave his hands sufficiently in Maxwell's face that Maxwell came to understand in a colloquial way what Faraday was trying to propose. Maxwell had the vocabulary (i.e., math) to flesh out Faraday's concepts and propose them in a way that other physicists could understand, test, and manipulate. Maxwell's math expresses rigorously, concisely, and elegantly concepts like, "There are no magnetic monopoles." ∇ · B = 0 says this unambiguously to a real physicist.

Yes, you have to know what B means. It's a vector field—a collection of vectors organized by (x,y,z) coordinates. At each point in the field there is vector that describes the direction and strength of magnetic attraction. You have to know what ∇ · B means. Combining the little upside-down triangle with the dot operator means "divergence," here alluding to a dot-product in vector math. The idea behind divergence in a vector field is similar to adding up all the little vectors (like little arrows) in the field. The answer is a single number. If the number is positive, more little arrows point out. If it is negative, more little arrows point in. If it is zero, the net effect is zero.

Saying the divergence here is zero means conceptually that you can't have a magnet with only a north pole or only a south pole. If such a thing existed, you could compute the divergence ∇ · B of its magnetic field B and the answer would not be zero. Faraday observes that magnets don't do that. If you divide a magnet in half, you get two identical magnets each with its own properly formed, zero-divergent field.

It takes me a whole paragraph or two to explain it to smart lay people, but to fully explain it to a physicist takes only five symbols. This is why Maxwell gets all the credit that really should be shared between Maxwell and Faraday. And because there is a whole well-established (and mind-bogglingly rich) vocabulary for expressions using those symbols, we can write other sentences that build on the concept of magnetic fields having zero divergence and make many more testable predictions in physics.

Similarly Einstein was not a math genius. Just like Faraday, Einstein was pretty sure he was onto something. But he didn't know how to explain it aside from waving his hands vigorously and generating confused expressions among his colleagues. So he contacted his friend Marcel Grossmann.

If you know calculus you know that you can use some rules to transform equations into new equations that describe the rates of change of values in those equations or the rates of accumulating integral sums if your first equation was about rates. It turns out that there is a generalization of vectors called tensors. You think of a regular old number as the measurable distance along a number line. A vector is a number that has measurable dimensions along more than one number line simultaneously. A tensor is a way of thinking of all the possible ways a number can be simultaneously measured along any arbitrary number of number lines.

Grossman was an expert in what happens when those number lines don't have to be straight lines, which is what Einstein figured out he needed in order to express a "space" that was simultaneously a straight line when thought of in one way, but curved when thought of in another way. We call those spaces "manifolds," which are not the same as what's in your car. Tensor calculus is a way of looking at how tensor fields change or accumulate when those fields are defined by math—including math that involves un-straight number lines. That's what Grossmann could do, and what makes it work for physics where everything is either speeding up or slowing down. Einstein needed to quantify (i.e., use math) the amount of speeding up and slowing down that resulted from the effects of mass.

When it came time to publish their thoughts on spacetime curvature, Einstein wrote part of the paper and Grossmann wrote his part. With that, and with the help of lots of other physicists and mathematicians, the initial problems were worked out and the final math was presented in a later paper.

So @wise47 might have taken a page from this book and collaborated with someone who does know the math that he lacks. But he didn't. He's been puttering around with this idea since 2011. And at no time in that process does he seem to have figured out that in order to be accepted as physics he would need to express it as math, and to either learn the math he needed or consulted someone who already knew it. That's a pretty shaky perch from which to condemn all existing physics as "rubbish."
 
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