Merged Relativity+ / Farsight

[Tubbythin]

I've covered this already in post #386. Read it and understand the non-sequitur.

I've read it and understood that it is a an argument about throwing globes through a magnet and saying actually the globes aren't globes but mobius strips. That is all. It is not a physics argument.

No it isn't.

Yes it is. As I explained in my previous purpose

The electron has a magnetic dipole moment. It's a real rotation.

It doesn't have an electric dipole moment (that we can measure).

 

[Farsight]

Crack pot index +1 (The fact that you can't really explain your ideas and blame the 'theocracy' of science is ridiculous.)

Geddoutofit. dd said if you challenge the status quo you aren't worth listening to. That's not scientific. Skepticism has morphed into a dismissal of any evidence that challenges conviction.

BTW Here is where Gell-Mann described a particle that had not been found. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eightfold_Way_(physics)

No problem per se. But do note that the lifetime of the Omega baryon is very short. It isn't in the same league as the electron and the proton.

 

[Farsight]

So, here you are telling people about an idea but you won't explain it, you won't defend it. My guess is because you do not really know how to answer the question. You are unable to actually defend your own ideas. The problem is you can't explain what you think.

I explained it in post 386. The problem is that you're dismissing the explanation because it doesn't tally with what you think you know.

 

[Farsight]

Among other things, the scientific evidence shows conclusively that when you measure the spin of the electron along some axis, you always get one of two possible answers (+ or -hbar/2). If the spin were due to ordinary rotation, any value would be possible. That's one of the many pieces of independent evidence that spin is intrinsic.

No, it's just evidence that the spin is not that of a classical spinning sphere. Has anybody even read post #386? Can nobody see the non-sequitur in the Stern-Gerlach article? Or that a spin in two orientations fits the experimental result? Sheesh, this is just like talking to creationists.

Gotta go.

 

[Tubbythin]

I explained it in post 386. The problem is that you're dismissing the explanation because it doesn't tally with what you think you know.

I do love the irony.

 

[Tubbythin]

No, it's just evidence that the spin is not that of a classical spinning sphere. Has anybody even read post #386? Can nobody see the non-sequitur in the Stern-Gerlach article? Or that a spin in two orientations fits the experimental result? Sheesh, this is just like talking to creationists.

Gotta go.

Says the person who's "explanation" for the spin of the electron involves throwing globes (which are actually mobius strips and not globes) through a magnet separator. And no numbers. Whatsoever.

 

[sol invictus]

Groan. You won't read the original Maxwell?

Why would I? I'm not a historian of science. I haven't read Copernicus either.

Here my head thunks to my desk. They aren't Maxwell's equations.

They are called Maxwell's equations, Farsight. Here are 635,000 hits that say so. And here, one of the first image hits.

No, you don't.

I certainly know more about some things, for example almost anything involving EM radiation, antennas, blackbody spectra, stars, etc. I also have access to a far more powerful and mathematically sophisticated formulation of his equations than he did, I know how they are corrected by quantum mechanics, I know what current is, I know how to build advanced electronic circuits, I know what role EM plays in solids, etc.

So yes, I think I can say with confidence that I know much more about EM than Maxwell did. Of course the same goes for anyone else educated in physics these days - which obviously doesn't include you.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

I explained it in post 386. The problem is that you're dismissing the explanation because it doesn't tally with what you think you know.

All you have to do is provide some evidence for your position. A reasonable person would show us that Farsight pair production matches our measurements of electron charge. A reasonable person would show us what Minkowksi actually meant in his paper.

Or, alternatively, a reasonable person would admit that they do not have the evidence and that they are merely speculating.

As it is now, you are simply trying to should louder than others. You haven't made any attempt to try to a) actually show that your explanation matches the available data, or b) try to find out what the actual data is. Until you complete these tasks, you won't even know what people here or anywhere in physics think they know.

 

[sol invictus]

Of course it isn't. The particles have two orientations of spin.

Can nobody see the non-sequitur in the Stern-Gerlach article? Or that a spin in two orientations fits the experimental result?

Dead wrong. Electrons can have any orientation of spin, just like a classical spinning sphere in that regard (anything else would indicate a violation of rotation invariance, and hence non-conservation of angular momentum). You can orient your Stern-Gerlach apparatus along any axis you like, and the electrons you measure with it will always have spin +-hbar/2 along that axis. What makes that surprising is that the result is always +-hbar/2, and never anything else, not that they "have two orientations of spin".

Having read your post 386, it's even more clear (from, for example, the way you refer to the "inhomogeneous magnetic field") that you don't understand the experimental setup or why the result is significant. Yet more evidence that you haven't even the most basic clue about physics - experiment or theory.

By the way, you're right about one thing - the wiki is wrong where it says electron spin has nothing to do with rotation.

 

[Beerina]

If you had the effects of gravity factored in with quantum mechanics and the standard model you'd have a theory of everything

Except for how the subjective conscious experience arises.

 

[ben m]

I certainly know more about some things, for example almost anything involving EM radiation, antennas, blackbody spectra, stars, etc. I also have access to a far more powerful and mathematically sophisticated formulation of his equations than he did, I know how they are corrected by quantum mechanics, I know what current is, I know how to build advanced electronic circuits, I know what role EM plays in solids, etc.

So yes, I think I can say with confidence that I know much more about EM than Maxwell did. Of course the same goes for anyone else educated in physics these days - which obviously doesn't include you.

Yep. This is how all of these things work in the end---indeed it's how they are supposed to work. A modern relativist knows more about GR than Einstein did; a modern solid-state theorist knows more stat mech than Boltzmann; any random physics major knows more orbital mechanics than Kepler; etc. I did not say "smarter than", I said "knows more than"

For an analogy, who knows the most about (say) King Tut's tomb?

• On one hand you have the guy who maybe spent 10 years searching the desert alone, excavating dozens of dead-ends, finding the real tomb, excavating the entrance, and finally taking a sledgehammer to the door.
• On the other hand you have the late-arriving scholars who just walk in to the now-open room and can devote 20 years to reading all of the inscriptions, CAT-scanning the mummies, scraping pollen off the papyri, reading all of the newly-discovered papyri of the intervening years, talking to other scholars at conferences, etc.

So yes, the discoverer does the hardest part of the work, but the discoverer does not "know more than anybody else" even about the very thing he discovered. He knows a lot about the dead ends, a whole lot about shoveling out entrances, etc., but he has not read all of the inscriptions.

 

[Dancing David]

Geddoutofit. dd said if you challenge the status quo you aren't worth listening to. That's not scientific. Skepticism has morphed into a dismissal of any evidence that challenges conviction.

No problem per se. But do note that the lifetime of the Omega baryon is very short. It isn't in the same league as the electron and the proton.

No the problem is that you can't express your ideas and then complain about the theorcracy.

The problem is that you can't express your ideas in a form that has meaning. You have a speculative hypothesis with no prdictive value.

 

[Dancing David]

I explained it in post 386. The problem is that you're dismissing the explanation because it doesn't tally with what you think you know.

Ah yes, you mean this: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=5753254&postcount=386

Except you cant explain how the photon does that or why it gets the mass of an electron.

As I said you have a speculative hypothesis, not a description that make predictions about reality.

Put the math behind it and show how it works, that is what physics does.

You have your idea, you don't explain how it works, when you explain why the photon has the exact or even approximate mass it does, then you will have a theory.

 

[Reality Check]

No it doesn't, not at all. A classical spherical spinning particle would have a surface spinning faster than light.

Yes it does, all the time. A classical any-shaped spinning particle would have a surface spinning faster than light.

I was talking earlier to a guy called lpetrich who knows his stuff, and he accused me of being too literal minded, like I was promoting some straw-man myth that particles are points. He said "The particles are not little billiard balls or whatever, but quantum fields that follow field equations". The Dirac equation is a wavefunction equation. See http://electron6.phys.utk.edu/qm2/modules/m9/dirac.htm for a better article. Itdoesn't talk about point particles at all. ψ₁ is a two-component spinor. Follow the spinor link. This is non-relativistic, but pay attention to "We must also specify its spin variables in spin space Es..." and lower down "For the electron Es is two-dimensional."[/url] There are no point particles. Point particles cannot exhibit angular momentum.

and the first sentence is

The Dirac equation for a spin ½ particle is of the form

particle = point particle.

​

Actually I used to know a bit about the Dirac equation and spinors. They were what I did a pure math undergraduated thesis on many years ago.​

This is non-relativistic, but pay attention to "We must also specify its spin variables in spin space Es..." and lower down "For the electron Es is two-dimensional."[/url] There are no point particles. Point particles cannot exhibit angular momentum.

Spin space is 2-D. So what? It is a mathematical space. Hamiltionian spaces have infinate dimensions, Minkowski spaces have 4, etc.​

All of QM includinhg the Dirac equation describes point particles. It states that these point particles exhibit angular momentum and this is mesured experimentally.​

And.... The web page in the same module before this states this explicitly
Module 9 has Correction terms which starts with:​

We have previously found the energy eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the hydrogen atom, assuming that both the electron and the proton are point particles. We then have used stationary perturbation theory to find corrections to the energy eigenvalues due to the finite size of the proton. These corrections are extremely small. We now want to use stationary perturbation theory to find corrections to the energy eigenvalues and eigenfunctions due to the spin of the electron and the proton, which we have neglected so far.​

 

[RussDill]

It's an electromagnetic field variation propagating through space. I've talked about the electromagnetic field as a frame-dragged three-dimensional geometrical "twist" distortion of the space around an electron. For a photon, imagine space as a lattice of steel rods under compression. These lattice lines are all straight, so there's no discernible electromagnetic field. When a plane-polarized photon passes through there's a spatial distortion that causes lattice lines to twist. It's like you put a car jack in the middle and extended some of the steel rods to make a distortion like the outline of a wavepacket. The archtypal sinusoidal EM waveform tells you the degree of twist. It starts off gradually, goes to a positive maximum halfway up the slope of the lemon-like wavepacket outline, goes to zero at the top, then goes to a negative maximum half way down the back slope, then back to zero again.

blah blah babble blah blah. There is no such thing in physics as "it's like", there is no such thing as a car jack in physics. Same question. Why are your lattice lines straight, why do they exist, are the intrinsic? Why does a spatial distortion exist? Why does a spatial distortion cause the lattice lines to exist, is in "intrinsic"?

The car-jack analogy gives you the freeze-frame picture, the photon is a ripple of action where E=hf and p=hf/c. It's a wave, it has a kick to it like any other wave.

And is that an intrinsic property?

See the geometry and look at the h in E=hf. It's Planck's constant of action. The dimensionality of action is momentum multiplied by distance. The distance is the same for all photons. It's a displacement, a spacewarp like a gravitational wave is a spacewarp, and regardless of photon wavelength it's always 3.86 x 10^-13 m.

Which one is a distance? 'h' is in units 'eV*s', f is in units s^-1, and E in in units eV.

The 3.86E-13m didn't ring any bells so I did a search and found:

That's got a wavelength 2.426 x 10-12 metres. And it's the only wavelength you can use to make an electron. because that's the only wavelength which divided by 2π equates to the common photon amplitude of 3.86 x 10-13metres. The latter is what provides the cutoff that prevents the ultraviolet catastrophe. It's the quantum of quantum mechanics. And it's in every picture of the electromagnetic spectrum you will ever see.

ok, so I think what you want is E=hc/λ, since λ is in units of 'm'. That would give 511.06KeV. So then the question is where does 3.86E-13m come from. The only place I can find is the compton wavelength of the electron, which makes your definition circular.

I have no idea what you mean by "provides the cutoff that prevents the ultraviolet catastrophe". The solution to the ultraviolet catastrophe is the quantization of light, closely related is the Planck length, 1.616252(81)×10−35m. No where near your 3.86E-13m.[/quote]

You need to show where you are coming up with 3.86E-13m, or is it somehow "intrinsic"?

Pair production isn't imaginary. It's real physics. If the energy isn't adequate to separate the electron and the positron they annihilate and the result is two 511keV gamma photons.

Which is equivalent to me saying that unicorns are real because pair production isn't imaginary. After all, I have a bunch of word salad about car jacks and unicorns that describe pair production.

 

[sol invictus]

ok, so I think what you want is E=hc/λ, since λ is in units of 'm'. That would give 511.06KeV. So then the question is where does 3.86E-13m come from. The only place I can find is the compton wavelength of the electron, which makes your definition circular.

That's right - there's no way to get a distance out of h and c. You need something with mass dimensions in it, like the mass of the electron or Newton's constant. The Compton wavelength of the electron, h/(mc), is 2.4E-12m. The other length Farsight mentioned is the Compton wavelength divided by 2pi.

As you say, circular.

I have no idea what you mean by "provides the cutoff that prevents the ultraviolet catastrophe". The solution to the ultraviolet catastrophe is the quantization of light, closely related is the Planck length, 1.616252(81)×10−35m. No where near your 3.86E-13m.

Eh? No, that's not correct. The Planck length is the length you can form with h, c, and G, Newton's gravitational constant. But the solution to the UV catastrophe has nothing to do with gravity.

The cutoff comes from the fact that a single photon has energy E=hv, where v is the frequency. So if you want to excite the EM field at frequency v, it will cost you at least that much energy, because you must create at least 1 photon. You cannot create 1/2 a photon, or 1/10 of a photon. But that means that at temperature T, it will be extremely rare to find EM oscillations with frequency much higher than kT/h (k is Boltzmann's constant), because there's a Boltzmann factor e^(-hv/kT) suppressing the probability for them. If the number of photons could be non-integer, that wouldn't be the case (because you could excite arbitrarily high frequencies just a little, at small energy cost).

 

[Tubbythin]

See the geometry and look at the h in E=hf. It's Planck's constant of action. The dimensionality of action is momentum multiplied by distance. The distance is the same for all photons. It's a displacement, a spacewarp like a gravitational wave is a spacewarp, and regardless of photon wavelength it's always 3.86 x 10^-13 m. An electron is a configuration where the spacewarp is travelling entirely through itself in a double loop, changing its own path constantly, and for this the wavelength has to be 2pi times that common amplitude, or 2.426 x 10^-12 m. Hence electrons are always 511keV.

So, let me get this straight... you think an electron has a size about 2000 times bigger than the radius of a proton?

 

[ben m]

I've talked about the electromagnetic field as a frame-dragged three-dimensional geometrical "twist" distortion of the space around an electron.

This is a really seriously stupid claim, Farsight. The only thing that is known to bend spacetime is energy. We know exactly how much energy a photon has, and therefore we know how much it bends spacetime. Ditto for an electron, a neutrino, a neutron, a planet, etc.

This amount is tiny---absurdly tiny. It's too small to be have any bound states. (If it did have a bound state, it would be what we call a "geon". This possibility has been studied extensively and it doesn't work.) It's too small to have any effects at all, in fact.

If you want to hypothesize that the photon bends spacetime a lot, why don't you tell us what part of General Relativity you are throwing out the window? We can tell you in response which null-result precision gravity experiments you are in disagreement with. Alternatively, answer this: when I shoot an photon beam through spacetime, I expect it to follow a geodesic path, which may or may not (as in gravitational lensing) be a classical "straight line". Nonetheless, I can fire a photon beam through the middle of the densest photon clouds you could possibly imagine (as in, say, femtosecond lasers, or NIF, or NOVA) and it doesn't deflect one bit. Why doesn't an external photon follow a non-straight geodesic through the curved space in your hypothetical twists?

(I'll tell you why: because the thing you call "spacetime" in your imagination is just a mental image of some curved lines, and has no relationship to anything in physical law.)

 

[Reality Check]

Of course it isn't. The particles have two orientations of spin.

You really do not understand the Stern-Gerlach experiment.

If the particles are classical, "spinning" particles, then the distribution of their spin angular momentum vectors is taken to be truly random and each particle would be deflected up or down by a different amount, producing an even distribution on the screen of a detector.

The original experiment started with a vapor of silver atoms where the orientations of spin were random because you have a gas of particles bouncing against each other randomly and changing spin orientation randomly. Modern experiments also start with collections of particles with random orientations of spin.

The Stern-Gerlach experiment does not show that particles have set orientations of spin. It shows that spin is quantized.

N.B.

The Stern-Gerlach experiment is not done only with electrons.

• The original experiment was done with silver atoms to test the Bohr–Sommerfeld hypothesis that the direction of the angular momentum of a silver atom is quantized. It was not really a test of the spin in quantum mechnaics since the concept did not even exist at the time. It does demonstrate that spin is quantized as realized later.
• The experiment was repeated with neutral hydrogen atoms to eliminate doubts about the use of silver atoms.
• It has been done for atomic nuclei.

This shows that all spins at atomic scales are quantized.

ETA:
As sol victus stated the wiki article is wrong when it states that spin angular momentum has nothing to do with rotation:

Electrons are spin-1⁄2 particles. These have only two possible spin angular momentum values, called spin-up and spin-down. The exact value in the z direction is +ħ/2 or −ħ/2. If this value arises as a result of the particles rotating the way a planet rotates, then the individual particles would have to be spinning impossibly fast. Even if the electron radius were as large as 14 nm (classical electron radius) then it would have to be rotating at 2.3×10^11 m/s. The speed of rotation would be in excess of the speed of light, 2.998×10^8 m/s, and is thus impossible.[2] Thus, the spin angular momentum has nothing to do with rotation and is a purely quantum mechanical phenomenon. That is why it is sometimes known as the "intrinsic angular momentum."

It is to do with rotation but not classical rotation.
Also note that the surface of a non-point particle (of any shape) with the electron radius is moving at ~1000 times the speed of light. We know that an electron is actually many orders of magnitude smaller than this.

 

[Farsight]

Well this doesn't seem to be the way Farsight is using the word intrinsic. Rightly or wrongly he seems to be using it to mean that it's a quantity that isn't measured in the classical sense.

I'm challenging the way intrinsic is used to refute rotation, eg in the Stern-Gerlach wiki article, which says:

Thus, the spin angular momentum has nothing to do with rotation and is a purely quantum mechanical phenomenon. That is why it is sometimes known as the "intrinsic angular momentum."

We know that electron spin isn't like a classical spinning sphere, but it's then a non-sequitur to say it's nothing to do with rotation.