Merged Relativity+ / Farsight

[Reality Check]

Looking back at previous posts does reveal some interesting )) statements from Farsight like this from 23rd June 2013:

Look at the blue torus on the Edinburgh TQFT web page.

Wow - a blue torus on a web page for the Geometry and Topology group in a School of Mathematics !

This is the University of Edinburgh Geometry and Topology

The Geometry and Topology group have interests in Algebraic Surgery Theory and the Topology of Manifolds; Algebraic Geometry and its relation to Combinatorics, Commutative Algebra, Gauge Theory and Mathematical Physics, Homotopy theory, Symplectic Geometry; Birational Geometry; Category Theory and its Applications; Derived Categories and Moduli Spaces; and Derived Algebraic Geometry. Together with Algebra and Number Theory group we form the Hodge Institute.

No specific mention of TQFT.

The University of Edinburgh web page for Mathematical Physics is more promising for TQFT:

We are the University of Edinburgh branch of the EMPG: a group of researchers with interests in Mathematical Physics, based at Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt universities. Our areas of interest include: String Theory, Supergravity, Conformal Field Theory, Integrability, Gauge Theory, Geometry of Supersymmetry, Quantum Gravity, Cosmology.

Both have Michael Atiyah as an Honorary Professor.

 

[Farsight]

But you did not and have not, Farsight !

A poster presentation is not scientific literature.

Mark Dennis is studying knotted optical vortices which have nothing to do with the Qui-Hong Hu idea about electrons. arXiv has 10 results for an author search on Qui-Hong Hu. The only applicable result is the old "The nature of the electron" from 2005.
Nine years later and all he can do is pin up a poster containing the same old stuff at a conference !
Ten years later and still no one has cited his article (hardly a scientific paper) in Physics Essays from 2004 (see the poster) !
That preprint written by Atiyah does not mention...

As I said on the other thread, all I can do is tell you what physicists think. Strictly speaking Sir Michael Atiyah is a mathematician, but no matter, he really did talk to Qiu-Hong Hu about knots at ABB50/25, Mark Dennis was one of the organisers, and TQFT is "related to, among other things, knot theory". No, atoms are not knotted vortices, but the electron is, so Kelvin was right, and that's why Mark Dennis gave the cryptic comment in tying light in knots. Like I was saying on another thread, when I tell you what physicists say, don't dismiss it just because it doesn't square with some popscience written by some hack. Don't kid yourself that I'm some "my theory" guy, because I'm not. I'm just the guy who can tell you about things that aren't mainstream now, but will be.

You know that University of Edinburgh page you linked to? Look on the left, click on geometry and topology, and there's the blue torus top right. Why do you think it resembles to Qiu-Hong Hu's "hubius helix" and the toroidal electron? Pot luck?

 

[lpetrich]

I'm just the guy who can tell you about things that aren't mainstream now, but will be.

Dream on.


I think that we ought to consider how science progresses. A common view in the past has been the slow and steady accumulation of observations and experimental results and successful theories. There is something to be said for that, but there are certain problems, as Thomas Kuhn noted in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Some changes in overall theories or paradigms are *very* big.

He called paradigms "incommensurable", meaning that they cannot be reasonably compared, and he sometimes seemed to imply that going from paradigm to paradigm was little better than a random walk. But incommensurability is often overstated. Competing paradigms are not incommensurable in their predictions of observed results, even if their content is incommensurable. Even their content is often not quite incommensurable, especially if one paradigm is a limiting case of another one.

This limiting-case commensurability is what has happened in the physics revolutions of the twentieth century. Newtonian mechanics is a limiting case of both relativity and quantum mechanics, and they are both limiting cases of relativistic quantum field theory.

So any new fundamental theory ought to have general relativity and the Standard Model of particle physics as its limiting case. Grand Unified Theory model builders are aware of that, and they are careful to construct theories that have the Standard Model as a limiting case.

However, for "Farsight Physics", for lack of a better name, there is no hint as to how one can get the Standard Model's Lagrangian out of it. What a contrast it is to supersymmetry, GUT's, and SUSY GUT's.

 

[Farsight]

What you call "Farsight physics" is within the Standard Model physics, lpetrich. The first free parameter is electron mass, and the electron is a "just is" fundamental particle. One develops the Standard Model by explaining why the electron has the mass it does, and explaining its spin-½ structure. The alternative to this is beyond the Standard Model physics where one proposes a selectron without understanding the electron in the slightest. As you know that sort of thing has brought physics into disrepute and is a busted flush.

As for how science progresses, see page 53 of Graham Farmelo's Dirac biography The Strangest Man:

"At that time, Cunningham and Eddington were streets ahead of the majority of their Cambridge colleagues, who dismissed Einstein's work, ignored it, or denied its significance".

That was 1923. Also see Clifford M Will's The Confrontation between General Relativity and Experiment where in section 2.1.2 you can read that SR wasn't accepted by mainstream physicists until the late twenties. Then look at the History of General Relativity on Wiki where you can read this:

"Kip Thorne identifies the 'golden age of general relativity' as the period roughly from 1960 to 1975 during which the study of general relativity,[19] which had previously been regarded as something of a curiosity, entered the mainstream of theoretical physics".

And you thought special relativity hit the mainstream in 1905? And that general relativity hit the mainstream in 1916? Yeah right. Do not underestimate the stubborn stupidity of the naysayer defenders of orthodoxy, lpetrich. And do not mistake what I tell you for some "my theory" stuff. Like I said to edd, think of me as your herald. The guy who tells you about things long before it's in your textbook bible, and long before it's in your popscience rag that peddles woo because woo sells copy.

 

[Reality Check]

As I said on the other thread, all I can do is tell you what physicists think.

Why are you making up fantasies about what you think physicists think rather than citing what they actually think as in the scientific literature, Farsight?

Rumors are not fact, Farsight.
Farsight (19 June 2014): What was the content of the conversation between Hu and Atiyah?

No, atoms are not knotted vortices,

so Kelvin was wrong.
The idea that a long dead man knew about a recent fantasy of "electrons are knotted vortices" is quite delusional !

Oh dear, Farsight - actual delusions about the lives and work of
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin (died 17 December 1907)
Peter Guthrie Tait (died 4 July 1901)
Yes - they "coined the phrase spherical harmonics". So what?
No - they died decades before QM and did absolutely no work on your fantasy about "In TQFT a muon is a sort of like a slipknot".

(my emphasis added)

and that's why Mark Dennis gave the cryptic comment in tying light in knots.

No "cryptic comment" exists in this irrelevant article that has nothing to do with any "electrons are knotted vortices" fantasy

The study of knotted vortices was initiated by Lord Kelvin back in 1867 - that is historical fact.
Lord Kelvin was wrong to apply knotted vortices to atoms - that is historical and physical fact.

You repeat the inanity of being amazed about a blue torus image

Wow - a blue torus on a web page for the Geometry and Topology group in a School of Mathematics !

This is the University of Edinburgh Geometry and Topology

No specific mention of TQFT.

The University of Edinburgh web page for Mathematical Physics is more promising for TQFT:

Both have Michael Atiyah as an Honorary Professor.

It resembles a torus because it is the image of a torus - a common topological object

 

[Reality Check]

Farsight: the inanity of linking a blue torus image to one paper about torus

To emphasize:

You repeat the inanity of being amazed about a blue torus image
...
It resembles a torus because it is the image of a torus - a common topological object

How many preprints in arXiv include "torus" and so have a magical link to this image of a blue torus (and the delusional idea that the people there support the preprint even though they may have never read it):
Too many to report so arXiv reports the first 1000 preprints

 

[Reality Check]

What you call "Farsight physics" is within the Standard Model physics, lpetrich
...snipped cherry picked biographies....

That is an quite ignorant statement, Farsight.
The Standard Model treats the electron as a point particle. Any treatment of the electron as an extended particle is outside of the Standard model.

The Standard Model has electron mass as a parameter.
The Standard Model was developed through by explaining the structure that we see for all particles using valid physics. For example the "spin-½ structure" of the election has been explained for many decades by the Dirac equation.

Going beyond the Standard Model , introduces extra particles such as the selectron from supersymmetry.

The assertion "without understanding the electron in the slightest" is totally ignorant. Scientists understand a great deal about the electron.

Wow - scientists take time to accept new ideas. Totally unknown to everyone, Farsight !

Carl Sagan

The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

The case of the Qui-Hong Hu idea about electrons is even worse - it is so bad that people are not even laughing at him .

 

[lpetrich]

What you call "Farsight physics" is within the Standard Model physics, lpetrich. The first free parameter is electron mass, and the electron is a "just is" fundamental particle. One develops the Standard Model by explaining why the electron has the mass it does, and explaining its spin-½ structure. The alternative to this is beyond the Standard Model physics where one proposes a selectron without understanding the electron in the slightest. As you know that sort of thing has brought physics into disrepute and is a busted flush.

What you are proposing is itself "Beyond the Standard Model" physics.

The electron is unexplained in the Standard Model, along with the rest of the elementary fermions and the Higgs particle. Only the gauge particles, the gluon, photon, W, and Z, owe their existence to some theoretical principle. So anything that purports to explain the electron is BSM territory. Since "Farsight physics" proposes that an electron is a circling photon, that makes FP a BSM theory, a theory alongside SUSY and GUT's.

(orthodox-oxen bellyaching snipped)

 

[Reality Check]

Fatsight's 4 years of obsessing about an invalid paper

Why do you think it resembles to Qiu-Hong Hu's "hubius helix"

Just noticed this bit of blindness, from you Farsight:
* a torus is not a helix.
* that torus image is not like Qiu-Hong Hu's "hubius helix" image which is Figure 1 in his 2005 preprint and in his 2009 poster.
* The mathematical definition of a "hubius helix" is not the mathematical definition of a torus.

The idiocy of thinking that a Google for "toroidal electron" images will bring back anything except images of tori and electrons should be obvious to you, Farsight!
This looks like a vary bad attempt to refer to the invalid "Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology?" paper by Williamson and van der Mark that you are obsessing about. But then

You refer to a paper and still do not understand that it is fatally flawed after 4 years! ctamblyn's post from 25th March 2010 There are two basic mistakes they have made, aside from their semi-classical treatment of the photon...

The invalid Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology? by Williamson and van der Mark does have a figure containing a torus - amazing !

This is the actual exchange on 23rd June 2013:
ben m: The electron has been studied in great detail from its discovery in 1897 to the present, and this actual study of the electron is my source of information about the electron. As of June 2013, the electron is known not to be a vortex.
Farsight: Look at the blue torus on the Edinburgh TQFT web page.
That is the insanely irrelevant act of pointing to a torus image on a web page about geometry and topology in reply to a statement about the known physics of electrons. It is almost as if you were ignorant about what geometry and topology are (or for that matter an electron), Farsight!
Geometry and especially topology are basically about the shapes of things. So it is not strange that a page on geometry and topology has a image of an interesting shape in it, a torus.

 

[Reality Check]

Farsight: Can you give a list of the refereed citations for this paper

The invalid Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology? by Williamson and van der Mark does have a figure containing a torus - amazing !

So Farsight thinks this paper is so amazing, ground-breaking, etc. that he keeps on referring to it 4 years after the obvious flaws in it have been pointed out.

The obvious question is what does the scientific community think about this paper? Has it been ignored because the flaws are so obvious? Is it so good that it has been cited many times?
The paper was "Published in: Annales de la Fondation Louis de Broglie, Volume 22, no.2, 133 (1997)" - 17 years ago. I can only find one reference in what looks like an unpublished preprint.

Farsight (20 June 2014): Can you give a list of the refereed citations for "Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology?" by Williamson and van der Mark?

 

[Reality Check]

Farsight:Can you give a list of the follow-up papers from Williamson and van der Mark

One indication that a paper is valid is that the authors do not abandon their theory. A single or couple of papers by authors about one subject followed by that subject never coming up again is an hint that the paper(s) are so wrong that even the authors are embarrassed .

Farsight (20 June 2014): Can you give a list of the follow-up papers about an electron as a photon with toroidal topology from Williamson and van der Mark?

 

[Farsight]

Why are you making up fantasies about what you think physicists think rather than citing what they actually think as in the scientific literature, Farsight?

Rumors are not fact, Farsight.
Farsight (19 June 2014): What was the content of the conversation between Hu and Atiyah?

so Kelvin was wrong.
The idea that a long dead man knew about a recent fantasy of "electrons are knotted vortices" is quite delusional !

(my emphasis added)

No "cryptic comment" exists in this irrelevant article that has nothing to do with any "electrons are knotted vortices" fantasy

The study of knotted vortices was initiated by Lord Kelvin back in 1867 - that is historical fact.
Lord Kelvin was wrong to apply knotted vortices to atoms - that is historical and physical fact.

You repeat the inanity of being amazed about a blue torus image

It resembles a torus because it is the image of a torus - a common topological object

Fantasies, delusional, inanity? When you're the guy who's forever getting things wrong?

Moderator: can you do something about this guy please? Otherwise people will get the impression that JREF isn't a discussion forum for critical thinking, but is instead just a slander-platform for hyperskeptic naysayer defenders of orthodoxy who don't know any physics.

What you are proposing is itself "Beyond the Standard Model" physics. The electron is unexplained in the Standard Model, along with the rest of the elementary fermions and the Higgs particle. Only the gauge particles, the gluon, photon, W, and Z, owe their existence to some theoretical principle. So anything that purports to explain the electron is BSM territory.

No way. The selectron is BSM territory. The electron isn't. And you have to explain the electron to reduce the number of free parameters, which is definitely within-the-Standard-Model work.

Since "Farsight physics" proposes that an electron is a circling photon, that makes FP a BSM theory, a theory alongside SUSY and GUT's.

Not when in atomic orbitals "electrons exist as standing waves" and we've got all those other things like the wave nature of matter and magnetic dipole moment and Einstein-de Haas. These are things that need to go into the Standard Model. Not doing this and dreaming up things like the selectron is crazy. HEP needs that like it needs a hole in the head.

 

[edd]

Farsight - the Standard Model is what it is. Change it, and it's not the SM any more. What you're on about is beyond the Standard Model in that sense. A theory that managed I reduce the number of free parameters (fixing the electron mass for example) would indeed be 'Beyond the Standard Model' whether or not it introduced more particles along the way.

 

[Farsight]

I disagree edd. I can change a model in a small way and it's still that model. Then I can repeat. The model evolves. It develops. That's what's happened to the Standard Model in the past, and that's what will happen to the Standard Model in the future. This "within the standard model" thing might seem unfamiliar now, but it won't be.

NB: This forum is going slow.

 

[edd]

This must be some new meaning of the word 'standard' of which I was not previously aware.

 

[lpetrich]

(Me: anything that purports to explain the electron is BSM territory.)

No way. The selectron is BSM territory. The electron isn't. And you have to explain the electron to reduce the number of free parameters, which is definitely within-the-Standard-Model work.

In a sense, the electron is not quite fundamental in the Standard Model. That is because the electron as a distinct particle is a consequence of electroweak symmetry breaking.

Here is how it works.

In the Standard Model before EWSB, all the elementary fermions are massless Majorana spinors. A Majorana spinor is a 2-component field. A Dirac spinor is a 4-component one, and a Dirac spinor can be broken down into 2 massless Majorana spinors connected with the mass term.

Before EWSB, the electron is actually two separate parts. The left-handed part is in a weak-isospin doublet that also includes the electron neutrino, and the right-handed part is in a weak-isospin singlet, all by itself. The doublet and the singlet interact with the Higgs particle:
(coupling strength) * ( (doublet) . (singlet) . (Higgs) )

The Higgs particle gets a nonzero Vacuum Expectation Value from its self-interaction, and that in turn causes EWSB. The Higgs VEV combined with the Higgs-interaction terms makes mass terms, and this causes the electron part of the left-handed doublet to couple with the right-handed singlet. Thus making an electron.

There is a further complication. The lepton left-handed doublet and the electron right-handed singlet have 3 copies, one for each ur-generation, for lack of a better word. Their coupling to the Higgs particle is a 3*3 matrix across the ur-generations. So the electron's mass is really a mass matrix. One can take mixtures of the ur-generations that make the mass matrix diagonal in them, with each mixture having its own mass value separate from the other mixtures. One of these mixtures is the electron proper, another one is the muon, and the third one is the tau lepton.

The same thing happens to quarks, with both up-like and down-like quarks having right-handed parts. The down-like quarks have interactions with the Higgs particle similar to charged leptons, while the up-like quarks interact with a sort of flipped version of the Higgs particle. The up-like and down-like mass matrices are somewhat misaligned, and that's what makes cross-generation decays.

Neutrinos are massless in the Standard Model. So their observed masses are a BSM effect. Their masses are also misaligned with the charged-lepton masses, and that's what makes neutrino oscillations.

This is yet another difficulty with the circling-photon hypothesis of the electron and the trefoil-handle hypothesis of quarks.

Not when in atomic orbitals "electrons exist as standing waves" and we've got all those other things like the wave nature of matter and magnetic dipole moment and Einstein-de Haas. These are things that need to go into the Standard Model.

All of these features are consequences of the Standard Model. They do not require BSM theories like the circling-photon theory of the electron.

 

[Reality Check]

...snipped irrelevant stuff....

What do we have from Farsight in the last couple of months?

That two different screw analogies from Maxwell and Minkowski as explained by W.D.Clinger magically make EM field lines from a point particle into a screw, Farsight. Sounds like a fantasy.

Farsight's imaginary spiral cartoons (1 May 2014) are fantasies given the impossibility of just adding E and B fields and the B field being wrong for a point particle. edd has a plot of the actual E and B field lines a few posts later.

Might have missed the answer to this simple question, Farsight::
Farsight (27 May 2014 ): What is the charge of a photon? What does this mean for Maxwell's equations for the interaction between two photon?
Or Farsight (28th May 2014: Do photons have direct interactions with each other?
However you may have grasped the concept that photons cannot directly interact after your assertion that they do.

The ideas in this post are just bad:
* the electron field is a particular "configuration" of the photon field is ignorance of QFT.
* TQFT is a kind of QFT, not a foundation of QFT.
* Virtual particles are not real particles (which you seem to realize now). They are particles that exist for a short time (thus virtual) with the properties of real particles. They are also excitations of a field.

The idea that GR includes an "aether" (regardless of what Einstein sometimes called space-time) is a fantasy given that you claim to know about GR, Farsight.

A statement that scientists who were dead before years QM was even created and decades before QFT, worked on Topological Quantum Field Theory is wrong or a fantasy, Farsight:
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin (died 17 December 1907). Peter Guthrie Tait (died 4 July 1901)

A statement about the content of an so-far imaginary conversation is a fantasy, Farsight:
Farsight (19th June 2014): What was the content of the conversation between Hu and Atiyah?
If it is not a fantasy then answer the question.

Still quote mining the atomic orbitals article since 13 August 2013, Farsight, is not a fantasy - it is a close to a lie.

Relying on a paper that was shown to be invalid in ctamblyn's post from 25th March 2010 There are two basic mistakes they have made, aside from their semi-classical treatment of the photon... is not a fantasy - it is ignorance or an obsession (take your pick ).

To emphasize that the scientific community (and even the authors of that paper) did not think it was valid, I asked you two simple questions:
Farsight (20 June 2014): Can you give a list of the refereed citations for this paper?
Farsight (20 June 2014): Can you give a list of the follow-up papers from Williamson and van der Mark?
which you have ignored.

 

[Reality Check]

Farsight: What is the scientific definition of space

Farsight was contributing to the In a double slit experiment it is the dark matter that waves thread but abandoned it with a suggestion that a new thread about his ideas on dark matter be started. But we already have this thread!

I will start with a point about Farsight's "aether": We call it "your aether" because it is not whatever you imagine Einstein, Minkowski, Maxwell, Newton (which is actually a lie ), Robert B Laughlin and a few more people in arXiv spoke of. For a start, they are talking of different "aether"!

1. Farsight: (24 July 2014) Isaac Newton held that space is absolute and there is no luminiferous aether ([URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpuscular_theory_of_light#Sir_Isaac_Newton"]Corpuscular theory of light).[/URL]
2. Farsight: (25 July 2014) Can you understand the stupidity of that arXiv search that returns no citations of Einstein's ether speech?
3. Farsight: (25 July 2014) Can you understand that many of the results for that arXiv search are for [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_aether_theory"]Einstein aether theory?[/URL]
4. Farsight: (25 July 2014) Einstein's aether is "space endowed with physical properties". This is a field as in a gravitational field.
5. Farsight: (25 July 2014) Einstein never said that "space is not homogeneous". It was "empty space", i.e. in the real universe, matter and energy need not be homogeneous or isotropic thus the 10 equations in the EFE.

This really should be in the other thread but since you have abandoned it: Farsight: (24 July 2014) Have you been listening to the ideas of liquidspacetime for years?

Actual questions:
Farsight: (29 July 2014) What is the scientific definition of space?
Farsight: (29 July 2014) What is the scientific definition of a field in physics? And the follow-on: How does this make What a field in physics really is by W.D.Clinger wrong?

 

[Perpetual Student]

Farsight's misinterpretation (leading to one of his many dogmas) of Einstein's words using "ether" metaphorically for space-time in his Leiden address is another interesting failure. I presented this quote (from Einstein's correspondence), which he has ignored (he does this when he is trapped):

"I agree with you that the general relativity theory admits
of an ether hypothesis as does the special relativity
theory. But this new ether theory would not violate the
principle of relativity. The reason is that the state
[...metric tensor] = Aether is not that of a rigid body in an
independent state of motion, but a state of motion which is
a function of position determined through the metrical
phenomena."

So, clearly Einstein is equating "ether" to the metric tensor of spacetime, which varies in the presence of gravity. Both space and time are influence by gravity, as we all know. Case closed!
These kinds of misunderstandings come from reading about physics instead of studying physics!

 

[Farsight]

There is absolutely no misunderstanding on my part. I've studied the physics. You haven't. That's why I can give references whilst all you can do is play the hyperskeptic naysayer who clings to popscience woo in the face of bona-fide physics. Here's Einstein's Leyden Address and a couple of quotes from it:

"Mach's idea finds its full development in the ether of the general theory of relativity. According to this theory the metrical qualities of the continuum of space-time differ in the environment of different points of space-time, and are partly conditioned by the matter existing outside of the territory under consideration. This space-time variability of the reciprocal relations of the standards of space and time, or, perhaps, the recognition of the fact that "empty space" in its physical relation is neither homogeneous nor isotropic, compelling us to describe its state by ten functions (the gravitation potentials gmn), has, I think, finally disposed of the view that space is physically empty...

Recapitulating, we may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether. "

Here's also the quote from Nobel Laureate Robert B Laughlin:

"It is ironic that Einstein's most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed [..] The word 'ether' has extremely negative connotations in theoretical physics because of its past association with opposition to relativity. This is unfortunate because, stripped of these connotations, it rather nicely captures the way most physicists actually think about the vacuum. . . . Relativity actually says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of matter pervading the universe, only that any such matter must have relativistic symmetry. [..] It turns out that such matter exists. About the time relativity was becoming accepted, studies of radioactivity began showing that the empty vacuum of space had spectroscopic structure similar to that of ordinary quantum solids and fluids. Subsequent studies with large particle accelerators have now led us to understand that space is more like a piece of window glass than ideal Newtonian emptiness. It is filled with 'stuff' that is normally transparent but can be made visible by hitting it sufficiently hard to knock out a part. The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether. But we do not call it this because it is taboo."

Like Einstein said, we describe the state of space using the metric tensor. The metric tensor relates to "what you measure", and you measure time using an optical clock, or more fundamentally, using light moving through space. So the state of space affects your measurement of time. Why on Earth do you think Einstein or anybody else meant spacetime when they said space? You surely know that spacetime is an abstract mathematical model that depicts space at all times. It's static. There's no motion through it. Light moves through space, and we represent this with a worldline in spacetime, but light doesn't move through spacetime. It's the "block universe".