Merged Relativity+ / Farsight

[Kwalish Kid]

My examples fit the facts. How can you delude yourself to pretend they don't? Or that I dodge questions? And we've already got the numbers and the equations. What I'm describing explains those equations. This is the thing that people like you just don't get. You cannot explain what the mathematics means with mathematics. Now stop being such a spoiler troll. Contribute some sincerity to the discussion or butt out.

Look, just show the equations that produce the spiral pattern that you have described. Then show how this relates to the equations that Minkowski uses? Because so far, you have not demonstrated that these two things have anything to do with each other. This is a direct question, which you can either answer or dodge.

Again, can you show, with the right numbers, how your explanation of pair production produces charge?

 

[ben m]

consider this gedankenexperiment: you are very small, with a vertical stack of electrons motionless in front of you. You have an electron-tipped wand with which you can feel the electromagnetic field. Take it slowly and you can feel out a cylinder of repulsion. Now swipe the wand down past the stack of electrons, and the end of your wand moves in circles. You're still feeling the electromagnetic field. There aren't two fields there, only one, and it exerts force in two different ways.

Sorry, Farsight, you're insisting that you didn't make a mistake about the forces, but the above statement is pretty clear: it says that "the wand moves in circles" which is flatly incorrect.

 

[ctamblyn]

Okay, I've got some questions:

<snip>
Scale it up another dimension and you can push twelve spheres around a central sphere. Each electron repels another with about a twelfth of its field in any given direction. However the fine structure constant isn't 1/144 because the spheres don't quite fit. They don't fit snugly like the pennies. There gaps between them.

[qimg]http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/geometry/kissing/3d.jpg[/qimg]

To appreciate this, it's best to think of an icosahedron, with a sphere centered on each of the twelve vertices. If each edge is 1 unit long, the radius of one large sphere just enclosing the icosahedron would be √(10+2√5)/4 or 0.9510565163. This means for our twelve spheres to touch, the central sphere has to be smaller. But it isn't, and that's why they don't fit snugly. There's a gap between the surrounding spheres of circa 5%. If you were the last sphere to join the icosahedron you'd be able to see more than a twelfth of the central sphere on account of this gap. In similar vein an electron "sees" more than a twelfth of another electron when it repels it with its field. Each electron repels another with circa 1/11.7th of its field, which is more than 1/12th. One 11.7th of one field is working against one 11.7th of another, so the combined coupling factor is circa 1/137th. The "running" aspect is crucial when it comes to gravity, but's that's one for another day.

• Why is the fine structure constant dependent on the ways we can pack solid spheres? Electrons never "kiss" each other, and they are always observed to be point-like in interactions, rather than spherical with some well-defined radius, as far as anyone can tell.
• You say the last sphere would see more than a twelfth of the central sphere. But why? It seems to me, from basic symmetry, that all twelve spheres see the same proportion of the central sphere - namely, 1/12. Unless they aren't packed symmetrically, of course - but then why should the last sphere be special and not the first, say?
• Your calculation does not match the experimentally determined value of alpha. What is the reason for the discrepancy?

 

[ben m]

Each electron would repel another with a sixth of its field in any given direction, and the fine structure constant would take a value of 1/36. Scale it up another dimension and you can push twelve spheres around a central sphere. Each electron repels another with about a twelfth of its field in any given direction. However the fine structure constant isn't 1/144 because the spheres don't quite fit. They don't fit snugly like the pennies. There gaps between them.

a) That's not how fields work. The Moon only takes up 0.01% of the sky, but that doesn't mean that the moon uses "0.01% of the field". The statement doesn't make a lick of sense.

b) The rest of your argument is pure numerology. You can find one number in geometry which is in the ballpark of another number in physics. Amateur natural-philosophers have been doing this for centuries---remember how the orbits of the inner planets are pretty close to the radii of nested Platonic solids----and it has always proven completely and utterly pointless.

 

[ctamblyn]

a) That's not how fields work. The Moon only takes up 0.01% of the sky, but that doesn't mean that the moon uses "0.01% of the field". The statement doesn't make a lick of sense.

I was wondering about this. And the fact that Farsight's argument, as it stands, seems to imply that the fine structure constant should go as 1/r⁴. Which would be wierd, to say the least.

b) The rest of your argument is pure numerology. You can find one number in geometry which is in the ballpark of another number in physics. Amateur natural-philosophers have been doing this for centuries---remember how the orbits of the inner planets are pretty close to the radii of nested Platonic solids----and it has always proven completely and utterly pointless.

Arthur Eddington springs to mind.

 

[Tubbythin]

Arthur Eddington springs to mind.

Exactly what I was thinking.

 

[Tubbythin]

If you can create and destroy electrons and positrons, they aren't fundamental.

Why not?

Ditto for quarks. Perform low-energy proton/antiproton annihilation and you don't see quarks. What you usually see is neutral pions, for a nanosecond.

Errm. You do know pions are made of quarks right?

Then gamma photons. So try explaining to the board where those quarks went.

They annihilated with each other.

Even when it isn't new, and when Einstein said it. Or Feynman or Dirac or Minkowski or Maxwell or Newton.

Stop name-dropping. This is a skeptic's forum.

 

[Tubbythin]

We need it because virtual photons are virtual, and because Feynman said nobody understands what it all means. Look at α = e²/2ε0hc and remind yourself of this: the electron has unit charge. The effect of that charge varies, but not the charge itself. Imagine you're in a black box in space, and I cannot enter to alter the contents. But I can move the box around without your knowledge. Maybe I do it while you sleep, whatever. You've got an electron in there with you. Between you and the electron is space. If the effect of that electron's charge varies, the properties of something else must have changed. What do you think it might be?

Can you give us a scientific argument for what you're trying to say, rather than a nonsense analogy?

 

[Reality Check]

Or is there some aspect of pair production that is not seen in current models?

The latter. They don't explain how it works.

What do you mean "how"?
It looks quite simple to me: pair production, E=mc^2, momentun conservation and all that stuff.

 

[Farsight]

What? The fine structure constant is in fact very easy to understand without all your contrived nonsense.

It is in fact just the ratio between two constants.

The Force between two charges is inversely proportional to the square of the distance separating those charges...

You're just shuffling terms here without getting to the bottom of it, and for the benrfit of other readers: this relation is usually expressed in terms of energy rather than force, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-structure_constant#Physical_interpretations and note "The ratio of two energies: (i) the energy needed to overcome the electrostatic repulsion between two electrons when the distance between them is reduced from infinity to some finite d, and (ii) the energy of a single photon of wavelength λ = 2πd...". You'll notice pair production and annihilation has been mentioned. In electron/positron annihilation the result is usually two 511keV photons. What I'm talking about on this thread is the geometry of the electromagnetic field, and this will lead on to the geometry of the electron in terms of a self-trapped photon. This relationship comes back to geometry. Read the thrad to catch up.

 

[Farsight]

Look, just show the equations that produce the spiral pattern that you have described. Then show how this relates to the equations that Minkowski uses? Because so far, you have not demonstrated that these two things have anything to do with each other. This is a direct question, which you can either answer or dodge.

I can't do it, it's too difficult. This is three-dimensional dynamical geometry, and even a simple little thing like the moebius strip defied mathematics for 75 years. See http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P2-10456329.html.

Again, can you show, with the right numbers, how your explanation of pair production produces charge?

No, not with the right numbers. But one didn't dimiss the moebius strip just because the formalism was lacking. Ditto for pair production. You talk about it, kick it around, discuss it. You don't accept a non-answer that doesn't explain it at all whilst rejecting those that do.

 

[Farsight]

Sorry, Farsight, you're insisting that you didn't make a mistake about the forces, but the above statement is pretty clear: it says that "the wand moves in circles" which is flatly incorrect.

It isn't flatly incorrect. You're swiping it down at the same time. Consider the vertical stack of electrons to be moving upwards instead of the electron-tipped wand swiping down. So you've got an "electron in a magnetic field". They move in circles. Or helixes if you insist. Come on, this is simple. If an electron is sitting there motionless with respect to you, you see the electromagnetic field as an "electric field". If it's moving in circles, as per the electrons in a magnetic domain, you see the electromagnetic field as a "magnetic field". That's why we have magnets. The thing to remember is this: there's only one field there.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

I can't do it, it's too difficult.

So you are saying that the elecromagnetic field is like that with no ability to test your theory whatsoever? Why should anyone else place the same blind faith in that drawing? Why do you compare your drawing to the work of Minkowski, when he is obviously working with actual equations that exactly spell out what he was discussing?

This is three-dimensional dynamical geometry, and even a simple little thing like the moebius strip defied mathematics for 75 years. See http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P2-10456329.html.

Have you actually read the article to which that popular science article refers? Are you aware of the many mathematical descriptions of such strips prior to the to article and mentioned in that article?

No, not with the right numbers. But one didn't dimiss the moebius strip just because the formalism was lacking.

Do you think that there is a difference between such strips that we can construct and see and your spiral pattern that nobody can detect? Don't you think that it is a problem that your drawing contradicts what people can actually detect?

Ditto for pair production. You talk about it, kick it around, discuss it. You don't accept a non-answer that doesn't explain it at all whilst rejecting those that do.

But you have just admitted that you can't actually explain pair production, because you can't explain how we get charge out of moving photons.

 

[ben m]

What I'm talking about on this thread is the geometry of the electromagnetic field, and this will lead on to the geometry of the electron in terms of a self-trapped photon. This relationship comes back to geometry.

Hold your horses on the "geometry of the electron". So far, from your discussion of the EM field, it sounds like you haven't quite gotten a handle on Maxwell's Equations, even at the freshman/sophomore level.

On the topic of "geometry"---again, this is the first thing that crackpots always want to go to to reexplain physics. Hundreds, probably thousands of amateur physicists have looked at lists of elementary particles and played the Lewis/Dalton/Democritus/Witt/Etc. game of imagining that particles are spheres that stack up in some weird way. The entire idea has had exactly zero success of any sort. Why does it keep coming up? I think it comes up because people like you, Farsight, learned enough geometry so that packed-spheres are easy to think about. Meanwhile, quantum mechanics is all complex differential equations and matrices---hard to think about, requires specialized knowledge that you don't have, and to be honest it's not much fun. When push comes to shove and you say "I want to sit down and think about particle physics" obviously you decide to think about geometry. Unfortunately, there's no evidence whatsoever that Nature works this way.

 

[ben m]

It isn't flatly incorrect. You're swiping it down at the same time. Consider the vertical stack of electrons to be moving upwards instead of the electron-tipped wand swiping down. So you've got an "electron in a magnetic field". They move in circles. Or helixes if you insist. Come on, this is simple. If an electron is sitting there motionless with respect to you, you see the electromagnetic field as an "electric field". If it's moving in circles, as per the electrons in a magnetic domain, you see the electromagnetic field as a "magnetic field". That's why we have magnets. The thing to remember is this: there's only one field there.

Nope! Still wrong. Let's take your column of electrons to be moving along the z-axis. This generates a B-field in the in the theta direction (orbiting the axis). Meanwhile, you're describing an electron orbiting the axis---a motion which can be produced only by a B-field in the z-direction. You're taking the electron motion we associate with a uniform z^ B field and mistakenly transposing it over to a situation with a 1/r theta^ B field.

 

[ctamblyn]

Here are some of the problems I can see so far:

How can a photon be self-trapped? I could understand how a photon might be trapped by a small-scale quirk in spatial geometry and topology, but in what sense can a photon be self-trapped?
Even if you get your photon moving in a spatially closed loop, and can get the topology just right in order to do this, notice that the E-field still has zero divergence - and hence there is no charge. And even if you can work the topology to get some lines of E disappearing down a hole (producing the illusion of charge), the same topology can have the same effect on lines of B - so assuming the electron is modelled correctly in the first place by this method, you'll also have magnetic monopoles in your theory with the same mass as the electron.
I also note that in one of the papers you linked to in the other thread, that the photon moving in the "figure of eight" pattern always gave an electric vector pointing in the same sense relative to the "strip". There is no oscillation of E as you move round the photon's path - it has zero frequency, and so the "electron" has zero energy. Maybe your model is different in some essential way, which overcomes this fault?
ETA: Found the paper: http://www.cybsoc.org/electron.pdf

 

[ctamblyn]

Another problem comes to mind: if an electron is just a photon moving in an exotic path, how does electron-photon scattering occur?

 

[Farsight]

Okay, I've got some questions:

Why is the fine structure constant dependent on the ways we can pack solid spheres? Electrons never "kiss" each other, and they are always observed to be point-like in interactions, rather than spherical with some well-defined radius, as far as anyone can tell.

The electron's field is part of what it is, so they're always "kissing". They aren't actually point particles, they're geometrical entities. The wrong inference was drawn from scattering experiments. It's like not finding a cannonball down to 1m when probing a whirlpool, then setting this as an upper bound for the size of the cannonball.

You say the last sphere would see more than a twelfth of the central sphere. But why? It seems to me, from basic symmetry, that all twelve spheres see the same proportion of the central sphere - namely, 1/12. Unless they aren't packed symmetrically, of course - but then why should the last sphere be special and not the first, say?

The last sphere isn't special, I didn't mean to suggest that. Go back to the two-dimensional situation, and imagine that after evenly setting 6 circles around the central circle, you had gaps left. To close the gaps you have to move all the central circles inwards. Replace the circles with electric fields, with archetypal "point sources" at each centre. Now there's slightly more than 1/6th x 1/6th coupling in each of the six directions extending out from the centre.

Your calculation does not match the experimentally determined value of alpha. What is the reason for the discrepancy?

The fine structure constant varies. A portion of the mass/energy of the electron is out in its electromagnetic field. How much depends on certain properties of the surrounding space, and this alters the strength of the electromagnetic field. Please can we come back to this later ?
It does lead to a rather surprising understanding of permittivity and permeability.

 

[Reality Check]

Another problem comes to mind: if an electron is just a photon moving in an exotic path, how does electron-photon scattering occur?

That is not the only problem with that idea

1. Photons have no charge. Electrons do.
2. Photons have no spin. Electrons do.
3. Photons have no mass. Electrons do.
4. Photons do not have a magnetic moment. Electrons do.

Then there is the question of what Farsight means by "self-trapped". Is the photon bouncing between tiny, wee mirrors ?

I hope we do not see the usual crank handwaving, e.g electrons = "self-trapped" photons so "self-trapping" must create charge, spin, mass and magnetic moment.

 

[ctamblyn]

The electron's field is part of what it is, so they're always "kissing".
<snipped for brevity>

OK, so the effective radius of the electrons (for calculating the kissing number) is half whatever their separation is, I take it.

<snipped for brevity>
Now there's slightly more than 1/6th x 1/6th coupling in each of the six directions extending out from the centre.

Hmmm, this doesn't seem quite right. The picture I have is this: if I place 12 electrons around a central positron, say, then exactly 1/12 of the field lines coming out of the positron will end on each electron. I'll have a bit more of a think.

The fine structure constant varies. <snipped for brevity>

If you don't want to discuss it yet, OK. I'll get this question in in advance: there is a well-defined value for the effective alpha at a given energy scale. At which scale does your calculation apply?