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Merged Relativity+ / Farsight

Edd's addressed this in post #351 - photons do not directly couple to photons, they only couple to charged particles (and gravity). That was what I was driving at.
They don't couple, but they can interact, for example to produce a fermion pair.

Personally I'd have said that a greater novelty was in having a photon trapping itself in a loop, in otherwise free space. YMMV. But anyway, my point was that to get the correct transformation properties under SU(2), the electron (if we are to view it as a classical-type object like a looped path of light) can't just be an object sitting in normal, flat, simply-connected space. Hence the requirement for some pretty novel topology.
Fair enough. We're essentially talking about topological charge. This kind of thing.

Yes, the Lorentz group is fascinating, as is group theory (and representation theory) in general. The Lorentz group includes the usual spatial rotations - SO(3) - as a subgroup, and also contains other transformations called "boosts". Though boosts have certain formal similarities to rotations (but with an imaginary rotation angle), you shouldn't read too much into it. There's no "twisting" involved in a boost, it's more of a squash/stretch sort of transformation.
Noted.

Edit: sheesh, look at the time. I've got to go. Sorry I haven't started that gravity thread yet.
 
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I'm sorry, but photons do interect with photons. The experimental evidence takes precedence over a diagram here.
Read what is being said, for goodness sake, Farsight. I said they do not interact directly with photons. Obviously that doesn't exclude indirect interactions which are mediated by fermions.
 
Sorry Russ, I don't know what you mean. A wavelength is a distance, as is an amplitude. It doesn't have the same units as energy. There is a sense in which you can relate charge to force and voltage to distance, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronvolt, but your expression has a problem with the dimensionality.

Nice work Farsight, thank you for pointing out the obvious. Your word salad make no sense, and your attempts at mathematics even less so. The expression is yours, not mine. Your statement was that the electron energy must be 510.9810KeV because that is the energy where "the wavelength is 2pi times the common amplitude".
 
That throws the baby straight out with the bath water and confuses space-time curvature with space curvature. A different approach is required.
How so? The curvature I referred to involves spatial curvature, as a part of the predicted spacetime curvature.
The photon is stress, it pushes the lattice lines out of true, hence curving space, and imparts a pressure gradient that then causes curvilinear motion, which is curved spacetime.
Yes, there is stress-energy-momentum associated with e/m waves. But the amount of stress-energy-momentum produced by a 511 keV photon is orders of magnitude too small to correspond to the postulated spatial curvature via the GR field equations. If you read the Williamson / van der Mark paper, even they acknowledge this.
GR isn't wrong, with respect, you've made an assumption that's wrong.
It's entirely possible. Or perhaps I didn't explain my point clearly enough. But I think the problem may be that we have differing notions of curvature.
Yes and no. The Riemann curvature in GR is used for the equations of motion, not spatial curvature. There's this extra time axis in there, akin to what Minkowski was saying about the difference between magnetic force and electric force resulting from the electron's electromagnetic field.
The Riemann tensor contains information about purely spatial curvature, as well as other kinds (though the notion of "purely spatial" depends on the coordinates chosen).
I honestly think that you'd have more luck with topology trapping a photon than geometry (whether spatial or spacetime), if it's going to be possible at all.
 
They don't couple, but they can interact, for example to produce a fermion pair.
In the standard model, this interaction takes place via virtual fermions. Essentially, the e/m field and a charged quantum field are "coupled", and this coupling of the fields gives rise to interactions between the field quanta.
Now, since you're not too keen on electrons as fundamental particles I'm guessing that virtual electrons are right out (despite their enormous utility), so let's just examine the observable experimental data. Photon-photon scattering, while possible, is very very unlikely to happen. Hence the reason Maxwell's equations are linear. On the other hand, photon-electron scattering happens relatively easily, so there's a bit of a mismatch here if electrons are just photons in a self-trapped state. Furthermore, the nature of the scattering is very different in the two processes, even when it does occur, due to the fact that photons are bosons while electrons are fermions - this isn't directly to do with spin, but with the way fermion and boson states behave under exchange of two particles (spin is involved secretly though, via the spin-statistics theorem).

ETA: Oops. I just compared scattering of identical fermions with identical bosons, which isn't really what I meant to do. However, charged fermion-photon scattering is still different to photon-photon scattering.
Fair enough. We're essentially talking about topological charge. This kind of thing.
I'll add it to my task list.
 
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How as a skeptic can you possibly accept that? A point particle can't have angular momentum or a magnetic moment. A point particle can't travel through two slits at once. QED is a mathematical treatment, don't ignore what Feynman about nobody knowing why it works and mistake the mathematical convenience of working with points as with the real thing. Check out Evanescent modes are virtual photons instead.
How as a skeptic can you possibly accept that?
A point particle can have angular momentum or a magnetic moment. A point particle can travel through two slits at once.
QED is a mathematical treatment that matches with rreality like all other scientific theories.
 
Motion is relative. The motion of one electron is relative to another. If there's an argument as to which one is "really" moving, then we settle that argument using the CMBR, and we say the one that's moving with respect to the observable universe is the one that's really moving. The buck stops with the universe.
So you mean that motion is absolute.
Yes it is. Look it up, search google.
The very first link in your seach is a FAQ pointing out that the CMB is not an absolute reference frame. Like all your citations, that is a fail. I have actually extensively studied the science of cosmology, and I have never found a cosmologist that claimed that the CMB provided an absolute reference frame.
I said Minkowski supported my point regarding the dualism of the electromagnetic field as demonstrated by his wrench analogy, but that he was wrong concerning the unification of space and time. It's space and motion that are primary. Time is an emergent property of motin through space.
So can you actually explain what the wrench analogy means for Minkownski and using that specific Minkowski paper and how Minkowski's mathematics backs up that analogy and your theory? In other words, can you provide the scientific evidence that you claim is there?
 
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Incredible. KK is so keen to trash the thread he dismisses Newton as well Minkowski, Maxwell, and Einstein.
Yes, I dismiss Newton's alchemy. Do you not think that Newton's alchemy was incorrect? Or are you willing to accept all the achemical principles that Newton investigated?

And I haven't trashed Minkowski. I have tried to save him from your misrepresentation. So far, you have latched on to Minkowski without giving a good reason.
It's the electron Compton wavelength divided by 2pi. "The Compton wavelength of a particle is equivalent to the wavelength of a photon whose energy is the same as the rest-mass energy of the particle... The CODATA 2006 value for the Compton wavelength of the electron is 2.4263102175±33×10−12 meters".
How is your answer above a calculation for the components of gμv that you were asked for? Remember, you said: "Spacetime curvature isn't the same as curved space. It's associated with a gradient in gμv that results in curvilinear motion, the latter being labelled as curved spacetime. Did you read my cubic-lattice description of a photon? Think of the gμv gradient as a pressure-gradient surrounding a small lemon-shaped region where space has been extended by 3.86 x 10 -13 m. This region is marked out by curved lattice lines: space is curved. "
 
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I'm sorry, but photons do interect with photons. The experimental evidence takes precedence over a diagram here.

There is zero experimental evidence for that. "Collide" two extremely high intensity and high frequency laser beams in a tiny region, and not one photon scatters off another.

With that said, QED actually predicts that there will be such scatter, but it is extremely rare and impossible to see with current tech (because it involves creating a virtual electron/positron pair and therefore requires extremely high frequencies and extremely high intensity).

I'm not trying to compete with QED, I'm trying to describe the physical reality that underlies it.

And yet you keep contradicting it...

That's no argument. If you can accept that a gravitational wave increases a distance in space, you shouldn't have a problem with a photon doing something similar.

This is the kind of utter nonsense that replaces logic for you. If one thing can do something, the so can something totally different. Gravity waves and photons are two completely different things.

It's like saying "if you accept you can drive your car to the grocery store, you shouldn't have a problem with a slice of pizza doing something similar".
 
Bah. My last post was a mess, probably best to disregard it :(
Sol invictus put it better - photon-photon scattering hardly ever happens. That's the main point I tried, ineptly, to make.
 
That'll be an embedded font problem. Try upgrading your Adobe Acrobat reader. I gave the background to demonstrate that "made of light" is serious physics. It goes back to Newton, who said "Are not gross bodies and light convertible into one another?" That's in Opticks, see query 30.
Missed this. Finally got a readable copy of the paper by using Acrobat Reader 7 instead of 8!

Your "background" is this single paper by Williamson & van der Mark. That paper is not serious physics. As noted by other posters it has fatal flows:
  • Treats the photon classically when QM has demonstrated that it is not a classical particle.
  • Electrons are charged. Photons and EM fields are not.
And citing the alchemy section of Newton's Optics is silly, even if it is somewhat correct: E=mc^2 means that electrons and positrons are made of the "same stuff" and can annihilate to create photons and vice versa.
 
Just FYI David - yes, EM fields can exist in the absence of charges. However there is a mathematical characteristic of the field which tells you whether there is charge in some region. Imagine drawing a surface that encloses that region - it doesn't matter which surface, so long as it encloses the region of interest and doesn't have any holes - and then integrate (add up) a certain quantity on that surface (the component of the electric field that's perpendicular to it). If you get zero, that means there is zero charge enclosed by that surface - that's a law of physics called Gauss' law.

In the case of a photon, or any EM wave, that integral will give you zero. In the case of an electron, it will not - because electrons are charged, and photons and EM fields aren't. That's one of many ways to see that electrons cannot possibly be composed of photons.

The intergral as in calculus, cool. So the photon exists in the EM field, and it does not carry any charge. And as stated then it could not generate a charge.
 
I'm not sure if there's any point in replying but what the hell...

Simple. I can show you an electron, sitting there in front of you. You can't do the same for a photon, and nor can you do the same for a neutrino.
The laws of physics couldn't care less what humans are capable of doing. If the neutrino has a mass then it has a well-defined reference frame. The fact that it may be difficult for us as humans to observe the neutrino at rest is irrelevant. Unless you think the laws of physics treats us humans as privaleged observers. Which couldn't be more in contradiction with reltivity.

And by the way, the W- has a mean lifetime of 3×10−25 s. And that means you can't show me one of them, either.
What do you mean by I can't show you one? What would you require for something to be shown? Do you mean me personally? Does the fact that it has a measured lifetime not mean it has been shown?

The standard model doesn't cover neutrino oscillation, so you know that it isn't saying enough.
Irrelevant.

And you can't stop one either.
So. Doesn't mean that they can't, in principle, be stopped. Or that they don't have a well-defined reference frame. I'll repeat, the laws of physics couldn't care less what humans can or can't do.

See that symmetry between momentum and inertia. If the particle is moving, it's got momentum. If it's you moving it's got inertia.
Pardon.

Neutrons? That must have been a typo. I was talking about neutrinos.
You're still wrong.
 
That "made of light" isn't my theory, and that the people who conceived it are not crackpots.
Its not a theory. Not in a scientfic sense anyway.

No, evidence is evidence, it's physical, not quantitative. You're dismissing it, and offering no evidence in return. For the last twenty years string theory has failed for the same reason.
I'm dismissing it because its contradicted by, among other things, some of the most precisely tested theories in the history of physics. Why would I bother offering an alternative. I can't do better than QED so what's the point.

I understand it, it's relevant, it's evidence,
You don't. You don't even understand when it is and isn't an important process.


and you dismiss it, just like YECs dismiss strata and fossils. LOL, and you swan around thinking you're a skeptic!

You've just dismissed some of the most precise experiments in scientfic history! Can you not see the extreme irony in your posts?
 
Now, where was I? I'll take it from the top of page 10. Please don't hesitate to point out any points I've missed.

No problem, just assume a null gravitational field. Lets follow this.

RC: My guess is that you will assert that your magical path can only be travelled by photons at 510.9810 KeV because you want them to.

FS: No, because that's the only energy where the wavelength is 2pi times the common amplitude.


Which indicates to me, and I'm sure everyone else, that you are claiming that you can explain why this path can only be traveled by photons at 510.9810. You seem to be claiming that you can come by the relation by something involving 2pi, the wavelength, and the "common amplitude".
Yes. The common amplitude. I'm sure you're familiar with E=hf, which applies to all photons. The h is of course Planck's constant of action. This has the dimensionality of energy x time, and also momentum x distance. Action is "kick", all photons involve the same momentum x distance, and frequency is the inverse of time - it tells you how fast this kick is delivered. But regardless of this, the distance is always the same.

To which you replied: "The "invariant" mass varies", but then not 20 minutes later posted "Electron mass doesn't vary". Which way is it? You can explain why photons of 510.9810 and no other energy "form electrons", electron mass varies, or doesn't vary, etc?
It's subtle. If you make electrons (and positrons) via pair production, you find can trap them to remove their kinetic energy, and then you find that they all have the same mass. Thus electron mass doesn't vary. You now let your electrons fall through a gravitational field, then trap them again to remove their kinetic energy. This kinetic energy didn't come from the earth, or from the gravitational field, it came from each electron. Thus the energy of each electron is reduced, hence the mass is reduced.

The Standard Model doesn't claim that charge is fundamental or spin is intrinsic just to be obtuse, it is a result of many careful experiments. You've certainly made no attempt to show how a self trapped photon can provide the same physical effects as a spin 1/2 particle, just vague hand waving and funny diagrams. No math.
I'm explaining the maths. I can't use maths to do that. Now pay attention to my OP and what I said about spin in two orientations.

None of the things you have listed, supersymmetry, 11 dimensions, time travel, parallel worlds, are part of the Standard Model, so I'm not sure what you are getting at. Current theory claims no such thing, all the things you listed are part of theoretical physics.
I know they aren't part of the standard model. But they are things that people accept without evidence, whilst dismissing the evidence that tells them that spin is not instrinsic.

Again, you haven't actually presented anything to counter.
Again refer to the OP and other posts. Plenty there. You're fooling yourself that there's nothing to counter.

I really have trouble wrapping my mind around individuals such as yourself. The closest thing I can find in Anosognosia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia) or maybe Wernicke's aphasia. It is just hard for me to understand how you can look at the current state of science, specifically physics, and think that in any way the thing you are doing is science.
Not so. You have trouble wrapping your mind round the geometry of the electromagnetic field, and I'm afraid you're describing yourself.

What you are presenting doesn't even vaguely look like a theory. The only other possibilities is that you are purposely withholding information, or you haven't actually studied physics beyond pop science works.
I'm presenting evidence. You're dismissing it on specious ground that don't hold water.
 
An electric monopole field is, by definition, one in which a Lorentz frame exists in which the tensor field has the following form, aside from an overall constant factor which is the charge....

One of the reasons we don't call this an electromagnetic monopole field, is to distinguish it from a magnetic monopole field. This is, by definition, one for which a Lorentz frame exists in which the tensor field has the following form, again aside from an overall constant factor....
The problem with this "by definition" approach is that there is no such thing in reality. An electron has an electromagnetic field, not an electric field. The approach is misguided - it separates one field into two distinct fields, and then suggests that each field has an independent existence. They do not.
 
You did and the author is correct: modern GR treats that speed of light as constant rather than the equivalent formulism of GR where it varies. This is because the experimental results support that the speed of light is constant.
I reiterate, experimental results show that the speed of light varies. We define our time using the motion of electromagnetic waves, essentially light in the wider sense:

“Under the International System of Units, the second is currently defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom...”

Check out the NIST caesium fountain clock. It employs the hyperfine transition, which is an electromagnetic "spin flip" change to one of the atom's electrons. As a result a microwave photon is emitted with a given "frequency". But imagine you're the detector. You sit there counting the arriving microwave peaks, and when you get to 9,192,631,770 you tick off a second. Since frequency is measured in Hertz which is cycles per second, you haven't actually measured the frequency, the frequency is 9,192,631,770 by definition. So if electromagnetic phenomena proceed at a reduced rate, the second is bigger. In other words, if the light moves slower, the second is bigger, and you use it to measure the speed of light. The metre isn't affected because provided you avoid the radial length contraction, the slower light and the bigger second cancel each other out.

The fact is that clocks clock up motion, not time. When atomic clocks or light clocks "run slow" in a region of low gravitational potential, they do this because the speed of light at that location is less than it is up in space. That’s why we have the GPS clock adjustment, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gps#Relativity. A GPS clock is an atomic clock that employs microwaves. The clock runs slower because the light moves slower. This is why the Shapiro delay is called what it is. It’s a delay, the light moves slower when it passes the limb of the sun. And this doesn’t just affect light. It affects everything. It affects electromagnetic things like electrons, because of what pair production is showing us. The evidence is there. Electrons are literally made from light.

Whether charge is "fundamental" has nothing to do with it. Electromagnetic waves are electromagnetic waves. They do not contain charges. They contain electromagnetic waves.
It's got everything to do with it. Many people who consider themselves to be knowledgeable in physics are stumped when pressed for an explanation of things they consider to be intrinsic or fundamental, and give nonsense non-answers like electromagnetic waves contain electromagnetic waves. Show them the clear evidence that leads to deeper understanding, and they reject it.

We have been talking about gravity - that is what GR is about.
Agreed. I did start on a new thread on this as promised, but it seems there was a problem: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=171080. If you want to talk about gravity further, we may have to take it offline or elsewhere.
 
Farsight, this isn't a matter of debate. You don't need to read the BBC. Just look at any book on the standard model of particle physics, or QED alone. Those theories define alpha, they tell us what alpha is. And it has nothing to do with the strong force.

Similarly if you want to measure alpha, you do it by measuring the strength of the interaction between an electron and a photon. Again, nothing to do with the strong force.
The fine structure constant tells you the relative strength of the electromagnetic force as compared to the strong force. That's a fact.

The fact that you argue about such basic facts tells us two things:

1) you have no clue what you're talking about, and
2) you're totally unwilling to learn.
You're denying the facts, and I'm afraid that points 1 and 2 apply to you, not me.
 
OK, I've read the Williamson and van der Mark paper again. I understand fully what they're describing, but they have miscalculated the external field produced by their twisted photon loop, and the correct answer is unfortunately, for them, zero. No apparent electric charge, no apparent magnetic dipole moment.
Please point out where you think this miscalculation occurs in order to justify your assertion.

There are two basic mistakes they have made, aside from their semi-classical treatment of the photon:
  1. They make a rather odd assumption about the field produced by a photon, essentially imagining that lines of E and B somehow originate (or terminate, equivalently) on photons. They do this early on - page 4 in fact - and it obviously escaped their attention.
  1. I've just read page 4, and can see no sign of any such assumption. What is there however, is this:

    "Note that, insofar as photon propagation defines the shortest distance between two points (a geodesic), we may view our postulated confinement force as being equivalent to a closed, locally curved space. This curvature cannot arise from gravitation as in geometrodynamics[18, 19] as this is far too weak to replace a force of the magnitude of the Poincaré-stresses."

    Please refer to our earlier exchange re curvature, and your assertion that the photon cannot cause curved space because its mass/energy is inadequate by many orders of magnitude. I'm disappointed that this indicates that you didn't previously read this paper.

    This mistake, if glossed over, would possibly allow the construction of an apparent charge, because you've built in a source of divergence right at the start. But no cigar this time.
    The photon does involve an electromagnetic field variation without charge, usually depicted with orthogonal vectors, and with respect, you're claiming an error where none exists.

    Glossing over the first mistake, they then imagine that they can have a photon travel twice round a loop in one period. They notice that this would normally give destructive interference, so they postulate some exotic topology to avoid it. However, although this might prevent cancellation on the twisted strip itself, it doesn't help once you move out into the normal, simply connected space surrounding the system - the fields there cancel.
    The "exotic topology" was introduced on page 4. On page 5 they say:

    "In flat space, this would lead to total destructive interference everywhere along the path. Within our object, where we have demanded that space is curved, the interference is always constructive as is clear from Fig. 1b."

    So there you have it. A nice idea but it doesn't yield a charge or a magnetic dipole.
    With respect, ct, you're rejecting the evidence in the right-hand rule and electromagnetic phenomena that associates the electromagnetic field with twist and turn, then you're rejecting the deduction that this must arise from spatial curvature and that the photon involves such spatial curvature. You then use this along with a false assertion re field lines terminating on photons to reject the whole paper.

    I suppose it does at least give you a system with mass and angular momentum - although you don't actually get the correct spin-1/2 properties, because their system doesn't have the right properties under rotation.
    The rotation is what yields the electron properties.

    And let's not forget that this whole model depends on getting a photon of energy 511 keV to perform this special dance, which noone's going to accept without some extraordinary direct evidence.
    It's pair production and annihilation and electron angular momentum and magnetic dipole moment. Etc. For some extraordinary reason people reject all this and maintain a dogmatic adherence to things like intrinsic spin. The basis for this is that "an electron does not spin like a planet", but they will not consider a spinning planet where the axis of rotation is also spinning.
 
I'm on holiday at the moment, so I can't post much. Just quickly:
Please point out where you think this miscalculation occurs in order to justify your assertion.
The error is in their twisted strip picture. They imagine, for example, electric field lines normal to the strip - i.e. the photon - pointing radially inwards. They miss the fact that those field lines must carry on straight through the strip, pass through the centre of the object, and then go radially out the other side - leading to zero net field.
I've just read page 4, and can see no sign of any such assumption. What is there however, is this:

"Note that, insofar as photon propagation defines the shortest distance between two points (a geodesic), we may view our postulated confinement force as being equivalent to a closed, locally curved space. This curvature cannot arise from gravitation as in geometrodynamics[18, 19] as this is far too weak to replace a force of the magnitude of the Poincaré-stresses."

Please refer to our earlier exchange re curvature, and your assertion that the photon cannot cause curved space because its mass/energy is inadequate by many orders of magnitude. I'm disappointed that this indicates that you didn't previously read this paper.
I'm confused by this statement. I first read the paper during the FTL thread. Anyway, as I said before: the geometric curvature associated with the photon is too small for your purposes, therefore I assume that you have in mind a topological solution - as Williamson and van der Mark suggest - which is not curvature in the way I normally use the term. Informally, okay we can call it curvature.

More later. For now, back to the screaming kids wonderful family day out.
 

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