Merged Relativity+ / Farsight

[Farsight]

...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 tell us about current. And I don't just mean the flow of electrons.

 

[Farsight]

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".

Will you ever get it? The two orientations of spin mean the the initial spin axis is spinning, thus its orientation is all orientations. The secondary spin can have one of two chiralities with respect to the first spin. Hence the two Stern-Gerlach spots.

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.

Garbage. I know the setup, and I understand the result. It's evidence that the rotation is real and is in two dimensions.

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

A breakthrough! A chink of light has just leaked into Sol's dark closed little mind. OK, so what's rotating?

 

[Farsight]

I've done it; I've spent plenty of time in canoes. The laws of fluid mechanics allow semi-stable whirlpools to exist, and allow them to interact. So what?

Their interactions demonstrate a fluid analogy for attraction, repulsion, and annihilation.

Electrons aren't obeying the laws of fluid mechanics---certainly not in the standard model, and again not in your hypothesis.

No, because we're dealing with the motion of stress-energy through space rather than fluid motion. But the analogy works because the Falaco soliton resembles half an electron with only one component of spin. Place another inverted Falaco soliton on top of it for a vortex with smoke-ring spin, then add steering-wheel spin to improve the picture.

I don't learn anything about electrons from looking at vortices in a completely unrelated system. I mean, why not have me look at interacting tops, or dervishes, or pinned flux lines in a superconductor, or lattice defects, or some other unrelated system which contains interacting objects?

Why not indeed? I've spoken of a lattice as regards a photon, thence pair production, and I've used spinning tops in a description of gravity. As for superconduction, make two Falaco solitons in rapid succession and see how the second one gets free transport through the first, then the first gets free transport through the second. The pair together move faster than a single soliton. This emulates low-temperature superconduction. For HTS you project one soliton through an line of other solitons, which act like roller bearings.

 

[Farsight]

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

And an electron doesn't have a surface, just as a photon doesn't have a surface, because a photon is a wave in space. Like a seismic P-wave deep in the earth doesn't have a surface. Like a wave in the ocean doesn't have a surface. The ocean has the surface, not the wave.

particle = point particle.

No, they aren't points. They're "field excitations".

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 explains why you have no regard for experimental evidence. You're not a scientist. Just a mathematician. Mathematicians don't follow the scientific method.

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

And underlying it is real space, and real action, and real spin.

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

No, it doesn't.

The web page in the same module before this states this explicitly Module 9 has Correction terms which starts with: assuming that both the electron and the proton are point particles.

And then it goes on to say: due to the spin of the electron and the proton, which we have neglected so far. It's only an assumption of point particles. And point particles can't have angular momentum. Point particles can't spin. Capiche?

 

[Farsight]

blah blah babble blah blah...

You asked for an explanation, you got it.

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.

No, you have no idea. And I doubt if anybody here will put you straight.

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

I'll tell you, but you'll only say blah blah, so forget it.

 

[sol invictus]

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.

There's a minor wording error on wiki, in an article about a specific, technical experiment written by a bunch of anonymous people on the internet, and it isn't even the main article on spin.... and you consider it worth harping on? Why?

This is part of the reason you're a crank and regarded as such, Farsight. An error on a wiki page does not constitute support for your idea, nor does it represent the view of experts on the topic. It's completely irrelevant - and yet you always focus on such things. The reason is obvious.

Will you ever get it? The two orientations of spin mean the the initial spin axis is spinning, thus its orientation is all orientations.

"Initial spin axis"? What are you talking about?

The secondary spin can have one of two chiralities with respect to the first spin. Hence the two Stern-Gerlach spots.

Utter and complete nonsense. You're just making it more and more clear you don't understand Stern-Gerlach (or even spin and angular momentum at the classical level, for that matter).

Garbage. I know the setup, and I understand the result. It's evidence that the rotation is real and is in two dimensions.

No. It's proof that it is not "in two dimensions", whatever that might mean.

A breakthrough! A chink of light has just leaked into Sol's dark closed little mind.

It's a breakthrough that that phrase in a particular wiki is wrong?

OK, so what's rotating?

Nothing's rotating in any normal sense of the word. In the standard model, the spin of the electron is due to the fact that the electron field transforms in the spin 1/2 representation of the massive little group of the Lorentz group. The fact that such representations are possible and relevant follows directly from the invariance of physical law - and specifically the standard model Lagrangian - under the Lorentz group.

So what does this have to do with rotation? Well, the little group is SO(3), of which one representation is the action of rotations on 3D space. But electrons do not transform in that representation, they transform in a spinor representation - something with no classical analog.

 

[Farsight]

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

Not quite, it doesn't have a surface and it doesn't have a size. That might sound odd, remember what I said above about a wave, and think of a whirlpool. Yes, it's the fluid analogy again, it isn't perfect, but it's the closest we can get. Imagine a flat calm ocean. Now add one whirlpool. How big is it? Where does it actually end? No matter how far from this you go, you can always measure some rotational flow, and you cannot find a surface. The only apparent size and surface is in the hole in the middle, but this isn't the size and the surface of the whirlpool.

The electron and proton are akin to this whirlpool, at the centre there's a stress-energy distortion rotating at c around a radius, which is very much smaller for the proton. Remember what I said about the photon? I said it is a distortion, an extension that distorts all the surrounding space, and wherever the distortion is, the photon is, hence many paths. The rotational distortion of an electron creates a frame-dragging distortion all around like that spiral depiction. That's the electromagnetic field. It has a mass equivalence. Part of the electron's mass is out there in its field. It's electromagnetic field is part of what it is. It's similar for a proton, but more complicated.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

No, because we're dealing with the motion of stress-energy through space rather than fluid motion. But the analogy works because the Falaco soliton resembles half an electron with only one component of spin.

But how does the analogy work? We can't do any physics with your inane analogy. You are saying that the electron is like something from fluid dynamics, but then you say that it isn't governed by fluid dynamics. Can you actually tell us in detail what the electron is governed by?

 

[Kwalish Kid]

No, they aren't points. They're "field excitations".

So, how does a "field excitation" move in a mobius strip and how does this produce the quantized spin, and how does this movement not exceed the speed of light?

I suspect that, since you can no more answer this question than any of my other questions, you will simply cry foul and ignore the substantuive issues.

 

[ben m]

Their interactions demonstrate a fluid analogy for attraction, repulsion, and annihilation.

... which (if true) one would show by applying the normal laws of fluid mechanics. You'd write down the fluid velocity vector field, ask the Navier-Stokes equation how it evolves, and that tells you how long the soliton lasts and in what direction it moves. (You don't need an analogy with strings or tops or Yrast states or anything)

For real-world electrons, you write down the Dirac spinor and ask the QED equations how long the spinor lasts and in what direction it moves.

For your hypothesis, you write down nothing at all, apply no equations, and go straight to guessing about what analogies you think are appropriate.

 

[Cuddles]

analogy

That's not how science works.

 

[Farsight]

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.

It isn't stupid at all. I had this conversation with ctamblyn. Energy is a curvature of space. The photon is like a pressure-pulse in a lattice, and the lattice lines are bent. They're curved. Around an electron they're curved in two dimensions, hence curled. The spacetime curvature we call gravity is something different, to do with vacuum impedance. I explained it in the new thread I started by popular demand, but somebody censored it here. Search google on Farsight and How Gravity Works to find it elsewhere.

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.

Wheeler got it wrong. He got a lot of things wrong, like Matter tells space how to curve. Space tells matter how to move.

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.

I'm not saying that. I'm saying the electromagnetic field is curved space. What do you think the spiral is all about? Thus the photon's electromagnetic field variation is curved space too, a pressure-pulse like a lemon shaped distortion in a lattice.

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".

No problem. The curvilinear motion occurs because of a gradient in g_μv caused by the central concentration of energy tied up as the matter of a planet or star.

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?

But it does. What do you think photon-photon scattering is? Picking something at random, see http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/1999-02/919892082.Ph.r.html where the guy talks about the interactions occuring via fermion/antifermion pairs. But remember these are virtual, that the evanescent wave is what they are, and remember what happens to the photon in Compton scattering. It changes path. Also see DOI: 10.1038/NPHYS1504 aka Isolated optical vortex knots by Mark R. Dennis, Robert P. King, Barry Jack, Kevin O’Holleran, and Miles J. Padgett. Why do you think these guys are talking about torus knots and trefoil knots and sending their paper to Qiu-Hong Hu?

(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.)

Those curved lattice lines depicted space, not spacetime. There's a crucial difference. The spacetime in your room is curved, not the space. If the space was curved every ball you threw would follow the same arc regardless of how fast you threw it.

 

[Farsight]

You really do not understand the Stern-Gerlach experiment...

Oh yes I do.

...This shows that all spins at atomic scales are quantized...

Because atoms are made up of electrons and protons and neutrons, and neutrons decay into electrons and protons and antineutrinos. It's all the same kind of spin.

As sol victus stated the wiki article is wrong when it states that spin angular momentum has nothing to do with rotation. It is to do with rotation but not classical rotation.

It isn't a classical spinning sphere, but it's classical rotation in terms of wave mechanics. There's no mysticism to it. Not any more.

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.

Wrong. It travels through both slits. Like a wave travels through both slits. Because the electron is a wave, and there's no surface to it, so there isn't any size. The scattering experiments are using a billiard-ball inference to set an upper bound on the size, like presuming there's some rotating cannonball at the heart of a whirlpool. It just isn't there.

 

[ben m]

But it does. What do you think photon-photon scattering is? Picking something at random, see http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/1999-02/919892082.Ph.r.html where the guy talks about the interactions occuring via fermion/antifermion pairs.

You misunderstand this rather badly. The photon-photon elastic scattering cross section is vanishingly small and has not been observed at all, ever. (see http://www.springerlink.com/content/emdy0a1g99hejq41/ for a search; the cross section goes as (E_gamma/m_e)^6 for crying out loud.) LEP observed *inelastic* scattering, photon+photon -> e+ e-, and moreover they did this using multi-GeV photons. Your model seems to predict that the photon-photon scattering cross section is as large as the Thompson cross section.

Those curved lattice lines depicted space, not spacetime. There's a crucial difference. The spacetime in your room is curved, not the space. If the space was curved every ball you threw would follow the same arc regardless of how fast you threw it.

Great, then your theory also violates Lorentz invariance. Should I await your new non-Lorentz-invariant theory of spacetime?

 

[dafydd]

You asked for an explanation

Your definition of the word explanation differs greatly from the accepted meaning,much like your understanding of physics.

 

[RussDill]

You asked for an explanation, you got it.

You explained nothing. Your provided analogies, "likes", "as", "imagine", and car jacks. You haven't explained why a photon does any of these things. eg, why does a photon bend space in this "special" way that you can "imagine", but a neutrino does not. Additionally, why does an charged particle travel differently through this "car jacked" space, but a non-charged particle does not.

No, you have no idea. And I doubt if anybody here will put you straight.

I'll tell you, but you'll only say blah blah, so forget it.

Seems like this is always your response when questions are asked with any specificity. You grab the chess board (or perhaps checkers in this case) and throw it across the room like a child.

3.86E-13m, where are you getting it? You claim that "It's the quantum of quantum mechanics. And it's in every picture of the electromagnetic spectrum you will ever see." I've never seen the number in quantam mechanics (except related to the compton wavelength of the electron, which is derived from the mass-energy relation of the electron), much less a picture of an EM spectrum (except that 3.86E-13m is contained somewhere within it).

 

[kalen]

A little article from PhysicsToday (March 2010)

Holograms tie optical vortices in knots


Apparently these people are tying photons into knots and closed loops with various topological configurations. No mention of any electrons appearing, though. Or "hadronic debris in the main", either.

(Unfortunately, it's a subscription site, so either you have to cough up $23, or go to your local university library, or work on campus. Or, get it mailed to you, like I do.)

 

[The Man]

What? You make an electron and a positron out of a photon, they've got angular momentum and magnetic dipole moment et cetera, then you can annihilate them and get photons again. This does support the view of the electron being a self-bound photon. How can you dismiss scientific evidence so readily?

No it does not it conclusively shows a photon can (under the right conditions) produce a pair of oppositely charged particles, not just an electron. You are erroneously taking pair production from a photon and claiming it as evidence of just electron production from a photon. You have to show how your single self-bound photon state results in just the change of the electron and pair production simply does not result in just the charge of an electron.

It doesn't amuse me to see people dismissing scientific evidence that doesn't fit with what they believe they know.

It always amuses me to see people claiming evidence for their assertion that actually refute their assertions.

Huh?

Huh? What? It is your claim that an electron is some self-bound state of a photon, so support your claim. Pair production is, well, a pair, not just an electron.

It will.

I won’t hold my breathe

Please, spare me the string theory psuedoscience.

Since when is making testable and quantitative predictions “pseudoscience”?

The current evidence is pair production.

The critical word you seem to keep ignoring is “pair”.

The photon is split and converted into an electron and a positron.

“split”? Please explain exactly how this splitting occurs and specifically how such a “split” photon results in the charge of just an electron. It would seem now that your claim is not that the electron is some self-bound state of a photon, but some self-bound state of just ½ a photon. Looks like QM and QED just went out the window as well.

The further evidence is annihilation. The electron and the positron become two photons. How you magic up "directly contradicts" out of this beats me. There's no contradiction whatsoever.

Where is the evidence of just an electron becoming a photon? That would support your claim. Again annihilation is not evidence of your claim either. The contradiction you keep missing is that a photon is charge neutral, a proton-electron pair (in production or annihilation) is charge neutral. An electron is not charge neutral. Are you now claiming that your ½ photon from whatever way you imagine it being split is not charge neutral? Once again you are going to have to explain exactly how that works and how it is consistent with current evidence.

 

[Tubbythin]

Not quite, it doesn't have a surface and it doesn't have a size. That might sound odd, remember what I said above about a wave, and think of a whirlpool. Yes, it's the fluid analogy again, it isn't perfect, but it's the closest we can get. Imagine a flat calm ocean. Now add one whirlpool. How big is it? Where does it actually end? No matter how far from this you go, you can always measure some rotational flow, and you cannot find a surface. The only apparent size and surface is in the hole in the middle, but this isn't the size and the surface of the whirlpool.

The electron and proton are akin to this whirlpool, at the centre there's a stress-energy distortion rotating at c around a radius, which is very much smaller for the proton. Remember what I said about the photon? I said it is a distortion, an extension that distorts all the surrounding space, and wherever the distortion is, the photon is, hence many paths. The rotational distortion of an electron creates a frame-dragging distortion all around like that spiral depiction. That's the electromagnetic field. It has a mass equivalence. Part of the electron's mass is out there in its field. It's electromagnetic field is part of what it is. It's similar for a proton, but more complicated.

And can you show that you're "electron is bit like a whirlpool" hypothesis makes predictions which match experiments to at least the same precision as QED. Or can you show that get the result of an experiment right that QED gets wrong. Because if it can't then its scientific value is worth this: 0.

 

[Reality Check]

And an electron doesn't have a surface, ...

A macroscopic point has a surface.

No, they aren't points. They're "field excitations".

No, a particle in QM is both a point particle and a "field excitation": wave'particle duality.

This explains why you have no regard for experimental evidence. You're not a scientist. Just a mathematician. Mathematicians don't follow the scientific method.

Showing your ignorance of scientific education there, Farsight.
Third year mathematics was a required course for my physics degree. I belive that this would be the same in many universities.

In case you are interested, the next year my Honors thesis was a study of the properties of surfactants. I spent many hours in a lab measuring the power spectrum of lasers passing through many different oil/surfactant/water mixtures in test tubes.

And underlying it is real space, and real action, and real spin.

And underlying a spin space is no space at all. It is a mathematical object in its own right.

No, it doesn't.

Yes it does.

And then it goes on to say: due to the spin of the electron and the proton, which we have neglected so far. It's only an assumption of point particles. And point particles can't have angular momentum. Point particles can't spin. Capiche?

And then it goes on to say: due to the spin of the electron and the proton, which we have neglected so far. It's only an assumption of point particles that is retained throughout the rest of the web site and indeed throughout quantum mechanics. It just happens to produce the most accurate theories in physics.
And point particles can have angular momentum. Point particles can spin. Capiche?

Of course what you are really confused about seems to be the word "spin".
Spin in QM is not classical spin. It just happens to have the same effects, i.e. it produces angular momentum and magnetic moments.