Perpetual Student
Illuminator
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The multiverse is a scientific conjecture. The claim that electrons are photons trapped in loops is woo.
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The multiverse is a scientific conjecture. The claim that electrons are photons trapped in loops is woo.
Let's see now. You can make electrons and positrons out of light in pair production. And you can diffract an electron. And it's got a magnetic moment. And in atomic orbitals electrons "exist as standing waves". And then there's the Einstein-de Haas effect which "demonstrates that spin angular momentum is indeed of the same nature as the angular momentum of rotating bodies as conceived in classical mechanics". Oh and then there's electron-positron annihilation, and what do you get? Why, photons! The wave nature of matter is beyond doubt. But blow me down, the idea that an electron is anything other than a fundamental point-particle is woo, but a zillion Perpetual Students out there tippy-tapping away on their laptops isn't? Beam me up Scotty!Perpetual Student said:
phunk
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You can make any particles out of light with pair production. Is everything made of photons?
You can diffract lots of things, for example C60
Photons don't.
So? Everything has a wavelength, electron wavelengths happen to be on the scale of atoms, which is nice because it allows atoms to exist in the first place, but it doesn't mean they're made of photons.
Which has what to do with electrons being made of photons?
You can also get neutrinos and W and Z bosons from electron-positron annihilation, are those all parts of the electron too?
No kidding, but that doesn't mean matter is made of photons.
We've never seen any evidence that an electon is anything other than a point-like particle, but we have seen evidence of inflation, which predicts a type-1 multiverse.
Apart from pair production and electron diffraction and magnetic moment and atomic orbitals and Einstein-de Haas and Aharonov-Bohm and annihilation.
No we haven't, and no it doesn't. We've seen B-mode polarization of the CMB which might be caused by something else. And inflation doesn't predict an infinite universe. It was introduced to postdict a flat homogeneous universe.
ctamblyn
Data Ghost
All of which are predictions of mainstream physics, which not only demands that the above phenomena occur but also gives us quantitative predictions we can compare with experiment.
As for your model, it is quite apparently incapable of making any quantitative predictions whatsoever. You think I'm wrong? Then show us how your model can meet this essential requirement. Show us how - in a world in which electrons magically acquire electric charge despite being composed of neutral particles, in which electrons magically acquire fermion statistics despite being composed of bosons - show us how that model can tell us anything quantitative about Coulomb scattering, or branching ratios in e+e- annihilation, etc.
Otherwise your model is not even wrong.
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phunk
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None of which require an electron to be a composite particle.
Yes, we have, and yes, it does. Inflation theory makes predictions, some of those predictions have been observed. That's evidence. You may be confusing evidence with proof, which no one is claiming.
Infinite is not required for a type 1 multiverse. All that is required for that is a universe that is substantially larger than the observable distance, so that non-overlapping observable universes can exist. That's exactly what inflation creates.
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They aren't predictions, they're experimental evidence of the wave nature of the electron.
It's not my model. I refer to mainstream physics as above and to papers like Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology? by Williamson and van der Mark, and point out that the electron has a wave nature. And that wave isn't moving linearly at c.
Surely I've been through all this? There is no magic. Charge is topological. Shades of TQFT, an electron is a Dirac's belt spindle-sphere-torus trivial-knot standing-wave of displaced frame-dragged space. The positron has the opposite chirality. Also see http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0512265 along with http://groupkos.com/mtwain/TheElectron.pdf for mention of some older models.
Huh? Nobody said it was a composite particle. And no, we don't have any evidence for inflation, and like you said it is irrelevant to the multiverse.Phunk said:
OK, gotta go.
ctamblyn
Data Ghost
Nonsense. Of course they are predictions. That's what you call it when you can actually use a theory to work out what you expect to see in experiments. You know, the very thing that your loopy photon model cannot do.
The Williamson / van der Mark PDF you keep referring to is crackpot physics, pure and simple. Your own version of the electron isn't even the same as theirs, by the way, or anyone else's as far as I can see, so it is perfectly appropriate to refer to it as "your model" to avoid confusion with all the other crackpot theories you bring up.
Sorry, but that is no better than a stream of cargo cult incantations. Until you have properly addressed the objections raised throughout this thread about charge and statistics (and many others, e.g. how the self-bound state arises as a solution of the field equations etc.), and have constructed a mathematical model capable of making quantitative predictions, what you have is (as I said above) not even wrong.
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Irrelevant Einstein-thumping.
I was talking about atoms, not electrons. What chemical elements are made of.
TOTALLY irrelevant. A believer in Aristotelian physics would say "Horsefeathers! How objects move depends on what elements they are composed of. Earthly objects are composed of earth, water, air, and fire, from heavy to light. The heavier ones fall and the lighter ones rise. That stone cannonball falls because it has a lot of earth in it. However, celestial objects are composed of aether, which continually moves in circles. The Moon is made of aether, and that's why it moves the way that it does."
Farsight, what arguments would you have made against it?
Aristotelian physics died a slow death, as many big paradigms do, and if one had lived before many of the events that I've listed, what would one have said about it?
Heliocentrism:
- Aristarchus: ~250 BCE -- proposed it
- Nicholas Copernicus: 1514 -- Commentariolus ("Little Commentary") -- revived it
- Galileo Galilei: 1610 -- observations of Venus and Jupiter -- clear examples of non-geocentric motion
- Isaac Newton: 1687 -- Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica ("Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy") -- his physics was only consistent with heliocentrism
- James Bradley: 1729 -- seeming observations of parallax explained as aberration of starlight caused by the Earth's moving around the Sun
- Friedrich Bessel: 1838 -- parallax of 61 Cygni successfully measured
- ~ 1970 -- pulsar-timing measurements -- one must correct for their pulses crossing the Earth's orbit
- Aristotle: ~ 350 BCE -- different
- Isaac Newton: 1687 -- same
- Anaxagoras: ~ 450 BCE -- meteorites suggest that celestial objects are hot rocks
- Aristotle: ~ 350 BCE -- terrestrial: earth, water, air, fire; celestial: aether
- ? -- Moon contaminated by earthly elements
- Galileo Galilei: ~ 1610 -- the Sun has spots, the Moon has mountains, and Venus has phases -- rather Earthlike
- Isaac Newton: 1687 -- same laws of motion
- Jean-Baptiste Biot: 1803 -- successfully revives extraterrestrial hypothesis of meteorites
- Mid to late 19th cy. -- identification of terrestrial chemical elements in the Sun by spectroscopy
- 1966: Surveyor 1 spacecraft lands on the Moon
- 1969: Apollo 11 astronauts collect rocks and soil from the Moon, and return with them
Reality Check
Penultimate Amazing
None of this is evidence that the electron is anything but a point particle, Farsight.
In fact it is the other way around - the theory describing these phenomena works and that theory has electrons as point particles
.Evidence that the electron has a finite size would be a measurement of that size or a theory based on a finite electron radius that makes predictions that are verified (and different from the current working theory).
Yes we have seen more evidence for inflation, and yes inflation does predict a type I multiverse
What is your candidate for that "something else", Farsight?
Pink unicorns?
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Reality Check
Penultimate Amazing
You point out trivial facts like the electron has a wave nature and seem to ignore the fact that it also has a particle nature.
ETA
You essentially lie (quote mine) about Wikipedia as I pointed out back in 13th August 2013.
Wow Farsight, you know that electrons do not move at c
!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...
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phunk
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I'm sorry, weren't you saying electrons were made of photons? That's what composite means, a particle that is made of other particles.
That is not what I said. I said the universe didn't need to be infinite to be a level 1 multiverse. Inflation does not imply an infinite universe, just one much bigger than the observable universe.
Reality Check
Penultimate Amazing
Way to demonstrate your inability to distinguish valid science from pseudoscience (and in the second case delusional science!), Farsight!
A 2005 paper in Physics Essays that has never been cited and never followed up by the author.
A random PDF of a chapter from an unpublished book on the web by an "Millennium Twain" that is 19 years old (1995) and even states that it is a "presentation" not a paper
!The best evidence for the electron's pointlike nature is in the behavior of its interaction cross sections as a function of scattering energy. Scattering tells us that the proton is composite. Scattering tells us that the electron is not composite. Your list is irrelevant: The first, second, fourth, and sixth are evidence that the participating particle is quantum mechanical. (Both composite and fundamental particles may participate in pair production, diffraction, and bound states; the Aharonov-Bohm effect would happen to any charged particle.) The third is evidence that electromagnetism itself is quantum-mechanical. The fifth is evidence that angular momentum is conserved.
It's like listening to someone argue that dogs are reptiles because (a) they breathe oxygen, (b) they feel attractive gravity, and (c) the nuclear Overhauser effect.
Williamson and van der Mark do not have a quantitative theory of anything. They drew a pretty picture of a Mobius strip. They drew another picture of a torus. You liked the pictures. Neither the Mobius drawing, nor the torus drawing, nor your liking of them, have any useful physics content, or experimental predictions associated with them.
Referring to what Einstein said isn't "irrelevant Einstein thumping".lpetrich said:
This is getting surreal.
This evidence is overwhelmed by the other evidence. And it's clearly the wrong inference because it's quantum field theory. It isn't quantum point particle theory. The electron's field is part of what it is.ben m said:
And it isn't composite. But it isn't a point particle either.ben m said:
My list is not irrelevant. That's the evidence that the electron is not a point particle.ben m said:
This really is getting absurd. Everybody know's about Dirac's belt:ben m said:
"In contrast, the Mobius strip is a non-orientable surface, because a right-handed figure, moved continuously around the loop until arrive back at its starting point, becomes left-handed. An object must be translated around the loop twice in order to be restored to its original position and chirality. In this sense a Mobius strip is reminiscent of spin-1/2 particles in quantum mechanics, since such particles must be rotated through two complete rotations in order to be restored to their original state".
edd
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I note that last week you were still posting nonsense and are seemingly no closer to figuring out how units and dimensions work? That sort of thing is certainly not mainstream physics. It's not physics at all - it's logically incoherent (despite you inserting a mention of needing 'appropriate dimensionality').
When are you going to accept that is wrong? I mean, I was taught how to ensure correct units at school. I don't know how you can claim to know what you're talking about while making this sort of error.
W.D.Clinger
Philosopher
Much of this thread has been farsics-al, beginning with the OP.
Claiming is easy. Making credible claims would be a lot harder.
John Duffield (aka Farsight) has yet to explain why n just happens to be 1 when the speed of light is measured in m/s, but becomes an obvious crock when c is measured in equally fundamental units (such as furlongs/fortnight).John Duffield said:
ctamblyn
Data Ghost
Evidently you are using some idiosyncratic definition of "prediction". Perhaps I need to reword my point in a way that doesn't use that word.
Let me put it this way. Mainstream physics provides a set of methods and tools which anyone who has successfully completed the training can use to arrive at assertions about what the results of various experiments and observations will be. This is useful, because by comparing the assertions with the actual outcomes we learn about the applicability of the models we are using, and thus about nature. The assertions made by mainstream physics cover all of the examples you gave (pair production, AB effect, ...), and the fact that those assertions match observation (qualitatively and quantitatively) is evidence in favour of the validity of the underlying models.
On the other hand, your electron model does not lead to any such methods or tools. The same goes for the other electron models you have brought up, and that numerological tripe about mass ratios. There is no way to start with, say, your picture of the electron and use that to deduce that electrons are stable, or what the mean lifetime of ortho-positronium is, or what all the different possible outcomes of e+e- collisions are and how often we should expect each, and so on ad infinitum. In that sense, it fails even to be wrong. Furthermore, though, it makes nonsensical claims about the nature of electrons and photons - e.g. that a photon can enter some mysterious and magical self-trapped state and somehow transform itself from a neutral boson into a charged fermion. The cargo-cult incantations you posted earlier in the thread regarding TQFT etc. do nothing to clarify this mystery; you might as well have quoted ancient Egyptian mythology.
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If your argument is simply "quantum field theory is right", well, great. Quantum field theory is right, as far as anyone can tell! Glad you agree.
But you think we shouldn't use the word "point particle" when talking about a wavefunction? Whatever. There are two different totally phenomena with separate scales here: (a) the length scale associated with internal degrees-of-freedom of all objects of this type vs. (b) the spatial extent of the object's wavefunction in a given experiment.
All hydrogen atoms have internal stuff going on a scale of 1A. All lead nuclei have internal structure spread over 8fm. All protons have internal structure spread over 1fm. All C60 buckyballs have internal structure spread over 10nm. A baseball has internal structure over 10cm. This is all visible in experiments. This is the scale you see in scattering experiments.
You can prepare an atomic hydrogen beam in which the particle positions are uncertain on a scale of 1cm. Or 1mm. Or 1A. Depends on the experiment. You can prepare a proton beam where the wavefunction diffracts through two slits 100um apart. Or 1um. Or 1nm. Depends on the experiment. It's a totally different phenomenon than the scale mentioned in the previous paragraph.
On the first observable: scattering experiments cannot find a spatial scale associated with electrons qua electrons. No matter how hard we look. This means there is no such scale down to 10^-18m. On the other hand, you can have an electron wavefunction spread over 1mm, or spread over 1A, or spread over 0.01A. (Depends on the experiment, remember?)
The standard term for the former quantity is "the size of the particle". If I say "the size of a buckyball is 10nm", I'm referring to the former quantity. You cannot rebut this by pointing out a buckyball diffraction experiment that used 100nm slits---that's referring to the latter quantity.
I will continue to say "electrons are pointlike", and I'm always referring to the former quantity. Electrons are pointlike in the same sense that hydrogen atoms are 1A wide and protons are 1fm wide. Electrons are wavelike in the same uncontroversial sense that everything is wavelike.
(Williamson and van der Mark's hypothesized electron is 0.01A wide in the former sense, so the hypothesis is wrong. Williamson and van der Mark are incompetent to attempt to write the uncontroversial everything-is-wavelike aspect of their electron, so the hypothesis is wrong again.)
Yes, you have pointed out one well-known mathematical object X that has one of the same symmetries as another well-known mathematical object Y. This does not, by itself, compel physicists to say that every Y is actually an X.