Merged Relativity+ / Farsight

[edd]

You said you'd combine the field lines by not combining them. Not too clever was it?

I think others have interpreted me correctly there and posted on it (thanks to those people btw)

Bah, stop prevaricating. Just get on and draw it.

You might want to consider that sometimes we post from devices that don't make such acts straightforward (e.g. smartphones).

So they got it wrong. They wrote it in 1991. Cut them some slack. The charge of the electron is [qimg]http://www.forkosh.com/mimetex.cgi?e = \sqrt {\epsilon_0 \over 4 \pi c^3}[/qimg] with a binding energy adjustment.

Looks like a Worsleyism. Straightforward to check with GNU units (using the square since it isn't so fond of rooting dimensionful quantities):

You have: epsilon0/(4 pi c^3)
You want: e^2
conformability error
	2.6150305e-38 A^2 s^7 / kg m^6
	2.5669697e-38 A^2 s^2

The units don't match. Of course this has never bothered you in the past, so I shouldn't be surprised now.

 

[ben m]

I would like someone to mine through Farsight's posts and compile all the times he said, effectively, "This drawing of a spiral is an electromagnetic truth so incredibly obvious that you're a Maxwell-denying moron for even asking me to explain it further. Bah".

So we can contrast it with:

We drew orthogonal lines around pingpong balls, with arrowheads. We concluded that whilst the electron and the positron are deemed to have a spherically-symmetric electric field, there has to be an underlying toroidal nature because electrons and positrons have opposite chiralities.

i.e., effectively, "this drawing of a spiral sort of illustrates something two unpublished nonphysicists convinced ourselves of once."

 

[ben m]

The units don't match. Of course this has never bothered you in the past, so I shouldn't be surprised now.

"Well Worsley's formula is wrong anyway," says the National Bureau of Measuring Things in Inch-Pound-Seconds But Thereafter Ignoring Units Like Worsley Does, "because sqrt(e0 / 4 π c^3) clearly evaluates to 1.23x10^-23."

 

[Reality Check]

No, they aren't.

Yes they are described like that in the article:

That question is ridiculous Farsight, since "playing catch with photons" is your personal description based on what seems to be ignorance of QED.

Feynman Diagrams and Forces Between Particles has an explanation in terms of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Very basically attractive forces are particles throwing photons away from each other (not playing catch!).

 

[Reality Check]

Farsight's imaginary spiral cartoons

See my response to ctamblyn where I referred to the Williamson / van der Mark electron ...

See where you remain unable to understand that that paper is invalid so it is dumb to refer to it, Farsight .

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...

See where you remain obsessed with that invalid cartoon of a spiral, Farsight .
Part 1 (28th April 2014)
* it is totally ignorant to add up E and B field lines.
* it is totally ignorant to think that the second image is the B field lines from a point source.
* it is a bit deluded to state that E and B fields do not exist and then draw cartoons of E and B fields . The proper cartoon according to you would be the EM field lines from an electron as derived from the actual EM field of an electron.

Part 2 (28th April 2014)
* The E field lines from a point source are always drawn as radial lines as any high school science student knows.
* The B field lines from a point source are always drawn as radial arcs from one pole to the other as any high school science student knows.
* Lying about the results of the Google search is bad - there are few "concentric lines" in the B field lines search - they are radial arcs from one pole to the other. There is no similarity to that second image in your cartoon.

Part 3 (28th April 2014)
* ignorantly adds the E field lines of a single charged particle to the B field lines of a current (many moving charged particles)
* cherry-picks the second image to fit Farsight's wanted outcome (item c). Guess what the B field lines of a current look like from the side!
* makes up the fantasy that item c depicts a spinor. A spinor has no "depiction" - it has a mathematical symbol and analogies.
* still has no idea what topological charge is (nothing to do with electrical charge)!

Part 4 (1 May 2014)
* The delusion that drawing 2 of these imaginary spirals represents electrons or positrons.

 

[Reality Check]

Ah, such cute abuse.

Ah such cute facts for you to ignore, Farsight, like the Williamson / van der Mark's toroidal crackpot electron model does not have your spiral cartoons in it!

That lack is because Williamson and van der Mark are not stupid. They would not try to just add a E field to a B field. They would not try to add the E field of a point source to the B field of a current in any way.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

A question to the rest of the posters here: What did Maxwell and Minkowski actually mean by the "screw" analogies? Is there anything to it at all?

Yes, there's something to it, but Maxwell and Minkowski meant different things by their "screw" analogies, and neither analogy supports Farsight's cartoon spirals.

Maxwell wrote:

A motion of translation along an axis cannot produce a rotation about that axis unless it meets with some special mechanism, like that of a screw, which connects a motion in a given direction along the axis with a rotation in a given direction round it;

He was talking about "the rotation of the plane of polarized light when transmitted along the lines of magnetic force". Maxwell's title for the section in which he used this analogy was "Part IV: The Theory of Molecular Vortices applied to the Action of Magnetism on Polarized Light".

Maxwell had begun that section by stating equations (9), which looks to be a statement of the part of the Lorentz force law that's due to the magnetic field alone. He's trying to figure out how to go beyond that force law by developing a theory of polarization that could explain some rather interesting experimental results.

Minkowski was talking about something rather different: How Lorentz transformations transform the electromagnetic field. His "screw" analogy was a throwaway remark, which he immediately disclaimed as "imperfect". His main point is that you can't hope to understand why the electric and magnetic fields transform the way they do until you recognize that their combination, the electromagnetic field, is the Lorentz-invariant field. The division of that electromagnetic field into electric and magnetic fields is coordinate-dependent, hence relative:

In the description of the field caused by the electron itself, then it will appear that the division of the field into electric and magnetic forces is a relative one with respect to the time-axis assumed; the two forces considered together can most vividly be described by a certain analogy to the force-screw in mechanics; the analogy is, however, imperfect.

Needless to say, neither Maxwell's nor Minkowski's "screw" analogies can carry the weight of Farsight's pseudoscience.

 

[Hellbound]

Needless to say, neither Maxwell's nor Minkowski's "screw" analogies can carry the weight of Farsight's pseudoscience.

So, you're saying there's a screw loose in Farsight's theories?

I think we've all suspected as much

 

[Perpetual Student]

All: OK guys, I have to go now. And you know, I think we've covered the screw nature of electromagnetism enough for now. Talk among yourselves. Oh, and remember this: as you are to Anders Lindman, so am I to you.

We have a good bit of irony here. The only apparent difference between Mr. Lindman and Mr. Duffield seems to be a degree of glibness. Their take on physics is certainly at a similar level of superficiality and is similarly devoid of mathematical rigor.

 

[edd]

Bah, stop prevaricating. Just get on and draw it.

Here you go, since I had a spare minute at a capable box.

Don't take any notice of field lines springing up out of nowhere. That's a figment of the plotting library trying to keep line density ~ constant. All field lines start and stop on the particle at the origin.

As discussed previously, two sets of vectors to express the 4 components of the tensor that are in this particular plane (chosen so that the dipole points in the y direction).

 

[The Man]

See my response to ctamblyn where I referred to the Williamson / van der Mark electron and said inflate the torus into a spindle sphere torus and place that at the centre of my spiral depiction:

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=30824&stc=1&thumb=1&d=1398594708[/qimg]

I've seen and it doesn't change your problem of handedness reversal upon a coordinate reversal. Now please show how you get you do get a spindle sphere torus from combining the electrical and magnetic fields of a stationary charged particle and especially how that a spindle sphere torus transforms to just a radial electrical field at some distance from that charged particle.

It is. Try drawing arrows on ping-pong balls, and on Moebius strips. What's difficult is explaining it to people who cannot conceive that what they've been taught is in any way defective or deficient.

Great, so it isn't as intuitive as you asserted. If you want or need some other drawings than you draw them.

Trivia.

Ah, so your assertions that...

You cannot flip it on two axes to give it the same spin as the other. Just as you cannot make your left hand look like your right. Because it has chirality. Handedness.

..are trivially false, glad to see you understand that now.

And one more time: the charged particle has an electromagnetic field. It doesn't have an electric field, it doesn't have a magnetic field, it has an electromagnetic field. This deserves a depiction, so we combine radial "electric field lines" with concentric "magnetic field lines" like so:


[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=30815&stc=1&thumb=1&d=1398534443[/qimg]

Say it as many time as you want but what you still haven't said is exactly how you combine them. Also a dipole field doesn't result in spherical field lines. So right off the bat you're leaving out what differentiates a dipole field from a spherical field in your representation.

Though you do seem to get one thing right, as your finial image shows the radial component dominating after some distance from the stationary particle. So even that final image supports just considering the electrical field at some distance from a stationary charged particle

But we remember we are dealing with curl in three dimensions rather than curvature in a plane, and with chirality rather than helicity. We don't quibble about a 2D depiction of a 3D dynamical thing, do we?

Indeed we do quibble about your "2D depiction of a 3D dynamical thing" that (perhaps deliberately) excludes the distinctive characteristics of a dipole field.

Then combine the radial electric field with a dipole magnetic field. What does a dipole look like, ooh, here's a picture of one.

Great so you do know what a dipole field looks like, combine away but remember unless the magnetic component is sufficiently strong the electrical component will still dominate at some effective distance. Also should you choose to combine them then be sure to describe exactly how you combined them.

The whole idea of sources and sinks is misguided I'm afraid. A charged particle isn't sucking or blowing. Sinks attract sinks and the arrows just don't work.

No it is the idea of sucking and blowing that sucks and blows. Sinks don't attract because they don't suck. The arrows do work and they would even work for you as they would give a spatial reference that is linked to the particle and which would not change with simple coordinate spatial reversals. That is why they are used because they do work, so don't be afraid of them.

This current round of discussion began because I said when you understand the screw nature of electromagnetism, you understand why magnetic monopoles do not exist.

And you still have not demonstrated that "you understand the screw nature of electromagnetism" nor explicitly why it would mean "magnetic monopoles do not exist.". All you have demonstrated is that your "2D depiction of a 3D dynamical thing" simply doesn't include the characteristic details (even in just 2D) of a dipole field that you assert should be used. Is it that you just don't or didn't understand what you wanted to represent or were you being deliberately disingenuous? Not that it matters much since unless you can show the magnetic components as a significant contributor to the over all field at some distance from a stationary partial then just the electrical component dominates and you are de facto just left with an electrical field.

 

[Farsight]

You haven't combined them at all. Try again.

 

[edd]

You haven't combined them at all. Try again.

Why would you say they're not combined? I've made what I think is a reasonable attempt to create a diagram that describes four of the six components of the electromagnetic field tensor (having thrown two out by taking just one plane through the space).

You seem to want me to throw out another two, and just leave two for me to plot. Perhaps you would like to specify mathematically how I should do that and give a physical justification for it?

 

[ben m]

You haven't combined them at all. Try again.

Quite the contrary, Edd's plot shows the complete electromagnetic field tensor in this plane. For example, if I zoom in on coordinate {+1,+1} the plot tells me that the electromagnetic field has the form

F^munu = { {0,-1,-1,0}, {1,0,0,0}, {1,0,0,-a},{0,0,a,0}}

(I leave "a" as an unknown constant because Edd's plot does not include, nor is it easy to include, a scale.) In other words, edd's plot shows the electromagnetic field.

Farsight, I await---and not for the first time---any fragment of information about exactly what information about the electromagnetic field you think can be read off your "spiral" plot.

 

[ben m]

Maybe the problem is a word Farsight has misinterpreted, badly. The word is "combined".

Farsight read about the unification of electric and magnetic fields, and he's thinking "they combined two fields into one field." But the only definition of "combine" that he's aware of is something like addition. You can "combine" 3 and 5 to get 8; 8 is obviously the same type of object (i.e. an integer) that 3 and 5 are. If you told someone to make a graph showing "y=8", and they insisted on showing two graphs (of y=3 and y=5), you'd be right to complain "look, you didn't combine them. You're still showing this surplus information which combining 3 and 5 should have discarded. Just graph x=8."

But electromagnetic unification is not like addition. It did not throw away any information. Before unification, you needed six independent components to describe the (separate) E vector field and B vector field. After unification, you still need six independent components to describe the (single) electromagnetic tensor. There is no surplus information "discarded" in unification. There is no addition-like operation. The fields are "combined" but not with the implications Farsight has blindly assumed. He continues to insist on a simple vector plot, because he has never imagined that "combining" things meant anything other than adding them.

You'd think that five or six JREF posters (plus some combination of Jackson/Purcell/Maxwell/Einstein/literally every other non-Worsley/Williamson source text on E&M) might have gotten this through to him. I'm posting this on the hypothesis that since he's stuck on such a simple word ("combined"), and previous attempts to correct him have explained more-complicated words and equations ("tensor"), he's been ignoring these corrections by assuming they're math-y obfuscation of the simple and obvious truth of "combining" fields. Hey Farsight, stop doing that. The stuff you ignored was actual electromagnetism. The simple thing you've been waiting for has never existed.

 

[ctamblyn]

Farsight - I'm still waiting for answers to these:

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?p=9967337#post9967337

As well as this:

...
I'm curious, incidentally. Using the same methodology which produced that spiral, how do you think the following three field configurations would look?

1. A uniform magnetic field in the x-direction.
2. A uniform electric field in the x-direction.
3. A linear superposition of the previous two fields.

 

[Perpetual Student]

Maybe the problem is a word Farsight has misinterpreted, badly. The word is "combined".

Farsight read about the unification of electric and magnetic fields, and he's thinking "they combined two fields into one field." But the only definition of "combine" that he's aware of is something like addition. You can "combine" 3 and 5 to get 8; 8 is obviously the same type of object (i.e. an integer) that 3 and 5 are. If you told someone to make a graph showing "y=8", and they insisted on showing two graphs (of y=3 and y=5), you'd be right to complain "look, you didn't combine them. You're still showing this surplus information which combining 3 and 5 should have discarded. Just graph x=8."

But electromagnetic unification is not like addition. It did not throw away any information. Before unification, you needed six independent components to describe the (separate) E vector field and B vector field. After unification, you still need six independent components to describe the (single) electromagnetic tensor. There is no surplus information "discarded" in unification. There is no addition-like operation. The fields are "combined" but not with the implications Farsight has blindly assumed. He continues to insist on a simple vector plot, because he has never imagined that "combining" things meant anything other than adding them.

You'd think that five or six JREF posters (plus some combination of Jackson/Purcell/Maxwell/Einstein/literally every other non-Worsley/Williamson source text on E&M) might have gotten this through to him. I'm posting this on the hypothesis that since he's stuck on such a simple word ("combined"), and previous attempts to correct him have explained more-complicated words and equations ("tensor"), he's been ignoring these corrections by assuming they're math-y obfuscation of the simple and obvious truth of "combining" fields. Hey Farsight, stop doing that. The stuff you ignored was actual electromagnetism. The simple thing you've been waiting for has never existed.

Perhaps this is an opportunity for a breakthrough.

 

[ben m]

While Farsight is busy haranguing Edd for "failing" to graph an electromagnetic field, let's recall the actual "electromagnetic field" content of Farsight's attempt (my bolding)

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=30815&stc=1&thumb=1&d=1398534443[/qimg]

As for what actual quantities are being depicted, I struggle to say. Item a depicts radial "electric lines of force" around a charged particle. Item b depicts "magnetic field lines" as per the current-in-the wire. As we know the latter aren't quite lines of force because motion is around the field lines, and the concentric lines aren't quite apt for an electron because it has a dipole nature. But the "the greater whole" that is the electromagnetic field surely deserves some kind of depiction, and I think item c achieves that quite well.

Since edd was generous enough to make a scientific depiction of an electromagnetic field, i.e. by plugging real-world electromagnetic field configurations into a scientific plotting program, will you return the favor?

Or is a hand-drawn "some kind of depiction" of the "I struggle to say" lines as rigorous as it will get?

 

[edd]

Thanks for pointing this out, ben m.
Here we have Farsight saying:

As for what actual quantities are being depicted, I struggle to say. Item a depicts radial "electric lines of force" around a charged particle. Item b depicts "magnetic field lines" as per the current-in-the wire. As we know the latter aren't quite lines of force because motion is around the field lines, and the concentric lines aren't quite apt for an electron because it has a dipole nature. But the "the greater whole" that is the electromagnetic field surely deserves some kind of depiction, and I think item c achieves that quite well.

and then he goes on to talk about corotating vortices repelling, but when I point out that corotating magnetic fields around currents in wires cause them to attract suddenly it's

Please do not try to confuse other readers edd. Stick with charged particles which have an electromagnetic field.

It's even in the same page of the thread.

 

[Farsight]

God forbid.

Edited by Gaspode: 

Removed off-topic content.

Edd: The current-in-the wire is a different situation. You have a column of electrons and a column of metal ions each with their electromagnetic fields, but these fields don't quite cancel each other because the electrons are moving up the wire. I spoke about this in the opening posts. Obviously you didn't read it.

All: you know guys, we just aren't getting anywhere with this are we? You're all happy with the idea of field lines, and you all know about the electromagnetic field as per the Minkowski quote. But nobody will depict electromagnetic field lines or talk sincerely about this subject. Nobody will step up to the plate about electrons and positrons slinging photons back and forth. Yep, like I was saying a couple of days back I think we've done this one to death. If anybody wants to talk to me about a different subject, please start a new thread and PM/email. Until then it's over and out from me. Favourites Delete.