(For an introduction to quantum field theory concepts, see The physics of quantum field theory.)

1. Newtonian gravity

Let’s begin with a look at the Newtonian gravity law F = mMG/r², which is based on empirical evidence, not a speculative theory (remember Newton’s claim: hypotheses non fingo!). The inverse square law is based on Kepler’s empirical laws, which were obtained by Brahe’s detailed observations of motion of the planet Mars. The mass dependence was more of a guess by Newton, since he didn’t actually calculate gravitational forces (he did not know or even write the symbol for G, which arrived long after from the pen of Laplace). However, Newton’s other empirical law, F = ma, was strong evidence for a linear dependence of force on mass, and there was some evidence from the observation of the Moon’s orbit. The Moon was known to be about 250,000 miles away and to take about 30 days to orbit the earth, so it’s centripetal acceleration could be calculated from Newton’s law, a = v²/r. This could confirm Newton’s law in two ways. First, since 250,000 miles is about 60 times the radius of the Earth, the acceleration due to gravity from the Earth should, from the inverse-square law, be 60² times weaker at the Moon than it is at the Earth’s surface where it is 9.8 m/s².

Hence it was possible to check the inverse-square law in Newton’s day. Newton also made a good guess at the average density of the earth, which indicates G fairly accurately using Galileo’s measurement of the gravitational acceleration at the Earth’s surface and - applied also to the Moon (assumed to have a similar density to the Earth) gives a very approximate justification for the assumption of Newton’s that gravitational force is directly proportional to the product of the two masses involved. Newton worked out geometrically proofs for using his law. For example, the mass of the Earth is not located in a point at its centre, but is distributed over a large three-dimensional volume. Newton proved that you can treat the entire mass of the earth as being in a small place in the centre of the Earth for the purpose of making calculations, and this proof is as clever as his demonstration that the inverse square law applies to elliptical planetary orbits (Hooke showed that it applied to circular orbits, which is much easier). Newton treated the mass of the earth as a series of uniform shells of small thickness. He proved that outside the shell, the gravitational field is identical, at any radius from the middle of the shell, to the gravitational field from an equal mass all located in a small lump in the middle. This proof also applies to the quantum gravity mechanism (below).

Cavendish produced a more accurate evaluation of G by measuring the twisting force (torsion) in a quartz fibre due to the gravitational attraction of two heavy balls of known mass located a known distance apart.

2. General relativity as a modification needed to include relativistic phenomena

• Dr Tim Poston and Dr Ian Stewart, ‘Rubber Sheet Physics’ (science article) in Analog: Science Fiction/Science Fact, Vol. C1, No. 129, Davis Publications, New York, November 1981.

• http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0507619, pp. 17-18.

1. Small size of the cosmic background radiation ripples

The prediction of gravity by this mechanism appears to be accurate to within experimental data, which is accurate to within a factor of approximately two. The second major prediction of this mechanism is the small size in the sound-like ripples in angular distribution of the cosmic background radiation which is the earliest directly observable radiation in the universe, whose emitted power peaked at 370,000 years after the big bang when the temperature was 3,500 Kelvin, and redshifted or ’stretched out’ due to cosmic expansion which reduces its temperature to 2.7 Kelvin.

Because radiation and matter were in thermal equilibrium (an ionised gas) at the time the cosmic background radiation was emitted, the radiation carries an imprint of the nature of the matter at that time. The cosmic background radiation was found to be of extremely uniform temperature, far more uniform than expected at 370,000 years after the big bang, when conventional models of galaxy formation implied that should have been big ripples to indicate the ’seeding’ of lumps that could become stars and galaxies.

This is called the ‘horizon problem’ or ‘isotropy problem’, because the microwave background radiation from opposite directions in the sky is similar to within 0.01%, and in the mainstream models gravity always has the same strength and would have caused bigger non-uniformities within 370,000 years of the big bang. A mainstream attempt to solve this problem is ‘inflation’ whereby the universe expanded at a faster than light speed for a small fraction of a second after the big bang, making the density of the universe uniform all over the sky before gravity had a chance to magnify irregularities in the expansion process.

This ‘horizon problem’ is closely related to the ‘flatness problem’ which is the issue that in general relativity, the universe depending on its density has three possible geometries: open, flat, and closed. At the critical density it will be flat, with gravitation causing its radius to increase in proportion to the two-thirds power of time after the big bang. Mainstream consensus was that the universe was probably flat - which means of critical density, five to twenty times more than the observable density. The flatness problem is that if the universe was not completely flat, but of slightly different density across the universe, then the variation in density would be greatly magnified by the expansion of the universe and would be obvious today. The absense of any such large anisotropy is widely believed, by the mainstream, to be evidence for a flat geometry.

The mechanism for gravity solves these problems. It solves the flatness problem by showing that the critical density (distinguishing the open, flat, and closed solutions to the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric of general relativity, which is applied to cosmology) is false for ignoring quantum gravity effects: there ars no long range gravitational influences in an expanding universe because the graviton exchange radiation of quantum gravity is becomes severely redshifted like light, and cannot produce curvature effects like forces on large distances. So the whole existing mainstream structure of using general relativity to work out cosmology falls apart.

The horizon problem as to why the cosmic background is so smooth is solved by this model in an interesting way. It is very simple. The relationship giving the gravity parameter G is directly proportional to the age of the universe. The older the universe gets, the stronger gravity gets. At 370,000 years after the big bang, G was 40,000 times smaller than it is now, and at earlier times it was even smaller. The ripples in the cosmic background radiation are extremely small, because the gravitational force was so small.

As proved earlier, the Hubble acceleration is a = dv/dt = H²R = H²ct, where t is time past when the light was emitted but can be set equal to the age of the universe for our purposes here. Hence the outward force F = ma = mH²ct, is proportional to the age of the universe, as is the equal inward force according to Newton’s 3rd law of motion.

We can also see proportionality to time in the result G = (3/4)H²/(rπe³), since H² = 1/t² and r is mass of universe divided by volume (which is proportional to the cube of radius, i.e., the cube of the product ct), so this formula implies that G is proportional to (1/t²)/(1/t³) which is of course directly proportional to time.

Dirac did not have a mechanism for a time-dependence of G but he guessed that G might vary. Unfortunately, lacking this mechanism, Dirac guessed that G was falling with time when it is actually increasing, and he did not realise that it is not just the strength constant for gravity that varies, but all the strength coupling constants vary in the same way. This disproves Edward Teller’s claim (based on just G varying) that if it were true, the sun’s radiant power would vary with time in a way incompatible with life (e.g., he calculated that the oceans would have been literally boiling during the Cambrian era if Dirac’s assumption was true).

It also disproves another claim that G is constant based on nucleosythesis in the big bang, in the same way. The argument here is that nuclear fusion in stars and in the big bang depends on gravity to cause the basic compressive force, causing electrically charged positive particles to collide hard enough to sufficiently break through the ‘barrier’, caused by the repulsive electric Coulomb force, so that the short-ranged strong attractive force can then fuse the particles together. The big bang nucleosynthesis model correctly predicts the observed abundances of unfused hydrogen and fusion products like helium, assuming that G is constant. Because the result is correct, it is often claimed (even by students of Professor Carroll) that G must have had a value at 1 minutes after the big bang that is no more than 10% different to today’s value for G. The obvious fallacy here is that both electromagnstism and gravity vary the same way. If you double both the Coulomb force and the gravity force, the fusion rate doesn’t vary, because the Coulomb force is opposing fusion while gravity is causing fusion, and both are inverse square forces. The effect of G varying is not manifested in a change to the fusion rate in the big bang or in a star, because the corresponding change in the Coulomb force offsets it.

For a discussion of why the different forces unify by scaling similarly (it is due to vacuum polarization dynamics) see this earlier post: http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/03/17/the-correct-unification-scheme/

Louise Riofrio has investigated the dimensionally correct relationship GM = tc³ which was discussed earlier on this blog here, here and here where M is the mass of the universe and t is its age. This is algebraically equivalent to G = (3/4)H²/(rπ), i.e, the gravity prediction without a dimensionless redshift-density correction factor of e³. It is interesting that it can be derived on the basis of energy based methods, as first pointed out by John Hunter who suggested setting E = mc² = mMG/R, i.e, setting rest mass energy equal to gravitational potential energy.

Since the electromagnetic charge of the electron is massless bosonic energy trapped as a black hole, the gravitational potential energy would have to be equal, to keep it trapped.

This rearranges to give the equations of Riofrio and Rabinowitz, although physically it is obviously missing some dimensionless multiplication constant because the gravitational potential energy cannot be E = mMG/R, where R is the radius of the universe. It is evident that this equation describes the gravitational potential energy which would be released if the universe were (somehow) to collapse. However, the average radial distance of the mass of the universe M will be less than the radius of the universe R. This brings up the density variation problem: gravitons and light both go at velocity c so we see them coming from times in the past when the density was greater (density is proportional to the reciprocal of the cube of the age of the universe due to expansion). So you cannot assume constant density and get a simple solution. You really also need to take account of the redshift of gravitons from the greatest distances, or the density will cause you problems due to tending towards infinity at radii approaching R. Hence, this energy-based approach to gravity is analogous to the physical mechanism described above. See also the derivation, by mathematician Dr Thomas R. Love of California State University, of Kepler’s law at http://nige.wordpress.com/2006/09/30/keplers-law-from-kinetic-energy/ which demonstrates that you can indeed treat problems generally by assuming that the rest mass energy of the spinning, otherwise static fundamental particle or the kinetic energy of the orbiting body, is being trapped by gravitation.

This leads to to a concrete basis for John Hunter’s suggestions published as a notice in the 12 July 2003 issue of New Scientist, page 17: he suggested that if E = mc² = mMG/R, then the effective value of G depends on distance since G = Rc²/M, which is algebraically equivalent to the expression we obtained above for the gravity mechanism, and published in the article ‘Electronic Universe, Part 2′, Electronics World, April 2003 (excluding the suggested e-cube correction for density variation with distance and graviton redshift, which was published in a letter to Electronics World in 2004). Hunter’s July 2003 notice in New Scientist indicated that this solves the horizon problem of cosmology (thus not requiring the speculative mainstream extravagances of Alan Guth’s inflation theory). Hunter pointed out in his notice that his E = mc² = mMG/R, when applied to the earth, should include another term for the influence of the nearby mass of the sun, leading to E = mc² = mMG/R + mM’G/r where m is mass of Earth, M is mass of universe, R is radius of universe (which is inaccurate as pointed out since the average distance of the mass of the surrounding universe can hardly be the radius of the universe, but must be a smaller distance, leading to the problem of the time-variation of density and thus also the redshift of the gravitons causing gravity), M’ is the mass of the Sun, and r is the distance of the Earth from the sun. Hunter argued that since r varies and is 3.4% bigger in July than in January (when Earth is closest to the sun), this leads to a suggestion for a definite experiment to test the theory: ‘Prediction: the weight of objects on the Earth will vary by 3.3 parts in 10 billion over a year, as the Earth to Sun distance changes.’ (My only problem with this prediction is simply that it is virtually impossible to test, just like the ‘not even wrong’ Planck scale unification supersymmetry ‘prediction’. Because the Earth is constantly vibrating due to seismic effects, you can never really hope to make such accurate measurements of weight. Anyone who has tried to make measurements of masses beyond a few significant figures for quantitative chemical analysis knows how difficult such a mass measurement is: making sensitive instruments is a problem, but the increased sensitivity multiplies up background vibrations so the instrument just becomes a seismograph. However, maybe some space-based precise measurements with clever experimentalist/observationist tricks will one day be able to check this to some extent.)

2. Electric force constant (permittivity), Hubble parameter, etc.

The proof [above] predicts gravity accurately, with G = ¾ H²/(pre³). Electromagnetic force (discussed above and in the April 2003 Electronics World article) in quantum field theory (QFT) is due to ‘virtual photons’ which cannot be seen except via forces produced. The mechanism is continuous radiation from spinning charges; the centripetal acceleration of a = v²/r causes the emission energy emission which is naturally in exchange equilibrium between all similar charges, like the exchange of quantum radiation at constant temperature. This exchange causes a ‘repulsion’ force between similar charges, due to recoiling apart as they exchange energy (two people firing guns at each other recoil apart). In addition, an ‘attraction’ force occurs between opposite charges that block energy exchange, and are pushed together by energy being received in other directions (shielding-type attraction). The attraction and repulsion forces are equal for similar net charges. The net inward radiation pressure that drives electromagnetism is similar to gravity, but the addition is different. The electric potential adds up with the number of charged particles, but only in a diffuse scattering type way like a drunkards walk, because straight-line additions are cancelled out by the random distribution of equal numbers of positive and negative charge. The addition only occurs between similar charges, and is cancelled out on any straight line through the universe. The correct summation is therefore statistically equal to the square root of the number of charges of either sign multiplied by the gravity force proved above.

Hence F(electromagnetism) = mMGN^1/2/r² = q₁q₂/(4per²) (Coulomb’s law), where G = ¾ H²/(pre³) as proved above, and N is as a first approximation the mass of the universe (4pR³r/3= 4p(c/H)³r/3) divided by the mass of a hydrogen atom. This assumes that the universe is hydrogen. In fact it is 90% hydrogen by atomic abundance as a whole, although less near stars (only 70% of the solar system is hydrogen, due to fusion of hydrogen into helium, etc.). Another problem with this way of calculating N is that we assume the fundamental charges to be electrons and protons, when in fact protons contain two up quarks (each +2/3) and one downquark (-1/3), so there are twice as many fundamental particles. However, the quarks remain close together inside a nucleon and behave for most electromagnetic purposes as a single fundamental charge. With these approximations, the formulae above yield a prediction of the strength factor e in Coulomb’s law of:

e = q_e²e_2.7…³[r/(12pm_e²m_protonHc³)]^1/2 F/m.

Using old data as in the letter published in Electronics World some years ago which gave the G formula (r = 4.7 x 10^-28 kg/m³ and H = 1.62 x 10^-18 s^-1 for 50 km.s^-1Mpc^-1), gives e = 7.4 x 10^-12 F/m which is only 17% low as compared to the measured value of 8.85419 x 10^-12 F/m.

Rearranging this formula to yield r, and rearranging also G = ¾ H²/(pre³) to yield r allows us to set both results for r equal and thus to isolate a prediction for H, which can then be substituted into G = ¾ H²/(pre³) to give a prediction for r which is independent of H:

H = 16p²Gm_e²m_protonc³e²/(q_e⁴e_2.7…³) = 2.3391 x 10^-18 s^-1 or 72.2 km.s^-1Mpc^-1, so 1/H = t = 13,550 million years. This is checkable against the WMAP result that the universe is 13,700 million years old; the prediction is well within the experimental error bar.

r = 192p ³Gm_e⁴m_proton²c⁶e⁴/(q_e⁸e_2.7…⁹) = 9.7455 x 10^-28 kg/m³.

Again, these predictions of the Hubble constant and the density of the universe from the force mechanisms assume that the universe is made of hydrogen, and so are first approximations. However they clearly show the power of this mechanism-based predictive method.

Furthermore, calculations show that Hawking radiation from electron-mass black holes has the right force as exchange radiation of electromagnetism: http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/03/08/hawking-radiation-from-black-hole-electrons-causes-electromagnetic-forces-it-is-the-exchange-radiation/

4. Particle masses



Fig. 6: Particle mass mechanism. The ‘polarized vacuum’ shell exists between IR and UV cutoffs. We can work out the shell outer radius from either using the IR cutoff energy as the collision energy to calculate the distance of closest approach in a particle scattering event (like Coulomb scattering, which predominates at low energies) or we use Schwinger’s formula for the minimum static electric field strength which is needed to cause pair-productions of fermion-antifermion pairs to pop out of the Dirac sea in the vacuum. The outer radius of the polarized vacuum around a unit charge by either calculation is on the order 1 fm. This scheme doesn’t just explain and predict masses, it also replaces supersymmetry with a proper physical, checkable prediction of what happens to Standard Model forces at extremely high energy. The following text is an extract from an earlier blog post here:

‘The pairs you get produced by an electric field above the IR cutoff corresponding to 10^18 v/m in strength, i.e., very close (<1 fm) to an electron, have direct evidence from Koltick’s experimental work on polarized vacuum shielding of core electric charge published in the PRL in 1997. Koltick et al. found that electric charge increases by 7% in 91 GeV scattering experiments, which is caused by seeing through the part of polarized vacuum shield (observable electric charge is independent of distance only at beyond 1 fm from an electron, and it increases as you get closer to the core of the electron, because you have less polarized dielectric between you and the electron core as you get closer, so less of the electron’s core field gets cancelled by the intervening dielectric).

‘There is no evidence whatsoever that gravitation produces pairs which shield gravitational charges (masses, presumably some aspect of a vacuum field such as Higgs field bosons). How can gravitational charge be renormalized? There is no mechanism for pair production whereby the pairs will become polarized in a gravitational field. For that to happen, you would first need a particle which falls the wrong way in a gravitational field, so that the pair of charges become polarized. If they are both displaced in the same direction by the field, they aren’t polarized. So for mainstream quantum gravity ideas work, you have to have some new particles which are capable of being polarized by gravity, like Well’s Cavorite.

‘There is no evidence for this. Actually, in quantum electrodynamics, both electric charge and mass are renormalized charges, with only the renormalization of electric charge being explained by the picture of pair production forming a vacuum dielectric which is polarized, thus shielding much of the charge and allowing the bare core charge to be much greater than the observed value. However, this is not a problem. The renormalization of mass is similar to that of electric charge, which strongly suggests that mass is coupled to an electron by the electric field, and not by the gravitational field of the electron (which is way smaller by many orders of magnitude). Therefore mass renormalization is purely due to electric charge renormalization, not a physically separate phenomena that involves quantum gravity on the basis that mass is the unit of gravitational charge in quantum gravity.

‘Finally, supersymmetry is totally flawed. What is occurring in quantum field theory seems to be physically straightforward at least regarding force unification. You just have to put conservation of energy into quantum field theory to account for where the energy of the electric field goes when it is shielded by the vacuum at small distances from the electron core (i.e., high energy physics).

‘The energy sapped from the gauge boson mediated field of electromagnetism is being used. It’s being used to create pairs of charges, which get polarized and shield the field. This simple feedback effect is obviously what makes it hard to fully comprehend the mathematical model which is quantum field theory. Although the physical processes are simple, the mathematics is complex and isn’t derived in an axiomatic way.

‘Now take the situation where you put N electrons close together, so that their cores are very nearby. What will happen is that the surrounding vacuum polarization shells of both electrons will overlap. The electric field is two or three times stronger, so pair production and vacuum polarization are N times stronger. So the shielding of the polarized vacuum is N times stronger! This means that an observer more than 1 fm away will see only the same electronic charge as that given by a single electron. Put another way, the additional charges will cause additional polarization which cancels out the additional electric field!

‘This has three remarkable consequences. First, the observer at a long distance (>1 fm) who knows from high energy scattering that there are N charges present in the core, will see only a 1 charge at low energy. Therefore, that observer will deduce an effective electric charge which is fractional, namely 1/N, for each of the particles in the core.

‘Second, the Pauli exclusion principle prevents two fermions from sharing the same quantum numbers (i.e., sharing the same space with the same properties), so when you force two or more electrons together, they are forced to change their properties (most usually at low pressure it is the quantum number for spin which changes so adjacent electrons in an atom have opposite spins relative to one another; Dirac’s theory implies a strong association of intrinsic spin and magnetic dipole moment, so the Pauli exclusion principle tends to cancel out the magnetism of electrons in most materials). If you could extend the Pauli exclusion principle, you could allow particles to acquire short-range nuclear charges under compression, and the mechanism for the acquisition of nuclear charges is the stronger electric field which produces a lot of pair production allowing vacuum particles like W and Z bosons and pions to mediate nuclear forces.

‘Third, the fractional charges seen at low energy would indicate directly how much of the electromagnetic field energy is being used up in pair production effects, and referring to Peter Woit’s discussion of weak hypercharge on page 93 of the U.K. edition of Not Even Wrong, you can see clearly why the quarks have the particular fractional charges they do. Chiral symmetry, whereby electrons and quarks exist in two forms with different handedness and different values of weak hypercharge, explains it.

‘The right handed electron has a weak hypercharge of -2. The left handed electron has a weak hypercharge of -1. The left handed downquark (with observable low energy, electric charge of -1/3) has a weak hyper charge of 1/3, while the right handed downquark has a weak hypercharge of -2/3.

‘It’s totally obvious what’s happening here. What you need to focus on is the hadron (meson or baryon), not the individual quarks. The quarks are real, but their electric charges as implied from low energy physics considerations, are totally fictitious for trying to understand an individual quark (which can’t be isolate anyway, because that takes more energy than making a pair of quarks). The shielded electromagnetic charge energy is used in weak and strong nuclear fields, and is being shared between them. It all comes from the electromagnetic field. Supersymmetry is false because at high energy where you see through the vacuum, you are going to arrive at unshielded electric charge from the core, and there will be no mechanism (pair production phenomena) at that energy, beyond the UV cutoff, to power nuclear forces. Hence, at the usually assumed so-called Standard Model unification energy, nuclear forces will drop towards zero, and electric charge will increase towards a maximum (because the electron charge is then completely unshielded, with no intervening polarized dielectric). This ties in with representation theory for particle physics, whereby symmetry transformation principles relate all particles and fields (the conservation of gauge boson energy and the exclusion principle being dynamic processes behind the relationship of a lepton and a quark; it’s a symmetry transformation, physically caused by quark confinement as explained above), and it makes predictions.

‘It’s easy to calculate the energy density of an electric field (Joules per cubic metre) as a function of the electric field strength. This is done when electric field energy is stored in a capacitor. In the electron, the shielding of the field by the polarized vacuum will tell you how much energy is being used by pair production processes in any shell around the electron you choose. See page 70 of http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0510040 for the formula from quantum field theory which relates the electric field strength above the IR cutoff to the collision energy. (The collision energy is easily translated into distances from the Coulomb scattering law for the closest approach of two electrons in a head on collision, although at higher energy collisions things will be more complex and you need to allow for the electric charge to increase, as discussed already, instead of using the low energy electronic charge. The assumption of perfectly elastic Coulomb scattering will also need modification leading to somewhat bigger distances than otherwise obtained, due to inelastic scatter contributions.) The point is, you can make calculations from this mechanism for the amount of energy being used to mediate the various short range forces. This allows predictions and more checks. It’s totally tied down to hard facts, anyway. If for some reason it’s wrong, it won’t be someone’s crackpot pet theory, but it will indicate a deep problem between the conservation of energy in gauge boson fields, and the vacuum pair production and polarization phenomena, so something will be learned either way.

‘To give an example from http://nige.wordpress.com/2006/10/20/loop-quantum-gravity-representation-theory-and-particle-physics/, there is evidence that the bare core charge of the electron is about 137.036 times the shielded charge observed at all distances beyond 1 fm from an electron. Hence the amount of electric charge energy being used for pair production (loops of virtual particles) and their polarization within 1 fm from an electron core is 137.036 - 1 = 136.036 times the electric charge energy of the electron experienced at large distances. This figure is the reason why the short ranged strong nuclear force is so much stronger than electromagnetism.’

3. Quantum gravity renormalization problem is not real

1. copy of a comment (if you like the comment below, see also my little article http://quantumfieldtheory.org/Dingle.pdf ):

http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/05/27/smolin-on-einstein-in-the-new-york-review-of-books/#comment-266146

Professor Smolin has written some funny things about Einstein. His description in The Trouble with Physics of how he went to the Institute for Advanced Study to meet Freeman Dyson and find out what Einstein was like, was hilarious. (Dyson himself went there to meet Einstein in the late 40s but never did meet him, because the evening before his meeting he read a lot of Einstein’s recent research papers and decided they were rubbish, and skipped the meeting to avoid an embarrassing confrontation.) In an earlier article on Einstein, Smolin writes:

‘Special relativity was the result of 10 years of intellectual struggle, yet Einstein had convinced himself it was wrong within two years of publishing it. He rejected his theory, even before most physicists had come to accept it, for reasons that only he cared about. For another 10 years, as the world of physics slowly absorbed special relativity, Einstein pursued a lonely path away from it.’

- Einstein’s Legacy - Where are the "Einsteinians?", by Lee Smolin,

http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_4.3/smolin.htm

This definitely isn’t what’s required by school physics teachers and string theorists, who both emphasise that special relativity is 100% correct because it’s self-consistent and has masses of experimental evidence. Their argument is that general relativity is built on special relativity, and they ignore Einstein’s own contrary statements like

‘The special theory of relativity … does not extend to non-uniform motion … The laws of physics must be of such a nature that they apply to systems of reference in any kind of motion. … The general laws of nature are to be expressed by equations which hold good for all systems of co-ordinates, that is, are co-variant with respect to any substitutions whatever (generally co-variant).’ – Albert Einstein, ‘The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity’, Annalen der Physik, v49, 1916 (italics are Einstein’s own).

Einstein does actually admit, therefore, that special relativity is wrong as stated in his earlier paper in Ann. d. Phys., vol. 17 (1905), p. 891, where he falsely claims:

‘Thence [i.e., from the SR theory which takes no account of accelerations or gravitation] we conclude that a balance-clock at the equator must go more slowly, by a very small amount, than a precisely similar clock situated at one of the poles under otherwise identical conditions.’

This is by consensus held to be the one error of special relativity, see for example http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-58/iss-9/pdf/vol58no9p12_13.pdf

When clocks were flown around the validate ‘relativity’ they actually validated the absolute coordinate system based general relativity (the gravitational field is the reference frame). G. Builder (1958) is an article called ‘Ether and Relativity’ in the Australian Journal of Physics, v11 (1958), p279, writes:

‘… we conclude that the relative retardation of clocks … does indeed compel us to recognise the causal significance of absolute velocities.’

The famous paper on the atomic clocks being flown around the world to validate ‘relativity’ is J.C. Hafele in Science, vol. 177 (1972) pp 166-8, which cites uses ‘G. Builder (1958)’ for analysis of the atomic clock results. Hence the time-dilation validates the absolute velocities in Builder’s ether paper!

In In 1995, physicist Professor Paul Davies - who won the Templeton Prize for religion (I think it was $1,000,000), wrote on pp. 54-57 of his book About Time:

‘Whenever I read dissenting views of time, I cannot help thinking of Herbert Dingle… who wrote … Relativity for All, published in 1922. He became Professor … at University College London… In his later years, Dingle began seriously to doubt Einstein’s concept … Dingle … wrote papers for journals pointing out Einstein’s errors and had them rejected … In October 1971, J.C. Hafele [used atomic clocks to defend Einstein] … You can’t get much closer to Dingle’s ‘everyday’ language than that.’

Dingle wrote in the Introduction to his book Science at the Crossroads, Martin Brian & O’Keefe, London, 1972, c2:

‘… you have two exactly similar clocks … one is moving … they must work at different rates … But the [SR] theory also requires that you cannot distinguish which clock … moves. The question therefore arises … which clock works the more slowly?’

This question really kills special relativity and makes you accept that general relativity is essential, even for clocks in uniform motion. I don’t think Dingle wrote the question very well. He should have asked clearly how anyone is supposed to determine which clock is moving, in order to calculate the time-dilation.

If there is no absolute motion, you can’t determine which clock runs the more slowly. In chapter 2 of Science at the Crossroads, Dingle discusses Einstein’s error in calculating time-dilation with special relativity in 1905 and comments:

‘Applied to this example, the question is: what entitled Einstein to conclude from his theory that the equatorial, and not the polar, clock worked more slowly?’

Einstein admitted even in popular books that wherever you have a gravitational field, velocities depend upon absolute coordinate systems:

‘But … the general theory of relativity cannot retain this [SR] law. On the contrary, we arrived at the result according to this latter theory, the velocity of light must always depend on the coordinates when a gravitational field is present.’ - Albert Einstein, Relativity, The Special and General Theory, Henry Holt and Co., 1920, p111.

The real brilliance of Einstein is that he corrected his own ideas when they were too speculative (e.g. his ‘biggest blunder’, the large positive CC to cancel out gravity at the mean intergalactic distance, keeping the universe from expanding). What a contrast to string theory.

Comment by nc — May 27, 2007 @ 9:47 pm

2. A little more about the ‘absolute’ reference frame provided by the real existence of the gravitational field:

1. I want to add some comments about the exact role of Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) and also about the Zen-like interpretation of Feynman’s path integrals:

‘I like Feynman’s argument very much (although I have not thought about the virtual charges in the loops bit bit). The general idea that you start with a double slit in a mask, giving the usual interference by summing over the two paths… then drill more slits and so more paths… then just drill everything away… leaving only the slits… no mask. Great way of arriving at the path integral of QFT.’

- Prof. Clifford V. Johnson’s comment

‘Light … "smells" the neighboring paths around it, and uses a small core of nearby space. (In the same way, a mirror has to have enough size to reflect normally: if the mirror is too small for the core of nearby paths, the light scatters in many directions, no matter where you put the mirror.)’

- Feynman, QED, Penguin, 1990, page 54.

‘The world is not magic. The world follows patterns, obeys unbreakable rules. We never reach a point, in exploring our universe, where we reach an ineffable mystery and must give up on rational explanation; our world is comprehensible, it makes sense. I can’t imagine saying it better. There is no way of proving once and for all that the world is not magic; all we can do is point to an extraordinarily long and impressive list of formerly-mysterious things that we were ultimately able to make sense of. There’s every reason to believe that this streak of successes will continue, and no reason to believe it will end. If everyone understood this, the world would be a better place.’

– Prof. Sean Carroll’s blog post on laws

‘It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of spacetime is going to do? So I have often made the hypothesis that ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed, and the laws will turn out to be simple, like the chequer board with all its apparent complexities.’

- R. P. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, November 1964 Cornell Lectures, broadcast and published in 1965 by BBC, pp. 57-8.

Clifford Johnson’s argument is pictorially illustrated in Chapter I.2 (Path Integral Formulation of Quantum Physics) of Zee’s book, Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell.

I think there is a big similarity in the underlying assumption, in this explanation of path integrals, to the underlying assumption of LQG.

It’s clear that path integrals apply to different sorts of particles - photons, electrons, etc. - which behave to give the well known interference effects when the double-slit experiment is done. However, physically the mechanism of what is behind the success of path integrals may vary.

One big question with bosonic radiation like photons is how it can scatter in the vacuum below the Schwinger threshold electric field strength for pair-production of fermions: photons interact with fermions, not with other photons (i.e., photons don’t obey the Pauli exclusion principle).

In other words, the diffraction of light in the double slit experiment is due to the presence of fermions (electrons) in the edges of the slit material. Take away the physical material of the mask with its slits, and the photons will be unable to diffract at all. So the path integral or sum over histories cannot be interpreted correctly by making endless holes in the mask until the mask completely disappears.

However, this argument ignores the presence of charged radiation in the vacuum which mediates all electromagnetic interactions, as described in this blog post. So we get the question arising: does the path integral (sum over histories) arise because photons and other particles interact with charged gauge boson exchange radiation present throughout the zero-point field of the vacuum?

The answer seems to be yes. This is exactly where the formulation of LQG comes into the argument. Because the spin 1 gravitons (not the widely assumed spin-2 ones, see http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/05/19/sheldon-glashow-on-su2-as-a-gauge-group-for-unifying-electromagnetism-and-weak-interactions/ ) used to make the checkable predictions in this post don’t interact with one another (photons don’t interact with one another), LQG which is based on spin-2 gravitons does directly not apply to gravity. But it will be useful for electromagnetic forces where the gauge bosons are charged. What I like about the LQG framework is that it is applying well-validated (the double slit experiment is well checked) path integral concepts to model exchange radiation in the vacuum: as Smolin’s Perimeter Institute lectures explain clearly, the path integral to determine fundamental forces is the sum over the interaction graphs of what the gauge bosons are doing in the vacuum. This path integral naturally gives a relationship between the cause of the field and the acceleration produced (curvature of spacetime, or force effect) which is similar to Einstein’s general relativity.

Comment by nc — June 1, 2007 @ 6:54 am

2. The key background experimental fact to the nature of electromagnetic force gauge bosons being charged (rather than photons) is the nature of the logic step and the theoretical modifications it necessitates to the traditional role of Maxwell’s displacement current:

http://electrogravity.blogspot.com/2006/04/maxwells-displacement-and-einsteins.html :

"… What actually happens in the sloping part of the real logic step is that electrons are accelerated in non-zero time, and in so doing radiate energy like a radio transmitter antenna. Because the current variation in each conductor [you need 2 conductors to propagate a logic step, each carrying an equal and opposite current] is an exact inversion of that in the other, the fields from the radio waves each transmits is capable of exactly cancelling the fields from the signal from the opposite conductor. Seen from a large distance, therefore, there is no radio transmission of energy whatsoever. But at short distances, between the conductors there is exchange of radio wave energy between conductors in the rising portion of the step. This exchange powers the logic step … That’s why the speed of a logic pulse is the speed of light for the insulator between and around the conductors. …"

Comment by nc — June 1, 2007 @ 7:16 am

3. Below are copied a couple of comments from the previous post on this blog,

http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/05/19/sheldon-glashow-on-su2-as-a-gauge-group-for-unifying-electromagnetism-and-weak-interactions/

because they explains in several ways why the black hole size for a fundamental particle like an electron is physically more sensible than Planck’s length:

copy of a comment:

http://kea-monad.blogspot.com/2007/05/blog-notice.html

It’s an interesting post about the Planck units. Actually, the Planck units are very useful to befuddled lecturers who confuse fact with orthodoxy.

The Planck scale is purely the result of dimensional analysis, and Planck’s claim that the Planck length was the smallest length of physical significance is vacuous because the black hole event horizon radius for the electron mass, R = 2GM/c^2 = 1.35*10^{-57} m, which is over 22 orders of magnitude smaller than the Planck length, R = square root (h bar * G/c^3) = 1.6*10^{-35} m.

Why, physically, should this Planck scale formula hold, other than the fact that it has the correct units (length)? Far more natural to use R = 2GM/c^2 for the ultimate small distance unit, where M is electron mass. If there is a natural ultimate ‘grain size’ to the vacuum to explain, as Wilson did in his studies of renormalization, in a simple way why there are no infinite momenta problems with pair-production/annihilation loops beyond the UV cutoff (i.e. smaller distances than the grain size of the ‘Dirac sea’), it might make more physical sense to use the event horizon radius of a black hole of fundamental particle mass, than to use the Planck length.

All the Planck scale has to defend it is a century of obfuscating orthodoxy.

Comment by nc — May 21, 2007 @ 2:19 pm

Non-submitted comment (saved here as it is a useful brief summary of some important points of evidence; I didn’t submit the comment to the following site in the end because it covers a lot of ground and doesn’t include vital mathematical and other backup evidence):

http://borcherds.wordpress.com/2007/05/22/toroidal-black-holes/

This is interesting. A connection I know between a toroidal shape and a black hole is that, if the core of an electron is gravitationally trapped Heaviside-Poynting electromagnetic energy current, it is a black hole and it has a magnetic field which is a torus.

Experimental evidence for why an electromagnetic field can produce gravity effects involves the fact that electromagnetic energy is a source of gravity (think of the stress-energy tensor on the right hand side of Einstein’s field equation). There is also the capacitor charging experiment. When you charge a capacitor, practically the entire electrical energy entering it is electromagnetic field energy (Heaviside-Poynting energy current). The amount of energy carried by electron drift is negligible, since the electrons have a kinetic energy of half the product of their mass and the square of their velocity (typically 1 mm/s for a 1 A current).

So the energy current flows into the capacitor at light speed. Take the capacitor to be simple, just two parallel conductors separated by a dielectric composed of just a vacuum (free space has a permittivity, so this works). Once the energy goes along the conductors to the far end, it reflects back. The electric field adds to that from further inflowing energy, but most of the magnetic field is cancelled out since the reflected energy has a magnetic field vector curling the opposite way to the inflowing energy. (If you have a fully charged, ’static’ conductor, it contains an equilibrium with similar energy currents flowing in all possible directions, so the magnetic field curls all cancel out, leaving only an electric field as observed.)

The important thing is that the energy keeps going at light velocity in a charged conductor: it can’t ever slow down. This is important because it proves experimentally that static electric charge is identical to trapped electromagnetic field energy. If this can be taken to the case of an electron, it tells you what the core of an electron is (obviously, there will be additional complexity from the polarization of loops of virtual fermions created in the strong field surrounding the core, which will attenuate the radial electric field from the core as well as the transverse magnetic field lines, but not the polar radial magnetic field lines).

You can prove this if you discharge any conductor x metres long which is charged to v volts with respect to ground, through a sampling oscilloscope. You get a square wave pulse which has a height of v/2 volts and a duration of 2x/c seconds. The apparently ’static’ energy of v volts in the capacitor plate is not static at all; at any instant, half of it, at v/2 volts, is going eastward at velocity c and half is going westward at velocity c. When you discharge it from any point, the energy already by chance headed towards that point immediately begins to exit at v/2 volts, while the remainder is going the wrong way and must proceed and reflect from one end before it exits. Thus, you always get a pulse of v/2 volts which is 2x metres long or 2x/c seconds in duration, instead of a pulse at v volts and x metres long or x/c seconds in duration, which you would expect if the electromagnetic energy in the capacitor was static and drained out at light velocity by all flowing towards the exit.

This was investigated by Catt, who used it to design the first crosstalk (glitch) free wafer scale integrated memory for computers, winning several prizes for it. Catt welcomed me when I wrote an article on him for the journal Electronics World, but then bizarrely refused to discuss physics with me, while he complained that he was a victim of censorship. However, Catt published his research in IEEE and IEE peer-reviewed journals. The problem was not censorship, but his refusal to get into mathematical physics far enough to sort out the electron.

It’s really interesting to investigate why classical (not quantum) electrodynamics is totally false in many ways. I think quantum electrodynamics and particle-wave duality have blocked progress.

Some calculations of quantum gravity based on a simple, empirically-based model (no ad hoc hypotheses), which yields evidence (which needs to be independently checked) that the proper size of the electron is the black hole event horizon radius.

There is also the issue of a chicken-and-egg situation in QED where electric forces are mediated by exchange radiation. Here you have the gauge bosons being exchanged between charges to cause forces. The electric field lines between the charges have to therefore arise from the electric field lines of the virtual photons being continually exchanged.

How do you get an electric field to arise from neutral gauge bosons? It’s simply not possible. The error in the conventional thinking is that people incorrectly rule out the possibility that electromagnetism is mediated by charged gauge bosons. You can’t transmit charged photons one way because the magnetic self-inductance of a moving charge is infinite. However, charged gauge bosons will propagate in an exchange radiation situation, because they are travelling through one another in opposite directions, so the magnetic fields are cancelled out. It’s like a transmission line, where the infinite magnetic self-inductance of each conductor cancels out that of the other conductor, because each conductor is carrying equal currents in opposite directions.

Hence you end up with the conclusion that the electroweak sector of the SM is in error: Maxwellian U(1) doesn’t describe electromagnetism properly. It seems that the correct gauge symmetry is SU(2) with three massless gauge bosons: positive and negatively charged massless bosons mediate electromagnetism and a neutral gauge boson (a photon) mediates gravitation. This predicts the right strength of gravity, because the charged gauge bosons will cause the effective potential of those fields in radiation exchanges between similar charges throughout the universe (drunkard’s walk statistics) to multiply up the average potential between two charges by a factor equal to the square root of the number of charges in the universe. Since there are around 10^80 charges, electromagnetism is 10^40 times gravity. On average, gauge bosons spend as much time moving away from us as towards us while being exchanged between the charges of the universe, so the average effect of divergence is exactly cancelled by the average convergence, simplifying the calculation. This model also explains why electromagnetism is attractive between dissimilar charges and repulsive between similar charges.

Comment by nc — June 1, 2007 @ 11:06 pm

4. copy of a comment:

http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/05/21/guest-post-joe-polchinski-on-science-or-sociology/#comment-273147

Peter claims: " the equations one has to solve in order to find the "vacuum state" corresponding to our world are at least as complicated if not more so than the ones that define the SM"

So what? Are these equations required to be simpler? Is such a simplification always the case when a large, deeper, and more comprehensive physics theory includes an earlier theory of much more limited scope? - gina

More complex mathematical models for the physical world are justified if there is a pay-back in terms of solid predictions which can validate the need for the additional complexity. The nemesis of physics is the endlessly complex theory which makes no falsifiable predictions and is proudly defended for being incomplete.

Ockham’s razor (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem): "Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity".

String theory multiplies entities without necessity. Where is the necessity for anything in string? If there is no falsifiable prediction, there is no necessity.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for complex theories when there is a pay-back for the additional complexity. In certain ways, Kepler’s elliptical orbits were more ‘complex’ than the circular orbits of both Ptolemy and Copernicus, oxidation is more complex than phlogiston, and caloric was replaced by two theories to explain heat: kinetic theory of gases, and radiation.

These increases in complexity didn’t violate Ockham’s razor because they were needed. Maxwell’s aether violated Ockham’s razor because it required moving matter to be contracted in the direction of motion (FitzGerald contraction) in order for the Michelson-Morley experiment to be explained. This was an ad hoc adjustment, and aether had to be abandoned becaus it did not make falsifiable predictions. Notice that Aether was the leading mathematical physics theory of its heyday, circa 1865 when Maxwell’s equations based on the theory were published.

String theory has not even led to anything predictive like Maxwell’s equations. String theorists should please just try to understand that, until they get a piece of solid evidence that the world is stringy, they should stop publishing totally speculative papers which saturate the journals with one form of speculative, uncheckable orthodoxy which makes it impossible for others to get checkable ideas published and on to arxiv. (Example: Sent: 02/01/03 17:47 Subject: Your_manuscript LZ8276 Cook {gravity unification proof} Physical Review Letters does not, in general, publish papers on alternatives to currently accepted theories…. Yours sincerely, Stanley G. Brown, Editor, Physical Review Letters.)

Comment by nc — June 2, 2007 @ 9:39 am

6. The Greek symbols used in this and other posts and sites will not display properly on computers which don’t have Greek symbol fonts installed. Hence on such a computer you will get r appear in place of the Greek symbol for Rho, and you will get p appear in place of the symbol for Pi, etc.

The problem here is that I use r a lot for radius and p a lot for momentum, so the maths will not be readable on such computers. One solution is to produce PDF files of the pages, since PDF documents contain the symbol set used in the pages within the file itself. All people have to get is the free PDF reader from Adobe,

http://www.adobe.com/products/reader/


Hence I have put this blog (unfortunately posts only, no comments - and since I’ve been using comments to add supplementary information this is a problem) on PDF format at


while this post (including the comments above) is in PDF format at:
http://quantumfieldtheory.org/1a.pdf


I’ve now finished my blogging activities (which scientifically has been fairly fruitful, although the results are messy long essays), and will devote future spare time not to blogging but to writing up the content to go on the site http://quantumfieldtheory.org


It is too hard writing long mathematical blog posts on either blogspot or wordpress without sophisticated mathematical software and lots of time. What is on this blog is enough to be going on with. I think it is a disaster to try writing anything on a computer, because you end up always typing at the speed you are thinking so the results are inclined to be a stream of ideas. It’s vital at this stage to write the papers on paper using a pen, which will permit better editing. You can’t edit efficiently on a computer because there is just too much material you don’t want to cut out. The only way to get something well written and concise is to write it by hand, correct it on paper, and then revise again it while typing it into a computer. Better still, use the computer as a typewriter and don’t save files - just print them out. That forces you to retype the whole thing from beginning to end, and while you do so, you naturally condense that material which is the least concise to save retyping it. It’s expensive in terms of time, but it’s probably the only way to get a lot of detailed editing done efficiently on a complex topic like this.

Comment by nc — June 2, 2007 @ 1:29 pm

7. Just a final note about probability theory abuse in modern physics, and how this can lead to experimental tests.

As quoted in this post, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and the associated mechanism for Schroedinger’s equation in quantum mechanics, is due to scattering of multiple electrons by other as they orbit.

Schroedinger’s equation can only be solved exactly for single electron atoms, like hydrogen isotopes (hydrogen, deuterium, tritium). For all heavier atoms, the solutions require approximations to be made, and are inexact.

The claim here is that if you picture the atom like the solar system, it would look like a Schroedinger atom, with chaotic orbits instead of classical elliptical orbits. The reason the solar system doesn’t have chaotic (Schroedinger) orbits is mainly due to the fact that the sun has 99.8% of the mass of the solar system, and the mass is the gravitational charge holding the solar system together. Hence the planets don’t affect the orbits of each other much, because they are relatively light and far apart. By far the main source of gravity they experience is due to the sun’s mass.

That’s why the planets have deterministic, classical orbits; chaotic effects are trivial.

If you made an atom like the solar system, the electric charges of the electrons would need to be far smaller than they are while keeping the nuclear electric charge high. In such a case, the electrons would interfere with one another less, so the orbits would become more classical.

However, it is likely that the pair-production mechanism (spontaneous appearance and annihilation of pairs of virtual positrons and electrons out as far as 1 fm from an electron core) causes random, spontaneous deflections to the motion of an electron on a small scale, such as in an atom. This mechanism would explain why the hydrogen atom’s electron doesn’t have a classical orbit.

The problem with the Schroedinger equation is that it implies that there is some chance of finding the electron at any distance from the nucleus; the peak probability corresponds to the classical Bohr atom radius, but there is some chance of finding the electron at arbitrarily greater distances.

This is probably unphysical, as there is probably a maximum range on the electron determined by physical considerations. The electron loses its radial kinetic energy as it moves further from the nucleus, due to the deceleration effect produced by the Coulomb attraction. At some distance, the electron’s outward directed radial velocity will fall to zero, and it will then stop receding from the nucleus and start falling back. This physical model doesn’t contradict Schrodinger’s model as a first-approximation, it just supplements it with a physical limitation due to conservation of energy.

Similarly, sometimes you hear crackpot physics lecturers claiming that there is a definite small probability of all the air in a room happening to be in one corner. That actually isn’t possible unless the dimensions of the room are on the order of the mean free path of the air molecules. The reason is that pressure fluctuations physically result from collisions of air molecules, which disperse the kinetic energy isotropically, instead of concentrating it in a particular place. In order to have all the air in a room located in one corner, you have to explain the intermediate steps required to achieve that result: before all the air gets into one corner, there must be a period where the air pressure is increasing in the corner and decreasing elsewhere. As the air pressure in the corner begins to increase, the air in the corner will expand in causal consequence, and the pressure will fall. Hence, it is impossible to get all the air in a room in a corner by random fluctuations of pressure: the probability is exactly zero, rather than being low but finite. (Unless the room is very small and contains so few air molecules that there are negligible interactions between them to dissipate pressure isotropically.)

Similarly, a butterfly flapping its wing has zero propability of triggering off a hurricane because of the stability of the atmosphere to small scale fluctuations. Hurricanes are triggered by the large scale deflection due to the Coriolis effect (Earth’s rotation) of rising warm moist air which has been evaporated from a large area of warm ocean (surface temperature above 27 C). It’s not triggered by small scale irregularities.

Small scale irregularities and random chances can be multiplied up into massive effects, but only if there is instability to begin with. For example, on a level surface a nothing can generate a landslide. But on a steeply sloping surface covered by loose rocks which have been loosened from the surface by weathering, the system may become increasing unstable until the rocks over a wide area of the sloping surface may need only a minor trigger to set off an avalanche.

The same effect occurs when too much snow lands on steep mountain slopes. Another example of an unstable situation is trying to balance a pyramid on its apex. If it is balanced like that temporarily, it is highly unstable and the slightest impulse (even from a butterfly landing on it) would trigger off a much bigger event.

You can see why the physics in this comment - which is obvious - is officially ignored by mainstream physicists. They’re not completely stupid, but they believe in selling hoaxes and falsehoods which sound romantic to them and the gullible, naive fools who buy those claims. At the end of the day, modern physics is in a dilemma.

It is immoral to knowingly sell modern physics packaged in the usual extra-dimensional, stringy magic multiverse, in which anything is possible to some degree of probability.

The sociology of group-think in physics:

‘(1). The idea is nonsense.

(2). Somebody thought of it before you did.

(3). We believed it all the time.’

- Professor R.A. Lyttleton’s summary of inexcusable censorship (quoted by Sir Fred Hoyle in his autobiography, Home is Where the Wind Blows, Oxford University Press, 1997, p154).

‘… the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly…’

- Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter VI:


Concerning New Principalities Which Are Acquired By One’s Own Arms And Ability, http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince06.htm

Comment by nc — June 2, 2007 @ 7:02 pm

8. Just found an interesting brief independent comment about gravity mechanism (I’ve omitted the sections which are either 100% wrong or trivial, and have interpolated one amplification in square brackets). Notice, however, that critical comments which follow below it on the physicsmathforums page link by ‘Epsilon=One’ are largely rubbish (example of rubbish: ‘Gravity travels at many, many times the SOL; otherwise the Cosmos would have the motions of the balls on a pool table. Gravity’s universal "entanglement" requires speeds that are near infinite’):

http://physicsmathforums.com/showthread.php?p=8084#post8084

09-22-2006, 05:47 PM
Member bpj1138
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: USA
Posts: 35

The Shielding Theory

… La Sage … proposed that gravity was caused by shielding of universal flux surrounding bodies in close proximity. …

The first principle of the theory is really that no force can be a made to pull objects, it must always be a push force, so gravity is actually caused by pushing of the surround space, rather than a planet emitting "pulling particles" that eminate outwards from the planet.

The space that pushes objects towards each other is the complete surrounding space around a locality (where the two objects are in proximity), so it is a very large sphere with its radius reaching to the light wall (where objects are traveling at the speed of light relative to the center of this sphere therefore are red shifted out of view, and influence on the center). …

The push concept also helps to explain why there is no [spin-2, attractive] graviton. It is actually the lack of light, or shadow that causes the effect. Moreover, it explains why gravity travels at the speed of light.

Another thing that the theory seems to expalin is why there is a universal expansion. At some point, roughly on a galactic scale, there is not enough shielding to cause attraction, rather the flux becomes just a force of expansion.

What’s also remarkable is that even though the theory is based on the geometry of shielding of background flux, the equations (though not based on squares) still yield a function that is almost exactly in the form of the inverse squared distance, as described by Newton.

… if you think about it, it is often hard to change something from the inside, such as with politics. It’s also an advantage not to have any preconceived ideas. …

… I don’t think anybody has expressed the idea quite as bluntly as I did, and I say this because again, other people are aware of this idea. I only hope my writing suits the purpose.

Regards,
Bart Jaszcz
http://www.geocities.com/bpj1138

Comment by nc — June 2, 2007 @ 7:50 pm

9. copy of a comment:

http://kea-monad.blogspot.com/2007/06/light-speed-ii.html

"… the strange spiral nebulae were in fact distant galaxies, not unlike our own. The same seminar concluded, on the observation that accelerated publication rates had not produced as many major breakthroughs in the last two decades, that technology had finally caught up with observations over the electromagnetic spectrum and that we may well have seen most of what there is to see. Naturally there was some dissent. To believe that in a mere 80 years humanity can go from a relatively trivial understanding of the cosmos to complete comprehension is hubris. …"

When I did a cosmology course in 1996, one thing that worried me was that the galaxies are back in time. If I were Hubble in 1929, I wouldn’t have just written recession velocity/distance = constant with units of [time]^-1. Because of spacetime, I’d have considered velocity/time past = constant with units of [acceleration].

This is the major issue. I think it is a fact that the matter is accelerating outward, simply by Hubble’s law

v = dx/dt = Hx (Hubble’s law)

Hence, dt = dx/v

Now, acceleration

a = dv/dt = dv/(dx/v)

= v*dv/dx

= (Hx)*d(Hx)/dx

= (H^2)x

Because the universe isn’t decelerating due to gravity, H = 1/t where t is the age of the universe [if the universe were decelerating like a critical density universe, then the relationship would be H = (2/3)/t].

Hence, a = (H^2)x

= x/t^2

= c/t

= c/(x/c)

= (c^2)/x

So there’s cosmic acceleration.

Lee Smolin on page 209 of his book The Trouble with Physics:

"The next simplest thing [by guesswork dimensional analysis] is (c^2)/R [where R is radius of universe]. This turns out to be an acceleration. It is in fact the acceleration by which the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing - that is, the acceleration produced by the cosmological constant."

You can see my problem. The empirically verified Hubble law acceleration happens to be similar to the metaphysical dark energy acceleration. Result: endless confusion about the acceleration of the universe.

It would be useless to try to discuss it with Smolin or anyone else who believes that the two things are the same thing. The real acceleration of the universe is just an expression of Hubble’s law in terms of velocity/time past.

The assumed dark energy is completely different, not a real acceleration but a fictional outward acceleration which is supposed to cancel out the (also fictional!) inward acceleration due to gravity over great distances.

In fact the vital inward acceleration due to gravity which was supposed (by the mainstream) to be slowing down distant supernovas until this effect was disproved in 1998 by Perlmutter’s group, isn’t real because the enormous redshift of light from such great distances doesn’t just apply to visible light but also to the gauge bosons of gravity. For this reason, the gravity coupling constant is weakened because the exchanged energy arrives in a very severely redshifted (very low energy) condition.

So the cosmological constant (outward acceleration fiddled to be just enough to cancel out inward gravity for Perlmutter’s supernovae, so that the observations fit the lambda-CDM model) is actually spurious.

There is really no long-range gravity over distances where redshift of light is extreme, because the masses are receding and gravitons are redshifted. Hence, there is no cosmological constant, because the role of the cosmological constant is to cancel out gravitational acceleration, not to accelerate the universe.

In virtually all the popular accounts of dark energy, popularisers lie and say that the role of dark energy is to accelerate the universe.

Actually, it’s not real, and even if the dark energy theory were correct, it is a fictional acceleration made up to cancel out gravity’s effect, just like the way the Coulomb force between your bum and your chair stop you from accelerating downward at 9.8ms^{-2}.

You don’t hear people describe the normal reaction force of a chair as an upward acceleration.

So why do people refer to dark energy as the cause of cosmic acceleration? It’s really pathetic. There is an acceleration as big as the fictional dark energy acceleration, but it isn’t due to a cosmological constant or dark energy. It’s just the normal expansion of the universe, due to vector bosons. There’s too much disinformation and confusion out there for anybody to listen. My case is that you take the real acceleration, use Newton’s second law and calculate outward force F=ma, and then the 3rd law to give the inward reaction force carried by vector bosons, and you get gravity after simple calculations.

Comment by nc — June 2, 2007 @ 11:56 pm

10. Mechanisms for the lack of gravitational deceleration at large redshifts (i.e., between gravitational charges - masses - which are relativistically receding from one another)

1. Direct link to illustration mentioned in previous comment:

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1931/1487/1600/mechanism.0.jpg

Comment by nc — June 3, 2007 @ 7:57 am

2. Experimental evidence that quarks are confined leptons with some minor symmetry transformations

1. In this blog post it as shown that if in principle you could somehow have enough energy - working against the Pauli exclusion principle and Coulomb repulsion - to press three electrons together in a small space, their polarized vacuum veils would overlap, and all three electrons would share the same polarized dielectric field.

Instead of the core electric charge of each electron being shielded by a factor of 137.036, the core electric charge of each electron would be shielded by the factor 3 x 137.036, so the electric charge per electron in the closely confined triad, when seen from a long distance, would be -1/3, the downquark charge.

This argument doesn’t apply to the case of 3 closely confined positrons: the upquark charge is +2/3, not +1/3. However, Peter Woit explains very simply the complex chiral relationship between weak and electric charges in the book "Not Even Wrong": positive and negative charges are not the same because of the handedness effects which determine the weak force hypercharge.

According to electroweak unification theory, there are two symmetry properties of the electroweak unification: weak force isospin and weak force hypercharge. The massive weak force gauge bosons couple to weak isospin, while the electromagnetic force gauge boson assumed by SU(2)xU(1) couples to weak hypercharge.

There is a relationship between electric charge Q, weak isospin charge Tz and weak hypercharge Yw:

Q = Tz + Yw/2. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_hypercharge

"Type "u" fermions (quarks u, c, t and neutrinos) have Tz = +1/2, while type "d" fermions (quarks d, s, b and charged leptons) have Tz = −1/2." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_isospin

"Yw = −1 for left-handed leptons (+1 for antileptons)

"Yw = +1/3 for left-handed quarks (−1/3 for antiquarks)" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_hypercharge

So the factor of 2 discrepancy in the vacuum polarization logic can be addressed by considering the weak force charges.

2. When a massive amount of energy is involved in particle collisions (interactions within a second of the big bang, for example), the leptons can be collided hard enough against Coulomb repulsion and Pauli exclusion principle force, that they approach closely.

The Pauli exclusion principle isn’t violated; what happens is that the tremendous energy just changes the quantum numbers of the weak and strong force charges (leptons well isolated have zero strong force colour charge!), so that the quantum numbers of 2 or 3 confined leptons are extended to permit them to not violate the exclusion principle.

This change modifies the electric charge because, as stated above, Q = Tz + Yw/2.

3. Direct experimental evidence for the fact that leptons and quarks are different forms of the same underlying entity exists: universality. This was discovered when it was found that the weak force controlled beta decay event

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicola_Cabibbo

1. To clarify the previous comment further: the minor symmetry transformations which occur when you confine leptons in pairs or triads to form "quarks" are physically caused by the increased strength of the polarized vacuum, and by the ability of the pairs of short-ranged virtual particles in the field to move between the nearby individual leptons, mediating new short-ranged forces which would not occur if the leptons were isolated. The emergence of these new short ranged forces, which appear only when particles are in close proximity, is the cause of the new nuclear charges, and these charges add extra quantum numbers, explaining why the Pauli exclusion principle isn’t violated. (The Pauli exclusion simply says that in a confined system, each particle has a unique set of quantum numbers.)

Comment by nc — June 3, 2007 @ 10:31 am

2. On the causality of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in its energy-time form: the momentum-distance form of the uncertainty principle is equivalent to the momentum-distance form as shown in the post, and Popper showed that the latter is causal. The mechanism for pair production by Heisenberg’s uncertainity principle with Popper’s scattering mechanism is that, at high energy (above the Schwinger threshold for pair production, i.e., electric field strengths exceeding 10^18 v/m), the flux of electromagnetic gauge bosons is sufficient to knock pairs of Dirac sea fermions out of the ground state of the vacuum temporarily. This is a bit like the photoelectric effect: photons hitting bound (Dirac sea of vacuum) particles hard enough can temporarily free them for a short period of time, when they become visible as "virtual fermions". Obviously the ground state of the Dirac sea is invisible to detection, since it doesn’t polarize. Maxwell’s error in assuming that it does polarize, without knowing Schwinger’s threshold for pair production, totally contradicts QED results on renormalization (Maxwell’s electrons would have zero electric charge seen from a long distance, because the polarization of the vacuum would be able to extend far enough - without Schwinger’s limit which corresponds to the IR cutoff - that the real electric charge of the electron would be completely cancelled out!), and so Maxwell’s displacement current is false in fields below 10^18 v/m. What happens instead of displacement current in weak electric fields is radiation exchange, which produces results that have been misinterpreted to be displacement current, as proved at: http://electrogravity.blogspot.com/2006/04/maxwells-displacement-and-einsteins.html

Comment by nc — June 3, 2007 @ 11:09 am

3. Evidence for redshift implying expansion

Alternative redshift ideas like tired light theories can’t work as proved here:

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/tiredlit.htm

Recession-caused redshift does work; it is empirically confirmed by redshifts from stars in different parts of rotating galaxies, etc.

There is no evidence for tired light whatsoever. The full spectrum of redshifted light is uniformly displaced to lower frequencies, which rules out most fanciful ideas (scattering of light is frequency dependent, so redshift as observed isn’t due to intergalactic dust).

Comment by nc — June 3, 2007 @ 12:08 pm

4. copy of a comment:

http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/05/varying-speed-of-light-vsl-theories.html

c = 186 miles/second or 300 megametres/second in a vacuum, less in a medium filled with strong electromagnetic fields which slow the photon down (eg light travelling inside a block of glass).

The vacuum has some electric permittivity and magnetic permeability because it has a Dirac sea in it. The Dirac sea only produces observable pairs of charges above Schwinger’s threshold field strength of 10^18 v/m, which occurs at 1 fm from the middle of an electron (you can estimate that by simply setting Coulomb’s law equal to F = qE where E is electric field strength in v/m and q is charge).

This creates a problem for Maxwell’s theory of light, because his displacement current of vacuum gear cogs and idler wheel dynamics isn’t approximated by the real vacuum unless the electric field is above 10^18 v/m. So Maxwell doesn’t explain how radio waves propagate where the field strength is just a few v/m. The actual mechanism weak electric fields mimics the Maxwell displacement current mathematically, but is entirely different in physical processes: http://electrogravity.blogspot.com/2006/04/maxwells-displacement-and-einsteins.html

If the spacetime fabric or Dirac sea was really expanding, you might expect the permittivity and permeability of the vacuum to alter over time, like the velocity of light in a block of glass increasing as the density of the glass decreases due to the glass expanding.

However, what is expanding is the matter of the universe, which is receding. There is no evidence that the spacetime fabric is expanding:

‘Popular accounts, and even astronomers, talk about expanding space. But how is it possible for space … to expand? … ‘Good question,’ says [Steven] Weinberg. ‘The answer is: space does not expand. Cosmologists sometimes talk about expanding space – but they should know better.’ [Martin] Rees agrees wholeheartedly. ‘Expanding space is a very unhelpful concept’.’ – New Scientist, 17 April 1993, pp32-3.

(The volume of spacetime expands, but the fabric of spacetime, the gravitational field, flows around moving particles as the universe expands.)

Think of a load of people running along a corridor in one direction. The air around them doesn’t end up following the people, leaving a vacuum at the end the people come from. Instead, a volume of air equal the volume of the people moves in the opposite direction to the people, filling in the displaced volume. In short, the people end up at the other end of the corridor while the air moves the opposite way and fills in the volume of space the people have vacated.

There is no reason why the gravitational field should not do the same thing. Indeed, to make it possible to use the stress-energy tensor T_{ab} we have to treat the source of the curvature mechanism as being an ideal fluid spacetime fabric:

‘… the source of the gravitational field can be taken to be a perfect fluid…. A fluid is a continuum that "flows" … A perfect fluid is defined as one in which all antislipping forces are zero, and the only force between neighboring fluid elements is pressure.’ - Bernard Schutz, General Relativity, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp89-90.

This works and is a useful concept. Think about a ship in the sea (like a Dirac sea). The ship goes in one direction, and the water travels around it an fills in the void behind it. So water of volume equal to the ship goes in the opposite direction with a speed equal to the ship, and if the ship is accelerating, then the same volume of water has an acceleration equal to the ship’s acceleration but in the opposite direction (this is merely a statement of Newton’s 2nd and 3rd laws of motion: the ship to accelerate needs a forward force, and the water carries the recoil force which is equal and opposite to the forward force, like a rocket’s exhaust gas).

Evidence that the spacetime fabric does push inward as matter recedes outward is easy to obtain. The Hubble recession

v = HR

implies outward acceleration

a = dv/dt

where dt = dR/v (because v = dR/dt)

a = dv/(dR/v) = v*dv/dR

Putting in v = HR gives

a = (H^2)R

That’s the outward acceleration of the mass of the receding universe. By Newton’s 2nd law

F = ma

where m is mass of universe. That gives outward force.

By Newton’s 3rd law, there is an equal inward force, which is the graviton force and predicts the strength of gravity, http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/05/25/quantum-gravity-mechanism-and-predictions/

This is evidence that the spacetime fabric isn’t expanding, so light velocity probably is constant.

Comment by nc — June 3, 2007 @ 12:57 pm

5. On the CERN document server closure to updates to papers and to new submissions (except via arxiv) see:

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=154#comment-2339

Tony Smith Says:

March 6th, 2005 at 7:22 pm

Roger Penrose’s book The Road to Reality comes in two editions:


UK edition (ISBN: 0224044478, Publisher: Jonathan Cape, July 29, 2004)


And


USA edition (ISBN: 0679454438, Publisher: Knopf, February 22, 2005).

The two editions are NOT identical.

For example:

The UK edition on page 1050 says in part:

"… Bibliography


There is one major breakthrough in 20th century physics thatI have yet to touch upon, but which is nevertheless among the most important of all! This is the introduction of arXiv.org, an online repository where physicists … can publish preprints (or ‘e-prints’) of their work before (or even instead of!) submitting it to journals. …as a consequence the pace of research activity has accelerated to unheard of heights. … In fact, Paul Ginsparg, who developed arXiv.org, recently won a MacArthur ‘genius’ fellowship for his innovation. …"


But


the USA edition on its corresponding page (also page 1050) says in part:


"… Bibliography


… modern technology and innovation have vastly improved the capabilities for disseminating and retrieving information on a global scale. Specifically, there is the introduction of arXiv.org, an online repository where physicists … can publish preprints (or ‘e-prints’) of their work before (or even instead of!) submitting it to journals. …as a consequence the pace of research activity has accelerated to an unprecedented (or, as some might consider, an alarming) degree. …".


However,


the USA edition omits the laudatory reference to Paul Ginsparg that is found in the UK edition.

For another example:


The USA edition adds some additional references, including (at page 1077):


"… Pitkanen, M. (1994). p-Adic description of Higgs mechanism I: p-Adic square root and p-adic light cone. [hep-th/9410058] …".


Note that Matti Pitkanen was in 1994 allowed to post papers on the e-print archives now known as arXiv(obviously including the paper


referenced immediately above), but that since that time Matti Pitkanen has been blacklisted by arXiv and is now barred from posting his work there. His web page account of being blacklisted is at

http://www.physics.helsinki.fi/~matpitka/blacklist.html

It seems to me that it is likely that the omission of praise of arXiv’s Paul Ginsparg and the inclusion of a reference to the work of now-blacklisted physicist Matti Pitkanen are deliberate editorial decisions.

Also, since the same phrase "… physicists … can publish preprints (or ‘e-prints’) of their work before (or even instead of!) submitting it to journals. …" appears in both editions, it seems to me that Roger Penrose favors the option of posting on arXiv without the delay (and sometimes page-charge expense) of journal publication with its refereeing system.

Therefore, a question presented by these facts seems to me to be:

What events between UK publication on July 29, 2004 and USA publication on February 22, 2005 might have influenced Roger Penrose to make the above-described changes in the USA edition ?

There are two possibly relevant events in that time frame of which I am aware:

1 - The appearance around November 2004 of the ArchiveFreedom web site at http://www.physics.helsinki.fi/~matpitka/blacklist.html which web site documents some cases of arXiv blacklisting etc;

2 - According to a CERN web page at

http://documents.cern.ch/EDS/current/access/action.php?doctypes=NCP "… CERN’s Scientific Information Policy Board decided, at its meeting on the 8th October 2004, to close the EXT-series. …". Note that the CERN EXT-series had been used as a public repository for their work by some people (including me) who had been blacklisted by arXiv .

Maybe either or both of those two events influenced Roger Penrose in making the above-described changes in the USA edition.


If anyone has any other ideas as to why those changes were made, I would welcome being informed about them.

Tony Smith http://valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/

Comment by nc — June 4, 2007 @ 9:29 am

6. Browsing Tony Smith’s internet site, I just came across

http://valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/Sets2Quarks10.html#sub3 which contains a nice illustration of the spin-2 graviton from Feynman, plus a concise quotation (in an illustration extract of a scanned page):

"the graviton has an energy content equal to (h-bar)*(angular velocity omega), and therefore it is itself a source of gravitons. We speak of this as the nonlinearity of the gravitational field."

However, as proved at the page http://electrogravity.blogspot.com/2006/04/maxwells-displacement-and-einsteins.html , what is normally attributed to vacuum "displacement current" caused by polarization of vacuum charges in a photon is really due to not vacuum charge polarization, but radiation effects:

i.e., a photon itself is - in a sense - a source of photons (which travel in the transverse direction, at right angles to the direction of propagation, and produce the effects normally attributed to Maxwell’s displacement current; the only limitation being that the photon absorbs all the photons it emits as proved for the example of the two conductor transmission line with a vacuum dielectric.

However, at high energy - above the Schwinger threshold field strength for pair production in the vacuum by an electromagnetic field - Maxwell’s model is physically justified because the pairs of free charges above that ~10^18 volts/metre field strength threshold (closer than ~1 fm to the middle of an electron) really do polarize and in order to polarize they drift along the electric field lines, causing a "displacement current" in the vacuum. Maxwell’s theory is only false (or incomplete) for the mechanism of a light wave (or other phenomena requiring "displacement current" to propagate) in which the electric field strength is below ~10^18 volts/metre.

At weaker field strengths, bosonic radiation has the same effect as that due to fermion displacement currents above the IR cutoff.

Another thing to watch out for is the spin. Spin 1 means is regular spin, like a spinning loop made a strip of paper with the ends stuck together, which has no twist: a 360 degrees turn brings it back to the starting point.

Now imagine making a mark on one side of a Mobius strip and rotating it while looking only at one side of the strip while rotating. Because the Mobius strip (a looped piece of paper with a half twist in it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip ) has only one surface (not two surfaces - you can prove this by drawing a pen line along the surface of the strip, which will go right the way around ALL surfaces, with a length exactly twice the circumference of the loop!), it follows that you need to rotate it not just 360 degrees but 720 degrees to get back to any given mark on the surface.

Hence, for a 360 degree rotation, the Mobius strip will only complete 360/720 = half a rotation. This is similar to the electron, which has a half-integer spin.

The stringy graviton, assumed by the mainstream to be a spin-2 particle, is the opposite of the Mobius strip: it has twice the normal rotational symmetry instead of just half of it.

This is supposed to make the exchange of such particles result in an attractive force. One well-known (unlike the unobserved spin-2 graviton) example of such a known attractive force is the strong force, mediated between protons and neutrons in the nucleus by vector bosons or gauge bosons called pions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pion

The story of the strong force is this. Japanese physicists first came up with the nuclear atom in 1903, but it was dismissed because the protons would all be confined together in the nucleus with nothing to stop it blowing itself to pieces under the tremendous Coulomb repulsion of electromagnetism.

Then Geiger and Marsden discovered, from the quantitatively large amount of "backscatter" (180 degree scattering angle) of positively alpha particles hitting gold, that gold atoms must contain clusters of very intense positive electric charge which can reflect (backscatter) the amount of alpha radiation which was measure to be reflected back towards the source.

 

Rutherford made some calculations, showing that the results support a nuclear atom with a nucleus containing all the positive charges (the positive charge being equal to all the negative charge, in a neutral atom).

People then had the problem of explaining why the nucleus didn’t explode due to the repulsion between positively charged protons all packed together. It was obvious that there was some unknown factor at work. Either the Coulomb law didn’t hold on very small scales like the nuclear size, or else it did work but there was another force, an attractive force, capable of cancelling out the Coulomb repulsion and preventing the nucleus from decaying in a blast of radiation. The latter theory was shown to be true (obviously, some atoms - radioactive ones and particularly fissile ones like uranium-235 and plutonium-239 - are not entirely stabilized by the attractive force, and randomly decay, or can be caused to break up by being hit).

In 1932, Chadwick discovered the neutron, but because it is neutral, it didn’t help much with explaining why the nucleus didn’t explode due to Coulomb repulsion between protons.

Finally in 1935, the Japanese physicist Yukawa came up with the strong nuclear force theory in his paper "On the Interaction of Elementary Particles, I," (Proc. Phys.-Math. Soc. Japan, v17, p48), in which force is produced by the exchange of "field particles". From the uncertainty principle and the known experimentally determined nuclear size (i.e., the radius of the cross-sectional area for the nucleus to shield nuclear radiations which penetrate the electron clouds of the atom without difficulty), Yukawa calculated that the field particle would have a mass 200 times the electron’s mass.

In 1936 the muon (a lepton) was discovered with the right mass and was hyped as being the Yukawa field particle, but of course it was not the right particle and this was eventually revealed by an analysis of muon reaction rates in 1947 by Fermi, Teller, and Weisskopf: the muon mediated reactions are too slow to mediate strong nuclear forces.

In 1948 the correct Yukawa field particle, the pion, was finally discovered, with a mass of 270 electron masses.

If we take the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in its energy-time form, E*t = h-bar.

Putting in the mass-energy of the pion (140 MeV), we get a time of t = (h-bar)/E = 5*10^{-24} second.

The maximum possible range for the pion is therefore c*t = 1.5*10^{-15} metre = 1.5 fm.

This is the size of the nucleus (for constant density the nuclear radius only increases slowly with mass number - in proportion to the cube-root of mass number to be exact - so a plutonium atom is only about 6 times the radius of a hydrogen atom; obviously the fact that the range of the strong nuclear attractive force does not scale up in proportion to the cube-root of mass number tends to make it less effective at holding the bigger atoms together, so 100% of the very atoms are of course unstable, and decaying), and it is also the range of the IR cutoff, and of the related Schwinger limit for pair-production in the vacuum (a field strength of ~10^18 v/m occurs at about this distance from a unit charge).

Pions, causing the attractive strong force, have zero spin:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pion#Basic_properties

It’s so obvious that you don’t need spin-2 gravitons to cause gravity, the whole thing is a joke. Looking at another of Tony Smith’s interesting pages:

http://valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/goodnewsbadnews.html#badnews

He makes the point that even people like Feynman had terrible problems getting anyone to listen to a too-new idea, and he quotes Feynman’s reactions to dismissive ridicule from Teller, Dirac and Bohr at the 1948 Pocono conference:

"… My way of looking at things was completely new, and I could not deduce it from other known mathematical schemes, but I knew what I had done was right.

… For instance,

take the exclusion principle … it turns out that you don’t have to pay much attention to that in the intermediate states in the perturbation theory. I had discovered from empirical rules that if you don’t pay attention to it, you get the right answers anyway …. Teller said: "… It is fundamentally wrong that you don’t have to take the exclusion principle into account." …

… Dirac asked "Is it unitary?" … Dirac had proved … that in quantum mechanics, since you progress only forward in time, you have to have a unitary operator. But there is no unitary way of dealing with a single electron. Dirac could not think of going forwards and backwards … in time …

… Bohr … said: "… one could not talk about the trajectory of an electron in the atom, because it was something not observable." … Bohr thought that I didn’t know the uncertainty principle …

… it didn’t make me angry, it just made me realize that … [ they ] … didn’t know what I was talking about, and it was hopeless to try to explain it further.

I gave up, I simply gave up …".

What happened was that Dyson wrote a paper showing that Feynman’s approach is equivalent to Schwinger’s and Tomonaga’s [unfortunately, Dyson ignored someone whose work had preceded all of them, namely E.C.G. Stueckelberg, Annalen der Physik, vol. 21 (1934), whose paper was even harder for contemporaries to grasp than Feynman’s; people like Pauli spend great efforts trying to grasp Stueckelberg in the 1930s and gave up, which to me shows a danger in being too abstract, mathematically speaking, although some like Chris Oakley - http://www.cgoakley.demon.co.uk/qft/ and to some degree also Peter Woit, Danny Lunsford, and others who may also have too much respect for the mathematical rigor over the physical processes being modelled mathematically - view pictorial mechanisms, and possibly solid predictions as well, as being kid’s stuff and seem to think that the more mathematically abstract, and less readily understandable, your work is to your contemporaries, the better].

Next, Dyson was ridiculed, see him talking about it at http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-77014189453344068&q=Freeman+Dyson+Feynman

"… the first seminar was a complete disaster because I tried to talk about what Feynman had been doing, and Oppenheimer interrupted every sentence and told me how it ought to have been said, and how if I understood the thing right it wouldn’t have sounded like that. He always knew everything better, and was a terribly bad organiser of seminars.

"I mean he would - he had to have the centre state for himself and couldn’t shut up [like string theorists today!], and we couldn’t tell him to shut up. So in fact, there was very little communication at all.

"Well, I felt terrible and I remember going out after this seminar and going to Cecile for consolation, and Cecile was wonderful …

"I always felt Oppenheimer was a bigoted old fool. … And then a week later I had the second seminar and it went a little bit better, but it still was pretty bad, and so I still didn’t get much of a hearing. And at that point Hans Bethe somehow heard about this and he talked with Oppenheimer on the telephone, I think. …

"I think that he had telephoned Oppy and said ‘You really ought to listen to Dyson, you know, he has something to say and you should listen. And so then Bethe himself came down to the next seminar which I was giving and Oppenheimer continued to interrupt but Bethe then came to my help and, actually, he was able to tell Oppenheimer to shut up, I mean, which only he could do. …

"So the third seminar he started to listen and then, I actually gave five altogether, and so the fourth and fifth were fine, and by that time he really got interested. He began to understand that there was something worth listening to. And then, at some point - I don’t remember exactly at which point - he put a little note in my mail box saying, ‘nolo contendere’."

Comment by nc — June 4, 2007 @ 11:28 am

7. Another nice quotation of Tony Smith’s page


http://valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/goodnewsbadnews.html#badnews


According to Freeman Dyson, in his 1981 essay Unfashionable Pursuits (reprinted in From Eros to Gaia (Penguin 1992, at page 171)), "… At any particular moment in the history of science, the most important and fruitful ideas are often lying dormant merely because they are unfashionable. Especially in mathematical physics, there is commonly a lag of fifty or a hundred years between the conception of a new idea and its emergence into the mainstream of scientific thought. If this is the time scale of fundamental advance, it follows that anybody doing fundamental work in mathematical physics is almost certain to be unfashionable. …"

Comment by nc — June 4, 2007 @ 11:31 am

8. One more quotation from Tony Smith about censorship by mainstream world-leading (dictatorial?) physicist Oppenheimer [simply imagine some mainstream M-theory leader in the role of Oppenheimer]:

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=189#comment-3222

What about David Bohm’s expulsion from Princeton?

According to the Bohm biography Infinite Potential, by F. David Peat (Addison-Wesley 1997) at pages 101, 104, and 133:

"… when his [Bohm’s] … Princeton University … teaching … contract came up for renewal, in June [1951], it was terminated. … Renewal of his contract should have been a foregone conclusion … Clearly the university’s decison was made on political and not on academic grounds … Einstein was … interested in having Bohm work as his assistant at the Institute for Advanced Study … Oppenheimer, however, overruled Einstein on the grounds that Bohm’s appointment would embarrass him [Oppenheimer] as director of the institute. … Max Dresden … read Bohm’s papers. He had assumed that there was an error in its arguments, but errors proved difficult to detect. … Dresden visited Oppenheimer … Oppenheimer replied … "We consider it juvenile deviationism …" … no one had actually read the paper … "We don’t waste our time." … Oppenheimer proposed that Dresden present Bohm’s work in a seminar to the Princeton Institute, which Dresden did. … Reactions … were based less on scientific grounds than on accusations that Bohm was a fellow traveler, a Trotskyite, and a traitor. … the overall reaction was that the scientific community should "pay no attention to Bohm’s work." … Oppenheimer went so far as to suggest that "if we cannot disprove Bohm, then we must agree to ignore him." …".

Tony Smith


http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/

Comment by nc — June 4, 2007 @ 11:41 am

9. The Schwinger correction for the magnetic moment of leptons (i.e., the first Feynman diagram coupling correction term)

In the text of this blog post I wrote:

‘There is a similarity in the physics between these vacuum corrections and the Schwinger correction to Dirac’s 1 Bohr magneton magnetic moment for the electron: corrected magnetic moment of electron = 1 + {alpha}/(2*{Pi}) = 1.00116 Bohr magnetons. Notice that this correction is due to the electron interacting with the vacuum field, similar to what we are dealing with here.’

In comment 19 above, I wrote:

‘Now imagine making a mark on one side of a Mobius strip and rotating it while looking only at one side of the strip while rotating. Because the Mobius strip (a looped piece of paper with a half twist in it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip ) has only one surface (not two surfaces - you can prove this by drawing a pen line along the surface of the strip, which will go right the way around ALL surfaces, with a length exactly twice the circumference of the loop!), it follows that you need to rotate it not just 360 degrees but 720 degrees to get back to any given mark on the surface.

‘Hence, for a 360 degree rotation, the Mobius strip will only complete 360/720 = half a rotation. This is similar to the electron, which has a half-integer spin.’

What I should have mentioned in the post is the mechanism for why the first (i.e., the Schwinger) vacuum virtual charge coupling correction term is alpha/(2*{Pi}) added to the electron’s core magnetic moment of 1 Bohr magneton (Dirac’s result).

Schwinger’s result, 1 + {alpha}/(2*{Pi}) = 1.00116 Bohr magnetons, is:

{magnetic moment of bare electron core, neglecting the interaction picture with the surrounding virtual charges in the vacuum}*(1 + {alpha}/(2*{Pi})

because

the virtual particle which is adding to the bare core magnetic moment is shielded from the bare core by the intervening polarized vacuum, which causes the alpha (i.e., 1/137.036) dimensioness shielding factor to appear in the correction term.

In addition, there is a spin correction factor which reduces the contribution of the magnetism from the virtual charge by a factor of 2*{Pi}.

Notice that we may need to think of a Mobius strip in a particular way (comment 19, as quote above) to explain causally why the electron is spin-1/2.

The 2*Pi reduction factor is equal to the difference in exposed electron perimeter (if the electron is a loop) when seen side on and when seen along the longitudinal axis of symmetry passing through the middle of the loop.

Hence, if you look at a loop side on, you see a length (and an associated area) which is smaller by a factor of 2*{Pi} than the length and area visible when looking at the loop from above (or from below): the circumference is 2*{Pi} times the diameter.

There was a trick suggested during President Reagan’s 1980s ‘Star Wars’ (SDI project) whereby you can protect a missile partly from laser bursts by giving it a rapid spin. This means that the flux per unit area which will be received on the side of the missile from a laser (or whatever) is reduced by a factor of 2*{Pi} if the missile is spinning about its long axis, compared to the non-spinning scenario.

So there you have candidate explanations for why the first virtual particle correction to the magnetic moment of a lepton doesn’t give a total of 1 + 1 = 2 Bohr magnetons, but merely 1 + 1/(137.036*2*Pi) = 1.00116 Bohr magnetons.

Obviously, it’s a sketchy explanation. However, it becomes clearer when you look at what a black hole/trapped TEM (transverse electromagnetic) wave looks like (Electronics World, April 2003 issue): draw a circle to represent the path of propagation of the trapped TEM wave, and draw radial (outward) lines of electric field coming from that line, which are orthagonal to the direction of propagation of the TEM wave at the point they radiate from. Next, draw the magnetic field lines looping around the direction of propagation: the magnetic field lines are orthagonal to both the direction of propagation and to the electric field lines (see the Poynting-Heaviside vector). Whey you discover is that at big distances (distances many times the diameter of the electron loop), the magnetic field lines (which have a toroidal shape close to the electron) do form a magnetic dipole with the poles (radial magnetic field lines) running along the axis of rotation of the electron’s loop.

Those polar magnetic field lines which are parallel to the radial electric field lines (at big distances from the electron) are - unlike the electric field lines - not shielded by the electric polarization of the vacuum. The electric field lines are shielded simply because the electric polarization (displacement of virtual charges) opposes the electric field of the electron core by creating a radial electric field pointing in the opposite direction to that from the core of the electron (conventionally, the electric field vector or arrow points inwards, towards a negative charge, so the radial electric field created by the polarized vacuum points outward, partially cancelling the electron’s charge as seen from great distances). There is no interaction between parallel electric and magnetic field lines (if there were, they wouldn’t be separate fields; the electric and magnetic fields interact according to Maxwell’s two curl equations, which are composed of Faraday’s law and Ampere’s law plus Maxwell’s displacement current term for vacuum effects - both of which have the magnetic field and electric field at right angles for biggest interaction and show that there is never an interaction for parallel magnetic and electric force field vectors).

Hence, the polar magnetic dipole field from the electron is not shielded by the pairs of virtual charges in the vacuum (the other magnetic field lines, which are not parallel but more nearly at right angles to the the radial lines from the middle of the electron, will generally be shielded like electric field lines, of course).

This justifies why there are two important terms (neglecting the higher order corrections for other vacuum interactions, which are trivial in size), 1 + alpha/(2*{Pi}) where 1 is the bare core charge and the second term is the contribution from a vacuum charge aligning with the core.

There is obviously more to be done to illustrate this mechanism clearly with diagrams and to use the resulting simple physical principles to make predictive calculations of other vacuum interactions in far more simplified and quick way than existing mainstream methods.

In the meanwhile, two other aspects of the loop electron. Hermann Weyl points out in The Theory of Groups and Quantum Mechanics, Dover, 2nd ed., 1931, page 217:

"[In the Schroedinger equation] The charge contained in V [volume] is … capable of assuming only the values -e and 0, i.e. according to whether the electron is found in V or not. In order to guarantee the atomicity of electricity, the electric charge must equal -e times the probability density. But if we base our theory on the de Broglie wave equation, modified by introducing the electromagnetic potentials in accordance with the rule [replacing (1/i)d/dx_a by {(1/i)d/dx_Alpha} + {(e/{hc}){Phi_Alpha}], we find as the expression for the charge density one involving the temporal derivative d{Psi}/dt in addition to Psi; this expression has nothing to do with the probability density and is not even an idempotent form. According to Dirac, this is the most conclusive argument for the stand that the differential equations for the motion of an electron in an electromagnetic field must contain only first order derivatives with respect to the time. Since it is not possible to obtain such an equation with a scalar wave function which satisfies at the same time the requirement of relativistic invariance, the spin appears as a phenomenon necessitated by the theory of relativity." (Emphasis as in original.)

The simple way to link relativity to spin was published in the Electronics World Apr. 2003 article: the spin is the flow of the TEM wave energy around the loop (for an half integer spin fermion, the polarization vector changes direction as it goes around the loop, hence making the field twisted, like a Mobius strip):

Let the whole electron (TEM wave loop) propagate at velocity v along its axis of symmetry, i.e., it propagates along the axis of "spin". Let the spin speed of the TEM wave energy going around the loop be x. Since the vectors v and x are perpendicular, their resultant is given by Pythagoras’ theorem:

(v^2) + (x^2) = c^2

We let the resultant be c^2 because of the requirement of empirically confirmed electromagnetism and relativity.

A measure of time is for an electron is the spin speed (just as the measure of time for a thrown watch is how fast the hands spin around the watch face). Time, hence relative spin speed, taking time to pass at rate unity for electron propagation speed v = 0, is

t’/t = x/c = [[(c^2) - (v^2)]^{1/2}]/c

= [1 - (v/c)^2]^{1/2}

which is the usual time-dilation factor in the FitzGerald-Lorentz contraction.

To get the length contraction in the direction of motion, you can argue that the observable(distance)/(time) = c, hence to preserve this ratio any time-dilation factor must be accompanied by an identical length contraction factor. A more physical, explanation is however that the vacuum "drag" (actually not continuous drag, but just resistance to changes in speed, i.e., resistance to acceleration) causes contraction:

In 1949 a crystal-like ground state of the vacuum (i.e., at lower electric field strength that Schwinger’s threshold for pair production of 10^18 v/m), for situations below the IR cutoff energy so that there are no pairs of virtual particles forming a dissipative gas like steam coming off crystalline water - ice - by sublimation, the Dirac sea was shown to explain the length contraction and mass-energy effects. The reference is

C.F. Frank, ‘On the equations of motion of crystal dislocations’, Proceedings of the Physical Society of London, volume A62, pp 131-4:

‘It is shown that when a Burgers screw dislocation [in a crystal] moves with velocity v it suffers a longitudinal contraction by the factor [1 - (v/c)^2]^{1/2}, where c is the velocity of transverse sound. The total energy of the moving dislocation is given by the formula E = E(o)/[1 - (v/c)^2]^{1/2}, where E(o) is the potential energy of the dislocation at rest.’

Comment by nc — June 4, 2007 @ 2:24 pm

10. copy of a comment:


http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=562#comment-25739


nc Says:


June 4th, 2007 at 10:19 am


‘If I accept that these theories (or "schemes") make zero predictions, do they still give me a unified description of the fundamental forces?’

1. Supersymmetry is the theory required to ‘unify’ forces and just does that by getting all the SM forces to have equal charges (coupling constants) near the Planck scale, presumably because that looks prettier on a graph than the SM prediction (which does not show that the 3 interaction coupling constants - for EM, weak, and strong forces - meet at a single point near the Planck scale).


The problem’s here are massive. The experimental evidence available confirms the SM, and the supersymmetric model extrapolated to low energy seems to contradict experimental results. See Woit’s book Not Even Wrong, UK ed., page 177 [using the measured weak SU(2) and electromagnetic U(1) forces, supersymmetry predicts the SU(3) force incorrectly high by 10-15%, when the experimental data is accurate to a standard deviation of about 3%].


In addition, why should the three SM forces unify by having the same strength at the Planck scale? It’s group-think galore with no solid facts behind any of it. Planck never determined the Planck scale from a solid theory, let alone observed it. It just seems to be a way to glorify his constant, h (e.g. the length 2mG/c^2 where m is electron mass is not only much smaller than the Planck length, but it is also more meaningful since i[t] is a black hole radius). Why should they meet at a point anyway?

2. String theory hasn’t succeeded in usefully putting gravity into the standard model. Furthermore, unlike supersymmetry which at least has been found to disagree with experiment (as mentioned), string theory says nothing remotely checkable about gravity. All it does is to allow vacuous claims like:
   ‘String theory has the remarkable property of predicting gravity.’ - Dr Edward Witten, M-theory originator, Physics Today, April 1996.


What he means is presumably that it predicts speculative things called gravitons, or that it might predict something about gravity, some day. Congratulations, in advance! But why can’t these string theorists admit that their ‘theory’ doesn’t even exist, and the claims made for it are just a lot of hype that help censor alternatives?

Comment by nc — June 4, 2007 @ 3:25 pm

11. A bit more about the Weyl-suggested link between particle spin and relativity outlined in comment 22 above: the reason why a particle with spin will generally move in a direction along the axis of spin, so that the direction of spin is orthagonal to the direction of the propagation of the whole particle (relative to the surrounding "gravitational field", i.e., the absolute spacetime of general relativity, the evidence for which was discussed in an earlier comment), is that this makes the spin speed consistent at each point around the loop of the electron. If the angle between the electron’s propagation and the plane in which the electron spins is anything other than 90 degrees, the speed will vary around the circumference of the electron instead of remaining constant, and this will result in a net transmission of energy as oscillating waves (in addition to the usual equilibrium of Yang-Mills force-causing exchange radiation which constitutes the electromagnetic field).

When electrons are deflected in direction, they do indeed emit "synchrotron radiation". This is a well known effect and is well confirmed experimentally! It’s not speculation in any way. It’s a plain fact.

What I need to do now is to investigate Hawking’s radiation as a source for the electromagnetic charged gauged bosons:

"Furthermore, calculations show that Hawking radiation from electron-mass black holes has the right force as exchange radiation of electromagnetism: http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/03/08/hawking-radiation-from-black-hole-electrons-causes-electromagnetic-forces-it-is-the-exchange-radiation/ "

Conventionally, Hawking radiation is supposed to occur when a pair of fermion-antifermion particles appears near a black hole event horizon. One of them (fermion or antifermion) falls into the black hole, while the other escapes and later annihilates with another such particle (this is the key point: there is an implicit assumption in Hawking’s theory which states that, on average, as many virtual positrons as virtual electrons escape, i.e., you get gamma rays given off because you end up with an equal number of escaped particles and escaped anti-particles, so they can all annihilate into uncharged gamma rays). So in Hawking’s theory, all the radiation gets converted into gamma radiation. Simple.

However, the black holes we’re dealing with are not the same as those Hawking’s calculations apply to. We’re dealing with fermions as black holes, which means they carry a net electric charge. This electric charge dramatically alters the selection of which one of the pair (fermion and antifermion, for example: electron and positron), falls into the black hole, and which one escapes.

We’re back to vacuum polarization and displacement current again: the particles which will be swallowed up by the black hole will tend to have an opposite charge to the black hole’s charge.

This means that a fermion black hole does not tend to produce uncharged gamma rays: the particles it allows to escape all have like sign and can’t annihilate into gamma rays.

So it is fully consistent with the mechanism in this blog post: Hawking radiation doesn’t produce gravity, it produces the charged exchange radiation we need for electromagnetism.

Notice that, as calculated at http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/03/08/hawking-radiation-from-black-hole-electrons-causes-electromagnetic-forces-it-is-the-exchange-radiation/ , the electron as black hole - because of its small mass - has an extremely high Hawking radiating temperature, 1.35*10^53 Kelvin.

Any black-body at that temperature radiates 1.3*10^205 watts/m^2 (via the Stefan-Boltzmann radiation law). We calculate the spherical radiating surface area 4*Pi*r^2 for the black hole event horizon radius r = 2Gm/c^2 where m is electron mass, hence an electron has a total Hawking radiation power of

3*10^92 watts

But that’s Yang-Mills electromagnetic force exchange (vector boson) radiation. Electron’s don’t evaporate, they are in equilibrium with the reception of radiation from other radiating charges.

So the electron core both receives and emits 3*10^92 watts of electromagnetic gauge bosons, simultaneously.

The momentum of absorbed radiation is p = E/c, but in this case the exchange means that we are dealing with reflected radiation (the equilibrium of emission and reception of gauge bosons is best modelled as a reflection), where p = 2E/c.

The force of this radiation is the rate of change of the momentum, F = dp/dt ~ (2E/c)/t = 2P/c, where P is power.

Using P = 3*10^92 watts as just calculated,

F = 2P/c = 2(3*10^92 watts)/c = 2*10^84 N.

For gravity, the model in this blog post gives an inward and an outward gauge boson calculation F = 7*10^43 N.

So the force of Hawking radiation for the black hole is higher than my estimate of gravity by a factor of [2*10^84] / [7*10^43] = 3*10^40.

This figure of approximately 10^40 is indeed the ratio between the force coupling constant for electromagnetism and the force coupling constant for gravity.

So the Hawking radiation force seems to indeed be the electromagnetic force!

Electromagnetism between fundamental particles is about 10^40 times stronger than gravity.

The exact figure of the ratio depends on whether the comparison is for electrons only, electron and proton, or two protons (the Coulomb force is identical in each case, but the ration varies because of the different masses affecting the gravity force).

Comment by nc — June 5, 2007 @ 9:02 am

12. To lucidly clarify the distinction between a "virtual fermion" and a real (long lived) fermion, the best thing to do is to quote the example Glasstone gives in a footnote in his 1967 Sourcebook on Atomic Energy (3rd ed.):

"In the interaction of a nucleon of sufficiently high (over 300 MeV) energy with another nucleon, a virtual pion can become a real (or free) pion, i.e., at a distance greater than about 1.5*10^{-13} cm from the nucleon. Such a free pion can then be detected before it is either captured by a nucleon or decays into a muon. This is the manner by which pions are produced …"

See Figure 5 in the post to explain how two fermion-like exchange radiation components, while passing through one another due to the exchange process between charges, acquire boson-like behaviour. This explains how the Hawking-type fermion radiation constitutes vector bosons. It’s experimentally validated by transmission line logic signals which propagate like bosons if there are two conductors with opposite currents in each, see http://electrogravity.blogspot.com/2006/04/maxwells-displacement-and-einsteins.html

(There are other examples of pairing of fermions to create bosons, such as the Bose-Einstein condensate. Simply get the outer electrons in two atoms to pair up coherently, and the result is like a boson. This is how you get superconductivity, frictionless fluids, and such like in low temperature physics. Vibrations, due to thermal energy, at higher temperatures destroy the coherence.)

Comment by nc — June 5, 2007 @ 11:40 am

13. (To be precise, superconductivity is pairing of conduction electrons into Cooper pairs of electrons. Presumably, as explained in comment 22 above, the reason why the vacuum virtual particles increase the magnetic moments of leptons the amount they do, is due to the fact that on average there is always one virtual lepton pairing with the real lepton core, allowing for a weaking in coherence due the shielding effect by the polarized vacuum, and the geometry.)

Comment by nc — June 5, 2007 @ 12:29 pm

14. Plan for further research:

• http://www.ivorcatt.com/1_3.htm (To avoid confusion in linking to Catt, I have to add the note that although there are important findings by Catt, I disagree with many of Catt’s own slipshod interpretations of the results his own research, and I note that he refuses to engage in discussions with a view to improving the material.)

1. Distinction between virtual and real photons

Referring to Fig. 5 in this post, we see the distinction between real and virtual (gauge boson) "photons". The gauge boson type "photon" has extra polarizations. This is Feynman’s explanation in his book QED, Penguin, 1990, p120:

"Photons, it turns out, come in four different varieties, called polarizations, that are related geometrically to the directions of space and time. Thus there are photons polarized in the [spatial] X, Y, Z, and [time] T directions. (Perhaps you have heard somewhere that light comes in only two states of polarization - for example, a photon going in the Z direction can be polarized at right angles, either in the X or Y direction. Well, you guessed it: in situations where the photon goes a long distance and appears to go at the speed of light, the amplitudes for the Z and T terms exactly cancel out. But for virtual photons going between a proton and an electron in an atom, it is the T component that is the most important.)"

This accords with Figure 5 in this blog post where an electromagnetic force-carrying gauge/vector boson has important time polarization because of the exchange mechanism.

Comment by nc — June 7, 2007 @ 11:24 am

2. copy of a comment directed to a landscape popularizer:

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=564#comment-25893

Your comment is awaiting moderation.


nigel cook Says:
June 7th, 2007 at 7:04 am

If you think it permissible to bring up the McCarthy era as an analogy to criticisms of the cosmic landscape, you may escalate the hostilities because others will draw analogies between string propaganda and the propaganda of certain historical dictatorships, etc.

The following question in my opinion can more appropriately be directed to those who popularize pseudoscience, than to those who combat it:

‘Have you no sense of decency?’ - http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/welch-mccarthy.html

Comment by nc — June 7, 2007 @ 12:08 pm

3. Calculating the magnetic moments of leptons

More about comment 22. The first coupling correction or Feynman diagram (which gives Schwinger’s alpha-squared-over-two-pi addition to Dirac’s 1 Bohr magneton for the magnetic moment of leptons) is for the electron to emit and then absorb a photon.

In order for this physical process to occur, photon is emitted by the real electron and then reflected back (absorbed and re-emitted) by one of the virtual electrons in the surrounding vacuum.

That’s the mechanism.

Comment by nc — June 7, 2007 @ 1:01 pm

4. copy of a comment:

http://riofriospacetime.blogspot.com/2007/06/holes-in-mars-and-beyond.html

This is interesting, but remember that super-tiny black holes are just as exciting!

Uncharged black holes emit gamma radiation because virtual fermion pair production near the event horizon leads one of the pair to fall in and the other to escape and become a real particle.

So if the black hole is uncharged, on average you will get as many fermions as positrons leaking from the event horizon, which will annihilate each other to form gamma rays.

The way to really confirm black holes is to detect this radiation.

However, I’ve got two developments on this.

First, pair production doesn’t occur everywhere in space. It only occurs above minimum electric field strength calculated by Schwinger in 1948, the threshold being about 1.3*10^18 v/m (equation 8.20 in http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0510040 and equation 359 in http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0608140).

So in order for a there to be Hawking radiation, the black hole needs to be accompanied by a strong electric field of more than 1.3*10^18 volts/metre at the event horizon. Hence, black holes much be charged to emit Hawking radiation.

That’s the bad news for Hawking.

The good news is that calculations show that fermions seem to behave like black holes, and since they are electrically charged, they give off Hawking radiation! The particular types of radiations seem to have the right characteristics to explain the Yang-Mills quantum field theory vector bosons (exchange radiation constituting fields) for electromagnetism and gravity.

Comment by nc — June 8, 2007 @ 4:32 pm

5. copy of a comment:

• http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/01/03/danger-phil-anderson/#comment-10901

1. A quick clarification of comment 32 above: fermion particle cores exchange charged vector bosons (giving electromagnetic forces) but the uncharged vector bosons that give rise to gravity are exchanged not between the cores of fermions, but between the mass-giving particles in the polarized vacuum surrounding each fermion out to a radius of about 1 fm.

copy of a follow-up comment:

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2007/06/early-extra-dimensions.html

‘I have sympathized with the idea of having 3 time like dimensions as well, but eventually gave up because I couldn’t make sense out of it. Does a particle move on a trajectory in all 6 dimension, and if so what happens to two particles that have a distances in time but not in space?’

Bee, thanks for giving me the opportunity to explain a bit more. The particle only moves in 3 dimensions (the curvature that corresponds to an effective extra time dimension could have a physical explanation in quantum gravity; curvature is a mathematical convenience not the whole story).

The particle doesn’t ‘move’ in any time dimension except on a graph of a spatial dimension plotted against time. Since there are 3 spatial dimensions, the simplest model is to have 3 corresponding time dimensions.

The assumption that there’s only one time dimension is the same as you would have if everything around you was radially symmetric, like living in the middle of an onion, where only changes as a function of radial distance (one effective dimension) are readily apparent: the Hubble constant, and hence the age of the universe (time)is independent of the direction you are looking in.

If the Hubble constant varied with direction then t = 1/H would vary with direction, and we’d need more than one effective time dimension to describe the universe.

The role of time as due to expansion is proved by the following:

Time requires organized work, e.g., a clock mechanism, or any other regular phenomena.

If the universe was static rather than expanding, then it would reach thermal equilibrium (heat death) so there would be no heat sinks, and no way to do organized work. All energy would be disorganised and useless.

Because it isn’t static but continuously expanding, thermal radiation received is always red-shifted, preventing thermal equilibrium being attained between received and emitted radiation, and thereby ensuring that there is always a heat sink available, so work is possible.

Hence time is dependent upon the expansion of the universe.

You can’t really measure ‘distance’ by using photons because things can move further apart (or together) while the photons are in transit.

All cosmological dimensions should - and usually are - measured as time. That’s why Herman Minkowski said in 1908:

‘The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.’

It’s remarkable that as soon as you start thinking like this, you see that the recession of matter by Hubble’s empirical law v = HR at distance R is velocity v = dR/dt, so dt = dR/v, which can be put straight into the definition of acceleration, a = dv/dt giving us

a = dv/dt

= dv/[dR/v]

= v*dv/dR

= [HR]*d[HR]/dR

= RH^2.

So there really is an outward acceleration of the matter in the universe, which means we are forced to try to apply Newton’s 2nd (F=ma) and 3rd (equal and opposite reaction) laws of motion to this outward acceleration of matter. This process quantitatively predicts gravity as mentioned, and other stuff too. Why is this physics being censored out of arxiv in place of stringy guesswork stuff which isn’t based on empirically confirmed laws but on a belief in unobservables, and doesn’t predict a thing? It’s sad in some ways but really funny in others.

Comment by nc — June 9, 2007 @ 9:28 am

2. I’ve recently revised the page http://quantumfieldtheory.org/proof.htm which contains supplementary information.

1. copy of a follow-up comment

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2007/06/early-extra-dimensions.html

Garrett, Lubos Motl previously dismissed Lunsford’s SO(3,3) unification on the basis that time-like dimensions might form circles and violate causality. However, the time-like dimensions of spacetime are orthagonal just like the three large spatial dimensions.

It’s pretty easy to list failures that people in the past have had, and that simply aren’t applicable.

However, giving a list of objections without backing them up is helpful if you or someone reading is biased. There is evidence that all observed fermion masses can be built up from a simple quantized mass of similar to the Z_0 mass of 91 GeV. Whether you actually find experimentally confirmed evidence based on a physical mechanism convincing is your own choice.

How can the spacetime correspondence explained above, where dt = (1/c)dx, etc., give rise to wave solutions that go faster than c? It doesn’t look as if that is the case here. Perhaps it occurs with incorrect use of extra time dimensions? Thanks.

Comment by nc — June 9, 2007 @ 9:52 pm

 

 

 

EXTRACT FROM:

http://quantumfieldtheory.org/

‘Science n. The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena.’ - www.answers.com

Mainstream frontier fundamental physics, string theory, doesn’t model reality because it doesn’t model anything observed, since 10-dimensional supersymmetry and 11-dimensional supergravity are speculative ‘explanations’ not of observed gravity and particle physics facts, but merely of other unobserved, guesswork speculations - namely, Planck scale unification and spin-2 gravitons. Even the conjectured AdS/CFT correspondence in string theory is empty, since AdS (anti de Sitter space) requires a negative cosmological constant. So you can’t evaluate particle CFT using AdS because it’s not real spacetime.

‘Science is the belief in the ignorance of [the speculative consensus of] experts.’ - R. P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, 1999, p187.





Loop quantum gravity is the idea of applying the path integrals of quantum field theory to quantize gravity by summing over interaction history graphs in a network (such as a Penrose spin network) which represents the quantum mechanical vacuum through which vector bosons such as gravitons are supposed to travel in a standard model-type, Yang-Mills, theory of gravitation. This summing of interaction graphs successfully allows a basic framework for general relativity to be obtained from quantum gravity. The model is not as speculative as string theory, which has been actively promoted in the media since 1985 despite opposition from people like Feynman because it fails to predict anything. Despite endless hype, string theory is now in a state called ‘not even wrong’, which is less objective than the wrong theories of caloric, phlogiston, aether, flat earth, and epicycles, which were theories that tried to model some observed phenomena of heat, combustion, electromagnetism, geography, and astronomy.

String theory fails because it postulates that 6 dimensions are compactified into unobservably small manifolds in particles; these 6 dimensions need about 100 parameters to describe them, and there are 10⁵⁰⁰ or more configurations possible, each describing a different set of particles (different particles within any set arise from the different possible vibration modes or resonances of a given string). This makes it the vaguest, least falsifiable mainstream speculation ever: to make genuine predictions, the state of the extra unobserved 6-dimensions must be known, which means either building a particle accelerator the size of the galaxy and scattering particles to reveal their Planck scale nature, or eliminating the false 10⁵⁰⁰ guesses, which would take billions of years with supercomputers. There is some evidence that the spin-2 graviton assumption and supersymmetry ideas in string theory are false.

For supersymmetry, in the book Not Even Wrong (UK edition), Dr Woit explains on page 177 that - using the measured weak and electromagnetic forces - supersymmetry predicts the strong force incorrectly high by 10-15%, when the experimental data is accurate to a standard deviation of about 3%. Supersymmetry is also a disaster for increasing the number of Standard Model parameters (couping constants, masses, mixing angles, etc.) from 19 in the empirically based Standard Model to at least 125 parameters (mostly unknown!) for supersymmetry.

Supersymmetry in string theory is 10 dimensional and involves a massive supersymmetric boson as a partner for every observed fermion, just in order to make the three Standard Model forces unify at the Planck scale (which is falsely assumed to be the grain size of the vacuum just because it was the smallest size dimensional analysis gave before the electron mass was known; the black hole radius for an electron is far smaller than the Planck size).

At first glance, this 10-dimensional superstring theory for supersymmetry contradicts the 11-dimensional supergravity ideas, but this 10/11 dimensional issue was conveniently explained or excused by Dr Witten in his 1995 M-theory, which shows that you can make the case that 10-dimensional superstrings are a brane (a kind of extra-dimensional equivalent surface) on 11-dimensional supergravity, similarly to how an n - 1 = 2 dimensional area is a surface (or mem-brane) on an n = 3 dimensional object (or bulk). 11-dimensional supergravity arises from the old Kaluza-Klein idea, which was debunked and corrected by Lunsford in a peer-reviewed, published paper - see International Journal of Theoretical Physics, Volume 43, Number 1, January 2004 , pp. 161-177(17) for publication details and here for a downloadable PDF file, which was immediately censored from arXiv which seems to be partly influenced in the relevant sections by a string professor at the University of Texas, Austin.

On the speculative nature of conjectures concerning spin-2 gravitons, Richard P. Feynman points out in The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation, page 30, that gravitons do not have to be spin-2, which has not been observed. There is no experimental justification for that guess, which is discussed in detail here (discussion of alleged reason for spin-2 gravitons) and here (reasons why the spin-2 gravitons guess is just plain wrong, and what goes in its place).

String theory predictions are not analogous to Wolfgang Pauli’s prediction of neutrinos, which was indicated by the solid experimentally-based physical facts of energy conservation and the mean beta particle energy being only about 30% of the total mass-energy lost per typical beta decay event: Pauli made a checkable prediction, Fermi developed the beta decay theory and then invented the nuclear reactor which produced enough decay in the radioactive waste to provide a strong source of neutrinos (actually antineutrinos) which tested the theory because conservation principles had made precise predictions in advance, unlike string theory’s ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ political-type, fiddled, endlessly adjustable, never-falsifiable pseudo-‘predictions’. Contrary to false propaganda from certain incompetent string ‘defenders’, Pauli correctly predicted that neutrinos are experimentally checkable, in a 4 December 1930 letter to experimentalists: ‘... Dear Radioactives, test and judge.’ (See footnote on p12 of this reference.)

Worse, attempts to explain observed particle physics with string theory result in 10⁵⁰⁰ or more different vacuum states, each with its own set of particle physics. 10⁵⁰⁰ solutions is so many it eliminates falsifiability from string theory. This large number of solutions is named the ‘cosmic landscape’ because Professor Susskind claims that each solution exists in a different parallel universe, and when you plot the resulting vacuum ‘cosmological constants’ as a function of two variables, in string theory, you produce a landscape-like three dimensional graph. The reason for the immense ‘cosmic landscape’ is the fact that string theories only ‘work’ (i.e., satisfy the basic criteria for conformal field theory, CFT) in 10 or more dimensions, so the unobserved dimensions have to be ‘compactified’ by a Calabi-Yau manifold, which - conveniently - curls up the extra dimensions in to a small volume, explaining why nobody has ever observed any of them. In superstring theory, two dimensions (one space and one time) form a ‘worldsheet’ and another eight are required for the CFT of supersymmetric particle physics. Sadly, the Calabi-Yau manifold has many parameters (or moduli) describing size and shape of those unobserved conjectured extra dimensions which must have unknown values (since we can’t observe them), so it is the immense number of possible combinations of these unknown parameters which make string theory fail to produce specific results, by producing too many results to ever rigorously evaluate, even given a supercomputer running for the age of the universe. The 10⁵⁰⁰ figure might not be right: the true figure might be infinity. String theory results depend on many things, e.g., how the moduli are ‘stabilized’ by ‘Rube-Goldberg machines’, monstrous constructions added to the theory just to stop string field properties from conflicting with existing physics! It’s presumably hoped by Dr Witten, discoverer of a 10/11-dimensional superstring-supergravity unification called M-theory, that somehow a way will turn up to pick out the correct solution from the landscape and start making checkable predictions.

However, the best idea of how to go about this is to assume that cosmology is correctly modelled by the Lambda-CDM general relativity solution, which attributes the observed lack of gravitational deceleration in the universe to dark energy, represented by a small positive cosmological constant in general relativity field equations. Then you can try to evaluate parts of the landscape of solutions to string theory which have a suitably small positive cosmological constant. Unfortunately, general relativity does not include quantum gravity, and even the mainstream quantum gravity candidate of an attractive force mediated by spin-2 gravitons, implies that gravity should be weakened over vast distances due to redshift of gravitons exchanged between receding masses, which lowers the energy of the gravitons received in interactions and reduces the coupling constant for gravity. Thus, dark energy may be superfluous if quantum gravity is correct, so it is clear that string theory is really a belief system, a faith-based initiative, with no physics or science of any kind to support it. String theory produces endless research, and inspires new mathematical ideas, albeit less impressively than Ptolemy’s universe, Maxwell’s aether and Kelvin’s vortex atom (e.g., the difficulties of solving Ptolemy’s false epicycles inspired Indian and Arabic mathematicians to develop trigonometry and algebra in the dark ages), but this doesn’t justify Ptolemy’s earth-centred universe, Maxwell’s mechanical aether, Kelvin’s stable vortex atom, and string theory. Another problem of this stringy mainstream research is that it leads to so many speculative papers being published in physics journals that the media and the journals concentrate on strings, and generally either censor out or give less attention to alternative ideas. Even if many alternative theories are wrong, that may be less harmful to the health of physics than one massive mainstream endeavour that isn’t even wrong...

‘It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of spacetime is going to do? So I have often made the hypothesis that ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed, and the laws will turn out to be simple, like the chequer board with all its apparent complexities.’ - R. P. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, November 1964 Cornell Lectures, broadcast and published in 1965 by BBC, pp. 57-8.

Feynman is here referring to the physics of the infinite series of Feynman diagrams with corresponding terms in the perturbative expansion for interactions with virtual particles in the vacuum in quantum field theory:

‘Given any quantum field theory, one can construct its perturbative expansion and (if the theory can be renormalised), for anything we want to calculate, this expansion will give us an infinite sequence of terms. Each of these terms has a graphical representation called a Feynman diagram, and these diagrams get more and more complicated as one goes to higher and higher order terms in the perturbative expansion. There will be some ... ‘coupling constant’ ... related to the strength of the interactions, and each time we go to the next higher order in the expansion, the terms pick up an extra factor of the coupling constant. For the expansion to be at all useful, the terms must get smaller and smaller fast enough ... Whether or not this happens will depend on the value of the coupling constant.’ - P. Woit, Not Even Wrong, Jonathan Cape, London, 2006, p. 182.

‘For the last eighteen years particle theory has been dominated by a single approach to the unification of the Standard Model interactions and quantum gravity. This line of thought has hardened into a new orthodoxy that postulates an unknown fundamental supersymmetric theory involving strings and other degrees of freedom with characteristic scale around the Planck length. ... It is a striking fact that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever for this complex and unattractive conjectural theory. There is not even a serious proposal for what the dynamics of the fundamental ‘M-theory’ is supposed to be or any reason at all to believe that its dynamics would produce a vacuum state with the desired properties. The sole argument generally given to justify this picture of the world is that perturbative string theories have a massless spin two mode and thus could provide an explanation of gravity, if one ever managed to find an underlying theory for which perturbative string theory is the perturbative expansion.’ – P. Woit, Quantum Field Theory and Representation Theory: A Sketch (2002), pp51-52.

‘String theory has the remarkable property of predicting gravity.’ - E. Witten (M-theory originator), Physics Today, April 1996.

‘50 points for claiming you have a revolutionary theory but giving no concrete testable predictions.’ - J. Baez (crackpot Index originator), comment about crackpot mainstream string ‘theorists’ on the Not Even Wrong weblog here.

 

Background information

Quantum field theory is the basis of the Standard Model of particle physics and is the best tested of all physical theories, more general in application and better tested within its range of application than the existing formulation of general relativity (which needs modification to include quantum field effects), describing all electromagnetic and nuclear phenomena. The Standard Model does not as yet include quantum gravity, so it is not a replacement yet for general relativity. However, the elements of quantum gravity may be obtained from an application of quantum field to a Penrose spin network model of spacetime (the path integral is the sum over all interaction graphs in the network, and this yields background independent general relativity). This approach, 'loop quantum gravity', is entirely different from that in string theory, which is based on building extra-dimensional speculation upon other speculations, e.g., the speculation that gravity is due to spin-2 gravitons (this is speculative is no experimental evidence for it). In loop quantum gravity, by contrast to string theory, the aim is merely to use quantum field theory to derive the framework of general relativity as simply as possible. Other problems in the Standard Model are related to understanding how electroweak symmetry is broken at low energy and how mass (gravitational charge) is acquired by some particles. There are several forms of speculated Higgs field which may rise to mass and electroweak symmetry breaking, but the details as yet unconfirmed by experiment (the Large Hadron Collider may do it). Moreover, there are questions about how the various parameters of the Standard Model are related, and the nature of fundamental particles (string theory is highly speculative, and there are other possibilities).

There are several excellent approaches to quantum field theory: at a popular level there is Wilczek’s 12-page discussion of Quantum Field Theory, Dyson’s Advanced Quantum Mechanics and the excellent approach by Alvarez-Gaume and Vazquez-Mozo, Introductory Lectures on Quantum Field Theory. A good mathematics compendium introducing, in a popular way, some of maths involved is Penrose's Road to Reality (Penrose's twistors inspired some concepts in an Electronics World article of April 2003). For a very brief (47 pages) yet more abstract or mathematical (formal) approach to quantum field theory, see for comparison Crewther’s http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9505152. For a slightly more ‘stringy’-orientated approach, see Mark Srednicki’s 608 pages textbook, via http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~mark/qft.html, and there is also Zee's Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell on Amazon to buy if you want something briefer but with that mainstream speculation (stringy) outlook.

Ryder’s Quantum Field Theory also contains supersymmetry unification speculations and is available on Amazon here. Kaku has a book on the subject here, Weinberg has one here, Peskin and Schroeder's is here, while Einstein's scientific biographer, the physicist Pais, has a history of the subject here. Baez, Segal and Zhou have an algebraic quantum field theory approach available on http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bsz.html, while Dr Peter Woit has a link to handwritten quantum field theory lecture notes from Sidney Coleman's course which is widely recommended, here. For background on representation theory and the Standard Model see Woit's page here for maths background and also his detailed suggestion, http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0206135. For some discussion of quantum field theory equations without the interaction picture, polarization, or renormalization of charges due to a physical basis in pair production cutoffs at suitable energy scales, see Dr Chris Oakley's page http://www.cgoakley.demon.co.uk/qft/:

‘... renormalization failed the "hand-waving" test dismally.

‘This is how it works. In the way that quantum field theory is done - even to this day - you get infinite answers for most physical quantities. Are we really saying that particle beams will interact infinitely strongly, producing an infinite number of secondary particles? Apparently not. We just apply some mathematical butchery to the integrals until we get the answer we want. As long as this butchery is systematic and consistent, whatever that means, then we can calculate regardless, and what do you know, we get fantastic agreement between theory and experiment for important measurable numbers (the anomalous magnetic moment of leptons and the Lamb shift in the Hydrogen atom), as well as all the simpler scattering amplitudes. ...

‘As long as I have known about it I have argued the case against renormalization. [What about the physical mechanism of virtual fermion polarization in the vacuum, which explains the case for a renormalization of charge since this electric polarization results in a radial electric field that opposes and hence shields most of the core charge of the real particle, and this shielding due to polarization occurs wherever there are pairs of charges that are free and have space to become aligned against the core electric field, i.e. in the shell of space around the particle core that extends in radius between a minimum radius equal to the grain size of the Dirac sea - i.e. the UV cutoff - and an outer radius of about 1 fm which is the range at which the electric field strength is Schwinger's threshold for pair-production (i.e. the IR cutoff)? This renormalization mechanism has some physical evidence in several experiments, e.g., Levine, Koltick et al., Physical Review Letters, v.78, no.3, p.424, 1997, where the observable electric charge of leptons does indeed increase as you get closer to the core, as seen in higher energy scatter experiments.] ...

‘[Due to Haag’s theorem] it is not possible to construct a Hamiltonian operator that treats an interacting field like a free one. Haag's theorem forbids us from applying the perturbation theory we learned in quantum mechanics to quantum field theory, a circumstance that very few are prepared to consider. Even now, the text-books on quantum field theory gleefully violate Haag's theorem on the grounds that they dare not contemplate the consequences of accepting it.

‘... The next paper I wrote, in 1986, follows this up. It takes my 1984 paper and adds two things: first, a direct solving of the equal-time commutators, and second, a physical interpretation wherein the interaction picture is rediscovered as an approximation.

‘With regard to the first thing, I doubt if this has been done before in the way I have done it³, but the conclusion is something that some may claim is obvious: namely that local field equations are a necessary result of fields commuting for spacelike intervals. Some call this causality, arguing that if fields did not behave in this way, then the order in which things happen would depend on one's (relativistic) frame of reference. It is certainly not too difficult to see the corollary: namely that if we start with local field equations, then the equal-time commutators are not inconsistent, whereas non-local field equations could well be. This seems fine, and the spin-statistics theorem is a useful consequence of the principle. But in fact this was not the answer I really wanted as local field equations lead to infinite amplitudes. It could be that local field equations with the terms put into normal order - which avoid these infinities - also solve the commutators, but if they do then there is probably a better argument to be found than the one I give in this paper. ...

‘With regard to the second thing, the matrix elements consist of transients plus contributions which survive for large time displacements. The latter turns out to be exactly that which would be obtained by Feynman graph analysis. I now know that - to some extent - I was just revisiting ground already explored by Källén and Stueckelberg⁴.

‘My third paper [published in Physica Scripta, v41, pp292-303, 1990] applies all of this to the specific case of quantum electrodynamics, replicating all scattering amplitudes up to tree level. ...

‘Unfortunately for me, though, most practitioners in the field appear not to be bothered about the inconsistencies in quantum field theory, and regard my solitary campaign against infinite subtractions at best as a humdrum tidying-up exercise and at worst a direct and personal threat to their livelihood. I admit to being taken aback by some of the reactions I have had. In the vast majority of cases, the issue is not even up for discussion.

‘The explanation for this opposition is perhaps to be found on the physics Nobel prize web site. The five prizes awarded for quantum field theory are all for work that is heavily dependent on renormalization. ...

‘Although by these awards the Swedish Academy is in my opinion endorsing shoddy science, I would say that, if anything, particle physicists have grown to accept renormalization more rather than less as the years have gone by. Not that they have solved the problem: it is just that they have given up trying. Some even seem to be proud of the fact, lauding the virtues of makeshift "effective" field theories that can be inserted into the infinitely-wide gap defined by infinity minus infinity. Nonetheless, almost all concede that things could be better, it is just that they consider that trying to improve the situation is ridiculously high-minded and idealistic. ...

‘The other area of uncertainty is, to my mind, the ‘strong’ nuclear force. The quark model works well as a classification tool. It also explains deep inelastic lepton-hadron scattering. The notion of quark "colour" further provides a possible explanation, inter alia, of the tendency for quarks to bunch together in groups of three, or in quark-antiquark pairs. It is clear that the force has to be strong to overcome electrostatic effects. Beyond that, it is less of an exact science. Quantum chromodynamics, the gauge theory of quark colour is the candidate theory of the binding force, but we are limited by the fact that bound states cannot be done satisfactorily with quantum field theory. The analogy of calculating atomic energy levels with quantum electrodynamics would be to calculate hadron masses with quantum chromodynamics, but the only technique available for doing this - lattice gauge theory - despite decades of work by many talented people and truly phenomenal amounts of computer power being thrown at the problem, seems not to be there yet, and even if it was, many, including myself, would be asking whether we have gained much insight through cracking this particular nut with such a heavy hammer.’

The humorous and super-intelligent (no joke intended) Professor Warren Siegel has an 885 pages long free textbook, Fields http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9912205, the first chapters of which consist of a very nice introduction to the technical mathematical background of experimentally validated quantum field theory (it also has chapters on speculative supersymmetry and speculative string theory toward the end).

Gerard ’t Hooft has a brief (69 pages) review article, The Conceptual Basis of Quantum Field Theory, here, and Meinard Kuhlmann has an essay on it for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy here.

‘In loop quantum gravity, the basic idea is to use the standard methods of quantum theory, but to change the choice of fundamental variables that one is working with. It is well known among mathematicians that an alternative to thinking about geometry in terms of curvature fields at each point in a space is to instead think about the holonomy [whole rule] around loops in the space. The idea is that in a curved space, for any path that starts out somewhere and comes back to the same point (a loop), one can imagine moving along the path while carrying a set of vectors, and always keeping the new vectors parallel to older ones as one moves along. When one gets back to where one started and compares the vectors one has been carrying with the ones at the starting point, they will in general be related by a rotational transformation. This rotational transformation is called the holonomy of the loop. It can be calculated for any loop, so the holonomy of a curved space is an assignment of rotations to all loops in the space.’ - P. Woit, Not Even Wrong, Jonathan Cape, London, 2006, p189. (Emphasis added.)

‘Plainly, there are different approaches to the five fundamental problems in physics.’ – Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 2006, p254.

The major problem today seems to be that general relativity is fitted to the big bang without applying corrections for quantum gravity which are important for relativistic recession of gravitational charges (masses): the redshift of gravity causing gauge boson radiation reduces the gravitational coupling constant G, weakening long range gravitational effects on cosmological distance scales (i.e., between rapidly receding masses). This mechanism for a lack of gravitational deceleration of the universe on large scales (high redshifts) has counterparts even in alternative push-gravity graviton ideas, where gravity - and generally curvature of spacetime - is due to shielding of gravitons (in that case, the mechanism is more complicated, but the effect still occurs).

Professor Carlo Rovelli’s Quantum Gravity is an excellent background text on loop quantum gravity, and is available in PDF format as an early draft version online at http://www.cpt.univ-mrs.fr/~rovelli/book.pdf and in the final published version from Amazon here. Professor Lee Smolin also has some excellent online lectures about loop quantum gravity at the Perimeter Institute site, here (you need to scroll down to 'Introduction to Quantum Gravity' in the left hand menu bar). Basically, Smolin explains that loop quantum gravity gets the Feynman path integral of quantum field theory by summing all interaction graphs of a Penrose spin network, which amounts to general relativity without a metric (i.e., background independent). Smolin also has an arXiv paper, An Invitation to Loop Quantum Gravity, here which contains a summary of the subject from the existing framework of mathematical theorems of special relevance to the more peripherial technical problems in quantum field theory and general relativity.

However, possibly the major future advantage of loop quantum gravity will be as a Yang-Mills quantum gravity framework, with the physical dynamics implied by gravity being caused by full cycles or complete loops of exchange radiation being exchanged between gravitational charges (masses) which are receding from one another as observed in the universe. There is a major difference between the chaotic space-time annihilation-creation massive loops which exist between the IR and UV cutoffs, i.e., within 1 fm distance from a particle core (due to chaotic loops of pair production/annihilation in quantum fields), and the more classical (general relativity and Maxwellian) force-causing exchange/vector radiation loops which occur outside the 1 fm range of the IR cutoff energy (i.e., at lower energy than the closest approach - by Coulomb scatter - of electrons in collisions with a kinetic energy similar to the rest mass-energy of the particles).

‘Light ... ‘smells’ the neighboring paths around it, and uses a small core of nearby space. (In the same way, a mirror has to have enough size to reflect normally: if the mirror is too small for the core of nearby paths, the light scatters in many directions, no matter where you put the mirror.)’ - R. P. Feynman, QED, Penguin, 1990, page 54.









Solution to a problem with general relativity: A Yang-Mills mechanism for quantum field theory exchange-radiation dynamics, with prediction of gravitational strength, space-time curvature, Standard Model parameters for all forces and particle masses, and cosmology, including comparisons to other research and experimental tests

Acknowledgement

Professor Jacques Distler of the University of Texas inspired recent reformulations by suggesting in a comment on Professor Clifford V. Johnson’s discussion blog that I’d be taken more seriously if only I’d only use tensor analysis in discussing the mathematical physics of general relativity.

Part 1: Summary of experimental and theoretical evidence, and comparison of theories

Part 2: The mathematics and physics of general relativity [Currently this links to a paper by Drs. Baez and Bunn]

Part 3: Quantum gravity approaches: string theory and loop quantum gravity [Currently this links to Dr Rovelli's Quantum Gravity]

Part 4: Quantum mechanics, Dirac’s equation, spin and magnetic moments, pair-production, the polarization of the vacuum above the IR cutoff and it’s role in the renormalization of charge and mass [Currently this links to Dyson's QED introduction]

Part 5: The path integral of quantum electrodynamics, compared with Maxwell’s classical electrodynamics [Currently this links to Siegel's Fields, which covers a large area in depth, one gem for example is that it points out that the 'mass' of a quark is not a physical reality, firstly because quarks can't be isolated and secondly because the mass is due to the vacuum particles in the strong field surrounding the quarks anyway]

Part 6: Nuclear and particle physics, Yang-Mills theory, the Standard Model, and representation theory [Currently this links to Woit's very brief Sketch showing how simple low-dimensional modelling can deliver particle physics, which hopefully will turn into a more detailed, and also slower-paced, technical book very soon]

Part 7: Methodology of doing science: predictions and postdictions of the theory based purely on empirical facts (vacuum mechanism for mass and electroweak symmetry breaking at low energy, including Hans de Vries’ and Alejandro Rivero’s ‘coincidence’) [Currently this links to Alvarez-Gaume and Vazquez-Mozo, Introductory Lectures on Quantum Field Theory]

Part 8: Riofrio’s and Hunter’s equations, and Lunsford’s unification of electromagnetism and gravitation [Currently this links to Lunsford's paper]

Part 9: Standard Model mechanism: vacuum polarization and gauge boson field mediators for asymptotic freedom and force unification [Currently this links to Wilczek's brief summary paper]

Part 10: Evidence for the ‘stringy’ nature of fundamental particle cores? [Currently links to Dr Lubos Motl's list of 12 top superstring theory 'results', with literature references]

 

‘I like Feynman’s argument very much (although I have not thought about the virtual charges in the loops bit bit). The general idea that you start with a double slit in a mask, giving the usual interference by summing over the two paths... then drill more slits and so more paths... then just drill everything away... leaving only the slits... no mask. Great way of arriving at the path integral of QFT.’ - Prof. Clifford V. Johnson's comment, here

‘The world is not magic. The world follows patterns, obeys unbreakable rules. We never reach a point, in exploring our universe, where we reach an ineffable mystery and must give up on rational explanation; our world is comprehensible, it makes sense. I can’t imagine saying it better. There is no way of proving once and for all that the world is not magic; all we can do is point to an extraordinarily long and impressive list of formerly-mysterious things that we were ultimately able to make sense of. There’s every reason to believe that this streak of successes will continue, and no reason to believe it will end. If everyone understood this, the world would be a better place.’ – Prof. Sean Carroll, here

THE ROAD TO REALITY: A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO THE LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE by Sir Roger Penrose, published by Jonathan Cape, London, 2004. The first half of the 1094 pages hardback book (2.5 inches/6.5 cm thick) briefly summarises fairly well known mathematics of background importance to the subject at issue. The remaining half of the book deals with quantum mechanics and attempts to unify it with general relativity. On page 785, Penrose neatly quotes his co-author Professor Stephen Hawking:

‘I don’t demand that a theory correspond to reality because I don’t know what it is. Reality is not a quality you can test with litmus paper. All I’m concerned with is that the theory should predict the results of measurements.’ [Quoted from: Stephen Hawking in S. Hawking and R. Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1996, p. 121.]

But acidity is a reality which you can, indeed, test with litmus paper! On page 896, Penrose analyses those who use string ‘theory’ as an obfuscation (or worse) of the meaning of ‘prediction’:

‘In the words of Edward Witten [E. Witten, ‘Reflections on the Fate of Spacetime’, Physics Today, April 1996]:

‘String theory has the remarkable property of predicting gravity,

‘and Witten has further commented:

‘the fact that gravity is a consequence of string theory is one of the greatest theoretical insights ever.

‘It should be emphasised, however, that in addition to the dimensionality issue, the string theory approach is (so far, in almost all respects) restricted to being merely a perturbation theory …’

Hence, string ‘theory’ as hyped up by genius Witten in 1996 as predicting gravity, is misleading, really. String ‘theory’ has no proof of a physical mechanism and predicts not even the inverse square law, let alone the strength of gravity! (In apt words of exclusion-principle proposer Wolfgang Pauli, string ‘theory’ is in the class of belief junk, ‘not even wrong’.)

On page 1020 of chapter 34 ‘Where lies the road to reality?’, 34.4 Can a wrong theory be experimentally refuted?, Penrose says: ‘One might have thought that there is no real danger here, because if the direction is wrong then the experiment would disprove it, so that some new direction would be forced upon us. This is the traditional picture of how science progresses. Indeed, the well-known philosopher of science [Sir] Karl Popper provided a reasonable-looking criterion [K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1934] for the scientific admissability [sic; mind your spelling Sir Penrose or you will be dismissed as a loony: the correct spelling is admissibility] of a proposed theory, namely that it be observationally refutable. But I fear that this is too stringent a criterion, and definitely too idealistic a view of science in this modern world of "big science".’

Penrose identifies the problem clearly on page 1021: ‘We see that it is not so easy to dislodge a popular theoretical idea through the traditional scientific method of crucial experimentation, even if that idea happened actually to be wrong. The huge expense of high-energy experiments, also, makes it considerably harder to test a theory than it might have been otherwise. There are many other theoretical proposals, in particle physics, where predicted particles have mass-energies that are far too high for any serious possibility of refutation.’

On page 1026, Penrose points out: ‘In the present climate of fundamental research, it would appear to be much harder for individuals to make substantial progress than it had been in Einstein’s day. Teamwork, massive computer calculations, the pursuing of fashionable ideas – these are the activities that we tend to see in current research. Can we expect to see the needed fundamentally new perspectives coming out of such activities? This remains to be seen, but I am left somewhat doubtful about it. Perhaps if the new directions can be more experimentally driven, as was the case with quantum mechanics in the first third of the 20th century, then such a "many-person" approach might work.’

Last Updated: 9 June 2007. This site is currently under revision, for older material see this old blog, this new blog (see particularly 'comments' to the most recent post, which contain several updates and clarifications), this very lengthy and ramshackle compilation of bits and pieces (updated 8 June 2007), and this PDF file.

 

 

This page was revised (mainly by corrections to the discussion of tensors in general relativity) on 8 June 2007 and is a totally disorganised, rambling, informal supplement to (not a replacement of) the more concise proof paper at:

http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/05/25/quantum-gravity-mechanism-and-predictions/ and

http://quantumfieldtheory.org/1.pdf

Professor Jacques Distler has an interesting, thoughtful, and well written post called ‘The Role of Rigour’ on his Musings blog where he brilliantly argues:

‘A theorem is only as good as the assumptions underlying it. … particularly in more speculative subject, like Quantum Gravity, it’s simply a mistake to think that greater rigour can substitute for physical input. The idea that somehow, by formulating things very precisely and proving rigourous theorems, correct physics will eventually emerge simply misconstrues the role of rigour in Physics.’

Jacques also summarises the issues for theoretical physics clearly in a comment there:

2. ‘There’s the issue of the theorem itself, and whether the assumptions that went into it are physically-justified.
3. ‘There’s the issue of a certain style of doing Physics which values proving theorems over other ways of arriving at physical knowledge.
4. ‘There’s the rhetorical use to which the (alleged) theorem is put, in arguing for or against some particular approach. In particular, there’s the unreflective notion that a theorem trumps any other sort of evidence.’

1. disrupted from bound into freed charges (pair production effect) above the IR cutoff (threshold for pair production),
2. given energy in proportion to the field strength (by analogy to Einstein’s photoelectric equation, where there is a certain minimum amount of energy required to free electrons from their bound state, and further energy above that mimimum then then goes into increasing the kinetic energy of those particles, except that in this case the indeterminancy principle due to scattering indeterminism introduces statistics and makes it more like a quantum tunnelling effect and the extra field energy above the threshold can also energise ground state Dirac sea charges into more massive loops in progressive states, ie, 1.022 MeV delivered to two particles colliding with 0.511 MeV each - the IR cutoff - can create an e- and e+ pair, while a higher loop threshold will be 211.2 MeV delivered as two particles colliding with 105.6 MeV or more, which can create a muon+ and muon- pair, and so on, see the previous post for explanation of a diagram explaining mass by ‘doubly special supersymmetry’ where charges have a discrete number of massive partners located either within the close-in UV cutoff range or beyond the perimeter IR cutoff range, accounting for masses in a predictive, checkable manner), and
3. the quantum field is then polarized (shielding electric field strength).