This is one of the amusing things we found during our long thread
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=46055
(a thread that beats most guessers and crackpots predictors by some orders of magniture in precision, so it acts as a kind of vaccine).

But Z0 has other amusing properties related not properly to its mass but to its decay width: it decays at the same (scaled) rate that strong-bounded neutral particles, including the neutral pion.

Historically it was with a Keplerian malabarism how Sommerfeld constant was defined. This is because in relativistic orbits there is a maximum angular momentum (because there is a maximum orbital speed), and in quantum mechanics there is a minimum angular momentum.

‘The problem is not that there are no other games in town, but rather that there are no bright young players who take the risk of jeopardizing their career by learning and expanding the sophisticated rules for playing other games.’

- http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0603112 p46

‘My final conclusion is that the young and intelligent Harvard professor Lubos Motl has decided to build his career on offering a cartering service for the string community. He obviously is a quick scanner of the daily hep-th server output, and by torching papers which are outside the credo of string theorists (i.e. LQG, AQFT) he saves them time. The downgrading of adversaries is something which has at least the tacit consent of the community. It is evident that he is following a different road from that of using one’s intellectual potential for the enrichment of knowledge about particle physics. If one can build a tenure track career at a renown university by occasionally publishing a paper but mainly keeping a globalized community informed by giving short extracts of string-compatible papers and playing the role of a Lord of misuse to outsiders who have not yet gotten the message, the transgression of the traditional scientific ethics [24] for reasons of career-building may become quite acceptable. It would be interesting to see into what part of this essay the string theorists pitbull will dig his teeth.’

- http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0603112 p22

http://www.haloscan.com/comments/lumidek/116000857491015071/#612528

This is just a little bit too strong, now that the problems of string theory are at least being aired in Nature at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v443/n7111/full/443491a.html

While the stringers are not particularly friendly people to outsiders, being too sarcastic doesn’t help the physics.
nc

For an example of Motl’s lack of politeness and diplomacy, see as a random example his comment: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=467#comment-16818

When Woit said “There are some real things you can do with string theory,” maybe he trying to win over Motl. I think that if Woit could discover one real thing that string can do, it will prevent Motl being so upset. However, that’s a big challenge, I fear. It is a tragedy. I just hope that the stringy ship sinks quickly, so that the stringers are put out of their misery without a lingering finish.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v443/n7111/full/443491a.html

‘… string theorist Lubos Motl of Harvard University posted reviews furiously entitled “Bitter emotions and obsolete understanding of high-energy physics” and “Another postmodern diatribe against modern physics and scientific method”. As Nature went to press, the reviews had been removed.

‘Few in the community are, at least publicly, as vitriolic as Motl. But many are angry and struggling to deal with the criticism. “Most of my friends are quietly upset,” says Leonard Susskind, a string theorist at Stanford University in California. …

‘The books leave string theorists such as Susskind wondering how to approach such strong public criticism. “I don’t know if the right thing is to worry about the public image or keep quiet,” he says. He fears the argument may “fuel the discrediting of scientific expertise”.

‘That’s something that Smolin and Woit insist they don’t want. Woit says his problem isn’t with the theory itself, just some of its more grandiose claims. “There are some real things you can do with string theory,” he says.’

Unfortunately, Woit doesn’t actually explain what ‘real things’ he means…

Many thanks for your comments. I take it you are happy with Dr Love’s derivation of Kepler’s main result, but don’t see the logic of my suggestion since I’m using E = mc^2 instead of E=SQRT((pc)^2+(mc^2)^2).

However, if we put rest mass m = 0, we get E = pc from the general equation you supply. Here p = mc.

Hence, E = pc = (mc)c = mc^2.

P.C.W. Davies writes on page 21 of “The forces of nature” (C.U.P., 2nd ed., London, 1986):

“This relationship can, in fact, be deduced from Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory … The fact that photons have no rest mass isn’t a problem because, as discussed above, they can never be at rest anyway, whatever the reference frame of the observer.”

Hence, photons DO have transit mass in effect, because they have momentum; they merely don’t have rest mass (which is another way of saying that they can’t be at rest).

If you think E=SQRT((pc)^2+(mc^2)^2) provides a solution for photon energy which is different from E = pc = mc^2, please let me know what this solution is.

The second point you make is:

“The other issue is that when charged particles move in circular orbits, they emit radiation and your model should likely include some provision for that as well.”

I agree with you. The emitted radiation is equivalent to the gauge boson radiation. This is all in my Electronics World papers.

Bohr assumed that the electron doesn’t radiate or it would spiral into the nucleus. This is false, because Yang-Mills quantum field theory shows that charges transmit forces by exchanging radiation, which means charges do radiate continuously.

The reason they don’t spiral into the nucleus is that the universe is old so there is an equilibrium: they receive as much gauge boson exchange radiation energy from other charges each second as they transmit to the other charges.

See my old comment here: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=236#comment-4462

“Lee’s seven promising options include one of causality and two of hidden variables. It would be nice to have a convergence toward consensus, which is vital to avoid a disintegration of the research-education infrastructure. Without consensus, it’s very hard to teach with interest at lower levels, because it looks a bit like speculative gambling or the disintegration of central ideas. It would be nice to see some things unified carefully, like path integrals and some hidden variables. This is not regression to determinism, because you still have uncertainty, you just have a cause for it like chaos due to wave interference. ‘Caloric’, fluid heat theory, eventually gave way to two separate mechanisms, kinetic theory and radiation. This was after Prevost in 1792 suggested constant temperature is a dynamic system, with emission in equilibrium with the reception of energy. The electromagnetic field energy exchange process is not treated with causal mechanism in current QFT, perhaps if it was it would turn out to be the missing hidden variable needed.”

You next say:

“… one thing that I insist upon is that with the improvement of every theory, previous results should be able to be replicated to better accuracy.”

I agree. I tried hurling insults at the establishment, but it doesn’t work. The establishment is so noisy, my insults get drowned out in the noise.

Thanks,
Nigel

I would also like to add one thing. It really bothers me that these tacit comments are being made about not having an open mind or echoing ‘the establishment.’ I have always had an open mind to different possibilities. But one thing that I insist upon is that with the improvement of every theory, previous results should be able to be replicated to better accuracy. I started studying loop quantum gravity because it was interesting, and it is certainly NOT mainstream physics. I have even delved in studying theories of p adic consciousness. But in each of these cases, there is some phenomenological consistency.

Thomas Thiemann and K. Giesel came up with a new approach to quantized gravity called AQG. I wrote them a list of questions about two pages long and THEY pleasantly responded to each of my concerns and questions. Therefore, again the goal is to understand and not to denigrate.

For this reason, although I disagree with some of your interpretations of existing data, I can respect you Nigel. What I have issues with is those that do nothing to substantiate their position other than hurl insults at people for ‘echoing’ the establishment.

Hello Nigel:
I understand that you want the gravitational potential energy to be balanced by a body’s kinetic energy in your example. But where you lose me is when you use the expression E=mc^2=mMG/r.

The reason for this is that if a body is orbiting in a gravitational field, it is NOT at rest. Therefore the relativistic equation E=mc^2 should be modified to read: E=SQRT((pc)^2+(mc^2)^2). In this situation, we are now accounting for its motion in addition to its rest mass energy.

The other issue is that when charged particles move in circular orbits, they emit radiation and your model should likely include some provision for that as well.

Have a nice day.

If anyone is guilty of hyping incomplete physics and misleading the public, he is a mainstream string theorist. So don’t worry. Only when the mainstream starts being objective, will they be in a position to genuinely complain about others trying to make themselves heard. (When the mainstream stops making so much noise that drowns out alternatives, alternatives will start being heard without having to raise their voices.)

Hi Mahndisa,

It is physically substantative when you consider the dynamics are gravitational potential energy stopping the kinetic energy of the orbiting mass (or photon) from causing it to escape.

Hence, for the orbiting object to just be trapped in orbit, it’s kinetic energy in its forward (orbital) direction must be exactly equal to the gravitational potential energy which is trapping it. Any more kinetic energy than gravitational potential energy, and it spirals outward! Less kinetic than gravitational energy, and it would spiral inward! Hence the two must be equal for orbital stability. This is clearly the simple basis for Love’s equipartition of energy, E = (1/2)mv^2 = mMG/r.

In the August 2002 issue of Electronics World, I suggested (article is “Electronic Universe Part 1″) that a fermion is half a boson, but trapped into a loop by gravitation. Because the varying electromagnetic fields in a photon are described by the Poynting-Heaviside vector, a trapped (looped) half-photon (ie that part of the photon where the electric field is all negative or all positive) would have a net electric field which turns out to be spherically symmetric, while the way the magnetic field lines add up gives a magnetic dipole as a resultant. The circular looping of the energy corresponds to spin. Hence, we have known properties of the fermion.

This provides the physical basis in the previous post for setting E = mc^2 = mMG/R when you take account of the gravitational dynamics: because gravity is trapping the Heaviside-Poynting energy in the fermion into a loop, and because quantum gravity is the exchange of gauge bosons such as some kind of “gravitons” with the surrounding masses in the universe, it follows that the spin kinetic energy locked up in the fermion MUST be balanced by the gravitational potential energy.

If the fermion’s spin kinetic energy was less than the gravitational potential energy, it would spiral inwards and becomes smaller. If it had greater spin kinetic energy than the gravitational potential energy, then gravity would be unable to constrain it, so the spin would spiral outwards and it would become bigger.

Hence, the spin kinetic energy of a fermion is in exact equilibrium with the gravitational potential energy which is keeping it trapped into a small loop.

The main problem people try to raise is that this picture of spin is physical, and people claim the principle of superposition of spin states (based on the Copenhagen Interpretation of the wavefunction collapse, where spin only becomes real when you measure it and is metaphysical at all other times) denies any mechanism. Thomas Love explains that the Copenhagen Interpretation of the wavefunction collapse is a mathematical artefact which comes from the two forms of the Schroedinger wave equation: time-dependent and time-independent forms.

The moment you take a measurement, you switch over the equations, in effect, and it is the discontinuity between the two mathematical models – and not a real world discontinuity – which creates the metaphysical drivel in the Copenhagen Interpretation, which is wrong.

I’ve gone into this on my old blog, and I think I summarised the arguments with a comment on a previous post on this blog.

Oops and I didn’t mean Lord Kelvin, I was thinking of Galois.

Yes Nigel, it is interesting how you have explained how you can get the SRadius from your derivation. When you say you approximated the average velocity, what was the approximation you made? I also was thinking that the equipartitian theorem says that for objects that have a degree two polynomial form internal energy, that each degree of freedom gets (1/2)KbT of energy. I hadn’t seen equipartitian applied to gravitational systems, but have not taken an astrophysics course either. Is this a common tool used in by astrophysicists?

Louise, I do await your responses to some of the concerns Christine and I raised. Yes as a matter of fact I question all of my professors because the purpose of studying science is to learn. I cannot learn without asking questions. But your allusion to SFSU is strange. Don’t you recall how I never commented on your theory because I did not feel that I had adequate enough knowledge to do so? In fact, I never discussed you with any of the professors. What I do recall is that you said Maarten Goltermann was not pleased with your talk and left at some point, if I am not recalling incorrectly. That matters little to me, however. What matters is that you have a consistent theory that stands up to the scrutiny of the scientific community. And if you chose to be a maverick, be able to answer their questions in a well reasoned way.

I realize that you are trying to push envelopes in how you think and I commend that. However you have to substantiate what you are doing in a more rigorous way. Lord Kelvin’s ideas were not accepted by the scientific majority in his lifetime. However he was able to describe conventional theories and why they were wrong. You have not done that at all, less unsubstantiated statements.

When I attend SFSU for coursework, I discuss my own thoughts with the professors and I question them. But I don’t get in your business. My only concern is that you are spreading your ideas as gospel, while they need to be modified. That is all.

Maxwell’s model had various forms to account or the displacement current in a light wave. There are two totally different ways that electric polarization can occur:

(1) By the physical separation of electric charge monopoles of opposite sign in an electric field. A neutral vacuum is here a uniform or random mixture (ie non-polarized) of these two types of dipoles.

(2) By the alignment of the polar axis of electric charge dipoles (like molecules which are positive at one end, negative at the other). A neutral vacuum in this case is due to random alignment of the polar axes of the electric dipoles.

Polarization type (1) works well in quantum field theory to explain the screening of the core charge (hence renormalized charge) by pairs of charges created in the high energy vacuum within 10^-15 m of the charge (where field strength is over 10^18 v/m or so).

However, polarization type (1) can’t explain the renormalization of mass, which is also renormalized. This is because all masses (of matter or antimatter) fall the same way – ie downwards in eath’s gravity.

However, polarization type (2) must also exist, because radio waves propagate with lower electric fields than the 10^18 v/m which corresponds to the “infrared cutoff” ie the lowest field strength which can cause pair production and this vacuum polarization. Displacement current in Maxwell’s theory is the physical separation of vacuum charges during polarization, say between two oppositely chargd capacitor plates with a vacuum separating them.

Clearly, Maxwell’s theory doesn’t fit with quantum field theory because of the lower energy cutoff which quantum field theory insists on before there can be any vacuum polarization.

Exactly how you modify Maxwell’s theory to fit reality is an exercise which lasted from about 1901 (Planck’s quantum theory) to about 1905 (Einstein’s dismissal of the spacetime fabric). By the time Einstein returned to the spacetime continuum some 15 years later (1920, Leyden lecture), all the crackpots in physics academia had retired or been replaced by mathematicians who were more concerned with equations which tied into experiments. This naturally led to the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which Einstein then tried to fight.

Today, it is coming closer to full circle because extradimensional string theory is moving further and further away from the kind of mathematical physics equations which have experimental evidence.

Getting back to physics, a Z_o electroweak gauge boson is very special: it is like light (uncharged radiation) but it has rest mass. Because it has rest mass, and is a bit like a photon, presumably it has very special properties like undergoing polarization type (2), ie it has an electric field oscillation in it with one half positive field and the other half negative electric field, so it can align in an electric field. It’s mass as Rivero and others have published recently on arxiv, is such that when you multiply it by alpha and twice Pi or some similar geometric factor (alpha is the ratio of say shielded charge due to vacuum polarization, to unshielded core electric charge), you get the muon mass or something. Extending this you get a picture of the masses: http://thumbsnap.com/v/96oFXbrG.jpg However, this is tentative and details need ironing out: it isn’t a rigorous final theory (see comments in previous posts), and it remains to be seen whether such a thing is possible using such ideas.

Thus, the forward directed kinetic energy is half the total.

For light waves, be they just strings or something more like Maxwell’s lines of electric an magnetic fields, or some kind of vacuum charge oscillations (related to Maxwell’s physical model of displacement currents in a vacuum, ie Maxwell’s equation for curl.B in a vacuum, which is used with Faraday’s of induction for curl.E, to produce the speed of light from electromagnetic constants), the oscillatings of the string or the aether are what carry the kinetic energy being described here.