“An excellent example is how your paper’s on the problems in quantum gravity are ignored by string theorists. That proves string theorists are respectable, you see. If they engaged in discussions with their critics, they would look foolish. It is curious that if Witten refuses to discuss problems, he escapes being deemed foolish, but if outsiders do that then they are deemed foolish. There is such a rigid view taken of the role of authority in science today, that hypocrisy is taken for granted by all.”

(Emphasis added to error.)

contains an unwanted apostrophe:

“is how your paper’s on” should read

“is how your papers on”.

It’s interesting that this post is from January 2007, nearly a year old, and I’ve only just read that and spotted that error. It’s very hard to proof read your own work and detect errors; you just skim over recently written text if you are the writer. If it’s something you have not personally written, you can spot such errors much more easily, because you have to read it more slowly (it’s less familiar). I probably wrote this at touch-type speed which accounts for how the error arose in the first place. I quite like my analysis of Dr Witten’s problems, however, a year on. Hopefully there is now enough draft and source material compiled on this blog for me to carefully proof-read it and convert it into a PDF online book which is word-perfect. A lot of revision, additions, and improvements will be needed, but this blog probably provides a good start in helping the speedy compilation of a textbook.

nige said…
“As we know, c has been changing according to GM=tc^3.”

Unless, say, G is rising in proportion to t, a possibility consistent with observations of apparently constant G from nuclear fusion in the early big bang, etc., because the Coulomb and gravity forces would vary the same way, preventing an increase in fusion as gravity increases (the Coulomb force increase repels protons, slowing fusion, which offsets the increased gravitational force of rising G).

The assumption that c falls off as the inverse cube root of the age of the universe is obviously one way of looking at the equation.

Ultimately it has to be determined observationally or experimentally whether it is right or not.

I think there is evidence that c is constant and G is rising, there is also a fair amount of theoretical evidence from a gravity mechanism that there is dimensionless multiplication factor to be included; the completely correct formula is, I believe on some theoretical evidence I have, GM = t(c/e)^3, where e is the base of natural logarithms.

On the other hand, the restricted theory relativity and certainly general relativity, don’t disprove the possibility of changes to the velocity of light.

According to the pre-relativity FitzGerald and Lorentz transformation, the length of the Michelson-Morley instrument was contracted in the direction of absolute motion by the spacetime fabric (be that an ether or a Yang-Mills exchange radiation field). This contraction shortened the length of the instrument in that direction, but not in a perpendicular direction. The result is that an absolute speed of light in an ether or Yang-Mills exchange radiation field is rendered undetectable; the slowing down of that light which has to move against a moving background speed (like a swimmer being slowed by a water current) is exactly compensated by the shortening of the distance the light has to travel. Hence, both beams of light in the Michelson-Morley experiment arrive at the same time, because the ‘relativistic’ contraction offsets an absolute speed of light.

There is an amusing discussion of faster than c speeds by Neil Cornish, an astrophysicist at Montana State University, at http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mystery_monday_040524.html

‘The problem is that funny things happen in general relativity which appear to violate special relativity (nothing traveling faster than the speed of light and all that). Let’s go back to Hubble’s observation that distant galaxies appear to be moving away from us, and the more distant the galaxy, the faster it appears to move away. The constant of proportionality in that relationship is known as Hubble’s constant. One seemingly paradoxical consequence of Hubble’s observation is that galaxies sufficiently far away will be receding from us at a velocity faster than the speed of light. This distance is called the Hubble radius, and is commonly referred to as the horizon in analogy with a black hole horizon. In terms of special relativity, Hubble’s law appears to be a paradox. But in general relativity we interpret the apparent recession as being due to space expanding (the old raisins in a rising fruit loaf analogy). The galaxies themselves are not moving through space (at least not very much), but the space itself is growing so they appear to be moving apart. There is nothing in special or general relativity to prevent this apparent velocity from exceeding the speed of light.’

Hi Kea,

Yes, I do read Rivero’s papers and the model above is based in the major “coincidence” on one of them!

The paper http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0503104 by Hans de Vries and Alejandro Rivero, “Evidence for radiative generation of lepton masses”, 11 Mar 2005, inspired the model in my last comment.

They write that in November 2004 de Vries noticed numerical coincidences between the the anomalous magnetic moment of electron, and muon (mainly the Schwinger first coupling correction of alpha/(2*Pi)) appeared numerically close to the ratio of muon mass to Z boson mass, and to the ratio of electron mass to Z boson mass, respectively.

I was already interested in the relationship between alpha and particle masses, because I had some evidence that the core charge of the electron is e/(alpha) ~ 137e, and that the vacuum polarization between UV and IR cutoffs shielded it down to e. Therefore, the 137 factor 1/alpha is a general shielding factor where it crops up in quantum field theory. Most of the differences in masses between particles are artifacts of the way vacuum polarization shielding weakens the association between the standard model charge core and the mass-giving particle, which is well separated from the charge core and separated by two vacuum polarizations in the case of an electron (hence low mass) but is less shielded (one vacuum polarization shield only) in the case of the muon, tauon, and hadrons (differences in mass being due there to the number of particles present in the core, eg the number of quarks, and differences in the discrete number of mass-giving particles around the core), and is unshielded in the case of Z bosons, which have a 1:1 correspondence with mass giving particles, a bit like the idea of supersymmetry.

If this idea is right, obviously it has a way to go and is just a crude model at present. Ideally, you would want to get a way of calculating masses with all the necessary corrections and fine tuning so that the theory could be checked against data to high precision, not just with an accuracy of a couple of percent either way. That is likely to take time. However, it might not be that difficult. http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0503104 does show some relationships between vacuum polarization corrections and the “coincidences” in detail. I’d like to examine this carefully and see if it is possible to come up with a complete mechanism-based approach to calculating quantum field theory expansions for different loop corrections to mass.

The “fine tuning” of the mass model is obviously due to the loops of charges spontaneously appearing in the vacuum for a brief period, acquiring mass, and then disappearing.

So the accurate prediction of masses is likely to involve precisely the same kinds of calculations as are involved in calculating, say, the precise magnetic moment of the electron to 10 significant figures.

If this can be done to theoretically predict precise, empirically checkable values of masses for a range of particles, then the practical benefits of the model will be improved.

Hi Kea and Carl,

For the neutral electroweak boson mass, the Z, 91 GeV:

91 GeV/ (2*Pi*137) ~ 105 MeV

similar to Muon mass.

91 GeV/ (3*Pi*137^2) ~ 0.51 MeV

similar to electron mass.

Hence the masses of at least two leptons may correlate with the Z boson mass, depending on whether the idea of empirical data leading theory is deemed numerological crackpotism or not. (Here, for convenience I’m using 137 to represent 1/alpha or 137.036…, which is close enough for present purposes.)

If you want to have all particles arising from a single particle, it would seem natural to have a Higgs mass of 91 GeV, similar to the Z mass. I think the Higgs particle is supposed to have spin-0, whereas the Z has spin-1.

But if the Higgs is giving mass to the Z directly, then you could expect them to have similar masses.

Taking the coincidence above for Z mass and muon mass,

91 GeV/ (2*Pi*137) ~ 105 MeV,

the 2*Pi*137 attenuation factor would contain 2*Pi for geometric reasons relating to spin and the 137 for vacuum polarization (muon charge core shielding) reasons.

For the electron mass,

91 GeV/ (3*Pi*137^2) ~ 0.51 MeV.

the mechanism would be similar to the mion except that there is a 50% bigger geometrical reduction factor and an additional 137 polarized vacuum shielding factor.

Taking accepted facts from QFT, the vacuum polarization exists in the range from the UV cutoff to the IR cutoff (e.g. from the Planck scale out to about 1 fm).

Hence, if the mass-giving particle is glued to a fermion or massive boson by a polarizable field, there are two possibilities for the mass.

If the mass-giving particle is so close that it is inside the polarized zone (say at a distance equal to the Planck scale), then polarization won’t shield and attenuate the mass.

But if the mass-giving particle is outside the IR cutoff distance, then the effective mass will be shielded by a factor of 137 with some geometric correction.

An analogy is the magnetic moment of leptons. Whereas Dirac calculated the magnetic moment of the electron as 1 Bohr magneton, Schwinger obtained a closer approximation to allow for the effect of the field on the magnetic moment, which is 1 + 1/(2*Pi*137) = 1.00116 Bohr magnetons.

Obviously there are lots of further corrections for vacuum interactions. However, this is by far the biggest and most important vacuum correction.

The vacuum field is increasing the core magnetic moment, not by 1 Bohr magneton, but by that amount reduced with a combination of shielding factors of 2*Pi*137.

If both the electron core and the particle which gives mass to the electron have a polarized vacuum, and these don’t overlap, then the total polarizing shielding of the field associating them will be by the 137^2 factor because each polarization will shield by 137 fold.

The 2*Pi multiplier for one vacuum polarization may increase to 3*Pi for the case of two vacuum polarizations, because they take up more space.

For hadrons, the mass is correlated closely to a similar formula:

91*n(N+1)/(6*Pi*137) = hadron mass (GeV)

= 35n(N+1) MeV,

where n is the number of quarks in the hadron core (n=2 for mesons, n=3 for baryons), and N is an integer (N = the number of Higgs bosons associated with the hadron?).

This formula does post-dict or correlate all meson and baryon masses +/- 2%.

The explanation for the structure of nuclei can involk nuclear shell theory “magic numbers” for N which denote nuclei of high stability, so N = 2, 8 and 50 predict relatively stable systems.

For n = 3 (baryons) and N = 8 (stable), 35n(N+1) = 945 Mev which is approximately the mass of neutrons and protons (938, 940 Mev).

For n = 1 (lepton) and N = 2, 35n(N+1) = 105 Mev (muon mass)

For n = 1 (lepton) and N = 50 (magic number), 35n(N+1) = 1785 Mev
which is similar to the tauon mass.

For n = 2 (mesons) and N = 1, we get 35n(N+1) = 140 Mev (pions have masses 139.57 and 134.96 Mev).

All the measured meson masses seem close to 70(N+1) MeV where N is an integer, while baryon masses are close to 105(N+1) MeV.

If this general model is correct, then the electron is the most complex particle there is, not the simplest.

The electron would have two polarization factors shielding it from the mass-giving particle by 137 squared, in addition to a geometrical factor.

The muon is simpler, with the mass-giving particle outside a simple polarized vacuum, and all hadrons are similar to the muon except for differing number of core particles at the centre.

The fact a quark has a fractional electric charge can be grasped from the crude (and physically impossible) idea of bringing together three electrons. The polarized vacuum shielding is driven by the electric field strength of the core.

If you make the core charge 3 times stronger, the polarized vacuum is 3 times stronger at shielding the core charge. Hence, if you could (impossibly) bring 3 electrons together so that the vacuum polarization of each exactly coincided, the increased charge would be cancelled out by the stronger vacuum polarization.

Thus the core charge would be 3*137*e but the observable charge beyond the polarized vacuum would be 3*137*e/(3*137) = e. Each electron in the core would therefore appear to have an apparent electric charge of 1/3 of the electron’s charge. This corresponds to what probably is the cause for the downquark charge of -1/3.

It is just a polarization effect. This is not obvious because it is severely cloaked in the standard model by complex effects of chiral symmetry and weak charge, the exclusion principle, and colour charge/strong force.

A quick calculation which claims to justify the idea that the vacuum polarization shielding factor for electric charge is 137 is as follows.

Using uncertainty principle, uncertainty in momentum p and distance x is:

h/(2*Pi) = px = (~mc)(~ct) ~ (mc^2)t = Et = Ex/c

hence x = hc/(2*Pi*E)

although x and E are just uncertainties in distance and energy, this result is a good prediction, for instance it correctly shows that the range of a 91 GeV boson is about 10^{-17} m.

Rearranging x = hc/(2*Pi*E) gives

E = hc/(2*Pi*x)

Hence we are justified in treating x and E as real distance and real energy, and using E = Fx to estimate force:

F = E/x = hc/(2*Pi*x^2)

This result for force between electrons is directly comparable to Coulomb’s law because both are inverse-square law forces.

It turns out that the quantum field force above is 137.036… times the Coulomb law for electrons. Hence, there is some evidence that the core charge of an electron is 137.036e, and that the polarized vacuum shielding reduces this to the observed electron charge value of e beyond a distance of 1 fm from the core.

I realise that this is very sketchy in places, but it does seem to me to tackle some diverse issues with a general framework.

The human question is, what this is trying to achieve. It certainly is quite a different idea to say string theory, where experimental data is treated as crackpot, and theories are developed in complete isolation from reality (ie, extra dimensions, unobserved superpartners and gravitons, branes, etc.).

I don’t think that string theorists would take kindly to data driven theorising in particle theory. So anything like this will just annoy them, and cause them to freak out and try to censor it. I’m wondering how much time and effort I can afford to put in to writing up proper-looking papers. The problem is, you have to do a good deal of exploration to get ideas roughly right, before writing any papers.

There are enormous gaps in the above ideas, such as how to rigorously predict quark charges other than the crude argument for the downquark having -1/3 because the electric field driven polarization of the vacuum around a triad of electrons would be three times stronger than that around a single electron, so the long range observable charge per electron in the triad would reduced by a factor of 3 from its normal value.

How to predict the upquark charge of +2/3 from this sort of polarization model? Presumably, that will involve going deeply into representation theory for the standard model. I’ve a sneaking idea that even if I did have a complete paper which did everything, it would still be censored out by those who are sure that only string theories are real physics.

January 19th, 2007 at 10:59 am

“It’s certainly true that astrophysical observations of a CC pose a serious challenge to fundamental particle physics, but unfortunately I don’t think anyone has a promising idea about what to do about this.”

Look at the data plot, http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/01/11/evolving-dark-energy/

The CC model doesn’t fit the data, which seem to suggest that the CC would need to vary for different distances from us. It’s like adding epicycles within epicycles. At some stage you really need to question whether you definitely need a repulsive long range force (CC) to cancel out gravity at great distances, or whether you get better agreement by doing something else entirely, like the idea that any exchange radiation causing gravity is redshifted and weakened by recession:

‘the flat universe is just not decelerating [ie, no long range gravitational retardation on expansion], it isn’t really accelerating’ – Phil Anderson, http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/01/03/danger-phil-anderson#comment-10901

http://riofriospacetime.blogspot.com/2007/01/cumbre-vieja.html

Although religious preachers ideally require belief in what they say, scientists should not have any guesswork beliefs, but just confidence in solid observational and experimental facts. A theory should only be accepted on the basis of experimental or observational evidence upon which it rests.

This is not the case today, as the mainstream defence of string theory shows. How is this problem likely to be resolved? Not from experimental or observational data, since string theory isn’t able to make any falsifiable predictions. It stands to reason that there is going to be grave difficulties ahead in making fundamental progress against bigoted attitudes.

“And certainly, “…interpreted in terms of existing…”, is usually the way humans, including scientists, do things isn’t it? (Standing on the shoulders of giants, and all that).”

Yes, that’s the entire problem with physics. Physicists have to come to analyse the history of science objectively, and to learn that instead of fiddling old theories by adding additional epicycles, sometimes it pays to listen to radical new ideas, whether superficially they look crazy or not:

“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.”

- Bohr’s reply to Pauli, quoted by Freeman J Dyson, “Innovation in Physics”, Scientific American vol. 199, pp. 74-82, sept 1958.

Dirac himself had different ideas about the vacuum, ie, the ideas he actually used to predict antimatter from the Dirac equation’s negative energy solution. He thought about a “Dirac sea”:

… with the new theory of electrodynamics we are rather forced to have an aether.

– P.A.M. Dirac, ‘Is There An Aether?,’ Nature, v.168, 1951, p.906.

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=262#comment-5066

It’s gravity gauge boson radiation that causes the pressure on matter (ie the subatomic particles, not macroscopic matter as it appears, which we know if mostly empty), and such radiation is directional.

The argument that shadows will be filled in by non-radial (eg sideways) components of pressure was the major argument against LeSage’s material aether push gravity theory.

The aether exists as a Dirac fluid closer to 1 fm to an electron where you have a nice, strong, disruptive electric field strength of 10^20 v/m to break it up into a fluid. Beyond that, whatever “aether” there might be, is metaphysical in the sense that it is definitely not polarized or QFT wouldn’t work (it is too locked up by bonding forces to be polarized and thus it is unable to really move much if at all). The only way you will work out what it is at low energy (beyond 1 fm, or the distances electrons approach in collisions at an energy of less than 1 MeV per collision) is to work out all the stuff you can detect by high-energy physics above the IR cutoff (within 1 fm) and use those results to work out a model which both produces all of that, tells you the low energy structure of the vacuum, and also makes some other predictions so that it can actually be verified scientifically by experimentation.

Hence, what you need to do is to get a complete understanding of how the Standard Model (or some other equally good approximation to high energy phenomena, if you know of one!) can arise with some understanding of how to resolve existing problems like electroweak symmetry breaking, in a predictive way that exceeds existing understanding.

The LeSage mechanism is actually the pion exchange strong nuclear force in the vacuum. There is a limit on the range, because the pions aren’t directional (the Dirac sea within 1 fm from a particle is a fluid assembly of the chaotic motions of particles), unlike the radiation which travels through the non-fluid vacuum beyond 1 fm range (gravity and electromagnetism). The pion pressure only pushes protons and neutrons together if they are close enough that there is not room for too many pions to appear between two particles and neutralize the pressure: similarly, a rubber sucker only sticks to surfaces smooth enough to exclude air. If air gets between the sucker and the surface, the pressure on both sides of the sucker is equalized, and it won’t be “attracted” (pushed to the surface by ambient air pressure).

For some evidence, see
http://nige.wordpress.com/2006/10/20/loop-quantum-gravity-representation-theory-and-particle-physics/

“the anthropic explanation is a disappointing and controversial approach to an explanation of anything but it is the only remotely acceptable quantitative explanation of the size of the observed cosmological constant we have.

“Until you post a better explanation on this blog, your comparisons may be viewed as fog, sorry. … We want to know why the vacuum energy responsible for acceleration of the expansion of the Universe is equal to

exp(-283.2) times m_{Planck}^2,

at least qualitatively why it is so small.”

It’s not a fixed value: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=evolving+dark+energy&meta=

See curves at http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/01/11/evolving-dark-energy/

I predicted the correct expansion curve in May 1996 and it was published via page 693 of the October 1996 issue of Electronics World, well before the first evidence from Perlmutter’s automated CCD observations were published in, if I recall correctly, January 1998.

The mechanism is that there is no long-range gravitational retardation. This discredit’s Friedmann’s solution to GR. Quantum gravity modifies GR by insisting that exchange radiation between severely redshifted galaxies is itself – like the visible radiation – redshifted and has an energy deficit.

GR omits the dynamics for this quantum gravity phenomena. The prediction of the phenomena agrees with the detailed observations, and gets rid of evolving dark energy: http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/01/09/rabinowitz-and-quantum-gravity/

nc | Homepage | 01.12.07 – 10:51 am | #

Dark matter = phlogiston (however, actually there is some dark matter as dust, gas, neutrinos, etc., but not Friedmann critical density of dark matter)
Dark energy = caloric
Lambda-CDM model = Ptolemy’s Earth centred universe with its epicycles to force it to “predict” what we see.

Copy of a comment to
http://kea-monad.blogspot.com/2007/01/dark-mysteries-update.html

nige said…
Seeing that nobody has found any dark matter, it is just hype.

The usual evidence doesn’t say what it is. About 15% of the mass of the universe is dark dust. The usual claim, that the amount of dark matter is many times the mass of the glowing visible matter, is based on galactic rotation curves and the Friedmann critical density.

Both of these are wrong. Gravitational lensing due to matter in some cases has also been hyped as “direct evidence” of dark matter, and may be true. It may be mass from dark dust or neutrinos.

If there was a lot of dark matter around, why isn’t it here on earth? Why doesn’t {it} affect the solar system? The “direct evidence of dark matter” is just like epicycles in Ptolemy’s earth centred universe having “direct evidence” in the “fact” the sun orbits the earth, which everyone can see. Or the “direct evidence” that phlogiston exists because fires burn and the ash left is less massive than the material burned.

Phlogiston was actually the original “dark matter”, just as caloric was the original “dark energy”. [According to the scientific approach to physics, all that counts are facts, not fashionable popularity (citations) or how many collaborators there are.

This is obsolete, now that there is a landscape of 10^500 non-checkable string theory solutions to the same thing, particle physics. The way forward is for everyone who is a true scientist to join a mainstream bandwaggon. If it is headed in the wrong direction, who cares because might is right politically, and it's the mainstream which makes the most noise and gets attention from research funding committees.]

11:06 PM