http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2008/07/recreating-big-bang.html

“I suspect that there is just little motivation to actually get things right, but instead there is an emphasize on advertising and entertaining, and the more bang the better.”

It’s about making money. The exact reason why so-called cosmological “implications” of high energy physics research are eagerly hyped by the media was explained by Jeremy Webb, former BBC sound engineer and now Editor of New Scientist, in Roger Highfield’s article “So good she could have won twice” in the Daily Telegraph, 24 Aug. 2005:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2005/08/24/ecfysw24.xml

“Prof Heinz Wolff complained that cosmology is ‘religion, not science.’ Jeremy Webb [Editor] of New Scientist responded that it is not religion but magic. … ‘If I want to sell more copies of New Scientist, I put cosmology on the cover,’ said Jeremy.”

Since Jeremy’s job includes the requirement to make sure that the magazine sells well, it’s obvious why any alleged development in particle physics which has a cosmological connection is likely to end up as the story spin on the front cover.

The easiest way for a science journalist to begin an article about the LHC in a way that will grab an editor’s attention and the typical reader’s attention, is to write something like:

“The purpose of the LHC is to recreate exactly the conditions which occurred in the big bang, allowing us to see precisely what occurred during the creation of the universe.”

I’m glad that Martinus Veltman and bloggers such as Peter Woit and yourselves decided to be honest about what the LHC really is up to. It’s interesting enough to investigate the electroweak symmetry breaking mechanism, without the really interesting physics of the LHC being misrepresented by the BBC News and other purveyors of nonsense.

http://dorigo.wordpress.com/2008/07/01/fine-tuning-and-numerical-coincidences/#comment-98513

Lubos a few years ago condemned the book ‘The Final Theory’, which was being sold on Amazon with lots of positive reviews, after reading the first chapter which was available free ( http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/08/amazoncom-controlled-by-crackpots.html ). I later found that book quite by accident beside Feynman’s lectures on physics in a library! It’s based on the discovery of the numerical ‘coincidence’:

G = (1/2)g(r^3)/(Rm) = 6.82*10^{-11} (m^3)/(kg*s^2),

(2% higher than the observed constant), where g is the acceleration due to gravity on the surface of the Earth, R is Earth’s radius, r is mean orbital radius of the ground state of hydrogen, and m is the mass of a hydrogen atom. The book tries to justify this by an argument that the atoms, planets, etc., are expanding at an accelerative rate proportional to their radii. The idea in the book is that the ground accelerates upwards as the Earth expands, creating the illusion of gravity since everything expands.

This idea fails to hold water ( http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/06/20/the-mathematical-errors-in-the-standard-model-of-particle-physics/ ) for the simple reason that it would cause gravity to be solely dependent on the radius of the planet, instead of the mass of the planet. Also, his ‘theory’ doesn’t doesn’t explain the convenient arbitrary factor of 1/2 in his ‘coincidence’, and the expansion rate is higher by an astronomical factor than the observed acceleration of the universe. So it is numerology, and can’t explain the facts of gravitation. It doesn’t tie in to the observed expansion of the universe, or to the universal law of gravity where the force depends on the product of masses of the planets involved, not the radii of the planets.

Feynman explained sarcastically why coincidence can be a misunderstood concept: ‘On my way to campus today, I saw a car with the licence plate XRT-375 in the parking lot – isn’t that amazing? What are the odds of seeing that exact licence?’ The point is, probability just indicates your uncertainty given your ignorance of the situation. Once you have observed something, you are no longer uncertain. If something occurs, it’s no longer unlikely (to those who know about it); it’s just a certain fact. So ‘coincidences’ alone are not really too impressive. You expect some numerical coincidences when juggling with different values in a physics data book, so it’s only impressive if you have a theory that will predict a ‘coincidence’ in advance of finding empirical evidence. If you predict you will see a car with licence plate XRT-375 in the parking lot, then confirm the prediction, that would be a useful coincidence.

By comparison, Koide’s formula is relatively impressive because it has survived improvements to the data, and has various extensions. It is great that it is leading towards a theory which may be able predict other particle masses.

http://kea-monad.blogspot.com/2008/06/m-theory-lesson-197.html

Thank you for the link to the article about Galois’s last letter before his fatal duel. He must have led a very exciting life, making breakthroughs in mathematics and fighting duels. Dueling was a very permanent way to settle a dispute, unlike the uncivilized, interminable, tiresome squabbles which now take the place of duels.

The discussion of groups is interesting. I didn’t know that geometric solids correspond to Lie algebras. Does category theory have any bearing on group theory in physics, e.g. symmetry groups representing basic aspects of fundamental interactions and particles?

E.g., the Standard Model group structure of particle physics, U(1)*SU(2)*SU(3) is equivalent to the S(U(3)*U(2)) subgroup of SU(5), and E(8) contains many elements, including S(U(3)*U(2)) subgroups, so SU(5) and E(8) have been considered candidate theories of everything on mathematical grounds.

Do you think that these platonic symmetry searching methods are the wrong way to proceed in physics? Woit writes in http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0206/0206135v1.pdf that there the Standard Model problems are not tied to making the symmetry groups appear from some grand theory like a rabbit from a hat, but are concerned with explaining things like why the weak isospin SU(2) force is limited to action on just left-handed particles, why the masses of the standard model particles – including neutrinos – have the values they do, whether some kind of Higgs theory for mass and electroweak symmetry breaking is really solid science or whether it is like epicycles (there are quite a landscape of different versions of the Higgs theory with different numbers of Higgs bosons, so by ad hoc selection of the best fit and the most convenient mass, it’s a quite adjustable theory and not extremely falsifiable), and how quantum gravity can be represented within the symmetry group structure of the Standard Model at low energies (where any presumed grand symmetry like SU(5) or E(8) will be broken down into subgroups by various symmetry breaking mechanisms).

What worries me is that, because gravity isn’t included within the Standard Model, there is definitely at least one vital omission from the Standard Model. Because gravity is a long-range, inverse-square force at low energy (like electromagnetism), gravity will presumably involve a term similar to part of the electroweak SU(2)*U(1) symmetry group structure, not to the more complex SU(3) group. So maybe the SU(2)*U(1) group structure isn’t complete because it is missing gravity, which would change this structure, possibly simplifying things like the Higgs mechanism and electroweak symmetry breaking. If that’s the case, then it’s premature to search for a grand symmetry group which contains SU(3)*SU(2)*U(1) (or some isomorphism). You need to empirically put quantum gravity into the Standard Model, by altering the Standard Model, before you can tell what you are really looking for.

Otherwise, what you are doing is what Einstein spend the 1940s doing, i.e., seaching for a unification based on input that fails to include the full story. Einstein tried to unify all forces twenty before the weak and strong interactions were properly understood from experimental data, so he was too far ahead of his time to have sufficient understanding of the universe experimentally to be able to model it correctly theoretically. E.g., parity violation was only discovered after Einstein died. Einstein’s complete dismissal of quantum fields was extremely prejudiced and mistaken, but it’s pretty obvious that he was way off beam not just for his theoretical prejudices, but for trying to build a theory without having sufficient experimental input about the universe. In Einstein’s time there was no evidence of quarks, no colour force, no electroweak unification, and instead of working on trying to understand the large number of particles being discovered, he preferred to stick to classical field theory unification attempts. To the (large) extend that mainstream ideas like string theory tend to bypass experimental data from particle physics entirely, such theories seem to suffer the same fate as Einstein’s efforts at unification. To start with, they ignore most of the real problems in fundamental physics (particle masses, symmetry breaking mechanisms, etc.), they assume that existing speculations about unification and quantum gravity are headed in the correct direction, then they speculatively unify those guesses without making any falsifiable predictions. That’s what Einstein was doing. To those people this approach seemed like a very good idea at the time, or at least it seemed to be the best choice available at the time. However, a theory that isn’t falsifiable experimentally may still be discarded for theoretical reasons when a better theory comes along.

http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/03/16/why-old-discarded-theories-wont-be-taken-seriously/

Teresa,

Electromagnetism and gravity do have a certain amount in common; the inverse square law. What’s also interesting is that the electromagnetic force between a proton and electron is 10^40 times stronger than gravitation. Also, magnetism is dipolar; nobody has discovered even a single magnetic monopole in nature. You get attraction of unlike poles and repulsion of like poles. Gravitation is a monopole force field; yet it is always attractive no matter what the electric charge of the mass/energy.

I wrote an article in Electronics World April 2003 which leads to the conclusion that the distinction between gravity and electromagnetism is a result of a simple physical difference: the charge of the gauge bosons being exchanged. This predicts the 10^40 coupling constant difference between electromagnetism and gravity, and it explains why gravitation is always attractive (over non-cosmological distances; get too far and the net effect is repulsion because the theory predicts the small positive cosmological constant which is accelerating the universe), and why unlike electromagnetic charges attract while like electromagnetic charges repel.

Gravity is due to electrically uncharged gauge bosons are exchanged between all mass/energy in the universe. Net gravitational forces arise due to asymmetry, the Lesage shadowing effect, due to the way the exchange process works.

In order for two masses to exchange gravitons, they must be receding from one another at a relativistic velocity in accordance with the Hubble law, v = HR. This gives them an outward acceleration from one another of a = dv/dt = d(HR)/dt = Hv = RH^2. As a result of this acceleration, they have a force outward from one another of F = ma = mRH^2. Simple!

Newton’s 3rd law (action and reaction are equal and opposite) then tells us that the outward forces of each of the receding masses must result in an equal inward reaction force. This force – by elimination of all other possibilities – is carried by gravitons.

Hence, gravitation causes distant receding masses to forcefully fire off gravitons at each other, so the relativistically receding masses end up exchanging gravitons and being repelled apart. Impulses and recoil forces when gravitons are exchanged between relativistically receding masses causes those masses to go on accelerating as they recede from one another. This gives the cosmological acceleration normally attributed to dark energy (the Lambda term).

Now examine what happens when two masses (say me and the planet Earth) are not relativistically receding relative to one another! There is no forceful exchange of gravitons between me and the Earth! This is because the acceleration of me away from the Earth is zero, so the force of me away from the Earth is zero, and the reaction force of gravitons from me towards the Earth is zero.

In other words, I’m not exchanging gravitons with the Earth in a forceful way, simply because I’m not receding from the Earth. So the Earth and I are unable to exchange gravitons efficiently! This is a shielding effect, because the Earth and myself are both exchanging gravitons with the distant, receding galaxies in the universe.

The only direction in which I’m not able to efficiently exchange gravitons is downward, because some of the tiny fundamental particles in the Earth are exchanging gravitons with distant receding masses in that direction from me, but are unable to then exchange those gravitons with me because there is no graviton exchange between myself and the Earth. Hence, the fundamental particles in the Earth are shielding or shadowing a small portion of the graviton force from distant receding galaxies in the downward direction from me!

So the net graviton force on me is the excess of gravitons pushing downwards over that coming upward through the planet below me.

Now this is a very simple geometric effect: gravitons are electrically uncharged exchange radiation with spin-1, like photons. For electromagnetism, the only way to get a physical understanding is to change Feynman’s QED U(1) Abelian theory. There are lots of problems with U(1): it only has one type of charge (hence the 1 in U(1) symmetry), so negative and positive charges have to be treated as the same thing moving in different directions through time. But there is no evidence that anything goes backward in time. Also, there are other problems with the mainstream U(1) electromagnetism. It doesn’t predict or explain physically what the mechanism for electromagnetic forces is; it has to use a photon with 4-polarizations instead of the normal 2, so that it can include attraction and not just repulsion. It’s a very unsatisfactory physical description.

My argument here is that electromagnetism and gravity are actually an SU(2) Yang-Mills theory, with charged massless gauge bosons. SU(2) gives rise to two types of charge and three types of gauge boson: neutral, positive and negative. I’ve worked out that charged massless gauge bosons can propagate in the vacuum despite the usual objection to the charged massless radiation (infinite magnetic self-inductance): what happens is that in exchange radiation, there is an equilibrium of exchange of radiation travelling in two directions at once, so the clockwise magnetic curl of say leftward travelling charged radiation will exactly cancel out the relatively anticlickwise curl of rightward travelling charged radiation. The cancellation of the magnetic curls in this way means that the magnetic self-inductance is no longer infinite but zero!

Next, the exchange of charged massless gauge bosons between electromagnetic charges has more possibilities than gravitation. The random arrangement of fundamental charges (positive and negative) relative to one another throughout the universe means that all of the positive and negative electric charges in the universe will be linked up by their exchange of charged gauge bosons, like a lot of positive and negative charged capacitor plates separated by vacuum dielectric. Because the arrangement is random, they won’t add up linearly. If the addition was linear with positive and negative charges arranged in a long line with alternating sign at each charge, then the result would be like a series of batteries or capacitors in circuit, and electromagnetism would be stronger than gravitation by about a factor of 10^80 (the number of hydrogen atoms in the universe).

Because the arrangement is random, and charged gauge bosons of one sign are stopped by half the charges in the universe, the actual addition is non-linear. It’s a drunkard’s statistical walk, like the zig-zag path of a particle undergoing Brownian motion. The vector sum can be worked out by doing a path integral calculation. It’s approximately the square root of the number of hydrogen atoms in the universe, times stronger than gravity. I.e. 10^40.

This model also explains repulsive forces and attractive forces in electromagnetism, as a correspondent (Guy Grantham) has pointed out to me. Because you have two types of charged gauge boson, two protons have overlapping force fields composed of positively charged massless gauge bosons.

As a result, the protons exchange positively charged gauge bosons and get repelled away from one another, rather like two people firing machine guns at one another will be forced apart both by the recoil impulses when firing each round, and by the strikes when receiving each round! (The incoming positively charged exchange radiation from distant masses in the universe to the far side of each of the protons being considered is severely redshifted and thus carries little energy and hence little momentum.)

In the case of dissimilar charges, the positive charge and negative charge (or north pole and south pole in the case of two magnets) suffer the problem that the opposing fields cancel each other out instead of adding up. So there is no forceful exchange of radiation between them; they shield one another just like the Lesage shadowing gravity mechanism, and so opposite charges get pushed together by the exchange radiations coming from the distant receding galaxies in the universe.

The fact that the electromagnetic attractive force between a proton and an electron is identical in strength but opposite in sign (i.e. direction) to the repulsive force between either two protons or two electrons, is explained by the energy balance of exchange radiation with the surrounding universe during the period that the force is acting, as proved graphically in my April 2003 Electronics World article.

When two particles repel or attract due to electromagnetism, they are converting the potential energy of the redshifted incoming exchange radiation energy (from distant charges in the receding universe) into kinetic energy. The amount of energy available in this way per second (i.e., the power used to accelerate charges) to just two charges (whether they are proton and electron, proton and proton, or electron and electron) is the same because each charge has a similar cross-section for interactions with exchange radiations!

Hence, when two protons or two electrons repel, they are being repelled by a similar power of radiant exchange radiation supplied externally by the surrounding universe as in the case of the attraction of one proton and one electron.

The diagram in the April 2003 Electronics World article makes this energy summation clearer: the resultant of all the exchanges is that unit similar charges repel at the same force that dissimilar charges attract.

I agree with you that light is a particle and has mass: saying light has “no rest mass” which the literature is fond of announcing, is pathetic because light is not at rest anyway,

“The fact that photons have no rest mass isn’t a problem because … they can never be at rest anyway …”

- page 21 of P.C.W. Davies, The Forces of Nature, Cambridge University Press, London, 2nd ed., 1986.

Nige

http://kea-monad.blogspot.com/2008/01/riemann-rekindled-iii.html

I’ll have to concentrate on this a lot more, I guess. At present categorical theory is still way over my head. I think in school we did a bit of very basic set/group maths, like Venn diagrams and the just the abstract symbols for union (U) and intersection (upside down U), but they the whole area was dropped. From there on it was algebra, trig and calculus (particularly the nightmare of integrating complex trig functions like cot or cosec theta, without having a good memory for trivia like definitions of abstract jargon). There was no set or group theory in the pure maths A-level, and at university the quantum mechanics and cosmology (aka elementary general relativity) courses didn’t use anything more advanced than calculus with a bit of symbolic compression (operators).

The kind of maths where you get logical arguments with lots of abstract symbolism from set theory and group theory is therefore completely alien. I can see the point in categorizing large numbers of simple items, if that is as actually a major objective of categorical theory. It would be nice if it were possible to build up solutions to complex problems like quantum gravitation by categorizing large numbers of very simple operations, i.e. if individual graviton exchanges between masses could be treated as simple vectors and categorized according to direction or resultant to simplify the effect. Smolin had a Perimeter lecture on quantum gravity where he showed how he was getting the Einstein field equation of general relativity by summing all of the interaction graphs in an assumed spin foam vacuum. I’m not sure that a spin foam vacuum is physically the correct, but the general idea of building up from a summing of lots of resultants for individual graviton interaction graphs is certainly appealing from my point of view.

“with $F(2) = \pi$, and this looks something like a count of binary trees, with an increasing number of branches at each step. What are the higher dimensional analogues of $i$? What if we took the $s$-th root, so that $F(2n)$ was some multiple of $\pi$ for all $n \in \mathbb{N}$, just like the volumes of spheres?”

I may be way off topic in my physical interpretation here, but if you are considering how graviton exchanges occur between individual masses (particles, including particles of energy since these interact with gravity and thus have associated with them a gravitational charge field), then you could well have a tree structure to help work out the overall flow of energy in a gravitational field from a theory of quantum gravity.

I.e., each mass (or particle with energy) radiates gravitons to several other masses, which radiate to still more, in an geometric progression. This loss of energy is balanced by the reception of gravitons. Presumably this kind of idea just sounds too naive and simplistic to people in the mainstream, who assume (without it ever having been correctly proved) that such simplistic ideas must be wrong because nobody respectable is working on them.

I’m studying the maths of the SU(2) lagrangian as time allows. It’s nice that the lagrangian is simplest for the case of massless spinor fields (massless gauge bosons). The most clear matrix representations of U(1) and SU(2) to particle physics I’ve come across are equations 8.59 and 8.65 (which are surprisingly similar) in Ryder’s “Quantum Field Theory”. The Dirac lagrangian for a massless field just summed for the particles: e.g., right handed electron, left handed electron, and also the neutrino which only occurs in the left-handed form. Given some time, it should be possible to understand the massless SU(2) lagrangian since it is relatively simple maths (pages 298-301 of Ryder’s 2nd edition, also the first 3 chapters of Ryder were excellent lucid introductions to gauge fields in general and the Yang-Mills field in particular).

But one problem I do have with the whole gauge theory approach is that it is built on calculus to represent fields; ideal for a vacuum that is a continuum, but inappropriate for quantized fields. There’s an absurdity in treating the acceleration of an electron by quantized, individual discrete virtual photons or by gravitons as a smooth curvature of spacetime! It’s obviously going to a bumpy (stepwise) acceleration, with a large number of individual impulses causing an overall (statistical) effect that is just approximated by differential geometry. I think it’s manifestly absurd for anyone to be seeking a unification of general relativity and quantum field theory that builds on differential geometry. Air pressure, like gravity, appears to be a continuous variable on large scales where the number of air molecule impacts per unit area per second is a very large number. But it breaks down for small numbers of impacts, for example in Brownian motion, where small particles receive chaotic impulses not a smooth averaged out pressure. Differential equations are usually good approximations for classical physics (large scales), but they are not going to properly model the fndamental physical processes going on in quantum gravity. You can do quite a lot with the calculus of air pressure (such as fnding that it falls off nearly exponentially with increasing altitude, and finding the relationship between wind speed and pressure gradients in hurricanes), but you can’t deduce anything about air molecules from this non-discrete (continuum) differential model. It breaks down on small scales. So does differential geometry when applied to small numbers of quantum interactions in a force field. This is why the classical physics breaks down on small scales, and chaos appears.

It would be nice if it were possible to replace differential geometry in QFT and GR with some kind of quantized geometry and show how the approximations of QFT and GR are valid, emerging for the limiting case whereby very large numbers of field quanta interact with the particle of interest, so that the averaging of many chaotic impulses produces a deterministic average effect every time on large scales.

http://riofriospacetime.blogspot.com/2007/08/black-holes-lead-to-storm.html

One more piece of quantitative evidence that fermions are black holes:

Using Hawking’s formula to calculate the effective black body radiating temperature of a black hole yields the figure of 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.

http://riofriospacetime.blogspot.com/2007/08/black-holes-lead-to-storm.html

Tony,

You wrote here (that is a U.S. Amazon book discussion comment, where I can’t contribute as participants need to have bought books from the U.S. Amazon site, and being in England I’ve only bought books from Amazon.co.uk):

… shortly after Baez described his Six Mysteries in Ontario, I sent an e-mail message to Smolin saying:

‘Mystery 4: Neutrino masses and mixing angles consistent with experiment are described in the first part of this pdf file http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/NeutrinosEVOs.pdf Mystery 5: A partial answer: If quarks are regarded as Kerr-Newman black holes, merger of a quark-antiquark pair to form a charged pion produce a toroidal event horizon carrying sine-Gordon structure, so that, given up and down quark constituent masses of about 312 MeV,the charged pion gets a mass of about 139 MeV, as described in http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/sGmTqqbarPion.pdf Mysteries 6 and 1:The Dark Energy : Dark Matter : Ordinary Matter ratio of about 73 : 23 : 4 is described in http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/WMAPpaper.pdf

I’m extremely interested in this, particularly the idea that the mass-providing boson is a condensate particle formed of a Top quark and an anti-Top quark, like a meson. I’m also extremely interested in quarks modelled as Kerr-Newman black holes in the pion, to predict the mass. Your mathematical technical approach is not easy going for me, however.

Maybe I can outline some independent information I’ve acquired regarding three basic scientific confirmations that fermions are indeed black holes, emitting gauge bosons at a tremendous rate as a form of Hawking radiation:

(1) The “contrapuntal model for the charged capacitor”, which I’ll explain in detailed numbered steps below:

(1.a) All electric energy carried by conductors travels at light velocity for the insulator around the conductors.

(1.b) A small section of a (two-conductor) transmission line can be charged by like a capacitor, and behaves like a simple capacitor, storing electric energy.

(1.c) Charge up that piece of transmission line using of sampling oscilloscopes to record what happens, and you learn that energy flows into it at light velocity for the insulator.

(1.d) There is no mechanism for that electricity to suddenly slow down when it enters a capacitor. It can’t physically slow down. It reflects off the open circuit at the far end and is trapped in a loop, going up and down the transmission line endlessly. This produces the apparently “static” electric field in all charges. The magnetic fields from each component of the trapped energy (going in opposite directions) curl in different directions around the propagation direction, so the magnetic field cancels out.

(1.e) The “field” (electromagnetic vector boson exchange radiation) that causes electromagnetic forces controls the speed of the logic signal, and the electron drift speed (1 millimetre/second for 1 Amp in typical domestic electric cables) has nothing to do with it.

(1.f) Electricity in paired conductors is primarily driven by vector boson radiation (comprising the electromagnetic “field”). The electron drift current, although vital for supplying electrons to chemical reactions and to cathode emitters in vacuum tubes, is pretty much irrelevant as far as the delivery of electric energy is concerned. (It’s easy to calculate what the kinetic energy of all the electron drift in a cable amounts to, and it is insignificant compared to the amount of energy being delivered by electricity. This is because of the low speed of the electron drift in typical situations, combined with the fact that the conduction electrons have little mass so their total mass is typically just ~0.1% of the mass of the conductors. Kinetic energy E = (1/2)mv^2 tells you that for small m and tiny drift velocity v, electron drift is not the main source of energy delivery in ordinary electricity. Instead, gauge/vector bosons in the EM field are responsible for delivering the energy. Hence, by a close study of the details of how logic pulses interact and charge up capacitors – which is not modelled accurately by Maxwell’s classical model – something new about the EM vector bosons of QFT may be deduced from solid, repeatable experimental data!)

(1.g) The trapped light velocity energy in a capacitor is unable to slow down, and the effect of it being trapped leads to the apparently “static” electric field and nil magnetic field (as explained in 1.d above). Another effect of the trapping of energy is that there is no net electric field along the charged up capacitor plate: the potential is the same number of volts everywhere, so there is no gradient (i.e., there is no volts/metre) and thus no electron drift current. Without electron drift current, we have no resistance because resistance is due to moving conduction band electrons colliding with the conductor’s metal lattice and releasing heat as a result of the deceleration. There is merely a energy bounding at light speed in all directions in any charged object.

There is also the effect of electric charge in the form of electrons that drifts into one capacitor plate (the negative one), and out of the other plate (the positive one), while the capacitor is charging up.

(1.h) Now for electrons. The capacitor model (1.g above) explains how gauge boson radiation (the field) gets trapped in a capacitor. Experiments by I.C., who pioneered research on logic signal crosstalk in the 60s, confirmed this: a capacitor receives energy at light speed for the insulator in the feel transmission line, the energy that gets trapped in a transmission line can’t slow down, and it exits at light speed when discharged. He, together with two other engineers, also showed how to get Maxwell’s exponential charging law (1 – e^x) out of this model although it contains various errors and omissions in the physics. However, the main results are correct. When you discharge the a capacitor charged at v volts, (such as a charged length of cable), instead of getting a pulse at v volts coming out with a length of x metres (i.e., taking a time of t = x/c seconds), you instead get a pulse of v/2 volts taking 2x/c seconds to exit. In other words, the half of the energy already moving towards the exit end, exits first. That gives a pulse of v/2 volts lasting x/c seconds. Then the half of the energy going initially the wrong way has had time to go to the far end, reflect back, and follow the first half of the energy. This gives the second half of the output, another pulse of v/2 volts lasting for another x/c seconds and following straight on from the first pulse. Hence, the observer measures an output of v/2 volts lasting for a total duration of 2x/c seconds. This is experimental fact. It was Oliver Heaviside – who translated Maxwell’s 20 long-hand differential equations into the four vector equations (two divs, two curls) – who experimentally discovered the first evidence for this when solving problems with the Newcastle-Denmark undersea telegraph cable in 1875, using ‘Morse Code’ (logic signals). (Heaviside’s theory is flawed physically because he treated rise times as instantaneous, a “step”, an unphysical discontinuity which would imply infinite rate of change of the field at the instant of the step, causing infinite “displacement current”, and this error is inherited by Catt, Davidson, and Walton, which blocks a complete understanding of the mechanisms at work.)

Using the model of trapped gauge boson radiation to represent static charge, the electron is understood to be a trapped charged gauge boson. The only way to trap a light velocity gauge boson like this is for spacetime curvature (gravitation) to trap it in a loop, hence it’s a black hole.

In the August 2002 issue of British journal Electronics World there is an illustration demonstrating that for such a looped gauge boson, the electric field lines – at long distances compared to the black hole radius – diverge as given by Gauss’s/Coulomb’s law, while the magnetic field lines circling around the looped propagation direction form a toroidal shape near the electron black hole radius but at large distances the results of cancellations is that you just see magnetic dipole, which is a feature of leptons.

(2) The second piece of empirical evidence that fermions can be modelled by black holes that I’ve come across is in connection with gravity calculations. If the outward acceleration of the mass of the universe creates a force like F = ma (which is a force on the order of 7*10^43 Newtons, although there are obvious various corrections you can think of such as the effect of the higher density of the universe at earlier times and greater distances – I’ve undertaken some such calculations on my newer blog – or questions over how much “dark matter” there is which is behaving like mass and accelerating away from us) where m is mass of universe and a is acceleration, then Newton’s 3rd law suggests an equal inward force, which according to the possibilities available would seem to be carried by vector bosons that cause forces.

To test this, we work out what cross-sectional shielding area an electron would need to have in order that the shielding of the inward-directed force would give rise to gravity as an asymmetry effect (this asymmetry idea as the cause of gravity is an idea sneered at and ignorantly dismissed for false reasons, and variously credited to Newton’s friend Fatio or to Fatio’s Swiss plagiarist, Georges LeSage).

It turns out that the cross-sectional area of the electron would be Pi*(2GM/c^2)^2 square metres where M is the electron’s rest mass, which implies an effective electron radius of 2GM/c^2, which is the event horizon radius for a black hole.

This is the second piece of evidence that an electron is related to black hole, although it is not a strong piece of evidence in my view because the result could be just a coincidence.

(3) The third piece of evidence is a different calculation for the gravity mechanism discussed in (2) above. A simple physical argument allows the derivation of the the actual cross-sectional shielding area for gravitation, and this calculation can be found as “Approach 2″ on my blog page here.

When combined with the now-verified earlier calculation, this new approach allows gravity strength to be predicted accurately as well as giving evidence that fermions have a cross-sectional area for gravitational interactions equal to the cross-sectional area of the black hole event horizon for the particle mass.

http://riofriospacetime.blogspot.com/2007/08/black-holes-lead-to-storm.html

“Theoretically if an accelerator fired enough mass into a tiny space a singularity would be created. The Black Hole would almost instantly evaporate, but could be detected via Hawking radiation. Unfortunately quantum mechanics says that a particle’s location can not be precisely measured. This quantum uncertainty would prevent us from putting enough mass into a singularity.”

I disagree with Lisa Randall here. It depends on whether the black hole is charged or not, which changes the mechanism for the emission of Hawking radiation.

The basic idea is that in a strong electric field, pairs of virtual positive fermions and virtual negative fermions appear spontaneously. If this occurs at the event horizon of a black hole, one of the pair can at random fall into the black hole, while the other one escapes.

However, there is a factor Hawking and Lisa Randall ignore: the requirement of the black hole having electric charge in the first place, because pair production has only been demonstrated to occur in strong fields, the standard model fields of the strong and electromagnetic force fields (nobody has ever seen pair production occur in the extremely weak gravitational fields).

Hawking ignores the fact that pair production in quantum field theory (according to Schwinger’s calculations, which very accurately predict other things like the magnetic moments of leptons and the Lamb shift in the hydrogen spectra) requires a net electric field to exist at the event horizon at the black hole.

This in turn means that the black hole must carry a net electric charge and cannot be neutral if there is to be any Hawking radiation.

In turn, this implies that Hawking radiation in general is not gamma rays as Hawking claims it is.

Gamma rays in Hawking’s theory are produced just beyond the event horizon of the black hole by as many virtual positive fermions as virtual negative fermions escaping and then annihilating into gamma rays.

This mechanism can’t occur if the black hole is charged, because the net electric charge [which is required to give the electric field which is required for pair-production in the vacuum in the first place] of the black hole interferes with the selection of which virtual fermions escape from the event horizon!

If the black hole has a net positive charge, it will skew the distribution of escaping radiation so that more virtual positive charges escape than virtual negative charges.

This, in turn, means that the escaped charges beyond the event horizon won’t be equally positive and negative; so they won’t be able to annihilate into gamma rays.

It’s strange that Hawking has never investigated this.

You only get Hawking radiation if the black hole has an electric charge of Q > 16*Pi*Permittivity*[(mMG)^2]/(c*e*h-bar).

(This condition is derived below.)

The type of Hawking radiation you get emitted is generally going to be charged, not neutral.

My understanding is that the fermion and boson are both results of fundamental prions. As Carl Brannen and Tony Smith have suggested, fermions may be a triplet of prions to explain the three generations of the standard model, and the colour charge in SU(3) QCD.

Bosons of the classical photon variety would generally have two prions: because their electric field oscillates from positive to negative (the positive electric field half cycle constitutes an effective source of positive electric charge and can be considered to be one preon, while the negative electric field half cycle in a photon can be considered another preon).

Hence, there are definite reasons to suspect that all fermions are composed of three preons, while bosons consist of pairs of preons.

Considering this, Hawking radiation is more likely to be charged gauge boson radiation. This does explain electromagnetism if you replace the U(1)xSU(2) electroweak unification with an SU(2) electroweak unification, where you have 3 gauge bosons which exist in both massive forms (at high energy, mediating weak interactions) and also massless forms (at all energies), due to the handedness of the way these three gauge bosons acquire mass from a mass-providing field. Since the standard model’s electroweak symmetry breaking (Higgs) field fails to make really convincing falsifiable predictions (there are lots of versions of Higgs field ideas making different “predictions”, so you can’t falsify the idea easily), it is very poor physics.

Sheldon Glashow and Julian Schwinger investigated the use of SU(2) to unify electromagnetism and weak interactions in 1956, as Glashow explains in his Nobel lecture of 1979:

‘Schwinger, as early as 1956, believed that the weak and electromagnetic interactions should be combined into a gauge theory. The charged massive vector intermediary and the massless photon were to be the gauge mesons. As his student, I accepted his faith. … We used the original SU(2) gauge interaction of Yang and Mills. Things had to be arranged so that the charged current, but not the neutral (electromagnetic) current, would violate parity and strangeness. Such a theory is technically possible to construct, but it is both ugly and experimentally false [H. Georgi and S. L. Glashow, Physical Review Letters, 28, 1494 (1972)]. We know now that neutral currents do exist and that the electroweak gauge group must be larger than SU(2).’

This is plain wrong: Glashow and Schwinger believed that electromagnetism would have to be explained by a massless uncharged photon acting as the vector boson which communicates the force field.

If they had considered the mechanism for how electromagnetic interactions can occur, they would have seen that it’s entirely possible to have massless charged vector bosons as well as massive ones for short range weak force interactions. Then SU(2) gives you six vector bosons:

Massless W_+ = +ve electric fields
Massless W_- = -ve electric fields
Massless Z_o = graviton (neutral)

Massive W_+ = mediates weak force
Massive W_- = mediates weak force
Massive Z_o = neutral currents

Going back to the charged radiation from black holes, massless charged radiation mediates electromagnetic interactions.

This idea that black holes must evaporate if they are real simply because they are radiating, is flawed: air molecules in my room are all radiating energy, but they aren’t getting cooler: they are merely exchanging energy. There’s an equilibrium.

Equations

To derive the condition for Hawking’s heuristic mechanism of radiation emission, he writes that pair production near the event horizon sometimes leads to one particle of the pair falling into the black hole, while the other one escapes and becomes a real particle. If on average as many fermions as antifermions escape in this manner, they annihilate into gamma rays outside the black hole.

Schwinger’s threshold electric field for pair production is: E_c = (m^2)*(c^3)/(e*h-bar) = 1.3*10^18 volts/metre. Source: equation 359 in http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0608140 or equation 8.20 in http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0510040

So at least that electric field strength must exist at the event horizon, before black holes emit any Hawking radiation! (This is the electric field strength at 33 fm from an electron.) Hence, in order to radiate by Hawking’s suggested mechanism, black holes must carry enough electric charge so make the eelectric field at the event horizon radius, R = 2GM/c^2, exceed 1.3*10^18 v/m.

Now the electric field strength from an electron is given by Coulomb’s law with F = E*q = qQ/(4*Pi*Permittivity*R^2), so

E = Q/(4*Pi*Permittivity*R^2) v/m.

Setting this equal to Schwinger’s threshold for pair-production, (m^2)*(c^3)/(e*h-bar) = Q/(4*Pi*Permittivity*R^2). Hence, the maximum radius out to which fermion-antifermion pair production and annihilation can occur is

R = [(Qe*h-bar)/{4*Pi*Permittivity*(m^2)*(c^3)}]^{1/2}.

Where Q is black hole’s electric charge, and e is electronic charge, and m is electron’s mass. Set this R equal to the event horizon radius 2GM/c^2, and you find the condition that must be satisfied for Hawking radiation to be emitted from any black hole:

Q > 16*Pi*Permittivity*[(mMG)^2]/(c*e*h-bar)

where M is black hole mass.

So the amount of electric charge a black hole must possess before it can radiate (according to Hawking’s mechanism) is proportional to the square of the mass of the black hole.

On the other hand, it’s interesting to look at fundamental particles in terms of black holes (Yang-Mills force-mediating exchange radiation may be Hawking radiation in an equilibrium).

When you calculate the force of gauge bosons emerging from an electron as a black hole (the radiating power is given by the Stefan-Boltzmann radiation law, dependent on the black hole radiating temperature which is given by Hawking’s formula), you find it correlates to the electromagnetic force, allowing quantitative predictions to be made. See http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/05/25/quantum-gravity-mechanism-and-predictions/#comment-1997 for example.

To summarize: Hawking, considering uncharged black holes, says that either of the fermion-antifermion pair is equally likey to fall into the black hole. However, if the black hole is charged (as it must be in the case of an electron), the black hole charge influences which particular charge in the pair of virtual particles is likely to fall into the black hole, and which is likely to escape. Consequently, you find that virtual positrons fall into the electron black hole, so an electron (as a black hole) behaves as a source of negatively charged exchange radiation. Any positive charged black hole similarly behaves as a source of positive charged exchange radiation.

These charged gauge boson radiations of electromagnetism are predicted by an SU(2) electromagnetic mechanism, see Figures 2, 3 and 4 of http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/06/20/the-mathematical-errors-in-the-standard-model-of-particle-physics/

It’s amazing how ignorant mainstream people are about this. They don’t understand that charged massless radiation can only propagate if there is an exchange (vector boson radiation going in both directions between charges) so that the magnetic field vectors cancel, preventing infinite self inductance.

Hence the whole reason why we can only send out uncharged photons from a light source is that we are only sending them one way. Feynman points out clearly that there are additional polarizations but observable long-range photons only have two polarizations.

It’s fairly obvious that between two positive charges you have a positive electric field because the exchanged vector bosons which create that field are positive in nature. They can propagate despite being massless because there is a high flux of charged radiation being exchanged in both directions (from charge 1 to charge 2, and from charge 2 to charge 1) simultaneously, which cancels out the magnetic fields due to moving charged radiation and prevents infinite self-inductance from stopping the radiation. The magnetic field created by any moving charge has a directional curl, so radiation of similar charge going in opposite directions will cancel out the magnetic fields (since they oppose) for the duration of the overlap.

All this is well known experimentally from sending logic signals along transmission lines, which behave as photons. E.g. you need two parallel conductors at different potential to cause a logic signal to propagate, each conductor containing a field waveform which is an exact inverted image of that in the other (the magnetic fields around each of the conductors cancels the magnetic field of the other conductor, preventing infinite self-inductance).

Moreover, the full mechanism for this version of SU(2) makes lots of predictions. So fermions are blac[k] holes and the charged Hawking radiation they emit is the gauge bosons of electromagnetism and weak interactions.

Presumably the neutral radiation is emitted by electrically neutral field quanta which give rise to the mass (gravitational charge). The reason why gravity is so weak is because it is mediated by electrically neutral vector bosons.

From: “Nigel Cook”
To: “David Tombe” ; ; ; ; ; ;
Cc: ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Sent: Friday, July 27, 2007 9:54 AM
Subject: Re: The Effect of Gravity on Light

Dear David,

The electrons and positrons we see are not the same thing as an “aether”, or
the vacuum would be full of matter (electrons and positrons), which could be
polarized.

The complete absence of vacuum polarization at electric field strengths
below 1.3*10^18 volts/metre, Schwinger’s threshold for pair production in
QED, dispenses with your (and the Simhony/Grantham) electron-positron ether
as a medium which allows radiation propagation at field strengths below this
threshold.

As stated about a year ago to you, if the vacuum could polarize at low field
strengths, the effective electron charge seen from a large distance would be
exactly zero. It isn’t, because of the IR cutoff on the running coupling
for the screening of the electron’s charge by the polarized vacuum.

More information:

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

This dispenses with the idea that an electron-positron “aether” has any role
in allowing the propagation of radiation. Ignoring these facts doesn’t make
your model more rigorous.

Best wishes,
Nigel

—– Original Message —–
From: “David Tombe”
To: ; ; ;
; ;
;
Cc: ; ; ;
; ;
; ; ;
; ; ;
; ;

Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2007 4:02 PM
Subject: Re: The Effect of Gravity on Light

> Dear Nigel,
> You are confusing two separate issues here. We need to
> distinguish between what goes on between the electrons and positrons and
> what is the wider effect of the electron positron sea as a whole.
>
> I don’t encounter any of the frictional problems that you
> are talking about for EM theory because in my view, EM radiation is about
> the manner in which angular acceleration is propagated from one electron
> positron dipole to the next.
>
> In the wider electric sea we may have friction for fast
> moving bodies. On the other hand, centrifugal pressure and solenoidal
> alignement should have a significant effect on reducing friction or maybe
> even eliminating it.
>
> Yours sincerely
> David Tombe
>
> —-Original Message Follows—-
> From: “Nigel Cook”
> Reply-To: “Nigel Cook”
> To: “David Tombe”
> ,,,,,,
> CC:
> ,,,,,,,,,,,,,
> Subject: Re: The Effect of Gravity on Light
> Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2007 14:34:13
>
> “Gravity and EM radiation both involve aether flow.” – David.
>
> Dear David,
>
> You might as well say
>
> “Gravity and EM radiation both involve Wakalixes flow.”
>
> (For information on what Wakalixes are, please see
> http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm .)
>
> Don’t you think that aether of the kind you’re suggesting would behave
> like a gas, and slow down things, contrary to Newton’s 1st law of motion?
>
> That kind of drag occurs because the electron-positron aether is comprised
> of fermions, which obey the exclusion principle and interfere with one
> another, so energy gets spread out in that kind of aether (if it existed
> as in your picture), making moving bodies lose energy and slow down.
>
> Massless (no rest mass) bosonic radiation has the advantage that the
> bosons which interact with a body don’t dissipate energy by interacting
> with one another, so they behave as a perfect fluid and don’t slow things
> down. The bosonic field doesn’t heat up in causing forces, unlike a
> fermion composed sea such as your electron and positron aether.
>
> Best wishes,
> Nigel
>
>
> —– Original Message —– From: “David Tombe”
> To: ; ;
> ; ;
> ; ;
>
> Cc: ; ; ;
> ; ;
> ; ; ;
> ; ; ;
> ; ;
>
> Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2007 12:46 PM
> Subject: The Effect of Gravity on Light
>
>
>>Dear Nigel,
>> It’s true that I can’t predict the electric permittivity of
>> the pure aether. But that doesn’t detract from the fact that the only
>> function that satisfies E in EM radiation is -(partial)dA/dt where curl A
>> = B.
>>
>> -(partial)dA/dt must therefore represent tangential
>> acceleration.
>>
>> Gravity and EM radiation both involve aether flow. But EM
>> radiation is a vortex flow of rms velocity c. Gravitation is a radial
>> flow that imparts its acceleration to particles.
>>
>> It would of course probably follow that if the gravity
>> inflow velocity were greater than the speed of light, that light would be
>> unable to escape as it wouldn’t be able to overcome the flow.
>>
>> Yours sincerely
>> David Tombe
>>
>>
>>
>>—-Original Message Follows—-
>>From: “Nigel Cook”
>>Reply-To: “Nigel Cook”
>>To: “David Tombe”
>>,,,,,,
>>CC:
>>,,,,,,,,,,,,,
>>Subject: Re: Irrotational Flow in Little Switzerland
>>Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2007 12:34:31
>>
>>Dear David,
>>
>>I seem to think otherwise because the mechanism predicts gravitation
>>accurately as well as predicting electromagnetism accurately, and many
>>other things, see http://nige.wordpress.com/about/ . I don’t see the
>>evidence for your claims. Yes you can cook up vortex formulae that you
>>seem to think look like Gauss’s law and Newton’s law, but you can’t also
>>predict the values of the fundamental constants which determine the
>>strengths of gravity and electromagnetism, etc.
>>
>>This is why your claims that I’ve got it wrong are a bit of political
>>spin. If I’ve got it wrong, then it’s a coincidence that I’m predicting
>>all the constants accurately!
>>
>>If I were wrong, it would be better than being “not even wrong”, not
>>making any checkable calculations… It’s pretty easy to say everything
>>is due to aether swirls.
>>
>>Best wishes,
>>Nigel
>>
>>
>>
>>—– Original Message —– From: “David Tombe”
>>To: ; ;
>>; ;
>>; ;
>>
>>Cc: ; ; ;
>>; ;
>>; ; ;
>>; ; ;
>>; ;
>>
>>Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2007 11:26 AM
>>Subject: Re: Irrotational Flow in Little Switzerland
>>
>>
>>>Dear Nigel,
>>> You’ve got it all wrong. Centripetal acceleration has got
>>> absolutely nothing to do with the EM radiation mechanism. In fact
>>> neither does centrifugal acceleration.
>>>
>>> The component involved in EM radiation is the ‘angular
>>> acceleration’ which doesn’t even exist in Keplerian orbits. EM radiation
>>> is linked to vorticity. Radiation exchange may well occur but it doesn’t
>>> actually cause gravity as you seem to think. It is part of the same
>>> overall mechanism as gravity.
>>>
>>> Yours sincerely
>>> David Tombe
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>—-Original Message Follows—-
>>>From: “Nigel Cook”
>>>Reply-To: “Nigel Cook”
>>>To: “David Tombe”
>>>,,,,,,
>>>CC:
>>>,,,,,,,,,,,,,
>>>Subject: Re: Irrotational Flow in Little Switzerland
>>>Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2007 01:31:52
>>>
>>>Irrotational flow is fine, just admit the possibility that there is
>>>exchange! Traditionally, the fact that electrons in orbit should be
>>>radiating due to centripetal acceleration has been ignored, because Bohr
>>>thought electrons would lose energy by radiating. Clearly, he was
>>>assuming that only one electron in the universe was radiating while
>>>orbiting an atom! When you take account of the fact that all electrons do
>>>the same thing, the radiation emitted is soon in equilibrium to that
>>>received: it’s the exhange radiation.
>>>Similarly, Hawking’s idea that black holes must evaporate if they are
>>>real simply because they are radiating, is flawed: air molecules in my
>>>room are all radiating energy, but they aren’t getting cooler: they are
>>>merely exchanging energy. There’s an equilibrium.
>>>
>>>Moving to Hawking’s heuristic mechanism of radiation emission, he writes
>>>that pair production near the event horizon sometimes leads to one
>>>particle of the pair falling into the black hole, while the other one
>>>escapes and becomes a real particle. If on average as many fermions as
>>>antifermions escape in this manner, they annihilate into gamma rays
>>>outside the black hole.
>>>
>>>Schwinger’s threshold electric field for pair production is 1.3*10^18
>>>volts/metre. So at least that electric field strength must exist at the
>>>event horizon, before black holes emit any Hawking radiation! (This is
>>>the electric field strength at 33 fm from an electron.) Hence, in order
>>>to radiate by Hawking’s suggested mechanism, black holes must carry
>>>enough electric charge so make the eelectric field at the event horizon
>>>radius, R = 2GM/c^2, exceed 1.3*10^18 v/m.
>>>
>>>Schwinger’s critical threshold for pair production is E_c =
>>>(m^2)*(c^3)/(e*h-bar) = 1.3*10^18 volts/metre. Source: equation 359 in
>>>http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0608140 or equation 8.20 in
>>>http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0510040
>>>
>>>Now the electric field strength from an electron is given by Coulomb’s
>>>law with F = E*q = qQ/(4*Pi*Permittivity*R^2), so
>>>
>>>E = Q/(4*Pi*Permittivity*R^2) v/m.
>>>
>>>Setting this equal to Schwinger’s threshold for pair-production,
>>>(m^2)*(c^3)/(e*h-bar) = Q/(4*Pi*Permittivity*R^2). Hence, the maximum
>>>radius out to which fermion-antifermion pair production and annihilation
>>>can occur is
>>>
>>>R = [(Qe*h-bar)/{4*Pi*Permittivity*(m^2)*(c^3)}]^{1/2}.
>>>
>>>Where Q is black hole’s electric charge, and e is electronic charge, and
>>>m is electron’s mass. Set this R equal to the event horizon radius
>>>2GM/c^2, and you find the condition that must be satisfied for Hawking
>>>radiation to be emitted from any black hole:
>>>
>>>Q > 16*Pi*Permittivity*[(mMG)^2]/(c*e*h-bar)
>>>
>>>where M is black hole mass. So the amount of electric charge a black hole
>>>must possess before it can radiate (according to Hawking’s mechanism) is
>>>proportional to the square of the mass of the black hole. This is quite a
>>>serious problem for big black holes and frankly I don’t see how they can
>>>ever radiate anything at all.
>>>
>>>On the other hand, it’s interesting to look at fundamental particles in
>>>terms of black holes (Yang-Mills force-mediating exchange radiation may
>>>be Hawking radiation in an equilibrium).
>>>
>>>When you calculate the force of gauge bosons emerging from an electron as
>>>a black hole (the radiating power is given by the Stefan-Boltzmann
>>>radiation law, dependent on the black hole radiating temperature which is
>>>given by Hawking’s formula), you find it correlates to the
>>>electromagnetic force, allowing quantitative predictions to be made. See
>>>http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/05/25/quantum-gravity-mechanism-and-predictions/#comment-1997
>>>for example.
>>>
>>>You also find that because the electron is charged negative, it doesn’t
>>>quite follow Hawking’s heuristic mechanism. Hawking, considering
>>>uncharged black holes, says that either of the fermion-antifermion pair
>>>is equally likey to fall into the black hole. However, if the black hole
>>>is charged (as it must be in the case of an electron), the black hole
>>>charge influences which particular charge in the pair of virtual
>>>particles is likely to fall into the black hole, and which is likely to
>>>escape. Consequently, you find that virtual positrons fall into the
>>>electron black hole, so an electron (as a black hole) behaves as a source
>>>of negatively charged exchange radiation. Any positive charged black hole
>>>similarly behaves as a source of positive charged exchange radiation.
>>>
>>>These charged gauge boson radiations of electromagnetism are predicted by
>>>an SU(2) electromagnetic mechanism, see Figures 2, 3 and 4 of
>>>http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/06/20/the-mathematical-errors-in-the-standard-model-of-particle-physics/
>>>
>>>For quantum gravity mechanism and the force strengths, particle masses,
>>>and other predictions resulting, please see
>>>http://nige.wordpress.com/about/
>>>
>>>
>>>—– Original Message —– From: “David Tombe”
>>>To: ; ;
>>>; ;
>>>; ;
>>>
>>>Cc: ; ;
>>>; ;
>>>; ; ;
>>>; ; ;
>>>; ; ;
>>>
>>>Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2007 1:14 AM
>>>Subject: Irrotational Flow in Little Switzerland
>>>
>>>
>>>>Dear Forrest,
>>>> If you liked the picture and want to go there, I’ll
>>>> tell
>>>>you how I first discovered it.
>>>>
>>>> That picture was one of many pictures high up above
>>>> Snake
>>>>Alley in Taipei. I first saw it in 1998 but it took more than two years
>>>>for
>>>>me to actually find out where the place itself is.
>>>>
>>>> It is in the hills above Tainan in southern Taiwan in
>>>> a
>>>>region called ‘Little Switzerland’ in Chinese. (Taipei means
>>>>Taiwan-North
>>>>and Tainan means Taiwan-South).
>>>>
>>>> It is a piece of Japanese engineering from the early
>>>>1960′s and its purpose is to divert water down a tunnel to a nearby
>>>>reservoir.
>>>>
>>>> A fence keeps you from getting too close to it. There
>>>> is
>>>>no safety grid across the sink. You climb over the fence and go near it
>>>>at
>>>>your own risk.
>>>>
>>>> If you want to go there, you better take this picture
>>>> with
>>>>you and get somebody to write down ‘Little Switzerland’ in Chinese
>>>>characters.
>>>>
>>>> Yours sincerely
>>>> David Tombe

From: “Nigel Cook”
To: “Guy Grantham” ; “David Tombe” ; ; ; ; ;
Cc: ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Sent: Friday, July 27, 2007 10:10 AM
Subject: Re: The Effect of Gravity on Light

Dear Guy,

Light is an example of a massless boson. There is an error in Maxwell’s model of the photon: he draws it with the variation of electric field (and magnetic field) occurring as a function of distance along the longitudinal axis, say the x axis.

Maxwell uses the z, and y axes to represent not distances but magnetic and electric field STRENGTHS.

These field strengths are drawn to vary as a function of one spatial dimension only, the propagation direction.

Hence, he has drawn a pencil of light, with zero thickness and with no indication of any transverse waving.

What you get occurring is that people look at it and think the waving E-field line is a physical outline of the photon, and that the y axis is not electric field strength, but is distance in the y-direction.

In other words, they think it is a three dimensional diagram, when in fact it is one dimensional (x-axis is the only dimension; the other two axes are field strengths varying solely as a function of distance along the x-axis).

I explained this to Catt, but he wasn’t listening, and I don’t think others listen either.

The excellent thing is that you can correct the error in Maxwell’s model to get a real transverse wave, and then you find that it doesn’t need to oscillate at all in the longitudinal direction in order to propagate! This is because the variation in E-field strength and B-field strength actually occurs at right angles to the propagation direction (which is the opposite of what Maxwell’s picture shows when plotting these field strengths as a variation along the longitudinal axis or propagation direction of light, not the transverse direction!).

Maxwell’s drawing of a light photon in his final 1873 3rd ed of A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism is actually a longitudinal wave because the two variables (E and B) are varying solely as a function of propagation direction x, not as functions of transverse directions y and z which aren’t represented in the diagram (which uses y and z to represent field strengths along x, instead of directions y and z in real space).

The full description of the gauge boson can be found in figures 2, 3 and 4 of:

http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/06/20/the-mathematical-errors-in-the-standard-model-of-particle-physics/

Best wishes,
Nigel

—– Original Message —–
From: “Guy Grantham”
To: “Nigel Cook” ; “David Tombe” ; ; ; ; ;
Cc: ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2007 6:55 PM
Subject: Re: The Effect of Gravity on Light

>
> Dear Nigel
> My cynicism has been tweaked again … just what *is* a “massless boson”.
> ie what *is* a photon in your QFT? (What *is* a hole in a
> semiconductor)?
> Is it real and how would you know it from a figment of the imagination
> having the convenient function it is said to accomplish?
> I can accept it as pseudo particle representing the action of a wave
> transferring energy but that requires a medium in which to propagate.
> I do not understand how energy can travel as a slab through totally empty
> vacuum space, as previously described.
> I can accept that mass is not apparent when fully bound and but not that a
> particle has *no* mass.
>
> Would you please explain it to me.
>
> Best regards, Guy

http://kea-monad.blogspot.com/2007/07/grg18-day-3.html

“As expected, the poster session involved a notable lack of interest in Category Theory, but the sandwiches were yummy and the company pleasant.” – Kea

The second paragraph of the Wiki entry on “Category theory” begins:

Category theory has several faces known, not just to specialists, but to other mathematicians. “Generalized abstract nonsense” refers, not entirely affectionately, to its high level of abstraction, compared to more classical branches of mathematics.

(Emphasis added.)

I don’t think that this explanation is that helpful.

The most abstract mathematical tools are generally the most valuable once they are widely understood and applied to appropriate problems. It’s still early days for category theory.

I also keep getting confused between functors and functions (because the symbols used are similar and I’m more used to thinking about functions) when I read about it, not to mention the different morphisms.

One thing is to keep working on it and to try to find successful ways of applying Category Theory to explaining preon or some related theory, about how the different sets of quantum numbers (including weak and strong charges, masses, etc.) of fundamental particles of physics are really related to one another by morphisms.

You don’t necessarily have to have a physical mechanism explaining how the morphism physically occurs. It can just be a mathematical representation of what happens, and what the relationships between different fundamental particles really are.

I think the key thing here is the relationship of leptons to quarks. Quark properties are only known through composites of 2 or 3 quarks, because quarks can’t be isolated. The fact of universality, e.g., similarities between lepton and quark decay processes

muon -> electron + electron antineutrino + muon neutrino

for leptons and

neutron -> proton + electron + electron antineutrino

for quarks, hints that quarks and leptons are surprisingly similar, when ignoring the strong force. (My preliminary investigations on the relationship are here,
here and here.)

The problem is how much time it takes to apply new maths to solving these physical problems.

I like the fact that although you are a mathematician, you are free to go to physics conferences and study that stuff, at least as far as your time allows. The standard mathematical tools of particle physics, like Lie and Clifford algebras, aren’t focussed at modelling the morphisms between different fundamental particles (transformations between leptons and quarks obviously haven’t been observed yet, but they probably are possible at very high energy in certain situations). That would appear to be an ideal area to try to apply Category Theory to, because you have a table of particle properties and just have to f[i]nd the correct morphisms between them. That’s very important for trying to understand how unification can occur at high energy, and could lead to quantitative, falsifiable predictions (the old unification ideas like supersymmetry are not even wrong). I hope to learn a lot more about Category Theory.

http://kea-monad.blogspot.com/2007/07/m-theory-lesson-72.html

Interesting post. I’m interested in the ordering of braids to properly explain particle spins. String theory failed to account for the different standard model particles as being different vibrations of the same extra dimensional string.

So, how do the different particles come about? Some kind of Sundance Bilson-Thompson’s braid model seems likely. Lubos once tried to ridicule the idea by calling it “octopusi swimming in the spin network”, so you know it’s worth investigating.

If you look at the results, differences in braiding account for differences in particle spin, while differences in electric charge account for the difference between a downquark and an electron.

This makes sense to me: compress 3 electrons in a small space (against the exclusion principle) so that the polarized vacuum of each (out to the Schwinger pair production cutoff of (m^2)*(c^3)/(e*h-bar) = 1.3*10^18 v/m, which occurs out to a radius of r = [e/(2m)]*[(h-bar)/(Pi*Permittivity*c^3)]^{1/2} = 3.2953 * 10^{-14} metre = 32.953 fm from the middle of an electron) overlaps substantially, and the shielding effect due to the vacuum polarized vacuum would be 3 times stronger, so the screened charge per electron sharing the vacuum shield will be increased 3 times, giving an observable charge at long distances of e/3 per electron, i.e., downquarks. The extra energy shielded by the vacuum when 3 leptons are compressed has to go somewhere: it goes into a new-short range force powered by the vacuum, mediated by colour charge. (There are also other complexities such as isospin charge for mesons, but this basic principle still holds good.)

The basic structure of a preon, or the unification particle behind leptons and quarks, has real spin if particles can be described by black holes consisting of trapped light velocity radiation. The principal magnetic moment of an electron, 1 Bohr magneton, is easily explained this way. I’ve an article in Electronics World, Apr. 2003 which shows that you get the spherically symmetric E-field, the dipole B-field, and time-dilation from the model of a fermion as radiation trapped into a loop by the black hole effect of gravity.

Theorem: for any effective gravitational mass M (which includes energy E/c^2 according to general relativity) there is a black hole event horizon radius of R = 2GM/c^2. If charged electromagnetic radiation has a wavelength of that scale, it’s trapped into a tiny loop by the curvature of spacetime and becomes a fermion. It doesn’t slow down; the motion is just circular as a small loop (i.e. electron “spin”).

The connection to the Bilson-Thompson diagrams is that the Poynting vector of such trapped charged radiation can in some cases rotate while it goes round in the loop, producing an effect like a Mobius strip. This is one way that different types of particles can occur.

There are other mechanisms as well. Obviously, the main difference between the particles in the three different “generations” of the standard model is mass. Thus, muons are effectively heavy electrons. So to understand the different generations, you need to look closely at the model which describes the masses of particles (Higgs field bosons). It’s possible to do that.

By the way, a brilliant Nov 64 Feynman lecture, “The relation of mathematics to physics”, is now on google video!

http://tyrannogenius.blogspot.com/2006/06/not-even-wrong.html

Drop the question mark, please! String is not even wrong, full stop. It has to compactify 6 dimensions as a Calabi-Yau manifold with 100 or so parameters, all unknown because it’s too small to ever see it. So there are 10^500 or more combinations of parameters you need.

The Standard Model has 19 parameters, mainly Higgs field couplings for masses.

String theory has at least 125 parameters, giving a landscape of 10^500 possibilities.

The number of atoms in the observable universe is about 10^80. So string theory has 10^420 times more versions than there are atoms in the universe.

The age of the universe is 13.7 thousand million years or 4.32*10^17 seconds old.

So if a super-computer had been evaluating string theory since the instant of the big bang, it would need to have been working through about 10^483 models per second in order to check the consequences of the whole string theory landscape.

Furthermore, string theory is dependent on the unobserved speculations it is built on.

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%.

How can anyone take string seriously?

http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/06/29/downtime-2/#comment-294447

4. nigel on Jul 1st, 2007 at 6:42 am

Niel B: I agree that running couplings (relative charge) should be plotted as a function of distance not just collision energy. It is more lucid to plot the shielded charge strength as a function of distance from the particle core, than as a function of collision energy (which is the orthodoxy). You can do this easily: the distance of closest approach of two electrons in a head-on collision occurs when their initial kinetic energies equal the electrostatic potential energy (which is proportional to charge and inversely proportional to distance). The charge is not the low energy charge, but the higher charge given by the running coupling.

Obviously when you do this you get discontinuities in the graph corresponding to “cutoffs”: the IR cutoff occurs at the greatest distance and marks the limit where the electric charge starts to rise from its normal (Maxwellian) constant value, and the UV cutoff occurs at the shortest distance and is determined by renormalization constraints (i.e. you can’t go down to zero distance because the running coupling is proportional to the logarithm of distance or 1/energy at the highest energies, so it would become infinite as you go to zero distance, creating pairs of charges with infinite momenta, which is unphysical because it stops QED working; you have to take cutoffs or limits on the running coupling range to correctly predict the magnetic moments of leptons, the Lamb shift, etc.).

Below the Schwinger threshold electric field strength for fermion-antifermion pair-production, (m^2)*(c^3)/(e*h-bar) = 1.3*10^18 v/m, there are no annihilation-creation loops in the vacuum (just gauge boson exchange radiation). The distance for this is r = [e/(2m)]*[(h-bar)/(Pi*Permittivity*c^3)]^{1/2} = 3.2953 * 10^{-14} metre = 32.953 fm.

It’s curious that this is 11.69 times the classical electron radius, 2.81794 * 10^{-15} m = 2.81794 fm. (For those who like numerology, the square root of the dimensionless factor 1/alpha = 137, is equal to about 11.7.) The classical electron radius comes from integrating the energy of the electromagnetic field from this radius out to infinity, with this radius being chosen so that the integral equals the electron’s rest-mass energy mc^2. Clearly the electron is core is very much smaller than the classical electron radius, so mc^2 cannot be the total energy of the electron, it is merely the energy releasable in pair-production or annihilation phenomena, or when mass becomes binding energy. The physical explanation is probably the chaotic nature of the vacuum where the electric field strength is well above the Schwinger threshold: the pair production energy is almost randomly directed and has near maximum entropy, so most of it cannot be used. It’s the same as trying to extract useful energy from the kinetic energy of air molecules (air pressure). It can’t be done because the energy has maximum entropy so you need to supply more energy than you can possibly extract.

http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/06/26/constraints-and-signatures-in-particle-cosmology/#comment-294424

46. nigel on Jul 1st, 2007 at 4:48 am

Van (comment#40): the standard model already has that chiral symmetry built into it by simply setting the weak isospin charge of right handed Weyl spinors equal to zero.

Hence only left-handed particles have a weak isospin charge and can engage in weak interactions. All I’m pointing out is that SU(2) can be extended to include gravity in the standard model, to predict the strength of electromagnetism, to predict other things about cosmology etc. There is more explanation on my blog than I can put in a comment here. Thanks.

http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/06/19/the-alternative-science-respectability-checklist/

Very relevant article:

“Refereed Journals: Do They Insure Quality or Enforce Orthodoxy?

by Frank J. Tipler

Abstract- The notion that a scientific idea cannot be considered intellectually respectable until it has first appeared in a “peer” reviewed journal did not become widespread until after World War II. Copernicus’s heliocentric system, Galileo’s mechanics, Newton’s grand synthesis — these ideas never appeared first in journal articles. They appeared first in books, reviewed prior to publication only by their authors, or by their authors’ friends. Even Darwin never submitted his idea of evolution driven by natural selection to a journal to be judged by “impartial” referees. Darwinism indeed first appeared in a journal, but one under the control of Darwin’s friends. And Darwin’s article was completely ignored. Instead, Darwin made his ideas known to his peers and to the world at large through a popular book: On the Origin of Species. I shall argue that prior to the Second World War the refereeing process, even where it existed, had very little effect on the publication of novel ideas, at least in the field of physics. But in the last several decades, many outstanding physicists have complained that their best ideas — the very ideas that brought them fame — were rejected by the refereed journals. Thus, prior to the Second World War, the refereeing process worked primarily to eliminate crackpot papers. Today, the refereeing process works primarily to enforce orthodoxy. I shall offer evidence that “peer” review is NOT peer review: the referee is quite often not as intellectually able as the author whose work he judges. We have pygmies standing in judgment on giants. I shall offer suggestions on ways to correct this problem, which, if continued, may seriously impede, if not stop, the advance of science.” – http://www.iscid.org/boards/ubb-get_topic-f-10-t-000059.html

“Frank J. Tipler is Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University and a fellow with the International Society for Complexity Information and Design.”

Notice that the very first time Einstein ever underwent peer-review was in 1936, and he blew his top at the concept of peer-review (how can peer-review even occur when the idea is so radical you have no really specialist “peers” to begin with?), refusing to ever again submit to the journal (it was the Physical Review):

“… the final [gravitational wave denying] manuscript was prepared and sent to the Physical Review. It was returned to him accompanied by a lengthy referee report in which clarifications were requested. Einstein was enraged and wrote to the editor that he objected to his paper being shown to colleagues prior to publication. The editor courteously replied that refereeing was a procedure generally applied to all papers submitted to his journal, adding that he regretted that Einstein may not have been aware of this custom. Einstein … never published in the
Physical Review again.”

- Abraham Pais, “Subtle is the Lord: the Science and the Life of Albert Einstein”, Oxford University Press, 1982, quoted at http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-59/iss-6/p9.html

(In this case the peer-reviewers were actually correct and Einstein was wrong. The point is, Einstein felt that his paper should have been published, and critics should have been able to criticise it later. Einstein did not feel it was right to censor publication because of alleged errors.) Since I’ll be falsely accused of “comparing myself to Einstein” because of this quotation, I might as well bring up Galileo as well just to keep the bigots happy:

1. Galileo claimed that he had discovered moons orbiting Jupiter using a home-made telescope.

2. Cremonini (the Professor of philosophy at Padua) refused to look through the telescope because he feared the week would have to be extended from 7 days if it turned out there were more than 7 orbital bodies in the heavens, or something like that.

Why should anybody have lifted a finger to support Galileo? What pay-off would they immediately get in return? Sacked from their jobs? Ridiculed? Ignored? Would Galileo have become a “star” laughing stock on crank.net if it had existed then? Or, with the benefit of hindsight, would Mr Francis have been able to judge Galileo to not be a crank?

http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/06/19/the-alternative-science-respectability-checklist/#comment-294420

158. nigel on Jul 1st, 2007 at 4:25 am

Marty Tysanner on Jun 20th, 2007 at 12:39 am

“Sometimes it seemed their interest in physics is deep enough to persist and study it at the university level. … If pressed hard enough, they can become verbally abusive, or simply disappear from sight for awhile. … Check out crank.netfor a good summary of many of these guys.”

I object strongly to this claim. If you look at the page http://www.crank.net/bigbang.html which is part of http://www.Crank.net run by Erik Max Francis you will see a sneering attack on me (ignoring the science totally) by him at the top of the page (who allegedly believes himself superior to all others because he discovered how to derive Kepler’s laws from Newton’s laws; actually, Newton used Kepler’s laws to derive his laws, so Francis’ is a circular argument: http://www.alcyone.com/max/ ).

Francis was described in the New York Times as follows:

“Mr. Francis, 29, is not a scientist, and has taken only a handful of classes at a community college.” (Bonnie Rothman Morris in The New York Times of Dec. 21, 2000)

But this quotation is a bit misleading because when you look up the article, you see that Bonnie Rothman Morris is actually amazed in a positive way with Francis because he has only a handful of classes. She thinks that means he is really, really clever and qualified to call other people cranks: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/21/technology/21CRAN.html?ex=1183435200&en=04375f6836cbc7b0&ei=5070

This is the world we live in:

‘Fascism is not a doctrinal creed; it is a way of behaving … What, then, are the tell-tale hallmarks of this horrible attitude? Paranoid control-freakery; an obsessional hatred of any criticism or contradiction; the lust to character-assassinate anyone even suspected of it; a compulsion to control or at least manipulate the media … the majority of the rank and file prefer to face the wall while the jack-booted gentlemen ride by. …’ – Frederick Forsyth, Daily Express, 7 Oct. 05, p. 11.

Francis calls my page “illucid” which he defines as: “Something so beyond understanding that it defies classification.” – http://www.crank.net/about.html

He gives no indication of even having read the page. If he is unable to understand it, it might indicate that he is less than clever, which might also be consistent with his educational background. However, the media and basically most people think it’s clever to sneer at new ideas. Fortunately, I had a hearing/speech defect when a kid and was sneered at etc. The fact that an idea is attacked doesn’t prove or disprove the idea, but the fact that the idea is supported by natural facts is more useful. The more angry these bigoted charlatans become, the more the media thinks they must be right. Not so!

http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/06/realclimate-saturated-confusion.html

Dear aktivní blb, it doesn’t look like you know something about absorption by CO2, H2O, or by anything else, for that matter.

The absorption rate can’t grow linearly and indefinitely because it is impossible to absorb more than 100 percent – at a given frequency or in a given band. This fact is independent of discrete vs band spectrum.
Luboš Motl | Homepage | 06.30.07 – 7:22 am | #

I didn’t say the absorption rate grows linearly and indefinitely: just that it doesn’t saturate by concentrating the absorption on a small set of narrow lines.

I don’t like your objection above to the approximation e^{-x} ~ 1 – x. That’s a perfectly good approximation when x is much smaller than 1. For example, when x = 0.1, e^{-x} = 0.905 while 1-x = 0.9. It’s a good approximation and the smaller x is, the more accurate this approximation becomes.

For global warming % of radiant energy being absorbed by CO2 in the air is always small so this kind of approximation is good.

Your argument reminds me of the problem with calculating radiation casualties with a linear dose-effects “law”. It’s absurd because the risk of a person being killed by radiation exceeds 100% beyond some dose according to such a law; it doesn’t naturally saturate. Obviously a more realistic model would be f = 1 – e{-x}, which gives mortality risk f as being directly proportional to dosage x where x is small compared to 1, but f then saturates at 1 (i.e. 100% probability) when x is very large.

However, for small doses, it is more reasonable to assume f ~ x, a linear dependence.

You haven’t grasped my point about the line spectra. The sun emits almost all of its energy as continuous blackbody spectra. There are spectral lines in it (bright emission lines and dark absorption lines), but most of the energy is in a wide spectrum. The width of individual lines is small and so when you integrate over the spectrum, absorption lines in the atmosphere can’t endlessly reduce the total thermal radiation transmission.

If you subtract a narrow line from a broadband spectrum, either completely removing the line or only partly removing it, it makes little difference. However, for band spectra there is a substantial effect.

aktivní blb | Homepage | 06.30.07 – 7:15 pm | #

(Note by NC: poor old Aktivní Blb! What a problem it is to argue with string theorists about anything, whether related to string or not. He has to explain everything so that a little kid could understand it, or it is misunderstood.)

http://www.stevens.edu/csw/cgi-bin/blogs/csw/?p=48

“Last week the New York Times reported that firstborn children have IQs three points higher on average than their younger siblings, according to a big new study. Interesting. Even more interesting was the association of the psychologist Frank Sulloway with the story. Sulloway wrote an editorial that Science published in tandem with the IQ study. The Times quoted Sulloway at length in its coverage and then made him available for an online Q&A. None of the coverage I’ve seen has mentioned the controversy that has shadowed Sulloway recently.

“Now at the University of California at Berkeley, Sulloway was at MIT in 1996 when he published Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics and Creative Lives. The book portrayed history as a struggle between stodgy, conservative firstborns and open-minded, creative later-borns. … According to Sulloway, firstborn children are much more likely than their younger siblings to be conservative, support the status quo and reject new scientific or political ideas. Later-born children, in contrast, tend to be more adventurous, radical, open-minded, willing to take risks. (Sulloway, naturally, is the youngest of two brothers.) … Sulloway’s conclusions contradicted those contained in the 1983 book Birth Order: Its Influence on Personality. The authors, the Swiss psychiatrists Cecile Ernst and Jules Angst, sifted through hundreds of previous studies attempting to link birth order to personality traits, and then conducted their own survey of 7,582 college-age residents of Zurich. They concluded not only that birth-order effects do not exist but also that continued efforts to find such effects represent “a sheer waste of time and money.” [Italics in the original.]” – John Horgan.

Sorry, John, but I don’t like the direction you appear to be coming from. A big new study confirms that first borns are slightly more intelligent. That would be a perfectly rational mechanism for some causal effect, albeit of weak statistical significance, on which leaders in history did what. So maybe the recent media coverage isn’t mentioning the controversy surrounding Sulloway because it is irrelevant to the news story: the news story is confirming Sulloway to some extent. That’s the end of the connection to Sulloway. Why rake up old controversy???

If I have a theory and it’s controversial, then some new evidence appears to confirm it (which has nothing to do with the past controversy), why on earth should the media write about the old controversy? Maybe that’s good political investigative journalism, but it might be scientifically irrelevant and harmful.

Put it another way. Galileo’s claim that he had discovered moons orbiting Jupiter using a home-made telescope was “controversial” because Cremonini (the Professor of philosophy at Padua) refused to look through the telescope because he feared the weak would have to be extended from 7 days if it turned out there were more than 7 orbital bodies in the heavens, or something like that. For how long should the media have appended a mention of this scientifically-irrelevant “controversy” to the news that Galileo had discovered Jupiter’s moons?

By the way, I’m an only child, so I’m both a first born and a last born! So maybe you can use me as a false reductio ad absurdum attack on Sulloway’s thesis: the example of an only child (both first and last born) would mean that that child is somehow more intelligent than itself which is a logical impossibility, so Sulloway is falsified. But that’s too obviously a nonsense counter-argument. The trick is to throw mud at the teflon until it is simply buried under a gigantic big pile of mud; then you can claim the non-stick isn’t working. That’s a great way to get rid of politicians you don’t like, but it’s a bit tough on scientists who aren’t used to wallowing in mud!

http://carlbrannen.wordpress.com/2007/06/29/to-help-miss-cite-reb-eretics-simple-hot/

“My dream is to get at least single citation from an academic physicist before I die;-).” – Matti Pitkanen

Matti,

But Roger Penrose cited your work in the revised edition of the book “The Road to Reality”. Doesn’t that count as a “citation from an academic physicist”?

“‘[Unorthodox approaches] now seem the antithesis of modern science, with consensus and peer review at its very heart. … The sheer number of ideas in circulation means we need tough, sometimes crude ways of sorting…. The principle that new ideas should be verified and reinforced by an intellectual community is one of the pillars of scientific endeavour, but it comes at a cost.” – Editorial, p5 of the 9 Dec 06 issue of New Scientist.

“(1). The idea is nonsense.
(2). Somebody thought of it before you did.
(3). We believed it all the time.”
- Professor R.A. Lyttleton (quoted by Fred Hoyle in the book “Home is Where the Wind Blows”, Oxford University Press, 1997, p154).

It is interesting that even people like Feynman and Bohm were censored, mainly by groupthink led by some elite priest figure (Oppenheimer was behind the initial censorship of both Feynman and Bohm, although he changed his mind over Feynman after Dyson got Bethe to argue with Oppenheimer at length).

Tony Smith quotes Dyson’s conclusion:

“… 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. …”

- Freeman Dyson, 1981 essay “Unfashionable Pursuits” (reprinted in “From Eros to Gaia” (Penguin 1992, at page 171).

That sort of time delay is totally unacceptable. You can see why the mainstream has so much support: new ideas are liable to “go down the tubes” for half a century not because they’re wrong, but just because they’re unfashionable. Problem is, there is a widespread “common sense” idea that anything unorthodox is crackpot and wrong, while orthodoxy is deemed sensible and correct even when it is, in the case of string theory, just groupthink and fantasy.

I don’t believe in hunting “crackpot hunters” because when you catch them they’re miserable little losers. There’s Erik Max Francis who owns and runs “www.Crank.net” and allegedly believes himself superior to all others because he discovered how to derive Kepler’s laws from Newton’s laws. (Actually, Newton used Kepler’s laws to derive his laws, so this is a circular argument.)

He was described in the New York Times as follows:

“Mr. Francis, 29, is not a scientist, and has taken only a handful of classes at a community college.” (Bonnie Rothman Morris in The New York Times of Dec. 21, 2000)

But this quotation is a bit misleading because when you look up the article, you see that Bonnie Rothman Morris is actually amazed in a positive way with Francis because he has only a handful of classes. She thinks that means he is really, really clever and qualified to call other people cranks.

This is the world we live in:

‘Fascism is not a doctrinal creed; it is a way of behaving … What, then, are the tell-tale hallmarks of this horrible attitude? Paranoid control-freakery; an obsessional hatred of any criticism or contradiction; the lust to character-assassinate anyone even suspected of it; a compulsion to control or at least manipulate the media … the majority of the rank and file prefer to face the wall while the jack-booted gentlemen ride by. …’ – Frederick Forsyth, Daily Express, 7 Oct. 05, p. 11.

Carl – sorry for the length and please delete this comment if it is unhelpful; I’ll copy it to my blog so it won’t be lost anyway. Cheers, Nigel.

http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/06/26/constraints-and-signatures-in-particle-cosmology/#comment-293764

Van: the standard model already has that chiral symmetry built into it by simply setting the weak isospin charge of right handed Weyl spinors equal to zero. Hence only left-handed particles have a weak isospin charge and can engage in weak interactions. All I’m pointing out is that SU(2) can be extended to include gravity in the standard model, to predict the strength of electromagnetism, to predict other cosmology and the apparent lack of antimatter. There is more explanation with diagrams on my blog if anyone is interested. Thanks!

http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/06/realclimate-saturated-confusion.html

the greenhouse effect gets weaker as the absorption of the appropriate spectral lines gets saturated
the overall greenhouse effect from several gases is smaller than a simple sum if their spectra overlap

Lubos, I know a lot about infrared absorption by H2O and CO2, and in these cases you have molecular band absorption spectra, not line absorption spectra. The difference is caused by the freedom of atoms to vibrate many different ways, so the sharp lines do not occur and instead you have fuzzy molecular band spectra. These will not saturate in the way you claim.

Your argument only applies to line spectra, which only really applies to free atoms and ions, not CO2 and H2O. In the case of molecular band spectra, the absorption doesn’t get saturated: the bands cover a wide range of wavelengths and the more molecules you have, the more absorption there is for radiant transfer over that entire band.

aktivní blb | Homepage | 06.30.07 – 7:08 am | #

… McCutcheon on page 194 calculates a value for G by rearranging these equations:

G = (1/2)g(R^3)/[(R_E)m]

=(1/2)*(9.81)*(5.29*10^-11)^3 /[(6.378*10^6)*(1.67*10^-27)]

= 6.82*10^-11 m^3/(kg*s^2).

Which is only 2% higher than the measured value of

G = 6.673 *10^-11 m^3/(kg*s^2). …

This doesn’t seem to have any physical validity. The mean density of the hydrogen atom, treating it as a sphere of radius equal to the ground state mean radius, is (1.67*10^-27 kg)/(6.20*10^-31 m^3) = 2,700 kg/m^3.

The mean density of the planet Earth is about 5.5 kg/m^3 Hence, the hydrogen atom has 490 times the density of the Earth, in the way McCutcheon’s calculation goes. His calculation is based on the assumption that:

a = (1/2)gR/R_E

where R_E is Earth’s radius, R is hydrogen atom ground state radius, a is acceleration of gravity on hydrogen atom’s surface and g is acceleration of gravity on Earth’s surface.

If this were to be true, the factor of 1/2 would need to be explained by relative densities of the hydrogen atom to the Earth (i.e. Earth would need to have twice the density of the hydrogen atom). In fact, the hydrogen atom is 490 times higher in density than the Earth. So that road is a failure.

If we try to find a physical understanding for a = (1/2)gR/R_E, the factor of 1/2 is a difficulty: as shown in the post, McCutcheon doesn’t have any reason to include it because invoking Galileo’s (1/2)gt^2 gives the wrong dimensions. To correct the dimensions, you must drop t^2, and in so doing you have no reason physically for retaining (1/2). However, the 1/2 factor is not a big problem in physics generally. (Einstein’s first estimate of the deflection of light by gravity in 1911 was out by a factor of 1/2, as was the early estimate of the spin of the electron and the magnetic moment of the electron. Generally, where things occur in pairs in nature – like spins and field polarizations – it is possible that in the early estimates people are confused whether 50% are involved in interactions or 100%, so they often risk an error by a factor of 2 or 1/2.)

a = (1/2)gR/R_E

is equivalent to:

2a/g = R/R_E

why should gravitational accelerations scale in proportion to radius (while density varies by hundreds of times)? The Hubble expansion v = HR implies an outward acceleration in spacetime of a = dv/dt = d[HR]/[dR/v] = vH = RH^2, so acceleration is directly proportional to radial distance. However, the Hubble acceleration is much smaller. If we relate McCutcheon’s formula to the Hubble acceleration a = RH^2, then:

H^2 = a/R = 1.54*10^-6 s^-2

Hence:

H = 1.24*10^-3 s^-1.

This is bigger than the cosmological Hubble parameter (H = 2.3*10^-18 s^-1) by a factor of 5.4*10^14. So that is another dead end.

Another way of looking at McCutcheon’s formula 2a/g = R/R_E is trying to see it as an energy balance. Energy, E = FR where F is force and R is distance moved in direction of force as a result of the force. Since F = ma, we get:

E = maR

McCutcheon’s relationship stated as an energy balance would then need to be something like:

E =

(m_H)aR = (m_E)gR_E

where the left hand side applies to a hydrogen atom with gravity acceleration a at ground state radius R, while the right hand side applies to the Earth with surface acceleration g at radius R_E.

However, this doesn’t work because when rearranged it can’t yield anything like McCutcheon’s 2a/g = R/R_E. So that is a dead end also.

39. nigel on Jun 29th, 2007 at 4:04 am

Hi Van, glad you got my point. Thank you very much for referring to the Pati-Salam modem, SU(4) x SU(2)_L x SU(2)_R. Yes I am interested in something that looks nearly identical, like SU(3) x SU(2)_L x SU(2)_R. However, SU(4) x SU(2)_L x SU(2)_R is different in many ways. They chose that not due to experimental evidence or unique quantitative predictions it can make, but because it can undergo spontaneous symmetry breaking to produce exactly the existing Standard Model, so that the Higgs field at low energy causes SU(4) x SU(2)_L x SU(2)_R to produce SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1). At high energy where the symmetry is unbroken, it is a grand unification theory.

This approach has many problems both in methodology and in checking it. 1) It assumes the Standard Model is totally correct at low energies and it assumes that forces do unify at very high energy. 2) It doesn’t make immediate predictions or post-dictions of the strength of gravity, cosmological effects, etc., that can validate the approach. 3) It doesn’t actually seem to make any long-term checkable predictions that are useful. 4) It doesn’t seem to make things simpler with regard to the Higgs field or the masses of different fundamental particles, which is the cause of most of the adjustable parameters in the existing Standard Model. 5) It doesn’t seem to help resolve existing problems in physics or to point in the direction of simple mechanisms to improve understanding. 6) It doesn’t get rid of U(1) at low energy, since U(1) emerges at low energy as a result of the symmetry breaking they are assuming. 7) It’s a theory built on speculation instead of on empirial observations.

SU(2) does have several advantages in describing leptons as doublets: pair production produces lepton-antilepton pairs. A conversion of 100% of positrons into upquarks and 50% of electrons into downquarks in the big bang would explain the alleged lack of anti-matter in the universe: it’s locked up by quark confinement in nucleons (the universe is mainly hydrogen, an electron, downqrark, and two upquarks). One simple mechanism based entirely on mainstream QFT is that the electric field of the core of a lepton is shielded by the polarization of pairs of virtual fermions around it. The virtual fermion pair production is, Schwinger showed, a result of the electric field of the electron core which extends out to about 1 fm radius where the electric field is above the threshold of 1.3*10^18 v/m required for pair-production. If at high energy in the big bang (very early times), N electrons were crowded together in a small space (against the Pauli exclusion principle), the polarization of the vacuum would be stronger, so the shielding factor due to the vacuum would be N times bigger. Thus, 3 electrons crowded together in a tiny space would still only give an overall electric charge of e; the contribution from each electron would be e/3 due to the extra shielding by the stronger polarized vacuum. This is just a simple heuristic mechanism for fractional charges. The energy conservation issue then comes to the fore: what happens to the 2/3rds of the electric charge energy (that is now being shielded by the stronger, shared vacuum polarization around the triplet)? Clearly, that energy is stopped at very short distances by the vacuum and used to produce loops of virtual particles which mediate short-range interactions. To avoid violating the Pauli exclusion principle (which would prevent a triplet of three identical quarks, since there are only two spin states available), colour charge must appear. This suggests that ‘unification’ of all forces doesn’t occur at very high energy: the colour charge is powered by short-range vacuum loop effects and decreases towards zero when you are close enough to the particle core that there is no room for the vacuum to polarize (i.e. no space for virtual fermion pairs to move apart along the lines of the radial electric field).

http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/06/26/constraints-and-signatures-in-particle-cosmology/#comment-293567

nigel on Jun 28th, 2007 at 3:08 pm

The chirality issue is addressed in the Standard Model just by the SU(2) charge, isospin, being zero for all right-handed Weyl spinors (see the table here. The right-handed particles simply can’t interact with the massive weak gauge bosons, although they still see the same electromagnetic force. Below electroweak unification energy, the weak gauge bosons gain mass, and these massive weak gauge bosons can’t interact with right-handed particles (The loss of the weak isospin charge for right-handed particles is compensated for by their increased weak hypercharges.)

What’s interesting is that there are severe issues with the U(1) electromagnetic and weak hypercharge gauge field. Sheldon Glashow and Julian Schwinger in 1956 tried to use SU(2) to unify electromagnetism and the weak interaction by having the two charged vector bosons the mediators of weak interactions and the neutral vector boson the mediator of electromagnetism. I.e., they tried to use SU(2) for electroweak unification! Glashow comments on his 1979 Nobel lecture:

“Things had to be arranged so that the charged current, but not the neutral (electromagnetic) current, would violate parity and strangeness. Such a theory is technically possible to construct, but it is both ugly and experimentally false [H. Georgi and S. L. Glashow, Physical Review Letters, 28, 1494 (1972)]. We know now that neutral currents do exist and that the electroweak gauge group must be larger than SU(2).”

SU(2)xU(1) gives four vector bosons, two charged and two neutral. However, it implies that all leptons are singlets (in fact they are only formed in lepton-antilepton pairs) and it doesn’t include a gravity vector boson which you’d expect to be found. An alternative would be a second SU(2) group, i.e., SU(2)xSU(2), which gives 6 vector bosons, i.e., the usual 3 weak gauge bosons and another 3 which can be always massless and thus long-range forces. Another option would be that the Higgs mechanism is wrong, and the correct electroweak group is just SU(2), in which some of the 3 massless gauge bosons (2 charged, 1 neutral) acquire mass and interact with left-handed particles.

When you examine well known anomalies in electromagnetism carefully, it is easy to model electric fields as products of positive and negative charged exchange radiation (usual objections to massless charged bosons propagating are erased in the case of exchange radiation due to cancellation of the curls of the magnetic fields of electrically charged gauge bosons passing through one another in equilibrium), while gravity is electrically uncharged massless gauge bosons. This tells us that electromagnetism is ~10^40 times gravity in a simple way by taking a Brownian motion like a path integral (electric fields add up like diffusion if there are equal positiev and negative charges scattered around) for the ~10^80 charges in the observable universe.

http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/06/26/constraints-and-signatures-in-particle-cosmology/#comment-293468

25. nigel on Jun 27th, 2007 at 5:15 pm

My research in a simple causal mechanism of gauge boson exchange addresses all these problems successfully: http://quantumfieldtheory.org/1.pdf

The problem I’ve found is that once you hit on something that does agree with nature, how far you should you then go in applying it yourself? Particularly if you have family and work commitments and have limited time? Newton allegedly spend 22 years (1665-87) working out the consequences of his initial idea. He published finally after a priority dispute with Hooke over the inverse-square law.

If you get bigoted responses from egotists and “crackpot” abuse from the mainstream, probably the best thing to do is to go ahead and apply the basic concepts as far as you can. Boltzmann’s problems were getting depressed by other people’s ignorant reactions. If certain people aren’t interested in new ideas or are prejudiced against you, it’s only your problem if you are dependent on them. If those people are just a nuisance to everyone, then it’s better not to waste too much time in arguments (just enough to prove you made some effort and to document the ignorant hostility or abuse you receive in return). Not making any effort to communicate information is just as dangerous as making too much effort (hype) to do so, because potential opportunities for fruitful discussions will be lost. The first priority is applying the science.

http://riofriospacetime.blogspot.com/2007/06/alpha-magnetic-spectrometer-in-limbo.html

“Nearly everyone has experienced the power of a thunderstorm. We are taught in school that lightning originates from static discharges within storm clouds. What triggers those discharges is unknown. The tracks of cosmic rays, striking and scattering particles in the atmosphere, are very similiar to lightning. Some researchers have suggested that cosmic rays are the cause of lightning! Since cosmic rays fall nearly steadily across Earth’s surface, that is a hypothesis that needs to be tested. If cosmic rays cause lightning, that is one more example of how our lives are intimately entwined with Space.” – Louise

Yes! It’s simply the Geiger counter effect: there is a massive (400 kV) electric potential between the ionosphere at high altitude and the earth’s surface, and the ionospheric gas is at low pressure, just like the inside of a Geiger counter tube with high voltage and low pressure gas!

A sufficiently ionizing, high-energy cosmic ray, can set off a lightning bolt, just as a “count” (electron avalanche) is set off by a beta particle entering a Geiger counter tube.

If you actually have a Geiger counter with a glass window, turn out the lights and bring some Sr-90 near it. You can see miniature lightning flashes! The gas (argon) sparks when particles of radiation set off electron avalanches, even at the normal operating voltage (you get trouble if you turn the potential up too high, because the gas no longer quenches so the first particle that ionises it causes it to light up like a neon tube and remain glowing until the counter is switched off; that’s damaging to the lifespan of the Geiger tube, and of course the scalar or ratemeter attached to it which is providing the HV can’t detect any pulses if that happens).

So the atmosphere is in a sense a giant Geiger counter, and lightning bolts are likely just electron avalanches in triggered at altitude in low pressure air by cosmic rays. The direction of the lightning bolt marks the direction of the electric field lines in the atmosphere. Usually they’re vertical, corresponding to the natural electric field gradient of the atmosphere, 120 v/m vertically near sea level.

Feynman has a great lecture about this in his Lectures on Physics. The base of the electrically conductive ionosphere is 50 km above sea level, and it forms one electrode with the sea (conductive salt water) or wet ground as the other one. The Earth has a net charge of 1,000,000 Coulombs. The vertical electric potential between them is V = 400,000 volts, and since the capacitance of the Earth (treating the oceans and the ionosphere as two concentric capacitor plates with the air between them as the dielectric) is C = 0.091 F, the atmosphere normally stores (1/2)CV^2 = 7.3 GJ of energy!

Because the air is normally fairly non-conductive, the vertical current flowing as a result of that natural vertical electric field is normally small, just 3.5 pA/m^2, but this means that 1,800 Amps is flowing vertically at any one time over the entire Earth.

This vertical current is compensated-for by an average of 40 lightning discharges per second (in 2,000 thunderstorms concentrated mainly in warm oceanic tropical locations which suffer the most frequent electrical storms; South America, central Africa, Southeast Asia, and Northern Australia) which maintains the balance of charge between Earth’s surface and the ionosphere. (This figure of 40 lightning strikes per second is based on 1995 data from the Optical Transient Detector satellite and this figure is only about half of the old obsolete estimate used in Feynman’s lectures.)

http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/06/is-witten-working-on-loop-quantum.html

Thanks for your support of alternatives to string, Lubos. Anything you write negatively about them backfires.

The girl in your photo (should be labelled Fig. 1) is actually tied up in a knot, making fun of the Calabi-Yau manifold. If she had an extra 6 dimensions, there’d be 10^500 ways she could compactify herself. If she was Planck scale, you’d be unable to probe her to find out how she was tied up with all those extra degrees of freedom in those extra dimensions. So you’d be totally frustrated unable to get any pleasure from her, just as you’re frustrated by string theory which is in just the same state and can never, ever ever ever predict anything real. Admit it, string is just another (bad) loser.

aktivní blb | Homepage | 06.27.07 – 3:35 pm | #

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=570#comment-26428

anon. Says:

June 27th, 2007 at 6:38 am

Kea, I note that you quote Lubos’ remark on your blog:

“Well, I happen to think that if Edward Witten started to work on loop quantum gravity, as defined by the existing contemporary methods and standards of the loop quantum gravity community, it wouldn’t mean that physics is undergoing a phase transition. Instead, it would simply mean that Edward Witten would be getting senile. We all admire him and love him, if you want me to say strong words, but he is still a scientist, not God.” – Lubos Motl

This kind of gives the impression that Ed Witten risks being deemed as “senile” and “not God” but merely “a scientist” if he did take more interest in Loop Quantum Gravity. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t?

http://matpitka.blogspot.com/2007/06/peter-woit-and-kea-commented-wittens.html

“The little I know about LQG is that it is 3+1-D theory with 3-geometries as basic objects expressed in terms of loop variables. Witten considers 3-D theory with Chern Simons action: in this case 2-geometries would be the basic dynamical objects. Witten himself made clear that he has no idea about how to generalize the theory to 4-D context.”

Peter Woit does give a discussion of the basic principle of LQG in his book:

‘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.

I watched Lee Smolin’s Perimeter Institute lectures, “Introduction to Quantum Gravity”, and he explains that 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.

It’s pretty evident that [the] “loops” are the closed exchange cycles of gravitons going between masses (or other gravity field generators like energy fields), back and forward, in an endless cycle of exchange. That’s the loop mechanism, the closed cycle of Yang-Mills exchange radiation being exchanged from one mass to another, and back again, continually.

According to this view, the graviton interaction nodes are associated with the ‘Higgs field quanta’ which generates mass.

Hence, in a Penrose spin network, the nodes represent the points where quantized masses exist.

I think the mainstream is being misled by spin-2 graviton ideas, and the U(1) component of the Standard Model is wrong and SU(2) describes electromagnetism (as well as isospin). The SU(2) symmetry models two types of charges, hence negative and positive charges without the wrong method U(1) uses where it specifies there are only negative charges and positive ones are negative ones going backwards in time. In addition, SU(2) gives 3 massless gauge bosons, two charged ones (which mediate the charge in electric fields) and one neutral one (which is the spin-1 graviton, that causes gravity by pushing masses together).

In addition, SU(2) describes doublets, charge-anticharge pairs. We know that electrons are not produced individidually, only in lepton-antilepton pairs. The reason why electrons can be separated a long distance from their antiparticle (unlike quarks) is simply the nature of the binding force, which is long range electromagnetism instead of a short-range force.

The problem is that string people reflexively stamp the label “crackpot” immediately on to any alternative ideas for unifying the Standard Model and gravity.

http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/06/19/the-alternative-science-respectability-checklist/#comment-291414

nigel on Jun 22nd, 2007 at 1:21 pm

Van, Professor Siegel has already written a self-diagnosis checklist of that type, and then there is Professor Baez’s crackpot index. And please don’t forget Professor ‘t Hooft’s page on ‘How to become a bad theoretical physicist’ which admits:

‘It is much easier to become a bad theoretical physicist than a good one. I know of many individual success stories.’

http://dorigo.wordpress.com/2007/06/15/and-so-about-cascade-baryons/#comment-50998

13. nc – June 22, 2007

Hi Tomasso,

If the Omega_b is a baryon, it’s mass should be close to an integer when expressed in units of 105 MeV (3/2 multiplied by the electron mass divided by alpha: 1.5*0.511*137 = 105 MeV).

If it is a meson, it’s mass should be close to an integer when expressed in units of 70 MeV (2/2 multiplied by the electron mass divided by alpha: 1*0.511*137 = 70 MeV).

If it is a lepton apart from the electron (the electron is the most complex particle), it’s mass should be close to an integer when expressed in units of 35 MeV (1/2 multiplied by the electron mass divided by alpha: 0.5*0.511*137 = 35 MeV).

This scheme has a simple causal mechanism in the quantization of the ‘Higgs field’ which supplies mass to fermions. By itself the mechanism just predicts that mass comes in discrete units, depending on how strong the polarized vacuum is in shielding the fermion core from the Higgs field quanta.

To predict specific masses (apart from the fact they are likely to be near integers if isotopes don’t occur), regular QCD ideas can be used. This prediction doesn’t replace lattice QCD predictions, it just suggests how masses are quantized by the ‘Higgs field’ rather than being a continuous variable.

Every mass apart form the electron is predictable by the simple expression: mass = 35n(N+1) MeV, where n is the number of real particles in the particle core (hence n = 1 for leptons, n = 2 for mesons, n = 3 for baryons), and N is is the integer number of ‘Higgs field’ quanta giving mass to that fermion core.

From analogy to the shell structure of nuclear physics where there are highly stable or ‘magic number’ configurations like 2, 8 and 50, we can use n = 1, 2, and 3, and N = 1, 2, 8 and 50 to predict the most stable masses of fermions besides the electron.

For leptons, n = 1 and N = 2 gives the muon: 35n(N+1) = 105 MeV.

For mesons, n = 2 and N = 1 gives the pion: 35n(N+1) = 140 MeV.

For baryons, n = 3 and N = 8 gives nucleons: 35n(N+1) = 945 MeV.

For leptons, n = 1 and N = 50 gives tauons: 35n(N+1) = 1785 MeV.

Best,
nigel

http://dorigo.wordpress.com/2007/06/15/and-so-about-cascade-baryons/#comment-50999

14. nc – June 22, 2007

Whoops, I wrote fermion to cover all the particles, but I include mesons which are of course bosons. Sorry.

http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/06/22/designs-intelligent-and-stupid/#comment-291235

8. nigel on Jun 22nd, 2007 at 5:01 am

The standard answer (I think it is mentioned already in Darwin works, or at least implicit) is that the right question is not “What good is half a wheel” but “What bad is half a wheel”. If the mutation is not troublesome, it will survive even if it is not useful, and eventuallly it could evolve into a useful one. – Alejandro Rivero

Without going off topic, this is a crucial point: how much junk and clutter can you hoard just in case you might one day find a use for it? Get too much clutter, and you can’t see the wood for the trees, but if you hoard abstract odds and ends long enough, it can eventually pay off in a big way. E.g. ellipses were known (as conic sections) in ancient Greece, as well as Aristarchus of Samos’ solar system, but Kepler in c. 1610 was the first to fit both [...] together to accurately represent Brahe’s observations of Mars’ orbit. There’s also an allegation that Archimedes’ work The Method used the basic principles of the calculus (Archimedes called it the ‘mechanical method’) to work out the volume of geometric shapes by summing over a lot of thin slices, but it was lost and unavailable when calculus was developed by Newton and Leibniz. Maybe this was for the best because Archimedes [...] regarded calculus as just a non-rigorous trick, not a really convincing proof: ‘… certain things first became clear to me by a mechanical method, although they had to be proved by geometry afterwards …’ (That kind of prejudice was probably best lost because there are now many things you can prove with calculus that can’t be proved afterward using simple geometry.)

http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/06/19/the-alternative-science-respectability-checklist#comment-291201

119. nigel on Jun 22nd, 2007 at 4:04 am

Has anybody come across the book called ‘The Final Theory’? I read the intro some time back and the author starts off by pointing out many contradictions in physics, but ends up destroying his own credibility. My favourite was how Newtonian gravity and general relativity conflict, and therefore both must be wrong. – GP

That book by Mark McCrutcheon is unhelpful because it doesn’t predict anything checkable. The idea is simple: that all planets and masses are expanding at an accelerating rate, with the surface of the Earth accelerating upwards at 9.8 ms^{-2}, so that gravity is superfluous.

In a fuzzy way, this idea can be superficially related to the accelerating universe, but it fails as a universal theory when you look at the numbers. When you do a mathematical check on it, all masses would have to be expanding at different rates that aren’t directly proportional to mass, which means you lose the mathematical simplicity of universal gravitation without gaining any benefits in return. It makes the universe more mysterious, not less so.

Your argument that ‘My favourite was how Newtonian gravity and general relativity conflict, and therefore both must be wrong’ reminds me of an essay of Professor Hawking, where he writes something to the effect that he gets lots of letters from people with personal pet theories, but they’re all wrong because they’re all incompatible. (It’s very tempting for busy people to use this bogus argument. I think Dr Motl took offense to McCrutcheon because of a similar statement that string theory is an even more fruitless approach to modelling gravity, with 10^500 string theory landscape models. Dr Motl then published a negative review of some parts of the book (ignoring McCrutcheon’s basic idea) at Amazon, but Amazon deleted it.

111. nigel on Jun 21st, 2007 at 12:34 pm

I would say that it isn’t valid criticism to just parrot things you’ve read in recent books or on another blog. When a string theorist does try to respond to criticisms from such people, there is virtually no way to explain things because 1) they don’t have the relevant background and 2) they are really not interested in a true discussion to begin with as they only want to repeat what they’ve heard elsewhere. – Van

1) The parroting comes from people repeating false string theory claims to do physics; 2) the insults come from those claiming that any critics are repeating rubbish from recent books, i.e. ad hominem attacks ignoring the point. The ‘relevant background’ seems maybe to be a euphemism for prejudice?