In an earlier post, it was explained that mainstream first quantization (e.g., the Schroedinger wave equation or the Heisenberg matrices) was known non-relativistic since the 1920s and to falsely quantize the wrong variables: first quantization falsely keeps the Coulomb field potential classical and makes position/momentum intrinsically uncertain, instead of allowing the random, chaotic exchange of field quanta between charges to produce the indeterminism and uncertainty of atomic electron orbits.

“Bohr … said: “… one could not talk about the trajectory of an electron in the atom, because it was something not observable.” … Bohr thought that I didn’t know the uncertainty principle … it didn’t make me angry, it just made me realize that … [ they ] … didn’t know what I was talking about, and it was hopeless to try to explain it further. I gave up, I simply gave up …”

- 1965 physics Nobel Laureate Richard P. Feynman, quoted in Jagdish Mehra, The Beat of a Different Drum (Oxford, 1994, pp. 245-248).

“Niels Bohr brainwashed a whole generation of theorists into thinking that the job of interpreting quantum theory was done 50 years ago.” – 1969 physics Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann.

For more evidence about Bohr’s deep ignorance of physics and his crank propaganda, see the 325 page 1999 book Quantum Dialogue by the expert on the history of quantum mechanics, Professor Mara Beller (1945-2004), or read her article The Sokal Hoax: At Whom Are We Laughing?

The widely-ignored (due to Bohr’s brainwashing first quantization/uncertainty principle lie) Fig. 65 from Richard P. Feynman’s 1985 book QED illustrates how individual electromagnetic field quanta exchanges cause indeterministic electron orbits: ‘I would like to put the uncertainty principle in its historical place … If you get rid of all the old-fashioned ideas and instead use the ideas that I’m explaining in these lectures – adding arrows [path amplitudes] for all the ways an event can happen – there is no need for an uncertainty principle!’ – Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, pp. 55-56. ‘… with electrons: when seen on a large scale, they travel like particles, on definite paths. But on a small scale, such as inside an atom, the space is so small that there is no main path, no “orbit”; there are all sorts of ways the electron could go, each with an amplitude. … we have to sum the arrows to predict where an electron is likely to be.’ – Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, Chapter 3, pp. 84-5. Hence, the indeterminate electron motion in the atom is simply caused by second-quantization: the field quanta randomly interacting and deflecting the electron.

So the mainstream argument for the uncertainty principle is based on the assumption that first quantization (the false, non-relativistic, Heisenberg matrix mechanics and Schroedinger wave equation) quantum mechanics is true, when in fact such first quantization has been known to be a convenient lie since 1927 when discovered incompatible with relativity. It’s convenient for teaching quantum mechanics because the people who teach it are just concerned with use of the mathematical machinery, and don’t care about the underlying physical processes, since the atom calculations in quantum mechanics are simplest when using the false physical model of first quantization. Because atomic electrons only orbit at speeds of about 1% of the velocity of light, the fact that first quantization (such as Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics and Schroedinger’s wave equation) is non-relativistic and false in the relativistic limit will not pose a significant error, and such non-physical quantum mechanical descriptions of atoms do produce useful predictions, just as Ptolemy’s physically inaccurate, highly convoluted medieval geocentric epicycle predictions were approximately correct and in some ways (circular orbits) easy to calculate with, prior to the Copernican solar system and Keplerian elliptical orbit. What the mainstream has done is to take a physically false theory of primitive 1927 quantum mechanics (first quantization, unlike the later physically correct second quantization – i.e. non-classical, with a field quanta-mediated Coulomb potential – of QFT by Dirac, Feynman et al.), and use the inaccurate physically reasoning of that false model as if it were true in order to try to discredit the concept of quantum gravity, by showing that Schroedinger’s equation violates the equivalence principle between inertial and gravitational mass.

The mainstream quantum mechanics hyping of the uncertainty principle fails to see that Schroedinger’s equation also violates relativity, which is precisely why Dirac came up with his relativistic quantum field equation. Yes, Schroedinger’s equation is in disagreement with gravitational observations. No, that doesn’t mean quantum gravity is impossible: it just means that Schroedinger’s equation is wrong as was known by Dirac and others back in the 1920s.

There is an Orwellian “double-think” (“the act of simultaneously accepting as correct two mutually contradictory beliefs“) manifesting itself in physics about first and second quantization: instead of proclaiming first quantization to be wrong, everyone in the mainstream and even outside it seems to endlessly refuse to see that first and second quantization are incompatible physically (although the predictions for bound states are similar, in the non-relativistic limit for approximate calculations). As we shall see below in this post, this problem is particularly severe for string theorist Lubos Motl, and it is also behind the failure of less mainstream-dominated researchers like Professor Lee Smolin to come to understand quantum mechanics. When I write up the quantum gravity paper, I will have to go into the details of this contradiction to show how first quantization has led to quantum mechanics confusion, blocking progress in quantum gravity.

In the previous post, we finally formulated and presented the draft diagram that has been desperately lacking since the mechanism idea originated in 1996. There was a limit to how much progress could be made without getting the geometry crystal clear. I don’t like the presentation, but it (1) is fact based and (2) makes checkable predictions which have been confirmed.

The post before that was called Second quantization (Quantum Field Theory of Dirac, Feynman et al.) is physically correct and debunks the non-relativistic, physically wrong first quantization approximation to Quantum Mechanics (Schroedinger and Heisenberg).

To summarize, the Heisenberg and Schroedinger approaches to quantum mechanics are non-relativistic; they’re useful approximations for bound states (electrons bound to atoms) but they’re fundamentally wrong in principle because they use the wrong hamiltonian energy formula. They fail to put space and time on an equal footing, i.e. they don’t incorporate relativity, and they wrongly model the Coulomb electric field potential energy classically as a continuous and non-fluctuating parameter, ignoring the fact that in QED – as experimentally proved by the Casimir effect and by such facts as the quantum tunnelling of 8.78 MeV alpha particles out from polonium-212 nuclei through a classically impenetrable 26 MeV “Coulomb barrier” – the electromagnetic field is experimentally known to be mediated by the exchange of virtual (off-shell) photons in a stochastic manner between electromagnetic charges. It is precisely the quantum field nature of the real Coulomb potential (as opposed to its classical formulation) that makes the orbital electron’s motion indeterministic and non-classical, and which causes the “Coulomb barrier” faced by an alpha particle in the nucleus to vary chaotically with time about its average value, occasionally weakening enough for an alpha particle with classically insufficient energy to escape or “tunnel out”.

Similarly, in nuclear fusion of protons, the stochastic nature of the real quantized Coulomb field allows “tunnelling in” and significant fusion cross-sections to exist at energies which are totally forbidden by the classical Coulomb barrier.

Hence, the whole reason for the indeterminancy in quantum mechanics is falsely assumed to be an intrinsic uncertainty in the position and momentum product of a real (on-shell) particle. Wrong. That assumption is so-called ‘first quantization’, where the uncertainty principle is used in the form of operators for uncertainties in momentum or position, and the classical Coulomb field energy potential is assumed true.

In fact, the chaotic motion of the electron is not due to intrinsic uncertainty by itself, but is due to the uncertainty in the exchange of virtual (off-shell) photons between the nucleus, the orbital electron, and other charges around it. The electric field is chaotic on small spacetime scales because the numbers of field quanta being exchanged to produce the Coulomb force is smaller than it is on large scales. This effect is like the transition from classical, steady air pressure on large areas to Brownian motion on micron sized dust particles where individual air molecule impacts don’t average out perfectly and random, chaotic motion results!

If you try to measure the position of an electron by firing a photon at it, sure, then the uncertainty principle can be used correctly to describe the minimum uncertainty in position and momentum. But generally, as Feynman stated in his book QED, you don’t need an uncertainty principle.

Instead, you just need to sum over the histories of many chaotic virtual photon exchanges and the randomness in that quantum field replaces the classical Coulomb field and explains the reason why a wave equation is statistically a good model for finding the probability that the electron will be found in a given location.

This is called “second quantization”, and Dirac’s quantum field theory equation of 1929 is an example, although it is falsely presented in many treatments as an addition to the basic ideas of quantum theory, when in fact it is totally incompatible because it’s relativistic, not non-relativistic, and thus has a totally different hamiltonian, describing energy of the system. Feynman’s sum-over-histories or “path integrals” approach to quantum mechanics is vital for understanding physically the difference between second quantization (QED) and non-relativistic first quantization (Heisenberg/Schroedinger quantum mechanics).

‘You might wonder how such simple actions could produce such a complex world. It’s because phenomena we see in the world are the result of an enormous intertwining of tremendous numbers of photon exchanges and interferences.’

- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, p. 114.

‘Underneath so many of the phenomena we see every day are only three basic actions: one is described by the simple coupling number, j; the other two by functions P(A to B) and E(A to B) – both of which are closely related. That’s all there is to it, and from it all the rest of the laws of physics come.’

- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, p. 120.

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

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

We should add a bit more about the history of attacks against (and defence of) the causal basis of quantum fields in producing indeterminancy and debunking non-relativistic Heisenberg/Schroedinger first quantization (so-called “QM”). Dirac in 1929 came up with the Dirac equation which replaces first quantization and is relativistic, unlike QM. Bohr apparently never understood the difference between first and second quantization, as shown by his 1948 Pocono conference attack on Feynman’s second quantization path integrals which was quoted above (which were initially presented in non-relativistic format as a conceptually simple alternative to first-quantization, but are easily made relativistic and now are used in relativistic high energy particle physics, e.g. the Standard Model).

Bohr never retracted his irrational beliefs in the first-quantization uncertainty principle religion. But Dirac, having come up with the relativistic quantum field theory equation, knew that Bohr’s religion was wrong, although he was unable to counter its propaganda. Dirac loved relativity but could see that atomic “indeterminancy” arises not from Bohr’s command, but instead from particle interactions with the vacuum (relevant quotations from Dirac are in comments here, here and here):

‘Physical knowledge has advanced much since 1905, notably by the arrival of quantum mechanics, and the situation has again changed. If one examines the question in the light of present-day knowledge, one finds that the aether is no longer ruled out by relativity, and good reasons can now be advanced for postulating an æther. . . .

‘We must make some profound alterations to the theoretical idea of the vacuum. . . . Thus, with the new theory of electrodynamics we are rather forced to have an æther.’ – P. A. M. Dirac, ‘Is There an æther?’, Nature, v168 (1951), pp. 906-7.

‘Infeld has shown how the field equations of my new electrodynamics can be written so as not to require an æther. This is not sufficient to make a complete dynamical theory. It is necessary to set up an action principle and to get a Hamiltonian formulation of the equations suitable for quantization purposes, and for this the æther velocity is required.’ – P. A. M. Dirac, ‘Is there an æther?’, Nature, v169 (1952), p. 702.

This causal explanation of quantum indeterminancy didn’t go down very well against the anti-aether propaganda (and some of Dirac’s arguments were simplistic and wrong, anyway, including his “Dirac sea” aether and some details of his theory of the “large numbers coincidence”). Dirac’s defence of aether in the 1950s coincided with a dramatic reversal from his early pragmatic view of physics. On page 7 of his 1930 book The Principles of Quantum Mechanics Dirac stated:

‘The only object of theoretical physics is to calculate results that can be compared with experiment.’

But on 7 May 1963 Dirac told Thomas Kuhn during an interview:

‘It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations, than to have them fit experiment.’

- Dirac, ‘The Evolution of the Physicist’s Picture of Nature’, Scientific American, May 1963, 208, 47.

What Dirac clearly has in mind in 1963 is the excellent prediction of the Feynman-Schwinger-Tomonaga QED virtual particle mechanism Lamb shift and magnetic moment of the electron and muon. Dirac strongly objected to Feynman’s extension of his quantum field theory and he rejected the renormalization of charge and mass with arbitrary cutoffs on running couplings at high energy to prevent infinities in the equations, a procedure which he considered an ugly ad hoc fix. This is despite the fact that it was a paper about the role of “action” in quantum field theory by Dirac which prompted Feynman’s path integrals formulation. Schroedinger’s time-dependent wave equation has an exponential solution whereby the wavefunction as a function of time is proportional to e^-iHT/ħ where H is the energy operator (Hamiltonian), T is time and ħ is Planck’s constant over twice Pi. Squaring this wavefunction gives the probability of finding the particle, i.e., the exponential represents a kind of “amplitude”. Dirac took e^-iHT/ħ and derived the more fundamental lagrangian amplitude for action S, i.e. e^iS/ħ. Feynman showed that summing this amplitude factor e^iS/ħ over all possible paths or interaction histories gave a result proportional to the total probability for a given interaction. This is the path integral. Notice that the amplitude depends on the size of the action relative to Planck’s constant: where S/ħ is a big number, you get classical physics, and if S/ħ is small then you get quantum mechanics. But although it is derived from the time-dependent Schroedinger equation, it is not any longer theoretically equivalent to that equation, because it is now being summed or integrated over, to make it represent endless different interactions from virtual particles which contribute to the outcome.

In other words, the path integral, by summing over all possible interactions, in effect includes the quantum field particle creation and annihilation operators, allowing random field fluctuations to introduce statistical variations on small scales where the action S for a path is small. This is totally ignored in first quantization procedures and is omitted from the time-dependent Schroedinger formulation which doesn’t include the many virtual particle interaction contributions to the end result, and therefore lacks the proper mechanical basis for the indeterminancy and statistical basis of quantum mechanical predictions. Dirac, like Bohr and others, objected to Feynman’s path integrals at Pocono in 1948: “Dirac had proved … that in quantum mechanics, since you progress only forward in time, you have to have a unitary operator. But there is no unitary way of dealing with a single electron.”

Dr Chris Oakley also quotes Dirac stating: “[Renormalization is] just a stop-gap procedure. There must be some fundamental change in our ideas, probably a change just as fundamental as the passage from Bohr’s orbit theory to quantum mechanics. When you get a number turning out to be infinite which ought to be finite, you should admit that there is something wrong with your equations, and not hope that you can get a good theory just by doctoring up that number.”

Dr Oakley quotes Feynman (in his 1985 book QED) stating: “The shell game that we play … is technically called ‘renormalization’. But no matter how clever the word, it is still what I would call a dippy process! Having to resort to such hocus-pocus has prevented us from proving that the theory of quantum electrodynamics is mathematically self-consistent. It’s surprising that the theory still hasn’t been proved self-consistent one way or the other by now; I suspect that renormalization is not mathematically legitimate.”

The fact is that calculus itself suffers from the reductionist fallacy: discontinuties are ignored, so in the real world you can’t treat real length’s the same way as you do in mathematics (e.g., a hundred feet of rope in the form of 100 separate 1-foot long lengths is less use to a sailor than a single length of 100 feet of rope; the law of addition may tell you that both are mathematically similar but in the real world it’s obvious that there is an important difference). The mathematical model of any physical process is never completely accurate: it’s just a convenient calculating procedure. Regarding renormalization, it cuts off a running coupling from making a charge tend towards infinity at an arbitary high energy. Mathematically, this introduces a discontinuity. But physically, the real world has such cutoffs on natural laws we use every day. E.g., the inverse-square law of solar radiation would predict infinite energy density at zero distance from the sun’s core. But we have to cutoff the application of the inverse-square law at the sun’s radius: inside the sun’s radius, the inverse-square law breaks down because it is a plasma of ions and not a vacuum.

This is a good example of how a mathematical law holds up to a point and then breaks down when pushed further, due to a simple change in the physical mechanism of what it is modelling! These introduce a mathematical discontinuity naturally due to physical effects you can understand. Renormalization cutoffs in QFT are similar: as renormalization investigators like Wilson argued, it is physically logical to take a high-energy cutoff because as you go to higher energy, particles approach more closely and eventually they would be so close that there would not be enough spacetime between them for virtual particles to pop into existence, become polarized by the field, and thus shield the field. Hence, at extremely high energy, the distance scales become so small that the physical basis for the running coupling (the shielding of charge due to the polariation of virtual particles) cannot fit into the small space. The “grain size” of the vacuum is the smallest space that the virtual particle creation and polarization processes can fit into. At higher energy, the coupling (relative charge) is no longer running (varying) as a function of energy, because there is no more shielding: it remains constant at higher energy simply because there is no physical mechanism at play at higher energy (smaller distances) for vacuum shielding of charge.

Dr Oakley’s work focusses on the Haag theorem of 1955, which is a mathematical attack on renormalization that shows that a free field vacuum of virtual particles doesn’t exist. However, in a gauge theory, the virtual particles are not a free field vacuum as such: they are always being exchanged between real charged particles, e.g. between real electrons. If you take away the charges in the universe, the vacuum field of exchanged quanta would no longer exist, because those virtual quanta which mediate force fields only exist when being exchanged between particles. So the field quanta don’t exist independently of the real particles: they are not a free field vacuum. E.g., you can, as we have seen in the previous post and others, accurately model the gauge interaction process physically by treating real charges as radiating black holes: the radiation behaves as field quanta (gauge bosons). Every electron in the universe is radiating field quanta “gauge bosons”. Thus, every electron in the universe is also receiving field quanta: in steady state situations (with no net forces acting to produce accelerations) there is an equilibrium of exchange of field quanta between charges. This interaction picture simply does not imply the existence of “free field particles” in the vacuum, which Haag objects to. The field quanta aren’t free but are instead generated by the real particles in the universe, which act as both sources and sinks for the virtual particles. In addition, as we have pointed out before, there are no annihilation-creation operators for a free vacuum: Schwinger showed that there is a cutoff on pair-production in the vacuum and it simply can’t occur where the steady electric field strength is less than 1.3 x 10¹⁸ volts per metre which only exists out to 33 fm from the centre of a unit charge like an electron! In the vacuum beyond that small 33 fm distance, there are no creation-annihilation spacetime Feynman diagram loops, because the field strength is simply too weak to make virtual fermions pop into existence from the ground state of the vacuum. (For proof, just see equation 359 in Dyson’s http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0608140 and equation 8.20 in Luis Alvarez-Gaume, and Miguel A. Vazquez-Mozo’s http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0510040.)

This is the low-energy or IR cutoff to the logarithmic running coupling formula in QFT corresponding to electron collision energies on the order of 1 MeV: at lower energies and thus at distances beyond 33 fm, the charge of the electron no longer falls due to the running coupling, but is constant because there is no further pair production and polarization of the vacuum. Forces then vary merely due to the geometric (inverse square law) effect of distance on the spreading out of force-mediating gauge boson exchange radiation. However, if you read popular accounts of quantum field theory, they all ignore equation 359 in Dyson’s http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0608140 and equation 8.20 in Luis Alvarez-Gaume, and Miguel A. Vazquez-Mozo’s http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0510040, and instead claim that the entire vacuum is full of virtual particles spontaneously popping into existence and being annihilated. Nope. It isn’t. This is why long-range forces vary according to the geometric inverse-square law over large distances, without an additional logarithmic or exponential attenuation factor (which you do need when modelling shorer range forces where pair production does exist, e.g. the weak and strong nuclear forces). Over larger distances than 33 fm from a fundamental particle, due to the IR cutoff the vacuum doesn’t contain any Feynman diagram loops: it merely contains bosonic exchange radiations. There can be no spontaneous pair production of virtual fermions where the electric field is below Schwinger’s 1.3 x 10¹⁸ volts/metre threshold, because the field is then too weak to allow them to be created. (Think of the photoelectric effect for an analogy to this threshold: you can only release electrons from a metal by photon impacts if the photon energy exceeds a threshold energy called the work function of the electron. In other words, charges have a binding energy, and you must deliver more than that binding energy before you can free them.)

Like Dirac, Einstein also objected to Bohr, but obviously he did not side with Dirac and objected to first quantization on different grounds to Dirac (because Einstein simply didn’t want any particles, but just classical “continuum” fields such as extensions to general relativity), and Einstein was also widely ignored in favour of Bohr’s philosophy (Smolin’s 2006 book for instance quotes Dyson as skipping a meeting with Einstein, after Dyson read Einstein’s latest papers and decided they were poor).

Bohr simply wasn’t aware that Poincare chaos arises even in classical systems with 2+ bodies, so he foolishly sought to invent metaphysical thought structures (complementarity and correspondence principles) to isolate classical from quantum physics. Poincare chaos means that chaotic motions on atomic scales can result from 2+ electrons influencing one another, e.g. from the randomly produced pairs of charges (creation-annihilation “loops” on spacetime Feynman diagrams) which exist randomly within 10^-15 metre from an electron (where the electric field is over Schwinger’s threshold for spontaneous pair-production in the vacuum, about 1.3 x 10¹⁸ v/m) causing deflections in motion (these effects might average out over long times and large distances, but would cause more chaotic motion on smaller time and distance scales). The failure of determinism (predictable closed orbits, etc.) is therefore present in classical, Newtonian physics, which can’t even deal with a collision of 3 billiard balls. Newtonian physics works in the solar system only because the planets all have masses – i.e. gravitational charges – far smaller than the mass of the sun, reducing it to effectively a two-body problem where only the masses of the planet under consideration and the sun are important for calculating the gravitational force. By contrast, in the atom, the electrons carry charges which are a much larger fraction of the nuclear charge with opposite sign (for a hydrogen atom the electron has an identical amount of electric charge as the nucleus), so mutual interference between electrons in nearby atoms (or electron shells in the same atom), will cause a massive amount of chaos in the subatomic world which isn’t seen in the solar system where the sun’s mass dominates (over 99.8% of the mass of the solar system is the sun) and planet-planet interactions are therefore relatively trivial:

‘… the ‘inexorable laws of physics’ … were never really there … Newton could not predict the behaviour of three balls … In retrospect we can see that the determinism of pre-quantum physics kept itself from ideological bankruptcy only by keeping the three balls of the pawnbroker apart.’

– Dr Tim Poston and Dr Ian Stewart, Analog, November 1981.

So why is this fact – that the chaos of quantum mechanics is simply due to the random exchange of virtual particles in the quantum electromagnetic field between charges in atoms – being covered-up?

Professor Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute has enlightened me as to why the mainstream ignores this: I’ve just read his 2006 arXiv paper http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0609109, ‘Could quantum mechanics be an approximation to another theory?’ Smolin simply fails to discriminate first from second quantization, then goes into details of deriving the Schroedinger equation (first quantization, i.e. wrong quantum mechanics) from stochastic processes. In other words, he completely ignores Feynman’s explanation that the field quanta cause indeterminism in the atom and other small-scale phenomena (such as light passing through nearby double slits and being influenced by the electromagnetic fields of the electrons in the slits) and talks instead about modifying Bohm’s 1952 discredited “hidden variables” ideas:

“We consider the hypothesis that quantum mechanics is an approximation to another, cosmological theory, accurate only for the description of subsystems of the universe. Quantum theory is then to be derived from the cosmological theory by averaging over variables which are not internal to the subsystem, which may be considered non-local hidden variables. We find conditions for arriving at quantum mechanics through such a procedure. The key lesson is that the effect of the coupling to the external degrees of freedom introduces noise into the evolution of the system degrees of freedom, while preserving a notion of averaged conserved energy and time reversal invariance.

“These conditions imply that the effective description of the subsystem is Nelson’s stochastic formulation of quantum theory. We show that Nelson’s formulation is not, by itself, a classical stochastic theory as the conserved averaged energy is not a linear function of the probability density. We also investigate an argument of Wallstrom posed against the equivalence of Nelson’s stochastic mechanics and quantum mechanics and show that, at least for a simple case, it is in error.”

ArXiv, being controlled by string theory partisans who don’t like Smolin’s loop quantum gravity, have permitted a trackback to the paper from Dr Lubos Motl’s blog post called “Wavefunctions and hydrodynamics: crackpots vs. rational thinking”, where Lubos writes:

“It is no secret that I consider all people whose main scientific focus is a revision of the basic postulates of quantum mechanics – and a return to the classical reasoning – to be crackpots. They just seem too stubborn and dogmatic or too intellectually limited to understand one of the most important results of the 20th century science.

“Every new prediction based on the assumption that there is a classical theory that underlies the laws of quantum mechanics has been proven wrong. The local hidden variables have first predicted wrong outcomes in the EPR experiments and later they predicted the validity of Bell’s inequalities and we know for sure that these inequalities are violated in Nature, just like quantum mechanics implies and quantifies. The non-local hidden variables predict a genuine violation of the Lorentz symmetry. I think that all these theories predict such a brutal violation of the Lorentz symmetry that they are safely ruled out, too. But even if someone managed to reduce the violation of the laws of special relativity in that strange framework, these theories will be ruled out in the future. Their whole philosophy and basic motivation is wrong.

“The whole political movement to return physics to the pre-quantum era is a manifestation of a highly regressive attitude to science – an even more obvious crackpotism than the attempts to return physics to the era prior to string theory. But among the proposals to undo the 20th century in physics, some of the papers are even more stupid than the average.”

As with his string theory propaganda, Lubos is wrong about the Bell inequality tests as shown by the following evidence:

“In some key Bell experiments, including two of the well-known ones by Alain Aspect, 1981-2, it is only after the subtraction of ‘accidentals’ from the coincidence counts that we get violations of Bell tests. The data adjustment, producing increases of up to 60% in the test statistics, has never been adequately justified. Few published experiments give sufficient information for the reader to make a fair assessment.” – http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/9903/9903066v2.pdf

“The quantum collapse [in the mainstream interpretation of first quantization quantum mechanics, where a wavefunction collapse occurs whenever a measurement of a particle is made] occurs when we model the wave moving according to Schroedinger (time-dependent) and then, suddenly at the time of interaction we require it to be in an eigenstate and hence to also be a solution of Schroedinger (time-independent). The collapse of the wave function is due to a discontinuity in the equations used to model the physics, it is not inherent in the physics.” – Thomas Love, California State University.

Lubos then goes on and on about Smolin’s paper because Smolin claimed to debunk Wallstrom’s objection to Nelson’s hidden variables (actually Smolin was not defending Nelson, he argues that Wallstrom simply gives a false reason to debunk Nelson and states that the real problem in Nelson are Hilbert space states with discontinuous wavefunctions). I do have to agree with Lubos on the issue that the few people with influence who are probing the foundations of quantum mechanics, like Professor Smolin, are not approaching the subject correctly. The correct approach is to describe quantum fields throughout the universe by summing over histories; i.e., the physical use of path integrals (by analogy to their use in Brownian motion) for modelling the results of field quanta exchange as force fields. Instead, Smolin and others avoid simple modelling at all costs, and choose to work on the problem using variations of old approaches which are failures.

David Bohm’s hidden variables theory was first published in his 1952 paper “A suggested interpretation of quantum theory in terms of hidden variables, I and II”, Physical Review v. 85, pp. 166-93. Bohm ignored the evidence for quantum fields causing indeterminancy as accepted in second quantization (quantum field theory) and instead abstrusely and controversially introduced “hidden variables” to explain the chaotic, Brownian motion-type indeterminancy of electron orbits, deriving the first-quantization Schroedinger equation! Bohm’s error is plain to see: he should have been rebuilding quantum mechanics using quantum field theory, with Feynman’s path integrals to sum the exchange of field quanta between charges in the universe, instead of trying to derive the epicycle-like non-relativistic first quantization model of quantum mechanics.

Later, in 1969, Edward Nelson published his “Derivation of the Schroedinger equation from Newtonian mechanics” in Physical Review, v. 150, p. 1079. The title alone tells you why Lubos and other string theorists get so angry with this stuff: they want their complex, stringy mathematical ugliness to replace the deep simplicity in the world just as Ptolemy’s geocentric epicycles of 150 A.D. won out over Aristarchus’ more physically correct solar system of 250 B.C.; their stringy mathematics is analogous to Ptolemy’s geocentric, non-physical epicycles (where the correct theory is not such a mathematical landscape of endless ad hoc epicycles with many fine-tuned anthropic-derived parameters, but is simply a solar system with elliptical rather than circular orbits).

Nelson also wrote a book, “Quantum fluctuations” (Princeton University Press, 1985), available as a PDF download. It doesn’t address anything interesting and although the aim is very interesting, it focusses on the wrong theory (first quantization quantum mechanics, not QFT/second quantization). Another book with similar errors is Peter R. Holland’s “The Quantum Theory of Motion: An Account of the De Broglie-Bohm Causal Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics”, Cambridge University Press, 1995. Although the aim is good, the method and results are wrong because it again focusses on deriving the wrong theory!

To understand why they are all wrong, imagine this is the year 1500 A.D. and some errors in Ptolemy’s geocentric universe epicycle theory have been found using more accurate measurements of planetary positions. Instead of everyone trying different things to solve the problem, the mainstream all goes and adds more epicycles to cover up the problems (exactly like today’s string theorists addressing the problems of the Standard Model); while the heretics such as Copernicus try to resurrect Aristarchus’s solar system complete with its own system of circular orbits and epicycles to explain retrograde motion. Nobody works on elliptical orbits. Both the mainstream and the heretics work on false models. Everyone wrongly agrees that circles are the most beautiful mathematical tool and that nature must have planets moving in circles: they only disagree on whether the earth or the sun is the centre.

Arthur Koestler’s 1959 “The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe” actually counted the epicycles up and found 40 in Ptolemy’s Earth-centred-system in his “Almagest” of 150 A.D., versus 80 in Copernicus’s solar system of 1500 A.D. (which used circular orbits with epicycles instead of ellipses like Kepler). This was contrary to the prevailing history of science, which insisted that Copernicus was accepted on the basis of Occam’s Razon due to having the fewer epicycles than Ptolemy. Actually sometimes more complex theories are closer to nature and there were different reasons why Copernicus was preferred. (Viz: Mercury and Venus are always observed from Earth to be on a bearing within 90 degrees of the position of the sun, a fact which is explained very simply in the solar system model by Mercury and Venus having orbits closer in to the sun than the Earth’s orbit. Additionally, the apparent size of the Moon seen from Earth in Ptolemy’s model should vary by a factor of two monthly due to its epicycles, when in fact it doesn’t appear to vary in size.)

The road ahead, by analogy to the road to the atom: How our knowledge of matter was developed through guesswork, experiment-forced correction of simplistic theory, and a reluctant acceptance for unpredicted complexity

‘In considering the history of thought, it is necessary to distinguish the real stream, determining a period, from the ineffectual thoughts casually entertained. In the eighteenth century every well-educated man read Lucretius and entertained ideas about atoms. But John Dalton made them efficient in the stream of science …’ – Alfred North Whitehead, Science in the Modern World, Harvard, 1925.

‘… John Dalton made the theory quantitative. By showing how the weights of different atoms relative to one another could be determined, he introduced a feeling of reality into a purely abstract idea. … Most of his weights were subsequently proved to be erroneous, but Dalton sowed the seed which grew, where others had previously merely turned over the soil. … It provided an explanation or, at least, an interpretation of many chemical facts and, of greater consequence, it acted as a guide to further experimentation and investigation. … A fact may be defined as something for the actual existence of which there is definite evidence. A theory or hypothesis, on the other hand, is a purely conceptual attempt to explain or interpret known facts. While facts are presumably established and unalterable, a theory may be altered or discarded if it proves to be inadequate.’ – Samuel Glasstone, Sourcebook on Atomic Energy, D. van Nostrand, 2nd ed., New York, 1958, pp. 2-3. (Copyright of the U.S. Government.)

There were two rival theories of matter in Ancient Greece, circa 500 B.C. Leucippus and his student Democritus thought matter ultimately composed of void and tiny fundamental ‘atoms’ (this name meaning ‘non-divisible’, from the Greek, a-temnein). Empedocles and Aristotle rejected the atomic hypothesis, preferring a theory in which all matter is formed from a combination of one or more of four fundamental ‘elements’: air, earth, fire and water.

In 1774, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier proved that air is not an element but a mixture of (mainly) nitrogen and oxygen, only the latter of which supports combustion. In 1781, Joseph Priestley and Henry Cavendish similarly debunked the theory that water is a fundamental element, by proving it to be a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. In 1808, John Dalton’s New System of Chemical Philosophy was published, containing relative masses measured for various types of atom, i.e., various elements.

Dalton made serious errors in assuming that water was a simple compound of equal numbers of hydrogen and oxygen atoms (HO), and that ammonia was similarly simple (NH). These and other errors caused Dalton to deduce incorrect masses for oxygen and nitrogen atoms of 7 and 5 relative to hydrogen, instead of 14 and 15 using the true formulae H₂O and NH₃, respectively. The correct masses of oxygen and nitrogen atoms relative to hydrogen are 16 and 14. Despite errors, Dalton’s idea caused progress.

In 1811, Amadeo Avogadro argued that, under constant temperature and pressure, the density of any gas is directly proportional to the relative mass of its constituent molecules:

‘Setting out from this hypothesis, it is apparent that we have the means of determining very easily the relative masses of the molecules of substances obtainable in the gaseous state.’

For practical purposes, Avogadro’s law led to the concept of the gram-molecule or ‘mole’ whereby the atomic mass of a molecule to roughly that of hydrogen – or, as defined precisely, to one-twelfth of the mass of carbon-12 – expressed in units of grams, is the mass of one mole. E.g., for water (H₂O), one mole is roughly 2 + 16 = 18 grams. According to Avogadro’s law, one mole of any gas occupies a volume of 1 litre at 1 atmosphere pressure and 0 ^oC temperature. In 1905, Albert Einstein worked out a diffusion equation for the Brownian motion of small dust grains hit by air molecules which was used by experimentalist Jean Perrin in 1908 and subsequent researchers to calculate that there are about 6.022 x 10²³ molecules in one mole of any substance. This permitted the masses of different atoms to be estimated.

In 1816, William Prout stated his hypothesis that all atomic masses were integral multiples of the mass of hydrogen. This was statistically defended by Lord Rayleigh in 1901:

‘The atomic weights tend to approximate to whole numbers far more closely than can reasonably be accounted for by any accidental coincidence … the chance of any such coincidence being the explanation is not more than 1 in 1000.’

Detractors of Prout’s hypothesis pointed out that the accurately measured masses of chlorine and copper (about 35.5 and 63.5) were definitely not integers. Instead of the hypothesis being abandoned as empirically false, the non-integer masses were later explained by the discovery of isotopes due to a variable numbers of neutrons present in the nucleus of atoms of a given element, as well as the mass of the nuclear fields which bind nuclear particles together. The presence of neutrons was not merely a problem in producing non-integer average masses for some elements. Neutrons also introduced complexity into the relationship between the chemical properties of elements and their relative masses.

John Newlands in 1865 tried to arrange the known elements into a table on the basis of their weights and chemical properties. He discovered a ‘law of octaves’ in which the eighth most massive atom has similarities to the first, and so on. However, due to Newland’s omission of undiscovered elements, Newland’s law was simplistic, and wrongly related iron with sulphur and gold with iodine.

In 1869, Mendelyeev published his periodic table that correctly associated the properties of elemental atoms of different masses by allowing some empty spaces in the table to ensure that the properties in each column correlated correctly. Three of the gaps were soon filled by the discovery of gallium in 1875, scandium in 1879 and germanium in 1886, which had the properties predicted by Mendelyeev. As a result of these correct predictions, Mendelyeev’s periodic table was taken seriously and was first reported in English in the London Chemical News journal of December 1875.

Mendelyeev’s periodic table contains vertical columns correlating the chemical properties of elements and horizontal ‘periods’ containing an increasing number of elements: 2 in the first period (hydrogen and helium), the 8 elements in each of the next two periods (lithium to neon, and sodium to argon), followed by 18 in the following period (potassium to krypton).

The Pauli exclusion principle of quantum theory, by imposing constraints on the combinations of electron pairing in atomic shells, explains this periodic table of the elements.

One deep lesson from this history of matter is that we have to follow and model experimental data when theoretical guesswork fails or is uncheckable: science isn’t concerned with uncheckable speculations. Another deep lesson is that the theory of the atom which resulted wasn’t anything like the “beautiful” regular geometric solids idea of the ancient Greeks, and the atoms were not even unsplittable. If you try to ignore and censor out advances without checking them on the basis that your “gut reaction” is that they don’t look pretty, you are in effect just a gutless supporter of mainstream groupthink. If the scientific evidence supports a model (be it intuitive, counterintuitive, simple, complex, “elegant”, or “ugly”, a model with many fans and promoters, or none at all), you need to take it seriously. Otherwise, you’re just acting emotionally, not scientifically.

Fig. 1 – new presentation of quantum gravity, based on both the recent discussion with Doug Sweetser in the About page comments, and an attempt to explain the mechanism to a science teacher, during an hour long run in the park this evening. Note that this predicts the actual strength of gravity, e.g. it predicts the value of the gravitational parameter G. This is not a non-predictive theory like string theory, based on 6/7 extra dimensions that nobody can observe and adding 100 or more extra unknown parameters plus a multiverse of 10⁵⁰⁰ extra universes to the Standard Model of particle physics. It’s a predictive theory based on factual inputs, not a non-predictive theory which is based speculations about yet other speculations (Planck scale unification, wrong spin-2 gravitons, etc.).

The mainstream spin-2 graviton theory can’t calculate anything checkable, since it has to falsely ignore graviton contributions in the surrounding universe, which are immense due to the fact that (1) the masses of galaxies in the surrounding universe are immense and (2) the gravitons from such distant masses are converging from a great distance as they are exchanged with masses here, which is the opposite of divergence. This spin-1 graviton theory is the only possible falsifiable theory of quantum gravity for this reason: it is based on observable facts seen in nature. By Newton’s 2nd law, the cosmological acceleration (a = Hc ~ 7 x 10^-10 ms^-2) of the mass of the universe (~3 x 10⁵² kg of observable luminous matter, according to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope) implies a force outward from any observer of F = Ma = 2 x 10⁴³ Newtons. Newton’s 3rd law implies an equal and opposite force (i.e. inward directed, towards the observer). From the possibilities of known particle physics (gravity and the Standard Model), this force must be carried by gravitons, implying the mechanism in Fig. 1 which gives gravity as the asymmetry when this force is shadowed by masses with a cross-section for graviton interactions equal to the black hole event area of the mass of that fundamental particle, which is a fact that is empirically justified in the earlier post linked here. The blach hole event horion radius for an electron is 1.35 x 10^-57 metre, so it has a cross-section of just 5.73 x 10^-114 m². This small cross-section is why gravity is so weak compared to other forces (e.g., the gravitational attraction between two apples is negligible, and you need immense masses like the mass of the earth to make the gravitational interaction significant, whereas other fundamental forces show up when dealing with just a few particles).

There is an radial inward force of 2 x 10⁴³ Newtons which is the 3rd law reaction to the observed cosmological acceleration of the universe around the observer. This is an immense force, but because the cross-section for quantum gravity is so small, gravity gets cut down to the observed strength by the shadowing effect in Fig. 1.

The gravitational attraction force given by Newton’s law with parameter G obtained in the usual way empirically (from the twisting of a fibre by the attraction of large lead spheres in the laboratory) can now be calculated theoretically as proved in Fig. 1 above. It is accurate, with errors well within the error in the estimate of the mass of the observable universe (3 x 10⁵² kg which is taken from page 5 of the NASA report linked here). Fig. 1 also summarizes the flaws in trying to extend LeSage’s inaccurate and useless theory of gravity to this theory in order to ignore it (which is like falsely claiming Darwin’s evolution is wrong because Lamarke came up with an inaccurate and misleading theory of evolution before Darwin sorted out the facts of evolution; it superficially impresses the gullible, but it is a false argument itself): LeSage’s theory is based on real radiation, not virtual (off-shell) radiation like gauge bosons (which don’t heat up objects or slow them down by causing drag). In any case, quantum gravity will imply that there are gravitons throughout the vacuum, so if this naive objection were true, it would be a problem for spin-2 gravitons just as spin-1 gravitons. Actually, there are interactions between gravitons and moving masses: these cause the FitzGerald contraction in length in the direction of motion (head-on pressure effect), the increase in mass (snowplow effect), and for static masses the radial contraction (compression) which leads to various curvature effects in the approximation to quantum gravity which is known as general relativity.

Above: LeSage’s shadow theory was developed originally by Newton’s friend Fatio, but was a failure because it couldn’t predict anything:

(1) Fatio and LeSage didn’t know Weyl’s gauge theory whereby two gravitational charges will exchange off-shell virtual particles, gravitons, to cause gravity (which is the case in the other fundamental particle interactions in the Standard Model). So they falsely speculated that gravity was caused by dust like particles which would cause drag, slowing down the planets and heating them up by impacts. Maxwell and Kelvin later pointed out these flaws, debunking the Fatio-LeSage theory.

(2) They didn’t know that we’re surrounded by immense masses in all directions and that according to any Weyl gauged quantum gravity theory, we will be exchanging gravitons with those surrounding masses. There is no way to prevent or justifiably ignore the consequences of this graviton exchange with immense distant masses.

(3) They didn’t know about the recession of matter, so they couldn’t predict the cosmological acceleration of the universe correctly ahead of measurement (which we did publish in 1996, two years before discovery), and then use that value to calculate the outward force of receding mass M by Newton’s 2nd law, F = Ma. They couldn’t in consequence apply Newton’s 3rd law to get the equal and opposite inward-diected, graviton mediated force. They also didn’t have any evidence about the graviton interaction cross-sectional area for matter; they didn’t know the evidence that it is black hole sized.

There are other ignorant claims to be found on the internet. For example, http://www.mathpages.com/HOME/kmath209/kmath209.htm states falsely that the isotropy of the universe is 1 part in 100,000 without specifying the area of sky that this this amount of cosmic background radiation temperature fluctuation applies to: the page claims that this amount of anistropy would cause “fluctuations in the “weight” of a 1 pound object (in the shape of a slender rod, to make it sensitive to the directional flux) on the order of 100 pounds”. It gives no time-frame for the period of oscillation of this density, or the ratio of length to diameter of the rod, just the pseudoscientifically value word “slender” (which is non-quantitative). Actually, this is totally false because if a long slender rod is made, it will not fluctuate in mass due to the anisotropy because the anisotropy is not fluctuating! The same pattern of anisotropy in the cosmic background radiation exists across the sky. Rotating the rod makes no difference whatsoever, because the rod is composed of individual fundamental particles! The sum of forces acting on those particles is no different regardless of the orientation of the rod. With a cross-section for graviton interactions of 5.73 x 10^-114 m² for an electron, there is no significant chance (even with the mass of the earth) that two fundamental particles will lie on a single given line of sight. Hence, the shape of a given mass is irrelevant for the mass sizes we are concerned with in the case of rods in a laboratory. There are also false “arguments” that gravitons have to travel faster than light, cause heating to melt objects, cause drag forces, and so on, which are based upon studiously ignoring the off-shell nature of force-mediating virtual particles, Weyl gauge bosons. Does your fridge magnet glow red-hot from exchanging gauge bosons with the fridge door? No? Electromagnetism between fundamental charged particles is 10⁴⁰ times stronger than gravity, so if gravitons are supposed to cause heating then electromagnetism would cause a heating effect 10⁴⁰ times worse than gravitons! That debunks the idea that gauge bosons cause any type of heating, including drag effects which cause objects moving in a real (on-shell, not off-shell) fluid to heat up.

All of the objections to this mechanism of gravity are similar in their off-the-top-of-my-head stupidity and ignorance to the objections Feynman’s path integrals received from Oppenheimer, Bohr, Teller and others at Pocono in 1948; they are based on ignoring the facts and simplistically dismissing progress.

Consider Oppenheimer’s attempt to censor Feynman’s path integrals without listening at all, as described by Freeman Dyson (Stuckelberg was working on the same idea independently, but was ignored and – as with Zweig’s quarks – he received no Nobel Prize). It’s remarkable that genius in the past has consisted to such a large degree in overcoming apathy (Oppenheimer was not just a stubborn exception who objected to path integrals. E.g., Feynman is quoted by Jagdish Mehra in The Beat of a Different Drum, pp. 245-248, saying that Teller, Dirac and Bohr all also claimed to have “disproved” path integrals: Teller’s disproof consisted of saying that Feynman didn’t have to take account of the exclusion principle, Dirac disproved it for not having a unitary operator, and Bohr disproved it because he believed that Feynman didn’t know the uncertainty principle: “it was hopeless to try to explain it further.” So without Dyson’s brilliance at explaining ideas, Feynman’s path integrals would probably have been ignored.)

“… take the exclusion principle … it turns out that you don’t have to pay much attention to that in the intermediate states in the perturbation theory. I had discovered from empirical rules that if you don’t pay attention to it, you get the right answers anyway …. Teller said: “… It is fundamentally wrong that you don’t have to take the exclusion principle into account.” … Dirac asked “Is it unitary?” … Dirac had proved … that in quantum mechanics, since you progress only forward in time, you have to have a unitary operator. But there is no unitary way of dealing with a single electron. … Bohr … said: “… one could not talk about the trajectory of an electron in the atom, because it was something not observable.” … Bohr thought that I didn’t know the uncertainty principle … it didn’t make me angry, it just made me realize that … [ they ] … didn’t know what I was talking about, and it was hopeless to try to explain it further. I gave up, I simply gave up …”

- Richard P. Feynman, in Jagdish Mehra, The Beat of a Different Drum (Oxford, 1994, pp. 245-248).

http://www.mathpages.com/HOME/kmath209/kmath209.htm compiles equally false dismissals of physical mechanisms from “geniuses” of physics, with added nonsense thrown in (like the mass variation claim we have just debunked):

Historical Assessments of the Fatio-Lesage Theory

It’s an interesting historical fact that the attitudes of scientists toward the Fatio-Lesage “explanation” of gravity have varied widely, not just from one scientist to another, but for individual scientists at different moments. This is exemplified by Newton’s ambivalence. On one hand, he told Fatio that if gravity had a mechanical cause, then the mechanism must be the one Fatio had described. … he explicitly denied (in a famous letter to Bentley) the intelligibility of bare action at a distance, but he just as explicitly rejected (in a letter to Leibniz) the notion that space is filled with some material substance (a la Descartes) that communicates the force of gravity. His alternative was to say that gravity is caused by the will and spirit of God, not by any material cause. Of course, he gave consideration to various possible material mechanisms, and even included some Queries in the latter editions of Opticks, speculating on the possibility of an ether …

Even setting outside the outlandishness of the explanation, Newton was never able to extract from Fatio’s idea any testable consequence that could support it, so the idea remained an occult mechanism which, according to Newton, is not the proper purview of science.

Subsequent scientists have had similarly ambivalent reactions to the theory of Fatio and Lesage. For example, Euler originally expressed interest in Le Sage’s theory, stating (in the same conditional manner employed by Newton) that if gravity is due solely to impulse forces, then something like Lesage’s theory must be true. However, Euler ultimately rejected Lesage’s theory …

This striking ambivalence regarding the Fatio-Lesage theory has many other examples. Herschel spoke for many scientists when he said it was “too grotesque to need serious consideration”, whereas Thomson and Tait gave it serious consideration, the latter even asserting that it was “the only plausible answer which has yet been propounded”. Darwin too gave the idea “serious consideration”, but he also said “no man of science is disposed to accept it as affording the true road”.

Several of the founders of modern kinetic theory, including both John Herapath in 1820 and John James Waterston in 1845, began their investigations by trying to devise mechanical explanations of gravity. Herapath seems to have been influenced explicitly by Lesage’s writings, whereas Waterston was apparently one of the many independent discoverers of the concept. …

I remember a discussion on Physics Forums in which all the errors in LeSage’s theory and dismissals of it by famous physicists were straightened out over many hundreds of comments. Finally the discussion thread was closed by an administrator who falsely stated that at some point in the above discussion, a decisive dismissal of physical mechanisms had been given, but he couldn’t remember what it was, although it proved that it was pointless to go on discussing the topic. This is of course wrong, but it is what happens in such pointless discussions. Feynman had tried to defend himself against Bohr, who closed the discussion in the same way by falsely claiming that Feynman didn’t know the uncertainty principle. If he had shouted back, Bohr would doubtless have just become either angry or smug and would have still ignored the physics Feynman was putting forward.

It is important to “stand upon the shoulders of giants” in physics in order for them to pay attention to your idea. (The Feynman suppression episode in 1948 reminds you of a famous joke by the late Sidney Coleman: “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing between the shoulders of midgets”.) By building on new foundations which Bohr was ignorant of (and biased against), Feynman guaranteed that he would be ignored and falsely dismissed by an arrogant and ignorant Bohr. Feynman’s continuing censorship today for second-quantization are in favour of a mechanism (virtual, field quanta multipath interference) causing the indeterminancy of fundamental particles on small scales:

“… Bohr … said: ‘… one could not talk about the trajectory of an electron in the atom, because it was something not observable.’ … Bohr thought that I didn’t know the uncertainty principle … it didn’t make me angry, it just made me realize that … [ they ] … didn’t know what I was talking about, and it was hopeless to try to explain it further. I gave up, I simply gave up …”

- Richard P. Feynman, quoted in Jagdish Mehra’s biography of Feynman, The Beat of a Different Drum, Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 245-248. (Fortunately, Dyson didn’t give up!)

‘I would like to put the uncertainty principle in its historical place: When the revolutionary ideas of quantum physics were first coming out, people still tried to understand them in terms of old-fashioned ideas … But at a certain point the old-fashioned ideas would begin to fail, so a warning was developed that said, in effect, “Your old-fashioned ideas are no damn good when …” If you get rid of all the old-fashioned ideas and instead use the ideas that I’m explaining in these lectures – adding arrows [path amplitudes] for all the ways an event can happen – there is no need for an uncertainty principle!’

- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, pp. 55-56.

‘… when the space through which a photon moves becomes too small … we discover that light doesn’t have to go in straight [narrow] lines, there are interferences created by the two holes, and so on. The same situation exists with electrons: when seen on a large scale, they travel like particles, on definite paths. But on a small scale, such as inside an atom, the space is so small that there is no main path, no “orbit”; there are all sorts of ways the electron could go, each with an amplitude. The phenomenon of interference becomes very important, and we have to sum the arrows to predict where an electron is likely to be.’

- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, Chapter 3, pp. 84-5.

The indeterminate electron motion in the atom is simply caused by second-quantization: the field quanta randomly interacting and deflecting the electron.

However, the physically false, non-relativistic Heisenberg/Schroedinger approach is easier to apply to bound states like atoms, so it is falsely taught as QM, just as the Bohr atom is falsely taught in high schools.

Here is a solid example of the failure of first quantization mathematics:

“The quantum collapse [in the mainstream interpretation of first quantization quantum mechanics, where a wavefunction collapse occurs whenever a measurement of a particle is made] occurs when we model the wave moving according to Schroedinger (time-dependent) and then, suddenly at the time of interaction we require it to be in an eigenstate and hence to also be a solution of Schroedinger (time-independent). The collapse of the wave function is due to a discontinuity in the equations used to model the physics, it is not inherent in the physics.”

– Dr Thomas S. Love, Departments of Mathematics and Physics, California State University.

“In some key Bell experiments, including two of the well-known ones by Alain Aspect, 1981-2, it is only after the subtraction of ‘accidentals’ from the coincidence counts that we get violations of Bell tests. The data adjustment, producing increases of up to 60% in the test statistics, has never been adequately justified. Few published experiments give sufficient information for the reader to make a fair assessment.”

– http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/9903/9903066v2.pdf

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

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

Obviously, one diagram cannot summarize all of the justifications and implications. However, there is a need in physics to make clear how simple nature really is, as proved by the failure of non-relativistic first quantization and the success of simple path integrals in second quantization (representing fields as exchanged off-shell quanta).

‘Underneath so many of the phenomena we see every day are only three basic actions: one is described by the simple coupling number, j; the other two by functions P(A to B) and E(A to B) – both of which are closely related. That’s all there is to it, and from it all the rest of the laws of physics come.’

- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, p. 120.

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

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

‘You might wonder how such simple actions could produce such a complex world. It’s because phenomena we see in the world are the result of an enormous intertwining of tremendous numbers …’

- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, p. 114.

What is the way forward? Well, this spin-1 graviton exchange mechanism deals neatly with gravitation and dark energy as both being quantum gravity effects, and this modifies the Standard Model. So my preferred option is to write a paper, titled maybe ‘A Simple Change to the Standard Model for Inclusion or Quantum Gravity, with Predictions and Validation’, and/or a full textbook explaining first the maths of the Standard Model, and then explaining the evidence for makin the slight corrections needed to incorporate quantum gravity.

A second option (maybe when the first gets ignored) is to follow in the footsteps of a great physicist and write a satrical ‘Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences’, comparing the failures of over-hyped mainstream false spin-2 speculative, non-falsifiable string theory to the successful predictions of this censored, entirely fact-based theory (note that the black hole cross-section has empirical evidence discussed in the post linked here).

The relationship between the black hole cross-section for gravity and the mechanism for electromagnetism is discussed in earlier posts here and here. The gauge boson of electromagnetism is a virtual photon with 4-polarizations, not the 2-polarizations that normal photons have. The two extra polarizations are required to make attraction work in the framework of Weyl’s gauge theory. The repulsion law works fine even using 2-polarization photon exchange: you get hit by a photon from a similar charge, and it knocks you away from the similar charge. If you fire a photon to that similar charge, you recoil away from that other charge. So similar charges repel. Fine. But attraction requires adding two extra polarizations to the field quantum of electromagnetism. The field around an electron is negative: we know the electron has negative charge because of the field, which is mediated by virtual photons. We don’t know anything about the electron’s core, only about its field. We’ve only probed matter to energies on the order of 100 GeV or so, and we’ll never collide charges hard enough to see beyond the field effects to the core. So the whole notion of “charge” really needs to be applied to what we see with charge, which is the field, not the unobservable inner core of an electron. Hence, in electromagnetism the virtual photons can be treated as charged. The normal objection to this turns out false. It used to be objected that massless charges can’t move or they would generate infinite magnetic self-inductance. But actually, in Weyl’s theory virtual particles are exchanged in two directions at once, e.g. from charge A to charge B and back the other way. This two-way exchange is possible – even though one-way motion is impossible – because the superimposed magnetic curls of the field vectors will cancel out if two-way exchange is occurring. Many photons are exchanged in each direction simultaneously, so this works.

With two oppositely spin-1 charged field quanta mediating electromagnetism and one uncharged spin-1 field quanta mediating gravity, we have 3 massless gauge bosons which seem to be described by an SU(2) symmetry without mass. This suggests a modification to the Standard Model, where at present SU(2) gauge bosons are given mass by a speculative untested, non-falsifiable “Higgs mechanism”. Modifying it so that left-handed SU(2) gauge bosons acquire mass still gives the weak force but allows gravity to be included in a reformed Standard Model.

The coupling strengths of gravity and electromagnetism are different at observed low energy by a factor of about 10⁴⁰, gravity being the weaker. This is explained in a simple path-integral random walk between charges: the existence of two different electric charges but only one gravitational charge means that you can get a random-walk of gauge boson exchange between electric charges which adds up differently to that between gravitational charges. The random walk result is numerically equal to the size of one step multiplied by the square-root of the number of steps. It turns out that on average the outward divergence of receding field quanta is compensated for by the inward convergence of approaching field quanta, so all we need to do is to multiply gravitational charge strength by the square root of the number of particles in the universe (about 10⁸⁰) to get the electromagnetic charge strength in QFT: this turns out to be accurate within experimental error (10⁴⁰).

What is physically happening is that fundamental particles are black holes, radiating high energy particles which behave as field quanta (virtual particles) since they are of extremely small wavelength. The black hole radiating power for electrons calculated from Hawking’s formula predicts a fundamental force 10⁴⁰ times stronger than gravity; hence this is electromagnetism. Gravity is about 10⁴⁰ times weaker due to the random-walk mechanism illustrated in previous posts.

Above: just as Bohr’s atom is taught in school physics, most mainstream general physicists with training in quantum mechanics are still trapped in the use of the “anything goes” false (non-relativistic) 1927-originating “first quantization” for quantum mechanics (where anything is possible because motion is described by an uncertainty principle instead of a quantized field mechanism for chaos on small scales). The physically correct replacement is called “second quantization” or “quantum field theory”, which was developed from 1929-48 by Dirac, Feynman and others.

The discoverer of the path integrals approach to quantum field theory, Nobel laureate Richard P. Feynman, has debunked the mainstream first-quantization uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. Instead of anything being possible, the indeterminate electron motion in the atom is caused by second-quantization: the field quanta randomly interacting and deflecting the electron.

“… Bohr … said: ‘… one could not talk about the trajectory of an electron in the atom, because it was something not observable.’ … Bohr thought that I didn’t know the uncertainty principle … it didn’t make me angry, it just made me realize that … [ they ] … didn’t know what I was talking about, and it was hopeless to try to explain it further. I gave up, I simply gave up …”

- Richard P. Feynman, quoted in Jagdish Mehra’s biography of Feynman, The Beat of a Different Drum, Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 245-248. (Fortunately, Dyson didn’t give up!)

‘I would like to put the uncertainty principle in its historical place: When the revolutionary ideas of quantum physics were first coming out, people still tried to understand them in terms of old-fashioned ideas … But at a certain point the old-fashioned ideas would begin to fail, so a warning was developed that said, in effect, “Your old-fashioned ideas are no damn good when …” If you get rid of all the old-fashioned ideas and instead use the ideas that I’m explaining in these lectures – adding arrows [path amplitudes] for all the ways an event can happen – there is no need for an uncertainty principle!’

- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, pp. 55-56.

‘When we look at photons on a large scale – much larger than the distance required for one stopwatch turn [i.e., wavelength] – the phenomena that we see are very well approximated by rules such as “light travels in straight lines [without overlapping two nearby slits in a screen]“, because there are enough paths around the path of minimum time to reinforce each other, and enough other paths to cancel each other out. But when the space through which a photon moves becomes too small (such as the tiny holes in the [double slit] screen), these rules fail – we discover that light doesn’t have to go in straight [narrow] lines, there are interferences created by the two holes, and so on. The same situation exists with electrons: when seen on a large scale, they travel like particles, on definite paths. But on a small scale, such as inside an atom, the space is so small that [individual random field quanta exchanges become important because there isn't enough space involved for them to average out completely, so] there is no main path, no “orbit”; there are all sorts of ways the electron could go, each with an amplitude. The phenomenon of interference becomes very important, and we have to sum the arrows [in the path integral for individual field quanta interactions, instead of using the average which is the classical Coulomb field] to predict where an electron is likely to be.’

- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, Chapter 3, pp. 84-5.

His path integrals rebuild and reformulate quantum mechanics itself, getting rid of the Bohring ‘uncertainty principle’ and all the pseudoscientific baggage like ‘entanglement hype’ it brings with it:

‘This paper will describe what is essentially a third formulation of nonrelativistic quantum theory [Schroedinger's wave equation and Heisenberg's matrix mechanics being the first two attempts, which both generate nonsense 'interpretations']. This formulation was suggested by some of Dirac’s remarks concerning the relation of classical action to quantum mechanics. A probability amplitude is associated with an entire motion of a particle as a function of time, rather than simply with a position of the particle at a particular time.

‘The formulation is mathematically equivalent to the more usual formulations. … there are problems for which the new point of view offers a distinct advantage. …’

- Richard P. Feynman, ‘Space-Time Approach to Non-Relativistic Quantum Mechanics’, Reviews of Modern Physics, vol. 20 (1948), p. 367.

‘… I believe that path integrals would be a very worthwhile contribution to our understanding of quantum mechanics. Firstly, they provide a physically extremely appealing and intuitive way of viewing quantum mechanics: anyone who can understand Young’s double slit experiment in optics should be able to understand the underlying ideas behind path integrals. Secondly, the classical limit of quantum mechanics can be understood in a particularly clean way via path integrals. … for fixed h-bar, paths near the classical path will on average interfere constructively (small phase difference) whereas for random paths the interference will be on average destructive. … we conclude that if the problem is classical (action >> h-bar), the most important contribution to the path integral comes from the region around the path which extremizes the path integral. In other words, the article’s motion is governed by the principle that the action is stationary. This, of course, is none other than the Principle of Least Action from which the Euler-Lagrange equations of classical mechanics are derived.’

- Richard MacKenzie, Path Integral Methods and Applications, pp. 2-13.

‘… light doesn’t really travel only in a straight line; it “smells” the neighboring paths around it, and uses a small core of nearby space. (In the same way, a mirror has to have enough size to reflect normally: if the mirror is too small for the core of neighboring paths, the light scatters in many directions, no matter where you put the mirror.)’

- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, Chapter 2, p. 54.

There are other serious and well-known failures of first quantization aside from the nonrelativistic Hamiltonian time dependence:

“The quantum collapse [in the mainstream interpretation of first quantization quantum mechanics, where a wavefunction collapse occurs whenever a measurement of a particle is made] occurs when we model the wave moving according to Schroedinger (time-dependent) and then, suddenly at the time of interaction we require it to be in an eigenstate and hence to also be a solution of Schroedinger (time-independent). The collapse of the wave function is due to a discontinuity in the equations used to model the physics, it is not inherent in the physics.” – Thomas Love, California State University.

“In some key Bell experiments, including two of the well-known ones by Alain Aspect, 1981-2, it is only after the subtraction of ‘accidentals’ from the coincidence counts that we get violations of Bell tests. The data adjustment, producing increases of up to 60% in the test statistics, has never been adequately justified. Few published experiments give sufficient information for the reader to make a fair assessment.” – http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/9903/9903066v2.pdf

First quantization for QM (e.g. Schroedinger) quantizes the product of position and momentum of an electron, rather than the Coulomb field which is treated classically. This leads to a mathematically useful approximation for bound states like atoms, which is physically false and inaccurate in detail (a bit like Ptolemy’s epicycles, where all planets were assumed to orbit Earth in circles within circles). Feynman explains this in his 1985 book QED (he dismisses the uncertainty principle as complete model, in favour of path integrals) because indeterminancy is physically caused by virtual particle interactions from the quantized Coulomb field becoming important on small, subatomic scales! Second quantization (QFT) introduced by Dirac in 1929 and developed with Feynman’s path integrals in 1948, instead quantizes the field. Second quantization is physically the correct theory because all indeterminancy results from the random fluctuations in the interactions of discrete field quanta, and first quantization by Heisenberg and Schroedinger’s approaches is just a semi-classical, non-relativistic mathematical approximation useful for obtaining simple mathematical solutions for bound states like atoms:

‘You might wonder how such simple actions could produce such a complex world. It’s because phenomena we see in the world are the result of an enormous intertwining of tremendous numbers of photon exchanges and interferences.’

- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, p. 114.

‘Underneath so many of the phenomena we see every day are only three basic actions: one is described by the simple coupling number, j; the other two by functions P(A to B) and E(A to B) – both of which are closely related. That’s all there is to it, and from it all the rest of the laws of physics come.’

- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, p. 120.

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

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

Sound waves are composed of the group oscillations of large numbers of randomly colliding air molecules; despite the randomness of individual air molecule collisions, the average pressure variations from many molecules obey a simple wave equation and carry the wave energy. Likewise, although the actual motion of an atomic electron is random due to individual interactions with field quanta, the average location of the electron resulting from many random field quanta interactions is non-random and can be described by a simple wave equation such as Schroedinger’s.

This is fact, it isn’t my opinion or speculation: professor David Bohm in 1952 proved that “brownian motion” of an atomic electron will result in average positions described by a Schroedinger wave equation. Unfortunately, Bohm also introduced unnecessary “hidden variables” with an infinite field potential into his messy treatment, making it a needlessly complex, uncheckable representation, instead of simply accepting that the quantum field interations produce the “Brownian motion” of the electron as described by Feynman’s path integrals for simple random field quanta interactions with the electron.

Quantum tunnelling is possible because electromagnetic fields are not classical, but are mediated by field quanta randomly exchanged between charges. For large charges and/or long times, the number of field quanta exchanged is so large that the result is similar to a steady classical field. But for small charges and small times, such as the scattering of charges in high energy physics, there is some small probability that no or few field quanta will happen to be exchanged in the time available, so the charge will be able to penetrate through the classical “Coulomb barrier”. If you quantize the Coulomb field, the electron’s motion is indeterministic in the atom because it’s randomly exchanging Coulomb field quanta which cause chaotic motion. This is second quantization as explained by Feynman in QED. This is not what is done in quantum mechanics, which is based on first quantization, i.e. treating the Coulomb field V classically, and falsely representing the chaotic motion of the electron by a wave-type equation. This is a physically false mathematical model since it omits the physical cause of the indeterminancy (although it gives convenient predictions, somewhat like Ptolemy’s accurate epicycle based predictions of planetary positions):

Fig. 1:The Schrodinger equation, based on quantizing the momentum p in the classical Hamiltonian (the sum of kinetic and potential energy for the particle), H. This is an example of ‘first quantization’, which is inaccurate and is also used in Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics. Correct quantization will instead quantize the Coulomb field potential energy, V, because the whole indeterminancy of the electron in the atom is physically caused by the chaos of the randomly timed individual interactions of the electron with the discrete Coulomb field quanta which bind the electron to orbit the nucleus, as Feynman proved (see quotations below). The triangular symbol is the divergence operator (simply the sum of the gradients in all applicable spatial dimensions, for whatever it operates on) which when squared becomes the laplacian operator (simply the sum of second-order derivatives in all applicable spatial dimensions, for whatever it operates on). We illustrate the Schrodinger equation in just one spatial dimension, x, above, since the terms for other spatial dimensions are identical.

Dirac’s quantum field theory is needed because textbook quantum mechanics is simply wrong: the Schroedinger equation has a second-order dependence on spatial distance but only a first-order dependence on time. In the real world, time and space are found to be on an equal footing, hence spacetime. There are deeper errors in textbook quantum mechanics: it ignores the quantization of the electromagnetic field and instead treats it classically, when the field quanta are the whole distinction between classical and quantum mechanics (the random motion of the electron orbiting the nucleus in the atom is caused by discrete field quanta interactions, as proved by Feynman).

Dirac was the first to achieve a relativistic field equation to replace the non-relativistic quantum mechanics approximations (the Schroedinger wave equation and the Heisenberg momentum-distance matrix mechanics). Dirac also laid the groundwork for Feynman’s path integrals in his 1933 paper “The Lagrangian in Quantum Mechanics” published in Physikalische Zeitschrift der Sowjetunion where he states:

“Quantum mechanics was built up on a foundation of analogy with the Hamiltonian theory of classical mechanics. This is because the classical notion of canonical coordinates and momenta was found to be one with a very simple quantum analogue …

“Now there is an alternative formulation for classical dynamics, provided by the Lagrangian. … The two formulations are, of course, closely related, but there are reasons for believing that the Lagrangian one is the more fundamental. … the Lagrangian method can easily be expressed relativistically, on account of the action function being a relativistic invariant; while the Hamiltonian method is essentially nonrelativistic in form …”

Schroedinger’s time-dependent equation is: Hy= iħ.dy /dt, which has the exponential solution:

y_t = y_o exp[-iH(t – t_o)/ħ].

This equation is accurate, because the error in Schroedinger’s equation comes only from the expression used for the Hamiltonian, H. This exponential law represents the time-dependent value of the wavefunction for any Hamiltonian and time. Squaring this wavefunction gives the amplitude or relative probability for a given Hamiltonian and time. Dirac took this amplitude e^-iHT/ħ and derived the more fundamental lagrangian amplitude for action S, i.e. e^iS/ħ. Feynman showed that summing this amplitude factor over all possible paths or interaction histories gave a result proportional to the total probability for a given interaction. This is the path integral.

Schroedinger’s incorrect, non-relativistic hamiltonian before quantization (ignoring the inclusion of the Coulomb field potential energy, V, which is an added term) is: H = ½ p²/m. Quantization is done using the substitution for momentum, p -> -iħ{divergence operator} as in Fig. 1 above. The Coulomb field potential energy, V, remains classical in Schroedinger’s equation, instead of being quantized as it should.

The bogus ‘special relativity’ prediction to correct the expectation H = ½ p²/m is simply: H = [(mc²)² + p²c²]², but that was falsified by the fact that, although the total mass-energy is then conserved, the resulting Schroedinger equation permits an initially localised electron to travel faster than light! This defect was averted by the Klein-Gordon equation, which states:

ħ²d²y/dt² = [(mc²)² + p²c²]y.

While this is physically correct, it is non-linear in only dealing with second-order variations of the wavefunction. Dirac’s equation simply makes the time-dependent Schroedinger equation (Hy = iħ.dy/dt) relativistic, by inserting for the hamiltonian (H) a totally new relativistic expression which differs from special relativity:

H = apc + b mc²,

where p is the momentum operator. The values of constants a and b can take are represented by a 4 x 4 = 16 component matrix, which is called the Dirac ‘spinor’.  This is not to be confused for the Weyl spinors used in the gauge theories of the Standard Model; whereas the Dirac spinor represents massive spin-1/2 particles, the Dirac equation yields two Weyl equations for massless particles, each with a 2-component Weyl spinor (representing left- and right-handed spin or helicity eigenstates).  The justification for Dirac’s equation is both theoretical and experimental. Firstly, it yields the Klein-Gordon equation for second-order variations of the wavefunction. Secondly, it predicts four solutions for the total energy of a particle having momentum p:

E = ±[(mc²)² + p²c²]^1/2.

Two solutions to this equation arise from the fact that momentum is directional and so can be can be positive or negative. The spin of an electron is ± ½ ħ = ± h/(4p). This explains two of the four solutions! The electron is spin-1/2 so it has a spin of only half the amount of a spin-1 particle, which means that the electron must rotate 720 degrees (not 360 degrees!) to undergo one revolution, like a Mobius strip (a strip of paper with a twist before the ends are glued together, so that there is only one surface and you can draw a continuous line around that surface which is twice the length of the strip, i.e. you need 720 degrees turning to return it to the beginning!). Since the spin rate of the electron generates its intrinsic magnetic moment, it affects the magnetic moment of the electron. Zee gives a concise derivation of the fact that the Dirac equation implies that ‘a unit of spin angular momentum interacts with a magnetic field twice as much as a unit of orbital angular momentum’, a fact discovered by Dirac the day after he found his equation (see: A. Zee, Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell, Princeton University press, 2003, pp. 177-8.) The other two solutions are evident obvious when considering the case of p = 0, for then E = ± mc².  This equation proves the fundamental distinction between Dirac’s theory and Einstein’s special relativity. Einstein’s equation from special relativity is E = mc². The fact that in fact E = ± mc², proves the physical shallowness of special relativity which results from the lack of physical mechanism in special relativity.  E = ± mc² allowed Dirac to predict antimatter, such as the anti-electron called the positron, which was later discovered by Anderson in 1932 (anti-matter is naturally produced all the time when suitably high-energy gamma radiation hits heavy nuclei, causing pair production, i.e., the creation of a particle and an anti-particle such as an electron and a positron). 

Much of the material above is from the previous post (I’m putting it here on a separate post because that previous post began with sorting out errors in mainstream cosmology, which may have put off some bigoted and dogmatic people who are only interested in non-cosmology aspects of quantum field theory; it also helps me towards assembling background/draft material for a forthcoming book/paper).

To understand how the path integrals approach explains the double slit experiment, see this post. To see how scientific criticisms of mainstream first quantization lies have been censored out of mainstream journals by dogmatic mathematical simpletons who lack a grasp of the nature of science itself (‘Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.’ – Richard Feynman in Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics, Houghton-Mifflin, 2006, p. 307), see this post. There’s a completely causal explanation: the photon is not a point but has transverse spatial extent; when it encounters two nearby slits (closer than a wavelength) part diffracts through each slit and the recombination on the other side gives rise to the photon whose probability of landing at any point depends on both slits, not just one of them.

String theorists who believe dogmatically that mathematical elegance, mystery and beauty in physics rather than hard evidence of agreement with experiment, are the central requirements, should listen to Einstein and Boltzmann:

“I adhered scrupulously to the precept of that brilliant theoretical physicist L. Boltzmann, according to whom matters of elegance ought to be left to the tailor and to the cobbler.”

- A. Einstein, December 1916 Preface to his book Relativity: The Special and General Theory, Methuen & Co., London, 1920.

Ugly but useful mathematics

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle p.x = h-bar is quantized by turning uncertainties in momentum p and position x into non-commuting operators (which I’ll signify by simply placing square brackets around them), and replacing h-bar with -i{h-bar}. This gives [p,x] = h-bar. The two solutions to that are firstly [x] = i{h-bar}d/dp with [p]=p, and secondly [p] = -i{h-bar}d/dx with [x] = x. Either of these solutions is a first quantization of classical physics.

Then you do the same thing replacing momentum p = E/c and x = ct for light, giving p.x = (E/c)(ct) = E.t, which allows you to replace the product of uncertainties p.x in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle with the product of uncertainties in energy and time, E.t. Repeating the previous recipe for quantization on this energy-time Heisenberg uncertainty principle then gives us [E,t] = h-bar. This has the two solutions: [E] = -i{h-bar}d/dt with [t] = t, and [t] = i{h-bar}d/dE with [E] = E.

Taking [E] = -i{h-bar}d/dt, this gives Schroedinger’s time-dependent equation when it acts on wavefunction Psi, with energy operator [E] = H, the Hamiltonian:

H{Psi} = -{h-bar}d{Psi}/dt

Rearranging

(1/{Psi})d{Psi} = -H.dt/(i{h-bar})

integrating this gives:

ln {Psi} = -Ht/(i{h-bar})

(ln {Psi}_t) – (ln {Psi}_0) = -Ht/(i{h-bar})

Taking both sides to natural exponents to get rid of the natural logarithms on the left hand side:

({Psi}_t)/({Psi}_0) = exp(-Ht/(i{h-bar}))

hence

{Psi}_t = {Psi}_0 * exp(-Ht/(i{h-bar}))

Thus the time-dependent wavefunction equals simply the time-independent wavefunction multiplied by the exponential amplitude factor, exp(-Ht/(i{h-bar})).

The product of the Hamiltonian operator for energy with time is analogous to the integral of the Lagrangian for energy over time, so let Ht = {integral symbol}L dt = S, action. Thus the relative amplitude of a wavefunction (representing the contribution from one Feynman diagram or one “path” in the path integral) is given by:

exp(-Ht/(i{h-bar})) = exp(-S/(i{h-bar})).

So the path integral amplitude factor is very simply related to both the Heisenberg matrix mechanics and the Schroedinger wave equation. However, just as Ptolemy’s model and the solar system both modelled the same planets in different ways, there are physical differences. First quantization is physically wrong. Second quantization is physically correct in the way Feynman presents it.

For a detailed derivation of the time-dependent Schroedinger equation using the path integrals formulation, see David Derbes, “Feynman’s derivation of the Schroedinger equation”, Am. J. Phys. v64, issue 7, July 1996, pp. 881-4.

Update:

Relevant copy of a comment to Professor Johnson’s Asymptotia:

“Gell-Mann is best known as the person who came up with the idea of quarks, the particles that make up (for example) protons and neutrons, the building blocks of atomic nuclei.”

It took genius to publish such a speculative idea. According to William H. Cropper’s book Great physicists (Oxford U.P., p. 418), George Zweig’s paper on that theory was “emphatically rejected” by Physical Review but Murray Gell-Mann was “older and wiser” so he “anticipated a negative reception at the Physical Review to such bizarre entities as unobservable, fractionally charged elementary particles, and he published his first quark paper in Physics Letters. Zweig’s theory went unpublished except in a CERN report, but it and its author acquired a certain reputation. When Zweig sought an appointment at a major university, the head of the department pronounced him a ‘charlatan’.”

It’s good that Gell-Mann managed to anticipate and avoid that censorship so cleverly, or we wouldn’t have quark theory, with the SU(3) strong interaction part of the Standard Model. Another example: Pauli’s attempt to censor Yang-Mills theory in February 1954 because the particles are massless (Pauli had already discarded the idea for this “failure”) is another example (Yang simply sat down when Pauli persisted in objecting).

Consider Oppenheimer’s attempt to censor Feynman’s path integrals without listening at all, as described by Freeman Dyson (Stuckelberg was working on the same idea independently, but was ignored and – as with Zweig’s quarks – he received no Nobel Prize). It’s remarkable that genius in the past has consisted to such a large degree in overcoming apathy (Oppenheimer was not just a stubborn exception who objected to path integrals. E.g., Feynman is quoted by Jagdish Mehra in The Beat of a Different Drum, pp. 245-248, saying that Teller, Dirac and Bohr all also claimed to have “disproved” path integrals: Teller’s disproof consisted of saying that Feynman didn’t have to take account of the exclusion principle, Dirac disproved it for not having a unitary operator, and Bohr disproved it because he believed that Feynman didn’t know the uncertainty principle: “it was hopeless to try to explain it further.” So without Dyson’s brilliance at explaining ideas, Feynman’s path integrals would probably have been ignored.)

“… take the exclusion principle … it turns out that you don’t have to pay much attention to that in the intermediate states in the perturbation theory. I had discovered from empirical rules that if you don’t pay attention to it, you get the right answers anyway …. Teller said: “… It is fundamentally wrong that you don’t have to take the exclusion principle into account.” … Dirac asked “Is it unitary?” … Dirac had proved … that in quantum mechanics, since you progress only forward in time, you have to have a unitary operator. But there is no unitary way of dealing with a single electron. … Bohr … said: “… one could not talk about the trajectory of an electron in the atom, because it was something not observable.” … Bohr thought that I didn’t know the uncertainty principle … it didn’t make me angry, it just made me realize that … [ they ] … didn’t know what I was talking about, and it was hopeless to try to explain it further. I gave up, I simply gave up …”

- Richard P. Feynman, in Jagdish Mehra, The Beat of a Different Drum (Oxford, 1994, pp. 245-248).

Above: the latest illustration (updated 27 September 2009) which has replaced the older illustration included in the post below. Improvements have been made.

In 1996, the cosmological acceleration a = -Hc = -6.9*10^-10 ms^-2 (the minus sign here indicating outward acceleration, against inward gravitational attraction) was predicted which was discovered two years later from supernova redshift observations. The observed magnitude of the acceleration is stated by Lee Smolin in his 2006 book The Trouble with Physics, page 209 to be a = -c²/R = -c²/(cT) = -c/T = -Hc = -6.9*10^-10 ms^-2. This post reviews the theoretical discovery and some of its implications.

Fig. 1: an improved illustration from the earlier post, The probability of a confirmed prediction – from a theory based entirely upon facts – being the way forward is not trivial! There are two measuring scales for time: (1) beginning at the big bang (13,700 million years ago) and going forward, and (2) beginning at the present age of the Earth and looking back in time with increasing distance. It turns out that there is a simple relationship between them. If we take Hubble’s equation v = HR = HcT where T is time past for the spacetime distance R = cT, then differentiating gives us outward effective acceleration a = dv/dT = d(HcT)/dT = Hc. Simple. However, you might find it confusing to deal with time past getting bigger with increasing distances; so you might prefer to instead use the increasing time since the big bang, t = H^-1 – T. As proved in the diagram, the cosmological acceleration in that time coordinate system is a = dv/dt = d(HR)/dt = d(cTH)/dt = d[c(H^-1 - t)H]/dt = d[c(1 - Ht)]/dt = -Hc. An identical result apart from the minus sign because the increasing time t. These calculations give us the cosmological acceleration at the furthest possible distance, R = cT. For smaller distances, r, the cosmological acceleration will be simply a = (r/R)Hc.

This can be seen from observing that if we define dr/dt = v, then dt = dr/v, so a = dv/dt = d(Hr)/(dr/v) = vH*dr/dr = vH = rH² = (r/R)Hc.

Why isn’t this kind of simple proof, showing that the correct amount of acceleration is inherent in the empirical observation of recession velocity increasing with distance, widely published and accepted? As with evolution in 1859, it simply doesn’t fit into current dogma of mainstream physics, while outside mainstream physics the only people who have any interest in physics don’t know the difference between the facts (like the astronomical measurements) and mainstream stringy speculations, so they believe that all cosmology is speculative. In other words, the mainstream speculation mongers have discredited the scientific method to those who value facts above dogma. The same is allegedly true of mainstream mathematics, according to the experience of Grigori Perelman when his work on the Poincare conjecture was downplayed by mainstream conformist Shing-Tung Yau to give more credit to conformists Cao and Zhu: ‘Of course, there are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest.’

They have to tolerate Shing-Tung Yau because he epitomises the mainstream, has won many awards, and is powerful. Nobody wants to argue someone else’s case with someone like that. It is similar to the dishonest claim ’string theory has the remarkable property of predicting gravity’ by Edward Witten in the April 1996 issue of Physics Today. Anonymous peer-review can serve as a severe punishment for non-conformist work, by simply blocking publications.

‘Inappropriate topic. While arXiv serves a variety of scientific communities, not all subjects are currently covered. Submissions that do not fit well into our current classification scheme may be removed…’

- arXiv moderation page policy against new topics within science that upset the dogma of status quo (revolutionary discoveries by their very definition ‘do not fit well into our current classification scheme’!)

There are also other reasons for prejudice. Some people who rejected the work of Copernicus, Darwin, Boltzmann, and others did so not just because it was contrary to the dogma they had been taught, but because they thought that the facts were ugly and they didn’t want to take them seriously, or because others around them ignored the facts or laughed about the facts, and they wanted to fit in to their peer group. They ’sincerely’ believed that all work which didn’t seem appealing to their prejudices was scientifically wrong and that if they only had the time to read the new paper they would be able to find a flaw in it; a convenient pseudoscientific belief system. The next logical step they take is to start to claim that it is wrong without having found any error, or better yet they claim to have found an error which doesn’t actually exist. The alleged ‘error’ they find is accepted by other conformists without question or checking as a good excuse to ignore the facts, although eventually turns out to be just a disagreement between newly discovered facts and old incorrect but well-established speculative prejudices in some textbook which is widely worshipped as accepted dogma, despite being at first unchecked against experiment and is eventually discovered to be wrong. Einstein modifies Newton’s law to make it compatible with conservation of energy, so those who object to progress state that Einstein is shown wrong by the difference with Newton’s law, and they ignore or dispute experimental facts to the contrary. Other prejudices are more obvious. If the new theory is presented using simple mathematics, it can be dismissed as simplistic; using complex mathematics, it can be dismissed as complex! However something is presented, it’s easy to sneer at it, to find an excuse to ignore it. In his Introduction to the 1992 Penguin edition of Feynman’s book The Character of Physical Law, Professor Paul Davies states on page 7:

“Each revolution comes with a cluster of so-called geniuses, men and women whose skill and imagination force the scientific community to break out of old habits of thought and embrace new and unfamiliar concepts.”

This is contrary to the usual message of science advancing by quiet discoveries, and the usual message that science is about discovering the facts, not marketing gimmicks, political conformism, and sociology.

Instead of taking non-quantum general relativity and fitting it to observations using arbitrarily selected amounts of unobserved ‘dark matter’ and unobserved ‘dark energy’ – like Ptolemy fitting his earth centred universe to observations by adding more epicycles then hailing the mathematical beauty of a world of epicycles - we should look at the data and try to find the simplest model which not only fits the data but makes other checkable predictions concerning gravity. This is precisely what we did when we predicted the cosmological acceleration in 1996. In May 1996, an 8-page-long paper was written, deriving cosmological acceleration a = Hc from the Hubble recession law v = HR, and applying it to the universe. When the more appropriate journals like Classical and Quantum Gravity didn’t want to know because of biased opinions about quantum gravity being a stringy phenomenon, we sent it to Martin Eccles, editor of Electronics World. He made it available via page 896 of the letters pages in the October 1996 issue. It was later published in the February 1997 issue of Science World, ISSN 1367-6172, and the prediction for cosmological acceleration, a = Hc = 6.9*10^-10 ms^-2 was criticised in private correspondence by Electronics World author Mike Renardson: the acceleration seemed far, far too small to ever detect. However, it was later detected in 1998 by Saul Perlmutter et al., using computer software to automatically detect distant supernovae directly from CCD telescope data live input, who published in Nature and failed to cite the prediction because the correct journals had refused to publish it properly. The prediction applied the acceleration to the mass of the universe using Newton’s laws of motion with relativistic corrections: F = ma where m is mass of accelerating universe and a is the cosmological acceleration. This gives a large outward force which predicts gravity via the 3rd law of motion (an implosion carrying an equal, graviton mediated, reaction force upon the observer, which predicts gravity with good accuracy for the input data; a fact totally ignored and indeed suppressed by the general relativity and stringy spin-2 obsessed mainstream, which believes in a false attraction-spin connection for off-shell graviton radiation, derived using incorrect implicit assumptions by Fierz and Pauli way back in 1939).

Fig. 2: why the universe accelerates. We see distant masses every direction we look so we experience an equilibrium of spin-1 graviton exchange on all sides (apart from the effect of nearby masses, called gravity, shown in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 below), but in our frame of reference a mass so distant that it is near radius R = cT where T is the age of the universe, can’t have an equilibrium of exchange because it’s so far out that there is little or no mass beyond it to exchange gravitons with it. So it receives a radial asymmetry (from our point of view, e.g., from our frame of reference) and appears to accelerate away from us.

Fig. 3: Feynman diagrams for general relativity, spin-2 (mainstream, failed, non-falsifiable, over-hyped, stringy) quantum gravity, and spin-1 (non-standard, successful, predictive, totally-censored out) quantum gravity.

Fig. 4: how the spin-1 mechanism predicts the Newtonian gravity law and the strength of gravity represented by G: but remember that it also predicts the general relativistic contraction of radius for mass by the amount (1/3)MG/c² metres by simple squeezing akin to the Lorentz contraction (which is caused by off-shell gaviton exchange radiation force against accelerating masses), and therefore unlike the Newtonian law it is fully Lorentzian and is completely compatible with the classical approximation of gravity in the basic field equation of general relativity for its successful non-cosmological applications and tests.

Hawking’s formula for the radiating power of the black hole electron tells us it radiates with power P = 3 × 10⁹² Watts; but this is field quanta emission not real radiation for technical reasons. Hawking’s mechanism for black hole radiation emission omits Schwinger’s threshold field strength for pair-production in the vacuum, so only charged black holes produce field strengths above Schwinger’s threshold at the event horizon radius. The charge necessitated for black holes to emit radiation also changes the nature of the emitted radiation because it means that only positive virtual charges will fall into the electron core, and only negative virtual charges can be emitted.

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. Hence, F = 2P/c = 2(3 × 10⁹²)/c = 2 × 10⁸⁴ Newtons. This is 10⁴¹ times the F = 1.8 × 10⁴³ Newtons cosmological force, so this Hawking radiation force predicts the electromagnetic force strength, and is more empirical evidence that the cross-section for fundamental particles is the black hole event horizon size, not the Planck size.

Fig. 5: In a capacitor, energy enters at light velocity accompanied by electrons (drifting at typically about 1 mm/s). The light velocity Poynting-Heaviside vector energy (consisting of light velocity field quanta Maxwell knew nothing of) bounces off the far end and adds to the energy still flowing in, causing a discrete rise in the stored potential difference (so-called voltage). There is no mechanism for the gauge boson energy to ever slow down below the velocity of light. It doesn’t stop, but keeps going. Studying trapped light velocity energy is like studying a static electric charge, because the magnetic fields cancel out if there is an equilibrium (with equal energy going north as going south, and going east as going west, etc.). ‘A so-called steady charged capacitor is not steady at all. Necessarily, a TEM wave containing (hidden) magnetic field as well as electric field is vacillating from end to end.’ – Catt. This means we can study gauge bosons by studying trapped light velocity electromagnetic current. Actually, nobody – from J. J. Thomson onwards – has ever probed the Planck scale to see an actual static electric charge: they have only seen light velocity electromagnetic fields which mediate charge and which they falsely and implicitly assume are some kind of crackpot proof of a Planck scale static charge. Catt’s work suggests that there is no such thing: all electrons are just trapped electromagnetic energy.

For further evidence plus details of the effect on the Standard Model and general relativity, see the earlier posts linked here and here.

Fig. 6: Unification in supersymmetric stringy M-theory compared to the standard model. Notice the key difference that string theory assumes metaphysically (without any mechanism or evidence) that all couplings for fundamental interactions are equal at the numerological Planck scale (~10¹⁹ GeV energy or ~10^-35 metre distance of closest approach between colliding particles), which implies a bare core charge for the electron which is far lower than 137 times the low energy value. The actual bare core charge of the electron can be shown to be 137 times the low-energy value, by comparing the value deduced from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (ignoring vacuum polariation shielding) to the shielded value measured by Coulomb. Heisenberg’s minimal energy-time uncertainty relation, h-bar = E*t.

F = dE/dx(h-bar/t)/dx[h-bar/(x/c)]/dx².

= d

= d

= -h-bar*c/x

This inverse-square law force is a factor of ~137 or 1/alpha times the Coulomb force between two electrons (i.e. it doesn’t incorporate the polarized vacuum shielding factor of alpha). Hence, the bare core charge of an electron is a factor of 1/alpha or ~137 times stronger than than the value measured at low energy, i.e. below Schwinger’s 1.3*10¹⁸ v/m electromagnetic field strength for pair production in the vacuum, which correspondes to the distance of closest approach in a ~1 MeV collision, which is thus the IR cutoff energy for the logarithmic running coupling equations in QFT. This bare core charge disagrees with the Planck scale unification, but agrees with black hole scale unification, which requires a much higher collision energy than the Planck scale, corresponding to approach distances of ~10^-57 metres for the black hole event horizon radius of an electron, which is far smaller and more fundamental than the ~10^-35 metre Planck length.

Notice also that Fig. 6 includes the variation of strong, weak and electromagnetic charge strengths (coupling parameters) below the 100 GeV scale, which is excluded in all popular diagrams of unification. What you notice by including the full graph is that the strong and weak interactions only arise above the electromagnetic IR cutoff, when the electromagnetic coupling begins to rise. The bare core electromagnetic charge at the black hole scale radiates field quanta which get attenuated in the vacuum, the energy giving rise to every kind of particle you can imagine, including strong and weak field quanta. Hence, the attenuation of the electromagnetic field by the polarized virtual charges which are created by pair production in the vacuum in strong electric fields, absorbs electromagnetic energy and deposits that energy in the vacuum out to the IR cutoff radius, some femtometres from the core. This deposited energy gives rise to weak and strong field quanta, and hence powers those fields. By the conservation of energy, the variation of field strength of the electromagnetic field with distance inversely corresponds to that of the strong and weak fields. I.e., near the bare charge where little electromagnetic field energy has been absorbed by the vacuum, both the strong and weak fields are weak, because little energy has been deposited in the vacuum to create the field quanta corresponding to those field. At greater distances, more of the electromagnetic field energy has been absorbed in the vacuum, so the weak and strong fields can be mediated by more virtual particles and are stronger. This energy conservation mechanism for unification does not (unlike string theory) postulate equality of all charges at the smallest possible distance scale (the UV cutoff). Instead, it shows that the electromagnetic charge reaches a maximum value, and that at arbitrarily small distances from the bare core electron charge, negligible energy from the electromagnetic field has been deposited in the vacuum so there is negligible energy for weak and strong field quanta: therefore, the weak and strong charge strengths tends towards zero as you approach the black hole scale. Unification facts, in short, contradict the mainstream dogma of equal charges for the UV cutoff. These facts further substantiate the use of the black hole event horizon area for quantum gravity predictions, discussed earlier in this post using completely different physical evidence.

Relevant extract from a post on the other blog:

Above: Dr Zaius in Planet of the Apes simultaneously held religious and scientific positions, leading him to suppress scientific findings which contradicted the religious dogma. You know, like my suppression by Britain’s Open University physics department chairman, Professor Russell Stannard, author of books like Science and the Renewal of Belief: Actually, this makes some sense when you recognise that Stannard takes “physics” to include the religious belief in uncheckable pseudoscience: a landscape of 10⁵⁰⁰ different universes to account for the vast number of possible particle physics theories which can be generated by the 100 or more moduli for the shape of the unobservably small compactification of 6-dimensions assumed to exist in the speculative Calabi-Yau manifold of string theory, as well as other rubbish like Aspect’s alleged “experimental evidence” on entanglement via correlation of particle spins:

“offering fresh insight into original sin, the trials experienced by Galileo, the problem of pain, the possibility of miracles, the evidence for the resurrection, the credibility of incarnation, and the power of steadfast prayer. By introducing simple analogies, Stannard clears up misunderstandings that have muddied the connections between science and religion, and suggests contributions that the pursuit of physical science can make to theology”,

arguing that science should be alloyed with dogma again as a “unification” of physics and religion, as it was in the time of Galileo.

“In some key Bell experiments, including two of the well-known ones by Alain Aspect, 1981-2, it is only after the subtraction of ‘accidentals’ from the coincidence counts that we get violations of Bell tests. The data adjustment, producing increases of up to 60% in the test statistics, has never been adequately justified. Few published experiments give sufficient information for the reader to make a fair assessment.” – http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/9903/9903066v2.pdf

“The quantum collapse [in the mainstream interpretation of first quantization quantum mechanics, where a wavefunction collapse occurs whenever a measurement of a particle is made] occurs when we model the wave moving according to Schroedinger (time-dependent) and then, suddenly at the time of interaction we require it to be in an eigenstate and hence to also be a solution of Schroedinger (time-independent). The collapse of the wave function is due to a discontinuity in the equations used to model the physics, it is not inherent in the physics.” – Thomas Love, California State University.

First quantization for QM (e.g. Schroedinger) quantizes the product of position and momentum of an electron, rather than the Coulomb field which is treated classically. This leads to a mathematically useful approximation for bound states like atoms, which is physically false and inaccurate in detail (a bit like Ptolemy’s epicycles, where all planets were assumed to orbit Earth in circles within circles). Feynman explains this in his 1985 book QED (he dismisses the uncertainty principle as complete model, in favour of path integrals) because indeterminancy is physically caused by virtual particle interactions from the quantized Coulomb field becoming important on small, subatomic scales! Second quantization (QFT) introduced by Dirac in 1929 and developed with Feynman’s path integrals in 1948, instead quantizes the field. Second quantization is physically the correct theory because all indeterminancy results from the random fluctuations in the interactions of discrete field quanta, and first quantization by Heisenberg and Schroedinger’s approaches is just a semi-classical, non-relativistic mathematical approximation useful for obtaining simple mathematical solutions for bound states like atoms:

‘You might wonder how such simple actions could produce such a complex world. It’s because phenomena we see in the world are the result of an enormous intertwining of tremendous numbers of photon exchanges and interferences.’

- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, p. 114.

‘Underneath so many of the phenomena we see every day are only three basic actions: one is described by the simple coupling number, j; the other two by functions P(A to B) and E(A to B) – both of which are closely related. That’s all there is to it, and from it all the rest of the laws of physics come.’

- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, p. 120.

As a physics student with a mechanism for gravity that predicted correctly the cosmological acceleration two years ahead of its discovery, Russell didn’t even personally reply but just passed my paper to Dr Bob Lambourne who in 1996 wrote to me that my prediction for quantum gravity and cosmological acceleration was not important because it is not within the metaphysical, non-falsifiable domain of Professor Edward Witten’s stringy speculations on 11-dimensional ‘M-theory’. In 1986, Professor Russell was awarded the Templeton Project Trust Award for ‘significant contributions to the field of spiritual values; in particular for contributions to greater understanding of science and religion’. So who says the Planet of the Apes story is completely fictional, aside from a little hairiness?

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

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

‘I would like to put the uncertainty principle in its historical place: When the revolutionary ideas of quantum physics were first coming out, people still tried to understand them in terms of old-fashioned ideas … But at a certain point the old-fashioned ideas would begin to fail, so a warning was developed that said, in effect, “Your old-fashioned ideas are no damn good when …” If you get rid of all the old-fashioned ideas and instead use the ideas that I’m explaining in these lectures – adding arrows [path amplitudes] for all the ways an event can happen – there is no need for an uncertainty principle!’

- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, pp. 55-56 (footnote). His path integrals rebuild and reformulate quantum mechanics itself, getting rid of the Bohring ‘uncertainty principle’ and all the pseudoscientific baggage like ‘entanglement hype’ it brings with it:

‘This paper will describe what is essentially a third formulation of nonrelativistic quantum theory [Schroedinger's wave equation and Heisenberg's matrix mechanics being the first two attempts, which both generate nonsense 'interpretations']. This formulation was suggested by some of Dirac’s remarks concerning the relation of classical action to quantum mechanics. A probability amplitude is associated with an entire motion of a particle as a function of time, rather than simply with a position of the particle at a particular time.

‘The formulation is mathematically equivalent to the more usual formulations. … there are problems for which the new point of view offers a distinct advantage. …’

- Richard P. Feynman, ‘Space-Time Approach to Non-Relativistic Quantum Mechanics’, Reviews of Modern Physics, vol. 20 (1948), p. 367.

‘… I believe that path integrals would be a very worthwhile contribution to our understanding of quantum mechanics. Firstly, they provide a physically extremely appealing and intuitive way of viewing quantum mechanics: anyone who can understand Young’s double slit experiment in optics should be able to understand the underlying ideas behind path integrals. Secondly, the classical limit of quantum mechanics can be understood in a particularly clean way via path integrals. … for fixed h-bar, paths near the classical path will on average interfere constructively (small phase difference) whereas for random paths the interference will be on average destructive. … we conclude that if the problem is classical (action >> h-bar), the most important contribution to the path integral comes from the region around the path which extremizes the path integral. In other words, the article’s motion is governed by the principle that the action is stationary. This, of course, is none other than the Principle of Least Action from which the Euler-Lagrange equations of classical mechanics are derived.’

- Richard MacKenzie, Path Integral Methods and Applications, pp. 2-13.

‘… light doesn’t really travel only in a straight line; it “smells” the neighboring paths around it, and uses a small core of nearby space. (In the same way, a mirror has to have enough size to reflect normally: if the mirror is too small for the core of neighboring paths, the light scatters in many directions, no matter where you put the mirror.)’

- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, Chapter 2, p. 54.

‘When we look at photons on a large scale – much larger than the distance required for one stopwatch turn [i.e., wavelength] – the phenomena that we see are very well approximated by rules such as “light travels in straight lines [without overlapping two nearby slits in a screen]“, because there are enough paths around the path of minimum time to reinforce each other, and enough other paths to cancel each other out. But when the space through which a photon moves becomes too small (such as the tiny holes in the [double slit] screen), these rules fail – we discover that light doesn’t have to go in straight [narrow] lines, there are interferences created by the two holes, and so on. The same situation exists with electrons: when seen on a large scale, they travel like particles, on definite paths. But on a small scale, such as inside an atom, the space is so small that [individual random field quanta exchanges become important because there isn't enough space involved for them to average out completely, so] there is no main path, no “orbit”; there are all sorts of ways the electron could go, each with an amplitude. The phenomenon of interference becomes very important, and we have to sum the arrows [in the path integral for individual field quanta interactions, instead of using the average which is the classical Coulomb field] to predict where an electron is likely to be.’

- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, Chapter 3, pp. 84-5.

Sound waves are composed of the group oscillations of large numbers of randomly colliding air molecules; despite the randomness of individual air molecule collisions, the average pressure variations from many molecules obey a simple wave equation and carry the wave energy. Likewise, although the actual motion of an atomic electron is random due to individual interactions with field quanta, the average location of the electron resulting from many random field quanta interactions is non-random and can be described by a simple wave equation such as Schroedinger’s.

This is fact, it isn’t my opinion or speculation: professor David Bohm in 1952 proved that “brownian motion” of an atomic electron will result in average positions described by a Schroedinger wave equation. Unfortunately, Bohm also introduced unnecessary “hidden variables” with an infinite field potential into his messy treatment, making it a needlessly complex, uncheckable representation, instead of simply accepting that the quantum field interations produce the “Brownian motion” of the electron as described by Feynman’s path integrals for simple random field quanta interactions with the electron.

Dirac was the first to achieve a relativistic field equation to replace the non-relativistic quantum mechanics approximations (the Schroedinger wave equation and the Heisenberg momentum-distance matrix mechanics). Dirac also laid the groundwork for Feynman’s path integrals in his 1933 paper “The Lagrangian in Quantum Mechanics” published in Physikalische Zeitschrift der Sowjetunion where he states:

“Quantum mechanics was built up on a foundation of analogy with the Hamiltonian theory of classical mechanics. This is because the classical notion of canonical coordinates and momenta was found to be one with a very simple quantum analogue …

“Now there is an alternative formulation for classical dynamics, provided by the Lagrangian. … The two formulations are, of course, closely related, but there are reasons for believing that the Lagrangian one is the more fundamental. … the Lagrangian method can easily be expressed relativistically, on account of the action function being a relativistic invariant; while the Hamiltonian method is essentially nonrelativistic in form …”

Update, 6 September 2009:

Mathematical physicist and noted string theory critic Peter Woit of Columbia has a new post which states: ‘The latest Forbes magazine has an article entitled String Theory Skeptic, which gives me a lot more credit for the problems of string theory than I deserve.’

You can see why he is keen to take a back seat, namely that Woit’s unfortunate hero, stringy M-theory creator Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton is quoted being elitist:

“Princeton’s Witten declines to discuss Woit, saying in an e-mail that he prefers to debate these issues only with “critics who are distinguished scientists rather than with people who have become known by writing books.”

“That sounds like elitism. Physicists, though, defend themselves by saying that in the Internet age, when anyone can put out an opinion about anything, they have to draw limits around who they can get into arguments with. There are only 24 hours in the day. [Yeah, they spend all their time hyping lies.]

“Which raises the question: Why should anyone take a nonphysicist seriously on such a fundamental physics issue? [Duh, it's the content of what is being said, not their groupthink authority status, which counts in science; which is the whole difference between religion and science.]

“Physics itself might hold the answer to that question. John Baez, a UC, Riverside physicist, famously created the Crackpot Index, a tongue-in-cheek but nonetheless useful guide to evaluating scientific claims by nonscientists. For example, it awards one 40 points “for claiming that the scientific establishment is engaged in a conspiracy to prevent your work from gaining its well-deserved fame.” [Actually, string theory is a public conspiracy to hype-out all alternative ideas; if string was a quiet failure, then nobody would need to complain about it! Like Cold Fusion in 1989, the problem isn't that an idea is a failure, the problem is that uses authority to gain media attention and lie to millions of people with unproved hype.]

“Using Baez’s index, it’s clear Woit is no crackpot. He doesn’t play the role of the persecuted truth-teller. For example, Woit says that Witten is “a genius, who works very hard and who just doesn’t want to spend time arguing.” [That was precisely what was said in the media of a certain German Chancellor from election in 1933 until after Munich in 1938, when he just dictated and didn't engage in arguments with critics who merely wrote books.]

“Woit also acknowledges he might be wrong. It’s hard to think of an example from the history of science when so many of the field’s best people took to a new idea that ended up being utterly mistaken, a fact that Woit himself is the first to admit. [Duh, then what about all the history of failure in fundamental particle physics such as unsplittable atoms, Ptolemy's epicycles, vortex atoms, aether, etc.]

“A lot of really smart guys are doing it, and sometimes I wonder, ‘Who am I to be challenging them?’” he says. “The strongest argument in favor of string theory is that Ed Witten thinks it’s right.”

“It’s common in physics for people to have incredibly ambitious ideas that don’t pan out but lead to rich mathematical ideas that end up being very useful.”

Senior editor Lee Gomes covers technology from our Silicon Valley bureau. Visit him at www.forbes.com/gomes/.

Woit’s “earliest work verified Edward Witten’s 1979 quantum chromodynamic formula for the eta-prime mass in terms of the second derivative of the vacuum energy.”

This indicates that Woit understands and respects Witten’s 1979 work on solid checkable physics, which holds him back from a general attack on Witten’s later “work” on string theory speculations. (You know, the kind of “logic” which says that Hitler ended unemployment – by, ahem, conscripting a massive army – so he can’t have been 100% evil. Or the airplane you were due to fly on crashed with no survivors, so really you should be grateful to the thugs who stopped you catching the flight, thus saving your life.)

As an alternative to stringy ideas, Woit suggested, for example, that: “spontaneous gauge symmetry breaking is somehow related to the other mysterious aspect of electroweak gauge symmetry: its chiral nature. … The SU(2) gauge symmetry is supposed to be a purely internal symmetry, having nothing to do with space-time symmetries, but left and right-handed spinors are distinguished purely by their behavior under a space-time symmetry, Lorentz symmetry. So SU(2) gauge symmetry is not only spontaneously broken, but also somehow knows about the subtle spin geometry of space-time.”

In the Standard Model, the SU(2) isospin charge weak force only operates on left handed particles because all neutrinos – which are needed for weak interactions – are left handed. Our explanation of SU(2) differs from the Standard Model in that SU(2) with massive gauge bosons is the weak interaction and SU(2) with massless gauge bosons is the electromagnetic (charged field quanta) and gravitational (neutral field quanta) interaction: so maybe as Woit suggests, the SU(2) weak interaction left handedness arises from the way that mass is acquired by the massive weak SU(2) field quanta. No checkable explanation of this left handedness is given in the Standard Model. However, the previous post gives some speculations from Penrose and a potential application to work by Koide and Brannen. Further work is being done. Feynman, in the final chapter of his 1985 book QED, makes it clear that the “electroweak unification” theory is not a a perfect unification: it’s held together by the unobserved Higgs mechanism and unexplained ad hoc Weinberg mixing angle, which act like leaky duct tape.

The lagrangian of the Standard Model (SM) for low energies (i.e., broken symmetry) is well verified, but this doesn’t prove the SM electroweak group structure or that the mass of weak bosons and other particles at low energy is being provided by Higgs bosons according to the Higgs mechanism, whereby they lose mass and unify at high energy. Even the electroweak theory successes doesn’t prove that the unification is correct: the arbitrary value of the Weinberg mixing angle doesn’t prove that electromagnetism and the weak force are unified in the way specified by the SM. It is just a mathematical model for unification which works well at the (broken symmetry) energies used in experiments so far.

E.g. if weak field bosons acquire mass at all energies, the electroweak force symmetry is broken at all energies. You can still have your Weinberg electroweak mixing angle. Just because two related fields are mixed, doesn’t prove they’re unified by all having massless field quanta at high energies. Mass can be acquired in a simpler way, just as the quantized charge for quantum gravity. Such a mass, as a quantum gravity charge, need not decay by either Higgs decay routes H->WW and H->ZZ. The quantized gravity charge (mass) would just give particles charges (gravitational mass). There’s no need for it to consist of decaying Higgs type bosons.

Why does the SM actually “model” electroweak symmetry – as if electroweak symmetry has been seen – when it hasn’t been seen? Sheer dogmatic prejudice, which is exactly what real scientists should guard against.

Returning to the Forbes article, it mentions:

“There is no direct evidence that the world really is made of strings; the idea was first proposed simply because it made a certain amount of mathematical sense. The theory became more popular when physicists realized that replacing dots with strings would solve an enormous math problem left over from 20th-century physics: unifying the force of gravity with the forces that explain the interaction of atomic particles.”

This final sentence ends on a falsehood, because “unification” pipe-dreams, at least in the way they are currently defined by mainstream dogma (i.e., all couplings becomign equal at the Planck scale) has not been shown to actually exist in nature. What you actually want to do in science is to come up with a predictive quantum gravity that can be checked against the real world, instead of building ivory towers. Unification can be achieved with the other forces not by the numerology of equal force couplings at the Planck scale, but instead by fitting gravity into the Standard Model as the neutral massless gauge boson with a revised SU(2) achieved by removing the unobserved Higgs fairy field and replacing it with the observed quantum gravity charge field.

However, it is true that point particles pose problems (like zero distances with infinite field strengths) that can be easily disposed of using some kind of extended object like a loop of string for a fundamental particle: “replacing dots with strings would solve an enormous math problem”. Closely related to this problem is a less widely known problem of the quantization of electromagnetic fields.

Suppose we take an electric field within a photon. QFT says that this field is composed of virtual photons. Those virtual photons in turn are composed of electromagnetic fields. What are those fields composed of? More virtual photons, within virtual photons, ad infinitum? Like a Russian doll, with an infinite number of shells? Maybe pure mathematicians would like the idea of an infinite amount of complexity, but real world physicists would suspect a problem and want to break the endless cycle of chickens-and-eggs coming before one another. (Due to evolution of complexity from simplicity, a proto-egg came before the chicken, because the egg is a single cell and is thus simpler than the chicken. An egg is closer in structure to the first organisms than a chicken is, simply because it is unicellular.)

Similarly, at least the virtual (off shell) photon is probably a primitive particle in its own right, with no other particulate fields within it. If string theory has any direct role in fundamental particle physics (i.e., aside from just potentially providing ways to do applied physics like make QCD calculations for quark-gluon plasmas with the conjectured AdS/CFT equivalence), then it should model the photon as vibrating string in a simple and checkable way (making solid, testable predictions!). This is not what string theorists do, and the whole problem is that they traditionally find any real world modelling heretical. Due to Bohr’s and Heisenberg’s metaphysical attacks on understanding nature, such as the complementarity and correspondence principles, they have slunk into a world of metaphysics in which the false dogma is that nature has transcended reason.

Update (7 September 2009):

Carlos Castro’s paper, “The Cosmological Constant and Pioneer Anomaly from Weyl Spacetimes and Mach’s Principle”, http://vixra.org/pdf/0908.0093v1.pdf states:

“It is shown how Weyl’s geometry and Mach’s Holographic principle furnishes both the magnitude and sign (towards the sun) of the Pioneer
anomalous acceleration a_P ~ −c²/R_Hubble firstly observed by Anderson et al. Weyl’s Geometry can account for both the origins and the value of the observed vacuum energy density (dark energy). The source of dark energy is just the dilaton-like Jordan-Brans-Dicke scalar field that is required to implement Weyl invariance of the most simple of all possible actions. A nonvanishing value of the vacuum energy density of the order of 10⁻¹²³M⁴_Planck is found consistent with observations. Weyl’s geometry accounts also for the phantom scalar field in modern Cosmology in a very natural fashion.”

I discussed the mainstream problems with the cosmological constant on the about page of this blog:

Because of relativistic effects on the source of the gravitational field (i.e., accelerating bodies contract in the direction of motion and gain mass, which is gravitational charge, so a falling apple becomes heavier while it accelerates), the curvature of spacetime is affected in order for energy to be conserved when the gravitational source is changed by relativistic motion. This means that the Ricci tensor for curvature is not simply equal to the source of the gravitational field. Instead, another factor (equal to half the product of the trace of the Ricci tensor and the metric tensor) must be subtracted from the Ricci curvature to ensure the conservation of energy. As a result, general relativity makes predictions which differ from Newtonian physics. General relativity is correct as far as it goes, which is mathematical generalization of Newtonian gravity and a correction for energy conservation. It’s not, however, the end of the story. There is every reason to expect general relativity to hold good in the solar system, and to be a good approximation. But if gravity has a gauge theory (exchange radiation) mechanism in the expanding universe which surrounds a falling apple, there is a reason why general relativity is incomplete when applied to cosmology.

Sean’s paper ‘Why is the Universe Accelerating?’ asks why the energy of the vacuum is so much smaller than predicted by grand unification theories of supersymmetry, such as supergravity (a string theory). This theory states that the universe is filled with a quantum field of virtual fermions which have a ground state or zero-point energy of E = (1/2){h-bar}{angular frequency}. Each of these oscillating virtual charges radiates energy E = hf, so integrating over all frequencies gives you the total amount of vacuum energy. This is infinity if you integrate frequencies between zero and infinity, but this problem isn’t real because the highest frequencies are the shortest wavelengths, and we already know from the physical need to renormalize quantum field theory that the vacuum has a minimum size scale (the grain size of the vacuum), and you can’t have shorter wavelengths (or corresponding higher frequencies) than that size. Renormalization introduces cutoffs on the running couplings for interaction strengths; such couplings would become infinite at zero distance, causing infinite field momenta, if they were not cutoff by a vacuum grain size limit. The mainstream string and other supersymmetric unification ideas assume that the grain size is the Planck length although there is no theory of this (dimensional analysis isn’t a physical theory) and certainly no experimental evidence for this particular grain size assumption, and a physically more meaningful and also smaller grain size would be the black hole horizon radius for an electron, 2GM/c².

But to explain the mainstream error, the assumption of the Planck length as the grain size tells the mainstream how closely grains (virtual fermions) are packed together in the spacetime fabric, allowing the vacuum energy to be calculated. Integrating the energy over frequencies corresponding to vacuum oscillator wavelengths which are longer than the Planck scale gives us exactly the same answer for the vacuum energy as working out the energy density of the vacuum from the grain size spacing of virtual charges. This is the Planck mass (expressed as energy using E = mc²) divided into the cube of the Planck length (the volume which each of the supposed virtual Planck mass vacuum particles is supposed to occupy within the vacuum).

The answer is 10¹¹² ergs/cm³ in Sean’s quaint American stone age units, or 10¹¹¹ Jm^-3 in physically sensible S.I. units (1 erg is 10^-7 J, and there are 10⁶ cm³ in 1 m³). The problem for Sean and other mainstream people is why the measured ‘dark energy’ from the observed cosmological acceleration implies a vacuum energy density of merely 10^-9 Jm³. In other words, string theory and supersymmetric unification theories in general exaggerate the vacuum energy density by a factor of 10¹¹¹ Jm^-3/10^-9 Jm^-3 = 10¹²⁰.

That’s an error! (although, of course, to be a little cynical, such errors are common in string theory, which also predicts 10⁵⁰⁰ different universes, exceeding the observed number).

Now we get to the fun part. Sean points out in section 1.2.2 ‘Quantum zero-point energy’ at page 4 of his paper that:

‘This is the famous 120-orders-of-magnitude discrepancy that makes the cosmological constant problem such a glaring embarrassment. Of course, it is somewhat unfair to emphasize the factor of 10¹²⁰, which depends on the fact that energy density has units of [energy]⁴.’

What Sean is saying here is that the mainstream-predicted vacuum energy density is at since the Planck length is inversely proportional to the Planck energy, the vacuum energy density of {Planck energy}/{Planck length³} ~ {Planck energy⁴} which exaggerates the error in the prediction of the energy. So if we look at the error in terms of energy rather than energy density for the vacuum, the error is only a factor of 10³⁰, not 10¹²⁰.

What is pretty obvious here is that the more meaningful 10³⁰ error factor is relatively close to the factor 10⁴⁰ which is the ratio between the coupling constants of electromagnetism and gravity. In other words, the mainstream analysis is wrong in using the electromagnetic (electric charge) oscillator photon radiation theory, instead of the mass oscillator graviton radiation theory: the acceleration of the universe is due to graviton exchange.

Another cause of error in the mainstream calculation of the vacuum’s “dark energy” is the use of the Planck scale for particle spacings in the vacuum, rather than the black hole scale for fundamental particles, as we have already discussed.

On the non-electromagnetic nature of the cosmological constant, Danny R. Lunsford has published a classical unification of electrodynamics and general relativity in Int. J. Theor. Phys., v 43 (2004), No. 1, pp.161-177, which uses 6 dimensions (3 time and 3 spatial, where the time dimensions are normally indistinguishable and can be lumped together) rather than the Kaluza-Klein 5 dimensional unification (1 time and 4 spatial dimensions). Kaluza-Klein requires compactification of the unobserved extra spatial dimension, while predicting nothing checkable (it is a non-dynamical unification). Lunsford’s 6-d unification predicts a zero-sized electromagnetic based cosmological constant, which as we have seen is consistent with the cosmological acceleration being due to a gravitational field rather than electromagnetic field. The mainstream think that a numerically unified field, i.e., effectively the electromagnetic field vacuum, causes the cosmological acceleration. Actually, the cosmological acceleration is small because it is not caused by such a numerically unified field, but by the weak gravitational field.

While energy serves as a source of gravitation in general relativity, making quantum gravity appear to be a Yang-Mills field (where the field quanta themselves carry gravity charge which are a source of gravitons and thus make the field escalate in strength in a very rapid, non-linear way as you get near a mass), in actual fact quantum gravity does not behave as such a field because gravitational charge (mass) is not an intrinsic property of energy: even in the Standard Model, gravitational charge (mass) is not an intrinsic property of particles but is supplied by a “miring” mechanism some external vacuum field (hence Higgs field speculations).

One example of how a vacuum field can give effective mass to energy is given by Penrose as discussed in the previous post. Hence, general relativity is wrong to lump together mass and energy: particles intrinsically contain energy, but mass (gravitational and inertial) is given from vacuum field interactions by a mechanism. General relativity completely ignores the dynamics by lumping together mass and energy, which is fine for modelling certain gross phenomena, but fails where quantum gravity effects are important. The field quanta of the gravitational field do not carry gravitational charge (mass) so the gravitational field does not grow in strength to equal other field running coupling at the Planck scale as “predicted” by mainstream unification theories.

Update (12 Sept. 2009):

On his blog post http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/09/schrodinger-virus-and-decoherence.html former Harvard assistant physics professor Lubos Motl writes about the typical arXiv pseudophysics paper Towards Quantum Superposition of Living Organisms (that title makes you glad you don’t have a paper on arXiv, doesn’t it?) http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.1469

“So all these [Schroedinger quantum entanglement due to wavefunction collapse upon measurement] things are cool and sexy and we’re used to viewing them as mysterious. And we often love the profound feelings of mystery. But in reality, there is no genuine question concerning the behavior of Schrödinger viruses (or even cats) that would remain uncertain as of 2009.”

I’ve commented there (Lubos Motl probably won’t “understand” the following distinction between first and second quantization any more than Adolf Hitler could “understand” the distinction between ethics and eugenics):

Entanglement and the Copenhagen Interpretation are based on QM which is first quantization; i.e. quantization of particle position/momentum using a wave equation (Schroedinger) or uncertainty principle (Heisenberg), in each case having a classical Coulomb potential.

Actually, QM with 1st quantization is false: it is inconsistent with special relativity. 2nd quantization is correct, and quantizes the field not the position/momentum. I.e., the field quanta cause the indeterminancy in 2nd quantization. Indeterminancy is a physical effect of chaotically arriving field quanta on small scales of spacetime, such as inside an atom.

Dr Thomas Love of California State University has shown that:

“The quantum collapse [in the mainstream interpretation of of quantum mechanics, which has wavefunction collapse occur when a measurement is made] occurs when we model the wave moving according to Schroedinger (time-dependent) and then, suddenly at the time of interaction we require it to be in an eigenstate and hence to also be a solution of Schroedinger (time-independent). The collapse of the wave function is due to a discontinuity in the equations used to model the physics, it is not inherent in the physics.”

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/9903/9903066v2.pdf:

‘In some key Bell experiments, including two of the well-known ones by Alain Aspect, 1981-2, it is only after the subtraction of ‘accidentals’ from the coincidence counts that we get violations of Bell tests. The data adjustment, producing increases of up to 60% in the test statistics, has never been adequately justified. Few published experiments give sufficient information for the reader to make a fair assessment. There is a straightforward and well known realist model that fits the unadjusted data very well. In this paper, the logic of this realist model and the reasoning used by experimenters in justification of the data adjustment are discussed. It is concluded that the evidence from all Bell experiments is in urgent need of re-assessment, in the light of all the known ‘loopholes’. Invalid Bell tests have frequently been used, neglecting improved ones derived by Clauser and Horne in 1974. ‘Local causal’ explanations for the observations have been wrongfully neglected.’

Update:

General relativist Professor Sean Carroll is blogging from the religious Templeton Foundation “Philosophy and Cosmology” Conference at Oxford which has barred Dr Sheppeard on the false basis of a lack of space. Carroll reports:

“… multiverse proponents are proposing that we weaken the idea of scientific proof. Science is about two things: testability and explanatory power. Is it worth giving up the former to achieve the latter?”

It’s interesting to hear someone including “explanatory power” as a part of physics. I thought that only mathematical models which make testable predictions can count as physics? Even Ptolemy’s epicycles – regarded as pseudoscience – made falsifiable predictions of planetary positions in addition to “explaining” planetary orbits around the earth. The multiverse is a step back beyond even that pseudoscience, to totally non-falsifiable philosophy. If you want to explain the apparent fine-tuning of fundamental constants like cosmological acceleration aka dark energy, I suggest you look to falsifiable scientific predictions made prior to its discovery!

Fig. 25.13 on p. 644 of the 2004 Cape edition of Penrose’s Road to Reality. Caption reads: ‘In the zigzag picture of a Dirac particle, the vertices may be viewed as interactions with the (constant) Higgs field.’ Because the mass of the particle is acquired as it interacts with the constant mass vacuum field quanta at the vertices (some kind of mass-producing field, not necessarily any particular speculative Higgs boson, which has never been observed), it follows that the ‘coupling constant’ for the interaction must be different where the resultant particles are different in mass: the coupling per vertice (there are two vertices needed for each complete cycle of de Broglie wave oscillation as the particle moves in the zigzag motion) is a square root factor which apparently explains the Koide formula for leptons, including Carl Brannen’s modification for neutrino masses. This results from the decomposition of Dirac’s spinor into a 2-spinor form by Weyl in 1929, where one component of the spinor is left handed and the other right handed. A truly massless neutrino would be an entirely left-handed spinor, like just the zig part of the zigzag motion of an electron. But if they have a small mass an can change flavour (as observed for solar neutrinos), neutrinos must occasionally interact with a massive vacuum field and therefore have a very small zag component.

Let the masses of the electron, muon and tauon be M_e, M_m, and M_t, respectively. Koide’s formula in its usual presentation is then:

(M_e^1/2 + M_m^1/2 + M_t^1/2)²/(M_e + M_m + M_t) = 3/2

Multiplying out the squared numerator, simplifying and rearranging gives (see appendix B at the end of this post for detailed steps):

M_e + M_m + M_t = 4[(M_eM_m)^1/2 + (M_eM_t)^1/2 + (M_mM_t)^1/2]

To further simplify the Koide formula, remember from the law of indices that any mass can be represented like: M_e = (M_eM_e)^1/2. The Koide formula can then be seen to consist entirely of a summation of terms of the form (M_aM_b)^1/2, some positive and some negative.

Physically, the Koide formula in its original form presumably is high-energy averaging for all flavours of leptons (electron, muon and tauon) as suggested in a previous post (which considered a different explanation for the square roots, however): at high enough energy (in either collisions or simply in a strong enough static field very close to the real core of a fundamental particle), all three flavours of leptons can spontaneously occur as virtual fermions in the vacuum due to pair-production. The original Koide formula seems to apply to the averaging of the masses of leptons at high energy when they can all briefly arise as virtual particles formed from preon interations in the vacuum.

A MECHANISM EXPLAINING HOW LEPTON MASSES CAN BE PRODUCTS OF PAIRS OF SQUARE ROOTS OF OTHER LEPTON MASSES (OR OF PREON COUPLING CONSTANT MASSES WHICH NORMALLY CANNOT BE DIRECTLY OBSERVED, BUT WHOSE PAIRED COMBINATIONS GIVES RISE TO THE OBSERVED PARTICLE MASSES)

The Dirac spinor was first resolved into 2-spinors by Weyl in 1929, and the relevance here is that, as Penrose shows (Road to Reality, 2004, pp. 629-30):

‘The Dirac equation can then be written as an equation coupling these two spinors, each acting as a kind of “source” for the other, with a “coupling constant” 2^-1/2M describing the strength of the “interaction” between the two. …

‘From the form of these equations, we see that the Dirac electron can be thought of as being composed of two ingredients … It is possible to obtain a kind of physical interpretation of these ingredients. We form a picture in which there are two “particles”, one described by alpha_A and the other by beta_A’, each of which is massless, and where each one is continually converting into the other one. Let us call these the “zig” particle and the “zag” particle … this is a realization of the phenomenon referred to as “zitterbewegung“, according to which, the electron’s instantaneous motion is always to be the speed of light, owing to the electron’s jiggling motion, even though the overall averaged motion of the electron is less than light speed. Each ingredient has a spin about its direction of motion, of magnitude h-bar/2, where the spin is left-handed in the case of the zig and right-handed for the zag. …

‘In this interpretation, the zig particle acts as the source for the zag particle and the zag particle as a source for the zig particle, the coupling strength being determined by M.’

This zig-zag motion of the electron is a kind of oscillation as it propagates, as Penrose explains on p. 630:

‘… we find that the average rate at which this [zig-zagging] happens is (reciprocally) related to the mass coupling parameter M; in fact, this rate is essentially the de Broglie frequency of the electron.’

Hence, the electron (and leptons generally) have two components which drive one another cyclically with a mass coupling constant of 2^-1/2. Each different lepton has a different mass, so the zig-zag amplitude will vary for electrons, muons, and tauons, each being a square root factor: the product of the two square root terms for the two components gives us the overall mass of the lepton of interest. The interaction of zigs and zags is a W-shape on a Feynman diagram, and according to Feynman’s rules (very nicely explained with clear examples in the 2008 book Quantum Field Theory Demystified) the amplitude for an interaction is simply the product of the various coupling constants and propagators involved, integrated in such a way as to conserve momentum for the interaction.

Now, at each zig and zag vertex in the W-shaped Feynman diagram for a lepton’s Zitterbewegung motion, the electron is actually interacting with a vacuum field particle which gives it mass, according to Figure 25.13 on page 644 of Penrose’s 2004 Road to Reality:

‘In the zig-zag picture of a Dirac particle, the vertices may be viewed as interactions with the (constant) Higgs field.’

This is how the mass of leptons mass arises, according to Sir Roger Penrose! My argument is that the square root products in the expanded Koide formula arise because the mass of a lepton is a composite of the product of two square roots of lepton masses (including neutrino masses, since Carl Brannen has shown that the Koide formula with a slight modification – a minus sign to the lightest neutrino mass square root term instead of a positive sign – fits the neutrino mass data very well); if mixing is allowed for massive particles as like electrons, muons and tauons, as occurs with other leptons (neutrinos) you get three distinct ways that the electron, muon and tauon mass square roots can mix:

1. electron-muon
2. muon-tauon
3. tauon-electron

We know from observations that some leptons at least, neutrinos, can mix varieties spontaneously while they are propagating: there are three flavours of neutrinos, only 33% of the flavour generated in the sun by fusion is detected here on earth, hence that neutrino has mixed flavours equally between all 3 flavours while on the way to the detector on the earth. In this way, the number of neutrinos of the original flavour has fallen by the factor 3 to just 33% as observed, and 67% are present as other flavours which the detector here (a larger underground swimming pool filled of carbon tetrachloride and a big scintillation photomultiplier) is simply unable to detect.

What happens with the electron, muon and tauon in Koide’s formula is simply that the sum of their masses is directly proportional to the sum of the products of all combinations of the square roots. The expanded Koide formula:

M_e + M_m + M_t = 4[(M_eM_m)^1/2 + (M_eM_t)^1/2 + (M_mM_t)^1/2]

shows that M_e + M_m + M_t is equal to the sum of 4*3 = 12 separate terms, i.e., each of the masses is represented by 4 terms each. If we look at the right hand side of the equation above, the term (M_mM_t)^1/2 is the biggest, (M_eM_t)^1/2 is second biggest, and (M_eM_m)^1/2 is the smallest.

It is probable that the Koide formula is a gross manifestation of something much deeper, because if we look at individual particle masses, we can’t get the electron mass by multiplying the square roots of two massive lepton masses together, unless maybe one of the masses is a neutrino mass and the other one is the muon or tauon mass.

The reason for bringing neutrinos in here is that Penrose states that neutrinos are equivalent to the ‘zig’ part of an electron, which makes them left handed (neutrinos are only left-handed in the Standard Model to make the weak interaction purely left-handed as experimentally observed; neutrinos interact with Z bosons in weak interactions). But because neutrinos have a very small mass, they can’t be entirely left-handed ‘zig’ particles and need to interact with a massive vacuum field occasionally in order to acquire mass so they can change flavour i.e. to ‘oscillate’ between electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tauon neutrinos. (Penrose, 2004, Figure 25.9.) Without mass, neutrinos would go at velocity c only and thus would be frozen and unable to oscillate; having a very small mass reduces their velocity to just under c and allows them to gradually change flavour on the 8.3 minute journey from the sun to the earth.

This zig neutrino idea is funny because it will force a change to the Standard Model: the neutrino is not 100% left-handed; it is very slightly right-handed in order to explain its mass. The small proportion of right-handedness presumably will be linked to the ratio by which matter outweighs antimatter in the universe; because it is the left-handed weak interaction which allows downquarks (in neutrons) to decay into upquarks (allowing neutrons to decay into protons), but not vice-versa (nobody has detected a proton decaying). The asymmetry of left-handedness of weak interactions is clearly tied into the asymmetry of matter over antimatter in the universe from the first fraction of a second onward.

SUMMARY

The underlying mechanism for the square roots of mass in the Koide formula is linked to the Weyl 2-spinor (left and right handed spinors) using Schroedinger’s ‘Zitterbewegung’ lepton as discussed by Penrose, Road to Reality, 2004. See Penrose’s Figure 25.13 for a Feynman diagram showing how two components of a lepton interact to produce the de Broglie oscillation of a moving particle. They acquire mass at the interaction vertex. The Zitterbewegung vertex coupling constant for the interaction is a square root factor, because you square the momentum integrated amplitude of coupling constants and propagators for a Feynman diagram to get the resultant probability or reaction rate.

Because Zitterbewegung involves interactions between two components, a zig and a zag, in a lepton, you need two interaction vertices in each complete oscillatory cycle of the particle as it propagates, and the coupling constants multiply together to give the amplitude according to Feynman’s rules; this provides the seed for an explanation of the square roots in the Koide formula. Since any lepton is acquiring mass from the same vacuum at vertices, it follows that to explain the variety of lepton masses that exist in nature, the Zitterbewegung vertex coupling constants must be proportional to the square root of the mass of the zig and zag components of a Zitterbewegung lepton. We know that neutrinos oscillate in flavour uniformly between three flavours while coming to us from the sun, which is why we detect just one third of the total (the third which have the flavour that our discriminate detector is searching for). If we extend this idea so that the zig and zag components of leptons in general, the masses of leptons will be represented by the sum of products of pairs of square roots of masses of different leptons. Although Koide’s original formula only applied to the masses of the electron, muon and tauon, Brannen has extended it with a modification to include neutrino masses.

The question now is to see if this mechanism for the Koide formula can be tied firmly into Carl Brannen’s application of the Koide formula to neutrino masses, mentioned in an earlier post.

One possibility is that the

Appendix A: History of Zitterbewegung (quoted from Wikipedia)

‘The existence of such motion was first proposed by Erwin Schrödinger in 1930 as a result of his analysis of the wave packet solutions of the Dirac equation for relativistic electrons in free space, in which an interference between positive and negative energy states produces what appears to be a fluctuation (at the speed of light) of the position of an electron around the median, with a circular frequency of , or approximately 1.6 × 10²¹ Hz.’

Appendix B: rewriting the Koide formula

Koide formula: (M_e^1/2 + M_m^1/2 + M_t^1/2)²/(M_e + M_m + M_t) = 3/2.

Rearranging:

2(M_e^1/2 + M_m^1/2 + M_t^1/2)²

= 3(M_e + M_m + M_t).

Expand 2(M_e^1/2 + M_m^1/2 + M_t^1/2)²:

2(M_e^1/2 + M_m^1/2 + M_t^1/2)²

= 2[M_e + M_m + M_t + 2{(M_eM_m)^1/2 + (M_eM_t)^1/2 + (M_tM_m)^1/2}]

= 2M_e + 2M_m + 2M_t + 4{(M_eM_m)^1/2 + (M_eM_t)^1/2 + (M_tM_m)^1/2}

Which equals 3(M_e + M_m + M_t).

Hence:

M_e + M_m + M_t = 4[(M_eM_m)^1/2 + (M_eM_t)^1/2 + (M_mM_t)^1/2].

To further simplify the Koide formula, remember from the law of indices that for example M_e = (M_eM_e)^1/2, so M_e + M_m + M_t = 4[(M_eM_m)^1/2 + (M_eM_t)^1/2 + (M_mM_t)^1/2] can be written as:

(M_eM_e)^1/2 + (M_mM_m)^1/2 + (M_tM_t)^1/2 = 4[(M_eM_m)^1/2 + (M_eM_t)^1/2 + (M_mM_t)^1/2],

which may help.

In the previous post, the Casimir force was discussed. It was discovered theoretically by Casimir in 1948 and experimentally proven in 1996 by Steve Lamoreaux and Dev Sen. Depending on the geometry of the situation, i.e., the shape of the plates, it can be either an attractive or a repulsive force.

The Casimir force between two parallel flat conducting metal conductors is attractive because the full spectrum (all wavelengths) of electromagnetic radiation fluctuations in the vacuum bombard the outside area of the plates (pushing them together), but only wavelengths smaller than the distance between the plates can arise in the space between the plates:

In other words, the shortest wavelengths of the “zero-point” (ground state) electromagnetic energy fluctuations of the vacuum bombard each plate equally from each side, so there is no asymmetry and no net force. Only the longer wavelengths contribute to the Casimir force, for they don’t exist in the small space between the plates but do bombard the plates from the outside, pushing them together in the LeSage fashion.

Looking at the Wiki page on the Casimir effect, they derive the Casimir force from the force equation

F = dE/dx

which we can use to formulate the basic (unshielded) QED force from Heisenberg’s minimal energy-time uncertainty relation, h-bar = Et.

F = dE/dx = d(h-bar/t)/dx = d[h-bar/(x/c)]/dx = -h-bar*c/x².

This inverse-square law force is a factor of 1/alpha times the Coulomb force between two electrons (i.e. it doesn’t incorporate the polarized vacuum shielding factor of alpha).

The Casimir force calculation is considerably more complex. It relies on only wavelengths longer than the gap between two parallel metal plates pushing them together by acting on the outside, but not in between, the plates. According to the discussion of thie Casimir force mechanism in Zee’s QFT textbook p. 66: ‘Physical plates cannot keep arbitrarily high frequency waves from leaking out.’ This is one way of explaining why short wavelengths don’t contribute to the Casimir effect significantly: like very high energy gamma rays, they penetrate straight through the thin Casimir plates without interacting significantly with them. Longer wavelengths, on the other hand, are all stopped and impart momentum, producing the Casimir force. However, Zee’s explanation – just like his flawed explanation of Feynman’s path integrals using the double-slit experiment (where he doesn’t seem to grasp that the diffraction of the photons is physically caused by the interaction of the photon with the electromagnetic fields from the physical material at the edges of the slits in the screen, which doesn’t exist in the vacuum below Schwinger’s 1.3 * 10¹⁸ v/m IR cutoff) – is physically wrong.

Zee is wrong because if the shorter wavelengths were excluded from contributing by merely penetrating the Casimir plates, the wavelengths cutoff from the integral would depend not on the distance between the plates, but just on the nature of the plates themselves (their mass per unit area for example, as in gamma radiation shielding).

So rather than Zee’s theory of the plates shielding (stopping) long wavelengths and letting short wavelengths (high frequencies) penetrate by leaking through and thus not contributing, the Casimir mechanism must be one that explains why the wavelength cutoff is equal to the distance between the plates.

Notice that Zee is right that higher frequencies (shorter wavelengths) are more penetrating: I’m not disputing that. What I’m saying is that his shielding mechanism neglects to explain the wavelength dependence upon the distance between the plates.

The only way that the distance between the plates can determine the wavelengths contributing to the Casimir force is if wavelengths longer than the distance between the plates are unable to exist between the plates in the first place.

It simply doesn’t matter what happens to the shorter wavelengths, because it is only the longer wavelengths that contribute to the Casimir effect. Zee should be explaining what the mechanism is for the asummetry in the energy density of the longer wavelengths, not discussing the shorter wavelengths, because it’s just the asymmetry between the energy density of the longer wavelengths on each side of each metal plate which causes the Casimir force.

The actual mechanism for the exclusion from the space between the plates of wavelengths longer than the distance between the plates is simply the waveguide effect. When you have a radio frequency resonator (source) and want to send the radiation to a dish antenna for transmission, you can pipe the radiation inside a conductive metal tube or box (a so-called ‘waveguide’) with an internal size at least equal to the wavelength you’re using. If the wavelength is longer than the diameter of the metal tube, the radiation can’t propagate: it is absorbed by the sides and heats them up.

What happens is that the electromagnetic radiation is simply shorted out by the waveguide if its wavelength is bigger than the size of the waveguide, since the oscillation of the electric field strength in the photon is transverse (perpendicular to the direction it propagates in), not longitudinal. (Ignore the usual obfuscating ‘pictures’ of a Maxwellian photon in textbooks, since they are one-dimensional and merely plot field strength and magnetic field strength versus the one-dimension of propagation. Anyone glancing at those pictures is misled that they are looking at a 3-dimensional spatial illustration of the photon, when in fact two axes are field strengths, not spatial dimensions! It’s as nutty as plotting a graph of speed versus distance for an oscillating pendulum, and claiming that the sine wave graph is the real 2-dimensional outline of the pendulum.)

On p. 66, Zee calculates the Casimir force to be

F = dE/dt = Pi*h-bar*c/(24d²),

where d is the distance between the plates. Notice the inverse-square law! But the Wiki page on the Casimir effect calculates the following for the Casimir pressure (force per unit area):

P = F/A = -Pi²*h-bar*c/(240d⁴).

If both Zee and Wiki are correct, then the effective area of the Casimir plates will be the Zee formula for F divided by the Wiki formula for P:

A = F/P = 10d²/Pi.

Hence the distance of separation between the plates is d = (Pi*A/10)^1/2. For the simplest geometric situation of circular shaped plates with area A = Pi*R², the distance of separation is

d = (Pi*A/10)^1/2 = (Pi²R²/10)^1/2 = Pi*R/10^1/2.

‘It’s a problem that physicists have learned to deal with: They’ve learned to realize that whether they like a theory or they don’t like a theory is not the essential question. Rather, it is whether or not the theory gives predictions that agree with experiment. It is not a question of whether a theory is philosophically delightful, or easy to understand, or perfectly reasonable from the point of view of common sense. The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment.’

- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Chapter 1, Princeton, 1985.

‘You might wonder how such simple actions could produce such a complex world. It’s because phenomena we see in the world are the result of an enormous intertwining of tremendous numbers of photon exchanges and interferences.’

- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, p. 114.

‘Underneath so many of the phenomena we see every day are only three basic actions: one is described by the simple coupling number, j; the other two by functions P(A to B) and E(A to B) – both of which are closely related. That’s all there is to it, and from it all the rest of the laws of physics come.’

- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, p. 120.

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

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

‘I would like to put the uncertainty principle in its historical place: When the revolutionary ideas of quantum physics were first coming out, people still tried to understand them in terms of old-fashioned ideas … But at a certain point the old-fashioned ideas would begin to fail, so a warning was developed that said, in effect, “Your old-fashioned ideas are no damn good when …” If you get rid of all the old-fashioned ideas and instead use the ideas that I’m explaining in these lectures – adding arrows [path amplitudes] for all the ways an event can happen – there is no need for an uncertainty principle!’

- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, pp. 55-56 (footnote). His path integrals rebuild and reformulate quantum mechanics itself, getting rid of the Bohring ‘uncertainty principle’ and all the pseudoscientific baggage like ‘entanglement hype’ it brings with it:

‘This paper will describe what is essentially a third formulation of nonrelativistic quantum theory [Schroedinger's wave equation and Heisenberg's matrix mechanics being the first two attempts, which both generate nonsense 'interpretations']. This formulation was suggested by some of Dirac’s remarks concerning the relation of classical action to quantum mechanics. A probability amplitude is associated with an entire motion of a particle as a function of time, rather than simply with a position of the particle at a particular time.

‘The formulation is mathematically equivalent to the more usual formulations. … there are problems for which the new point of view offers a distinct advantage. …’

- Richard P. Feynman, ‘Space-Time Approach to Non-Relativistic Quantum Mechanics’, Reviews of Modern Physics, vol. 20 (1948), p. 367.

‘… I believe that path integrals would be a very worthwhile contribution to our understanding of quantum mechanics. Firstly, they provide a physically extremely appealing and intuitive way of viewing quantum mechanics: anyone who can understand Young’s double slit experiment in optics should be able to understand the underlying ideas behind path integrals. Secondly, the classical limit of quantum mechanics can be understood in a particularly clean way via path integrals. … for fixed h-bar, paths near the classical path will on average interfere constructively (small phase difference) whereas for random paths the interference will be on average destructive. … we conclude that if the problem is classical (action >> h-bar), the most important contribution to the path integral comes from the region around the path which extremizes the path integral. In other words, the article’s motion is governed by the principle that the action is stationary. This, of course, is none other than the Principle of Least Action from which the Euler-Lagrange equations of classical mechanics are derived.’

- Richard MacKenzie, Path Integral Methods and Applications, pp. 2-13.

‘… light doesn’t really travel only in a straight line; it “smells” the neighboring paths around it, and uses a small core of nearby space. (In the same way, a mirror has to have enough size to reflect normally: if the mirror is too small for the core of neighboring paths, the light scatters in many directions, no matter where you put the mirror.)’

- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, Chapter 2, p. 54.

‘When we look at photons on a large scale – much larger than the distance required for one stopwatch turn [i.e., wavelength] – the phenomena that we see are very well approximated by rules such as “light travels in straight lines [without overlapping two nearby slits in a screen]“, because there are enough paths around the path of minimum time to reinforce each other, and enough other paths to cancel each other out. But when the space through which a photon moves becomes too small (such as the tiny holes in the [double slit] screen), these rules fail – we discover that light doesn’t have to go in straight [narrow] lines, there are interferences created by the two holes, and so on. The same situation exists with electrons: when seen on a large scale, they travel like particles, on definite paths. But on a small scale, such as inside an atom, the space is so small that [individual random field quanta exchanges become important because there isn't enough space involved for them to average out completely, so] there is no main path, no “orbit”; there are all sorts of ways the electron could go, each with an amplitude. The phenomenon of interference becomes very important, and we have to sum the arrows [in the path integral for individual field quanta interactions, instead of using the average which is the classical Coulomb field] to predict where an electron is likely to be.’

- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, Chapter 3, pp. 84-5.

Sound waves are composed of the group oscillations of large numbers of randomly colliding air molecules; despite the randomness of individual air molecule collisions, the average pressure variations from many molecules obey a simple wave equation and carry the wave energy. Likewise, although the actual motion of an atomic electron is random due to individual interactions with field quanta, the average location of the electron resulting from many random field quanta interactions is non-random and can be described by a simple wave equation such as Schroedinger’s.

Feynman explains in his 1985 book QED how Newton discovered that the amount of light reflected from the front face of a block of glass depends on the number of wavelengths of light that can fit into the thickness of the glass block. Before the photon arrives at the block of glass, the electrons it it are oscillating due to interacting with one another by exchanging electromagnetic field quanta. The natural frequencies of oscillation of the electrons throughout the glass therefore depend on the thickness of the glass, because vibrations are continually propagating throughout the glass with many frequencies before the photon arrives, and only vibration waves which fit into the glass with an integer number of wavelengths reinforce each other optimally.

The oscillation frequencies which don’t have a wavelength that makes the block thickness correspond to an integer number of wavelengths, soon die out due to interference as they reflect off the edges inside the block. Just as the windows of an old bus rattle when the engine oscillations reach the natural frequency of vibration of the windows, a photon hitting the front of the block of glass where the electrons already (due to the block size) have certain natural periods of vibration, will have a likelihood of being reflected that depends on whether the block thickness divided by the wavelength of the photon is an integer or not. The photon does not have to travel right through the glass to discover how thick it is, divide the thickness into the wavelength, and decide whether to reflect. It just arrives at the front face of the glass block, and the glass thickness determines reflection probability since, long before the photon has even arrived, the thickness of the glass has already set up a natural frequency of vibration in the front electrons, due to the electron oscillations and field quanta exchanges in the glass:

‘When a photon comes down, it interacts with electrons throughout the glass, not just on the surface. The photon and electrons do some kind of dance, the net result of which is the same as if the photon hit only the surface.’

- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, Chapter 1, pp. 17.

The paper by Professors Alfonso Rueda and Bernard Haisch, “Gravity and the Quantum Vacuum Inertia Hypothesis”, published in Annalen der Physik, vol. 14 (2005), pp. 479-498, provides an alternative to a Higgs field for generating mass: there are mass (i.e., acceleration-resisting and gravitational interaction) effects of a zero-point (off-shell) vacuum radiation field. E.g. inertia is due to radiation effects in the vacuum similar to the mechanism of the normal Casimir force (experimentally confirmed to 15% accuracy): virtual particles in the vacuum don’t just press metal plates together by excluding wavelengths that can’t fit between the plates, but they can also provide inertia (resistance to acceleration) and gravitation. The randomness of the virtual photons on small scales also causes the quantum indeterminancy, and impacts of such radiation on moving bodies will cause the contraction of moving bodies in the direction of motion and resistance to acceleration, but not continuous drag because the field quanta are off-shell virtual radiation.

The first empirically defended suggestion that inertia (Newton’s 1st law of motion) is due to some kind of field interaction between the mass in question and the masses surrounding it in the distant universe, was originally proposed by Ernst Mach on the empirical evidence of Foucault’s pendulum. Jean Foucault discovered in 1851 that a large pendulum hung from a high ceiling which is not constrained to swing along a fixed path (as in pendulum clocks) will naturally swing along a line which ‘rotates’ one revolution over the course of 24 hours: the path it swings is constant with respect to the distant stars, and the earth rotates underneath the pendulum. The only observable things that correlate with the plane of the pendulum are distant stars. Obviously, the stars are moving but their angular motion across the sky is negligible compared to the speed of the pendulum effect, and Ernst Mach pointed out that the observable reference frame for the inertia of the pendulum is the average distribution of matter in the surrounding universe. Mach rejected Newton’s old speculative and decrepid reference frame of invisible, unobservable ‘absolute space’ for determining accelerating motions (which restricted relativity doesn’t apply to, only applying to uniform motion) and replaced that ‘absolute space’ with an observation-based reference frame consisting of the observable average distribution of visible matter in the universe:

‘When … we say that a body preserves unchanged its direction and velocity in space, our assertion is nothing more or less than an abbreviated reference to the entire universe. … The considerations just presented show, that it is not necessary to refer the law of inertia to a spacial absolute space. … We may, indeed, regard all masses as related to each other.’

- E. Mach, The Science of Mechanics, Open Court, 1960, pp. 285-8.

Max Born in his book Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (Dover, New York, 1965, p. 362) suggests that Einstein applied general relativity to cosmology in 1917 on the basis of his equivalence principle between inertial and gravitational mass, assuming by Mach’s argument that mass in general will be determined by the distribution of the matter in the universe. In quantum gravity, gravitons are gravity field quanta exchanged between all masses as well as energy, so there is a graviton-mediated physical interaction between all masses, just as Mach argued using Foucault’s pendulum. Einstein:

‘… it … turns out that inertia originates in a kind of interaction between bodies, quite in the sense of your considerations on Newton’s pail experiment … If one rotates [a heavy shell of matter] relative to the fixed stars about an axis going through its center, a Coriolis force arises in the interior of the shell; that is, the plane of a Foucault pendulum is dragged around (with a practically unmeasurably small angular velocity).’

- Albert Einstein, letter to Ernst Mach, 25 June 1923. (Source: C. Misner, et al., Gravitation, W. H. Freeman, San Francisco, 1973.)

The 2005 Rueda-Haisch paper obtained a qualitative mechanism of shielding gravity for off-shell radiation, but they don’t make any checkable quantitative predictions because they don’t look at the balance of forces acting in the accelerating universe. They should also have discriminated gravitons from other vacuum field quanta with different force coupling constants, and introduced the factors which would make the mechanism yield checkable, quantitative predictions. In particular, the usual computation of the vacuum zero-point energy that causes the acceleration of the universe (i.e., the ‘dark energy’ of cosmology) is a massive overestimate, partly because it assumes Planck scale unification (discussed later) and partly because it implicitly and incorrectly assumes that the electromagnetic component (rather than just the graviton component) of the zero-point vacuum energy is causing the cosmic acceleration; the graviton field component of the zero-point energy naturally has a coupling constant only 10^-40 that of electromagnetism for the low-energy physics of cosmological acceleration (supersymmetry assumes that unification and equality of couplings occurs at high energy, not low energy). Electrically neutral matter such as galaxies is accelerated by gravitons, not by electromagnetic field quanta that accelerate charged matter. For a technical explanation of quantitatively how this zero-point vacuum energy is miscalculated by a factor of 10¹²⁰ or more for cosmic acceleration using the wrong field quanta component of the zero-point energy for low energy long range interactions using supersymmetry theory, see the about page. Nobel Laureate Sheldon Glashow was quoted commenting on their paper in New Scientist 13 Aug. 05, pp. 16-17: “This stuff, as Wolfgang Pauli would say, is not even wrong.”

Bare core QED force (i.e., not including the shielding factor due to vacuum polarization surrounding the core out to Schwinger’s cutoff at 33 fm from the centre of a unit charge like an electron)

Within 33 fm of a charged fermion (i.e. in electric fields stronger than the Schwinger cutoff for pair production), pairs of virtual fermions are created which annihilate into virtual radiation. The energy and duration, or the momentum and distance travelled, by such virtual radiation is modelled by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

Newton’s definition of force: F = dp/dt

where for static (equilibrium) forces exerted by light velocity field quanta such as virtual photons, r = ct or t = r/c, so F = dp/d(r/c) = c*dp/dr.

Heisenberg uncertainty principle (for minimum uncertainty): pr = h/(2*Pi), where p and r are uncertainties in momentum and distance, respectively. So p = h/(2r*Pi).

Hence, fundamental quantum field theory force F = c*dp/dr = c*d[h/(2r*Pi)]/dr = -hc/(2*Pi*r²).

This simple treatment produces a numerical prediction of the force strength together with producing the inverse-square law. Physically, this models the way that chaotic pair-production and annihilation in strong fields in the vacuum result in the emission of field quanta. Schwinger showed that the minimum electric field strength that is strong enough to disrupt the structure of the ground state of the vacuum and thereby cause spacetime ‘loops’ consisting of the endless cycle of pair-production -> virtual fermions of matter and antimatter -> annihilation -> virtual photons -> pair-production …, is 1.3*10¹⁸ v/m, which occurs up to a distance of 33 fm from a unit charge such as from the centre of an electron or proton. Inside this 33 fm radius, the vacuum is chaotic with particles colliding and annihilating at random, producing virtual radiation.

Notice that we have calculated the repulsive force between two electrons via quantum mechanics, and obtained a quantitative prediction complete with inverse-square law. When you compare this new result to the usual coulomb force prediction for the force between two electrons for low energy physics, you find that the force above from quantum mechanics (neglecting the vacuum polarization shielding of the core of an electron) is 1/alpha or about 137.036 times bigger than that from coulomb’s law. Hence vacuum polariation reduces the bare core charge of an electron by a factor equal to the fine structure constant. This large ~137 shielding factor implies that the running coupling for electromagnetism does not terminate at the speculative (unverified, merely dimensional analysis-based) Planck length of ~1.6×10⁻³⁵ meters, but at a much more fundamental, smaller, more physically meaningful distance from the electron core, the black hole event horizon radius for the electron’s mass, 2MGc^-2 ~ 1.4×10⁻⁵⁷ metres. This vacuum polarization shielding factor support for the black hole scale of fundamental particles is a brand new result: Penrose for example speculates in his 2004 book Road to Reality that the bare core electron charge is just 137^1/2 = 11.7 times the charge at low energy, on the basis that the formula for alpha (1/137…) is proportional to the square of the electronic charge. However, Penrose’s argument is just a numerological guess (rather like Planck’s inaccurate guess by dimensional analysis that the Planck length is the smallest physical size), unsupported by theory or experiment. As shown above, the quantum field strength is F = -hc/(2*Pi*r²), which is a factor of 1/alpha stronger than Coulomb’s law for two electrons, not a factor of (1/alpha)^1/2 which would be the case if Penrose was correct. The physical importance of this result is that it substantiates the black hole core size for fundamental particles, which we will use below to make checkable predictions for quantum gravity.

In the previous post we explained that the exchange of a field quanta between real charges, with borrowed energy E delivered and re-emitted to produce a total momentum change in the real electron of p = E/c, just as in the reflection of light (where momentum E/c is delivered by impact and another E/c is delivered by the recoil when the new photon is emitted in the same direction as the incident photon, giving a total momentum of 2E/c), implies that Hawking’s radiation emission formula for black hole electrons correctly predicts electromagnetic forces.

Hawking’s formula for the radiating power of the black hole electron tells us it radiates with power P = 3 × 10⁹² Watts; but this is field quanta emission not real radiation for technical reasons. Hawking’s mechanism for black hole radiation emission omits Schwinger’s threshold field strength for pair-production in the vacuum, so only charged black holes produce field strengths above Schwinger’s threshold at the event horizon radius. The charge necessitated for black holes to emit radiation also changes the nature of the emitted radiation because it means that only positive virtual charges will fall into the electron core, and only negative virtual charges can be emitted.

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. Hence, F = 2P/c = 2(3 × 10⁹²)/c = 2 × 10⁸⁴ Newtons. This is 10⁴¹ times the F = 1.8 × 10⁴³ Newtons cosmological force (which by F = ma is the product of the cosmological acceleration of the universe and the mass of the accelerating universe) which gives rise to gravitation as proved below (see also the previous post) by Newton’s 3rd law, so this Hawking radiation force predicts the electromagnetic force strength, and is more empirical evidence that the cross-section for fundamental particles is the black hole event horizon size, not the Planck size.

This 137.036 (approx.) shielding factor applies to the vacuum polarzation region which extends from the bare core of an electron (believed by many people to be Planck size) out to the limiting distance for the pair production by a steady electric field, which is the IR cutoff and is predicted by Schwinger’s formula: 1.3*10¹⁸ volts/metre (equation 359 in Dyson’s http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0608140 or equation 8.20 in Luis Alvarez-Gaume, and Miguel A. Vazquez-Mozo’s http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0510040). This electric field occurs out to 33 femtometres from the electron core, so all vacuum polarization (spacetime loops) and thus all vacuum shielding of electric charge occurs within 33 fm from the core of an electron.

The reason why alpha is a variable is vacuum polarization, e.g. at 91 GeV it falls from 1/137.036… to just 1/128.5 as reported in lepton collisions by Levine et al, in PRL, in 1997.

Alpha is the ratio of the low energy electric charge of an electron (i.e. the textbook charge for collisions and low energy physics generally below about 1 MeV energy, which corresponds to the required low-energy or IR cutoff on the logarithmic running coupling for QED interactions) to the bare core (high energy) charge of an electron. So if you collide particles hard enough that they penetrate part way through the shield, they experience a stronger (less shielded) force. This is why alpha is a ‘running coupling constant’. Just as the velocity of light is not a constant when compared for different transparent media, alpha is only a true constant for low energy physics, i.e. below the IR cutoff energy of ~1 MeV.

It is a true constant only when used to represent the total amount of shielding by the entire polarized vacuum, from the bare core charge to the low electron charge usually quoted in the textbooks for the case of a fully-shielded electron (i.e., for physics below the 1 MeV collision IR cutoff energy).

Above: fundamental forces are caused by the exchange of field quanta between charges. The light velocity gauge bosons or field quanta thus constitute the force fields around charges. The ‘virtual photons’ exchanged between electric and magnetic charges have 4 ‘polarizations’ and not just the 2 polarizations of real photons, because the force fields around an electron and around a proton are different; we observe the ‘charge’ of the fermion via the field so it appears that the 2 extra polariztions of virtual photons are electric charges (this doesn’t cause infinite magnetic self inductance and prohibit them being exchanged, because the magnetic field of the equilibrium return current of charged gauge bosons has a curl that cancels the magnetic field curl from the outgoing current; therefore only the one-way propagation of charged massless radiation is prohibited by the magnetic field problem which doesn’t exist for gauge bosons where there is an equilibrium of exchange with outgoing currents being matched by return currents).

We have never been able to observe ‘charge’ in any other way (no particle accelerator can ever approach the Planck scale, so we are always working with properties of fields, not the charged cores of fundamental particles themselves).

The Standard Model and mass (the charge for quantum gravity)

Noether’s theorem states there’s a symmetry for every conserved quantity, i.e. for every conserved charge. It is widely believed that all fundamental forces should unify, but the Nobel Prize was awarded for successes of electrweak theory in the low-energy “broken” regime where separate (short-ranged) weak and (long-ranged) electromagnetic interactions exist, not in the presumed unified high-energy regime above the presumed electroweak unification energy! The simplest model that fits observations is simpler than the Higgs symmetry breaking field, and is that the weak gauge bosons have mass at all energies (not just low energy as in the Standard Model). The massiveness of weak gauge bosons makes the weak force weak, so if you want running couplings to become identical above the “electroweak unification” energy, the weak gauge bosons need to lose their mass by a Higgs mechanism. But there is no evidence that nature does this; in fact the SM can’t even predict identical running couplings at the Planck scale for all forces even with a Higgs field (you need to add SUSY with 100+ additional parameters). The dogma of all running couplings becoming equal at the Planck scale leads only to ugly, non-falsifiable SUSY complexity.

There is empirical evidence that at higher energies (smaller distances) the Coulomb force running coupling or effective charge increases (e.g. it is 7% higher at 91 GeV than at low energy below the ~1 MeV IR cutoff), while the strong charge running coupling decreases as energy increases. Although gauge bosons are off-shell, the force fields they produce have a definite energy density so you can relate electric field strength at any distance from a quark to the energy density (J/m³) of that field. The running coupling increases the observable electric charge at high energy/short distances (seeing less of the polarized vacuum shielding effect), so that large bare-core electromagnetic charge when shielded by the cloud of polarized virtual fermions around it, deposits field energy in that shielding cloud which is what powers the short-ranged nuclear interactions. This fact based physical model will make falsifiable predictions because it’s built on observed facts, instead of containing 100+ unobservable parameters and many unobserved particles which can’t be predicted in a falsifiable way by supersymmetric theories (the supersymmetric theory doesn’t predict specific energies for those particles).

The Higgs field was, however, helpful to me for first getting a mechanistic model for gravitation. It is supposed to act like a “perfect fluid” in the vacuum, supposed to be composed of particles which don’t cause continuous drag, but only resistance to accelerations by “miring” particles. This mass-giving hebaviour is similar to the kind of gravitational charge needed to represent masses in the T_ab tensor of general relativity:

“In many interesting situations… the source of the gravitational field can be taken to be a perfect fluid…. A fluid is a continuum that ‘flows’… A perfect fluid is defined as one in which all antislipping forces are zero, and the only force between neighbouring fluid elements is pressure.”

- Bernard Schutz, An Introduction to General Relativity, Cambridge, 1986, pp. 89-90.

Think of a submarine submerged. It has to push its own volume of water out of the way, causing an additional inertial resistance force to an acceleration. Behind the submarine, water flows into the same volume that the submarine is vacating as it moves. We know that water actually gets pushed out from the front, flows around, and pushes in at the rear. So, once the submarine is moving, the water flow adds additional momentum to the submarine.

Back in May 1996 we predicted cosmological acceleration a = Hc by applying Hubble’s empirical recession law to time since the big bang (illustrated below), which was confirmed observationally by NASA in 1998 (with no credit given), and we observed that particles accelerating radially from us will – by the fluid Higgs mechanism – result in an inward-directed Higgs motion, just as an array of submarines (or even swimmers!) accelerating outward from an observer underwater will be pushing water back, towards the observer. However, it has since become clear that the Higgs electroweak symmetry breaking field has problems, but the graviton (field quanta) and mass (gravitational charge) fields in the vacuum will do the same thing, so we began merely using Newton’s 2nd and 3rd laws to calculate outward force of accelerating matter F = ma and its resultant inward forces, predicting gravity:

Above: if two electrons of mass M were receding with cosmological acceleration a = Hc = 6 × 10^-10 ms^-2, their outward force F = Ma would be balanced – due to Newton’s 3rd law – by an equal and opposite i.e. inward-directed F = Ma gravitational repulsive force due to spin-1 graviton exchange between the masses. This is a repulsive force on the order of 10^-39 Newtons, which is clearly wrong as Lubos says! But it is wrong because this gravitational repulsion of small masses is simply trivial compared to the overwhelming force of repulsion of them towards one another due to the inward force of F = ma = m(Hc) = 1.8 × 10⁴³ Newtons from the graviton exchanges with m = 3 × 10⁵² kg of distant masses in the surrounding universe (according to NASA’s Hubble space telescope). The spin-1 quantum gravity predicts gravitational phenomena accurately, unlike string theory which isn’t even a quantitative prediction of the strength of quantum gravity (string theory is just qualitative agreement with spin-2 for gravitons, which we’ve disproved anyway).

Above: Edward Witten’s April 1996 ‘Reflections on the Fate of Spacetime’ in Physics Today included the claim that string theory ‘predicts gravity’ when it actually is just consistent with an unobserved spin-2 mode, claimed to be the spin of the graviton in a 1939 published Fierz-Pauli ‘proof’. Gravity is artifically forced to be attractive by the act of ignoring graviton exchange with all distant masses, instead of being treated with the beautifully simple predictive repulsion of similar charges: gravitons are simply pressing us down due to recoil from exchange with the immense masses of galaxies all around us in space, which makes the local repulsive exchange trivial by comparison. The Fierz-Pauli ‘proof’ simply ignored the fact that gravity charges in the surrounding universe will be exchanging gravitons with the two test masses, and there is no way to shield those exchanges to stop this from happening and save the spin-2 idea. Spin-2 means that the graviton has to look the same after 360/2 = 180 degrees rotation, so the outgoing and incoming gravitons look indistinguishable. This spin-2 idea is falsified by distant masses. (At least string theory’s gravity prediction turned out to be falsifiable after all!)

For quantum gravity, the surrounding mass of galaxies has the same gravity charge sign, so it will repel the two test charges. Further, incoming gravitons from distant immense masses will be converging (not diverging) so there will be geometric concentration, which will exceed the force from the local exchange of gravitons between two masses. Therefore, the incoming gravitons exchanged with the rest of the universe can push two masses together. This tragically means gravitons can have spin-1, not spin-2. Fierz and Pauli were negligent in ignoring the mass of the surrounding universe, using a defective oversimplified model! So string theory is inconsistent with a universe where we’re surrounded by immense mass whose converging (not diverging) incoming gravitons will push us down to earth; quantitative predictions of the spin-1 gravity coupling are possible and are successful. But string theorists are welcome to the holographic AdS/CFT correspondence as a consolation prize.

Above: discussion of graviton spin with the pathetically rude and deluded string theorist and former Harvard physics department assistant professor Lubos Motl, who is just one of many string theorists ignorant of the profound difference between classical (on-shell) hot radiation which can cause drag on moving objects like a gas, and virtual force-delivering radiation which is off-shell and doesn’t obey the classical laws of radiation, for instance it doesn’t heat up masses moving in a graviton (off-shell radiation) field, and it doesn’t slow down such moving masses by drag-effects.

This ignorance allows string theorists to simply ignore predictions using off-shell delivery of force:

Nige says: “Lubos, you ignored the physics of the mass in the surrounding universe exchanging gravitons with the two charges, pushing them together.”

Lubos Motl replies: “The reason why I ignored it is that it (a “third mass”) doesn’t influence the force between the two objects in any way. If you want to revive the 17th century Le Sage theory of gravity, see e.g. this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Sage’s_theory_of_gravitation#Predictions_and_criticism why it’s wrong.”

Nige replies: “Dear Lubos, on-shell (real hot radiation) particles and off-shell (virtual) particles, are different. If the criticism against on-shell radiation also holds against off-shell radiation, then the arguments like drag will apply to all vacuum radiation including your beloved spin-2 gravitons.”

We know experimentally that these old objections simply don’t hold for off-shell particles, i.e. virtual radiations in the vacuum that cause fundamental forces. E.g., the Casimir force, experimentally confirmed to 15% accuracy, proves that vacuum radiation pushes metal plates together without causing drag or heating to moving bodies!

The Lorentz contraction and the inertia of bodies are due to graviton interactions, but off-shell field quanta moving with light velocity can’t be speeded up or slowed down like air molecules or dust hitting the nose of an aircraft. Thus, off-shell radiation thus heat up moving objects or cause drag, which would necessitate carrying away kinetic energy. They just cause a body to exert some radiation resistance to accelerations (inertia). An accelerating electron emits on-shell (hot) electromagnetic radiation and it also emits gravitational waves due to the acceleration of mass, although the gravitational waves carry on the order of 10⁴⁰ times less energy due to the fact gravity is weaker than electromagnetism.

Other string theorists think similarly but prefer not to discuss the problems of string theory if at all possible

Professors Clifford Johnson (author of D-branes) and Jacques Distler (who works in string theory in Steven Weinberg’s department) both have blogs and I’ve been trying to understand their motivation for studying string theory. Do they really believe that there is any possibility of getting helpful physics out of a model of particles which has 6 compactified dimensions in a Calabi-Yau manifold so small that even in principle they can never be investigated to discover the hundred or so moduli (parameters of shape) they have, which are crucial for making predictions? The theory has so many unknown inputs that it produces a landscape of 10⁵⁰⁰ metastable vacuum states, or so, depending on how the unobservably small compactified extra dimensions are stabilized with charged “branes” by what is known technically as a “Rube-Goldberg mechanism” There is not even any known way to prove that our universe is included in the landscape of 10⁵⁰⁰ possibilities. There is no evidence that any of these possibilities are real, but the advocates of the theory believe and claim that all 10⁵⁰⁰ are real, and that they exist in that many unobserved parallel universes. Why do they proudly continue to work on it, when it looks such a massive failure, such a pseudoscientific belief dogma?

One idea from extra-dimensional string theory which is generating a lot of interest is that physics in an n dimensional space can be mathematically related to physics in a n – 1 dimensional space, allowing the understanding of one space to help with another. Maldacena’s holographic correspondence relates 5-d AdS (anti de Sitter space) as a “bulk” of n dimensions to conformal field theory of particles for QCD strong interactions or maybe condensed matter physics which can be represented by a 4-dimensional (mem-) “brane” with n – 1 dimensions. This should also hold for smaller numbers of dimensions, allowing “toy models” with a 2-d brane on a 3-d bulk to be modelled simply by the 2-d surface of an inflated balloon, filled with a “bulk” consisting of 3-d air. Another example is of course Edward Witten’s M-theory, where 11 dimensional supergravity (an unobserved spin-2 graviton theory in which there is supersymmetry present, so the graviton has a superpartner) is the bulk for a 10-dimensional supersymmetry of particle physics.

Think of a hologram: 3-d information is represented on a 2-d surface. But in order to view the 3-d information intrinsic in the 2-d representation, you need to move! Dr Jacob D. Bekenstein discovered that superstring theory in 5-d is equivalent to a conformal field theory of particles in the 4-d hologram, and that a black hole in the 5-d spacetime is equivalent to real (hot) radiation on the 4-d spacetime hologram (they have the same entropy, although it has a different origin).

Well, AdS has a negative cosmological constant (not the positive one observed) which would cause cosmological attraction (not the repulsion and outward acceleration observed by Perlmutter et al. from 1998 onwards). Therefore, AdS is junk cosmology. However, in nuclear physics AdS is useful over a certain range of distances because the pion-mediated strong nuclear force between nucleons is attractive with an effect similar to AdS! (The AdS/CFT correspondence is of course mathematically exact, but it will only be approximate when used to make predictions because the strong force is complex and over some distances the field quanta will not produce results that can be modelled accurately by AdS. This makes me wonder if the whole thing is being hyped far too much.)

So mathematically it may one day be useful to use the exact AdS/CFT correspondence as an approximation method for taking the field theory of the particles (CFT) and using it to calculate the force field geometry of the attractive force as a spacetime metric in AdS. This might allow some useful predictions for nuclear physics from QCD, which is notoriously difficult to deal with mathematically to make predictions, owing to the large coupling of the strong force, which causes a divergence – rather than a convergence – of successive terms in the perturbative expansion to a Yang-Mills QCD path integral for strong interactions, thereby necessitating non-perturbative methods like lattice approximations. It might also help to approximate the physics of other matter with similar properties, such as condensed matter, where the particles attract universally in order to condense.

It’s a very nice application of stringy ideas. But just because it may be useful (it has not won a Nobel prize yet, although that may not be far off), it isn’t a proof that string theory is correct regarding spin-2 gravitons over alternatives, or unification at the Planck scale. Professor Clifford Johnson has written:

“The tools … constitute quantum field theory, and we don’t need to declare whether or not the quantum fields and associated baggage (gauge symmetry, etc) are “out there” in Nature in some Platonic sense. Why bother? We are physicists and not philosophers. We need not (should not) confuse our tools with the things we are trying to describe with them. The same goes for string theory. If we find a place where string theory gives the best working description of the phenomena being studied and observed, why not just call it what it is? It is string theory that is being used, not “the tools of string theory”. There is no distinction.”

I responded (slightly tongue in cheek):

“Hope a big prize is soon awarded for the use of string theory’s AdS/CFT to solve problems in condensed matter physics or QCD strong interactions! Maybe when it starts getting prizes for applications, it will be seen in context more clearly, and will need less hype for unification and quantum gravity applications in popular media.”

I have the sneaking feeling, you see, that when some spin-off application of string theory is confirmed, Clifford will celebrate the confirmation of string theory, and we’ll get more suppression, not less, from mainstream “believers” in speculation. However, there is always the possibility that when string theory is celebrated for one application, the advocates will tone down their defensiveness of the speculative side of it, and be more understanding to other people.

On another post, Clifford commented upon a book called Why Does E = Mc²?:

“One of the interesting things was that there was a lot of amiable chatter around the science, but hardly any actual explanations. This was particularly marked when Simon tried to get them to explain E = Mc², and I perked up since it sounded like there was going to be a very clever quick radio soundbite of Relativity and a snappy thought experiment to nail the concept, and I was all ready to be super-impressed by Brian Cox’s answer… but instead he punted it to “the theorist” Jeff Forshaw, who beat a bit about the bush for a while, and in the end it came down to the audience being told that… it’s in the book. To be fair, it was a tough job they had.”

I kind of take issue with this a bit, because Einstein never even addressed “why”; he just derived the equation. This is Mach’s argument to physicists to keep philosophy out of physics, because it is just noise that prevents communication and clear thinking:

“The question “why” surely is an unscientific question, just philosophy? Maxwell’s empirical equations of electromagnetism (based on experimental laws from Ampere for curl B, Gauss/Coulomb for div.E, and Faraday/Lenz for curl E) don’t contain any absolute motion dependence: e.g. you only get a magnetic field when there is a current (charge moving) relative to the observer, and that plus the fact that the velocity of light appears the same to all observers (as confirmed by the Michelson-Morley experiment) are the principles Einstein uses to derive E = mc² mathematically.

“We don’t know why nature is the way it is. Models and equations are just convenience – predictive descriptions of observable phenomena. In biology you still have mechanisms like evolution, but basic physics is more mature and has dispensed with all mechanisms long ago. As far as mature physics is concerned, we’re not allowed to ask “why” questions, let alone come up with mechanisms to answer them.”

Above: the Feynman diagram and the path integral are behind the well-tested parts of physics, the Standard Model fundamental interactions. They’re not mathematical, e.g. Euler’s formula states that a simple path amplitude exp(iS) = (cos S) + i(sin S), allowing the path integral to be replaced by the summation of a series of arrows, one for each path, of constant length but varying direction: the resultant arrow is given by the straight line from the start of the first arrow to the tip of the last arrow, as Feynman shows when explaining path integrals without any equations in his 1985 book QED. The actual Feynman diagrams on the left involve only one distance in space and one in time, so every Feynman diagram represents the application of the depicted interaction over many paths in configuration space (shown on the right hand side for light being diffracted through water to reach an observer).

This isn’t a speculative “interpretation” of physics. Feynman did not say that nobody understands this theory, he wrote a book in 1985 called QED which explains all the virtual photon exchanges and the basis for the path integral without math, so anybody can understand the actual physics of reality. Feynman did state that nobody understands why quantum mechanics is the way it is; this is a statement about nature itself and not about the well-tested model of nature which Feynman did understand and teach.

Light really does follow all paths, as can be shown – for example – by facts experimentally proved in the double slit experiment where a single photon is affected by the presence of both slits! That’s a fact! Notice that the Feynman diagrams above are also oversimplifications in that they don’t include the other particles in the surrounding universe which may be interacting with the two particles which are “attracted” or pushed together. E.g., the small space between two nearby nucleons (closer than one nucleon diameter apart) will slightly reduce the size of the virtual pion cloud inbetween those two nucleons, but the virtual pion clouds on the opposite sides of each nucleon will be unaffected, so they will tend to push the nucleons together over short distances by the “LeSage mechanism”. The same thing happens with the Casimir force, which is well tested to 15% accuracy.

The chaotic randomness of virtual particle exchanges is what makes quantum mechanics non-classical and non-deterministic: over small distances in the atom, an orbital electron (which is in a strong electromagnetic field and is also travelling around 1% of light velocity) exchanges field quanta randomly with other charges, so the Coulomb force acts a little like air molecules impacting upon a dust particle in Brownian motion, causing the electron to undergo somewhat chaotic motion and obey only a statistical wave equation rather than a simple classical orbit. (Bohm in 1954 derived the Schroedinger equation using Brownian motion; but notice the Brownian motion on small scales from field quanta we are dealing with is a well established fact of the well-tested Standard Model of particle physics such as the well-tested Casimir force of QED, totally unlike Bohm’s mysterious unobservable and hated “hidden variables”.)

Graviton exchanges with distant masses in the universe will have a similar effect, because almost all the mass is in the distant universe (clusters of galaxies, etc.) and gravitons exchanged with that surrounding mass will be concentrated as they converge inwards towards us. (The mainstream authors, such as Zee 2003, ignore the straight line path contributions to phase amplitudes depicted in Feynman’s QED book, and assume that the paths can go anywhere because they use a false argument that if you drill so many holes into screens screen that the screen disappears, particles can diffract anywhere. But diffraction by slits requires the real electrons at the edges of slits to interact with passing particles, so if you get rid of the screen altogether, diffraction will disappear and virtual particles will not be affected chaotically; Schwinger showed that virtual fermions can’t be formed in the vacuum unless you are close enough to a real charge that the field strength is 1.3 x 10¹⁸ v/m or more, the low energy IR cutoff limit for pair production and vacuum polarization. Therefore, the mainstream such as Zee’s book, are misleading themselves into neglecting the important physics that leads to physical predictions and is relatively simple. Gravitational effects on energy don’t cause significant deflections from straight line trajectories in everyday physics; even the mass of the sun had a trivial effect on the energy – or gravitational charge – of the starlight in the validation of a prediction of general relativity.)

In the previous post and (in far more technical detail) on the About page for this blog, there are some predictions made using the most simple physical concepts possible. How about trying the other way? Quantum gravity is incorporated into the Standard Model by a simple modification of the electroweak breaking Higgs field, so maybe we should present a paper on the mathematics of quantum field theory, dealing with the lagrangian field equations for the Standard Model interactions, their integration with respect to time to obtain the action for a particle interaction, and the integration of the exponential complex amplitude action over the configuration space to obtain the path integral. I would also have to go into the use of Noether’s theorem to connect the conservation laws of the different gauge symmetries to the Lagrangian field equations.

From http://www.ivorcatt.com/1_3.htm:

“a) Energy current can only enter a capacitor at the speed of light.

b) Once inside, there is no mechanism for the energy current to slow down below the speed of light.

c) The steady electrostatically charged capacitor is indistinguishable from the reciprocating, dynamic model.

d) The dynamic model is necessary to explain the new feature to be explained, the charging and discharging of a capacitor, and serves all the purposes previously served by the steady, static model.”

e) The static model, since it requires STATIC electric charge, suggests that the static electron needs to be replaced by some kind of light-velocity trapped electromagnetic current which behaves as an electron.

Gravitation is strong enough to trap light or electromagnetic energy waves into a trapped standing wave (an electron, or other fundamental, charged, spinning particle) where the original wavelength is smaller than the black hole radius for the original amount of mass-energy.

Once trapped in a black hole, the electron’s size and mass is fixed because it can only radiate and receive charged TEM wave radiation at the same rate:

The rate a black hole electron radiates energy per second is given by Hawking’s radiation formula and is almost ridiculous: 3 x 10⁹² watts, which predicts the electromagnetic force strength accurately. However, it can be proved that this is the rate at which all electrons are radiating charged radiation in the universe, and there is a perfect equilibrium of emission and reception.

This equilibrium exists in Ivor’s model in the magnetic self-inductance of charged light-velocity radiation: it cannot propagate unless there is equal amounts propagating in both directions so that the magnetic curl vectors of each component cancels the other out.

This equilibrium effect is vital for mainstream quantum field theory in the form of the Yang-Mills equation, which is a general equation that allows forces to be mediated by charged radiation exchange. The standard model of particle physics is just the Yang-Mills equation applied to charged radiations for strong and weak nuclear forces, and Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism.

The form used for these equations is to as a Lagrangian which follows the energy of particles throughout an interaction. Integrating the Lagrangian energy over time gives the so-called action S for a path, and contributions from all paths are then summed by a Feynman path integral of the form exp(iS), which by Euler’s equation is (cos S) + i(sin S), so the action can be interpretated as an arrow of variable direction but constant length, and the path integral is a summation of such arrows or contributions from different paths, which allows for interference of paths. See Feynman’s 1985 book QED for a non-mathematical application of Standard Model path integrals to light, etc.

The Yang-Mills actually applies to electromagnetism, because the exchanged radiation between charges will itself be charged if the charge like the electron is trapped TEM energy with intrinsic charge. Hawking’s black hole radiation theory can’t be applied directly to a black hole electron because of the electric charge. Hawking assumes that radiation is emitted by unprejudiced escape of charges from pair production near the event horizon of an uncharged black hole. However, because the electron black hole will have a negative electric field and therefore appear as a negative charge to any observer, it will prejudice the escape of charge so that only negative radiation will be emitted. Thus, whereas in Hawking’s model the black hole radiation escaping is uncharged light for uncharged black holes, in the case of a negative electron you get the emission of only negatively charged radiation: the positively charged radiation caused by the pair production falls into the black hole. The equilibrium of emission and reception with other electrons in the universe keeps the charge and mass of the electron generally steady, although motion causes Lorentz type effects.

Now the importance of the contrapuntal model is that the Standard Model of particle physics contains Maxwell’s equations labelled U(1) and Yang-Mills equations labelled SU(2) for 2 electrically charged massive short ranged weak gauge bosons, W_- and W₊ (both observed at CERN, 1983), and SU(3) for three charges of strong nuclear forces.

By Ivor’s contrapuntal model, the infinite self-inductance in the exchange of charged radiation between electric charges is what ensures an equilibrium of emission and exchange, so that the magnetic vectors are exactly cancelled out, preventing magnetic self-inductance from stopping charged radiation propagation between electrons etc.

This mechanism that Ivor asserts, that you have to have equal amounts of charged radiation going both directions at one time (an equilibrium) is what converts the Yang-Mills equation for charged radiation induced electromagnetic forces into the Maxwell equation for uncharged radiation exchange!

In other words, ALL fundamental forces, including electromagnetism, are mediated by the exchange of CHARGED radiation. The mainstream quantum field theorists wrongly believe that electromagnetism is mediated by UNCHARGED radiation. Therefore, they think falsely that they need Maxwell’s U(1) (unitary 1 or Abelian) symmetry for electromagnetism and Yang-Mills charged radiation special unitary SU symmetries 2 and 3 for nuclear forces!

If you put Ivor’s contrapuntal model for electromagnetism into the Standard Model of particle physics, you change it because U(1) is no longer electromagnetism: instead, electromagnetism comes from massless versions of electrically charged SU(2) gauge bosons, and the theory makes sense physically then because charged radiation exchange can push similarly charged electrons apart, and push oppositely charged electrons together, without needing the vague “4-polarization” radiation ad hoc fix of the mainstream for electromagnetic force mediating radiation.

Now what I’m trying to do is to work out what the true symmetry of the universe is. Massive SU(2) x SU(3) represents the short-ranged weak and strong nuclear forces of the Standard Model, and this is accurate and well tested. We need massless radiation SU(2) for electromagnetism, but we also need to include gravitation with mass being the fundamental charge for gravitational radiation forces to act upon. Since mass has only been observed to come with one sign of charge (all masses fall in the same direction!), gravitation should be a U(1) force.

So the Standard Model U(1) x SU(2) x SU(3) is actually the right mathematics but the wrong physics: the mainstream has made the following errors physically;

(a) The mainstream doesn’t realize that charges are trapped charged radiation, and that you get charged radiation emitted so electromagnetism is a charged radiation force modelled by the Yang-Mills SU(2) symmetry equation, not U(1) which is for uncharged radiation.

(b) The mainstream thinks that SU(2) is only for the weak forces and that ALL weak charged gauge bosons must be given mass by a separate, ugly, “Higgs field”, to prevent them from being long-range forces. Actually, only left-handed spin is affected by weak forces so it appears that only half of the charged radiations acquire mass and are responsible for weak nuclear forces; the other half don’t acquire mass and are instead long-range electromagnetism charged, massless radiation forces.

(c) The mainstream thinks that mass (gravitational charge) cannot be included in the Standard Model gauge groups because they can’t understand the symmetry needed for gravity, which they think needs spin-2 radiation to always be attractive for similar charges (all masses, gravitational charges, have the same sign so you would expect repulsion not attraction if the radiation spin was 1; the spin number is simply the number of symmetries for the radiation when it’s direction is rotated by 360 degrees, so spin12 means that if you rotate the radiation just 180 degrees it looks identical to how it did before rotating it, hence incoming and outgoing radiation for spin-2 would always cause attraction in the Fierz-Pauli theorem). This goes back to a 1939 paper by Fierz and Pauli.

However, that paper is based on a universe consisting of merely TWO charges exchanging radiation. It ignores the problem that gravity causing radiation will be exchanged with 3 x 10^52 kg of surrounding galaxies (NASA Hubble measurement of total mass of stars in universe: from page 5 of http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/Numbers/Math/documents/ON_the_EXPANSION_of_the_UNIVERSE.pdf ).

When you include these immense surrounding masses, you see that the gravity exchange-radiation which earth emits diverges outward, but that it receives is converging inward. It turns out that inward spin-1 (simple, 360 degree symmetry radiation) radiation from distant galaxies converging down from above your head pushes you down because it’s stronger than the non-converging radiation coming from the relatively small mass of the earth below your feet. This is a fact not just because it actually predicts the strength of gravity accurately, but more importantly because the “theory” isn’t a falsifiable Popperian speculative piece of junk, but instead it is based on observations and empirically confirmed evidence.

Hence, gravity symmetry is actually the very simple U(1) uncharged force: there is universal attraction up to galaxy sized distances because every mass has the same sign which pushes us down to the earth, etc. Electromagnetism produces repulsion of like charges rather than attraction because of the equality of positive and negative charges in the universe, which causes an effective cancellation of long range exchanges. Hence, the spin-2 graviton problem is a hoax.

I decided around January 2008 to go ahead with the project of putting this into quantum field theory, and obtained all the quantum field theory textbooks, including the widely recommended textbooks of of Ryder and Weinberg, as well as older books by Dyson and Dirac, and wacky newer books by authors Zee and McMahon. I also read Feynman’s original paper on path integrals, and the original Fiertz and Pauli paper claiming (incorrectly, by ignoring graviton exchanges with the mass of the universe surrounding any two masses under consideration) that gravity field quanta must be spin-2 for universal attraction. I also read various relevant arXiv papers introducing quantum field theory and the Standard Model.

It was over a decade since I had studied quantum mechanics, but I found quantum field theory more interesting. The reason I had studied quantum mechanics in the 1990s was because I had been duped into believing that it could calculate anything about atoms and nuclei to 15 decimal places, and was incredibly impressive. Towards the end of the course, after a lot of calculations that didn’t impress me at all, it became clear that quantum mechanics is more of an art than a science; the art of finding a good approximation as a simplified yet not too inaccurate model to calculate (the old applied physics art of ‘assuming a spherical cow as a first approximation, a cylindrical cow as a second, five cylinders as a third, five cylinders and a sphere as a fourth, …’): for every atom beyond hydrogen you are dealing with approximations because there are no analytical solutions. Even the ‘exact’ analytical solutions for the hydrogen atom ignore perturbative corrections for quantum vacuum effects, such as the possibility that a field quanta of the electromagnetic force binding the electron to the proton will interact in complex ways with virtual fermion loops near the proton or near the electron. In fact, there are an infinite number of possible ways that such interactions could occur, so you would need an infinite number of mathematical calculations to model all possibilities! Nature simply isn’t mathematical, it’s obvious. The few things calculated to 15 decimals were magnetic moments of leptons and the Lamb shift of hydrogen, and they were not quantum mechanics but quantum field theory which was not included on the course! Furthermore, it was clear that the calculations to that many decimals had taken large groups of physicists decades of work because of the complexity of calculating more and more complicated loop perturbative corrections from the vacuum field. Anyway, the reason for this blog post is the statement by Dr Peter Woit author of Not Even Wrong:

‘1. I firmly believe that at a fundamental level physics is based on deep mathematics, not on things that humans are readily able to visualize. The problem with string theory is not that it uses too sophisticated mathematics, it’s that it is a wrong idea about unification, and no amount of mathematical technology can fix this.

‘2. The problem with string theory is not that it can’t be tested today, but that it is inherently untestable, no matter how high an energy accelerator we ever figure out how to build. … In the case of string theory, in 1984 there was such a proposal, but what has been learned about the theory since then has shown that it doesn’t work, leading instead to landscape pseudoscience. … 25 years of research has just made the whole thing more and more implausible the more we learn.’

The sentence ‘I firmly believe that at a fundamental level physics is based on deep mathematics, not on things that humans are readily able to visualize’ is a piece of pseudoscientific prejudice. Who cares what anybody believes until they can prove that belief? In any case, what does he mean by ‘based on deep mathematics’? If it’s ‘based’ on deep mathematics, why isn’t there an exact analytical solution to any problem in quantum theory? We know enough about the mathematics of ordinary quantum mechanics to be able to see that physical reality cannot be based on mathematics; simply because it would require an infinite number of calculations to fully model even the very simplest quantum interactions that we see every day in the real world:

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

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

Possibly what had annoyed Feynman was propaganda from another Nobel Laureate, mathematical physicist Eugene Wigner, who gave a celebrated lecture on the ‘Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Physical Sciences’, published in Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 13, No. I (February 1960). However, a vital incident during Wigner’s own work during the Manhattan Project – conveniently not mentioned in his paper – illustrates why he is wrong. After Fermi had made the first nuclear reactor in Chicago in 1942, Wigner designed larger graphite moderated nuclear reactors to manufacture plutonium for atomic weapons. He knew the accuracy of the cross-sections of uranium, graphite and the other construction materials, and was proud to calculate the exact size.

It is well documented that he nearly resigned in anger when the engineers building the reactors increased the size of the reactor space to ‘allow for errors’. He argued that his physical data and mathematical calculations were reliable, and nobody had found an error. He was insulted and felt that the engineers didn’t understand nature, physics, mathematics and the ability to extrapolate from laboratory experiments on cross-sections to a full scale reactor. However, the engineers won and the reactors were built with room for extra uranium in case of unforeseen eventualities!

Now what do you think happened when the first full scale reactor started up with the amount of uranium Wigner had calculated? Yes. It failed. It worked for a few hours then spontaneously shut down! Wigner had missed out a vital piece of physics which hadn’t been seen in either Fermi’s low power (200 watt) reactor or in the laboratory fission experiments: large power reactors produce large amounts of a gaseous fission products like Xenon which are themselves effective absorbers of neutrons. Such gases escaped from small scale short-duration experiments lasting at most a few hours, and their properties were missed amid the 300 other fission products. But they became important and stopped reactor operation in a sealed high power reactor after about twelve hours of operation! This, to my mind, is a great illustration of the potential ineffectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences, and the effectiveness of seat-of-your-pants mistrust of arrogant physicists by practical engineers. Of course mathematics is useful, but it isn’t any kind of substitute for religion. (If the engineers had done what Wigner insisted they should do, the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki would have been delayed, and World War II would have continued longer.)

David Halliday and Robert Resnick state in Physics:

“If the [Newtonian] force laws had turned out to be very complicated, we would not be left with the feeling that we had gained much insight into the workings of nature.”

Sir Michael Atiyah also wrote on this topic in his article, “Pulling the Strings”, Nature, vol. 438, pp. 1081-2 (2005):

“The mathematical take-over of physics has its dangers, as it could tempt us into realms of thought which embody mathematical perfection but might be far removed, or even alien to, physical reality.”

Kea seems not to like this view of the problem of overly complex, elitist mathematics in physics, but I think that the category theory she is working with may be what is needed to reformulate QFT and solve all the outstanding problems of quantum gravity in a way which is more acceptible to the elite mainstream guys than my quantum gravity work which is just emulation of Feynman with a few ideas to make it produce the checkable predictions needed.

Category theory and Feynman’s path integral

In category theory you have “functors” which are processes that preserve and associate different mathematical structures or “categories”. Noether’s first theorem states that symmetries in the Lagrangian of a physical system are preserved by a conservation law. So symmetries and conservation laws are (by Noether’s first theorem)both “functors” which preserve and associate the different categories of fundamental particles in nature. “Morphisms” associate the fundamental particles in one category with those in another category. E.g., the act of painting a red car blue would be a “morphism” that would remove a red car from the scene and produce a blue car. Similarly, suitable “morphisms” to change the spin, mass and charges of fundamental particles would change them into one another. For example, neutrinos coming from the sun undergo “morphisms” that change them from one flavour into all three flavours by the time they arrive on earth, so that the experiments on the Earth which are designed to detect just the one flavour actually emitted from the sun in fact only detect 1/3rd of the amount emitted.

I hope that such methods will one day be used to replace the Feynman diagram and the sum over histories in configuration space (i.e. the path integral) with a more helpful system which will allow graviton contributions from distant masses to be included in quantum gravity, and will replace the existing Standard Model with a symmetry which incorporates gravitation. If category theory offered a better formal approach to replace all the elements of the Standard Model with discrete summations of interactions, computer calculations could simulate interactions, so you would have a discrete model for a discrete reality, instead of the current deeply flawed mathematical practice of using continuous techniques (calculus) to model discrete interactions. The current system requires discontinuities in the form of IR and UV cutoffs to be included for renormalization to get reasonable results; it would be much cleaner to build a model in which the physical phenomena of such cutoffs is present to begin with, instead of being manually inserted later to avoid infinities by forcing a continuous variable to include discontinuities at very low and very high energy.

Copy of a comment to Arcadian Functor on the subject of predictions of the Higgs mass by different theories:

Interesting predictions. There is some field that gives mass to particles in the gauge symmetries such as those of the SM, and since mass/energy is the charge of quantum gravity.

In general relativity a gravitational field has energy and is therefore a source of gravitation itself.

This causes quantum gravity to be looked at like some kind of Yang-Mills field where the field quanta must carry charge itself, i.e. the mainstream sees general relativity as evidence that quantum gravity is non-Abelian.

You would however expect from the fact that quantum gravity appears to involve only one sign of charge (mass-energy always falls downward in a gravity field) together with apparently just one type of field quanta, that quantum gravity is a simple Abelian U(1) gauge theory.

U(1) x SU(2) x SU(3) has to be supplemented with a Higgs field to break the U(1) x SU(2) symmetry thus separating the electromagnetic and weak forces by giving the weak forces mass.

Woit has made the point in his early blog post “The Holy Grail of Physics” that this electroweak symmetry breaking seems to go hand-in-hand with the way that the SU(2) field quanta which gain mass at low energy (limiting the range of the weak force to very small distances) also have the property of only partaking in left-handed interactions.

The left-handedness of the weak force seems due to an intrinsic property of the weak field gauge bosons. The simplest way to put quantum gravity and mass into the Standard Model is to leave the short range nuclear force SU(2) x SU(3) symmetry alone, but to change electromagnetism from U(1) to SU(2) with massless weak gauge bosons. I.e., half the weak gauge bosons gain mass to give the left-handed weak force; the remainder mediate electromagnetism. So you have negatively charged radiation mediating negative electric fields around electrons, instead of a neutral photon with 4 polarizations. The equilibrium of radiation exchange means that (1) magnetic curls cancel preventing the usual problem of infinite self-inductance for the propagation of charged massless radiation, and (2) this necessary perfect equilibrium of exchange physically prevents the charged field from affecting electric charges, so that the Yang-Mills equation for SU(2) electromagnetism automatically collapses effectively to Maxwell’s equations, since the Yang-Mills term for the charged field to modify fermion charges will be zero, and the equation is otherwise identical to Maxwell’s.

Hence, in SU(2) x SU(3) you then have electromagnetism, weak force and strong force. Because there is only need for one sign of gravitational charge (mass/energy) and one graviton, a U(1) theory can be added for quantum gravity and mass, with the U(1) field boson mixing with the neutral SU(2) field boson in the SM way to produce both a graviton and massive weak Z_0. I’d expect the massive U(1) gravitational charge to be identical to that of the Z_0, 91 GeV (already observed in 1983 at CERN).
Update:

‘I have here to again emphasize that I am only talking about people with good training [in mainstream methods] all the way through to a PhD. This is not a discussion about quacks or people who misunderstand what science is.’ – Professor Lee Smolin (click here for photo of him impersonating Einstein in a karaoke contest), The Trouble With Physics, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 2006, p. 370.

I think that this quotation is one thing from Smolin that Woit agrees with:

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=2199

Is there a fundamental problem of representing the presumed spin-2 graviton using an SU(N) Yang-Mills gauge theory?

Fierz and Pauli showed that universal attraction of similar charges – mass/energy – requires a spin-2 field quanta, using two implicit assumptions you can easily disprove:

1. only two masses in the universe are assumed to exchange gravitons in the proof, so

2. the LeSage shadowing mechanism is automatically being ignored, despite the fact that all objections to LeSage only apply to on-shell real radiations, not off-shell virtual particles like gravitons

Is this spin-2 graviton the problem? Does this spin stop gravity being included by simply adding another gauge symmetry to the standard model to make it include gravitation? Hawking says:

“The real reason we are seeking a complete theory, is that we want to understand the universe, and feel we are not just the victims of dark and mysterious forces. … The standard model is clearly unsatisfactory in this respect. First of all, it is ugly and ad hoc. The particles are grouped in an apparently arbitrary way, and the standard model depends on 24 numbers, whose values can not be deduced from first principles, but which have to be chosen to fit the observations. What understanding is there in that? … The second failing of the standard model, is that it does not include gravity.”

- http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php/lectures/91-godelendofphysics?format=pdf

I get the impression that spin-2 gravitons is a problem, and string theory is hyped as its solution since it includes spin-2.

Have you examined the [lack of] evidence for spin-2 gravitons either in theory or in practice?

The spin-2 gravitons will be interacting with the Higgs field (or its substitute) in the Standard Model, anyhow. The Higgs field isn’t given a gauge symmetry as as the charge for quantum gravity in the standard model. You say in your book that the Higgs field is called “Weinberg’s toilet”, but have you actually examined the fact that some such field is needed to supply mass as gravitational charge to the standard model?

Update on problems with the Higgs field

My argument is that the Standard Model is incomplete because it omits quantum gravity, which involves spin-1 gauge bosons as gravitons and a quantized unit charge. Quantum gravity is in this view like an Abelian U(1) field, not a Yang-Mills SU(N) field. The exchange of spin-1 gravitons produces a universal repulsive force; because it is bigger between an apple and the surrounding universe – with incoming gravitons converging inward from very large masses – than between an apple and the earth, the repulsion which predominates is the downward push. With much larger masses on all sides, such as galaxy clusters, the action of spin-1 gravitons is purely repulsive hence the cosmological acceleration of the universe.

There is no Higgs-type electroweak symmetry breaking as a function of energy as in existing electroweak theory; the symmetry is broken by a mass-giving field operating on half of SU(2) to give the left-handed massive weak gauge bosons of SU(2) at all energies; the remaining SU(2) gauge bosons remain massless and constitute charged electromagnetic fields. The Abelian group U(1) ceases to be the electromagnetism and becomes quantum gravity, a spin-1 graviton and a quantized 91 GeV massive gravitational charge which – after the Weinberg mixing of the gauge boson of U(1) with the uncharged Z gauge boson of SU(2) – couples via electromagnetic interactions (with reductions of mass caused thus by electromagnetic vacuum polarization effects) to the standard model charges. Tommaso Dorigo argued that mass should – in his view – couple via colour charge fields not electromagnetic fields, but we know in fact that leptons don’t appear to interact with colour charges under the energies so far used in experiments, while both leptons and quarks do undergo electromagnetic interactions. For more details on the prediction of fundamental particle (leptons and hadrons; individual quark masses aren’t isolatable even in principle) masses from the model, see the earlier post linked here.

Basically, the change is this: instead of an all-pervading Higgs field, we have instead a graviton field where gravitons are exchanged between 91 GeV gravitational charges which cluster around fermions in discrete numbers, and which mediate gravitational accelerations and resistance to accelerations (inertia) to particles with real mass (fermions and bosons) via electromagnetic interactions. This model is substantiated by the quantitative agreement of its predictions with measurements.

Above: the latest illustration (updated 27 September 2009) which has replaced the older illustration included in the post below. Improvements have been made.

We’re surrounded by immense visible, receding masses totalling m = 3 × 10⁵² kg (the Hubble Space Telescope gives an estimate of stars in the observable universe of 9 × 10²¹ observable stars, with a mean mass assumed to be the solar mass of 2 × 10³⁰ kg on the basis that the large population of dwarf stars balances out the population of stars whose mass is greater than the solar mass; the source of this estimate is page 5 of the NASA report linked here, so complain to NASA and the Hubble Space Telescope inventors if you don’t like scientific facts, not me!), which are accelerating radially away from us at acceleration, a = Hc = 6 × 10^-10 ms^-2 (L. Smolin, The Trouble With Physics, Houghton Mifflin, N.Y., 2006, p. 209), giving an outward effective force by Newton’s 2nd law of about F = ma = (3 × 10⁵²)×(6 × 10^-10) = 1.8 × 10⁴³ Newtons!

By Newton’s 3rd law of motion, every force has an equal and opposite reaction force, so there is an inward force towards us from distant receding masses of 1.8 × 10⁴³ Newtons! What particles do we know of that can mediate such large forces? As proved above, they act like spin-1 gauge boson radiation in causing gravity by pushing relatively small masses (compared to the mass of the universe) together, so should be called gravitons (gravity field quanta). Why apply Newton’s old laws (first published on 5 July 1687) to the acceleration of the universe? Professor Feynman said:

‘… we must take our concepts and extend them to places where they have not yet been checked.’

- R. P. Feynman et al., Feynman Lectures on Physics, v. 3, Quantum Mechanics, Addison-Wesley, 1965, c. 2, p. 9.

Professor Alfred North Whitehead stated (in his Presidential Address to the London Branch of the Mathematical Association in 1914):

‘The art of reasoning consists in getting hold of the subject at the right end, of seizing on the few general ideas that illuminate the whole, and of persistently organizing all subsidiary facts round them. Nobody can be a good reasoner unless by constant practice he has realized the importance of getting hold of the big ideas and hanging on to them like grim death.’

Notice in the diagram above that the calculation of gravity appears at first glance to be using the suspect assumption of fixed distance R for the radius of the entire accelerating mass of the universe around us. But notice from the diagram that the radius R actually cancels out in the calculation! It does not come into the final result because it is in both the numerator and the denominator! The spherical area of shell R is 4 Pi R², which represents the full area of the sky that contributes the inward 1.8 × 10⁴³ Newtons reaction force. This full force from the whole sky cancels out in the absence of nearby masses, because it’s extremely isotropic. But a nearby mass introduces an asymmetry, since it interacts with gravitons coming towards you from the direction of that mass! The area of a fundamental particle of such a nearby mass is A. The fraction of the area 4 Pi R² which is being shadowed by A is equal to the fraction of the 1.8 × 10⁴³ Newtons net inward graviton force which is pushing you towards the nearby mass with area A. So we project A from radius r (near you) to radius R to see how much of the area 4 Pi R² is covered (and blocked) by the local mass.

This tells us that the net force acting on two fundamental particle masses each with graviton interaction cross-sectional area A = Pi(2GM/c²)² is for two electron masses:

F = 2maA/(Pi r²) = 8maG²M²/(c⁴r²) = 2(1.8 × 10⁴³)(Pi(1.35 × 10^-57)²)/(Pi r²)

= 6.6 × 10^-71/r² Newtons.

Now compare this to Newton’s law (derived by combining Kepler’s observational third law with a guess, and checking it for the Moon; although Newton’s law was of course not useful in general until Cavendish first measured the gravitational coupling constant G, which was not included in the qualitative relationship by Newton but was added by Laplace), for two electrons each of mass M: F = GM²/r²

= 5.5 × 10^-71/r² Newtons.

QED. Compare the above result of quantum gravity F = 8maG²M²/(c⁴r²) with the result of Newtonian classical gravity F = GM²/r². See how close the results are.

Now you must go back to deluding yourself that non-predictive extradimensional stringy speculations about spin-2 gravitons are still the truth, and that the spin-1 quantum gravity is plain wrong, ’somehow’.

Dr Peter Woit reports that the rich Windows O/S programmer Bill Gates has bought the rights to the November 1964 Messenger lectures by Feynman and plans to make them available to all!

Hopefully Gates will put the second Messenger lecture, ‘The Relation of Mathematics to Physics’ on YouTube permanently. This is what Feynman says there:

‘What does the planet do? Does it look at the sun, see how far away it is, and decide to calculate on its internal adding machine the inverse of the square of the distance, which tells it how much to move? This is certainly no explanation of the machinery of gravitation!’

Feynman then gives the LeSage ‘mechanism’ whereby gravitons cause gravity by scattering off nuclei, but deliberately dismisses it when not bothering to distinguish between on-shell (real) particles and off-shell (virtual) particles, so when he says that gravitons would slow down planets like real dust would (by being heated up), his objection would debunk spin-2 gravitons of string theory just as much as any other particle. In fact, virtual bosons don’t steal energy when interacting with steadily moving charges (you get a net emission of real radiation and hence energy loss only when charges accelerate; if the accelerating charge is electric then this radiation is photons and if it is gravitational charge i.e. mass-energy, the radiation is gravitational waves, which are real particles carrying net energy and are related to gravitons like virtual photons are related to real photons: the virtual particles are off-shell and the real particles are on-shell). Feynman was author of Feynman Lectures on Gravitation, and wasn’t ignorant that virtual particles (gauge bosons) don’t behave like real particles! His objection to LeSage is only applicable for on-shell real particles as gravitons, not to gauge bosons. Gauge bosons or virtual radiations still impart momentum as proved by the Casimir force, which is experimentally substantiated. However, vacuum radiation phenomena never steals kinetic energy from moving bodies unless there is acceleration! Acceleration causes contraction of the body, which readjusts the exchange radiation (graviton) equilibrium so that when the acceleration ends, no further energy is lost. This is a fact of nature.

Feynman’s ‘objection’ to any exchange radiation theory of gravitation in claiming that vacuum radiation would cause drag is obviously bunk; we know the vacuum radiation pushes plates together in the Casimir force without slowing down charged particles in the vacuum! We know that on-shell particles don’t behave like off-shell particles! If his objection was valid, it would debunk all the Standard Model forces which rely on vacuum exchange radiations! It isn’t valid. What Feynman was really doing was popularizing the idea that some kind of simple mechanism might underly physics. Feynman said:

‘Suppose that in the world everywhere there are a lot of particles, flying through us at very high speed. They come equally in all directions – just shooting by – and once in a while they hit us in a bombardment. We, and the sun, are practically transparent for them, practically but not completely, and some of them hit. Look, then, at what would happen.

‘If the sun were not there, particles would be bombarding the Earth from all sides, giving little impulses by the rattle, bang, bang of the few that hit. This will not shake the Earth in any particular direction, because there are as many coming from one side as from the other, from top as from bottom.

‘However, when the sun is there the particles which are coming from that direction are partly absorbed [or reflected, as in the case of Yang-Mills gravitons, an exchange radiation!] by the sun, because some of them hit the sun and do not go through. Therefore, the number coming from the sun’s direction towards the Earth is less than the number coming from the other sides, because they meet an obstacle, the sun. It is easy to see that the farther the sun is away, of all the possible directions in which particles can come, a smaller proportion of the particles are being taken out.

‘The sun will appear smaller – in fact inversely as the square of the distance. Therefore there will be an impulse on the Earth towards the sun that varies inversely as the square of the distance. And this will be a result of large numbers of very simple operations, just hits, one after the other, from all directions. Therefore the strangeness of the mathematical relation will be very much reduced, because the fundamental operation is much simpler than calculating the inverse square of the distance. This design, with the particles bouncing, does the calculation.

‘The only trouble with this scheme is that … If the Earth is moving, more particles will hit it from in front than from behind. (If you are running in the rain, more rain hits you in the front of the face than in the back of the head, because you are running into the rain.) So, if the Earth is moving it is running into the particles coming towards it and away from the ones that are chasing it from behind. So more particles will hit it from the front than from the back, and there will be a force opposing any motion. This force would slow the Earth up in its orbit… So that is the end of that theory.

‘”Well,’ you say, ‘it was a good one … Maybe I could invent a better one.’ Maybe you can, because nobody knows the ultimate. …

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

Notice that when we equate the quantum gravity and classical gravity force laws, we get

F = 8maG²M²/(c⁴r²) = GM²/r².

Inserting a = Hc (this relationship is proved in detail further on in this post), we get 8mHG = c³ where for the observed flat spacetime H = 1/t where t is the age of the universe, thus 8mG = c³t. Apart from the dimensionless factor of 8, this is Louise Riofrio’s fundamental equation, Gm = tc³. String theorist Lubos Motl denounced it and then published a picture of Louise beside a lizard and, together with other string theory supporters, made sexist comments, so we showed how it is equivalent to not just our work but also that of John Hunter who first argued (in a notice in New Scientist) that the rest mass energy E = mc² of a particle may be equated to its gravitational potential energy with respect to the distant immense masses in the surrounding universe! We developed this simple idea into a more detailed derivation of Louise Riofrio’s equation linked here. Naturally, one thing heretical about any equation like Gm = tc³ is that because t increases (it is the age of the universe), G, m and c can’t all be constants! What varies?

Louise has investigated a solution to her equation assuming that c varies inversely as the cube root of the age of the universe, i.e., c = (Gm/t)^1/3. We know that light slows down in glass because the photon’s electromagnetic fields get ‘loaded’ by interacting with the electromagnetic fields of the electrons and nuclei in the glass, so by analogy if the vacuum is full of virtual charges and is expanding as the universe expands, then you might expect some kind of effect on the velocity of light: one problem here is, you’d expect light to speed up with time rather than slow down. There is also an error in the popular assumption that the vacuum is populated with virtual charges (virtual fermions) beyond 33 fm from fundamental unit charges: the assumption neglects Julian Schwinger’s proof that vacuum virtual pair production requires very strong steady electric field strengths and can’t occur beyond 33 fm from electric charges (we’ll discuss his formula and the mechanism in detail later in this post).

The velocity of light may vary effectively when it is emitted by a distant receding mass, e.g. it may slow down because its frequency is redshifted, and the frequency is measured by us as the number of crests we receive per second. The mainstream formula for the cosmological background radiation says that its energy density falls as the fourth power of the age of the universe. This fourth power of time fall is based on an arm-waving argument based on the cube-of-time fall for spherical divergence of radiation in an linearly expanding volume of space (which doesn’t apply when the radiation is converging inward to any observer from a shell nearly 13,700 million light years distant), and an additional fall in direct proportion to time for the stretching out of the radiation due to redshift (this is fine). The real motivation for the fourth-power of time fall is that it fits other evidence about the big bang, i.e. it is an ad hoc fiddle used to make the theory work.

It may well be correct, but it needs to be replaced by a proper derivation which will undoubtedly throw light on what is occurring physically. One possibility is that the cosmic background radiation isn’t effectively coming to us at velocity c, but at a much slower speed (reduced in proportion to the amount of redshift of the light). The Michelson-Morley experiment just determined that it is not possible to observe effects from the velocity of light because the instrument contracts in the direction of its motion (clocks also slow down), so you can’t measure a change: the instrument is distorted offsetting the effect of any change in the velocity of light. The effect of ‘restricted’ (not the hype term ’special’!) relativity is similar to that of the Heisenberg ‘uncertainty principle’ where you can’t measure both the position and the momentum of a particle with perfect accuracy even in principle: it generates pseudoscientific dogma. Actually, nothing can ever be measured with absolute precision. This doesn’t tell you anything about physics. (Dogmatic belief systems don’t operate like rational science. When they fail to measure something, the failure is interpreted as a proof of decisive knowledge that it is impossible for anybody ever to achieve that thing. E.g., if string theory can’t predict anything, then that’s not the failure of string theory. It’s proof that ‘nature is simply not predictable’. See? We then have to live with that big lie, and every journal has then to censor predictions from being published, like the dictatorship Orwell describes in 1984.)

What is actually varying is G. Dirac first investigated this but got the facts wrong and generally did a poor job (when he earlier predicted the positron as the anti-particle for the electron, it was only after trying falsely for years to make the anti-electron the proton which was already known but had too much mass!), and was opposed successfully by an obviously vacuous argument from Edward Teller (who ignored the fact that the other inverse-square law force, electromagnetism, would vary the same way as gravity and this would prevent any effect of a varying G on fusion rates: increased electrostatic repulsion will cancel out the effect of increased gravitational compression upon the ability of the strong force to fuse colliding protons). Since G increases in direct proportion to the age of the universe, the universe was extremely flat (not bumpy) at the early time when the cosmic background radiation emitted because gravity was so weak then, and gravity is what causes clumping. This successful prediction gets rid of the ad hoc cosmological inflation theory of the big bang.

Another groupthink delusion that I’ve argued against since 1990 is the lying ‘Planck scale’: Planck used deceptive dimensional analysis to derive what lying physicists call the minimum length, 1.6 × 10^-35 meters; when in fact there is no theoretical proof of this scale, it’s just dimensional analysis numerology which even if it used the correct constants in the correct ways could still be missing any combination of dimensionless multiplying factors like Pi or 2, etc. The black hole event horizon radius for an electron is 1.35 × 10^-57 meters; way smaller than the Planck scale. Nobody listened. Groupthink lies are still shamelessly hyped by quacks. The black hole event horizon radius is physically significant because black hole electrons radiate!

We proved this on 8 March 2007 in an email to Dr Rabinowitz, see: Hawking’s formula for the radiating power of the black hole electron tells us it radiates at P = 3 × 10⁹² Watts. The momentum of absorbed radiation is p = E/c, but in this case the exchange mechanism 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. (When a photon is absorbed it imparts momentum p = E/c, but when that photon is re-emitted back in the direction it came from, it delivers an additional momentum of p = E/c due to the recoil, so the total momentum delivered is p = E/c + E/c = 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. Hence, F = 2P/c = 2(3 × 10⁹²)/c = 2 × 10⁸⁴ Newtons. This is 10⁴¹ times the F = 1.8 × 10⁴³ Newtons total inward graviton force, so this Hawking radiation force is the electromagnetic force strength, which has a ‘coupling constant’ (this is a constant for energies below the IR cutoff, but of course is not constant at higher energies where it increases as a weak logarithmic function of energy due to penetrating through the shield of polarized virtual fermions which exist above the IR cutoff energy) that is higher than gravitation by roughly such a factor (the precise factor depends on the vacuum polarization shielding of the electromagnetic undressed charge, but the result is extremely good, unlike the errors in supersymmetric speculations of the vacuum energy which are off by massive factors like 10¹²⁰).

Notice that there is an error in the physical arm-waving that Hawking delivers with his formula: he claims that Hawking radiation is emitted when one virtual fermion of a pair spontaneously appearing near the event Horizon falls in, allowing the other to escape and become real, then annihilate with an oppositely charged fermion created in the same way to produce uncharged gamma rays (Hawking radiation). However, this arm-waving mechanism implicitly ignores Julian Schwinger’s cut-off for pair production in quantum field theory; you need electric fields of at least 1.8 × 10¹⁸ volts/metre to get spontaneous pair production in the vacuum, hence the spacetime creation-annihilation loops only populate the vacuum out to 33 femtometres from a unit fundamental electric charge! (equation 359 in Dyson’s http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0608140 or equation 8.20 in Luis Alvarez-Gaume, and Miguel A. Vazquez-Mozo’s http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0510040).

Despite explaining this point time and again, the quacks still don’t grasp its implications: the vacuum isn’t filled with chaotic loops of particles appearing and disappearing. If it was, there would be no IR cutoff, and the charge of an electron seen at macroscopic distances would be exactly zero (it would be completely cancelled out by vacuum polarization shielding, because such shielding would exist all over the vacuum not merely out to the small 33 fm distance of approach of fermions in collisions with the IR cutoff energy). It is therefore only because of Schwinger’s threshold limit on pair production for steady electric fields that we see electric charge at all; without the cutoff, the observable electric charge of the electron seen even a micron away would be zero! The vacuum (at distances beyond 33 fm from real long-lived fermions) is only filled with exchange bosons, not with polarizable charged loops containing virtual fermions! This point is so simple and yet so widely misunderstood that we much recognise that not only string theorists but also all published quantum field theorists so far who don’t grasp it, are deluded quacks. It severely affects the mechanism of Hawking radiation, for it prevents the Hawking mechanism working at all unless a black hole has a sufficient electric charge to produce an electric field of at least 1.8 × 10¹⁸ volts/metre at the event horizon radius!

Electrons don’t have a problem here, but uncharged black holes do. Hence, Hawking radiation is not emitted from large black holes which don’t carry a net electric charge; it is only emitted from electrically charged fundamental particles. Not only that, but the very fact that the fundamental particle has to have an electric charge in the mechanism we are analyzing has another effect: it prejudices the fall of virtual fermions into the black hole! Only those with opposite sign to the core particle fall in; the others are repelled away from the event horizon. The charge accumulating beyond the event horizon is then all of one sign (similar sign to the core), so it can’t annihilate into gamma rays. This thus modifies the entire Hawking radiation theory for black holes. What we find is that electrically charged black holes radiate charged bosonic radiation: the usual objection to massless charged radiation (infinite magnetic self-inductance) is prohibited from applying because the magnetic fields are cancelled out by the exchange of equal fluxes in opposite directions (exchange radiation means just that; an exchange equilibrium).

This radiation gives us the electromagnetic force mechanisms of attraction and repulsion, as well as telling us how to correct the U(1) × SU(2) electroweak symmetry of the standard model. One objection you can think about is that the electrically charged radiation as gauge bosons in electromagnetism would mean that electromagnetism should be a non-Abelian SU(2) theory described by the Yang-Mills equation, instead of Maxwell’s equations. But that’s wrong: the Maxwell model only differs from the Yang-Mills equation by a term for the ability of charged gauge bosons to change the charge they act on. This term is automatically suppressed in nature by the mechanism, simply because of the condition that the exchange of charged radiation is only possible (i.e., via the need for the elimination of infinite self-inductance) if there is a perfect equilibrium of exchange of charged radiation (with each electron receiving the same number of Coulombs per unit time as it radiates!), so the Yang-Mills term that allows charges to be changed by the exchange of charged field quanta is thus prevented from operating in the case of electromagnetism! This mechanistic physical effect disabling a term in the Yang-Mills equation is totally alien to the kind of groupthink worshipping stringy quacks who pretend that they are physicists. Their mathematical skills have become inflexible or ‘wooden’; they literally worship the mathematics like a religion, instead of seeing it for what it is, merely a rough calculating tool that may or may not usefully apply in any situation.

String theorists (yes, that is Edward Witten’s big but hot air-filled head being pushed down to earth by spin-1 gravitons above) use a lying Pauli-Fierz ‘proof’ that gravitons (gravity field quanta) exchanged between two masses must have spin-2 (in other words, must have 180 degree rotational symmetry, so outgoing gravitons would be identical to incoming gravitons with 180 degrees rotation) in order to achieve universal attraction! Duh! This ‘proof’ implicitly ignores all the masses in the entire universe surrounding the two masses in question! It ignores 3 × 10⁵² kg of distant surrounding masses when you calculate the gravity of exchange between an apple and the earth or the earth and the sun, or the sun and the centre of the Milky Way. Notice that due to F = ma giving a trivially small force for small mass m, local masses like the earth below you don’t repel you significantly, you’re instead repelled downwards by the distant mass above your head. Not only does this ‘theory’ (it isn’t a stringy theory, it is empirically justified facts, unlike popular groupthink string ‘theory’) predict gravity, it predicts cosmological acceleration and the flatness of the early universe when the CBR was emitted, and it predicted these things in 1996 before the cosmological acceleration was observationally discovered!

Notice from the diagram above that the gravitons coming in are radially converging, not diverging. Hence, they do not have a smaller effect than nearby small masses, but in fact cause a way greater effect than the exchange of gravitons with nearby relatively small masses! They cause gravity as illustrated above (masses small compared to the mass of the universe get pushed together because they don’t exchange gravitons with much force but are pushed together by immense exchange forces on the opposite side to the other mass!). This proves that the spin of at least the majority of gravitons making up most of the observed strength of gravitation is spin-1. Consequently, we can disprove (falsify) string theory’s basis in assuming gravity to be mediated entirely by spin-2 gravitons. In addition, as predicted in 1996 (before the acceleration of the universe was discovered in 1998), spin-1 gravitons actually cause the acceleration of the universe since their exchange between very large distant masses does not involve the shadowing mechanism in the above diagram, and simply pushes masses apart. The physics is discussed on the About page of this blog, which links to other posts. Quite an effort will be made in this new post to see why my research into this new Feynman path integral graviton theory is being violently censored out by vicious string theory groupthink quacks.

I’ve tried to be understanding to these people in the past, but following censorship since 1996 and more recently the ignorant abuse from CERN physicist Tommaso (see the previous post) who presumably was trying to be ‘nice’ to me without having the first clue about the scientific basis of this breakthrough in 1996, I think the time has come to start opposing quackery. I’m not ‘disproving’ as such (any more than Peter Woit or Lee Smolin are!) the existence of ’strings’, spin-2 gravitons, extra dimensions, parallel universes, and entanglement (there is certainly lots and lots of entanglement in string theorists minds, that’s a hard fact); merely that all of this pseudoscientific fantasy and speculative hype (like UFOs, aliens, God, Cold Fusion, Piltdown Man, and the Lock Ness Monster) is simply not required in the calculations we made and confirmed for quantum gravity and – most important of all – that the lies that these things are useful – lies politely called ‘hype’ by certain string theorists – are preventing the discussion of the facts of physics (hype drowns out this fact-based physics).

(I now don’t intend to be censored out by abusive dictators, but to hit them back so hard that the result will act as a deterrent to the other quacks; I know people suppressed by such quacks who just end up dying from cancer while still censored out like dissidents in a communist or fascist dictatorship, and I personally don’t believe that this is the freedom from dictatorship that millions of people died to preserve in world wars; see also the epilogue to this blog post about democracy and dictatorship. These thuggist dictators just want to destroy the work of others without bothering to check it properly first. They are evil. I used to think that patience was the way to overcome hostility, but actually the Jews were patient with Hitler, and we all know the result.)

‘In the past, a physical theory was considered to be “symmetric and elegant” if it explained a large number of observable phenomena with a small number of constructions. What is new [in the latest false spin-2 graviton based string theory 'universality' hype] is the discovery that you can get “symmetry and elegance” at the opposite extreme: a theory which explains no observable phenomena using extremely complicated constructions. They couple this with a very powerful new principle of how to do science: just because a theory can’t ever be tested doesn’t make it any less likely to be correct. This principle has wide possible applications, promising to bring back together science and religion, healing the terrible split which occurred with Galileo.’ – Dr Peter Woit.

Dr Peter Woit was then attacked out of the blue in a comment made by Professor Jacques Distler on June 12, 2009 at 7:09 am (who was an arXiv adviser when my paper was deleted from arXiv, unread, a few seconds after upload from my university in 2002!) on the Asymptotia blog: ‘There’s a reason Peter Woit is such a big fan of his [i.e. algebraic field theorist Professor Bert Schroer, who pointed out to the string theorists that perturbative string theory isn’t really a theory of 1-dimensional extented objects, it’s just an infinite-component local field theory].’ This led Professor Clifford Johnson to attack Woit at June 12, 2009 at 7:17 am: ‘Well, even if it does not hit the mark, at least he tries to write equations and make his objections at least look somewhat like science, as opposed to the babble, deception, and fakery tactics of his admirer.’

At this point, Dr Peter Woit commented politely at June 12, 2009 at 10:05 am: ‘Hi Jacques and Clifford, For the record I have no views one way or another concerning Schroer’s claims about world-sheets and T-duality. If you just can’t help yourselves and must find excuses to insult me, I think you can do better than this. Why not actually address something I write? One thing I do agree with Schroer about is the pathetic dishonesty and lack of professionalism of certain string theorists, especially certain prominent bloggers…’

Professor Clifford Johnson refused to read Dr Peter Woit’s book, Not Even Wrong, which amounted to ignoring all the points Dr Woit made (also Dr Smolin’s book), and then wrote fanatically about string theory’s 30 years of failure not being enough to judge it a lie and fanatically that we must live with more and more ‘research’ quacks and their eternal and viciously abusive censorship just because a handful of dictators are bad sportsmen who won’t graciously admit to being losers, at June 12, 2009 at 3:14 pm:

‘Excellent. This is truly funny. This is your proof that the entire community of string theorists is misguided and wrong? Before, I might add, we’ve even done with the research? Before we’re done with even fully understanding and defining the theory? This is your proof that it is all a waste of time? That’s just too funny. The point, Peter, is that we don’t know whether it is right or wrong either, nor what the outcome of the entire program of research will be, ultimately. But we’re not (or at least, that large percentage of the field I know and trust) are not presuming the answer at the outset, like you are. That’s why it is called research. We don’t know. You don’t know. You claim (and try to convince the public at large) that you know the outcome.

‘And you offer this joke as a proof of this strong claim. Can you not see how ridiculous that is? (Combined with the fact that you’ve never written a credible paper demonstrating competence in this field that you are condenming.) This is another fancy talk with slides of pretty pictures, and a few equations here and there. Looks much like the thing you offered as laughable rigourous proof of the wrongness of string theory a year or two ago.

‘I’d hope that after two years there’s an actual paper out by now with actual computations, and that it has been discussed in the community? I think I missed it. People would love to see that, so that they can know whether to go work on something else. Do point people to it.’

- Professor Clifford Johnson’s June 12, 2009 at 3:14 pm attack on Dr Peter Woit’s explanation that string theory is not even wrong, at his Asymptotia blog. Professor Johnson then shut that blog post comments down to prevent further comments, stating: ‘This is a total waste of time.’

It is important to try to understand the mentality behind this kind of string delusion, which is called groupthink and is defined as follows:

‘Groupthink is a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. Individual creativity, uniqueness, and independent thinking are lost in the pursuit of group cohesiveness, as are the advantages of reasonable balance in choice and thought that might normally be obtained by making decisions as a group. During groupthink, members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of consensus thinking. A variety of motives for this may exist such as a desire to avoid being seen as foolish, or a desire to avoid embarrassing or angering other members of the group. Groupthink may cause groups to make hasty, irrational decisions, where individual doubts are set aside, for fear of upsetting the group’s balance.’

It is not just Professor Johnson of course. Here is the delusion of Edward Witten, creator of M-theory quackery:

‘The critics feel passionately that they are right, and that their viewpoints have been unfairly neglected by the establishment. … They bring into the public arena technical claims that few can properly evaluate. … Responding to this kind of criticism can be very difficult. It is hard to answer unfair charges of élitism without sounding élitist to non-experts. A direct response may just add fuel to controversies [which must be avoided at all costs, to preserve the quack M-theory hoax].’ – Dr Edward Witten, M-theory originator, Nature, Vol 444, 16 November 2006.

All he is saying at the end is that string theorists should ignore critics:

‘Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.’ – George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four, Chancellor Press, London, 1984, p225

‘Fascism is not a doctrinal creed; it is a way of behaving towards your fellow man. 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 October 2005, p. 11.

‘… internalization is the long-term process of consolidating and embedding one’s own beliefs, attitudes, and values … Internalization is also often associated with learning … internalization is the process of acceptance of a set of norms established by people or groups which are influential to the individual. The process starts with learning what the norms are, and then the individual goes through a process of understanding why they are of value or why they make sense, until finally they accept the norm as their own viewpoint. … Lev Vygotsky suggested that mental functions, such as concepts, language, voluntary attention and memory are cultural tools acquired through social interactions.’

‘I have observed in teaching quantum mechanics (and also in learning it) that students go through the following experience: The student begins by learning how to make calculations in quantum mechanics and get the right answers; it takes about six months. This is the first stage in learning quantum mechanics, and it is comparatively easy and painless. The second stage comes when the student begins to worry because he does not understand what he has been doing. He worries because he has no clear physical picture in his head. He gets confused in trying to arrive at a physical explanation for each of the mathematical tricks he has been taught. He works very hard and gets discouraged because he does not seem able to think clearly. This second stage often lasts six months or longer, and it is strenuous and unpleasant. Then, quite unexpectedly, the third stage begins. The student suddenly says to himself, “I understand quantum mechanics”, or rather he says, “I understand now that there isn’t anything to be understood”. The difficulties which seemed so formidable have mysteriously vanished. What has happened is that he has learned to think directly and unconsciously in quantum mechanical language, and he is no longer trying to explain everything in terms of pre-quantum conceptions.’ – Freeman Dyson, ‘Innovations in Physics’, Scientific American, Vol. 199, No. 3, September 1958, pp. 74-82.

‘The ability to blindly believe anything, regardless of its absurdity, can have different causes: respect for authority, fear, indoctrination, even critical laziness or gullibility.’

Professor Paul Feyerabend explained in the concluding chapter of his 1975 book Against Method that anything goes which works in science, regardless of the method:

‘The idea that science can, and should, be run according to fixed and universal rules, is both unrealistic and pernicious. … the idea is detrimental to science, for it neglects the complex physical and historical conditions which influence scientific change. It makes our science less adaptable and more dogmatic: every methodological rule is associated with cosmological assumptions, so that using the rule we take it for granted that the assumptions are correct. Naive falsificationism takes it for granted that the laws of nature are manifest and not hidden beneath disturbances of considerable magnitude. … Putting them to a test means that we stop using the methodology … and see what happens. … such tests occur all the time … they speak against the universal validity of any rule. All methodologies have their limitations and the only ‘rule’ that survives is ‘anything goes’. …

‘Scepticism is at a minimum; it is directed against the view of the opposition and against minor ramifications of one’s own basic ideas, never against the basic ideas themselves. Attacking the basic ideas evokes taboo reactions which are no weaker than are the taboo reactions in so-called “primitive societies.” Basic beliefs are protected by this reaction … and whatever fails to fit into the established category system or is said to be incompatible with this system is either viewed as something quite horrifying or, more frequently, it is simply declared to be non-existent. …

‘Scientists do not solve problems because they possess a magic wand – methodology, or a theory of rationality – but because they have studied a problem for a long time, because they know the situation fairly well, because they are not too dumb (though that is rather doubtful nowadays when almost anyone can become a scientist), and because the excesses of one scientific school are almost always balanced by the excesses of some other school. (Besides, scientists only rarely solve their problems, they make lots of mistakes, and many of their solutions are quite useless.) Basically there is hardly any difference between the process that leads to the announcement of a new scientific law and the process preceding passage of a new law in society: one informs either all citizens or those immediately concerned, one collects ‘facts’ and prejudices, one discusses the matter, and one finally votes. But while a democracy makes some effort to explain the process so that everyone can understand it, scientists either conceal it, or bend it, to make it fit their sectarian interests.

‘No scientist will admit that voting plays a role in his subject. Facts, logic, and methodology alone decide – this is what the fairy-tale tells us. … This is how scientists have deceived themselves and everyone else about their business, but without any real disadvantage: they have more money, more authority, more sex appeal than they deserve, and the most stupid procedures and the most laughable results in their domain are surrounded with an aura of excellence. It is time to cut them down in size, and to give them a more modest position in society. …

‘It is the vote of everyone concerned that decides fundamental issues such as the teaching methods used, or the truth of basic beliefs such as the theory of evolution, or the quantum theory, and not the authority of big-shots hiding behind a non-existing methodology. There is no need to fear that such a way of arranging society will lead to undesirable results. Science itself uses the method of ballot, discussion, vote, though without a clear grasp of its mechanism, and in a heavily biased way. But the rationality of our beliefs will certainly be considerably increased.’

Above: the implosion bomb principle deployed at Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, relied on the same principle as quantum gravity: the inward force F = ma that accelerates an apple downward comes from the cosmological acceleration a of the distant masses M radially outward from an observer. In implosion, TNT detonates around a subcritical plutonium core. Half the force of the TNT explosion goes outward (and is wasted) but by Newton’s 3rd law of motion (the reaction force rocket principle), half the force of the TNT explosion goes radially inward as an implosion wave which hits the metal core and compresses it to over double its normal density: this makes it supercritical for a combination of three very obvious reasons: (1) the ratio of (surface area from which neutrons are lost)/(mass of plutonium in which neutrons are generated) decreases, so the number of neutrons lost per fission falls (only the spaces between atoms decreases, not the cross-sectional areas of the nuclei themselves!), (2) the distance between nuclei decreases, so the average time between fissions is decreased, increasing the fission rate, and (3) by reducing the amount of empty space between nuclei while the size of nuclei is unaffected, the probability of a neutron hitting a nearby nucleus is increased, just as the probability of an archer hitting a target board is increased if the space between the archer and the board is diminished (while the board size is unaffected).

The outward force of the universe is the product of the mass and cosmological acceleration of the universe; an equal and opposite reaction force (by Newton’s 3rd law, which the mainstream neglects without physically valid reason) presses radially inward causing the ‘curvature’ of spacetime by radial compression and thus excess radius (e.g., Earth’s radius is contracted 1.5 mm, causing a distortion to Euclidean geometry which is predictable both from this quantum gravity and from general relativity), and causing gravity where a nearby mass causes an asymmetry in the inward graviton force flux.

The interesting thing is that this is 100% quantitative and makes solid predictions that have been confirmed in numerous ways since the theory was discovered in May 1996.

But the ignorant string ‘theorists’ don’t even know basic physics of Newton’s laws of motion and the need to apply such laws to every possible situation in order to discover more about nature! They don’t understand the basic fact that the graviton can’t have spin-2 because the spin-2 ‘proof’ relies on ignoring all the mass in the universe except for two masses, and offers no reason why gravitons shouldn’t be exchanged between all masses in the universe. Once you include in the path integral all the masses in the universe (which is very simple to do, and visually geometric as in the diagram below for low-energy, since there are no vacuum loops beyond the IR cutoff energy which corresponds to all physics at distances beyond 33 femtometres from a unit charge, due to Schwinger’s threshold electric field strength of 1.3 x 10¹⁸ v/m for spontaneous pair production in the vacuum; this geometric application of path integral techniques is very similar to Feynman’s visual path integrals for light refraction in his book QED as we will show later in this blog post), you find that spin-1 gravitons are required for universal ‘attraction’ and that they also predict long-range repulsion (cosmological acceleration, i.e. dark energy). The converging inward flux of exchange spin-1 gravitons from the distant immense masses of the universe (clusters of galaxies, etc.) push the apple down to the Earth because they swamp the local repulsive exchange of spin-1 gravitons between the apple and the Earth. This is why there is universal attraction of masses within the galaxy. But over immense, cosmological sized, distances, the masses are so big that the spin-1 graviton exchange causes universal repulsion to begin to exceed the attraction effect of more distant masses pushing them toward one another. Eventually, at sufficiently large distances the immense masses involved (clusters of galaxies) ensure that the spin-1 exchange repulsive effect predominates, so the cosmological acceleration becomes apparent between such immense masses but not between smaller masses (like an apple and the Earth, the Earth and Sun, etc.).

The gravity force is simply mediated by the spin-1 graviton which is the uncharged photon; the way that these photons interact with massive vacuum particles (gravitational charges) gives rise to particle masses due to electromagnetic coupling between particle cores and the vacuum. The gravity force is predicted theoretically from the Hubble expansion as proved below. First, it is an empirical fact that expansion of the universe and not ‘tired light’ is the mechanism of redshift (string theorists who deny these facts in science need to read Ned Wright’s page, ‘Errors in Tired Light Cosmology’). Second, Hubble’s law in 1996 predicted the acceleration of the universe (proof below) which was subsequently discovered by observations, a = 6*10^-10 ms^-2. This is radially outward acceleration, opposing the radially inward gravitational retardation of the big bang. Newton’s 2nd law tells us that the mass of the universe M gives force outward F = Ma, while his 3rd law tells us that there’s an equal and opposite force, i.e., an immense inward force which is what produces the excess radius in general relativity (Earth’s radius is compressed radially 1.5 mm by gravitons, and according to general relativity this occurs like the directional contraction of special relativity i.e. without a corresponding non-radial contraction, so the transverse lines – e.g. circumference – are unaffected; general relativity speculatively assumes Pi is constant in 4-dimensions that that this distortion to Euclidean 3-dimensional geometry by gravity is due to an extra time-like dimension causing distortion so that 3 spatial dimensions exist as the surface or ‘brane’ upon a 4 dimensional universe: however, Pi is not a feature of the universe but is a human construction and an alternative to general relativity’s speculation is to vary Pi and keep space Euclidean, and in the simplest quantum gravity model general relativity is wrong and the radial contraction is accompanied by a reduction of circumference, keeping Pi constant! All of the checkable parts of general relativity, such as the deflection of light by twice the classical Newtonian amount due to relativistic situations and conservation of energy – i.e. the field lines of the energy in a photon extend only transversely to its motion not longitudinally as well which occurs with non-relativistic particles, so you get twice as much deflection due to the radial graviton field interacting twice as much more strongly with the transverse field energy in a passing photon than with the field energy of a non -relativistic mass – are matched in quantum gravity, the only discrepancies are for situations where general relativity has never ever been checked and therefore is unreliable. The best classical unification of general relativity and electromagnetism which I’ve seen is Lunsford’s, which has 3 spatial dimensions and 3 corresponding time dimensions. This suggests a simple relationship between any given spatial dimension and the corresponding time dimension. Time may naturally be measured from the origin of the universe by the inverse of the Hubble parameter in our flat spacetime universe: t = 1/H. Since H can in principle be measured in 3 different spatial dimensions – looking at stars receding to the left, straight ahead, and upwards – we can in principle have 3 values of measured H for those 3 spatial dimensions and thus 3 corresponding times, t = 1/H. This kind of illustrates that the curved space idea of general relativity is just a fantasy ‘interpretation’ of accelerations, totally devoid of physical substance, and liable – as seen in cosmology – to cause confusion and mislead mainstream cult physicists who believe in it as a dogmatic religion.). This quantitative prediction gives you gravity, and from this – by the electromagnetic coupling theory – you get the strength of electromagnetism. The weak force is weaker than electromagnetism on account of the massive field quanta it uses. The strong force is generated by the electromagnetic energy soaked up by the polarized vacuum at small distances, creating gluons and other particles. Every force can thus be predicted. The spin-1 graviton exchange which causes gravity also causes cosmological scale repulsion of masses.

The observed Hubble recession law states that recession v = HR, where R = cT, T being time past (when the light was emitted), not the time after the big bang for the Earth.

As shown in the diagram below, this time past T is related to time since the big bang t for the distance of the star in question by the simple expression: t + T = 1/H, for flat spacetime as has been observed since 1998 (the observed acceleration of the universe cancels gravitational deceleration of distant objects, so there is no curvature on large distance scales).

Hence: v = HR = HcT = Hc[(1/H) - t] = c – (Hct). Thus, a = dv/dt = d[c - (Hct)]/dt = -Hc = 6×10^-10 ms^-2which is cosmological acceleration of the universe (since observed to be reality, from supernova redshifts!). E.g., Professor Lee Smolin writes in the chapter ‘Surprises from the Real World’ in his 2006 book The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the fall of a Science, and What Comes next (Allen Lane, London), pages 209:

‘… c²/R [which for R = ct = c/H gives a = c²/(ct) = Hc, exactly the theoretical prediction we earlier published in Oct. 1996 via page 896 of Electronics World and then in more detail in Feb. 1997 via the Science World peer-reviewed journal, ISSN 1367-6172]… is in fact the acceleration by which the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing – that is, the acceleration produced by the cosmological constant.’

The figure 6×10^-10 ms^-2 is the outward acceleration which Smolin quotes as c²/R. Full credit to Smolin for actually stating what the acceleration of the universe was measured to be! There are numerous popular media articles, books and TV documentaries about the acceleration of the universe which are all so metaphysical that they don’t even state that it is measured to be 6 x 10^-10 ms^-2!

Back in May 1996, I made the mistake of discovering something: gravity implies that the universe is accelerating. Worst, I could make quantitative predictions. The problem with this discovery? The month previously, renowned string ‘theorist’ (speculator) Edward Witten had lied in a journal:

‘String theory has the remarkable property of predicting gravity.’

- Dr Edward Witten, M-theory originator, ‘Reflections on the Fate of Spacetime’, Physics Today, April 1996.

‘In the particular case of spin 2, rest-mass zero, the equations agree in the force-free case with Einstein’s equations for gravitational waves in general relativity in first approximation …’

– Conclusion of the paper by M. Fierz and W. Pauli, ‘On relativistic wave equations for particles of arbitrary spin in an electromagnetic field’, Proc. Roy. Soc. London., volume A173, pp. 211-232 (1939). [Notice that Pauli did make errors, such as predicting in a famous 4 December 1930 letter that the neutrino has the mass of the electron!]

‘It is said that more than 200 theories of gravitation have have been put forward; but the most plausible of these have all had the defect that that they lead nowhere and admit of no experimental test.’

- A. S. Eddington, Space Time and Gravitation, Cambridge University Press, 1920, p64.

The Feynman diagrams below explain Witten’s lie: spin-2 ‘gravitons’ in string theory are lies because they’re based on a Pauli-Fierz theorem which applies to a universe with only two masses in it, and with no exchange of gravitons with distant masses which would overwhelm local exchanges; gravitons coming from the immense galaxies surrounding us in all directions will be converging inward towards our two little test masses and will dwarf the graviton exchange between them, so gravity is not due to spin-2 gravitons but to spin-1 gravitons, disproving Witten and his string ‘theory’ work. Note that as proved on the About page for this blog the vacuum is provably full of exchange radiation which:

(1) causes the Casimir force (pushing two parallel metal plates together because they exclude virtual radiation of longer wavelengths that the gap between the places, so the full spectrum of virtual radiation pushes them towards one another, but only a spectrum with the long wavelengths cut-off it can pushes apart so the net force is attraction),

(2) causes inertia, Newton’s 1st law of motion (resistance to acceleration due to head on pressure until exchange equilibrium is re-established by the emission of radiation which always accompanies the acceleration of charged particles),

(3) causes the FitzGerald-Lorentz contraction of moving objects in the direction of their motion which explains special relativity: measuring rods shrink with increasing velocity, causing mass to increase so that the oscillating parts of any clock – regardless of whether it is mechanical or atomic in nature – gain mass and must therefore slow down in oscillatory speed v for momentum mv to be conserved, so time-dilation accompanies length contraction.

‘The Michelson-Morley experiment has thus failed to detect our motion through the aether, because the effect looked for – the delay of one of the light waves – is exactly compensated by an automatic contraction of the matter forming the apparatus…. The great stumbing-block for a philosophy which denies absolute space is the experimental detection of absolute rotation.’

– Professor A.S. Eddington (who confirmed Einstein’s general theory of relativity in 1919), MA, MSc, FRS, Space Time and Gravitation: An Outline of the General Relativity Theory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1921, pp. 20, 152.

‘Concepts which have proved useful for ordering things easily assume so great an authority over us, that we forget their terrestrial origin and accept them as unalterable facts. They then become labeled as ‘conceptual necessities,’ etc. The road of scientific progress is frequently blocked for long periods by such errors.’ – Albert Einstein

Above: as proved on the About page (linked here), the final theory is a new physical application of the Standard Model U(1) x SU(2) x SU(3) where SU(2) is no longer just the source of left-handed isospin charge and massive weak gauge bosons due to an indiscriminately mass-producing ‘Higgs field’, but instead (with a modified ‘Higgs field’ which makes checkable predictions about particle masses) not all massless SU(2) gauge bosons are given mass, and those which don’t get mass behave as charged electromagnetic field quanta; leaving the usual mixed U(1) and neutral SU(2) field quanta to produce spin-1 gravitons together with the usual massive neutral weak boson. Thus, instead of having a neutral photon with 4 polarizations as the gauge boson of electromagnetism, massless versions of weak field quanta (unsupplied with mass from a Higgs field) exist at low energy and mediate electromagnetism. The positive electric field around a proton is due to positively charged gauge bosons around a proton. The full gauge boson exchange dynamics of this model predicts the difference in force strengths between electromagnetism and gravity as being due to a random walk of charged gauge bosons between similar charges in the universe (straight line exchange being non-permissible because on average there will be an equal number of positive and negative charges along any given straight line, thus cancelling out). The random walk means that the vector sum of electromagnetism mediated by charged gauge bosons exceeds that from gravity by a factor equal to the square root of the number of charges. Charged massless radiations are of course unable to propagate in one direction only along a single path due to infinite magnetic self inductance (they can’t accelerate by themselves), which is the reason why they can only propagate in both directions: the magnetic field curls of each component then cancel, preventing infinite self inductance.

This feature also conveniently cancels out the term in the Yang-Mills equation that allows charged gauge bosons to alter the electric charge signs of electrons and other particles in the way that weak gauge bosons alter isospin by carrying isospin themselves between particles: the self inductance effect obviously ensures that electrically charged gauge bosons can’t alter electric charges because the charged gauge bosons can only propagate in a perfect equilibrium. (I.e., there is as much negative charge radiated on gauge bosons leaving an electron every second as received by it, so nothing changes. Any disturbance to this equilibrium is called an acceleration and is accompanied by the emission of a photon, which enables the equilibrium to be re-established.)

Above: the photons and exchange radiations implied by advances in electromagnetic cross-talk analysis, which shows that charged massless gauge bosons can propagate as exchange radiation in both directions between two charges, since such exchange cancels out the magnetic field components and prevents infinite self inductance.

Path integrals

Above: the double slit experiment is as Feynman stated the ‘central paradox of quantum mechanics’. Every single photon gets diffracted by both of two nearby slits in a screen because photon energy doesn’t travel along a single path, but instead, as Feynman states, it travels along multiple paths, most of which normally cancel out to create the illusion that light only travels along the path of least time (where action is minimized), so the double slit and a few other situations are the rare special cases that show up the true nature of light photons as individually traveling along spatially extended paths:

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

If there are two effective paths that deliver energy to the screen, path 1 and path 2 (as in the double slit experiment with a single photon) then the square of the resultant of the amplitudes for the two paths, A₁ and A₂, respectively, will be given by |A₁|² + |A₂|², where the squaring is just Born’s suggestion to avoid negative probabilities (it has its roots in the Schroedinger wavefunction which can take negative values, so you need to square that wave function to find the relative probability of finding an electron within a given volume of space represented by the value of the wavefunction, so that the probability is always a number between 0-1, and is never negative!).

Feynman’s genius in discovering path integrals was the amazing intuition it took to realize that Dirac’s ‘propagator’ (derived by Dirac in 1933 from the time-dependent Schroedinger equation’s result for the probability of a path: e^-iHT/h-bar where H is the Hamiltonian for a path, i.e. simply the kinetic energy if dealing with a free particle, and T is simply time), namely e^iS/h-bar where S is action, could be used to represent each path without the need for squaring the modulus of the amplitude! The complex number in the exponent does it all for you, so you just need to integrate e^iS/h-bar for all paths contributing energy that affects the overall amplitude. Hence, the amplitude for two paths of the double slit experiment is simply: (|A₁|² + |A₂|²)^1/2 = B[e^iS(1)/h-bar + e^iS(2)/h-bar]

where B is a constant of proportionality (easily determined by adding up all paths and normalizing the summation to a total probability of 1, since energy is conserved and the photon definitely ends up somewhere, so the sum of all possible path amplitudes must be equal to a probability of exactly 1 of finding the photon!). Dirac had taken the Hamiltonian amplitude e^-iHT/h-bar and derived the more fundamental lagrangian amplitude for action S, i.e. e^iS/h-bar. Dirac however restricted his work on this problem to merely the classical action S, whereas Feynman had the genius to extend it to sum over the actions S for all paths, not just the classical action! However notice that this summation over all paths has never, ever, ever been proved to require a summation of any curved paths, where there is no mechanism for such curvature in quantum fields. Curved geodesics in general relativity are merely the results of using differential geometry with a necessarily false smoothed-out source term tensor T_ab to deliberately and artificially give rise to a smooth curvature! In place of the factually proved discontinuous distribution of particles of matter and energy (photons, etc.) which give rise to all gravitational fields, the stress-energy-momentum tensor T_ab in the field equation of general relativity uses an artifically smoothed-out averaged distribution, with the real world particulate field discontinuities falsely eliminated! E.g., all of the particles of matter and energy are just ignored and replaced by a totally fictitious ‘perfect fluid’ continuum in general relativity: this false source field continuum then gives rise to the equally unphysical curved spacetime continuum because it is equated to the Ricci curvature tensor minus a contraction term for conservation of mass-energy.

So, instead of calculating the gravitational fields from a large number of discontinuous particles, general relativity averages out the mass per unit volume and uses the average, giving rise to a false model of gravity which is only approximately valid for certain conditions where the statistical number of gravitons is large enough to average out and appear like a classical field! General relativity is therefore not ‘only missing’ a vital ingredient (quantum fields), but it is entirely a false framework to start off with because of the mass-energy-momentum tensor which doesn’t describe real particulate gravity-causing fields, but only represents at best artificial approximations to such fields which are roughly applicable for large masses.

Anyone with a knowledge of calculus and more than one brain cell knows that discontinuities cause problems to differential equations; vertical steps produce infinities when differentiated to find gradients! There is actually no mechanism for a smooth curvature of geodesics in quantum field theory, where nobody has ever proved that particles (including virtual particles and cancelled particle paths in path integrals!) don’t travel according to Newton’s 1st law of motion (straight lines in the absence of quantum interactions which impart forces!). Crackpottery is often introduced into mainstream accounts of path integrals by false claims that curved particle paths are ‘permitted’ by the path integral formulation, but that these paths are cancelled out.

This is false, and the reason for it is to introduce false mythology into physics. There is no evidence for it, there is no checkable prediction from it, and it is pseudoscience. It is a lie to claim that physics requires curved paths of particles to be included in path integrals. It doesn’t. See Feynman’s treatment of the refraction of light using graphical illustrations of path integrals (without any equations at all!) in his 1985 book QED: the you don’t need wiggly curved paths to be included. All you need to include are straight line paths from light bulb to the water surface, and then after a discrete deflection at the water surface, another straight line path in the water to the receiver. The differing paths consist solely of straight lines with varying angles of deflection at the water surface! You don’t need to include any curved lines.

Above: Professor Zee lies in Chapter I.2 of his book Quantum field theory in a nutshell (Princeton, 2003) that if the screen with two slits in the double-slit experiment has more and more holes drilled into it so that it eventually disappears altogether, you get chaotic path integrals because – so he falsely claims on page 9 – the photons will still diffract just as if they are going through small slits! Zee is so stupid that he ignores the whole mechanism for diffraction by a slit: the photon interacts with the electromagnetic fields of the electrons in the material along the edge of a slit, and is thus diffracted. When you remove the slits altogether, there are no edges left to cause photons to diffract, so contrary to Zee, photons don’t go loopy in empty space as if they are being diffracted by an infinite number of slits! Think about the refraction of light when entering glass: the electromagnetic fields in the photon interact with those of the electrons in the glass, and the result is a change in the velocity of light, causing refraction of light by glass. The edge of a slit has electrons in it, and the electromagnetic fields of those electrons interact with the nearby photon, causing it to diffract. Drill lots of holes and yes you get more complex interferences, but if you remove the material altogether you suddenly have no edges of slits left to cause diffraction, so the chaos disappears and things become simple!

Not only is he so gullible and mad that Zee ignores this obvious physical mechanism, but he falsely attributes his crank analysis to Feynman, who did not author it! (See Feynman’s book, QED, Princeton, 1985 for the facts Zee ignores!) Zee is just a liar and a fraudster: he is not just a charlatan but he draws a salary from teaching lies to people and he sells books with lies in them, which makes him a quack. Quack science often becomes mainstream: Hitler’s genocide was based on quack genetics, for example. So we need to catch these perpetrators and prosecute them for fraud, and convict them for willful deception for profit. Zee also makes some purely physical errors about particle spins, and promotes them with false propaganda. E.g., his path integral for quantum gravity presupposes spin-2 gravitons and then tries to justify this lie by excluding all the mass in the universe except for two small test masses. Obviously for just two masses, you would indeed need spin-2 graviton exchange to pull them together. But he does not state that if you include all the other masses in the universe (all carry gravitational charge, so there is no way to prevent them from exchanging gravitons with your two little test masses), you don’t need spin-2 gravitons anymore because you can predict gravity with spin-1 gravitons, allowing you to incorporate gravity into the revised Standard Model and have the final theory! But that is just a mistake by Zee, unlike his deception over what Feynman’s path integrals say about the double slit experiment, so it isn’t necessarily a fraud, just plain incompetence which suggests Zee should be sacked from his job for ignorance in the basics of physics. However, I’d like to see Witten kicked out of the Institute of Adcanced Study in Princeton for his massive lie:

‘String theory has the remarkable property of predicting gravity.’ – Dr Edward Witten, M-theory originator, ‘Reflections on the Fate of Spacetime’, Physics Today, April 1996.

This lie damaged my chances of getting my discovery published in Classical and Quantum Gravity, so it has held back scientific progress. I know Witten would possibly argue that my work would have been rejected anyway, but there is such a thing as the straw that breaks the camel’s back; such lies don’t help physics.

In high energy physics above the IR cutoff you get pair production, as explained in detail in the previous post. This causes ‘loops’ in which bosonic field quanta knock pairs of virtual fermions free from the unobservable ground state of the vacuum/ether, which soon annihilate back into radiation again in a ‘loop’ of repeated virtual fermion creation and annihilation. Although it is convenient to depict this process by a circular loop on a spacetime Feynman diagram, even this situation (which is irrelevant below the 1 MeV IR cutoff for all low-energy physics anyway) is not physically composed of curved particle All apparent cases of ‘curvature’ are merely a lot of straight lines joined up with particle interactions occurring at the vertices! Starlight deflected by the sun is deflected in a series of quantum graviton interactions in the vacuum, and the overall result can be statistically modelled to a good approximation by ‘curvature’ but such curvature remains just an approximation. There is no curved continuum spacetime, there is quantum spacetime. This is even clear when you look at the lies needed in general relativity: as soon as you introduce the properly quantized T_ab energy-momentum-stress tensor as the source of the gravitational field, the theory falls to pieces because the Ricci tensor only represents a continuously variable curved geodesic, not a straight line with discontinuities.

The whole of general relativity is just a classical approximation that usefully allows calculations to be made (albeit with a loss of physical intuition for the nature of the real world) incorporating the conservation of field energy into classical gravitation. It’s a lie to presume that general relativity, or any theory representing discontinuous fields as continuously variables in differential calculus, is a physically correct model. Such calculations are fairly complex approximations to the awesomely simple nature of the physical world, which doesn’t use the calculus.

With Feynman’s innovation, any problem in quantum mechanics generally can be evaluated by integrating the Dirac propagator over all path actions, thus instead of having to follow Born and add up the squares of the moduli of amplitudes for each path, we just instead add up a linear summation of e^iS(n)/h-bar terms, which is much easier and quicker (even a bright two year old can do it without making a mistake on a calculator). There is no mathematics beyond the trick of summing the amplitudes in such a way that they add up in a physically logical simple way without negative probabilities! For large numbers of paths, we can sum using calculus, by integrating e^iS(n)/h-bar for an infinite number n of possible geometric paths with differing actions S(n). (This integration may be mathematically hard, and may lead to infinities and problems in some cases, but that’s a human mathematical problem of using the calculus, it’s not a proof that nature is complex! Duh!) Just so that readers who don’t understand quantum field theory can see what we’re doing, S is action: action is the integral of the lagrangian over time, and the lagrangian for a free particle in a field is simply the difference between the kinetic energy, E = (1/2)mv² for non-relativistic situations, and the potential energy it has from the field it is immersed in. If a free massive particle has no potential energy and only kinetic energy, then the lagrangian is just the kinetic energy, (1/2) mv². Integrate that over time and the result is the action, S. The amplitude for the path integral just requires the action S and Planck’s constant, h. The bar through h (i.e. h-bar) signifies h divided into twice Pi, a result of the geometry of rotational symmetry. There’s absolutely no complex mathematics whatsoever, no stringiness whatsoever, within nature; instead it is beautifully simple and factual. It’s really important for me to stress that Feynman was not, definitely not, merely trying to solve the problem of the infinite momenta of field quanta at close to the middle of an electron, and other quantum field theory problems with path integrals by imposing cutoffs for infrared and ultraviolet divergences (i.e. renormalization) in his theory. That is a lie, spread by liars in the mainstream who believe in extradimensional crap. Yes, Feynman did solve problems with renormalization, but what is being suppressed is that that his innovation is not a mere abstract addition to the existing theory of quantum mechanics. It’s a revolution which replaces Bohring physics of multiverse speculations and other nonsense with facts, as you can see by reading the key paper by Feynman which was inevitably rejected by the Physical Review (see page 2 of 0004090v1; due to egotistical cranky ‘peer’ reviewers who worship false dogma and abhore factual physics, the Physical Review has regularly acted as a typical pseudoscience propaganda journal which believes that religious lobbying is a substitute for hard facts from experimental work on quantum gravity), before being published in Reviews of Modern Physics, vol. 20 (1948), p. 367:

‘This paper will describe what is essentially a third formulation of nonrelativistic quantum theory [Schroedinger's wave equation and Heisenberg's matrix mechanics being the first two attempts, which both generate nonsense 'interpretations']. This formulation was suggested by some of Dirac’s remarks concerning the relation of classical action to quantum mechanics. A probability amplitude is associated with an entire motion of a particle as a function of time, rather than simply with a position of the particle at a particular time.

‘The formulation is mathematically equivalent to the more usual formulations. … there are problems for which the new point of view offers a distinct advantage. …’

Wow, what an understatement! I’m not alone in supporting Feynman’s case against the crackpot, backward mainstream which is still stuck in 1927 with obsolete physics and hasn’t grasped path integrals at all. E.g., Richard MacKenzie clearly supports what I’m saying about Feynman where he writes in his paper Path Integral Methods and Applications, pages 2-13:

‘… I believe that path integrals would be a very worthwhile contribution to our understanding of quantum mechanics. Firstly, they provide a physically extremely appealing and intuitive way of viewing quantum mechanics: anyone who can understand Young’s double slit experiment in optics should be able to understand the underlying ideas behind path integrals. Secondly, the classical limit of quantum mechanics can be understood in a particularly clean way via path integrals. … for fixed h-bar, paths near the classical path will on average interfere constructively (small phase difference) whereas for random paths the interference will be on average destructive. … we conclude that if the problem is classical (action >> h-bar), the most important contribution to the path integral comes from the region around the path which extremizes the path integral. In other words, the article’s motion is governed by the principle that the action is stationary. This, of course, is none other than the Principle of Least Action from which the Euler-Lagrange equations of classical mechanics are derived.’

So far so good, but I must point out that MacKenzie goes on to make a terrible error in his analysis of the Aharonov-Bohm effect, where a shielded box containing a magnetic field is placed between the two slits in the double slit experiment, and the photon interference pattern is affected by the magnetic field in the box. (This experiment was first done by Chambers in 1960.) The fatal mainstream error MacKenzie makes is the implicit assumption that the ’shield’ which eliminates the observable magnetic field actually stops that magnetic field instead of merely cancelling it by superposition! Magnetic fields work by polarization. Little magnets such as fundamental spinning charges align against an external field in such a way as to oppose and partially ‘cancel’ that field: but this cancellation is a superposition of two fields, not the elimination of a field. Think simply: if you put a child on each end of a see-saw, it may balance, but that doesn’t mean you have cancelled out all the forces. You have only cancelled out some of the forces: you have ensured that the forces balance but there is still a force on the fulcrum that isn’t ‘cancelled out’. Similarly, if you have $1000 credit in one bank account and a debt of $1000 in another, you aren’t free from debt unless you transfer the money across.

What happens with magnetic fields is any material is full of magnetic fields because all fundamental particles have have electric charge and spin, but normally the random orientations or the paired up spins (adjacent electrons in an atom are paired with opposite spins under the Pauli exclusion principle) mean that normally the magnetism cancels out. Only when you have an asymmetry, aligning more of the spins one way than the opposite way, do you see the magnetic field. In the absence of alignment, the fields cancel by superposition, but the energy is still there in the field (energy is conserved). Therefore, in the Aharon-Bohm effect, the influence of the ’shielded’ magnetic field on the interference pattern isn’t ‘magical’ or unexpected. The magnetic fields of the photon are affected by the energy density of the ‘cancelled’ magnetic fields, just as light slows down in a block of glass due to the energy density of the electromagnetic fields from the charged matter making up glass!

All of the mainstream ‘physicists’ (quacks) I’ve spoken to believe wrongly that because an ‘uncharged’ block of glass contains as many protons as electrons and hence has a net electric charge of zero, the electric fields ‘don’t exist’ anymore there, just as they claim the magnetic fields ‘don’t exist’ in the Aharonov-Bohm effect. They are so far gone into mystical eastern entanglement quackery that they they just ignore anomalies and become abusive when disproved time after time, and of course they get still more and more angry when you predict gravity factually and all the related predictions from the corrected physics. They are all totally insane, they are bad losers, they hate real physics, they hate the way the world really is!

This is essential to the checkable aspects of quantum gravity, i.e., low energy quantum gravity stuff like predicting the gravity force coupling parameter G, because at low energy graviton fields will carry a very low energy density (gravity is 10⁴⁰ times weaker than electromagnetism at low energy, everyday physics). Therefore, at low energy, we can ignore the effects of graviton emission from the energy of the gravitational fields (because they are so weak at low energy) which ensures that the path integrals for quantum gravity will be similar to those of electromagnetism for low energy physics, where the checkable predictions of quantum gravity will be found. Who – apart from nutty string theorists – cares about the uncheckable speculations of Planck scale quantum gravity? If we first get a quantum gravity theory that makes correct checkable predictions at low energy, then we will be in a position to make confident extrapolations from that particular theory to higher energies. We can’t have that confidence if we start with speculations of high energy that can’t be checked! Duh! Get a grip on reality, all you string theorists and fellow-travellers in the media!

This makes quantum gravity path integrals very simple for low energy, like electromagnetism. So let’s deal with electromagnetism first, then move on to quantum gravity.

Feynman’s explains that all light sources radiate photons in all directions, along all paths, but most of those cancel out due to destructive interference. If you throw a stone at an apple, the apple won’t move significantly if someone on the other side of the apple does the same thing with a similar stone! The two impacts will cancel out, apart from a compression of the apple! In other words, there are natural situations where exchange radiation causes destructive interference, and the nature of light is exactly this situation.

The amplitudes of the paths near the classical path reinforce each other because their phase factors, representing the relative amplitude of a particular path, exp(-iHT) = exp(iS) where H is the Hamiltonian (kinetic energy in the case of a free particle), and S is the action for the particular path measured in quantum action units of h-bar (action S is the integral of the Lagrangian field equation over time for a given path).

Because you have to integrate the phase factor exp(iS) over all paths to obtain the resultant overall amplitude, clearly radiation is being exchanged over all paths, but is being cancelled over most of the paths somehow. The phase factor equation models this as interferences without saying physically what process causes the interferences.

Thus, in Feynman’s path integral explanation in his 1985 book QED, an electron when it radiates actually sends out radiation in all directions, along all possible paths, but most of this gets cancelled out because all of the other electrons in the universe around it are doing the same thing, so the radiation just gets exchanged, cancelling out in ‘real’ photon effects. (The electron doesn’t lose energy, because it gains as much by receiving such virtual radiation as it emits, so there is equilibrium). Any “real” photon accompanying this exchange of unobservable (virtual) radiation is then represented by a small core of uncancelled paths, where the phase factors tend to add together instead of cancelling out.

All electrons have centripetal acceleration from spin and so are always radiating, so there is an equilibrium of emission and reception established in the universe, called exchange radiation/vector bosons/gauge bosons, which can only be ’seen’ via force fields they produce; ‘real’ radiation simply occurs when the normally invisible exchange equilibrium gets temporarily upset by the acceleration of a charge.

A conspiracy of mainstream string worshipping physics quacks claims that quantum entanglement exists and that the universe can’t be described in terms of Feynman’s simplicity, but this is a lie as exposed by the following facts:

Editorial policy of the American Physical Society journals (including PRL and PRA):

From: Physical Review A [mailto:pra@aps.org]
Sent: 19 February 2004 19:47
To: ch.thompson1@virgin.net
Subject: To_author AG9055 Thompson

Re: AG9055

Dear Dr. Thompson,

… With regard to local realism, our current policy is summarized succinctly, albeit a bit bluntly, by the following statement from one of our Board members:

“In 1964, John Bell proved that local realistic theories led to an upper bound on correlations between distant events (Bell’s inequality) and that quantum mechanics had predictions that violated that inequality. Ten years later, experimenters started to test in the laboratory the violation of Bell’s inequality (or similar predictions of local realism). No experiment is perfect, and various authors invented ‘loopholes’ such that the experiments were still compatible with local realism. Of course nobody proposed a local realistic theory that would reproduce quantitative predictions of quantum theory (energy levels, transition rates, etc.). This loophole hunting has no interest whatsoever in physics.” …’

There you have the proof that the editor of the Physical Review is just a mad liar, who relies on ‘experts’ who think that exposing the lies of Alain Aspect’s egotistical false claims and ridding the world of superstitious religious mainstream junk physics ‘has no interest whatsoever in physics’. Duh! What a nutter. That makes me so, so angry. The Physical Review is not a physics journal, it is a religious journal which supports proved lies by the suppression of factual discoveries about nature! They are all insane groupthink nutters, like the U.S. Government when it received warning of an impending attack on Pearl Harbor and decided not to even bother passing on the warning, like the nutters who voted for Hitler, like the nutters who supported communism, and like the nutters who think that it is sensible to follow lemmings just for the sake of fashion. The censored author of this ‘rebuke’, the late Caroline H. Thompson, of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, had earlier written in her mainstream-damning arXiv preprint Subtraction of ‘accidentals’ and the validity of Bell tests, http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/9903/9903066v2.pdf:

‘In some key Bell experiments, including two of the well-known ones by Alain Aspect, 1981-2, it is only after the subtraction of ‘accidentals’ from the coincidence counts that we get violations of Bell tests. The data adjustment, producing increases of up to 60% in the test statistics, has never been adequately justified. Few published experiments give sufficient information for the reader to make a fair assessment. There is a straightforward and well known realist model that fits the unadjusted data very well. In this paper, the logic of this realist model and the reasoning used by experimenters in justification of the data adjustment are discussed. It is concluded that the evidence from all Bell experiments is in urgent need of re-assessment, in the light of all the known ‘loopholes’. Invalid Bell tests have frequently been used, neglecting improved ones derived by Clauser and Horne in 1974. ‘Local causal’ explanations for the observations have been wrongfully neglected.’

After her tragic death from cancer in 2006, her website was preserved, where she wrote in defiance of the Physical Review editor man:

http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/EPR_Progress.htm:

‘The story, as you may have realised, is that there is no evidence for any quantum weirdness: quantum entanglement of separated particles just does not happen. This means that the theoretical basis for quantum computing and encryption is null and void. It does not necessarily follow that the research being done under this heading is entirely worthless, but it does mean that the funding for it is being received under false pretences. It is not surprising that the recipients of that funding are on the defensive. I’m afraid they need to find another way to justify their work, and they have not yet picked up the various hints I have tried to give them. There are interesting correlations that they can use. It just happens that they are ordinary ones, not quantum ones, better described using variations of classical theory than quantum optics.

‘Why do I seem to be almost alone telling this tale? There are in fact many others who know the same basic facts about those Bell test loopholes, though perhaps very few who have even tried to understand the real correlations that are at work in the PDC experiments. I am almost alone because, I strongly suspect, nobody employed in the establishment dares openly to challenge entanglement, for fear of damaging not only his own career but those of his friends.’

The stringy mainstream still ignores Feynman’s path integrals as being a reformulation of QM (a third option), seeing them instead as QFT: Feynman’s paper ‘Space-Time Approach to Non-Relativistic Quantum Mechanics’, Reviews of Modern Physics, volume 20, page 367 (1948), makes it clear that his path integrals are a reformulation of quantum mechanics which gets rid of the uncertainty principle and all the pseudoscience it brings with it.

Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin, 1990, pp. 55-6, and 84:

‘I would like to put the uncertainty principle in its historical place: when the revolutionary ideas of quantum physics were first coming out, people still tried to understand them in terms of old-fashioned ideas … But at a certain point the old fashioned ideas would begin to fail, so a warning was developed that said, in effect, “Your old-fashioned ideas are no damn good when …”. If you get rid of all the old-fashioned ideas and instead use the ideas that I’m explaining in these lectures – adding arrows [arrows = path phase amplitudes in the path integral, i.e. e^iS(n)/h-bar] for all the ways an event can happen – there is no need for an uncertainty principle! … on a small scale, such as inside an atom, the space is so small that there is no main path, no “orbit”; there are all sorts of ways the electron could go, each with an amplitude. The phenomenon of interference [by field quanta] becomes very important …’

So classical and quantum field theories differ due to the physical exchange of field quanta between charges. This exchange of discrete virtual quanta causes chaotic interferences to individual fundamental charges in strong force fields. Field quanta induce Brownian-type motion of individual electrons inside atoms, but this does not arise for very large charges (many electrons in a big, macroscopic object), because statistically the virtual field quanta avert randomness in such cases by averaging out. If the average rate of exchange of field quanta is N quanta per second, then the random standard deviation is 100/N^1/2 percent. Hence the statistics prove that the bigger the rate of field quanta exchange, the smaller the amount of chaotic variation. For large numbers of field quanta resulting in forces over long distances and for large charges like charged metal spheres in a laboratory, the rate at which charges exchange field quanta with one another is so high that the Brownian motion resulting to individual electrons from chaotic exchange gets statistically cancelled out, so we see a smooth net force and classical physics is accurate to an extremely good approximation.

Thus, chaos on small scales has a provably beautiful simple physical mechanism and mathematical model behind it: path integrals with phase amplitudes for every path. This is analogous to the Brownian motion of individual 500 m/sec air molecules striking dust particles which creates chaotic motion due to the randomness of air pressure on small scales, while a ship with a large sail is blown steadily by averaging out the chaotic impacts of immense numbers of air molecule impacts per second. So nature is extremely simple: there is no evidence for the mainstream ‘uncertainty principle’-based metaphysical selection of parallel universes upon wavefunction collapse. (Stringers love metaphysics.) Dr Thomas Love, who writes comments at Dr Woit’s Not Even Wrong blog sometimes, kindly emailed me a preprint explaining:

‘The quantum collapse [in the mainstream interpretation of quantum mechanics, where a wavefunction collapse occurs whenever a measurement of a particle is made] occurs when we model the wave moving according to Schroedinger (time-dependent) and then, suddenly at the time of interaction we require it to be in an eigenstate and hence to also be a solution of Schroedinger (time-independent). The collapse of the wave function is due to a discontinuity in the equations used to model the physics, it is not inherent in the physics.’

‘… nature has a simplicity and therefore a great beauty.’

- Richard P. Feynman (The Character of Physical law, p. 173)

The double slit experiment, Feynman explains, proves that light uses a small core of space where the phase amplitudes for paths add together instead of cancelling out, so if that core overlaps two nearby slits the photon diffracts through both the slits:

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

– R. P. Feynman, QED, Penguin, 1990, page 54.

Hence nature is very simple, with no need for the wavefunction collapse or the ‘multiverse’ lie of crackpot Hugh Everett III who wouldn’t even incorporate the physical dynamics of fallout particle sizes and deposition phenomena in his purely statistical paper allegedly predicting fallout casualties:

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

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

‘The history of science teaches that the greatest advances in the scientific domain have been achieved by bold thinkers who perceived new and fruitful approaches that others failed to notice. If one had taken the ideas of these scientific geniuses who have been the promoters of modern science and submitted them to committees of specialists, there is no doubt that the latter would have viewed them as extravagant and would have discarded them for the very reason of their originality and profundity. As a matter of fact, the battles waged, for example by Fresnel and by Pasteur suffice to prove that some of these pioneers ran into a lack of understanding from the side of eminent scholars which they had to fight with vigor before emerging as the winners. More recently, in the domain of theoretical physics, of which I can speak with knowledge, the magnificent novel conceptions of Lorentz and Planck, and particularly Einstein also clashed with the incomprehension of eminent scientists. The new ideas here triumphed; but, in proportion as the organization of research becomes more rigid, the danger increases that new and fruitful ideas will be unable to develop freely.

‘Let us state in a few words the conclusion to be drawn from the foregoing. While, by the very force of circumstances, research and teaching are weighted down by administrative structures and financial concerns and by the heavy armature of strict regulations and planning, it becomes more indispensable than ever to preserve the freedom of scientific research and the freedom of initiative for the original investigators, because these freedoms have always been and will always remain the most fertile sources for the grand progress of science.’

- Nobel Laureate Louis de Broglie, April 25, 1978

‘The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science. If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated.’ – Wilfred Trotter, 1941

‘The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.’ – Paul Johnson

‘The expression of dissenting views may not seem like much of a threat to a powerful organization, yet sometimes it triggers an amazingly hostile response. The reason is that a single dissenter can puncture an illusion of unanimity. … The existence of suppression of dissent as a pervasive feature of science calls for a reconceptualization of the enterprise. Rather than being solely a search for the truth, science is closely bound up with the exercise of power. This is normally acknowledged for totalitarian regimes and for military dictatorships, where intellectual suppression is overt. But the same sorts of processes occur, usually in a more subtle fashion, in liberal democracies. From Copernicus to Darwin to Einstein, as well as countless others who have challenged the conventional wisdom, it has been the dissidents, the outsiders, the contrarians who have spurred science on. We should protect and encourage dissent, even when we disagree with the dissidents.’ – Brian Martin

‘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.’ – Frank J. Tipler, Refereed Journals: Do They Insure Quality or Enforce Orthodoxy?

For the proof that redshift is not caused by light getting tired and losing energy by interacting with particles, please see the really excellent article on the internet by Professor Ned Wright, Errors in Tired Light Cosmology. The whole spectrum of redshifted light is uniformly shifted to lower frequencies, which wouldn’t occur if light was being made red by scattering or absorption effects. We know that force-causing exchange radiation has specific frequencies because that’s how the Casimir effect is produced (long wavelengths of vacuum radiation are excluded between two metal plates, which get pushed together by the full spectrum of radiation beyond the plates). The redshift part of the big bang is solid science with plenty of facts behind it.

‘Popular accounts, and even astronomers, talk about expanding space. But how is it possible for space … to expand? … ‘Good question,’ says [Steven] Weinberg. ‘The answer is: space does not expand. Cosmologists sometimes talk about expanding space – but they should know better.’ [Martin] Rees agrees wholeheartedly. ‘Expanding space is a very unhelpful concept’.’ – New Scientist, 17 April 1993, pp32-3. (The volume of spacetime expands, but the fabric of spacetime, the gravitational field, flows around moving particles as the universe expands.)

‘Looking back at the development of physics, we see that the ether, soon after its birth, became the enfant terrible of the family of physical substances. … We shall say our space has the physical property of transmitting waves and so omit the use of a word we have decided to avoid. The omission of a word from our vocabulary is of course no remedy; the troubles are indeed much too profound to be solved in this way. Let us now write down the facts which have been sufficiently confirmed by experiment without bothering any more about the ‘e—r’ problem.’ – Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, Evolution of Physics, 1938, pp. 184-5. (This is a very political comment by them, and shows them acting in a very political – rather than purely scientific – light.)

‘The idealised physical reference object, which is implied in current quantum theory, is a fluid permeating all space like an aether.’ – Sir Arthur S. Eddington, MA, DSc, LLD, FRS, Relativity Theory of Protons and Electrons, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1936, p. 180.

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

‘Some distinguished physicists maintain that modern theories no longer require an aether… I think all they mean is that, since we never have to do with space and aether separately, we can make one word serve for both, and the word they prefer is ‘space’.’ – A.S. Eddington, New Pathways in Science, vol. 2, p39, 1935.

‘All charges are surrounded by clouds of virtual photons, which spend part of their existence dissociated into fermion-antifermion pairs. The virtual fermions with charges opposite to the bare charge will be, on average, closer to the bare charge than those virtual particles of like sign. Thus, at large distances, we observe a reduced bare charge due to this screening effect.’ – I. Levine, D. Koltick, et al., Physical Review Letters, v.78, 1997, no.3, p.424.

‘It seems absurd to retain the name ‘vacuum’ for an entity so rich in physical properties, and the historical word ‘aether’ may fitly be retained.’ – Sir Edmund T. Whittaker, A History of the Theories of the Aether and Electricity, 2nd ed., v1, p. v, 1951.

‘It has been supposed that empty space has no physical properties but only geometrical properties. No such empty space without physical properties has ever been observed, and the assumption that it can exist is without justification. It is convenient to ignore the physical properties of space when discussing its geometrical properties, but this ought not to have resulted in the belief in the possibility of the existence of empty space having only geometrical properties… It has specific inductive capacity and magnetic permeability.’ – Professor H.A. Wilson, FRS, Modern Physics, Blackie & Son Ltd, London, 4th ed., 1959, p. 361.

‘Scientists have thick skins. They do not abandon a theory merely because facts contradict it. They normally either invent some rescue hypothesis to explain what they then call a mere anomaly or, if they cannot explain the anomaly, they ignore it, and direct their attention to other problems. Note that scientists talk about anomalies, recalcitrant instances, not refutations. History of science, of course, is full of accounts of how crucial experiments allegedly killed theories. But such accounts are fabricated long after the theory had been abandoned. … What really count are dramatic, unexpected, stunning predictions: a few of them are enough to tilt the balance; where theory lags behind the facts, we are dealing with miserable degenerating research programmes. Now, how do scientific revolutions come about? If we have two rival research programmes, and one is progressing while the other is degenerating, scientists tend to join the progressive programme. This is the rationale of scientific revolutions. … Criticism is not a Popperian quick kill, by refutation. Important criticism is always constructive: there is no refutation without a better theory. Kuhn is wrong in thinking that scientific revolutions are sudden, irrational changes in vision. The history of science refutes both Popper and Kuhn: on close inspection both Popperian crucial experiments and Kuhnian revolutions turn out to be myths: what normally happens is that progressive research programmes replace degenerating ones.’ – Imre Lakatos, Science and Pseudo-Science, pages 96-102 of Godfrey Vesey (editor), Philosophy in the Open, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1974.

If he was writing today, maybe he would have to reverse a lot of that to account for the hype-type “success” of string theory ideas that fail to make definite (quantitative) checkable predictions, while alternatives are censored out completely.

No longer could Dr Lakatos claim that:

“What really count are dramatic, unexpected, stunning predictions: a few of them are enough to tilt the balance; where theory lags behind the facts, we are dealing with miserable degenerating research programmes.”

It’s quite the opposite. The mainstream, dominated by string theorists like Jacques Distler and others at arXiv, can actually stop “silly” alternatives from going on to arXiv and being discussed, as they did with me:

http://arxiv.org/help/endorsement -

‘We don’t expect you to read the paper in detail, or verify that the work is correct, but you should check that the paper is appropriate for the subject area. You should not endorse the author … if the work is entirely disconnected with current [string theory] work in the area.’

What serious researcher is going to treat quantum field theory objectively and work on the simplest possible mechanisms for a spacetime continuum, when it will result in their censorship from arXiv, their inability to find any place in academia to study such ideas, and continuous hostility and ill-informed ‘ridicule’ from physically ignorant string ‘theorists’ who know a lot of very sophisticated maths and think that gives them the authority to act as ‘peer-reviewers’ and censor stuff from journals that they refuse to first read?

Sent: 02/01/03 17:47
Subject: Your_manuscript LZ8276 Cook

Physical Review Letters does not, in general, publish papers on alternatives to currently accepted theories.

Yours sincerely,
Stanley G. Brown, Editor,
Physical Review Letters

Now, why has this ‘nice genuine guy’ still not published his personally endorsed proof of what is a ‘currently accepted’ prediction for the strength of gravity? Will he ever do so? Don’t say the editor of Physical Review Letters is another quack? I’m afraid so:

‘… in addition to the dimensionality issue, the string theory approach is (so far, in almost all respects) restricted to being merely a perturbation theory.’

- Sir Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality, Jonathan Cape, London, 2004, page 896.

Richard P. Feynman points out in The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation, page 30, that gravitons do not have to be spin-2, which has never been observed! Despite this, the censorship of the facts by mainstream ’stringy’ theorists persists, with professor Jacques Distler and others at arXiv believing with religious zeal that (1) the rank-2 tensors of general relativity prove spin-2 gravitons and (2) string theory is the only consistent theory for spin-2 gravitons, despite Einstein’s own warning shortly before he died:

‘I consider it quite possible that physics cannot be based on the [smooth geometric] field principle, i.e., on continuous structures. In that case, nothing remains of my entire castle in the air.’

- Albert Einstein in a letter to friend Michel Besso, 1954.

Epilogue on groupthink

Above: a still from the video below showing Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown smirking at the complaints in the European Parliament by Daniel Hannan MEP about the £100 billion of taxpayers debt he developed as Chancellor and Prime Minister. Groupthink means he will profit from what he does, just as Witten will escape justice for lying about string theory predicting gravity:

‘Groupthink is a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. Individual creativity, uniqueness, and independent thinking are lost in the pursuit of group cohesiveness, as are the advantages of reasonable balance in choice and thought that might normally be obtained by making decisions as a group. During groupthink, members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of consensus thinking. A variety of motives for this may exist such as a desire to avoid being seen as foolish, or a desire to avoid embarrassing or angering other members of the group. Groupthink may cause groups to make hasty, irrational decisions, where individual doubts are set aside, for fear of upsetting the group’s balance.’

1. His multibillion pound ‘New Deal’ for the young unemployed has failed just as predictable (he made no effort to make it work, it was just a back-of-the-envelope media spin idea to waste money): there are now 850,000 young people who are ‘NEET’: Not in Employment, Education, or Training. What a failure!

2. His tax credits system has rewarded single mothers for having as many children by different men as they can, fuelling dependency, juvenile delinquency and family breakdown.

3. He blocked Frank Field’s attempts for welfare reform, allowing alcoholics and drug addicts to live on premium-rate incapacity benefit.

4. He threw tens of billions of pounds into the unreformed National Health Service where it was poured down the drain, while he was reducing the freedoms to be offered to foundation hospitals.

5. He frustrated Tony Blairs plans to give more freedom to head teachers and more choice to parents while he was Chancellor.

6. He sank the country into debt to make the powerful Labour Party backers (the public sector unions and the left wingers) support his leadership ambitions. It was the personal greed of one man for power and glory as a leading statesman which sank Britain into crisis.

7. “Mr Brown’s expenses claim receipts, part of a batch of ministerial claims obtained by The Daily Telegraph, show that he paid his brother, a senior executive of EDF Energy, £6,577 over 26 months for cleaning services. Downing Street said that the brothers had shared a cleaner for a number of years.” – Philippe Naughton, ‘No 10 releases Gordon Brown’s cleaning contract’, From Times Online, May 8, 2009.

This proves how sinister Prime Minister Gordon Brown is: squandering vast sums of public expenses money from taxpayers on cleaning his flat after adding £100 billion to the British national debt as Chancellor and Prime Minister. Gordon Brown the prime minister was previously Chancellor of finances and is reponsible for the money wasting and UK debt over the last 12 years or so (from 1997). During the global economic boom years from 1997-2008, he squandered taxpayers money on rubbish nobody wanted like the Millennium Dome, and funded the squandering by borrowing money, adding £100 billion to the public debt. Recently newspapers have exposed that he personally has been claiming thousands of pounds in expenses for having a small flat cleaned. As Chancellor, he a decade ago deregulated the banks in the UK, enabling them to lend vast amounts to risky debtors and thus cause the banking crisis in the UK recently. Not only that, he got rid of the UK gold standard when it was at its lowest value, just before the value of gold shot up, thus making a fantastic loss for the taxpayer. But he didn’t worry because he doesn’t use his own elbow grease, let alone pay out of his own pocket, to have his flat cleaned. The taxpayer gets the bill, as always, for his incompetence and failure.

Above: this is the U-tube attack on him to his face in the European Parliament by Daniel Hannan MEP:

‘The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around £20,000. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child. … it is true that we are all sailing together into the squall – but not every vessel in the convoy is in the same dilapidated condition. Other ships used the good years to caulk their hulls and clear up their rigging – in other words, to pay off debt – but you used the good years to raise borrowing yet further. As a consequence, under your captaincy, our hull is pressed deep into the water line, under the accumulated weight of your debt. We are now running a deficit that touches almost 10% of GDP – an unbelievable figure. More than Pakistan, more than Hungary – countries where the IMF has already been called in.

‘Now, it’s not that you’re not apologising – like everyone else, I’ve long accepted that you’re pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things – it’s that you’re carrying on, wilfully worsening the situation, wantonly spending what little we have left. Last year, in the last twelve months, 125,000 private sector jobs have been lost – and yet you’ve created 30,000 public sector jobs. Prime Minister you cannot go on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorging of the unproductive bit.

‘You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we’re well place to weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like a Brezhnev-era Apparatchik giving the party line. You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it’s nonsense. Everyone knows that Britain is the worst placed to go into these hard times. The IMF has said so. The European Commission has said so. The markets have said so, which is why our currency has devalued by 30% …’

In the same way to the continuing debacle of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, we will have to put up with Edward Witten and his fellow travellers like Lubos Motl ignoring the factual reality of the world and promoting lies with continuing spin and propaganda. People like Gordon Brown and Edward Witten have obtained positions of power and trust, but the same was true of Hitler in 1933 so it doesn’t prove that they are currently acting professionally. Politics is the opposite of science:

‘Unfortunately, I am very sceptical of the potential impact of this book on the field of particle physics. The Emperor is naked, but he is perceived as irrelevant as well.’

- Dr. Bojan Tunguz, http://www.amazon.com/Not-Even-Wrong-Failure-Physical/dp/0465092756

I’m sure that anyone reading this particular post will grasp Dr Tunguz’s point. String theory cheapens physics by replacing the well proved mathematical physics structure with abject unproved speculations. Nothing in string theory is internally self-consistent; it’s not even been proved self-consistent to a few terms in the perturbative expansion. Furthermore, it can’t make predictions, it doesn’t deal with reality, it’s a religion. This is why people don’t study physics so much now in England (A-level uptake of physics is falling, university physics departments have been closing as I have reported on this blog for years); intelligent people see the dogma of science for the political spin confidence trick it is, irrelevant to the real world. The mainstream sees the solution as the need for more lying spin and hype, just like Gordon Brown sees the solution to his political problems as more lies and more spin and hype. In other words, treat people with hatred and contempt and insult their intelligence! Those living under Witten and those who in the past lived under Hitler, can do nearly nothing about it. Once you give a dictator power, it’s too late to change your mind. If you try to oppose the lies and spin, you will just draw attention to yourself in a negative way and receive abuse in consequence! If you try to be reasonable, you will be ignored completely! All your objections to fashionable dictators like Gordon Brown, Hitler, and Witten have as much relevance to politics or physics as Gordon Brown, Hitler, and Witten themselves have to useful politics or useful physics. In other words, the mere ability to recognise the problem and its solution is irrelevant, because there is no mechanism available to get anyone to listen and to implement the facts. Everything must be approved by groupthink, which is automatically hostile to advance!

Forum: On the importance of being creative – Innovative thinkers should be allowed to come to the fore. From issue 1692 of New Scientist magazine, 25 November 1989, by HOWARD FIRTH (Howard Firth is an independent science consultant, and was director of the first Edinburgh Science Festival.)

‘It’s not merely that people with creativity and flair are not properly paid; in many places they are not wanted, as they unsettle those in more established positions.

‘The problem is that the result of all the training in the dominant disciplines of finance, personnel and marketing is not to encourage new ways of thinking, but to keep people thinking along established lines. The skills we are recruiting for are those of the fast talker and the forceful personality, the utilisers of the here and now, rather than the creative minds that constantly question the given order of things.

‘And, of course, each new layer of conventional-thinking, establishment-minded people has to protect itself by appointing more conventional-thinking and establishment-minded people below, thereby building up every year an even stronger wall against the creative thinkers who find that, as time goes on, even their most positive attitudes crumble into bitterness. Every year, some new government initiative comes along – and successive governments deserve credit for at least trying. The trouble with enterprise and training initiatives is that the people who are put in charge of them are often the type of people who have got there because of their ability in conventional ways of doing things. …

‘Catt argues that as bodies of knowledge grow, they become stronger in keeping out any new items of knowledge that appear to question the fundamental base of the established knowledge and its practitioners. To assist the propagation of new ideas, he proposes the creation of an electronic information-sharing network.’

As Machiavelli noted in Chapter VI of his medieval book of guidance for politicians, The Prince: ’… the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.’

This, plus being on the receiving end of groupthink orthodoxy as a kid with a speech problem, is what has led me to hate the kind of majority-is-always-right politics and politicians which often win the majority of votes in so-called ‘democracy’ today, a ‘democracy’ in which the amount of choice is pitifully small – basically a choice every four years between two parties which are relatively similar in trying to be popular enough to win! This type of ‘democracy’ seems fairly distant from the original form of democracy practised in the city states of Ancient Greece, where all citizens would vote daily for policies. The number of decisions each citizen is able to participate in has therefore fallen by a factor of at least (365 days)*(4 years) = 1,460, and in modern ‘democracy’ people have to form pressure groups, get the media on their side, and try to shame elected politicians in to taking notice of some problem and acting upon it: in the real world you have to fight not vote for freedom even in a democracy, using tactics of pestering the media and those who don’t want to know which are hardly that much different from those used by many of the dissenters in the Soviet Union (which had effectively one-party elections, and claimed in its propaganda to be democratic, too!). So there are different forms of democracy, and ours is not necessarily as good as it could be. This problem applies not only to mainstream party politics, but all the way through the expert quangos, educational committees, technical journal editorial committees and ‘peer’-reviewer politics. Science is entirely different in nature from the political system which prints, promotes and teaches science. Propaganda can make a scientific failure look like a success by excluding a better theory and by dismissing errors as ‘mere anomalies’.

The nuclear test by North Korea is a good example of the kind of thing I’m fighting on another blog about nuclear weapons testing: terrorist dictatorships are being encouraged to go into nuclear proliferation by groupthink based obscene exaggerations of the effects of nuclear weapons. Mainstream physicists in the West have lied that there is no such thing as effective easy improvised civil defense against the bomb, while exaggerating the effects of nuclear weapons in total disagreement with the hard facts from Hiroshima, Nagasaki and other nuclear explosions. This is the cause of nuclear proliferation, and the cause of the threat to civilization. What the scum don’t realize is that no amount of pacifist hot air will protect you against radiation, but civil defense countermeasures will! No amount of sanctions will do anything but increase the suffering of the oppressed people, and harden the resolve of the leadership which isn’t affected by the sanctions anyway. Sanctions punish the innocent. Political diplomacy and sanctions are no use against dictatorship, as proved by the case of dictatorships in history. All they do is to hand the dictatorship some real facts to supplement its lying propaganda, showing that the West really increases the suffering of its perfectly innocent, impoverished people out of Western paranoid delusions, etc., and claiming that it is merely trying to get the same nuclear security as the West to protect itself from war and thus maintain the peace by deterring aggressors.

UPDATE:

copy of a comment to Louise Riofrio’s blog:

http://riofriospacetime.blogspot.com/2009/06/another-voice.html

Hi Louise,

Thank you very much for blogging about the problems in the mainstream lambda cold dark model.

General relativity falsely replaces the discontinuous (particulate) distribution of fields and matter with a smooth artificial stress-energy-momentum tensor, T_{ab}.

This is equated to the curvature Ricci tensor and contraction term, so the whole of general relativity is artificial to begin with, regardless of gravitons! It’s a false continuum source model being used to represent particulate (quantized) energy fields and particulate matter!

Anyone can see general relativity is obsolete classical junk, only relevant for physics as a fully relativistic correction to classical Newtonian gravity, which gets the light curvature etc. correct by energy conservation!

It’s not a complete theory of gravity. General relativity implicitly assumes (by taking a universal fixed Newtonian coupling constant G for the entire universe) – without any evidence – that there is no gravitational mechanism within the universe.

When I point out these problems, the mainstream says falsely “well it’s the best theory of gravity until we have a quantum theory of gravity”. Duh! Some people have worked out a theory of gravity, and they just suppress it from journals and even from arXiv,

http://arxiv.org/help/endorsement -

‘We don’t expect you to read the paper in detail, or verify that the work is correct, but you should check that the paper is appropriate for the subject area. You should not endorse the author … if the work is entirely disconnected with current [string theory] work in the area.’

Thanks also for the update about Jacqui Smith going. That’s excellent news. Maybe if the new Home Secretary spends less time submitting claims to get the taxpayer to pay for her husband’s dirty porn on Virgin Cable, work visas will be done more efficiently! (Or is that just wishful thinking?)

I’ve suspended my Facebook account to avoid distraction until I’ve finished writing a new paper on gravity, reviewing all the theories.

Copy of a comment to Louise Riofrio’s blog:

http://riofriospacetime.blogspot.com/2009/05/inconsistent-with-inflationary-lcdm.html

Hi Qubit,

Planck had to introduce quantum theory in order to explain the blackbody radiation spectrum curve which doesn’t go to infinity at high frequencies which classical theory predicted; and Bohr had to introduce quantized orbits to explain observed line spectra.

The trouble was started by Ernest Rutherford’s impatient and insulting letter to Niels Bohr dated 20 March 1913, where Rutherford stated:

“There appears to me one grave difficulty in your hypothesis which I have no doubt you fully realize [conveniently not mentioned in your paper], namely, how does an electron decide with what frequency it is going to vibrate at when it passes from one stationary state to another? It seems to me that you would have to assume that the electron knows beforehand where it is going to stop.”

(Quotation from: A. Pais, “Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World”, 1985, page 212.)

Rutherford made two errors here.

1. New correct theories will introduce anomalies at first, until a lot more research is sponsored to sort out the problems. E.g., Dalton’s theory that all atoms were composed of integer masses was ridiculed and rejected at first because the mass of chlorine is 35.5 times that of hydrogen. Later, it became clear that chlorine contains istotopes with the same basic chemistry (the same number of protons and electrons) but differing numbers of neutrons.

2. The real reason why electrons ‘know’ when to stop radiating (i.e., when they are in the ground state), is simply that all electrons in the universe radiate and exchange gauge boson radiation with one another. This radiation constitutes the electric fields around charges. Because they are all radiating, achieve equilibrium and radiate as much energy as they receive when in thr ground state!

Rutherford by similar “reasoning” could have also denied Prevost’s 1792 thermodynamic discovery that hot objects forever radiate, by claiming that if this were so, the ground would freeze! Once a hot object has cooled to the same temperature as the surroundings, its temperature can’t decrease any further due to its continued emission of radiation, because it then receives back from the surroundings radiation at the same rate that it emits radiation!

Bohr used wavefunction collapse to oppose realism in nature, but Dr Thomas S. Love of California State University emailed me the following:

‘The quantum collapse [in the mainstream interpretation of quantum mechanics, where a wavefunction collapse occurs whenever a measurement of a particle is made] occurs when we model the wave moving according to Schroedinger (time-dependent) and then, suddenly at the time of interaction we require it to be in an eigenstate and hence to also be a solution of Schroedinger (time-independent). The collapse of the wave function is due to a discontinuity in the equations used to model the physics, it is not inherent in the physics.’

Caroline H. Thompson of University of Wales, Aberystwyth, stated in http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/9903/9903066v2.pdf:

‘In some key Bell experiments, including two of the well-known ones by Alain Aspect, 1981-2, it is only after the subtraction of ‘accidentals’ from the coincidence counts that we get violations of Bell tests. The data adjustment, producing increases of up to 60% in the test statistics, has never been adequately justified.’

http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/EPR_Progress.htm:

‘The story, as you may have realised, is that there is no evidence for any quantum weirdness: quantum entanglement of separated particles just does not happen. This means that the theoretical basis for quantum computing and encryption is null and void. …. the funding for it is being received under false pretences.’

http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/Papers/Crasemann-CHT%20correspondence%202004.htm

Editorial policy of the American Physical Society journals (including PRL and PRA):

“This loophole hunting has no interest whatsoever in physics.”

(For more information about this, please see my earlier blog post: http://nige.wordpress.com/2009/05/10/feynman-versus-mainstream-quantum-mechanics-uncertainty-principle/.)

Copy of a comment to Arcadian Functor:

http://kea-monad.blogspot.com/2009/06/question.html

Qubit,

Should I presume that your insult is directed to my comment?

I’m sorry for being born if that helps. But [there] is no reason why gravity isn’t simple in nature, being mediated by radiation (gravitons) exchanged by gravitational charges (mass and energy, like photons and electrons).

The falling apple is forced to accelerate due to graviton exchange. Feynman’s path integral sums a lot of graviton interactions by weighting them according to their influence. Many cancel out due to geometric reasons. E.g., if equal amounts of graviton exchange with distant masses occurs to the left and right of the apple, it is not accelerated right to left. The asymmetry is vertical.

String theorists begin with the Fietz-Pauli argument that quantum gravity is due to only the apple and the earth, thus ignoring the surrounding mass of 9 × 10^21 stars, totalling 3 × 10^52 kg.

By ignoring the 3 × 10^52 kg observable mass around us and assuming that the apple only exchanges gravitons with the earth, Fierz and Pauli found that gravitons would need to be spin-2 (180 degrees rotational symmetry, so outgoing and incoming gravitons look identical):

‘In the particular case of spin 2, rest-mass zero, the equations agree in the force-free case with Einstein’s equations for gravitational waves in general relativity in first approximation …’

– Conclusion of the paper by M. Fierz and W. Pauli, ‘On relativistic wave equations for particles of arbitrary spin in an electromagnetic field’, Proc. Roy. Soc. London, volume A173, pp. 211-232 (1939).

This is where string theory starts, building on error. What’s needed is a correct summation of graviton exchanges. I can do it geometrically using various mathematical tricks, but don’t have the time to build up an elaborate mathematical obfuscation that looks professionally impressive to mainstream physicists. It would be great if Categorical theorists could sort out quantum gravity!

Copy of a comment of mine to Arcadian functor which addresses the path integral in terms of the difference between the virtual photons perpetually being exchanged along all paths between charges to cause forces (where phase factor amplitudes cancel, making the virtual photons undetectable apart from effects like forces which they cause), and the ‘real’ photons where – as Feynman explained – the phase factor amplitudes add together, delivering a net pulse of energy (i.e., light):

http://kea-monad.blogspot.com/2009/05/twistor-seminar.html

“Twistor diagrams inspire also more ambitious ideas. The notion of plane wave is usually taken as given but twistors suggest as basic objects the analogs of light-rays which are waves completely localized in directions transverse to momentum direction. These are perfectly ok quantum objects since de-localization still takes place in the direction of momentum.” – Matti Pitkanen

Thanks for those links Matti. I’m deeply interested in the application of twistors to spin-1 massless particles such as real and virtual photons. Feynman points out that from the success of path integrals, light uses a small core of space where the phase amplitudes for paths add together instead of cancelling out, so if that core overlaps two nearby slits the photon diffracts through both the slits:

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

– R. P. Feynman, QED, Penguin, 1990, page 54.

Feynman’s approach is that any light source radiates photons in all directions, along all paths, but most of those cancel out due to interference. The amplitudes of the paths near the classical path reinforce each other because their phase factors, representing the relative amplitude of a particular path, exp(-iHT) = exp(iS) where H is the Hamiltonian (kinetic energy in the case of a free particle), and S is the action for the particular path measured in quantum action units of h-bar (action S is the integral of the Lagrangian field equation over time for a given path).

Because you have to integrate the phase factor exp(iS) over all paths to obtain the resultant overall amplitude, clearly radiation is being exchanged over all paths, but is being cancelled over most of the paths somehow. The phase factor equation models this as interferences without saying physically what process causes the interferences.

One simple guess would be that an electron when radiates sends out radiation in all directions, along all possible paths, but most of this gets cancelled because all of the other electrons in the universe around it are doing the same thing, so the radiation just gets exchanged, cancelling out in ‘real’ photon effects. (The electron doesn’t lose energy, because it gains as much by receiving such virtual radiation as it emits, so there is equilibrium). Any “real” photon accompanying this exchange of unobservable (virtual) radiation is then represented by a small core of uncancelled paths, where the phase factors tend to add together instead of cancelling out.

Is the twistor nature of a particle like a photon compatible with this simple interpretation of the path integral for things like the double slit experiment, and virtual photons (the path integral for the coulomb force between charges)? I’m wondering whether the circulatory motion around the direction of propagation in twistors will cause the interferences and cancellation when they are exchanged in both directions between two charges, thus making virtual photons or gauge bosons invisibly apart from their role in causing forces?

Twistor diagrams

There is an interesting paper by Sir Roger Penrose, On the Origins of Twistor Theory in ‘Gravitation and Geometry, a volume in honour of I. Robinson’, Biblipolis, Naples, 1987. Section 8 of that paper is ‘Robinson Congruences and Twistors’ which contains:

Fig. 1, the diagram of a twistor published in the 2004 book Road to Reality, labelled: ‘A time-slice (t=0) of a Robinson congruence.’

Penrose writes there: ‘I had, somewhat earlier, worked out the geometry of a general Robinson congruence: in each time-slice t=const. of M the projections of the null directions into the slice are the tangents to a twisting family of linked circles (stereographically projected Clifford parallels on S⁴ – a picture with which I was well familiar), and the configuration moves with the speed of light in the (negative) direction of the one straight line among the circles. (See fig. 1′). …

‘I decided that the time had come to count the number of dimensions of the space R of Robinson congruences. I was surprised to find, by examining the freedom involved in Fig. 1′, that the number of real dimensions was only six (so of only three complex dimensions) whereas the special Robinson congruences, being determined by single rays, had five real dimensions. The general Robinson congruences must twist either right-handedly or left-handedly, so R had two disconnected components R⁺ and R^-, these having a common five-dimensional boundary S representing the special Robinson congruences. The complex 3-space of Robinson congruences was indeed divided into two halves R⁺ and R^- by S.

‘I had found my space! The points of S indeed had a very direct and satisfyingly relevant physical interpretation as “rays”, i.e. as the classical paths of massless particles. And the “complexification” of these rays led, as I had decided that I required, to the adding merely of one extra real dimension to S, yielding the complex 3-manifold PT = S U R^- U R⁺.’

So the twistor diagram is a Robinson congruence which represents a massless ray, which is interesting. Is there a relationship between the electric and magnetic field lines, and the spin-1, of a photon and the Robinson congruence?

Hat-tip to Asymptotia

Thanks to a blog post by Professor Clifford Johnson, I had a good laugh listening on iPlayer to the spoof BBC4 radio programme, ‘Down the Line: Series 3: Episode 2′, 11:00 pm Thursday, 7 May 2009 (unfortunately the BBC only keep each episode available online for one week). Here are some snippets which give you the flavour of it (excluding the dirty talk about ladies of course). Professor Andrew Vester has written the book, The String Conspiracy:

‘The thing about it is that there is no string theory, there is just a theory that there might be a theory. Nevertheless it has become the dominant theory in physics. If you don’t adhere to it, you won’t get funding, you won’t get promotion, you won’t get science prizes, you won’t get a job. That’s what my book is about, how string theory has stifled all other research and become like a form of medieval religious orthodoxy…. One set of beliefs has suffocated all others. … The Holy Grail of physics has always been to find the unifying theory of everything. … Einstein’s theory* talks about large objects; quantum mechanics talks about very small objects and we discovered that very small objects don’t behave in the same way as very large objects. … String theory was originally invented to explain the behaviour of hadrons. … Yoichiro Nambu recognised that the dual resonance model of strong interactions could be explained by a quantum mechanical model of strings. …. according to string theory we can have up to 26 dimensions.’ [Actually the mainstream limit has been taken as 11 dimensions since Witten's M-theory in 1995.]

Call-in from Katrina: ‘I’m a Christian, and for me string theory is so important because it explains God’s miracles. If you think about our world, the brane world, as a television inside a house; that is the bulk world, and we have only got our three dimensions where we are in the television, and in the bulk world there is the other [dimensions] out there, and that is where God is, and why we can’t see Him.’

Andrew Vester: ‘That’s exactly the point I’ve been making about string theory. It’s based on belief, there is no actual proof that any of the string theory stuff actually exists, and it’s exactly the same with religious belief. There’s no definite proof that God exists, therefore the belief in string theory is extremely close to the belief in God. And yes, they’re both dealing with things we can’t see, things that are hidden.’

*Even Einstein grasped this at the end of his life, when he wrote to Besso in 1954: “I consider it quite possible that physics cannot be based on the [classical differential equation] field principle, i.e., on continuous structures. In that case, nothing remains of my entire castle in the air, [non-quantum] gravitation theory included …”

Copy of a comment to Carl Brannen’s blog, Mass:

http://carlbrannen.wordpress.com/2009/05/15/the-force-of-gravity/

Nige
May 17, 2009 at 7:59 am

‘The fourth point of the paper is a computation of the gravitostatic attraction of gravity in Schwarzschild and GP coordinates. The result shows that if gravity is interpreted as due to a flux of gravitons, then that flux becomes stronger with distance. (That is, when integrated over the surface area of the sphere, the amount of flux increases with the radius.) So in the final part of the paper I showed that the amount of increase in flux is proportional to the square of the flux density. This is compatible with a theory of gravity where the graviton flux interacts with itself. Think “dark energy.”’

Ummm. Are you saying that you take a large sphere of space with radius r, containing the usual matter density (due to galaxies, etc.); the surface area of that sphere increases with r^2 but the volume and hence total mass in the sphere increases as r^3. Thus, the total mass per unit surface area of the sphere is directly proportional to the ratio (r^3)/(r^2) = r. If that’s the physics of your calculation, then it’s a nice simple argument, and one which I missed.

You don’t have to worry about gravitons interacting with themselves in low energy physics, because the coupling constant for gravity is so low, the field is normally weak and doesn’t contain significant energy to produce a lot of gravitons compared to masses. So at low energy (well below Planck scale), the main source for the emission of gravitons is mass, not gravity fields.

Sorry, I’ve just found that the title to the paper is hyperlinked to a PDF file. I’ll read it carefully!

Hostile reception to new developments

Something that needs research, before writing radical papers and trying to get them published, is the hostility to new developments that is generated by any innovation, good or bad.

Malcolm Gladwell, a former science writer for the Washington Post, in 2000 wrote a book called The Tipping Point (Little, Brown and Co.) which I’ve just read. It makes the point that sometimes there is only a small difference between an idea being fashionable and unfashionable, and those unfashionable ideas which are unstable (balanced at a tipping point) may need only a small push to make them gain mainstream attention.

To the practical, successful science journalist, the aim of science is to achieve consensus; to the hard-headed scientist the aim of politics is to achieve consensus. The common journalist can’t distinguish between the objective of science and that of politics. What matters in science are facts, not fashions. However, those scientists with revolutionary ideas who were considered successful were not those who discovered things and then hid the discoveries away, or merely sneaked them into papers that would be ignored by referees, but scientists like Galileo, Darwin, Einstein, and Bohr, who overcame hostility and ridicule from opponents before getting a fair hearing from the world. This ‘culture clash’ between political pseudoscience and science is not entirely irrelevant to scientists. Once vital facts are established, such need to be explained to people, regardless of the bias in favour of false opinions or beliefs that the people have in lieu of the facts. So scientists need to be able to explain things that are unfashionable, or else they will never overcome status quo.

Gladwell explains on pages 258-9 of his book that the way new ideas become attractive or fashionable is counter intuitive:

‘The world … does not accord with our intuition. … Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuitions. Without the evidence … which told them that their intuition about fantasy and reality was wrong, Sesame Street would today be a forgotten footnote in television history. Lester Wunderman’s gold box sounded like a silly idea until he proved how much more effective it was than conventional advertising. That no one responded to Kitty Genovese’s screams sounded like an open-and-shut case of human indifference, until careful psychological testing demonstrated the powerful influence of context. … human communication has its own set of very unusual and counterintuitive rules.

‘… We like to think of ourselves as autonomous and inner-directed, that who we are and how we act is something permanently set up by our genes and our temperament. … We are actually powerfully influenced by our surroundings, our immediate context, and the personalities of those around us. Taking the graffiti off the walls of New York’s subways turned New Yorkers into better citizens [crime rates fell]. Telling seminarians to hurry turned them into bad citizens. The suicide of a charismatic young Micronesian set off an epidemic of suicides that lasted for a decade. … To look closely at complex behaviors like smoking or suicide or crime is to appreciate how suggestible we are in the face of what we see and hear, and how acutely sensitive we are [at least, those who have always had good hearing and thus are not in the slightest autistic] to even the smallest details of everyday life. … social change is so volatile and often inexplicable, because it is the nature of all of us to be volatile and inexplicable. … By tinkering with the presentation of information, we can significantly improve its stickiness.’

Update: Peter Woit of Columbia has a new blog post up, Feynman Diagrams and Beyond:

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=1986

‘The Spring 2009 IAS newsletter is out, available online here. It includes the news that the IAS is stealing yet another physics faculty member from Harvard, with Matias Zaldarriaga moving there in the fall.

‘The cover story of the newsletter is called Feynman Diagrams and Beyond, and it starts with some history, emphasizing the role of the IAS’s Freeman Dyson. It goes on to describe recent work on the structure of gauge theory scattering amplitudes going on at the IAS, emphasizing recent work by IAS professor Arkani-Hamed and collaborators that uses twistor space techniques, as well as Maldacena’s work using AdS/CFT to relate such calculations to string theory. Arkani-Hamed (see related posting here) says he’s trying to find a direct formulation of the theory (not just the scattering amplitudes) in twistor space …

‘Evidence for the finiteness of N=8 supergravity has been around for a few years now, I first wrote about it here:

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=268

‘One reaction to this possibility from string theorists is to argue that N=8 supergravity has problems non-perturbatively. Another is to basically just ignore all evidence that there are QFTs with sensible perturbative expansions and keep on repeating the argument that “string theory is the only known way” to get a finite theory of quantum gravity.’

Update: copy of a comment to Arcadian Functor on the Quantum Mechanics Multiverse of Hugh Everett III

http://kea-monad.blogspot.com/2009/05/everett-today.html

Before learning that he was into many worlds quantum mechanics philosophy, around 1992 when trying to grasp fallout I went to SRIS in London specially to read a paper that Hugh Everett III’s co-authored, called ‘The Distribution and Effects of Fallout in Large Nuclear-Weapon Campaigns’, Operations Research, Vol. 7, No. 2, March-April 1959, pp. 226-248. My university didn’t have Operations Research but the SRIS of the British Library did.

It is completely and spectacularly devoid of any physics whatsoever about fallout; the whole fallout distribution mechanism is totally ignored. They don’t even consider the fallout particle-size distribution, which is key to determining whether the fallout is spread over a massive area in relatively uniform low concentrations or whether you get a very non-uniform distribution.

Exactly the same pseudoscience abounds in Hugh Everett III’s extravagant multiverse (many worlds) interpretation of the uncertainty principle:

‘If you … use the ideas that I’m explaining in these lectures – adding arrows for all the ways an event can happen – there is no need for an uncertainty principle! … on a small scale, such as inside an atom, the space is so small that there is no main path, no “orbit”; there are all sorts of ways the electron could go, each with an amplitude. The phenomenon of interference [by field quanta] becomes very important …’ (Feynman, QED, 1985, pp. 56, 84. Emphasis added.)

Dr Thomas Love states:

‘The quantum collapse [in the mainstream interpretation of quantum mechanics, where a wavefunction collapse occurs whenever a measurement of a particle is made] occurs when we model the wave moving according to Schroedinger (time-dependent) and then, suddenly at the time of interaction we require it to be in an eigenstate and hence to also be a solution of Schroedinger (time-independent). The collapse of the wave function is due to a discontinuity in the equations used to model the physics, it is not inherent in the physics.’

This is absolutely vital to Hugh Everett III’s many worlds speculations.

Alain Aspect’s experiments and PhD thesis ignore loopholes when claiming entanglement from photon correlations: the detectors are very inefficient and Aspect relies on the unproven assumption of the independence of emission events. His data has to be adjusted for fair sampling, the assumption that the ensemble of pairs detected is a fair sample of those emitted, which – given the low efficiencies of the detection of individual polarized photons – is highly questionable.

See the arXiv paper:

http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9903066:

‘In some key Bell experiments, including two of the well-known ones by Alain Aspect, 1981-2, it is only after the subtraction of “accidentals” from the coincidence counts that we get violations of Bell tests. The data adjustment, producing increases of up to 60% in the test statistics, has never been adequately justified.’

The Physical Review policy is to suppress these facts:

‘In 1964, John Bell proved that local realistic theories led to an upper bound on correlations between distant events (Bell’s inequality) and that quantum mechanics had predictions that violated that inequality. Ten years later, experimenters started to test in the laboratory the violation of Bell’s inequality (or similar predictions of local realism). No experiment is perfect, and various authors invented “loopholes” such that the experiments were still compatible with local realism. …

‘This loophole hunting has no interest whatsoever in physics.’

Thus the multiverse is not unquestionable dogma, which of course happened. Sorry if this comment is too long, off topic, or seems to ignore the rules of courtesy for comments, just delete it if so (I’ll copy it to my blog).

Copy of a comment to Louise Riofrio’s blog:

http://riofriospacetime.blogspot.com/2009/05/week.html

Hi Louise,

The ‘theoretical’ curve on the graph is the prediction of Alan Guth’s theory of inflation, right?

Your point is that inflation doesn’t predict the density fluctuations of the universe at 400,000 years when the cosmic microwave background originated?

I agree stongly that inflation is wrong. I wonder if you have a statement anywhere of exactly how the varying velocity of light produces uniform distribution of matter across wide angles of sky (over 60 degres) at 400,000 years after the big bang?

As you know, I accept that there is substance in GM = tc^3 relationship, but I challenge the idea that c varies to compensate for the variation of t while GM remain fixed. From the point of view of quantum gravity (I’m rewriting my paper on this to make it clearer), the only variables in the equation are G and t, so G increases in proportion to t. Normally this is ruled out along with Dirac’s hypothesis (Dirac guessed that G is inversely proportional to t) by Teller’s 1948 argument that if G varies, the compression in the big bang and in stars would vary fusion rates, affecting the abundance of elements from the big bang and the thermal history of the sun in the distant past. But if quantum gravity is unified with electromagnetism (which Teller ignored), both the strength of Coulomb repulsion of protons in fusion processes and the strength of gravitational attraction (compression) vary in the same way and offset one another, totally negating Teller’s argument and allowing fusion to be unhindered by a variation in G.

My argument is that the universe at 400,000 years has uniform density on large scales because gravity strength G was 400,000/13,700,000,000 = 0.03 of what it is today. That gravity was then only 3% of what it is today, prevented the clumping and kept the expanding universe very uniform until it started to age and G increased. This is how I get rid of inflation.

However, I’d like to understand your argument so I can compare in detail all predictions to COBE and WMAP observations of density fluctuations.

Update (22 May 2009): Peter Woit wrote a blog post called Why Colliders Have Two Detectors, where he stated:

‘Last year the D0 collaboration at the Tevatron published a claim of first observation of an Ωb particle (a baryon containing one bottom and two strange quarks), with a significance of 5.4 sigma and a mass of 6165 +/- 16.4 MeV. This mass was somewhat higher than expected from lattice gauge theory calculations.

‘Yesterday the CDF collaboration published a claim of observation of the same particle, with a significance of 5.5 sigma and a mass of 6054.4 +/- 6.9 MeV.

‘So, both agree that the particle is there at better than 5 sigma significance, but D0 says (at better than 6 sigma) that CDF has the mass wrong, and CDF says (at lots and lots of sigma..) that D0 has the mass wrong. They can’t both be right…’

Any discovery of new particles is vitally important to me, to further check the quantum gravity model. Dr Tommaso Dorigo wrote a comment and a blog post resolving the discrepancy in favour of the CDF detector result, which is what the quantum gravity model also agrees with! Thus, I submitted the following comment in response.

Copy of a comment to Tommaso Dorigo’s blog:

http://www.scientificblogging.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/cdf_vs_dzero_and_winner#comment-15435
05/22/09 | 05:31 AM

“And I think I am now convinced, dear reader, beyond any reasonable or unreasonable doubt, that who discovered the Omega_b particle is CDF. However mildly unlikely it may look, DZERO probably picked up a fluctuation mixed up with the true signal, and heavily underestimated their mass systematics.” – Tomasso

Hi Tommaso, your conclusion is also justified by a quantum gravity model prediction for mass that baryons should have masses close to an integer when expressed in units of 3/2 multiplied by the electron mass divided by alpha: 1.5*0.511*137 = 105 MeV.

CDF: 6054.4/105 = 57.88

D0 = 6165.0/105 = 58.71

The CDF mass is closer to an integer than D0, so it is more likely correct. This quantum gravity model attributes mass to an integer number of massive particles which interact with hadrons and leptons, giving them their masses. Like Dalton’s early idea of integer masses for atoms, it’s not exact because of the possibility of isotopes (e.g. the mass of chlorine was held up against Dalton’s idea until mass spectrometry showed that chlorine is a mixture of isotopes with differing numbers of massive neutrons) not to mention the mass defect due to variations in binding energy. But ilike Dalton’s idea, it is approximately correct for all known hadron and leptons:

It’s just a rough model, but it is substantiated by a quantum gravity path integral model for low energy physics, which shows from the force of gravity that all gravitational charges (masses) are derived from a single building block of mass, which is equal the mass of the Z_0 neutral weak boson, 91 GeV. This mass is coupled weakly to most particles due to the shielding due to vacuum polarization around standard model particle cores.

[To give a real world example, it is well known that by merely spinning a missile about its axis you reduce the exposure of the skin of the missile to weapons by a factor of Pi. This is because the exposure is measured in energy deposit per unit area, and this exposed area is obviously decreased by a factor of Pi if the missile is spinning quickly. For an electron, the spin is half integer, so like a Mobius strip (paper loop with half a turn), you have to rotate 720 degrees (not 360) to complete a 'rotation' back to the starting point. Therefore the effective edge-on exposure reduction for a spinning electron is 2Pi, rather than Pi.]

******

Tommaso kindly responded that he did not grasp the fine structure constant as a polarization shielding factor, so I explained:

Hi Tommaso,

The reason why alpha is a variable is vacuum polarization, e.g. at 91 GeV it falls from 1/137.036… to just 1/128.5 as reported in lepton collisions by Levine et al, in PRL, in 1997.

Alpha is the ratio of the low energy electric charge of an electron (i.e. the textbook charge for collisions and low energy physics generally below about 1 MeV energy, which corresponds to the required low-energy or IR cutoff on the logarithmic running coupling for QED interactions) to the bare core (high energy) charge of an electron.

To see why this is so, consider the QED electric charge suggested by the repulsive force generated by a simple exchange of virtual photons (field quanta) between two electrons.

Virtual photons are generated by virtual fermion annihilation loops in the vacuum (whereby virtual photons are being generated constantly by the annihilation of virtual fermion pairs, in an endless cycle). Now, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle says that the product of the uncertainties in momentum and distance is at least h-bar. Let uncertainty in momentum for virtual photons be p = mc, and the uncertainty in distance be x = ct. Hence the product of momentum and distance, px = (mc).(ct) = (mc^2)*t = Et which of course is still equal to h-bar, where E is energy (from Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence). This Heisenberg relationship (the product of energy and time equalling h-bar) is used in quantum field theory to determine the relationship between particle energy and lifetime: E = h-bar/ t. The maximum possible range of a virtual particle is equal to its mean lifetime t multiplied by c. Now for the slightly clever bit:

px = h-bar implies (when remembering p = mc, and E = mc^2):

x = h-bar / p = h-bar /(mc) = h-bar*c/E

so: E = h-bar*c/x

when using the classical definition of energy as force times distance (E = Fx, i.e. the energy required to exert force F over distance x in direction of the force is E):

F = E/x = (h-bar*c/x)/x

= h-bar*c/x^2

Notice that we have calculated the repulsive force between two electrons via quantum mechanics, and obtained a quantitative prediction complete with inverse-square law. When you compare this result to the usual coulomb force prediction for the force between two electrons for low energy physics, you find that the force above from quantum mechanics (neglecting the vacuum polarization shielding of the core of an electron) is about 137.036 bigger than that from coulomb’s law. Hence vacuum polariation reduces the bare core charge of an electron by a factor equal to the fine structure constant.

This 137.036… shielding factor applies to the vacuum polarzation region which extends from the bare core of an electron (believed by many people to be Planck size) out to the limiting distance for the pair production by a steady electric field, which is the IR cutoff and is predicted by Schwinger’s formula: 1.3*10^18 volts/metre (equation 359 in Dyson’s http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0608140 or equation 8.20 in Luis Alvarez-Gaume, and Miguel A. Vazquez-Mozo’s http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0510040 ). This electric field occurs out to 33 femtometres from the electron core, so all vacuum polarization (spacetime loops) and thus all vacuum shielding of electric charge occurs within 33 fm from the core of an electron.

Do you see the point now, that the 137.036 factor is the complete vacuum shielding? It’s a bit like going up a mountain. At sea level, you’re shielded from cosmic radiation by 10 tons/square metre of atmosphere (like being behind a 10 metres thick water radiation shield), which cuts the cosmic radiation by a factor of 100. As you get more energy to climb a mountain or go up in an aircraft to get nearer space, there is less shield between you and space so the cosmic radiation level increases. Flying at 36,000 feet, there is a 20 fold increase in cosmic radiation from 0.01 mR/hour to 0.20 mR/hr, and on the Moon (no atomsphere) you get totally unshielded radiation at 1 mR/hr.

Similarly, the reason why the 137.036 number falls at higher energy is because it is a shielding factor, and as you collide particles harder, get approach ever more closely, so there is less polarized vacuum between them to shield their electric charges. Hope this helps, and that you don’t mind me explaining the distinction between the running coupling and the fine structure constant. I can’t understand why the mainstream refuses to think physically about vacuum polarization shielding electric charge (which is a simple physical fact in capacitor dielectrics which used to be an area of electronics I worked in).

‘I fail to understand how the fine structure constant can be all it takes to predict particle masses, especially for hadrons which are quarks bound by the strong force.’

There’s a physical model of quantum gravity behind it, and the binding of quarks inside hadrons by the strong force doesn’t imply that the strong force couples the hadron to a Higgs-type massive field in the vacuum! All quarks have electric charges which are more important strong forces (colour charges) for coupling to external Higgs type mass fields, because they are longer ranged. The strong interaction is very short ranged, electric fields have longer range and can interact with the surrounding vacuum.

Tommaso unfortunately has become insulting after I took the trouble to resolve his “problem”:

Hi Tommaso,

‘I am still waiting for an answer on why the electromagnetic interactions are all it matters for the mass of hadrons, for which the bound is governed by strong ones.’

Thank you for pointing out that my reply was not adequate for you regarding the relationship of strong interactions to mass:

(1) Mass/energy is the charge of quantum gravity.

(2) Quantum gravity is related to electromagnetism, they’re both long range inverse square law forces and I’ve got an SU(2) mechanism which makes quantitative predictions for the forces of each which are correct. This is why mass depends on electromagnetic interactions between particle cores and the vacuum. This has been suppressed by string theory peer-reviewers at IoP journals.

For this reason I didn’t want to get your blog bogged down in this, and just commented on the quantization of masses, by analogy to Dalton, who didn’t even have a model of nuclear structure when analyzing masses of atoms.

Science doesn’t proceed direct from first theory to final theory in one step.

“In this latter case, letting your ego roam loose has a nocuous impact on my will to discuss with you. Do you think you can teach me quantum electrodynamics ? Answer frankly, instead than taking an attitude.”

If you think I have an ego compared to string theorists and others who can’t make predictions, you are welcome to your opinion. I suggest you delete all my comments from the thread instead of being abusive and insulting when I tried to help by replying to you insult. Best wishes, Nige

Update: the disagreement above was all my fault for stating facts. Facts have no place in modern physics, where people like Tommaso probably believe that quarks and gluons have masses and that the masses are determined by QCD not QED. In fact it is well-known to those who study physics carefully that you can’t ever isolate a quark, so you simply can’t measure its mass, even in principle. If you try to isolate a quark to determine its mass, you find that the binding energy you need to overcome in order to first separate it from the other quark or quarks (in the case of a meson or a baryon, respectively) exceeds the energy that will produce a new quark-antiquark pair in the vacuum via pair-production! Therefore, attempts to isolate quark masses are stupid even in principle, never mind experimentally! I’m 100% certain that Tommaso isn’t stupid because he has a PhD, but I think he is wrongly working with false theories about particle masses. Forget quark masses. They don’t exist for practical purposes! If you can never measure something like a quark mass, then the value you assign it depends on the details of the model you use to separate the supposed mass it has from that of the gluon field surounding it, and you are stating a theoretical mass, not a measurement! If you can’t measure something, leave it out of the list of inputs for other theories if you can! All the problems in particle physics today come from people having unobservable inputs to theories, e.g. string theory needs the hundred moduli that describe the shape and parameters of the unobservably small 6-dimensional Calabi-Yau manifold. Because you can’t ever hope to measure these inputs, the theory is pretty useless. The mainstream QCD theory for particle