‘This is of course a common situation; that the people who have failed to clean up a subject then don’t believe that it can be cleaned up … And then if somebody comes along and says, “Look, it works,” they don’t believe. … All the old people … including Max Born and Heisenberg and Schroedinger … had radical proposals which turned out to be totally useless [but which distracted them from taking new ideas seriously, and generally cluttered up the stage with useless junk, preventing more useful ideas from being seen] … Feynman … and … Schwinger … and … I were conservative in the sense that we … actually made the mathematics work and got the right answers.’
– Professor Freeman Dyson, on the way big shot Oppenheimer arrogantly brushed off Feynman’s path integral approach to quantum mechanics by falsely claiming: ‘Well, you know, that’s not leading anywhere,’ in People’s Archive interview with Freeman Dyson (number 78), as quoted by Tony Smith.
Above: in 1996, this spin-1 (repulsive) mechanism of gravity correctly predicted that the universe is accelerating at a = Hc, which is correct within existing experimental error. The measurement was only done two years later in 1998. Nature was unable to publish the prediction in 1996 (presumably due to the mainstream belief in the false claims of string theorists like Ed Witten, about gravity being predicted by spin-2 gravitons), but it was published elsewhere (see the letter below). If the distance R between the two particles is much larger than their effective radii r for graviton scatter (exchange), then geometrically, the area of the shadow cast on surface area 4*Pi*r2 by another fundamental particle of mass with similar size is Pi*r2(r/R)2 = Pi*r4/R2, so the fraction of the total surface area of the particle which is shadowed is simply (Pi*r4/R2)/(4*Pi*r2) = (1/4)(r/R)2.
This fraction automatically contains the inverse square law of gravity, and merely has to be multiplied by the inward force generated by distant mass m undergoing radial outward observed cosmological acceleration a, i.e. force F = ma, in order to predict the gravitational force. The theory works! The inward force produces the contraction term of general relativity, as proved in the earlier post linked here. One of many false objections is the claim that general relativity predicts a departure from the inverse-square law. In fact, the effective force of gravity on planet Mercury during its elliptical orbit can be represented as a departure from the inverse square law as a rough approximation only. The average orbital velocity of Mercury is about 48 km/s, but it speeds up when near the sun and slows down when far from the sun. The variation in speed causes a relativistic variation in inertial mass, which by Einstein’s equivalence principle of general relativity is equivalent to gravitational mass. Hence, since gravitational force is proportional the product of the masses involved, the variation in the mass of Mercury as it orbits the sun causes a slight departure from the Newtonian force predicted by the inverse-square law: the force of gravity falls off faster than predicted by the inverse-square law alone, since at greater distances the planet moves more slowly and thus has less mass. The accurate way to allow for this is to simply include the relativistic term, but as a rough approximation the inverse-square law can be modified.
This is not a rejection of the inverse square law, since it only applies approximately and only to the case of the orbit of Mercury. As discussed in previous posts, there have been many nonsensical attacks on this theory: most of these would reject the whole of quantum field theory by falsely claiming that any quantum field capable of causing gravity would slow down (and heat up) the planets by “drag” (which is false, since the quantum field consists of virtual/off-shell radiations which do not behave like that), or even that the tiny anisotrophy in the distribution of long-range matter around us, or even random impacts of force-mediating field quanta would cause “unobserved chaos” of particle motion at the subatomic level (which in fact has been observed and is the whole basis for quantum mechanics, although this is routinely still obfuscated by first quantization rubbish, which is provably wrong and second quantization is still being hidden from most students under the guise of abstract quantum field theory).
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb’s 1785 work, Deuxieme Mémoire sur l’Electricité et le Magnétisme, presents his law that opposites attract while similar (charges or magnetic poles) repel each other. This is obviously not the case for Newton’s law of gravity, where two masses with similar signed gravitational charges appear to attract (each creates a gravitational field which makes small test particles fall towards it).
Although this acceleration is tiny, it is important for large masses spread over immense distances, such as the distant 3 × 1052 kg mass of the 9 × 1021 stars in galaxies observable by the Hubble Space Telescope (page 5 of NASA report linked here), giving an immense outward force of the big bang under Newton’s 2nd law of F = ma = 1.8 × 1043 Newtons.
This inward force due to the repulsion of the entire mass of the surrounding universe is much greater than the mutual repulsion of the relatively trivial mass in an apple and the relatively trivial mass in the Earth. A fairly relevant example of the physical mechanism of gravity is to be found in the implosion mechanism of nuclear weapons (this analogy first suggested the predictive gravity mechanism), where an ordinary chemical explosion around the core forces the atoms in the core to approach one another more closely (i.e. compression) despite the repulsive “normal reaction force” when you squeeze the metal.
So the apple is pushed to the Earth much more forcefully by the convergence of gravitons from immense masses (galaxies) located directly above the apple, than it is pushed away from the Earth by the direct repulsion between its own mass and the mass of the Earth. Pauli and Fierz totally missed this. (They implicitly assumed that the universe contains just two masses, causing the spin-2 error.)
The result is apparent “attraction” between small masses: the graviton field from the immense masses of the universe gets very slightly shadowed by small particles of mass, which are thus pushed towards one another, with not just the well known Newtonian inverse square geometric law, but also with the radial contraction of mass which is correctly predicted by general relativity but not by Newtonian gravity. (For the geometrical details see the post linked here.)
Hence, this repulsive gauge theory of quantum gravity actually predicts general as well as special relativity.
So quantum gravity, like the force between similar charges in electromagnetism, is universally repulsive between similar charges, and we’re simply being pushed down by the graviton exchange force converging inwards on us as the recoil from the immense outward force from the terrific mass of accelerating galaxies above us, which exceeds the smaller amount of repulsion between our mass and that of the Earth! The planet earth below us determines how much asymmetry there is: i.e. how much cancellation there is for the upward force coming from the galaxies receding from us below our feet (the gravitons are very, very slightly shielded by the Earth). The bigger the mass of the Earth, the more shielding, so the force is more asymmetric and the bigger is the acceleration downwards that we experience. If there was no Earth below us, we wouldn’t be accelerated at all, because the downward force on us would simply equal the upward force, cancelling out. The a bigger mass below us allows more of the constant downward force from above us to go uncancelled, i.e. to become a net downward force!
The more mass below us, the more asymmetry, so the greater is the fraction of the downward force that is uncancelled and which thus causes the effects of gravity we observe. A 1 kg book sitting on a table is an example of the need for there to be a net force. It is still in the Earth’s 9.8 ms-2 accelerative field, but isn’t falling because it’s 9.8 Newtons downward directed gravitational force is being completely cancelled out by the 9.8 Newtons upward electromagnetic force due to the repulsion between the electrons of the atoms of the table and those of the book. Things are only moved by an accelerative field if there is a net force. Similarly, there has to be an asymmetry in the isotropic inward reaction force of 1.8 × 1043 Newtons, in order for effects of gravity (other than the contraction predicted by general relativity), to occur.
The point I’m making is this: two similar sign gravitational charges (each composed of mass-energy) accelerate towards one another because they’re being pushed by spin-1 gravitons converging inwards from the distant, surrounding universe. The acceleration of the universe is small but the accelerating mass is immense so we can easily estimate the order of magnitude of the inward reaction force from the 2nd and 3rd laws of Newton: 1.8 × 1043 Newtons. Only a trivial fraction of this isotropic inward force needs to be shadowed by the fundamental particles in the Earth in order to produce the 9.8 Newtons gravitational force of a 1 kg book on your table. That’s provably how gravity works. It makes checkable predictions which are accurate to within experimental error. We made the predictions and published them in 1996, two years before Perlmutter confirmed from supernovae data that masses do repel over large distances where the universal repulsion predominates over local shadowing. Like the examples in the previous post, political prejudice in physics in favour of the Pauli-Fierz spin-2 graviton paradigm – which has not one shred of evidence is is promoted with the same pseudoscientific lies as the claim that “the sun’s apparent daily orbit of the Earth disproves Galileo” – in order to secure funding for spin-2 graviton “research” (false speculations) like Witten’s stringy M-theory and Smolin’s spin-2 loop quantum gravity. Fortunately, it’s funding money they’re after, not just power of the abusive thuggery sort of fascist eugenics. Spin-1 gravitons completely change – and simplify – the nature of the problem involved in bringing gravitation into the Standard Model. Instead of looking for universal by symmetry breaking from some more fundamental theory, we merely need to modify the electroweak force symmetries U(1) × SU(2). All this is virtually totally censored out and ignored by everyone else.
They find the proved facts unattractive in the standard presentation, because they believe that they can’t be wrong because they have so much crackpot research behind them, and they’re hoping to employ the AdS (anti-de Sitter space, i.e. spacetime with a negative cosmological constant, not the positive one observed) to conformal field theory conjecture from “string theory” in order to help to calculate the strong QCD attractive force over long distances where it is universally attractive. This correspondence is exact mathematically between AdS and CFT, but it’s not true that the effects of the strong force are exactly analogous to AdS: the strong force is not universally attractive over all distances. So the AdS/CFT conjecture when applied to practical nuclear physics is at best only going to be an approximation valid for the range of distances where the QCD force between hadrons is attractive and thus similar to AdS. We already have approximations like lattice QCD to to make calculations in this area. Even if it does help with calculations, it will just be a computational trick, not proof that the AdS/CFT conjecture proves stringy CFT. It has nothing to do with confirming spin-2 graviton conjecture. Anyway, back to the title of this blog post:
Being pushed together, rather than attracting: Lori Gottlieb’s new book Marry Him
Lori Gottlieb has just published a new book called Marry Him: The Case For Settling For Mr Good Enough. Basically, the message is to give up waiting for magical attraction to work, and marry the first person you get pushed into.
Gottlieb says that a girl, if still single by age 30, should be less fussy and should push her way into the arms of the first guy who will take her. I.e., people need to be pushed together, not wait in the eternal forlorn hope of a mythical romantic attraction that in the real world either doesn’t exist or, at least, is universally insignificant at long distances. There is an arm-waving connection between this and the spin-1 graviton (which I’m exploiting in this post, as it hopefully makes for more interesting reading than purely stating the facts on gravity again and again). At long distances, gravity is repulsive as proved by cosmological repulsion of supernovae accelerating outward; only at short ranges where the masses involved are relatively small, does an apparent “attraction” occur because the push inward from all the surrounding masses presses two small masses together more strongly than they can repel each other (their gravitational charges – e.g. masses – are trivial compared to the masses in the surrounding universe, the converging inward flux of gravitons from which pushes them together).
Many dating problems arise in the same way: many people naturally repel at first when far apart, rather than attract, so it takes special circumstances to produce apparent “attraction”. People have to be pushed together by either circumstances or friends: something has to break the ice, and to break ice someone has to push it, not pull.
Lori Gottlieb’s new book which says girls should be less fussy and more pushy to get married: waiting for perfect, fairy tale romantic attraction is like demanding a miracle. Like charges fundamentally repel each other unless pushed together (it’s a law of nature well known from electric charges and magnetic poles, but it holds true even for gravity over large distances).
Update (29 Jan 2010):
Copy of a comment submitted to moderation queue of Woit’s new blog post, Are There Cosmic Microwave Anomalies?
There’s still a very big CBR “anomaly” Peter, well-known since 1978: our galaxy still has an “absolute” motion with respect to the CBR of ~600 km/s:
http://muller.lbl.gov/COBE-early_history/Aether-Drift-Scienti%231E3402.pdf
R.A. Muller, “The cosmic background radiation and the new aether drift” Scientific American, vol. 238, May 1978, p. 64-74.
“The radiation is a few millidegrees hotter in the direction of Leo, and cooler in the direction of Aquarius. The spread around the mean describes a cosine curve. Such observations have far reaching implications for both the history of the early universe and in predictions of its future development. Based on the measurements of anisotropy, the entire Milky Way is calculated to move through the intergalactic medium at approximately 600 km/s.”
Regarding Einstein’s SR on this topic, see Carlos Barceló and Gil Jannes, “A Real Lorentz-FitzGerald Contraction”, Foundations of Physics, Volume 38, Number 2 / February, 2008, pp. 191-199 PDF file: http://digital.csic.es/bitstream/10261/3425/3/0705.4652v2.pdf :
“… In this essay we ask ourselves the following question: In a homogeneous condensed matter medium, is there a way for internal observers, dealing exclusively with the low-energy collective phenomena, to detect their state of uniform motion with respect to the medium? By proposing a thought experiment based on the construction of a Michelson-Morley interferometer made of quasi-particles, we show that a real Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction takes place, so that internal observers are unable to find out anything about their ‘absolute’ state of motion. Therefore, we also show that an effective but perfectly defined relativistic world can emerge in a fishbowl world situated inside a Newtonian (laboratory) system. This leads us to reflect on the various levels of description in physics, in particular regarding the quest towards a theory of quantum gravity. …
“… Remarkably, all of relativity (at least, all of special relativity) could be taught as an effective theory by using only Newtonian language. …”
Relevant quotation from Tony Smith’s website:
Dyson-Feynman-Schwinger v. Oppenheimer
A People’s Archive interview with Freeman Dyson (number 78) discusses Dyson’s work on QED showing the equivalence of the Feynman and Schwinger approaches. Dyson wanted to show Oppenheimer and the Princeton IAS the QED success. Oppenheimer’s reaction reminds me of the attitude of the superstring establishment toward alternative models (including mine). Here are some excerpts from interview 78 with Dyson:
“… we met Oppenheimer and I wanted to talk about this in the seminar at the Institute … Oppenheimer wasn’t enthusiastic at all. It came as a big shock to me that we’d done this wonderful stuff and I desperately wanted to tell Oppenheimer about it, that was the whole point in coming to Princeton. And Oppenheimer just brushed us off and said, “Well, you know, that’s not leading anywhere,’ …
… This is of course a common situation; that the people who have failed to clean up a subject then don’t believe that it can be cleaned up … And then if somebody comes along and says, “Look, it works,” they don’t believe.
So that was how it was, and so we had a very hard time to get Oppenheimer’s attention. …
All the old people … including Max Born and Heisenberg and Schroedinger … had radical proposals which turned out to be totally useless …
Feynman … and … Schwinger … and … I were conservative in the sense that we … actually made the mathematics work and got the right answers. And that came a surprise to Oppenheimer. It was very hard for him even to listen to it. …
finally Uhlenbeck interceded with Oppenheimer … “Let’s listen to Dyson,” and so Oppenheimer put on a seminar series for me …”.
The “totally useless … radical proposals” of Born, Heisenberg, and Schroedinger remind me of superstring theory.
Sadly, it seems that today there is no Uhlenbeck who will listen to alternatives that work.
Oppenheimer’s arrogant intolerance of physics views differing from his own was further illustrated by his statement (acting as the then-current Pope of Princeton’s IAS) about David Bohm’s interpretation of Quantum Theory:
“… if we cannot disprove Bohm, then we must agree to ignore him. …”.
The source of that quote was Max Dresden (in my opinion impeccably honest) and The Bohm biography Infinite Potential, by F. David Peat (Addison-Wesley 1997), page 133. Here are some relevant excerpts from that book:
“… Max Dresden … read Bohm’s papers … errors were difficult to detect … von Neumann’s “proof” … did not rule out the sort of theory that Bohm had proposed. … Oppenheimer [said]…
“We consider it juvenile deviationism … we don’t waste our time …” [by] actually read[ing] the paper …
Dresden … present[ed] Bohm’s work in a seminar to the Princeton Institute …
The reception he received came as considerable shock to Dresden. Reactions to the theory were based less on scientific grounds than on accusations that Bohm was a fellow traveler, a Trotskyite, and a traitor. It was suggested that Dresden himself was stupid to take Bohm’s ideas seriously. … all in all the overall reaction was that the scientific community should “pay no attention to Bohm’s work” … Abraham Pais also used the term “juvenile deviationism”. Another physicist said that Bohm was “a public nuisance” …”.
It seems that the silent treatment plus ad hominem attacks has used by the USA physics community against non-conformists for at least 50 years.
***
All in all, now I have feelings somewhat like those described by Richard Feynman about his talk at the 1948 Pocono conference, about which he said:
“… My way of looking at things was completely new, and I could not deduce it from other known mathematical schemes, but I knew what I had done was right.
… For instance, take the exclusion principle … it turns out that you don’t have to pay much attention to that in the intermediate states in the perturbation theory. I had discovered from empirical rules that if you don’t pay attention to it, you get the right answers anyway ….
Teller said: “… It is fundamentally wrong that you don’t have to take the exclusion principle into account.” …
… Dirac asked “Is it unitary?” … Dirac had proved … that in quantum mechanics, since you progress only forward in time, you have to have a unitary operator. But there is no unitary way of dealing with a single electron. Dirac could not think of going forwards and backwards … in time …
… Bohr … said: “… one could not talk about the trajectory of an electron in the atom, because it was something not observable.” … Bohr thought that I didn’t know the uncertainty principle …
… it didn’t make me angry, it just made me realize that … [they] … didn’t know what I was talking about, and it was hopeless to try to explain it further.
I gave up, I simply gave up …”.
The above quotation is from The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, by Jagdish Mehra (Oxford 1994) (pp. 245-248).
Quantum field theory 
One thought on “Pushed together without any magic attraction: Lori Gottlieb’s new book, Marry Him, and particle physics”