Gauge theory mechanisms

47 Comments »

1. 

   Dear Nigel,

   Please find a link back to you [ http://nige.wordpress.com/ ] at the bottom of each page of Relativity Calculator [ http://www.relativitycalculator.com/ ] as follows:

   1). Relativity >> Quantum Relativity >> Quantum field theory - all pages.

   I placed this as a tool tip: “Nigel Cook provides a preliminary draft of his book attempting a solution to a problem with General Relativity. A must read! ”

   2). Relativity >> Quantum Relativity >> Quantum field theory [ http://www.relativitycalculator.com/menumachine/footer_menu/navigation.html ]. This is provided for those non-javascript enabled browsers. This is just straight html for Google’s bots.

   Best regards,
   Don
   Don Saar
   drdonzi@crocker.com
   http://www.relativitycalculator.com/

   Comment by Don Saar — May 10, 2007 @ 1:09 am

2. 

   As mentioned in a comment on the original version of this post,

   http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/05/25/quantum-gravity-mechanism-and-predictions/

   there are two factors to take account of in dealing with the lack of deceleration of galaxy clusters at extreme redshifts predicted in 1996. See

   http://electrogravity.blogspot.com/2006/04/professor-phil-anderson-has-sense-flat.html

   This shows one simple mechanism: the calculation is made for the spacetime reference frame we are observing, so masses which appear to us to be near the visible horizon will also be near the visible horizon for calculational purposes in working out their recession. You can’t muddle up reference frames: in the reference frame we observe, objects at extreme red-shifts are near the boundary of the observable universe and we must calculate their gravity accordingly:

   we are only interested in calculating what we can observe from our reference frame, not in taking account of masses that may be at greater distances, which don’t contribute to what we are observing because they are beyond the visible horizon caused by the age of the universe dropping toward zero as radius approaches 13,700,000,000 light years.

   In addition to this mechanism by which recession velocities at high red-shifts are affected (asymmetry of gauge boson radiation due to location of galaxy with respect to observable centre of mass of universe being where we are, in our frame of reference [this not a claim that we are in the centre of the universe, just that the surrounding mass of the universe is uniformly distributed around us, so gravitational deceleration of distant galaxies can be calculated simply by assuming the entire mass of the universe is where we are; similarly, in calculating gravity at Earth's surface from Newton's law, we can quite accurately assume that the entire mass of the Earth is located at a point in the middle of the Earth]) there is another mechanism at work:

   See my comment to:

   http://riofriospacetime.blogspot.com/2007/08/dark-energy-is-bad-for-astronomy_09.html

   Louise, this is very good. This “dark energy” groupthink is mainstream mythology, mob culture in physics. It was always like this.

   Back in 1667, Johann Joachim Becher “discovered” a substance later called “phlogiston”, in order to explain how some things (but not others) could burn. This idea caught on, with German chemist Georg Ernst Stahl naming it phlogiston after the Greek word for fire, and applying the idea to all sorts of problems in chemistry, finding it a useful descriptive model in many ways.

   The “phlogiston” was supposed to be released when something burns, and the fact that some things don’t burn was simply “explained” by posulating the absense of “phlogiston” inside them. All problems with the theory were automatically new discoveries; instead of writing that the theory was wrong, people would write that they had discovered that the theory needed such-and-such modifications to make it account for this-and-that.

   You see, once this was given a name, it entered science because it was “needed” to explain why certain things burn.

   Then “phlogiston theory” was taught in scientific education, as the only self-consistent theory of combustion (just like string theory is supposed to explain gravity today, because it’s self consistent).

   Unfortunately, although it was wonderfully self-consistent and it was easy to cook up a lot of maths to describe certain aspects of combustion based on this “phlogiston” theory, there was no experimental evidence for it. It became a self-propagating fantasy. How can something be named by a scientist if it has never been discovered? Absurd, people thought, so they believed that the “evidence” for it (so indirect that it didn’t rule out alternative ideas) and the consensus behind it made it scientific.

   If you burn wood, the ash is lighter, and the loss in mass was attributed to a loss of phlogiston from the wood. (Actually, the wood has simply released things like CO2 gas to the air during combustion, which accounts for the decrease in mass.)

   This was supposedly the proof of phlogiston theory. It was debunked by Antoine Lavoisier (the French chemist who was beheaded in the Revolution) in 1783, who showed that fire is primarily a process of oxidation, the gaining of oxygen from the air. (This had previously been obscured in studies of fire by the natural production of gases like CO and CO2.)

   Sadly, Lavoisier’s discovery that the air contains a vital ingredient for combustion, oxygen, and his dismissal of phlogiston, were both negated by his claim in his 1783 paper Réflexions sur le phlogistique that there is a fluid substance of heat called caloric.

   This caloric was supposed to be composed of particles which repel one another and thereby flow from hot bodies to cool ones, explaining how temperatures equalize over time.

   Sadi Carnot’s heat engine theory (which is quantitatively correct) was also developed from the false theory of caloric. Caloric as a fundamental fluid of conserved heat was disproved in 1798 by Count Rumford who showed that an endless amount of heat can be released by friction in boring holes in metal to make cannons. Caloric is not conserved.

   The “dark energy” theory is far worse than phlogiston and caloric.

   I think “aether” is an interesting thing to compare to dark energy. The problem is that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate in the conventional analysis which assumes that the field equation of general relativity describes the cosmological expansion, not quantum gravity.

   Problem is, quantum gravity accounts for the observations without a cosmological constant:

   (1) the mainstream general relativity model says that a cosmological constant (describing dark energy) causes a repulsive effect that offsets gravitational attraction at very long distances (large redshifts).

   (2) quantum gravity (gravity due to gravitons of some sort exchanged between receding gravitational charges, i.e., masses) implies a very different explanation: gravitons are red-shifted to lower energy in being exchanged between masses over long distances (high redshifts).

   So in (1) above, otherwise unobservable “dark energy” provides a repulsive force that offsets gravity at great distances, thus explaining the supernova red-shift data.

   But in (2) above, the same supernova red-shift data can be explained by the loss of energy of red-shifted gravitons being exchanged between masses which are receding at relativistic velocities (large red-shifts).

   Hence, general relativity needs to take account of quantum gravity effects like graviton red-shift weakening gravity and decreasing the effective value of gravity constant G towards zero as red-shift (and distance) increase to extremely large figures.

   If general relativity is corrected in such a way, we get a prediction of the supernova results which allegedly (in the current uncorrected general relativity paradigm) show “acceleration”. Actually that “acceleration” is an artifact of the mainstream data processing, which assumes gravity constant G is not affected by large distances (when quantum gravity suggests otherwise; this fact was censored off arXiv).

   The entire mainstream theory is built on brainwashing, prejudice, groupthink, consensus, politics, and similar. Any effort to get those people to listen leads them to think that the person with the facts is just ignorant of the “beauty” and “elegance” of the mainstream model. It’s hopeless.

   **********************

   Updated summary at top of the blog:

   http://electrogravity.blogspot.com/

   Standard Model and General Relativity mechanism with predictions

   Galaxy recession velocity v = dR/dt = HR. (R is distance.) Acceleration a = dv/dt = d(HR)/dt = H.dR/dt = Hv = H(HR) = RH^2 = 6*10^-10 ms^-2. Outward force: F = ma. Newton’s 3rd law predicts equal inward force: non-receding nearby masses don’t give any reaction force, so they cause an asymmetry, gravity. It predicts particle physics and cosmology. In 1996 it predicted the lack of deceleration at large redshifts.

   Comment by nigel cook — August 10, 2007 @ 5:55 pm

3. 

   I’ve just revised that brief “summary” (very scanty introduction to the main idea) to reduce any possible confusion (however, the more precise scientifically it is, the more abstract and boring it will look for non-mathematical readers, but you can’t please everyone all the time):

   http://electrogravity.blogspot.com/

   Galaxy recession velocity: v = dR/dt = HR. Acceleration: a = dv/dt = d(HR)/dt = H.dR/dt = Hv = H(HR) = RH^2 so: 0 < a < 6*10^-10 ms^-2. Outward force: F = ma. Newton’s 3rd law predicts equal inward force: non-receding nearby masses don’t give any reaction force, so they cause an asymmetry, gravity. It predicts particle physics and cosmology. In 1996 it predicted the lack of deceleration at large redshifts.

   Comment by nigel cook — August 10, 2007 @ 6:22 pm

4. 

   Dear Nigel,

   I have just read something on your blog about calculating the critical density of the universe, and how you advocate that “if we want to know the value of r at our present time after the big bang, we should ignore the crackpot ‘mainstream’ estimate of approximately of r = (3/8)H2/ ( π G) = 9.5*10-27 kg/m3 and instead work out an estimate of r from observational evidence.”

   The value you get from your observational estimate is 2.8*10-27 kg/m3, and I wondered if you’d be interested in reading a short laymans paper of mine where my estimate (based upon using only the observed volume of the universe and G without, the need for the Hubble Constant) gives a value of 9.086063897-28 g/cm3.

   The paper is based solely on classical physics and Newtonian concepts of gravity as I am approaching the problem from a philosophical standpoint rather than taking a scientific approach, but I think some of the ideas in the paper may be of interest to you.

   Could I email you the paper? If so, send me an email to davidgow77@hotmail.co.uk

   Comment by David Gow — August 16, 2007 @ 1:30 pm

5. 

   David Gow, I’ve emailed you. There’s no point in predicting rho to 10 significant figures as it can’t be checked that accurately. Maybe you could also publish your paper on a blog or something and link to it, as I deplore secrecy in science and don’t want to be party to such politics. I’m just interested in whatever equation you use and how you obtain that equation. If you have a fact based theory which is checkable and helpful, it will be interesting. Thanks!

   Comment by nige — August 16, 2007 @ 3:19 pm

6. 

   David has kindly emailed me the paper, “Identifying The Gravitational Constant”, and I’ve responded to it by email. It is intriguing and well written, although the mathematics is less interesting.

   (I won’t go on at length about what I disagree with, but will briefly summarise those areas here. The formula he obtains giving the prediction of density is based on his postulate that the energy density of the universe is 8.168*10^{-6} J/m^3 where he obtains 8.168*10^{-6} from the square root of the universal gravitational parameter G, which causes problems of dimensionality - the units are wrong. Anyway, David divides this by c^2 to convert to kg/m^3. The resulting value for density is far too high - notice especially that in comment 4 above David compares one density in units of kg/m^2 to another in units of g/cm^3, and then remember the conversion: 1000 kg/m^3 = 1 g/cm^3.)

   I’ll just quote here some of those parts of interest to me:

   “The important point to note here is that this approach requires that mass carrying bodies do not occupy space, but rather exist within their own spatially extended dimensions. This is something that Einstein thought significant when he stated in Relativity:

   “Physical objects are not in space, but these objects are spatially extended. In this way, the concept of empty space loses its meaning.” [Quoted from Einstein's Relativity, 15th ed., Preface.]

   “In response to this I would say that empty space is the volume of space that was previously occupied by energy but which, due to the propagation of matter, has now been vacated.”

   This last bit is very much in agreement with my initial idea about gravity, such as in http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/706468

   What is interesting about the paper is its physical approach in trying to identify the energy density of the gravitational field around a single mass. My response to that is the following brief essay:

   ENERGY DENSITY IN ELECTRIC AND GRAVITATIONAL FIELDS

   Energy density in an electric field is easy to calculate in electromagnetism because you can charge up a capacitor to a constant potential or voltage v (two parallel flat metal plates with an “x” metre gap such as vacuum between then, the vacuum being called the dielectric of free space) and there is then a constant electric field of v/x volts/metre between the plates. Knowing how much electrical energy you put into the capacitor to charge it up, allows you to relate the electric field strength v/x to the energy per unit volume in the field (i.e., the energy used to charge the capacitor, divided by the product of the gap between the plates “x” and the area of the plates).

   Coulomb’s law for electric charges q and Q is:

   F = qQ/(4*Pi*permittivity*r^2)

   the strength of an electric field v/x (I’m not using E for electric field here or it will be too confusing; I’m using E only for energy) from charge Q is given by

   F = (v/x)q

   Hence

   Electric field strength, v/x = F/q

   = Q/(4*Pi*permittivity*r^2).

   Now from the analysis of a capacitor, the energy density of an electric field is

   E/V = 0.5*[permittivity]*(v/x)^2

   where V here is unit volume and has nothing to do with voltage v (reference: see http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/engfie.html )

   So the energy density of electric fields is (substituting the previous expression for electric field strength v/x around charge Q into the last formula):

   E/V = 0.5*[permittivity]*[Q/(4*Pi*permittivity*r^2)]^2

   = (1/32)*Q/[(Pi^2)*permittivity*r^4]

   Hence, the energy density of a field varies as the 1/r^4.

   Now, we have the energy density of an electric field - which derives from the Coulomb force which is an inverse-square law rather Newton’s in some respects, can we use the analogy between Newton’s law and Coulomb’s law to derive the energy density of a gravitational field?

   If we assume for quarks or electrons or whatever that Newton’s law is just something like 10^40 times weaker than Coulomb’s electric force law, then presumably the energy density of the gravitational field will be simply the value we calculated from Coulomb’s law, divided by 10^40:

   E/V ~ (1/32)*Q/[(10^40)*(Pi^2)*permittivity*r^4]

   This equation allows you to calculate approximately the energy density of the field around a unit mass like a fermion. It’s clear that the energy density varies very rapidly with distance from the middle. This is why I don’t see how you are going to get a constant energy density for space from an inverse square law: the Joules of field energy per cubic metre fall off rapidly with increasing distance. You would have to find a way to average the energy density by integrating the total energy as a function of radius.

   Notice that the classical electron radius is based on this approach for the energy density of Coulomb’s law. You integrate the energy density over space from a small inner radius out to infinite radius, and you set the result equal to the known electron rest-mass energy E = mc^2 where m is electron mass. The maths then tells you the value of the inner radius you need to start the calculation (if you took the inner radius to be zero, you would get a wrong answer, infinity). The calculated inner radius is 2.818 fm, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_electron_radius

   The paper has made me think about how to calculate the energy density of various fields and this has some applications to what I’m trying to do in working out how energy is conserved when short range nuclear forces are created from electromagnetic force which is shielded by the polarized particles of the disrupted fabric of the vacuum at very high energy (very close to a particle).

   Comment by nc — August 16, 2007 @ 7:30 pm

7. 

   copy of a relevant comment:

   http://globalpioneering.com/wp02/more-cavendish-mythology

   Pioneer1,

   Thanks. I’m interested in your statement above:

   “My claim is that Newtonian force is occult. Occult does not exist in nature. Therefore, force is not a magnitude and cannot be measured. Consequently, Cavendish never measured the Newtonian force. …

   “To me the occult nature of the Newtonian force is definitive proof of its non-existence. But occult is not enough evidence to discredit a Newtonian concept in the framework of Newtonian physics. Failing to measure the Newtonian force physicists defined the Cavendish experiment as the posthumous measurement of it.”

   The word “force” to me is just rate of change of momentum or approximately the product, mass*acceleration, i.e., F = dp/dt ~ ma.

   Mass can be measured, momentum can be measured, and acceleration can be measured.

   So I don’t see a deep problem, really. If you don’t like F = GmM/r^2, then employ F=ma and you can write down acceleration a = GM/r^2, so your problem is sorted: acceleration is definitely measurable.

   Force might be occult in one sense, but you can measure both of the things you need to calculate it’s value.

   If you are going to attack force as being occult, then you could also attack momentum and energy.

   The problem with momentum occurs when you ask what momentum a photon of light has. If light hits a surface and is absorbed, it imparts a momentum of p = E/c, but if the light is reflected from the surface (say a rigid mirror), the total momentum imparted to the surface is p = 2E/c. The difference is because the reflection process can be considered as two events: the absorption of the photon (giving momentum p = E/c to the mirror) and then the re-emission of the photon in the opposite direction (giving a recoil to the mirror which - because of the reversed direction of the photon - adds a second p = E/c to the first impulse, so the total momentum is p = 2E/c.

   Therefore, the amount of momentum a photon is able to deliver to a target depends on whether the photon is absorbed or reflected back the way it came. [Obviously, there is a snag in my simple argument here, because in deriving p = 2E/c for reflection, I'm assuming that the mirror is perfectly rigid. If it really is perfectly rigid (i.e., of infinite mass) then it won't actually recoil at all. If it is not perfectly rigid, then the reflection factor will be less than 2, because some of the incident energy will be lost before the photon is re-emitted and the new photon will have a longer wavelength and less energy, giving less recoil.]

   The occult problem with energy is the problem of the reference frame in which a collision process is viewed. This is well known in particle physics, of course, where the conventional reference frame is that of the centre of mass for the system under consideration:

   Consider two colliding toy cars, and the occult nature of energy becomes clear.

   (1) Take two cars each 1 kg in mass and have them each travelling at 5 metres/second towards each other (total impact speed 10 metres/second). The total kinetic energy release is E = 2[(1/2)mv^2] = 25 Joules.

   (2) Take the same two cars but keep one stationary and have the other hit it at 10 metres/second. The total kinetic energy release is E = (1/2)mv^2 = 50 Joules.

   Now why the difference? When two 1 kg masses collide at a total speed of 10 m/s you get 25 Joules if the centre-of-mass is the reference frame, but you get 50 Joules for the same masses hitting at the same relative speed when you view the collision in the reference frame of one mass!

   Clearly the difference is due to the fact that kinetic energy is proportional to the square of velocity, so you get disproportionately more energy when one body is considered to have all the motion, than you do when you consider the motion to be equally distributed.

   But surely conservation of energy is violated? Of course, it is not violated.

   I’ve had a long correspondence by email with Dr Mario Rabinowitz over various things, often consisting of politely worded arguments. One problem he had with my work was my argument that in the expanding universe, radiation being exchanged between charges (in the case of gravitational force, the charge is mass) is redshifted to lower energies. This means that masses receding from one another at immense distances will exchange redshifted radiation, including redshifted “gravitons” in any Yang-Mills quantum field theory of gravity. As a result, at extreme redshifts, quantum gravity should be reduced in strength in an expanding universe, because redshifted gravitons have lower energy (E=hf). Mario suggested that this would violate conservation of energy. However, it is just usual redshift theory.

   If you think about the redshift of any radiation in an expanding universe, say the most severely redshifted radiation there is - the cosmic background radiation - what has happened to the principle of conservation of energy there?

   It’s fairly obvious that energy is conserved, and what happens is that photons get “stretched out” longitudinally in the expanding universe, so the radiation expands in length as the universe expands, filling the same proportion of the volume of the universe.

   The total energy present remails the same, it is just that the transverse frequency falls because the photon gets longer. What is occurring as the universe expands is that the energy density of radiation in space falls (because the same energy is distributed over a bigger volume), but the total energy remains constant. However, it gets redshifted to lower frequency, so its entropy increases and it is a less useful form of energy.

   There is still a bit of mystery here when you consider a single photon that is redshifted due to the expansion of the universe. How can the frequency of a single photon in the cosmic background radiation get shifted to a lower value as the universe expands, without violating conservation of energy, E = hf?

   If individual photons in the cosmic background do lose energy as they get more and more redshifted, where does that energy go? Clearly the answer is has to do with reference frames. The cosmic background radiation we see is coming from a vast difference associated with a massive recession velocity. So the paradox in energy when considering a single photon is that we’re comparing dissimilar energy, because the reference frames are different. When we consider a single photon before redshift, we’re calculating its energy in a reference frame far from us, receding at a massive rate. When we consider the redshifted photon arriving here on earth, we’re changing reference frames to one in which (to us) the photon appears to be severely redshifted.

   In order to understand conservation of energy, it’s only conserved in a similar reference frame. So to get into the reference frame of a photon of the cosmic background radiation, you’d need to be in a spaceship travelling outward from the earth at the same speed that the gaseous fireball matter (at the location where the cosmic background radiation originated from) was receding at.

   Once you get up to that speed into the radiation so you are in the same reference frame, the photons of cosmic background radiation will no longer be redshifted to 2.7 K, they will have a temperature of 3000 K or so (just as they did at 400,000 years after the big bang). This is because the radiation hitting you head on is (to you) blueshifted to higher energy as you accelerate to higher speeds. So if you get in the same frame of reference as the radiation when it was emitted, energy is perfectly conserved.

   It’s really shameful how hard it is to get clear explanations of physics from textbooks and lecturers on some things. You end up having to try to work answers out for yourself. Another problem with reference frames regards Newton’s gravitational force law:

   (a) Suppose you have an apple falling to earth, then the law is F = GmM/r^2 where m is mass of apple and M is mass of earth. Here, the force F is due to the earth upon the apple (the gravitational field around an apple is trivial). This is proved because F = ma, so F = GmM/r^2 is due to simply the acceleration field around the big mass M, acceleration a = GM/r^2.

   (b) Now suppose you have two planets of approximately equal mass, m and M. In that case F = GmM/r^2 is wrong. The reason is that each mass M then has its own significant gravitational acceleration field around it so and the total acceleration is then

   a = (Gm/r^2) + GM/r^2

   = G(m + M)/r^2.

   Hence the total force of one planet with respect to the other is generally given by:

   F = Ma = GM(m + M)/r^2.

   This is substantially different from Newton’s law because for identical masses m = M gives the solution:

   F = 2GMM/r^2

   This is obviously twice what Newton’s law says! The inaccuracy in Newton’s law is not a substantial problem because in the solar system, the mass of one body is always much smaller than the other, so for instance the acceleration of the sun towards the earth’s mass can be excluded and the only significant acceleration is a = MG/r^2 where M is sun’s mass, giving F = ma = mMG/r^2 which is Newton’s law.

   It’s only where both masses are similar (which would be the case in certain binary stars) that Newton’s law is wrong.

   This is maybe useful evidence that force, as defined in Newton’s law for gravity, is occult, and it is far less confusing to consider the accelerative field surrounding a mass than to consider the “force”. There are also problems with a = MG/r^2 due to modifications introduced by general relativity. Because radial coordinates are contracted around a mass in general relativity (just as masses in motion are contracted in the direction of motion), the effective strength of gravity gets altered.

   The reason for this effect in general relativity is that when Newton’s a = MG/r^2 is converted into tensor mathematics notation you get R_(ab) = 4*Pi*GT_(ab), which “when combined with the contracted Bianchi identity … leads to the conclusion that the trace T of the energy-momentum tensor … has to be constant throughout spacetime. This is blatently inconsistent with ordinary (non-gravitational) physics. Accordingly Einstein … came up with [a correction factor to the Newtonian tensor model] we now know as Einstein’s field equation R_(ab) - (1/2)Rg_(ab) = 8*Pi*GT_(ab).” (Quoted from Penrose, Road to Reality, ch. 19, section 7. Penrose includes a minus sign on the source term, right hand side, for the direction of arrows on the gravitational field lines drawn between masses, but that is just convention and confuses the story for quantum gravity where the field lines represent the paths of gravitons being exchanged between masses, i.e. gravitons are travelling in both directions along such lines.)

   Still another problem with Newton’s a = MG/r^2 introduced by general relativity is that for light speed radiation crossing the radial gravitational field lines at right angles, the deflection of the radiation is not given by a = MG/r^2 but by a = 2MG/r^2. This is because a low speed object has its electric field lines extending in 3 spatial dimensions, but a light speed object is contracted in the direction of motion so it’s electric field lines in the direction of propagation have zero magnitude. All of the electric field lines from a light velocity object are in the transverse direction (at right angles to the line of propagation). The geometry of how the electric field lines from a photon and a slow moving object interact with gravitational field lines then shows that for a given number of electric field lines, you get twice the interaction if the object is going at light velocity (a photon) than if it is going at low speed.

   So there are many failures in Newton’s law, although the usual way the corrections are handed out does not inspire much understanding.

   Comment by nc — August 17, 2007 @ 11:34 pm

8. 

   Obviously previous comment above I made showing F = 2GMM/r^2 for similar masses M and M will affect the calculation made in this post where I assumed F = GMM/r^2. The correction factor needed is a factor of 2. I will leave the post as it is for the moment.

   Comment by nc — August 17, 2007 @ 11:35 pm

9. 

   copy of a comment:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   It’s strange that Hawking has never investigated this.

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

   (This condition is derived below.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   Equations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   where M is black hole mass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   Comment by Nigel Cook — August 31, 2007 @ 9:47 am

10. 

    copy of a comment:

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

    Tony,

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

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

    ‘… I would like to present, at Perimenter, answers to those questions, as follows: Mysteries 2 and 3: The Higgs probably does exist, and is related to a Tquark-Tantiquark condensate, and mass comes from the Standard Model Higgs mechanism, producing force strengths and particle masses consistent with experiment, as described in http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/YamawakiNJL.pdf and http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/TQ3mHFII1vNFadd97.pdf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Comment by Nigel Cook — September 1, 2007 @ 2:10 pm

11. 

    copy of a comment:

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

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

    Using Hawking’s formula to calculate the effective black body radiating temperature of a black hole yields the figure of 1.35*10^53 Kelvin.

    Any black-body at that temperature radiates 1.3*10^205 watts/m^2 (via the Stefan-Boltzmann radiation law). We calculate the spherical radiating surface area 4*Pi*r^2 for the black hole event horizon radius r = 2Gm/c^2 where m is electron mass, hence an electron has a total Hawking radiation power of

    3*10^92 watts

    But that’s Yang-Mills electromagnetic force exchange (vector boson) radiation. Electron’s don’t evaporate, they are in equilibrium with the reception of radiation from other radiating charges.

    So the electron core both receives and emits 3*10^92 watts of electromagnetic gauge bosons, simultaneously.

    The momentum of absorbed radiation is p = E/c, but in this case the exchange means that we are dealing with reflected radiation (the equilibrium of emission and reception of gauge bosons is best modelled as a reflection), where p = 2E/c.

    The force of this radiation is the rate of change of the momentum, F = dp/dt ~ (2E/c)/t = 2P/c, where P is power.

    Using P = 3*10^92 watts as just calculated,

    F = 2P/c = 2(3*10^92 watts)/c = 2*10^84 N.

    For gravity, the model in this blog post gives an inward and an outward gauge boson calculation F = 7*10^43 N.

    So the force of Hawking radiation for the black hole is higher than my estimate of gravity by a factor of [2*10^84] / [7*10^43] = 3*10^40.

    This figure of approximately 10^40 is indeed the ratio between the force coupling constant for electromagnetism and the force coupling constant for gravity.

    So the Hawking radiation force seems to indeed be the electromagnetic force!

    Electromagnetism between fundamental particles is about 10^40 times stronger than gravity.

    Comment by Nigel Cook — September 1, 2007 @ 2:18 pm

12. 

    copy of comment to:

    http://kea-monad.blogspot.com/2007/11/m-theory-lesson-119.html

    Thanks for the link to Carl Brannen’s use of electromagnetic field equations to explain the Koide mass formula.

    The Koide mass formula says take the three generations of masses such as leptons, square root the mass of each and then add these square roots together, square the result, then multiply that sum by 2/3, you obtain the sum of the three lepton generation masses!

    As Carl suggests, because for an electromagnetic field the energy density (Joules per cubic metre) of the field is equal to half the product of the permittivity of the vacuum and the square of the electric field strength (volts/metre), you get

    Energy density (energy E, unit volume X)

    = E/X

    = (mc^2)/X = (1/2)*{permittivity}*{electric field strength in volts/metre}^2

    Hence,

    m ~ e^2

    i.e. mass is directly proportional to the square of the field strength.

    If masses depend on field strengths (i.e., if some vacuum field bosons which interact with gravitons to produce mass, are associated with electric charges), then because the electron, muon and tauon all have similar electric charges (with slight differences due to vacuum polarization loops, the kind of thing that means that differemt leptons have slightly different intrinsic magnetic moments), you would expect to have to square root the masses:

    m ~ e^2

    so

    m^{1/2} ~ {+/-}e

    I think this is true because there is evidence I’ve seen that is consistent with it, and that evidence comes from several calculations and many “coincidences”.

    What is occurring here physically is very simple indeed. The core of the electron (or muon or tauon) has electric charge only and no mass; hence the core of the electron/muon/tauon is a common entity.

    The differences between these three leptons stem from the surrounding vacuum field.

    It is the surrounding vacuum field, some kind of Higgs field or a Dirac sea, which interacts with gravitons to produce the “space time curvature” of the vacuum.

    It interacts also with the cores of leptons and quarks to give them their masses.

    m^{1/2} ~ {+/-}e

    can be seen to be a consequence of the idea that masses arise from electromagnetic field interactions with a vacuum field that interacts with the gravitons,

    hence the two-step interaction for masses/gravity: charged core interacts with surrounding field in vacuum (Higgs-like or Dirac-sea like) which in turn interacts with gravitons.

    The fact that the Koide mass formula says m1 + m2 + m3 = (2/3)*[(m1^1/2) + (m2^1/2) + (m3^1/2)]^2 looks to me like a WEIGHTED AVERAGING of the ratio of relative masses to relative field strengths (expressed in mass units).

    I.e., it should be written as:

    (m1 + m2 + m3)/[(m1^1/2) + (m2^1/2) + (m3^1/2)]^2

    = 2/3.

    In plain English: the sum of the masses divided by the square of the sum of the relative field strengths (when expressed in units of mass via E=mc^2) gives you a dimensionless number, 2/3.

    The reciprocal of number also comes up in other “coincidences”, e.g., muon mass is roughly {electron mass}/[(2/3)*{alpha)] = 205.5*{electron mass, 0.511 MeV} ~105 MeV.

    I’ve tried to come up with a mechanism, although it is still sketchy in detail, for hadron masses as well as leptons, e.g. see the “about” link on the sidebar of my nige.wordpress.com blog, but it needs to be rewritten and there are lots of loose ends.

    The Koide formula is impressive and I didn’t think about the square roots coming in via the electromagnetic field equation, so I’m grateful to Carl for pointing this out. Hopefully it is the missing link ….

    Comment by nc — November 9, 2007 @ 7:10 pm

13. 

    I’ve just made and saved some changes to the text of this “About” post which have not appeared on this blog (server problems?), mainly edits, updates and improvements to the first few introductory paragraphs, but also updates to the links to works by Ivor Catt, Malcolm Davidson and David Walton; which point out that their work while physically only semi correct, is a major advance on the status quo. Catt’s main error was claiming that his work and that of his co-authors was important in electronics theory, not in fundamental physics. Basically, Catt comes across as a Hubble figure, who picks up a vitally correct insight, with substantial help from Davidson and Walton, but then tries to fit it to the wrong theory (because the wrong theory happens to be the only theory he has come across which is anywhere near reality). Hubble did that I think when he tried to explain his cosmic recession data using not Friedmann’s cosmology but something even less physical which immediately labelled Hubble’s theory as crackpot. Hubble had great status as an observational astronomer, but no status at all as a theoretical physicist: he couldn’t even do a literature search in 1929 to discover Friedmann’s 1922 paper (so Robertson and Walker ended up duplicating Friedmann’s research as well as discovering several other solutions in the process), let alone could Hubble himself do cosmology using general relativity. (Perhaps this is as well, since general relativity is not the final theory and has no real claim to be cosmology, since it is not even a theory of quantum gravity, see for example: http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/11/28/predicting-the-future-thats-what-physics-is-all-about/ )

    Both Malcolm Davidson and David Walton had physics degrees, and Walton who also had a PhD, had been a senior lecturer/assistant professor. So you would expect them to find the correct interpretation of their work. Ivor Catt told me in emails and interviews that they were both interested in electronics applications, not fundamental physics, although Walton did try to have a discussion about the electron with Catt (Catt refused to discuss it, it was outside Catt’s real interest, just as mathematical cosmology was outside of Hubble’s observational astronomy).

    For background on this, see this quote:

    ‘I entered the computer industry when I joined Ferranti (now ICL) in West Gorton, Manchester, in 1959. I worked on the SIRIUS computer. When the memory was increased from 1,000 words to a maximum of 10,000 words in increments of 3,000 by the addition of three free-standing cabinets, there was trouble when the logic signals from the central processor to free-standing cabinets were all crowded together in a cableform 3 yards long. … Sirius was the first transistorised machine, and mutual inductance would not have been significant in previous thermionic valve machines… In 1964 I went to Motorola to research into the problem of interconnecting very fast (1 ns) logic gates … we delivered a working partially populated prototype high speed memory of 64 words, 8 bits/word, 20 ns access time. … I developed theories to use in my work, which are outlined in my IEEE Dec 1967 article (EC-16, n6) … In late 1975, Dr David Walton became acquainted … I said that a high capacitance capacitor was merely a low capacitance capacitor with more added. Walton then suggested a capacitor was a transmission line. Malcolm Davidson … said that an RC waveform [Maxwell’s continuous ‘extra current’ for the capacitor, the only original insight Maxwell made to EM] should be … built up from little steps, illustrating the validity of the transmission line model for a capacitor [charging/discharging]. (This model was later published in Wireless World in Dec 78.)’

    - Ivor Catt, “Electromagnetic Theory”, Volume 2, St Albans, 1980, pp. 207-15.

    For the mild Dr Walton versus Catt episode on the nature of the trapped field electron, see the Preface written by Walton for Catt’s 1994 book “Electromagnetism 1″, http://www.ivorcatt.com/em_pref.htm , where Walton quotes Catt as follows:

    “Then one night, [28 May 1976] as was his wont, Walton phoned Catt and talked about a number of things - how he knew he should get the sine wave out of his [conceptual] system but how difficult it was to do so; how he wondered how the particle came into Faraday’s Law of Induction; that perhaps the Law was only an approximation and did not hold exactly at the atomic level. Catt wanted no particles introduced into the argument [!!].”

    Dr Walton should not have accepted this from Catt: it is not up to Catt’s whim whether fundamental particle physics should be a part of nature or not. Catt was certainly extremely arrogant and rude to me when I pushed him on the role of particle physics. He didn’t even know the very basics, he rejected everything even beta radioactivity and when I tried to demonstrate things experimentally he just ignored what I said and formulated off-the-cuff alternative ideas to explain the facts, based not on careful study but on ignorance: e.g., he claimed that nuclear energy was based not on modern physics but on simply purifying radium and uranium. He has no idea of the detailed history of the subject in the 1930s and the role of neutrons in producing fission, and how that was discovered by Lise Meiner using E=mc^2. In 1934 Fermi and collaborators in Italy irradiated every element known with neutrons, which has been discovered only a couple of years earlier by Chadwick (who stole the name neutron from Pauli’s suggestion for the light neutral particle emitted in beta decay, which later had to be renamed the “neutrino” to distinguish it from Chatwick’s very different massive neutral particle). Fermi discovered intense radioactivity when he subjected uranium to neutrons, but he believed wrongly that this was neutron induced activity by simple neutron capture (not splitting of atoms), and largely for this serious error he was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize for physics! At exactly the time that Fermi was receiving the prize, two German chemists duplicated Fermi’s work and tried to chemically isolate the new element. They discovered a mixture of already-known elements and the abundance of barium was sufficient to allow definite identification! Barium is little more than half the mass of uranium. Lise Meiner crucially analysed this and proved using E=mc^2 that this was nuclear fission of uranium atoms. Uranium has 92 protons, so when it splits typically you have two nearby nuclei of approximately 46 (or so) protons each. Using Coulomb’s law, it is easy to see that these positive nuclei will immediately repel away from one another, accelerating apart in accordance with that law. Since the force decreases with the inverse-square of the distance, it the total integral of the kinetic energy gained by the fission fragments is asymptotic and each fission fragment gains about 100 MeV, hence fission releases on average something on the order of 200 MeV. By E=mc^2, Meiner was able to calculate how much mass is converted into this amount of energy, and the difference in mass between uranium and the fission fragment atoms tallied with the E=mc^2 equivalence. Hence, nuclear fission was discovered and is well established.

    I was never able to deliver the contents of this last paragraph politely to Catt, who would always interrupt to claim that the whole thing is a farce or a waste of time. Being more resolute after years of this simply led to shouting matches. Conclusion: Catt doesn’t want to deal with nuclear and particle physics in general. His own efforts as modelling an electron using “two concentric spheres” and using a “TEM wave escaping at the edges from two dimensional crystals” to “explain gravity” don’t lead anywhere in physics, and were used by him to obfuscate this. There was no communication between us on any fundamental physics. I had the impression that Catt achieved his A-grades in his engineering exams due to having a high IQ and being able to remember orthodox methods for exams, and remember pages of useful mathematical and other trivia, rather than being the sort of person who spends a lot of time reading out-of-the-way books and puzzling out theoretical problems by hard work on them to research all the facts and assess them. Far from being genuinely unorthodox, he was extremely orthodox with regards to almost everything (except experimentation), even on the subject of orthodoxy and consensus itself which he wrote (and had published) orthodox papers on.

    The problems are demonstrated by the hostile review by B. Lago in the IEE Electronics & Communication Engineering Journal October 1995, p218 (B. Lago of Keele University had much earlier had a hostile letter published in Wireless World, July 1979, claiming that “…. the [Catt, Davidson and Walton] articles are wrong in almost every detail and it is vital that this should be clearly demonstrated before undue damage is done. …”). Lago’s October 1995 article in IEE Electronics & Communication Engineering Journal was a book review of Catt’s Electromagnetism 1 which - amid hostility - rightly pointed out some defects in Catt’s whole program:

    “There are numerous examples of sloppy argument in the text. … The flaws in these arguments are easy to see. … The author sees an anomaly in the conventional view of the transmission line. This he calls the ‘Catt anomaly’ and it is the starting point of his proposals for an improved theory.

    “For a vacuum dielectric the speed of the wavefront is the speed of light so that, according to Catt, the charges on the conductors must travel at the speed of light, which is impossible. This is the ‘Catt anomaly’. Since the wavefront does travel at the speed of light, so do the charges, which then have infinite mass. It follows that there cannot be charges on the conductor surfaces and conventional theory must be wrong.

    “The flaw here is the assumption that the charges move with the wave. whereas in reality they simply come to the surface as the wave passes, and when it has gone they recede into the conductor. No individual charge moves with the velocity of the wave. The charges come to the surface to help the wave go by and then pass the task to other charges further along the line which are already there and waiting. This is the mechanism of guidance and containement. There is no anomaly.

    [Lago is misreading Catt's "anomaly/question" entirely. Catt asks a question: where does the charge come from at the front of the logic step in that conductor which is carrying an electric current which flows in the opposite direction to the direction of propagation of the logic step? However, Catt's original wording of the "anomaly" or "question" did contain a lot of obfuscation which cloaks the question, and Catt did falsely believe exactly what Lago says. Catt was completely incompetent in wording the question, because he added on a lot of ignorant off-the-cuff nonsense. I remember Catt writing to me that the Severn Bore tidal wave contains water going at the wave propagation speed. He could not accept from me that if when you throw dye into water it doesn't move along with the wave: the dye simply bobs up and down as the wave passes. I made this point to Catt in say 1997. At that time, Catt and Dr Arnold Lynch gave a talk in which Lynch tried to straighten out the mess of the Catt anomaly. I corresponded directly with Lynch but again, although Lynch could see Catt's errors, he wasn't any more interested in particle physics than Davidson and Walton were. He didn't care about it, despite that year giving the IEE centenary lecture about the electron which was attended by 300, because he had known J. J. Thomson at Cambridge in the 1930s when a graduate student, and he had told him about his discovery of the electron. Dr Lynch invented part of the first programmable computer used in Britain to break the Nazi "Fish Code" during WWII, and later he worked on dielectrics and microwave beam transmission for the British Post Office Telecommunications, now BT. He stated he had no enthusiasm for particle physics whatsoever due to the mathematics involved, and he had obtained his PhD for experimental physics work, not theoretical physics. However, some of his work on the mechanisms of solid plastic dielectrics is extremely interesting and seems to me to be relevant for the close analogy of the polarization of the vacuum in quantum field theory.]

    “But Catt goes on. Having removed charges from the surfaces of his conductors, he can no longer apply Gauss’s law and the displacement current in the wave has to go somewhere. Catt’s solution is typically ingenious: the current must continue as displacement current in conductors, which are actually dielectrics with a very high permittivity; there is no conduction current in conductors - ever! Catt’s Ockham’s Razor has been wielded to remove conduction current as well as electric charge from electromagnetic theory. There is of course the small problem of a value for the permittivity of copper. Catt is equal to the challenge …. the permittivity of copper must be extremely large. ….

    [I agree with Lago in part here: Catt's total bullshit emerges from his naive simplicity in ignoring the electron. When you grasp Catt's work properly, which Catt himself doesn't, the electron and the field are united because an electron is a gravitationally trapped charged field quanta, a charged photon trapped by gravitation into a small loop of black hole size for its associated E=mc^2 mass. This is the key fact. I has this published in ELectronics World, April 2002 and August 2003.]

    “… It is significant that, having introduced his new theory and abolished charge and current …., he then proceeds to use these concepts quite unashamedly in the rest of the book. ….

    “There are many other items in this book which give cause for concern, for example the false statement that ‘The TEM wave has virtually disappeared from today’s electromagnetic theory’.

    “Catt’s belief in his own work is clearly sincere, but this reviewer, after lengthy and careful consideration, can find virtually nothing of value in this book. B. LAGO.”

    Although I’d agree with Lago’s statements in a general way, Lago is ignoring a few bits of substantial value:

    (1) http://www.ivorcatt.com/6_2.htm

    “[Mathematical proof, followed by conclusion as follows:] The self inductance of a long straight conductor is infinite.

    “This is a recurrence of Kirchhoff’s First Law, that electric current cannot be sent from A to B. It can only be sent from A to B and back to A.” [In the context of a logic step guided by two conductors at light speed for the surrounding dielectric, this means that one conductor must contain an electric current flowing in an opposite direction to that of the other one, which gives rise to the "Catt question" whose solution I prove at http://electrogravity.blogspot.com/2006/04/maxwells-displacement-and-einsteins.html also http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/04/05/are-there-hidden-costs-of-bad-science-in-string-theory/ ]

    (2) See http://www.ivorcatt.com/1_3.htm :

    “there is no mechanism for the reciprocating energy current to slow down. The reciprocating process is loss-less [2] (so that dispersion does not occur).” [I.e., charge up any pair of conductors, and the energy enters as a light velocity logic step and maintains this velocity. Hence, any "static charge" is INDISTINGUISHABLE from dynamic, light velocity, TRAPPED ENERGY CURRENT or TRAPPED HEAVISIDE CURRENT, or TRAPPED T.E.M. WAVE, or TRAPPED LIGHT VELOCITY ELECTRIC ENERGY, whichever term you prefer. Electric energy is delivered by the field, since the kinetic energy of electron drift is trivial - electrons typically in a 1 Amp current drift at an average of 1 mm/s, and carry negligible net kinetic energy. The normal energy of electricity which we all use is due to the field, i.e., to the exchange/vector/gauge boson radiation of the electromagnetic-force-causing quantum field in the vacuum between electrons.]

    “Let us summarize the argument which erases the traditional model;

    “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.”

    On that same page, http://www.ivorcatt.com/1_3.htm , Catt does semi-usefully show that an isolated electron has a capacitance: I don’t agree with all of Catt’s explicit and implicit assumptions but the basic concept of his calculation is important. Catt shows that if you treat an electron as a concentric shell capacitor surrounded by an equal positive charged shell, and you make the radius of the latter infinity, you still get a small residual capacitance for the electron! This residual amount of capacitance appears to be: C = 4*{Pi}*{Permittivity of free space}*R, where R is the radius of the electron. Catt writes some speculative nonsense as a conclusion, but also this more sensible comment: “Note that the energy (current) is concentrated near the centre, but extends throughout space (because the outer sphere which terminates the lines of electric flux is at infinity). This echoes Faraday’s idea that unit charge extends throughout space (and is merely concentrated at a point).”

    Comment by nigel cook — December 23, 2007 @ 1:44 am

14. 

    See also Ivor Catt’s page http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/x6kncool.htm for some of the problems. For example, Catt there publishes a letter sent to me on 2 June 1997 by Dr Alun M. Anderson, the then-editor of New Scientist, concerning Catt’s work. Anderson writes falsehoods:

    “These are better submitted to an academic journal where they can be subject to the usual scientific review. … Should Mr Catt’s theories be accepted and published, I don’t doubt that he will gain recognition and that we will be interested in writing about him.”

    Catt’s work had ALREADY been published in peer-reviewed IEEE Transactions on Electronic Computers, Vol. EC-16, Dec 1967, and Proc. IEEE June 83 and June 87. I sent these to Anderson who ignored them. Recently, since leaving editorship of New Scientist, Anderson has been running cruises to the polar waters to allow people to witness the impact of global warming, which was recently criticised in the letters of New Scientist by someone (Not me!) who pointed out that the carbon footprint of such travel creates massive damage to the environment. As you might expect, New Scientist then gave Dr Anderson the last word, who true to his PR skills dismissed the issue by saying that he was using the trips to turn the travellers into eco-warriors who would return home to stop carbon emissions and he also claimed that by paying money to have trees planted, the harm due to the travel involved could be negated. It’s all spin.

    All these mainstream journalists are either liars or they are chained to editors and publishers who will only print what turns out a profit. Hard unpleasant, important facts get rejected as boring and un-salesworthy (journals don’t like getting too many unsold copies returned from the distributor, and the distributor doesn’t like transporting things around which don’t sell well), so fashionable trash gets printed just to make the widest possible readership happy (most people prefer fiction/fantasy to reality, which is the cause of all the problems in the world). Eventually nearly any journalist gets corrupted by status quo. Publish the facts at your peril. In order to get my key Electronics World article published (after much hostility), I had to forego all payment and royalty. Science that is real is not a money-making endeavour.

    Anyway, on that page http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/x6kncool.htm Catt ends up with an attack on my gravity work:

    “In your message on my answer phone you regretted my giving no characteristics to space. You had space moving around.”

    This is false, I had the FABRIC of space (such as gauge bosons, gravitons) moving around. Catt always begins an attack on me in this way, by misrepresenting what he is attacking. In quantum field theory, field quanta such as gravitons get exchanged between charges, and this exchange process provides the spacetime fabric which causes forces in the vacuum like gravity.

    “This idea contradicts your enthusiasm for my concept of a single-velocity space; a space which supports only one velocity. Such a concept has meaning only in my kind of space; totally static and absolute space. You cannot have it both ways.”

    This is false; massless radiation has a speed “c” as determined by an observer. This is independent of motion of the observer partly because the observer’s clock slows down when moving, and partly because the observer (and the observer’s instruments for measuring distance) contracts in the direction of motion when moving. So it’s quite possible to have everything apparently move at velocity c without problem. For example, I showed in Electronics World August 2002 and April 2003 how a fundamental particle with spin, which is a trapped energy current in a small loop due to gravity (black hole effect), can have any apparent speed. If it is “stationary” it is spinning at speed c. If it is propagating at high speed, then its spin speed gets modified and since its spin speed is the only objective measure of time it has (time is determined by internal motion in a clock), this accounts for time dilation. Catt’s refusal to distinguish between the spacetime fabric and the volume of empty space is tragic.

    “Some years ago I said that I did not comprehend the concept of the particle, so as a true scientist I could not introduce it into my theories. Those in discussion with me have always accepted that I may not be expected to build theories using concepts that I did not comprehend. …”

    This (and the rudeness which follows it) is typical Catt nonsense, and the kind of thing which eventually caused a break down in communication between us. Catt refuses to comprehend facts based on particle physics and refuses to listen. I tried for years to get a discussion, and never did get it.

    Comment by nigel cook — December 23, 2007 @ 2:19 am

15. 

    copy of a comment:

    http://riofriospacetime.blogspot.com/2007/12/big-trouble-for-little-physics.html

    Thank you very much for writing this cheerful post, Louise! I agree that simplicity is key. The simplest model that predicts everything required is what science requires to be successful. I got a top grade A for a module in marketing at university, but I still don’t have a clue how to combat the mainstream hype machine despite this! Somehow, I think that the mainstream has “cried wolf” so much with its hype of all kinds of crazy interpretations, speculations, string theories, multiverses, etc., that they have made it impossible for alternatives with no budget to be taken seriously or even published.

    2:19 PM

    Comment by nc — December 26, 2007 @ 3:09 pm

16. 

    Just for the benefit of string theorists and other morons who can’t remember the basics of calculus:

    “… Acceleration: a = dv/dt = d[HR]/dt = H*dR/dt = Hv …”

    This line in my post comes about as follows.

    The product rule of differentiation is

    d(uv)/dx = (v*du/dx) + (u*dv/dx)

    Hence the observationally based Hubble law v = HR differentiates as follows:

    dv/dt = d(RH)/dt

    = (H*dR/dt) + (R*dH/dt)

    The second term here, R*dH/dt, is zero because in the Hubble law v = HR the term H is a constant from our standpoint in spacetime, so H doesn’t vary as a function of R and thus it also doesn’t vary as a function of apparent time past t = R/c. In the spacetime trajectory we see as we look out to greater distances, R/t is always in the fixed ratio c, because when we see things at distance R the light from that distance has to travel that distance at velocity c to get to us, so when we look out to distance R we’re automatically looking back in time to time t = R/c seconds ago.

    Hence R*dH/dt = R*dH/d[R/c] = Rc*dH/dR = Rc*0 = 0.

    This is because dH/dR = 0. I.e., there is no variation of the Hubble constant as a function of observable spacetime distance R.

    One problem in communication between myself and string theorists is that they want long mathematical proofs for results like these, which are so obvious at a glance that you don’t need to write down the long proof. Such people are not physicists, just wooden-style mathematicians who can’t grasp any facts from looking at the equations but instead need to work through long proofs. That’s all very well in abstract mathematics, but it obscures the physical mechanisms involved in nature. Nature isn’t mathematical, it’s mechanistic and the approximate mathematical models which describe the mechanism are just that: approximate mathematical representations. If you start to present it as a mathematical system, readers get the wrong impression and anyone with any sense is immediately put off.

    Comment by nige — January 20, 2008 @ 12:32 pm

17. 

    copy of a comment:

    http://kea-monad.blogspot.com/2008/01/monthly-misquote.html

    If the events supposedly creating the gravitational waves are at cosmological (massive) distances, then the reason why the gravitational waves will be much smaller than mainstream predictions suggest is down to quantum gravity:

    1. Quantum gravity works by the exchange of gravitons between masses (and fields possessing energy).

    2. If the masses or fields the detector is exchanging gravitons with is located at cosmological distances, then the exchanged gravitons are passing through an expanding distance due to cosmological recession. This will cause redshift of graviton energy.

    3. By Planck’s law E = hf, a shift of frequency of any field quanta is accompanied by a loss of energy of the field quanta. [This is why the light we see from the big bang is redshifted to microwaves, instead of 3000 K blackbody (mainly infrared) radiation scorching us to a cinder, which would occur in the absence of redshift!]

    4. The redshift of exchanged gravitons over cosmological (massive) distances reduces the energy of the received gravitons and thus reduces the effective value of the gravitational coupling constant, G, for the interaction.

    5. As a result, the gravitational waves from events at cosmological distances appear far, far smaller than predicted using a constant gravitational coupling constant G. The faulty prediction can be corrected by working out the relative graviton redshift energy depletion effect for the cosmological distance of interest, and simply scaling the value of G by the same factor. I.e., if the redshift is such that quanta suffer a doubling of wavelength and a halving of frequency, their energy will fall by a factor of two, and the correct scaled value of G to use in gravity wave predictions will be G/2. It’s as easy as that to compensate for graviton redshift (the amount of graviton redshift will be identical to the amount of visible light redshift at a given distance, and that is well known from the Hubble law).

    Comment by nige — January 20, 2008 @ 12:55 pm

18. 

    [...] light observed, since energy is related to frequency by E = hf) and the analogy to the big bang which suggested the mechanism of gravity in 1996. In an air blast wave, Newton’s 3rd law - the equality of action and reaction forces - always [...]

    Pingback by Quantum gravity mechanism and predictions « SU(2)xSU(3) for QFT — February 5, 2008 @ 9:32 am

19. 

    Another factor which needs to be taken account of in calculating the effective outward force of the distant galaxies that are acceelrating away from us in the big bang, is the relativistic mass increase of those distant, rapidly receding masses.

    Comment by nc — February 6, 2008 @ 9:04 am

20. 

    [...] would make two masses always attract.  The failure here, aside from predicting nothing checkable unlike the spin-1 graviton, is that it is false in the first place to assume that gravitons are only going to be exchanged [...]

    Pingback by Book (updated 6 February 2008) « SU(2)xSU(3) for QFT — February 6, 2008 @ 10:09 am

21. 

    The quotation near the end of the post text,

    ‘U-2 observations have revealed anisotropy in the 3 K blackbody radiation which bathes the universe. 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.’ – R. A. Muller, University of California, ‘The cosmic background radiation and the new aether drift’, Scientific American, vol. 238, May 1978, pp. 64-74,

    should be followed by a statement pointing out that if you take the 600 km/s velocity as an order of magnitude estimate of the our velocity compared to the cosmic background radiation since the big bang (actually it may be higher than the average velocity since time zero, because the Milky Way is currently being approaching Andromeda, which is a much bigger galaxy), you can derive a distance from the origin of the universe (assuming the universe is something like an expanding fireball with a centre, rather than assuming the “boundless curvature” lying picture from general relativity usually hyped as if it had some factual evidence to support it, which it doesn’t when you take account of the long range redshift of gravitons in an expanding universe, which would destroy the idea of long-range curvature and thus would stop the universe being a boundless, curved geometric entity with no outer edge):

    distance = vt

    v = 600 km/s
    t = 13.7 thousand million years expressed in seconds

    The result is that we’re on the order of only 0.3% of the radius of the universe from the “middle” of the fireball, or the “point of origin” (to use language which is a heresy to general relativity worshippers who are nearly a century out of date and haven’t heard of graviton dynamics yet).

    Comment by nc — February 8, 2008 @ 7:59 pm

22. 

    Nobel laureate Gerard ‘t Hooft has recently begun arguing that although phenomena on scall scales are non-deterministic as described in quantum mechanics by probabilities, the evolution of the universe is the most fundamental event we have knowledge about and that is deterministic (a determinable, predictable sequence of events occurs; e.g. clumping of hydrogen and other atoms by gravity can be predicted to form stars where nuclear fusion occurs):

    ‘… quantum mechanics as it is known today has become the theory enabling us to produce the best possible predictions for the future, given as much information as we can give about the system’s past, in any conceivable experimental setup. Quantum mechanics is not a description of the actual course of events between past and future.

    ‘Quantum mechanics will exactly reproduce the statistical features of Nature at a local scale, in our laboratories. The only effect our present considerations will have on the pursuit of an improved, accurate theory of quantum gravity and cosmology is that the universe in itself is required to be controlled by equations beyond quantum mechanics. The argument for this is simple. Quantum mechanics has been tailored by us to describe the statistical outcomes of experiments when repeated many times, locally in some laboratory. We may well assume this theory to be exact in describing local statistics. The entire Universe, however (in particular when we are talking about a closed universe), is itself a ‘experiment’ carried out only once, and all events in it are unique. The question whether a single event took place or not can only be answered by ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but there is no probabilistic answer. A theory that yields ‘maybe’ as an answer should be recognized as an inaccurate theory. If this is what we should believe, then only deterministic theories describing the entire cosmos should be accepted. There can be no ‘quantum cosmology’.’

    - Gerard ‘t Hooft, ‘Emergent Quantum Mechanics and Emergent
    Symmetries’, http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.4568v1 , 31 Jul 2007, page 2.

    The argument by Gerard ‘t Hooft above is very important: it is an attack on the quantum indeterminancy of Leonard Susskind’s ‘cosmic landscape’ of string theory, which claims that the universe is ruled by a quantum cosmology with a landscape of 10^500 metastable vacua (the exact number being determined by the details of the Rube-Goldberg machines which are required to stabilize the Calabi-Yau manifold’s moduli). According to Susskind, we have to religiously believe on faith (without any proof) that one of those 10^500 metastable vacua is our own vacuum, which determines the Standard Model of particle physics. To emphasise again, nobody can even prove that the universe is one of the 10^500 metastable vacua, let alone identify the particular one and use it to predict the parameters of the Standard Model. However, Susskind’s argument is that it is more logical to replace existing religious belief in ‘intelligent design’ with a religious belief in string theory, because the latter is - in his opinion - more logical. ‘t Hooft’s argument is contrary to Susskind’s.

    ‘t Hooft argues that quantum mechanics shows us that the universe as a whole must be deterministic, bringing up the religious idea of Laplace that God started the universe and it has run in deterministic fashion by applying laws to initial conditions ever since.

    Let’s examine ‘t Hooft’s argument (quoted above). He starts by pointing out that quantum mechanics is just a statistical (for large numbers of particles under examination) or probabilistic (for small numbers of observed particles) model, and is not a physical description of events: ‘Quantum mechanics is not a description of the actual course of events between past and future. … the universe in itself is required to be controlled by equations beyond quantum mechanics. The argument for this is simple. Quantum mechanics has been tailored by us to describe the statistical outcomes of experiments when repeated many times, locally in some laboratory. We may well assume this theory to be exact in describing local statistics. The entire Universe, however (in particular when we are talking about a closed universe), is itself a ‘experiment’ carried out only once, and all events in it are unique. The question whether a single event took place or not can only be answered by ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but there is no probabilistic answer. A theory that yields ‘maybe’ as an answer should be recognized as an inaccurate theory. If this is what we should believe, then only deterministic theories describing the entire cosmos should be accepted.’

    The point being made by ‘t Hooft is that although quantum mechanics is not deterministic in its present mainstream form (for example in the way that quantum mechanics models probabilities by integrating the square of a statistical wavefunction over volume), the ultimate equations describing the universe we observe cannot be defended in a statistical manner. We have definite information from cosmology, which is about the big bang event. It’s not statistical information, derived from a large number of universes. Anyone trying to force the statistical/probabilistic methods of quantum mechanics on to cosmology is missing the point that the whole statistical/probabilistic basis for quantum mechanics as a nature of model is only defensible because it is impossible to observe the history of an individual electron in an atom in the same way that we can observe the history of the universe by simply looking to further distances (earlier times).

    It is for this reason that a scientific model of the universe (based on laws derived from scientific observations, not from armchair speculations) must be based upon laws that must be deterministic, not statistical, in nature. If science is based on laws based on observation, then those laws based on observations of statistical and probabilistic phenomena like electron scattering measurements or random radioactive decay, will be statistical in nature, predicting only in terms of probability what will occur in the future; while laws based on observations of a once-only event such as the evidence we have from the universe, will be deterministic rather than based on probability/speculation.

    Where I disagree with ‘t Hooft is in his claim that the universe is really ‘deterministic’. Given initial conditions, I can predict (using a semi-Monte Carlo simulation run on a computer) certain aspects of the evolution of the universe, but not others.

    Even ignoring the crucial role of the virtual particles (whose number is generally regarded as not conserved, because you get high-energy virtual photons spontaneously disappearing and producing pairs of fermions which after an uncertain amount of time tend to annihilate back into radiation) which interact with real particles and cause most of the chaos on small scales in the nucleus and the atom, you still have the problem that there are 10^80 long-lived (’real’ particles in the observable universe.

    That’s too many interactions to accurately simulate by Monte Carlo calculations in a computer; you have to make simplifying approximations like treating distant stars, planets and galaxies as individual items of known mass. Even if you could include the 10^80 long-lived particles, you would get chaotic indeterminancy creep into the simulation due to Poincare chaos: even classical physics fails to give deterministic predictions where you have more than two particles interacting. Where you have three bodies in orbit, chaos is a natural consequence.

    ‘… 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, ‘Rubber Sheet Physics’ (science article) in Analog: Science Fiction/Science Fact, Vol. C1, No. 129, Davis Publications, New York, November 1981.

    But even if you could somehow simulate every long-lived particle in the universe using a Monte Carlo computer code, that would not make the universe deterministic because you don’t know the initial conditions at a tiny fraction of a second. All you know is that fermions and quarks were created at very high energy; you don’t know their initial locations and motions. In other words, the Monte Carlo computer simulation would have to start off by using random numbers (with a statistically representative distribution for particular physics in question, e.g. a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution or whatever statistics are appropriate to that stage in the universe) to enable the computer represent all the unknown particles usefully.

    It can then apply physical laws to those initial conditions to simulate the universe. However, if you alter the randomly selected initial conditions, you will end up with changes in details later in the universe. E.g., you might be able to predict the approximate statistical rate of formation of spiral galaxies as a function of time after the big bang, but you won’t be able to predict exact numbers because when you run the simulation repeatedly with different random numbers to represent the initial particle motions, you get different details in the universe at later times.

    In any case, interactions randomly with virtual particles such as gauge bosons in the vacuum will make physics indeterministic both at early times in the universe and at small distances from particles in the universe today. Because the initial conditions of the universe can’t be determined accurately even in principle, the subsequent history of the universe is - so far as details go - indeterministic. It is only deterministic when you look at the statistical evolution of the universe, e.g. the percentage of different kinds of galaxy at different times after the big bang (different distances from us in spacetime). Similarly, quantum mechanics is deterministic when you look at large statistics, e.g., on the average the electron in the ground state of a hydrogen atom is most likely to be found near the Bohr radius, 53 pico metres. If you measure the electron distance from the nucleus for a large number of hydrogen atoms (or infer it from the size and mass of a large quantity of condensed hydrogen), indeterminancy effects become trivial and you get a deterministic result.

    It’s a pity that instead of wasting time on a search for a cosmology of indeterminism (the landscape of 10^500 metastable vacua) or determinism (’t Hooft), people don’t investigate causality in cosmology. Physics is not deterministic, but it does have a causal mechanism.

    Comment by nige cook — March 7, 2008 @ 12:07 pm

23. 

    Copy of a comment to:

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

    Teresa,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Nige

    Comment by nc — April 25, 2008 @ 3:09 pm

24. 

    Copy of a comment:

    http://coraifeartaigh.wordpress.com/2008/04/10/more-on-inflation/#comment-38

    ‘Basically, the idea is that quantum fluctuations in the early universe could have been stretched by inflation to astronomical proportions, providing the seeds for galaxy formation. The predicted spectrum of these fluctuations was calculated by Guth and others in 1982.’

    You write as if the stretching of the quantum fluctuations made them big enough to seed galaxy formation, which is totally misleading I fear.

    I studied cosmology a decade ago, and my understanding is the opposite of what seems to be implied by those sentences in your otherwise very nice post.

    General relativity (Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric) predicts far too much curvature in the early universe, so the density fluctuations predicted by general relativity without inflation would lead to galaxy formation much too soon. With the Hubble telescope and others, the era of early galaxy formation can be determined and it is a lot later than general relativity predicts.

    In addition, the cosmic background radiation tells us what the fluctuations in radiation (and density of matter) were at 300,000 years after the big bang, when the temperature of the big bang fell below 3000 K allowing electrons and protons to combine into hydrogen, which made the universe transparent to most radiation. (At higher temperatures i.e. earlier times, the universe was basically ionised hydrogen gas, which was a strong absorber of all electromagnetic waves. Hence at earlier times than 300,000 years after the big bang, the radiation and matter temperatures were identical because they were in an equilibrium, but at all later times the radiation field temperature decoupled from that of the matter and decreased due to falling energy of photons received from 300,000 years emission time by distant matter as the universe expanded, i.e. the redshift effect.)

    Inflation was supposed to have occurred at very early times after the big bang (10^{-26} of a second or so), due to a phase change in the vacuum’s state, as you write in the post, which briefly allowed faster-than-light expansion.

    This extremely rapid ‘inflationary’ expansion epoch, at around 10^{-26} of a second into the big bang, is supposed to be wonderful because it would reduce the curvature of the universe thereafter, and would reduce galaxy formation rates subsequently. Galaxy formation requires curvature to make the quantum fluctuations grow. The role of inflation is to reduce the curvature of the universe on large scales by spreading the same amount of mass-energy over a bigger volume than suggested by the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric. Curvature (gravitational acceleration) is reduced if you spread the same amount of mass-energy over a bigger volume, just as gravitation would appear weaker if the Earth was made bigger in size but only contained the same mass.

    Inflation spreads out the matter over a bigger volume, hence it reduces curvature, which reduces the rate at which quantum fluctuations grow in size, which in turn reduces the rate at which star and galaxy formation is seeded.

    So the fact that as you write, ‘quantum fluctuations in the early universe could have been stretched by inflation to astronomical proportions’ is actually a bit misleading.

    The quantum fluctuations are actually reduced in size by inflation, because inflation reduces curvature, which in turn reduces the growth rate of quantum fluctuations.

    Inflation is not impressive because it makes no falsifiable predictions. It’s a false, epicycle-style piece of metaphysics.

    Instead of inflation reducing curvature by expanding the universe faster that light velocity during a phase transition in the vacuum state, what happens is that the universal gravitational constant is directly proportional to time since the big bang. This is a checkable prediction from a quantum gravity mechanism which reproduces all checked general relativity effects and which also predicts the gravitational constant G within the experimental error bars of the data.

    Hence at 300,000 years after the big bang, the universe was 46,000 times younger than it is now, so G was smaller by a similar factor. This is the correct reason as to why there the early universe was much flatter (less curved, i.e. less gravitational field strength) at early times such as when the cosmic background radiation originated.

    This explanation is the correct one for the observed slow rates of galaxy formation in the early universe, not inflation. There is solid evidence behind this model, because it is simple, makes checked predictions, and reproduces empirically confirmed aspects of quantum field theory and general relativity.

    Note that the variation in G with time prediction of this alternative theory was falsely attacked by Edward Teller in 1948 after a different theory of varying G was proposed by Dirac. Teller ignored the fact that electromagnetism is related to gravitation so should have a coupling constant that varies in the same way with time that G varies as. Teller claimed that varying G would vary the compression rate in the fusion rates in the stars (and obviously the fusion rate in first minutes of the big bang) in a way incompatible with observations, but this objection is totally false and based on Teller’s ignorance that the electromagnetic coupling will vary with time in the same way as G. The variation in electromagnetic coupling constant means that where gravitation is weaker (causing less compression of matter in the big bang fusion and in star fusion), Coulomb electromagnetic repulsion would similarly be weaker. Since it is precisely the Coulomb barrier that stops protons from easily being fused together by the short-ranged pion-mediated strong nuclear force, the variation in Coulomb force with time cancels out the effect of gravity constant G varying with time (so far as nuclear fusion is concerned). Everything works out!

    Comment by nige — April 29, 2008 @ 6:08 pm

25. 

    copy of a comment:

    http://coraifeartaigh.wordpress.com/2008/04/16/euclid-and-the-renaissance

    ‘The strange aspect of the story is that the painstaking recovery of classical maths and science made it appear sacred. In fact, we now know much of Aristotlean science was wrong (due to lack of experimentation), but it was only against the greatest resistance that reformists such as Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo gradually made headway.’

    Well, all radical ideas meet objections. A new scientific theory doesn’t make progress by overcoming objections with sheer force or counter-arrogance, but by becoming clearer, more lucid, and therefore better understood.

    Euclid is commonly dismissed for neglecting the possibility that spacetime is curved.

    However, according to quantum gravity, the effects of curvature are attributed to a spacetime fabric composed of graviton interactions.

    Therefore, the classical curved spacetime of general relativity is wrong. Albert Einstein himself expressed it in a 1954 letter to his close friend Michel Besso:

    “I consider it quite possible that physics cannot be based on the [spacetime continuum] field principle, i.e., on continuous structures. In that case, nothing remains of my entire castle in the air, gravitation theory included…”

    Already we know that two confidence-tricks must be used to make the continuously variable differential geometry of general relativity (Ricci tensor, its trace, and the stress-energy tensor) approximate the real world.

    Instead of representing the particulate distribution of matter realistically in the stress-energy tensor, you always have to put in an artificially smoothed (averaged) distribution which ignores the discontinuities of fundamental particles at discrete locations in the vacuum. So you have to model mass-energy (the source of the curvature) using a false model such as a “perfect fluid” in which density is averaged, rather than being lumpy. You can’t use calculus on discontinuities, or you get infinities and zeros as output. E.g., true density is zero up to the edge of a fundamental particle, say the Planck scale or whatever radius you use, then density jumps discontinuously to a very high value. The rate of change of density is thus zero or infinity.

    So to get the stress-energy tensor to work smoothly, you have to put in an artificial, averaged distribution of fundamental particles instead of using the really discontinuous distribution of small fundamental particles in the vacuum.

    Then when you calculate curvature, you are again using a tensor, differential geometry. But curvature is not real because spacetime is quantized with discrete, quantum graviton interactions causing all the effects. Hence, masses accelerate in discrete impulses due to successive graviton interactions, not as the smooth acceleration suggested by 3+1 dimensional curved spacetime in classical general relativity.

    All of the curvature effects of general relativity can be better understood in terms of graviton interactions than in terms of classical 3+1 dimensional spacetime curvature. E.g., the normal way to present curvature of 3 dimensions in space is to draw a 2 dimensional diagram. As soon as you extend the 2 dimensional diagram to 3 dimensions, you end up facing the reality of the spacetime fabric, not geometry.

    Aristotle’s “Physics” made it clear that he didn’t understand what air is. He believed that when an arrow is fired, it continues to move because air is displaced by bthe motion of the arrow from its front, and then pushes around the moving arrow from front to rear, pressing in at the back of the arrow, thereby keeping the arrow in motion.

    What he was trying to do was to explain the physical mechanism behind Newton’s 1st law of motion (not yet formulated experimentally in Aristotle’s time), the momentum of a moving object.

    If Aristotle had known about the spacetime fabric (as distinct from air) and fundamental particles, he could have applied his mechanism for momentum to the spacetime fabric flowing around moving fundamental particles from front to rear.

    This mechanism is vital for physics. Gauge bosons which interact with fundamental particles can’t penetrate through those particles as if those particles were not there, or they wouldn’t have any interactions or any effects. Hence, gauge bosons like gravitons are stopped by the fundamental particles they interact with. Consequently, when a fundamental particle such as some fermion moves, it might be expected to create a void in the spacetime fabric behind it, and for the spacetime fabric to pile up on the moving side.

    But because the spacetime fabric such as gravitons is composed of light-velocity exchange radiation in perpectual motion, the spacetime fabric is capable of moving out of the way of moving fundamental particles if those particles aren’t going at light velocity themselves. Hence, the Aristotle mechanism really does seem to reply. Also, the pressure of gravitons against moving matter in the direction of motion can be shown to cause the FitzGerald length contraction and mass increase effect.

    What really settles the issue is that in in the big bang, the relative outward motion of matter away from us at velocity v=H*R (Hubble’s recession law) leads to radially outward acceleration of matter a=dv/dt = d(HR)/dt = H*v + R*dH/dt = H*v = R*H^2. Thus you obtain an outward force of receding matter F=ma, and by Newton’s 3rd law an equal inward directed reaction force, mediated by gravitons which predicts the strength of gravity…

    Comment by nc — May 11, 2008 @ 12:21 am

26. 

    copy of a comment:

    http://www.nonequilibrium.net/various/41-peter-woit-what-will-you-do-if-string-theory-is-wrong/#comment-242

    “It is simply true that the Planck scale is the ultimate scale below which the usual concepts about geometry have to break down.” - Dr Lubos Motl

    Dr Motl, the Planck length scale has no empirical evidence. It’s just a combination of G, c, and h by dimensional analysis to yield a small length. Actually, the black hole event horizon radius of an electron (~10^{-57} m) uses G, c and m_electron, and yields a much smaller length than the Planck scale. So if you want a small “fundamental” length from dimensional analysis, why choose Planck’s length over the smaller black hole event horizon radius for a fundamental particle? The decision of which to use is down to prejudice and familiarity, rather than being based upon empirical evidence in favour of the Planck scale which is unobservable.

    “… an amazing example of an outsider’s collapsed mental abilities - a person who can only produce ad hominem attacks but cannot ever do anything useful.” - Dr Lubos Motl

    That might just be down to the fact that the work of outsiders is rejected, unread, by the mainstream string community, who seem to be regarded by journal editors as the perfect “peer-reviewers” for innovative non-string ideas. If you delete work from arXiv that is non-string based, as mine was in December 2002, then your claim that outsiders never do anything useful is just hot air. You’ve insulated yourselves from what outsiders are doing, you don’t care to read their work, and you just hype your own genius all the time. Journals are full of masses of physically-meaningless, self-consistent mathematical drivel that leads nowhere, can never be falsified, etc. I don’t see any evidence for genius in string theorist work, except for the kind of nefarious genius of snubbing work they haven’t even bothered to read before deleting it.

    “If you think that you can do research in physics - or even better than the real physicists, right? - why don’t you do it instead of the defamations and crackpot preprints of yours?” - Dr Lubos Motl

    Nice one, Lubos. Doubtless you have a genius for putting into passionate words the unspoken kind thoughts of Edward Witten, Jacques Distler, and many other heroes of the pro-string media.

    Comment by nc — May 11, 2008 @ 8:30 am

27. 

    Comment by anon.

    http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=686#comment-38329

    “This is certainly true: if the string theory landscape made lots of testable predictions so that we had good reason to believe in it, and the same structure implied a multiverse, that would be good reason to believe in the multiverse.” - PW

    Even a theory which makes tested predictions isn’t necessarily truth, because there might be another theory which makes all the same predictions plus more. E.g., Ptolemy’s excessively complex and fiddled epicycle theory of the Earth-centred universe made many tested predictions about planetary positions, but belief in it led to the censorship of an even better theory of reality.

    Hence, I’d be suspicious of whether the multiverse is the best theory - even if it did have a long list of tested predictions - because there might be some undiscovered alternative theory which is even better. Popper’s argument was that scientific theories can never be proved, only falsified. If theories can’t be proved, you shouldn’t believe in them except as useful calculational tools. Mixing beliefs with science quickly makes the fundamental revision of theories a complete heresy. Scientists shouldn’t start begin believing that theories are religious creeds.

    Comment by anon. — May 15, 2008 @ 8:46 pm

28. 

    comment by anon.

    http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=686#comment-38472

    ‘… but, until recently the question of whether particle theorists were doing science or pseudo-science was not one that ever came up. You just didn’t see leading figures in the field publicly making bogus claims about what it means to test a scientific theory.’ - PW

    Witten twelve years ago wrote that the most remarkable prediction of string theory is the fact it predicts spin-2 gravitons:

    ‘String theory has the remarkable property of predicting gravity.’ - E. Witten, Physics Today, April 1996.

    It’s quite interesting that string theory does attempt to tie together long-established speculations concerning spin-2 gravitons, coupling constant unification at the Planck scale, and black hole entropy. These theoretical ‘tests’ of string theory - in which it is merely shown to be compatible with speculation (partly based on theoretical arguments, but embellished by prejudice over the years) about the gauge boson of quantum gravitational interactions and so on - is weaker than direct experimental verification, but they do make string theory appear consistent with such speculations.

    So I’m wondering how on earth anyone is ever going to get motivated enough to work seriously and hard on alternative ideas, to really rival string theory. Aristarchus of Samos came up with the solar system in 250 BC, but it was unable to make any headway against the mainstream for nearly two thousand years (until Kepler’s ‘inelegant’ elliptical orbits took away the need for ‘pure’ circles with epicycles in Copernicus’s complex solar system model). By analogy, maybe some crazy idea around today is basically true, but requires a lot of work scientifically before it is taken as a serious contender to rival the mainstream string theory speculation.

    Comment by anon. — May 20, 2008 @ 8:50 pm

29. 

    Anon: please stop copying comments here. If you attack Witten and other people like him, it will give my blog a bad reputation, and it will look as if I’m condoning your arguments by allowing your comments to remain.

    http://dorigo.wordpress.com/2008/05/17/one-more-chunk-of-susy-parameter-space-ticked-off/

    On the reality of the big bang, can I recommend http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/tiredlit.htm for an analysis of the redshift facts and the reasons why pseudoscientists can’t accept the big bang facts as valid.

    Notice also that Alpher and Gamow predicted the cosmic background radiation in 1948 and it was discovered in 1965.

    Actually, the big bang theory is incomplete, because when you take the derivative of the Hubble expansion law v = HR, you get acceleration a=dv/dt = d(H*R)/dt = (H*dR/dt) + (R*dH/dt) = H*v = R*H^2. This tells you that receding masses around us have a small outward acceleration, only on the order of 10^{-10} ms^{-2} for the most distant objects. This is a tremendous prediction. I published it via Electronics World back in Oct 96, well before Perlmutter confirmed it observationally.

    This is just about the observed acceleration of the universe! Smolin points this amount of acceleration and the “numerical coincidence” that it is on the order of a = Hc = R*H^2 out in his book “The Trouble with Physics” (2006) but neglects to state that you get this result by differentiating the Hubble recession law! Note that arXiv.org allowed my paper upload from university in 2002, but then deleted in within seconds, unread!

    Dr Bob Lambourne of the Open University years ago suggested submitting my paper to the Institute of Physics’ Classical and Quantum Gravity, the editor of which sent it for “peer-review” to a string theorist who rejected it because it added nothing to string theory!

    So some additional evidence and confirmed predictions of the big bang do definitely exist (the outward acceleration of matter leads to radially outward force, which by newton’s 3rd law gives a predictable inward reaction force, which allows quantitative predictions of gravity that again are confirmed by empirical facts). Don’t just believe that only stuff that survives censorship by string theorists is factual. Classical and Quantum Gravity was publishing the Bogdanov’s string theory speculations (which the journal later had to retract) at the time it was rejecting my fact-based paper!

    Comment by nc — May 21, 2008 @ 11:15 am

30. 

    copy of a comment of mine to Not Even Wrong (currently in moderation queue there, so it might not appear there):

    http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=689#comment-38515

    Your comment is awaiting moderation.

    nigel cook Says:

    May 22nd, 2008 at 11:43 am

    ‘… the problem is whether they are even in principle scientifically testable or not. If they’re not, they’re not science and promoting them to the public is a bad idea.’

    You actually need to specify precisely why it’s a bad idea to promote belief-based ideas (that have no more checkable evidence behind them than religions), otherwise some readers will assume that you’re asserting a personal opinion about what is ‘bad’. Some readers, I’m sure, think uncheckable speculation is fine science.

    Comment by nc — May 22, 2008 @ 4:46 pm

31. 

    my comment hasn’t appeared yet, but Dr Woit has stated (in a reply to a comment by somebody else):

    http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=689#comment-38536

    “My problem is … with the idea of writing articles for a major US popular science magazine promoting the multiverse and Boltzmann brain argumentation. This gives people the idea that this kind of empty speculation is what science is, impressing those who can’t tell the difference between science and science fiction, and turning off those who can.”

    Comment by nc — May 23, 2008 @ 12:15 pm

32. 

    http://kea-monad.blogspot.com/2008/05/m-theory-lesson-192.html

    It’s a shame if loop quantum gravity is now describing things which can’t ever be experimentally refuted if incorrect.

    Smolin put some Perimeter Institute [lecture]s of his on quantum gravity online a few years ago, and I was impressed with the basic concept: to quantize gravity with a minimal amount of speculation.

    In particular, I liked the idea of arriving at a gravitational force path integral by summing all of the interaction graphs for gravitational interactions in spacetime.

    This seems a physically sensible approach. Smolin showed (in outline) in the first lectures that you can sum interaction graphs to get general relativity without a metric, which is what he calls background independence.

    A metric is an output of general relativity for a particular set of input assumptions. So it’s interesting that you can get the basic field equation without a metric from summing spin-foam interaction graphs over spacetime.

    However, all of this is very abstract and it doesn’t predict anything comparable to observation such as the relatively weak force of the gravitational interaction (relative to other fundamental forces).

    Comment by nc — May 23, 2008 @ 1:27 pm

33. 

    http://kea-monad.blogspot.com/2008/05/m-theory-lesson-192.html

    One thing that I don’t see any evidence for is the assumption in loop quantum gravity that the penrose “spin network” model for gravitational interactions in spacetime is physically the best model to use! Smolin’s summation of interaction graphs is basically a summation of the Penrose spin network graphs, which is a very abstract an[d] questionable model of spacetime.

    Penrose’s own papers on spin networks, http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/penrose/Penrose-AngularMomentum.pdf and http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/penrose/Penrose-OnTheNatureOfQuantumGeometry.pdf, are entirely abstract models with no checkable predictions or even solid foundations in physical facts.

    On page 18 of the first paper Penrose states:

    “When the vertex connections have been completed at every vertex of a closed spin-network, then we shall have a number of closed loops, with no open-ended strands remaining.”

    This could physically be a model for the closed loops of graviton radiation being exchanged from gravitational charge A to charge B and then back again to charge A, in a endless cycle (closed loop).

    However, the linkage between mathematical or geometric model and physical fact is so indirect and vague that it’s just not very helpful physically.

    On page 4 of the first paper, Penrose writes:

    “I have referred to these line segments [in the Penrose spin network spacetime illustration] as representing, in some way, the world-lines of particles. But I don’t want to imply that these lines stand just for elementary particles (say). Each line could represent some compound system which separates itself from other such systems for long enough that (in some sense) it can be regarded as isolated and stationary, with a well-defined total angular momentum n*(1/2)*h-bar. Let us call such a system or particle an n-unit. (We allow n = 0, 1, 2, … For the precise model I am describing, we must also imagine that the particles or systems are not moving relative to one another. They just transfer angular momentum around, regrouping themselves into different subsystems, perhaps annihilating one another, perhaps producing new units.”

    This is needlessly very vague, which is a pity. Why not physically describe something specific, such as gauge boson exchange between gravitational charges, and see where it leads? Why instead do they just pick one very vague spacetime model and work on that (the Penrose spin network)?

    Comment by nc — May 23, 2008 @ 3:55 pm

34. 

    copy of a comment:

    http://kea-monad.blogspot.com/2008/05/neutrino08.html

    Here’s something they won’t discuss concerning Rutherford. He and Bohr were extremely naive in 1913 about the electron “not radiating” endlessly. They couldn’t grasp that in the ground state, all electrons are radiating (gauge bosons) at the same rate they are receiving them, hence the equilibrium of emission and absorption of energy when an electron is in the ground state, and the fact that the electron has to be in an excited state before an observable photon emission can occur:

    “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.”

    - Rutherford to Bohr, 20 March 1913, in response to Bohr’s model of quantum leaps of electrons which explained the empirical Balmer formula for line spectra. (Quotation from: A. Pais, “Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World”, 1985, page 212.)

    The ground state energy and thus frequency of the orbital oscillation of an electron is determined by the average rate of exchange of electromagnetic gauge bosons between electric charges. So it’s really the dynamics of quantum field theory (e.g. the exchange of gauge boson radiation between all the electric charges in the universe) which explains the reason for the ground state in quantum mechanics. Likewise, as Feynman showed in QED, the quantized exchange of gauge bosons between atomic electrons is a random, chaotic process and it is this chaotic quanta nature for the electric field on small scales which makes the electron jump around unpredictably in the atom, instead of obeying the false (smooth, non-quantized) Coulomb force law and describing nice elliptical or circular shaped orbits.

    Comment by nc — May 25, 2008 @ 9:55 am

35. 

    copy of a comment:

    http://riofriospacetime.blogspot.com/2008/05/einsteins-sphere.html

    “He rejects a flat Universe, for his General Relativity shows that Space/Time is curved. He rejects the idea of boundaries and considers the Universe “finite yet unbounded”. The obvious analogy is a sphere.

    This 4-dimensional spherical Space has a finite volume given by:

    V = 2 $\pi$^2 R^3

    Where R is radius, with dimensions of length. (If anyone can’t abide by this, please complain to Einstein.)”

    There isn’t any “curved” smooth classical spacetime, it’s just an approximation using calculus to represent effects of discrete field quanta being exchanged between gravitational charges composed of mass or energy.

    The universe isn’t curved, this was discovered by Perlmutter around 1998, when it was found that the predicted curvature (gravitational acceleration) as assessed from the redshifts of distant supernovae, was absent.

    Einstein 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, gravitation theory included…”

    Quantum field theory is something that definitely needs to be considered.

    Comment by nc — May 25, 2008 @ 10:16 am

36. 

    [...] the usual scattering.  If you want to know why light bends on the presence of gravitating mass, this post  (figures 1, 2, 3 and table 1) deals with mass and gravity while this post (figures 2, 3, [...]

    Pingback by Energy conservation in the Standard Model « U(1) x SU(2) x SU(3) and gravity — May 30, 2008 @ 11:25 pm

37. 

    On my newer post introducing the basic mechanism of quantum gravity, http://nige.wordpress.com/2008/01/30/book/ , I make the point that the mainstream spin-2 graviton hypothesis is wrong because it only deals with a path integral that considers 2 regions of mass-energy (i.e., 2 sources of gravitation).

    It ignores graviton exchanges with all other masses in the universe, and thereby concludes that exchange of spin-2 gravitons would cause attraction of two masses (in a universe which only consisted of two masses).

    However, when you include the surrounding masses in the universe, this argument breaks down:

    1. When you include the surrounding masses in the universe, spin-1 gravitons do the job of pushing masses together, http://nige.wordpress.com/2008/01/30/book/

    2. When you include the surrounding masses in the universe, spin-2 gravitons no longer necessarily cause the correct (ad hoc) model of attraction for 2 masses. In any case, this spin-2 model is unphysical and has no evidence, unlike the correct predictions of quantitative effects by the spin-1 graviton model, http://nige.wordpress.com/2008/01/30/book/

    Comment by nc — June 8, 2008 @ 7:56 pm

38. 

    copy of comment to:

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

    It should be noted that the Wikipedia article about LeSage has been considerably increased in quality and content since the discussion in this post, yet the basic flaws in the article survive untouched.

    It continues to try to debunk the idea of exchange radiations causing fundamental forces using the false argument that quantum fields would (by exchanging field quanta between particles of matter) heat up matter, despite the fact that this exchange radiation model is the MAINSTREAM Yang-Mills and Abelian Standard Model of particle physics, and quantum gravity.

    Shamefully, people like the authors of the book on LeSage gravity, “Pushing Gravity”, continue to try to ignore this fact, ignoring all of quantum field theory which is based on the exchange of field quanta between charged particles of matter.

    Another one is the drag objection: again, if exchange radiation caused drag on moving particles, this criticism would need to be leveled against the MAINSTREAM model of Yang-Mills quantum field theory, the Standard Model of quantum physics. Actually, long-range (light velocity) exchange radiations are responsible for some effects on moving bodies in lieu of drag: length contraction, mass increase, etc. These effects are discussed in the latest (and final) post on this blog, http://nige.wordpress.com/2008/01/30/book/ as well as in the earlier post http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/05/25/quantum-gravity-mechanism-and-predictions/ and various other posts.

    However, while all these people ignore the facts using false arguments (hypocrisy, because such arguments would debunk the Standard Model of particle physics if they were true, and they don’t use such arguments to debunk that; they just focus such arguments at the LeSage model because they’re just crackpots) they have at least assembled quite a few facts about the (false) reasons for the censorship at

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Sage’s_theory_of_gravitation

    including notably a readable English translation of LeSage’s own paper:

    http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Le_Sage_Theory_of_Gravitation

    Comment by nige — June 8, 2008 @ 10:53 pm

39. 

    Another piece of horseshit in the Wikipedia article:

    “Therefore, in order to be viable, Fatio and Le Sage postulated that the shielding effect is so small as to be undetectable, which requires that the interaction cross-section of matter must be extremely small (P10, below). This places an extremely high lower-bound on the intensity of the flux required to produce the observed force of gravity. According to standard physics any form of gravitational shielding is a violation of the equivalence principle and therefore is inconsistent with general relativity.[44]”

    Quantum fields are incompatible with general relativity too, because they deny smooth curvature and replace it with quantized effects (discrete particles of exchange radiation constituting the field, not a continuum). This means nothing, because we know that general relativity is only a classical aproximation, not a religious truth declared by God.

    So all this horseshit about LeSage not being compatible with general relativity is just an example of propaganda, mud-throwing in the hope that some will stick.

    In any case, when you look at the numbers, the outward acceleration of the universe, on the order 10^{-10} ms{-2} as observed from supernovae redshifts by perlmutter and published in Nature, and calculated see http://nige.wordpress.com/2008/01/30/book/ , this gives an immense outward force F=ma on the order 10^43 Newtons (because the mass of the receding universe is immense, despite the small acceleration).

    From the possibilities known to be available in the Standard Model and quantum gravity for what carries the equal and opposite reaction force (Newton’s 3rd law), gravitons are one candidate. The shielding area is the area of the fundamental particle’s black hole event horizon, see http://nige.wordpress.com/2008/01/30/book/ for references. This area is very small, and there is no significant error in Einstein’s equivalence principle. Overlap of particles in the Earth or even a star is not a significant effect because the areas are so small. It’s extremely improbable that two particles will be aligned so perfectly along any line-of-sight that their miniscule shielding areas will overlap. This is an example of a quantitative effect becoming a qualitative effect because of the extreme scale of the numbers involved. Because the cross-sections for quantum gravity interactions are so small, there is no significant overlap problem of the LeSage variety.

    In any case, LeSage’s original theory is as far from the truth as Aristarchus or Samos’s solar system was from Kepler’s and Newton’s laws of planetary motion and gravity. The hard work isn’t proclaiming that the Earth orbits the sun, but obtaining the laws of motion which were quite different (elliptical orbits) to Aristarchus’s and Copernicus’s circular orbits.

    In the 1750 or more years when Aristarchus’s correct idea was being suppressed and censored (i.e., from 250 BC to 1500 AD or so), the people doing the censorship could throw any horseshit abuse at the idea without bothering to read it or study it carefully, and they certainly did throw a lot of mud. For example, they asserted that because the solar system required the earth to spin on its axis (one revolution daily), it was immediately disproved by the fact we aren’t thrown off the earth (at 1000 miles/hour near the equator), and by the fact that the clouds in the sky over the equator don’t whiz by at 1000 miles per hour. These were some of the ignorant sneers made by Ptolemy in his “sun orbits earth” tract, the Almagest, published in 150 AD.

    This was all horseshit, based on hostility, ignorance, and lying political showmanship of the sneering variety. The physics of the laws of motion and meteorology didn’t exist at the time Aristarchus was around. Newton in 1687 published the laws of motion, and detailed understanding of meteorology was discovered in the centuries after that.

    That horseshit is similar to Maxwell and kelvin’s horseshit about quantum fields being an impossibility because the exchange of field quanta would heat up objects until they glowed red hot. They invent a speculative objection, based on their own ignorance, which is like saying that people at the equator would fly off if the earth was really spinning. In science, unobserved speculations don’t disprove observed facts, except in the minds of the gullible and the confidence tricksters like string theorists.

    Comment by nige — June 8, 2008 @ 11:35 pm

40. 

    Notice that there is a flaw in the automatic hyperlinking of web-addresses by the wordpress comments code: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Sage’s_theory_of_gravitation does not hyperlink to the relevant page because the comments page automatically formats the simple (neither 6 nor 9 shaped) apostrophe into an intelligent 9-shaped apostrophe, before attempting to hyperlink it. This makes the hyperlinking fail at the apostrophe. Wikipedia has a page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Sage’s_theory_of_gravitation with a simple apostrophe in the name LeSage’s, not a clever apostrophe.

    Anyway, a couple of further observations about the LeSage page. It claims falsely that general relativity and the LeSage mechanism are incompatible in general, as I’ve explained above. In fact, the incompatibility is non-observable, and at a higher level general relativity is the classical (non-quantized) inaccurate approximation, not vice-versa. See http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/05/25/quantum-gravity-mechanism-and-predictions/ and http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/07/04/metrics-and-gravitation/ for a discussion of general relativity’s contraction mechanism. What happens in general relativity is a mathematical generalization of the Newtonian gravitational law in tensor calculus, followed by a correction that is needed for conservation of energy in the field: it is the correction which makes a photon of light (or anything else moving at velocity c) get deflected twice as much as a slow-moving (non-relativistic) object would in the same gravitational field.

    “As shown by Laplace, another possible Le Sage effect is orbital aberration due to finite speed of gravity. Unless the Le Sage particles are moving at speeds much greater than the speed of light, as Le Sage and Kelvin supposed, there is a time delay in the interactions between bodies (the transit time). In the case of orbital motion this results in each body reacting to a retarded position of the other, which creates a leading force component. Contrary to the drag effect, this component will act to accelerate both objects away from each other. In order to maintain stable orbits, the effect of gravity must either propagate much faster than the speed of light or must not be a purely central force. This has been suggested by many as a conclusive disproof of any Le Sage type of theory. In contrast, general relativity is consistent with the lack of appreciable aberration identified by Laplace, because even though gravity propagates at the speed of light in general relativity, the expected aberration is almost exactly cancelled by velocity-dependent terms in the interaction.[48]” - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Sage’s_theory_of_gravitation

    The problem with the above is simply that the gravity mechanism gives rise to general relativity as a classical approximation for orbital aberration and many other purposes! See http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/05/25/quantum-gravity-mechanism-and-predictions/ . Because the quantum gravity theory explains the mechanism behind general relativity and shows where it is valid (it isn’t valid for cosmologically vast distance interactions where you get the cosmological acceleration and recession rather than gravitational attraction, but that is not relevant to orbital aberration! Hence the entire quotation above is horseshit.

    The discussion on “drag” in that article is wrong because it implicitly assumes a false idea that the particles causing gravity are simply like a gas. We know even in the MAINSTREAM model, that there are two components involved which are distinct from normal fermionic particles:

    (1) bosonic exchange radiation
    (2) a mass-giving bosonic field such as some kind of Higgs field

    The combined effect of these two particles is approximated by an ideal fluid, which doesn’t exhibit any drag at all. Drag occurs only when there is a net energy loss to the surrounding medium due to motion of a particle relative to that medium. With bosonic field quanta, this “drag” effect only occurs when a fermion accelerates or decelerates. When accelerating or decelerating, energy is lost or emitted as radiation and the fermion changes shape and mass due to the surrounding bosonic field. Once acceleration stops, the net emission of energy stops because an equilibrium is established.

    The whole point is that any particle is continually emitting and receiving radiation at all times, regardless of motion: this quickly stabilises as an equilibrium so there is no net loss or gain of energy. Moving a fermion causes an upset to the equilibrium during the period of acceleration. After that, the equilibrium is re-established and there is no net loss or gain of energy. Because the particle is not able to lose energy after the Lorentz contraction process (which occurs during accelerations only, a fact covered up in special/restricted relativity by the problem that special/restricted relativity doesn’t apply to accelerations at all), it is unable to slow down. Drag can’t occur physically, because no energy is being lost.

    Drag occurs when particles of air hit a moving object and carry away some of the original kinetic energy of the moving object in the form of increased motion of air molecules. This is a process which can’t occur with massless bosonic exchange radiation (the Z boson is a massive bosonic field quanta), which are restricted in velocity to the velocity of light. Because the mechanism for quantum gravity involves inertial forces and Lorentz contraction phenomena during accelerations but not during constant velocity motion, drag doesn’t occur.

    “In many particle models, such as Kelvin’s, the range of gravity is limited due to the nature of particle interactions amongst themselves. The range is effectively determined by the rate that the proposed internal modes of the particles can eliminate the momentum defects (shadows) that are created by passing through matter. Such predictions as to the effective range of gravity will vary and are dependent upon the specific aspects and assumptions as to the modes of interactions that are available during particle interactions. However, for this class of models the observed large-scale structure of the cosmos constrains such dispersion to those that will allow for the aggregation of such immense gravitational structures.” - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Sage’s_theory_of_gravitation

    The lying horseshit here is the sneaky “hint” that the large-scale structure of the universe debunks a limited range for gravitational attraction: actually the acceleration of the cosmos on large cosmological scales, discovered from supernova redshifts by Perlmutter in 1998, is a universal repulsion of masses on extremely large scales. As shown in Fig. 1 at http://nige.wordpress.com/2008/01/30/book/ , the limited range of gravitational attraction and the existence of repulsive cosmological acceleration on larger scales, are both predicted accurately from one mechanism. The cosmological acceleration was predicted in 1996 and published prior to Perlmutter’s observational discovery of it.

    Comment by nige — June 9, 2008 @ 8:17 am

41. 

    copy of a comment:

    http://riofriospacetime.blogspot.com/2008/06/inflation-deflated.html

    “Why the Best Theories Aren’t Always Right” - New Scientist editorial, http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19826592.900-editorial-why-the-best-theories-arent-always-right.html

    Thanks for quoting this classically absurd New Scientist editorial headline! It’s a great title, telling us a lot about the thinking of the editor.

    Personally, I think that a scientist should hold the viewpoint that the best theory is the correct theory.

    As soon as you start believing that theories which are not right are the best theories, you enter the “doublespeak” world of delusion discussed by George Orwell in 1984.

    Notice that the New Scientist editorial tells the lie:

    “When Copernicus showed that the observations fitted more elegantly with a theory in which the Earth went around the sun, Ptolemy’s work became redundant.”

    This was debunked by Arthur Koestler in his 1959 masterpiece of research, “The Sleepwalkers”.

    Koestler counted the number of epicycles used by Ptolemy and by Copernicus (both needed epicycles, since they used perfect circles to describe orbits, not ellipses which were only discovered long after Copernicus by Kepler who used Brahe’s detailed observations to work out the orbit of Mars).

    Koestler found that Ptolemy used about 40, and Copernicus used 80.

    This is hardly the “elegant” simplicity that the New Scientist editorial claims; it is ugly complexity.

    The reason was that Copernicus was only partly right; he wrongly used many epicycles (twice as many as Ptolemy) because he missed out the fact that planets go in elliptical shaped orbits, rather than lots of circles within circles.

    Copernicus’ circular orbits with circular epicycles (within the circular orbits) was proposed in 1500 AD. Kepler discovered that Copernicus’s model was wrong in all the mathematical details when he discovered circa 1610 that the planets move in ellipses. It was only on the back of Kepler’s three accurate laws of planetary motion (based on new observations by Tycho Brahe, the astronomer who had lost his nose in a sword duel), that Newton was able to come up with three general laws of motion, ending the medieval era for physics.

    The New Scientist editorial continues:

    “Questioning and replacing long-held ideas is what science does best. Copernicus could not have happened without Ptolemy.”

    This is ignoring Aristarchus of Samos, who came up with the solar system of Copernicus (minus some of Copernicus’s false epicycles) in 250 BC, some 1750 years before Copernicus!

    I can’t believe that the editor of the New Scientist really believes that a false theory doctrine was helpful. It wasn’t. Copernicus failed to publish until he was on his deathbed. If it hadn’t been for Ptolemy’s rubbish, progress would have happened a lot faster.

    E.g., when you read Ptolemy’s Almagest (published in 150 AD) - you can find Ptolemy’s Almagest together with Copernicus and Kepler in volume 16 of Encyclopedia Britannica’s series from 1952, “Great Books of the Western World” (volume 11 in that series is also vital reading for scientists) - you see that Ptolemy made slighting attacks against the solar system theory.

    Ptolemy declared that if the solar system was right, the Earth would need to be spinning on its axis daily, which isn’t true because clouds near the equator would be flying across the sky at an immense speed (over 1000 miles/hour). Notice that Ptolemy was writing this in 150 AD, over 1500 years before Newton wrote down the three basic laws of motion.

    So Ptolemy had no basis for claiming that the solar system was wrong because clouds should be left behind by the Earth’s spin. It was completely junk “debunking” - he was using speculative guesswork to deduce a false “prediction” from the solar system, then claiming that because the false prediction is in disagreement with nature, the solar system must be wrong!

    This is very similar to some of the crackpotism that occurs when the Fatio or LeSage gravity mechanism is discussed: physicists want to ignore mechanism or to pretend that there is no basis for it so they falsely claim that any exchange radiation which mediates forces would heat up objects like ordinary heat radiation, or that exchange radiation would cause drag and slow things down. These objections are insubstantial because in any quantum field theory, forces are caused by the exchange of field quanta. This has been established in the accurate tests of quantum field theories of electromagnetism, the weak interactions and the strong force. The field quanta don’t cause objects to heat up, despite the fact that all of these interactions have a much higher coupling than gravity does! The objectors are confusing real/observable radiation for the exchange radiation (which has extra polarizations, e.g. a the field quanta of electromagnetism have four polarizations rather than the two polarizations of observable photons), so they aren’t the same thing. Gauge bosons don’t cause objects to heat up, they just cause fundamental forces. Nobody in the mainstream objects to exchange radiations in the Standard Model, including electromagnetism which is a long-range, inverse-square law like gravitation, so they shouldn’t try to ridicule a basic mechanism using such hypocritical, unethical and ignorant nonsense.

    The physical mechanism of New Scientist’s editorials in the universe is to slow down the development of physics by defending ignorance.

    For the editor to defend Ptolemy by saying that Copernicus required Ptolemy’s bigotry and nonsense to bog down physics for 1350 years (150 AD - 1500 AD), is like saying that Churchill and his supporters really owe a debt of gratitude to Hitler because World War II wouldn not have been won without Hitler causing the initial problem. While a moron might be swept along by such an argument, anyone sensible will raise the point that although World War II wouldn’t have been won without dictators, the world would have been better off not having the war at all!

    Ptolemy’s Almagest is the most evil work ever written, due to not just ignoring the correct model, but ridiculing it for false reasons and not properly analysing it (the correct solar system model, albeit with circular orbits not ellipses, had been published by Aristarchus of Samos in 250 BC but was lost when the library of Alexandria burned down, because it hadn’t been copied due to mainstream ignorant bigotry such as that spread by people like Ptolemy).

    I recommend the book by Robert R. Newton, “The Crime of Claudius Ptolemy”, John Hopkins University Press, London, 1979.
    

    Comment by nige — June 13, 2008 @ 8:00 pm

42. 

    copy of a comment:

    http://riofriospacetime.blogspot.com/2008/06/inflation-deflated.html

    In his book 1984, published in 1949, Orwell actually uses astronomy to illustrate doublethink:

    ‘What are the stars?’ said O’Brien indifferently. ‘They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.’ Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say anything. O’Brien continued as though answering a spoken objection: ‘For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?’

    The editor of New Scientist is actually well in tune with O’Brien’s doublethink.

    Comment by nige — June 13, 2008 @ 8:18 pm

43. 

    here is a comment I will copy here if you don’t mind in case it gets lost:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Comment by anonymous — June 13, 2008 @ 10:09 pm

44. 

    copy of a comment:

    http://carlbrannen.wordpress.com/2008/06/15/koide-splittings-and-heavy-quarkonium/

    This is very interesting. I get lost in the fourth paragraph where the first two equations are introduced. Are these obtained anywhere from the model described in the earlier paragraphs, i.e. the energy level model?

    The numerical agreements for predicted and observed masses of many particles which you give later in the article are very impressive. I’m trying to grasp the details of the mechanisms involved.

    Koide’s formula always gets me thinking about averaging in statistics, because in its initial form it is applying a special kind of averaging to the lepton masses. To find a standard deviation, you take the square root of the sum of the squares of the error of each data point from the mean. One reason to square the errors here is that the data points can be either above or below the mean, and if you just subtract the data point from the mean you will get a summation that on average contains as many positive as negative terms, giving zero. That’s a mistaken error analysis. Squaring the amounts of error for each data point included in the standard deviation calculation automatically gets rid of the negative signs for components where the data point is less than the mean which is subtracted from it. However, you could just take the modulus (square root of the square) of each instance of a data point minus the mean, which would get rid of minus signs in the sum of terms. The really special function of adding up the sum of the squares of the errors from the mean, and then taking the square root of the result, is that the standard deviation you obtain emphasises or exaggerates those contributions to the error which come from the largest individual errors in data points. The Koide formula does the exact opposite, by summing the square roots of data points (masses) and then squaring the result, you are doing an averaging which exaggerates the contributions from the smallest data points (the smallest masses). In a qualitative way, this makes sense because the lower the mass of the lepton, the more stable it is and the more predominant it is the the virtual particle soup: virtual electrons occur in the vacuum out to the greatest distance from real particles, but virtual muons and tauons require more field energy and only occur much closer, so populate a smaller space and so have less contribution to the total mass of a real particle.

    I’m wondering about the mathematical connection between the model analogy of the hydrogen atom with energy levels of E = -13.6n^2 eV, and the Koide formula. Taking your first paragraphs literally, if we put E=mc^2 into the hydrogen atom energy level formula E = -13.6n^2 eV, then the integer number of the energy level, n, is directly proportional to the square root of the mass. This will explain the use of the square root of mass terms in the Koide formula, but you have three preons rather than just the two particles in hydrogen, so the first couple of formulae you give have the square root of mass proportional to a constant plus a cosine expression containing n.

    Comment by nige cook — June 17, 2008 @ 12:26 am

45. 

    According to Table 1 in this post, the theory of the mass mechanism gives relative masses for the leptons the electron, muon and tauon (which are identical except for differences in mass and small corrections due to mass-related implications):

    1, (2+1)/(2*alpha), and (50+1)/(2*alpha)

    (as explained in the post, the 2 and 50 in the numerators for muon and tauon respectively are the stable shell structure number of massive particles associated with the high energy states of the lepton, an analogy to the ‘magic’ numbers for high nuclear stability of 2 and 50 nucleons)

    Hence the series of relative masses for electron, muon and tauon is:

    1, 3/(2*alpha), and 51/(2*alpha).

    In the case of mesons, there are two quarks per particle core, so for a pion the mass relative to an electron is

    2(1+1)/(2*alpha)

    while for a baryon there are three quarks per particle core, so for a nucleon the mass relative to an electron is

    3(8+1)/(2*alpha)

    where the number 8 is another stable shell structure of the massive particles which are the units of quantized mass (in the analogy to nuclear shell structure stability, 8 is another nuclear ‘magic number’ of nucleons of high stability - little radioactivity - in nuclear physics).

    The full explanation for these formulae is in the text, e.g. see Table 1 and Figure 6.

    Comment by nige cook — June 18, 2008 @ 9:29 am

46. 

    interesting comment by anon to Not Even Wrong (copied here in case it gets lost in moderation queue):

    http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=701#comment-39191

    All applied mathematics for real world physics is only approximate:

    1. Newtonian physics only has exact analytical solutions for two-body interactions, whereas there are many bodies present in the universe. Poincare chaos arises for orbits of more than two bodies, where each affects (alters) the orbit of the other as it moves. There is also a quantum chaos from the random exchange of field quanta that causes the electromagnetic interaction between electrons and protons, which on small scales is random (on big scales the large number of field quanta interaction statistics smooth out to give the deterministic classical Coulomb law). This prevents deterministic calculation of electron orbits inside the atom.

    2. General relativity’s stress-energy tensor uses an artificially smoothed distribution of mass and energy instead of representing the real particulate (discontinuous, i.e. atoms and quanta) distribution of matter and energy, to create an equally false smooth source for the Riemann curvature. It just ignores the QFT idea that gravity field quanta (gravitons) are exchanged in discrete interactions, not continuous acceleration (smooth curvature).

    3. Even if you just consider simple addition, counting two electrons, you haven’t an exact mathematical model with 1+1=2 for two times the same thing, because the electrons are all slightly different in their motions and by the uncertainty principle in principle you can’t ever find their exact positions and momentums. So they will have slightly different velocities and therefore slightly different masses. So you’re not adding up exactly the same real thing. To make the point clearer, if you add up apples (or if you count sheep), you are adding up things which are approximately similar, but not exactly the same. Two similar looking items will differ at the atomic scale. So addition is only ever exactly true when dealing with tokens like money, an invention due to mathematics.

    It is impossible even in principle to get exactly true input data in the real world from making measurements. Also, it’s impossible to make exact predictions, because all applied physics calculations for the real world involve making approximations. So the universe isn’t intrinsically mathematical. You can’t get completely exact input data, and - even if you did know exact initial conditions - the mathematics used to model real (complex) phenomena is an approximation only.

    In order for the universe to be intrinsically mathematical, it would be necessary in principle for there to exist some way of exactly representing the real world using mathematics, instead of relying on approximations and statistical wave equations. Mathematics is in principle at best just an approximation to the universe, so the universe can’t - even in principle - be intrinsically mathematical in nature.

    Comment by nige cook — June 18, 2008 @ 11:09 am

47. 

    copy of a comment:

    http://riofriospacetime.blogspot.com/

    Hi Louise,

    I don’t understand the details the black hole mechanism for heat release you mention.

    Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, may generate heat in various ways. I don’t see how you can rule out radioactivity as a source of heat; potassium-40, uranium and thorium-232 abundances in it are not known. Before radioactivity was known, Kelvin worked out that tidal action wouldn’t generate enough heat inside the earth to account for volcanic action and the temperature at the bottom of deep mineshafts, so he simply made up a theory that the earth’s internal heat was mainly due to the latent heat given off by lava as it solidified (like the latent heat energy given off when steam condenses). This was the basis for Kelvin in 1862 trying to disprove Darwin’s 1859 theory of evolution by “proving” that the Earth couldn’t be more than 100 million years old, which wasn’t enough time for evolution in Darwin’s theory. Then in 1897, Bequerel discovered radioactivity. Although you can measure the radioactivity in surface rocks, you are limited in what you can deduce about the amount of radioactivity in the core of the Earth, so the theory isn’t completely checkable. However, the antineutrinos emitted in radioactivity within the Earth are detectable and provide limits.

    What I don’t understand about the black hole heat source idea you mention, is what the mechanism is for its stable consumption of 2.8 kg of matter per year. What stabilises it, preventing the black hole from either evaporating faster than it can suck in matter, or alternatively, sucking in matter faster than it can radiate energy?

    Surely if a such a black hole was surrounded by a lot of matter, all the matter would soon fall into it, and the black hole would either grow or explode. Why should it remain stable? Why should just 2.8 kg of the surrounding matter drip into the black hole over the course of a year? This seems strange.

    But on the fundamental particle level, this stability question can be solved if the Hawking radiation is gauge boson exchange radiation: the fundamental particle as a black hole is stable because it is in an equilibrium, receiving and emitting gauge boson radiations. Radiation continually falls in and is continually radiated out, giving a mechanism for the Yang-Mills theory of exchange radiation.

    Comment by nige — June 23, 2008 @ 11:58 am

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