Lattices and Lorentz invariance

Farsight, this is not a profound observation. It applies to everyone, including yourself and myself. We are all influenced in how we "see", interpret and understand the world and what we think we know, by our own historical backgrounds. What we have studied and what kind of impact it has had on us.

The most important part of you comment is that portion below...

No one is exempt!

 

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Prometheus, as one of those lurkers with am admittedly limited understanding of QED, I think your position is maybe a bit too strong. Addressing a fringe element or idea/interpretaion, of a post is a good thing, it keeps things on track and at least to some extent comsistent with the consensus view in the scientific community.

Having said this, the responses and explanations that follow are and have demonstrated some good information that would not have been presented other wise.

Sometimes it is how knowledgeable persons answer, that is most important.

What's the old saying? There are no dumb questions.., just dumb answers. And yet it is precicely some of those dumb or inaccurate answers that draws out, good ones.

 

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This thread is already 8 pages long and farsight has contributed a large proportion of that so I'm hardly curtailing free speech. The fact is farsight is ascribing something to QED and experimental results that they absolutely do not say. It really is that simple.

I still haven't taken any formal action against anyone either.

In my opinion that is a dumb saying because there certainly are dumb questions. An easy question is where the questioner does not know the answer but the answerer does. A stupid question is one where both the answerer and the questioner know the answer and the questioner is asking the question for some other reason - possibly to shine on the answerer, possibly because they are so retarded that they haven't realised they know the answer (you think that sounds unlikely, but believe me it happens all the time - there are many examples on here.). That is not really the point of this however...

 

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Also, I suspect that if I looked back through this thread I'd struggle to find a genuine question from farsight. It's almost all his own unsupported opinion interspersed with cherry-picked quotations from famous physicists (which is almost as worthless: if you want to know what someone in physics thinks, read their technical papers, not their pop science books and talks), which is certainly not science in any way, shape or form.

 

No, I was pointing out that relying on an argument from authority is invalid. I am entitled to disagree with Einstein and Maxwell if I want. Anyone is. There is no requirement in physics for us to be "faithful" to Maxwell's or Einstein's original way of seeing things.

The particular example that sticks in mind is the way you tried to use a quote from Einstein's Leyden address to argue that general relativity was really a theory about space being inhomogenous.

You're only restating what I said in language that indicates you're just taking for granted that the past and future are completely different, and it is "obvious" that you can remember one but not the other. It is not unreasonable to ask why things are this way.

No, it means that I think you're going to end up with an asymmetric perception of time regardless of whether time is really symmetric or not. And clearly there are asymmetries in physics with respect to time at the macroscopic level, mostly related to thermodynamics. An open problem in physics is understanding why physics becomes time asymmetric at the macroscopic level when, with few exceptions, it isn't at the microscopic level. In other words, the general indication in physics is that time is symmetric or nearly symmetric fundamentally but that an asymmetry somehow arises above the atomic scale.

I never said I could.

No, I'm calling your assessment of things simplistic because it really is simplistic. The fact that we perceive space and time very differently obviously isn't something we should ignore. It's something that is going to have to be explained one way or another. What I'm pointing out is that it is dangerous to act like space and time really being of completely different natures is necessarily the only explanation.

I don't think you understand my views well enough to make that kind of judgment.

I'm not a fan of the Copenhagen interpretation, but I don't think that's really a fair assessment of it.

And they're entitled to that opinion. And a lot of qualified physicists will tell you something completely different. It is not like the view that quantum physics is incomprehensible is crushing all other possible views. I work in the physics community. I personally take the view that it is possible to "understand" quantum physics as well as it is possible to understand basically anything. I don't feel crushed or intimidated or oppressed.

What almost all physicists will tell you is that it doesn't seem possible to understand quantum physics purely in terms of intuitions and experiences you already have. That doesn't mean you can't study quantum physics for a year or two and develop an intuitive feel for it, even if it doesn't really resemble anything you already know about.

I've explained why I don't accept that evidence very clearly: it is nonexistant.

If you want to claim you have evidence that something in the electron is actually rotating? Then literally that: evidence that something in the electron is actually rotating.

That sounds like an attempt at a dismissive insult.

In the sense that you can trade photons for electrons.

No, this is ignoring that this may not be the only explanation, that there is more about pair production that you have to explain than just the fact it happens, and that there is more you have to explain than just pair production. And if you're going to compete with QED, it all has to be done with the same model.

What are you talking about? It does. Just not the way you seem to think it should be done.

It does have a model for the electron: an excitation level of an underlying quantum spinor field. Again, it's just not the model you had in mind.

QED is a theory about the electromagnetic interaction. Protons are held together by the strong force. That's the domain of QCD.

 

Prometheus, I appologize for any misunderstanding. I think the following demonstrates what I meant. At least I hope it does.

Set aside everything else. In the above exchange, while przyk did not really present anything new, I find his comment of some benefit, personnally. And it is something that would not have or may not have been said under different circumstances.

Though I have no real idea what significance it may have, there have been over 3,000 views of this thread. That is a lot of people just watching. As long as there is a voice of consensus that remains involved, there continues to be merit in the discussion over all.

Your comment on the dumb question issue is noted. I guess I am or try to be an idealist when it comes to the motives of others.

 

It's probably worth mentioning that Nuclei are held together by mesons playing the part of the gauge bosons, a la the Yukawa theory

 

QED is a tight accurate theory, right up there with GR, but pair production and annihilation is real experimental physics, we've known it since 1932. Take one low-energy electron, add one low-energy positron, and what do you get? Two 511 keV photons. So you can change one into the other. Your electron field has gone. Do you really think that the QED fermion-boson vertex explains how this works? If you do, let's have it, in your own words. And by the way, time passing in a particular direction is a figure of speech. After everything we've talked about, how can you possibly come out with that?

You're not nearly as well versed in particle physics as you think. If you were, you wouldn't come out with lines like photons and electrons are fundamentally different and you cannot change one into the other.

Duly noted. I'll take a special interest in your moderation.

I know, OnlyMe. I know that I'm not exempt either. I know I can't trust my own convictions, and that's why I try not to have any. I try to have an opinion instead, wherein if you show me contrary evidence, I will examine that evidence, and I am fully prepared to modify my opinion, and if need be put my hands up and say sorry, I was wrong. I will not dream up some fatuous reason to discount that evidence. Or at least I hope I won't. If you find me doing that, sing out, and sing out loud.

 

Firstly Prom isn't claiming to be an expert but he could damn well beat the intellectual snot out of you in that area I'm 100% certain of. Secondly you aren't in a position to be evaluating anyone's abilities are physics, just like I'm in no position to evaluate someone's Japanese, which I can't speak.

You have said repeated things about how people can be blinded by their preconceptions and it's easy to fool oneself and people cling too strongly to their assumptions without asking themselves why they hold them but you are the most guilty person of doing such things as anyone I've seen on forums who isn't just plain insane. You have no justification for your positions, beyond "Because I say so". You complain string theory is lacking in justification and yet your claims have even less.

As for Prom supressing things that's BS. Personally I've found I am less inclined to use my mod powers now I have them because I want it to be clear I'm giving the other side a chance. You've been given pretty much free reign in this and a number of other threads so your claim is just a lie. That is dishonest of you, not Prom. Personally I think your posts are a waste of bandwidth but I don't get to put my personal views into my moderator actions and neither does Prom. If you have an issue with how this subforum is being run then you are welcome to complain to the admin about either one of us (or both). But I'll tell you now, I am within the bounds of the moderator remit to hand out warnings and sanctions if the consensus is you're trolling, either deliberately or just being a massive dishonest oblivious hypocrite without anything to support his claims. And you walk a very fine line.

 

No, the field is still there, what has been removed are two types of excitations, which have moved into a coupled field, the photon field.

You don't appear to know how it works yourself so you're not in a position to dismiss things you haven't taken the time to understand properly.

You haven't learnt any QED and all you know about it is filtered through pop science explanations others have written for you. Even you should realise that isn't going to lead to the optimal insight of QED or any other mainstream physics.

After the years of what we've talked about how can you come out with what you come out with?

Neither are you. The difference is that people like Prom and przyk have demonstrated to people whose particle physics expertise you can't dismiss that they are competent physicists.

I hate to break it to you but you simply aren't in a position to evaluate anyone's particle physics capabilities. Do you think what we post here is what we do day to day? What particle physics is about? You haven't got a clue. This is the very small tip of a huge iceberg for us, an iceberg you have absolutely no knowledge of.

And yet you ignored so many corrections and attempted discussions and illustrations of your hypocrisy over the years. Why do you think so many of us are quoting you saying that, we know you are saying "Do as I say, not as I do!". You claim you're not exempt but your actions over the years say otherwise.

 

True enough. But that doesn't give you carte-blanch permission to airbrush over history to dismiss what they actually said on nebulous grounds of "context".

I wouldn't say that's what it's about, it's about "the equations of motion". But Einstein said what he said. He did refer to inhomogeneous space. And in my view when you appreciate that there is no motion through spacetime, you understand the significance of it.

I'm not restating what you said. Look again at what I said, and about X moving from A to B. You can observe that, you can record it. You can't see X moving from D to E because it isn't happening. When you see X moving from C to D you can then label the motion from A to B as "in the past". But it isn't "in" anywhere other than your records. It's just some motion in our dynamical universe which you label as a past event. To wonder why you can't remember the motion from D to E, which you label a future event, is spectacularly unreasonable.

It's because motion has a tendency to even out. That might sound simplistic, but think about a gedanken container of stationary hydrogen atoms, and throw in a fast-moving hydrogen atom. Watch it collide with other hydrogen atoms, and you see that it loses that fast motion. You're left with a container of slow-moving hydrogen atoms. Then take one of those hydrogen atoms, and put it under a microscope. Go with the flow of what I've been saying, and consider orbital angular momentum to be some form of electron motion. You might throw in some more motion in the guise of a photon which is absorbed by the electron along the lines of the Compton Effect, the electron orbital then changing. But that doesn't even out. The electron is in one orbital or another, there's no half measures, just like the gears on your bike. The electron energy might drop back with the emission of a photon, but it isn't going to be shared with another hydrogen atom. Throw in another photon such that the photoelectric effect occurs, and now the electron is definitely moving. It's free rather than bound, and now you're back to motion that does have a tendency to even out.

Good.

You could explain it yourself if you sat down and looked at what you actually see. You don't see time flowing, you don't see motion through time. You see space and motion through it. And things of course. But think carefully about the photoelectric photon in my answer above. It's gone, and what we're left with is a free electron that is now moving. And we could have made that electron from a photon via pair production.

No problem. We discuss things to try to arrive at explanations, and I can only hope that if a better explanation comes along, I will listen carefully with an open mind and pay close attention to the supporting evidence.

Then please accept my apologies.

OK noted.

Fair enough.

OK.

We'll have to agree to differ on this too.

And you'll say that it isn't evidence. That's how conviction works, przyk.

It wasn't. I really meant that. There's nothing in QED to say what actually happens in pair production.

I don't want to compete with QED. I want it completed.

Then explain how QED covers electron-positron pair production. How does the photon transform into an electron. And a positron but don't worry about the positron). Or if you prefer, how do you trade an electron for a photon? Or vice versa in annihilation where the typical result is two 511keV photons?

And how does this spinor field get created when all we started with was a photon?

And yet we see low-energy proton-antiproton to gamma photons. That strong force, one of the fundamental forces, has gone. So let's stick with that strange theory of light and matter, focus on the electron, and take it from there.

 

As AN said, (unfortunately) the mods aren't given a free reign to ban whoever we like. Generally speaking, I feel like an ordinary member that occasionally gets shouted at by the membership. Feel free to follow or not follow what I do - until I ban you of course.

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I think this thread has gone on long enough without some real physics: Pop quiz; does anyone recognise this?
\(\mathcal{L} = -\frac{1}{4}F_{\mu \nu} F^{\mu \nu} + \overline{\psi} \left(\gamma^\mu D_\mu - m \right) \psi, \qquad F_{\mu \nu} = \partial_\mu A_\nu - \partial_\nu A_\mu\)

There are two fundamental fields in this expression: \( A_\mu \) and \( \psi\). The former is the photon field, the latter is the electron field. The two are coupled by a term that is hidden in the covariant derivative \(D_\mu = \partial_\mu - i e A_\mu\) or something like that. That means the fields can interact but in no sense does the electron field change into the photon field and is not "made" of the photon field. As AN has said, when you study particles scattering and interacting you aren't really talking about the most fundamental objects in the theory which are the fields. Particles are simply quantum excitations and they can appear and disappear as long as they obey the Feynman rules.

Here is the Feynman diagram for the interaction vertex of QED

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Imagine time passing from left to right - you have pair production. Now imagine time passing from bottom to top - you have an energetic electron emitting a photon (maybe it's a position - I think the arrows are the wrong way around). You see how this works? You're more than welcome to compute the diagram using the Feyman rules you'll find on wikipedia if you like.

 

If he could, then he can simply demonstrate that instead of saying I'm talking crap, and making dark threats. Should be a piece of cake. Only it isn't, is it?

Ah, the argument from authority again. It cuts no ice, not in the face of scientific evidence.

The justification is right there in the scientific evidence. Prometheus said photons and electrons are fundamentally different - you cannot change one into the other. And I pointed to pair production. Is that "because I say so"? No. I'm constantly pointing out the scientific evidence.

Not so. I give scientific evidence to support my argument. There is no scientific evidence to support string theory.

Prometheus said In no way does QED predict electrons are made of photons and Farsight's assertion there is evidence for this is frankly crap. Farsight: I'm starting to feel your contributions to this thread are trolling. And yet pair production is real bona-fide physics, it isn't crap, it isn't a case of because I say so. Like I said, the evidence supports my argument, and if you want to make threats and accusations and hurl abuse that's your choice. And if you want to take some "moderator" action that's your choice too.

Then tell przyk where his spinor field has gone.

Then you explain it. In your own words. Take your time.

But I do know why the photon takes many paths, and why the positron is a "time-reversed" electron.

Because time does not pass. Godel worked it out in 1942. Care to show me the scientific evidence for time passing or flowing, or for backward or forward motion through time? Would you like to explain why there is motion through spacetime, when it's an all-times "block universe" representation which is therefore static?

Prometheus is doubtless a competent mathematical physicist, but his knowledge of experimental physics does appear weak. So he ought to gain some benefit from this thread, which he started in response to my passing comment. Przyk is clearly more experienced and more knowledgeable, I don't recall impugning his physics expertise, I've challenged his concepts instead. And again it's good to talk. It's a discussion forum. That's why we're here. To talk physics. It sounds as if you feel threatened by that.

Ah, the argument from authority again. The one that is outraged at the thought that some guy off the street dares to point to the scientific evidence and say you're wrong.

You've never entered into any sincere discussion with me. You sling abuse and wreck threads instead.

 

Very funny.

Yes. See QED on wiki.

Wiki says \(A_\mu \) is the covariant four-potential of the electromagnetic field generated by the electron itself and \(\psi\) is a bispinor field of spin-1/2 particles (e.g. electron-positron field); But maybe I'm looking at the wrong thing, if so sorry in advance.

How about \(D_\mu \equiv \partial_\mu+ieA_\mu+ieB_\mu \,\!\).

But pair production and annihilation happens. Photons change into electrons (and positrons), and vice versa.

Like magic?

I'll button my lip about time passing and ignore the arrowheads. If we say this is pair production, then a photon has vanished like magic and an electron-positron pair have appeared like magic. If we say this is cyclotron radiation then we've changed the motion of an electron and a photon has appeared like magic. So no, I don't see how this works. Not a bit. Do you seriously think that the whole of space is one big "fundamental" photon field overlaid with a "fundamental" electron field? Overlaid with a handy "fundamental" bispinor field for when an electron gets close to a positron? I recommend that you look again at classical electromagnetism and the original Maxwell. And that you think of the various fields in terms of configurations of an underlying field that is more fundamental.

 

Er, it's you who doesn't have carte blanche to ignore the the context.

Why do you keep saying this? You know perfectly well that it is possible for there to be motion in spacetime and what we mean by that: it is possible for worldlines to be non-vertical, and more generally it is possible for the state of the universe to be different at different times just as it can be different in different places.

Similarly, an equation of motion in spacetime predicts bendy worldlines and time-varying fields. They're used all the time in physics.

This is the same reasoning you keep using: this is the way you see things, therefore it's the way they are. I've already explained that I'm not moved by such simplistic appeals to the way things look to you, and I've explained why. In general the way things look to you is not necessarily representative of all of physics.

Why is it unreasonable?

That's what almost certainly will happen. But it is also possible, though unlikely, for the other hydrogen atoms to collide with the one you threw in in such a way that it ends up even faster-moving than when you threw it in. This is true in general in physics: for every physical process you see in everyday life, the time reversed process is always physically possible, even if it is exceedingly unlikely. The only known exceptions to this general principle are certain weak interactions. Literally, it is physically possible for a smashed vase on the floor to spontaneously reassemble and jump back on the table. But this requires all the molecules in the floor to knock each other and then the broken pieces of pottery in just the right way for it to work, which is so astronomically unlikely that you're just never going to see it happen.

Saying that there is a tendency for motion to even out doesn't explain the second law of thermodynamics. You're just stating a special case of it. Ultimately, when you think about it, the second law of thermodynamics basically boils down to the observation that probability theory seems to work one way in time but not the other.

But that's the problem: I don't trust that the way I see things is necessarily reflective of reality. In fact I think I've got a good reason to downplay it. The reason is that I see myself as a physical system just like any other, whose behaviour and evolution is ultimately governed by the same physical laws that govern everything else. In particular, those laws should ultimately predict what neurons are going to end up firing in my brain, which will determine what I perceive and think. The thing is, the language I state these physical laws in - spacetime or space+time or space+motion (if that's even possible) or whatever - is not going to change the predictions these laws make about which neurons are going to fire in my brain and when. Whether you work in "spacetime" or not, you predict that the same neurons are going to fire in the same patterns either way, and I'm going to see the same thing. Because of that, spacetime, space+time, space+motion, etc. are all observationally indistinguishable, and the only question is which is most natural for describing physics at the most fundamental level we know about.

What are you going on about? You don't have evidence. You only have assumptions that you seem to think are beyond question. Magnetic moments are only evidence of rotation if you assume that magnetic moments are always produced by rotating charges. That's an assumption that can perfectly well turn out to be false, and in quantum physics the apparent impossibility of having half integer orbital angular momentum states strongly suggests that it is false.

What happens in QED is that the quantum electron and photon fields interact in a way that means that the photon field can become less excited and the electron field becomes more excited, or vice versa.

Then explain how you manage to construct fermionic field operators, with anticommutation relations, out of vector field operators, with commutation relations. Alternatively in the Feynman path integral picture, explain how you construct Grassman variable-valued spinor fields out of real-valued vector fields. Explain how in general you can get spin half particles out of spin one particles. I doubt this is even possible, but I'm willing to accept maybe I haven't thought of everything. So go ahead, show that this is possible, if you can.

Then, once you've established that it is actually possible in principle for spin half particles do be made out of spin one particles, explain why it is that photons end up forming bound states. The QED Lagrangian density, conveniently provided by prometheus, is

\( \mathcal{L} = -\frac{1}{4}F_{\mu \nu} F^{\mu \nu} + \overline{\Psi} \left(\gamma^\mu D_\mu - m \right) \Psi; \qquad F_{\mu \nu} = \partial_\mu A_\nu - \partial_\nu A_\mu \,. \)​

This is the experimentally confirmed Lagrangian density which models the electron-photon interaction. Propose your own Lagrangian which is purely a function of the photon field \(A_{\mu}\), say something like

\( \mathcal{L} = -\frac{1}{4}F_{\mu \nu} F^{\mu \nu} + f[A_\mu] \,. \)​

You will need a photon self-interaction term, which is why I included the \(f[A_\mu]\), otherwise you have no chance of getting photons to form bounds states of any kind. Specify the interaction \(f[A_\mu]\) you think you need, or more generally extend the Lagrangian above in any way you feel you need to, and show that under certain conditions you recover something that resembles the electron field \(\Psi\). With that, show that you approximately recover the QED Lagrangian that prometheus posted for us.

If that looks like a lot of work, it's because it is. That's reality for you, and it's why you'll find most physicists aren't too enthusiastic about trying to model electrons as being made of photons: it looks like a lot of work that would most likely go nowhere. And even all that is taking it for granted that QFT is the correct theoretical framework to be working in to begin with. If you disagree with that, then that's something else you need to recover.

I'm not just making all this up. This is what any physicist would have to do - and eventually get published in a peer reviewed journal - if they wanted to go around telling people that electrons even could be made of photons. They're the standards I'd apply to myself, so you can't reasonably expect them to be relaxed for you.

It's not created. It's already there in its ground (or vacuum) state, and ends up in a more excited state.

Huh? How, from the fact that the strong interaction isn't the only interaction relevant to protons, do you get to saying that the strong interaction has gone? You are completely distorting standard model physics here.

 

From post 48:

BTW, italics here are an nonstandard quotation from Wikipedia, so this is supposed to be an argument from authority, when the source is not identified and the source is not an authority. But since the Wikipedia page also goes on to point to Quantum Electrodynamics as the correct physical model, it's inconsistent to take this extract as an article of faith as presented without also talking modern physics as practiced by people who are good at it.

Here, at apparent issue is how to parse this quote, with the persons exposed to modern physics at the upper-division (or better) level reading this as an equality of two phenomena with respect to a particular conservation law (conserved quantity = ang-momentum[spin] + ang-momentum[orbital-motion] ), and Farsight reading this an equality of phenomena (spin = orbital-motion).

From post 48:

Completely unanswered is why Farsight would bookmark a December 7, 2010 edit of Wikipedia where some someone edited 2.8 fm (correct) to 2.8 nm (much more incorrect) as the classical electron radius.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_electron_radius
http://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/cuu/Value?re
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/lengths.html

Since the (uncorrected) Bohr radius, the Compton wavelength of the electron and the classical electron radius are all simply related and the fine structure constant is approximately 1/137, a simple way to remember this approximate value is 53 pm / 137^2.

I would later take issue with why Farsight would later (post 117) link to an older version of Wikipedia which has a worse mistake (14 nm which is on the order of a bacterial cell wall thickness).

From post 118:

These are non-controversial statements, yet Farsight seeks to take issue with them.
From post 127:

Billiard balls is, of course, a straw man for what I wrote which was about a physically rotating electron with arbitrary mass and charge distributions. If it gets non-zero angular momentum from actual rotation, then not all of the mass can be at a point or on the axis of rotation, which means the mass has to be somewhere. This is what is meant when you talk about a mass distribution. But if Farsight wishes to abandon his advocacy for electrons being in a state of actual rotation and adopt a quantum field theory of a spin-1/2 particle, I will welcome this.

Since I understand these phenomena as well-modelled by quantum electrodynamics which also models spin as intrinsic without requiring any spatial extent of electrons or any rotation, I'm not perturbed by what takes your breath away. I was, however, addressing what is weird about electron spin which is a confrontation of human intuition versus phenomena of the universe. Clearly naked intuition loses, and it's best to work in a more abstract manner of thought to make sure that our model makes reliable predictions in anyone's hands. Such a reliable method is quantum electrodynamics.

... with respect to a particular physical model. Experiment is compared with modifications of current theory which give the electron an arbitrary structure in its interactions which is to be compared with experiment and limit that structure. The high precision of quantum electrodynamics suggests that at length scales larger than 0.001 fm, the electron interacts very much like a point-like object. http://hussle.harvard.edu/~gabrielse/gabrielse/papers/2006/HarvardFineStructureConstant2006.pdf http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0104165 This is why the currently empirically best-supported physics models label the electron as an "elementary particle."

Your analogy is unclear. We can interact with the electron. We can count them trivially enough. Also the experimental limits on electron structure seem far more reliable than your analogy, in that they posit non-point-like structure and predict what we would find.

You assert this, but I don't believe that you have said anything to convince people that you are right. One of the problems in popular science coverage of quantum physics is that if someone says "matter is made of waves" it is not clear if that person is communicating how the "waves" of one electron differ qualitatively from the "waves" of two electrons in quantum mechanics or how the same issue is treated in Dirac's quantum field theory. So in this case, I think I will wait for you to offer a communicable argument.

From post 118:

From post 127:

You do realize that I linked to a 1939 paper which says that nothing rotates for spin-1/2 electrons and this is part of modern quantum electrodynamics? I find this reasonable because this is my position. Why do you find this reasonable?

From post 118:

From post 127:

I am describing how (essentially all) matter is modeled in a precise and useful manner. Your question indicates that you don't care about precision and usefulness and would prefer imprecise or useless "answers" to ill-defined questions. You might as well ask me about what the human soul is made out of, because neither question connects with what I was talking about.


From post 118 (in regard to a January 2010 extract from Wikipedia):

From post 127:

In that the Wikipedia article reflects the viewpoint of quantum field theory that the electron's intrinsic angular momentum has nothing to do with a physical rotation, the pop-science source accurately conveys a few bits of physics understanding, but does not present the raw experimental data or mathematical models at issue and are not persuasive on their own merits. (I have tried to find what The Story of Spin said, but not only was this reference added to Wikipedia long after the pop-science flavoured argument, I have discovered that it is a translation of physics lecture notes, and a fine source on 1930-1940 spin physics. It is not clear if the Wikipedia paragraph summarizes a throwaway comment on page 35, but it is not developed and not a major theme since the bulk of book rests on empirical evidence confronting models.) Indeed, the two edits of this page that you pulled from the past have unnecessary inserted errors in the paragraph at issue for numbers central to the "dumbed down" argument. Had their been any attempt to carry out the calculation, the mistakes (in units or values) would have led to obvious inconsistencies.

There is precious little physics in pop-physics. There's a whole culture that concerns itself with talking about science (in pop-science books or newspaper articles) -- it seeks to convey that some phenomena are understandable without actually conveying the understanding necessary to model such phenomena. Such "dumbed down" glosses are inappropriate substitutes for textbooks and research articles when one actually seeks education about a technical subject. Would you trust a self-professed Shakespeare scholar who only knows movie reviews of Shakespeare-based films to have insight into Shakespeare's working environment?

From post 118:

From post 127:

My support for that viewpoint (quoted again in italics for some reason) is in the 1939 article linked above, and every textbook on quantum field theory. Since I am grounded in professional science first-class sources, I need not concern myself with the path by which some secondary source like the pop-physics book or some tertiary source like the Wikipedia article authors came to a similar viewpoint.

Did you read and understand the 1939 article I linked to above. It's a pay-link beyond the first page but the article is well known, in many university libraries and the findings have been incorporated in any number of QFT, AQFT and related textbooks.

If you are suggesting that the intrinsic angular momentum of the electron is necessarily tied to a state of physical rotation, then I await the publication of your idea in the peer-reviewed primary scientific literature. At a minimum, I would like to see your ab initio calculations of the result of the Stern-Gerlach experiment. What is your detailed model of the electron and how does it give rise to two distinct spots separated as in the Stern-Gerlach experiment?

From post 117:

From post 118:

From post 127:

Well, the math doesn't follow if you use 2.8 nm or 14 nm. But those are Wikipedia-introduced errors.

 

Dark threats? You're the guy who called into question his moderating and said you'd watch him carefully, after falsely accusing him of suppression.

It's not an argument from authority. It's noting that you have no experience with experiments, either doing them or analysing their results, no experience with theory, you're essentially innumerate and yet you have a strong belief you're competent at physics.

You can pass energy and momentum from one field to another but you don't turn an electron into a photon. You can turn combinations of oscillations in one field into oscillations in another but electron to photon isn't one of them.

Please Farsight, no one is going to buy your crap.

How many times have I asked you to give just one working model of any actual phenomenon. You haven't ever given me one. Your work is less applicable than string theory, lacks any formalism and is regularly shown to be flawed on basic concepts. As this thread illustrates. The 'scientific evidence' (as you're so fond of saying) is against you.

Actually, since I've asked you directly so many times and you've been incapable of answering me if you make that claim again and don't answer my question then I'll give you a warning because it amounts to trolling, ie baseless claims you refuse to justify. You've been given years of notice of the question so it's not like I'm springing it on you out of the blue.

You're changing what he's saying. He said that QED doesn't say electrons are made of photons, which is true. Pair production is not saying electrons are made of photons, it is saying they interact. We all know you like the whole "The electron is a photon going around on a toroidal path" thing, which is what you're referring to when you say the electron is made of a photon. That isn't what QED says, that isn't what pair production says.

You saying "It's bona-fide physics" is just a false assertion. Pair production is, QED is, your claims are not and you misrepresent QED by claiming that's what pair production is saying. You are wrong.

Give the persecution complex a rest. You're not seen as a threat, one which must be suppressed. You're seen as annoying, misinformed and not a little dishonest. That is why you keep being banned from physics forums, nothing to do with "OMG, he'll kill mainstream physics! We'll be out of a job!". I can guarentee no one loses any sleep after speaking to you. Actually you're a source of mild amusement.

It's always there. An electron being destroyed doesn't mean the field is gone, it means the field's oscillation has gone. A particle is an exciting in the field, not the field itself.

By not getting this you're showing you don't understand a fundamental concept in quantum field theory.

I was referring to how you represent what happens at a vertex in terms of fields being destroyed. It's bad enough you're incapable of doing any of the work Feynman did (ie calculate a Feynman diagram) but you're even getting the conceptual stuff wrong.

And you just made a logical fallacy. I don't need to be able to explain something to know you can't.

And I know why the caged bird sings. You claim to know a lot of things, several Nobel Prizes worth, but it's yet to amount to anything but vacuous blustering on forums.

You wish to get into somewhat philosophical grounds. The fact remains things behave in a manner which can be parametrised by something, something where each value corresponds to a unique configuration of the system, thus making it a useful parameter to describe things. That's why things like closed time-like curves in GR are annoying, they break that nice parametrisation property. Whether or not you wish to argue philosophical grounds the application of the concept of time is extremely useful for describing existence.

A world line is static but it's useful to refer to things as moving through space-time because the division between space and time in space-time is frame dependent and thus position to one person is time to another (or rather a mixture) so parametrisations necessarily need clarification.

As I said, how are you in a position to evaluate any of us? You have no experience or working competency in any of this. You don't read textbooks, you don't work with experimental data, you don't know the models, you can't do any of the algebra so most books are unreadable to you even if you wanted.

You're arguing "I read a pop science book on the matter and now I'm in a position to evaluate everyone else". Sorry but that isn't the case. You've already shown you don't understand even the conceptual nature of things like field theoretic vertex interactions.

This isn't an argument from authority, it's highlighting that if you are so ignorant you don't know the right answer your "You're wrong because you don't agree with me" isn't really valid. How many threads like this have you spawned? How many posts have people like przyk made to you over the years? It's a running theme, you don't know this stuff even 1% as good as you think.

Of course if you think we're all incompetent or dishonest suppressors of you then submit your work to a journal. But you've already done that and you got rejected from everywhere. And so you're back here telling us how it really is without any evidence.

The 'scientific evidence' seems to be against you.

You ought to have got some benefit from the 5+ years of forum discussions you've been involved in but you seem to learn nothing.

Unlike you I don't think any of us here have any problem pointing to people more capable than us. I'll quite happily say Przyk has much more competency at relativity related things than I, I have no problem saying that. And yet despite him giving you so many lengthy explanations over the years you've gained nothing.

You really haven't.

You really need to get over yourself. Remember how I once offered to help you format your work so you could submit it to a journal? Remember how I offered to bet you money? And despite all your talk about how you were certain you'd kill string theory etc etc you didn't take me up on the offer and submitted anyway? I've got nothing to fear from you, I just don't like your intellectual dishonesty.

It isn't an argument from authority to point out you know nothing about any of this. Are you claiming to have a working familiarity with the inner workings of QED? You can't even do A Level maths.

I'm more than happy to stand up to people whose claims I disagree with. I am generally considered in the office as someone who'll challenge people on points I don't agree with. I have no problems with it, I enjoy it. But then again I work with many doctorates across both maths and physics so the discussion is an informed and honest one.

The problem is you refuse to answer any questions. When you first made your claims on PhysOrg I tried to explain the difference between a mathematical axiom and a physical postulate because you were confusing the two and you wouldn't listen. You won't discuss string theory because your work is 'even more wrong' than it. You won't discuss any formal mathematics because you can't do any. You won't answer direct questions because you don't want to admit the short comings of your work. Remember my recent offer to do a weekly or fortnightly discussion on some area of mathematical physics? You and plenty of people could benefit from it. You refused. The offer was genuine. You could have got yourself on the road to understanding QED. It's a long road but you'd have at least started. Instead you just stick to the wordy arm waving. And people notice it, it's not like I'm the only one. Look at Rpenner and Przyk above this post, going through your mistakes in detail because clearly they aren't terribly impressed with you either. I just happen to be a little blunter with you, probably due to being tired of the same old nonsense you spew in every thread.

We get it, you think you're the best thing since sliced bread and have all the answers despite addressing no one's questions. But the fact remains every journal rejected you and every discussion ends up with multiple people pointing out your errors and dishonesty. Personally I don't see why you do it. You're not accomplishing anything and you're clearly not learning anything. No amount of convincing people online will get you into a journal.

I point out your dishonesty. You stop being dishonest and economical with the truth and I'll stop pointing it out. Can't say fairer than that.

So, in that regard can you provide me with one working model of a single phenomenon from your work, along with its derivation. If you can't then your claims about being more scientific than string theory are lies. Here's your chance. Answer the question.

 

I keep saying it because people keep on thinking that things move through spacetime. If a particle is motionless we draw a vertical worldline in spacetime. If it moves through space we draw a non-vertical worldline. But the particle isn't moving through spacetime.

Not a problem.

Not necessarily. But if disregard what you can see in favour of abstraction you can't see, you can end up lost.

I'll try another way: you can recall all the places you've visited, because you've kept records. It's unreasonable to wonder why you can't recall the places you haven't visited and wonder why there's no symmetry.

Agreed.

I don't agree with that. You're observing particles moving, not a theory working in time.

Good stuff. You're part of the system.

I agree with the sense of this, though I'd prefer to say accurate rather than natural.

I don't assume that they're always produced by rotating charges! It's a rotating current! And it isn't conduction current. That's what you get when you move the whole thing, which is the charge.

It isn't much of an explanation at all.

I don't know how to explain it in those terms. It something along the lines of a vector vectored by itself into a closed path.

I can. But it'll take me a while to write it down. Just let me try something:

↓↓↓↓↓↑↑↑↑↑

Let's focus on this in our ongoing discussion.

It'll take some doing. I don't think I can do it by myself in a reasonable timescale.

It isn't, przyk. It isn't that much work, and it isn't going nowhere.

QED is a robust accurate theory.

I fear you would struggle to get past peer review with this. I fear you'd spend years at it and end up settling for a low-impact journal, and then you'd be "studiously ignored".

I am not satisfied by this.

I'm not distorting it. I'm just stating the obvious. All the quarks and gluons have gone too.

 

His was a clear threat. I responded to it.

That's exactly what it is.

We've known about electron-positron annihilation since 1932. Where you had an electron, you've now got a photon departing at c. The electron was there, and now it isn't. The photon wasn't there, and now it is. We converted matter, the electron, into energy, the photon. Read the wiki Mass-energy equivalence article which is where you're redirected if you search on E=mc². Note this sentence: Although mass cannot be converted to energy, matter particles can be. They're converted. You do turn an electron into a photon. The opposite is performed in pair production.

Crap? I show you electron-positron annihilation and you say you don't turn an electron into a photon? It's not me who's talking crap here.

LOL! You come out with the scientific evidence is against you after dismissing electron-positron annihilation!

And here we go again, another threat.

I said pair production is a clear demonstration that electrons can be made from photons. Where you had a photon moving at c, you've now got an electron, and a positron. The electron wasn't there, and now it is. The photon was there, and now it isn't.

Like I said, QED doesn't explain how pair production works. Hence you can't offer that explanation. No, pair production doesn't say that the electron is a toroidal photon, but it's patent evidence that we can make an electron from a photon. And the positron of course.

Read what I said. I said this: And yet pair production is real bona-fide physics, it isn't crap, it isn't a case of because I say so. Pair production and annihilation is real, we do convert photons into electrons and positrons and vice versa. Anderson got a Nobel prize, that's how bona-fide it is. We've known about it since 1932. Or should I say some of us.

Yeah yeah. That's why you're always foaming in outrage and hurling abuse. It isn't me who's dishonest.

I understand it. LIke I said, I think that aspect of QFT is a shame. There isn't really an electron field filling the whole of space along with a photon field and so on.

I've got to go, I'll look at the rest of your feather-spitting diatribe later. Meanwhile, save your blushes and just admit you can't give the QED explanation for how pair production works because there isn't one. Oh, and tell me again about what happens at a vertex in terms of fields being destroyed. What fields are being destroyed?

LOL.

 

How exactly are you defining the phrase "motion through spacetime"? I'm asking because I find it a bit silly for you to attack an idea without defining exactly what the idea is that you're attacking. A non vertical worldline is what we'd normally call "motion" in spacetime. If you mean something else by motion in or through spacetime, please explain exactly what it is you mean.

I'm not disregarding what I see. As I said earlier, why we see things the way we do is something that needs to be explained one way or another. I think I already gave a good explanation of why the human brain would be predisposed view the world from an "all space but not all times" perspective.

But this is all presupposing that it is only fundamentally possible to record past events in the first place. That we can only remember the past is a very deeply ingrained part of our experience. You seem to be having great difficulty looking at this objectively and wondering why things are this way. It is not self-evident that we should only be able to recall the past.

The problem is that there is symmetry - at the very fundamental level in physics. With the exception of weak interactions, all the known fundamental interactions in physics are time-symmetric. Since the electromagnetic and strong interactions are time-symmetric, and the matter we're made of is held together by these interactions, it is not unreasonable to ask where this time-asymmetry at the macroscopic, everyday level comes from. In fact many people would tell you this is a significant unsolved problem in physics today, and I don't agree with the way you're trivialising it.

So what's your explanation for why motion has a tendency to even out? It is part of everyday experience and it seems natural, but that's not an explanation. So what's your explanation?

No, I mean natural. If different theories make identical predictions in all cases, they are equally accurate as far as observations and experiments are able to test them.

How does this address the point I was making? There's a connection between magnetic dipole moment and rotation in classical physics, and you can't call the observation of a magnetic dipole evidence for rotation without assuming this connection. In the case of spin, we think that's an example of where that connection doesn't hold.

What, objectively, is wrong with it? The thing is, I know what you're going to say here: you're going to complain that QED just "describes" what happens without "explaining" it. The problem is, you could complain about any theory in exactly the same way. No matter what a theory "explains", you will always be able to ask why things behave the way they do. There is no such thing as a theory that doesn't make postulates.

In any case there's still an important point here: regardless of whether you think QED is "complete" or not - and in general we don't anyway - the fact of the matter is that QED does have some specific things to say about electrons and photons, namely that they're modeled as excitations of different fields, that contradicts many of the things you have said about electrons and photons.

Then you're going to have to learn those terms, because they're the language of a summary of all the experimental observations you need to be able to explain. However long you think learning QED and then explaining it would take, it's nothing compared with how long it would take you to learn and individually explain the results of every relevant experiment that has ever been done. The former approach would take years. The latter is not possible in a single human lifetime.

What does that even mean?

How does this explain how you get Grassman variable-valued Dirac fermion fields out of real-valued vector fields?

To give an example of what an answer to do that might look like, it is easy to do it the other way around. It is well known that if \(\Psi\) is a Dirac spinor, then the combination \(\bar{\Psi} \gamma^{\mu} \Psi\) is a four-vector. But no-one knows how to do anything like that the other way around.

If you think it isn't that much work, and that it has a chance to go somewhere, why don't you do it? You can't count on someone else to do it for you: to everyone who has experience with QFTs, this doesn't look like a promising avenue. The general rules for composing angular momentum and spin in quantum theory seem to kill the idea at the outset.

I was talking about quantum field theory, which isn't so much a theory as a general theoretical framework. QED is a quantum field theory. If you think QFT is fine the way it is then fine. But if you think that QFT is in any way wrong or incomplete, then you also have to be able to explain why QFT's general rules for extracting predictions apply as part of your derivation of QED.

No, if you could actually show it was even possible something looking like a QFT spinor field to be made out of something looking like a QFT vector field, this would be a genuinely interesting result. You'd just have to be able to support your case properly.

That doesn't mean that the strong interaction has ceased to exist.