Direct Proton Collisions Possible?

[prefiz]

In the LHC proton-to-proton collision experiments, is it technically possible to align protons directly into each other?

[Boris2]

In the LHC proton-to-proton collision experiments, is it technically possible to align protons directly into each other?

they are packets of protons containing millions (or lots more) so some are bound to hit head on.

[AlphaNumeric]

Particles like electrons or protons never directly collide, they exchange force particles. For example the electrons in my fingers are not bumping the electrons in the keyboard as I type but rather they are exchanging photons and the resultant momentum and energy changes are the important thing. The previous accelerator at CERN, the LEP, collided electrons and positrons while the LHC uses protons. Electrons are fundamental, while protons are not. Hence trying to collide 2 protons is very different, as it's the quarks you're interested in and you can't directly control them. Hopefully, with enough attempts (trillions are involved!), two quarks get close enough to one another to exchange either photons, weak bosons or gluons (quarks have charges for all forces) and something happens. This is difficult though, it's like 2 people standing hundreds of miles apart and each simultaneously firing 3 guns at one another and hoping they manage to shot the bullets of the other out of the sky.

Furthermore, because you don't know precisely how they'll interact or the energies there's a lot of noise in the system. This is known as the 'background' and considerable effort has gone into computing it and thus allowing us to remove it from data. If there's an accelerator after the LHC it'll use electrons and positrons, which don't have all the gluon noise issues and are much cleaner for it. The LHC is a sledgehammer, to find if something is there. The next accelerator will be a scalpel, to do things precisely.

[prefiz]

Particles like electrons or protons never directly collide, they exchange force particles. For example the electrons in my fingers are not bumping the electrons in the keyboard as I type but rather they are exchanging photons and the resultant momentum and energy changes are the important thing. The previous accelerator at CERN, the LEP, collided electrons and positrons while the LHC uses protons. Electrons are fundamental, while protons are not. Hence trying to collide 2 protons is very different, as it's the quarks you're interested in and you can't directly control them. Hopefully, with enough attempts (trillions are involved!), two quarks get close enough to one another to exchange either photons, weak bosons or gluons (quarks have charges for all forces) and something happens. This is difficult though, it's like 2 people standing hundreds of miles apart and each simultaneously firing 3 guns at one another and hoping they manage to shot the bullets of the other out of the sky.

Furthermore, because you don't know precisely how they'll interact or the energies there's a lot of noise in the system. This is known as the 'background' and considerable effort has gone into computing it and thus allowing us to remove it from data. If there's an accelerator after the LHC it'll use electrons and positrons, which don't have all the gluon noise issues and are much cleaner for it. The LHC is a sledgehammer, to find if something is there. The next accelerator will be a scalpel, to do things precisely.

Thanks for the details. Do you think that the "scalpel" collider you mentioned might be able to align protons to protons directly? If so, where can I find this info?

[prefiz]

So Boris2, we are talking about random, as opposed to precise, collisions.

[AlphaNumeric]

Thanks for the details. Do you think that the "scalpel" collider you mentioned might be able to align protons to protons directly? If so, where can I find this info?

You cannot align the protons properly. The LHC accelerates protons but really protons are collections of quarks and the quarks jiggle about inside a proton so there's no way to align the quarks properly. The 'scalpel' accelerator will use positrons and electrons. If it's really fancy and somehow, from somewhere *cough* China *cough* a few extra billion dollars/euros/pounds can be found on top of the likely 10 billion it'll cost to build the next accelerator (straight line linear accelerator of length about 100 miles. Someone even suggested 400 miles! It'd be like a pencil running across Europe!) then they could use muons and anti-muons. Muons are more massive than electrons so have the benefits the proton has but with none of the strong force annoying background crap. If you went completely wacko and dumped more money than Jesus into the project you could perhaps use taus and anti-taus but that would, quite frankly, be insane.

Personally I think this represents a signficant problem for particle physics. For the last 100 years we've been building bigger and better accelerators. Initially you could, literally, put them together using scrap metal and in your spare room. Now they require a global agreement, decades and billions of [insert major currency here]. In all cases we've had theories predict there's something to find and, amazingly, in each case we've found what theory predicted. 1932 was antimatter. The 1950s were all sorts of hadrons. 1970s electroweak neutral currents and a 3rd family of leptons and quarks. 1990 extra massive quarks. 2010s the Higgs. Unfortunately now to go to the next level requires pretty much every single industrialised country to chip in. The decline of particle physics in the West is partly due to the decline in economic power and partly to do with the fact after the Higgs there's nothing we're really confident about. Yes, it would be WONDERFUL if supersymmetry is seen or some other new, unexpected (even better!) particles are seen by the LHC. If they aren't the next accelerator, more expensive than pretty much the sum of all previous ones, will be just to make more accurate measurements of things we already know exist. It won't even be as powerful as the LHC, it'll be more accurate instead. To convince politicians to fund the LHC we had the Higgs, the missing piece of the hugely successful Standard Model but what next? Now we're just stabbing in the dark. GUT models predict there's things around GeV but we're at GeV. It'll require an accelerator the size of the galaxy to do such an experiment and even China can't afford that! Sure, there will be other ways to probe new physics but not in the direct way accelerators allow. It'll mean there's more money for other areas of physics but it'll be pretty much the end of perhaps the greatest and fastest progress of scientific understanding in history

I suspect a fair few academics have similar feelings. Yes, it'll mean more money for other projects and more theoretical research but without accelerator experiments theoretical physics will become even more esoteric than it is at the moment. If the LHC finds something utterly unexpected it will be a very welcome thing to particle physics. I know a lot of the ignorant cranks here with delusions of mediocrity like to think physicists would try to deny new physics which doesn't gel with the Standard Model but I suspect in 20 years time when the LHC is coming to the end of its life and funding isn't going ahead for the next one they'll be desperate for it.

[prefiz]

400 miles! That would be insane. What if there's a simpler explanation to our existence that would not require such expense?

I refer to comments made by John Archibald Wheeler who once said, "Someday, surely, we will see the principle underlying existence itself as so simple, so beautiful, so compelling, so obvious, that we will all say to each other,'Oh, how could we all have been so blind, so long.'

Would we be open to such an idea if presented or would we reject it?

[AlphaNumeric]

400 miles! That would be insane. What if there's a simpler explanation to our existence that would not require such expense?

There's undoubtedly a lot of clever people asking themselves precisely that question. Initial design and technology evaluation for the next collider began before the LHC was even finished. Originally Europe and America were going to do one each but just like the international space station, due to budget issues they were folded into one project, the International Linear Collider. Since you only get one shot at accelerating the particles, as you can't just send them round and round like at CERN, you need a long enough tube to get the speed up. A number of very very clever advances have been made which are akin to 'after burners', accelerating some particles in the beam suddenly, at the expense of slowing down most of them, can be used and in fact are planned upgrades to the LHC. But technological constraints make for a minimal length.

There's ways to learn other stuff using other experiments. Neutrino telescopes discovered neutrino oscillations and now allow us to get a good estimate for neutrino masses, despite them being discovered in accelerators decades ago. More of these indirect methods will become common.

I refer to comments made by John Archibald Wheeler who once said, "Someday, surely, we will see principle underlying existence itself as so simple, so beautiful, so compelling, so obvious, that we will all say to each other,'Oh, how could we all have been so blind, so long.'

The best results are ones which people couldn't see but when you explain them they say "Of course!". A few times when I've solved some problem I've been working on I got this sudden panic that because the result is now so obvious that surely someone else must be writing a paper on it right now and will beat me to publication.

Would we be open to such an idea if presented or would we reject it?

If it is powerful enough to compete with the Standard Model but explains more or is easier to compute things in then yes, people will fall on it like flies.

[prefiz]

The best results are ones which people couldn't see but when you explain them they say "Of course!". A few times when I've solved some problem I've been working on I got this sudden panic that because the result is now so obvious that surely someone else must be writing a paper on it right now and will beat me to publication.

If it is powerful enough to compete with the Standard Model but explains more or is easier to compute things in then yes, people will fall on it like flies.

So may I ask which papers have you written?

BTW - As far as people falling on it like flies, I am not so confident that would be the case. What if such a model would require a paradigm shift in how the field of physics interprets nature? Currently physics is about how observed or measured effects cause other effects, not cause and effect. So for a new model that deals with the cause and effects of nature one would require to enter into unchartered territory. Would you be up for that? Like I said, not so sure...

[Farsight]

Particles like electrons or protons never directly collide, they exchange force particles. For example the electrons in my fingers are not bumping the electrons in the keyboard as I type but rather they are exchanging photons and the resultant momentum and energy changes are the important thing.

This is somewhat misleading, Alphanumeric. The force-carriers are said to be virtual photons. These aren't actual photons. There aren't any flashes of light zipping back and forth between say the proton and the electron in the hydrogen atom. Virtual photons are field quanta in that they can be thought of as "chunks" of a field. The interaction is a field interaction. It's similar for gluons.

Be cautious with the Higgs boson, some of the reportage contradicts E=mc². In Does the Inertia of a Body Depend upon its Energy-Content? Einstein made it quite clear: ”the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content”. It’s nothing to do with “cosmic treacle”. A radiating body loses mass: ”If a body gives off the energy L in the form of radiation, its mass diminishes by L/c².” Ergo if you trap a photon in a mirror-box, you add mass to that system. Open the box and the photon escapes, reducing the mass. There’s no Higgs mechanism there, and even a child can work out that electron-positron annihilation is like two boxes opening one another and radiating away so totally that they no longer exist. The reportage also ignores Gian Giudice’s Zeptospace Odyssey and the Higgs mechanism accounting for only 1% of the mass of matter.

As regards accelerators, there's hope for benchtop experimentation see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_acceleration and note this: "A recent experiment performed by a team at SLAC achieved an energy gain to 42 GeV over 85 cm"[/i].

[AlphaNumeric]

So may I ask which papers have you written?

I got 3 papers published during my PhD, two on the symmetries inherent to the deformations of generalised Calabi-Yau spaces and one on a D3/D7-brane origin of the way the proton is much more massive than it's component quarks via a concept originally put forth as an alternative to the Higgs mechanism known as technicolor. Since then I've gone into the private sector but I still do a fair amount of mathematical physics, I'm still a professional researcher, but I can't publish what results I do because it's usually within a private contract.

BTW - As far as people falling on it like flies, I am not so confident that would be the case. What if such a model would require a paradigm shift in how the field of physics interprets nature? Currently physics is about how observed or measured effects cause other effects, not cause and effect. So for a new model that deals with the cause and effects of nature one would require to enter into unchartered territory. Would you be up for that? Like I said, not so sure...

A few years ago someone proposed an alternative to general relativity which even violated special relativity, thus disagreeing with quantum field theory's founding principles. It is known as entropic gravity or Horava gravity and it became the idea of the year, with people scrambling to explore it as much as possible. It's died down a little due to various problems arising but it was the hot topic for quite a while despite a fundamental disagreement with pretty much all of the current paradigms.

This is somewhat misleading, Alphanumeric. The force-carriers are said to be virtual photons. These aren't actual photons. There aren't any flashes of light zipping back and forth between say the proton and the electron in the hydrogen atom. Virtual photons are field quanta in that they can be thought of as "chunks" of a field. The interaction is a field interaction. It's similar for gluons.

Firstly I don't think you're really in a position to be telling anyone the finer points of quantum field theory and secondly what I said is entirely accurate, I didn't attempt to make any distinction between on and off shell particles. Partly because the questioner wouldn't really by helped by going into that details and secondly that on shell bosons still carry the force. Furthermore there isn't really a fundamental distinction between on and off shell particles in quantum field theory, one of them just happens to have a particular value for . So when you say they aren't actual photons this is not really an accurate statement in terms of the description quantum field theory involves. For example, you say "Virtual photons are field quanta in that they can be thought of as "chunks" of a field. The interaction is a field interaction." but that's precisely what on shell particles are too, they are quanta of field disturbances. They are all quanta of fields, that's why it's called quantum field theory.

How many times am I going to have to tell you to actually learn something about this stuff before you go around telling people how it supposedly really is. You claim you know more about this area of physics than Dirac, the person who invented quantum field theory, yet you show a remarkable lack of understanding about both specific details and general concepts. Stop reading pop science books littered with analogies, you seem to have an issue with taking analogies and simplifications too directly. Obviously this is hindering your learning and causing you to waste many years of your time, as it's precisely how your own 'work' is formulated, a slew of analogies and metaphors with no subst

Be cautious with the Higgs boson, some of the reportage contradicts E=mc². In Does the Inertia of a Body Depend upon its Energy-Content?

You really do love to trot out that paper. Can't you read something younger than 100+ years old? And even that paper you don't understand the mathematics of. Remember how you once claimed to be a world leading expert in electromagnetism and yet you couldn't even explain why it's Lorentz invariant? You're practically innumerate so any details are beyond your comprehension yet you tell people how it supposedly works. You also have no access to experimental results relating to it nor do you have any experience working with any other experimental data yet you go around telling people how gravity or electromagnetism works. With no experience of theory nor experiment and your only information sources layperson analogy filled pop science books it's pretty daft of you to think you have some kind of information no one else has. How can you tell me how gravity or light works when you don't have any experimental information to work with and you don't understand the current theories which at least give accurate descriptions for some of the experimental data. It's like someone who is blind and dead trying to discuss the nature of colour. Why you persist I have no idea.

Einstein made it quite clear

Oh yes, please tell me what Einstein said, the many pop science books I've read, lectures I've attended, published papers I've read and research I've done didn't tell me anything about what Einstein said, not compared to all of those information sources you have....... I really want to hear your paraphrasing of someone else's simplification of some qualitative aspect of Einstein's work, that'll really let me know what Einstein's work leads to, much more so than actually doing it.

”the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content”. It’s nothing to do with “cosmic treacle”.

Well done, you've just showed you have no idea what the Higgs mechanism is about. You have done similar things in the past, where I had to explain to you the difference between the Higgs boson and the Higgs mechanism, a subtlety you didn't grasp. The relativistic notion of mass is not quite the same as the Higgs notion of mass. Quantum field theory contains special relativity, it has built into it all of the stuff from the start. As such you throwing out wordy quotes from Einstein is irrelevant, all of Einstein's work in special relativity is already accounted for. The Higgs mechanism isn't about that. The Higgs mechanism is about how to construct a quantum field theory which has massive particles in it because, due to various technical things, a natural quantum field theory is built from massless particles. I'll be more specific which will likely mean you don't understand but it'll show how your arm waving is so easily batted down.

Let's consider a massless scalar quantum field. It'll have a Lagrangian of the form . From this you can compute it's equation of motion, the wave equation, . This incorportates all of special relativity, the whole , Lorentz invariance, energy and momentum conservation etc. The whole shebang, despite the field being massless. But what if we want a massive scalar field? Well that would have a Lagrangian , which leads to the Klein-Gordon equation of motion (up to signs I can't be bothered to look up). Of course putting in m by hand is a little inelegant and in the electroweak sector particularly troublesome. So let's throw in a Higgs field . It's scalar too so it'll have the same massless Lagrangian. which in total gives us . This is just 2 non-interacting systems. Well let's write down some interactions, since there's a general principle that if an interaction isn't forbidden then you must consider it. I'll just consider the bit I'm interested in, namely a Higgs-scalar-scalar interaction where g is some coupling. This is a Yukawa interaction and is similar to the way in which the positron-photon-electron coupling in QED arises, . In phenomenological models we will have many many different fields and we have to consider all of their various couplings. But we're still no closer to getting mass terms. Well what happens if the Higgs field gets a vacuum expectation, , where is a field representing perturbations from the VEV? Then the Lagrangian becomes . So by just by the h field getting a vacuum expectation value we've essentially done a change of label and generated a new term, . But this is of the form so we have mass for . It might seem like one arbitrary choice (making h have a VEV) compared to another (adding in mass term) but this single VEV will cause all of the necessary particles to get masses. It's even better because when you do this in the electroweak sector the fields reorganise themselves and you go from 4 massless fields to 3 massive fields and one massless field. We know the massive fields to be the W+, W- and Z and the massless to be the photon. So in one fell swoop we've generated massive fields from massless ones and we've explained why the electroweak sector has the structure it has. None of this has requires harkening back to Einstein's 1905 paper, special relativity and all it's requirements and properties were built into the massless model and have continued through to the massive one.

So your "Oh, go back to Einstein's paper in 1905!!" and "It's not cosmic treacle" just smacks of you attempting to look like you've read and understand this stuff but you really haven't. All you ever seem to do is trot out 2 or 3 papers again and again and again, nonse of which you have the mathematical capabilities to understand the details of, you just pick out particular sentences you think you understand and you think backs up your position but almost invariably that isn't the case. Seriously, you need to move past this superficial arm wavy "If I quote a paper by Einstein people will surely think I've got a good grasp of it!" navel gazing you've been spending most of the last decade doing. If you'd just started from the basics and learnt a basic understanding of undergraduate level mathematics and physics you'd be able to at least follow significant chunks of proper published articles, rather than having to quote mine abstracts or conclusion sections. The fact you're basically innumerate cripples your ability to formalise and justify any of your claims, which is why no one who knows any physics takes you seriously. I know you continue on your forum to post 'explanations' of things and then you and various hacks slap each other on the back because you could do a Google image search and string buzzwords together but that has, is and will get you nowhere.

There’s no Higgs mechanism there

Your fundamental lack of understanding of what role the Higgs mechanism actually plays in particle physics doesn't mean your repeated construction of strawmen will suddenly become a valid direction to argue in.

and even a child can work out that electron-positron annihilation is like two boxes opening one another and radiating away so totally that they no longer exist.

Tell me, do you have a working, quantitative, predictive model of such processes, where electrons and positrons interact, annihilate and reappear or become muon-antimuon pairs or emit additional photons? You claim you're a world leading expert in electromagnetism and know more about quantum stuff than Nobel Prize winner Paul Dirac so it would be reasonable to assume that when you say you can explain electromagnetism and all of this stuff that you have a quantitative, predictive, testable model underpinning all of this. Except you don't. The one time you attempted to answer my request you could provide any quantitative model following from your work, along with its derivation, you gave a laughable piece of numerology someone else did. If I were to ask you to compute the differential cross section of the process electron + positron -> photon + photon could you do it? It's a homework problem for students studying quantum electrodynamics and since you claim to be a world expert with 'explanations' for all of this stuff then surely you could compute such things? After all, since those results in QED are known to be experimentally accurate any model attempting to describe QED needs to produce essentially the same results in such conditions. Have you got such a derivation and set of results? No, of course you haven't. So all of this "even a child could..." is laughable for (at least) two reasons. Firstly you have absolutely no justification for your 'interpretation' of things and secondly you cannot do what 20 year olds (who, compared to you, are just children) do half a dozen times for a single homework problem sheet.

and the Higgs mechanism accounting for only 1% of the mass of matter.

And anyone who has actually looked into what the researchers actually say, rather than getting everything from BBC news or a newspaper will know that particle physicists are well aware that there are contributions to the mass of objects which are not due to the Higgs mechanism. As I just said to prefiz, I even looked at a string theoretic model for such things during my PhD! Those are, once again, fundamentally different from the Higgs mechanism and do not do as the Higgs mechanism does, which is to explain why the fundamental interactions can involve massive particles rather than all massless ones as well as the electroweak sector's structure. The process which gives the proton a mass much much larger than the sum of it's 3 quark masses doesn't give a Lagrangian mass terms, ie the process I just outlined. It is, once again, because you either haven't looked or do not understand (ie even if you have looked you're incapable of understanding) what particle physicists actually do in regards to these various phenomena that you have constructed a flawed grasp of what physics actually says. Personally I cannot stand reading/watching the media report on particle physics because it's so full of half truths, misconceptions and down right mistakes that it makes me grit my teeth. Despite having been told this many many times, and having your resultant flawed understanding illustrated to you many times, you continue to get your information 3rd or 4th hand, by which time even if you grasped what the media explained it isn't what physicists actually have in their research. All you end up doing is constructing strawmen which you then whine about, on pretty much every forum you can find relating to physics. It hasn't gotten you very far in the last 5+ years so why you persist I don't know.

[prefiz]

I got 3 papers published during my PhD, two on the symmetries inherent to the deformations of generalised Calabi-Yau spaces and one on a D3/D7-brane origin of the way the proton is much more massive than it's component quarks via a concept originally put forth as an alternative to the Higgs mechanism known as technicolor. Since then I've gone into the private sector but I still do a fair amount of mathematical physics, I'm still a professional researcher, but I can't publish what results I do because it's usually within a private contract.

A few years ago someone proposed an alternative to general relativity which even violated special relativity, thus disagreeing with quantum field theory's founding principles. It is known as entropic gravity or Horava gravity and it became the idea of the year, with people scrambling to explore it as much as possible. It's died down a little due to various problems arising but it was the hot topic for quite a while despite a fundamental disagreement with pretty much all of the current paradigms.

Sounds like you cannot do your own papers any more without the company you're working for claiming that your work is theirs?

Anyway, regarding a new approach to understanding nature, what if all events were predetermined to be either certain and uncertain dependent upon which type of selection was made? Such a theory would be inclusive of both general relativity and quantum mechanics. Would you find it of interest or are you committed to only QM way of thinking?

[AlphaNumeric]

Sounds like you cannot do your own papers any more without the company you're working for claiming that your work is theirs?

Rather that I don't write papers for publication. Instead the research is private and given only to the client who paid for it. You'd be amazed where cutting edge (by which I mean you simply will not find it in papers or books, it's a new result) quantum mechanics has applications......

Would you find it of interest or are you committed to only QM way of thinking?

If someone could put in front of me an alternative to quantum mechanics which avoids many of the enormous labyrinthine calculations required to do such things as derive chemical properties of molecules then I could be more than happy to work on it. Of course they would have to provide an awful lot of work to demonstrate their new approach can compete with quantum mechanics, never mind surpass it but that's just the nature of science. Like I said, people looked at entirely new ways to formulate gravity when it was suggested, even though it violated one of the tenants central to both quantum field theory and relativity. Physicists actually like new directions because it gives an opportunity for them to get noticed. Consider quantum mechanics. It's 100 years old and all the major common results were done decades ago. No one my age (late 20s) is going to get their name on something fundamental in quantum mechanics. Nor GR or even string theory, the core of all of them have been done long ago. A new area, a new paradigm, provides a clean slate for a new generation to make their mark rather than just fiddle with the work of the previous generation. This is part of the reason the LHC finding new stuff would be so good, it'd provide such an opportunity. The enormous success of models from the 30s-70s has taken some of the wind out of the sails of my generation

[prefiz]

A new area, a new paradigm, provides a clean slate for a new generation to make their mark rather than just fiddle with the work of the previous generation. This is part of the reason the LHC finding new stuff would be so good, it'd provide such an opportunity. The enormous success of models from the 30s-70s has taken some of the wind out of the sails of my generation

We should talk. Please check your PM. What you have mentioned has arrived: http://gsjournal.net/Science-Journal.../Download/4259

... looks like I do not have enough posts to send a PM. Just use the email address on the article and I will get back with you.

[rpenner]

Manuel Morales (=prefiz??) appears to have a claim that billboard art affects the outcome of the American football championship and claims some sort of lecturer position (he says Professor, the most recent staff listing doesn't list him at all) at Burlington County College (a two-year secondary education institution in New Jersey) -- which does not seem to be a research institution.

http://temptdestiny.com

At least three of prefiz's 11 posts point to the fake academic journal article(s) of Manuel Morales.

[Tach]

We should talk. Please check your PM. What you have mentioned has arrived: http://gsjournal.net/Science-Journal.../Download/4259

... looks like I do not have enough posts to send a PM. Just use the email address on the article and I will get back with you.

"GS Journal of Science" is a crackpot website where crackpots "publish" pure garbage.

[prefiz]

rpenner, you have read into this instead of reading what is said. As far as being a fake academic article, you apparently are unaware that the insight about the omission error stems from research from an earlier article which is now a part of NASA ADS. As far as being a professor at BCC, I have not made myself available recently and will most likely be accepting a position elsewhere.

But thanks for the background check...

[prefiz]

"GS Journal of Science" is a crackpot website where crackpots "publish" pure garbage.

I guess you must also include the American Physical Society and NASA ADS as crackpot websites as well...

[Tach]

I guess you must also include the American Physical Society and NASA ADS as crackpot websites as well...

No, only the GS Journal of Science, where you have been "publishing".

[rpenner]

an earlier article which is now a part of NASA ADS

http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/APR11/Event/145843
12 minutes in front of academics does not make a peer-reviewed scientific publication. This might have been in "conference proceedings" at best.
You will also note that the abstract had nothing to do with the intended session topic of "Energy Research and Applications"

Your claims of affiliation with APS and NASA ADS are specious -- they don't demonstrate that your claims are true, that your reasoning is solid, that your work is well-recieved, or that fine minds wish to associate with you. Since neither affiliation is invitation-only they don't even provide a presumption that at one time you were well-regarded by anyone.