Electromagnetism: quantum mechanics or vortices?

???? Do you really believe that????

While we have only verified frame-dragging as it relates to the earth and sun (GP-B), the conclusions should apply to all gravitationally significant objects, with either angular or linear momentum! So what then does your conclusion above say about frame-dragging and say Venus and a magnetic field?

Mercury, the Earth, Jupiter and Saturn all have magnetic fields that originate with the internal dynamics of the planet. But you may have inadvertently stumbled into a far weaker field dynamics, associated with how frame-dragging (a spacetime prediction), interacts with the solar wind and charged particles in a planet's atmosphere. Which could be kind of like a picture of how the solar wind follows the curvature of spacetime, associated with frame-dragging originating with a planet, that has no intrinsic magnetic field, but looks kind of like.... Still it is a stretch to, commit to a statement as matter-of-fact, as yours above.

See how the sentence in italics above is intentionally phrased in terms you might understand? You know, by using the phrase, "kind of like". Sorry no pictures!

 

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PhysBang: It really warms my heart to see someone is understanding my arguments!

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You pretty much gave all the responses I would have to Farsight's misinterpretation of my E-field question. At this point, though, I'm not sure that question matters so much, because:

Ok, so we're talking about your vortex model, not the model from the linked paper. This is good - we're narrowing it down! Could you point me to a paper that describes the model we're actually discussing, as opposed to one of its predecessors from 1991?

It's not enough to be able to comb the doughnut (that sounds like a euphamism). The resulting combing has to be basically isotropic; that is, the nature of the vortex must look roughly the same to an outside observer in all directions. (I'll grant that there can be a small anisotropy because of the spin, but in positron-electron attraction, for instance, an overwhelmingly large fraction of the interaction is isotropic and spin-independent.) Unlike a ball, a torus has a very strong preferred axis, so the strength of a vortex interaction will be completely different for two particles separated vertically than for two separated horizontally. More specifically, I'm pretty sure any doughnut combing (including the one depicted in figure 2) necessarily involves combing around the perimeter with some number of loops around the cross section. Any vortex with this type of anisotropy will change chirality when flipped upside-down, meaning spatial inversion would turn matter into anti-matter. This is what rpenner was getting at with his comment about egg timers.

I'm lumping this in with "magnets don't shine" as a statement that gives the conceptual gist of where your ideas are coming from, but doesn't delve into any details. I don't care about such statements at all.

That's almost what I'm saying. I'd clarify: "It can't be bound because we can see it far outside its classical radius, but we don't see it spontaneously unbind itself." There are strongly-bound and highly-localized states, like atoms. There are also weakly-bound states which spread out and are prone to tunneling; because such states are very fragile I can't think of an everyday example, but an electron in a shallow optical trap is one such state. You're trying to have your cake and eat it with a state that is highly non-localized but also robust against tunneling effects; the Schrodinger equation says such a state cannot exist.

 

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You seem to miss the point. Coulomb's law is a very simple statement about four facts about the behavior of electrostatics:

• The magnitude of the force between two electric charges, both at rest, separated only by vacuum, is proportional to the magnitude of the product of the electric charges.
• The magnitude of the force between those charges is inversely proportional to the square of their mutual distance.
• The direction of force is radially attractive if the signs of the charges are opposite and radially repulsive if the signs of the charges agree, and
• The magnitude and direction of the force has no dependency on the orientation of the charges.

Coulomb's law of electrostatics was incorporated in Maxwell's equations so what was true for Coulomb's force law is true about Maxwell's electric field and constrains the electric potential.
This last point requires the both the electric potential of a point charge and the electron's reaction to an electric field to be spherically symmetric, as is experimentally well-verified in spectral studies of positronium and hydrogen atoms.

We reject the point Farsight makes as irrelevant, because:

• A sphere is spherically symmetric, however a combed sphere cannot be. Indeed, one may not even smoothly comb a sphere.
• A torus is not spherically symmetric. A combed torus is not spherically symmetric. (Although a torus may be smoothly combed in many different ways, the combing is tangential to the torus and necessarily lacks spherical symmetry.)
• A spindle torus (self-intersecting) is not spherically symmetric except in the degenerate case of a sphere, so a combed spindle torus is not spherically symmetric.
• A degenerate torus is not geometrically distinct from a sphere, so it is spherically symmetric. A combed degenerate torus is either identical to a combed sphere or doesn't exist in Euclidean space since every Euclidean point on the sphere necessarily corresponds to at least two points on the degenerate torus, so even if the torus is smoothly combed, the combing is not one that applies to the geometry of space.

The point that I (and I believe Fednis48) make is that since Farsight's vortex model requires the electric force to be mediated by the distortion of the medium by the vortices and sensitive to orientation to give rise to "opposites attract" rule, these vortices must, in the Euclidean space around every electron, impose a spherically symmetric combing of the motion of the medium tangential to any sphere about the electron if Coulomb's law/Maxwell's equations are to hold in the macroscopic picture. So the actual microscopic shape of the electron's vortex is irrelevant to the macroscopic application of the Poincaré–Brouwer theorem.

The Poincaré–Brouwer theorem says a 2-d model of forces mediated by motions of a medium imposed by a vortex with rotational symmetry does not and cannot generalize to a 3-d model with spherical symmetry.

The obviousness of this geometric result may be why Maxwell himself seems to have dropped his heavy reliance on analogy with vortices seen in the 1861-1862 paper and not seen in the 1865 treatise which received wider reception.

 

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No. There is no specific paper. But here's a nice article that covers what we've been discussing: On Vortex Particles by David St John.

Fednis, I've told you about this already. Follow the link to Adrian Rossiter's Antiprism torus animations. You start with the ring torus then "inflate" to the horn torus then to the spindle-sphere torus. The "ball" on the right is topologically a torus, even though geometrically it has a spherical symmetry:

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Well you should, because Don Lincoln from Fermilab is telling people that electrons are point particles that interact with other point particles by spitting out photons. It's cargo-cult nonsense.

Pair production says it can. This is a straw man, Fednis. You're employing theoretical idealizations in an attempt to conter hard scientific evidence. It doesn't work. In pair production we start with light and we end up with an electron and a positron. A field variation is now a standing field. The electron has its magnetic moment, the Einstein-de Haas effect tells us that spin angular momentum is like classical angular momentum, and we can diffract electrons. Then when we annihilate the electron with the positron we've got light again. The patent blatant scientific evidence makes it crystal clear that the electron is light going round and round, and this "chiral dynamical spinor" nature then matches the linear and/or rotational motion of charged particles. To dismiss all this, presumably in favour of photon-spitting point-particles, is not scientific.

It's a straw man. rpenner referred to the hairy ball theorem but neglected to mention that "A hairy doughnut (2-torus), on the other hand, is quite easily combable." Then Fednis didn't follow up on inflating the torus. Imagine you have an inner tube. The more you pump it up, the more it resembles a sphere.

That's just a simplified flat depiction. You must know this. I told Fednis the field lines curl in three dimensions.

No you don't. You have some risible specious objections that are easily shot down.

 

So, what's PhysBang saying?

Not a bit.

I can't because I don't have any. And note that what you think of as "my" vortex can arguably be traced back to Kelvin and/or Maxwell.

Fednis's argument suffers from a logical fallacy: it can't be bound because it doesn't spontaneously come unbound. That totally deserves a phooey.

So PhysBang is as ever saying nothing.


How about rpenner?

Tsk. You haven't you been paying attention to what I said Percy Hammond said in The Role of the Potentials in Electromagnetism: "We conclude that the field describes the curvature that characterizes the electromagnetic interaction". You haven't thought it through. We have light in a closed path. But light goes straight. So space is curved. It isn't Euclidean.

 

No I didn't. Fednis pointed out that I referred to the Williamson / van der Mark torus, and I've spoken repeatedly about the spindle-sphere torus, even to you, on this thread and elsewhere I'm sure. Edit: I'd dig up some more instances but I'm pushed for time.

Sorry about the lack of maths. But do note that the evidence backs it, not the maths. The maths would just describe it.

It doesn't. It's chiral. You reverse the gif to go from the electron to the positron. Ergo the positron is a time-reversed electron.

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I have shot it down. The ring torus is chiral, like a Moebius strip with arrows drawn around it. Get two strips of paper, draw arrows on them, then make a left-handed Moebius and a right-handed Moebius. You can't make one look like the other by turning it over. Now mentally inflate them from a flat (twisted) inner tube to a torus. Then inflate them to fat torus shapes, then keep on inflating until they're so fat they look like spheres.

 

If there's a "Proposal to exclude pseudoscientists from posting in Science subforums" can I report Farsight for constantly posting the same pictures and saying the same things and using faulty logic and being dishonest over and over and over again?

How tired and disenchanted can members get before action would be taken?

 

James, isn't it time this whole thread was consigned to Alternative Theories? Duffield can go on like this ad infinitum.

You beat me to it: though I was going to suggest Alternative Theories, since they are at least scientific ideas. Farsight is evidently capable of keeping this going ad infinitum.

 

This is just about the only live physics discussion on this forum. And you're calling for censorship because you have no counterargument? Bah.

 

Your idea can be thought of as a bastard child. But if you have no equations, then we have to reject the idea. You can't pretend that your idea is the secret heart of mainstream physics if it cannot possibly be tested. You have to accept that you are presenting an alternative theory. You need to identify it as such when presenting it.

Fednis48 is relying on the way that quantum states behave in our best supported theory of physics. You cannot simply wave that away because you do not like the way that physical systems behave. You are arguing from authority where you are the authority.

In this case, you seem to either be deliberately misrepresenting Fednis48's remarks or you are demonstrating that you do not understand the relevant physics.

You seem to consider serious questions about your own writing to be not serious. To this, I agree; your work is not serious physics. That does not mean that the questions do not exist, nor does it mean that your writings magically become transformed into physics because you ignore the fact that they cannot be used to do physics.

If space is curved, then show us the equations that explain the curvature.

If you do not have equations, which I suppose that you do not, then we have no reason to believe in your alternative theory because there is no test of your theory and no evidence from observations.

 

If you cannot describe your ideas in enough detail that they can be compared to observations, then you have no evidence. This is an idea that has been part of science since its very beginnings.

Since Newton, almost all physics has required mathematical description in order to meet the level of description required to produce evidence.

Once one speaks of quantum physics, mathematical description is absolutely required, as the results observed are so counter-intuitive given earlier physical theories, that a mountain of evidence needed to be produced in order to establish quantum theory. Quantum theory is built on very specific measurement results that match very sophisticated mathematical theory.

 

All credit for that insight goes to rpenner. I'm glad you found my follow-up explanations illuminating, though.

Sure, the spindle sphere has a sphere-shaped surface, but that doesn't mean it's spherically symmetric once you put a vortex on it. A quick glance at the animation shows that the vertical axis is still very much a preferred axis, and that the picture would look quite different under a 90-degree rotation. Electron-electron repulsion is essentially unchanged under rotation, so any such anisotropic picture won't do. And no matter how you make your ball (simply drawing a ball, inflating a torus, or doing something even more complicated), the hairy ball theorem guarantees you will never be able to draw an isotropic vortex on the result.

So, what now, pair production is unambiguous proof that the electron is made of bound light, Schrodinger equation be damned? That's absurd. I work with creation and annihilation operators all the time, so I know that in quantum mechanics, it's quite common for two (or more) particles to interact in a way that annihilates them and produces something else. Pair production could be just such an interaction, and according to QED, it is. You're welcome to advance other possibilities, but if I point out that they violate the rules of quantum mechanics, I expect you to answer those objections; you don't just get to hide behind the fact that it seems obvious to you.

I hate to break it to you, but your spindle sphere as drawn does actually turn into its time-reversed counterpart when inverted. Keeping track of the rotation is a good exercise in the right hand rule: in the electron picture, the rotation about the upward vertical axis is left handed, while the shapes go up and down the sphere in equal measure. Flip your hand over, and you'll find that the rotation about the downward vertical axis is right handed. Therefore, when you invert the sphere, you'll turn left into right handed rotation, while preserving the vertical motion of the shapes. This gives the second picture, which is a positron.

Ok, two things. First, I already clarified that statement once: "It can't be bound because we can see it far outside its classical radius, but we don't see it spontaneously unbind itself." To keep using your original version because it sounds less reasonable is shameless straw-manning.

Second, the term "fallacy" means an error in logical reasoning. Singling out just the conclusion of an argument and saying it sounds like nonsense, even if it does, is not the same as finding a fallacy in the argument. I'll break it down:
Premise 1 - Any stable (i.e. tunneling-proof) bound state that obeys the Schrodinger equation must decay exponentially outside of its classical radius.
Premise 2 - Farsight's bound photon is stable, but decays sub-exponentially (more precisely, quadratically) outside of its classical radius.
Conclusion, by modus tollens - Farsight's bound photon does not obey the Schrodinger equation.
So am I committing an informal fallacy by assuming the truth of the Schrodinger equation, or a formal one by applying basic deductive logic? Either way, I'd appreciate a counterargument more on-point than "your conclusion sounds stupid."

 

Following that reasoning there would be little or no discussion in the science forums. Farsight would repost his pictures and out of context quote mining.., and the whole thread gets sent to Alternative Theories? I think the better solution is to move specific posts to Alternative Theories and restrict posting in the science forums.

The thing is, if Farsight did not always run off into his own world, he sometimes raises issues that could generate some good discussions. The problem seems to be that there is no real time lag between when he begins to post, in a thread and when he carries a discussion off into his own imagined reality.

 

Yes, it is true that some interesting things get thrown up in the course of some of these arguments. But to fillet threads post by post is a lot of work for the Mods. Maybe the best course is to let them run for a bit and then call time and move all or part - as seems to have just been done here.

 

There is no insight. It's a straw-man deceit. Rpenner knows full well about the chirality.

Yes it is. The rotation is both equatorial and polar. You can't say which way it's going. But you can say it has one of two chiralities.

Yes, because it's not a perfect animation. It's from some guy's modelling software site.

It isn't true. See what rpenner said in post #103: a combed degenerate torus is either identical to a combed sphere or doesn't exist in Euclidean space. It doesn't exist in Euclidean space. Is there some part of this light curving that you've failed to appreciate? The space is curved. It isn't Euclidean.

Not just pair production, there's all that other experimental evidence.

What's absurd is dismissing the hard scientific evidence of pair production and magnetic moment and Einstein-de Haas and electron diffraction and atomic orbitals and annihilation to gamma photons. It's absurd to ignore all that and say the electron is a point-particle spitting out photons.

Only there's a problem in the QED given explanation of gamma-gamma pair production which says pair production occurs because pair production occurs. It's a tautology. It's absurd. Your creation and annihilation operators are not describing what's actually happening. We have a photon-photon interaction. And it doesn't switch off until you annihilate the electron with the positron.

I don't hide behind anything.

Well the Moebius strip with arrows doesn't, and what we're talking about is an "inflated" version of that. You must know the "as drawn" isn't perfect. There are no hexagons, there is no surface, there is no North pole.

Go and make some Moebius strips with arrows on them, they are chiral, they are not the same. You cannot rotate one into the other.

I found a clear fallacy in your argument. You said it can't be bound because it doesn't spontaneously unbind. That's absurd.

There is no classical radius. The photon takes many paths. When it's in a closed path, it still does. The spindle-sphere above doesn't depict this, it's like the eye of the storm.

Your conclusion is based on false assumptions. You should base your conclusion on that hard scientific experiment, not on an equation. Schrodinger's equation was overtaken by the Dirac equation anyway.

 

Yes. You try to claim my argument is shot down, I shoot down your claim, so you kick the whole thing into alternative theories where nobody goes, because it carries a stigma. You know that it will kill the discussion. Why did you even start it?

 

So there's totally a way to draw a spindle sphere-like ball with isotropic vortices, but you don't know the equation for it and the animations you have don't show its isotropy. I hope you'll forgive me for being skeptical - this sounds like a "Canadian girlfriend" kind of argument.

As you keep saying, the object you're depicting is the "eye of the hurricane" in a much larger vortex that gives rise to the electron field. I understand that in the eye, space is folded up and highly non-Euclidean. But it's the long-range interactions that really need to be isotropic, so the outer part of the hurricane needs to look like a combed sphere. Having non-Euclidean geometry in the core doesn't help with this problem. Or are you saying that the electron exhibits long-range, non-Euclidean geometry?

You talk as though QED has to take pair production as an extra axiom or something. To understand why the electron couples to the electromagnetic field in the way it does, you would probably have to look to the broader Standard Model. But given that coupling, QED predicts all of the things you list, and it does so to extreme numerical accuracy. Whether or not you think its explanations for these phenomena are satisfying, it does predict them. You, on the other hand, have not yet proven that your model predicts the same phenomena to comparable accuracy, so it does not matter how much more satisfying your qualitative explanations are. In particular, when confronted with serious objections to the fundamentals of your theory (e.g. "the vortices you describe are geometrically impossible" or "the bound states you describe violate quantum mechanics"), it is non-responsive to cite high-level phenomena that would make more sense if your theory were true.

Yeah, I just did the following:
-Make two identical Moebius strips, oriented with the half twist closest to you
-Label them with arrows going in opposite directions
-Flip one over about the axis pointing toward you; it is now identical to the other
So your claim is false. A Moebius strip-shaped electron would still turn into a positron upon inversion, as would any electron in the more general class of shapes that look like a loop with some number of twists.

Again, a conclusion that sounds absurd to you does not a fallacy make. The beauty of deductive logic is that you can attack my premises or point out a formal fallacy in my reasoning, but you can't attack my conclusion directly.

Alright, so you attacked one of my premises. Cool. But your state has to have a classical radius, insofar as it's not completely delocalized over the entire universe. In an atomic orbital, the electron's position is confined to a volume on the order of a cubic nanometer or less, so the electron's internal structure must be smaller than that. But one can detect the electron's field many orders of magnitude farther out. If the electron consists of a bound photon, that photon must be venturing well outside its bound volume with high probability to generate the long-range fields we see. And according to the Schrodinger equation, any bound state that does that won't stay bound for long.

Are you seriously saying that violating the Schrodinger equation isn't reason enough to dismiss a model?! If you are actually willing to make that claim, please state it explicitly, for the record. If not, this is just another appeal to high-level results, which I dismissed above.