Electromagnetism: quantum mechanics or vortices?

[PhysBang]

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?

To be fair, you are the one who stops discussions on your alternative theories when they are correctly identified. You have done this before. Even though you are clearly offering an alternative, you hate to admit it.

Worse, you do not want to do the work to actually deliver a theory or even learn physics in the first place.

 

[Farsight]

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.

Geddoutofit. You know full well that a Moebius strip is chiral, and that you can inflate it to a ring torus then a spindle-sphere torus.

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?

Yes. The electromagnetic field is a place where space is curved. That's all it is. In similar vein the gravitational field is a place where space is inhomogeneous.

You talk as though QED has to take pair production as an extra axiom or something.

There seems to be an issue in that QED allegedly says photons don't interact with photons, when they do.

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.

Feynman said it predicts things nicely, but it doesn't explain them at all. However we now have people promoting cargo-cult explanations that are absolute tosh. When an electron and a proton move towards one another they don't exchange photons. Hydrogen atoms don't twinkle. Instead virtual photons are field quanta. The electron and the proton exchange field, such that the hydrogen atom doesn't have much of a field. And then when two hydrogen atoms move towards each other, they don't exchange field. Their combined field is twice as strong, not a zillion times weaker.

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.

Of course not. I'm an IT guy talking on a physics forum. But one who is talking sense.

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.

They aren't serious objections, they're specious objections. You know full well that a spin ½ particle is likened to a Moebius strip, you know full well that the lack of spontaneous unbinding is an absurd reason to claim the photon can't be bound in a chiral configuration. You know full well that the hard scientific evidence I've referred to is legit. You know that I didn't put this picture on the Wikipedia spinor page:

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.

No it isn't. Get two strips of paper, draw lengthways arrows on them, on both sides, then make a left-handed Moebius strip, and a right-handed Moebius strip. You cannot flip one over to make it identical to the other.

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.

Not true. Go and look up Moebius chiral.

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.

I can attack it directly. I can demolish it via reductio ad absurdum.

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.

You're advancing a specious straw-man argument here. We make an electron (and a positron) from two photons in gamma-gamma pair production. The electron stays bound. It doesn't magically turn back into a photon, because that would breach conservation of charge and conservation of angular momentum and conservation of momentum.

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.

No, I'm saying it doesn't violate the Schrodinger equation, and that you're claiming it does because you can't find a problem with the hard scientific evidence of pair production, magnetic moment, Einstein-de Haas, electron diffraction, atomic orbital standing waves, annihilation, the wave nature of matter, and so on. Even a child can work out that an electron is a photon going round and round, but you're fighting it tooth and claw. You're getting in the way of scientific progress Fednis. And not just you. Get out of the way.

 

[PhysBang]

Geddoutofit. You know full well that a Moebius strip is chiral, and that you can inflate it to a ring torus then a spindle-sphere torus.

But is it isotropic? Do you know what "isotropic" means?

So far, according to all of your pictures, all particles should turn into their anti-particles when rotated 180 degrees. You tried to escape this conclusion by posting yet another picture for which this is true.

Yes. The electromagnetic field is a place where space is curved. That's all it is. In similar vein the gravitational field is a place where space is inhomogeneous.

Since you have claimed not to understand the mathematics, how are we to evaluate this claim? Why should we accept the one source where Einstein used "inhomogeneous space" versus all the multitude of sources from Einstein and others where GR successfully uses spacetime and its mathematical relationship to its contents, homogeneously disctributed or not, to determine the behavior of gravity?

There seems to be an issue in that QED allegedly says photons don't interact with photons, when they do.

That seems to be a lie, since you seem to know about the possible photon-photon interactions in QED because you have discussed them. Why make such a stupid, obvious lie?

Feynman said it predicts things nicely, but it doesn't explain them at all. However we now have people promoting cargo-cult explanations that are absolute tosh. When an electron and a proton move towards one another they don't exchange photons. Hydrogen atoms don't twinkle. Instead virtual photons are field quanta. The electron and the proton exchange field, such that the hydrogen atom doesn't have much of a field. And then when two hydrogen atoms move towards each other, they don't exchange field. Their combined field is twice as strong, not a zillion times weaker.

You seem to be claiming that you are offering an explanation in addition to the science, but why should we accept an explanation that cannot be reconciled to the behavior of the physical systems that the science explains?

Of course not. I'm an IT guy talking on a physics forum. But one who is talking sense.

As I and others have said before, your imaginings about physics cannot be considered to be physics until they can be accurately compared to the behavior of physical systems. Until you do this, you cannot be said to make sense of the physics.

This is why I and others fear for your mental health: you are making claims that lack sense and you do not seem to understand this.

They aren't serious objections, they're specious objections.

They are very serious, but let's take a look at your specific replies:

You know full well that a spin ½ particle is likened to a Moebius strip,

You are relying on a mathematical analogy of spin 1/2 to a mobius strip in terms of what are mathematically described as rotations. Yet this does not help your point, since the physical rotations required to return a mobius strip to its original orientation indicate that the mobius strip is not isotropic in 3D space. So, if anything, you are solidifying the objection.

you know full well that the lack of spontaneous unbinding is an absurd reason to claim the photon can't be bound in a chiral configuration.

You are asking Fednis48 to reject a principle of quantum theory developed to account for the behavior of all observed particles and their interactions. All you have offered in return is your own incredulity.

If you had an exact description of your photon-twisting process, then we could compare it to the observations and see if it does better than quantum theory. Yet you are asking us to take your position on faith.

You know full well that the hard scientific evidence I've referred to is legit.

We have good evidence to doubt the so-called "hard scientific evidence" you provide. You usually produce citations to documents over 80 years old, you routinely provide citations to known alternative physicists with views that contradict established physics, you routinely ignore much of the content of the citations that you provide.

As you have admitted that you have no equations, we cannot consider your "evidince" to be anything more than textual analysis. This would be fine for a work of history (were it not for the omissions and mistakes in your analysis). However, since you are attempting to overthrow scientific claims, you need to compare your claims to scientific observations, not a small subset of scientific statements.

You're advancing a specious straw-man argument here. We make an electron (and a positron) from two photons in gamma-gamma pair production. The electron stays bound. It doesn't magically turn back into a photon, because that would breach conservation of charge and conservation of angular momentum and conservation of momentum.

First, there is no straw man argument, since Fednis48 is faithfully representing your claims, as vague as those claims are, and attempting to understand them as if they were serious scientific claims capable of describing particles in quantum theory. Second, you are the person who wants to abandon all of quantum theory in favor of your own personal ideas. If you think that your personal theory does better, show people how to do the relevant quantum theory calculations using your ideas.

No, I'm saying it doesn't violate the Schrodinger equation, and that you're claiming it does because you can't find a problem with the hard scientific evidence of pair production, magnetic moment, Einstein-de Haas, electron diffraction, atomic orbital standing waves, annihilation, the wave nature of matter, and so on. Even a child can work out that an electron is a photon going round and round, but you're fighting it tooth and claw. You're getting in the way of scientific progress Fednis. And not just you. Get out of the way.

Farsight, you have admitted that you do not know the relevant equations. Why are you so certain that your ideas don't violate the equations?

Again, all you seem to offer is your dogmatic claims about the universe, claims that seem to violate observations, and claims that you offer to us only on faith, not on empirical evidence.

 

[Fednis48]

Geddoutofit. You know full well that a Moebius strip is chiral, and that you can inflate it to a ring torus then a spindle-sphere torus.

It's true that a Moebius strip is chiral. In fact, even a Moebius strip without any arrows on it is chiral. The half-twist is either clockwise or anticlockwise, and its chirality remains the same under inversion. In the torus model, the equivalent would be whether the photons winds around the cross-section clockwise or anticlockwise as it travels. Drawing arrows on the strip neither adds nor removes anything from this chirality; flip an arrowed strip over, and you get a strip with the same chirality but arrows in the opposite direction. Thus, the rotationally invariant quantity is not the circulation direction of the photon, but its twisting direction. This is important, because time reversal is equivalent to reversing the arrows. Regardless of the chirality of the strip, flipping it over is equivalent to time-reversing it, which should turn an electron into a positron and vice-versa.

Yes. The electromagnetic field is a place where space is curved. That's all it is. In similar vein the gravitational field is a place where space is inhomogeneous.

Ok, let me make sure I understand. Space is highly non-Euclidean - so much so that any spherical shell drawn around any electron is not simply connected- and yet it mimics the macroscopic properties of Euclidean space so well that no one even noticed the difference until the 1900s? I would be fascinated to see such a geometry. Again, it's really coming across as a Canadian girlfriend argument: there's totally a geometry that has all of these amazing properties you describe, but you don't know the equation for it and have no illustrations that actually exhibit said properties.

There seems to be an issue in that QED allegedly says photons don't interact with photons, when they do.

Feynman said it predicts things nicely, but it doesn't explain them at all. However we now have people promoting cargo-cult explanations that are absolute tosh. When an electron and a proton move towards one another they don't exchange photons. Hydrogen atoms don't twinkle. Instead virtual photons are field quanta. The electron and the proton exchange field, such that the hydrogen atom doesn't have much of a field. And then when two hydrogen atoms move towards each other, they don't exchange field. Their combined field is twice as strong, not a zillion times weaker.

PhysBang really hit the nail on the head here. A theory that accurately predicts physical phenomena is good. A theory that accurately predicts physical phenomena and explains why they happen is better. A theory that explains physical phenomena in broad strokes but cannot predict them with any accuracy is delusional. Being able to predict that the electron's field is stable and isotropic is more important than giving a satisfying explanation for pair production. Until you show that your model can do the former, I simply don't care about the latter.

You know full well that a spin ½ particle is likened to a Moebius strip, you know full well that the lack of spontaneous unbinding is an absurd reason to claim the photon can't be bound in a chiral configuration. You know full well that the hard scientific evidence I've referred to is legit.
...
Even a child can work out that an electron is a photon going round and round, but you're fighting it tooth and claw.

No, I don't know any of those things full well. You have to argue for all of these positions before I am convinced. (In the case of the hard scientific evidence, I do know that the effects are real, but I do not know that your model is the obvious conclusion.) You seem to be under the impression that your views are so clearly right given the evidence that any free-thinking and intellectually honest person should find them obviously true. This impression is incredibly arrogant; when presenting your model, you need to work from the position that your audience - even if they are considering it in good faith - may in fact find your claims quite incredible.

No it isn't. Get two strips of paper, draw lengthways arrows on them, on both sides, then make a left-handed Moebius strip, and a right-handed Moebius strip. You cannot flip one over to make it identical to the other.

Again, the arrows are unnecessary for this. A left-handed Moebius strip can't be turned into a right-handed Moebius strip at all. If you do have arrows on your strip, flipping it over will turn it into another strip with the same handedness but reversed arrows. Which is equivalent to time reversal. Which is what turns electrons into positrons.

I can attack it directly. I can demolish it via reductio ad absurdum.
...
You're advancing a specious straw-man argument here. We make an electron (and a positron) from two photons in gamma-gamma pair production. The electron stays bound. It doesn't magically turn back into a photon, because that would breach conservation of charge and conservation of angular momentum and conservation of momentum.
...
No, I'm saying it doesn't violate the Schrodinger equation, and that you're claiming it does because you can't find a problem with the hard scientific evidence of pair production, magnetic moment, Einstein-de Haas, electron diffraction, atomic orbital standing waves, annihilation, the wave nature of matter, and so on.

Ok, please explain to me specifically why it doesn't violate the Schrodinger equation. Your only argument so far has been that it would be absurd for electrons to spontaneously unbind themselves, for reasons of charge/momentum conservation and simple observation. That's kind of my point. Electrons in the real world do not tunnel into unbound photons, but the Schrodinger equation predicts that your model electrons would do so because they have so much probability amplitude so far outside their binding radii. If there's a flaw in my interpretation of the Schrodinger equation, by all means point it out. But you just seem to be saying "The argument implies that my model makes unrealistic claims, but my model is correct, therefore the argument must be wrong." That's really putting the cart before the horse.

 

[Farsight]

It's true that a Moebius strip is chiral. In fact, even a Moebius strip without any arrows on it is chiral. The half-twist is either clockwise or anticlockwise, and its chirality remains the same under inversion. In the torus model, the equivalent would be whether the photons winds around the cross-section clockwise or anticlockwise as it travels. Drawing arrows on the strip neither adds nor removes anything from this chirality

The arrows just show you the direction of the photon, as it were. They also highlight the fact that you've got a double-loop path going round 720 degrees.

Thus, the rotationally invariant quantity is not the circulation direction of the photon, but its twisting direction. This is important, because time reversal is equivalent to reversing the arrows. Regardless of the chirality of the strip, flipping it over is equivalent to time-reversing it, which should turn an electron into a positron and vice-versa.

You can play around with gifs to clarify this. The first gif is the original ring torus, the second one is time-reversed, the third one is time-reversed and flipped horizontally.

Ok, let me make sure I understand. Space is highly non-Euclidean - so much so that any spherical shell drawn around any electron is not simply connected- and yet it mimics the macroscopic properties of Euclidean space so well that no one even noticed the difference until the 1900s? I would be fascinated to see such a geometry.

Google on electromagnetic geometry. People tend to think the gravitational field is all to do with curved space, but it isn't. It's all to do with inhomogeneous space, see this thread. For an analogy, imagine you're standing on a headland looking out to sea. There's an estuary on your right so there's a salinity gradient from left to right. You notice a single wave coming straight towards you. This represents a photon. But as it gets closer you notice that it's veering left. It curves like light curves when it passes a star. OK, now look at the surface of the sea where the wave is. It's curved.

Again, it's really coming across as a Canadian girlfriend argument: there's totally a geometry that has all of these amazing properties you describe, but you don't know the equation for it and have no illustrations that actually exhibit said properties.

Who says I have no illustrations? This is an illustration of a photon:

PhysBang really hit the nail on the head here. A theory that accurately predicts physical phenomena is good. A theory that accurately predicts physical phenomena and explains why they happen is better. A theory that explains physical phenomena in broad strokes but cannot predict them with any accuracy is delusional.

PhysBang is a lying troll. And this is a physics discussion, that's all.

Being able to predict that the electron's field is stable and isotropic is more important than giving a satisfying explanation for pair production. Until you show that your model can do the former, I simply don't care about the latter.

Well I do, and so do a lot of other people. Because saying the photons pop out of existence and the electrons and positron pop into existence is not good enough. It isn't scientific.

No, I don't know any of those things full well. You have to argue for all of these positions before I am convinced. (In the case of the hard scientific evidence, I do know that the effects are real, but I do not know that your model is the obvious conclusion.) You seem to be under the impression that your views are so clearly right given the evidence that any free-thinking and intellectually honest person should find them obviously true.

I don't have an issue if you object to the particulars of what I've been saying, but the evidence for the wave nature of the electron is patent, along with the evidence of some form of rotation. However there is absolutely no evidence that the electron is some photon-spitting point-particle. That's absurd, it's cargo-cult nonsense peddled by arrogant quacks who take the public for fools.

This impression is incredibly arrogant; when presenting your model, you need to work from the position that your audience - even if they are considering it in good faith - may in fact find your claims quite incredible.

No it isn't arrogant. What's arrogant is to ignore all the scientific evidence.

Again, the arrows are unnecessary for this. A left-handed Moebius strip can't be turned into a right-handed Moebius strip at all. If you do have arrows on your strip, flipping it over will turn it into another strip with the same handedness but reversed arrows. Which is equivalent to time reversal. Which is what turns electrons into positrons.

See above.

Ok, please explain to me specifically why it doesn't violate the Schrodinger equation. Your only argument so far has been that it would be absurd for electrons to spontaneously unbind themselves, for reasons of charge/momentum conservation and simple observation. That's kind of my point. Electrons in the real world do not tunnel into unbound photons, but the Schrodinger equation predicts that your model electrons would do so because they have so much probability amplitude

It doesn't violate the Schrodinger equation because there is no such thing as probability amplitude. See this article? It's not bad. But see this?

"Schrödinger’s equation requires calculus and is very difficult to solve, but the solution of the equation, when treated properly, gives not the exact position of the electron (remember Heisenberg), but the probability of finding the electron in a specific place around the nucleus".

That's wrong. The electron is not some point-particle that has a probability of being detected in some region of space. The electron's field is what it is, the electromagnetic field is curved space, the electron is a Dirac's belt knotted 720-degree curvature of that space, with a central locus rather like the eye of a hurricane.

 

[rpenner]

You can play around with gifs to clarify this. The first gif is the original ring torus, the second one is time-reversed, the third one is time-reversed and flipped horizontally.

Flipped horizontally is mirrored. That's not the same as a rotation of torus 180° about an axis perpendicular to the axis of the torus.

If I'm standing on the plane perpendicular to the axis of the torus on the left [the original torus], the motion of the torus at the point nearest me has components to the (-a) to the right [or a to the left] and (+b) up; the motion of the torus at the point furthest from me is to the (+a) to the right and (+b) up.

This is chiral flow which can be verified because if you grab the near side of the torus overhand your thumb will point along the -a direction and the fingers will curl about the +b direction only if you grab it with the right hand.

If I rotate this torus x° about its axis, nothing changes: the motion of the torus at the point nearest me has components to the (-a) to the right and (+b) up; the motion of the torus at the point furthest from me is to the (a) to the right and (+b) up. The toroidal flow is axisymmetric.

If I rotate the original torus 180° about my line of sight, a line which is perpendicular to the axis, all the signs flip: the motion of the torus at the point nearest me has components to the (+a) to the right and (-b) up; the motion of the torus at the point furthest from me is to the (-a) to the right and (-b) up.

If I rotate the original torus 180° about the line which is perpendicular to both its axis and my line of sight, all the signs flip: the motion of the torus at the point nearest me has components to the (+a) to the right and (-b) up; the motion of the torus at the point furthest from me is to the (-a) to the right and (-b) up.

Likewise if I time-reverse the original torus, all the signs flip: the motion of the torus at the point nearest me has components to the (+a) to the right and (-b) up; the motion of the torus at the point furthest from me is to the (-a) to the right and (-b) up.

Thus time-reversal = rotation by 180° about a line perpendicular to the axis for a torus with this class of axisymmetric motion. Since time-reversal can be duplicated/undone by a suitable continuous motion in Euclidean space, time-reversal does not alter the chirality of toroidal flow, as in your second image.

This is chiral flow which can be verified because if you grab the near side of the second torus underhand your thumb will point along the +a direction and the fingers will curl about the -b direction only if you grab it with the right hand.

---

Spatial inversion swaps top and bottom, left and right, front and back. So if I spatially invert the original torus, I get a torus with a different chirality: the motion of the torus at the point nearest me has components to the (-a) to the right and (-b) up; the motion of the torus at the point furthest from me is to the (+a) to the right and (-b) up.

Mirroring an object is the same as spatially inverting it and then rotating by 180° in an line perpendicular to the mirror. Therefore for this axisymmetric torus, reflection in a mirror perpendicular to the axis of the torus results in the same situation as pure spatial inversion: the motion of the torus at the point nearest me has components to the (-a) to the right and (-b) up; the motion of the torus at the point furthest from me is to the (+a) to the right and (-b) up.

Mirroring the original torus in a plane parallel to the axis, is similarly a combination of spatial inversion and 180° rotation in a line perpendicular to the axis: the motion of the torus at the point nearest me has components to the (+a) to the right and (+b) up; the motion of the torus at the point furthest from me is to the (-a) to the right and (+b) up.

If I both mirror the original torus in a plane parallel to the axis, and time reverse it (as in your third picture) we get the same result as pure spatial inversion: the motion of the torus at the point nearest me has components to the (-a) to the right and (-b) up; the motion of the torus at the point furthest from me is to the (+a) to the right and (-b) up.

This is chiral flow which can be verified because if you grab the near side of the third torus underhand your thumb will point along the -a direction and the fingers will curl about the -b direction only if you grab it with the left hand. Spatial inversion and mirroring both flip chirality.

---

You would think someone with as many computer generated images would understand the isometries of geometry better. You would demand someone using chirality as part of their argument should.

// edited upon noticing the last image with both mirrored and time-reversed.

 

[PhysBang]

No it isn't arrogant. What's arrogant is to ignore all the scientific evidence.

Farsight, everyone agrees on this.

The problem is that you are the person ignoring the scientific evidence. You are the one who ignores the mathematics and the observational evidence it supports and instead offer pictures that you admit cannot be used to do physics. You are the one who scoffs at the restrictions on bound states that have been established through careful study. You are the one who ignores the decades of work on spacetime geometry in general relativity in favor of a single line from a single public speech.

You can call me a "lying troll" all you want, but that won't change these facts and it won't change your family.

 

[Farsight]

Yes, we all know that. Here's the ring torus along with the same torus rotated 180°:

 

[rpenner]

You can play around with gifs to clarify this. The first gif is the original ring torus, the second one is time-reversed, the third one is time-reversed and flipped horizontally.

Flipped horizontally is mirrored. That's not the same as a rotation of torus 180° about an axis perpendicular to the axis of the torus.

Yes, we all know that. Here's the ring torus along with the same torus rotated 180°:

[Schoolmaster's cutting understated indication that his student has failed to make a relevant point:] Quite.

Actually it looks like you rotated the 2-D animated image of the torus which is a distorted version of rotating the torus about its axis. As I pointed out in my tutorial appended to post #126, this changes nothing because the flow is axisymmetric. You can verify this with the chirality test -- you can grasp both nearest sides of both by the same overhanded grasp of the right hand. If you had rotated the torus by 180° through an axis perpendicular to its axis, you would necessarily have to switch to an underhanded grip to have the fingers and motion align.

 

[Farsight]

The problem is that you are the person ignoring the scientific evidence...

Au contraire, the problem is that I'm not. Pair production and Einstein-de Haas and magnetic moment and electron diffraction and atomic-orbital standing waves and annihilation all make it patently clear that the electron is not some cargo-cult point particle spitting out photons like Don Lincoln of Fermilab said. The positron has the opposite chirality to the electron. That's a bit tricky for a point particle.

...Actually it looks like you rotated the 2-D animated image of the torus ...

Oh quit carping, you windbag. When I replied to your post #126 above, it was a one line long. We all know that there's various transformations that you can do to the torus. And since some of us also know that time travel is science fiction, we know that a positron is not actually an electron travelling back in time. But we can understand why Feynman thought of it as a time-reversed electron.

 

[quantum_wave]

A Moment of Reflection

A universe without end, where the greatest things work like the tiniest.
A sameness across the vastest expanse, in the tiniest increments.
A poetry with both rhyme and reason.
A comfort in knowing that you must believe to know.

The knowing is a belief.
The belief is a mystery solved.
The particle is a wave.
The wave is a particle.

 

[rpenner]

It's ironic that Farsight, who faults working physicists for working with mathematical models that describe reality, has fallen into error "play[ing] around with [2-d images]."

Oh quit carping, you windbag.

Explaining concepts that you have heard of and reference but can't apply is no definition of "carping" of which I am familiar. I'm not criticizing; pointing out that you are wrong is just a side effect of educating. The characterization of "windbag" is an unfair charge that stems from psychological projection from the author of ISBN 0956097804, A Child's Guide on How to Ape Scholarship.

When I replied to your post #126 above, it was a one line long.

That one line, which would have been all that was necessary had you mastered concepts of chirality and isometries of 3-d flows, was faithfully reproduced as a quote in post #129. I then composed a helpful tutorial, written at the high school level, so your readers will expect you to never again repeat the untruths about chirality and the isometries of 3-d flows that have dominated your reaction to criticism of your purported model.

We all know that there's various transformations that you can do to the torus.

I limited myself to isometries, which are those continuous and discrete transformations which leave the image geometrically congruent to the original. The continuous ones are rotation, translation and change in the standard of rest. They correspond to physical things one may do to a physical object (active transform). They also correspond to effects on gets by changing one's coordinate system (passive transform). Because of relativity, the active and passive transforms take on the same mathematical form and thus to the extent the torus is meant to be a real thing, you cannot just dismiss them. The discrete ones are time-reversal, spatial inversion (in an odd-number of spatial dimensions) and mirroring. They don't necessarily have real-world application, but are useful in the geometry of computer graphics and are particularly important in this thread because in post #2, your first post captured in this split thread, you claimed:

the electron and the positron move linearly and rotationally like cyclones and anticyclones:
View attachment 167
See positronium. Counter-rotating vortices attract, co-rotating vortices repel.

So it is clear we want some isometry which transforms electrons to/from positrons.

And since some of us also know that time travel is science fiction,

Contemplating time reversal is distinct from contemplating time travel. Trying to distract us with your Canadian girlfriend direction to do a vague Google search bloviation in another thread is an evasion, not an argument.

we know that a positron is not actually an electron travelling back in time.

The CPT theorem happens to argue for precisely that equivalence in mainstream general Quantum Field Theory. Mawell's Laws likewise are all of C, P and T symmetric. As you have brought no evidence that reality violates CPT symmetry and not argued that your model violates CPT symmetry, you have not argued against the position that time-reversal is not the appropriate isometry which links electron torii and positron torii.

 

[PhysBang]

Au contraire, the problem is that I'm not. Pair production and Einstein-de Haas and magnetic moment and electron diffraction and atomic-orbital standing waves and annihilation all make it patently clear that the electron is not some cargo-cult point particle spitting out photons like Don Lincoln of Fermilab said. The positron has the opposite chirality to the electron. That's a bit tricky for a point particle.

Nobody is ignoring the scientific results except you. I note in your response that you ignored a) that you ignore the mathematical details, b) that you ignore the limitations on bound states that are part of quantum theory, and c) the evidential reasoning and practice of general relativity. You posted yet another response where you ignore the specific points raised against your position and you attempt to change the subject.

You haven't given us a definition for chirality, despite having been asked several times. Your definition may not be the definition that is used in the relevant science. Quite often, when you are asked for details like this, you insult the person who asks the question or otherwise dodge the question.

You have a long history of dodging scientific details and you have admitted that you cannot do the mathematics of the science. This means that you haven't done anything to make your case that your claims are scientific and not religious.

 

[Fednis48]

The arrows just show you the direction of the photon, as it were. They also highlight the fact that you've got a double-loop path going round 720 degrees.

You can play around with gifs to clarify this. The first gif is the original ring torus, the second one is time-reversed, the third one is time-reversed and flipped horizontally.

In his usual style, rpenner has addressed this argument with more eloquence and rigor than I ever could. Suffice it to say, I was quite amused to see that you were literally manipulating the .gif, as opposed to the object in the modeling software.

Google on electromagnetic geometry.

I clicked the link just to be sporting, but honestly, I have no interest in Googling a broad concept and combing through the results for evidence in favor of my opponent's argument. I want you to show me this magical geometry that looks Euclidean on large scales but violates the hairy ball theorem.

Who says I have no illustrations? This is an illustration of a photon:

I didn't say you have no illustrations; I said none of your illustrations exhibit any of the remarkable properties you insist the electron has. Your illustration of a photon is in one spatial dimension, with no curvature. Your illustrations of toruses are highly anisotropic and not distinct under 3-D rotation. An illustration (or even better, an equation) that exhibits isotropy and an actual difference between inversion and time reversal is so far absent, and I assert impossible to make. Prove me wrong.

Well I do, and so do a lot of other people.

This is exactly the point under contention. Everyone here except you is convinced that your model does not, and cannot, predict an electron with an isotropic, stable field. When you simply state that your model does make such predictions without explaining how, it comes across as an empty assertion at best and a lie born of desperation at worst. Show us a geometry that actually has the properties you claim, and then we'll be getting somewhere.

I don't have an issue if you object to the particulars of what I've been saying, but the evidence for the wave nature of the electron is patent, along with the evidence of some form of rotation. However there is absolutely no evidence that the electron is some photon-spitting point-particle. That's absurd, it's cargo-cult nonsense peddled by arrogant quacks who take the public for fools.
...
No it isn't arrogant. What's arrogant is to ignore all the scientific evidence.

You think that given the physical evidence, your model (or something similar to it) is obviously correct. I have looked at all the same evidence as you, and I disagree. So how do we get past this impasse? Fortunately, in the sciences, there is a standard way to weigh competing models objectively: compare the predictions of each model against real world observations. On my side of the argument, I make the following observation:

*Within its domain of applicability, QED predicts all observed phenomena to very high accuracy.

Of course, that doesn't guarantee that QED is correct. There could be as-yet-unobserved phenomena that contradict QED, or there could be a different model that makes the same predictions but with a more general scope and/or better explanatory power. But in order to be considered as a viable alternative to QED, your model must at least meet the same standard of predicting all observed phenomena to comparable accuracy. In this regard, there are three major strikes against it:

*In the real world, time-reversing the dynamics of an electron does something fundamentally different from any spatial rotation. Your model as presented does not predict this, and it is not clear how your theory could be modified to rectify the error.
*In the real world, the repulsion between two electrons is highly isotropic in three dimensions. Your model as presented does not predict this, and there are strong field-theoretic reasons to think that no modification could rectify the error.
*The Schrodinger equation (which nicely predicts many phenomena even outside the domain of QED) says that any state with spatial extent far outside its binding radius must be unstable and prone to spontaneous unbinding. Your model violates this rule, and so is in competition with the Schrodinger equation as well as QED.

Of course, I might be wrong about some or all of these points. Your job is to show that I'm making mistakes in all of these observations, or at least that I'm missing something that would make the errors less fatal to your model. But you do have to address all of them, and the burden of proof is squarely on you to show a theory that does not have these problems, even when I can't give you an airtight "no-go" theorem. To save you the trouble of repeating yourself, the following arguments (numbered helpfully for future reference) are not responsive to any of the standing challenges, and I will ignore them from here on:

1. Assuring me that there totally is a modification of your model without the listed problems.
2. Reiterating that your model is obviously right given the evidence, possibly along with platitudes like "magnets don't shine".
3. Saying that QED is "cargo cult nonsense", or that I am "getting in the way of scientific progress".
4. Telling me to Google/brush up on any broad sub-discipline of electrodynamics.
5. Offering vague analogies, e.g. to force screws or ocean waves.
6. Citing the opinions of any other scientist (including Maxwell), except insofar as that opinion is directly tied to a concrete model/equation than can be evaluated.

Hope that helps! I look forward to hearing your subsequent responses without any of the above distractions.

It doesn't violate the Schrodinger equation because there is no such thing as probability amplitude.

Wow. I was not expecting that. Showing that probability amplitude does, in fact, exist is certainly beyond the scope of this thread. But fortunately for me, I was only using the phrase "probability amplitude" for technical accuracy - my argument is if anything easier to understand without the term: The Schrodinger equation predicts that if there is high probability to see a bound particle well outside of its binding radius, that particle will be prone to spontaneous unbinding via tunneling. Your electron is just such a bound particle, and the Schrodinger equation predicts it should not be stable.

See this article? It's not bad. But see this?
...
That's wrong.

It's a little weird to cite an article no one was talking about for the sole purpose of saying it's wrong. I don't know what you were hoping to accomplish by that.

 

[James R]

Farsight,

Re: censorship

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?

I kicked this thread into "Alternative Theories" because it is discussing an alternative theory - namely, your theory that electrons and positrons can be described as vortices. That is not standard physics. Also, there is a redirect link to this thread, left in the Physics forum.

Moving this thread hasn't killed the discussion. Several physicists have been attempting to get you to understand why your silly model has failed.

Why did I start the thread? To discuss your model. Now that it has been demolished, we can probably close the thread. Do you agree?

 

[Farsight]

Demolished? LOL. What's been demolished is the cargo-cult crackpot notion that the electron is a point particle spitting out photons. Because there's patent blatant evidence that's it's a wave in a closed path, and you can't refute it. Which is why you're eager to hide the thread and close it. Bah, you're no physicist.

 

[Farsight]

In his usual style, rpenner has addressed this argument with more eloquence and rigor than I ever could. Suffice it to say, I was quite amused to see that you were literally manipulating the .gif, as opposed to the object in the modeling software.

Why? You were getting confused about the transformations, I showed you some which made the clockwise and anticlockwise rotations crystal clear. You didn't acknowledge this, or concede that it was Feynman who referred to the positron as the time reversed electron. That isn't something I invented.

I clicked the link just to be sporting, but honestly, I have no interest in Googling a broad concept and combing through the results for evidence in favor of my opponent's argument. I want you to show me this magical geometry that looks Euclidean on large scales but violates the hairy ball theorem.

No. There's plenty of works out there such as Geometry of Electromagnetic Systems by Baldomir and Hammond. I will not let you ignore them and hurl "your theory" aspersions when all this vortex particle spinor stuff goes back to Thomson and Tait and Maxwell. The magic is the notion that electrons and positrons move linearly and rotationally because they're throwing photons around.

I didn't say you have no illustrations; I said none of your illustrations exhibit any of the remarkable properties you insist the electron has. Your illustration of a photon is in one spatial dimension, with no curvature.

No curvature? What? Go and look at the picture again. Or are you now just dismissing and denying everything?

Your illustrations of toruses are highly anisotropic and not distinct under 3-D rotation. An illustration (or even better, an equation) that exhibits isotropy and an actual difference between inversion and time reversal is so far absent, and I assert impossible to make. Prove me wrong.

No, because now you're into full-blown dismissal mode.

This is exactly the point under contention. Everyone here except you is convinced that your model does not, and cannot, predict an electron with an isotropic, stable field. When you simply state that your model does make such predictions without explaining how, it comes across as an empty assertion at best and a lie born of desperation at worst. Show us a geometry that actually has the properties you claim, and then we'll be getting somewhere.

I've told you repeatedly: the electron does not have an electric field. It has an electromagnetic field that results from its bispinor rotation. And you know I'm sure that there is no axis to this rotation, there is no North pole.

You think that given the physical evidence, your model (or something similar to it) is obviously correct. I have looked at all the same evidence as you, and I disagree. So how do we get past this impasse? Fortunately, in the sciences, there is a standard way to weigh competing models objectively: compare the predictions of each model against real world observations. On my side of the argument, I make the following observation:

*Within its domain of applicability, QED predicts all observed phenomena to very high accuracy.

Of course, that doesn't guarantee that QED is correct.

We've covered this. Feynman said QED offered no explanation of the underlying phenomena, nowadays people like Don Lincoln give cargo-cult explanations that flatly contradict the hard scientific evidence, but what I say doesn't. Nor does it contradict QED. The electron and the proton exchange field. Virtual photons are not real photons, they're field quanta.

There could be as-yet-unobserved phenomena that contradict QED, or there could be a different model that makes the same predictions but with a more general scope and/or better explanatory power. But in order to be considered as a viable alternative to QED, your model must at least meet the same standard of predicting all observed phenomena to comparable accuracy.

All of this is a straw man. It isn't my model, it's a description of the bleedin' obvious, and it's in accord with QED, not some alternative theory. What I'm saying is a viable alternative to the point-particle garbage that was never in QED in the first place. it's quantum field theory, not quantum point-particle theory. Duh!

In this regard, there are three major strikes against it:

*In the real world, time-reversing the dynamics of an electron does something fundamentally different from any spatial rotation. Your model as presented does not predict this, and it is not clear how your theory could be modified to rectify the error.
*In the real world, the repulsion between two electrons is highly isotropic in three dimensions. Your model as presented does not predict this, and there are strong field-theoretic reasons to think that no modification could rectify the error.
*The Schrodinger equation (which nicely predicts many phenomena even outside the domain of QED) says that any state with spatial extent far outside its binding radius must be unstable and prone to spontaneous unbinding. Your model violates this rule, and so is in competition with the Schrodinger equation as well as QED.

Specious tosh. I showed you the transformations, there is no issue. I told you the repulsion is isotropic because there is no electric field, E represents the linear force that results from electromagnetic field interactions, and the electromagnetic field is there because of the biaxial rotation. You know what happens when you inflate a torus, you end up with something that looks spherical and isotropic. And of course you know that the Schrodinger equation is a wave equation. Not a point particle equation, or a probability equation. How you think you can use that to attack the idea of the wave nature of the electron fair takes the breath away. You slipped up with the probability didn't you?

Of course, I might be wrong about some or all of these points.

You know you are. You know you're using sophistry to attack the physics that is amply supported by hard scientific evidence because you've been backing the wrong horse.

Your job is to show that I'm making mistakes in all of these observations, or at least that I'm missing something that would make the errors less fatal to your model. But you do have to address all of them, and the burden of proof is squarely on you

No it isn't because the evidence is on my side.

to show a theory that does not have these problems, even when I can't give you an airtight "no-go" theorem. To save you the trouble of repeating yourself, the following arguments (numbered helpfully for future reference) are not responsive to any of the standing challenges, and I will ignore them from here on:

1. Assuring me that there totally is a modification of your model without the listed problems.
2. Reiterating that your model is obviously right given the evidence, possibly along with platitudes like "magnets don't shine".
3. Saying that QED is "cargo cult nonsense", or that I am "getting in the way of scientific progress".
4. Telling me to Google/brush up on any broad sub-discipline of electrodynamics.
5. Offering vague analogies, e.g. to force screws or ocean waves.
6. Citing the opinions of any other scientist (including Maxwell), except insofar as that opinion is directly tied to a concrete model/equation than can be evaluated.

Hope that helps! I look forward to hearing your subsequent responses without any of the above distractions.

Item 2 is the giveaway. You will continue to dismiss the hard scientific evidence of pair production, electron diffraction, magnetic moment, the Einstein-de Haas effect, atomic orbitals, and annihilation. All of which demonstrate the wave nature of matter, in favour of abject fairy tales that totally contradict the hard scientific evidence. Why, Fednis? When you're in a hole, why keep digging? Stop digging!

Wow. I was not expecting that. Showing that probability amplitude does, in fact, exist is certainly beyond the scope of this thread. But fortunately for me, I was only using the phrase "probability amplitude" for technical accuracy - my argument is if anything easier to understand without the term: The Schrodinger equation predicts that if there is high probability to see a bound particle well outside of its binding radius, that particle will be prone to spontaneous unbinding via tunneling. Your electron is just such a bound particle, and the Schrodinger equation predicts it should not be stable.

Now you're rewriting history. Schrodinger's equation is a wave equation. He devised his cat to show how absurd the Copenhagen Interpretation was. And you're making up assertions. No way does the Schrodinger equation predict that a closed-path wave will spontaneously jump out of its circulation in contravention of conservation of angular momentum and conservation of momentum.

 

[James R]

Demolished? LOL. What's been demolished is the cargo-cult crackpot notion that the electron is a point particle spitting out photons.Because there's patent blatant evidence that's it's a wave in a closed path...

A wave in a closed path? What on earth does that mean?

...and you can't refute it.

No, because I don't know what it might mean. Sounds like gibberish.

Which is why you're eager to hide the thread and close it.

It is neither hidden nor closed.

Bah, you're no physicist.

Meh. Like you're qualified to judge.

 

[Farsight]

A wave in a closed path? What on earth does that mean?

A wave that goes round and round. A bit like this. See the comments. Quick, before they get deleted.

This is what the wave nature of matter is all about. And TQFT. Attached below is Qiu-Hong Hu's ABB50/25 poster. He talked to Sir Michael Atiyah about it. And about the trefoil photon. Find a picture of a trefoil, like the one below. Start at the bottom left and go round it clockwise calling out the crossing-over directions: up down up. Ring any bells? The given reason why you've never seen a free quark is just another fairy tale. You've never seen one because quarks are partons. Just parts. When you break this thing, the loops don't survive.

 

[rpenner]

I believe Farsight has badly misunderstood the scientific content of the experiment because of his reliance on his own tortured reading of a pop-science source.
The jargon of those that experiment with beams of light uses terms like "vortex" and "angular momentum" in ways that Farsight has confused with his own ideas. This is confirmation bias at work.

A review of the literature indicates that nothing connects with Farsight's picture barrage and claims of a self-bound optical object and admissible rest frame.

Background information:

Poincaré beams are a general form of vector beams. Their transverse profile carries a state of polarization that varies from point to point. These polarization-state patterns constitute partial, full or multiple mappings of the Poincaré sphere onto the transverse plane of the mode.

http://www.colgate.edu/portaldata/i...13d5/ImageGallery/poincare-modes-of-light.pdf

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0712.0782.pdf

We studied a novel family of paraxial laser beams forming an overcomplete yet nonorthogonal set of modes. These modes have a singular
phase profile and are eigenfunctions of the photon orbital angular momentum. The intensity profile is characterized by a single brilliant ring with the singularity at its center, where the field amplitude vanishes.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.2646.pdf -- This article pretty much demolishes the misunderstanding Farsight has applied to the term "vortex" in these experiments. An optical vortex according to these authors is a cylindrical beam of light where the polarization varies across its 2-d profile and has a singularity (zero) where the polarization is necessarily undefined.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_vortex traces this topic back to 1974.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_angular_momentum_of_light confirms that the discussion is about beams with transverse patterning.

A wave that goes round and round. A bit like this.

That's not a wave that goes round and round, that's a beam of light structured to have a pattern of polarization in planes near a focal point.

The referenced pop-science description refers to work begin done and published as:
Thomas Bauer, Peter Banzer, Ebrahim Karimi,* Sergej Orlov, Andrea Rubano, Lorenzo Marrucci, Enrico Santamato, Robert W Boyd, Gerd Leuchs "Observation of optical polarization Möbius strips" Science 1260635. DOI:10.1126/science.1260635 (Received for publication 1 September 2014. Published online 29 January 2015.)

Möbius strips are three-dimensional geometrical structures, fascinating for their peculiar property of being surfaces with only one “side” - or, more technically, being “non-orientable” surfaces. Despite being easily realized artificially, the spontaneous emergence of these structures in nature is exceedingly rare. Here, we generate Möbius strips of optical polarization by tightly focusing the light beam emerging from a q-plate, a liquid crystal device that modifies the polarization of light in a space-variant manner. Using a recently developed method for the three-dimensional nano-tomography of optical vector fields, we fully reconstruct the light polarization structure in the focal region, confirming the appearance of Möbius polarization structures. The preparation of such structured light modes may be important for complex light beam engineering and optical micro- and nano-fabrication.

Supplementary materials:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2015/01/28/science.1260635.DC1/Bauer-SM.pdf