Electromagnetism: quantum mechanics or vortices?

[PhysBang]

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

That article does not describe a wave going round and round, it discusses a beam of photons that have their polarization controlled in a certain way in different regions. Again you are saying things about your citation that simply are not true. I doubt that you actually have a copy of that paper and that you have read it. Even if you somehow paid for a copy, if you understood it, then you are now lying about it.

See the comments. Quick, before they get deleted.

All the comments seem to be comments from crackpots. However, even one of the crackpots notes that in order for the crazy electron-made-of-light idea to work, the details have to be worked out.

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.
View attachment 352

While a dubious source like that is of no use to any of us, it at least provided the means to find a number of questions that you have to answer, Farsight.

The first comment on this link, http://www.quora.com/What-do-physicists-think-of-the-hubius-helix-model-of-electron-structure , nicely lays out the requirements for anyone who wants to claim that the electron has an internal structure. It is a direct response to Qiu-Hong Hu's idea.

So, Farsight, I know that you used to try to predict the fine structure constant, until you kept failing to put it in the correct units, but now you have a reason to try it for real.

Heck, I'll reprint the comment below:

Dear Hubius Helix Model,

So you want to be an electron model? That's great! A good electron model is a beautiful thing. Many wonderful and noble electron models before you have taught us innumerable things about the natural world. Unfortunately, to supplant the Standard Model as the world's next top electron model, you'll have to satisfy a few requirements:

1. Experiments show that free electrons in slowly-varying electromagnetic fields move according to the Lorentz force law. You should make it possible to derive this law in the limit where fields vary slowly compared to the electron's Compton wavelength.
2. Experiments show that in the presence of more rapidly varying fields, electron motion is well-described by the Schrödinger equation, as long as the velocity is much less than the speed of light. You should make it possible to derive this equation. In particular, you should correctly predict the Energy levels of atoms, up to relativistic corrections of order
   
   , where
   
   is the Fine-structure constant.
3. Experiments show that electron motion is compatible with the principles of Special relativity, and that it is well-described by the Dirac equation for arbitrary field profiles and electron velocities. You should make it possible to derive this equation. In particular, you should correctly predict the Fine structure of atoms (the
   
   corrections to energy levels).
4. Experiments show that electrons have an Electron magnetic dipole moment given by
   
   where
   
   is the Bohr magneton,
   
   is the electron spin, and
   
   is the electron g-factor (physics). Experiments show that
   
   . You should predict this value of
   
   to 12 decimal places. You should also predict the Hyperfine structure of atoms and arbitrary higher corrections.
5. The Large Electron–Positron Collider collected about 1 inverse-femtobarn (Barn (unit)) of data on electron-positron annihilation between 1989 and 2000. You should correctly predict the probabilities for different processes measured at that experiment.
6. The Large Hadron Collider has collected more than 5 inverse-femtobarns of data on proton-proton collisions, many of which involve electron and positron creation. You should correctly predict the probabilities for processes measured at that experiment which involve electrons and positrons.

Please come back when you have met all of these requirements.

Thanks and Best Wishes,
Physics

 

[Fednis48]

First off, rpenner: thanks for looking into the "vortex beam" research! I've seen some of that stuff at conferences, but most of it didn't really sink in and the links were very helpful for refreshing my memory. The idea of a "Moebius beam" is especially cool, although it's not clear to me how much of a breakthrough it actually is.

Why? You were getting confused about the transformations, I showed you some which made the clockwise and anticlockwise rotations crystal clear.

Yeah, you've given me plenty of illustrations that show rotations. But none of them have exhibited isotropy, and time reversal has been equivalent to vertical inversion in all of them. That's the problem.

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.

For once I agree with your citation; the fact that time reversal turns electrons into positrons is accepted mainstream physics, and I don't think anyone in this thread would disagree with it. One consequence of this fact is that in any reasonable model of the electron, time reversal must not be equivalent to any isomorphism, because if it was, one could turn an electron into a positron through spatial manipulation. Time reversal has been equivalent to vertical inversion in all of your illustrations so far, so none of them are reasonable.

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

The link is broken, so I can't tell what picture you're referring to. Looking back, the first picture looks just like a photon propagating in 1D. The second is a little less clear to me - does it have something to do with a photon curving under gravity? Regardless, neither of the illustrations shows anything in 3D, let alone the the isotropic, rotationally invariant vortex you need to have a viable model. That's what I asked for, so just showing two pictures of photons is non-responsive.

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

Let the record show that I asked Farsight to show me any geometry with the properties he claims his model electron has, and he explicitly refused to do so.

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.

And because I knew you were a stickler about this, nowhere in my post did I even use the word "electric". I just said that the electron's field must be essentially isotropic, because electron-electron repulsion is essentially isotropic. You can insist all you want that your model contains rotation with no axis, but unless you can actually show me such a rotation, I assert that you are lying.

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.

Having "no electric field" is hardly sufficient to guarantee isotropic repulsion. In order for the repulsion to be isotropic, whatever gives rise to it must be isotropic. In your case, the vortical motion gives rise to repulsion, so you must be able to show at least one example of isotropic, vortical motion. It is not sufficient to say that the vortices are in whatever configuration gives rise to the linear force represented by E, because such a configuration may not exist.

You know what happens when you inflate a torus, you end up with something that looks spherical and isotropic.

You yourself gave us an illustration of the spindle sphere (i.e. inflated torus) earlier in this thread. It's spherical, but the vertical axis is still clearly different from the horizontal axes, so it is not 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?

This bit has me very confused. Quantum mechanics is intrinsically probabilistic, and I never tried to attack the wave nature of the electron. Are you trying to attack the particle nature of the photon, or the idea of measurement collapse? I'm sorry for the weak response, but I really can't parse this as anything more than a pile of angry sentences with the same subject matter as my argument.

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

Let the record show that Farsight does not think the burden of proof is on him to show that his model is free of logical contradictions. Rather, he thinks the evidence is so strongly in favor of his model that just a qualitative description of it should be sufficient for its acceptance.

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!

I agree that you have there a list of six physical effects that are real. I do not agree that any of them prove that an electron is a bound photon. The scientific way to convince me would be to show me that your model is consistent with physical reality; a good starting point would be to show me that the geometric properties your model must have are even mathematically possible. Repeating the list of six physical effects over and over, getting angrier each time, will not convince me and bears no resemblance to real scientific discussion. So stop it.

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.

The argument is as follows. Any particle in quantum mechanics has a wavefunction. The Schrodinger equation tells us how that wavefunction will propagate with time. Specifically, it tells us that any steady state will pick up a rotating phase, described by an exponential with exponent equal to the imaginary unit times the square root of energy. One interesting consequence of the Schrodinger equation is what happens with a bound particle. In classical mechanics, a bound particle never travels farther out than its binding radius, but quantum mechanics allows the wave function to extend past the point where it would normally be bound, into regions with potential energy higher than the energy of the particle itself. In this case, total energy is negative, so its square root is imaginary and the complex phase accumulation becomes real, exponential amplitude decay. This exponential decay, in turn, causes the wave amplitude to drop off rapidly as it gets farther out of the binding radius, resulting in something that looks essentially localized but with a fuzzy boundary.

But what if the binding barrier is very thin - thinner then the width of this fuzzy boundary? In that case, the amplitude can undergo some exponential decay through the barrier, then pick up normal oscillation again with reduced amplitude on the far side. Because the Schrodinger equation is linear, this portion of the wavefunction outside the binding radius acts just like any other unbound wave: it flies off. Unless the system is in a cavity or some other larger constraining structure, the bound wavefunction will continue to leak amplitude until almost none of it is still bound. This is spontaneous decay by tunneling, and it happens to any wavefunction with significant spatial extent beyond its binding radius. Farsight's bound photon maintains a sub-exponential amplitude decay over very long distances, so it must fall into this category, meaning it is susceptible to spontaneous decay. If this results in nonsense predictions like unstable electrons or violation of conservation of angular momentum, that's not a flaw with my understanding of the Schrodinger equation; that's a flaw with Farsight's model.

 

[Farsight]

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.

It isn't. See tying light in knots where Mark Dennis rather cryptically says this: “The study of knotted vortices was initiated by Lord Kelvin back in 1867 in his quest for an explanation of atoms”, adds Dennis, who began to study knotted optical vortices with Professor Sir Michael Berry at Bristol University in 2000. “This work opens a new chapter in that history.” Mark Dennis was one of the organisers of ABB50/25 where Qiu-Hong Hu had his poster and was talking to everybody including Sir Michael Atiyah. Again see On Vortex Particles by David St John.

 

[PhysBang]

Farsight, your ignorance of the science is making you say foolish things.

Your quotation convinces nobody, and shouldn't. You do not understand the Mobius strip polarization and it seems clear.

 

[Farsight]

Yeah, you've given me plenty of illustrations that show rotations. But none of them have exhibited isotropy, and time reversal has been equivalent to vertical inversion in all of them. That's the problem.

You're making too big a deal of that. Just go back to the photons, then put them through pair-production, then look at the electron. You can diffract it. It isn't a point particle. It's a wave. And it isn't going thataway → at c. And it's chiral.

For once I agree with your citation; the fact that time reversal turns electrons into positrons is accepted mainstream physics, and I don't think anyone in this thread would disagree with it.

OK. Let's not quibble about the fine subtleties.

One consequence of this fact is that in any reasonable model of the electron, time reversal must not be equivalent to any isomorphism, because if it was, one could turn an electron into a positron through spatial manipulation.

To turn the electron into the positron you evert it.

Time reversal has been equivalent to vertical inversion in all of your illustrations so far, so none of them are reasonable.

Not true. I posted an animated ring torus and a time-reversed version. There is no vertical inversion. But think smoke rings, and observe how the torus on the left is "rolling in" while the one on the right is "rolling out".

The link is broken, so I can't tell what picture you're referring to. Looking back, the first picture looks just like a photon propagating in 1D. The second is a little less clear to me - does it have something to do with a photon curving under gravity? Regardless, neither of the illustrations shows anything in 3D, let alone the the isotropic, rotationally invariant vortex you need to have a viable model. That's what I asked for, so just showing two pictures of photons is non-responsive.

The top portion is your typical electromagnetic sine wave, which is the derivative of potential. The bottom picture shows this potential. What you're looking at is curved space. The right side has a "positive" curvature, the left side has a "negative" curvature.

Let the record show that I asked Farsight to show me any geometry with the properties he claims his model electron has, and he explicitly refused to do so.

Let the record show that you won't google on electromagnetic geometry because you want to think of me as some "my theory" guy when I'm not.

And because I knew you were a stickler about this, nowhere in my post did I even use the word "electric". I just said that the electron's field must be essentially isotropic, because electron-electron repulsion is essentially isotropic. You can insist all you want that your model contains rotation with no axis, but unless you can actually show me such a rotation, I assert that you are lying.

I assert that you're lying, because you've heard of a bispinor and you can envisage a clock which exhibits a clockwise rotation, which is then spun like a coin. What's the axis of rotation? There isn't one.

Continued

 

[Farsight]

Having "no electric field" is hardly sufficient to guarantee isotropic repulsion. In order for the repulsion to be isotropic, whatever gives rise to it must be isotropic. In your case, the vortical motion gives rise to repulsion, so you must be able to show at least one example of isotropic, vortical motion. It is not sufficient to say that the vortices are in whatever configuration gives rise to the linear force represented by E, because such a configuration may not exist.

A gravitomagnetic field offers an example, see this article. It's a 2D vortex because the Earth does have an axis of rotation, but it's surely enough because Heaviside developed gravitomagnetism as an analogy of electromagnetism.

You yourself gave us an illustration of the spindle sphere (i.e. inflated torus) earlier in this thread. It's spherical, but the vertical axis is still clearly different from the horizontal axes, so it is not isotropic.

You're making too much of that animation. Think of a football with backspin, now give it sidespin as well. If you were to look at it from different angles, you couldn't say it was spinning in any preferential direction. So the frame-dragging is isotropic.

This bit has me very confused. Quantum mechanics is intrinsically probabilistic, and I never tried to attack the wave nature of the electron. Are you trying to attack the particle nature of the photon, or the idea of measurement collapse? I'm sorry for the weak response, but I really can't parse this as anything more than a pile of angry sentences with the same subject matter as my argument.

I'm attacking your use of the Schrodinger wave equation to try to say the electron isn't a wave. But since you mention it, the photon is a wave too. E=hf applies, it has a wavelength. It looks pointlike when you measure it because there's something like an optical Fourier transform going on. Detect it at one slit and it goes through that slit only. Detect it on the screen and you see a point, not its many-paths.

Let the record show that Farsight does not think the burden of proof is on him to show that his model is free of logical contradictions. Rather, he thinks the evidence is so strongly in favor of his model that just a qualitative description of it should be sufficient for its acceptance.

It isn't my model. I didn't invent the wave nature of matter. You should accept that because of the hard scientific evidence like pair production, electron diffraction, Einstien-de Haas, etc. You don't have to accept every last little thing I say, just the idea of the electron being some kind of wave that isn't moving linearly at c. Why you reject this beats me.

I agree that you have there a list of six physical effects that are real. I do not agree that any of them prove that an electron is a bound photon. The scientific way to convince me would be to show me that your model is consistent with physical reality; a good starting point would be to show me that the geometric properties your model must have are even mathematically possible. Repeating the list of six physical effects over and over, getting angrier each time, will not convince me and bears no resemblance to real scientific discussion. So stop it.

I'm not getting angry. But you are dismissing hard scientific evidence, and now you're demanding maths instead, when that maths won't prove anything at all.

The argument is as follows. Any particle in quantum mechanics has a wavefunction. The Schrodinger equation tells us how that wavefunction will propagate with time. Specifically, it tells us that any steady state will pick up a rotating phase, described by an exponential with exponent equal to the imaginary unit times the square root of energy. One interesting consequence of the Schrodinger equation is what happens with a bound particle. In classical mechanics, a bound particle never travels farther out than its binding radius, but quantum mechanics allows the wave function to extend past the point where it would normally be bound, into regions with potential energy higher than the energy of the particle itself. In this case, total energy is negative, so its square root is imaginary and the complex phase accumulation becomes real, exponential amplitude decay. This exponential decay, in turn, causes the wave amplitude to drop off rapidly as it gets farther out of the binding radius, resulting in something that looks essentially localized but with a fuzzy boundary.

You need to work on this vision. For example see weak measurement work by Jeff Lundeen who will tell you that wavefunction is real. Think of the bound particle as rotating wavefunction and remember that many-paths photon.

But what if the binding barrier is very thin - thinner then the width of this fuzzy boundary?

it isn't, because the photon is displacing its own path into a closed path, and it's a many-paths photon. Think of a photon as something like a seismic wave. The seismic wave goes across a plain from A to B, but it isn't just the houses on the AB line that shake,

In that case, the amplitude can undergo some exponential decay through the barrier, then pick up normal oscillation again with reduced amplitude on the far side. Because the Schrodinger equation is linear, this portion of the wavefunction outside the binding radius acts just like any other unbound wave: it flies off. Unless the system is in a cavity or some other larger constraining structure

It is. The electron is "a photon in a box of its own making". Read this about a photon in a mirror-box: http://www.tardyon.de/mirror/hooft/hooft.htm . It isn't the Nobel 't Hooft, just some guy at Philips Eindhoven.

the bound wavefunction will continue to leak amplitude until almost none of it is still bound. This is spontaneous decay by tunneling, and it happens to any wavefunction with significant spatial extent beyond its binding radius. Farsight's bound photon maintains a sub-exponential amplitude decay over very long distances, so it must fall into this category, meaning it is susceptible to spontaneous decay. If this results in nonsense predictions like unstable electrons or violation of conservation of angular momentum, that's not a flaw with my understanding of the Schrodinger equation; that's a flaw with Farsight's model.

This mathematical strawman is no match for the hard scientific evidence. We can make electrons out of light, we can diffract 'em, and they don't decay. Do not elevate mathematics above physics, Fednis.

 

[Fednis48]

You're making too big a deal of that. Just go back to the photons, then put them through pair-production, then look at the electron. You can diffract it. It isn't a point particle. It's a wave. And it isn't going thataway → at c. And it's chiral.

"Making too big a deal" of it? Your electrons turn into anti-matter when you flip them upside down. I'm not sure its possible to overstate how big a problem that is. If your model fails to predict isotropic electrons and positrons that are not isomorphisms of each other, then your model is wrong. Full stop. It doesn't matter how many other physical phenomena your model predicts well; you need to show that it predicts these ones.

Not true. I posted an animated ring torus and a time-reversed version. There is no vertical inversion. But think smoke rings, and observe how the torus on the left is "rolling in" while the one on the right is "rolling out".

An excellent example. The torus on the left is "rolling in" from the top and "rolling out" from the bottom (because of the viewing angle, we can't see the bottom, but all the flow disappearing into the central hole must come out on the bottom and loop around the outside before reappearing up top). If you flip the torus over (not just the image, but the actual object being rendered), the "in" side goes to the bottom and the "out" side goes to the top, turning it into the figure on the right. This has been true for every image you have posted in this thread, and it is fatal to your model.

Let the record show that you won't google on electromagnetic geometry because you want to think of me as some "my theory" guy when I'm not.

Fair enough. I refuse to believe that your model is espoused by other people, and you refuse to show me that it's consistent with the rules of geometry. One of those things is a lot more relevant to the model's viability than the other. Show me a geometry with the properties you claim your electron has, or link a specific page where someone else does so, but don't expect me to go digging through search results for an illustration that I don't even believe exists.

I assert that you're lying, because you've heard of a bispinor and you can envisage a clock which exhibits a clockwise rotation, which is then spun like a coin. What's the axis of rotation? There isn't one.

I used Mathematica to plot out the trajectory of the tip of the clock's hand, for various relative rotation rates about the two axes.

(In thumbnail format because Mathematica made the originals really big, and I'm rubbish at image editing.) The one on the left corresponds to equal rotation rates; it stays on one hemisphere the entire time, so it's obviously not isotropic. The second is for a clock advancing twice as fast as it is spinning; the trajectory overlaps itself at only two antipodal points, so it's not isotropic. The third image (which is quite pretty, imo) is for a clock advancing 1.5 times as fast as it is spinning. Here all three axes are qualitatively distinct, so I guess it is hard to identify one axis of rotation, but only because the path exhibits richer anisotropies than can be described by a single vector. Describing a spherically isotropic vortex of any kind remains an outstanding challenge. (The same plots apply to the football analogy lower down.)

A gravitomagnetic field offers an example, see this article. It's a 2D vortex because the Earth does have an axis of rotation, but it's surely enough because Heaviside developed gravitomagnetism as an analogy of electromagnetism.

We've already established that 2D vortices can be isotropic. I want a 3D example.

You're making too much of that animation.

Well then, find me an animation that actually does hold up under scrutiny. My primary assertion is that it is impossible to draw a picture that meets your requirements. Your response so far has been to give me pictures that fail to do so, and say "The real thing is kind of like this, except that it meets all of my requirements." That's not a model; it's at best a vague idea. It's disingenuous of you to even present it as a working hypothesis, let alone a proper theory.

I'm attacking your use of the Schrodinger wave equation to try to say the electron isn't a wave.
...
You don't have to accept every last little thing I say, just the idea of the electron being some kind of wave that isn't moving linearly at c.

Huh? I never tried to say that the electron isn't a wave. Of course the electron is a wave, and of course it isn't traveling at the speed of light. It's a far jump from there to saying that it consists of a bound photon.

Think of the bound particle as rotating wavefunction and remember that many-paths photon.
...
it isn't, because the photon is displacing its own path into a closed path, and it's a many-paths photon.
...
The electron is "a photon in a box of its own making".

Oh, ok. I may have been coming at this from the wrong angle. I was assuming that you were treating the electron as basically well-localized. Now it sounds like you actually want to treat the electron as having a long-range binding potential, and being spatially extensive. If that's the case, please answer me the following. It's possible to trap electrons in regions much smaller than the extent of their electromagnetic fields. Just outside such a trap, we can measure significant field strength, but we will never actually find the electron there (e.g. an electron detector of the type used in double-slit experiments will never "click"). Inside the trap, we can find both a strong field and the electron itself. If the electron really is nothing more than its own circulating field, why the discrepancy?

[N]ow you're demanding maths instead, when that maths won't prove anything at all.
...
Do not elevate mathematics above physics, Fednis.

I think these lines speak for themselves.

 

[PhysBang]

You're making too big a deal of that.

How can it be possible to make too big a deal over your prediction that turning an electron over turns it into a positron?

You are the only person here who wants to hold on to this alternative idea that makes these predictions.

I can understand that you want us to look away from the few times when you say something specific (and therefore wrong), but if you have an idea, then you have to accept the consequences of the idea. In this case, your consequence leads quite quickly to the conclusion that your theory is wrong.

But if you want to say that your theory is supported by evidence, then you have to accept its consequences.

Just go back to the photons, then put them through pair-production, then look at the electron. You can diffract it. It isn't a point particle. It's a wave. And it isn't going thataway → at c. And it's chiral.

None of these things have anything to do with your claim that an electron is some kind of photon vortex.

To turn the electron into the positron you evert it.

That is a fine, totally meaningless sentence. Why not just admit that you have no way to make your idea work as physics?

Not true. I posted an animated ring torus and a time-reversed version. There is no vertical inversion. But think smoke rings, and observe how the torus on the left is "rolling in" while the one on the right is "rolling out".

And what does one of these objects look like from the other side? You seem to have an amazing failure of imagination that nobody else does.

The top portion is your typical electromagnetic sine wave, which is the derivative of potential. The bottom picture shows this potential. What you're looking at is curved space. The right side has a "positive" curvature, the left side has a "negative" curvature.

This, too, is meaningless, since you are not explaining the relationship between the picture and where and how much curvature there is and in what direction.

Let the record show that you won't google on electromagnetic geometry because you want to think of me as some "my theory" guy when I'm not.

You have admitted that it is your idea! Why lie now? You have no equations, you have admitted that Maxwell's pictures do not match your idea. You have admitted that you are using 3D pictures that bear no relation to anyone else's ideas.

You merely say that your ideas match electromagnetic geometry. You have given nobody any reason to believe this. You refuse to answer specific questions about the details of your ideas.

You and I both know this is because you have no details because you can't do physics. Wouldn't it be easier to simply admit this and move on?

I assert that you're lying, because you've heard of a bispinor and you can envisage a clock which exhibits a clockwise rotation, which is then spun like a coin. What's the axis of rotation? There isn't one.

That makes no sense. You are the person making crazy claims that you refuse to defend. Even if you really were the Great White Hope of physics, how can you make your case for the true physics if you won't give us the details that we could use to do physics?

A gravitomagnetic field offers an example, see this article. It's a 2D vortex because the Earth does have an axis of rotation, but it's surely enough because Heaviside developed gravitomagnetism as an analogy of electromagnetism.

So your example of a 3D isotropic field is one that isn't 3D isotropic? Don't you feel that response is completely stupid?

You're making too much of that animation.

That animation is the most detailed position of your ideas you have ever provided. Since you admitted that you have no equations, until you produce any details, we are forced to use your animation.

Think of a football with backspin, now give it sidespin as well. If you were to look at it from different angles, you couldn't say it was spinning in any preferential direction. So the frame-dragging is isotropic.

Actually, one could clearly identify the axis of spin, given what you have described, and it is not isotropic.

If you were able to do even the most basic of physics, you might be able to understand this. But you continue to insult the work of others in complete ignorance, not bothering to abandon your dogma in order to even become a better person yourself.

I'm attacking your use of the Schrodinger wave equation to try to say the electron isn't a wave.

Then you are attacking a straw man. I would say that you are lying here, but I think that this is merely yet another example of your failure to understand the basics of the relevant physics.

It isn't my model. I didn't invent the wave nature of matter.

Again, this is your lie. You know that your idea is not merely the wave nature of matter, but also the unique to John Duffield idea that all matter is photons in a vortex. You don't like admitting this, since it makes you responsible, but you clearly are the sole author of this crank theory.

You should accept that because of the hard scientific evidence like pair production, electron diffraction, Einstien-de Haas, etc. You don't have to accept every last little thing I say, just the idea of the electron being some kind of wave that isn't moving linearly at c. Why you reject this beats me.

Again, all anyone rejects is your idea.

I'm not getting angry.

You are clearly acting irrationally and your insulting nature leads people to think that you are reacting angrily.

Perhaps you just lack basic communications skills?

But you are dismissing hard scientific evidence, and now you're demanding maths instead, when that maths won't prove anything at all.

All hard scientific evidence in physics involves mathematics. Your failure to understand and deliver mathematics means that you cannot offer hard evidence.

You need to work on this vision. For example see weak measurement work by Jeff Lundeen who will tell you that wavefunction is real. Think of the bound particle as rotating wavefunction and remember that many-paths photon.

Sadly, those sentences make no sense.

it isn't, because the photon is displacing its own path into a closed path, and it's a many-paths photon. Think of a photon as something like a seismic wave. The seismic wave goes across a plain from A to B, but it isn't just the houses on the AB line that shake,

If this is the case, then you need to show us the equations for this photon. You are claiming details about these particles that you cannot deliver.

It is. The electron is "a photon in a box of its own making". Read this about a photon in a mirror-box: http://www.tardyon.de/mirror/hooft/hooft.htm . It isn't the Nobel 't Hooft, just some guy at Philips Eindhoven.

Noting that a crank wrote your citation doesn't stop it from being a crank citation. You are making specific physics claims that you have no evidence for.

This mathematical strawman is no match for the hard scientific evidence.

The mathematics of a physical theory lays out the details. It is what allows people to compare ideas to observations. You are the only person here avoiding hard scientific evidence, since you do not want to give us any details about your ideas and when people stick to the details you provide, you try to weasel out of them. Plus, you avoid all the evidence for the aspects of quantum mechanics that you do not like, e.g., the application of the Schrodinger equation.

 

[Dr_Toad]

Maybe this sort of exchange could be valuable to a child just beginning to explore physics, in that Farsight makes so many claims unsupported by observation and experiment (at least for the last 120 years or so).

Why are so many threads in this section unraveled by this side-chatter? I found the responses by Fednis, Physbang. James R, Rpenner and many others who know a bit to give better, more concise and importantly, provable models and math as answers to the OP.

Just sayin'...

 

[origin]

Farsight is always quoting Einstein instead of doing actual physics. So I wonder what he would make of this quote by Einstein.

“When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.”

 

[Farsight]

"Making too big a deal" of it? Your electrons turn into anti-matter when you flip them upside down.

They don't. Nor do Möbius strips! Which you inflate into the ring torus, which you inflate into the spindle-sphere torus.

I'm not sure its possible to overstate how big a problem that is. If your model fails to predict isotropic electrons and positrons that are not isomorphisms of each other, then your model is wrong. Full stop. It doesn't matter how many other physical phenomena your model predicts well; you need to show that it predicts these ones.

I've shown it. You know full well that the right-handed Mobius strip doesn't turn into a left-handed Mobius strip when you flip it upside down. You know full well that the clockwise-twisting ring torus doesn't start twisting anticlockwise when you flip it upside down. And you know that if you keep on inflating, it looks spherical, but the topology persists.

An excellent example. The torus on the left is "rolling in" from the top and "rolling out" from the bottom (because of the viewing angle, we can't see the bottom, but all the flow disappearing into the central hole must come out on the bottom and loop around the outside before reappearing up top). If you flip the torus over (not just the image, but the actual object being rendered), the "in" side goes to the bottom and the "out" side goes to the top, turning it into the figure on the right. This has been true for every image you have posted in this thread, and it is fatal to your model.

No it isn't, the Mobius strip has two chiralities, so does the torus. You know this. Here's an example:

Fair enough. I refuse to believe that your model is espoused by other people

Only I can provide evidence that it isn't my model. Such as this post where you referred to the Williamson / van der Mark electron and their figure 2, which is the chiral torus again, which you're saying isn't chiral. You convince nobody Fednis. Not even yourself.

and you refuse to show me that it's consistent with the rules of geometry. One of those things is a lot more relevant to the model's viability than the other. Show me a geometry with the properties you claim your electron has, or link a specific page where someone else does so, but don't expect me to go digging through search results for an illustration that I don't even believe exists.

See above. It's chiral.

I used Mathematica to plot out the trajectory of the tip of the clock's hand, for various relative rotation rates about the two axes.
View attachment 354 View attachment 355 View attachment 356
(In thumbnail format because Mathematica made the originals really big, and I'm rubbish at image editing.) The one on the left corresponds to equal rotation rates; it stays on one hemisphere the entire time, so it's obviously not isotropic. The second is for a clock advancing twice as fast as it is spinning; the trajectory overlaps itself at only two antipodal points, so it's not isotropic. The third image (which is quite pretty, imo) is for a clock advancing 1.5 times as fast as it is spinning. Here all three axes are qualitatively distinct, so I guess it is hard to identify one axis of rotation, but only because the path exhibits richer anisotropies than can be described by a single vector. Describing a spherically isotropic vortex of any kind remains an outstanding challenge. (The same plots apply to the football analogy lower down.)

Oh come on. Just make the clock rotation a lot faster than the coin rotation. The trajectory of the hand sweeps out a sphere. Do it on Mathematica and show us. Then remember that the photon isn't some point.

We've already established that 2D vortices can be isotropic. I want a 3D example.

Alternatively make sure the two rotations have no common factor. For example try it with one rotation rate π times the other.

Well then, find me an animation that actually does hold up under scrutiny. My primary assertion is that it is impossible to draw a picture that meets your requirements. Your response so far has been to give me pictures that fail to do so, and say "The real thing is kind of like this, except that it meets all of my requirements." That's not a model; it's at best a vague idea.

It's more than just some "vague idea". All the scientific evidence points towards the wave nature of matter, and the electron being a wave in a closed path. As for a better animation, I'll have a look. But you know that that torus is chiral, don't you?

It's disingenuous of you to even present it as a working hypothesis, let alone a proper theory.

No Fednis, it's disingenuous to present the electron as a point particle when all the evidence says it isn't. What evidence is there that the electron is a point particle? None! Where this cargo-cult myth came from I don't know. Deep inelastic lepton scattering? The electron is isotropic with no discernible structure and therefore it's a point particle? When it's quantum field theory? Ye gods, talk about a non-sequitur. It's like some guy gives an explanation for kddies, and some other guys believe it.

Huh? I never tried to say that the electron isn't a wave. Of course the electron is a wave, and of course it isn't traveling at the speed of light. It's a far jump from there to saying that it consists of a bound photon.

Not when we create it out of photons in gamma-gamma pair production, and then when we annihilate it with the positron, we get the photons back. What do you think is happening there Fednis? Magic? If you have an ounce of physicist bone in your body, you will seek to explain it. And the first thing you will turn to is surely displacement current.

Oh, ok. I may have been coming at this from the wrong angle. I was assuming that you were treating the electron as basically well-localized. Now it sounds like you actually want to treat the electron as having a long-range binding potential, and being spatially extensive.

Yes. The electron's field is what it is. There is no point at which this field stops. If you're far enough away it's swamped and undetectable, but it has no outer edge.

If that's the case, please answer me the following. It's possible to trap electrons in regions much smaller than the extent of their electromagnetic fields. Just outside such a trap, we can measure significant field strength, but we will never actually find the electron there (e.g. an electron detector of the type used in double-slit experiments will never "click"). Inside the trap, we can find both a strong field and the electron itself. If the electron really is nothing more than its own circulating field, why the discrepancy?

Because what you think of as the electron isn't. What you think of as the electron is effectively just "the eye of the storm". And that's the place where the wind doesn't blow. That's where there is no storm.

 

[PhysBang]

Error

 

[PhysBang]

They don't. Nor do Möbius strips! Which you inflate into the ring torus, which you inflate into the spindle-sphere torus.

You can't claim that you don't understand the relevant physics here: you accepted that positrons behave as if they were time-reversed electrons and you should be able to see what happens when you turn your models over 180 degrees.

This is a problem for your unique ideas, not the ideas of anyone else. So when we reject it, we do not reject the ideas of anyone else.

I've shown it. You know full well that the right-handed Mobius strip doesn't turn into a left-handed Mobius strip when you flip it upside down.

Yet the 2D strip is anisotrpic, and you have claimed to reject it in favor of the 3D model which, unfortunately, has the tie-reversal problem.

You know full well that the clockwise-twisting ring torus doesn't start twisting anticlockwise when you flip it upside down. And you know that if you keep on inflating, it looks spherical, but the topology persists.

If you can demonstrate this behavior you claim mathematically and show isotropy, then do so. Until you do, everyone else will accept what their eyes tell them about your pictures.

No it isn't, the Mobius strip has two chiralities, so does the torus. You know this. Here's an example:

If you are now using these pictures, then you have introduced anisotropy. Now you need to explain how it produces an isotrpic field.

You keep switching pictures depending on what you are trying to defend. You seem to have no coherent picture.

Only I can provide evidence that it isn't my model. Such as this post where you referred to the Williamson / van der Mark electron and their figure 2, which is the chiral torus again, which you're saying isn't chiral. You convince nobody Fednis. Not even yourself.

But you have introduced far more to your idea than that paper admits to. So you remain presenting your own, lone, idea, a mismatch of things stolen from other ideas without regard to scientific evidence.

See above. It's chiral.

That is not answering the question: you need to show a radically curved space that will act as a Euclidean space in almost every application. This is your idea, it is not a part of anyone elses's idea.

Oh come on. Just make the clock rotation a lot faster than the coin rotation. The trajectory of the hand sweeps out a sphere. Do it on Mathematica and show us. Then remember that the photon isn't some point.

The fact that, smeared out over time (which you do not believe in), one can draw a sphere does not mean that all the information about the trajectory is lost or irrelevant.

Alternatively make sure the two rotations have no common factor. For example try it with one rotation rate π times the other.

That clearly will not work.

It's more than just some "vague idea". All the scientific evidence points towards the wave nature of matter, and the electron being a wave in a closed path. As for a better animation, I'll have a look. But you know that that torus is chiral, don't you?

The wve nature of matter everyone agrees on. The "closed path" idea is one that only four people, at best, seem to believe: you and three physics cranks. Nopne of those three cranks believes that the closed path is due to curved space and nobosy have a model that they can show to match the hard, scientific evidence of observations, so you are alone in your vague idea.

No Fednis, it's disingenuous to present the electron as a point particle when all the evidence says it isn't.

Except for all the evidence in favor of quantum theory. You seem to imagine that a "point particle" cannot be a wave. If you would just learn some basic science then you might understand the terminology better.

What evidence is there that the electron is a point particle? None!

There is quite a lot of evidence that the electron has no internal structure. For example, nobody has produced a coherent theory of an electron with an internal structure that can match observations, including Farsight. It does no benefit to your character that you present an indea of the electron and ignore all the observations of electron behavior.

The electron is isotropic with no discernible structure and therefore it's a point particle? When it's quantum field theory? Ye gods, talk about a non-sequitur. It's like some guy gives an explanation for kddies, and some other guys believe it.

You are, again, not understanding the terminology. Your dogma prevents you from even learning, you just assume that you are correct and that practicing physicists that have learned physics and performed experiments are wrong.

Not when we create it out of photons in gamma-gamma pair production, and then when we annihilate it with the positron, we get the photons back. What do you think is happening there Fednis? Magic? If you have an ounce of physicist bone in your body, you will seek to explain it. And the first thing you will turn to is surely displacement current.

Farsight, all you have offered us is magic: you have no equations to describe what is happening, you expect space to bend in a special way nobody has observed, you keep switching your pictures that even you admit are vague. Standard particle physics works, your idea apparently does not.

Because what you think of as the electron isn't. What you think of as the electron is effectively just "the eye of the storm". And that's the place where the wind doesn't blow. That's where there is no storm.

But that isn't an answer. Leaving aside the fact that your idea cannot match a host of electron and positron beahior, if this were the case, then trapping the eye of the storm should completely destroy the electron. Why can the electron be trapped and not destroyed, if all that is being trapped is nothing?

 

[Fednis48]

They don't. Nor do Möbius strips! Which you inflate into the ring torus, which you inflate into the spindle-sphere torus.
...
No it isn't, the Mobius strip has two chiralities, so does the torus. You know this. Here's an example:

This right here is why it's so frustrating to argue with someone who refuses to commit to any particular model. You're now drawing/describing toruses without directional arrows on them, and saying the chirality is the difference between electrons and positrons. That's a different model than the one you've been describing up until this post. Before, you were saying that the direction of the arrows was the difference, which is why you ran into problems with them turning into each other under inversion. Now they are distinct under 3D rotation (good!), but they are also distinct under time reversal (whoops!). It's a different model, so it is susceptible to different criticisms. PhysBang says it perfectly:

You keep switching pictures depending on what you are trying to defend. You seem to have no coherent picture.

You've shown us pictures that square with gut intuition about vortex mechanics. You've shown us pictures that exhibit the appropriate time-reversal relations, and you've shown us pictures that exhibit the appropriate rotational relations. But to have a viable model, you need to show us a picture that does all of this at the same time. The fact that the shapes keep shifting slightly to avoid the argument of the moment indicates that your "model" isn't even that - it's a collection of impressions about what sorts of properties a model should have. And it's virtually impossible to disprove a collection of impressions, which is why this thread has gone on for 8 pages.

Only I can provide evidence that it isn't my model. Such as this post where you referred to the Williamson / van der Mark electron and their figure 2, which is the chiral torus again, which you're saying isn't chiral.

I was about to make a point about how your vortex attraction mechanism goes beyond anything discussed i the Williamson/van der Mark paper, but then I realized that's beside the point. The real point is: I DO NOT CARE WHOSE MODEL THIS IS. It's "your" model in the sense that it's the model you are arguing for. It may be some other scientists' model as well. That is completely irrelevant to whether it's true. Got a link in which someone else describes it well? Give me the link. Otherwise, you're the only one here advocating your theory, and the burden of proof is on you to show that it is viable. It could be the joint work of Maxwell, Feynman, and Jesus, and I would still call it rubbish based on everything you've said so far.

Oh come on. Just make the clock rotation a lot faster than the coin rotation. The trajectory of the hand sweeps out a sphere. Do it on Mathematica and show us. Then remember that the photon isn't some point.

These are actually pretty fun! The one on the left is for a clock advancing 10x as fast as it is spinning. All the lines pinch together up top, so the vertical axis is clearly preferred. The one on the right is kind of the opposite situation, in which the clock is spinning 7x as fast as it is rotating. (Mathematica found it much harder to render for whatever reason, so I had to lower the multiplier.) Interestingly, it's not at all the same as the case on the left, but it's still not isotropic; the radius of curvature depends exclusively on vertical position, and all the points of self-intersection lie on a plane roughly perpendicular to the viewing direction. So that's two more models, neither of which work.

Alternatively make sure the two rotations have no common factor. For example try it with one rotation rate π times the other.

Of course, these pictures are necessarily incomplete; I plotted through 5 full rotations about the slower axis in each. The one on the left is for a clock advancing π times as fast as it is spinning, and the vertical axis is preferred in the same way it has been for most of the pictures so far. The one on the right is for the opposite case; aside from being my favorite of the pictures so far, it seems to exhibit rich, multi-axis anisotropies that are, nonetheless, clearly anisotropies. Two more models, neither of which work. Of course, if you were to provide us with something more specific than "One axis rotates much faster than the other, or maybe it's an irrational multiplier," then maybe we could look at it in more detail.

(As a side note, if we were to keep plotting the irrational cases out to infinity, every point on the sphere would be repeatedly crossed in many different directions. All the pictures so far have had at least one intersection point where the vector function is multi-valued, but they've been finite in number, so I haven't brought it up. Now, though, we're looking at a function that is uncountably multi-valued at every point. For a physical, time-independent state of the field, it's not clear what that would even mean.)

As for a better animation, I'll have a look.

Please do. An illustration or equation that you're willing to stand behind in detail - as opposed to just in concept - would be a major improvement to this thread.

No Fednis, it's disingenuous to present the electron as a point particle when all the evidence says it isn't. What evidence is there that the electron is a point particle? None! Where this cargo-cult myth came from I don't know. Deep inelastic lepton scattering? The electron is isotropic with no discernible structure and therefore it's a point particle? When it's quantum field theory? Ye gods, talk about a non-sequitur. It's like some guy gives an explanation for kddies, and some other guys believe it.
...
Not when we create it out of photons in gamma-gamma pair production, and then when we annihilate it with the positron, we get the photons back. What do you think is happening there Fednis? Magic? If you have an ounce of physicist bone in your body, you will seek to explain it. And the first thing you will turn to is surely displacement current.
...
Yes. The electron's field is what it is. There is no point at which this field stops. If you're far enough away it's swamped and undetectable, but it has no outer edge.
...
Because what you think of as the electron isn't. What you think of as the electron is effectively just "the eye of the storm". And that's the place where the wind doesn't blow. That's where there is no storm.

Alright, this goes deeper than I realized.

For Farsight: I'm dropping this point, not because I've changed my mind, but because I misunderstood your position and vastly underestimated the size of the can of worms I was opening. Congratulations.

For everyone else: In the most common interpretation, quantum mechanics says everything is both a particle and a wave. (Or perhaps more precisely, everything has both particle-like and wave-like characteristics.) Some legitimate interpretations, including the Pilot Wave interpretation, the Many Worlds interpretation, and to a lesser extent Quantum Bayesianism, try to do away with the "wave" half of the duality, introducing mechanisms that cause particles to move in ways that seem wave-like between measurements. Farsight is the first person I have ever heard try to do away with the "particle" half of the duality. Even getting my head around that kind of argument, let alone refuting it, would be beyond the scope of this thread, so I'm dropping it. I hope I've shed some light on tunneling and the Schrodinger equation for anyone who's been reading.

 

[rpenner]

Farsight may have a vague notion of Wirbel über alles but with all the clip art in the universe at his disposal, has not communicated a concrete hypothesis of the nature of the electron and its relation to the macroscopic electromagnetic behavior summarized and extended by Maxwell. Indeed, like the cited article which Farsight claimed was wrong, he contradicts the very notions of geometry all of his pictures supply, after those geometric notions are criticized as not-electron like by other posters. Thus Farsight appears to change models multiple times and contradict himself.

When one contradict oneself, perhaps it's a communication problem or perhaps one doesn't understand what one professes to understand. A scientific theory is a communicable, precise and useful description of the behavior of the universe or a large class of related phenomena within the universe.

In the (approximate) decade Farsight has advanced his ideas about physics on the Internet (and via the vanity press) he has failed to communicate anything precise or useful. This failure is quantifiable in the paucity of citations of Farsight in the scientific press.

Science-as-an-human-endeavor is progressive in that evidence accumulates and new good ideas displace the old ideas which don't fit the accumulated evidence to date. This means confirmation bias, a great impediment to one's ability to fairly judge the evidence, cripples one's ability to do science. To judge fairly, familiarity with the evidence, the most current good theories and the ability to extract useful descriptions of the behavior of reality from the theories are all needed to know how one is making progress. This in turn has required some considerable mathematical facility since the days of Newton and Kepler.

Farsight presents us tortured citations which he claims other people had thoughts about physics similar to his. Even if his twisted interpretations were true, it's not evidence that his ideas are useful descriptions of the behavior of physical phenomena. Farsight is not capable of doing the mathematics of Maxwell (1865) or Einstein (1916) which would seem to be a great impediment to evaluating if one's claims are equivalent or better. When confronted with inconvenient facts (such as the existence of a field of mechanics which deals with description of rigid bodies under both linear forces and torques) he halts that chain of his advocacy only temporarily before repeating the same claim months later in a different thread. This, I think, is evidence of confirmation bias at work and Farsight effectively putting himself beyond the reach of education.

This particular conversation with Farsight has not been atypical except in being called out by the moderation staff.

 

[PhysBang]

What I find fascinating is that on the internet at large, Farsight has begun defending climate science deniers. Meanwhile, Farsight presents far less evidence for his idea than those who have argued for the existence of global warming and its cause in human activity. I suppose since he too is a denier of physics, he feels a certain kinship with these folks.

See the comments section in the pages below, if you dare:
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article...change-denier-given-top-brazilian-science-job
http://scienceblogs.com/startswitha...re-out-whether-global-warming-is-real-part-3/

 

[Farsight]

This right here is why it's so frustrating to argue with someone who refuses to commit to any particular model. You're now drawing/describing toruses without directional arrows on them, and saying the chirality

Follow the link to http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2014/sm/c4sm00076e#!divAbstract and read what it says:

"We present a theoretical study of director fields in toroidal geometries with degenerate planar boundary conditions. We find spontaneous chirality: despite the achiral nature of nematics the director configuration shows a handedness if the toroid is thick enough. In the chiral state the director field displays a double twist..."

is the difference between electrons and positrons. That's a different model than the one you've been describing up until this post. Before, you were saying that the direction of the arrows was the difference, which is why you ran into problems with them turning into each other under inversion. Now they are distinct under 3D rotation (good!), but they are also distinct under time reversal (whoops!). It's a different model, so it is susceptible to different criticisms.

I've always said they have the opposite chirality, my reference to time-reversed was explaining what Feynman was groping for.

PhysBang says it perfectly:

No he doesn't. The guy's a troll who will say anything to try to trash the thread. And as for the 8 pages, go back to the beginning, read it, appreciate just how far we've come.

I was about to make a point about how your vortex attraction mechanism goes beyond anything discussed i the Williamson/van der Mark paper

Yes, that paper dates back to 1991, but the vortices go back much further, to Thomson and Tait and arguably Maxwell. Have you read about the vortex atom?

but then I realized that's beside the point. The real point is: I DO NOT CARE WHOSE MODEL THIS IS. It's "your" model in the sense that it's the model you are arguing for. It may be some other scientists' model as well. That is completely irrelevant to whether it's true. Got a link in which someone else describes it well? Give me the link.

Here's a few links where people attempt to describe the electron in a fashion that is in some way akin to Williamson and van der Mark :

http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0512265
http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.0620
http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.3253

Here's a couple of links about the vortex atom

http://zapatopi.net/kelvin/papers/on_vortex_atoms.html
http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~aar/papers/silliman.pdf

Otherwise, you're the only one here advocating your theory, and the burden of proof is on you to show that it is viable. It could be the joint work of Maxwell, Feynman, and Jesus, and I would still call it rubbish based on everything you've said so far.

Bollocks. What's rubbish is the cargo-cult notion that the electron is a point particle spitting out photons. And you know it. You know I'm right about the wave nature of the electron. You know I'm right about the electron and the positron having the opposite chirality. You know that knots have chirality, and that TQFT is related to knots. You know that Tait was the guy who drew the first knot table.

These are actually pretty fun! The one on the left is for a clock advancing 10x as fast as it is spinning. All the lines pinch together up top, so the vertical axis is clearly preferred.

False! Imagine you're underground digging a cavity with a spoon. What shape is this hole? Spherical. Isotropic. Now remember that the photon is not some point-particle. It isn't like the point of your clock hand, or a spoon for that matter. The spindle-sphere torus is not swept out by some point-particle photon.

The one on the right is kind of the opposite situation, in which the clock is spinning 7x as fast as it is rotating. (Mathematica found it much harder to render for whatever reason, so I had to lower the multiplier.) Interestingly, it's not at all the same as the case on the left, but it's still not isotropic; the radius of curvature depends exclusively on vertical position, and all the points of self-intersection lie on a plane roughly perpendicular to the viewing direction. So that's two more models, neither of which work.

It looks like there's some problem with this render. There ought to be seven sweeping lines going down the sphere, like you set off from the North Pole heading West-SouthWest. Nevermind. The same point applies, you're sweeping out a sphere, it's isotropic, and the photon isn't some point.

Of course, these pictures are necessarily incomplete; I plotted through 5 full rotations about the slower axis in each. The one on the left is for a clock advancing π times as fast as it is spinning, and the vertical axis is preferred in the same way it has been for most of the pictures so far. The one on the right is for the opposite case; aside from being my favorite of the pictures so far, it seems to exhibit rich, multi-axis anisotropies that are, nonetheless, clearly anisotropies. Two more models, neither of which work. Of course, if you were to provide us with something more specific than "One axis rotates much faster than the other, or maybe it's an irrational multiplier," then maybe we could look at it in more detail.

As above. Imagine your clock had two hands. Then three, then four, then more, and further hands behind the plane of the clock face, and in front of it. And more still that were longer or shorter. Then you're starting to get the hang of it. But remember that the electron is a spin ½ particle, and that the black line in the Williamson / van der Mark electron goes round twice, so your clock hands need to go round the spindle-sphere torus twice.

(As a side note, if we were to keep plotting the irrational cases out to infinity, every point on the sphere would be repeatedly crossed in many different directions. All the pictures so far have had at least one intersection point where the vector function is multi-valued, but they've been finite in number, so I haven't brought it up. Now, though, we're looking at a function that is uncountably multi-valued at every point. For a physical, time-independent state of the field, it's not clear what that would even mean.)

These plots have maybe been a distraction. Try to imagine a subterranean seismic wave propagating linearly at some speed. Let's call it c. Now imagine another subterranean seismic wave propagating linearly at c. They intercept. Because the rock is displaced by the first seismic wave, it alters the path of the second seismic wave. Let's say that this is so drastic that its path passes through itself. Which alters its path further. Such that it ends up in a bispinor double-loop closed path forever being displaced by itself. Now try drawing that on Mathematica. Then animate it.

Please do. An illustration or equation that you're willing to stand behind in detail - as opposed to just in concept - would be a major improvement to this thread.

I'll look into it.

Alright, this goes deeper than I realized. For Farsight: I'm dropping this point, not because I've changed my mind, but because I misunderstood your position and vastly underestimated the size of the can of worms I was opening. Congratulations.

You haven't heard the half of it.

For everyone else: In the most common interpretation, quantum mechanics says everything is both a particle and a wave. (Or perhaps more precisely, everything has both particle-like and wave-like characteristics.) Some legitimate interpretations, including the Pilot Wave interpretation, the Many Worlds interpretation, and to a lesser extent Quantum Bayesianism, try to do away with the "wave" half of the duality, introducing mechanisms that cause particles to move in ways that seem wave-like between measurements. Farsight is the first person I have ever heard try to do away with the "particle" half of the duality. Even getting my head around that kind of argument, let alone refuting it, would be beyond the scope of this thread, so I'm dropping it. I hope I've shed some light on tunneling and the Schrodinger equation for anyone who's been reading.

No you haven't. Now watch my lips: there are no point particles. Everything is waves and fields, when you see something pointlike, it's because there's something akin to an optical Fourier transform going on in the detection process. Otherwise the photon goes through both slits. Oh, and Many Worlds is cargo-cult trash peddled by quacks who portray the photon as a point-particle rather than a wave, then express amazement that it's in two places at once. Check out Aephraim Steingberg et al and weak measurement. The depiction below is from his website, it isn't perfect, but it gets across the idea of what a photon going through two slits is like:

 

[Farsight]

Farsight may have a vague notion ...

Your entire post is one long ad-hominem. It is dishonesty, not physics.

...When confronted with inconvenient facts (such as the existence of a field of mechanics which deals with description of rigid bodies under both linear forces and torques) he halts that chain of his advocacy only temporarily before repeating the same claim months later in a different thread...

This is absolutely untrue. Which is why you have not, and will not provide an example.

 

[Fednis48]

I've always said they have the opposite chirality, my reference to time-reversed was explaining what Feynman was groping for.

Yes. You've always said they have opposite chirality, but for seven pages, all your pictures have shown that they differ according to which way the arrows are pointing. The direction of the arrows never affected the chirality, so rpenner and I pointed out - correctly - that your electrons were always isomorphic with your positrons. Now you've finally found a picture that does not fall victim to this problem, by dropping the arrows and just saying the electron and positron are toruses with opposite twisting chirality. This is a different model, and rpenner and I would have used different arguments if you had advocated it from the get-go. In particular, your positron no longer behaves like a time-reversed electron, which it must if it is to reproduce the predictions of QED. See what I mean about it being frustrating to argue with someone who refuses to commit to details? It would be great if you could give a detail - any detail, really - that we could be confident you would stick to in the face of counterarguments.

Here's a few links where people attempt to describe the electron in a fashion that is in some way akin to Williamson and van der Mark :

http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0512265
http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.0620
http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.3253

Here's a couple of links about the vortex atom

http://zapatopi.net/kelvin/papers/on_vortex_atoms.html
http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~aar/papers/silliman.pdf

Hey, actual papers! That was like pulling teeth. Let's see what we've got. The first paper is by Qiu Hong-Hu, and I must admit, looks extremely similar to Farsight's model. Or rather, it looks extremely similar to one of Farsight's models - the model with one full twist and no directionality on a spindle sphere. I was looking forward to finally getting a description of how inter-particle forces are supposed to arise, but alas, Dr. Hong-Hu was more focused on showing how the model gives natural descriptions of spin magnetic moment and Zitterbewegung and the like. He mentions charge only to say that it is related to the chirality of the helix, but that the relation is "incomplete and qualitative in character." In fact, that might be the biggest similarity to Farsight's models of all.

The next two papers are interesting indeed, if over my head. The first models the electron as a bound, massless, charged particle in a closed path, and goes on to show how bound motion at the speed of light explains various phenomena in much the same way as Farsight has. But the key here is that the bound particle is charged, which a photon is not. Same with the second; small-scale periodic motion of the electron plays a central role, but nowhere is the possibility raised that the electron might in fact be a photon. This difference is crucial, at least insofar as it means both these papers' models are different from Farsight's model and therefore can't be relied on to supply details.

The last two papers are a pair of historical notes on the musings of Lord Kelvin. Interesting from a historical perspective, but really nowhere near offering an actual working model. In fact, latter of the two says in its first paragraph: "While seriously entertained as a credible scientific hypothesis in some circles as late as 1906, the year before Thomson's death, the vortex atom was eventually forgotten in the wake of achievements associated with the names of J. J. Thomson, Ernest Rutherford, and Niels Bohr and today has no value as a representation of the ultimate nature of matter." So in short, I do appreciate the links, but none of them even approach answering my standing: how can one draw vortex electrons that repel each other isotropically in 3D?

You know that Tait was the guy who drew the first knot table.

For what it's worth, I did not know that.

False! Imagine you're underground digging a cavity with a spoon. What shape is this hole? Spherical. Isotropic. Now remember that the photon is not some point-particle. It isn't like the point of your clock hand, or a spoon for that matter. The spindle-sphere torus is not swept out by some point-particle photon.

What in the name of...? So I'm supposed to imagine that I'm digging with a spoon, the realize that then photon is not like what I'm imagining, or like the plots Farsight just asked me to draw. Rather, it falls into the incredibly helpful and specific category of "not point-like." And this somehow shows that the resulting geometry has no preferred axis. It's like an Old Spice commercial:

"Hello, ladies, look at this torus, now at this Moebius strip, now back to the torus, now back to the strip. Sadly, neither is isotropic, but if you inflated them into spheres, they could be. Start digging a hole with a spoon. Now stop, where are you? You're in the eye of the storm, and it's chiral. Look at the photon's path, back at me. The photon isn't a point particle, so it doesn't have a path. Look again, the photon is now self-bound, with many closed trajectories. Anything is possible when your sphere is self-intersecting and rotates about two axes at once. I'm citing Maxwell."

It looks like there's some problem with this render. There ought to be seven sweeping lines going down the sphere, like you set off from the North Pole heading West-SouthWest. Nevermind. The same point applies, you're sweeping out a sphere, it's isotropic, and the photon isn't some point.

Possible render issues notwithstanding, I'm glad we've narrowed your model down to "something that isn't well-represented by a 1D trajectory." Of course, if you could specify what it is rather than what it isn't, that would be even more helpful.

As above. Imagine your clock had two hands. Then three, then four, then more, and further hands behind the plane of the clock face, and in front of it. And more still that were longer or shorter. Then you're starting to get the hang of it.
...
It looks like there's some problem with this render. There ought to be seven sweeping lines going down the sphere, like you set off from the North Pole heading West-SouthWest. Nevermind. The same point applies, you're sweeping out a sphere, it's isotropic, and the photon isn't some point.

I guess you've lost me. I certainly wasn't assuming that your whole electron was doing laps around the particular trajectory I had drawn. Rather, the trajectory taken as a whole gives a vector field along that particular loop, and the loop can be rotated to give a vector field across the surface of the sphere. Expand and contract the sphere and multiply it by some radius-dependent coefficient, and you've got yourself a 3D vector field. But such a vector field will inherit the anisotropies of the trajectories used to build it up, since it's nothing more than many such trajectories stacked together. Is that what you had in mind, or did you mean something else?

But remember that the electron is a spin ½ particle, and that the black line in the Williamson / van der Mark electron goes round twice, so your clock hands need to go round the spindle-sphere torus twice.

Ah, so we're talking specifically about the Williamson/van der Mark electron, with no arrows and a half twist. Awesome. Can I get a confirmation on this?

These plots have maybe been a distraction. Try to imagine a subterranean seismic wave propagating linearly at some speed. Let's call it c. Now imagine another subterranean seismic wave propagating linearly at c. They intercept. Because the rock is displaced by the first seismic wave, it alters the path of the second seismic wave. Let's say that this is so drastic that its path passes through itself. Which alters its path further. Such that it ends up in a bispinor double-loop closed path forever being displaced by itself. Now try drawing that on Mathematica. Then animate it.

I'm no geologist; I don't even know if the situation you describe can happen, let alone what the equations for it would be. So I can't do it. Sorry.

I'll look into it.

Not to belabor the point, but please, please do. A diagram or equation that actually shows the properties you're talking about would be so helpful.

 

[rpenner]

Your entire post is one long ad-hominem.

I disagree. I didn't say people shouldn't listen to your ideas. I'm explaining why your ideas are wrong.

It is dishonesty, not physics.

I disagree. I'm pretty much spelling out what physics is.

This is absolutely untrue.

I disagree. I've got some examples in mind.

Which is why you have not, and will not provide an example.

I disagree. The reason I did not provide an example this time is because I had just finished a noon-to-5pm-the-next-day shift of writing software in a task chair and was unwilling to put off returning to that office any longer. The reason I will not provide an example in this reply is because you strike me as a deeply unreasonable person beyond my powers of persuasion and that most important of all reasons: Amendments 1 and 13 of the US Constitution, the United Kingdom Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, the Convention to Suppress the Slave Trade and Slavery, Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the forum rules, you are not in a position to dictate how I spend my time.

But thank you for the implicit permission to do and present this research and not have you label it harassment.