Electromagnetism: quantum mechanics or vortices?

[rpenner]

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/08/30/how-would-you-figure-out-whether-global-warming-is-real-part-3/

My vote is to round up all the science deniers and tone-trolls and bury them deep as a carbon sequestering project.

You see, that sort of reaction to Farsight is too extreme for his pseudo-scientific claims about the nature of electron or general relativity.

 

[PhysBang]

You see, that sort of reaction to Farsight is too extreme for his pseudo-scientific claims about the nature of electron or general relativity.

I agree. Farsight is not the only one being over zealous.

 

[Farsight]

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.

Go and look at the thread. I took the arrows off the electric and magnetic field lines. Look through the various pages, where are all the arrows in all my pictures? They're not there. You're imagining this problem, Fednis.

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.

No you didn't. Here's a static picture of the left-twisting torus and the right twisting torus. They look the same. You need the arrows to show how they're moving.

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.

Again, go back through the thread and point to all those arrows. They aren't there. On page1 I took the arrows off the field lines, and at the bottom of the page I showed a depiction OnlyMe found along with the Williamson / van der Mark electron. That has the chiral lines, and one of them has an arrow. Big deaI. On page2 I said the arrowheads on the radial electric lines of force don't work. That's the only mention of arrow or arrowheads on that page. There's more about that on page 3 with 5 mentions of arrow, but no stress-flow arrows. Page 4 is similar with only 3 mentions. In page 5, where you came in, the word arrow does not appear. The only arrows that appear are those depicting linear force in post #99 at the bottom. On page6 post #108 I said the ring torus is chiral, like a Moebius strip with arrows drawn around it. Without the arrows showing the motion around the major and minor axes, the two ring tori look the same as per the picture above. Post #120 is where you start carping about arrows, missing the point that the arrow shows the major axis rotation whilst the twist of the paper shows the minor-axis rotation. You're making a mountain out of a molehill, scrabbling for reasons to dismiss something you ought to be deeply interested in. Stop doing it.

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.

Note that Hu's "Hubius helix" is the same as the dark line on the Williamson / van der Mark electron. See page 15 re charge: "the disparity in the charge of the electron and positron can be connected to the parity or the sign of the twist of the Hubius Helix". Remember that picture of the photon where I was irritated when you said there was no curvature? The curvature at the bottom right is the positive field variation, the curvature on the bottom left is the negative field variation.

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.

Yep. It's a common mistake. People can't understand that charge is this all-round curvature, where you wrap a field-variation into a standing field.

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.

There's various people groping towards the truth. In some respects its like the blind men trying to describe the elephant. Only I've seen the elephant. I know what they're on about.

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?

I said I'd have a look. How about if you do your own research too?

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

And did you know that Thomson (Kelvin) and Tait coined the term spherical harmonics?

Continued.

 

[Farsight]

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."

Sigh. You ask for explanations, I give them, and you're trying to find ways to reject them. Come on Fednis, get your thinking cap on. You know the photon is an E=hf wave, you know it takes many-paths because it's a wave rather than a point particle, you know that it propagates thataway → at c. And you know you can put it through pair production and diffract an electron that has a magnetic moment wherein the Einstein-de Haas effect demonstrates that spin angular momentum is of the same nature as classical angular momentum. You know that that electron is a wave, you know it isn't moving linearly at c, so how is it moving? Come on man, think! Here's a clue:

"...rotational... rotation... spin... rotation about the arbitrary axis... measuring electron spin in that arbitrary direction... rotated... rotations about tilted coordinates... spin... rotation about some axis... electron spin out from a unitless rotation... to specify how "big" the spinning is."

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.

Like I said, I'll try to find a better depiction.

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?

You're still not getting it. Look at the ring torus. Look at the bit in the middle closest to you. In what direction is the vector? It's up and left. Now go across to the far side of the torus. What direction is the vector? It's down and right.

Now draw two circles to represent sections through the torus. Next draw two bigger circles, and repeat until your circles are congruent. That represents the spindle-sphere torus. What direction is your vector at the top? Up and left and down and right.

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?

Pay attention Fednis, and don't be sarky, because it's got an arrow:

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.

Tsk.

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.

I'm beginning to doubt it.

 

[Farsight]

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

No you aren't. You're merely carping and mud-slinging because you can't show any problems with the physics.

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 I am in a position to call you out and say you can not and will not give any examples of me being confronted with inconvenient facts then temporarily halting a chain of advocacy before repeating the same claim months later in a different thread. Because there are no such examples. Which means you're a charlatan and a liar.

 

[PhysBang]

Go and look at the thread. I took the arrows off the electric and magnetic field lines. Look through the various pages, where are all the arrows in all my pictures? They're not there. You're imagining this problem, Fednis.

From the first, the only difference between your positron and electron was the direction of spin. It is still there in your first post. Whether or not there are arrows drawn on the direction, you indicate the direction of the rotation in a 2D way that is not isotropic. You only late attempt to dodge this with a different picture altogether.

Yep. It's a common mistake. People can't understand that charge is this all-round curvature, where you wrap a field-variation into a standing field.

"People can't understand that charge is this all-round curvature," because it doesn't make sense. You need to demonstrate how this curved space can both go undetected in all other respects and create all the phenomena associated with charge. So far, you have only a vague idea with no details and hence no support.

There's various people groping towards the truth. In some respects its like the blind men trying to describe the elephant. Only I've seen the elephant. I know what they're on about.

You are claiming to have had a mystical revelation that no other person has had, yet you are not claiming that this is your own idea.

You need to see a doctor and tell her or him about this behavior.

I said I'd have a look. How about if you do your own research too?

Farsight, if you have not had a look yet, then you haven't done anything close to gathering evidence for your idea. Most of us already knew this about you; I'm hoping that someday you will come to this realization.

Sigh. You ask for explanations, I give them, and you're trying to find ways to reject them.

The problem with your "explanations" is that you always dodge the question, "How can this possibly produce the world as we observe it?" Your explanations never give specific details and, as Fednis48 pointed out, the vague details you give contradict each other because you reject them and then go back to them.

You know that that electron is a wave, you know it isn't moving linearly at c, so how is it moving?

Quantum theory has a lot of answers about electron movement, none of which involve a rotating photon and none of which your idea can match. So you do not have an explanation.

Like I said, I'll try to find a better depiction.

This does not seem to be true. You seem to have too much invested in keeping your idea vague and never exploring the details. If you really cared, you would take the time to learn the relevant math and physics.

You're still not getting it. Look at the ring torus. Look at the bit in the middle closest to you. In what direction is the vector? It's up and left. Now go across to the far side of the torus. What direction is the vector? It's down and right.

This is, almost by definition, anisotropic. So you have failed once again to demonstrate isotropy.

Pay attention Fednis, and don't be sarky, because it's got an arrow:

If it has an arrow like that, it's anisotropic.

I'm beginning to doubt it.

I think this is a lie. I think that, on one level, you know very well that none of your claims will be supported by mathematics. I think that this is part of the reason why you, consciously or not, avoid learning mathematics. I think that another part is that every time you have tried to use mathematics you end up making clear errors that undermine your point (e.g., presenting numerology using the fine structure constant that are dependent on choice of units).

But this doesn't have to be the case. You could actually learn to use mathematics correctly. You could learn physics in a way the you could demonstrate the ideas clearly and distinctly where possible.

 

[James R]

"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."

I endorse this product or service.

 

[Fednis48]

Go and look at the thread. I took the arrows off the electric and magnetic field lines. Look through the various pages, where are all the arrows in all my pictures? They're not there.
...
Again, go back through the thread and point to all those arrows. They aren't there.

I apologize for being unclear. I meant to refer to the flow direction of the electromagnetic field, not the actual arrows sometimes used to signify it. I fully acknowledge that you variously used arrows (as in the Williamson/van der Mark diagram), spirals (as in the 2D plots near the beginning of the thread), and animated motion to depict this flow direction. No matter how it's drawn, though, every positron you have shown has been identical to the corresponding electron except with reversed flow direction. (Reversed arrows, oppositely winding spirals, or time-reversed animation.) As PhysBang put it, "From the first, the only difference between your positron and electron was the direction of spin." As of post 152, you are suddenly giving pictures in which the flow direction is not relevant to the electron/positron distinction; indeed, the green toruses in said post show a difference between electrons and positrons without specifying the flow direction at all. It's up to you which type of model you want to advocate, but you really need to pick one and commit to it. As it stands, rpenner and I have spent many pages arguing that your electrons are isomorphic to your positrons, only to have you dodge out of all those arguments by changing the model.

Yep. It's a common mistake. People can't understand that charge is this all-round curvature, where you wrap a field-variation into a standing field.
...
There's various people groping towards the truth. In some respects its like the blind men trying to describe the elephant. Only I've seen the elephant. I know what they're on about.

This, right here, is why I think debating you is fruitless. These are links that you yourself provided, with no qualifications or directions to specific quotes/ideas I should take from them. Now, just a post later, you are explaining how major aspects of the papers are wrong, and saying that your model is not like the papers in those respects. This fits perfectly into the pattern of a vague, qualitative veneer over a base of ever-changing details. What we know about your model is that it involves a bound photon going round and round while twisting, and the topology of said photon gives rise to the phenomenon we call charge. But beyond that, the specifics are nebulous and ever-changing. Is the photon's motion described by a Moebius strip, a torus, or a spindle sphere? Does the electron/positron distinction depend on the direction of field flow, or on the handedness of the winding? For that matter, does the photon even have a well-defined direction of field flow, or is it better described with directionless loops? Does the photon undergo a whole wind for every loop? Half a wind? Or maybe, as you briefly suggested, does it undergo many winds per loop, or even an irrational number? In what ways do the papers you cite describe your model, and in what ways do they differ?

And through it all, you keep coming back to how obvious you think the whole thing is, because it squares so well with the intuitive nature of the electron. In other words, you're asking us to accept the veneer on its own merits, while taking it on faith that the underlying details can be worked out. That is not how science works, and it makes your model as useless as it is hard to pin down. I think PhysBang has your number: you're so invested in your beliefs being right that you're not willing to provide enough detail for anyone to show that they're wrong.

You're still not getting it. Look at the ring torus. Look at the bit in the middle closest to you. In what direction is the vector? It's up and left. Now go across to the far side of the torus. What direction is the vector? It's down and right.
...
Now draw two circles to represent sections through the torus. Next draw two bigger circles, and repeat until your circles are congruent. That represents the spindle-sphere torus. What direction is your vector at the top? Up and left and down and right.

In the spirit of engaging every specific example you offer, you're right that at any two points on the spindle sphere, the flow function is two valued: its values are equal and opposite vectors. (Except on the top and bottom of the sphere, where it is uncountably valued.) However, each vector pair can be associated with a line to which both are parallel, and that line changes as one moves around on the sphere, so the result is still not isotropic.

I endorse this product or service.

Everything seemed to be going well, and early testers loved the innovative scents of "Seismic Collision", "Infinitely Many Clocks", and "I've Seen the Elephant". Unfortunately, to be rigorous, they insisted on calling the product "Old and/or Spatially Distance Spice, Depending on Your Reference Frame" which was a flop with consumers, and the stylish Klein Bottle storage proved extremely difficult to ship. So don't expect to see it in stores near you any time soon.

 

[PhysBang]

Everything seemed to be going well, and early testers loved the innovative scents of "Seismic Collision", "Infinitely Many Clocks", and "I've Seen the Elephant". Unfortunately, to be rigorous, they insisted on calling the product "Old and/or Spatially Distance Spice, Depending on Your Reference Frame" which was a flop with consumers, and the stylish Klein Bottle storage proved extremely difficult to ship. So don't expect to see it in stores near you any time soon.

That got a genuine LOL out of me.

 

[rpenner]

When confronted with inconvenient facts ... [Farsight] 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.

provide an example.

This charge is not original with me:
November 10, 2006:

You see, I was right, Farsight simply ignores everything and presses on with his pet theory.

April 29, 2013:

I hope you are not still confused about the difference between chirality and helicity. The latter is a feature of electromagnetism, the former is not. This has already been explained to you - I suggest you accept it and simply move on. I really don't get why this is so difficult to fathom.

While I could waste months compiling, cataloging, and dissecting possibly over a thousand specific facts which have been brought to Farsight's attention and yet ignored, here is the most relevant.

Minkowski was talking in analogy with a 6-dimensional geometric object in mechanics, not a mechanical device or simple machine, when speaking of a force-screw (Kraftschraube), so it is a fact that Farsight's repeated use of this quote (ignoring the previous paragraph) has been a distortion:

November 13, 2011:

Minkowski wasn't talking about rotating the observer's reference frame there.

April 25, 2013:

But Minkowski doesn't refer to a screw. In the text you cite the translation is "force-screw". Other translators use "wrench in mechanics" or other phrases. He originally used German words that refer to a feature of mechanics where a combination of forces can be broken down into a (somewhat) arbitrary decomposition.

April 28, 2013:

"Mechanik" means mechanics, not mechanism ( which would be "Mechanismus" ). That is a world of a difference. "Kraftschraube der Mechanik" therefore translates literally to "force screw of mechanics", as in classical mechanics.
This from someone who has been speaking fluent German, amongst other languages, for 35 years.

May 4, 2014:

"force-screw in mechanics" corresponds to "Kraftschraube der Mechanik" and Kraftschraube corresponds to the application of an off-center force in rigid-body mechanics, a six-component combination of force and torque, just as electromagnetism is a described by a six-component combination of electric and magnetic field vectors. That Minkowski saw a mathematical analogy here in the way six-component objects transform under a change of coordinates is natural. That Farsight would attempt to highjack this reference to mathematical physics to support his peculiar notions is unnatural.

May 10, 2014:

Minkowski's topic was the math of relativistic electromagnetism. The section Farsight absconded with concerned an analogy between $$\vec{E}\oplus\vec{B}$$ and "a force-screw in mechanics" ("einer Kraftschraube der Mechanik") that Minkowski did not elucidate for those without a physics education. Farsight didn't seem to realize that both "force-screw" and "mechanics" referred to mathematical disciplines within physics (see Wikipedia (de): Kraftschraube and Wikipedia (de): Mechanik), minimum knowledge before seeking to explain an analogy in a 100-year-old mathematical physics lecture. Instead, Farsight first seemed to say that Minkowski was saying something analogous between electromagnetism and devices built on the simple machine of a screw.

November 27, 2014:

Minkowski was a mathematically sophisticated person talking to an audience of people well-versed in physics and mathematics. Moreover, in context, Minkowski cited the Liénard–Wiechert description of electromagnetism of a moving charged particle in the immediately prior paragraph to make it clear what he was describing by analogy.

All analogies are imperfect. To understand the analogy you have to understand both endpoints and then you can see the similarities highlighted by the analogy and the dissimilarities where the analogy is not reliable.

Farsight misunderstands in post #12 a reference to "force screw" (also called "wrench" ) in Newtonian mechanics of rigid bodies referring to a six-dimensional description of linear force + torque. No "twistyness" of the electromagnetic field† is implied by Liénard and Wiechert and therefore not by Minkowski, either. Thus Minkowski was just saying there was a six-dimensional mathematical object that describes the electromagnetic field at a point in every inertial frame. Today we call that geometric object the electromagnetic tensor.

So I think that, especially if you visit those sources in context, I have met any reasonable burden of proof for my thesis. The prosecution rests. Does the defense wish to enter any evidence at this time that Farsight did further educate himself on electromagnetism as it was known by Minkowski, Liénard and Wiechert or a German language physics source that explains Kraftschraube der Mechanik better than German-speaking physics posters have?

 

[Farsight]

I apologize for being unclear. I meant to refer to the flow direction of the electromagnetic field

Apology accepted. If I can clarify though, it's a stress flow. An energy-momentum flow if you like. You could say it's the motion of a wave or field-variation or pulse of potential. This then results in a standing electromagnetic field which IMHO can best be thought of as chiral frame-dragged space.

not the actual arrows sometimes used to signify it. I fully acknowledge that you variously used arrows (as in the Williamson/van der Mark diagram), spirals (as in the 2D plots near the beginning of the thread), and animated motion to depict this flow direction. No matter how it's drawn, though, every positron you have shown has been identical to the corresponding electron except with reversed flow direction. (Reversed arrows, oppositely winding spirals, or time-reversed animation.)

The electron and the positron have the opposite chirality, which means the toroidal motion twists either clockwise or anticlockwise like your right-handed and left-handed Mobius strips.

As PhysBang put it, "From the first, the only difference between your positron and electron was the direction of spin."

PhysBang is a dishonest abusive anonymous troll intent on spoiling the discussion. Pay no attention to him.

As of post 152, you are suddenly giving pictures in which the flow direction is not relevant to the electron/positron distinction; indeed, the green toruses in said post show a difference between electrons and positrons without specifying the flow direction at all. It's up to you which type of model you want to advocate, but you really need to pick one and commit to it. As it stands, rpenner and I have spent many pages arguing that your electrons are isomorphic to your positrons, only to have you dodge out of all those arguments by changing the model.

I haven't dodged or changed the model, you're making a mountain out a molehill that just isn't there. Go and google on Farsight positron chiral and you can see I've been consistent.

This, right here, is why I think debating you is fruitless. These are links that you yourself provided, with no qualifications or directions to specific quotes/ideas I should take from them. Now, just a post later, you are explaining how major aspects of the papers are wrong, and saying that your model is not like the papers in those respects. This fits perfectly into the pattern of a vague, qualitative veneer over a base of ever-changing details. What we know about your model is that it involves a bound photon going round and round while twisting, and the topology of said photon gives rise to the phenomenon we call charge. But beyond that, the specifics are nebulous and ever-changing.

It isn't. You're claiming that when you haven't even read this thread from the beginning, and when I went through page after page refuting your assertion. See post #41 where I said the positron has the opposite chirality to the electron. I've said previously that the spiral was a simplified flat 2D picture, rpenner knows this full well.

Is the photon's motion described by a Moebius strip, a torus, or a spindle sphere?

The latter. But we start with the Möbius strip because you're familiar with that from Dirac's belt (see Mathspages and spinors (see Wikipedia). We inflate the flat twisted strip to the ring torus, then inflate that to the spindle-sphere torus.

Does the electron/positron distinction depend on the direction of field flow, or on the handedness of the winding?

The handedness. The chirality. But that depends on the direction of the flow:

For that matter, does the photon even have a well-defined direction of field flow

See above re what's flowing. The photon has a "flow" thisaway → linearly at c, and a flow this way ↑ followed by this way ↓.

or is it better described with directionless loops?

It's better described as a pulse of potential, the spatial derivative of which is the sinusoidal "electric" field variation and the time-derivative is the sinusoidal "magnetic" field variation.

Does the photon undergo a whole wind for every loop? Half a wind? Or maybe, as you briefly suggested, does it undergo many winds per loop, or even an irrational number? In what ways do the papers you cite describe your model, and in what ways do they differ?

You have to have two loops because the photon has to be interacting with itself displacing itself. Think about a Mobius strip: the photon path is represented by a line drawn twice round the strip, not by the paper.

And through it all, you keep coming back to how obvious you think the whole thing is, because it squares so well with the intuitive nature of the electron. In other words, you're asking us to accept the veneer on its own merits, while taking it on faith that the underlying details can be worked out. That is not how science works, and it makes your model as useless as it is hard to pin down.

It's no veneer, I haven't made up things like molecular vortices or the screw nature of electromagnetism or Dirac's belt or spin ½ or spinors or electron diffraction or magnetic moment or Einstein-de Haas or spherical harmonics or the wave nature of matter. Science is understanding, I'm asking you to understand the electron, not reject all that hard scientific evidence in favour of some cargo-cult nonsense that says the electron is some photon-spitting fundamental point particle that surpasseth all human understanding.

I think PhysBang has your number: you're so invested in your beliefs being right that you're not willing to provide enough detail for anyone to show that they're wrong.

No he doesn't. He's a troll, he can't show where I'm wrong.

In the spirit of engaging every specific example you offer, you're right that at any two points on the spindle sphere, the flow function is two valued: its values are equal and opposite vectors. (Except on the top and bottom of the sphere, where it is uncountably valued.) However, each vector pair can be associated with a line to which both are parallel, and that line changes as one moves around on the sphere, so the result is still not isotropic.

You are clinging to ignorance here Fednis. Stop doing it.

Everything seemed to be going well, and early testers loved the innovative scents of "Seismic Collision", "Infinitely Many Clocks", and "I've Seen the Elephant". Unfortunately, to be rigorous, they insisted on calling the product "Old and/or Spatially Distance Spice, Depending on Your Reference Frame" which was a flop with consumers, and the stylish Klein Bottle storage proved extremely difficult to ship. So don't expect to see it in stores near you any time soon.

And do not demand a full-blown theory before you'll listen, because if you do, you've made yourself redundant, and sizzz, that's the sound of your future career. Flipping burgers for a living.

 

[Farsight]

This charge is not original with me:
November 10, 2006:

Q said: You see, I was right, Farsight simply ignores everything and presses on with his pet theory.

That's just another ad-hominem assertion from a troll. It isn't an example of me being confronted with inconvenient facts then temporarily halting a chain of advocacy before repeating the same claim months later in a different thread.

April 29, 2013:
Markus Hanke said: I hope you are not still confused about the difference between chirality and helicity. The latter is a feature of electromagnetism, the former is not. This has already been explained to you - I suggest you accept it and simply move on. I really don't get why this is so difficult to fathom.

Nor is that. It's a specious assertion, and it's wrong. The positron has the opposite chirality to the electron. Google on positron chirality.

While I could waste months compiling, cataloging, and dissecting possibly over a thousand specific facts which have been brought to Farsight's attention and yet ignored, here is the most relevant...

Minkowski was talking in analogy with a 6-dimensional geometric object in mechanics, not a mechanical device or simple machine, when speaking of a force-screw (Kraftschraube), so it is a fact that Farsight's repeated use of this quote (ignoring the previous paragraph) has been a distortion...

So I think that, especially if you visit those sources in context, I have met any reasonable burden of proof for my thesis. The prosecution rests. Does the defense wish to enter any evidence at this time that Farsight did further educate himself on electromagnetism as it was known by Minkowski, Liénard and Wiechert or a German language physics source that explains Kraftschraube der Mechanik better than German-speaking physics posters have?

And yet again, this is not an example of me being confronted with inconvenient facts then temporarily halting a chain of advocacy. You have merely repeated your own sophistry that attempted to persuade readers that Minkowski didn't say what he said. And what's noticeable is that you have not given the Minkowski quote:

"In the description of the field caused by the electron itself, then it will appear that the division of the field into electric and magnetic forces is a relative one with respect to the time-axis assumed; the two forces considered together can most vividly be described by a certain analogy to the force-screw in mechanics; the analogy is, however, imperfect."

Nor have you provided the related Maxwell quote:

"a motion of translation along an axis cannot produce a rotation about that axis unless it meets with some special mechanism, like that of a screw".

This is crystal clear. You cannot suggest that there's any translation issue, or somebody "talking in analogy with a 6-dimensional geometric object"[/I]. So your assertion is shown to be false. As is your assertion that I temporarily halt a chain of advocacy when confronted with inconvenient facts. As I knew, you couldn't provide any supporting evidence, because it isn't true.

 

[PhysBang]

Apology accepted. If I can clarify though, it's a stress flow. An energy-momentum flow if you like. You could say it's the motion of a wave or field-variation or pulse of potential. This then results in a standing electromagnetic field which IMHO can best be thought of as chiral frame-dragged space.

OK, so show how this produces isotropic behavior. You have said a lot to try to dodge this question.

The electron and the positron have the opposite chirality, which means the toroidal motion twists either clockwise or anticlockwise like your right-handed and left-handed Mobius strips.

So, again, you are retreating to anisotropic position. Show how your ideas reproduce isotropic behavior.

PhysBang is a dishonest abusive anonymous troll intent on spoiling the discussion. Pay no attention to him.

Do you have any evidence for this claim? I have merely asked you to clarify your scientific positions. Thus, I have been trying to add something to the discussion. You, on the other hand, keep attempting to stifle discussion: you do not want us to see your scientific details. At this point, it seems clear that you have little, if any details to offer and you are intent on stifling questions, like the ones I ask, in order to present yourself as an authority that you do not warrant.

I haven't dodged or changed the model,

This seems demonstrably false. It might be that you feel that you have been as vague as possible in order to avoid committing to contradictory claims, but you have clearly been going back on forth on the nature of your claims.

you're making a mountain out a molehill that just isn't there. Go and google on Farsight positron chiral and you can see I've been consistent.

Sadly, that google search does not reveal consistency: it reveals a position that you have explicitly abandoned in this thread, a position that you now seem to be taking up again.

It's better described as a pulse of potential, the spatial derivative of which is the sinusoidal "electric" field variation and the time-derivative is the sinusoidal "magnetic" field variation.

You are using mathematical terms and evaluations here; let's see the actual equations. This would be something that adds to the discussion rather than vague promises.

It's no veneer, I haven't made up things like molecular vortices or the screw nature of electromagnetism or Dirac's belt or spin ½ or spinors or electron diffraction or magnetic moment or Einstein-de Haas or spherical harmonics or the wave nature of matter.

You quite clearly invented the "screw nature of electromagnetism", as many people have documented that you are alone in your interpretation. As to the other things, you are attempting to put them together in a way that, as you have admitted, nobody else is. That you continue to cling to this lie does neither you nor anyone else any service.

Science is understanding, I'm asking you to understand the electron, not reject all that hard scientific evidence in favour of some cargo-cult nonsense that says the electron is some photon-spitting fundamental point particle that surpasseth all human understanding.

Farsight, you are asking us to reject the best available theories along with the best available evidence in favor of your claim of a mystical revelation.

No he doesn't. He's a troll, he can't show where I'm wrong.

To an extent, you are correct that I often can't show where you are wrong; this is because you refuse to provide details and continue to refuse to produce details when asked. For example, when you claim that all physicists are making an error in calculating galaxy rotation curves, I have asked you to identify the specific error. You have never identified that error. Thus on that matter and on most others, people are forced to come to the conclusion that you are not telling the truth about the issue.

Farsight, your sole criterion for "adding to the discussion" appears to be whether or not someone is agreeing with you.

You are clinging to ignorance here Fednis. Stop doing it.

Fednis48 appears to be clinging to the mathematical definition of the mathematical object to which you are appealing. Why is this clinging to ignorance?

And do not demand a full-blown theory before you'll listen, because if you do, you've made yourself redundant, and sizzz, that's the sound of your future career. Flipping burgers for a living.

Farsight, I fail to understand how you feel that the ability to do science makes one less qualified for a job in science than the ability to accept the word of a zealot without question. Again, aside from your admittedly vague pictures, all you offer is your claim of mystical revelation, "There's various people groping towards the truth. In some respects its like the blind men trying to describe the elephant. Only I've seen the elephant. I know what they're on about." Since you admit that you cannot produce the equations to describe your idea, you cannot have compared your idea to measurements; mystical revelation is all that is available to you, but it is not science.

 

[PhysBang]

That's just another ad-hominem assertion from a troll. It isn't an example of me being confronted with inconvenient facts then temporarily halting a chain of advocacy before repeating the same claim months later in a different thread.

This is the same claim that the people at the BAUTforums documented. For example, there, as here, you refused to answer the very basic question as to how scientists should be calculating galaxy rotation curves. You avoid confronting the inconvenient fact that you have no idea how to do this, despite your claim to have discovered a significant error.

This is crystal clear.

No, it is not. Though you have attempted to do textual analysis, the evidence is that other people did textual analysis better. Regardless, that does not bear on the fact that you have yet to make your textual analysis into science. You have avoided the inconvenient detail that nobody can turn your screw idea into a way to do any physics. Despite having been asked for these details, you have instead merely called me a troll for asking for the scientific information.

You cannot suggest that there's any translation issue, or somebody "talking in analogy with a 6-dimensional geometric object"[/I].

It seems quite clear that you have lost this point, Farsight. As always, I recommend that you take this as an opportunity to learn some physics and then later return to this article.

Your continued adherence to this position shows merely more unscientific dogma and undoubtedly does no good for your mental health.

On the plus side, it does give people evidence to discount your claims when you attempt to spam your ideas into other venues.

 

[Fednis48]

Apology accepted. If I can clarify though, it's a stress flow. An energy-momentum flow if you like. You could say it's the motion of a wave or field-variation or pulse of potential. This then results in a standing electromagnetic field which IMHO can best be thought of as chiral frame-dragged space.

Alright, stress flow it is.

The latter. But we start with the Möbius strip because you're familiar with that from Dirac's belt (see Mathspages and spinors (see Wikipedia). We inflate the flat twisted strip to the ring torus, then inflate that to the spindle-sphere torus.

And it's on the spindle sphere. This post is off to a good start!

The electron and the positron have the opposite chirality, which means the toroidal motion twists either clockwise or anticlockwise like your right-handed and left-handed Mobius strips.
...
I haven't dodged or changed the model, you're making a mountain out a molehill that just isn't there. Go and google on Farsight positron chiral and you can see I've been consistent.
...
It isn't. You're claiming that when you haven't even read this thread from the beginning, and when I went through page after page refuting your assertion. See post #41 where I said the positron has the opposite chirality to the electron. I've said previously that the spiral was a simplified flat 2D picture, rpenner knows this full well.

Well, yes. I have in fact read this thread from the beginning (even if I didn't start posting for several pages), and you have indeed stated that the electron and positron have opposite chirality. But before page 8, I find two 3D depictions of the electron vs. the positron: the pair of spindle spheres in post 108, and the leftmost toruses in post 125. In both cases, the positron is a time-reversed electron (and you said so verbatim in post 108), but they have the same chirality and are isomorphic to each other. rpenner and I pressed you on this issue, because the electron/positron pairs you were showing did not have the chirality properties you claimed they did. As of page 8, you switched to diagrams in which the electrons and positrons do have opposite chirality and are not time-reversals of each other. In particular, the animated toruses in your latest post share the same format as the ones in post 125, but the positron is clearly animated differently, and they do not inflate into the same spindle spheres as in post 108. From now on, I'm holding you to the latest set of diagrams.

You have to have two loops because the photon has to be interacting with itself displacing itself. Think about a Mobius strip: the photon path is represented by a line drawn twice round the strip, not by the paper.

We're on a roll! I think that in the notation I was using, the Möbius strip has half a twist rather than two; just to be unambiguous, we're looking at a loop that cycles around the major axis twice for each loop around the minor axis.

This, combined with the above details, gives a much clearer picture of the model we're looking at. So clear, in fact, that we can describe it with equations(?!). We can define the stress flow associated with the electromagnetic field throughout all space as a function of spherical coordinates, $$F(\theta,\phi,r)$$ where $$\phi$$ tracks the major axis ("around the equator" coordinate) and $$\theta$$ tracks the minor axis ("around the cross section" coordinate). Although Farsight hasn't said so explicitly, I'm going to assume that the radial coordinate is separable; that is, the full 3D function can be built up from a bunch of concentric spheres with different amplitudes but the same angular properties. My guess is that the radial function $$R$$ would have to asymptote to $$r^{-2}$$ for normalization reasons, but for now let's keep it general:

$$F(\theta,\phi,r)=R(r)f(\theta,\phi)$$

In this form, $$f(\theta,\phi)$$ describes the spherical surface that Farsight has been plotting. So, what is this function? In general it could be time-dependent, but Farsight has told us that it's a steady state, so the function itself should be independent of time even if the "flow" it describes is dynamic in nature. We can further say that the function must be a vector function (because flow has direction) and that the $$\hat{r}$$ component of said vector must always be zero, because steady state flow into (out of) the electron would make it a source (sink) of the field, rather than a conservative circulation. Since Farsight has described his model as bispinor rotation, and just based on the animations provided, the circulation rates about the two axes must be independent of both each other and the location of the sphere. According to a recent reply, the circulation of $$\phi$$ is more specifically twice that of $$\theta$$. And without loss of generality, we'll use the recent pair of toruses to specify that the electron has right-handed chirality and therefore the the same sign on the circulation direction of both variables. All this together gives:

$$F(\theta,\phi,r)=R(r)(2\hat{\phi}+\hat{\theta})$$

Of course, all of this is unitless, and needs to be multiplied by an overall coefficient - probably involving $$\hbar$$ - to make it physically relevant. But really, was that so hard? Now there's only one thorny issue left: this function is at least doubly valued everywhere. Spherical functions often restrict their domains to $$\phi\in[0,\pi]$$ to preserve one-to-one mapping with Cartesian coordinates, but because this sphere was inflated from a torus, it cannot do so and every Cartesian coordinate ends up double-counted. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to show that if this equation is transformed into Cartesian coordinates (Wikipedia has the formulas if you're stuck), the function's values for a given spatial coordinate are always two opposite vectors. (Except at the north and south poles, $$\theta=n\pi$$, where its values are an infinite ring of vectors.) So Farsight: what does this mean, physically? No matter what is "really there" - be it electromagnetic field amplitude, spatial stress, or something else - surely its value must be a well-defined function of spatial coordinates. Simply summing the multiple values gives a value of zero everywhere, so some other mapping must be going on, and I'd ask you to tell me what that is. I assert that for any answer you can give, the resulting model will immediately predict nonsensical behavior.

You are clinging to ignorance here Fednis. Stop doing it.

You said your spindle sphere was isotropic, and I explained why it wasn't. That's not clinging to ignorance, it's just stubbornly insisting that you show me the logical coherence of your model before I accept it.

And do not demand a full-blown theory before you'll listen.

A full-blown theory? Of course not - a theory requires extensive study and comparison with experiment, which takes a long time. But I am going to demand a working hypothesis.

 

[rpenner]

On the plus side, it does give people evidence to discount your claims when you attempt to spam your ideas into other venues.

Not an ad hominem fallacy because PhysBang didn't advance the idea that people should reject your formal arguments, just your claims -- those statements of fact which are based on your credibility as a soi disant authority on physics and "interpreting" the words of the dead.

(Posted from Texas between a missed connection and its replacement.)

 

[PhysBang]

Interesting side note: Someone on reddit was promoting this nice essay by Einstein, "Geometry and Experience", http://pascal.iseg.utl.pt/~ncrato/Math/Einstein.htm . In it, Einstein writes, "Space is homogeneous, that is to say, the same spherical configurations are possible in the neighborhood of every point." (He adds a footnote, "This is intelligible without calculation—but only for the two-dimensional case—if we revert once more to the case of the disc on the surface of the sphere.")

 

[Fednis48]

Fascinating. Ask Farsight for an equation, and he'll just dismiss you. But accuse Farsight of having an equation, and he vanishes in a puff of smoke.

 

[PhysBang]

Fascinating. Ask Farsight for an equation, and he'll just dismiss you. But accuse Farsight of having an equation, and he vanishes in a puff of smoke.

He may be too afraid to post here, but his greatest hits are still appearing on the internet: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2015/feb/05/photons-simulate-time-travel-in-the-lab (See comments)

NB: A strange article, by the way. A group of scientists test a conjecture by Deutsch about the nature of quantum states that could save closed timelike loops from destructive interaction and the article calls it a simulation of a closed timelike curve, which it is not.

 

[river]

He may be too afraid to post here, but his greatest hits are still appearing on the internet: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2015/feb/05/photons-simulate-time-travel-in-the-lab (See comments)

NB: A strange article, by the way. A group of scientists test a conjecture by Deutsch about the nature of quantum states that could save closed timelike loops from destructive interaction and the article calls it a simulation of a closed timelike curve, which it is not.

Farsight isn't about the math but is about the physical model or picture

Don't see the problem with Farsights perspective