[General] Group discussion at San Diego

Wed Mar 25 06:38:11 PDT 2015

Dear Chip,
let me start by answering your questions (not because John cannot do it, but he is doing a lot of answering already)
First of all you are right in saying that it is not the whole story, something else is going on as well.

But first we have to get a few things very straight.
What I know as being correct knowledge, as a professional physicist, is what I will describe below. Correct knowledge is that knowledge that science has approved of to be the closest to the truth as we presently know. Not more, and also not any less.

(Special) relativity is essentially correct, it describes experiment, including time dilation, twin paradox, etc.
The foundation of the theory is that the speed of light is the same for all observers. The consequence is that clocks flying at high speed seem to be slow (the clock thinks the same of stationary you). Clocks will stop ticking in the limit where they would move at light speed. At the same time space is contracted, the clocks look short. No size (in the direction of motion) will remain when at light speed.
Conclusion: something that goes at the speed of light does not see any time or space, it is there but contracted to nothing at all. Something that happens, but without space or time interval. This is what we call an event. It is a point in space-time.

If you cannot agree with the above, you cannot agree with physics as it stands. It may not be the whole story, but the bit I described is the consistent truth to our very best knowledge. One cannot dismiss it out of hand, or even with a lot of experiments, because a zillion experiments have confirmed this already. There may be an additional subtlety that has been overlooked, but then one has to point out that subtlety very precisely.

Now there are at least two extra things to the story you want to talk about, some subtleties you may call them, but before I go into those, I want to point out something else that we know to our very best knowledge. It is the single most puzzling thing, I believe, in physics today.
It is the experimental result of the EPR-experiments, the quantum teleportation, quantum eraser, and other quantum entanglement experiments, see Bell inequalities and GHZ entanglement. The result of these experiments is the proof that space is non-local for entangled quantum states. That may be a part of a very limited set of states describing normal life, but it shows that space is not simply what normal  reason of local causality makes of it.

Again I have so far not done any speculation, this is what the situation in physics is.

>From here it is still nothing new really, it is only just taking the full consequences of the above, but it is not an embedded piece of knowledge in the whole body of physics.

So now it comes; These results can be understood completely if we look at them from the point of view of emission as a result of interaction by the absorber!!!!!! In all their weirdness, this is how it actually seems to be workings.
Interaction of the emitter and absorber to exchange a photon is saying that the photon is part of an event (or that two entangled photons [emitted from a singlet state] are part of a single event with one emitter and two absorbers). The emitter and absorber(s) are one at that event.
This notion unifies the idea of non-locality and emission of light, AS A CONSEQUENCE OF THE LIGHTSPEED BEING CONSTANT FOR ALL ABSORBERS.

Now you can choose to dismiss it or not.
There here are the mentioned two subtleties:

1)      light is quantized, we are talking about photons. That is not a required part of relativity, but it is not clear to me how it would upset it. Or is it perhaps..?

2)      Light does not really go at the speed of light or rather it is, but  I mean photons are not really going at the speed of light. The near-field part of the excitation or the limited distance between emission and absorption (it is not infinite) puts boundaries on it and pulls the total emission slightly off the energy-momentum shell, hence it is ever, ever,ever so slightly slow.... (only the radiative part is light speed and rigorously on-shell)

Well John, or anybody else, may add what is missing! I have to go...
Best regards, Martin

Dr. Martin B. van der Mark
Principal Scientist, Minimally Invasive Healthcare

Philips Research Europe - Eindhoven
High Tech Campus, Building 34 (WB2.025)
Prof. Holstlaan 4
5656 AE  Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Tel: +31 40 2747548

From: General [mailto:general-bounces+martin.van.der.mark=philips.com at lists.natureoflightandparticles.org] On Behalf Of Chip Akins
Sent: woensdag 25 maart 2015 13:35
To: 'Nature of Light and Particles - General Discussion'
Subject: Re: [General] Group discussion at San Diego

Hi John W

Still working on coming to grips with emission and absorption interactions.
Lots of opinion follows...

I feel that photon exchange, and virtual particle exchange, is a mechanism we can demonstrate and is a required part of our understanding, at least for many short range interactions.  However I do not feel the "single point in spacetime" approach provides the answer. I believe that photons are very simple linear, principally transverse, quantized wave structures. And that mater is made of wave structures as well. And as such photons are responsible for creating relativity.  Photons are then the fundamental upon which relativity is built, and are not subject to the spacetime velocity transformations, but rather are the cause for these transformations being required for mater.

Imagine an asteroid or planet orbiting a star a billion light years away.  Now envision the past light cone for an absorber on that asteroid or planet.  If photons zig, zagged in their paths to their destination, the popular concept could work for absorption and emission.  But of course they travel in "straight" lines in spacetime. Even if an absorber can see all of its past light cone at one point in space time, it still does not correctly explain photon exchange.  There is something else going on here, something is missing, and something that is not really there has been "added" to try to explain things. I feel we have reached for an explanation which is convenient, but an error, and that we do not yet have the real answer to this issue.

Still eager to understand.

Chip

From: General [mailto:general-bounces+chipakins=gmail.com at lists.natureoflightandparticles.org] On Behalf Of John Williamson
Sent: Tuesday, March 24, 2015 10:28 PM
To: Nature of Light and Particles - General Discussion
Cc: Anthony Booth; Hans De Raedt
Subject: Re: [General] Group discussion at San Diego

Dear Chip and everyone,

I am trying to start to get my act together in preparation for August, and just came across the keynote talk from Carver Mead from nature of light and particles 5. It is available here :

http://natureoflight.org/

It addresses the very issue of interaction with the absorber we discussed earlier. In my opinion it is spot on - even though the answer to the last question (similar to your worry Chip) was rather weak - that a lot of people have trouble with resonances over million year plus-time scales. Indeed.

I think the proper way to view this is, as I said, from the point of view of the observer being in touch with all points on the lightcone at previous times, not that the emitter sees all "future" times all over the universe. This is a "pull" not a "push" for the direction of causality. The observer says "hit me!". The past is happy to oblige - zillions of hits per second painting the universe of your perceptions.

Now I enjoyed Carver Mead's book thoroughly a few years ago when I first came across it (thanks Nick) and he is one person I would very much like to meet if I'm coming to California. That man can really think - and think freely.  Is he coming to this one, and, if not, can anyone introduce me? He would be a most excellent person to have on the group. Another excellent chap - and I have just finished reading some spectacularly interesting work of his- is Tony Booth (copied above). Tony is a real engineer (I am in an engineering department but I can tell the difference). Please add him to the general discussion group!

Further to this whole developing endeavour. I am perfectly delighted to try and give classes on any aspect of the new theory - or to help bring people up to speed on some of the other relevant theories and areas in my areas of expertise - in quantum mechanics (relativistic or ordinary), experimental solid state physics, elementary particle physics (including QED, the standard model and various field theories), and relativity (special or general). Another favourite theme of mine is current problems and mysteries in Science as a whole. Another possibility is a question and answer session on "how stuff works". I'm particularly interested in questions I cannot answer. We should make a list!

I expect lots of you to contribute and educate me in areas where I am weak such as optics, photonics, atomic physics to name but a very few (my ignorance is, almost, boundless). Martin and I are quite used to this as we both belong to an international study club (I was a founder member - but it is still going strong after a quarter of a century) which does this sort of thing regularly. It is BIG fun! I'm sure there will be  a lot of input from others in the group in developing aspects of the above theories where, I am sure, many of you go beyond me.

I already have tens of hours of lecture material prepared and am perfectly happy to go on for multiple hours at a time (if people can stand it). I just gave four hours of lectures on-the-trot yesterday (then had lunch and gave another one). I am quite used to it - and it would be much more fun than the first year vector and complex number maths given in two of the lectures today. If a room can be made available either before or after the conference with a projector and board all would be welcome. I know Martin would be prepared to talk on his areas of expertise as well, and I'm sure others of the more senior group would be delighted to help educate the younger ones as well.

We could, further, invite anyone from industry who was interested in new, linear, paradigms for developing and thinking about new kinds of materials, devices and systems for a further session, perhaps after the conference proper. This may have the added advantage of snowballing into some other meetings and prospects for the future.

What does everyone think?

Regards, John.
________________________________
From: General [general-bounces+john.williamson=glasgow.ac.uk at lists.natureoflightandparticles.org] on behalf of chandra [chandra at phys.uconn.edu]
Sent: Monday, March 09, 2015 7:02 PM
To: 'Nature of Light and Particles - General Discussion'
Cc: Hans De Raedt
Subject: [General] Group discussion at San Diego
Dear Out-of-Box "Electron Modelers":

We are arranging for a special 3-hour (8 to 11AM) discussion session, especially, for this group, on Thursday, August, 13, 2015. The title has been deliberately chosen as a somewhat open ended question:
"Are electrons oscillating photons or oscillations of the vacuum itself?"

If needed, the 3-huor duration would be flexible; and we can add an extra hour. During the main conference schedule, all of you have been given the standard 20-minute slots. This compensating discussion period provides all of you a better forum to debate and further develop your concepts.

I will take the role of the Moderator. I would need a couple of volunteer editors from your "Electron Modeling" group. Feel free to suggest their names. Obviously, I am looking for "volunteers" who are very respectful to logically self-consistent views of others in spite of those views being counter to their personal views. All of you will be given the opportunity to present the summary of your views, as well-articulated issues/point-of-views to promote discussions. Duration of this first presentation will be short (5 minutes??).

The ideas presented above are suggestions, and obviously, they are not set in stone; since we want to maximize the scientific outcome of this discussion. So, please, feel free to send me your suggestions through this "General Forum" to develop a better approach towards our ultimate ambitious goal: The correct ontological model of the electron!

I am soliciting also suggestions and editorial support regarding how to incorporate the summary of this discussion  in the SPIE proceeding. The turn-around time has to be less than a month. Normally, SPIE publishes many of the proceedings pre-conference publication available during the conference. We have been holding out for post-conference. We must finalize everything by the end of September.

Please, develop concepts and ideas on how to summarize the discussion/debate and also relate them to your individual papers. Remember that SPIE proceeding rule is 10-page limit for individual articles.

Also remember, while preparing your papers and presentations that our dominant SPIE audience consists of engineering. Engineers think in terms emulating nature allowed processes in different permutations and combinations to create new working tools and technologies, in spite of their incomplete understanding of the deeper complete theory. So, try to add relevant experiments to illustrate the deeper ontological processes that may be going on in nature; even though you are speculating them with your mathematical models.

Sincerely,
Chandra.

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