[General] nature of light particles & theories

Fri Oct 16 01:43:51 PDT 2015

Hello Adam Chip, handra, Albrecht and everyone,
Some random thoughts on the present discussion ...
I am somewhat puzzled by what people ascribe to what I'm trying to say. Both Adam and Al have asserted that they think I'm starting from fields. Others have too. Not so. I'm starting from space and time, as I thought I had made clear in the papers! I’m finding it funny and instructive though to have other folk tell me what they think I am thinking! It reminds me of …

  1.  What is thought is not said
  2.  What is said is not heard
  3.  What is heard is not understood
  4.  What is understood is not believed
  5.  What is believed is not yet advocated
  6.  What is advocated is not yet acted on
  7.  What is acted on is not yet completed
Just for the record, I’m not thinking in maths. That is the last thing I do (ask Martin!). If I tried to tell you the actual thinking it would sound pretty crazy. Hey _ I’m not shy - whirlwind, lights, accompanying music – flashes –things emerging, forming and reforming – wheels within wheels – colours changing to sounds or smells, everything exiting stage left (I said left but I meant (and saw) right! –really!) to be replaced with a troupe of clowns …. Honestly, it is a mess (though seldom boring!).
To do maths I have to make physical marks on paper – in order – slowly - and keep checking them to make sure i  has not changed to j or gamma to alpha or plus to minus – or worse! It is painful and slow!
The maths is not even secondary - but at least tertiary (I won't say ultimate) - to the thinking process. Mere maths more often blinds than it elucidates. Chandra is right. The recent discussion was sterile (for Wolf) just because of that - because it was largely about what people thought other people meant - not about anything actually fundamental. It was talks about talks. Not talk.

Let me try to talk about what fields are, for me, and why they are in no way “fundamental”.

What fields are, for me, is a rate of variation in space with respect to time (or time with respect to space). They are, quite literally, derivative of space and time - not in any way fundamental or the starting point. A field is, kind of, an area. Like a field then (though usually without the grass). It is not a static deformation caused by a lump. It is dynamical! This is what you see in experiment. Stop taking received wisdom. You need to think! You need to think through the maths, consistent with what you know, and see the physics. What the hell do you think E - h nu tells you. Think about it...

Energy is some constant times an inverse (differential) time. Forget the constant for a moment (though it is important - it is the angular momentum! – spin! Quantum spin!). The equation says energy IS frequency. Is it just me or is everyone trying to act deliberately a bit slow? Here -lets do some brain yoga to warm up- on a cauld cauld dark Scots morning ...

Forget the units. Energy - frequency - time. Pick one - any one you think is most fundamental. Now, in your head, derive the other two from it. Now, choose another. Repeat. Now the third. Once again...

Next: ask yourself what is still missing from your understanding of what time is (or is not).
Now next question (slightly harder)- just what is (quantum) angular momentum anyway? Hint: answer is cunningly hidden in plain sight in Williamson paper posted on SPIE!

Putting quantum spin aside, by now the answer to what (two of) energy, time and frequency is should be blindingly obvious. You might choose energy, for example, is vibration and time is inverse vibration. Vibration, then, of what with respect to what? Well that depends on the form of the energy. For field energy it is time by space or space by time (not strictly an area but a length - length quotient or a length time quotient or a time length quotient). This is just a special kind of (Leonardo) projection. It is worth looking at Leonardo's notes on this (they are on project Gutenberg). Just follow these (not whatever you think you think you know about projection)- then just think about what this means if you add (inverse) time in to the mix. That should do the trick!

The actual development of anything new for me (happens seldom enough!) is in terms of things more like nested visual forms – which fit better with the way my mind works (its quite fun spinning one within an another and seeing what happens). I've tried to explain this method to others, but I think it only really works for me and my crazy mixed up mind - though when I read Maxwells original work (not the stuff written about what he said (and often about just how crazy THAT was) but what he actually said) I think something at least a bit similar was going on in there for him. The problem for both him and me was sussing in which space the spins (or inverse spins) were happening. The Williamson thought process is very messy and always half-not-there. It is always a huge struggle for me to try to squeeze any physical understanding of process into mere maths. Martin and I have a method – but neither of us really understands how that works – so don’t ask!

Lets try to talk a bit about understanding and mis-understanding in space, time and gravitation. Look - the reason people talk about "curved spacetime" arises largely from a fundamentally incorrect analogy that has become all pervasive about what general relativity is about at all at all. This is the rubber sheet analogy. It is not very helpful. The idea goes a bit like this: gravity is “like a deformed rubber sheet”. Put a big ball bearing in the middle of a sheet - a small ball bearing orbits around it. Monkey looks. Monkey sees. Monkey gets it!  ... OOh Ah - Gravity is just like a bent rubber sheet. Hallelujah - I understand General relativity!
Oh no you do not! What you have learned is that, in a uniform external gravitational potential small balls follow a curved path on a rubber sheet. This is not just quite the same thing.
Proof. Stick a stick under the sheet. Bend it up. Hey presto - antigravity! This is just equal and opposite bullshit. General relativity is a simple tensor theory with one scalar parameter. That parameter is not “bend”, it is mass.

The end result is that folk talk - seeming wise - about "curved space time". Usually (actually - always) the talker understands neither space nor time - let alone what it may mean to "curve" it. These talkers usually (though not always) have very little idea of what is ACTUALLY in the theory of General relativity.
The other result is that anyone thinking about deforming spacetime then gets the question - is it gravity then? NO! And neither is Gravity in general relativity bent space time! A bend is in a specific plane. Think about it. Which plane is it in which the supposed bend of space time is? With respect to just what system are the fundamental four dimensions deformed? What has mass got to do with “bend”. If you are thinking here about a little curved path around the sun you are already lost! Lost in the land of the bent rubber sheet. The only proper cure is a bit painful: to actually learn general relativity.
It is something similar Al is getting upset about in the textbook analogies of SR – he is right that (most of) the analogies are bullshit. So what – what actually happens is, and always has been, quite independent of what anybody thinks about it.  Fields are real. Take two magnets. Feel the force!

Another thing: Albrecht, I noted that you talk as though none of us have a mechanism for the reason stuff is going round and round in the electron. Not so. There was not such a reason in Martin and my 1997 paper -true. There ARE reasons in our more recent work. Explicitly the term PE in my recent SPIE papers, the 2014 paper and the 2008 paper. This is, effectively, a momentum transverse to the Poynting vector E cross B, and gives rise to a circulating electromagnetic momentum (in momentum space). The confinement force for this stuff is in there now.
Ah yes, for information Adam, another thing. When Chip is talking about electromagnetism and momentum exchange he is referring to how electromagnetism is described in quantum electrodynamics (QED). Here one has two input parameters (the mass and charge), sets them up as point (not point-like) emitters and or absorbers of “photons” (electromagnetic lumps of energy-momentum) and then do the sums. This works to as many decimal places as the experiments can measure. If you want more detail there are big books on this – though it may take a year or two to get competent with it. QED does not really concern itself with “fields” – just “photons” which are treated as (4-)momentum-transfer vehicles. For the magnet (above) one has positive and negative 4-momentum transfer for attractive and repulsive regimes. Sounds a bit mad – but it works. Because QED is such a good approximation any new theory should be able to explain or contain BOTH this concept AND that of fields. I hope my new theory does just that (but I could be proven wrong!).
Coming to that I will now do an Al and set myself up as a universal guru (preaching to you – unwashed or not (and whether you like it or not!)). I’m just going to set myself up as the guru for my own theory though – not for anyone else’s (ok?). What I’m about to attempt is to explain just what “electromagnetic field” is in the new theory. As payment for this gracious gift of me (the guru) to you (the great unshowered – well it IS still early) all I will ask in return is to please tell me just how full of shit you think I am!
In the new theory, what field is is square-root energy density (vot) in space times inverse time, space times inverse perpendicular space or time times inverse space. Now the new theory expresses space as relativistic space and time as relativistic time – scaling properly with energy – that is setting a local scale proportional OF the local scale of structure. Small is large and large is small. That is small size is large energy and small energy large size. What else would you do? This is what you see. Field is then root-energy clothed in space-time forms. What the hell does this mean?
Ok – take space, twang it (this is more like music than “bend”). Twoing – what happens “next”. It twoings back- that is what it does. Why? Because space is stiff, strong, massless and energyless (obviously!). Ok that is words – what is the proper description of this. One can understand this in terms of the fundamental equation dG=0. G has sixteen components in the Space-time algebra. d is the expression of differential inverse space and time, as local to the “observer” frame. Lets take G as being non-zero only in the six componets of  the field F, as we need no more for understanding field than field. Now what dG=0 (now just Maxwell dF=0) tells you is not that “everything is nothing” nor that “nothing changes” but rather “things may change in space and time provided there is also an equal and opposite change”. What kind of change is then allowed? That change must, at least, conserve Energy. That would give you a Hamiltonian approach. Good, but not good enough. More fundamentally it must conserve, as is expressed concisely by the Maxwell equations, root-energy density, locally at each point in space-time and in any (and all) inertial frames (whatever “d” you like then – in whatever frame). This sounds complicated (and it is) but that is just exactly what the Maxwell equation do – and always did do. It is not just one equation for one mans space and time, but many equations for anyones space and time. This sounds very strict and complicated (and it is) but it does allow certain strongly-constrained kinds of variations with respect to inverse space and with respect to inverse time as measured by any observer or inter-actor anytime, anywhere, any velocity. These transformations are exactly those transforming (dynamically and at lightspeed in every frame) a space by time stretch to a same space by a perpendicular space stretch. Ex to By, for example. To make a conection with a previous discussion -his friend, who is lying down taking a rest sideways in a passing spaceship, thinks it is Ey to –Bx, but the scale is different and that there was some other –B to begin with. They are both right! There you go. Bob is your uncle. That is what field is. For me. Vibrating space- (inverse)time, time inverse space or space inverse other space. Dynamical. Continuosly. One into the other. Smoothly. Just as dear old Maxwell envisaged it.
Vibrating – not just simply “bent” by some inert lump of crap!
Now I thought all of this was obvious from my papers. Obviously not!
If you want why it is quantised though – you will have to go back to my SPIE paper and tell me why I am wrong! I think I probably am – but am a bit too thick to see just why.
Coming back to gravity (in GR) as I see it. Properly, what gravity does is not there that it “bends” space-time, but rather that it changes the local scale of space-time. It scales all scales. It is a scaling of (the infinitely many) allowed local scales by a global scale. Why and how does it do that? Well that is a subject for a (much) longer discussion culminating, eventually, it is to be hoped, in another paper.
That is enough for a Friday morning. I will now go and prepare myself to explain the deep mysteries of the “Argand diagram” to four hundred first year students.
It is such a pleasure to see their faces light up when they (or one or two of them the front at least) get it! Funny: I remember not getting that (a long time ago) as well. Was that really me? Oh dear.
Have fun!
Regards, John (W).
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