[General] nature of light particles & theories

[John Williamson]

Hello Al,

Thanks for your well-considered reply.

This picks up on an unfinished conversation in San Diego, in the early hours in the bar at Hotel Solamar, between you and me and a few others on the ontological basis of reality. You were saying some very interesting things, but we had distraction from others, ran out of time and we were both, by then, a little the worse for wear. My feeling is that you went pretty deep – but not yet quite deep enough. You and me both! Perhaps we can help one another.

I take your point about the hypothetical “charged test particle” beloved of text books. Unfortunately, no such particle exists with which to probe stuff. The lightest stable particle we have is the electron, the smallest the proton. Muons are useful in that they are far smaller than the electron, long lived enough to be useful and far simpler than the proton. It was fun playing with 200 GeV muons in my youth – but that does not give all the answers either as one remains a monkey – essentially banging the rocks together and going OOOH! at whatever comes out.

I like your argument about the ontological basis being of (as I understood it late that night  – though forgive me if this is far too simple) trajectories in space through time and I think one can, indeed, get a long way thinking from this basis. Unfortunately, in experiment, it is usually energy and momentum that one measures directly and not (the conjugate variables) space and time. One knows the energy (and momentum) of a photon fairly precisely, but have correspondingly far less information about its time (and position). Yo – that photon hit me – it was blue and it came from that direction. Likewise, in a high energy scattering experiment, one gets the energy and momentum of all the particles pretty precisely, that the interaction was point-like down to 10-18m, but one (even with the best photographic emulsions) only gets the position to within a micron or so. This is 36 orders of magnitude of uncertainty in a volume!. Not good for fixing a trajectory!

Coming back to theory. I could not agree more with - “why fix the roof if the foundation is crumbling?”. This is exactly the point. Indeed, the discussion in our 1997 paper does not go nearly far enough. This work is, however, nearly two decades ago. We have moved on a long way since then. I am still proud of it, but it is certainly not the whole story.

In that work the basis was not fields as you suggest, however, but rather, starting from our best view then of the “photon”, the “what if” of considering the electron as a (self) localised photon.  Fields are far more complex than space and time themselves and famously hard to understand. No wonder: who really understands even just space and time?

The 1997 paper even if “correct” in principle within its starting framework, immediately begs the question of “what is a photon?. A question Chandra, you and all of you have been discussing for a decade or more in this series. Of course it works: electron-positron pairs do annihilate experimentally into photons and the numbers must match up even if the theories are incapable of describing the continuous transformation properties of one into the other. The challenge is to a) realise that light and matter are fundamentally the same thing and b)  get to an over-arching theory describing both properly.

 Even if we do get the photon, for example, in terms of the fields, this will still leave the question of “what are the fields?”, as you so correctly point out. It is, perhaps, the reason that our earlier paper has “only” 39 citations (on Google scholar), as opposed to more than thousands in my most cited papers in the other two fields in which I have worked professionally. Too many loose ends. It just does not go far enough into the basis. I think that, fundamentally, as you, Chip and Viv have argued (amongst others – myself and Martin included) it will need to be understood in terms of (at least projections onto) the four dimensions of space and time. The question then comes down to us, creatures imbedded in that space and time, to try to understand the framework in which we exist. This is well-known to be problematical philosophically (Witgensteion, Godel etc..) but what can you do? We are stuck where we are and must make the best of it!

My SPIE papers try to address this by proposing (as is conventional) that the fields are derivatives of some aspect of space with respect to time (and vice versa). This is at a level more fundamental then even space and time by themselves: it leaves the question of what the derivatives in the mathematics represent in reality. These are, as expressed in the mathematics, a division of a little bit of a quantity in space by a little bit of a quantity of time (or vice-versa). Note carefully the “in” and the “of” in the last sentence. For example the electric field E = dA/dt, where A is the vector potential. So then: what is the vector potential?  Now I have (not very good) papers on the measurement of the physical effect of the vector potential (Loosdrecht first author if you want to look them up – but there are better papers out there) but what is the vector potential, really, physically? For Maxwell, it was the same physical thing as the (continuous) current, in the same way that the Electric field and Electric displacement are representations of the same thing in free space (see his textbook, whose original version predates the discovery of the electron). A better representation these days would be the 4-vector potential and the 4-current density (charge and 3-current density). Even if these are equated and understood as continuous underlying quantities the problem is then: why is charge (or A0) quantised in physical “particles” such as the electron. For me, the answer to this is sketched in the two papers to SPIE to be read together with Martin and my 1997 paper. Briefly: light is quantised because otherwise it does not propagate. Charge is then quantised because it is then (self) localised circulating light plus mass – and one can then (with proper modelling) calculate the charge. I’m not going to attempt to repeat these arguments here as they are far better explained in those three papers.

This is all very well but there remain (at least) two problems. Firstly, what does it mean physically to divide one part of a four-vector by another part of the same four-vector (as in the mathematical definition of “field”). Secondly, what is “division” in this context anyway? Every (human) monkey thinks they know what “division” is – but most monkeys do not go beyond a proper understanding of the division of mere numbers. This is what I would call “arithmetic”. One needs to understand the electr-on the prot-on and the divisi-on. All are hard!

Now Martin and wrote a paper initially entitled “On division and the algebra of reality” about a decade ago. We made two or three attempts to get it published – but it was rejected on such grounds as “there is no conceivable application in physics”. By the time this was over we had moved on to other things, though the paper has a few citations (don’t know how – it is not out there!). This may be a topic, if we do not get it anywhere else, for SPIE in two years time.

Coming back to following science. I have, like you for me, not delved as deeply into your papers as they should merit. The papers of yours I have read, however, I have thoroughly enjoyed. I think it would be good to continue this conversation and see where it gets us. For that we need some proper time. In the second half of November and the first two thirds of December I can travel. I would like to spend some of this visiting Martin for one of our sessions, and Tony Booth (who is based in Brussels). During this it would be good to arrange talks in the vicinity at some of the Dutch, Belgian and German Universities. Any chance I can spend a few days with you, or in the vicinity?

Gotta go – get ready to get to work …

Cheers for now,

John W.
________________________________
From: General [general-bounces+john.williamson=glasgow.ac.uk at lists.natureoflightandparticles.org] on behalf of John Williamson [John.Williamson at glasgow.ac.uk]
Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 2015 2:02 AM
To: Nature of Light and Particles - General Discussion
Subject: Re: [General] nature of light particles & theories

Haha .. good analogy John. I am having a very good laugh here! May I use this one?

Regards, John.
________________________________
From: General [general-bounces+john.williamson=glasgow.ac.uk at lists.natureoflightandparticles.org] on behalf of John Duffield [johnduffield at btconnect.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2015 7:52 PM
To: 'Nature of Light and Particles - General Discussion'
Subject: Re: [General] nature of light particles & theories

Al:

I recommend you read On Vortex Particles<http://www.scribd.com/doc/68152826/On-Vortex-Particles-Fiasco-Press-Journal-of-Swarm-Scholarship#scribd> by David St John.

IMHO those electron size experiments are something like hanging out of a helicopter, probing a whirlpool with a bargepole, and then saying I can’t feel the billiard ball, it must be really small.

Regards
John D

From: General [mailto:general-bounces+johnduffield=btconnect.com at lists.natureoflightandparticles.org] On Behalf Of af.kracklauer at web.de
Sent: 29 September 2015 17:51
To: Nature of Light and Particles - General Discussion <general at lists.natureoflightandparticles.org>
Subject: [General] nature of light particles & theories

Hi John:

Only my "non expertise" in HEP mathches your espertise.  In my professional progression I have been captured by the "building block" principle: why fix the roof if the foundation is crumbling?  This has constrained me to focusing on QM and SR.  Anyway, I'm frequently surprised by how far what I have learned there takes me even in HEP (now and then).

It turns out that someone posted the 97 paper Mark cited; too convenient to pass up, I took a look.  Turns out I recognized it, I had read at it perhaps 10 years ago.  Then, as again now, I found the idea of building the electron out of fields (a beloved idea for Einstein) flawed (in my view) the way certain concepts current in QM are.  In short:  fields are defined in terms of their inferred effect on infinitesimal "test charges."  Without them, and the source charges, the current and charge in Maxwell's eqs. are zero and so then the fields too.  Thus, one is straightaway in a circular ...   This is at least a serious lexicographical problem---minimally we need a new word, "E&B-fields" wont do.

Doesn't the term a "charged" photon (itself, un- or precharged, an inconsistently defined entity!)  gets us even deeper into a linguistic black hole?  Spin too, is another troubled notion; there is absolutely no evidence that any entity is (or has) spinning outside of a magnetic field.  Point charges can't spin but they can gyrate; so if they do, as they must (per classical E&M), in a B/H field ...

So why does it (your 97 electron model) work so well?  I don't know, and can't take the time to figure it out without cutting into my current projects, but one has to recognize the possiblity that it is the inevitable consequence of a fortuotous choice of inputs, then, by the sort of logic exploited by dimensional analysis, every thing else just follows.  Another factor perhaps in play here is a sort of dualism between particless and fields, much like that between lines and planes in projective geometry.  If sheaths of particle trajecotiries are dual to particle motion, then fields (i.e., eviserated orbit patterns) capture the motion of the true ontological primative elements: particles.  This sort of concept at least breaks out of the "circle".

Regarding scattering, the issue motivating my injection to begin with; clearly a static point charge will look like a point charge.  But, what bugs me, is that if the point target is moving uncontrollably and unknowably, but confined (basically) to a certain region,is it not possible, enevitable actually, that the scattering (statistically over many repeats) will evidence something of the "internal structure" of the uncontrolable motion, thus, for example, preventing the "resolution" of impuned internal structure.  This would seem to me to lead to much confusion or mushy talk.  Not so?  Some of the liguistic dressing to various fundamental theories in physics these days, seems to me to actually be compatible with the imagery I'm suggesting, but never quite gat around to saying it clearly and explicitly---another large part of my motivation for responding to Mark's shot at Albrecht's doublets.

Zitter forces: One fact, experimentally established as well as anything in physics, is that a charge is, as described by Gauss's Law, in interaction with every other charge in the universe, and, insofar as Gauss's Law has no "pause button," has been so since the big bang (modulao ntis) and will remain so until the big crunch.  While many exterior charges are far away and reduced by 1/r^2, etc. they add up and there are quite a number of them!  Thus, no electron, per John Dunn, is an island.  In consequence, it zitters!  Like the rest of us.  Further, how would one "see" this scale of motion as such in a scattering experiment?  Maybe it is beinng seen, it's the foggy structure preventing resolution of the imagined internals.

Maybe we are well advised not to write off Albrecht's duals, even if he himself has little to say regarding their origin.  Obviously, breaking up a single charge via scattering-type experiments cannot eject a virtual particle.  It wouldn't acutally exist, it would be a stand-in for the effect of polarization of the remaing universe, moreover, as it all zitters to and fro.   So far, I see no objection here expcept that this notion is not kosher sociologically!  Fatal in career terms, but not logically.

Enough for the moment,  Best regards,   Al










Gesendet: Dienstag, 29. September 2015 um 10:52 Uhr
Von: "John Williamson" <John.Williamson at glasgow.ac.uk<mailto:John.Williamson at glasgow.ac.uk>>
An: "phys at a-giese.de<mailto:phys at a-giese.de>" <phys at a-giese.de<mailto:phys at a-giese.de>>, "Nature of Light and Particles - General Discussion" <general at lists.natureoflightandparticles.org<mailto:general at lists.natureoflightandparticles.org>>, "Richard Gauthier" <richgauthier at gmail.com<mailto:richgauthier at gmail.com>>
Cc: "Joakim Pettersson" <joakimbits at gmail.com<mailto:joakimbits at gmail.com>>, "Ariane Mandray" <ariane.mandray at wanadoo.fr<mailto:ariane.mandray at wanadoo.fr>>, "Anthony Booth" <abooth at ieee.org<mailto:abooth at ieee.org>>
Betreff: Re: [General] research papers
Dear everyone especially Al, Albrecht and Richard,
I have been meaning to weigh-in for some time, but term has just started and I’m responsible for hundreds of new students, tens of PhD’s, there is only one of me and my mind is working on less than ten percent capacity.
I think we have to distinguish between what is know, experimentally, and our precious (to us) little theoretical models. Please remember everyone that theory is just theory. It is fun to play with and that is what we are all doing. The primary thing is first to understand experiment – and that is hard as there is a huge amount of mis-information in our “information” technology culture.
You are right, Al, that Martin has not carried out experiments, directly, himself, on the electron size in both high energy and at low energy, but I have.
I have many papers, published in the most prestigious journals, on precisely those topics. They HAVE had much interest (in total more than ten thousand citations). I have sat up, late at night, alone, performing experiments  both with the largest lepton microscope ever made (The EMC experiment at CERN) and with my superb (best in the world at the time) millikelvin Cryostat looking at precisely the inner structure of single electrons spread out over sizes much (orders of magnitude) larger than my experimental resolution. It is widely said, but simply not true, that “no experiment resolves the electron size”.  This comes, largely, from simple ignorance of what the experiments show. I have not only seen inside single electrons, but then used the observed properties and structure, professionally and in widely published and cited work, to design new devices. Have had them made and measured (in collaboration with others), and seen them thenwork both as expected, but also to reveal deeper mysteries again involving the electron size, its quantum spin, its inner charge distribution and so on. That work is still going on, now carried by my old colleagues and by the rest of the world. Nano – my device was the first nanosemiconductor device. Spintronics, designed the first devices used for this. Inner workings of spin , and the exclusion principle Martin and I hope to crack that soon! Fun! All welcome!
Now where Martin is coming from, and where he, personally, late at night etc … HAS done lots of professional experiments and has been widely cited is in playing the same kind of games with light that I have done with electrons. This means that, acting together, we really know what we are talking about in a wide range of physics. Especially particle scattering, quantum electron transport, and light. We may be making up the theories, but we are not making up a wide and deep understanding of experiment.
I take your point – and you are so right -that there are so many things one would like to read and understand and has not yet got round to. So much and so little time. Ore papers written per second than one can read per second. There is, however, no substitute for actually having been involved in those very experiments to actually understand what they mean.
So what I am about to say is not going to be “shooting from the hip”, but is perhaps more like having spent a couple of decades developing a very large rail gun which has just been loaded for its one-shot at intergalactic exploration …
Now I hope you will not take this badly …  it is fun to think about this but here goes
Here is what you said (making you blue):
You have not done an experiment, but (at best) a calculation based on some hypothtical input of your choise.  Maybe it's good, maybe not.
Not so: I have done the experiments! Myself. This is exactly why I started looking into the extant models decades ago, found them sadly lacking, and hence set out to devise new ones that did agree with experiment at both low and high energy. This is the whole point!

The Sun scatters as a point only those projectiles that don't get close.
True,
   So far, no scattering off elecrtons has gotten close enough to engage any internal structure, "they" say (I#ll defer to experts up-to-date).
Not so. Lots of papers on this. Some by me. See e.g. Williamson, Timmering, Harmans, Harris and Foxon Phys Rev 42 p 7675. Also – I am an expert (up to date) on HEP as well. A more correct statement is that no high-energy scattering experiment has RESOLVED any internal structure in free electrons. If this was all you knew (and for many HEP guys it seems to be) then one might interpret this as meaning the electron was a point down to 10-18m. It is not. It cannot be. It does not have enough mass to account for its spin (even if at lightspeed) if it is that small. Work it out!

 Nevertheless, electrons are in constant motion at or near the speed of light (Zitterbewegung) and therefore at the time scales of the projectiles buzz around (zittern) in a certain amout of space, which seems to me must manifest itself as if there were spacially exteneded structure within the scattering cross-section.  Why not?
Because this is no good if one does not have the forces or the mechanism for making it “zitter”.
More importantly -experimentally- because that is not what you see. If it was just zittering in space one could see that zitter. What you see (in deep inelastic lepton scattering, for example), is that there is no size scale for lepton scattering. That is, that no structure is resolved right down to 10^-18 metres. This is NOT the same thing as an electron being a point. That is why one says (if one knows a bit about what one is talking about) that it is “point-like” and not “point” scattering. These qualifiers ALWAYS matter. Point-like – not a point. Charged photon- not a photon. Localised photon – not a photon. Vice-Admiral- not an admiral. Vice-president- more a reason for not shooting the president!
That structure is not resolved does NOT mean that the electron is point.  This is widely accepted as fact, but just represents a (far too widespread) superficial level of understanding. Any inverse-square, spherically symettric force-field has this property (eg spherical planets if you do not actually hit them). The real problem is to understand how it can appear spherically symettric and inverse square in scattering while ACTUALLY being much much larger than this. This is exactly what I started out working on in 1980 and have been plugging away at ever since. Exactly that! You need to explain all of experiment: that is what this is all about.
Not to defend Albrecht's model as he describes it, but many folks (say Peter Rowlands at Liverpool, for example) model elemtary particles in terms of the partiicle itself interacting with its induced virtual image (denoted by Peter as the "rest of the universe").   This "inducement" is a kind of polarization effect.  Every charge repells all other like charges and attracts all other unlike charges resulting in what can be modeled as a virtual charge of the opposite gender superimposed on itself in the static approximation.  But, because the real situation is fluid, the virtual charge's motion is delayed as caused by finite light speed, so that the two chase each other. Etc. Looks something like Albrecht's pairs.
Yes I know. This is the same kind of maths as “image charges” used all the time in modelling the solid state. These are all models. All models have features. We need to confront them with experiment. Problem with the pairs is you don’t see any pairs. If one of the pair has zero mass-energy it is not there at all. If there was a pair, bound to each other with some forces, then one would see something similar to what one sees in proton scattering (see below), and you do not. One then has to explain why and how this process occurs, every time. You always (and only) see one thing for electrons, muons. You see a single object for the electron, and an internal structure for the proton. This is what your theory has to deal with. Really. Properly. In detail. At all energies.

I too havn't read your 97 paper yet, but I bet it's unlikely that you all took such consideration into account.
You could not know this, but his could not be more wrong. We did. You did not specify the bet. Lets make it a beer. You owe me (and Martin) a beer! If you have not yet read the paper by the time we next meet I think you should buy all the beers! Deal?
The whole point of the paper my reason for leaving high energy physics at all, the seven years of work Martin and I put into it to that point, was exactly to resolve this mystery – on the basis of an “electron as a localised photon”. My subsequent work has been to try to develop a proper field theory to deal with the problems inherent I the old model (unknown forces) and in the Dirac theory (ad hoc lump of mass) (amongst others). This is the point of the new theory of light and matter:an attempt to sort all that out. You should read it too! Do that and I will buy you a beer!
Now Richard, while I am disagreeing with everyone I am going to disagree with you too! You keep saying that the electron apparent size scales with gamma – and you keep attributing me with agreeing with you (and Martin and Viv and Chip). Let me say this once and for all: I DO NOT agree with this.  Now Viv and Chip must speak for themselves, but I’m pretty sure Martin would (largely – though not completely) agree me here.  I have said this many times to you – though perhaps not specifically enough.  It is not quite wrong – but far too simple. It scales ON AVERAGE so. I agree that it changes apparent size- yes, but not with gamma- no. How it actually scales was discussed in the 1997 paper, and the mathematics of this is explained (for example) in my “Light” paper at SPIE (see Eq. 19). Gamma = ½( x+ 1/x). Also, this is amongst other things, in Martin’s “Light is Heavy” paper. Really the apparent size scales BOTH linearly AND inverse linearly (as x and 1/x then). It is the average of these that gives gamma. This is how relativity actually works. You do not put things in, you get things out. You need to look at this and understand how gamma is related. Best thing is to go through the maths yourself, then you will see.
The bottom line is that the reason one does not resolve the electron size is that, in a collision, this size scales like light. It gets smaller with increasing energy. Linearly. Likewise the scattering exchange photon scales like light. Linearly. The ratio for head on collisions remains constant – but the exchange photon is always about an order of magnitude bigger that the electron (localised photon). This is WHY it can be big (10^-13 m)  and yet appear small. I said this in my talk, but I know how hard it is to take everything in.
One does not see internal structure because of this effect – and the fact that the electron is a SINGLE object. Not composite – like a proton (and Albrecht’s model).
Now what would one see with lepton scatting on protons? I have dozens of papers on this (and thousands of citations to those papers) – so this is not shooting from the hip. Let me explain as briefly and simply as I can. Lock and load …
At low energies (expresses as a length much less than 10^-15 m or so), one sees point-like scattering from, what looks like, a spherically symettric charge distribution. Ok there are differences between positive projectiles (which never overlap) and negative, but broad brush this is so. There is then a transitional stage where one sees proton structure – some interesting resonances and an effective “size” of the proton (though recently this has been shown to be (spectactularly interestingly) different for electron and muon scattering! (This means (obviously) that the electron and muon have a different effective size on that scale). At much higher energies one begins to see (almost) that characteristic point-like scattering again, from some hard bits in the proton. Rutherford atom all over again. These inner parts have been called “partons”. Initially, this was the basis –incorrect in my view – of making the association of quarks with partons. Problem nowadays is that the three valence quarks carry almost none of the energy-momentum of the proton - - keeps getting less and less as the energies go up. I think this whole quark-parton thing is largely bullshit. Experimentally!
Now Albrecht you make some good points. You are absolutely right to quote the experiments on the relativity of time with clocks and with muons. You are also right that one is not much better off with double loops (or any other kinds of loops) than with two little hard balls. This is a problem for any model of the electron as a loop in space (Viv, John M, Chip, John D – this is why the electron cannot be a little spatial loop – it is not consistent with scattering experiments!). Now this is a problem in space-space but not in more complex spaces as Martin and I have argued (see SPIE electron paper for up to date description of this – from my perspective). It is more proper to say the loops are in “momentum space” though this is not quite correct either. They are in the space(s) they are in – all nine degrees of freedom (dimensions if you like) of them. None of the nine are “space”. For me, they are not little loops in space. In space they are spherical. You are not correct – as the DESY director said and as I said in the “panel” discussion- that one would not “see” this. One would. Only if one of the balls were not there ( I like your get out of saying that!), would one observe what one observes. In my view, however, if it is not there it is not there. I’m open to persuasion if you can give me a mechanism though!
Regards, John W.






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