[General] nature of light particles & theories

[John Duffield]

You certainly may!

 

From: General
[mailto:general-bounces+johnduffield=btconnect.com at lists.natureoflightandpar
ticles.org] On Behalf Of John Williamson
Sent: 30 September 2015 02:02
To: Nature of Light and Particles - General Discussion
<general at lists.natureoflightandparticles.org>
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.natureoflightandparticl
es.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.natureoflightandpar
ticles.org] On Behalf Of af.kracklauer at web.de <mailto:af.kracklauer at web.de> 
Sent: 29 September 2015 17:51
To: Nature of Light and Particles - General Discussion
<general at lists.natureoflightandparticles.org
<mailto: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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