[General] Photonic electron models - etc

[Richard Gauthier]

Hello Grahame (and all),

    I very much appreciate your explaining that your main interest is in understanding the nature of reality, and that specific particle models are a sideline to this. In a way it is the same with me. Reality includes the mental world and conscious experience as well as the physical world (which of course is experienced through the senses as well as through concepts.) But I think that a good particle model can be mind-expanding, particularly if it matches experiment and makes new predictions that are confirmed experimentally.

    You define time as the “flow of energy” and seem satisfied with this definition. But what is “flow” and what is “energy”? Defining one unknown term in terms of two unknown terms does not seem like progress to me. According to Richard Feynman:  “It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge what energy is.” (from "The Quotable Feynman”). That may have changed since he said it, but I doubt it. And “flow” implies time or motion or movement, so I don’t think that the term “flow” clarifies time either. I think we will have to go deeper to better understand the nature of time and energy.

    I agree with you that a really good detailed electron model or other elementary particle model may be far off. But still some progress can be made with theoretical particle models that make better and better experimental predictions. Vivian doesn’t invite (at least to me) the pointing out of any further errors in his electron model (although he has acknowledged one serious error that I previously pointed out to him, in the calculation of the electron’s magnetic moment from his model) because he says that experiments will be the best judge of an electron model, and that his electron model is consistent with some experiments and makes other predictions that are subject to experimental testing. He claims that his electron model predicts that the transverse radius of a moving electron decreases as 1/gamma with increasing electron speed. I pointed out an error in his calculation of this result that shows that the transverse radius of his electron model will not decrease at all with increasing velocity, a result which corresponds to the prediction of your electron model. If it would not be too much trouble, would you please check for this error that I found in his calculation and either confirm it or not? HIs article is attached below for your and other’s convenience. I explained the error in my July 14 email to this list as follows:
 
"In your (Vivian’s) electron model, you calculate that the transverse radius of your electron model reduces as 1/gamma with increasing electron velocity. But your “radius” in your calculation is just a transverse length in relation to your light calculation, and so your light calculation result is therefore not specific to electron size but to ANY transverse length. The mistake you make in your calculation of the reduced electron radius is to assume that the travel time T  for light in the transverse direction (the electron’s rest frame) is the SAME travel time T for light traveling along the hypotenuse that is the corresponding light path for a moving electron. Since the hypotenuse is clearly longer than the other sides and so the travel time must also be longer than in the rest frame, your calculation brings you to conclude the the “radius” has decreased by a factor of 1/(gamma), whereas you should conclude from your calculation that ANY transverse length including macroscopic lengths also reduces by 1/gamma, which is a violation of special relativity for “no length contractions in the transverse direction of a moving object” for macroscopic objects.”

   It could be claimed that you might not be impartial in checking this error, since confirming it would be consistent with your own electron model showing a constant transverse radius with increasing electron velocity (the error does not support my electron model). But the math is simple enough (Pythagorean theorem) that anyone knowing basic standard relativity calculations who looks objectively at this calculation (it also occurs in the well-known basic  light-clock calculation for time dilation) would I think come to the same conclusion.  The error occurs on page 4 of the article in section 4 The Relativistic Corrections in the middle of column 2. 

      Richard


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