Posts by JohnDuffield

Quote from Zephir_AWT

IMO you're combining intrinsic and extrinsic perspectives way too much...
Anyway Einstein in article linked also says: "The essential result of this investigation is a clear understanding as to why the "Schwarzschild singularities" do not exist in physical reality."

No I'm not. There is no magic. Light curves downwards like any wave curves downwards. Because there's an orthogonal gradient in wave speed.

Image from FAS and the US Navy, see course ES310 chapter 20

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Anyway Einstein in article linked also says: "The essential result of this investigation is a clear understanding as to why the "Schwarzschild singularities" do not exist in physical reality."

Because he didn't think about Oppenheimer's frozen star. The black hole grows from the inside out. Like a hailstone.

Quote from Wyttenbach

This reasoning is based on gravity alone and neglects the true forces at work...

It is a fact that dense mass gets compresses when it aggregates and it as a follow up reaction releases space-time energy associated with the reduced volume. The other fact is that dense mass does more rotations than gravitating mass.

Einsteins reasoning is classic as it assumes that time is always a free parameter only bound to mass(3D,t). Today we know that mass is EM mass only and thus the relation to time looks quite different.

But the reasoning is instructive as it proves that gravity cannot explain the process of forming black holes.

Sorry Wyttenback, but I do not recognise this as any physics I've ever heard of.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

This is supposed to be a relativistic effect, because when massive body collapses, then the time runs increasingly more slowly for it (due to gravitational dilatation of time within curved space-time) - so that at certain level the further condensation would require more time, than the age of observable Universe. One could consider it as a canonical reasoning, why black holes singularities cannot exist or - if they turn out to be still existing - they must be older than the Universe (or most probably that Universe is older than particle horizon of it). It's known that despite the fatherhood of black holes is attributed to Einstein in mainstream media, he never fully accepted this concept in similar way, like many other relativistic theorems (gravitational waves, Big Bang universe or even space-time concept itself), which are routinely connected with him.

The thing is this, Zephir: an object falls down because "the speed of light is spatially variable". Because light goes slower when it's lower. Because there's a local gradient in the speed of light. A light-clock doesn't go slower when it's lower because some magical mysterious thing called time goes slower. It goes slower because light goes slower. So there is no mechanism by which a falling body slows down. Falling bodies don't fall slower and slower. They fall faster and faster. Because the speed of light is getting lower and lower. Eventually there would be some crossover point where the falling body would be falling faster than the local speed of light. That can't happen because of the wave nature of matter. So something else has to happen. BOOM! A gamma-ray burst. I cannot explain to you why Einstein didn't predict this. Perhaps it was because his paper dates back to 1939, and he had other things on his mind. Things like war and Nazis and genocide and nuclear weapons.

Quote from Navid

Clicked on your blackholes section and noted your proposition about gamma ray burst....

I read Einstein's 1939 paper along with Oppenheimer and Snyder’s 1939 frozen star paper on continued gravitational contraction, and thought something's missing here, because falling bodies don't slow down. But I don't think you can call it my proposition. See my Firewall! article and read Friedwardt Winterberg's 2001 paper gamma ray bursters and Lorentzian relativity. He said this: “if the balance of forces holding together elementary particles is destroyed near the event horizon, all matter would be converted into zero rest mass particles which could explain the large energy release of gamma ray bursters”. I think he's essentially correct. Winterberg was the guy who had the idea for GPS. He's ninety. I think he deserves a Nobel prize actually.

Quote from axil

If you'll have a theory that replaces the standard model then you'll can explain things that the standard model cannot. Give this a try.

Why and how does the neutrino have mass?

Why does the neutrino oscillate over its three favors?

It isn't my theory. Like I said, I didn't write all those papers in post 314.

The neutrino doesn't have mass. It travels at c, like a photon. In this respect the Standard Model is right. The claim that neutrino oscillation means the neutrino has mass is a non-sequitur.

Why does the neutrino oscillate? Because it's a rotational wave which is something like a "travelling breather". See the Wikipedia article on breathers:

Quote from THHuxleynew

...In fact I'll be very interested to see many things substantiating the exciting claims made above on this thread: my requests have as yet not been answered. I'll review what, from the outside, things look like when I next have time.

Here's some light reading for you, Huxley:

The nature of time

The speed of light is not constant

How gravity works

The principle of equivalence and other myths

Black holes

I wrote the above. It's all fairly straightforward. I'd say Einstein missed the trick that a black hole forms from the inside out, like a hailstone. Imagine you’re a water molecule. You alight upon the surface of the hailstone. You can’t pass through this surface. But you are presently surrounded by other water molecules, and eventually buried by them. So whilst you can’t pass through the surface, the surface can pass through you.

Quote from THHuxleynew

1/ These comments are helpful, I can see where you are coming from. You don't understand, as a predictive model also providing strong physical intuition into a very different world from classical, in which every thing is quantum, and therefore intrinsically a wave-particle duality behaving like both at the same time according to precise rules, what QM is. and hence also you reject what its elaboration (QFT) is. I'd be surprised if you have ever worked through and mastered a 2nd year Maths Quantum Mechanics module teaching the linear algebra, and coordinate-free notation, as well as Schroedinger equation. Or if you did that perhaps it just did not allow you to make the weird set of connections that we call intuition. If you have, then you could I am sure provide a more sophisticated explanation of your dismissal of QM as unphysical, which I'd be interested in.

Spare me the mathematical smokescreen Huxley. It's the hard scientific evidence that tells you the electron is not a point-particle. Then you know that QM is a fairy tale.

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2/ You do not, I suspect, understand how curved spacetime, or curved space, works mathematically. Or you would have given precise models for what "going round" is. The string theory guys do this, the easy way. They invoke extra dimensions. You are as I understand explicitly saying it is 3D space that is curved, in which case you need to provide the math for how this works. It is not simple. Quite possible, but till you have done that you cannot have any idea what you are dealing with. I'd worry about how Maxwell's equations interact with so many spatial singularities. More likely you want your fields to curve spatially within a Minkowski flat spacetime. But then you have the complexity of what makes the curl, why are these e-m wave so different from all the others we see, what are the equations that reduce to Maxwell except in the vicinity of an electron, where they turn into something quite different. That is a big ask too. I'm not saying it could not be done, just that it needs to be done and you are avoiding it. Without a good solution that works you have no physics. With such a good solution you have more complexity - but maybe it would be justified - or maybe not.

As above. I don't have too provide the maths to tell you a banana is curved, and nor do I have to provide the maths to tell you space is curved. These e-m waves aren't so different from all the others we see. When an ocean wave moves through the sea, the sea waves. When a seismic wave moves through the ground, the ground waves. When an electromagnetic wave moves through space, space waves. It's that simple Huxley. And like I said this idea has pedigree. It dates back to Maxwell and Clifford. And do note that where space waves, space is curved.

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3/ Perhaps one thing might help others. The 20th Century was the time when, with GR and QM, we realised that the simplest and most accurate descriptions of the universe at very large and small scales were profoundly unlike what we expect from classical mechanics.

No, we didn't. General Relativity is based upon continuum mechanics. Schrodinger came up with a wave equation. It was Bohr who sold us the pup that quantum mechanics surpasseth all human understanding. Stop peddling it. Physics is science, not mysticism.

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And then we realised that the very small scale physics could also apply over light-years. At that time (for example the papers you quote) and for a few people after there was profound psychological discomfort that at all scales the universe should not mirror structure what we understand in our lives, and that quantum weirdness should be as it is, non-local and profligate in how much inaccessible physics it creates (those many worlds which are needed to remove God's dice). For me, it is wonderful and exciting that the world is so very different from our medium-scale intuition. That wonder is inextricably wedded to the maths, which provides incredibly compact and simple, intuitive, algebraic descriptions from which emerge enormous complexity. The same simple equations give us classical approximations, a host of quantum phenomena, and a 4d Minkowski spacetime that is profoundly different from what we anthropomorphically expect.

It's cargo-cult science. The electron's field is what it is. There are no virtual particles popping in and out of existence. Spontaneoudly, like worms from mud.

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4/ Your arguments above about what is "physical" and what is not are thus from my personal POV profoundly incorrect, and show a reluctance to move from a classical viewpoint to something new.

It's based on all those papers I showed you. Read them.

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5/ The point about understanding forces emphasises this. You have things that seem un-unifiable and therefore say you know they cannot be unified. That is profoundly arrogant. The one thing we do know is that as we move up the energy scale physics changes profoundly. For example, at neutron star energies (or in an LHC ion collision) we have a soup of quarks and gluons that bears no relationship to the nuclei we know or the long scale forces we see outside of nuclei. This is not guesswork, it is based on experimental evidence. Electrical and weak forces appear completely separate until you see the common symmetry, and understand how symmetry breaking with a Higgs field can make both part of a very simple larger structure. So I think you are not thinking as somone interested in exploring physics and finding more; the quest for simpler more fundamental structure is never over.

Unfortunately when you understand the electron, you know all this is a fairy tale. There is no Higgs field because the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content. The gluons in ordinary hadrons are virtual. Nobody has ever seen a quark. In low energy proton-antriproton annihilation we see gamma photons. Not quarks. Pions decay to electrons neutrinos and photons. When you know that charge is topological, you know color charge is a fantasy.

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"resistance to change in motion" is familiar from our known physical world, I agree. Children learn it as part of sensorimotor awareness and it is embedded in our experience. But why does that make it less complex? Above I've indicated why the rest of your hypothesis needs reification, and when/if that is done will be some unknown amount more complex. What makes that resistance? Why does it happen?

Because waves are energy, and energy makes things move, because those things are waves too, and the interaction transfers some wave energy from one thing to another. It's all very simple.

Image from Rod Nave’s hyperphysics

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The Standard Model provides a profound and simple answer that incorporates all forces except gravitation - and that as we know is another story intimately related to space-time itself. I would not necessarily disagree that charge is topological - that covers a wide range of possibles. But one thing you'd need to answer is what makes it conserved in your model. When two electrons collide why does the charge always stay constant, even when diverse particles come out?

Conservation of angular momentum.

PS: It isn't my model. I didn't write those papers. I just read them.

Quote from THHuxleynew

In (2) we have a charge rotating with no mechanism to make this happen. In the 1920s this was perfectly acceptable, when very little was understood. Now that we have very accurate predictive and coherent models for all the subatomic behaviour we can see you need a very large motivation to prefer a more complex model with a new magic force, no simple dynamics, no easy correspondence with QM. Spin as a spinor is beautifully simple. Spin as some composite object having not understood dynamics (why does the charge rotate, many other questions) even if identical behaviour can in the end be got from it is much more complex and therefore not attractive (sorry about the pun).

It isn't charge rotating. It's an electromagnetic wave rotating, in the guise of a "spinor". It looks like a standing wave, but there's angular momentum in there. A rotational Poynting vector.

GNUFDL spinor image by Slawkb, see Wikipedia.

As for you having a predictive model, it's all postdiction. As for magic force, messenger particles constitutes the magic force.

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In (3) we have a mechanism (clever) for the rotating charge - it is not charge, it is an e-m field with a twist. We then have a much worse complexity - how is this twisting and variable sized pocket of spacetime formed? How does it evolve? Why does it evolve. Why do we not see evidence of these spacetime pockets elsewhere? How can these low mass-energy high curvature regions so different from GR curvature relate to GR? Why do particle accelerator experiments, which bound electron size much lower than this, not detect the ring/torus? Or, if the ring is variable size, how does that work - yet more complexity.

Think of gamma-gamma pair production. You start with two electromagnetic field variations. You end up with two standing electromagnetic fields. Two "spinors". It isn't a "much worse complexity". A spinor is simply a wave going round and round, one that looks like a standing wave. Don't forget you can diffract the electron, and refract it. It has a crystal clear wave nature. Then in a magnetic field it goes round and round due to Larmor precession. That spin is real.

So is the high curvature, but I don't have hard scientific evidence for that. Just a pedigree that goes back to guys like Maxwell and Clifford. There's curvature because the photon is a wave in space. A gravitational field isn't a place where space is curved, it's a place where space is inhomogeneous. That's what Einstein said. Particle experiments don't detect a ring torus because the electron is a spindle-sphere torus. With a spherical symmetry. You inflate the flat strip to a ring torus, then you inflate that through the horn torus stage to the spindle-sphere stage.

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e-m fields, Maxwells eqns magic complexity ==> electron

Looks much more complex than what QFT does, which goes the other way:

electrons + virtual photons as force carriers ==> maxwells equations, e-m fields

Virtual particles don't exist. Charge is topological. Mass is resistance to change-in-motion for a wave in a closed path. it isn't complex. It just means the Standard Model is wrong on multiple counts. Which is why you're fighting shy of facing up to the electron.

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Especially because we get photons and electrons with their properties out of an "8-fold way" symmetry of particles all of which have now been discovered, and which have conserved quantities according to the symmetries. OK, there is quite a bit of complexity here because SU(2) is broken, but it is still a very very simple structure from which the properties of electrons and e-m fields can be derived.

Oh please, Huxley. The study of ephemera tells you nothing about the properties of photons and electrons and electromagnetic fields. You don't understand the first thing about the photon, or pair production, or the electron. Or the electromagnetic field. It has a "screw" nature you know. See Maxwell’s On Physical Lines of Force, and note this: “a motion of translation along an axis cannot produce a rotation about that axis unless it meets with some special mechanism, like that of a screw”.

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In addition - both (2) and (3) suffer from hand waving. They do not provide a precise, unique, calculable model of electron dynamics. If they did, a lot of precise checking could be done. They do not (AFAIK) even approximate the known QM wave packet properties - All that solid state physics stuff where electron orbitals can be calculated. I'll save the more specific and serious criticisms for later.

There's no hand waving in electron diffraction. Trying to dismiss the Davisson-Germer experiment and the Thomson and Reid diffraction experiment because they don't provide "a calculable model of electron dynamics" cuts no ice.

Quote from THHuxleynew

and their point-particle electron - that is more difficult, because point particle is simplest and works. No elaborate model makes different better predictions

It doesn't work because it flatly contradicts the hard scientific experiment.

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A mathematical technique can however enable understanding of physics through a rigorous mathematical model with calculable predictions.

No it can't. It obviously can't. Because the mathematical technique is based on a point-particle electron which is at odds with the evidence. Then you have to introduce virtual particles to fill the gap in your understanding with mysticism.

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And it is true that without mathematical understanding, you will never have complete physical understanding.

Sure. But the physics has to take priority. The experiment trumps the maths.

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You will never have a GUT. Not sure what is the point of that assertion?

You were waxing lyrical about GUTs. The point is that when you understand the forces you understand that they don't unify at high energy.

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That's not bad. Which means the electron isn't a point particle. N'est pas? Well it depends on what you mean by point particle. In QM - or QFT - all so-called point particles in finite space have indeterminate position, momentum. "Point particle" means that no internal structure can be observed - just the wave function. Sometimes particles that appear point particles reveal structure at higher energies than we have been able to probe of course. You can never rule that out.

I mean the wave nature of matter. The electron has a wave nature, not a point-particle nature. Its field is what it is. It isn't some speck that "has" a field, it is field. The diffractiona nd refraction experiments tell you it's a wave. It's structure is revealed the way it moves in a magnetic field. Something is going round and round. The g factor tells you it's going round twice. The lack of an electric dipole tells you is has a spherical geometry. And so on.

Quote from THHuxleynew

JohnDuffield you do not of course know me very well, I seldom ignore tech details others post.

In this case you have posted a whole load of papers from 1913 - 1935, when sub-atomic physics was in an initial state of flux and the mystery of "what are sub-atomic particles" was still in its early days of investigation. You have to be very sure of yourself (as I can see here you are) to ignore the next 84 years of particle physics research, deciding that you alone realise where all other physicists went wrong.

It isn't just me. There's a lot of people who take issue with the Copenhagen School and their point-particle electron. Unfortunately they tend to struggle to get their papers into a high-impact journal.

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You summarise (I paraphrase) "in the 1930s QFT was plagued by severe difficulties, caused by infinities, themselves caused by the assumption that electrons are point particles". I agree. QFT was very difficult for anyone to accept because of those infinities, and other problems. However the next 35 years show how one by one all those difficulties were overcome.

But they weren't overcome. The situation only get worse.

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You don't consider this - for example regularisation - relatively late to the party - which turns a fix into a proper and provably correct mathematical technique. we will probably understand more when we have a GUT - which now looks highly likely to be fundamentally quantum, with the equations of GR emerging naturally from an emergent spacetime produced from quantum events.

A mathematical technique can never substitute for understanding the physics. You will never have a GUT. Spacetime does not emerge from quantum events. That's just another fantasy that stems from a lack of understanding of the fundamental physics. See Svend Rugh and Henrik Zinkernagel’s 2002 paper on the quantum vacuum and the cosmological constant problem. They point out that photons don't scatter on the vacuum fluctuations of QED. If they did, “astronomy based on the observation of electromagnetic light from distant astrophysical objects would be impossible”. Hence when they say the QED vacuum energy concept “might be an artefact of the formalism with no physical existence independent of material systems”, they’re right.

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I think anyone wanting to consider this topic "is QFT correct" could properly look at the various ideas floated in the 1920s and 1930s, but they would also need to look with sympathy and understanding at the work afterwards. That includes the later (19702, 1980s) work on renormalisation groups and regularisation. It is often the case that hacky things that give the right physical results but seem weird end up having proper mathematical explanations. So it has been with renormalisation, although i'm not saying we have a full underlying explanation of QFT - clearly we need a GUT for that. Still, the direction of travel is towards problems with QFT being solved and successes multiplying. The strong indications are that a GUT will emerge from basic QM operations and so at a fundamental level explain QFT as well as GR.

As above. All that GUT stuff about the forces unifying at some high energy is just cargo-cult nonsense. Sorry Huixley, but when you understand how the forces work, from reading all those old papers, you know this.

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Anyway enough on your throwaway dismissal of QFT (forgive me if I've misinterpreted it, it sounded like that).

It isn't throwaway. It's considered.

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I'm going to summarise what I think are the key ideas in these early papers (you may disagree) and your comments, and then state how I think they relate to modern thinking, and why few others agree with you that the 84 years after have gone in a wrong direction which can now clearly be identified. The three basic ideas are:

(1) there is plentiful experimental proof that electrons are waves

(2) the electron is not a fundamental particle, but rather has structure: as a rotating ring or other shape of charge. The rotation then means that geometrically we have a torus, but AFA these papers go the exact topology is not so important, whereas the fact that an electron is a rotating charge is.

(3) electrons are in fact spacetime twists carrying standing wave photons, which appear to be charge because the twisting space causes the E field to be uniformly inward. (3) has some recent support, so I've added it. Although I'm not sure it existed in any of the early papers.

Yes, the evidence says electrons are waves. But it isn't rotating charge. It's a rotating field-variation that results in a standing wave. Then we call it charge. Your point 3 isn't bad, but note that there isn't really an E field. It's an electromagnetic field, which is the twisted space.

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I'm going to give you one line answers to (1) and (2) and (3) on the understanding that much more could be said on each, but a summary shows you and everyone else where I stand. (1) - indeed electrons are waves and QM describes exquisitely well all of the many effects that this causes. A "rotator" view of electrons would need exactly to emulate the defined QM wave characteristics which are precisely defined and consistent with experiment. Thus, specifically, the frequency of these waves varies with electron momentum. The waves vary in shape, forming specific calculable functions in potential wells or in boxes or in free space. The "size" of the electron (viewed as a wave packet) varies from smaller than we can measure to as large as the universe (only a slight exaggeration).

That's not bad. Which means the electron isn't a point particle. N'est pas?

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(2) and (3) These two models are different and have severe different individual technical critiques, which we could consider later. They share one critique as follows: Both suffer from a similar enormous complexity.

It isn't complicated Huxley. It's simple. Drat, the wife is calling. I have to go. I'll explain why it's simple tomorrow.

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In (2) we have a charge rotating with no mechanism to make this happen. In the 1920s this was perfectly acceptable, when very little was understood. Now that we have very accurate predictive and coherent models for all the subatomic behaviour we can see you need a very large motivation to prefer a more complex model with a new magic force, no simple dynamics, no easy correspondence with QM. Spin as a spinor is beatifully simple. Spin as some composite object having not understood dynamics (why does the charge rotate, many other questions) even if identical behaviour can in the end be got from it is much more complex and therefore not attractive (sorry about the pun).

In (3) we have a mechanism (clever) for the rotating charge - it is not charge, it is an e-m field with a twist. We then have a much worse complexity - how is this twisting and variable sized pocket of spacetime formed? How does it evolve? Why does it evolve. Why do we not see evidence of these spacetime pockets elsewhere? How can these low mass-energy high curvature regions so different from GR curvature relate to GR? Why do particle accelerator experiments, which bound electron size much lower than this, not detect the ring/torus? Or, if the ring is variable size, how does that work - yet more complexity.

e-m fields, Maxwells eqns magic complexity ==> electron

Looks much more complex than what QFT does, which goes the other way:

electrons + virtual photons as force carriers ==> maxwells equations, e-m fields

Especially because we get photons and electrons with their properties out of an "8-fold way" symmetry of particles all of which have now been discovered, and which have conserved quantities according to the symmetries. OK, there is quite a bit of complxity here because SU(2) is broken, but it is still a very very simple structure from which the properties of electrons and e-m fields can be derived.

In addition - both (2) and (3) suffer from hand waving. They do not provide a precise, unique, calculable model of electron dynamics. If they did, a lot of precise checking could be done. They do not (AFAIK) even approximate the known QM wave packet properties - All that solid state physics stuff where electron orbitals can be calculated.

I'll save the more specific and serious criticisms for later.

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I must go. I'll just say this for now: displacement current does what is says on the tin.

Quote from Wyttenbach

You should start with the proton picture as this is well defined. To work with Clifford torus in a mind structure it took me about 3 moths of training but adding one more dimension for charge took much longer...

All points noted, Jürg. I fear we may have to differ on this. The fundamental physics I've been doing is all very "plain vanilla" with nothing mysterious.

Quote from Wyttenbach

If you understand how charge is generated in SO(4) then this is no longer a mystery. The fact is: No magnetic moment without ring a current (Sorry for QM ..) . -->We have to look for a hen-egg structure that is self sustaining and upholds both. In SO(4) the virtual charge stays e.g. in 5 rotation dimensions where as the magnetic generation flux stays in 4, that are enclosed by the charge loop. This implies that you have in average a constant change in flux (dϕ/dX)

in one dimension.

I'm sorry Wyttenbach, but I'm still not getting this 4D thing. I understand how charge is generated. Or at least I think I do. You simply wrap a sinusoidal electromagnetic field-variation into a double loop Mobius-like formation:

Then instead of a field-variation, it looks like a standing field. The Mobius strip is the same width all round, and appears to be phase-invariant. There's two orthogonal rotations. Only it isn't some flat strip, it's a torus, with no cowlick. As per the hairy ball theorem:

Only it's a torus that's so fat it looks like a sphere. Hence the electron has no discernible electric dipole. Here's a fatter torus:

Here's an even fatter torus:

Now it starts to look like an electron in a textbook:

But this depiction still isn't right, because the electron's field is what it is. Because the photon isn't a flat strip of paper. It's wave in space. So the first picture ought to be more like this:

The black round thing in the middle on the right corresponds to the purple sphere. Only the purple sphere isn't what the electron is. It's more like the eye of the storm.

Only there's two orthogonal rotations going on. It's difficult to draw, but it's something like this:

Poynting flux image found on physics stack exchange

Can you explain how charge is generated in SO(4) in this context?

Oh for God's sake, the images don't work. When I edit the post the images are visible, when I save it, they're not. Sorry Wyttenbach, I have to go.Use the quote option to view the images.

Quote from Curbina

I don’t say it’s easy to visualize it, it’s “mind bending” and that’s perhaps why Wyttenbach’s idea is so good and so hard to digest at the same time. The vortex soliton you talk about can also be looked as a 3D projection of paths on the Clifford torus. One has to understand that all models are just tools to try to understand reality, and if the model provide better predictions one can use it to expand it until a new model is thought to fit better reality.

Sounds good to me.

Re an extra dimension, I do recall talking about Flatland, where horizontal stretching offers an extra dimension of sorts. It isn't an extra dimension like bending a part of Flatland into a circle in the third dimension. But it's something that needs more than just a simple 2D length x length measurement. Maybe Wyttenbach's fourth dimension is something like that. A wave in 3D space stretches space. Even when it's going round and round.

And so to bed.

Quote from THHuxleynew

I'm fighting on this thread against people who do not understand the merits of the Standard Model, and erroneously think its successes are caused by fudge factors. I often think such views are psychological projection.

The psychological projection is coming from you, Huxley. Now go and read those papers instead of studiously ignoring them. See post 315.

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That is not to say it is complete, or satisfactory. Things not understood:

They are understood. But you refuse to admit that understanding because it shows the Standard Model to be wrong.

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Why is magnetic moment the sum of angular and spin components? what connects these two things. Almost certainly we need a deeper understanding of QM (from a quantum gravity theory) to get this. Resorting to classical ideas (spinning charge in some understood continuous geometry) seems all wrong because we know at the size of an electron that the world is quantum, not classical, and that electrons are as near as we know point particles. There is no reason to think that classical notions of rotation help. On the other hand degrees of freedom seem a very basic to QM thing, and geometry in terms of number of dimensions, and dimensions "curled up" that is not seen by us, are all possible I guess. So topology that has macroscopic visualisations is in the frame.

Because a particle like an electron is a rotational spin ½ wave that looks like a standing wave. That deeper understanding was in the 1920s papers. Now it's been expunged and wilfully ignored and hidden behind paywalls. There is no evidence whatsoever that the electron is a point particle. On Wikipedia you can read that “observation of a single electron in a Penning trap shows the upper limit of the particle’s radius is 10⁻²² meters”. But when you follow up on the references and read Hans Dehmelt’s 1989 Nobel lecture you realise that the upper limit is merely an extrapolation. It’s an extrapolation from a measured g value, which relies upon “a plausible relation given by Brodsky and Drell (1980) for the simplest composite theoretical model of the electron”. When you track back to Brodsky and Dell you can read the anomalous magnetic moment and limits on fermion substructure. And what you read is this: “If the electron or muon is in fact a composite system, it is very different from the familiar picture of a bound state formed of elementary constituents since it must be simultaneously light in mass and small in spatial extension”. The conclusion is effectively this: if an electron is composite it must be small. But there’s no actual evidence that it’s composite. So it’s a non-sequitur to claim that the electron must be small. Meanwhile all the evidence points to the wave nature of matter. Not the point-particle nature of matter.

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What is QM? For me, and many, it seems very likely that the whole of QM, entanglement, virtual particles, QFT, is fundamental to physics, and when there is a unification with GR will explain GR. This world is so different from macroscopic physics that intuition from that does not work, one reason why I am unhappy with semi-classical theories, or theories that attempt to model QM in some classical way. It is understandable that people look for that, but I see it as anthropomorphism. No reason for fundamental physics to have any intuitive connection with macroscopic ideas and geometry, now that we are pretty sure that spacetime is an emergent phenomenon.

Virtual particles are virtual, see the peculiar notion of exchange forces part I and part II by Cathryn Carson. Einstein explained GR. That world is not at all different from macroscopic physics. Electrons go round in circles in a magnetic field like boomerangs go round in circles, because of precession. Not because magnets twinkle. Spacetime is not an emergent phenomenon. It's a mathematical abstraction that models space at all times, and therefore is static.

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Where do the particle masses come from? random symmetry breaking, or something more?

From a wave's resistance to change-in-motion when it's in a closed path. Hence the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content. Hence E=mc².

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Do we invoke anthropic principle in a multiverse to determine values that give rise to non-trivial physics and astronomy? I would not mind doing that - others would.

No.

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Why those symmetry groups? Are there others hidden to us? Lots of other stuff

Understand the photon first. Then pair production. Then the electron. Not pretty patterns in the ephemera. You will never understand gunpowder by gazing upwards at the New Year's Eve fireworks.

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But it is no good turning your back on fundamental structure...

That's exactly what you're doing.

ALL: Watch Huxley studiously ignore all the papers and evidence given in my post 315. That ought to tell you everything you need to know.

Quote from Curbina

If you look at the Clifford torus that is the topological representation of the SO(4) space you realize, as Wyttenbach has said already, that this Moebius strip representation is the 3D projection of the 4D path of the electron. You can trace that Moebius shape as a path over the surface of the torus. So the wave is the 2D shadow, the Moebius strip is the 3D and the torus is the 4D. Is the same phenomena that is being seen from different perspectives without finding the relation, until you see the torus as the volume where the electron “lives”.

I just don't "get" this 4D path thing. Sorry. Maybe it's because I've lived with the Williamson / van der Mark electron for so long:

Image from Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology? by John Williamson and Martin van der Mark

It's a three-dimensional steady-state vortex solution with no singularities. Like a Hopf fibration:

Public domain image by David A Richter, see Wikipedia commons, caption: Some of the flow lines along a Hopf fibration

I have difficulty getting to grips with a fourth dimension. I think of Charles Galton Darwin's the electron as a vector wave where “it is possible to regard the wave of the electron as in ordinary space” and I struggle to think of it as anything else.

This is important. Note what Born and Infeld said. “in the classical theory we got the result S = D x B = E x H”. They were talking about the Poynting vector, and I said that's light going round and round. Now read this excerpt from something I've written previously:

Take a look at what Feynman said in the Feynman lectures: “Suppose we take the example of a point charge sitting near the center of a bar magnet, as shown in Fig. 27–6. Everything is at rest, so the energy is not changing with time. Also, E and B are quite static. But the Poynting vector says that there is a flow of energy, because there is an E × B that is not zero. If you look at the energy flow, you find that it just circulates around and around. There isn’t any change in the energy anywhere – everything which flows into one volume flows out again. It is like incompressible water flowing around. So there is a circulation of energy in this so-called static condition. How absurd it gets!”

Fig 27-6 from The Feynman Lectures by Michael A Gottlieb and Rudolf Pfeiffer

Only it isn’t absurd at all. The Wikipedia Poynting vector in a static field article talks about a circular flow of electromagnetic energy. It shows the Poynting vector marked with an S. It goes around and around. The article says this: “While the circulating energy flow may seem nonsensical or paradoxical, it is necessary to maintain conservation of momentum. Momentum density is proportional to energy flow density, so the circulating flow of energy contains an angular momentum”. Feynman also said this: “we know also that there is momentum circulating in the space. But a circulating momentum means that there is angular momentum. So there is angular momentum in the field”. You bet there’s angular momentum in the field.

That's because the electron is a 511keV photon going round and round. When you've read all those papers and looked at the evidence, it's obvious.

Quote from THHuxleynew

I think a lot of the internet dislike of SM comes from people who have never fully understood QFT and QED. They are not simple, although also not impossibly complex. Then, further dislike comes from the fact that:

• QCD calculations are so difficult, and quark containment is counter-intuitive and different from other forces.
• In QED renormalisation sounds like a fudge (and has often been described as this, and seems weird). It is not simple to understand, though quite simple to do.

I strongly recommend this description of renormalisation.

At the end, and relevant to the "fudge" issue, this paragraph on regularisation:

Since the quantity is ill-defined, in order to make this notion of canceling divergences precise, the divergences first have to be tamed mathematically using the theory of limits, in a process known as regularization...

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All: Huxley isn't being straight with you here. He's giving you a false narrative.

The Wikipedia history of quantum field theory article tells you how in the 1930s QFT was “plagued by several serious theoretical difficulties”, and the situation was dire, desperate, and gloomy. The problem of infinities or “divergence” was the big one. It stems from the point-particle electron. This was proposed by Yakov Frenkel in 1925. He said electrons “have no extension in space at all. Inner forces between the elements of an electron do not exist because such elements are not available”. This was adopted and promoted by Heisenberg and Pauli and the rest of the Copenhagen school despite the following:

• Gustav Mie’s 1913 foundations of a theory of matter. That’s where Mie said electrons “are not, as has been believed for twenty years, foreign particles in the ether, but they are only places at which the ether takes on a particular state”. Mie’s chapter 2 is Knot Singularities in the Field.

• The 1917 Einstein-de Haas effect which demonstrated that spin angular momentum is indeed of the same nature as the angular momentum of rotating bodies as conceived in classical mechanics.

• Arthur Compton;s 1921 paper on the magnetic electron. He referred to the Parson electron or magneton which featured a rotation with a “peripheral velocity of the order of that of light”. Compton said “we may suppose with Nicholson that instead of being a ring of electricity, the electron has a more nearly isotropic form”.

• The 1922 Stern-Gerlach experiment which demonstrated that the spatial orientation of the electron's angular momentum is quantized. They used silver atoms, which have an outer electron.

• Louis de Broglie's 1923 letter to Nature on waves and quanta. He said he’d ”been able to show that the stability conditions of the trajectories in Bohr’s atom express that the wave is tuned with the length of the closed path”. His 1924 thesis was on the theory of quanta,

• The 1926 discovery of electron spin by Samuel Goudsmit and George Uhlenbeck. Their paper on spinning electrons and the structure of spectra was printed in Nature.

• Llewellyn Thomas's 1926 paper on the motion of the spinning electron.

• Erwin Schrödinger's 1926 paper quantization as a problem of proper values, part I. He said things like “a closer definition of the surface harmonic can be compared with the resolution of the azimuthal quantum number into an ‘equatorial’ and a ‘polar’ quantum’” and the “main difference is that de Broglie thinks of progressive waves, while we are led to stationary proper vibrations”.

• Erwin Schrödinger's 1926 paper quantization as a problem of proper values, part II. He talked about wavefunction and phase and geometrical optics, and on page 18 said classical mechanics fails for very small dimensions of the path and for very great curvature.

• Erwin Schrödinger's 1926 paper quantization as a problem of proper values, part 3. He says “since then I have learned what is lacking from the from the most important publications of G E Uhlenbeck and S Goudsmit”. He referred to the angular moment of the electron which gives it a magnetic moment, and said “the introduction of the paradoxical yet happy conception of the spinning electron will be able to master the disquieting difficulties which have latterly begun to accumulate”.

• Erwin Schrödinger's 1926 Physical Review An Undulatory Theory of the Mechanics of Atoms and Molecules. This is where he said material points consist of, or are nothing but, wave-systems.

• Franco Raseti and Enrico Fermi’s 1926 paper on the rotating electron. They said “the electron has almost always been considered to be a material point up to now”. They also said this: “it was only in recent years that Uhlenbeck and Goudsmit made the hypothesis that the reason for some spectroscopic phenomena – in particular, the anomalous Zeeman effect – was to be found in a structural element of the electron. Those authors assumed precisely that the electron is animated with a rotational motion around itself, in such a way that it possesses a quantity of a real motion, namely, a magnetic moment”. Raseti and Fermi also said “despite the grave energetic difficulties that have been pointed out, one can conclude that the hypothesis of the rotating electron must not be abandoned”. Unfortunately for quantum electrodynamics, it was.

• The 1927 Davisson-Germer experiment, as well as diffraction experiments by George Paget Thomson and Andrew Reid which proved the wave nature of matter.

• Charles Galton Darwin’s 1927 Nature paper on the electron as a vector wave, which talked about a spherical harmonic for the two directions of spin.

• Charles Galton Darwin's 1927 PRSA paper on the electron as a vector wave. He said we must regard the electron as a wave, and its motion in free space or weak fields can be treated by the ordinary theory of waves. He said “it is possible to regard the wave of the electron as in ordinary space”.

• Charles Galton Darwin's 1928 papers on the wave equations of the electron, the magnetic moment of the electron, and on the diffraction of the magnetic electron.

• Louis de Broglie's 1929 Nobel lecture on the wave nature of the electron?

• Robert Oppenheimer’s 1930 note on the theory of the interaction of field and matter. Oppenheimer said “the theory, is, however, wrong, since it gives a displacement of the spectral lines… which is in general infinite”.
• Landau and Rudolf Peierls' 1931 extension of the uncertainty principle to relativistic quantum theory. They talked of absurd results and the complete failure of the theory, and said “it would be surprising if the formalism bore any resemblance to reality”.
• Max Born and Leopold Infeld's 1935 paper on the quantization of the new field theory II. On page 12 they said this: “the inner angular momentum plays evidently a similar role to the spin in the usual theory of the electron. But it has some great advantages: it is an integral of the motion and has a real physical meaning as a property of the electromagnetic field, whereas the spin is defined as an angular momentum of an extensionless point, a rather mystical assumption”. On page 17 they said this: “the rest-mass occurring in our theory is not, as in Dirac’s, an absolute constant of the system but the total internal energy, depending on rotation and internal motion of the parts of the system. An external field will influence not only the translational motion, but also these internal motions”. On page 23 they said this: “in the classical theory we got the result S = D x B = E x H”. They’re talking about the Poynting vector. That's light going round and round.

Renormalization was a kludge. A clumsy fix that was only necessary because the Copenhagen school somehow managed to successfully promote their point-particle electron. Despite all the evidence and papers to the contrary. It's been downhill ever since. Or should I say it's been all downhill since 1925. That was when Pauli shot down Ralph Kronig’s electron spin using the straw-man claim that the electron’s surface would have to be moving faster than light.

Quote from THHuxleynew

I guess THHNew is referring to the QED/QCD/ SU??? composite of ninety years of post-Bohr trial and error

Which most physicists would see as an incredibly exciting 90 years of theoretical and experimental progress, with extraordinary successes from QED and QCD, and predictions of particles only much later discovered.

However what physicists don't like is that the LHC has discovered no new physics - SM is too accurate, and it is annoying. Everyone was expecting new physics. Anyway I'm sure there will be new physics and a better more fundamental way to understand SM physics - but that will not come from those who claim incorrectly (as BH above) that accurate SM calculations do not exist for the things that they do exist for!

Here BTW is a good personal but accurate and well informed account of the development of the standard model, its strengths and weaknesses:

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1412/1412.4094.pdf

on electroweak unification

But there was a big problem with all these proposals. Some mechanism had to be found
to break the symmetry, leaving the photon massless while giving large masses to the other
gauge bosons. Just putting in masses by hand spoiled the nice properties of gauge theories,
and indeed rendered them unrenormalizable; the process of renormalization could not be
used to make them give finite answers. So people began to ask, could the symmetry be
broken spontaneously? Spontaneous symmetry breaking is a well-known and ubiquitous
phenomenon. It means that the underlying theory remains symmetric, but the particular
realization we are dealing with is not. It frequently occurs at a phase transition, as from
liquid to solid, where we move from a phase where the symmetry is manifest to one where it
is hidden. If you place a circular bowl of water on a table, it looks exactly the same from
every direction; it has rotational symmetry. But when it freezes, the ice crystals will line up
in particular directions, breaking the symmetry. The breaking is spontaneous in the sense
that we cannot predict in advance which direction will be chosen, unless we know of external
features that already break the symmetry, such as imperfections in the bowl.
However, this did not immediately solve the problem, because it was widely believed that
in any theory compatible with Einstein’s special theory of relativity spontaneous symmetry
breaking would always lead to the appearance of unwanted massless “Nambu-Goldstone
bosons”, unwanted because no one had seen any such particles, though they should have
been easy to detect. These particles correspond to waves in the direction of the symmetry
breaking. When Steven Weinberg visited Imperial College on sabbatical in 1961, he and
Salam spent a lot of time discussing this problem. Their unhappy conclusion, that such
particles are inevitable, was the content of the “Goldstone theorem”, published together with
Jeffrey Goldstone.
The escape from this obstacle was found in 1964 by three groups of people independently,
firstly François Englert and Robert Brout from Brussels, then Peter Higgs from Edinburgh,
and finally a couple of months later by two American colleagues, Gerald Guralnik and Carl
Richard Hagen, and myself at Imperial College. The three groups all published papers in
Physical Review Letters in the summer and autumn of 1964. ..

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It's one big fairy tale Huxley. A tottering tower of fantasy that's been peddled for so long that some think it's fact. Even though the predictions are postdictions, the "discoveries" are rigged, and it flatly contradicts classical electromagnetism, E=mc², and general relativity. Even though it's a pack of lies-to-children and a moveable feast: if some experiment shows the Standard Model to be wrong, it is adjusted to fit. Meanwhile it has no foundations: it does not explain the photon, or pair production, or the electron. It claims the electron is a point particle, even though all the evidence says it's the wave nature of matter and spin is real. Worse still, its advocates willfully refuse such foundations in the certain knowledge that they'll bring the whole edifice crashing down.

When you understand the electron, you understand that mass is resistance to change-in-motion for a wave in a closed path. So you know that the Higgs mechanism is wrong. When you understand the electron, you know that charge is what you get when you wrap a sinusoidal field-variation into a spin ½ path. So you know that color charge is wrong. When you know that an electron goes round and round in a magnetic field because of Larmor precession, you know that messenger particles do not exist. Then you know that quantum electrodynamics is pants. When you know that the neutron charge distribution matches the nuclear force, you know that the weak interaction is pants. When you understand the proton, you know that quantum chromodynamics is pants. When you know that light curves because the speed of light varies, you know that the great white hope called quantum gravity is trash. Knowledge of physics shows you just how awful the Standard Model is. And you can't stop that knowledge, Huxley. Because we have the internet. We will prevail.

Quote from Bob#2

Is the SM wrong? It surely is incomplete. Yet it has predicted and had many, many experimental verifications. Will it be proven absolutely wrong.

Very doubtful.

I'm sorry Bob, but it's a moveable feast that hasn't had many many expermental verifications. You need to read things like the 2003 physicsworld article Carlo Rubbia and the discovery of the W and Z by Gary Taubes. He doesn't actually use the phrase "scientific fraud", but he clearly implies that Rubbia faked it. Also read The Higgs Fake by Alexander Unzicker. It's a book published in 2013. In a nutshell, Unzicker says they selected the events they needed to get a bump on a graph, and then declared that this was 5-sigma proof of the existence of the Higgs boson. Regardless of the fact that the Higgs mechanism flatly contradicts E=mc².

Quote from Bob#2

So we have a few here that think the literal thousands of physicists over the past decades are blind and incoherent of thinking because they promote a

model that is different than "my pet theory".

I'm not talking about "my pet theory". I'm talking about Einstein's general relativity and papers by Schrodinger, Charles Galton Darwin, and Born and Infeld and others. It's only when you read the original material that you realise that it's people like Huxley who have the religious/tribalist view and will admit no error. See for example

Erwin Schrodnger's 1926 paper quantization as a problem of proper values, part II

Charles Galton Darwin’s 1927 paper on the electron as a vector wave,

Max Born and Leopold Infeld’s 1935 paper on the quantization of the new field theory II

Read this stuff, and other stuff like it, and you will know better. Do your own research and think for yourself.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Well, no. The field tensor Fuv or its GA equivalent waves. And the equations for this (Maxwell's equations) are Lorentz invariant. Maxwell did not put it together in one tensor and wrote separate differential equations. However space waving would be gravitational waves, quite a different beast.

No Huxley. A gravitational field is a place where space is inhomogeneous. Not curved. So a gravitational wave is a transient inhomogeneity of space. Not space curving or waving. Now go and read what Percy Hammond said in the 1996 Compumag article The Role of the Potentials in Electromagnetism: “We conclude that the field describes the curvature that characterizes the electromagnetic interaction". Read the material I told Bob about too.

Quote from uncertainH

I agree with you John. Space "remains the sole medium of reality" is an excellent qualitative way to state it but we still don't know how pair production actually works in an exact quantitative way. And yes mass is resistance to change in motion but that is a description of how mass behaves and how we measure it. Sort of like describing a car as thing that moves when you step on a pedal doesn't tell me anything about what a car is or how it works.

You'll never know how pair production works in an exact quantitative way. Because understanding how pair production works is qualitative. Ditto for mass. You can know all the maths in the world and not understand anything. People like Sabine Hossenfelder call it Lost in Math.

As for pair production, IMHO you have to understand the photon first. You have to understand that it has an E=hf wave nature, and that it moves through space. When an ocean wave moves through the sea, the sea waves. When a seismic wave moves through the ground, the ground waves. So, what waves when a photon moves through space? There can only be one answer, and that answer must be space. Space waves. That's what guys like Maxwell and Clifford were saying. Once you know this you can reason that space is curved where a photon is. Because displacement current does what it says on the tin. So then you can reason that another photon moving through this space will curve. So what might happen if it curves so much that it ends up moving through itself? Let's phone a friend on that. What's that Erwin? "Let us think of a wave group of the nature described above, which in some way gets into a small closed ‘path’, whose dimensions are of the order of the wave length". Ah, I get you. It's like "What does a hedgehog do when threatened?"

Hedgehog image © Warren photographic

Quote from THHuxleynew

DF: I'm afraid I won't be able to help you much more - and you do spend a lot of time trying to teach me physics at the level of A-level school physics - which is a bit silly. And your level of assumption about what I'm likely to learn in this area makes communication quite difficult.

My communication is crystal clear. You believe in some ersatz doppelganger general relativity where the speed of light is constant and where light curves because it "follows the curvature of spacetime". It doesn't. It curves because the speed of light is spatially variable. Like Einstein said. There's clear evidence for this in that optical clocks go slower when they're lower. Light curves wherever there's a gradient in the speed of light. That's equivalent to wherever spacetime is tilted. It's something like the path of the marble is curved because the board is tilted, not because the board is curved:

Marble from the house of marbles, board and arrow added by me

Quote

I should perhaps have been more precise. Of course F_uv (the e-m field tensor, describing electric and magnetic fields and charge) corresponds to mass-energy. However, since we all know that.

Aaaargh! It's the electromagnetic field! The electron doesn't have an electric field and a magnetic field, it has an electromagnetic field. You know Huxley, sometimes it's as if Maxwell's unification never happened. Just about all contemporary physicists talk about electric fields and magnetic fields without understanding that they're just the spatial and time derivatives of potential. They're two sides of the same coin. See the upper portion of the picture below? That's your typical photon depiction, with orthogonal electric and magnetic waves. But it's the wrong picture. The right picture is underneath. There's only one wave there:

The moral of the tale Huxley, is that once you understand the photon, you can understand pair production. Then you can understand the electron, then mass, and charge, and why electrons and positrons move the way that you do. Then you can understand the proton and the neutron and the nuclear force. And when you understand these things, you understand why the Higgs mechanism contradicts E=mc², and is wrong. You understand why messenger particles are wrong, why colour charge is wrong, and why the Standard Model is wrong. And most of all, you understand why people like you stand four square in the way of scientific progress. It's because you've painted yourself into a corner with cargo-cult science, Huxley, and you will not admit that any of it is wrong. Of course, when I say "you" I'm thinking of all those people like you. People who have been digging physics into a hole for fifty years, and can't stop digging. It's got to stop, Huxley. It's got to stop.

Quote from uncertainH

I have often thought that spacetime and mass are the yin-yang of energy. When it is said that a massive body conditions the surrounding space it is more likely the other way around, that the conditions of space create what we measure to be mass. In pair production mass-less energy is converted into mass and charge, likely by light being confined in a small space. It doesn't acquire mass and then start conditioning the surrounding space, it must be space itself that is modifying it own curvature in real time at the speed of light due to particular configuration of energy. It is that deeper connection between energy and the properties of spacetime that I think is missing.

It isn't missing. people just don't know about it. See Einstein's 1930 Nottingham lecture. He said space “remains the sole medium of reality”. People don't quite get this, but it's easy to understand it when you see it. Imagine you have a block of gin-clear ghostly elastic jelly representing space. You slide a hypodermic needle into the centre of the block, and inject more jelly. This represents a concentration of energy bound up as the matter of a massive star. It creates a pressure gradient in the surrounding jelly. Stress is directional pressure, the pressure is outwards, and Einstein’s equation G_μν = 8πT_μν is modelling the way gin-clear ghostly elastic space is conditioned by the energy you added. But don’t forget that you added jelly to represent energy, and that the jelly also represents space. At some deep fundamental level, space and energy are the same thing.

Quote

I'm really enjoying this thread. Thanks everyone for your contributions. Looking back at the title of the thread I can only conclude that if anyone tells you what mass really is you can be sure that it is obviously false information.

Mass is just resistance to change-in-motion. It's easier to slow down a skateboard than a truck.