Posts by JohnDuffield

Quote from Cydonia

JohnDuffield

The picture above you shared is false, the one below remains the good one. It's a mistake to separate mass representation , here the earth in 3D, from empty space all around, represented in 2D. Both a mistake to separate space / time from mass / energy on the other side.

The mass, so the earth here, is only a 3D cylindrical "plication" from surrounding "mesh", so the void.

the analogy would be a 3D spot on your 2D skin, they are both composed from the same "material".

Gravity is something else ..

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I'm sorry Cydonia, what you're saying isn't clear. Can I say this: there is no curvature in some unseen dimension. The picture shows a “curved metric”, and a metric is associated with measurement. As for what you’re measuring, imagine you could place a 15 x 15 array of optical clocks throughout a horizontal slice of space around the Earth. Then you plot all the clock rates, such that the lower slower clock rates generate data points lower down in a 3D image, and the higher faster clock rates generate data points higher up in the 3D image. When you join the dots, your plot looks like this:

It's a plot of the spatially variable speed of light, that's all. Light curves because the speed of light is spatially variable, not for any other reason. Read this: “Second, this consequence shows that the law of the constancy of the speed of light no longer holds, according to the general theory of relativity, in spaces that have gravitational fields. As a simple geometric consideration shows, the curvature of light rays occurs only in spaces where the speed of light is spatially variable”. This explanation was erased at some point. In the 1960s I think. I'm note sure when. Irwin Shapiro was still talking about the variable speed of light in 1964. His paper was all about what we now call the Shapiro delay. Wikipedia faithfully quotes what Shapiro said, which is that “the speed of a light wave depends on the strength of the gravitational potential along its path”.

OK sorry guys, I've got to go to bed.

Quote from THHuxleynew

GR does not use Newtonian potential. Try again with g_uv?

See the Einstein quote! The one where he referred to the gravitation potentials g_μν!

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I've never denied that empty space (in general) is neither isotropic nor homogeneous, because mass exists and distorts things - although, as I pointed out, there are homogeneous and isotropic models with and without (uniform) mass and with or without curvature.

You still aren't getting this distinction between space and spacetime. Look again at what Einstein said. A gravitational field is a place where space is neither homogeneous nor isotropic. So where space is homogeneous and isotropic, light goes straight, there is no gravitational field, and there is no spacetime curvature. Homogeneous isotropic space is a place where spacetime is flat. Do not confuse yourself with homogeneous spacetimes.

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However, you are not paying attention to the definition of curved spacetime (Ruv not equal 0). Curved spacetime is curved spacetime, R_uv neq 0. I'm not sure how you define curved space, pls give me the maths.

I can't define curved space using maths. Space is curved like bananas are curved. So the path of light is curved. Only we are talking about a very strong curvature here. Remember what Schrödinger said on page 27 of his 1926 paper quantization as a problem of proper values, part II. About light rays influencing one another and showing remarkable curvature. If it helps any see what Percy Hammond said in the 199 Compumag article The Role of the Potentials in Electromagnetism: “We conclude that the field describes the curvature that characterizes the electromagnetic interaction".

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As I've pointed out you need to look at the tensor equation for R_uv and what makes it non-zero. This is a second order PDE and T_uv is the source (or lambda if non-zero) that gives rise to curvature. It is a PDE so curvature propagates (as we know because mass generates curvature all around it).

Not mass. A concentration of energy results in a gravitational field. Which is inhomogeneous space. Not curved space. Again, spacetime curvature is the non-linearity in this inhomogeneity. Read the original material by Einstein, not the ersatz version from Misner Thorne and Wheeler.

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Anyway - none of this helps you with your non sequitur equating em fields to mass.

It isn't a non-sequitur. It's E=mc² . The mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content. Note how Einstien refers to "body" and "electron" on the same line:

Photon energy or photon momentum is a measure of resistance to change-in-motion for a wave moving linearly at c. Electron mass is resistance to change-in-motion for a wave going around and around at c. That’s it. It’s as simple as that. The electron is a body, the positron is a body. When they annihilate, they're two radiating bodies losing mass. All of it.

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Incidentally, I don't think you are in any position to criticise Wheeler. He may not be right, but as someone who learnt GR from MTW - a beautiful textbook - I'll not accept your critique of Wheeler till you can read and understand it.

I'm sorry Huxley, but Wheeler was wrong about so many things. Read the Einstein digital papers, and you'll know this. You'll learn that a concentration of energy in the guise of a massive star "conditions" the surrounding space, this effect diminishing with distance in a non-linear fashion. As a result the speed of light is "spatially variable", and as a result of that, light curves. Then because of the wave nature of matter and because spin is real, matter falls down. Misner Thorne and Wheeler don't say any of this. Because they were making it up as they went along. The bottom line is this, Huxley: just about everything you think you know about general relativity is wrong.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Spacetime is curved (in a technical sense) where mass-energy is and around that. That curvature gives rise to gravitation. Curvature is necessarily nonlinear, of course (or it would not be curvature).

I'm sorry Huxley, but that's wrong. Gravitational force is related to the first derivative of potential. It's the gradient in the potential, the local slope, which equates to the inhomogeneity of space. The tidal force is related to the second derivative of potential, which is in essence spacetime curvature. That's the non-linearity in the inhomogeneity. The inhomogeneity reduces as you move away from the central body. As far as you can tell, the force of gravity in the room you're in is 9.8m/s² at the floor and at the ceiling. So there's no detectable spacetime curvature. However your pencil still falls down. That's readily detectable. In other words, in the rubber-sheet analogy (which is not ideal but not as bad as you might think) the path of the light beam curves wherever the sheet is sloping. The curve of the light beam's path is not the curve of the sheet. The light beam do not "follow the curvature of spacetime".

CCASA image by Johnstone, see Wikipedia

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However homogeneity is something different. A very long time ago I wrote a maths dissertation on the topic "Homogeneous Relativistic Cosmologies". Alas at the time I did not do much work in maths, and it was not a great dissertation, nevertheless I'm aware of what homogeneity is, and homogeneous spacetimes can be curved, or flat. So I have to disagree with you unless you use these words in an unusual way...

I'm using the words in the Einstein way. He said this: “’empty space’ in its physical relation is neither homogeneous nor isotropic, compelling us to describe its state by ten functions (the gravitation potentials g_μν)". Like Wheeler, you're confusing space and spacetime. Curved spacetime is where the inhomogeneity of space is non-linear. See for example the 2008 paper Inhomogeneous vacuum: an alternative interpretation of curved spacetime. Curved space is curved space. It's the electromagnetic field, not the gravitational field.

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There is the stress-energy tensor that drives non-flat spacetime, R_uv is the Ricci curvature tensor, R is the (scalar) curvature, which depends on g_uv and R_uv because R = Trace_g R_uv

Take a look at the Ricci curvature tensor. It "represents the amount by which the volume of a narrow conical piece of a small geodesic ball in a curved Riemannian manifold deviates from that of the standard ball in Euclidean space". Take it literally, but replace the conical piece of a ball with a cube of space. Ricci curvature is telling you how the volume of your cubes vary. Like this:

Public domain image from NASA (I removed the moon and added the lattice lines and the light beam)

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The equation is complex because as here g_uv depends on R_uv, but then R depends on g (via the index raising necessary to obtain the trace) as well as R_uv, and R_uv depends on second derivatives of g. I'm sure you know this stuff, because it is the basic GR equations. My point is that you can be more precise about what you mean by curvature. I'd identify it with R_uv not R which can be 0 when R_uv is non-zero.

I'm being precise here Huxley. Spacetime curvature isn't spatial curvature. Somehow that got lost in the wash, along with the spatially-variable speed of light. I think it was in the so-called golden age: "Kip Thorne identifies the "golden age of general relativity" as the period roughly from 1960 to 1975 during which the study of general relativity,which had previously been regarded as something of a curiosity, entered the mainstream of theoretical physics. During this period, many of the concepts and terms which continue to inspire the imagination of gravitation researchers and the general public were introduced".

Quote from THHuxleynew

Gravity is an ultra-weak force. The spatial curvature around a photon (GR tells you - we can look at the tensor equations if you like) is incredibly small.... Could never ever be measured. To make photons curl up on each other you need a micro black hole.

(1) that would be much much heavier

(2) if only the mass-energy of a photon - (you can theoretically get a photon mass black hole) it would evaporate in hawking radiation

(3) either way when curved it would not be a photon, which from many experiments looks like an electromagnetic field and is always "uncurled" into the QM wave-packet that it is, can exactly measured, and agrees precisely with its standard definition.

You're missing the trick here Huxley. A gravitational field is a place where space is like neither homogeneous nor isotropic. Space isn't curved where a gravitational field is. It's inhomogeneous. Spacetime curvature is where the inhomogeneity is non-linear. To understand this, imagine you’re standing on a headland overlooking a flat calm sea near an estuary. The water is saltier on the left than on the right. You see a single ocean wave, and notice that its path curves left a little because of the salinity gradient. The sea is an analogy for space. The salinity gradient is an analogy for a gravitational field. The ocean wave is an analogy for a photon. Now look at the surface of the sea where the wave is. It’s curved. It’s curved in a far more dramatic fashion than the curved path of the wave. This might sound unfamiliar to you, and perhaps radical. But see what Percy Hammond said in the 1999 Compumag: “We conclude that the field describes the curvature that characterizes the electromagnetic interaction”. See what Schrödinger said on page 18 of his 1926 paper quantization as a problem of proper values, part II: “classical mechanics fails for very small dimensions of the path and for very great curvature”. Also see what Maxwell said when he was talking about displacement current in 1861: “light consists of transverse undulations in the same medium that is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena”. When Wheeler proposed his geon, he thought gravity was the cause. It isn't. Electromagnetism is the cause. He should have called it an electron.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

The refraction is only extrinsic approximation of gravitational lensing in similar way, like the curvature of 4D space-time is intrinsic one. Actually the very existence of dark matter indicates, that path of light across space-time isn't just about refraction. And the path of light around black holes is just topologically inverted path of light across Universe - and our Universe doesn't refract the light - it scatters it and this scattering can be approximated by bending of light for small curvatures - but not for larger ones.

We'll have to agree to differ on this Zephir. I've got to go, but take a look at page 26 of Schrödinger’s quantization as a problem of proper values, part II. That’s where he said “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”. On page 27 he talked about light rays influencing one another and showing remarkable curvature. Also see Born and 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”. The point to appreciate is that a photon is a wave in space. Space is curved where a photon is. And if a photon moves through that space, its path curves. Then if it moves through itself, it can end up in a closed path. Then it's phase invariant. That's what gauge invariance really is.

Quote from Wyttenbach

Ether is the next level of theory we have to take on. But now I would first like to understand what is behind a magnetic flux line? Why are only e, p, neutrino? stable states of magnetic flux? What is the form factor of charge?

I think the answer is in TQFT. I think the electron is a trivial-knot photon. The proton is the next knot in the knot table. A trefoil-knot photon. The electron g-factor is -2.002. The proton g factor of 5.585 is nearly three times as much.

CCASA image by Arpad Horvath see Wikipedia Public domain image by Jim Belk, see Wikipedia

See the picture of the trefoil knot on the right? Imagine it’s elastic, like a fat rubber band. If you threw rocks at it, the rocks would bounce back right in your face. Hence deep inelastic scattering. You might think there are hard points inside the proton, but there aren't any. It’s elastic so if you could grab hold of two of the loops and try to pull them apart, it would be more and more difficult, like the bag model. If you break it you aren't left with three loops. Now trace around the trefoil anticlockwise from the bottom left calling out the crossing-over directions: up down up. Now where have you heard that before? See my other posts where I inflated the torus into a spindle sphere torus. The electron has a spherical geometry and a toroidal topology. It's stable because h is what it is, and only one wavelength will do to make a "knot singularity in the field". You need a different wavelength for a more complex knot. As for magnetic flux lines, you might like to read a little something I wrote on the screw nature of electromagnetism. Followed by how a magnet works. IMHO classical electromagnetism is not well taught. John Jackson said “one should properly speak of the electromagnetic field F_μv rather than E or B separately”. But that’s in section 11. It ought to be in section 1.

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What is the impact on GER as we now know that gravity is an EM force?

It reverts to Einstein's original theory. The General Relativity you read about today is not true to Einstein's General Relativity.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

BTW the path of light in gravity field cannot be described by refraction rather by scattering. Einstein himself realized in 1908 already, that refraction-based approach to general relativity cannot be fully correct.

It's a refraction Zephir. Cross my heart and hope to die. It ain't called gravitational lensing for nothing. Refraction in glass is frequency-dependent because the light is interacting with electrons in the glass. In space it isn't. Your 1908 link doesn't work for me. See this. Einstein was talking about horizontal light rays. The vertical light rays don't bend. Note that he's talking about a variable c.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

This simple animation illustrates how curved space-time deflects path of light. In the vicinity of massive bodies the space-time gets locally more curved, so that photons are forced to travel along longer paths there...

In dense aether model the massive bodies are source of this disbalance itself due to their ability to shield transverse and longitudinal components of omnipresent vacuum energy at different distance...

Zephir, see where Einstein said a gravitational field is a place where space is “neither homogeneous nor isotropic”. He referred to Huygen’s principle and talked about “the refraction of light rays by the gravitational field”. As you know Einstein spoke of space as the aether of general relativity and Newton had a similar view. See Opticks query 20: “Doth not this aethereal medium in passing out of water, glass, crystal, and other compact and dense bodies in empty spaces, grow denser and denser by degrees, and by that means refract the rays of light not in a point, but by bending them gradually in curve lines?” Also see this:

Fair use excerpt from Newton’s views on aether and gravitation by Léon Rosenfeld 1969

Quote from THHuxleynew

I'm not as macho as you JD. I will happily rest with your statements and mine contradictory.This post is my last on these facts. if you post more independently false statements I may however find it difficult to resist correcting them as well.

Background links

here is an insightful Q&A on virtual particles answering most of these questions

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/…um/virtual_particles.html

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You haven't corrected anything from me. The Baez article by Matt McIrvin is junk. He doesn't even get the basics right. He said "an electromagnetic field wiggles in the same way when it possesses waves. Applying quantum mechanics to this oscillator reveals that it must also have discrete, evenly spaced energy levels". It isn't true. Photon energy is E=hf. The f can take any value, and so can E. He later says "the particle that emits the virtual photon loses momentum p in the recoil, and the other particle gets the momentum". That isn't true either. Positronium doesn't twinkle. As for his effort to "explain" an attractive force via virtual photons, it's just risible.

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energy conservation over intermediate states with VPs: https://www.quora.com/How-do-v…k-the-energy-conservation

There's nothing there. Just more mystic handwaving like "one particle at an instance would transform into combination of two different elementary particles for a very short interval of time".

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are virtual particles real: https://www.scientificamerican…re-virtual-particles-rea/

Oh not, not the Gordon Kane fairy tales again!

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also - for some info on the alternative (equivalent) idea of VPs being wiggles in the field, which nevertheless interact:

https://www.physicsforums.com/…articles-interact.588831/

Nothing to see.

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see above for why VPs don't contradict conservation of energy: look at the QM wave functions for a deeper understanding

I have the deeper understanding. It's me who knows how a magnet works, not you.

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SM says there are no first-order interaction photon-photon. However, an energetic photon can (briefly) turn into a (virtual) massive particle, which interacts with another photon. So we get higher-order interactions.

A photon doesn't turn into a virtual massive particle. Photons interact with photons, end of story. So the Standard Model is wrong. It falls at the first hurdle. It doesn't describe the photon, or how pair production works, or the electron. It has no foundations. It's a castle in the air.

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From quantum electrodynamics it can be found that photons cannot couple directly to each other, since they carry no charge, but they can interact through higher-order processes: a photon can, within the bounds of the uncertainty principle, fluctuate into a virtual charged fermion–antifermion pair, to either of which the other photon can couple. This fermion pair can be leptons or quarks. Thus, two-photon physics experiments can be used as ways to study the photon structure, or, somewhat metaphorically, what is "inside" the photon. Creation of a fermion–antifermion pair through the direct two-photon interaction.

I've told you that this is patent blatant nonsense. A 511keV photon doesn't fluctuate into a 511keV electron and a 511 keV positron. Conservation of energy forbids it. A 511keV electron and a 511 keV positron do not annihilate into a single photon. Conservation of momentum forbids it. And pair production does not occur because pair production occurred!

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There are three interaction processes:

• Direct or pointlike: The photon couples directly to a quark inside the target photon.^[7] If a lepton–antilepton pair is created, this process involves only quantum electrodynamics (QED), but if a quark–antiquark pair is created, it involves both QED and perturbative quantum chromodynamics (QCD).^[8][9][10]

The intrinsic quark content of the photon is described by the photon structure function, experimentally analyzed in deep-inelastic electron–photon scattering...

Surreal! There are no quarks inside a photon. You don't really believe this twaddle do you? Come on man! Get a grip!

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I've got no idea why you think that? Perhaps you could give a reference. Symmetries allow any particle to annihilate with its anti-particle to energy. Conservation of momentum and energy can always be satisfied with energy carried as two or more photons.

I gave you the interaction chart. You know that Feynman diagrams show the electron and positron interact by exchanging a photon. The electron is said to interact with the photon, and so is the positron. But in truth they interact with each other.

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I have no idea why you say this. it is 100% unevidenced. See above for why VPs pop in and out of existence. Light does not go round and round, because photons travel geodesics. But if they did, they would not form electrons since an electron has charge and spin, a photon has neither. Both charge and spin are conserved.

There is ample evidence for electron spin. The Einstein-de Haas experiment, the Stern-Gerlach experiment, circular electron motion in a magnetic field.

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See this long and useful account (with all derivations), of why Einstein in 1915, using complete GR doubled the deflection of light that he deduced in 1911, using only the equivalence principle. This is pure GR, and accounts for this fact with no reference to your "the horizontal component bends downwards".

You haven't even read it, have you? If you had you would have noticed this drawing:

Light curves downwards because the speed of light is spatially variable. The quote I gave earlier was an Einstein quote. Here it is again: 1920: “Second, this consequence shows that the law of the constancy of the speed of light no longer holds, according to the general theory of relativity, in spaces that have gravitational fields. As a simple geometric consideration shows, the curvature of light rays occurs only in spaces where the speed of light is spatially variable”. Light curves downward because the speed of light varies. Sonar waves curve downwards in the sea for the same reason:

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

Again, see Hans Ohanian’s 1984 paper what is spin? He said this: “the means for filling the gap have been at hand since 1939, when Belinfante established that the spin could be regarded as due to a circulating flow of energy”. We made that electron along with a positron out of light in gamma-gamma pair production. When we annihilate it with the positron what we get is light. So given that there's ample evidence that spin is real, what do you think is going round and round? Cheese?

Do you know what The Trouble with Physics really is, Huxley? Is isn't String Theory. It's the tragic fact that the people who pimp the Standard Model have been peddling nonsense and standing four square in the way of scientific progress for fifty years. It's got to stop. You might like to read The Higgs Fake by Alexander Unzicker.

Quote from THHuxleynew

DF thinks the above branch for free neutron decay is a fairy tale.

i'd guess he does not really mind subatomic particles decaying - because it is observed that they do.

The thing he highlights about this path is that the intermediate state: uud + W- is much higher in energy than the initial or end state.

neutron: 0.9395 GeV

proton: 0.9383 GeV

W^- boson: 80GeV

So there is in this reaction a 79GeV energy surplus in the intermediate state. Not borrowed from anywhere - just possible because when a particle has a very short lifetime its energy cannot exactly be measured, and therefore its existence is not constrained by conservation of energy.

If you look at the quantum wave functions, and their time evolution, this becomes crystal clear. There is no loss of energy conservation. However the instantaneous energy of the system does not (HUP) have a sharply peaked probability distribution, which allows the short-term existence of the W^- . Strictly speaking the instantaneous energy of the system just does not exist - but the very short time measured energy does exist, only with a very broad peak.

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This is poppycock. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is merely a feature of the wave nature of light and matter. And I quote: "It has since become clearer, however, that the uncertainty principle is inherent in the properties of all wave-like systems [8], and that it arises in quantum mechanics simply due to the matter wave nature of all quantum objects". Please don't tell fairy tales. We can diffract neutrons. A free neutron decays in circa 15 minutes because neutrons are unstable when they aren't bound with protons in a nucleus. They decay into protons with the emission of high-speed electrons plus antineutrinos. We have never ever seen an 80GeV W boson. Did you read the Gary Taube article? It was Carlo Rubbia and the discovery of the W and Z. You really ought to.

Quote from THHuxleynew

I'm not sure here what your point is. Why do you consider mathematical constructs (fields) that are only related to reality through the forces they exert on particles as more real than mathematical constructs (virtual particles) that are only related to reality through the forces they exert on particles? Because you think things being created and destroyed is magic? Weird.

A field is something real. It isn't just some mathematical construct. In his 1929 essay on the history of field theory, Einstein described a field as a state of space. I think he was right about that. A gravitational field is a place where space is "neither homogeneous nor isotropic". I don't know if you know, but light curves because the speed of light is not constant. Not because light follows the curvature of spacetime. See this:

1920: “Second, this consequence shows that the law of the constancy of the speed of light no longer holds, according to the general theory of relativity, in spaces that have gravitational fields. As a simple geometric consideration shows, the curvature of light rays occurs only in spaces where the speed of light is spatially variable”.

An electron falls down because it is in essence light going round and round. The horizontal component bends downwards. That's half the total, which is why the GR deflection of light is twice the Newtonian deflection of matter. Note that there are no virtual particles popping in and out of existence.

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In any case physics does not actually care what words you use to describe maths, so I don't see why this matters. And I don't see further purpose from engaging more in arguments about whether some part of a mathematical description of the world (AKA physics) is real. I'm not a philosopher. I think I was dragged into this by your making a meaningless statement (about some types of being physical models being real and others not) and me replying to it! Apologies for going down that rabbithole.

It matters because we do physics to understand the world. Not to give up. And not to shut up and calculate.

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However what does matter is whether you understand the SM that you so roundly criticise, and its building blocks, like the quantum description of particles. From the above you persist in asserting that energy must be conserved through short-lived intermediate states - and therefore the standard explanation for photon-photon higher order loop interactions is a fairy tale? Also, presumably, you believe that tunnelling does not exist - since this too requires particles temporarily to have an energy higher than conservation of energy would allow (the length of time depends on the particle speed and the length of the barrier).

Watch my lips: energy is conserved. Full stop. The Standard Model "explanation" for photon-photon interactions is wrong. See the picture below? The usual a caption says “connections denoting which particles interact with each other”:

Public domain image by TriTertButoxy, see Wikipedia

It says gluons interact with gluons, even though the gluons in ordinary hadrons are virtual. As in not real. It also says photons don’t interact with photons, when they do. According to the Standard Model, electrons don’t even interact with positrons. It's absurd. It has no foundations.

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PS - The level of provably and simply incorrect assertions here is getting too high for me - so unless you weasel out of the above contradiction that is probably as far as we can get.

I will hold your nose to this grindstone until I see a scintilla of understanding from you. Or a submission. Whichever comes first.

Quote from THHuxleynew

A self-propagating disturbance in electric and magnetic fields (which are themselves mathematical constructs) seems pretty abstract to me.

Now - the effect of e-m radiation is concrete. As are the effects of the field disturbances called virtual particles.

My point was not really about whether you choose to call the mathematical models we use in particle physics (and give concrete names) real or abstract. It is that you are inconsistent considering some real and others not real.

Anyway, can I suggest we agree to disagree until such time as you come to understand that in a quantum world conservation of energy cannot be applied on short timescales(my post above).

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You haven't been paying attention. A photon is an electromagnetic wave. The field concerned is the electromagnetic field. What you think of as an electric wave is the spatial derivative of four-potential. What you think of as the orthogonal magnetic wave is the time derivative. That's why they're always in phase.

Again, virtual particles are virtual. The clue is in the word virtual. That's virtual as in not real. An electron goes round in circles in a uniform magnetic field because spin is real. Not because virtual photons are popping in and out of existence like magic.

As for conservation of energy, let me tell you something. A 939 MeV neutron does not decay because an 80GeV W boson spontaneously pops out of a 4.8 MeV down quark, converting it into a 2.3 MeV up quark. And then magically turning into an electron and an antineutrino with a combined energy of 1.5MeV. Before you can even see it! It's a fairy tale, Huxley. Like a lot of the other things you're clinging too. So yes, let's agree to differ.

I like Geometric Model for Fundamental Particles by Batty-Pratt and Racey“. They talked about spherical rotations, and said “our geometrical model demonstrates the difference not only between spin-up and spin-down states, but also between the particle and the antiparticle”.

Fair use excerpt from Geometric Model for Fundamental Particles by Batty-Pratt and Racey

The wave nature of matter and electron spin means we’re talking about waves going around and around rather than a lump spinning round bodily. Batty-Pratt and Racey said they’d “made the presumptive leap of assuming photons to be undulations of the space-time structure”. They also talked about a “theory of the continuum that purports to describe matter as a distortion of space in the manner first suggested by W K Clifford”. I like that too.

Quote from Cydonia

you should make geometric attempts in order to "link" them to our empty space.

It's tricky. I've drawn things like this, but they're flat 2D pictures. 3D animations is what we need.

The thing on the left is trying to depict a photon. It isn't some billiard ball thing, it's a wave in space. Space waves. The thing on the right is trying to depict an electron. The electromagnetic field is a place where space is twisted. This is unfamiliar to most people, but the electromagnetic field isn't totally unlike the gravitomagnetic field. See the NASA GPB article by Tony Phillips where you can read that space is twisted. Also see the gravity probe B video:

Frame-dragging still image from the gravity probe B video by Bob Kahn, James Overduin, Lee Kolb, and Greg Trent

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Nice attempt to not decorrelate mathematical toughts from your geometric projections, the great Einstein knew how to do it too.

Thanks. I've read a lot of Einstein's material. I take note of what he said in his 1929 essay on the history of field theory, He said a field is a state of space. In his Nottingham lecture in 1930 he said space “remains the sole medium of reality”. It's like Clifford's space theory of matter.

Quote from THHuxleynew

It seems from your reply above that you do not understand QM, do not understand QFT. And therefore classify it as "not real". That is your privilege, but it is a shame and excludes you from evaluating the last 50 years of physics. Can I ask have you actually learnt the math for QM and the QFT? All that linear algebra? Because without that I don't think you can fairly evaluate either.

Are you talking to me? I understand the maths of QFT. And I can fairly evaluate it. Enough to tell you this: it falls at the first hurdle. QED claims photons don't interact with photons, when they do. See the Wikipedia two-photon physics article. It originates from the HEP group at UCL and says this: “From Quantum Electro Dynamics (QED) we know that photons cannot couple directly to each other, since they don’t carry charge, but they can interact through higher order processes: a photon can, within the bounds of the uncertainty principle, fluctuate into a charged fermion/anti-fermion pair, to either of which the other photon can couple”. It's abject nonsense. A 511KeV photon does not magically morph into a 511keV electron and a 511keV positron. That’s in breach of conservation of energy. In similar vein a 511keV electron and a 511keV positron cannot magically morph back into a single 511keV photon. That’s in breach of conservation of energy and conservation of momentum. Moreover photons travel at the speed of light whilst electrons and positrons don’t. So if a photon did somehow manage to fluctuate into a fermion pair and back again, it couldn’t be travelling at the speed of light. And most importantly of all, pair production doesn't occur because pair production occurred! Spontaneously! Just like that! SNAP!

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"only exist in maths of the model". Sure, that is true of all reality as described by modern physics. What makes a QM wave looking like an photon more "real" than a QFT disturbance looking like a virtual photon? Both are math constructions with precise observable effects. Both are abstract.

What? Photons are not abstract. Compton scattering is real. The photoelectric effect is real. The electron is real too. And when you understand the electron, you understand why it moves the way that it does. And it isn't because virtual photons are popping in and out of existence like magic.

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Don't teach grandma to suck eggs? I'm sure most people here know that particle/wave duality is satisfactorily resolved with wave packets.

I will hold your nose to this grindstone until I see a scintilla of understanding from you.

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QM means you don't have to choose. So, given you accept this, and we agree, why not accept disturbances in quantised fields as as virtual particles? Too modern for you? I realise QFT was not nearly as easy historically as QM (which itself was not that easy).

Because virtual particles are virtual. Because they don't exist. Messenger particles do not exist. I've already told you that an electron goes round in circles in a magnetic field because spin is real, and subject to Larmor precession. There are no unseen virtual photons popping in and out of existence.

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Well it accords (as a popularisation) well with my (now 40 years old) understanding. And Matts better description is pretty precise. While I do not claim to be an expert, having studied this stuff so long ago, Gordan Kane can reasonably so claim, as can Matt Strassler. I don't accept proof by authority but I'd need more than "appalling garbage" and links to either outdated science, or outlying science from authors who have clearly never learnt the math to understand the theory you claim they are replacing, either because it did not yet exist in a fully coherent form (Lamb, Rutherford), or because (Schaeffer) they have never learnt it.

You're clinging to conviction. Those guys aren't experts, and I'll give you a lot more than "appalling garbage". See this post where I referred to Maxwell's 1871 paper? Where he combined convergence and curl? I then gave a depiction of the electromagnetic field. Now think about positronium. Why do the electron and the positron move towards one another and around one another? Because Maxwell was barking up the right tree with his theory of molecular vortices. Because counter-rotating vortices attract. And because the electron is a "dynamical spinor":

CCASA positronium image by Manticorp, spinor motion image by me

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I'm sympathetic with people who have fully understood modern QFT, and can solve problems in it, want something better and try to find it. There are a lot of those. But not your links from people who have not done that.

Are you sympathetic to page 26 of Schrödinger’s quantization as a problem of proper values, part II? Schrödinger said let us think of a wave group “which in some way gets into a small closed ‘path’, whose dimensions are of the order of the wave length”.

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You are asserting one magical mathematical model over another (also magical, but emerging directly from theory that applies to many other physical things, and therefore more fundamental) model. Why? In what way is magnetic moment more real than a virtual photon?

I'm not asserting some "magical mathematical model". I'm dispelling the mysticism of the magical mathematical model. Magnetic moment is real because the torque is real. Things really do go round and round. The Einstein-de Haas effect is real. Have a read of Hans Ohanian's 1984 paper what is spin? He said “the means for filling the gap have been at hand since 1939, when Belinfante established that the spin could be regarded as due to a circulating flow of energy”. Frederik Belinfante’s paper was on the spin angular momentum of mesons.

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Look, that is a very strong claim about a prolific theoretical physicist who has published a lot of relevant papers. How many of his (peer reviewed) papers have you read, and how many have you succeeded in rebutting or adding to? With peer reviewed refs please.

It's a strong claim and it's true. I can't recall reading any of Matt Strassler's papers. Let's have a look on the arxiv. What have we got? Metastable supersymmetry breaking and multitrace deformations of SQCD dating from 2009. No thanks. My interest is real physics, not fantasy physics.

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You are stuck in the past.I'm not. I just prefer to read the original material instead of the popscience fairy tales.

I'm not. See for example Art Hobson's explanation of the double slit experiment in his 2013 paper There are no particles, there are only fields. It starts on page 12.

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I take (as popular account of strong force understanding as of 2 years ago John Butterworth (he wrote a book too)

https://www.theguardian.com/sc…uclear-force-a-revelation

There's no understanding of the strong force here.

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and the relevant review: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05935 (published as Eur.Phys.J. C78 (2018) no.4, 321)

Now, the maths here is complex. I'll accept the "it is rubbish" opinion from anyone who can do it (and has done so) - but not from those who have not. And I'll accept that it (the above review) is not nonsense, because

(1) it gets through peer review in a major journal

(2) It gets a lot of (peer reviewed major journal) citations https://inspirehep.net/search?…efersto%3Arecid%3A1631169

This paper isn't explaining the strong force in any way. It's talking about parton distribution, Why are you even referring to it? Because it's been peer reviewed and it has citations? Weinberg's paper has over sixteen thousand citations. That doesn't make it right. It doesn't model the electron at all.

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That means a lot of people who have learnt and done calculations with the relevant theory have read it and not trashed it. (You can check the citations if wondering whether they mostly say it is nonsense).

But did any of them ask the obvious question? Where do all those partons go in low-energy proton-antiproton annihilation to gamma photons?

Annihilation images from CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility

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Now - I'd agree that strong interaction is "unsolved" in the sense that not all questions about it can be calculated. The calculations are unpleasant. But I'll not accept that it is "not explained". The model does explain it nicely, does allow calculations that are predictive. I'll not accept that "all the models create too little or no intermediate range attraction".

It isn't explained at all. If you beg to differ, explain it.

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Philosophically - I'd also not accept that forever unpleasant calculations make a theory wrong or even incomplete, though equally I'd always hope for better calculation methods in the future.

I hope you're not going to tell me to shut up and calculate. I will not.

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I'd accept Machleidt17 (as a personal but not unreasonable view) but not your summary of his conclusions:

Thus, chiral EFT may ultimately suffer the same fate as meson theory. As explained in Sections 1 and 2, meson theory was originally (Phase I) designed to be a quantum field theory, but later (Phase II) had to be demoted to the level of a model (a very successful model, though). During the current Phase III, the main selling point has been that chiral EFT is a theory and not just a model and, therefore, its dogmatic use has been pushed. However, in analogy to what historically happened to meson theory, during the next phase (namely, Phase IV), we may have to resign ourselves to chiral EFT based models (that may potentially have great success). The history of nuclear forces clearly shows a pattern of 30-year phases. Whether these cycles will go on forever or whether Phase IV will be the last one, we will know Anno Domini 2050.

His paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.07215) misses the trick. The nuclear force is electromagnetic. Electron capture does what it says on the tin.

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And I'd agree that QCD is work in progress - partly because so computationally complex, it makes working out what is true slower.

A decent forward-looking paragraph (with broader context) from Laura Marcucci

Nuclear force between nucleons can be seen as a residual force resulting from the constituents of the nucleons, i.e., the quarks. How this force is connected with QCD has been an intense field of research since many decades. Thanks to lattice QCD and to the advent of chiral effective field theory (for recent reviews see [2, 3]), we are in the process of building nuclear interaction on the strong basis of QCD. Some issues however remain unsolved and definitely constitute grand challenges for NP: while the nucleon-nucleon interaction is nowadays quite well under control, the same cannot be said for the three-nucleon force, for which at the moment exist far less sophisticated models. This reflect on some long-standing discrepancies between theory and experiment in few-body observables, as the well known “Ay puzzle” (see [4] and references therein). The solution of this puzzle is a grand challenge for NP. The situation is even worse for the hyperon-nucleon and hyperon-hyperon interactions, for which lot of work still needs to be done. This is ultimately related to the “hyperon-puzzle” in neutron stars [5], which will be discussed below.

If this is true, how come there's no diprotons and no dineutrons? There are no proton-proton nuclei, and no neutron-neutron nuclei either.

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One thing I don't accept is that systems like nuclei which are known to be highly complex many-body systems should (in a final GUT) necessarily have simply calculable properties. In fact I'd say we know enough to see why the known interactions (whether you use a quark model or something equivalent) are likely to be difficult to calculate. That does not (to me) seem a defect of the model.

Fine. But if you want to understand a nucleus, you have to understand the proton first. And to understand the proton, it helps if you understand the electron. But when you do, you come to appreciate that much of the Standard Model is wrong.

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I fully expect something deeper than the SM to emerge from a GR / QFT unification that explains spacetime. I don't expect that such will make calculations of complex many-body systems in QCD any easier. Will we end up with a much easier way of calculating this stuff? Open question.

Spacetime is an abstract mathematical thing that models space at all times. We live in a world of space and motion. The map is not the territory. And I expect something deeper to sweep away the Standard Model. I'm not sure what you'd call it. Maybe TQFT. Maybe electromagnetic geometry. Maybe something else.

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I guess the amplitudehedron story gives us some hope.

It's pseudoscience. Forget it.

Quote from Wyttenbach

This is OK for free space. But in solid matter some photons travel on SO(4) orbits and simply do interact as Schrödiger thought.

The photons definitely interact. It isn't called gamma-gamma pair production for nothing. As for whether they really travel on SO(4) orbits I don't know. But this picture from the Wikipedia article on rotations in 4 dimensional Euclidean space is similar to depictions of spin ½:

CC By SA image by RokerHRO, see Wikipedia commons

The caption says this: "A 4D Clifford torus stereographically projected into 3D looks like a torus, and a double rotation can be seen as in helical path on that torus. For a rotation whose two rotation angles form a rational number, the paths will eventually reconnect, while for an irrational ratio they will not. An isoclinic rotation will form a Villarceau circle on the torus, while a simple rotation will form a circle parallel or perpendicular to the central axis".

Quote from THHuxleynew

Virtual particles are virtual. They aren't real. I'm afraid to say that anything that "explains" forces using particles that do not exist is pseudoscience.

By those realist standards particles are not real!

Not so. Photons are real. Electrons are real. Protons are real. Neutrons are real. Neutrinos are real. Virtual particles aren't real. They are virtual. They only exist in the mathematics of the model. Hydrogen atoms don't twinkle, and magnets don't shine.

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It is like saying that QM is not real because an electron cannot be both a particle and a wave.

No it isn't. You would know this if you'd read Pascual Jordan’s resolution of the conundrum of the wave-particle duality of light by Anthony Duncan and Michel Janssen. See page 47 where they quote Jordan: “Einstein drew the conclusion that the wave theory would necessarily have to be replaced or at least supplemented by the corpuscular picture. With our findings, however, the problem has taken a completely different turn. We see that it is not necessary after all to abandon or restrict the wave theory in favour of other models; instead it just comes down to reformulating the wave theory in quantum mechanics. The fluctuation effects, which prove the presence of corpuscular light quanta in the radiation field, then arise automatically as consequences of the wave theory. The old and famous problem [of] how one can understand waves and particles in radiation in a unified manner can thus in principle be considered as solved”. Pascual Jordan solved the issue of wave-particle duality in 1927. Particles are waves. That's why photon energy E=hc/λ. That's why we can refract and diffract electrons.

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Or that QFT is not real because fields are not quantum phenomena.

Quantum Field Theory is just a theory. An electromagnetic field is real. But scientific progress such as Maxwell's unification reduced the number of fields, by combining electricity and magnetism to give us the electromagnetic field. Unfortunately the Standard Model has gone the other way, and tries to tell us there are 25 fundamental fields. Even though it doesn't even tell us how pair production works.

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And to say that virtual particles do not explain forces is just wrong. They do.

No, they don't. It's a fairy tale. It's what's called "lies to children". Think about an electron and a positron in a magnetic field:

Bubble chamber picture from CERN

They don't go round in opposite circles because virtual photons are popping in and out of existence. They do this because each is a "dynamical spinor". Spin is real. The electron doesn't have a magnetic moment for nothing. It goes round in circles because It’s subject to Larmor precession. The spin “precesses counter-clockwise about the direction of the magnetic field”. The electron goes round in circles rather like a boomerang goes round in circles due to gyroscopic precession. See the MRI article by Allen D Elster: “two particles with positive and negative gyromagnetic ratios precess in opposite directions”. The positron goes round the other way because it has the opposite chirality. Think in terms of a left-handed boomerang.

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Readable popularisation of the issues: https://www.scientificamerican…re-virtual-particles-rea/

Virtual particles are indeed real particles. Quantum theory predicts that every particle spends some time as a combination of other particles in all possible ways. These predictions are very well understood and tested...

This article is the most appalling garbage. Virtual particles are merely a mathematical bookkeeping device for quantum mechanics. Have a read of Willis Lamb and Robert Retherford's paper fine structure of the hydrogen by a microwave method. There's absolutely nothing in there about virtual particles. Gordon Kane is telling the most appalling popscience porkies here.

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https://profmattstrassler.com/…-particles-what-are-they/

The term “virtual particle” is an endlessly confusing and confused subject for the layperson, and even for the non-expert scientist. I have read many books for laypeople (yes, I was a layperson once myself, and I remember, at the age of 16, reading about this stuff) and all of them talk about virtual particles and not one of them has ever made any sense to me. So I am going to try a different approach in explaining it to you. The best way to approach this concept, I believe, is to forget you ever saw the word “particle” in the term. A virtual particle is not a particle at all. It refers precisely to a disturbance in a field that is not a particle...

Matt Strassler says a virtual particle is a disturbance in a field that is not a particle. That's better than what Gordon Kane said. But see this?

"It turns out that since electrons carry electric charge, their very presence disturbs the electromagnetic field around them, and so electrons spend some of their time as a combination of two disturbances, one in in the electron field and one in the electromagnetic field. The disturbance in the electron field is not an electron particle, and the disturbance in the photon field is not a photon particle. However, the combination of the two is just such as to be a nice ripple, with a well-defined energy and momentum, and with an electron’s mass. This is sketchily illustrated in Figure 3".

It's still a fairy tale. Because Matt Strassler doesn't understand what a photon is, or what an electron is.

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JD. The two graphs you post above for "nuclear force" and neutron charge distribution do not remotely show that the strong force is electromagnetic: and indeed that is unevidenced.

You're in denial. You do know that the Standard Model doesn't explain the nuclear force, don't you? Here's something I've written previously. You might like to follow the hyperlinks:

In 1986 in Hideki Yukawa and the meson theory Laurie Brown said “today’s standard model has not been able to calculate ‘low-energy’ processes, such as meson-nucleon scattering, or the nuclear forces”. In 1999 Charlotte Elster said calculations started about 15 years ago and many groups have been involved, but all the models create either too little or no intermediate-range attraction. According to Riken in 2007 the short-range repulsion remains an open question. That’s when Frank Wilczek said this in Nature: “ironically from the perspective of QCD, the foundation of nuclear physics appear distinctly unsound”. In John Gowan’s 2012 paper strong force two expressions you can read that the exact origin of the strong force is not yet a completely settled matter. In Ruprecht Machleidt’s 2013 paper origin and properties of strong inter-nucleon interactions you can read that it’s been seventy years of desperate struggle. Machleidt advocates chiral effective field theory but the bottom line is that there hasn’t been much in the way of recent progress. That’s why the nuclear force is in the list of unsolved problems in physics.

Quote from THHuxleynew

The point is that SM predicts those decay product observations on the basis of underlying symmetries that explain other observed particles. Such validation is very powerful. The theory (that those symmetries imply particles) explains many diverse observations from a simple idea.

You really need to read Carlo Rubbia and the discovery of the W and Z. Gary Taubes basically said Rubbia faked the discovery of the W and Z. It's true I'm afraid. When you understand the electron, you know why the electron and the positron move the way that they do. It isn't because they're throwing photons back and forth. Then you come to appreciate that Weinberg’s 1967 paper on a model of leptons is a) nothing of the sort and b) badly wrong. Weinberg started by saying “leptons interact only with photons". It simply isn't true. Electrons also interact with electrons, and with positrons and protons and neutrinos too. Don’t forget that Fermi’s interaction “posits four fermions directly interacting with one another”. In Weinberg’s model, they don’t. Something else you might like to look at is the peculiar notion of exchange forces part I and part II by Cathryn Carson. She says the exchange-particle idea worked its way into QED from the mid-1930s, even though Heisenberg used a neutron model that was later retracted.

Quote from THuxleynew

If you have an alternative simple idea that explains some of those observations but not all then it is much much less useful. Also BTW less beautiful - beauty comes from simplicity predicting apparent complexity.T

Beauty is no substitute for understanding. It leads to dead-end ideas like supersymmetry, wherein people predict a selectron when they have no understanding whatsoever of what an electron is.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Now, I'm sympathetic to novel formulations that explain particle physics, although as above unless they go in the direction of using VP exchange to explaln forces I think they are regressive. But, for example, I'd be happy with some different idea of what is a real (or virtual) particle. But, only if it includes (e.g. from it we can derive) all the simplicity and predictive goodness we get from SM:

Virtual particles <==> forces

symmetries <==> particles.

That whole pantheon of particles looks complex until you see that it comes from a very simple set of symmetries. The symmetry explanation was truly predictive (not just retrospectively explanatory).

Virtual particles are virtual. They aren't real. I'm afraid to say that anything that "explains" forces using particles that do not exist is pseudoscience. That whole pantheon of particles might look complex, but note that we have only a handful of stable particles: the photon, the neutrino, the electron, and the proton. Plus antiparticles. That symmetry "explanation" doesn't explain any of them. As such the Standard Model is just Smoke and Mirrors. For example, when you understand the electron, you understand why the mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content. It isn't a measure of its interaction with some kind of cosmic treacle. So the Higgs mechanism is wrong. It's referred to as the toilet of the Standard Model because it was an ugly kludge. A short-range force demands massive gauge bosons, which means electroweak theory is not a gauge theory like electromagnetism is supposed to be. After touting the wonders of symmetry, Weinberg and co claimed the gauge bosons get their mass from a broken symmetry. Then they touted broken symmetry as a great virtue! Here's something else to look at. It's a plot of the nuclear force, plus a plot of neutron charge distribution. You know what that means? It means the nuclear force is electromagnetic. Check out Bernard Schaeffer's website: http://bernardschaeffer.canalblog.com/

Nuclear force plot from Dux college HSC physics course, neutron charge distribution image by Dru Renner inverted by me

Quote from Zephir_AWT

What it so bizarre about it? One cannot observe something without exchanging some energy with observed object, one cannot exchange energy with subject without affecting it - the opposite is what the perpetuum mobile is called. This is what was originally opposed in this very thread. Not accidentally the minimal energy required for affecting the object and making an observation is just the energy of microwave noise field which surrounds all of us - everything smaller than that would disapper in this background noise.

Hi Zephir. How are you keeping? Did I ever tell you about William Kingdon Clifford's space theory of matter? He said “I hold in fact:

(1) That small portions of space are in fact of a nature analogous to little hills on a surface which is on the average flat; namely, that the ordinary laws of geometry are not valid in them.

(2) That this property of being curved or distorted is continually being passed on from one portion of space to another after the manner of a wave.

(3) That this variation of the curvature of space is what really happens in that phenomenon which we call the motion of matter, whether ponderable or etherial.

(4) That in the physical world nothing else takes place but this variation, subject (possibly) to the law of continuity”.

I think it's pretty much correct. You might like to call it aether wave theory. I prefer electromagnetic geometry myself.

Quote from THHuxleynew

...A quick note for people who might think this merits attention: the problem in fundamental physics is not to explain just one particle in terms of one other, but to explain all particles.re complex than is told here. The partial (and mathematically void) links made here are more likely to point in the wrong direction than the right.

Hi. I'm happy to talk about other particles. For example, when you take a close look at the properties, the neutrino appears to be more like the photon than the electron.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Both papers ignore the electron's interaction with the W and Z particles, and ignore the implications for the muon, tau lepton, and quarks. That's because even in their hand-waving, free-form speculation, they can see that their story explains nothing. Like the Ancient Greeks explaining sunrise and the change of seasons, a separate god has to be created to explain every facet of every particle, and they soon lose the track of their narrative. It is less a physical explanation than a dreary theistic soap opera, but instead of gods per se, it is stocked with airy conceits that the authors can't or won't put into math to be confronted with physical experiment.

We've never actually seen a W or a Z. Their existence was inferred from decay products. See the January 2003 physicsworld article Carlo Rubbia and the discovery of the W and Z by Gary Taubes. Nobody has ever seen a quark either. Note this in the Wikpedia tau particle article: "They did not detect the tau directly, but rather discovered anomalous events". Muons are short-lived, lasting for circa two millionths of a second. So I think it's reasonable for an electron paper not to include the electron's interaction with the W and Z and other particles.

Quote from THHuxleynew

That does not mean that an electron is not (in some deeper unified spacetime and QM theory) related to a photon. But we have many more particles to make sense of (if we are not to ignore experiment) and much other stuff too. So the story would need to be a lot more complex than is told here. The partial (and mathematically void) links made here are more likely to point in the wrong direction than the right.THHuxley

We have to start somewhere. I think it starts with understanding the photon, then the electron, then other stable particles. I think it was a big mistake to try to understand the proton by studying an ephemeral "zoo" of "resonances". It's like studying the pretty patterns of the firework explosions on New Year’s eve, thinking it’s going to teach you everything there is to know about gunpowder.