EDIT: If a physicist were to read this, I’m pretty sure he/she would say that the hypersurface activation layer concept, where our existence and all interactions are confined to a 3D time slice of 4D spacetime is incompatible with the principles of special relativity. Rest assured that I have considered this objection in depth. Special relativity denies the idea of simultaneous events for all observer frames of reference, among other things, and also proves the interchangeability of space and time in observations for a given frame of reference. This would seem to contradict the idea that we exist in a single 3D time slice activation layer of spacetime. Currently, I don’t think it does, because the observation process (receipt of particles) in different frames of reference is complicated. There will be variations of a given observation in relativistic frames of reference due to things like Doppler shifting and the corresponding shift in detection times of source particles. Observers in different frames of reference have to observe (receive source particles) events at different times, but this outcome does not then imply the existence of multiple active hyperspaces or connections between them. There is no question that this subject deserves my full attention and I will dedicate a post to analyzing this–hopefully objectively!
I have been investigating Emergent Fields, which are fields that have the creation/annihilation concept built in, in order to come up with a way to solve quantum field theory problems analytically. In current research, we do interaction computations by separating particles and virtual particles from the fields they exist in. This forces us to compute perturbative solutions–and thus significantly limits the type of interactions we can realistically compute, both for complexity and convergence reasons. By specifying stable particles as a particular manifestation of wave behavior, emergent fields should not only enable analytic solutions for more complex interactions, but yield new insights into our physical reality. For example, this work shows an elegant basis for elementary particle quantization. If you read through this, I think you will be convinced that our existence requires that all elementary particles have to be quantized.
One such wave proposal I came up with for an emergent field is a 4D vector field that can have spins pointing in both the three physical dimensions as well as the time dimension. This type of field has a number of interesting properties such as giving point particles independent dual spins (for example, one in the X-Y plane and one in the Z-T plane, see https://wordpress.com/post/agemozphysics.com/1839). By constraining this field with the fact that we exist in a 3D hypersurface of 4D spacetime, I found some elegant insights. One of the most beautiful results I see is how it enforces quantization of particles such as photons.
Einstein was able to prove that photon energy had to be quantized for a given wavelength, and from that the entire quantum theory infrastructure (quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics, quantum chromodynamics) was built and verified beyond a shadow of doubt. What scientists didn’t discover is why this quantization occurs, and I have found that an emergent field constrained by our 3D hypersurface existence within 4D spacetime gives us a beautiful answer.
As I discussed in these posts (https://wordpress.com/post/agemozphysics.com/1891 and https://wordpress.com/post/agemozphysics.com/1910), we exist in a 3D hypersurface of 4D spacetime I call the activation layer, and there is good reason to believe that other hypersurfaces adjacent to ours cannot exist or interact with the 3D hypersurface activation layer that we live in. This is a common portrayal of particle interactions in Minkowski spacetime:
As discussed in this post https://wordpress.com/post/agemozphysics.com/1910, this cannot be correct, the 3D activation layer hypersurface view of the same interaction must actually look like this:
Constraining the emergent field particle view with this activation layer behavior will help define the required formula for the generalized emergent field. As I mentioned in the previous post, I didn’t like one of the specifications of the emergent field example I use–particles are defined as quantized twists such that there is a lowest energy spin state pointing in the time dimension direction. Why is there a lowest energy state for a particular spin rotation, there is no evidence of such a thing? I’m sure any of you that read that post were thinking, no, that can’t be right.
I had a wonderful insight, I realized we don’t need that lowest energy concept. The activation layer does it for us, and is why experimenters in Einstein’s time were finding good experimental evidence for particle quantization.
Many research papers have been written that attempted to compute the shape and length of a photon.The underlying basis for quantization and the quantum theories we have comes from extensively verified experimental evidence of particle quantization, and researchers have tried to visualize or mathematically describe what drives this quantization. It’s really dangerous–and usually completely wrong–in quantum physics to try to ascribe classical attributes such as “looks like” to quantum particles. We don’t have an answer why quantization exists, we just know it is there. Here is a typical textbook drawing of a “quantized” photon, shown with a gaussian envelope that fits the uncertainty principle constraint.
However, my annihilation diagram above gives some great insight on the why this is a bad depiction. Let’s modify the annihilation diagram above by moving our activation layer hypersurface to the photon output of the collision, it will look like this:
That gaussian picture of a photon, or any other similar depiction, has to be wrong! We exist in an activation layer, a 3D hypersurface slice in 4D spacetime–so the photon has to be nothing more than a single vector direction, rotating as time passes and the activation layer hypersurface moves forward. The confining of all particles to our existence in the 3D slice, our activation layer, is what quantizes particles!
You can increase the radiation intensity by adding more nearby rotation vectors, but this still is a quantized step. You might say, well, just increase the magnitude of the vectors, but we know we can’t do that because the photon energy is only a linear function of its frequency, E=hv. There is no magnitude degree of freedom. This isn’t just for photons–every single elementary particle has to be quantized via a single vector within our 3D slice of 4D spacetime. We don’t need the (questionable) lowest energy rotation state idea for quantization or a bogus gaussian packet description, our 3D hypersurface activation layer does the quantization for us!
Agemoz
PS: An exciting corollary is how emergent field quantized vector fields leads to why probability amplitudes add and sometimes subtract (actually, add with negative amplitudes). We’ll cover that in another post!
Tags: general relativity, general-relativity, physics, quantization, quantum, quantum theory, science, special relativity, special-relativity
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