Agemoz's Physics Blog

I had heard from several of you that absorbing the theoretical concepts of my theory from the blog was tough slogging, and one of you (thank-you, you know who you are!) suggested posting a paper to the scribd site, which I did.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/17052457/The-Paradoxes-of-the-Electron-Point-Source

It’s got a few typos, and the derivation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty section is missing, more specifics and math should undoubtably be added, and a few other things need to be fixed, but this should give you an easier to absorb picture of the theory. Feel free to whale away with comments!!

Uh, that meter had been pretty quiet through most of these thoughts as I tried to be as rigorous as possible with this material–pushing the boundaries of irresponsible speculation but trying to stay close to known reality–a balancing act that allows a chance that I may see something that an academically trained physicist might not cover. But it went off big time when I posted the experiment.

A powerful tool I try to use in my thinking is the realization that there’s 8 billion people on this planet, of which maybe .1% think extensively about science and physics, and maybe 1% of those are physics professors, scientists, etc, and maybe 10% of those are actively knowledgeable about particle physics and quantum behavior of electrons. That’s around 800 people at any given moment who are far better and smarter and experienced experts than I am would have thought of every conceivable theoretical and experimental approach related to the size question of the electron–and because there are some paradoxes with the electron being a point source (Heisenberg uncertainty, capture of low energy photons, wave energy points to Compton radius, etc), there’s a good chance that number is actually an order or two magnitude bigger.

This realization is a powerful discriminating tool because very often when I think of an idea, I look at it through the filter of “it’s already been thought of/done”. If the idea is too obvious, I can assume that it’s just about certain that it’s already been considered and pursued. There’s been 20-30 years of approximate stasis in the electron kernel situation, time enough for a very large number of people to think about, perform experiments, analyze, and draw conclusions.

This experiment is far too simple not to have been done a zillion times. Orient a sample of electrons in a magnetic field, hit it with photons, see if the absorption rate varies with incidence angle. I can use my “It’s been done” filter (I’ll call it the IBD filter, which handily could also mean “I Be Dumb” filter) to say–this has been done–and better yet, I can say, with near certainty, that no orientation dependent absorption factor has been found–because if there were, that would be common knowledge by now. The IBD filter is a great tool–I don’t have to have a lot of knowledge myself if I can leverage off of the knowledge of a lot of people. Used to an extreme, of course, this tool says there’s no point in my thinking or doing any experiments, so there’s a balancing act to do here. But when something comes up that is within the realm of the obviously been done, it’s a battle not worth fighting to try to think that a special outcome may result that no one has seen.

Nevertheless, I still think the experiment should be able to determine if there’s a finite radius to the electron if the twist loop is valid. So–if it’s been done, and I assume that no orientation dependent orientation has been found, there’s only a few outcomes: my assumptions about a detectable absorption change in a twist loop are invalid (possible), the experiment hasn’t been done (very unlikely), or–the twist loop model is wrong (unfortunately, quite likely).

I’ll have to think about this some more. If I have integrity as a thinker, I have to be able to take all the thinking and exciting conclusions about twist rings, and throw it down the drain. Then again, I could be jumping to a false conclusion too quickly. Right now, the right thing to do is to think about this for a bit.

Agemoz

In the last post, I had hypothesized that accelerator experiments would give identical results whether the target particle was a point source, a line with zero thickness, or a ring or other shape with zero thickness. Each case would appear as a knife edge in an accelerator experiment, you would not be able to determine the shape of the knife edge.

However, there should be a way to distinguish, even on the tiny scale of the twist ring. Here is the experiment: the twist ring of the electron absorbs a photon of any size when it penetrates the twist ring, but ignores the photon otherwise (this is why the twist ring is geometrically such a good model for photon absorption–it provides a concrete, geometrical solution for absorption of photons that are 100000s bigger than the electron, whereas the point source electron model is extremely problematic here). If we have a volume of free electrons, and assert a magnetic field to line up the electron magnetic moments, we should be able to shoot a laser at the free electrons from different angles to get measurably different absorption rates. If the laser is aimed relative to the magnetic moment of the aligned electrons, and if the electron is a twist ring of some diameter, there should be different levels of absorption of the laser photons, because if the beam is in the plane of the twist ring, the absorption cross section is a line, whereas if the beam is normal to the ring plane, the absorption cross section is the interior of a circle. I think this experiment could be easily done in a cathode ray tube. Aiming a laser at different angles into the magnetic coil deflection region of a cathode ray tube, and measuring the intensity of the dot on the cathode ray tube as different magnetic fields are applied, should point to whether or not the electron is a twist ring. A point source will show no variation, but a twist ring will.

Agemoz

The twist ring seems like such a good solution, so why am I not jumping all over the sofa? Because I’d be jumping the shark, that’s why. The number one reason reason why physicists ignore those who claim any solution that gives a finite electron radius, and especially the Compton radius, is experimental evidence. This evidence has many forms but probably most significantly comes from scattering experiments, the experiments done in accelerators.

Why are experimental physicists smashing particles into each other? Can’t we just use a ruler, or look through the Hubble telescope in the wrong end? The problem is that even the Compton radius is too small, never mind the apparent zero radius of the electron, to look at with high energy photons in a microscope. This radius, 2^10^-11 cm, is about 100 times smaller than the approximate size of a simple atom. Obviously, an electron microscope, which bombards its observed target with electrons, isn’t going to help when looking at electrons–you need particles, whether photons or other particles, significantly smaller than the object you are looking at to be able to form an image of the target. The electron frequency is around 20 EHz, 100000 times higher frequency than visible light, where Gamma rays exist. We don’t have Gamma ray microscopes that are within range of imaging an electron–we’d need Ultra Gamma ray microscopes, and even if it was possible to make such a thing, the inability of holding an electron still for a radius measurement, and the destructive energy of such rays, would completely destroy any hope of getting useful information.

So–what DO physicists do? They smash particles against each other. We can’t control exactly where a beam comes in relative to a cross-section of the target particle at this scale, so a direct measurement of particle sizes is still impossible–but just like those amazing experiments that have found extra-solar planets around far-too-distant stars, there are ways to get what we need indirectly. Those experiments, whether looking for distant planets or tiny particles, measure indirectly tiny variations of observable parameters caused by the target, and then analyze the results to show that the only explanation can be planets or particles of some size.

It turns out there is an amazing amount of information and good conclusions we can draw from particle collisions. There are a variety of ways to do collisions, but let’s think about an experiment that shoots the smallest possible particles or photons from a source and tries to hit a stationary target particle that we want to learn about. We can very easily determine whether a particle is a point or a homogenious region (mass of the particle is dispersed from the center) by detecting the bounce-off angle of a fixed target. If no particles ever bounce back toward the shooting source, but there is a probability distribution of deflection angles away from the source, that’s a very good signature for a homogenious region. If we get a probability distribution where the angle of deflection is uniformly random, we are hitting a knife edge–a point, a rail, a ring of something that has practically a zero diameter.

We can easily measure the mass of the target by observing conservation of momentum of both the shooting and target particles. We can measure the charge of a particle by seeing how it curls in a magnetic field (you wonder how tiny quarks were found, and how they determined there were two or three of them–it was the result of complex smashed particle sprays that showed there had to be short-lived point-like particles with charges 1/3 that of an electron). And so on. Experimental physicists have earned their PhDs and livelihood based on ever more clever ways of extracting information out of experiments they devise.

Now, the one result we care about that is unequivocal–when such accelerator experiments are done on electrons, regardless of the increasing energy and finer resolution of the shooting particles, there have never been any results that show any other than a knife edge result–the uniform distribution of bounce-back shooting particles. (Note, it’s actually somewhat more complicated that a uniform distribution, because we can’t control where within a particle cross-section or it’s immediate neighborhood we can hit–it’s a bit of mathematical work to get the actual distribution cones–but the principle is still valid, we can get the cross-section of interaction by the experimental distribution of deflection angles).

The crucial question is this. Can scattering experiments distinguish between different knife edges such as points, lines, or rings, given that a collision at the point of impact will look the same in each case (remember that the distance scale is too small to have any control over where we hit in the target particle cross-section, or even to assure that we hit the cross-section at all). I think a pretty good argument can be made, assuming a true knife-edge, that the ability to discern the shape and dimension of the knife-edge is not possible. Let’s go more into this next time, to try to guess how we *could* come up with a shape determination.

Agemoz

Blogging about something is an interesting endeavor–the bad news, is nobody ever reads a blog. The good news, is nobody ever reads a blog. I can write whatever I please, with a near certainty, within various cultural behavioral limits, that no one will ever care. This allows for a wonderfully free train of thought that can just go wherever it pleases, and allows me a mirror, however accurate or not, for me to discover what I really think, and even, who I really am and want to be. I can choose to be honest or deceptive, try to impress or just journal, be conscientious and thorough or throw out inaccurate or misleading junk. I can and do get enjoyment out of pretending that there is someone out there that actually wants to wade through all my drivel, is impressed by it, and is about to rush off to Sweden to recommend a Nobel Prize, or that I show up at Carnegie Hall (I teach and play piano), or some other deliciously warm thought that enlivens my day.

I’m not so disconnected from reality that I recognize the absurdity of these thoughts as being as likely as what I call the bad date hope: back in my young days I would pursue a gal in the hopes she would like me, go on a date, and never get a second date. The analogy is in my hopefulness that the gal actually liked me (I was, and still am, rather anti-social and kind of weird, and have some nasty demons I carry around) and if I just kept trying, the Truth would set me free for the idealized life I envisioned with her. I’ve long since recognized in me the human penchant for pointless hopefulness as a variation of the bad date hope, and learned in many later situations to shut down hopefulness of something that clearly isn’t meant to be.

On the other hand, I have been extraordinarily fortunate and blessed several times in my life where my activities and thinking has opened a goldmine of great richness that has transcended the normal life. I have some patent work that has resulted from wonderful insights that revolutionized how certain things are done, and I did eventually marry and have some family situations that added richly to my human experience. Those moments where I recognize the transcension are carved brightly into the corners of my mind as memories to keep and joy of fulfilled hope that is not that ugly old, pointless, bad date hope.

I can’t tell if my thoughts about twist loops is pointless, fun but not relevant to reality, or is one of my serendipitous moments, or what–but I do know for sure it has now opened up a door from the previous level of thinking. All the thinking I’d been doing up to now has been considered as possible, but the likeliness of it going anywhere was definitely just wishful thinking, probably already hashed out a century ago when people were still working out how to interpret the first experimental quantum observations in what is called a classical or geometrical way. The human mind wants and craves a logical explanation, and a century of university training has been used to drive physics students away from logic when it comes to quantum theory. It just has not been helpful to think this way when dealing with this branch of science because the contradictions and mathematical paradoxes have been insurmountable. Yet here I am, thinking maybe this great example is the one special exception. I am so tempted to think this latest enlightenment means something, but long experience has taught me that that kind of bad date hope thinking is unique to physics crackpots in particular.

As I mentioned though, blogging is great, because here I can explore ideas to the fullest I desire–I can travel in places where real physicists have been trained not to go. And lo, I believe that I have found that there is a stable wave solution with the right degrees of freedom to represent some of the particles in our existence. While I’ve never felt the need to clarify the math behind many of the statements I’ve made on this blog since I suspect no one will ever wade through it all, there’s always that bad date hope in the back of my mind that says this one is important enough that that one reader is going to maybe need a little guidance what I was thinking.

So, let me just mention that the twist ring is a complex valued field. The field normally has some analytic complex valued function, but around the circumference of a ring, the field undergoes a 2*Pi twist of this complex field as it goes around. The twist (and thus the energy of the field) is quantized because when the twist comes full circle, it must rejoin the twist phase at the start. The discovery, if it is worthy of being called that, is that not only is there quantization of the twist field energy and radius at a given frequency, but that the field energy (or frequency, or radius, or mass–all are dependent variables) have only specific allowable states because the twists have both electrostatic attractive forces (opposite sides of the ring have opposite field potentials and thus are attracting charges) but repulsive magnetic forces since the force on either of a pair of antiparallel magnetic moments is in the direction of decreasing magnetic field, that is, away from each other. A further aspect of the discovery is that since electrostatic fields diminish as 1/r^2, but magnetic fields diminish as 1/r^3, the opposing forces can only intersect in one place, meaning that there is one r for which the forces will be equal and opposite and thus would be an equipotential solution. And most important of all, perturbations on this equipotential solution are restoring–any solution at r + delta results in a -k delta net force, and an r – delta distance results in a + k delta force, because 1/r^3 – 1/r^2 is positive (repulsive)at r r0.

So what have I done? Not even wrong? Interesting? Who cares? Well, since nobody reads blogs, a big tree has just fallen in the forest. I guess I’ll follow this rabbit hole and see where it goes, and there will come a time where I won’t come back out, and no one will notice or care. But what a fun ride!

Agemoz