Posts Tagged ‘causal’

Basis Field For Particles

July 16, 2016

I think every physicist, whether real or amateur or crackpot, goes through the exercise of trying to work out a geometry for the field that particles reside in.  This is the heart of many issues, such as why is there a particle zoo and how to reconcile quantum theory with relativity, either special or general.  There are many ways to approach this question–experimental observation, mathematical derivation/generalization, geometrical inference, random guessing–all followed by some attempt to verify any resulting hypothesis. I’ve attempted to do some geometrical inference to work out some ideas as to what this field would have to be.

Ideas are a dime-a-dozen, so throwing something out there and expecting the world to take notice isn’t going to accomplish anything.  It’s primarily the verification phase that should advance the block of knowledge we call science.  This verification phase can be experimental observation such as from a collider, mathematical derivation or proof, or possibly a thorough computer simulation.  This system of growing our knowledge has a drawback–absolute refusal to accept speculative ideas which are difficult or impossible to verify (for example, in journals) can lock out progress and inhibit innovation.  Science investigation can get hide-bound, that is stuck in a loop where an idea has to have ultimate proof, but ultimate proof has become impossible, so no progress is made.

This is where the courageous amateur has some value to science, I think–they can investigate speculative possibilities–innovate–and disseminate the investigation via something like a blog that nobody reads.  The hope is that pursuing speculative ideas will eventually reach a conclusion or path for experimental observation that verifies the original hypothesis.  Unlike professional scientists, there are no constraints on how stupid or uninformed the amateur scientist is and no documentation or credentials that says that science can trust him.  The signal-to-noise is going to be so high that it’s not worth the effort to understand or verify the amateur.  The net result is that no progress in our knowledge base occurs–professional scientists are stuck as publishable ideas and proof/verification become more and more difficult to achieve, but no one wants to bother with the guesses of an amateur.  I think the only way out is for an amateur to use his freedom to explore and publish as conscientiously as he can, and for professionals to occasionally scan amateur efforts for possible diamonds in the rough.

OK, back to the title concept.  I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on the field of our existence.  I posted previously that a non-compressible field yields a Maxwell’s equation environment which must have three spatial dimensions, and that time is a property, not a field dimension as implied by special relativity.  I’ve done a lot more thinking to try to pin down more details.  My constraints are driven primarily by the assumption that this field arose from nothing (no guiding intelligence), which is another way of saying that there cannot be a pre-existing rule or geometry.  In other words, to use a famous aphorism, it cannot be turtles all the way down–the first turtle must have arisen from nothing.

I see some intermediate turtles–an incompressible field would form twist relations that Maxwell’s equations describe, and would also force the emergence of three spatial dimensions.  But this thinking runs into the parity problem–why does the twist obey the right hand rule and not the left hand rule?  There’s a symmetry breaking happening here that would require the field to have a symmetric partner that we don’t observe.  I dont really want to complexify the field, for example to give it two layers to explain this symmetry breaking because that violates, or at least, goes in the wrong direction, of assuming a something emerged from nothing.

So, to help get a handle on what this field would have to be, I’ve done some digging in to the constraints this field would have.  I realized that to form particles, it would have to be a directional field without magnitude.  I use the example of the car seat cover that is made of orientable balls.  There’s no magnitude (assuming the balls are infinitely small in the field) but are orientable.  This is the basic structure of the Twist Field theory I’ve posted a lot about–this system gives us an analogous Schroedinger Equation basis for forming subatomic particles from twists in the field.

For a long time I thought this field had to be continuous and differentiable, but this contradicts Twist Theory which requires a discontinuity along the axis of the twist.  Now I’ve realize our basis field does not need to be differentiable and can have discontinuities–obviously not magnitude discontinuities but discontinuities in element orientation.  Think of the balls in the car seat mat–there is no connection between adjacent ball orientations.  It only looks continuous because forces that change element orientation act diffusely, typically with a 1/r^2 distribution.  Once I arrived at this conclusion that the field is not constrained by differentiability, I realized that one of the big objections to Twist Field theory was gone–and, more importantly, the connection of this field to emergence from nothing was stronger.  Why?  Because I eliminated a required connection between elements (“balls”), which was causing me a lot of indigestion.  I couldn’t see how that connection could exist without adding an arbitrary (did not arise from nothing) rule.

So, removing differentiability brings us that much closer to the bottom turtle.  Other constraints that have to exist are non-causality–quantum entanglement forces this.  The emergence of the speed of light comes from the fact that wave phase propagates infinitely fast in this field, but particles are group wave constructions.  Interference effects between waves are instantaneous (non-causal) but moving a particle requires *changing* the phase of waves in the group wave, and there is a limit to how fast this can be done.  Why?  I don’t have an idea how to answer this yet, but this is a good geometrical explanation for quantum entanglement that preserves relativistic causality for particles.

In order to quantize this field, it is sufficient to create the default orientation (this is required by Twist Field theory to enable emergence of the particle zoo).  I have determined that this field has orientation possible in three spatial dimensions and one imaginary direction.  This imaginary direction has to have a lower energy state than twists in the spatial dimension, thus quantizing local twisting to either no twists or one full rotation.  A partial twist will fall back to the default twist orientation unless there’s enough energy to complete the rotation.  This has the corollary that partial twists can be computed as virtual particles of quantum field theory that vanish when integrating over time.

The danger to avoid in quantizing the field this way is the same problem that a differentiable constraint would require.  I have to be careful not to create a new rule regarding the connectivity of adjacent elements.  It does appear to work here, note that the quantization is only for a particular element and requires no connection to adjacent elements.  The appearance of a connection as elements proceed through the twist is indirect, driven by forces other than some adjacent rubber-band between elements.  These are forces acting continuously on all elements in the region of the twist, and each twist element is acting independently only to the quantization force.   The twist discontinuity doesn’t ruin things because there is no connection to adjacent elements.

However, my thinking here is by no means complete–this default orientation to the imaginary direction, and the force that it implies, is a new field rule.  Where does this energy come from, what exactly is the connection between elements that enforces this default state?

 

Oh, this is long.  Congratulations on anyone who read this far–I like to think you are advancing science in considering my speculation!

Agemoz

22 Years!

September 9, 2015

It’s been 22 years since I started as an amateur crackpot, and have nothing more to show for it except that I’m still an amateur crackpot.  However, I did reach the goal of a better understanding of the physics behind the particle zoo and the history of physics.  I still think that my basic premise could work to produce the array of particles and force mediators we know to exist.  The idea is analogous to the Schroedinger wave solutions for excited electrons and is based on the assumption that at quantum scales there is a way (other than gravity) to curve EM waves.  We already know that this outcome cannot result from Maxwell’s equations alone, so I have proposed that EM field twists can occur.  These could be considered strings and consist of an axially rotating field vector that propagates only at speed c.  If the axis is a straight line, we have a photon that cannot rest and has no rest mass.  However, a twist that forms in a closed loop must only exist in quantized structures (any point on the loop must have a continuous vector twist rotation, so only complete rotations are possible).  Loops can exist as a simple ring or more complex knots and linked knots and would provide the basis for a particle zoo.  The loop has two counteracting magnetic fields that curve and confine the loop path, thus enabling the soliton formation of a stable particle–the twist about the axis of the twist, and the rotation of the twist about the center of the loop. Mass results from the momentum of the twist loop being confined to a finite volume, inferring inertia, and electric charge, depending on the loop configuration, results from the distribution of  magnetic fields from the closed loop.  Linked loops posit the strong force assembly of quarks.

The biggest objection to such a twist model (aside from assuming an unobserved variation of Maxwell’s equations that enables such a twist field) is the resulting quantized size of particles.  Electrons have no observed dimensional size, but this model assumes they result from twist rings that are far larger than measurements indicate.  I have to make another assumption to get around this–that collisions or deflections are the result of hitting the infinitely small twist ring axis, not the area of the ring itself.  Indeed, this assumption helps understand why one and only one particle can capture a linear twist photon–if the electron were truly infinitely small, the probability of snagging a far larger (say, infrared) photon is vanishingly small, contrary to experiment (QFT posits that the electron is surrounded by particle/antiparticle pairs that does the snagging, but this doesn’t answer the question of why only one electron in a group will ever capture the photon).

In order for this twist theory to work, another assumption has to be made.  Something needs to quantize the frequency of axial twists, otherwise linear twists will not quantize like loops will.  In addition, without an additional constraint, there would be a continuous range of closed loop energies, which we know experimentally does not happen.  In order to quantize a photon energy to a particular twist energy, I posit that there is a background state direction for the twist vector orientation.  In this way, the twist can only start and finish from this background state, thus quantizing the rotation to multiples of 2 pi (a complete rotation).  This assumption leads to the conclusion that this background state vector must be imaginary, since a real background state would violate gauge invariance among many other things and probably would be detectable with some variation of a Michelson-Morley experiment (detecting presence of an ether, or in this case an ether direction).  We already describe quantum objects as wave equations with a 3D real part and an imaginary part, so this assumption is not wildly crack-potty.

So in summary, this twist field theory proposes modifying the EM field math to allow axial twists in a background state.  Once this is done, quantized particle formation becomes possible and a particle zoo results.  I’ve been working hard on a simulator to see what particle types would emerge from such an environment.

One remaining question is how does quantum entanglement and the non-causal decoherence process get explained?  I propose that particles are group waves whose phase instantly affects the entire wave path.  The concept of time and distance and maximum speed c all arise from a limit on how fast the wave phase components can change relative to each other, analogous to Fourier composition of delta functions.

You will notice I religiously avoid trying to add dimensions such as the rolled up dimensions of various string theories and multiple universes and other such theories.  I see no evidence to support additional dimensions–I think over time if there were other dimensions connected to our 3D + T, we would have seen observable evidence, such as viruses hiding in those dimensions or loss of conservation of some quantities of nature.  Obviously that’s no proof, but KISS to me means that extra dimensions are a contrivance.  My twist field approach seems a lot more plausable, but I may be biased… 🙂

Agemoz

Noncausal solution, Lorentz Geometry, and trying a LaGrangian solution to deriving inertia

December 31, 2012

Happy New Year with wishes for peace and prosperity to all!

I had worked out the group wave concept for explaining non-causal quantum interactions, and realized how logical it seems–we are so used to thinking about the speed of light limit causing causal behavior that it makes the non-causal quantum interactions seem mysterious.  But when thinking of a universe that spontaneously developed from nothing, non-causal (infinite speed) interactions should be the default, what is weird is why particles and fields are restricted to the speed of light.  That’s why I came up with the group wave construct for entities–a Fourier composition of infinite speed waves explains instant quantum interference, but to get an entity such as a particle to move, there is a restriction on how fast the wave can change phase.  Where does that limitation come from?  Don’t know at this point, but with that limitation, the non-causal paradox is resolved.

Another unrelated realization occurred to me when I saw some derivation work that made the common unit setting of c to 1.  This is legal, and simplifies viewing derivations since relativistic interactions now do not have c carried around everywhere.  For example, beta in the Lorentz transforms now becomes Sqrt(1 – v^2) rather than Sqrt(1 – (v^2/c^2)).  As long as the units match, there’s no harm in doing this from a derivation standpoint, you’ll still get right answers–but I realized that doing so will hide the geometry of Lorentz transforms.  Any loop undergoing a relativistic transform to another frame of reference will transform by Sqrt(1 – (v^2/c^2)) by geometry, but a researcher would maybe miss this if they saw the transform as Sqrt(1 – v^2).   You can see the geometry if you assume an electron is a ring with orientation of the ring axis in the direction of travel.  The ring becomes a cylindrical spiral–unroll one cycle of the spiral and the pythagorean relation Sqrt(1 – v^2/c^2)) will appear.  I was able to show this is true for any orientation, and hand-waved my way to generalizing to any closed loop other than a ring.  The Lorentz transforms have a geometrical basis if (and that’s a big if that forms the basis of my unitary twist field theory) particles have a loop structure.

Then I started in on trying to derive general relativity.  Ha Ha, you are all laughing–hey, The Impossible Dream is my theme song!  But anyway, here’s what I am doing–if particles can be represented by loops, then there should be an explanation for the inertial behavior of such loops (totally ignoring the Higgs particle and the Standard Model for right now).  I see a way to derive the inertial behavior of a particle where a potential field has been applied.  A loop will have a path through the potential field that will get distorted.  The energy of the distortion will induce a corrective effect that is likely to be proportional to the momentum of the particle.  If  I can show this to be true, then I will have derived the inertial behavior of the particle from the main principle of the unitary twist field theory.

My first approach was to attempt a Lagrangian mechanics solution.  Lagrange’s equation takes the difference of the kinetic energy from the potential energy and creates a time and space dependent differential equation that can be solved for the time dependent motion of the particle.  It works for single body problems quickly and easily, but this is a multiple body problem with electrostatic and magnetic forces.  My limited computation skills rapidly showed an unworkable equation for solution.  Now I’m chewing on what simplifications could be done that would allow determining the acceleration of the particle from the applied potential.

Agemoz

Noncausal Interactions, part II

December 11, 2012

I want to clarify the previous posting on how I resolve the noncausal paradox in unitary twist field theory–after all, this is the heart of the current struggle to create a quantum gravity theory.  Here, I’m continuing on from the previous post, where I laid out the unitary twist field theory approach for quantum interactions.  In there, I classified all particle interactions as either causal physical or noncausal quantum, and quantum interactions fall into many categories, two of which are interference and entanglement.  These two quantum interactions are non-causal, whereas physical interactions are causal–effects of physical interactions cannot go faster than the speed of light.

Many theories have attempted to explain the paradoxes that result from the noncausal quantum interactions, particularly because relativity theory specifies that no particle can exceed the speed of light.  The Copenhagen interpretation, multiple histories, string theories such as M theory, the Pilot wave theory, etc etc all attempt to resolve this issue–but in my research I have never found anyone describe what to me appears to be a simple solution–the group wave approach.

In my previous posting, I described this solution:  If every particle is formed as a Fourier composition of waves, the particle can exist as a group wave.  Individual wave components can propagate at infinite speed, but the group composition is limited to speed c.  This approach separates out particle interactions as having two contributors:  from the composite effect of changing the phase of all wave components (moving the center of the group wave) and the effect of changing the phase of a single fundamental wave component.  If the individual wave components changed, the effect is instantaneous throughout spacetime, but there is a limitation in how quickly the phase of any give wave component can be changed, resulting in a limitation of how quickly a group wave can move.

It’s crucial to understand the difference, because this is the core reason why the paradox resolves.  Another way to say it is that when a change to a wave component is made, the change is instantaneous throughout R3–but the rate of change for any component has a limit.  An analogy would go like this: you have two sheets of transparency paper with a pattern of parallel equally spaced lines printed on it.  If you place each sheet on top of each other at an angle, you will see a moire pattern.  Moving one sheet relative to the other will move the moire pattern at some speed limited by how quickly you moved the sheet.  But note that every printed line on that sheet moved instantaneously relative to every other line on that sheet–instantaneous wave component movement throughout R3.  Note that the interference pattern changes instantaneously, but the actual movement of the moire pattern is a function of how fast the sheets are moved relative to each other–exactly analogous to what we see in real life.  This is the approach that I think has to be used for any quantum gravity theory.

Agemoz

Multiple histories. Baloney!

June 29, 2012

I’ve dug in deep to trying to find out how to make a valid field description that will be implementable in a simulation.  The hope is, just like Conway’s game of life, the right unitary twist field model will show self sustaining quantized behavior that could provide a geometrical basis for the particle zoo.  When you do this, a lot of the baloney in a crackpot idea is forced out into the open–not easy to fool yourself when you have to actually implement an idea.  No surprise that that’s a tough road to follow–what I’ve found is that there are an awful lot of cool ideas that die this way.

I’m still working and thinking, but today I had a great discussion with a friend about a different topic.  Someone was asking me about multiple dimensions and multiple histories, and I told him what I thought–and we had a great time!  You may think physics is a mined out field with not much prospect of exciting work, but discussions like this are why I find this field so fascinating.  There’s not really any chance that I will actually add anything to the base of human knowledge–that’s for university physicists with papers to write.  But we can still think–and that is what I love to do!

Here’s the deal.  Multiple histories and String theory (theories, actually, including M-theory and other multiple dimensional approaches) are two broad classes of theories that try to resolve the non-causality of quantum problems such as entanglement and the dual slit experiment.  In other words, these are theories that try to form a common mathematical basis for general relativity and quantum theory.  These are really the only two approaches that are considered by mainstream physicists–and I don’t think a lot of them really like either approach.  Multiple histories, the idea that all possible alternatives to a triggering event  exist, and that observation resolves the alternatives to a single outcome without violating causality, and multiple dimension theories, which remove causality by providing a near zero length alternative path (via an additional set of dimensions) both have serious problems.  I have no doubt that the history of physics is full of fiery debate about which approach works and is real.

There’s no debate in my mind, though, I think they both severely violate the keep-it-simple-stupid rule–because I think there’s a far better answer.  Causality is a property of particles, massive or massless (eg, photons).  Quantum entanglement and non-causal interference is a property of wave phase.  A simple answer is that the Fourier composition of a collection of group waves is limited in velocity (to c), but the phase information propagates at infinite speed.  The phase information gets to the target (observation point) instantly, but the actual particle takes a while to arrive.  There’s a lot of details to this approach that I won’t cover in this post, but hopefully that is enough for you to get the gist.  No piling on of dimensions, no absurd multiple copies of the universe weaving in and out of observer views (do we have to include all possible observer outcomes as a set of histories–but then just where does it resolve to one observed outcome…. etc).

So my friend asks, if this is a real option, why isn’t presented and considered in the literature or in pop physics books and all?  Well, there’s an excellent chance that this idea *was* considered back in the early quantum theory days and rejected for obvious reasons, just not obvious to me.  Unfortunately, the literature only records successes, not failures and the reasons behind the failure–so valuable information and research about why something *wont* work does not get captured for future generations.  Perhaps a future version of the scientific method will evolve that realizes the value of wrong information (properly labeled) and include it with papers describing groundbreaking correct discoveries.

Even though I suspect a real working physicist would have an easy answer why this approach can’t be, I haven’t heard it yet, read of it yet, nor thought of a good reason why this can’t be the right answer–despite having a hopefully skeptical sense that I am unlikely to have a right answer when no one else has found it.  Don’t know what to tell you there, except that this phase/group wave idea seems a far simpler and more logical explanation than adding dimensions or whole universe copies to our existence.  And in any event, thinking about it and having fun discussing it isn’t restricted to university physicists!

Agemoz

PS:  It may look like I’ve left out the Copenhagen interpretation, which says the process of observation causes composite quantum states to resolve (decohere).  Not really–I categorize this interpretation as a variation that falls under the multiple histories category–the composite quantum state vector contains all possible outcomes).

PPS:  And, then you might come back with:  Oh, this looks like the discredited Pilot Wave approach, where there are multiple pieces to the particle and the surrounding part “guides” the particle.  Dr. Bell, who should have won a Nobel before he died, disproved that one by showing there cannot be internal structure explaining entanglement.   My counterpoint:  You are getting warmer, a better objection–but Fourier composition does not mean physical components–the Pilot Wave is not the same as a group wave composition forming a particle.

Then there’s DeBroglie, Bohm, and a whole bunch of others.  I’ll leave you to research the rest of it.  It’s kind of a tired debate now…