I’ve been working diligently on the details of how the quantizing behavior of a unitary twist vector field would form loops and other topological structures underlying a particle zoo. It has been a long time since I’ve talked about its implications for special relativity and the possibilities for deriving gravity, but it was actually the discovery of how the theory geometrically derives the time and space dilation factor that convinced me to push forward in spite of overwhelming hurdles to convincing others about the unitary twist theory approach.
In fact, I wrote to several physicists and journals because to me the special relativity connection was as close as I could come to a proof that the idea was right. But here I discovered just how hard it is to sway the scientific community, and this became my first lesson in becoming a “real” scientist. Speculative new theories occupy a tiny corner in the practical lives of scientists, I think–the reality is much reading and writing, much step-by-step incremental work, and journals are extremely resistant to accept articles that might cause embarrassment such as the cold-fusion fiasco.
Back in my formative days for physics, sci.physics was the junk physics newsgroup and sci.physics.research was the real deal, a moderated newsgroup where you could ask questions and get a number of high level academic and research scientists to respond. Dr. John Baez of UC Riverside was probably one of the more famous participants–he should be for his book “Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity”, which is one of the more accessible texts on some of the knowledge and thinking leading to thinking about gravity. But on this newsgroup he was the creator of the Crackpot Index, and this more than anything else corrected my happy over-enthusiasm for new speculative thinking. It should be required reading for anyone considering a path in the sciences such as theoretical physics. Physicists 101, if you will–it will introduce you hard and fast to just how difficult it will be to be notable or make a contribution in this field.
I’m not 100% convinced, as I’ve discussed in previous posts, that there isn’t a place for speculative thinking such as mine, but this is where I discovered that a deep humility and skepticism toward any new thinking is required. You *must* assume that speculation is almost certainly never going to get anywhere with journal reviewers or academic people. Nobody is going to take precious time out of their own schedule to investigate poorly thought-out ideas or even good ideas that don’t meet an extremely high standard.
So, I even presented my idea to Dr. Baez, and being the kind and tolerant man he is, he actually took the time review what I was thinking at that time–has to be 20 years ago now! Of all the work I have done, none has been as conclusive to me as the connection to special relativity–but it did not sway him. I was sure that there had to be something to it, but he only said the nature of special relativity is far reaching and he was not surprised that I found some interesting properties of closed loops in a Lorentzian context–but it didn’t prove anything to him. Oh, you can imagine how discouraged I was! I wrote an article for Physical Review Letters, but they were far nastier, and as you can imagine, that’s when my science education really began.
But I want to now to present the special relativity connection to unitary twist theory. It still feels strongly compelling to me and has, even if the theory is forever confined to the dustbin of bad ideas in history, strongly developed my instinct of what a Lorentzian geometry means to our existence.
The geometry connection of unitary twist field theory to special relativity is simple–any closed loop representation of a particle in a Lorentzian systen (ie, a geometry that observes time dilation according to the Lorentz transforms) will geometrically derive the dilation factor beta sqrt(1 – v^2/c^2). All you have to do to make this work is to assume that the loop represention of a particle consists of a twist that is propagating around the loop at speed c, and the “clock” of this particle is regulated by the time it takes to go around the loop. While this generalizes to any topological closed system of loops, knots, and links (you can see why Dr. Baez’s book interested me), let’s just examine the simple ring case. A stationary observer looking at this particle moving at some speed v will not see a ring, but rather a spiral path such that the length of a complete cycle of the spiral will unroll to a right triangle. The hypotenuse of the triangle by the Pythagorean theorem will be proportionate to the square root of v^2 + c^2, and a little simple math will show that the time to complete the cycle will dilate by the beta value defined above.
When I suddenly realized that this would *also* be true in the frame of reference of the particle observing the particles of the original observer, a light came on and I began to work out a bunch of other special relativity connections to the geometry of the unitary twist theory. I was able to prove that the dilation was the same regardless of the spatial orientation of the ring, and that it didn’t matter the shape or topology of the ring. I saw why linear twists (photons) would act differently and that rest mass would emerge from closed loops but not from linear twists. I went even as far as deriving why there has to be a speed of light limit in loops, and was able to derive the Heisenberg uncertainty for location and momentum. I even saw a way that the loop geometry would express a gravitational effect due to acceleration effects on the loop–there will be a slight resistance due to loop deformation as it is accelerated that should translate to inertia.
You can imagine my thinking that I had found a lodestone, a rich vein of ideas of how things might work! But as I tried to share my excitement, I very quickly learned what a dirty word speculation is. Eventually, I gave up trying to win a Nobel (don’t we all eventually do that, and perhaps that’s really the point when we grow up!). Now I just chug away, and if it gives somebody else some good ideas, then science has been done. That’s good enough for me now.
Agemoz
Agemoz's Physics Blog 