arthur jackson

I did look at a multi-drop system but I was a bit concerned about the noise - it would be next to the road and I live in the country so I think it would be disturbing to people going past. The one I have is 56 dB which is just about tolerable in the room - all the other portable systems were 65 dB which wouldn't do my tinnitus any good and also too much for the dog in the room because of his sensitive hearing. An air-water system might have worked for me since I have a back boiler to the rayburn but the radiators just aren't big enough I think particularly with the lower water temperatures. I like the air-air version because it warms the room up really quickly. Many years ago I had a volkswagen beetle and think I agree with that nice Mr. Porsche who said that all cars are air cooled, it's just that car manufacturers will insist in putting water in the way. Also my system cost £350 as I recall and just needed a conversion kit for the sash window rather than a few thousand for equipment and installation - even with the improved COP I think it would have made the repayment time too long. A multi-drop air-air system would have warmed both upstairs and downstairs but I've also got a conservatory which does warm the rest of the house somewhat during the day even in winter. Eta: I hadn't thought before but I don't think I could have 200-mm holes drilled through the wall. It's traditional Cornish rab construction which means stone-clay-stone. Try to drill a 5-cm hole on one side through that and I've been told you get a 50-cm hole on the other side.

yes but as I say I've not seen dual-hose versions in the UK. I don't think it's a scam - I kept figures last year which I need to check but as I recall I was having the 1 kW fan heater on pretty well continuously while this year the 1 kW heat pump seems to be on for only half the time. And yes it must be pulling in cold air through the building fabric, but I don't think it pulls in too much because the heat pump is pushing out a lot of air into the room without seeming to pull in much more. Hence my question as to whether it's acting as a sort of displacement ventilation system, though. I nearly installed one of those last year but that would again be drawing cold air into the house. The main problem is that the house has suffered badly from damp and mould which don't agree with my chest much, so anything that helps solve that is going to be worthwhile. That's similar to mine with 12,000 BTU but that's only 1.2 kW input power and 5 A so well below the 13 A plug fuse. Point taken about risk of explosion but I'm not having the rayburn going downstairs and there's no real risk of ignition in the room. I did see that US article a while ago but it's not my experience (and a fan heater won't extract water), and as I say I can't see a dual-hose version in the UK. I'd love to know how much air is actually being expelled to the outside but again it doesn't feel like it's that much, and I wonder whether there's a benefit from positive displacement ventilation.

Interesting yes. Or in this case filling the heat pump's water tank by removing 1.5 litres of water/evening into the heat pump's water tank. The heat pump also acts as a dehumidifier in summer. I've been reluctant to use it because it runs at around 1 kW and doesn't seem to extract much water into the water tank. Presumably then it's expelling that water outside and I should be checking my room's humidity meter to see how effective it is.

Thank you for the reply. Yes to first para, I think the writer has made a mistake. Second and third paras: that's how a normal heat pump works. I'm assuming that the single hose portable heat pump takes heat from the internal air as you say but exhausts some of it at colder temperature out of the window to heat the returned internal air. The COP is supposed to be around 2 (rather than 4 for a proper installed heat pump) and it does seem to give about twice the heat of the 1 kW fan heater I used to use - plus it pulls out a fair amount of water vapour which adds to the effectiveness. I've been thinking that it wasn't really worth the expenditure but it looks like it has a 2.5 year repayment time with energy prices at around 20p/kWh, shorter if electricity prices go up. Which I'm pleased with since I (think) I've made all the short-term so 2-year repayment time savings like basic insulation etc. There are dual-hose portable heat pumps which are more efficient - so working as you describe - but I've not seen any for sale in the UK, only in the US.

I decided to stop using the wood-fired Rayburn last year and bought a portable (single-hose air-to-air) heat pump. There’s only me in the house and I spend evenings upstairs and just need to keep the room at 18º. I’m hoping someone here knows about heat pumps because I have a few questions. I read from https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/heat-pumps/portable-heat-pumps: "Single hose portable heat pumps have one exhaust hose, which you stick out the window. The exhaust hose releases excess heat and moisture, while the heat pump absorbs air from inside the room, heats it, and releases it back into the room." I’m not sure what it means by “the exhaust hose releases excess heat” because it’s cold air that’s being expelled. My first question though is whether it’s also working as a sort of displacement ventilation system because some air is being expelled through the exhaust hose (although I think by far most of it comes back into the room). It feels like it should be better than displacement ventilation because (a) it’s also heating up the air and (b) it’s pulling out a good 1.5 litres of water a night (I’m in Cornwall, UK ). It also seems strange that it’s presumably drawing in some cold air through the fabric of the building, although the rest of the house doesn’t seem noticeably colder when I’m using it.

Surely predictions (or, since this is a model, statements which agree with current theory) can be specific without being mathematical, and different models will always be coming up with predictions to explain things that are already known. Only two of my 16 predictions/statements have actually been queried: polarization and angular momentum. I still haven’t had an explanation why my photons aren’t polarized, and I didn’t actually say ‘free electron’. Even if my original statement was wrong (but hardly ‘falsified’) I’ve freely admitted that I am learning, so surely learners are allowed to make mistakes as long as they accept corrections. It’s difficult because I just don’t understand a lot of the advanced maths and physics terms in the comments (which is why I’m just not able to give the mathematical proofs you’re asking for), but have answered all questions and points as fully and honestly as I can. As I say, this isn’t a mathematical but a conceptual model. Surely a thread on the Bohr model of the atom would be allowable, even though the predictions it would make are similarly already known, and much of the mathematics would actually now be seen as wrong – it would still be valuable as a learning exercise. It now feels like you’ve decided to delete the thread. Fair enough: your site, your rules and I was actually surprised I wasn’t called a quack and banned after the first post. Shame, though, because I am still learning and have unanswered questions. Could you just ignore the thread for a while and leave me in the tender hands of other posters if I’m annoying you? I don’t think it will last too much longer, so delete it by all means when it’s done.

Can I just point out before moving on that when I say something I'm getting "This shows a remarkable lack of understanding of basic Physics, which is no good for your attempt to provide hand waving explanations for your proposition. " When a website says the same thing it's " quite good but a bit too elementary". I do have two nearby charges - the charge pairs - in fact there are lots of "two nearby charges" in the array. I was talking about a single charge pair when I was referring to two nearby charges. Pulling out a couple of electrons, say, would give the two nearby charges floating above the aether that I think you mean, but I wasn't referring to them. I was answering the question what happens in a static electric field, in which I said I thought the charge pairs would align along that field. The charge pairs are static (+/-/+/-) until they're hit by an external energy which causes a twist which, if it is large enough and lasts long enough, causes a 360 degree rotation so produces a photon. And when they are twisting they are indeed no longer static. I drew the electric field with the magnetic field at right angles on my diagram of a photon - which again indeed aims to show how electromagnetic radiation works. Thank you for the diagram, but surely the dipoles you show are on the macroscopic scale, so involving electrons rather than charge pairs. I made more than a dozen specific predictions on the front page of the thread. They seem to me to follow logically rather than mathematically. OK I think I understand - I've been talking about charge pairs but you are talking about the fields around (for example) electrons and protons as electric charges. There are three parts to the description I've done. I've largely been talking about part 1 which deals with photons. Give me a couple of days and I'll show a pdf of part 1 which hopefully will clear up any confusion from the summary I've given up page. I'll then show a pdf of part 2 which deals with electrons, protons and electric/magnetic fields. Eta: they're quite short, honest

But it's not a mathematical model. It's an analogy which I'm intending to use to explain the basics to people who are fresh to the subject. I'm not trying to convince anyone that the model is mathematically rigorous - it's just an analogy. One of the main problems I've found with trying to understand atomic physics is the advanced mathematics that is needed - as I say you need a degree in the subject to understand the textbooks. Yes I know you need to understand the mathematics to properly understand the subject (please note that!). However, giving a model helps people visualize what is going on and once they have that they can then tackle the mathematics.

Can we take this step by step? You asked about electric fields, not magnetic fields . I didn't mention magnetic fields but said "I’d imagine any ‘lines of force’ would (for example) go from positives to negatives. A quick web search gives: Electric field lines or electric lines of force are imaginary lines drawn to represent the electric field visually. Since the electric field is a vector quantity, it has both magnitude and direction. Suppose one looks at the image below. The arrows indicate the electric field lines, and they point in the direction of the electric field. https://www.sciencefacts.net/electric-field-lines.html How is that different to my remark? The frequency is the frequency of the photons: how many photons (twists) per second you get. i.e. the ν in E = hν. Eta: or are you saying that the quantum of energy is Planck's constant?

No they're not physical twists in space in the SM model - it's just my model that they're seen as twists of the charge pairs in space. Why would my photons not pass through a polarization filter? The diagram I put up showed the sinewave electric field, and this is in the same plane as the rotating twist, and at 90 degrees to the sinewave magnetic field. I'm hoping it's my diagram that isn't clear. The twists are actually just photons, so they are seen in all the experiments and in fact light up everything we see. Rather than a photon headed off into space my model says that all the charge pairs remain in their original position so none move, but one of them twists round through 360 degrees and this twist is passed on to a straight line of them. Each of them in turn twist, and that twist is what heads off into space at speed c. I'm not sure what you mean by always close. Each charge pair is close to the next charge pair which is why you get the twist being passed on, and it's that twist and its effect on the surrounding charge pairs which rotate some of the way (i.e. the virtual photons) that gives the electromagnetic field. The effect dies away at a distance around a wavelength of the photon.

OK when you said 'cancel' I thought you meant merge into each other. They'd be similar to protons/electrons in that case - you'd have to get close to see the charge distribution. We have detected the particles: virtual particles bubbling up out of a vacuum, and again the ones that have been hit with enough energy to form stable electrons, protons etc. If you mean it would be harder to 'twist' because the charge pair is in a different orientation because of a static field I don't think so - it still just needs a whole twist to form a photon.

First apologies for this long post - the site has concatenated all of my replies, I've tried to answer the various questions below. Why they don’t cancel has to be an additional premise, for example like protons and electrons don’t cancel (I've read) because of the Uncertainty Principle when they’re close to each other in a hydrogen atom or (I presume) a nucleus where the charges look like they cancel from outside, but I presume they remain separate. I see the charge pairs as virtual (imaginary) particles that form the surface of space. When hit with enough energy a charge pair is pulled out to form a real electron above space and a balancing ‘unreal’ (whatever that might mean) positron below space. Hit with much more energy the charge pair is similarly pulled out to become a proton/antiproton. So yes the particles will have size and mass, although with much less mass than an electron since there I'd imagine there have to be huge numbers of charge pairs but dark matter I understand makes up only 85% of the matter of the universe? Presumably hitting the charge pairs with large amounts of energy adds to the mass. I think the charge pairs would rotate to align themselves with a static electric field. Two more predictions by the way: that there is dark matter, and that, since the big bang, space is expanding (the charge pairs are gradually moving apart). I’m thinking that the twist that is a photon sticks to the electron and adds to its energy until something happens and the photon escapes again. So no, not a photon with no angular momentum. Sorry I still don’t understand, why won’t my photons be polarized? Are you viewing the axis of twisting as being along the direction of travel? I’m viewing the axis of twisting to be perpendicular to the direction of travel like wheels on a conveyor belt. So a twist and its electric field would be oriented vertically as on that second diagram I gave. Using the Catherine Wheel analogy again, the electric field corresponds to the sparks flying round. A polarizing filter could therefore surely block all orientations except the single orientation it allows through. Another good point on anisotropy. Properties would indeed look to be different if the wave was for example travelling diagonally rather than vertically or horizontally (having a hexagonal shape like Maxwell’s would improve this but not really solve it, and I don’t want to add the complication). The charge pairs could perhaps be self orienting – a charge pair twisting in a particular direction could attract the next charge pair closer to it so properties weren’t anisotropic? I don’t think I’ll try to address this, though, just add a note that it is an imperfection in the model. I'd agree that field theory does all of this more elegantly but I'm not sure about more simply. I’ve not seen a description of field theory that is half way understandable to anyone who doesn’t actually have a degree in the subject they’re supposed to be studying. The twist model has just two or three relatively simple premises (although initially somewhat difficult to visualize but I think good gif images would make it much clearer – I’ve had a go at this but have so far failed spectacularly) and seems to introduce the major concepts of atomic physics as long as there’s a clear statement of the limitations. They do also have different aims. Field theory aims to give as accurate a description of the world as possible. I’m just aiming to give a simple model to get across the basic concepts. I’m specifically not talking about sub-atomic particles, partially because I can’t see how the model would apply but mainly because I have no idea what’s going on in sub-atomic processes. I’m limiting it to photons, electrons/protons and atoms: to make sense of the electronics I learned at uni. I’ve not thought of this as a mechanical model but in one sense I suppose it is – the charge pairs along the direction of motion do act like gears meshing together to pass on the motion. No real idea, I’m afraid but I’d imagine any ‘lines of force’ would (for example) go from positives to negatives. Here, too, I wouldn’t plan to address this since I’m only really interested in explaining photons, electrons and protons. It would be interesting to know what it might be but I feel the getting into the possible mechanics of the aether would be a distraction. Again fair point about why no electric field surrounding the electric charge, but I think any electric field would stay on the ‘surface’ of space (within the aether). It would not show up in the real world, where it’s the rotation of charge pairs that cause an electric field. I think. Yes behind every point in space (or rather on the surface of space) is a charge pair. And yes as above they can’t really be point charges. The charge pairs don’t actually move through space, it’s the twist that moves to give apparent motion of the photon. When a charge pair is hit with enough energy to form an electron or proton, those particles are freed from the surface of space to move frictionlessly across the top of space (which I think means there would be no ‘aether wind’ so the Michelson-Morley objections to the aether wouldn’t I think apply). You say there are clarification issues I've not addressed. I've just gone through all the questions again and tried to answer them – are there any others? Again, why are the photons I describe not polarized? And again I’m not proposing the aether as replacing anything in physics theory, but only as a concept to help with understanding and be thrown away once someone has a picture of how things could work. I’m also only looking at the physics needed to build up a model of the atom. Coming back to this, when I said energy isn’t quantized I was using the word in it’s commonly used sense, as in the equation E = hν. In that equation involving Planck’s constant, it not the energy that is quantized. For example, the first search (and there are many more) for ’quantum of energy’ throws up “In the realm of quantum physics, energy is not a continuous quantity but rather comes in discrete packets, known as quanta. ” That is what I take issue with. Aside from (I understand) some arcane theories energy is infinitely variable like frequency is infinitely variable. It’s not energy that’s quantized, but action. I know what they mean but it’s not really accurate. I would still though like to lob 20 quid into the server fund as a thanks to people for their time – I did check on the site but can’t see how to do this. And as a footnote - thanks for that I actually understood it pretty well up to the point it involved zeta so I'll go back and take a look at it again.

On reflection yes you're right (I copied that from a physics book - I'll delete it ). I can see the point though, they're not quite like electrons and atoms.

I wrote the following before seeing the other comments and problems. Some very good points and I’ll have to go and study them but am not sure I’ll be able to give answers. In the meantime, some more background. Part 1 of my description discusses pretty well what I’ve said so far. I’ve missed out some of the description so this is from the end of Part 1: The charge pairs alongside the central line but perpendicular to the direction of the paper also try to follow the central pairs round. They align 'end on', however, and briefly gyrate clockwise (call it “north”) or anticlockwise (“south”), as in Figure 3. So, perpendicular to the electric wave (y direction) and distance (x direction) is a magnetic wave in the z direction. … The 'wobbling' of the surrounding charge pairs appears as virtual photons, which must exist for a time <ħ/2ΔE or they would form actual photons. We cannot detect virtual photons but suspect they are there by their effects. They tumble out at speed c, leaving a brief Catherine-wheel-like trail approximately the photon's wavelength across as it travels along its path. Part 2 discusses photons with enough energy to form electrons and protons. Yes I’ve purposely avoided mentioning the aether, I knew I wasn’t fooling anyone though . I’d not come across the hexagonal aether, interesting. I’ve read that Einstein was comfortable with the aether given certain conditions that I totally failed to understand. If Maxwell used it to develop his equations, it has to have something going for it. From Wiki Aether theories: Physicist Robert B. Laughlin wrote: "The word 'ether' has extremely negative connotations in theoretical physics because of its past association with opposition to relativity. This is unfortunate because, stripped of these connotations, it rather nicely captures the way most physicists actually think about the vacuum. ..." We may know better now as you say, but I’ve not seen a description that is half way understandable without actually having a degree in the subject we’re supposed to be studying. There look to be just two premises: that the +/-ve charge pairs underlie space and can rotate to form photons, and that they don’t collapse into each other. The rest seems to follow. I’ve often seen the aether being dismissed because of Occam’s Razor. I’d say quite the opposite – it seems to give a simple model for a lot of physics theories (virtual photons, gravity etc.) Relativity must be the definitive way to visualize things, but that’s just not accessible to people beginning study. I’m not really proposing charge as a magic substance, rather a property of the charge pairs. On second thoughts they may well have mass – as I say Part 2 of my text discusses photons with enough energy to produce electrons and protons, which indeed do have mass.