BenTheMan

Two things: First you are falling into the dangerous trap of trying to use your intuition on things that humans inherintly have no experience with. We don't get to tell Nature about the properties of space-time, so if it ``seems'' like it shouldn't work, it may be an artifact of our limited experiences as humans. Saying ``it doesn't seem like we should be able to bend time'' is imposing some prior onto the problem: namely that everything that ``seems reasonable'' happens in Nature, and nothing that doesn't ``seem reasonable'' doesn't happen. Without the framework of physics, and a mathematical language to describe it with, we have nothing. So if math DOESN'T describe Nature, at least approximately, we are in real trouble, and science will be effectively dead. If you don't believe me, think of this: for hundereds of years (since Aristotle), people believed in an idea called impetus. This idea basically states that something is kept in motion by some invisible outside force. This is clearly wrong (cf conservation of energy), but even today, when pysics undergraduates are given quizes BEFORE learning physics, they think of things in terms of impetus. This means that most people in the world, who have never taken a physics class, when applying their ``common sense'' to a problem, come up with a solution that is directly disproven by experiment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_impetus Hopefully you see some parallels between the preceding two paragraphs and the preceding five pages of discussion Second, think of it in terms of four dimensions. Time is a dimension, just like space. When you solve GR equations, you get configurations of space-time. You can think of these configurations as hyper-surfaces. If you are, say, a beam of light, you must travel in geodesics along space-time. If you happen to find a closed time-like curve, then you will be travelling mostly along the time direction (as opposed to traveling equally along space and time directions normally). Hopefully that made SOME sense. We're not talking about actually building a time machine here. These are pretty abstract ideas. Again, you are imposing a prior on the situation. No offense, but who are you to assume that Nature should behave in exactly the way you think? How many times have you seen or preformed an experiment that has a strange result? Again, closed time-like curves are fully consistent solutions to Einstein's equations. This means that if you believe GR, you HAVE to admit that the idea of time travel is possible, at least in principle. If you don't believe GR, then fine---find some way to modify it or some new theory which doesn't predict time travel. But I will stress that CTC's are mathematically realizable solutions of GR, like it or not (Einstein hated it, but had to accept it). See this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_metric#Closed_timelike_curves Finally, I want to highlight one scentence from the Wiki article above, for no reason whatsoever: I would say that this should be changed to Now we are quite comfortable with time as the fourth dimension.

Well if you get rid of the associative property, doesn't it mean that the negative integers would no longer be a group?

Someguy--- Farsight has set up a dichotomy that doesn't exist. Just because I think he is wrong doesn't preclude me from believing that people who build time machines are crackpots, too. Likewise, even if I did believe that matter was made of light (and I want to make it clear that that certainly isn't the case), there are still ways to travel in time---i.e. along a closed timelike curve. Time travel is probably not possible for other reasons, and I have never said that time travel is a literal possibility (unless it was to piss Farsight off), only a physical one---i.e. Einstein's equations (as pointed out TO Einstein BY Goedel) admit closed time-like curves. This was much to Einstein's chagrin, I should add---he had claimed that GR only contained physically realizable solutions. If Farsight claimed to have an easy way to travel in time, his ideas would be met with no less skepticism from me, at least. The idea that we are made out of light, however, is just plain wrong, as we have demonstrated many times here, and will continue to demonstrate untill Farsight gets banned, or declares victory and pulls out of Baghdad, which ever comes first.

And why do I have ``63''? I presume it is because I made some relevant point somewhere in some discussion, but how is it quantized? I seem to recall starting with 10? And 63-10 is 53, which is prime, so it tells me that it is not simply quantized. And is there a graph somewhere that's number of members vs. reputation?

Yeah I read that and didn't quite understand what he was talking about. It is not so hard to confuse me about these things Nearest I can figure is that he means this where he's calling the wavy line a photon. But it's not a photon, it's a W boson. And it isn't observed in this reaction because it's virtual. It's always virtual (and off-shell) because it is massive, which ALSO explains why the weak force is a short range force, which ALSO explains why we need a higgs boson. But, you know, I am easily confused about these things.

I will defer to your expertise:) I thought that (s)he had a field discontinuity, which is a problem for GR, if I'm not mistaken. Certainly discontinuities in the potential are ok.

If photons make up matter, via these stable configurations, then there must be some energy in binding them---that is, it should take some energy to force it from its classical path (i.e. a geodesic) into a closed loop. In order to create different particles, the photon in the loop has to have a different frequence. (Again I point out to the exprets---not to Farsight---that this is exactly the same situation in string theory.) So in a sense you can excite different particles by adding energy to the loop. The problem is, however, that the act of exciting things requires energy, so there are some states that have higher energy than other states. This COULD explain why pions are not stable (if it weren't for the other problems when it comes to pions, that you STILL haven't addressed)---they are not a lowest energy configuration. The point of all of this is, though, that the lowest energy configuration of a photon IS a photon, and not an electron, because making an electron by forming a little loop out of a string, (sorry, photon), costs energy. The second law of thermodynamics (which I'll assume you believe)says that things tend to their lowest energy states. Why, then, does matter exist? If you believe the validity of the second law of thermodynamics, shouldn't the universe be filled with photons, and NO matter? If you say that there is NO energy required in binding the photon, then the entire universe should be in equilibrium with ALL particles. But there are clearly more photons than anything else. I have, as of yet, seen NO explanation of this here. Einstein is saying that the ether is frame independant, and very much an abstract idea. This may be what you were saying earlier, you never really clarified the point. I always hear...alternative scientists...using this quote when talking about their ideas. This and ``Remeber Gentlemen---we haven't shown that the ether doesn't exist, we have only shown that we don't need it for calculations.'' Either way, both of these quotes are out of context. I will ask, do you derive the number of space-time dimensions, or just put it in? You will be forced to answer (as will ALL non-string quantum gravity people) that you just put it in. I will ask, wouldn't it be nice if we could DERIVE 3+1 dimensions from some fundamental theory? The correct answer is yes. Then I will point to the fact that the requirement for ghost cancellation (i.e. quantum consistency) in string theory GIVES a prediction for the dimension of space-time. Terribly sorry for the digression there, but I have spent several years studying the subject, and you appear to get all of your information from Lee Smolin. Either way, what you are describing is very similar to string theory, whether you like it or not. Farsight, you continue to whine about nobody reading your work. I ask you---if you were sitting next to Einstein, wouldn't you rather have him explain things to you personally, than have to read it written in a book that is intended for a wide audience? I read mass explained and time explained once, and I found it very vague, with quotes like ``Do you think you understand time? You don't. I do''. This is one of the reasons that I haven't read any of your other essays---I have learned more about your ideas by talking to you. Plus there are no equations, and I rarely ever read the words in a physics paper anyway, unless the guy who wrote it is a good writer. When I say ``Your theories'', I am specifically referring to the ansatz that all particles are some topological excitations of photons. As of yet I have seen no acceptable clairfications of the following (``scientific'') points. =>Why do pions decay into different numbers of photons? =>How do you explain neutrinos, which have no observed decays into photons? =>Why is the universe not filled with photons? =>How can one force a photon from its classical path (a geodesic) into a closed loop? These are four experimental results which challenge your theories, namely =>Pions decay into 2, 3, or four photons, see http://pdg.lbl.gov/ =>Neutrinos don't couple to photons, see above. =>The universe contains matter. =>Photons always travel along geodesics, a well-known result from GR. This entire post, I hope you realize, has been a ``science-based'' challenge to the idea that all particles are made of photons.

I thought that that was clear from the context...

I think our ability to understand what the world is doing physically is intimately tied to the extent to which math describes nature. If math fails to describe nature, we can no longer understand it.

How many citations do the KKLT papers have?

Absolutely. We only have photons because they are left over from electroweak symmetry breaking, which happens at 10^-12 seconds after the big bang. So before this, there are no photons, plain and simple. Before this time, the universe is filled with a quark-gluon plasma. The electro-weak symmetry breaking gives mass to three of the four electroweak bosons. Only the photon remains massless. Again, we know that this is experimentally the case because the electroweak force is a short range force, which means that the gauge bosons which mediate the force MUST be massive. We can even measure the distances and we get exactly what we expect---the electroweak force is only important on distances equivalent with the compton wavelength of the massive Z boson (mass=91 GeV or so). And the mass of the Z boson is the most accurately measured parameter in the standard model. In physics, we say that the electro-weak force is spontaneously broken to electromagnetism. You can look at the wiki entry for the big bang timeline if you'd like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_timeline#The_electroweak_epoch So in Farsight's proposal, the quarks and gluons are MADE of particles that don't even exist yet, in terms of the early universe. My guess is that he has some alternative explanation to the big bang as well. This is an important point, and it is my next argument against farsight's ideas. It is a bit weaker than the first argument, because we know very well how pions decay, and we haven't observed the higgs boson yet (although keep your ear to the ground for news from FermiLab). As of yet, however, Farsight still hasn't answered satisfactorily any of the questions that anyone has posed him in this thread.

Great. The photon can be divided. Then why do we exist? Why is there matter? Photons are obvioulsy the lowest energy state, and the second law of thermodynamics demands that the universe should be filled with only photons? This idea is called the ether, and has been disproven by experiments before 1900. You are a bit late with this revelation. Two things. First, how can a transverse wave be put into a ``moebius soliton configuration''? You haven't specified a mechanism, only waved your hands and said ``This CAN happen and this CAN happen''. Secondlt, the extreme irony in all of this is, of course, you are describing something which looks very much like string theory. Fundamental particles are just excitations of the most fundamental object, the string. This is quite hillarious, because we all remember this: Either way, you will deny this, because you don't understand string theory, and you seem to have only read page 105 of Lee Smolin's book. This was quite a nice laugh for me this afternoon, Farsight, so I will thank you for it. Back to your response: This statement is void of any meaning. Sure, charge is part of what an electron is. But you haven't explained what this statement means, or how one can home to get charge from a photon. You have said something akin to ``Just believe what I say, because I am right.'' You will no doubt point me to ``Charge Explained'', which I will no doubt not read. In whos frame? Inertia, as you surely know, is a frame dependant quantity.

It doesn't.

Ummm...who is everyone? Quantum mechanics superficially offers a good interpretation of probability because that's how it is constructed---you know the song, hermitian operators make the time evolution operator unitary... I don't know who in the world would disagree with this... I'm not REAL sure what you are talking about, but one would expect the evolution operators to ALWAYS be unitary. Are you making a general statement? Or is there some counterexample you have? The idea of ``conserving probabilities'' seems pretty meaningless to me, and I don't have any idea how one would do physics if one couldn't do statistics. I am thouroughly confused by your post. You seem to be open to the possibility that probability is not something fundamental. But this is wrong, which has been shown in the hidden variables experiments. So I really don't know what you are saying here.

Farsight's theories are strikingly similar to another, ummm, alternative scientist with which I have had extensive discussions. His stuff is at einsteinhoax.com.

What about it?

Kalynos--- You can treat all of these processes perturbatively. It corresponds to taking more and more complicated interractions of photons and electrons. For most purposes, the tree level result (i.e. leading term in the perturbative expansion) is pretty accurate, though---usually to around 10-15%. Did you actually read that thread? Did you read the places where I claimed many times that the argument against LQG wasn't mine, and the places where I asked for clarifications of points? It seems not. And if string theory is dead, you might want to tell the thousands of people who are working on it. My arrogance comes from having worked hard enough so that I know the right answers. Where does yours come from? Either way, I'll repeat my point---if a pion is just a configuration of a photon, why can it decay into so many different photons?

Lakshya--- There is a discontinuity in the metric. The manifold you are describing is not smooth and differentiable everywhere---it is not a manifold at all. In less technical terms, you can't go from ``gravity'' to ``no gravity'' across a boundary. I think.

Lockheed--- You can twist a torus as well. It is not as easy to see, but here goes an explanation. Draw a square on a piece of paper. If you imagine indentifying the opposite sides, you have a torus. If you don't believe me, start with an empty roll of paper towels and cut it open. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Torus.html What you do it identify the ``up'' arrows and the ``right'' arrows. To twist the torus (like a Moebius strip), take the ``up'' arrow and turn it ``down'', and the ``right'' arrow and turn it ``left''. It's just a generalization of a twisted surface.

Oh my so many things to respond to. This is, of course, where Farsight begins attacking me personally---as is the way of things, I suppose. I remember once, on another forum, he threatened me with physical violence. HA! If he only knew me. But these things aside. Hmm. I don't actually know how one detects a neutrino. So I'll think about it, and let someone else do the google search. The neutrino couples too weakly to matter---it only participates in things like weak interractions (i.e. beta decay). My guess is that that's what they use, namely the reverse beta decay where a proton and a neutrino go to a neutron and a positron. Then the positron annihilates with an electron in the detector and gives your ``flash of light''. Fair enough. Let's assume that this is how it works (perhaps I haven't been creative enough). But if it is, then you're left with a neutron and a photon. But the neutron decays, into a proton, an electron and a neutrino. Hopefully it is painfully obvious to your superior intellect that this logic is circular. And a neutrino doesn't give a photon directly. In fact, I'm confusing myself now trying to decide what is made of what. I can understand how you confuse yourself with pair production---it's a tree level process. But neutrino to photons is suppressed by powers of the Fermi constant. This is probably why it is so hard to see the neutrinos in the detectors, which I know are very large. The photon is A fundamental particle below the weak scale, sure. But I have shown several cases where the interpretation of particles as ``configurations'' of a photon is experimentally ruled out, cf pion decays. If particles were configurations, pions, for example, would always decay into the same number of photons, and electrons and positrons would always anihilate into the same number of photons. This simply is not the case. Way to steal my tag. And the whole point of me spending an hour responding to your posts instead of getting drunk (it is my birthday) is to show you that you have confused yourself. Challenge them all you want. If this really IS your point, you shouldn't be scared to be wrong. I assure you, other great physicists have had your same thoughts flash through their heads. But they knew enough physics to say ``Oh, wait. That's dumb. What about pions?'' I read enough of it to know that it was wrong. How much of a song do you have to listen to before you've made up your mind about it? How many bites do you take from a meal you dislike? You KNOW you won't like the food because of past experiences. I've spent five years reading physics papers, and trust me---I know if it's bogus after reading the abstract. Thank you for the lesson in electrons. The spins have to line up very specifically for the reaction to take place, otherwise they just scatter off of each other. Note that there is a process called Bhabha scattering, e+e- --> e+e-. This happens when the helicities aren't right. The spin of the electrons has to be just right. Again, this is something that can be checked with experiment. Take two polarized beams, one of electrons and one of positrons. Cross them and measure the helicities of the resulting photons. So you're scared of the math? This is nice. You are using my axioms to prove that my axioms are wrong? How so? Maybe you should call Phys Rev D, and tell them that you've found a glaring inconsistency in the standard model. What are my axioms, exactly? Please, enlighten me, because I have never really stated what axioms I was using. I'm just assuming that the data in the particle data book (http://pdg.lbl.gov/) is correct, and described by a quantum field theory. For details, consult a textbook : http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~mark/ms-qft-DRAFT.pdf. Very good Farsight, very good. I hope, after careful consideration, that you realize you have pointed out a flaw in your own reasoning. If electrons and positrons are configurations of photons, how can one photon create BOTH an electron and a positron from a single photon? I actually hadn't thought of this process, so I should thank you. No, the CCD gives you an electrical impulse, which a computer reads out and TELLS you that there was a photon. You never see a photon, you only see evidence for photons. You have a theory, and a detector. You predict that the detector behaves in a certain way (using math, which is very much part of the Axis of Evil, I might add) and you observe that behavior. Repeat. Do statistics. Now you can be reasonably certain that you do, in fact, have a photon, and your theory is correct. Hello pot? This is the kettle... Don't get your knickers in a wad just because you can't ``EXPLAIN'' some data that I have presented you with. This is how science works, love it or leave it. But yes, I have never made any attempt to hide the fact that this is EXACTLY what I am doing. Wait for it... Wait for it... Just a bit more... Here it comes... And the payoff. I don't squeal to moderators. I will point out that your ideas contradict a number of experiments, and that you respond to scientific criticisms of your ideas with hand waving and personal attacks. This pretty much DEFINES pseudoscience. What I object to is that you pass yourself off as an expert, and you don't even know what you're talking about. Then you go and tell other people you're an expert, and doop them into believing that you are right. Then those people vote, and I get stuck with 51% of Americans who blieve in things like Creationism, VooDoo, the Bermuda Triangle and Relativity+. Farsight---I get paid to do physics. What you are doing is telling me that I have no position to judge your theories because I get paid to judge theories. You are telling a dentist that he doesn't know anything about teeth, and the umpire that he doesn't know anything about football. And we're still on the first problem that I found with your ideas---namely that there is no well-defined notion of things like pions being made of ``configurations of photons''. You keep attacking my axioms, and I haven't even really said what axioms I am applying here. You attack my character and dodge the questions when you can't think of a way to respond to my criticisms of your ideas. Is this how you treat your grandmother when you try to explain physics to her?

1. Yes. That's why we never say mass is conserved. 2. If you plan to be taking ``sum'' college courses, you should learn some Enrish so you can m-press your professors.

Well, there you have it. It seems that you have learned as much from Wikipedia about spinors as I have in the two months or so it took me to understand them. You have just cut and paste something from Wikipedia that someone else has cut and paste from somewhere else. You haven't attempted to understand what a spinor is, and why we think spinors represent fermions. I really doubt that you read any more than the first paragraph of the article. And now you're putting words into my mouth. This is most certainly a farsight post, which I will link to to save you the trouble of looking for it: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showpost.php?p=354386&postcount=2. Nonetheless, almost every scentence in the following paragraph is wrong: The standard model has no UV completion. It has a perfectly happy interpretation as a low energy effective field theory---indeed, asking for anything more is expecting too much of it. Farsight has not, as yet, proposed anything that has even a remote possibility of explaining the standard model. For one, the Standard Model itself says that photons are not fundamental... If you don't know this, then you should really go back and study physics, or back to driving a cab (or whatever day job you have). The photon is only an artifact of the electroweak symmetry breaking, and doesn't exist above energies of around 100GeV. This is another problem with Farsight's theories---namely, photons don't even EXIST in the very early universe. And I will be there (God willing) to show you why it's wrong. My temper is fine thanks---I KNOW I'm right because I've done the calculations. And I KNOW farsight is wrong because his ideas contradict direct observation, as well as common sense. I have presented MANY genuine criticisms here, NONE OF WHICH farsight has answered directly.

We are picking on Farsight's theories (if they can be called that) here. But there probably should be some precision tests of Makwell's laws---you should look into it.

Trust me---there are many straws to clutch at. I'm trying to clarify what you said, which I am still not sure of. You linked to two papers---the first was on a website called ``Academic Open Journal'', which I disregard as not peer-reviewed, and thus illegitimate. The second article was a theoretical estimate of neutrino anihilation along the horizon of a black hole. This still doesn't support your point. I searched the particle data book for a measurement of neutrinos to photons. The problem is that the neutrinos only come in one helicity---left-handed. This means that they can't align in the way electrons and positrons can, so they can't anihilate. I showed you the SM lagrangian, and you can check for yourself that there is no neutrino anti-neutrino photon term in the Yukawa potential. Please correct me if I am wrong. Spin is not gone, it's still very much there. The correct equation is this: [math]+ \frac{1}{2} + -\frac{1}{2} = +1 + -1[/math] That is, two electrons of opposite hilicity annihilate and form two photons of opposite helicity. Spin isn't gone because the photons still have spin. Ah no. This cannot happen because a photon has only two helicities, +1 and -1. A photon absolutlely cannot emit another photon---that is, no photon can ``split'' into two other photons. Again I refer you to the standard model lagrangian, or just the QED lagrangian. In any case though, you are quite wrong. Now, if you want to give photons a small (but non-zero) mass, they gain a longitudinal polarization, another degree of freedom, and thus a third polarization. Then what you said could be correct. But photon masses (of course) break Lorentz Invariance. Evidence? What do you mean evidence? That's all we can ever have in an experiment. Show me a single photon. You can't. You can show me a detector that records an event, which we interpret as a photon. The photon fits the calculation, so we call it a photon and close the book. This is how science works, but, of course, you already know this. Did I ever, anywhere, say that Lorentz Invariance was complicated? I think not---I just told you how one who understands the mathematics behind the group structure would answer your question. Apologies, my friend, of course. I've only showed everyone else here that you are wrong, if they didn't already know. OOOOOH, I think I've angered the great Farsight, whose wrath knows no bounds. Look, ass---I'm criticizing your ideas on my turf, specifically the standard model and quantum field theory. These are the things I understand best, and it is quite clear to me that your ideas fail here. You disagree with experiments and mathematical consistency on so many levels that you've torn the whole framework apart. I don't care what you say about mass because I know you're wrong---likewise for time. It would be a shame if you huffed out of this discussion early. I quite enjoy these conversations because it gives me an ooportunity to shore up the physics that I already know. I like talking with crackpots for exactly this reason. For example, before this, I had never thought about neutrinos anihilating to photons. I know now why it is impossible, unless we are working at high enough energies where a very massive right handed neutrino (needed to generate small non-zero masses for neutrinos) could participate in the interractions.

There's a guy at OSU working on this, Lou DiMauro, I think is his name. http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~dimauro/