Severian

In my neck of the woods, cattle are slaughtered by an electric current through the brain which wipes their brain instantly, supposedly preventing pain. It is certainly true that the slaughterhouses go to great lengths to ensure that the cattle are not stressed, since that spoils the meat. Also, most butchers where I live (not supermarkets though) get all their meat from organic free-range farms, simply because that is the way it has always been, even though they don't advertise it as such.

2 points: Firstly, the religious person helping the old people would not be doing it solely because his god told him to. He would be doing it because he thought it was right and that is reinforced by his religious beliefs. Secondly, the person helping the old people because they think it is the right thing to do are also operating on belief. They believe that the world will be a better place if they help. While I agree with that, it is an aesthetic argument that cannot be proven and as such is a belief. Criticizing someone for acting on belief and then advocating it for your own actions smacks of hypocrisy.

It is similar. They are both based on local gauge symmetries, and are just different groups (SU(3) rather than U(1)). However, the form of the force is completely different in manifestation. The reason for this is that the group structure of SU(3) means that the gluon (which mediates the strong force) has an SU(3) charge (unlike the photon which has no U(1) charge). This means that the gluons attract one another and this drastically changes the form of the field. In other words, we have a very good description of the electromagnetic and strong interactions via essentially the same mechanism. However, this mechanism leads to very different manifestations for each force (as we observe in experiment). You are trying to explain them in a different way, so you are throwing away the mechanism (the similar bit) and need to reconcile that we appear very different in experiment. You can't use the theory you are dismissing to make a deduction in your own theory.

There seems to be something in twisters though, even if it isn't what he originally expected.

The LHC will be switched on sometime next summer. The initial run will just be calibration so don't expect any results too soon. All the worlds particle physicists are waiting with baited breath...

The W boson is a particle which was discovered in 1983 at CERN. It is one of the carriers of the weak interaction (one of the four fundamental forces). It has now been extremely well examined in experiment and forms a part of a theory called The Standard Model. This model also contains a particle called the Higgs boson, which has not yet been discovered. The Standard Model is not just a handwaving idea. It is a highly quantitative theory which provides very accurate predictions of what happens when we collide particles together. These predictions are probabilistic since it is based on Quantum Mechanics (so we say that X happens Y% of the time). The Standard Model has been tested with incredible precision. It makes the best tested predictions ever made, and no result in the last 30 years has disagreed with it. However, it has not yet been tested at very high energies since we have not had big enough colliders to do this. This is why we are building the Large Hadron Collider and hope to find the Higgs boson to finally confirm the theory. Farsight wants to remove the Higgs boson from the theory, since he believes it is not necessary. The Higgs boson is usually described as the particle which gives mass to all the others, and Farsight believes that he has an alternate explanation for mass, so doesn't need the Higgs boson. I was pointing out that even if this were true (and I don't believe it is) then the removal of the Higgs boson from the model would destroy it. Without the Higgs boson the model predicts probabilities greater than 1, which doesn't make sense. Either he has an new explanation for this unitarity problem or he is asking us to throw away the thousands of successfully tested predictions that the Standard Model has already made. He has been unable to respond to my question, and I humbly suggest that until he does, he will not be taken seriously.

You haven't answered a single question I have asked you! How can you think I would be happy with your lack of answers? Am I just supposed to believe your 'theory' without questioning it?

Don't you think you should? Why should I throw away a theory which does explain this for a theory which doesn't?

The good news is that April 13th 2036 isn't a Friday (it is a Sunday).

OK. I went away and read Farsight's 'Mass explained' post and it is quite interesting how it is explained. I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding of how detailed our current theories (like the Standard Model) are and how carefully they do explain things. To some extent this is the fault of the physicists. We are aware that to understand the Standard Model in any depth you would need to have a degree in physics and then attend graduate courses. So when explaining it to the general public we use analogies and plenty of hand waving. While this might suit some people, it is deeply unsatisfactory to people who want to think about these things some more, and therefore they get the impression that we are not really explaining anything at all. Of course, we are, but we never present that explanation to them because we expect them to take our word for it. This leads to some people like Farsight coming up with explanations of their own which they believe are more compelling than the wishy washy rubbish that their physicist friend has explained down the pub. But when actual physicists look at the explanation their reaction is that nothing is explained because there is no mathematical formalism behind it. For example, Farsight claims an electron is really a photon going round and round in a sort of mobius strip. But he make no attempt to explain why the photon should follow this path, other than the rather unsatisfactory statement that it has "grabbed its own magnetic tail". Similarly, in 'charge explained', although he has charge as a consequence of spinning (like a spinning plate), he makes no attempt to tell us why all electrons then couple to photons with the same strength and why this coupling changes with energy (in a very well predicted way). In order to make physicists take his ideas seriously he will have to write them down in a much more precise way.

The reason that I mention WW scattering is because it is another reason for needing the Higgs boson. We talk a lot about the Higgs boson as being the origin of mass and all that, but from a theoretical perspective WW scattering is just as important. I presume you agree that the W boson exists, right? If so, then our current theory predicts that if the Higgs boson is absent then the WW scattering cross section rises too quickly with energy. So quickly in fact that by about a TeV it violates unitarity (probabilities no longer add up to 1). This is of course disasterous for the theory, but the Higgs boson saves us. It couples to the W's giving a negative contribution to WW scattering which tames the unitarity violation. So the Standard Model without the Higgs boson would have to be thrown in the bin. My question for you is, does your alternative explanation of mass which has no Higgs boson, also have an alternative solution to the WW scattering problem?

Ok, since you refuse to answer my question on g-2, let me ask a simpler one. What happens to WW scattering in your theory at asymptotically high energies?

For once, it appears that your predictions have born fruit.

This is especially true because the electron is so light that it falls out of equilibrium rather late on. Before then, any particle anti-particle annihilation rate is compensated by the back reaction of [math]\gamma \to e^+e^-[/math]. I suppose if all your particle were very heavy (so that they annihilate early) then you might be able to argue this.

Not really - there is no restriction on free electromagnetic waves either. You can have a photon with arbitrarily long wavelength and as far as we know for sure arbitrarily short wavelength. The only energy restriction you can come up with for free particles is that they should possibly not have energies above the Planck Mass. This is because we expect gravity to become very strong at that very very high energy scale and space-time will foam. Then your minimum waveleght would be the Planck length. But that is very speculative, is unproven, and forms no part of our current model of physics (the Standard Model). (I suppose you could also argue that the universe itself might be a finite size, but that is even more speculative, epsecially since we know it is topologically open.)

2 comments: This was in response to Ben's comment: " This is very beautiful, and is why we have left handed and right handed spinors." The point here is that all particles we have ever observed have been representations of various symmetry groups. The left and right handed spinors are separate representations of the Lorentz group, so if every fundamental symmetry should have particles corresponding to its irreducible representations, then we must have left and right handed spinors. So this is a prediction of Lorentz symmetry and is confirmed. In your rebuttal, Rae is pointing out that QM is only a structure within which theories should be built, not a theory in itself. So you need a Lagrangian to together with QFT to provide predictions. I would agree with that, but it in no way invalidates that point Ben made. To Farsight: May I ask for your prediction of the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron (or muon if you like)?

As far as we know, there is no 'smallest amount of energy possible'.

Quantum Mechanics is actually a really bad name for Quantum Mechanics since most things in Quantum Mechanics aren't actually quantised. Even worse, there are plenty of classical systems which are quantised. For example, the frequencies of a (unheld, or whatever the musical term is) guitar string are quantised for exactly tha same reasons as the hydrogen atoms energy levels are quantised. Non-commutative Mechanics might have been better.

This bit is wrong. The time dilation is dependent on the square of the (relative) velocity, so the angle has no effect. Only the magnitude of the velocity is important.

Ooooh, now I am on a distinguished road.

It is not really that odd. When you are outside the sphere, all of the sphere is off in one direction, 'below' your feet, so it all pulls at you in the same way and you feel the force. When you are inside the sphere, some of the sphere is above you and some is below you, so different bits of the sphere pull you in different directions. Let's say your head is the closest bit of you to the sphere, and that you are quite near the edge, for a sec (to simplify the discussion). Then the amount of mass above you is less than the amount below you, but since the mass above you is closer its gravitational effect (per unit area) is greater. The nice/weird/particular thing about gravity and electromagnetism, is that the extra gravitational pull (per unit area) of the mass above you is exactly compensated by the reduced area, so the forces from above and below exactly are exactly the same. This is because the force [math]\sim 1/r^2[/math] but the area [math] \sim r^2[/math]. So if gravity happened to be [math]\sim 1/r^3[/math] (or for that matter [math]\sim 1/r^{2+\epsilon}[/math] with [math]\epsilon[/math] very small) this wouldn't work.

I am categorically opposed to the reputation system, since no-one ever gives me any.

What I was meaning, is why do you think it is a singularity? Have you ever observed a singularity in real life? It seems far more likely to me that there would be some sort of quantum gravity effect which would kick in as you got close to the centre stopping it from becoming a singularity.

All of them. Only then will you have a complete overview of science.

Penrose is a good guy. He tends to have some weird ideas, but all in all he is a pretty smart cookie.