Charge Explained

[Farsight]

CHARGE EXPLAINED

 

Charge is another one of those things you learn about in physics. Well, you think you do, but you don’t. Not really. The textbooks don’t explain it, and they shrug off this omission by telling you it’s fundamental. It isn’t. It’s as fundamental as mass, which is not very fundamental at all. The thing is this: if you understand mass you already understand charge. But you probably don’t realise it yet. So I’ll explain it.

 

 

Let’s start with the easy stuff. We know that we can rub a balloon to create an electric field. It can pick up a piece of paper or make your hair stand up. We’ve all seen and felt a spark of static, blue and crackling as electricity tears the air. We know that high voltage is called high tension, and tension is negative stress and stress is pressure. So we’re happy with the fluid analogy where a current flows from the negative to the positive terminals of a battery. It doesn’t much matter that they got electricity backwards. We measure this rate of flow in terms of amperage, and multiply by time to get charge, and multiply again by voltage to get energy. We work out that the amount of charge in a battery is all about the number of electrons available to flow, and we know that our charged-up balloon has a surplus of them above and beyond its protons.

 

So, how much charge is in a flat battery? None, I hear you say. Wrong. It’s chock full of charge. It’s full of positive charge and negative charge. That’s why it’s got mass. That’s why it’s a material object. If there wasn’t any charge, it would be a whole heap of gamma radiation, and you and I would be looking like something out of Mars Attacks!

 

 

 

LOL. But let’s keep it simple and stick to electrons. What is it about these electrons that keeps our laptops humming? What is this thing called “charge” that causes motion? The answer is trivial once you know how to see it. Go to the kitchen, get a glass, then pour a glass of water and hold it up to the window pronto. You will see bubbles swirling and silvery, pop pop, popping. They aren’t actually silver of course, they just look that way because they distort the light. Now go to the cutlery drawer and pull out a spoon. It’s silvery. Metals look that way because they are awash with electrons. When you look at a spoon you are seeing those electrons, or more properly, their charge. It’s reflective, silvery. Charge looks like this for the same reason as those bubbles. It’s like a highway mirage on a hot sunny day. You see what looks like water on the road far ahead, but it’s merely the light from the sky bent towards your eye. You are seeing distortion, and it’s silvery like a bubble because it bends light.

 

 

Charge is distortion too. Charge is “curl”. Charge is twist. If it wasn’t there, your electrons would be gamma photons of 511KeV apiece. To show you how it works, I need you to play with plates. Take two dinner plates, one in each hand. Find a swimming pool or a pond, preferably on a sunny windless day. Dip one of the plates halfway into the water. Now stroke it gently forward in a paddling motion whilst lifting it clear. Notice that you create a “U-tube” double whirlpool that moves slowly forward through the water.

 

 

This is a Falaco Soliton. If your pool is big enough, the double whirlpool will settle down into two dimples on the surface of the water, visible as two black-spot shadows on the bottom. They are very stable, and can persist for maybe an hour. But you don’t need to wait for that. Create one double whirlpool with one dinner plate, then step to one side and create another one with the other dinner plate. You’ll need a little practice, but after a while you’ll have the knack of it, and you’ll be able to create two double whirlpools with ease. Aim them at each other. Notice what happens. If the left-hand-side of one double whirlpool closes with the right-hand-side of the other, the two opposite whirlpools move together. If the left-hand-side of one double whirlpool closes with the left-hand-side of the other, the two similar whirlpools move apart. What you are seeing is attraction and repulsion.

 

Now aim two double whirlpools straight at one another, face on. This is best in a shallow pond with a muddy bottom. The two double whirlpools meet and merge and are gone with a surprisingly energetic puff of muddy water. You’ve just seen annihilation.

 

It’s another fluid analogy. But the vacuum of space is not a fluid like water. It doesn’t flow. It’s more like an elastic solid, but one with no solidity at all. Let’s recap a little. I explained energy in terms of stress. Stress is force per unit area, and energy is force times distance, so energy is stress times volume. I talked about a photon as a stress travelling through space like a transverse wave propagating through a block of ghostly rubber. I explained mass by talking about pair production, where a massless gamma photon is converted into an electron and a positron.

 

 

Both the electron and the positron can be viewed as a photon configured as a moebius doughnut, twisting and turning to stay in place. It takes two turns round a moebius to get back to where you started, hence the spin ½. The difference is that one twists and turns one way, and the other twists and turns the other way. They are mirror images of opposite chirality, primitive 3D knots tied different ways. Do note though that there are no surfaces involved. An electron has no surface, just like a photon has no surface, just as an ocean wave has no surface, because it’s the ocean that does. And space does not. The electron isn’t some little particle that’s “got” charge extending out into space. Instead charge is one of the things the electron is.

 

 

The electron and positron will attract one another like the Falaco solitons, and if they meet it’s like pushing two opposite twists of fishing line together. Twang. The electron and the positron annihilate, and become gamma photons flying off in opposite directions like that puff of muddy water.

 

 

Energy is fundamental. You cannot create energy, and you cannot destroy it. But you can create charge just as you can create mass, via pair production. And you can destroy charge just as you can destroy mass, via annihilation. Because charge is the twist that you need to apply to a travelling stress to keep it twisting and turning in one location to re-present momentum as inertia. And because there’s nothing solid to brace against in our pure marble geometric world where stable particles are knots, the only way to make a twist is to make an untwist at the same time. That’s why charge is always conserved. Yes, you can make a mass without any charge, but that’s only because one twist is masked by another, as in a neutron. A neutron is pinned down stable in a nucleus, but let it escape that nucleus and it comes apart.

 

 

This twist is what charge is. It’s a twist in the thing you call space, stretching out into space. You could call an electric field a “twist field”.

 

Let’s see how it affects an electron. Remember, an electron is a photon travelling in a twisting turn, a moebius doughnut. Drop it into a cube of space so it looks like this: ◙. If we take a side view of our photon at one instant in time it looks like a vertical slice of the moebius doughnut, like this: o. Now twist the cube from top to bottom. What happens to the o? It tilts. Its orientation has changed. It’s now angled downwards. So the electron digs down through the electric field like a drill bit.

 

Note that that the electric field isn’t just a twist in one dimension, it’s actually in three dimensions. Your electron digs down like a drill bit from any direction. But it’s very difficult to think in three dimensions. Our primary input is visual, and whilst binocular vision permits depth perception, we tend to think in two dimensions. That’s why getting the feel for something is what intuition and grasp are all about. It gives us a better, three-dimensional concept. To illustrate this, get a block of plasticine or maybe the wax from Babybel cheese, and make a cube. Now try twisting it in three dimensions. Two twists is easy: twist, turn, twist. But doing the third one is surprisingly difficult. In the end you have to just do it by feel: twist turn, twist turn, twist. You end up with something like this:

 

 

The easiest way to get your head round all this geometry is to imagine that the twisted cube is a twisted block of water, and we’ve got to swim through it. I’m really good at swimming underwater, I do it like the Man from Atlantis, undulating my whole body. Spladoosh, in we go. As you’re swimming behind me you find that all the twisting and turning means you’ve got to swim further than you thought, and you come out of the other side gasping for air. But you will now understand refraction. Light travels slower through a glass block because it’s got to make its way through all that twisting and turning in all directions, be it positive or negative.

 

Talking of turning, let’s talk about magnetism. Imagine that you’re flying through space, but the space ahead of you is twisted like a catherine wheel because of the electric field. It will make you turn. We now use Relativity to work out that if you aren’t travelling through space but you find yourself turning, then the twist must be travelling through you. That’s what happens when a current flows through a wire. Imagine the current is flowing down a wire from your eyes into the screen, and introduces an anticlockwise twist. I do mean anticlockwise because I’m talking about a flow from – to +.

 

.. ←

↓ ¤ ↑ o

.. →

 

Ignore the little dots, they're just spacers because this website compresses the spaces. The nearby electron o is basically a circling photon. This comes full circle in the twisting space before it has gone round 360 degrees. So it ends up at a different place, and describes a cycloid motion. So it follows the twist and goes round the wire like it’s in a washing machine, like swarf going round a drill bit.

 

It really is that simple. It’s so simple that it’s amazing that people puzzle at the mystery of it. I guess it’s because people like a good mystery. The electric field is effectively a “twist field”, and if you move through it you perceive a magnetic field, which is effectively a “turn field”. It’s so obvious once you see it. And you can see it. You can see how a magnetic field changes the polarization plane of a beam of light via the Faraday effect.

 

 

That’s the utter simplicity of electromagnetism: twist and turn. It tells you a battery is like a wind-up clockwork spring, only the twist is in space rather than steel. The electric twist extends forward with the flowing current, and it makes things turn like a pump-action screwdriver. That’s the principle of the electric motor. But you can turn a screw with an ordinary screwdriver too, extending the twist forward. That’s the principle of the dynamo.

 

Most materials aren’t magnetic because all this twisting and turning is symmetrical in all directions, even for your charged-up balloon. It’s what you call isotropic. When it isn’t, that’s when you get a magnet. Fly through an electric field or past a stationary electron and you “see” more twist in the direction of travel, so you “see” a magnetic field that makes you turn. Move an electron towards you and you get the same effect. All you need to do to make an actual magnet is arrange the atoms so that the electrons jitter round in the same orientation.

 

.. ←

↓ .. ↑

.. → o

 

The electron is moving in a circular fashion, so its component photon doesn’t need to complete a full 360 degrees to turn around. This is why a day is less than one full rotation of the earth. So there’s a component of the “turn” left over, and you end up with a magnetic field similar to what you’d see if you flew past a stationary electron. It’s rather like the inverse of the current in the wire situation, but with no current and no wire.

 

Whilst I describe a magnetic field is a “turn field”, you have to remember that space is like an elastic solid. The electric field is the “twisted space”, and the magnetic field is only your relativistic view when you move through it, or it moves through you. There are no actual regions of space that are turning round like roller bearings or wheels. That’s why you can’t have magnetic monopoles. But you can have superconductors. High temperature superconductors consist of copper oxide planes. The atoms present an array of opposite magnetic fields rather like a conveyor belt, allowing electrons to zip through effortlessly like they’re not moving at all.

 

.. ←

↓ ¤ ↑

.. →

 

o→

 

.. →

↑ ¤ ↓

.. ←

 

It is of course a little more complicated than that. Wheels need bearings and axles. Here’s some pictures of a high-temperature superconductor called yttrium barium copper oxide, or YBCO for short. The chemical formula is YBa2Cu3O7 and it’s a crystal so you get repeating groups. Look at the third picture. In simple terms the “wheels” are where the green pyramids are.

 

 

Low temperature superconductors aren’t quite the same. You have to think Barn Dance, where you’re an electron with a “Cooper Pair” dance partner making your own magnetic fields as you go. When everybody’s cool, the dance line is tidy and you swing easily from one end to the other. But when it’s hot and late and everybody’s bumping around pissed, you spill somebody’s beer, lose your partner to a “Phase Slip”, and get into a fight. Yeehah. In both cases the superconductor is diamagnetic. It doesn’t want to be magnetised because of the Meissner Effect where internal opposite magnetic fields scramble an applied magnetic field so it doesn’t get into the material. All interesting stuff.

 

But not as interesting as the electron itself. Here’s the secret: cut a strip of paper, maybe an inch wide and ten inches long. Draw a very flattened X across the length of it, to represent the sinusoidal electric and magnetic fields over half a photon wavelength. That’s the slanted curvy twisted χ to the right of the M in the middle of this picture.

 

 

Mark the top left hand corner of your strip with an E, and the bottom left corner with an M. Mark the top right hand corner with an M and the bottom right corner with an E. This kind of thing:

 

E .......... M

..... X......

M ......... E

 

Turn the paper over and repeat. Now loop it around and twist it to make a moebius strip. You see the E adjoining the M and the M adjoining the E. That’s the nub of it, why the electron is a stable soliton. The electric field is the magnetic field and vice versa. The twist is the turn and the turn is the twist. It’s because of Relativistic abberation. Travel really fast and a horizontal line like this — looks skewed like this /. Travel at c like a photon and your horizontals look totally vertical. Change course fast and your change of course is skewed too, so you change course more than you meant to. And you do it fast so you change course even more. The details of this were worked out by Llewellyn Thomas in 1927, and is called Thomas Precession. Knock a photon just right to change its course, and it keeps on changing course because its velocity vector precesses π/2 times per revolution. The photon “thinks” its travelling in a straight line but its travelling like this: ∞. It’s all twisted, and it turns. It’s curly.

 

The twist and the turn are just two sides of the same thing. That’s how it always is. That’s why we have electromagnetism and the electromagnetic field. A magnetic field is the same thing as an electric field, it just depends how you’re looking at it. It depends on whether you’re moving through it or it’s moving through you, or not. That’s Relativity for you. Once you learn how to see things the way they are, things get a whole lot simpler. An electron is what it is because it’s “got” charge, and charge is twist.

 

The really really interesting thing about all this is that if charge isn’t fundamental, we can’t quite say that the photon is the mediator of the electromagnetic force. They got it back to front, like everything else to do with electricity, and it does matter. It matters a lot.

 

 

Acknowledgement note: I rather thought I’d worked this on out on my own and had a hot property on my hands that I'd sit on until the book was finished. Try googling for “What is Charge?” and you’ll know what I mean. The only thing that gave me a clue when I was puzzling it over, was something on a Science Hobbyist website by William J Beaty, an electrical engineer at the University of Washington in 1996. Read it yourself at http://amasci.com/elect/charge1.html. What stuck in my mind was that charge is silvery. That was enough, because I had a head start. I understood mass. And once you understand mass as something that isn’t fundamental, it’s quite easy to take a fresh look at charge. Especially if you’ve read “The Falaco Soliton: cosmic strings in a swimming pool” by R M Kein dated January 2001. See the original on http://arxiv.org/ftp/gr-qc/papers/0101/0101098.pdf. I tried it out in my pond in the back garden, and chewed it all over in my mind. I’m pretty confident I’ve got it right because electricity, magnetism, refraction, superconduction, and even the electron itself all seemed to follow quite logically. The RELATIVITY+ toy model flies like a bird. But whilst I thought I’d worked it out for myself, when I check back, I realise I didn’t. I’ve just found a PhysOrg forum post from "Good Elf "dated October 9th 2006, and there it is: “I think charge is not fundamental. It is partially expressed in this reference Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology by J.G. Williamson and M.B. van der Mark”. This predates even my essay on mass, and goes back to when I thought charge was a dimension. Duh. I was rather surprised to realise that CHARGE EXPLAINED isn’t so original, and a little surprised to realise that what I thought was my original thought wasn’t. It’s just a “synthesis” of things I’ve read. Things like Robert E Galloway’s "Refracting Saddle Wave Model of Stable Fundamental Particles". Or D T Froedge’s "The Concept of mass as Interfering Photons". Or Norman Albers' "Gravitation and Vacuum Polarization" (we are barking up the same tree, Norm). There’s Christoph Stiller and "Does Matter Differ from Vacuum?" There’s David Lush and Harold Aspden and many others. I owe these guys thanks and proper acknowledgement and credit, which I’ll have to look into properly.

 

Meanwhile, if anybody can give me some feedback to CHARGE EXPLAINED I’d be grateful.