Charge Explained

[Farsight]

CHARGE EXPLAINED v2.0

 

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 just measure the 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 tangible 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!

 

 

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 quickly fill it with water and hold it up to the window. You’ll 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 mobile 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. Watch carefully. 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 of course. It isn’t a perfect analogy because the vacuum of space is not a fluid like water. Space doesn’t flow. It’s more like an elastic solid, but one with no solidity at all. There’s nothing there, but energy can travel through it, and we can talk about a photon as a stress volume travelling through space like a transverse wave propagating through a block of ghostly transparent rubber. Then we can understand mass by talking about pair production, where a massless gamma photon is converted into an electron and a positron:

 

 

The thing to note is that both the electron and the positron can be viewed as a photon configured as a moebius doughnut, a travelling stress that twists and turns to stay in place. 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. They’re knots of stress in space, so the electron isn’t some little particle that’s “got” charge extending out into space. Instead charge is one of the things that the electron is.

 

 

While they’re travelling stresses rather than travelling fluid, the electron and positron will attract one another like the Falaco solitons. When 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.

 

 

It’s energy that’s fundamental. Not mass or charge. 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 place to re-present momentum as inertia. And because there’s nothing solid to brace against in this 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 that doesn’t exhibit any charge, but that’s only because one twist is countered by another, as in a neutron. A neutron has charge, like a flat battery has charge. The positive charge is matched by the negative. There’s charge there, but you just don’t notice it while the neutron is pinned down stable in a nucleus. However should the neutron escape that nucleus, it wobbles itself apart in about ten minutes. Then the charge is obvious. The neutron decays into a neutrino plus an electron and a proton that were in a way there all the time. They’re two opposite twists, but they’re different sizes and shapes that can’t annihilate each other.

 

 

 

This twist is what charge is. It’s a twist in the thing you call space, stretching out into space. This is why 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. In very simple terms you can consider it to be a circle looking this: o. Drop it into a cube of space 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. Now twist the cube from top to bottom. What happens to the slice? It tilts. The orientation has changed. It’s now angled downwards. So the photon will travel downwards while it’s also travelling in a twisting turning loop. Hence the electron digs down through the electric field like a drill bit. That’s how attraction works. Repulsion is the same sort of thing, but of course a positron goes the other way, like a drill in reverse.

 

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 appreciate 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 the geometry is to imagine that the twisted cube is a twisted block of water, and we’ve got to swim through it. 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 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.

 

 

Hold your arms out and walk forwards like you’re an aeroplane. When you encounter the twisted space lean into the twist. The twisted space will make you rotate in an anticlockwise fashion. 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 page. It’s flowing from negative to positive, so this introduces an anticlockwise twist:

 

...←

↓ ¤ ↑ o

...→

 

(Please ignore the dots, this website compresses out 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. Hence 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. 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. This is 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. Beautiful.

 

Most materials aren’t magnetic because all this twisting and turning is equal and opposite 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 experience 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. It’s like the earth going round the sun - a day is less than one full rotation of the earth, lasting 23hours 56 minutes instead of 24 hours. As far as the electron is concerned 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 a ghostly elastic solid. The electric field is the “twisted space”, and the magnetic field is only your relativistic view when you move through it. There are no actual regions of space turning round and round like roller bearings. 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. The array of magnetic fields act like wheels.

 

...←

↓ ¤ ↑

...→

 

o →

...→

↑ ¤ ↓

...←

 

It is of course a little more complicated than that. Wheels need bearings and axles. Here’s a couple of 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 second 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. Interestingly, in both types of superconduction the superconductor is what’s called diamagnetic. It doesn’t get magnetised because of the Meissner Effect, where all the internal opposite magnetic fields scramble an applied magnetic field like a billion egg whisks, hence it doesn’t get very far 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 curly 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 when you change course more, you’re doing 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 it’s travelling like this: ∞. It’s all twisted, and it turns. It’s curly. It’s an electron.

 

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. 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 curl, 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 things back to front, like everything else to do with electricity, and it does matter. It matters a lot. It’s a matter of some... gravity.

 

[swansont]

Moved to speculations.

[Mr Skeptic]

Farsight, much as I think your theories are interesting, they are too vague. Perhaps your paper will clarify some points, but I could not access it (and what happened to putting it on arXiv?).These are also just the vagueness with respect to your theory of electromagnetism to stay on topic:

1) You say electricity is twist, along which axis? An answer to this would clarify many of my questions.

2) Can you explain why charges are multiples of e? Why would it twist such a specific amount?

3) How do you explain conservation of charge? Yes, I did read about your examples of strings (twisted along the string's axis) and Falaco Solitons. I do not think these are good analogies; one is one-dimensional, and the other is a fluid. If you answer 1) I can clarify this better. Your string seems to be the only place you can separate two twists and let them join to cancel each other. How do you separate your twists?

 

Actually, answer 1) first so I don't have to ask a bunch of misinformed questions.

[Edtharan]

Yes, you can make a mass that doesn’t exhibit any charge, but that’s only because one twist is countered by another, as in a neutron. A neutron has charge, like a flat battery has charge. The positive charge is matched by the negative. There’s charge there, but you just don’t notice it while the neutron is pinned down stable in a nucleus. However should the neutron escape that nucleus, it wobbles itself apart in about ten minutes. Then the charge is obvious. The neutron decays into a neutrino plus an electron and a proton that were in a way there all the time. They’re two opposite twists, but they’re different sizes and shapes that can’t annihilate each other.

But what then is a Neutrino. Neutrinos have mass, there fore must be a "Twist" too (from Mass Explained this kind of Twist is also used to explain Mass), but it has no charge (that is why it is a Neutrino).

 

It has antimatter counter parts (therefore a reverse twist) that is also neutral in charge. When they collide, they too annihilate and release energy. They seem to perform all the tricks that all your other twists do, but do not display any "charge" as is predicted by your theory.

[ydoaPs]

If an electric field is twisted spacetime, what keeps it twisted? IIRC, gravity is the curvature of spacetime caused by mass, and when the mass is removed, so is the curvature. This seems to imply a springy-ness to spacetime. Would this not produce an opposing effect? You said charge is like a wound spring. Remember that a wound spring must be kept from unwinding. Essentially, my question is: what keeps the twist field from untwisting?

 

Also, I am confused as to whether this twist is static or dynamic. Is the twist twisting or twisted? From your Falaco Solution analogy, you seem to be saying charge is twisting spacetime, which would cause a charged particle to deflect non-charged particles(put a rubber ducky in the pool). When you described charge as a wound spring, it seemed like you were saying charge is twisted space-time. This leads to the question I have above.

 

Also, how would you determine the polarity of the charge? I had assumed you were thinking the polarity would depend on the direction in which spacetime is twisted. Then, I quickly decided that such could not determine the polarity since the direction really depends on your position relative to the field and that would mean the two polarities are just one polarity from different angles. It would also mean there are six distinct polarities and infinite intermediate polarities.

 

And, as in one of the above posts, I'd like to see how you explain the discrete nature of charge with your twist field speculation.

 

As to the accusations about your speculations not being theories, I'd say they are not theories YET. From a few moments of thinking about your speculations, I can see a few predictions(most of which don't correspond with reality as we currently know it, however). And as I said in another thread, you can definitely apply mathematics. You problem, as you have been told countless times, is that you are too vague. Once you get more specific, the maths and predictions become easier. Just look at the predictions that fall out of my posts in this thread.

[Farsight]

If an electric field is twisted spacetime, what keeps it twisted? IIRC, gravity is the curvature of spacetime caused by mass, and when the mass is removed, so is the curvature. This seems to imply a springy-ness to spacetime. Would this not produce an opposing effect? You said charge is like a wound spring. Remember that a wound spring must be kept from unwinding. Essentially, my question is: what keeps the twist field from untwisting?

 

The knot. I know it sounds trite, but the electron configuration is a "trivial" knot. It's not easy to visualise. Ideally we need computer modelling to show it in the form of a movie. The travelling stress goes round and round because it's propagating through the twisted space caused by its own turning.

 

Also, I am confused as to whether this twist is static or dynamic. Is the twist twisting or twisted? From your Falaco Solution analogy, you seem to be saying charge is twisting spacetime, which would cause a charged particle to deflect non-charged particles (put a rubber ducky in the pool). When you described charge as a wound spring, it seemed like you were saying charge is twisted space-time. This leads to the question I have above.

 

The twist is static. The cause is dynamic. When the charged particle moves, the twist moves, and if it moves past you you would say space is twisting, and then the twist is dynamic. Later on in the "scientific paper" I say that all massive particles have charge, and that a neutron has both positive and negative charge. So it's both attracted and repelled, hence there's no net motion due to the electromagnetic field. Note that I say space is twisted, not spacetime.

 

Also, how would you determine the polarity of the charge? I had assumed you were thinking the polarity would depend on the direction in which spacetime is twisted. Then, I quickly decided that such could not determine the polarity since the direction really depends on your position relative to the field and that would mean the two polarities are just one polarity from different angles. It would also mean there are six distinct polarities and infinite intermediate polarities.

 

It's a three-dimensional twist. The best words I can find to describe it is "twist in" or "twist out". It's really hard to visualize. Imagine something like this, only it's three-dimensional and you can move around it, but it always looks like the same from any vantage point.

 

 

Now imagine a mirror image of the above. That's the opposite "polarity".

 

And, as in one of the above posts, I'd like to see how you explain the discrete nature of charge with your twist field speculation.

 

I'm not quite sure what you mean, but perhaps it's to do with the constant photon amplitude, which means an electron comes in one size only. The electron is the simplest knot, the trivial knot, with just one loop. Other stable particles are similar, but with more complexity. For example the proton is a trefoil knot with three loops but the same degree of twist. But come to think of it, apart from the "antiparticle" versions with opposite chirality, and missing out the massless photons and the neutrinos, there are no other stable particles.

 

As to the accusations about your speculations not being theories, I'd say they are not theories YET. From a few moments of thinking about your speculations, I can see a few predictions (most of which don't correspond with reality as we currently know it, however). And as I said in another thread, you can definitely apply mathematics. You problem, as you have been told countless times, is that you are too vague. Once you get more specific, the maths and predictions become easier. Just look at the predictions that fall out of my posts in this thread.

 

All this stuff is certainly no theory, it's a model at best. And a mere toy at that. Thanks for your feedback on this. It's what I want and need. I know I'll have some things wrong, maybe a lot of things wrong, and some howlers too. But there's surely something here that's worth following up. Ideally I could interest somebody else to do some mathematics on it, because I'm kind of stuck in a catch-22 situation wherein this set of concepts can't get anywhere because it isn't adequately developed with sufficient rigor, and I haven't got the mathematical prowess to inject it. I was rather hoping that's why we had discussion forums, to float out a few ideas, kick things around, and get other people interested. It doesn't seem to be much like that.

[ydoaPs]

The knot. I know it sounds trite, but the electron configuration is a "trivial" knot. It's not easy to visualise. Ideally we need computer modelling to show it in the form of a movie. The travelling stress goes round and round because it's propagating through the twisted space caused by its own turning.

Gah, I was afraid of that. This would imply that there is minimum mass requirement for a given quanta of charge. The static twist wants to straight out, because, as you say, spacetime is like an elastic solid. There would, by your model, necessarily be a minimum mass. The knot has to be tied to some tightness for a given twist or else the twist would come undone. This is another BIG prediction of your model.

 

 

The twist is static. The cause is dynamic.

I'm sorry, but I must have missed the cause of the twist. Could you elaborate?

 

Note that I say space is twisted, not spacetime.

Is this because of how time is defined in your model, or does the twist field only occur in three dimensions? I'm not familiar with your model's view of time. Could you please give a brief overview? I'd read your latest Time Explained, but I don't have much time as I work basically 14 hour days(sometimes 16).

 

 

It's a three-dimensional twist. The best words I can find to describe it is "twist in" or "twist out". It's really hard to visualize. Imagine something like this, only it's three-dimensional and you can move around it, but it always looks like the same from any vantage point.

I'm confused. From your explanation below, it seems that the polarity is the difference between clockwise and counterclockwise. With three dimensions, there are 8 distinct possible twist polarity configurations as well as the in-betweens.

 

I'm not quite sure what you mean

I was wondering how your model explains why the charge of every particle is some multiple of the charge of the electron.

[Edtharan]

Later on in the "scientific paper" I say that all massive particles have charge, and that a neutron has both positive and negative charge.

How does this explain Neutrinos, a neutrally charged, non compound (unlike the Neutron) particle and it has mass?

[Farsight]

I'm sorry chaps, but I'm not carrying on any conversations in this trashcan.

[iNow]

I'm sorry chaps, but I'm not carrying on any conversations in this trashcan.

 

Hello Pot? Meet the kettle.

[insane_alien]

I'm sorry chaps, but I'm not carrying on any conversations in this trashcan.

 

ah the 'i don't know so i'm not talking to you' method. very scientific. he raises an incredibly valid point against your pet hypothesis. and whats more its short like you keep nagging him about.

 

if you ever submitted that for peer reveiw you'd get questions like that. so, an elementary particle with no charge. according to you shouldn't exist. but reality says otherwise.

[granpa]

no such thing as 3 dimensional twist. no matter how many dimensions space has, twist can always be described with a 2 dimensional plane. of course, that plane can have any orientation in space.

[ydoaPs]

Farsight, I saw that you're posting again. It's been a couple of years, so I was wondering if you had any updates for this.

[StrengtheningSagaciousness]

I'm wondering if the farther the electron travels away from mass into the vacuum the less twisting and turning happens. More so, if a galaxy is quadri-polar, and an electron crosses over the galactic plane does it twist the other way? Any thoughts? Anybody know of similar current studies on this?

[Ronald Hyde]

With due respect to the OP, there are three things you need to know about charge. It is scale invariant, when dynamic, as opposed to static, it is coupled to a vector field, it has a coupling strenght of appr. 1/137. But you do need to know how to construct a perturbation expansion for higher order processes. However charge alone has no meaning, all charged

particles have a mass ( despite the scale invariance ) so it has to be incorporated into a larger framework to be fully useful.

[swansont]

I'm wondering if the farther the electron travels away from mass into the vacuum the less twisting and turning happens. More so, if a galaxy is quadri-polar, and an electron crosses over the galactic plane does it twist the other way? Any thoughts? Anybody know of similar current studies on this?

!

Moderator Note

Hijacking a thread to bring up your won pet theory is against the rules. You have a thread on this. Don't bring it up elsewhere