metacogitans Posted August 29, 2015 Posted August 29, 2015 Zitterbewegung is the hypothetical rapid trembling motion of subatomic particles, which is sporadic in different directions and could be thought of more or less as occurring in every direction due to how rapid the sporadic changes in direction are. If it exists, it would supposedly be caused by fluctuations in positive and negative fields around/nearby the particle, such as from other particles, and this would mean that Zitterbewegung becomes more intense when particles are grouped together. So, if we assume Zitterbewegung exists as a property of all matter and all of those facts about it are true, it would end up producing an effect very similar to gravity would it not? Imagine a lone particle traveling through space, going past a group of particles all experiencing zitterbewegung with each other. As the lone particle gets closer, it starts to experience zitterbewegung. The more it experiences zitterbewegung, the more it picks up more zitterbewegung, because as its trembling sporadically in different directions, every time it trembles in the direction of the group of particles it would pick up more zitterbewegung from them and start to move farther towards them each time it trembled towards them. That would be pretty indistinguishable from gravity wouldn't it? Also, looking at the Einstein Field Equations, the gravitational constant present in the equations (which was carried over from Newtonian gravity and is the same plain old meters/second constant it was in classical physics) describes a force and how it behaves, but doesn't describe where that force actually comes from. The tensors in the rest of the Einstein Field Equations describe warped space-time for us, but don't forget that without the gravitational constant in the equation, warped space-time does not produce free-fall by itself (it would cause the trajectory of moving objects to curve, but not free-fall). So, there most definitely is still missing puzzle pieces (in the field equations themselves even) that General Relativity didn't give an explanation for. From the wikipedia article on Zitterbewegung, there's not much proof of it existing, but there's not much proof that it doesn't exist either. It would stand to reason that subatomic particles should be experiencing some kind of trembling motion anyways just from random fields affecting them, like just from background radiation for example. And it would also seem logical that anytime a particle with a charge moves at all, the field of its charge moving would cause a fluctuation in other nearby fields and would influence other nearby particles slightly. If that influence were strong enough, it could cascade causing acceleration resembling gravity,
ajb Posted August 29, 2015 Posted August 29, 2015 One would need to mathematically show that the basic features of gravity can be explained in this way. In particular you would need to explain how general relativity comes out of this in some limit. By explain I mean do some calculations. I wonder how you could get long range interactions from small local vibrations. The amplitude is on par with the Compton wavelength.
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