Luis Alvarez-Gaume and Miguel A. Vazquez-Mozo, Introductory Lectures on Quantum Field Theory, arXiv.org hep-th/0510040 v1, 5 October 2005.

Peter Woit recently placed a link to the paper above on Not Even Wrong.

These guys have now made a major step indeveloping a classical model of QFT, see pp 70-71, 83-85: p71: "... the electromagnetic coupling grows with energy... the polarisation of the vacuum [ether] ... electron-positron pairs around the location of the[core of the] charge. These virtual pairs behave as dipoles that, as in a dielectric medium, tend to screen this charge ... decreasing its value at long distances (i.e. lower energies)."

This has been known for a while (see for example Koltick's 1997 PRL paper on the electron-positron collision experiments at high energy, which partly penetrated the polarised shield).

p85: "Here we have illustrated the creation of particles [pair-production asquantum tunnelling] by semiclassical sources in Quantum Field Theory... what one observer calls the vacuum will be full of particles for a different observer [hence special/restricted relativity is horses***, giving way to the absolute motion implicit in accelerations and general motion, hence general relativity is an ether theory not a non-ether theory]."

It is curious to see restricted/special relativity being abandoned on page 85 with the technically obscure words: The breaking of such invariance, as happened in the case of coupling to a time-varying source analyzed above, implies that it is not possible anymore to define a state which would be recognised as the vacuum by all observers.

So special relativity is ditched because of quantum field theory! Didn't Dirac do this in his paper sating quantum field theory implies an ether, published in Nature in 1951? Or did he make the error of talking clearly?

The cause of particle-wave duality is the use of the ether, called the Dirac sea. An individual particle, say electron, has a real spinning core, electromagnetic energy normally going around in a loop at light speed (we also need allow for orbit speed, etc.). Surrounding this core is the infinite Dirac sea of virtual charges, the ether. The positive virtual charges in the ether are attracted toward the real core, causing a polarisation of the ether, and this polarisation acts as a veil or attenuating shield for the core's electric field strength.

The magnetism of an electron from crude experimental data and also Dirac's theory is defined as 1 Bohr magneton, but better experiments by Polykarp Kusch (I think they simply flipped electrons in an alternating magnetic field and measured radio emission or some such idea) gave a more precise result of 1.00116 Bohr magnetons. Schwinger came up with renormalisation for a simple interaction (now called the first Feynman coupling correction), which predicted 1 + 1/(2Pi.137) = 1.00116 Bohr magnetons, so QFT was at last starting to work.

However, when you look at the maths, as Dr Chris Oakley and Dr Peter Woit points out, it is not clear what renormalisation and path integrals QED is really representing. Using classical physics, it seems clear to me that the 1 [in the simple result 1 + 1/(2Pi.137)] is the magnetic moment from the electron core, unshielded, while the small correction is suggesting to us that the electron core is associating - perhaps by Pauli's exclusion process - with a virtual charge in the vacuum. The 2Pi is is wavelength or spin effect, and the 137 is the shielding factor of the polarised virtual charge, which gives rise to the coupling with a virtual charge in the surrounding spacetime fabric. (Presumably only the core's electric field is shielded by radially polarised virtual charge, and not the core's magnetic field.)

This is why the observed electric charge of the electron at great distancesis 137 times weaker than the core charge. This attenuation factor of 137 is validated by a discrepancy in the apparent spin of the core as calculated from the measured magnetism (Zeeman effect and Stern-Gerlach experiment), as well as by nuclear physics which shows that nuclei approaching 137 protons cannot be formed as there would be zero stabilility; this and other evidence indicated that the short-range strong nuclear force is about 137 times theelectromagnetic force. The only way to reconcile all the facts is to say that the electric force is the residual of the strong nuclear force once the latter has penetrated the veil of polarised virtual particles in the surrounding vacuum.

Double slit experiment explanation, 'central paradox in QM' (Feynman): (1) diffraction (wave effect) is only detectable if the slits are sufficiently close together that the disturbance in the ether created by the motion of the electron or photon can be affected by both of the slits, (2) the weird 'explanations' don't even discuss what happens in thedark fringes on the screen, between bright stripes. Do these guys claim, like Young, that two out of phase photons arrive at the dark fringes 'cancelling out' and violating the conservation of energy? Or do they simply ignore physics altogether and issue a lot of patronising metaphysics which 'justifies itself' by shrugging shoulder and claiming 'nature is weird'? Very convenient too, for string theory ...