Published mathematical physics of explosions at http://Einstein157.tripod.com/

Includes my full proof of the G.I. Taylor formula for nuclear fireballs, with the constant he could not find analytically. Hardly Fermat's last theorem, but practical maths for survival. Enjoy!

Force of sound

The sound wave is longitudinal and has pressure variations. Half a cycle is compression (overpressure) and the other half cycle of a sound wave is underpressure (below ambient pressure). When a spherical sound wave goes outward, it exerts outward pressure which pushes on you eardrum to make the noises you hear. Therefore the sound wave has outward force F = PA where P is the sound wave pressure and A is the area it acts on. When you read Raleigh's textbook on 'sound physics' (or whatever dubious title it has), as I have done, you see the fool fits a wave equation from transverse water waves to longitudinal waves, without noting that he is creating particle-wave duality by using a wave equation to describe the gross behaviour of air molecules (particles). Classical physics thus has even more wrong with it becaus of mathematical fudges than modern physics, but the point I'm making here is that sound has an outward force and an equal and opposite inward force following this. It is this oscillation which allows the sound wave to propagate instead of just dispersing like air blown out of your mouth.

Note the outward force and equal and opposite inward force. This is Newton's 3rd law. The same happens in explosions, except the outward force is then a short tall spike (due to air piling up against the discontinuity and going supersonic), while the inward force is a longer but lower pressure. A nuclear implosion bomb relies upon Newton's 3rd law for TNT surrounding a plutonium core to compress the plutonium. The same effect in the Higgs field surrounding outward going quarks produces an inward force which gives gravity, including the compression of the earth's radius (1/3)MG/c^2 = 1.5 mm (the contraction term effect in general relativity).

The IGNORANT falsely 'believe' there is no inward force in big bang

Once again, an explosion - in air or in space, creates an outward pressure and hence force (via F=PA where A is area), which by 3rd law of motion implies an inward pressure of the surroundings like the Higgs field or air. If you look at some of the films of tests, you see the inward pressure phase of the blast is set up before the fireball begins to rise.

Brode deals with numerically integrating the equations of motion given the conservation of momentum, mass, and energy in a shock wave.

However, what physically results as shown on his charts is an outward force at the greatest distances, with an inward force within that zone, once there is a vacuum near ground zero.
The inward force of the blast (the inner concentric sphere) is the 3rd law reaction to the outward force (outer zone of the blast).

An analogy of this to the big bang in the Higgs field gives gravity right. Personally I think it was unethical of Dr Campbell of Nature to write me that he was "not able" to publish this nearly a decade ago. However, I'm sure he will get promotion and prizes for holding back progress. His type always do.

How do the horses*** artists, the string theorists, get away with their rubbish on gravity? Answer: society pays them to invent 10 dimensional horses*** speculation which cannot be tested and is not based on fact.

Question: why isn't the big bang treated as an explosion, as indicated above? Why am I suppressed? Who is responsible? Answer: Jeremy Webb BSc, editor of New Scientist, and his friends like Dr John Gribbin. Also Ivor Catt, who thinks facts proved in science can be ignored using Ockham's Razor which allows him to 'accept only falsely simplistic models which bend the facts to fit them'.

Now tell me that science is a matter of Popper's personal pet theories, not experimentally proved facts and testable predictions.

http://nigelcook0.tripod.com/:

The universe is receding; galaxies apart from a few nearby galaxies like Andromeda, all have a red shift. While there are speculations that the red shift may be tired light, there is no mechanism and no evidence of this from the spectrum of the red shifted light. In fact, the best ever experimental black body radiation spectrum was obtained by the cosmic background explorer satellite in 1992 from the 2.7 K (microwave) red-shifted 3,000 K (infrared) big bang radiation flash. This frequency spectrum was uniformly reduced by over 1,000 times by red shift, not by the effects of scattering of radiation (scattering is frequency-dependent). It was emitted about 300,000 years after the big bang. The three pieces of evidence for the big bang, namely (1) red shifts, (2) microwave background spectrum, and (3) the abundance of hydrogen, deuterium and helium in the universe are conclusive proof of the big bang in general. The purpose of this paper is to establish a fourth piece of evidence and to clarify what more we can learn from the big bang by proved experiments rather than by speculation. ...

Georges Louis LeSage, between 1747-82, explained gravity classically as a shadowing effect of space pressure by masses. The speculative, non-quantitative mechanism was published in French and is available online (G.L. LeSage, Lucrece Newtonien, Nouveaux Memoires De L’Academie Royal de Sciences et Belle Letters, 1782, pp. 404-31). Because gravity depends on the mass within the whole earth’s volume, LeSage predicted that the atomic structure was mostly void, a kind of nuclear atom which was confirmed by Rutherford’s work in 1911. LeSage argued that there is some kind of pressure in space, and that masses shield one another from the space pressure, thus being pushed together by the unshielded space pressure on the opposite side. Feynman explained that the major advance of general relativity, the contraction term, shortens the radius of every mass. He does not derive the equation, but we will do so below. ...

The contraction of space is by (1/3) GM/c2. This is the 1.5-mm contraction of earth’s radius Feynman obtains, as if there is pressure in space. An equivalent pressure effect causes the Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction of objects in the direction of their motion in space, similar to the wind pressure when moving in air, but without viscosity. Feynman was unable to proceed with the LeSage gravity and gave up on it in 1965. However, we have a solution.
The big bang causes an outward force (Newton’s 2nd law) that results in an equal inward force (Newton’s 3rd law) which causes gravity as an inward force, Higgs field pressure. Where partially shielded by mass, the inward pressure causes gravity. Apples are pushed downwards towards the earth, a shield. ...


METHOD 1: SIMPLE SHIELDING CALCULATION

Illustration: http://nigelcook0.tripod.com/Image1.jpg

There is strong evidence from electromagnetic theory (April 2003 Electronics World paper, reprinted near the end of this page) that every fundamental particle has black-hole properties. The effective shielding radius of a black hole of mass M is equal to 2GM/c2. A shield, like the planet earth, is composed of very small, sub-atomic particles. The very small shielding area per particle means that there will be an insignificant chance of the fundamental particles within the earth ‘overlapping’ one another by being directly behind each other. The total shield area is therefore directly proportional to the total mass: the total shield area is equal to the area of shielding by 1 fundamental particle, multiplied by the total number of particles. The earth’s mass in the standard model is due to particles associated with up and down quarks: the Higgs field. From the illustration above, the total outward force of the big bang, (total outward force) = ma = (mass of universe).(Hubble acceleration, see below), while the gravity force is the shielded inward reaction (by Newton’s 3rd law the outward force has an equal and opposite reaction): F = (total outward force).(cross-sectional area of shield projected to radius R) / (total spherical area with radius R). The cross-sectional area of shield projected to radius R is equal to the area of the fundamental particle (p multiplied by the square of the radius of the black hole of similar mass), multiplied by the (R/r)2 which is the inverse-square law for the geometry of the implosion. The total spherical area with radius R is simply four times p, multiplied by the square of R. Inserting simple Hubble law results c = RH and R/c = 1/H give us F = (4/3)p r G2M2/(Hr)2. We then set this equal to F=Ma and solve, getting G = (3/4)H2/(p r ). When the effect of the higher density in the local universe at the great distance R is included, this becomes G = (3/4)H2/(p r (local) e3), which is accurate and identical to that obtained in the other type of proof below (which does not require the shielding area to be inserted). ...

(Symbols for density rho and for pi have not come out - just the letters p and r, nor has superscript, in the paragraph above, see http://nigelcook0.tripod.com/.)

Fascist Nazi mentality in science

1. Anyone who asserts an opinion in science without some kind of evidence is a charlatan.

2. Anyone who ignores evidence or dismisses it out of hand without careful study is a charlatan.

3. Anyone who offers someone else 'advice' of the obviously already-tried sort (get published in PRL, NS) is an abusive Nazi or is just a fellow-traveller of the Nazis, like the French Vichy who rightly ended up at the looped end of pieces of rope when the war ended,

4. Anyone who tells me I don't have a right to call Nazis 'Nazis' or that I'm a Nazi myself because I defend freedom and try my hardest to discredit fascists, is Hitler.

5. I didn't fight in WWII but Dr Arnold Lynch who died in January designed a major component of Colossus, the computer which broke enigma-coded German messages, helping allied victory in Europe. Lynch was an Honorary Research Fellow at I think University College, London University. He was a bigwig in the IEE, and although he knew much of Ivor Catt's efforts to save lives (www.ivorcatt.com) were being falsely suppressed by bigots, he stepped in and co-authored a paper with Catt in 1998, the IEE paper HEE/26, A Difficulty in Electromagnetic Theory. He also corresponded with me from about 1997 onwards, helping with theoretical physics (Lynch gave the IEE centenary lecture on the discovery of the electron, because JJ Thomson - discoverer of the electron - had told him about it).

Copy of a post to http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/blog/ (in case it is deleted for being 'off-topic' ;).

‘... The draw of string theory isn’t its strong scientific credentials, it is the weakness of any competition.’-Gavin

Dirac had a sea of particles and holes to visually use his equation to predict antimatter. Similarly, to the holes and electrons model of a semiconductor, the outward flow of matter in the big bang gives an inward flow of spacetime fabric. If you consider a sealed corridor with loads of people at one end, walking towards the other end, the mass of air flows the opposite way to the way the people are going. You know this not only from the fact that air flows around you to fill in the space behind you as you move, but also because the corridor starts full of people at one end and air at the other, and ends up the other way around.

The surrounding Higgs field similarly pushes inwards as stars go outward. In any explosion there is some outward pressure, and if we multiply this by the spherical surface area, we get outward force. Newton's 3rd law says there’s equal inward force (the rocket effect). This is the zone of inward ‘reversed wind’ phase in an air burst, but is the inward Higgs field pressure/force in a big bang. I've a couple of simple calculations at http://nigelcook0.tripod.com/ which predict gravity from this mechanism fairly accurately (1.7% error using convenient data from the literature for the Hubble parameter and density) as well as predicting other stuff about cosmology.

Strong competition is not science but religion. I predict string theory will disappear when the Pope issues a dictum stating spacetime is just 4 dimensional. Real science is a messy business, with retrogression to new interpretations of old "obsolete" ideas. People are ‘branewashed’ by superstringers and other cranks about the nature of reality, they want a final theory in the form of abstract equations and extra dimensions, not obsolete mechanism, so string theory is infallible. This is not good!

UPDATE: I'm not planning to continue with this weblog any longer. All I get is ignorant arguments from Kevin (http://electrogravity.blogspot.com/2005/10/electrons-pass-pulse-of-energy-along.html) which go nowhere. Kevin does not know anything about explosion physics. I respect freedom so will let people comment what they want, which will mean people will 'branewash' each other into discrediting science and believing instead on speculations without evidence.

FROM http://iso42.blogspot.com/:

Hubble humiliated – could not calculate effective spacetime acceleration

Hubble measures galaxies of famous Hollywood stars accelerating away from him linearly in all directions. They reach 60 miles per hour (or 1 mile/minute) after a minute (distance gone by that time is 0.5 mile).

To any rational folk, this equals acceleration = velocity/time = 1 mile per minute squared. (Then you can calculate the outward force – from F = ma – and study an inward push of wind/Higgs pressure that pushes in towards you, occupying the volume which the cars are vacating as they accelerate outward! I wonder what results from this Higgs pressure? Could it be gravity? No, that would be consistent with the contraction effect in general relativity! New stuff is only accepted as credible if it is wrong, not if it is right!)

But Hubble states velocity/distance = 2 miles per minute per mile = 2 per minute = 2 reciprocal minutes. (As a result, everyone sees his result as an abstract puzzle and tries to fit mathematical models to it with epicycles for dark matter and dark energy to ‘fix’ flaws.)

UPDATE

Kevin Brunt comments: 'Nigel,A former colleague of mine was a co-author of a paper which analysed the heights of nineteenth century British army recruits from the records at the PRO in Kew.No doubt you would criticise the paper because they did not report the rates of change of average height with time as a velocity.'

YES KEVIN! I would criticise a scientific analysis of data of heights which did not correlate average heights as a function of time. The 'velocity' you try to ridicule is vertical velocity, as in centimetres per century. Any analysis of such data needs to search for underlying trends like vertical velocity to see if the selection of Army recruits was reflecting societal height variation due to changing diet or how the average height varied above the minimum height permitted by recruitment regulations. Science is about searching for ideas, then testing and checking them. For a random example of what science is all about, see Feynman gravity home page

Spinor mathematics and understanding

Now for something completely different, the Standard Model all over again. Readers of my internet page and this blog will know that electroweak unification is mathematically OK, but quantum chromodynamics and quantum gravity/M-theory (11 dimensions) is horses***. I have sympathy with quantum mechanics and general relativity, at least the physical aspects of them (not the lengthy mathematical horses*** like some interpretative Copenhagen horses*** about ‘parallel universes’; I have sympathy with just the predictions which can be tested, i.e., I’m interested in science).

Spin in quantum field theory is described by ‘spinors’, which are more sophisticated than vectors. The story of spin is that Wolfgang Pauli, inventor of the phrase ‘not even wrong’, in 1924 suggested that an electron has a ‘two-valued quantum degree of freedom’, which in addition to three other quantum numbers enabled him to formulate the ‘Pauli exclusion principle’. (I use this on my home page to calculate how many electrons are in each electron shell, which produces the basic periodic table.)

Because the idea is experimentally found to sort out chemistry, Pauli was happy. In 1925, Ralph Kronig suggested that the reason for the two degrees of freedom: the electron spins and can be orientated with either North Pole up or South Pole up. Pauli initially objected because the amount of spin would give the old spherical model of the electron (which is entirely false) an equatorial speed of 137 times the speed of light! However, a few months later two Dutch physicists, George Uhlenbeck and Samuel Goudsmith, independently published the idea of electron spin, although they got the answer wrong by a factor (the g-factor) of 2.00232 (this is just double the 1.00116 factor for the magnetic moment of the electron). The first attempt to explain away this factor of 2 was by Llewellyn Thomas and was of the abstract variety (put equations together and choose what you need from the resulting brew). It is called the ‘Thomas precession’. Spin-caused magnetism had already been observed as the anomalous Zeeman effect (spectral line splitting when the atoms emitting the light are subjected to an intense magnetic field). Later the Stern-Gerlach experiment provided further evidence. It is now known that the ordinary magnetism of iron bar magnets and magnetite is derived from electron spin magnetism. Normally this cancels out, but in iron and other magnetic metals it does not completely out in each atom, and this fact allows magnets. Anyway, in 1927 Pauli accepted spin, and introduced the ‘spinor’ wave function. In 1928, Dirac introduced special relativity to Pauli’s spinor, resulting in ‘quantum electrodynamics’ that correctly predicted antimatter, first observed in 1932.

The Special Orthogonal group in 3 dimensions, or SO(3), allows spinors. It is traced back to Sophus Lie who in 1870 introduced special manifolds to study the symmetries of differential equations. The Standard Model, symmetry unitary groups SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) is a development and application of spinor mathematics to physics. SU(2) is not actually the weak nuclear force despite having 3 gauge bosons. Contrary to what I said a couple of posts back, the weak force arises from the mixture SU(2)xU(1), which is of course the electroweak theory. Although U(1) described aspects of electromagnetism and SU(2) aspects of the weak force, the two are unified and should be treated as a single mix, SU(2)xU(1). Hence there are 4 electroweak gauge bosons, not 1 or 3. One whole point of the Higgs field mechanism is that it is vital to shield (attenuate) some of those gauge bosons, so that they have a short range (the weak force), unlike electromagnetism.

On the other hand, for interactions of very high energy, say 100-GeV, the weak force influence SU(2) vanishes and SU(3)xU(1) takes over, so the strong nuclear force and electromagnetism then dominate. Now the question is how far I go into the mathematics of the Standard Model? Should I study spinors and symmetry unitary groups? How far has that got other people? More likely, you should compromise and try working a bit from both ends of the same problem. Look into the abstract maths by all means, but also look out for any clues that can be deduced from reality, hard experimental fact.

Virtual particle clouds surrounding charge cores

ELECTRONS

The electron core is surrounded by virtual particles, photons that dissociate into fermion and anti-fermion pairs. The virtual photons have no effect on the charge, but the positive virtual fermion in each pair is attracted near the electron core (which is negative), while the negative virtual fermions is repelled. Therefore there is an outward (radial) ‘polarisation’ of the virtual matter cloud, and this effect largely shields the electric charge of the electron core! If electrons collide at higher and higher energy, you penetrate further through the shielding cloud, so the electromagnetic force increases. This shielding effect was measured and confirmed quantum electrodynamic (QED) predictions in 1997, by Levine, Koltick, et al.

QUARKS

Like electrons, a quark core is surrounded by virtual particles, namely gluons and pairs of quarks and their anti-quarks. Because of the strong nuclear force, the virtual gluons, unlike photons, do have a strong force charge called ‘colour’ charge (to distinguish it from electric charge). This means that both the virtual gluon cloud and the overlapping cloud of quark and anti-quark pairs interfere with the forces away from the core of a quark. While there are two types of electric charge (arbitrarily named positive and negative), there are three types of nuclear colour charge (arbitrarily named red, green, and blue in quantum chromodynamics, QCD). If the quark core carried ‘red’ charge, then in the surrounding cloud of virtual quark pairs, the virtual anti-red quarks will be attracted to the red quark core, while the virtual red quarks will be repelled to a greater average distance. This effect shields the colour charge of the quark core, but the overlapping cloud of virtual gluons has colour charge and has the opposite effect. The overall effect is to diffuse the colour charge of the quark core over a volume of the surrounding virtual particle cloud. Therefore, the net colour charge decreases as you penetrate through the virtual cloud, much as the earth’s net gravity force falls if you were to go down a tunnel to the earth’s core. Thus, if quarks are collided with higher and higher energies, they will penetrate further through the virtual cloud and experience a reduced colour charge. When quarks are bound close together to form nucleons (neutrons and protons), they therefore interact very weakly because their virtual particle clouds overlap, reducing their net colour charge to a very small quantity. As these trapped quarks move apart, the net colour charge increases, increasing the net force, like stretching a rubber band! This makes it impossible for any quark to escape from a neutron or proton. Simply put, the binding energy holding quark together is more than the energy to create a pair or triad of quarks, so you can never isolate a single quark. Attempts to separate quarks by collisions require so much energy that new pairs (mesons) or triads (baryons and nucleons) of quarks are formed, instead of breaking individual quarks loose.

COLOUR CHARGES

A nucleon, that is a neutron or proton, has no overall ‘colour’ charge, because the ‘colour’ charges of the quarks within them cancel out exactly. Pairs of quarks, mesons, contain one quark with a given colour charge, and another quark with the anti-charge of that. Triads of quarks, baryons and nucleons, contain three quarks, each with a different colour charge: red (R), blue (B) and green (G). There are also Anti-colours, AR, AB, and AG. Common sense tells you that the gluons will be 9 in number: R-AR, R-AB, and R-AG, as well as B-AR, B-AB, and B-AG, and finally G-AR, G-AB, and G-AG, a 3x3 = 9 result matrix.

If you search the internet, you find a page dated 1996 by Dr James Bottomley and Dr John Baez which addresses this question: ‘Why are there eight gluons and not nine?’ They point out first that mesons are composed of quark and anti-quark pairs, and that baryons (neutrons, protons, etc.) are triads of quarks. Then they argued that the combination R-AR + B-AB + G-AG ‘must be non-interacting, since otherwise the colourless baryons would be able to emit these gluons and interact with each other via the strong force – contrary to the evidence. So there can be only eight gluons.’ Fair enough, you subtract one gluon without saying which one (!), to avoid including a general possibility that makes the colour charge false. (Why does the term ‘false epicycle’ spring to mind?) I love the conclusion they come to: ‘If you are wondering what the hell I am doing subtracting particles from each other, well, that’s quantum mechanics. This may have made things seem more, rather than less, mysterious, but in the long run I'm afraid this is what one needs to think about.’ All the utter horses*** of colour force QCD is officially sold as being ‘beautiful’! (What sort of person looks at horses*** and calls it beautiful?)

GRAVITY

‘The quantum theories of gravity also have infinities in the terms with couplings, but the "dippy process" that is successful in getting rid of the infinities in quantum electrodynamics doesn’t get rid of them in gravitation. So … we have no reasonable theory.’ – Richard P. Feynman (1918-88), QED, The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, 1990, p151. (Whoops: I’ve quoted Feynman way out of a real context. What he was really saying was that there is an official quantum gravity called Dr Lisa Randall’s ‘big brane’ horses*** theory of quantum gravity, which is so ‘beautiful’ everyone cries! Buy Randall's book Warped Passages and see all the answers to everything!)

Google falls for the wrongful bigotry of owner of Crank Dot Net...

http://www.crank.net/gravity.html:

Cause of gravity and mechanisms of forces 2005 Feb 12 ... gravitation . Big Bang ...
"As the big bang mass goes outward, the fabric of space must flow around each fundamental particle, filling vacated volume. The inward moving fabric exerts space pressure, increasing as it acts inward upon smaller areas, thereby causing the correct force of gravity where it is shielded by mass."

The extract above omits the maths and physics on the page linked to (http://members.lycos.co.uk/nigelbryancook/).

Let's first ignore the fact that the quotation is taken out of its mathematically and physically defended context, and just look at what they see as being crackpot.

They think the Higgs field of the Standard Model, the 'spacetime fabric' which fills three dimensional volume, is crackpot. Wrong. It is the basis for mass in the Standard Model. They are too chicken to be specific as to what they think crackpot, so let's assume that everything they quote is what they see as being crackpot: they think the Higgs field and thus the Standard Model crackpot, as well as the perfect fluid analogy to general relativity (Feynman-Lesage gravity, see my page), and the force of gravity itself... Now remind me why I'm crackpot?

The Standard Model (particle physics grand unified theory) and Gravity

All quantum field theories are based ultimately upon simple extensions of Dirac's mathematical work in attempting to unify special relativity with quantum mechanics in the late 1920s. People such as Dr Sheldon Glashow and Dr Gerard t'Hooft developed the framework. A quantum field theory, the 'Standard Model' [gauge groups SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1)] is built on a unitary group, U(1), as well as two symmetry-unitary groups, SU(2) and SU(3).

U(1) describes electric charge (having a single vector field or gauge boson, the photon). Because bosons are spin 1, the force can be attractive or repulsive, depending on the signs of the charges. (To have a charge which is always positive or attractive, like gravity, would require a spin 2 boson which is why the postulated quantum gravity boson, the unobserved graviton, is supposed to have a spin of 2.)

SU(2) describes weak isospin interactions (having 3 vector fields or 3 gauge bosons: Z, W+, W-).

SU(3) describes the strong nuclear force, the 'colour charge' interactions (having 8 vector fields or 8 gauge bosons: gluons). Gauge bosons are force mediators, 'gauge' coming from the size scale analogy of railway line gauges, and 'boson' coming from Einstein's collaborator Bose, who worked out the statistical distribution describing a gas of light photons.

SU(2) allows left handed fields to form doublets, while left handed fields in SU(3) allows triplets of quarks (baryons like neutron and proton) and singletons (leptons like electron and muon) to form. The right handed fields are the same for SU(3) but only form a pair of two singletons (mesons) for SU(2).

To work, mass must be provided by an uncharged massive particle, the 'Higgs field boson'. SO(3) is another symmetry group which describes the conservation of angular momentum for 3 dimensional rotations. Is the Standard Model a worthless heap of trash, as it requires the existence of an unobserved Higgs field to give rise to mass? No, it is the best available way of dealing with all available physics data, and the Higgs field is implied as a type of ether. If you see an inconsistency between the use of special relativity in quantum field theory and the suggestion that it implies an ether, you need to refresh yourself on the physical interpretation of general relativity, which is a perfect fluid (ether/spacetime fabric) theory according to Einstein. General relativity requires an additional postulate to those of special relativity (which is really a flat earth theory, as it goes not allow for curved geodesics or gravity!), but gives rise to the same mathematical transformations as special relativity.

Peter Woit has some very interesting ideas for proceeding with the Standard Model in the sense of explaining the electroweak symmetry using geometric spinors and Clifford algebras (Quantum Field Theory and Representation Theory: A Sketch, http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0206135). Personally, I have various reservations with the popularisation of the existing Standard Model. For one thing, the basic physics described by the maths is usually ignored by the modellers, who for example don't care if Maxwell made errors or fiddles in his 'electromagnetic unification' which is encapsulated as U(1). For another thing, these calculations are fine for building up a representation of the possible particles and fields, and the representation predicts - by gaps in the pictorial symmetry - missing particles that are later discovered. But never forget that these theories do not predict the masses of particles. The electroweak prediction of the relative force of the weak and electromagnetic force replies on you putting into the calculation experimentally determined values of the particle masses. So the correct prediction is not completely theoretical, it is unifying two things, but is using other data to do so, so it is really just a correct scaling procedure. Tony Smith has a prediction of the top quark mass, relying on Higgs field assumptions. (Unfortunately, he is suppressed by arXiv.org.)

Traditional extensions of the Standard Model involve, for example, SUSY, 'SUper-SYmmetry'. SUSY is supposed to be a helpful girl as she matches or pairs up fundamental particles with 'superpartners'. Each superpartner has a spin that is different from the original particle by half a unit. For SUSY to model reality, the particle and superpartner cannot have exactly the same mass, so SUSY is a broken symmetry theory. None of the superpartners have so far been detected, so they must be very massive! The advantage of SUSY is to unify the strengths of all fundamental forces at very short distances from particle core, i.e., when all forces including electromagnetism are 137 times that of the electromagnetism force as seen from a long distance. Saying 'short distances from the particle cores' is identical to saying 'at extremely high energies', because you need to accelerate them to extremely high energies to break through the polarised shield of quantum foam particles around the particle's core!

However, SUSY is very naughty girl, predicting unobserved dark matter, and is too close to arm-waving parallel universes, string theory, and 11 dimensional M-theory to be defended as science. Why can't the gravity mechanism be taken seriously? The hypocrisy of the 'branes' of string theory is bad. The string theorists, for example Dr Edward Witten in Physics Today (April 1996) and Dr Lisa Randall in her 2005 book Warped Passages claim that general relativity can be unified with the Standard Model using various aspects of string theory. I've discussed them in detail on previous posts. It is not correct. As Dr Roger Penrose points out in Road to Reality, and as Dr Peter Woit confirms, simply putting quantum gravity into the same package as the Standard Model by means of specifying ad hoc 11 dimensions and 'branes scenarios' with no experimental justification or testable predictions is a dead end. What is needed is the more classical mechanism that makes testable and tested predictions...

http://nigelcook0.tripod.com/
http://members.lycos.co.uk/nigelbryancook/Image11.jpg

In a real spin ...

Magnetic moment of spinning classical charge, M = (1/2)qs/m

Where q is observed (shielded) electron charge, s is spin (discussed below a couple of posts back), and m is the observed mass of an electron.

Dirac's quantum field theory multiplies this by a factor of 2 to get the proper magnetic moment of an electron. But still it is not very accurate to meet experiment, so we use the 1st Feynman coupling term for virtual charge to give a more precise correction factor, 2[1 + 1/(2.Pi.137)]. (Let's ignore more coupling terms for the moment, as we are happy with accuracy to 6 s.f.)

I'm content now that the veil shield of polarised vacuum leptons (which shields the electric field from the electron core by a factor of just over 137) has no significant effect on the polar magnetic field from the electron core. The full task of identifying the causal process in the quantum 'foam' spacetime fabric which gives rise to each mathematical coupling correction remains ahead.

For the moment, let's worry about the size, shape, and range of the polarised virtual particle shells surrounding the core. An electric field line is defined by convention as an arrow from a positive charge towards a negative one. So we have an inward arrow from the positive virtual charge shell around the negative core, and an outward arrow between the outer negative virtual shell and the inner positive shell. Since the shielding factor is massive, 137, the arrows are pretty similar in length to look at visually. The polarised shells are stopping 99.27 % of the electric field from the core of the electron.

How long will it take to get around to working out the details, the sizes of the shells? No idea. There are actually quite a few unknowns to deal with. We can hope that the assumptions will be few due to the way in which mathematical unknowns can be cancelled out to give a definite answer. (See my home page for the gravity proof which uses this fact.) While there is no evidence that the Great Architect of the universe is a mathematician (J.B.S. Haldane said, by analogy, that God must be a beetle-lover, because of the vast number of beetle species on Earth), the use of mathematics for understanding things easily is essential. Without maths, you would have be be extremely clever to understand the atom or anything else realistically!

Update: Dr Motl reports discovery of extra dimensions in India: http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/10/news-on-string-theory-in-media.html
(Presumably this refers to the warping around the black hole of Calcutta?)

Lack of magnetic force shielding by polarised virtual shells around electron core

Normally a conducting shell will shield a magnetic force. However, in the case of the polarised virtual particle shells surrounding the electron bare core, this may not happen because of aligning of the spin axis. We have to remember that pairs of virtual particles are involved. How do they align? If the core magnetism is being attenuated by the 137 factor due to the polarised veil of virtual particles (which I do not think likely), then this would imply an opposite interpretation of the 1/(2.Pi.137) Schwinger correction to Dirac's 1 Bohr magneton for the magnetic moment of the electron, with the 1 being due to the magnetism of the paired virtual particle in the veil and the small and the small 0.00116 addition being the core factor. However, then we have the problem of how to interpret the additional Feynman couplings for other possibilities, which becomes more difficult.

So I think we need to check out a model as suggested below, in which the magnetism of the core of the electron shines through the veil without attenuation. This if correct implies that the veil of polarised virtual particles are aligned radially with their spin axes such that they don't screen the magnetic field, and only attenuate the electric field by the 137 factor.

The meaning of everything

Heisenberg's uncertainty (based on impossible gamma ray microscope thought experiment): pd = h/(2.Pi), where p is uncertainty in momentum and d is uncertainty in distance. The product pd is physically equivalent to Et, where E is uncertainty in energy and t is uncertainty in time. Since, for light speed, d = ct, we obtain: d = hc/(2.Pi.E). This is the formula the experts generally use to relate the range of the force, d, to the energy of the gauge boson, E.Notice that both d and E are really uncertainties in distance and energy, rather than real distance and energy, but the formula works for real distance and energy, because we are dealing with a definite ratio between the two. Hence for 80 GeV mass-energy W and Z intermediate vector bosons, the force range is on the order of 10^-17 m.Since the formula d = hc/(2.Pi.E) therefore works for d and E as realities, we can introduce work energy as E = Fd, which gives us the strong nuclear force law: F = hc/(2.Pi.d^2). The range of this force is of course d = hc/(2.Pi.E) .

The above is an extract from an earlier post. On http://nigelcook0.tripod.com/ the mechanism for push gravity is proved mathematically, giving a list of predictions (scroll down a bit) that agree with observations very well, and which sort out many outstanding problems in physics, without introducing any extra conflicts! Now let us 'see' a picture of a fundamental particle core: http://members.lycos.co.uk/nigelbryancook/Image11.jpg

Surrounding this core is a veil of virtual particles in the spacetime fabric 'quantum foam', with virtual positrons attracted closer to the negative electron core than virtual electrons. Now I've said on Dr Motl's blog that the 1 + 1/(2.Pi.137) = 1.00116 correction of the Dirac magnetic moment of the electron arises because a virtual particle associated with the electron core by Pauli's exclusion (pairing) principle. The 1 is the core magnetism, which is unshielded by the radially polarised veil of virtual charges, but the electric field is attenuated by 137 times, so the virtual particle which pairs with the core is paired with a weakening factor of 137 times, while the 2.Pi factor comes in from the relative spin + orbit speeds involved (or wavelength). I'm still vague. But let's now try to build a physical picture of the polarised shells of aether.

From quantum mechanics, electrons have a magnetic moment and a spin angular momentum of s = half a quantum spin unit [s=0.5h/(2.Pi)]. If the stationary electron spins at light speed as implied by electric energy transfer speed (Electronics World Apr. 03), then s = mcr, where r is the spin radius. So, r = s/mc = h/(2.Pi.mc) ~ 10^-13 m. The model of electron as the negative electric field half of a gamma ray discussed in Electronics World March 05 letters (the full ray is half negative and half positive like a sine wave) implies that gravity confines the energy in a loop of black hole radius (EW Aug. 02), R = 2GM/c^2 ~ 10^-58 m.

Since force is energy per unit distance moved (from E = Fd), the strong force which causes pair production divided by the gravity force proportional to r/R. The electron spin radius is therefore larger than the electron loop core by a factor similar to the ratio of the strong force to the gravitational force (Electronics World Apr. 03). The continuous motion of non-periodic energy in an electron along its electric field lines is the mechanism by which the central core of the electron influences, and is influenced by, the outside.

The last two paragraphs above are in a recent letter from me printed in Electronics World. Here are some further thoughts. First, some of the statements are probably either wrong or inexact. Second, it is better to have an idea that is wrong or inexact than one that is 'not even wrong' (untestable, religion-type speculation). The ideas above can be tested, modified and developed further. For example, the assumption that the speed is c may not apply to the virtual particles, which may orbit the electron core more slowly, which will affect the suggested radii of the electron shells. There could be other errors too. I want a picture for the electron core with the distances of the polarised shells of virtual particles surrounding it.

In the middle is the negative core, the real electron with a bare force 137 times Coulomb's law. Surrounding it is a virtual particle shell with net positive charge, and beyond that is a shell with a net negative charge. The geometric effects of the two shells is to shield the core by a factor of 137. Surely someone like Dr Peter Woit can analyse the available data, the known spin of the electron and the implied shielding factor of 137, to get a physically working model of the polarised dielectric, so we can see what is going on? If it can't be done by geometry and calculus, surely computer calculations can be used to get a model? I first wrote computer programs in 1981 aged 9 to evaluate simple formulas, so why don't I do this? Part of the reason is that something which looks 'dead easy' in retrospect is hard to plan out when it is done for the first time! Basically, you cannot plan such a thing. You just have to play around with it until you find something that works. Who has time to play around in today's world? Even if you do make an advance, what happens then? Who will publish it? How long will it take to overcome ignorance and apathy, or downright hostility and anger, and catch on? Why bother at all?

Road to Reality

The vacuum is full of 'virtual' particles - particles that we feel only as forces such as inertial resistance to acceleration, nuclear confinement of charged particles, electromagnetism and gravity.

Aound any particle core some of these particles will be attracted, forming a polarised veil which acts like a dielectric, shielding the charge of the core. Electron cores tend to attract virtual positrons, leaving behind an outer zone of virtual electrons. This shields the real electron core charge by a factor of 137, the 'magic number' of QED. For the massive quarks, you get virtual quark pairs polarising around them. This limits the range of the colour charge of quantum chromodynamics. Gravity is just the shielding of a background pressure of the virtual particles in the vacuum. Because all energy has speed c, as per Einstein's E=mc^2, gravity goes at c.

We can visualise an emerging unified force as a progressive shielding effect by the polarised vacuum on the particle core. The strong nuclear force is the basic force, and gets progressively filtered down by the polarised virtual charges of the vacuum around the particle core until we get through electromagnetism, weak force, and finally gravity. No extra dimensions!

Dr Peter Woit has very interesting ideas on the problem of the actual particles themselves (I'm sticking to forces at present): http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0206135

Hiding in the Mirror, Lawrence Krauss

At http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/blog/, Dr Peter Woit comments: 'I’ve just finished reading Lawrence Krauss’s new book Hiding in the Mirror: The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond, and it’s very, very good.'

Plato fooled me! See http://eskesthai.blogspot.com/2005/08/fifth-dimension-is-spacetime-fabric.html . It appears Plato and Dr Gerard t'Hooft are as alike as Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde.

I wanted a way for a spacetime fabric to give light speed gravity force and seized on Plato's idea: "The Fifth Dimension, is the Spacetime Fabric. Perhaps Quantum Gravity can be Handled by thoroughly reconsidering Quantum Mechanics itself? by Gerard t' Hooft. I was attracted to Nigel Cook's statement on Peter Woits blog..."

Notice the vanity, because I'm mentioned personally, I automatically lower my guard a bit. Is the 5th dimension really the spacetime fabric? I use it at http://nigelcook0.tripod.com/ as just a vague explanation of the speed of gravity pressure. It doesn't appear in the calculations at all.

So we don't need the 5th dimension? http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=280#comment-5478 :

As for QM and QFT, we know the fabric of space is filled with virtual particles. Normally particles like gas molecules can't carry transverse waves, only a solid normally allows transverse waves. But suppose the virtual particles have a spin, like real ones? Then you get transverse waves. Dr John Baez has some ideas on this for quantum gravity here http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/loops05/ which seem to account for the light speed of gravity while preserving a pressure mechanism.

My understanding is that this is reinventing the wheel, since Maxwell's 1873 Treatise section 822-3:

"The ... action of magnetism on polarised light [discovered by Faraday not Maxwell] leads ... to the conclusion that in a medium ... is something belonging to the mathematical class as an angular velocity ... This ... cannot be that of any portion of the medium of sensible dimensions rotating as a whole. We must therefore conceive the rotation to be that of very small portions of the medium, each rotating on its own axis... The displacements of the medium, during the propagation of light, will produce a disturbance of the vortices ... We shall therefore assume that the variation of vortices caused by the displacement of the medium is subject to the same conditions which Helmholtz, in his great memoir on Vortex-motion, has shewn to regulate the variation of the vortices of a perfect fluid."

So I may have been hiding in the mirror for a bit myself, because of Plato!

The last post for ‘braney’ superstring theory…

Dr Lisa Randall’s string theory fantasy/propaganda in books and interviews (based on her popularity on arXiv.org, which deleted my factual paper after 2 minutes in 2002) is brilliant comedy.

Let’s hope that when the string theory band falls off its over-funded wagon, she continues to make people cry with laughter.

The physics world will be a horribly sad place without stringy theory. The clowns of the world are those who bring in the laughter, and God knows how valuable that laughter is. Keep overdoing that lipstick!

Just to show I’m not sexist, here’s another female physicist: http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/


Caroline Thompson's page says:

'This site is about what is wrong with Fundamental Physics. It started with the discovery that we have been misled. We have been told that experiments agree with all the predictions of quantum theory, including those that involve the impossible - the Bell test experiments, that are supposed to show totally incomprehensible effects of separated particles on each other. I have looked at the evidence. The "loopholes" that they know are present are large enough to allow for perfectly straightforward explanations, with no sign of "non-locality". I am led to suggest that perhaps there is other currently-accepted "evidence" for both quantum theory and Einstein's relativity theories that needs re-investigation. (There is! See Forgotten History .) I am not talking of "re-interpretation", but of recognising that if we want to understand nature, not just produce "predictions", the first step is to re-assess the facts, reject falsehoods.'


'New! Additions, 1999 onwards. Very Latest:
12:10:05: Now might be a good time to join in the battle in wikipedia to get a fair deal for local realism in the pages Bell's Theorem, Bell Test Experiments and related pages. I notice that a Google search on "Bell test loopholes" give quite a bit of prominence to a certain C H Thompson and to wikipedia. Unsurprisingly, other sites easily beat wiki on Bell's Theorem.
Added link to Bibhas De in People and Places . He gives a brilliant satirical criticism of current physics. Replacement ideas include a photon with mass, and other concepts I dispute. His teacher was Hannes Alfven ... perhaps they both could have learned from my Phi-Wave-Aether.
'I'm still working on revisions to my paper "Homodyne detection and parametric down-conversion: a classical approach applied to proposed “loophole-free” Bell tests", intending now to submit to J Opt B. Parts of my "classical approach" have turned out (thankfully) to be already well known.
'The Chaotic Ball and the Bell test loopholes: For newcomers.
'Wikipedia pages on Bell tests: I've added some pages of my own to this online encyclopaedia.
'My Papers (and a few others), with notes.
'Progress Report on Realism versus Quantum Weirdness (written July 31, 2000).
'Challenges to Quantum Optics, inspired by EPR and other "entanglement" experiments. These cover the nature of light, atomic cascades and low-intensity "parametric down-conversion" (PDC).
'Suggestions for experiments: Some test fundamental ideas, others check realist explanations.
'Experiments in the headlines: Realist ideas on experiments that have hit the headlines -- primarily those claiming quantum entanglement. Which "loopholes" are relevant? What facts do we need before we can explain them? Most of my requests for additional data etc have gone unanswered.
'Letters to magazines: I've taken to writing to New Scientist, Physics World and such like, trying to persuade them to change their tone. Why do they have to present material as if quantum theory were universally accepted? It is not. Why don't you write too? One success! 'Physics World, November 2001, p17
'Comments on my work: This file covers only 1998-9. It's just to remind me that I'm not on my own.
'The Aether, Relativity, Cosmology: For those more interested in the structure of the universe than quantum magic. Should we be thinking in terms an all-pervading aether whose oscillations of state are responsible for everything? Could the universe be in a steady state after all, as was commonly assumed before anyone heard of a cosmological red shift? See my ideas for the basis of a Theory of Everything, the latest version of which (October 2004) is in "The Phi-Wave Aether: a Wave Theory of Everything" (.pdf (two-column compact format) or HTML)
'Forgotten History: The Einstein-Miller aether drift scandal, Millikan's condemnation of Einstein's photon hypothesis, and other interesting facts the establishment seems to have forgotten! Additions welcome.
'Book list: Just a few ideas, gleaned from my friends. If you have ideas for additions please let me know.
'FAQ: a small beginning, answering a few questions on light, the aether, "phi-waves" and forces.
'Who am I?
'People and Places: Links to other sites (not complete!)
'Discusson groups I belong to
'Contact me '

Higgs field and aether

Dr Peter Higgs suggested in the early 1960s that the spacetime fabric is a kind of ideal non-viscous fluid, causing mass. By non-viscous, I mean it causes no continuous drag, just an opposition to acceleration (inertia) and deceleration (momentum). [It works a bit like Aristotle's arrow in air as described in his book Physics (350 BC), where he confuses an arrow for a fundamental particle, and air for the spacetime fabric. The spacetime fabric pushed out of the way by the particle pushes in again behind it, returning the energy it has taken, and keeping it in motion!] It is vital for the Standard Model, since it is the mechanism for every piece of mass in the universe.

Quantoken, renowned expert on everything, has pointed out that Einstein's principle of equivalence between inertial and gravitational mass in general relativity tends to suggest that if gravitons (spin 2 bosons) are responsible for gravity, they must also be responsible for inertial mass. Why not just have the Higgs field?

The Higgs field is vital to explain the massiveness (80 GeV) of the Z and W particles that carry electroweak force interactions. The electroweak theory comes from independent work in 1967 by Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam. The high mass-energy of the Z and W particles is due to their short range. They were both discovered experimentally at CERN in 1983.

I want to have a second shot at deriving the strong nuclear force law. Heisenberg's uncertainty (based on impossible gamma ray microscope thought experiment): pd = h/(2.Pi), where p is uncertainty in momentum and d is uncertainty in distance. The product pd is physically equivalent to Et, where E is uncertainty in energy and t is uncertainty in time. Since, for light speed, d = ct, we obtain: d = hc/(2.Pi.E). This is the formula the experts generally use to relate the range of the force, d, to the energy of the gauge boson, E.

Notice that both d and E are really uncertainties in distance and energy, rather than real distance and energy, but the formula works for real distance and energy, because we are dealing with a definite ratio between the two. Hence for 80 GeV mass-energy W and Z intermediate vector bosons, the force range is on the order of 10^-17 m.

Since the formula d = hc/(2.Pi.E) therefore works for d and E as realities, we can introduce work energy as E = Fd, which gives us the strong nuclear force law: F = hc/(2.Pi.d^2). The range of this force is of course d = hc/(2.Pi.E) .

When we compare F = hc/(2.Pi.d^2) to coulomb's law of electromagnetism, we see it is 137 times stronger. What is occurring physically is a shielding by the polarised spacetime fabric around the core of a fundamental particle, so the core force is filtered and attenuated by 137 times as seen from a great distance.

The strong nuclear force is supposed to be carried by pions, as predicted by Yukawa around 1935. In this sense, 'strong nuclear force' refers to the force keeping the protons confined to the nucleus without the nucleus exploding by electrostatic repulsion.

However, with the development of quark theory, the confinement of triads of quarks led to the suggestion of a more elaborate strong nuclear force theory, called quantum chromodynamics, in which confined quarks each have a different colour charge (red, green, and blue, for example), making the whole baryon (neutron or proton) colourless. These forces are supposed to be mediated by 'gluons'. It might sound weird, but colour charges just don't excite me much. Can't we unify forces without having colour charge? Which of the two otherwise identical upquarks in a proton has which colour charge? This just seems very artificial, very ad hoc to me! I know it works, but so did Ptolemy's ancient cosmology with its epicycles...

Professor Paul Davies obscurely defends Einstein's 1920 'ether and relativity' lecture

In 1995, physicist Professor Paul Davies - who won the Templeton Prize for religion (I think it was $1,000,000), wrote on pp54-57 of his book 'About Time':

'Whenever I read dissenting views of time, I cannot help thinking of Herbert Dingle... who wrote ... Relativity for All, published in 1922. He became Professor ... at University College London... In his later years, Dingle began seriously to doubt Einstein's concept ... Dingle ... wrote papers for journals pointing out Einstein's errors and had them rejected ... In October 1971, J.C. Hafele [used atomic clocks to defend Einstein] ... You can't get much closer to Dingle's 'everyday' language than that.'

Now, let's check out J.C. Hafele.

J. C. Hafele is ANTI-HORSES***. Hafele writes in Science vol. 177 (1972) pp 166-8 that he uses G. Builder (1958) as analysis for the atomic clocks.

G. Builder (1958) is an article called 'ETHER AND RELATIVITY' in Australian Journal of Physics, v11, 1958, p279, which states:

'... we conclude that the relative retardation of clocks... does indeed compel us to recognise the CAUSAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ABSOLUTE velocities.'

Just to remind ourselves of what Einstein and his verifier Sir Arthur Eddington wrote on this:


‘The Michelson-Morley experiment has thus failed to detect our motion through the aether, because the effect looked for – the delay of one of the light waves – is exactly compensated by an automatic contraction of the matter forming the apparatus…. The great stumbing-block for a philosophy which denies absolute space is the experimental detection of absolute rotation.’ – A.S. Eddington, Space Time and Gravitation, Cambridge, 1921, pp. 20, 152.

So the contraction of the Michelson-Morley instrument made it fail to detect absolute motion. This is why special relativity needs replacement with a causal general relativity:

‘According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable.’ – Albert Einstein, Leyden university lecture ‘Ether and Relativity’, 1920. (A. Einstein, Sidelights on Relativity, Dover, 1952, p. 23.)

‘… with the new theory of electrodynamics [vacuum filled with virtual particles] we are rather forced to have an aether.’ – P.A.M. Dirac, ‘Is There an Aether?,’ Nature, v168, 1951, p906. (If you have a kid playing with magnets, how do you explain the pull and push forces felt through space? As ‘magic’?)

‘Children lose interest … because a natural interest in the world around them has been replaced by an unnatural acceptance of the soundness of certain views, the correctness of particular opinions and the validity of specific claims.’ – Dr David Lewis, You can teach your child intelligence, Book Club Associates, London, 1982, p. 258.

More at http://nigelcook0.tripod.com/

Important eye-watering news about string theory

America's finest news source reports a string theorist who has claimed he can 'explain everything', see http://www.theonion.com/content/node/41454:

BATAVIA, IL—Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory physicist Laird Karmann, a noted string theorist and accused philanderer, said Monday that he can "explain everything" if his wife Elizabeth will just give him a chance. "Surely, anyone can see that, mathematically, the universe is composed of Riemann surfaces, having positive-definite metrics, across which the attached 'loops' or free 'strings' have a (1+1) dynamic topology," Karmann said. "But string behaviors are Lorentzian, meaning that they—like me—need an intense ... Elizabeth refused to accept her husband's theory, suggesting that he study the transformational loop dynamics implicit in her hurled wedding ring.

Bryan comments sadly that the Scientific American pokes fun at another string theorist: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=278

Bohm, Bell and Aspect

Einstein's big error in attacking metaphysics was his religious arrogance in trying to win the battle by force of personality and authority. Einstein wrote Born, 'God does not throw dice.' Einstein also made Born wait a long time for his prize. (Born was even deeper in horses*** than Bohr and Heisenberg, for example developing a crackpot social science of the uncertainty and complementary principles; see the article: The Sokal Hoax: At Whom Are We Laughing?

It is weird that Einstein, who was normally very good with public relations, made such a mistake. However, he was a very polite person at least in public, and did not want to drag physics down into a farce. This is partly why Heisenberg's role in trying to make a bomb for Hitler is ignored. It is harder to ignore Heisenberg's false derivation of the uncertainty principle equation using the thought experiment of a 'gamma ray microscope'. Problem is, gamma rays tend to behave different 'laws' to light rays. Light behaves more like a wave in glass, while gamma rays behave more like particles - being scattered mainly by the Compton effect.

The Schroedinger and Einstein objections to the interpretation of the uncertainty principle equation were inadequate to destroy the metaphysical 'Copenhagen Interpretation'. Schroedinger in 1935 put forward the cat paradox, a cat in a box whose fate is controlled by the uncertain emission of an alpha particle from uranium, which sets off a geiger counter connected to a poison flask which kills the cat. (The whole experiment is basically the issue of what happens to a coin if you toss it and are not allowed to see whether it lands heads or tails.)

Schroedinger's reason for using alpha radioactivity instead of a coin toss was that Gamow had recently used quantum tunnelling theory to relate the energy of alpha particles to the half-life of the atoms emitting them. It was a reasonably good agreement between theory and experiment, so was an early success of quantum theory.

The Bohr-Heisenberg Copenhagen Interpretation implies that the cat remains in a limbo state between life and death until an observer looks in the box. Eugene Wigner later asked what happens if one person looks in the box but doesn't tell anyone else the result (thus 'collapsing the metaphysical wavefunction' to a definite result, or determining which one of the two parallel universes we are in). This person is deemed 'Wigner's friend' and is a separate paradox itself.

Now Einstein, Polansky and Rosen came up with an apparently more scientific argument - although I think it was published a few months before Schroedinger's cat paradox in 1935.

Einstein and the rest, or 'EPR', considered a molecule of two atoms, having zero overall spin. They argued that if you separate the atoms and measure the spin of one of them, even if they are metres apart, you will automatically know the spin of the other using the principle of conservation of angular momentum, since the total spin will remain zero.

This disproves the Bohr-Heisenberg Copenhagen Interpretation. Bohr published a defence which was so obscure and unreadable (see The Sokal Hoax: At Whom Are We Laughing?) that nobody noticed that the pages were out of order in both hardback and paperback reprints!

Years later, when Dr David Bohm was trying (with help from Einstein but fierce opposition from Robert Oppenheimer) to take up Dirac's ether ideas and use hidden variables to explain the Schroedinger wave equation and all the rest of it, Dr John S. Bell (1928-90) came up with a weird idea. Why not actually do the EPR experiment, and settle the matter experimentally?

Bell formulated an inequality to make it scientific. (Unfortunately, the inequality is both obscure and trivial, rather like the formulation of the Michelson-Morley experiment to test for an ether.)

Professor Alain Aspect at the University of Paris tested the Bell inequality, publishing the experimental results in three major PRL papers between 1981-2. What Aspect found is that the spins correlate as Einstein predicted even when several metres apart. Aspect used paired light photons moving at light speed in opposite directions.

Sadly, there are two equally valid explanations of the result: (a) The two photons are 'entangled' metaphysically with infinite-speed (or at least, faster than light speed) communication of information between them, or (b) the Copehagen Interpretation is horses***.

Take your pick. You can choose to believe in a non-causal universe if you want. But that interpretation, (a) has no support whatever from science. On the other hand, explanation (b) is completely consistent with science. So the choice is yours. Go off the religion end, and believe in brainwashing the world with UFOs, parallel universes and ESP if you wish. Or grow up!

Plato and Bohr

Niels Bohr brainwashed a whole generation of physicists into believing that the problem had been solved... - Murray Gell-Mann, Nature of the Physical Universe, NY, 1979, p29.

The quotation above comes from Dr John Gribbin, and although I don't agree with some of the views in some of his books, there are many insights into these problems to be found in them.

Heisenberg was an influence on Bohr. Heisenberg was a Nazi who as a teenager fell in love with Plato's book Timaeus, which argued that the universe must be reduced to abstract math.

The crushing effects of hyperinflation, unemployment, and general discontent in Germany in the 1920s sets the background for the metaphysical view of modern physics. Historian Paul Forman in 1971 wrote a long and generally boring piece on this called Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 1918-27: Adaptation by German Physicists and Mathematicians to a Hostile Intellectual Environment.

It was published in Historical Studies in Physical Sciences, v3, pp 1-115. Bohr had been put under pressure by Rutherford around 1916, when Rutherford initially dismissed Bohr's atomic theory as being incompatible with Maxwell's equations. Bohr tried to defend himself by inventing laws and principles of the imagination which basically said that apparent contradictions do not need to be resolved. In plain English: if the boots fit, wear them.

However, because Bohr did not write in plain English, but in double Mongolian, physicists sort of thought he was writing a religious tract, and that they had to take it as their religious confession of faith. Bohr did have some integrity at the beginning, but as he battled with Einstein over the question of causality (does God play dice?), he degenerated gradually, becoming entrenched.

Heisenberg went from strength to strength. After Hitler came to power in 1933, a Jewish mathematician was thrown out of Heisenberg's university department. Heisenberg was invited to resign in protest, but refused. Fair enough, perhaps. But then Hitler's regime rewarded Heisenberg by making him head of nuclear research!

In 1939, when Heisenberg visited America, physicists pleaded with him not to return to Nazi Germany, but he refused. He went back there, trying to build a 20 kt warhead (based on U233 made by irradiating thorium with neutrons in a nuclear reactor) for the V2 missile. If he had succeeded, I would not be writing this today.

Anyway, he was treated softly by Britain when interned at Farm Hall in 1945, where his reactions to Hiroshima and Nagasaki (secretly tape recorded) are consistent with Bohr's recently recently papers, showing Heisenberg to have been genuinely trying to make a bomb for Hitler. Bohr was fortunately anti-fascist, despite all his other failures. Just as well, as Bohr was the man who worked out by a brilliant piece of reasoning from scant evidence that U235 rather than common U238 is capable of undergoing fission for low neutron energies...

The early papers discrediting/casting doubt upon the Bohr-Heisenberg's horses*** interpretation of quantum mechanics are: Erwin Schroedinger's cat paradox, Naturwissenshaften, v23, p812, and Albert Einstein, B. Podolsky, and N. Rosen, 'Can Quantum Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete?', Physical Review, v47, 1935, p777.

A year later, Einstein wrote another paper for Physical Review and the editor gave him 'the treatment' so Einstein withdrew the paper, argued with the editor bitterly, and never went there again (apart from a letter of rebuttal).

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 ...

Dr Peter Woit and Dr Chris Oakley

These people have a lot more knowledge of mathematics than I do. They both managed to succeed academically and to publish papers in mainstream physics journals. They know what they are doing, but they both still need to struggle against the powerful opposition of the quasi-religious string theory lobby. The area where their knowledge overlaps the most is probably quantum field theory.

There are some lovely letters in existence from a humble Michael Faraday to the mathematician James Clerk Maxwell. Faraday begs Maxwell to translate his equations into plain English. (We have to remember that this occurred in the mid 1850s, long before Heaviside reduced Maxwell's 20 long-winded differential equations to 2 neat little curls, 2 even neater divergences, and conservation of charge.)

Somewhere, Feynman remarked something about Dr Gell-Mann or Dr George Zweig going crazy in an effort to explain particle physics, before coming up with the quark theory. I think the same applies to Maxwell! The poor guy did die young from cancer, and if he had lived long enough to possibly discuss physics with Heaviside, then perhaps the Maxwell 'displacement current' equation would have been corrected for light speed charging, a century before CDW in WW.

It is interesting that Dr Zweig did not get a Nobel prize although in my view he probably should have one (http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=25503). He also seems to be very cool about it, and not bothered. This makes you respect him greatly.

Feynman somewhere suggests that the common fundamental charges should ideally be labelled 1, -2, and 3. This is instead of -1/3, 2/3, and -1 which are used for the downquark, upquark, and electron, respectively. Perhaps one day there will be a new French revolution, where the SI system will be extended to modernise electrical units.

It certainly feels nicer to have fundamental charges like 1, -2, and 3, than two fractional charges and then a negative charge for the unit of electricity. You always have to remember in electricity, that electron drift current flows in the opposite direction to electric current! This paradox is created solely by the tradition of drawing an arrow from the positive terminal of a battery towards the negative terminal, which stems to a wrong guess made by Franklin.

Dr Lee Smolin

On the weblog Not Even Wrong there is some controversy concerning Lee Smolin. A while back he listed about eight different approaches to be followed up, and I was very excited that two of these concerned causal possibilities (cause and effect mechanism).

His book Life of the Cosmos annoyed me at first, because it did not say the direction it was going on the first page. You have to wait until you get to the end, where he comes up with a metaphor, the city. In this analysis, the universe is not designed at the beginning for all time, but rather builds itself like a city.

Some cities, like Milton Keynes in England (if it is a city, it might just be a town?), are designed with road layouts and everything rational from the beginning, but Lee Smolin was referring more to traditional cities like London, which are not designed in one go.

They evolve as time goes by, and modifications occur naturally. A very interesting idea ...

D.R. Lunsford is author of ‘Gravitation and Electrodynamics over SO(3,3)’ on CERN document server, EXT-2003-090.

I emailed him material on my mechanism for gravity extensively, and only received one reply from him, which said he would inform the police if I continued emailing him my ideas.

However, I like his idea at the end of the paper, where he concludes that gravity is some kind of 'residual' of the other forces. This prompts me to argue that the electromagnetic force is a residual of the strong nuclear force. This is fact.

The strong nuclear force is 137 times stronger than electromagnetism. The cloud of virtual charges in the surrounding ether are polarised around the core of a fundamental particle, causing a shielding or screening effect which reduces the observed electric field strength seen by us by a factor of 137.

This is the underlying reality to all the maths of quantum field theory. Now I read on Peter Woit's blog that Lee Smolin is posting comments about others doing this stuff by more rigorous arguments. Lucky they weren't suppressed. I'm really waiting for someone to plagarise my work, while pretending to come up with it independently. Was Darwin right to withhold his evidence for evolution until Wallace independently rediscovered it? No, that is horses***.

I quote from the Dutch Uncle himself, Mr Jeremy Webb, BSc (electronics), editor of the good old New Scientist: 'Scientists have a duty to tell the public what they are doing.'

http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/seta/2004/12/16/stories/2004121600111500.htm

Now read the horses***:


From: Jeremy.Webb@rbi.co.uk [mailto:Jeremy.Webb@rbi.co.uk] Sent: Mon 30/08/2004 11:29 To: ivorcatt@electromagnetism.demon.co.uk; Cook, Nigel B Cc: Jeremy.Webb@rbi.co.uk

Subject: RE: Catt and New Scientist

Dear Ivor and Nigel

If this is mediation, I'm a Dutch uncle. ... Hawking and Penrose are well regarded among their peers. I am eager to question their ideas but I cannot afford to ignore them. Any physicist working today would be daft to do so. ...

Yours Jeremy

More commentary on http://nigelcook0.tripod.com/ and the page it links to at the bottom

Heaviside the Man

I recently clicked on the link http://www.neurodiversity.com/bio_heaviside.html which is on my internet site. The collection of quotations there was updated by Kathleen Seidel on 19 September. For months it had shown Heaviside the mathematician in a nice glowing light.

It still quotes me praising Heaviside (which is why I had the link there, being humble), but it now also quotes an attack on Heaviside in a new book by Paul J. Nahin, Oliver Heaviside : The Life, Work, and Times of an Electrical Genius of the Victorian Age. The quotation is:

'He was a man who often was incapable of conducting himself properly in the most elementary social interactions. His only continuing contacts with women were limited to his mother, nieces, and housekeepers. He was a man who knew the power of money and desired it, but refused to work for it, preferring to live off the sweat of his family and long-suffering friends, whom he often insulted even as they paid his bills.'

If this is the sort of personal diatribe that happens, an attack on personal failures, then you don't want to become famous. My memory is going at 33, but I think when I saw Ivor Catt in February to video him talking about Heaviside for a DVD, he waited until I had used up all the DV tapes before discussing Heaviside. I did not like what I heard! I've always felt empathy a bit with Heaviside in the sense that I had a hearing difficulty at an early age.

Some of the anecdotes were more crazy than sad. One time, Heaviside broke a gas pipe and was worried about escaping gas. Knowing no chemistry, he decided that the safest way to prevent being suffocated by gas was to burn it off, and the resulting explosion burned and blackened his face for weeks. Heaviside never made money out of his fame, and Catt told me that the friends who gave Heaviside money were people who were grateful for his equations, like the famous Oliver Lodge. Lodge often visited Heaviside, and it was he who struggled to get Heaviside made an FRS.

Bad craziness

My 'proof' of the strong nuclear force strength using Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and F=ma, which appears in the Electronics World April 2003 article, looks an insult to any mathematician. First, I confuse uncertainties in energy and time for differential elements of these two things, and then I confuse the differential element of distance for the true distance in the inverse square law. It is a first approximation towards reality. Big ideas don't get born as intelligent adults, they start off as something far more vulnerable ...

Dr Lubos Motl, string theorist, responds to me with a weird message, probably because he is stuck with the string length and cannot do anything about it in the string community: http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/09/crichton-in-senate.html

Nigel said...
Dear Lumo,

You say 'Your 10^{-58} meters as an alternative for string scale is nonsense, and you can't justify it, and no one can reproduce it.'

I said it was the black hole size, R = 2GM/c^2

Putting in the electron mass gives something on the order 10^-58 m.

I did explain this is black hole size.

The Planck size is determined by dimensional analysis to find the smallest possible length from fundamental constants.

It is disproved, because the black hole size of an electron is smaller than the Planck size.

Planck evidently did not think of proposing the combination of units MG/c^2 to get length, with M the electron mass.

If you want theoretical justification for the black hole electron, check out my internet site. [http://nigelcook0.tripod.com/] However, there is no justification for the Planck size experimentally or theoretically. It is nonsense to use this unit in ST.

This doesn't need a DSc. It is obviously an error on the ST background which is ignored.Best wishes,Nigel

7:06 AM
Lumo said...

Dear Nigel,

the black hole whose mass equals the mass of the electron definitely can't be described by a trustworthy solution with the radius 10^{-58} meters.

As you say correctly, there are many new effects that become important at distances much longer than 10^{-58} meters and that prevent one from considering these very short distances. The Planck scale will definitely come to rescue if nothing else.

Of course that there are ways to multiply and divide the elementary constants without any rational thinking to obtain more or less anything - but it does not mean that anything is relevant for physics.

All tbe best
Lubos

Teaching Dr Lubos Motl about a basic problem in string theory, his area of expertise

Dear Lumo,

You say 'Your 10^{-58} meters as an alternative for string scale is nonsense, and you can't justify it, and no one can reproduce it.'

I said it was the black hole size, R = 2GM/c^2

Putting in the electron mass gives something on the order 10^-58 m.

I did explain this is black hole size.

The Planck size is determined by dimensional analysis to find the smallest possible length from fundamental constants.

It is disproved, because the black hole size of an electron is smaller than the Planck size.
Planck evidently did not think of proposing the combination of units MG/c^2 to get length, with M the electron mass.

If you want theoretical justification for the black hole electron, check out my internet site. However, there is no justification for the Planck size experimentally or theoretically. It is nonsense to use this unit in ST. This doesn't need a DSc. It is obviously an error on the ST background which is ignored.

Best wishes,
Nigel

Electrons pass a pulse of energy along a cable at the speed of light in the insulator between the two conductors. Few people look at the problem of how information about the insulator flows into the electron. The problem is conventionally explained akin to a line of touching ball bearings in a wire, you push the end one and almost immediately the one at the other end moves. This model works when you forget about the speed of electricity, but then fails to account for the effect of the insulator on the speed.

Critically, when you consider a capacitor charging up, you find that the light speed energy flooding across the plates causes discrete, step-wise voltage increases when it reflects back at the far end of the plate and adds to further incoming energy. The issue here is that Maxwell’s special equation is based on the model of the capacitor charging up continuously, giving classical EM. When you take account of the stepwise increases which occur, you start to get a picture which looks more compatible with the view of quantum mechanics than Maxwell’s original theory. See curve at: http://www.ivorcatt.org/icrwiworld78dec2.htm

http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/09/crichton-in-senate.html :

Nigel said...
Dear Lumo,

'He [the Jurassic Park author] explained some crucial features of the scientific method of inquiry: especially the requirement that the experiments and calculations must be repeatable - in principle by anyone - without silly comments that certain things are only allowed to priests or "experts".'

The problem here is that if you ask how big a string is, you can get at least two different answers: the black hole size (10^-58 m or so for string electrons), or Planck size (10^-35 m).

In order to justify using the larger unit, the Planck size, you have to be a high priest or expert.

I realise that the absolute string size is irrelevant to the use of M-theory to perfect the Standard Model, but you would think string theorists would worry about how big the strings are.

If you don't investigate the rationale for using the Planck length instead of the smaller black hole size, then you are just using an arbitrary [length-dimension] small number with no scientific basis.

It seems that the closer anything in string theory gets to hard facts, the less interested the string theorists become! I suppose, if you live in a 10/11 dimensional universe, you can't escape the problem of going crackpot (I just mean that you may tend to lose touch with reality).

I notice that in the latest issue of New Scientist, the editor Jeremy Webb (an electronics engineer ...) has allowed an article which quotes Dr Leonard Susskind proposing to 'outlaw' the use of the word 'real' by physicists. Do you subscribe to this new piece of Orwellian thought control?

Best wishes,
Nigel

Nigel Cook worries about non-existent censorship?

Extracts from Daily Express article by Allison Little, 29 September 2005, p8:

"... Mr Wolfgang [a pacifist and for half a century a member of the Labour Party] was detained by police under the Prevention of Terrorism Act [for shouting 'nonsense' once during in the Labour Party Conference when Jack Straw lectured about the policy on Iraq]...

" ... it flew in the face of Tony Blair's defence of the Iraq war two years ago when he said: 'The great thing about living in a democracy is that people are free to express their view.' "

The article quotes Frank Dobson saying: "It is particularly poignant as he was a refugee from Nazi Germany where expressing dissent was not exactly encouraged."

The paper's editorial on p10 of the same issue says:

"Control freaks have taken over...

"Mr Wolfgang's yell of 'nonsense' seemed a very sane response, but in less time than it takes to say 'negative image', he was thrown out. ... These days they sit meekly in the hall, listening dutifully to the word from the ruling presidium. The whole event is controlled with an iron fist Stalin would have admired. ... In Tony Blair's unbrave new world, nobody can be seen to demur, let alone disrupt. It was a moment of truth. Control freakery rules ... Mr Wolfgang was like the little boy pointing out the emperor was naked. He'll be lucky not to get an Asbo."

An 'Asbo' in Britain is an anti-social behaviour order, keeping anti-social people from annoying others by law enforcement. However, remember that in the 'police states' of dictatorships, the law enforcement propaganda sounds very similar. Thin end of the wedge?

How far can the government go after election? If you cursed Hitler in 1935, you would probably have been reminded he was democratically elected in 1933. But does that mean Hitler was right to assume dictatorial powers?

Back to fundamental science

Heaviside wrote Maxwell's equations which is basically the whole of classical electromagnetism. In the process he invented the induction coil system which makes long-distance phones work without frequency-dependent attenuation (speech distortion).

As a result,Heaviside found that Maxwell's theory implies a pulse of electromagnetic energy is guided by two conductors, the speed depending on the insulator between them.This contradicts the idea that electricity flows in or on the conductors, independently of the insulator.

Obviously, Heaviside and Catt are bothtalking reality, which is the light speed energy flow. People like Maxwell, Ohm and Ampere were living in a dream world where they had no idea how fastelectricity goes.

On the internet, I've quoted Maxwell writing in histreatise that he has no idea whether electricity goes at [a fast or slow speed relative to light]. The error of Maxwell is that his (two curl) equations describe two properties of the transmission line TEM wave, which is the mechanism forenergy delivery in electricity.

What you see in the electric contradiction between particles (drift current of electrons at 1 mm/s for 1 amp) and waves (light speed TEM wave, whose speed is that of light not for the wire butcrucially for the insulator between the wires) is wave-particle duality 30 years before de Broglie and Bohr.

Catt then points out that Maxwell made a second error, apart from simply ignoring the mechanism of electric energy transfer (which Heaviside workedon, you just need to time a Morse Code pulse sent into a long cable with four conductors crossing over at the other end so the pulse you send out inone pair comes back in the other; Heaviside did this sort of thing with along undersea cable between Newcastle and Denmark).

The second Maxwell error was to assume that when a capacitor charges, theonly motion is of energy is from one plate to the other, whereas Cattexplains that the energy is actually travelling along the capacitor platesand so it charges up just like an open-ended transmission line (a pair ofunterminated wires) connected to battery terminals.

Hence Maxwell's 'capacitor' with vacuum insulator is really a transmission line. This means that it charges in in a series of discrete steps, not the traditional textbook continuous 1 - e^t type curve. Since Maxwell actually used thecapacitor to get the equation for displacement current in one of the fourMaxwell-Heaviside equations, we see that this equation is misleading, in that it should be a stepwise 'curve' not a continuous curve.

It isimpossible to differentiate a true stepwise increase since calculus gives infinity as the result of each vertical jump which occurs when the energy reflects off the far end of the capacitor plate, nearly doubling the voltage by adding to further incoming energy.

So the true equation for displacement current leads to quantum mechanics, discrete jumps [it is on my internet site].

My feeling is that you have to dismiss all of Catt's political diatribes and some of his unfounded assertions in his scientific books and papers, and to focus on what is provably fact, which gets you down to a few important discoveries. You then have to follow them up.