Thomas R. Love, of the Departments of Mathematics and Physics, California State University, has sent me his very interesting new preprint. It is book-length and far more fascinating at many levels than anything I've ever read before, and I've not fully digested it yet!

Love is author of papers like 'The Geometry of Grand Unification', Int. J. Th. Phys., 1984, p801, 'Complex Geometry, Gravity, and Unification, I., The Geometry of Elementary Particles', Int. J. Th. Phys., 32, 1993, pp.63-88 and 'II., The Generations Problem', Int. J. Th. Phys., 32, 1993, pp. 89-107. He presented his first paper before an audience which included Dirac (although unfortunately Dirac was then old and slept right through).

It is a very valuable survey of the literature concerning the controversy over current QFT, in addition to a presentation of very interesting ideas, and I am quite sure that string theorists will not be very pleased with it. [I asked string theoprist Dr Motl what his view of Dr Oakley's home page was, and Motl responded that Oakley's quotations of Dirac's and Feynman's criticisms and reservations about renormalisation being a fiddle (subtracting out the logarithm of infinity or whatever), was "best described as obsolete". Motl added that his views of Oakley's own criticisms of string theory were "unpublishable". Later, Motl published comments on blogs calling Dr Oakley a crackpot, along with many others with doubts over strings.]

One of the innovations Love introduces is a way to overcome a conflict between the axioms of quantum field theory and of general relativity using the harmonic analysis of the complex spacetime U(3,2)/U(3,1)xU(1). Quantum field theory is not yet axiomatically derivable without problems, and in any case there is strong evidence that the existing abstract mathematical approach needs to undergo a revolution before a final field theory is obtained, due to problems incorporating gravity.

“How in the world is it possible to sort out the crackpots from the legitimate researchers if you lack the time, background, mathematical sophistication, etc. to master the topic?” - Daryl

You demand to see something called evidence. You examine the evidence. If it consists solely of unobserved gravitons and unobserved superpartners, you have to conclude that it fits into the category of speculations which also contains organised money-making religion. If the evidence is convincing and the theory is not otherwise in contradiction of reality, then you have to scientifically appreciate that it is a real possibility.

String theorists call all alternatives crackpot. Alternatives to failed mainstream ideas are not automatically wrong. Those who are censored for being before their time or for contradicting mainstream non-tested speculation, are hardly crackpot. As a case in point, see http://cdsweb.cern.ch/search.py?recid=688763&ln=en which was peer-reviewed and published but censored off arxiv according to the author (presumably for contradicting stringy speculation). It is convenient for Motl to dismiss this as crackpot by personally-abusive name-calling, giving no reason whatsoever. Even if he gave a 'reason', that whoud not mean anything, since these string theorists are downright ignorant. What Motl would have to do is not just call names, or even go to providing a straw-man type 'reason', but to actually analyse and compare alternative theories objectively to mainstream string theory. This he won't do. It is curious that nobody remembers the problems that Einstein had when practically the entire physics establishment of Germany in the 1930s was coerced by fascists to call him a crackpot. I think Pauli’s categories of “right”, “wrong”, and “not even wrong” are more objective than calling suggestions “crackpot”.

If you live in a society where unobserved gravitons and superpartners are believed to be “evidence” that string theory unifies standard model forces and “has the remarkable property of predicting gravity” {quoted from stringy M-theory originator Edward Witten, Physics Today, Apr 96}, then your tendency to ignore it is no help. You have to point out that it is simply vacuous.

String theory lacks a specific quantum field theory vacuum, yet as Lunsford says, that doesn’t stop string theory from making a lot of vacuous “predictions”.

String theory allows 10^500 or so vacua, a whole “landscape” of them, and there is no realistic hope of determining which is the right one. So it is so vague it can’t say anything useful. The word “God” has about 10^6 different religious meanings, so string theory is (10^500)/(10^6) = 10^494 times more vague than religion.

Feynman’s statements in Davies & Brown, ‘Superstrings’ 1988, at pages 194-195:

‘… I do feel strongly that this is nonsense! … I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction. … I don’t like it that they’re not calculating anything. … why are the masses of the various particles such as quarks what they are? All these numbers … have no explanations in these string theories - absolutely none! …’ - http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=272#comment-5295

Larsson has listed the following more recent experts:

Sheldon “string theory has failed in its primary goal” Glashow - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/view-glashow.html

Martinus “string theory is a figment of the theoretical mind” Veltman - http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/981238149X/701-5527495-9406712

Phil “string theory a futile exercise as physics”Anderson- http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_10.html#andersonp

Bob “string theory a 50-year-old woman wearing way too much lipstick” Laughlin - http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/03/14/MNGRMBOURE1.DTL

Dan “string theory is a complete scientific failure” Friedan - http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0204131

Also note that even Dr Lubos Motl has expressed concerns with the ‘landscape’ aspect of ST, while Dr Peter Woit in his 2002 paper pointed out the problem that ST doesn’t actually sort out gravity:

‘It is a striking fact that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever for this complex and unattractive conjectural theory. There is not even a serious proposal for what the dynamics of the fundamental ‘M-theory’ is supposed to be or any reason at all to believe that its dynamics would produce a vacuum state with the desired properties. The sole argument generally given to justify this picture of the world is that perturbative string theories have a massless spin two mode and thus could provide an explanation of gravity, if one ever managed to find an underlying theory for which perturbative string theory is the perturbative expansion.’ – Quantum Field Theory and Representation Theory: A Sketch (2002), http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0206135

In addition, Sir Roger Penrose analysed the problems with string theory at a technical level, concluding: ‘in addition to the dimensionality issue, the string theory approach is (so far, in almost all respects) restricted to being merely a perturbation theory.’ - The Road to Reality, 2004, page 896.

So now we have explained why 'string theory' is empty, let us examine Love's paper in detail.

Einstein, in his 1936 paper Physics and Reality, argued that quantum mechanics is merely a statistical means of accounting for the average behaviour of a large number of particles. In a hydrogen atom, presumably, the three dimensional wave behaviour of the electron would be caused by the interaction of the electron with the particles and radiation of the quantum mechanical vacuum or Dirac sea, which would continuously be disturbing the small-scale motion of subatomic sized particles, by analogy to the way air molecules cause the jiggling or Brownian motion of very small dust particles. Hence there is chaos on small scales due to a causal physical mechanism, the quantum foam vacuum. Because of the Poincare chaos which the electromagnetic and other fields involves in 3+ body interactions create, probability and statistics rule the small scale. Collisions of particles in the vacuum by this mechanism result in the creation of other virtual particles for a brief time until further collisions annihilate the latter particles. Random collisions of vacuum particles and unstable nuclei trigger the Poisson statistics behind exponential radioactive decay, by introducing probability. All of these phenomena are real, causal events, but like the well-known Brownian motion chaos of dust particles in air, they are not deterministic.

Love has a vast literature survey and collection of vitally informative quotations from authorities, as well as new insights from his own work in quantum mechanics and field theory. He quotes, on page 8, from Asim O. Barut's paper, On the Status of Hidden Variable Theories in Quantum Mechanics, (Aperion, 2, 1995, p97): "We have to study the structure of the electron, and if possible, the single electron, if we want to understand physics at short distances."

String theory claims to study the electron by vibrating extra dimensional strings of Planck scale, but there is not a shred of evidence for this. I'd point out that the Planck scale is meaningless since the radius of a black hole electron mass (R = 2GM/c^2) is a lot smaller than the Planck size, so why choose to speculate strings are Planck size? (Planck was only fiddling around with dimensional analysis, and falsely believed he had found the smallest possible length scale, when in fact the black hole size of an electron is a lot, lot smaller!)

On page 9, Love points out that: "The problem is that quantum mechanics is mathematically inconsistent...", which compares the two versions of the Schroedinger equation on page 10. The time independent and time-dependent versions disagree and this disagreement nullifies the principle of superposition and consequently the concept of wavefunction collapse being precipitated by the act of making a measurement. The failure of superposition discredits the usual interpretation of the EPR experiment as proving quantum entanglement. To be sure, making a measurement always interferes with the system being measured (by recoil from firing light photons or other probes at the object), but that is not justification for the metaphysical belief in wavefunction collapse.

Page 40: "There is clearly a relationship between the mass of an elementary particle and the interactions in which it participates."

To combine the heuristic quantum field theory physical ideas with general relativity, matter causes the curvature of test particle geodesics via radiation (vector boson) exchange. The pressure causes GR curvature, the GR contraction of masses (squeezing by radial radiation pressure from the surrounding universe), GR gravity (LeSage shielding of the radiation pressure).

To understand what the vector boson radiation is (photons having spin 1 and stringy speculative "gravitons" having spin 2) we need to understand the electromagnetic unification of Maxwell. It is all perfect except the "displacement current" term which is added to Ampere's current to complete continuity of circuit current in a charging capacitor with a vacuum dielectric.

The continuum is composed of radiation! There are also trapped particles in the vacuum which are responsible for the quantized masses of fundamental particles, leptons and the pairs and triads of quarks in hadrons. The change in my approach is due to physical understanding of the displacement current term in Maxwell's equations. Since about 2000 I've been pushing this way, hoping Catt would help, but he is not interested in progress beyond Heaviside's model. See my recent blog post: http://electrogravity.blogspot.com/2006/03/electromagnetism-and-standard-model_10.html and the links to my earlier posts and Catt's critical paper.Maxwell supposed that the variation in voltage (hence electric field strength) in a capacitor plate causes an ethereal "displacement current".

Mathematically Maxwell's trick works, since you put the "displacement current" law together with Faraday's law of induction and the solution is Maxwell's light model, predicting the correct speed of light. However, this changes when you realise that displacement current is itself really electromagnetic radiation, and acts at 90 degrees to the direction light propagates in Maxwell's model. Maxwell's model is entirely self-contradictory, and so his unification of electricity and magnetism is not physical!Maxwell's unification is wrong, because the reality is that the "displacement current" effects result from electromagnetic radiation emitted transversely when the current varies with time (hence when charges accelerate) in response to the time-varying voltage. This completely alters the picture we have of what light is! Comparison:(1) Maxwell's displacement current: Voltage varying with time creates an "ethereal displacement current" (not mere electromagnetic radiation) in the vacuum. (2) True model to replace fully "displacement current": Voltage varying with time accelerates charges in the conductor, which as a result emit radiation transversely.I gave logical arguments for this kind of thing (without the full details I have recently discovered) in my letter published in the March 2005 issue of Electronics World. Notice that Catt uses a completely false picture of electricity with discontinuities (vertically abrupt rises in voltage at the front of a logic pulse) which don't exist in the real world, so he does not bother to deal with the facts and missed the mechanism. However Catt is right for arguing that the flaw in Maxwell's classical electromagnetism stems to the ignorance Maxwell had of the way current must spread along the plates at light speed.

On page 40 Love finds that "the present work implies that the curvature of the space-time is caused by the rotation of something..." We know the photon has spin, so can we create a spin foam vacuum from radiation (photons)? Smolin is interested in this.

Page 41: Muon as a heavy electron. Love says that "Barut argues that the muon cannot be an excited electron since we do not observe the decay muon -> electron + gamma ray." Love argues that in the equation muon -> electron + electron neutrino + muon neutrino, the neutrino pair "is essentially a photon", if the muon neutrino has mass and thus can decay into an electron anti-neutrino. It does seem likely from experimental data on the properties of the electron and muon that the muon is an electron with extra energy which allows it to associate strongly with the Higgs field.

Traditionally the Higgs field is introduced into electroweak theory partly to give the neutral Z-boson (91 GeV) a limited range at low energy, compared to the infinite range of photons. Now lets look at the mainstream heuristic picture of the electron in the Dirac sea of QFT, which is OK as far as it goes, but doesn't go far enough:

Most of the charge is screened out by polarised charges in the vacuum around the electron core:'... we find that the electromagnetic coupling grows with energy. This can be explained heuristically by remembering that the effect of the polarization of the vacuum ... amounts to the creation of a plethora of electron-positron pairs around the location 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).' - arxiv hep-th/0510040, p 71.

‘All charges are surrounded by clouds of virtual photons, which spend part of their existence dissociated into fermion-antifermion pairs. The virtual fermions with charges opposite to the bare charge will be, on average, closer to the bare charge than those virtual particles of like sign. Thus, at large distances, we observe a reduced bare charge due to this screening effect.’ – I. Levine, D. Koltick, et al., Physical Review Letters, v.78, 1997, no.3, p.424.

Koltick found a 7% increase in the strength of Coulomb's/Gauss' force field law when hitting colliding electrons at an energy of 80 GeV or so. The coupling constant for electromagnetism is 1/137 at low energies but was found to be 1/128.5 at 80 GeV or so. This rise is due to the polarised vacuum being broken through. We have to understand Maxwell's equations in terms of the gauge boson exchange process for causing forces and the polarised vacuum shielding process for unifying forces into a unified force at very high energy. The minimal SUSY Standard Model shows electromagnetic force coupling increasing from alpha of 1/137 to alpha of 1/25 at 10^16 GeV, and the strong force falling from 1 to 1/25 at the same energy, hence unification. The reason why the unification superforce strength is not 137 times electromagnetism but only 137/25 or about 5.5 times electromagnetism, is heuristically explicable in terms of potential energy for the various force gauge bosons. If you have one force (electromagnetism) increase, more energy is carried by virtual photons at the expense of something else, say gluons. So the strong nuclear force will lose strength as the electromagnetic force gains strength. Thus simple conservation of energy will explain and allow predictions to be made on the correct variation of force strengths mediated by different gauge bosons. When you do this properly, you may learn that SUSY just isn't needed or is plain wrong, or else you will get a better grip on what is real and make some testable predictions as a result.

It seems that the traditional role of the Higgs field in giving mass to the 91 MeV Z-boson to limit its range (and to give mass to Standard Model elementary particles) may be back-to-front. If Z-bosons can be trapped by gravity into loops, like the model for the electron, they can numerically account for mass. Think of the electron as a bare core with 137e, surrounded by a shell of polarised vacuum which reduces the core charge to e. A Z-boson, while electrically neutral as a whole, is probably an oscillating electromagnetic field like a photon, being half positive and half negative electric field. So if as a loop it is aligned side-on it can be associated with a charge, providing mass. The point of this exercise is to account for empirical recently observed coincidences of masses:

Neutral Z-boson: 91 GeV

Muon mass: 91,000/ (twice Pi times 137 shielding factor) = 105.7 MeV
=> Muon is electron core associated with a Z-boson which has a polarised shield around its own core.

Electron mass: Muon mass/(1.5 x 137) = 0.511 MeV
=> Electron is like a muon, but there are two polarised shields weakening the association (one polarised shield around electron core and one around Z-boson core).

So the Z-boson, muon, and electron masses are physically related by just multiplying by 1/137 factors, depending on how many polarised shields are involved (ie, on whether the cores of the electron and Z-boson are close enough for the polarised veils of the Dirac sea to overlap, or not). The 2Pi shielding factor above is explained as follows: the spin of a fermion is half integer, so it rotates 720 degrees (like a Mobius strip with a half turn), so the average exposed side-on loop field area is half what you would have if it had spin of 1. (The twist in a Mobius strip loop reduces the average area you see side-on, it is a simple physical explanation.) The Pi factor comes from the fact that when you look at any charged loop side-on, you are subject to a field intensity Pi times less than if you loop at the field from the loop perpendicularly.

The 1.5 factor arises as follows. The mass of any individually observable elementary particle (quarks aren't separable to I'm talking of leptons, mesons and baryons) is heuristically given by:

M = {electron mass}.{137 polarised dielectric correction factor; see below for proof that this is the shielding factor}.n(1/2 + N/2).

In this simple formula, the 137 correction factor is not needed for the electron mass, so for an electron, M = {electron mass}.n(1/2 + N/2) = {electron mass}.

Here n stands for the number of charged core particles like quarks (n = 1 for leptons, n = 2 for mesons, n = 3 for baryons), and N is the number of vacuum particles (Z-bosons) associated with the charge. I've given a similar argument for the causal mechanism of Schwinger's first corrective radiation term for the magnetic moment of the electron, 1 + alpha/(2.pi) on my page. The heuristic explanation for the (1/2 + N/2) factor could be the addition of spins.

The problem is that whatever the truth is, whether string theory or LQG, some kind of connection with reality of these numbers is needed. You have three leptons and three families of quarks. The quark masses are not "real" in the sense that you can never in principle observe a free quark (the energy needed to break a couple or traid of quarks apart is enough to form new pairs of quarks).So the real problem is explaining the observable facts relating to masses: the three lepton masses (electron, muon, tauon, respectively about 0.511, 105.66 and 1784.2 MeV, or 1/137.0..., 1.5 and 25.5 respectively if you take the 1/137.0... as the electron mass), and a large amount of hadron data on meson (2 quarks each) and baryon (3 quarks each) masses.When you multiply the masses of the hadrons by alpha (1/137.0...) and divide by the electron mass, you get, at least for the long-lived hadrons (half lives above 10^-23 second) pretty quantized (near-integer) sized masses:

Mesons
Charged pions = 1.99
Neutral Pions = 1.93
Charged kaons = 7.05
Neutral kaons = 7.11
Eta = 7.84

Hyperons
Lambda = 15.9
Sigma+ = 17.0
Sigma0 = 17.0
Sigma- = 17.1
Xi(0) = 18.8
Xi(-) = 18.9
Omega- = 23.9

Of course the exceptions are nucleons, neutrons and protons, which have both have masses on this scale of around 13.4. It is a clue to why they are relatively stable compared to all the other hadrons, which all have half lives of a tiny fraction of a second (after the neutron, the next most stable hadron found in nature is the pion of course, which has a half life of 2.6 shakes (1 shake = 10^-8 second).

All these particles masses are produced by the semi empirical formula {M ~ 35n(N + 1) Mev} above to within 2% error, which is strong statistical evidence for quantization (similar if not better than Dalton's evidence for periodicity of the elements in the early nineteenth century; note that Dalton was called a crackpot by many):

N...................................n = 1............n = 2...........n = 3
(number of Z-bosons.........1 particle........2 quarks.......3 quarks
associated with core).........Leptons........Mesons........Baryons

1...........................................Electron..........Pions
2...........................................Muon
6....................................................................Kaons
7....................................................................Eta
8................................................................................................Nucleons
10..............................................................................................Lambda,Sigmas
12..............................................................................................Xi
15..............................................................................................Omega
50.........................................Tauon


As you can see from the "periodic table" based on masses above, there are a lot of blanks. Some if not all of these are doubtless filled by the shorter-lived particles.

What needs to be done next is to try to correlate the types of quarks with the apparent integer number of vacuum particles N they associate with, in each meson and baryon. I seem to recall from a course in nuclear physics that the numbers 8 and 50 are "magic numbers" in nuclear physics, and may explain the nucleons having N = 8 and the Tauon having N = 50. This is probably the "selection principle" needed to go with the formula to identify predictions of masses of relatively stable particles. (As you comment, there is no real difference between nuclear physics and particle physics.) I know Barut made some effort to empirically correlate lepton masses in his paper in PRL, v. 42 (1979), p. 1251, and Feynman was keener for people to find new ways to calculate data than to play with string theory:

‘… I do feel strongly that this [superstring theory stuff] is nonsense! … I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction. … I don’t like it that they’re not calculating anything. … why are the masses of the various particles such as quarks what they are? All these numbers … have no explanations in these string theories - absolutely none! …’ - R.P. Feynman, quoted in Davies & Brown, ‘Superstrings’ 1988, at pages 194-195 (quotation provided by Tony Smith). The semi-empirical formula is not entirely speculative, as the shielding factor 137 can be justified as you may have seen on my pages:

Heisenberg's uncertainty says pd = h/(2.Pi), where p is uncertainty in momentum, d is uncertainty in distance.This comes from his imaginary gamma ray microscope, and is usually written as a minimum (instead of with "=" as above), since there will be other sources of uncertainty in the measurement process.For light wave momentum p = mc, pd = (mc)(ct) = Et where E is uncertainty in energy (E=mc2), and t is uncertainty in time. Hence, Et = h/(2.Pi), so t = h/(2.Pi.E), so d/c = h/(2.Pi.E)d = hc/(2.Pi.E). This result is used to show that a 80 GeV energy W or Z gauge boson will have a range of 10^-17 m. So it's OK. Now, E = Fd implies d = hc/(2.Pi.E) = hc/(2.Pi.Fd). Hence F = hc/(2.Pi.d^2). This force is 137.036 times higher than Coulomb's law for unit fundamental charges. Notice that in the last sentence I've suddenly gone from thinking of d as an uncertainty in distance, to thinking of it as actual distance between two charges; but the gauge boson has to go that distance to cause the force anyway.

‘… the Heisenberg formulae can be most naturally interpreted as statistical scatter relations, as I proposed [in the 1934 German publication, ‘The Logic of Scientific Discovery’]. … There is, therefore, no reason whatever to accept either Heisenberg’s or Bohr’s subjectivist interpretation of quantum mechanics.’ – Sir Karl R. Popper, Objective Knowledge, Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 303. Note: statistical scatter gives the energy form of Heisenberg’s equation, since the vacuum is full of gauge bosons carrying momentum like light, and exerting vast pressure; this gives the foam vacuum.

Clearly what's physically happening is that the true force is 137.036 times Coulomb's law, so the real charge is 137.036e. All the detailed calculations of the Standard Model are really modelling are the vacuum processes for different types of virtual particles and gauge bosons. The whole mainstream way of thinking about the Standard Model is related to energy. What is really happening is that at higher energies you knock particles together harder, so their protective shield of polarised vacuum particles gets partially breached, and you can experience a stronger force mediated by different particles! This is reduced by the correction factor 1/137.036 because most of the charge is screened out by polarised charges in the vacuum around the electron core.

The problem is that people are used to looking to abstruse theory due to the success of QFT in some areas, and looking at the data is out of fashion. If you look at history of chemistry there were particle masses of atoms and it took school teachers like Dalton and a Russian to work out periodicity, because the bigwigs were obsessed with vortex atom maths, the ‘string theory’ of that age. Eventually, the obscure school teachers won out over the mathematicians, because the vortex atom (or string theory equivalent) did nothing, but empirical analysis did stuff. It was eventually explained theoretically!

It seems that there are two distinct mechanisms for forces to be propagated via quantum field theory. The vacuum propagates long ranges forces (electromagnetism, gravity) by radiation exchange as discussed in earlier papers kindly hosted by Walter Babin, while short-range forces (strong and weak nuclear interactions) are due to the pressure of the spin foam vacuum. The vacuum is below viewed by analogy to an ideal gas in which there is a flux of shadowed radiation and also dispersed particle-caused pressure.

The radiation has an infinite range and its intensity decreases from geometric divergence. The material pressure of the spin foam vacuum is like an ideal gas, with a small mean-free-path, and produces an attractive force with a very short range (like air pressure pushing a suction plunger against a surface, if the gap is too small to allow air to fill the gap). The probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics is then due to the random impacts from virtual particles in the vacuum on a small scale, which statistically average out on a large scale.

There is strong evidence showing Maxwell's light photon theory is not only drivel, but can be corrected by modern data from electromagnetism. First consider what electricity is. If you charge up a x metre long transmission line to v volts, energy enters at the speed of light. When you dicharge it, you (contrary to what you may expect) get a light speed pulse out of v/2 volts with a duration of 2x/c seconds, which of course implies a pulse 2x metres long. Nobody has ever proposed a mechanism where by energy travelling at light speed can magically stop when a transmission line charges up, and magically restart when it is allowed to discharge.

Static electrons are therefore to be viewed as trapped electromagnetic field energy. Because there is no variation in voltage in a static charged conductor, there is no electric drift current, and no resistance or net magnetic field from current, yet energy is still going at light speed.

Because we know a lot about the electron, namely its electric charge in interactions at different energy, its spin, its magnetic dipole, we can use Heaviside's model of energy current to obtain a model for an electron: it's just a Heaviside-Poynting energy trapped in a loop by the only force that will do that, gravity. I discussed this in ten pages of articles in Electronics World, August 2002 and April 2003, which are both now cited on Google Scholar (despite the abuse from string theorists). This tells us the loop size is black-hole sized. This in turn allows a mechanism for LeSage gravity to be tested (although the calculations of the mechanism can also be done in another way that doesn't depend on assumed black hole sized shield area for a fundamental particle). Maxwell had no idea that electricity is related to light in speed, or he would probably have grasped that electrons are spinning at light speed:

James Clerk Maxwell, Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, 3rd ed., Article 574:- "... there is, as yet, no experimental evidence to shew whether the electric current... velocity is great or small as measured in feet per second."

James Clerk Maxwell, Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, 3rd ed., Article 769:- "... we may define the ratio of the electric units to be a velocity... this velocity [of light, because light was the only thing Maxwell then knew of which had a similar speed, due to his admitted ignorance of the speed of electricity ! ] is about 300,000 kilometres per second."

So Maxwell was just guessing that he was modelling light, because he didn't guess what Heaviside knew later on (1875): that electricity is suspiciously similar to what Maxwell was trying to model as "light".

More important, a photon of over 2 electron rest masses in energy interacts with heavy nuclei (of high atomic number) by pair-production. Hence a 1.022 MeV gamma ray with spin 1 can be converted into a 0.511 MeV electron of spin 1/2 and a 0.511 MeV positron of spin 1/2. Since a classical light ray is a variation in electromagnetic field, usually drawn as being half negative electric field and half positive, the direct causal model of pair production is the literal splitting or fission of a gamma ray by the curvature of spacetime in the strong field near an atomic nucleus. The two fragments gain potential energy from the field and become trapped by gravity. The wavelength of a gamma ray of >1 MeV is very small. (It's a tragedy that pair-production was only discovered in 1932, well after the Bohring revolution, not in 1922 or before.)

Additional key evidence linking these facts directly to the Standard Model is that particles in the Standard Model don't have mass. In other words, elementary particles are like photons, they have real energy but are mass-less. The mass in the Standard Model is supplied by a mechanism, the Higgs field. This model is compatible with the Standard Model. Furthermore, predictions of particle masses are possible, as discussed above.

Page 49: Love gives strong arguments that forces arise from the exchange of real particles. Clearly from my position all attractive forces in the universe are due to recoil from shielded pressure. Two nuclear particles stick together in the nucleus because they are close enough to partly shield each other form the vacuum particles. If they are far apart, the vacuum particles completely fill the gap between them, killing the short range forces completely. Gravity and electromagnetism are different in that the vector bosons don't interact or scatter off one another, but just travel in straight lines. Hence they simply cannot disperse into LeSage "shadows" and cancel out, which is why they only fall by the inverse square law, unlike material-carried short-range nuclear forces.

P. 51: Love quotes a letter from Einstein to Schrodinger written in May 1928; 'The Heisenberg-Bohr tranquilizing philosophy - or religion? - is so delicately contrived that, for the time being, it provides a gentle pillow for the true believer from which he cannot easily be aroused. So let him lie there.'

P. 52: "Bohr and his followers tried to cut off free enquiry and say that they had discovered ultimate truth - at that point their efforts stopped being science and became a revealed religion with Bohr as its prophet." Very good. Note the origin of Bohr's paranoid religion is Maxwell classical equations (saying centripetally accelerated charge in atom radiate continuously, so charge spirals into the nucleus, a fact which Bohr was unable to resolve when Rutherford wrote to him about in in 1915 or so). Being unable to answer such simple questions, Bohr simply resorted to inventing a religion to make the questions a heresy. (He also wanted his name in lights for all time.)

P. 55: excellent quotation from Hinton! But note that vortex theory of atom was never applied to electrons; it was heresy when discovery of radioactivity "disproved it".

Although the application of GR by the 'cosmological constant' fiddles to the big bang is a repeated failure of predictions for decades, as new data arises, the basic observed Hubble law of big bang expansion, nuclear reaction rates, etc., are OK. So only part of GR is found wanting!

P. 72: "In order to quantize charge, Dirac had to postulate the existence of magnetic monopoles." Love points out that magnetic monopoles have never been found in nature. Heaviside, not Maxwell, first wrote the equation div.B = 0, which is logical and only permits magnetic dipoles! Hence it is more scientific to search for UFOs than magnetic monopoles.

P. 92: "The doctrine of determinism is dead, because one cannot determine the present to an arbitrary degree of accuracy. However, this does not prevent the equations of a theory from being deterministic! ... The uncertainty principle destroys the possibility that the initial conditions can be precisely known. This says nothing whatsoever about the equations of evolution."

P. 93: interesting that Love has the source for the origin of the anti-causality crackpot claim that radioactive events have no triggering cause as Gurney and Condon 1929 [R. W. Gurney and E. U. Condon, 'Quantum Mechanics and Radioactive Disintegration', Physical Review, 1929, pp127-40]. I will get hold of that reference to examine in detail if a satire can be made of their argument. But I suppose Schrodinger did that in 1935, with his cat paradox?

Also, Popper rejected it: ‘… the Heisenberg formulae can be most naturally interpreted as statistical scatter relations, as I proposed [in the 1934 German publication, ‘The Logic of Scientific Discovery’]. … There is, therefore, no reason whatever to accept either Heisenberg’s or Bohr’s subjectivist interpretation of quantum mechanics.’ – Sir Karl R. Popper, Objective Knowledge, Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 303. Note: statistical scatter gives the energy form of Heisenberg’s equation, since the vacuum is full of gauge bosons carrying momentum like light, and exerting vast pressure; this gives the foam vacuum.

P. 94: Particles and radiation in the vacuum create the random triggers for radioactive decays. Normal gauge boson or other radiation or vacuum particles, triggers decays statistically. Love gives arguments for neutrinos and their antiparticles being involved in triggering radioactivity, but that (initially) seems to me to only account for long half-lives, where there is a reasonable chance of an interaction with a neutrino, and not for short half lives where the neutrino/antineutrino flux in space is too small, and other vacuum particles are more likely to trigger decays (either vector bosons, or other particles in the quantum foam vacuum). The more stable a nuclide is, the less likely it is that an impact will trigger a decay, but due to chaotic collisions there is always some risk. I agree with Love that quantum tunnelling is not metaphysical (p. 95), but due to real vacuum interactions.

The problem is that to get a causal mechanism for radioactive decay triggering taken seriously, some statistical calculations and hopefully predictions are needed, and that before you do that you might want to understand the masses of elementary particles and how the exact mass affects the half life of the particle. Love gives an argument that the vacuum foam neutrino spectrum would be black body radiation.

P. 98: Quotation of Einstein's summary of the problems with standard quantum theory: 'I am, in fact, firmly convinced that the essential statistical character of contemporary quantum theory is solely to be ascribed to the fact that this theory operates with an incomplete description of physical systems.' (Albert Einstein, 'Reply to Criticisms', in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, edited by P. A. Schipp, Tutor Publishing, 1951.)

'Einstein ... rejected the theory not because he ... was too conservative to adapt himself to new and unconventional modes of thought, but on the contrary, because the new theory was in his view too conservative to cope with the newly discovered empirical data.' - Max Jammer, 'Einstein and Quantum Physics' in Albert Einstein: Historical and Cultural Perspectives, edited by Gerald Holton and Yedhuda Elkana, 1979.

P. 99: "It is interesting to note that when a philosopher of science attacked quantum field theory, the response was immediate and vicious. But when major figures from within physics, like Dirac and Schwinger spoke, the critics were silent." Yes, and they were also polite to Einstein when he spoke, but called him an old fool behind his back. (The main problem is that even authority in science is pretty a impotent thing unless it is usefully constructive criticism.)

P. 100: 'The minority who reject the theory, although led by the great names of Albert Einstein and Paul Dirac, do not yet have any workable alternative to put in its place.' - Freeman Dyson, 'Field Theory', Scientific American, 199 (3), September 1958, pp78-82.

P. 106: 'Once an empirical law is well established the tendency is to ignore or try to accommodate recalcitrant experiences, rather than give up the law. The history of science is replete with examples where apparently falsifying evidence was ignored, swept under the rug, or led to something other than the law being changed.' - Nancy J. Nersessian, Faraday to Einstein: Constructing Meaning in Scientific Theories, Martinus Nijhoff Pub., 1984.

O'Hara quotation "Bandwagons have bad steering, poor brakes, and often no certificate of roadworthiness." (M. J. O'Hara, Eos, Jan 22, 1985, p34.)

Schwartz quotation: 'The result is a contrived intellectual structure, more an assembly of successful explanatory tricks and gadgets that its most ardent supporters call miraculous than a coherently expressed understanding of experience. ... Achievement at the highest levels of science is not possible without a deep relationship to nature that can permit human unconscious processes - the intuition of the artist - to begin to operate ... The lack of originality in particle physics ... is a reflection of the structural organization of the discipline where an exceptionally sharp division of labor has produced a self-involved elite too isolated from experience and criticism to succeed in producing anything new.' [L. Schwartz, The Creative Moment, HarperCollins, 1992.]

P. 107: 'The primary difference between scientific thinking and religious thinking is immediacy. The religious mind wants an answer now. The scientific mind has the ability to wait. To the scientific mins the answer "We don't know yet" is perfectly acceptable. The physicists of the 1920s and later accepted many ideas without sufficient data or thought but with all the faith and fervor characteristic of a religion.'

The vector boson radiation of QFT works by pushing things together. ‘Caloric’, fluid heat theory, eventually gave way to two separate mechanisms, kinetic theory and radiation. This was after Prevost in 1792 suggested constant temperature is a dynamic system, with emission in equilibrium with the reception of energy. The electromagnetic field energy exchange process is not treated with causal mechanism in current QFT, which is the cause of all the problems. All attractive forces are things shielding one another and being pushed together by the surrounding radiation pushing inward where not shadowed, while repulsion is due to the fact that in mutual exchange of energy between two objects which are not moving apart, the vector bosons are not red-shifted, whereas those pressing in on the far sides are red-shifted by the big bang, as they come from immense distances. I've a causal mechanism which works for each fundamental force, although it is still sketchy in places.

P. 119: "In the Standard Model, the electron and the neutrino interact via the weak force by interchanging a Z. But think about the masses ... Z is about 91 GeV". I think this argument of Love's is very exciting because it justifies the model of masses above: the mass-causing Higgs field is composed of Z particles in the vacuum. It's real.

P. 121: Matter is trapped electromagnetic field energy: this is also justified by the empirical electromagnetic data I've been writing about for a decade in EW.

Spin-spin interaction (Pauli exclusion force?) is clearly caused by some kind of magnetic anti alignment or pairing. When you drop two magnets into a box, they naturally pair up not end to end, but side by side, with the north poles pointing in opposite directions. This is the most stable situation. The same happens to electrons in orbits, they are magnets so they generally pair up with opposite orientation to the their neighbour. Hence Pauli's law for paired electrons.

P. 130: Vitally important, excellent quotation from Dirac about physics developing by big jumps when prejudices are overcome!

'When one looks back over the development of physics, one sees that it can be pictured as a rather steady development with many small steps and superimposed on that a number of big jumps.... These big jumps usually consist in overcoming a prejudice.'

- P. A. M. Dirac, 'Development of the Physicist's Conception of Nature', in J. Mehra (ed.), The Physicist's Conception of Nature, D. Reidel Pub. Co., 1973.