The diagram above shows how the flux of Yang-Mills gravitational exchange radiation (gravitons) being exchanged between all the masses in the universe physically creates an observable gravitational acceleration field directed towards a cosmologically nearby or non-receding mass, labelled ’shield’. (The Hubble expansion rate and the distribution of masses around us are virtually isotropic, i.e., radially symmetric.) The mass labelled ’shield’ creates an asymmetry for the observer in the middle of the sphere, since it shields the graviton flux because it doesn’t have an outward force relative to the observer (in the middle of the circle shown), and thus doesn’t produce a forceful graviton flux in the direction of the observer according to Newton’s 3rd law (action and reaction, an empirical fact, not a speculative assumption).
Hence, any mass that is not at a vast cosmological distance (with significant redshift) physically acts as a shield for gravitons, and you get pressed towards that shield from the unshielded flux of gravitons on the other side. Gravitons act by pushing, they have spin-1. In the diagram, r is the distance to the mass that is shielding the graviton flux from receding masses located at the far greater distance R. As you can see from the simple but subtle geometry involved, the effective size of the area of sky which is causing gravity due to the asymmetry of mass at radius r is equal to the cross-sectional area of the mass for quantum gravity interactions (detailed calculations, included elsewhere, show that this cross-section turns out to be the area of the event horizon of a black hole for the mass of the fundamental particle which is acting as the shield), multiplied by the factor (R/r)^2, which is how the inverse square law, i.e., the 1/r^2 dependence on gravitational force, occurs.
Because this mechanism is built on solid facts of expansion from redshift data that can’t be explained any other way than recession, and on experiment and observation based laws of nature such as Newton’s, it is not just a geometric explanation of gravity but it uniquely makes detailed predictions including the strength of gravity, i.e., the value of G, and the cosmological expansion rate; it is a simple theory as it uses spin-1 gravitons which exert impulses that add up to an effective pressure or force when exchanged between masses. It is quite a different theory to the mainstream model which ignores graviton interactions with other masses in the surrounding universe.
The mainstream model in fact can’t predict anything at all. It begins by ignoring all the masses in the universe except for two masses, such as two particles. It then represents gravity interactions between those two masses by a Lagrangian field equation which it evaluates by a Feynman path integral. It finds that if you ignore all the other masses in the universe, and just consider two masses, then spin-1 gauge boson exchange will cause repulsion, not attraction as we know occurs for gravity. It then ‘corrects’ the Lagrangian by changing the spin of the gauge boson to spin-2, which has 5 polarizations. This new ‘corrected’ Lagrangian with 5 tensor terms for the 5 polarizations of the spin-2 graviton being assumed, gives an always-attractive force between two masses when put into the path integral and evaluated. However, it doesn’t say how strong gravity is, or make any predictions that can be checked. Thus, the mainstream first makes one error (ignoring all the graviton interactions between masses all over the universe) whose fatally flawed prediction (repulsion instead of attraction between two masses) it ‘corrects’ using another error, a spin-2 graviton.
So one reason why the actual spin-2 gravitons don’t cause masses to repel is because the path integral isn’t just a sum of interactions between two gravitational charges (composed of mass-energy) when dealing with gravity; it’s instead a sum of interactions between all mass-energy in the universe. The reason why mainstream people don’t comprehend this is that the mathematics being used in the Lagrangian and path integral are already fairly complex, and they can’t readily include the true dynamics so they ignore them and believe in a fiction instead. (There is a good analogy with the false mathematical epicycles of the Earth-centred universe. Whenever the theory was in difficulty, they simply added another epicycle to make the theory more complex, ‘correcting’ the error. Errors were actually celebrated and simply re-labelled being ‘discoveries’ that nature must contain more epicycles.)
A Feynman lecture about was briefly in 2007 on Google Video but was then deleted LeSage's theory of pushing gravity by material particles, not exchange radiation, in a November 1964 Cornell lecture, filmed for BBC2 TV.
By Einstein's equivalence principle of general relativity, inertial mass equals gravitational mass. The graviton interactions that cause gravity therefore also cause inertial effects. The gravitational contraction of Earth's radius which Feynman himself calculated (in his main 1963 Lectures on Physics) to be (1/3)MG/c2 = 1.5 millimetres, is equivalent to the Lorentz contraction of inertial mass as proved here.
SU(3)xSU(2)xSU(2) or SU(3)xSU(2) instead of the standard model SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1), describes electromagnetism, gravity, strong and weak forces
(Several old links to this blog referring to 'top post' mean the previous one, below this post.)
Mainstream quantum gravity is based on the idea of the exchange of gravitons. The problem is such gravitons would carry energy (the energy a falling object picks up from the gravitational field, for example) and, in the non-ad hoc sector of general relativity (regardless of arguments about the cosmological constant), gravity affects anything with energy (such as deflecting star light, as observed in confirmations of general relativity), not just mass. Therefore, gravitons - because they carry energy - should interact with each other. This is why the problem of quantum gravity is traditionally different to electromagnetism, where photons (containing as much positive as negative electric field energy, and as much magnetic curl in one direction as in the other) are neutral as a whole, and so do not interact with each other, at least by electromagnetic interactions.
Hence, in quantum gravity, there is a self-interaction in the graviton problem which simply does not occur in mainstream quantum electrodynamics (quantum electromagnetism). Professor Lee Smolin on page 85 of his recent book The Trouble with Physics (U.S. edition), argues that the failure here is 'a consequence of not taking Einstein's principle of background independence seriously. Once the gravitational waves [gravitons] interact with one another, they can no longer be seen as moving on a fixed background. They change the background as they travel.' He explains how background independent loop quantum gravity solves this problem. However, while his argument here is correct so far as it goes (assuming that gravitational effects are due to gravitons), there is a difficulty in Maxwellian electrodynamics which are incuded in quantum electrodynamics: see this earlier post which explains that in quantum field theory, you can't get any pair production or vacuum polarization below the IR cutoff energy, which corresponds to about 1018 volts/metre electric field strength. This proves that "Maxwell's radio waves" which we all use can't possibly use vacuum displacement current to close the wave cycle of time-varying electric fields -> time-varying displacement current -> time-varying magnetic fields -> time-varying electric fields, et seq. Instead of there being displacement currents in electromagnetic waves with electric fields below the IR cutoff equivalent of 1018 v/m, there are electromagnetic radiation effects which cause effects normally attributed to displacement currents, as that post proves. Now is the time to review the whole problem.
Chargeless photons are assumed to be exchange radiation in electromagnetism, maybe because it is considered that there would be observable interactions if the gauge bosons were charged. In fact, the exchange of charged bosons in two directions at once is possible since the magnetic field from each component (moving in opposite directions) will cancel that from the other component, leaving only the electric field of the radiation uncancelled. You can't transmit charge electromagnetic radiation normally, because it has infinite - uncancelled - magnetic self-inductance. The exception is the contrapuntal situation, where you can fire as much in one direction as in an opposite direction, so cancelling out the infinite magnetic self-inductance. This is well known form transmission line theory. You can send energy carrying an electric field of one sign only along a transmission line of one conductor contains electrons moving in one direction, and the other conductor contains electrons moving in the opposite direction, so cancelling out the net magnetic self-inductance of each conductor. A further effect is that if you have two such pulses passing through one another in opposite directions, all magnetic fields appear to cancel out completely, creating the illusion of a steady charged situation.
SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) is the standard model, which is wrong in the U(1) sector: U(1), supposedly modelling electromagnetism with a single gauge boson (the massless photon), is actually an oversimplification (see illustration below) of the physical dynamics necessary. It specifically ignores the issue of how neutral photons can mediate and thereby constitute a field which has a positive or negative charge in the vacuum. The necessary expansion of U(1) to include the full dynamics for electromagnetic forces leads to a symmetry similar to the weak force SU(2), apart from the lack of mass and the breaking of parity. (Weak force chiral symmetry, the handedness of particles and the fact that the weak force operates only on left-handed particles, sets apart the SU(2) weak force from the SU(2) electromagnetic force in this scheme.)
The SU(2) weak force has 3 massive gauge bosons (one neutral, one with positive electric charge, and one with negative electric charge): the SU(2) electrogravity force similarly has 3 gauge bosons but all are massless; the photon mediates gravitation and so it is unable to add up in the universe when exchanged between similar charges in a random walk to avoid dissimilar charges and cancellation (see previous post for the simple mechanism), the massless positively charged gauge boson mediates positive electric fields, while the massless negatively charged gauge boson mediates negative electric fields. That's the corrected version of the standard model. The replacement of the electroweak groups SU(2)xU(1) with SU(2)xSU(2) makes no difference to electroweak theory beyond enabling the inclusion of gravity plus a causal mechanism of electromagnetic and gravitational forces.
The complex polarization of a gauge boson of electromagnetism in the conventional theory is due to this. Electric forces work because electric charges only emit electric field gauge bosons of a similar electric charge to themselves, but absorb all charged gauge bosons. The way that all long-range forces derive from this SU(2) electromagnetic unification is illustrated below. Remember that radiation is exchanged in all directions but only that along the connecting line between two particles is illustrated for simplicity. Also see previous post for details of this physical theory which predicts how electromagnetism is 10^40 times stronger than gravity. Note that incoming exchange radiation from distant universe is redshifted, unlike radiation exchanged between two local masses which are not receding from one another (redshifted exchange radiation has less energy E because by Planck E = hf where f is frequency, which falls in redshifted radiation, and the momentum imparted by radiation is p = E/c if the radiation is absorbed, or p = 2E/c if it is reflected). See also here including this post for other developments.
In the illustration above, electric charges receive gauge boson of either positive or negative electric field, but only reflect back charged gauge boson radiation of their own charge. Hence when two charges are nearby, the effect is an asymmetry with a net gain that either pushes them together (dissimilar charges) like two people standing back-to-back and firing machine guns outward (so the recoil causes attraction) or causes them to repel (similar charges) like two people firing machine guns at each other. The analysis above shows that the magnitude of the attraction and repulsion forces are similar in strength. (The apparent lack of an electric field near matter which contains equal numbers of positive and negative charges is due to the superimposed field being neutral, not to there be an absence of gauge bosons of electromagnetism. Magnetic fields have been discussed previously; there is no such thing as an electric field without a perpendicular magnetic field, and where that is apparently the case, what is happening is that the curls of the magnetic field from the exchange radiation or from a 'Heaviside energy current' are cancelling one another's effects out, with the energy still present but unobserved until the observer moves in the electric field and hence experiences uncancelled magnetic field effects. Magnetic field B = E/c but is not normally seen due to calcellation effects. For more on radiation effects replacing Maxwell's classical 'displacement current' equation's mechanism in electromagnetism, see this post and see this post for a basic discussion of exchange radiation in quantum field theory and problems with the photon in Maxwell's theory.)
The gravity mechanism in the diagram above does not explain much: see instead the illustrations at http://quantumfieldtheory.org/Proof.htm for the full geometric proof of gravity. Masses recede at Hubble speed v = Hr = Hct in spacetime, so there's outward force F = m.dv/dt ~ 10^43 N. Newton's 3rd law implies an inward reaction, carried by exchange radiation, predicting forces, curvature, cosmology and particle masses. Non-receding masses obviously don't cause a reaction force, so they cause asymmetry => gravity. Non-receding masses are nearby masses which aren't moving away from one another at relativistic velocities in spacetime (hence accelerating away, exerting outward force F=ma which by Newton's 3rd law has a recation force, which by the Standard Model possibilities must be carried by exchange radiation). Because non-receding masses don't fire exchange radiation at one another as a reaction force (like rocket exhaust) from their force in accelerating apart, they is no exchange of photon energy by exchange radiation between local, non-receding masses, but there is with distant receding matter in the rest of the distant, receding universe. Hence, local, non-receding masses act as a shield so that a type of LeSage gravity mechanism works. That's the mechanism for gravity: it's a Rube-Goldberg machine. Each stage is simple, but each stage is fact-based, and put together they fully explain the empirically defensible parts of physics (it isn't all defensible, see posts here, here and here).
Update, 18 March 2007: obviously, the electro-weak-gravity group SU(2)xSU(2) described here may be just SU(2) if there are dynamics which allow some of the electro-gravity SU(2) group to transform into weak SU(2) forces. For such dynamics see http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/03/17/the-correct-unification-scheme/. If so, the vacuum pair production dynamics will give rise to the massive weak force gauge bosons at the vacuum energy which allows them, so replacing the Higgs mechanism. Then the corrected standard model becomes simply SU(3)xSU(2), i.e., we merely drop the U(1) from the existing standard model. The mass mechanism needed is:
Update, 23 March '07: I've included some relevant comments near the end of a post here: "The electromagnetic theory, in order to causally explain the mechanisms for repulsion and attraction between similar and dissimilar charges as well as gravity with the correct strength from the diffusion of gauge bosons between similar charges throughout the universe (a drunkard’s walk with a vector sum of strength equal to the square root of the number of charges in the universe, multiplied by the gravity force which is mediated by photons) ends up with 3 gauge bosons like the weak SU(2) force. So this looks as if it can incorporate gravity into the standard model of particle physics.
"The conventional treatment of how photons can cause attractive and repulsive forces just specifies the right number of polarizations and the right spin. If you want a purely attractive gauge boson, you would have a spin-2 ‘graviton’. But this comes from abstract symmetry principles, it isn’t dynamical physics. For example, you can get all sorts of different spins and polarizations when radiation is exchanged depending on how you define what is going on. If, for example, two transverse electromagnetic (TEM) waves pass through one another with the same amplitude while travelling in opposite directions, the curls of their respective magnetic fields will cancel out during the duration of overlap. So the polarization number will be changed! As a result, the exchange of radiation in two directions is easier than a one-way transfer of radiation. Normally you need two parallel conductors to propagate an electromagnetic wave by a cable, or you need an oscillating wave (with as much negative electric field as positive electric field in it) for energy to propagate. The reason for this is that a wave of purely one type of electric field (positive only or negative only) will have an uncancelled infinite self-inductance due to the magnetic field it creates. You have to ensure that the net magnetic field is zero, or the wave won’t propagate (whether guided by a wire, or launched into free space). The only way normally of getting rid of this infinite self-inductance is to fire off two electric field waves, one positive and one negative, so that the magnetic fields from each have opposite curls, and the long range magnetic field is thus zero (perfect cancellation).
"This explains why you normally need two wires to send logic signals. The old explanation for two wires is false: you don’t need a complete circuit. In fact, because electricity can never go instantly around a circuit when you press the on switch, it is impossible for the electricity to ‘know’ whether the circuit it is entering is open or is terminated by a load (or short-circuit), until the light speed electromagnetic energy completes the circuit.
"Whenever energy first enters a circuit, it does so the same way regardless of whether the circuit is open or is closed, because goes at light speed for the surrounding insulator, and can’t (and doesn’t in experiments) tell what the resistance of the whole circuit will turn out to be. The effective resistance, until the energy completes the circuit, is equal to the resistance of the conductors up to the position of the front of the energy current current (which is going at light speed for the insulator), plus the characteristic impedance of the geometry of the pair of wires, which is the 377 ohm impedance of the vacuum from Maxwell’s theory, multiplied by a dimensionless correction factor for the geometry. The 377 ohm impedance here is due to the fact that Maxwell’s so-called ‘displacement current’, which is (for physics at energies below the IR cutoff of QFT) radiation rather than virtual electron and virtual positron motion.
"The point is that the photon’s nature is determined by what is required to get propagation to work through the vacuum. Some configurations are ruled out physically, because the self-inductance of uncancelled magnetic fields is infinite, so such proto-photons literally get nowhere (they can’t even set out from a charge). It’s really like evolution: anything can try to work, but those things that don’t succeed get screened out.
"The photon, therefore, is not the only possibility. You can make exchange radiation work without photons if where each oppositely-directed component of the exchange radiation has a magnetic field curl that cancels the magnetic field of the other component. This means that two other types of electromagnetic gauge boson are possible beyond what is normally considered to be the photon: negatively charged electromagnetic radiation will propagate providing that it is propagating in opposite directions simultaneously (exchange radiation!) so that the magnetic fields are cancelled in this way, preventing infinite self-inductance. Similarly for positive electromagnetic gauge bosons. See this post.
"For those who are easily confused, I’ll recap. The usual photon has an equal amount of positive and negative electric field energy, spatially separated as implied by the size or wavelength of the photon (it’s a transverse wave, so it has a transverse wavelength). Each of these propagating positive and negative electric fields has a magnetic field, but because the magnetic field curls in the opposite direction from a moving electric field as from a moving magnetic field, the two curls cancel out when the photon is seen from a distance large compared to the wavelength of the photon. Hence, near a photon there are electric fields and magnetic fields, but at a distance large compared to the wavelength of the photon, these fields are both cancelled out. This is the reason why a photon is said to be uncharged. If the photon’s fields did not cancel, it would have charge. Now, in the weak force theory there are three gauge bosons which have some connection to the photon: two charged W bosons and a neutral Z boson. This suggests a workable, predictive revision to electromagnetic theory."
Copy of a comment comment:
http://kea-monad.blogspot.com/2007/04/whats-new.html
"But note that White seems to think that DE has solid foundations." - Kea
Even Dr Woit might agree with White, because anything based on observation seems more scientific than totally abject speculation.
If you assume the Einstein field equation to be a good description of cosmology and to not contain any errors or omissions of physics, then you are indeed forced by the observations that distant supernovae aren't slowing, to accept a small positive cosmological constant and corresponding 'dark energy' to power that long range repulsion just enough to stop the gravitational retardation of distant supernovae.
Quantum gravity is supposed - by the mainstream - to only affect general relativity on extremely small distance scales, ie extremely strong gravitational fields.
According to the uncertainty principle, for virtual particles acting as gauge boson in a quantum field theory, their energy is related to their duration of existence according to: (energy)*(time) ~ h-bar.
Since time = distance/c,
(energy)*(distance) ~ c*h-bar.
Hence,
(distance) ~ c*h-bar/(energy)
Very small distances therefore correspond to very big energies. Since gravitons capable of graviton-graviton interactions (photons don't interact with one another, for comparison) are assumed to mediate quantum gravity, the quantum gravity theory in its simplest form is non-renormalizable, because at small distances the gravitons would have very great energies and be strongly interacting with one another, unlike the photon force mediators in QED, where renormalization works. So the whole problem for quantum gravity has been renormalization, assuming that gravitons do indeed cause gravity (they're unobserved). This is where string theory goes wrong, in solving a 'problem' which might not even be real, by coming up with a renormalizable quantum graviton based on gravitons which they then hype as being the 'prediction of gravity'.
The correct thing to do is to first ask how renormalization works in gravity. In the standard model, renormalization works because there are different charges for each force, so that the virtual charges will become polarized in a field around a real charge, affecting the latter and thus causing renormalization, ie, the modification of the observable charge as seen from great distances (low energy interactions) from that existing near the bare core of the charge at very short distances, well within the pair production range (high energy interactions).
The problem is that gravity has only one type of 'charge', mass. There's no anti-mass, so in a gravitational field everything falls one way only, even antimatter. So you can't get polarization of virtual charges by a gravitational field, even in principle. This is why renormalization doesn't make sense for quantum gravity: you can't have a different bare core (high energy) gravitational mass from the long range observable gravitational mass at low energy, because there's no way that the vacuum can be polarized by the gravitational field to shield the core.
This is the essential difference between QED, which is capable of vacuum polarization and charge renormalization at high energy, and gravitation which isn't.
However, in QED there is renormalization of both electric charge and the electron's inertial mass. Since by the equivalence principle, inertial mass = gravitational mass, it seems that there really is evidence that mass is renormalizable, and the effective bare core mass is higher than that observed at low energy (great distances) by the same ratio that the bare core electric charge is higher than the screened electronic charge as measured at low energy.
This implies (because gravity can't be renormalized by the effects of polarization of charges in a gravitational field) that the source of the renormalization of electric charge and of the electron's inertial mass in QED is that the mass of an electron is external to the electron core, and is being associated to the electron core by the electric field of the core. This is why the shielding which reduces the effective electric charge as seen at large distances, also reduces the observable mass by the same factor. In other words, if there was no polarized vacuum of virtual particles shielding the electron core, the stronger electric field would give it a similarly larger inertial and gravitational mass.
Penrose claims in his book 'The Road to Reality' that the bare core charge of the electron is 'probably' (137.036^0.5)*e = 11.7e.
In getting this he uses Sommerfeld's fine structure parameter,
alpha = (e^2)/(4*Pi*permittivity of free space*c*h-bar) = 1/137.036...
Hence, e^2 is proportional to alpha, so you'd expect from dimensional analysis that electric charge shielding should be proportional to (alpha)^0.5.
However, this is wrong physically.
From the uncertainty principle, the range r of a gauge boson is related to its energy E by:
E = hc/(2*Pi*r).
Since the force exerted is F = E/r (from: work energy = force times distance moved in direction of the applied force), we get
F = E/r = [hc/(2*Pi*r)]/r
= hc/(2*Pi*r^2)
= (1/alpha)*(Coulomb's law for electrons)
Hence, the bare core electron's bare core charge really has the value e/alpha, not e/(alpha^0.5) as Penrose guessed from dimensional analysis. This "leads to predictions of masses."
It's really weird that this simple approach to calculating the total amount of vacuum shielding for the electron core is so ignorantly censored out. It's published in an Apr. 2003 Electronics World paper, and I haven't found it elsewhere. It's a very simple calculation, so it's easy to check both the calculation and its assumptions, and it leads to predictions.
I won't repeat the argument that dark energy is a false theory here at length. Just let's say that on cosmological distances, all radiation including gauge bosons, will be stretched and degraded in frequency and hence in energy. This, the exchange radiation which causes gravity will be weakened by redshift due to expansion over large distances, and when you include this effect on the gravitational interaction coupling parameter G in general relativity, general relativity then predicts the supernovae redshifts correctly. Instead of inventing an additional unobservable to offset the unobserved long range gravitational retardation being offset by dark energy, you just have no long range gravitational deceleration. Hence, no outward acceleration to offset inward gravity at long distances. The universe is simply flat on large scales because gravity is weakened by the redshift of gauge bosons over great distances in an expanding universe where gravitational charges (masses) are receding from one another. Simple.
Another problem with general relativity as currently used is the T_{ab} tensor which is usually represented by a smooth source for the gravitational field, such as a continuum of uniform density.
In reality, the whole idea of density is a statistical approximation, because matter consists of particle of very high density, distributed in the vacuum. So the idea that general relativity shows that spacetime is flat on small distance scales is just bunk, it's based on the false statistical approximation (which holds on large scales, not on small scales) that you can represent the source for gravity (ie, quantized particles) by a continuum.
So the maths used to make T_{ab} generate solvable differential equations is an approximation which is correct at large scales (after you make allowances for the mechanism of gravity, including redshift of gauge bosons exchanged over large distances), but is inaccurate in general on small scales.
General relativity doesn't prove a continuum exists, it requires a continuum because its based on continuously variable differential tensor equations which don't easily model the discontinuities in the vacuum (ie, real quantized matter). So the nature of general relativity forces you to use a continuum as an approximation.
Sorry for the length of comment, feel free to delete.
posted by nige @ 1:15 PM
24 comments
