The Higgs after Einstein’s Unified Field Theory

After the Higgs  mania, in the cold light of 2012, let’s think back to the basic scepticism of reality-physicists for the current ‘standard model’ and string ’theory’ – which is a string of conjectures without principles such as energy conservation. 

Einstein wrote in the 1931 Commemoration volume of essays, that Maxwell tried to find a mechanical model for light vibrations, but “the equations themselves were all that was essential” and “the field intensities… were elementary, not derivable from other simpler entities.” Since Maxwell, Physical Reality is viewed as “represented by continuous fields, governed by PDEs and not capable of any mechanical interpretation.”

“This change in the conception of Reality is the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton”, wrote Einstein, and that notwithstanding Quantum Mechanics, physicists will be brought back to “Maxwell’s programme” ie. “the description of Physical Reality by fields which satisfy without singularity a set of partial differential equations.”

Einstein however failed in his life-project to develop a ‘unified field theory’ covering all physical forces. So current models of Physical Reality still require massive ‘particles’ as well as the fields.

Whatever the outcome over the Higgs, the current ‘standard model’ cannot be the ultimate answer - it doesn’t include the gravitational field while its ‘photons’ are inadequate in modeling the e-m field.  Pretty secure as a basis for combatting Higgs mania and delusion!

Crunch-time over Higgs

The ATLAS group at CERN claims to see a ‘hint’ of Higgs in their event statistics around energies of 125 GeV.

As fields and particles are viewed as complementary, why does the Higgs Field get little mention. Does the term “God field” lack punch? Does the particle “boson” grab you, while the “boson field” lacks umph?

The Higgs field – in the Standard Model – consists of two neutral and two charged component fields while the Higgs boson is the particle associated with it.

Proponents of the ‘standard model’ have long avoided the issue of the ‘graviton’, the particle supposed to be associated with the gravity field, but given little credibility by physicists. So are we not right to be highly sceptical of the ‘higgs’? Non-detection would be a blow to the ‘standard model’ community, so claims to detection are over-influenced by self-interest.

As detection implies a new higgs-energy field, let’s not forget it would make an interesting addition to the Einstein-Hilbert field equation.

Wave neutrinics – new territory of the neutrino

 Alice has a pot at Jim Al-Khalili’s rash promise…..

So neutrinos might – just might – go faster than light. Maybe some neutrinos go faster than some light – maybe. Let’s face it, we don’t really understand neutrinos as much as light. There’s an awful lot of them, and they might – just might – have a little bit of mass – or at least some of them might. 

Say the neutrino field (in all of its varieties) has zero mass, so it propagates at the speed of light. But what is that? The speed of light depends on its frequency, through the refractive index of the medium. Do you retort there is no medium – that the aether went out a hundred years ago? Well there is hardly empty space between Geneva and Gran Sasso.

Also, the full understanding (if that is what we have) of light propagation requires us to distinguish between ray optics and wave optics, even in “empty” space. To a very good approximation we work out how light paths are bent by the Sun’s gravity by applying Fermat’s Principle (ray optics) to the path length. One way of describing this latter calculation (see The Theory of Gravity by A. A. Logunov, 2001) is that the Riemann forward light cone is contained within the Minkowski causality cone. But there is a region of space-time between the two cones, and that region is where there is scope for different frequencies to behave differently.

Now throw in the new varieties of speed-of-light objects and, without needing to wander into any exotic new dimensions, you have some new physics. While holding firm to causality, I would not be sure that Jim Al-Khalili will not have to “eat his boxer shorts on live TV”.

Can we celebrate Defeat for the Photon by Maxwell-Planck theory?

Success for SPUC and Maxwell-Planck theory is reported in Wikipedia as

“experimental prediction of SED dubbed ‘spontaneous parametric up-conversion’ (SPUC) was tested in 2009 and 2010 with positive results.”   [consulted 1 Aug.2011]

The formulations of both the Chinese (2009) and Indian (2010) groups appear to fit well with our 2002 prediction and the technical description presented at the Bristol ABB conference.  The new studies show

## the cutting angle of the BBO crystal must be such as to avoid confusion with second harmonic generation (SHG)

## the need for a large (20 degree) conical angle, which contrasts with the very small angles used with Lithium Iodate in the earlier Italian experiments.

## the dependence on crystal thickness confirms exponential growth of the SPUC and SPDC signals.

## acknowledgement by the Chinese group that SPUC occurs as a consequence of interaction between the zeropoint (“quantum noise”) and the laser components.

Their reference to “early nonlinear optics” relates to the analysis in the 1960s, by people like Bloembergen and Kleinmann, as stressed in 2002.

These results underline the inadequacy of post-1960s nonlinear (that is Quantum) optics, whereby a laser “photon” converts into two lower-energy photons (SPDC).  Both groups confirm SPUC, that is the outgoing cone may contain components whose frequency is higher than the laser.  If the claims about excluding SHG are correct, the results give us grounds for celebrating the long-awaited confirmation of the 2002 prediction.

Neutrinos do Cherenkov, don’t they?

CERN theorists seem baffled, but it’s no surprise that standard physics predicts supraluminal (FtL) neutrinos to slow down via Cherenkov radiation analogous to FtL charged particles, although Cohen & Glashow call it bremstrahlung of electron-positron pairs. Cherenkov radiation is best depicted by analogy with the sonic boom of a supersonic projectile – a sonic boom in the electromagnetic field from a supersonic particle. Likewise, a FtL neutrino would generate a sonic boom in the gravitational field and slow down to ‘c’ (not lower as suggested).

Another argument (neutrino-reaction) is that light is slowed below ‘c’ due to transient electron-positron pairs – zeropoint vacuum fields – but neutrinos are not slowed. This forgets that the field energy has an equivalent gravitating mass (E/c²), which decreases ‘c’ below c_vaccuum - FtL neutrinos slowed to ‘c’ by Cherenkov-type emission.

It seems physicists need reminding that the powerful Einstein-Hilbert gravitational field equation includes source terms from field-energy, both gravitational and electromagnetic. Depicting fields as particles – whether gravitons or photons - can readily mislead.

Stephen Hawking sad at seventy

How sad that Stephen Hawking struggles at interviews, has a flippant comment about women (‘a complete mystery’) widely reported, and lacks consistency in expressing belief or not in time travel via Black Holes/wormholes.

Stephen Hawking’s problem is being no physicist while his mathematics of BHs (black holes) has shaky foundations.  In 1970 with Roger Penrose, he constructed an elegant topological argument on the premise of a trapped surface taken from the 1939 solution of Oppenheimer and Snyder. Unfortunately this trapped surface arises from an erroneous  fit of inner and outer solutions by O&S and is not a property of the Einstein field equation. Going for topological arguments also overlooked the warning of O&S that it’s impossible for a singularity to develop in a finite time – the slowing of local time in high gravity means a Black Hole never forms.

The Black Hole idea led Hawking to the ‘information loss paradox’ and evaporation of mini-BHs, but never did he address the shaky basis. His predicted ‘Hawking’ radiation depends moreover on uncertain quantum uncertainty. Criticisms and alternative approaches to the Einstein equations are growing in cogency, since Abhas Mitra (1999), Logunov et al. (2006), Marshall (2007), Mitra (2010) and Marshall (2011), with the latter finding an explicit solution for zero-pressure spherical collapse ever more slowly towards a shell of matter.

Though Hawking has spoke of winning the Nobel prize, the contradictions between causal physics and his maths look insuperable.

 

Stephen Hawking – famous, but hardly a Scientist

Hawking’s 70th birthday is generating comments like “the world’s most famous scientist”. The BBC Radio interview has him boasting of his book “The Brief History of Time” as the biggest ‘best seller’. It’s also said to be the ‘most unread book’.

For millions of people, the interviewer said, Hawking is the iconic scientist.

How sad is that for modern science!  Take two of his statements:
** I can’t predict human behaviour as there are too many equations to solve
** Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity seems to offer the possibility that we could create wormholes (in space-time and) ….use them for rapid travel around the galaxy or travel back in time.

The first shows unscientific belief in mathematical equations, disregarding limitations and insuperable obstacles in describing complex organisms mathematically. The second describes an added chapter to “The Brief History…” of speculation that runs contrary to physical principles.

Though he denied it in the interview, Hawking is a showman – who propounds speculative cosmology based on unphysical conjecture and mathematical formalism, far removed from what should be recognised as activity of scientists.

Peroration on the Fiction of Nothing

The Guest Editorial by Brian Greene in New Scientist is a pretentious peroration in favour of ‘nothing’ – of beliefs that space is empty – and shows the poverty of reductionist physics.

He’s wrong that Isaac Newton saw space as empty, for the latter believed in the aether (or several aethers) as Paul Davies’s article says.  Johannes Kepler had conjectured a force in the Earth that causes the Moon to move, while Newton’s contemporaries contested the algebraic law of gravity on the grounds that action-at-a-distance is non-science.  But not until Michael Faraday (~1850s) did the concept of a field of force, filling space, come to the fore. 

Greene’s empty space is a false concept – space is filled with physical fields, zeropoint radiation / quantum fluctuations and dark energy.  Paul Davies’s article embraces this physics – “the notion that space is a mere void with no physical properties is no longer tenable” – so why did Greene’s editorial ignore it?

As Davies says, fields possess energy and exert pressure.  Recasting of Einstein’s unified field equation with a true (not pseudo) tensor shows gravity is not only geometry (Leonid Grishchuk).  Gravitational wave scientists are seeking to detect physical waves, comprising propagating energy pulses.  The idea of gravity as just geometry – the ‘shape of nothing’, Greene calls it – is plain wrong.

Neutrino fields get Jim’s boxer shorts in a twist

Jim Al-Khalili’s defence of his extreme scepticism of faster-than-light neutrinos departs from the fundamental standpoint of Faraday, Maxwell and (early) Einstein that space-filling fields are physical, as the formulation of Steven Weinberg, Logunov etc. of a real energy tensor for the gravitational field.   He blogs the CERN neutrinos:

##  moved faster than light “were it travelling in a vacuum“

##  “moving through empty space… they don’t interact or bump into anything”

Yet light travels not in a vacuum but through the gravitational field and waves in it, as well as in the electromagnetic (e-m) field.

If neutrinos have mass, they would likewise be travelling in the gravitational field and they would Cherenkov-radiate in that field.  But if they are massless like ‘photons’, they are not perturbations of the electromagnetic field, but would be perturbations of a third space-filling ‘neutrinic’ field.  As that has an energy density, it automatically enters the Einstein-Hilbert unified field equation. Is Jim’s offhand “bring back the aether” dismissing this basic field theory?

So physics can accommodate neutrinos faster-than-light without the drastic overthrow that Jim warns of – and in a way as Alice suspects that might force him to eat his boxers.