Dear Sir, (Dr. Anton Biermans)
You have started off very well - asking the right questions. That is the sign of a seeker for truth. But somehow, you have mixed up many things into a knot that need to be untangled. We begin with your egg example, as it reflects the universal creation mechanism for massive structures.
We had actually seen an egg being delivered by a hen from about 5 feet up on a wall which fell on a concrete platform below. It was a rose colored spongy blob that sprang a little on hitting the floor, rolled some distance and turned white and egg shaped with the exterior cover hardening. Thus, its creation does not "comes down to un-breaking the egg", but a combination of fluid (without fixed dimensions - we call it "anasthaa") to transforming a fixed structure (we call it "asthanwaa"). If you look at the creation of Earth and life form of Earth, you will find that entire creation process followed this route. But your gas example is not appropriate, because, though all gases have radiative dimension, the relatively low dense gases like hydrogen spread out more than relatively more dense gases like carbon dioxide - thus un-breaking.
Entropy is the inertia that makes a thermodynamic process more likely to occur. Inertia of motion is always accompanied by inertia of restoration (elasticity) in the medium, which restores the equilibrium of the medium. Thus, low entropy, which describes the natural tendency of the universe to fall apart into disorder, is always accompanied by an opposite effect. This turns the times arrow to cycles making time cyclic. To that extent you are right in questioning the SLT.
Entropy is very hard to directly measure as it is a value that can be seen to embody several quantities such as kinetic and potential energy, temperature, work and force. So it can be seen as a derived value that relies on all these values. It can mean the tendency of the cosmos to fall into disorder, be a measurement of thermodynamic process or reaction, or simply a measure of the energy available for work or becomes heat. Heat is associated with hot energy like those associated with elementary particles. Once that becomes unavailable, the opposite effect takes over and the structures dissolve into equilibrium led by the inertia of restoration. Slowly it revives its conjugate inertia of motion, which brings in inherent instability to the system in different localities. This starts the creation process again. Thus, all along there is the cause and effect chain operational.
You say: "particle properties are defined to be independent from their behavior". This is true only for the physical properties. You cannot directly define the some properties of a particle (such as charge) without interaction with other objects. And that behavior is not random. Further, you cannot separate particle properties from particles. The egg-shape comes with the egg.
Gravity is not a force that contracts like magnetism. It stabilizes the two bodies to orbit around each other with the barycenter as the center to induce equilibrium.
A "clock inside a gravitational field is observed to run slower" has to be treated with caution. Even light travels slower in denser mediums. A strong gravitational field means more mass over a smaller field leading to high average density. But this affects the entire field and not the clock alone. Thus, there will be no net effect like the passenger of the train did not find length contraction. In any case, clock readings are not relativistic, as even Einstein has used the clock at A as a privileged frame of reference to synchronize the clocks at B and C (though later he claimed the opposite). In any case, to define the very concept of second, we use a privileged frame of reference - the motion of Earth around Sun. Even the atomic clock uses a large number of readings to match with this unit. The GPS uses the average readings of a number of atomic clocks to do just that.
There is much misconception regarding Higg's particle. It does not provide mass to all particles. Many particles acquire mass via strong interaction. Secondly, why should these particles require such a massive particle - as much as 134 protons - to hammer in the mass? In fact it raises many questions on the electro-weak theory itself. The W boson is said to be the mediator in beta decay by facilitating the flavor change or reversal of a quark from being a down quark to being an up quark: d → u W-. The mass of a quark is said to be about 4MeV and that of a W boson, about 80GeV - almost the size of an iron atom. Thus, the mediating particle outweighs the mediated particle by a ratio of 20,000 to 1. Since Nature is extremely economical in all operations, why should it require such a heavy boson to flip a quark over? There is no satisfactory explanation for this. The W- boson then decays into an electron and an antineutrino: W- → e v. Since the neutrinos and anti-neutrinos are said to be mass-less and the electron weighs about 0.5MeV, there is a great imbalance. Though the decay is not intended to be an equation, a huge amount of energy magically appearing from nowhere at the required time and then disappearing into nothing, needs explanation.
Messers Glashow, Weinberg, and Salam "predicted" the W and Z bosons using an SU (2) gauge theory. But the bosons in a gauge theory must be mass-less. Hence one must assume that the masses of the W and Z bosons were "predicted" by some other mechanism to give the bosons its mass. It is said that the mass is acquired through Higgs mechanism - a form of spontaneous symmetry breaking. But it is an oxymoron. Spontaneous symmetry breaking is symmetry that is broken spontaneously. Something that happens spontaneously requires no mechanism or mediating agent. Hence the Higgs mechanism has to be spontaneous action and not a mechanism. This does not require a mediating agent - at least not the Higg's boson. Apparently, the SU (2) problem has been sought to be solved by first arbitrarily calling it a symmetry, then pointing to the spontaneous breaking of this symmetry without any mechanism, and finally calling that breaking the Higgs mechanism! Thus, the whole exercise produces only a name!
A parity violation means that beta decay works only on left-handed particles or right handed anti-particles. Messers Glashow, Weinberg, and Salam provided a theory to explain this using a lot of complicated renormalized mathematics, which showed both a parity loss and a charge conjugation loss. However, at low energies, one of the Higgs fields acquires a vacuum expectation value and the gauge symmetry is spontaneously broken down to the symmetry of electromagnetism. This symmetry breaking would produce three mass-less Goldstone bosons but they are said to be "eaten" by three of the photon-like fields through the Higgs mechanism, giving them mass. These three fields become the W-, W, and Z bosons of the weak interaction, while the fourth gauge field which remains mass-less is the photon of electromagnetism.
All the evidence in support of the Higgs mechanism turns out to be evidence that, huge energy packets near the predicted W and Z masses exist. In that case, why should we accept that because big particles equal to W and Z masses exist for very short times, the SU (2) gauge theory can't be correct in predicting zero masses. And that the gauge symmetry must be broken, so that the Higgs mechanism must be proved correct without any mechanical reason for such breaking? There are other explanations for this phenomenon. If the gauge theory requires to be bypassed with a symmetry breaking, it is not a good theory to begin with. Normally, if equations yield false predictions - like these zero boson masses - the "mathematics" must be wrong. Because mathematics is done at "here-now" and zero is the absence of something at "here-now". One can't use some correction to it in the form of a non-mechanical "field mechanism". Thus, Higgs mechanism is not a mechanism at all. It is a spontaneous symmetry breaking, and there is no evidence for any mechanism in something that is spontaneous.
Since charge is perceived through a mechanism, a broken symmetry that is gauged may mean that the vacuum is charged. But charge is not treated as mechanical in QED. Even before the Higgs field was postulated, charge was thought to be mediated by virtual photons. Virtual photons are non-mechanical ghostly particles. They are supposed to mediate forces spontaneously, with no energy transfer. This is mathematically and physically not valid. Charge cannot be assigned to the vacuum, since that amounts to assigning characteristics to the void. One of the first postulates of physics is that extensions of force, motion, or acceleration cannot be assigned to "nothing". For charge to be mechanical, it would have to have extension or motion. All virtual particles and fields are imaginary assumptions. Higgs' field, like Dirac's field, is a "mathematical" imagery.
The proof for the mechanism is said to have been obtained in the experiment at the Gargamelle bubble chamber, which photographed the tracks of a few electrons suddenly starting to move - seemingly of their own accord. This is interpreted as a neutrino interacting with the electron by the exchange of an unseen Z boson. The neutrino is otherwise undetectable. Hence the only observable effect is the momentum imparted to the electron by the interaction. No neutrino or Z boson is detected. Why should it be interpreted to validate the imaginary postulate? The electron could have moved due to many other reasons.
It is said that the W and Z bosons were detected in 1983 by Carlo Rubbia. This experiment only detected huge energy packets that left a track that was interpreted to be a particle. It did not tell that it was a boson or that it was taking part in any weak mediation. Since large mesons can be predicted by other simpler methods (e.g., stacked spins; as proposed by some, etc), this particle detection is not proof of weak interaction or of the Higgs mechanism. It is only indication of a large particle or two.
In section 19.2, of his book "The Quantum Theory of Fields", Weinberg says: "We do not have to look far for examples of spontaneous symmetry breaking. Consider a chair. The equations governing the atoms of the chair are rotationally symmetric, but a solution of these equations, the actual chair, has a definite orientation in space". Classically, it was thought that parity was conserved because spin is an energy state. To conserve energy, there must be an equal number of left-handed and right-handed spins. Every left-handed spin cancels a right-handed spin of the same size, so that the sum is zero. If they were created from nothing - as in the Big Bang - they must also sum up to nothing. Thus, it is assumed that an equal number of left-handed and right-handed spins, at the quantum level.
It was also expected that interactions conserve parity, i.e., anything that can be done from left to right, can also be done from right to left. Observations like beta decay showed that parity is not conserved in some quantum interactions, because some interactions showed a preference for one spin over the other. The electroweak theory supplied a mystical and non-mechanical reason for it. But it is known that parity is not conserved always. Weinberg seems to imply that because there is a chair facing west, and not one facing east, there is a parity imbalance: that one chair has literally lopsided the entire universe! This, he explains as a spontaneously broken symmetry!
A spontaneously broken symmetry in field theory is always associated with a degeneracy of vacuum states. For the vacuum the expectation value of (a set of scalar fields) must be at a minimum of the vacuum energy. It is not certain that in such cases the symmetry is broken, because there is the possibility that the true vacuum is a linear superposition of vacuum states in which the summed scalar fields have various expectation values, which would respect the assumed symmetry. So, a degeneracy of vacuum states is the fall of these expectation values into a non-zero minimum. This minimum corresponds to a state of broken symmetry.
Since true vacuum is non-perceptible; hence nothingness; with only one possible state - zero - logically it would have no expectation values above zero. However, Mr. Weinberg assumed that the vacuum can have a range of non-zero states, giving both it and his fields a non-zero energy. Based on this wrong assumption, Mr. Weinberg manipulated these possible ranges of energies, assigning a possible quantum effective action to the field. Then he started looking at various ways it might create parity or subvert parity. Since any expectation value above zero for the vacuum is wholly arbitrary and only imaginary, he could have chosen either parity or non-parity. In view of Yang and Lee's finding, Mr. Weinberg choose non-parity. This implied that his non-zero vacuum degenerates to the minimum. Then he applied this to the chair! Spontaneous symmetry breaking actually occurs only for idealized systems that are infinitely large. So does Mr. Weinberg claim that a chair is an idealized system that is infinitely large!
According to Mr. Weinberg, the appearance of broken symmetry for a chair arises because it has a macroscopic moment of inertia I, so that its ground state is part of a tower of rotationally excited states whose energies are separated by only tiny amounts, of the order h2/I. This gives the state vector of the chair an exquisite sensitivity to external perturbations, so that even very weak external fields will shift the energy by much more than the energy difference of these rotational levels. As a result, any rotationally asymmetrical external field will cause the ground state or any other state of the chair with definite angular momentum numbers to rapidly develop components with other angular momentum quantum numbers. The states of the chair that are relatively stable with respect to small external perturbations are not those with definite angular momentum quantum numbers, but rather those with a definite orientation, in which the rotational symmetry of the underlying theory is broken.
Weinberg declares that he is talking about symmetry, but actually he is talking about decoherence. He is trying to explain why the chair is not a probability or an expectation value and why its wave function has collapsed into a definite state. Quantum mathematics works by proposing a range of states. This range is determined by the uncertainty principle. Mr. Weinberg assigned a range of states to the vacuum and then extended that range based on the non-parity knowledge of Messers Yang and Lee. But the chair is not a range of states: it is a state - the ground state. To degenerate or collapse into this ground state, or decohere from the probability cloud into the definite chair we see and experience, the chair has to interact with its surroundings. The chair is most stable when the surroundings are stable (having "a definite orientation"); so the chair aligns itself to this definite orientation. Mr. Weinberg argues that in doing so, it breaks the underlying symmetry. Thus, Mr. Weinberg does not know what he is talking about!
Weinberg believes that the chair is not just probabilistic as a matter of definite position. Apparently, he believes it is probabilistic in spin orientation also. He even talks about the macroscopic moment of inertia. This is extremely weird, because the chair has no macroscopic angular motion. The chair may be facing east or west, but there is no indication that it is spinning, either clockwise or counter clockwise. Even if it were spinning, there is no physical reason to believe that a chair spinning clockwise should have a preponderance of quanta in it spinning clockwise. QED has never shown that it is impossible to propose a macro-object spinning clockwise, with all constituent quanta spinning counterclockwise. However, evidently Weinberg is making this assumption without any supporting logic, evidence or mechanism. Spin parity was never thought to apply to macro-objects. A chair facing or spinning in one direction is not a fundamental energy state of the universe, and the Big Bang doesn't care if there are five chairs spinning left and four spinning right. The Big Bang didn't create chairs directly out of the void, so we don't have to conserve chairs!
Electroweak theory, like all quantum theories, is built on gauge fields. These gauge fields have built-in symmetries that have nothing to do with the various conservation laws. What physicists tried to do was to choose gauge fields that matched the symmetries they had found or hoped to find in their physical fields. QED began with the simplest field U (1), but the strong force and weak force had more symmetries and therefore required SU (2) and SU (3). Because these gauge fields were supposed to be mathematical fields (which is an abstraction) and not real physical fields, and because they contained symmetries of their own, physicists soon got tangled up in the gauge fields.
Later experiments showed that the symmetries in the so-called mathematical fields didn't match the symmetries in nature. However, the quantum theory could be saved if the gauge field could be somehow broken - either by adding ghost fields or by subtracting symmetries by "breaking" them. This way, the physicists landed up with 12 gauge bosons, only three of which are known to exist, and only one of which has been well-linked to the theory. Of these, the eight gluons are completely theoretical and only fill slots in the gauge theory. The three weak bosons apparently exist, but no experiment has tied them to beta decay. The photon is the only boson known to exist as a mediating "particle", and it was known long before gauge theory entered the picture.
Quantum theory has got even the only verified boson - the photon - wrong, since the boson of quantum theory is not a real photon: it is a virtual photon! QED couldn't conserve energy with a real photon, so the virtual photon mediates charge without any transfer of energy. The virtual photon creates a zero-energy field and a zero-energy mediation. The photon does not bump the electron, it just whispers a message in its ear. So, from a theoretical standpoint, the gauge groups are not the solution, they are part of the problem. We should be fitting the mathematics to the particles, not the particles to the mathematics. Quantum physicists claim repeatedly that their field is mainly experimental, but any cursory study of the history of the field shows that this claim is not true. Quantum physics has always been primarily "mathematical". A large part of 20th century experiment was the search for particles to fill out the gauge groups, and the search continues, because they are searching blind folded in a dark room for a black cat that does not exist. When US Congress wanted to curtail funding research in this vain exercise; they named the hypothetical Higg's boson (which is non-existent), as the "God particle" and tried to sway public opinion. Now they claim that they are "tantalizingly close" not to discover the "God particle", but to "the possibility of getting a glimpse of it". How long the scientists continue to fool the public!
Regards,
basudeba