Hi Rodney,

Yes, people become entrenched in their views. As you say, time will tell.

Cheers,

Alan

    Strange quark matter is also credited with being able to explain another celestial anomaly:

    Could Quark Stars Explain Magnetars Strong Magnetic Field?

    [quote]Magnetars are the violent, exotic cousins of the well known neutron star. They emit excessive amounts of gamma-rays, X-rays and possess a powerful magnetic field. Neutron stars also have very strong magnetic fields (although weak when compared with magnetars), conserving the magnetic field of the parent star before it exploded as a supernova. However, the huge magnetic field strength predicted from observations of magnetars is a mystery. Where do magnetars get their strong magnetic fields? According to new research, the answer could lie in the even more mysterious quark star...[end quote]

    There's more:

    Some black holes may actually be 'quark stars'

    [quote]Think black holes are strange? Understandable, considering these powerhouses of the universe (many times heavier than our sun) are collapsed stars with gravity so strong that even light cannot escape their grasp.

    But maybe they're not "strange" enough, some astrophysicists suggest. "Stellar" black holes, ones only a few times heavier than the sun, may actually be something even weirder called a quark star, or "strange" star.

    A physics team led by Zoltan Kovacs of the University of Hong Kong sizes up the issue in the current Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Quark stars are only theoretical right now, but "the observational identification of quarks stars would represent a major scientific achievement," Kovacs says.

    If quark stars exist, it could prove a theory that normal matter - the stuff of people, planets and stars - isn't stable and could help explain the existence of the "dark matter" that fills much of the universe.[end quote]

    This plays very well into my own personal hypothesis that *all* celestial bodies have strange quark matter at their cores.

    Alan

    Alan,

    The issue of repulsion and attraction is very intimately tied up with whether or not space has a role to play in motion. You also did not say how the clockwise and anti-clockwise spinning particles will cause electromagnetic attraction and repulsion to take place across a barrier opaque to light (i.e. photons).

    On "I believe space is a vacuum with particles traveling through it. This is a standard scientific view of many I believe". There are many views out there (with references if you want) that space may be discrete, in which case it MUST have a role to play in motion. Indeed, an FQXi contest was dedicated to whether space/reality was digital or analog. How does motion take place on your computer screen? Given a car on your screen, in moving to your right, the pixels to the right take up the character of the car, while the pixels previously depicting the car revert to the background characteristic. Another way, which I conjecture is the natural one for 'digital motion' is for the pixels to the right of the car to annihilate to nothing simultaneously as pixels emerge from nothing to the left of the car. The car is therefore seen to be displaced to the right, but actually remains in its place! This form of motion resolves the paradoxes of motion for both a discrete and a continuous space. A blog for Quark stars may not be the most appropriate place to elaborate further. You can take a look at various ways of expressing "Digital motion" here, under Examples of patterns, and ask yourself if this may not be what motion actually is in reality.

    Akinbo

    Akinbo,

    Alas, we are at loggerheads over our views on whether an 'ether-like' aspect of space itself exists. I used to believe in something must exist like yourself but have since been convinced of the simplistic particles in empty space ideology.

    I'm saying that we have to have a mechanical simulation model of photons, gravitons, force carriers and quarks before we have a complete understanding of how forces work. We're a long way off from that goal. The Standard Model *doesn't* explain 95% of reality. It doesn't model gravity, dark matter or dark energy.

    P.S.

    I've emailed Ouyed's team asking about the possibility of Quark star rotation creating anisotropic strange quark matter:

    ...............

    Can Centrifugal Force Make Strange Matter Anisotropic?‏

    Dear Rachid,

    I've been very impressed with your teams successful work on the search for quark stars and have been discussing issues with others on a fundamental physics FQXi forum site here: "Quark Stars and a New State of Matter?" http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1971

    I have a burning question for you though: due to strange quark matter being considered unbounded unlike regular matter, could fast spinning quark stars create a migration of particular types of quark away from the center on the plane of rotation by centrifugal force?

    I have good circumstantial evidence to suggest that gravitationally anisotropic strange quark matter exists at the center of the Earth, Moon, planets and stars. The addition of tide raising forces on the plane of rotation between interacting strange quark innermost cores of celestial bodies can explain the 100ky ice age cycle and solve the many problems of Milankovitch insolation only theory. It can also explain the climate millennial cycle with relation to the 1,800 lunar tide cycle.

    Congratulations on the continuing excellent work of your team,

    Yours sincerely,

    Alan Lowey

    .....................

    Similarly with Rodney, we are both set in our ways and we'll just have to wait to see who's right.

    Best wishes,

    Alan

    Replying to Akinbo Ojo's comment of Feb. 18, 2014 - "Rodney, In your own view of black holes, how do clocks behave near them?" (Answering this will be great mental exercise for me! And I do love exercise!)

    Hi Akinbo,

    If you could compare the speed of a clock you carried into a black hole with that of a reference clock kept far away, then the clock falling into the black hole would appear to slow down relative to the clock far from the hole (at the event horizon, it would appear to stop). This is how I came to that conclusion (a conclusion shared by a little thing called Relativity).

    It's impossible to point to the 4th dimension of time, so this cannot be physical. Since the union of space-time is well established in modern science, we can assume the 4th dimension is actually measurement of the motions of particles (both in the 3 dimensions of length, width, and height and - I believe - in a 5th-dimensional hyperspace where they're called "dark matter"). The Endnotes of my 2014 FQXi essay state that the idea of instability in space of more than 3 dimensions is based on the assumption that gravity is purely attractive. However, Einstein showed that attraction of two bodies of matter actually results from space-time's curvature pushing bodies (is this "repulsive" gravity known as dark energy?).

    The basic standard of time in the universe is the measurement of the motions of photons - specifically, of the speed of light. This is comparable to the 1960's adoption on Earth of the measurement of time as the vibration rate of cesium atoms. At Lightspeed, time = 0 (it is stopped). Below 300,000 km/sec, acceleration or gravitation causes time dilation (slowing of time as the speed of light is approached). If time's 0, space is also 0 because space and time coexist as space-time whose warping (gravity) is necessarily 0 too. Spacetime/gravity form matter/mass (addressed shortly in this message), so the latter pair can't exist at lightspeed and photons are massless at that velocity. Gravitons are also massless at Lightspeed since electromagnetism and gravitation are both disturbances in unified space-time.

    How can space-time cease to exist at Lightspeed? Total elimination of distance, or space-time, produces nothing in a physical sense and reverts to theoretical physicist Lee Smolin's imagining of strings as "not made of anything at all" (p.35 of Dr. Sten Odenwald's article "What String Theory Tells Us About the Universe": Astronomy - April 2013). It also reverts the universe to the mathematical blueprint from which physical being is constructed (this agrees with cosmologist Max Tegmark's hypothesis that mathematical formulas create reality, http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jul/16-is-the-universe-actually-made-of-math#.UZsHDaIwebs and http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646). So, infinity = something (maths), agreeing with Dr. Sten Odenwald's statement on p.32 of his article, that "The basic idea is that every particle of matter ... and every particle that transmits a force ... is actually a small one-dimensional loop of something." (Like infinity, this something would be maths - I believe it's base-2 maths.) The next paragraph may be another way of relating gravitation and acceleration. Just as accelerating to lightspeed means matter/mass ceases to exist, matter stops existing in a black hole. Far from becoming infinitely dense and infinitely massive, the matter is reduced to binary digits.

    In the case of the sun, our star would become a black hole if it was compressed to 2.95 kms ("From the Big Bang to Dark Energy" - a lecture on coursera.org by Hitoshi Murayama from the University of Tokyo), in which case the pressure increase "shreds" the sun into its binary digits. In other words, its mass is relativistically converted into the energy of binary digits i.e. the bosons stop interacting in wave packets to produce the forces we identify as mass, and the bosons - which are ultimately composed of the binary digits depicting pi, e, в€љ2 etc. (see "Digital String Theory") - register as 1's and 0's.

    Back to black holes - there's no such thing as a quark-electron mixture forming Quark Stars. But there is a mixture of 1's and 0's forming matter, energy, forces, and all space-time. The formation of binary digits that most resembles stars, or masses of perhaps billions of stars, would be that part of space-time called Black Holes. Black holes aren't composed of matter but do have mass because they are meeting-places and "sinks" for the gravitational currents flowing in and between galaxies.** They possess charge because the universe's mathematical foundation unites gravity/spacetime with electricity/magnetism (see the paragraph about Digital String Theory in my essay). Since it has mass, a black hole can naturally possess the 3rd property of holes viz. spin.

    Einstein's work famously showed that time is relative. In 1907 his General Theory of Relativity showed that clocks run more quickly at higher altitudes because they experience a weaker gravitational force than clocks on the surface of the Earth. Going into more detail, my own thoughts are -

    Suppose Albert Einstein was correct when he said gravitation plays a role in the constitution of elementary particles (in "Do Gravitational Fields Play An Essential Part In The Structure of the Elementary Particles?" - a 1919 submission to the Prussian Academy of Sciences). And suppose he was also correct when he said gravitation is the warping of space-time. Then it is logical that 1) gravitation would play a role in constitution of elementary particles, and their mass, and also in the constitution of the forces associated with those particles, and 2) the warping of space-time that produces gravity means space-time itself plays a role in the constitution of elementary particles, their mass, and the forces. Matter can be thought of as "coherent space" that is bound by forces. There's a stronger gravitational force on the surface of the Earth because gravity is concentrated in the matter there (see WHY IS GRAVITY WEAK? in my essay). So, like a black hole, time is slowed down at lower altitudes (but far less, of course).

    What would I do without Einstein's theories to support all my wild ideas?

      Rodney,

      Let me brief in my response since this blog is on Quark stars.

      RE: If you could compare the speed of a clock you carried into a black hole with that of a reference clock kept far away, then the clock falling into the black hole would appear to slow down relative to the clock far from the hole (at the event horizon, it would appear to stop).

      In other words, any process takes an infinite amount of time to complete. Now compare this with "Seth Lloyd led off the longer talks... and gave the sage advice that if you should find yourself falling into a black hole, whatever you do, don't struggle".Refer here and here. We all know that Struggling is a process, can it be completed in a black hole? If it can, then can the duration taken to complete struggling not be used to measure a finite time?

      Then hear Zeeya Merali's sweet voice here contradicting the theory that clocks virtually come to a stop. If you fell in a black hole, how long will it take you to be spaghettified, ripped apart, crushed and frazzled to a crisp? These are processes that will take eternity according to Einstein's common sense but those who think they know more than the founder of General relativity speak from both sides of the mouth on this topic. Hawking is to be praised for now partially retracing his steps.

      Finally, as I have posted on a blog elsewhere, RE: Einstein's work famously showed that time is relative... that clocks run more quickly at higher altitudes because they experience a weaker gravitational force than clocks on the surface of the Earth. When you want to dtermine the time taken for light to travel a given distance, which clock will you use?

      Akinbo,

      thank you for addressing the point that this forum is for discussion about Quark Stars and strange quark matter (SQM). I wish to make a quick response to your last point though:

      "Finally, as I have posted on a blog elsewhere, RE: Einstein's work famously showed that time is relative... that clocks run more quickly at higher altitudes because they experience a weaker gravitational force than clocks on the surface of the Earth. When you want to dtermine the time taken for light to travel a given distance, which clock will you use?"

      It worth noting that pendulum clocks tick or swing more slowly at higher altitudes contrary to atomic clocks. This to me is proof that 'time' can't be thought of as running faster in a lower gravitational field, only *atomic* clocks can. This is why Einstein's mathematical equations without a mechanism for the gravity force are redundant imv.

      Alan

      This latest finding suggests exotic matter is at play:

      NASA's Chandra Sees Runaway Pulsar Firing an Extraordinary Jet (Feb 18 2014)

      "With the pulsar moving one way and the jet going another, this gives us clues that exotic physics can occur when some stars collapse," said co-author Gerd Puehlhofer also of the University of Tuebingen.

      Originally discovered with the European Space Agency satellite INTEGRAL, the pulsar is located about 60 light-years away from the center of the supernova remnant SNR MSH 11-61A in the constellation of Carina. Its implied speed is between 2.5 million and 5 million mph, making it one of the fastest pulsars ever observed.

      "We've never seen an object that moves this fast and also produces a jet," said Lucia Pavan of the University of Geneva in Switzerland and lead author of a paper published Tuesday,in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. "By comparison, this jet is almost 10 times longer than the distance between the sun and our nearest star."

      The X-ray jet in IGR J11014-6103 is the longest known in the Milky Way galaxy. In addition to its impressive span, it has a distinct corkscrew pattern that suggests the pulsar is wobbling like a spinning top.

      IGR J11014-6103 also is producing a cocoon of high-energy particles that enshrouds and trails behind it in a comet-like tail. This structure, called a pulsar wind nebula, has been observed before, but the Chandra data show the long jet and the pulsar wind nebula are almost perpendicular to one another.

      "We can see this pulsar is moving directly away from the center of the supernova remnant based on the shape and direction of the pulsar wind nebula," said co-author Pol Bordas, from the University of Tuebingen in Germany. "The question is, why is the jet pointing off in this other direction?"

      Usually, the spin axis and jets of a pulsar point in the same direction as they are moving, but IGR J11014-6103's spin axis and direction of motion are almost at right angles.

      I'll be the first to say anisotropic Strange Quark Matter is responsible.

        Alan,

        That is an interesting observation. I keep making the point that while we experience time as a sequence of events and physics further distills this to measures of duration, the reality is that what is present isn't a point on some dimension and thus moving along it through these situations, but that what is present is all that is physically real and since it constantly changing configuration, it is these events which are created and dissolved, ie, going from being in the future to being in the past. We are not traveling/flowing from yesterday to tomorrow, rather tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates. This makes time an effect of action, like temperature, not the space in which it occurs.

        Then each action is its own clock and runs according to circumstance. If time really were a flow from past to future, you would think a faster clock would move into the future more rapidly, but because it processes/ages/burns faster, it actually recedes into the past that much quicker.

        Regards,

        John M

        Alan,

        One of my contentions has been that black holes are really cosmic vortices and what gets pulled in them is what gets shot out those jets at the poles.

        So the fact this has a tail and a jet perpendicular to one another raises the possibility the tail is material being pulled in, rather than blown off. Possibly the nebula isn't its own, but one it's pulling material from. Just a thought.

        Regards,

        John M

        Hi John,

        Thanks for joining in on this discussion. Yes, I agree when you say "This makes time an effect of action, like temperature, not the space in which it occurs." I'm from a computer simulation modelling background and so think in simple recreation of events using mechanical modelling.

        Einstein's work is long over due for the recycling bin, yet I hear there's a new film dedicated to the life of Prof. Stephen Hawking who's his biggest advocate, entitled Theory Of Everything

        ..groan..

        Alan

        John,

        I had the thought that all these exotic high energy celestial bodies have the same basic form. It's exactly like that of the Earth: they spin around an axis, have a magnetic field and also wobble:

        "The X-ray jet in IGR J11014-6103 is the longest known in the Milky Way galaxy. In addition to its impressive span, it has a distinct corkscrew pattern that suggests the pulsar is wobbling like a spinning top."

        I'm convinced that they all have exotic matter, anisotropic strange quark matter, at their cores to produce the same basic form. How do you feel about this extraordinary idea? I'm guessing you'll need plenty of convincing.

        Alan

        Alan,

        I'm somewhat of the opinion that we don't really appreciate the nature of ordinary matter. Physics seems bent on finding some mystery buried down in the most elemental nature and goes to extremes of smallest, largest and most abstract, but this everyday reality we live in is a balancing act of forces and properties, of which we tend to focus on one side of, or see the two sides as somehow distinct. A good example is the whole Big Bang cosmology, where the universe is a singular vector from beginning to end. What seems to be overlooked is that galaxies are not inert points of reference, but 'space sinks,' which do balance the expansion of the measure of inter-galactic space, resulting in an overall flat space, as is measured. Logically this would imply some sort of cycle and we know radiation expands, while mass contracts and they do emerge from one another. Yet our intellectual model is to focus on the distinctions, rather than the connections, so its a search for what we are missing, but it may be what we are missing is not hiding, we just are not looking at it the right way.

        This is something I wrote for another discussion and it was ignored, but it's an idea that keeps nibbling at my brain;

        "According to increasingly accurate measurements, the overall universe appears flat, with gravity balancing the expansion. While the space between galaxies appears to expand, these galaxies are not just inert points of measure, but 'space sinks,' collapsing measures of space in proportion to that which expands between them. Given this balance it would seem to me some form of convection cycle, of expanding radiation and collapsing mass, would better explain the entire process, than just the current focus on the expanding inter-galactic medium creates the impression of an expanding universe.

        The contraction of mass and the expansion of energy would then constitute opposing directions of time, as structure forms on the perimeters of galaxies and becomes increasingly complex and dense, until apparently collapsing into the center and being ejected out the poles, if not previously radiated away as light. Meanwhile the radiation is constantly expanding away from prior forms and coalescing into new forms. Keep in mind that a clock has two components, the face and hands and they go in opposite directions. To the hands, it is the face going counterclockwise. The form of classic clocks evolved from sundials and the hand(s) originally represented the sun, or conversely, the shadow created by its light, moving around the dial. As such it represented the present, while the marks on the face represent the units of time. So the hands/present moves from past to future units, while these units go from being in the future, to being in the past. Such as energy is constantly manifesting form, expanding in out, until it becomes rigid, then breaking it down and going onto new forms and growing them. So we have these galaxies, composed of physical forms that are constantly coalescing out of more basic forms, expanding out as they accumulate energy and mass, then radiating it away, eventually to where the last of the energy appears to be shot out the poles as cosmic jets. All this energy goes to create the effect of an expanding inter-galactic space.

        Gravity, then, is not so much a property of mass, but the vacuum effect of energy coalescing into mass and ever more dense forms after that. Given dark matter cannot be detected, but there is excesses of unexplained cosmic rays on the perimeters of galaxies.

        So there are two directions of time. That of the physical present, as the energy, moving onto the future and expansion, while the forms it manifests coalescing and eventually dissolving, ie, going future to past.

        Now when we measure something, we convert energy into information, which is form. So in an elemental sense, our very effort of measurement converts energy into mass, that of a stabilized state of the energy."

        So, in a sense, matter is stabilized energy and when we measure anything, we have to balance it with another force, so we are creating mass by measuring energy. This then gets to the issue of the 'observer generated' reality.

        Sorry I'm wandering off topic, but the brain tends to wander off while I'm doing other things. I think that on a deeper spiritual level, we have some primal sense of this, For example, the primitive assertions that cameras and taking a picture are 'soul stealers.' That some tiny measure of the person takes some of their energy. On a personal sense, I seem ever more suspended in the interpersonal and organic web of consciousness and any thread I pull, causes lots of different effects, so my sense of the material becomes ever more tenuous. It's all about balance.

        Regards,

        John M

        John,

        Quite off topic, yes. Your use of the word "mass" means you are subscribing to Einstein's spacetime imv and therefore not too open to non-baryonic candidates for dark matter. There was something that you mention which caught my interest:

        "Given dark matter cannot be detected, but there is excesses of unexplained cosmic rays on the perimeters of galaxies."

        I have a hunch that strange quark matter at the center of celestial bodies create cosmic rays when two such bodies interact on the plane of their rotation. There's evidence that cosmic rays originate from Jupiter Cosmic rays from Jupiter.

        Even from the Earth's core. Take a look at the diagram for terrestrial gamma ray flashes (TGF's)

        There's a clue that TGF's have a trigger emanating from the center of the Earth imo:

        [Quote]Second, TGFs are strongly concentrated around Earth's equator when compared to lightning.[11] (They may also be concentrated over water compared to lightning in general.)[end quote]

        The thinner crust under the oceans would allow the easiest escape route for a mystery pulse escaping the center of the Earth. Bermuda Triangle type mysteries also occur over the oceans - coincidence?

        Alan

        Here's a recent paper which reads suspiciously similar to the 1982 paper on Jupiter Cosmic Rays linked above:

        Global Anisotropies in TeV Cosmic Rays Related to the Sun's Local Galactic Environment from IBEX (Feb 2014)

        [quote]Observations with the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) have shown enhanced energetic neutral atom (ENA) emission from a narrow, circular ribbon likely centered on the direction of the local interstellar medium (LISM) magnetic field. Here, we show that recent determinations of the local interstellar velocity, based on interstellar atom measurements with IBEX, are consistent with the interstellar modulation of high energy (TeV) cosmic rays and diffusive propagation from supernova sources revealed in global anisotropy maps of ground-based high-energy cosmic-ray observatories (Milagro, Asγ and IceCube). Establishing a consistent local interstellar magnetic field direction using IBEX ENAs at hundreds to thousands of eV and galactic cosmic rays at tens of TeV has wide-ranging implications for the structure of our heliosphere and its interactions with the local interstellar medium, particularly important at the time when the Voyager spacecraft are leaving our heliosphere.[end quote]

        Alan

        John, you said, "According to increasingly accurate measurements, the overall universe appears flat, with gravity balancing the expansion...". Mass until shown otherwise is the source of gravity and expansion implies an increasing radius. One can therefore rephrase your statement as "According to increasingly accurate measurements, the overall universe appears flat, with increasing Mass balancing the increasing radius...". I wrote a paper some years ago, which I am afraid of updating for fear that Moderators may disallow me. In that paper I posed the question: Does the universe have a constant mass during its evolution or has its mass been increasing with its radius? Come to think of it, if the universe is now about 1052kg, was all that mass there right from the beginning? Apart from being unnatural, as Nature tends to do its work gradually unlike we humans, having everything all at once results in theoretical difficulties for the Big bang model, such as "a temperature problem", quite apart from the identified flatness problem which inflationary theory was invented to resolve.

        Akinbo

        *I make this post here because this blog is categorized under Cosmology, although I know Alan wants nothing but his Strange type of matter discussed! But if the universe is increasing in mass, the initial stable types of matter must have the strongest bonds between them because of the high ambient temperature, but newly forming matter can make do having just gravitational bonds to form stable structures, and so will be more diffuse and less clumpy since current ambient cosmic energy and temperature is about 2.7K.

        Alan,

        It's not strange if it fits in the larger system. So what you are saying is that at the gravitational center, energy radiates back out. Isn't that emblematic of a vortex? That the energy radiates back out out into the larger system, rather then disappearing into some other dimension?

        Akinbo,

        My view is that space is unbounded/infinite, so the whole system isn't expanding, rather it is a cycle, effectively a cosmic convection cycle, of energy radiating out and eventually congealing into mass/balanced structure, than inexorably falling back together and heating up, until it breaks down and radiates back out again. It's just they are only looking at the effect of the expansion and not adding in that gravity does cancel/balance out the overall expansion. They use inflation to explain why it appears flat, but that just shoehorns evidence of an infinite universe into a finite model. It's institutional myopia, given the proof is in their own evidence.

        Having to keep it short, off to work.

        Regards,

        John M

        John,

        I'm saying that there's additional tide raising forces at the center of the Earth from non-baryonic matter interaction on the plane of rotation. I've worked backwards from a novel explanation for both the ice age 100ky insolation-only conundrum as well as the mysterious climate millennial cycle which fits with the 1,800 yr lunar tidal cycle. It's a long story, but as Akinbo points out, that's all I want to talk about right now. Sorry for my obsession but I'm convinced this is a worthy avenue of inquiry, if nothing else. Strange quark matter fits the bill just right.

        Cheers,

        Alan