Electron time, mass and zitter by David Hestenes

Hi David,

Let me be the first to congratulate you on your essay. I was so surprised and delighted to see you name on one of the entries for today. I've skimmed the essay, but have followed your work for years.

With this fortuitous breakthrough, your physical ideas should get much more attention, accelerating the acceptance of your great mathematical accomplishments. I hope so.

Just out of curiosity, what implications, if any, do you think this has for the relevancy of Planck units, and theoretical views stemming therefrom?

Dear Dr. Hestenes,

Thank you for the good news you bring to us in this essay, about the electron's "inner clock". During the time, I devoured your articles and books on Geometric Algebra, with their applications to Physics, including the zitterbewegung interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. But it is only now when I hear about this major experimental confirmation. I was really impressed by the insights and the history presented here. I am happy for this major point earned by a point-like model of the electron, although I myself am pursuing a rather complementary (but not opposed) viewpoint in QM.

Congratulations for your work,

Cristi Stoica

"Flowing with a Frozen River",

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/322

Why can't I download the Hestenes Essay?

Dear Dr. Hestenes,

Unlike many other pointless philosophical writings about the concept of time presented here, your essay seems to be about real physics and is very concrete. I like it and I am sorry that I didn't know about your works before (thanks for putting references to your papers). Of course, the idea about charges circling inside the electron is not new, but I see that you are trying to develop this idea into a real theory. Although the structure your are exploring is oversimplified comparing to what it actually might be, I am pretty sure that you are on the right track. Congratulations!

Vladimir Yershov

I had no trouble downloading and reading the paper. It mentions Gauge Theory Gravity, which is somewhat unique in that it gives results identical to general relativity but constructed on a flat or Minkowski background space and so avoids topological stuff like worm holes etc.

One has to admit that a flat background space for gravity is an invitation to write a quantum field theory for it, and a cosmology to go along. The stuff that the Cambridge geometry group has done along this line is compatible with Big Bang theory. However, one wonders if it is possible to rewrite cosmology on a flat space as well.

To get a big bang effect on flat space, one has to assume that the clock of an observer increases its rate steadily over time. Early on, his clock runs very slowly so the universe appears very hot and small. This change in clock time corresponds to the ZBW frequency of Dr. Hestenes' paper. To get the right cosmological consequences, one must suppose that the zbw frequency is proportional to how far into the universe he can look backwards (to its beginning).

I also greatly enjoyed this essay and was completely unaware of this interesting experiment. I look forward to such an analysis for other particle clocks. Maybe the GSI anomaly?

Prof. Hestenes, I've been following your work with interest since I read your book "Space-time Algebra" years ago, so I'm surprised and delighted to read your essay here. I'm especially delighted since the Gouanère experiment you mentioned seems to corroborate my own long-standing suspicion of an elementary process underlying the fermion mass. Though our models differ in details (mine is nowhere as refined as yours), I do salute you for your fine essay and for bringing to light an interesting experiment.

P.S. there's a typo for reference 3 at the end of the paper. Here's the correct link for those who may have trouble looking it up in arXiv:

http://arxiv.org/abs/0802.2728

Hi Dr Hestenes,

I have been reading thermophysics literture:

SV Alekseenko, PA Kuibin, VL Okulov,

Theory of Concentrated Vortices: An Introduction.

These authors discuss Beltrami flows ~ helical motion, which seems related to Zitterbewegung. In fluids speeds are slow relative to distance, while in Zitterwebegung, speeds are realtivistic at quantum distances.

Could time also be a Beltrami flow?

I really aprreciated the novelty of this contribution.

The only source of misunderstanding is the interpretation of the "electron intrinsic time" as something real. As stated at a certain point, such parameter relates the spin and phase of the electron with space variable. The only speakable consequence is that space and spin/phase are related, but nothing can be said about the parameter time, especially its connection with clock time of macroscopic objects.

It is a convenient view to call such parameter time, but it is possible only by supposing that one knows what is frequency, which is a time dependent concept (uses "period").

John

Very good essay but it has little to do with the "nature of time"

Dear Dr. Hestenes,

Did you read the book "Schroedinger - Life and Thought"?

It contains an erotic poem by Schroedinger: Zittern.

My factual criticism of Schroedinger can be found in

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/369.

Regards,

Eckard Blumschein

Dear David,

Your late submission permitted me to see your essay only now. It is significantly informative for me as i was not aware of the aspect touched-electron time due to its zitter!The huge frequency of zitter is mind boggling 10 E21 Hz.You say that electron moves in circular motion with speed of light about the spinning direction.In fact the spinning itself arises from circular spinning about its own axis! It all sounds quite a bit imaginative for a point particle like the compton radius of the electron.If one questions the concepts of space time and have alternative description, the spce-time history of electron will go too to sustain the zitter model.The channeling experiment has just been done only once. from what i know about channeling, it is very tough experiment to conduct. The interpretation is based on single row/plane of the crystal in theoretical considerations. But actual experiment yields depend on contributions from the neighbouring rows/planes, besides consideration of crystal defects. These can affect the interpretation of results. The experiment needs more than one repetition at different laboratories to substantiate the Zitter and its universality, being proposed.Your connection of this aspect to the dark matter also does not seem to have attracted the cosmologists thus far!

In making these comments, i certainly don't mean to be critical of your unique essay on a unique aspect. Let us repeat the channeling experiment at 2, 3 different labs of repute around the world. The significance to me lies in uuderstanding Gravity better than what we know currently, as the Unified field is being defied ,the other three field components get unified! Also, what will be the consequence of a varying value of 'c' that has been experimentally observed to have slightly lost its value closer to the birth of the Universe? The changes in 'c' may affect your zitter model's mathematical equations!

Dear David,

Before getting into a discussion of your essay, let me say I hope to see an intro physics text based on clifford algebra someday! (Am J Phys v71, #2, 2003, p104)

I realize you had to leave much out of your essay, so maybe these three naive questions result fm that fact:

1) Do I understand correctly that you want a massive particle, the electron, to follow a null path?

2) What force supplies the centripetal acceleration for the helical motion?

3) The picture seems very classical, much like that of an electron in orbit about the nucleus. We know that picture doesn't work b/c the electron would promptly irradiate away its orbital energy and spiral into the nucleus. Why doesn't that happen in this model?

Thanks,

Mark

Enjoyed reading your essay, although I found some of it to be heavy going. But I am intrigued by the notion of helical lightlike trajectories around timelike worldlines. Could this mean that all fundamental particles are "really" massless? Could the "transverse" directions be unphysical? After all, null vectors in higher dimensional spacetimes project to causal (null or timelike) vectors in lower dimensions!

Dear David Hestenes,

The received results mean the nonzero sizes of the electron or the electron remains a dot particle? The question is put in a context of an essay The Theory of Time, Space and Gravitation, where the conclusion about the nonzero sizes of any material particle is presented.

Regards,

Robert Sadykov

My post of Dec.,07 remains unresponded. The reliability of your innovative concepts is much tied to the Channeling Experiment's reliability that has been commented upon in the said post!

David,

You summed up, "Perhaps gravitational torsion due to

spin, like gravitational force due to mass, is negligible at the atomic level but accumulates to an

observable effect at the galactic level. Enough said!"

Enough indeed. My own calculation for concservation of angular momentum even at the planetary level (FQXI, "Time Counts") is a tiny but not negligible difference from the classical expectation of about 8.96 X 10^-7 sec for the example given (sun-earth relation)--meaning a tiny loss of time due to energy dissipation.

Thanks for a well done and enlightening essay!

Tom

Dear prof. Hestenes,

I liked your essay. It is very important, that the helical world line of the Dirac particle, predicted by your Zitter-Dirac model, was confirmed experimentally. There is an important detail, connected with the helical world line. Besides, the helix follows from the Zitter-Dirac model , it follows also directly from the Dirac equation. One can eliminate gamma-matrices from the action for the Dirac equation by means of change of dynamic variables, and one can present the action in terms of hydrodynamic variables. (Yu.A.Rylov, "Dirac equation in terms of hydrodynamic variables" Advances in Applied Clefford Algebras, 5, pp 1-40, (1995)).

Elimination of gamma-matrices discovers two important circumstances: (1) In the hydrodynamic variables the action can be divided into two parts: classical and quantum ones, (2) description of the Dirac dynamic system appears to be nonrelativistic.

The classical part describe the statistical ensemble of classical dynamic systems S_cl. Each dynamic system S_cl has 10 degrees of freedom. Considering the dynamic system S_cl as a particle, one obtains, that the world line of this particle is a helix. Six external degrees of freedom, describing translations are described relativistically, whereas four remaining degrees of freedom describe the particle spiraling. These four degrees of freedom are described nonrelativistically.

Nonrelativistic character of spiraling is a defect of the Dirac equation. This defect does not appear in the consideration of electronic envelopes in atoms, because in this case the intrinsic structure of the electron is of no importance. But it may be important in theory of elementary particle.

It is interesting, whether this defect appears in the Zitter-Dirac model of Hestenes. Although the nature of the spiraling is not yet clear, I believe, that prediction of this spiraling and confirmation it in experiment is a very important achievement.

Sincerely yours,

Yuri Rylov

The necessity of repeatation of such an experiment is much needed as Channeling experiments need very careful interpretation , as perfect crystals structure don't exist in nature. Both lattive defects and impurities play significant role and need careful analysis!