Scales Solve the Continuous vs. Discrete Paradox by Ray B Munroe

Ray,

I have a new post at my thread. I'd appreciate your comments very much...

I'd like to know how you fit the idea of self-similarity at the level of the galaxies. I'd like to know what components you see at that scale and what you don't see and where they should be located 'physically'.

Rafael

Dear Rafael,

Laurent Nottale predicts at least one scale of greater complexergy than ours. My analysis of fundamental particle spins (including spin-3/2 gravitinos and spin-2 gravitons) leads me to think that there may be at least two sclaes of greater complexergy than ours.

Within our Observable Universe, there is some interesting structure, such as Superclusters. Are Superclusters part of our Classical Scale, or are they part of a larger scale that we can observe (just like the Quantum scale is a smaller scale that we can observe)? I haven't given this possible scale-level as much thought as it probably deserves, but my friend Len Malinowski has. Max Tegmark is working along similar lines.

At the top scale, we have the Multiverse. It is (near?) infinite in space and time, always has existed, always will exist, and each Observable Universe is a fragment of fractal dust within its composition. Perhaps this fits into Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation, but the "many-worlds" have always existed - we don't need new Big Bangs to provide those alternate worlds/ realities/ possibilities.

Have Fun!

Dr. Cosmic Ray

Ray,

As you know my GEM theory has for five years predicted no Higgs and no SUSY (Super-Symmetry) and no other new particles.

Your response, if I understood it correctly, is "There has to be SUSY!"

You might want to check out this week's Nature (3 Mar 2011): over a year of searching at LHC has failed to find any evidence of super-particles (or the Higgs), and if SUSY is not found by the end of the year, the theory is in serious trouble (some already say that 'SUSY is dead'.)

Nature says "SUSY's utility and mathematical grace have instilled a "religious devotion" among its followers" some of whom have been working on the theory for thirty years.

The key statement in the article is this:

"This is a big political issue in our field. For some great physicists, it is the difference between getting a Nobel prize and admitting they spent their lives on the wrong track."

That surely makes clear why the resistance is so strong. But I don't believe that you expect the Nobel, nor have you spent your life on this, so what is your response to no SUSY? Can you adjust your theory to live with this?

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Hi Ed,

Most people talk about SUSY within the framework of a Weak-Scale MSSM. My ideas are more general than that. In my opinion, the Standard and/or MSSM Higgs only explains the origin of the W and Z masses well - it really doesn't explain the origin of 3 generations of fermion masses well, but I have ideas that involve Pentachorons and the Golden Ratio - similar to Coldea et al's magnetic quasiparticles...

I think that SUSY, String Theory and TOE may all be related. I know that SUSY and String Theory aren't popular, and a TOE doesn't have to exist (but for the sake of "symmetry" and "beauty", I am pursuing the idea).

Can the LHC exclude my ideas? Perhaps, but not in its second year of operation. The LHC has already discovered some unusual stuff - and they have tentatively identified it as a gluon-quark plasma. But what if they have discovered a fractal nature to spacetime, or an unexpected stop squark pair production signal? If SUSY eists, it will have many free parameters - we can only guess some...

I think that your ideas are part of a TOE, but not the complete TOE. Four particles are not enough particles to produce the 5-fold symmetry that I think is the origin of mass (and only one of several symmetries). Lisi's E8 had 8 basis vectors (the 8-D Gosset lattice), and you could probably represent those basis vectors with 4 particles and 4 fields, but E8 is not large enough - by itself - for a TOE. Lawrence and I have been talking about an E8xE8*~SO(32) minimum TOE (and I am looking at larger models).

Am I committed to String Theory, SUSY and TOES? I have been playing with TOE ideas since 1979 (my original Quantum Statistical Grand Unified Theory), my 1996 Doctoral Thesis modeled the possible discovery of SUSY, and I have been playing with String Theoretical ideas for about 5 years.

If the LHC could exclude all of my ideas in the next couple of years, I would quit my independent research, and go back to teaching Astronomy at nights at the local Community College (I did that from 2000-2003 and I made ~10K$ extra income per year - unlike my rocket design, book, publications, and FQXi participation over the past three years that haven't netted any income). I'm not as old as you, but like you there would be no point in starting over...

Have Fun!

Dr. Cosmic Ray

Ray,

Thanks for a serious answer to that question. As you remark, if LHC finds something that disproves my theory, I would just pack it in and enjoy my grandkids more.

I did predict the 'perfect fluid' that they're calling the 'quark gluon plasma' so I feel good about that, because QCD was predicting a 'quark gas'.

Since in my model mass/energy is basic, I don't need any symmetry to realize it. The need for such derives from QED and QCD wherein the fields are effectively 'charge-based' and mass is an 'add-on' or an 'after-thought'.

And the four fermions (times three generations) and four bosons are all there is!

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Hi Ed,

One final point:

I think that Supersymmetry (SUSY) gives us the mathematical umbrella to unify your 4 particles and 4 fields (that sounds similar to an E8~H4xH4*). I am concerned about balancing degrees-of-freedom, perhaps your 4 particles (times 3 generations) is balanced by 4 fields (times 3 spatial dimensions)?

I am still convinced that your idea does not contain enough degrees of freedom, but I think you may have part of the TOE, I respect you enough that I listed you as one of my essay's reviewers, and I am not here to discourage you...

Have Fun!

Dr. Cosmic Ray

Ray

Really appreciate you reading my essay. Your hurdler was unfortunately an incorrect analogy. Don't worry, most struggle to grasp the 3D visualisation at first, but then it becomes simple, as you see from the posts with yours.

I posted a reply, but reproduce it with a thought experiment here;

"Thanks for your post, and having an initial go, but you're not quite there with your hurdler. That's not what I'm saying. Did you read the 'bus' analogy in Lawrence's string? (repeated by Edwin in mine above).

If one hurdler jumps on a passing bus he's IN a different inertial frame (via acceleration). He may well run along the bus at the same speed as the others, but unfortunately is DISQUALIFIED from being observed in the same terms as the others without a mathematical adjustment. i.e. The camera at the finish is perfectly allowed to see him at an APPARENT C plus V, but there is only one VALID inertial frame, that of the running track.

There may be dozens of hurdlers around, on bikes, in cars, planes on infinitely many vectors, but only those in the SAME INERTIAL FRAME of the observer comply with the rules that the maximum possible speed is 'c'.

This means light on the bus will do 'c' with respect to 'wrt' the bus. (Let's imaging a pulse going through a gas on the bus.). The gas molecules scatter light sequentially, at 'c'. It goes through the window (n=1.5) and air at c/n, and everyone else will recive it at 'c'. The fact that to all them it may APPEAR to be doing C plus V DOES NOT MATTER, because in reality it isn't!!

(This is precisely what Georgina is saying, also consistent with Edwins, Constantinos Regazas and many other good essays here, as the posts above).

Yes it IS different, Yes it IS reasonable huge, and yes it does meet and explain both the SR postulates, and identifies how Equivalence works.! The boundary (between the bus and the track) in space is the quantum mechanism of diffraction of plasma, ionised particles, which form all shocks and may well prove to be the core constituent of dark matter. (Eddington was wrong). GR then slots in neatly as the ions condensed with speed ARE mass, with inertia.

The emipirical evidence is unbelievably consistent once we look. I't the discrete field model,(DFM), and you heard it here first, can you see it too? Have fun exploring it!

Best wishes.

Peter

Hi Peter,

No, Your thread is long enough that I had overlooked the bus analogy.

You said "The fact that to all them it may APPEAR to be doing C plus V DOES NOT MATTER, because in reality it isn't!!"

SR also gives this result. What's new? the interpretation of a discrete vs. continuous reality? If reality is fully discrete, then I want you to explain the "vacuum", the permitivity of free space, and the permeability of free space (all of these terms are important in defining the speed of light in a vacuum) in terms of discrete phenomena. I think that the discrete answer to this question should tie into my FCC lattice of the Dirac Sea, and Constantin Leshan's quantum spacetime holes. We are closer to the same bus route than you may realize...

I did not enter this contest to challenge SR and GR - I think that they stand fairly well in their realms of applicability. Certainly, we observe some apparently super-luminal jets. Is this an optical illusion due to gravitational lensing effects, or would the unknown Theory of Quantum Gravity explain it all?

Rather than overthrow SR and GR in their present form, I prefer to try to understand how Quantum Gravity should behave (based on anticipated symmetries), and use it to "modify" our understanding of SR and GR.

Have Fun!

Dr. Cosmic Ray

Dear Friends,

I thought that this exchange with Alan Lowey was worth reposting on this thread:

Hi Ray,

I'd like to applaud you on such an excellent endeavour as your grandiose book. It's just the kind of thing I've wanted to do myself. I have a non-mathematical approach to begin with though, so I would be lost quite quickly if I tried to read it perhaps. I'm sure you can gain something from the Archimedes screw idea, it can explain the galaxy rotation curve mystery as well as dark energy. See the new thread below,

You have fun too Ray,

Best wishes, Alan

Hi Alan,

Thank You! I think that Physics is a necessarily bilingual thought process involving both language and mathematics. Some people fall too heavily on the language side, and some fall too heavily on the mathematics side. Ultimately, a succesful theory will usually involve mathematics applied to an idea.

Perhaps I am too mathematical (I have a PhD in Physics, but only a BS Minor in Mathematics - so I'm not the most extreme mathematician) to appeal to a general audience. Some of my FQXi friends "beat me up" over falsifiability. Chapter 6 of my book did address some falsifiable ideas (I explained Dark Energy with Variable Coupling Theory), but the truth is that I'm always trying to push further beyond the horizon.

It was easy and inexpensive to publish my book as a print-on-demand book on Lulu.com, and pay for Amazon distribution.

Have Fun!

Dr. Cosmic Ray

Dear Ray

Thanks for putting your above post to me on my thread. Modify and improve understanding is indeed the result, but you're not quite on target yet. I post my response below.

"Ray. Hmmm, you need to slow down a bit (to below C?). I make it clear I'm not trying to overthrow anything!! And yes, the jets are also explained without needing optical illusions.

Firstly; Of course SR gives the same result ('c') this IS SR. But, - as we understand it it has paradoxes, unfalsifiable contraction & circular logic, is non compliant with QM, and can't have the fields of GR and now the CMBR! Lets' get real Ray, it's not perfect it's a mess, so all I say is; - Hey! if we think carefully there's a way SR may work without ANY of the messy bits, and unified with QM!

So.. are you saying; "Don't be silly, it's all fine as it is, the theory can't possibly be right so I'm not even going to bother checking it out."??

For those who HAVE made the effort and SEEN it Ray, someone who says that... ..well I'm sure you can imagine how they'd be perceived. I rate your perception higher than that, but do understand how unlikely you may feel this is.

Unless of course you're using the standard model of new physics!; - (ignore, criticise, deny, then claim it's self apparent). I that case It's way further on than I'd hoped!

Frankly I already wrote long ago it's able to be consistent with the Dirac Sea, as with lattices, as it ALLOWS (though not necessarily demands) a background frame, (not one giant bus but 'infinitely many') and provides a quantum matrix (ions & scattering) to implement change to em energy propagation (rate/f/lambda).

The superluminal jets are simply 'Incentric' streams, - small buses within bigger buses within bigger buses, on planets in solar systems in galaxies etc. Light changes speed at plasma shocks around matter to do 'c' in the local 'bus.' THAT'S what's new! and suddenly all else slots neatly into place at last. I really do hope you get this as it seems we could be heading for an astonishing ridiculous situation where it's only (some) physicists who can't understand how physics might really work!!! It needs bright physicists to help falsify it, fine tune it and work on the quite vast consequences.

there are some other papers to read in the string and in the references (stacks of empirical evidence) which may also help. With the 1st paper already in Peer Review this is no joke Ray, and I hope you can maybe give it a just a little respect.

And I really hope you give understanding it a decent shot."

Very best wishes

Peter

Dear Ray Munroe,

Thanks for your views and I stress you to, please,go thro' my web-site that I have mentioned in my essay and there you find complete answer for your problems on QG.In it I have given the basic field equation of the QG field in tensor form.In it I have also said how Immirzi-parameter is related to QG field.

Your idea of collective collaboration is inspiring.

cheers

Sreenath B N.

Ray, Thanks. My money was always on you to get it first.

I agree, P&P and the condensate were among a dozen important aspects squeezed. But I do like falsifiability. See first line of my abstract (..'unknowable'). I also had to judge prejudice (if presented as an 'ether' theory) when it must first stand on pure, but initially complex, logic. The same's true of the LT which (you asked "what's new") is relegated to a local minor league, which I can see the fans objecting to!

I have a good plan for your car - aim it the right way on a spinning planet orbiting a sun flying through your galaxy, and you should get a few extra mph out of it! Same with your book, which I did indeed look at. Very nice, but of course you now need a new one. I could agree with some bits, but winced at others. I'm not a fan of canonball bosons. It's logical there's something (dark energy potential) with P&P at 2.7 degrees in the CMBR rest frame, but a condensate (yes, a 'scale') below 'matter'. We now need to stop denying it's there (allowed by the DFM) and zero in on all it's properties. We only know ANYTHING by it's properties - and we know stacks about the (dis)continuum, or 'C' field of Edwin. If you're on board with the new paradigm and are the first physicist to get the book out...!

And I haven't rated yours yet either. It does now seems to be creeping up in my estimation! I think you have the required ability to take a few steps back for new overview.

Speaking of that, did you find the hidden toroid black hole evidence in the essay? (photographic evidence). And, a few scales further up, see the scale model of a universe (possibly ours 12m years ago) in my short logical conclusions paper (fig 1). It also gives you the answer to the above, plus another black hole photo (or call it the light scattered off the 'dust cloud' around the event horizon if we prefer). http://vixra.org/abs/1102.0016

For QG I agree, the DFM only provides the mass and mechanism for curved space time and equivalence with Inertial mass. There is a local property change of the (sub matter) condensate caused by condensation. I don't see that as using 'boson' particles, but could be wrong, which is why it's currently peripheral. However, we should realise it's not just Relativity that needs a bit of action from Occams razer to tidy it up! I have however never been able to reconcile Tachyons with the logical picture either. Sure I can see relative superluminal phase velocity, superconductivity, tunneling, incentric jet motion etc, but would need to find a description more consistent with those to stop feeling they're incongruous to intuitive science. Do help me on that if you can.

Best wishes

Peter

PS. If anyone told me they'd derived life after death scientifically? Yes I'd have first assumed they were a nutter!

Nice, Ray! You're getting ever better at lassoing highly rareified technical concepts and wrestling them into the range of ordinary discourse. Applause.

With you as with Lawrence, I don't find it practical at the moment to engage in an intense technical exchange (we tend to do that continuously on the blog forums anyway), but there are a couple of outstanding issues on which I want to extend my compliments:

One is a clear explanation of why supersymmetry plays such an important role in modern physical theory. One grows weary of having it compared to medieval scholasticism or recreational mathematics, neither of which is even close to the actual case. The other is your penultimate statement about the divide between string/membrane and kissing sphere/cdt models -- right on. As you're aware, unification of those models is the point of my own research.

Thanks for a great read, and good luck in the contest.

All best,

Tom

Thanks, Tom!

Dear Sreenath,

I like your ideas, but the reality is that I might not have time to read your web-site before the end of this contest. There are many essays that I have not yet read (and many that I need to read again), and I have gotten some good ideas and insights from most of the essays that I have read.

I am a bit surprized that your blog has not attracted much attention. Perhaps I can make some comments and try to stir up some interest.

Good Luck & Have Fun!

Dr. Cosmic Ray

Dear Peter,

Thanks for the comments on my blog site!

I also like falsifiability. Chapters 4 and 6 of my book tie into experimental data, and are falsifiable. The obvious problem is that most everything that I have done since is so speculative that it isn't yet obvious to me if it is or isn't falsifiable (although the lattices that I use are fundamental to Solid State Physics). I like the fact that some of my ideas may tie into Coldea et al's magnetic quasiparticle mass-ratio experimental results. I also like Vladimir Tamari's ideas that may tie into Gingras' magnetic spin ice quasiparticle experimental results.

Do you have an infinite number of buses and bus stops with an infinite number of discrete reference frames, or am I way off-base?

I use stacks of cannonballs as analogies for fermions because it is easier to describe than an FCC lattice. I think that the bosons are the reciprocal lattice and behave like "struts" between centers of cannonballs in our 3-D space.

Yes - I am aware of the "slingshot" method for speeding up space probes. My van would probably fall apart...

I also like tokamaks. I worked on the TEXT tokamak at the University of Texas, Austin in 1981-82.

I have wild ideas that might unite several of our ideas (you, me, Crowell, Gibbs, Lisi, Castel, Sreenath, Tamari, Leshan, Duforney, perhaps Lowey and Klingman). It goes something like this:

A static Black Hole does not collapse on its singularity because a buckyball-shaped lattice of spacetime (or quantum gravity) prevents said collapse. In the case of a rotating Black Hole (most stars rotate so most Black Holes should as well), torsion effects cause a pair of nested buckyball lattices to morph into their homotopic cousin, a lattice-like torus in a rotating (rotation = time along Steve Duforney's ideas?) and apparently 3-D space with 120 lattice sites. Each of these 120 sites, contains one of Vladimir Tamari's tetrahedra (which may also be related to Gingras and Section 7.2 of my book) which are also rotating (another time dimension?) in an (another set of spatial dimensions?) apparently 3-D space. Along the lines of my ideas (and Laurent Nottale's), these different 3-D shapes - torus and tetrahedra - may exist at different spatial scales (I suspect that the tetrahedra are much smaller than the torus) with different time scales (different rates of rotation for torus and tetrahedra). In this case, the Black Hole "singularity" is at the center of the donut hole, and is either empty (like one of Constantin Leshan's quantum spacetime holes) or permanently confined - we will never know.

Carbon-60 buckyballs have superconductor properties that expel electric fields. Wouldn't it be cool if these spacetime (or quantum gravity) lattices (buckyball or lattice-like torus) had properties that allowed them to expel gravitational fields? And wouldn't this be close to some of Klingman's GEM-like ideas?

This model contains 120x4=480 degrees-of-freedom plus basis vectors (at least 8? two 3-d spaces and 2 times?). This looks a lot like an E8xE8* ~ SO(32) where one E8 is strictly real, and the other E8* is stricly imaginary (Theoretically, the TOE needs complex representations whether we like it or not as this may be the most appropriate way to include CP symmetry violation - recall that tachyons have imaginary mass). We require imaginary numbers for the mathematical modeling to be complete, however we also admit that we might not be able to observe this part of "reality" (although we may use the Kramers-Kronig Relation for some implications), and therefore anticipate that any observer should be able to measure half (at most) of the dynamic variables present in any given experiment.

One of these E8's is a corrected version of Garrett Lisi's E8 TOE (he never should have had bosons and fermions in the same lattice representation - they should be in reciprocal lattices to one another). If we break these E8's into H4's (such that E8~H4xH4*), then we may have an H4xH4* representation that is similar to Edwin Klingman's 4 particles and 4 fields - I don't think that Ed is necessarily wrong - I think that his model might use the same triality symmetry for color and generations, and is not complete.

Each point in the toroidal lattice is the end of a string (that should be rotating in response to the tetrahedra). Within the Black Hole, these strings expand outwards as Sreenath's logarithmic spirals until the scale is "diluted" enough that we have a reasonably flat, continuously-differentiable spacetime outside of the Event Horizon.

If these strings also rotate (as implied above), and have the dimensional (probably extra-dimensional because it has different scales for gravity and electromagnetism?) equivalent of "screw-threads", then the strings may behave like Alan Lowey's Archimedes' Screw idea to transfer force along the direction of the string (now an infinitely-thin "flexible screw").

Please wrap your brain around that and let me know what you think?

Have Fun!

Dr. Cosmic Ray

Ray

That looks absolutely spot on to me, I think it's a done deal. Some may accuse you of foolishly missing Buriden's ass, but as two fall out of the equation anyway you end up with SUSY.

The only issue is it's now precisely equivalent to the theory in Tommy Gilbertson's essay! How fast are your publishers?

Having fun

Peter

Tom and/or Ray,

Tom speaks of "a clear explanation of why supersymmetry plays such an important role in modern physical theory."

Just why does supersymmetry play such an important role in modern physics? Since superpartners have not been observed at the same masses as the Standard Model particles, super symmetry cannot be an exact symmetry.

When I first tried to understand why SUSY was deemed so important, it seemed that it simply made it easier to cancel undesirable artifacts. And then I found Schwarz and Seiberg in the 1999 Review of Modern Physics state: "Boson-fermion cancellation is at the heart of the applications of supersymmetry."

But even this is threatened by the fact that LHC has found no evidence of SUSY. And the important thing is that, even if they do find it in the future, it will imply masses so large that SUSY "will no longer perfectly cancel out the troublesome quantum fluctuations that SUSY was meant to correct." [3 Mar 2011 Nature Vol 471]

At what point does one admit that SUSY was a 'patch' or 'fix' to a problem (or problems) and that the 'fix' isn't there? And that it is a sign of much deeper problems with current theory.

Thanks for playing,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Hi Peter,

I guess I need to read Tommy Gilbertson's essay so that I can figure out how to improve on it!

Have Fun!