Thanks to three decades of rust, I need to spend significant time in review before I get Hans' dissertation to attempt to follow his original argument.
In the meantime, here's a potential paradox: why doesn't a constant moving charge generate electromagnetic waves? The static solutions become time changing in a plenty nonlinear fashion. Do any of the textbooks have a rigorous derivation of why a moving charge doesn't radiate? My memory is foggy on the subject.
A charge moving at constant velocity doesn't radiate - only accelerating charges radiate. Equivalently, you need to create time-varying fields to trigger radiation.
If a charge moves past me, I am in a time varying field.
I know that a constantly moving charge doesn't radiate. I just don't recall a rigorous mathematical proof that the time varying terms cancel out exactly so that there is no radiation.
When I first read model instead of calculate I thought computer models (Global warming, et al),
but none the less when the screen didn't burst into flame when I held crossed drafting pencils before it, I read on.
Sadly, I have the impression that even in STEM peer review is far to often accepted rather than reproducible results.
Engineering; KISS seems forgotten, be it a car or a coffee pot, hard to find the functional components wrapped by and buried under the bells and whistles.
All power to Dr. Schantz. I have enjoyed his fictional writings, and tried to puzzle my way around Fields & Energy.
I share his contempt for "peer review", having been involved in the process myself as both author and reviewer. Done right, "peer review" involves major energy inputs for very minor improvements (at best). As the world moves towards on-line journals, there is no need for anonymous "peer review". Instead, let anyone with comments put his name & reputation on the line, step forward into the glare and explain his views, whether supportive or contrary. There is no need for anonymity. And if papers attract no comments, that might be a good measure of how little those "publish or perish" papers are worth.
On a substantive level, a factor about physics today which concerns me is that almost everyone simply accepts "time". We can't even discuss time without involving time. I have a niggling feeling there is a great mystery buried in the obvious fact of the continual passage of time.
Great insights from Dr Schantz that would have otherwise been lost to readers had he been swallowed up by the quicksand of mediocrity that is the higher education system. A million breaths of fresh air.
Great interview, I have too much to say for a comment, so maybe it will become a post.
Hans: "any model of radiation requires at least two charges .... The single-charge reductionism of the conventional approach leads to any number of problems and misconceptions."
True, and this has caused all sorts of problems. The very definition of the electric field depends on an imaginary charged test particle which somehow does not affect the field. Nonsense! The Dirac equation tries to describe a single electron, originally in the least comprehensible way, but when clarified and made concrete and visualizable, after taking out the position probability density, the velocity, the spin plane and the phase - there is still a term left which overrides all of these which nobody can explain except to posit that it represents the effects of all the other electrons in the universe. (See my post on "beta".) Cramer's transactional interpretation of QM and, in more detail and more comprehensibly, Carver Mead's "Collective Electrodynamics" as well as theoretical reasons and experimental evidence that are hard to refute, say that a charge cannot emit energy without a specific charge to absorb that energy which is determined at the instant of emission, even if they are separated by many light-years, for instance a single electron in a distant star and a single molecule in your retina. For the light, no time at all passes between emission and absorption. All QM formalisms have not only regular "retarded waves" moving forward in time from emitter to absorber, but conjugate "advanced waves" moving backward in time from absorber to emitter.
As I wrote in a comment on The Tree of Woe post "Escaping the Black Iron Prison", 2022:
"Carver Mead's Collective Electrodynamics is a pretty short and comprehensible book which explains things better than I can,, using the example of the quantum behavior of macroscopic superconducting loops rather than subatomic particles. As I understand his explanation, an electron can't emit a photon unless it is in perfect resonance with the absorbing electron, which is a very rare and sensitive thing. This resonance occurs through the universal wave function, which propagates forward (psi) and backward in time (psi-star). The resonance between the two, though, has an asymmetry in time, starting off relatively slow until there is a phase-lock between emitter and absorber which then rapidly increases the resonance until there is a transfer of energy from the emitter to the absorber, the latter being distinguished only by its being later in time. This burst of resonance is seen as "the collapse of the wave function". (Carver Mead, I should say for those who have never heard of him, is an extremely respected professor at Caltech, the godfather of the modern electronics industry, Moore's Law would better have been named Mead's Law (Moore went to him to find out if the trend he had noticed could continue). He also taught courses with Feynman, co-wrote the seminal textbook in chip design, and founded several successful companies.)" His book "Collective Electrodynamics" is exceptionally clear, only about 130 pages long, and well worth reading. Despite his eminence, and having worked on the theory intermittently for most of his career, his ideas got virtually no traction.
For much easier, indeed fun, and even more iconoclastic articles on electricity and EM fields see Bill Beatty's great site: http://amasci.com/ele-edu.html , which has been up since 1994. I used his articles extensively in teaching electronics theory to smart elementary school kids. (For practical electronics, we used Forrest Mimms "Getting Started in Electronics".)
Hans wrote: "In my theory, electromagnetism is due to two things: non-local fields that behave like waves, and local energy that – in the quantum limit – behaves like particles. Fields propagate like waves. Energy flows along specific paths and behaves like particles in the quantum limit."
This sounds a lot like von Neumann's process I vs. process II, or as I like to put it: "its a wave when it's going somewhere and a particle when it gets there", or more controversially: "particles do not propagate, nor do waves interact". But the truth is there can be no fields without charges and currents and vice versa. Maxwell's equations are completely equivalent to: “the gradient of the field is equal to the current”, with the field being the unified electromagnetic field, the gradient being the rate of change both spatially and temporally, and the current being the 4-D charge current, so that a charge at rest still is a current flowing down the time dimension. (An electron is never truly at rest, though, see below.) From this, it is clear that the EM field is inseparable from charge and its motions, there cannot be one without the other. One can't just describe the fields by themselves, one must describe the particles as well, but QM was carefully designed to be as incomprehensible as possible.
Here's a visualizable model for the electron: in a hydrogen atom, the electron really does orbit the proton. De Broglie's matter waves were conceived as circular motions of a point particle, with the frequency found by noticing that energy is equivalent to both mass and frequency, the former scaled by c-squared and the latter by Planck's constant. Schrodinger worked out the implications for the Dirac (electron) equation, calling the phenomenon "zitterbewegung", meaning "trembling motion". It is of very high frequency - 1.6E21 Hz = 1.6 zettaherz, or billion trillion cycles per second, double that of the De Broglie wave of an electron.
The orientation of the helix (clockwise / counterclockwise) is the electron spin, the curvature of the helix is the electron mass, the angle of the particle around the helix is the electron phase, and the helical motion creates a static magnetic dipole and a rotating electric dipole. This is David Hestenes' zitter theory of the electron, borne out by the discovery an absorption of 81.1MeV electrons in silicon crystals, due to the spatial zitter frequency and its electric dipole lining up at that speed with the spatial period of the crystal lattice. Before Hestenes' explanation, the experimental results were so unexpected as to be implausible to most of the reviewers at the journal Physical Review Letters. (It should be noted that electrons can move in more complicated ways than single simple helices, and superpositions are possible.)
It seems to me that this actually makes time simpler - if both light and electrons are constrained to move at c, then time for either sort of particle, rather than being some mysterious quantity with a square opposite in sign to the other dimensions (the spacetime metric, a.k.a. the Pythagorean theorem for spacetime is: x^2 + y^2 + z^2 - (ct)^2 = 1 - (v/c)^2 when v=c becomes instead simply a distance, the hypotenuse in x^2 y^2 z^2 = ct^2.
So in the zitter model, an electron can only ever move at the speed of light, when at rest, it moves in small circles (about 2.4 pm across at minimum, the Compton radius for an electron, (= h-bar/(m_e*c)) less than 1/15th of a hydrogen atom radius). When plotting this circular motion over time, one sees a helix. The helix is the true form of all waves – it's three orthogonal views are circular motion, cosine, and sine. A wave is always all three of these. (To teach a little essential trig to elementary school students, I made a helix of coat-hanger wire with a little ball of aluminum foil that I could slide down the helix. Looking down the helix, one could see the phase of the ball change as it moved around in a circle. Another ball or piece of tape served as a reference marker so one could measure the phase angle around the circle, one can only measure differences in phase, there is no “absolute phase” without reference to some marker, a crucial point that is the basis for much obscurity about “gauge theories”.
*
Another angle on the mysteries of physics is noticing how much is based on of area and frequency. All the following relations and many others can easily be seen graphically on the Physical Units Factor Tables. (See my earliest Substack post.) Each of these the following quantities is the time rate of change of the one before it:
moment of inertia (= mass*area, kg*(m*m) )
angular momentum,
energy,
power
which is also to say that each is multiplied by a successive power of frequency (Hz^{0,1,2,3}).
All those also have a factor of area in square meters in the numerator, and no other factors of distance or volume or any other geometric quantity, and the same is true of:
specific energy ( = area / frequency^2 = velocity^2 = m*m/(s*s))
magnetic flux (Weber, Wb; angular momentum / charge)
electric potential (Volt, V; energy / charge)
inductance (Henry, H; moment of inertia / charge squared)
inverse capacitance (1/Farad, daraf; energy / charge squared; electric potential / charge)
as well as quantities derived from these, such as heat capacity and thermal conductance, which are energy and power per temperature (Joules/Kelvin, Watts/Kelvin) respectively; any of the above units divided by temperature but without any other factors is also fundamentally and geometrically an “area” quantity. None of these quantities has a factor of time in the numerator, all but moment of inertia and inductance have at least one factor of frequency in the numerator. This is deliberately obscured by senselessly using current (charge/time) rather than charge as the base unit in the SI system.
Enon, you and Hans should connect directly if you haven't already. You're both super-smart independent thinkers and would really hit it off. Happy to make an email intro.
Ah! Now I understand. The novella is not yet available for sale. What one has to do is navigate one's way through the minefield of "fundmycomic", make a contribution, and claim the novella for future delivery as a reward. Seems like the owners of "fundmycomic" could boost their business substantially if they hired someone to make their site more intuitive and user friendly.
Thanks to three decades of rust, I need to spend significant time in review before I get Hans' dissertation to attempt to follow his original argument.
In the meantime, here's a potential paradox: why doesn't a constant moving charge generate electromagnetic waves? The static solutions become time changing in a plenty nonlinear fashion. Do any of the textbooks have a rigorous derivation of why a moving charge doesn't radiate? My memory is foggy on the subject.
A charge moving at constant velocity doesn't radiate - only accelerating charges radiate. Equivalently, you need to create time-varying fields to trigger radiation.
If a charge moves past me, I am in a time varying field.
I know that a constantly moving charge doesn't radiate. I just don't recall a rigorous mathematical proof that the time varying terms cancel out exactly so that there is no radiation.
You're not radiating. The question is whether the moving charge is radiating. From the perspective of the moving charge, the fields are static.
When I first read model instead of calculate I thought computer models (Global warming, et al),
but none the less when the screen didn't burst into flame when I held crossed drafting pencils before it, I read on.
Sadly, I have the impression that even in STEM peer review is far to often accepted rather than reproducible results.
Engineering; KISS seems forgotten, be it a car or a coffee pot, hard to find the functional components wrapped by and buried under the bells and whistles.
All power to Dr. Schantz. I have enjoyed his fictional writings, and tried to puzzle my way around Fields & Energy.
I share his contempt for "peer review", having been involved in the process myself as both author and reviewer. Done right, "peer review" involves major energy inputs for very minor improvements (at best). As the world moves towards on-line journals, there is no need for anonymous "peer review". Instead, let anyone with comments put his name & reputation on the line, step forward into the glare and explain his views, whether supportive or contrary. There is no need for anonymity. And if papers attract no comments, that might be a good measure of how little those "publish or perish" papers are worth.
On a substantive level, a factor about physics today which concerns me is that almost everyone simply accepts "time". We can't even discuss time without involving time. I have a niggling feeling there is a great mystery buried in the obvious fact of the continual passage of time.
I'm not sure if your lines "all power to Dr Schantz" and "peer review involves major energy inputs" were intentional puns but I hope so!
My head hurts... this is pretty much the polar opposite of what I'm versed in.
But it is also educational, maybe? I mean, it's a bit hard to have a valid opinion either way when one's understanding of magnets is on the ICP-level.
But.
A+ for the S.P.Q.R. Not the easiest acronym to make something of.
So Pleased, Quite Relieved you like it.
Aether is implacable and will eventually break back into scientific understanding
Alchemy and astrology are right on its heels
This is the most awesome interview I have read in ages.
Mind blown.
Great insights from Dr Schantz that would have otherwise been lost to readers had he been swallowed up by the quicksand of mediocrity that is the higher education system. A million breaths of fresh air.
Great interview, I have too much to say for a comment, so maybe it will become a post.
Hans: "any model of radiation requires at least two charges .... The single-charge reductionism of the conventional approach leads to any number of problems and misconceptions."
True, and this has caused all sorts of problems. The very definition of the electric field depends on an imaginary charged test particle which somehow does not affect the field. Nonsense! The Dirac equation tries to describe a single electron, originally in the least comprehensible way, but when clarified and made concrete and visualizable, after taking out the position probability density, the velocity, the spin plane and the phase - there is still a term left which overrides all of these which nobody can explain except to posit that it represents the effects of all the other electrons in the universe. (See my post on "beta".) Cramer's transactional interpretation of QM and, in more detail and more comprehensibly, Carver Mead's "Collective Electrodynamics" as well as theoretical reasons and experimental evidence that are hard to refute, say that a charge cannot emit energy without a specific charge to absorb that energy which is determined at the instant of emission, even if they are separated by many light-years, for instance a single electron in a distant star and a single molecule in your retina. For the light, no time at all passes between emission and absorption. All QM formalisms have not only regular "retarded waves" moving forward in time from emitter to absorber, but conjugate "advanced waves" moving backward in time from absorber to emitter.
As I wrote in a comment on The Tree of Woe post "Escaping the Black Iron Prison", 2022:
"Carver Mead's Collective Electrodynamics is a pretty short and comprehensible book which explains things better than I can,, using the example of the quantum behavior of macroscopic superconducting loops rather than subatomic particles. As I understand his explanation, an electron can't emit a photon unless it is in perfect resonance with the absorbing electron, which is a very rare and sensitive thing. This resonance occurs through the universal wave function, which propagates forward (psi) and backward in time (psi-star). The resonance between the two, though, has an asymmetry in time, starting off relatively slow until there is a phase-lock between emitter and absorber which then rapidly increases the resonance until there is a transfer of energy from the emitter to the absorber, the latter being distinguished only by its being later in time. This burst of resonance is seen as "the collapse of the wave function". (Carver Mead, I should say for those who have never heard of him, is an extremely respected professor at Caltech, the godfather of the modern electronics industry, Moore's Law would better have been named Mead's Law (Moore went to him to find out if the trend he had noticed could continue). He also taught courses with Feynman, co-wrote the seminal textbook in chip design, and founded several successful companies.)" His book "Collective Electrodynamics" is exceptionally clear, only about 130 pages long, and well worth reading. Despite his eminence, and having worked on the theory intermittently for most of his career, his ideas got virtually no traction.
For much easier, indeed fun, and even more iconoclastic articles on electricity and EM fields see Bill Beatty's great site: http://amasci.com/ele-edu.html , which has been up since 1994. I used his articles extensively in teaching electronics theory to smart elementary school kids. (For practical electronics, we used Forrest Mimms "Getting Started in Electronics".)
Hans wrote: "In my theory, electromagnetism is due to two things: non-local fields that behave like waves, and local energy that – in the quantum limit – behaves like particles. Fields propagate like waves. Energy flows along specific paths and behaves like particles in the quantum limit."
This sounds a lot like von Neumann's process I vs. process II, or as I like to put it: "its a wave when it's going somewhere and a particle when it gets there", or more controversially: "particles do not propagate, nor do waves interact". But the truth is there can be no fields without charges and currents and vice versa. Maxwell's equations are completely equivalent to: “the gradient of the field is equal to the current”, with the field being the unified electromagnetic field, the gradient being the rate of change both spatially and temporally, and the current being the 4-D charge current, so that a charge at rest still is a current flowing down the time dimension. (An electron is never truly at rest, though, see below.) From this, it is clear that the EM field is inseparable from charge and its motions, there cannot be one without the other. One can't just describe the fields by themselves, one must describe the particles as well, but QM was carefully designed to be as incomprehensible as possible.
Here's a visualizable model for the electron: in a hydrogen atom, the electron really does orbit the proton. De Broglie's matter waves were conceived as circular motions of a point particle, with the frequency found by noticing that energy is equivalent to both mass and frequency, the former scaled by c-squared and the latter by Planck's constant. Schrodinger worked out the implications for the Dirac (electron) equation, calling the phenomenon "zitterbewegung", meaning "trembling motion". It is of very high frequency - 1.6E21 Hz = 1.6 zettaherz, or billion trillion cycles per second, double that of the De Broglie wave of an electron.
The orientation of the helix (clockwise / counterclockwise) is the electron spin, the curvature of the helix is the electron mass, the angle of the particle around the helix is the electron phase, and the helical motion creates a static magnetic dipole and a rotating electric dipole. This is David Hestenes' zitter theory of the electron, borne out by the discovery an absorption of 81.1MeV electrons in silicon crystals, due to the spatial zitter frequency and its electric dipole lining up at that speed with the spatial period of the crystal lattice. Before Hestenes' explanation, the experimental results were so unexpected as to be implausible to most of the reviewers at the journal Physical Review Letters. (It should be noted that electrons can move in more complicated ways than single simple helices, and superpositions are possible.)
It seems to me that this actually makes time simpler - if both light and electrons are constrained to move at c, then time for either sort of particle, rather than being some mysterious quantity with a square opposite in sign to the other dimensions (the spacetime metric, a.k.a. the Pythagorean theorem for spacetime is: x^2 + y^2 + z^2 - (ct)^2 = 1 - (v/c)^2 when v=c becomes instead simply a distance, the hypotenuse in x^2 y^2 z^2 = ct^2.
So in the zitter model, an electron can only ever move at the speed of light, when at rest, it moves in small circles (about 2.4 pm across at minimum, the Compton radius for an electron, (= h-bar/(m_e*c)) less than 1/15th of a hydrogen atom radius). When plotting this circular motion over time, one sees a helix. The helix is the true form of all waves – it's three orthogonal views are circular motion, cosine, and sine. A wave is always all three of these. (To teach a little essential trig to elementary school students, I made a helix of coat-hanger wire with a little ball of aluminum foil that I could slide down the helix. Looking down the helix, one could see the phase of the ball change as it moved around in a circle. Another ball or piece of tape served as a reference marker so one could measure the phase angle around the circle, one can only measure differences in phase, there is no “absolute phase” without reference to some marker, a crucial point that is the basis for much obscurity about “gauge theories”.
*
Another angle on the mysteries of physics is noticing how much is based on of area and frequency. All the following relations and many others can easily be seen graphically on the Physical Units Factor Tables. (See my earliest Substack post.) Each of these the following quantities is the time rate of change of the one before it:
moment of inertia (= mass*area, kg*(m*m) )
angular momentum,
energy,
power
which is also to say that each is multiplied by a successive power of frequency (Hz^{0,1,2,3}).
All those also have a factor of area in square meters in the numerator, and no other factors of distance or volume or any other geometric quantity, and the same is true of:
specific energy ( = area / frequency^2 = velocity^2 = m*m/(s*s))
magnetic flux (Weber, Wb; angular momentum / charge)
electric potential (Volt, V; energy / charge)
inductance (Henry, H; moment of inertia / charge squared)
resistance (Ohm, Ω; angular momentum / charge squared; magnetic flux / charge)
inverse capacitance (1/Farad, daraf; energy / charge squared; electric potential / charge)
as well as quantities derived from these, such as heat capacity and thermal conductance, which are energy and power per temperature (Joules/Kelvin, Watts/Kelvin) respectively; any of the above units divided by temperature but without any other factors is also fundamentally and geometrically an “area” quantity. None of these quantities has a factor of time in the numerator, all but moment of inertia and inductance have at least one factor of frequency in the numerator. This is deliberately obscured by senselessly using current (charge/time) rather than charge as the base unit in the SI system.
Enon, you and Hans should connect directly if you haven't already. You're both super-smart independent thinkers and would really hit it off. Happy to make an email intro.
Feel free to send @Enon my email, @Tree of Woe.
Thanks.
Plese excuse me for asking a basic question -- where is the "Split Decision" novella available?
Ah! Now I understand. The novella is not yet available for sale. What one has to do is navigate one's way through the minefield of "fundmycomic", make a contribution, and claim the novella for future delivery as a reward. Seems like the owners of "fundmycomic" could boost their business substantially if they hired someone to make their site more intuitive and user friendly.