| Subject: RE: 4-Symmetry Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2002 00:01:35 -0600
Dear Jason,
No, from ANY positive
charge in the universe to any negative charge in the universe, there is
a field and a broken symmetry in the vacuum interchange. What spreads
out from the dipole one makes, e.g., is just that circulation. The
CIRCULATION is what spreads at the speed of light, the moment you make a
dipole or charge (set of composite dipoles).
The question is also a
bit more complex. Think for a moment: Although we have all been taught
to think that "things move in 3-space" as being an obvious universal
truth, that is an utter impossibility! What exists is 4-space, before
observation. "Observation" is a d/dt operator imposed upon an ongoing
4-space process, yielding an instantaneous frozen 3-space snapshot by d/dt(LLLT)
=> LLL.
The problem is that
change itself is a violation of Aristotelian logic, which we imbibed
with our mother's milk, so to speak. Unfortunately, Aristotelian logic
"eats itself" and is incomplete. The age-old problem of change, e.g, is
an example. Heraclitus said it this way: "For a thing to change, it
must turn into something else. But how can a thing be itself and
something else also?" That problem has not been solved, either in
philosophy or physics --- in physics, it's the old "wave-particle
duality" problem that they debated furiously until they finally realized
they were getting nowhere and were not going to get anywhere. So they
just left it as "Well, it's somehow both a wave and a particle and
neither just a wave or just a particle, before it is observed.
Depending upon the conditions of observation/measurement, it will be
observed as either a wave, as a particle, or as a mix of both." And
they called that the "duality principle" and shook hands and quit
arguing.
For the same reason,
the philosophers never solves their own fundamental problems (nature of
being, nature of time, nature of mind, nature of existence, etc.).
Instead, they split into "schools" each of which had a "position",
usually very smoothly and elegantly worded. In short, they substituted
"truth according to authority or position". And all the positions
differed. Still do.
In physics, we do not
know what force, mass, time, charge, and length really are. No one
does. And no definition of any of these, in any dictionary of physics,
is correct or even adequate. For such questions, to see the thinking
and positions and notions, one will have to read the literature of
foundations of physics. Here are some very good ones, e.g.:
And many others, of
course.
For anything to "move"
in 3-space, it must use some time in moving. Hence it actually moves in
4-space. More exactly, it is perceived to have changed position in
space between two or more 3-space frozen snapshots. If there is
absolutely no time, anything in that 3-space (frozen instantaneous
snapshot of the universe) is fixed and does not move at all, but is just
a single frozen snapshot (3-spatial) at one instant.
We mentally perceive
movement in 3-space by a process very similar to how we perceive
"motion" in a so-called motion picture. The actual film (observations)
is just a series of frozen instantaneous snapshots. At any one instant,
there is only a single frozen frame on the screen (in this case, further
passing onto the screen of the observer's mind). The mind continually
recalls the past (particularly the immediate past), and compares the
"now" snapshot with the "then" snapshot just before. Nonetheless, since
we continually recall past snapshots and compare, we "remember" any
change and therefore "see" movement (actually seeing continual different
positions, and comparing them in the mind).
It is the very notion
of "movement of an object through 3-space" that is massively in error in
physics, right across the board. E.g., for this very reason, the common
"illustration" of the EM wave in 3-space, used in all elementary texts,
is just flat wrong and is in fact a terrible thing that confuses the
dickens out of most students and professors. For a succinct statement
of this, here is what the previous Editor of American Journal of
Physics has to say about that stupid diagram:
In an article, Robert
H. Romer,
"Heat is
not a noun," American Journal of Physics, 69(2), Feb. 2001, p.
107-109, in endnote 24, p. 109, Dr. Romer takes to task
"…that dreadful diagram purporting to
show the electric and magnetic fields of a plane wave, as a function of
position (and/or time?) that besmirch the pages of almost every
introductory book. …it is a horrible diagram. 'Misleading' would be too
kind a word; 'wrong' is more accurate." "…perhaps then, for historical
interest, [we should] find out how that diagram came to contaminate our
literature in the first place."
Very few professors in
university make their students aware that there exists a literature
dealing with the foundations of physics, or that there are very serious
problems in physics itself. Physics theory is a set of models, not a
set of absolutes. There is no definition of charge, energy, or force,
e.g. There is no such thing as a separate force acting upon a separate
mass, as taught in mechanics. One easily sees that mass is a component
of force, from F => d/dt(mv), where I use the => as meaning "is
identically".
The EM field in
mass-free space is a quite different beast from the EM field in matter!
Yet nowhere in Maxwell-Heaviside EM does that difference appear, because
the Maxwellians all believed in a material ether. To them, there was no
single point in the entire universe where observable mass was absent.
Today we know that is false (shown by the Michelson-Morley experiments
in the 1880s). But the equations still assume that same material ether,
by assuming that E(vacuum) is identical to E(mass medium). That is
totally untrue. Higher group symmetry electrodynamics such as O(3), is
beginning to identify the E-field in mass free space in a general
relativity fashion: as a curvature of spacetime, and dynamics of that
curvature.
So things do not move
in 3-space. Things moves in 4-space, and we take continual "frozen
3-space snapshots" of it.
Hence the entire
notion of an "EM wave in 3-space" is a non sequitur.
No observable "exists
in time!" No observable (such as mass)
continuously persists in
time, or even in 3-space. To overcome the notion of the concreteness of
mass, one needs to read -- e.g. -- Max Jammer. By definition (quantum
mechanics), observation is 3-spatial; it is that d/dt operator imposed
on an ongoing 4-space process, at one single point in time. So instead
of an observable "existing" (implied, continuously in time), it
continually reappears in 3-space, as
time passes. We may say that appears continually, but does
not exist continuously.
The real debate (and
it is still ongoing and unsolved) is how to deal with that situation.
Do we say that it really does continuously exist in 4-space, as a
continuous dynamic process, and that the discontinuities are an
artificial anachronism of the peculiar differentiating process used for
observation? Or do we say that observably it does not continually
exist? Or are they both true somehow, and just different sides of the
same coin -- analogous to the wave-particle duality principle? After
all, a wave has to exist in time, else it is not "waving". A particle,
however, is an observable and hence a 3-space object. And so on.
Again, this is the old "accursed necessity for the identity of
opposites" that so defeated the philosophers (because it defeats
Aristotelian logic, in that the law that "A or not-A" is somehow
violated and not violated at the same time, so that we must somehow
understand how "A or not-A" is identical to "A and not-A"
simultaneously. I can give an analogy of a black marble and a dark red
marble. To a color-blind observer, he cannot distinguish any difference
between the red and black marble, hence they are "identical" if by
identical we mean "indistinguishable". On the other hand, they are
easily distinguished by an observer with color vision. I used this sort
of thing to take a position that identity was not absolute, at least
"observed identity" wasn't, but a condition of the observation process.
Change the process, and two things that are identical need no longer be
identical. At least this agreed with the duality notion of physics, and
it also allowed a five-law logic as an extension of Aristotelian logic,
which became very valuable in that many otherwise intractable problems
suddenly became tractable.
As you can see, much
of physics still needs a very dramatic overhaul. Sadly, the very ones
who should be insisting on this great revision and overhaul, and funding
it, are the ones who would not touch it with a 10-foot pole: the
National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Science.
Meanwhile, we struggle
with many little notions that we "imbibed with our mother's milk", to
quote Einstein, and which are just not true. He said it beautifully, as
follows:
"...the scientist makes use of a whole arsenal of concepts which he
imbibed practically with his mother's milk; and seldom if ever is he
aware of the eternally problematic character of his concepts. He uses
this conceptual material, or, speaking more exactly, these conceptual
tools of thought, as something obviously, immutably given; something
having an objective value of truth which is hardly even, and in any case
not seriously, to be doubted. ...in the interests of science it is
necessary over and over again to engage in the critique of these
fundamental concepts, in order that we may not unconsciously be ruled by
them."
[Albert Einstein, "Foreword," in Max Jammer, Concepts of Space: The
History of Theories of Space in Physics, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969, p. xi-xii.]
So
"movement through space" and "3-space propagation" etc. are concepts
that are seriously flawed -- and desperately need revision. You can
have change of 3-space position in 4-space, but not in 3-space alone.
Hope this
helps a bit.
Tom
Bearden
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