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    By Doug Sweetser | July 9th 2012 11:31 PM | 5 comments | Print | E-mail | Track Comments
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    About Doug

    Trying to be a semi-pro amateur physicist (yes I accept special relativity is right!). I _had_ my own effort to unify gravity with other forces in...

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    The Higgs has been discovered, so this is the last of my Monday/Tuesday weekly blogs.  Blogging at Science 2.0 achieved my primary goal: debunking my GEM unified field proposal.  Part of that work suggested there was "no stinkin' Higgs".  The announcement from the LHC on July 4 of the Higgs discovery showed that technical speculation was in error. Don't believe the 1 in a million of being wrong PR however.  The spin of the particle detected remains to be shown in the data.


    I am using the Higgs discovery as an excuse to stop weekly blogging.  It is a huge effort to create content on that time scale, particularly since these are not reports as much as research efforts, pushing my own boundaries of what I have figured out, or not figured out as the case may be.

    A summary of my efforts here should be written in about a month or so to close this chapter of my investigative work.

    As to the future, that is always open, including blogging at Science 2.0.  I could imagine a blog quarterly, or perhaps once a month, but only if they had received a bit of editorial review first.  I have a web site, so I could pre-publish there, get some feedback, refine, make a backup Mathematica notebook, then go live.  Improving the quality of my efforts is of interest to me.  If you have any specific ideas, do feel free to contact me here or through email.

    Or not.  There are many technical speculations I have that require quite a bit of work to try and flush out.  I am making contacts with a small cluster of serious folks and we will have to see if we can make a productive working group.  I can easily imagine spending a few years to put a collection of these research bits together before blogging again.

    Thanks for this open forum.

    Doug
    sweetser@alum.mit.edu

    Comments

    vongehr
    My respect - you keep your promise after all. Seems you are one of the very few who might just be able to change themselves.
    If you have any specific ideas
    My idea is still the same and specific: Leave the fundamental stuff alone, especially if doing it alone, and look either for a more hands on project (there are so many out there that would welcome help) or for participating in a project on fundamental physics but guided by somebody (try my QRC or MW-EPR perhaps). It is sad to see your skills and time being wasted. Your intuition on what is a promising idea and likely true (no Higgs, quaternions) is too often mistaken, that is all, but this small handicap alone should not stop you, as little as missing math skills stopped Einstein.
    Sascha Vongehr | 07/10/12 | 01:27 AM
    "Improving the quality of my efforts is of interest to me. If you have any specific ideas, do feel free to contact me here or through email."

    Some advice on process:
    It's not clear what your goal is anymore, and your logic always becomes more problematic once you started allowing yourself to change ideas in the middle of investigating something. So my advice would be to clearly define your goal before you start looking at something. Then clearly define any object you want to investigate, and then take care to carefully derive each statement from the preceeding information. Playing word-association leads to logically disconnected statements, so be careful not to misuse analogies.

    In short, take great effort to make sure you are presenting an idea and deriving the consequences of that idea. It sounds obvious, it sounds simple, but it has been missing since the days of presenting a Lagrangian and seeing what the consequences are.

    That is advice on process. Advice on content, if you want to continue using quaternions, is to follow up with previous discussion to really figure out the specifics of "coordinate changes" of quaternions, and whether you are going to consider them a number or a vector instead of a constantly changing between the two when it is convenient to you. I think that discussion was getting to the real heart of the issues more than any other.

    Good luck on your quest.

    CuriousReader (not verified) | 07/10/12 | 01:44 AM
    fundamentally
    The Higgs particle is very sparse. Its field must be abundant. Still it only induces inertia. It does not explain the curvature of space in the neighborhood of massive particles. Any theory about mass must explain both aspects and must explain how they are linked, because both aspects are characterized by the value of the property "(rest) mass" of particles.
    The Higgs theory does not resolve this dilemma. It only makes it more obscure. It only targets inertia.
    In order to implement inertia, the Higgs field must be very sticky. And it must appear everywhere in universe where massive particles exist.
    A field with such functionality exists!. At every location in universe it is possible to construct the local superposition of the tails of the quantum state functions of all particles that exist in universe. The influence of quantum state functions decreases with distance. However, the number of particles for which the tail of the quantum state function contributes to the local superposition increases with that distance. This second effect wins! The result is a very strong field at every location in space. The field is isotropic, because all differences between contributors are averaged away. The background acts as one large solid mass that is located in all directions at a very large distance. The next step is an application of field theory. As long as a locally considered particle moves uniformly, nothing happens. However, a change in the speed goes together with the existence of an extra field that counteracts the acceleration. This is exactly the effect of inertia!
    The matter is explained in more detail in the paper of Denis Sciama, "On the origin of inertia" (1953, more than ten years before Higgs and his colleagues published their ideas). Sciama uses a universe wide integral balance equation.
    The effect of mass on local curvature can be explained by considering the Dirac equation as a kind of differential balance equation. On the one hand it contains a drain term in the form of a divergence of the quantum state function. On the other hand it contains a source term in the form of the background field (the equivalent of the Higgs field). The currents that provide the coupling cause the compression of space that is responsible for curvature.
    Thus balance equations explain both inertia and gravitation.    
    —
    If you think, think twice
    Hans van Leunen | 07/10/12 | 03:47 AM
    My advice:
    Basically do what you were doing before with your Lagrangians. Specify what you want, use your best understanding to construct something you think will do that, and then test your hypothesis and be honest with yourself. If you just slowed down (I like your idea of articles once a month) and took the time to learn before zipping onto a disconnected idea, I think you would gain a lot more from the process.

    You could even just write your lofty goal of the month, and let people fill up tons of discussion trying to work out the goal. Then post your well thought out monthly response (liberally borrowing from the discussion results if you need to). This would give you more time to think, and also could invert the situation to people figuring out valid paths for you instead of showing errors in paths you pull out of your hat.

    Whatever you do, just be careful not to insulate yourself if you want to continue improving.
    I've seen way too many engineers (not that you are an engineer, but it just seems more common with engineers) get in their 50's and turn into crackpots. The internet lets them huddle into self-reinforcing groups and it is just sad. There's one site a friend showed me where an engineer who can do a decent amount of math, and doesn't deny relativity outright, is stuck on a conceptual mistake trying to figure out something about a rotating wheel in relativity ... and he and others have been arguing about it for over two years!! now in an isolated (albeit public) forum. No amount of math or logic can convince him he made a mistake, yet he increasingly believes he's discovered something that all the physicists don't understand. Please don't end up like that. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

    LagrangiansForBreakfast (not verified) | 07/11/12 | 02:10 AM
    It deeply saddens me that I actually know who you are referring to there.

    A gradstudent bet an undergrad he couldn't construct a convincing enough explanation to get a crackpot to realize he is wrong. The undergrad gave requirements that the crackpot needed to understand the basics of the subject and at least be accepting of calculus (some crackpots think anything higher than algebra is just mathematical trickery to get to the answer you want). The gradstudent found the guy you are talking about, and the bet was made.

    A lot of us thought it would be fun to watch. It was instead just chillingly sad. I think the undergrad did amazingly well, giving many clear explanations, but the engineer just had this weird bizarre (as you say) logical disconnect that nothing could overcome. It was clear the guy was intelligent, but he just had this blind spot that nothing could illuminate. It actually scared me a bit, for he really truly can't see it, and it made me worry that one day I'll hit a problem that even if it is obvious to everyone else, no amount of effort on my part could make the "light bulb" click on. It sounds terrifying, and I hope I never end up like that engineer.

    Anonymous (not verified) | 07/11/12 | 02:48 AM