Bell's Future Quantum Mechanics - A Novel Interpretation

Hello! Years and years have gone by without a blog. For reasons I do not understand, I appear to...

Future Train Wreck: Mine or Modern Physics talk Next Thursday, Jan. 26

If you are in Cambridge, MA on Thursday, Jan. 26, you can see me live at MIT in room 3-270 from...

Holiday Physics Card, 2016

Just put them in the mail on December 24...It was a fun year of thinking, whether the idea is right...

Unified Mathematical Field Theory Talk

I gave a 15 minute talk at a local Americal Physical Society Meeting.  Here is the title and...

 Doug Sweetser 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 Nature. It ran into quite a number of technically... Read More » Blogroll
Gauge symmetry is a clear, direct idea in EM, as I will detail. This property is essential, [correction: due to redundancy found in the 4-potential description of light and not any issue of the speed of travel for the wave]. Any proposal for gravity must also have [gauge symmetry]. I will show how the Lagrangians I have discussed over the last few months do not have this property, therefore they are wrong. I have altered three titles to say "RETRACTION", including a brief explanation at the start. [Note: the corresponding YouTube video titles have also been marked.] A different Lagrangian I am toying with might have a chance, but that will be discussed at another time.

Click or skip this reading of the blog.
$J^* \boxtimes A \rightarrow J \boxtimes A$

# RETRACTION: Deriving And Fixing The Force Equations (6/5+1)

Oct 31 2011 | comment(s)

RETRACTION: I have decided to retract three blogs (Deriving … 4/5, 5/5, 6/5+1). I was unable to figure out a reasonable statement concerning gauge symmetry. When the blogs were initially written, I focused on the field equations, mainly the Gauss-like law, and ignored the force equations entirely. Finding a solution that works with the the field and force equations were not looked for. A consistent proposal should do all three things (fields, forces, and solutions) with grace. I have concluded it is not possible to achieve these goals with the Lagrangian as written, hence the retraction.
The hypercomplex gravity and unified GEM Lagrange densities was wrong.

# Gravity is a Mystery (in words, no equations)

Oct 24 2011 | comment(s)

Gravity continues to work fine, even though we don't know why. Newton wrote down the first calculus based description. Gravity worked at a distance for reasons beyond our reach. Einstein developed a more accurate description with a little help from his friends, including Grossman, Hilbert and Schwarzschild. "Matter tells space how to warp. And warped space tells matter how to move" is John Wheeler's circular logic jerk. My own work suggests gravity is all about doing close to absolutely nothing, pushed to do trivial harmonic motions because there is other stuff in the Universe.
$U = (cos(\alpha), 0, 0, sin(\alpha))$

Oct 17 2011 | comment(s)

The sixth Snarky Puzzle Answers leads off with the story of a minor controversy.

\begin{align*} Gravity: &\quad\rho = +\nabla^2 \phi \\ EM: &\quad\rho = -\nabla^2 \phi \end{align*}