Explaining the Lamb shift in classical terms

Corona-virus is bad, but it does have one advantage: more time to work on my hobby ! I finally managed to have a look at what the (in)famous Lamb shift may or may not be. Here is the link to the paper.

I think it’s good. Why? Well… It’s that other so-called ‘high precision test’ of mainstream quantum mechanics (read: quantum field theory)m but so I found it’s just like the rest: ‘Cargo Cult Science.’ [I must acknowledge a fellow amateur physicist and blogger for that reference: it is, apparently, a term coined by Richard Feynman!]

To All: Enjoy and please keep up the good work in these very challenging times !

🙂

Mainstream QM: A Bright Shining Lie

Yesterday night, I got this email from a very bright young physicist: Dr. Oliver Consa. He is someone who – unlike me – does have the required Dr and PhD credentials in physics (I have a drs. title in economics) – and the patience that goes with it – to make some more authoritative statements in the weird world of quantum mechanics. I recommend you click the link in the email (copied below) and read the paper. Please do it!

It is just 12 pages, and it is all extremely revealing. Very discomforting, actually, in light of all the other revelations on fake news in other spheres of life.

Many of us – and, here, I just refer to those who are reading my post – all sort of suspected that some ‘inner circle’ in the academic circuit had cooked things up:the Mystery Wallahs, as I refer to them now. Dr. Consa’s paper shows our suspicion is well-founded.

QUOTE

Dear fellow scientist,

I send you this mail because you have been skeptical about Foundations of Physics. I think that this new paper will be of your interest. Feel free to share it with your colleagues or publish it on the web. I consider it important that this paper serves to open a public debate on this subject.

Something is Rotten in the State of QED
https://vixra.org/pdf/2002.0011v1.pdf

Abstract
“Quantum electrodynamics (QED) is considered the most accurate theory in the history of science. However, this precision is based on a single experimental value: the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron (g-factor). An examination of QED history reveals that this value was obtained using illegitimate mathematical traps, manipulations and tricks. These traps included the fraud of Kroll & Karplus, who acknowledged that they lied in their presentation of the most relevant calculation in QED history. As we will demonstrate in this paper, the Kroll & Karplus scandal was not a unique event. Instead, the scandal represented the fraudulent manner in which physics has been conducted from the creation of QED through today.” (12 pag.)

Best Regards,
Oliver Consa
oliver.consa@gmail.com

UNQUOTE

The Mystery Wallahs

I’ve been working across Asia – mainly South Asia – for over 25 years now. You will google the exact meaning but my definition of a wallah is a someone who deals in something: it may be a street vendor, or a handyman, or anyone who brings something new. I remember I was one of the first to bring modern mountain bikes to India, and they called me a gear wallah—because they were absolute fascinated with the number of gears I had. [Mountain bikes are now back to a 2 by 10 or even a 1 by 11 set-up, but I still like those three plateaux in front on my older bikes—and, yes, my collection is becoming way too large but I just can’t do away with it.]

Any case, let me explain the title of this post. I stumbled on the work of the research group around Herman Batelaan in Nebraska. Absolutely fascinating ! Not only did they actually do the electron double-slit experiment, but their ideas on an actual Stern-Gerlach experiment with electrons are quite interesting: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1031&context=physicsgay

I also want to look at their calculations on momentum exchange between electrons in a beam: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/701/1/012007.

Outright fascinating. Brilliant ! […]

It just makes me wonder: why is the outcome of this 100-year old battle between mainstream hocus-pocus and real physics so undecided?

I’ve come to think of mainstream physicists as peddlers in mysteries—whence the title of my post. It’s a tough conclusion. Physics is supposed to be the King of Science, right? Hence, we shouldn’t doubt it. At the same time, it is kinda comforting to know the battle between truth and lies rages everywhere—including inside of the King of Science.

The ultimate electron model

A rather eminent professor in physics – who has contributed significantly to solving the so-called ‘proton radius puzzle’ – advised me to not think of the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron as an anomaly. It led to a breakthrough in my thinking of what an electron might actually be. The fine-structure constant should be part and parcel of the model, indeed. Check out my last paper ! I’d be grateful for comments !

I know the title of this post sounds really arrogant. It is what it is. Whatever brain I have has been thinking about these issues consciously and unconsciously for many years now. It looks good to me. When everything is said and done, the function of our mind is to make sense. What’s sense-making? I’d define sense-making as creating consistency between (1) the structure of our ideas and theories (which I’ll conveniently define as ‘mathematical’ here) and (2) what we think of as the structure of reality (which I’ll define as ‘physical’).

I started this blog reading Penrose (see the About page of this blog). And then I just put his books aside and started reading Feynman. I think I should start re-reading Penrose. His ‘mind-physics-math’ triangle makes a lot more sense to me now.

PS: I agree the title of my post is excruciatingly arrogant but – believe me – I could have chosen an even more arrogant title. Why? Because I think my electron model actually explains mass. And it does so in a much more straightforward manner than Higgs, or Brout–Englert–Higgs, or Englert–Brout–Higgs–Guralnik–Hagen–Kibble, Anderson–Higgs, Anderson–Higgs–Kibble, Higgs–Kibble, or ABEGHHK’t (for Anderson, Brout, Englert, Guralnik, Hagen, Higgs, Kibble, and ‘t Hooft) do. [I am just trying to attribute the theory here using the Wikipedia article on it.]

The proton radius puzzle solved

I thought I’d stop blogging, but I can’t help it: I think you’d find this topic interesting – and my comments are actually too short for a paper or article, so I thought it would be good to throw it out here.

If you follow the weird world of quantum mechanics with some interest, you will have heard the latest news: the ‘puzzle’ of the charge radius of the proton has been solved. To be precise, a more precise electron-proton scattering experiment by the PRad (proton radius) team using the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at Jefferson Lab has now measured the root mean square (rms) charge radius of the proton as[1]:

r_p = 0.831 ± 0.007_stat ± 0.012_syst fm

If a proton would, somehow, have a pointlike elementary (electric) charge in it, and if it it is in some kind of circular motion (as we presume in Zitterbewegung models of elementary particles), then we can establish a simple relation between the magnetic moment (μ) and the radius (a) of the circular current.

Indeed, the magnetic moment is the current (I) times the surface area of the loop (πa²), and the current is just the product of the elementary charge (q_e) and the frequency (f), which we can calculate as f = c/2πa, i.e. the velocity of the charge[2] divided by the circumference of the loop. We write:Using the Compton radius of an electron (a_e = ħ/m_ec), this yields the correct magnetic moment for the electron[3]:What radius do we get when applying the a = μ/0.24…´10^–10 relation to the (experimentally measured) magnetic moment of a proton? I invite the reader to verify the next calculation using CODATA values:When I first calculated this, I thought: that’s not good enough. I only have the order of magnitude right. However, when multiplying this with √2, we get a value which fits into the 0.831 ± 0.007 interval. To be precise, we get this:

Of course, you will wonder: how can we justify the √2 factor? I am not sure. It is a charge radius. Hence, the electrons will bounce off because of the electromagnetic fields. The magnetic field of the current ring will be some envelope to the current ring itself. We would, therefore, expect the measured charge radius to be larger than the radius of the current ring (a). There are also the intricacies related to the definition of a root mean square (rms) radius.

I feel this cannot be a coincidence: the difference between our ‘theoretical’ value (0.83065 fm) and the last precision measurement (0.831 fm) is only 0.00035 fm, which is only 5% of the statistical standard deviation (0.007 fm). Proton radius solved?

Maybe. Maybe not. The concluding comments of Physics Today were this: “The PRad radius result, about 0.83 fm, agrees with the smaller value from muonic and now electronic hydrogen spectroscopy measurements. With that, it seems the puzzle is resolved, and the discrepancy was likely due to measurement errors. Unfortunately, the conclusion requires no new physics.” (my italics)

I wonder what kind of new physics they are talking about.

Jean Louis Van Belle, 24 January 2020

PS: I did make a paper out of this (see my academia.edu or viXra.org publications), and I shared it with the PRad team at JLAB. Prof. Dr. Ashot Gasparian was kind enough to acknowledge my email and thought “the approach and numbers are interesting.” Let us see what comes out of it. I need to get back to my day job. 🙂

[1] See: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1721-2. See also: https://www.jlab.org/prad/collaboration.html and https://www.jlab.org/experiment-research.

[2] Zitterbewegung models assume an electron consists of a pointlike charge whizzing around some center. The rest mass of the pointlike charge is zero, which is why its velocity is equal to the speed of light. However, because of its motion, it acquires an effective mass – pretty much like a photon, which has mass because of its motion. One can show the effective mass of the pointlike charge – which is a relativistic mass concept – is half the rest mass of the electron: m_γ = m_e/2.

[3] The calculations do away with the niceties of the + or – sign conventions as they focus on the values only. We also invite the reader to add the SI units so as to make sure all equations are consistent from a dimensional point of view. For the values themselves, see the CODATA values on the NIST website (https://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Constants/index.html).