Bob_for_short

That's in addition to the original particle, though. It does not simply convert matter to antimatter.

You are right, of course. I did not mean "inverting" matter into anti-matter but producing additional globally neutral pairs.

...QUESTION: If this is so, couldn't you "slam" charged matter particles, against relativistic electrostatic potentials (millions of volts, or more), and "invert them" into antimatter ??? (Something along the lines of an "matter isospin flip" ???)

Yes, if the energy is sufficient, hitting a particle with a strong potential barrier may produce particle-antiparticle pairs with high probability, just like in particle-particle high energy collisions.

The weird thing with gravity is that it is an acceleration without movement.

Acceleration is a movement feature by definition. Gravity can be felt as a force without motion if it is compensated with an elastic force, for example.

Once movement is used, it becomes indistinguishable from force induced by regular acceleration.

If we speak of macroscopic bodies, the forces should be applied to each body piece proportionally to their masses. Normally we apply an external force at some point or on a surface smaller than the body size so there arise deformations inside the body. It never resembles the gravity action.

I see no problem of having theories with non-observable elements in it.

 

Quantum field theory has quite a few: ghosts , antifields, virtual particles, non-gauge invariant operators... the list goes on.

 

These things have a place in the formulation and are used to get observable results, but I see no reason why they should be thrown away from the start.

The QED output is the real, physical, dressed particles. Why we, knowing the output, cannot use it as an input? Why not work exclusively in terms of physical entities? Maybe because we just do not have the right idea about them yet?

The discrete space can be imagined as a set of pixels and the discrete time can be thought of as refreshing rate of your screen.

eh? this is the normal approach, we are testing theories (quite a few at once) as per normal scientific method.

I do not think so. As long as a theory is not physical - its essential elements are non observable bare particles and renormalizations, it is not a physical method. Why do we close eyes on these mathematical and conceptual problems? How can we count on predicting something new if we start from non existent things?

i don't think its right to compare it to a religion.

 

more, the standard model has already proven itself to be a highly reliable theory and the confirmation of the higgs boson(which it predicts) would be a major piece of evidence in its favour.

Maybe not religion but obsession of theorists to build a TOE, not less. You know, we theorists, are so clever that can guess everything that exists and even what has not been observed yet, - so powerful we are. We do not need many experiments to build theories. We advance theories and see the experiments via our pattern. That's the right scientific approach. Soon the God's particle will be found and our SM theory patch will be justified experimentally.

similarly, the absence of the higgs at the predicted energy regimes would also be hailed as a major scientific break through as it means there is something majorly wrong with standard model.

I really count on absence of Higgs, to tell the truth.

put simply, the presence or absence of the higgs boson will determine the course of quantum physics. its discovery or lack there of will falsify many theories and hypothesis allowing us to concentrate on those that fit best with reality.

That's why I really hope the experiments will make many physicists more sober.

From what I have heard, it is the final particle to make ends meet in SM. They call it a "God's particle" because it can save an otherwise unsatisfactory theory. Higgs boson makes the SM to be a religion with Higgs as the Saviour.

If one considers time inevitably linked to change as measurement parameter, let’s add absolute zero into the equation and theory. This would give us no movement and yet we would still have time! Hmmm.

There are things above T=0K that do not feel time: the conserved functions of motion, for example, the total energy, the total momentum, the total angular momentum, etc., that do not change in time despite motion.

The listed explicitly functions are well known and are additive in particles, but there are the integrals of motion in CM that are not additive in particles. Their number is equal to the number of initial data, I think.

In the mathematical formulation of classical mechanics and general relativity taking infinitesimal changes in time are fine.

Yes, of course, because they are classical theories with abstractions and idealizations. For example, CM is about motion of centers of inertia of macroscopic bodies (3 coordinates suffice). As soon as the body information gets "fluctuating", CM fails. Consider the limit of low intensity of light (few photons per second). The body position gets uncertain due to lack of statistics for good averaging. This is an experimental limitation. In such conditions you cannot collect sufficient information about the initial data and predict the body trajectory with CM.

Classically there is no limit to slicing up intervals of time, infinitesimal is fine (as infinitesimal displacements are also ok).

 

However, based on intuition and arguments from quantum theory one expects that space-time will be come ... "fuzzy". ...

In fact, time flow is not a series of infinitesimal periods but always a series of finite intervals because for a too short interval of time we cannot get sufficient information - information becomes uncertain, unreliable. Take a film camera and try to increase the rate of frames by decreasing the exposition periods. You will arrive at so short expositions that the information on each frame will be too poor or even absent some times (no photons registered on a frame). On the other hand, time serves to follow changes of information on frames, so for certainty the exposition periods cannot be too short or too long.

No one has been able to get a bare quark of any kind. You can get your quarks in quark-antiquark pairs or triplets of either quarks or antiquarks. Recently I've even heard of getting a combination of the above. But I haven't heard of any lone quarks. The reason for this is that the binding energy for the quarks is bigger than the quark mass, so anything that would have enough energy to separate a quark from his buddies would have enough energy to make a quark-antiquark pair instead.

Quarks were conceived as bound entities, let us not forget it. So whatever energy is used to "separate" them, they will always come together.

The reason for this is that the binding energy for the quarks is bigger than the quark mass, so anything that would have enough energy to separate a quark from his buddies would have enough energy to make a quark-antiquark pair instead.

It is popular but not correct explanation because it may still imply some probability of creating separated quarks in pairs. In fact, the only "explanation" is the quark definition as charged species in bound states. In other words, gluons are always meant to be inplace. Unfortunately a "gauge" way of introducing quarks and gluons (via "gauge covariant derivative") makes an illusion that quarks may be free, at least theoretically - if we neglect the gluon field.

If we introduce quarks as quasi-particles in compound systems, there will be no question about their observing as free particles. This way is quite phenomenological and physical.

Very simplified and comprehensible model is given in my "Reformulation instead of Renormalizations" paper (http://arxiv.org/abs/0811.4416).

I think if "no signs of Higgs are observed" everyone will get very excited because our theory will break down. The SM without a Higgs boson would violate unitarity, and this would be visible in WW scattering, causing the cross-section to rise too fast with energy. Since it obviously can't really violate unitarity (we can't have probabilities greater than one) there would need to be a mechanism to slow down the rise (the Higgs boson previously took this role). One possibility would be W-bosons that feel the strong interaction at higher energies, which would be quite revolutionary.

Unfortunately we see the things via pattern of our theories. And our theories have tendencies to be TOE because it is our aspiration and ambition. If Higgs does not exist, that will mean W-boson and all that do not exist either, at least in a way it was meant to be - as gauge fields.

I disagree. It is very phenomenological. We even have indirect evidence for the Higgs boson, since it should contribute to the scattering of other particles by being present in loops. Indeed we find that the SM without the Higgs boson is a poor fit compared to the SM with the Higgs boson, and this even allows us to place limits on the Higgs mass that I mentioned in an earlier post.

When a model is complicated and contains many "free" parameters, some experimental data can be "predicted" (fitted) and this creates an illusion that the model is right. With years we become hostages of our beliefs in our models and close eyes on obvious failures.

For example, the idea of elementarity is contradictory to the idea of interaction because there are "elementary" things that are in permanent interaction (non separable). It is better to speak of a compound complex system with elementary excitations rather than of elementary and separable particles (electron and photon, quark and gluon, etc.). The corresponding mathematics is known but different from "gauge" concept. So absence of Higgs will signify more then just new properties of W-boson at high energies, I think.

I think that is a fair comment. Progress is very slow, especially when you need to reach such high energies. But I think you can see from the Higgs mass limits that we are now homing in on exciting stuff.

I am afraid the excitement may well turn into disappointment with SM when no signs of Higgs are observed. To me Higgs "mechanism" is a highly theoretical (speculative) construction, not phenomenological one (in particle physics at least). I think the right direction is to proceed from non-elementary, permanently coupled things and they are not described with gauge approach.

But going to the trouble to really understand a current scientific theory isn't as much fun as learning just a tiny bit and then coming up with my own crazy theory that appears to be better than the original because of my lack of understanding.

Should a good physical theory predict phenomena that happen always? Yes, of course.

What is a probability of a phenomena that never happens? Zero, of course.

Consider then a Rutherford scattering of an electron from a proton in QED. The first Born approximation gives indeed a Rutherford (or Rutherford-like) cross section and the textbooks represent it as a success. At the same time any scattering is experimentally accompanied with photon radiation. The probability of any photon radiation is equal to unity. So QED predicts a phenomenon that never happens - scattering without radiation.

Only much later, when treating the infra-red catastrophe, QED books correct this QED failure but not before.

I advanced a theory where the radiation is unavoidable: the elastic cross section (i.e., without radiation) is equal to zero, as it should be. Only inclusive cross section is different from zero. In my theory the electron charge and photon degrees of freedom are coupled intrinsically and permanently. They cannot be decoupled unlike QED construction.

But my pet theory is in an embryonic state, it cannot be compared to the fourth-order QED calculations of (g-2) yet due to lack of funding.

That's why we are building the LHC - to find out.

I used to work with supersymmtries and supergravity in particular when I was a student (1979-80). Supergravity was motivated by canceling infinities in some loops, not by any physical observations. I think nothing has changed since.

There is no problem with renormalization, but there is an issue of naturalness, often called the hierarchy problem. The divergence behaves like the cut-off squared, and although the divergence can still be subtracted off as usual, it means that the bare mass has to be fine-tuned to get the physical mass right. Solving this is one of the principle motivations for supersymmetry...

Bravo, you repeated Zinn-Justin's words! But whether the supersymmetry is observed physically or it is just another patch of a nice theory?

Could time be this field?

No, time in physics is not a field. Again, when we speak of fields, we mean forces that change particle positions in time.

By the way, is there any problem with renormalizability because of the scalar massive boson? It is mentioned in

http://ipht.cea.fr/Docspht//articles/t98/118/public/publi.pdf

Are you suggesting there is no field inside a body?

No, on the contrary - outside a body. We cannot check it without a probe body.

I'm not quite getting your point here. We probably agree that the electromagnetic field exists and interacts with charged particles. So what is special about gauge invariance?

Yes, we agree, no doubt. If we speak of E and B, there is no even a notion of gauge invariance, is there? So which physics may be encompassed with the gauge principle?

The particle physicists tend to consider their Standard Model a great success and are very proud of it. Where do you see the big fail?

It is a subject of another thread. I just wanted to say here that there are many other ways of constructing theories, apart from gauge (unphysical) principle.

Well, although we are not in speculations, I will make public my own salad:

"a field is a particle's past".

For a force between two bodies to exist, it is not necessary to have a field everywhere. For example, two bodies connected with a spring. Or two not-completely-separated pieces of a chewing gum. They interact because they are pieces (parts) of something complex? They cannot be ever separated, as a matter of fact. Thus there is no problem with the action-at-a-distance (there is no true separation) and there is no field in each point of space. Only where our probe body is.

...So either the Higgs of the Standard Model does not exist or its mass is probably somewhere in the range of 114-158 GeV....

The Higgs boson was introduced as a patch of an otherwise massless gauge theory, roughly speaking. It is not a God's particle. I will not be surprised if it does not exist.

The "gauge principle" is not physical at all either. It does not come alone in QED but with renormalizations. No wonder if such a way of theory "development" fails. I am for a phenomenological way, with a deep physical phenomenology though.

An example of atmosphere-pressure heat-to-motion transformation

From your explanation, I understand nothing. Could you please develop?

Yes, I can. One particle acts on another. We may say that one particle is a source of a field that exists everywhere. But the true sense of this field is the force term appearing in the second particle equation as an external force. Similarly we may say about the second particle in respect to the first one. In both equations we have the same force depending on the distance between particles. Working with such forces does not cause any physical and mathematical problems. However working with proper fields, for example, calculating their energy, gives infinities and some conceptual problems. I want to say that when we assign an independent meaning to the field, it becomes overly complicated mathematically and physically. Another example is a self-action - when we insert the proper field into the first particle equations of motion.