Farsight

I know why there are no black hole singularities. It's crushingly simple. But the explanation is deemed to be pseudoscience, so I can't share it here.

What the hell are you on about? Illegal moves? This is no game. The is the real thing. History in the making. I do physics, and you guys who learned some physics parrot and sneer and insult and will not read what I say. Do you think I wrote TIME EXPLAINED some wet lunchtime for a laugh? This is what's gone into it. And time is the key. Understanding time is the key that unlocks all the doors of physics.

The concept of time that you find here is nothing new. Maybe five years ago I read Julian Barbour’s 1999 book The End of Time. It didn’t sink in much. It was just another fairly interesting book that I read on my Saturday afternoons on the sofa. A couple of years later I also read About Time by Paul Davies, dating from 1995, but again it was just one book amongst many. I didn’t pay too much attention. I was sleepwalking. But thank you Julian and Paul because something along the lines of time is change became lodged in my mind, and it made me query the speed of light. In August 2006 I got myself into an argument about it on the internet. I remember looking up at my bookshelf and pulling down those books on time, weighing them in my hand, pondering. I resolved to get it down so darn straight that nobody could argue any more. I knew it wasn’t a brand new idea, because it goes back to Aristotle, who was born 2391 years ago and counting. But I could put a fresh slant on it, using catchy conversational language and a tight delivery that would be crystal clear even to the layman. So I wrote a little essay called TIME EXPLAINED and posted it on an internet forum. Even the first version referred to the optical illusions, because I already knew that we take things too much for granted, and seeing is not always believing. Hence I’m very grateful to “echalk” Online Resources For Teachers, and to R Beau Lotto and Edward H Adelson, see http://www.echalk.co.uk/amusements/OpticalIllusions/illusions.htm. That was October 2006. The feedback was interesting. I learned a lot. I learned about Presentism, a philosophical concept introduced by John McTaggart in 1908 in an essay called The Unreality of Time, see http://www.ditext.com/mctaggart/time.html. I found myself siding with Presentism rather than Eternalism, an opposing philosophy that involves the block universe and big problems for free will. A fellow forummer called mganderson flagged up A Hole at the Heart of Physics; A Matter of Time; Special Editions; by George Musser. It was in the September 2002 issue of Scientific American, and I was too mean to buy it. But I read the synopsis. Sorry George, but thanks, and thanks mg. And thanks THoR for vital encouragement when I was flagging. Ditto to amrit, real name Amrit Srecko Šorli, who was ahead of the game but language was a barrier. And thank you yquantum. On 29th October 2006 you recommended a book called “A World Without Time: the forgotten legacy of Godel and Einstein” by Palle Yourgrau, professor of philosophy at the Brandeis University in Massachusetts. This book was published in 2005, and I bought the last copy Amazon had in stock at the.. time. It’s historical and philosophical, and pure gold dust. I was amazed to discover that Einstein thought of time this way too. Not in 1905, but in 1949, when he was at Princeton with Godel. Thanks Palle. I also came across a 1999 paper Quantum Spacetime: what do we know? by Carlo Rovelli, see http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9903045, who said “At the fundamental level we should, simply, forget time”. Thanks Carlo. There’s also Process Physics by Reginald T Cahill, see http://www.scieng.flinders.edu.au/cpes/people/cahill_r/HPS13.pdf dating from 2003. Whilst I didn’t find myself empathising with all aspects, I did find myself empathising strongly with the basic premise that time is process. Thanks Reg. Much of what I learned went into a new improved version of TIME EXPLAINED, which is pretty much what you’ve read here. It’s all just a rehash of an old idea, and isn’t particularly original at all. As to why it’s news to anybody I’m not quite sure. Understanding time seemed to be the key that would open all the doors in physics. It was enough to convince me that I could make a difference. I could break the impasse. And then the fun began.

Sadly Fred, folk here don't want to talk about it. That's why TIME EXPLAINED was chucked into the Pseudoscience and Speculations trashcan. But it's not pseudoscience, time travel is pseudoscience, and TIME EXPLAINED is the best science this forum has seen. I know amrit. He thinks like I do, but English is not his first language, and it's been a barrier.

So just click on my userid in the top left hand corner of this post and then Find all posts by Farsight. Easy peasy. You'll find posts like this: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?p=355414#post355414 I've answered plenty of questions. Plenty. So what's all this childish accusation from you? And you dropped your previous accusation fast enough. Remember your post #76 talking about a single matter that supports my claims? Well I found you one, you ignored it, and you even changed your post #88 at 6:38pm after I'd posted my reply at 6:37pm. You aren't interested in what I've got to say. You're just joining gung-ho into an irrational absurd abusive game of burn the heretic that is still in denial about TIME EXPLAINED and other essays and still will not address them. Then ask me a question about time, energy, mass, et cetera. Jesus Christ, knock on wood! Here you go again. You're in denial, you won't ask questions on my ideas, and you trying to discredit me with stupid childish insults. SLAP!. Wake up and smell the coffee. ********************************************************* How about Neutrinos have mass because they travel slower than light. I could search through it all and give you a big list but you'll find some reason to dismiss them like my list of predictions, then change the subject. Because you're fooling yourself Swanson. You never read BELIEF EXPLAINED did you?

Albers: Yep. Elas: You got it. someguy: You haven't. I thought I owed you guys a little progress report on what I've been doing these last few days. I've got a paper in progress called A qualitative 3+1 dimensional geometrical model: RELATIVITY+. I've been a little stuck on section 8, suffering from being pulled in two different directions towards cosmology and particle physics. But what I now realise is that Severian was right. I didn't intend to destroy The Standard Model, but I do. Utterly. Do you recall what I said about mass? How it's a merely a measure of energy that is not moving in relation to you? Well check this out: The Mystery of Quark Mass MASS EXPLAINED alone kicks the legs out from underneath quarks. All that color and charm is reduced to trash. There's more, lot's more, and if you don't mind I'm keeping it under my hat. But let me tell you this: The Standard Model is holed beneath the waterline, is burning from stem to stern, and is going down fast with all hands. Abandon ship! This is history in the making, guys. Remember you were here.

Shrug. It's simply not true. Check my previous posts: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/search.php?searchid=346746 Sure I can't answer some of the Standard Model curve balls from Severian, but people ask me simple questions, and I can answer them. Pity they aren't questions about Farsight's Ideas, but what does one expect in this quite charming game of burn the heretic. LOL. There will come a day when you move my RELATIVITY+ threads back to Relativity so fast they won't touch the sides. Test of fire my arse. Nobody is testing TIME EXPLAINED or any of the other essays. The only fire round here is personal, and it's directed at me.

I'm glad you're speaking out against this absurdity, Spyman. One day they'll realise it, but right now it's like the shutters are down and there's nobody home. It's quite amazing just how irrational people can be to persuade themselves they don't have to listen to a rational argument. Yes, I do rather enjoy all this. It's rather cruel of me. But it's because I know I'm right. Oh, I'm not right about everything. I will have gotten some things wrong, and I've certainly missed a trick or two with my colourful broad strokes. But not the big stuff. I know that's right. It's time travel that's crackpot, not me. Even now, none of the above has actually tackled TIME EXPLAINED. It's all a bit over their head I guess. OK, back to work.

iNow: I need a little break from time to time. My RELATIVITY+ paper is hard work. And my new-found reticence is because there's something I don't want to give away. You haven't seen a single question that supports my claims? Please refer to the link in my previous post. This is what it says: This "good insight" from BenTheMan supports my claims. The insight is in MASS EXPLAINED, and Ben's post demonstrates is that all his antagonism has come from somebody who hasn't paid any attention to my material. By the way, he's now asking about time on another thread, demonstrating that he hasn't read TIME EXPLAINED either. Quite absurd. Phi is similar to Ben. He dismisses my material without actually reading it. He exhibits conviction, and conviction is a hard nut to crack. But we'll get there. And it sure is going to be fun when the penny drops. Norm: your post noted. I've been thinking of getting in touch with Joao. He's at Imperial College London, a couple of hours away from me. OK, back to work, catch you later. PS: My son is still at school. My daughter is a straight-A student who starts university in three weeks. She's doing Psychology.

Time doesn't move forward in my picture. It does in the commonly-held picture, but not mine. Here's an excerpt:

You're pretty much spot on there Spyman. Mind you, I don't feel bullied. It's more like I'm the star attraction in a game of burn the heretic. Note Ben's ongoing abusive comments above, compare with this... http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showpost.php?p=356323&postcount=219 ...and judge the guy for yourself. Don't think I'm in any way hurt or wounded by all this stuff. I simply must submit my material formally, and meanwhile chitchatting about it on the internet might prove more than unproductive.

I've been busy writing a formal-paper version of my essays. I'm sorry, but I prefer not to answer questions such as Ben's ten posts back until this is complete. It will be several days at least, perhaps a week.

I'm happy with that insane-alien. I don't quite have "bullet point claims", but I hope the summaries I've previously posted up on time and energy are in the right spirit. Here's another one. Sorry it's a bit bulky: Mass, in its barest essence, is a measure of how much energy is not moving with respect to you. A wave in the surf has no mass and it has no surface, because the water has the mass, and the ocean has the surface. But the wave does carry energy/momentum. And it is both intangible and tangible, because it is an action that can bowl you over, so whilst you can’t get hold of it, it can get hold of you. A photon is a different action, a travelling stress that travels through space. The energy of a photon can also be expressed as momentum, a time-based view rather than a distance-based view. And momentum and inertia are related by relative motion. Normally it’s the photon moving, and you feel its momentum when it hits you. But relativity tells us there is no absolute motion, so if it was you moving instead of the photon, you’d feel its inertia when you hit it. But a photon always travels at c, you can't stop a photon can you? Oh yes you can. When we use pair production to convert a photon into an electron, the travelling stress is broken and wrapped into solitons of opposite chirality. The electron is a photon tied in a knot, a moebius loop. In simple terms, it's a photon going round in a circle. It's going nowhere fast, and it isn’t moving with respect to you. Hence momentum is now re-presented as inertia. When you push an object you deform the circle in the direction of motion, creating a partial helix. The travelling stress now moves in a helical path, rather like a spring. The rest mass is the circular component of the path, and the relativistic mass is one turn round the helical path. As you accelerate an object it's like stretching a spring. You can't stretch it straighter than straight, and a particle made out of light can never go faster than the light from which it's made.

INTRODUCTION I’ve always held Albert Einstein in the highest regard. I admire his ability to think outside the box, I empathise with his curiosity, and I share his desire to understand the world in terms we can grasp. And I so love the romance of the lowly patent clerk who applied his fresh young mind to the world’s great mysteries. There he was, in the dying days of horse-drawn transport, dreaming of light, and of space and time. What he came up with was just so profound. It feels like it was ahead of its time, and I suppose it was. It took a long time to catch on, a long time to earn recognition, and a long time to catch the public eye. But when it did, the public were thrilled, as I am thrilled. You find out more when you read about him. You learn of the imperfection, the humanity. You learn that he didn’t do it all, and it wasn’t all right. You learn that some things are incorrectly attributed to him, and that there have been shifts in interpretation that he might not agree with. You also learn of things forgotten. Because he was ahead of his time, and the world wasn’t ready. Because it’s an imperfect world, because people aren’t perfect. That’s how it is, that’s how we are. I ponder at what might have been, if things had turned out different. I muse that if Einstein had lived longer, the world wouldn’t be quite so imperfect. I think he would have achieved his dream of a Theory of Everything, where everything was explained through the geometry he called “pure marble”. I think he would have explained the postulates he used in Special Relativity, and explained why General Relativity works the way it does. I think he would have given us an intuitive understanding of gravity, and energy and mass, and time and space itself. I think he would have laid it all out in terms so simple that we could not have failed to have grasped how the universe works. It would have been something special, something even more thrilling, something that would have made a difference to the way we live. But nobody lives forever. The sands of time ran out for Albert Einstein, and nobody picked up the torch. The light of understanding slipped from our grasp, it spluttered and died. His dream died with him. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The world turns, days go by, years stretch into decades, time passes. And here I am. I’ve found his dream. I share his vision. I know where he was going. I know what he was working on in his twilight years, when he was sidelined, out of the mainstream. He wasn’t just on his own, he was out on his own. But he never got it out. He got close. The signs are there when you know how to look. You see the resonance when you read what he said, not what people say he meant. You see the vision. You see the light. I’ve seen it, and I have to share it. There’s no time to get it perfect so right now it’s just a vision. It doesn’t qualify as a theory. It’s a model at best, a toy model. But everything has to start somewhere, so it still needs a name: RELATIVITY+ There’s already a General Relativity+. But I wanted something with more scope. Something that covers it all. Something more general. And strangely enough, the name RELATIVITY+ fits the bill. Because less is more, because it’s a tale of something and nothing. Once you share his vision, you see how simple it is, and you’ll wonder why you didn’t see it before. I’ll show you how to see it. But first I need to tell you how I got where I am. The story starts in 2006. One fine day I was going about my business when I heard that the Maths Tower at Manchester University was to be demolished. I was shocked. To me it was an inspirational icon of learning, the thing that put the campus on the skyline, on the map, and on the picture postcards. I used to sit on the seventeenth floor in a class, learning about gates and induction from the likes of Tom Kilburn, godfather of Computer Science. I listened intently with the cityscape before me and Jodrell Bank behind. I learned a lot in that Maths Tower. It shaped my life, it was my beacon. And now it’s gone. Yes, I know buildings don’t last forever. But the building that replaced it is the Tin Drum, a thousand-seat lecture theatre for commercial seminars, part of a Social “Sciences” development, which in turn is part of a new vision for a 21st century campus. In this 21st century vision, the new mathematics building isn’t the Maths Building. It’s called AMPSS. It’s shared with other schools. And it’s on the edge of campus. Yes I’m sure it’s more modern, and more practical. But it’s out on a limb. It just isn’t so important any more. And moreover, UMIST is no more. The University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology no longer exists. It has been fused with the rest of The University of Manchester. The prospectus now shouts old stone, a retrograde vision that talks of heritage and 1824 instead of the white heat of modern technology. And the list of Humanities courses is so very much longer than the Engineering and Physical Sciences. Things have changed, and I don’t much like it. Who am I to complain? Computers were the next big thing when I was starting out. Hence I’m in IT, and it’s served me well. I live in a place called Sandbanks. No, not quite Sandbanks, because Sandbanks is next door. I live in a place called Lilliput. There really is such a place. It’s a comfortable world of beach and pool, ten minutes to work, quality of life. There’s time for living and time for wine, and time to do the things you want to do. My interest is physics. It’s more than a hobby. It’s more of a passion, one that has grown deeper as I’ve grown older. I’m deeply curious about the world, I want to know how the universe works. Doesn’t everybody? No. The sound of a stylus slewing across an album. My teenagers don’t. The wife and I have two teenage children, and when the time arose for choices and courses, I was disappointed. Both the boy and the girl have dropped their science subjects. I asked them about it, talked to them. They told me physics at school was dull. They weren’t taking it forward. What can you do? You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. They are simply not interested in science. It’s my fault. I wasn’t paying enough attention, either to them or their schooling. I didn’t notice that the curriculum had changed. I didn’t notice the dumbing down, or how the dead hand of Health & Safety has turned it from Van Der Graaf generators into bookwork and pendulums. I’m not sure of the underlying reasons, but whatever they are, it’s real, it’s happening, and I didn’t realise until it was too late. Suddenly I woke up. I learned of physics departments closing down, and other science departments too, and it set my alarm bells ringing. I read that the number of A-level students taking physics has fallen 56% in 20 years, and I felt a shiver. This is serious. What are you going to do about it? I left it too late for my own children. But perhaps, I said to myself, perhaps I could do something to enthuse other people’s children. Or laymen. Perhaps I could use my skills to make physics a little more interesting, a little more accessible, a little more fun. Maybe I could even appeal to the sort of person who gets the electrician in to replace a halogen spotlight. I say that because there’s a standing joke in our house, that I’m the only one who can change a ****ing lightbulb. But somehow it isn’t funny. If you selected a hundred people at random and tested their technical and scientific knowledge, I think the average score would be lower than that of a similar group from fifty years ago. Yes, we’re more high tech these days, more specialist, and some things are more difficult to understand. But there seems to be more people around who just don’t understand the basics, who have only the vaguest concept of how things work. They wouldn’t know where to start if their car broke down, and some wouldn’t even know how to open the bonnet. It’s like there’s an ebbing tide that doesn’t feel healthy, that slowly, insiduously, is getting worse. Something must be done, I said to myself. And if you want something done, you’ve got to do it yourself. So there I was, determined to make a difference. I do have a skill. It’s subtle, understated, you don’t always see it. Like I was saying, I’ve spent my years in IT, where we work hard to keep things simple. It’s all to do with language, the right language. A good system is clear and understandable, organised in a top-down structured fashion so you can look at a picture and get a feel for it quickly. Then you can dig down a level and get a handle on a few more things, and keep on digging until you get to the bottom of it. Every step of the way you’re seeing order, discipline, clean functionality, understanding. It’s all so easy when you make it look easy. It’s all so obvious when it’s all done right. That’s what Systems Analysis is all about. You call a spade a spade and make sure it does what it says on the can. You learn to think clearly and logically, and when you do it right, nobody knows that you did it right. But you know you did, because you’ve seen what happens when people get it wrong. Because when it’s not done right, when it’s complicated, when you can’t understand it, it means somebody screwed up. And then you wonder how people can get it so wrong. Where would I start? At the beginning of course, with the basic concepts. I’d explain them simply and logically in friendly fashion that made physics fun. After all, as Einstein said: If you can’t explain it to your grandmother, you don’t understand it yourself. No problem. I mean, we’re talking Popular Science, not Rocket Science. Easy, no problem. No problem? Big problem. The problem was that when I tried to explain those basic concepts, I found I couldn’t. I couldn’t explain it to my grandmother. I consulted my books and searched the internet, I delved deep, I read substantial papers, but I just couldn’t find the answers. Then I looked at the mathematics, and thought about it. I applied my Systems Analysis experience. I broke down the problem and shuffled the pieces and checked the functionality of every component. I worked it out. I found what my problem was. Mathematics is a vital tool for physics. We can’t do physics without it. But the basic concepts I was trying to explain is where the mathematics starts. And whilst I take a top-down approach, the mathematics is bottom-up. The basic concepts were base mathematical terms, like E, and m and t and c and g. I was trying to dig under the axioms, the postulates, the things we take for granted. I realised then that whilst mathematics is a vital tool for physics, when it comes to basic concepts, it just doesn’t have a handle. It doesn’t offer any grasp. Don’t get me wrong. With mathematics we calculate and predict, and then conduct experiments to confirm these predictions. It’s vital. But mathematics shouldn’t be the only tool in the box. It can’t do it all. It can’t explain the basic concepts. That’s like trying to understand the Jury System using legal shorthand, or teaching English in a foreign language. You just can’t do it. I understood then why Relativity and Quantum Physics have not been reconciled. Relativity is macroscopic and top down. Quantum Physics is microscopic and bottom up. It isn’t just a gap between them, they’re headed in different directions, and they’ve missed each other. And to get to the bottom of why, I had to get to the bottom of those basic concepts. That’s when the fun began. That’s how I got where I am, and now I’d like you to come with me on a journey. Share the vision. It’s all about basic concepts. Concepts so basic that you’ve never really thought about them. It ends with Albert Einstein’s dream, a world of pure marble geometry. It explains time and energy and mass and charge and gravity and space, in simple conceptual terms that tell you how the universe works. This is what he was working on, and never finished. Godel handed him the key when they were together at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. It’s both disturbing and it’s wonderful. So elegant and so simple, and we were so so close. What a crying shame that Richard Feynman, the "Great Explainer", turned down that Princeton position after the war. I think he might have become Einstein’s successor, carrying the torch. Feynman won joint Nobel Prize for Quantum Electrodynamics in 1965. The gap between QED and Einstein’s twilight work is so easily bridged. If only Einstein had passed on the torch to Feynman. Maybe we would have had a theory of everything by now, a theory that takes the best of Quantum Electrodynamics and Quantum Chromodynamics and blends them into a new improved Relativity. A Relativity that actually explains what gravity is, that tells us how to master it. But it didn’t happen. So our Rocket Science remains complicated, and difficult. Too difficult. After the Challenger disaster it was Feynman who told NASA they’d been fooling themselves about safety, and about O rings. All it took was a touch of frost to cripple the space programme. It’s incredible how they could get it so wrong. You wonder how people can get it so wrong. I think that if Feynman had gone to Princeton, and talked to Einstein, he would have realised that this applied to other things. And then things would have turned out different. So different that by now, sixty years later, NASA wouldn’t be flying rockets with O rings. They’d be flying something different. They’d be flying something bigger. Something faster, further, higher. They wouldn’t be reaching for the moon. They’d be reaching for the stars. That’s the prize. So come with me on that journey. But hold on to your hat, and hang on tight. Because it’s quite a ride.

I'm sorry I can't respond to that one Severian. And I realise that my response to your anomalous magnetic moment question was trivial. But like I said, I've gone for width rather than depth, and I don't have enough time. Here's the real Farsight Explained: INTRODUCTION Your comments noted Paranoia and Xerxes.

Yes, I do think I should. But I took the choice to explore wider rather than deeper. I just don't have the time to do it all. I was rather hoping that I could interest others to do this, but as you can see, there are... difficulties. People can be extremely hostile to new ideas, as the history of physics amply demonstrates. I'm not asking anybody to throw anything away. Just take something else on board. Which reminds me, I must spend my time more productively than chatting on this forum. And that involves completing and submitting a formal paper before some astute lurker gets in first. I do however expect to have one or two... difficulties with refereeing.

Cancerous memes? FFS! You guys can't rip my ideas to shreds. That's why you avoid them, you cannot examine them rationally, because you will not entertain a challenge to your dogmatic beliefs that create intractable mysteries. You give me all this foolish "burn the heretic" abuse instead. How many times have I got to say it? Time travel is your crackpot pseudoscience. TIME EXPLAINED is not. Got it? Now where does that leave you?

You are a perfect example of the Psychology of Belief. As per the BELIEF EXPLAINED essay, I challenge your beliefs, you get hostile. Or didn't you get that far in your quick little skim?

This is moot. I don't claim that the W boson "does not exist". But its lifetime is so very very short. It isn't on a par with the photon. And for mass, the photon is boson enough. I would say it doesn't have to be thrown in the bin. It needs fixing and improving. General Relativity isn't entirely correct either. But just because there's something wrong, that doesn't mean it's all wrong. Hence my working title of RELATIVITY+. No. I haven't thought about it. See the latter portion of CHARGE EXPLAINED. You've perhaps only skimmed this. Charge is curl. Charge is twist. I've explained a lot in there. Yes, I could explain more. But I do have further work in progress, for example:

LOL, BenTheMan. Now you're claiming I can't possible explain mass because I don't understand it. Whatever next? It's totally absurd. Why don't you repeat some of that Higgs explanation here, so everybody can see how great you are at explaining things. Or would it more properly belong in Pseudoscience and Speculations? Chuckle.

OK I get it. You ask for predictions, I give them, you ignore them, when I push, you dismiss them. Par for the course. They don't seem to mind the lack of testable predictions when it comes to String Theory. Why don't you ask Ben about that? He's a paid String Theorist, and this is just a discussion forum. Whatever. I'll make another prediction: the Higgs Boson will never be found. There is no "coupling" to the Higgs Scalar Field. There is no such field, it is an abstraction, and The Higgs Mechanism is wrong. I make this prediction because I can explain mass. ******************************************************** Sorry someguy, I was thinking I'd get get a fatal infraction if I had the temerity to actually mention one of "Farsight's Heresies" on this thread. ******************************************************** I didn't refuse to answer your question, Severian. I did give a response, but I just don't have the training to give a anomalous magnetic moment prediction without spending hours on it. Ditto with the above. I've never given WW scattering any consideration at all. But I can explain mass. http://acfahep.kek.jp/acfareport/node184.html ******************************************************* Not present. Sorry. But have I got to do everything? It's a question of priorities. I felt it more important to outline time, energy, mass, charge, gravity, and space than detail any one item. I rather thought somebody else might like to do a little "accounting". ******************************************************* Thanks Elas. I'll get back to you on that other thread. Sorry I haven't done it yet. Busy busy busy. There you go Norm. See? Thanks gcol. I have to say though, that charge is something different to that. But it's still very simple... But you have to get a handle on energy then mass before you try to get a handle on charge.

Noted, Norm. Swansont, what about my predictions? You asked, you got, now how about a response? Or do you ignore everything I say unless you think you can score a point off it?

Very droll, Severian. Oh cringe. This guy has now given me 20 infraction points. Ten previously for abuse, another ten just now for trolling. Because I replied to someguy with something that is utterly pertinent to the thread title. Absurd! Swanson: start a new thread with an appropriate title of your choice, and I will employ my best endeavours to stay on topic. You'd better hurry up about it before I get banned, or shall we say censored. Which of course, must be because I'm winning this argument.

MASS EXPLAINED v3.0 You know that energy is an intangible thing. You can’t hold pure energy in the palm of your hand. Because energy is stress, which is the same as pressure, which is the same as negative tension, and you need a volume of stress to get the dimensionality right. You know that mass is a tangible thing. You can hold an object in your hand and feel the mass of it. You even know that E=mc², and that the intangible thing called energy can be used to make the tangible thing called mass. But you don’t know how. I’ll explain how. The answer is all down to motion. Or the lack of it. You have to get relative, and think in terms of momentum and inertia. You have to stop thinking of momentum as something that a mass has, because a thing can “have” momentum without having the thing you call mass. Like a photon. You know this because you’ve read the physics. You also know this because you’ve felt it yourself, down on the beach, playing in the surf. Along comes a massive wave. You know it’s a travelling stress and you know it has no mass because it’s the water that has the mass. But the wave does have momentum, enough to knock you and your girlfriend flat on your back, laughing and screaming with salt water up your nose. It's both intangible, and it's tangible. You can’t grab hold of it, but it can grab hold of you. And realising this is the first step in grasping how intangible energy can become tangible mass. You can get a better feel for this with a gyroscope. Waggle it back and forth. See how light and insubstantial it feels. Now wind the string round the spindle, grasp it tight, and pull. You pulled tension out, so you put energy in. Your gyroscope is now humming, maybe precessing a little. When you try to waggle it you can feel the angular momentum working against you. Now it feels that bit more substantial. And you’re beginning to get a feel for mass. Something that has a lot of mass is harder to move. Or harder to stop. Because it’s got a lot of inertia. Or a lot of momentum. And a lot of energy. And these things aren’t quite as different as you might think: momentum p=mv kinetic energy KE=½mv² energy E=mc² Consider a mass in motion. Consider a 10 kilogram cannonball travelling at one metre per second in space relative to you. Brace yourself, then apply some constant braking force by catching it in the midriff. Ooof, and you feel the energy/momentum. Kinetic energy is looking at this in terms of stopping distance, whilst momentum is looking at it in terms of stopping time. The measure we call momentum is conserved in the collision because the two objects share a mutual force for the same period of time. The measure we call kinetic energy isn’t conserved, because some of the mass-in-motion is redirected into deformation and heat and bruises, all of which involve mass-in-motion, but scattered motion instead of tidy vector quantities of masses moving relative to you. Or you moving relative to them, because all the while you were never too sure whether it was you moving or the cannonball. When we turn our attention from a cannonball to a photon, we have to express the energy and the momentum in a different way. It’s a travelling volume of stressed space. There is no “mass”, so the energy is hf, and the momentum is hf/c. The h here is Planck’s constant of 6.63 x 10-34 Joule-seconds, and is an “action”, which is a momentum multiplied by a distance. The f is the frequency per second, and our old friend c is distance over time. It converts a stopping-distance measure into a stopping-time measure. A wavelength is a distance, and a frequency is the reciprocal of a time, so we can express c as wavelength multiplied by frequency, or λf . Hence you can also express the energy of the photon as hc/λ, and the momentum as h/λ. Remember that for later. For now all you have to know is that it’s all down to action. A photon is an action, like a shout, or a kick, or a wave in the surf. And you can see how the photon acts upon a mass via Compton scattering: When a photon collides with a free electron, the electron gets a bump and goes recoiling off at an angle, while the photon is also deflected and its wavelength is increased. The electron gains some energy/momentum and the photon loses some. The upshot is that their velocity vectors have changed, as have their relative velocities. To get the feel for this you can play “photons” at home with a strip of carpet or better still a rubber mat. Lift one end, grip it tight, and give it a shake. You get a wave travelling down the length of the rubber. It’s a travelling stress that rides on the tension it creates, and you can toss “electrons” with it, be they dollies or eggs. Now remember your Relativity. There is no absolute motion. Look again at the picture above. Imagine you’re that target electron, but you’re not at rest. Imagine it’s you moving instead of the photon. Bump, and you’re sent flying off at an angle. It would feel like you hit something solid instead of a photon. It would feel like a bad flight, with turbulence and so many air pockets it’s like riding over rocks. It would feel like the photon had inertia instead of momentum. It would feel like the photon was a bump, and was something solid. It would feel like the photon had mass. But the photon isn’t sitting in one place, it always travels at c. You can’t nail it down like you can nail down your rubber mat. So how do you keep a travelling volume of stressed space in the same place? It’s easy when you know how. Imagine you’ve got a couple of “free-electron” table tennis bats, and you’re good at topspin. If you bat that photon just right, you can change its direction and give it some more energy/momentum. It’s called an Inverse Compton, like the picture above but with the arrows going the other way. Then you can hit the photon with the other bat to change its direction again. Repeat in rapid succession until you’ve got a kind of hexagon going, a miniature electromagnetic swirl that is your photon going round in circles. Now keep batting away, but close your eyes, like you might close your eyes when you’re playing repulsion with a couple of magnets. You can feel something there between your bats. What you can feel is basically mass. You’ve made a “mass”. It isn’t a proper mass because if you stop batting, your photon will be off like a shot. You need to bat faster and harder to get it down smaller. You’re packing more and more stress into a smaller and smaller volume. Then at 511keV or 8.18 x 10-14 Joules, something happens. You suddenly find you don’t have to bat any more. The diameter got down to half a wavelength, and the electric stress in your photon somehow grabbed its own magnetic tail, and now it’s tangled round itself like a moebius-strip bagel. A moebius doughnut. You’ve got yourself a self-sustained soliton of travelling stress that goes round and round all on its own, twisting and turning at the same time. It goes round twice to get back where it started, so it’s got spin ½. It’s a wave and it’s a particle, so it exhibits wave/particle duality. And because it isn’t moving any more with respect to you, when you hit it, it’s you hitting that photon instead of the photon hitting you. It had momentum, and now its got inertia. It’s got mass. And you’ve got yourself an electron. This moebius doughnut electron is actually very difficult to depict. It isn’t a solid object, and whilst we can draw a representation of it, it doesn’t have any surface. It’s got as much surface as an ocean wave. The ocean has a surface, but the wave does not. The electron has got as much surface as the repulsion you can feel with a couple of magnets. It’s got just as much surface as a light beam, as the photon that it really is. It’s a jitterbug photon. It’s got the property we call zitterbewegung, and that makes it something else, like a string that’s got knottedness becomes the thing you call a knot. Now we call the photon an electron. It jitters because it twists as it turns as it loops round and round. It’s still travelling at the speed of light, but now it’s going nowhere, so it’s going nowhere fast. But wait, I hear you say, there’s no table tennis bats in particle physics. And a photon always travels at 299,792km/s. You can’t really stop a photon. Yes you can. It’s simple. You use pair production: In pair production, a gamma photon of slightly more than 1022KeV is effectively broken over a nucleus to create an electron and a positron of 511KeV apiece. They’re like two half-wavelength “eddies” spinning off in opposite directions. Apart from a little wastage on the motion of the particles, most of the energy/momentum is stopped down from c and re-presented as inertia. We converted travelling kinetic energy or "relativistic mass" into non-travelling energy or "rest mass". If we simplify matters by discarding the positron and considering the electron to be at rest, we can look at those equations again and say: E = hc/λ → mc² therefore m ≡ h/λc That seems to be saying the photon has mass. That sounds wrong, because nowadays we define mass to be rest mass. But we know that both matter and energy cause gravity. Einstein told us that with his mass/energy stress tensor. Energy has what’s called “active” gravitational mass. And since a photon has energy, it has gravitational mass too. A 511KeV photon contributes the same amount of gravitational attraction as an electron. What’s important is that energy causes gravity, not mass. Whilst a mass does cause gravity, that’s because of its energy content. It can get a little confusing because there are lots of different ways of talking about mass. Whilst the accepted definition is rest mass, this is also called “invariant mass” or “intrinsic mass” or “proper mass”. The term “relativistic mass” is really a measure of energy, which is why it applies to a massless photon. When you apply it to a cannonball travelling at 1000m/s, it’s a measure that combines the rest mass and the kinetic energy into total energy. There’s also “inertial mass”, which is a measure of how much force you need to apply to accelerate an object according to the equation F=ma. If you think of decelerating the cannonball using sheets of cardboard, it’s clear that this is the same thing as relativistic mass. There’s also “passive gravitational mass”, which is a a measure of how much an object is attracted by gravity. But it’s best not to get hung up on all these terms, because what’s important is this: A photon has no rest mass, because rest mass is just rest energy, and the photon is never at rest. Because when it is at rest, it’s not a photon any more. Rest mass is mass, and mass is just energy that isn’t going anywhere because it’s going nowhere fast. It’s a travelling stress travelling in such a tight little twist that it looks like it’s not travelling any more. You can't treat mass as something fundamental like energy, because you can “create” it and you can “destroy” it. All you have to do stop and start the energy. You stop the energy with pair production to produce an electron and a positron. To get it moving again you shove them back together. You need them both, because whether it's an electron or a positron, that tight little twist means you can’t undo it unless you’ve got the opposite twist to hand. When you do, and you do shove your electron and positron back together: bang, annihilation sends out two photons of 511KeV apiece. It’s like the electron is a twist in your tight taut fishing line, and the positron is the opposite twist. Slide them together and: twang, gone. Interestingly, the motion of the electron and the positron in a magnetic field echoes the eddies created in pair production. We’ll come back to that later. The thing to note is that a magnetic field is all you need to shove an electron round. A magnetic field is produced by moving an electric field, so all you need is another electron, moving. Or a table tennis bat that’s full of them. It’s much easier to think in terms of a table tennis bat. When you give your electron a little face-on tap with your table tennis bat, you effect a photon deflection as per the Inverse Compton. But this is a photon tied tight as a nut at 511KeV, so the deflection doesn’t alter the wavelength. It can only alter the photon velocity vector. It alters all the subsequent velocity vectors in the moebius doughnut electron. It translates into motion, so the electron as a whole moves with respect to you. In very simple terms the electron is a photon travelling in a circle, and if the electron moves past you, you see it as a cycloid or helix. The whole helix represents the relativistic mass, the total energy of the thing. The circular component represents the rest mass, denoting how much energy is going nowhere fast. The helix less the circle represents the kinetic energy of your electron, and denotes how much that energy that’s going nowhere fast is.. going somewhere. This is why a moving mass is like a spring. To get it moving you had to deform the circle like you were making a split-ring helical spring. It then traces a helical path. To stop it moving you have to push it back into a circle. It’s rather like stretching and compressing a spring. And in case you didn’t notice, you can’t get it moving faster than the light from which its made. That’s the real trick to it. We’re made out of these circles of light. Everything is, be they our atoms, our brains, or our rulers or our clocks. If you’re moving, my circles look helical to you, and yours look helical to me. Everything is relative, be it our motion or our energy or momentum. And mass is just relative too. It’s just a measure of energy that’s relatively at rest with respect to us, because it’s going nowhere fast. And it’s going nowhere fast for a very simple reason. Look at the picture of the moebius doughnut. Look at the line with the arrowheads. Now look at the picture of the balloon. The travelling stress is going nowhere fast because it’s tied in a knot. All this means we don’t need the Higgs Boson. We converted a photon into an electron via pair production. The photon is boson enough, it’s the “mediator” of the electromagnetic force. An electron is a fermion, and it’s got mass, and it’s easy to see how mass comes from the electromagnetic field. So we don’t need the Higgs field. We don’t need to couple to it. The electromagnetic field is field enough, and it’s a vector field. Yet the Higgs field is a scalar field. Which means it can’t be right. It has to be a mathematical abstraction. It has to be wrong. It gets worse. All we’re talking about is stress volumes travelling in space, and tying them into three-dimensional surfaceless solitons of variable tightness, complexity, energy, mass. It means “particle physics” is the stuff of boy scouts. It’s like they’re trying to tie knots of energy, and most of them come undone in a nanosecond because the particles just aren’t stable. What it all means is that the Large Hadron Collider is not just some misguided search for the Higgs Boson. The Large Hadron Collider is just playing with knots.

ENERGY EXPLAINED v2.0 The schoolroom textbooks told you that energy is The Capacity to do Work, and work is the transfer of energy. The words go round in circles without getting to the heart of it, and children grow into adults with no real concept of what energy is. So what is it? Let’s start by saying that energy is the property of a thing. To illustrate this, I can talk about a red balloon, a red bus, or a red red ruby. All these things have the property that we call red. A thing can be red, but you cannot remove this red and hold it in the palm of your hand. You can remove the paint or the dye, and you can hold that in the palm of your hand, but you’re still holding a thing that is red. You cannot remove the red from the dye to hold the red in the palm of your hand. Even when you imagine red, the image in your mind’s eye is a thing. You always need a thing to be red. There is no such thing as “raw red”. You give a thing energy by doing work on it. You “put energy into it”. The parallel between work as in physics and work as in a job are quite striking here. One is to do with energy, the other is to do with money. The money in your bank account is rather like the energy that’s at your disposal. Hence you can spend money like you can expend energy. But the money doesn’t disappear, just as the energy doesn’t disappear. Somebody else now has your money, just as some other thing now has your energy. Think about an old house, nestled in the countryside. It’s picturesque, worth a lot of money, and it’s built out of cob: Way back when, some medieval construction crew put some energy into shifting earth and straw to make the walls of this house. They did the same with the wood, which grew out of the earth because the trees put energy into shifting water and CO². The guys made money out of that house. Somebody paid for the energy they put into it, through the work they did moving stuff around. But moving stuff around isn’t what energy is. That’s what it does, not what it is. And it does it to things, things that have mass. So we need to talk about mass and motion to talk about energy. Consider a 10 kilogram cannonball, in space, travelling at 1000 metres per second. We talk about how much kinetic energy this cannonball has. We say KE = ½mv² and we do the maths and get five million Joules. But what has the cannonball really got? Its mass seems real enough, I hefted it into my spaceship this morning before I took off. And its motion seems real enough too, because one false move and it’ll be smashing through my viewscreen doing all sorts of damage. To find out more, I take a spacewalk to place a thousand sheets of cardboard in the path of my cannonball. Each sheet of cardboard exerts a small braking force, slowing the cannonball to a halt. This takes two seconds. We know that the cannonball will punch through more cardboard in the first second than in the second second, because it’s slowing down. So we deduce that a cannonball travelling at 1000m/s has more than twice the kinetic energy of one travelling at 500m/s. We can do the arithmetic for each second, then slice the seconds up finer and finer, and we end up realising that the ½v² is the integral of all the velocities between v and 0. But what we don’t realise, is that kinetic energy is a way of describing the stopping distance for a given force applied to a given mass moving at a given velocity. You can flip it around to think about force times distance to get something moving. Or you can think in terms of damage. But basically that cannonball has “got” kinetic energy like it has “got” stopping distance. It’s similar with momentum. That’s a different way of looking at the mass and motion, based on force and time instead of force and distance. We look back to our cannonball and cardboard, and we know by definition that the same amount of time passed in the first second as in the second second. So we realise that a cannonball travelling at 1000m/s has twice the momentum of one travelling at 500m/s. But what we don’t realise, is that momentum is a way of describing the stopping time for a given force applied to a given mass moving at a given velocity. A cannonball has “got” momentum like it has “got” stopping time. But wait a minute. I didn’t fire the cannonball at 1000 metres a second. I dropped it off at a handy spot out near a GPS satellite, then zipped off in my spaceship in a big fat loop. It’s me doing 1000m/s, not the cannonball. The cannonball is just sitting there in space. It hasn’t got any kinetic energy at all. I’ve got it. But I don’t feel supercharged with five million Joules of energy coursing though my veins. So where is it? Where’s the kinetic energy gone? It isn’t anywhere really, because all that cannonball has got, is its mass, and its motion. And that motion is relative to me. Kinetic energy is not a thing. It’s just a relative property. So, let’s examine this property. How do you make something move? Easy. Hit it with something else that moves. And how did you make that something else move? Where did it all start? I pitch you a baseball, you whack it with a bat, and it flies away at twenty metres per second. You made that baseball move. Now, where did the energy come from to make it move? From your muscles: “The release of ADP and inorganic phosphate causes the myosin head to turn, causing a ratchet movement. Myosin is now bound to actin in the strong binding state. This will pull the Z-bands towards each other. It also shortens the sarcomere...”. It all gets a little complicated, but in the end it’s all down to bond angles. Bonds within molecules change, and the change releases energy. Sometimes it’s a simple single change of bond angle, something like a leaf spring letting go and giving something a flip. Sometimes there’s more than one bond angle change, in a molecule that resembles an elasticated deckchair surging from one configuration to another. And sometimes the molecule takes a rather different shape. A familiar shape: Collagen looks like a spring because it is a spring. That’s why it’s elastic. It’s in your skin. It makes your skin elastic. You see the same shape repeated in a great many organic molecules. It’s in your muscles too. The molecules look like springs because they are springs. That’s the size of it. The energy to move your muscles is stored in tiny compressed springs. Yes, they’re electromagnetic springs rather than solid springs, but let’s face it, that’s what all solid springs are. They are electromagnetic in nature. That’s how the muscular energy is stored. It’s the same for chemical energy, and I quote: In the early 1980's it was pointed out that cubane's very high density and high heat of formation would make it an especially good explosive, especially if each carbon could have a nitro group attached. The resulting molecule would decompose to eight molecules of carbon dioxide, and four molecules of nitrogen, and release a lot of heat in the process. A cubane with a nitro group on each carbon is called octanitrocubane. Several factors are important in making a good explosive. The decomposition must be energetic. In cubane derivitives, the strain energy ensures a very energetic decomposition. Did you catch that? It’s the strain energy. There’s compressed “springs” in there. It’s the same with nuclear energy, only the springs are stronger. The sun gets its energy from nuclear fusion. Squeeze hydrogen atoms together and you make helium. But when you do, twang, something lets go, and things spring out between your fingers, things like photons. Yes, there’s more to it than that because actually it’s a three-stage process and the recipe goes like this: 4 1H + 2 e --> 4He + 2 neutrinos + 6 photons. But the gist of it is simple. And it’s even simpler for matter/antimatter annihilation. Take one electron. Add one positron: bang. Two springs let go so totally that they’re just not there any more, and photons come bounding out at gamma-wave energies. A photon is an interesting thing. Particle physics comes with mental baggage that says it’s a speck, a point, a particle. But we have long-wave radio which reminds us that photons can be 1500m long. A photon isn’t a speck. It’s more like a slink in a slinky spring. No, not a slink, because a photon isn’t a longitudinal wave like a sound wave. A photon is a transverse wave. It’s more like a shimmy. The slinky spring here is space, that vacuum void with its permeability and permittivity. A photon is like a ripple on an electromagnetic ocean between the stars. A boat on this ocean can ride the ripple and the ripple just passes on by. But tie that boat to the sea bed with a rubber rope, and you can capture the energy of the ripple, and you can save it in starch or oil. Space isn’t really an ocean. It doesn’t have a surface, it isn’t a liquid, and there’s no substance to it. But mathematically speaking, space can be likened to a block of ghostly transparent rubber. And a photon is a stress travelling in it, a transverse wave of vacuum stress. A tree can capture a photon via photosynthesis and use it to make leaves and branches, and then you can use the wood to build your house. It all comes down to springs, elasticity. The energy is in the compression, the pressure, the stress. And in the end, this stress is somehow in space itself. It’s not obvious. You don’t always realise the energy is there. But then you get a “phase change”, and something happens. Then you realise it was there all along. Like you realise that the cool night air was moist when the water vapour condenses out and it starts raining warm rain. Sometimes it’s more dramatic. Sometimes it’s called “symmetry breaking”. It’s rather like a big hidden spring letting go. The Big Bang was something like that. All these springs and elastic are just analogy of course. Analogies are based on the tangible things we experience with our senses, and these are not the things of the subatomic world. So analogies can be dangerous, like too much butter. But the Universe will wind down to the sameness that we call entropy. The stresses in space will eventually even out. Because in the end that’s what energy really is. Stress in space. It’s in the space between the stars, and in the spaces in the atoms. It’s everywhere. In physics, stress is the same thing as pressure, which is the same as negative tension. To quantify energy and get the correct dimensionality, we also have to know that stress is force per unit area, and energy is force multiplied by distance. We have to multiply a stress by an area and then by a distance to get energy. So we multiply stress by volume. We have to multiply the degree of stress by the volume of space that is stressed. Then we can calculate how much energy is there. And then we’ve got a new definition of what energy really is: Energy is the capacity to do work, and is in barest essence a volume of stressed space. That’s what it is. Energy is a volume of stressed space. That’s why you can’t hold it in the palm of your hand. You know you can’t hold stress in the palm of your hand, and a volume of it doesn’t make it something you can get hold of either. That’s why you can’t hold pure energy in the palm of your hand. Just as you can’t hold a photon in the palm of your hand. A photon is a travelling stress, it’s travelling in space, and it has to travel. It isn’t pure energy, because it travels. Nothing is “pure energy”, just as there’s no such thing as pure pressure. Because energy is the property of a thing, even when it’s the very last property that makes a thing the thing that it is. But oddly enough, you can hold energy in your hand. It’s a subtle difference, but it’s very simple. Just squeeze a fist. Use your right hand. Squeeze it tight. Now touch your left thumb to your right thumb. Feel that blood pressure. Now look at the volume of your fist. Stress is the same thing as pressure, and there’s a volume of it in that fist. Your fist has energy. And if you swing that fist, it has even more. As to how, it’s all to do with pushing little circles into spirals and making little springs. But to explain that, I’ll have to explain mass.