Farsight

Note that "flat" means it doesn't mean flat like a pancake. Read this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/727073.stm And do read that pair production link and understand that you really can create matter out of light. I'm sorry, but talking further on mass is getting too far off topic.

Just read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_production In pair production a gamma photon, which is light, is converted into an electron and a positron. They're matter, OK we call the positron antimatter. But they've both got mass. I'm not fond of the word density, because that's a term usually associated with matter, which you can create using light. IMHO it's better to think in terms of pressure. But as to how this pressure was created, I don't know. I don't know where you got that from, someguy. It isn't right. The universe is what you call "flat". It doesn't curve round on itself. The trouble is that when I explain things, people who can't get annoyed and give me a hard time. And we are getting a little off topic so I'll leave it there.

Blah blah blah. I haven't nailed the Standard Model, so Ben says don't listen and don't discuss. On a discussion forum. Duh. He does go round trashing the competition, here's where he's trying to trash LQG, but Martin picked him up: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=27674 I do feel some accord with LQG. For example, see the end of paragraph 1 on page 105 of Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics. Also see this paper Quantum Spacetime: what do we know? by Carlo Rovelli at http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9903045. Here's a paragraph from page 13: "In quantum gravity, I see no reason to expect a fundamental notion of time to play any role. But the nostalgia for time is hard to resist. For technical as well as for emotional reasons. Many approaches to quantum gravity go out of their way to reinsert in the theory what GR is teaching us we should abandon: a preferred time. The time “along which” things happen is a notion which makes sense only for describing a limited regime of reality. This notion is meaningless already in the (gauge invariant) general relativistic classical dynamics of the gravitational field. At the fundamental level, we should, simply, forget time".

I started thinking this about when I was trying to describe a basic concept in plain English, writing MASS EXPLAINED. You look at pair production and see a photon being chopped/converted into an electron and a positron. Then you look at annihilation and see the electron and positron combining to give photons. What seems pretty logical, that the electron is a particular configuration of a photon. LOL, let there be light does have a nice ring to it. But this is a tricky one. I couldn't say it's the very first step, and I'm not clear what you mean by hold together. I've maybe got an understanding of why the universe adds up to nothing and why we see the increasing expansion. But I can't explain how you start from absolutely nothing and create a universe. People talk about a Quantum Fluctuation but IMHO it doesn't really tell us anything. Fair enough, Luke. I'll have to find somebody to work with on this.

Maybe you’re right, Xeres. I have read about gauge theory, but I struggle to explain it in plain English, and that’s the acid test of understanding. I don’t have the formal education, and I find myself pausing on some aspect of the presentation, such as “particle” and “spacetime”. Do I understand it? Maybe the gist. I could tell you that the electromagnetic field exhibits gauge invariance because we can measure what we call an electric field, and after applying a continuous transformation to our point of measure, we then measure what we call a magnetic field. But we recognise that the two things are one and the same, and consider the theory of electromagnetism to be a gauge theory. Do I understand the subtleties of it? Probably not. But I do understand some other subtleties, I do have insights. The toy model I’ve developed is geometrical. It explains electromagnetism and other things in terms of fundamental geometry. I don’t know where that leaves gauge theory. The important thing to note is that people who do have the formal education and are at home with the mathematical terminology cannot actually explain in plain English why this geometrical model is wrong. Especially since they're too arrogant to actually read it.

Ben doesn't know the meaning of honesty. Of course I could answer simple questions. He comes out with this nonsense because he cannot refute the concept delivered by TIME EXPLAINED, nor can he justify his own concept using any actual evidence. Hence he resorts to lies and obfuscation, and will quite deliberately start an unpleasant argument in an attempt to spoil a thread that he disapproves of. You'll find him claiming that I don't understand Lorentz Invariance, and that I breach the "laws of physics". What he doesn't tell you is that I actually explain why Lorentz Invariance holds - the deeper truth is that we are, in simple terms, "made of light". We can never measure a change in the speed of light directly because our clocks and atoms are electromagnetic in nature. This principle of immersive scale change also applies to other measurements. However the Shapiro Time Delay allows an indirect measurement. What Ben will also try to conceal, is that I'm in line with Einstein in many many respects. That's why the model I offer is called RELATIVITY+. But perhaps he's changing tack and lining things up to tell you that Einstein was a crackpot too. Guys, listen up: he's a paid String Theorist who goes round forums rubbishing the competition and being abusive. Since String Theory makes no predictions it is not actually a theory. Moreover it no longer involves strings. And BenTheMan is just a dishonest pseudoscientist quack.

Sorry I'm tardy, I don't visit this forum much. It's rather dead these days. Don't think I dispute that black holes exist. I do not. I dispute the interpretation. There's plenty of evidence that objects have fallen to an event horizon, but no evidence whatsoever that any object has ever fallen through an event horizon. Sorry, I'm struggling to find it. Have a read of this though. It doesn't entirely support my case, but you should find it useful. http://www.mathpages.com/rr/s7-02/7-02.htm. It's related to my assertion that an object can't fall through an event horizon. If you dropped an object from John Michell's "infinite height" it would be travelling at c at the event horizon, where time dilation is now infinite. It can't go faster than c. That's the speed limit. It takes an infinite time to get through the event horizon, which means it never does. Its proper time is not "proper", but instead has become an abstraction. No, sorry. Your mental model of a black hole is wrong. Even Schwarzschild thought his solution was non-real. I'm arguing against the interpretation, not the evidence. What I propose is RELATIVITY+, which is a geometrical model along the lines of Einstein's pure marble dream. It explains time, energy, mass, charge, gravity, and space. It's only a qualitative "toy" model, but it does unify electromagnetism and gravity in terms you can grasp. I need to look into the strong force and the Standard Model to take it further, and of course it will need mathematical rigor. I've just had a look. "It is argued that, if the laws of physics permit an advanced civilization to create and maintain a wormhole in space for interstellar travel, then that wormhole can be converted into a time machine with which causality might be violatable. Whether wormholes can be created and maintained entails deep, ill-understood issues about cosmic censorship, quantum gravity, and quantum field theory, including the question of whether field theory enforces an averaged version of the weak energy condition..." I'm not paying for it because time travel is crackpot. That's a strong word I know. But you can't travel in time. Time is a relative measure of motion through space. You can't travel through a relative measure of motion through space. That would be like literally climbing to a higher temperature, or travelling through travel. Time travel is an abstraction, and when you understand time empirically rather than in terms of Minkowski's mathematical space, you realise why.

Yes, they're wrong, and their opinions concerning a currently accepted hypothesis is not evidence. You might feel unhappy about that, but that's how science is. Don't forget that many years ago everybody thought the sun went round the earth. And every last one of them were wrong. There's plenty of people who agree with me, or vice versa if you prefer. You might find it difficult to accept, but one of these people was Schwarzschild himself. He thought his solution was an unreal solution, and he was right. Click on that article I linked to, print it out, sit down, and read it. It doesn't say exactly what I'm telling you, but it presents everything at some length in a reasonable fashion along with different viewpoints. The thing to note is that infinite time dilation at the event horizon is of utmost importance. It means that no collapsing star has finished collapsing yet, and never ever will.

Don't take dark matter (or dark energy) for granted. Check out Conformal Gravity: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0505266

That's not evidence, fatty. All that stuff is hypothesis. Here's another hypothesis. I don't quite agree with it myself, but I prefer it to the never-never land of a singularity that you only reach at the end of time. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00012DEF-46AA-1F04-BA6A80A84189EEDF&sc=I100322 Do print and read this: http://www.mathpages.com/rr/s7-02/7-02.htm If you want a visceral conceptual idea of what a black hole really is you have to think of electrodynamics in terms of elastodynamics. Imagine that space is transparent ghostly rubber, wherein a photon is a transverse-wave "shimmy" rippling through the rubber. It's not a perfect analogy, but it's pretty close actually. OK, the real world is three-dimensional, I can't show you that. But I can show you something two dimensional: imagine you've got a black party balloon serving as an analogy of space. To make the analogy a little more lifelike, I shall paint some stars and stuff on this party balloon. I'll take care, and make it as realistic as I can. Are you ready? This can be a little shocking. Here you go: It's from the wiki black hole page. It's an artist's depiction of gravitational lensing. But it looks like a hole in the balloon. A black hole really is a hole. It's a hole in space, and you cannot get to the middle, because there is no middle. I've got essays on this entitled BLACK HOLES EXPLAINED and SPACE EXPLAINED, so I could back this up. But these essays contain some knockout stuff so I'm sitting on them for now.

Here's an interesting article on The formation and growth of black holes, by a chap called Kevin Brown: http://www.mathpages.com/rr/s7-02/7-02.htm It's not evidence, you can't treat it as definitive, but it is interesting. See this excerpt regarding Weinberg: Remember that historically the two most common conceptual models for general relativity have been the "geometric interpretation" (as exemplified by Misner/Thorne/Wheeler's "Gravitation") and the "field interpretation" (as in Weinberg's "Gravitation and Cosmology"). These two views are operationally equivalent outside event horizons, but they tend to lead to different conceptions of the limit of gravitational collapse. According to the field interpretation, a clock runs increasingly slowly as it approaches the event horizon (due to the strength of the field), and the natural "limit" of this process is that the clock just asymptotically approaches "full stop" (i.e., running at a rate of zero) as it approaches the horizon. It continues to exist for the rest of time, but it's "frozen" due to the strength of the gravitational field. Within this conceptual framework there's nothing more to be said about the clock's existence. This leads to the "frozen star" conception of gravitational collapse. If you drop an object from an "infinite height" and let it fall into a black hole, by the time it reaches the event horizon, it will be travelling at c. If it kept on falling and accelerating, it would then be travelling faster than c. My physics doesn't allow things to travel faster than c, because in the end we're made out of "electromagnetic effects", in other words light. What I'm arguing for is closer to what Einstein actually said rather than what people say he said. I've ended up with something that seems very much like "Einstein's geometrical dream", where forces and matter can be described in terms of space geometry. It's only a toy model, with no mathematical rigour. But it involves "moebius solitons", and it's only recently that the moebius strip has been described mathematically. http://seedmagazine.com/news/2007/07/loopy_logic_moebius_strip_ridd.php There's no "evidence" of a singularity, fatty. Not one shred of evidence. There's plenty of evidence of black holes, but not of the singularity. It's always in the future. It hasn't formed yet, and never will. Apply this rule of thumb: there are no infinities in nature. If you encounter anything where infinity is mentioned, be suspicious. If somebody says "blahblah is infinite", look for a different concept that removes this infinity. If you fall in you get crushed, flattened, and you die. Ever been to a New Year's Eve party where people get on the dance floor and form a big circle to do the hokey cokey? Falling into a black hole is like joining the circle of people. You never actually get past the event horizon. You can't. There are no more events past the event horizon. But that circle of people gets bigger, just as the black hole gets bigger.

The thing is this, iNow: as we speak, no object anywhere has fallen through any black hole event horizon anywhere. The infinite time dilation means that the "progress as normal" situation does not in fact progress. There are models that describe what happens, but they don't get an airing any more. The "Weinberg interpretation" is one. True, but note that gravity can't get any "stronger" than it gets at the event horizon. I've thought through what gravity actually is, and this gives one a rather different picture of what a black hole actually is. It's still a hole, and it's still black. It's still a one way ticket. But a different interpretation of what's actually happening paints a startlingly different picture of what a black hole actually is. I can't give you any actual evidence. And sadly because the interpretation is closer to older interpretations, it's classed as a "speculation". I could PM you with further details if you wish. You have no actual evidence for this interpretation. I've thought a great deal about this, and am no totally confident that it's the wrong concept. I totally agree. Again, I totally agree. I have a vision for spaceflight. But it involves a revision to certain concepts that most people take for granted.

No, this is garbage. There is no singularity at the centre of a black hole. Instead time dilation goes infinite at the event horizon. This means that right now, anything that has ever fallen into a black hole has not reached the centre, and never ever will. Look up the "Weinberg Interpretation" and "frozen stars". More mathematical abstraction I'm afraid. There is no inside to a black hole. There is no singularity. Time travel is nonsense. You can travel in space, but you can't travel "in time". Not backwards, not forwards, not at all. It isn't. That's science fiction, not science fact. Sadly some real scientists get sucked into this sort of thing because they cannot distinguish real mathematical solutions from abstract mathematical solutions. When you try to discuss the distinction, they can become very hostile.

Sorry guys, I didn't mean to be rude, I've been busy. Sayonara: there's more than one of them babies. agentchange: there are no shortcuts through time, because there's no going "through" time at all. We only go through space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Poincar%C3%A9

Pity that density was zero, but nevermind. Here's something on the speed of sound in steel (and other stuff) samson. It would take about a quarter of an hour for the west coast to notice anything. http://library.thinkquest.org/19537/Physics4.html

Read this one next, Norm: REFERENCE FRAMES

I think the common interpretation of QM is set to change, Norm. Radically.

This is a new little "RELATIVITY+" essay/chapter that serves as a "lead in" to time, which is a toughie. If anybody can give me any feedback and put me straight on any errors/omissions/confusions I'd be grateful.

REFERENCE FRAMES You know I was talking about magnetic fields and electric fields? When you move through an electric field you see it as a magnetic field. That’s Relativity. It’s the same old thing really. The difference is down to you. Sometimes you don’t realise that things are the same because you see them a particular way. Because you walk around all your life wearing some very special sunglasses. They’re like Ray-Bans. You grow up with them, so much so that you don’t know you’re wearing them. They colour your vision but you cannot see how. They stop you seeing the light for what it really is. I need to talk about them, because I want to get to the bottom of Special Relativity and talk about time, and I want to get to the bottom of General Relativity and talk about gravity. But the things that colour your vision aren’t sunglasses. What they are is reference frames. Let’s have a little gedanken, a thought experiment. It involves my spaceship. Remember my spaceship? You’re the copilot, and I’ve just taken you down to the cargo bay and shown you “the box”. It’s a ten foot canister sitting in front of the airlock. It’s comfortable, cushioned, equipped with an air supply so you don’t need a spacesuit, with thruster rockets for positioning and trim and emergency escapes. And as you may have gathered, you have to get in the box. You climb in, find the light switch and turn it on, then I swing the hatch closed and give you a slam slam goodbye. You hear me leave and the pumps evacuating the air, followed by the grinding of steel as the outer doors open. There’s a jolt as the launch ram pushes you outside the ship, and then everything goes quiet. There are no windows in this box. There is however a radio so we can stay in touch. I call you up to say I’m pulling back a little, leaving you there in your box. You say A-OK catch you later, and enjoy a few zero-gravity games, doing somersaults and pushing yourself from one side of the box to the other practising your racing turns. After a while you find the tennis ball in your jumpsuit pocket and throw it against the opposite wall, smiling when it bounces straight back into your waiting hand. The radio bleeps into life and it’s me, asking how you’re doing. Fine you reply, I ask if you can detect any acceleration and you say Nope. You’re cool, because you’re weightless, it’s fun. You're in the box. There are no windows. You chuck the ball across the inside of the box and it goes straight as a die, bounces off the side, and back into your hand. You are in an inertial reference frame. You can feel no gravitational force, and you can detect no gravitational force acting upon the ball. You are not accelerating. I ask if you’d like to try a little acceleration, you say Sure! and then you feel and hear the thruster rockets burning. You find yourself pressed back, and now one side of the box feels like it’s the floor. You stand up and it’s like being on the surface of the moon, or shipside under artificial gravity. You can feel your weight. You throw the ball and it travels in a lazy arc towards the floor and bounces around a little before settling there. You are now in a non-inertial reference frame, and you know you’re accelerating. You can feel it, you can measure it locally, within your frame, within your box. I shut off the thrusters so you’re back weightless again, floating in your inertial reference frame. You can no longer feel any acceleration. You can’t measure any. The ball flies straight as a die. As far as you are concerned, you are not accelerating. Did I mention that you’re falling into a black hole? No? Oops. Sorry about that. Here’s the deal: a body in freefall is not accelerating. If you say it is, you're mixing reference frames. You're looking at yourself from some reference frame out somewhere in space rather than from your reference frame, that of the body in freefall. Don’t be mistaken about this. The Principle of Equivalence between gravity and an accelerating box applies when you're standing on a planet, not when you're in freefall. There really is no force acting on your freefalling body. You can't feel any, you can't see any, you can't measure any. Because there is none. If you looked out of a window to see a moon going backwards, you're mixing frames. This is why gravity is not technically a force. It exerts no force on you. In your reference frame you are not accelerating. You never can be, because in your reference frame your velocity must be zero. If you say it isn’t, you’re mixing frames. You really really are not accelerating, and that’s why you can throw that ball straight. And that’s why Einstein called gravity a pseudoforce. Meanwhile I’m sitting pretty, out in space in the ship where the black hole gravity is so neglible that I can also consider myself to be in an inertial reference frame. All I have to do is switch off the ship gravity, and I can play ball games just like you. But when I look through the viewscreen I see you falling faster and faster towards the black hole, knowing that as far as you’re concerned, you’re in an inertial reference frame just like me. We’re both in inertial reference frames, but yours isn’t inertial as far as I’m concerned, and vice versa. What’s happening is that your inertial reference frame is changing and you can’t see it. But you can detect something, if you have the right equipment. And that you do. Because the radio crackles and it’s me again, telling you open a concealed hatch and pull out an apparatus that looks like a long dumbell. I tell you to perform a "Pound-Rebka" experiment, and you follow my instructions and find that you get a photon blueshift reading when the instrument is pointed in a given direction. I tell you it’s pointed at the black hole, and what you’re measuring is a slight tidal force in that direction. Note that a “proper” gravitational field is never uniform. Sometimes the tidal force is neglible, but it is never ever zero. If gravitational felds were uniform, they’d be hills without slopes, they’d be flat, so they wouldn’t be hills at all. The tidal force is always there because of a slight change in the gravity in a given direction. This is where the Principle of Equivalence isn’t quite perfect, because there is no tidal force in a simple accelerating box in free space. Einstein knew this, but people only look at what he generalised in 1911 and take it all too far. Here’s a quote from a guy called John R Ray dating from 1977: The first thing to note about the 1911 version of the principle of equivalence is that what in 1911 is called a uniform gravitational field ends up in general relativity not to be a gravitational field at all – The Riemann tensor is here identically zero. Real gravitational fields are not uniform since they must fall off as once recedes from gravitating matter. It’s really obvious when you think about it. But people never do. They never actually look at the reference frames that they look through. You’re in your box, and "gravity" is continuously changing your inertial reference frame. But you’re in it, you are immersed in your reference frame, you can’t see it, it’s what you look through to see the world, you can’t see it changing. All your photons are blueshifting, but you don’t notice it. Your time is dilating, but you don’t notice it. Your seconds are changing, and your metres too, but not to you, because you can’t see it. Your reference frame is how you see the world, but it isn’t how the world is. Because in your reference frame, your velocity is always zero. And that simple fact means you are at odds with Copernicus, because in your reference frame, the sun goes round the earth. I don’t like reference frames. They aren’t real, they don’t actually exist, they get in the way instead of making things clearer. People talk about them too much, more than Einstein did. Let’s use them less, and learn to look at the world the way it really is. Is that the time? It’s time for tea. We will continue this gedanken another time. OK, thrusters on, full boost. Come on home, back to the ship. Time is of the essence.

CHARGE EXPLAINED Charge is another one of those things you learn about in physics. Well, you think you do, but you don’t. Not really. The textbooks don’t explain it, and they shrug off this omission by telling you it’s fundamental. It isn’t. It’s as fundamental as mass, which is not very fundamental at all. The thing is this: if you understand mass you already understand charge. But you probably don’t realise it yet. So I’ll explain it. Let’s start with the easy stuff. We know that we can rub a balloon to create an electric field. It can pick up a piece of paper or make your hair stand up. We’ve all seen and felt a spark of static, blue and crackling as electricity tears the air. We know that high voltage is called high tension, and tension is negative stress and stress is pressure. So we’re happy with the fluid analogy where a current flows from the negative to the positive terminals of a battery. It doesn’t much matter that they got electricity backwards. We measure this rate of flow in terms of amperage, and multiply by time to get charge, and multiply again by voltage to get energy. We work out that the amount of charge in a battery is all about the number of electrons available to flow, and we know that our charged-up balloon has a surplus of them above and beyond its protons. So, how much charge is in a flat battery? None, I hear you say. Wrong. It’s chock full of charge. It’s full of positive charge and negative charge. That’s why it’s got mass. That’s why it’s a material object. If there wasn’t any charge, it would be a whole heap of gamma radiation, and you and I would be looking like something out of Mars Attacks! LOL. But let’s keep it simple and stick to electrons. What is it about these electrons that keeps our laptops humming? What is this thing called “charge” that causes motion? The answer is trivial once you know how to see it. Go to the kitchen, get a glass, then pour a glass of water and hold it up to the window pronto. You will see bubbles swirling and silvery, pop pop, popping. They aren’t actually silver of course, they just look that way because they distort the light. Now go to the cutlery drawer and pull out a spoon. It’s silvery. Metals look that way because they are awash with electrons. When you look at a spoon you are seeing those electrons, or more properly, their charge. It’s reflective, silvery. Charge looks like this for the same reason as those bubbles. It’s like a highway mirage on a hot sunny day. You see what looks like water on the road far ahead, but it’s merely the light from the sky bent towards your eye. You are seeing distortion, and it’s silvery like a bubble because it bends light. Charge is distortion too. Charge is “curl”. Charge is twist. If it wasn’t there, your electrons would be gamma photons of 511KeV apiece. To show you how it works, I need you to play with plates. Take two dinner plates, one in each hand. Find a swimming pool or a pond, preferably on a sunny windless day. Dip one of the plates halfway into the water. Now stroke it gently forward in a paddling motion whilst lifting it clear. Notice that you create a “U-tube” double whirlpool that moves slowly forward through the water. This is a Falaco Soliton. If your pool is big enough, the double whirlpool will settle down into two dimples on the surface of the water, visible as two black-spot shadows on the bottom. They are very stable, and can persist for maybe an hour. But you don’t need to wait for that. Create one double whirlpool with one dinner plate, then step to one side and create another one with the other dinner plate. You’ll need a little practice, but after a while you’ll have the knack of it, and you’ll be able to create two double whirlpools with ease. Aim them at each other. Notice what happens. If the left-hand-side of one double whirlpool closes with the right-hand-side of the other, the two opposite whirlpools move together. If the left-hand-side of one double whirlpool closes with the left-hand-side of the other, the two similar whirlpools move apart. What you are seeing is attraction and repulsion. Now aim two double whirlpools straight at one another, face on. This is best in a shallow pond with a muddy bottom. The two double whirlpools meet and merge and are gone with a surprisingly energetic puff of muddy water. You’ve just seen annihilation. It’s another fluid analogy. But the vacuum of space is not a fluid like water. It doesn’t flow. It’s more like an elastic solid, but one with no solidity at all. Let’s recap a little. I explained energy in terms of stress. Stress is force per unit area, and energy is force times distance, so energy is stress times volume. I talked about a photon as a stress travelling through space like a transverse wave propagating through a block of ghostly rubber. I explained mass by talking about pair production, where a massless gamma photon is converted into an electron and a positron. Both the electron and the positron can be viewed as a photon configured as a moebius doughnut, twisting and turning to stay in place. It takes two turns round a moebius to get back to where you started, hence the spin ½. The difference is that one twists and turns one way, and the other twists and turns the other way. They are mirror images of opposite chirality, primitive 3D knots tied different ways. Do note though that there are no surfaces involved. An electron has no surface, just like a photon has no surface, just as an ocean wave has no surface, because it’s the ocean that does. And space does not. The electron isn’t some little particle that’s “got” charge extending out into space. Instead charge is one of the things the electron is. The electron and positron will attract one another like the Falaco solitons, and if they meet it’s like pushing two opposite twists of fishing line together. Twang. The electron and the positron annihilate, and become gamma photons flying off in opposite directions like that puff of muddy water. Energy is fundamental. You cannot create energy, and you cannot destroy it. But you can create charge just as you can create mass, via pair production. And you can destroy charge just as you can destroy mass, via annihilation. Because charge is the twist that you need to apply to a travelling stress to keep it twisting and turning in one location to re-present momentum as inertia. And because there’s nothing solid to brace against in our pure marble geometric world where stable particles are knots, the only way to make a twist is to make an untwist at the same time. That’s why charge is always conserved. Yes, you can make a mass without any charge, but that’s only because one twist is masked by another, as in a neutron. A neutron is pinned down stable in a nucleus, but let it escape that nucleus and it comes apart. This twist is what charge is. It’s a twist in the thing you call space, stretching out into space. You could call an electric field a “twist field”. Let’s see how it affects an electron. Remember, an electron is a photon travelling in a twisting turn, a moebius doughnut. Drop it into a cube of space so it looks like this: ◙. If we take a side view of our photon at one instant in time it looks like a vertical slice of the moebius doughnut, like this: o. Now twist the cube from top to bottom. What happens to the o? It tilts. Its orientation has changed. It’s now angled downwards. So the electron digs down through the electric field like a drill bit. Note that that the electric field isn’t just a twist in one dimension, it’s actually in three dimensions. Your electron digs down like a drill bit from any direction. But it’s very difficult to think in three dimensions. Our primary input is visual, and whilst binocular vision permits depth perception, we tend to think in two dimensions. That’s why getting the feel for something is what intuition and grasp are all about. It gives us a better, three-dimensional concept. To illustrate this, get a block of plasticine or maybe the wax from Babybel cheese, and make a cube. Now try twisting it in three dimensions. Two twists is easy: twist, turn, twist. But doing the third one is surprisingly difficult. In the end you have to just do it by feel: twist turn, twist turn, twist. You end up with something like this: The easiest way to get your head round all this geometry is to imagine that the twisted cube is a twisted block of water, and we’ve got to swim through it. I’m really good at swimming underwater, I do it like the Man from Atlantis, undulating my whole body. Spladoosh, in we go. As you’re swimming behind me you find that all the twisting and turning means you’ve got to swim further than you thought, and you come out of the other side gasping for air. But you will now understand refraction. Light travels slower through a glass block because it’s got to make its way through all that twisting and turning in all directions, be it positive or negative. Talking of turning, let’s talk about magnetism. Imagine that you’re flying through space, but the space ahead of you is twisted like a catherine wheel because of the electric field. It will make you turn. We now use Relativity to work out that if you aren’t travelling through space but you find yourself turning, then the twist must be travelling through you. That’s what happens when a current flows through a wire. Imagine the current is flowing down a wire from your eyes into the screen, and introduces an anticlockwise twist. I do mean anticlockwise because I’m talking about a flow from – to +. .. ← ↓ ¤ ↑ o .. → Ignore the little dots, they're just spacers because this website compresses the spaces. The nearby electron o is basically a circling photon. This comes full circle in the twisting space before it has gone round 360 degrees. So it ends up at a different place, and describes a cycloid motion. So it follows the twist and goes round the wire like it’s in a washing machine, like swarf going round a drill bit. It really is that simple. It’s so simple that it’s amazing that people puzzle at the mystery of it. I guess it’s because people like a good mystery. The electric field is effectively a “twist field”, and if you move through it you perceive a magnetic field, which is effectively a “turn field”. It’s so obvious once you see it. And you can see it. You can see how a magnetic field changes the polarization plane of a beam of light via the Faraday effect. That’s the utter simplicity of electromagnetism: twist and turn. It tells you a battery is like a wind-up clockwork spring, only the twist is in space rather than steel. The electric twist extends forward with the flowing current, and it makes things turn like a pump-action screwdriver. That’s the principle of the electric motor. But you can turn a screw with an ordinary screwdriver too, extending the twist forward. That’s the principle of the dynamo. Most materials aren’t magnetic because all this twisting and turning is symmetrical in all directions, even for your charged-up balloon. It’s what you call isotropic. When it isn’t, that’s when you get a magnet. Fly through an electric field or past a stationary electron and you “see” more twist in the direction of travel, so you “see” a magnetic field that makes you turn. Move an electron towards you and you get the same effect. All you need to do to make an actual magnet is arrange the atoms so that the electrons jitter round in the same orientation. .. ← ↓ .. ↑ .. → o The electron is moving in a circular fashion, so its component photon doesn’t need to complete a full 360 degrees to turn around. This is why a day is less than one full rotation of the earth. So there’s a component of the “turn” left over, and you end up with a magnetic field similar to what you’d see if you flew past a stationary electron. It’s rather like the inverse of the current in the wire situation, but with no current and no wire. Whilst I describe a magnetic field is a “turn field”, you have to remember that space is like an elastic solid. The electric field is the “twisted space”, and the magnetic field is only your relativistic view when you move through it, or it moves through you. There are no actual regions of space that are turning round like roller bearings or wheels. That’s why you can’t have magnetic monopoles. But you can have superconductors. High temperature superconductors consist of copper oxide planes. The atoms present an array of opposite magnetic fields rather like a conveyor belt, allowing electrons to zip through effortlessly like they’re not moving at all. .. ← ↓ ¤ ↑ .. → o→ .. → ↑ ¤ ↓ .. ← It is of course a little more complicated than that. Wheels need bearings and axles. Here’s some pictures of a high-temperature superconductor called yttrium barium copper oxide, or YBCO for short. The chemical formula is YBa2Cu3O7 and it’s a crystal so you get repeating groups. Look at the third picture. In simple terms the “wheels” are where the green pyramids are. Low temperature superconductors aren’t quite the same. You have to think Barn Dance, where you’re an electron with a “Cooper Pair” dance partner making your own magnetic fields as you go. When everybody’s cool, the dance line is tidy and you swing easily from one end to the other. But when it’s hot and late and everybody’s bumping around pissed, you spill somebody’s beer, lose your partner to a “Phase Slip”, and get into a fight. Yeehah. In both cases the superconductor is diamagnetic. It doesn’t want to be magnetised because of the Meissner Effect where internal opposite magnetic fields scramble an applied magnetic field so it doesn’t get into the material. All interesting stuff. But not as interesting as the electron itself. Here’s the secret: cut a strip of paper, maybe an inch wide and ten inches long. Draw a very flattened X across the length of it, to represent the sinusoidal electric and magnetic fields over half a photon wavelength. That’s the slanted curvy twisted χ to the right of the M in the middle of this picture. Mark the top left hand corner of your strip with an E, and the bottom left corner with an M. Mark the top right hand corner with an M and the bottom right corner with an E. This kind of thing: E .......... M ..... X...... M ......... E Turn the paper over and repeat. Now loop it around and twist it to make a moebius strip. You see the E adjoining the M and the M adjoining the E. That’s the nub of it, why the electron is a stable soliton. The electric field is the magnetic field and vice versa. The twist is the turn and the turn is the twist. It’s because of Relativistic abberation. Travel really fast and a horizontal line like this — looks skewed like this /. Travel at c like a photon and your horizontals look totally vertical. Change course fast and your change of course is skewed too, so you change course more than you meant to. And you do it fast so you change course even more. The details of this were worked out by Llewellyn Thomas in 1927, and is called Thomas Precession. Knock a photon just right to change its course, and it keeps on changing course because its velocity vector precesses π/2 times per revolution. The photon “thinks” its travelling in a straight line but its travelling like this: ∞. It’s all twisted, and it turns. It’s curly. The twist and the turn are just two sides of the same thing. That’s how it always is. That’s why we have electromagnetism and the electromagnetic field. A magnetic field is the same thing as an electric field, it just depends how you’re looking at it. It depends on whether you’re moving through it or it’s moving through you, or not. That’s Relativity for you. Once you learn how to see things the way they are, things get a whole lot simpler. An electron is what it is because it’s “got” charge, and charge is twist. The really really interesting thing about all this is that if charge isn’t fundamental, we can’t quite say that the photon is the mediator of the electromagnetic force. They got it back to front, like everything else to do with electricity, and it does matter. It matters a lot. Acknowledgement note: I rather thought I’d worked this on out on my own and had a hot property on my hands that I'd sit on until the book was finished. Try googling for “What is Charge?” and you’ll know what I mean. The only thing that gave me a clue when I was puzzling it over, was something on a Science Hobbyist website by William J Beaty, an electrical engineer at the University of Washington in 1996. Read it yourself at http://amasci.com/elect/charge1.html. What stuck in my mind was that charge is silvery. That was enough, because I had a head start. I understood mass. And once you understand mass as something that isn’t fundamental, it’s quite easy to take a fresh look at charge. Especially if you’ve read “The Falaco Soliton: cosmic strings in a swimming pool” by R M Kein dated January 2001. See the original on http://arxiv.org/ftp/gr-qc/papers/0101/0101098.pdf. I tried it out in my pond in the back garden, and chewed it all over in my mind. I’m pretty confident I’ve got it right because electricity, magnetism, refraction, superconduction, and even the electron itself all seemed to follow quite logically. The RELATIVITY+ toy model flies like a bird. But whilst I thought I’d worked it out for myself, when I check back, I realise I didn’t. I’ve just found a PhysOrg forum post from "Good Elf "dated October 9th 2006, and there it is: “I think charge is not fundamental. It is partially expressed in this reference Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology by J.G. Williamson and M.B. van der Mark”. This predates even my essay on mass, and goes back to when I thought charge was a dimension. Duh. I was rather surprised to realise that CHARGE EXPLAINED isn’t so original, and a little surprised to realise that what I thought was my original thought wasn’t. It’s just a “synthesis” of things I’ve read. Things like Robert E Galloway’s "Refracting Saddle Wave Model of Stable Fundamental Particles". Or D T Froedge’s "The Concept of mass as Interfering Photons". Or Norman Albers' "Gravitation and Vacuum Polarization" (we are barking up the same tree, Norm). There’s Christoph Stiller and "Does Matter Differ from Vacuum?" There’s David Lush and Harold Aspden and many others. I owe these guys thanks and proper acknowledgement and credit, which I’ll have to look into properly. Meanwhile, if anybody can give me some feedback to CHARGE EXPLAINED I’d be grateful.

I think I need a picture, Norm. But until then it sounds like what you've got is a spiral drill bit.

I've sent you CHARGE EXPLAINED Albers. It mentions refraction, and superconduction, and should give you "grasp" of what an electric field actually is. The relativity aspect is crucial.

Noted Albers. Yep, just electric. And even that isn't quite the right word. Remember we were talking about what the right word was? Have a look at my recent posts on PhysOrgForum and see what I was saying to Darren. Puthoff is wrong. Aw dammit, I'm going to have to send you Charge Explained. It will give you the vision. Do you promise to a) keep it to yourself b) give me credit if it's due and c) not say a dicky bird about how refraction and superconduction works?

That sounds darn interesting, Albers. I drew myself a picture and found one on the internet. http://fisica.udea.edu.co/~mpaez/aharanov/Bohmen.html I'm not clear on your second post. What's the BINGO for? I'm scratching my head a little because I've never even heard about about this Aharanov-Bohm effect. It reminds me a little o the Hall Effect, but nevermind. Have you nailed some bit of mystic QM crap? Funnily enough I was on "another forum" looking at a quantum entanglement thread thinking I'm going to write an essay called QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT EXPLAINED. I've been writing SPACE EXPLAINED, it needs a polish. But you know your purely electric virtual vacuum field? Maybe it's a little more common than you think. Oooh. Wait a minute Albers. Where is this force transmitted from? From the coil to the electrons? Or have you just rumbled AntiGravity?