vol VII: Notes
2019
Notes
Sunday 29 December 2019 - Saturday 4 January 2020
[Notebook: DB 84 Pam's Book]
[page 86]
Sunday 29 December 2019
I have now lived three quarters of my expected lifetime and most of it has been very different from what I expected. The change began with an act of God, the universe, perhaps created at Blackfriars, that convinced me to enter the Dominicans. In my younger days the thought of entering the priesthood had never, to my recollection, crossed my mind. My first years on the Order were hard but exciting. The discipine was hard. The discovery that I was not good at singing a capella in a milieu where singing was the principal form of worship was embarassing and the discovery of philosophy and theology was very exiting, but led to my failure in the Order. It very soon became clear to me, with the help of Bernard Lonergan's Insight, that attempts to prove the existence of God, that is the God of Christianity, outside the world, are a failure, and that it makes much more sense to believe that God and the Universe are identical. I have pursued this idea ever since, publishing millions of words on the subject on this and other websites. I have felt that my new knowledge of God is precious and might be a gift to [hu]mankind seeking peace on earth through global theological consistency. Bernard Lonergan: Insight: A Study of Human Understanding
[page 87]
I 'came out' theologically on 2BOB Radio in 1987, 20 years after I wrote the essay that led to my expulsion from the Order, How Universal is the Universe. The result was underwhelming, but I decided at that time that my theology should be scientific, that is evidence based, and that I should not vigorously promote it until I had received academic recognition for my work. At the beginning of 2018 I began to seek such recognition by going to Adelaide University to study philosophy with a view to getting a doctorate based on my theological views. That project has now foundered, for, it seems to me, three reasons. First, though I have completed an honours year, the department is too small and specialized to be able to provide a supervisor for my project; second, my results were not very good, hovering somewhere between honours 2A and 2B, not really sufficient to gain entry to the PhD stream; and third, my views were a significant mismatch to the philosophy profession which judges candidates through their essays and requires essays to be closely reasoned critiques of existing philosophical literature [very little of which, as far as I can see, deals with exploring scientific foundations for theology]. My tendency to seek a broad view based on modern research in cognitive science, biology, information theory and social evolution did not get good results. How universal is the universe? (1967)
Three courses now lie open to me. The first is to argue that my results, given the work that I have done, should have been marked more highly. This approach has little chance of success and I find myself here in the same position as I was in the Church, being judged by an institution that has a a strong interest in maintaining the status quo. The second is to use what results I have to seek some other degree awarding institution; and the third is to continue as I have done for the last fifty years, seeking my holy grail, that is a clear scientific argument to establish the divinity of the world, something that will give me 'ethical clearance' in my own mind to actively promote my theological idea [as I write this, it occurs to me that I have a very clear right to express my opinion independently of any academic imprimatur; I seek academic accreditation now to give me income and a pulpit].
[page 88]
The search for the grail therefore continues, and its physical foundation remains the same, to write a convincing book (incorporating some of the ideas of my honours thesis) coupling modern physics and cosmology to theology in what appears to me to be a foolproof manner. My pension and inheritance provide me with the means to go on with this task and I just have to do the work in the hope that the necessary inspiration will come. In other words, I must assume the role of prophet rather than preacher and bring the message from God to the people that we live in God, we are all divine, and our common genesis gives us ground not only to love one another but to love the divine world that gives us life and performs all the roles traditionally attributed to God. Being able to write pieces like this gives me the courage to go on and the feeling that my life in theology has not been wasted [through being largely uncoupled from traditional theology].
My biggest effort in my monastic days was to understand Aquinas's treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity and it eventually became clear to me and has served as a long term standby in the development of a model of the universe based on a network model of God whose starting point was a version of the Trinity in which I understood communication to be the foundation of the real relationships upon which the world is built, and managed to make some of my network ideas explicit in my honours thesis. The task now has become to introduce a version of the standard model into theology and so I must now make an effort, equivalent to my job on the Trinity, to create a theological version of the standard model which I hope will be simpler and more logically consistent than the present version and embrace gravitation through
[page 89]
an interpretation of covariant differentiation which avoids the unrenormalizable infinities which currently infest efforts to include gravitation in the standard model. All this sounds, of course, impossible, but we must face the fact that the universe exists as a coherent whole and must therefore be intelligible, and that it started as a structureless initial singularity, so it can be expected to be relatively simple, at least in the first stages of its construction. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride but somebody must once have dreamt of horseriding and done it, as the Wrights flew, so the task appears possible, even if I cannot do it myself. Prolegomenon to scientific theology, If wishes were horses, beggars would ride - Wikipedia
Monday 30 December 2019
One way to simplify the complexities of the standard model is to imagine that the dimension of spacetime occupied by particle processes started at zero (pure act) and then increased through energy = time (1D), then 2D spacetime (photon) and then 3-4D spacetime to become the standard model, taking a hint from the ancient doctrine of the trinity. A lot of work here, but an attempt to roll the standard model into theology should be educational if nothing else.
Physics profited enormously from the political and strategic value of nuclear weapons and the construction of vehicles to deliver these weapons. Physics and theology, working together may justify a similarly massive scientific and technological effort to deliver a scientific theological system sufficiently robust to underpin world peace by giving us a clear picture of our place in the divine world. History of nuclear weapons - Wikipedia
Creativity and ignorance. We start with a universe which knows nothing but will try anything and has ended up like this, where we
[page 90]
live. I wish to follow a similar trajectory. I am embedded in the universe and learn from it but I started with nothing and have never stopped exploring so I hope that eventually my mind will become isomorphic to my divine habitat [a modern version of the beatific vision]. Aquinas, Summa, I II, 3, 8: Does man's happiness consist in the vision of the divine essence?
Given that it started as pure act we might imagine that the first thing the universe invented was energy which is equivalent to the discovery of the circle group [and complex numbers which are natural descriptors of periodic function]. Perhaps the complex numbers, in this scenario, come before the reals which are in effect the [classical] outputs of quantum observations that come further down the track [so we might see the real visible universe emerging from an invisible complex imagination]. Circle group - Wikipedia
How can I see through this, the mysterious efficacy of mathematics that so fascinated Wigner who was often able to see the mathematical structures isomorphic to the behaviour of the universe. Such structures, verified by proofs, are the output of logic. We make logic work by embodying it in a network like the physical network of a computing machine which serves as a form of logical plumbing which we understand to be something like the universe which we understand in as way as a set of fermionic sources joined by conserved flows of bosons. Eugene Wigner: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences
Tuesday 31 December 2019
How do things interact? By exchanging symbols whose meaning is encoded in their physical shape like pheromones [or sound waves] The meaning of these shapes is determined by the process of encoding and decoding used by the sources, so a butterfly pheromone may have no meaning to a human [or human speech to a butterfly, except perhaps to scare it away]. This structure is universal and we call it language.So how do we express the language that photons and electrons share? The physicists call it gauging and express it in terms of phase so
[page 91]
the set of possible phases is the set of possible 'sentences' that photons and electrons can exchange. Physics understands this to be a [n infinite] continuum of phase angles. Phase space - Wikipedia
One of my principles, which serves as an argument against the use of continuous [real?] mathematics in physics is that a continuum carries no information because it has no 'marks' to serve as representative vehicles. Thus in photonic communication between atoms, the only effective photons are those whose energy corresponds closely to a line in the atomic spectrum which means that it changes the spin or orbital angular momentum by one Planck quantum. This appears to be a function of photon energy rather than phase.
So one approach to rephrasing QED is to present a network version based on Feynman's path integral which admits only integral quanta of action in the path integrals so that any non-integral path is automatically excluded (which seems to be like the case as explained above [and is probably, in effect, the outcome of the evaluated path integral]). In the network context we may have a large number of sources communicating with each other, in each case by an integral number of quanta of action, with a probability which depends upon the sources involved and the energy differences between them. Non-relativistic quantum mechanics compute this probability by the distance between two sources measured by the inner product of their state vectors, is the 'overlap integral' which is a function of the phase difference and superposition. In other words probability of interaction is a function of correlation measured by phase?? Born rule - Wikipedia
[page 92]
The idea here is to build QED in a discrete "vacuum" that does not have any need for remormalization nor any cosmological constant problem. One feature of this approach is that it works in two dimensions, considering only pairwise couplings between sources. From this point of view, four dimensions does not enter the problem until we move from pairwise communications to four dimensions and introduce Yang-Mills gauging. This is just chat, but it may mean something on the assumption that the world emerges as 0, 1, 2 . . . dimensions of coupling. Each individual in this system may be seen as time division multiplexed, as I am in my social contacts. My life of social contact, which determines my actual 'personality', is a superposition of an infinity of binary interactions. To make superposition possible, we need memory, that is particles that have a lifetime (like atoms) that are not annihilated every time (like fundamental particles) which are too simple to live through change. Things like the Lamb shift are in effect products of the history of the life of a particle. Lamb shift - Wikipedia
Our criteria of trust in physics are fundamentally our ability to calculate physical quantities with a degree of precision matching observation. Both the observations and the calculations are conducted in terms of physical constants; the basic ones are Planck's constant and the velocity of light, Boltzmann's constant and the gravitational constant. Many values, like the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron, can be derived from these values and many other measured values like the mass and charge of the electron, the permeability and permittivity of space and so on. We would like to be able to compute the values of these physical quantities from first principles, but as things stand we depend on dozens of measured values to feed into our computstions to test the algorithms we have devised to
[page 93]
couple various measurements together. Many hope that on day we will be able to calculate everything from fundamental constants, but how this might happen is far from clear. If we assume that the universe began as a structureless and particle free initial singularity it seems obvious that the universe has determined all these physical constants for itself in the process of becoming a complex consistent whole, so we are encouraged to think that eventually we will work out how all this happened. Anomalous magnetic dipole moment - Wikipedia
We may think of a mathematical equation as a 'wormhole' in symbol space, so E= mc2, and we may think of these wormhole in the form of a is b, or more generally subject - verb - object. From this point of view, groups form a sort of closed language. One of the features of infinite groups is that they explore a closed space of symbols but there is no limit to the number of symbols. Groups like the group of all positive and negative integers with addition as the law of composition include zero and are both discrete and infinite. Groups with multiplication as the law of composition must exclude zero as it has no inverse under multiplication.
Infinitesimal operators always commute in the first order and physicists, at least, are inclined to ignore second order infinitesimals. Insofar as the basic operator in the universe is finite rather than infinitesimal, the use of infinitesimals operators to obtain commutativity in physics may, in real terms, be fictitious and suffer from the same defects as perfect continuity, being unable to represent information. If we think of all physics equations as alternative representations of the same information, the use of differential and integral calculus in physics may be unsound. Physical continuity may be an illusion which must be replaced by logical continuity to make a real world.
[page 94]
One ground for demanding a remarking of all my essays may be the fact that this point, which I have made frequently, has been overlooked by the markers.
Higman page 187: 12.6 Infinitesimal operators and the group manifold. Bryan Higman: Applied Group-Theoretic and Matrix Methods
'With a continuous group there arises the possibility of infinitesimal operators. These are operators which make an infinitesimal change in a vector, not operators which convert a finite operator into an infinitesimal one X → X + dX, not X → dX. (More rigorously, they are operators whoe limit is I, not 0. The latter operator cannot be part of a [multiplicative] group, of course).'
'It will be noticed that whereas the general special-unitary operator in two dimensions depends on three parameters, the infinitesimal special unitary operator depend on only two. We are here is waters deeper than our present theory will fathom, but we may point out that infinitesimal operators always commute since (I + aA)(I +bB) = I +aA + bB + abAB and if a and b are infinitesimals, the only non-commuting term is an infinitesimal of the second order. This result is analogous to the fact that since small areas of a sphere may be taken as a plane, small rotations must commute as do translations.'
And maybe the whole idea of tangent planes on differentiable manifolds is fake news.
Wednesday 1 January 2020
[page 95]
I assume that the universe is alive. What theoretical consequences follow? As Aristotle said, life is self motion. Aquinas noted that this is not motion from potency to act, which would imply potency in God, forbidden. Instead God's motion is intellectual motion that perfects the mover rather than acting outside the mover. The same is true of the life of the Universe, since there is nothing outside it, and the notion that it is intellectual motion reinforces the idea that we must rewrite physics and cosmology as cognitive cosmology. This position is reinforced by Wigner's observation of the value of mathematics in the natural sciences and whitehead and Russell's argument that the structure of mathematics is guaranteed by logic, that is proof. Aquinas Summa Theologiae I,18, 3: Is life properly attributed to God?
All this looks plausible, and we can accept the identification of the classical God, the initial singularity and pure act as the starting point for s book on the divinity of the world, as I have felt for a long time. Now the task is to produce interpretations of the standard model of God and the standard model of physics which are consistent with one another. We have the general in hand, now we have to work down to the particular, a job for 2020 that has been brewing since about 1965, the year I met Bernard Lonergan.
Who? (What?) is God anyway
Huang page 204; 20.3 The pion as a Goldstone boson.
Nambu and Guangzhao concluded that chiral symmetry (q.v) is spontaneously broken. The symmetry is a global gauge symmetry and is not gauged (?) Its spontaneous breaking is therefore manifested through the massless Goldstone boson . . . the pion. Chirality (physics) - Wikipedia
[page 96]
Huang page 205: 'The chiral symmetry breaking must have a dynamical origin in QCD, but we have not yet understood the mechanism."
page 210: 'coupling constants determined by group structure.'
'The cancellation of anomalies suggests that the lepton-quark family is an inseparable multi-component particle. Isolating any one component calls up uncontrollable frequency modes that are not really there. (Thus again, the anomaly gives evidence of colour.) We do not know where the family comes from.
page 212: An even larger question:
Q: why the gauge principle? A. Because the universe is a communication network.
page 215: 21.1 A matter of scale.
Logical networks are essentially identical at all scales.
'When increasing magnification brings us to the end of a self similar range, with the revelation of new structures we need a "scientific revolution".'
page 216: 'It seems futile to extrapolate what we know at one scale to the world that lies beneath." Maybe not, if we have sufficiently universal model.
page 217: 21.2 Renormalization
[page 97]
Huang page 217: 'Our introduction to renormalization started with the ultraviolet catastrophe in QED - the divergence of integrals due to high frequency modes.' A theoretical catastrophe, not a real one, as the world goes serenely on despite theorists' troubles. Renormalization - Wikipedia
'Any theory we create cannot be expected to be valid at all length [momentum? energy?] scales.' What about logical scales? When we make a computer go faster, ie operate it at higher energy, the processes do not change, they [just] halt sooner. Does the fact that the world seems to change at higher energies mean that it is not logical, that energy / momentum shape what happens, or do higher energy and momentum merely reveal things that we did not resolve before, given quantum pixellation?
'A renormalizable theory is one in which there is no intrinsic length scale other than the cutoff [which is a frequency/energy?]' Length is secondary, interval is primary, 4 momentum is really what sets the scale.
page 218: 'under a change of scale the electron's renormalized charge and mass change, but the theory remains self similar. That is the theory is unchanged, except for the values of these parameters.' Ie logically [= algorithmically] invariant.
'Renormalizability is a closure property that makes physics possible.' We explain this by network layering. There are many layers of logical structure between me and my fundamental particles.
page 219: 'bare charge is being screened by charges induced in the Dirac sea,' a seriously weird idea [as weird as anything I propose]. Surprising that we can move around in it, given the stupid answers that Wilczek derives about the various ethers. Wilczek: The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces, page 109
21.3: Running coupling - Who ordered that? lots of wishful thinking, scifi, aka hypothesis.
[page 98]
Huang page 220 Bogoliubov. Where's Wilson? *
"bare theory' high energy? low energy? Running couplings all meet at 1016 - 1020GeV. Why? What is coupling strength? Rate of communication - marriage - friendship - acquaintance - ignorance.
page 222: 'Cutoff is the only scale parameter in a renormalizable theory.' What has it got to do with reality? Its just there to make dodgy theory work.
page 223: 'At high energy QCD coupling runs to zero' (QED to infinity)
page 225: 'Like a cruise ship the true theory has made many ports of call while travelling up the energy scale.'
page 227: In the space of all possible theories.
Which I like to call the transfinite computer network Prolegomenon to scientific theology: 4.3.5 On continuity and transfinity
22.1 'The physics is in the cutoff.' This has got to be rubbish since it has nothing to do with nature, only with the inadequacy of our models.
* The cutoff is a physical parameter, as emphasised by Kenneth Wilson. Once again: is it there in the physics or do we makeout it is there to make the algorithm work?
'All modes of motion at a higher frequency than the cutoff A0 are ignored', ie all energies above hA0.
[page 99]
Thursday 2 January 2020
The more I read about the standard model in Huang the wonkier it sounds. There is hope for me yet, at least to kep my fantasies alive by following the loop logic → mathematics → physics → logic which is built into the scientific method by the fundamental article of faith — that the settled structures of the universe are logically consistent, so all apparent inconsistencies have a deeper consistency which physicists understand by delving deeper into the system they happen to be studying.
Huang page 228: The Lagrangian is the thing: 'We can choose the theory by specifying the nature of the basic field, and the form of the kinetic and potential energies as functions of the field. The field as a function of time [integrated to give action] with given initial and final configurations, constitute a history or Feynman path. The cutoff is introduced by limiting acceptable paths to those involving frequencies less than some value.
We see network as a field and our cutoff is the requirement that network configurations be digitized in quanta of action so the action of the permissible Feynman path is an integral number of quanta. This requirement applies to action rather than energy and takes advantage of the fact that the Lagrangian is the difference between potential and kinetic energy, and if this difference is zero this action and [total] energy are also zero, although independently kinetic and potential energy may be very large.
page 232: 22.4 Of time and temperature
'One of the remarkable properties of quantum field theory
[page 100]
that it formally reduces to statistical mechanics when tie becomes pure imaginary:
t = ih/T via t = 1/frequency = 1/energy
Huang page 233: 'In the crystal lattice of a solid, for example, the lattice spacing is a natural cutoff.
The Truth (film) The Truth (2019 film) - Wikipedia
How does the world really work? The fundamental principle is that it made itself and so must be overall closed and consistent [and so subject to fixed point theory]. All of its subsystems, on the other hand, must be partly open to communicate with their environment, but internally consistent and consistent with their environment to maintain their existence. How does this idea express itself mathematically? The network view of general relativity, the differentiable manifold where we understand differentiation as an expression of communication between two values. When consistency fails to some degree some degree of death is involved. The most serious forms of death are instantiated in black holes, supernovas, bushfires, wars etc.
The power of the network model is its scale invariance so we can learn about physical space by studying human spaces so going to the movies is part of physical research. How do we go from a baby to an adult? How does the universe go from absolute simplicity to now? The universe runs on its own complex conjugate, so |φ|2 is real.
[page 101]
Gravitation condenses clouds of gas into stars. We can interpret the differentiable manifold as a network and then apply this abstract representation to explore the condensation of clouds of energy or action into particles. Can we imagine that the charge of an electron explains both its mass and its particulate nature and its affinity with photons? We may conceive electrons, photons and all fermions as "Dirac" particles. Rattle on like a supremely active singularity, building itself like the Trinity by bifurcation stabilized by communication, Father and Son bound by a loving Spirit. Can we dream up a better story than the ancients did, unhindered by a sea of empirical knowledge?
We do not see something until we see it, the fundamental tautology of encoding and decoding messages. The Son both sees the Father and is created by the Spirit, and the Father sees the Son and is created (ie becomes Father) by its relationship to the Son through the Spirit, an early version of bosons, fermions and the creation of space.
Veltman. Martinus Veltman: Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics
Veltman page 1: Change in point of view from Einstein to
page 3: 'It is not realistic to think that electromagnetism and other forces are properties of spacetime. In this book, elementary particles are the central objects. Spacetime is the stage.
page 6: Books: Pais Subtle is the Lord and Inward Bound. Abraham Pais: 'Subtle is the Lord...': The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, Abraham Pais: Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World
page 24: E=c√(p2 + m2c2) → E = mc2 when p = 0
page 38: proton = up up down, neutron = u down down. down is unstable, so neutron can decay into proton.
page 40: Conservation of energy is very strict [so how is this, which looks mathematically simple, enforced in reality?]
[page 102]
Veltman page 41: charge conservation. Charge is conserved: ±1, ±⅓, ±⅔, ie quantum number [what do these fractions tell us about the structure of charge?]
page 44: If a particle has a quantum number, antiparticle has opposite
baryon number etc rule out unobserved reactions [but once again, how does this work in reality?]
page 45: r, g, b quarks, also -r, -g, -b.
page 46: gluons, mass zero, carry colour and anti-colour.
page 47: r + b + g is white, quarks change colour by exchanging gluons.
'. . . something that happens all the time in particle physics and the world of quantum mechanics. One can compute things in great detail but it is often very difficult to "understand" these things in an easy way [we need a visualizable mechanism].
quarks have colour, charge and baryon number. 3 colours, 2 charges, 2 baryons number = 12 possibilities [plus antis].
electron number
page 50: crossing: n → p + e + antineutrino, neutrino + n → p + e
Friday 3 January 2020
Veltman page 53: 'All charged particles can emit or absorb photons, but they remain the same particle [so photon has no "personality", just energy and spin?].
page 55; antiparticle figure is crossed version of particle figure.
'Elementary particles have no further structure that we know of ' [so how to they carry their "personality"? Each of them is a process, a subroutine in the universe, a code].
Compare Huang page 181, page 81 supra, 22 December 2019.
[page 103]
Most of the earliest discovered particles, such as pions and kaons, are bound states.
Veltman page 58: Spin characterizes a particle but axis of rotation may vary in space-time: matter spin ½, forces spin 1 [which means?].
' . . . experimentally we have never encountered a particle that has spin 0. Higgs? Higgs boson - Wikipedia
* particle + antiparticle → pure energy, so they are formally inverse, like hole and heap of dirt = nothing, ie a bifurcation, like kinetic and potential energy.
page 59: CPT theorem couples particle and antiparticles to spacetime, so what about point 3 on page 101 supra? Streater & Wightman: PCT, Spin, Statistics and All That
* Insofar as the CPT theorem demands the existence of antiparticles that annihilate to [unstructured energy] when they meet the corresponding particle we imagine that this gives us a clue about how spacetime breeds particles out of energy. So the basic theorems of interest here are CPY and spin-statistics, and I must drill into them [via S&W].
Mass is a classical quantity whereas quantum mechanics is specifically concerned with energy, while quantum field theory works in the bigger space of four momentum.
What I am doing is theological archeology, trying to strip back the modern world to the time when God was young and unformed. The story back to the atom is known and the real problem lies between
[page 104]
there and the beginning.
Random motion of stock prices in the "vacuum" of buyers and sellers explains vacuum expectation values which are really simply a consequence of randomness, non-control, Only when a stock price make a determined move in some direction do we know that there is information about [which may of course be false].
How does the quantum mechanics of zero size apply to God?
Veltman page 62: The three generations of leptons (electrons and corresponding neutrinos) and quarks [baryons] are identical except for mass. This suggests that the internal processes that create mass are more [algorithmically] efficient in the lighter particles and so keep the particle structure intact without so much processing rate = energy. For me this is a very old idea which has taken a long time (20 years, check the notes) to come back around again.
page 64: Every lepton pair has a quantum number, electron and electron neutrino number, muon and muon neutrino number etc.
page 66: greatest puzzle: why three families?
page 67: It is a sad fact that all sophisticated mathematics and deep considerations that have seen the light of day since 1975 have contributed absolutely nothing to the three family question, nor in fact to a host of other problems that we have not yet talked about.
[page 105]
Veltman page 69: W+ and W- are antiparticles. Photon and Z0 are their own antiparticles (which tells us something about CPT?). Graviton, spin 2, is its own antiparticle. Total 48 leptons, 13 bosons = 61. Antiparticle of gluon is another gluon.
page 70: love, hate, force, field.
Field has independent existence, it contains (potential?) energy - QM field → particles; love to conversation in photons, phonons, pheromones.
Binding photons 'off mass shell'
page 71: Strengths of interactions vary with energy? This must have something to do with meaning / coding.
page 73: eg low energy neutrinos go right through Earth, high energy [interaction] as strong as electromagnetism [interaction rate proportional to energy = processing rate].
'. . . for the theory to make sense it is for massless spin 1 particles (such as the photon) absolutely essential that the coupling constant be a conserved quantum number.' And so why do interactions vary with energy (71 above)?
page 75: electromagnetic: αem = e2/ 4π = 1/137.
weak: αw = 1/40. Vector bosons couple to each other and photon
strong: αstrong/qcd = 1. gluon = colour + anti-colour and can change colour of quarks. There are three "diagonal" gluons, blue - antiblue etc
page 77: red - antired + green - antigreen + blue - antiblue = white gluon, non existent. Gluons couple to each other, so quark gluon system is very interdependent and cannot be taken apart.
[page 106]
Veltman: 2.13 Representing Interactions.
Saturday 4 January 2020
Veltman page 69: 61 elementary particles suggests 7 generations of bifurcation, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, the last being the emergence of antiparticles of which 3 [4?] are their own antiparticles so the last generation is 32 = 29 separate antiparticles giving 61 [?]. So we have something like the following layers of construction, in an order yet to be finalized:
1. initial singularity
2. energy - quantum mechanics
4. space-time
8. fermions, bosons, / particles
16. leptons - baryons
32. gravitation / universal structure - classical mechanics
61. the emergence of antiparticles.
Chew on this for a while. A prophetic piece of numerology, but like most prophecies, to be treated with suspicion. So press on.
Veltman page 78: Feynman diagrams, most basic shows charged particle and photon, the vector bosons and gluons.
All these possibilities (and associated impossibilities) can be coded into a network of possible / impossible communication links without going into the complex calculations that yield frequency / energy / mass.
page 82: all the particle that we associate with forces, 12 diagrams, excluding Higgs and gravitation.
page 83: The origin of quantum numbers.
[page 107]
Veltman page 85; Quantum mechanics - Mixing
Motions of elementary particles described by quantum mechanics.
Trajectories are probabilistic (although fundamental constants appear exact).
page 88: amplitude, a quantity that must be squared to obtain physical statements. - two slit experiment, waves, ie periodic functions, ie groups.
Everything comes down to the interpretation of the "two slit" experiment which depends very much on what quantum systems see. It seems to depend very much on delocalization insofar as an electron, interpreted as a point article, sees both slits (and appears to go through both) at once. If we measure which slit it apparently chooses, interference is lost. As Feynman tells us at the beginning, interference only occurs between undistinguished alternatives: [The Uncertainty Principle: The more general statement was that one cannot design equipment in any way to determine which of two alternatives is taken, without, at the same time, destroying the pattern of interference.] Feynman lectures on Physics Volume III:Chapter 1 Quantum Behaviour
page 92: 'Remember now that the experiment was done with the photons strictly separated in time. To say it crudely, they do not interfere with each other, they interfere with themselves. . . .. Of course the idea of a material particle interfering with itself is quite lunatic and you will save yourself a lot of headache by not trying to visualize that.' On the other hand, Feynman's path integral method does exactly that [and imagines that the particle explores the whole of space-time]. In effect the particle examines all possible paths and follows the one which maximises the amplitude arising from the superposition of the action of the path (QED). From a computational point of view the most probable events are the ones where all the necessary operations are synchronized which is why we establish determinism in a computer by arranging all processes to respond to a single clock.
[page 108]
Veltman page 92: Waves have a sign. Why waves? Ultimately the transfer of information requires a signal and a signal requires a mark to break the meaninglessness of a perfect unmodulated continuum and waves are the fundamental form of modulation, differentiating the continuum algebraically into up and down, positive and negative, state and anti-state, particle and anti-particle and so on and on. So blindingly simple it is hard to understand, but we see waves as the foundation of an information processing, that is logical, universe. The beating of my heart, the spiking of my neurons, the Fourier type representation of all signals. This seems trivial but irresistibly true and provides us with a bridge between logic, QED and QCD.
All through this I have been thinking in binary terms because it gives an easy connection between two valued logic and arithmetic. We can of course combine bits to give words and move to a system with s bigger base like 16 or 256.
We can use object oriented programming to represent network layering by nesting object within objects, like set within sets, but dynamic.
Huang page 223: 'At high energy QCD coupling goes to zero.' Ie in the very high energy at the beginning of the big bang there was no QCD? Au contraire QED goes to infinity, so it would have swamped all other couplings at that time.
The Gentlemen: Nothing like a good caper to cheer one up with plenty of murder and double crossing. An aspect of the spirit? The Gentlemen (2019 film) - Wikipedia
