vol VII: Notes
2019
Notes
Sunday 5 January 2020 - Saturday 11 January 2020
[Notebook: DB 84 Pam's Book]
[page 109]
Sunday 5 January 2020
How does a particle carry it character? This is a question of entropy, one symbol per feature, the most interesting cases being, it seems, the gluons with their colour-anticolour structure and their ability to change quark colours .
How do I carry my character? I suppose the best I can say for myself is that I am a pretty average person whom fate, moving through many twists and turns, has saddled me with a supremely important task that does not appear to have been taken up by anyone else - to save the planet and its inhabitants by extending the scientific method which has brought us supreme and dangerous success as a species, to our basic understanding of the nature and constraints of the divine universe we inhabit by working toward scientific theology. I am not guaranteed any success, but like any explorer steadfastly maintaining a course in a new direction, I am seeing new things and doing a little to weight human consciousness in a new direction. After many adventures, some profitable, some not, I have settled down to spending the final decades of my life exploring and documenting my work to the best of my ability on an income guaranteed by the government of a generous people to whom I owe my life.
The development of ever more powerful accelerators revealed a flood of particles which have been identified as permutations and combinations of about 60 so called fundamental elementary particles that are documented in Veltman's book. General relativity indicates that the universe began as one structureless particle, the initial singularity, and we are now faced with trying to understand where the current
[page 110]
crop of "elementary" particles came from. The obvious answer is to repeat the success of the seventies era by developing a sceme of permutations and combinations that explains the elementary particles, and it would be very pleasing, to me, to see a construction that begins at 1 and goes 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 as outlined on Saturday 4 January. My current hope for that plan relies on a finite foundation of the transfinite computer netwok discussed frequently in these pages. Having failed in the philosophy milieu to get into postgraduate work in theology, the next step seems to be to begin again at the beginning and spend the next 6 years getting a PhD in science based on the study of the initial stages of the growth of God in the big bang. Here, in a way, we are beyond the each of accelerator physics and must begin to rely more heavily on philosophy and theology to make some progress.
I came to Adelaide and went to university to deal with the grief of a series of family disasters and I chose philosophy because I felt that it would be less demanding on my senilifying mind. I found the philosophers still wallowing in the nineteenth century, totally ignorant of the reality of evolution and creation, locked into a literary paradigm of choosing tiny localized problems and beating them to death. Now that I have my energy back, I am getting some preliminary insight into the course of physics from Huang and Veltman and am ready to bite all the necessary bullets and plough on. The world is somewhat in turmoil as a result of scientific and social success, but the fact that we ae still running on fragmented and mythical
[page 111]
theologies hose average age is about 3000 years means that we are seriously lacking global guidance and the Popes and Ayatollahs have no idea what is to be done. Most of the things they and the politicians do are making things worse. Kerson Huang: Fundamental Forces of Nature: the Story of Gauge Fields, Martinus Veltman: Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics
Veltman page 99: Cabibbo and CKM mixing
Monday 6 January 2020
Music, computers and quantum mechanics all depend on timing and we can imagine that this is the basic clue to how the world works, a matter of harmonious frequencies and intervals closely related to energy [so the general tendency to minimize energy is a genral tendency to reducie frequency, that is slow things down]. From this starting point we need to work out how to create space and momentum out of time and energy, and so give some meaning to the individual relationships between angular momentum [the basic carrier of information in the form of waves], space-time and photons. Veltman seems to see particles being independent of space-time like actors on a stage, but de Broglie's ideas seem to suggest that spacetime has an intimate role in the structure of particles and this idea is reinforced by the CPT theorem, the spin statistics theorem and the Lorentz transformation which although 'classical' is seen to have a lot to say about the domain of quantum field theory [and it necessary to allow for the existence of p and not-ps]. It is no doubt all as simple as the wheel if we could but see it, some wheels spinning in place, others rolling along a road. Everything runs around in pixellated space-time. Streater & Wightman: PCT, Spin, Statistics and All That
Tuesday 7 January 2020
What we want to know is how God created itself into a complex entity, and the first chapter, written long ago, is the Trinity. Accelerator physicists take a very violent approach to discerning the structure of matter, seeking
[page 112]
to imitate conditions in minuscule regions of the space and time which they imagine were ubiquitous in the early moments of the big bang. Feynman [allegedly] compared this method to smashing watches together and observing the bits and pieces that emerged in an effort to understand how watches work. It may be, of course, that like watches fundamental particles are very precisely designed and constructed. This is suggested by the very high, if not absolute, precision which seems to go with the nature of fundamental constants. Because things in the region of the most fundamental particles are both very simple and beyond the energy range of any possible accelerators, we are constrained to determining their structures through discrete logic. We might like to see the big bang as a chain reaction of trinities. High energy physicists simply assume that plenty of energy produces plenty of particles, but we must accept that each new particle is in some way logically derived from its predecessors.
Wednesday 8 January 2020
Tim Low Low: Where Song Began
Forever circling my divine target and barely getting closer. On the other hand, the downsides of traditional theology are becoming more obvious in many political leaders, opening more space for alternative visions. In particular the contrast between relying on an imaginary God and facing the realities of the divine world we live in are being underlined by the issues of bushfires and global warming so there is space in the public debate for identifying the Aboriginal concept of Land with the theological concept of a divine world. James Boyce: The Devil and Scott Morrison, Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology - Wikipedia
[page 113]
Fermions, bosons and spacetime re intimately related, bosons corresponding to time and fermions to space. Time is the means by which spaces communicate, coupled by bosons moving at the velocity of light. Streater & Wightman: op. cit.
Freedom and complexity are correlated, since complexity, working by combination and permutation, generates the cardinals (entropy) that are the measure of freedom.
We begin with a perfectly smooth continuous surface that carries no information, nor aan it have any meaningful size. Then we modulate it with information bearing waves that 'depress' and 'elevate' it locally so that the algebraic sum of the local heights remains zero. This is not possible without introducing a metric when enables us to distinguish the peaks from the troughs. From a logical point of view the function of spatial differentiation is to make possible the simultaneous existence of p and not-p. We know that from an observer's point of view time does not pass on a photon, and its extension also appears to be zero so if it has waves they are all seen as heaped up on one another and so summing to zero, and yet the photon carries energy which is tantamount to frequency which is tantamount to the differentiation of state in space and time. From an observer's point f view, the photon is like the pristine surface but in itself the photon is a carrier of information, frequency and energy. How do we fit all these ideas together? Photons are not observers, the observers (sources and sinks of information) are fermions. From an observer's point of view a photon exists at the boundary of space-time, in other words it looks like the initial singularity [so we might think of al the photos in the Universe as initial singularities, but what distinguishes them?]. Shane Keating: The story of a wave: from wind-blown ripples to breaking on the beach
[page 114]
Each frequency requires a resonator and playing a piece of music requires choice, sequencing and superposition of resonators which are physical like throats, guitars, woodwinds, brass and so on. When we come to physics and quantum mechanics we see the resonators as implemented by physical entities like atomic and nuclear orbitals. In order to produce fixed notes (spectral lines, eigenvalues) we need fixed physical strutures and the game is to work from a spectrum of frequencies to a mechanism to produce them just as a discerning listener may be able to construct a piano by listening to the music it can produce. Physics is the search for the generators of cosmic music on a spectrum running from infinity to zero, the period of the universe. Descartes was looking for clear and distinct ideas; physics is looking for diagonal matrices.
Thursday 9 January 2020
I am impatient and want to do everything. Back in the monastic days one of the vices we were expected to eliminate from ourselves was 'dissipation'. Perhaps dissipation has done me good because it has yielded a wide range of experience but now I am a pensioner with negligible responsibilities I must try to focus myself on this work on the of chance that like a persistent prospector i will eventually discover something of great value. The clues I have found so far through wide coverage lead me on and I have got nothing to lose by continuing the quest. Hydrothermal mineral deposit - Wikipedia
Back to Veltman:
Veltman page 99: '3.4 Cabibbo and CKM mixing (from page 111)
[page 115]
page 99: Particle families and interactions with vector bosons
'. . . coupling constant may have a sign (as for example the electric charge of a partice may have a sign) but the transition probability, being proportional to the square of the amplitude and hence proportional to the square of the coupling constant is, of couse, always positive. . . . . this is not different from the emission of a photon by a charged particle.'
page 100: 'up quark can become a down quark, emitting a W+ and the charmed quark can become a strange quark, emitting a W+. The negative vector boson W- is involved in the opposite transition.'page 101: Cabibbo rotation: coupling to down is less than 1, the difference being accounted for by coupling to strange, so we have here an angle a bit like the angles measured by the Born rule. Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix Wikipedia, Born rule - Wikipedia
'The idea of an angle implying the probability of soe reaction diminishes, but that a new reaction makes that up has been a very fruitful one.'
page 104: 'The Cabibbo rotation is experimentally well established but its origin remains a mystery'. Situation more complicated because there are three families, 3D Cabibbo extended by Kobayashi and Maskawa → CKM mixing.
page 108: Why is there no mixing between the leptons of the three generations? Solar neutrino experiments now suggest that neutrinos are massive and mix. - electron → neutrino + W-. If neutrinos are massive travel at less than c. Solar neutrino - Wikipedia
page 112: 'if two particles have the same quantum numbers (including spin) they will mix.' This suggests that they are almost the same particle differing only by mass?
[page 116]
Veltman page 113: 'quark mixing thought to be due to Higgs.'weak mixing angle between photon and Z0.
page 115: Chapter 4: Energy, Momentum and Mass-Shell
'The aim of this Chapter is to explain the mechanical properties of elementary particles . . . '
'Energy and momentum are important concepts because of two facts: first they are, in the context of quantum mechanics, enough to describe completely the state of a single free particles (disregarding internal properties such as spin and charge) and second, they are conserved.'Essay: How God discovered space-time.
page 116: 'In quantum mechanics, when you know precisely the momentum of a particle, no information on its position can be given.'
So photons have no position (on their null geodesics). 'If you cannot know where the particle is located, lets not talk about it.'
page 117: 'The discussion will focus on collision processes. . . ' elastic / inelastic
page 120: x, y, z energy and momenta are orthogonal / independent.
page 122: Rutherford 1911 [discovered nucleus] Bohr 1913 [first atom model]
[page 117]
Veltman page 125: 'The relation between momentum and energy . . . is called the mass-shell relation. . . . the relationship is quadratic: if the energy has some value for a given momentum, then it will be four times greater if the momentum becomes twice as large.'
page 126: 4.3 Relativity
If particles hae velocities approaching the speed of light relativistic effects become important. The kinetic energy and the momentum depend on the velocity in a different way, namely such that for speeds approaching the velocity of light (c) both energy and momentum go to infinity. . . . That is the way the limit of the speed of light is imposed by the theory of relativity.
E = c√(p2 + m2c2), or, given c = 1, E2 = p2 + m2
page 131: 4.4 Relativistic Invariance
page 132: Classical, pre-Einstein physics invariant with respect to time, position and angle. Einstein added constant velocity of light and equivalence with respect to inertial motion.
page 133: velocity of light is determined locally
page 135: 'the fast moving lives longer' from the observer's point of view.
'A point on the mass shell (corresponding to a particle of definite mass, momentum and energy) will transform under a Lorentz transformation to another point on the mass shell . . . the mass shell is an invariant: a particle of a given mass remains on the same mass shell when going to another reference system.'
'Reducing things to the most convenient reference frame is often of great help in particle theory.' Energy has mass, (but not in a photon - why?) what explains the arithmetic?
[page 118]
Veltman page 140: Chapter 5: Detection
page 146: Photoelectric effect
page 147: '[Planck's] discovery was really something. It was not "in the air" and no oe else even vaguely suspected anything like it.'page 161: 6.1 Energy bubbles contain localized energy [which is converted into a] spectrum of particles [so they are effectively little initial singularities]. The kinetic energy of the bubble itself is irrelevant.
page 162: Elementary particles are energy bubbles on the mass shell. Decay is controlled by conservation laws.
page 163: Electron cannot decay because no lighter particles of charge 1.
Energy bubble is produced by collision, and then we want to see what comes out.
Energy bubbes automatically (magically) create particles within the constraints of the conservation laws (symmetries) of the universe which in the network model, points to the layering of the system.
Friday 10 January 2020
Physicists use a system of conservation laws to define the possible outcomes of events. What we need to do, in a nutshell, is to produce a consistent dynamic picture of how these constraints fit together, and this seems to be a way forward to
[page 119]
my little project to explain how God creates itself, a paradigm of all creation, and in particular of the generation of a picture of the future of humanity.
Ultimately the output of complex multidimensional calculations involving vectors and tensors are simple scalars, quanta, quantum numbers, like the deflection of photons passing the Sun or the forces acting between particles. The ultimate success of physical theory is to devise a way to calculate the measured numbers. What does this mean? And how many different ways are there to get the right numbers? Given an elaborate enough scheme, one can cook up almost any number, but how do we discern if the scheme is right? A mixture of logical continuity and numerical precision. The general theory of relativity, for instance, is logically closed and yields precise answers that correspond to reality. What about the Standard Model? Maybe too many input parameters and too many tricky bits, somewhat ad hocish.
Saturday 11 January 2020
While it seems perfectly obvious (to me) that it is reasonable (and necessary) to identify the Universe with God, many would disagree. The fundamental reason for this seems to be that God is considered to be perfect whereas the Universe is flawed. In particular the Catholic Church reinforces this position with the claim that we are all destined for an afterlife of Heaven or Hell, and because we are all tainted with Original Sin, the only route to Heaven is through the divine Grace bestowed upon us when we are Baptized into the Church. The promise of an eternal life of heavenly bliss is a powerful incentive to believe the Church. We can see a clear example of this sort of motivation in the total corruption of the US GOP by the fact that they believe that Trump
[page 120]
is their route to power and power is for them a form of Heaven. Our evolutionary history suggests that survival in our principal goal and so we will follow any leader who appears to guarantee the power to survive. He can we combat this? How can we make the realities outweigh the dreams? There seems to be no panacea, just steady work to reveal that human peace and happiness depends on accepting the reality of our condition as revealed by science, which is my motivation for attempting to develop and promote scientific theology even though most of the time I seem to be spinning my wheels and making very little headway. Reality is much more complex than dreams. Matthew Avery Sutton: Explaining the bond between Trump and white evangelicals, Republican Party (United States) - Wikipedia
