Notes
Sunday 19 January 2020 - Saturday 25 January 2020
[Notebook: DB 84 Pam's Book]
[page 121]
Sunday 19 January 2020
I have a decided reluctance to bite bullets and face facts. I have received quite a lot of unflattering criticisms of my written work done in my two years at university. I console myself with
[page 122]
the observation that much of the criticism deals with the form rather than the content of my work and is directed toward getting me to conform to the conventions of philosophical writing. Early in my recent academic phase I was pleased to hear one of the professors say that modern philosophy is expanding in two directions, toward more engagement with science and theology, and took this to heart and set out to develop a scientific theology in a philosophical context with rather poor results. Another professor counselled that a good philosophical essay is an exhaustive treatment of a specific narrow issue. I have consequently concentrated on defending the notion that God and the Universe are identical, bringing in a lot of scientific data in the process particularly involved with cosmology and evolution. Another suggested that one can deal with details without exhaustive treatment by referring to authors who have already done the work, and I have done this very extensively, drawing on all the authors I have encountered over the last two years.. . .
Despite my failure to get good results, the last two years have carried my natural theology project a long way forward in my own understanding, and so the most effective option seems to be to repeat my honours year, if such is possible, while at the same time refining my ideas and making them more
[page 123]
explicit in a literary form more appealing to my examiners. . . . My poorest performances have been in the region of metaethics where I have tried to establish an evolutionary paradigm for the development of ethics. My thesis dealt with issues of the existence and nature of God in the context of the first part of Aquinas' Summa. My post graduate proposal was to do similar work on the second and third parts of the Summa applying the ideas of scientific theology to questions of ethics and salvation . . ..
Monday 20 January 2020
Tuesday 21 January 2020
Finally sitting pretty again after the disappointing end to the 2019 academic year. My comment on a NYT article by Yuval Levin summarized the position succinctly and now all I need to do is to find a vehicle to carry it through 2020.Americans say "In God we Trust" and for many the fundamental institutions that underwrite this trust are religions. Unfortunately many religions, like Christianity, are based on unverifiable myths which often fly in the face of the reality revealed by science. This renders them untrustworthy. Perhaps the answer lies in analogy to the spirituality of Indigenous Australians. The foundation of their spirituality is the Land, that is in effect the whole of their reality. From millennia of hunting and gathering they developed an intimate knowledge of their environment. This knowledge was not confined to the search for food and shelter. The land also documents their understanding of the creation of themselves and their world. In the modern world, the whole Universe is analogous to the Land and it plays for us all the roles traditionally attributed to God. To rebuild a foundation of trust in religion, we need to build a scientific theology, based on the actual world we inhabit. At present the world is fractured by myriad theologies that have grown up in relative isolation and provide a foundation for conflict. Science shows us that the world is one: A critical scientific study of the world will have a tendency to unify theology and religion, just as scientific biology has unified our understanding of life. A scientific approach to theology will lead to the unification of theology and religion, creating a foundation for trust in our most fundamental religious institutions. Comment on Levin
I am in love with my theological dream but find very little interest in the wider world. The believers will not change, the non-believers see theology as mythology, a subject to be avoided rather than reclaimed, but I see theology as following the course that led astrology to astronomy. The astrologers worked with real astronomical data which eventually led them into the light. Real data on
[page 124]
can do the same for theology. Yuval Levin: How Did Americans Lose Faith in Everything?
The emergence of 4D spacetime made Yang-Mills type structures possible and/or vice versa.
Wednesday 22 January 2020
Thursday 23 January 2020
A particle is a representative vehicle of a software subroutine of the universe so that we may conceive of the interactions of all the particles as the overall universal process which I understand to be the universal network in my thesis . Physicists call the software "field". Prolegomenon to scientific theologyThe Hebrew God Yahweh is an exemplar for honour societies, conceived in the image of a warlord who responds to insult of his amour propre with severe punishment, including murder, [as] we saw when Moses killed the worshippers of idols at Sinai (Exodus 32:26 sqq.).
How do we understand that particles with no physical size nevertheless carry information? The information is residing in the region of invisibility which the physicists call wave function or field, analogous, it seems to my internal states of mind which inform the movements of my body.
Back to Veltman from page notes 118 (Sunday 5 January 2020)
Veltman page 163: Proton cannot decay since there are no stable particles with non-zero baryon number lighter than the proton.
[page 125]
Veltman page 165: 6.2 Accelerators ('atom smashing')
Highest energy cosmic ray 1021 eV, highest accelerator 1013 eV.
Cyclotron to 1 GeV Cyclotron - Wikipedia
page 174: Collider Collider - Wikipedia
page 181: Machine builders: - 'particle physics is very much driven by technology.
page 186: Bubble energy grew exponentially 1950 →
page 189: CERN neutrino experiment. In 1959 ~30 GeV machines started the era of high energy physics. CERN: About/History/
page 195: Creating a flux of neutrinos by colliding protons with a fixed target that produces pions that decay into muons and neutrinos. CERN/Neutrino: The lighter side of neutrino experiments
page 199: Results presented by Veltman, the entry of CERN into particle physics.
page 200: TD Lee and CN Yang dominated neutrino physics. Chen Ning Yang & Tsung-Dao Lee: The Nobel Prize in Physics 1957
page 203: Checking the two neutrino hypothesis - electron and muon neutrino.
page 205: Vector boson event: 2 muons or muon + electron or positron.
[page 126]
Veltman page 208: CERN was scooped [by US] on 2 neutrino experiement so turned to vector boson. No result.
page 219: The Particle Zoo Particle Data Group. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: The Particle Adventure
page 222: 'is explained by bound states of quarks ['they are particles, but not elementary particles.']
page 223: Binding energy per nucleaon is about -7 MeV, a million times greater than the binding energy of electron in hydrogen, -13.6 eV.
Proton: 2 up quarks and one down = 15 MeV. Proton mass 93.8 MeV, so gluon blob contributes 923 MeV.
page 224: Heavy quarks 1.3, 4.5 and 175 GeV. J/ψ mass 3096 MeV, charmed + anti-charmed quarks account for 2600 MeV, gluons for 500 MeV.
page 225: No glueballs, ie glob of gluons no quarks.
page 227: Regge trajectory Regge theory - Wikipedia
page 244: Chapter 9 Particle Theory
page 245: Feynman: In a nutshell I want to do an Einstein / Feynman job on theology.
page 246: 'Without the simplifications due to Feynman's methods that progress would have been unthinkable. Not only in experimental physics but in theoretical physics as well the advance in techniques leads to new developments and insights'
[page 127]
Veltman page 247: 'That is typical in quantum mechanics. Specify the initial and final configurations and then the theory provides the calculation of the probability for the process to happen.' This is a universal approach to life. In political theory, for instance, we specify the initial and final positions on a political event and the pundits provide probabilities for its realization, etc etc.
'particles can be created in an interaction.'
page 248: '[the outcomes of] interactions obey strictly the laws of energy and momentum conservation.
page 249: high energy photon moving freely cannot convert into electron and positron since from the point of view of a fast moving observer it becomes redshifted to a low energy photon.
page 250: 'Particles can exist with inadmissable energies for short times as determined by the uncertainty principle but then the books have to be balanced.'
A particle in an inadmissable state is called 'virtual' — off mass-shell.
page 251: 'Virtual particles occur as intermediate objects in a calculation in a diagram but cannot be observed directly.' Rather like complex numbers in algebraic calculations [used for manipulating amplitudes in quantum mechanics].
page 252: Tunnelling effect: If an electron is initially on one side of the tunnel and finally on the other side, it seems only
[page 127]
natural to say that "it has passed through the mountain' Such a statement is, however,beyond the limits of quantum mechanics. There is no way to establish if the electron ever was halfway in the mountain. The electron is there as a virtual electron . . . What you observe, however, are the initial and final states of the electron, never the intermediate virtual particles. Delocalization. Principle of locality - Wikipedia
Interference: 'The way this works is that for a given situation there may be more than one way to go from a given initial state to a given final state. The different possibilities may interfere . . .
Veltman page 254: 'For example, to calculate light scattering one must consider six diagrams and combine their contributions. . . . All these diagrams correspond to contributions of possibly different sign, and all these contributions interfere [which happens because the route from before to after is not deterministic, a number of different computations may give the same result].
page 255: Infinities: Where life becomes difficult is implicit in these diagrams . . . they must be summed over all the different energy-momentum values of the virtual particles . . . Consider, for example, . . . the temporary transition of a photon into an electron-positron pair. The virtual electron or positron of this pair can have an infinite range of possible energies, including also negative energies. The particles are then very far off mass-shell. The total energy must of course be equal to the energy of the photon . . . One must take all the possibilities into account, no matter how far off mass-shell. . . . It is q question of the magnitude of the contributions . . .
[page 129]
Normally contributions are smaller, damped, as the particles are further off mass-shell. The crucial thing is the amount of damping. If there is no or too little damping, one is in trouble.
Veltman page 256: The more a particle is away from its mass shell, the shorter the amount of time that it is alowed to exist in that state.
'A difficult point is the behaviour of virtual particles as a function of their intrinsic properties' Spin.
page 257: 'Every elementary particle has a definite spin. . . . As their spin becomes higher, virtual particle are less damped at higher energy. Particles of spin 1 are barely damped a high energy in virtual processes. Particles of spin 2 are even worse.
Even if the photon has spin 1 and has not much of a damping factor associated with it, there is still effective damping due to the way different diagrams tend to compensate one another. As a consequence the theory of electrons interacting with photons becomes manageable using the renormalization technique discussed below.
page 258: However, weak interactions involving other spin 1 particles remained intractable. What changed the situation for weak interactions was the discovery that the worst effects of individual diagrams can theoretically be cured by introducing new interactions and particles (and hence new diagrams) in such a way that the bad parts cancelled out.' Suggesting that the bad parts were never there in nature and simply an artefact of an incomplete theory.
[page 130]
The uncertainty constraint on virtual processes each of which is described by a feynman path integral suggests that only those can actually complete [halt] which are described by exactly one quantum of action which gives them a probability of 1 and those that do not meet this criterion have a probability of 0, a path to digitization Only those things happen whose actual probability is 1.
Veltman page 258: 9.4 Perturbation theory. Fine structure constant 1/137 reduces the weight of diagrams as the number of vertices increases.
page 262; Accuracy of the magnetic moment of electron. Electron magnetic moment - Wikipedia
page 263: tree diagram → 1 loop → 2 loop . . .
'Many theorists would have liked a formulation of the theory not involving approximations , but so far perturbation theory is all we have.' reflecting the network nature of interactions in the real world.
page 264: diagrammatic methods and perturbation theory carried Veltman through the dark times in the middle 60s when false gods were dominating particle theory. 'Now, of course, with the Standard Model we can apply those methods all over the place.' Veltman (1994): Diagrammatica: The Path to the Feynman Rules
9.5 Renormalizability
page 264: No infinities in the calculation of the magnetic moment of the electron.
Basic electric charge in tree diagram plus the contributions of higher order diagrams. So let us choose the basic charge so
[page 131]
that the result after we consider all the higher order diagrams is the measured value. Charge of the electron is a free parameter so we can fiddle with it. which makes the idea of charge conservation look a little dodgy.
Veltman page 265: Free parameter is input to the theory, not something we can computer. Why not? The universe much have computed it. All we observe is the electron after the diagrams have done their stuff [if the diagram theory is correct].
page 266: 'Se here we are. We have a theory that is imperfect on several counts. First the theory is only perturbative. Second, infinities occur, even if they can be isolated and hidden.
Yang-Mills refers to gauge theories with spin 1. Spin 2 gravitation is not renormalizable. Gerardus t' Hooft (editor): 50 Years of Yang-Mills Theory
page 267: 9.6: Weak interactions have very short range. Began with radioactivity discovered by Becquerel. Henri Becquerel - Wikipedia
down quark decays into an up quark releasing W- changing neutron into proton. W- is antiparticle. W- is very heavy and far off mass shell [expending one quantum of action in very short time = high energy/mass].
page 269: W has spin 1, and due to the absence of damping at high energy leads initially to non-renormalizable theory,
page 270: 9.7 Compton scattering. Scattering of a photon off an electron.
[page 132]
Veltman page 270: Two compensating diagrams prevent probability from increasing beyond 1 with increasing energy.
page 272: Cancellation of bad behaviour between diagrams in the idea behind gauge theories, of which QED is the simplest example.
page 273: Neutral Vector Bosons: Bad high energy behaviour of W+ scattering off electron is cured by introducing neutral vector boson Z0.
page 276: Charmed quarks - a new quark proposed to repair the decay of Λ (down, up, strange) which involves strange decaying into W+ and up, which has bad high energy behaviour repaired with charm (1500 MeV).
page 279: 'The discovery of the charm quark was a second major victory for the gauge idea.' ie the introduction of another software routine [to close a gap in the process].
9.10: The Higgs Particle. Vector bosons have a such a short lifetime that they cannot be used as projectiles or targets.
Higgs proposed to control energy dependence of W-, W+ and Z0 vector boson diagrams. Veltman (2003) looks forward to LHC producing Higgs. Higgs boson - Wikipedia, Higgs mechanism - Wikipedia
page 282: 'The demonstration that the bad energy behaviour can be made to vanish with only the particles discussed above is usually referred to as the proof that this theory is renormalizable. . . . The Higgs particle is the last one needed.
[page 133]
'The symmetry [of the standard model] was discovered and investigated some 20 years before its consequence, a renormalizable theory, was finally understood.'
9.12 Speculations
Veltman page 282: 'Up tp now we have no clue where masses come from, they are just the parameters to be fixed by experiment'.
From the network point of view every particle is an element of the network, an element of the universal process, and its mass, proportional to its energy, is the rate of processing (in quanta of action per time) assigned to it by the universal process [or, we might say masses seem to be a function of the time available to execute a process in the overall dynamics, which, since each process is equivalent to one quantum of action, determines the mass of the representative vehicle of the process, since the uncertainty principle establishes mass/energy as the inverse of time].
Particles that can decay may be understood as processes that can be broken into subprocesses which are the 'decay products' which we may understand as subprocesses within the decaying process. The fact that quarks and gluons cannot be separated suggests that they are not closed processes capable of independent existence.
page 283: How many Higgs particles do we need? It seems that one may be enough.
'The top quark has a function in the scheme, for if it were not there certain diagrams grow in an intolerable way.'
page 284: 'self energy diagrams' depict mandatory dissociations of W+ and Z0 into quark-antiquark pairs. Three diagrams, two involving the top quark give a finite result which would not be possible without the top quark.
In computational terms non-renormalizability points to processes that do not halt but continue to infinity, maybe involving infinite amounts of energy.
page 134]
Veltman page 285: 10; Finding the Higgs
'The most spectacular feature of the Standard Model is the quantum correction of the p parameter [=M2/Mo2 cos2θw where M is mass of W and Mo is the mass of Z0 and θw relates weak and electromagetic interactions and the mass of the top quark.'
'if all the theoretical problems [associated with the weak interaction] are to be solved using one and only one Higgs particle then the ratio of the mass of the charged vector bosons W+ and W- must have a very specific value.Here experiments tell us that the answer is that the values of the masses are indeed precisely such that one Higgs particle is enough to do the job [ie the masses, which control the timing of processes, are such as to get the timing just right].
page 289: So probably one Higgs and a vague prediction of its mass (2003)
page 290: Bound state of Higgs? Bound state has less energy than separated individual states, so bound state of infinite Higgs's may have negative energy.
page 291: So some relationship between Higgs and gravitation. Higgs relation effects become visible if its mass is greater than 500 GeV.
page 292: LHC will find it [right]
page 293: Chapter 11: QCD cannot use perturbation theory because coupling constant is 1.
Wilczek says now we can compute the mass of the proton and pion [taking large amount of supercomputer time to do something the universe does instantaneously!]. Wilczek: The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces
[page 135]
Veltman page 295: Gluons interact with eachother.
11.2 Confinement: 'It seems impossible to have long range gluon field although they are massless.' Colour neutrality eliminates long range fields - all bound states of quarks are 'white', ie r + g + b or colour + anticolour.
page 296: So one cannot remove one quark from a proton becasue colour neutrality would be violated → confinement.
11.3 Asymptotic freedom: Coupling constant of QCD is a function of energy, getting smaller at high energy, a matter of radiative corrections. At very high energy, therefore, coupling constant becomes so small that perturbative calculations are possible.
page 300: 11.4 Scaling: Low energy photons see proton as a whole, but at higher energy resolves quarks, which also become more visible through asymptotic freedom at high energy. SLAC experiment showed quarks to be real. Quark - Wikipedia
page 304: Epilogue.
page 306: Greatest mystery is the three lepton families.
page 308: Neither string theory nor supersymmetry has experimental basis [and therefore not discussed in this book].
