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a reply to: Arbitrageur

Obviously a "nothing" can weigh."something". Otherwise,how did Sally Struthers gain enough mass to have moons?

a reply to: Arbitrageur

But, to clarify, I don't subscribe to the Big Rip theory. I was just wondering if the gravitational force of a singularity could hold together under the current models of the rip.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

a reply to: BO XIAN
This gets into the semantics of exactly what you mean by "communicate". We see chemical and electrochemical forms of communication between cells in living organisms to coordinate the efforts of the cells to keep the organism alive.

If you mean outside living organisms, like two individual hydrogen atoms, I would explain the process by which they form an H2 molecule as an "interaction". However if I was explaining this process to my young nephew I might inaccurately describe their interaction as a form of communication to simplify it for him, fully realizing that it's not really what I would normally consider "communication". So I guess it depends on what you mean by "communicate". We say particles interact, but when physicists say two like charges repel and unlike charges attract, the vocabulary is more one of interaction and not so much "communication" though if you define "communication" broadly enough I suppose it could overlap with interaction somehow.

I was meaning something more like "communication" as we normally think of it between organisms, individuals.

So then, my question to myself was . . . is there enough variability in the normal states of such particles such that a change in such states--with all the possible variations--would result in a vocabulary of 0, 1 or 0, 1, 2, 3 or what?

And if there were potential for a vocabulary of a handful of 'meanings' . . . what might a postulated, hypothesized

MECHANISM for TRANSMISSION of information be . . . an 'other dimensional' sort of thing? What?

Some of us are keenly aware of a 'spiritual dimension.'

What might the mechanics be--if such is a fitting question--in terms of the spiritual dimension interacting with the 'normal 3D plus time dimension?

Could the interaction occur on a sub-atomic level?

Let's assume that God literally does have all the hairs of our head numbered and knows when a sparrow falls and probably when an ant dies. What might the mechanism be for such awareness? Guardian angels filing reports every nanosecond? For every ant? I'm a bit skeptical about that probability.

On the other hand . . . IF . . . every particle of reality is sort of 'hard wired' into a 'wireless' God-alternate dimension(or 3 or 4) network . . . that might be interesting.

Thanks for your kind reply.

a reply to: BO XIAN
I don't think it's fruitful to search for scientific explanations for how paranormal deities operate, especially those which are omniscient, omnipotent, etc. Scientists try to describe the natural world in a systematic way of following natural laws. Omnipotent supernatural beings are under no requirement that I know of to follow natural laws.

I read an article explaining the science of how Jesus might have walked on water. I don't think the science was good, but moreover I think the effort misses the entire point that it was supposed to be a miraculous event defying natural laws. It's not supposed to be explained by science. The people who try anyway are missing the point that it was supposed to be a miracle.

Likewise it seems your line of questioning is intended to explore deconstructing a supernatural entity into something natural following natural laws. If God did that he would no longer be God as far as I can tell.

Here is the question: how experimentally accurate, really, is QED?

Background: After Physical Review Letters rejected my latest work, saying I needed field quantization, I ordered Julian Schwinger's book. In reading the forward, I remembered why I didn't dig deep into the topic before. I did take, and fully pass, my grad school courses on it, but there was always THE CENTRAL PROBLEM - which is that renormalization never made any sense at all, it fact it appeared as a blatant fudge. And then in the forward, Schwinger emphasized toward the end what an unsatisfactory thing it is. Feynmann made similar totally disparaging comments. I don't know of any of the originators that ever really supported it wholeheartedly. Since it appeared to be totally based on a fraud, I didn't dive too deep into it.

But there is the issue of how extremely well it is advertised to match experiments, and this is a big, big deal. If it really does match experiments as well as is claimed, then one has to perhaps revisit the issue of how this can be. Perhaps renormalization, as flaky as it looks, has some sort of solid underpinning that just hasn't been found. (Or perhaps it has been found, and you can enlighten me.)

Yet there is also the possibility, I believe, that perhaps QED isn't nearly as good as it is claimed to be. What I recall renormalization doing is that it requires that certain parameters - mass, charge - be set experimentally. Now these parameters are not the same ones that are observed in the "far field", because (for example, in the case of charge) as one gets closer to the center things like electron positron pair creation occur, and there can be some sort of screening that takes place. So you then get a far field charge and a bare charge, and they are different. The far field charge is set by classical tests. And the bare charge gets assigned as the result of different experimental tests, and then renormalization wraps it all up so that things all agree. That is how I've understood it - is that basically correct?

And so the issue is this - if renormalization theory allows for a determination of the bare quantities from experiment, are there enough independent high resolution experiments so that we really do have high accuracy? Or, say, does the Lamb shift allow us to set the bare charge, and the electron g-2 allow us to set the bare mass of the electron, and the muon g-2 allow us to set the bare mass of the muon?

And then there are the running coupling constants. Are they allowed to let the renormalization just run to another value whenever needed?

Because of course, if we have one free parameter to set for every truly unique experiment, we will always get 100% agreement between theory and experiment. So my question (again) is how experimentally accurate, really, is QED?

I am just starting to look into all of this again, so I'd appreciate any enlightenment.

a reply to: BO XIAN

supernatural things cannot be explained by science. take for example the Born Again experience.
You can feel your soul leaving the body as if the body is being stripped from inside and out side, and you can feel the Holy Ghost entering your body. this is the greatest miracle of all. Praise the Lord. though the feeling is electro magnetic, it still will never be explainable scientifically.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

AGREED fairly wholesale.

Not at all trying to bring God down to mortal's level.

It's just been an idle thought sort of hypothesis for years in my noggin.

I've never seen a good answer about that level of detail on a particle level.

a reply to: delbertlarson
I was hoping someone else here with the requisite expertise would tackle your question as this is a complicated topic and I'm no expert, but I do think you summarized some of the issues with reasonable accuracy. The only comment that really surprised me was this one:

Because of course, if we have one free parameter to set for every truly unique experiment, we will always get 100% agreement between theory and experiment.

Your fellow physicists might be guilty of some things like groupthink sometimes, but I think they know better than to make experimental conclusions using circular reasoning along these lines.

Yes, Feynman called renormalization a "dippy" process, though it's seen as less dippy now than when he said that as we've had some time to kick the tires on the idea. There's an interesting article you can read and I can't vouch for it's complete accuracy, but despite the title saying there are no problems with QFT the article explores some of the problems and puts them into perspective. The bottom line is that QED is at best incomplete because of some of the reasons discussed and we aren't really sure how to resolve some of the issues needing resolution to make it more complete, but that doesn't mean the theory isn't still useful in its current less-than-complete form, it seems to be useful. One problem commonly raised with QED are the Landau Pole divergences but this and other articles explain why that's more of an academic problem than a practical problem.

Quantum field theory has no problems

At some exponentially high energy scale - that you may morally visualize as "exp(137.036) times electron mass", although there are extra coefficients everywhere - QED breaks down, anyway. It has a Landau pole: the fine-structure constant diverges if extrapolated to the huge energy scale. The same occurs with theories with quartic self-couplings of scalar fields etc.

In practice (I mean practician's practice), this Landau pole is not a real problem because the scale "exp(137.036) times electron mass" is much higher than the Planck scale, so obviously many things such as quantum gravity (and even much more mundane phenomena such as the electroweak unification) will modify QED long before you get to the Landau pole. But from a theoretical viewpoint, not thinking about the extra modifications of physics that exist in the real world, the Landau pole is a problem, too.

Take for example this paper exploring the Landau Pole problem:

Is there a Landau Pole Problem in QED?

We investigate a lattice version of QED by numerical simulations. For the renormalized charge and mass we find results which are consistent with the renormalized charge vanishing in the continuum limit. A detailed study of the relation between bare and renormalized quantities reveals that the Landau pole lies in a region of parameter space which is made inaccessible by spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking.

I've also seen others like Steven Weinberg discuss using a Lattice version of QED as an approach to the Landau Pole issue, among others, as discussed here:

Living with Infinities

....I describe for non-specialists the current status of the problem, and present my personal view on how it may be resolved in the future.

That topic is discussed on pages 13-16 if you want to skip the first 12 pages which are interesting but maybe not so relevant. He's obviously given the subject a lot of thought.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Thank you for your response. I will dig into the references in the future. For now, I want to share a story. It gets a bit lengthy, but it is relevant, so here goes.

Back when I was at the SSC doing longitudinal dynamics, I spent a long time looking for evidence of a length contraction. The last thing I looked into led me to a circular reasoning situation. And so it would not surprise me to see more.

If you take a rubber band and put it up on a corkboard with two stick-pins holding the ends, you can then put your thumb and forefinger toward one end, and your other thumb and forefinger on the other. You can then pluck that rubber band with your middle finger, and a standing wave will ensue between where you are holding it down. If you then slide your fingers along, the oscillation will still go on, with nulls where your fingers and thumbs are. (I have actually done this experiment. It is a bit awkward to do, but it can be done.) If you then write down the equation for the waves, you will see that the action of moving your fingers along the band changes the velocity to and fro, so that the wave has a constant speed with respect to your fingers, rather than a constant speed with respect to the rubber.

Since mirrors enforce a null condition in the electromagnetic oscillation, it is possible that the cause of the null result of the Michelson-Morley test is the same as my thumb and forefinger test with the rubber band. It has been known for quite some time that the result of phase experiments (for instance the two slit experiment) are sensitive to the apparatus, so I still believe that it is entirely possible that no length contraction exists. I wrote a paper that showed how you can derive the Lorentz transformation equations from concepts of a classical aether and time dilation alone. But of course the critical issue is the experimental record. Was there any proof other than the Michelson-Morley test for a length contraction?

I ran down many possibilities. The last one that looked like it proved a length contraction dealt with light pulses that were sent to the moon and back. If I recall correctly, there was a claim made by a NASA group that they saw length contraction effects during different orbital positions of the earth and moon in some laser lunar ranging experiments. But I couldn't figure out how they could measure the angles of the light beams to the needed accuracy to know whether they actually observed the length contraction or if the angles were just off, so I contacted them. It turned out that they had assumed the usual special relativity relations to derive the angles rather than measuring them. So it was at that time that I really began to question how many circular arguments might be around right now.

I published my work, but not before being summoned by a modern day inquisition. The SSC had put together a "Publications Committee" to ensure that any submitted work met the high standards required of the lab. The committee approved my submittal to Physical Review Letters of my paper showing that the Lorentz Transformations could be derived assuming a classical aether and just a time dilation. PRL rejected it, claiming that this was not new, and that everyone already knew that special relativity had no length contraction. I appealed this on-its-face ridiculous decision, and the appellate reviewer sided with the original review! From there the politics got even nastier. I then wished to submit elsewhere, but the Publications Committee said no. I asked how it could have been approved earlier, but not now, and they replied that they could trust the Physical Review, but not just any journal. (Even though the theorists at the SSC also said they thought the PRL blew the reviews.) A friend reported in the midst of this that the entire Publications Committee was set up just because someone was writing papers on special relativity that was not an expert in special relativity, and to save the reputation of the lab they needed a Publications Committee. (There was much concern that the SSC might be cancelled, and any bad press had to be avoided.)

Later, while still at the SSC, I submitted another PRL, this time on a new accelerator mechanism - a free electron accelerator. It was accepted and published in PRL. Shortly thereafter I was summoned to meet with the lab's lawyer. He said I would not be happy to learn that they'd been investigating me for my efforts. You see, I might have spent valuable lab time working on unapproved science! But he said that fortunately I had done everything right and gotten permission from my boss for the effort. Otherwise they would have fired me. I was supporting a wife and two very young boys. It would have been nasty. Later, they did fire another physicist, who subsequently got a lawyer, and after about a year he was reinstated with full back pay.

So the way things work right now is really not much further along that when it was with Galileo from the point of view of accepting new ideas. At least we no longer use the rack. We just make it very hard for people with different ideas to find work "in science".

During that whole time I was also trying to push for doing a group velocity equivalent of the Michelson Morley test. Before going to the SSC I worked at CREOL on free electron lasers. Other scientists there had made the worlds shortest laser pulses, and I proposed using those pulses to look at intensity rather than phase during perpendicular round trips of the light. The proposal was rejected at the NSF with two Fs and a D when you needed all As to be funded. It would be a waste of valuable taxpayer money to do such a test.

All of this was quite an eye opener. So forgive me if I suspect something less than the best from those who still can find the available jobs.

Subsequent to all of that, the SSC was indeed cancelled, and during its dying days the lab allowed me to publish and even paid the page charges. Then, even later, I saw that CERN showed evidence of earth tides. I believe that may mean that they also may have evidence of a length contraction, since the sensitivity needed in each case is similar. But I never did run that down. I really don't know whether or not a length contraction exists. I suspect now that it does. But I still think that a group velocity equivalent of the Michelson Morley test should be done. How can such a basic, new, and cheap (less than $50K) test of nature be rejected?

But back to why I asked my question. There are a lot of circular assumptions made all over the place when you start looking for real basic things in physics. It gets embedded pretty deep. And it generally is quite hard to isolate your assumptions fully. They are sneaky things, assumptions. And measuring anything to one part in a million is quite difficult.

Please don't get me wrong about my original question. I do believe there is a lot of evidence that the first order part of QED works, and works very well. My question is more about those claims with all the 9's. Those are the ones that I really wonder about, and those are the ones where I expect it might be so easy (like in my length contraction story) for rather subtle circularities to be missed.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

I read through the article motls.blogspot.com... I remain totally unconvinced. My dad was a car salesman and he told me some of the tricks of the trade. For used cars, open the back door and show how new the seat looks (people usually don't use the rear seat much); if there is a dent on one side, walk the customer up from the other side. This whole article looked like that, and then interspersed throughout were the comments along the lines that thinking otherwise just betrays an ignorance or lack of intellect of the critics thinking. But when the critics included Schwinger, Dirac and Feynman, I don't think a single blog, with almost no math, really does the trick. Sorry, I ain't buyin' what he's sellin'. Especially the arrogant assertion that QCD is on track. The bottom line there is that if QCD was on track it could calculate the meson masses with at least some degree of accuracy. Instead its just a mess. Again, I just don't buy it.

On arxiv.org... I got lost on the Chiral symmetry breaking. However, they did mention the thing I thought of on my own, which was that putting things on a lattice just means that you are localizing the problem to the smallest lattice step. And as that step goes to zero you have issues computationally, since now any finite volume of analysis will require infinite steps. So I really don't see the hope in this approach either.

arxiv.org... started and ended as a good and personal read. In it, I again see the angst over infinities in QFT. I also saw how things have changed over the years. And that brings up another point. Are the various order loops to be done with all known particles? For instance, are there up-antiup loops and so on? And if so, what happens when new particles are discovered? How can it be accurate if we aren't sure what particles there are?

The whole thing appears to be a mess. But it could be (this is a very strong possibility) that I just don't know enough about it. As alluded to above, I am resuming my study. And to help, one question I have is this:

QED is a perturbation theory approach. What is being perturbed?

My own issue with all the infinities goes back 40 years, when I was an undergrad and learned the usual quantum mechanics hydrogen atom. All was marginally acceptable with the potential energy due to Coulomb, since there is an r^2 sin(theta) inside the integral in spherical coordinates. So when you find the expectation value of the 1/r Coulomb potential you are OK all the way down to zero. But it wasn't OK at all for the magnetic dipoles, which go as 1/r^3. There the energy becomes infinite. Of course even the infinity in the Coulomb force at zero is of some concern, but you could see how the wave function remained finite. With the magnetic field that wasn't even possible. I was told that it was solved by perturbation theory, but that left the prime question totally unanswered, which was "why doesn't the atom collapse to zero size in the presence of this infinite force?"

At that time I saw three ways out. 1) The wave function is real, and is the square root of the density of the electron. With this, as we go to zero size both the electric and magnetic forces will go to zero as there is less and less "stuff" inside the small region. (For a constant density sphere you get (4/3)pi*(r/R)^3 as the amount of stuff inside r.). And this, when multiplied by the magnetic potential gets a constant, and for Coulomb goes to zero, so all would be well. No infinities. But I looked into this possibility a bit and I doubt it now. The other two are: 2) There is some small hard core and 3) There is some small soft core. In the hard core, particles can only get so close to one another. In a soft core, things can penetrate each other and the stuff inside has a constant density. There is again the (r/R)^3 fall off, but this time within a very small R.

When I got to grad school later I saw the same issues again, and they are the ones QED has wrestled with as well. I think the whole problem is this notion of point-like entities, and that is mandated by relativity, which is a point-like theory in space-time. But with Bell's theorem tests already calling relativity into question I believe it is time to consider a return to Lorentz. (Or possibly, if there is no length contraction, Larson.) This, in turn, plays into that equation I developed on the other thread.

I look forward to any comments, and thanks again for the recommended reading.

a reply to: delbertlarson

What an outrageous experience at the hands of the Religion of Scientism.

Congrats on your resilience and persistence.

a reply to: delbertlarson

you are quite an ardent researcher. might i suggest you read the thread in my signature

originally posted by: delbertlarson
Here is the question: how experimentally accurate, really, is QED?

Background: After Physical Review Letters rejected my latest work, saying I needed field quantization, I ordered Julian Schwinger's book. In reading the forward, I remembered why I didn't dig deep into the topic before. I did take, and fully pass, my grad school courses on it, but there was always THE CENTRAL PROBLEM - which is that renormalization never made any sense at all, it fact it appeared as a blatant fudge. And then in the forward, Schwinger emphasized toward the end what an unsatisfactory thing it is. Feynmann made similar totally disparaging comments. I don't know of any of the originators that ever really supported it wholeheartedly. Since it appeared to be totally based on a fraud, I didn't dive too deep into it.

But there is the issue of how extremely well it is advertised to match experiments, and this is a big, big deal. If it really does match experiments as well as is claimed, then one has to perhaps revisit the issue of how this can be. Perhaps renormalization, as flaky as it looks, has some sort of solid underpinning that just hasn't been found. (Or perhaps it has been found, and you can enlighten me.)

Yet there is also the possibility, I believe, that perhaps QED isn't nearly as good as it is claimed to be. What I recall renormalization doing is that it requires that certain parameters - mass, charge - be set experimentally. Now these parameters are not the same ones that are observed in the "far field", because (for example, in the case of charge) as one gets closer to the center things like electron positron pair creation occur, and there can be some sort of screening that takes place. So you then get a far field charge and a bare charge, and they are different. The far field charge is set by classical tests. And the bare charge gets assigned as the result of different experimental tests, and then renormalization wraps it all up so that things all agree. That is how I've understood it - is that basically correct?

And so the issue is this - if renormalization theory allows for a determination of the bare quantities from experiment, are there enough independent high resolution experiments so that we really do have high accuracy? Or, say, does the Lamb shift allow us to set the bare charge, and the electron g-2 allow us to set the bare mass of the electron, and the muon g-2 allow us to set the bare mass of the muon?

And then there are the running coupling constants. Are they allowed to let the renormalization just run to another value whenever needed?

Because of course, if we have one free parameter to set for every truly unique experiment, we will always get 100% agreement between theory and experiment. So my question (again) is how experimentally accurate, really, is QED?

I am just starting to look into all of this again, so I'd appreciate any enlightenment.

Renormalization is now better understood and accepted.
For an electron the bare charge and mass is infinite, these infinities are used to cancel out the "self energy" of the electron which on paper is infinite. The actual measured mass is the difference between the 2 infinities.

As far as experimental results QED is just fine. It predicted the fine structure constant to a very fine degree and is the most accurate theory ever.

a reply to: joelr


Thanks joelr for joining the discussion. Perhaps you can further enlighten me on some of the thinking behind QED.

If we have a point-like electron with charge e, it will have an infinite, positive, self energy from that charge by the classical arguments. If we now let e run to infinity that would naively appear (at least to me) that we have infinity squared, not a cancellation. How does QED refute that logic?

And further, is QED saying we now have negative infinite energies in order to cancel out the positive ones? For pre-QED physics, total energy is always a positive quantity in any physical system I know of. Of course, in bound states the total energy is less than the total energy of the constituents, but I don't obviously see what is bound here if we are considering a single particle.

I have heard that QED is the most accurate theory ever. My question really is what experiments prove that, and how many free parameters are being determined as a result of those experiments. I believe the claim comes from truly impressive work, both theoretically and experimentally, on g-2 experiments. I understand that such experiments and theory agree to many, many decimal places. But if the bare mass is set via renormalization through these experiments, then these experiments are really just extremely accurate determinations of the physical bare mass constants. That is still excellent and important science, but it doesn't address my question. And charge gets set via renormalization too. So that should allow a perfect match to the Lamb shift through a determination of bare charge, once the bare masses were calculated by g-2. So next we get to high energy scattering and possibly decay processes, and I don't believe we get all that many 9's of accuracy in those measurements. The scattering measurements will require excellent knowledge of energies and momenta both before and after the events, while the decay processes rely on assumptions of internal structure. So that is what I meant by the question.

Also I think that "the most accurate theory ever" claim comes with at least a tinge of hype. F = dp/dt is still considered exact as far as I am aware, so I don't think QED passes F = dp/dt for accuracy. Of course what happens is that F = dp/dt is used to determine what F, p and t are in some situations. And that gets back to my point. It seems to me that some (maybe most?) of the claimed accuracy of QED comes from the fact that it Is used to determine what the bare m's and q's are.

remember December ??
"LHC sees hint of boson heavier than Higgs"

well...
Hopes for revolutionary new LHC particle dashed

It would have been bigger than finding the Higgs boson and marked the beginning of a new era in particle physics. But new data has squashed the hope that the hints of a new particle detected by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) would solidify with time. Instead, the intriguing data ‘bump’ — first reported in December — turns out to be nothing more than a statistical fluctuation.

I repeat myself again...
all ripples in EM field, this is what those particle ZOO really is.

moving charge causes fluctuation in EM field, right ?
now think what 100 BILLION of this charges do.
Yes, that's what CERN is proud of, "colliding" 100 billions

I tell you CERN, manage to collide 1 on 1 and see what happens, than we talk

a reply to: KrzYma
well they do do 1 on 1...

lots of particles in each bunch but the actual number of impacts at the interaction point is still very small...

Anyway, will be no point in talking with you in particular, your not exactly open to anything beyond 'EM is everything'

a reply to: ErosA433

1 on 1 ?
in a bunch like 100 billion ?

and how do you guys detect those 1 on 1 interactions without all the other in the bunch interfering the result ?
can you somehow "switch off" all the other interactions ?
or...
is your detector "just in the place of the interaction"

you guys assume things, use math to polish out and present what is "assumed to be correct"

BTW.. you know nothing about me and the EM theory

originally posted by: delbertlarson
It turned out that they had assumed the usual special relativity relations to derive the angles rather than measuring them. So it was at that time that I really began to question how many circular arguments might be around right now.

If you're asserting they really had a circular assumption in their calculations I'd be interested in seeing the details of that, but from your vague description it's hard to confirm if that's the case. Maybe they didn't do what you expected them to do but they did what they intended to do. Some experiments test relativity and some don't. If the experiment is testing relativity it should pre-calculate the expected results if relativity is right and what results to expect if some other model is correct instead, or if relativity is wrong. On the other hand, if the experiment isn't testing relativity, it's not unreasonable to make assumptions that relativity is correct based on other experimental results. As long as those assumptions are clearly stated I don't see it as circular or flawed science, even if relativity turns out to be wrong which it probably is in some broader case like Newton's model turned out to be wrong in the broader case.

So the way things work right now is really not much further along that when it was with Galileo from the point of view of accepting new ideas. At least we no longer use the rack. We just make it very hard for people with different ideas to find work "in science".

That's quite an ordeal, but I guess politics isn't just in politics, it's rampant in corporations, and per to your experience, also in laboratories. Lead scientist Dr Rind had it worse than you though, when US House of Representatives passed a resolution in 1999 that his team's science was wrong even though they apparently knew next to nothing about his science, since one representative who did know something about the science pointed out that almost nobody who voted on it even read the paper, and of the handful who did read the paper, most were unqualified to evaluate the science. So politics is even worse in politics but even outside of government it rears its ugly head.

originally posted by: delbertlarson
a reply to: Arbitrageur

I read through the article motls.blogspot.com... I remain totally unconvinced. ... Especially the arrogant assertion that QCD is on track. The bottom line there is that if QCD was on track it could calculate the meson masses with at least some degree of accuracy. Instead its just a mess. Again, I just don't buy it.

As I said I can't vouch for what he says being accurate but as far as I can tell his viewpoints that the existing QED and QCD models are somewhat useful even with their flaws seems to be shared by many. I'm sure he won't argue that QCD can calculate masses, so perhaps you and he have different ideas on what's expected from the current working models. I also read the article a little differently than you as your reading seems to infer a lack of problems, but as I said if you ignore the title it does describe problems with the models, then puts those into perspective. If you're trying to model the big bang I think the problems are currently unsurmountable, but that's a rather unique application at extremely high energies and the problems with the models at those energies don't apply to all energies which is how they can be useful even if they are "wrong" in the sense of not working at big bang energies.

On arxiv.org... I got lost on the Chiral symmetry breaking. However, they did mention the thing I thought of on my own, which was that putting things on a lattice just means that you are localizing the problem to the smallest lattice step. And as that step goes to zero you have issues computationally, since now any finite volume of analysis will require infinite steps. So I really don't see the hope in this approach either.

Steven Weinberg referred to it as one of the *potential* solutions, not a present solution. It does provide more useful results with large coupling than with small coupling but the hope is we can find better mathematical approaches to using it than we currently have.

originally posted by: KrzYma
a reply to: ErosA433

1 on 1 ?
in a bunch like 100 billion ?

Yes there are about 100 billion in a "bunch", and out of those you get about 20 collisions, but those aren't all head on collisions, some are only glancing blows, so the number of head on collisions is only a fraction of 20 out of 100 billion.

originally posted by: KrzYma
BTW.. you know nothing about me and the EM theory

We know what you reveal about yourself and your understanding in your posts here, which is not "nothing".

originally posted by: delbertlarson
a reply to: joelr


Thanks joelr for joining the discussion. Perhaps you can further enlighten me on some of the thinking behind QED.

If we have a point-like electron with charge e, it will have an infinite, positive, self energy from that charge by the classical arguments. If we now let e run to infinity that would naively appear (at least to me) that we have infinity squared, not a cancellation. How does QED refute that logic?

And further, is QED saying we now have negative infinite energies in order to cancel out the positive ones? For pre-QED physics, total energy is always a positive quantity in any physical system I know of. Of course, in bound states the total energy is less than the total energy of the constituents, but I don't obviously see what is bound here if we are considering a single particle.

I have heard that QED is the most accurate theory ever. My question really is what experiments prove that, and how many free parameters are being determined as a result of those experiments. I believe the claim comes from truly impressive work, both theoretically and experimentally, on g-2 experiments. I understand that such experiments and theory agree to many, many decimal places. But if the bare mass is set via renormalization through these experiments, then these experiments are really just extremely accurate determinations of the physical bare mass constants. That is still excellent and important science, but it doesn't address my question. And charge gets set via renormalization too. So that should allow a perfect match to the Lamb shift through a determination of bare charge, once the bare masses were calculated by g-2. So next we get to high energy scattering and possibly decay processes, and I don't believe we get all that many 9's of accuracy in those measurements. The scattering measurements will require excellent knowledge of energies and momenta both before and after the events, while the decay processes rely on assumptions of internal structure. So that is what I meant by the question.

Also I think that "the most accurate theory ever" claim comes with at least a tinge of hype. F = dp/dt is still considered exact as far as I am aware, so I don't think QED passes F = dp/dt for accuracy. Of course what happens is that F = dp/dt is used to determine what F, p and t are in some situations. And that gets back to my point. It seems to me that some (maybe most?) of the claimed accuracy of QED comes from the fact that it Is used to determine what the bare m's and q's are.

How your interpretations explain Big Bang event?

Thanks

I think Universe has to be looked from fluid dynamics perspective instead of looking for "a particle that responsible for"...

Back to Aristotle ideas.