User:Martin Gibson

Motivation
I have an interest in foundational issues of subjects. In college I discovered monism in a comparative religion course. It was my first glimpse of non-dualistic thinking and perception and It has since formed the basis of my investigation of various disciplines.

Interests
My initial interest in college was astrophysics, but for various reasons, I transferred my major to economics with an effective minor in philosophy.
 * In addition to the matter of monism, there were two other wake-up moments at the university.
 * The first was being told that there was no way to conceptualize or at least visualize wave-particle duality or to bridge the gulf between gravitational and quantum theory.
 * The other was finding out in my money and banking course that most of the money supply consisted of debt.

Working Life
Most of my working life has been in the design, engineering and construction fields with a smattering of computer skills, including some database design.
 * This has given me a bias towards teleological systems in philosophy.
 * It has given me a view of discreteness as an emerging property of continuity instead of one of apparent continuity arising out of a fundamental quantum ontology, and this has been axiomatic to an investigation of questions of physical theory and philosophy.

Wiki Interests
I am retirement age and have spent the past two decades studying fundamental physics and my adult working life trying to figure out an alternative to debt. My interests in the Wiki world and in possible contributions to the discussion therein concern the nature of consciousness, physical cosmology and the relationship between the two, and in political economy and public policy.

Essays
Physics/Essays/Martin Gibson/Dimensional Analysis of the Fine Structure Constant

Disclosure
I would like to make this statement as a clarification of my point of view on this topic of discussion and on discussion in general. The purpose of communication is the conveyance of understanding first, of knowledge second, and of inquiry third. At first glance it may appear that I have these in reverse order. In practice we ask a question about something we don't understand, we seek information to arrive at an answer, and with an answer in hand, we arrive at an understanding. We imagine that understanding to be knowledge, accurate and precise; it may well be. It may also simply be a workable hypothesis, a matter of reasonable opinion.

Understanding involves language, meaning, syntax, context, not to mention nuance. Before any information can be faithfully processed, such understanding must be established. This is written in English and will involve all four of the remaining concepts in the first sentence of this paragraph, a list that is not meant to be exhaustive. By virtue of the last item on the list, it is perhaps best understood by someone who has shared my life experience and cultural perspective, as much goes unspoken in the written word. Certain words will be used by me which may have a different connotation for readers with different experience and perspective. This can result in misunderstanding and a failure of communication with respect to the remaining two components of the flow of knowledge and inquiry.

Knowledge, therefore, acquired individually or in communication with others, first requires some degree of understanding. In turn, inquiry requires some degree of knowledge of the language of communication and of the experience under discussion. Parties to the inquiry, by virtue of participation, are seeking knowledge, but are also possible sources of insight based on their individual perspectives. They may also be sources of reasonable opinion that is of value; or such opinion may have been historically accepted as knowledge of greater degree of accuracy and precision than is warranted. In this event, that opinion can be defended as beyond inquiry and revision, and vociferously, even haughtily so.

I am sensitive to the use of the first person pronoun, particularly in the possessive case, and quite comfortable with dispassionate, objective discourse. In fact, I prefer it, or should I say, it is preferred. Still, the passive voice presents its own problems. I am an aging human being, who has spent the bulk of his adult life trying to eschew personal, self-conscious attachment to self-reference, with a reasonable degree if success. The job is not finished. However, it becomes self defeating at some point to belabor this inclination, this missive notwithstanding.

In light of the above, if I use the term "my" in reference to the model of fundamental physical interactions evolving from my inquiry, it is because it is based on my experience which informs my perspective. If it had evolved with the substantive participation of others, which would have been my preference, it would be "our" model or would have a recognized consensus name. That such inquiry has been without benefit of the standard pedagogy makes my participation difficult. It does not make it unwarranted. From my current perspective, the insights responsible for its development would likely not have occurred if I had been through such indoctrination. I use that term without any hint of derision. If you are charged with academic responsibility, you must teach established doctrine, if you want knowledgeable doctors to continue the practice. And the success of the practice of physics is unquestionable as evidenced by this means of communication.

What might be questionable to anyone reading this is the value of what I might have to say. If I was well schooled in quantum field theory and general relativity instead of self taught, I would understand all the nuances and context and syntax and meaning of the language of physics and be able to avoid many pitfalls in presentation of my model of particle genesis and interaction. As said, however, I might then be susceptible to some of the pitfalls of reasonable opinion that appear, from my perspective as well as many within physics, to plague the discipline. It is, after all, one hundred years after the presentation of general relativity and almost as long since the development of quantum theory, and we still have no detailed model of how the tensor of spacetime couples with the tensor of rest mass or energy particles, despite the efforts of thousands of very brilliant minds. Perhaps they are one and the same.

And what is my perspective? Among others, it is that the scientific method has great value in determining the reliability of a hypothesis, chiefly by setting well defined constraints to an experiment or observation of natural events so as to remove subjective or teleological contamination of experimental or observational data. However, I am also acutely aware that experimentation and observation are necessarily teleological and subjective endeavors as is the act of explaining the data and molding it into a model of some physical process. Any model used in the framing of experimentation plays a hand in the forthcoming observational data and in framing the interpretation of the results. I am also aware that many a practical and workable model of such processes have undergone revision or outright discard in light of new discoveries, and my effort at understanding basic physical processes is not immune from this.

Part of this procedure of scientific inquiry is that some things that are made axiomatic in one system or model are found to be the necessary result of more basic principles upon deeper understanding. Thus Heisenberg uncertainty and the effects of special and general relativity are found to be necessary consequences of my modeling, and their operational imperatives flow naturally from the analysis. They are not themselves axiomatic; for example relativistic effects do not require a Minkowski spacetime. But I can't easily explain this fact to a reader unless he or she is willing to first suspend acceptance of the standard axiomatic interpretation of such concepts and invest the time and mental effort required to comprehend an alternative derivative explanation.

What I all too often encounter is objection to the axioms of my model based on the other party's supposition of their conflict with their axioms or more frustrating yet, their assumption of naïveté on my part in a lack of understanding of theirs. Thereby, what results on their part is an inability to take seriously or ever follow the chain of logic of my model. In this regards it should be stated that the greatest receptivity I have encountered has been among generalist of classical physics. But they, in self conscious awareness of their lack of understanding of theory at a very small or fundamental scale, understandably defer to the specialist and send me to the string theorists or general relativists. These parties in turn want to know how this has anything to do with mathematical constructs at a scale so small they can never be experimentally verified, be they strings or gravitons. To which I must respond, "nothing", and with all due respect, "such things do not need to exist", unverified theoretical prognostications notwithstanding.

I learned to follow the logic of Ockham's razor long before I knew its name. Look for the simple solution. My father was an electrical and structural engineer who worked in industrial design and construction, except for a for a few years spent in the fledgling semi-conductor and aerospace industry in Florida and Alabama when I was in my early teens. He quickly tired of that corporate scene and returned to construction and to giving long winded lectures about impedance and hysteresis to my simple questions about electricity. I was interested in astronomy and cosmology at a young age and considered going into astrophysics when I entered college. The statement by my freshman year physics professor, essentially that wave-particle duality could be learned but never envisioned, which to me meant never understood, was discouraging. That and no doubt several other reasons took me to the field of economics, before graduation took me to construction as well.

This bit of personal history is entered here only to emphasize that the most important prerequisite to inquiry is not understanding or knowledge, but curiosity, a desire to know and the environment that fosters satisfaction of that curiosity. I had both growing up, and I have lost neither the curiosity or the ability to seek its satisfaction. I have, however, suffered much environmental loss, but perhaps that can change.

So how can such curiosity bring results? About eighteen years ago I wanted to understand just why no one had been able to tie gravity to quantum physics. I had for several years come to the conclusion that the simple reason massive particles could not go faster than light was because they were composed of light. Ockham's razor again. If light has wave characteristics,. . . and I continue to believe that is all light is, though they must localize, collapse, in some massive particle to be seen. In fact that is the only way we know any electromagnetic energy particles exist, through their interaction with rest mass particles, in our retinae or in the nerve endings in our skin or in photo sensitive media or in our radio receivers or other electronic devices, through their focus at a node that appears to be and is more easily mathematically dealt with as a point. . ., if light has wave properties, then it is likely that massive particles have wave properties, and I mean actual classical wave properties and not probabilistic wave functions.

At the time I had not developed any model of what such wave might be, but I knew it must involve transverse oscillation due to the transverse nature of the light waves with which it interacted. And it must have a rotational component due to the ubiquity of spin angular momentum, so it must be moving in three dimensions even while at rest. And it must be discrete, not capable of dispersion of its energy, which meant there must be some mechanism to constrain its nodes. If it is a type of inertial wave, then it must have a frequency of action which is really what its energy and therefore its mass is. If it is accelerated from a position of rest, then its amplitude must decrease to keep up with its translational velocity and its frequency must increase, all in keeping with the Lorenz transforms. At least such was my thinking. Matter was a type of circulating, standing wave, exact mechanics to be determined.

At the time I wanted to understand gravity in terms of these yet to be understood massive waves. So I simply, Ockham again, plugged what I knew about the neutron into Newton's gravitational law. I chose the neutron instead of electron or proton, because the latter two are a young person's preoccupation, energy, charge, attraction of opposites. The neutron is an old person's interest, chargeless, stable, at least when it's at home in the nucleus keeping the other particles in order. In seriousness, it is the most massive day-to-day particle, and it is smaller than a proton due to its greater mass and frequency. The assumption was that gravity, as a quantum effect, was a manifestation of particle spin analogous in some manner to centripetal acceleration. Thus two such particles in contact at their radius of assumed gyration would, using Newton's law, evidence the greatest gravitational force between particles. (I can feel the general relativists cringing as I write.)

To my astonishment, when I plugged in the neutron mass for each of two bodies, and divided by their reduced Compton wavelength squared for their presumed distance of separation (each particle's "surface" of gyration to other particle's center of mass), and applied Newton's constant, G, I got a result for the gravitational force that was equal to the Compton square figure divided by a factor of 6 times the square root of 3. It actually took a while to figure out this factor, but the geometric meaning of the result was clear. Some rearrangement gave a definition of G as the neutron reduced Compton to the fourth power divided by the product of the deduced factor and the neutron mass squared. This seemed of significance to me, though I could find no reference to it in the literature, and I went to my nearby alma mater to get more information. I was directed to a very helpful string theorist, who seemed a bit curious and perplexed. He told me what to study and specifically to find out how it related to h-bar, Planck's reduced constant, or quantum of action. This single development has driven all the rest of my investigation.

I pursued this matter over the next several years as time allowed. Along the way I picked up a copy of Physics of Waves, by Elmore and Heald, a very clear presentation of classical waves that was very helpful, in addition to Wheeler, et al, Gravitation and many others. The first book was instrumental in terms of its exposition of the Euler formalism, elasticity and stress and strain tensors. Gravitation was instrumental in its depiction of the coordination entanglement condition, without which I don't know if I would have stumbled on the rotational oscillation mechanism which is responsible for all, perhaps I should just say most, quantum properties.

This model is based on the assumption of a wave bearing non-particulate continuum which is co-terminous with cosmic space; not an ether or other wave bearing, particle based substrate that fills that space, but space itself. In order to be wave bearing it must be inertial and elastic, capable of densification and rarefaction, but there must be limits over the short run to such strain to allow the restorative force of oscillation. A mechanism for producing transverse oscillation while advancing the phase in a rotational manner had to be found and Gravitation provided that insight. Physics of Waves pointed to the fact that as an inertial-elastic wave bearing continuum, it must have an extremely high bulk modulus. Space must comprise not a vacuum as customarily conceived, but an extremely rigid, expandable solid. What this model means is that when you or I cross the room to turn on the light, we are made of different "stuff" when we get to the switch than when we got up from the couch. It is the phase structures of the particles that make up our bodies and clothes and stuff in our pockets that moves and not self-contained units of material substance or matter. Such is the illusion.

Analysis of the developed model mechanism shows that the rotation of the phases provides a shear stress at the two nodes of the wave which prevents dispersion of the energy, and insures its discreteness. It also provides a visual, mechanical understanding of charge, anti-particles, the quantization of spin, quantum gravity, the emission of the electron as a subsidiary oscillation that results from a drop in impedance of the continuum, the mass ratios of the three basic particles, the magnetic dipole as a result of the rotating capacitive and inductive moments, fractional charge that is recognized by way of relativistic collisions as the quarks of the standard model, the basis for the lack of internal structure of the electron and positron. This study took years, off and on, for development, and will take a bit of time no doubt for an expert in the field to master, if he can suspend belief in his currently held model. No one, or perhaps only relatively few, should think they could give it a quick read and "get it". Hopefully, I may be mistaken on this.

Most of this model was fleshed out over a ten year period. Somewhere along the way, I believe around 2003, it became clear that all the quantum properties were a function of external stress and that such stress comes from the expansion of such inertially dense spacetime, though the time in such spacetime is a gauge of expansion and not the Minkowski time of relativity. Eventually it became apparent that beta decay, as registered by a free neutron, was a function of the expansion.

It has been my perception from early on that cosmic expansion of an inertial spacetime would start out, not with a Big Bang, but slowly and accelerate like a flywheel as inertia is overcome. As such, the universe is much older in current terms than conventionally figured. From this perspective, it was also likely that the model had relevance for fusion.

I believe this is confirmed by my recent investigation into cold fusion and low energy nuclear reactions. From the analysis I have pursued, there is more structure to the relationship between the electron and proton than the inverse square, coulomb force, and the probabilistic wave function location of a point particle in an orbital. The validity of these structural components may be undeniable, but my point of departure is that proton and electron are a naturally evolved wave state of the fundamental neutron wave state, and that while the electron may be disassociated from its parent proton wave due to energetic interaction with other particles, resulting in an ionic condition of the proton, and subsequently replaced by another electron as such energy level declines, the stress-strain relationship that initiated beta decay and electron emission remains essentially a wave stress connection between proton and electron that can be anisotropic with respect to each under definable ambient conditions.

In other words, the coulomb force is an expression of the wave stress that results from beta decay, which may be spherical as in the s sub-shells, or either oblate or prolate as in the higher sub-shells, due to energetic interaction. In this latter case involving a covalent bond with a metal lattice atom, the proton of a hydrogen atom, including deuterium or tritium, is bare in the nucleus with respect to the electron location probability to a degree not found in a spherical condition. These wave stresses originating at the proton and extending to the electron are still exclusionary, i.e. repulsive, with respect to another approaching hydrogen nucleus, but do not have the isotropic range they would in an s shell condition. They are vectored toward the covalent bonding points, so that in an anti-parallel condition of two D nuclei approaching each other due to close to simultaneous covalent bonding with the lattice atoms, the repulsive force between protons is largely mitigated. This vectoring appears to be facilitated by the geometric relationship between the octahedral and the tetrahedral interstitial chambers of the lattice. It is my intention to provide a link to a video demonstrating this effect in greater detail. --Martin Gibson (discuss • contribs) 19:22, 11 May 2015 (UTC)