Report from the 10th Eastern Gravity Meeting
Hello:
This is another L O N G post. I went to the 10th Eastern Gravity Meeting expecting to give a 12 minute talk like I had since EGM 7. It didn't happen because there were too many people attending. I wrote up this note, and will be shipping it out on Monday to the organizers. This is life for an "independent researcher". I do try to do polite body slams.
Subject: Notes from the fringe of the physics community
Alan Lightman discussed progress in physics as a result of community. I thought I would share a few observations I made based on my experiences at EGM 10 from the position on the edge of the community. The hope is to improve the situation in the future, which is why I cc'ed the past organizers.
I define a fringe physicist as someone not employed as a physicist currently, or not on a path towards a degree in physics, who feels compelled to make a contribution. The definition can be applied without passing judgment on the value of the claimed contribution. By this definition, I am a fringe physicist, working for a software company with degrees from MIT in biology and chemical engineering, hoping to unify gravity with the other three fundamental forces of nature.
One defining characteristic of any community is how it treats the elements at the edge. The issues are never easy: is it better to let people live hard but free lives in the streets of the Northeast or force them to take shelter from an institution? The way to handle fringe physicists is not physically dire, but many have a great emotional devotion to their perspective projects. My own approach is to reflect Nature, which doesn't care if we get answers right or wrong, but she gives us an unmatched opportunity to be. Analytical indifference pulls against human hope, and at least for this email, hope has a lead.
At the bulletin boards provided by physicsforums.org, they grew tired of repetitive posts from fringe physicists and created a special place for "independent researchers". They have eight criteria for admission. My work met the criteria, and a discussion going on over there has been accessed twenty two thousand times, a high number for that site. That discussion has improved my proposal. I know where I've made mistakes in my Lagrangian. Dialog can make a difference.
The EGM has been small enough in the past to let everyone hear from the few east coast fringe physicists willing to make the journey. I had presented my work three times before, receiving a few questions at the end. My intent this year was to answer some of those questions, such as a demonstration that the exponential metric I work with satisfies the data for the precession of the perihelion of Mercury. For me, that was a difficult problem to solve. Although I had flipped through a good number of written solutions, none of them made sense in detail. For more than three years I had lived with the weight of feeling inadequate to answer the question. I am persistent to a fault. Sean Carroll's notes helped me step into the problem on the ground floor. I did complete the calculation. I was pleased enough with the twenty four step process that when I got married in October, for my groomsmen I made lunch boxes with the derivation on the side panels. A box made it to Ithaca, but stayed in my bags. The lunch box is both a prized possession and embarrassing.
EGM 10 had to take a different approach. There were too many talks to do in two days. We can hope that next year a smaller armada will fly out from the west coast. The wind was strong due to the stars appearing for Saul's symposium. People being creatures of habit, I would not be surprised if the attendance stays at this level for EGM 11.
The decision was made to provide a poster session for the fringe physicists. There is nothing inherently wrong with such an approach. My guess was such a decision was made very late in a chaotic and hectic game. There is almost no need to point out that people whose talks were shifted to the poster session should have been sent an email, but that detail of execution was missed. I checked the website on Wednesday at work and was able to print out my slides. At Ithaca during the lunch break on Thursday, a $34 trip to the bookstore plus some high paced snipping led to a colorful poster I was pleased with.
At the end of a long day of talks on Thursday, the session was closed without announcing the poster session. There were more fringe physicists with posters than members of the physics community proper. Although Alan Lightman feels guilty about his baby seal clubbing incident with Webber, being utterly ignored can be as bad. Between these two extremes, is there something better?
This is what I did: I practiced my skills as a skeptic. This turned out far better than I expected. It was trivial to spot errors and glaring omissions. It requires discipline to resist clubbing. The bigger challenge was to find the roots of the person's area of study. It is a great exercise to find the pea under the pile of mattresses that is bothering this person. Since the list is not long, I will tell you the positive things I learned from three of my fellow fringe physicists.
1. Ed "negative mass" Miksch was the man who drove up from Pittsburgh with his wife. The organizers certainly know, but other folks may not be aware, how assertive he and his wife were about the need for Ed to be heard by this gathering of physicists. He was the guy who gave the three minute speech at the end of Friday's session. He claims to have shown that we should all be working with negative mass because he's done the calculation, one no physics professor at Reed College in the 50s could find an error in. The reason is that from where his calculation starts, there is no trivial math error.
This issue was understood by none other than James Clark Maxwell, but has not reached the wider physics community. The story was written up well at this URL:
http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath613/kmath613.htm. In GR books, they note the link between Newton's potential theory and the Schwarzschild metric, g_00 = 1 - 2 G M/c^2 R = 1 - 2 phi, and so ignoring the constants, phi = - M/R. What Maxwell understood was that such a potential plugged into a field theory like that for electromagnetism implies that like mass charges repel. The correct answer for a Newtonian potential where like charges attract is phi = 1 - G M/c^2 R!. Ed started from the wrong place because he was instructed by everyone that phi = -M/R is OK. Maxwell did see the correct way out - add a HUGE positive constant - he just couldn't justify it. Einstein's metric theory gets the potential theory right. Ed should be proud that he saw a problem realized by Maxwell. It is unfortunate that this potential theory is taught incorrectly to this day, because there will be people in the future that will walk down this wrong bend in the road.
To appreciate the consequences of how Ed's issue is misunderstood at the highest levels of the physics community, I asked Clifford Will why a 4-potential theory was not listed even as a possibility in his Living Review article on GR. He claimed one could make a potential theory get h!alf of the light bending around the Sun, but not all the bending measured by experimental tests. Will is correct for a scalar potential theory, the g_00 term. A 4-potential theory could easily match the data, with A = (1 - 2 GM/c^2 R, -1 - 2 GM/c^2 R, -1, -1), so the g_00 and g_11 terms will contract time measurements and expand space measurements as seen in tests.
2. Fred "MM" Pierce had a poster on the Michelson-Morley experiment. I was not hopeful as he went into his story. He talked about relativity, not once distinguishing between special and general relativity, two very different theories. He pointed out that if the interferometer was placed vertically instead of horizontally, the vertical machine would have interference fringes, both here and at the antipode, while the horizontal machine would not. I told him that was consistent with our current understanding. He then claimed this was connected to a misunderstanding about an ether. I told him I saw no need for an ether.
He also focused on a spinning satellite. He pointed out how the satellite would provide an accelerated reference frame. Go a different distance out from the spinning hub, and your weight would change although your mass would stay constant. Again it sounded consistent with our knowledge. He claimed it shows a link between motion and the cause of gravity. Gravity must be motion since it is the same as being on a spinning satellite. I told him I'd think about it, and left it at that.
Both Newton and Einstein spent quality time thinking about the spinning bucket. I don't think that debate has been settled. There is the standard elevator thought experiment. Gravity has tides, but the elevator does not. Some say that tides are the only real effect of gravity. The spinning satellite has tides, therefore it is a more faithful representative of gravity than the rocket. Once going, the satellite can maintain its "fake" gravity via angular momentum inertia, unlike the rocket which requires ever increasing amounts of energy.
Consider this thought experiment. Someone has replaced the Earth with a thin shell made of dense material such that the mass of the Earth is the same. You don't notice the change until you find a hole in the shell. Curious, you climb through, and almost by accident because you didn't hang on, you end up (or down?) flying across the hollow inside, there being no gravity field. After quite some time (the Earth is large), you get to the other side, and spring on back. This time you grab on to the edge. You got to collect physical data on Gauss' law that there is no gravity field inside a hollow sphere, how cool. You hear a noise, some creaking, and then stand up. The shell of an Earth is moving. It is picking up speed, and finally, it feels like you weigh your usual weight due to the spinning of the Earth. You can crawl back out the hole, and feel your weight due to gravity, or go into the hole, and feel your weight due to the spinning. Do an experiment with tides, and you realize one is a continuation of the other, no matter if you are inside or outside the shell.
I have come to the conclusion that any proposal for gravity must make clear the connection between gravity and rotational dynamics.
3. John "Two Timing" Kulick works with the two dimensions of time. I have written command line programs to add, subtract, multiply, divide, take sines, cosines, and apply group theory to events in spacetime. None of these will work if there are two times. John's work made no sense to me. Although I challenged him on traveling faster than the speed of light, that discussion went nowhere. His mantra was geometry, and I didn't get it.
What I did understand was his complaints about cosmology. From the rotation profiles of disk galaxies, to the big bang, basically anything big or old, physics fails. I am too skilled a skeptic to believe in two dimensions of time, dark matter, or dark energy. It is our mathematical description of nature that will have to change.
4. Doug "Rank 1" Sweetser has a unified field theory. He has also worked on leprosy (cloning genes from the mycobacteria that cause the disease) which somehow seams appropriate: no one wants to hang out with someone who has anything to do with leprosy or unified field theory. It turns out that leprosy is near impossible to transmit, but is the most visually frightening disease and thus the most feared because we are predominantly visual. Since Einstein worked more than thirty years on a unified field theory and failed, this is a topic to avoid, a kiss of death for an academic career.
Prof. Steve Carlip said through an email exchange that he thought my action could only involve a spin 1 and a spin 0 field. I told him if that was true, my proposal would be wrong. I had trouble following his logic. My field equations are rank 1, but my field strength tensor is rank 2. The part that does the work of gravity is a rank 2 symmetric tensor, so I couldn't understand how it could describe a spin 0 field that arises from an index-free tensor. Steve held his ground however, giving up on the discussion, telling me to go read chapter 3 of the Feynman lectures on gravity. That's what I did during EGM 10.
There are two separate reasons why one can spot a spin 1 field in the EM Lagrangian. The first is the rank 2 antisymmetric field strength tensor, A_u;v - A_v;u. The second arises from the charge coupling term, J^u A_u, that can be rewritten using a Fourier transform in momentum space as a current-current interaction. Take one current and the conjugate of another current, form the product, and the phase of the resulting term will return after 2 pi rotations, thus is spin 1. See section 3.2 for details.
My relationship with Steve broke because I was utterly unaware of this standard approach to field theory. I spent many fun hours going through the details of chapter 3, picking up nuances, working on my speed of creating the logic flow. I had his critique based on the coupling term down pat. I have been fortunate that once I understand an issue, I can see two others: how to get around the problem and why it has stumped people before.
If you are given a 4D vector space, list the anti-involutive automorphisms. Sounds too mathematical, sorry. A conjugate is an example. My guess is that nearly all well-trained physicists believe there is nothing other than the conjugate. That is true in a 2D space like complex numbers. A conjugate has three properties: you stay in the same place, two operators in a row is like doing no operator, and (a b)* = b* a*. One could imagine an operator that flips the sign for all but the x. I call this the first conjugate because it is the first part of the 3-vector. The second conjugate is defined similarly. Although one could define a third conjugate, it does what the other three could do in combination, so I don't include it. My bet is that all who read this note have never used a first or second conjugate, but it should be a simple idea to absorb.
I redid the Feynman current-current interaction calculation, and when the time was right, used a first conjugate instead of the Plain Jane conjugate. The resulting product is written on page 39 for a spin 2 particle. Getting the details solid on that calculation made the trip.
My unobserved poster had two themes. One board was nothing but the Lagrangian, a partial derivative party. I included the recently worked out details of the current-current spin 2 interaction. The second part tried to answer a difficult question asked of me: what does your theory do that's really different? A 4D Lagrangian is not different.
I decided at this meeting to come out of a mathematical closet, and admit publicly that I use quaternions. My observation is that half of technically trained people are familiar with the word, and few have done any serious calculations with them. The exceptions are rocket scientists and game designers who do 3D calculations without the problem of gimbal lock. There are a few people who play near quaternions: Connes with non-commutative geometry, Penrose with twistor theory, Alder with quaternionic quantum mechanics, and Baez with octonions. Out here on the edge, I learned how to take a quaternion expression and make an animation. I figured out how to make a ten second animation of SU(2), the group sitting in the middle of the standard model. I can say with complete confidence you don't know what it looks like, but my ipod does. Small steps from there have led to animations of U(1), U(1)xSU(2), SU(3), and Diff(M)xSU(3). I think a visual justification of the standard model with gravity qualifies as "really different".
FUTURE LINE OF ACTION
The organizers of EGM 11 will face the same issues you have. Please feel free to pass on any of these observations and suggestions.
We should admit that there is a physics fringe. That fringe needs to interact with physics skeptics. I could see a later presentation session, or a poster session for "alternative approaches". We would need to get a good dozen or more grad students and professors, including the organizer of the meeting. The reward for the professionals would be a chance to work on their skills as skeptics. It is a balance of asking, connecting, sifting through the history of physics, and criticizing. The session should not be promoted as such, rather we find a different way to accommodate a group that will hopefully remain on the same scale of a half dozen. I could serve as a liaison or chair of the session.
Was the conference worth my time and eleven hundred dollars? The funds came from an estate left by my mother back in August. She would have wanted me to go but to be careful someone did not steal my ideas. This unified field theory is the elephant in my life. I am proud of its latest trick with a spin 2 current-current interaction. I want to know if this elephant is real or a technical mirage. My own limitations are painfully glaring to me. This note, long as it is, has brought clarity on my feelings concerning the fringe of physics. Sorry for the fire hose of an email and attachments, but I am from MIT.
Thank you for all the effort you put into this meeting.
doug