Planck's constant - yin/yang balance / discussion

0:00 I'm going to talk about Frank's constant yin-yang balance. ...activity at this point in my life is to edit and publish the Journal of Galilee and Electrodynamics, of which there are some sample copies available over there on the table. Now, when I first came to ANFA for the first time last year, I was quite impressed with the very long and scholarly activity that had been going on in pursuit of the fine structure constant. I am going to go one step back to something that's a bit messier, at least in so far as I've been able to handle it, and that is Planck's constant. I want to see if I can understand something about Planck's constant in a different way than it has normally been historically understood in the 20th century. People today think of it as a fundamental constant of nature. It's something that you simply have to accept and take as a postulate, the first thing you have to write down, in order to begin developing quantum mechanics. I'm not so sure that that's necessarily the only way that you could look at it. I am hopeful that, in fact, there are some reasons behind Plan's Constance, that it is, in fact, a function of some other things, and let's try to uncover today a a possible understanding of it in terms of some other things, and simply place that problem before you in hopes that other people will also look into this issue, that maybe we are able to reduce the number of fundamental constants that we have to accept into physical theory. And if we can do that, that does make life altogether simpler. My basis for getting some different handle on it is an idea that I introduced last year here at ADPOP. So this is a slide sucked over from last year. It illustrates my conception about a possible way that light propagation works, and it is different from the conceptions that have been in the literature otherwise. I'm not speaking of either a little bullet like photon or an extended wave.

2:30 Don't even ask me if I believe in photons or waves. I won't answer the question. Whatever the answer to that is, it is hidden inside of an envelope. And I only want to talk about the envelope. And what I posit about this envelope is that when light succeeds in making a transfer of energy from one particle to another particle, what happens in this process is that first the envelope extends outward from the ascending particle until at some point in time it finally makes contact with a candidate receiving particle, which of course would be chosen at random. And once that contact is made, immediately the process reverses and the envelope begins to collapse into the receiving particles. This has a complete symmetry between emission and absorption. I kind of like that. Physicists do like symmetries. And so I like to see this one in regard to the propagation of light. And it takes care of all those nasty problems about how it is that all of the energy ends up in one place when you imagine that it initially started out in a spherical, completely dispersive scattering of energy, according to Maxwell's theory. So, I have called anything that develops from this idea to stuff like. And that is what I first introduced last year and what I'm going to exploit this year. So stated in words, the main ideas are that any time a propagation occurs, it's got two parts to it. And the first part is an emission or expansion of that envelope. And the second part of it is a collapse of the energy to the receiving particle. Now, if you imagine that an envelope containing this particle or wave and we don't know which expands, with one end of it still attached to the source, it's obvious that the leading end of it has to move at speed 2C relative to the source. And conversely, when it's being absorbed, when one end of it is really in the grip of the receiving particle, then the trailing end of it has to get in there real fast, again at speed 2C,

5:00 only this time relative to the receiver instead of relative to the source. This description answers all those questions that people would naturally want to pose about seeing relative to what. That has always been the issue with relativity theory, and the thing that follows everyone about light having to move at the same speed c with respect to whatever, whatever observer might be talking about it. This spec makes a specification on that, So it kind of cleans up that situation. I spoke about this last year from the point of view of an engineer trying to explain why it is that the literature's special relativity theory is so full of discussion of paradoxes. And the explanation that I offered was that any time you've got a mismatch between the physical reality and the model in you, you're going to have problems of this sort where you get inconsistent results, and I believe that that is a pretty good candidate explanation for why it is that the literature of relativity theory so often speaks of paradoxes. In short, I believe there is a mismatch between the models that have been in use, all of which can be characterized as like propagation in one step, as compared to the reality, which I posits as being a two-step process. Now, we got into some trouble early at the beginning of the last century because of the fact that we had at that point in time only Maxwell's theory about light. And that is essentially one among the class of one-step theories about light. The theory told us that if a charge accelerates, it ought to lose energy. And that being the case, you ought to have a problem with the hydrogen atom and not be able to exist on a permanent basis because the moving electron accelerating as it goes around in its circular path has got to lose energy. And that inconsistency drove people to go in a completely new direction and make a new hypothesis and develop a new theory, mechanics in order to explain the stability of atoms and everything else about atoms.

7:30 Well, I think the reason why this scenario occurred is that we were mistaken in believing that one-step kind of model, and we therefore were unaware of all of the physical processes that would actually go on in a simple little two-body system like that, and having been unaware of them we drew wrong conclusions about them this is how the one-step restriction yourself to a one-step life forces the QM postulate That's right, yes. The one step idea about light is embedded in Maxwell's theory, and all the things that people drew from that, including the assertion that a charge traveling in a circular orbit should lose energy, and since it doesn't, there's something that required a new postulate. Yes, yes, yes. Now, since quantum theory was originally posed because there had been a conflict with Maxwell's theory, it's not very surprising that there are yet more conflicts uncovered. So, here's another one. If you read the classical derivation of the Leonard Riefer's potentials and commentary on what the fields are that arise from that, the classical fields that arise from that, There are, of course, two kinds of fields. One of them you could characterize as being columbic in nature, just your regular e-field, and the other one being radiative in nature, the kind of thing that goes away with distance in a less precipitous way and therefore allows for far-field radiation to be developed. Well, you look at the directions that are specified for the two kinds of fields here, you find out that if you are looking at a little dancing electron in the distance, this little electron is dancing and perhaps also translating, the theory is telling you that the radiation that you receive as light appears to come from

10:00 a different place than does the attraction that you're experiencing, the coulombic attraction. I think that's quite peculiar. I think it's something to be suspicious about. I've always been suspicious about that. And it just points to the fact that there's probably more in conflict between quantum mechanics as we understand it and classical radiation theory as we understand it than we even have uncovered yet. Now, what I'm doing today in going back and revising the classical theory, I'm going to try to establish a pathway from a revised version of classical theory into quantum mechanics. It's going in the reverse direction from what Lou was talking about the other day. He was talking about beginning with the precepts of quantum mechanics, about the communication relationships, and redeveloping a lot of classical theory. I think that little perky things like this probably would not come out of his reconstruction because I think these are wrong and I think his reconstruction is right. I think what we see at this meeting is two people trying to build roads. I'm building a one-way road from classical theory to fine mechanics and he was building a one-way road from fine mechanics back to classical theory. Putting the two together may give you a two-way highway and if everything is really honky-dory when you finally finish building the road, You should be able to get from anywhere to anywhere, assuming that the anywhere that you're speaking of is in fact right. Well, I think we've got some things on our map that are not right. Now, beginning again with classical theory and developing it with light as a two-step process instead of a one-step process, and looking at the situation of the hydrogen atom, there's more than one thing that's going on in this system now. It used to be only the radiation from the circulating charge, which was a concern, but now there's a second thing going on in this system, because you have forces within the system that are not only not balanced, but they produce a net force on it, and they also are not central, and they produce a torque on it. So there's two kinds of new effects here that were not previously discussed in the context of classical theory.

12:30 And you've got two of something, there's a chance for that. Okay, the two things that can happen because of the two-step light are, first of all, that your little atomic system does not sit stationary in space with its center of mass nailed down, and center of mass actually moves. Now, why does this happen? This is really very unfamiliar in Newtonian types of theory. You would never expect such a thing coming at it from the point of view of Newton's mechanics. But perhaps you shouldn't be quite so surprised, because when you get into electromagnetic theory, That really is not Newtonian mechanics anymore. There is another actor in this scenario in all electromagnetic phenomenology. It's not only forces and particles that are acted upon. There's also a field, and the field can be a repository for energy or angular momentum or anything else that you used to think was simply conserved by the particles when you were handling Newtonian physics. So we do have another actor. It is possible for other things to happen in electromagnetic problems that you wouldn't have anticipated from Newtonian physics. And so, bear with me. Consider the possibility that in this situation that I described, it is possible for the entire system to be driven around in a circle. So that's one thing that I believe that can happen. The other thing that can happen is that because the forces are not central in this system, we've got the torque on the system, that can basically work to spin the system up. So as hard as the electron tries to radiate energy, there's something that's finding that and trying to pump energy into the system at the same time. That is the source of the potential balance that I'm trying to develop here. Now, there is something very, very interesting about any kind of system being driven around in a circle. And this first came up early in the 20th century. People were worrying about a scenario of this type in connection with the electron, and the screwy way it seemed to react to the fact that it would be seeing the proton move.

15:00 It just didn't interact enough, it appeared magnetically with the proton. when having an anomalous magnetic moment, and people didn't understand that until Thomas did a real detailed analysis of what happens to you when you drive something around in the circle, which means applying a number of Lorentz transformations that are not collinear with each other one after another. And you get this rotation that is imposed upon the problem, which means that a coordinate frame attached to the electron traveling around an atom in this case, rotates, and just makes half a turn every time the electron makes a whole circuit around the atom. Well, that had a career for a while. That idea had a career for a while in explaining the anomalous magnetic moment. It eventually got laid off from that job because we do have more modern theories with the direct theory of the electron, which left it in the position of being kind of a curiosity. The people still know it's there. It doesn't have a very necessary role in physics at the moment, but I want to rehire it because I think it's important in this problem. Its first application was a situation where what was being driven in the circle was the electrons around the nucleus. I want to apply it to another scenario now. Not that one, but instead I want to apply it to a case where it's the center of mass of the hydrogen atom, which has two parts to it, the electron and the proton, and drive that center of mass around in the circle. And look what that same phenomenology does in that case. Now, there's more here than meets the eye. This Thomas rotation is another one of these instances of a factor of two, for which our friend Peter Rollins has really spent a lot of time looking into deep meaning of these things, and I'm sorry that he isn't here today, because this is a juicy one. This factor 2 really does mean something important. It isn't just a curiosity. The fact is, if you look, if you suppose that this is a little system that's being driven around, and this little system is playing out whatever it naturally does, you begin to understand that this coordinate system that's being made to rotate is, in fact, locally inertial for this little system.

17:30 Whatever it naturally wants to do, it's naturally going to do it in this rotating coordinate frame. Now this is important because when you look at what the consequences are far, far away from the system, it's going to look as though what's happening isn't really the way the system perceives it locally. If this system locally is supposed to go in a circular orbit at a certain frequency, and that frequency is the same as the frequency at which this thing is being driven around in a circle, what's going to happen in the far field with the radiation is that the amount of radiation is going to be as if that system were going at twice the frequency that your equation says naturally should be going at. Now, shudder for a moment because that appears to make the radiation problem, which originally drove the development of in the far field. So, change fingernails for a minute. It's a pretty big factor. You double the radiation like that, and you change what used to be a little bit of 2 in front of the radiation formula, you change it into a 2 to the 5th power. That's terrible. However, torque to the rescue. The system, as I said, has something else going on within it as well, which is that the forces are not central, and therefore each particle is experiencing a twist from the other particle that tends to pump energy into the system. So you've got this other thing going on for which you can develop a formula that tells you that energy is flowing into the system because of the torquing. So while you're spending it, you know, propagately with the radiation, at the same time you are somehow gathering from an investment something from the torque. Okay, two things happening. One is a gain, one is a loss. The obvious question is when do they balance one another? And that's the origin of my title

20:00 with the Indian balance, they certainly do. You can write down each formula and then start solving for things in there because a lot of variables are repeated on both sides. And, for example, you can solve for the separation between the electrons and the protons. And you get a number there that is pretty good. It's not up to the standards that the society likes to see. But, well, maybe you'll cut me a little slack because this number that I'm quoting has some physical dimensions to it, and it's contingent on a whole bunch of other measurements, which means that however messy those measurements are, they all pump into making my estimate even more messy. So I think it's a physical number rather than a pure number. So, forgive me for... No, just a little bit. I was going to say the opposite thing, that the formula here appears to me to be dimensionless. I mean, you've got MP over ME, multiplied by E squared over NC squared, which is a practical electron radius. This is a square test here. Yeah, I mean, I take one of them, underneath the MP, you just have an MP over ME, and then you've got e squared over nc. Ah, sorry, no, it's me, isn't it? Well, it's equivalent to what it is. It's e squared over n squared c squared, isn't it? No, it's not. Well, she's put it equal to a length. Yes, she says it's a length, but I say it's just a number. You say that's a mistake. I say it looks, to me, just a number. e squared over r is energy, right? So, e squared over energy is 1 over r. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. Thank you, Evan. So anyway, it's, you know, pretty good, especially since some of us are engineers. The important point in developing that formula is that there is, in the quantum mechanics literature, of course, a formula that quotes this distance in terms of Planck's constant. And we've got it instead in terms of these other variables, which do not involve Planck's constant, which means we've got an alternative, which means we've certainly got this radius thing expressed without using Planck's constant.

22:30 And as a matter of fact, we could solve all those equations and get an expression for Planck's constant. So there's that. And that's kind of the, you know, punchline of the whole presentation. So now I'm going to punch, pass out my copy of the punchline that you graph with a couple of supporting lines on the back side of it. So I believe that the thing that we call Planck's constant in quantum mechanics can be developed as a function of other variables. Furthermore, you can see that it depends on masses of things and so forth. And if you were talking about another kind of system, such as Sarah was talking about yesterday, where it was... You'd have the mass ratios. Yes, you'd have mass ratios appropriate to the system. If you took the conventional view about the plank confidence, then you'd have the mass ratio. So if you wanted to talk about astrophysical things, maybe you'd have planets and suns instead of electrons and protons, whatever, but it shows that in a variety of problems like this, if there can be a radiative process, which there can be in gravitation, and there can also be some type of a propagation delay phenomenon, which I think there can be with gravitation, although not everyone knows about it. that, you know, in another kind of system, you could develop a similar kind of formula that would tell you about the conversation of that type of system. What about the new products that they have in the room? Yeah, it is. So what's the question? So would that be changed? Yes, it would. And here's the interesting problem that I have been working on, That concerns the ionization potentials of all of the different atoms in the periodic tables which have different ratios of neutrons and protons. This gives you some guidance that's different from what people currently believe concerning what the scaling of those things might be from one atom to the next. Well, that's the 128, which arose from the factors of 2 that were in the equations from which this was derived.

25:00 Okay, that's kind of interesting and incites a person who keeps working in the ice. And there are, I believe, a great many things still to do and I wouldn't claim to be anywhere near the end of this problem. I will talk a little bit about excited space as a hydrogen atom or any kind of atom. It's kind of preliminary in a sense. I believe there's still a great deal of work done there. Also there is a discussion about stability at this balance point, which is a nitpicking, long technical discourse, and it's in another paper. So if you really care about that, you can read that. There are a whole bunch of questions about other elements, which we're probably just to raise attention to a little bit. And that also is another paper, and people can read about that if they would like to read about it. There's a whole bunch of things on my to-do list which I simply haven't had time to look into yet, including all of the other cases where H occurs. can it make any sense of those to go along with the analysis of hydrogen atoms. And it goes on and on, falls off the bottom of the slide. What I have to say about exciting things is to express a certain doubt about the current understanding of what they really are. It's rather esoteric, I think, that they're labeled by a quantum number that arises from the possible solutions of a differential equation. I think that's kind of a man-made description, and I kind of doubt that's really what nature is doing. The idea that I'm investigating instead is that what's being counted by the integer that appears in the definition of the excited space and the hydrogen atom, that integer has to do with a number of atoms working together in some coherent way. So we're counting atoms, we're not counting solutions to a differential equation. And that is an idea. But they're not mutually exclusive, are they? They're not mutually exclusive, is it? No, they're not usually exclusive. It's just that some people's tastes would perhaps prefer counting atoms, whereas other people's tastes would prefer counting solutions of a differential equation.

27:30 Usually in physical situations, one description sort of works, and people pick the one they like for whatever their reasons are. There's also, so that bears on the connection to spectroscopy, because as we know, in spectroscopy there's evidence from the spectral line, is that the energy state must evolve in versions like that for an integer. And the other question at the end is, what do those integers mean? So, I'm pursuing a possible different definition of what those integers mean. To summarize all of this, in the present theory, Planck's constant comes out as a result rather than being an input. So, that's kind of what I like about it. If this, indeed, Thank you.