Although I do like weird science. Things that make you think, “What if the universe was like this.” This may not be correct, it may be obvious even to those who work in the field, but given that the post-1945 sequence is ending, we would expect it to end in physics as well, as it did after 1918. When great upheavals occur in human history, previous certainties diminish and things begin to move forward in the arts and sciences. These are all theoretical noodling, but at least they take the time to flesh out an interesting idea. Anyway, in no particular order, here are some weird science papers and some notes about each.
Leptons cannot generate gravity. I mean, they may be, they may not be. Leptons (mostly electrons) are strange because they are 2000 times lighter than everything else. Leptons obviously have inertial mass. I’m pretty sure by now someone has shown that they are also subject to gravity, but I’ve never looked for evidence of it. Perhaps this is part of particle accelerator physics: electrons should fall in the direction of the Earth’s core as fast as anything else. Whether they generate gravity or not has not been measured to the precision we need to know for sure. This is a thing worth knowing in principle. The Kreuzer experiment was an early attempt to measure the gravitational mass versus inertial mass of two different types of ordinary matter. This paper makes a good argument that such an experiment could not isolate the case where leptons or binding energies were not causing gravity as general relativity says they should be. Maybe it’s just a wacky idea, but it’s an interestingly wacky idea that physicists should get their torsion balances off of.
Gravity is an entropic consequence of matrix mechanics. I don’t fully understand it as it includes some references to noodle theory, but it’s fun to pretend that gravity is entropic and see what happens. In this case, the author defines fast and slow timescales in matrix mechanics. Gravity is experienced by slow timescale matrix elements through complex entanglement interactions with faster timescale matrix elements (which act like a heat bath). It’s a little annoying that he’s using the noodle principle, because that’s where the gravitational constants come from, making it a kind of self-licking ice cream cone. If gravity is entropic why do we need the noodle theory? There are some other papers in the same genre, I did not choose this one because of any special merit, it is just the first paper I found. I mentioned that I find the whole entropic gravity idea interesting, although there aren’t really any compelling documents on it. The main argument for this is the fact that most of the everyday forces we encounter in life are thermodynamic in origin; Why not gravity too? Certainly hand-waving logic, but many great things, like special relativity, arose from humble logic.
Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology? It seems like this should be wrong, since the electron has a charge and everything, but it’s an interesting idea, and it has an excellent answer to this objection. The current theory of point-like electrons is pretty strange if you stop to think about it: the points represent singularities. I mean, the electron has charge, spin, and a magnetic dipole moment: how do you get that from one point? This is a very clever paper: wrap the electromagnetic field of a photon on a torus and you’ll naturally get lots of interesting properties of the electron, including spin-1/2 properties, a net magnetic dipole moment, and an electric charge; effectively by the orientation of the photon’s electric field around the torus. The precession of the field around the torus makes it look like a sphere on most reasonable time scales, which looks like what we think of an electron as. It even derives the charge of the electron using simple arguments. Some dopes say this isn’t quite right, then happily go back to QED, which doesn’t get the electron charge quite right. The strange thing about this is that the Compton wavelength of the electron also naturally falls: basically you get quantum mechanics for free from this, and Mechanism This is demonstrated rather than the general state of affairs, which means simply acknowledging that there is a wavelength. It is related to the Doppler shift of the photon’s motion on the torus. This is really a beautiful and wonderful idea. There are about 130 citations so far. I found this on paper in a Huygens Optics video presentation, which is worth a look, although the paper is also quite clear. It’s an old idea, a strange fluctuation in the Dirac equation. Here’s a good review paper of this set of ideas, which says nice things about this paper in particular, but points out that it doesn’t explain how the photon got twisted into the donut in the first place. However he suggested that smashing a few high energy photons together in a particular way could cause this; Pair production, basically, although toroidal symmetry shows something more elaborate (possibly involving circular polarization). This is my favorite in this little collection of weird science papers: the kind of thing that might develop into something that dispels a lot of the mysterious nonsense that has accumulated over the last century. Parts of it seem arbitrary, but not as arbitrary as the Standard Model, and it has satisfactory mechanistic explanations without any mysticism. All you need are electromagnetic waves, special relativity, and the Doppler shift. Oh yes and a torus.
I guess it’s not physics, but astronomy, weird enough to count. After all, Astrobiology was located in the same buildings as my department at Pitt, the Physics Department; To the person who used rockets to learn about the atmosphere. Imagine if there were a very different kind of life based on, say, arsenic or silicon. How will we detect organisms until they grow? I mentioned earlier that new forms of normal life are discovered all the time in places like mud; If any forms of life were strange we might not be able to detect them. This concept has been explored a bit, for example in this paper Signatures of a Shadow Biosphere, they speculate that “desert varnish” might be such a thing. Desert varnish looks strange and is rich in arsenic and manganese. Perhaps this is the result of a form of life with a fundamentally different metabolism involving arsenic and manganese. Others say no, but of course others say no; This is worth further investigation. Less exotic: we can look for L-sugars (amino acids have more inherent racemic properties).
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