Wacky fun physics ideas

My reading lately has ventured into weird physics papers. Mainstream physics (unlike machine learning and classical statistics where real progress has been made) is booooring these days. There’s no point in reading another “shittonium on silicon 111” papers, nor am I interested in stupid big budget projects where people always get the expected answer, nor is there any return in reading yet another “confirmation of the standard model” phenomenology gobbledeygook. Black holes, dork matter; anything that can’t be observed is uninteresting and generally just gabbling on about our ignorance of how things actually work. I don’t care for any of the PR touted baloney unified field theories by gentleman surfers or purple hair quaternion enthusiasts, which are about quirky personalities rather than quality of ideas. I’m also sick to death of anyone paying any attention to Avi Loeb, who sees flying saucers in every piece of space junk flying through the solar system. Anyone that hires a PR firm for his “results” is a fraud. Anyone who the media likes for other reasons is likely also a fraud.

I do like weird science though. Stuff that makes you think, “hey what would happen if the universe was this way.” It might not be right, it might even be obviously retarded to people who work in the field, but considering that the post-1945 order is ending, we’d expect it to end in physics as well, just as it did post 1918. When the great upheavals happen in human history, previous certainties become less certain and things start to move in the arts and sciences.  These are all theoretical noodlings, but at least they take the time to have an interesting thought. Anyway, in no particular order, here are some WEIRD SCIENCE papers and a few notes about each.

Leptons might not generate gravity. I mean, they might, they might not. Leptons (aka mostly electrons) are weird because they’re like 2000x lighter than everything else. Leptons obviously have inertial mass. I’m pretty sure someone has shown that they are subject to gravity also by now, but I never looked for evidence of this. Probably this is part of particle accelerator physics: electrons should drop as quickly as anything else in the direction of the earth’s core. Whether or not they generate gravity has definitely not been measured to within the accuracy we’d need to know for sure. This is in principle a knowable thing. The Kreuzer experiment was an early attempt to measure gravitational mass versus inertial mass of two different kinds of normal matter. This paper gives a decent argument that such an experiment couldn’t distinguish the case where leptons or binding energy were not gravity generating as General Relativity says they must be. Maybe it’s just a wacky idea, but it’s an interesting wacky idea that should have physicists getting out their torsion balances.

Gravity is an entropic result of matrix mechanics. I don’t fully understand this one as it involves some references to noodle theory, but it’s fun to pretend gravity is entropic and see what happens. In this case, the author defines a fast and slow timescale in the matrix mechanics. Gravity is experienced by the slow timescale matrix elements through complex entanglement interactions with the fast timescale matrix elements (which act like a heat bath). It’s a little annoying he’s using noodle theory, as that’s where the gravitational constants come from, making this a sort of self-licking ice cream cone. Why do we need noodle theory if Gravity is entropic? There’s a couple of other papers in the same genre, I didn’t pick this one for any particular strengths, it’s just the first one I came across. I’ve mentioned I find the whole entropic gravity idea to be interesting, though there are no really compelling papers on it. The main argument for it is the fact that most of the everyday forces we encounter in life are thermodynamic in origin; why not gravity also. Hand wavey argument for sure, but many great things, such as special relativity, originated from humble reasoning.

Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology. It seems like this must be false, since the electron has charge and all, but it’s an interesting idea, and it has an excellent answer to this objection. The present theory of point-like electrons is pretty weird if you stop to think about it: points imply singularities. I mean, the electron has charge, spin and a magnetic dipole moment: how do you get that from a point? This is a very clever paper: wrap an electromagnetic field of a photon on a torus and you naturally get a lot of interesting properties of the electron back, including spin-1/2 properties, a net magnetic dipole moment and an electric charge; effectively from 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 as an electron. It even gets the charge of the electron right using simple arguments. Some dopes say it’s not quite right, then happily go back to QED, which also doesn’t get the charge of the electron right by a significantly larger degree. The crazy thing about this is the Compton wavelength of the electron also  falls out naturally: basically you get quantum mechanics for free from this, and the mechanism of this is demonstrated, rather than the normal state of affairs, which is to simply accept that there’s a wavelength. This has to do with the Doppler shift of a photon’s momentum on the torus. This is a really elegant and cool idea. There are about 130 citations so far. I came across this one in this Huygens Optics video presentation on the paper which is worth a look, though the paper is quite clear also. It’s an old idea, the Dirac equation has a funny oscillation in it. Here’s a nice review paper of this group of ideas, which says nice things about this paper specifically, but points out that it doesn’t explain how the photon got all twisted up in a doughnut in the first place. Though they kind of suggested smashing a couple of high energy photons together in a special way might do it; pair production, basically, though the toroidal symmetry implies something a little more detailed (probably involving circular polarization). This is my favorite of this small collection of weird science papers: the type of thing that could grow into something which sweeps away a lot of the mystical nonsense accreted up over the last century. Some of the bits of it seem arbitrary, but nowhere near as arbitrary as the standard model, and it has satisfying mechanistic explanations without any mysticism. All you need is electromagnetic waves, special relativity and the Doppler shift. Oh yeah and a torus.

I guess this one is not physics, but astrobiology is weird enough to count. Astrobiology was housed in the same buildings as the physics department in my department at Pitt after all; near the guy who used rockets to learn about the atmosphere. Imagine if there were very different kinds of life, say, something based on arsenic or silicon. Unless the organisms were big, how would we detect them? I’ve mentioned before that new forms of normal life are discovered all the time in places like mud; if a form of life were weird we might not be able to detect them at all. The concept has been explored a little, for example in this paper Signatures of a Shadow Biosphere, they speculate that “desert varnish” may be such a thing. Desert varnish looks weird and is enriched in arsenic and manganese. Maybe it is the result of a form of life with a radically different metabolism involving arsenic and manganese. Others say no, but of course others say no; it’s worth investigating further. Less exotic: we could look for L-sugars (amino acids have more inherent racemic qualities).