Crackpot Quantum Electrodynamics

 
Okay, so, I may have a way of describing the behavior of electrons and photons, within the framework of all this insane nonsense.

Thanks, Timecake, for pointing me at the Feynman lecture, I had forgotten about that.

Now, in my model, an electron, like every other particle, is something like a standing wave in spacetime; it causes spacetime to curve this way and that way.  In the big theory, it is infinite, occupying the entire universe, and a measure of its "depth" over distance looks something like sin(ln(x))/x.

However, let us simplify our model a little bit to consider just the interactions of electrons: An electron is a bowl, a curved topology, whose depth is inversely proportional to the distance of a point from the center.  For now let's consider the simplified, fake, spin-0 electron, so our bowl is nice and uniform.  We're still going to call it infinite, however.  Imagine our bowl of distortion in a nice two dimensional plane.  "Grab" the center and wiggle it around a bit; relativity applies, so this creates little ripples in our bowl, what I will call an "update wave", which fly away from the center at the speed of light, "telling" everything they encounter where the center of the bowl was when they left; since the center of the bowl didn't move instantaneously from one point to another, but took time to get from one point to another, these ripples will have a measure, a "width"; the faster the bowl moved, the narrower the ripple, and the slower the center of the bowl moved, the wider.

Now, add another bowl, such that the depth of the bowls add together; they're separated a bit, but if you think about the way the bowls add, you should get a little valley connecting the two bowls together.  Now, wiggle one of the bowls, and observe the way the ripples wash over the second bowl.  These ripples are changes in distance - so the ripples cause the second bowl to move, in turn, relative to the first bowl.  From the center of the first bowl's perspective, the second bowl will move, because, for a little bit of time, its distance from the first bowl is changing.  Thus they'll begin trading ripples back and forth.

Suppose we wiggle the bowls back and forth, oscillating the center about a point, towards and away from each other, simultaneously (for a given value of simultaneous).  Well, consider the ripples; depending on the distance between the centers of the two bowls, the ripples could cancel out, or they could double up - if the ripples of the changed distance arrive just as a bowl is moving one direction, the changed distances could subtract out.  If they arrive just as the bowl is moving back in the opposite direction, they could double up.

Add a third bowl, separate from the other two, and observe something: It is moving in the ripples from the motion of both bowls, and also in the secondary ripples, and, in a particular sense, it moves in the secondary ripples regardless of whether or not there actually *are* secondary ripples; they do not truly cancel out, because there is not a "true" value for the distance between anything, once it is in motion.

The absence of a "true" value for the distance is, itself, an absence of a "true" location for the centers of the bowls, which becomes more apparent as you add more bowls - there isn't even a true location for the center of a bowl with respect to the bowl itself.

Now, remember - the bowl is an electron.  As should be apparent, the ripples, the update waves, are light.  We can extend Feynman's notation for light a little bit, here: The arrow is pointed in the direction the electron was moving at the moment the light left the electron.  However, in Feynman's notation, the arrow continues spinning, its frequency of rotation corresponding to the frequency of the light.  Our arrow is, in a sense, fixed.  What is not fixed, however, is the other electron; the center of the second bowl, which is also oscillating.  Relative to the other electron, then, the arrow continues to spin, because the arrow represents the relative distance to the emitting electron, which continues to change.

We're missing some pieces, however - first, these ripples are fundamentally transitory; they do not impart any energy.  Second, they are continuous - we do not get quantization out of what I have described.  And third, they lack polarization - they lack spin.

Polarization is, in a sense, the easiest to deal with: Spin is relative orientation.  I've been talking about electrons that move directly towards and away from each other, and glossed over the issue with the third electron.  Electrons have more range of motion than that, and can move, relative to a second electron, side to side - which still represents a change in distance, but a more subtle one.  Or just at a random angle.  Spin, I believe, reflects the variation in the shape of the ripples, depending on how the electron is oscillating.  Remembering, as we consider this oscillation, that the electron is not properly the center, but the entirety of the "bowl", which includes the entire universe.  (This requires more explanation than I've written here, because the orientation of an electron in an atom is more constrained than this may suggest.)

Energy, action, arises out of the idea that this entire structure is curvature; these ripples represent a change in distance, and therefore a change in curvature, and therefore an impartation of energy.  However, it is only ever partial - the bowl is the entirety of the universe, yet the ripple only covers a small portion of it.  The transformations here are messy and ugly, and beg complicated questions about whether or not the bowl structure has some kind of integrity, some force forcing it to cohere into a single shape.  (No, there is not a force holding the electron into a particular shape, but almost all ripples are fundamentally transitory in nature, leaving the topology the same as they were when they depart.  The exceptions are interesting but out of scope here, concerning the creation or destruction of matter.)

Action, the impartation of energy, is necessarily symmetric; it is not any more correct to say that an electron imparts energy upon another electron, as it is to say that that second electron takes energy from the first electron.  It is all a symmetric interaction of topologies, without inherent causal structure.

As the electrons are constantly oscillating, they're constantly emitting and absorbing very small amounts of energy.  This oscillation is what we generally think of, when we think of an electron, and these very small amounts of energy being shuffled about - sub-quantum energy - are a large part of what we think of, when we think of an electrical field.

It's light - it's a fluctuation in the electrical field - but it isn't LIGHT, and in particular, we have no mechanism of detecting it.  There's a minimum level of energy needed for us to detect light: It's the level of energy necessary to cause an electron to leave an atomic "orbit".  This amount of energy causes the electron to move both very quickly, and, given that it will immediately fall into another "orbit", predictably.  This much larger chunk of energy is what we call a photon, which goes off in (mostly) two directions, depending on the orientation of the electron when it changed orbits.  Remember, however, that there is no causal direction to the topological changes taking place here; this is all symmetric, and universal, and - for a given notion of simultaneity - simultaneous.

Consider a photon hitting an electron - this is a particularly intense ripple interacting with our bowl.  Except the photon was emitted from another electron (leaving out other sources of photons for the moment), and both electrons/bowls occupy the entire universe, so the second electron, in a certain perspective, initiated the energy transfer - or, rather, the entire transfer occured acausally, as a result of an interaction between the two electrons, which both occupy the entire universe.  The topological changes in the electron which "received" the photon are exactly identical to the topological change of the ripple itself - that is, as far as every other electron is concerned, the only energy that was emitted was from the electron that was hit by the photon, not by the electron that emitted it - and this energy wasn't emitted either, if we keep going.

Why that specific electron, though?

Well, see, that's a matter of interpretation.  See, I've been describing the electron as a bowl occupying the entire universe; this bowl represents two things.  In quantum mechanics, the "depth" of the bowl at any given point represents the probability distribution.  And in general relativity, the "depth" of the bowl at any given point represents the mass-energy distribution - that is, curvature.

Also, the bowl isn't a bowl.

Verification #3

 If the basic model of the crackpot nonsense is correct:

I expect that there is some radius between 10^22 meters and 10^26 meters (vicinity of 10^24) which marks the largest possible size of a galaxy, and some radius between 10^28 and 10^32 (vicinity of 10^30) which marks the most common distance between galaxies.

Galaxies which are between the vicinity of 10^24 and the vicinity of 10^30 meters from one another should be moving apart, on average; galaxies which are greater than the vicinity of 10^30 meters from one another should be falling into one another on average.

Galaxies which are approximately 10^30 meters apart should be orbiting one another - neither moving towards nor away.

Verification #2

 If the basic model of the crackpot nonsense is correct:

There should be a second magnetic anomaly somewhere in the vicinity of 10^12 m (So between 10^11 and 10^13), although I suspect at that distance it will be too faint to detect.

More easily detected, because there is a repulsive field at work at these distances - mass should be scarce at this distance from the dominant "local" masses, a scarcity that should continue up to about 10^18 m (between 10^17 and 10^19, although errors really begin to compound here); at 10^18 m, I expect an unusually dense distribution of matter; this value in the vicinity of 10^18 m should be the most common distance between objects in the galaxy.

It should be possible to find large masses (say, black holes) orbiting each other at, accounting for relativistic changes in distance, 10^18m, which we might otherwise expect to fall into one another.

Verification #1

 If the basic model of the crackpot nonsense is correct:

I expect that there is some distance from a magnetic source between 10^5 meters and 10^7 meters at which there will be magnetic anomalies; in particular, there will be a phenomenon by which the apparent field strength drops much faster than expected and passes through zero into the negative (reversed polarity).

I specifically expect this to be somewhere in the vicinity of 10^6 meters, although the specific distance will vary with the mass of the object.

Why are there Three Dimensions?

 Gimbal locking, plus relativity.  (Alternatively, gimbal locking plus holographic principle, if the idea that relativity implies 2+1 dimensions, rather than 3+1 dimensions, doesn't seem incredibly obvious to you.)

Locally, at least, all dimensions eventually collapse down to 2+1.

Assuming the mechanism I'm thinking of works - it's not quite gimbal locking, but it's kind of the same principle, in which two rotational dimensions become locally dependent - any finite number of spacial dimensions should reduce to two spacial dimensions in practice for the oriented matter, over enough time, at least locally.  I don't think the last two dimensions can lock, because you need at least one non-time orthogonal dimension (because some interactions create orthogonal forces), but my thoughts are very vague right now.

This explanation probably will not actually work in conventional physics, because the distribution of mass/energy doesn't work out nicely, as those extra dimensions never actually go away or become compact, they just become dependent; I do not believe you would get the inverse square law under these conditions.

A Random Thought

 If we consider the extra dimension(s) on which the amplitude of the wave function given to the Schrodinger Equation, the wave function instead defines a topology-like geometric object.  If the topology can be evaluated over time by some alternative mathematical construct, that alternative mathematical construct may form the basis for a more powerful (in the sense of describing a wider range of potential phenomena) physics, because it should be constructable in such a way as to not possess the limitations of the Schrodinger Equation that the function returns a value for the entire dimensional space under consideration.

The amplitude of quantum waves are geometrically limited in a way that the topology shouldn't be; quantum waves have an extent from 0 to the amplitude, whereas a more general topology should permit discontinuous extents.  The amplitude of the probability would be equivalent to a thickness, or measure, in the topology; the exact position of the topology relative to the dimension of amplitude could vary (this variance is why I describe this as a topology).  These values could potentially matter for the generalized version of the Schrodinger Equation, which would describe the special case where these values don't matter, where the measure is continuous, and where the topology is defined for all of the non-amplitude dimensions.

I suspect there is a class of such generalizations, which make distinct predictions.

Time Travel

 If you want to travel backwards in time, the steps are simple.

First, travel away from your current location faster than the speed of light.

Second, catch up with that period of time.

Third, convert yourself destructively into a gravity wave propagated in the direction of travel, with all the transformations and distortions that the original gravity wave experienced, such that you precisely imitate the gravitic wave that your existence at that time would have produced, had the wave also traveled alongside all the others; if you get any of the transformations or distortions wrong, it won't work.