The ISU Dialogues, Part One -- The Theory That Goes EEP

DB: "You haven't had us over for coffee as much lately. Are the ATM rule changes at BAUT the reason?"

CM: "Yes, I'm afraid so. There's been slim pickins' in ATM lately. I wanted to discuss Coldcreation's cosmology because there was one topic, the possibility of an upper limit to the amount of curvature, that I thought worthy of discussion. But the thread got derailed on some peripheral topic and kept getting closed, so we won't be discussing that."

BH: "Maybe we could deconstruct Dutch's 'Hyperdimensional Design'?"

CM: "A complete waste of time. There's no science in it, everyone (well, almost everyone) can see that, he's only making it up as he goes along. Not worth our time.

CM: "A worthier use of our time and my coffee would be taking a good look at the 'Infinitely Spongy Universe' theory of Bogie. I've not been able to work up an interest in it until now. I want you to read this printout of 'The Infinite Reach of Gravity' thread and see what you think."

A half-hour and a cup of coffee later, we put down our copies and started to discuss.

BH: "The most notable thing about Bogie's presentation are the things that are not there: no equations, no anti-matter, no neutrinos, no quarks, no quantum mechanics to speak of, no mention of relativity, special or general."

CM: "That bothered me a little. You'll notice my comment in the thread about Eddington's Fundamental Theory. I really did read it back at the university; an interesting book but ultimately left behind as a dead end because it did not acknowledge all of the particles discovered and already known within Eddington's lifetime. To Eddington and to Bogie the universe seems to consist only of protons, electrons and photons. Such was the list of known particles at the dawn of quantum mechanics. Within Eddington's lifetime the positron (predicted by Dirac), neutron and muon were discovered. Since then we've seen an explosion of particles which have given way to the fundamental particles of the standard model: six quarks, six leptons, photon, W+/-, Z, gluon and (maybe) Higgs and graviton. Could any of these be composites of some smaller number of particles? Possibly, there are models out there but so far no observations to back any of them up."

DB: "I notice that Bogie doesn't really say much about the properties of his so-called EEPs. He doesn't say how much mass they have, how much angular momentum, well, in post #20 he does say how much charge, but I don't really believe it."

CM: "There's a very fundamental error in his calculation of the number of EEPs in the proton and the electron. We'll get to that later. But first let's look at post #2 of the thread.

CM: "There's a lot here; we don't have spacetime to comment on it all, so I'll try to summarize."
BH: "And not an equation in any of it! I'd feel a lot better if there was a wee bit of quantum mechanics describing an equation of motion for these EEPs, or maybe a propagator or something."

DB: "All Bogie is doing is telling a story; he's after understanding."

CM: "But it won't come just from storytelling. A story is just that; a story. An equation is a library-full of stories, stories that write themselves if you only have the understanding. ( ) Unfortunately when most people use the word 'understanding', such as when VivPope wrote 'understanding is more important than equations', it's not understanding that they're after, but some kind of new-age mantra for their navel-gazing. I'm not willing to provide this. OK, here's something for you navel-gazers out there: 'Mass is what enables us to sit still and wait.' This should provide hours of navel-gazing enjoyment. Meditate on that."

CM: "While the navel-gazers are occupied elsewhere, let's get back to post #2 of this thread. Let's look at it in a little more detail. One of the first things I take issue with is this:"
CM: "Quantum field theory has been one of the most successful of our theories; quantum electrodynamics (QED) makes predictions to ten decimal places and more that are measured in experiments. And at the bottom of it all is the conception of creation and destruction operators. And with the exception of the photon (which is treated as its own anti-particle), this means creation and destruction operators for particle and anti-particle."

BH: "I noted that there was no mention of anti-matter anywhere. How does he propose to put together an anti-proton out of hundreads of millions of EEPs in such a way as to guarantee the same mass but opposite charge?"

CM: "Indeed. In some other thread I also asked how all of these presumably neutrally-charged EEPs could give rise to a charged composite. I did not find the answer satisfactory. But there is a way out for Bogie, if he's willing to take it. If he allows for the existence of anti-EEPs, anti-particles of his EEPs, he is then able to build anti-matter that is exactly the 'mirror image' of matter simply by combining anti-EEPs in the same way as EEPs where combined. As a bonus, a photon can then be considered as a composite of EEPs and anti-EEPs, although there is no evidence as yet for such structure in photons."

DB: "Why are you telling Bogie what his theory should be?"

CM: "Well, if he does progress in his reading and learning he will ultimately have to take in some quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. I'm hard-headed enough to know what is necessary and soft-hearted enough to give it to people, whether they understand it or not."

DB: "Or want it or not!"

CM: "That too."

BH: "But I'd really like to know what you found wrong with his computation in post #20."

DB: "And I'm sure most of our readers would like to know, too."

CM: "OK, let's get a refill and I'll deconstruct post #20."

To be continued ...

__________________
Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.