Particle and Planck Wave Home
By
Rex Pay
The single greatest puzzle in science is action at a distance. All the great names have made contributions to it. Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein to name a few. It is involved in everything from the motion of galaxies, stars, and planets, to sunlight, movies, and cosmic rays. Gravity, electricity, magnetism, electromagnetism, the weak and strong forces all act over a characteristic distance, from the very smallest to the largest in the universe. One cannot discuss the nature of the universe without coming to terms with action at a distance,
Quantized spacetime faces this challenge in the movement of elementary particles like electrons and photons as they move from one point in spacetime to another, well described in the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED). According to Richard Feynman, who received a Nobel prize for his contribution to development of QED, three basic actions of electrons and photons described by this theory provide the basis for all the phenomena of physics, except for nuclear physics (which covers radioactivity and actions that power the stars).
The three basic actions govern all the phenomena of light and other types of electromagnetic radiation. This, in turn, provides the basis for chemistry and biology throughout the universe. Specifically, the actions are the basis for own evolution and that of other sentient beings.
Feynman described the interactions this way:
"Action #1: A photon goes from place to place.
Action #2: An electron goes from place to place
Action #3: An electron emits or absorbs a proton”
Each action described by Feynman will have a probability amplitude calculated by certain rules. The amplitudes describing a series of actions can be combined by a simple rule to give the probability of a specific event, such as the mutation of a gene by a stray photon or electron. We naturally have an interest in such interactions. The difficulty in forecasting them is the enormous number of particle interactions involved in even the simplest actions at the chemical and biological level. What is more, we do not get a definite answer. Only the probability of what will happen.
In QED the mystery is in the relationship between an elementary particle going from place to place and the electromagnetic wave that appears to accompany it. In the parlance of quantum mechanics, the particle is said to have a duality. This somehow license it to act as a particle if an experiment is measuring the property of particles and act as a wave if the experiment is measuring waves. This is not the view in quantized spacetime. There a particle is a particle and a wave is a wave.
QST Particles and Waves
The properties of particles and the waves associated with them are well documented and the length of the wave for a particular particle is predictable. There is a specific formula for particles with energy and no mass, like photons, and another for elementary particles like electrons that have mass.
From the appropriate formula, a photon producing yellow light goes from place to place accompanied by a wave with length of 527x10-9 meter, which is very much longer than the 1.65x10-35 diameter of the spacetime quantum. Nevertheless this odd couple is critical to action at a distance in a controlled and productive way.
The initial problem with going from place to place is that being randomly assembled into a universal matrix, the quanta are not in rows of straight lines. They are organized randomly, which is disorganized. At every transfer from quantum to quantum, a particle faces the alternative of leaving by one of four to six available exit contacts on the inner surface of the quantum. There may be one which will allow it to travel in a straight line across the first quantum to the next. But often there is no such path and the particles’ trajectory needs to be redirected to get into the next quantum.
Path of A Photon
When a photon is emitted by an electron in a spacetime quantum, it enters its first quantum in a straight line with a specific direction, carrying the energy and momentum it has gained from the electron. There may be a contact on the opposite side of the first quantum sphere that is reachable by this straight-line trajectory. If so, the photon exits through it into the next quantum. But often there is no contact offering such a direct exit. Then, the photon must deviate from its straight line to leave through the nearest contact available in the quantum surface.
I assume that the photon always turns its track towards a region of the quantum membrane where the tension is a minimum and that this is the region around each contact. From there the tension rises rapidly to the general membrane tension of the quantum. Moving with the minimum change of momentum to a contact with low tension and exiting through it means the photon is generally following a new track when it exits.
To make the change in its track it requires an increment of momentum at right angles to its original path. I assume the photon gains this in passing through the region of lower membrane tension, and that the increment is minute compared with that gained initially by the photon from the electron.
The diverted photon retains the increment of momentum as it enters the next quantum. But the random nature of the matrix means that the exit contacts it now faces may have a different radial distribution to the previous quantum. So, in many cases, it will leave the next quantum with the sum of two increments of momentum. Either may be directed to the left or right or up or down from the original path. Some increments will be reinforcing, others will cancel each other out. The process of forming a new increment of momentum continues with each successive transfer with total increment increasing and decreasing.
The added increments will not cause any significant change in the original track of the photon if their sum is less than the Planck constant (6.626×10−34 J.Hz−1 ). So it is possible that a photon passing along this track may not reach this critical limit for many transitions, because the random positive and negative increments of momentum balance each other out. But sometimes the Planck limit will be reached. Then the deviation becomes real, a photon appears that is moving along a new track.
We are not often able to follow a single photon through this process. Usually, we observe a beam of millions of photons passing along closely similar tracks in a collimated beam. But we do see that some new tracks moving off in random directions are also produced. There are significantly fewer diverted tracks than tracks close to the original path. This is characteristic of a photon beam (Figure 1).
[From The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard P. Feynman, Princeton Science Library, 1985.]
Figure 1 Richard Feynman shows in quantum theory why light appears to travel in straight lines. When all possible paths are considered, each crooked path has a nearby path of considerably less distance and therefore much less time and a substantially different direction for the arrow. Only the paths near the straight-line path D have arrows pointing in nearly the same direction, because their timings are the same. It is from these that quantum theory accumulates a large final arrow.
Correspondances
In quantized spacetime the tracks making up the main beam correspond to the final arrow in Figure 1. The random paths correspond to tracks that leave the main beam, with the assumption in quantized spacetime that not all of them cancel out.
The Plank constant, the speed of light, the matrix randomness, and the spacetime quantum configuration of contacts are such that a small fraction of photons veer off path. The main beam remaining allows reflected light from a distant object to illuminate a sufficient number of light sensitive neurons in a retina for neural detection of a significant object in the field of view. The difference in numbers of photons in the main beam and in the random tracks is significant. It means that by adjusting the sensitivity of retinal neurons, the random tracks will not cause confusion.
For evolution to succeed, changes in photon tracks in going from place to place should be sufficiently infrequent that light appears to travel in straight lines and provides an illumination of distant objects sufficient for neural pattern recognition, otherwise human and bird navigation would be impossible and photographers and hawks will have more misses than successes.
But a sufficiency of deviations in a fraction of photons is also needed if some photons or electrons are to collide randomly with RNA, DNA, and other reproduction-specific molecules. These deviants are essential to creation of the random mutations required for natural selection by variation of species. Quantum electrodynamics appears to have been tailored exquisitely for the evolution of biological species on a planet that is initially devoid of life. Experience of the variety of human behaviors suggests that the system is not slanted towards any specific outcome.
Deciding on Track Deviation
To decide whether a straight-line track is to be continued or a new track created, successive values of the original momentum plus the sum of momentum increments must be monitored along the path of the photon, with a redirection occurring when the total exceeds the original momentum by the Planck constant. However, each individual quantum along the track cannot do this. It is a simple sphere in tension that responds to changes in mass. It has no record of the direction of the original momentum that is not to be exceeded. It cannot sum a sequence of increments. And it has no means of measuring that sum against the Planck constant.
Calculating if it is time for a redirection of a particle calls for system that identifies the direction the photon is coming from and the place it was going to. It must also hold the running sum of the magnitude and direction of the successive momentum increments. And this information must be compared continuously with the Planck constant to decide if the photon is to be redirected at its current angle from the quantum onto a new track.
A possible source of these functions lies in the electromagnetic wave created when an electron emits a proton. In 1865 James Clerk Maxwell predicted mathematically that an electromagnetic wave exited that traveled at the speed of light. His equation came from laws for generating electrical and magnetic phenomena discovered by experimenters studying interactions between moving magnets, electricity and copper wires.(2) The complexity of this wave suggests it may carry out the functions required for trajectory selection.
Figure 2 The transverse electromagnetic wave, showing electric component E (blue) and magnetic component B (red), fluctuating in magnitude in a self-sustaining way across the track of the wave.[SuperManu, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons]
The wave is a transverse wave (Figure 2) with electric and magnetic components both at 90 degrees to the direction of travel of the wave and at 90 degrees to each other. The essential property of this specific configuration is that the two components interact to create a self-sustaining composite wave. The electric wave generates the magnetic wave and the magnetic wave generates the electric wave. Once the unified electromagnetic wave is launched by an electron into space it travels along with the photon at the speed of light with no further input
Figure 3. A circularly polarized electromagnetic wave. The electric field vectors that make the wave circularly polarized are shown. At each point the electric field vector has a constant value and rotates at a constant rate in a plane perpendicular to the wave.
The final touch that makes the wave conservator of legitimate quantum tracks and redirector of variants is that it is circularly polarized (Figure 3). The necessary circular polarization can be created by combining two electromagnetic waves traveling at right angles to each other. When it is present, this form of polarization provides a momentum vector directed outward from the track and rotating through 360 degrees in one wave length. This is in the ideal cycle for combining the momentum increments ejected at 90 degrees from the particle track with the momentum of the polarized wave.
With this arrangement the summed increments of momentum being brought to each quantum can be inserted into the wave to add to or subtract from its own momentum. And when the sum exceeds the Planck constant, the wave simply lets to photon go off on its new track.
As the photon was not proposed until early in the 20th century, an electromagnetic wave was initially assumed to be light itself. But with the development of quantum physics and the exploration of photon properties, the photon gained a strong claim to be light because it carried quantized energy, and light intensity increased by greater numbers of photons not raising their individual intensity.
The function of the wave accompanying a photon has since been the subject of much debate. A minor view was that Maxwell’s equation did not show that light was a wave but proved an electromagnetic wave traveled at the speed of light. It was more widely thought that the wave was an alternative manifestation of light, as was any other electromagnetic radiation of higher or lower momentum. A wave-particle duality was proposed whereby the same amount of momentum could be transported by a wave at one time and a particle at another time.
It was argued that the wave aspect of the photon could be confirmed by one set of experiments arranged to detect a wave, while its particle aspect could be demonstrated by other experiments set up for detecting particles. The distribution of tracks was felt to an inherent random probability, characteristic of the uniqueness or quantum phenomena, with no particular function except perhaps to show that the universe was not deterministic. It was not regarded as a dual system directed to harvesting both a large number of legitimate tracks travelling together and functioning as one beam and also a small number of deviant tracks, in the interest of economically giving the photon ability to performance of two necessary but quite different functions.
The Planck Wave
The notion that an electromagnetic wave and a particle were both equal to the task of taking light from place led to the concept of duality, whereby light can be a particle at one time and a wave at another. QST does not accept duality. It views a particle as a particle and a wave as a wave. The vastly different sizes of the photon and the wave suggest they have different functions. For a photon or electron travelling from place to place, I assume the wave has a higher energy and momentum than the particle itself, which amounts to the sum of increments needed to exceed the Planck constant. But although the wave energy is higher, consistent with its scale compared with that of the photon, it does no work and disappears when the photon is absorbed by an elelctron.
When a track deviatioin occurs, a new wave is formed to accompany the particle along a new track when the increments exceed the Planck constant. The new direction is at the angle the wave momentum vector is pointing to when the limit is reached. A particle remains a particle and a wave remains a wave. A difference of trillions of orders of magnitude between the size of the wave and the size of individual quantum means that the quanta and the gaps between appear to the wave as a smooth continuous space. Giving rise perhaps to the perception that space and time are continuous.
In quantized spacetime the Planck constant is involved continuously with the electromagnetic wave in deciding path deflection. So, it is appropriate to refer to this instance of the electromagnetic wave as a Planck wave, particularly since it operates in a quantum environment based on the Planck length and the Planck time.
A photon goes from place to place in a series of small, unobservable random deviations about the straight line it should be following, as long as the sum of the deviations do not reach the Planck constant. The line is defined by the axis of an electromagnetic wave that is real and observable. The wavelength of this wave is very much longer than the diameter of each quantum. It is probably of the order of the average distance a photon travels before a deviation to a new track occurs. That is, it is likely be long enough for a particle to be capable of traveling one wavelength before it takes a new path.
This average wavelength is suggested by the calculation of the Planck wave. We find its length to be the Planck constant times the speed of light divided by the momentum of the photon. As the Planck constant and the speed of light are both constant, the length of the Planck wave decreases as the photon energy increases. In the visible spectrum, the decrease is observed as the light we perceive goes from red, through orange, yellow, green, blue, and indigo to violet. The wavelength of a photon that excites a yellow color in our vision is 527x10-9 m. Compared to the diameter of the spacetime quantum, which is 1.616 x 10-35 meter, the Planck wavelength is very large. A photon experiencing one wavelength of yellow light passes through more than 3 x 1028 spacetime quanta, generating a corresponding number of negative and positive increments of momentum for summation and test against the Planck constant. As the particle and the wave are moving at the same speed it is only the phase of the wave that is changing with respect to the particle.
Much shorter Planck waves are generated for x-ray and gamma ray photons. This is required by the momentum-wavelength relationship. As the photon momentum increases the increments of momentum become larger, requiring fewer increments to reach the critical sum for photon change to a new track. Therefore, the correction system can use a shorter Planck wavelength and still accurately determine when the critical momentum for a new track is reached.
The Planck wave traveling with a particle provides an efficient transfer process that overcomes the randomness of the quantum matrix to a sufficient degree that positive outcomes for various photon interactions with neural networks controlling organism responses can be achieved with a reasonable degree of probability and reproducibility while leaving sufficient randomness to provide for the random mutations necessary to sustain a biological evolution producing higher organisms increasingly hardened against random environmental effects.
12/22/2022