A New Model of the Electron that Unifies Classic Physics with Quantum Mechanics
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | A New Model of the Electron that Unifies Classic Physics with Quantum Mechanics |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | John R Warfield |
| Keywords | electron |
| Published | 2009 |
| No. of pages | 10 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
The objective of the Article is to postulate that the physical shape of a free electron's magnetic field is not that of a dipole structure. In addition, this article will demonstrate a new model of the electron based upon an electron current within a metal conductor, what's more how this new model can be incorporated into quantum nature of matter and energy.
Overview
Warfield's paper is a qualitative, entirely non-mathematical model of the electron. Its central claim is that the free electron's magnetic field is not a dipole field at all but a circular (circumferential) magnetic field, wrapped around a central spherical radiating electric field, with the plane of the magnetic ring "oriented perpendicular with respect to its motion through the Ether." There is, on this view, no particle: "the fields are the electron", just as electromagnetic radiation consists of nothing but fields. The model is developed in an explicitly aether-based framework carried over from the author's earlier Natural Philosophy Alliance papers, including one that treated gravitation as inflowing space with an inflow velocity at the Earth's surface of 11.2 km/sec.
The route to the claim is by analogy with a current-carrying wire. Warfield first argues that a permanent magnet's domains are not arrays of aligned electron dipoles but stacks of circular, room-temperature superconducting electron currents — so that the magnetic fields of a solenoid, of the Earth's core, and of a permanent magnet are all produced by "the exact same process". With the dipole picture of magnetism thus dispensed with, the electron dipole is dispensed with too, and the electron's own field is read off from the geometry of the field around a straight wire: since the circular field around a wire is "the summation of the magnetic field from each electron of that current", each electron must itself carry a circular magnetic field whose plane is perpendicular to its motion. He then argues that this field-only electron reproduces the qualitative content of quantum mechanics — probability clouds, quantised transitions, orbital shapes — without wave functions, and closes by claiming to explain why a moving electron is deflected sideways in a uniform magnetic field while a bar magnet is not.
The argument
Sections 1 and 2: magnetism without electron dipoles
Section 1 recites the textbook account: a current in a straight wire produces a circular field around and within it; wound into a solenoid this becomes a dipole field; and the Earth's field is attributed to large circulating currents in the molten outer core, so that "the Earth's magnetic field and the magnetic field of a solenoid electromagnet are produced by the exact same process."
Section 2 contrasts this with the standard account of permanent magnetism — unpaired outer-shell electrons acting as small dipoles, aligned within magnetic domains — and proposes an alternative: "the magnetic domains are actually stacks of parallel circular superconducting electron currents, to some extent analogous to a solenoid electromagnet." Outer-shell unpaired electrons traverse "from atom to atom in a circular manner", and the resulting current loops are stacked "just as multiple permanent ring magnets will stack one on top of the other". Because no energy is supplied and no heat is produced, Warfield concludes the currents "must necessarily be self sustaining, therefore superconducting at room temperature" — a superconductivity that, he stipulates, neither expels the internal field (no Meissner effect) nor involves Cooper pairs.
The evidence offered is pictorial: an electron-holography image of a Permalloy from Tonomura's The Quantum World Unveiled by Electron Waves (p. 77) showing "multiple circular shaped magnetic fields surrounding a central hub", compared with textbook figures of the field around a straight wire, a current loop, a bar magnet and a solenoid. The stated logical basis is threefold: a longitudinal cross-section of a solenoid, imagined end-on, looks like the Permalloy image; both conductors and permanent magnets have unpaired outer-shell electrons; and domains must be either aligned dipoles or circular currents, "in essence these alternatives are the only two possibilities."
Section 3: the field structure of the electron
Section 3 sets out the ontology. Electromagnetic radiation is a wave of the Ether travelling through itself. An electron is "a reorganization of the electric and magnetic fields of EMR": linear momentum at c is converted to angular momentum when the wave "curls and spins upon itself", the transformation occurring only for a precise quantum of energy — he gives 0.511 MeV. Protons, positrons and quarks are formed the same way. Matter is thus "ultimately a product of the Ether", and what is usually called empty space is "by far the most fundamental 'stuff' of the Universe".
Three premises then generate the geometry. First, standard electrodynamics: an electron at rest relative to the observer has only an electric field, while a moving one also has a magnetic field, growing with velocity "until they become equal at the speed of light". Second, the aether substitution: replace "relative to the observer" with "relative to the Ether", the Ether being the inflowing space at the Earth's surface. Third — "and this is new" — the plane of the circular magnetic field is perpendicular to the electron's direction of motion through the Ether. A fourth clause modifies the picture again: the electron at rest in the Ether retains a "primary magnetic field", which is "perceived by physicists as the electron's magnetic moment, even though not analogous to a spinning gyroscope"; motion increases and reorients it.
The wire argument follows. In a conductor with no current, electrons and protons share the same velocity through the inflowing Ether, so their electric fields cancel and their magnetic fields (including opposite spins) cancel. With a current, the conduction electrons acquire a relative velocity and a common direction, the magnetic cancellation fails, and the residual overall field is due to the current alone. Since that field is the sum of the individual electrons' fields, and since the summed field is circumferential about the wire, each electron's field must be a ring perpendicular to its motion.
Section 4: recovering the quantum picture
Warfield converts the Bohr atom into something "analogous to the electron cloud model of QM" by asserting that a fields-only electron has no point location and no definite orbital path, so only probabilities of position and of orbital velocity can be measured; time-integrated, the orbiting field is a cloud around the nucleus. Atoms exist at "stable equilibrium points" of the complex interacting fields of their protons and electrons; other configurations are unstable and decay to a new equilibrium; different elements are different equilibria, some producing "odd configurations, such as a donut or a bar bell, yet again just like QM". De Broglie wavelengths are said to be "a part of the stable state of equilibrium". Nuclear physics is treated the same way, with the strong force added to the list of interacting fields, and radioactive decay described as a rare excursion of the field configuration into an unstable form.
Section 5: the Lorentz force asymmetry
The closing section returns to the opening observation. Warfield's rule is: when the plane of an electron's circular magnetic field is perpendicular to a uniform external field the two do not interact and there is no force; when it is parallel, they interact and produce a sideways Lorentz force. Hence an electron at rest, or moving parallel to the field, feels nothing; an electron moving at right angles feels a sideways force whose direction depends on "the spin of the electron's circular magnetic field [up or down]", giving "two potential opposite sideways Lorentz's forces". A permanent magnet or solenoid, by contrast, presents whole fixed domains to the external field, and so experiences torque but "no force producing linear motion". The difference in behaviour is offered as proof that the electron's field is not a dipole field.
Assessment
What is attractive. The paper is admirably explicit about its ontology: fields are primary, the particle is a perception created when fields interact with a detector "at a specific location". That is a coherent and long-standing dissident position, and Warfield states it more plainly than most. The demand for a visualisable mechanism behind "spin" — a quantum attribute textbooks concede "cannot be visualized" — is a legitimate one, and his repeated observation that he "can find no actual experimental evidence that these opposite spinning electrons consist of a revolving particle" is fair: the electron's magnetic moment is not evidence of a spinning ball, and standard physics agrees. The unification of solenoid, planetary-core and permanent-magnet fields under one mechanism is an appealing economy, and the section 4 sketch does at least identify the right things to explain (probability distributions, orbital shapes, discrete transitions).
A load-bearing error in the opening observation. The paper's whole motivation is a claimed "dichotomy": that a free electron crossing a uniform magnetic field is deflected "either + 90 or else -90 degrees", and that the direction depends on the electron's spin state. This is not what happens. The Lorentz force on a charge, F = qv×B, is fixed by the sign of the charge and the directions of v and B — all electrons with the same velocity in the same field curve the same way, which is why a cathode-ray tube produces one spot rather than two and why a mass spectrometer or cyclotron works at all. Spin plays no part in it. Since the "two forms of the electron, and so two kinds of dipole fields" that Warfield sets out to refute are inferred from this non-existent dichotomy, the target of the refutation is one that standard theory does not hold.
The comparison does not discriminate between the models. Warfield contrasts a charge (deflected) with a bar magnet (not deflected) and concludes the electron cannot be a dipole. But standard electrodynamics predicts exactly this pair of outcomes and has done since the nineteenth century: a charge in a uniform field feels qv×B; a magnetic dipole in a uniform field feels only a torque, because the force on a dipole is ∇(m·B), which vanishes when B is uniform. The electron's own magnetic moment likewise produces no force in a uniform field — which is precisely why the Stern–Gerlach experiment requires an inhomogeneous field, and why in that inhomogeneous field a beam of neutral silver atoms does split in two. So the observation Warfield presents as fatal to the dipole electron is a standard consequence of it, and the experiment that actually probes the question gives the two-valued result his own account cannot produce (his splitting is attributed to the Lorentz force, which is charge-driven and unsplit).
Similarly, the claim flagged as "and this is new" — that the plane of a moving electron's magnetic field is perpendicular to its motion — is the Biot–Savart field of a point charge, B ∝ qv×r̂/r2, in which the field lines are circles about the velocity axis. That is textbook electrodynamics, correctly stated, but it is not new; and it is the reason the summed field around a wire is circumferential, so the "derivation" of the electron's field shape from the wire's field shape is a restatement of what standard theory already supplies rather than an independent result. The related statement that the electric and magnetic fields "become equal at the speed of light" is right in the Gaussian sense that |cB|/|E| = v/c → 1, and is a fair paraphrase.
Room-temperature superconducting domains. This is the paper's boldest empirical commitment and it is the most exposed. Ferromagnets are ordinary resistive conductors: iron has a measurable, quite unremarkable electrical resistivity, and no persistent current has ever been detected in a magnetic domain. Warfield anticipates the objection only by stipulating away the two defining signatures of superconductivity — the Meissner effect and Cooper pairing — leaving a "superconductivity" with no independent test. More decisively, the mechanism is not available at all in the large class of magnetic insulators: yttrium iron garnet, magnetite, the ferrites used in transformer cores and EuO are strongly magnetic yet have no mobile electrons to circulate. Any theory that derives magnetisation from circulating conduction electrons has to account for these, and the paper does not mention them. The disjunctive argument that aligned dipoles and circular currents are "the only two possibilities" is asserted rather than established, and in any case the standard account already unifies the two: a magnetic moment is an amperian current loop, so Warfield's alternative is closer to the received view than he presents it as being.
Other difficulties. Two quantitative facts about the electron go unaddressed and are hard to reconcile with a purely orbital-current picture: the g-factor of the electron is close to 2, not the 1 that a classical circulating charge gives, and the anomalous moment is measured and calculated in agreement to twelve significant figures — the most precise agreement in physics, and one that any replacement model has to match. The neutron carries a magnetic moment while having zero net charge, which a "field of a moving charge" account cannot generate. The paper is also internally inconsistent about the rest electron: premise 3 states that an electron at rest with the Ether "consists of only a spherical electric field", and premise 4 immediately amends this to include a primary magnetic field at rest, without withdrawing premise 3 or explaining what sustains a magnetic field with no motion in a model where the magnetic field is produced by motion. No equation appears anywhere in the paper, so none of the claims — the field geometry, the equilibrium points, the quantum transitions — is quantitative enough to be checked against a measurement, and the ether-inflow value of 11.2 km/sec is imported from an earlier paper rather than used here. Finally, the dismissal of relativity as leading to "irrational concepts, such as the twin paradox problem as well as the quandary of simultaneity" is asserted in a sentence, without engagement with the experiments — muon lifetimes, Hafele–Keating, GPS clock corrections — that the theory was built to describe.
Judged on its own terms the paper is a picture rather than a theory: it is consistent as a picture, and its motivating dissatisfaction with unvisualisable spin is genuine, but the observation it is built on misdescribes what electrons do in a magnetic field, and its magnetic mechanism is contradicted by ordinary magnetic insulators.