Quantization and Some Problems with It
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Quantization and Some Problems with It |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Milos Abadzic |
| Keywords | plank, relativity, quantum |
| Published | 2009 |
| No. of pages | 13 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
In the article "One Step Back, Two Steps Forward", presented at this conference, is a point out to the need for re-examination of attitudes, which is base of modern physics. Since the theory of relativity and quantum physics are the foundations of modern physics to review applies to them. One of the assumptions of both of these theories has been experimentally obtained data on the behavior of radiation energy of black body that has established Planck in 1900 year. According to them the value of radiation's energy is equal to the product of a constant and frequency, which belongs to a series of natural numbers. This constant is called Planck constant h. It represents a fact that then, and even to this day, is not got the physical background and explanation. This is not bothered that its value has build into the explanation of behavior of many physical quantities, and that the process of quantization expand on the more physical and nonphysical magnitudes. Indisputable that the Planck constant has great significance in physical processes, but the question of whether so uni-versal as presents, and whether there are some limitations of its implementation. The analysis that I made show that such restrictions exist, which puts in doubt the validity of some relevant views in the modern physics. In this paper, I turn attention to some of these. Thereby it is based on the assumption that the process of quantization, no matter how broadly we understand it, should be linked to the most elemental particles that can meet in nature, or that the entire ana-lysis should be place on the so-called subelemental level (SEL).
Overview
Abadžić presented this paper at the 16th Natural Philosophy Alliance conference in 2009 as a companion to his "One Step Back, Two Steps Forward". It is an application of the "Natural Model of Nature" (NMN model) set out in his 2007 Serbian-language book Razmišljanja o prirodi Prirode to a single question: what, physically, is being quantized when physics quantizes something?
His answer is restrictive. Quantization, he argues, is only legitimate when it applies to a magnitude that genuinely has a smallest possible value — and the only such magnitudes are those attaching to truly indivisible particles. Since no such particles have been identified at present, most of the quantization performed in modern physics is, in his phrase, "formal" and applied "no selectively". Planck's constant h in particular is treated as an absolute of nature although "it still hasn't the physical justified the appointment of an absolute constant". The bulk of the paper is an attempt to give h a mechanical interpretation, and in doing so to replace the photon with an oscillating subelemental particle he calls the elektrion. Two conclusions follow that put him squarely at odds with both quantum theory and relativity: the electron is not elementary, and the propagation speed of light is a transmission delay in a medium rather than a limiting speed for anything else.
The argument
The subelemental level
The NMN model posits three subelemental substances — two physical (electrical and material) and one nonphysical or mental — whose particles Abadžić calls collectively demos, individually elektrion, materion and menion. Each demo has a fixed mass, a fixed spherical diameter, and is "impossible split on small parts under any conditions". Mass and dimension are invariant of time and spatial coordinates, which he takes to exclude at a stroke mass–energy transformation, velocity-dependent mass m = f(v), and annihilation, which he characterises as a transformation of the type "something ↔ nothing".
Each substance forms a subelemental system (SES) that "evenly fills the space of whole cosmos"; the three systems interpenetrate. Electrical and material demos do not interact spontaneously with one another, but menions interact with both. The demos sit in a quasi-steady state, oscillating about equilibrium positions. Two laws govern them: a law of action at a distance in which force is proportional to the product of the masses and inversely as the square of the separation, needing "no mediators"; and a law of minimum potential energy for closed systems, which Abadžić says "with only minor corrections may also be calling the law of a system's inertia". The scheme is a discrete elastic aether in all but name, and it is worth noting that the paper adopts direct action at a distance at the subelemental level while rejecting it in the propagation of waves.
Waves as chain excitation
Disturbances cannot originate at the subelemental level — that level is stated to be two orders of magnitude more energetic than the nearest level above it — so all excitation arrives from above: impact by particles from other levels, bulk structures ploughing through the medium "similar to flow of some fluid around the mobile body", periodic fields, or secondary excitation by already-excited demos. An excited demo transfers momentum to its neighbours, converting kinetic to potential energy until Wk = 0 and Wp is maximal, then returns, and the process propagates. Neighbouring demos move "asynchronous", always in opposing directions. The oscillation is harmonic, v(t) = vm cos ωt.
Abadžić stresses two departures from the standard picture: the carriers do not translate through space at c but oscillate about fixed equilibrium positions, and the carriers are subelemental magnitudes with definite characteristics rather than the photon, which he calls "physically unestablished".
What may and may not be quantized
The central objection to Wk = hf is that it is a discontinuous function which jumps at every increase of frequency by 1 Hz. Abadžić presses two questions: what happens between 0 and T within a single period, and what happens when the frequency is less than 1 Hz? Either there is no physical process in the interval 0–T, which he rejects because "in the nature constantly present some processes", or "the notion of quantum was here wrongly applied".
He therefore separates two cases. Genuinely quantized are the masses of the demos, their dimensions, the contact force between two touching demos, and the potential energy at a demo's surface — noting pointedly that the last two are the largest values available at that level, not the smallest. Not quantizable are processes, time, and space, all of which he holds to be continuous and monotone. Quantization of a process is at best "conditioned": it records selected magnitudes at control points and thereby "us away from the real events that take place between the control points". His analogy is a life summarised as a periodic series of weight and height measurements — statistically processable, but "it would not be life".
Reinterpreting h
On his model, h is not an indivisible quantum of action but a period-integrated quantity: the kinetic energy transferred per period of an electromagnetic wave, constant regardless of frequency. Since Wk = hf with f in reciprocal seconds is energy referred to one second, he argues that expression (2) is really a power rather than an energy. He proposes an instantaneous radiated power h(t) = hm cos(2πft), whose integral over a period returns the constant h, with peak value hm = (π/2)·hf rising linearly with frequency. Radiation energy over an arbitrary interval is then Wk(t) = hn with n = t/T a dimensionless count of periods — a formulation that removes the 1 Hz threshold by making the number of periods, not the frequency, the discrete variable.
Equating this to the kinetic energy of the oscillating charge, wk(t) = ½eev²(t) integrated over a period, gives hf = ¼eevm², and at 1 Hz h = ¼ee, whence the elektrion charge ee = 4h = 2.6504252 × 10−33 C and vm = f. Using the standard energy of an accelerated charge, W = ½·(μ0ee²/6πre)·vm², he extracts an elektrion radius re = 1.4135601 × 10−39 m.
Consequences
Four conclusions are drawn explicitly. Electromagnetic waves are carried by elektrions of the electrical SES, not by photons. The carriers oscillate about equilibrium, generating varying electrostatic and magnetic fields around their paths. At high frequencies the elektrion's oscillation speed "can be higher as the speed of light c". And the electron is composite, its charge comprising Ne = e/ee = 6.045 × 1013 elektrion charges — a claim he supports by observing that the standard model already assigns quarks fractional charges of ±1/3 and ±2/3, so e itself cannot be the quantum of charge.
Two further consequences are flagged. Because the medium offers some resistance to elektrion motion, oscillation speed and hence frequency must decline with distance travelled, which "must be taken into account when analyzing the appearance of red shift" from distant bodies — explicitly not as a replacement for the Doppler interpretation but as an additional cause. And the speed of light is redefined as "an amount of delay in transmission momentum from elektrion to elektrion, under conditions within the SEL, reduced to 1 [s]", determined by elektrion density, interaction energy, connection character and charge. So defined, it has "no direct connection with the movement of material structure" through space, and the relativistic role of c as a universal limit becomes, in his view, unwarranted.
Assessment
The paper's real strength is its opening critique, which is sharper than the machinery that follows. The observation that W = hf is a prescription whose discreteness lives in the frequency rather than in any identified physical grain, and that reading it as a quantum of energy leaves the sub-period interval unaccounted for, is a legitimate conceptual complaint about how quantization is taught even if it is not a difficulty for the formalism. The distinction between quantities that could in principle have a least value (masses, diameters, charges) and quantities that could not (time, space, "processes") is a useful discipline, and his warning that sampling a process at discrete control points substitutes a record for the process is well put. The reformulation Wk = hn with n a period count is the paper's most defensible technical move: counting periods rather than hertz does dissolve the artificial 1 Hz threshold he objects to.
Against that, the derivations do not hold up. Equation (14), h = ¼ee, equates a quantity in joule-seconds to one in coulombs; the numerical result ee = 4h = 2.65 × 10−33 C is therefore not a charge derived from physics but a number obtained by discarding units. The same defect propagates into vm = f (a velocity set equal to a frequency), into re, and into the electron composition number 6.045 × 1013, which inherits it entirely. The kinetic-energy expression wk = ½eev² likewise substitutes charge for mass in the standard formula without justification. These are not incidental slips: every quantitative result in sections 4.1 and 4.2 rests on them, so the "clear physical characteristics" claimed for the elektrion are not established.
The empirical difficulties are equally direct. A carrier that may move faster than c at high frequency, in a medium filling the cosmos, is not obviously compatible with the frequency-independence of light speed, which is constrained by gamma-ray burst timing across cosmological distances to parts in 1017 or better across many decades of photon energy. The proposed frictional loss mechanism for redshift is a form of tired light, and inherits that model's standard problems: energy lost in transit by scattering off medium particles would blur distant images, and a purely energy-losing mechanism does not reproduce the (1+z) stretching of Type Ia supernova light curves, which is a timing rather than an energy effect. Abadžić does not address either. Nor does the elektrion model engage the specific evidence for electron elementarity — the agreement of the anomalous magnetic moment with QED to twelve figures, and the absence of form-factor structure in high-energy scattering, which bounds any electron radius far below the composite structure a 6 × 1013-constituent object would imply.
Finally, the English of the published text is difficult in places — some sentences are repeated verbatim three times in the introduction, and figure 1 is referred to for a relation the text does not otherwise establish. Readers should treat the paper as a statement of a programme rather than a completed derivation. The programme itself — a discrete, mechanically explicit medium underlying both quantum discreteness and light propagation — is a recognisable and respectable dissident position, but this paper does not yet supply the quantitative support it claims.