"The Question is: What is The Question?" J.A. Wheeler, The Daring Conservative

We need to distinguish several issues:

1. Is a virtual photon ZPF cutoff actually observed in the lab? - empirical question.
2. If yes, does that imply a new experimental effect of anisotropy in Lamb shift radiation as observed perhaps in angular correlation measurements on such radiation? - empirical question.
3.What is the value of the cutoff if it exists? - empirical question
4. If a virtual photon cutoff is a fact, is this evidence for non-commuting space-time? theoretical question
.....

On Jun 29, 2004, at 6:35 PM, carlos castro wrote:

Dear Tony. Gary and Jack :

Tony wrote :

Jack, when Mark Davidson said
"... There is no known way to apply a cuttoff
in the zero point spectrum and still have
perfect Lorentz invariance. ...",


This is NO problem at all . In1940 Snyder proved that you could have a noncommutative space time
without violating Lorentz invariance by introducing a Planck scale cuttoff.

Max Born in 1938 and Heisenberg already had similar ideas. The commutator is

[ X^mu , X^nu ] = L theta^{ mu nu } = not equal to zero .

L = Planck scale

Snyder set the tensor theta^{ \mu \nu }

to be just given by M^{ \mu \nu } = a generalized rotation .

Yang also proposed a noncommutative spacetime algebra related to
the de Sitter and Anti de Sitter algebras that has TWO scales :
an upper and lower scale , like the Planck scale and the Hubble radius =
ultraviolet/Infrared DUALITY.

URL for this?

Tanaka even showed the holographic connection of YANG's algebra .
See hep-th/0406166.

I recommend very strongly Tanaka's papers because you will see the two scales and de Sitter,
Anti de Sitter space and holography.

In my work on the Extended Relativity Theory in Clifford Spaces there is NO violation of Lorentz inavriance despite the existence of Planck scale as a cutoff.

In Nottale's work it is the same story.

You need to see the work by Nottale on vacuum fluctuations and his solution to the cosmological constant problem. His work precedes, by many years, the work by all these people in the web .
I told Beck in person) to look up Nottale's work. I don't know if he did.

URLS? Does Notalle solve the cosmological constant problem with macro-quantum vacuum coherence the way I do? Of course he did not know about dark energy before 1999.


I see a lot of papers in the web today based on the same
ideas of Nottale , but nobody, hardly anybody, gives Nottale the proper credit.
The same Stueckelberg story. As Tony said :

It is the big shot who says these things that counts and NOT those who said them first.

Best wishes

Carlos


On Jun 29, 2004, at 8:12 PM, Mark Davidson wrote:

Jack,

Yes, loop integrals as in Feynman integrals coming from Feynman diagrams with loops in them.

I would add to what I've said that if the cutoff were as low as 10^12Hz, ie. in the microwave region, then probably the Lamb shift will be much too small to agree with the exquisitely precise experiments that have been done.

Yes, and that is logically separate from the Lorentz invariance issue. Beck's result seems very strange, but I have not had time as yet to understand it.

With the best and latest up-to-date experiments and theory the Lamb shift data agrees with QED for a wide spectrum of atoms, ions, and isotope variations in nuclei according to Peter Mohr at NIST. I'm almost certain that imposing such a severe cutoff as 10^12 Hz would make the Lamb shift all but disappear. I put this question to Beck and Mackey and Beck responded that (I'm paraphrasing his response and abbreviating it considerably) the QED zero point field is not the real zero point field that was being measured in the Josephson experiment, but is rather a calculational artifice that isn't real and which requires a very high cutoff to agree with experiment. One of the main experimental pieces of evidence historically for the existence of the zero point field was in fact the Lamb shift though (a la Wentzel if I remember correctly), and so I don't find this argument compelling.

I certainly do not understand what Beck is allegedly saying! :-)

The Lamb shift is due entirely to the electromagnetic interaction, and so if there were other zero point energy terms from other fields with a negative sign they could cancel the electromagnetic contribution to the energy density without affecting the Lamb shift results.

Best wishes,

Mark

At 03:43 PM 6/29/2004, you wrote:

Thanks. I will be thinking about all this. By "loop integrals" you mean the virtual electron-positron loop "PV" absent in Hal Puthoff's "PV" gravity?

On Jun 29, 2004, at 3:29 PM, Mark Davidson wrote:

Jack,

As Tony pointed out, Pauli-Villars regularization can be applied to loop integrals which appear in QED. But I don't think the same approach works for the zero point field. Once one puts an energy cutoff in the zero point field, making its total energy per unit volume finite, then there is a preferred Lorentz frame of reference.
Only in this preferred frame will the zero point radiation be isotropic.

You mean there will be some anisotropy in the Lamb shift in hydrogen in a new kind of experiment? Now that would be interesting! Maybe some kind of angular correlation measurement in microwaves from hydrogen transtions where Lamb effect is detected would show it?

Apply a Lorentz boost to it and you end up with a distorted and non-isotropic distribution of radiation. I don't see how one avoids this conclusion by attenuating the zero point density function by a smooth function of energy or by any other means. If the energy per unit volume is finite the radiation density will change with Lorentz boosts and the resulting theory will not be Lorentz invariant. This will lead to experimental predictions. Charged particles will probably experience a viscous drag slowing down their relative velocity to the center of momentum of the radiation field, etc.

I should add there is one trivial exception to what I just said. That is when the cuttoff is at zero energy in which case the zero point field is totally eliminated and you just have a classical vacuum.

Well we do not want that. Also there is the issue of scale dependence.

Best wishes,

Mark

On Jun 29, 2004, at 9:26 PM, Tony Smith wrote:

Gary, I am not sure how
Jack's G* and strong short-range gravity and the SU(3) color force
all fit together, but here is my guess:

1- Jack's G* and the A. I. Arbab stuff seem to have a G that
varies as the universe ages, sort of somehow connected
with the large number hypothesis

That depends on other things like whether Lenny Susskind's hologram idea is correct?
Let R(t) be the dimensionless FRW scale factor. The Hubble horizon distance is then
LpR(t). If Lenny's idea is correct then

Lp*(t) = Lp^2/3(LpR(t))^1/3 = LpR(t)^1/3

The hologram entropy of the Universe is then

S/kB = 4piR(t)^2/4Lp*(t)^2 = piR(t)^4/3

and the thermodynamic arrow of time is explained by the expansion of the Universe.

However, the large scale structure of Universe is still given by Newton's G, which may increase only on small scales ~ 1 fermi.

My /\zpf field gives an effective G* >> Newton's G only on small scales because

(Newton's G)(stuff effective mass density)(1 + 3w(stuff)) ----> c^2/\zpf for ZPF (of all quantum fields)

In particular, if the bare electron is a Bohm hidden variable thin spherical shell of charge e of radius 10^-13 cm, spinning like a gyro with hbar/2, with a repulsive self-Casimir force then /\zpf ~ (10^-15 cm)^-2 dynamically stabilizes it as a micro-geon. Note that 10^-15 cm = 10^-17 meters ~ 100 Gev ~ mass of W boson.

2 - strong short-range gravity (in my model, and in some of
Jack's discussions) may not vary with the age of the universe,
but only becomes strong at short distances, as a near-field
phenomenon like near-field electromagnetism, which is well-known
and experimentally verified and useful and does NOT obey the
1/r^2 law that applies to far-field electromagnetic radiation

4 - the SU(3) color force, in my view, is something else again,
and involves SU(3) gluons - its short-range character is
due to how the SU(3) color force works, and is not directly
related to why the strong short-range gravity is short-range.

I like local gauge invariance to the max. All the dynamical fields are compensating fields of all symmetry groups both space-time and internal. Do the internal groups mean extra space dimensions? Can the conformal group in 4D explain the internal groups? etc. I don't know.

------------------------------

Since my model uses mostly 2 and not 1,
and since Arbab's astro-ph/9811422 seems to me to be about 1,
I don't have much to say about it.

As to Arbab's newer paper gr-qc/0406055, he says
"... we have found that for every bound system
(nucleus, atom, star, galaxy, the whole universe)
there is a characteristic Planck constant ...",
and I strongly feel that nuclei and atoms and planets
and stars and galaxies etc do NOT each have their
own different Planck constant, so I don't have any
further comment here on that paper.

Tony

I also sense intuitively that Arbab's stuff is not correct, but I have not studied it.


On Jun 29, 2004, at 10:50 PM, Gary S. Bekkum wrote:


http://www-spires.fnal.gov/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=ea+Salam,+Abdus

Abdus Salam's f-gravity paper:

http://library.ictp.trieste.it/DOCS/P/73/050.pdf


Gary S. Bekkum
garysbekkum@hotmail.com

On Jun 29, 2004, at 9:49 PM, carlos castro wrote:


...

The commissioned review of the "Extended Relativity Theory in Clifford spaces" was accepted in the IJMPA journal. Hereby I am attaching the revised PDF file after correcting it according to the referee.

For me the most important part of the paper is pages 11, 12, 13, 14 on superluminal propagation.
where we show ( the C-space boosts arguments are mine; the Stueckelberg stuff is Pavsic's )
why one can have superluminal propagation in this Extended Relativity Theory
without violations of causality, and other paradoxes.
...

You do not need to be an expert of any kind to read and understand this review. ...


At 03:01 PM 6/29/2004, you wrote:

On Jun 29, 2004, at 12:22 PM, Tony Smith wrote:

Jack, when Mark Davidson said
"... There is no known way to apply a cuttoff
in the zero point spectrum and still have
perfect Lorentz invariance. ...",

I am not sure that he is correct.
For example,
Lubos Motl said in an spr post at
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr/2001-06/msg0033286.html

But he also says he is an ET! ;-)

"... Abstract: cutoffs ...[can be]... Lorentz invariant
...
Take a Klein-Gordon theory.
The momenta in the loops are integrated in the Euclidean momentum
space up to the limit p_{euclidean}^2 <= Lambda^2.
Recall that p_{euclidean}^2 really corresponds to E^2 - p_{vector}^2
- i.e. how far you are from mass shell.
This condition is completely Lorentz symmetric.
Another topic are the gauge symmetries:
the regulators must be of specific kind to preserve these kinds
of symmetry - but they almost always preserve Lorentz symmetry. ...".
and
a web page at
http://mcelrath.org/Notes/PauliVillars
states "... PauliVillars regularization ...
also called "Covariant regularization" ... introduces an explicit
dependence on the cutoff while still being Lorentz invariant and
gauge invariant. ...".

Thanks I will study that. :-)

---------------------------------------------------

To me, the Beck and Mackey paper at
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0406504
has some very interesting statements:
"... the zero-point term has proved important in explaining
X-ray scattering in solids [4];
understanding of the Lamb shift ... in hydrogen [5, 6];
predicting the Casimir eect [7, 8];
understanding the origin of Van der Waals forces [7];
interpretation of the Aharonov-Bohm effect [9, 10];
explaining Compton scattering [5];
and
predicting the spectrum of noise in electrical circuits
[11, 12, 13, 14]. It is this latter effect that concerns us here.
...
We predict that the measured spectrum in Josephson
junction experiments must exhibit a cutoff at the critical
frequency nu_c. If not, the corresponding vacuum energy
density would exceed the currently measured dark energy
density of the universe.
...
The energy associated with the computed cutoff frequency nu_c
...[ about 10^12 Hz ]...
E_c = h nu_c = (7.00 ± 0.17) x 10^-3 eV ...
coincides
with current experimental estimates of neutrino masses. ...".


It seems to me that Beck and Mackey are saying that you can see
zpf in Josephson junction experiments, which have been done up to
about the frequency 6 x 10^11 Hz or about 4 x 10^-3 eV,
and
that the observed zpf corresponds to a dark energy density
of about 0.062 GeV/m^3
and
that if there is no change in the equation (i.e., no cut-off)
with increasing frequency then the zpf would exceed the
cosmologically observed dark energy (3.9 ± 0.4) GeV/m^3
corresponding to /\_DE = 0.73
and
the energy range where a change/cut-off is neccessary to
avoid DE exceeding about 4 GeV/m^3 is about 10^-2 eV
which is the energy range of neutrinos.

All this makes good sense to me in light of the statement
by Beck and Mackey
"... It is likely that the Josephson junction experiment only
measures the photonic part of the vacuum fluctuations,
since this experiment is purely based on electromagnetic
interaction. ...".

What is probably going on (in my opinion) is that you need
to have ALL the forces (gravity, color, weak, and QED) to get
cancellations that give a cosmological constant near zero
(instead of something like 10^120),
and
when you get energetic enough to introduce neutrinos,
you are effectively bringing in the weak force that is
felt by the neutrino
so that
you begin to change the equation (or introduce a cut-off)
at that energy
and
since
the cut-off is due to introduction of weak force effects
(and probably NOT a simple hard-line energy/frequency cut-off,
which could violate Lorentz symmetry)
it probably is a cut-off of the type cited by Lubos Motl
as preserving Lorentz symmetry.

As you go to higher and higher energies, you introduce
more and more forces, etc, and in the high-energy limit
(in my model in particular) the cosmological constant
terms all cancel out to zero.

The fact that we "see" a non-zero cosmological constant
in our universe may be related to the fact that our universe
has cooled down a lot and is in a QED regime in which its
characteristic zpf does not have a lot of components from
the other forces (this is something that I am thinking out
loud about, so it might not be right, but maybe it is).

Tony


On Jun 29, 2004, at 3:01 PM, Jack Sarfatti wrote:


On Jun 29, 2004, at 12:22 PM, Tony Smith wrote:

Jack, when Mark Davidson said
"... There is no known way to apply a cuttoff
in the zero point spectrum and still have
perfect Lorentz invariance. ...",

I am not sure that he is correct.
For example,
Lubos Motl said in an spr post at
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr/2001-06/msg0033286.html

But he also says he is an ET! ;-)

"... Abstract: cutoffs ...[can be]... Lorentz invariant
...
Take a Klein-Gordon theory.
The momenta in the loops are integrated in the Euclidean momentum
space up to the limit p_{euclidean}^2 <= Lambda^2.
Recall that p_{euclidean}^2 really corresponds to E^2 - p_{vector}^2
- i.e. how far you are from mass shell.
This condition is completely Lorentz symmetric.
Another topic are the gauge symmetries:
the regulators must be of specific kind to preserve these kinds
of symmetry - but they almost always preserve Lorentz symmetry. ...".
and
a web page at
http://mcelrath.org/Notes/PauliVillars
states "... PauliVillars regularization ...
also called "Covariant regularization" ... introduces an explicit
dependence on the cutoff while still being Lorentz invariant and
gauge invariant. ...".

Thanks I will study that. :-)

---------------------------------------------------

To me, the Beck and Mackey paper at
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0406504
has some very interesting statements:
"... the zero-point term has proved important in explaining
X-ray scattering in solids [4];
understanding of the Lamb shift ... in hydrogen [5, 6];
predicting the Casimir eect [7, 8];
understanding the origin of Van der Waals forces [7];
interpretation of the Aharonov-Bohm effect [9, 10];
explaining Compton scattering [5];
and
predicting the spectrum of noise in electrical circuits
[11, 12, 13, 14]. It is this latter effect that concerns us here.
...
We predict that the measured spectrum in Josephson
junction experiments must exhibit a cutoff at the critical
frequency nu_c. If not, the corresponding vacuum energy
density would exceed the currently measured dark energy
density of the universe.
...
The energy associated with the computed cutoff frequency nu_c
...[ about 10^12 Hz ]...
E_c = h nu_c = (7.00 ± 0.17) x 10^-3 eV ...
coincides
with current experimental estimates of neutrino masses. ...".


It seems to me that Beck and Mackey are saying that you can see
zpf in Josephson junction experiments, which have been done up to
about the frequency 6 x 10^11 Hz or about 4 x 10^-3 eV,
and
that the observed zpf corresponds to a dark energy density
of about 0.062 GeV/m^3
and
that if there is no change in the equation (i.e., no cut-off)
with increasing frequency then the zpf would exceed the
cosmologically observed dark energy (3.9 ± 0.4) GeV/m^3
corresponding to /\_DE = 0.73
and
the energy range where a change/cut-off is neccessary to
avoid DE exceeding about 4 GeV/m^3 is about 10^-2 eV
which is the energy range of neutrinos.

All this makes good sense to me in light of the statement
by Beck and Mackey
"... It is likely that the Josephson junction experiment only
measures the photonic part of the vacuum fluctuations,
since this experiment is purely based on electromagnetic
interaction. ...".

What is probably going on (in my opinion) is that you need
to have ALL the forces (gravity, color, weak, and QED) to get
cancellations that give a cosmological constant near zero
(instead of something like 10^120),
and
when you get energetic enough to introduce neutrinos,
you are effectively bringing in the weak force that is
felt by the neutrino
so that
you begin to change the equation (or introduce a cut-off)
at that energy
and
since
the cut-off is due to introduction of weak force effects
(and probably NOT a simple hard-line energy/frequency cut-off,
which could violate Lorentz symmetry)
it probably is a cut-off of the type cited by Lubos Motl
as preserving Lorentz symmetry.

As you go to higher and higher energies, you introduce
more and more forces, etc, and in the high-energy limit
(in my model in particular) the cosmological constant
terms all cancel out to zero.

The fact that we "see" a non-zero cosmological constant
in our universe may be related to the fact that our universe
has cooled down a lot and is in a QED regime in which its
characteristic zpf does not have a lot of components from
the other forces (this is something that I am thinking out
loud about, so it might not be right, but maybe it is).

Tony





On Jun 29, 2004, at 5:06 PM, Jack Sarfatti wrote:

2.7 meg document (from Ken Shoulders' EVO photos) with details posted at

http://qedcorp.com/destiny/GR17.doc

if you need a pdf let me know.

On Jun 29, 2004, at 4:53 PM, Jack Sarfatti wrote:

Corrected below

OK, in reworking my EVO collaboration with Ken Shoulders and preparing paper for Vigier V Paris Proceedings (Kluwer) and for GR 17 I included my Bohm hidden variable rotating thin charged spherical shell model of Vigier's spatially-extended electron for the "tight atomic states" (with Maric et-al in Beograd) "cold fusion" anomalous atomic energy release. Dynamical stability including the repulsive QED Casimir force + the centrifugal barrier in the rotating frame + Coulomb self-energy + strong gravitational effect of the exotic vacuum core of the electron gives apriori

/\zpf ~ (10^-15 cm)^-2

inside the charged thin spherical shell of total charge e of radius e^2/mc^2 = 10^-13 cm to stabilize the electron!

That is I APRIORI DERIVE the weak force scale (alpha)(e^2/mc^2) from a simple Bohm-Vigier HV model!

That was not my intent. It popped out in a surprise. I did not get it earlier because I did not include the repulsive QED Casimir force in spherical cavity explicitly in my toy model for the semi-classical electron a la Lorentz theory of the electron of 100 years ago that fits in with Bohm's pilot wave theory.