TUTORIAL NOTE 11
Welcome to the Second 'Semester' of Ten Tutorial Notes, which teach the mathematical basis of Aether Science theory.
A MYSTERY OF PARTICLE PHYSICS?
© Harold Aspden, 1999
To introduce this second set of Tutorial notes, I will invite you to consider a puzzling problem that drew my attention only in October, 1998 when I was considering revising and expanding these Internet web pages.
I have in my possession a book entitled The Nature of Physics, by Peter J Brancazio. The book, published in New York by MacMillan Publishing Co. Inc., dates from 1975. Now I pride myself on having discovered the secret of quantum gravitation as will have been seen from Tutorial No. 6. Key to understanding the nature of gravitation is the step of unification of the 'field' theory linking electrodynamics and the inertial properties of mass, taken together with the 'graviton'.
My theory of gravitation dates from the late 1950s period so far as that field unification step is concerned and from about 1964 so far as the 'graviton' quantum is concerned. You will have seen that the graviton, or g-particle, was shown in Tutorial No. 6 to have 5063 times the mass of the electron, a rest-mass energy of 2.587 GeV.
Now I bought that book by Brancazio some 12 or so years after publishing the second edition of my book The Theory of Gravitation in 1966 and I bought it because it was the first student textbook that I had seen to make reference to the 'graviton'. This is what it said on page 695 about the graviton:
"When the known particles of physics are arranged in order of increasing mass, they are found to fall neatly into four groups, or 'families'. At the bottom of the list we find two massless bosons. One of them is the familiar photon. The second is a hypothetical particle, the graviton, which has never been observed. Its existence has been postulated on the assumption that gravitational fields are quantized. The graviton is the quantum that transmits the gravitational force. Because of the extreme weakness of the gravitational interaction, the graviton should be considerably more difficult to detect than even the neutrino. At the present time there is no experimental evidence that gravitons exist, but at the same time their existence cannot be ruled out."
This can be read in two ways, either by accepting what is said, recognizing it as an authoritative statement, and not being too discerning about its implications, or by being somewhat critical.
First of all you are introduced to the 'familiar photon' as if you know all about it as being something you can 'see'. Yet what you see is the effect of a photon in producing waves in the aether. On pages 145-146 Brancazio explains how Isaac Newton accepted that the aether is 'an invisible, weightless, and highly rarified substance that pervades all space' but that 'around the beginning of the twentieth century, a number of experiments were performed that cast serious doubt as to the existence of the aether'. So the 'familiar photon' is seen but it is not a manifestation of an aether phenomenon. It has no mass but it has energy, so one wonders what has happened to that formula E=Mc2, which says that energy has mass.
Are you puzzled? Indeed you should be!
Surely you must entertain the suspicion that the photon, the graviton and, indeed, the neutrino, are phenomena rooted in the fabric of the aether, whatever those experiments might imply. So let us take stock. In that quoted statement Brancazio tells you that 'the photon is the quantum that transmits the electromagnetic force'. To my way of thinking it is the movement of electric charge causing oscillations or waves that disturb the aether and ripple along until they are intercepted by matter, before they assert the force which we say is 'electromagnetic'. Take away the aether and you are left mentally stranded in having to say that the photon is an energy quantum which travels at the speed of light but which has no mass. It has no rest mass according to Einstein's theory, because otherwise, since mass escalates by a factor of infinity when travelling at the speed of light, according to the relativistic formula, its energy would be infinite and its mass would become infinite. Zero times infinity is, it seems, finite, but .... well, I for one say that physics has taken leave of common sense if what we are told about this in textbooks of physics has to be accepted in order for you to pass your academic examinations.
Better by far to say that the aether has properties which are elusive and which are part of a jig saw that we call 'physics' and are striving to piece together stage by stage, only to complete the work when that theory of quantum gravity and its interplay with the world of particle physics has emerged in its full glory.
So what about that 'graviton'? Well, some 35 years ago, I came to the conclusion that the graviton had a mass that was some 5063 times that of the electron. That was indicated as being the value that would allow G, the constant of gravitation, to be explained in terms of the known charge/mass ratio of the electron. Obviously, there would be no point in trying to publish such a result if that 'graviton' had, using Brancazio's words, 'never been observed'. Note that the photon, as such, has in that sense never been observed either. All we 'observe' is an electromagnetic wave frequency and an energy transition where the wave is created or absorbed. I would not have considered publishing the graviton theory that features in my 1966 book The Theory of Gravitation unless I could point to experimental evidence that in its turn pointed, at least indirectly, to the real existence of that graviton. One needs two or more clues which combine to tell you it exists, just as a frequency and an energy transition tell you that the photon exists.
So what was my evidence? You can track it from that 1966 book to find that it has the form tabulated in Tutorial No. 6, namely:
| Hadron Energy Product of Graviton Decay |
|---|
| No. of particles | Energy in electron units |
|---|
| gravitons | muons | 1843 | leptons (L) | gravitons (G) | hadrons (G-L) |
| 1 | 2 | 0 | 412+0 | 5064 | 2(2326) |
| 1 | 2 | 2 | 412+3686 | 5064 | 966 |
| 1 | 4 | 2 | 824+3686 | 5062 | 2(276) |
| 2 | 2 | 2 | 412+7372 | 2(5063) | 2342 |
| 2 | 4 | 4 | 824+7372 | 2(5064) | 2(966) |
This table presents data aimed at showing that if a graviton having a mass 5063 times the electron does exist then it might get involved in high energy particle events and disclose its energy quantum in the energy balance applicable as spin-off particles are created.
My theory had already before 1966 told me that the aether contained a particle form that could be called a 'sub-electron' in that its intrinsic energy quantum was about 0.0816 of the electron rest mass energy. This meant that its physical form was much greater than that of the electron, its radius being 12.26 times larger and its volume being some 1843 times larger. It made sense to presume that in high energy particle reactions an energy package of 1843 electron mass units might be squeezed into the volume of space taken up by those sub-electron aether particle forms. This had appeal owing to 1843 being larger but of the same order as the 1836 factor of the proton-electron mass ratio.
More than this, however, when the energy density of that aethereal sub-electron was calculated it was found to be such that a unit cubic cell of the aether (one sub-electron per cell) would, with the same energy density, amount to the rest mass energy of a pair of mu-mesons or muons, that being some 412 or so times the rest mass-energy of a single electron. However, even more on this theme, there emerged the equation (5.19) on page 78 of the 1966 edition of my book The Theory of Gravitation, which was:
[E - 2mμc2]/[mec2 - mc2] = 5063
where mc2 here signifies the energy of that sub-electron form. Here E signifies the mass-energy of the graviton and mμ is the mass of the muon.
I am saying, therefore, that, back in that 1966 period, I had a theory which gave a precise value of G in terms of the electron charge-mass ratio in full accord with its measured value and that was without reliance on an empirical determination of the graviton mass as being 5063 electron mass units. However, contrary to the Brancazio assertion, I was able to show that the high energy particle data, as pertaining to the Σ baryons, did provide experimental evidence pointing to the real existence of those gravitons. That is what we see from the above table.
You will find on inspection of that data that I sought only to get a primary energy balance without concern for conservation of charge parity. I just could not be so specific as to say exactly how the particle activity was occurring and my object was to get support for that 5063 quantum. To me, four graviton decays, all pointing to the graviton energy was quite impressive in supporting my theory of gravitation. Note that the second and fifth decays listed in the table amount to much the same process and have the same result.
I cannot recall the data source used as my base reference for the masses of the hadrons indicated in the table. I see however that Brancazio in his 1975 book presents Table 21-1 as a summary of 'Properties of known sub-nuclear particles (1959)' and this includes three Σ baryons, the negative, neutral and positive forms having masses 2343, 2338 and 2328, respectively, in electron units. Now, of course, data for the precise mass values of such particles often changes a little as experiments improve over time and I will not therefore try to be too precise in reviewing the energy balance indicated by the data in the table. Certainly the third listed item, which points to the charged pion mass, has altered in value from its 276 level of earlier days and come down to 273. The 966 entry which identifies the charged kaon has withstood the test of time. This leaves the Σ particles and here, the step which has motivated me to write this Tutorial Note, follows my recent reaction to reading of Brancazio's remarks on his pages 698-699. Here he mentions anomalies in the 'baryon conservation principle' as applied to particle reactions involving kaons and Σ particles.
He explains how, typically, the high energy collision of a negative pion and a proton can produce a negative sigma particle plus a positive kaon, in accord with the accepted conservation principle, but that the principle does not account for all 'forbidden' reactions, because the emergence of a positive Σ particle and a negative kaon is never seen from such pion-proton collisions. Here then is the 'Mystery' introduced by the title of this Tutorial Note. What might account for that anomaly in producing a negative Σ but not a positive Σ?
This caused me to inspect the above table in my book. It tells me that the Σ particle produced by one graviton decay mode can have a mass that is 2326 times the electron mass and that a different graviton decay mode produces a sigma particle that is 2343 times the electron mass. The question then is whether I can interpret something from this in terms of the polarity of the resulting Σ particles produced by the different reactions, something which might explain that conservation anomaly noted by Brancazio.
Let us suppose that the Σ particle, unlike the kaon, is always produced by a particle reaction that triggers graviton decay. The kaon, incidentally, can be shown to be produced, as is the proton, by the activity of muons, given a high energy source seeking to place the energy released. See my paper 'Conservative hadron interactions exemplified by the creation of the kaon', [1989d] referenced elsewhere in these web pages. The kaon can have positive and negative forms of equal rest-mass energy.
Now, looking at the fourth listed graviton decay in the table presented above, we see that two gravitons shed much of their energy into forming the 1843 forms, which means that, for each 1843 unit, they absorb an aetherial sub-electron of charge -e. The muon pairs produced involve a net charge that is neutral overall and so we have two gravitons each of charge +e decaying by merger with four units of charge -e to leave an energy quantum absorbed by a residual charge of -2e, which implies the production of an electron and a negative sigma particle. Thus we expect that the negative sigma particle will have a mass-energy that is close to being 2342 times that of the electron.
As to the first graviton decay listed in the table, here a single graviton of charge +e, is deployed to shed a muon pair (electrically neutral overall) and leave the residual energy to produce an electron (-e) and then split in forming two positive sigma particles, each having a mass-energy that is close to being 2326 times that of an electron.
This suggests that the high energy collision of pions and protons can trigger graviton decay and lead to the emergence of either positive or negative sigma particles depending on whether the decay involved one or two gravitons. However, according to Brancazio, at least at the time when he wrote his 1975 book, the pion-proton reaction producing the negative kaon cum positive sigma particle has never been seen, so one could infer that the single graviton decay does not occur in such circumstances. However, here we must take note that the 1843 factor is not present, whereas it is present in the case where the negative sigma particle is produced. That 1843 factor really means that there is a target the size of that sub-electron form for the energy action stimulating particle formation to take root. That same size of target is involved when muons bombard that 'sub-electron' aether particle to create the proton, as I describe in Tutorial No. 9, so my proposal here is quite feasible. Possibly this explains why the positive Σ particle is not produced but the negative Σ particle is produced in the pion-proton high energy collisions.
The question then is whether I am justified in saying that the gravitons involved have positive charge polarity. In fact, gravitons come in equal numbers in both charge polarities, but if the graviton decay occurs essentially because the positive graviton engages that sub-electron aether particle, which is of negative polarity, it is more likely to be absorbed into a decay mode, whereas a positive graviton would be rejected or repelled. I tend therefore to see the process as always involving positively charged gravitons and I see the single graviton decay as being one that is rare owing to the target encounter then being a normal electron having 1/1843 of the volume of that sub-electron.
At this stage, if you, the reader, are already well informed on the subject of high energy particle physics, you will suspect that I have not heard of what has come to be termed 'strangeness'. On this subject I can say that it would be strange indeed for a physicist to write a textbook for students in which it is admitted that something is amiss with the principles and laws of physics offered for study. That problem of the predicted but unobserved particle reactions was presented by Brancazio only to introduce the reader to 'strangeness'.
Brancazio on his page 699 tells us that the discovery in 1953 of a new conservation principle called 'strangeness' was made independently by American physicist Murray Gell-Mann and Kazuhiko Nishijima of Japan. A strangeness number 0, 1, -1 or -2 has to be assigned to relevant particles so that the scheme of reactions satisfies the rules devised by physicists. Further on in the Brancazio text we read:
"The principle of strangeness does not have the universallity of the other conservation principles, however, for there is a whole group of reactions in which strangeness is not conserved."
So, as I see it, the principle of devising new principles to explain anything and everything is like digging oneself into a hole that gets deeper and deeper, as one looks for easy solutions. The simple fact has to be that it is all a question of probability as to whether some particle reactions are more prevalent than others, plus the fact that the charges in the aether may or may not get into the act and so account for what has been termed 'strangeness'. I would rather interpret strangeness as an aether involvement which I can picture in my mind's eye than as just pure 'strangeness', a word which could embrace anything include the participation of ghosts!
The hole that particle physicists then dug themselves into went deeper than the level of strangeness. It made a quantum leap into the realm of ingenuity and fiction by introducing the idea of fractional charge, such as e/3 or 2e/3, where e is the electron charge. The electron charge stands in its own right as a universal constant at the bedrock of the real physical world, but, just as Einstein contrived to interfere with the notion of time, so there emerged in particle physics the notion of the so-called 'quark'.
This subject brings me back to the proton and its creation, a topic dealt with in Tutorial No. 9, but one I shall deal with further as we proceed. In the meantime, however, I just wish to say that the quark picture can be replaced by a pattern of unitary charges, based on interpreting 'strangeness' as the interplay of a unit e of charge involving the aether. If you are interested in that then read Energy Science Essay No. 15, which is entitled 'The Chain-Structure of the Nucleus', a paper which I published in 1974.
The message of this Tutorial Note is simply that if you choose to ignore the aether then you live in a world where you will have to seek enlightenment in 'strangeness' without ever understanding what causes gravity and how particles are created. If you are ready to advance your knowledge of aether theory, then read on in this second set of Tutorial Notes.
To progress to the next Tutorial press:
Tutorial No. 12
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