Think again

In an effort to prove or disprove any of my recent hypotheses, I began to think up experiments that could be performed for such a purpose. In my last Mison Space entry, "Barriers, shmarriers", I argued that particles, instead of actually tunneling into and through classically forbidden regions, they enter into Mison Space and go around said region by releasing energy.

One misconception that I had, which S.R.D. Rosa cleared up in his paper, "Student Understanding of Tunneling in Quantum Mechanics", is that particles lose energy during the tunneling process. In tunneling problems, the classically forbidden region is usually represented by a barrier whose height represents is energy, leading to the misconception that the particle wave amplitude is a measurement of its energy. What the amplitude actually represents, however, is the probability that the particle will be found at that particular location.

So, contrary to my previous argument, particles do not release energy as a means of entering Mison Space. On the otherhand, within the classically forbidden region the amplitude of the particle's wave function decreases exponetially, which means that the probability of it being found diminishes exceedingly fast the farther in one looks for it. The rapidly decaying wave function could still be evidence for the particle's escapade around the barrier.

To prove this, one would simply need to put a detector within the forbidden region to see if the particle can be found there. I found an article entitled "Detection of particles under a potential barrier". It is a theoretical paper in which the authors propose a 1- and 3-D model detector for finding particles within potential barriers. The detector is able to locate a particle without significantly disturbing its wave function (to do so, the time of encounter is left unknown). By stringing several together in a simulation, they were able to encounter particles at various locations within the barrier and found that their trajectories are straight line paths.

That may debunk my side-stepping hypothesis, but then again, the simulation is based on the creator's pre-conceptions of how particles behave as they enter into the forbidden region. At any rate, in trying to reconcile this finding with previous hypotheses, I have begun to consider space in a different light, but that will have to wait for a future post.

References

1. Rosa, S.R.D. Student Understanding of Quantum Mechanics. Proceedings of the Technical Session, 22 (2006) 47-52. Institute of Physics, Sri Lanka
2. Vilenkin, A. and Winitzki, S. Detection of particles under a potential barrier. Phys. Rev. D. 30, 8 (1994)

Barriers, shmarriers

Continuing the development of my light-as-a-fourth-dimension hypothesis, I know embark upon potential barriers and tunnelling.

For this, matter needs to be thought of as a potential wall more or less proportional to its viscocity. We can run through air like a hot knife through butter because air just moves out of the way. Our mass, viscocity, potential barrier, or whatever you want to call it, is much greater than that of air, so we move through it easily.

But now think about running through water. Or worse yet, honey or molasses. Much more difficult. They are more dense and have a higher viscosity (a greater potential).

Finally, try running into a brick wall or a barn door. Actually, don't. It hurts. Think of them as huge potential spikes. The cumulative energy of your body is not sufficienty high enough to pass over the potential spike, so you bounce off of it and are turned away.

Small, energetic particles, the subjects of quantum mechanics, are known to tunnel through matter. Classically, their energy is lower than the potential barrier and should be turned away. Quantumly*, however, on occasion, they pass through the barrier and wind up on the other side.

My claim is the following: Each object is seen as a potential barrier with a certain height and thickness. On either side of the barrier, the potential feel drops steeply to that of "empty" space. Depending on the size and thickness of the barrier, these small particles can sense the lower potential on the other side of the barrier. Its energy field feels out the a way around the barrier through the 4th dimension that light travels through. In effect, the particle is able spend its energy to create a small wormhole-like link to equipotential field on the other side of the barrier, then passes through it.

I support this claim by first re-iterating my previous claim (see 4D Glasses) that electrons orbit atoms on equipotential field lines of this 4th dimension (which will here-to-forth be called Mison Space), then by noting that a change between electron orbits results in the emission or absorption of a photon (which, as I argued earlier, lives in Mison Space).

The loss of energy that occurs when a paticles tunnels through a potential barrier, I argue, is not simply expended in the particle's efforts to penetrate the barrier. Rather, the energy is released and travels through Mison Space, creating a portal for the particle to travel through. The portal exists on short temporal and spacial scales and is a link that traverses a space perpendicular to the 3D space that we live in. Essentially, the particle goes around the barrier, which is a perfectly reasonable thing for it to do.

Future Mison Space topics to be oublished:

• Why are electron orbits so crazy and how can they go through the nucleus iteslf (partially answered previously)?
• EM waves, as the name implies, are made up of both electric and magnetic fields, which travel perpendicular to one another, so how can Mison Space be just one extra dimension?

4D Glasses

I have been contemplating the constancy of the speed of light and the relationship between electric and magnetic fields for a long time and think I may have stumbled onto an interesting hypothesis.

One of the axioms of general relativity is that the speed of light is constant in all inertial frames, even ones that are moving at nearly the speed of light. However, in the normal world, if you travel at the speed of something, that something appears to be moving with velocity zero from your perspective. How can it be, then, that light is different than everything else in the universe?

I will tell you how it can be: light travels orthogonal to space. Consider yourself to be holding a radar gun that police use to catch speeders and driving a car approaching a crossroad. Travelling towards you along that crossroad is a race car. You flash your lights, signalling a race, and begin to speed up. The race car, not knowing that he has been challenged, continues at a steady pace.

As you speed up, you expect the difference in speed between you and the racecar to diminish, but, dishearteningly, the race car continues to move in the positive direction, even as you surpass its meager pace.

If the racecar had been travelling in the same direction and along the same road as you, it would have appeared to stop, then travel backwards towards you as you reached its speed and surpassed it.

The difference? Orthogonality. Light always appears to be travelling at 3x10^8 m/s, no matter what, because it is moving perpendicular to three dimensional space.

But how to prove it... One way would be to spontaneously combust hot enough to turn all of your molecules into light and see what happens. Unfortunately, the reverse process is not very predictable, so gathering evidence and showing reproducability would be difficult. Another way is to consider things that behave sometimes like light and sometimes like particles: electrons in the double slit experiment.

Electrons have charge that produce an electromagnetic (EM) potiential and fields. There is an upper limit on their mass, but they could very well be massless. When there is a single slit present, electrons pile up behind the slit in a gaussian distribution, behaving like a particle. When there are two slits present, however, it is believed that they travel through both slits in a wave-like manner, causing an interference pattern behind the slit.

Now change your idea of what an electron is. Think of it as an EM particle living in the EM space that is perpendicular to our 3D space. We already know that EM waves can interact with things in our world. Afterall -- we can see. How they move, however, could very well be a mystery, if there is indeed a 4th dimension.

As an aside, imagine yourself at a campfire in late autumn. You forgot to bring a sweatshirt, so are sticking fairly close to the fire. There is a ring around the fire in which the temperature is comfortable and you feel like you can hang out for the rest of the night. Closer in you start sweating or start to feel burnt, whereas any farther out you get cold and start to shiver. This heat field is like a potential well. It attracts you to the ring around the fire at which you body heat lets you be in comfortably.

Now, consider 3D space to be the campfire and you to be the electron. The electron can be in any ring of 3D space that is an equipotential to its own potential field. It spreads out over that space in a way that is not alltogether clear, it being a 4th dimension and whatnot. The two slits comprise two equipotentials that the electron can pass through without problem. It follows the 3D potentials through the holes to the detector plates and causes an interference patter. Not, however, because it is a wave, but because it is travelling along the 3D equipotentials of space.

If one of the slits is closed, the potential of that particular path is increased by a whopping amount, and the electron can no longer pass through it. It must stick to the single, open slit, behind which the 3D space potential is that of a macroscopic particle.

If you believe me this far, you might be wondering how we can map this 4th dimension. Ponder for a moment, if you will, the orbits of electrons around an atom. They move along EM equipotentials at discrete energy levels. If the EM dimension is perpendicular to 3D space, then these equipotials have to be wrapped around the fabric of space itself. All we have to do is map the electron orbits to see how EM space fits in with our own.

And there you have it. The culmination of my thought experiment. Now to prove it...