An Idea About Beta Decay

How can we possibly explain the continuous spectrum of electron energies in beta decay without having to invent another particle to properly arrive at conserved energy and momentum? There are two factors that give me hope that a solution is possible. One is the extreme difference in mass between the unstable nucleus and the escaping electron. For example, what was known as Radium E is, in fact, Bismuth - 210. This nucleus has a mass approximately 382,000 times bigger than the electron. Secondly, all atoms in solids undergo thermal oscillations. Thus, a decaying nucleus will have a unique velocity at the instant of ejection of the electron. The velocity distribution of the nuclei may be intimately related to the spectrum of the ejected electrons. This seems worth looking into.

If this is correct, then we would expect to see some much smaller variation in the energies of alpha particles ejected in alpha decay.

Mossotti-Lorentz Gravity

Everyone interested in gravity and the link between gravity and electrodynamics ought to read the 1900 paper by Hendrik Antoon Lorentz. An English translation can be downloaded from the digital library in the Hague in the Netherlands under the History of science and scholarship in the Netherlands. Starting in Section 5 of the paper Lorentz derives two sets of Maxwell equations for gravity based on the idea that gravity is nothing more than a small residual of electric forces wherein the attractive forces between unlike charges are just slightly larger than the repulsive forces between like charges. He gives full credit to Mossotti for this idea and credit to Weber and Zollner for further development. Naturally, the result looks like Newton's Law (like Coulomb's Law) but with extra terms. Lorentz calculated the effect of the modified theory on the orbit of Mercury; it was common knowledge that Mercury's orbit has a slow rotation of the slightly elliptical orbit that doesn't fit Newton's Law. Lorentz needed to select a speed and direction of the motion of the solar system through the medium. [Remember this was just before Poincaire, Einstein, and everyone else decided that they didn't need a medium for light propagation.] Lacking anything else, it seems that Lorentz chose the 'proper motion' of the sun, i.e., the motion of the sun with respect to the local group of stars in our neighborhood of the galaxy. The speed is about 16km/s. The number he obtained for the 'advance of the perihelion of Mercury', was way too small. It is interesting to note that if one uses a much larger value, like the speed of the solar system with respect to the microwave background radiation, one gets much closer to the observed value. There seems to have been only a little follow-up to Lorentz' paper. To me it seems a shame that the whole idea was not vigorously pursued.

Pointing Out Some Questionable Physics

I think I'll just go ahead and lay out some items to be explored.

1. There are no photons. It all started with a misinterpretation of the results of the experiments on the photelectric effect. As Augustin Fresnel worked so hard to demonstrate, electromagnetic radiation is purely a wave phenomenon.

2. Even though 19th century physicists were unable to grasp it, there is a medium of propagation of electromagnetic radiation. Up until about 1899 it was clear to physicists that any wave phenomenon is a disturbance propagating through some sort of medium ... by definition.

3. There is no such thing as mass converting to energy and vice versa. There is no E=mc-squared. I need to go back and carefully do my homework to see exactly how that odd idea was introduced and try to show that it has no real basis in nature. Just to give one small example, I feel fairly certain that the energy of an atomic bomb can be accounted for purely by Coulomb forces.

4. The tiny 'bending' of light passing near massive objects can be explained by a slightly lower speed of light close to such objects. I think it will eventually be shown that the characteristic speed of the medium is slightly less near massive objects, i.e., there is a dependence on "aether density" as it were. There are undoubtedly no such things as 'black holes'; this is an inadmissible extrapolation (orders of magnitude) from the miniscule observed 'bending'.

5. Lorentz and Fitzgerald will eventually be shown to have been on the right track regarding the odd null results of the Michelson-Morley experiments. There must be a certain physical change in the dimensions of objects moving through the medium. The effect is a result of propagation delay changing the equilibrium spacing of neighboring atoms in a solid. It will turn out that the Michelson-Morley experiment was precisely the wrong experiment to measure the speed of objects moving through the medium.

Neutrinos? You're Kidding Me

I'm certainly not the first person that says that neutrinos do not exist. I'm pretty certain that the invention of the neutrino was one of the big boondoggles of modern physics. I would say that Wolfgang Pauli and the others rushed the solution of the problem of the continuous spectrum of the kinetic energy (or speed if you prefer) of the electrons that emerge from the nucleus in beta decay. At the moment I cannot prove it, but I feel fairly certain that the correct explanation lies somewhere in a proper accounting of all the energy and momentum involved in the decay process without neutrinos. Also, I have not yet found a fatal flaw in the 1956 experiments of Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan, the first time physicists claimed to have observed neutrinos (albeit fairly indirectly). I am open to sensible suggestions and/or experimental results on either side of the hypothesis.

How Does Light Propagate?

In the 19th century a number of physicists worked hard to understand the mechanism of the propagation of electromagnetic radiation. They failed utterly. I claim that the physicists of the 20th century did no better. I am allowed to speculate on this mechanism. I said earlier that to ignore the underlying electric fields of charged particles and to focus only on the net fields is an error, an error that goes back to Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell among others.

We start with the choice that the electric fields of charged particles are real, are of infinite extent, and overlay each other everywhere. Already we almost have a medium. In the case when one charged particle moves with respect to the others (a rather artificial special case), necessarily its electric field must move with it. I claim that it does not move instantaneously. Rather, the adjustment of the electric field takes place in a measured fashion as it moves with respect to the others. With each increment of motion of the particle, the adjustment of the electric field is "telegraphed" outward from the particle at a characteristic speed, known to us as the speed of light. Why? To put it in homey language, the electric field of a charged particle "knows" it wants to be symmetrically disposed about the particle, and in moving over it encounters a miniscule bit of "resistance" as it slides through the overlaid electric fields of all the other particles. Hence, there's a bit of delay as the adjustment takes place. That's the medium for you. There's no elastic solid-like monolithic aether. There's no sea of ultra-mundane particles zipping around. The medium consists only of what we always knew was there if we had only chosen to look at it clearly. Of course, there's plenty of details to figure out. And of course, we don't know exactly what these electric fields are, nor do we know exactly how they work, but its a start.