Thursday, August 6, 2015

UPDATE: TORSION, AND CERN… A SMALL BIT OF A CONFIRMATION?

Years ago, onthe late Ms. George Ann Hugh's The Byte Show, Ms. Hughes asked me what I thought about CERN's Large Hadron Collider being fired up, and then, just as suddenly, shut down. The claim then was that a kind of "tear" had occurred in the coollant tanks for the collider's juge cryogenically cooled magnets. In answering Ms. Hughes, I made it clear that my answer was speculative, but that, given the fact that the collider itself, and the Proton Synchrotron accelerator above it, might have produced an unexpected and perhaps very large and unbidden, unsought torsion effect.
Let's recall briefly what torsion is via my favorite analogy for explaining it. Imagine emptying an aluminum soda can, and then wringing it like a dishrag. That counter-rotating motion of the wringing folds, pleats, and twists the metal of the can, which is a simple illustration of torsion, only torsion does this to the fabric or lattice-work of space-time, rather than on aluminum. My reasons for suspecting that CERN might have encountered such a large scale torsion phenomenon were based on (1) the large size of its magnets and the magnetic fields they produce, (2) the counter-rotation of those fields in the LHC, (3) the Proton Synchrotron, which also uses such large fields, is placed above the Collider itself, and is canted off-center, which might produce a kind of "precessional wobble" in its magnetic field vis-a-vis the counter-rotating ones of the Collider. As I explained to Ms. Hughes, in these respects the hadron collider might be viewed as an extraordinarily large version of the same principles inherent in my "reverse engineering" of the principles behind the Nazi Bell. I reiterated and ellaborated on these ideas in my most recent book, The Third Way: The Nazi International, the European Union, and Corporate Fascism.
Now, thanks to the research efforts of a regular reader of this website, Mr. R.M., there seems to be perhaps a bit of confirmation of those ideas. Consider first the abstract of this article:
Physical Aspects of the Space-Time Torsion
Now, while I have not had the time to read this lengthy paper, certain things from the abstract jumped out at me almost immediately. First, the article was published in a Brazilian university, and if you don't know, Brazilian universities and scientists have a history of publishing such papers, and sometimes these are attacked in more mainstream journals or by mainstream, but nonetheless, the track record is there. What leapt out at me in the abstract was this:
Chapter 4 is devoted to the action of spinningand spinless particles in a space-time with torsion, and to the discussion of possible physical e ects generated by the background torsion. In particular, we review the upper bounds for the magnitude of the background torsion which are known from the literature. In Chapter 5, the comprehensive study of the possibility of a theory for the propagating completely antisymmetric torsion eld is presented. It is supposed that the propagating eld should be quantized, and that its quantum e ffects must be described by, at least, some e ective low-energy quantum fi eld theory. We show, that the propagating torsion may be consistent with the principles of quantum theory only in the case when the torsion mass is much greater than the mass of the heaviest fermion coupled to torsion. Then, universality of the fermion-torsion interaction implies that torsion itself has a huge mass, and can not be observed in realistic experiments. Thus, the theory of quantum matter elds on the
classical torsion background can be formulated in a consistent way, while the theory of dynamical torsion meets serious obstacles.
What interested me here was the implied connection between torsion and certain types of particles(fermions, which are particles with whole number spin, i.e., protons, neutrons, and electrons), and also the statements that torsion might be a quantized field, that the theory is based on classical rather than dynamic torsion (in the past, I have favored dynamic torsion approaches, so chalk another one up in the "wrong again column" if this paper should eventually be born out), and that, contrary to usual approaches to torsion, that "torsion itself has a huge mass, and can not be observed in realistic experiments."
Or to put it "country simple", what intrigued me here was that (finally) someone was talking about these things in connection to quantum mechanics and more specifically in respect to the spin moments of particles.
Which brings me to the second bit of "confirmation" of my speculations with Ms. Hughes, and this one I have to admit left me somewhat breathless:
Now, what obviously caught my eye here was that this was a paper on the CERN documents server with a clear reference to syncrotron radiation(syncrotron radiation is the radiation emitted by particles moving in curved paths, such as is the case both in the Proton Synchrotron accelerator which is the final accelerator of the proton stream before they are injected into CERN's hadron collider. This syncrotron is the circular accelerator located above and canted to the axis of rotation of the hadron collider).
Well, all of this is a far cry from confirmation of my high octane speculations with Ms. Hughes and in The Third Way, but at least they're headed in the right direction, and I do find it significant that buried in the documents server of CERN we have this paper on torsion and scalar-tensor theories of gravity(another subject for another blog perhaps). Time will tell.

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