Re: dimensionality of mass part one

Posted by DickT on May 11, 2003 at 08:49:19:

In Reply to: dimensionality of mass part one posted by rtharbaugh on May 11, 2003 at 07:28:42:

Break,

The X was just to indicate "any old particle" or perhaps "some unspecified particel".

Elementary particles are treated as pointlike in quantum physics. There has beeen no discovery of size so far to contradict this assumption, which is important because they want the particles to act locally - at a point in spacetime.

The idea that mass requires some bulk is an intuition from human scale physics that doesn't carry over to quantum physics. They currently explain mass as an interaction between particles, and as I said, putting in bulk without any specific reason for it would screw up the relativity.

In quantum relativiy (Dirac and QED, for example), fields that are "spacelike related", or separated in space at the same moment in time, do not interact. They "commute" which guarantees no interaction. So if the particle had a space dimension, one side of it couldn't interact with the other - which is not what you want to see in an elementary particle.

Regards,
Dick

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Follow Ups: (Reload page to see most recent)

• Re: dimensionality of mass part one -- rtharbaugh 5/12/03 (0)
• M Physics 21: Which is better:- 'Old Newtonian Particles' vs 'Odd Einsteinian Particles'? *** Fantasy of Gravitational Forces *** -- kx21 5/11/03 (0)

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