User talk:Hkyriazi

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Hi there Hkyriazi! Allow me to wish you a warm welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you're so inclined, please drop us a note at so we can meet you and help you get you started as a wikipedian. If you need editing help, visit Wikipedia:How to edit a page, or drop me a line. For any formating questions, feel free to visit our manual of style. Should you wish to personalize your userspace, you may also wish to contact the good people at wikiproject userboxes, for a bit of colorful decoration. If you have any other questions about the project then check out Wikipedia:Help or add a question to the Village pump.KyroTalk 01:42, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

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[edit] A note on Gyron Aether Theory

Mr. Kyriazi, I suspect your Gyron Theory page is shortly to be deleted. In the meantime, perhaps you can pass on some advice to Mr. Meno: his guess about avoiding Le Sage-style heating is incorrect. If there's a collection of particles (or a fluid) moving in a certain direction, which is expected to interact with objects and exert forces on them, then the fluid is manifestly NOT in thermal equilibrium with the objects. You don't magically erase the laws of mechanics and thermodynamics by postulating that particles have "gyron substructure" and that the substructure has a temperature. You'll still heat them up if you intend to collide something with them to transfer momentum and exert force. Nor do you escape by mentioning liquid helium and superfluidity---these are not magical "vortex" effects, but very specific quantum-mechanical effects; Mr. Meno seems to want his gyrons to impart forces by ordinary hard collisions which transfer momentum and energy. In any case, superfluids obey the laws of mechanics just as well as classical gases do. in the cases where they flow without exhibiting friction, they also fail to exert forces!

Nor should Mr. Meno assume that something totally different happens because he's postulating "stable vortices" in a background fluid, rather than a bunch of particles moving in a bunch. Such phenomena are quite familiar to theoretical physicists, as "solitons" for example. They do not have any magical properties that invalidate these criticisms. Mr. Meno has also jumped the gun to assume that concave particles somehow "self-focus" in vortices. They do not, both on theoretical grounds (1st-order ideal gas behavior is independent of particle shape) and experimental (CS2, perfluoroethane, etc. are dumbbell-shaped molecules which show no clustering behavior)---I can see why Mr. Meno's intuition told him otherwise, but he is mistaken.

Anyway, that's just one of the problems with this theory. As a more general piece of physics advice to Mr. Meno: he should try to answer *basic* questions about his theory before he starts trying to attain "epistemological nirvana". Before asking "what is the proton", he needs to show that, in his theory: the Michaelson-Moreley experiment expects a null result; that a fast-moving clock should lag behind a stationary clock, in the observed fashion, and that this should appear true to any observer at any speed; that photons are massless and travel at a single, energy-independent velocity, that this velocity is also the limiting velocity (and the "c" in energy/momentum equations) of energetic electrons, protons, etc., and that this speed is independent of the speed of the emitter. He needs to show that the same mass which goes into inertial equations (F=ma) also goes into energy equations (E = sqrt(m^2 c^4 + p^2 c^2) and, if your theory includes gravity, into gravitational equations (F = GmM/r^2). *These* are the questions which physicists want answered about a new theory; his apparent ignorance of these questions, and his lack of answers, are the reasons Mr. Meno hasn't been able to publish his work. Professional physicists *start* with Lorentz invariance and build theories which either a) guarantee to obey it from Page 1 or b) carefully specify where it will be violated, and if so whether it passes or fails experimental tests. Mr. Meno seems to start with dumbell-shaped particles and vortices, and hope that maybe Lorentz invariance will sort of come out when you do the math.

That's also the reason that ether theories were abandoned by professional physicists: it's not because no one could think of an appropriate substructure for the electron, nor because they tried and failed to come up with "the right shape---dumbells!" for an ether particle, nor because LeSage's gravity (which is not actually an ether theory at all) failed, nor because the "establishment" closed their minds. It's because ether and ether-like theories *never* lead to relativistic equations-of-motion, Lorentz invariance, and E=mc^2. Mr. Meno has applied himself diligently to the fun handwaving guesswork of "what is the proton? what is gravity?" and so on, while ignoring the straightforward task of describing, e.g., the motion of a rocket ship of mass M, under force F, with a clock onboard, etc. This is rather like, say, an engineer dreaming of a 10,000-mpg supercar, then daydreaming about how many airbags it will have, the future of the oil industry, etc---without ever figuring out whether 10,000 mpg is possible.18.4.2.3 14:51, 6 September 2006 (UTC) (Sorry, wasn't logged in---should have signed as Bm gub 14:54, 6 September 2006 (UTC))

[edit] Reply to "A Note"

Dear "Bm gub,"

Please accept my sincere thanks for the constructive criticism! I find it very refreshing! For the record, Dr. Meno did not write this article--I did--and I'm no expert in math or physics, so the failure to show how his theory results in Lorentz invariance may be solely mine. And Dr. Meno has never, to my knowledge, offered that particular speculation about proton structure--that is simply what seemed most reasonable to me; he has been much more cautious. His book, "Cats, Atoms, Gyrons, Aether, and the Universe", despite trying to be accessible to the layperson, is filled with derivations and equations, many of which go right over my head. I'll go back and see if and how he derives Lorentz invariance.

Meno feels his derivation of photon structure is his strongest argument, and considers it unassailable, but unfortunately, is also that aspect of his theory I'm least able to visualize (so far). This may be viewed at: http://www.gyrons.net/page3.html.

  • If Dr. Meno indeed believes, as the page implies (though this is unclear) that the photon is a disturbance of a background collection of gyrons, then it manifestly fails the Michaelson-Moreley test---i.e., the original test that disproved all of the original aether theories. This is not a niggling detail---this (in combination with the many speed-of-light-is-independent-of-speed-of-emitter experiments) is a really fundamental (and famous!) failure of ether theories. Unfortunately, following links to what is claimed to be the "expert" page yields something buzzword-filled but otherwise unintelligible. Michaelson-Moreley is dismissed (on the book page) as having been "misinterpreted". Bm gub 22:23, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
    • But what if the Michelson-Morley equipment, being made of vortices in the same aether, itself experiences a Fitzgerald-Lorentz contraction in the direction of motion against the aether?
It's one thing to say "my ether theory can work if it predicts Fitzgerald-Lorentz contractions" and it's another thing to actually come up with an ether theory that predicts Fitzgerald-Lorentz contractions, time dilations, relativistic mass increases, and so on, as ordinary consquences of the behavior of the ether. There's no point in describing how Dr. Meno wants it to work---he should just show whether it works or not.Bm gub 21:31, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

RE the gravitational heating problem, I believe Meno's theory accounts for the lack of it by saying the continual inflow of vacuum gyrons and their motion is counterbalanced by the outflow of gravitational gyrons and their motion.

  • I've seen many ether theories try to make this claim. Basically, you're saying that "the sort of heat generated by infalling gyrons is an invisible sort of heat which is re-radiated invisibly, and does not connect in any way to macroscopic heat." In a nutshell: here's an atom on Earth, say, at high noon. It's going to accelerates towards the Earth. Meno says that this occurs because it gets hit by something from above. That's easy to say, but do the math. You say it has absorbed a particle with momentum p (to get F=dp/dt) and energy E (what is the energy-momentum relationship for gyrons? Make it whatever you like.) If the atom is allowed to fall, you'll admit that it acquires kinetic energy, so don't say that the gyrons are energyless. You're saying that, for every incoming gyron, no matter what its source (Sun, earth, Moon, lead brick ...) the atom figures out how much energy to convert to physical acceleration, and converts the rest precisely to outgoing gyrons so as to avoid heating? In that case, the collision can't behave anything at all like an ordinary physical collision, whose behavior should depend only on the relative velocities of the target and the projectile. Isn't the whole point of push-gravity to use a familiar force-generating mechanism (Newtonian collisions) to replace "magical" action-at-a-distance? This theory replaces magical action-at-a-distance with a new magical type of invisible collision.
    • Good point, and well-stated. But I think his idea is that matter creates a continual drift of vacuum aether toward it, and that drift rate is what determines the gravitational acceleration, which applies to every structure in the aether equally, material vortex and light wave alike. Nothing magical there.
Except that it doesn't actually work. Again, it's not a question to be answered in words and descriptions, it's to be answered by giving an equation-of-motion for a "vortex" embedded in a bath with a "drift rate"---how the does that cause a constant acceleration of the vortex? If this equation-of-motion is governed by fluid-like mechanics, the vortex will not undergo constant acceleration, but rather will end up matching the drift velocity via a drag term---and, I dare say, both a heating problem and a preferred-frame problem. If the equation-of-motion is governed by collision kinetics, it it will show both a heating problem and a preferred-frame problem. Bm gub 21:31, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
    • The generation of the (largely) invisible, rifle-bullet flying gyrons (let's call them gravitational gyrons, or GGs) is a somewhat independent process but, presumably, the universe comes to an equilibrium after some time, such that the proportion of drifting gyrons vs. GGs stays constant (both motion and number being conserved), and there's no longer any net heat transfer. I said "somewhat independent," because I suppose such an equilibrium would be inevitable if the maintenance of the vortices that produce the GGs depends upon there being a certain density of drifting gyrons to supply that production. If there was so much matter that it depleted the latter, it'd also slow down the production of GGs, in a negative feedback loop. At the other end, in a universe with very little matter (few vortices), there'd be a very low proportion of GG/total G, and plenty of room for electrons and positrons to be created from random fluctuations in the aether. (I'm only now learning about positronium, so don't ask me to comment yet on its short laboratory half-life.) So, the fact that the gravitational constant in our universe does seem to be constant everywhere, is evidence that the aether's density and proportions are the same everywhere. An earlier universe could have had much more vigorous vortices that generated many more GGs per unit time, but over time the proportion of GGs increased so much that "vortex vigor" and vortex number leveled off, as did that GG-to-total G ratio.
I dare say that's all too speculative for me to even address. Bm gub 21:31, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
  • There's also the reference frame issue. What happens when I'm *moving* through the bath of gravity gyrons? Don't the ones coming from ahead of me hit me harder than the ones coming from behind? Again, without a somewhat-magical rewrite of the energy/momentum/velocity rules for gravity gyrons, this effect would cause a vacuum drag force which is ruled out by experiment. Bm gub 22:23, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
    • This argument is one I brought up with Dr. Meno several months ago, and which almost caused me to abandon his view of gravity. How is it that the vortices that make up our bodies feel the flow of gyrons drifting down their density gradient (i.e., experience gravity), but not feel any resistance to movement against a stationary aether? In other words, how is it that they can assume a non-turbulent, streamlined flow when they move against a stationary aether (like vortices in a superfluid), but not do the same thing when the flow is of gyrons down their density gradient? One way to save his theory was to postulate that, somehow, our vortices are affected by the highly directional net flow of GGs away from the center of the earth, that prevents them from assuming a streamlined flow pattern (maybe the net amount of up-flying GGs make the vortices "stiffer" in some way). The only other possibility was that the vortices somehow can tell the difference between flowing against a uniform density aether, and being in one with a density gradient. That, I grant you, is very close to being magical, but it's a possibility one must consider.
Sorry---not a possibility. These explanations no longer yield anything resembling linear gravity, where the acceleration of any particle is a simple vector sum of its attractions to all other particles. If your vortices are "stiffened" by being in the Earth's gravitational field, compare them to the vortices comprising, say, the Ulysses spacecraft (1AU from the sun, but very far from Earth.). You want to change the structure of the near-Earth vortices to make them respond correctly to Earth's gravity, but both vortices must respond to the Sun's gravity in the same way, as observed.

The point about perfluoroethane not showing clustering behavior is something I'll bring up wit Dr. Meno, but it certainly seems reasonable to me that even weak charge interactions might spoil such an effect. The assertion that 1st order ideal gas behavior is independent of particle shape seems much more serious, and I'll both study the question myself and mention it to Dr. Meno. For my information, however, does that statement simply mean that the macroscopic phenomena of pressure and temperature are unaffected by anisotropies of the constituent particles over the full range of particle density (diffuse gas to solid)?

  • Hot, hard particles in thermal equilibrium do not form clusters. Not even if they have little hooks and eyelets. Why not? In a nutshell, if there's a hook-stuck-through-eye configuration that's difficult to get out of via random motion, then it's also difficult to get into by random motion, and hooked-together configurations won't be any more populated in (in phase space density) than any other configuration. This is not generally true if there are attractive/repulsive forces, but you said quite clearly that the gyrons are considered hard-surfaced things which do nothing but bounce off one another. This can be derived from quite general phase-space arguments; the entropy of a "vortex" configuration is lower than that of a gas, and with hard-surface interactions there's no way to give the configuration a stabilizing energy---it's just a bunch of sticks rattling around. Low-entropy, energy-neutral configurations do not stick together. If Dr. Meno wants the opposite to occur, he will either have to mechanically lock the particles together (with little chain links or something), or postulate an attractive force between them. Dr Meno may counter with "But look, if they hit each other at such-and-such angle, they pull together", whatever "together" means---fine, fine, but at what angle do they end up afterwards? Do they pull together in the subsequent collision, too? And the one after that? For what fraction of possible collisions, integrated over all possible collision angles and positions, do they pull the right way rather than the wrong way? Bm gub 22:23, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
    • This is reasonable, but on the other hand, we're not talking about stationary structures, but swirling patterns of these particles, in constant motion. How, one might also ask, is it possible for vortices to exist indefinitely in superfluids (or tornadoes to exist indefinitely if air were inviscid), that themselves consist of hard particles? Moreover, I still like the argument that since convex-surfaced particles obviously produce scattering, concave-surfaced particles might, conversely, be able to engage in stable flow patterns. I honestly don't know how to decide this issue, except though detailed kinetic analysis. (Or perhaps by reading some of the theoretical writings of Boltzmann or Maxwell.)
I was also taking about "swirling patterns", and stating that such swirling patterns won't be stabilized by some detail of the particle shape. Vortices in a superfluids are stabilized by rigorously-conserved quantum numbers, not by some general property of vortices. Absent an energy source, tornados are not persistent in air, even in the absence of viscosity---they dissipate by breaking up into smaller and smaller (and weaker and weaker) eddies, until the eddies become indistinguishable from random thermal motion. Real tornados are sustained by a constant input of energy. (By the way, what makes you think that your gyron-ether is superfluid or frictionless? Ideal gases have a nonzero viscosity; it has nothing to do with the fact that no energy is lost in particle-particle collisions, it requires only that such collisions can occur and can transfer momentum. Real superfluidity is a purely quantum phenomenon, more akin to wave diffraction than to kinetic theory.) Your inference that "since convex-surfaced particles obviously produce scattering, concave-surfaced particles might, conversely, be able to engage in stable flow patterns" is, therefore, a bit mysterious, and I don't see any grounds for it. There's no conserved quantum number, there's no attractive interaction, and you admit that there has been no detailed numerical simulation. On what grounds does Dr. Meno expect that such vortices are possible, other than a) the fact that he can picture them in his mind's eye and b) vortices sometimes seem stable in other physical systems?
Of course, I don't actually expect Dr. Meno to come up with a numerical model---even with spheres, calculations of this type are a big job. Here's another illustration of how such a thing will fail: Create one of your "vortices" at rest in a fluid of randomly-moving "gyrons". You admit that individual gyrons both enter and leave the vortex---it's a propagating pattern, not a fixed collection of particles. Draw the origin of a coordinate system at the center of the vortex. Consider the gyrons leaving the vortex---what is their average angular momentum with respect to the origin? Certainly nonzero, as you can work out. Now, you'd say, another gyron from the ambient bath will come in from the outside and join the rotation. What is its average angular momentum? Zero---it's equally likely to come in clockwise or counterclockwise. Thus the vortex will gradially lose angular momentum and stop spinning. Again, I have no doubt that Dr. Meno can come up with some explanation---he'll say that vortex only discards and accepts just the right particles so as to maintain itself---but such explanation must be increasingly divorced from the known behavior of small, hard objects bumping into each other! Bm gub 21:31, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
    • On a personal note, do you mind if I ask who it is I find myself indebted to for this thoughtful exchange?


Sorry, I'm generally anonymous with respect to Wikipedia. By way of credentials, I'm an experimental physicist at MIT. Bm gub 21:31, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Further discussion

Dear "Bm gub,"

I'll start a new section here, rather than continue with further indentations.

RE the Fitzgerald-Lorentz contractions, I suppose a full explanation under Dr. Meno's theory would await a detailed kinetic description of one of the proposed spherical vortices. But, from my perspective, it at least makes intuitive sense to say that as an object consisting of a collection of twisted smoke rings moves against an aether wind it will tend to become flattened by that wind, and as the object's speed approaches the RMS speed of the aether's constituent particles, things get very funny very quickly, as the structure begins to lose its integrity and threatens to build up a shock wave of particles. But to say, as Einstein speculated, that c is actually the same in all reference frames, rather than just being measured to be the same due to such physical contractions, is to elevate a useful mathematical formalism into a nonsensical physical reality. And, General Relativity's view that gravity warps space, rather than simply affecting light waves as well as matter, seems not far removed from Aristotle's "stones fall because it is their nature to do so" explanation of gravity.

It may make "intuitive sense", but there are a zillion different theories which intuitively seem to give you *some sort* of length contraction, or *some sort* of time dilation, or maybe even both. Therefore, seeing "intuitively" how a theory might sort of contain a limiting speed --- well, it's an all-but-useless way of telling a true theory from a false theory. That's why the standard technique is to actually solve the dynamics and show Lorentz invariance. (Keep in mind, by the way, that Lorentz invariance in an ether theory does not just demand "length contractions"---I don't see how you expect the energy-momentum relations to work out. Come to think of it, you can't be confident that ordinary kinematics to work out: lacking a detailed description of the vortices, it's not clear that it will even obey Newtonian mechanics or Galilean relativity!
Funny you should mention that, as Dr. Meno recently told me that if Newton had known matter consisted of vortices, and knew their behavior, he could have stated his first law of motion, at least, without any need to consult Galileo's results: they move indefinitely, in straight lines, unless perturbed, and force is required only to produce an acceleration. (Of course, Newton wouldn't have known automatically what corresponded to gravitational mass without knowing about the vortices' ejection of GGs, but inertial mass would correspond to the need to induce a deformation in the vortex required for streamlined flow.) The cosmic speed limit is readily explained as being the RMS speed of the aether particles, but why the length contraction, time dilation, and mass increase obey those equations exactly would seem to have to be an area of future study. This seems like an epistemlogical debate, not one of physics per se. Is it better to pursue a possibly fruitless search with a theory that promises to offer common sense explanations and possibly much more, or stay with a paradigm that describes behaviors well, but goes against common sense, and whose answers to questions like the cosmic speed limit, and why opposite charges attract and like charges repel, are, for the moment at least, "because that's the way Nature is"?

RE Meno's density gradient theory of gravity, now that I think about it, thanks to your Ulysses spacecraft example, how could the vortices not sense the density gradient and flow down it, since they themselves are made up of the same particles? The vortices drift for the same reason that the particles themselves drift down their density gradient. There really isn't any need for any "stiffening" of the vortices as I'd proposed. Thanks for helping me see this. The drift rate is radially in, toward the earth's center, and is a direct result of the earth's vortices' ejection of gravitational gyrons (GGs), which constitutes the "sink" that stabilizes the inward flowing pattern into each vortex. The flow rate decreases as 1/r**2, and is at terminal velocity just at the earth's surface.

Yes, you're proposing that the "flow rate of GGs" varies as 1/r^2 about any gravitating mass. You need to go down and think about a single (e.g.) atom, say, released from rest far above the Earth. You say it wants to "go with the flow"---how does it sense the flow? By the GGs going around it, or scattering off of it, or being absorbed by it? Keep in mind, then, that this particle has to respond in some regular way to those GGs---it can't magically "know" that it's supposed to respond one way to Earth gravity, and a different way to Sun gravity, and to maintain energy-momentum conservation in some cases but not others. Does that flow actually imply a constant acceleration (a ~ 1/r^2 ), or some other law? Ordinarily, "drift" and "flow" does *not* give us a constant acceleration law-of-motion, but rather a drag law---the acceleration depends on the difference between its velocity and he fluid velocity: a = (v - v0). (More generally, it can be any power of (v-v0).) This is dramatically at odds with observations. This is the problem I was pointing out: it's easy to find "some theory" that generally pushes objects towards one another (Meno's is one example), and it is not very interesting to learn that gyron theory has an intuitive mechanism for this. It's very hard to find one that does so with an universal, linear (a = GM/r^2) rule, and gyron theory will *not* be able to reproduce that rule without incorporating Meno-style heating.
You're right that the radial surface density of GGs, or as you say, "flow rate of GGs," goes as 1/r^2, but that is not, according to Meno, what causes the actual gravitational effect (although their exiting from the vortices sustains gravity). His theory is that gravity is communicated by the randomly tumbling gyrons (I'll refer to them as "vacuum gyrons" from now on) that diffuse down their density gradient toward the vortex center. So, according to his view, the GGs basically disappear from considerations about gravity for a while (he speculates that they tend, on average, to come back to rest, i.e., rejoin the vacuum gyrons, after traveling 50,000 or so light years, to explain the limited size of galaxies -- I have some problems with that notion, however). Anyway, you can see that a true density gradient (which Newton also postulated, in a few of his Queries at the end of his "Opticks") that radiates out from a sink/drain would, by itself, be a gradient of acceleration as well, diminishing as 1/r^2, and being directly proportional to the masses involved.
It's insufficient to say "We've found something in the theory that might vary as 1/r^2 near large masses, so we'll suppose that this causes gravitational attraction." You need a microscopic description of how gradient diffusion of vacuum gyrons causes a force on a free-falling particle. You need to show the energy and momentum equations for vacuum gyrons hitting a particle, and show that this makes a unidirectional acceleration. You need to show that the accelerations add linearly for multiple sources. You need to show that the applied force (and the energy transferred) is independent of the particle's velocity and of other forces on it. And so on. Lacking that, you can't really say that you have a model of gravity---you have a mass-dependent something-or-other which you hope to use to describe gravity.
The "drain" (which you questioned toward the bottom) is the GGs that are constantly being emitted, and I believe that simple diffusion down a density gradient toward a point will inevitably produce flow that goes as 1/r^2. The somewhat 2-dimensional case of water flowing down a drain has the water moving fastest in the drain funnel and slower the further away one gets (but with speed varying more like 1/r, because of the flatter geometry). A spherical case goes as 1/r^2.
RE "Meno-style heating," I'm still not sure why you say that, as the outgoing motion from GGs flying away in all directions counterbalances the net inward drifting motion of the vacuum gyrons.
Sorry, I meant to say "Le Sage-style heating". Well, you'll see what I meant if you try to come up with a microscopic description of how "vacuum gyron diffusion" causes gravity-like acceleration.
I would think a bulk solution is adequate for this. On top of all the random collisions occurring, there's a net direction of diffusion down the density gradient, which moves everything along, like little eddy currents on the surface of a river.
Also, what is special about the surface of the Earth? The constant-acceleration nature of gravity (contra Aristotle, etc., who though of constant-velocity, circular-path, etc. models) has been measured, extremely precisely, with respect to all sorts of bodies (Earth, moon, asteroids and planets, sun, black holes, lumps of lead and copper ...) with all sorts of distances and densities. It's been measured deep inside the Sun by helioseismology. If your theory requires there to be some special property associated with that position ("6000 km from 6e24 kg"), or with that drift rate (9.8m/s/s), you're going to lose agreement with every non-Earth measurement.
No, nothing special -- that was just an example I was using. The density gradient near the sun is, of course, much steeper, and hence the gravitational acceleration is much greater there.
So, when you said "terminal velocity" you really meant "9.8 m/s/s" or something?
My understanding is that escape velocity and terminal velocity have the same scalar value, only with different signs. In a universe with only you and the earth, if you start falling from rest toward the earth at an infinite distance, the speed with which you will impact the earth is what I called terminal velocity.
That's highly nonstandard---terminal velocity refers to the viscosity-limited speed of an object moving through a fluid under constant force, like (for example) how a skydiver's speed maxes out at 200 mph due to atmospheric drag. Escape velocity is the word you're looking for. Once again, don' mistake escape velocity for acceleration-due-to-gravity. Earth, Uranus, and Saturn all have about the same surface acceleration (about 9.8 m/s/s), but Saturn's escape velocity is three times Earth's. (acceleration depends on M/r^2, escape velocity depends on sqrt(M/r).) Once again---you need a microscopic model to show how whatever drift/flow/diffusion/etc. actually yields an acceleration! You need to give an equation for the kinetic energy and momentum transfers to a vortex due to particle motion near or past it! It's a nice touch that your theory yields "something" which varies as 1/r^2, but that "something" does not seem to imply an F = Mm/r^2 force---it implies an F=(v - v(r)) drag-like force, and all of your arguments so far are simply suggesting that v(r) = M/r^2.18.109.6.3 17:21, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

RE the conservation of angular momentum as each vortex spits out GGs spinning in one direction, can't we assume that since there are many such vortices, pointing in all directions and shooting GGs in all directions, the effects cancel? And, after all, electrons and positrons do tend to be created together, and the theory points toward there being equal numbers of positrons and electrons in all ordinary matter, so no problem there. In any case, thanks for pointing this out, as such cooperative effects will be important in figuring out how more complex structures, such as nucleons, generate so many more GGs, and consequently have so much more gravitational mass, than their constituent electrons and positrons.

  • I wasn't talking about GGs, I was talking about a vortex of Gs propagating through a bath of Gs. You said that the vortex is a propagating pattern---implying that it picks up Gs on its leading edge, incorporates them into a vortex motion, and leaves them behind on its trailing edge---and that this sort of propagation is the only way it can move through space. I'm talking about those gyrons, the ones which come in and leave when the vortex moves normally. In addition to the fact that the vortex will fall apart by ordinary kinetics, those gyrons will destroy, not sustain, a vortex.
  • No, we can't "assume" that "effects cancel"---why should we? Think carefully about what "cancellation" would mean for an individual electron sitting still in space. You're proposing that all space is filled by a uniform bath of randomly-oriented thermal gyrons. The electron, on the other hand, is supposed to be a collection of gyrons spinning in a certain direction in an organized way. Thermal gyrons have to hit the vortex all the time; some have to be absorbed into it, some have to bounce off of it. Some vortex gyrons will simply escape the edges of the vortex to join the thermal bath. Figure out the angular momentum balance---the average angular momentum (L_tot = v x r (motion) + s (spin)) and you'll see that the vortex *will* slow down under such collisions---or, alternatively, figure out what conditions are necessary (motion-spin correlations? Selective absorbtion/scattering?) for the vortex *not* to slow down, and see whether those conditions are realistic.
  • Again, don't jump the gun on trying to "understand nucleons" unless you're absolutely confident that: a) an electron-vortex, by itself in otherwise empty space, holds together for an arbitrarily long time; b) that two electrons, colliding, conserve energy and momentum; and that the same is true a) at all low speeds (Galilean relativity) and b) at all high speeds (Special Relativity). The theory is absolutely useless if its answer to every question is "Depending on the still-unsolved properties of the vortex, maybe ...", and any time you spend on other questions will be rather a waste.
Again, my fault for being overly exuberant in my speculations about proton structure and "epistemological nirvana." The theory holds that the organized flow pattern of the vortex is acually only a tiny fraction of the total gyrons within the structure (perhaps 30 orders of magnitude smaller -- 10^20 organized flowing gyrons vs. 10^50 total gyrons in the vortex volume). So, not a lot of flow pattern shifting is needed to produce streamlined movement of the vortex through the vacuum. I know that doesn't get around the kinetic argument, and I've tried to picture how the flowing gyrons are oriented, such that random collisions would tend to keep them flowing stably. For an isolated electron in the vacuum, I would think that some funny things may start to happen -- perhaps it "seeds" the creation of a positron in the vicinity, owing to its selective removal of angular momentum from the vacuum; perhaps it dies away without any nearby positron (I suppose the existence of cathode ray tubes and high energy electron beams says something about the latter possibility); perhaps it starts to motor around on its own, if it keeps spitting GGs out in the same direction. Tough questions, which I'll raise with Dr. Meno.
Considering that particles are known to survive (and to conserve energy and momentum) for billions of years and million-light-year travel paths, it's not sufficient to show sort-of-streamlined movement or a "tendency" to flow stably; you really need a conservation law which makes it impossible for these particles to fall apart. By the way, electrons in a vacuum are perfectly stable and well-behaved, and (I might point out) macroscopically energy-conserving, so there's no chance of spontaneous motoring-around or positron generation. In deep space you can get 1 electron per liter; in the best lab vacuums you can get 100 electrons per cubic mm---but, in any case, you're looking to protect them from funny phenomenon on planck-length scales; at this level, all electrons are "isolated".
Thanks - good to know about isolated electron stability and absence of "self-motoring" and "positron generating" properties. These "funny phenomena", though, would occur at ~10^(-16)M scale (vortex size), though, not that of the Planck length (gyron size), so I'm not sure there'd be sufficient separation in lab vacuums to say anything definitive. It's way too speculative to bother with, in any case.
The separation in laboratory vacuums is at the 10^-5 meter scale. The question of "are vortexes stable" is the core assumption of your theory.

RE stability of vortices, I asked Dr. Meno about this, and he said it's true that tornadoes aren't stable, since they don't have a closed flow pattern. But, he says that Helmholtz proved that smoke rings would continue indefinitely in an inviscid fluid.

Helmholtz's proof was much more specific: it holds only in an inviscid, infinitely smooth, and perfectly non-compressible fluid. Any nonzero viscocity of course slows down the vortex smoothly (and, again, we have no reason to believe that the "gyron ether" has zero viscosity, and very good reasons to believe the opposite), and compressibility allows the vortex to break up into turbulence. Your gyron ether, consisting of individual free-flying particles, is highly compressible. Secondarily, Helmholtz smoke rings are not merely "propagating patterns", like a wave or a soliton, but rather actual packets of gas: a smoke ring contains the same gas atoms after flying 1000 feet as it did when it was generated. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that this is not meant to be true for your gyrons.
You're right about Meno's organized gyron flow patterns being statistical in nature, and not necessarily composed of the same gyrons, but since they have high spin rates (and thus are highly resistant to reorientation under collision) and defined angles and rates of precession, I don't suppose they're often knocked out and replaced by vacuum gyrons. I haven't read Helmholtz's derivation, and am not sure what he meant by "infinitely smooth." If it means an infinitely smooth particle surface, so as to permit no friction, that certainly applies to Meno's gyrons. I suppose compressibility would allow some disturbances in the flow pattern, which could cause a break-up, but if there's also a drain, maintaining that flow, it seems that it could be indefinitely stable. RE the gyrons' viscosity, I would think that the linear and angular momenta of vacuum gyrons are in equilibrium, and so there'd be no loss of motion. If the pattern is stable, there'd also be no increase in entropy. Hence, there'd be zero viscosity. Am I missing something? (Good cheap shot opportunity!)
Well, if "gyrons are not often knocked out", then your assertion that vortices propagate frictionlessly through space is even less sustainable than the Helmholtz-smoke-ring idea. An electron moving at the speed of light is an "organized set" of 10^20 particles with "defined angles" which nevertheless can stick together while plowing through a much higher-density bath of particles at arbitrary speeds? And these "defined angle" gyrons, which obviously have to hit one another often to sustain the vortex-ness, but somehow don't hit any of the other 10^50 gyrons in the neighborhood when they move? Or they hit the neighboring gyrons via some sort of magical momentum-less scattering, unless they're spinning or vortexing or something, in which case they transfer momentum?
I spoke with Frank (Meno) about this last night, and he said that a crucial aspect of the Helmholtz smoke ring analogy is that the smoothness Helmholtz talked about, which avoids any type of particle collision, and which therefore isn't applicable to gyron theory, is more than compensated by the slight concave shape of the gyron particles. The latter allows those collisions to preserve the structure rather than scatter it. I didn't mean to say that the organized, flowing gyrons don't collide with vacuum gyrons, but that the average collision tends to keep them moving in their pattern, owing (I'm thinking) to their precise orientation (precession angle).
In terms of the vortex, I try to think about it as an organized swarm of bees, whose individual orientations are somewhat fixed by their high degree of angular momentum. For a plausible (and new to me) idea about how they may move frictionlessly once the vortex stops being accelerated, see below.
You'll notice that nothing in ideal gas theory ever mentions the shapes of particles. Square, sphere, concave, toroidal---it doesn't matter. No one ever said "vortices are stable unless convex particle-collisions scatter material out of them", or that "viscosity in kinetic theory arises because of the collision angle distribution of convex particles". The issue is particle collisions, of any type, at any angle: all collisions are energy-momentum exchanges, and they represent "things with one particular velocity/momentum distribution" colliding with "things with another velocity/momentum distribution". You exchange momenta between these two distributions every time there's a particle-particle collision (or, in Helmholtz's smooth gas, whenever there's a density variation in the torus.) You have no hope of having the "average collision tend to keep them moving", because both the vortex and the ambient momentum distributions come into the equation. When two individual gyrons collide, they don't know whether they're coming from the vortex distribution or the ambient thermal; all they know is "an incoming gyron has hit me at such-and-such angle". After scattering, they don't know what distribution they're supposed to join. Now, you and Dr. Meno might be thinking, "well, it's got a 50% chance of joining the vortex and a 50% chance of joining the thermal bath afterwards, so the vortex will persist." This is incorrect; the vortex distribution is, by definition, "more restricted" than the thermal distribution. The thermal particles are moving equally likely at all angles, distributed over essentially all energies (a Gaussian distribution). The vortex particles are moving *preferentially* at a certain angle, at the very least, for a given location in space. (This has to be the case in order for it to be a vortex; it remains the case even if it's only 1 in 10^10 particles participating with organized angles.) Therefore, the phase space for scattering into the vortex is small; the phase space for scattering into the thermal bath is large; picking up a non-vortexy angle and energy is more likely than picking up a vortexy angle. Now, again, you're going to hypothesize that the gyron's orientations, precessions, and concavity will help to drive things into the vortexy angle. But, by specifying this, you've shrunk the target even further: perhaps you've made it more probable that the final-state scattering direction will be correct, but, in order to join the vortex in a helpful way, you've put narrow conditions on the particle's orientation and spin. The thermal bath is happy to accept any orientation and spins, so it's still a bigger target and will receive the lion's share of the scattered particles. Maybe you think that you can orient the vortex particles in a certain way, and in this orientation, it's more likely---remember, you need exactly 50% chance---that an incoming particle will scatter into the right direction, with the right velocity, and the right spin, so as join the vortex? Sorry, you've forgotten that the *projectiles*---the thermal bath particles you're trying to add to the vortex with 50% efficiency---are coming in with random angles, orientations, and velocities. They're not going to cooperate with your carefully calibrated scattering contraption; they'll hit it from the back and sides, nose-on, spinning, too fast, and so on. You can never apply any sort of interscattering between a thermal distribution and a nonthermal distribution without the thermal one "winning". Is that clear? That's the law of entropy, basically. If you want to organize any pattern at all, it means that you're narrowing down the phase space of the particles participating in it. That makes it less-than-50% likely that a scattered particle---which, remember, sometimes involves an "organized" particle scattering off of a "disorganized" particle---will enter the "right" phase space (to perpetuate the organization) rather than the "wrong" phase space (to join the thermal background.) All of your pro-vortex arguments depend explicitly on the assumption that organized particles scatter only off of other organized particles. Placing an organized vortex in a vast bath of thermal particles means that this assumption is untrue.18.109.6.3 17:21, 15 September 2006 (UTC)
In a nutshell, "infinitely smooth" means that Helmholtz allowed his "incompressibility" argument to hold true right down to infinitesimal length scales---not talking about any particular situation, but giving a proof which is approximately true in interesting cases. This sort of smoothness is obviously impossible, at small scales, in particle-based fluid; at some point, there are particles and there are spaces between them, and these peaks and gaps will behave (for these purposes) just like the density variations you'd get in a compressible fluid at larger scales.
In terms of viscosity: take a look at a college-level thermodynamics textbook; it will explain how viscosity works in ideal gases. Like your gyrons, ideal gas molecules need have no individual friction, no excitations or bending or whatever. You can write an ideal gas law for dumbell-shaped molecules with spin. Both bulk and shear viscosity arises in every case, as I tried to describe (the textbook will certainly do a better job). Viscosity has nothing to do with molecule-molecule friction; it occurs because particles bump into each other and scatter, and this scattering universally turns "a bunch of particles are all moving in a certain direction" situations into "all the particles are moving in random directions" situations. You have not suggested any microscopic property of the gyrons which suggests *any* difference from ideal-gas kinematics, yet all of your vortex properties seem to violate it. Why not go back to the microscopic theory and figure out what the individual gyrons are up to? If, and only if, you can find microscopic behavior that violates kinetic theory, you might have a hope of making the vortex properties actually follow from the gyron behaviors.
I'll have to do some remedial reading in thermo, as Frank and you seem to have a fundamental disagreement on this. He likes to show a graph where a convexly-shaped particle, when collided with particles coming from the same direction, but intercepting it at different places along its length, scatters those particles widely. By contrast, particles coming at a gyron from the same direction all tend to end up focused in the focal plane of its concave curvature. The only sense I can make of this, with respect to vortex stability, is that if the vortex does indeed cause the gyrons in its flow pattern to possess certain degrees of spin and angle of precession, then they'll all tend to be pushed in the same direction by random, though highly anisotropic due to their preferred orientation, collisions with the vacuum particles. Conversely, those vacuum gyrons that collide with the vortex gyrons would all tend to end up flowing through the vortex in a streamlined way (i.e., with fewer subsequent collisions), owing to their being bounced off the oriented gyrons in a focused way. (If this sounds sketchy, it's because the latter only just now occurred to me. I've been trying to get a grasp of how such vortices might work for a while, but the going has been tough.)
I suspected that your mental model might look something like this. You draw a picture of a gyron, then draw another gyron scattering off of it, and clearly there's a well-defined direction for the second gyron. Sorry, this picture is incorrect unless the first gyron is bolted down. For two equal-mass objects colliding in free space, the collision makes both of them move---it is true that choosing the shape (in 2D, anyway, and less so in 3D) can constrain the scattering angle for this first collision; I suspect, though, that you've been over-optimistic in avoiding edge-edge collisions and such. Anyway, on average, each object takes away 1/2 of the momentum and 1/2 of the energy. Let's call the two components the "focuser" and the "projectile". After the projectile-focuser collision, the focuser is moving---let's say it's moving back towards the vortex---with about 1/2 of the projectile's original velocity. Let's look at these two particles post-collision. A) Can the original "focuser" scatter another particle back towards the vortex? No; it's now moving *away* from the vortex at 1/2 of the original collision's speed; it will encounter future collisions with a totally different rest-frame orientation, and will preferentially scatter things (and itself) *away* from the vortex. B) Can the projectile "replace" the focuser? No, it's moving at a lower velocity, a different orientation, and so on. Can it be focused again? No, it's only got half of the velocity it originally had. C) Can we fix these velocity issues by sort of replacing lost velocities with thermal energy? No, thermal velocities are of random magnitude and direction: all of your focusing arguments depend on a *particular* scattering angle, which depends on both particles' full velocities. If these velocities have thermal components, the scattering directions will be even more rapidly randomized. And not in a synergetic, cooperative way: random means random.
Anyway, it's a bit silly to be talking through individual scattering angles, velocities, and frame transformations. It's precisely this sort of reasoning which is fully contained within kinetic theory, which strongly suggests that your vortices will fall apart into random thermal motion. That's why I've been harping on this point: whenever you talk about individual gyron behavior, you describe something that corresponds perfectly well to ideal gas kinetic theory. When you talk about large numbers of gyrons, though, you feel free to invent new behaviors and justify them by talking about collision angles and energies. Sorry, kinetic theory includes the consequences of scattering angles and energies, and there's no way to make it behave as you suggest. It's sort of like saying "I have a collection of even integers. I know that group theory tells me that any sum of even integers will be even. Nevertheless, I'm hoping to find cooperative behavior in large collections of even integers that give an odd sum." if you want the bulk behavior to deviate from the Boltzmann (etc.) equations, you really have to go through the ideal-gas derivations and show why you think gyrons are different. If you want the big difference to be the "concave shape", you have to go through the kinetic-theory derivations and see whether Boltzmann actually made a presumption about shapes being convex. If he did, then you'll have to show that Boltzmann's conclusions break down for concave shapes. If you can't find that presumption, then you're required to conclude that Boltzmann's equations *do* apply correctly to the "gyron ether"; therefore the gyron ether evolves towards high entropy; therefore vortices fall apart by viscous and other forces, leaving a uniform thermal bath; therefore it doesn't describe the universe we live in.
Also: "if there's a drain maintaining the flow"??---at some point you need to make a list of the properties of your theory. In one column, list the "obvious" (obvious to you) properties of your system: "all gyrons are the same", "needle-like ones collide less often than random ones", "individual gyrons obey Newtonian kinematics". Then make another column listing the "needed" properties of your system: you "need" vortices to somehow spit out needle-like gyrons. You "need" them to have a bizarre sort of macro/microscopic thermal equilibrium with the ether. You "need" vortices to somehow be stable indefinitely. You "need" vortices to plow losslessly through the ether. You "need" inter-vortex forces to be compressed at ether high speeds to give Fitzgerald-Lorentz contractions. You "need" diffusion-equation vacuum collisions to cause constant accelerations akin to gravity ... and so on. It seems that your gyron vortices are expected to violate kinetic-theory behavior more often than they obey it---in other words, there's virtually nothing in your theory that is derived straightforwardly from the behavior of the gyrons! There are very few "Here is how we expect gyrons to behave---and here is the physical phenomenon that results" aspects of the theory. Every aspect works out backwards: "Here is how things behave macroscopically---I suppose that must correspond to the Nth emergent property of gyron vortices, even though it appears to contradict the microscopic behavior." If you replace the word "vortex" with "leprechaun" throughout this discussion, the theory has just about the same predictive power. Bm gub 01:04, 14 September 2006 (UTC)
Actually, the theory does predict, for one thing, that gravity falls off somewhat faster than 1/r^2 (at least at galactic distances), owing to the eventual return of GGs to tumbling mode, though I grant you that, for me, the appeal is mostly its explanatory power (charge effects are due to pressure changes, gravity to more frequent collisions from one direction, etc.) I hope the above comments have persuaded you that the theory is somewhat more tenable than "the leprechaun did it"!

I've asked Dr. Meno to post, on one of his websites, his two-page derivation of photon structure, which is expressed in classical, Maxwellian field theory, so that you'll be able to judge whether he has solved that problem or not, while also maintaining your Wikipedia anonymity. I'll let you know where it is, if and when he gets it posted.

He needn't bother---I'm not likely to read it, unfortunately. I've leapt upon the "gyron vortex" thing because it's wrong in an interesting and straightforward way; I'm sure Dr. Meno has amassed many other derivations (some correct, some incorrect) over his years of work. 18.4.2.3 14:33, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
It may be just as well. I've already asked an expert in classical EM theory here at Pitt to take a look at it. Maybe something will come of that, though he has had it for two months now (!). But I, for one, am still not convinced that there's anything irrevocably wrong with the theory. You're right, of course, that it won't do to always haul out "the as-yet-undetermined properties of the vortex" to answer all questions, but that seems to be where the theory is stuck at the moment.
Frank suggested I post his two-page derivation of the photon here, which I'll try to do as a pdf. It's here at Wiki under "Image:Photonstructure.pdf". Download and examine it if you find the time and interest. (Or, better yet, download it now and examine it later, as it may not stay up, owing to my inability to give it a proper copyright designation.)
Downloaded, whether to be read of not I don't know. You probably ought to "speedy delete" it yourself; Wikipedia is not meant to be a personal fileserver. 18.109.6.3 17:21, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Further Discussion, part II

I gather, "Bm gub," from your most recent time stamp, that you're in Geneva at CERN at the moment, probably killing time between experimental runs. Thanks. I continue to appreciate the helpful discussion! Ooops. I just noticed that my own time stamp came out as 8:51pm, and it's only 4:51 my time. Never mind!!

I'll try to come to grips with your ideal gas ideas, but one kinetically important realization I had this morning, which I confirmed with Dr. Meno by phone, is that the orbiting vortex gyrons must maintain a constant phase relationship between their precession speed and orbital speed, such that their "northern tip" is always pointed somewhat away from the vortex axis except when it crosses the equator, at which time it's merely tilted, but not pointing toward or away from the vortex axis. In other words, its northern tip is almost always further away from the axis than its southern tip, and when it crosses from North to South, it precesses in phase with its rotation. This insures that their collisions with the net-inflowing vacuum gyrons are always such as to push them in the direction of the twisted toroidal flow pattern. Thus, when they come out of the top (North pole), they're tilted radially away, and the collisions that tend to come in from the top will push them down slightly and out to the side. Once out on the side at the equator, their net collisions push them radially inward. They continue their trajectory downward and inward, and when they get into the southern hemisphere, they've orbited and precessed such that their northern tip is still tilted away from the axis a bit, and now the net amount of collisions coming in from the bottom direct them inward and upward, back toward the vortex's central funnel. On top of this, they have a slight tilt of their northern tip clockwise, looking down from the North (for a clockwise rotating vortex), and their slight concave shape insures that the net collisions with vacuum gyrons tend to hit them on either their outward tips (and thus tending to propel them back into the vortex), or along the half of their length closest to the vortex center. (The somewhat bulbous tip of the gyron shields its outermost half to some extent from collisions. This plays a role mostly for the gyrons that precess at a small angle.)

I understand that this is how you want the gyrons to behave, and how you need them to behave in order to imagine that they stay in stable vortexes. You have a very clear picture of how you want them to go around---this one gets hit from below and goes up here, this one precesses around to avoid thus-and-such collision---but your understanding of the forces involved is very sketchy.
You have to grasp not the idea that the "incoming" gyrons---the ones whose final states you want to specify very precisely---are coming in with a *thermal* distribution. They're entering at all possible angles, energies, orientations, and impact parameters. If they're capable of spinning, which you regard as very important, the thermal distribution will contain a mixture of all possible spin orientations and angular momenta. Your carefully-imagined scattering angles only have a hope of being correct for certain incident angles, energies, and orientations. Please think things through for an ensemble of random initial angles, at the very least, and don't forget about the momentum transfer! Going back to proveable facts: there is no way to take a bunch of randomly-oriented, randomly-positioned projectiles, scatter them, and end up with something organized, no matter how cleverly shaped the scatterer is! (This is called "Liouville's Theorem", which demonstrating a phase space density conservation law for conservative processes.) Your gyron
You've still shown no hint that you or Dr. Meno are thinking about what particle-particle collisions look like! For example, saying that he bulbous tip "shields" the gyron---no it doesn't! A collision with the bulbous tip will still alter the energy and momentum (and direction) of both particles! You've made no mention whatsoever of energy and momentum---surely Dr. Meno realizes that two-particle scattering events conserve linear momentum, no matter what bizarre shapes and spins he assigns to the particles? And that when you add a random number (say, a thermal momentum vector) to a determinate number (say, a vortex-specific momentum vector), the result is not completely determinate?

I don't regard all these seeming constrictions as confining the phase space, however, because whatever position and precession angle the gyrons tend to come out of the north pole at, so long as that northern tip is pointed away a bit, will tend to result in collisions that propel them along the proper flow pattern. If they've just entered the vortex, and are still mostly in the twirling mode (with a large precession angle -- I'm defining 0o to be a perfectly spinning top, and 90o to be a top spinning on its side), then it'll tend to get hit downward more forcefully than outwardly, and will tend to stay closer to the vortex equator. The ones that have a tiny precession angle, and are almost ready to be lauched as GGs, will have much bigger orbits, that extend much further away from the equator. (It's very reminiscent of a type of π-orbital for the electron, where there are lobes above and below, and an annulus in the center. Roger Penrose's twistor seems even closer to what I'm picturing. There's an illustration about half-way down the following page, of "a time-slice of a Robinson congruence": http://users.ox.ac.uk/~tweb/00001/index.shtml.)

Two things: one, you may need to read up on "phase space" and what it means. Secondly: again, I appreciate that you have a very clear picture in your head of the shape and organization of an organized "swirling" motion. From that mental-picture, you're working backwards---figuring out where particles need to be to stay in the motion, and then rationalizing ways for the particles to get there. It sounds like you want some position-angle correlations in your vortex---you attribute it to "precession", but you don't have a good grasp of what precession is, or what is causing it, or whether collisions can organize it in the way you want. You want "orbits" for certain particles, but you don't have a model for how thermal collisions can apply forces to organize such an orbit. You want collisions to "propel the particles" along the "proper flow"---forgetting that the propulsion must come from *randomly* oriented, randomly directed particles, and that the propulsion would have to correctly specify both the final-state direction and the gyron's orientation. You want particles to "get hit downward more forcefully than outwardly"---do the incoming particles know which way is "down"? It appears to me that, on a more basic level, you're imagining that things get "swept up" into the "common flow". Well, sweeping up is an act of momentum transfer. It *is* possible for a flow to "incorporate" a formerly-random particle, but the new particle's momentum-change comes from an overall momentum loss by everything else. Every time a flow "sweeps up" a new particle, it becomes less flow-like and more thermalized.
Again, I regret the need to discuss this in terms of angles and individual scattering. You'd probably be amused to try to talk reason with, e.g., a perpetual-motion-machine inventor. They always have a explanation for how the parts of their machines move---"First, the knocker hits the magnet. The magnet falls and hits the paddlewheel which turns the screw" --- but they've never quite done the math all the way around the circle, nor thought about the conservation laws which (in effect) summarize all such math. Mr. Kyriazi, if you can convince yourself that gyrons are indeed subject to the laws of thermodynamics, you'll see that a great many of your proposed vortex behaviors---frictionless vortex motion, frictionless propagation through space, self-organized ejection of spinning GGs, "heatless" absorbtion of gravity particles, etc.---are impossible. All of your angle/precession/etc. arguments are interesting, but all together they're about as reliable as the inventor's specification of which-magnet-falls-on-which-hammer. They're the first step of a chain of calculations which will (after just a few steps) be summarized by the laws of thermodynamics. Anyway, I'm glad to see (below) that you're beginning to look into formal statistical mechanics. 18.109.5.182 13:31, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

Regarding your point about needing to determine the fraction of collisions that knock vortex gyrons out, the fraction that send vacuum gyrons into the flow pattern, the relative sizes of the phase spaces, etc., I think this concavity (for the reason described above), along with the gyroscopic nature of the particles (which makes the ones spinning rapidly along their axis much more resistant to reorientation than the tumbling ones) changes their behavior in fundamental ways that I doubt Boltzmann or Maxwell considered, but I need to get a better handle on their assumptions and derivations, and the kinetics of ideal gases in general, before I can say anything for sure.

Well, actually, I just took a peek at a derivation of the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution here at Wikipedia, and it considers the ideal gas particles' momentum in the x, y, and z directions, but has no factors at all for angular momentum, which tells me right away that a gas of gyrons may behave very differently than their theory would predict. (Neither could I find any angular momentum factors in the Boltzmann equation.) Boltzmann also seems to have relied on an assumption called "molecular chaos," (also described here in Wikipedia) in which "the velocities of colliding particles are uncorrelated, and independent of position." This also seems not to hold for gyron collisions, as GGs would only tend to interact with other very high speed Gs found in the vortices (although that's more of a gravity thing, not a vortex stability or E&M thing). Gyrons are as anisotropic a particle as one can imagine (basically they're a line - Meno tells me he has estimated their length-to-width ratio at 330:1), so their collision rates are highly influenced by their translational speed, angular momentum, degree of precession, and relationship between their translational and spin axes. This means that their mean free path varies greatly according to the latter relation. GGs have the longest mean free path, gyrons whose line of travel is in their tumbling plane would be next (their interactional cross-section looks like a "ghostly" line, varying from a dot to a line of gyron length), and ones that tumble in a plane perpendicular to their direction of linear motion present a "ghostly" circular cross-section. (BTW, I estimated the tumbling gyrons' average rotation rate today, and it's an incredible 6x10^42 Hz!) I've been thinking all along that GGs are way off by themselves at the upper end of the translational speed distribution (with an average speed of at least 200,000,000 x c, according to a theoretical treatment of Le Sage-type gravity by LaPlace), in an extreme bimodal distribution, with vacuum gyrons having a Gaussian distribution centered near c.

I see below that you've learned a bit more about this. The main effect of angular momentum is to increase the heat capacity of the gas: the quantity called "adiabatic index" is 1.66 (5/3) for monatomic gases, 1.4 (7/5) for molecules that can rotate, 1.3 and lower for molecules that can both rotate and vibrate, etc., asymptotically approaching 1 for molecules with many internal vibration/bending/excitation modes. It's certainly a normal feature of kinetic theory and does not change any of the conclusions. The questions you'll be interested in are a) the kinetic basis of viscosity, which will tell you whether your vortexes will hold together and b) the counting-of-states meaning of entropy.
On the topic of Molecular chaos: this condition is used to describe a gas at equilibrium, which is when it will have the Maxwell-Boltzmann distributions. The distribution does not hold true for any cases of flow, shear, sound waves, strong temperature gradients, etc., which is the situation in your hypothetical vortices.

Thanks for straightening me out on the correct use of the phrase "terminal velocity" (makes sense), and pointing out the difference between a planet's surface gravitational acceleration and escape velocity. I suppose Saturn has much more mass but much lower density than the earth, putting its surface out much further, which would account for the similar gravitational acceleration (way out at its gassy surface), but 3-fold higher escape velocity. hkyriazi 23:53, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

On the gravity issue, let me refocus your (and Dr. Meno's) attention on the most relevant question: you should consider the microscopic view of a particle embedded in your "flow", wherever the flow came from. You have to figure out the actual force on the particle---a particle at position x, velocity v, acceleration a0, gets hit A times per second from direction Y, and B times from direction Z, etc., with each collision transfering vector momentum P and scalar energy E, yielding a net force F(x,v,a0)---and see whether that force law agrees with experiments. This exercise may also help you understand whether your "extra energy is radiated as GGs" idea requires leprechauns or not.  :) As far as I can tell, you're still stuck with a diffusion-based flow which varies as 1/r^2, but which leads not to F=-GMm/r^2, but to F = GMm (v-1/r^2) at best. 18.109.5.182 13:31, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] A few more comments by Kyriazi

A few more comments, after having done more reading and thinking. First of all, it seems that Clausius actually did consider angular (and vibrational) motions of his gas molecules, and later efforts talk about various degrees of freedom in the movement of monatomic vs. diatomic gases, for example. So, I'll have to find a good thermodynamics textbook and read up on it. Secondly, in brushing up on thermodynamics (which I last visited formally in college 32 years ago!), I've realized that our proposed theory does indeed violate various thermodynamic laws, such as the notion that the entropy of a closed system that engages in heat exchange must constantly be increasing, and that there can be no perpetual motion machine: the universe, according to Meno's theory, maintains a constant amount of order despite large scale heat exchange, and itself promises to be in perpetual motion. I suppose that even in Meno's theory one can consider that the current universe may have simply already reached its state of maximal entropy (and minimum state of order), but that's a very different animal than the "heat death" of the universe predicted by thermodynamics. (Although, I myself have always felt that this latter prediction is totally invalidated by gravitation attraction, which can reorder the universe by a "Big Crunch.") As Cyrano de Bergerac once said, however, "This news fails to disquiet me."hkyriazi 00:34, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

A few comments. My preferred stat mech textbook is Reif, "Fundamentals of Statistical and Thermal Physics". I agree that your theory violates the laws of entropy; however, it's indeed confusing to think about this issue for "the whole Universe". You might prefer to think about it for, say, an isolated collection of atoms (isolated in whatever way you like.) This is not a "closed" system, but rather a system in contact with a thermal bath, for which there are also well-defined laws. The most obvious laws violated are a) that your vortices (i.e. the macroscopic temperature) is not in equilibrium with, and not at the same temperature as, the vacuum gyrons, although they apparently exchange energy with them; b) that your vortices themselves are pockets of lowered entropy, and c) that you're using thermal energy to drive the creation of high-energy, low-entropy GGs, i.e. running a lossless heat engine.
Universal gravitational attraction does not by itself decrease entropy in a Big Crunch. In classical gravity, a collapsing universe does not lead to a black hole, but rather to an extremely hot final ball of gas. The entropy of this ball is higher than the entropy of the stuff that fell into it, in just the way the laws predict. Also, note that a Big Crunch is not an automatic consequence of attractive gravity; it's a consequence of attractive gravity only for collections of masses in which nothing exceeds the escape velocity. If your expanding universe exceeds its escape velocity, it does not "crunch" but rather goes on to the famous "heat death".
It is General Relativity, not classical gravity, that requires that "big crunches" turn into (essentially) black holes. At first glance, a black hole appears to be low-entropy---there's just one of it, right?---but entropy clearly does not simply "go away" in the way that, e.g., perpetual-motion inventors want it to: you do not see a bunch of disordered particles spontaneously cool and order themselves. Entropy sort of goes away because GR's warped spacetime sort of wraps up phase-space and puts it out of sight. If you drop a bunch of gas into a black hole, the last time you see it it will be very, very hot, and very-high entropy; this entropy seems to be embedded in the black hole's event horizon in a way that obeys the laws of thermodynamics perfectly well. 18.109.5.182 14:07, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Brief comment by Kyriazi

Thanks again, "Bm gub." You've given me much to think (and learn) about, and I continue to appreciate the clarity of your writing.

I wish only to make two comments at the moment. One, when I wrote about the bulbous end of a precessing gyron (that's participating in the vortex flow pattern) shielding its outer half from collisions from the inward thermal gradient, what I meant was that the net motion flow from the outside (owing to the cooling of the aether caused by the vortex's ejection of high-velocity GGs) tends to cause hits to occur on either the gyron's outer end (pushing it back toward the center of the vortex, and also tending to make it spin less straight), or on their inner half -- the bulb shields the concavely curved outer half to some extent. The point there was that the net surplus of such collisions would tend to straighten out the spinning tops, and that collisions would tend to be made there rather than at the tip, resulting in a net straightening out of the spinning tops. (There's a balancing act here, which I may be able to figure out using simple models, to decide whether the precession angle-increasing effect of tip collisions is overcompensated by the angle-decreasing effect of more inner half collisions.) So, I am thinking about gyron-gyron collisions in a statistical way. But, the collisions would be much more complicated than that type of analysis would indicate. For example, there will undoubtedly be some collisions that result in double hits, and it is in such cases that I'm afraid ordinary statistical mechanics will fail. Maybe considerations of rotational and vibrational motion would capture the dynamics adequately, but Dr. Meno thinks not, which leads me right into comment #2.

Secondly, Dr. Meno tells me that both Maxwell and Boltzmann dealt only with spherical particles, and that others have dealt with elliptical ones, but that no one has solved the problem for the kinetics of concave (dumbbell-shaped) particles. Perhaps your suggested textbook will fill me in on this dispute. hkyriazi 16:03, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

Equilibrium conditions in ideal gases are entirely independent of shape---due, in part, as you may have surmised, to the "molecular chaos" conditions, which establish that all of the angles/velocities/positions are randomized; it doesn't matter if, e.g., "every collision leads to a 90 degree deflection" if the initial orientations are random. The details of non-equilibrium kinetics depend very weakly on the particle shape---see, for example, the "acentric factor" which appears in the Peng-Robinson equation of state, generally with very small effects, and which corresponds somewhat to oblateness. But we're not talking about the details of kinetics---I would not pretend to offer a numerical estimate of, e.g., shock compression, in a gas of arbitrarily-shaped particles---we're talking about whether the viscosity is zero or not in a gyron gas (!), whether gyron vortexes have lower or higher entropy than random thermal gas (!). You can solve the former, I believe, without even specifying the particle shape. Take a look at Reif, section 14.8, where he derives the viscosity of an ideal gas. You can make the cross section whatever you want---"particles at angle Ai see a target of size X(Ai,Af) steering them into angle Af"---which is integrated into an effective cross-section (equation 14.8.21). Double-hits, concavity, etc., will all just be details of the configurations over which you integrate. If you like, this can be a full 21-dimensional integral (I think---six position angles, one impact parameter, one velocity, six angular momenta for the initial and final states, minus seven conserved quantities) in which you specify whatever collision dynamics you want: "Collisions at thus-and-such angle result in double hits, so the end state is at thus-and-such spin and velocity" is a perfectly normal thing to include in such an integral. Reif assumes cylindrical symmetry, but nothing else, and does so solely to reduce this to a simple 1-D integral. All of Dr. Meno's careful shape-calculations, if he chooses to do them, should disappear into his version of the integral; certainly its numerical value will be different for spheres, sticks, dumbells, or leprechauns, but it'll still be a nonzero number which carries through into a nonzero viscosity (in Equation 14.8.30).
None of the entropy arguments depend on particle shape at all---nor, indeed, on the existence of moving particles, Newton's Laws, or anything else. They're a very general property of systems with a large number of interacting degrees of freedom. I suspect the exact condition is "interacting degrees of freedom which exchange an additive conserved quantity", or something like that. 18.109.6.3 17:52, 18 September 2006 (UTC)
Finally, I dare say that's as much time as I have to devote to this discussion. I'll check back here occasionally and will be willing to point you in the right direction if you need help. I hope I've given you a lot to think about. Perhaps the main thing to be learned is: there's very little room for saying "I'm not 100% sure how this works, or I haven't solved it completely, but maybe I can assume it works the way it needs to." Physics has been around for a long time; it's solved a lot of specific cases very accurately; it's developed a lot of very useful general laws to constrain unsolved cases. Applying these laws is much, much quicker---and infinitely more accurate---than guessing how things will work, mentally sort-of-adding up forces, inventing effects to cancel one another, etc. It's also quite elegant stuff sometimes, and a joy to learn and to apply. Good luck. Bm gub 00:24, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Thank you note to "Bm gub"

Thanks for the constructive comments. I think we've pretty much wrapped it up for now, anyway. I checked 4 thermodynamics texts out of our engineering library yesterday, including your favorite, by Reif. Interestingly, one ("The Kinetic Theory of Gases") of them is from 1927 by a fellow named Leonard Loeb, who was a student of Millikan, and who was a young man when physics was undergoing the huge paradigm shift away from mechanical aether theories, toward relativity theory and quantum mechanics. His intro is about as poignant as one can get in a physics text, about mankind's previous search for "explanations" (he really put it in quotations!) perhaps being a "mental immaturity" that we'll have to outgrow, just as previous generations had to outgrow the even greater immaturity of asking "the ultimate 'why'." hkyriazi 21:15, 19 September 2006 (UTC)