Farsight wrote:I haven't got it backwards, lpetrich. Look above at how we define time. We really do define it using motion. When we "measure time", what we're actually measuring, is motion. Clocks clock up motion, not time. You can't see time, you can't see time flowing, you can't see any "travel through time". Hold your hand up a metre apart. There's a gap between them. A space. You can see this. Now waggle your hands. Make them move. You can see this too. You can see space and motion through it. Hence you assign the primacy not to time, but to motion, because you can see it.

What a dumb argument. Why don't you think about what it means to see an object? It's much less simple than what you seem to think.
Also, we don't see space, any more than we see time. Seeing object separation != seeing space directly.
It can't be worked out mathematically.lpetrich wrote:Farsight, why don't you try to work it out mathematically? You won't get taken seriously unless you can do at least as well as mainstream physics in getting LOTS of VERY precise numbers.

He was overall correct, though we'd nowadays add derivatives, integrals, Lie algebras, differential geometry, etc.Galileo wrote:Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes. I mean the universe, but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. This book is written in the mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word of it, and without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth. -- The Assayer (1623)
So you want pretty pictures in your mind? How is that supposed to be "underlying reality"?Farsight wrote:Mathematical expressions are great at telling you how terms relate to one another, but they don't actually tell you what the terms really mean, and they don't give you a picture of the underlying reality.
What horse doo-doo. Quantum electrodynamics not only accounts for pair production, it also accounts for how fast it happens and the distribution of outgoing particles in it.I didn't say that. I said the electron is literally made from light, and the scientific evidence for that is pair production.lpetrich wrote:Which you interpret as meaning that electrons have tiny sort-of-gyroscopes in them.
The magnetic moment pops right out of quantum-mechanical spin and electrodynamics. In fact, it's rather straightforward to demonstrate that in the case of the Dirac equation. Farsight, can you please show us why it doesn't?Then I said the electron exhibits magnetic dipole moment, which is a display of real rotation.
In fact, the Dirac equation provides the correct lowest-order prediction of the magnetic moments of the electron and the muon. They have some additional magnetic moment that must be calculated with quantum electrodynamics and related Standard-Model theories. However, these calculations agree with observations to within vary high accuracies.
That fits in with quantum mechanics VERY well, and not at all with classical mechanics. From QM, we find that a beam of electrons or atoms/molecules/ions gets split up into several beams, each one with a different projection of the spin onto the magnetic field. In the continuous limit, those beams become a continuous fan.Then I said that the Stern-Gerlach experiment fits with two spin components in two orientations,
Farsight, you've yet to prove that quantum-mechanical spin cannot possibly cause this effect.and the Einstein-de Haas effect demonstrates that spin angular momentum is indeed of the same nature as the angular momentum of rotating bodies as conceived in classical mechanics.
All you are doing is cherry-picking and sometimes misinterpreting.You're disregarding this scientific evidence in favour of what? Other scientific evidence? No. You dismiss it in favour of what you think you know.
Irrelevant. The real question is why you seem to think that the Dirac equation is wrong.It's the first time it's come up here, and I've got to explain other simpler things first, like t and E and m and c and C and G.lpetrich wrote:Without bothering to try to explain why the Dirac equation works so well for electrons, other charged leptons, and quarks.
Good Grief! What makes a neutrino more photon-like? Why do you think that it is not some neutral electron-like particle?Yes, pesky neutrinos muddy the waters. Perhaps interestingly (or perhaps not!) nowadays I'm seeing the neutrino as more like a photon than an electron.lpetrich wrote:Neutrinos are a special case; they could follow a similar sort of equation, the Majorana equation, or they could follow a mixture of the two.