How did Einstein arrive at E=mc^2?

What are the minimum and maximum electrical charges of a photon and of an electron?

In physics, photons don’t have charge and an electron has (amazingly) exactly 1 electron volt.
{{ seems suspiciously like Intelligent Design to me…hmm…}}

Sorry for continuing to ask silly questions James (I got that Joule-joke the first time though)
I am just curious as to the type of changes that happen between an electron and a photon.

How does the energy of a photon amount to electrical charge in an electron? What exactly is electrical charge?

Well, before I get into another lengthy and boring lecture on Rational Metaphysics, I need to know whether, when speaking to me, you are asking of the physics or of the Truth. Physics can only determine measurements between the measured. Science is an effort to reverse engineer nature using nature. Rational Metaphysics is the mental engineering of nature taken from the Genesis approach, starting from “nothing” and building up to what can be measured.

But then realize also that Rational Metaphysics is a mountain growing from under the sea (“subspace”) and hasn’t yet reached the surface where it meets the theories of Science and can be clearly seen.

In physics, electric charge is simply the attraction between positive and negative particles. That attraction constitutes a “field” involving distance and volume. Physics can’t tell you why anything is so, but only that it is so (after they give “names to the creatures/creations of the field”). They give you the names and their distinction from the other named creations. Rational Metaphysics gets into exactly why they are positive or negative and why they attract but such is a much more complicated explanation and not entirely ready for display (reached the surface of the sea).

It doesn’t. A photon might have an energy of 0.511MeV, which is the “rest energy” of an electron, but the photon has zero charge, whilst the electron charge is −1.602×10^−19 Coulombs. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron#F … properties. Energy and charge are different.

It’s a “standing electromagnetic field variation” with a particular disposition. The photon or electromagnetic wave is an electromagnetic field variation that goes past you at c. The field variation is sinusoidal, with a positive followed by a negative. If you fix this so that it’s going round and round in a stable configuration where the negative field variation is on the outside, what you’ve got is a negatively charged particle.

If you want to get more fundamental, the electromagnetic wave is a wave of displacement current. A charged particle is where you’ve got an isotropic all-round spatial displacement which diminishes with distance.

In the end thats what Im interested in.

Great to hear that it’s progressing toward the surface.

Wow, that’s a great explanation. From my perspective very useful, at least. If this means that we could (if we were to distinguish categories “force” and “form”) classify electrical charge in the category of form.
That sheds a new light on the compatibility of positive and negative charges.

Is there an analogous explanation for a positive charge?

Thanks Jakob. One of the reasons I talk on forums is to try to hone the descriptions to get them as brief and clear and robust as possible. It’s nice to get some feedback that says I’m hitting the mark.

I guess so. I probably would have said geometry, but that’s “form” I suppose. But note the distinction is probably not so much between force and form as between fundamental and form. In electromagnetism there’s the electrostatic force and the magnetic force, both of which are the result of the electromagnetic field. Some would say they’re the result of charge, but charge isn’t fundamental. You can create and destroy charge via pair production and annihilation. You can liken this to angular momentum - if you’re an astronaut in space poised in front of a satellite and neither of you are spinning, it’s like there’s no charge. If you grab the satellite and spin it clockwise, you’ll find that the reaction causes you to spin anticlockwise. Angular momentum is conserved - there wasn’t any, now there is, but it nets to zero.

You could say that the positive field variation is on the outside, but it’s probably better to get a handle on the “form” of a charged particle like an electron. It’s a spin ½ particle. I think it’s something like this, with a steering-wheel spin along with a smoke-ring spin:

Reverse the direction of the arrowhead to go from an electron to a positron. That’s like going from clockwise to anticlockwise, only in three dimensions. See cybsoc.org/cybcon2008prog.htm#jw for background reading. The authors of Is the electron a photon with a toroidal topology? were at CERN for 6 years and know their stuff, but this paper has been largely overlooked. Or perhaps “studiously ignored” is closer to the mark. Funny old business is physics.

It is a paper that should be ignored. The two primary reasons that the paper is not valuable is that, while the paper can recover one aspect of the electron, the idea behind the paper is inconsistent with everything else about the election and the paper cannot explain why a photon would ever behave like the author describes.

One should not trust in a broad interpretation of the results of the paper (far beyond that actually written in the paper!) because of the argument from authority that the author of the paper worked at CERN. There are many different kinds of employees at CERN and many of them do not need to understand the physics studied there in great detail.

Here’s a similar paper that has been studiously ignored: The nature of the electron by Qiu-Hong Hu. Papers like these tend to be dissed by naysayers who don’t explain anything and instead butt in to offer platitudes like quantum mechanics surpasseth all human understanding.

If somebody doesn’t understand the relevant physics, they have to ask themselves how reasonable the physics is for that paper. They would note that this paper has only been accepted for publication in a non-professional journal that is populated by papers by non-professional physicists or by physicists publishing outside of their areas of expertise. In other words, a crank journal.

If one was interested in the sociology of jewish people, one would not look to the publications of the Klu Klux Klan. Similarly, one should not look to Physics Essays for good physics. Guilt-by-association is not always a fallacy: one should look carefully to the associations of a person if one wants to use that person as an authority.

This analogy doesn’t hold water at all. if one would be interested in the factual history of the Jews, one should certainly not ask the Jews!

Who has convinced you that the physicists society and the physicists preferred method have the authority over the workings of the universe? There is a chosen direction in which a tradition aims to explain the world and a certain code that is tied to that, and whoever does not strictly use their code is thereby disqualified - by them. Not by any objective reality.

You should re-read my post. I did not suggest that. Indeed, one should consult historians.

In this case, Farsight is attempting to make an argument from authority. If you do not accept this authority, then fine, we agree. If you only want to accept someone as an authority because they agree with what you are saying, that’s fine too, but it won’t convince anyone else.

Whinging about the shortcoming of physics doesn’t get physics done. Neither does accepting half-assed papers.

Ay, I dramatically misread that word. But does it make an essential difference?
Inside accounts of a society are necessarily biased in favor of that societies validity to continue to act as it needs to to preserve itself according to its self-image.

Not to say that an outsider necessarily has a clear perspective - but it does not seem to me that the sources Farsight presents are antagonistic toward and ignorant of the subject of physics, rather reluctant to obey to restriction to certain methods and dogma’s about expected outcomes.

I never got the impression that Farsight was appealing to authority, only that he is making a lot of sense. If he would have needed to appeal to authority to support points he makes I would have ignored those points, they would not have registered with me. The only authority is clarity.

Perfect. =D>
…well if you add… Verification. O:)

Btw, I am pretty certain that I spoke with the first guy that publicly proposed that toroid theory a few years ago, or at least one of them. He had to use 4 spacial dimensions to make it work out right so I immediately dismissed his theory, although the toroid idea could have still been valid. I suspect the paper that Farsight linked to got the idea from such a person and then applied Broglie’s and/or other more professionally accepted theories so as to get community acceptance (such is often the case).

I can’t say that the toroid idea is right or wrong (yet), but it doesn’t seem as likely as others. If the math using Maxwell’s equations works out for his toroid model, then I am certain that the precision isn’t right because the Maxwellian equations aren’t precisely right. But again, that doesn’t mean that a toroid construct is wrong. So far, I haven’t seen the need for such complexity, but then, I am starting from a very different perspective that allows for me to sometimes know for a fact that certain accepted equations cannot be precise. But often exact precision isn’t necessary for the over-all idea to be valid.

So far, I am more inclined toward the spherical form rather than the toroid.

James: You’re right to be inclined towards the spherical form, because the evidence tells us that the electron “shape” is indeed spherical. See newscientist.com/article/mg21028145.100. But consider an inflatable rubber ring. Inflate it, and the ring turns into a torus. Keep on inflating it. The torus gets fatter and fatter, and looks apple-like. Keep on inflating it, and it ends up looking spherical.

Jakob: PhysBang isn’t being straight with you here. I don’t appeal to authority, I appeal to scientific evidence. We can make an electron (along with a positron) via pair production. We start with an electromagnetic wave, and we end up with a “particle” which still has a wave nature, as demonstrated by electron diffraction. An electron has a magnetic dipole moment because it has spin. Some people will insist that spin is “intrinsic”, and is nothing to do with ordinary rotation, but what they won’t tell you about is the scientific evidence of the Einstein-de Haas effect which “demonstrates that spin angular momentum is indeed of the same nature as the angular momentum of rotating bodies as conceived in classical mechanics”. Unfortunately the people who will tell you about this struggle to get their papers into high-impact journals, because the physics they offer is seen as a threat. Then when they settle for a little-known journal, they are decried as cranks. They aren’t. The cranks are the people telling you about the multiverse, ten-dimensional branes, and hypothetical particles for which no evidence has been found even after decades.

And it isn’t just the way-out stuff that puts itself in the way of scientific progress. Here’s something to think about:

This is a depiction of annihilation. You can annihilate an electron and a positron to get light, and you can annihilate a proton and an antiproton to get light too. A proton is said to be composed of quarks and gluons, which are described as fundamental particles, see the CSIRO outreach page for more. The $64,000 dollar question is this: if all those fundamental quarks and gluons have gone, how come they’re fundamental?

In any regard, one shouldn’t get the notion that any particle is like a marble with a surface whether spinning or not. The outside of any particle must always be in flux and really more like a spinning cloud with higher and lower densities involved.

And btw, the “negative on the outside” analogy won’t hold up, despite its tempting simplicity.

And yet somehow, your only defense of your interpretation of Einstein is cherry-picked quotations while you have never bothered to actually learn the content of his theories because you cannot follow the mathematics. You cannot show that any of your fanciful suppositions are consistent with the most basic tests of the theories that you claim to employ.

In the case of these toroid papers, you want us to believe your position because actual physicists have written about it and you mention that one of them worked for CERN. This is an attempt to impress those who cannot do the physics for themselves. Since you cannot actually follow the relevant physics yourself, your only use of these papers can be to cite them as an authority for their conclusions.

This is not clarity, this is artful obfuscation.

James: yes, there are no actual surfaces. And yes, I hesitated before saying negative on the outside. It doesn’t get to the bottom of it, but it’s difficult to give a succinct and short explanation for topological charge and chirality.

I understand that whatever you’re saying in such plain terms is not meant literally, using terms that apply to human scale objects to scales where such terms do not literally apply… But then again this is the terrain where force becomes form, so it makes sense that these are half-truths, indications of reality that are not actual descriptions.

Having said that - I assume there is some truth in that description of negative on the outside. What is the greatest objection to this phrasing?

I did not have the imagine in my mind of a ball with a negatively charged coat or anything - I realize nothing like that is the case. I don’t think of electrons as solids, I generally think of matter as a certain dense condition of force, and it is clear that the electron is near the threshold between different conditions. The explanation of spin made this more concrete.