Physics on a Flat Earth

Today I want to explain what physics looks like on a Flat Earth. It looks, in fact, exactly like the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Particle physicists are finding more and more anomalies, that prove beyond reasonable doubt that in fact the Earth is Round. I have tried for ten years to explain to them that the Earth is Round, like the Emperor’s New Balls, but they just say “Emperor’s N.E.W. Bollocks!” and ignore me. They do not consider it possible that a 12-year-old child can see things they can’t see.

So, let’s begin by pointing out the obvious: the Large Hadron Collider is a Large Horizontal Collider. It is flat. Almost all other experiments are horizontal. More or less the only ones that are not are the neutrino experiments, that measure neutrinos fired through the Earth from one side to another. All such neutrino experiments produce anomalies, called neutrino oscillations. The neutrinos don’t come out the same as they went in. This anomaly contradicted the Standard Model at the time, so they added neutrino masses to the model, and pretended everything was hunky-dory. But it’s not, because they can’t measure these predicted masses.

But I’m jumping the gun here, let’s go back to 1887, and the Michelson-Morley experiment. This experiment is usually explained as a measurement of the speed of light, but actually it was a search for Dark Matter (luminiferous aether). Like all other dark matter searches since then, they didn’t find any. They were expecting to see a difference between the speed of light measured in different directions at different times of year, but didn’t find any. So after that people started to assume that the speed of light was the same in all directions at all times and in all places. But they haven’t tested that properly, and in fact it is false, as detections of gravitational lensing of light from distant galaxies demonstrates.

Essentially, this demonstrates a failure of the scientific method, because the Michelson-Morley experiment predicted this phenomenon, which means it cannot also be used to test it. This applies not only to the original experiment, but to every subsequent experiment that tests essentially the same thing. And since the Michelson-Morley experiment was a horizontal experiment, you must at the very least test it vertically as well. The same applies to particle physics experiments, like the kaon decay experiments, the muon gyromagnetic ratio experiments, and the rest. You must test your conclusions vertically as well as horizontally if you want to use them vertically as well as horizontally. You don’t test your car on a road and then assume it can fly, do you? So why do particle physicists assume their cars can fly?

So let’s get back to Michelson-Morley, and the theoretical analysis of it. Let’s suppose that it actually has been tested well enough horizontally, and that it makes sense to assume the speed of light is the same North-South as East-West, and anywhere in between. Then you get Lorentz to work out the transformations and you build a symmetry group SO(2,1) on the two horizontal directions and time, and everything works out nicely. And then you find that you get a dual action of SO(2,1) on momentum and energy, and then you write SO(2,1) as 2×2 matrices acting by conjugation on another 2×2 matrix, and then there’s a scalar matrix which represents the mass, and the mass is the same for all Flatland observers, so mass is nice, and it looks like the square root of a determinant in the matrices, and the square root of a metric on the SO(2,1) spacetime Flatland, so you think these things aer equivalent, and off you go.

Then you pretend you know what happens in the third dimension as well, even though you really shouldn’t do this without testing it first. Now you have a problem: if you work with the metric, then you extend from SO(2,1) to SO(3,1); but if you work with the matrices, the you extend from GL(2,R) to GL(3,R). You cannot translate from one to the other, because there is no translation. You need to square root the metric, but cube root the determinant. Which one is right? This is a serious question, and a serious difficulty. The problem, though, is that nobody ever asked this question. They just assumed the metric was correct and went with that. Unfortunately, the metric is not correct. The determinant is correct.

Well, they pretended to test the model vertically. The measured muons falling through the atmosphere, at very high speed, and said, aha, these muons live much longer than the ones we make in the laboratory, that proves it. Not really. These muons weigh much less up in the atmosphere, and they are essentially in freefall, hitting very little on the way down, and carrying a huge amount of energy so they just smash everything out of the way anyway. It is only when they sit still that they lose energy and decay. If you use the correct GL(3,R) model, you have to work with the 3-dimensional weight vector in order to calculate the mass, and you get a completely different answer for vertical muons than you get for horizontal muons. That’s a fact, and it has been detected in the muon g-2 experiments, where their muons are almost perfectly horizontal – but the vertical direction changes from one side of the experiment to the other, and you cannot keep a perfect circle perfectly horizontal unless you live on a Flat Earth. That’s the experimental anomaly – their prediction is correct on a Flat Earth, but nature abhors a flat earth.

Einstein used the metric to devise his theory of gravity. He did not use the determinant. Therefore his theory of gravity is a Flatlander’s theory of gravity. It may work quite well sometimes, but it is based on the assumption that the Earth is Flat, so it will fail at some point. And when it fails, it will fail spectacularly. Or to put it more accurately, when it failed it failed spectacularly. Unfortunately, not many people accept that it has failed at all. A very large number of Republicans refuse to accept that Trump lost the 2020 election. The Democrats (particle physicists) of course would be very happy if Trump lost, and particle physics could rule the world. But the political system is so bizarre, that the particle physicists and the relativists are locked in continual combat, so that no progress can ever be made. Relativists continue to defend the indefensible, string theorists invent ever more ridiculous theories of aliens, gods pushing the Sun and Moon around, etc etc,

But this isn’t a political debate, and the particle physicists are just as bad – they also live on a Flat Earth. Let us see how they describe the decay of a neutron. They start off with a group U(2). When I was a student, U2 was a boy band, not a rock group, and certainly not a Lie group. Anyway, U(2) is just the wrong name for the group they actually use, which is GL(2,R). Exactly the same as the group that should be used for special relativity in 2 dimensions. At this point they go to extreme lengths to ensure that they cannot confuse these two copies of GL(2,R), one of which they mangle into SO(3,1) and call SL(2,C), and the other of which they call U(2). But actually, if you do the mathematics properly in Hamiltonian phase space, they are in fact the same group. How do I know that? I read up the experiments. The Wu experiment that put radioactive cobalt-60 in a magnetic field at about 1/1000 of a degree above absolute zero detected that the electrons came out in a specific direction relative to the magnetic field. Awesome. That means that the direction of the gravitational field that defines the group GL(2,R) for light and electromagnetic fields is the same direction that defines the group GL(2,R) for beta decay.

Well, not quite. It’s a bit more complicated if you work in 3-dimensional space rather than just 2 dimensions. Both groups sit inside GL(3,R), in a related way. That means that between them they break the symmetry between the three directions in space. This is what particle physicists call chirality. But what it means in terms of the directions up/down, North/South and East/West is that if you turn yourself upside down, then either you face in the opposite direction from before, or you’ve swapped your left with your right. Or if you want to swap left with right, you either have to turn round and go backwards, or turn upside down. But the particle physicists’ problem is, how do you tell left from right in an absolute sense? They think that beta decay answers this question. But they are wrong, because they have forgotten to couple to the gravitational field. The masses of the proton and neutron are almost but not quite equal. You can therefore detect the chirality of beta decay because it couples to the chirality of the tidal forces of the Sun and the Moon caused by the rotation of the Earth.

There’s much more where this came from. I could write a book about it. Perhaps I will one day. Perhaps I already have. But the Sun is shining, and I want to go outside and feel its electromagnetic field as well as its gravitational field.