Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum What?s Normal About Renormalization?

Good argument Uncle Al, however, according to my viewpoint, it is based on the wrong paradigm. The argument that there are vacuum fluctuations is, at least to me, suspect. The Casimir force can also be explained as a van der Waal's interaction. Furthermore, the real origin of spin has not been explained by Dirac's equation. The latter solution derived by Dirac for the free electron is nothing more than a mathematical trick. This will be treated in one of my forthcoming papers.

The more important point you are making is the uncertainties in momentum and position. When you calculate a time-independent wave that represents an electron, you still get uncertainties in position and momentum; however, relative to what is this wave time-independent. The "particle" is NOT a photon, so that the wave must be time independent relative to an inertial reference frame. The actual momentum of an electron is not, like that of a photon, invariant relative to different inertial reference frames, but depends from which inertial reference frame an electron is observed; i.e. the momentum can have many values, and this has NOTHING to do with uncertainty but relates totally to relativity. So what has the uncertainty in "momentum" within an inertial reference frame relative to which the wave is time-independent and stationary got to do with the momentum of an electron? NOTHING. It should not be interpreted as momentum. It only gives the size of the wave in k-space; hbar should not have been attached to this k-vector. Momentum only manifests when the electron moves relative to the observer and this requires the wave representing the electron to also move relative to the observer: i.e. THE WAVE HAS TO BE TIME-DEPENDENT!! In order to interpret the uncertainty in k as an uncertainty in momentum requires a unique stationary inertial reference frame; we know from Einstein that such a thing does not exist.

Thus, Heisenberg's interpretation of his uncertainty relationship violates relativity. All Heisenberg's relationship really implies is that when the wave encounters new boundary conditions in position space it will morph in such a way as to adhere to this relationship between position and k-space. This is universally true for all waves.

How to isolate an electron? It is only a problem when one erroneously assume that an electron is a "point-particle". I believe that a "point" only exists in Plato's mathematical universe. The electron is not a "point-particle" but a wave that occupies a volume in space. Furthermore the "essence of the electron" is contained within a region that does not include the parts of the wave that can act as "tunnelling tails" (in the case of the s-orbital of a hydrogen atom the essence of the electron lies within the van der Waals radius of the hydrogen atom). It only acts like a point particle under the conditions where its centre of mass plays a role; i.e. when the wave is "observed" from outside the "essence-volume"; i.e. the volume which does not include the tunnelling tails.