A Revised Planck Scale?

Thus spake "
wrote:

So if you want to argue that a proton is a black hole, but with a higher
value of Newton's constant, this is observationally testable, and very
clearly fails the tests. If you are instead merely making a rough analogy,
I see no reason that you should use an equation for angular momentum that
was defined very specifically for black holes: if a proton isn't really a
black hole, why should that relation, and not any of the other properties
of a black hole, continue to hold?


Your arguments are convincing if the assumptions upon which they are
based are unquestionably correct. These assumptions a

(1) the *theoretical* interpretation of particle scattering experiments
is virtually infallible,

Well it is pretty damned good. Theories which do away with quarks, for
example, are a definite non-starter.

(2) the Nobel prize committee does not make mistakes,

It is not down to just the Nobel prize committee to examine the
evidence. This has been done by literally thousands of physicists. You
cannot ignore the evidence for quarks unless you have no concern as to
whether your theory is empirically valid. In that case it is not physics
at all.

(3) that we have a complete and error-free knowledge of K-N black
holes,

Kerr-Newmann black holes are a theoretical idea, not an empirical fact.
As such we know exactly and precisely what they are. They are that which
is described in the mathematical theory of general relativity. We also
know that we have not quantum description of such a thing. That would
be needed to discuss a proton. Asserting that protons are K-N black
holes is like asserting that "green ideas sleep furiously" (Chomsky).
The words simply do not go together.


But consider the following.

A. Standard particle physics gets the vacuum energy density *wrong* by
120 orders of magnitude!!

This is sometimes said, but it isn't actually true. One might claim that
it gets the vacuum energy density infinite, so that it is wrong by an
infinite order of magnitude. As I understand, the idea that it is at
least 120 orders of magnitude comes from making an error correction to
this infinity. But this entire argument does not hold up if the vacuum
energy density is analysed a bit more thoroughly. The ultraviolet
divergence has its root in the misuse of Wick's theorem, as shown in
Scharf, Finite Quantum Electrodynamics. It is a problem in the maths,
not in the physics. The only way to treat the vacuum energy density is
to exclude it altogether. What the argument really shows is that vacuum
energy density is not responsible for the cosmological constant. The
cosmological constant remains unexplained, but that is a different issue
altogether.

B. I believe that when the Planck length (and the Planck Scale, in
general) is recalculated without theoretical bias, but rather on an
*empirical* basis, it will be found that the standard particle physics
estimate is off by 20 orders of magnitude! See astro-ph/0701006 and
physics/0701132 at www.arxiv.org for discussions related to this issue.

Given these theoretical shortcomings,

The only shortcoming appears to be a speculative disagreement prefaced
by personal belief. Where is the science?

why should we have so much
confidence in the contention that standard particle physics can
accurately describe the proton on scales of less than 2 x 10^-13 cm?

Because empirically it does.


Regards

--
Charles Francis
substitute charles for NotI to email