Order "The Stand-Up Physicist said..." t-shirt!

...and then pay

An Explanation

The Stand-Up Physicist is Doug Sweetser, a fellow doing theoretical physics in his basement, reaching out via YouTube videos. He has tried to publish these very equations, but one journal thought they were too radical (the quaternions and hypercomplex products) while another thought it was too conservative (using Lagrangians, how dull). With the power of the free market, the equations can be worn by free thinkers!

The math on this t-shirt has aspirations to unify the four known forces into one. The widely worn "And God Said [the Maxwell equations] and there was light" describes how light, electricity, and magnetism play with each other in the heavens. Newton's law for gravity and Coulomb's law for electrostatics are so similiar, everyone who first learns them thinks that linking the two should be easy. Yet all efforts since the mid 1700s have failed to do so. The solution must be tricky!

The Higgs is a particle that according to a hypothesis known as the standard model, is one of ways that particles gain mass. It is a Mexican hat trick that gives particles mass without breaking the symmetries behind the electric, weak, and strong forces. Breaking electric charge symmetry would be very bad since that would mean electric charge did not have to be conserved, yet precise experiments have always shown that eletric charge is always conserved. Physicist are spending up to $10 billion dollars on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to see if they can spot the Higgs. The Higgs is the only way they know how to keeps the symmetries while adding in mass.

The Stand-Up Physicists tips his hat to the grand experiment being conducted at the LHC. However, the writing on the back of the shirt says directly there is no need for the Higgs boson if gravity and the standard model are brought together correctly.

What is the secrete trick? Gravity is the "I love you" force, no matter who you are, no matter what you are made of. Electric forces can love, hate, or not care at all about you. There are different kinds of multiplication in Nature's tricky accounting systems. We already kind of know this: some products of numbers are areas, some make a vector longer, some things make one number out of two vectors. The product needed by gravity to be the universal love force has exactly zero minus signs in it. This is known as the hypercomplex product, and is rarely seen in the physics literature. The other forces need sign flips, and quaternions can provide that.

The symmetry needed for electromagnetism comes from the normalized quaternions (the A/|A|) since EM needs a unit circle in the complex plane and a quaternion is simply three complex numbers sharing the same real. The symmetry needed by beta decay is called the unit quaternions, and can be written as the exponential shown. The symmetry for the strong force requires 8 independent players coming from two teams of quaternions.

People well trained in mathematical physics will scratch their heads. Why the zero on the front, where is the current density? Well, if like charges attract for gravity, and repel for electric charge, then when gravity and electric charge are unified, the equation could not have a charge density, since no change density could both attract and repel.

The equation will also look familiar to the well-trained eye: it is the Maxwell equations in the Lorentz gauge, minus the terms that make up the Lorentz gauge. Curious, but in a good way. Having gauge symmetry is vital in the action, and it is interesting to see that same property inhereted in the field equations themselves.

The cynic will reject this work since it cannot be posted by The Stand-Up Physicists on the physics pre-print server, the place the most interesting, current work appears first. The pre-print server has far to much experience with crank physics, and thus can document their cynicism is justified.

For the skeptic, who has significant doubts but is willing to look at extrodinary evidence, I invite them to download a Mathematica notebook which shows explicity that the front of the t-shirt arises from applying the Euler Lagrange equations to the Lagrange density on the back of the shirt.