Of Tubes, Branes and Spinning Donuts

In my past posts I’ve said that an electron is a piece of string, a horn torus and that all types of matter are looped and closed hollow tubes of densely packed dots. I still think all these statements are correct. However, for all of these statements to be correct, I have to revisit the statement: “Then it hit me but not in one go. First of all I had an idea that the electron should be a toroidal helix, or a horn torus. This way the quantum of light absorbed by a Van der Waals molecule could coil into closed packages of energy.”

While I didn’t state it explicitly, I thought there would be space between the loops of string in this horn torus. That the dots would somehow fly in the open space, just hindered by dots on two sides. The idea wasn’t bad, but now that I have the idea of matter being a two-dimensional tubular surface, I finally get the parameters to accurately define an electron.

And the first thing I realize is that the electron cannot be a true horn torus any longer, because it is comprised of a discreet (= a known number) of rings of dots, packed in a similar manner as with the atomic orbital, but this time packed into a donut. This means that the inner circumference has to be the number of rings times the thickness of a dot (most probably Planck length), whereas the outer circumference is the number of rings times the thickness of a dot times the amount the packing of the dots into a hexagonal lattice increases the thickness.

However, as is often the case with new ideas, my initial idea of the packing of the moving loops of string wasn’t exactly right. At least for now it appears more logical that the strings are always linear and that the tight, hexagonal packing is what takes place in the inside bend of the electron donut and that the square packing is what takes place at the outer bend.

The distance between two moving strings is cos 30 times the diameter (D) of the dots (circles in the scheme), or √3/2 D, or ~0.866 D in the inner bend, whereas the distance between the moving strings is exactly D in the outer bend. Thus, the ratio of the distance is √3/2, or ~0.866. If I’m not badly mistaken, this means that an electron honestly looks less like a donut and more like a hula hoop, where the hole in the middle is much bigger than the thickness of the donut. Or more specifically, the when the hole is √3/2, or ~0.866 in radius, the thickness of the donut is 1 - √3/2, or ~0.134.

So here is the structure, drawn with blender, the radius from the center of the torus to the center of the ring is 0.933. Am I a 100 % sure this is the structure of an electron? Not really. But considering that before I had absolutely no idea of the structure of an electron, this is a good starting point to figure out whether I’ve gone wrong somewhere. It’s always easier to falsify a concrete claim than a vague suggestions. Vague suggestions are “not even wrong”.

And getting back to not even wrong, this is exactly the criticism of string theory and even the name of a popular book on the subject. Where this realization of electron being a tubular structure links with current string theory is in the concept of branes. According to Wikipedia:

In string theory and related theories such as supergravity theories, a brane is a physical object that generalizes the notion of a point particle to higher dimensions. Branes are dynamical objects which can propagate through spacetime according to the rules of quantum mechanics. They have mass and can have other attributes such as charge.

And here is an illustration from the Wikipedia article on the interaction of a string between to branes:

If I’m being honest, I can’t really follow what the Wikipedia says about the branes. As far as I understand it, there a mathematical reasons why these branes make sense of the observed quantum interactions.

But really, the only thing we need to take home from this, is that the concept of the surface of the electron being like a membrane (or a brane), is not far-fetched and without precedent. However, as the M-theory, where these branes were first introduce, assumes that there are extra dimensions, we have to be extremely careful not think these two approaches are identical.

But it is clear that some of the concepts that I found have parallels in M-theory. One such is the concept of compactification. According to the Wikipedia article of M-theory:

At large distances, a two-dimensional surface with one circular dimension looks one-dimensional.

This is exactly the phenomenon that had me scratching my head when I first came up with the concept of the molecular orbital being a string in a closed loop. If the molecular orbital was truly comprised of individual elementary particles (dots) moving tangentially along the orbital, there wasn’t really a good explanation as to why the trajectory of the dots could bend into a closed loop. However, if the molecular orbital is compacted in the same way, the bending of this compacted tubes make much more sense.

And returning back to the electron donut, a cool thing about the concept is that it appears to explain the spin of an electron. A fellow by the name of Daniel Walsh shows on his website how such a torus made of springs both spins and moves when individual points (shows as arrows in the below illustration) move.

This isn’t just a theoretical concept, but an actual manufacture slinky-like object, called toroflux, designed by Jochen Valett.

So, not bad at all. Seems quite promising. The best thing I like about all of this, is that I haven’t really had to claim that everyone else is wrong. This would be a sure sign of entering crackpot territory. Rather, I’ve always attempted to approach the areas where everyone else says “nobody knows”. Thus, what I say isn’t in contradiction with any clear counter-theories. Well, the exception is that I claim that there are no extra dimensions. But I don’t think I’m alone with this idea.

Comically, it was only two weeks ago, when I said:

So, after this exercise I’m convinced that I should just write what I know and try not to make too specific claims about things I know that I can’t yet explain.

But I just couldn’t leave things be. Luckily, now I have at least a slightly better grasp of the properties of the electron. I can still be wrong, but at least what I’m saying makes some sense.

The whole concept of branes is what

initiated a flurry of research activity known as the second superstring revolution.

This is the most comical thing. The only theory that I claim to be wrong, i.e. the one requiring the existence of extra dimensions, is the theory closest to what I propose.

Perhaps what I know have, is enough to finish my revision of the Counterevidence paper. The only way to know for sure is to start writing and see whether I'll still hit a wall, or not.