Are there any ideas for why a proton's radius is smaller than predicted?

He is certainly not without his own controversy, yet puzzingly, it seems most detractors of Nassim would rather draw attention every other aspect of his life rather than to address his physics.

It’s worth noting that Nassim responded in full to the reviewer’s (IV) criticisms here:

http://www.sciencedomain.org/uploads/1367411682-5-Author%20Feedback%20V1.zip

The critic’s vague review was delivered in barely 60 words which perhaps speaks more to his/her understanding of the subject than anything else.
Perhaps Nassim’s paper was published on the strength of the two favourable reviews it received?

What’s really interesting, is that Nassim’s equations put a finer point on the charge radius of the proton, prior to the most recent measurement. His paper was copyrighted a month beforehand.

See here about these sorts of “journals”.

Anyone with $30 to spend on a domain name and a few teammates to call an “editorial board” can start a open-access online publishing company with as extensive a set of journals as desired. There’s no magical oversight. Over the last decade hundreds of start-up journals have appeared with no academic reputation behind them but with plenty of potential profit. It’s a great example of the classic Internet commerce model: design a business where the content is generated by others.

The author here paid $500 to the owners of this journal-like business for them to post his Microsoft Word document on their webpage. I mean, umm…, to “cover publication expenses”.

Pasta: Thanks for digging into that a little more. I should have followed through by doing some background on the “journal” as well.

I remember once on another forum someone cited another supposedly peer reviewed article as conclusive proof that thermite was used in bringing down the WTC towers. Since the idea was absurd on it’s face but the article had all the indicia of a legit publication, I investigated and discovered the same sort of thing - a pay to publish model where the reviewers are chosen by the author.

I often see threads here and elsewhere wondering about how the general public can be so skeptical of what is well known to be proven science, but if you then stop to consider the explosion in pseudoscience that is going to such lengths to masquerade as the real thing, and doing so somewhat successfully in many circles, it’s hard not to have a certain amount of empathy.

Anyway, thanks again. :slight_smile:

Interesting, but how does it speak to the quality of the material published by Sciencedomain International?

The chief editors of Physical Review and Research International (where Nassim’s paper was published) are as follows:

[ul]
[li]Prof. David F. Mota, Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Oslo, Norway[/li]
[li]Prof. Stefano Moretti, School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Southampton, UK[/li]
[li]Prof. Christian Brosseau, Distinguished Professor, Department of Physics, Université de Bretagne Occidentale, France[/li]
[li]Dr. Orion Ciftja, Department of Physics, Prairie View A&M University, USA[/li]
[li]Prof. Abbas Mohammed, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden[/li]
[li]Prof. Ashok Chatterjee, School of Physics, University of Hyderabad, India[/li][/ul]
Would that account for academic reputation?

And who else has published in the same issue as Nassim?:

A. Zakery 1, A. Asrar 1 and S. R. Elliott 2

1 Department of Physics, College of Science, Shiraz University, Shiraz 71454, Iran.
2 Department of Chemistry, Cambridge University, Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK.

http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=201&id=4&aid=1124#.UdJ7jNj2uSq

Would this also be pseudoscience by association?

Again, with the greatest respect, I see discussion of everything bar Nassim’s physics.

The fact still remains, published in a predatory journal (as you would have it) or not, Nassim’s equations still predicted a precise value for the charge radius of the proton, one month before the results of Pohl’s second experiment were published.

The Nature piece describes the journal watchdog efforts of Jeffrey Beall. ScienceDomain International is identified as a questionable publisher according to his documented criteria. (Although it really takes little time on the ScienceDomain website to come to the same conclusion.)

No. Have you heard of any of these places? (Okay, I’ve at least heard of University of Oslo.) There is strong motivation for young researchers and for folks at tiny places to beef up their resumes. If you didn’t know better or if you thought your academic review committee wouldn’t know better and some new journal called Physical Review and Research International asked you to sit on their editorial board, you might jump at the chance. Heck, it must be a prestigious journal – it’s got “International” right there in the title.

If it is or isn’t pseudoscience won’t have anything to do with its association. Solid science can get through a pro forma review process just as well as pseudoscience. It just means that one can’t wave the “It was peer-reviewed” flag as evidence of scientific merit.

I posted only in reply to deltasigma’s observation about the curious review/publication cycle for this article. My post was about the nature of the journal, and I’ve made no claims about the merits or demerits of this particular work aside from noting that its publication does not imply robust peer-review. As the article is a rather verbose and tedious exposition with many word salad-y sections, I haven’t yet had available the considerable time required to disentangle what the author is on about.

Ah, what the hell – How about we give the article a look. I’ll admit I ran out of steam part way through. I just couldn’t take it anymore. But this post will be long enough in any case.

First, one more journal note having read (most of) this text. There really is zero publication service (manuscript formatting, copyediting, etc.) being provided by ScienceDomain. They really did just post his unedited Word document directly on the web site after sending it through a PDF filter to add stock headers, footers, and frontmatter.

Anyway, to the article. The first 35% of the document (through page 8) has zero content. However, it’s like watching a lonngggg stage magician act. You know that you just witnessed 10 minutes of misdirection and that at some point the rabbit was put into the hat before it was pulled out again, so nothing really happened, but there it all is anyway.

His big conclusion is that he derives a “quantized expression” for the Schwarzschild radius using a novel holographic approach. Except he doesn’t do anything of the kind. There’s nothing being quantized and there’s no holography. In fact, there’s nothing at all because across these eight long, tediously numerical, eye-numbing pages, he manages to multiply in a bunch of physical constants then divide them all back out again to claim that he’s constructed the expression for the Schwarzschild radius, r = 2Gm/c. There are no explained physical principles behind his manipulations, and there is no mathematical ground covered during them. If one insists that I address the physics of this section, I cannot, because there is none. To be sure, there are passages with physics jargon strung together but there isn’t a definition or underlying principle in sight.

If this assessment is unsatisfying, the a more direct way to look at this section is that, regardless of the manipulations involved, it is literally impossible to get an expression for the radius that involves G that isn’t exactly in the form r=<number>Gm/c given that h-bar is the only other quantity in the problem. So, he couldn’t not get the right form. For the leading coefficient (in this case, the number 2), he introduced apparently arbitrary ratios of geometric quantities (suitably obfuscated first) along the way. Need a factor of 4? Divide the area of a sphere by the area of a circle. Why? Why not.

In the next couple of sections of the article, he switches topics to the mass and radius of a proton. He says he chooses a proton “due to the fundamental nature of protons in the hadronic picture.” I could spend the whole post quoting such doublespeak, but this example will suffice. This phrase read to a layman as meaningful, but it’s entirely empty. The hadronic picture? Protons as fundamental? Fundamental to what? Protons are about the least fundamental thing you could pick even if “the hadronic picture” meant something specific.

Okay, so we’ll go with the proton. His conclusion through this section is that he can get a relationship between the proton radius and its mass using Planck quantities based on the “holographic” derivation down in the first section. A couple of things. First, it’s been known for ages that the proton mass is smaller than the Plank mass by about the same factor that the proton radius is larger than the Planck length. If you give yourself the freedom to spin in some coefficients, you can make this relationship rather close. He does this (with a admittedly simple coefficient) to about 1% or 4% depending on which values of proton radius and mass he uses. But this is just numerology.

Second, and more curious, is that he appears to deviate from the relations derived ages early. As mentioned, dimensional analysis guarantees that you will get the right form for the Schwartzchild radius if you put the right quantities into the math. However, nothing guarantees that that will give you anything useful for the proton radius / proton mass numerology. And it doesn’t. So, he swaps numerator and denominator and then multiplies by 2 with no mention of why.

(It’s painful to follow the discussion in detail, though, because he introduces variable after variable, each just a ratios of others and all with unconventional symbols chosen. This might sound like a slight at the author and not the content, but on the contrary: a cogent idea should be presentable in a cogent way. In the enterprise of scientific research, sharing an idea clearly is as central as having the idea in the first place.)

With the numerology complete, he claims he has demonstrated both that the muon-based proton charge radius measurement is sound and that the holographic approach is sound. The issue at hand with the proton radius, though, is that you get different answers when you use muonic hydrogen versus electronic hydrogen. Since there are no usable physical principles described in his derivation, there is no explanation why the procedure should work for one and not the other. He just ignores the disagreement from the electron case. Further, you can’t in the same logical breath conclude that the mathematical approach is sound because it aligns with the muonic measurement and conclude that the muonic measurements are sound because they are supported by the mathematical approach.

Some of the language implies that this is all fundamental (despite the form of the expressions changing mid-stream), so you might expect some discussion of why this doesn’t work for electrons or quarks or whatnot. If he wants a bound state like the proton (Why? I thought we wanted fundamental?), what about the pion or a purely leptonic system like positronium? Of course, you could make it work for any system, but only one system at a time since the coefficient will need to be different. I calculate that for positronium you need a factor of around 280, depending on what you want to take as the characteristic radius. If you allow a dozen pages to throw around geometric arguments (you could even bring the term “multidimensional” into it by invoking the volumes and surface areas of various n-spheres), you could introduce that factor to within a few percent pretty easily. 9pi[sup]3[/sup] gets to within 0.4%. But this closeness cannot logically justify itself. It’s needs something behind it.

And, indeed, if there were physical principles in this article, you could have a discussion about how you might test it in other systems or what broader implications the principles might have. This isn’t done.

And this is where I lost interest. The final third or so of the paper appears to claim a holographically derived connection between the timescale of strong-force decays and the above numerology. Without even looking at the math I’m going to go ahead and wager that it’ll be equivalent to a straightforward order-of-magnitude statement that the energy scale of strong decays is about 1 GeV and the timescale for strong decays is about h-bar/(1 GeV), with the energy “1 GeV” motivated as the scale of the strong force by the proton mass itself, as its mass is almost entirely from its (strong force) binding energy.

Pasta, thanks for explaining Haramein’s paper to me. I guess we (I) can disregard his work as irrelevant to the question asked here.

One last thing, if you could be so kind; do you think it’s possible/likely that Haramein may have used the data taken from Pohl’s 2010 experiment in order make his ‘prediction’? Or is it mere coincidence/luck that Haramein’s prediction falls within the experimental uncertainty of the 2013 experiment? (this is of course with regards to proton measurement at the Paul Scherrer Institut)

After reading your analysis of his work, I find it highly unlikely he arrived at his conclusion analytically.

Thanks for your time.

Yes, certainly, but that’s okay. Pohl’s data are indeed from 2010, this work is dated 2013, and a significant amount of the verbiage is about the 2010 data. The article doesn’t try to make it look like a “blind” prediction at all. But, there is nothing wrong with trying to explain past anomalous data. One just has to stay aware of the intrinsic selection bias when doing so. That is, no one would bother writing up something that didn’t get the desired answer.

No coincidence. The updated 2013 measurement is essentially the same as the 2010 one (same approach, same authors, same numerical result to within 0.1%), so given the agreement with the 2010 data there is nothing unexpected in the agreement with the 2013 data.