Thursday 7 November 2013

A shameless attack on the pillars of physics


A preamble:

I do not hold a Phd. in…anything. Heck, I don’t even have a master’s degree. My lack of formal degrees or specialization merely suggest a slight laziness of a kind ;-) But that doesn’t stop me from having a deep genuine interest in science and a passionate curiosity about the nature of reality. As the late Jean-Jacques Cousteau once said: “What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through the keyhole of nature, trying to understand what’s going on.” Of course, one needs to look with a logical mind. I think I have a smidgeon of that too. But sometimes, logic needs to be trumped momentarily by imagination (and I seem to have way more of that!), to consider alternatives, the “what-ifs?” that are fundamental to the momentum in science.

I have such a “what-if” idea and I’d like to share it.

I am but a humble geophysicist, working with applied physics in the pursuit of mineral exploration. And even here, I am somewhat of an impostor, having actually completed a bachelor in Earth Sciences rather than pure geophysics. Since I’m in the business of finding NiS, I get to work with electromagnetism a lot and experience firsthand a series of wave-particle causes/effects related to that. I suppose some of my hobbies also benefit my perspective: photography and music (both fundamental expressions of a frequency nature – light and sound). I’m clearly aware of my blatant ignorance in many topics and on the details of topics that are even close to my profession and hobbies. So the ideas I’d like to bounce around are not rooted in mathematical or even scientific rigor, but are rather philosophical in nature. Please don’t hold it against me…

Ok, enough preliminaries. On to the big ideas…

Standing on the shoulders of giants

Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2 has to be the epitome of contemporary pop-culture physics (sorry Newton, you lived in another era…honorable mention to Hawking). It revolutionized our perception of our reality and kindled new exciting research, culminating, it can be argued, to quantum theory and other fun stuff like string theory and quantum gravity loops etc. But it also created all kinds of puzzles for many of the smartest minds on the planet that have since tackled these topics. I feel we are now at an impasse such as we were with Newtonian physics. C’est à dire, the equations that we use are good at approximating results; hence the success in field experiments, but there’s something missing. The brightest minds already know this and are working hard at it.
 

Another language

What if we only had to change our language slightly in order to shift our perception to another level? Akin to what Einstein did with relativity and special relativity – granted he did this with more mathematical rigor. I feel - and I’m not alone nor the first - that a major problem in our perception and understanding of ‘reality’ is our propensity to believe space-time exists and is the fabric of reality and use that as the fundamental benchmark. It is forgivable. After all, our biology and resulting perception of the electromagnetic spectrum and matter is inescapable. Yet, we have transcended that limitation greatly with mathematical tools, technological prowess, general cleverness and imagination. Quantum theory is a good example. It is only burgeoning and could soon propel us out of the bend on Moore’s Law curve on an exponential upshot of evolution. Things could change quickly.

Articles questioning the existence of time and/or space are increasingly popping up in the general culture, trickling down from the scientific ivory towers. Time: that pervasive property that seems to enslave our existence and destiny from a beginning to an end. Some have good arguments to suggest it doesn’t exist, such as David Deutsch. Others say space and time cannot coexist. Space: that vessel that holds us and all the things dear to our hearts, and the rest, as a ‘bubble’ we can roam and the ‘where’ where “stuff happens”.

Breaking for new ground

This is where I want to take the metaphysical sledgehammer out and support Bohm in his quest for truth: I would like to encourage, as others are increasingly doing, that the fabric of reality is simply energy and that space (at least as defined as the navigable topology of matter) and time (the sequencing of ‘events’) both don’t exist (they may be emergent or perceptual by-products/illusions like some have suggested).

Rather, let’s imagine that energy is singular and expressed ‘quantum-ly’ in a non-linear particle-wave duality. This may set up Einstein’s famous equation for a makeover, because although accurate, there’s more to it in my intuition…

And this is where I’m afraid I can only offer philosophical leads and that my personal computation capacities dry up…

·         Instead of time, could we speak in terms of polarization? – we may perceive time through the frequency expression of energy; the non-intuitive concept here will be to contend that frequency is still a valid phenomenon even if time doesn’t exist fundamentally.

·         Instead of matter/space, should we look at ‘nodes’ or equilibrium/stability plateaus? Chemistry already has a good heads-up on this with the periodic table (they’re only concentrating on one scale however) – the order hierarchy of energy has been alluded to before – in that sense, what do Moore’s law, evolution (e.g. human brain) and capacitors have in common? The expression of energy as hierarchal organization of complexity. Why does this happen? Have a look at this video. Quantum loops gravity theory is interesting in the perspective of a feedback loop probabilistic nature of everything – how the energy turbulence (spin foam) interacts with itself to produce higher order patterns;

·         Understanding and reconciling the electromagnetic field with the gravity field seems crucial because fundamentally there’s only  particles and waves expressed from the singular energy source – these guys might be on tosomething…?:
·         Since I contend that space-time doesn’t exist, it therefore cannot be bent – rather, I propose that fields are perturbed and we may need to start discussing interference, noise, harmonics, timbre, power/amplitude, decay, lensing, feedback, filtering, tuning, modulation, attenuation, shielding and the like – but on a mathematical basis addressed in the cosmological energy context.

·         Looking at the principle of convolution in light of this thinking may be useful; i.e. the Universe we experience could in fact be an energy source that is convolved – the question would then be, what created a point energy source to convolve?

·         Could we then express E=mc2 as a probability density function in order to bring in what is observed at the quantum level? I.e.: to define the expression of the energy convolution. Could we use a generalized Gram-Charlier expansion?

·         Regarding the convolution lead, what about looking at the cosmological constant as noise (i.e. feedback loops) – but where does it come from? What does the presence of noise mean? Given an infinite nature, is the Universe just noise fundamentally, with the emergence of any pattern inevitable?

 
The bottom line

My hope is that minds smarter than my own will have the benevolence to consider this set of ideas seriously and indulge work on it somehow. In this aim, I have metaphorically base-jumped off a mountain without a parachute and sent it to the following physicists and mathematicians on my birthday, September 9th, 2013 in order to ridicule myself:
Joseph Polchinski - Professor of Physics, UCSB
Sean Carroll - Physicist, California Institute of Technology
Steve Giddings - Professor, Department of Physics, University of California
Nathan Seiberg – Physicist, Institute for Advanced Study
Abhay Ashtekar - Eberly Professor of Physics and Director of the Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry, Penn State
Lee Smolin - Founding and Senior Faculty member, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
John D. Barrow – Physicist, Dept. of Applied Mathematics & Theoretical Physics, Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge University
Andreas Albrecht - Professor of Physics, UC Davis
Terrence Tao - Professor at the Department of Mathematics, UCLA
Christopher Hirata – Mathematician, Caltech
Simon Saunders - Professor of Philosophy of Physics, Oxford
Eleanor Knox – Research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, King’s College London
David Deutsch - Physicist at the University of Oxford
Steven Weinberg – Professor of physics, University of Texas
Willy Fischler - Professor of physics, University of Texas
Jacques Distler - Professor of physics, University of Texas
E. C. George Sudarshan - Professor of physics, University of Texas
Cecile DeWitt-Morette - Professor Emerita, University of Texas
Lawrence C. Shepley – Retired Associate Professor, University of Texas
Arno Bohm - Professor of physics, University of Texas
Duane Dicus - Professor of physics, University of Texas
Brian Greene - Professor Mathematics & Physics, Columbia University

Please do share further if you think someone you know is genuinely interested in these ideas. I am merely seeking the truth, which I am not finding online ;-). I wish I had the ability to expand my perception to a more useful form but simpleton words will have to do for now I’m afraid…the essence is in what is imagined...
 
We do not die. We deconvolve or attenuate. For the privileged observer, given infinity, noise is everything, and it can be wonderful.
 

Mathieu Landry