© Copyright 01-02-2010 by 45 Mike Anderson
Hmmm, where should I start? Should I begin with a discussion of what we commonly think of as “light”? Perhaps instead I should begin with a cute story, one that incidentally began my interest in theoretical elementary particle physics.
The cute story.
One day a bunch of scientists were working on genetics, and they came upon a method of creating life out of a primordial soup of gunk and some solar energy. They were all fairly excited and they published their work, and soon a bunch of scientists all round the world were duplicating the experiments and getting good results. Eventually one of the scientists managed to make enough of the life stuff that he could make exact duplicates of single celled organisms that actually exist today, and we suppose are the basic bulding block that all other plants and animals evolved from. So that he began exclaiming that we don’t need God, because we figured out how it all could have happened without any creation at all.
Well, about that time God appeared to the scientists, and said to them, “So you think you have it figured out, and I don’t need to exist, because you can make life yourselves.”
The scientists all nodded, “Yes, we can create life, and you are not needed.”
God replied, “Okay, then show me what you think you can do without my help.”
One of the scientists said, “Great, just watch this! We take some of this mud here, and we mix it with. . . .”
God interupted the scientist, “Wait just a minute, that’s not really fair, you are starting with MY mud, you need to make your own mud first.”
So, yeah. That is a cute story, and when I first heard it, from my mother I think, I filed it away in my memory as two categories, “Mom is not as dumb as I sometimes think she is” and “Science may not be as smart as I sometimes think it is.”
Some years later, while I was learning about nuclear physics in the Navy, I would spend hours working on a math problem I was having, I would drink coffee at a local shop and write tiny notes and equations on napkins until I could not think straight. The math problem was this;
If you take a distance, say one inch, you can divide that into halves as many times as you’d like. Now take another distance, say two inches, and you can divide that as many times as you’d like as well. Now ‘common’ sense tells me that because two inches is twice the distance as one inch, no matter how many times you divide each distance, there will always be twice as many divisions available in two inches as one inch. Which means there should be a number such as infinity times two, that actually has a meaningful value. Much as the imaginary number ‘i’ has a meaningful use in dealing with reality.
However, mathematics decided that there could NOT be a number such as two infinity, because that implies, if you extend that far enough, that division by zero is possible and has meaning as well. Mathematics does NOT allow division by zero, (as far as in know, no mathematical system of any value does), and because zero division is not allowed, neither is infinity allowed to be manipulated by multiplication , etc.
Well, to be honest that frustrated me to no end, it seemed obvious to me that there was likely to be useful operations that could use division by zero, and discrete values for infinities. In fact I still think so.
Why does that seem so important to me? The first reason is simple and should be obvious, the situations where one might like to divide by zero are so common that the mathemeticians and computer designers and programmers had to make up special rules to make SURE that no one ever actually could divide by zero. SO, if it was never something useful, why did they spend so much effort making sure no one could do it?
This is where that cute story comes back into play. That story is an example of one of the most basic assumptions that people make about physical reality, that assumption is that “You cannot get something from nothing.”
It turns out also that, that assumption is why division by zero is not allowed either.
Scientists, mathemeticians, computer geeks, corporate CEOs, and my mom, and all my buddies and girlfriends agreed, with that same assumption.
The only people who seemed to think that there might be one single exception, were the people who seemed to insist that only God has the secret of making something from nothing. So, I studied religions. I kept looking for clues or some evidence that someone else thought it odd, that God could do this, but apparently everyone accepts this without question, as if were NOT the most incredible and important aspect of God that is presented.
Then I began looking at other systems of faith, and they all fall under two distinct categories;
1. There never was a beginning, existence is a circular system that never began, and never ends.
2. God always existed, never ends, and God created everything else that we can percieve or know.
When I realized this is what separates religions, fundamentally from each other, I decided to look at the difference, and see what if any clue there might be in that. As I kept looking at the difference between the cirular, and God always existed paradigms, I was shocked to discover that there IS NO DIFFERENCE, in fact affecting physical reality between those two systems. They are essentially the exact same nonsense, with self contradictory meaning!
I was upset, and dismayed, so I left the religions behind, and went back to science. As I searched in the scientific theories concerning beginnings and endings, I found EXACTLY the same situation. Every theory propounded relied on either a circular or never ending paradigm, and each one of them was self contradictory in their basic premise.
Every scientific and religious theory concerning the physical reality we experience begins with a contradiction to that most basic assumption, “You can’t get something from nothing.”
Religious nuts get frothy mouthed extolling the wonders of God, and scientists just nod, smile, and wander off muttering inanities.
Now, there I was with an assumption that is untested, merely commonly held to be universally true that is causing every system of thought about our universe and reality to begin with a contradiction and an impossible to reconcile one, at that.
I you recall, I mentioned that I had spent hours upon hours battling inside my mind against this same assumption, and coming to the same contradiction. What I find interesting is that almost universal to logical thought is that a proof may be made to a statement by assuming a converse statement, and then showing that EVERY instance of logic that begins with that converse statement ends with a contradiction. If that happens, then the original statement is considered to be proven true, NO MATTER how insane it seems to be to ‘commen sense’.
This is the situation that I saw in the early 80’s, I had a “proof” that supports the truth of the assertion that the universe began with NOTHING!
As silly as that seems, and seemed to me as well, it seemed solid enough of a proof that I began thinking that IF that was true, then there MUST be some system of physics and reality that could describe accurately just how that nothing become something. I also understood that if that were unraveled, then whatever that system was, it also must describe EVERY possible physical particle and energy form that exists, ever did exist and ever can exist.
Pretty scary stuff for a twentysomething unemployed outlaw biker running from the evil forces of the WA state legal system, AND discovering some extremely weird things about my own reality. (witchy stuff, really).
What is mass? What is energy? Is ANYTHING actually constant in the universe? What about the laws of physics we depend on daily for our very lives? Conservation of mass and energy? Holy shit, if the universe actually operates on the something from nothing assertion, then all those conservation laws, just got smashed, obliterated.
I know how scientists treat folks like me who come forward with something that even hints at changing, much less, denying the validity of those laws.
Then again, I was actually kinda used to being an outlaw anyway, and so the idea of going up against the entire established scientific community sounded like a challenge and maybe kinda fun.
With that I decided that if anyone was going to start making sense out of the assertion, I was the one person that should get started, because as far as I knew, and still know to this day, I am the ONLY peron on earth who is absolutely certain that the universe began with nothing, and yet is essentially as we see and use it physically today, the laws ARE valid on the scale of existence that are of any real interest and use. Time is not a continuous aspect of reality, nor is it strictly constant from one part of the universe to another. The experiments that “proved” that the ether does not exist were flawed, and the ether DOES exist, but not in the manner that was assumed by the experiments.
The speed of light is a joke, even though it seems very useful, at this time, because of the scale of astronomical and nuclear observations being made, the assumptions about the nature of light is causing serious errors in understanding the results of those observations.
I was recently reading a ‘popular’ article concerning the basic elemental particles that make up the universe, quantum foam was one of the terms the article used. In any case as an aside, there was a bare mention that some physisists are beginning to theorize about particles so tiny that they have no properties, and indeed seem to wink in and out of existence for no reason and seem to do nothing at all, but exist, or not at random times and places.
Anyone who has read my previous work concerning the actual mechanics of something from nothing should recognize that I knew what those “particles” were, what they were doing and how they were affecting the universe, years ago! They are NOT partcles to begin with, they are in fact locations that exist, then don’t, just as I said they do, years ago.
They don’t move, EVER. However that very fact is the basis of every form of energy in the universe. They have NO mass, ever, because they are the cause of the effect that we percieve as mass, because their pattern of existence causes what we see as particles to exhibit momentum. Those locations never move, ever, but their patterns of existence and non existence cause what we perceive as particles to move, vibrate, spin, exhibit polarity and valence and electro negative, and positive characteristics, with attending exceptions, and elemental results. Without those locations, the universe could not exist and if those locations did not wink in and out of existence in more or less random times and places, the universe simply would not exist at all.
Those locations that may or may not exist, but never move, but cause movement, have no mass, but cause mass, BECAUSE they never move, are in fact the “ether” that the experiments proved does not exist. The experiments made assumptions about the ether that made it impossible for them to detect what they were looking for. The assumption was that the “ether” was some stuff that was substantially different than any energy or particle that was known. There further was an assumption that the “ether” was fluid in nature, and that energy and particles moved through this fluid and affected the fluid in some fashion by it’s motion, further it was assumed that the “ether” was fluid also in the sense that it was not fixed, but had properties of flow and eddy that could be described as either gaseous, or fluid. Further it was assumed, that the “ether” had some property that did affect mass or energy when mass or energy moved through it. It was the last assumption that made the experiments doomed to failure, even though the assumption IS in fact TRUE.
That might seem odd, but it IS true. The properties of mass and energy that are measurable are only measurable because of the affect that the locations have on them, but those properties are measured as they exist, regardless of mirrors, mercury and slabs of granite. The ether is not stuff that all the other stuff moves through, it IS the stuff that moves, the ether IS fluid, but not because it moves in swirls and eddies, but rather because it exists or not more or less at random, and if a location exists, it never moves. The speed of light is not constant, because distance is not constant, and neither is time. The experiments all depend on a constant of some kind, and NO SUCH constant actually exists.
Essentially all the work I have done on this, began because I realized that the classic view of reality is based upon an assumption that has never been seriously questioned, nor tested for validity. The philosophers of greek and earlier cultures all agreed on some basic assumptions and those assumptions have become so deeply ingrained in every culture today.
The ramifications of those on how we perceive our reality cause stress and dissension in almost every aspect of our lives.
Something from nothing is not impossible, nor an exception, not a rarity, it is pervasive, and the very basis of existence.
There, I made mud. deal with it.