Vladimir Tamari
I went through your interesting text exorting the recasting of the existing overall structure of Theoretical Physics. However, to see how the things really are, one has to dig deeper beyond the enjoyable artistic caricaturing.
1. General points:
- Scientific process. In scientific work, the appropriate hypotheses, assumptions are necessary to set up the calculational apparatus. The results of the calculations are confronted with the hard nuts and bolts of the experimental work. If this test does not work, one has to start all over again in a different way. Science moves bit by bit most of the time in an iterative manner based on "reasonable assumptions". The whole of science does not appear as a total revelation. It is a dynamical process. Moreover, a known scientific truth is always considered to be just as a relative truth.
- Geometry and Algebra. Since the dawning of the discipline of Algebra almost a thousand years back, the Algebraic Equation has been the most potent instrument for scientific work in spite of the almost deification of this Geometry by the Ancient Greeks. Of course, one can represent geometrically a theme with a few dimensions, but the treatment of a large number of dimensions, for example, in the Hilbert vector-space is impossible. In fact, one can say without any hesitation that without this Algebraic Equation, quite likely, we shall still be in the stone age of Physics.
2. Specific points
1: The search of scientific truth - Nature's laws, has to move via different groping ways. Of course, the endgame has to be one Algebraic Equation that unifies all the interactions/ forces of Nature in a testable way. In this context, the things seem to moving in the right direction. After the unification of the E and M fields by the Maxwell's equations, one has managed to unify the EM with the nuclear weak interaction in the Particle SM that also deals with the strong interaction via the QCD. One has found interaction mediating bosons for all of them: Photons (EM), W^+-, Z° (weak interaction) and gluons (strong interaction). They have just found a scalar boson that may be the Higgs boson of the Higgs field that massifies the different particles.
2. Nature of time. This has been a controversial point since the confrontation of Leibniz and Newton: one believed in the physical reality of time, while for the other, it was just a relation between the different things around. In QM, if one considers that the total energy: normal energy + gravity as negative energy, in the universe is zero, it becomes a timeless configuration space with all of its eigenvalues: past, present and future, present. However, the things are different in the classical domain of SR and GR with spacetime, where this time is integral part of them. We live the daily tribulations of this time coordinate. Let us see how one resolves this contradiction between the two sides.
3. Speed of light. This speed in vacuum is constant. Due this constant speed, the time coordinate has to suffer the dilation that we live and use every day via clocks. There is a bundle of theories that contest this constancy of c, but a lot of experimental work done so far to test these theories, shows that Δc/c is < 10^-13.
4. Gravity. In GR, the gravity is the curvature of spacetime. Moreover, the local GR is relative because it obeys the fundamental Local Gauge symmetry. Moreover, the red shift work in the gravitational field shows a change in energy of radiation, but not any change in its speed. Hence, the concept of refractive index suggested by Eddington cannot treat the problem.
5. Photon. The idea of wave-particle for the Photon led de Broglie to his particle-wave relation for massive particles. This relation is the only basis for QM. Now, if one supposes following Planck, that this photon behaves as a particle only when it is absorbed or emitted and it is a wave when in flight, then, what does happen to the massive particles in flight? Will they be also only waves? Will then QM apply only to objects in flight?
6. Quantum probability. In QM one uses operators that operate on the wavefuction that represents the system under treatment. The measurement on the system tells one in which of the (sub)state of the system's basis states it is. This, in the context of QM, leads directly to the quantum probability concept. As QM is nonlocal in nature, the entanglement of particles in a wavefunction is independent of time and their separation distance - now, reached more than 400km! As to the system of dipoles, first one has to treat them via QM and define their overall wavefuction and then see their behavior under different relevant operators. A CM treatment of this problem is not sufficient
7. Standard Model of particles. The SM is a highly complex QM model obeying, like the GR, the local gauge symmetry, where, as said before, different interactions are mediated by different and known bosons: Photons, W^+-, Z ° and gluons. They have to deal with 6 types of quarks, 3 types of leptons and three types of neutrinos through a particular group of symmetry. To say anything significant, your dipole-based system has to pass through all these highly controlled quantum stages.
8. Dark energy and dark matter. The DE is supposed to be repulsive and DM attractive relative the normal gravity. The CMB results from the Planck instrument in space along with the other activity with different types of telescopes, may give a clue as to their nature in the near future.
9. Ether. One has to find and pin down this Ether in some way, first, before riding the horses of ethereal conjectures.
Finally, as we move forwards, due the nature of things - conspiracy of Nature?, Physics is becoming more and more complex to deal with , but not at all a Gordian knot that can be cut with some classical sword.