Essay Abstract

Space, whose structure and properties dictate all characteristics of matter and forces in it, has been underappreciated by physics. That empty space has a property of a rigid solid constitutes the central paradox of science. For 150 years it has remained unresolved. The work has been neglected due to physics' century-old decree that declared space empty, which was an act of frustration with ether models that could not resolve the paradox. Pressing ahead without solving the problem led to the current situation where paradoxes have become physics' distinctive feature and matter and space are fused into an inseparable totality of fields. Mathematical models attempting to describe this totality abound, and yet there is no model of space. In its place is a tradition that discourages discussion of the structure of space for fear of resurrecting old ether theories. This essay attempts to open such a discussion and offers an example of how the topic can be approached with very few assumptions in mind. It shows that, consistently applied, a simple organizing principle can lead to a straightforward solution to the old problem and reveals a dynamic, 4-dimensional, vibrating structure, in time, that conjures up an image of a 4D ocean, the 3D surface of which is the visible Universe.

Author Bio

Ms. Vasilyeva grew up in the former Soviet Union. She graduated from NYU with a degree in computer science. Having worked in the industry in NY and LA, she now lives with her family in the woods of Pennsylvania, pursuing her interests in history of ideas, physiology and physics. A gifted analyst, she loves a good puzzle.

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  • Post #2

Ms. Vasilyeva,

The arguments you present in your essay are a danger to the establishment, which has convinced various funding sources to give them $billions to prove what I consider to be a fallacy.

I note that your references follow the Chicago Style, and I wonder if you were requested to provide that format? Many of the essays do not follow that style.

    Lol, Frank, I disagree with your assessment of my essay. No danger to anyone -- well, it may hurt a bit brains of those who never gave space a thought. I approached physics as a puzzle and I believe I did a good job solving it.

    How about you? What do you think of the reality of a 4th spatial dimension? There is nothing radical about the idea.

    Dear M.V. Vasilyeva,

    I really enjoyed your essay. You make a couple points which I think are crucially important:

    1. You note at the very beginning that "space," whatever we take it to be, dictates the characteristics of matter and forces in it. I do not think that this fact is adequately appreciated. It's not that no one knows this; anyone who reads Weinberg's quantum field theory books, for instance, learns how important the Poincare symmetry group of Minkowski space is in determining the properties of particle states. However, people often don't realize just how great an assumption they are making when they ascribe certain properties to space. A lot of otherwise very good ideas in physics just won't work if you try to apply them to the wrong spacetime model.

    2. You point out the necessity of understanding the actual physical structure of space. Many people, even physicists, are content to imagine spacetime as 4-dimensional real space, possibly curved, but fail to appreciate the difference between this mathematical abstraction and the actual physical space that interacts dynamically.

    You and I have perhaps different ideas on the nature of time; I view time as a manifestation of causality, and my approach to building up spacetime is to use causal relations. I describe this in my essay here: On the Foundational Assumptions of Modern Physics.

    In any case, you have written a very intriguing essay, and I wish you the best of luck in the competition. Take care,

    Ben Dribus

      Dear Ben, thank you for your kind words. I have not read your work yet, but will do now. Regarding your statement:

      "anyone who reads Weinberg's quantum field theory books... learns how important the Poincare symmetry group of Minkowski space is in determining the properties of particle states."

      See, from the position of the structure of space, which I advocate, the particles are abstractions of our theories and have very little to do with reality (simply because these abstractions are largely divorced from the underlying geometry of space). Besides, Minkowski spacetime is hardly a suitable model for the quantum scale. There it just does not work. There is another method of modeling time and distance at those scales. Too bad I ran out of space, lol, and could not address it.

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      • Post #6

      Ms. Vasilyeva,

      I can not even explain the "nature of our existence", thus agreeing to the existence of a 4th spatial dimension is putting the cart way ahead of the horse. As one of my mentors stated, a Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering (since deceased), we are all a specialized form of energy. Once the atom is broken down into its constitute parts, they pretty much represent some form of "energy".

      Please realize that transverse electromagnetic (EM) waves were the only field orientation Einstein was aware of when he formulated his weird curved space-time theory. EM waves with longitudinal components, where a field vector is aligned with the axis of propagation, are being produced by photonic types. Also, Einstein was one of the lost generations in regards to solitons, thus he developed his theories based upon " incomplete information", a Georgina Parry term, topic 1216.

      Keep in mind that our current space has permittivity and permeability, and the physics community cannot explain why.

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      • Post #7

      Dear M.V.

      I hope you can read Russian

      What is common between this flatland and your flatland?

      http://modcos.com/articles.php?id=201

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        • Post #8

        Terminology problem you can solve

        http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=quantum-gravity-in-flatland

        Yuri, this article in SA has a very different idea from what I describe in my essay and besides, I only use it as an analogy with our 4D world. In SA, they have 2D + time, while in my Flatland analogy I have 3D + time. Even that is too tight, so I don't see how they can do anything meaningful with just 2D. If they curve the plane, as I do, there is a need for a 3rd dimension. If not, what's gravity for them?

        In any rate, I use the Flatland analogy to illustrate how we could live in 4 spatial dimensions and not know it. And yes, I took liberties with Abbott's Flatland by modeling it as a surface of a sphere. It illustrates gravity and mass concepts of a 4D world very well. It's the EM field that it cannot handle (well, it allows for either one but not both).

        So, to answer your question, there is nothing in common between my analogy and the article in SA where they are seriously trying to figure out quantum gravity in 2D+time. Things are actually easier with more dimensions than less, so I don't understand what they want to achieve. I think I saw that article in SA years ago -? The date of it is not clear in the links you gave.

        What did you think of my idea that it is natural for a dynamic vibrating structure that defines space to assume the 4D configuration, because it corresponds to its lowest energy state? I tried to find a theorem to this effect, but was short on time. I hope a good topologist reads my paper and comments.

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        • Post #10

        Dear M.V.,

        You have written a paper containing many imaginative ideas and touching upon many different fields in physics. I especially liked how you introduced your ideas with the fable in the preamble. Certainly, the notion that "All the space there is belongs to this universe and can contain nothing else." rings true to me.

        As intriguing as your ideas are, I believe physicists would want want to see your visual-conceptual model translated into a mathematical model, and some experimentally testable predictions before they would seriously consider adopting it as a worldview (for better or for worse), but I'm sure you already know this.

        I did notice that your ideas have a certain picturesque quality to them, which seems quite appropriate, given the topic (although this may also be enhanced by your vivid writing style).

        Let me mention that, concerning your remark about Minkowski Spacetime above, most quantum field theorists would vehemently disagree with it.

        To me personally the most striking implication of Minkowski spacetime as concerns the structure of space is that evidently in a Universe without any matter at all but just radiation, there could be no Spacetime. That is because distance intervals in spacetime are proportional to the proper time of an object, and only objects with mass have a non-zero proper time. If there are no objects with non-zero proper time, there can be no frame in which there are non-zero spacetime distances(Incidentally, only some physicists agree with this conclusion. Those who do not posit that one can mathematically still describe a spacetime without matter. To me this is an instance of mistaking the map for the territory) I mentioned this because I thought you might find this digression relevant to your topic.

        Good luck on the contest and all the best,

        Armin

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          • Post #11

          I am not topologist, just layman...

          Dear Armin, thank you for your comments on my essay. Regarding the mathematics, I actually started doing it in the section on time, but then realized that I ran out of space, so I just left it out, expecting the logic of the model to speak for itself. Besides, the model is in line with ADD, the reference to which, with all its mathematics, is included for an interested reader.

          Regarding predictions, perhaps you did not check the reference to a dwarf galaxy in a nearby void that shows a deformation in its structure (2011)? Or what about the prediction that the same object can be seen twice from different directions in our sky? Finally, you don't seem to be impressed by my resolution of the old paradox of space, but how would you personally explain that a material object can freely move through what is otherwise impermeable?

          Perhaps I should have greater emphasized that what we perceive is actually projections from 4D on either side of the membrane onto its 3D. This explains the quantum uncertainties: some info is lost when you project from a higher space, and then the result varies depending on the angle of the projection. The model explains why a nucleus appears so small from our 3D POV and the half-integer spin of fermions: a full rotation in 4D looks from a 3D POV as 720° or 2 turns necessary to return to the original state.

          True, I only listed all this, without going into the details, expecting the reader to have a decent grasp of the basics of the 4D geometry, which perhaps was not right.

          The model explains the source of all movement as originating from the structure ejecting the deformations introduced into it locally, thus showing why a naked nucleus gets kicked around much... Why... I thought the premise on which the model stood was sound and that its implications were logically derived.

          But I very much appreciate your feedback. Thank you!

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          • Post #13

          M.V.:

          Your essay touched on the core of a physics problem.. "space". In space one can observe the motion of mass and keep track of all energies involved, but rarely consider the concomitant "growth" that can occur to affect energy balances..

          My model, To Seek Unknown Shores

          聽聽 http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1409

          developed in detail in "End Notes", suggests 1-D, 2-D, and 3-D "spaces" achieve 6/16, 9/16, and 1/16 " respective probabilities for growth as motion proceeds.

          Comment?

            Frank, I don't think Einstein's curved space-time theory is weird, lol. I rather think it's brilliant. What's more, I believe that he got really lucky with Minkowski spacetime (the idea of which he did not like at first): it worked out so well, because our world _is_ 4D.

            As for the specifics of the EM field housed in 3-brane, again I respectfully disagree with your assessment. There is plenty of work explaining it workings and many proposed models, starting with the original Maxwell model. That's why I did not think that I should go into these details. Besides, it is the overall concept derived from the top down approached that I wanted to show.

            But thank you for your reply!

            Why thank you George! Do tell your friends and relatives :)

            Ms. Vasilyeva,

            Maxwell's ether theory says that the speed of light (relative to the observer) varies with the speed of the observer. Special relativity says the speed of light is independent of the speed of the observer. What do YOU say?

            http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/Chasing.pdf

            JOHN NORTON: "Finally, in an apparent eagerness to provide a seamless account, an author may end up misstating the physics. Kaku (2004, p. 45) relates how Einstein found that his aversion to frozen light was vindicated when he later learned Maxwell's theory." MICHIO KAKU: "When Einstein finally learned Maxwell's equations, he could answer the question that was continually on his mind. As he suspected, he found that there were no solutions of Maxwell's equations in which light was frozen in time. But then he discovered more. To his surprise, he found that in Maxwell's theory, light beams always traveled at the same velocity, no matter how fast you moved." JOHN NORTON AGAIN: "This is supposedly what Einstein learned as a student at the Zurich Polytechnic, where he completed his studies in 1900, well before the formulation of the special theory of relativity. Yet the results described are precisely what is not to be found in the ether based Maxwell theory Einstein would then have learned. That theory allows light to slow and be frozen in the frame of reference of a sufficiently rapidly moving observer."

            http://culturesciencesphysique.ens-lyon.fr/XML/db/csphysique/metadata/LOM_CSP_relat.xml

            Gabrielle Bonnet, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon: "Les équations de Maxwell font en particulier intervenir une constante, c, qui est la vitesse de la lumière dans le vide. Par un changement de référentiel classique, si c est la vitesse de la lumière dans le vide dans un premier référentiel, et si on se place désormais dans un nouveau référentiel en translation par rapport au premier à la vitesse constante v, la lumière devrait désormais aller à la vitesse c-v si elle se déplace dans la direction et le sens de v, et à la vitesse c+v si elle se déplace dans le sens contraire."

            http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Time-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553380168

            Stephen Hawking: "Maxwell's theory predicted that radio or light waves should travel at a certain fixed speed. But Newton's theory had got rid of the idea of absolute rest, so if light was supposed to travel at a fixed speed, one would have to say what that fixed speed was to be measured relative to. It was therefore suggested that there was a substance called the "ether" that was present everywhere, even in "empty" space. Light waves should travel through the ether as sound waves travel through air, and their speed should therefore be relative to the ether. Different observers, moving relative to the ether, would see light coming toward them at different speeds, but light's speed relative to the ether would remain fixed."

            Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

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              • Post #19

              This is my community rating on your essay.

              Pentcho, I believe the speed of waves is the property of the medium in which they propagate (ex. the speed of sound in air is about constant, modified by some local conditions such as density, temperature, humidity, etc). I do not see why space should be different. So, speed of light is a constant, modified by some local conditions.

              Since speed of light is the property of space itself then your question boils down to: what is the observer and how observation can interfere with the wave-medium properties of space.

              The result of Michelson-Morley experiment is well known, even though its interpretation varied in time. At first it meant that there was no stationary ether; then it meant that the laws of nature were the same for all observers. What you are saying in your essay is that observer interferes with the local conditions in space, therefore affecting the speed of light. It's hard to argue with that. However, Lorentz transformation shows hows this type of interference cancels out in the end. Perhaps there are different ways of observing -? Would they each come with its own transformation, still giving the same null result?