Alternative Models of Reality

Foamy Ether Theory (FET) proposes that the Big Bang did not explode separate particles (or strings) into the vacuum of empty space. Rather, the explosion resulted in a continually expanding foam (or three dimensional web). FET is based on the assumption that the entire universe is comprised of foamy ether that is expanding in a void. The curvature of space-time is the manifestation of distortions in the foamy ether and atomic particles are kinks (or knots) in the foam.

FET is a model that works extremely well in explaining many of the conundrums that persist to this day (i.e. wave-particle duality, gravitational-inertial mass equivalence, GR and QM incompatibility, nonlocality). For more conundrums, see FQXi article: The Persistent Failure of a Two Substance Paradigm.

A complete description of FET can be found at: www3.telus.net/foamyether/ This site contains many images and actual computer simulations that show how foamy ether works in explaining all of the forces of nature. FET also makes a bold prediction that current interferometer based gravitational wave detectors (such as LIGO) will fail, and offers an alternate design that will work.

You might look at Zeeya's article in Nature of a few days ago, which I believe to be free to view, at least as of now, http://www.nature.com/news/theoretical-physics-the-origins-of-space-and-time-1.13613. She lays out several of the current approaches to tackling space-time, some of which I take to make the distinction between space-time and matter relatively minimal. I find the devil in such things is in the construction of both tractable and beautiful mathematics and in proving or calculating enough that other people can see that there is some hope of it being useful.

Zeeya should have made that the article to this comment thread, since it seems very much what she is working on. Though there might be some proprietary issues.

This is the post I put on the comment thread there, since it gives a thumbnail sketch of my model of reality, or rather where I think the current model leaves the tracks. (Stuff I've said here many times.);

"I think the most significant problem in physics is its treatment of time. We exist as points in space and experience activity as a sequence of events, thus we model time as a progression from past events to future ones. In the broad context though, it is just a sea of activity and this creates change, such that potential becomes actual, ie, it is the future becoming past. For instance, the earth does not travel either Newton's flow or Einstein's fourth dimension from yesterday to tomorrow. Rather tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates. Quantum mechanics uses the external vector of time and ends up with multiworlds, as it goes from determined past into probabilistic future, yet it is the actual occurrences which determine the cat's fate, as probability collapses into actuality.

Causality is not due to temporal sequence, but energy transmission. Yesterday didn't cause today, nor does one wave cause the next. The sun shining on a spinning planet and wind across the waves are cause of these sequences.

Time then is an effect of action, not the basis for it. Much like temperature arising from quantities of action, time arises from change caused by action. We are just one of those molecules of water, bouncing from one point of contact to another. The narrative effect is what our minds record. Flashes of insight, like a movie camera taking a series of stills and reconstructing reality from them."

Tom,

It makes some interesting comments about thermodynamics;

"A provocative hint comes from a series of startling discoveries made in the early 1970s, when it became clear that quantum mechanics and gravity were intimately intertwined with thermodynamics, the science of heat."

Hi Peter,

Nice to see you active again, we had some correspondence 4 years back. Whatever happened to your random fields, is there any connection to your new idea? I wonder if you had seen Philip Gibbs idea in the new FQXI contest, he also seems to be talking about a similar idea called random graphs and necklace lie algebra.

I cannot remember at what stage my theory was when you kindly reviewed it and commented on it, but I feel I have made much progress since. One of the main points of my theory is that reality follows a simple math (Your original criticism was that it has no great math in it). Your criticism of lacking presentation is still true, but that is because I have spent a lot of time on the simulations to get some really good results. However, the FQXI contest entry has a somewhat better presentation than the original website. And you can get much better idea from the people who commented on my theory, including Shirazi and Torsten.

One of the greatest results that I get from my theory is the mass of the electron from a renormalization curves like in my theory(actually the graph shows the proton/electron mass ratio at the simulated scale). So I think you are very correct in emphasising the renormalization issue. Again, my theory might seem to you (and others) an amateurish, crackpotish and underdeveloped for its lack of standard physics presentation, but I cannot help that ,it is what it is (for now). The important thing which I hope people can see is the results.

As you can see from the theory, matter is made up of many random lines (which their lengths interpreted as energy) and their start and end points are space points. That unifies space and matter in such a simple way! The laws of physics naturally arise. I hope I can explain more in coming days. Thank you.

http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1877

the simulations can be run and they are in the website

http://www.qsa.netne.net

Adel

Hi Hahn,

May I ask a few starting questions,

1 what is your ether made of?

2 Why does it bend, and what is the law for its bending?

3 I don't see them behaving in a quantum manner. How does the hydrogen atom look like?

Thanks.

Adel

Hi Adel. In some sense I have made peace with QFT, so that random fields have become merely background thinking. I found, in particular, that although I could construct a random field equivalent for the quantized electromagnetic field, I could not construct a random field equivalent for quantized Dirac spinor fields, and I couldn't prove that it's not possible, so that I felt that I had to give up that line of thinking for now. I also gradually realized some parts of why the nature of the relationships that I could construct between random fields and quantum fields would not be convincing for physicists, but without enough clarity to be able to publish that realization.

Nonetheless, QFT can peacefully coexist with classical stochastic fields by taking QFT to be a signal analysis formalism, and taking the empiricist line that what the causes of the signals are is not so important insofar as they are inaccessible (if a cause isn't inaccessible, then it's a signal, so it can be analyzed, together with its relationships with other signals). If all our measurements are noisy, to the same extent, then signal analysis is relatively difficult and somewhat counterintuitive, with Hilbert spaces and noncommuting operators being a naturally useful mathematics for models of experimental apparatus. As a single sentence summary, state preparations in QFT are modulations of the vacuum state, and measurements identify how similar a given state is to a reference modulation (or, for a mixed state, to a collection of reference modulations).

I regret to say, Adel, that I can't make much contact with the paper that you link to. I feel that you've fed more assumptions into your modeling than you think you have, and that unpicking those assumptions is something that it may take you a while to do. In particular, I note that a collection of points randomly chosen is not a simple thing, since the choice of a random process to provide those choices already encodes a lot of information; saying something like "of course it should be Gaussian", for example, puts you on a direct course for something like a quantized harmonic oscillator. As another possible point of departure, although it sadly introduces much more complexity, it might help if you think carefully about how your ideas would apply in Minkowski space, insofar as working in a more general setting is one way to help one realize where unacknowledged assumptions have crept in.

Adel,

You said you read my essay 'many times' and would get back. I hope you do. Your site address only led to 'cache file' (whatever that is) with no simulations. Can you post a live one one using the 'link help page' link above?

Peter WM,

From what I could understand of your paper I agree you're in an important part of the forest and on one of the right non-linear tracks. I point to quantum and laser optics and plasma physics for a fast (still non-linear) track the right way. If you've read any of my last 3 essays you'll know my own method digs down and roots out the deepest of hidden assumptions. If not I hope you'll return the compliment and do so. I hope you'll find good support, though the medel described is rather more fundamental.

Peter CMH,

I still support your model in principle as a valid partial description (see your blog Aug 22nd last year) and my comments to PM above re plasma/ionization apply. Again I hope you'll also read mine this year, which 'points' the DFM dynamic at QM and the tangled web seems to unravel to expose the postulates of SR. (Which as Einstein said in '52 that SR is "entirely contained within". I'd appreciate your views.

John,

Not to ignore you... I agree our treatment of time is wrong, but as discussed and not quite as you propose. i.e. Time 'signals' one emitted are only EM signals (fluctuations) not 'time' itself, and may be altered by interactions, including as Christian Doppler discovered.

Zeeya,

Nice idea, and nice little Nature review. I can't really describe the discrete field model here as key elements have been both published and web archived on arXiv. Of course now the science data flow has surpassed the (Shannon) channel capacity available it's reached 'optical breakdown mode' (an information overload state) so two effects emerge, It is no longer 'joined up', and, as Peter M points out above, new theories, however superior, have virtually zero impact, lost in the 'noise'.

My essay this year does describe a way of 'decoding' the noise with a more intelligent 'IQbit', but even a high place in peer voting here may not overcome the 'theoretical inertia' indicating a possible end to our evolutionary cycle. However, I commend your sentiments in starting this blog so much that I would like to describe at least one key aspect not so far specifically presented, opening one of the doors to the rest and unification; Dark Matter. Please let me know if I may do so without breaching your conditions.

Many thanks

Peter

Peter,

Not sure what you mean by "time itself." By my view, time is simply a form of measurement, like temperature. Whether we are measuring electromagnetic signals, rotations of the planet, a swinging pendulum, or waves hitting the beach, it is a way to compare/measure the rate of activity/change. Just as temperature could be molecular, atomic, or the employment rate.

The conceptual problem is that our brain functions by producing a sequence of insights/thoughts and this too is a similar progression, but it is only one thread in a tapestry of thoughts and actions, all serving to balance one another, not all going in the same direction. Thought is a form of action and for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That's why we have wives and girlfriends. ;-)

As well as liberals and conservatives, capitalists and communists, etc.

Regards,

John M

John,

I suggest certainly not like temperature! That is my point. Where temperature is the quantification of a real physical property, which changes with changes to the measured 'oscillation rate', time is NOT! If we change that oscillation rate (where emitted by what we call a 'clock') we do NOT measure a change in some mystical property called 'time', only a change in a local oscillation rate. That is the important difference missed.

Time itself is only metaphysical and stays the same, whereas the physical EVIDENCE of an emission somewhere which was 1 second long, can be tampered with as much as you please as you're only tampering with the 'evidence', not the original fact.

I'm not sure you'll be able to discern the subtlety easily as you are, with all apologies, highly 'entrenched' in your own way of looking at it which may be partially valid but does seem to exclude many other with validity forming the holistic picture. I'm suggesting that time cannot be likened to 'anything' else because it is not a 'thing'. It IS a universal measure of duration, but no light or noise emitted necessarily has any faithful relevance to the period at the emitter once 'at large'. i.e. What we currently CALL 'Time' CAN BE DOPPLER SHIFTED! What we measure in some other frame is not then of course 'time' itself, which is invariant.

I'm sure you'll at least see and agree an analogy; 'Time' on the clocks of 3 people is co-ordinated and equal. But if one was approaching another at high speed the 'signals' from the other watch would simply be Doppler shifted, so the rate changed. We then need a new term 'apparent' time, which then defines SR's 'co-ordinate' time. But the rate of time (and watches) for all observers is unaltered. This very simple fact entirely eludes current theory and causes untold havoc and confusion.

Did any sense emerge from that?

Peter

Hi Peter J. I remember seeing your FQXi competition papers in the past; in any case, I looked again at your last three. How would you think they might affect the mathematics of the paper I posted? Does your way of thinking suggest any critique? Alternatively, how would you think its mathematics might affect your approach?

Peter,

" If we change that oscillation rate (where emitted by what we call a 'clock') we do NOT measure a change in some mystical property called 'time', only a change in a local oscillation rate. That is the important difference missed."

I agree there is no mystical property called time.

"'Time' on the clocks of 3 people is co-ordinated and equal. But if one was approaching another at high speed the 'signals' from the other watch would simply be Doppler shifted, so the rate changed. We then need a new term 'apparent' time, which then defines SR's 'co-ordinate' time. But the rate of time (and watches) for all observers is unaltered. This very simple fact entirely eludes current theory and causes untold havoc and confusion."

The problem with this point is that the effect is not just doppler shift. Since nothing can exceed the speed of light, when you accelerate a clock and its observer to close to the speed of light, their internal atomic activity is in fact slowed, since the electrons are vibrating/cycling at nearly the speed of light to begin with, so when you combine both external velocity and internal activity, it still can't exceed C, so everything in that frame is slowed proportionally. I think though that this goes to the inherent inertial effect of space, rather than some spacetime geometry being a causal property. The fact is that the concept of time as part of this foundational math is simply based on measures of duration and how they are affected by context, such as velocity, gravity, acceleration.

Duration emerges from action. As you seem to agree in the first paragraph, time is simply the change caused by activity, such that if it goes faster, so does its "clock." Duration being what is physically happening between points of reference. So it is the slowed activity which results in slowed time, not time as the frame causing activity to slow.

So no time as mystical property, only measure of change caused by action.

Regards,

John M

Adel,

In answer to your questions:

1. I think that it is futile to ask what ether is made of. If I said that ether was made of substance 'x', you could then ask what is substance 'x' made of. (String theorists are not concerned with what strings are made of; they are primarily interested in their properties). Ether is THEE fundamental substance and a foamy or web like structure makes for an excellent model of reality.

2. Because the ether is elastic, it is subject to distortions. A knot or kink will cause the surrounding ether to distort. The stickiness of the ether (similar to a spider web) keeps the knot from unfolding. The laws I use in the computer simulation use Hooke's Law for calculating spring distortion.

3. FET has quantum behavior build in because the foamy cells are the size of a Planck length so everything gets grainy at that scale. Because I am not a particle physicist, I can't give you exact pictures of atoms, but I'm assuming they are knots that are very similar to orbitals already calculated using current QM maths. In FET, these images would represent knots in the foamy ether instead of probability clouds of orbiting electrons.

Peter Hahn

Zeeya,

Exciting times to be a science journalist. The barbarians are at the gates and the old order is mostly bickering amongst themselves. All foam and bubbles and little forward momentum. Recipe for change.

Regards,

John M

Zeeya,

I understand the opportunity you are offering, but the fact is that every participant on these forums does have some form of model, or improvement on an existing model, that they have been using every other thread to advance and debate the virtues over other's models. So being given a thread specifically dedicated to the purpose should engender enthusiasm, but the sense is more that it removes what little padding there is on the wall we have been banging our heads against. Not to say I'm ungrateful for the chance, but it begs some larger questions, such as how could there be any form of objective consideration, since even the pros have resorted to anthropic multiverses to explain reality?

You are a journalist, not a judge, so it is your job to report the state of the discipline, not make judgements, but as a journalist you still have to do some editing and narrating. This can go in any number of directions. Necessarily the normal route with science reporting is simply to report whatever cutting edge experiment, theory, or discovery has happened recently and leave larger context to those writing books. Yet it must be occurring to the members of your profession that cutting edge might just be a little far out over the edge. So at some point journalism will also have to turn around and try to figure out where the train did leave the tracks, or else step off the edge into the multiverse.

I suspect you have read some of my more repeated points, so I won't bother you with them here and the other participants in these discussions have heard and given their opinions in no uncertain terms. In the long run though, we will most likely have to let the dust settle somewhat and see what is still standing.

Thank you very much.

Regards,

John M

Dear Zeeya,

If you have children or grandchildren, you will observe what I see an increasing loss of distinction between virtual reality and reality. Do we really need more and more alternative models of reality as to possibly save our preferred theories? Perhaps, you felt that your recent article in Nature on theoretical physics and the origins of space and time does too much focus on mathematically based theories rather than on the question how realistic they are.

Set theory and Hilbert space were welcomed as alternative to Euclid's definition of point and continuum and to Salviati's insight. Meanwhile, the mainstream even denies that the other way round Euclid, Galileo, and Shannon are still serious alternatives to the virtually endless search for new alternatives to a qualified common sense notions of logic and reality.

Regards,

Eckard

John,

You want Zeeya to report honestly on leading edge research, but censor anything you disagree with, such as the multiverse hypothesis, which is part of leading edge research?

If you don't have an ethical problem with that, I think you should.

Because my first career was journalism (not restricted to science) I have first hand experience with powerful people who control media resources (think Rupert Murdoch and his ilk) shaping news and opinion to suit their religion or philosophy, tastes, or just plain whim. I've been subpoenaed for testimony before the FCC with other Young Turk journalists of that day (the early 70s) who were reprimanded, fired or otherwise punished for reporting news not to the liking of owners and advertisers. We lost the battle, of course -- there are no more FCC standards that mean anything, and commercial news today both national and local is hardly anything more than sad or silly, even though still unduly influential. Thank God for public broadcasting and the BBC.

So ask yourself that if you had the power, would you publish only those science theories or anything else, that suit your worldview or whimsy?

Academics serve at the pleasure of institutions, John. They are not powerful people. They do their research and communicate the results, for university public relations departments to report to the public. And the institutions are hardly going to support research that tarnishes their reputation for what they *perceive* as a leading edge organization, because that perception feeds their funding stream of corporate and alumni largesse.

So you would dare ask a courage freelance journalist like Zeeya to become a functionary for your -- or anyone else's -- opinions of what science should be? There are already too few Zeeyas, and too many Murdochs. When the ratio is reversed, the world will be safe for informed opinions.

Best,

Tom

Tom,

I think you may be projecting your own experiences onto this situation a little too emphatically. It is safe to say that I have no power over what Zeeya writes and if using multiverses offends you, I will gladly switch to some other example, such as supersymmetry, which has been publicly faltering. There are lots of ideas put forth and I will readily admit there are a number I feel to be arrived at through erroneous logic and am will to offer my two cents on the subject. Would you alternatively feel that I have no rights to express my thoughts? Wouldn't that amount to censorship as well? There will alway be conflicting viewpoints on any number of subjects and those where there are none, tend not to elicit much discussion. If you read back through what I did write, you might notice my main intent is to try to explain to Zeeya the tactical position of those of us in these conversations. I don't think it really qualifies as directing her reporting to observe there is a natural give and take to the process, such that not all ideas are viable and someone, somewhere has to make some decisions as what to focus on.

Regards,

John M

Hi Richard, I don't dispute your claim that if there's a wave that propagates there must be something that waves, not as much as would some, because it is possible for a dynamics to be Lorentz invariant, as experiment quite strongly indicates it must be, but I feel a "so what?" reaction. What consequences does it have for a detailed mathematical description/model if there is a material ether? A 100 years ago, a material ether was felt so little to suggest Lorentz invariance that it was felt to be incompatible. After the event, and a 100 years, we know that Lorentz invariance can emerge in special states of condensed matter physics (for example, see Volovik's "The Universe in a Helium Droplet"), but it's not a commonplace. Given that, how confident can we be that suggestions that come from a particular material ether hypothesis will turn out to be experimentally useful, unless experiment has played an overwhelming role in choosing the hypothesis?

My second reaction is to ask how exactly do the waves move? I see on your "Waves in Space-Time" page an example motion that seems to require some kind of nonlinear wave equation, but I don't begin to be content unless there is a likeable motivation for a particular nonlinearity of an equation, and happiness only follows if the mathematics is tractable and turns out to be experimentally useful. Lastly, most importantly by far, what about the apparent stochasticity of our experimental results, the wave-like nature of the statistics of recorded discrete events, rather than there being a directly wave-like phenomena?