Dear Wayne

If you are looking for another essay to read and rate in the final days of the contest, will you consider mine please? I read all essays from those who comment on my page, and if I cant rate an essay highly, then I don't rate them at all. Infact I haven't issued a rating lower that ten. So you have nothing to lose by having me read your essay, and everything to gain.

Beyond my essay's introduction, I place a microscope on the subjects of universal complexity and natural forces. I do so within context that clock operation is driven by Quantum Mechanical forces (atomic and photonic), while clocks also serve measure of General Relativity's effects (spacetime, time dilation). In this respect clocks can be said to possess a split personality, giving them the distinction that they are simultaneously a study in QM, while GR is a study of clocks. The situation stands whereby we have two fundamental theories of the world, but just one world. And we have a singular device which serves study of both those fundamental theories. Two fundamental theories, but one device? Please join me and my essay in questioning this circumstance?

My essay goes on to identify natural forces in their universal roles, how they motivate the building of and maintaining complex universal structures and processes. When we look at how star fusion processes sit within a "narrow range of sensitivity" that stars are neither led to explode nor collapse under gravity. We think how lucky we are that the universe is just so. We can also count our lucky stars that the fusion process that marks the birth of a star, also leads to an eruption of photons from its surface. And again, how lucky we are! for if they didn't then gas accumulation wouldn't be halted and the star would again be led to collapse.

Could a natural organisation principle have been responsible for fine tuning universal systems? Faced with how lucky we appear to have been, shouldn't we consider this possibility?

For our luck surely didnt run out there, for these photons stream down on earth, liquifying oceans which drive geochemical processes that we "life" are reliant upon. The Earth is made up of elements that possess the chemical potentials that life is entirely dependent upon. Those chemical potentials are not expressed in the absence of water solvency. So again, how amazingly fortunate we are that these chemical potentials exist in the first instance, and additionally within an environment of abundant water solvency such as Earth, able to express these potentials.

My essay is attempt of something audacious. It questions the fundamental nature of the interaction between space and matter Guv = Tuv, and hypothesizes the equality between space curvature and atomic forces is due to common process. Space gives up a potential in exchange for atomic forces in a conversion process, which drives atomic activity. And furthermore, that Baryons only exist because this energy potential of space exists and is available for exploitation. Baryon characteristics and behaviours, complexity of structure and process might then be explained in terms of being evolved and optimised for this purpose and existence. Removing need for so many layers of extraordinary luck to eventuate our own existence. It attempts an interpretation of the above mentioned stellar processes within these terms, but also extends much further. It shines a light on molecular structure that binds matter together, as potentially being an evolved agency that enhances rigidity and therefor persistence of universal system. We then turn a questioning mind towards Earths unlikely geochemical processes, (for which we living things owe so much) and look at its central theme and propensity for molecular rock forming processes. The existence of chemical potentials and their diverse range of molecular bond formation activities? The abundance of water solvent on Earth, for which many geochemical rock forming processes could not be expressed without? The question of a watery Earth? is then implicated as being part of an evolved system that arose for purpose and reason, alongside the same reason and purpose that molecular bonds and chemistry processes arose.

By identifying atomic forces as having their origin in space, we have identified how they perpetually act, and deliver work products. Forces drive clocks and clock activity is shown by GR to dilate. My essay details the principle of force dilation and applies it to a universal mystery. My essay raises the possibility, that nature in possession of a natural energy potential, will spontaneously generate a circumstance of Darwinian emergence. It did so on Earth, and perhaps it did so within a wider scope. We learnt how biology generates intricate structure and complexity, and now we learn how it might explain for intricate structure and complexity within universal physical systems.

To steal a phrase from my essay "A world product of evolved optimization".

Best of luck for the conclusion of the contest

Kind regards

Steven Andresen

Darwinian Universal Fundamental Origin

    Dear Wayne,

    What a fascinating essay! I was surprised at how short it was in page count, since you cover a lot of turf. I was also very pleased to see an essay that addresses quarks, the strong force, and neutrinos, since without those other non-electrons it's hard to see how one can make serious inroads into the issue of where fermions come from. Arguably, the far messier and more complicated interactions of quarks are more likely to be telling us something important about fermions in general than are the clean, largely unencumbered (unconfined!) electrons in isolation.

    Yes, I am very familiar with the rishon model and its delightfully named pair of preons, the vohu ("void", V, with no electric charge) and the tohu ("unformed" ,T, or mnemonically one "Third" of an electron charge). It was the starting point for some of my most intriguing personal research, even though the original rishon model flatly does not work. What Harari and Shupe glommed onto there was an underlying symmetry that they unfortunately tried to translate directly into still more particles, when the message was really a bit subtler than that.

    My familiarity with where rishons went wrong is why I found this paragraph of your essay especially fascinating. It also made me pay much closer attention to what you are saying in your entire essay:

    Essay page 1: "The T & V (Rishon[s]) geometric basis doesn't include curvature, which is constructed when three [T & V preons] are taken as a group, e.g. quark. Geometric intuition suggests that they are 'fused', as partitions of a closed string, band, etc. ... QCD color is determined by the orientation of the intrinsic spin centerline with respect to the colored partitions, Up or Down quanta by the number of T (or V) partition/preons, and Electro-dynamic charge is assigned as usual."

    Uh, WOW!

    You are dead right that the original Harari "straight string" of three preons, e.g. TTT for the positron, {VTT, TVT, and TTV} for the three colors of up quarks, {TVV, VTV, VVT} for anti-down quarks and anti-colors, and VVV for neutrinos, fails literally at the geometric level because it "distinguishes" both the start and end quarks and the order in which they are connected. The only geometric resolution that makes sense is exactly what you drew in your figure: A loop of three rishons that is bowed in outward (either up or down) around its axis of symmetry.

    After that , I started reading what you are saying a lot more carefully. To be, um, a bit blunt about it, you're writing style is so informal and, well... "syntactically random" maybe?... that it's too asy to skim over what you are saying about physics.

    But here's the deal: Out of the hundreds or thousands of folks who have looked at the rishon model seriously over the past few decades, to the best of my knowledge you are only person (OK OK, other than myself) who noticed this absolutely critical geometry issue. It's literally foundational in the sense that if you don't notice it, you are instantly and from there on guaranteed that no theory built on T and V can ever be internally self-consistent, despite all of its promising relationships that rishon triplets have to the fermions. I am pretty sure that folks not noticing this deep problem is at least one of the reasons why the rishon idea never really got out of the starting gate.

    You are a very clever man, Wayne. You hide it a bit behind a highly informal and somewhat syntactically random style of speaking, but some of your insights are deep and frankly profound. If early in rishon history Harari or Shupe had figured out what you just said, I suspect that some of the major threads in the history of particle unification theory would have played out very differently by now.

    Another important issue that you identified was this one:

    Essay page 2: "The proposed [rishon loop] approach to particle theory bears a striking geometric similarity to string theory."

    Now on this one I'll go out on a bit of limb and suggest to you that the reason for this resemblance is that you are looking at the real, experimentally accessible prequel to string theory.

    Most folks aren't aware of it, but nucleons like protons and neutrons have additional spin states that appear like heavier particles built from the same set of quarks. Thus in addition to uud forming a spin 1/2 proton, the same three quarks can also form a heavier particle with spin 3/2 (1 added unit of spin) and spin 5/2 (2 added units of spin). These three variations form a lovely straight line when plotted as mass versus spin, which in turn implies a fascinatingly regular relationship between mass and nucleon spin.

    These lines are called Regge trajectories, and back in the late 1960s and early 1970s they looked like a promising hint for how to unify the particle zoo. Analyses of Regge trajectories indicated string-like stable resonance states were creating the extreme regularity of the Regge trajectories. These "strings" consisted of something very real, the strong force, and their vibrations were highly constrained by something equally real, the quarks that composed the nucleons (and also mesons, which also have Regge trajectories). These boson-like resonances of a string-like incarnation of the strong force were highly unexpected, extremely interesting, and experimentally accessible. Theorists were optimistic.

    Then it all went to Planck.

    Specifically, the following paper caught on like wildfire (slow wildfire !) and ended up obliterating any hope or future funding for understanding the quite real, experimentally accessible, proton-scale, strong-force-based string vibrations behind Regge trajectories. They did this by proposing what I like to call the Deep Dive:

    Scherk, J. & Schwarz, J. H., Dual Models for Non-Hadrons, Nuclear Physics B, Elsevier, 1974, 81, 118-144.

    So what was the Deep Dive, and why did they do it?

    Well, it "went down" like this: Scherk and Schwarz noticed that the overall signature of some of the proton-sized strong-force vibrations behind Regge trajectories were very similar to the spin 2 signatures of the (still) hypothetical gravitons that were supposed to unify gravity with other three forces of the Standard Model. Since the emerging Standard Model was having breathtaking success in that time period for explaining the particle zoo, quantum gravity and the Planck-scale foam were very popular at the time... and very tempting.

    So, based as best I can tell only on the resemblance of these very real vibration modes in baryons and mesons to gravitons, Scherk and Schwarz made their rather astonishing, revelation-like leap: They decided that the strong-force-based vibrations behind Regge trajectories were in fact gravitons, which have nothing to do with the strong force and are most certainly not "composed" of the strong force. The Planck-scale vibrations of string theory are instead composed of... well, I don't know what, maybe intense gravity? I've never been able to get an answer out of a string theorist on that question of "what is a string made of?" This is not an unfair question, since for example the original strings behind Regge trajectories are "composed" of the strong force, and have quite real energies associated with their existences.

    I still don't even quite get even the logic behind the Deep Dive, since gravity had exactly zero to do with either the substance of the strings (a known force) or the nature of the skip-rope-like, quark-constrained vibrations behind Regge trajectories. Nonetheless they did it. They took the Deep Dive, and it only ended up costing physics the following:

    ... 20 orders of magnitude of and shrinking size, since protons are about 10-15 meters across, and the gravitons were nominally at the Planck foam scale of 10-35 (!!!), which is a size scale that is inaccessible to any conceivable direct measurement process in the universe; plus:

    ... 20 orders of magnitude of increased energy costs, which is similarly universally inaccessible to any form of direct measurement; plus:

    ... a complete liberation from all of those annoying but experimentally validated vibration constraints that were imposed in real nucleons and mesons by the presence of quarks and the strong force. That's a cost, not a benefit, since it explodes the range of options that have to be explored to find a workable theory. Freeing the strings from... well... any appreciable experimental or theoretical constraints... enabled them instead to take on the nearly infinite number of possible vibration modes that a length or loop of rope gyrating wildly in outer space would have; and finally:

    ... just to add yet a few more gazillion unneeded and previously unavailable degrees of freedom, a huge increase in the number of available spatial dimensions, always at least 9 and often many more.

    And they wonder why string theory has 10500 versions of the vacuum... :)

    Oh... did I also mention that the Deep Dive has cost the US (mainly NSF plus matching funds from other institutions) well over half a billion dollars, with literally not a single new experimental outcome, let alone any actual working new process or product, as a consequence?

    This was only to be expected, since the Deep Dive plunged all research into real string-like vibrations down into the utterly inaccessible level of the Planck foam. Consequently, the only product of string theory research has been papers. This half a billion dollars' worth of papers has built on itself, layer by layer of backward citations and references, for over 40 years. In many cases, the layers of equations are now so deep that no human mind could possibly verify them. Errors only amplify over time, and if there is no way to stop their propagation by catching them though experiments, it's the same situation as trying to write an entire computer operating system in one shot, without having previously executed and validated its individual components.

    In short, what the US really got for its half billion dollars was a really deep stack of very bad programming. Our best hope for some eventual real return on string theory investments is that at least a few researchers were able to get in some real, experimentally meaningful research in all of that, to produce some real products that don't depend on unverifiable non-realities.

    So Wayne, here is real my point:

    It is not accurate to say that your loop rishons ideas resembles string theory, because what you just proposed is almost certainly both real and experimentally accessible, and string theory is not.

    Thus the correct statement is that string theory somewhat vaguely resembles your work on rishon string loops. I'll give the string theory body of work credit for that much, even if it is a lot shabbier in quality.

    In other words, your 2017 FQXi essay very likely has more experimentally meaningful real value than all that pile of string theory papers that all those US government agencies have invested in for over 40 years. (DoD did not participate, nanny-nanny boo-boo NSF!).

    And you accomplished all of this for... a lot less than half a billion dollars!... :)

    Cheers,

    Terry

    Fundamental as Fewer Bits by Terry Bollinger (Essay 3099)

    Essayist's Rating Pledge by Terry Bollinger

    P.S. - Sorry, but the FQXi rating that I'm giving your essay as a submission to the 2017 FQXi Essay contest is not all that high. That's because your essay is: structurally and syntactically a bit of a mess; stuffed to the gills with way too many ideas introduced in way too short of a space; and not even pretending to answer the real FQXi question this year, which is to explain what the word 'fundamental' really means. That said, I also think every serious particle theorist should at least look over and read your essay. While some of the content of your essay is very likely nonsense (sorry, but that is pretty much true for everyone writing papers in an exploratory area like this), you are also almost frighteningly spot-on for at least some issues. That makes your essay very much worth reading and taking seriously, contest aside.

      Wayne

      Are you saying there has to be a sharp 'cut off' line at the switch? or how about 'blending' with uncertainty across the change?

      For my model I'm pleased to have now found tho Poincare sphere, matching my 2 paired orthogonal distributions! Could you actually follow the full ontology producing the CHSH.2 classical reproduction of QM?

      Scoring yours now, hold tight for the boost.

      Peter

      Steven,

      I'm not really 'looking for more essays to read and rate'' but am interested in innovative ideas. There are many papers here that consider PART of the basis for all 4 fundamental forces... but few even attempt to explain all.

      I'll search out yours, but you really didn't need to write a mini-essay to ask... I feel all hypotheses must end somehow, so it is important to understand and be able to explain how. so few even attempt THAT!

      WRL

      Terry,

      The association with string was originally geometric, and I always constructed it 'with partitions'. But they couldn't figure out how to do that and the journals were filled with dead-end refs. Eventually, after seminars hosted by Kaufmann and conversations with Smolin, the two collaborated with Bilson-Thompson on another geometric version of TVT combinatorial algebra and quantum gravity. IMHO the younger students maybe miss a lot of good older theory just because it isn't accessible in the arXiv.

      I attempted to explain my departure from traditional string theory via ref to M.B. Green, J.H. Schwarz and E. Witten, Superstring Theory, Cambridge University Press, p 21-22, 1987.

      But you tell it:

      "... papers ..built on itself, layer by layer of backward citations and references, for over 40 years. In many cases, the layers of equations are now so deep that no human mind could possibly verify them. Errors only amplify over time, and if there is no way to stop their propagation "

      The truly sad part of this observation is that I've tried for ages to stop the limp-string madness, citing GSW page 21-22, in which an unstated assumption is made that the closed string is cylindrically symmmetric with perturbations. As you observe, this both allows a myriad of possible ground-state algebras and avoids (forever) the possibility of finding the correct one-- which is a band (i.e. a closed stiff string).

      Then finally you acknowedge some unfamiliar grammar (perhaps things like "representation geometry"?), which I tend to think was key to the mathematically abstract discussion of 'what is fundamental'. I took the question in the mathematical-physical sense rather a task to define the word in the context of theoretical physics. In fact Sabine Hossenfelder's essay says very much the same thing.

      Clearly both the contest rules and the scoring system favor a more philosophical, and verbose, discussion. se la vie. Having taken on the challenge of writing a fundamentals essay, I chose to stick closely to known theoretical work at that level. Thus it was like a deep 'bounce' dive to the foundational formula (not yet even an equation!) and thence to use that result to answer a few well-known, documented, fundamental physical questions.

      So I am not as verbose, but original in the sense of "what" is fundamental. After all, talking about the requirements (as a couple essay authors did well) but NOT 'putting anything _in_ the box' is not so convincing, yes?

      Also, I have a nice example of how it is that the quark-scale closed band comes to look like an open (thick) string. Of course, since they are at vastly different scales, as you point out, the closed band becomes stretched into a very long dog-bone shape _during_ weak interactions. We note, of course, that the open string theory comes from 'Lund' Univ., and to give it mass in the situation desribed above, Prof Gross showed that the string needs a thickness. Concatinate that thickness, 'b', also intrinsic-energy 'erg'- and what theory do you get??!

      Best regards, look forward to hearing more from you... perhaps collaborative.

      Wayne

      Wayne

      People invent clocks, then Einstein comes along and discovers their rate is modulated in gravitational environments.

      What you have done is listen to somebody say, "forces drive a clocks function, so forces must be implicated in general relativitys effects".

      To which your respond. Nothing of any interest here, bit of poetic mumbo jumbo maybe!

      Maybe it's that you're not very deductive

      Steve

        Oddly, in Einstein's time, those clocks were mostly gravity-driven by weights. Since then many other forces are used to MEASURE time, since they impart some effects on physical objects. Of course, that includes atomic clocks, among the most accurate, which use electro-weak forces.

        So indeed, since all 4 well-known fundamental forces can be used to measure time, certainly all 4 should be formulated in a causal fashion. But quantum mechanics isn't.

        Dear Wayne,

        Your ideas of space-filling objects are very interesting! I do not have any definite answers, but gravitation theories with torsion, which I have been studying, might be relevant. I have outlined some preliminary ideas in:

        https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.00747

        https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.05330

        My best regards,

        Tejinder

          Thank-you for the arXiv refs, Tejinder. I understand that point-like particles (or masses) are prohibited in any self-consistent mathematical system. I also find your Compton-Schwarzschild length interesting, although I have very serious doubts about any form or particle-like DM matter candidate, at least for the conical strong lensing signature. No observed clumping= not any form of massive particle.

          WRL

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