Eckard,
Your essay caught me completely off guard. For a number or reasons I pretty much accept the "now is real" interpretation a the only one that is logically self-consistent, since all block models of time require a sort of magical preconstruction of the block that on closer examination cannot be made self-consistent without some kind of causality-enforcing "growth" from past to future. Any such "growth' process looks a whole lot like... well, time, and time with a very definite sense of "now" at the future face of growth.
I am very much aware of the SR and quantum arguments for the block universe, but am also unimpressed by them. Since there exist computational models by which an infinite number of inertial frames can co-exist and show the exquisite symmetry of SR, but with only of the frames being "real" and all of the others "virtual", I do not see any logical path for justifying the need to create a block universe. That would be sort of the most ham-fisted attempt at a solution, and as I noted above, it doesn't really work anyway due to self-consistency issues. Computer science tends to ingrain the value of virtual into your world view, and of how real these virtual worlds can become, with each one potentially being the site of the single "real" frame.
I've also been a fan of Fourier transforms for decades, particularly the complex variety. I once "invented" a fractional integration/differentiation spectrum based on Fourier transform phase shifts. A chemist friend who actually used fractional calculus in his work was quite excited by it, but I just laughed and said I was very confident that all I had done was come up with an idea that someone else likely had done at least a century ago... which turned out to be exactly the case!
I very much like and agree with your idea that Fourier transforms are even more relevant to particle physics than we give them credit for, though I suspect we differ in some of the details of what part of which variety of transform gets applied where. If you get a chance sometime and have not already done so already, you should look up the chirality issue for fermions in the Standard Model. The left-handed and right-handed version of the electron (and other fermions, except neutrinos) present some interesting opportunities to link Fourier components to both particles and how particles obtain mass.
My only disappointment in your essay was that I was hoping that in the last couple of pages you would take your model a bit further into particle physics to show how it might connect there. I realize though that the length limits of these essays are tough, but for me this one ended too quickly.
So again, thanks. Yours is one of a very small number of essays that I will stash away for a closer look after the FQXi commentary period.
I will put a short posting under your essay thread to point to this one as my assessment.
Cheers,
Terry