Is Reality Digital Or Analog? Physics Is Undecided - A Beautiful Universe ToE Offers An Answer by Vladimir F. Tamari

Tommaso, thanks for your comments I have a feeling I responded to them but now I see I have not. Apologies. Yes of course Descartes' premises are very different from yours or mine but there are startling similarities - that everything including space (not just matter) is made of corpuscules. In my case the similarity is even more startling as he theorized that these corpuscles rotate.

I raise my proverbial hat to whoever made those beautiful etchings to illustrate his ideas - they had no computer graphic software as I benefited from or programmed graphics as in your case.

The node states in my theory have three aspects 1) a node may or may not rotate 2) the rate of rotation can have any positive value but the angular momentum is in units of (h) 3) a node rotates at any spherical angle 4)the chirality of node rotation (whether it is clockwise or counterclockwise) is of critical importance.

My own state in Tokyo after the recent earthquake is stable after a week with my mind in a whirl.

Dear Alan

Thanks for your good wishes. I am very gratified that so many good and original thinkers were able to read my speculations..and of course they are nothing but speculations. If Nature is kind enough to act the way I have concluded it does (with dipolar building blocks capable of accounting for both gravity and electrostatics) I will be very happy - but it may well not! The pleasure of participation and learning here not ratings per se is what matters.

I am very interested in Maxwell's mechanical models and have been looking for source material but could only find the diagram I reprinted in my essay, and without explanation of what it means exactly. I will appreciate it if you can provide Edwin's reference.

Some weeks ago I had already read your idea about an Archimedes screw interpretation of the particle-wave duality. It is very clever the axis of the screw would be a vector and the helical structure the wave. I had commented about this in one of the discussions here but could not find my comment again! In it I said that - judging from the nice animation you made of the particle being driven by the screw - this may be a version of de Broglie's idea of a pilot wave associated with a point particle. In the figure illustrating electromagnetic propagation in my original 2005 Beautiful Universe paper on which my present fqxi paper is based, I have suggested how a circularly polarized wave would move with the axes of the nodes rotating in place to create a helical pattern - I feel there is no need for a separate 'mechanism' to create this motion as the screw does in your model. I will read your paper again.

Best wishes from Vladimir

Hi Ian

Thanks and good luck with your conference. The past week in Japan was a major tragedy. Thank God my wife and family here are fine, but we had quite a shake in Tokyo too, not to mention the radiation scare. But it is nothing compared to those who suffered so much up North.

I was reading a bit about St. Anslem College it sounds a pleasant place to contemplate life and the universe!

Best wishes from Vladimir

Dear Russell

thank you for your kind remarks. The Japan earthquake and the response to it from people all over is yet one more reminder that we live on one planet that is full of challenges and that our fate is linked because of our common humanity, including the rich cultures and sciences we have created and share. Please excuse these disjointed ideas - it has been a strange couple of weeks here in Tokyo!

As some have noted the rating process can be rather arbitrary and I am lucky to have been considered in the final list. On the other hand there are so many essays that I am sure many gems have been overlooked because they have not been read, or perhaps as in your case, need a second reading to see its full merit.

I really should devote more time now to developing, analyzing and simulating in greater detail aspects of the model I have presented. GR becomes simple - momentum and a pattern of twisting node axes as measured along geodesics through a density field - like light rays bending in a gradient-index optical medium. On the other hand simple motion of matter needs acrobatic convolutions of the pattern made up of the node's rotation rate and axes orientation as they transfer their energy to their neighbors in the lattice. To answer your question about what the nodes are made of: as I told Steve the nodes are not themselves spheres or made up of matter - their angular momentum merely has the possibility to orient itself in any spherical angle. I agree with you and the other papers that insist that photons (whatever they are) are " the explanation for the other particles", and I may add "all the rest of physics besides!"

As I have pointed out in my essays, to make these notions work, physics has to be reverse-engineered and rebuilt on new first principles - call it an earthquake and reconstruction in physics :)

Best wishes from Vladimir

Dear Dr. Cosmic Ray,

Thanks for your comments. You are playing a wonderful role in this fqxi contest to read various papers, compare their ideas and introduce them to other authors and encouraging us in the process. One such idea is 'twisting' whether it is in a rope as you interestingly point out, or in my own theory, it may well hold a key ingredient to describe gravitational attraction. Alan's Archimedes' screw idea if I understand it correctly, applies to photons - a screw twists but how that is implemented in the general scheme of things has to be detailed. String theory is way beyond my understanding and interest. The tetrahedrons illustrated in my paper show the geometrical configuration of dipolar nodes in the lattice, but the tetrahedra do not spin as a unit. It is only the nodes of the surfaces of particles facing each other that spin in place, and in opposite directions This causes the systematic rope-like twisting of the nodes making up the intervening space. Obviously this idea needs to be examined more carefully and in detail.

Indeed I am having fun and hope you are too! With best wishes from Vladimir

Kharasho, Yuri

Thank you for the links to Professor Winterberg's website and writings. I have now read a number of his texts and find his outlook refreshing. His suggestions of a "Planck Ether" made up of vortices of positive and negative elements making up everything in the universe without the need for extra dimensions has some interesting similarities with my theory, but also significant differences. I would be honored if he can read and comment on my papers.

One of the things I could not agree with is his interpretation of the results of Aspect's experiment (a variation of Bell's Theorem) as proving the existence of superluminal light velocities. He makes this claim because he considers the quantum wave as a real wave in the ether particles or nodes (as I do) and yet retains the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics (which I reject- the "probability" is just a natural outcome of the wave-form). This adds a layer of complication to his plan to revamp physics, even as he convincingly shows the necessity of reinterpreting General relativity in terms of his ether vortices.

In any case it is refreshing to read his work since it shows yet again that aspects of Einstein's theories need to be seriously re-examined and reinterpreted for physics to be whole.

From his brief words on the subject I could not understand Professor Winterberg's argument that Minkowski spacetime implies that everything is pre-determined - implying a theological conclusion about God and free will. One wants to read more on why he thinks so.

With best wishes from Vladimir