#4. My First Theory of Everything (TOE) [physics]

PH

Red, theory; black, fact.

The nucleus around which a TOE will hopefully crystallize.

Alocia and Anaevia

In my first post, I made a case for the existence of absolute space and even suggested that space is some kind of condensate (e.g., a crystal). The divide-and-conquer strategy that has served us so well in science suggests that the next step is to conceptually take this condensate apart into particles. The first question that arises is whether these particles are themselves situated in an older, larger embedding space, or come directly out of spacelessness (i.e., a strange, hypothetical early universe that I call "Alocia," my best Latin for "domain of no space." Going even further back, there would have been "Anaevia," "domain of no time." Reasoning without time seems even trickier than reasoning without space.)

What came before space?

The expansion of our universe suggests that the original, catastrophic condensation event, the Big Bang, was followed by further, slower accretion that continues to this day. However, the resulting expansion of space is uniform throughout its volume, which would be impossible if the incoming particles had to obey the rules of some pre-existing space. If there were a pre-existing space, incoming particles could only add to the exterior surface of the huge condensate in which we all presumably live, and could never access the interior unless our universe were not only embedded in a 4-space, but hyper-pizza-shaped as well. The latter is unlikely because self-attraction of the constituent particles would crumple any hyper-pizza-shaped universe into a hypersphere in short order. (Unless it spins?) Conclusion: the particles making up space probably have no spatial properties themselves, and bind together in a purely informational sense, governed by Hebb's rule. 

Hebb's rule was originally a neuroscience idea about how learning happens in the brain. My use of it here does NOT imply that a giant brain somehow underlies space. Rather, the evolutionary process that led to the human brain re-invented Hebb's rule as the most efficient way of acquiring spatial information. 

Hebb's rule pertains to signal sources: how could hypothetical space-forming particles come up with the endless supply of energy required by pumping out white noise, waves, etc., 24/7? Answer: these "particles" are the growing tips of time lines, that themselves grow by an energy-releasing accretion process. The chunks that accrete are variable in size or interrupted by voids, so timeline extension has entropy associated with it that represents the signals needed by Hebb's rule.

I am well aware of all the space-bound terms in the previous paragraph (underlined), supposedly about goings-on in Alocia, the domain of no space; however, I am using models here as an aid to thought, a time-honored scientific technique.

Is cosmological expansion some kind of accretion?

I imagine that Alocia is home to large numbers of space-like condensates, with a size distribution favoring the microscopic, but with a long tail extending toward larger sizes. Our space grows because these mostly tiny pre-fab spaces are continually inserting themselves into it, as soon as their background signal pattern matches ours somewhere. This insertion process is probably more exothermic than any other process in existence. If the merging space happens to be one of the rarer, larger ones, the result would be a gamma ray burst bright enough to be observed at cosmological distances and generating enough pure energy to materialize all the cosmic rays we observe.

The boundary problem

I suspect that matter is annihilated when it reaches the edge of a space. This suggests that our space must be mostly closed to have accumulated significant amounts of matter. This agrees with Hawking's no-boundary hypothesis. The closure need not be perfect, however; indeed, that would be asking a lot of chance. Imperfections in the closure of our universe may take the form of pseudo-black holes: cavities in space that lack fields. If they subsequently acquire fields from the matter that happens to hit them, they could evolve to closely resemble super-massive black holes, and be responsible for nucleating galaxies.

Conclusions

• Spatial proximity follows from correlations among processes, and does not cause them.
• Any independence of processes is primordial and decays progressively.
• The universe evolves through a succession of binding events, each creating a new property of matter, which can be interpreted as leftover entropy.
• Analysis in the present theoretical framework proceeds by declaring familiar concepts to be conflations of these properties, e.g., time = change + contrast + extent + unidirectional sequence; space = time + bidirectional sequence.