Red, theory; black, fact
 |
| The nucleus around which a theory of everything will hopefully crystallize. |
The Concept
Our reality, the world of appearances, is encoded in the relative phases of an ineffably large number of oscillators, each of which is a kind of primitive clock.
Inspiration from Quantum Mechanics
An early interpretation of the theory of quantum mechanics was that there is a harmonic oscillator somehow assigned to each point in space, and that these account for the matter fields of the universe. Examples of oscillators would be a mass bouncing up and down on a spring and an electronic device called a tank circuit, which is just one capacitor connected across the terminals of one inductor.
Consider Huygens's Clocks
If a set of such oscillators can communicate with each other (exchange oscillatory energy), this is called coupling, and it can make the oscillators tend to pull each other in to the same, common phase. The Huygens's clocks experiment began with two old-school pendulum clocks in a case with their pendulums swinging in some random phase relationship. The next day, mysteriously, the pendulums were found swinging in opposite directions. The coupling is evidently due to tiny, rhythmic forces travelling through the common supporting beam from clock to clock.
Enter Positive Feedback
If the coupling is positive, as assumed here, (it's negative in the above experiment), the phase pull-in effect becomes stronger the closer the two phases approach each other, causing a positive feedback effect. This is very reminiscent of Hebb's rule in neuroscience and the tendency of natural attractive forces such as gravity to depend inversely on distance.
A Organizing Principle
The phase pull-in effect provides a simple answer to questions such as where the organizing principle comes from. All you need to explain is where the oscillators themselves all came from, how they oscillate, and why they are coupled. Since the oscillators begin life in spacelessness, they cannot avoid interacting to produce a coupling effect. Second, oscillators need no past or future; they can arise as a succession of causally related nows that alternates between two contrasting forms. Figures in Conway's game of Life would seem to be examples of this alternation.
Enter Entropy
A great many oscillators all with the same phase is not an interesting universe. However, suppose that this is impossible because of "train wrecks" happening during the synchronization process that produce frustration of the synchronization analogous to spin frustration in spin glasses. An example would be a cyclic relationship of oscillators in which a wave goes around the loop endlessly. Such cycles may correspond to particles of matter in our universe, and the spiral waves that they would throw off into surrounding space may correspond to the fields around such particles.
Gravitational Lensing Explained
A black hole or galaxy would be surrounded by a tremendous number of such radiating fields. The resulting desychronization of the oscillators making up the surrounding space would increase the average phase difference between phasically nearby oscillators, thereby inhibiting their coupling, thereby inhibiting the travel of signals generally through the region. Result: the speed of light is reduced in the vicinity, resulting in the bending of light rays, called gravitational lensing.
Quantization is not explained, which is a limitation of the present theory.
