#26. The Phasiverse [physics]

PH

Red, theory; black, fact.

The nucleus around which a TOE will hopefully crystallize.

3-29-2017

I will be arguing here that 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.

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 such oscillators (the definition is abstract and mathematical), unsuitable for easy, weekend universe creation, would be masses bouncing up and down on springs, and electronic devices called tank circuits, which are just one capacitor connected across the terminals of one inductor, plus taps on the inductor for getting the energy in. (I am thinking here of the Hartley oscillator, of which I built half a dozen as a teenager.)

If a bunch 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 begins with two old-school pendulum clocks in a case with their pendulums swinging in some random phase relationship. The next day,  mysteriously, the pendulums will always be found swinging in opposite directions. The coupling is evidently due to tiny, rhythmic forces travelling through the common case from clock to clock.

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. I have already offered Hebb's rule in these pages as an abstract rule of attraction and binding in a scheme for polymerizing spaceless but noisy "time lines" into a three dimensional network that approximates the space we live in. However, oscillators make better space-forming entities than these "time lines" on a number of counts.

First of all, the phase pull-in effect alluded to above 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, it is hard to see how they could 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. (Since we haven't gotten as far as space yet, these would have to be abstract, spaceless entities that smack of yin and yang.) Figures in Conway's game of Life would seem to be examples of this alternation.

What is the time required for such an alternation? The question is meaningless; they just do it. With no past or future, the special status of the present becomes self-explanatory, alleviating some of the cognitive dissonance that goes with the concept of a unified space-time. This space-time, and the even more bizarre idea that it is warped by mass-energy as if embedded in an even higher-dimensional space, starts to look like a device to visualize one's way to solutions to problems that have their origin in unvisualizable spacelessness.

A great many oscillators all with the same phase is not an interesting universe. However, suppose 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.

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. Notice how easily we derive an effect that formerly required General Relativity.

The next level of description deals with where the oscillators come from.

4-23-2017

Let us jettison the particle model altogether at this point and assume the universe to be made of the waves themselves, with no need for generating objects. These waves might have a tendency to synchronize as a fundamental given. If it is not fundamental, maybe the explanation for it can safely be left to a future generation of physicists. (The image I get at this point is of a series of temporary camps struck during the ascent of some stupendous mountain, for step-wise consolidation of gains, with the grail of the TOE located at the summit.)

As a second thread of this argument, I note that some of the phenomena characteristic of quantum theory can be explained as due to the practicalities of representing functions like waves, practicalities that are always in your face when programming a computer, but never mentioned in the physics I have read so far. In programming, you have to define memory space for all variables, which is always, ultimately, an integer or a set of integers, with both a maximum and a minimum (nonzero) amount that can be represented.

Quantization could be due to the presence of small quantities comparable in size to the value of the least significant bit of an integer-like entity. (Deprecated, Part 4)