Channels ▼

Jack Woehr

Dr. Dobb's Bloggers

Dust in the Wind : A Unified Field Hypothesis

January 26, 2011

Maybe the classic Eagles Kansas (a reader corrected me!) rock song is correct. Maybe all we are is dust in the wind.If you are prepared to accept the idea that the spookiness of entanglement is an artifact of the technical and mathematical definition of quantum state, the song title sugggests an attractive hypothesis unifying gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force.

Readers might first wish to go back through the three previous items in this series:

  1. The Distribution of the Solar System is Quantized
  2. The existential irreality of quantum state
  3. Gazing into the Abyss of Bell's Theorem
As we deconstruct the physical universe, we find it is infinitely subsconstituent. We find stuff in motion, the stuff itself being further composed of stuff in motion ad infinitum, per Ogden Nash.

All that really exists is stuff and motion.

All forces are motion, stuff moving and becoming entangled in near approach by confluence of the internal motion of the many elements of its subconstituency with the internal motion of the many elements of subconstituency of other stuff (internal in the sense of "internal to the calculation of the overall system" as opposed to "geometrically inside").

In such a model a particle is not a thing, an object: it's a vortex of stuff in motion in an ambient medium of stuff in motion. This description unifies subatomic phenomena, the planetary weather system, all the waves in all the oceans of the world, galaxies.

This hypothesis unifies the various forces as various tides and cross currents in the ebb and flow of the stuff in motion of which subatomic quantum phenomena in motion which we study are composed.

This hypothesis explains why atoms don't run down like windup watches over time. They are phenomena of an infinitely complex entanglement like tornados in a universally encompassing weather system.

This hypothesis explains missing mass in the standard models: current approaches can't track the motion of all the subconsituent mass, just the larger and cruder manifestations. There are no Higgs Bosons, but there may well be very small, very dense moderators shepherding the wispier, more perceptibly distributed stuff of the electron in the shells.

This hypothesis almost resurrects the Aether as a usable recycled theory, with the caveat that we do not float in the Aether, we are the Aether, at least, we are a denser region of the Aether than interplanetary space.

This hypothesis disturbs Zeno's ghost. In motion that results in collision (the only motion which counts in this model) does collision ever actually occur, and at what level of subconstituency does collision occur? Try out the following mental picture:

  1. Imagine tennis balls colliding
  2. telescope down in your mind to nuclei colliding
  3. Now define "collision" in both instances in terms of infinite subconstituency

The present hypothesis is local realistic, and thus is ruled invalid by quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is only satisfactory because it is statistical. It can be employed profitably to approximate the incommensurate. But not now, not ever has it been epistemologically sound to employ the statistical approach to exclude local realism.

I'll confess, I'm more of an aesthete than a scientist. The attractiveness of the model is the primary reason I am provisionally convinced that all we are, or all anything else is, is dust in the wind.

Related Reading

More Insights

Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags


<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags


<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

