Today started like every other day during the pandemic and more recently the Southern California heat wave. I woke up and made coffee and browsed social media. Oh, Sabine Hossenfelder has a new song! Cool. Her songs are usually top notch. But this one was about a sore subject, dissing people who are out of the mainstream and who attempt to share their theory of everything. Ostensibly she was targeting Eric Weinstein, Garrett Lisi, and Stephen Wolfram, but she also addressed the rest of us.
Sabine’s not interested, and that’s fine with me. However, to then go on the attack is way over the line in my opinion. If you’ve been following my blog you know how much it bothers me to constantly get attacked for sharing my NPQG ideas in social media. And it also disturbs me greatly to see others subjected to the same invective, even if their ideas are nonsense. Perhaps most of all, it frustrates me to no end that professionals in the fields of physics and cosmology would engage in such hostile and bullying behaviour toward independent ideators who hold them in high esteem and are crushed by their response. There is no excuse. There are neutral and diplomatic ways to ignore, mute, or decline unsolicited ideas and conversations. On top of all that, I think this aggro behaviour is endemic internal to the fields of physics and cosmology and is related to the challenges that so many new and diverse entrants to the fields face in their careers.
So with steam coming out of my ears, I pounded out a dozen tweet responses to Sabine, and called her out for poor behaviour and then rattled off thirty-seven major items of nonsense that the fields themselves have wrong in GR/QM/LCDM era physics and cosmology.
Recently I have encountered a spate of negativity from physicists and cosmologists. I was banned on Eric Weinstein’s discord for sharing my ideas and BEING bullied. Then a splinter discord was formed because some the folks didn’t like seeing people banned and I was invited and joined it, but so did the bullies. Of course, when they bully me, I’m not going to take it on the chin, so I fire back my best words designed to cut them down to size and tick them off even more. I do my best to attack ideas, but I’ve gone over the line as well when under withering attack. I feel terrible later and go back and delete those comments since they have served their ephemeral purpose to fight back against bullies. Unfortunately, I’ve noticed that I do get more defensive as time passes, bracing for attack and ready to counter-attack, as you will see later in this post.
One of the few bright spots on social media for me has been Sarafina Nance, who is an astrophysicist Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley. She’s full of happiness, good cheer, joy, love, and wonder for all things astrophysics. She’s totally plugged into current social issues and I learn a lot from the information she shares and her opinions. Sarafina makes fun astrophysics related posts, stories about her dog, hosts live drunk science videos (more like tipsy), and generally shares a lot of her life with her followers.
Sarafina also is a “BRCA2 previvor making cancer her bitch” as she says, and in the last year has had three surgeries including a double mastectomy and reconstruction. So besides fighting cancer, which would crush most people, she made it all public as a service to others to be informed, brave, proactive, and also created a social media support network. In so many ways, Sarafina is a superb individual.
This week Sarafina tweeted about a man who had sent her multiple messages about his theory of everything and how she wished she had an ounce of his confidence. I don’t have any issues with her tweet at all, but her followers, many of whom are scientists, were triggered and openly started scorning the ‘man’ as a crackpot and displaying the typical hostility of science towards people bearing unsolicited ideas. I decided to come out and respond and try to ideator’splain myself.
Note to the astute reader, there is also an element here of the popular generalization of the ‘evil privileged white man’. I’m an individual and am opposed to generalizations, but I understand that they are talking about a pattern which requires vigilance to aggressively defend against and to educate about appropriate behaviour.
With all of that as the backdrop to my week, I have been in a fairly lousy mood. Yet, there is absolutely no way I will give up. If NPQG is right, and I am convinced that it is, then it is important to transfer this knowledge to the scientific community. The future of intelligent life and the environment would benefit tremendously with knowledge of how nature and the universe actually work from the foundation level up. So after work today, I signed on to the PBS SpaceTime discord server and had the following pleasant conversation. You can see that I started out defensively, but once I was afforded some psychological safety the conversation went very well.
TorchFire
Very interesting theory in this article. They’re putting forth the idea that instead of a single Big Bang, instead the universe continuously expands and contracts forever in a “Big Bounce”. Thoughts?
Quanta Magazine : Big Bounce Simulations Challenge the Big Bang
Detailed computer simulations have found that a cosmic contraction can generate features of the universe that we observe today.
Dark energy is definitely important but it appears to be baked into both the Big Bang and this Big Bounce Model. The interesting implications of the Big Bounce model is that it removes the need for a multiverse and string theory, which many argue are untestable, and therefore not very useful.
Basically we need to know whether dark energy causes the universe to expand forever no matter how sparse the energy gets (Big Bang), or whether dark energy eventually becomes too sparse to continue expanding, and the universe then begins to contract (Big Bounce)
Mark
@TorchFire : I’ve given a lot of thought to whether LeMaitre got everything off on the wrong track when he reversed time backwards to a single event that we now call a bang. Guth, et al, later added inflation. But then inflation was extended to eternal inflation, so supposedly it is still happening but we can’t detect it, which doesn’t make sense because bang and inflation are supposed to happen everywhere all at the same time.
I think the scientists have made an enormous error. In my opinion they need to reposition the bang, inflation, and expansion to be galaxy local via the SMBH and its jets. They get crunch for free. In other words, parallel, independent, intermittent galaxy local processes. That means that each galaxy operates an enormous recycling process.
What about expansion? You can keep it, but its really galaxy local spacetime aether assemblies expanding in volume as they dissipate energy. There is no such thing as all galaxies receding from one another. The expansion effect on photons is the same. This path dependent diversity in spacetime aether characteristics and redshift will lead to the solution of the H0 tension. Also it eliminates tension with certain processes that take much longer than the age of the universe, some even trillions of years, so it is no longer a tension that we just happened to be lucky and find ourselves at the beginning of time (on that length scale). There are more tensions this takes care of as well. This also gives new mechanisms that could help solve dark matter, dark energy, and galaxy rotation curves. And pretty much everything remains the same observation wise. Only narrative changes. You get isotropy because there are billions or trillions of observable galaxies. It’s a bitter pill for scientists to swallow though.
Astrophysicist
“because bang and inflation are supposed to happen everywhere all at the same time” This is not an accurate presentation. In eternal inflation models, big bangs are simple bubble nucleation events within the eternal inflaton field.
Mark
“In 1983, Paul Steinhardt was the first to show that this “new inflation” does not have to end everywhere.[1] Instead, it might only end in a finite patch or a hot bubble full of matter and radiation, and that inflation continues in most of the universe while producing hot bubble after hot bubble along the way.” – Wikipedia. That sounds like what I said, but maybe I am not interpreting it correctly.
Astrophysicist
With eternal inflation, there is an eternally inflating inflaton field, and at times, certain locations of the inflaton field tunnel to a lower energy state. This precipitates particle production — a big bang. A big bang doesn’t involve the entirety of the inflaton field, only the location of tunnelling, so to say the big bang happens ‘everywhere’ is a misrepresentation.
Mark
Actually that sounds like it would map quite well to an SMBH containing ‘inflatons’ or what I would call a Planck point charge core and jetting Planck point charge plasma.
Astrophysicist
In the eternal inflation model, ‘the big bang’ is simply ‘a big bang that initiated our Hubble sphere/universe of which our Hubble sphere is a part’
Mark
@Astrophysicist : That’s ok. And I am suggesting we need to change the scope from our Hubble sphere to galaxy local.
Astrophysicist
I’m merely pointing out that the way you presented the eternal inflation model was a bit off. Wasn’t making any commentary on your model. But eternal inflation is by no means galaxy local, and cannot be rescoped as such.
Mark
Ok, well I get most of my learning from the outreach materials and so my language reflects the way the scientists describe it, e.g., the expanding balloon model, etc. Why could eternal inflation not be modified to reflect independent galaxy local bang/inflation events via the SMBH/jets?
Astrophysicist
Because the space between big bangs never stops undergoing inflation, which happens at superluminal speed. I can see the Andromeda galaxy (with an adequate telescope). Thus the inflaton tunnelling to a lower energy state at those locations that comprise our hubble sphere (or universe of which our hubble sphere is a part) is larger than a galaxy. We can observe galaxies some 13.5BLy away, and that includes galaxies, clusters, super clusters, walls, and voids. If it was galaxy local, we would not be able to observe other galaxies. A galaxy-local eternal inflation would predict galaxy-island universes.
Mark
So I would change that to inflation in the volume around the jets, which eventually at enough distance gives way to expansion.
Astrophysicist
Doesn’t work either. You’d be instantiating superluminal inflation between galaxies again the moment the jets form.
At the moment of the formation of the jets, such a model would predict all other galaxies would be forced out of sight.
Mark
Well, let’s break it down. So the jet erupts and out flows Planck point charge plasma and besides all the other stuff that the bang model says it will form, it also makes spacetime aether particles. This is all local to the jet. In terms of superluminality, I can definitely see such a jet piercing right through cold spacetime aether and once that is cleared out of the way there would be no speed limit. But it would only go as far as it does until it piles up in a terminus
Astrophysicist
And its that terminus that is incompatible with eternal inflation.
Mark
Ok maybe we are speaking past each other. There will be some modification required to existing models. In what I am saying you get the eternal inflation through independent intermittent events from active SMBH throughout the universe. So it is eternal in that sense. And observable.
Astrophysicist
Eternal inflation is a model that proposes the underlying structure of the cosmos is an eternally inflating inflaton field. If you instantiate such a thing inside a tunneled patch of inflaton (ie: a universe), you tear that patch apart.
And very very quickly at that.
Mark
Ok, I see. You are using ‘eternal inflation’ to refer to a very specific model that solves a problem. I am trying to solve that same problem a different way and calling that ‘eternal inflation’ as well.
Astrophysicist
Given you’re wanting to tether big bangs to the jets, you’d likely find the fecund universe cosmology more fruitful.
Eternal inflation is just an interesting attempt at the problem of prima causa. It’s a hypothesis to explain a hypothesis. The ultimate problem here is simply the seeming flatness of spacetime (ie that in general it appears very close to a flat Minkowski space)
Mark
I hadn’t heard of the fecund universe before, but a lot of these terms like multiverse and etc would no longer make sense if we rebased LCDM on to a different galaxy local cosmology. We’d just say – other galaxies instead of fecund universe. Or other galaxies instead of multiverse. I have a solution to flatness too, if you want to hear more of my radical ideas.
Astrophysicist
Given we can see other galaxies, any model that is galaxy local is going to have major hurdles. And fecund would be a little more useful in that sense, though for some reason you’re attaching to the jets, whereas fecund attaches to the inside of the black hole.
Mark
In my model the jets emanate from inside the black hole.
Astrophysicist
Yes. That’s one of the problems. We know they don’t.
Mark
Scientists think they don’t. They are wrong.
Astrophysicist
We can observe that fact.
Mark
Everything I have seen works backwards to prior assumptions, like can’t breach the event horizon, so must be the accretion disk. Can’t be superluminal, so must be a narrow viewing angle. What can we observe that proves the jets are not emanating from inside the black hole? And I’m ok with accretion disk material going along for the ride.
Astrophysicist
Yes. Working backwards from what is known is the essential nature of science. Going from first principles is not. As for observations, we can observe relativistic jets originating from black holes and neutron stars. We can observe their formation in model analogs (though not sure we have to date; but a possibility — anyone know if we have?).
Mark
As an aside. Thank you for discussing in a friendly manner even if you think I am wrong. That is refreshing. I usually get the pulp beaten out of me. Part of my thinking is that we have a fairly lengthy series of at least 8 decisions that were wrong that cause problems for the priors. I am trying to work from first principles and meet up with established science. But so far, my imaginary thought experiment universe makes a lot more sense and I can see how it solves the paradoxes and open problems. Of course that is thought experiments and I know that gives scientists quite a bit of concern. Still, I keep moving forward and maybe some day I’ll find something that passes muster in more minds than mine.
Astrophysicist
I don’t think it’s concerning. It simply isn’t the methodology. As a thought experiment there’s nothing wrong with it. But it has no means for error correction. Consider that those with FAR more background have pointed to two particles being unable to reproduce quantum physics. My understanding is not that advanced, but, to the level I do understand, it accords with my limited intuition of the field that two particles of the nature you describe could not give rise to all the quantum numbers, ie all the degrees of freedom, needed to replicate QM.
Let us assume they are correct. When you start to formalize the system trying to replicate QM, you will fail under this assumption. How do you detect at what level the error occurred? It may be that the immediately prior step is the error — but it may be that it’s the two-particle model itself. It could be any level in between. Since you’re beginning with these assumptions and building up, you have no experimental way to find the error, and little conceptual way to do it. You would essentially have to introduce corrective terms and see how they propagate back to your first principles — you will have to use backwards reasoning with correction. Given this, I fail to see the scientific value of starting from first principles, since validating them will require working backwards anyways. That said, again, it IS an interesting thought experiment — and thought experiments rock. They can lead to insights. GR started with a thought experiment in Einstein’s head (ignoring the foundational work set up by Poincare and Lorentz). I mean, I’m one of those more than happy to throw out any rule of logic, adopt new ones, and just see what happens, even if those laws have absolutely no relation to the universe we observe… I get the appeal of a purely intellectual exercise. 🙂
Mark
Great! Super! It’s nice to meet you. So, my starting point isn’t exactly unnatural. I am working with Planck scale after all, and I get it that physicists don’t assign a true physical reality to Planck scale. But to your point, what I am finding so far is that this particular thought experiment leads to entirely new ways to look at things. Here is what I wanted to share earlier which I think is just amazing. In my model I start with a Euclidean void in time and 3D space. Then you toss in a certain density of immutable charged energetic point charges in equal amounts. All you get is classical mechanics and electromagnetism. So there are two free parameters – the point charge density and the density of the energy they carry. If you pick the parameters properly, then assemblies will form and stable assemblies will emerge. One of the dominant structures to form is the spacetime aether, which is made of point charge assemblies that have this cool property where the more energetic they are the smaller their volume.
This is where I say that nature is really a trickster because it gave us a flat Euclidean time and space and fills it with an aether that has Riemannian behaviour. No wonder everyone is so confused. So you have to move Einstein’s inertial observer from low energy spacetime aether into the Euclidean void. Looking from there, things look entirely different mathematically. Even the simple math. Like if you are in the aether, speed of light looks constant because the aether particles retain a relationship of radius and frequency. But if you are in the Euclidean frame you see varying speed of light. And then that would fit with the aether having a permittivity and permeability that varies with local mass-energy density and your standard speed of light formula applies with that variable permittivity and permeability. So currently I am working on trying to augment basic equations with the Euclidean view.
It’s fascinating, so in an SMBH the densest point charges could be packed would be FCC or HCP and they would have stopped moving relative to each other at that point. Temperature zero. That matches theory. One microstate – no entropy. That’s cool. No information in an ideal Planck point charge core. Even if this is all imaginary it is a really cool idea. And we eliminated singluarities and wormholes along the way.
Astrophysicist
I’m confused. As I understood your model, you have the positrino and electrino, and these are your point charges. You’ve just proposed a neutral particle.
Mark
Oh, no just the electrino and positrino, but they form assemblies. So the spacetime assembly is a group of them executing their individual wave equations. Think of maybe three dipoles orbiting in orthogonal planes just for thought experiment purposes.
Astrophysicist
Okay, so the neutral particle being referred to is a composite. Now, you’ve used wave function, implying some sort of field. What is the relation of that field (or fields) to the positrino and electrino?
Mark
So the electrino and positrino are each charged, and I am currently using |e/6| as their magnitude because that maps well when I try to decode the standard matter assemblies. So you have the electric potential field of each of these assemblies and if they are moving, the scalar and vector potential field they emit. So the hypothesis is that the electrino and positrino in whatever assemblies they form generate the fields of QFT.
Astrophysicist
Given that explanation I understand better why others with more experience and expertise would point out that you cannot achieve the necessary degrees of freedom for replicating QM. Your system doesn’t have a way to implement symmetries other than those afforded by electromagnetism. Weak isospin and the weak interaction would not be recoverable in this model.
Mark
I don’t know yet. I am hoping that those will emerge out of the structure that forms.
Astrophysicist
Fair. But might serve as an error-checkpoint. I would suggest that might be a high-value target then. If you can, you’d definitely have something.
Mark
Ok, good. But I also have to do what I am capable of and while that is improving, it is very slow.
Astrophysicist
Especially given such a solution would give you a path to the electroweak unification. Yeah, this would be SUPER high value.
Mark
I am trying for something that to me seems more within reach, which is a formula for mass.
At the end of this pleasant conversation I was in a good mood. I was so charged up that I decided to go out into the late afternoon heat and pick fruit from my small orchard, a bucket of deep purple figs and a bucket of softball sized sapotes. Yum. You’ve gotta love low hanging fruit! Cheers!
J Mark Morris : San Diego : California
Neoclassical Physics and Quantum Gravity 