abstract wondering

8/14/2019 Abstract Wondering

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ABSTRACT WONDERING

By Tom Slattery

Humor me. I worked among scientists in a variety of scientific labs as a lab

technician, and I have written science fiction stories. But I am not a scientist, and the

following is not about science. If anything, it is more like an essay out of eighteenthcentury natural philosophy questioning the tools and trademarks of twenty-first century

physical science.

It is also pointedly the kind of skeptical and hopefully constructive criticism that

an average local yokel like me might offer if for no other reason than to have the feel of

being a participant rather than an awestruck helpless bystander. I suspect that some of the

appeal of Creationism and its Intelligent Design successor is an offer of participation inthe great quest to understand some meaning for our lives through a modicum of

comprehension of the mysterious universe in which we all live.

Institutionalized science has grown beyond the grasp of even scientists in other scientific disciplines. Each branch of science has its own almost esoteric vocabulary and

symbol manipulation and resultant almost cult-like membership. This membershipsometimes seems to be gained as much from cult-like indoctrination starting in

undergraduate studies and proceeding through post-graduate certification formalities as

from the highly personal participation in questioning and seeking answers through

experimentation that laid the groundwork for modern science.

Add to that the destructive forces unleashed by science, from nuclear bombs to

various metastasizing environmental disasters and threats, and there is reason to viewscience more with fear and suspicion than with hope for understanding.

So the following is offered as a counterweight, an example of "participation" by anon-scientist, an illustration of a local yokel looking not only at the universe with

questions but at inconsistencies in science itself with additional questions. And one need

not surrender any of the awe or respect for the hard work that goes into scientificinvestigation to "participate."

I read interesting things, and my mind gets overheated. There was an article on

the first instant of the Big Bang and sub-nuclear particles called quarks in the online May2006 Scientific American by Riordan and Zajc that set me to wandering through ancient

and modern science.

Here, briefly, are two highlights in the article. (1.) There is the "counterintuitive"

behavior of sub-nuclear particles called quarks. They behave somewhat analogous to

rubber bands in that the farther away they are stretched from each other they attract moreand more. (2.) As with the now bypassed MIT Bag Theory, they behave like they might

be nuclear bubbles in an inferred liquid universe. The Scientific American article also

might infer a "liquid universe" of qluon-quarks creating a super low viscosity liquid in

which everything else in o ur universe is immersed.



Pawel Mazur's new approaches to gravitation also might imply a "liquid" (well,

"superfluid") universe.

These inferences of a "liquid" universe might bring to some minds the ancient

roots of science and cosmology as seen lingering in the biblical phrase at the beginning of Genesis: "…and darkness was on the face of the deep."

Some students of the Bible as well as the history of science may be aware that the phrase appears to have had its origin in the cosmology of ancient Sumer, one of the focal

points where civilization began 7000 years ago. Their cosmology revolved around a

"liquid universe" and waters separated by a created flat Earth. On the surface, a saltwater

sea surrounded their flat Earth. Below the surface was the Apsu, the freshwater sea onwhich their universe floated.

Like good scientific observers they had noticed that if one dug down into the earth

one got fresh well water. Presumably there was more fresh water be low where that hadcome from.

Over the years the cosmology was modified, but the idea of a universal sea

around and under the solid earth did not go away easily. Even Columbus had to deal with

ideas and fears of a flat Earth when crossing the Atlantic as late as 1492.

By the time that the Bible was finalized into the poetic King James English-

language version and the above phrase in 1611, early modern science was beginning to

take hold of the human imagination. Sixty-three years earlier in 1543 Copernicus haddemonstrated that the Earth revolved around the sun. By 1609 Kepler had formulated his

first two laws of motion. And by 1610 Galileo had mentioned his telescopic observations

of nearby outer space.

One might imagine that the very poetic and evocative "deep" in the beginning of

Genesis was meant to be ambiguous enough to include both the ancient and dearly heldmeanings of deep oceans and the emerging but not quite yet articulated concept of "deep

space."

It took humans almost seven thousand years to get that far. How smart, really, arewe? And what do we really have now? With gluon-quarks we may again be pondering a

"liquid" universe?

But even beyond this inappropriate mixing of ancient and modern scientific

metaphors for the sake of raising a question might we be in need of a breakthrough down

at the fundamental levels? Science, and modern cosmology derived from it, at timesseems a flimsy patchwork of sometimes contradictory reasoning and resulting theories.

We base modern physics on mysterious Newtonian "forces, as in "May the Force

be with you!" But the classical Newtonian force of gravity is now in question due to the



"Pioneer Anomaly." The twin Pioneer spacecraft launched in the 1970s are not where

they are supposed to be. There has been a surprising additional pull of gravity as they

have gone farther out from the sun. And it is born out in movements of stars in outer galaxies. As one goes huge distances from gravitational centers, the classical gravitational

constant seems to become "unconstant" and increase slightly.

Not long after Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo came Newton and his theories,

early discoveries and experiments with magnetism, electricity, and the nature of light. But

there is something flimsy about this structure, too.

Take electricity. No "magneton" or magnetic monopole has ever been found to

correspond to the electron to complete the proposed electromagnetic symmetry. We go

ahead and use the logic systems of electromagnetic symmetry anyway because theywork. But is this really all that much different from ancient Sumerians digging fresh-

water wells and being reinforced that their cosmology is correct?

The mass of the electron is defined by electromagnetic fields. The mass is foundfrom how much it bends, or "weighs," in a magnetic or electric field after being shot into

it by an electromagnetic impetus. Milikan's experiment may seem to include gravity, butit is the pull of gravity on his oil droplets and his experiment was designed to find the unit

electric charge, which was then used to find electron mass. Electric or magnetic fields

ultimately determine electron mass. Nuclear conjectures then draw on these

electromagnetic assumptions and analogies of mass.

The force of gravity is too weak in our Earthly environment to define an electron

mass in terms of gravity so it is left to this. It sometimes seems that defining an electronmass in terms of electromagnetic fields is a like saying the sky is blue because it is blue.

Perhaps someone clever has by now defined an electron mass in terms of gravitational

pull on it by using the tremendous gravitational pull of black holes? I don't know. But thewhole structure built on electron mass as defined by electromagnetic fields continues to

be a foundation for a very large theoretical structure.

Moreover, there is an inconsistency in the descrip tion of electromagnetic "waves"

and electromagnetic "particles." In some ways these versions contradict each other.

In addition, the behavior of electromagnetic "particles" -- photons -- in mirrorsmight raise some questions. This would be true of mirrors in which we see out lovely

faces as it is for mirrors that mechanically make lasers work. Photons may have some

mass. If so, then it seems curious that when approaching the surface of a mirror a photondecelerates from the speed of light to zero, reverses direction, and then accelerates to the

speed of light again.

And what about those curious "holes" in solid-state physics that make transistors

work. Might there be something ever so slightly lacking in electromagnetic assumptions

that forces scientists to use what might be a fudge-factor like "holes" to make things work

out in the end?



Time, in our universe, intuitively does not seem reversible. Nor does the force of

gravity as we experience it. For all the time-travel and anti-gravity devices of science

fiction, there seems no observed instance of time-reversal or negative time, and thereseems no instance of anti-gravity or negative gravity.

Nor, for that matter does there seem to be negative energy or what might be calledanti-photons. There is, for instance, no sun or star that is working almost like a negative

Peltier-effect thermocouple and emitting particles of dark and cold rather than light and

heat.

And to revisit Planck's constant for guidance one more time, it could be seen as a

factor to synchronize our arbitrary units of time and distance, seconds and meters (or

worse), with "natural units" of time and distance.

These imaginable "natural units" might hint at fundamental entities of some kind,

not unlike present concepts of "elementary" nuclear and sub-nuclear particles. These

fundamental entities would seem to have something to do with the limits of time anddistance, time as seen in the cessation of time (motion) at absolute zero, time and distance

as seen in the maximum limit of the velocity of light.

In thinking outside the box let's start with a universe of granular time and gravity.

My apologies to Star Trek fans, but let's call its basic elements "chronotons" and

"gravitons."

Time means nothing unless it has something to act upon. And the "substance"

implied by "gravitons" means nothing unless it acts over time. So chronotons andgravitons essentially do nothing by themselves.

But should a chronoton and a graviton pair up or interact in some way, then timeand substance come into being.

What a chronoton-graviton pair looks a little bit like is a photon. The chronotongives the pair time to act in and the graviton gives time something to act upon. Our

perceived universe of time and substance comes into existence.

And it is all the more tempting to see this hypothetical pair as a photon because of the limiting time-factor of the velocity of light. It would almost seem as if the graviton

half of the marriage prevents the chronoton from behaving with absolute freedom and

flying off infinitely fast.

Extending this a little more, perhaps "charge " is a threesome. The basic particle

for a negative charge, an electron, could be two chronotons plus a graviton.

Its opposite, the basic particle of positive charge, the proton, might be two

gravitons and a chronoton. A stronger interaction between the two gravitons held together

by the chronoton might be stretched to explain the proton's apparent larger mass, but



mass derived from something else than pull of an electric or magnetic field and therefore

maybe a different number.

This is all a different way of looking at things. It might not, for instance, be only

chronotons and gravitons. Maybe we could have a holy trinity, chronotons, gravitons, and

neutrinos?

In the Chart of Nuclides, neutrons seem to be a glue holding heavier atoms

together. But beta decay seems to show that neutrons are actually protons, electrons, andneutrinos. So neutrinos would seem to be the glue. And more and more neutrinos seem to

be needed to glue heavier and heavier atoms tog ether.

And imagination might extend this to a neutrino binding two or more gravitonstogether, perhaps with a chronoton, to make a proton.

This is all wild speculation. It falls short of a scheme that makes sense and is

workable. But I suspect that thinking outside of the box this way might lead someone toSweden to pick up a Nobel medal some day.

And even if not, what might people say about our science and resulting

cosmology seven thousand years from now?

Tom Slattery is author of both short and book-length posts on Scribd and severalnonfiction and fiction books listed on book sites.

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