The Theory Of Nothing (Ton)

[CraigD]

Continuing the Silly Claim, Plus Math

I like what you’re up to here, sci, but think you’ve made at least 1 serious mistake.

 

In the overview, externally, there is only distance^4, 4D space of quadric distance, while here, internally there is 3D space and time, which are not so separate, but unified into space-time. ‘c’ (distance/time) is the conversion factor from the hypervolume to spacetime:

 

Distance^4 = distance/time * (time)(distance^3)

Good so far, though I don’t recognize the term “quadratic distance” (point-quadratic distance is familiar, but doesn’t seem much applicable to this discussion). This appears to be soft of a definition in your own words of a 4-vector, the usual way one represents length and direction in space-time, working toward a philosophical overview.

 

The hypercube has a constant, finite, four-dimensional size, and this is the boundary condition for energy quantization, called unit hypervolume, as shown in this reduction of dimensional units for the photon energy over energy density…

 

hc / EnergyDensity [ED] = (in dimensional units) = …

I assume by “hc”, you mean Planck’s constant (h) times the speed of light ©. If so, the dimension of this expression is M L³ T^-2, because the dimension of h is M L² T^-1, and the dimension of a speed such as c, L T^-1. This is not the dimension of a quantity of energy, M L² T^-2.

 

If you mean the term hc to be an energy, “the photon energy”, it’s incorrect.

 

The usual formula for the energy of a photon is [imath]E=hv[/imath], where v is the frequency of the photon. Frequency has dimension T^-1, so [imath]hv[/imath] has the dimension of energy.

 

… ( Energy*time [h] * distance/time [c] ) / ( Energy/distance^3 [ED] ) =

 

Energy*distance^4 / Energy = distance^4 = unit hypervolume!

Replacing this with the correct terms gives

[math]\frac{\mbox{Energy} \cdot \mbox{time} \mbox{[h]} \cdot \frac{1}{\mbox{time}} \mbox{[v]}}{ \frac{\mbox{Energy}}{\mbox{distance}^3} \mbox{[ED]} } = \mbox{distance}^3[/math]

 

an ordinary 3-D volume.

 

I think you need to rework this. I don’t know how your philosophical wrappings of it will fare when you do.

 

Getting back to your basic “nothing theory”, I’ve been personally in this camp for at least a decade. I’ve been disappointed to find little literature on the subject since it first (AFAIK) appeared in Ed Tryon’s short and terribly dated (a lot has happened in physics since 1973!) article “Is the Universe a Vacuum Fluctuation?” (Nature, 246(1973), pp. 396–397 – like most Nature articles, a bit hard, but not impossible, for the non-subscriber to find online, and worth the effort), wherein he repeats a slightly fancied-up version of his semi-famous catchphrase: “I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of this things that happens from time to time”. :) What has been written appears to me to consist of failure-finding with Tryon’s original speculation in light of new observation (the universe looks a lot different than it did in 1973), with few or no attempts to revise and repair the theory. This 1994 Harper’s magazine article mentions “a small group of physicists known as the ‘nothing theorists.’”, but I’ve not been able to find anything by or about them :( - forgive the cheesy wordplay, but I went looking for nothing, and found a lack of it that yet wasn’t something. ;)

 

You seem pretty energized by nothing theory, Sci – do you know of some literature I’ve missed? or feel like seriously hunting for some? Inquiring minds want to know! :)

 

Getting at the key of what Tyron said, and what I think you’re saying, Sci, but I suspect may not see as key:

• Nothing theory – that is, the quantum theory that underlie it – requires that all conserved quantities, both discrete (eg: lepton and baryon number, charge) and continuous (eg: momentum and mass-energy) are approximately conserved.
  
• For particles and antiparticles, this conservation, or symmetry, is simple – just have every particle have an antiparticle (most of the time)
  
• Conservation of mass-energy is trickier, as all the standard model’s particles have positive mass-energy. Gravitational potential energy plays the role of conservation/symmetry preserving negative energy.
  

The great problem in this seems to me to be that, although the standard model superbly describes positive mass-energy particles, attempts to extend it to explain gravity – to include gravitons, in a quantum gravity theory – have so far failed. Some formalism where the vacuum emits positive mass-energy SM particles paired with negative energy gravitons simply hasn’t been written.

 

In his pop sci book The Trouble with Physics, Lee Smolin suggested that lack of attention to this problem is due to a recent (since about 1980) fashion in physics that’s discouraged new physicist from pursuing formalisms other than string theories. I don’t entirely agree – there are so many more well-educated physics students now than every in human history, and likely will be even more in the future, that it seems to me even if 99.9% of them are on a “wrong path”, the remaining 0.1% will be more than enough for the work along the “right path”. More likely, to my thinking, is that cosmogenies lack scientific popularity, though they’re a favorite of science enthusiasts and the general public, because they’re impractical – people, including physicists, are more interested in what’s happening in the universe here and now than far in the past or future.

 

It’s fertile, uncrowded territory. :)

[lawcat]

The only ground breaking idea proposed here is the definition of nothing as perfect balance.

[Sci]

Thanks for the lengthy response, CraigD. I’ll put several posts.

 

I’ll have to look at that resultant distance^4 formula again, for I could have mangled it, as I got the hint from somewhere that I’ve forgotten and was trying to reconstruct it. A time of neglect has intervened. I retired from IBM ten years ago, and began a new family, which is still going well, but I have lots of extra time still, and so can do ‘nothing’, ha-ha, until I begin to go broke. It’s not easy doing or studying ‘nothing’.

 

I don’t like to use ‘mass’ in formulas since I don’t know if it’s truly representative, as sometimes its dimensional units come out to time^3, but maybe this is because matter is spectacularly curved in time or something. I even had ‘energy’ canceling out in the reduction in case energy’s dimensional units were in dispute.

 

Yes, quadric distance (not quadratic) is like the 4-vector, I suppose, but it’s of all distance since talking about the 4D hypercube. This hypercube stuff is kind of secondary at this point, and may have to be ditched, because it seems to be leading to a non-statistical, totally deterministic universe; whereas, Anton Zellinger and his team are onto showing that some quantum properties cannot be pre-existing. I like his saying that “Randomness is the bedrock of reality”. Of course, there is still macro-realism, as, for example, the color of our furniture is a pre-existing property. Maybe it’s all just QM realm. Time will tell, I guess. It’s an open field, as you say.

 

The notion of the hypercube came by way of the next lower dimensionality of a 3D interior of a sphere being bounded by its endless 2D surface, and so then an infinite 3D space could bound a 4D hypercube as its interior. Maybe it should have been ‘hypersphere’, but all these things like infinity and points are really shapeless anyway, I guess. 4D is allowed since spacetime is 4D.

[Sci]

Literature

 

True, as you say, Craig, there really isn’t a lot of literature on nothing theories. Russell Standish has a book, ‘The Theory of Nothing’, and while he touches on ‘nothing’ at first, as in “…the radical idea that the reality we see around us is but one of an infinite ‘library’ of alternate realities, the sum of which contains no information and is in fact ‘Nothing’, he then goes off for the rest of the book to talk about the ‘Many Worlds’ idea instead. He liked my redo of Borges’ Library of Babel story and put it on his web site, as this was showing that everything and nothing have the same information content: zero.

 

Victor Stenger, who has an e-mail list called AVOID (for atoms and the void), is mainly interested in proving that a Theistic God can’t exist, the God who is said to be everywhere doing everything (as opposed to a Deity who just started things off and left), and in promoting atheism, but he has some talk about ‘something’ having to be the natural and normal state of affairs because ‘nothing’ is unstable, as well as much physics information. That AVOID list is mostly now about world politics now, which is strange. He’s doing a new book now, called ‘The Folly of Faith’, that some of us AVOIDers are helping him with. I don’t really know these guys personally—just had a one or two direct correspondences from that e-mail list. I’m just a regular guy trying to put different ideas together, as there really not much more to find under the sun that’s really original by itself.

 

Oh, Lawrence Krauss has a video about nothing somewhere, as well as a book on nothing coming out. Hope it doesn’t just have blank pages in it.

 

Other than that, there is not so much, I guess (but I may remember more), but for a guy on ToeQuest a while back, named Nobody Nowhere, who had a slightly different take—that everything happened all at once but that it takes time to play out; however, he didn’t get much into how ‘nothing’ could differentiate itself. He had gravity somehow erasing light.

 

I am waiting for actual physicists to realize that either all is of nothing or that something was forever. We know that one of these must be correct, like it or not, so this spurs us on, and the something forever theory seems unlikely, as I’ve suggested, seeming incomplete and problematic.

[Sci]

Gravity

 

Maybe gravity is really just a secondary effect of other elementals. Here is how Wilczek has it, as I’ve summarized it from his ‘Lightness of Being’ book:

 

The strength of gravity, the feeble apparent.

 

Gravity is a universal force—for any body: the force felt by a body is mass proportional; yet, the acceleration that’s felt is the inverse! This coincidence removes all mass dependence. (Einstein transcended this amazing “coincidental” race by bodies going straight through curved space.)

 

Gravity might be derived from the fundamentals, the byproduct of a small residual after cancelations of opposite electric or color charges, and more. Why then is gravity universal, for its sources are not? Perhaps the appearance of feebleness is deceptive since protons and neutrons are but lightweights.

 

But why are they so light? Their mass is a compromise between a disturbance energy and its cancellation. The quarks’ color charge disturbs gluons around them, small at first, but larger growing farther from the quark. These disturbances cost energy, but, how to cancel them?

 

With an anti-quark or two complementarily colored quarks. But, the qualifying quarks can’t sit atop the originals, for quarks have no definite position, just a wave function, and they can’t be localized to a small spread of position, for this requires a larger energy; so, forget nullification.

 

The compromise is that some residual energy amounts from the not-completely-canceled gluon field disturbances and from the not-completely-canceled quark positionings; thus, the proton mass from m=E/cc, with this tricky element of how the gluon disturbance field grows with distance. The residual strong energy from color charge also binds the protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus; the electromagnetic electron/nuclei charge residuals bind atoms into molecules, and molecules into materials.

 

Asymptotic freedom is a subtle feedback effect from virtual particles antiscreening the color charge. This antiscreening builds up gradually, especially at first, then proceeds more quickly, building upon each building. Whereas, screening happens for electrically charged particles, being such as a positive charge attracts a negative virtual cloud. Thus, at first, since it’s so slow to build, the pressure to localize the nullifying quarks is quite mild as well; thus, there’s no need to very strictly localize and so the energies are small; so then is the proton mass. This is the lightness of being.

 

(Ideas herein were gathered from readings, esp. Frank Wilczek)

[Sci]

Lee Smolin

 

I like Lee Smolin, and he’s worried that string theory is going nowhere. I don’t get much into that theory, or many nuts and bolts at all, for I like to get at the root of things, and if ask a string theorist what strings are made of, then they may just say that it’s metaphysical. Or maybe they see strings as unbreakable and therefore unmakable stuff.

 

Smolin had this view in one of those yearly compendiums of the best science stories (my notes):

 

AT THE BOTTOM OF IT ALL

 

The last watch fire, that of mathematics, lights the shadows of the universe, telling us much about its machinery; and, yet, there is a kind of mysticism about this and its platonic forms and ideals of perfection; so, although no one has been killed in its name, it requires a kind of faith in what magic lies beneath it; but, perhaps, what is really there beneath and at the bottom of all, are statistics and probabilities averaged over large numbers of small events, which, though math-like come to be, are not exactly the root mathematical formulas; so, perhaps math is not at the bottom of all although it is very much amenable to the emergent and secondary patterns that we observe and measure thereafter, being very effective in describing that “real” world.

 

It’s just that, as Lee Smolin sort of said once, about platonic forms being underlying, “A flower is not a dodecahedron”. Is the universe, and even more so the world a reflection of some perfect mathematical form? Or does the world rest on the kind of statistical methodologies that underlie our understanding of biology? Physicists, unlike biologists, wrestle not with reality but with mathematical representations of it. This is a great and masterly art, as is that of a painting artist, the high beauty obtained not from reproducing nature, but from representing it, with the addition that a physicist’s greatest creations may even truly capture some of the deep and permanent reality behind mere transient experience. There can be moments of blissful clarity, a rare combination, indeed, such as when one really comprehends Newton’s laws, and realizes simultaneously that what one has grasped mentally is a logic that is realized in each of the countless things that move in the world.

 

And, yet, neither Newton’s nor Euclid’s laws completely capture the world, but are still a fine mirror of it, although not the finest and truest mirror of reality; plus, there are areas that can’t be completely captured by math. And, thus, what is both wonderful and terrifying is that there is absolutely no reason that nature at its very deepest level must have anything to do with math directly.

 

In many cases, there is a simple, non-mathematical reason that an aspect of the world follows a mathematical law on a subsequent plane. Some systems have an enormous number of parts, such as why the air is spread uniformly in a room, no mystery or symmetry being required, or how the force on a rubber band increases proportionally to the distance stretched, this reflecting nothing deep, as the rubber band force we feel is a sum of an enormous number of small forces between the atoms.

 

Each of which may act in a complicated, even unpredictable way, to the stretching. A platonist nightmare, then, would be that, in the end, at the bottom, all of our laws will be like this, all the regularities turning out to be more statistics, beyond which lies only randomness or irrationality. It must always come to this, as we already see in biology: that the tremendous beauty of the living world is but, in the end, merely a matter of randomness, statistics, and frozen accidents—for which the capture of there can be no one, single, and beautiful equation. (Gleaned from Lee Smolin’s article)

[Sci]

The only ground breaking idea proposed here is the definition of nothing as perfect balance.

 

That's the key and so that's where we have to look for more evidence.

[Sci]

Zero-sum physics perhaps started here:

 

Einstein as a near traffic fatality…

 

George Gamow told in his book, ‘My World Line’,

How he was conversing with Albert Einstein

While walking through Princeton in the 1940s.

Gamow casually mentioned that one of his colleagues

[Pascual Jordan] had pointed out to him that according

To Einstein’s equations a star could be created

Out of nothing at all, because [at point zero]

Its negative gravitational energy [mass defect]

Precisely cancels out [is equal to]

Its positive mass energy [rest mass].

 

“Einstein stopped in his tracks,” says Gamow,

“And, since we were crossing a street,

Several cars had to stop to avoid running us down”.

[Sci]

OK, hc is not the “photon energy”, so, that description mix-up was incorrect, but the formula is still good for something. I also purposely left out a unitless constant, the proportionality defined by the way the energy of the individual photons is gemetrically distributed into space, as it doesn’t add to the dimensional analysis.

 

The question is: What does hc represent? I looked online and found only this one definition… Planck's constant times c, the speed of light, hc, represents the fundamental Charge quantity in the Universe, (and Potential Charge Energy E= - hc/r and GmM is the fundamental Matter quantity in the Universe and Potential Matter Energy E = -GmM/r.)

 

Anyone have any other ideas about what hc represents?

 

Since E=hf and c=wf, where ‘f’ is wave frequency and ‘w’ is wavelength (Lambda), then hc = Ew. So, what does Energy times the wavelength represent?

 

Next, what does hc / EnergyDensity represent? Or Ew / EnergyDensity?

 

For me, I guess, it is about somehow deriving unit hypervolume as distance^4.

 

 

More notes from the hazy past:

 

The finite 4D hypercube idea became an idea since an infinite space of N dimensions has a finite size in N+1 dimensions that it can contain. Infinite three-dimensional space thus corresponds to finite four-dimensional space. This finite four-dimensional constant is what Planck’s constant is, more or less. Since unit hypervolume is a four-dimensional finite, it represents the one and only bounding condition for anything, in particular the quantization of energy, just as would be expected of the hypervolume of the universe.

 

This is also why Planck’s constant has units of J-m, and why it is associated with the quantization of energy. Joules, as energy, is three-dimensional, and meters are one dimensional, for a total of four dimensions of td^3, which is essentially spacetime. Planck’s constant isn’t exactly equal to space’s four-dimensional size, as the proportionality between the two is 2 Pi (now, I’ll have to verify that).

 

 

Visualization

 

To visualize the finite 4D hypercube, take the three-dimensional space of the universe, divide it into innumerable finite cubes, and lay these onto each other, infinitely close together, along the fourth dimension. Or, but sightly differently, perhaps, use the infinite slices of Einstein’s 4D block universe.

 

An analogy in 1D to 2D is to cut up an infinite line into segments which can then be aligned into a finite plane.

 

For 0D to 1D, align infinite points into a line. The line is finite since it can be neither zero nor infinite, which is why we arrive at infinity times zero = one.

 

For 2D to 3D, stack an infinite number of planes into a cube.

 

The funny thing about all this is that the finite hypercube is probably but a fraction of a millimeter in size, although touching and being in 3D space everywhere.

 

Just as Planck’s constant is the four-dimensional quantization of photons, elementary charge is the four-dimensional quantization of matter particles.

 

Photons are the encapsulation of time by space, while matter particle fields are the encapsulation of space by time.

 

 

All in All

 

It is totally obvious that there is nothing to make anything of and that this necessary distribution of nothing into something must ever sum to zilch, showing up here as a zero-sum balance.

 

 

Forever

 

This “something of nothing” has been going on forever, and always will, so now we can delve into the strangeness of forever, which would seem to be circular, for this causeless basis is ever its own precursor, thus eliminating the chicken and the egg problem. There were always stars, there being no first one. Matter always made light and light always made matter. Anyone want to take a trip about this kind of mobius strip or Klein bottle? Seems like the chicken and the egg came about at the same ‘time’ somehow.

 

 

Now

 

Is there only ‘now’, all history and future somehow contained in it, as the center of what would have been the future and past eternities, which are nonexistent?

 

 

The Package

 

Seems like the whole package must relate to and include infinity, the largest and the smallest; eternity, the past and future one; everything and nothing; no-where and now-here.

[Gordon Freeman]

I was not claiming that energy had been around forever. I was saying that in this order:

 

1) Nothing exists; no matter, no space, no time, no energy, then

2) The Big Bang ('explosion' of space), then

3) The energy released by the Big Bang condenses to matter

 

The first one is wrong. I don't know if you meant it this way, but by what you said in "1).", you are saying no dimensions existed... this is false. The Big Bang supposedly occurred because other dimensions self-actuate the rest if they are non existent. Dimensions are produced because other dimensions are the causation, or at least that's whats been so far theorized by Hawking. The Big Bang did not happen in the absence of nothing, it happened in the absence of matter and energy, and those two objects alone, none other are listed within the modernized theory. Just saying...

 

Also, to keep in line with the rest of what's been said here to far, If TON gets any further, look into some of the equations used by Wolfram, I bet you could argue that "one of those things that happens now and then" happens all the time, less developed even, like one of the half-universes created in Wolfram's research. Some of those mathematical universes might also hold a "nothingness" or be able to sustain a non-existence of matter and energy for a while, along with having sub-universes exist inside of it at the same time. It'd be something to look into, just to support it more mathematically.

 

I may be wrong, but it seems like it's worth looking for.

[sigurdV]

Hi All!

 

I have as yet not read everything in the thread, but I believe it centers around the concept of "Nothing".

 

There is no problem imagining "the nothing", what we do wrong is to believe it corresponds to something "there" somewhere outside... "The map is not the territory."

 

Some discoveries takes time to spread and since theres alway new minds entering the world, the truth of the matter must be understood again and again:

 

The earliest formulation of the solution of the paradox was made by the greek philosopher Parmenides, who told us not to belive that nothing is a "thing" :

 

Say you are a christian in the purgatory, and that you are given the job to check all things there are and present a list for inspection by God... -Is nothing left? He asks...

 

And if you say "yes" he will throw you back saying -Dont come back unless the job is done!

And if you say "no" he will throw you back saying I cant find it in here, you must have lost it somewhere, dont come back unless you find it...

 

So there never ever was a nothing that something could come from

[URAIN]

The Theory of Nothing (TON)

 

 

Intro

 

‘Nothing’ is nonexistence, the lack of anything, which is, of course, is still different from existence, but seeming to have no other quantity or quality; yet, would this lack of anything be a stable situation, or perhaps more of a lawless realm? Obviously, it is not the state now, but if it were stable, it would have been.

 

At any rate, we usually dismiss nothing as being able to be any kind of cause, for we feel that nothing begets nothing, yet it always comes back to haunt, for there is really and literally nothing to make the ‘elementals’ of.

 

It doesn’t help to say that the basic ‘elementals’ were around forever, what ever these are, such as perhaps electrons, positrons, quarks, antiquarks, and photons, because not only are their types very few and particular, but so would be their overall count of their amount, as well as their individual specific particulars such as their form, mass, charge, location, size, matter/antimatter state, and whatever other properties they have.

 

The above strongly mandates that the ‘elementals’ must be created, for things cannot be already defined and made in their particulars without ever having been made and defined as such in the first place that never was. So, we are again back to the helping of the notion that there is nothing to make the basic stuff out of. Naturally this also precludes stuff being made of smaller stuff all the way down, plus that idea leads to an infinite regress in which all effects would take forever to cascade upward.

 

 

 

Sci I am not clear.

 

Do you are saying nothing has existed or nothing has never existed?

 

I am asking this because, according to P.P.Principle "Nothing has never existed in any time"

 

About this theory, discussion has done on this thread

 

http://scienceforums.com/topic/24079-natural-phenomena-for-conservation-and-invariance/

 

Please have a glance on the thread and theory.

 

You are saying 'nothing is the premise to move'. Please explain, What is the meaning of this?