Are there really unbreakable particles?
Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2016 12:17 pm
Or other units of matter/substance/stuff?
We know, roughly speaking, of molecules down through atoms down through protons and neutrons and electrons down to quarks, and alongside all these, in principle in some cases anyway, their (super?)symmetrical partners in the Menagerie, and so on. However, here, it's the quarks that don't divide, as far as the series of divisibles goes. (Throw in quantum field theory and everything's way more interesting; throw in string theory, though, and read on...) But there is in fact speculation or theorizing or at least maybe hypothesizing going on in some quarters, that maybe quarks (and antiquarks?) are composite, composed that is of things on average referred to as "preons."
Now, as a devotee of Kant, I have myself thought for a long time that we have no a priori reason to expect the possibility of division in matter to ever end. That is, since the intuition of space in the pure imagination is subject to infinite division, everything in physical space admits of being composed from subtler and subtler substance, else space would at some point not be filled and presto, the principle of the Anticipation of Perception would be violated. However, I doubt a Kantian argument, here, is going to do a great deal of solid dialectical work. Hence, a different proposal.
The question of geometrodynamics is at once a matter of genuine physics, it appears, yet with a strong relationship to philosophical inclinations in methodology or conception, affinities shared also with, say, quantum information theory (if from a syntactic rather than topological(?) direction, so to speak). Another random physics article I found recently reported on a mathematical discovery of a geometrical structure that maps all the Feynman diagrams for QM or something---the implication being that this hyperdimensional crystal or whatever they described it as, corresponds to the graph for the fundamental quantum functions of the world. That is, the geometrodynamical question just is the physicist's question: what is the function for the graph of the fundamental changes in physical reality (what functions graphs the unified action of the four forces, or even what function graphs that action as the action of a single force)?
But now suppose that we are also set with the problem of filling space, of making sure there is no vacuum. QM seems to solve the problem with notions like virtual particles or zero-point energy or the like. Space gets filled as the wave-function overlaps it indeterministically. Now actually there's nothing wrong with this as far as I or, I suppose, most anyone else can tell; or at least I am certainly not in a position to argue the merits of this solution to the space-filling problem.
However, one thing is that the waves of wave-particle duality, and the fields of QFT, and the like, don't quite reduce to the point-particulate description of matter. For example, the Higgs boson, if my understanding of the topic is correct, is a "scalar field," like a temperature map but for mass itself or something. Maybe there are in some form little spherical/point-like Higgs boson quanta pulsing about but I don't get the impression that that's really what's supposedly going on.
Another thing to consider is the motivation behind string theory. Now on the one hand there's all that "the elegance of mathematics" stuff, which again hearkens back to or anticipates at least aspects of the geometrodynamical question. But basically, the shift from point-particulate to string-theoretic descriptions of matter is much more than broad theoretical drift.
So, let's allow that space does have to be filled. If we are Kantians or whatever, we'll go a step sideways and say that it is not "intrinsically" filled but only so far as we have actually experienced its division, so that in a way the quantum foam might really be the "end point" for our knowledge of the substructure of matter and yet this is only in a proto-positivist sense true. But if we are more Platonistically minded geometrodynamics theorists, we will look for a function for a graph that can be used to fill space at all magnifications, at a glance, and which does seem to be manifest in much of the natural order---and which, due to the role of recursion in ideal mathematical structures across the board, is perhaps to be expected anyway, in the concrete expression of mathematical reality in the physical universe.
I'm talking about fractals, that is. What do you do if you want to fill space to infinity, but also to capture the proto-positivist sense of things, here? You fill it with two fractals, or rather you assume that there are two substances for the fractal, one for the figure, one for the "gaps." Well actually this is just speculation on my part; maybe it would take more; but the gist of it is, some set of fractals would be sufficient to fill in all of space, very efficiently it seems to me. Just watch a 3d-fractal video on YouTube and you'll have some sense of why it seems so to me, then.
If this is true, then the quantum foam, and even the preons that might precede this, are but the capstones of their own infinitely ascending series of material substructures. That is, every single atom that we know of, contains as much detail, as one divides its structure down and down, as does the entire observable universe, on the macrolevel, and in fact much more detail, but then everything would be much, much more detailed, on this scheme of things.
An immediate objection that comes to mind is that since photons could not access the overwhelming majority of these lower material levels, or would overlap them in some unhelpful way, or whatever, no information about them could be effectively conveyed. Or something along this line. Now the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on infinity includes a discussion of a description of the electron as posited to be "infinitely small." Hence it would be a genuine point-particle. But are photons infinitely small, too? Are either, that is, anyway? I don't know what the most up-to-date summaries of the research say. So, anyway, then, though, to broaden the objection, the problem with fractal theory, so to speak, is that, like string theory, it does not appear to have observable evidence, irrespective of our theories of photon paths and information transmission more particularly or whatever. Even if some parts of the world exhibit fractal order, or are recursively geometrodynamical, or however you'd like to put it, the whole world doesn't strike many as being so.
So secondly, a different objection that comes to mind is that the theory would reduce the action of the four known forces to the action of one force, the fractal force. The category of a fundamental force is the category of a fundamental cause of a fundamental change in space, i.e. there is a function for the graph of all things changed by gravity, by the strong and weak nuclear forces, and by electromagnetism; and the GUT/TOE ideal is to find the function for a single graph that encompasses the others in the most fitting way. However, according to fractal theory, it seems, all the positions of all particles/units of matter are determined just so as to iterate the application of the axiom of the system's geometry, to infinity. Thus what appears to be gravity resulting from the curvature of space is really just space itself warping according to the fractal pattern, with its content appropriately warped as well. And where would gravitons appear in this description at all?
Since I am not a physicist except in some elaborately rudimentary way, I am not going to make a lot more in the way of detailed claims about the fractal picture of the cosmos. So, to pursue the immediate line of inquiry, why yes there would be a sense in which the curvature of the fractal determines the curvature of physical space. But more importantly, we are not to go about applying the fractal picture purely a priori but, to help test the theory at least mathematically---much as string theory is, then, to date more than less---it has to be shown whether there is indeed a given function, for a fractal graph, that maps on to the actions of the four known forces. Fractal theory then becomes a hypothesis and a research program, so to speak, and not a dogma: in the quest to find that function or similar ones, or to pursue new lines of relevant reasoning in this kind of light.
We know, roughly speaking, of molecules down through atoms down through protons and neutrons and electrons down to quarks, and alongside all these, in principle in some cases anyway, their (super?)symmetrical partners in the Menagerie, and so on. However, here, it's the quarks that don't divide, as far as the series of divisibles goes. (Throw in quantum field theory and everything's way more interesting; throw in string theory, though, and read on...) But there is in fact speculation or theorizing or at least maybe hypothesizing going on in some quarters, that maybe quarks (and antiquarks?) are composite, composed that is of things on average referred to as "preons."
Now, as a devotee of Kant, I have myself thought for a long time that we have no a priori reason to expect the possibility of division in matter to ever end. That is, since the intuition of space in the pure imagination is subject to infinite division, everything in physical space admits of being composed from subtler and subtler substance, else space would at some point not be filled and presto, the principle of the Anticipation of Perception would be violated. However, I doubt a Kantian argument, here, is going to do a great deal of solid dialectical work. Hence, a different proposal.
The question of geometrodynamics is at once a matter of genuine physics, it appears, yet with a strong relationship to philosophical inclinations in methodology or conception, affinities shared also with, say, quantum information theory (if from a syntactic rather than topological(?) direction, so to speak). Another random physics article I found recently reported on a mathematical discovery of a geometrical structure that maps all the Feynman diagrams for QM or something---the implication being that this hyperdimensional crystal or whatever they described it as, corresponds to the graph for the fundamental quantum functions of the world. That is, the geometrodynamical question just is the physicist's question: what is the function for the graph of the fundamental changes in physical reality (what functions graphs the unified action of the four forces, or even what function graphs that action as the action of a single force)?
But now suppose that we are also set with the problem of filling space, of making sure there is no vacuum. QM seems to solve the problem with notions like virtual particles or zero-point energy or the like. Space gets filled as the wave-function overlaps it indeterministically. Now actually there's nothing wrong with this as far as I or, I suppose, most anyone else can tell; or at least I am certainly not in a position to argue the merits of this solution to the space-filling problem.
However, one thing is that the waves of wave-particle duality, and the fields of QFT, and the like, don't quite reduce to the point-particulate description of matter. For example, the Higgs boson, if my understanding of the topic is correct, is a "scalar field," like a temperature map but for mass itself or something. Maybe there are in some form little spherical/point-like Higgs boson quanta pulsing about but I don't get the impression that that's really what's supposedly going on.
Another thing to consider is the motivation behind string theory. Now on the one hand there's all that "the elegance of mathematics" stuff, which again hearkens back to or anticipates at least aspects of the geometrodynamical question. But basically, the shift from point-particulate to string-theoretic descriptions of matter is much more than broad theoretical drift.
So, let's allow that space does have to be filled. If we are Kantians or whatever, we'll go a step sideways and say that it is not "intrinsically" filled but only so far as we have actually experienced its division, so that in a way the quantum foam might really be the "end point" for our knowledge of the substructure of matter and yet this is only in a proto-positivist sense true. But if we are more Platonistically minded geometrodynamics theorists, we will look for a function for a graph that can be used to fill space at all magnifications, at a glance, and which does seem to be manifest in much of the natural order---and which, due to the role of recursion in ideal mathematical structures across the board, is perhaps to be expected anyway, in the concrete expression of mathematical reality in the physical universe.
I'm talking about fractals, that is. What do you do if you want to fill space to infinity, but also to capture the proto-positivist sense of things, here? You fill it with two fractals, or rather you assume that there are two substances for the fractal, one for the figure, one for the "gaps." Well actually this is just speculation on my part; maybe it would take more; but the gist of it is, some set of fractals would be sufficient to fill in all of space, very efficiently it seems to me. Just watch a 3d-fractal video on YouTube and you'll have some sense of why it seems so to me, then.
If this is true, then the quantum foam, and even the preons that might precede this, are but the capstones of their own infinitely ascending series of material substructures. That is, every single atom that we know of, contains as much detail, as one divides its structure down and down, as does the entire observable universe, on the macrolevel, and in fact much more detail, but then everything would be much, much more detailed, on this scheme of things.
An immediate objection that comes to mind is that since photons could not access the overwhelming majority of these lower material levels, or would overlap them in some unhelpful way, or whatever, no information about them could be effectively conveyed. Or something along this line. Now the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on infinity includes a discussion of a description of the electron as posited to be "infinitely small." Hence it would be a genuine point-particle. But are photons infinitely small, too? Are either, that is, anyway? I don't know what the most up-to-date summaries of the research say. So, anyway, then, though, to broaden the objection, the problem with fractal theory, so to speak, is that, like string theory, it does not appear to have observable evidence, irrespective of our theories of photon paths and information transmission more particularly or whatever. Even if some parts of the world exhibit fractal order, or are recursively geometrodynamical, or however you'd like to put it, the whole world doesn't strike many as being so.
So secondly, a different objection that comes to mind is that the theory would reduce the action of the four known forces to the action of one force, the fractal force. The category of a fundamental force is the category of a fundamental cause of a fundamental change in space, i.e. there is a function for the graph of all things changed by gravity, by the strong and weak nuclear forces, and by electromagnetism; and the GUT/TOE ideal is to find the function for a single graph that encompasses the others in the most fitting way. However, according to fractal theory, it seems, all the positions of all particles/units of matter are determined just so as to iterate the application of the axiom of the system's geometry, to infinity. Thus what appears to be gravity resulting from the curvature of space is really just space itself warping according to the fractal pattern, with its content appropriately warped as well. And where would gravitons appear in this description at all?
Since I am not a physicist except in some elaborately rudimentary way, I am not going to make a lot more in the way of detailed claims about the fractal picture of the cosmos. So, to pursue the immediate line of inquiry, why yes there would be a sense in which the curvature of the fractal determines the curvature of physical space. But more importantly, we are not to go about applying the fractal picture purely a priori but, to help test the theory at least mathematically---much as string theory is, then, to date more than less---it has to be shown whether there is indeed a given function, for a fractal graph, that maps on to the actions of the four known forces. Fractal theory then becomes a hypothesis and a research program, so to speak, and not a dogma: in the quest to find that function or similar ones, or to pursue new lines of relevant reasoning in this kind of light.