Einstein Led Us into Mass Hallucinations

Technocrats ask us to “follow the science.” But what happens when that leads into mass hallucinations?

Ever since Einstein published his theory of gravity – General Relativity – physics has been in pursuit of a theory of everything. In this post, I will explain where Einstein went wrong, and how mass has been used to paper over all the evidence that disproves their theory of everything.

Einstein’s work depended upon the assumption that we can’t tell whether we are moving. Consider: sitting on your chair, you don’t feel like you are moving. In fact, you are carried along with the surface of the earth as it spins, completing a revolution each day. That cycle is embedded in larger cycles: the earth rotates around the sun, and the sun rotates around the center of the galaxy.

Of course, during an earthquake, we know that we are moving, because we can feel acceleration. Even here, however, Einstein said that we don’t know whether the earth is shaking or whether gravity is changing. Both shaking and gravity create acceleration.

To enshrine the principle that we cannot tell whether we are moving, Einstein declared that, should all matter be removed, space would be empty. Once matter is added, it causes space to deform, and the relative positions of particles begin to change. This relativity of motion is declared in the names of his theories: Special Relativity and General Relativity.

Once General Relativity was announced, other physicists considered how its principles might apply to other forces of nature. Eventually, we had three complete theories covering electromagnetism (most of engineering and chemistry), color (that keeps atomic nuclei from flying apart), and the weak force. In trying to extend General Relativity to those forces, a certain perspective became popular. Einstein was interpreted as having said that gravity exists to allow matter to change its position. In trying to build a theory of everything, then, physicists thought of forces as means of allowing any and all of the properties of a particle to change.

Before explaining how that ambition led to mass hallucinations, I will observe that to the spiritually sophisticated, Einstein is clearly wrong. In my career, I have worked with many spiritually sophisticated scientists. They are troubled by the failure of physics to explain spirituality but can’t see their way out of the trap that Einstein built. I have offered them that escape, but to accept it is to admit that everything published by particle physics and cosmology over the last forty years has been wrong. They aren’t ready to accept that humbling.

Pride comes before the fall.

Fortunately, I don’t have to explain the last forty years of journal articles to you for you to understand the mass hallucination.

Let’s start by counting the number of particle properties. We have:

  • Three positions (although some add time as a fourth property)
  • One electric charge
  • Two weak interaction charges
  • Three color charges
  • Spin (some particles act like turning tops)

That’s a total of ten. Mathematically, the equations that describe the effects of interactions between these properties cannot be bolted together, however. To unify them, we have to allow the possibility that there are other particle properties, currently hidden from us.

This is now an open-ended search. If we currently cannot see the other particle properties, how do we test our theories? This led the theorists to rely upon the principle established by Einstein in General Relativity. Forces exist to allow particles to influence other particles. The properties of one particle change the properties of another particle.

To theory starts, then, by putting all of the particle properties into a single bag. But how big a bag? Now we confront the constraint of analytical feasibility. The theorists needed to choose a bag that was subject to mathematical analysis. They turned to telecommunications, which had learned how to encode twenty-six channels of data into a single stream. Twenty-six is obviously more than ten, so this seemed an acceptable place to start.

Given this scheme of describing everything as the intermingling of properties, the problem was then to figure out how to test the theory. Here we come to the first of the delusions that follow from Einstein’s assumption that space was empty.

When Edwin Hubble began his survey of galaxies, it was obvious that light lost energy (“red-shifted”) as it traveled to us from distant galaxies. If space was filled with a substance, that could be explained as light bouncing off that substance. Given Einstein’s authority, however, that possibility was rejected. The only explanation available was that distant galaxies are moving away from us. From this explanation, we are led immediately to the conclusion that the universe formed in a huge explosion called the “Big Bang.”

Physics uses its theories to predict the history of objects. Here on earth, conditions are too complicated to support a test of theories of everything. But the Big Bang, conceived of first as starting at a single point and then as a small bubble in a super-heated soup of particles, simplified the starting conditions so that predictions could be calculated. This linked the theory of everything to cosmogenesis – the early history of the universe.

As that work progressed, the following problems arose. In each case, the problems were made to go away by introducing a “vacuum potential” to the theory. In what follows, I give that mechanism the degree of respect it deserves by substituting “pixie dust.” The outrageousness of its application demands the concession that the theory is no longer a theory of everything, because it cannot explain its own pixie dust.

  1. If we limit the properties to three positions, the equations predict that space should be filled with black holes and other “topological defects” that are too complicated to describe here. To avoid this, the theory has to allocate ten positions. This obviously contradicts our everyday experience, so the theorists sprinkled pixie dust to make the extra seven dimensions curl up and disappear.
  2. With ten positions, we still have sixteen other properties whose interaction we need to describe with other forces. Today we only see seven properties. To make the other nine go away, the theorists sprinkle more pixie dust.
  3. The early, super-hot universe is turbulent (think of an airplane in a storm). The universe we observe, however, is smooth. To make the turbulence go away, the theorists sprinkle more pixie dust. In fact, they use so much pixie dust that almost all of the matter we observe arises from the pixie dust. Unfortunately, that matter comes with anti-matter, which should annihilate all of the matter. The theory still cannot explain how matter survived.
  4. In all of these calculations, the theory ignores mass. To create mass, more pixie dust is sprinkled (the “Higgs boson,” a fraud that I will expose in a post to come).

Even with all of this pixie dust, the theory still does not guarantee that the universe will come out as we experience it. In fact, there are tens of millions of other possibilities. The chance that we exists seems impossibly small. To avoid this problem, the theorists gather all the remaining pixie dust, declaring that we live in a “multiverse” that contains more universes than there are atoms in our universe.

The definition of insanity is an inability to align our beliefs with the reality we share with others. On all of these grounds, the current theory of everything is insane. The delusion is sustained by the use of pixie dust in the form of vacuum potentials. The effect of the pixie dust is to disappear anything that disagrees with observation. It is a “mass hallucination” because the effect of the pixie dust is to use mass to prevent the disagreements from lasting beyond the earliest stages of the Big Bang.

The characterization of “mass hallucination” also applies in the psychological sense. Physical Review has a whole section dedicated to arguments over the theory of everything. The pursuit of evidence to prove the theory funnels tens of billions of taxpayer dollars towards construction and operation of earth- and space-based detectors. The largest machine in existence, the supercollider at CERN, itself costs more than a billion dollars a year. To that we must add neutrino detectors, space-based telescopes, gravity wave detectors, and others.

To protect that funding, these projects hire science publicists that flood media with what, given the pixie dust identified above, is pure propaganda.

As I indicate above, I have offered physics an escape from the delusions that follow from the dogma propagated by Saint Einstein. To the rest of us, this is not an idle matter. As I have explained, psychiatry was led into a dark corner by Einstein, to the suffering of tens of millions of our children and neighbors. It is time to stop funding this delusion.

Anti-Matter Antidote

On my New Physics tab, I have a set of links that document some important facts that are unexplained by modern particle theory. These aren’t obscure points of experience. Rather, they include facts such as “the proton weighs 50 times as much as it should” and “quazars precede galaxy formation.” They are “first order” facts that should cause every particle theorist to blush in shame.

Experimenters at CERN have now magnified the problem.

The reigning theory of the universe holds that it formed from a super-hot gas – so hot that the very fabric of space contained more energy than the existing particles. As the universe cooled, that energy was converted to particles.

One problem with this theory is that energy is converted to matter through a process called “pair production.” You can’t make only one particle – you have to make two.

Specifically, the particle comes with an “anti-particle” with equal mass and opposite charge. The conundrum is that those particles attract, and when they meet, they annihilate each other. The matter and anti-matter convert back to pure energy.

This leads the physicists to wonder: how did we end up with a universe composed only of matter? In principle, there should be equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, and every solid object should be annihilated.

The answer proposed by the theorists was that matter and anti-matter are slightly different – and most importantly in their stability. Anti-matter must disappear through some unknown process that preserves matter.

The experiment reported today attempted to measure differences between the most important building-block of matter – the proton – and its antiparticle. None was detected.

In consequence, everything created by the Big Bang (or the Expansive Cool – take your pick) should have disappeared a long time ago. There should be no gas clouds, no galaxies, no planets, and no life.

If that’s not a reason to be looking for new theories of fundamental physics, then what would be?

The Big Bang Collapses

Yet again.

One of the challenges confronting astrophysicists is figuring out how galaxies form. The problem arises in kind of a round-about way.

The space the fills our universe is remarkably uniform. That’s surprising, because it formed from an extremely violent context. We would expect it to be warped, in the mode of Einstein’s general relativity, causing light to “bend” as it traveled the great distances between galaxies. In addition, until a couple of years ago it was believed that the universe was coasting to a stop. In other words, the mass of the universe appeared to be just enough to keep the galaxies from flying apart forever, but not so much that they would turn around and collide together in a “big crunch.”

These two questions were reconciled with Alan Guth’s “inflationary universe” hypothesis. This holds that the universe was created with an invisible, uniform background energy that dissipated very early, creating most of the matter that we see around us.

One consequence of this model is that matter should be distributed uniformly in the universe. This is a problem for galaxy formation, because if matter is distributed uniformly, there’s no reason for it to start clumping together. There have to be little pockets of higher density for galaxies to form. When only normal matter is included in the simulations of the early universe, galaxies form way to slowly, and don’t exhibit the large-scale structures that we observe in the deep sky surveys.

Worse, when we look around the universe, we can’t actually see enough visible matter to account for the gravitational braking that slows down the rushing apart of the galaxies.

One way of solving these conundrums is “dark matter.” The proposed properties of dark matter are that it does not emit light (it’s dark) and that it has a different kind of mass that causes it to clump together to seed the formation of galaxies.

Today we have a negative result from an experiment designed to detect dark matter. This won’t deter the theorists for long – they’ll just come up with new forms of dark matter that are invisible to the detector (this is an old trick, which caught out my thesis adviser back in the ’80s).  But it does seem to make Occam’s razor cut more in the direction of the generative orders proposal for the formation of the early universe. That model doesn’t need inflation or dark matter or a multiverse to work. It anticipates just the universe that we see around us.

*sigh* Just saying.

Super Massive Black Holes

New study indicates that super massive black holes did not form through slow accretion from normal black holes, but rather early in the evolution of the universe in some unknown, cataclysmic process.

This contradicts the “Big Bang” theory, but is expected in a physics of Generative Orders (see points 7 and 8 of the “Reference Model”).

Galactic Asymmetry and the Big Bang

The reigning model of cosmology (the history of the universe) holds that it formed as a cooling bubble in a super-heated stew. It proposes that a lot of energy was stored in the fabric of space (whatever that means), and what we recognize as matter was created as that energy was released. That matter slowly coalesced to form concentrated seeds that eventually grew into galaxies. It’s a model not too different from the model we have for the formation of the solar system.

The model is notoriously called the “Big Bang” theory, but it’s not really a bang, nor is the universe really big in absolute terms. In fact, in that super-heated stew our universe is just a little tiny bubble that only looks big to us because as energy is released from the fabric of space signals travel more slowly through it, much as a violin string vibrates more slowly when it is loosened. In my book Love Works I coin another term for the process: the “Expansive Cool.”

The problem is that this model of gradual accretion is very difficult to reconcile with the structure and sub-structure  of the universe. This was first apparent in the distribution of galaxies, which is non-uniform. A more recent study of the age of stars in the Milky Way also shows some surprising structure.

It will be interesting to see if the cosmologists can come up with an explanation. I have to hand it to the astronomers, though: they sure know how to use pretty pictures to make a point!

 

From the Earth to the Sun and Back Again

One of the hazards of engaging in epistemological debate is that they almost always become religious. We look back through the haze of history, trying to understand the practices by which knowledge is revealed to us, hoping to glean insights that help us heal divisive intellectual conflicts in the present.

Currently, these discussions become religious because our era suffers from an extreme bifurcation in our pursuit of knowledge. In no other era of human history have the two great pursuits of understanding – religion and science – been perceived as diametrically opposed. The linear causality of Einstein stands in contradiction of the gift of prophesy, and the power and predictability of dumb matter seduces us into believing that we can achieve all of our desires right here on Earth. Conversely, science denies us the comfort of meaning, to the extent that some denounce the search for meaning, or go even further to propose that this reality is evidence of a malefic creator.

Given this modern myopia, in looking back at the great episodes of resistance to truth, we tend to focus on the conflict between science and religion. Consider, for example, the succession from geocentric models of the solar system to the heliocentric models. The oppression of Brahe and Galileo is characterized as resistance by a religious elite threatened by the destruction of a Platonic universe whose geometrical perfection (circles moving within circles) was advanced as proof of the existence of the Christian God.

In fact, the history was rather more subtle, and its consideration brings a great deal of insight into the intellectual resistance to the program of this blog, declared on the title bar: “Unifying Science and Spirituality.”

The Greeks advanced both the geocentric and heliocentric models. If the ancients had been capable of building the instruments used by Galileo, they would certainly have settled on the latter. They resolved on the former for entirely practical reasons: they were concerned with using the positions of the stars to calculate the calendar date and the position of objects on the Earth’s surface. Culturally, their needs were absolutely geocentric. To solve this problem, they correlated geographical position with stellar observations and the progression of the seasons. Next, they sought methods for compacting this large body of data in a form that could be used by voyagers. The technology most adaptable to that purpose was the mathematics of circular revolution. Not only was the mathematics of circular revolution relatively simple, it was easy to translate to mechanical form as instruments containing rotating dials.

The “geocentric” model of the heavens was not in essence a philosophical proposition, but a proposition of practical technology. The principle motivation for upending the model was that over the centuries, the circular approximations began to fail. Designs specified in the first century produced the wrong answers in the eleventh century. A more reliable model was necessary, and the application of the new mathematics of elliptical analysis revealed that the heliocentric model fit the data more reliably than did the geocentric model of circular revolution.

As for the resistance of the Church, Galileo insisted on publishing an insulting parody of the Pope with his observations. He made his science a political issue. This was not an idle matter: the Church used the feudal compact to constrain the rapaciousness of those with a monopoly on the instruments of war. Those scientists were well accepted that chose to engage with the Church with the aim of minimizing the social disruption that always comes with new knowledge.

In my own intellectual adventures here on this blog, I find myself confronted by those that tout modern cosmology as proof that the universe is a machine unfolding without purpose from its initial conditions. The foremost intellectual challenge to that conclusion has been “fine tuning” – the delicate balance of the fundamental constants of nature (specifically the relative strengths of the four forces) that must be preserved if life is to survive. The solution to this conundrum has been the “multiverse” variant of the Big Bang theory (the name itself is a mischaracterization). The multiverse proposition holds that universes exist with and without life – we just happen to occupy one in which life is possible.

The random generation of universes in the Big Bang, however, results from the proposition that we can explain all of nature by using two branches of mathematics: group theory and Fourier analysis. Both of these methods are relatively susceptible to hand calculation. What is little understood by the public is that the theorists trumpet their successes and ignore their failures. The application of current theory to study of the hydrogen nucleus is summarized here, and the results are incredibly ugly.

Why is the theory not abandoned? For the same reason that the geocentric theory was not abandoned: physicists and astronomers have used the current theory to justify the construction of multi-billion dollar observatories. As the Church did, they oppose any idea that might destabilize the social order that pays their salaries.

What is scandalous is that the interstellar navel-gazing saps money from problems here on Earth that desperately call for the full commitment of our best and brightest minds. The scientists need to get the heads out of the stars and back onto the Earth.

Shedding Light on Light Mysteries

In the last post, I identified correspondences between superfluid motion and the phenomenon that are described by the equations of quantum mechanics and special relativity. The discussion leads to the assumption that light is a disturbance in a cold – and therefore highly ordered (“crystal-like”) – sea of dark energy.

The illustration in that post showed a perfect lattice, but given what we know about the universe, we’d expect the dark energy lattice to be a little less regular. For example, we know from the Michelson-Morley experiment that dark energy is entrained with massive objects, which tend to be round. There’s an old adage about “pounding a round peg into a square hole” (or was it the other way around) that fits here: the distortion created by the spherical Earth requires accommodation from the rectangular lattice, which will introduce defects.

And then we have the early history of the universe: unless the universe was unfolded from a single location, dark energy will organize itself locally, just as we see in crystals formed in solution. Here’s a picture of insulin crystals:

Insulin crystals grown in solution
Now obviously as these crystals grow to fill in the volume, there’s going to be some places where they don’t fit together nicely, which is going to leave defects in the final mass. So it would happen with the dark energy lattice.

What would we expect to happen when light encounters such a defect? Well, a reasonable analogy is what happens when a water wave encounters a rock. While most of the wave will continue around the rock, ripples will be cast off all around.

Do we see evidence of this in our study of the universe? Well, yes we do. First of all is the cosmic microwave background. But there’s more than than. Recent studies reveal that there is too much light coming from the empty space between galaxies (see Galaxies Aren’t Bright Enough). Astronomers originally assumed that the light had to come from early sources (back around the “Big Bang”, which I think is hokum), but that early light should should be “stretched”, and therefore redder than it is. So the light must be coming from modern sources. Without any other proof, astronomers suppose that there must be many stars between galaxies.

In the lattice model, the cosmic microwave background and extra light between galaxies actually go together: if light is scattered by dark energy, it will lose a little bit of its energy (perhaps into microwaves) and change its direction. Therefore, some of the light coming from a distant galaxy will appear to have originated from empty space, and space will seem to be filled with microwaves.

Finally, the loss of energy from scattering in the lattice explains why light emitted from distant galaxies appears redder than light from nearer galaxies. In current theory, this is explained as due to the relativistic Doppler effect (similar to what we experience when a car passes us with its horn blaring, the pitch drops after the car passes us). But with the discovery of Dark Energy, other mechanisms may exist to explain this effect.

I will admit that the last two paragraphs are a “have you cake and eat it too” situation. If light from distant galaxies loses energy to scattering, it would be diffused as it passes, which would make the galaxies indistinct. But remember that the volume around galaxies is expected to have many more defects in the lattice than the intergalactic medium, which would cause stronger scattering in their vicinity. And when defects exist, radiation may also be emitted when the lattice reorganizes itself to close the defect. The point is that there is a whole set of new phenomena to consider when explaining astrophysical observations.

All this without needing to suppose a Big Bang at all.