The Enduring Beauty of Unified Physics

The Enduring Beauty of Unified Physics

L. Edgar Otto    17 October, 2012

There seems to be a compelling parallel between the laws and illusions of physics that we explore in the astrophysics of black hole objects and fundamental particles.

The quest for such fundamental laws, and the evolving logic of them, historically as slow as it seems to gain the simplest of foundational insight, simple in retrospect, is a beautiful thing in itself.  But in our methods history also seems to repeat itself while few are aware where such parallels may be significant.

While the wave particle duality is a powerful step in a sense it has locked us into philosophies of scientific methods that seems a bottleneck or certainly an obstacle to sound theoretical progress.  This is true also in our symbol systems logically and the foundations of mathematics itself used in physics especially of geometry. 

But for what seems so little and mysterious the work theoreticians do, incomplete or near dreams of a unified theory as possible, in our civilized progress in the era of classical and modern physics socially and in the new technology, the masses of mankind in the design of how we live seems driven from the highest level by these ideas, the defining work of everyman to the extent we share the dreams. 

Such work then seems very much and in our day is in a sense sacred as at least our highest achievement of which we cling to in the certainty at the frontiers of questions of philosophy, the why the world is here, who we are, and ow much we can develop in understanding things if any beyond ourselves within this Nobel purpose.

Yet the whole world cannot be one where everyone is the expert, meaningless duplication of services and a net gain in the number of those who learn to take up the service- nor is it guaranteed that some are capable, that in matters of theory in their calling, or hope dreams, theirs is a career in the stratosphere at one with truth and beauty felt beyond the mundane but great wonder of how things work, not the why then, these thinking engineers may beyond luck and harvest time favorable harvest our human genius.

Parallels of a third physics beyond the quantum intelligibly follows from it as quantum concepts follow from the classical.  While in a sense quantum theory is self referential in proofs where uncertainties reign, an acceptance of some form of mystery and a reasonable resolution of methods with prediction and correspondence to a regime of experiments so verified or wider mathematical concepts leaving tracks of observation as the evidence of the seemingly miraculous, physics seems to face periodically a sense of boredom that declares the totality of theory known save, historically the discoveries related to and interesting where we find anomalies.

This issue raised before the last century that the work physicists of theory do is to take finer and finer measurement as all is known - or in this mindset which is not forbidden as a logical possibility concerning the physical world we have those declaring everything is known in the new physics, that all there is even if we do not know quite what it is, say of matter.  I leave you the pleasure of learning about these individuals for while the subject is obscure it is common knowledge and the right of everyone who wonder and research this common property of intellect. 

But nothing will change much if our lives are focused on lesser creative and survival things, or we elect some tradition of beliefs that defines our level of civilization and awareness.  We may tell each other how to live but we cannot find that in  a unified theory so to contain and characterize mankind, as far as I can see, against those who speculate otherwise.

From Newton on we have a relation or interpretation to the nature of light and color and while the reality does seem to be unified or well defined despite the complimentary incompatibles involving scale and extreme regions of applied equations of theory, wave or corpuscular viewpoints, it is mundane in the defining of color in our day of classical computation on the computer monitor screen.  But we can see this as a sort of prism that so divides the energy and the color. 

The essential difference between computation of a computer as classical or quantum, the latter can be seem more as an artificial conforming of the laws of nature to a better fit of experimental data while the expected continuum of color requires a refined concept- namely that of packets or photons, is how we in our equations distinguish and very subtly in a more unified theory,  multiplication as if a series of additions and that of exponentiation. 

In the quasic physics the idea of a zero or neutral point or pixel is there, a sort of compromise in successive division or as if subtraction by steps of powers in a hierarchy unto a decimal limit, is a parallel as is the forms or patterns in the quantum terminology, but it is not the same idea of zero point, rather a singularity to be distinguished or merged in a movable cleft of where such zeros may be or in what process to a complex or class of singularities.  The wild card new (that is neoteric) math beyond the usual operations as the thought wave like guiding of the discontinuous transfinite is more fundamental than the transinfinities for numbers, especially the integers and the effect or reality of primes in zero and unity involves the deeper idea of the zero and one. Nature would compute this way if we are to make use of the laws of physics for computational machines, if we are to establish the nature and limits of factoring for encryption.

The quasic abstract motion function is in a sense neutral or neutral as hidden and is at once this subtle difference between addition or multiplication and subtraction and division.  It is natures quasifinite zero point so to speak.

In a unified quasic picture, the general picture with a better sense of the interrelation and definition of our term dimension, clearly we have preferences for corresponding infinite continuous and finite isolated things- although not all such relations are necessarily connected by existential theory alone as the diversity as well as the uniformity of the universe begs for explanation- nor can we expect a total theory to come from a bolt from the cosmic latte as methods of information alone. 

But the colors, and beyond the colors that we can intuit and not quite have evolved to see, suggest to me that we could paint the state of our mind that tries to see or picture the universe, given the information a photo- and one quite independent of the theoretician and his pet theories.  In a unified world, even if we have to tunnel and believe there are things beyond a closed room of the unknown, given stimulus and senses at least potentially as our endowment to compliment drive, we can describe and design the universe even if by thought from a dark room and that be the common elements to any definition or focus of that universe.

Debate on this is also really what is on the surface or the walls of reflections on which we so read, of which we as thinking things cannot by lesser methods show is the reality. In our day of the chemical oriented and so called imbalances that seems to define for some their true selves there does seem to be a more natural picture of a state of mind as the beauty as well the truth to which we vaguely distinguish the real.

Some may despair that after enormous expense the discovery and idea of the Higgs mechanism will be all that is found and again we have to do physics as the refinement to ever finer significant figures- lost the romance to workaday boring same frozen photo to which we give our aesthetic energy lost in the work of doing it as sure as we can bathe in the light of decoherening flashes of black light vivid but rationally muddy colors.

Some also fear that we reach the limits of what we can know by experiment or ever reach a better technology than our day as well what we can imagine in theory and is stepping stones of proofs.  But is it not as likely that the seeming wisdom of nature does not limit us in our understanding nor of our possibilities and patterns of experiments but in the detour along all possible paths and spins computed in the darkness that we by the mechanics of experiment, the first resolution of how that may realte to ideas of mass, acceleration and gravity that experiments as such and in the evidence of the physical obviousness have so limited us?

The Black Hole astrophysicists, in discovery a little less foundational than philosophy have not speculated on what is at the ground of those creative objects of which there is evidence we have stellar size and galaxy or quasar size ones, efficient engines per mass, that there is nothing in or we cannot say what is inside.  But this idea of a ground as absolute reachable or not could just as well apply to the smallest things more a total theory and more fundamental than the idea of strings - some says proves there is no God- for that description while vast and comprehensive and technical and beautiful is boring to the next higher theory, the next one that so far seems a new awakening of a sense of a unified totality.

Could it not apply to that part of the universe we imagine as the initial state of the big bang, that is we cannot logically exclude it as separate from the laws everywhere else for thermodynamics and the question of symmetry there that string theory does not address?  Would there be, as if the general design of atoms seen this way, or even a single electron that perhaps is not a point like object but could have divisions in some representations, an unexplained vast void to be found beyond chance in the expanded universe?  If the mathematics of what is in the center of such a Black Hole is of a wider physicality and the laws not quite uniform as we assert it in all outside such a hole- and if the spin is part of the picture of particles and gamma bursts and so on- then would not the interpreted idea of dark matter so imply it an analog to a nucleus and contain intelligible amounts of physical matter- one that moreover does not need to integrate the gravity to a standard analogous theory?

But this also involves what is fundamental as time, physics time as well as the philosophic and subjective descriptions of it.  Why are some constants of nature or events in nature in the same physical dimensions corresponding (a question as important as that of why a particular dimensionless constant)?  What is the escape velocity and the circumference of the spinning earth and what happened everywhere as if a change of state of nature some sixty millions of years ago to Saturn's rings and the dinosaurs and we again in the center of the universe it so vast since then?

Now some principles I have developed, often from a casual first hint or thought only later to be understood as having substance and with significant implications, such as my word teleoscoping... that generalized in this brane like quasic frame idea of dimensions proves important in such operations or mechanism like descriptions of interactive levels of the physics.  This alone tells me for the theoretician there is a vast span of work still to be done.

Sometime by the influence or experience from others a vastly complex but ridiculously simple but needed idea can be experienced and become a part of our own picture on a canvass...  The university, and historically the Nobel Prizes justly awarded have justified themselves their own prestige, should the the engine of learning and objective theory as well the faith that our unity of purpose and freedom of enquiry has at least that much meaning in the world.  So I wish to thank the University of Madison for replays now that I can see the lectures such as the one on black holes although from later reading I know a lot is obsolete now with all the new discoveries.

I especially want to thank Susan Coppersmith for her lecture on what theoretical physicists do and her lucid explanation on the difficulties and how in her work on quantum computing.  Sometimes, especially in the equations outside of academia it helps knowing so much that we may have missed essential simple steps along the way.

I must admit I am a little bored, theoretically, especially with the difficulty for finding direct dialog or comments from others with such interests- and I have other interests.  I wrote this more narrative than those notes in the manuscript jottings that suggest to me a further development of interest I vaguely and poetically called "quasi meaningfree arithmetic" we shall see but it is hard to access in all the word not only some post of a year ago as much as for me to say this work is finished.  I post a photo of the bridge I took one morning that for some reason got a lot of response in the social network and it pretty much paints a picture that I realize having taken it for its simplicity and beauty is one involving a more unified theory of the physics.

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