Physicist: This was an interesting back-and-forth, so the original questions are italicized.
What was the energy at the start of the universe and how did it create matter?
If the question is “how much?” or “where did it come from?”, the answers are unfortunately “a hell of a lot” and “we can only guess”. These are still very open questions. There are lots of clever guesses, but there isn’t much solid, direct data to pick out which guesses are good.
As for how it became matter, that’s “easy”: when you get enough energy in one place, new particles form spontaneously. If the new particle has mass m, then the energy present is reduced by mc2. This is Einstein’s famous energy/mass conversion rate: E=mc2.
Kinetic energy (the energy of movement) is the easiest way to concentrate a lot of energy in one place. That’s why we use “particle accelerators” like CERN to slam particles together, instead of using huge lasers or lenses or anything else. We can get individual particles moving so fast that they carry many thousands of times their mass-equivalent in kinetic energy. When they do slam together all of that energy is released as a burst of new particles plus the kinetic energy of those (typically very fast) particles plus some light.
The trajectories of newly formed particles flying away from the collision of two gold nuclei. When describing these events, CERN scientists inevitably make “explodey sounds” with their mouths.
The early universe was so hot that all of the particles flying around were moving at particle-accelerator speeds and new particles were generated continuously. However, when we (people) make new particles they always appear in matter/anti-matter pairs, so how the universe has managed to have more matter than anti-matter is a mystery.
Or rather, since we’re not going to call ourselves “anti-matter”, it’s a mystery how the universe managed to not be balanced between… the two types of matter.
Is this energy stable or not, and if it isn’t how do you make it stable?
You can produce new matter with any kind of energy, so pick your favorite. There’s no such thing as pure energy, so whatever form you choose will be one of the regular, boring types: hot water, moving stuff, light, etc. and the way you’d store it to make it stable is just as dull: charged battery, stretched spring, spinning flywheel, etc.
However, generating matter takes an colossal amount of energy. The Hiroshima bomb was around a gram’s worth of energy. Humanity consumes the equivalent of around 5-10 metric tons of energy per year (that’s a lot more than I had been expecting before looking it up). You could create enough matter to make a sandwich, or you could power New York City for about a year instead. Moral is: if you need matter, go out and collect it.
And also is it possible to contain this amount of energy in an enclosed space? (eg. a spaceship)
The greatest power source we’ll ever reasonably have access to is hydrogen to helium fusion, which converts about 0.7% of the hydrogen’s mass into energy, leaving 99.3% as helium. So (assuming perfect efficiency), if you want to turn energy into matter, starting with more than 100 times as much hydrogen is a good place to start.
When matter falls into black holes, it tends to spiral in dense, extremely hot disks of gas first. This gas gets hot enough that it radiates in the x-ray spectrum (the hotter something is, the bluer the light it emits and x-rays are… way to blue to see). Under ideal conditions, matter falling into a rapidly spinning black hole can radiate the equivalent of about 40% of their mass.
This isn’t a great system. At the end of the day, you’re throwing away matter to create the energy for less matter and you’re doing it as close as you can get to a black hole, which is a famously unpleasant place to be.
So if you want to store a lot of energy on a spacehip, it needs to have massive hydrogen fuel tanks, and if you want to use your fuel efficiently than fusion would allow, then you need a black hole too.
And what type of matter would it produce?
Newly created matter is a random assortment of all the fundamental particles it’s possible to create at the given energies. For example, an electron (the lightest particle) has a mass equivalent of about 0.5 megaelectronvolts, which is the energy gained by a particle accelerated by half a million volts. That means that if your accelerator uses slightly more than a million volts, then you’ll be making electron/positron pairs (positrons are anti-electrons), and if it uses less than a million volts to accelerate its particles, then you’re just making light. It’s possible to “dial in” particular particles by carefully choosing the speed and type of the particles in your accelerator, but even then you’re not going to be creating cats and dogs or even entire atoms; just lots of individual fundamental particles.
Most fundamental particles are extremely unstable and decay very rapidly into radiation and the few stable particles: protons, electrons, and their anti-particles. Neutrons aren’t stable on their own, but they last for about 15 minutes before decaying, which is more than enough time to use them. So that’s ultimately the answer to what kind of matter we can create: protons, neutrons, and electrons (and their anti-particles).
When those protons and electrons are slowed down after their violent creation, you can make hydrogen or even deuterium (hydrogen with an extra neutron), but that’s the most advanced matter-creation ever achieved. There aren’t presently any prospects for doing better.
The inevitable half of the new matter made up of anti-particles will go on to annihilate whatever normal matter it runs into, so it either needs to be thrown out or stored very carefully. Preferably stored. After all the trouble of creating new matter, you don’t want to just throw out half of it (destroying a bunch of perfectly serviceable matter somewhere else in the process).
And also whether oxygen will be produced?
Nope! Or at least, almost nope. Individual protons and neutrons, sure. Hydrogen with some effort, yes. But in order to create a useful amount of heavier elements, existing matter needs to be fused (through fusion). The inside of stars is presently the only environment where it seems to be possible to create elements above helium in any abundance. We’re nowhere remotely close to fusing elements above hydrogen in our fusion reactors. Even the Sun is incapable of fusing helium into anything bigger. Near the end of its life, as it runs out of hydrogen fuel and its core collapses, the Sun will briefly fuse helium, but even then it won’t make oxygen.
It’s hard to convey how difficult it is to build the atoms that go into building people. The oxygen in the air you’re breathing right now has already had a hell of a life, born riding a supernova shock wave out of the core of a star and into interstellar space.
The natural sources of all the elements. Artificial elements are created atom by atom, and almost everything else is made in supernovas and neutron star collisions.
Artificial isotopes can be created by bombarding existing isotopes with “slow” neutrons, some of which stick to the nuclei of the target material’s atoms. Just like the creation of particles, this is a random and extremely inefficient process. Technically you can make oxygen, a few atoms at a time, by using the neutrons your particle accelerator accidentally created. But this is a long way from being a source of breathable air.
Elements (the number of protons) increases upward and the number of neutrons increases to the right. Every isotope that isn’t black is radioactive and will decay into another isotope according to the rules in the box. The big tool we have for making new nuclei is neutron bombardment, which moves an atom one to the right. Starting from hydrogen, a couple of neutrons will get you to tritium (“3H” on the bottom row) which decays to helium-3 (“3He”). With a spectacular burst of neutrons you can get a few atoms to jump helium-5 and lithium-6 (the “!!!” squares) before they decay in the “wrong direction” and then neutron bombardment and beta- decay will eventually get you to oxygen. But not in any hurry.
So if you want to make oxygen efficiently, you really need to blow up a star bigger than the Sun. Just start with several solar-system’s worth of hydrogen, pack it together into a star, let it simmer for a few million years until it supernovas, then collect and sort what comes flying out. Easy.
If your spaceship is big enough to hold a black hole for power and a couple massive stars for fusion, then you can create oxygen. But at some point you have to step back and ask what the spaceship is for. As long as you’re slinging stars around, why not grab a nice planet to live on while you’re at it?
Just like I can’t not remember something, I can’t not see DIMP once I understand the concept. For me it’s obvious.
Consider all the following, and though you may not change your thinking, perhaps others would like to comment too?
PHOTON TO ELECTRON POSITRON PAIRS seems to be a elementary basic of physics.
The concept of dimp or a dimensionless point of all energy outside space/time; would explain all of the following.
Dimp led to the Big Bang.
Dimp still leads to virtual particles.
Dimp photons lead to pair production.
Dimp solves the cosmological constant problem.
Big Bang
First created: photons to electron/positron pairs and neutrinos and anti neutrinos.
Virtual Particles
From the vacuum comes virtual particles, in electron positron pairs.
Pair Production
Turns photons into electron positron pairs.
Cosmological Constant Problem
The vacuum energy density is many orders of magnitude bigger than the observed cosmological constant.
@Tom Hendricks
I cant not see Marilyn Monroe type beautiful ladies falling in love with me, every time I drink enough single malt Scottish whisky, but that, sadly, does not make the concept true.
Pair production:
High energy photons (which come physically close to atomic nuclei) converting to matter/anti-matter pairs. These might then collide back into a high energy photon or may be wrenched apart before that can happen. Yes, a fundamental universal process, started from a singularity which went through inflation and expansion (or big bang). The laws of conservation state that matter is not created or destroyed but you suggest this is wrong, you suggest new high energy photons are input to this universe from what you call DIMP. A dimensionless particle that exists ‘outside of this universe’ (in which ever way your imagination presents this concept to you). I assume you have decided this injection of new photons from outwith the universe is required to explain why vacuum energy is so high and the expansion rate is accelerating.
You have not, in anyway, gave any idea as to why your conjecture of a particle from ‘outwith’ our universe still feeding photons in(and perhaps other energy waves, you have not said if its only photons that are input from this particle into the universe), is more likely, than other concepts such as dark energy (and quintessence) or the anthropic principle or brane theory etc, in providing explanations for issues such as a positive cosmological constant, pair production, virtual particles and the processes which occurred in the big bang.
Why is the fact that DIMP is the obvious solution to you, to explain the cosmological constant problem, more valid, that those who think the existence of dark energy is the solution?
There really is no problem with conservation of energy and Dimp.
Just like virtual particles come in and out of existence in electron positron pairs, so Dimp energy comes in and out of existence. We know virtual particles are a reality, so what Dimp suggests is WHERE the virtual particles come from, and pop back to, when they annihilate.
Dimp would also suggest why charge balances out.
Let’s say all that is came from Dimp at the Big Bang as photons that turned to positron electron pairs, then we know that the space time universe has to have a balance of charges – half positive and half negative.
Your question about dark energy is intriguing one – and though I hope you don’t think Dimp answers every question left in physics – I doubt that it does – I will speculate.
There seems to be some force that during the Big Bang expanded out of the Dimp singularity.
That force seems to be opposite Dimp, that is a single dimensionless point, and does not seem to be gravity – because it is expanding instead of drawing in – and it seems to have some properties similar to dark energy. So could anti-gravity and/or dark energy be the force that broke away from Dimp to start space time during the Big Bang?
Further could anti gravity and dark energy be the same? That I don’t know.
Thank you a bunch for popularising science!
Always excellent articles, awesome book.
Please keep going!
@Tom Hendricks
As I said before Tom, your comments are pure conjecture and are based on playful thinking, but that’s ok. I don’t think you will ever get many responses however.
I look forward to your scientific paper being published.
I wont hold my breath in anticipation of that event however.
I took the following info from the website Quora, which has many comments from physics professors etc, regarding virtual particles.
Not one of them suggests a source of photons (virtual or real) (such as DIMP), outside of the universe.
I took this extract from a comment by Barak Shoshany, Graduate Student at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. I could not copy and paste the Feynman diagram he refers to but I included a link to it.
What are virtual particles in layman’s terms? What do they provide? What is their significance?
Virtual particles are, in principle, mathematical artifacts invented for the purpose of calculations of interactions between particles.
It should be stressed that virtual particles are not a different category of particles. Interactions between particles are calculated using Feynman diagrams such as this one:
https://www.quora.com/Are-virtual-particles-indeed-real-particles
The external lines are the particles that we observe; in this case, an electron e− and a positron e+ coming in from the left and a quark q , antiquark q¯ and gluon g coming out of the right. (The time axis goes from left to right.)
The internal lines are the “virtual particles”. In this particular diagram the virtual particle is a photon γ , but there are many other possible diagrams for this interaction (actually infinitely many), and each diagram has a different set of internal lines with different types of particles represented by each line. But these virtual particles are of the same type as the regular particles: photons, electrons, quarks, etc., and they are only called “virtual” because we do not actually observe them.
To summarize: we only see the particles coming in and out of the diagram. We don’t know what happens in between, and we approximate this using Feynman diagrams and the concept of virtual particles. This is called perturbation theory. Virtual particles have no other role other than in Feynman diagram calculations, and in principle they have no existence outside of the mathematical framework of perturbation theory. If you don’t use perturbation theory, then you don’t need virtual particles at all.
Also, as I said, for each interaction there are infinite possibilities for virtual particles on the internal line. So if they existed, all infinite possibilities must exist as once (in a quantum superposition). But since we cannot observe them and know whether they actually exist, the question of their existence is only of interest to philosophers, not to physicists.
Do artifacts of mathematical calculations actually exist in reality? This question cannot be answered using our current scientific knowledge, so physicists don’t bother with it, they only care that these mathematical calculations give results that agree with experiment.
The same can be said, for example, for the fields of quantum field theory themselves: do they actually exists or are they merely a mathematical tool? No one knows, and no one cares, as long as quantum field theory provides accurate results and its predictions agree with experiment better than those of other theories.
Many physicists think that the concept of virtual particles should be avoided entirely, because it is misleading and confusing, to the general public and also to physics students. As far as physicists are concerned, virtual particles cannot be observed, and thus they do not “truly” exist. That’s why they’re called “virtual”.
For further information, please see Frank Heile’s answer to Quantum Field Theory:
https://www.quora.com/Quantum-Field-Theory-The-Coulomb-force-between-electrical-charges-is-caused-by-exchange-of-photons-What-is-really-going-on-how-is-the-transfer-of-these-virtual-particles-responsible-for-such-important-phenomena-we-experience-in-our-daily-lives/answer/Frank-Heile
Also, please see :
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-physicists-argue-that-virtual-particles-arent-real-because-they-arent-observable-when-quantum-superpositions-are-also-not-observable/answer/Barak-Shoshany
The matter anti matter asymmetry problem.
Photons out of the big bang, can convert into electron/positron pairs in pair production, as long as the temperature is high enough.
But when photons transform, there are always an equal number of electrons and positrons.
So where did the positrons go? Why were electrons left?
They should have exactly annihilated each other.
Some say an electron escaped here and there? But what did it’s partner positron do? Where did it go? How can that positron be annihilated without another electron being part of the process?
So, with the physics we know now, we are not here!
Something major is missing!
Patience Tom, patience and perseverance. Science progresses significantly, just every now and then. We just have to wait until the right scientist has the right thought and can show the rest of us, why he/she is correct.
Einstein did not suggest E=MC2 and then performed the work to prove it. He did the work and that led to the equation. Same with general and special relativity. Best not to jump directly to pure conjectures such as DIMP.
Based on data gained so far, the idea that around 1 particle of matter in every billion does not get annihilated in matter anti-matter collisions and that’s why the universe has the matter content it has, is as you say what the evidence shows.
We simply don’t know why yet. We also don’t understand the pair production process in full. Any Feynman diagram showing the process, always has that central waveform to represent ‘the bit of the process we don’t understand’. We really only know the inputs and outputs.
The fact that we exist, suggests that their is a set of conditions which occur WITHIN THIS UNIVERSE which causes some matter to either escape or survive the annihilation process. We just don’t know how it happens yet.
DIMP does not take us any closer in my opinion.
If all photons come from DIMP then why don’t they all return to DIMP.
No different to why does some matter avoid or survive annihilation.
Both electron and positron are waves as well as particles.
Let’s say they are mirror waves
When they meet they reach destructive interference and annihilate each other.
Btw if one in a billion electrons is sparred, then one in a billion positrons are spared,
Or it’s just more make believe physics.
and your point is??
A free positron can exist in our Universe. Here is a quote from a scientific article in Forbes magazine, about the asynchronous matter/anti-matter balance.
“If you threw a single antimatter particle into the mix of our galaxy, it would only last for about 300 years before annihilating with a matter particle. That constraint tells us, within the Milky Way, the amount of antimatter can be no more than 1 part in a quadrilliion (10^15) compared to the total amount of matter.”
Scientists have also found combined anti-matter particles in experiments. Antihydrogen and Antihelium. Really small amounts but they have been found and i in some cases, created deliberately.
Here are two quotes from wikipedia:
“Accelerators first detected hot antihydrogen in the 1990s”
The first antihydrogen was produced in 1995 by a team led by Walter Oelert at CERN[11] using a method first proposed by Charles Munger Jr, Stanley Brodsky and Ivan Schmidt Andrade.[12]
Oh, I meant to also ask, Would you like to explain the method by which the destructive interference of a positron and electron wave form, produces a photon.
Are you also suggesting that the constructive interference of wave forms is the method used by a high energy photon in becoming an electron/positron pair or a proton/antiproton pair or a muon/antimuon pair?
Response to the lose anti matter. This seems more the exception than the rule and I think the electric charge of the universe is zero, still holds.
This would work like virtual particles, that pop up out of Dimp, exist and then are annihilated or turn back into two photons.
More on how there is matter, coming up.
@ Tom Hendricks
Your comments are becoming rather short, cryptic and obscure.
Still, I remain respectful of anyone who seeks scientific truths.
Meantime, I have included two comments below from a discussion on Quora with the title ‘are virtual particles real’. These are from people who are immersed in physics.
From :
Barak Shoshany, Graduate Student at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics:
Virtual particles are, in principle, mathematical artifacts invented for the purpose of calculations of interactions between particles. It should be stressed that virtual particles are not a different category of particles. Interactions between particles are calculated using Feynman diagrams.
A positron e+ coming in from the left and a quark q , antiquark q¯ and gluon g coming out of the right. (The time axis goes from left to right.)
To see the Feynman diagram, go to:
https://www.quora.com/Are-virtual-particles-indeed-real-particles
The internal lines are the “virtual particles”. In this particular diagram the virtual particle is a photon γ , but there are many other possible diagrams for this interaction (actually infinitely many), and each diagram has a different set of internal lines with different types of particles represented by each line. But these virtual particles are of the same type as the regular particles: photons, electrons, quarks, etc., and they are only called “virtual” because we do not actually observe them.
To summarize: we only see the particles coming in and out of the diagram. We don’t know what happens in between, and we approximate this using Feynman diagrams and the concept of virtual particles. This is called perturbation theory. Virtual particles have no other role other than in Feynman diagram calculations, and in principle they have no existence outside of the mathematical framework of perturbation theory. If you don’t use perturbation theory, then you don’t need virtual particles at all.
Also, as I said, for each interaction there are infinite possibilities for virtual particles on the internal line. So if they existed, all infinite possibilities must exist as once (in a quantum superposition). But since we cannot observe them and know whether they actually exist, the question of their existence is only of interest to philosophers, not to physicists.
Do artifacts of mathematical calculations actually exist in reality? This question cannot be answered using our current scientific knowledge, so physicists don’t bother with it, they only care that these mathematical calculations give results that agree with experiment.
The same can be said, for example, for the fields of quantum field theory themselves: do they actually exists or are they merely a mathematical tool? No one knows, and no one cares, as long as quantum field theory provides accurate results and its predictions agree with experiment better than those of other theories.
Many physicists think that the concept of virtual particles should be avoided entirely, because it is misleading and confusing, to the general public and also to physics students. As far as physicists are concerned, virtual particles cannot be observed, and thus they do not “truly” exist. That’s why they’re called “virtual”.
My second example is from Russell Childs, PhD Particle Physics, University of Birmingham:
“This is one of those tautologies for which the answer is yes and no. As “virtual” particles they can mediate interactions, but never appear as observable particles in their own right, which allows them more flexibility, such as virtual photons not being massless or having to travel at the speed of light. If they did not have this flexibility, many interactions would be forbidden since they need these virtual particles to ferry four-momentum between interacting particles in a manner that would be forbidden for real particles. As “particles” they may become “real” when you accelerate. This is called the Unruh Effect and is related to Hawking Radiation. This means that if you wave a thermometer about in free space, it will raise its temperature very slightly, as the virtual particles produced spontaneously from the quantum vacuum acquire the properties of a warm gas of real particles.”
Neither of these highly qualified individuals in physics, suggest a source such as DIMP for where virtual particles come from.
Wiki quote “In October 2017, scientists reported further evidence that matter and antimatter, equally produced at the Big Bang, are identical, should completely annihilate each other and, as a result, the universe should not exist.This implies that there must be something, as yet unknown to scientists, that either stopped the complete mutual destruction of matter and antimatter in the early forming universe, or that gave rise to an imbalance between the two forms.
Here’s my suggestion:
Let’s think of waves not particles.
There was massive expansion during a very short period at the start of the Big Bang. There also seems to have been a period of INFLATION as well.
Both of these would have stretched waves in a rapidly expanding universe.
Let’s think of mirror image waves not matter/anti matter particles
Both matter and anti matter particles and waves and mirror image waves would annihilate each other on contact. The former would be annihilation, the later destructive interference.
Let’s say photons made positron/electron WAVES during this massive expansion phase. Pair production.
Though every positron and electron made at the same time would annihilate each other – those made later would not be able to annihilate the earlier ones because they would be stretched!
Their positron/electron mirror waves would have been stretched out such that later positron waves could not annihilate earlier electron waves.
Each stretching would produce novel positrons and electrons whose waves would not annihilate earlier or later opposite charged waves because their waves would not align.
Thus we would end up with not electron positron particles, but an assortment of electron positron waves that were mirror images of each other though most would be stretched waves – and
BOTH electron and positron waves WOULD STILL BE HERE. And both would be elementary particles.
Right – no one except a few online readers, has heard about Dimp because the idea is original with me. Most that have are at that initial stage of, “This really can’t be because of ….”
But your own experts hint at it when they say virtual particles seem outside space – time.
Dimp is outside space time, contains all photons in a dimensionless point, that was here before the Big Bang, was the source that the Big Bang singularity expanded out of, is the source of all virtual particles, and is much more massive than all the energy of space time.
” The discrepancy of 120 orders of magnitude between the observed energy density of the vacuum and that predicted from manipulations of quantum assumptions has been considered as the “worst prediction in physics ”.”
Dimp would also address this vacuum catastrophe.
“There was massive expansion during a very short period at the start of the Big Bang. There also seems to have been a period of INFLATION as well.”
The ‘massive expansion during a very short period’ you refer to in big bang theory IS the inflation epoch there is no ‘AS WELL’.
“Both matter and anti matter particles and waves and mirror image waves would annihilate each other on contact. The former would be annihilation, the later destructive interference.”
To me, this makes no sense. A particle and its wave form are not separate so there is no former and later here. Your ‘annihilation’ and ‘destructive interference’ would be the same process.
“Though every positron and electron made at the same time would annihilate each other – those made later would not be able to annihilate the earlier ones because they would be stretched!
Their positron/electron mirror waves would have been stretched out such that later positron waves could not annihilate earlier electron waves.
Each stretching would produce novel positrons and electrons whose waves would not annihilate earlier or later opposite charged waves because their waves would not align.”
If this were true then this result of waveform stretching would still be happening today as the universe is still expanding, so no matter/anti-matter pairs would be able to annihilate with any that had occurred previously. I think if that were true then there would be a lot more anti-matter around.
Another two points:
The idea that the quotes I chose from physics experts hint at the source of virtual particles is ‘outside space and time’ exists only in your own imagination. In fact the physics professor states “virtual particles produced spontaneously from the quantum vacuum”
I have already stated earlier that a much more feasible theory which explains the level of vacuum energy is the existence of dark energy, produced as part of the big bang process and not from a non-existent singularity which you suggest exists within its own non-space (since its dimensionless), outside the space of this universe.
In my opinion and with all due respect, DIMP is about as plausible as ‘God did it’.
Here is where we differ.
My idea is that the quantum vacuum is Dimp. They are the same dimensionless point.
During the Big Bang , Dimp or quantum vacuum was such that it broke away and formed space time. Now the quantum vacuum produces virtual particle pairs that pop up, then annihilate. The real question for me is how was the Big Bang so big that it turned the quantum vacuum into real particles/waves. That certainly can’t happen on a Big Bang scale now!
Taking that further, my idea is that anti gravity OR dark energy was the force that broke out of Dimp. That leaves us with two major forces.
Dimensionless point that has all photons in a single point.
Anti gravity or dark energy , that broke out of Dimp and continues to expand.
You are merely playing with the idea that we don’t know where the singularity that big bang theory is based around, came from. You simply suggest it came from nowhere and everywhere. An x,y,z coordinate that all photons pop in and out of.
Its like answering the question “Where did the Universe come from?” with the answer “Somewhere outside the Universe.” Hardly a giant leap forward.
You are merely playing with the idea that science does not know the origin of the singularity that big bang theory is based around. You simply suggest it came from nowhere and everywhere. Any old x,y,z coordinate will do. All photons can pop in and out of it.
Its like answering the question “Where did the Universe come from?” with the answer “Somewhere outside the Universe, let’s give this place a name, lets call it DIMP”
Hardly a giant leap forward.
The argument that you should use to disprove the concept of Dimp is this.
Photons are not outside distance and time like Einstein said.
Then supply proof of your claim.
Thanks for your advice Tom, but it sounds like you might choose to heed Einstein as oppose to me.
In science, the burden of proof traditionally lies with the proposer. In this case, the proposer of DIMP. Responsibility to disprove it certainly does not lie with those who merely comment on it in a ‘scientific discussion’ website. I don’t need to disprove god either. Some people will keep their faith in god no matter what I say, just like some, perhaps you included, will still have faith in your DIMP suggestion.
BTW, I have been saying ‘photons are not outside distance and time’ since my first comment on your proposal.
This quote from the physics.org website, and the article, Does Light Expeience Time.
But for light itself, which is already moving at light speed… You guessed it, the photons reach zero distance and zero time.
A photon or a ‘concentration/packet/payload of energy’ is not sentient (just like a grain of sand), so it has no awareness of the passing of time or distance anyway, regardless of its motion. Only that which is ‘alive’ can experience (or be aware of) distance and time. Time and distance may not exist at all, except for that which is the state ‘Alive’. They don’t exist for that which is in the state ‘Dead.’
Motion is relative. If you have no sight or sensation of motion then you may be at rest or you may be moving, there is no way to know. As you know, this is true for all objects, alive or not, sentient or not.
That which has no mass, can travel at c and from ITS PERSPECIVE, experiences no time or distance.
The significance of this truth may be absolutely nothing or it may not be but it provides NO EVIDENCE AT ALL that anything exists ‘outside’ the universe. (or ‘outside’ the multiverse. For those who have faith in the idea that this universe was created due to the creation of a singularity which was itself created due a collision between two branes.)
You should pay attention to the comments of Z99 in the article from physics.org that you site.
As Z99 suggests, some people anthropomorphise concepts to the extent that they make giant leaps such as you have (in my opinion):
Photons travelling at c – don’t experience distance or time – so they are ‘outside’ of distance or time (whatever that means) – so they must have came from somewhere else – so…….DIMP etc. As I said, no more than playful thinking (but is also of course harmless).
Just incase you miss it Tom.
Z99 makes a lot of very good points in the post ‘Does light experience time’ on physics.org that you site but I particularly draw your attention to
“Photons DO travel distances (relative to us), there is no way to measure anything relative to them.”
With Dimp you may not need to use renormalization to get away from the infinities problem, because Dimp is the Infinity and the math was right all along.
So where are your dimp equations that result in no infinities and don’t need renormalization or regularization?
That’s not my point. The infinities are NOT a mistake. I don’t want to get rid of them. The infinities are the dimensionless point where all energy is, dimp.
We don’t need renormalization, because the answer was correct as is.
We should see the infinities as correct, not a mistake. We should not try to deny the answer, but build on it.
The problem you have Tom is that generalisations and unsubstantiated claims just don’t cut it. You will come across to many readers as just another ‘blah blah blah’. If you have no mathematical proofs or at least a mathematical scaffold then you simply ‘inherit the wind’.
Rather than playful imaginings like dimp, perhaps any readers would find this extract from https://plus.maths.org/content/does-infinity-exist more interesting:
“Quantum electrodynamics is the best theory in the whole of science, its predictions are more accurate than anything else that we know about the Universe. Yet extracting those predictions presented an awkward problem: when you did a calculation to see what you should observe in an experiment you always seemed to get an infinite answer with an extra finite bit added on. If you then subtracted off the infinity, the finite part that you were left with was the prediction you expected to see in the lab. And this always matched experiment fantastically accurately. This process of removing the infinities was called renormalisation. Many famous physicists found it deeply unsatisfactory. They thought it might just be a symptom of a theory that could be improved.
This is why string theory created great excitement in the 1980s and why it suddenly became investigated by a huge number of physicists. It was the first time that particle physicists found a finite theory, a theory which didn’t have these infinities popping up. The way it did it was to replace the traditional notion that the most basic entities in the theory (for example photons or electrons) should be point-like objects that move through space and time and so trace out lines in spacetime. Instead, string theory considers the most basic entities to be lines, or little loops, which trace out tubes as they move. When you have two point-like particles moving through space and interacting, it’s like two lines hitting one another and forming a sharp corner at the place where they meet. It’s that sharp corner in the picture that’s the source of the infinities in the description. But if you have two loops coming together, it’s rather like two legs of a pair of trousers. Then two more loops move out from the interaction — that’s like sewing another pair of trousers onto the first pair. What you get is a smooth transition. This was the reason why string theory was so appealing, it was the first finite theory of particle physics.”
My math skills are nil but in this case, I don’t need them. Instead I refer to the physicists that came up with the infinities . They were right. Check their math.
There’s nothing fanciful about dimp. Rather it is the interpretation of facts that you seem to object to imo.
Yes I agree with the first part of your quote showing problems.
No I don’t think string theory is the answer.
I don’t object to anyone’s interpretation of facts Tom but I do disagree with your interpretation and your pedestrian dimp idea.
In a similar vein, I note your opinion of string theory.
My last comment was more towards the interest of other readers whose very loud silence on dimp is judgement enough for me.
The rigour involved in string theory should at least give you an idea of the chasm between a plausible scientific theory and your playful dimp.
I will now join the loud silence on the topic as In my opinion, I have given dimp enough mouth to mouth.
To improve your understanding of infinities, I suggest you read up on the work of Georg Cantor.
Why do you need to conserve energy outside our universe? If the DIMP concept is how it all started then there is no reason to limit yourself to basic physics concepts because this dimensionless point exists outside our universe and actually creates the universe – with its laws of physics.
This actually fits the KISS pattern of how things actually work. People in particle accelerator labs are making the universe more complicated by using a process not seen in nature. Using occam’s razor we can understand conceptually that how we are trying to understand the micro universe is not how it works – thats why were are getting things more complicated as we take them apart using processes not found in nature.
I’ve been noticing a phenomenon that I cannot explain. When I ride my bicycle and have lights flashing in front and back to make myself more visible – I go faster. I have been tracking this; the days I leave my lights off my overall times are slower.
Now – there are many non-relativistic reasons for this – I”m slower that day, I am not pedaling as hard, the air is more dense marginally – but I see a 0.3mph increase with the lights on vs. off. I’ve been tracking this for months on the same path every single day.
Is this the solution to speeding up rocket travel? Does the brighter the light gets accelerate the phenomenon? Is this how we get to ‘warp’ travel? Shining really bright light outside the space craft and then accelerating it?
Anyway = back to DIMP – there is no reason to hold a dimensionless point outside our universe to the laws created when the universe existed.
Yes, that’s my point. When it was proved that photons are outside of distance and time, then they are in a no distance, eternal , dimensionless point . Then I went one step further and suggested that if eternal and outside of space time, then it was here before the Big Bang, and the Big Bang was some subset of Dimp that broke away.
DIMP dimensionless point holding all photons/ electromagnetic force.
Suggestion that Dimp is one of the two main forces in physics – the other is space-time/ gravity/ anti gravity.
The dark line in the 2 slit experiment
The black zone in an atom that the electron makes quantum leaps over.
The distance between entangled particles
The nodes of the wave in every elementary wave
The infinities that renormalization tried to fix.
The dimensionless point of all photons – eternal and outside space-time.
Amazing post, pls keep up this wonderful work of yours!
It is both educating and entertaining, I love it!
All the best, cheers from Romania!
Quote: Everything in the quantum mechanical universe happens in quantum leaps…. A quantum leap is a discontinuous transition between quantum states … An electron jumps instantly into another energy level …. There is no in between state and it doesn’t take any time for the leap to occur. Gary F. Morning.
My suggestion is that it leaps into the dimensionless point I call Dimp – which is outside time and space – and then leaps back
Dimp, the dimensionless point where all photons are, is also the space between quanta.
Quote Everything in the quantum mechanical universe happens in quantum leaps, a discontinuous transit between quantum states.
The out of space and time leaps are, like dimp, outside of distance and time.
Probably includes electrons when they make instant jumps between shells, which involves photons – dimp both ways.
Has anyone heard from the Physicist lately? Been a while since we got a new post. 🙁
I’ll chime in, though I’m only an armchair physicist and lawn chair mathematician (ok, I passed Diff-EQs and Thermodynamics, but wouldn’t want to revisit them).
All of the matter I look at through my window (lawn and a bunch of trees) stores an enormous amount of energy (I don’t mean burning wood, I mean in atomic bonds). We live and breath in an enormous energy plateau, even separated by time and space from the Big Bang. I can’t account for the complexity of the leaves and branches, much less my youngest daughter doing cartwheels over the lawn.
I read once that someone calculated the orders of magnitude of energy within we reside, I won’t hazard a guess from memory. I know this comment doesn’t provide answers, but we are all in the same thin raft of understanding “Why this and not nothing?”.
@Locutus
Sorry about that. I came down with a bad case of kids. Slows things down a lot.
There are an infinite number of different types of string theory vacuum within a finite range because they can agree to an infinite number of decimals places. So you would have a string theory vacuum which is the most powerful laws of physics at one end of the scale and the most least powerful laws of physics at the other end other the scale with an infinite number of different strength of laws of physics in between both ends of the scale. So basically there are an infinite number of ways that the laws of physics can be different but only within a finite range. Also quantum fluctuations that get superimposed atop this uniform background: the 1-part-in-30,000 imperfections that provided the seeds of cosmic structure in our universe. These should be random and on all scales, and our universe should be just one of an infinitely large set of possible outcomes within a finite range. There are an infinite number of ways that the entropy of inflating perturbations can be different within a finite range otherwise uniform mass of matter and energy that existed milliseconds after the Big Bang. If what I am saying is true, would there be exact copies of us in other bubble universes in the eternally inflating multiverse?
PHOTONS CREATED THE UNIVERSE – fifth version.
The physics student can write how photons made the entire universe in
FIVE LINES of SCRIPT – revised.
My suggestion is that in the big bang, as extremely high temperature cooled, photons produced ALL elementary particles and anti particle pairs:
neutrinos/ antineutrinos, electrons/positrons, protons/anti protons, (and later neutrons. through a combinations of positrons and electrons.
This probably happened during the Grand Unification Epoch, the 2nd epoch after the Planck Epoch.
1 Photons made particle pairs that included
2. The NEUTRINO and ANTINEUTRINO. No charge,
3. The ELECTRON – negative charge, POSITRON – positive charge.
4. The PROTON – positive charge, ANTI PROTON – negative charge
5. The NEUTRON – no charge, had either a
mix of proton and electron – no charge OR
mix of anti proton and positron – no charge.
(These hybrids could be formed in a way similar to the process of electron captures.)
Here are the pairs formed by photons with their electron/positron compositions.
Neutrino (x) Anti Neutrino (x)
Electron (-) Positron (+)
Proton (+) (-) (+) Anti Proton (-) (+) (-)
Neutron (+) (-) (+) (-) Anti Neutron (-) (+) (-)(+)
When this production of particles was over, most charged anti particles; positrons, anti protons, and anti neutrons, didn’t exist on their own.
They were locked into elementary particles – though conservation of charge was maintained. This may help explain the missing anti matter problem.
When this elementary particle making was over – the lose particles and their anti particles collided, causing a universe wide annihilation that caused massive energy that led to inflation, a period of expansion and cooling of the entire universe.
WHAT MY MODEL MAY RESOLVE
Why a proton and electron have the same charge
Why a positron and proton have the same charge, though the proton is so much larger.
Why the missing anti matter is in the protons and neutrons.
Why neutrons could form from protons + electrons, or anti protons and positrons.
Why the strong force may not be needed.
Why there is an electron and positron released in beta decay.
Why a proton and electron can form a neutron in a neutron star.
Why a proton needs a neutron for every atom except hydrogen.
Why electron capture.
Why the neutron tail (the extra negative charge on the neutron) is so important.
Why there are so many neutrinos
Why neutrons have no charge.
Why neutrons have a magnetic moment.
Why neutrons have negative charge on inner and outer edges but positive charge between.
Why there are problems with quarks.
Why inflation happened.
Hi Tom
A while ago I joined a site called The Philosophy Forum. I was taking part in a thread titled ‘Impossible to prove time is real.’ I was exchanging comments with a member who uses the ID ‘Raymond.’ The ID I use is ‘Universeness.’ Members don’t use their names on this site. Raymond states that he has the solution of the origin and structure of the Universe. I commented to him that he is the 3rd person I have come across on these websites who have claimed such. You were one of the other two I mentioned. I called you ‘the DIMP guy.’ I copied various portions of the details of your DIMP idea from this site into a words document. Tidied things up a little and posted what I considered the ‘Jist’ of your hypothesis onto the thread, for Raymond to look at as his Physics level was like yours, way deeper than mine. I did not mention your name. We have moved on from that thread but people can still view it or add to it. I hope you are ‘ok’ with my actions.
If you want to view the entries. I think you would be able to, by clicking on the link below:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/642769
If you feel my entry regarding DIMP does not represent your hypothesis correctly then you could join the Philosophy Forum and add any comments you wish to the thread.
That’s fine, though I’ve moved on, and what I claimed then has changed in parts for me.
I’m presently working on an issue for my zine Musea since 1992, after 3 years working on these concepts, called psy phy physics from a sci fi writer. There are four major points.
The latest ideas on dimp tie in with 3 others I’ve explored that include; a model of how the elementary particles were made of pair conversions of photons out of dimp, the force that caused the big bang , and another look at gravity versus dark energy. What I found is that if correct, they all tie together.
I thank you for sharing. If it stirs some interest, all the better.