Physics Q&A #6. What Is Mass?

I spend a lot of time on this blog explaining a physical spacetime model and the underlying metaphysics. In this series of posts, each entry poses a physics question for the spacetime model, along with the answer.

Physics Question #6. What is mass? For an elementary fermion (lepton or quark), mass is the inverse of the precision with which the location of a stationary particle can be known. This makes sense, because mass is defined as a measure of inertia or resistance to acceleration. Resistance to movement and having a known or fixed location are really the same thing. For a composite particle such as a baryon, mass is mostly binding energy (gluons), the masses of the elementary constituents (quarks) contributing very little to the baryon mass. For a massive gauge boson, mass is the inverse of the range of the force carried by the particle.

The masses of the elementary particles are said to be determined by the Higgs field. See this post to learn all about the Higgs and its relation to mass

Plato and Me

When I stated this blog in 2014, my first couple of posts introduced me, a retired electrical engineer, and the subject matter I hoped to cover, which is the connection between physics and consciousness and how it leads to solutions to nature’s greatest puzzles. Since I’m not trained as a philosopher. It has taken me this long to realize that some of the metaphysical concepts I covered in my third post are very close to Plato’s theory of forms or theory of ideas. I find that his approach is different from mine but reaches some of the same conclusions, and it’s enlightening to look at the subject from both viewpoints. That’s what I’ll try to show in this post, but first I have to say that I think it’s pretty exciting to be exploring the same ground that Plato did 2400 years ago, especially since we seem to agree in important ways.

Physics Q&A #5. Why Is Gravity So Weak?

I spend a lot of time on this blog explaining a physical spacetime model and the underlying metaphysics. In this series of posts, each entry poses a physics question for the spacetime model, along with the answer.

Physics Question #5. Why is gravity so weak? Gravity between spacetime points is actually quite strong, but points where elementary fermions are located are gravitationally decoupled from the overall spacetime by the ratio of the particle's mass to the Planck mass—22 orders of magnitude in the case of the electron. This makes gravity a very weak force for matter.

Our spacetime model adopts a harmonic oscillator model for a stationary electron. In this model, the underlying point's creation time is modulated sinusoidally at frequency ω where, from quantum mechanics, ω = mc²/Ñ. Thus, the wave function includes a phase difference between the local time at a particle point and the global time of the universe, which is the local time at every point that does not contain a particle. It is because the particle is out of phase with spacetime as a whole for most of the time that gravity is so weak for particles.

Sabine Hossenfelder: Looking in the Wrong Places

Looking in the Wrong Places is a new Edge essay by prominent theoretician and prolific writer/blogger Sabine Hossenfelder. It’s basically a lament about the lack of progress that’s hampered theoretical physics for a long time, as summarized in the following paragraph.

The field that I mostly work in is the foundations of physics, which is, roughly speaking, composed of cosmology, the foundations of quantum mechanics, high-energy particle physics, and quantum gravity. It’s a peculiar field because there hasn’t been new data for almost four decades, since we established the Standard Model of particle physics. There has been, of course, the Higgs particle that was discovered at the LHC in 2012, and there have been some additions to the Standard Model, but there has not been a great new paradigm change, as Kuhn would have put it. We’re still using the same techniques, and we’re still working with the same theories as we did in the 1970s.

Modified Gravity versus Particle Dark Matter

Sabine Hossenfelder is offering a new version of modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND, which she calls Covariant Emergent Gravity, or CEG. She explains it at her blog Backreaction here and in an arXiv paper here. She shows that CEG fits the data on the radial acceleration of stars in galaxies much better than particle dark matter. There’s no doubt that she’s right. The problem is that there’s ample evidence for the existence of dark matter, and no known reason why the acceleration of gravity should suddenly change at some distance from a center of mass.

Why Is There Something Rather THan Nothing?

“Why is there something rather than nothing? It’s a classic puzzle that’s getting a lot of attention now. Sean Carroll has just posted his opinion on the arXiv—he’s decided there’s no answer. Here’s his abstract:

It seems natural to ask why the universe exists at all. Modern physics suggests that the universe can exist all by itself as a self-contained system, without anything external to create or sustain it. But there might not be an absolute answer to why it exists. I argue that any attempt to account for the existence of something rather than nothing must ultimately bottom out in a set of brute facts; the universe simply is, without ultimate cause or explanation.

John Baez Struggles with the Continuum

Mathematician John Baez has a paper on the arXiv called Struggles with the Continuum, which he concludes with this:

We have seen that in every major theory of physics, challenging mathematical questions arise from the assumption that spacetime is a continuum. The continuum threatens us with infinities. Do these infinities threaten our ability to extract predictions from these theories—or even our ability to formulate these theories in a precise way? We can answer these questions, but only with hard work. Is this a sign that we are somehow on the wrong track? Is the continuum as we understand it only an approximation to some deeper model of spacetime? Only time will tell. Nature is providing us with plenty of clues, but it will take patience to read them correctly.

As readers of this blog well know, the assumption that spacetime is a continuum is absolutely wrong. The spacetime model that is the main subject of this blog is a discrete model that avoids all of the struggles that John discusses. I’ve pointed this out to him in an e-mail, but I don’t expect it to do any good.

Lee Smolin: Still Missing The Point On Quantum Gravity

In a new arXiv paper entitled “What are we missing in our search for quantum gravity?,” Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics summarizes various approaches to a theory of quantum gravity, lamenting that

Despite enormous effort from thousands of dedicated researchers over a century, the search for the quantum theory of gravity has not yet arrived at a satisfactory conclusion.

At the end of the paper he seems to give up on all of the current approaches.

Quantum Gravity Is A Wild Goose Chase

Quantum theory and Einstein’s general relativity are the two main pillars of modern physics. Quantum mechanics makes highly accurate predictions in the realm of the very small, while general relativity does the same on a cosmic scale. Unfortunately, the two theories are incompatible, leading vast numbers of theoretical physicists to attempt to unite them in a theory of quantum gravity, with a notable lack of success.

Isotopic Spin? It's Just The Higgs

Isotopic spin and the Higgs mechanism are two major features of the Standard Model that I’ve written about on this blog, but I just realized that for some unknown reason I’ve never pointed out that these two phenomena are closely related. One could almost say that they’re the same phenomenon. Mainstream physicists have no idea that this is the case. I’ll correct this oversight in this post.

God Enters Essay Contest

I’ve submitted one of my earlier posts, A Letter from God,  to the Foundational Questions Institute’s current essay contest. The theme is “Wandering Towards a Goal – How can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intentions?” I hope to show in a humorous way that what gives rise to everything is not mathematics but consciousness aka existence. You can find the essay here,

Existence of Dark Matter Challenged

A recent paper is causing a stir among cosmologists and bloggers because it appears to present evidence that dark matter may not exist. The authors’ observations reveal a strong correlation between the gravitational acceleration observed to be acting on stars in galaxies and the gravitational acceleration inferred from the distribution of luminous (baryonic) matter. If dark matter is a particle, as almost everyone has been assuming, it can’t explain this behavior. Ethan Siegel at Starts with a Bang comments on the situation here and Sabine Hossenfelder at Backreaction discusses it here.

Physics Q&A#4. The Cosmological Constant

I spend a lot of time on this blog explaining a physical spacetime model and the underlying metaphysics. In this series of posts, each entry poses a physics question for the spacetime model, along with the answer.

Physics Qustion #4. The Cosmological Constant Problem (Dark Energy Problem).
Measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation confirm that the universe is flat. There is not enough matter in it to explain this, so it is thought that there must be some "dark energy" that acts like Einstein's cosmological constant and has just the right value to make the universe flat. Supernova measurements show that the universal expansion is accelerating, and the dark energy is thought to be responsible for this effect as well. Physicists have no idea what this dark energy might be or how it gets so finely tuned as to make the universe perfectly flat. The best candidate, vacuum energy density, doesn't work, because the cosmological constant is 120 orders of magnitude smaller than the vacuum energy density calculated using the Standard Model.

Has Ed Witten Given Up On Consciousness?

Sad to say, but many physicists seem to be on the verge of giving up. Some think they’ll never know how the universe came to be, The multiverse is basically a cop-out, an excuse for abandoning the search for answers. The other big bugaboo is consciousness. As John Horgan reports on Scientific American’s Cross-Check, no less a superstar than Edward Witten now believes that consciousness “will remain a mystery.” All this pessimism comes as a result of many decades of failure to make significant progress on the hard questions.

Smolin and Unger Get It Spectacularly Wrong

Physicist Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute has been saying for some years tht physics and cosmology are in crisis. The standard models are highly successful as far as they go, but they don’t go far enough, and for decades, there’s been a frustrating failure of all attempts to go beyond them. Sabine Hossenfelder agrees. In a post for Fortune, she writes: