Consciousness, Physics, and the Holographic Paradigm
Original Essays and Shadowless Poetry by Alan T. Williams
All matter is immersed in it and it penetrates everywhere. No doors are closed to ether.
- Albert Einstein, The Evolution of Physics
Chapter 3
Section 4: The Subnuclear Milieu:
From Old to New Physics, Part 3
According to the Particle Data Group, most real and virtual particles created by the characteristic inelastic experimental testing of high-energy particle accelerators and colliders decay in less than one second in a closed or isolated (mechanically conservative) material system.
Nonetheless the electron, the workhorse of the material domain and the elementary carrier of negative electric charge (e- = e0 q-), has an estimated lifetime of more than 4.6 x 1026 years. Even so, the proton (p = p0 q+) is estimated to have an even longer lifetime of more than 2.1 x 1029 years. The neutron (n = n0 q0) takes third place with a lifetime of approximately 15 minutes before it decays.
Huge differences between the estimated lifetime decay processes of the atomic proton, electron, and neutron, compared to the subnuclear particle zoo of baryons (fermions) and mesons (bosons) discovered or produced since the 1950s seem to indicate that humankind has merely scratched the surface of physical reality just-as-it-is and that there exists unimaginably more to be learned.
The nucleons, i.e., the protons and neutrons that constitute the atomic nucleus, are bound together by the strong nuclear force. The strong nuclear force or nucleon-nucleon interaction that binds protons and neutrons together has been understood since the 1970s as a secondary or residual effect of the strong-interaction color force mediated by neutral pions. "Color" and color charge in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) describe strong interaction quark-gluon and gluon-gluon color state interactions between the mysterious quarks and the indispensable gluons.
Following classical physics, the subnuclear binding force or binding energy between nucleons diminishes as expected with increasing distance. Curiously, the activity of the strong-interaction color force or confinement of quarks within hadrons follows an opposite principle and diminishes with decreasing distance.
Quark confinement limits the separation of quarks within hadrons. Thus the strong-interaction color force is responsible for enabling the asymptotic freedom of the paired quarks and antiquarks in mesons and triplet constituent quarks in baryons, respectively, as they move in accordance with the running αs coupling within the limit of quark color confinement, i.e., in accordance with the abundance or lack of kinetic energy or momentum (Q).
Asymptotic freedom:
The theory of quark asymptotic freedom was proposed in 1973 by David Gross, David Politzer, and Frank Wilczek, who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for making the discovery. In 2006 Siegfried Bethke of the Max Planck Institute for Physics summarized the 30 years of high-energy particle physics experiments that provided definitive proof of the running strong-interaction coupling parameter αs(Q2) in a single paragraph:
The most significant experimental proof of asymptotic freedom today is provided by the summary and combination of all measurements of αs, over an energy range of 1.6 GeV to more than 200 GeV, from all available processes and experiments, involving perturbative and lattice QCD calculations. The results are in excellent agreement with QCD and precisely reproduce the inverse logarithmic dependence of αs from the energy or momentum transfer scale Q. 22
Bethke further emphasizes the unique quality of the inverted strong-interaction running coupling parameter αs(Q2) by noting:
In fact, there exists no theory which predicts a constant coupling. 23
Thus, compared to the familiar continuous spectrum of radioactive Beta decay electrons (β-) and positrons (β+ ) which varies from zero to relativistic kinetic energy (large momentum), the inverse logarithmic dependence of αs(Q2), i.e., the strong-interaction color confinement of quarks within hadrons, can be seen as a unique inverted running coupling parameter that varies from relativistic kinetic energy or momentum to effectively zero (asymptotic freedom).
Color state mixing:
Quarks are the most complex elementary particle yet discovered. Each quark is coupled to electric charge as well as the strong-interaction color charge. Quarks are also the only particles that interact with all four traditional fundamental forces, including the weak force and gravity. Gravity is the weakest of the four traditional fundamental forces currently acknowledged by the physics community in the material domain.
A new premise that logically precedes Aristotle's pre-existing matter premise leads to the universal principle of energy (TUPE, pronounced "toop") which implies the novel 2-time, 8-dimensional (8D) physics of The Energetic Holographic Paradigm (TEHP, pronounced "teep") with 6 extended dimensions and 2 synchronistic time dimensions (6 + 2 ; i.e., 6 + (t1 + t2)). The combined novel physics of TEHP and TUPE, in turn, reveals the omnipresent extradimensional continuum of transcendent, autonomous nonmaterial consciousness.
Moreover, properly defined the recently discovered omnipresent continuum of transcendent, autonomous nonmaterial consciousness described in the above paragraph can be seen as the First fundamental force (FFF) of physics.
Extensive experimentation since the mid-1960s has confirmed that six types or flavors of quarks and an SU(3) c color octet of eight gluons are the QCD color charge carriers. Gluons are the gauge boson carriers of the strong-interaction color force. An exhaustive experiment performed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) by Martin Perl and Eric Lee, published in 1997, was unable to isolate the mysterious fractional electric charge exhibited by individual quarks.
In contemporary quantum field theory (QFT) the four traditional fundamental forces are mediated by exchange particles. Electrically charged particles in the material domain emit and absorb (exchange) massless photons. Each massless photon has a fixed value throughout its lifetime as it travels from point A to point B.
In contrast, each color charged gluon mediates a dynamic combination of color and anti-color that produces the quark-gluon and gluon-gluon strong interaction. Each quark carries one of three dynamic color charges labeled red, green, or blue. Thus each gluon has a certain probability of interacting not only with the color charged quarks, but also interacts with the other color 8 gluons in the gluon cloud within each hadron. The result of color 8 gluon color state mixing is called linear independence.
The unique strong interactions of quark and gluon SU(3) c color charge carriers, gluon self-coupling, and dynamic color state mixing cannot be overemphasized.
Hadrons like protons and neutrons are responsible for more than 99% of the mass of all visible matter in our universe, and those masses are mainly generated by the strong binding of quarks inside hadrons, rather than by the (generally small) masses of the quarks themselves. 24
Beyond quantum mechanics to nonmaterial primordial energy (NPE) :
In his 2009 overview of contemporary high energy particle physics, Unanswered Questions in the Electroweak Theory, published 7 July 2009, Chris Quigg of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL) addressed a new way of thinking. In his detailed analysis and critique of the electroweak theory, he writes:
[I]t is worth pausing for a moment to ask how different the world would have been, without a Higgs mechanism or a substitute on the real-world electroweak scale. Eliminating the Higgs mechanism does not alter the strong interaction, so QCD would still confine colored objects into hadrons.
In seeking the agent of electroweak symmetry breaking, we hope to learn why the everyday world is as we find it: why atoms and chemistry and stable structures can exist.
New ways of thinking about electroweak symmetry breaking arise when we contemplate the possibility that spacetime has more than the canonical four dimensions. Among the possibilities are models without a physical Higgs scalar, in which electroweak symmetry is hidden ... .
Suppose instead that the electroweak gauge theory is itself formulated in more than four dimensions. From our four-dimensional perspective, components of the gauge fields along the supplemental directions will be seen as scalar fields with respect to the conventional four-dimensional coordinates. 25
One very good reason to consider advancing beyond the canonical four-dimensional coordinates of classical and quantum mechanics is succinctly stated in the first sentence of the Introduction to the article, Screening Effects in Superfluid Nuclear and Neutron Matter within Brueckner Theory, by L. G. Cao, U. Lombardo, and P. Schuck:
A satisfactory description of superfluidity in nuclear matter has not yet been achieved despite almost fifty years of research have elapsed since the first application of the BCS theory to nuclear systems. Somewhat at variance with the electron pairing in superconductors the pairing in nuclear systems results from the interplay between the direct action of the bare nuclear force and the action induced by the medium polarization.
In their 2010 Resource Letter: Quantum Chromodynamics, Andreas S. Kronfeld and Chris Quigg of the Theoretical Physics Department, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, not only provide precise technical explanations of Quantum Chromodynamics, they also provide pertinent references to source documents. They categorize the material as elementary, intermediate, and advanced sources. Regardless of reader classification, the Kronfeld-Quigg Resource Letter will save the interested reader hundreds of nonproductive research hours.
The other 95+% of the universe:
The naive assumption that our material universe encompasses the entirety of existence was unquestioned by the Milesian (Ionian) nature philosophers of ancient Greece who founded Western science. The existence of tangible matter humankind could see, feel, touch, taste, and smell had been a given since the beginning of human history. Moreover, the physically real source within which tangible and intangible matter is created, contained, and maintained would remain hidden for another 2,500 years. Two hundred years after the cosmological insights of Anaximander, the concept of energy (Greek: energeia) was introduced by Aristotle to explain his own novel concept of potentiality and actuality.
Following the work of Thomas Young, James Clerk Maxwell, and James Prescott Joule in the 19th century CE, energy per se was, and currently continues to be defined as the equivalent of doing mechanical work in a closed or isolated (mechanically conservative) material system. Hence the current definition of energy is self-limited and does not extend beyond the exclusive, de facto closed or isolated material system under consideration. Indeed, both mass and energy are conserved in the contemporary Big Bang conceptualization of our material universe.
Innovative new means and methods of experimental testing in various fields like high-energy particle physics, nuclear physics, astrophysics and cosmology, for example, continued to advance the cutting edge of science beyond known limits during the 20th century. The unsatisfactory result of almost fifty years of superfluidity research in nuclear matter, briefly mentioned a few paragraphs above, is only one indication of an incomplete understanding of fundamental physics that can be traced back to the historical concept of pre-existing matter/mass.
The unexpected discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) in 1964 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pyotr Kapitsa, was a harbinger of new physics rather than the continuation of classical physics and quantum mechanics. Astronomers and astrophysicists immediately began to search for the explanation of the newly discovered phenomenon. The CMBR was initially mapped by the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), launched into space in 1989. The results were interpreted as support for the Big Bang theory of the universe.
COBE was followed by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), launched in 2001. The 7-year WMAP release of data in 2008 confirmed that the matter/energy equivalent of non-particle Dark Energy = 72.1%. Non-baryonic Dark Matter virtual particle matter/energy = 23.3%. And baryonic atomic matter/energy = 4.3%. In other words, without the aid of sophistocated advanced technology humankind can see, feel, touch, taste, or smell less than 5% of the all-encompassing nonmaterial/material holonomic universe we live in.
Interestingly, the search for dark matter and dark energy in the late 20th century exacerbated unrecognized problems and lacunae within fundamental contemporary physics and sometimes focused attention on explicit incompatibilities apparently at odds with traditional physics.
Back to fundamentals:
Many individuals interested in contemporary science know of Albert Einstein and E = mc². Einstein's general relativity, a geometric theory of gravitation, was published as 3 separate papers on 4, 11, and 25 November 1915. A related paper, Explanation of the Perihelion Motion of Mercury from the General Theory of Relativity, was published on 18 November 1915. Cosmological Considerations in the General Theory of Relativity, a closed steady state cosmology, was published on 8 February 1917. Through constructive criticism and ad hoc changes, Einstein's theoretical universe became the conceptual source underlying 20th century cosmology.
Hence the spacetime and gravitation of 20th century physical cosmology comprise the arena within which the search for dark matter and dark energy unavoidably puts both quantum mechanics and general relativity to the ultimate test.
In his book, The 4 Percent Universe, 26 Richard Panek documents the search for more precise known physics and unknown or unexpected new physics during the nearly fifty years since the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) as well as the stresses and competitiveness between the Supernova Cosmology Project comprised of astrophysicists and the High-z Supernova Search Team comprised of astronomers.
Verifying theoretical science and discovering new physics in the cosmic vastness began with the search for a precise definition of Type Ia (Roman numeral one-a) supernovae and included Redshift, Hubble's law, the presumed Big Bang inflation, the metric expansion of space, accelerating expansion, dark matter, energy density, the cosmic inflation equation of state (Greek: omega ; symbol: ω), and the cosmological constant (Lambda ; Λ), among other measurements and the development of advanced earthbound and space technology.
The search for dark matter pushed 20th century general relativity (GR) and quantum mechanical (QM) physics to the limit. The search for dark energy pushed the fundamental incompatibility of GR and QM beyond the limit. One reasonable conclusion is that neither one of them nor a combination of the two de facto closed or isolated material systems wholly reflects universal physical reality just-as-it-is.
Panek captures one contentious vignette between a theorist and a member of the High-z team:
"You observational astronomers," a theorist told Alex Filippenko in 1998, "are wasting a lot of valuable Keck and Hubble time, because your result must be wrong. We have no theory that could be compatible with a tiny non-zero vacuum energy" — tiny in the sense that lambda would be equal to 0.6 or 0.7 of critical density, rather than 10120 — "and there's no theory that could possibly be compatible with this."27
The extremely low critical density mentioned in the quotation above is parsed in the Lambda-CDM model (ΛCDM) of Big Bang cosmology. The 10120 number is the incompatible quantum mechanical result.
The analysis of Supernova 1997ff by High-z team member Adam Riess places it at least 10 billion light-years distant from the Earth and is viewed as confirmation of Big Bang acceleration. 28
In the new TEHP cosmology, at time t = 0 the 4D (3 extended dimensions + 1 temporal dimension) extradimensional source (parent) hologram is created on a presently unknown transcendent level of physical reality just-as-it-is. The transcendent source or parent hologram produces the initial conditions (time t = t1) of our derivative reciprocally reconstructed, compound open (mechanically nonconservative) 4D (3 + 1) nonmaterial/material holonomic universe where time t = t2 = 1 / t1.
The 2-time, 8D (6 + 2 ; i.e., 6 + (t1 + t2)) holographic information in each present moment is omnipresent and pervasive. From the perspective of each galaxy, each world and each observer, a specific galaxy, world, or observer can be seen as omnicentric, i.e., centrally located in an all-encompassing boundless, unlimited, mechanically nonconservative nonmaterial/material universe. Furthermore, pre-existing matter/mass, the Lemaître "primeval atom", and Einstein's de facto absolute reference frame, i.e., a closed or isolated (mechanically conservative) material system, are either absent or merely hypothetical in physical reality just-as-it-is.
21st century TEHP cosmology suggests that the proximate cause of the ubiquitous expansion in our nonmaterial/material holonomic universe is the continual addition of new matter produced by relativistic jets and the matter generators in Active Galactic Nuclei like M-51, for example. Thus, an intelligent observer viewing SN 1997ff at close quarters is neither closer to nor farther away from the transcendent origin of our compound open nonmaterial/material holonomic universe than are the human inhabitants of Earth.
Reference Notes (Click on the Note number to return to the text) :
22 Bethke, Siegfried. Experimental Tests of Asymptotic Freedom, p. 32.
23 Ref. 22, Sec. 4.2, pp. 19-20.
24 Ref. 22, p. 3.
25 Quigg, Chris. Unanswered Questions in the Electroweak Theory, 7 July 2009, pp. 18-19. Dr. Quigg's document anticipates the imminent startup of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.
Dr. Quigg also wrote an earlier popular article, The Coming Revolutions in Particle Physics, published in a Scientific American magazine Special Report, February 2008, pp. 46-53.
26 Panek, Richard. The 4 Percent Universe; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, New York, New York, 2011. ISBN 978-0-618-98244-8
27 Ref. 26, p. 173.
28 Ref. 26, pp. 176-180.
Index: Consciousness, Physics, and the Holographic Paradigm
Last Edit: May 7, 2011
Comments and suggestions welcome.
This paper is a work in progress.
Please check for the latest update before quoting in other venues the concepts and hypotheses presented here.
Thank you.
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Copyright © 2009-2011 by Alan T. Williams. All rights reserved.
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