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THE SKY INSIDE A STONE: a 2-part workshop
What is the world? What is the world made of? What is a
human body? These questions aren't settled, and they are the site of active
battle in many communities, sometimes including this one.
One long tradition says humans are made of two kinds of
thing, a material body and an immaterial spirit, soul or mind. This ancient
contrast between material and immaterial substances has persisted even in
very recent thinking, where it takes the form of a contrast between matter
and energy. But what IS matter? A stone in our hand is a dense, heavy thing,
completely solid, and yet the physicists who are our authorities on such
questions tell us that, seen at the level of atomic structure, even the
densest physical matter is open space.
This two-part minicourse will look at the matter-energy
contrast from two directions. Part 1, based in recent physics, will offer
quite simple ways to visualize the intensely active but utterly immaterial
ocean of subatomic space that forms our utterly material human world. Part
2 will introduce a related vision developed within the Nyingma lineage of
Tibetan Buddhism, that describes a psychology of openness appropriate to
the openness of space a human body also is.
Workshop introduction: A common ground, a neutral nature
I saw the possibility of a visionary
medium through which a common ground could be found in the pursuits of
knowledge carried out by the various sciences and religions. Tarthang Tulku
The common background of microphysics
and depth psychology is as much physical as psychic and therefore neither,
but rather a third thing, a neutral nature . Jung Mysteriam coniunctionis Collected Works para 768
This workshop has had a couple of different sources, one
that's quite perennial at Goddard, two from the semester just ended, and
a fourth from a book I've been trying to read since 1977.
The root source is a series of comments from consciousness
studies students or health arts students who for instance talk about a "physical
body and an energy body," as if the physical body is not also an energy
body. That has made me feel we need to look more closely at what 'physical'
means - what we mean by it in everyday usage, and what physicists mean by
it in their technical usage. And then there are all the related terms -
"mass," "matter," "substance," on one hand,
and "energy" and "force" on the other - that we have
similar kinds of trouble with and misunderstandings about.
A second source of the workshop is something that happened
on the Chicago-Burlington flight on my way to the winter res last January.
The man sitting next to me turned out to be coming home from a gemstone
fair in Tucson, and when he saw I was interested he began putting stones
into my hands - an amethyst, a ruby, a topaz cut with a dished surface,
a star dioride that had a cross of white light hovering and sliding in or
on or above it. When I went home I got a couple of field guides and started
reading up on what a stone is. Then I began to realize that what I was reading
about a stone's atomic structure wasn't making sense to me: the language
it was written in was obstructing my understanding, because it was making
me visualize wrongly. So I went in search of descriptions in another kind
of language, and I did find an approach that immediately made more sense
to me. It's called the Wave Structure of Matter, and I'll try to pass that
approach on to you in part 1, today.
A third source of the workshop, also this semester, was
packet letter conversations with Todd about Jung, who didn't always seem
to be clear about what he meant by 'physical' and 'psychic' realities, but
who also came out with a beautiful statement - the one above - which Todd
sent me halfway through the semester.
The final source is a book published by the Nyingma Institute
in Berkeley, written by a Tibetan Tantric master and one of his western
students. I found the book in an Oriental bookshop opposite the British
Museum in London at a time in my life when I was pretty much dissolved.
I couldn't stand the minds I found in most books - a lonely, distraught
state for a reader to be in. But this book seemed alright to me. There was
a lot of it I didn't understand, but reading even a little of it consoled
me like finding dry ground or a warm wind. The voice it was written in felt
true. I've carried this book around ever since, reading and rereading and
trying to read. This spring my old copy fell apart and I went onto Amazon
Used and sent for a new one, and then when I was finding Wave Structure
physics at the same time it struck me how similar, or at least compatible,
the physics and the Tantric philosophy seemed to be. So in part 2 I'm going
to do my incomplete best to pass on some of Tarthang Tulku's vision as he
articulates it in Time, Space and Knowledge.
Part 1. Fabric of the universe
- 1. Imagine a stone
- 2. Visualizing physics
- a. Physics has been mathematics
plus metaphor.
- b. In sub-atomic physics
the mathematics has been working but the metaphor hasn't.
- c. The ancient metaphor
that hasn't been working is a particle metaphor.
- i. ancient origins of
subatomic particle physics
- ii. Newtonian origins
of subatomic particle physics
- iii. and subsequently
- iv. the particle vision
has led to convoluted, unintuitive theory
- d. An alternative is a
wave metaphor
- 3. Compare basic concepts understood as particle or
wave
- a. space
- b. matter
- i. atoms
- ii. electrons
- c. energy
- d. mass
- i. mass vs energy, matter
vs energy
- e. charge
- f. force
- 4. The brimming fabric of the real
- 5. Imagine a stone, imagine a body
1. Imagine a stone
Usually stones are aggregates of two
or more minerals.
Minerals are the natural crystalline
materials that form in the earth and make up most of its rocks.
A crystal is a solid material, whose
constituent atoms, molecules, or ions are arranged in an orderly repeating
pattern extending in all three spatial dimensions.
Almost all solids except glass and
organic materials are crystalline. Even organic materials form crystals
when isolated in a pure state.
Here it is: the solidest kind of thing we know, utterly
physical, a paradigm of matter. It's heavy. It's hard, which means we can
use it to smash other things. It's durable, which means we can build walls
and temples with it, that can still be in existence millennia from now.
Minerals have been studied since the Greeks, three or four
centuries BC, but we have only known what makes a rock hard and heavy and
durable since the early 20th century, when x-rays were used to discover
how atoms are arranged in crystals.
X-ray crystallography is a method in
which a beam of X-rays strikes a crystal and diffracts into many specific
directions. From the angles and intensities of these diffracted beams,
a crystallographer can produce a three-dimensional picture of the density
of electrons within the crystal. From this electron density, the mean positions
of the atoms in the crystal can be determined, as well as their chemical
bonds, their disorder and various other information.
Understanding rocks has meant correlating knowledge of
various minerals' atomic arrangements with observed chemical, electrical,
thermal and mechanical properties.
It turns out that what makes stones more hard, heavy and
durable than other substances is not that they are made of hard, heavy,
durable materials - since their atomic parts are pretty much immaterial
- but that those almost-nothing materials are arranged in a very particular
kind of pattern. What makes a diamond hard and durable is that its billion
billions of atoms (with their subatomic electrons, protons and neutrons)
are densely packed in regular 3-d lattices that are very hard to disarrange.
2. Visualizing
physics
a. Physics has been mathematics plus metaphor.
- In the end, science is all in how
you look at things. Carver Mead
Here is one way the atomic structure of a diamond is diagrammed:
[image of diamond lattice]
The balls in this image represent atoms and the lines linking
them represent their 'bonds' - the fact that they stay tightly bound together
in just that arrangement.
If we want to zoom into this image we have often been given
a similar diagram of atoms as a collection of little internal nucleus balls
with different numbers of other little electron balls whizzing around them.
These sorts of images are visualizations that tell
us what sort of metaphor has been used in the conceptual structuring of
physics as a science.
b. In sub-atomic physics the mathematics has been working
but the metaphor hasn't.
A metaphor is both a way of imagining something, a visualization,
and the language that goes with it.
What has been happening especially in the last century
in physics is that mathematical descriptions have been quite successful
- that is, physical laws expressed in mathematical form successfully predict
what will happen if various parameters are changed - but the physicists
are still making wild guesses about what this successful mathematics is
actually describing. Another way to say it is that they aren't sure how
to visualize the entities and processes their mathematics applies to, and
so there are alternative interpretations based on alternative metaphors.
Carver Mead (1934-, CIT computer microelectronics):
Once angels were the explanation, but
now, for us, it is a "force," or "field." But these
are all constructs of the human mind to help us to work with and visualize
the regularities of nature. When we grasp onto some regularity, we give
it a name, and the temptation is always to think that we really understand
it. But the truth is that we're still not even close.
It is my firm belief that the last
seven decades of the twentieth century will be characterized in history
as the dark ages of theoretical physics.
It's conceptual nonsense. You can calculate
stuff with the theory, but the words people put around it don't make any
sense. That had the effect of driving the more conceptually-oriented students
out of physics. We have ended up with more and more mathematicians in the
physics departments.
What this is telling us is that we
have simply not been thinking about it right. We have to start working
through the whole subject again. And that is going to take real work.
Richard Feynman (1919-1988, Nobel prize 1965):
it seems that very little physical
intuition has yet been developed we are reduced to computing exactly the
coefficient of some specific term. We have no way to get a general idea
of the result to be expected. We have no physical picture by which we can
easily see . We have been computing terms like a blind man exploring a
new room, but soon we must develop some concept of this room as a whole
.
c. The ancient metaphor that hasn't been working is
a particle metaphor.
This metaphor talks about, and visualizes, an atom as a
spatial configuration of particles 'having' charge, spin, mass.
i. "a metaphysics of dust:" ancient origins
of subatomic particle physics
Bread is made of crumbs, bricks are made of grains of earth.
We might come to the idea that even air is made of particles by seeing bits
of dust hanging in sunlight. All matter must be made of smaller bits of
matter, ultimate tiny particles.
From the first atoms have been thought of as particles.
The earliest references to the concept
of atoms date back to India in the 6th century BCE, appearing first in
Jainism.
In the West, the references to atoms
emerged a century later from Leucippus, whose student, Democritus, systematized
his views. In approximately 450 BCE, Democritus coined the term átomos
which means "uncuttable" or "the smallest indivisible
particle of matter". Although the Indian and Greek concepts of the
atom were based purely on philosophy, modern science has retained the name
coined by Democritus.
Over time an increasingly fine structure for matter was
discovered: objects are made from molecules, molecules consist of atoms,
which in turn consist of subatomic particles like protons and electrons.
ii. Newtonian origins of subatomic particle physics
Newtonian physics was phrased in terms
of things like position and momentum and force which are all characteristics
of particles.
Mathematically effective physics began with calculations
about planets, solid objects seen moving in the empty sky. As physics moved
into the small, it retained a visualization of solid, but tiny, bits of
matter moving in empty space.
iii. and subsequently
Sub-atomic mathematics does not depend on a belief
in particle substances
BUT
at each succeeding level of smallness, the 'objects' discovered
are still called particles and thereby visualized as discrete tiny objects
suspended in space.
iv. the particle vision has led to convoluted, unintuitive
theory
Carver Mead:
Point particles got us into terrible
trouble. If you take today's standard theory of particle physics, and the
standard theory of gravitation, it is well known that the result is "off"
by a factor of maybe ten to the power of 50. That's 10 followed by 49 zeroes.
The amount of matter in the universe is way, way more than what is observed.
And that discrepancy comes, at its heart, from assuming that matter is
made up of point particles.
If you keep the traditional assumption
that matter consists of points of mass and charge substance you are doomed
to the paradoxes of: causality violation, wave-particle duality, Copenhagen
errors, Heisenberg uncertainty, red-shift, and others. 242
Richard Feynman:
Throughout this entire story there
remains one especially unsatisfactory feature: the observed masses of the
particles, m. we use these numbers in all our theories, but we do not understand
them - what they are or where they come from. I believe that from a fundamental
point of view, this is a very interesting and serious problem.
d. an alternative is a wave metaphor
The metaphor I'm presenting in this workshop also has ancient
antecedents. It is unorthodox in physics today, but is being developed on
the fringes under the name Wave Structure of Matter (WSM).
I'm not presenting it as a claim for a new ultimate truth,
although it may be that. I'm saying, try visualizing it this way. See how
that goes.
3. Basic concepts
Below is a description of concepts that are foundational
in physics and yet somehow still unclear.
This section will first compare our ordinary understanding
of basic concepts used in trying to understand what the universe is
made of with versions of those concepts used in theoretical physics.
(When I talk about human Middle World usage here I'll mean daily life at
the scale of perception and action that is most relevant to humans, as opposed
to cosmological or subatomic scales.)
- Two things to notice here are:
- how even the abstract language of physics retains ordinary
language's preference for tangible things and events
- how much uncertainty there still is in the physics we've
been taking as authoritative.
This section will then also compare the two ways that physics
itself can visualize or understand its foundational concepts as particle
or wave.
a. SPACE
Etymology: Middle English: shortening of Old French espace,
from Latin spatium.
Human Middle World usage: "a continuous area or expanse
that is free, available, or unoccupied," "the dimensions of height,
depth, and width within which all things exist and move."
> predominantly a sense of open areas BETWEEN existing
objects, or of a container for objects.
Physics:
Space is one of the few fundamental
quantities in physics, meaning that it cannot be defined via other quantities
because nothing more fundamental is known at the present.
The concept of space is considered
to be of fundamental importance to an understanding of the physical universe
although disagreement continues between philosophers over whether it is
itself an entity, a relationship between entities, or part of a conceptual
framework.
i. in particle-based physics, the notion of space retains more of our Middle World sense of
space as what is around and between us but not inside us.
In Greece nature was first imagined as a self-organizing
whole in the 6th and 5th c BC - cosmogony the science that studies the origin
of the universe is from the Gk kosmos-gonia (kosmos order
or world + gonia begetting) and cosmology is from kosmos-logia
(cosmos + logia discourse).
Some of the early Greek physicists - the atomists - thought
the universe was made of atoms and the void. Contemporary physics
contrasts matter and space, so that a vacuum is defined as a volume of space
that is essentially empty of matter, and matter is thought of as distributed
in space.
ii. in wave structure physics, the
move is from 'mostly space' to completely space - space is all there
is.
There is just one real wave medium
of Nature; this is space.
In this vision space is an active structuring medium: a sea of substanceless action. It is like water in being a medium
that conducts waves of structural change, but unlike water in that space
could not be thought of as separate from its waves - in some sense we'd
have to think of it as made of the waves.
In this vision space is not a container but a fabric.
William Clifford 1870:
All matter is simply undulations in
the fabric of space.
Erwin Schrodinger about 1938:
What we observe as material bodies
and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space.
real wave structures in a space medium
whose properties underlie the wave properties
Compare these historical visions:
Anaximander [610-545 BC] spoke of apeiron
an invisible fabric of space, apeira plural
In the late 1600s there was talk of a plenum which was
a cosmic substratum, (from Latin, literally 'full space,' neuter of
plenus 'full'): "a space completely filled with matter, or the
whole of space so regarded."
Aether theories in alchemy, natural philosophy, and
early modern physics proposed the existence of
a medium of the aether (also spelled ether, from the Greek word meaning
"upper air" or "pure, fresh air", a space-filling substance
or field, thought to be necessary as a transmission medium.
Essentially aether is considered to be a physical medium
occupying every point in space, including within material bodies. A second
essential feature is that aether's properties give rise to the electric
and magnetic phenomena and determines the propagation velocity of their
effects. Therefore the speed of light and all other propagating effects
are determined by the physical properties of the aether at the relevant
location, analogous to the way that gaseous, liquid and solid media affect
the propagation of sound waves.
Recent aether theories exist but are not generally accepted
by the mainstream scientific community.
BUT
John Bell, the Irish physicist who articulated Bell's Theorem,
suggests resurrecting the aether "because it is a useful pedagogical
device. That is, many problems are solved more easily by imagining the existence
of an aether."
b. MATTER
- Etymology: Middle English via Old French from Latin materia
'timber, substance,' also matrix, womb and mater, matris
mother
- substance from L substantia,
substare to be present, under + to stand
- stuff from OE stuppa
tow, coarse short hemp or flax, fibre for spinning
- real from L res thing
Human Middle World usage: "a substance or material,"
"physical substance in general, as distinct from mind and spirit,"
Physics (for example):
Matter is a general term for the substance
of which all physical objects are made.
That which occupies space and possesses
rest mass, esp. as distinct from energy.
> Notice how human Middle World usage emphasizes
a contrast between matter and something thought of as immaterial, and how
even in physics some version of this contrast is often maintained.
At the same time, it's important to notice the definition
of 'matter' in physics is not settled:
It is fair to say that in physics,
there is no broad consensus as to an exact definition of matter
Typically, this includes atoms and
other particles which have mass. However in practice there is no single
correct scientific meaning; each field uses the term in different and often
incompatible ways. A common way of defining matter is as anything that
has mass and occupies volume.
A definition of "matter"
that is based upon its physical and chemical structure is: matter is made
up of atoms and molecules. A definition of "matter" more fine-scale
than the atoms and molecules definition is: matter is made up of what atoms
and molecules are made of, meaning anything made of protons, neutrons,
and electrons.
i. all matter in particle-based physics is thought
of as being made of smaller bits of matter
Atoms and electrons are considered particles, and the smaller
sub-nuclear entities like quarks are also considered particles:
Our present corpuscular view of the
universe is based on 12 elementary particles making ordinary matter and
twelve elementary particles transmitting forces. This number jumps to 36
if one takes into account that each quark 'exists' with 3 different color
properties, and to 60 when one includes the antiparticles
But at the same time it is acknowledged that even these
'particles' are mostly (at least) space. Even regular physics can be found
saying things like these:
atoms, which means essentially vacuum,
even though the modern vacuum is not nearly as empty as it once was thought
to be
the atom was essentially just empty
space
And yet matter continues to be contrasted with both
'space' and (in ambiguous ways) with 'energy' (more
on this contrast below):
ordinary matter with which we are familiar
is mostly empty space that is filled by occupying particles which are held
together electromagnetically.
The nucleus, which has positive charge
and virtually all the mass of an atom, occupies only about one millionth
of a billionth (10-15) of the volume of an atom
ii. matter in wave-based physics:
Matter is composed entirely of waves
in space.
matter is a wave structure embedded
in space, a space resonance
instead of 'particle' say wave center
or space resonance or oscillator or [to be determined]
Each atom or molecule is a stable wave
structure
Mead regarded the concept of the "point
particle" as an otiose legacy from the classical era. Early photodetectors
or Geiger counters may have provided both visual and auditory testimony
that photons were point particles, but the particulate click coarsely concealed
a measurable wave.
Certain classical physicists also came to something like
this conclusion:
Schrodinger saw that abolishing the
discrete point particle would remove the paradoxes of 'wave-particle duality'
and the 'collapse of the wave function.'
Einstein rejected the discrete point
particle and stated "Matter must be spherical entities extended in
space."
Einstein, Dirac, Schrodinger, and Mach
"showed that the structure of matter was closely related to the properties
of the apparently empty space around us
The physical reality of space is represented
by a field whose components are continuous functions of four independent
variables - the coordinates of space and time. Since the theory of general
relativity implies the representation of physical reality by a continuous
field, the concept of particles or material points cannot play a fundamental
part, nor can the concept of motion. The particle can only appear as a
limited region in space in which the field strength or energy density is
particularly high. Einstein 1950
Relativity
> For example atoms
The quantum world is a world of waves,
not particles. So we have to think of electron waves and proton waves and
so on. Carver Mead
The ancient Greek notion of a point
particle is replaced with a spherical wave structure
Most people's minds think about atoms
as tiny solar systems. That's what I was brought up on-this little grain
of something. Now it's true that if you take a proton and you put it together
with an electron, you get something that we call a hydrogen atom. But what
that is, in fact, is a self-consistent solution of the two waves interacting
with each other. They want to be close together because one's positive
and the other is negative, and when they get closer that makes the energy
lower. But if they get too close they wiggle too much and that makes the
energy higher. So there's a place where they are just right, and that's
what determines the size of the hydrogen atom. Carver Mead
> electrons
real quantum wave structures in a space
medium whose properties standing electron waves in the space medium
a spherical standing wave created by
interference of in and out waves
underlie the wave properties
The electron is made of waves that
interact at point locations in such a way as to appear particle-like
What is a standing wave?
A standing wave is the pattern of nodes
and antinodes formed when a wave train reflects so that amplitudes combine
- appearance of to and fro in place rather than travel
If the crests of the two waves always
occur together at the same place, and if the waves have identical frequencies,
and if the reflections occur continuously, then the two waves appear motionless:
a standing wave is seen.
But [electrons are] also waves, right? Then what are they waving
in?
It's interesting, isn't it? That is
the missing piece of intuition that we need to develop in young people.
The electron isn't the disturbance of something else. It is its own thing.
The electron is the thing that's wiggling, and the wave is the electron.
It is its own medium. You don't need something for it to be in, because
if you did it would be buffeted about and all messed up. So the only pure
way to have a wave is for it to be its own medium. The electron isn't something
that has a fixed physical shape. Waves propagate outwards, and they can
be large or small. That's what waves do.
So an electron is thought of as:
Energy is concentrated at the center
within a radius of about 10-15 meters but its amplitude extends indefinitely
each wave reaches to the ends of its
universe, mixing with and contributing to the fabric of the whole
- energetically connected to every other electron within
a time-bubble called Hubble Space
The appearance of point charge is given
by the fact that wave amplitude is a function of radial distance from the
wave center and so is greatest at source
c. ENERGY
Etymology: from French énergie, or via late
Latin from the Greek ________ energeia, "activity, operation."
In turn from _______, energos, "active, working" from en-
'in, within' + ergon 'work' - possibly appears for the first time
in the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle.
Human Middle World usage: "the strength and vitality
required for sustained physical or mental activity," "a feeling
of possessing such strength and vitality." In contemporary technological
usage "power derived from the utilization of physical or chemical resources,
esp. to provide light and heat or to work machines."
Physics:
The property of matter and radiation
that is manifest as a capacity to perform work (such as causing motion
or the interaction of molecules).
i. energy in particle-based physics -
It is important to realize that in
physics today we have no knowledge of what energy is. Richard Feynman 1963
Whatever it is that makes change happen?
Distinction between kinetic energy (motion) and potential
energy ('stored energy' from elasticity, displacement).
In a wave the two kinds of energy are said to alternate
- elasticity of the medium turns kinetic into potential.
A photon is said to be a 'particle' that 'transfers energy'
in discrete amounts.
ii. energy in wave-based physics -
Energy is the substance of space. Energy,
as space, is the one thing
of the ancient philosophers.
A property of waves. Confine them,
and you have more wavelengths in a given space, and that means a higher
frequency which means higher energy.
total wave amplitude
What we commonly think of as energy
is energy transfer
Energy transfer occurs at the high
density wave-centers, by coupling / changes of their wave frequency only
wave states / oscillators with equal frequencies can couple and shift frequency
the frequency (energy) changes must be equal and opposite
d. MASS
Terms like 'mass' and 'charge' suggest
a mechanism and conceal the fact that no mechanism is understood
Etymology: from late Middle English: from Old French masse,
from Latin massa, from Ancient Greek maza barley cake
Human Middle World usage: "a coherent, typically large
body of matter with no definite shape," "a large quantity or amount
of something"
Physics "the quantity
of matter that a body contains, as measured by its acceleration under
a given force or by the force exerted on it by a gravitational field"
- associated with the notion of weight.
i. in particle-based physics the concept of mass has
been closely related to the notion of particles
Mass has been said to be something a particle has,
the way we say an orange has weight. "A basic massive particle."
Mass, or matter, and energy have been understood as
transforming into one another.
Physicists often talk about energy turning into matter,
or matter turning into energy - something that isn't a particle turning
into a particle, or vice versa.
Energy also has mass according to the
principle of mass-energy equivalence. This equivalence is exemplified in
a large number of physical processes processes through which measurable
amounts of mass and energy are converted into each other.
all types of energy have an associated
mass, and this mass is added to systems when energy is added, and the associated
mass is subtracted from systems when the energy leaves. In nuclear reactions,
for example, the system does not become less massive until the energy liberated
by the reaction is allowed to leave whereby the "missing mass"
is carried off with the energy, which itself has mass.
That still allows us to think of them as different things,
but there are further complications.
There are questions about whether 'having mass' is a necessary
condition for 'being a particle' or being 'matter'. Normally mass is part
of the definition of matter or 'a particle,' but there are certain theoretical
entities thought of as 'particles' that are not thought to 'have
mass' but only to 'have energy.'
A photon is said to be "a truly massless particle"
"created out of pure energy" and thought to be particle-like only
in certain conditions.
The photon, unlike the neutrino, has
no measurable rest mass, even though it carries energy and momentum.
analogies between electron and photon
"share the enigma known as 'particle-wave duality'" particle-wave
system behaves like a wave when it is moving along, and like a particle
when it is stopped and detected.
Further, there are reasons to think 'mass' and 'energy'
not actually distinct:
The amount of matter in certain types
of samples The mass of an exact sample is determined in part by the number
and type of atoms or molecules it contains, and in part by the energy involved
in binding it together
Composites [such as atoms and molecules]
contain an interaction energy that holds the constituents together, and
may constitute the bulk of the mass of the composite. As an example, to
a great extent, the mass of an atom is simply the sum of the masses of
its constituent protons, neutrons and electrons. However, digging deeper,
the protons and neutrons are made up of quarks bound together by fields
and these fields contribute significantly to their mass. In other words
most of what composes the "mass" of ordinary matter is due to
the binding energy of quarks within protons and neutrons. The bottom line
is that most of the mass of everyday objects comes from the interaction
energy of its elementary components.
i. mass and energy in wave-based physics:
- we will use the terms mass and energy
interchangeably
- Malcolm MacGregor in What causes the electron to weigh?
At each point in space, waves from
all space resonance centers in the universe combine their intensities
At every point in space the frequency
or mass depends on all wave amplitudes present
charge and mass are properties of the
wave structure
e. CHARGE
Etymology Middle English (in the general senses to load
and a load): from Old French charger (verb), charge (noun),
from late Latin carricare, carcare 'to load,' from Latin carrus
'wheeled vehicle.'
Human Middle World usage: "a price asked for goods
or services," "a rush forward," something about control and
responsibility ("to take charge"). Contemporary technical usage
"the property of matter that is responsible for electrical phenomena,
existing in a positive or negative form," and from this something about
excitement and positive or negative feeling ( ("I was all charged up
in her presence").
Physics:
The concept of electric charge is as
mysterious in its fundamental reality as is the concept of mass. MacGregor
Charge and mass are mere constants
in formulas that describe the energy-exchange ('force') taking place when
an electron is moved.
i. in particle-based physics,
charge is something a particle 'has.'
Or sometimes is visualized as a fluid.
ii. in wave-based physics,
electron might in fact simply be the charge
charge polarity depends on whether
there is a positive or negative amplitude of the in-waves at the center
High density wave centers appear to
us as the location of point charges because force interactions occur there
that we call electric
Charge appears at wave centers because
the spherical waves are large at the center high density due to large wave
amplitude energy transfer or coupling between two resonances we observe
this process and call it charge no charge substance is involved
f. FORCE
Etymology: Middle English from Old French force (noun),
forcer (verb), based on Latin fortis 'strong.'
Human Middle World usage: "strength or energy as an
attribute of physical action or movement," "a person or thing
regarded as exerting power or influence," "coercion or compulsion."
Physics:
an influence tending to change the
motion of a body or produce motion or stress in a stationary body
In physics, a force is a push or pull
that causes a free body to accelerate or a flexible body to deform.
i. in particle-based physics:
Forces are now being visualized as moving particles:
particle physics has devised a Standard
Model to describe forces between particles smaller than atoms. The Standard
Model predicts that exchange particles are the means by which forces are
emitted and absorbed. Only four main kinds of interactions are known.
The strong and weak forces act only
at very short distances, and are responsible for the interactions between
subatomic particles. The electromagnetic force acts between electric charges
and the gravitational force acts between masses.
In the twentieth century, the development
of quantum mechanics led to a modern understanding that the first three
fundamental forces (all except gravity) are manifestations of matter interacting
by exchanging virtual particles.
ii. in wave-based physics:
matter and force are no longer distinct
concepts
Instead of forces, we deal with the
way interactions change the wavelengths of waves. Feynman
Space is an elastic medium with squirts and vortices, twists.
Tensions propagated through the medium are electromagnetic and gravitational
'forces.'
4. One universe: the brimming fabric of the real
Imagine the universe as an elastic energized self-active
space with many many things happening at once: knots, centers of density,
patterns temporarily locked, patterns constantly flickering in and out of
existence.
Imagine the boiling and brimming, the constant coming forward
of structure, the strong eruptions and surgings-across of a self-generating
sea.
What does the Wave Structure of Matter vision (WSM) imply
about the universe as we live it?
It's not a dream, it's not "all consciousness,"
it's physical, meaning it has space-time existence and structure.
It's not actually immaterial, but it reinterprets the meaning
of materiality in a direction we've thought of as immateriality.
- We are in true contact with it.
We perceive as humans, at human scale, not at the atomic
scale, but that doesn't mean perception is deluded. We perceive accurately
at the scale that is relevant to us.
- It's one unified 3-dimensional fabric.
At each point in space, waves from
all space resonance centers in the universe combine their intensities.
every wave centre communicates its
wave state with every other so that energy exchange and the laws of physics
are properties of the entire ensemble
each wave reaches to the ends of its
universe, mixing with and contributing to the fabric of the whole
At every point in space the frequency
or mass depends on all wave amplitudes present
- It's an intensely active self-organizing field.
- It has areas of more and less stable structure.
Solid matter - standing wave structures with minimum total
wave amplitudes.
> Think of Islamic tiling
patterns, all the variations of repeating patterns.
- The distinction between matter and energy dissolves
because mass is understood as energetic frequency of waves and what we
normally consider to be 'matter' as stability of structure.
- The visualization of 'forces' acting on 'particles'
becomes a visualization of wave structures interacting with each other
because of the inherent properties of space as a medium.
- Physical bodies are not 'in space' but of space
- they are relatively stable knots or knobs, patterns, within a vast extension
of other such.
- Physical objects are not in space,
but these objects are spatially extended . In this way the concept 'empty
space' loses its meaning . The field thus becomes an irreducible element
of physical description, irreducible in the same sense as the concept of
matter (particles) in the theory of Newton.
5. Imagine a stone, imagine a body
Imagine a stone:
Solidity and rigidity are properties
of the waves.
electron waves producing minimum amplitude
with enormous energy density
3-d lattices of wave centers with minimum total wave amplitude
- 'hardness' means that disarranging the lattice would need large energy
in.
Imagine a human bodies
Various ancient mystical traditions and their New Age spin-offs
often promote some kind of contrast between 'the physical body' and 'the
energy body.' This contrast dates to times when either,
- there were religious/political reasons to want to think
of humans as made of two completely different kind of thing, or
- the visible body was imagined through a machine metaphor.
One of the things that becomes obvious when we imagine
human bodies through a wave structure model is that a physical body IS
an energy body, there isn't an energy body added to a non-energy body.
Wave Structure physics says the bodies we see and live
are NOTHING BUT energy: spatial patterns of changing energy values. Partially
stable, partially unstable.
- The body's energy fields extend beyond the edges of the
visible body.
- We definitely can feel energetic flows between bodies.
- Whole bodies definitely act as antennas picking up subtle
informative structure from the wide universe.
- Bodies definitely have many powers still unnamed and
unexplained.
If we understand the meaning of 'physical' correctly, none
of those facts are incompatible with understanding mind or spirit in terms
of physical bodies.
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