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Revision as of 04:47, 21 June 2006
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Process physics is a new and radical information theoretic approach to the modeling of fundamental physics. It aims to be a theory of everything by abandoning the space-time construct of Galileo, Newton and Einstein, and by arguing that time can only be modeled as a process. The abandonment of time as a geometrical construct is used to solve the problems with conventional physics such as the incompatibility of the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. The model exhibits both gravitational and non-local quantum mechanical behaviour, uniting them in one theory. Space, matter, gravity and time seem to emerge from the model without the pre-existing notion of object or laws built in the model.
History
Process physics has its origin in a paper by Reginald T. Cahill and Christopher M. Klinger about modeling space and time with a random matrix in 1996 Pre-geometric modeling. This was further developed in the paper Self-Referential Noise and the Synthesis of Three-Dimensional Space in 1998. In 2002 the paper Process Physics: From Quantum Foam to General Relativity and Process Physics: From Information Theory to Quantum Space and Matter in 2003 took the radical step of expanding on the themes of the earlier papers to encompass both quantum mechanics and general relativity.
Cahill asserts that several experiments measuring the speed of light and "force" of gravity in 2003 to 2005 invalidate the theory of relativity as per Einstein/Hilbert and reduce relativity to the less "general" Lorentzian model, the law of relativity, in which an absolute motion is possible. He asserts a theory - as follows - that he claims employs identical assumptions to the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.
Modeling process physics
Process physics uses the concept of self-referential criticality to explain the emergence of structure and information from random processes. It is modeled by a boot-strap process that uses a matrix that describes the strengths of connections between nodes. By iterating this matrix by adding its inverse, causing self-reference, and adding random noise, a tree structure emerges with strongly connected nodes exhibiting a fractal but, at higher levels, three-dimensional structure, which resembles space. Connections between nodes decay, while new connections are created; over many iterations more new connections are formed than are lost, causing an exponentially expanding space, just as observed in the physical universe. Within this tree structure, topological defects that have more connectivity than normal and are therefore more 'sticky' emerge, giving rise to patterns that persist. It is argued that these patterns have matter-like behaviour because of their persistence and their fuzziness at smaller scales similar to quantum particles, and also gravity-like behaviour.
Simple visual representation is as follows:
| Self-organizing semantic information field (Goedel, Turing and Chaitin,..). Keywords: stochastic neural networks(SNN), randomness ,.. Semantic information generated and recognized within the system- unlike other approaches that are only syntactical and not semantic |
| The SNN characteristic inherent bootstrap mechanism triggers the process of iteration; semantics generated by semantic seeds appearing during the process of iteration. The iteration process is therefore the essential consequence of SNN structure and not a convenient tool one needs to "get things started". |
| The iteration process generates ge-bits, the geometry units later coalescing ("gluing") and thus "building" the space structure equivalent to the quantum foam. Topological defects appearing in the process of the growing three-dimensional fracatal space (ge-bits are glued into the space/quantum foam, composed of the active nodes and in-built topological defects) generate quantum matter, ie. one gets both space and matter via iteration mathematical formalism. The time modeling is not the quasi-geometric as is the case with the space. |
| Gravity equals to the loss of relation information during the in-flow from the quantum foam to the matter. Since the in-flow is turbulent, it necessitates the appearance of gravitation waves and explains the anomaly in rotation speed of spiral galaxies- as yet explained by the concept of dark matter; a concept process physics dispenses with. Quantum homotopy field theory, describing the dynamics of topological defects, gives subsequently ordinary quantum field theory and the rest of quantum physics and relativity, albeit differently interpreted |
Time
In classical physics, time is modelled as a geometrical dimension that is added to the three dimensions of space to construct four dimensional space-time. This is a static model that does not have the concept of a past, present or future, or the arrow of time within it, which mathematically allows any point in space-time to be predicted, whether past, present, or future.
Time in process physics is modelled as an iterative process, where each iteration is like the next present moment. Due to the randomness present in the iterative equation, the future is not completely predictable. Also it is not possible to perform the inverse operation, meaning you cannot go backwards to the previous moments. Process physics thus predicts a static past, a continually changing present moment, and an unpredictable future - all of which is consistent with how we experience the passage of time.
Space
A key point in the Process Physics theory is that space has internal structure. This structure is described as a network of nodal points with connections between nodes of varying strength, as described above in the section "modelling process physics". Mathematically the model used by process physics to describe space is essentially the same as that used to model neural networks. The inspiration to use this neural-network type of model to describe reality came from the discovery that the behaviour of the statistical particles skyrmions can be described by a similar model.
Matter
In process physics, matter is described as topological defects in three dimensional space that have the ability to become persistent by preserving the pattern of its links over many iterations. Matter is embedded in three dimensional space but is essentially made of the same thing as space. It moves by re-linking preferentially in the direction of travel and losing links more often in the opposite direction to travel. The pattern therefore appears to move relative to the underlying fabric of space and to other matter. Once the movement has started then it will become self sustaining requiring no more energy to continue. Any change in direction to its passage through space would be resisted, which manifests itself as inertia.
Gravity
The topological defect nature of matter means it has more links than normal space. This would produce the effect of using up more links than the space surrounding it meaning that space would effectively sink into matter. This is speculated as the reason behind gravity where the space between masses would effectively shrink making the masses become closer together. The masses would not move as such but the distance between them would get smaller. This also explains why a free falling body does not seem to experience a force while accelerating due to gravity towards a more massive body. This however goes against general relativity as the gravitational effect would be instantaneous rather than effect at a distance at the speed of light. An experiment to measure the speed of gravity would go a long way in establishing if general relativity or process physics is closer to reality.
See also
References
- Reginald T. Cahill, Process Physics: From Quantum Foam to General Relativity
- T. D. Martin, Comments on Cahill's Quantum Foam Inflow Theory of Gravity, an arXiv eprint critiquing Cahill's theory.
- Reginald T. Cahill. Process Physics: From Information Theory to Quantum Space and Matter. Nova Publishers (2005). ISBN 1-59454-300-3.
External links
- Process physics website
- Popular science review
- Critique
- Process physics archive
- Process studies supplement
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