TFNR - Reverse engineering of Reality: a case study
In these last three sections of this chapter, strengthened by all the anticipations provided in the first chapters, we will take a look at what will be developed in more detail in the next chapters. This incursion into the Fundamental Nature of Reality will allow us to see the peculiar approach at work, the hypotheses that this model of description of Reality proposes, the path that I intend to follow to outline a picture as complete as possible, even in this introductory work.
In this section I will follow a bottom-up approach to understanding what Reality is, what it is made of and how it works. Naturally in a super summary, which as mentioned will find more details in the next chapters. Having identified a case study, a real situation, possibly not too complex, I will try to do a bit of reverse engineering, to dismantle it step by step to trace the origins, the causes, the phases that have led here from the beginning of time, so to speak.
In the next section, I will try to follow a top-down approach, presumptuously assuming that I am the cook, the creator deity struggling with the arduous task of generating all this mess that lies before our eyes. I will try to identify the ingredients, the preparations, the main methods, the steps to follow to execute the recipe, and how to plate and serve the delight.
In the last section, "A box full of nothing" I will try to summarize what has been expressed so far, using a theatrical gimmick. The curtain opens. The magician is on stage. Silence. He is showing a box. He opens it and begins to remove things, increasingly thin, increasingly impalpable, abstract, immaterial. He is hunting for nothing! Will he find it? We will see...
And now let's begin. Reverse engineering of a case study. And which case do we choose? Infinite ones come to mind. But one stands out. Newton is resting under a tree. It's an apple tree and a fruit falls and hits the poor thinker's head!
Let's try to describe what is happening. From the point of view of the model I am presenting here.
The work we need to do together is to start from the level of Reality where there are apples, trees, people, air, soil, the Earth, light and heat, etc., and then go up or down, as you prefer, through the most elementary, fundamental levels of Reality, up to the Source, from which everything derives, originates, is formed. Go up or down, I was saying. It doesn't matter. It's just a convention. It's not a direction, a physical orientation. It's an attempt to go back up the causal chain that leads from the Source to the apple that falls on Sir Isaac Newton's head. A causal chain of Forces that act in Reality, which is accompanied by an ascent of a variational chain (Space-time), of the Fields on which these Forces act. What we see and try to understand is the set of Actions of those Forces on those Fields, which we see as "Processes of Events organized by Relations, produced by Entities", the objects (onto), the phenomena (pheno) that animate them and the dynamics (dyna) that realize them.
The extraordinary, but at the same time chilling, thing is that to describe any phenomenon, an insignificant event, a very common object, it is necessary to refer to the entire complex structure of the Formation of Reality. All physical entities, all natural processes, Forces, Fields, Events, Relations, Processes. Everything, at all levels of Reality, as every aspect of the world happens, or has a counterpart, on all levels and at all scales of Reality.
Let's get started!
An apple... Made of molecules, organic, biological. Made of interacting atoms. Made of electrons and nucleons, quarks and gluons, and who knows what else! Here we already encounter chaos and turbulence in abundance. But we cannot stop there. Going down the dimensional scales, after the abyss that opens up below the Particle scale, where impalpable turbulence dominates, we arrive at the Planck scale where the fundamental formative Processes resonate through Spaces and Times, in the seething of what is called quantum foam, zero-point fluctuations, quantum vacuum, which is not really vacuum. But we could go further, towards even smaller scales, where Space and Time are blurred, in formation, confused in the indeterminacy that places a constraint on pure chaos. Naturally, the tree is made like this too. And the ground, the Earth, etc. And the air, just a little less dense.
And then in the scene, we find light, heat, and other electromagnetic radiation, in the form of Waves and Particles. I wrote "and" and not Waves "or" Particles. An explanation is needed here, which anticipates themes that will be the subject of extensive discussion in the next chapters, in particular those on Structures of Information. Why do I say Electromagnetic Waves and Particles? In fact, the Structures that compose electromagnetic radiation consist of Waves. But it is undoubted that these objects are not simple Waves. They exhibit corpuscular behaviors, in some experiments and observations they seem Particles. So what? The solution seems simple. What shape must a wave have to have wave and corpuscular characteristics at the same time?
What form can it be if not that of a single wave cycle / period? Let's think about the processes of generation of electromagnetic radiation. We have two main situations. The first, the one that was first investigated experimentally (and for this reason in my opinion has generated so much confusion as to contribute to the interpretative problems of Quantum Mechanics) concerns the emission of electromagnetic radiation in the form of e.m. Waves, wave trains, multicycle waves generated by periodic, continuous and incessant phenomena. The second, where a small body of finite dimensions and localized/localizable, albeit with the limits of Uncertainty, an electron for example, in its dynamics of excitation / de-excitation emits an object, the photon, represented precisely as a single cycle e.m. Wave.
Why not a multiple Wave like for the emission of radio waves? Because the electron, so to speak, absorbs a quantum of energy and "jumps" to a higher energy state and then returns to the original state. And this return, "bounce" consists of a short stretch of Space covered in a very short Time, during which it accelerates due to the energy received and stored (in the atom as a whole) and then slows down due to the effect of the electrical attraction of the nucleus and other related phenomena. During this deceleration it emits the e.m. Wave in the form of a single cycle, which we call a photon. Which will have a wavelength equal to the Space in which the deceleration occurred, and polarization equal to the orientation of the Spin axis during this short period of time. The photon, remember, a single-cycle Wave, will have linear momentum determined by the energy lost in the deceleration, and angular momentum equal to the angular momentum lost by the electron during the deceleration itself.
Think about how many phenomena of this kind of emission and absorption of photons occur in a second ... and the e.m. waves, multiple wavelength, here yes we can say frequencies, because of the periodic origin of these kind of multicycle e.m. radiations... Light, radio waves at all frequencies, other e.m. radiation from space... infrared thermal radiation shaking atoms in an eternal chaotic vibration, partially constrained by chemical bonds produced by the joint dynamics of the outer layers of atomic electrons.
Here we are still in the (more or less) known territories of Ordinary Matter (visible) and Electromagnetic Radiation, of their dynamics and the dynamics of their interactions (just to be clear, Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Field Theory and Standard Model of Particles). It is the realm of Motion, Charge and Spin, between Quantities and Fundamental Physical Phenomena, of weak and strong nuclear interactions, between quantities and derived physical phenomena.
And Mass? And gravitational phenomena? All the pieces of Ordinary Matter that we have mentioned above possess a property that is called Mass. For small and medium agglomerations, for the small speeds of the world that we are trying to investigate, Mass and Gravity do not seem to have much impact on the phenomena and their dynamics. But among the elements of the scenario that we have drawn we find the Earth, and the Earth is not an isolated system, it is part of the solar system, which is part of a local structure, which is part of the galaxy that hosts us, the Milky Way. In turn, this is part of the Local Group, within a cluster, which is part of an even larger structure, and so on, up to the Universe as a whole. Within all of this, super compact objects, ultrafast dynamics, extreme energetic events, lead us to also consider the phenomena of Mass and Gravity, and all those that derive from large densities and or large velocities. We are in the world of Special and General Relativity.
If I try to explain the spatial distribution and the temporal distribution (the movement) of all this Matter in the Universe on the basis of this same Matter (Ordinary, visible) that I observe, something doesn't add up. In fact, it doesn't add up at all! Something absolutely essential is missing. We'll call it "invisible" Matter. Maybe we'd also need a little invisible Energy. A lot of invisible Energy. "Invisible"... not a great adjective, not very suggestive. And if we called it DARK! Dark Mass and Dark Energy! Much better...
And where can I imagine finding this Dark Matter and Energy? If I am inside a region of Ordinary Matter, there won't be any Dark Matter. Do they interpenetrate? It's not possible. And instead, they do! Because the Dark sector is the very structure of Space-time, its curvatures, its turbulence, are the low-density, wide-ranging Structures of Information that we call Dark Halos. What they encompass are the cradles, the cocoons in which Ordinary Matter gathers, aggregates, condenses and evolves. Not perfect shapes, the celestial spheres, but ellipsoids, bubbles, irregular halos formed by powerful, turbulent flows in the curvature of the metric of Space-time. Or rather, we should say metric of Time, since at the scales of size of the Particles and up to the extreme extensions of the Universe, Space is flat and homogeneous. Like soap bubbles, irregular, but with soft and globular shapes, in constant evolution, in the dilated times of the cosmic dynamics.
Let's go back to the particles. But what if we tried to fragment all these pieces of Ordinary Matter, those that we call elementary Particles, and together, assuming that it can be done, to decompose, to break up the Waves too? What would we find? What would we get? Let's try to turn the questions around. What should we do to produce these Particles, these Waves? What ingredients, raw materials, semi-finished products, should we use? What techniques, methods, instruments? And where could we find all this?
In short, how was or how is all this produced? If the Waves are produced by the dynamics of the Particles, where is the Particle factory? Who or what produces them? Let's exclude the existence of a manufacturer. Furthermore, I don't like the idea that all ordinary Matter was produced in the past and that now we are essentially riding the gravy train at all. With this tendency to increase Entropy, with all the time that has passed since this phantom and improbable Big Bang, there should not be a breath of Energy left usable to sustain the dynamism that characterizes the life of the Universe that we see.
What does Dark Energy produce to sustain the phenomenon that is called Cosmic Expansion (we will see later that the phenomenon seems to be apparent, mirage of another phenomenon, this real one, well hidden in the dimensional depths of Reality. What does Energy produce to sustain all the activity that we see around us? Has the spring of the cosmic clock, fetish of the most radical determinism, not yet run out? Does someone or something wind the spring?
Let's go back to the question everyone is trying to answer. Why is there something instead of nothing? And why "precisely" these Particles, made in this way (in what way? It's not very clear...), with these properties and behaviors? Why do those that are considered natural constants have exactly that value, why those physical quantities that we measure? In short, so many questions and so few answers. Quantum fields (so many), strings, loops, and I don't know what else. Objects, increasingly elementary entities, but always entities, for which the above questions are repeated, endlessly.
We must unify, go to the Essence of Existence, of existing, stop looking for bits of Reality, individual, identifiable fragments. We must delve into the continuum, from which the discrete that we see emerges incessantly. Instead of trying to quantize Gravity, Mass, Metrics, we must try to understand how and why the discrete, the Particles, the Waves, emerge from this continuous ocean, a unique and unitary field, whose dynamics supports everything that exists.
Here, skipping many steps, many important aspects that we will try to recover in the next chapters, we have arrived at the bottom of the "rabbit hole". In the dimensional abysses where Space and Times are incessantly formed, and where the dynamics emerge and are expressed, the Processes of Events organized by Relations that we observe as Particles, Waves, and so on.
Everything we find in the scene we have chosen for this reverse engineering attempt, the apple, Newton, the tree, the ground, the Earth, the entire Universe, everything like foam on the floating surface of an infinite ocean, always the same and always different, full of non-manifest Action, that we see as Informazione / Energy, which organizes itself in manifest, changing, impermanent forms.
Who or what moves the pawns? Who blows the wind that pushes the waves, that foam creating ever-changing designs and shapes? What force animates the ocean, this infinite and eternal dynamic field? What Force? What Field? From what Source do they spring? What Primary Source, manifesting itself, incessantly produces all this?
Links to the tables of contents of TFNR Paper
