A completely new version of the presentation of the Evolutionary Knowledge Project was released today.

It reports on the research developments of recent years, providing concise answers to the fundamental questions concerning the Project: why it exists, what are its aims and objectives, what the field of study, how do we intend to carry out the research and the diffusion of its results. What are the fundamental questions in physics and cosmology to which the Project seeks to provide unconventional answers, such as hypotheses, proposals and developments underway. Furthermore, in the last slides, three qualifying elements of this approach are illustrated in greater detail: the Process of Formation of Reality, What we see in the world. What is really fundamental?, the Evolutionary Cosmological Model.

Observations, experiments fail to find answers to the questions “Does dark matter exist?” and if it exists, “what is it made of?”. It is estimated that about 85% of the matter in the universe is invisible, the so-called Dark Matter. How can it be possible that such a large amount of matter, which influences in a decisive way the dynamics of cosmic structures, of the entire Universe, escapes all attempts to reveal its nature. Maybe we are searching in the wrong direction, or better we are searching something wrong. Perhaps we are guided by a fundamentally wrong idea: that all matter must be made up of particles. Perhaps it is the ancient atomistic vision, in its increasingly accurate and spectacular versions, such as the Standard Model of Particles, that conditions our observations, our experiments.

The only evidence we should consider in this strange and difficult research is that dark matter appears to be a low-density stuff distributed in large clumps over vast regions of space. We see the effects of the presence of such a strange and invisible stuff, we presume it exists, but no one is able to reveal its nature and composition. Just a large number of hypotheses about more or less strange particles or changes to the laws that we think regulate gravitational phenomena, hypotheses that become less and less plausible every day, as observations and experiments place ever more stringent constraints.

What can we do to get out of this impasse? My opinion is that we should stop looking for “particles”. Instead, we should look for something very large, with a very low density. Nothing that is now present in the Standard Model of Particles can help us. We need to try to better understand the infinitely small, what particles are in terms of what is most fundamental. We hypothesize that the same “substance” of which elementary particles are made, beyond quarks and leptons, bosons, is something that can be structured with various intensities of organization of various forms and densities. Not by chance. But following the laws that govern the dynamics of that hypothetical “substance”, dynamics that rules the conditions of equilibrium that permit the existence of structures characterized by masses, charges, spins, dynamics like those collected in the Standard Model. But not only. Also other structures, low density large extension structures precisely. And as in the case of ordinary matter particles (where it is present in a absolutely hidden, undetectable way), for those large cosmic structures made of Dark matter, Dark energy represents an inseparable element. These two dark stuffs being two complementary manifestations of that same hypothetical substance.

That “substance” is not “strings”, nor “spin networks”, nor “ether”, nor “modified gravity”, etc. That “substance” is Elementary Action. In particular, speaking of mass and gravity, the first mode of Elementary Action, that we call Perturbation. Its dynamics is the Dynamics of the Elementary Action.

Image description: Hubble Maps Giant Halo Around Andromeda Galaxy (Credits: NASA, ESA, and E. Wheatley (STScI))
Image web source: NASA

Reality does not exist in a classical or ordinary sense. Reality happens. All that exists appear as existing because at the elementary level of Reality, in the true factory of causality (–> force) and variationality (spatiality and temporality –> space-time), the Source incessantly create and recreate the Elementary Events, that support the basic “substance”, the Elementary Action, from whose organization everything emerges and evolves at the various levels of Reality.

The whole Reality, the Universe in evolution, everything that we consider as existent, is made “by” entities, but is not made “of” entities. Everything is made up of events and relations between them. More precisely, we must say that everything is made up of processes (an evolving mix of stochastic and deterministic processes): Entities (Agents / Forces and Acted / Fields) manifesting themselves producing Events organized by Relations forming Processes.

The Universe, and everything in it, is made of organized Events. In this sense, we can say that also the Universe happens, not that it exists in a conventional sense. We can only say that “it exists because it happens“. If the incessant flow of events, which sustain Reality, were stopped, Reality and its present section, the Universe, would instantly disappear (and with it also Space and Time), even if no one (no conscious beings) would notice it.

So, we must say that Reality don’t exists in a common sense. It incessantly happens, creating and evolving itself. In short, in the Evolutionary Knowledge System, Reality is considered as the creative and evolutive process (Processes|Process) by which what exists (Entities) produce what happens (Events) in the way it happens (Relations).

Nothing can be defined as entity, only the Primary Source, in its two complementary aspects, the Fundamental Force and the Elementary Field. The Source is the only “entity” in the true sense. Only the fundamental/elementary inseparable couple Force/Field can be considered as an entity. Everything else derive its existence from the fundamental/elementary Source. It is the incessant source, the origin of Existence, because it “causes” the happening, the emergence of the Elementary Events that represent the most fundamental form of Existence. Reality exists because happens, because the Source incessantly produce its happening.

The events which we are perceiving, observing, measuring, the events that compose of natural phenomena, the everyday facts that we are incessantly experiencing in our lives, always are to be considered and can be described as macro-events or Complex Events. Even the simplest events, like the emission of a photon by an excited electron in an atomic nucleus, is a complex structure of organized events. This “simple” interaction between two of the more elementary particles/waves, that we can observe in nature, in facts, involves an enormous number of Elementary Events. Each related to the others, or better, correlated in the complex forms that we call particles, both the massive ones like vortex/particles as electrons and the non-massive ones like wave/particles as photons. We also have to take in consideration all the “non-stable, short life, variable extension and shape” structures that characterize the normal dynamics of the Field, especially in the surrounding of the previously mentioned Structures engaged in a short-range interaction (which in Quantum Mechanics we call virtual particles and, more in general, quantum fluctuations of the void).

Reality is a whole, a unity, the Universe in evolution. Only for descriptive purposes is very useful to represent it as a multilevel structure, where successive layers of Reality, successive nested levels go from the most elementary (where the Primary Source produces the Elementary Events, the Elementary Action, the “substance” by which all the Reality in constructed, to the most complex that comprehend the cosmic structures, the living beings and all their cognitive expressions, the Universe as a whole.

Always keeping in mind that fundamental unity, we can imagine the various levels of Reality as separate worlds, with different principles, laws, dynamics, etc., different expressions, declination, fundamental principles, laws, dynamics that describe the whole Reality. This abstraction can help us to face more easily the immense complexity of Reality, it can help us to develop better systems of formalization, allowing us to treat high-level structures as macro processes, without necessarily having to describe them in terms of more elementary level structures.

An example… Think of you walking in a street… Hyper simplifying the structure of Reality, for briefness, reducing the number of levels involved in the existence of that situation…

• Going from complexity to the more elementary levels, at the top there is the entire Universe, the Cosmos and all its structures (including Dark Matter and Dark Energy) influencing everything in the part of the Universe where we life, influencing you, your structure, your dynamics. This is the realm of General Relativity.
• Then, leaving out the cognitive dimension of Reality, concentrating only on the physical side, we must consider the level in which the laws of classical physics govern the motion of your body, the motion and the functioning of the moving parts within your body, your heart, your lungs, your blood, the other solids. liquids and gasses inside you.
• Then we must consider the molecular biochemical and chemical level, with all the reactions that sustain the life of your body.
• Then the atomic level, where the electron interact to perform the chemical reactions. This is also the level in which all the electromagnetic radiation, all the energetic exchange happens inside and outside your body.
• And more, we must consider the nuclei of atoms, their dynamics, everything that gives physical stability to the mass we are composed by. These are the levels where the quantum manifests with all its power and weirdness, the realm of Quantum Mechanics, the domain of quantum information and the relative structures, particles and waves and their strange interactions.
• But we are not at the end of our journey. Indeed, there is some other level to explore. They separate us from the most elementary level, where Reality is incessantly formed, where the substrate of the whole Reality, the Elementary Events, that compose the Elementary Action, are incessantly created and participate to the evolution of the Universe.
• Then, we will find the level of the subatomic particles that compose the atoms of the ordinary/baryonic matter, particles (the quarks and gluons, and the other bosons) that stand side by side with electrons and neutrinos in the three “generation” in Standard Model of Particles. All these particles, in this model are considered and named as Structures of Information (Waves, Vortices and Interactions).
• This is the level of Information / Energy, where the three evolutive operators, Organization, Transformation and Selection incessantly act toward the formation and the conservation of those Structures.
• And, digging more in deep, we will find the level of Action, (the Derived) Forces and Fields interact to produce the (Derived) Events from whom organization the Structures form and, in turn, interact and organize to produce atom, molecules, etc. and all the high level, higher complexity structures and forms that compose the Universe in Evolution.
• Then, for many orders of magnitude till the Planck Scale we will see signs of an energetic dynamic “turbulence”, that in standard physics is represented by virtual particles, popping up and down in the quantum vacuum, appearing and suddenly disappearing. This is the product of the Action of the Derived Forces on the Derived Fields, creating Events that try to organize in Structures, that evolutively can’t reach a state of causal permanence. It is an infinite “ocean” of Derived Action that tries to become more or less stable Information (Energy), the incessant fluctuations of the quantum vacuum.
• One more step lead us to the Planck Scale, where the Fundamental Entities, expressions of the Primary Source, the Fundamental Force and the Elementary Field, incessantly interActing “create” the Elementary Events, the Elementary Action, the most elementary “substance”, the causal and variational (spatial and temporal) substrate from whom the whole Reality “evolve”. From the first organization of that “substance”, of the Elementary Events, Space and Time emerge and evolve toward the present vast complexity of the world.

New measurements of the rate of expansion of the universe give more different results. Discrepancies seem to become more and more significant. Is there something wrong with the way we measure the Hubble’s Constant or is there something wrong with the way we conceive the Universe and the dynamics of the cosmos?

Maybe both. But I think the second question is more true and more relevant to try to explain why the current measured values of this important natural constant are so far apart.

The Hubble’s Constant describes the expansion of the universe (in kilometers per second per megaparsec) and give us the possibility to make hypotheses about the size and age of the universe and estimate distances between objects in the cosmos.

That Hubble’s Constant is not constant in time is a science fact since the observation of the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe. But I think that its (supposed) constancy in space is not a scientific fact, and it comes from a profound misconception about the true nature of the the (derived) field we call space-time, or, even more, from a incorrect comprehension of the nature of the entire Physical Reality.

Hubble’s law tell us that the recessional velocity is proportional to the distance to distant bodies. As we can see in a medium subject to uniform expansion. This conception implies uniformity, homogeneity, isotropy, at least when viewed on a large enough scale. No special places, both for the parts of the cosmos that we see in expansion and for the part that include the observer. This is the Cosmological Principle. It implies that the forces act uniformly throughout the Universe. But, this its true only if we consider the Fundamental Force acting of the Elementary Field. All the derived forces (as gravity) don’t act uniformly. They (always) relative intensities are determined by the shape of the organization of the Elementary Field itself, in other words, the derived fields associated to those derived forces.

In my opinion, Hubble constant is not constant also in space dimensions, so it cannot be considered a support to the Big Bang model. The polarization of the dispute on cosmological models between static and Big Bang, for me, is one of the most destructive errors in cosmology. It has addressed all the further researches in a theoretical cul de sac that has produced inflation, the standard cosmological model, and a full series of theories father and farther from the observation. I thing that even the observation, of better, the way we observe the Universe has been deeply influenced by that wrong ideas.

So, let’s go. No static Universe, no Big Bang. To explain what we see in the Universe, a third way is needed. Let’s call it: the Evolutionary Cosmological Model (ECM). In this model we can “easily” accomodate phenomena like the expansion of the cosmos and its acceleration in time, the inconstancy of Hubble’s Constant in space, as well as in time, the strange super homogeneity of CMB, the existence of well formed cosmic structures in the early Universe, just a few hundred millions years from the supposed birth date on the Universe. And it is not enough. There are rooms for a dark matter not made of particles, that does not need to reject of modify gravity, and the strange stuff we call dark energy, theoretically required to account for the acceleration of the cosmic expansion.

In conclusion, even if – by definition – we postulate that it is absolutely flat as a whole in all its infinite extension, space-time is not uniform. It does not have a uni-form, a unique form, the same shape in all places, even at the largest scales. It appears to us as uniform, because we can span a sufficiently large portion of the (for me, infinite) Universe. So, at medium and small scales, we clearly see that space-time is not uniform. We see immense cosmic structures, super-clusters, cluster, galaxies, stars and planets…

At these scales, a lack of uniformity is the cause and, at the same time, the effect of the presence of those cosmic structures.

At the larger scales, a more slight non-uniformity is the cause and the effect of the existence of extremely large structures and the entire dynamics of the (infinite and unlimited) Universe as a whole.

Image description: Bright arcs: Hubble Stace Telescope image of a distant quasar that has been gravitationally lensed. This image was part of this latest study. (Credits: ESA/Hubble/NASA/Suyu et al)
Image credits: Nasa

Let us take a look at the main problems that modern physics and cosmology are facing. After a wonderfull period of discovery and development of ever wider and deeper models, is this a real crisis? Why the theoretical research is not able to keep up with the ever more numerous and strange observations of Nature and with the increasingly contrasting and surprising data coming from our instruments? Is there anything fundamental that does not work in scientific research?

Beyond standard models – When a standard becomes a stumbling block

Standard models are great results and great resources to guide thought and experimental research. But they can become conceptual prisons that prevent people from seeing new paths to knowledge. Moreover, they can determine a ghettoization of research, a polarization that pushes to the extreme the need to differentiate alternative research lines. In this scenario, the research has polarized, on the one hand, on orthodox positions that are not innovative enough to go beyond those standard models and, on the other, on research very far from physical reality and with little possibility of being subjected to experimental verification.

Too many stuffs we don’t understand

The emergence of the dark side of the Universe, as in the famous Star Wars saga, casts a sinister shadow on the current scientific scene. We are obviously talking about the two phantom entities / phenomena, Dark Matter and Dark Energy, which, according to the most reliable hypotheses, should together constitute about 95% of the energy content of the Universe. We call them “dark entities” because we cannot observe them through light, our main source of information on the Universe. But also, or rather, above all, “dark” because we do not understand their nature, their dynamics, their true role in the past and future evolution of the cosmos. It is still discussed whether these hypothetical entities really exist, or whether, by changing the laws we currently use to analyze and explain the physical behavior of Reality, it is possible to do without them. In short, we know very little about such important things.

Too much fantastic math

Mathematics is a very powerful language. It is the language of science. Since advanced tools allow us to carry out experimentation and observation of nature, so math has provided and increasingly provides more important tools for theoretical research and for the fundamental analysis and interpretation of collected data. But, in science, we can’t let mathematics drive. Mathematics must necessarily follow ideas, observations, facts. Therefore, it is very good to develop good mathematics. But let us not confuse good mathematics with scientific research, which, in short, is observation, hypothesis formulation, falsification, and so on, in an endless iterative process.

The surrender of the possibility of explaining Nature

The victory of Quantum Mechanics, which has produced many very important scientific results, has in a certain way led to the rejection of the possibility of understanding the world (at least the world of the infinitely small, the basis of our Physical Reality). And, while representing the best scientific theory ever developed by man, it has produced a fundamental split in the vision of the physical world (continuity vs quantization, relativity vs quanta, certainty vs probability and so on). While it allows us to interpret much of physical reality and to predict the results of experiments, QM has led us to a partial vision and to renounce the possibility of truly knowing Nature. In some interpretations of QM, for example that of the “many worlds”, not only can we no longer imagine knowing the facts of the world, but we can also hypothesize (without any possibility of falsification, in my humble opinion) that there is NOT a knowable reality, though there is an infinite number of them. Chaos in chaos … hopeless …

Is it a question of machines (and money)?

I do not believe that the current difficulty in going beyond what is known, explaining what we see in the Universe and what we cannot find in the colliders, is due to the lack of ability of our machines, of our instruments, to reach a new level in fundamental physics research (particles). I think it’s not a question of technology or money. I think it’s a matter of ideas. We must (re) open our minds. But this requires that some distorting aspects of the current academic system, which too often push research into comfortable places, in a short-term perspective, are modified. We need courage. The courage to think differently, to invest in a different way, to grant in a different way, to reward differently.

No more particles

I absolutely do not want to say that high energy research is not useful or appropriate. But I don’t think that in the present moment, in this crisis, this could represent the turning point. I do not believe that it will be a new particle to pave the way for the new physics that everyone is waiting with so much anxiety and interest. I don’t think that measuring Higgs in more detail, reaching more energy, will make us better understand the world. Perhaps we must accept that the Standard Model of particles is a fundamental piece of the puzzle, but it is not the only one, and perhaps not even the most important. I don’t think we can shed light on the dark side of the cosmos, on dark matter and dark energy, and on all the other weird things we are observing in the Universe, searching for new particles. I don’t think we can better understand the fundamental nature of Reality by smashing particles.