dzd@cosivax.UUCP (05/13/84)
<>
Let me begin by stating that I favor a minority view and tend to
agree more with brl-vgr!gwyn than utastro!ethan. My reasons are
not so much based on simple physics or astrophysics as they are
on plain aversion to singularities, whether big bangs,
renormalizations or (relatively) small whimpers -- black holes.
Such a principle is clearly "meta-physical" but I believe we too
sharply discriminate between physical science and philosophy
anyway. [note the newsgroups to which I have posted this]
I would like to cite three references on several sides of these
issues:
1) A. Eddington, "Universal Theory" <why fool around?>
2) Kantor, "Information Mechanics"
3) ?, "Cosmology, Physics and Philosophy"
The third is by an Israeli professor at U of Haifa but I can't
remember his name.
When published, Eddington's book was considered trash, probably
the result of senility. Eddington was inconsiderate enough to die
with this book only half done and, I believe it was Wittaker (of
Wittaker & Watson) who finished it as best he could from
Eddington's notes etc. A major theme is the connection between
cosmological theories, data, etc. and microscopic ones. This was
an extremely unpopular view in that day though very faddish now.
It tries to take seriously several things:
1) Einstein knew what he was doing in looking for Unified Field
2) Einstein did not reject completely the Cosmological Constant
but rather his too hasty evaluation of it. In particular, he
wanted to keep open the possiblity of a gravitating vacuum
energy. I believe this is what his pursuit of Unified Field
Theory was all about. I wish they would get on with
publishing his notes, letters etc.
3) All the "negative" principles -- uncertainty, finite speed
of light, etc. and *finite current size* of universe.
Notice that under all variation of big bang theories, current
universe is of finite size. This point seems to me to be
under-appreciated by the "standard" cosmologists nowadays.
Reference 3) is by a proponent of the current "mainstream" in the
sense that he is a big banger but also he is somewhat out of that
stream in advocating a tighter union of physics and philosophy. I
think his book is an excellent summary of the evidence, ideology
and philosophy of big bangers plus it has some interesting and
provocative speculations toward Unified Field Theory. But it
seems to me to ignore the finiteness of the universe and what
that might mean for metrology, especially wrt a standard for
length. Eddington had a lot to say on this but it is so obscured
within counting possible states of high-order tensors that I have
never been able to figure out what he means. BTW, I don't think
Wittaker figured it out either, but just reproduced it as best he
could.
Finally, there is reference 2) which came out about four years
ago and has been completely ignored as far as I can find out. It
is either completely crackpot or the **ANSWER**. It proceeds from
simple assumptions including finiteness of universe and the
implications of this in terms of Non-Relativistic Quantum
Electrodynamics (NRQE), i.e., the most accurately verified branch
of physics by many orders of magnitude. This leads to a
self-gauging universe with a vacuum energy that gravitates -- in
particular, the vacuum gravity affects the STANDING WAVES
associated with at least two photons so as to bind them such that
the quantum states of the result are determined by allowed
wavelengths devired by boundary conditions from finite universe.
This bound bunch of photons are what we call a particle. From
this, he goes on to derive mass, charge, spin, etc. properties of
various "elementary" particles from first principles. [Eddington
did some of this too, but to a lesser extent]. Of course, this is
a Super Grand Unified Theory since it subsumes all four "forces".
Its main appeal to me is that it contains *NO* singularities.
Also, it deals with position, what it means, its quantification,
quantization and relation to gravity and the "forward" coupling
from mass to geometry.
I would particularly be interested to hear from anybody who has
read Information Mechanics and what they think of it. I think
both IM and Eddington's stuff have great merit but, for
Eddington, was too far ahead of its time. I summarize my
understanding of these approaches by asking this critical
question:
"How does an electron know how big it's supposed to be?"
Answer in the spirit of Eddington and Info Mech:
"By sitting at the center of the universe, reaching out and
pushing against the edges"
Answer in the current "consensus" view:
AHEM!
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BTW: If you think this question is dumb, remember that modern
scientific cosmology began when somebody [Hubble?] asked:
"Why is the sky dark at night?"
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Dean Douthat
[All opinions are my own. I have no connection with COSI except
as a guest on their vax.]
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Answerback: 6501873270 MCI | 48104gwyn@brl-vgr.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) (05/14/84)
Very interesting references. Eddington's "Fundamental Theory" (not "Universal Theory") was indeed brought out by Whittaker (first name Edmund, I think), who also wrote his own book critiquing Eddington's. I tried to understand this work when I was younger and smarter but had only limited success. My impression is that much of Eddington's theory is valid but that he was trying too hard to extract patterns where there might not be any. It is quite certain that if you take the (Einstein flavor) unified field theory seriously, then a closed universe will produce field quantization. Indeed the "displacement field duality" of such a theory also embeds a discrete symmetry in the field. I have much to say about this in my Masters' thesis. It seems to me that the Grand Unified Field Theorists of today are working "inward" from quantum symmetries while Einstein and his small band of followers started close to the core with the expectation that they could eventually work their way "outward". Whether either is extensible into the complete picture is unclear. I prefer the Einstein-Schr"odinger approach because it can be built on explicit philosophical grounds that I happen to agree with, although this was not made explicit in the original work. Philosophy is important, folks.