Reply To: T-shirt designers unite and take over

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Phil’s Dad wrote: I wonder why you stop at the particle level in your discussion. Can not an infinitely large Universe also be infinitely small?

Along those lines recently I was trying to figure out if an infinite universe can actually “move forward” where every particle in the universe depends on the influence of every other particle in the universe. By “move forward” I mean where every particle progresses in whatever it ought to be doing. If the “next step” of a particle depends on the influence of every other particle in an infinite universe, how can an infinite amount of information be brought to bear on each particle. I’m still uncertain as to whether it’s possible, even with infinite computational ability.

Anyway as I was considering that, I realized that there is the issue of locality. A particle near me does not care what a particle in the crab nebula is doing “right now”. Whatever that distant particle is doing takes years to propagate here, due to the speed of light limitation. As such the influence of the crab nebula on particles in my local vicinity only depends on what was happening in the distant past “over there”.

Specifically it seems possible to have an infinite universe, provided the “aether” or fabric of the universe propagates effects at the speed of light. Every particle affects the aether, and those effects spread outwards. As such each region of the aether is dependent on the rest of the universe, but the problem is mitigated because you only have to be concerned with the immediate vicinity.

Now I’m trying to figure out if it’s possible to have no particles at all, only the “aether” and its characteristic properties. Might an electron not be a particle that exists on its own, and then has an influence on an electric field? Rather, could the “electron” be a stable phenomenon in the “aether” that has the effect of propagating outwards in all directions an effect on the aether like the electric field? So you have only the aether, plus stable “constructions” within that aether that we confuse as being particles. The question is, why have a particle, and then also have its effect on a separate field? Why not dispense with the particle and only have the field?

The way I visualize this is similiar to computer demo effects. There is a “fire” effect where you have a hot spot on a video window, and the “heat” propagates from hot to cold pixels. It’s accomplished with an averaging of neighboring pixels. If you simulate this you get a situation where “heat” bleeds away in a nice circular manner. An electron could be a stable source of “heat” that then bleeds off in 3 dimensions, the heat dissipating in an inverse square manner. Here is a link showing an image of such a “fire” simulation. http://www.xdr.com/dash/fire.html

It occured to me that perhaps there really are only two fundamental “particles” in this aether, the electron and the positron. Maybe somehow there is a stable mode where you get some 900 electrons and 901 positrions together and this blob forms a proton. Or 901 of each forms a neutron. In each case the overall “charge” on the heavy particle is correct, and its mass would be correct also.

Also I was wondering if a stationary electron is a perfectly symmetric structure in the aether, meaning it has a perfectly uniform effect on the aether spreading out in all directions. Perhaps a moving electron is no longer symmetric. It has a different effect on the aether, and this effect is itself moving through the aether.

I’m trying to figure out how special relativity can fall out of this approach. I don’t believe in general relativity, actually. I don’t believe space is warped. Rather, I like a uniform aether that actually does have a fixed reference frame. The question is how to have such a universe yet explain the observed effects.