Cosmologic philosophy: a non-local universe (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, July 06, 2023, 19:13 (296 days ago) @ David Turell

Based on quantum theory:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25834460-800-rethinking-reality-is-the-entire-un...

"These are the layers of reality, and this is how physicists understand the universe: by breaking everything down into its constituent parts, an approach known as reductionism. As a particle physicist, I grew up on this philosophy. It has brought physics a long way – it is how we built our current picture of matter and its workings, after all. But now, with further progress stalling, I am convinced we need to go about things differently from here.

"Rather than zooming ever further inwards, I think we need to zoom out. In doing so, we may see that everything there is, including such seemingly fundamental things as space and time, fragment out of a unified whole. This might sound like philosophy or mysticism, but it is in fact a direct result of applying quantum mechanics to the entire cosmos. When you do that, you realise that the universe isn’t fundamentally made of separate parts at all, but is instead a single, quantum object.

***

"In the 1930s, when Enrico Fermi worked out how a neutron decays into a proton and spits out an electron – known as beta decay – he did so only by considering the electrons, protons and neutrons involved. Only decades later, when physicists discovered an intermediary particle called the W boson, did they realise there was a deeper layer of interactions playing out at tinier scales.

"From today’s perspective, Fermi’s description is the prime example of an effective field theory (EFT), a mathematical framework that allows us to divide reality into different size scales and analyse them separately. In this way, physics behaves like a set of Russian Matryoshka dolls, where you can understand the outer doll without knowing anything about the dolls inside.

***

"Both supersymmetry and the extra dimensions idea predicted the discovery of new physics at the LHC, in the form of either new supersymmetric particles or excitations in quantum fields that would run around the curled-up dimensions. So far, however, the LHC has found the Higgs boson and nothing else. The possible solutions to the fine-tuning problem have become increasingly fine-tuned themselves, because the LHC keeps ruling out hiding places.

"In short, particle physics is in crisis. This is why a small group of theorists, including me, has recently started to explore another, radical approach – one that proposes an alternative to reductionism as we know it. Instead of treating the different energy scales of the universe separately, it treats them as if they all have some bearing on each other.

***

"While studying black holes, Cohen and his colleagues calculated that there is a maximum length, or minimum energy, at which the standard model stops being valid. Beyond it, gravity takes over. It might seem intuitive that if there is a lower limit, there must also be an upper one. But crucially the researchers found that these seemingly unrelated cutoffs aren’t independent of each other. In other words, the physics at these vastly different energy scales seems to be related – a phenomenon dubbed UV/IR mixing.

***

"It is a bold idea, but I suspect entanglement causes UV/IR mixing. If so, there are huge implications for understanding reality at its most fundamental. If entanglement can be applied to the entire cosmos, then instead of everything being made of smaller and smaller pieces, it would turn the universe into “a single, indivisible unit”, in the words of quantum pioneer David Bohm. All objects in existence would be encoded in a universal wave function, a mathematical entity that describes a single, entangled state.

"Soon, we may know if this matches up with reality. Cohen and his collaborators suggested UV/IR mixing would affect the interaction of electrons or subatomic particles called muons with electromagnetic fields, showing up as a mismatch between the standard model’s predictions and measurements. And the phenomenon may crop up in other processes, too. One example my colleagues and I are currently exploring relates to neutrino masses. Unlike any other particles, the almost non-existent masses of the elusive neutrinos can be entirely generated by virtual particles, according to some models. This means they should be more sensitive than other particles to any UV/IR mixing effects.

"If we do find evidence to support this idea, it would dramatically alter the way we conceive of the cosmos. It would mean we could not only see a world in a grain of sand, as the poet William Blake once said, but we could also quite literally see the entire universe in its tiniest pieces and particles. While this might sound like just a different way of going about physics, it is much more than that. I believe that we are on the way to a completely new understanding of how the universe is put together."

Comment: this is an old idea presented by Nadeau and Kafatos in their 1999 book: "The Non-local Universe." It took this long for science to catch up.