My name is Everett Daniel Arey Jr., and I have a hypothesis I’d like to share with you. By you, I mean everyone who I can possibly reach. I intend to send this message out to a wide array of different forums and individuals. My hypothesis consists of a new idea regarding the relationship between space-time and matter. It first occurred to me several years ago, when I was watching a video documentary about black holes. I was considering the popular mystery of what happens to matter when it is drawn into the incredible gravitational conditions of a singularity. I was approaching this question in a very casual and simplistic way, so I thought of it like this: Gravity tends to crush things together. Things crushed together tend to condense. Gases condense into liquids. Liquids condense into solids. So what does matter condense into when its gravitational attraction grows to such phenomenal levels as it does in a black hole? Is there another state of matter beyond solid? Suddenly I recalled a piece of information I had once read in a book called “The Holographic Universe.” It mentioned a peculiar incident in which an expert mathematician had attempted to calculate how much energy was contained within the substance of space itself. Surprisingly, the mathematical equations resulted in a calculation predicting that there was more energy contained within a single cubic inch of empty space than there was in all the atomic matter of the entire Milky Way Galaxy. This was generally assumed at the time to be some kind of bizarre and extreme miscalculation, and was therefore ignored. However I found myself linking the results of this strange mathematical incident to my ponderings about possible alternative states of matter and almost instantly I was struck by a fascinating idea. Now bear with me for a moment. What if the substance of space-time is actually super-condensed matter? I considered this for a moment before running into the obvious question: If space-time were actually a phase of highly condensed matter, then how could less-condensed states of matter exist within it? In response to this, I found myself thinking about how water can move through certain kinds of rock and how forms of energy like heat and sound are regularly conducted through even solid materials. I then considered the possibility that all atomic matter in the universe might actually be in a process of being conducted through the intensely condensed substance of space-time. This concept was obviously a bit overwhelming at first because of how radically counterintuitive it seemed, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to make sense. I began to consider that the force of gravity might actually be some kind of counterbalancing interaction between dimensional materials and atomic matter, like water meeting resistance while passing through a mildly permeable rock, or electromagnetic energy causing structural changes to a form of metal while conducting through it. There are many other thoughts and ideas which have spun off in my head from this hypothesis about space-time and matter, but I won’t go into any more of that. I just figured it was about time I shared this main idea through some kind of widely distributed format. I’ve been keeping it to myself all this time because I’m not a professional physicist, and I just assumed for a long time that no one would listen to me. Nowadays I don’t care as much about such things, so I decided that I might as well try to make some kind of contribution to the world if at all possible. It may be that this hypothesis of mine doesn’t actually work and that I’ve only succeeded in wasting a lot of time, but I won’t deny that I hope someone out there with the technical skills to test my idea will take a genuine interest in it and that I’ll someday soon be informed that “Everett’s Hypothesis” has emerged through critical trials as “Everett’s Theory.”
Everett, It's a nice idea. One problem that occurs to me is how the normal matter percolating through the condensed matter that makes up space would be prevented from also condensing. My concern is with the forces acting on the matter. We know of only 4 fundamental forces of nature. If gravity affects both normal matter and the supercondensed space matter equally then it would seem to me that the ordinary matter should be "sucked in" to the condensed space matter very rapidly. Do you have a suggested solution to that problem?
Mass has two properties which are everywhere linked -- inertial properties and gravitational properties. Since the proposal of empty space offering no resistance to movement avoids any test of inertial mass the only sensible test of the idea is via empty space's gravitational mass. In Newtonian gravity, the dynamics of the solar system are the same if empty space is vacuum or a dense medium that offers no resistance to the motions of stars and planets. But Newtonian gravity isn't perfect. The dynamics of the solar system in Relativistic Gravity (General Relativity) are very different from the case of vacuum solution if empty space was a dense medium. Much less dense than your proposal, studies of dynamics of clusters of galaxies and cosmology have revealed first dark matter -- clumpy stuff than isn't everywhere to the same extent -- and anti-gravitational "dark energy", evenly distributed and currently indistinguishable between a non-zero cosmological constant in the theory of gravity or a completely unknown type of stuff without discernible preferred frame of rest or variation in density. (In both cases "dark" means invisible and currently unknown, not black in color.) Also, in math and science, noone names their own ideas after themselves because real mathematicians and scientists are trained to avoid confirmation bias and investing their own name (and therefore ego) into their ideas is a losing proposition for science as a whole.
from the OP: "“The Holographic Universe.” It mentioned a peculiar incident in which an expert mathematician had attempted to calculate how much energy was contained within the substance of space itself. Surprisingly, the mathematical equations resulted in a calculation predicting that there was more energy contained within a single cubic inch of empty space than there was in all the atomic matter of the entire Milky Way Galaxy. This was generally assumed at the time to be some kind of bizarre and extreme miscalculation, and was therefore ignored. " That would be my reaction too, if I had heard of this before, but now I ask the two prior respondents if they knew of this claim and why it is not false? - Is possible?
This appears like the suggestion of deSitter et al. that there is a lower state of the vacuum than what we presently experience. I have not seen any calculations as to the energy difference between them though. That's what the supernova through experimentation at fermilab thread had been about, asserting that a high energy collision might trigger an instability, collapsing our current vacuum into a lower-state one, spreading outwards at c.
I would like to recommend the above as rather refreshing to see. Congrats Everett! Generally we have these alternative theory pushers, entering a forum, with the following approach... This is the way it is! I have evidence to support it!... The incumbent model is wrong! You are all sheep! etc etc etc
Good observation. Yes, energy is the ability to do work and conserved. If no such "lower state" of the vacuum exists, then one can assign any potential of unusable energy to each cc of vacuum you desire. (The zero of potential energy is always an arbitrary choice.) I wonder does Paul's old thread, in which deSitter energy played a central role - how the LHC, Large Hardon Collider should never be turned on as it would "punch hole" in the vacuum and let the deSitter energy flow into our universe and either destroy it or cook everything in the universe to a much higher temperature than tungsten's boiling point? Actually, Paul was suggesting the current vacuum is the lowest state, but a much higher one can fill with energy if the LHC, "connects" us to it. We have lost the long thread on cold fusion - perhaps Paul's thread is gone too? (That is the archive's self-protect feature? - long thread, dormant for a month, dies?)
Hello Everett, welcome. Hope you'll stick around for the discussion. A better word than "substance" might be "essence" since even energy isn't normally identified with "substance". Keep in mind that the states of matter are macro-scale phenomena that have more to do with the energy of chemical bonds vs the energy of the ambient, conveyed by pressure and temperature. At the macro scale, it's fair to say that space is the absence of matter, even when we only mean it's devoid of macro scale objects. From this we get the idea that it's a true void or vacuum, exhibiting no temperature or pressure of its own. And the only energy it contains is that which coming from all the emitters in the cosmos, not space itself. That's the macro view, which obviously changes at the quantum scale. Another thing to keep in mind is that the opposite of a condensation -- an expansion -- is underway. You might want to consider how the two ideas relate to each other. After all, given that space and time are created by this, it would suggest something quite different than condensation is the causative agent. Another thing that comes to mind is that space and time are relative. Thus we note that space is "compressible and expandable" (depending on how you might define those terms) as a matter of something akin to an optical illusion -- something that bears little resemblance to the macro-mechanical ways compression acts on the four states or phases of chemical matter. Particles are themselves entirely uncanny by macro scale standards - it may seem more appealing to think of them as "nano-solids" but this falls apart when we note that they are closest in properties to waves. Here I would subscribe to the idea that something more like expansion, pulling those waves apart, so to speak, would be more likely to produce the macro-scale void we typically think of when we say "space". Once we get down to treating matter as particles, and particles as specific kinds of energy waves -- then it seems that all of reality is something quite different than the ideas we get at the macro scale as Earthlings. It seems to involve the marking off of boundaries around particularly energetic vibrations, which then become encapsulated by those boundaries in ways that defy our macro scale experience. Thus we can't construct a basketball sized machine that generates the orbitals of an atom. It's the breakdown of some of those barriers, as occurs in stars, which accounts for the superdense matter in their cores. There you see not the creation of space, but the liberation of energy in the form of copious radiation, the unfathomably huge explosions of supernovae, and the trails of debris they scatter across the cosmos. After that they leave objects so dense they tend to form black holes. And there, even space could best be described as being "crushed" rather than "created". If there is a fifth state of matter which is the result of exotic gravity, I would think it would be defined as the state of particles that make up a neutron star.
Isn’t Bose–Einstein condensate sometimes referred to as the fifth state of matter? Leonard Susskind said something interesting. He said, that we tend to think of black holes as very exceptional, very unusual, not the norm, but very-very exotic. Well, if you take all the bits of information that exists within the universe, then for every 10 billion bits of information 9,999,999,999 of them are found on the surface of black holes. Only 1 bit out of 10 billion is an ordinary bit of the kind that you experience. All of the rest of them are plastered on the surface of black holes. So, in some sense, all most all of the information in the universe is in the form of black holes and we are the exceptionally undensed, (is that even a word?), rarefied, loosely knit together things.
Here is a physical experiment you can do that can explain where the energy within empty space is hidden. Say we have a wave tank with wave generators at each side of the tank. These wave generators are adding energy to the water as waves. Say we set up the two wave generators so the crests from one wave generator is timed to overlap the troughs created by the other wave generator. Since the waves are equal and opposite, they will add and cancel. There will be stillness in the middle of the tank, even with this energy input. The energy is hidden in the stillness and will appear invisible, but it is there. To prove the energy is there but hidden from sight, we will add a partition to the center of the tank to disrupt the wave addition. The partition will cause the crests and troughs to separate on each side of the partition, The energy will reappear as the water rises and falls from the stillness. It is only a question of the making the correct partition in space. I suppose one could argue that matter is a form of partition gaining its energy from the hidden waves of space as they rise from the stillness around this partition.
Actually, I don't think that's right. In this case, if there is never any actual movement of the water then there is no energy stored in it from the wave generators. You cannot set up a standing wave pattern that has only nodes and no antinodes.
You are of course correct and wellwisher is just ignorant. One can consider the same tank with still water in it as having one standing wave #1 with its crests where standing wave # 2 has its valleys. I.e. no need for the wave generators. Wellwisher thinks there is an infinite amount of energy available from still water. As I have read many of his posts, I'm not surprised with this one.
