MOPECCA – does the nature of quarks indicate/demonstrate that it is the boundaries of PA, and their abutments which determine the properties of Qnots?

This thought was prompted by wondering how the entanglements of PA(strong|colour) with PA(electro/magneto) can produce fractional electric charges.

Well the fractional charges of quarks may only be a result of needing to allocate net positive or net neutral charge amongst the proven grouping of three quarks per stable hadron – ie proton or neutron – and a net negative charge to the electron. The MOPECCA takes protons, neutrons, and atomic nuclear coalitions of these the be Qnots of entangled PAstrong, PAelectro, PAmag, PAweak, and PAvac. Electrons are taken to be Qnots of PAelectro, PAmag, PAweak, andPAvac only.

The tripartite nature of protons and neutrons per QM are attributable to the strong colour force/s of quantum chromo dynamics (QCD). These seem to be taken as ontological variations which are given and not otherwise explained.

The MOPECCA allows that the strong(green), strong(blue), and strong(red) components are orthogonal modes of oscillation manisfested by PAstrong because it has the fastest intrinsic speed of propagation.

Keep in mind

1. the MOPECCA assertion that “nothingness” is just a concept with no actual instantiation and, that
2. each PA is its own unique manifestation of the two opposite directions of bigwards and smallwards which are motions occurring at a unique rate intrinsic to each respective PA.

These give us the basis for understanding that tubes of each PA, where constrained by being entangled/Qnotted with at least one other PA, can sustain all manner of intrinsic resonant oscillations. The strong and weak nuclear forces are described by QM as ‘short range’ forces, whereas the electromagnetic force and gravity are described as, potentially at least, reaching to infinity. The MOPECCA on the other hand describes

• PAstrong and PAweak as each being unitary but with vastly different internal speeds of propagation, whereas
• PAelectro and PAmag are everywhere entwined which enforces an intrinsic chirality to their combinations and a fundamental direction to each in relation to the other, and
• PAvac which is also unitary but slower than all the others such that its filamentery tubes are much more easily disrupted and disconnected than the others.

Note that this idea of disconnections of PAvac should not be thought of as a cutting or chopping, although that in effect is what the outcome is like. Rather it should be seen as differences of resonant ocsillation frequencies such that the faster PA’s manifest as “stronger” forces which cause PAvac to seem to shrink back from certain encounters with other PA and to reconnect with itself when the Qnot of faster PA has passed by. The paradigm for this would be the passage of an EM photon from one part of the universe to another. It is the ‘unzipping’ of PAvac in front of the photon and PAvac reconnection behind it which governs the speed of passage of the Qnot on its journey.

PA insides versus boundaries

To be parsimonious in the way advocated by William of Occam it is reasonable to assume that each different PA, as a manifestation of existence per se, need only differ from any other in one significant feature. The MOPECCA takes this to be the intrinsic speed of propagation of disturbance through the PA in question. It considers that “c” the so-called speed of light, is the relevant speed of causality of PAvac, and that each of the other PA has a different intrinsic speed. These different speeds of propogation of disturbance are taken to be the causes of the different strengths of the fundamental physical forces and that c is the slowest of them all making gravity the weakest force. Occam’s Razor also provokes the MOPECCA to assert the simplest conceivable set of fundamental attributes for PA such that for and within each and all of them there are just two ‘directions’: bigwards and smallwards. It seems feasible that bigwards might have no limit other than encountering a boundary at which the PA abuts another PA. Smallwards is what occurs then until the smallest/thinnest possible instance of the PA is reached at which, the MOPECCA assumes, some sort of ‘bounce’ occurs.

Strings, filaments, tubes

The reason for speaking of “tubes” of PA is that, in order for each different PA to remain connected with every other instance/part of itself – which is a foundation of the MOPECCA – it is necessary that instances of the very smallest possible extent of each respective PA are only transient. A way to understand this is to note that such a region of the PA is effectively a boundary in every direction except where it is immediately connected with two neighbouring regions. It is as near to being a mathematical point as is possible for that PA. As such, if it cannot bounce into bigwards, it seems that disconnection must occur.

The thinking here is somewhat similar to, and much inspired by, that proposed by Gerard t’Hooft in his essay Time, the Arrow of Time, and Quantum Mechanics. In that paper he considers the fundamental nature of space-time to be analogous to the famous _Game of Life_ computer program of John Conway, but in 3D. I must admit that I was only transiently (grin) able to understand (at least some of) Gerard t’Hooft’s reasoning about strictly deterministic Planck level quantum life histories, and how this obviates the dire paradox of the so-called “delayed choice” version of quantum non-locality. Fortunately the MOPECCA is not beholden to non-locality as such because c is taken to be the topmost speed only of changes and disturbances of the vacuum. Another deep question I would put to Gerard t’Hooft is: Why should the whole universe apparently be subject to just one “clock”?

This question is relevant because the way the Game of Life works is that each update of the situation for each cell – which is based on the number of full or empty cells immediately adjacent to it – requires that a stored memory matrix containing the whole game ‘board’is sequencially analysed and the outcome for each cell is written into a second separate memory matrix. Only when the whole of the new matrix has been filled with cell outcomes can this new arrangement be displayed. Obviously that cannot be how the real world works! (One could argue that this necessity for the running of simulations is a decisive argument against”Matrix” (the movie) type conceptions of reality.)

Of course Gerard t’Hooft’s conjecture is not a simulation but involves an intrinsic universal oscillation of space-time on the scale of the Planck length for every pointlike volume of space-time such that Game of Life type rules of absolute existence determine what happens next at each location. Thus his conception relies on the fact that non-existence entails its own negation as does the MOPECCA. He however assumes that each such point oscillates between existence and potential non-existence with the actual outcome each time rigidly determined by the limited number of possible conformations adjacent to each point. From this he argues that regular structures and patterns of evolution will occur spontaneously in 3D/4D as happens in the 2D board of Game of Life. And that is a very neat idea!

Meanwhile, for the MOPECCA, it seems to imply that each smallest possible stable region of a PA must be adjacent to at least three others and maybe the minimum number is four or even higher than that. This is needed to ensure that any boundary region is adjacent to at least one completely “internal” region of the PA. How big such an internal region must be in order to balance the contraction of adjacent boundaries could potentially be another variable attribute of PA.

Surface tension versus expansion

The challenge for the MOPECCA is to minimise untestable assumptions. Because of this, further speculation about the internal nature of PA is not wise. It does seem however that if bigwards and smallwards are to be coherent concepts then the smallest dimension of a stable and enduring region of any PA would have to be the cross section of a tube where the diameter is at least three of four times the smallest possible manifestation of “smallwards” applicable to that PA.

One simple analogy for visualising how this works is the surface tension of water. Smallwards is a much more drastic attribute for a surface than the Van de Vals and other short range interactions of the electrons, etc in water molecules but the net effect must be similar. The extent to which this surface tension

MOPECCA – The importance of 3

The acronym is for Most Powerful Existential Conjecture Currently Available. Hopefully this will encourage someone or more people to take its refutation as a real challenge! This is the only way it can evolve from mere conjecture to hypothesis , let alone theory.

From the point of view of MOPECCA the number 3 is fundamentally important because this is the minimum number of connections to a PA node. (Mathematicians call conections of this sort ‘edges’.) A network of course can have nodes where more than three edges meet. If we think of a fish net, tennis net, or netting type fences, it is more common to have nodes of four edges meeting but this is because each node as such is made where two lines or wires are looped or knotted  around each other and/or welded together and each one leaves the node in a different direction from that in which it entered. In the simplest cases it is just tension and/or stiffness of the material which keeps the node from slipping along one of the lines – eg Cyclone brand wire fencing. The complex networks of each PA however are composed of one substance/entity/existence so each node is in no way a discontinuity but, rather, an extension of the whole.

3 way nodes as vectors

If we conjecture that all PA are ontologically unique but similar to PA-vac (our vacuum), in each manifesting:

• the direction of smallwards at their respective boundaries, and
• the direction of bigwards away from their boundaries, ie everywhere else within it, and that each has
• its own characteristic speed of motion in either of these directions – analogous to the maximum speed  “c” of PA-vac, and for each there is
• a characteristic smallest possible distance for each – analogous to the Planck length of PA-vac, then

it is reasonable to consider that each such smallest filament (AKA edge) of any PA is effectively a minimalistic tube of smallwards-moving boundary surrounding a bigwards moving-interior.

The MOPECCA already conjectures, heretically in this day and age, that for each PA the speed of propagation of influence or movement is different and the speed of causal propogation in PA-vac “c” is slower than the analogous speed in each of the other PA. In fact it seems reasonable that the maximum speed for each other PA is tightly related to the relative strength of the force associated with it in quantum mechanics (QM).

If we couple this with the realisation that nothingness is a concept only – because viewed ontologically there can never be any persistent manifestation of it – then the movement smallwards of a PA at (every part of) its boundary seems to allow for the idea of an intrinsic oscillation being manifest wherever any PA is confined to the state of a stretched  filament as just described.

Furthermore, because we have the clear example of intrinsic direction along filaments of electromagnetic force, we can accept that for some PA at least a filament of the smallest possible size will manifest an intrinsic motion of its boundary in one direction or the other along its length! And this is where the three edges of the simplest node of such a PA impose an intrinsic imbalance:  it will be one of the following situations: two going ‘in’ towards the node and the other going out, or two going ‘out’ and the other going in, or three going out. (Three “going in” does not fit with the concept of the central cross section of a 3 way node being greater than the smallest of its connected edges.) This would imply that each simple 3-edge node of such a PA will be either net outwards or net inwards; in other words the node will be either positively or negatively “charged”.

A question arises here. On the one hand the conjecture of PAelectro nodes being either net positive or net negative due to the status of their 3 edges lends itself to accounting for electric charge, for electrons anyway. On the other hand the fractional charges of quarks, where the Up quark has a +2/3 charge and the Down quark a -1/3 charge, need explaining!

This discussion is continued, and the question of fractional charges answered at another page: MOPECCA – Can a neutron reasonably be considered as a proton plus an electron?

MOPECCA – a dedication

Judith May Browning 1950-2015 was the person who, back in the mid ‘eighties first challenged me with the thought that: The opposite of ‘something’ is not ‘nothing’ it is ‘something else’. Being a bit of a slow-learner, it took me about three decades to actually understand the full implications of this realisation. Eventually however, “the penny dropped” and the MOPECCA has since coalesced around this understanding.

The concept of nothingness, I now think, is an anthropocentric conceit. It seems to imply that if we cannot imagine something then it can’t possibly exist. Given that the concept arose as a rhetorical toy long before the modern concept of vacuum was discovered I think it came about as an adjunct to the concept of a supernatural Supreme Being.

I say anthropocentric rather than anthropic because the latter term only says that we see and discover that which is as it appears from our particular viewpoint because it is what it is – _already_, so to speak. We happen to be what we are and where we are and therefore the pre-existing great It appears to us as It does. Anthropocentric on the other hand says that we are special and therefore where we are is ‘special’ in some way that needs further explaining. In short, ‘anthropocentric’ implies everything is ‘about us’ whereas, in a 13.8 thousand million year old universe, we are just lucky observers who happen to have evolved and who are still learning, very slowly, how to properly take responsibility for our own actions.

The MOPECCA is anthropic only. It quite naturally implies that ‘our’ universe is unique only in the sense that it is one amongst potentially infinitely many others which are probably all different and probably very few are connected with each other.

The realisation that nothingness is basically a self contradictory fantsy implies that the vacuum of our universe has properties which constrain, if not actually define, what can happen here. The MOPECCA currently asserts that _c_ is a property of the vacuum (PAvac) which manifests as the fastest speed at which any other PA can disturb PAvac. Occam’s Razor type reduction implies that _c_ is not necessarily a limit applicable to any other PA within or to itself. Insofar as each PA is a unique network of being, inter-penetrated and/or entangled, with each other PA out to and beyong the ‘edge’ of our universe, the phenomenon of spooky action at a distance is explained quite naturally.

Why is it so?

Saying that something came out of nothing and arguing that this needs a “creator” or there happened the Big Bang and the rest is cosmic pre history just begs the question of existence.
IE “Where did Big G come from?” or “What caused the Big B” are valid enough questions but the better question is What is the universe? and Why/How does it continue to exist?

What provoked this?

Someone whose opinion I had come to respect in these matters [Khush Singh] told me that, contrary to my assumption, my assertions about what I call Primary Absolutes [PA for short] make me a Platonist. I was surprised to realise this is true. Previously I expressed only limited esteem for what I thought to be “Platonist” ideas, particularly the claims of Mathematical Ontologists, as I call them, so I now feel pressed to make haste and clarify what I am on about. It’s not that I have any particular worry of being labelled Platonist if it is the truth, but I want to make clear why I think it wrong to consider numbers and other mathematical objects as the foundation of existence. In my opinion [IMO from now on], we cannot take existence per se for granted. In fact, as I will explain below, we should be prepared to accept that what we normally consider to be existence is only the emergent properties of existences [plural!] which are permanently beyond our knowledge. Happily, IMO anyway, this does not imply anything ‘supernatural’ in the common or garden sense or an ecclesiastical sense.

Why “Primary Absolutes”?

About 30 years ago I came across the idea that our consciousness – which for these purposes I always define as rememberable awareness – is what it is like to be a model of self in the world. I learned this from Susan Blackmore in her article Waiting for Consciousness – Science tackles the self, in New Scientist Magazine, April 1989. For me this idea has evolved into UMSITW [pronounced “um-see-two”] my acronym for updating model of self in the world. The relevance here is that I became convinced that my mind, conscious and unconscious which includes every bit of my subjective experience, is all and always actually inside my skull but [usually] about everything outside it.

This means our normal experience of being here now is intrinsically paradoxical because we normally act as if we are naive realists due to that being the default state that Darwinian evolution has left us with. Not a problem until you start questioning how it all works. Elsewhere I will deal with how brain and mind relate; here it is enough to say I decided that the strangeness and wonderfulness of the world described by Quantum Mechanics [QM] and Einstein’s relativity are features of the natural world, the Great It, and not merely products of the human mind.

I encountered the thinking of mathematical ontologists sometime after the turn of the century, hearing about Max Tegmark’s ideas now and then and then actually reading on-line discussions by Bruno Machal and occasionally dialoguing with him. I always felt provoked to try and imagine some way to combat their apparent belief that: before all else, numbers are. My gut instinct says they are begging the very question of existence per se.

Slowly my view has evolved to see:

• My knowledge of my existence is a synthetic a priori – because its denial involves a self contradiction
• Similarly, denial of the existence of a universe is also self contradictory and this carries with it the implicit acceptance of basic not-self, as a bare minimum, but also the recognition that denial of the existence of others and of factual knowledge about the rest of the world is basically stupid. Yes, those of a trolling disposition who really don’t get out enough may like to assert solipsism as their solace and from their own perspective it is logically possible but, that way madness lies. And them denying my existence is also rude and oppressive to me.
• Multiplicity is therefore also necessarily entailed in the very concept of universe which is just as well because the scientific revolution has provided us with the Copernican/Hubble expanding universe, the table of elements and a rigorous basis for understanding and dealing with potentially millions of different kinds of molecules, evolutionary biology, Einsteinian relativity, and quantum physics.
• Quantum physics and relativity theory have both been found to correctly predict measurable features of the ultimately small and the astronomically big and/or ultimately fast respectively and are considered to be very robust mathematical descriptions of their respective domains.
• QM and relativity theory do not tell us why the laws they describe are as they are and not just a little bit different or totally other than what they are.

Primary absolutes [PA] in more detail

PA provide me with a way of relating to what QM seems to describe without needing a degree in higher mathematics. I believe PA also help in visualising some aspects of relativity theory. I was pleased recently to come across a theoretical paper: Quantum Quandaries: A Category-Theoretic Perspective explaining how physicists and mathematicians are exploring new formulations for describing the QM world.
There is also a website showing the author John Baez’s earlier detailed presentation of his ideas. I skimmed through several pages of the pdf file but chugging through the web site was easier – only relatively speaking. I was struck by how some of what the author describes has at least a smidgeon of similarity to what I keep trying to imagine.

Thus – reasonably conjectured potential properties of PA so far include:

• Each PA exists in and of itself, is only itself and truly connected only to itself – as far as we can speculate – never mind purporting to know
• Each PA is different from each other, and at least some of them, do not merge with each other but meet [ie abut] at a mutual boundary
  • speculatively: it maybe some PA simply do not ‘recognise’ some others which would mean that for any two such PA to influence each other requires that they both influence or be influenced by a third PA which somehow makes them “adjacent” in some causally effective way
  • an occurrence of this sort might be part of the explanation of how dark matter can have such a profound gravitational effect on EM matter but be otherwise completely undetectable
• From our point of view each PA is eternal, but we can never know this for sure
• It is assumed each PA is not simply-connected within itself but every part must be connected to the rest of itself, [so its boundary with other PA is likely to be unbelievably complex].
  NB: a simply connected space – means that if a string were to connect any two points within it those two points could each be moved to anywhere that is also a point of the space and the string will still connect them and if those two points at any time should be at exactly the same place, the string can always be pulled in to itself become part of the point. So I am saying this is *not* the case for the PA underlying our universe.
• This last point above would seem to be a critical requirement if existence as such is not to be taken for granted – in the complete absence of any other assumption implying an absolute background. So ‘not simply connected’ means that PA are penetrated by regions of other PA such that all are connected to the rest of themselves at separate places. Thus the different PA are each like a different kind of holey cheese where the holes are all interconnected but the holes as such are not empty, they are made of other cheeses! From a simplistic point of view it might be said that PA as such form “strings”.
• From the above it is reasonable to assert that the word “exist” means something different – and absolutely so, in the case of each respective PA. [It’s a different kind of cheese!]

Nothingness, vacuum, or void

• True Void, AKA “Nothingness”, may be a PA whose occurrence is an emergent property of the existence of the other PA’s [but simply is where they are not]. It is possible to think of Nothingness also as a direction of “smallwards” in that where it occurs other PA may expand into it
• IF True Void is assumed to be the emergent result of the [presumably temporary] absence of other PA’s then it may reasonably be considered the only PA which retains its intrinsic nature when separated from other instances of itself. This may be a crucial insight into the way other PA may “lose” pieces of themselves or, much more speculatively, some pieces of a PA may change the way they are or become disconnected at one end whilst significant topological changes are happening
• However, if True Void is considered as the direction of “smallwards” then
  a/ it seems feasible that it may have a “smallest possible” limit, which would be the Planck length in which case it may be more like the other PA’s and had become entangled in the knots [Qnots] of others, and this may be what links what are taken to be particles-with-mass to space time, and
  b/ what is taken to be the ‘true vacuum’ may be the manifestation of two PA’s: Smallwards, as above, and “Bigwards”, AKA ‘Inflation’.
• A reasonable question arises then as to: What would be the boundary of these two PA’s? I have often wondered whether the [seemingly increasing rate of] expansion of the universe which is taken to be the result of “Dark Energy” may be something that operates on Dark Matter, not EM matter. Is Dark Matter composed of Qnots incorporating/entangled with the boundary of Bigwards and Smallwards and whatever boundaries are involved with the weak nuclear force?
• From the above: what we call our universe is in fact the emergent properties of the existences and boundaries of primary absolutes – PA.
• From the above it appears to follow that:
  • the archetypal feature of our universe is a virtual two dimensional surface – the boundary of two PA
    • [Note, this makes wave motion potentially more fundamental and/or more pervasive than particularity because the latter would seem to require loops and/or knots. ]
  • the boundary locus of 3 PA together is a line
  • possibly the maximum number of PA which can each be in contact with all the others is 5 [needs check via Google, Quora]
• Wherever two particular PA are in contact the properties of that locus of contact will be the same – [minimalism requires this] – but the presence of other PA abutted may change aspects of it
• Relative motion amongst the various PA will have a number of manifestations:
  • stretching and compressing of regions of boundaries
  • wave motions both sinusoidal and longitudinal
  • resonance of wave motions
  • disconnections/reconnections
  • rotation and twisting resulting in various consequences:
    • stretched associations of boundaries twisted into yarn-like and rope-like ‘filaments’ and ‘fibres’
    • coiling and coiling of coils
    • rotational oscillations such as repeated twisting, untwisting and over-twisting
  • disconnections/reconnections in combination with rotations, twisting and twisting oscillations would potentially result in the formation of
    • simple and complex loops including Moebius loopings
    • knots of twisted PA ropes
• The concept of friction does not apply to PA boundaries, not at the basic level anyway, because the boundaries as such are not a separate ‘thing’ from the PA.
• The speed of light is one limitation we know to apply to the interactions amongst PA boundaries because the testing of Einstein’s relativity theory and QM all confirm, as far as I know, that Einstein’s supposition that c is the fastest speed possible is correct; c applies everywhere
• The Planck length ℓ_P is another limit relevant here. It is derived from Planck’s constant h which relates the energy carried by a photon to its frequency. Basically the Planck length is a unit of length that is the distance light travels in one unit of Planck time, that is to say ℓ_P = 1.616255(18)×10⁻³⁵ m. This makes it about 10⁻²⁰ times the diameter of a proton, ie 20 orders of magnitude smaller!
  • Possibly this length may be related to the smallest of possible cross sections of the most tenuous of stable stretched PA.
  • Alternatively it may point to the smallest distance between nodes of a standing wave on a strand of twisted thread of PA boundaries where at least one of the boundaries embodies an aspect of EM force

Potential emergent properties

The dot points above are a work in progress.
Any bona fide suggestions for improvement will be gratefully received!

I feel reassured now that a coherent description is possible. The key would seem to be the fact that the Planck scale of things is umpteen orders of magnitude smaller than the smallest ‘particles’ of Quantum mechanics – quarks, electrons, neutrinos, photons, etc.
This belies the idea that something like the electron, for example, has no ‘internal structure’.

My intuition – based of course on profound ignorance and the wish for things to be as simple as possible – is to see what we call particles as structures of space time and not fundamentally different in nature from space time itself. Therefore even something as supposedly simple as an electron consists of a characteristic, and very stable, configuration of loops and folds of various PA boundaries.

• The connectedness of PA must rely on a process such that, as some strands of PA break, each broken end is far enough from the other end so that re-connection occurs and the speed of light limit prevents the “information” about the break travelling that distance before the re-connection has occurred
  • To be consistent here it seems that if a particular strand is broken at one end and no re-connection occurs then True Void replaces the lost piece as it retracts
  • How the surrounding PA strands and their boundaries react will depend on the existential nature of each.
• Motion, as such, is first and foremost the changing of the shape of boundaries which is primarily a stretching into one PA and then back into the other. These stretches and recoveries must usually travel as wave forms along the boundaries.
• Motion also includes rotation as well as translation so yarn-like twists of PA strands/strings would seem to be as likely to occur as not
• In the case of twisted ropes of PA stretched out and spiralled around one another there will be potential for
  • helical, sinusoidal, waves running back and forth along and around the ropes
  • various modes of standing waves of the whole ropes as both
    sinusoidal oscillations in a plane across the overall rope, and
    combinations of these just like, for example, a long playground skipping rope held at each end by different people
• Each of the basic forces of QM must involve at least one boundary ie pair of PA
  • a quandary for contemplation is the nature of the interrelationships amongst the various manifestations of strong nuclear force features and the electroweak force features
    • this is hard if one thinks of the electron charge as being something primary because why are quark electro charges either +2/3 or -1/3?
    • it is easier to suspect that the electron charge comes about as the complement of the combinations of quark charges ie:
      • the quark charges reflect the tripartite nature of quarks [AKA ‘colour charges’, etc], ie the numbers of PA boundaries incorporated, which ways they may be twisted, looped and knotted including how this may cause one PA rather than another one or more to be most on the ‘outer’ part of the rope
      • given that the net effect of quark trio electro charge is normally either +1 (= +2/3 +2/3 -1/3) or nil =-2/3 +1/3 +1/3) with the very rare antiproton being -1, it may simply be that electrons e^– are the most stable and simple complementary structure (ie -1/3 -1/3 -1/3) that survived the turmoil of the Big Bang!