Yesterday i read something that re-awakened my worst-case fears, regarding what we're aiming to achieve here...
But to appreciate my concerns, we must first go back to basics..
Allegations of confusing force and energy are a popular canard of the pseudosceptic crew, out here on the fringe. Yet we must also acknowledge that quantum mechanics does indeed explain force in terms of energy exchanges.
The class of particles known as 'elementary bosons' are the carriers, or 'mediators', of (it is believed) all four fundamental forces (this is what's 'elementary' about them). Hence, photons and virtual photons mediate the EM force, W and Z bosons mediate the weak nuclear force, gluons, the strong force, and, provisionally (they've yet to be experimentally confirmed), gravitons (or some similar particle) would mediate the gravitational force.
This lower-level particle zoo doesn't exactly supercede nor contradict the higher-level models, wherein EM force is a relativistic effect between charges in motion, gravity is a curvature of spacetime, and nuclear transitions are governed by probabilities of the wavefunction, etc.. Rather, they form a parallel realm of understanding, and are actually essential in reconciling everything else together; the layers of our universe can be built up from a series of branching dichotomies, each substrate dependent upon the level below.. so, in the first instance, there's only two types of particle in the universe: fermions, and our aforementioned bosons.
This is a perhaps surprising base level of simplicity underlying something so complex as a universe.. just two types of particle? Really? Yet this is the inescapable conclusion and consequence of something called the Pauli exclusion principle.
The principle delineates fermions from bosons in terms of a property called 'spin'. Spin can be thought of as ambient angular momentum. It's not momentum in the classical sense, being independent of mass, however it is like mass in that it, too, is a fundamental property of particles, along with charge etc. It comes in units of h-bar (derived from Planck's constant), and is apportioned between particles in either full or half measures, thus all of the most fundamental, basic, particles are fermions, and are so designated by virtue of having half-spin values. So, first off, we might start with electrons, the elementary units of charge, which all have half spin. This spin has dimensions and direction, and this is why we have paired orbitals or 'shells' surrounding atomic nuclei - an 'up' spin electron pairs most comfortably (ie. assumes a minimal energy state) alongside a 'downspin' electron. They're both identical, but their orientations are flipped relative to each other - they're oriented in opposite directions. It is also intriguing to note that one complete revolution in this spin plane requires 720° of rotation in our traditional 3-space...
It might also be noted at this point, if only as an aside, that there's an apparent paradox here in defining electrons as the fundamental units of charge - certainly, they're elementary charge carriers from our perspective, and there is no known way an electron can be dissassembled into constituent parts. Yet, despite this, charge is also a common property of other fundamental particles, especially other fermions like the quarks - which themselves, cannot be broken down into simpler parts, and which definitely aren't made of electrons. How, then, can the electron be the exclusive arbiter of charge when charge per se is also common to particles not made of electrons? Dig deep enough into the standard model, and the cracks start to appear in the whole artifice.. there can be no paradoxes, and yet the whole shebang is derived from first principles and substantiated by concrete experiments as far as is currently possible. The point is, simply, that when we get to the edge of what's known, there's a daunting precipice of unknown unknowns before us... wherein charge can somehow be more fundamental than its supposedly elementary carrier particle, just for example..
But i digress...
So, we have fermions, and bosons. If we go back in time to the earliest moments of the universe, at the very first instant matter and energy could be differentiated, there is nought but fermions and bosons; specifically, a quark-gluon plasma.
So, what is this Pauli exclusion principle, and what's spin got to do with it?
We've noted that fermions are distinguished by having half-spin values, (.5, 1.5, 2.5 (hypothetically) and so on), and accordingly, bosons have whole-number spin values, AKA 'integer spin'. So the venerable photon, for instance, has a spin value of 1. But what do these values actually mean, in practice? This is where the Pauli exclusion principle comes to bear: integer spin particles can all occupy a shared quantum state. This means the activity and evolution of any number of them, can be mashed together; they can all be made coherent and described by the same shared wavefunction. Lasers and masers are one such example of this - the quantum states of many disparate photons are being corralled into a unified superposition from all possible states.
Fermions however, with their half spins, are fundamentally incapable of attaining these superposition states - they simply cannot be squashed together. Squeeze atomic matter together with enough force, and electrons will merge with protons to produce neutrons before they merge with other electrons (this is where neutron stars come from).
But besides forming 20km-wide neutrons in space, this Pauli exclusion principle affords fermions certain other possibilities - for instance, if we force two up-spin or two down-spin electrons together, against their mutual repulsion, they'll eventually merge to form a boson - how's that for a get-out clause? They're only dissallowed from occupying superpositions because they have half-spins, but if, say, two up-spin electrons are forced together and allowed to form a stable state, they'll pair up to combine their two half-spins into a new particle having spin 1 - effectively, jumping the exclusion barrier and forming a boson instead. An example of this type of phase-transition is Cooper-pairing in low-temp superconductivity.
Elementary bosons, however, are not and cannot be divided into fermions - they're fundamental building blocks in and of themselves, born from the vacuum.
The point of this briefest foray into the underbelly of the standard model is to drive home the fact that the universe we see around us - all of the solid matter - is made up of fermions, particularly the quark family of baryons, hence we can call all the visible stuff 'baryonic matter', whereas all of the forces acting between this stuff, along with the light we see emanating from it, is made up of bosons.
In a nutshell, fermions are what it is, and bosons are what it's doing.
So putting all of this into concrete examples, consider a simple magnetic interaction, wherein two magnets attract together, then are drawn apart back to their starting points.
The force pulling them together is a 'flux' of particle exchanges - this boson flux, between fermions (the magnet's polarised electrons), is what the magnetic field is. The force being manifested within the field is made up of real energy exchanges, where virtual photons are popping out of the vacuum and interacting with the orbital electron charges, swapping units of angular momentum with them. This ambient momentum from the vacuum has a positive or negative sign, depending on the direction of travel with respect to the force vector. So when the magnets are being mutually drawn together, they're exchanging positively-signed angular momentum with the vacuum, and when we draw them apart the sign flips to negative.
Hence for one complete interaction like this, we have exchanged equal proportions of both + and - signed momentum with the vacuum - the interaction has been symmetrical in both classical and quantum domains.
Also, note well, that these virtual photons do NOT travel between electrons - their directions, for the fleeting instant of their lives, are completely random - so they don't fly between other particles like little messengers on a mission. Rather, they appear spontaneously out of the vacuum, before disappearing again just as suddenly, within an infinitesimally short duration. Magnets don't 'radiate' virtual photons, they merely co-opt the flux of virtual particles that is ordinarily broiling out of the vacuum all around us, everywhere, always. The vacuum has a non-zero potential energy, and by virtue of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, there's a non-zero chance of a photon of any wavelength appearing anywhere at any time... hence they do, and will interact accordingly with any charges they encounter. Hence, the mediator is really the vacuum itself, rather than the individual particles enacting the trades.
There's another way to illustrate the point i'm driving at - that baryonic matter doesn't interact with itself, not directly anyway, but rather via the mediation of ghostly virtual bosons fizzing in and out of the vacuum all around us - and it's known as Faraday's paradox.
Faraday's paradox is a simple experimental setup, wherein we have a disc magnet, polarised axially with a pole on each face, as well as two copper discs of the same dimensions as the magnet.
So we make a magnet sandwich, with the magnet nestled inside the two copper discs, and attach this to a metal co-axle shaft, allowing us to spin the magnet and discs independently from each other. Finally, we attach the terminals of a multimeter to either end of the shaft, or perhaps a light electric load such as a bulb or DC motor.
We can then make three observations:
1) when the copper discs spin, but the magnet is held stationary, current flows.
2) when the magnet spins, but the copper disks don't, no current flows.
3) finally, when all three spin together, current again flows.
It puzzled Faraday and it at first seems just as puzzling to us - surely condition 2 is perfectly analogous to condition 1, since motion is merely relative, no? And condition 3 makes no sense at all, since nothing's moving relative to anything else - all three elements are at equal speed!
The resolution of the paradox, is the realisation that the magnetic field is, however surprisingly, NOT a property of the magnet supposedly possessing and causing it!
Magnets don't have magnetic fields? How can this be? Evidently, the magnetic field has its own reference frame, independent of everything else we can see going on around it - and it is, of course, that of the vacuum activity. Current flows when a conductor moves in a magnetic field, but the 'stuff' of that field is the vacuum's activity, and it is motion relative to it that induces the flow of electrons.
Charges like electrons don't interact directly with each other, instead they react with the vacuum, which reacts back at them. The vacuum is the intermediary interlocutor in everything! The vacuum's incessant hive of activity is the glue cementing every atom and molecule of our bodies together! This vacuum activity is a part of us, a part of everything, that everything depends upon.
Before moving on to more weighty matters, then, let us just note one more implication here - what would be the consequence of an asymmetric magnetic interaction - ie. one where more or less positive or negative-signed ambient momentum is exchanged with the vacuum, leaving it with a deficit and us with a nice bonus? What might this change, in the greater balance of things?
Presumably, such asymmetric interactions are not common in nature (indeed most folk believe they're impossible, if mistakenly). But considering that energy is, ultimately, conserved this way, we've altered a property termed 'homeostasis' - a dynamic equilibrium, a stable balance of rates of change. What if the measured value of the fine structure constant, alpha, is a direct function of this homeostasis between the vacuum potential and the thermodynamic realm? Would the unconstrained adoption of magnetic OU - perhaps beyond Earth's bounds, into the future - eventually cause a perturbation in this homeostasis, ie. a drift in the local value of alpha?
If the local flux of vacuum-to-thermodynamic energies (or vice versa) were to change significantly from the global (ie. system-wide) balance, we might envision this reduced alpha to propagate outwards from its sphere of origin, thus initiating an effective inflow of energy as the global system settles into a new equilibrium. What might be the repercussions of such regauging transitions? What might be the local consequences of a reduced magnetic constant? Straight away we would have to conclude that the magic numbers for stable nuclei will be transposed - stuff that was stable will begin decaying, and vice versa. Matter will initially inflate, before the influx of more energy from outside the depleted zone causes a subsequent re-compression. Perhaps such waves will be so small as to be unnoticeable, but then again maybe the tiniest wobble could have reverberations beyond the catastrophic...
So, basically, all of the above points apply equally to mass / gravity / inertial interactions. An asymmetric inertial interaction, in particular, would seem to have similar regauging implications for the Higgs field...
There was a time, before the physics were better understood, when there was a non-zero risk that a fission explosion could run amok, perhaps even igniting the atmosphere or engulfing the whole planet. Only later did we learn that such fears were ungrounded. But the work was done, such that the risk had been virtually eliminated prior to the first atomic tests.
Out here on the fringe however, we have no such certainties. It's just the nature of the field that those most likely to strike OU are the least qualified or even motivated to ascertain its safety.
I've been voicing this concern for some years now, and doubtless i'm trying to count angels (or demons!?) dancing on the head of a pin.
A hypothetical pin, in most folks' reckoning.
Still, the reason i've been motivated to churn all of this up again is an article that appeared in yesterday's PhysOrg, entitled "Collapse of the universe is closer than ever before":
http://phys.org/news/2013-12-collapse-u ... loser.html
..which describes one apparently widely accepted angle on precisely what may result from a local depletion of the strength of the Higgs interaction, and thus the effective value of mass.
Previously, i'd only really been concerned about accidentally wiping out the earth, or perhaps the local stellar neighborhood, at worst.
However, it now appears that i wasn't nearly pessimistic enough.
The theory posits a spectacular phase-transition, massively boosting the value of eventually all mass in the universe, in an expanding bubble racing outwards from the vicinity of the initial deficit. Essentially, such a deficit would act as the seed for a kind of system-wide and unstoppable crystalisation process. Quote:
Consider the Fermi paradox, the riddle all the missing alien civilisations, and in light of that variable in the Drake equation denoting the likelihood of a sufficiently advanced intelligence destroying itself; and it all gels with the anthropic principle, of why the constants have their measured values..."The phase transition in the universe will happen if a bubble is created where the Higgs-field associated with the Higgs-particle reaches a different value than the rest of the universe. If this new value results in lower energy and if the bubble is large enough, the bubble will expand at the speed of light in all directions. All elementary particles inside the bubble will reach a mass, that is much heavier than if they were outside the bubble, and thus they will be pulled together and form supermassive centers."
Maybe we dodged a bullet, with Bessler keeping schtum and no one sussing it for three centuries..
Maybe any given universe only lasts so long, until a single sentience grows 'smart' enough to inadvertently destroy it?
Maybe the fundamental constants are amenable to life precisely because the universe is simply waiting for us to light the touchpaper on the next cycle?
Maybe the interwebs was the last piece of the jigsaw and the final nail in our collective coffin? There's basically F/A chance of establishing that OU won't destroy the universe before the 'net allows us to promulgate its global and irreversible uptake.
Are we earnestly racing blithely towards the means of our own demise? Doesn't the mere possibility seem like a preposterous, irrelevant distraction? Surely OU means truly FREE energy, conservation of energy will be disproven, there'll be no unforeseen consequences, and we'll all live happily ever after in a booming free energy economy of infinite exponential growth?
Again, you've gotta ask yourself if any of us are really qualified to be bringing such responsibilities to bear... the Manhattan project this is not..
So what can we do, as the would-be custodians of such responsibility (whether we even believe it or not) to address what clearly remains a decidedly non-zero risk? What could we do, once the genie's out of the bottle?
The last thing we want to do is bury OU - perhaps humanity's (and maybe life in the cosmos's) best guarantee of long-term survival. But the very VERY last and Final Thing We Want To Do is make everything everywhere two orders of magnitude heavier, either. Dilemma, eh..?
In the parable of Chicken-Licken, the eponymous hero gets eaten by Fox-Lox before he can tell the king the sky is falling in. Thus we never learn whether or not the next day the king visited the wood, whereupon a 15lb acorn fell on his head, killing him outright...
Finally, if you found any of these thoughts sobering, or even made it this far, you're probably not drinking enough. Either way, procrastination may be the only thing keeping us all alive... Hic...
Nite nite fellow universe killers, and sweet dreams... xxx
