Category: Cosmology

From Subatomic Rings to Starquakes: A Saturday Morning Leap Into Relativistic Phase Space

If you have been following my recent papers, you know that the RealQM framework has spent a lot of time down in the subatomic dirt. We have been building computational models of neutrons, protons, and multi-alpha networks (like Carbon-12 and Oxygen-16) by ditching the abstract “strong nuclear force”. Instead, we have been calculating everything from first principles: classical electrodynamics, relativity, and non-linear phase-locking via the Neumann mutual inductance tensor.

Our open-source solver on GitHub has done an excellent job showing how a bound neutron stabilizes when a nearby proton locks its dynamic phase drift.

But this Saturday morning, over a cup of coffee and a cigarette, things took a rather unexpected turn. During a rapid brainstorming session with Gemini, we asked a wild question: What happens if we take this exact same electrodynamic phase-locking engine and scale it up from a 16-body atomic network to an astronomical 105710^{57}-body network? In other words: can we use the new computational approach for modeling nucleons to model someting like a neutron star?

So we jumped straight from the micro-cosmos to the macro-cosmos—and the result is a brand-new paper on ResearchGate and a new functional 3D simulator: the RealQM Neutron Star Engine.

Embedding the Kuramoto Network into Schwarzschild Spacetime

In our nucleon models, the Zitterbewegung current loops spin at a bare intrinsic frequency ω0\omega _{0}. But when you pack 105710^{57} nucleons into a city-sized sphere under extreme gravitational compression, General Relativity enters the chat.

According to the Schwarzschild metric, local proper time ticks slower the deeper you go into a gravity well. This means a neutron star is not a collection of identical clocks. Gravity introduces a steep radial frequency gradient:

ωi(r)=ω01−Rsri\omega _{i}(r)=\omega _{0}\sqrt{1-\frac{R_{s}}{r_{i}}}

Our core engine couples this GRT time dilation directly into a macroscopic Kuramoto phase-velocity equation:

dθidt=ω01−Rsri−∑j=1NKij(|r→i−r→j|)sin⁡(θi−θj−αij)\frac{d\theta _{i}}{dt}=\omega _{0}\sqrt{1-\frac{R_{s}}{r_{i}}}-\sum _{j=1}^{N}K_{ij}(|\vec{r}_{i}-\vec{r}_{j}|)\sin (\theta _{i}-\theta _{j}-\alpha _{ij})

Where KijK_{ij} is our cubic near-field coupling 1/r31/r^3, and αij\alpha _{ij} is a geometric phase-twist representing the intense internal magnetic fields of a magnetar.

The Ultimate Star Collapse Stop-Mechanism

This architecture yields a beautiful alternative to mainstream physics. Standard theory claims neutron stars are held up by abstract “quantum degeneracy pressure” born from the Pauli Exclusion Principle.

The RealQM math offers a cleaner, electrodynamic alternative: as gravity tries to crush the star, it forces the spatial separations to plummet. Because our coupling tensor has a cubic singularity, the phase-locking strength KK explodes non-linearly. It completely overpowers the desynchronizing effects of GRT time dilation.

The entire star is violently forced into a rigid, macroscopic quantum attractor basin. To crush the star a single millimeter further, gravity must supply enough mechanical work to overcome the absolute global phase entrainment of the entire unified macro-nucleon network. The collapse cleanly freezes without ever needing non-classical forces.

Renders and the Superfluid Decoupling Paradox

We wrote a vectorized Python engine to simulate this lattice and project the phase velocity variance across 10 concentric layers onto a 1D terminal map [Core --------> Surface].

When we run the simulation, the star handles the 60 Hz GRT time-dilation gradient through high-energy relativistic phase-sloshing (rendered as ~). But at Step 12, we trigger a Global Crust Snap—a starquake that mechanically severs the coupling across 168 nodes in the outermost shell.

You would expect chaos, right? Instead, the output map gives us this:

Step 11 | R: 0.0164     |  59.22     | [~~~~~~~~~~]
[GLOBAL CRUST SNAP] The entire outer layer has fractured! (168 nodes broken)
Step 12 | R: 0.0407     |  60.28     | [~~~~~~~~==]
Step 13 | R: 0.0277     |  59.16     | [~~~~~~~~==]

The outer shell instantly locks into a quiet, perfectly uniform state (==)!

Note: The bracketed output [Core --------> Surface] slices the star’s crust into 10 concentric layers, tracking phase velocity variance using three quick character markers: (1) = : Synchronized base. Perfect local phase-locking acting as a unified clock; (2) ~ : Relativistic sloshing. Normal active phase-waves managing the steep GRT gradient; (3) * : Topological avalanche. Catastrophic coupling failure and high-velocity phase chaos.

This is a gorgeous mathematical paradox. Because those fractured nodes sit in a thin concentric shell at an equal distance from the origin, they share the exact same GRT time-dilation factor. The moment the fracture cuts them loose from the internal, phase-twisted torques of the core, they drop their phase friction entirely. They surrender completely to their shared background metric clock, ticking at identical speeds. Their local velocity variance collapses to zero.

This gives us a first-principles computational analog for superfluid crust decoupling. Mechanics, geometry, and electrodynamics explain why layers slip past each other without friction.

Check out the Code

Of course, a toy model has limitations (like grid-binning symmetry and phase-frustration simplifications), which I have openly detailed in the paper’s Annex. But as a proof-of-concept, it shows that the RealQM framework scales beautifully from the smallest structures in the universe to the largest, densest clusters in deep space.

In any case, you can judge for yourself: the short working paper (4-5 pages only) is live on ResearchGate, and you can clone the GitHub repository, set the random seed, and watch the starquake decouple the outer atmosphere yourself.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

Post Scriptum on the Neutron Model itself:

— After wrapping up the neutron star paper and publishing it, I submitted the whole RealQM particle model to DeepSeek for a final sanity check. It singled out something that has bedevilled all recent papers, indeed: how to explain the neutron’s coherence fraction — or rather, its decoherence — from first principles?

The answer turned out to be surprisingly elegant. The neutron is not a mysterious object with a “magic number” η=0.676. It might just be a simple two-shell oscillator — an outer positive shell and an inner negative shell — whose geometry is determined by a variational principle. The free neutron minimizes its electromagnetic self-energy, which naturally places the inner shell at 0.478 fm and the outer shell at 0.841 fm. That ratio gives exactly η=0.676.

When a proton comes along, its field tilts the energy landscape, pulling the inner shell into full phase alignment. The energy released during that transition is the deuteron’s binding energy: 2.22 MeV, matching experiment to 0.3%.

No free parameters. No fitted constants. Just geometry, electrodynamics, and the variational principle. DeepSeek did the math; I provided the physical intuition. Gemini helped with visuals and critique. The result is a complete geometric model of the neutron — from its metastability to its binding energy.

The paper is now up on ResearchGate: A Variational Principle for Neutron Coherence. It closes a loop I’ve been chasing for months.

And yes — this is what a Saturday morning looks like when you’re deep in the RealQM rabbit hole: the morning becomes an afternoon—but I will not let it become an evening, too. 🙂

Architectural Update: The Non-Post Pages Have Been Re-Written!

If you take a look at the navigation menu at the top of the site, you will notice things look a bit different. Indeed, today I worked with Google Gemini to completely overhaul and modernize all the core, static “non-post” pages of this blog.

For years, these pages served as an externalized, historical log of my daily research, thoughts, and mathematical frustrations. While honest, they had grown into dense, lengthy, and sometimes overly technical walls of text that were difficult for a casual reader to navigate.

We have swept the old clutter away. The new pages are streamlined, text-optimized, and free of dense formulas or graphs. They are designed to act as a clear, conceptual onboarding ramp for the RealQM (Realist Quantum Mechanics) framework.

Here is your quick roadmap to the newly redesigned directory:

  • About: The manifesto detailing the return to physical, deterministic equations of motion, and how human intuition paired with AI acceleration broke the research bottleneck over the last two years.
  • Matter: Matter as localized, self-locking wave oscillations of charge—explaining the electron as a 2D ring current, the proton as a 3D spherical squeeze, and our latest geometric modeling of light nuclei (deuteron and helium).
  • Motion: The relativistic corkscrew. How a moving particle’s velocity transforms its shape into a 3D helix, locking the Compton, de Broglie, and step wavelengths into the pure, classical geometry of an ellipse.
  • Atoms: Demystifying the spectral lines of the hydrogen atom and the Lamb shift. No vacuum ghosts required—just a layered hierarchy of mechanical orbit-to-spin and spin-to-spin magnetic couplings.
  • Light: Moving past wave-particle duality to model photons and neutrinos as localized, propagating electromagnetic wave-packets.
  • Philosophy: Grounding the math in reality using Occam’s Razor, H.A. Lorentz’s instinct for visualization, and the crucial distinction between statistical unpredictability and indeterminacy.
  • Sociology: A brand-new section deconstructing the institutional path-dependency of modern physics. It explains why massive academic facilities are structurally incentivized to invent an abstract “Standard Model Zoo” rather than accept that good old classical physics works just fine.

Whether you are a long-time reader or just dropping by from ResearchGate, these updated pages now offer a clean, cohesive bird’s-eye view of how geometry completely replaces the abstract mysticism of orthodox quantum mechanics.

Take a look around, enjoy the new layout, and let me know what you think! 🙂

Reclaiming Meaning Through Motion: Why realQM Doesn’t Do “Quantum Gravity”

I have just updated and uploaded Version 2 of my paper, The Geometry of Stability and Instability: From Action Closure to the Collapse of Structure, to ResearchGate. This version includes a brand-new Annex IV that I spent the last few days co-developing not with ChatGPT but Google’s Gemini AI platform. It addresses two very specific points that I hope will clarify my position on the current state of modern high-energy physics.

1. Gravity Is Context, Not Content (The Non-Problem of Unification)

This blog’s comment section frequently attracts well-meaning (and occasionally outright eccentric) pitches regarding “Grand Unification Theories” or the quantization of space at the Planck scale. Let me make the realQM position explicitly clear so we can save ourselves some comment space: We do not do “quantum gravity” here because it is a category error.

If you follow the pure, realist line of general relativity, gravity is not a physical “force” mediated by an exchange particle (the hypothetical graviton). It is simply the non-Cartesian metric manifestation of localized energy densities warping physical space.

  • Electromagnetism is the content—the real, localized field and charge oscillations that make up matter.
  • Gravity is the context—the geometric curvature of the space in which those oscillations exist.

To think about “gravitons” or “unifying” this spatial curvature with the electromagnetic force is a harmless mind exercise, but it remains a mathematical fiction. Forces do not “merge” at the Planck scale; rather, the geometric distortion of space simply catches up to the sheer intensity of the ultra-compressed electromagnetic field stress.

2. A Living Document of AI-Human Collaboration

This update also marks another nice experiment in human-AI dialogue on what physics as a science could or should be all about. Indeed, the original paper was written in June 2025 in a back-and-forth dialectic with ChatGPT (in its 4o version, at the time). Returning to it a year later (June 2026), I worked with Google Gemini to integrate our latest breakthroughs on 3D wavefunctions and a heuristic geometric proof capping particle generations at three.

Rather than rewriting the past, I chose to preserve Version 1 intact on ResearchGate. Version 2 therefore acts as a transparent, layered history of our thinking, demonstrating how generative tools can be used not to generate “slop,” but to rigorously sharpen physical clarity and mathematical architecture.

So, space and time remain robust concepts at all scales. That’s what Einstein and H.A. Lorentz and the modern thinkers (as opposed to post-modern thinkers) told us all along. Let’s leave the mysticism behind and stick to what we can visualize: real fields, real geometry, and real motion.

Lost in Math?

[Pre-scriptum (May 2026): This blog post grew out of a broader reflection that has since taken a more structured form. Prompted in part by the critical perspective of Sabine Hossenfelder, I have developed these ideas further in a short paper—Physics Beyond Prediction: On Beauty, Meaning and the Interpretation of Theory—which revisits the distinction between theory, calculation, and explanation, and asks what may still be missing from our current understanding of “good physics.”]

I finally got around to reading Sabine Hossenfelder’s ‘Lost in Math‘ (2018).

It fully deserves its praise. The book is, as the reviewers write, accessible, well-informed, and engaging—at times even genuinely funny. The structure, built around interviews with leading theorists, gives it both breadth and credibility. It is, without doubt, one of the better popular accounts of modern theoretical physics.

It also felt familiar.

Hossenfelder and I belong to roughly the same generation. As teenagers in the 1980s, we were fascinated by the same questions: What is the Standard Model really about? Where did it come from? What problems did it solve that even Albert Einstein or Max Planck could not? And what new questions did it open?

And then, of course, the next layer: why do we need theories beyond it—string theory, supersymmetry—if the Standard Model already works so well? What are these theories trying to explain that the Standard Model cannot?

And what should we make of the experimental side of things? From the discovery of the Higgs boson to the evidence for dark matter, dark energy, and gravitational waves—what do these findings actually mean?

Hossenfelder chose to pursue these questions within academic physics. I did not. I studied economics, but continued to explore physics as a personal project—especially after 2012, when the Higgs boson was announced. By then, I had grown dissatisfied with popular science accounts and felt the need to understand the mathematics itself.

And yet, after working through the math, I found myself asking a different kind of question: not whether the equations work, but what they mean.

It is here that Hossenfelder’s book, for me, remains incomplete.

Beauty, Truth—and Something Missing

The central argument of Lost in Math is well known: modern theoretical physics has been led astray by an overreliance on aesthetic criteria—symmetry, elegance, mathematical beauty—at the expense of empirical grounding.

That critique is compelling, and I largely agree with it.

But it seems to stop halfway.

While Hossenfelder questions the role of beauty, she does not fundamentally question the underlying framework itself. The Standard Model and its extensions remain, in her account, the unquestioned language in which physical truth must ultimately be expressed.

What is largely absent is a deeper discussion of physical interpretation.

The Question of Meaning

Let me be more concrete.

The book does not attempt to explain why the strong force could not be understood in more classical terms, for example as some form of electromagnetic interaction arising from internal charge dynamics.

It does not address why abstract quantum numbers—color charge, flavour, isospin—should be regarded as physically compelling, rather than as mathematical constructs that work but lack intuitive grounding.

Likewise, the weak force appears mainly as part of a formal structure, without much discussion of what it might represent in more tangible terms—such as the distinction between stable and unstable particles.

And perhaps most strikingly, the book does not engage in any depth with the meaning of the most fundamental relations in physics: the quantization expressed in the Planck relation, or the significance of mass-energy equivalence. These are presented as known facts, not as conceptual puzzles.

None of this is a flaw in the usual sense. It is simply not the book Hossenfelder set out to write.

But it is the book I was hoping to read.

Old Physics, Reconsidered

So where does that leave us?

In my own work, I often find myself returning to what many would call “old physics”: Maxwell’s equations, together with relations like Planck–Einstein relation and mass–energy equivalence.

This may seem old-fashioned. Perhaps it is.

But I am increasingly convinced that the real challenge is not to extend the mathematical formalism, but to understand what the existing formalism is telling us about physical reality.

From that perspective, the problem is not only that modern physics may have followed beauty too far. It is also that it may have drifted too far from meaning.

A Different Kind of Dissatisfaction

Hossenfelder ends her book on a note of optimism. Physics, she argues, will continue to make breakthroughs, and those breakthroughs will—once again—be beautiful.

I hope she is right.

But closing the book, I was left with a different thought. Not frustration, but a kind of clarity.

I realized that I am quite content continuing to explore these questions from a more classical, more intuitive starting point—even if that places me outside the mainstream.

Because, in the end, the question that still matters most to me is a simple one:

Not whether the mathematics works, but whether we truly understand what it is saying.

Post scriptum on the 2019 revision of SI units

Sabine Hossenfelder finished and published her book in 2018—just before the 2019 revision of the SI units.

I find myself wondering whether that revision is, in its own quiet way, more meaningful than many of the theoretical developments discussed in her book. Perhaps I am over-interpreting, but this is how it looks to me.

The revised SI system fixes exact numerical values for a small number of fundamental constants, such as the Planck constant, the elementary charge, and the speed of light. In doing so, it anchors our system of measurement in quantities that are directly tied to observation and experiment.

What is striking, however, is what it does not include.

There is no place in the SI framework for the various additional “charges” or quantum numbers that appear in the Standard Model—no color charge, no flavour, no isospin. These concepts may be essential within the mathematical structure of modern particle physics, but they do not enter the system that defines how we measure physical reality.

This is not a flaw in the SI system—quite the contrary. It is designed to remain independent of theoretical interpretation, and to rely only on quantities that can be operationally defined and reproducibly measured.

But that, in itself, is revealing.

It suggests a distinction between what we can measure directly and what we introduce as part of a theoretical framework. And it raises a question—at least for me—about how closely our most advanced theories are tied to physically meaningful quantities.

None of this diminishes the achievements recognized by a Nobel Prize in Physics or other honours—or the remarkable success of modern theoretical physics more generally. But it does serve as a quiet reminder that predictive success is not the same as final understanding.

If anything, the SI revision reinforces my own inclination to look for interpretations of physics that remain as close as possible to what can be directly measured and understood.

Post-Post-Scriptum on what I would like to write

Since writing this, I’ve taken a small but meaningful step: I uploaded a somewhat older manuscript and a newly written Chapter 2 to ResearchGate, as companion documents to my Radial Genesis paper (thoughts on cosmology).

It is not as a finished book — far from it — but as a snapshot of where my thinking currently stands. If I were to write a full-blown book about this, it would not be a technical monograph, nor a speculative manifesto. It would be something in between: a guided journey. I would try to connect three layers:

  • the physical intuition (what kind of universe are we actually living in?),
  • the mathematical structure (how symmetry, geometry, and scaling laws shape that intuition),
  • and the cosmological narrative (how a finite universe with emergent spacetime could naturally arise).

Most importantly, I would try to bridge particle physics and cosmology — not as separate domains, but as different perspectives on the same underlying structure.

The current documents are fragments of that attempt. For now, I will leave them as they are. Sometimes it is better to pause, let ideas settle, and return later with fresh eyes.

Post-post-post-scriptum

I couldn’t help thinking about this question: if the math in academic physics has become “ugly” or “lost,” then what would a beautiful alternative look like? Of course, ‘beauty’ (for me, at least) is a combination of simplicity and realism, and so that is my ‘RealQM’ world view. So I did a quick paper on ResearchGate on what Sabine Hossenfelder still thinks of as very ‘mysterious’ but which, to me, is easily explained in my ‘RealQM’ framework’:

  1. The “Ghost” Sector (Dark Matter): Two types of electromagnetism (defined by the fundamental asymmetry in Maxwell’s equations modern mainstream physicists completely ignore) share the same spacetime but do not interact otherwise. Because they share the same spacetime, they do interact ‘gravitationally’. Full stop: no further explanation needed.
  2. The Proton Radius: My two-line theoretical calculation gives a proton radius of 0.841 fm. Recent measurements clocked the proton at 0.8406(15) fm. What more confirmation is needed to urge physicists to think of particles as dynamical structures rather than abstract entities with lots of abstract or non-measurable properties?
  3. Needless to say: challenges are still out there, and AI baptizes one of them now officially as The Geometry Challenge or Proton Yarnball Puzzle.

Read this last (?) working paper on ResearchGate here.

Awe Without Illusions

Sagan, Einstein, and the Discipline of Wonder

An acquaintance sent me a video with her New Year’s wishes titled Carl Sagan’s spiritual side. I liked it and so I googled a bit further and found that many videos and transcripts now circulate online under the same heading. The framing is very well-intentioned but, in my humble view, also slightly misleading. It suggests a hidden dimension, a concession to religion, or a quiet retreat from science into something softer.

In fact, Carl Sagan was doing almost the opposite. He was insisting that science, taken seriously enough, already carries all the depth, humility, and emotional gravity that people often seek elsewhere.

What he offered was not spirituality instead of science, but a way of inhabiting science without becoming either cynical or metaphysical.

I. Spirituality without the supernatural

Sagan used the word spiritual carefully and sparingly. When he did, he did not mean belief in gods, hidden purposes, or unseen realms. He meant the human response to scale, structure, and intelligibility — the quiet shock of realizing what kind of universe we actually inhabit.

For Sagan, the universe did not become meaningful because it broke its own laws. It became meaningful because it has laws — stable, discoverable, astonishingly productive ones. The miracle was not that anything supernatural intervened, but that matter organized itself into stars, chemistry, life, and eventually minds capable of asking how any of this came to be.

That is not mysticism. It is respect for reality.

II. Wonder as a disciplined response

One of Sagan’s most enduring insights was that wonder is not something science erodes. It is something science trains. Childlike amazement fades quickly; informed amazement deepens with every layer of understanding.

A star does not become less beautiful once you understand nuclear fusion.
It becomes more demanding of your attention.

Sagan rejected the idea that seriousness requires emotional distance. He also rejected the opposite idea: that emotion should outrun evidence. His stance was subtler and harder to maintain. Feel deeply — but only about what you have taken the time to understand.

In that sense, wonder was not a mood. It was a discipline.

III. Einstein’s earlier echo

Long before Sagan, Albert Einstein struggled with similar language. When Einstein spoke of a “cosmic religious feeling,” he was not gesturing toward theology. He was pointing to an attitude: humility before order, gratitude for intelligibility, and suspicion of all claims to final certainty.

Einstein’s “mysterious” was not the supernatural. It was the fact that the universe is lawful at all — that abstract reasoning can reach into nature and come back with equations that work.

Sagan did not add much to this philosophically. What he added was clarity of expression, historical context, and a modern voice. If Einstein articulated the posture, Sagan taught generations how to stand in it.

IV. Meaning without guarantees

Neither Einstein nor Sagan believed the universe hands out meaning. The cosmos does not whisper instructions, assign destinies, or promise moral closure. That indifference is not bleak; it is simply honest.

Meaning, on this view, is not discovered like a buried artifact. It is constructed through attention, responsibility, and choice. We care not because the universe demands it, but because we can.

This is where both men quietly diverge from religion and from nihilism alike. There is no cosmic judge — but there is also no excuse to stop caring. The absence of guarantees does not empty life of significance. It places significance squarely in human hands.

That shift is not comforting in the usual sense. It is steadier.

V. Why this still matters

In an age saturated with noise, instant explanations, and synthetic forms of transcendence, Sagan’s voice still feels unusually calm. Not because he offered reassurance, but because he refused shortcuts.

Pay attention.
Learn carefully.
Stay curious.
Accept uncertainty without romanticizing it.

That combination — wonder without illusion, humility without surrender — is rare. It asks more of us than belief systems do. But it also gives more back: a way to stand in the universe without pretending it owes us anything.

Sagan’s spirituality, like Einstein’s before him, was not about escape. It was about orientation. About learning how to look outward without losing intellectual honesty, and inward without inventing metaphysics.

If that still feels “spiritual,” it is only because reality, understood clearly enough, is already more than enough.

Physics Without Consolations

On Quantum Mechanics, Meaning, and the Limits of Metaphysical Inquiry

This post is a rewritten version of an essay I published on this blog in September 2020 under the title “The End of Physics.” The original text captured a conviction I still hold: that quantum mechanics is strange but not mysterious, and that much of what is presented as metaphysical depth in modern physics is better understood as interpretive excess. What has changed since then is not the substance of that conviction, but the way I think it should be expressed.

Over the past years, I have revisited several of my physics papers in dialogue with artificial intelligence — not as a replacement for human judgment, but as a tool for clarification, consistency checking, and tone correction. This post is an experiment of the same kind: returning to an older piece of writing with the help of AI, asking not “was I wrong?” but “can this be said more precisely, more calmly, and with fewer rhetorical shortcuts?”

The result is not a repudiation of the 2020 text (and similar ones here on this blog site, or on my ResearchGate page) but a refinement of it.
If there is progress here, it lies not in new claims about physics, but in a clearer separation between what physics tells us about the world and what humans sometimes want it to tell us.

— Jean Louis Van Belle
1 January 2026

After the Mysteries: Physics Without Consolations

For more than a century now, quantum mechanics has been presented as a realm of deep and irreducible mystery. We are told that nature is fundamentally unknowable, that particles do not exist until observed, that causality breaks down at the smallest scales, and that reality itself is somehow suspended in a fog of probabilities.

Yet this way of speaking says more about us than about physics.

Quantum mechanics is undeniably strange. But strange is not the same as mysterious. The equations work extraordinarily well, and — more importantly — we have perfectly adequate physical interpretations for what they describe. Wavefunctions are not metaphysical ghosts. They encode physical states, constraints, and statistical regularities in space and time. Particles such as photons, electrons, and protons are not abstract symbols floating in Hilbert space; they are real physical systems whose behavior can be described using familiar concepts: energy, momentum, charge, field structure, stability.

No additional metaphysics is required.

Over time, however, physics acquired something like a priesthood of interpretation. Mathematical formalisms were promoted from tools to truths. Provisional models hardened into ontologies. Concepts introduced for calculational convenience were treated as if they had to exist — quarks, virtual particles, many worlds — not because experiment demanded it, but because the formalism allowed it.

This is not fraud. It is human behavior.

The Comfort of Indeterminism

There is another, less discussed reason why quantum mechanics became mystified. Indeterminism offered something deeply attractive: a perceived escape hatch from a fully ordered universe.

For some, this meant intellectual freedom. For others, moral freedom. And for some — explicitly or implicitly — theological breathing room.

It is not an accident that indeterminism was welcomed in cultural environments shaped by religious traditions. Many prominent physicists of the twentieth century were embedded — socially, culturally, or personally — in Jewish, Catholic, or Protestant worlds. A universe governed strictly by deterministic laws had long been seen as hostile to divine action, prayer, or moral responsibility. Quantum “uncertainty” appeared to reopen a door that classical physics seemed to have closed.

The institutional embrace of this framing is telling. The Vatican showed early enthusiasm for modern cosmology and quantum theory, just as it did for the Big Bang model — notably developed by Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest as well as a physicist. The Big Bang fit remarkably well with a creation narrative, and quantum indeterminism could be read as preserving divine freedom in a lawful universe.

None of this proves that physics was distorted intentionally. But it does show that interpretations do not emerge in a vacuum. They are shaped by psychological needs, cultural background, and inherited metaphysical anxieties.

Determinism, Statistics, and Freedom

Rejecting metaphysical indeterminism does not mean endorsing a cold, mechanical universe devoid of choice or responsibility.

Statistical determinism is not fatalism.

Complex systems — from molecules to brains to societies — exhibit emergent behavior that is fully lawful and yet unpredictable in detail. Free will does not require violations of physics; it arises from self-organizing structures capable of evaluation, anticipation, and choice. Moral responsibility is not rescued by randomness. In fact, randomness undermines responsibility far more than lawfulness ever did.

Consciousness, too, does not need mystery to be meaningful. It is one of the most remarkable phenomena we know precisely because it emerges from matter organizing itself into stable, recursive, adaptive patterns. The same principles operate at every scale: atoms in molecules, molecules in cells, cells in organisms, organisms in ecosystems — and, increasingly, artificial systems embedded in human-designed environments.

There is no voice speaking to us from outside the universe. But there is meaning, agency, and responsibility arising from within it.

Progress Without Revelation

It is sometimes said that physics is advancing at an unprecedented pace. In a technical sense, this is true. But conceptually, the situation is more sobering.

Most of the technologies we rely on today — semiconductors, lasers, superconductors, waveguides — were already conceptually understood by the mid-twentieth century and are clearly laid out in The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Later developments refined, scaled, and engineered these ideas, but they did not introduce fundamentally new physical principles.

Large experimental programs have confirmed existing theories with extraordinary precision. That achievement deserves respect. But confirmation is not revelation. Precision is not profundity.

Recognizing this is not pessimism. It is intellectual honesty.

After Physics Ends

If there is an “end of physics,” it is not the end of inquiry, technology, or wonder. It is the end of physics as a source of metaphysical consolation. The end of physics as theology by other means.

What remains is enough: a coherent picture of the material world, an understanding of how complexity and consciousness arise, and the responsibility that comes with knowing there is no external guarantor of meaning.

We are on our own — but not lost.

And that, perhaps, is the most mature scientific insight of all.

Stability, Instability, and What High-Energy Physics Really Teaches Us

One of the recurring temptations in physics is to mistake violence for depth.

When we push matter to extreme energy densities—whether in particle colliders or in thought experiments about the early universe—we tend to believe we are peeling away layers of reality, discovering ever more “fundamental” constituents beneath the familiar surface of stable matter. The shorter-lived and more exotic a state is, the more “real” it sometimes appears to us.

In my most recent RG paper (Lecture X1), I tried to step back from that reflex.

The starting point is almost embarrassingly simple:
stable charged particles persist; unstable ones do not.
That fact alone already carries a surprising amount of explanatory power—if we resist the urge to overinterpret it.

Stability as the exception, not the rule

If we imagine the early universe as a high-energy, high-density environment—a kind of primordial soup—then instability is not mysterious at all. Under such conditions, long-lived, self-consistent structures should be rare. Most configurations would be fleeting, short-lived, unable to maintain their identity.

From this perspective, stable particles are not “primitive building blocks” in a metaphysical sense. They are low-energy survivors: configurations that remain coherent once the universe cools and energetic chaos subsides.

Stability, then, is not something that needs to be explained away. It is the phenomenon that needs to be accounted for.

Colliders as stress tests, not ontological excavations

Modern facilities such as CERN allow us to recreate, for fleeting moments, energy densities that no longer exist naturally in the present universe. What we observe there—resonances, decay chains, short-lived states—is fascinating and deeply informative.

But there is a subtle conceptual shift that often goes unnoticed.

These experiments do not necessarily reveal deeper layers of being. They may instead be doing something more modest and more honest: testing how known structures fail under extreme conditions.

In that sense, unstable high-energy states are not more fundamental than stable ones. They are what stability looks like when it is pushed beyond its limits.

A simpler cosmological intuition

Seen this way, cosmogenesis does not require an ever-growing menagerie of proto-entities. A universe that begins hot and dense will naturally favor instability. As it cools, only a small number of configurations will remain phase-coherent and persistent.

Those are the particles we still see today.

No exotic metaphysics is required—only the recognition that persistence is meaningful.

Were the mega-projects worth it?

This perspective does not diminish the value of large-scale scientific projects. On the contrary.

The enormous investments behind colliders or fusion experiments—think of projects like ITER—have given us something invaluable: empirical certainty. They confirmed, with extraordinary precision, intuitions already sensed by the giants of the early twentieth century—figures like Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac, and Erwin Schrödinger.

Perhaps the deepest outcome of these projects is not that they uncovered a hidden zoo of ultimate constituents, but that they showed how remarkably robust the basic structure of physics already was.

That, too, is progress.

Knowing when not to add layers

Physics advances not only by adding entities and mechanisms, but also by learning when not to do so. Sometimes clarity comes from subtraction rather than accumulation.

If nothing else, the simple distinction between stable and unstable charged particles reminds us of this: reality does not owe us an ever-deeper ontology just because we can afford to build more powerful machines.

And perhaps that realization—quiet, unglamorous, but honest—is one of the most valuable lessons high-energy physics has taught us.

This reflection builds directly on an earlier blog post, “Stability First: A Personal Programme for Re-reading Particle Physics” (18 December 2025), in which I outlined a deliberate shift in emphasis: away from ontological layering and towards persistence as a physical criterion. That post introduced the motivation behind Lecture X1—not as a challenge to established data or formalisms, but as an invitation to reread them through a simpler lens. What follows can be read as a continuation of that programme: an attempt to see whether the basic distinction between stable and unstable charged particles already carries more explanatory weight than we usually grant it.

Post Scriptum — An empirical follow-up

When I wrote this piece, the emphasis was deliberately conceptual. The central idea was to treat stability versus instability as a primary organizing perspective, rather than starting from particle families, quark content, or other internal classifications. At the time, I explicitly presented this as an intuition — something that felt structurally right, but that still needed to be confronted with data in a disciplined way.

That confrontation has now been carried out.

Using the Particle Data Group listings as a source, I constructed a deliberately minimalist dataset containing only two observables: rest mass and lifetime. All a priori particle classifications were excluded. Stable or asymptotic states were removed, as were fractionally charged entities, leaving an unclassified ensemble of unstable particles. The resulting mass–lifetime landscape was examined in logarithmic coordinates and subjected to density-based clustering, with the full data table included to allow independent reanalysis.

The outcome is modest, but instructive. A dominant continuum of prompt decays clearly emerges, accompanied by only weak additional structure at longer lifetimes. No rich taxonomy presents itself when decay behaviour alone is considered — but the clusters that do appear are real, reproducible, and consistent with the intuition developed here and in earlier work.

This empirical annex does not “prove” a new theory, nor does it challenge existing classifications. Its value lies elsewhere: it shows what survives when one strips the description down to observables alone, and it clarifies both the power and the limits of a stability-first perspective.

For readers interested in seeing how these ideas behave when confronted with actual data — and in re-using that data themselves — the empirical follow-up is available here:

👉 Empirical Annex to Lecture X1 (Revisiting Lecture XV)
Structure in the Energy–Lifetime Plane of Unstable PDG Particles
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/399008132_Empirical_Annex_to_Lecture_X1_Revisiting_Lecture_XV_Structure_in_the_Energy-Lifetime_Plane_of_Unstable_PDG_Particles

Sometimes, the most useful result is not a spectacular confirmation, but a careful consistency check that tells us where intuition holds — and where it stops.

🧭 The Final Arc: Three Papers, One Question

Over the past years, I’ve been working — quietly but persistently — on a set of papers that circle one simple, impossible question:
What is the Universe really made of?

Not in the language of metaphors. Not in speculative fields.
But in terms of geometry, charge, and the strange clarity of equations that actually work.

Here are the three pieces of that arc:

🌀 1. Radial Genesis
Radial Genesis: A Finite Universe with Emergent Spacetime Geometry
This is the cosmological capstone. It presents the idea that space is not a stage, but an outcome — generated radially by mass–energy events, limited by time and light. It’s an intuitive, equation-free narrative grounded in general relativity and Occam’s Razor.

⚛️ 2. Lectures on Physics: On General Relativity (2)
Lectures on GRT (2)
This one is for the mathematically inclined. It builds from the ground up: tensors, geodesics, curvature. If Radial Genesis is the metaphor, this is the machinery. Co-written with AI, but line by line, and verified by hand.

🌑 3. The Vanishing Charge
The Vanishing Charge: What Happens in Matter–Antimatter Annihilation?
This paper is where the mystery remains. It presents two possible views of annihilation:
(1) as a collapse of field geometry into free radiation,
(2) or as the erasure of charge — with geometry as the by-product.
We didn’t choose between them. We just asked the question honestly.

Why This Arc Matters

These three papers don’t offer a Theory of Everything. But they do something that matters more right now:
They strip away the fog — the inflation of terms, the myth of complexity for complexity’s sake — and try to draw what is already known in clearer, more beautiful lines.

This is not a simulation of thinking.
This is thinking — with AI as a partner, not a prophet.

So if you’re tired of being told that the Universe is beyond your grasp…
Start here.
You might find that it isn’t.

—JL

🌀 Radial Genesis: A Universe That Grows from Within

What if space isn’t a container — but a consequence?

That’s the question I explore in my latest paper, Radial Genesis: A Finite Universe with Emergent Spacetime Geometry, now available on ResearchGate.

The core idea is surprisingly simple — and deeply rooted in general relativity: matter and energy don’t just move through space. They define it. Every object with mass–energy generates its own curved, local geometry. If we take that seriously, then maybe the Universe itself isn’t expanding into something. Maybe it’s unfolding from within — one energy event, one radial patch of space at a time.

This new paper builds on two earlier lecture-style essays on general relativity. But unlike those, this one has no equations — just plain language and geometric reasoning. It’s written for thinkers, not specialists. And yes, co-written with GPT-4 again — in what I call a “creative but critical spirit.”

We also explore:

  • Why the Universe might be finite and still expanding;
  • How a mirror version of electromagnetism could explain dark matter;
  • Why the so-called cosmological constant may be a placeholder for our conceptual gaps;
  • And whether our cosmos is just one region in a greater, radially unfolding whole — with no center, and no edge.

If you like cosmology grounded in Einstein, Dirac, and Feynman — but with fresh eyes and minimal metaphysics — this one’s for you.

🧠 Read it here:
Radial Genesis on ResearchGate

👁️‍🗨️ For context, you might also want to check out the earlier lecture papers:

—JL

🌀 A Bug on a Sphere — And Other Ways to Understand Gravity

I just published a new lecture — not on quantum physics this time, but on general relativity. It’s titled Lecture on General Relativity and, like my earlier papers, it’s written in collaboration with GPT-4 — who, as I’ve said before, might just be the best teacher I (n)ever had.

We start simple: imagine a little bug walking across the surface of a sphere. From there, we build up the full machinery of general relativity — metric tensors, covariant derivatives, Christoffel symbols, curvature, and ultimately Einstein’s beautiful but not-so-easy field equations.

What makes this lecture different?

  • No string theory.
  • No quantum gravity hype.
  • No metaphysical hand-waving about time being an illusion.

Just geometry — and the conviction that Einstein’s insight still deserves to be understood on its own terms before we bolt anything speculative onto it.

If you’ve enjoyed earlier pieces like Beautiful, but Blind: How AI Amplifies Both Insight and Illusion, or my more pointed criticism of pseudo-GUTs here, this one is part of the same lineage: a call to return to clarity.

📝 You can read or download the full lecture here on ResearchGate — or reach out if you want a cleaner PDF. — JL

Antimatter, dark matter and cosmogenesis

I used ChatGPT to push the math and logic of my ‘realist’ interpretation of (1) matter-antimatter annihilation and creation (the Dirac and Breit-Wheeler processes, respectively) and (2) dark matter and dark energy to its logical and philosophical limits. For those who do not like to read, I made two short audio videos as well: the one on my “mirror force” idea is here, and from there you can go to the other video(s) in the playlist. 🙂 The implications for cosmogenesis models are rather profound – it calls for another approach to explain any “Big Bang” that may or may not have occurred when our Universe was born – so that is something to explore in the future, perhaps.

New kaon decay modes?

As an amateur physicist, I get a regular stream of email updates from Science, Nature and Phys.org on new discoveries and new theories in quantum physics. I usually have no idea what to do with them. However, I want to single out two recent updates on the state of affairs of research which these channels report on. The first one is reflected in the title of this post. It’s on a very rare decay mode of kaons: see https://phys.org/news/2024-09-ultra-rare-particle-decay-uncover.html.

Something inside of me says this may lead to a review of all these newly invented conservation laws – combined with new ideas on symmetry breaking too – and/or new ‘quantum numbers’ that are associated with the quark hypothesis: I think everyone has already forgotten about ‘baryon conservation’, so other simplifications based on, yes, simpler Zitterbewegung models of particles may be possible.

The historical background to this is well described by Richard Feynman in his discussion of how these new quantum numbers – strangeness, specifically – were invented to deal with the observation that certain decay reactions were not being observed (see: Feynman’s Lectures, III-11-5, the (neutral) K-meson). So now it turns that certain decay reactions are being observed! Shouldn’t that lead to (future) scientists revisiting the quark/gluon hypothesis itself?

Of course, that would call into question several Nobel Prize awards, so we think it won’t happen any time soon. 🙂 This brings me to the second update from the field. Indeed, a more recent Nobel Prize in Physics which should, perhaps, be questioned in light of more recent measurements questioning old(er) ones (and the theories that are based on them) is the Nobel Prize in 2011 for work on the cosmological constant. Why? Because… Well… New measurements on the rate of expansion of the Universe as reported by Phys.org last month question the measurements which led to that 2011 Prize. Is anyone bothered by that? No. Except me, perhaps, because I am old-fashioned and wonder what is going on.

I get asked about gravity, and some people push particle theories to me talking about gravity. I am, quite simply, not interested. This ‘coming and going’ of the “cosmological constant hypothesis” over the past decades – or, should we say, the past 80 years or so – makes me stay away from GUTs and anything that is related to it. If scientists cannot even agree on these measurements, it is of not much use to invent new modified gravity theories fitting into ever-expanding grand unification schemes based on mathematical frameworks that can only be understood by the conoscienti, isn’t it?

It is tough: I am not the only one (and definitely not the best placed one) to see a lot of researchers – both amateur as well as professional – “getting lost in math” (cf. the title of Hossenfelder’s best-seller). Will there be an end to this, one day?

I am optimistic and so I think: yes. One of the recurring principles that guides some of the critical physicists I greatly admire is Occam’s Razor Principle: keep it simple! Make sure the degrees of freedom in your mathematical scheme match those of the physics you are trying to describe. That requires a lot of rigor in the use of concepts: perhaps we should add concepts to those that, say, Schrödinger and Einstein used 100 years ago. However, my own pet theories and recycling of their ideas do not suggest that. And so I really just can’t get myself to read up on Clifford algebras and other mathematical constructs I am told to study – simply because this or that person tells me I should think in terms of spinors rather than in terms of currents (to just give one specific example here).

I can only hope that more and more academics will come to see this, and that the Nobel Prize committee may think some more about rewarding more conservative approaches rather than the next cargo cult science idea.

OK. I should stop rambling. The musings above do not answer the question we all have: what about gravity, then? My take on that is this: I am fine with Einstein’s idea of gravity just being a reflection of the distribution of energy/mass in the Universe. Whether or not the Universe expands at an ever-faster-accelerating pace must, first, be firmly established by measurements and then, secondly, even then there may be no need for invoking a cosmological constant or other elements of a new “aetherial” theory of space and time.

Indeed, Einstein thought that his first hypothesis on a possible cosmological constant was “his biggest blunder ever.” While I know nothing of the nitty-gritty, I think it is important to listen to “good ol’ Einstein” – especially when he talked about what he ‘trusted’ or not in terms of physical explanations. Einstein’s rejection of the idea of a cosmological constant – after first coming up with it himself and, therefore, having probably having the best grasp of its implications – suggests the cosmological constant is just yet another non-justifiable metaphysical construct in physics and astronomy.

So, let us wrap up this post: is or is there not a need for ‘modified gravity’ theories? I will let you think about that. I am fine with Einstein’s ‘geometric’ explanation of it.

Post scriptum: While I think quite a few of these new quantum numbers related to quarks and – most probably – the quark hypothesis itself will be forgotten in, say, 50 or 100 years from now, the idea of some ‘triadic’ structure to explain the three generations of particles and strange decay modes, is – essentially – sound. Some kind of ‘color’ scheme (I call, rather jokingly, an “RGB scheme” – referring to the color scheme used in video/image processing) should be very useful: an electron annihilates a positron but an electron combines with a proton to form an atom, so there’s something different about these two charges. Likewise, if we think of a neutron as neutral neutronic current, the two charges “inside” must be very different… See pp. 7 ff. on this in my recent paper on multi-charge zbw models.

I was sceptical before – and I am still not a believer in the quark hypothesis – but I do think physicists – or, more likely, future generations of physicists – should get a better “grip” on these three different ‘types’ of electric charge as part of a more realist explanation of what second- or third-generation “versions” of elementary particles might actually be. Such explanation will then probably also explain these “unstable states” (not quite respecting the Planck-Einstein relation) or “exotic” particles. Indeed, I do not see much of a distinction between stable and unstable particle states in current physics. But that’s a remark that’s probably not essential to the discussion here… 🙂

One final remark, perhaps: my first instinct when looking at particle physics, was actually very much inspired by the idea that the quantum-mechanical wavefunction might be something else than just an EM oscillation. When I first calculated force fields in a Zitter electron, and then in the muon-electron and proton, I was rather shocked (see pp. 16 ff. of one of my early papers) and thought: wow! Are we modelling tiny black holes here? But then I quickly came to terms with it. Small massive things must come with such huge field strengths, and all particle radius formulas have mass (or energy) in the denominator: so more mass/energy means smaller scale, indeed! And I also quickly calculated the Schwarzschild radius for these elementary particles, and that is A WHOLE LOT smaller than the radius I get from my simple electromagnetic equations and the Planck-Einstein relation. So I see absolutely no reason whatsoever to think gravitational effects might take over from plain EM fields when you look at things at the smallest of scales.

But, then, who am I? I like to think I am not inventing anything new. I just enjoy playing with old ideas to see if something new comes out of it. I think I am fortunate because I do see a lot of new things coming out of the old ideas, even if there is little or nothing we can add to them: the old Masters have already written it all out. So, now I should stop chewing on these old ideas as well and conclude: if you want to read something, don’t read me or anything contemporary. Just read the classics! Many modern minds – often great mathematicians – tried or try to be smarter than Einstein, Lorentz, de Broglie or Schrödinger (I am deliberately not mentioning other great names): I think the more recent discoveries in physics and cosmology show they are not. 🙂

Note: Despite my recommendation not to read me, I did write another – probably more accessible – paper on a classical and straightforward geometrical explanation of the anomaly in the electron’s magnetic moment. Even if you do not like the explanation, I think it has a few interesting references to papers by contemporary academics that I find really interesting. 🙂

The metaphysics of physics: final thoughts

I wrote my last post here two months ago and so, yes, I feel I have done a good job of ‘switching off’. I have to: I’ve started a new and pretty consuming job as ICT project manager. 🙂

Before starting work, I did take a relaxing break: I went to Barcelona and read quite a few books and, no, no books on quantum physics. Historical and other things are more fun and give you less of a headache.

However, having said that, the peace and quiet did lead to some kind of ‘final thoughts’ on the ‘metaphysics of physics’, and I also did what I never did in regard to my intuition that dark matter/energy might be explained by some kind of ‘mirror force’: the electromagnetic force as it appears in a mirror image. Not much change in the math, but physical left- and right-hand rules for magnetic effects that just swap for each other.

You can find the results of that in a very concise (four pages only) paper on my ResearchGate site, and also in two lectures (each a bit more than one hour) on my YouTube channel. The first video focuses on ‘big questions’, while the second one talks about this ‘mirror’ force (I previously referred to it as a ‘anti-force’ but I realize that’s not a good term), and on how that would fit with Maxwell’s equations (including Maxwell’s equation written in four-vector algebra).

Have fun and keep thinking. Most importantly: keep thinking for yourself ! Do not take anything for granted in this brave new world. 🙂

[A]Symmetries in Nature

I find that just working off some notes from my tablet and talking about them works better for me than writing elaborate papers. Boileau: “Ce que l’on conçoit bien s’énonce clairement, Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.” I did five new lectures in just one week on my YouTube channel. Have a look at the last one: symmetries and asymmetries in Nature.

It takes an easy-to-understand look at CP- and CPT-symmetry (and the related processes that sometimes break these symmetries) by thinking about what particles actually are: not infinitesimally small, but charged oscillations with a 2D or 3D structure. We also revisit the inherent mass-generating mechanism, which explains all mass in terms of electromagnetic mass.

We talked about CP- and CPT-symmetries before – back in 2014, to be very precise – but then I did not know what I know now, and those older posts also suffered from the 2020 attack by the dark force. 🙂 Briefly, what you should take away from it, is that the most fundamental asymmetry in Nature is this: the asymmetry in the electromagnetic force or field itself. It is that 90 degree phase difference (or ‘lag’) between the electric and magnetic field vectors. That explains why mirror images cannot be real, and it also explains why some processes go one way only. So… Another mystery solved ! I call it “the fallacy of CPT arguments.” 🙂

Post scriptum: I also wrapped up my YouTube ‘Schrödinger’s cat is dead’ series. For those who do not like the theoretical aspects of all these things, have a look at the last one (on pair creation-annihilation and intermediate vector bosons), in which I discuss the two interpretations (mainstream versus my classical perspective) one can have when looking at this wonderful world. I wrote this comment on it, which is probably my farewell to this hobby of mine:

For those who struggle with this, the key to understanding it all, is to understand that the superposition principle works for fields, but not for charges. That is also the key to understanding Bose-Einstein statistics, Fermi-Dirac statistics and – at larger scales – the ‘real world’ Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics (which combine both). See: https://readingfeynman.org/2015/07/21/maxwell-boltzmann-bose-einstein-and-fermi-dirac-statistics/. Always do a good dimensional analysis of the equations: distinguish real physical dimensions from purely mathematical ones: do not add apples and oranges. Distinguish potential or field strengths from real forces and actual energy (a force acting on a charge over some distance). That is why charges should not ‘vanish’ in the analysis, and it is also why i*pi and -i*pi are not ‘common phase factors’ which vanish against each other (both are equal to -1, right?) in equations involving wavefunctions. A positive charge zittering around in one direction is not the same as a negative charge zittering around in the other direction. Neutral particles are either real photons (which carry no charge whatsoever) or, else, neutral matter-particles. Applying the saying that was looks and quacks like a duck must be a duck, we might say most of these neutral particles will look like ordinary matter. Some, however, will look like light-like or be photon-like because they travel at or near the speed of light (the orbital motion of the two charges has vanished and so there is zero angular momentum). That does not mean they are photons. Also do not worry about wave equations when you prefer to think in terms of wavefunctions: wavefunctions are the real thing, not wave equations (see: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341269271_De_Broglie’s_matter-wave_concept_and_issues and https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342424980_Feynman’s_Time_Machine). If you think otherwise, that is fine. Everyone looks for the Holy Grail, and you may be amongst those who think they have found it. If it is looks very different from the Holy Grail that I have finally found, that is OK. Jesus might have left more than one Holy Grail – fake or real ones – and just be happy with yours ! I will end this short illustrated Guide to the Universe with the Looney Tunes sign-off: “That’s All, Folks!”

Jean Louis Van Belle

The Uncertainty Principle, statistical determinism, and free will

I just came back from a consultancy (an IT assessment – it is nice to be fully focused again on work rather than obscure quantum-mechanical models) and, while flying back, I wrote a small paper on the implications of what I have tried to do (showing that, ultimately, we can understand Nature as being ‘statistically deterministic’, just like what A. Einstein and H.A. Lorentz always said) on epistemology, or the inquiry that philosophers refer to as ‘metaphysics’ (interpreted as thoughts on the ‘essence’ of Nature).

I also detail why and how it does not do away with what is probably the single most important foundation of our society (laws, business, etcetera): the idea of free will. Here is the link to the paper, and below I copy the key conclusions:

What I write above [see the paper] and its explanations of the principle of uncertainty as used in modern physics should not make you think that I do not believe in a religious mindset: conscious thoughts, or some sense or feeling of wonder that we would refer to as religious or – a better word, perhaps – mystical. On the contrary, in my journey to understanding, I have often been amazed that our mind is able to understand all of this. Here again, I appreciate my courses of philosophy – especially Hegel’s idea on the concept of our human mind encompassing and understanding more and more as mankind continues its rather lonely journey on a very small planet in a Universe whose borders we cannot imagine.

Such feeling of wonder – an old teacher of mine said the Greeks referred to this as tauma, and that it fuels our desire for knowledge, but I have not been able to find any bibliographic reference to this idea – is, exactly, what has been driving my own personal journey in search of truth. Whether you call that religious or not, is not of much interest to me: I have no need to describe that experience in old or new words.

Likewise, statistically determinism does not do away with the concept of free will: of course, we are the product of a rather amazing evolution, which I think of as rather random – but I do not attach negative connotation to this randomness. On the contrary, while our human mind was originally concerned with making sense of life or death situations, it is now free to think about other things: one’s own personal condition, or the human condition at large. Such thinking may lead to us taking rational decisions that actually change the path that we are following: we stop drinking or smoking for health reasons, perhaps, or we engage in a non-profit project aimed at improving our neighborhood or society at large. And we all realize we should change our behavior in order to ensure the next generation lives in an even better world than we do.

All of this is evidence of a true free will. It is based on our mental ability to rationally analyze in what situation we happen to find ourselves, so as to then try to do what we think we should be doing.

The shortest introduction to physics – ever !

My ‘last’ post talks about the end of physics as a science: nothing or nothing much is left to explain but – of course – a lot of engineering is left to be done! 😉

I thought it would really be my last post, but then I thought I’d also do a short video on my YouTube channel, and so I did that. This is the link to what I titled: “The shortest introduction to quantum physics – ever!”

Have a look and see if you like it ! If you do it, do leave a comment ! 🙂

Epilogue: an Easter podcast

I have been thinking on my explanation of dark matter/energy, and I think it is sound. It solves the last asymmetry in my models, and explains all. So, after a hiatus of two years, I bothered to make a podcast on my YouTube channel once again. It talks about everything. Literally everything !

It makes me feel my quest for understanding of matter and energy – in terms of classical concepts and measurements (as depicted below) – has ended. Perhaps I will write more but that would only be to promote the material, which should promote itself if it is any good (which I think it is).

I should, by way of conclusion, say a few final words about Feynman’s 1963 Lectures now. When everything is said and done, it is my reading of them which had triggered this blog about ten years ago. I would now recommend Volume I and II (classical physics and electromagnetic theory) – if only because it gives you all the math you need to understand all of physics – but not Volume III (the lectures on quantum mechanics). They are outdated, and I do find Feynman guilty of promoting rather than explaining the hocus-pocus around all of the so-called mysteries in this special branch of physics.

Quantum mechanics is special, but I do conclude now that it can all be explained in terms of classical concepts and quantities. So, Gell-Mann’s criticism of Richard Feynman is, perhaps, correct: Mr. Feynman did, perhaps, make too many jokes – and it gets annoying because he must have known some of what he suggests does not make sense – even if I would not go as far as Gell-Mann, who says “Feynman was only concerned about himself, his ego, and his own image !” :-/

So, I would recommend my own alternative series of ‘lectures’. Not only are they easier to read, but they also embody a different spirit of writing. Science is not about you, it is about thinking for oneself and deciding on what is truthful and useful, and what is not. So, to conclude, I will end by quoting Ludwig Boltzmann once more:

“Bring forward what is true.

Write it so that it is clear.

Defend it to your last breath.”

Ludwig Boltzmann (1844 – 1906)

Post scriptum: As for the ‘hocus-pocus’ in Feynman’s Lectures, we should, perhaps, point once again to some of our early papers on the flaws in his arguments. We effectively put our finger on the arbitrary wavefunction convention, or the (false) boson-fermion dichotomy, or the ‘time machine’ argument that is inherent to his explanation of the Hamiltonian, and so on. We published these things on Academia.edu before (also) putting our (later) papers ResearchGate, so please check there for the full series. 🙂

Post scriptum (23 April 2023): Also check out this video, which was triggered by someone who thought my models amount to something like a modern aether theory, which it is definitely not the case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X38u2-nXoto. 🙂 I really think it is my last reflection on these topics. I need to focus on my day job, sports, family, etcetera again ! 🙂

An antiforce to explain dark matter?

If you are interested in physics and cosmological theories, then you will know all research has been shaken up by the discovery of dark matter and dark energy. The fact of the matter is this: in 2011, a Nobel Prize was awarded to different teams of astronomers who, independently, discovered a whole lot of matter in our Universe – most matter in the Universe, actually – and that mainstream physicists have no idea about how to go about it in terms of modeling its structure and true nature: it seems quantum field theory and confined quarks and gluons and color charges are pretty useless in this regard.

The discovery goes back to 1998 (so it took the Nobel Prize committee more than ten years to verify it or to see its enormous value as a discovery), and is duly reported in the Wikipedia article on the cosmological constant because of its implications, although I have issues with the contributor to that article talking about ‘a repulsive force’ that would counterbalance the gravitational braking produced by the matter contained in the universe’: that sounds whacky to me. 🙂

The bottom line is this: according to research quoted by NASA, roughly 68% of the Universe would be dark energy, while dark matter makes up another 27%. Hence, all normal matter – including our Earth and all we observe as normal matter outside of it – would add up to less than 5% of it. Hence, NASA rightly notes we should, perhaps, not refer to ‘normal’ matter as ‘normal’ matter at all, since it is such a small fraction of the universe!

Now, as mentioned above: theoretical physicists have no clue about the nature of this dark matter. As our modeling of electrons and protons as two- and three-dimensional electromagnetic oscillations has provided easy answers to difficult questions, we thought we might, perhaps, explore one particularity of the electromagnetic force. Indeed, the electromagnetic force introduces this weird asymmetry in Nature: we know that, in our world, the magnetic field lags the electric field. The phase difference is 90 degrees, and you probably have a good mental image of that electric and magnetic field vector oscillating up and down and also moving together along a line in space. [If not, have a look at this GIF animation in the Wikipedia article on Maxwell’s equations. It shows a linearly polarized wave: both the electric and magnetic field vector oscillate along a straight line rather than rotating around (as they would do in a circularly or elliptically polarized wave).]

Of course, you may not think of this as a necessary asymmetry: if the magnetic field vector were to be 180 degrees out of phase with the electric field vector, then that would make no sense because the magnetic and electric field vectors would be working against each other. Also, we would have no propagation mechanism and all that. In fact, we would have no electromagnetic force theory and we would, quite simply, not be here to write this.

However, that is not what I mean by an asymmetry: what I am saying is that we can imagine another alternative. We can imagine the magnetic field vector to lead instead of to lag in regard to the electric field vector. Hence, Occam’s Razor tells us we should seriously consider such force actually exists! The situation is not unlike how the positron was discovered: people start looking for it because, in the math of his wave equation, Dirac saw positrons could possibly exist. Once people started seriously considering it, they actually found it (Anderson, 1932).

Exceptional measurements require exceptional explanations and so, yes, we thought: why not apply Occam’s Razor once more? Our idea of an antiforce is or was the one degree of freedom in our mathematical representation of matter-particles that we had not exploited yet[1], so our intuition tells us it might be worth considering.

Have a look at it (click the link to our RG paper here). It is a very short and crisp paper, and we think of it as fun to read but that is, of course, for you to judge. 🙂

[1] Truth be told, we were not aware or intrigued by the idea of dark matter or energy about a year ago. We can, however, now see we are actually closing and exploiting an aspect of our modeling of the electromagnetic force which we had not seen before. The history of science shows Occam’s Razor is a good guide for getting at the right model, and so we feel our rather radical use of this principle – in the tradition of P.A.M. Dirac and others, indeed! – may yield interesting results once more.

Movies, space travel and life elsewhere

I went to see the follow-up to Avatar (‘The Way of Water’). It took over 10 years to produce it. Indeed, how time flies: the first ‘Avatar’ was released in 2009 and was, apparently, the highest grossing film of all times (according to Wikipedia, at least). This installment is not doing badly either in terms of revenue and popularity but, frankly, I found it rather underwhelming. This may be because of the current international situation. Indeed, I wonder why American soldiers must always be the ‘true’ space explorers in such movies. Why not some friendly Chinese or Indian explorers? Fortunately, it will be a while before mankind will be able to build spaceships that can travel at speeds that would allow us to visit, say, the Gliese 667 Cc planet, which may well be the nearest planet that is inhabitable (practically speaking), but which is about 22 lightyears away, so that would be a few thousand years of travel with our current spacecraft. Mankind will have to find a way to keep our own planet inhabitable for some more time… Planets like Gliese 667 Cc and other exoplanets that may have life like we know it, will be safe from us for quite a while. 🙂

These are rather philosophical thoughts, but they came up as I was adding an annex to my one and only paper on cosmology, in which I argue there are no mysteries left: the question of ‘dark matter’ is solved when we think of it as anti-matter, and even the accelerating rate of expansion of the Universe could probably be explained by assuming our Universe is just a blob in a larger cluster of universes. These other universes are, obviously, beyond our horizon: that horizon is just the age of the Universe, which is currently estimated to be about 13.8 billion (109) years and which determines the limits of the observable Universe. Hence, not only can we not see or know the outer edges of our Universe (because those outer parts moved further out in the meanwhile, and at the rather astonishing speed of 2c/3, and so must assume the end-to-end distance across the Universe is of the order of 46 billion lightyears), but we would also never see the other universes that are tearing our own Universe apart, so to speak.

By the way, this thought is quite consistent with an earlier thought I had – much before I even knew about this acceleration in the expansion of our Universe when thinking about the Big Bang theory: I always wondered why the coming-into-being of our Universe should be such simple linear and unique process. Why not think of several Big Bangs at different places and times? So, if other universes would exist and tear ours apart, so to speak, then here you have the explanation !

[…]

However, I am not writing this post to share some assumptions or observations. It is to share this thought: is it not strange to think we know all about how reality works (as mentioned, I think there are no real questions or mysteries left in the science of physics) but that, at the same time, we are quite alone with our science and technology here on Earth?

Indeed, other forms of intelligent life are likely (highly likely, in light of the rather incredible size of the Universe), but they are too far away to be relevant to us: probably hundreds or even thousands of lightyears away, rather than only 20 or 40 of lightyears, which is the distance to the nearest terrestrial exoplanets, such as the mentioned Gliese 667 Cc planet. So we know it all and we relish in such knowledge and then, one day, we just die?

It is a strange thought, isn’t it? :-/

Pair creation and annihilation

I had been wanting to update my paper on matter-antimatter pair creation and annihilation for a long time, and I finally did it: here is the new version of it. It was one of my early papers on ResearchGate and, somewhat surprising, it got quite a few downloads (all is relative: I am happy with a few thousand). I actually did not know why, but now I understand: it does take down the last defenses of QCD- and QFT-theorists. As such, I now think this paper is at least as groundbreaking as my paper on de Broglie’s matter-wave (which gets the most reads), or my paper on the proton radius (which gets the most recommendations).

My paper on de Broglie’s matter-wave is important because it explains why and how de Broglie’s bright insight (matter having some frequency and wavelength) was correct, but got the wrong interpretation: the frequencies and wavelengths are orbital frequencies, and the wavelengths are are not to be interpreted as linear distances (not like wavelengths of light) but the quantum-mechanical equivalent of the circumferences of orbital radii. The paper also shows why spin (in this or the opposite direction) should be incorporated into any analysis straight from the start: you cannot just ignore spin and plug it in back later. The paper on the proton radius shows how that works to yield short and concise explanations of the measurable properties of elementary particles (the electron and the proton). The two combined provide the framework: an analysis of matter in terms of pointlike particles does not get us anywhere. We must think of matter as charge in motion, and we must analyze the two- or three-dimensional structure of these oscillations, and use it to also explain interactions between matter-particles (elementary or composite) and light-particles (photons and neutrinos, basically). I have explained these mass-without-mass models too many times now, so I will not dwell on it.

So, how that paper on matter-antimatter pair creation and annihilation fit in? The revision resulted in a rather long and verbose thing, so I will refer you to it and just summarize it very briefly. Let me start by copying the abstract: “The phenomenon of matter-antimatter pair creation and annihilation is usually taken as confirmation that, somehow, fields can condense into matter-particles or, conversely, that matter-particles can somehow turn into lightlike particles (photons and/or neutrinos, which are nothing but traveling fields: electromagnetic or, in the case of the neutrino, some strong field, perhaps). However, pair creation usually involves the presence of a nucleus or other charged particles (such as electrons in experiment #E144). We, therefore, wonder whether pair creation and annihilation cannot be analyzed as part of some nuclear process. To be precise, we argue that the usual nuclear reactions involving protons and neutrons can effectively account for the processes of pair creation and annihilation. We therefore argue that the need to invoke some quantum field theory (QFT) to explain these high-energy processes would need to be justified much better than it currently is.”

Needless to say, the last line above is a euphemism: we think our explanation is complete, and that QFT is plain useless. We wrote the following rather scathing appreciation of it in a footnote of the paper: “We think of Aitchison & Hey’s presentation of [matter-antimatter pair creation and annihilation] in their Gauge Theories in Particle Physics (2012) – or presentations (plural), we should say. It is considered to be an advanced but standard textbook on phenomena like this. However, one quickly finds oneself going through the index and scraping together various mathematical treatments – wondering what they explain, and also wondering how all of the unanswered questions or hypotheses (such as, for example, the particularities of flavor mixing, helicity, the Majorana hypothesis, etcetera) contribute to understanding the nature of the matter at hand. I consider it a typical example of how – paraphrasing Sabine Hossenfelder’s judgment on the state of advanced physics research – physicist do indeed tend to get lost in math.”

That says it all. Our thesis is that charge cannot just appear or disappear: it is not being created out of nothing (or out of fields, we should say). The observations (think of pion production and decay from cosmic rays here) and the results of the experiments (the mentioned #E144 experiment or other high-energy experiments) cannot be disputed, but the mainstream interpretation of what actually happens or might be happening in those chain reactions suffers from what, in daily life, we would refer to as ‘very sloppy accounting’. Let me quote or paraphrase a few more lines from my paper to highlight the problem, and to also introduce my interpretation of things which, as usual, are based on a more structural analysis of what matter actually is:

“Pair creation is most often observed in the presence of a nucleus. The role of the nucleus is usually reduced to that of a heavy mass only: it only appears in the explanation to absorb or provide some kinetic energy in the overall reaction. We instinctively feel the role of the nucleus must be far more important than what is usually suggested. To be specific, we suggest pair creation should (also) be analyzed as being part of a larger nuclear process involving neutron-proton interactions. […]”

“Charge does not get ‘lost’ or is ‘created’, but [can] switch its ‘spacetime’ or ‘force’ signature [when interacting with high-energy (anti)photons or (anti)neutrinos].”

“[The #E144 experiment or other high-energy experiments involving electrons] accounts for the result of the experiment in terms of mainstream QED analysis, and effectively thinks of the pair production being the result of the theoretical ‘Breit-Wheeler’ pair production process from photons only. However, this description of the experiment fails to properly account for the incoming beam of electrons. That, then, is the main weakness of the ‘explanation’: it is a bit like making abstraction of the presence of the nucleus in the pair creation processes that take place near them (which, as mentioned above, account for the bulk of those).”

We will say nothing more about it here because we want to keep our blog post(s) short: read the paper! 🙂 To wrap this up for you, the reader(s) of this post, we will only quote or paraphrase some more ontological or philosophical remarks in it:

“The three-layered structure of the electron (the classical, Compton and Bohr radii of the electron) suggest that charge may have some fractal structure and – moreover – that such fractal structure may be infinite. Why do we think so? If the fractal structure would not be infinite, we would have to acknowledge – logically – that some kind of hard core charge is at the center of the oscillations that make up these particles, and it would be very hard to explain how this can actually disappear.” [Note: This is a rather novel new subtlety in our realist interpretation of quantum physics, so you may want to think about it. Indeed, we were initially not very favorable to the idea of a fractal charge structure because such fractal structure is, perhaps, not entirely consistent with the idea of a Zitterbewegung charge with zero rest mass), we think much more favorably of the hypothesis now.]

“The concept of charge is and remains mysterious. However, in philosophical or ontological terms, I do not think of it as a mystery: at some point, we must, perhaps, accept that the essence of the world is charge, and that:

  • There is also an antiworld, and that;
  • It consists of an anticharge that we can fully define in terms of the signature of the force(s) that keep it together, and that;
  • The two worlds can, quite simply, not co-exist or – at least – not interact with each other without annihilating each other.

Such simple view of things must, of course, feed into cosmological theories: how, then, came these two worlds into being? We offered some suggestions on that in a rather simple paper on cosmology (our one and only paper on the topic), but it is not a terrain that we have explored (yet).”

So, I will end this post in pretty much the same way as the old Looney Tunes or Merrie Melodies cartoons used to end, and that’s by saying: “That’s all Folks.” 🙂

Enjoy life and do not worry too much. It is all under control and, if it is not, then that is OK too. 🙂