Where do you fit the set of all infinitesimals in your scheme here?

Is the something we experience just a phase in the transition from everything to nothing? — Agent Smith

That is the gist of the argument. And it fits the physics. The puzzle for cosmology is that the Big Bang didn’t just remain in its simplest possible state of a cooling-expanding radiation bath. Instead it went through a series of further symmetry breakings that led to complex matter.

But then, it will all return to that ultimate simplicity in the long run. All the particles will be swept up in blackholes and radiated away. The only material content left will be the dark energy stretching space until there is nothing around to actually have interactions.

So I offer a general logical argument. And it fits the physics.

The surprise is that the universe as we know it - full of material complexity - is a passing phase. Things had to get messier before they could eventually become simpler again. Not all self-cancellation could happen at once. The task is going to take time.

We need an argument that demonstrates that nothing is impossible or that something is necessary, same thing! — Agent Smith

Well everythingness must contain its own limitations just because it includes all possible conflicts. A will be cancelled by not-A. The result ultimately would be that everythingness thus cannot “exist”. It can only be the prior potential which then self-cancels.

Then nothingness ought to actually exist as a consequence. And yet somethingness does exist at the moment. So we know also that everythingness must pass by a state of somethingness on its way to manifesting nothingness.

So somethingness must be just the stepping stone - the host of self-cancelling actions that the Cosmos must pass through to achieve its desired oblivion.

And science says the Big Bang is on its way to its Heat Death. Sound familiar? :chin:

Intriguing. I looked into category theory years back but my approach is via hierarchy theory and Peircean semiotics which I just find far more physically natural and intuitive. So I would be happy if you might have further thoughts or references here.

But Lawvere’s adjoint cylinder example does get the essence of the triadic systems architecture in this kind of statement. And it even namechecks Peircean thirdness in doing so. Thus we are feeling the same elephant,

In other words, T unites, opposes and identifies L and R at the same time!

There isn't a difference between a state of anything and everything that is really absolute vagueness and nothing. — Shed

My argument was meant to lead from the usual monistic framing of the existential question towards a triadic or systems view of the ontology - in the tradition of Anaximander, Aristotle, Hegel, Peirce, etc.

So we start with the undoubted fact that something exists. And we then seem to have to conclude either that this state of embodied somethingness existed forever - there was no creation event or process of evolutionary emergence - or that it arose out of ... nothingness ... for no clear reason ... and by no clear causal mechanism.

People feel these are the only obvious options. Either existence brutely exists in some eternal uncreated fashion, or somethingness can be dialectically opposed to nothingness and so if the cosmos sprang into being - especially in the way that Big Bang science suggests – then it had to pop out of a void, a nullity. The opposite kind of thing to a something which is a nothing.

But metaphysics can be more sophisticated than that. It can continue on to create more categories of existence.

So somethingness suggests nothingness as it rightful antithesis. However nothingness can be opposed to everythingness. And then the very idea of dichotomous categories – dyads like nothing vs everything - can be seen to themselves resolve into the crispness that is some such extremal division, and the vagueness which is the very "other" of any kind of extremal division at all.

Peirce, for example, developed this in terms of modern logic. He defined vagueness as the category of "existence" to which the principle of non-contradiction fails to apply. Normally, we argue that something has to be one thing or the other in some definite fashion. But this opens up the further option of being simply utterly indeterminate or vague. Nothing is being ruled out and the PNC fails to apply.

Peirce also defined the idea of generality (as opposed to particularity) as that to which the Law of the Excluded Middle fails to apply. Where vagueness is fundamentally indeterminate in regards to some distinction, generality is so inclusive it absorbs all possible distinction.

This shows how metaphysics has more tools in its cupboard than are conventionally employed in these discussions about "why anything?".

Anyway, what I argued towards was the evolutionary or developmental cosmology based on a triadic systems view of the Cosmos. In the "beginning" was a vagueness - an apeiron, an ungrund, a firstness - that was less than nothing in being utter indeterminacy. This vagueness could also be considered an everythingness in being a generality so general it again lacked all distinction.

But in lacking distinction, it could be the ground for the birth of distinctions. It could spawn dichotomies or dialectical oppositions such as "everything vs nothing". Suddenly, these two metaphysical categories could start to apply in some mutual or relative fashion. There could be nothing to the degree there wasn't everything, and there could everything to the degree there wasn't nothing. Somethingness then could arise with the two limits being set. There could be something because there was not everything and also not nothing.

So vagueness becomes some ultimate state of symmetry - a logical indefiniteness. The breaking of this symmetry by any kind of somethingness then brings with it the opposing extremal bounds of this nascent thingness. The slightest somethingness is already a pointer towards the two ultimate anchoring bounds of nothingness and everythingness - the two distant limits that show the somethingness to be what it is in terms of what it is not ... which is either a nothing or an everything.

Once you have got used to thinking about ontological questions using this kind of metaphysical logic, then you can bring a new resource to the current science of the Big Bang. You don't get hung up at the first step where you start arguing that something must have popped out of nothing ... which doesn't compute as nothing can come from nothing ... etc.

I sense an agreement on your part that other branches of math, not just calculus, may lead to breakthroughs — Agent Smith

I'm trying to stress that the idea of maths as a branching tree may be a misleading metaphor here. A tree makes it sound like calculus is the sturdy root and knot theory is some tiny obscure twig that might prove to break the dam of misunderstanding.

The difference is instead between the concrete and the abstract. So geometry is done with equations that have to include distances and angles. Topology is the more abstract view that can throw away such concrete measurables and simply envisage a structure of relations. The coffee mug you hold in your hand becomes instead the far more general thing of a torus.

Does that then make the coffee mug the sturdy root of your mathematical description, the torus a random distant branch of your mathematical tree?

You in fact need to go beyond tree metaphors to hierarchy theory - another "branch of maths" :grin: - to see how what is being opposed here is the particular vs the general, the concrete vs the abstract, the local vs the global, etc.

Which branch of math do you suppose is most apt for decoding the Big Bang — Agent Smith

All physics likes to cash out in differential equations. And integration - as in path integrals - is just the reciprocal of differentiation. So in terms of the writing out of "laws", the language will look like the same old equations of motion approach.

Then physics strongly expects a final theory of the Big Bang to require an exact model of quantum gravity - the sought-for union of general relativity (GR) and quantum field theory (QFT). So those two bodies of maths would be melded into one capable of at least quantifying gravity, and possibly uniting gravity with the other three already quantified fundamental forces.

So the practical language of the maths is good old functions. And the justification of the unifying frame would be what employs the fancy-schmancy higher maths - stuff like permutation symmetries, topological order, and fibre bundles, and absolutely anything else that helped. Even category theory has been chucked into the fray.

Thus the target of producing a working theory of quantum gravity is a well-defined goal here. It would unite the three fundamental constants of c, G and h which found the differentiation of the "cosmological equations of state". QFT unites h and c. GR unites G and c. What is missing is QG that can unite h, c and G. Then we will be equipped to write out differential equations (and integrals) that contain all three required terms.

But as I say, the more metaphysical - or logic-based - arguments for how the cosmos works would be knitted together out of the usual symmetry/symmetry-breaking mathematical arguments. The conservation principles and least action principles that have been used since Newton, just with ever greater mathematical abstraction.

So for example knot theory tells you that knots only stay tied in three dimensions. And if you can make the argument that particles are really just "knots", then you can say why only a 3D reality could be the case. You don't have to write an ad hoc 3D constraint into your QG theory to make it work. You can say that any other number of dimensions would be a "trivial representation" - one that couldn't even hang together and thus exist.

So the big motivating ideas can come from all over the abstract end of maths. But then it will all be just "metaphysics" unless a framework can be cashed out in the usual concrete differential equations that let's scientists divide their labours into the usual thing of model building and acts of measurement.

That is simply the most practical way to reduce complexity to simplicity. Tell me exactly where something is now and I can calculate its position or action for all times, both prospectively and retrospectively. One number and one constant sums up "everything" about some physical interaction.

The ultimate question of metaphysics is, "What is the ultimate question of metaphysics?"

It all breaks down to computing the path integral of the symmetry of quantum foam, so that a vacuum results. — jgill

As I describe, I see these as two extremes of the one intellectual enterprise. We need to go abstract to get the big ideas, and then be able to do something - like compute the integral of a quantum foam - to prove that our theories measure up against the world they describe.

Seems simple enough. A vacua is a space that is devoid of content. And thus it is already the existence of a structure - a metric or particle field.

To have a vacua is already to have the global symmetries that ensure the local invariances, or degrees of freedom. The breaking of symmetries can follow from the construction of the symmetry.

My point is that you then have to wind back your cosmic “clock” to whatever supposedly grounds this production of an actual vacua, this actual generalised state of symmetry.

e.g. Eternal vacua of fluctuating, virtual universes/clocks. — 180 Proof

Except the concept of a quantum vacuum is already predicated on a bounded, energy conserved and time symmetric, state. A gone to equilibrium backdrop which thus merely fluctuates. And probably with just three spatial dimensions - as that is the special condition where rotational degrees of freedom are symmetric with translational degrees of freedom. Etc.

So the prior potential has to be far more unstructured than any vacua. We are talking a quantum foam or some other pregeometric understandings of the initial conditions.

Yet here we are so I guess the question then leads to did something come from nothing ? — Deus

You just rightly rejected the idea that something could come from nothing. The existence of something already negates the possibility of a true nothing as that true nothing would have to lack the capacity for even the possibility or potentiality of producing a somethingness.

So next up on the batter's order is something from everything. The prior potential could be understood as a plenum, a state of absolute everythingness. And this works quite well as it is pretty quantum. In the quantum path integral or sum over histories, all possibilities exist, but then the majority must also contradict or self cancel. If a fluctuation can go right, it can also go left, and the upshot is the somethingness of a fluctuation that just didn't really get to happen at all.

Quantum field theory tells us reality actually works this way. A neutrino or quark are mixtures of all the particles they could be. The maths has to sum over all the possible states to get the most probable emergent state - the one that cancels away all the everythingness to arrive at some local somethingness, exact to 20 decimal places.

So we already can imagine using a quantum sum over histories to account for the Cosmos as simply what emerges when you average over all possible dimensional and particle arrangements to arrive at whatever final structure doesn't just self-cancel away its own potential to actually exist.

This approach to the Big Bang fits as its trajectory is then towards its own Heat Death. The Universe is also locked into a structure of expanding and cooling which will eventually achieve a state of as close to absolute nothingness as it can get - technically, a de Sitter void with a temperature of absolute zero and empty of particle content apart from the residual sizzle of Hawking radiation produced by the cosmic event horizon itself.

So everythingness must constrain itself via the interaction of all its own conflicting possibilities, which is how a residual somethingness is left. And we can see that the Big Bang cosmos is still manifesting this fate - this dissipative journey towards the nothingness of a void, exhausted of all its possibilities and so able to now exist in peace for all eternity.

But then "everythingness" as an initial conditions becomes something we can refine a little further. It carries connotations of an infinity of actuality - actual interactions, some actual place that was full of rather concrete possibilities. We want to get beyond even that to arrive at some more pure definition of a simple state of unbounded - not yet in anyway constrained - possibility.

That leads us to a logic of vagueness. A state of anything and everything is really just a state of absolute vagueness. The principle of non-contradiction doesn't even apply. It is literally less than nothing as it is beyond any concrete distinction, such as the negation of a nothing, or the affirmation of a something.

To sum up, the big question is the "why anything?" question. If you check ancient metaphysics, the "something out of everything" story is in fact pretty routine. The "something out of nothing" story arose with Greek atomism and its void, then got embedded in Christian theology in particular, with its need for an act of creation.

Modern science has arrived back at "something out of everything" as a mathematical theory. Quantum field theory can simulate the stormy interior of a proton as a suitably constrained potential, getting to the point where the sum over histories calculations shows surprisingly that the internal mass-creating fluctuations produce far more anti-down quarks than anti-up, to give a random example of how well supported this is.

But then, to really shift our thinking, we need to upgrade our metaphysical logic. Vagueness becomes a further category of "existence" that goes beyond the yin and yang of everything vs nothing.

Presence and absence are the crude or emergent categories which folk tend to want to apply to fundamental nature. But we can do better. Vagueness makes an even deeper claim that transcends the distinctions - the dichotomies - which it can thus engender.

To get back to the question, the short answer is that there is something because a state of everything includes its own negation, its own limitation. But not everything could then self-erase or cancel away its possibility of being actualised. Even the Heat Death of the cosmos - as an actualised state of maximal nothingness or void - is still going to be forever a residual something. The Universe will be like an infinitely large box produced so as to definitely and actually lose all the unbound possibilities that an absolute vagueness would have had to have contained.

A potential just wants to burst. And a vague potential has nothing to stop it bursting, but also no direction into which to burst. So the Big Bang is that logical impasse resolving itself in a sum over histories fashion. Spacetime organised as a direction, and matter-energy organised as the contents expressing the constraints of this spatiotemporal structure.

You had the hylomorphism of material impulse and formal order. A path arose to concretely turn a manifested everythingness into a matching "end of time" state of actualised nothingness. And overall this can be seen as a logical trajectory from a pure vagueness to a state of supreme counterfactual definiteness.

Physics and metaphysics come together, as they ought.

Laws prescribe what should occur in the future. ... Habits derive from what occurred in the past; a habit is a descriptive account of past trends.

...When we trade “laws of the universe” for “habits of the universe”, we dispense with the eternal, exterior law-giver and recognize that, as far as we can tell, the universe determines its own behavior. The universe doesn’t obey the laws of physics; it merely does what it does. — Art48

What we have here is the usual thing of a metaphysical dichotomy - an argument that successfully derives its two dialectical extremes, but then falters by striving to eliminate one or either side of the story rather than seeing them as the two sides of the one more general story.

In general, science finds itself pursuing both ways of thinking. It treats the laws of nature as both cumulative statistical accidents - the kind of patterns that the Laws of Thermodynamics describe. And then it has its other laws that seem prescribed by the maths of symmetry - like relativity and quantum theory.

So the actuality of the physical world seems split between two poles of causality - the actions of blind material accident and prescriptive formal constraints. Or Aristotle's hylomorphic theory of substance, in other words.

Thus you can argue forever about which pole of causality really underpins reality. The idea of a law has to be seen as one or other of these two choices ... because ... two choices, right?

Yet it should be obvious that instead reality - as substantial actuality - is produced by this very division of causality towards its different poles of causality. Physical reality is a system, a structured process. And so that involves the creation of differentiation itself. You need the yin and yang of local accidents and global necessities to have anything worth describing at all.

When it comes to framing the laws of nature, this is why we end up with a lot of embedded conflicts, such as classical vs quantum laws, statistical vs mathematical laws, etc. Sometimes we have to lean towards one pole, sometimes towards the other.

What this conflict should tell is is not that one way of framing laws is the real way, the other some kind of error. Instead, it should tell us that we are always trying to stand outside the complexity of our physical actuality. And the two ways of doing that cleanly are to pretend that the cosmos is either ruled by cumulative statistical accident or by prescriptive mathematical structure.

We do both - we take the limit in both directions to see what we discover, to see what it becomes useful to so - and end up with the various famiiiar bodies of law like thermodynamics, relativity and quantum theory. Then we see the moves to try to re-integrate what we have separated in the various systems science, condensed matter physics and information theoretic approaches to modelling physical reality.

Again, epistemology demands breaking the thing-in-itself apart into dialectially-opposed viewpoints. We want to be absolutely sure of standing "outside" the world we intend to describe by standing outside both its possible sides, or limiting extremes. We have to transcend the world in two reciprocal directions to be certain of actually getting beyond all its possible limits.

This leads us - as law-mongering scientists - to explore both extremes of causality. The view from pure accident as opposed to the view from pure necessity. Thermodynamics pretends the world can be accounted for by the vagaries of Darwinian statistics. QFT and GR pretend it can be accounted for by the inescapable logic of gauge and Lorentzian invariance.

A systems view would then unite the two metaphysical views to follow Aristotle in seeing physical reality as a hylomorphic blend of these two mutually opposed, but jointly exhaustive, extremes.

Makes you think your day hasn't been entirely wasted. — Wayfarer

:grin:

It's not that I cant follow. I dont want. to follow. — Haglund

:up:

But the photons ain't virtual. — Haglund

Oh, and this. It’s Hawking radiation. So pulled out of the vacuum by the event horizon.

Think for yourself instead of quoting Wiki! — Haglund

You apparently couldn’t follow Lineweaver’s paper so I tried something that was hopefully more your level.

(I see Wiki was in fact quoting Lineweaver’s SciAm article. This Lineweaver must be a real bum, eh? :razz: )

As usual, you seem deeply confused about even simple stuff.

The particle horizon differs from the cosmic event horizon, in that the particle horizon represents the largest comoving distance from which light could have reached the observer by a specific time, while the event horizon is the largest comoving distance from which light emitted now can ever reach the observer in the future.[3] The current distance to our cosmic event horizon is about five gigaparsecs (16 billion light-years), well within our observable range given by the particle horizon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_horizon

The current distance is about 45 billion ly. — Haglund

You’re confusing the particle horizon with the event horizon. But nice try. :wink:

Forget it. — Haglund

:grin:

You're right. The figures given by Lineweaver are that the current distance to our cosmic event horizon is 16 billion light-years, and the eventual maximum distance will be 18 billion light years. So there won't be a doubling. We are just about there.

See figs 2 and 3 of https://www.mso.anu.edu.au/~charley/papers/mepp.pdf for both that and the argument that all that's left is blackbody radiation with a wavelength the size of the entire cosmic event horizon.

General relativity's equation of state says the universe is a balance of the positive potential of its kinetically spreading mass-energy content and the negative potential of the gravitational attraction of that same mass-energy content.

So one blows. The other sucks.

The blowing gets ever weaker. The mass-energy content gets colder and colder, and thus less kinetic as time marches on.

But the sucking also gets ever weaker. The mass-energy content gets more and more spread out and so exerts an ever smaller gravitational force.

If the two sides of the equation remain in balance, then the whole shebang can coast along forever - continuously spreading and cooling - to reach its heat death at the end of time.

Note that in the updated picture - the current Lamda-CDM concordance model - the end of time (as the effective end of all discernible change) now arrives at a finite future date.

Dark energy is acting to accelerate the underlying metric expansion - the spreading. And so the cooling will reach a finite cut-off where kinetic energy can't be drained out of the largest cosmic light cone as light can no longer shift fast enough to cross the cosmic event horizon.

In effect, our visible corner of the cosmos will have fallen down a black hole about 36 billion light years across (about double its current size). But it won't be a big deal as all its particle content, and any blackholes, will also be long gone.

The only thing left will be the fizzle of virtual photons with a blackbody radiation to match a temperature of absolute zero.

But hey, why walk before we can run? Let's deal with the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker metric before we add the wrinkle of the Lamda-CDM concordance model. Let's hear you rant and rave a little more about the vanilla description for a bit.

Tell us again how Einstein got it so wrong and MU gets it so right. :rofl:

There's a lot of standard cosmology which to anyone who takes any amount of time to think about, will be apprehended as fictional. — Metaphysician Undercover

....said every crackpot ever

The distance between objects changes in some sense. — jgill

And the photons travelling between them get red-shifted - a simple observational effect.

"The Cosmos is deemed to be flat because it has the critical mass..." — Metaphysician Undercover

What, you have never heard this before? Standard cosmology.

https://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/c/Critical+Density

Neither do you, apparently. — Haglund

Well, you don’t have an organised approach to explaining. There’s that.

Yes, I skimmed that one, I suppose I'm more interested in the causation argument, — Manuel

So do you mean you are focused on the contrast in epistemologies or on Peirce’s ontic position on causation?

Hume is the big set piece epistemological debate. But if you want more on Peirce’s ontology, Menno Hulswit wrote a book. And there is a summary on Commens - http://www.commens.org/encyclopedia/article/hulswit-menno-peirce-causality-and-causation

Peirce’s theory of causality and causation is very valuable in many respects, and perhaps even revolutionary inasmuch as it is based upon one, and only one, coherent categoreal system; contrary to the received view today (which is caught between a substance ontology and a fact ontology (see Hulswit & Sowa, 2001), Peirce’s theory is based upon an event ontology in the strictest sense of the word.

And he mentions the other scholarship.

Finally, there is the problem of Peirce’s place in the history of philosophy in respect of causation. Roth (1985) explicitly discusses the question “Did Peirce answer Hume on Necessary Connection?,” and Hookway (1992) provides some valuable insights into Peirce’s relationship to Hume, Kant and Russell.

Hulswit and Sowa (2001) situate Peirce’s theory within the context of the historical evolution of the concept of cause from Aristotle to the present discussions. The topic needs far more research, though.

I'm trying to find literature on Peirce's reaction to some of Hume's ideas. — Manuel

That hasn't been an interest of mine. But Googling "peirce hume miracles" brings up https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/29194829.pdf as its first hit. And Cathy Legg has written other good papers.

She cites the key Peircean point:

Logically speaking, Hume's method neglects the important role played in scientific inquiry by abduction.

With this in mind, Peirce suggests a better method than Hume's for the naturalist to investigate "miraculous" testimonies: searching for the best explanation for all given facts, including the testimonies themselves.

It is important to note here that Hume's argument relies on a miracle being a violation of the laws of nature as we believe them to be. Thus, as noted earlier, Hume does not live up to his “metaphysical” definition of miracles, and relies on a rather more "epistemic" one.

And I've had quite enough of your misrepresentations.

but I'm not too interested in fiction. — Metaphysician Undercover

You're an idiot.

That was your attempt to justify your earlier claim that space is both curved and flat. — Metaphysician Undercover

Where in your confusion do you see that contained in what I said?

Quite clearly I said space - as in a smoothly connected manifold - can be either flat or curved, with flatness in fact being the special case from the more general view of non-Euclidean geometry.

It’s an everyday point. Plenty of others were familiar with it.

So either, not both. Although also both in that one can be used as the basis from which to measure the other.

The natural way would be for the more general to be the basis for measuring the more particular. So flatness would be measured as a lack of curvature.

You keep then trying to add an embedding dimensionality which would allow a flat space to be seen as a curved one. In the flatness of a three dimensional realm, we can then see that the ant is crawling across the surface of the 2-sphere.

Thus the views can be treated reciprocally. However general relativity gives us good motivation to make curvature the more general case, and so go with the maths of intrinsic curvature.

The Cosmos is deemed to be flat because it has the critical mass that leaves it almost exactly poised between positive and negative curvature.

So from the point of view of how reality is, we know that space might have curvature of either kind. And yet somehow it is perfectly poised in a way that must be a fundamental clue.

So I'll ask you again, the question I asked back then. — Metaphysician Undercover

Did you really ever ask this question? Or are you just papering over your knee jerk misunderstandings?

Anyway, I’ve once more outlined the standard story and added the physical motivation. And I’m sure you will continue to rant and rave about things no one ever said.

It's kind of funny that on physics forums no one has offered such response on preons as you did! — Haglund

What, they weren't skeptical?

You have to see that you come across as a crackpot, especially where your view builds off crackpots like Randell Mills and a collection of other outsiders and independent scholars.

So preons are already fringe. And your version is predicated on stuff that looks way beyond the fringe.

Your posts on the issue simply state your opinions rather than presenting a proper argument. You treat it as obvious that pretty much all mainstream physical thought is wrong. Which makes it hard to even have the beginnings of a serious discussion.

And see it from my point of view. I'm interested in how a left-field proposition like preons might stack up against the Cern-approved party line of leptoquarks as the "missing physics" behind the muon dipole discrepancy.

And I'm interested in leptoquarks as they would fill in the important gap in the first split second of the Big Bang - the time after reheating and before the Higgs symmetry breaking - when some kind of strong~electroweak gauge unity ruled.

But inflation, Higgs, and SU(2) gauge, are the type of things you just dismiss out of hand - on the basis of sources that are far off the familiar map of reality themselves.

At least I can see why we are not getting far now. :up:

Apokrisis claimed space was both flat and curved, — Metaphysician Undercover

Stop making shit up. I said space would be flat to the degree it ain’t curved and curved to the degree it ain’t flat.

The issue was how to measure the kind of space you might be embedded in. The rest is your hysteria.

That's from 2004! — Haglund

Well yes. The muon issue was already clear by the conclusion of the Brookhaven experiment in 2001.

If you can find a calculation based on the C and U preons, show it please. There isn't. — Haglund

I was asking you for a preon based view. When it became clear you couldn’t, or wouldn’t, I googled up an example for myself in about 30 seconds.

Given your belly aching about the lack of love for a preon approach to the muon discrepancy, I thought you might be better pleased to find they exist.

What's so difficult to understand that the dipole moment is different if the muon is an excited electron? — Haglund

What is easy to understand is hand waving that avoids tackling problems like how is the superstrong force analogous to the strong force, yet apparently without the critical feature of asymptotic freedom.

Again, if you can provide a paper to substantiate your wild claim, go for it.

We don't know enough about the universe to verify much of what they write. — Gregory

Like what wild idea in particular? I’m sure that if you can think of an example, you will find wide discussion of its merits. There will be an informed assessment to be had in terms of the risk/reward of pursuing that line of thought.

Sure. So what is the problem? Apart from needing to be consistent with the facts as well.

Who's to say for sure what parts are BS — Gregory

It would be about being able to make a scholarly case either way.

It's not a matter of using maths explicitly, but that most of the concepts in mathematical physics require a grasp of the maths in order to understand. — Wayfarer

But as physics moved from Europe to the USA and increasingly under the patronage of the military-industrial complex then it became much more a matter of shut up and calculate. — Wayfarer

I think the irony is rather that mathematical physics has become an industry of ill-motivated speculation. The academies are pumping out post-grads trained in the art of spinning intricate mathematical tales like preons and leptoquarks. You can claim any kind of "metaphysics" as long as it is presented in the accepted mathematical forms as some kind of "calculation".

And even the lay public ought to have an interest in whether this is a good thing or not, given that is their tax payer money that funds the great particle collider cathedrals, and them that are expected to shower prestige upon the priestly class of researchers.

So to be a critic - someone doing metaphysics in the modern era - demands being able understand the mathematical ideas well enough to call obvious bullshit on branes, cycling cosmologies, or whatever.

If charges rotate wider, the magnetic moment changes. The superstrong color force keeps the prekns together, like the quarks in hadrons. So the Lagrangian is QCD like. Charged hadrons have various magnetic moments too. — Haglund

This is just babble. The question was about how the charges could rotate wider - in some hand-waving analogy to electron orbits - when you are also relying on (some equally hand-waving) assertion that the charges are bound by an analogous strong force.

As usual, your replies substantiate nothing. They are slogans. When pressed, you can deliver neither specific arguments nor useful references.

I'm not clear on what you're saying; can you explain? I wasn't asserting the idea of strict determinism, just outlining it, and pointing out that there is no logical contradiction in the idea that it doesn't obtain. — Janus

I was saying that the physical idea of a constraint works better as it is large enough to include determinism without presuming determinism and thus excluding contingency.

A constraint certainly determines the likelihood of events. That likelihood can be made "almost sure", or effectively a probability of 1, by really piling on the constraints. But even a loose constraint is still some degree of determinancy.

How do we know that this is not just the way it appears to us, time-bound creatures that we are? — Janus

But we can see to the start of time and the end of time - if we believe our astronomical instruments and cosmological models. So we are not particularly impoverished in that regard.

Also why could entropy not also obtain under the dominion of strict determinism wherein the only uncertainty would be epistemic? — Janus

Determinism doesn't explain the existence of degrees of freedom - the uncertainty that is ontic.

An ideal gas is defined as a system of non-interacting particles that thus are described by their simplest six degrees of freedom - three directions of translation and three directions of rotation.

Each particle is thus free to go at any speed in any direction with the only thing to fear being the uncertainty of some momentum-exchanging collision.

But then being constrained within a box set within a heat bath (a tellingly complex set of constraints!) the collection of particles is thus entrained to the inevitability of arriving at a Gaussian thermal distribution.

So you can choose to focus on all that seems deterministic about the situation - the Newtonian laws governing the particle collisions, the central limit theorem and law of large numbers. Or you can choose to focus on all that seems contingent - the information uncertainty attached to any individual system microstate, the actual momentum of any particular particle.

Or you can do the third thing of adopting the constraints-based view which sees the necessity and the contingency as the two faces of the one causal story - the two metaphysical limits that bound the reality.

Nature is never either completely determined, nor completely contingent. And entropy models are the way to establish the ground state of such a metaphysics - the state of nature as it is when fully thermalised and at its destination of achieving a steady equilibrium.

I'm sure nobody here other than yourself and Apo would know what a 'preon' is (or a Mexican hat, for that matter :roll: ) — Wayfarer

Alternatively, particle physics is exactly where concepts of logical necessity and physical causation intersect in practice. It is the frontline of the debate.

Is reality little atomistic lumps of matter in motion or instead a mathematics of structure and relation?

That's the point. The preon model isn't even considered. — Haglund

So you were hand-waving. Yet even my quick search found such consideration from 2004 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ph/0102242.pdf

The muon's magnetic moment is larger than thought. Which happens if three charges circulate wider. — Haglund

You tell me. I don't claim to understand what the superstrong force might be, let alone how it could apparently lack the essential strong force feature of asymptotic freedom.

Are you claiming superbradyons have something to do with your approach? Am I suppose to understand that your specific points are all to be found in rishon theory? Or perhaps they come instead from braid theory?

C'mon. I asked you to substantiate your claim that preons have some advantage is accounting for the g-2 muon result. Just give us the paper that backs that one up.

If not exotic preon combos like W8, then what?

Every particle process can be explained. Proton decay is easy. The basic group is SU(3)XSU(3)XU(1). — Haglund

OK. Which actual preon theory are you speaking for here. References please.

OK. Time to produce some references to the particular preon theory you are describing.

By giving the the one dimensional plane a presence as a two dimensional figure (or two dimensional plane a presence as a three dimensional object), you produce the possibility that pi could be anything. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's only you who insists on seeing the embedding dimension that the intrinsic curvature of differential geometry has long done away with.

So you are tilting at windmills as usual.

But if God wanted a universe with maximum entropy, He would have just created it that way. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. So another excellent argument against theism?

Within any system, there is a quantity of energy which is lost to that system, over time. Much of that energy actually escapes the system, as heat loss from friction for example. How would we account for energy which escapes the system, if the universe was a system? — Metaphysician Undercover

The Universe is the heat sink. It expands and thus cools. Heat is lost into the space that gets made.

We'd be stuck in the ancient "mainstream" of thousands of years ago, thinking that the sun "comes up", in the morning, and "goes down" in the evening. — Metaphysician Undercover

And that "gods" created it all.

It's the lowest energy state of three -1/3 charged preons. — Haglund

There are specific and general problems with preons as far as I can see.

You said that preons explained the g-2 result. But that turns out to be just a curve fitting exercise. If one believes in preons, one can believe in exotic preon composites like W8 and arrange the contributions to fit whatever dipole moment is measured.

Leptoquark folk will be doing the same. And leptoquarks are getting the big push this year to give LHC something plausible to chase. Yet also leptoquarks seem well motivated in the context of the Standard Miodel.

So your enthusiasm for preons already makes you overstate your case here. A more modest argument in favour of them would be more convincing, less of a turn off.

Then you brush off the technical issue that the smaller the region of confinement, the more massive the degrees of freedom become.

There is no clear motivation given for how preons are confined. I'm seeing superstrong EM, gravity, and metagluons being offered as binding mechanisms. And then the cancellation schemes to get rid of mass created by confinement are even more hand-waving as far as I can see ... on a quick skim of the literature I admit.

Finally there is the broad argument to be had that a search for ever smaller atoms of matter is simply an outdated approach.

What I like about preons is that it fits the general S-matrix spirit of drilling down to talk of fundamental degrees of freedom rather than fundamental particles. This makes all fermions a zoo of composites.

But then QFT seems to be telling us that particles are glued together combinations of degrees of freedom. Every possible combo has some probability of being manifested from the "everythingness" of the quantum vacuum. It then becomes a Darwinian contest to find what best survives as the matter that has relevance in the cooling~spreading heat sink that is the Big Bang cosmos.

So protons and electrons are the kind of crud that exist because they are the hardest combinations to dissolve away. Most of the combinations just don't wind up with interesting interactions.

Thus the metaphysics is the opposite of atomism. Rather than searching for the simplest possible elements of matter - some palette of preons to combine - the causality flows in the other direction. Unlimited quantum possibility eventually shakes itself down into a reasonably complex crud of protons, neutrons and electrons. Much else gets produced, but it is too unstable, too simple, too lacking in interactions, too whatever, to count as the basic construction material that is the Standard Model of effective low energy particles.

So preons are appealing in many ways. It is nice they could explain particle generations using the analogy of atomic orbitals. It is fun that they might make U(1) fundamental and present at the Planck scale, while making SU(2) redundant - when Standard Model and leptoquarks make its seem the most central gauge group with its complex number magic.

But that is also a reminder that physics is so much groping in the dark that some kind of maths can be whipped up to justify any intuitive picture. There is an industry of post-grads churning out scenarios that curve fit the available data, and which will get pulled out by Cern or whoever when they want the cash to fund their next generation collider.

That preons might be even half-believable should be held up as a reason to be even more cautious about going overboard with whatever line the experimentalists are pushing in the current year.

Yet still, one wants to pick a line through the maze. At the moment, I more team leptoquarks than team preons. And more team topological order than team tiny atoms. :grin: