Sadly, claims to such finds are not rare at all, and to date all I have encountered have be vacuous. — Reformed Nihilist
Yes, indeed, as I too have had to refute over the last thirty years and more.
Here's the promised gist:
Since there is something, a lack of anything is out, plus there is no sequence in time from nonbeing to being because ‘Nothing’ has no time, nor anything else, nor can ‘Nothing’ have any properties, so nor can ‘it’ be. ‘It’ isn’t, and so that’s the end of ‘it’.
So, given that Something has no alternative, it is everywhere and continuous because it cannot have any spacers of ‘Nothing’ in it. Because it is continuous and never created, it is partless and is thus the simplest state, for a composite cannot be fundamental. As having no parts, the Something is unbreakable into parts as well as being unmakeable from parts, thus it cannot be generated or go away; so, it is eternal, as being ever, and so there isn’t anything else but it. It is permanent. See also ‘Parmenides’, who shocked the philosophic world, and still does, about the One.
The Something cannot be still, else naught would happen; so, we can assign movement to it as a truth, thus it is energetic. Since the elementary particles are lightweights, so does it follow, too, that the Something is a lightweight, just as it has to be, as the simplest state.
Forms from it cannot be new and different from the Something, thus forms such as elementary particles can only become through arrangements of the Something. Since the elementaries are rather persistent, there is a way that these lumps of Something can be made to be stable. We see that they occur at certain rungs of energy levels and not others, which we call quanta, so again, there is something inherent that allows for these steady formations. We see that all the elementary ‘particles’ of a type are identical, this further indicating that they are woven of the same cloth.
Since electrons or photons sent even one at a time through two slits makes an interference pattern, they must have a spread out wave nature, indicating also that they are not pinpoints. While we refer to them as elementary particles, they, of course, are secondary, and so they are elementary only as ‘particles’.
Look up QFT (Quantum Field Theory)!
To continue the philosophy, we can now refer to the Something as the Permanent. What it forms are mostly temporaries, the entire universe, even, although photons don’t seem to decay by themselves and ought to be all that’s sparsely left at the End of the Universe as forms.
Being of necessity, having no alternative, the Permanent requires no creation by ‘God’. Just as we see in the universe, the progression up to now went from the simple to the composite to the more and more complex. Not even the tiny proton can be the First, for it is a composite of quarks.
The Permanent ‘lesser’ simplest makes for the ‘greater’ temporaries in terms of complexity, yet the ‘lesser’ always wins, in a way, because it ever remains, for the ‘greater’ complexities don’t last. Even the elementaries can get annihilated. Still, the Permanent is boring, as we knew the TOE would be, while the temporaries can be interesting.
The religious template of the lesser always having to come from the greater was always a doomed notion, lest an infinite regress ensues, for one, and this is not seen, for two, and the Permanent is of necessity, for three. The notion of ‘God’ fails.
The Permanent is strictly physical because the secondary quanta that are physical are directly the quanta of the Permanent.
We now also know that there needn’t be just one universe, for the permanent ever remains and so it could make another universe. Thus, the Big Bang came from it and not from an impossible ‘Nothing’.
I propose that the Quantum ‘vacuum’ is the Permanent, for its modes of excitations would be what gives rise to the elementaries.
Note that Newton’s absolute time and space have fallen, as well as the notion of the ‘particles’ making the fields. What’s left as fundamental is what is being described here.
We can model the Permanent Quantum ‘Vacuum’ as spacetime points that ever move, these points forming a continuum that we can readily call a field since there is a value at every point. The sums of these harmonic oscillations form a wavering field, each point tugging at the next. In short, the wave nature gives rise to the formation of stable quanta.
A complication is that there are 25 quantum fields modeled, one for each entry in the standard model, these fields all atop each other, some of these fields interacting with other fields, making for one large mathematically complicated overall field. Further mathematical complexity arises from the wanna-be ‘particles’ that don’t have an energy quantum, these being the unstable ‘virtual particles’ that form and go away rather quickly.
Victor Toth says,
We decompose a quantum field into harmonic oscillators, since that’s what the field does, with its moving points, though a Fourier-transform, each point now as a quantum harmonic oscillator whose energy comes in quantized units.
The lowest energy state is not zero when we sum for all possible values so we get an infinite result.
When a theory is renormalizable, there’s a mathematically sensible process to discard the unwanted infinities but still account for finite differences, which are responsible for observables. We may sum energies to some finite cutoff value, and use it to compute physically observable values;
in the limit of the cutoff going back to infinity, the physical prediction doesn’t change.