Field Structure Theory (paper)

This article is about Don Briddell's 2006 paper. For the theory it sets out, see Field Structure Theory.

Scientific Paper
Title	Field Structure Theory
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Don Briddell
Keywords	Field Structures, action
Published	2006
No. of pages	39

Read the full paper here

Abstract

Field Structures begins with a discussion of the concept of action, the simplest notion we have about anything. FST shows a structural system that postulates a loop of action and then shows how these loops of action can interact to produce three-dimensional action event that organize fractally according to Field Structure mechanics to produce energy and mass structural systems that in nature are the fundamental boson/fermion particles. Field Structures show with working models (that will be shown and demonstrated) how action organizes itself. These are structures that are unique and new to science. Field Structure Theory will show how it is possible to begin with the simplest of all possible notions (action), produce radiant energy waves which interact with themselves to produce closed standing waves, which in turn interact to produce a particle, which interact at a higher field order to form atoms, and so on up the hierarchy to molecules, and beyond; all this made possible by a simple loop of action. I will briefly review the basic building block forms shown at Storrs meeting in 2005, and then go on to show exactly how these structures can determine particle characteristics. Field Structures show how fields can be understood supporting the idea with charts, graphs and tables in a Power Point presentation how fields and particles are related. The 3-D 'stop time' models to be shown and demonstrated freezes the blistering motion of a particle so their inherent and underlying structure can be examined at our scale of experience. Once the structural system is explained, and due to the limitations of presenting time, the presentation will only be able to show two important issues in physics: 1) how these Field Structures generate the known mass values with which physics is familiar, and 2) why there are only two stable rest mass particles, the electron and proton. This presentation will not be physics as you know it. This approach had to be taken in order to understand where mass values come from. It is a new way of seeing physical reality as the end result of structuring together loops of action to form spatial events that delineate motion, momentum and position.

Overview

This is the third in Don Briddell's series of Field Structure Theory papers, subtitled "Postulating the natural world as a product of fieldstructure geometry." Its programme is to derive the particle world not from equations but from buildable geometry. Briddell begins from what he calls the simplest notion available — action — defines an action as "a loop of relatedness," and then asks what can be constructed if the only building element permitted is a closed loop and the only operations are bending, twisting, linking and knotting. Open strings with two ends, he reports, were studied and "found incapable of structural potential"; only the closed loop can build complexity "without having to introduce contrived devices such as fasteners." The paper is illustrated throughout with photographs and CAD renderings of physical models that Briddell actually built, several rendered by Joseph Clinton.

The departure from the mainstream account is total rather than marginal. Where the Standard Model treats fundamental particles as structureless points characterised by quantum numbers, FST treats them as three-dimensional woven objects, each with an interior polyhedron, and claims that the polyhedron determines the particle's mass. The theory is explicitly "background dependant": it postulates a pervasive matrix of action loops at the Planck scale, which Briddell calls the action plenum or absolute action matrix, and which he identifies with what earlier traditions called ether, Akasha or prakriti — an aether revival in geometric dress. Matter is not something placed in this plenum but a knotting of it: "You can have a string without knots, but you cannot have a knot without a string."

The argument

Skew geometry: three axioms

Fieldstructures are built in a skew polyhedral geometry whose axioms Briddell states as: (1) lines are loops, lines do not end; (2) lines have dimension, they are not infinitesimally small moving points; (3) lines interact, they do not intersect. The third axiom carries the theory's central polemic. Intersection, Briddell argues, is what "produce[s] the dreaded infinities that have plagued physics," and treating particles as points "has precluded [physics] from discovering the structure of nature." Because lines may approach but never cross, the meeting places of loops are called vortices rather than vertices, and the enclosed shape they define is the nuclear polyhedron.

A further consequence claimed for the no-intersection rule is dimensionality itself. Action cannot return to its starting point in a single revolution; it must precess through successive rotations, and this "basic skew of space/time" is offered as the reason structure is "always and only polyhedral." Briddell extends this into a nine-dimensions-plus-time scheme, in which each observed x, y, z axis has three further axes rolled up inside it — the visible world being "the last three dimensions of a hierarchy of nine dimensions plus time."

Chirality and the wave

The first property a loop acquires is handedness: a circuit is either clockwise (Cw) or counter-clockwise (Ccw). Briddell's structural account of why waves wave follows from this. Place two mirror-image loops in the same spatial domain while forbidding either line to change length, and they have no option but to twist about a shared axis, producing a helical wave whose axis lies on the boundary between them. Hence "all forms of boson energy come in two forms simultaneously, a right and left handed form," and a complete action is a 720° event, 360° clockwise plus 360° counter-clockwise.

From this Briddell draws his account of the missing antimatter. Bosons require both chiral circuits to be present and self-sustaining, so both handednesses of light are visible. Fermions, by contrast, "can sustain their structure 'apparently' with only a right or left handed circuitry," and the counterpart circuit is cloaked inside the real particle. Antimatter is therefore not elsewhere and not absent — it is structurally interwoven with ordinary matter and invisible to instruments themselves made of ordinary matter. Its appearance in decay events is taken as evidence "that the anti-matter was there all along."

Twisting versus looping

Energy enters a fieldstructure two ways, and the distinction does the theory's main work. A boson takes on energy by twisting its line of action about its own axis; a fermion takes on energy by adding loops to a circuit. Both a 360° bend and a 360° twist count as one rotation and one quantum, which is offered as the structural reason mass and energy are interchangeable. Because a loop's length is fixed by the Planck length, adding twist cannot enlarge the object — it compacts it, so that "the more massive a particle the smaller its field of action becomes." Briddell reads E = hf accordingly: h is the loop, f the number of twists in it. A structure of three loops each twisted 180° totals 1080° of twist, f = 3, giving E = 3 × 3 = 9.

The particle hierarchy

Structures are built up in Field Orders, each order pairing a boson (energy) particle with a fermion (mass) particle, and each built from three of the order below. The First Field Order is the plenum itself, its Cw and Ccw action loops named pranum and prana after Vedic terms. Three interacting action loops give the photon; three photons interacting give the Nadi, identified with the neutrino; three Nadis of each handedness interacting give the Structor, identified with the electron (or, with handedness reversed, the positron); and the energy of three electrons fieldstructures the proton. Briddell classes the neutrino as not quite a full fermion — its polyhedron encloses space, but it still needs its opposite-handed partner to be self-sustaining. Spin is read off the same construction: forms requiring both chiral circuits are spin-1, those apparently needing one are spin-½, and quarks with ⅓ or ⅔ spin have mixed complements such as "one cw and two ccw."

The three generations of fermions are attributed to a counting fact about polyhedra, illustrated from Buckminster Fuller's Synergetics: only three, four or five lines can meet at a vertex of a closed three-dimensional solid, giving the tetrahedron, octahedron and icosahedron. Six lines produce a flat sheet, not a solid. These three vertex figures are matched to the first, second and third particle generations, with the tetrahedral family alone stable and the other two accounting for "the resonance particles ... their instability and short life times."

E = mc² as geometry, and the proton mass

Briddell's boldest claim is that c is not an independent constant. Mass is a count of loops; energy is a count of twists; and the number of twists a structure can carry is fixed as the square of the number of loops. Hence m and c carry the same number, "the constant c will keep up with it automatically," and relativistic E = mc² is restated in FST as E = m³. Charted, the loop-to-twist relation is said to generate a Sierpinski fractal, each line a twist and each triangle a loop.

The Particle Hierarchy Chart is then used to derive the proton-to-electron mass ratio. The bound proton is assigned a chart value of 2187. Splitting it from the nucleus releases a pion-meson valued at 243, leaving 1944; emission of an electron valued 81 leaves 1863; emission of a neutrino valued 27 leaves 1836, "the known mass number for the unbounded proton measured in units [of] electron mass." Briddell presents this as "the first plausible explanation for particle mass values."

Assessment

What is genuinely distinctive here is the method. Briddell does not merely assert a geometry; he builds it, and the models are self-proofing in a way equations are not — a fieldstructure lacking integrity "has the decency to fall apart." The demand that a structural system be "an all-encompassing fractal continuum through all scales" is a real and testable ambition, and the treatment of a wave as the resultant of two counter-rotating loops sharing a domain is a vivid physical picture of an object that quantum mechanics is content to leave abstract. The insistence that points and intersections are the source of physics' infinities is a criticism shared well beyond dissident circles.

The difficulties are correspondingly large. The central numerical result is the weakest step, not the strongest. The chain 2187 → 1836 works only because four chart values (2187, 243, 81, 27 — all powers of three) are assigned in advance, and the paper does not derive them from the loop-counting rules independently of the answer sought; a scheme built from successive triplings can be made to land near 1836, and no error bar or alternative-assignment test is offered. The measured ratio is 1836.153, and FST as presented gives no route to the decimal places, nor to any second mass — the muon, the pion itself, the neutron — as a check. Likewise E = m³ is dimensionally unlike E = mc²: it is a statement about counts of loops, and the paper never supplies the conversion that would let it reproduce a rest energy in joules, so the identification is asserted rather than demonstrated.

Several other steps are stipulated rather than argued. The nine-dimensions-plus-time hierarchy is introduced to explain why lines never intersect, but nothing in the model is subsequently computed from it. The cloaking of antimatter inside matter is attractive as a resolution of the baryon asymmetry, yet as stated it is unfalsifiable — the cloaked partner is said to be undetectable in principle by real-matter instruments, which removes the claim from experimental reach. The assertion that "light would loose energy as it radiantly expands" points toward a tired-light reading of the cosmological redshift, but it is left as an aside, and the paper does not engage the observation that most sharply constrains such proposals: the (1+z) stretching of Type Ia supernova light curves, which a simple photon-energy-loss mechanism does not produce. Nor does the claim that "if an electron is energized (heated) to a frequency of a proton, the electron will morph into a proton" confront lepton and baryon number conservation, which forbids exactly that transition and is among the best-tested conservation laws in particle physics.

Finally, the paper's own tone is candid about its status. Briddell writes that the looped action circuit is "admittedly an assumption," that his conclusions on indivisible linkages are a decision taken so that "FST [may] develop logically," and that the hierarchy chart "is a scaffold with which science can now detail a complete explanation." Read as a scaffold — a geometric research programme with a striking constructive method and one suggestive numerical coincidence — the paper is honest about what it has and has not established. Read as a derivation of the particle spectrum, it does not yet meet its own claim.

See also

• Don Briddell
• Field Structure Theory
• Aether
• Standard Model
• Cynthia Whitney
• Lee Smolin
• Halton Arp