Theoretical Physics in Crisis
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | Theoretical Physics in Crisis |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Peter Kohut |
| Keywords | crisis in physics, dialectical logic, bipolarity, non-locality, vacuum, quantum connections |
| Published | 2010 |
| No. of pages | 12 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
Contemporary fundamental theoretical physics has been in crisis for a long time, as it cannot provide an answer to the most important question: "What is the basic structural unit of matter (space, time, energy) and how is the universe constructed of these elementary units?" The reason for this situation is explained below. Also shown, is the way to find answers to these basic questions.
Overview
Peter Kohut, a Slovak cyberneticist writing from Prešov, offers a diagnosis rather than a calculation. His thesis is that theoretical physics has stalled not for want of mathematics but for want of philosophy: the discipline has "an axiomatic base, so they are only theories, and not the real knowledge of matter", describing manifestations while leaving the essence untouched. The two pillars — gravitation and quantum theory — remain "two separate and incompatible parts" whose splitting "manifests itself like schizophrenia", and the attempts to bridge them fail, he argues, at the level of their founding concepts rather than their equations.
His positive proposal is a single principle, stated in the paper's most emphatic sentence: "bipolarity as the dynamic relation of two opposite poles (anti-poles) is the basic building block of matter, space and time." From this he derives a picture in which particles, force fields and the vacuum are all made of the same thing — "elementary quantum connections" — so that the distinction between a particle and an interaction dissolves, and the vacuum becomes "not an empty space but the space of quantum relations connecting everything with everything." The departure from the standard account is total: no point particles, no virtual boson exchange, no local action, and no relativity of simultaneity. What survives from relativity is the empirical fact of time dilation, which Kohut keeps but re-explains.
The argument
Why physics is in crisis
Kohut opens with the Einstein–quantum dispute, which he reads in an unusual way. Einstein, he says, was right that quantum mechanics "uses uncertainty, statistics and probability without searching for their reasons", and right to suspect deeper reasons behind them; but wrong about which side to abandon. "Einstein thought that something was wrong with quantum mechanics as his relativity of simultaneity denies direct action at a distance. However, the problem lies not in quantum theory, but in his erroneous relativity of simultaneity as a consequence of his STR." Non-locality is real, and it is special relativity that must give way.
He grants that special relativity is "mathematically consistent… in its Minkowski four-dimensional space-time interpretation", and grants the reality of time dilation. What he denies is its symmetry. Referring to his earlier article "Unavoidable Interaction Seen as Reason for Relativistic Time Dilation", he argues that dilation "cannot be a consequence of mutual relative motion of symmetrical systems, or of acceleration and deceleration", but is a measure of the asymmetry between two clocks, produced by "their different motion relative to their common base — real physical surroundings (vacuum)." Every confirming experiment, he insists, has involved an asymmetric configuration: "the flying space ship is not symmetrical to the Earth. Analogically, accelerated, short-lived particles extending their lifetimes are not symmetrical to their surroundings."
Against string theory and loop quantum gravity
The criticism of string theory is philosophical and quite sharp. Strings are not the building blocks of space: "they do not form it, only oscillate and coil in it. Space and strings have mutually independent existence." That leaves the same dualism as Newtonian absolute space. Calabi–Yau manifolds are "only pure mathematical forms, abstracted shapes, without any content… voids having specific shapes", and "the relations between the strings and spaces are only external and formal", based on "the formal but not the dialectical logic of being". His verdict: "If Einstein succeeded in unifying matter and space, string theories separated them."
Loop quantum gravity fares better, being background-independent, and he credits it with computing areas and volumes from spin networks and with evidence for discreteness at the Planck scale. But it too leaves the essential question open: "the essence of these spatial components and the nature of gravity are not explained… the common features and differences between particles and vacuum are not explained."
The case against virtual particles
The longest sustained argument attacks the exchange picture of forces, which Kohut calls "a consequence of the mechanical approach to theoretical physics". He puts a series of questions to it. How does an electron "know how to exchange the virtual photon if there is no direct relation" with the proton? How does the proton know which electron a given photon came from? If the electron is a dimensionless point, "then the sea of virtual photons flying from it creates an unbelievably absurd picture", since every charge must exchange with every other charge in the universe.
He then turns the standard reply against itself. Physicists answer that the internal line of a Feynman diagram "represents only a mathematical value known as the propagator" — and Kohut takes this as the concession that settles the matter: "The reality is replaced by mathematics, which definitely obscures the real nature of electromagnetic interaction instead of disclosing it." He describes the tree diagram and the one-loop diagram with its virtual electron–positron pair accurately enough, acknowledges that QED "is the most precise physical theory as its predictions are in greatest measure, in harmony with experimental results", and argues that its very success is the problem: "the real electromagnetic field is only a consequence of virtual, i.e. mathematical existence of virtual particles."
He notes the awkward status of the mediators: W and Z bosons can exist as real particles, gluons cannot exist free, and gravitons "have never been detected."
Bipolarity and quantum connections
The alternative is stated in a few paragraphs. All forms of matter are forms of energy; energy is motion or the potential for motion; and motion has its reason in "the dialectical relation of contradictions". Bipolarity is therefore fundamental, and Kohut points to its ubiquity — "bipolarity of electric charges and magnetic poles, action and reaction laws, kinetic and potential energy, attraction and repulsion".
On this basis the photon in an electron–proton interaction is not exchanged; it is the connection: "the real direct connection whose structure is the same as the structure of a free photon", with an intensity depending on distance and relative motion. The weak bosons are more complicated structures of the same connections; gravity "is created by the huge number of elementary quantum connections between massive objects", emerging from every particle and joining it to the whole universe. The wave–particle problem then dissolves, because "every elementary connection is at the same time, the quantum of space (discontinuity) and the continual relation of anti-poles (continuity)." There is, on this view, "no difference between vacuum, matter and fields."
Philosophy before physics
Threaded through the paper is a claim about method. Dialectical logic, in the Hegelian tradition, "has found the most precise explanation of these categories", and "formerly every truth was uncovered notionally and afterwards it was put into mathematical language, if possible. So philosophy has a legitimate precedence before the exact sciences." Kohut blames the twentieth-century "decay" of philosophy — existentialism, positivism, analytic and operational philosophy, which "refuse to look for the answers to the basic questions of being" — for the physical impasse, and states his own programme: "my mission is not only to describe it philosophically, but also to put it into mathematical and physical form."
Assessment
The paper's real strength is that its central complaint is a serious one, and one that working physicists have themselves raised. The interpretive status of virtual particles genuinely is unresolved in the sense Kohut means: they are terms in a perturbation series, not objects, and textbook presentations that describe forces as literal ballistic exchange do invite exactly the objections he raises. His observation that string theory reintroduces a background arena, so that "space and strings have mutually independent existence", is a recognisable version of the background-independence critique that motivates loop quantum gravity, and he credits that programme fairly rather than dismissing it. The prose is direct, the targets are named, and the argument is at least clear enough to be argued with — which is more than can be said for much writing in this genre.
The difficulties begin where the paper's own standard is applied to itself. Kohut's charge against contemporary physics is that it substitutes formalism for physical understanding, and his remedy is to promise a mathematisation of the bipolar principle; but that promise is deferred to future work, and nothing in this paper computes anything. "Elementary quantum connections" are asserted, not defined: no rule is given for how a connection's "intensity depends on the distance between particles", so no inverse-square law is derived, no coupling constant emerges, no spectrum is predicted. On its own terms this is worse than the position it criticises, because QED at least yields numbers — the electron's anomalous magnetic moment agrees with experiment to roughly a part in 1012, and Kohut concedes its precision without saying what his connections would give instead. A picture that removes a puzzle by renaming its parts has not replaced the calculation that produced the agreement.
The treatment of non-locality is the paper's most consequential overreach. It is correct that Bell's inequalities are violated and that local hidden-variable theories are excluded; Kohut states this accurately. But he then slides from "non-separable correlations exist" to "direct communication between distant particles" capable of carrying forces — and that step is blocked by the no-signalling theorem, which is itself a theorem of quantum mechanics: entanglement correlations transmit no information, no energy and no momentum, and cannot be used to build an interaction. Bell violations are also entirely compatible with relativistic quantum field theory, which is local in the microcausality sense (commuting operators at spacelike separation) precisely so that this remains true. Kohut's argument requires exactly the kind of signalling that experiment and theory jointly forbid.
The re-reading of time dilation as an asymmetry effect relative to the vacuum is the one part of the paper that could be tested, and it faces specific measurements it does not address. The claim that special relativity rests on "experimental attestation of one relativistic effect" understates the case considerably — relativistic kinematics is verified daily in accelerator momentum–energy relations, and magnetism itself is the relativistic transform of electrostatics. More directly, if dilation were an interaction with a physical vacuum defining a preferred frame, that frame should be detectable: modern optical resonator and Michelson–Morley experiments bound any such anisotropy in the speed of light at the level of parts in 1018. And the second-order (transverse) Doppler shift, the pure symmetric time-dilation term with no acceleration involved, is measured directly — in the Ives–Stilwell experiment and its modern successors using laser spectroscopy of stored lithium ions, which confirm the relativistic prediction to about a part in 109. A theory that keeps dilation but attributes it to the surroundings owes an account of why no preferred frame appears in those results.
Two smaller matters. The quark table lists "d bottom" in the third family, duplicating the down quark instead of b; this is evidently a typographical slip rather than a confusion. And the critique of point particles — "such an understanding is quite naive", since particles "possess various qualities" and must therefore have "different internal structure" — is asserted rather than argued, and runs against the electron's measured pointlike behaviour down to about 10−18 m and the extraordinary precision of its g-factor, which structure would generally spoil. The honest summary is that this is a well-articulated statement of dissatisfaction and a sketch of an ontology, not yet a physical theory; Kohut says as much himself when he writes that putting the dialectical principle "into mathematical and physical form" remains his mission.