by Paul Anlee
“Virtual particles also allow us to calculate the exact wavelengths of light emitted by heating pure elements with astounding accuracy; within one part in a billion, or 0.0000001 percent. So we accept the virtual particle theory because it allows us to make the most accurate calculations in all of science.
"Now, many of you may have heard of the two kinds of real particles, fermions and bosons. Fermions are particles such as quarks, electrons, or neutrinos. Bosons carry forces between the fermions. Bosons include photons, gluons, Higgs bosons, and so on. We can calculate how these real particles and the virtual particles are related.
“Everyone’s heard of Einstein’s famous E=mc2, right? Energy equals mass times speed of light squared? An atomic explosion converts mass into energy. Most people don’t realize that Einstein’s equation works in the other direction, too. When you put enough energy in one place, the energy gets converted into mass.”
He displayed an image of the familiar mushroom cloud from an atomic explosion. That was shortly replaced by a strange-looking image full of weird blobs, representing the interactions between virtual particles and quarks inside a proton.
“The binding energy that ties virtual particles together inside a real particle makes up the majority of the mass of that real particle. Indeed, about seventy-percent of the mass of a proton comes from the energy created by the virtual particles bound together inside of it.
“Another way to think of real particles is as complete standing waves in the quantum field. What does that mean?
“Well, think of each real particle as a string that loops back on itself. The looped string represents a wave in the quantum field. If a wave is of the correct frequency, relative to the size of the loop, when it reaches the end of the loop, it starts all over again, creating what we call a standing wave in that loop. Kind of like when an audience at a football game performs a wave that goes all the way around the stadium, and starts over again. Real particles, standing waves in a loop, are stable.
"Virtual particles, on the other hand, are just incomplete sections of a complete standing wave. They're highly unstable and transient; they don’t last long enough for us to even observe.
“We have recently shown that every known real sub-atomic particle can be modeled, not as a solid speck or ball, but as a boiling collection of randomly appearing and disappearing virtual particles that somehow manages to maintain a consistency of behavior in the aggregate, that is, in the collective whole.
“How do these chaotic, erratically behaved virtual particles—these incomplete waveforms—become nice, stable standing waves? The short answer is, through resonance.
“Two resonant—or compatible—waves on the same looped string reinforce each other. When they match the natural resonance of the string, they form a stable standing wave.
“So, imagine we have a partial wave in a quantum field, and it meets up with another partial wave of the same frequency. The second wave ‘completes’ part of the first wave. And, if you put enough of these resonant partial waves together, you create a full standing-wave pattern. And, bingo! The virtual turns into the real. The sections that overlap are redundant and fall out of the resulting real particle as excess binding energy.
“That makes reality, the universe as we know it, an emergent phenomenon of interacting virtual particles, things that don’t really exist in any directly-measurable way. Poetically speaking, one might say that the physical nothing of the quantum vacuum is filled with an infinite number of tiny bits of imagination, existing without dimension, for no time.
“That sounds like a whole lot of unicorns, I mean, ‘nothing’ to me.”
Very few laughed. Most stared back, stone-faced, uncomprehending, fidgety, and silent.
“What, no laughs? C'mon, that was funny!”
Wow, tough crowd—he thought, but it was more than that. There was a pervasive tension building out there. Something's up. He took a sip of water and returned to his lecture, uneasy.
“An entire universe filled with nothing but virtual particles would be very chaotic, yet it would appear completely empty to us. Virtual particles of all kinds would spontaneously appear, briefly interact with each other and disappear.
“Most of these interactions would be extremely short-lived because the incomplete waves of one particle would likely not resonate with the incomplete waves of incompatible, neighboring virtual particles.
“Which brings us to the question that has motivated my research team: How could a universe full of these chaotic, poorly behaved virtual particles give birth to the well-behaved real universe we see today?
“How can we conceive of a completely natural mechanism of real matter that evolves by a kind of natural selection from virtual matter, without the intervention or initiation of any intelligent creator? In other words, without God?
“The problem of spontaneous creation of a universe from nothing is not really a problem of the creation of energy and matter. As we've established, what we used to think of as nothing, is actually full of stuff. The quantum vacuum, deeper than the deepest vacuum in outer space, is crowded with energetic virtual particles.
"The problem is that, in the universe before the Big Bang, these virtual particles had not yet evolved a consistent set of stable, well-behaved interactions with each other. They existed; they just didn’t exist stably.
“Our newest theory came from thinking about this problem. That led us to the next question, which led to the next, and so on. Questions like: How could these virtual particles that filled the great nothingness before the Big Bang achieve stable associations in an otherwise chaotic universe? How could virtual particle interactions propagate from one pair to another?
“Our best theory is that an orderly universe would start to distill from this chaotic brew of virtual particles by the resonance I mentioned earlier. A very rare event would eventually place numerous virtual particles, each with sufficient overlapping oscillations to produce a standing wave in the quantum field. Such standing waves would be the first real particles and provide little islands of stability in an essentially chaotic universe.
“The standing waves of these real particles would interact with the incomplete waves of nearby virtual particles. Our models show that after many, many interactions—too many to easily count—these interactions could eventually lead to larger stable domains in the otherwise chaotic universe. All of this would have taken place with ridiculously low probability.
“But before the Big Bang and the causality that we know and love today, even ridiculously low probability events were essentially guaranteed to happen eventually.
“These resonances formed the basis of the rules that determine how matter and energy interact, the laws of nature, if you will. The laws evolved from these interactions; they were not designed or imposed by an external force. The resonances, leading to the ways in which particles formed and interacted, arose by chance from infinite possibilities.
“Now, the real universe that formed through this process, our universe, still shares the same space with infinitely many other possible virtual universes. However, these other possible virtual universes have been unable to form a stable set of interactions and become real.
“This is different from the so-called multiverse theory, which states every universe that can exist, does. That's correct to a certain extent, but only our universe ever became real, that is to say, stable. All other possible universes remained virtual, never forming a stable relationship between enough of their member virtual particles to coalesce into reality. They're all still out there, those many other possibilities, interacting, appearing, and vanishing. Rather boggles the mind, doesn't it?
Darian switched to a slide showing a traditional analog stopwatch with a ticking second hand. The image was overlaid with a large question mark.
“I've got another brain twister for you. Consider the ridiculously high, practically infinite, number of interactions that would have to take place, along with the ridiculously low probabil
ity of just the right bits coming together precisely when, where, and how they needed to. Got that?
“Now, given all of that, how long do you think it took for our universe to come together, to evolve naturally from chaos? Anyone want to venture a guess?"
Darian looked around to see if there were any takers. The second hand moved on the overhead slide. He let them suffer for a few seconds before jumping back in.
"No takers? Well, I don't blame you; it was kind of a trick question. In a universe struggling to come into existence as I’ve described, the question of ‘how long’ is meaningless.
“There is no way to measure time before the first stable interactions were in place. The chaotic universe was eternal, lasting forever. Time was immeasurable as far back as one could possibly imagine. Without cause and effect, time has no direction.
“In such a universe of chaos, we can roughly define time as something like event opportunities. According to this definition, we can see there would be adequate time for a real universe to evolve. Event opportunities are essentially infinite.
“Another question we've been scratching our heads over is: How could that lead to the Big Bang?
"What we've come up with so far is this. While partial waveforms of virtual particles are easily able to share the same space, standing waves of identical real particles, particularly those we call fermions, are not. This is called the Pauli Exclusion Principle.”
“Remember those little islands of stability I mentioned earlier? As more and more of those interacting domains of stability appeared, a sufficiently large nucleus accumulated.
“The effect those domains had on adjacent virtual particles through resonance became overwhelming. New real particles sprang into existence as the stable interactions started to spread outward, mediated by their resonance effect on adjacent virtual particles. The nucleus of real particles expanded faster than the speed of light because the resonant effect of virtual particles is not limited by the speed of real photons.
“Virtual particles coalescing into real particles in this way hate to occupy the same space. They rush to get away from each other. This led to the release of a huge amount of energy, the culmination of which, we call the Big Bang. Although, I think it would be more accurate to say, the Big Bloom.
“Our universe blossomed out of the chaos, rather than exploded. A region of stable reality spread into the surrounding area where only non-coherent virtual particles had existed previously. I suspect the process is still ongoing at the edges of the real universe, which continues to expand into the infinite chaotic virtual universe faster than the speed of light.
“In this way, the ancient Greeks were right: our universe has existed forever. There was a universe of chaotic virtual matter going back forever before the Big Bang. That virtual matter is the source of our universe, and the stable interactions that evolved between coalescing virtual particles are what we think of as the laws of nature.”
Darian paused to take a sip of water and a deep breath.
“I realize that what I’ve described to you sounds extraordinary, certainly less than obvious. Science is, above all, pragmatic. We can make up all the outlandish theories and hypotheses we like, but they can only become scientifically accepted after they are tested against the reality of the universe. Reality is always the final arbiter of truth.
“So how can we test these ideas I’ve described? How do we go from wild conjecture to scientifically sound knowledge? We can’t exactly go back 13.8 billion years into the past to test the origin of the universe, nor can we go trillions of years into the future to see how it all turns out.
“So here's where it gets really interesting. We believe that we can develop a device to generate complex fields that will amplify and select interactions among other virtual particles. Particles other than the ones that led naturally to real particles in our universe."
Darian noted a couple of dubious faces peering up at that comment.
"Once these virtual particles are coaxed into their own resonance, they will form tiny universes with their own natural laws, laws different from our own." A few more furrowed brows appeared.
"We call these fields ‘Reality Assertion Fields’ because they assert a new set of natural laws on a region of space. It turns out that a Reality Assertion Field, or RAF, is surprisingly easy to generate. All we have to do is compute the shape of a field that will encourage the selection of these new resonances between adjacent virtual particles within the RAF.
“We can use any field, but electromagnetic fields are the easiest to generate. The hard part is computing the shape of the overlap of a large number of EM fields so we can encourage the specific resonances we desire among the various virtual particles in a portion of space. The math gets a little difficult, as you might imagine.”
There was an appreciative chuckle from the physicists in the audience.
Darian checked in with his lattice sub-routine again. No one, other than the Reverend LaMontagne and the man his lattice had flagged were raising any further alarms with the algorithm. He would keep an eye on those two during the Q&A session.
“My group is now in the process of building a very fast and powerful computer, and developing new types of mathematics, which we will use to calculate the fields required to generate a new RAF in a very small volume—about one hundred cubic centimeters—of a nearly perfect vacuum.
“Once completed, we will probe this region with a variety of tests to make sure that it has physical properties different from those specified by the laws of nature in our own universe. We expect to be able to demonstrate that our principles are correct within the next few months and, from there, I anticipate some paradigm-shifting science unfolding.”
Among the sea of confused, bored, or frustrated faces looking back, Darian counted a disappointingly small number of individuals still exhibiting rapt attention.
In his distraction, he failed to see the angry man and Reverend LaMontagne exchange glances. The angry man gave an almost imperceptible nod.
17
Dr. Pratt lumbered out of his seat and requested a microphone from one of the assistants. He tapped it twice to make sure it was working. Thank goodness that’s over. And I thought it was painful listening to Darian talk about the human soul.
Aloud, he said, “An intriguing hypothesis, I’m sure, Dr. Leigh. Thank you for explaining your ideas so elaborately. Perhaps I could begin the question period by asking you, how dangerous is it to try and alter the laws of nature, even at the smallest level? I’m sure you’ll recall the concerns many of us had over the experimental work on the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle. Although that work turned out to have no dire large-scale consequences—at least, none that we know about so far—it seems to me that your own research may pose an even greater potential for disruption. How do we know that your work is not moving us toward some horrific and irreversible disaster on a universal scale?”
“Thank you for your question, Dr. Pratt,” Darian replied equitably. “As you point out, the fears around the Higgs boson research were indeed exaggerated. However, that is not the reason we think our current research poses no danger.
“The reason we do not fear some unforeseen disaster resulting from our research is that the real universe is incredibly stable.
“The universe of real particles is much more robust than, say, people’s perception or memory. People think they remember things happening that didn’t really happen at all, sometimes that couldn’t have happened. Unlike imagination or memories—let’s call those our perceived realities—an objective reality actually exists. It is formed out of countless, consistent and well-defined resonances between the virtual particles that, altogether, make up the real particles of the universe. It is definable, measurable, predictable, and can be consistently recreated.
“It is, however, exceedingly difficult to calculate how even a small number of stable real particles might interact with their adjacent virtual particles. That’s why we are generating
the RAF—the Reality Assertion Field—in as much of a complete vacuum as we can. Until we understand how artificial microverses interact with the real universe, we want to avoid any contact between these two different kinds of matter.”
Satisfied with his answer, Darian turned to the audience and asked, “Other questions?” A hand shot up immediately. Darian recognized the speaker from campus, “Yes, Mr. Lim?”
The third-year physics major beamed at being identified by name by the world-famous scholar. It didn’t occur to him how easy it was for Darian to access SFU's confidential registration data via his lattice in the brief time between seeing a raised hand and acknowledging it. An assistant handed the student a microphone. “I’m confused about the quantum fields—”
“I believe that feeling is widely shared,” Darian joked, “even physicists have struggled with the complexities. But what is it in particular that you find confusing, Mr. Lim? Perhaps I can help clarify.”
The undergrad smiled shyly and continued in a quiet, precise voice. “I’ve been taught that all quantum fields are associated with a real particle. So how could one extend across the universe, when most of the universe is empty space? How can a field exist in the absence of any particles?”
“An excellent question, Mr. Lim. You have touched upon something that has bothered many theoretical physicists for quite some time.
“Remember my earlier description of static electric charge? As charged real particles move, they interact with virtual particles that are constantly and spontaneously arising all around them. Some of the virtual particles will resonate by chance with the real particles. These, in turn, may resonate with other nearby virtual particles. Stringing these together, leads to the transmission of the resonance outward from the material.
“Actually, what we call the quantum field is simply the potential for resonance by the virtual particles. But virtual particles permeate the universe and beyond. So the field itself isn’t a real thing; it's more like a representation of potential, a mathematical convenience, if you will. The part of a field closest to an actual thing is this traveling wave of resonance which is transmitted through the cloud of virtual particles. Does that clarify it for you?”