Physicists Suggest All Matter May Be Made Up of Energy 'Fragments'

 The matter is what makes up the Universe, but what makes up matter? This question has long been tricky for people who consider it – especially for the physicists.

Reflecting recent trends in physics, my colleague Jeffrey Eischen and that I have described an updated thanks to giving some thought to the matter. We propose that matter isn't made from particles or waves, as was long thought, but – more fundamentally – that matter is created of fragments of energy.

From five to 1

The ancient Greeks conceived of 5 building blocks of matter – from bottom to top: earth, water, air, fire, and aether. Aether was the matter that filled the heavens and explained the rotation of the celebs, as observed from the planet viewpoint.

These were the primary most elementary elements from which one could build up a world. Their conceptions of the physical elements didn't change dramatically for nearly 2,000 years.

Then, about 300 years ago, Sir mathematician introduced the concept that every one matter exists at points called particles. 100 fifty years afterward, James Clerk Maxwell introduced the radiation – the underlying and infrequently invisible type of magnetism, electricity, and light-weight.

The particle served because the building blocks for mechanics and also the wave for electromagnetism – and therefore the public settled on the particle and also the wave because of the two building blocks of matter. Together, the particles and waves became the building blocks of all types of matter.

This was an unlimited improvement over the traditional Greeks' five elements but was still flawed. in a very famous series of experiments, referred to as the double-slit experiments, light sometimes acts sort of a particle and at other times acts sort of a wave. And while the theories and math of waves and particles allow scientists to form incredibly accurate predictions about the Universe, the foundations break down at the biggest and tiniest scales.

Einstein proposed a remedy in his theory of general relativity theory. Using the mathematical tools available to him at the time, Einstein was ready to better explain certain physical phenomena and also resolve a longstanding paradox referring to inertia and gravity.

But rather than improving on particles or waves, he eliminated them as he proposed the warping of space and time.

Using newer mathematical tools, my colleague and that i have demonstrated a brand new theory that will accurately describe the Universe. rather than basing the idea on the warping of space and time, we considered that there might be a building block that's more fundamental than the particle and therefore the wave.

Scientists understand that particles and waves are existential opposites: A particle could be a source of matter that exists at one point, and waves exist everywhere except at the points that make them.

My colleague and that I thought it made logical sense for there to be an underlying connection between them.

Flow and fragments of energy

Our theory begins with a replacement fundamental idea – that energy always "flows" through regions of space and time.

Think of energy as made from lines that replenish a locality of space and time, flowing into and out of that region, never beginning, never-ending, and never crossing each other.

Working from the concept of a universe of flowing energy lines, we hunted for one building block for the flowing energy. If we could find and define such a thing, we hoped we could use it to accurately make predictions about the Universe at the biggest and tiniest scales.

There were many building blocks to decide on from mathematically, but we sought one that had the features of both the particle and wave – concentrated just {like the} particle but also opened up over space and time like the wave.

The answer was a building block that appears sort of a concentration of energy – reasonably sort of a star – having energy that's highest at the middle, which gets smaller farther aloof from the middle.

Much to our surprise, we discovered that there have been only a limited number of the way to explain the amount of energy that flows. Of those, we found only 1 that works in accordance with our mathematical definition of flow.

We named it a fraction of energy. For the mathematics and physics aficionados, it's defined as A = -⍺/r where ⍺ is intensity and r is that the distance function.

Using the fragment of energy as a building block of matter, we then constructed the mathematics necessary to unravel physics problems. the ultimate step was to check it out.

Back to Einstein, adding universality

More than 100 ago, Einstein had turned to 2 legendary problems in physics to validate general relativity: the ever-so-slight yearly shift – or precession – in Mercury's orbit, and therefore the tiny bending of sunshine because it passes the Sun.

These problems were at the 2 extremes of the scale spectrum. Neither wave nor particle theories of matter could solve them, but the general theory of relativity did.

The theory of Einstein's theory of relativity warped space and time in such a way on cause the trajectory of Mercury to shift and lightweight to bend in barely the amounts seen in astronomical observations.

If our new theory was to possess an opportunity at replacing the particle and also the wave with the presumably more fundamental fragment, we might just be ready to solve these problems with our theory, too.

For the precession-of-Mercury problem, we modeled the Sun as an unlimited stationary fragment of energy and Mercury as a smaller but still enormous slow-moving fragment of energy. For the bending-of-light problem, the Sun was modeled the identical way, but the photon was modeled as a minuscule fragment of energy moving at the speed of sunshine.

In both problems, we calculated the trajectories of the moving fragments and got identical answers as those predicted by the speculation of relativity theory. We were stunned.

Our initial work demonstrated how a brand new building block is capable of accurately modeling bodies from the large to the minuscule. Where particles and waves break down, the fragment of energy building block held strong.

The fragment can be one potentially universal building block from which to model reality mathematically – and update the way people give some thought to the building blocks of the Universe.