Impressions

First of all, the point of this post is to give my impres­sions of Thad’s quantum space theory and his book, “Einstein’s Intuition”. Admittedly this will not be “sci­en­tific”. Admittedly I am not a “sci­en­tist” in the pro­fes­sional or aca­d­emic sense. I am what might have been called a nat­ural sci­en­tist in the nine­teenth cen­tury, or per­haps even a renais­sance man a cen­tury ear­lier. I am inter­ested in biology, astronomy, chem­istry and, of course, the great foun­da­tion of sci­ences, physics. I am also inter­ested in phi­los­ophy, the visual arts, lit­er­a­ture, tech­nology and the like. While I con­sider myself a sort of jack of all trades and master of none, I have learned a few things in my years on this planet. As such, I hope to ground my sub­jec­tive take in a multi-disciplinary con­text. If I fail, the fault is mine, not the theory’s or Thad’s.

I heard Thad lec­turing about his new “theory of every­thing” under less than ideal cir­cum­stances, but what struck me imme­di­ately was the intu­itive acces­si­bility of QST, its explana­tory breadth and the pas­sion it fos­tered both in its author Thad Roberts and the motley crew of atten­dees. After hearing Thad talk for about two hours, it became clear to me that I was hearing some­thing new, some­thing (dare I say) pro­found. In that short time, many of the prob­lems and vagaries of quantum mechanics dis­solved. This was amazing to me. I have studied quantum mechanics for years and have always been left with a sour taste from its lack of explana­tory power. Yes, it pre­dicts events and effects with amazing accu­racy, but when asked why a cer­tain thing hap­pens it abdi­cates the throne telling us that that is a mean­ing­less ques­tion. I, for one, have never been able to rec­on­cile with this epis­te­mo­log­ical failure. Thad was the first person to give me even a remotely plau­sible expla­na­tion for why things are the way they appear to be. After the lec­ture, I approached Thad and asked to read the draft of his book, “Einstein’s Intuition”. Later that week I was given the first couple of chap­ters. I began a journey then, one that I con­tinue on still. As I read the book, it became clear that my first impres­sions were cor­rect — this was an impor­tant work. I then became, for lack of a better term, Thad’s editor.

At that time (about three years ago), Thad’s theory was fairly com­plete, but still needed pol­ishing, in that there were sev­eral big ques­tions that plague modern physics that Thad had not yet fully inte­grated, for example, “what is dark matter” and how exactly does quantum space theory account for its effects let alone describe why it “exists” at all, that is, why is dark matter a nec­es­sary con­stituent of Nature? I was fairly far along in revising the first part of the book which out­lines the raison d’être for QST, when Thad came excit­edly to me with an expla­na­tion for the mys­tery of dark matter. He was, to use the cliché, pos­i­tively glowing. He then went on to elab­o­rate, proposing that dark matter can be thought of as a phase tran­si­tion in the fabric of space­time itself. As we move out from the warmer inte­riors of galaxies, the quanta of space change den­si­ties rad­i­cally (think of the tran­si­tion from steam to water), cre­ating a sharp gra­dient, this gra­dient is lit­er­ally gravity. So, in this tran­si­tion region, an apparent mass exists, but it is invis­ible or “dark” because there is nothing there but space (quanta). There are no tra­di­tional par­ti­cles with tra­di­tional mass, simply a grav­i­ta­tional influ­ence brought on by this dra­matic change in space­time density.

What I found most inter­esting about this expla­na­tion of dark matter was not so much the expla­na­tion itself, but rather that Thad’s gen­eral theory required no mod­i­fi­ca­tion to explain the phe­nom­enon. That is, Thad had taken QST and explained some­thing that the theory was not specif­i­cally designed to explain. This rec­on­cil­i­a­tion of theory to obser­va­tion was in essence a priori, in that the theory by its very nature offered up an expla­na­tion for a dis­parate, his­tor­i­cally puz­zling obser­va­tion. Any good “theory of every­thing” should have this hall­mark. You should be able to take the gen­eral idea and deduc­tively apply it to the spe­cific cir­cum­stance with no mod­i­fi­ca­tion to the orig­inal. If you have to go back and recast the theory, then the theory obvi­ously was not right in the first place. These epipha­nies hap­pened sev­eral times over the fol­lowing year as Thad fin­ished the later chap­ters of the book. One by one, the great puz­zles of physics fell as Thad arrived at a descrip­tion of an under­lying cause, based solely on the impli­ca­tions of quan­tizing space and allowing for higher dimen­sions. The obser­va­tions were no longer con­tin­gent, but nec­es­sary because of the struc­ture of the under­lying system. It was quite remark­able to wit­ness first hand.

During the period when Thad was fin­ishing up the rough draft of the book and I was fol­lowing behind doing the first edit, we had many long dis­cus­sions. A sub­ject that we touched upon both directly and tan­gen­tially was that of emer­gent behavior. The basic idea is that a system with many small, simple parts (or parts that obey simple rules) will often exhibit very com­plex behavior when those parts interact in mul­ti­tudes. An example might be a neuron — a neuron is a rel­a­tively simple com­po­nent (in its basic comu­nica­tive and pro­cessing actions, not inter­nally, where it is almost incon­ceiv­ably com­plex) but a huge net­work of neu­rons will dis­play astound­ingly intri­cate behav­iors (think of the dif­fer­ence between the behavior of a single nerve cell and the dizzying array of behav­iours we as humans exhibit.) I am very inter­ested in how this super­ve­nient rela­tion­ship actu­ally works, par­tic­u­larly if and how the inter­me­diate levels of the hier­ar­chical system feed­back to each other. I sup­pose that most com­plex sys­tems have mech­a­nisms that cross between the var­ious levels their com­po­nents operate upon. To me, one of the very inter­esting ideas found in QST is that of hier­archy, in par­tic­ular dimen­sional hier­archy. I have the feeling that this lay­ering of dimen­sions allows for com­plex behavior to emerge that a flatter struc­ture would pre­clude. This is just a feeling. But, it seems that sim­ilar ideas are emerging in fields as diverse as lin­guis­tics, com­puter sci­ence, soci­ology and micro­bi­ology. What at first to me seemed a weak­ness of QST (its poten­tially infi­nite regress of dimen­sional hier­ar­chies) now seems an almost nec­es­sary strength. I see lay­ered­ness as the very foun­da­tion of every­thing in the uni­verse (quite lit­er­ally). I see matter made pos­sible by the cross-dimensional inter­ac­tions allowed by this layeredness.

At the center of all this is, of course, Mr. Thad Roberts. He’s a strange char­acter deserving at least a para­graph here. He is, first of all, a dear friend. He is also the cre­ator of this theory that poten­tially explains some of the greatest mys­teries of modern physics. While some of the ideas incor­po­rated into the theory are not new (which can be said for just about any encom­passing theory — sci­ence does not happen in an intel­lec­tual vacuum), the syn­thesis he pro­vides is star­tlingly simple in its con­cept and refresh­ingly novel. It allows even the lay person to grasp what’s going on under Nature’s hood. But all that aside, Thad is a won­derful mix of the inquis­i­tive child and the wise old man. There is an inno­cence about him (though the U.S. Department of Justice might see that dif­fer­ently) that is con­ta­gious. His curiosity is bound­less. He is inter­ested in just about every­thing. He has a thirst for adven­ture, which some­times gets him in to trouble, but it is fair to say he lives every day to its fullest, some­thing I truly admire in him. Even if his theory is proven wrong, he has at the least started a con­ver­sa­tion that could lead sci­ence back to its roots — one where deduc­tion, theory and expla­na­tion reign again and the fact col­lec­tors and col­la­tors are seen again as tech­ni­cians (nec­es­sary, but dif­ferent in kind not degree).

I invite you to read the first part of Thad’s upcoming book, “Einstein’s Intuition”, which lays out the his­tor­ical land­scape and the rea­sons a new theory is needed. I also invite you to join in the con­ver­sa­tion, both sup­por­t­ively and critically.