LIGHT, GRAVITY AND COLOR
Miguel Ángel Martínez Iradier
Mechanical theories of gravity fell into a deserved discredit at the beginning of the twentieth century after having been seriously considered by the greatest physicists for centuries. We will not make here an attempt of rehabilitation but we will remind that if we do not know when a particle radiates we are not really qualified to discredit other theories by thermodynamic arguments. Mechanical theories may be pathetically inadequate, but even if this is the case they might stand on the threshold of the most unsuspected revelation. We talk about the relationship between the color theory and field theories. We talk about Color Technologies. We even talk about the Riemann zeta function.
There is no need to review all the physicists who carefully dealt with the mechanical or kinetic theories of gravity; it is enough to cite the names of Huygens, Jakob Bernoulli, Leibniz, Kelvin, Maxwell, Lorentz or Poincaré to give it a respectable place among the recurrent topics in the history of physics. It was only after the widespread acceptance of the General Theory of Relativity that the subject was relegated to the marginal research and amateur physicists, even if it was clear that the new brand theory had nothing to say about the cause of gravity.
It has been called "Le Sage theory", "push theory", "theory of radiation pressure", "shadow gravity", "Universal Repulsion Theory", and so on. It could be said that there are two parts to it: a supposedly mechanical part, which attempts to explain the push with collisions, and the non-mechanical part, which actually states that gravity is not a force but the absence or shadow of a force. To the first part belongs all the pedestrian and pathetically inadequate explanations of this kind; to the second part, a truth so sublime that we do not know how to take it, since it is evident that the free fall of bodies does not produce deformations and in this sense has nothing to do with forces as they are commonly understood.
Between one thing and the other, there is room enough for indecision. We know, however, from the thermodynamic arguments provided by Kelvin, Maxwell and Poincaré, that the more basic estimates of friction and temperature seem to be conclusive on the unfeasibility of the model. And yet, it is precisely since Maxwell's theory that we lack a definite criterion for knowing when accelerated matter should radiate or not —remember Bohr's circular atom-, what at least should have to put all these objections into quarantine.
Needless to say, the problem of radiation remains completely open in our modern quantum electrodynamics, among other things, because as we have already commented in another article, in addition to the ambiguities of the Maxwell framework, special relativity is not suited for accelerated frames of reference, nor for extended particles, nor for other kind of energy conservation than the most purely local. Too many limitations and contraindications for any realistic thermodynamic model.
To date we simply do not have an adequate framework to settle friction and radiation matters in our particle/field theories. In all honesty, this should be the starting point.
So, what to do? If one takes into account the great and elementary gap in the subject of particle radiation, it can still be said that the probabilities of finding some important truth in this type of theories remain around 50 percent. This, without having any problem in admitting that the mechanisms hitherto proposed are not really mechanisms at all and sidestep the difficulties of justifying the energy balance.
On the other hand, even from the point of view of the constitution of matter in the Standard Model, only 1.88% of mass is resting mass, with the remaining 98 percent being interaction energy —another name for radiation. If we add to this the fact that particles of matter such as electrons use to be considered to be made up of nothing more than "electromagnetic field", one can understand that popular theory saying that matter is nothing more than trapped light after different transformations of its linear momentum in angular momentum.
If space is defined by light, it has been thought, what else could particles be made of but light, which is synonym for space. And if experimental physicists already try to create matter from light, some of these common theories of gravity due to ultra-long wave radiation have long held speculations about the transformation of light into polarized pairs of matter on the surface of super-massive galactic nuclei, and vice versa, with the added merit of banishing the no less speculative black holes.
The idea always underlying, although rarely openly formulated, is that light is space, and matter with its gravity is simply its shadow. We could also say that light and its propagation depend on the homogeneity of space while matter and gravity involves its heterogeneity. In this abysmal simplicity, supported by the elemental common denominator of the law of inverse squares, resides all the appeal of such theories.
There are incredibly silly things not only in the mechanical theories of gravity, but also in the most common ideas about the propagation of light, which we imagine moving through eternity but which we cannot conceive of as remaining and vanishing at the place of its emission, as standing waves for instance. Our inability to represent the intensive activity of nature leaves us in a desperate situation when it comes to aspiring to understand anything. Physicists' theories contain many intensive elements, but they don't reveal by themselves any activity, which we understand to follow only from the motion thing… so finally they try to explain mass by a kind of braking friction against a field.
Sometimes you think you might be asking physics for something it can't give at all, but, otherwise, Where are the written limits of what physics should be?
Field theories, such as quantum electrodynamics, display an overwhelming complexity in calculation —to the point that it makes us think that a single photon knows more and better than our own brain - but, despite this, it is incomparably less rich and revealing of nature than the panorama of the visual field, the bare perception of colors. And since here I am thinking of the most painful deficiencies of our theories in the face of nature's unfathomable simplicity, I will go one step further and ask, with the painter's eye, what is between shadow and light. The habit of the mathematician compels him to say: "a limit". In other words, practically nothing. The understanding of a naïve educated person like Goethe whispers to him: "the color". In other words, all colours and the entire field of vision.
And most interesting of all is that the essence of color is independent of motion. Certainly, the naked perception of color, the pure phenomenon, is incompatible with the requirements of a theory proper. In order to move from the elusive phenomenology to the modern fields theories we need a robust connection for which there are only attempts. Nicolae Mazilu, for example, has made a laudable effort to connect gauge and Yang-Mills fields, quantum chromodynamics and the holographic principle with the classical theory of light and color. His approach through external differential forms also allows very basic connections with concepts such as friction.
Colors in modern theory, since authors such as Schrödinger, form a linear three-dimensional space; color geometry instead is not Euclidean, but Riemannian, and its metric bears a statistical significance with the components of the metric tensor as covariances of the three coordinates of color. Mazilu points to a general dynamics of color with a flow of colors for the human eye related to Hannay's angle. I miss many connections but I think it's clear this is a way of mediating between modern field theories and the questions raised by the real visual field and its perception of color.
Mazilu's guiding principle is that light is a universal model for the physical world as far as we can go, for after all it is light what transmits information in the universe. In contemporary theoretical physics, this privileged role of light as an information carrier has taken the form of the holographic principle.
Probably in the future we will talk about "Color Technologies", which will be a good part of the most integral and analogical information technologies. If light is a supreme model, we are still far from having discovered all the aspects of its interaction; and among them the "chromatic interaction", as far away as possible from kinematic considerations, has a special role to play here.
In the most obvious physical sense colors are a mere surface phenomenon; but for the visual field and perception —let's say, for Nature's eye - they are themselves responsible for our sense of depth. There can be no greater contrast between the two points of view, but if we really want to delve into the paths of nature we cannot do it disregarding the greatest, plain and primary evidence that it has unfolded before our eyes.
It may seem that we adopt the most contemplative stance, but in reality it is here, beyond motion, where nature exhibits its most genuine activity, activity that in this case it's not even hidden. On the other hand and in quite a different sense, we are still in a phase of "literal" reading, that is why we speak of the famous and non-existent "book of nature" that makes us think of a code and a single meaning, even though all this are man's games playing the codebreaker.
The same genes could one day be the subject of the new color sciences; for we now know that there is no single reading, that enzymes make very different proteins with the same message, and that three-dimensional folding is something completely different from linear sequences. All stereometry problems can be translated in colorimetry ones; and they can be applied to the atomic nucleus as well as to the nucleus of the cell, or so many other matters.
As Schrödinger saw it, the argument for color depth requires a framework of projective geometry. That there is no form in nature without a rigorous equivalence in color was a mere truism before Galileo began to speak of primary and secondary qualities. At the end of the escape, in the extreme flight down of gravity, we will again find part of this notion in the holographic principle itself.
Goethe spoke of polarity in colors, and physicists, so concrete always, have observed that there is no polarity in light but only in electrical charges. Well, I for one think just the opposite: electrical charges are the inexistent, but there is polarity in light, which, as one can guess, cannot depend on something as trivial as a mere convention of particles with opposite signs. The naturalistic polarity of which Goethe spoke would rather have to do with the duality of electricity and magnetism, matter and space, tension and deformation, which interpenetrate and can emerge from each other by the work and grace of the dynamic and static aspects of kinetic and potential energy: the same would happen with colors on the part they share as an electromagnetic phenomenon, and beyond that, in what we might call their "analytic continuation".
Not only in the nucleus and the nuclear matter and forces we can continue applying the theory of the deformations, also in the virtual interactions of color in the visual field. Talking about an analytic continuation for this one, we are irremediably lead to think about the Riemann zeta function and its proven but enigmatic relation with atomic energy levels. It is well known that the type of quantum system that can replicate the real values corresponding to the function is actively sought. Berry, Connes, Sierra and Townsend seem to have even suggested confining an electron in two dimensions and inflicting electric and magnetic fields to it in order to "obtain its confession" in the form of zeros... For me, the critical line is the same virtual line between light and shadow, space and matter, unfolded in the miracle of our sight and vision.
In other words, the physical replica of the zeta function cannot be a matter of quantum mechanics alone; to believe that is perhaps the main obstacle in specifying the type of system that can replicate it, since quantum formalisms are at odds with any tangible concretion. Once again, quantum mechanics acts as a smokescreen.
They say that the zeta involves the most basic and deep relation between addition and multiplication, between the quantitative and qualitative aspects of numbers, between the explicate and the implicate order. Can we figure out the most basic and deep relation between addition and multiplication of colors?
In order to better understand the relationship between the zeta and quantum mechanics, one must necessarily have a better understanding of the relationship between the latter and the physical continuum from which it emerges. There is no true universality without this. For the physical continuum, which makes itself present for the first time as the Maxwellian electromagnetic Ether, is an indefinitely broader concept than the mathematical continuum of real numbers. Understanding the zeta-quanta relationship involves understanding the quantum-continuum relationship, no more nor less. And this forces us to look both at the past and the future of physics, and at the discarded theories that seems to be in conflict with the prevailing ones.
Of course, in order to circumvent modern vetoes, physicists are forced to look for subterfuges such as "semiclassical approximations"; encrypted messages that everyone will do well to interpret. All attempts to "crack" the zeta instead of trying to understand it globally are doomed to failure. And the same can be said for the rest of the hard sciences with a dramatically diminishing reductionists returns.
Needless to say, the zeta function has been used to regularize and calculate the partition functions of "thermal gravitons" and quanta of matter in black holes —to obtain "finite values despite the infinite blue shift of the local temperature over the event horizon".
The fact is that we have a theory of light and color strictly in terms of surfaces, while gravity and General Relativity, for which the punctual particle does not exist, give them infinite depth. Now we would rather have to proceed to the contrary: delimiting the superficial part of gravity and grasping the infinite and uncontrollable reverse of the electromagnetic continuum in which light has its being.
Light is extremely universal; the zeta is extremely universal; color is extremely universal. It would be extremely unlikely that they do not have a relationship both very general and crucial. How universal are gravity and matter, light should tell.
Finally, I would like to say that although the idea of privileged frames of reference has been practically banished from physics, it would still be highly desirable to consider it for different reasons. Weber's law already fulfilled relativistic criteria better than Relativity six decades later and yet it did not outlaw Ether, because Ether is much more than just a cinematic assumption. Anyone who cares about the non-kinematic aspects of physics, and there are many of them —even in General Relativity - would do well to keep this in mind.
In an old Ether theory, as Riemann and Maxwell themselves conceived, material condensations could show an atmosphere around them, since matter itself was conceived as a condensation of the medium. Thus, in the same way that planets show their own atmosphere or transition zone with free space, particles would have their own halo; as the field theories have not stopped talking about particles as condensations of the very fields.
This is not merely a question of how we represent the transition between space and matter, there is a huge range of experiments with precious information involved. Even going backwards, we see that the Lorentz undraggable ether, the Fresnel and Fizeau partially draggable ether, and the Stokes theory of total drag of ether are not contradictory and refer to clearly different cases; one could even say, with Stoinov, that they are complementary visions of an issue which, like matter itself, cannot be reduced to a simple arbitration once and for all.
Mass and force, matter and gravity, distribute their extensive and intensive aspects according to our consideration of motion, which, needless to say, can be extremely variable. The relations between surface and depth, matter and motion, statics and dynamics, have find its symbol through the ages in the interaction between the Sphere and the Cube, which defines at each moment the limits of manifestation and the ever-present limits of the ascent and descent of knowledge that, with or without self-consciousness, we can assume are balanced.
No surface is only motion, but all motion is meticulously superficial. The great question of the Continuum is not so much to provide us with a privileged frame of reference as to allow us to discover the part of physics that is less dependent on motion. To understand it better, and to find its relationship with the best known kinetic and kinematic aspects, be it in electromagnetism, in gravity, or in thermodynamics, that and nothing else is for me the great prize. It is as if we have not yet opened the door, ignoring if it is open or closed, if the door even exists.
References
N. Mazilu, The Classical Theory of Light Colors: a Paradigm for Description of Particle Interactions
N. Mazilu, From Kepler problem to Skyrmions
N. Mazilu, The concept of physical surface in nuclear matter
N. Mazilu, Mechanical problem of Ether
S. W. Hawking, Zeta Function Regularization of Path Integrals in Curved Spacetime
D. G. Stoinov; D. Stoynov, For Physics of reason against Physics of misconception
M. A. M. Iradier, Between stress and pressure
M. A. M. Iradier, Self-energy and Self-interaction
M. A. M. Iradier, Beyond control-Feedback and potential