Grand Unified Theory.........

The search has been on for a great many years for the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.

According to The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, it took Deep Thought 7.5 millions years to come up with the answer of 42

Using current theories as the basis for our Answer, it may take us 7.5 millions years to arrive at similarly random result.

This Blog does not attempt to unify the fundemental forces, but rather to produce an alternate explanation.
As I previously posted in A Starting Point , The atom is a system and once you start looking at the components of an atom you can no longer see the system.

What this means is that some those fundemental forces that are needed to be unified to create a supreme theory, may not exist in isolation.

As part of the system that is an atom, the strong and weak forces are an attribute. They only exist as part of the atom. If you smash an atom, the protons and neutrons do not continue to stick together after the atom ceases to exist. The odds are that with the number of atoms that have been smashed over the years, that one of them would have produced a result where the nucleus of the atom remained intact after the initial detonation.

Consider an alternative solution.

The forces contained within the atom are there because of the constituent parts of the atom. They are an attribute to the system called atom. Once you destroy the system that is the atom, those attributes are also destroyed.

Every piece of shrapnel that is produced from smashing an atom, eventually decays to massless energy - the photon. Consider the mutual destruction of an electron and a positron. The result is two photons. All the mass that the two particles contained disappears.

The atom, at the most basic level, consists of nothing more than energy - Einstein's e=mc2

It is the configuration of this energy that determines its attributes, one of which is the Strong Force speculated to maintain the structure of the nucleus of the atom.

Atoms are created in the cores of stars where the pressure reaches extreme values. It is these extreme pressures that configure the energy into a system that, once free of the extreme pressure, can maintain the structure.

The forces said to maintain this structure are attributed to the Strong Force, but are not an individual force between two objects, rather it is the attribute that maintains the structural integrity of the system.

A Starting Point.

In an attempt to understand the workings of our Universe, it is important to have an understanding of the current level of our knowledge and distinguish between hard facts and theoretical proposals.

Every theory must have an initial concept or principle on which it is based.

"I have deep faith that the principle of the universe will be simple." - Albert Einstein

'Every complex system can be reduced to a simple set of rules' - Murray Gell-Mann.

Taking the Universe as the ulitmate complex system, it too must be based on a simple set of rules. These rules must encompass all aspects of the Universe, and to provide a stable system be the simpest set of rules possible, ultimately be comprised of a single rule.

The first problem is where to start.

How do you search out the one fundemental rule from which everything in the Universe is based. The most obvious answer is to break down what is currently known to a point where the is a single rule or entity.

No matter where you start, there comes a point where further reduction results in purely theoretical conclusions.

The structure of the atom is described in the standard model, but again is purely theoretical.

The atom is a system and once you start looking at the components of an atom you can no longer see the system. When atoms are smashed in particle accelerators, what is recorded is not the atom, it is not even the propoerties of the atom, it is what is happening to its components the moment they are no longer part of the atom. You will not detect any properties of the system called atom because when it was smashed it ceased to be.

Smashing atoms has been likened to breaking plates. If you take two identicle plates and hit them in the exact same place with the exact same force, you should get two identicle sets of plate fragments. From this data you can determine that using a different force will result in a different set of fragments, this can be tried and no doubt proven to be the case. It doesn't tell you much about the plate though.

The assumption has to be made that as far as a starting point, the atom is too complex a system and there are too many unknowns to go beyond it.

If there is no system that can be broken down to provide the Holy Grail of Rules, then the quest will have to look to the simplest particle.

If there is no system that can be broken down to provide the Holy Grail of Rules, then the quest will have to look in the other direction. Take the most basic particle known and attempt to build from it.

The most basic particle we know is the Photon. It is massless, has no charge yet is the most prolific free particle in the Universe.

What do we know about this simplest of particles ?

The Photon has a constant velocity, it always travels at 186,000 miles per second.

They come in varying levels of energy.

They display properties of both Particles and Waves.

They are affected by Gravity.

The Photon would apear to adhere to a number of different rules, but as the simplest particle we know about, it has to be the starting point.