Prolegomena to any Future Physic

Full Title

Physics is just a collection of Physics. We still are in need of a few more to make sense of the world we live in.

Abstract

This paper will enumerate the problems faced by the Physics of today and explore solutions that might be successful in overcoming those Problems.

Introduction

We will establish a taxonomy of terms and there meanings for the sole purpose of communication with the reader. In general the meaning of these terms is not universally acceptable and we don't wish to claim to the right to declare any meaning for other's use, but just so we can be clear about our use of the terms. We will call that part of the universe that is accessible by our senses, the Sensible Universe. The rest of the universe will be called the Hidden Universe. All that we sense about the universe appears to be in Euclidean 3-space or in Minkowski (Lorentzian) 4-space by the addition of time and relativity.

Problems

1. Entanglement or superposition primarily as expressed by Einstein as "Spooky Actions at a Distance." We will focus here on the Anton Zeilinger experiment with two entangled photons emitted in opposite directions. Some have called these two photons as Contrary. The state of either is not knowable until a measurement is made on either of the photons. Only then do we know the state of both.
2. Dark Stuff including the Dark Energy and Dark Matter hypotheses tell us that we know the source of neither all energy nor all momentum. Meaning that these components are not a part of the universe that is directly sensible to us.
3. Continuous verses quantum (discrete) values.
4. Zeno, a pupil of Parmenides, showed clearly that the infinite and the infinitesimal were absurd. But we know that the differential calculus works in predicting motion.
5. Reconciling General Relativity to a Quantum Physic.
6. Conservation laws are local, that is when a region in space loses energy, it must be accounted for by a flow of energy, usually as a photon. When we perform the Zeilinger experiment (or any similar one) the local state is not knowable until we get a measurement of one of the photons. In other words the energy of the local region depends on what happens somewhere else at some time else. In general, the only way to know how much energy or momentum has left a region is to measure it.
7. It is not possible to know the path that a "particle" takes in 4-space. All we can do is generate them at one point and record when they hit a detector at another. The path they travel is never known. The principle of least-action does provide some information about the path, but it is never exact.
8. Energy can, theoretically, have any value at all. That does not mean that energy is continuous in our sensible reality. QM teaches us that it only appears in discrete chunks, quanta. But then what is the missing energy. Well, we don't know what nonsensible energy is, only that there's a awful lot of it.

History

Too Long, Don't Read unless you want to know how we got here.

1. At least since the time of Plato (350BC) philosophy has focused on ideal Forms that can be known to be true since the beginning of time. These truths are out there for us to discover. Some of Plato's examples are anthropocentric like tables. That must be because Plato believed that there exists an ideal human form — a perfect archetype that transcends the limitations of our physical bodies, but still needed to sit at a table.
2. Galileo (1633), Newton (1984) and Einstein (1905) all agreed that reality was predictable if we just got the equations right. Granted, we could never know all the details of the present state of reality, but if we did, the universe would run on exactly that the current state and the eternal laws of reality could be calculated.
3. Schrodinger (1926) created his equation that determine where at particle was.
4. Born (1927) described the (squared) result of the Schrodinger equation was just the probability of find a particle at the point calculated.
5. Heisenberg (1928) was able to show that the the best we can do is only describe the conjugate pairs of values (location and momentum) to be with an error bound.
6. Whitehead (1929) tried to describe space-time as just a series of events (which may be similar to the effect of the collapse of the Schrodinger equations).
7. Kolmogorov complexity (1965) is the length of a shortest computer program that produces the object as output. It is a measure of the computational resources needed to specify the object
8. Computational irreducibility was clarified by Steven Wolfram in 2002 as situations where a system’s behavior cannot be simplified or “shortcut” through any means. In other words, there are computations that cannot be sped up or predicted using shortcuts. The implication is that the universe cannot be calculated in less time than it takes to run the universe itself.
9. Time is real from Lee Smolin who previously had thought it unreal. but decided in 2012 that the only way that it was possible to see the future was to let reality take its course and see what happened.

Postulate

The follow were selected in an arbitrary manner, but they seem to be suitable for physics and do not exhibit any of the above problems.

1. All things that are measurable are discrete.
2. The Schrodinger Equations (SE) is not directly measurable as it propagates. All it does is create a probability density distribution for future effects.