I have been contemplating the nature of the universe for a while, as a general interest. Quantum mechanics seems to tell half the story of the actual underlying structure. This has led me to find out about alternative ideas about the fabric of ‘spacetime’, first triggered by the qualities of gravitational waves. There are quite a number of thinkers who have ideas that are outside the box, for instance Thad Roberts and Gerard Gremaud, who I discovered once I concluded that spacetime is some kind of crystalline latice. My view has a relation with loopgravity, which can be made consistent with quantum dynamics.
Taking my views to their logical consequences recently I concluded that light should have to cover different distances in the same time depending on its frequency. There is a wonderous difference between radiation and movement of mass that is hard to explain. Why does anything radiate. This has to do with conversions of energy, this is well known. We say an electron is lifted to a higher band and can emit a photon as it drops back. The photon represents energy, it is a wave and also has properties of a particle. Very confusing.
A photon can travel for billions of years in a straight line from its perspective. All that time is a wave and a particle. I don’t think there are particles, I think particles are defined by their ability to interact and maintain their character. I think all particles are types of turbulence in spacetime. This is similar to the thinking of Gremaud. He views the univers as a kind for stiff metal that has deformations. Thad Roberts thinks the universe is a superfluid, which is a fluid in which there is no friction. He thinks that there is 3d space in which space itself can move around. I think there’s still a flaw there. There can be nothing, because it all came from nothing. Our experience is turbulence in a very thin mesh, but I have no definite answer and have not yet put all qualities of that mesh in their place.
Somehow radiation is special, it is not turbulence. It moves at the maximum speed, against the elastic limit of space. Einstein did describe space as something elastic (so Gremauds ideas are not super strange). If you accept space ‘pixels’ are all connected by springs in three dimensions, you can imagine a force that compresses the spring to its maximum, ramming one point in space into the next. If that happens you would not be able to tell where in space you where. To dig a bit deeper into ‘space time’ : If it took no time to go from one location in space to another, then how would you know these locations where different? Therefore time IS space (gets rid of a pesky 4th dimension thanks!). The fact space has to be traversed creates time, or better still, locality. Time is locality is a property of the 3d lattice of space (which may be 3d as an emergent property)..
So I propose any type of radiation ‘bangs’ the springs of space flat as it travels through space. It experiences no time, because to it it is in all the places it traverses. There can’t be a seprerate location for anything in its path, it is all one location even though its like an estafette. Surrounding this punching through space is a wake and of course the spring reverberates back. So if we study radiation we see a wave, which is the literal variation in density of space. Carried on the crest of this wave though is two points in space that have melted.
Now my claim in the title follows from the fact that photons of different energy travel as light of different wavelengths. The wavelenght can be calculated as hC/E where h is Plancks constant, C the speed of light and E the energy. The higher the energy the shorter the wavelength. This, if you follow the above view of space means that radiation of a higher frequency ‘bangs’ space together more often over a given distance it travels. This banging means that distance does not need to be covered, because during these ‘bangs’ the two locations is space become one. If two photons of different energy travel a specific distance though space, they thus will arrive at the end of this distance at different times, or you could say one will travel faster than the other.
“A telescope viewing a supernova from over 16 billion light years away recently clocked the low energy photon arriving 5-7 seconds later than it’s high energy equivalent.”
Looking for confirmation I found a lot of people repeating that the speed of light is constant (even though light travels at various speeds in different media and can even be stopped), I was looking for an example of an exception. I found one (this one) that said that gamma radiation from a super distant star arrived 5 seconds earlier than visible light.
If you do the calculation for the above quote then you take 16 billion light years, calculate how many peaks of the lightwave are in that distance, divide it by the planck length (this is the ‘skipped’ space) then multiply the result with the speed of light to get the time advantage of those skips which comes out at .2894 seconds. This does not exactly match the measurements, so there may be other factors, but a delay is a delay. The speed of light is not constant.
To me it is not clear how a deformation front in space suddenly gives rise to a photon that extracts itself from the local turbulence in (literally) no time. You can imagine music fans in a crowd pushing and pulling on each other until by accident all move into one way and cause a cascade of toppeling fans. In interfering surface waves you can also have sudden peaks. The amount of energy that can be contained in space is limted by what the springs can take, so such a peak translates into a burst of photon wave peaks send out that combined contain the energy that has to be removed. Of course it can be absorbed as wel, by turbulence. possibly when the ‘bang’ reaches a spring that was just extending. This is well known and is called interference. Energy can also be contained in groups of points moving about relative to other groups, for instance as they are perturbed by turbulence (an electron for instance).
Quantum mechanics will say that you can’t tell where a photon is etc. This simple thinking does not contradict that. If you are looking for a photon, you could see the probability distribution exactly for what it is, the likelyhood that it will pop up in one place or another. The subquantal perturbations are often ignored but they make it very uncertain where the energy reaches the treshold needed for detection. This translates in uncertainty of a photons existence at any time you choose to try to interact with it. You’r trying to catch the peaks of the wave in a space that’s already full of movement.
The above thinking does imply that if you can measure the timing of light of different frequencies exactly and you know they originate from a synchnous origin, you can determine the exact distance of to that origin. Patent is pending!