I've been keeping my brain occupied on long drives by trying to come up with a theory of everything, because... why not?
My current pet hypothesis is that all fundamental particles are sort-of like tiny black holes, and that the space-time distortion caused by black holes is precisely the same thing that ordinary matter causes. All matter and energy are space-time distortions, which is why mass-energy bends space time. It's not a secondary effect, the bending is what everything is, not a property that things have. (This is essentially just a variant of Kaluza Klein theory, or others like it.)
Particles are kept apart by their spin, same as in well-established physics. Matter is still mostly empty space, same as normal.
In this toy model, neutron stars are like a boba tea, with the black holes of particles close-packed but still not touching.
When forced into forming a black hole, the event horizons of individual particles begins to merge, forming a "super-particle" that expands out. When fully-formed, the black hole is hairy, with a very dense packed crust of still-separate particles layered over a very lumpy surface, inside which there is... nothing. Not even space-time. The surface is where space-time ends.
It's like... imagine if we lived on a knitted jumper or a space-time like woven cloth and could only follow threads. If someone were to poke a hole in the weave with a finger, pushing aside the threads, then it would be meaningless to ask what threads are inside that hole. There aren't any. The "weave space" doesn't extend into the hole.
This simultaneously satisfies a long list of requirements gathered from modern physics:
1. Black hole formation is a gradual, continuous process at both microscopic and macroscopic scales. This model can start all the way down with the first pair of particles that got squished together and then can be extended all the way up to something the size of a star.
2. Black holes are hairy instead of smooth, satisfying thermodynamics and quantum information theory.
3. There's no paradox of what happens when you go past the event horizon. There's no singularity. The event horizon is a surface, essentially just a highly red-shifted neutron star. Hitting it is the same as hitting a neutron star. You do not go through. You get squished.
4. There's no need for complex maths to explain black hole evaporation. In a sense, black holes don't exist, they're just a very time-dilated neutron star, and their evaporation is just an ultra-slow-motion explosion of a neutron star.
5. A well-established theorem is that many properties of a black hole grow in proportion to their surface area (2D), not their volume (3D). This theory matches that. There is no volume, there's only the surface. The inside doesn't exist. When approaching from normal flat 3D space, space gradually becomes fractal (2.x dimensional), smoothly transitioning to a 2D space, which is the event horizon.
6. It is time-reversible. Seen backwards in time, "fingers" of 3D space invade into the event horizon, splitting it up into smaller and smaller chunks that bud off to form small, stable spheres that evaporate away. These are the particles that made up the black hole.
While I understand these are just idle musings, you should note that this is failing to address the biggest problems that actually "require" a theory of everything.
Most importantly, it doesn't explain how quantum fields interact with a non-flat space-time. If you try to combine QM with the space-time-deforming characteristics of mass from GR, you quickly get infinities all over the place, which is obviously not what we observe.
Secondly, the object that you are calling a black hole is simply different from the object called a black hole in GR. That object, by definition, has a huge mass in an extremely small volume. All the other descriptions of it are derived properties of how GR says masses affect the structure of space-time. And it should also be noted that the event horizon of a black hole is much wider than the size of the object just before collapse, as far as I know - which sounds different from what your model would predict (but perhaps not?).
Of course, the experimental observations that lead to QFT need to be accounted for, but not any specific mathematical model of QM. If two models like GR and QM disagree, we’ve got to drop one of the two. In my opinion it’s easier to keep GR, because I’ve never heard of a way to make QM particles produce spacetime curvature. (Conversely there is an entire zoo of theories that extend GR down to particles.)
Fundamentally, GR predicts that even an individual electron curves spacetime, and not just at “interstellar” distances. The effect ought to be continuous all the way down to the particle’s “surface” for a want of a better term.
It’s a consistency principle. Theories don’t end at the edge of the experimental benchtop or the surface of a planet. Either everything everywhere follows a rule or nothing does. The experimenter themselves is QM and GR, as is every particle and every planet.
In this sense, there are several ways to “add” most of QM theory to any extension of GR such as Kaluza Klein theory.
Most of these are some variants of the many worlds interpretation (MWI). This can reproduce superposition and the various “spooky action at a distance” effects without anything spooky actually being needed. Locality can be preserved and the hidden variables are in parallel universes. The mathematical issues with hidden variables also vanish if you assume the experimenter is also a part of the quantum experiment and not just standing outside of it like some sort of God looking down at space time from above.
My pet variant of MWI is to do away with the discrete, tree-like “splits” and assume that the many worlds form a continuum. Essentially this means that there are multiple time dimensions, smoothly splitting the universe at every instant. Hence observations are not special in any way, and can’t even be clearly identified. It’s just stuff that “goes on”.
The really hard part for any TOE is not QM! The brutally difficult aspect is explaining the three particle generations.
As far as I've read, most physicists have the opposite impression: that QM is much closer to the truth, and that it's almost impossible to add explain the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in GR. As some others have shown in the comments here, there are even models of QM that actually predict various GR phenomena for relatively flat space times (i.e. anything that's not very close to the event horizon of a black hole).
> Fundamentally, GR predicts that even an individual electron curves spacetime, and not just at “interstellar” distances.
That's exactly the problem. Since the electron is not localized in space-time according to all QM observations, it's very hard to define how it can then bend space-time. This is not an interpretation problem (so MWI vs CI has nothing to do with it), it's a problem with the math itself.
The problem with MWI on the other hand is that there is no satisfactory way to arrive at the observed measurement outcome probabilities, especially in these continuous splitting scenarios. These become an extra postulate just like in the CI interpretation.
> The really hard part for any TOE is not QM! The brutally difficult aspect is explaining the three particle generations.
Well, that's hardly a real problem. That there are multiple kinds of particles may very well just be a fundamental aspect of nature, one that doesn't require any explanation, any more than the value of c or pi does. If we had a theory that unifies QM and GR, that could be the final theory of how the universe works (well, assuming it also somehow explained what dark matter and dark energy are, to be fair).
My personal goal has always been a TOE that allows aspects like particle generations and their various properties to be derived ab-initio from axioms with only simple constants such as integers or pi.
So particle generations ought to be an output, or an essential aspect of the geometry of the thing. In any event, the theory must model the generations, not just layer fields on top of fields like layers of pancake, or... epicycles on top of epicycles.
> most physicists have the opposite impression: that QM is much closer to the truth
This is the crux of the problem: QFT is newer than GR, and people often assume that newer is better. It had one huge numeric prediction success, and that has cemented the theory as more successful than all others in the minds of researchers. Never mind that they've sprinted up a valley to stare at a dead end, a proverbial insurmountable cliff up ahead.
> the electron is not localized in space-time
QM theorists would like to have things both ways at the same time, and then they make the surprised Pikachu face when things turn into nonsense. You can't have point particles smeared in space or even space-time. Pick one.
Or... use a model that allows a point in 3D space but treats it as a higher-dimensional object (surface/volume) in a higher dimensional space, such as the parallel worlds of MWI.
There are other options also. But throwing up one's hands is not the right path to a TOE, in my opinion...
Your first point sounds a lot like the Schwarzschild Proton conjecture by Nassim Haramein, don't know if you were aware of it. Alas, I need to point out that it is basically considered pseudoscience!
I got the original concept from the quite famous "black hole electron" theory, but I'm not saying that particles are exactly like tiny black holes.
PS: My toy theories are not to be taken seriously, they're a product of idle musing only.
My method however, I think is sound: try and come up with something that simultaneously satisfies as many known experimental and theoretical constraints as possible, poke holes in it (hah!), fix, rinse, and repeat. Or discard as necessary. Whatever.
A motivation that has been bugging me is: What sets the scale of particles? How does the universe know that a proton here should be the same size as a proton there? Why can't we have giant protons?
A simple geometric argument could be something like assuming that particles are black-hole-like things as described previously, and that they are solitons. They're the smallest units of spin, where their rotation and size is balanced such that some aspect moves at the speed of light. They can't get smaller because then their rotation would have to increase past the speed of light. Hence, all particles have their sizes fixed by the constancy of the speed of light.
That's why I pasted my rambling thoughts in response to this article, my original idea started off thinking of particles as solitons that are also somewhat like black holes, which is the topic of the article.
I don’t have anything to add other than I enjoy reading your idle musings. I’m not a physicist and don’t really know any real physics passed 101 college courses. I have similar idle musing with the speed of light so it’s nice to read another layman’s thoughts.
Some other notes from what I understand of current mainstream physics:
- elementary particles have no defined size in QM (electrons, quarks, neutrinos, photons etc); there is no known lower-bound on how small they could be, and there are serious mathematical issues both with assuming a non-0 radius, but other problems with assuming a radius of 0
- composite particles like a proton or a hydrogen atom have a size because of the relative strengths of the forces holding together their components; for example, the three quarks making up a proton must exist at a certain distance from one another because of the properties of the strong force; the electron of a hydrogen atom must "orbit" the proton at a certain distance because of the properties of the electrical force
- QM spin is not a rotation speed of any kind; QM particles are not little balls rotating around their center; quantum spin has no known relation to the speed of light
- replacing one constant of nature (the size of a proton, or at least of an elementary particle) by another constant of nature (the speed of light) is not really simplifying the theory; one could just as easily go the other way, and say that the speed of light is derived from the size of elementary particles in some other way
That's only kinda-sorta true, and only in a very restricted sense.
All particles have a wavelength, but that can change depending on their velocity.
In QM models, it is a simplification to treat particle as point-like to make the mathematics tractable. It isn't necessarily an accurate picture of the underlying reality.
> QM spin is not a rotation speed of any kind; QM particles are not little balls rotating around their center; quantum spin has no known relation to the speed of light
That's not exactly the case. From my best understanding, Spin is just the Dirac Belt Trick, an indication that particles are part of the spacetime fabric and attached to it. When they rotate, the fabric rotates with them locally. This requires two full rotations (720 degrees) to go back to the original state, which is why you have "spin 1/2" and the complicated maths.
> In QM models, it is a simplification to treat particle as point-like to make the mathematics tractable. It isn't necessarily an accurate picture of the underlying reality.
As far as I understand, it is more than that: it is an explicit assumption of the theory that elementary particles do not have an internal structure, and so their radius must be 0. This is not to be confused with the wave-like representation, which of course does have a size in space.
On the spin question, I will not claim I understand enough to actually go into more detail than the (probably simplistic) observation I've read that quantum spin can't be understood in terms of classical rotation/movement.
My current pet hypothesis is that all fundamental particles are sort-of like tiny black holes, and that the space-time distortion caused by black holes is precisely the same thing that ordinary matter causes. All matter and energy are space-time distortions, which is why mass-energy bends space time. It's not a secondary effect, the bending is what everything is, not a property that things have. (This is essentially just a variant of Kaluza Klein theory, or others like it.)
Particles are kept apart by their spin, same as in well-established physics. Matter is still mostly empty space, same as normal.
In this toy model, neutron stars are like a boba tea, with the black holes of particles close-packed but still not touching.
When forced into forming a black hole, the event horizons of individual particles begins to merge, forming a "super-particle" that expands out. When fully-formed, the black hole is hairy, with a very dense packed crust of still-separate particles layered over a very lumpy surface, inside which there is... nothing. Not even space-time. The surface is where space-time ends.
It's like... imagine if we lived on a knitted jumper or a space-time like woven cloth and could only follow threads. If someone were to poke a hole in the weave with a finger, pushing aside the threads, then it would be meaningless to ask what threads are inside that hole. There aren't any. The "weave space" doesn't extend into the hole.
This simultaneously satisfies a long list of requirements gathered from modern physics:
1. Black hole formation is a gradual, continuous process at both microscopic and macroscopic scales. This model can start all the way down with the first pair of particles that got squished together and then can be extended all the way up to something the size of a star.
2. Black holes are hairy instead of smooth, satisfying thermodynamics and quantum information theory.
3. There's no paradox of what happens when you go past the event horizon. There's no singularity. The event horizon is a surface, essentially just a highly red-shifted neutron star. Hitting it is the same as hitting a neutron star. You do not go through. You get squished.
4. There's no need for complex maths to explain black hole evaporation. In a sense, black holes don't exist, they're just a very time-dilated neutron star, and their evaporation is just an ultra-slow-motion explosion of a neutron star.
5. A well-established theorem is that many properties of a black hole grow in proportion to their surface area (2D), not their volume (3D). This theory matches that. There is no volume, there's only the surface. The inside doesn't exist. When approaching from normal flat 3D space, space gradually becomes fractal (2.x dimensional), smoothly transitioning to a 2D space, which is the event horizon.
6. It is time-reversible. Seen backwards in time, "fingers" of 3D space invade into the event horizon, splitting it up into smaller and smaller chunks that bud off to form small, stable spheres that evaporate away. These are the particles that made up the black hole.