While my previous post was all about the discovery of supramolecular orbital, that has a direct link to our company, there is more to the story. You see, while I wasn't explicit about it, the concept of light as a physical ring is just another way of saying that light is a closed string.
But doesn't this sound like string theory? Well, yes and no. The current string thery requires extra dimensions. More specifically the minimum number of dimensions requires at least a 10 dimensional spacetime. Well my theory of entangled molecules requires no such thing.
The probelem starts already with Daniel Bernoulli, who first came up with the idea of freely moving particles of gas in his 1738 book Hydrodynamica. This was the starting poin of the kinetic theory of gases, which Albert Einstein used as a basis for much of his work. In his paper "On a Heuristic Point of View about the Creation and Conversion of Light", which I referred to in my previous post, he assumed that each molecule of gas can be considered and independent entity. The equation of
, which we now know as
is preceded by the sentence "If every light energy quantum ionizes one molecule then the following relation must exist between the absorbed quantity of light L and the number j of thereby ionized gram molecules:" Emphasis mine. This seemingly innocent phrase states that if the kinetic theory of gases is right, then there is a linear correlation between the number of quanta of light and the number of molecules absorbing the light.
The only problem is that a freely moving molecule is a postulate. That is, it a a statement that is taken to be true, to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments. The reason this postulate has remained that no one has shown an instance where the postulate would not apply. However, if one were able to show a counterexample, where the postulate would not apply, it would need to be rejected.
To some extent the 1905 paper by Einstein could have been this counterexample, as it seemed to say that light does not have mass. But conversely, this resulted in the postulate that a quantum of light is a massless particle. Here we het into a convenient methematical trick. If instead of the wavelength of light, we start talking about its frequency, which is inversely related to the wavelength, we get a nice linear correlation. It looks like the problem is solved.
If it was only this, things would have been somewhat tolerable. The big problem arrived in the form of quantum mechanics. In the mid 1920s several physicists came up with an ingenious way to describe the workings of the world in the subatomic scale. This theory was based again on the kinetic theory of gases and on Einstein's work. Because light was a massless particle, this led to the interpretation of all interactions as probabilistic event, described by wave functions. These are quite unintuitive (for most people) mathematical representations that describe the experimental results that the physicists were getting with great precision.
And it wasn't just that quantum mechanics explained past experiments. It also helped to come up with new equation to describe phenomena, not even detected. And one by one, these predictions came true. So quantum mechanics had to be right, right?
There was one thing, though. Einstein would have none of it. The developers of quantum mechanics were sure that the mathematical principles of their theory meant that the world was a probabilistic place and could not be understood by concrete physical interactions. In a letter to Max Born, Einstein wrote "God does not play dice with the universe." and "God tirelessly plays dice under laws which he has himself prescribed."
Einstein was convinced that the rest of the physicist had misunderstood their findings and that a deeper understanding of quantum mechanics would take away the need for such a probabilistic interpretation of nature. Up to his death in 1955 Einstein tried to find a theory that would show that the world is not a fundamentally probabilistic place. However, the rest of the world had long since carried on, and after that, only scientific cranks and looneys were left supporting Einstein's views.
Time went by and physics and chemistry moved along. Except physics got more and more accurate, with rules explaining all possible phenomena. Chemistry used the tools developed by physicists, but encountered multiple cases, where the simple rules of physics did not explain the phenomena. But this was never held as a problem for physics, but more of a problem with the simplifications made to help with the applied quantum mechanics. There is a popular meme comparing physics to chemistry (click the image to see where I found it).
The meme conveys the role of chemistry as a rug under which all of the bits and bobs that don't exactly follow the hard rules are swept. There are plenty of equation describing phenomena that are only marginally connected to other phenomena. But because this is called chemistry, we can still claim that the rules of physics are steadfast. However, if there only one set of rules to describe all the phenomena in the universe, it seems dishonest not to be worried that chemistry is so disorganized.
What I hear many physicists say is that they aren't too interested in chemistry because you have to remember so many things by heart. Ernest Rutherford was claimed to have said: "All the science is either physics or stamp collecting". If he did, this would be rather comical, as he was awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry and not for physics. But this goes to show how arbitrary the difference between the two is.
As far as I see it, both physicists and chemists took a wrong turn when they rejected the idea that the interaction of light with conventional matter was a concrete, commonsensical, phenomenon. Had somebody thought hard what it means that water absorbs a photon with a wavelength of 2898 nm, they should have entertained the thought that there should be something of this size interacting with light. Perhaps they thought that there was nothing with a size of 2898 nm until light struck it, but the impact with light somehow caused water molecules to take this shape for a fleeting instance. Honestly I have no idea whether anyone ever thought of anything concrete, or was it just abstract mathematics. And I've worked with photochemists and been in photochemistry conferences, and none of this was ever discussed. It was only mathematics...
Except this isn't exactly true. It has been known for ages that there is a thing calles structural color and a related concept called iridescence. If you have an animal or a plant, with holes of just the right size, these holes produce a color with the same wavelength as their size. And If light shines from an angle, its color changes. But for some reason structural color was somehow considered different from 'normal color'.
Getting back to theoretical physics: if molecules are not free to move, but are bound to each other, this will lead to a closed loop of matter, moving at the speed of light. What would the they become, if this loop was considered to unbound, consisting of the fragments required by the old notion of free molecules? They would be short strings. And they would behave as strings, but have interactions with each other not directly caused by them touching each other, but by some induced force. I hope I haven't mangled the theory too much, but this is the current state of string theory. As E = mc², wouldn't it be most logical that everything has a mass that moves at the speed of light, without exceptions? With light, the speed of light was ok, but mass was the problem. Conversely, with matter, the mass was ok, but the speed of light was the problem. You see, none of the experiments have shown that there's anything moving at the speed of light in regular matter.
Except, that's not exactly true, either. Nuclear reactions have been known for aeons. It is well known that radioactive decay causes matter to release radiation with the speed of light. But the idea has been that the energy that was bound in the atoms was in some alternate form and only transformed into moving at the speed of light in the process.
Of course I have to own up to my ignorance here. You see, if there was only particles with the mass of m, moving at the speed of c, their kinetic energy would be 1/2 mc². So this is a bit of a problem for me, as superficially my theory appears to indicate that E = 1/2 mc² but at least the scale is otherwise ok. The discrepancy is probably sorted out in some well known rule. What it is, I don't know, but my hunch would be the Higgs boson.
This is the problem with me. I discovered all of this working on lignin, not working of theoretical physics. This means that I don't know nearly well enough how my theory is connected to the body of evidence collected over centuries. I might sound like I have a lot of knowledge of the history of science, but this is not the same as knowing how the existing theories were derived mathematically.
Now I have a conundrum. While my previous blog post discussed about things that I had been actively working on and from which I had experimental evidence, if I were to step onto the subatomic quicksand, I could easily sucked in too deep. The temptation to make claims is high, but the likelyhood of being wrong increases as well...
But I will dip my toe in, just a bit. My intuition says that the simplest supramolecular orbital model presented in my previous post has to be an analogue to the molecular orbital. It must surely consist of the same spheres of Planck length as light. While in most instances the movement of light is linear if not interrupted, the movement of these Planck spheres has to be mostly tangential in the orbitals. That is, you can imagine the movement of the Planck spheres to comprise of three components:'
Tangential movement: the movement of the spheres along the orbital
Rotational: the temperature of system determines the rotational speed
Free movement: the movement of the whole supramolecular entity.
To use slightly complicated mathematical terminology, the speed of each Planck sphere is always the speed of light and is the sum of vectors representing these three types of motion.
One might wonder where I have published this. The simple answer is that I first tried to write a simple preprint with the basic ideas and publish it in ArXiv. While ArXiv is not a peer-revied journal, they felt that my text requires peer-review before being accepted to it. I guess because I might be a Crank. And to some extent, who can blame them? I was making very outlandish claims.
The manuscript wasn't exactly ready, yet, but I felt compelled to submit it to Nature, as this is where articles of this magnitude should go to. After a long wait, I was politely let know that perhaps such speculative work would be more suitable elsewhere.
Long story short, I have now reworked the manuscript to leave only the bare necessities to make a case for the supramolecular orbital, but I have yet to try to introduce everything into a single manuscript. The manuscript is currently under consideration, which basically means that the editor of the journal is trying to find peer reviewers for the manuscript. Or if things go badly, the editor will let me know that the manuscript was rejected.
Usually in these sorts of circumstances, people would not proclaim that they've found something until they have been accepted by their peers. I decided to go against this, because I noticed that there is a reluctance even to engage with the thought. So, I'm putting my neck on the line. I might be proven wrong, but frankly, I don't think so. At least regarding the big picture. Smaller details might be wrong, though.
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