The Physical and the Non-Physical

To be physical, things must have a direct cause that can be identified as a thing or a combination of things acting together. The thesis of my physics is that everything in the universe can be traced back to this. Matter can be subdivided into particles that can move. From this premise, my entire physics is constructed.

It follows from this that everything else is either a combination of matter and motion, or an abstraction with no real physical existence. As examples of non-physical abstractions, we have time, space, energy and mass. While these things are clearly real, they are non-physical in the sense that they are abstractions for something else. Time is relative motion. Space is aether. Energy is size at the subatomic, and mass is a complex abstraction that joins inertia with gravity. Inertia and gravity are two further abstractions where inertia is time delay in the distribution of energy, and gravity is a low pressure in the aether.

We have hierarchies of abstractions that all boil down to matter and motion. Close analysis of any of the above mentioned abstractions lead to this basic physics. Any honest discussion on time leads us to motion. We end up with clocks and relative speeds. Any honest discussion on space leads to the aether.

Pure energy, separate from particles does not exist. It must therefore be an attribute of particles, and I’ve concluded that it must be the size of particles. Mass too is a property of matter, and closely related to energy. It too has to do with the size of subatomic particles.

When we fail to recognize abstractions, we end up looking for something physical where nothing physical exists. We search desperately for some mass-particle, but find nothing but charged particles. We look for pure energy, but find no energy without an accompanying particle. We imagine space-time as something real, but find nothing but relative motion and strange actions at a distance, indicating an aether.

Mistaking non-physical phenomena for something physical prevents us from looking deeper. It sends us on wild goose chases. It confuses and muddles everything to the point of being impossible to understand.

By Joseph Wright of Derby – http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/0706/fig3.jpg http://www.culturevoyage.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Alchymist.jpg, Public Domain, Link