Photons have the peculiar property that they seem to appear out of nowhere. All that’s needed is to heat a suitable material to a high enough temperature, and it starts to glow. But the heated material is made up of protons and electrons. There are no photons in the material, so where do the photons come from?
We propose that photons originate in the aether. Energy is transferred from the heated material to the aether in such a way that visible photons appear.
The mechanism for this is either one in which photons are produced on the fly from particle quanta, or one in which energy makes pre-existing photons visible. The more reasonable of these is the latter. It’s also the one that best explains a range of other phenomena encountered later in this book.
Since we know that neutrinos also have this peculiar tendency to appear out of nowhere, we can conclude that the aether is a mix of low energy photons and neutrinos. From our theory, we must also conclude that the aether is so dense that no particle is ever out of contact with its adjacent neighbours. With every particle in the aether moving at the speed of light, it’s extremely fluid as well.
Aether particles are by definition everywhere. They are space itself. They are extremely small and carry virtually no energy. Directly observable photons and neutrinos, on the other hand, are rare. For clarity, we’ll refer to low energy photons and neutrinos in the aether as zero-point particles whenever appropriate.
Reference frames
Another property of the aether is that it has no absolute reference point. Every particle in it travels at the speed of light relative to its surroundings. The aether is so fluid that any structure acts as a local reference frame. The aether inside a car travelling down the highway, has the car as its reference frame. The aether in a forest, has the forest as its reference frame. Earth as a whole, drags the aether with it as it turns. The solar system in turn, is another reference frame. This spans the entire size hierarchy from the subatomic to the galactic and beyond.
Relative to the local reference frame, the aether moves with equal number of particles in every direction. Furthermore, the local reference frame sets the speed of its particles in such a way that when the forward speed of the local frame, relative to the outside frame, is added to the local speed of the aether, we get the speed of the aether outside the local frame.
This means that the aether inside a speeding train is slower than the aether outside of it. The aether inside a rocket moving at close to the speed of light is close to standstill relative to the aether outside of it.
To allow for this, the aether must be tolerant of differences in speeds between frames. However, it’s extremely intolerant when it comes to dissenting member particles inside a frame. It behaves like a mob of wimps, ganging up on anything smaller than itself, while quickly conforming to anything bigger than itself.
There’s no explanation for this behaviour in the theory presented here. However, this behaviour is required in order to explain a number of phenomena described later. We must therefore use the above description of the aether as a premise as we progress through the rest of this book.
A feature of this model is that all reference frames have some higher reference frame that can be viewed as static compared to itself. Viewed from such a top, every reference frame contained in it will have an aether that moves slower than its own. The degree to which the reference frames contained within the top reference have slower moving aether depends on their relative speeds.
Since the particles in the aether move in all directions, the most natural analogy we have is a gas in which fast moving particles are hot and slow moving particles are cold. Similarly, we can describe fast moving aether as hot and slow moving aether as cold. The aether inside the above mentioned rocket ship is in other words cold relative to its external reference frame.
Pilot waves
We can now explain the phenomenon of light in terms of the aether and energy as size. When a suitable material is heated, electrons in that material kick low energy photons, everywhere available in the aether, one or more notches up in energy.
The more energy a particle carries, the larger it is, and the more it interacts with the aether.
This allows for pilot waves to build up around energetic particles. The pilot waves are comprised of zero-point photons and neutrinos that travel along straighter paths than their more energetic counter parts. Wave-fronts develops, similar to those in front of ships moving through water.
Once established, pilot waves don’t assert pressure on moving particles unless there’s a change in speed or direction. This is due to the fluid nature of the aether, and explains why things aren’t constantly slowed down by these wave-fronts.
Pilot waves are at their most intense close to their host particle and diminish into nothing at a distance. This means that a host particle is never very far from the extremities of its pilot wave. However, relative to the tiny size of the host particle, pilot waves cover vast distances. This can be deduced from analysing the double slit experiment in light of this model.
The double slit experiment
Consider the set-up of the double slit experiment:
Now, consider what’s registered on the light sensitive far wall as we pass one photon at the time through the barrier:
Each photon leaves a mark on the light sensitive wall, proving that photons manifest themselves as particles. At first, little can be seen of the interference pattern. However, for each additional photon passed through the barrier the pattern becomes more defined until it finally becomes a clear and undeniable wave pattern. Each photon must therefore have interfered with itself in some way.
Our explanation for this is that the pilot wave associated with each photon produces an interference pattern at the far side of the barrier as it cuts through both openings. This interference pattern alters the path of the photon in such a way that it can only reach certain areas of the far wall.
This is similar to what would happen if a boat were to pass through one of two adjacent openings into a bay. While the boat passes through only one of the openings, its pilot wave passes through both, creating an interference pattern in the waters inside the bay. The boat will thus experience self-interference similar to that experienced by a photon passing though a double slit barrier.
A small boat will be more affected by self-interference than a big boat. This corresponds to the difference in interference patterns produced by red and blue light. Red photons have less energy than blue photons. They are therefore smaller than blue photons. Hence, they are more affected by self-interference than blue photons. That’s why red photons produce wider interference patterns than blue ones.
Keeping in mind that the two slits in the barrier of the double slit experiment can be far enough apart to be seen as separate lines with our naked eyes, it’s clear that pilot waves are enormous relative to the particles that cause them. Photons are generally believed to be smaller than electrons, which are so small that we have never been able to see them, even with the most powerful microscope. The difference in size between particle and associated pilot wave is therefore in the orders of millions, if not more.
Size, vibrations and the speed of light
Going with our assumption that there’s a superabundance of neutrinos in the universe, we can conclude that the aether is mainly zero-point neutrinos, and that it’s the vibrational speed of these neutrinos that determine the speed of light.
We arrive at this conclusion by noting that collisions between photons and neutrinos in the aether happen all the time, and that these collisions must be friction-less. Otherwise, there will be loss of energy.
Friction-less collisions can only occur if they happen in elastic harmony, so photons travelling through the aether must move at a speed that corresponds to the vibrational speed of the aether. If they move faster or slower than this speed, there will be loss of energy. Hence, any deviation from the speed dictated by the aether will be corrected by the aether.
Furthermore, low energies are associated with low vibrational speeds, so zero-point neutrinos vibrate at their lowest possible pitch by definition. The size of zero-point neutrinos, their base harmonic, and the speed of light are therefore related. Photons and energetic neutrinos all travel at a speed that corresponds to the vibrational speed of zero-point neutrinos in the aether.
Energy transfers to and from neutrinos must also be in harmony with the aether. A neutrino cannot vibrate out of tune with its neighbours, so it cannot have a size that’s incompatible with its base harmonic. Its size, and therefore its energy, has to be a whole number multiple of its size as a zero-point neutrino.
Energy transfers to and from neutrinos must therefore be quantized, and the same must be true for photons, because photons are equally beholden to the aether. The energy of photons and energetic neutrinos must be some whole number multiple of the zero-point neutrino.
Since all energy transfers are facilitated by photons or neutrinos, all energy transfers are quantized. This may seem strange, because the world appears to be continuous both in quantity and in energy. There are no visible gaps in the energy spectre of white light. We push energy onto things in any arbitrary quantity.
But the continuous scaling of energy and matter is only apparent. When we go down to the subatomic level, we find gaps and discrete jumps everywhere. Matter is quantized into particles and energy is quantized into resonant frequencies.
The smaller things get, the bigger are the relative jumps. The first jump in energy for a zero-point neutrino is 100%, as illustrated above. The next jump is 50%. The next after that is 33%. Once we’re at the macro level, the relative jumps from one energy level to another are minuscule to the point of appearing to be continuous.
However, in certain cases, we are again reminded of the quantized nature of things, even at the macro level. Light spectra of gases such as hydrogen and neon are narrow and defined. But this doesn’t have anything directly to do with zero-point neutrinos. Rather, it has to do with electron orbits, which will be explained later in this book.
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