Friday, October 26, 2007

Returning to the Mechanical Universe

In some sense, the development of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory in the early 20th century has blurred the intuitive nature of the physical world because the probabilistic interpretation of the subatomic particles has been proven to be so accurate. But the question of what is the true nature of such a probabilistic universe has not been asked seriously enough. It seems like the key to the hint was in the mysterious properties of the neutrinos.

If we assume that Einstein's theory of special relativity represents the reality in both the inside and the outside of the light cone, the problem becomes very simple. We have astronomical number of particles traveling faster than the speed of light and their mass is represented by imaginary numbers.

People may say it is a nonsense. But it may be the nature's way of telling us that the universe has more than just massive particles and photons.

What it tells us is that there are particles traveling faster than the speed of light and they are neutrinos. The beauty and the simplicity of this concept are beyond imagination.

First of all, the Lorentz invariance is not violated. The mystery of the negative mass squared problem from the multitudes of experiments for the neutrinos are solved. The question of why the neutrinos were detected earlier than the actual visual observation of the supernova became trivial.

There is no problem of explaining how and why lights can propagate through the absolute vacuum. If those fast traveling tachyonic neutrinos are pervading the universe, in a way, they are the real permanent residents of the universe, the material worlds are just temporary drifters.

They act up the electrons around the atomic nuclei and make them behave the way they are in the physical world. Quantum mechanics is only one of the many mathematical ways to predict the nature of atomic world. The probabilistic nature enters into the picture because the universe is populated by the random yet very homogeneous density of the tachyonic neutrinos.

It will be easy to understand the picture by imagining how the individual air molecules are behaving in the atmospheric pressure. They try to preserve the pressure equilibrium in the space as the tachyonic neutrinos will behave the same way in the universe except that those particles are moving so fast that it doesn't take long time to get to the point of a constant equilibrium of the homogeneity.