© Dr Grahame Blackwell (March 2025)
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Big thanks to the 5.7 thousand of you who took the time to check out my last post, ‘Time Warp: Delayed-Choice Quantum Erasure”. This post continues on the theme of the energetic structure of matter, showing how this understanding of particulate matter calls into question a firmly entrenched position in the conventional view of material reality. Strap yourselves in and enjoy the ride!
[Maths alert: This post includes a helping of high-school algebra (including calculus), further down - but don’t let that put you off, it’s easy to understand the significance of that maths, even if you’re not keen on algebra (or calculus).]
First, a few thoughts about peer review
The scientific peer review process is a very robust system. It ensures that all proposed journal publications are vetted by highly-qualified academics in the relevant field (at its best - though regrettably there have been tales of some abuses of this process). In this way readers are protected from junk science or pseudo-science masquerading as amazing breakthroughs pushing back the frontiers of knowledge.
There is, though, an unfortunate loophole - one might say a ‘negative loophole’ (i.e. a hidden obstruction) in this system. Put simply, it means that those who are deeply invested in ‘present science’ are the very ones called upon to act as gatekeepers for ‘new science’. With the best will in the world, there’s likely to be a disinclination to give the nod to concepts which may call into question the scientific framework on which your professional status, your livelihood - maybe even substantial investments in research hardware - are based. Even more, if a new breakthrough were to upend the basis on which a particular field of research is founded, whole university research groups could be at stake.
Far better, then, not to give too much serious consideration to a radically new take on some aspect of physical reality but simply reject it on the grounds that it’s totally out of line with current thinking - and current thinking has done us pretty well so far, hasn’t it? (In other circles this is known as the ‘not invented here’ syndrome.)
99.999% of the time (with maybe a few more 9’s) ‘the system’ gets it right. Science is ultra-conservative for a reason: for every truly outside-the-box original thinker there are a million optimistic dreamers who are convinced they’ve figured out what nobody else knows - and science needs a good bit of stability if it’s going to become usable technology.
But it’s in that 0.001% (with a few more zeroes) that - if ever - we’re most likely to find our way through to a truly new scientific paradigm. A top-ranking peer-reviewer who carefully filters out anything too way-out could, paradoxically, hold back scientific progress - maybe for ever.
Ok, so what about the Higgs boson?
Without doubt the Higgs boson is one of the scientific ‘findings’ - maybe the finding - which would be most strongly defended against any suggestion of a possible alternative explanation for the phenomenon it (maybe) explains. There’s a huge financial investment in that view of inertial mass, not to mention tens of thousands of professional/academic positions resting on it. Not least, there’s a worldwide collective belief - sceptics might say a sort of ‘global groupthink' - which has a strong self-reinforcing effect that renders any alternative perspective almost literally unthinkable.
It’s interesting to note that, ever since particles of matter were found to be wavelike, i.e. distributed, almost exactly 100 years ago, particle physics has focused primarily on smashing together bits of matter as if they are discrete and highly localised - the exact opposite of what de Broglie, Davisson & Germer, and various others have shown us so conclusively. (See details on those guys and their findings further down). What might we learn if we actually regarded matter as a form of wave construct and investigated the consequences of this truism?
First and foremost, the concept of inertia, and inertial mass, drops out directly as a consequence of this energetic structure. Second, this perspective renders the Higgs boson totally redundant, a completely superfluous concept. William of Ockham would be delighted - though maybe not those whose livelihood or status is heavily invested in the Higgs field / Higgs boson model of inertial mass.
[There will be those at this point protesting that “But the Higgs boson principle has been proved!” Not so. A particle has been found which has characteristics matching those required of the proposed Higgs boson, and this particle has been found to couple to (i.e. interact with) various other particles; this is a far cry from proving that this particle actually confers mass on other particles (as well as on itself - a real ‘lifting yourself up by your bootstraps’ achievement!). There is also the real possibility of a good dose of confirmation bias in the Higgs field/boson saga: “We wanted it to be like that - and it is!”]
One key requirement that led to the Higgs concept in respect of localised discrete matter particles is that inertial mass is invariant over all inertial frames of reference. This isn’t the place to get into discussions of Special Relativity, which gives rise to that requirement, but we don’t need to: the energy-based wave-like view of matter takes care of that requirement without any sort of add-ons, as we’ll see.
The Rainbow Connection
I’ve chosen this rather whimsical sub-heading (credit: Kermit the frog) to represent the connection, on many levels, between matter and light - electromagnetic waveform energy. As Kermit says: ”Some day we’ll find it, the rainbow connection”; in many ways we already have.
When you look at a pink rose, or a yellow daffodil, certain frequencies - photons - of the light falling on that flower have been selectively absorbed: they have effectively become part of that flower The other frequencies, those reaching your eyes, have been absorbed by sensors in your retina - they have become part of you, integral to your material makeup. Light is literally becoming matter. (If it were possible to weigh to a hyper-fine degree of accuracy, you’d be heavier from seeing those flowers - but don’t walk around with your eyes shut to keep your weight down!)
Conversely, when you watch that log burning in your fire, glowing red and giving off yellow flames, you are literally seeing matter turn into light as the molecular structure of that log breaks down, releasing energy which manifests as photons of visible radiation. And let’s not forget the sun, transmuting over 4 billion kilograms of matter into electromagnetic wave energy every second.
Count Louis de Broglie first proposed the theory that particles of matter had wavelike properties back in 1924, a concept that earned him a Nobel prize a few years later. His matter wave actually comprised, in effect, two components: (a) a cyclic component, or ‘particle clock’, applicable to a static particle, equating to the mass-equivalent energy of the particle; (b) a linear component applicable only to a moving particle, related to the momentum of that particle. The full matter wave is a composite of these two components. The former of these is demonstrated in practice by the phenomenon of Compton scattering, with its associated Compton wavelength based on the rest mass of a static particle; the latter was shown to be a physical reality by the 1927 Davisson & Germer experiment showing an interference pattern created by an electron beam scattered by a nickel crystal. Definitive evidence of the composite wave has been explicitly demonstrated by the experiment of Catillon et al. (Found. Phys., 2008): a stream of electrons was fired through a silicon crystal at a speed such that their de Broglie clock frequency would be reduced (time-dilated) so as to exactly match the frequency of their meetings with atoms in the crystal matrix. As expected, this produced a resonance effect which resulted in a spike in the pattern of electrons scattered from the crystal. Interestingly, the effect was not at first as strong as they’d expected; then they factored in the double-rate cycle of the electron particle wave, as hinted at by Schrödinger’s zitterbewegung - and the signal showed up full strength, rather than as a second harmonic. This not only confirmed the waveform, it also confirmed Schrödinger’s proposal of a rapid oscillation around the electron’s mid-line at up to the speed of light.
In 1934 Lev Landau (later to be a Nobel Laureate) identified that production of a matter-antimatter particle pair in particle accelerators is characterised by prior generation of opposing high-energy photons which then interact to transform into those two particles: photons of pure electromagnetic energy become particles of pure matter. This has been found to be a standard feature of such pair production. In that same year Breit and Wheeler proposed their then-hypothetical Breit-Wheeler Process, in which two photons each of suitable energy would be caused to collide head-on, to be completely converted (so-called ‘mutual annihilation’) into a particle-antiparticle pair: pure photon energy becoming pure matter. A multi-stage version of this process was realised in practice at the Stanford University Linear Accelerator (now SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory) in 1997. Twenty-four years later direct production of thousands of electron-positron pairs was achieved through head-on collisions of high-energy pairs of photons at the RHIC, US Brookhaven National Laboratory. [See also this article.]
Considering the wealth of evidence characterising and physically demonstrating the family likeness between light and matter, it’s difficult to understand why research is still so predominantly focused on high-energy paticle collisions, rather than giving at least equal attention to the implications of that Rainbow Connection.
So Let’s Get Moving!
First, a few statements of the obvious:
(1) For a stable static elementary particle (such as an electron) to be formed from a cyclic pattern of waveform electromagnetic energy, that pattern must itself have long-term electromagnetic stability;
(2) Any input to that pattern, of additional directional energy-flow (such as a photon, or energy transferred from another particle), could upset the stability of the flow-pattern forming that material particle - unless this flow-pattern transforms into a new stable pattern which accommodates that linear-flow energy input; this will necessarily involve a state of motion for the particle, since it now includes a linear energy-flow component;
(3) It is implicit in this that all elementary particles with long-term stability - notably those forming the material universe of our experience - have a structure which auto-adjusts to input of energy from other sources by adapting to a new stable state which includes a motion component (or a changed state of motion, if initially already in motion); [From this it seems probable that those elementary particles were formed in the ultra-compact, ultra-intense-energy environment immediately following the Big Bang, from high-energy photons being forced into every possible configuration; only those configurations with the stability and innate adaptability described above survived as particles, the rest were thrown back into the melting pot to reconfigure or end up as part of the cosmic background radiation; matter-antimatter imbalance is addressed in another post on this channel];
(4) Every moving particle will have two components to its formative energy: (a) the cyclic structural energy which gives the particle its basic form, and (b) the linear directional energy which gives the particle its state of motion; to maintain structural stability, (a) must remain constant whist (b) will vary according to the speed and direction of motion;
(5) The composite energy-flow pattern for a moving particle will, then, follow a (possibly complex) helical-type path (cyclic + linear), these two components being orthogonal in a mathematical sense (i.e. at right angles if represented in a diagram) - as effectively combined in the well-established energy-momentum relation.
(6) The inertial mass of a particle or object is defined as its resistance to being put into a (changed) state of motion by an external force. From (1) to (5) above this is clearly due to the requirement for additional directed energy to be input to the particle or object so as to alter its energetic makeup to include that (changed) state of motion.
Let’s see where that takes us.
First we’ll establish that inertial mass is fully explained by the electromagnetic-wave structure of material particles, with no need for add-ons such as the Higgs boson or Higgs field. (Those who regard this as some sort of heresy had probably best leave the party here). This will involve a mathematical treatment suited to 12th grade Maths students (A Level in the UK). We’ll follow this through to proof that the energy content of a particle or object is equal to its mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light - that iconic mass-energy equivalence relationship.
Fig.1(a) shows the linear and cyclic speed components for the energy flow(s) forming a particle in motion at speed v. Fig. 1(b) shows the corresponding components of cyclic and linear energy flows providing particle structure and particle motion respectively at that speed. Note that energy flux rates - total, linearly and cyclically - will be in the same proportions as total, linear and cyclic flow speed components, also that the cyclic energy flux rate will necessarily be the same at all particle speeds: Eo, the formative energy flux rate for the static particle, ensuring its structural integrity; this is consistent with all findings documented earlier in this post.
From Fig. 1(b) we get:
We now need to consider how this same expression pans out if we introduce mass as the factor which relates energy input to change in speed. For this we need to use relativistic mass, since effective mass (resistance to acceleration) increases with speed - a consideration which becomes significant when we’re dealing with any speed greater than a tiny fraction of light speed. This requires that, rather than the commonly-used Force = mass x rate of change of speed (acceleration), we must use the version which applies Newton’s Second Law to a dynamically-changing mass, i.e.
Force = rate of change of (mass x speed)
We then sum (i.e. integrate) that force over a distance to get an increase in energy.
From equation (1) above it’s clear that that the increase in energy required for an increase in speed from v1 to v2 will be the same for two different objects having the same energy in the rest-state. It follows that two objects having the same rest-energy also have the same rest mass. It’s also the case that two ensembles drawn from a group of identical particles, one ensemble comprising m particles and the other n particles, will have masses in the ratio m:n. From these two considerations it can be inferred that the (effective) mass of any object is proportional to its energy content, at any speed, and so further that the variation of effective mass with speed is proportional to the variation of energy content with speed for any object.
Here we are not simply confirming that most famous relationship, we’re showing it to be a direct consequence of the energy-flow structure of material particles. Seen in this way it’s very clear that this relationship should actually be viewed the other way round: the inertial response (i.e. mass) of any material particle or object is derived from its formative energy content, divided by the square of the speed of light.
It should also be quite apparent from this analysis that every material particle has been subject to the property of inertial mass from the moment of its inception; the notion that elementary particles were flying around massless prior to the arrival of the Higgs field and its associated boson is incompatible with the waveform nature of matter.
Note that understanding of the photonic structure of matter brings with it a whole new understanding of the effects of Special Relativity (SR). That’s explored in detail in other posts on this channel, notably here , here and here. In this post it’s sufficient to note that effects of inertial mass, as explained here, are independent of any particular reference frame: in SR terms they are ‘frame invariant’. This is, quite simply, because inertial effects are down to properties of the structure of the particle or object itself, and therefore effectively act in the rest-frame of that particle or object; they’re not dependent on some outside influence which somehow exerts an identical effect across all reference frames - that’s a totally unnecessary complication. This of course brings us right back to Occam’s Razor: the simplest solution is usually the best solution. [Proof of the frame invariance of measured rest mass, based on the waveform energy-flow structure of matter. will be given in my next post. Be sure to sign up if you want to be notified of that post, and others following it.]
So Where To From Here?
Well, it looks as if there’s a strong case for further research into the consequences of the waveform nature of matter. As shown in earlier posts on this channel, in addition to the major issue of inertial mass there are serious potential implications for Special Relativity, antimatter - even a possible explanation for gravitation and the perceived curvature of spacetime (including the direct correspondence of gravitating mass to inertial mass). Who knows what radically new avenues might open up before us if we were to pick this concept up and run with it - maybe even a whole new paradigm for space and time.
In the meantime, a few copies of this post dotted around may be a good idea. Permission is here given for this post to be copied in full elsewhere (to include copyright credit). (notification here of posting of such copies would be appreciated). Be sure also to pass the word on to anyone else you feel may find this perspective on such a key aspect of material reality of interest.
You might also like to check out the various other posts on this Substack channel which follow similar lines of thought. You can find them listed in chronological order, with a brief summary and a link to each, here.
You could also take a look at Transfinite Mind for a wealth of free resources, including non-technical articles and presentations, as well as books to suit every level of scientific (or non-scientific) background.
Thanks again for tuning in.
See you again soon.