And of course dear Guoliang, if thing are so, then why we had to "drop down" the ancient aether hypothesis, just to make it a linear quantum operator (ie Higgs field)? I think we have to re-think about all foundamental concepts in Physics and let Newton, Einstein, Feynamnn and others to rest in peace,,,

Some other issues relative to this:

1)we are all used with the concept of a compact particle. Does this concept really exist even approximately or even with the quantum suggested cloud of probabilities?

2)Cartesian coordinates are so popular that have affected our way of thinking, but are they a good approximation in small distances?

Probably many well defined concepts are ill defined at the micro level.

Dear Demetris, as you know, quantum objects are/consist of fluctuations. It s precisely the unison of those fluctuations what defines a coherent state. The trouble about quantum theory lies in the transition or rupture of coherence to decoherence which leads from the quantum realm to the classical world. Such decoherence is also known as dephasing or the collapse of the wave-function.

The notion of rigid bodies is basically classical.

Dear Carlos, OK for quantum process, but what about our foundamental defined object like Euler angles etc? As you know in Compton scattering and in all particle scattering we are working with angles: Has such a view a meaning after all? Or we are just generalizing our every day rigid body originated sensual view to scales where this view is meaningless?

Dear Demetris, allow me please to suggest this take:

Some works on topology clearly indicate that the rigid character of bodies, reality does not hold at deeper levels. Especially when working on polytopes, tiles, and cohomology the dimension that arises is, as you know, the impossible.

Maths have brought to the fore the importance and necessity to study not only the real and possible but, still farther, or deeper, the impossible. Symmetry at these levels and topics is certainly less rigid than what it appears at larger scales.

Coexeter and Penrose are two conspicuous references, among others.

Would you agree?

Dear Carlos, I would certainly agree, since modern Physics acts like deeper levels are the same as human scale levels: It defines positions, angles and corresponding velocities like as everything were like the "trains of Einstein" in special relativity! No, my friends and sorry for disturbing your well established career (I am not referencing to you Carlos), but you have to recontruct your view, since the toy of Heisenberg's indeterminacy does not work any more... But as everybody knows, Physics and other hard sciences are so flexible as a massive neutron star is...

From a philosophical standpoint, we' come to realize that reality was/is not as rigid, stone-like, massive and the like, as tradition made us belief. From this point of view I guess we've entered into a revolution (not an evolution) as to the understanding of reality.

"Down there" things are much (much!) subtler than it was beleived, before.

I have been working on trying to show that, nonetheless, there are not two different - alas, opposite - levels of reality, but that the world and reality are ine and the same.

The world is neither purely quantum, nor purely classical. Yet, the understanding of the microsopic scale can shed metter lights on the macrosopic dimension.

Dear Demetris, what you say is truly relevant. The classical and standard understanding of the quantun world in not tenable as such any more. Hence, your corretc remark about Heisenberg' s uncertainty principle.

Via the working from people like Bohm, first, then Bell, later on Fuchs and Zeilinger, amnog many others, we have come to enrich and improve the quantum understanding of reality. Those quarrels, f.i. about the "spooky action" (to quote Einstein's words) seem to have only a historical importance, period.

I do agree with your comment, indeed

Dear Demetris,

If Higgs bosons can carry major portion of the vacuum zero-point energy, the vacuum catastrophe will disappear. The inertial mass density of bosons in space will be so high that it is comparable to Planck density, so we have to redefine the perfect vacuum as pure Higgs field. Hence, fermions with active gravitational rest mass are similar to vortexes in the sea of Higgs bosons; the vacuum is similar to the sea without vortexes. While neutrinos are similar to fluxes, and photons are similar to waves. The perfect vacuum is similar to the quietest sea of Higgs bosons without vortexes, without fluxes, and even without waves.

The so called rigid body should be composed by fermions, so it's impossible to go deeper after the smallest rigid body has reached the scale of fermions.

And of course dear Guoliang, if thing are so, then why we had to "drop down" the ancient aether hypothesis, just to make it a linear quantum operator (ie Higgs field)? I think we have to re-think about all foundamental concepts in Physics and let Newton, Einstein, Feynamnn and others to rest in peace,,,

Dear Demetris,

I agree with you. The universal flat space-time reference frame full of Higgs field, sitting infinitely far away from any gravitational fields, is the only valid inertial reference frame in reality. The proof of the existence of a preferred reference frame implies that the special relativity is really very special. If we talk about time dilation without referring to the preferred reference frame, then it can only lead to all kinds of paradoxes.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269311003947

http://hyperkrychle.cz/emails/silvertooth.pdf

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v322/n6080/abs/322590b0.html

Dear Demetris and Guollang, I completely agree. However, I think that the claim about taking back the aether is rather - well, unnecessary. (I get the spirit; I refer to the letter).

I would like to stress one point. The quantum nothingness - or quantum voidness - or quantum emptiness - is anything but void or empty. It certainly does nothing to do with the aristotelian, the christian, or newtonian conception of nothingness.

For the quantum nothingness is already filled with - well, yes: field(s) - fluctuations or particles and waves. The Higgs field is a reasonable hypothesis, though not the only one.

Of course we are not going to adopt the ancient aether, but we recognize that the 'revolution' of dropping it away was not so revolutionary action, since it just redefined it!

Probably we have to spend many many years of glory Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Feynmann and other guys (just like Aristotetle in Medieval Times) in order to realize the strong contradictions that their theories has reached. Then we will simply present new frames and new ways to testify them. The current problem is the "big names" in Physics, whose career is above every try to change the main dogma: Try to convince a 80 years old Physicist that his/her lovely (since half a century) quantum approach is just a linear approximation of a non linear world and if you succeed come back and tell me how you did it!

Dear Demetris, you are right and I basically agree with you. However, some finer analyses must be introduced here.

One of the subjects I work is quantum biology (QB). In QB great improvements have been made that allow a sort of matching between nonlinear (hence, complex) approach and the very quantum behaviors. Provided that we deal with non-trivial effects of Q physics in living systems.

Dear Carlos, as you know even our local universe is locally Euclidean, ie linear, so every theory from Linear Algebra can in principle give extrme accuracy. The problem is much more below the scales of QB, otherwise Quantum approach is fine.

Yes, indeed. However, I think we can both agree in that the problem at the cosmological scale is not to be different from the biological stance. This is just the purpose of my previous comment. All in all, the subject is absolutely passionating.

Just to add in an intentionally novel perspective:

What if all of our various "rigid framework" metrical concepts such as 3+1 spacetime, position, velocity, angle, and rotation are simply emergent properties of an underlying system that possesses no rigidity at all?

More specifically, the underlying rule set would be that of absolute conservation, with every property paired to a full canceling property. The metrical spaces and associated concepts that we see in classical physics, including point-like particles, would emerge only as a collection of asymptotic limits of the interplay of some set of "interesting" but locally unbalanced amorphous conservative fields. Renormalization, for example, would be turned upside down and have to be rewritten in terms of how unbalanced amorphous conservative fields ensure increasingly particle-like outcomes as more (conserved) energy is injected into them. Math based on real valued fields would unfortunately also be converted into a refined form of these same emergent property, rather than a preexisting Platonic ideal.

The peculiarities of quantum mechanics would become the at times locality-violating hints and allegations leaking out of the underlying amorphous conservation rule set. The classical universe, starting at the big bang or its softer equivalent, would become the ultimate example of a broken symmetry, an outcome of conservative fields that permitted positive and negative of a particular field called "mass-energy" to drift too far apart. All the emergent structure of our universe then becomes the result of other conservation rules carried along in the fray, producing structure by frantically to try to cancel out other absolutely conserved quantities such as charge (e.g. atoms), but unable to find the conserved quantities needed for true cancellation.

An interesting but pretty much unavoidable side effect of starting with amorphous conservative fields instead of metrical fields is that you end up with four forms of matter, not two. That's because it requires that both matter and antimatter have absolutely symmetric forms (not the slightly broken version seen in matter-antimatter) with true negative energy. The big one that created two exactly symmetric positive and negative energy universes happened nearly 14 billion years ago, but the same event would still take place in microscopic form whenever null energy virtual particle pairs form and disappear as if they never existed. So by starting with amorphous but absolute conservation and relegating all metrical spaces to emergent status, one of the most interesting side effects is that our observed universe would simply become one half of the grandmother of all virtual particle pairs.

And someday very far off, we'll go poof too.

Dear Terry, interesting analysis. Is there any formal documentation available? And a second question: Is there any laboratory based approach for testing that hypothesis of "locally unbalanced amorphous conservative fields"? Another hint is this: If we add the potential and kinetic energy in universe (as expected values) their sum is close to zero: It seems that we are just an oscillation about zero...