The Solar Archetype

I have always regarded the Sun as (at least) semi-sacred. I have long thought of the Sun and Earth as a male-female pair of godlike beings, either one sterile in the absence of the other, but together having the immense potential of producing a galaxy-colonizing life form: space-faring humanity. (See: "The Human Connection".)

From the very beginning of my focused research (since my 40th year, 1977), I believed that the Sun physically embodied and held the key to the unified field theory - that if we could understand the Sun, we could understand the theory. This because the Sun converts matter to light - returning matter full circle to its origins - and to understand this process and the circle fully, means understanding both matter and light fully, and physically that is all there is. Moreover, this is a natural and spontaneous, not an artificial or forced, process. This is Nature speaking in her own voice of the unity of matter and light. Hence in the solar transformation we should be able to discover clues to the unified field theory, the theory which unites free and bound energy. The Sun is the unified field theory in action, the great archetype and example which not only brings forth life on Earth, but in humanity brings forth understanding as well. (See: "Currents of Entropy and Symmetry".)

We should also note that the sun is taking the first step upward on the "Information Ladder" - the conversion of hydrogen to helium, that will eventually lead to the Periodic Table of elements (via supernovas and even neutron star collisions), the creation of life, the evolution of humanity, and recursively, to the fusion of hydrogen again, and a pathway to self-awareness and self-comprehension for the universe. So there is a deep double physical reason (beyond the many obvious ones - heat, light, gravity, etc.) for celebrating our glorious Sun: symmetry conservation and the initiation of the Information Pathway leading eventually to humanity (at least locally).

The appearance of the hydrogen bomb on Earth is a sad signal that the solar fusion process has been captured by the human mind in its raw or primitive (and very inappropriate) form, meaning we now have enough scientific knowledge to understand this final theory of matter and light, Einstein's dream. The Sun indeed does hold the secret of the theory, the meaning of light and matter, of time and space, of gravity, charge, and force. We have only to think of these energy forms in the appropriate terms of principle and natural law; the Sun integrates all the natural forces, and the result of this summation is light - the conversion of bound to free energy.

When left to themselves, the forces of nature spontaneously convert matter to light. Stars like the Sun begin the job; Hawking's "quantum radiance" of black holes completes the transformation. Looking up at the night sky, we see that the entire galaxy is busy at the same task. And this is only the gravitational pathway - nucleosynthesis followed by supernova and quasar phenomena, followed by "quantum radiance".

Two other major pathways converting matter to light exist, matter-antimatter annihilation via the electromagnetic force, and particle and proton decay via the interaction of the strong and weak forces. Almost all of the matter in the Universe has already been converted to light via electromagnetic annihilation with antimatter in the first moments of the Big Bang - only approximately one particle in ten billion of the original amount of matter remains. (Matter/antimatter annihilations continue today in the suppression of virtual particle pairs by the electromagnetic force, a maintenance activity protecting vacuum symmetry.) What we see today is just a minor "mopping up" operation, conducted by the remaining forces along two fronts: the "social" or gravitational tactic, the conversion of matter to light in great masses (stars); and the "individual" tactic of particle and proton decay involving the strong and weak forces. Between these four pathways, not a single atom of matter will escape an eventual transformation to light. But the Sun is the ancient, obvious, intuitive, and archetypical example; the others we have only recently discovered through the rational achievements of our science.

When we ask why this should be, why is matter everywhere and by every natural force being transformed to light, we are quickly led - by the light of our modern scientific understanding - to a conceptual formulation and understanding of the principles and conservation laws that underlie and frame the unified field theory.

In the first place, we understand that matter is not only being transformed to light, it is being returned to light, a crucial difference: matter began as light in the "Big Bang", and the natural forces are simply returning matter to its original and symmetric form. Again, we ask why - why do they bother? Why not leave matter just as it is? The reason is a conservation law discovered by Emmy Noether. The universal return of matter to light is in obedience to a mathematically formulated conservation law known as "Noether's Theorem". This great theorem has become the basis of all formal (mathematical) attempts to unify the forces (via "Group Theory").

Noether's Theorem will also serve as the major point of leverage in our much more modest conceptual (non-mathematical) formulation of the unified field theory, which nevertheless will be built strictly in accordance with the conservation laws of standard physics. We will arrive at our goal before the mathematicians simply because this is the easier path. It is much like learning to talk before learning to read or write. Talking is easier, and serves the purpose of communication, but it is very limited in its powers compared to reading and writing. In these papers we will have to be content to learn to talk only, and leave the more difficult "reading and writing" to the mathematically gifted among us. But in our talking we will nevertheless obey the rules of grammar that are also observed by reading and writing - the conservation laws of physics are the same - so that when the mathematicians do arrive on the scene, we will already have laid solid foundations within a common language and story.

"Noether's Theorem" states that in a multicomponent field, such as the electromagnetic field (or the metric field of spacetime), where one finds a symmetry one will find an associated conservation law, and vice versa. Noether's Theorem is saying that in the conversion of light to matter, not only must the raw energy of light be conserved in the mass and momentum of particles, but the symmetry of light must also be conserved - not only the quantity but the quality of energy must be conserved. The theorem does not say exactly how this must be done, but in practice the symmetry of light is conserved through the charges of matter - charge conservation = symmetry conservation in a temporal form - and the symmetry of the metric field of spacetime is conserved through inertial and gravitational forces.

I think of Noether's Theorem (1918) as the "Truth and Beauty" theorem, in reference to Keat's great poetic intuition ("Ode on a Grecian Urn"; John Keats,1819):

Noether's theorem tells us why the forces of nature are busy converting matter to light: matter was created from light in the "Big Bang", but since light has greater symmetry than matter, it is to conserve light's symmetry that all the charges and forces of matter work to accomplish the return of bound energy to its former state of greater symmetry. The charges of matter are the symmetry debts of light. These charges produce forces which act to pay the debt and return the system of matter to its original symmetric form, light.

A program of unification is therefore clearly indicated by Noether's Theorem: identify the (broken) symmetries of light carried, represented, and conserved by the charges of matter. The nature of the forces (and their actions) produced by these charges should offer clues as to what these (broken) symmetries are. This will allow us to refer all the charges and forces of matter (including gravity) to their respective origins as specific symmetries of light, accomplishing our conceptual unification. Matter is but an asymmetric form of light, just as time is an asymmetric form of space, and gravity is an asymmetric form of the inertial spacetime metric: the charges and forces of matter act to return bound energy to its symmetric, original state of free energy. In the papers linked below, and others on this website, we will follow out this simple program of force unification, identifying the broken symmetries of light represented by the conserved charges of matter. (See: "Symmetry Principles of the Unified Field Theory" (parts 1, 2, 3).

Postscript: Transformation of Hydrogen to Helium in the Solar Interior (Aug. 2019)

This process, first explained by Hans Bethe in 1937 (1967 Nobel Prize), is the universal first step in nuclear transformations and element-building in stars. Weak force IVBs ("W" IVBs) are required to regulate and mediate the transformations, since in the process of transforming protons to neutrons, new elementary particles (leptons) must be created/destroyed and quarks must be transformed. The massive "W" IVBs are only present in virtual form; the central solar interior need only become hot enough to facilitate the production of virtual "W" IVBs at a rate sufficient to supply a counter-pressure of radiation from nuclear conversions, just enough to prevent gravitational collapse. This dynamic tension between gravity and light maintains a relatively constant rate of nuclear reaction (on human time scales) in the solar core, to the great benefit of Earth's biology. (See also: "The Information Pathway"). (Details of the astrophysical creation of the various heavy elements of the Periodic Table were worked out by Fred Hoyle and George Gamow; some of the heaviest are evidently created only in collisions between neutron stars.)

Now it is perfectly obvious that all atomic matter, and things made from it (such as humans), ultimately derive from the asymmetric processes of the "Big Bang" (which created hydrogen and helium), and the subsequent creation of the heavier elements of the Periodic Table as manufactured by stars and supernovas, etc. This is simply to say that we come (physically) from the Multiverse through the portals of the "Big Bang" and stars via the mediating Higgs and IVBs as nuclear matter (quarks) and leptonic alternative charge carriers (electrons, neutrinos). The stars are gateways between us (our atomic constituents) and our origin in the Multiverse. When Picasso saw the famous cave paintings in France from 30+ millennia ago, he exclaimed: "We have learned nothing!" Perhaps the same may be said regarding the religion of our sun-worshiping ancestors.

Why is there something rather than nothing? Because the Creative Spirit of God fills the "void". Creativity is the Divine characteristic which answers this ancient philosophical question. Beginning with quantum-mechanical particle-antiparticle pairs and the creation of matter, this "creative drive" goes on to produce life, humanity (a fractal image of itself?), our science, philosophy, and all the arts.