[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

That indeed is a major problem with physics today. Everybody want to find the TOE (Theory Of Everything) even though, Kurt Godel proved that there can be no TOE, at least in a mathematical sense, in 1931. (Sorry, I don't know how to make a umlat o.) Since Godel was not a physicist, he doesn't count to physicists, and off they go...

Well, I can't blame them for wanting to come up with the grand theory of everything, or for trying. I can simply fault their methodology.

But the trap I'm talking about is more subtle. I went to a lecture by the late John Wheeler, on nothing. Literally. It was about zero vacuum energy, and how the calculations defining it and the reality measured didn't match by an order of 58th power. n x 10 to the 58th. Which everyone else ignores, because the quantum energy model work elsewhere so well. He gave the lecture to try to interest young physicists in the fundamental study of what the structure of vacuum really is, and maybe explain why the huge gap exists. But if you really start trying to analyse a vacuum, you bump up against C . (speed of light in a vacuum). And that's an immutable constant in physics. It and Plank's constant are sancrosant. If you suggest otherwise, you're unceremonially pitched out the door. So nobody studies what the structure of a vacuum really is, and how C is derived from it... (And the trap closes).

<shrug>

C and Plank's constant are example of values that have held up because no one has been able to come up with different values that work and yield meaningful results.

As you say, the quantum energy model works well elsewhere. Trying to use different values for those constants sounds like it might involve tearing down and redoing about half of the mathematical basis of modern physics (or more) because those values appear in a lot of places. I can see why people might not want to.

There have been an assortment of SF stores on the premise that "speed of light" is a local value, and may not be true elsewhere. (Like Vernor Vinge's _A Fire Upon the Deep_, which postulates that Earth is in an area called the Slow Zone, and that farther out toward the galactic rim, you find ultra waves which propagate at speeds orders of magnitude faster than light, and are used in a galactic [and inter-galactic] communications net.)

Peter F. Hamilton's _The Sleeping God_ featured an entity (the sleeping god of the title) which had been created by a vastly advanced race to help them explore the universe, and whose sentience resided in patterns of quantum vacuum fluctuations. It's structure allowed it direct access to and control over a good deal of the observable universe. As it put it "For me, thought and action are one and the same." I had to stop and think about technology advanced enough to manipulate and control quantum vacuum fluctuations. Can you say "Sense of Wonder"?

Hamilton also postulated a race that existed in a post-scarcity economy. They had achieved molecular level replication, ala Star Trek. Any adult member of their species could have any material object it desired by simply asking a Universal Provider to make one. If a pattern was in the Provider's database, it could, and these beings had been pretty much everywhere and analyzed pretty much everything, so the pattern was likely to exist. A Provider had no problem creating an ice cream cone for a human child that wound up on their home world, because they'd been to Earth at one point, too...

That made me ponder as well, because our notions of economic systems get turned on their heads if you can do that. The beings actively traded with others, but for knowledge, not goods. While they no longer roamed the galaxy, they were explicit that they had deliberately kept their technology, because it enabled them to pursue what had become their real interest: how the universe worked, and why.
______
Dennis