Dark Matter: A Shy Unicorn?
By: Gary Blaise
Tags: Gravity, Quantum Physics, Dark Matter, Space, Particle Physics

Our current description of dark matter relies upon the workings of a mysterious gravitational source to explain the strangest of observations. One of these is the block-like rotation of spiral galaxies and the terrific speed of their outer arms — often superluminal — whose starry members remain very much attached when they should have long been flung away in accordance with everything we know. Specifically, the problem is that these structures haven’t enough mass to create the gravity required for such tethering. Another, strikingly beautiful observation, is that of gravitational lensing; a condition which occurs when light from a galaxy hidden directly behind a galactic cluster (in a line of sight between us and it) manages to appear both enlarged and enlightened in the periphery of the cluster. The resulting image, which can be anything between slightly skewed to sharply streaked, is a result of the cluster’s gravitational field which bends and refocuses the hidden image in our direction. Once again, judging from the cluster’s luminous material, there’s not enough of it to pull off such an effect, yet . . . there it is. So, what gives? Dark matter? Here’s another idea involving the simplicity of space itself.

Consider for a moment that space is quantized, or comes in grains of some unimaginably tiny size.¹ Each grain consists of the fundamental properties of particles (i.e. mass, spin, charge, momentum, etc.) but most of these properties are in a potential form only. Potential because, although they truly exist, these properties exist with no measured values. Properties without measured values, potential properties, would be one reason why quantized space is so difficult to confirm because, without measured properties, there’s nothing to detect . . . and this would mean that each grain exists mostly as an abstraction, an idea.² The grains are mostly potential because, in addition to their unmeasured properties, each grain has a couple of measured, or “discrete” properties, and these are the material properties of volume and relative position.³ In this way, grains of quantized space are a kind of cosmic emulsion of the potential (abstract) and the discrete (material). Additionally, there are the discrete particles of matter and energy. These familiar bits which make up our physiscal reality are the remnants of “collapsed” grains whose potential properties have received measured values. While this description may feel unsettling to some, none of it is new: If you look around, it’s clear that your quantized world has volume, that most of the volume is “empty,” and that the remaining volume contains those particles of matter and energy which make up every thing we know.

Between the grains lies, by necessity, an immaterial background; a field which is neither spacial nor temporal for, if it were either of these things, it would, of course, already be in space. In this way, you may think of our quantized universe as a sort of cosmic bubble bath in which an impossibly thin film of soap forms a froth of tiny bubbles. In our sudsy metaphor, the bubbles are the grains of potential space-time while the soapy film represents the non-spacial background, an immaterial “substance” into which the grains are set and from which they have emerged. And, in our bubbly froth, you will occasionally come across a discrete particle; the condensed remains of a former bubble.

The background of a spacial field must, of course, be non-spacial. That is, the background must be immaterial and our non-spacial background is not only immaterial, it’s entirely abstract. Why? Because, if everything we know here in space-time exists in particles of matter and energy, where are those immaterial, abstract things we cannot find yet know to exist? Leaving aside the personal abstraction of your mind as the subject ongoing investigation, we are still left with the impersonal abstractions which include things like math, physics, the laws of nature, and the unmeasured properties of discrete particles. We find none of these abstractions here in our material world of space and time. And why would we, for these are the abstract realities of a necessarily immaterial nature. Consider, then, for the next few minutes that abstraction resides, as only it can, as an immaterial background; our abstract background into which are set discrete particles and potential grains of space and time.

Particles, and the coherent things⁴ made of them, are always in a state of change, or motion from one moment to the next.⁵ The motions of particles occur within the background and, because the background is abstract, these motions bring about an inevitable idea of the particle’s activity. This is a vibrational idea of the particle in terms of its measured properties; a description of the particle’s discrete form at each location in space and at each moment in time. The vibrational idea⁶ is refreshed, or updated by the particle’s activity in each moment of its evolution. Furthermore, because the grains are mostly abstract, the vibrational idea (vi) of each particle (and coherent object) blends easily with the potential, or abstract properties of the most likely grain it will collapse in order to exist in each moment of its evolution. During this blending of abstractions, the unmeasured properties of the grain are set to the measured properties of the particle’s vibrational idea whereupon the grain can no longer maintain its potential nature and collapses down to the measured properties of the discrete particle (or coherent object).⁷