The Little Acrobat

The little acrobat travels far among stars through colliding galaxies as their ballooning bubbles of wavicles stretch and expand. It turns around and jumps over the Moon to reach its home base where it grows wings and flies high through the realm of human thought. Wishing to connect dots, clarify points, and make corrections, it pauses and reads a detailed record of waves’ whereabouts in an impossible Sea by Matt Strassler.

On the deeper patterns of the Universe, it learns about the existence of an amotional medium — a space pervading everything, including humans. Unseen and barely perceived only in some indirect ways, such a space gives itself away by its physical and structural ‘void patterns’. Our face-blind acrobat who unknowingly juggles principles, fundamentals, and properties returns to the drawing board, hoping to make sense of its body parts. The chest bubble ‘Freedom, Essence and Existence’ wraps its heart as those of ‘beauty and melody’ and ‘feeling of space and emotion of time’ balance at its hips and knees. 

In part, what makes it impossible is that we lose ourselves in a sea of words. The word ‘energy’ applies to different processes. Most of the internal energy of ordinary objects — that is most of their rest mass — is stored in protons and neutrons. Space however entails the existence of a ‘vacuum’ energy which may be all of what is referred to as ‘dark energy’. Our wriggling acrobat is clueless about whether ‘energy’ should rise to its chest or even to its head. It is however acutely aware that naming is the art of actualization. 

Our leading character in the infinite game is as conceptual as it is representational. In a theory of everything, abstract and actual components must combine. Lifted to its chest, a ‘vacuum energy’ may be the hidden essence in existence while freedom derives from Nothingness and precedes essence and existence. The difficulty of placing ‘vacuum energy’ in the acrobat’s body is twofold: If there is a vacuum energy, does it imply the existence of an ‘absolute’ vacuum? And if space is inferred in the idea of vacuum energy, then the word ‘space’ should suffice since it has already such an intended meaning. 

Vacuum energy participates in the process of becoming. It is involved with all this changing across microscopic distances and times. It is the code of a hidden order that stems from the dark sector. As if it were a primer used by painters on a macroscopic canvas, such vacuum energy is the cause of the fundamental emptiness of atoms and when stars collapse under their own gravity crushing the space within to form denser and smaller entities. Any field stiffened by the Higgs field, Strassler explains, has vacuum energy that depends on the Higgs field’s value. If it didn’t exist, atoms would never have formed.

Against all odds, the acrobat finds its way back to the labyrinth of particles. Elementary particles are tiny quantities — parts of a field. A photon, gluon, or even ‘graviton’ comes into being in the shape of a field. Once named, each ‘individual’ whose related energy and/or associated mass is measured becomes a ‘field’ as if it were a collective noun. From neutrinos to Higgs bosons, fields are properties of the amotional everywhere medium. Their wave frequencies intertwine. 

The word ‘frequency’ defines the vibrating energy of a quantum. Things don’t just flow, they vibrate. The faintest possible tremor that is the minimal vibration, with the smallest possible amplitude is a quantum, may that be light. The higher frequency is, the larger the mass. The rest mass represents the energy needed for the wavicle to exist — which in turn is set by the resonant frequency of its field. 

There is a temporal order in the layout. Time invites motion whether things flow or vibrate. Wavicles roll, pitch, and yaw on the ‘plane’ surface. Motion allows them to oscillate back and forth. As if the ‘glue’ precedes what glues together, gluons and quarks get trapped before protons and neutrons ever exist. A greater impossibility lies in the existence of an energy field in which positive-energy particles scatter backwards in time with negative energies. Quark fields and electron fields contain particles and antiparticles while there is only one type of photons. 

Wavicles pop in and out in their fields of operation as if they were fireflies lightning in the dark. Subatomic structures decay while others form. In step with ‘energy', ‘mass’ refers to different kinds of processes. While the Higgs field gives quarks and anti-quarks their rest mass, any ordinary object obtains the majority of its rest mass through the strong nuclear force.

Fields have their own rules of engagement. The everlasting Higgs field is a strange space-suffusing entity, an elusive presence and a sort of stiffening partner, unaware though of whether it is an ‘agent’ or a ‘patient’. Strassler explains that it does not interact directly with the electromagnetic field, provides electrons with the entirety of their rest mass while ignoring photons altogether. The electromagnetic field, for its part, has no interaction with any of the neutrinos' fields. The Higgs field isn't either the carrier of gravity. Still, light and gravitational waves travel at the same rate. They are profoundly interrelated. Perhaps they are different facets of a single, underlying structure.

Certainly, we may be able to capture the internal view of the Milky Way, but we remain the outsiders to the inner experience of writhing particles and scattering elements as much as we are to merging stars and colliding galaxies. To the little acrobat, a ‘field’ has a dimensional aspect. The cosmic field encompasses a bundle of one-dimensional experiences. Each individual experience is unidimensional in how the subject finds itself experiencing, as when the light is absorbed one photon at a time. 

Dimensions feature a whole and a series. A whole refers to the entire medium of a ‘star’ or the reduced scale of a ‘wavicle’. A series represents each category of a particular medium or field. On a cosmic field, host of many others, resonance is the echo of an information shared on the same wavelength through the twelve fermionic fields primarily composed of one neutrino field, one electron-like field, and two quark fields. From wavicles to the vibration frequencies of carbon-based lifeforms, all that talk about fields makes the little acrobat wonder whether there is such a thing as a field of consciousness with its own terms of engagement. 

It has flown high in the realm of human thought and appears tired from travel. It lands on a sandy shore covered with slipper shells to catch its breath and watch the sunrise. “Nothing is what it seems,” it sighs, “Even an edge-on view of the Universal plane is only an imperfect line between a field of existence and a rhizomatic Nothingness.” An old lady named Maria who walks by has the biggest smile on her face. It gathers the courage to ask: “If whatever moves is something that feels, is there a wavefunction that describes the field of consciousness — the vibrating energy of its wavicles?” 

“Without feelings, there is no resonant form,” she kindly replies, “Consciousness is a web of resonance chains. It, too, is vibratory. While humans hold an insignificantly small place in space, the field of consciousness overlaps all the other fields that have allowed them to be recipients of the same elements and trace minerals as stars and nebulae. Farewell, Little acrobat!” She then continues her stroll along the shore and floats into the air.

Matt Strassler, Waves in an impossible sea

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince

Catherine Zucker, Mapping our galactic backyard

Zach Cano, Adventures of a Millisecond Magnetar

Arwen Rimmer, Largest-ever Catalog of X-ray Sources Tests Cosmology

Monika Young, Neutron Star “Glitch” Precedes Mysterious Radio Flash