The Origin of Life as Interpreted by Model Mechanics
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | The Origin of Life as Interpreted by Model Mechanics |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Ken H Seto |
| Keywords | relativity theory, forces, SRT |
| Published | 2006 |
| No. of pages | 15 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
A new model of the current universe called Model Mechanics has been formulated. Model Mechanics proposes that all the forces and processes (including the processes of life) of nature are the results of absolute motions of objects in a stationary, elastic and structured light-conducting medium called the E-Matrix. The unique structure of Model Mechanics leads to the discovery of a new repulsive force between all objects in the universe. The CRE Force, in turn, leads to a new theory of gravity called Doppler Theory of Gravity (DTG) and unites gravity with the electromagnetic and nuclear forces naturally. Model Mechanics also leads to a complete theory of motion called IRT (Improved Relativity Theory). IRT includes SRT as a subset. However, unlike SRT, the equations of IRT are valid in all environments…including gravity. This Model Mechanical description of the current universe leads to a new interpretation on the origin of life on earth. This paper presents this interpretation.
Overview
Ken H. Seto's paper is the biological chapter of a much larger programme. Model Mechanics is an Aether-based unification scheme in which a stationary medium — the "E-Matrix" — fills all of what Seto calls pure space (the void), and every particle, force and process is the result of absolute motion within it. The paper's distinctive move is to carry that machinery all the way up from quarks to cell division: Seto argues that a single repulsive force predicted by his model, the Cosmological Repulsive Effect (CRE) force, is "directly responsible for two of the most important processes of life: the cell division process and the ability of a replicated RNA strand to rip away from the DNA template."
The departure from the mainstream account is total rather than incremental. Space-time and quantum fields are both discarded — "Model Mechanics replaces the math constructs of space-time and field/virtual particle with the E-Matrix and the distortions or waves in the E-Matrix." Charge, Mass, the four forces, radioactivity, Dark Matter, the accelerating expansion and finally life and consciousness are all offered as consequences of one geometry. The paper's own summary table lists each ingredient of the model against a "function in life processes," which makes its ambition explicit: the origin of life is presented not as a separate biological problem but as an unavoidable corollary of the physics.
The model
E-Matrix, E-Strings and S-Particles
The E-Matrix is "a stationary, structured and elastic light-conducting medium," built from very thin three-dimensional elastic objects called E-Strings whose length is left undefined. Far from matter the E-Strings point in random directions, so that a slice of the medium looks the same in any orientation; near matter some emanate from the matter, and their number through unit area follows the inverse square law. The E-Strings repel one another, which Seto says implies "an unknown outside force that is compacting them together," with the two in equilibrium. Light is a wave-packet travelling in neighbouring E-Strings and following their geometry, which Seto offers as a physical picture of wave-particle duality.
Matter reduces to one entity. The S-Particle is "the only truly fundamental mass-bearing particle," a sphere repelled by the E-Strings around it, so that its motion through the medium is self-maintaining. Its orbital motion around an E-String generates the Electron (helical counterclockwise, the fastest such motion, one unit of negative charge), the down Quark (same sense at 1/3 the electron's speed, charge −1/3), the up quark (clockwise at 2/3 the speed, charge +2/3), and the electron Neutrino (counterclockwise but corkscrewing away from the charged particles, so its E-Matrix distortion has dissipated before they can respond — Seto's explanation for its lack of electromagnetic interaction). Mass is defined geometrically: "mass is the evidence of the orbiting diameter of its S-Particle." S-Particles that are not orbiting carry no charge, interact only gravitationally, and are identified with dark matter.
Two rules then generate every force. Bodies in absolute motion in the same direction converge (attraction); bodies in opposite directions diverge (repulsion). Seto derives this by analogy with parallel current-carrying wires, which attract for parallel currents and repel for antiparallel ones, reinterpreted as tension in the E-Strings rather than as a magnetic field.
The CRE force and gravity
The CRE force is a fifth force, always repulsive, which Seto identifies with inertia — "the resistance between two objects to change their state of absolute motion." Because the E-Strings emanating from any two bodies diverge according to the inverse square law, the bodies confined to follow them tend to separate. Crucially, and unlike the Cosmological Constant, the CRE force is not constant: Seto states that it increases with the square of the distance. He claims priority for it, saying Model Mechanics predicted it in 1993 and that the 1998 supernova result showing accelerated expansion at large distances confirmed it, removing the need to reinstate a cosmological constant by hand.
Gravity, in the Doppler Theory of Gravity, is the sum of the parallel-motion attraction and the global CRE repulsion — which Seto uses to explain why gravity is so weak relative to the other forces. His modified Newtonian expression multiplies GMaMb/r2 by the dot product of the two bodies' unit direction-of-absolute-motion vectors and by a squared ratio of frequencies (the frequency of a standard source in A's own frame divided by the frequency of an identical source in B's frame as measured by A). Because the dot product may be negative, "not all objects in the Universe attract each other gravitationally": locally it is +1 and gravity attracts, while beyond the observable horizon it is −1 and gravity repels. The paper lists five complaints against general relativity that this is meant to answer — the observed acceleration, galactic rotation curves, the Pioneer 10 trajectory, the prediction of black holes and singularities, and the failure to predict dark matter and dark energy.
Nuclear forces and decay
The strong force is "stacked interaction": two like-charged particles stacked on one another have S-Particles moving in the same direction and therefore attract. A Proton is two stacked up quarks plus electromagnetic binding to a down quark; a Neutron is two stacked down quarks plus an up quark. The stacked attraction is effective only within about 10-13 cm and turns repulsive beyond it, and pulling stacked quarks apart distorts the surrounding E-Strings further, which Seto offers as the mechanism of confinement.
The weak force is dispensed with as a separate interaction. Heavy-nucleus decay is the CRE force de-coupling stacked interactions weakened by neutron capture. Free-neutron beta decay is described step by step: a free S-Particle falls into the orbit of the neutron's up quark, becoming a second up quark that immediately stacks with the first; the down quark between them is drawn closer; the stacked down quarks shift laterally, and once the shift exceeds a down-quark radius their mutual force turns repulsive, so one peels away and combines with a free S-Particle to give an electron and an antineutrino. Muon decay is likewise reinterpreted: the muon's own decay time is 2.2 microseconds in both frames, and the observed longer decay length in the laboratory comes from the frequency ratio of Seto's Improved Relativity Theory rather than from relativistic Time Dilation.
The origin of life
Seto reviews the standard chemical account — Miller and Urey's 1952 spark-discharge experiment yielding amino acids, Juan Oró's 1961 demonstration that hydrogen cyanide and ammonia in aqueous solution yield a nucleic acid base as well, and the alternative delivery routes via interstellar dust, meteorites, comets, or deep-sea vents — and notes that the primitive-atmosphere conditions have been questioned and that assembling RNA and DNA from their constituents remains unsolved. His own contribution applies what he calls the "Pyramid Techniques": assume all three sources supplied the constituents, then assume repeated concentration and drying of primitive water bodies by crustal shifting, so that self-polymerization occurs in concentrated broth and mineral-catalyzed polymerization in the dried sediments, with the polymers washed into new water bodies until self-replicating RNA and then DNA appear. From there Darwinian evolution takes over.
The genuinely novel claim concerns cell division. Seto observes that a DNA strand could in principle grow without limit by addition at both ends, and that the forces which carry out replication are attractive — so what separates anything? His answer: the CRE force on an organized particle system is proportional to the number of basic particles in it, so as the strand lengthens the repulsion grows proportionately, the tension peaking at the strand's midpoint. When it exceeds the electromagnetic coupling there, the strand splits into two equal halves, each becoming the nucleus of a new cell. The same argument explains RNA release: as the growing RNA strand accumulates particles, its CRE force eventually exceeds the coupling to the DNA template and it rips away. Life itself is then defined as a balance — "a continuous process of balancing the organizational attractive EM Force and the dynamic repulsive CRE force within a collection of organized systems of life constituents." A crystal is organized but lifeless because its CRE force cannot overcome the electromagnetic force that formed it.
A short section extends this to consciousness: each sensory input imprints a specific geometric pattern on the E-Strings in the brain, these patterns act as memory cards, and neurons recognize a repeated stimulus by reacting to the reappearing pattern. Seto compares this with Gerald Edelman's neural Darwinism, Francis Crick's electrophysiological view and Roger Penrose's quantum proposal. A final section, "What About God?", argues that the elastic and repulsive properties of the E-Strings, the compacting force and the CRE/EM competition all "appear to be designed properties," and states Seto's personal view that a grand design is more likely than chance, with divine action working by adjusting the geometry of the E-Matrix.
Assessment
The attractive feature of Model Mechanics is its economy of ontology and its refusal to leave mechanisms unstated. One entity (the S-Particle), one medium and one rule about parallel versus antiparallel motion are asked to generate charge, mass, the forces and inertia; the parallel-wire analogy is a real and vivid piece of physical intuition; and the demand that a theory say how action at a distance works is a legitimate complaint about both Newtonian gravity and the exchange-particle formalism. The cell-division argument is the paper's most original thought, and it does identify a genuine puzzle — a purely attractive chemistry has to be told when to let go — with a candidate answer that is at least mechanical rather than verbal.
The difficulties, however, run through nearly every step, and they are of the kind that a single calculation would settle. The central one is that the CRE force is asserted, never derived and never given a magnitude. Nothing in the paper fixes its coupling constant, its units or its numerical size, so the claim that it splits a DNA strand at the midpoint cannot be checked against the covalent bond energies it would have to break — of order electron-volts per bond — nor against the fact that cell division is not a rupture of the chromosome but a controlled process (replication, spindle assembly, cytokinesis) whose molecular machinery has been observed directly. The stated distance behaviour makes matters worse: a force that increases with the square of the distance between any two objects would diverge without limit and would swamp every laboratory measurement of the inverse-square gravitational and electrostatic laws, including the Eötvös-type experiments and the torsion-balance tests of Newtonian gravity at short range. Identifying that same force with inertia is a third, separate claim, and it is incompatible with inertia's observed independence of the presence or distance of other bodies.
Internal tensions accumulate elsewhere. The identification of unorbiting S-Particles with dark matter is stated but not quantified against the measured dark-to-baryonic ratio. The gravitational equation contains a frequency-ratio factor whose value in ordinary laboratory conditions is not evaluated, so the equation is never shown to reduce to Newton's where Newton's works. The muon argument replaces time dilation with a frequency ratio designed to give the same numbers, which makes it an equivalent bookkeeping rather than a refutation; and the paper's list of general-relativity failures is uneven — the Pioneer anomaly has since been accounted for by anisotropic thermal recoil, and black-hole candidates are now supported by orbital tracking of stars around Sagittarius A* and by the gravitational-wave detections of merging compact objects.
The biological chapter also leans on an argument the paper does not defend: that a repulsive force must exist because replication forces are attractive. Molecular biology's answer is that strand separation is done by ATP-driven helicases and polymerases — enzymes that expend chemical energy — not by an unopposed attraction, so the mystery Seto sets out to solve is not, in the terms he states it, an open one. Finally, the closing sections on consciousness and design are explicitly speculative and Seto says so, but the "grand design" inference rests on the improbability of properties that his own theory simply postulates, which is circular: the E-Strings' elasticity looks designed only because nothing in the model explains it. Seto's own standard — "they will need to be confirmed experimentally" — is the right one, and the paper offers no experiment by which any of it could be.