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Three-Dimensional Spiral String Theory

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Scientific Theory
NameThree-Dimensional Spiral String Theory
TypeUnified theory of matter, radiation and spacetime
Author(s)Vladimir B Ginzburg
Keywordstoryx, helyx, trons, spiral field, dynosphere, polarized spacetime, Aether, vortex theory, dark matter, superluminal velocity
Year1993 onward
Also developed under the names Spiral Field Theory and the Universal Spacetime Theory

The Three-Dimensional Spiral String Theory (3D-SST) is a unified theory of matter, radiation and spacetime developed by the Russian-American engineer and independent theorist Vladimir B Ginzburg from 1993 onward. It holds that everything in nature — particles, fields, radiation, and the aether itself — is built from a single spiral spacetime element called the toryx and its offspring the helyx. Ginzburg offers it explicitly as an alternative to both the Standard Model and conventional superstring theory.

The theory is the modern continuation of the vortex tradition: the idea, older than the atom, that matter is not made of small balls but of motion — of circulation, whirl and spiral structure. Ginzburg presents his own work as that tradition's fifth phase, and the first to supply it with a workable mathematics.

Its distinguishing claim, and the source of its name, is that it requires only three spatial dimensions and time. Where superstring theories invoke ten or more dimensions, Ginzburg argues that a three-dimensional theory is in principle testable by three-dimensional experiment.

This article describes the theory. For Ginzburg's 2009 paper of the same name, see Three-Dimensional Spiral String Theory (2009 paper).

Motivation

Ginzburg accepts that the Standard Model predicts laboratory results accurately, but observes that it describes only the small fraction of the universe made of ordinary matter. Dark matter, dark energy and black holes — on the figures he cites, 95 to 99 per cent of what exists — fall outside it. That gap, he argues, is what has driven the search for alternatives.

His objection to the best-known alternative is methodological. Superstring theory, he holds, was "subdued by insurmountable mathematical difficulties" arising from its use of multi-dimensional space, and in buying unification at the price of unobservable dimensions it placed itself beyond experimental reach. His own programme accepts a strong constraint — three dimensions and time — and tries to obtain unification within it.

Origins

By Ginzburg's own account the theory has a datable beginning. In December 1992, prompted by a remark of his son Gene about the hidden worlds contained within matter, and while looking at the night sky over Phoenix, Arizona, he conceived of a multi-level spiral spacetime he named the helicola — a nested spiral path which he holds describes the motion of every celestial body. Pursuing its geometry led him in 1993 to the toryx, and from there to everything that followed.

Development

The theory was rebuilt several times, each version subsuming the last. The names changed as the ontology deepened: what began as a field in a medium ended as a state of spacetime itself.

Spiral Field Theory (1996–2000)

The first formulation rests on two claims. The first is a set of novel relativistic relationships on which both the gravitational mass and the electric charge of a particle decrease with increasing velocity, falling to zero at the speed of light — the reverse of the usual relativistic mass increase. The second is that the structure of everything in nature is spiral: elementary particles are built from toroidal spiral fields and electromagnetic waves from helical spiral fields, with mass and charge determined by the degree and direction of the field's vorticity and by its geometry, rather than being primitive properties.

Spiral fields exist only at discrete energy levels and transform into one another as those levels change. At the lowest, zero-energy level the toroidal field degenerates into a spherical field; the ensemble of these forms a zero-point-energy aether Ginzburg names the dynosphere. The dynosphere does three jobs at once: excited, it creates both outer toroidal fields (matter) and inner toroidal fields of opposite vorticity (antimatter); it is the medium in which electromagnetic waves propagate; and it supplies a dynamic velocity frame of reference for moving bodies. Unifying field, matter and aether in this way, Ginzburg argues, removes the infinities that afflict point-particle physics.

Key papers of this phase are Structure of Atoms and Fields (1997) and Double Helical and Double Toroidal Spiral Fields (1998), both in Speculations in Science and Technology, and Unified Spiral Field, Matter and Aether: An Introduction to Spiral Field Theory (2000).

The relativistic torus and helix (2002–2006)

From 2004 Ginzburg recast the theory in terms of two "prime elements of nature", the relativistic torus and the relativistic helix. Each is a spiral string element containing a single-wave leading double string wound about by a trailing double string that travels its spiral path at the speed of light. In the torus the leading string follows a circle and the trailing string a toroidal path; in the helix both follow helical paths. Because these objects can absorb and release energy they can sustain themselves, which makes them, in his account, the natural constituents of elementary particles (torus) and photons (helix). See The Relativistic Torus and Helix as the Prime Elements of Nature (2004).

Toryx, helyx and 3D-SST (2006–2011)

The mature form replaces fields in a medium with spacetime entities proper: the toryx and the helyx. This is the version presented at book length in Prime Elements of Ordinary Matter, Dark Matter & Dark Energy (2006) and in the papers The Origin of the Universe: Part 1 Toryces (2010) and Basic Concept of 3-Dimensional Spiral String Theory (3D-SST) (2011).

Ginzburg sets 3D-SST three goals: to describe the unified structure of the prime elements of the whole universe, including ordinary matter, dark matter and black holes; to demonstrate the possibility of radiation propagating at superluminal velocity; and to uncover the unified nature of the strong, superstrong (colour), gravitational and electric forces.

The Universal Spacetime Theory (2015)

In his final formulation Ginzburg makes the ontological claim as strongly as possible: what we perceive as matter, field, gravity, mass, charge and energy are "merely various metamorphoses of polarized spacetime". The spacetime properties of the toryx and helyx rest on a small number of assumptions, and their physical properties are expressed as functions of those spacetime properties. He argues that this resolves the long-standing problem of unifying the physics of the micro- and macro-worlds. See The Essence of the Universal Spacetime Theory (UST) (2015).

Core concepts

The toryx

The toryx is a spiral spacetime element whose decisive property is that it can be turned inside out. This makes it suited to modelling polarized prime elements of matter. Ginzburg presents the creation of the universe as the polarization of Nothingness, governed by a conservation law for Nothingness and constrained by the uncertainty principle.

Toryces are polarized in two independent ways:

  • By charge, through the ability of their leading and trailing strings to be in opposite inversion states.
  • By energy, since their total kinetic and potential energy may be negative or positive, making them able either to absorb or to release energy.

The components of the trailing string's velocity may be subluminal or superluminal, real or imaginary, and toryces occupy discrete excitation and oscillation quantum states.

The helyx

Helyces are produced when a parent toryx drops from a higher to a lower quantum energy state. Combining, they yield the radiation particles — photons and neutrinos — which carry energy and, in Ginzburg's phrase, communication between matter particles. Depending on the parent toryx, helyces may propagate at luminal or superluminal velocities.

Trons and the prime particles

Matched polarized toryces unify to form elementary matter particles Ginzburg calls trons:

  • a-trons — the lightest and most rigid, which constitute the aether
  • e-trons — which form electrons and positrons
  • z-trons — the heaviest, which form the cores of nucleons and the singularity

In the 3D-SST presentation the unification of specially matched polarized toryces yields four prime elementary particles — electrons, positrons, aetherons and higgstrons — which in turn constitute the quantum vacuum, the aether, and composite particles including nucleons. Ginzburg holds that the interplay of subluminal and superluminal string speeds is what keeps both matter and radiation particles in existence.

Unification of forces

Ginzburg's unification argument, given its own treatment in The Unification of Forces (2006) and the book The Unification of Strong, Gravitational & Electric Forces (2002), is geometric. If the electric charges of the interacting elements are taken to be distributed along circles rather than concentrated at points, then the strong, superstrong (colour) and gravitational forces all follow from Coulomb's law applied to those charge distributions. On this view there is only one force, and the apparent multiplicity of forces is an artefact of the point-charge idealisation.

Dark matter and dark energy

The theory treats the dark sector as a consequence rather than a separate puzzle. Ginzburg posits no undiscovered exotic substance. Dark matter and dark energy are, on his account, further metamorphoses of polarized spacetime — states of the same prime elements that constitute ordinary matter, differing in polarization and energy state rather than in kind. The dark sector is therefore not missing matter but unrecognised structure in the aether-spacetime the theory already requires, and the aetheron-type prime particles that make up the aether are precisely what mainstream cosmology is seeking under another name.

Points at issue

Several of the theory's commitments place it in direct conflict with results the mainstream regards as settled, and they are the natural focus of any assessment:

  • Velocity-dependent charge. The claim that electric charge decreases with velocity contradicts the invariance of electric charge, which is well supported experimentally and is built into the structure of electrodynamics. This is the theory's sharpest single break with accepted physics.
  • Superluminal propagation. The theory not only permits but requires radiation propagating faster than light, which conflicts with special relativity's prohibition on superluminal signalling.
  • Polarization of Nothingness. The founding move is metaphysical as much as physical, and its mathematical content — a conservation law for Nothingness — is not expressed in the language used by the rest of physics.
  • Absence of quantitative predictions. Although Ginzburg stresses that a three-dimensional theory is testable in principle, the published work is largely structural and does not offer the numerical predictions by which competing models are usually discriminated.

Ginzburg's response throughout is that these are features rather than defects: that the vortex tradition was abandoned prematurely rather than refuted, and that a picture able to accommodate the 95–99 per cent of the universe the Standard Model does not describe is worth the cost of revising assumptions that were never independently verified for the objects in question.

Relation to other work on this wiki

3D-SST sits within the broader family of structural models of the electron represented on this wiki by the toroidal ring tradition — Alfred Lauck Parson's 1915 magneton as developed by David L Bergman, Charles William Lucas, Domina Eberle Spencer and the Common Sense Science group. Both reject the point particle and both build the electron from a circulating structure rather than treating it as structureless.

They differ in what is circulating. The toroidal ring models a ring of charged matter in ordinary space, and stays close to classical electrodynamics; Ginzburg's toryx is a state of spacetime itself, and requires superluminal string components and a polarized Nothingness that the toroidal ring tradition does not invoke. Ginzburg's theory is thus the more radical ontologically, and correspondingly the more exposed.

His aether, the dynosphere, likewise belongs to the wiki's wider aether literature, though it is a zero-point-energy ensemble of degenerate spiral fields rather than a mechanical medium.

As of this writing, Ginzburg's theory has not been directly engaged — supported or criticised — in the published work of other contributors represented on this wiki. Readers in a position to assess it against their own models are encouraged to add that discussion.

Key papers

Books

External links

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