True, but this is not what the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (HUP) is all about. The HUP is about the mutual measurement of conjugate attributes. The best known example being the attributes of position and momentum but there are lots of others. If you measure the position of a moving object more and more accurately, its momentum measurement becomes less and less accurate. You can measure either of them as accurately as you want but you can’t do both at the same time. So, the HUP is not about “disturbing” anything, it’s about mutually exclusive measurements.

… foam …

Applying a sufficient negative pressure to any liquid will cause bubbles to form. Underwater propellers, for example, create cavitation bubbles. Empty space throughout the universe is under negative pressure right now and has been since early on. Conditions necessary for the cavitation of space have existed for billions of years.

Cavities in space would likely form surface tension membranes at the boundary surface. I go into this a little bit in the website paper.

… Your bubbles would have to be able to ‘pop’ …

Black holes are not like ordinary bubbles. Ordinary bubbles contain internal gasses under pressure. The inside of black holes (if my theory is correct) contain nothing at all. If you were to put the whole universe in a big vise of some sort and apply enough pressure, the holes would just shrink and disappear. Space would return to a smooth fluid state. That’s my guess.

You called it ‘foam’. And even the term ‘cavitation bubble’ implies a substance of some sort encapsulating it with some form of surface tension preventing it from collapsing. What is the ‘surface’? What is the force that acts as surface tension?

Your bubbles have to be able to ‘pop.’ We smash atoms apart all the time, we know it can be done. The result of it is fracturing & an expulsion of energy [like smashing a neutron into a proton, electron, & the extra energy]. If it were a bubble around a hole one would expect it to implode when broken.

We measure and manipulate electromagnetic & weak nuclear with present technology all the time. The measurements & predictions are extremely accurate. If your theory doesn’t include models for observable, repeatable, and well documented forces, then it’s not really done. Any new paradigm needs to first fit into the existing data.

That is why string theory is taking so long to put together. They have to do all the math, and it has to be accurate. Because, if a tool can’t measure the things you can verify accurately, then you can’t use it as a tool.

There is a wide spectrum of mythologies that have persisted in theoretical physics since the early nineteen hundreds when the ‘Copenhagen clan’ saddled us with the statistical interpretation of the Schrodinger wave equation. The Copenhagen interpretation has given us such gems as instantaneous interactions between photons light years apart, Schrodinger’s cat, the idea that a measurement alters the thing being measured (it doesn’t), and the best one of all, the ‘many worlds’ fantasy where infinities of new universes are created every picosecond of every day. A good, non-technical accounting of this history is given in Nick Herbert’s book Quantum Reality, http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Reality-Beyond-New-Physics/dp/0385235690 . More recently, Carver Mead of Cal Tech drove a silver stake through the heart of the whole ‘statistical’ nonsense in his (very technical) book called Collective Electrodynamics.

As for the ‘foam’, I’m not following you. What I mean by it is a collection of cavitation bubbles drawn together by gravity. The bubbles do not ‘pop’, they only fuse to form ever larger cavities when squeezed together by sufficient gravitational pressure.

Black holes come in a few varieties other than the simplest version I use in my paper. They can be charged (plus or minus), they can spin (up or down) and they can be non-spherical because of spin. Combinations of these types would give rise to subatomic entities like quarks. The lesson we learned from fractals is that great complexity can arise from very simple relationships.

In this scenario, things like electric charge and the nuclear strong and weak forces are shifted to the fine-structure of space itself, a realm that is beyond the reach of present technology.

My main problem is with the idea of ‘foam’. Since all matter has a tiny Schwarzschild radius inside it, the ‘foam’ would just be what the ‘normal’ models call mass. If not, what is the ‘substance’ at the edge of each ‘bubble’? Why, when you ‘pop’ a ‘bubble’, do you get an explosion instead of an implosion?

How do you explain nuclear forces? The strong might not apply with your model, but you need to cover weak/electroweak. Like, for instance, where does alpha radiation come from? And why?

Here is a link to an image showing a brief summary of the physics involved. I recommend opening it in a separate window:

http://dcgeorge.com/images/TheMeaningOfMatter/ThePhysicsOfACavityInSpace.jpg

The upshot is that the space around any massive object is stretched more and more as the distance to the object gets smaller. In the limiting case of a black hole, the metric stretching goes to infinity at the Schwarzschild radius (middle panel) and the density of space goes to zero (rightmost panel).

The implications are rather dramatic. Black holes are revealed to be actual holes in the fabric of space itself. General relativity, in other words, unequivocally, demands that holes exist in the fabric of space. Because such holes have mass and are indistinguishable from normal objects, it strongly implies that what we experience as normal objects could also be built out of nothing but warpages of space.

Now, if I may, let me respond more specifically to some of your comments.

unanonymous: … pseudo-intellectual poppycock. not one peer-reviewed article…

Fair enough but I suspect that you have never tried to get a paper peer-reviewed. These days, as far as I know, the only way to do that is to be professional researcher or be somehow associated with an established institution, which I haven’t been for many years (I’m an old person … OK, an ancient person).

Mitch: … I’d be interested to hear what people with the appropriate background have to say.

I have had a number of correspondences with established physicists over the years. They have *all* agreed that the physics underlying my theory is sound but have rejected the idea for various strange reasons. One professor agreed that general relativity allows what he called “cutouts” in space but maintained that such cutouts would be meaningless. The latest one, Dr. Sascha Vongehr of USC (two weeks ago) suggested that Einstein’s theory of general relativity (the gold standard of modern physics) is probably wrong:
Me: … If we consider the most simple case of a Schwarzschild black hole and strictly adhere to the mathematics of the radial component of the metric (describing the static condition of the space around the hole), we are led to the inescapable conclusion that the black hole is an actual hole in the fabric of space itself.
Vonger’s response: … Meaning basically that we should not trust the math at this point. ….

Ernie Branscomb: … something had to come from nothing, so unless you believe in magic, Doug’s ideas at least provide a way that “Something” came out of “Nothing”. Doug’s ideas at very least remove the magic and put the Genesis stories on a more scientifically thought-out basis. For that, me and my “hammer test of reality” applaud him.

Hello Ernie, well put, and thanks for the moral support. All those years ago, when I was first trying to work things out, all I could tell you was that the space at your toes is thinner than it is at you nose. I didn’t have access to the internet then.
I was just thinking of you recently and wondering if you had seen the movie. Come to think of it, you may have been the first person to hear the essence of the idea.

JK: … Also, I have a problem with ‘everything “inside” simply doesn’t exist.’ It’s too simplistic. It reminds me of how people misunderstand Schrödinger’s cat. The cat is in fact either dead or alive, there is a specific truth. We just don’t know it, so we have to create models of understanding based on it being both. But, the cat knows…

I agree with you about Schrödinger’s cat being in fact either dead or alive but according to the mainstream interpretation of quantum theory, the cat (being a metaphor for quantum entities), does indeed exist as a strange mixture of being dead and not being dead until you look at it (thereby collapsing the wave function). It’s nutty stuff and seems a lot crazier than my idea.
To sum things up, I quite realize that my theory doesn’t rise to the level of being a “scientific” theory on par with currently accepted science and it is definitely not yet a complete theory of matter. It does, however, open up the possibility that the entire physical universe could be built out of nothing more than warped space. If the idea is correct, It not only greatly simplifies the overall picture of reality and, as Ernie noted, gives a scientific basis for how matter could have come into being, but, more importantly, it appears to resolve a number of seemingly intractable difficulties in theoretical physics (like the black hole scaling-problem and the accelerating expansion of the universe).

“However, there is an obvious difference between a black hole and an ordinary massive object such as a planet or a star. Those objects, being full of ordinary particle matter, are definitely not empty shells of deformed space. This problem is resolved by recognizing that planets and stars would be comprised of sub-nuclear, foam-like agglomerations of un-coalesced cavities while black holes would result from the forced coalescence of those small cavities to form ever larger holes in space.”

Foam? Seriously? It wouldn’t be so bad, but he never goes into any detail about the hows or whys of the foam. The metaphor doesn’t fit, since foam is made from salt or soap in the water, but he’s saying that pure water is foaming itself. This is an important detail on something some people would say is the only thing that ‘matters.’ [pun very much intended]

The problem is that the normal model works. It works with extreme precision in most cases. Any new model must integrate with the parts of the working model that we ‘know’ to be accurate. Which is why new models tend to be more complex, not less.

Anyway, hit the link to the site which gives more of the mathematical detail than the video.

Also, I have a problem with ‘everything “inside” simply doesn’t exist.’ It’s too simplistic. It reminds me of how people misunderstand Schrödinger’s cat. The cat is in fact either dead or alive, there is a specific truth. We just don’t know it, so we have to create models of understanding based on it being both. But, the cat knows…