Swerve
“Quantum theory predicts that the vacuum of space is a roiling bath of virtual particles that continuously appear and disappear. These vacuum fluctuations produce measurable phenomena, such as the Casimir effect, which arises from the pressure the virtual photons exert on stationary bodies. In 1970, Gerald Moore theorized that bodies in accelerated motion would produce real photons out of quantum vacuum fluctuation . . . Accelerated bodies modify quantum vacuum fluctuations, causing emission of photon pairs from the vacuum and dissipation of the bodies’ motional energy. The power dissipated in the motion of the body is equal to the total radiated electromagnetic power, as expected according to the law of energy conservation.” Nature, November, 17, 2011.
Acceleration of matter in vacuum space creates photons, particles of light. Acceleration of spin creates magnetism. Acceleration of mass creates gravity. There. . is. . something. . about. . acceleration. It is a form of change, of variation, in our universe, a special form, it is change of change – change squared. And it is the essence of gravity, matter, and light.
It is mysterious that light has the same velocity for all observers, but it does. To be so, it must be something like infinite acceleration, each point of light being infinitely close to being instanteously brief, but infinitely accelerated from the previous point, infinitely close to reaching an asymptotic limit of velocity that is, weirdly, infinitely close to being constant and therefore . . .finite. Einstein realized that light, then, being infinite acceleration that paradoxically achieves finite and constant velocity, is the universal invariant. It can be relative or variable to no other position or movement. Curiously, although matter and energy are interchangeable, only energy – electromagnetic radiation – can travel at the speed of light, matter cannot.
The Roman poet, Lucretius, in his famous poem: On the Nature of Things, introduced to the Roman world, the philosophy of the pre-Socratic Greeks of 300 B. C. These thinkers had deduced that the building blocks of reality – atoms – were infinitely small, infinite-in-number entities that repell and attract each other such as to create all things and events. These ancient Greeks saw, long before Darwin and Einstein and quantum physics, that the fundamental units must have . . . what Lucretius called: swerve – an irreducible, varying indeterminancy in their behavior so as to make for the change with variation that is necessary for the evolutionary processes that manifest all things and events, inorganic and organic. The most basic units of reality, they realized must be, themselves, units of variation, units of change.
“If all the individual particles, in their infinite numbers, fell through the void in straight lines, pulled down by their own weight like raindrops, nothing would ever exist. But the particles do not move lockstep in a preordained single direction. Instead, “at absolutely unpredictable times and places they deflect slightly from their straight course, to a degree thqt could be described as no more than a shift of movement” (2.218-20 Lucretius, On the Nature of Things), Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt, pg.188.
“Even if cooled to a temperature of absolute zero, all objects will retain a fundamental jitter in their physical positions due to quantum ‘zero-point’ fluctuations.” Painter, et. al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 033602, 2012
