Whitehead Meets Feynman and the Big Bang

Abstract

Historical quantum cosmology (HQC) is based not on matter but on a chain of local history—a chain lengthened by many local steps in each global step that expands a double-cone spacetime. The universe’s forward-lightcone lower bound corresponds to the big bang while its backward-lightcone upper bound corresponds to the present. (All history occurs after the big bang and before the present.) HQC adapts continuous string-theoretical and Feynman-graphical notions to discrete Whiteheadian process. While standard physics-cosmology posits a spatially-unbounded universe of matter that (continuously) carries conserved energy-momentum, angular momentum and electric charge, in HQC only a tiny “rigid” component (“enduring process” in Whitehead’s terminology) of a discrete and finite history corresponds to matter. The huge majority of history is “nonrigidly meandering” in time as well as in space and carries none of the above conserved quantities. Dense “vacuonic” history, unobservable by the scientific method, nevertheless carries conserved magnetic charge, contacts material history and participates in magnetodynamic action at a distance. One outcome is zitterbewegung for most standard-model elementary particles, leading to rest mass and collapse of material wave function. Another is probabilistic nature of predictions based solely on past material history. There is prospect of understanding gravity as outcome of interplay between magnetically polarized vacuum and matter. Origin of the standard model’s 3 colors, 3 generations and (approximately) 30-degree Weinberg angle will be sketched and related to the internal structure of the photon and other “elementary” particles.