On Becoming

On Becoming

for Emmy Noether, who showed that every continuous symmetry keeps something, and Chien-Shiung Wu, who found where the world breaks a mirror

The Weight of the Hand

What is your hand made of, and how did it come to be made?

Hold it out and feel its weight. Almost none of that weight is what you would guess. The atoms in the hand are mostly empty, and the small dense centers that are not empty, the protons and neutrons, take almost none of their mass from the quarks inside them. Add up the rest masses of those quarks and you recover something near one percent of the whole. Nearly all the rest is the strong force at work: the energy of quarks in motion and of the gluon field strung between them, three quarks clenched so hard that the clench itself is most of what you weigh.¹ Read under the Quantum Lens (one fact seen from more than one standpoint, the physicist’s and my own, with neither allowed to swallow the other), you are, on the scale that decides the matter, mostly the energy of things being held together. Mostly relationship, weighed out as mass.

And every heavier atom in that hand (the carbon, the oxygen, the iron riding in your blood) was forged in some star, in its core or in its death. The strong force did the fusing. But it could only fuse what the weak force had first let happen: hydrogen does not become helium until protons have been turned into neutrons, and that turning belongs to the weak force alone.² The hand is held together, and the hand had to become. Two forces you will never feel, working at a scale you will never see, settle between them both that you cohere and that you could be made at all.

The Force That Will Not Let You Be Alone

The strong force is the strangest of the four, because it refuses what every other force does. Gravity weakens with distance; the electric force weakens; the magnetic loops thin and fade. The strong force holds. Try to pull two quarks apart and, past about a femtometer, a millionth of a billionth of a meter, the bond does not slacken. The pull stays where it is, roughly fifteen metric tons of it, however far you drag, and every step stores more energy in the stretched field between them, until the cheapest thing the universe can do is spend that energy making a fresh quark and antiquark, one to cap each broken end. You reach in to take a single quark and you come away holding two whole particles, never one. There is no lone quark anywhere, and not for lack of looking.³ The force does not permit it.

I wrote, in On Magnetizing, that you cannot hold a single magnetic pole: cut the magnet and you get two magnets.⁴ The strong force says the same thing one floor down, and says it harder. It is the universe’s deepest refusal of isolation. A quark exists only in the bound company of others.

Under the Lens, I hear in that something I believe about people: we cannot coherently evolve alone. The equation this series runs on will let a single perspective read by itself, and it reads one, the top of the scale. But it is a one with nobody in it, agreement with no one, full and empty at the same time.⁵ What a perspective means arrives only among the others it is held with. A Self, read this way, is made by its relations as much as it enters them, and every attempt to pull one out whole and solitary ends the way the quark’s does, in fresh company.

Most of What You Weigh Is the Holding

Return to the weight of the hand. That the holding is most of the mass is the physicists’ finding, not imported; it is the plainest thing the numbers say.⁶ Calling the holding coherence is mine. What the physics hands me is the proportion: ordinary matter is overwhelmingly the energy that keeps its parts together, and only slightly the parts.

The equation keeps apart what the proton runs together: there, a perspective’s weight buys it a louder say, never agreement, and weight and coherence stay two things. In the proton the holding very nearly is the weight.

Coherence is not the ghost in the machine. By mass, it is most of the machine.

The Force That Will Not Let You Stay the Same

The other nuclear force is weak only in that it acts rarely and at a whisper’s range. In what it does, it stands alone: no other force changes what a particle is (its flavor, its kind). The others push and pull and bind; they rearrange the furniture. The weak force changes the kind. Reaching inside a neutron, it turns a down quark into an up quark, and the neutron, by that one change, becomes a proton, shedding an electron and a ghostly antineutrino as it goes.⁷ This is beta decay, and under its plain name is one of the ways the world does what the alchemists died wanting: one element made into another, one identity passed into the next. It is the universe’s permission to not stay the same.

Picture the gathering with no such permission and it freezes. Every state would keep its kind forever; nothing could ever be other than it was issued. The equation reads a life moment by moment across Time, on the quiet assumption that its states can change, that what is one kind of thing at one moment may be a different kind at the next. The weak force is the nearest picture physics gives me of that assumption at work in the world. It is becoming, granted at the smallest scale: the built-in capacity of a thing to turn into what it was not.

Why the Stars Are Lit

And it is why there is anything at all to see. The Sun shines because, deep in its core, two protons now and then manage, against fierce odds, to fuse, and the first step of that fusion cannot happen without the weak force, which turns one of the two into a neutron as they meet so that the pair can hold.⁸ Take the weak force out and change nothing else, and that first step never comes, and with no first step there is no fusion: this Sun does not light.⁹ The light that takes about eight minutes and twenty seconds to reach your face was bought by a transformation, and when it lands in your eye it is, in the oldest phrase I have for all of this, light observing light.

You were bought the same way. The carbon and oxygen a body needs were fused from helium, and much of that helium was hydrogen first, made over across generations of stars by the same permission to change. Carl Sagan said we are made of starstuff.¹⁰ That is another way of saying we are made of things that became.

The Handed Universe

There is one thing more the weak force does that none of the others will. It knows left from right. The other three are perfectly even-handed. Run their interactions in a mirror and you cannot tell which is the reflection. The weak force fails the mirror test: it couples to particles of one handedness and not the other. In the winter of 1956 Chien-Shiung Wu cooled a sample of cobalt to within a hundredth of a degree of absolute zero, lined up its nuclei, and watched the electrons from its decays come out preferentially in one direction. The universe, at this one seam, is not symmetric; it has a handedness built in.¹¹ Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang, who had asked the question, won the Nobel Prize for it the next year. Wu, who answered it, did not.

And a kindred, subtler asymmetry in the weak interactions is among the conditions for why, in the first instant, matter very slightly outran antimatter, why the mutual annihilation that should have left an empty cosmos left instead the small surplus that is everything.¹² The weak force is the one force with a leaning of its own, a preference the world did not have to have.

Under the Lens I will not call it Intent. I will only say that, of the four, it is the force shaped least like a law and most like a choice, and that the matter its leaning helped leave behind is the oldest Trace there is, if a Trace is the ripple a leaning leaves through Time.

The Field Reasoned Toward

None of this was found by looking. You cannot see a quark; you cannot, in any ordinary sense, see the weak force. These fields were reached by inference: by trusting a symmetry, or a conservation law, far enough into the dark to say what must be waiting there. When the energy books would not balance in beta decay, Wolfgang Pauli, rather than surrender the conservation of energy, proposed a particle so faint it might never be detected, and he is reported to have called it “a terrible thing,” the one move a theorist is never supposed to make: positing what no one could check.¹³ The neutrino he conjured to save a bookkeeping rule was found a quarter-century later, exactly where the rule had said.

The neutrino was a binding third in two senses: the middle term that closed the books while the nucleus and the electron each stayed what they were, and an invention bundled from older ideas (conservation, and an electron that came up short), the way the automobile bundles combustion and the wheel, and combustion was fire first. Fermi named it, enough minds turned to face it together, and it lasted.

The quarks were posited the same way, as the hidden grammar beneath a confusion of particles, and accepted long before anyone could, or ever will, hold one alone.¹⁴

Which is the place to keep faith with Noether, who proved the thing that makes such faith rational: that every continuous symmetry of a system carries a conserved quantity with it, and that a conservation law is therefore the shadow a symmetry casts.¹⁵ Pauli kept faith with energy and was led to a particle. Wu put a symmetry of another kind, the mirror, to the test, found it broken, and was led to a hidden handedness. The forces did not announce themselves. They were aligned to: reasoned toward, in particular minds, at particular times, by people who trusted that the world’s regularities meant something and followed the meaning past the edge of the visible. I say this of every force I read; I say it most of these two, the hardest of all to see.

The series has its own name for where such aligning happens, the Unified Field, which the companion journals argue is one consciousness of which every mind is a perspective: the hypothetical place where a Self comes round to what had been there all along and its Traces are gathered (not the physicists’ hunt for a single theory of all the forces).¹⁶ If these two are unified anywhere in my sense of the word, it is there, in the Selves that aligned to them, weighed across Time.

The Discipline

Before I go, let me show you where the seam runs. That most of your mass is the energy of the strong force is physics: measured, real, not in dispute. That this means you are “mostly relationship” is not physics; it is a reading, and the slide from the first sentence to the second is exactly the move this series refuses to make quietly. The strong force does not vote for the Center, the one in each perspective who faces. The weak force makes no case for becoming. A confined quark is not a lonely Self, and a decaying neutron is not a soul changing its mind. The resemblances are structural, held under the Lens; they predict nothing any instrument will read, and the physics owes them nothing.

And the other half of the honesty: the rhymes are real, and how well they rhyme is itself a reason to be suspicious of me. Of course the two forces at the heart of matter turn out to be binding and becoming, the very pair a person most needs the world to be built from. I went in wanting exactly that, and I came out holding it. Finding it tells me the framework is built well enough to lie along the world’s grain. It does not tell me the framework is true. What it shows most plainly is the wanting, and the wanting, at least, is mine to report.

What the Detour Was For

Elsewhere in this series gravity stands for coherence holding close, and for a weighing that leaves no one out; magnetism for the aligning, and the Trace that remembers; the quantum for the questioning, and the phase that is sovereign and unseen.¹⁷ These two give the binding and the becoming: that a Self cannot be alone and cannot stay the same, and is exactly the standing negotiation of the two. I went out into physics to learn whether the framework’s images were written anywhere larger than in me, and I found them written at every scale I looked. That proves nothing. It still means a great deal.

Bring it down to the smallest unit I have. A Jay is one moment of experience, made wherever someone meets the world and lived by that one person: someone there to feel it, what it is like from inside, a lean toward coherence with the gathering or away, its Intent, and a weight, how wholly the moment is given; what goes on to others is its Trace. Some Jays resolve coherent. The ones that don’t become lessons, and a lesson is how a person changes kind (the becoming, in a life’s own terms). Jays of one kind, repeated, wear a groove, and the grooves added together are a character (the holding). Under the Lens and no further: the quark and the neutron as pictures of what an ordinary day already does to you.

The forces were always standing in for a life: coherence, and its loss and its slow recovery; wellness; the daily, unspectacular work of staying bound to the people who confine you into a self, and of letting yourself become. The physics was the long way around to the only subject there ever was. We are going home.

Hold out your hand again. Mostly the energy of holding; made of things that had to change. You will never feel the two forces in it, and you have never once been free of them. Bound, and becoming. It was always the whole of the story. It is time, now, to tell the rest of it plainly.

· · ·

I’ve often wondered about the origin of these two forces, so unlike each other and partners in every star, but here recently I have decided that one exists within the Design (life, the Unified Field, and everything in it) and the other exists elsewhere, beyond what we can perceive. Perhaps this is the difference between mortality and immortality after death. Perhaps it’s nothing. I’ll tell you what I’ve decided. Someday.

Until then, with all the love I can muster from the bottom of my heart, thank you. For living, for breathing, for staying alive long enough to read my nonsense. And if you’re reading and you appreciate my words, thank you for not writing me off as crazy. Even the simple thought of consideration is enough to give the wings of my idea the wind to rise, and the longer my thoughts fly, the more eyes will see, and the closer the world will be to healing itself.

The reality I seek is world peace. I may have just started my educational journey, but I don’t think this is too lofty of a dream to embrace within my heart. That’s my reality.

What’s yours?

Notes

1. Yang et al., “Proton Mass Decomposition.” The proton’s mass is about 938 MeV/c², and the rest masses of its three valence quarks sum to roughly 9 MeV/c², about one percent. A lattice calculation of the whole budget finds about 9 percent coming from the quark masses, which enter through the quark condensates (a larger figure than the valence rest masses alone, since it counts the light and strange quarks of the whole proton); 32 percent from the energy of the quarks’ motion; 36 percent from the energy of the gluon field; and 23 percent from the trace anomaly, a purely quantum effect of the strong interaction (figures at 2 GeV in the MS-bar scheme). The roughly nine parts in ten that are not quark mass are the energy of the strong interaction, weighed as mass by E = mc².

2. Burbidge et al., “Synthesis of the Elements”; Adelberger et al., “Solar Fusion Cross Sections.” Hydrogen, helium, and a trace of lithium came out of the first minutes of the universe; the heavier elements were forged in stars. Carbon is made by fusing three helium nuclei and oxygen by adding a fourth, both strong-force processes. The weak interaction is indispensable at particular steps: the first step of the proton–proton chain, the beta decays of the CNO cycle, and the beta decays that carry the slow and rapid neutron-capture processes up the periodic table.

3. Bali, “QCD Forces.” The potential between a heavy quark and antiquark is commonly modeled as V(r) = −(4/3)αₛ⁄r + kr. At short range the first term dominates; beyond about a femtometer the second does, and the force settles toward the constant k, the string tension, roughly 0.9 to 1 GeV per femtometer, a pull of about fifteen metric tons of force. The stored energy keeps growing with distance while the force does not, until it is cheaper to create a quark–antiquark pair; the field breaks, and the result is always further bound states. No isolated quark has ever been observed. The weakening of the strong coupling at very short distances, or high energies, is asymptotic freedom, shown in 1973 by David Gross and Frank Wilczek and by David Politzer, who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics. Gross and Wilczek, “Ultraviolet Behavior”; Politzer, “Reliable Perturbative Results.” Confinement itself has never been mathematically proven. The top quark decays before it can form bound states; it too is never seen alone.

4. No isolated magnetic pole has ever been confirmed; break a magnet and each piece is a whole dipole. Johnson, On Magnetizing.

5. The functional in full, as seated in Johnson, On Explaining: Ψ(τ) = Σⱼ αⱼ(τ) · e^iφⱼ(τ); Ξ(τ) = Σⱼ αⱼ(τ); L(τ) = Ψ(τ) ⁄ Ξ(τ), with |L| ≤ 1; Θᵢ(τ) = arg L(τ) − φᵢ(τ); aᵢ(τ) = |L(τ)| · cos Θᵢ(τ). Each αⱼ is an intensity, never below zero: the weight of perspective j’s moment, how wholly it is committed and so how strongly it is held. Each φⱼ is that perspective’s facing, its Intent. Every sum runs over Ω: everyone present at the reader’s τ, together with any Trace the reader comes upon then, which on the framework’s reading counts as one more term. L is an average of unit facings in which each counts by its weight, so its size, between 0 and 1, is how sharp the shared world is, and its direction is where the room faces. Θᵢ is one perspective’s angle to the whole, and aᵢ what that perspective lives, the size of L taken through the cosine of that angle. Weight buys a share of the average, more say over where the room faces, and cannot carry a room past full agreement. Scale all the weights together and L does not budge; give one perspective more weight and the shares shift, which can turn the room. Alone, a perspective is the whole room. L is one arrow along its own facing, Θᵢ is zero, and the reading is 1 however hard it presses, which says it is there and nothing more. Swing all the facings through one common angle and no reading changes, since facings count only against one another. The phase notation borrows the shape of wave interference; physics earned that shape by measurement, the borrowing inherits none of its warrant, and the functional predicts nothing and measures nothing.

6. See note 1. That the energy of the strong interaction is most of ordinary mass is standard quantum chromodynamics, not a framework claim; reading it as coherence is the framework’s.

7. At the quark level, beta-minus decay turns a down quark into an up quark by emitting a W⁻ boson, which yields an electron and an electron antineutrino: n → p + e⁻ + ν̄ₑ. Only the weak interaction changes the flavor of quarks and leptons. An element can also be changed by fusion, fission, and alpha processes. The first artificial transmutation, in which alpha particles striking nitrogen knocked out protons and left oxygen behind, was a strong-force reaction. Rutherford, “Collision of α Particles.”

8. Adelberger et al., “Solar Fusion Cross Sections.” The first step of the proton–proton chain, p + p → ²H + e⁺ + νₑ, is a weak interaction: one proton becomes a neutron as the two meet. Light crosses the mean distance from the Sun to the Earth in about 499 seconds.

9. Harnik, Kribs, and Perez, “Universe without Weak Interactions.” Their weakless universe, with other parameters adjusted, still has big-bang nucleosynthesis, galaxies, and long-lived stars that burn by strong and electromagnetic reactions, beginning from extra primordial deuterium. The claim in the text, that this Sun would not light, holds for our universe with the weak force removed and nothing else changed.

10. Sagan, Cosmos.

11. Wu et al., “Experimental Test of Parity Conservation”; Lee and Yang, “Question of Parity Conservation.” The experiment, run with cobalt-60 cooled below 0.01 K at the National Bureau of Standards over the winter of 1956–57, found the electrons emitted preferentially opposite to the direction of the nuclear spin. Lee and Yang shared the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for the prediction; Wu was not included. Strictly, the weak force’s charged-current interactions act only on left-handed particles and right-handed antiparticles.

12. Christenson et al., “Evidence for the 2π Decay”; Sakharov, “Violation of CP Invariance.” CP violation, first observed in neutral kaons in 1964, is one of Sakharov’s three conditions for an excess of matter over antimatter in the early universe. The amount the Standard Model supplies is generally judged far too small to account for the surplus; it is a necessary ingredient, not a complete account.

13. Pauli proposed the particle in an open letter of December 4, 1930, addressed to his “Dear Radioactive Ladies and Gentlemen,” to save the conservation of energy in beta decay. The remark about having done “a terrible thing” by postulating a particle that cannot be detected is second-hand and widely repeated; its original source is uncertain. Enrico Fermi named the neutrino and built the theory of beta decay in 1933–34. Fermi, “Versuch einer Theorie.” Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines detected it in 1956. Cowan et al., “Detection of the Free Neutrino.”

14. Gell-Mann, “Schematic Model”; Zweig, “SU(3) Model.” Both proposed in 1964 that the strongly interacting particles are built from three kinds of more basic constituents; Gell-Mann called them quarks, and Zweig called them aces.

15. Noether, “Invariante Variationsprobleme”; Kosmann-Schwarzbach, Noether Theorems. Noether’s first theorem (1918): every continuous, differentiable symmetry of the action of a physical system corresponds to a conserved quantity. The implication runs from symmetry to conservation; the converse holds only under further conditions. Discrete symmetries such as parity, the mirror symmetry Wu found broken, fall outside the theorem. It is the formal ground for inferring unseen physics from a conserved quantity, the move on which much of this essay’s history turns.

16. The thesis is Journal One’s, and Journal Four gathers the case for it. Johnson, Toward a Theory of Coherent Existence, Journal One; Johnson, Alignment, the Triad, and the Architecture of Shared Mind, “The Argument Assembled.”

17. Johnson, On Gravitating; Johnson, On Magnetizing; Johnson, On Questioning.

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