“All right, then. First of all, remember that I was proposing we think of particles as standing waves. In other words, energy waves spinning and precessing in place at the speed of light to form tiny, three-dimensional balls of energy. So let’s think for a minute about what it would take for one of them to begin moving. To do this, or so it seems to me, some portion of E wave energy would have to be introduced into the spinning energy wave to somehow unbalance the particle to cause its E wave, instead of spinning in place, to begin to sort of corkscrew its way through space in the direction the unbalancing energy would cause it to move.”

“So once again we’ve got helical motion entering into things. But what causes the particle spin to stay unbalanced like that? Wouldn’t the unbalancing energy just sort of spread itself out into the rest of the wave?”

“Yes, actually, it does. But you have to remember, the unbalancing energy only causes the spinning E wave to begin accelerating. You see, the original spinning E wave and this new unbalancing energy are at first not in equilibrium with each other. Now again I’d want to leave it to quantum theorists to explain exactly how it happens, but the end result will have the spinning E wave accelerating until the unbalancing energy is evenly distributed throughout the standing wave. At this time the two energies will be in equilibrium with each other. When this happens the entire particle, the spinning E wave plus the new energy, will have reached its terminal velocity and will stop accelerating. It will still be moving, and in the direction of the applied force, but it will no longer be accelerating.”

“Oh, I get it. By transferring energy to the standing wave, you’re saying you’re doing work on it to get it to move. In other words, its Newtonian mass, and inertia--its Newtonian reluctance to move--is due to the fact that it’s a standing wave which won’t move until some extra, unbalancing, wave energy is introduced.”

“That’s pretty much the way of it. Remember, we sometimes equate energy to work that’s been done. Here this extra energy, which in the Newtonian world we call kinetic energy, is what gets transferred to the particle when we do work on it. The added kinetic energy, then, is the work we did to make the particle move. Further, once it’s moving, it’s going to keep on moving in a straight line at the same speed until, say, it hits something. When this happens, it’s going to lose some, or all, of this excess wave energy to whatever it hits. If all the excess wave energy is transferred out of the particle as it decelerates, the particle will stop moving and become stationary once again.”

“Hold it a minute. I just thought of something. You’ve been talking about what it takes to make an originally stationary particle move. Actually, because of the big bang, there are no stationary particles, right?”

“That’s true. Particles are not absolutely stationary relative to the center of the universe. But relative to all the other particles around them, they are stationary since they and all the nearby particles were born, if you will, with the same kinetic energy. All I’m doing here is ignoring this original kinetic energy to make things easier to explain.”

“I see. OK, then, if you’re right about this idea about particles being standing waves, and about transferring extra wave energy to or from a particle, we now know why a standing wave can have inertia, or mass, and a traveling wave can’t.”

“But that’s not all. If you think about it, we can now explain the Newtonian concept of kinetic energy, and where it comes from. It’s that extra wave energy we’re saying is being transferred into and out of standing wave particles at the quantum level to change their velocities.”

“Yeah, but where does momentum come into this?”

“Going back to the standing wave particle and how by transferring kinetic energy to it we can cause it to accelerate, it stands to reason that the more massive the particle, or the more massive the combination of particles, like an atom, the more kinetic energy, or, again in Newtonian terms, the more work, or force-applied-through-some-distance, will be required to achieve the same terminal velocity. And that’s what we mean when we say that forces don’t cause changes in velocity so much as they cause changes in momentum. Which, remember, Newton called an action.

“I see. So Newton would have said that for the same action, the greater the mass the smaller the terminal velocity.”

“Couldn’t have said it better myself. But there are two broader points to remember here as well. The first one has to do with Einstein’s discovery while working on the theory of special relativity that adding kinetic energy to a system increases its mass. He said later that it was this discovery which led him straight to the idea that inert mass was simply latent energy of some kind. He also said this was the most important discovery to come out of special relativity. What we’ve just done, then, with our hypothesis that matter is composed of standing helical E waves, is provide the physical explanation, which no one has so far been able to do, first, as why particles of matter are still bits and pieces of electromagnetic waves, and, second, how and why, when we apply a Newtonian force to a Newtonian mass, we are actually adding energy to energy. In other words, mass no longer has to be thought of as latent energy of some kind. It is latent energy composed of helically propagating standing waves.

The other broader point to be made here is that if we can accept the revised version of Newton’s laws I’ve proposed here, plus the ideas about helical traveling waves and standing wave particles, then we finally have a very clear and reasonable explanation of the connection between quantum mechanics and Newtonian mechanics. Indeed, if you think about it, since the entire Newtonian universe is composed of standing waves of energy, surely all of Newtonian mechanics can be explained in terms of the interaction of helically propagating standing waves and traveling waves, and equilibrium considerations.”

Yeah, but that’s a lot of ifs.”

“I know. And, to tell the truth, there’s no way you should believe what I’ve been saying here. Actually, though, you really don’t have to. In the first place, like I said, all you have to do is read the first part of Newton’s Principia. That ought to confirm what I’ve been saying about Newton’s laws. As to the rest of it, well, I think in, hopefully, a short time theoretical physicists are going to come around to this way of thinking about the big bang, and quantum mechanics, and so forth. And then I think you’ll see I’m pretty much on the right track.”

“How do you know that? With all due respect sir, I don’t know of anyone in the scientific community who thinks the way you do about these things. What can possibly make you think theoretical physicists, and mathematicians, and whoever else is working on trying to understand the universe, are going to come around to your way of thinking on this? Frankly, sir, how is it you can see these initial conditions, and equilibrium considerations, and things like that, and they can’t.”

“Well, actually, what I did was sort of short-circuit the way things are supposed to be done. I guess the best way to explain what I mean is to compare our attempt to understand the universe to the assembly of a jigsaw puzzle, since both are accomplished with two distinct steps. With the jigsaw puzzle the first step is, as you know, to turn over all the pieces. The second step, then, is to assemble the pieces using the picture on the boxtop for a guide.

With the universe, the first step, that is, in an ideal situation, would be to first uncover all the pieces of scientific knowledge we need to see the universe clearly. The next step would then be to assemble the pieces into a complete understanding of the universe. Of course, we have never had such an ideal situation. We don’t have a boxtop with a picture of the universe on it, and we don’t know when we’ve got all the pieces turned over because we don’t even know how many important pieces of scientific knowledge there are. And that’s led, through the years, to a lot confusion about what the universe really is, how it works, and so forth. And scholars are still in this mode.

But there’s a way around this problem. First of all, you have to realize that the universe is a process. After all, if you think about it, everything in the universe is, at the bottom line, a process. I know we tend to think of the universe as primarily being composed of physical things like planets, stars, rivers, rocks, people, furniture, things like that. But nothing that exists in today’s universe was always thus. And nothing, not us, or the stars, or anything else, will always remain thus. So everything is actually a process. It’s just that some processes proceed faster than others. That being the case, since the universe is entirely composed of processes, each of which serves to convert various forms of energy to other forms of energy, then the universe must itself be an enormous, by our standards anyway, energy conversion process.

Now you, as an engineer, know there are certain truths which apply to all the processes in our universe. One of these is that they exist inside some larger, older reality, which, as I just explained, must itself be a process. Another is that to fully understand any process you have to not only know how it proceeds the way it does, but you have to be able to answer questions like how did it come to exist in the first place, and what’s it doing? In other words, what part does it play in the larger scheme of things? That’s if you really and truly want to understand it.

And you also know that if you can identify all the initial conditions that exist at the beginning of a process, what materials are being used, their properties, the forces involved, and so forth, plus any boundary conditions, by that I mean how the process might interact with its environment as it proceeds, then you can accurately mathematically model, and thereby predict, the process from beginning to end. So we really need those initial conditions in order to understand the universe.”

“Yes, but as an engineer I also know that those initial conditions, the materials and so forth, have to be in place before the process can even begin. If the universe is a process, and I’m still going to have to think about that one for awhile, then how are we going to find out about these initial conditions if we don’t know anything about this larger, older reality within which you say the universe has to exist?”

“Remember what I just said about how scientific knowledge leads to understanding? Well, I sort of reversed the process. If the initial conditions can predict how the process evolves or unfolds, then if we know a lot about how the process is evolving or unfolding, can’t we work backwards and figure out what initial conditions would cause this?”

“I suppose so. But how do you know you’re right?”

“First of all, I don’t know if I’m right at all. But I think I’m right for a couple of reasons. For one thing, I only had to come up with two properties of energy, which is the only material we have to work with, plus the idea of helical wave motion, plus one boundary condition, and, as near as I can tell, the universe would then evolve from its beginning as a point source of energy to its present state. Even better, it turns out that physicists have been close to these two properties with their first and second laws of thermodynamics. And, as for the boundary condition, by that I mean the symmetry-breaking event which converted E waves into particles, it’s basically the same one that physicists say existed anyway. Since I only need such a minimal number of initial conditions, and these fit well with what physicists are already saying about the universe, and these do indeed allow the universe to evolve to its present state, at least as near as I can tell, then that’s why I think I’m probably pretty close to being right with these initial conditions.

Now as to when physicists are going to figure all this out for themselves, you have to keep in mind that they’re aware of this situation and have themselves been working backwards toward these same initial conditions. Stephen Hawking and others have written about how theoretical physicists have been trying to take their mathematical models of the expanding universe back to the beginning of time to find out what caused the universe to begin the way it did. The problem is their models blow up back at the beginning of time because of singularities. Dividing by zero and so forth. That’s where high energy particle accelerators come in. By physically recreating the super high energy conditions that existed at or near the beginning of the universe, they can learn more about the initial conditions that actually existed at the beginning of time.”

“Yes, but Hawking also said that they’re not really concerned about any reality that might or might not have existed before the beginning of the universe. Which you’re saying has to exist before the universe can even begin.”

“That’s true. But only because they’re not thinking about that yet. So all they’re trying to do now is take their models back to time zero. However, I’m certain that once they get their super collider built they’re going to get so much more information about particles their current theories and models can’t account for that somebody’s going to start realizing there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way they’re currently looking at the universe. And when they finally get to that point, somebody’s going to recognize the real importance of the discovery of the big bang. That the universe is a process which exists within a larger, parent reality. And when that happens I’m sure it won’t take them long to start thinking about helical wave propagation, and equilibrium considerations, and then they’ll be off and running.”

“Well, sir, I hope you’re right. And I thank you very much for telling me about all these things. It’s been really interesting. But my head is spinning from what you’ve said so far, so if you don’t mind, I’d like to get back to my reading, and also to think some on what you’ve talked about. Maybe I’ll have some questions later on if it’s all right with you.”

“Sure. No problem. That’s what I meant, though, when I said be careful what you wish for. Because you’re bound to get more than you bargain for when you give an old man a chance to talk about what he’s spent half his life thinking about. But of course you had no way to know that. Actually, you’re the first one I’ve ever talked to about this at such length. And I guess, now that I’m getting close to the end of this project, I was having too good a time talking about it to quit when I should have. So I apologize for laying so much on you.”

“Oh! No need to apologize, sir. No need at all.”

The young man once again opens his book and begins to read. The flight attendants are by this time making their way up the aisle with the beverage cart. The older man, thirsty now, lowers the tray from the back of the seat in front of him. And, even though his wife has her head on a pillow resting against the window with her eyes closed, he quietly lowers her tray as well, knowing she’s awake and will most likely want at least something to drink.