RING THEORY

BY William Hamilton

From Strings to Rings:

William Thompson (aka Lord Kelvin) in 1867 imagined a small solid entity that could not be broken and had the permanence which was a striking property of the atom. Thompson was inspired by a paper written by Heinrich Helmholtz on vortices. Helmholtz proposed that ring-like vortices could form in an ideal fluid and form some interesting combinations. It gave Thompson the idea that atoms might somehow be vortices in the ether.

It is fascinating to note that the most exciting theory of fundamental particles at the present time, string theory, has a definite resemblance to Thomson's vortex atoms. One of the basic entities is the closed string, a little loop, which has fields flowing around it reminiscent of the swirl of ethereal fluid in Thomson's atom. And it's a very beautiful theory - Kirchhoff would have been enthusiastic!¹

There are 2D string theories that incorporate the mechanics of a vortex as two dimensions in a loop which admits to a loop cross-section that has a vortex motion.

SOLITONS:

A soliton is a self-reinforcing solitary wave caused by nonlinear effects in the medium.

It is not easy to define precisely what a soliton is. Drazin and Johnson (1989) describe solitons as solutions of nonlinear differential equations which

1. represent waves of permanent form;

2. are localised, so that they decay or approach a constant at infinity;

3. can interact strongly with other solitons, but they emerge from the collision unchanged apart from a phase shift.

Could photons be solitons? A photon could be of any wavelength from extremely low frequency waves to high frequency gamma waves, but also behave as if they were bullets with those of shorter wavelength having greater energy and more impact than those of long wavelength. A soliton could be a single rolling vortex.

Are particles waves?

Could we just simplify the dual aspect of photons, electrons, neutrons, protons, and other …ons by reducing them all to waves? I think so, but not as simply as some suggest. If we consider a soliton in the form of a traveling rotating tube of extremely small size, perhaps on the order of planck length in diameter, then the formation of electrons and positrons may be no more than photonic rings, ring vortices that self-assemble into composite structures such as neutrons and protons which are stable and have extremely long lifetimes.

What about higher dimensions?

The higher dimensions that string theorists may be so fond of may exist as fractal dimensions. The existence of these higher dimensions is still in question and still beyond experimental verification. The universe may be multidimensional, not only in space dimensions, but time dimensions. This universe may be one of a Pluralverse.

Ref:

1. http://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/252/more_atoms.html