Hello fellow intrepid investigators of reality! 

Alain Rifat has sent us something he wrote on matter. Perhaps it will be helpful in our understanding of what Higgins is up to with radioactivity. It is quite interesting, especially in the final paragraph where he says, 

“Had it not been for an electric field, your hand would spookily mix with the stone.”

This is reposted from Alain’s blog, simulismblog.wordpress.com, with Alain’s permission.

INTRODUCTION TO SIMULISM: one step at a time

WHAT IS MATTER?
Simulism suggests that what we perceive as reality is
not real, that it is virtual! How could such an insane idea
about our perception of the universe exist?
You’re walking along a beach. It’s covered with pebbles.
One catches your eyes by its shape and color. You hold
it in your hand. It is clearly real! You feel its weight in the
palm of your hand. Your fingers discover its
smoothness. Without trying such a stupid experiment
you know that it could badly hurt you if you let it fall on
your feet! Clearly you are relating with an object that is
real, with its nature: a limestone, and its properties:
length, color, shape that define its individuality. It isn’t a
hallucination because your friend sees exactly the same
object you’re looking at; you both describe the same
properties of this nice pebble. Its nature reflects its composition – atoms and molecules
as science has described for a little more than a century – and what attracted you relates to its history, the erosion at the origin of its shape, its length, its smoothness…
How could the weight you feel be virtual? What is the
nature of matter that weighs in my hand?
“Whatever matter is, it isn’t made of matter.”
It’s a physicist who said that! A superb quote that shows
instantly the difference between what we perceive and
what is in reality!

First it should be remembered that science cannot
answer this question. Science describes properties and
relations, not the nature of things! The latter is
questioned by philosophers not scientists. When
scientists interpret their results, they have finished
experimenting and making scientific observations and
begin an approach that is close to philosophy.
The question becomes: what are the properties of
matter? The most important one seems to be its mass.
Mass is not weight! Weight is related to gravity fields
and changes with their strength while mass isn’t. An
object is lighter on the Moon than on Earth and heavier
on Jupiter. Mass is inertia at its core. To move a mass
you’ll have to use energy even in the absence of a
gravity field. Mass is related to the reaction against a
modification of movement you try to inflict to something.
So is mass a universal, stable, real property of an
object? The answer is no!

In the beginning of the last century Einstein described
how mass is energy in a very condensed form. He also
showed that the mass of an object increases when its
energy content increases. Mass isn’t a definitively stable
and intrinsic property of matter, just a weird expression
of energy. Moreover, the mass of the particles will
change whether the particles that constitute an atom are
linked by atomic forces or not… That’s why plutonium
releases an enormous quantity of energy when its
atoms break in a nuclear bomb, albeit the sum of
particles remains the same as before the atomic
reaction.

If matter is a form of energy we are led to ask what is
energy?
No one really knows! « It is important to realize that in
physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy
is. » said a famous physicist in 1963. Although science
can describe properties but not find the nature of things,
physicists must conceive what they are working on; so
how did they conceive energy? The answer is fields.
To explain how some objects could attract others at a
distance, physicists first imagined that space was full of
extremely small and invisible particles that could
transmit a force, like tiny gears turning and interacting;
they couldn’t imagine that energy could be transmitted
without a material support. But as nobody was able to
find an adequate material mechanism, physics imagined
that forces could be emitted and perceived by specific
objects in specific conditions across space, without any
material intermediate.

An energy field is a region of space that expresses
peculiar properties. One can draw field lines that link
space areas with equivalent values of its peculiar
properties. And these attributes express themselves on
specific objects sensitive to this particular energy field. A
magnet would modify the properties of space and an
object sensitive to magnetism would feel this
modification and show a behavior in accordance with it.
An electron would do the same but with a different sort
of field: electric instead of magnetic.
One can illustrate how a magnetic field modifies space
with a ferrofluid: a sort of liquid magnet made with
nanoparticles of magnetite suspended in oil. Please
have a look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=kmKMIBvdm9M
A ferrofluid is a liquid magnet useful to visualise how an
energy field shapes space. The video shows clearly that
a magnet, somewhere in space, gives it the power to
attract objects sensitive to magnetism. If a dog crosses
the magnetic field of a powerful MRI it will feel nothing at
all; space would be perceived as usual. But if the dog
wears an iron collar it could be hanged to death, stuck
on the super-magnet of the instrument! The space
around the MRI is peculiar, it seems informed on the
properties it can show if, and only if, an object sensitive
to magnetism comes in its vicinity. The dog without a
collar doesn’t trigger a reaction from the field; the
magnetic field won’t be manifested. But if the dog wears
an iron collar the field would manifest itself and trigger a
reaction: the movement of the dog’s collar. The space
the naked dog crosses is full of unmanifested energy
that doesn’t interact with it. The space is empty. The
magnetic energy has no attribute in the unmanifested
state; it doesn’t exist in the world made of objects with
attributes, in what we call reality. It’s virtual and
becomes real, manifested, only when something that
can interact with it crosses its field.There is a powerful
energy field that informs the space around it but remains
virtual until the conditions for it to become manifested
are met.

With this description of energy fields, space becomes a
set of informations in a way, since the energy field
describes what would be the behavior of an object in it.
And the behavior of the object which is reactive to the
field can be seen as another set of informations.
Information becomes the foundation of energy and
energy is the foundation of matter, of the objects we
think are real. And information is the foundation of any
virtual universe, of course. A universe made of
information seems therefore more compatible with the
virtual universe Simulism describes, than with a
materialistic universe made of real and independent
objects.

But aren’t atomic particles real objects?
All along the 20th century physicists constructed an
interpretation of their discoveries based on numerous
particles interacting in specific ways. Each is determined
by the kind of energy they interact with and the way they
do so. In quantum physics all particles have field
counterparts. The universe is thought to be full of fields
that can express localized excitations as particles. An
electron is a very concentrated vibration of the
universe’s electric field; a proton is a very concentrated
vibration of the proton field and so on… What we
perceive as independent objects would be vibrations of
specific overlapping fields in a localized part of space.
And the fields by themselves are not localized but
distributed everywhere.

If the universe is made of fields, what about the mass?
Physics postulated that mass was the result of an
interaction between specific particles. Some decades
after this model was published, this was confirmed in
2012 with the discovery of the Higgs boson.The intrinsic
mass of a particle is not seen as an intrinsic property of
a particle but comes from its interaction with a field. In
this case, the Higgs field which generates the Higgs
boson. In other words, the mass of a particle is the
result of an interaction with another particle and an
interaction can’t be understood as an object, but as an
exchange of information. If two billiard balls interact one
doesn’t create an object but a behavior which is the
expression of an exchange of information. Therefore the
mass of an object is more elusive than what we
perceive. We tend to understand mass as the proof of
matter being the foundation of reality. Again, reality
seems more related to information than to matter as we
perceive it. And if the universe is made of information
then Simulism seems a better paradigm to understand it
than realistic materialism.

Your perception of the pebble’s weight becomes less
definitive in your understanding of reality… but what
about your perception of its smoothness, of its shape
and individuality? What really happens on the fringes of
your hand and the stone it holds that separates you from
it, that gives you the certainty that you hold a real object
in your palm?

Physicists were astonished when they discovered that
atoms are essentially full of… emptiness! 99,95% of
their mass is restricted to an infinitesimal space in their
center: the nucleus. What is left are particles that vibrate
very far from the center. If by magic, an atom could grow
and become visible to the naked eye, its mass would be
concentrated in a nucleus the size of a pinhead in the
center of a football stadium. Its diameter, determined by
its peripheral electrons, would be defined by the outer
terrace. And between the pinhead and the outer
terrace… emptiness! And on the outer terrace nearly no
mass, essentially electric fields. Your own peripheral
electrons are repulsed from the stone’s ones; you think
you touch the stone when in reality it is impossible
because of the very powerful repulsion of the two
electric fields.

Your perception of a hard object seems more realistic
than it should be since it feels very hard and real albeit
it’s the consequence of repulsion between very elusive
parts! Had it not been for an electric field, your hand
would spookily mix with the stone because of the
emptiness of both! Again, what seems so real to you is
actually the interactions between elusive, weird and
spooky energy fields, more so than interaction with what
we would think of real materialistic objects! Once more,
Simulism seems to gain interest when we think about
the universe as science discovers it, instead of how our
senses perceive it. Our senses have evolved to keep us
alive in the best possible way, not to let us perceive our
universe’s deep nature directly in the most
comprehensible and complete way.