Sambodhi 2009 Vol 32

Author(s): J B Shah, K M patel
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 17

Vol. XXXII, 2009
Major progress linking modern science and...
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theory led to quantum field theory and almost infinitesimally small wave-particle energy packets as fluctuations of unbounded energy fields. Four underlying quantum fields have been identified, namely the electroinagnetic, weak and strong nuclear fields, and gravitation. Research in theoretical and experimental particle physics is attempting to unify these four fields into a single source of everything in nature—unified field theory. The electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear forces have been unified theoretically in grand unified theory, but unifying these three forces with gravitation has been a momentous challenge (1).
One important direction in recent research toward unification of the four fundamental forces integrates super-symmetry and string theory. Strings are theorized to be infinitesimally small filaments, sometimes also called branes (membranes). The vibrations or fluctuations of these abstract geometric objects are theorized to generate all the objects in our objective four-dimensional world of ordinary waking experience. Using mathematics from the 1940s, (structure, functers, categoricalness, etc.) along with set theory, string theorists are trying to model how from these fundamental geometric objects arise all the particles and forces found in nature. However, there is considerable controversy in contemporary quantum physics whether super-symmetry and strings and branes actually occur in nature, and whether they are the appropriate concepts for modeling nature at the incredibly tiny time and distance scale hypothesized to be the limit of space and time—the Planck scale of 10-33 cm (1). If these abstract geometric objects (strings and branes) are in some way real, they would relate to fundamental curvatures of the space-time geometry itself beyond matter. We are now at the point in the modern scientific investigation of nature that the search for the essence of matter has gone beyond all forms of matter to a theorized non-material basis of material creation. Modern physics is now grappling with the enigma that "matter does not have a material basis (1, p. X).” Even further, new theories are developing that propose ontologically real, non-local, non-material levels of nature underlying quantized particle-force fields—a sub-quantum reality.
For example, loop quantum gravity theory posits that quantized particleforce fields are underlain by an even more abstract, non-material, quantized information space (qubits) from which our familiar ordinary space-time is generated (14). Other theories propose an abstract, non-material field underlying all matter that is a field of non-local mental space. This subtle wave field, sometimes called