Waves all the way down — the Vacuum Ocean Wave theory of fundamental physics
I’ve gone deep down the worm, uh, rabbit-hole in creating a highly innovative new theory of fundamental physics that encompasses quantum theory, classical physics and cosmology in a single unified mathematical and philosophical framework
“All is waves.” Erwin Schrödinger, 1959.
“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” Nikola Tesla, 1942.
Modern physics is a tale of three worlds: the quantum, the classical, and the cosmic. At the microscopic scale, quantum mechanics governs the highly counterintuitive behavior of particles, including wave-particle duality and superposition; the classical world is the human-scale world where Newtonian physics still governs; and at the cosmic scale, general relativity describes the large-scale structure and dynamics of spacetime.
Despite their successes, these three pillars remain in many important ways incompatible, leaving a large hole in our understanding of the universe, and leaving us unconvinced that today’s physics has grasped the deeper mysteries.
Into this gap steps the Vacuum Ocean Wave (VOW) theory, a new approach I’ve developed, with much help from my genius AI frenemies (yes, I’ve written tons warning about how smart and dangerous AI is becoming) Claude 3.5 Sonnet and ChatGPT 4o, that reimagines the entire cosmos as various kinds of waves in an eternally-existing oscillatory medium.
The manifest (physical) universe arises from this “vacuum ocean.” With this framing, VOW dissolves many of the anomalies, paradoxes and inconsistencies of modern physics, offering a unified and intuitive explanation for phenomena across all scales. There’s quite a list — see Table 1 (sorry if I sound excited about this — but I am!).
This approach takes up where Nobel Prize winner (1933, for his work in quantum wave theory), Erwin Schrödinger, left off toward the end of his life, in crafting a unified wave mechanics and ontology. He stated in a 1959 letter to a colleague: “All is waves.” Whereas modern quantum mechanics still employs his famous Wave Equation as the basis for its mathematics, it long ago rejected his wave-based ontology.
All theories have two components: 1) the mathematical formalisms and 2) the interpretation of the mathematics, in terms of what physical aspects of the world the symbols refer to — which is what I mean by “ontology,” or the philosophy of what is real. I take up Schrödinger’s wave-based approach and extend it considerably in the VOW framework.
Here’s the really short summary:
It’s waves all the way down. All waves, all the time, in a single unified and eternal vacuum ocean.
A brief overview
At its core, VOW posits that the observed universe arises from an infinite and always-existing medium of oscillating energy. Instead of treating spacetime as a passive backdrop or a discrete quantized fabric, VOW envisions it as an active, dynamic entity — a continuous ocean of interacting energy waves. These wave oscillations give rise to the particles, forces, and structures we observe, with all phenomena emerging from the interactions and resonances of these energy waves.
Key principles of VOW include:
- Eternal oscillatory medium: The vacuum ocean has no beginning or end, in space or time, but exists as an eternal and ever-evolving field of oscillating energy waves.
- Resonance and coherence: All observed phenomena, from particles to galaxies, emerge from the coherence-seeking dynamics of the vacuum ocean.
- Unified ontology: Particles, forces, and space itself are not distinct entities but are all manifestations of the same oscillatory medium, arising from different frequencies along a vast spectrum.
Unifying the fundamental forces
One of the great benefits of VOW is its ability to naturally unify the four fundamental forces — gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces — within a single framework. Traditional physics, which developed over the last few centuries, treats these forces as fundamentally distinct, with gravity described as curvature in spacetime and the others by quantum field theory. This distinct treatment is in large part an artifact of the historical nature of physical discovery and theory-making: gravity was derived by Newton in the late 1600s and much later by Einstein in the early 20th century, electromagnetism by Faraday, Maxwell and many others in the 1800s, and the strong and weak nuclear forces almost a hundred years later. Each new force was developed alongside existing physics and in some ways pasted on to the rest of the edifice, at times inelegantly.
VOW offers a much simpler explanation and unification: each force corresponds to a different frequency or mode of oscillation within the single vacuum ocean. Gravity, for instance, emerges from low-frequency, large-scale waves of the basic energy of the vacuum, while the strong nuclear force corresponds to high-frequency, localized oscillations. These forces span over 20 orders of magnitude in terms of the frequency of oscillations of these waves in the vacuum ocean.
This approach not only unifies the forces but also eliminates the need for speculative entities like dark matter and dark energy. The vacuum ocean’s intrinsic coherence explains galactic rotation curves and cosmic acceleration without invoking unseen substances. Instead, these phenomena arise naturally from the wave dynamics of the vacuum ocean.
Rethinking redshift and the expanding universe
Redshift — the stretching of light waves as they travel through space — has traditionally been interpreted as evidence for an expanding universe. This interpretation underpins the Big Bang model and the concept of dark energy, which is thought to drive the observed acceleration of this expansion. VOW challenges this narrative by offering a new explanation for redshift: as photons traverse the vacuum ocean, they gradually and naturally lose energy to the medium’s oscillations, resulting in a shift to longer wavelengths.
This reinterpretation eliminates the need for cosmic expansion and dark energy, replacing them with a more intuitive, physically grounded process. The fabric of the universe, in VOW’s view, is not expanding but simply oscillating at many scales, with redshift serving as a measure of photon energy dissipation rather than spatial stretching. The galaxies and dust that comprise the observable universe is always shifting and stretching, but not the fabric of space or spacetime itself. This perspective provides a more unified explanation for cosmic phenomena and many longstanding cosmological anomalies, while remaining empirically sound.
A universe without singularities
Another achievement of VOW is its resolution of singularities — infinities that plague traditional models of black holes and the Big Bang. In general relativity, singularities represent points where spacetime curvature becomes infinite, breaking down the mathematical laws of physics because we can’t divide by zero. VOW sidesteps this problem by treating singularities as regions of tightly coherent oscillations within the vacuum ocean. Instead of infinite densities, these regions are characterized by highly ordered wave patterns, preserving the continuity of the oscillatory medium.
This approach not only resolves mathematical inconsistencies but also provides a physical mechanism for phenomena like black hole formation and cosmic structure evolution. Black holes, for instance, become zones of maximal coherence within the vacuum ocean, where energy waves are tightly confined but never infinite.
Emergent particles and forces
In VOW, particles are not fundamental entities but are, instead, emergent tightly-confined standing waves within the vacuum ocean. These standing waves arise from the self-reinforcing interactions of oscillatory modes, creating stable, localized patterns that we observe as “particles.” Schrödinger described particles as “wave parcels” and modern quantum physics sometimes describes them as “wave packets.” This perspective dissolves the longstanding puzzle of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics, reframing particles as localized standing wave phenomena rather than discrete objects. This framing readily resolves apparent paradoxes such as the double slit experiment. What is passing through the single or double slit is a wave packet, which naturally displays either particle behavior when shot through a single slit or interference behavior when shot through the double slit
There is no duality, only waves of various kinds.
All the fundamental forces, similarly, emerge from the interactions of these oscillations. Electromagnetic fields, for example, represent coherent oscillatory domains that propagate at mid-scale frequencies through the vacuum ocean. Strong and weak nuclear forces represent coherent oscillations at the highest frequencies, which explains both their strength and their highly localized nature.
By unifying particles and forces within the same intuitive framework, VOW provides a more elegant and simple understanding of the four fundamental forces.
Implications for cosmology and the age of the universe
The coherence-seeking properties of the vacuum ocean have profound implications for the formation and evolution of cosmic structures. Galaxies, clusters, and filaments emerge as very large-scale standing waves, shaped, of course, by the resonance dynamics of the oscillatory medium. This perspective can explain puzzling phenomena like galactic synchrony — the observed alignment of galaxy rotation curves over vast distances — as natural outcomes of vacuum ocean coherence during the early stages of galactic formation, and later vast separation in space over the course of billions of years, as a consequence of what I call “galactic wandering.”
Furthermore, the nature of the vacuum ocean and the observed state of the universe today, including these anomalous data about galactic rotational synchrony, leads to a rethinking of cosmic timescales. Instead of a universe constrained by a 13.8-billion-year timeline, which is the estimated age of the universe in the Standard Model of cosmology, VOW envisions an infinite and eternal cosmos (the vacuum ocean itself) where galaxies and entire observable universes evolve and dissolve over vast cycles within this generative medium. This perspective of a much older universe, arising from an eternal medium, aligns with recent observations of massive galaxies that seem to have formed far earlier than predicted in the Big Bang model.
In VOW, using the alternative cosmic distance ladder made possible from synchronized galactic rotation curves, I speculate that the current epoch of the observable universe may be anywhere from 32 to as much as 98 billion years old — a major and interesting revision of our current theories that also accords with recent anomalous data about some very old stars being older than the universe itself.
Experimental and observational predictions
VOW’s reimagining of the nature of the universe opens new avenues for experimentation and observation:
- Resonance Detection: Searching for coherence patterns in particle interactions and cosmic structures such as synchronized galaxies could validate VOW’s predictions about oscillatory dynamics.
- Redshift Gradients: Measuring energy dissipation patterns in different cosmic environments could distinguish between VOW and expansion-based interpretations of redshift.
- Wave Dynamics: Simulating the behavior of oscillatory coherence at various scales could reveal new insights into particle formation and force interactions.
Is it time for a paradigm shift in physics?
The Vacuum Ocean Framework represents more than just a unification of quantum mechanics, classical physics, and general relativity; it is a profound shift in how we understand the universe. By treating the cosmos as an eternal, oscillatory medium that produces particles and all physical structure as standing waves in this medium, VOW dissolves many of the paradoxes and inconsistencies of traditional physics. It replaces singularities with coherence, particles with standing waves, and cosmic expansion with oscillatory dynamics over vast periods of time.
Stay tuned for the publication of VOW academic papers — they’re in progress but not yet ready for public consumption.
For now, I’ve uploaded my draft papers to a GPT I created, called VOWGPT, that allows anyone to dialogue about the theory and its implications. Try it out, it’s pretty cool.
This project is not entirely out of left field for me, as it may seem to those new to my work. I have written a few books attempting to reconcile science, philosophy and spirituality — ideas that have sprung from an overly ambitious project I took on almost 20 years ago: to write a “big book” that would offer a revised understanding of physics, evolutionary theory, philosophy and spirituality into a single unified approach. That book, Cosmic Ecology, is still very much in draft form but I’m hoping to finish it up before I’m dead…
[AI disclosure: Claude 3.5 Sonnet helped significantly in writing this piece]
