THE FLUCTUON MODEL OF FORCE, LIFE, AND COMPUTATION - A CONSTRUCTIVE ANALYSIS

Fluctuons are self-perpetrating chains of particle-antiparticle excitations that originate as uncertainty fluctuations of unmanifest vacuum fermions. Such chains may originate by transfer of momentum to an absorbing particle, in which case they must propagate until they give up momentum to a second particle. In this form, they share identity conditions with virtual bosons. Alternatively, in trapped form, they may act as transient absorbers. It is possible to model a variety of physical phenomena with fluctuons: electromagnetism, the fine structure constant, gravity, and various particle properties, The relationship between the distribution of manifest and unmanifest particles evolves until it satisfies self-consistency conditions. The model implicates within itself a nonlinear (adaptive) dynamics that corrects deviations from self-consistency. Wave function collapse, hence irreversibility, is an inherent feature since the wave function of the vacuum interacts recursively with the manifest force interactions to which it gives rise. Collapse and irreversibility would be pronounced only in a far from equilibrium (early) universe or in the neighborhood of large masses; these phenomena are of negligible importance on the scale of the physics laboratory. The thesis proposed in this paper is that the highly sensitive transduction-amplification cascades of biological organisms unmask this hidden irreversibility, and that the real-time functional capabilities of organisms are due to this unmasking. The physical dynamics of biological organisms are broader than those captured in the standard time evolution equations and homomorphic to the broader dynamics operative in the early universe.