Nereid said:
Hmm, maybe I've misunderstood ... in that there are four 'fundamental' forces, and a veritable 'zoo' of 'elementary' particles, doesn't the universe 'obey a complex set of rules', at the quantum level, yet quite clearly it remains 'isotropic and homogeneous'? Am I missing something?
The observed variety of particles may arise from a very simple set of rules. The non-detection of supersymmetric particles is a plus.
Gravitation (one of the four "fundamental" forces) may in fact not be fundamental. While it is the dominant force at long distances in our universe, it may in fact be an emergent force, resulting from the interaction of matter with the polarized field of the quantum vacuum. Mach believed that inertia arises from the acceleration of matter in reference to a universal background field. Sakharov believed that gravitational attraction and inertia arise from the interaction of matter with the quantum vacuum. Neither proposed a mechanism to explain these behaviors, to my knowledge. I believe that Sakharov got closer to the truth, and that mass, inertia, and gravitation are conferred upon matter by its interaction with the LOCAL quantum vacuum field.
Nereid said:
There is, indeed, a 'very small imbalance' - the CP violation - and it
does result in a 'huge (and very obvious) anisotrophy' ... very little matter, cf antimatter
That is a very fortunate anisotropy, indeed.
Regarding imbalances and unseen anisotropies: if the gravitational equivalence of the energy of the quantum vacuum is sufficient to crush the universe to a diameter smaller (MUCH smaller actually) than the orbit of our Moon, and the repulsive pressure of the quantum vacuum is 120 OOM too strong to be responsible for the CC, this suggests (screams, in fact) that for these forces to remain in exquisite balance for the life of the universe, both forces must arise from the same field. Regardless of the density at which the virtual particle pairs of the vacuum can be packed by their interaction with mass, they will always come to an equilibrium state in which the Pauli exclusion principle supplies an equivalent repulsive pressure. If these two forces did not arise from the same field, any tiny imbalance in field density would have caused the universe to collapse or explode long ago.
Perhaps less obvious but just as important observationally: If the Higgs field conveys mass to matter and the gravitational field mediates the attraction between masses, these fields must also be remarkably concordant (to the nth degree!), else we would not observe galaxies and clusters behaving in relatively predictable ways all over the observable universe. This is proof that mass and gravitational attraction must arise from the same field.
These remarkable "coincidences" linking mass, gravitational attraction, and Fermionic repulsion (CC) are critical motivations for my ZPE model of gravitation. If these effects do not all arise from the same field, I see no way to derive a stable isotropic universe. Einstein's CC was not a blunder - it is absolutely essential for the formulation of a stable universe. The "blunder" was that he plugged it into GR without accounting for its origin or deriving a mechanism by which it could come to an equilibrium state with gravitation. Of course, he did not have the benefit of decades of work in quantum theory by which he might have figured this out. I am presuming of course that were he alive today, he might have reconciled himself with the notion that quantum theory is telling us important things about the nature of the universe.
Nereid said:
Yet this 'anisotrophy' was only observed in the last century; who's to say that other 'anisotropies' - perhaps more subtle, but no less 'huge' - will become glaringly obvious in the next century?
I would like to take the "long view" on this matter, but as I will likely not survive much beyond the first quarter of the next century, I am a bit impatient. I think we already have some keys to the big puzzles in cosmology. We have to be willing to question our assumptions before they can be applied. Here is a link to a nice series of lectures in streaming video that have been given at Princeton. Roger Penrose gave a series of three lectures in October 2003 on "Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe" If you haven't watched them, you'll be interested in his "take" on modern physics.
http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/lectures/
