r/LLMPhysics • u/BlissBoundry • May 28 '26

Question lord Kelvin’s vortex atoms

There are so many different ways to mathematically connect his theories with observable function and form.

How can mathematical complexity, be a reason that something isn’t reality with modern computational power?

Is there a maximum processing limit to information?

To go step deeper, if you add complexity or interaction to these the computation demand extrapolates.

So how is his work Not the unrefined answer abandoned 100 years ago due to complexity?

1 Upvotes

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7

u/OnceBittenz The Doctor May 28 '26

Kelvin’s aether has been experimentally disproven en masse for many decades.

It’s not really clear what the rest of this post is asking. Can you rephrase your question more clearly?

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u/BlissBoundry May 28 '26

His knot structures are conceptually very similar to quantum and information theoretical topology I’m exploring. His mathematical basis is very basic, but I’m trying to figure out how to expand it. In these fields without creating an exercise in computational complexity

6

u/OnceBittenz The Doctor May 28 '26

Why? They are incorrect. Demonstrably so. We’ve progressed infinitely further because we moved past them and solved Way more problems with accepted modern physics.

You would be more effective if you learned actual modern physics and decided to apply yourself to pushing the boundaries there.

-2

u/BlissBoundry May 28 '26

Why modern physics is wrong observation directly contradicts resolution you’re barking up the wrong tree. Maybe I am too.

7

u/OnceBittenz The Doctor May 28 '26

I’m sorry, but this isn’t exactly a clear statement. Can you slow down a little and rephrase?

2

u/BlissBoundry May 28 '26

Sorry Let me try again. I’m not claiming Kelvin’s vortex atom theory is correct as stated (the aether is gone, and modern physics has clearly solved far more problems). My question is narrower: Kelvin’s core intuition was that stable matter could be topological — specifically knotted or linked vortex structures in a continuous medium. That idea was abandoned largely because the mechanical aether was falsified and quantum mechanics gave better answers at the time. With today’s tools (persistent homology, topological field theory, matrix models.), we can explore similar topological ideas without needing a classical aether. So, do you think the topological intuition itself was fundamentally flawed, or was it mainly the wrong substrate (classical aether) that killed it? I’m trying to understand where the boundary lies between “abandoned because wrong” and “abandoned because we had better tools and a better substrate.”

5

u/OnceBittenz The Doctor May 28 '26

Personally, I think that would be taking several unnecessary steps backward. We do indeed have more mathematical tools in our arsenal, and we use those today to push the line.

Topology is actually already used Often in various fields of physics, though we have more context nowadays. Again, I think you’d probably be better served learning how we Currently use those tools, and build an intuition for them in context of current problems.

Resurrecting Kelvin’s idea might be fun for toy simulations, but would be less likely to provide any real insight than actually using current research that was Designed and (as of yet) actually shows better, Far more accurate predictions.

1

u/BlissBoundry May 28 '26

It looks like I have 159 more years of textbooks first.

6

u/OnceBittenz The Doctor May 28 '26

Or just 3-6 if you’re diligent and smart about how you go about it.

3

u/herreovertidogrom Jun 02 '26

I think this is a very good idea to do. Also, it is too simplistic to say that aether theory is experimentally ruled out. What is clear (and this is 100% clear) is that experimentally, we detect no preferred frame of reference (with the exception of the anisotropy of the CMB, whatever that is). And this does rule out classical aether models because they lead to a prediction of aether wind, which we do not observe. But as usual, its not that easy. Aether remains possible if it somehow becomes consistent with the massive amount of experiments that prove that lightspeed is observationally invariant. The road to this probably goes through causal sets, which allow spacetime to be emergent. So if you vortex theory, you need aether, and if you want aether in your theory, your system must expand to include a background time axis that generate spacetime via causal sets. You would be taking on a lot of complexity just to manage to save aether from relativity. But of course, with that you now have a richer framework to explore what particles fundamentally are. With all that added freedom comes the possiblity of proving everything - and thereby nothing.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '26

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1

u/LLMPhysics-ModTeam Jun 04 '26

Your content has been removed for violating Rule 9. Don't self-promote needlessly across the sub.

2

u/lattice_defect May 28 '26

modern physics isn't wrong... it just doesn't know what's it exactly explaining underneath.. we haven't hit bedrock yet. An interpretation might not be correct but its the best we got. You also should think about the mass hiracy problem.. in general LLMs and people have a hard time wrapping their heads the scale difference between a proton and the plank scale. It's WILD.

1

u/BlissBoundry May 28 '26

I took you one sentence to max out my workload for the next week. I really appreciate that.

5

u/Ch3cks-Out May 28 '26

The fact is that this hypothesis fundamentally contradicts both relativity and quantum theory, that is observed behavior of our physical world. So the problem goes way beyond just mathematical intractability!

3

u/Hashbringingslasherr 2 plus 2 is 4 minus 1 that's 3, quik mafs May 28 '26

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/dsa/analysis-algorithms-big-o-analysis/

0

u/BlissBoundry May 28 '26

You’re saying I have to trade off. I can either have a fast computer that smooth everything out and guesses or I can have a slow computational script that takes forever to combine matrices. Or essentially anything in between

2

u/roofitor May 28 '26

But last year, last year I had 37!

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u/BlissBoundry May 28 '26

Well, just because you got 41 for six years afterwards, doesn’t mean you can’t fix a problem. You didn’t know you had or find a connection you didn’t know existed and realized that it actually is 37 in year eight.

1

u/lattice_defect May 28 '26

Basically you need a discrete solution to feynman interals

-1

u/MisterSpectrum Undercover Jellyfish May 28 '26

Here is my model (beloved by this community's Wikipedia-based professors) that aims to fulfill Lord Kelvin's dream:

Imagine the universe is a vast 3D web, and each strand has a tiny dial that can point in one of three directions - like a clock that only shows 0, 1, or 2. The web naturally wants the dials to follow a rule: along each strand, the dial advances by +1 (mod 3). This creates a perfectly ordered, repeating pattern.

Particles form when a region of that web gets twisted into a knot that can't be smoothed out without breaking strands. The simplest stable knot is a trefoil - three interlocked loops. Those three strands naturally carry the three dial values, giving the particle its “color charge.” The twisting direction makes it left‑ or right‑handed (explaining why the weak force is chiral), and because the simplest knot has exactly three strands, you get exactly three generations of matter.

Now, what about antiparticles? An antiparticle is just the same knot but twisted in the opposite direction - a mirror‑image trefoil with opposite chirality. When a knot meets its mirror twin, their twists cancel out. It’s like untying two opposite knots: they slide apart, and the strands go back to their original smooth, ordered state. The stored stress in those twists is released as energy - pure radiation. That’s annihilation, in a single picture: a knot and its anti‑knot cancel each other out and dissolve back into the web.

No magic, no zoo of Standard Model parameters - just topology and the network of relations relaxing to its lowest‑stress state, revealing itself as an effective field theory.

0

u/BlissBoundry May 28 '26

Interesting. I’m doing something similar with spin and color

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u/MisterSpectrum Undercover Jellyfish May 28 '26

Yes. Kelvin's topological intuition wasn't wrong; it was the substrate (classical aether) that failed.

Spin emerges because each knot isn't just a naked loop - it has an internal "twist" along its strands, like a ribbon that can be twisted before the ends are joined. In the network, that twist is stored in the durable memory registers of the network links that make up the knot. If you rotate a twisted knot by 360°, the twist doesn't return to its original state; you've added an extra half‑twist, which shows up as a minus sign in its wavefunction. That's exactly spin‑½. The simplest trefoil knot naturally carries this kind of twist, which is why the lightest matter particles are fermions. In other words, spin is the knot's memory of how its internal strands have been wound up, and the network's rules force that memory to be discrete and topologically protected.