Fundamental Physics in Universal Space-Time

Abstract

Universal space-time is a natural candidate for the ‘bare’ arena of the fundamental forces, being the maximal 4-dimensional manifold having physically indicated properties of causality and symmetry. It is locally conformal to Minkowski space, and globally conformal to the Einstein Universe E~R¹хS³. The Einstein energy exceeds that in the canonically imbedded Minkowski space, and the difference has been proposed by the chronometric theory to represent the redshift. Although this eliminates adjustable cosmological parameters, the directly observable implications of this proposal have been statistically quite consistent with direct observations in objective samples of redshifted sources. These developments represent a mathematical specification of proposals by Mach, Einstein, Minkowski, and Hubble and Tolman. They suggest that the fundamental forces of Nature are conformally invariant, but that the state of the Universe breaks the symmetry down to the Einstein isometry group. This provides an alternative to the Higgs mechanism, and otherwise has implications for particle physics, including the elimination of ultraviolet divergences in representative nonlinear quantum fields, the formulation of a unified invariant interaction Lagrangian, assignments of observed elementary particles to irreducible unitary positive-energy representations of the conformal group, and the correlation of the S-matrix with the action in E of the generator of the infinite cyclic center of the simply-connected form of the conformal group.