Science tests theories by comparing what they predict with what actually happens. In this case, one theory predicts that at the highest frequency, light collides to create matter, while the other claims that light never ever collides:
“Two photons cannot ever collide. In fact light is quantized only when interacting with matter.” Wikipedia, 2019.
In the standard model, light doesn’t collide because photons are bosons that share quantum states. In a processing model, photons are the core network process so at a two-point wavelength they will overload the network, i.e. collide. The evidence supporting that light can collide in space to produce matter includes:
1. Confined photons have mass. A free photon is massless but in a hypothetical 100% reflecting mirror box, it has mass because as the box accelerates, unequal photon pressure on its walls creates inertia (van der Mark & t’Hooft, 2011). By this logic, photons confined at a point, in a standing quantum wave, will have mass.
2. Einstein’s equation. Einstein’s equation works both ways, so if mass can turn into energy in nuclear bombs, photon energy can become mass, as the Breit-Wheeler process allows.
3. Particle accelerator collisions create new matter. Protons that collide and stay intact produce new matter that didn’t exist before based on the collision energy, so high-energy photons could do the same.
4. Pair production. High-frequency light near a nucleus gives electrons and positrons that annihilate back into space.
5. Light collides. When high-energy photons at the Stanford Linear Accelerator hit an electron beam to accelerate it at almost the speed of light, some electrons knocked a photon back with enough energy to hit the photon behind it, giving matter pairs that a magnetic field pulled apart to detect (Burke et al., 1997).
That extreme light colliding in a vacuum can give matter is a plausible prediction that can be tested by experiment. And if pure light alone can create matter, the boson-fermion divide of the standard model falls, as bosons can become fermions. The future of physics then lies in colliding light not matter, using light colliders not particle colliders.
The standard model expected particle collisions to unlock the secrets of the universe but they didn’t. Instead of permanent particles, accelerators found only transient flashes, and in nature what doesn’t survive isn’t the future. Hence, these ephemeral flashes are just evolutionary dead-ends that failed to lead anywhere because they weren’t stable.
That everything came from matter is just a theory, and scientists who don’t question their theories are priests. Light is the simplest thing, so that everything came from light is more likely. This theory is testable, so let the facts decide whether it is right or wrong.