Science tests theories by comparing their predictions with physical outcomes. In this case, one theory predicts that high-frequency light will collide to create matter, while the other predicts that light never collides. In the standard model, matter collides but light doesn’t because photons are bosons that share quantum states, so:
“Two photons cannot ever collide. In fact light is quantized only when interacting with matter.” Wikipedia 2019.
However, if all photons are the basic network process, at a two Planck-length wavelength they will overload the network, i.e. collide. This predicts that light can collide in empty space to produce matter, and the evidence is that:
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 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 can 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).
Hence, extreme light colliding in a vacuum to give matter is a plausible prediction that can be tested by experiment. If pure light colliding in empty space creates matter, the boson-fermion divide of the standard model falls, as bosons can create 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 elementary bits, accelerators found the brief flashes of transient particles but in nature, what can’t survive isn’t the future. If matter evolved from light, these ephemeral flashes are evolutionary dead-ends that failed because they weren’t stable.
That matter is primal is just a theory, and scientists who don’t question their theories are priests. Light is simpler than matter, so it is more likely to be primal. The theory that light evolved into matter, based on reverse engineering, is testable, so if it is wrong, let the facts decide.