Science tests a new theory when it contradicts an old one. In this case, reverse engineering predicts that at the highest frequency, light will collide to become matter, but the standard model predicts that light never collides because photons are bosons that share quantum states. Table 4.1 separates matter particles that collide from bosons like light, that don’t, so:
“Two photons cannot ever collide. In fact light is quantized only when interacting with matter.” Wikipedia 2019.
However, if matter and light are both network processes, then a collision is an overload, so potentially, light can collide in empty space to form matter. Evidence for this includes that:
1. Confined photons have mass. A free photon is massless, but when confined in a hypothetical 100% reflecting mirror box, it has mass, because as the box accelerates, unequal photon pressure on its reflecting walls creates inertia (van der Mark & t’Hooft, 2011). By the same logic, photons confined at a point, in a standing wave, will have mass.
2. Einstein’s equation. That matter equates to energy works both ways so if nuclear bombs can turn mass into energy, photon energy can become mass. The Breit-Wheeler process describes how pure light can potentially transform into matter.
3. Particle accelerator collisions routinely create new matter. Protons that collide and stay intact produce new matter that didn’t exist before. If this matter comes from the collision energy, 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.