Abstract

The shift from Ptolemaic to modern, post-Copernican cosmology bears witness to the fact that a system of ideas that is bequeathed to us at any stage by the circumstances of history, no matter how prestigious and well-institutionalized it becomes, is not always, nor necessarily, the best there can ever be. The same applies to systems of thought, or paradigms, in physics. This paper argues the feasibility of a wholesale (in some cases, the long-awaited) paradigm shift from the customary analog conception of fundamental physics into a relativistic, quantum-digital mode. Such a shift offers a novel solution to the problem of how to unify the various 'field' concepts with which physics is historically encumbered. Since the common factor in all these concepts is that of angular momentum (orbital, spin, oscillatory or whatever), the logical solution to that problem of unification would be to dispense with those 'fields' entirely, in favor of an overall-conserved angular momentum nexus that fits, without further elaboration, the phenomena that those 'fields' have been traditionally invoked to explain. The fact that angular momentum is both non-local and quantized makes it the natural choice of datum in the recommended switch from the traditional analog paradigm of physics to a consistently digitalized alternative.

The same paradigm switch also introduces a novel way of deducing, from a 'Galilean' account of motion, the formula for relativistic time-dilation and, as a direct consequence, the Balmer Rydberg formula for spectral frequencies. This is in terms of proper-time-instantaneous action-at-a-distance instead of traditional 'electrodynamics'.