Foundation

Matter as a Defect, Not a Thing SERIES I — FOUNDATIONS The Mechanical Vacuum We are accustomed to thinking of matter as stuff: tiny objects moving through empty space. Electrons, atoms, and particles are treated as fundamental entities—things that exist independently of their surroundings. This post explores a different, mechanically grounded possibility: What if matter

Light as a Shear Wave SERIES I — FOUNDATIONS The Mechanical Vacuum Light is one of the most familiar phenomena in physics—and one of the most conceptually neglected. We learn early that light is a wave, and later that it is a transverse wave. We calculate its frequency, wavelength, polarization, and speed with extraordinary precision.

What Does It Mean for the Vacuum to Have Stiffness? SERIES I — FOUNDATIONS The Mechanical Vacuum In everyday language, stiffness sounds like a property of solid objects: steel beams, rubber bands, springs. It feels out of place when applied to empty space. And yet, stiffness is one of the most fundamental quantities in physics—because

Why Reintroduce a Physical Vacuum? SERIES I — FOUNDATIONS The Mechanical Vacuum Modern physics is extraordinarily successful at predicting what we observe.It is far less clear about what is actually there. We speak of curved spacetime, fluctuating fields, virtual particles, and probability amplitudes—concepts that work mathematically, yet remain physically opaque. The vacuum, in particular, is