Karim Ahmed and George Farre

In recent years, increasing evidence from astronomical data of intra-galactic dynamics strongly suggests that the vast bulk of mass of the universe (as much 90%) resides in non-luminous “dark matter” fields. At present, there are a number of non-baryonic candidates that may account for the missing dark matter field, including the presence of massive electron-neutrinos, and a number of theoretically-postulated exotic particles, such as axions. However, current proposals about dark matter particles and fields appear to be, for the most part, premature and ad hoc, since they are not based on direct observations or on firm conceptual foundations. In addition, we still do not have a workable quantum gravity model, that successfully unifies the gravitational field with electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear fields. Thus, the incorporation of an additional dark matter field into current super-symmetric quantum field models remains one of most difficult and challenging problems in the phyiscal sciences today.

In this paper, the authors briefly review the fundamental postulates of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, upon which most quantum field models of electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear fields are presently based. They address the following foundational question: has the incorporation of Poincare (or Lorentz) group symmetries (originally derived from special relativity), along with an exclusive reliance on the quantum of action (i.e. Planck’s constant), inadvertently introduced a hidden (and hitherto unrecognized) “electrodynamic bias” in most quantum field models. In other words, has such conceptual limitations restricted us from developing a more unified field theory that incorporates electromagnetic-weak-strong fields with gravitational and dark matter fields? In the paper, the authors discuss a group theoretical approach, which introduces symmetry transformation properties of elementary particles and fields, that may allow the emergence of different and seemingly incompatible physical domains in an energy-dissipating and temporally-evolving universe.