Are fundamental entities discrete or continous and what discretization at fundamental level could mean?

Sabine Hossenfelder talked about the recent findings (see this) giving support for the reality, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs), known earlier as UFOs.

The first findings are discussed in the article "Aligned multiple transient events in the first Palomar Sky Survey" by researchers in Nordita (see this). The researchers analyzed the photos taken in Galtech in the first Palomar Sky Survey 1849-1957. Here is the abstract of their article.

Old, digitized astronomical images taken before the human spacefaring age offer a rare glimpse of the sky before the era of artificial satellites. In this paper, we present the first optical searches for artificial objects with high specular reflections near the Earth. We follow the method proposed in Villarroel et al. and use a transient sample drawn from Solano et al. We use images from the First Palomar Sky Survey to search for multiple (within a plate exposure) transients that, in addition to being point-like, are aligned along a narrow band. We provide a shortlist of the most promising candidate alignments, including one with ∼ 3.9σ statistical significance.

These aligned transients remain difficult to explain with known phenomena, even if rare optical ghosting producing point-like sources cannot be fully excluded at present. We explore remaining possibilities, including fast reflections from highly reflective objects in geosynchronous orbit, or emissions from artificial sources high above Earth s atmosphere. We also find a highly significant (∼ 22σ) deficit of POSS-I transients within Earth's shadow when compared with the theoretical hemispheric shadow coverage at 42,164 km altitude. The deficit is still present though at reduced significance (∼ 7.6σ) when a more realistic plate-based coverage is considered. This study should be viewed as an initial exploration into the potential of archival photographic surveys to reveal transient phenomena, and we hope it motivates more systematic searches across historical data sets.

The weekend known as Washington flap 1952 was rich of UAPs. 5 transients were observed during the previous week. There were also radar observations by air traffic controllers. Also unusual light phenomena (UAPs) were observed. Some observations involved 4, 5, and even 6 dots in a row. Very few transients were found in the Earth's shadow. The reflection of sunlight from a metallic object has been considered as a possible explanation. But who put it there? Could the transients be objects orbiting the Earth? The official interpretation was that atmospheric phenomena are in question,

The article "Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-I) may be associated with nuclear phenomena and reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena" (see this) described AUPs associated with nuclear testing during the period 1851-1957.

Here is the abstract of the article.

Transient star-like objects of unknown origin have been identified in the first Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-I) conducted prior to the first artificial satellite. We tested speculative hypotheses that some transients are related to nuclear weapons testing or unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) reports. A dataset comprising daily data (11/19/49 4/28/57) regarding identified transients, nuclear testing, and UAP reports was created (n = 2,718 days).

Results revealed significant (p = .008) associations between nuclear testing and observed transients, with transients 45 percent more likely on dates within \pm 1 day of nuclear testing. For days on which at least one transient was identified, significant associations were noted between total number of transients and total number of independent UAP reports per date (p = 0.015).

For every additional UAP reported on a given date, there was an 8.5 percent increase in the number of transients identified. Small but significant (p = .008) associations between nuclear testing and the number of UAP reports were also noted. Findings suggest associations beyond chance between occurrence of transients and both nuclear testing and UAP reports. These findings may help elucidate the nature of POSS-I transients and strengthen empirical support for the UAP phenomenon.

Correlations of the nuclear transients with visual observations (AUPs), possible only during night time, are reported. This would conform with the assumption that the transients are equally probable at dayside and nightside.

I have managed to spoil my academic reputation in many ways. To take seriously unidentified aerial phenomena (UAEs), formerly known as UFOs, is one of these ways. So, what would be the TGD view of these objects?

  1. UAPs can move with huge velocities: this suggests that they are not objects but processes. The spot of light in the roof caused by a light beam can move arbitrarily fast as you turn in the direction of the beam.

  2. The light balls including ball lightnings, made possible by the TGD view of quantum physics predicting an entire hierarchy of effective Planck constants, would be primitive life forms, plasmoids and predecessors of chemical life. Ions of cold plasma would be their key aspect as it is also in the case of ordinary biological life.

  3. Researchers from NASA claim to have a lot of observations about these kinds of entities in the ionosphere. I wrote an article about these findings (see this).

  4. A basic prediction of TGD is the existence of phases of ordinary matter characterized by a scaled up value of effective Planck constant heff and behaving like dark matter but not identifiable as galactic dark matter. Their presence however explains why baryonic matter seems to disappear during cosmic evolution: protons would transform to "dark" photons at the magnetic bodies. This disappearance would be a signature of evolution increasing the algebraic complexity of space-time surfaces implying increase of heff.

  5. "Dark" particles have scaled up their Compton lengths and times. This makes possible quantum coherence in long scales and could explain the mysterious coherence of living matter impossible to understand in the standard biochemistry approach. Without this coherence we would be sacks of water with some chemicals and could not climb in trees or write poems.

  6. Metabolism is the basic aspect of life. At the fundamental level, dark photons with energies in the visible range could serve as metabolic energy. This would be the case also in living matter at the fundamental level: chemical energy storage would have emerged only when plasmoid life led to chemical life. Pollack effect and its generalization would be behind basic mechanisms of life and make it possible to get metabolic energy from the solar light. This could explain many findings about UAPs.

Consider now the findings from this perspective.

  1. The light-balls in the POSS survey described in the first article are reported to mostly appear at the day side of the Earth. The Sun would make this possible by providing metabolic energy via the Pollack effect making it possible to increase the value of h for protons to heff> h.
  2. AUPs as light balls tend to be associated with the lines of tectonic activity. The reason would be that tectonic activity in the group liberates energy as dark photons serving as metabolic energy for the plasmoids. Large values of heff are associated with quantum critical systems and the tectonic activity would be such a phenomenon.
  3. Nuclear explosions liberate huge amounts of energy and can induce tectonic activity liberating dark photons serving as a food for the plasmoids of the atmosphere. These plasmoids would not need solar radiation as metabolic energy so that they could occur also at the night-side of the Earth. This prediction is testable.

    The nuclear transients can occur also at the dayside as is clear from the fact (see this) that AUPs observable only in night-side were found to correlate with the transients and could be identifiable as transients. I did not find any direct information about whether the nuclear transits prefer to occur at the day-side.

  4. NASA researchers have reported (see this) that the plasmoids in the ionosphere look like living entities, which tend to appear in groups. Plasmoids could organize around magnetic or electric monopole flux tubes, which are basic objects in the TGD Universe appearing in all scales: even galaxies and now also stars around the Milky Way nucleus are found to form such linear sequences.
See the chapter About long range electromagnetic quantum coherence in TGD Universe or the article with the same title.