A Metaphorical Chart of Our Mathematical Ontology.

A new paradigm is emerging in fundamental physics. We know this because there is so much controversy about what is valid science, but what is the true nature of the new thinking? It may be too early to give a full answer but I think that an important part of it is in the way that we understand the vacuum and how it relates to particle physics. Thirty years ago all physicists would have assumed that the cold flat vacuum is a unique solution of the fundamental laws. The standard model of particle physics is now known to be successful beyond the wildest dreams of physicists back then and it has a single lowest energy state of broken symmetry from which all known laws other than gravity are known to follow. It was thought that a full unified theory was within our grasp. A fuller unification would be found at the GUT scale from a bigger but simpler gauge symmetry. Beyond that supersymmetry would provide the final unification with gravity. All the laws of the standard model including its 21 constants would be derived from some unique theory with fewer free parameters, or perhaps even none. Today the more progressive physicists take a different view. Space and time are seen as emergent from a yet unknown new way of looking at the universe that must go beyond the bounds of standard quantum field theory, but that much is widely accepted and therefore is not the defining feature of th