“Why?” could get one into an infinite regress, I suppose, with elephants all the way down, but to a certain depth it clarifies everything. Like, what’s with this elephant in the room?
What if, for example, we had begun with baryonic mass density rather than bifurcated charge density. What analogies to fragmentation would we have faced? To what extent would the need we have found for two unique halves of reality to make the whole thing work have arisen? Let’s see.
The two sides of the Poisson equation would come out to be:
The constant factor G appears partly as a unit conversion, here to energy units and earlier in root G in mass-to-charge conversion. But it is deeper than that. It is a link between the two substantive sectors of reality that depend upon each other to avoid total dissolution of one kind or the other.
Again we have the ever-present possibility of fragmentation in which splitting the encapsulated mass would reduce the total gravitational energy but not the total amount of mass. However, the implications of fragmentation are very different in this case because mass gravitationally attracts whereas like charges are repelled. So the ‘problem’ with fragmentation is the collapse back into itself rather than dispersing to infinity. The real problem here is that mass distributions all attract each other and would collapse into a singularity of a universal black hole.
What is interesting is that if we had begun from the mass sector instead of the charge sector, then mass would appear “natural” and charge would look like the strange complementary component requiring the orthogonal/imaginary role. We would have had to come up with something like:
Whichever sector we begin with seems ‘real’. The assignment of which has a i in front of it is irrelevant. It is the orthogonality that is essential. Reality is complex – not necessarily in the literal mathematical sense. It is bipartite. Of much more importance is its orthogonality, the conjugate pairing, and requisite scalar closure. There is little significance to the use of the literal “imaginary.” Either way we look at it, that part is an equally essential part of reality.
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