Abstract
In physics we encounter particles in one of two ways. Either as fundamental constituents of the theory or as emergent excitations. These two ways differ by how the particle relates to the background. It either sits on the background, or it is an excitation of the background. We argue that by choosing the former to construct our fundamental theories we have made a costly mistake. Instead we should think of particles as excitations of a background. We show that this point of view sheds new light on the cosmological constant problem and even leads to observable consequences by giving a natural explanation for the appearance of MOND-like behaviour. In this context it also becomes clear why there are numerical coincidences between the MOND acceleration parameter \(a_0\), the cosmological constant \(\Lambda \) and the Hubble parameter \(H_0\).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Mamazim Kassankogno, and Stevi Roussel Tankio Djiokap for helpful discussion and the Foundational Questions Institute, FQXi, for financial support and for creating an environment where it is alright to play with unorthodox ideas.
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Dreyer, O. (2015). Not on but of. In: Aguirre, A., Foster, B., Merali, Z. (eds) Questioning the Foundations of Physics. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13045-3_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13045-3_8
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