J.Konstapel,17-7-2026.
: What We Know, and What We’re Guessing
J. Konstapel — Constable Research, Leiden
A vibration that never quite stops
Look closely enough at almost anything, and it turns out to be moving in a rhythm. The empty vacuum of space hums with fluctuations. An electron trembles even when nothing pushes it. Molecules vibrate. Hearts beat. Predator and prey populations rise and fall together in cycles that can be tracked for a century. And some of the mathematics used to describe the universe as a whole takes the same shape as the mathematics of a swinging pendulum.
This essay follows that thread — oscillation — from the smallest thing physics can currently describe up to speculative ideas about consciousness, language, and society. The point of doing this is not to claim that everything is “secretly connected” in some mystical sense. It’s almost the opposite: the aim is to be very precise about where the solid ground ends. Some of what follows is as well-established as anything in science. Some of it is a genuine, open hypothesis — a good question, not yet an answer. Keeping those two categories clearly separated is the whole point of the essay.
Where the ground is solid
The vacuum isn’t empty. Quantum theory says that even a perfect vacuum has a minimum, unavoidable amount of energy in every possible mode of every field — what’s called zero-point energy. That’s not just theory: it has measurable consequences. Bring two metal plates very close together in a vacuum and they feel a tiny attractive pull, because the plates limit which vacuum vibrations can fit in the gap between them. This is called the Casimir effect, and it has been measured in the lab. A related effect — a very small shift in the light emitted by hydrogen atoms, caused by the electron interacting with the vacuum’s fluctuations — was measured back in 1947 and is called the Lamb shift. Both are textbook physics, confirmed many times over.
Particles are vibrations in a field. In modern physics, a particle isn’t a little ball. A photon is a ripple in the electromagnetic field; an electron is a ripple in the electron field. Given that the vacuum itself is already “humming” (see above), this is a very natural next step: particles are just the countable peaks riding on top of that hum.
Electrons tremble on their own. This one comes straight out of the equation Paul Dirac wrote down in 1928 to describe the electron. In 1930, Erwin Schrödinger noticed something odd buried in that equation: even a free electron, with nothing acting on it, should be jittering at an enormous frequency. This trembling motion is called Zitterbewegung (German for “trembling motion”), and it isn’t a fringe idea — it falls directly out of mainstream, decades-old physics.
Atoms and molecules ring like tiny bells. The bonds between atoms in a molecule stretch and bend at specific frequencies, which is exactly what lets us identify molecules using infrared light (this is the basis of infrared spectroscopy, used every day in chemistry labs) and using nuclear magnetic resonance (the same underlying physics as an MRI scanner).
Living things run on rhythms. Your body clock is a molecular feedback loop that cycles roughly every 24 hours. Your heartbeat is driven by pacemaker cells in the sinoatrial node that fire rhythmically. Your brain produces oscillating electrical activity that can be picked up with EEG, and this has been measured and reproduced in labs worldwide for decades.
Populations of animals can oscillate too. When you write down the simplest possible equations for a predator and its prey — more prey means more food for predators, more predators means fewer prey, and round it goes — you get equations (named after Alfred Lotka and Vito Volterra, who each derived them independently in the 1920s) that predict rising-and-falling cycles. The classic real-world illustration is the roughly ten-year boom-and-bust cycle of Canadian lynx and snowshoe hares, reconstructed from a century of Hudson’s Bay Company fur-trading records. The math is solid; how well it matches any particular real ecosystem varies, which is a fair and honest caveat, not a flaw in the underlying idea.
So: from the vacuum, up through particles, electrons, molecules, and living bodies, all the way to animal populations — oscillation is not speculation. It’s measured, replicated, textbook science.
Where the ground gets softer — but stays honest
Now the essay turns to ideas that are genuinely more speculative — not wrong, not fringe nonsense, but not yet established the way the items above are. These deserve to be taken seriously as hypotheses precisely because they’re clearly labeled as such.
Is the vacuum’s hum itself built from something deeper? Physicist Gerard ‘t Hooft — a Nobel laureate — has spent years developing an idea called the Cellular Automaton Interpretation of quantum mechanics. His proposal is that the randomness we see in quantum mechanics isn’t fundamental at all; underneath it, he suggests, there might be a completely deterministic, clockwork-like process (a “cellular automaton,” similar in spirit to Conway’s Game of Life) that produces quantum-looking behavior once you zoom out far enough. This is a minority position in physics, but a serious and mathematically worked-out one. In 2025, a research team (van Berkel, de Graaf, and van Hee) actually built a computational version of this idea and set it running: a fully deterministic, clockwork automaton, with no randomness built in anywhere, started in a particular quantum-oscillator-like state — and its behavior, once averaged out, matched the standard quantum prediction almost exactly. That’s a striking result. It doesn’t prove ‘t Hooft is right; it shows his idea is at least computationally viable, and that the “clockwork underneath the vacuum” hypothesis can’t be dismissed out of hand.
Does the vacuum reach into the electron’s trembling? Physicist Peter Rowlands has proposed a specific mathematical picture in which an electron’s spin, its Berry phase, and its Zitterbewegung all emerge together from one idea: you can’t fully define a localized particle without simultaneously defining the surrounding, non-local vacuum that the particle is embedded in. It’s an elegant, published, mathematically consistent way of tying the electron’s trembling (which is established) back to the vacuum’s structure (which is the more speculative layer above). It’s one proposed route among possible others — not the only way physicists derive Zitterbewegung — but it’s the clearest bridge available between these two layers.
Does brain rhythm actually carry information, or just accompany it? Neuroscientist Pascal Fries proposed an influential idea called “communication through coherence”: that when two groups of neurons oscillate in a synchronized, coordinated rhythm, that synchrony is how they communicate efficiently with each other — like two people finding a shared beat to talk over a noisy room. This is one of the most widely used and tested models in neuroscience today. But it remains an active hypothesis, not settled fact: some researchers argue that the coherence is a side-effect of shared input rather than the communication mechanism itself. Both the phenomenon (brain rhythms exist and synchronize) and the debate about its function are real; only the phenomenon is settled.
Is consciousness the same thing as coherence? Here the essay takes a clear step past the evidence. The claim that phase-coherence between oscillating neurons doesn’t just support communication but actually is consciousness — that’s a genuinely open hypothesis, one that goes beyond what Fries’ work (above) demonstrates. It’s a coherent, testable idea. It is not yet an established fact.
Does meaning itself vibrate? Push one step further: if consciousness is coherence, and language expresses consciousness, does the meaning of a word carry some oscillatory structure — something that gets lost the moment spoken language is converted into the kind of numerical “vector” representations used by modern language models? This is the weakest link in the whole chain. There is, at present, no measured mechanism connecting sound-wave oscillation to the meaning of what’s said. It’s worth exploring as a hypothesis. It should not be mistaken for a finding.
Do two brains sync up — and can a whole society? This one has a genuinely solid half and a speculative half. The solid half: researcher Guillaume Dumas and colleagues used a technique called hyperscanning — recording EEG from two people at the same time while they interact — and found real, measurable synchronization between the two brains during social interaction. That’s established, replicated science, at the scale of two people. The speculative half is the leap from two synchronized brains to millions of people coordinating through some similar mechanism at the scale of a whole society. Nobody has measured that. It’s an extrapolation, not a finding — though it does build on the same underlying principle (coupled rhythms) that’s well-tested at the two-person scale.
Does the universe itself have a “note” it plays? In certain simplified models of quantum cosmology — models physicists use as tractable toy versions of the real, far messier universe — the equation that’s supposed to describe the “wave function of the universe” (the Wheeler–DeWitt equation) can be rearranged into exactly the same mathematical form as the equation for a quantum harmonic oscillator, the same math used to describe a single vibrating atom. In some of these models, this literally produces a spectrum of “allowed sizes” for a toy universe, evenly spaced, just like the allowed energy levels of an oscillating atom. That’s a real, published mathematical result — but it applies to specific, simplified toy models, not necessarily to the real universe, and physicists are still debating some of the mathematical details (like how to properly order the underlying operators) even within those toy models.
What this adds up to
Put it all in one line, and it reads like this: a vacuum that hums, and might rest on something even more clockwork-like underneath (established hum; speculative clockwork) → ripples in that hum become particles (established) → electrons that tremble on their own, maybe because the vacuum’s structure reaches into their definition (established trembling; one elegant, published account of why) → atoms and molecules that ring at fixed frequencies (established) → living rhythms, possibly coordinated by synchrony itself (established rhythms; debated mechanism) → predator-prey cycles (established model) → consciousness, maybe identical to brain-wide coherence (open hypothesis) → meaning, maybe carrying its own vibration (weakest hypothesis) → two brains that really do sync up, and a whole society that maybe does too (established at two people; speculative at scale) → a toy-model universe that plays the same mathematical “note” as a vibrating atom (established within the toy model; open for the real one).
The most useful thing about laying it out this way is not the story it tells — it’s the boundary it draws. From the vacuum through animal populations, the evidence is independently confirmed, in different fields, by different researchers, using different methods. From consciousness onward, the same idea — rhythms that couple and synchronize — gets reused as an explanation in places where it hasn’t been directly tested yet. That’s not a weakness to hide. It’s exactly where a real research question begins. But it only stays a good question if nobody quietly lets the solid evidence below it lend credibility to the guesses above it — which is the mistake this essay has tried hard not to make.
Annotated reference list
Casimir, H. B. G. (1948). On the attraction between two perfectly conducting plates. Proceedings of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 51, 793–795. The original paper predicting what’s now called the Casimir effect: a tiny, measurable attractive force between two uncharged metal plates in a vacuum, caused by the plates restricting which vacuum fluctuations can exist between them. One of the two classic experimental fingerprints of zero-point energy.
Lamb, W. E., & Retherford, R. C. (1947). Fine structure of the hydrogen atom by a microwave method. Physical Review, 72(3), 241–243. The experimental discovery of the Lamb shift: a tiny splitting in hydrogen’s spectral lines that standard theory (without vacuum fluctuations) couldn’t explain. Along with the Casimir effect, this is direct experimental evidence that the vacuum isn’t truly empty.
‘t Hooft, G. (2016). The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Fundamental Theories of Physics, vol. 185. Springer. Nobel laureate Gerard ‘t Hooft’s book-length case that quantum randomness might be an illusion produced by an underlying deterministic, clockwork-like process. A minority position, but taken seriously in the foundations-of-physics literature. Important: this reinterprets why quantum mechanics works, without (yet) making different testable predictions from standard quantum theory.
van Berkel, K., de Graaf, J., & van Hee, K. (2025). Experiments with Schrödinger cellular automata. Quantum, 9, 1811. A 2025 paper that actually built a computational version of ‘t Hooft’s idea and tested it: a fully deterministic automaton, started in a quantum-oscillator-like state, reproduced the standard quantum prediction for oscillation frequency with no randomness anywhere in the model. The concrete, computational evidence behind the “clockwork under the vacuum” hypothesis discussed in this essay.
Schrödinger, E. (1930). Über die kräftefreie Bewegung in der relativistischen Quantenmechanik. Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Physikalisch-Mathematische Klasse, 24, 418–428. The original 1930 paper in which Schrödinger identified Zitterbewegung — the intrinsic trembling motion of a free electron — as a mathematical consequence of Dirac’s equation. Mainstream, foundational physics, not a fringe result.
Rowlands, P. (2017). Nilpotent quantum mechanics: Analogs and applications. Frontiers in ICT, 4, 20. Peter Rowlands’ account of how electron spin, Berry phase, and Zitterbewegung all emerge together from a “dual space” formalism, in which a particle’s definition is tied to the structure of the surrounding vacuum. A specific, published, mathematically consistent way of connecting the electron’s trembling to vacuum structure — one proposed bridge among others, not the only possible account.
Fries, P. (2015). Rhythms for cognition: Communication through coherence. Neuron, 88(1), 220–235. Pascal Fries’ influential proposal that synchronized brain rhythms are the mechanism that lets different brain regions communicate efficiently. The most widely used functional model of coupled brain oscillations in neuroscience today — genuinely well-supported, but still actively debated as to whether synchrony causes communication or merely accompanies it.
Dumas, G., Nadel, J., Soussignan, R., Martinerie, J., & Garnero, L. (2010). Inter-brain synchronization during social interaction. PLoS ONE, 5(8), e12166. The study that used simultaneous EEG recording of two interacting people (“hyperscanning”) to demonstrate measurable synchronization between their brains during social interaction. The solid, established foundation for any later claim about coordination at larger social scales — which this study itself does not attempt to make.
Lotka, A. J. (1925). Elements of Physical Biology. Williams & Wilkins. Volterra, V. (1926). Variazioni e fluttuazioni del numero d’individui in specie animali conviventi. Memorie della Reale Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 2, 31–113. Lotka and Volterra independently derived the same predator-prey equations in the 1920s. Together they form the mathematical basis for population-cycle oscillation discussed in this essay — a solid mathematical model whose fit to any specific real ecosystem varies.