Physics, and Spirituality, Thoughts.
Aug. 8th, 2010 03:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redneckgaijinI'm going to ramble a bit, so here's some cuts...
First, let's look at time travel. Current physics says that it's just barely, BARELY possible under absurdly extreme conditions, with completely infeasible limitations, and above all with massive power requirements.
How massive? Apparently even the shortest backwards jaunt would cost multiples of the total amount of energy in our observable universe- that is, if you convert all visible and dark matter into pure energy and add that to the free energy we already have.
Multiples of that.
I've been thinking a bit about this problem recently- not in the mathematical sense, since once I get beyond an ability to visualize dancing numbers my math skills vanish, but in more abstract, thought-problem terms. One of my truisms is that, since our universe is finite in everything except abstract human concepts, any physics formula or problem that returns infinity as an answer is either (a) asking the wrong question in the first place or (b) broken. Unfortunately, time travel's power requirements are not infinite... just so impractically large as to make no difference.
But my thought is: what is all that energy doing? Energy that's multiple times the total matter-energy mix of all of Creation has to be doing something more than just sending a DeLorean to November 5, 1955. It has to be doing a LOT of something.
And then I got to thinking about quantum probability- how, by one theory, our universe is composed of a series of highest-probability outcomes from one instant to the next. In the time it takes the smallest possible thing that can happen to happen (to put it in Pratchettspeak), billions, trillions, uncountable 'illions' of changes happen as every single particle and energy packet moves from one state to another- shifting position, shifting velocity.
Combine this with a bit of relativity. There are two ways you can drive from Point A to Point B: you either move your car across the surface of the Earth... or you keep your car absolutely still and move the Earth underneath it until where you want to go gets to you. From your point of view, the result would be identical in all respects: you started, you journeyed along a path, you arrived. One method would simply take vastly more energy than the other.
What I'm thinking is this: if someone were able to travel backwards through time, they would be proceeding backwards up the chain of probable outcomes- and virtually all of those probable outcomes are much LESS probable going the other direction. They would either be moving themselves up the timestream... or, and I think the theories point in this direction, they would be moving the rest of the universe backwards to get to their destination.
Only I don't think it's only moving the universe. I think it's unwriting the universe. All that multiples-of-everything-there-is energy goes to moving each and every particle, photon, whatever to a state which, in the relative perception of the traveler, is "backwards" in time... which would have the result of destroying the world our traveler came from. It wouldn't matter if our traveler did absolutely nothing to interact with anything once he got to the past. The very act of traveling there at all would ensure there was no future to return to- or at least nothing like the same one.
We've spent a century or more referring to time as a dimension of motion, just as up-down, forward-backward and left-right might be. I've never really agreed with that- if time really were a dimension of motion, then movement should be just as easy in both directions. I personally believe that time is not movement, not a dimension, at all; it's a side-effect of entropy. Entropy- the tendency for things to approach a less ordered, more random state rather than vice versa- is the only thing that keeps time linear. Without it- if things could become more orderly just as probably as less- then time becomes non-linear, cause and effect get broken, and (in my view at least) the universe fails to function.
So: no time travel, almost certainly.
Now, to quantum physics. There are two aspects of quantum physics which have been the subject of debate and ridicule almost from the start: first, that under quantum mechanics observing one particle affects all other particles that have been "entangled" (associated through interaction) with it, no matter how far apart they are; and second, that the state of any particle or energy packet does not exist prior to observation, i. e. Schrodinger's cat is dead-not dead-hanging out with Cthulhu.
Well, scientists in Vienna have been performing experiments on the second of those problems. Their results (read the whole article, but especially the last page) seem to indicate two hypotheses pretty strongly.
(1) On the quantum level, there is no defined reality prior to observation.
(2) There is absolutely no reason why this does not apply clear up to the macro, or "classical" level.
It's still a bit of a stretch to say, "we create our own reality," but it's now quite firmly on the table for discussion, I'd say.
BUT
I consider these findings cause for hope- hope that there is something beyond our perceivable universe, something beyond this life- and that we, human beings, are a part of it.
Consider first: presuming that we create reality as we go, SOMETHING had to kick-start the universe so it would exist for us to be in it to perceive it. If the universe you are in doesn't exist until you are in it to perceive it... well, unlock the safe with the key you will find inside. Even if we go with a strong soliphistic principle- that the universe begins with your birth and ends at your death and that nothing truly exists except you- SOMETHING outside the system had to put the whole thing into motion.
And even if we reject soliphism and go with a universe compiled from the shared perceptions of humans with an equal ability to perceive... at some point there has to be a First Human, or at least a First Thing Capable of Perception. Yet our science pushes us backwards far beyond humanity, far beyond dinosaurs, far beyond planet Earth, even back beyond planets, stars and even matter- clear back to 1 * 10-46 seconds after the Big Bang itself.
(That's 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds, if you want it spelled out.)
At some point in the past, there must have been a time when there was a universe, but nothing in it capable of perceiving anything here. If perception creates reality- and the experiment I link to above suggests that pretty strongly- then there was something OUTSIDE this reality to perceive it before we came along.
It might be God. It might be us- "I feel like a game of Humans on Earth today, who's got the board?"
But I think this is proof- or at least highly suggestive evidence for a basis of deduction, anyway- that there is something outside our current frame of reference, something that affects- and possibly defines- our very existence.
And if our observations help define our own reality, rather than the other way around, then that something might be us- or something like us.
Here's a bit more material for optimistic thought. In the past twenty years, we have discovered- on a theoretical level- antigravity. Just as there is a force pulling everything together, there is a force pushing everything apart. We call that second force, for whatever reason, "dark energy."
Of course, for all practical purposes dark energy is completely useless to us. Just as gravity is stronger in concentrations of matter, dark energy is stronger in total ABSENCE of matter. If we went to a strong source of dark energy, it wouldn't be any kind of source at all- because, by bringing our matter to the site, we'd cancel it out and more with our gravity.
But consider: even before the discovery of dark energy, gravity was the bastard stepchild of universal forces. Electromagnetism and the strong and weak atomic forces all shuffle together, if not neatly, at least comfortably into grand unified theories... but gravity has always broken those theories. Nothing theorists and mathematicians could do would get it to behave like the other forces.
Maybe it isn't a force- at least, not in the same sense as the other three.
Picture this: gravity is not matter tugging at other matter. Instead, picture gravity as matter eating space- that is, reducing distances between objects by sucking the distances themselves right out of existence...
... THIS existence, anyway.
Likewise, dark energy is not matter (or the lack of it) pushing against matter; dark energy is new space erupting into our universe, adding distance between objects and pushing them farther apart.
And the question to ask is: where does this space come from/go?
It's energy from nowhere, going to nowhere... that we can observe.
But our laws of conservation of energy state that energy- even simple kinetic energy- can neither be created nor destroyed, merely transformed from one state to another. You only get losses or gains of energy if your system is not closed.
Well, in order for our system to be closed, in this case, gravity and dark energy would have to be in perfect balance- space being created and destroyed at the same rate.
It isn't. Dark energy is winning. Recent measurements of the expansion of the universe show that the expansion is accelerating.
So, either we're getting free energy in the form of space from somewhere, or else gravity and dark energy are out of balance. Either way, we're not living in a closed system.
Which means there is something outside.
Which means, in my view, there is room to hope that, when whatever part of us extends into this reality ceases, we will continue on outside this reality in some fashion.
Beats hell out of being a bug banquet in an overpriced box, anyway.
First, let's look at time travel. Current physics says that it's just barely, BARELY possible under absurdly extreme conditions, with completely infeasible limitations, and above all with massive power requirements.
How massive? Apparently even the shortest backwards jaunt would cost multiples of the total amount of energy in our observable universe- that is, if you convert all visible and dark matter into pure energy and add that to the free energy we already have.
Multiples of that.
I've been thinking a bit about this problem recently- not in the mathematical sense, since once I get beyond an ability to visualize dancing numbers my math skills vanish, but in more abstract, thought-problem terms. One of my truisms is that, since our universe is finite in everything except abstract human concepts, any physics formula or problem that returns infinity as an answer is either (a) asking the wrong question in the first place or (b) broken. Unfortunately, time travel's power requirements are not infinite... just so impractically large as to make no difference.
But my thought is: what is all that energy doing? Energy that's multiple times the total matter-energy mix of all of Creation has to be doing something more than just sending a DeLorean to November 5, 1955. It has to be doing a LOT of something.
And then I got to thinking about quantum probability- how, by one theory, our universe is composed of a series of highest-probability outcomes from one instant to the next. In the time it takes the smallest possible thing that can happen to happen (to put it in Pratchettspeak), billions, trillions, uncountable 'illions' of changes happen as every single particle and energy packet moves from one state to another- shifting position, shifting velocity.
Combine this with a bit of relativity. There are two ways you can drive from Point A to Point B: you either move your car across the surface of the Earth... or you keep your car absolutely still and move the Earth underneath it until where you want to go gets to you. From your point of view, the result would be identical in all respects: you started, you journeyed along a path, you arrived. One method would simply take vastly more energy than the other.
What I'm thinking is this: if someone were able to travel backwards through time, they would be proceeding backwards up the chain of probable outcomes- and virtually all of those probable outcomes are much LESS probable going the other direction. They would either be moving themselves up the timestream... or, and I think the theories point in this direction, they would be moving the rest of the universe backwards to get to their destination.
Only I don't think it's only moving the universe. I think it's unwriting the universe. All that multiples-of-everything-there-is energy goes to moving each and every particle, photon, whatever to a state which, in the relative perception of the traveler, is "backwards" in time... which would have the result of destroying the world our traveler came from. It wouldn't matter if our traveler did absolutely nothing to interact with anything once he got to the past. The very act of traveling there at all would ensure there was no future to return to- or at least nothing like the same one.
We've spent a century or more referring to time as a dimension of motion, just as up-down, forward-backward and left-right might be. I've never really agreed with that- if time really were a dimension of motion, then movement should be just as easy in both directions. I personally believe that time is not movement, not a dimension, at all; it's a side-effect of entropy. Entropy- the tendency for things to approach a less ordered, more random state rather than vice versa- is the only thing that keeps time linear. Without it- if things could become more orderly just as probably as less- then time becomes non-linear, cause and effect get broken, and (in my view at least) the universe fails to function.
So: no time travel, almost certainly.
Now, to quantum physics. There are two aspects of quantum physics which have been the subject of debate and ridicule almost from the start: first, that under quantum mechanics observing one particle affects all other particles that have been "entangled" (associated through interaction) with it, no matter how far apart they are; and second, that the state of any particle or energy packet does not exist prior to observation, i. e. Schrodinger's cat is dead-not dead-hanging out with Cthulhu.
Well, scientists in Vienna have been performing experiments on the second of those problems. Their results (read the whole article, but especially the last page) seem to indicate two hypotheses pretty strongly.
(1) On the quantum level, there is no defined reality prior to observation.
(2) There is absolutely no reason why this does not apply clear up to the macro, or "classical" level.
It's still a bit of a stretch to say, "we create our own reality," but it's now quite firmly on the table for discussion, I'd say.
BUT
I consider these findings cause for hope- hope that there is something beyond our perceivable universe, something beyond this life- and that we, human beings, are a part of it.
Consider first: presuming that we create reality as we go, SOMETHING had to kick-start the universe so it would exist for us to be in it to perceive it. If the universe you are in doesn't exist until you are in it to perceive it... well, unlock the safe with the key you will find inside. Even if we go with a strong soliphistic principle- that the universe begins with your birth and ends at your death and that nothing truly exists except you- SOMETHING outside the system had to put the whole thing into motion.
And even if we reject soliphism and go with a universe compiled from the shared perceptions of humans with an equal ability to perceive... at some point there has to be a First Human, or at least a First Thing Capable of Perception. Yet our science pushes us backwards far beyond humanity, far beyond dinosaurs, far beyond planet Earth, even back beyond planets, stars and even matter- clear back to 1 * 10-46 seconds after the Big Bang itself.
(That's 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds, if you want it spelled out.)
At some point in the past, there must have been a time when there was a universe, but nothing in it capable of perceiving anything here. If perception creates reality- and the experiment I link to above suggests that pretty strongly- then there was something OUTSIDE this reality to perceive it before we came along.
It might be God. It might be us- "I feel like a game of Humans on Earth today, who's got the board?"
But I think this is proof- or at least highly suggestive evidence for a basis of deduction, anyway- that there is something outside our current frame of reference, something that affects- and possibly defines- our very existence.
And if our observations help define our own reality, rather than the other way around, then that something might be us- or something like us.
Here's a bit more material for optimistic thought. In the past twenty years, we have discovered- on a theoretical level- antigravity. Just as there is a force pulling everything together, there is a force pushing everything apart. We call that second force, for whatever reason, "dark energy."
Of course, for all practical purposes dark energy is completely useless to us. Just as gravity is stronger in concentrations of matter, dark energy is stronger in total ABSENCE of matter. If we went to a strong source of dark energy, it wouldn't be any kind of source at all- because, by bringing our matter to the site, we'd cancel it out and more with our gravity.
But consider: even before the discovery of dark energy, gravity was the bastard stepchild of universal forces. Electromagnetism and the strong and weak atomic forces all shuffle together, if not neatly, at least comfortably into grand unified theories... but gravity has always broken those theories. Nothing theorists and mathematicians could do would get it to behave like the other forces.
Maybe it isn't a force- at least, not in the same sense as the other three.
Picture this: gravity is not matter tugging at other matter. Instead, picture gravity as matter eating space- that is, reducing distances between objects by sucking the distances themselves right out of existence...
... THIS existence, anyway.
Likewise, dark energy is not matter (or the lack of it) pushing against matter; dark energy is new space erupting into our universe, adding distance between objects and pushing them farther apart.
And the question to ask is: where does this space come from/go?
It's energy from nowhere, going to nowhere... that we can observe.
But our laws of conservation of energy state that energy- even simple kinetic energy- can neither be created nor destroyed, merely transformed from one state to another. You only get losses or gains of energy if your system is not closed.
Well, in order for our system to be closed, in this case, gravity and dark energy would have to be in perfect balance- space being created and destroyed at the same rate.
It isn't. Dark energy is winning. Recent measurements of the expansion of the universe show that the expansion is accelerating.
So, either we're getting free energy in the form of space from somewhere, or else gravity and dark energy are out of balance. Either way, we're not living in a closed system.
Which means there is something outside.
Which means, in my view, there is room to hope that, when whatever part of us extends into this reality ceases, we will continue on outside this reality in some fashion.
Beats hell out of being a bug banquet in an overpriced box, anyway.
