The Nature of the Universe, Time Travel and More...

I do fall prey to Dunning-Kreuger on occasion. I am pursuing my own undergrad in theoretical physics, and as you are more qualified I will bend to whatever you say on the matter.

 

Please don't do that. I'm probably way out of date so I have no authority, not that that would count for anything. As I was more an experimentalist, I tend not to be impressed by perceived beauty in mathematical formulations being interpreted as truth. There is no guarantee that the universe has to be describable by equations at all levels. Stephen Wolfram refers to this limit as computational irreducibility. I didn't use to be very persuaded by his approach based on automata theory (as in A New Kind of Science), but his branchial space approach seems to offer a lot of useful insights into fundamental physics. I don't know what it has to say about quantum gravity, but Wolfram claims it contains all the necessary elements:

Finally We May Have a Path to the Fundamental Theory of Physics… and It’s Beautiful—Stephen Wolfram Writings
The Wolfram Physics Project: Finding the Fundamental Theory of Physics

 

I was intrigued by quantised inertia as a suggested explanation for anomalous galactic rotation curves. It's basically a MOND theory. However, one galaxy (NGC 1277) has been found recently to be rotating more in agreement with Newtonian dynamics. This would be difficult to explain by any MOND-like theory.

 

Don't bend to authority in the matters of theoretical physics or meta-physics. No amount of education or any background, makes a person the authoritative source on the subjects of speculation. An appeal to authority is not a good logical argument. It is a cop out from presenting irrefutable premises upon which to build sound reason. It is like arguing the existence of God because the Bible tells you so.

Present your opinion, uphold it with reasoned argument and be prepared to be proven wrong. In fact, be eager to be proven wrong. If you are, that doesn't mean you shouldn't have spoken up in the first place.

I've had masters level math classes and university physics. I've enjoyed studying philosophy and meta-physics for most of my life. I have strong opinions, speculations, questions and there are plenty of subjects and treatments of subjects to which I am completely ignorant of. I will not fail to engage, just because I'm not an authority.

-Will

 

^ I agree - I'd also recommend studying the scientific method and the history and philosophy of science.

While I wouldn't yield to authority automatically, I do give greater credence to someone who has spent thousands of hours studying, researching and teaching a subject than someone who has watched a few YouTube videos. I fall in between those two stools as my active involvement in physics research ceased over thirty years ago when I decided I needed to earn more money to have a life.

 

Gimme more credit than that.

 

I am not referring to you, but to someone else who used to hang around this subforum. I'd be interested to know what you (or anyone else) think of Wolfram's ideas, but I realise your time might be precious to you.

 

It helped that Wolfram had money…

 

I don't have any time, but I was curious.

When we were touring the Physics department at Cornell; my son was interested in going there, Professor Franks, I think his name was, was showing us one of his experiments about cell growth. At one point, I suggested that he look at simple structures and behaviors. I explained that I was coming from a computer science background and I knew that simple two and three state transistors could produce only basic switch-like behaviors, but when put together in large numbers, in a matrix structure, were capable of enormously complex behaviors.

This is not particularly insightful. It has been the basic goal for millennia to reduce our understanding of the Universe to just such fundamental elements.

In my initial skim of Wolfram's proposal, it looks like he is working with the basic concepts around fractals. A small collection of basic elements that have rules for producing more basic constructs until the complexity grows towards some undefined result.

He's very likely correct, but it would be surprising if these most fundamental origins could be easily determined. Once again, a system for which the math may actually work, but the conclusions to such success are going to be mostly speculation.

I'm rooting for him.

-Will

 

Yeah, those were basically my thoughts. I don't see a way of experimentally testing his ideas. The number of possible rules is also vast so exploring that space to determine the most likely seems a dauting task. We're in the realms of metaphysics - perhaps literally so. A theory that includes all aspects of all other theories because it is intrinsically computational is not necessarily correct, but how does one test this? I wonder if this dilemma can be represented formally.

 

That is often the case, I discovered. I couldn't afford to stay in basic research. It turned out I was happier in a more mundane career.

 

Nice 3D view of supernovae
https://phys.org/news/2023-09-world-3d-simulations-reveal-physics.html

Very like the logarithmic view here:
https://www.universetoday.com/163112/the-case-for-a-small-universe/

Cthulhu’s eye…

Still, I have heard it said that perhaps physicists look for too much in the way of elegance.

 

I think Leonard Susskind's views on the nature of time are still relevant, although this talk at the Santa Fe Institute is from 10 years ago.



The latest significant insights that might advance the understanding of this subject are by Stephen Wolfram.

 

What are you saying, that time marches on?


-Will

 

That our understanding changes over time. For example, branchial theory might provide deeper insights.

What I found revelatory about Susskind's talk is that our universe might be on a particular path through state space that merely has the appearance of starting with a singularity. We wouldn't be able to tell whether that was actually the case. It might be ripped apart when it reached the outer (white) chaotic region, only to be reformed when it re-entered the inner (blue) ordered region. The probability of state configurations reoccurring depends on the dimensionality of the state space.

Random walk - Wikipedia

Wild speculation:
The state space for the universal wave function (which actually can be interpreted as a multiverse) has a very large dimensionality, but is not necessarily infinite. If that is the case, the probability of the same state reoccurring is finite, but very small. Our consciousness at any instant is determined by the state that a universe occupies, but it only one of a vast number of possible states. There is no need for time in this viewpoint. Time is what we perceive as change from a less probable state configuration to a more probable state configuration - that is, in the direction of entropy (proportional to the natural logarithm of number of possible microstates) increasing. The probability of us remembering a "future" state has a very low probability - our memories being part of the configuration of the state. All paths between adjacent states can occur, but some are much more probable than others.

 

This concept has been described by many ancient religions. Chaos equates to the Void, out of which all things come. The ancient Greeks used the word Cosmos, meaning ordered, symmetrical and beautiful. We also use that as the root word for cosmetics, an order and beauty laid over or imposed upon the Void. Chaos was the antithesis of Cosmos.

It was Empedicles who taught the duelist view, that Love or Strife took turns controlling our place in or our perception of the Universe. Love, represented by Aphrodite, was the illusion we lived within that told us the Cosmos was ordered and beautiful. Strife would destroy that illusion, reveal the true nature of the Universe. Before throwing himself into the caldera of Mount Etna, he appealed to Strife to set him free from the illusion. He saught to release his mind from the restraints of the corporeal world.

-Will

 

Well, we dress it up with mathematics rather than deities nowadays, but that only gets us so far, it seems. I remember reading about various Greek and, indeed, Eastern philosophies that expound similar propositions. Wolfram's approach is to model reality as emerging from underlying computational automata governed by a ruliad. It does appear that it might be necessarily impossible to determine exactly what constitutes the computational substrate. We might be able to prove that something like it must have the possibility of existing, but not that it must or why it must, given that we have the sensation that it does. Of course, it it didn't, there'd be no thing that could report that state to other things that didn't exist. I do suspect that all possibilities exist simultaneously in an exterior timeless state space, but given that is timeless, "simultaneously" is the wrong word as is "exist". We only just got down from the trees FFS.

ETA: If there is any candidate for an equation to describe the multiverse, I suspect it will be something along the lines of the Hamiltonian and momentum constraints formulation of the Wheeler–DeWitt equation - some operator acting on the functional of all possible state space configurations is equal to zero. In other words, everything arises as fluctuations from nothing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler–DeWitt_equation#Mathematical_formalism

 

Considering the Gödel Incompleteness Theorems, it should be impossible.

However, in a cosmology of mind...
As entities bound by our sense of time, we really only know a single moment. We have the memory of change, we have the rational of past/ present/ and a predictable(?) future, but we can only know the one moment. Of that moment, can we even know more than a feeling? Can we really have the broad and varied experiences of the phenomenonal world, even in just that moment? All we can really say is that we have a feeling of knowing.

What we do have, as the focus of a Universe of mind, is the ability to transcend the system and account for the calculus ahead or in addition to the system that includes the calculus. We can imagine a chaos outside that allows us to know the Cosmos from both within and without.

You mentioned a Mathematics that was beyond the one dimensional string of formulas. We also have Linear Algebra and matrix Mathematics. Perhaps we can't calculate the entire 2D matrix at one time (here we are talking time again), but in a dimensionless state of time, all calculations are done as one. Just like multi-variable calculus and vector Mathematics can break down from 3+ dimensions to a sequence of 1 dimensional calculations, matrix Mathematics can go into many dimensions of formulae. Time or sequentiality is significant only trivially. However, it is still significant.

-Will

 

Yeah, I suspect it could be broken down to 1-D strings of symbols and executed on a Turing machine with the same limitations on what is achievable - so my speculation was likely a non-flyer. You'd really need some sort of hypercomputer or oracle to transcend those bounds. I have no idea how to build any version of those in our version of reality, or whether any self-consistent reality could exist in which they could be built.

Hypercomputation - Wikipedia

 

Interestingly, the human brain is capable of this. It isn't perfect, but some of the more brilliant minds have been able to see things such as the infinite set of primes or the infinite set of paired primes. These are basically the halting problem. To know that there is only one loop of numbers that satisfies the Collatz Conjecture is the halting problem solved. To prove it, turns it into a Turing computable problem.
The short answer is that we add context and proof by analogy, as well as other, non-math strict formulations to our calculus.

-Will