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

[fireproof78]

I know this may not be a popular opinion, but I do believe in a Creator, but I am still curious as to how the universe actually works.

Same here.

The universe is an infinite source of fascination. Understanding the universe is part of the appeal of a creator. yes, it might it might be an unresolvable metaphysical question, but that does not change my desire to learn about the universe.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I believe in the God Gene rather than the God, Gene.

 

[Toril Toran]

Gene Roddenberry???

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Just another flawed human.

 

[Will The Serious]

For some reason, I have not been getting notices of new posts on this thread, so I thought it was inactive. I had a lot of reading to do catch up.

I just checked in to post a new article that came up on my Google front page. Amazing how much more appropriate it is to the current discussion then I thought it would be. Perhapse an example of retroactive consciousness.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrea...consciousness-spawning-theory-of-reality/amp/
It's a long article, but an interesting read.

-Will

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

State vector reduction (wave function collapse) is a myth - there is absolutely no evidence for it other than it being merely one way in which we can interpret what experiments in quantum mechanics are telling us about the true nature of reality. However, I don't know of any way to concoct falsifiable tests of it or any alternate interpretations. There seems to be no Archimedean Point on which we can stand to determine the correct interpretation. We can fart about creating analogues of bubble universes in Bose-Einstein condensates, but there is no guarantee that these correspond to the larger cosmos. It might just be us who are forever blowing bubbles.

 

[Toril Toran]

Wouldn’t wave collapse explain the uncertainty principle? There are perhaps several possible states exist, until it is observed and then it is reduced to one?

 

[Will The Serious]

I would think that any phenomenon, no matter how it came about, that culminates in a single observed state, is described by the Uncertainty Principal.

-Will

 

[Will The Serious]

The physicist trying to create space-time from scratch
Allow me a moment to laugh.

"SPACE-TIME may not be fundamental. Instead, according to the holographic principle, it emerges from something deeper, like a 3D hologram emerges from a flat surface. The principle says that space-time, and by extension gravity, arises from quantum entanglement.
...
according to the holographic principle, is enough to encode all the information that describes the universe within. This “holographic duality” says that space-time and the lower-dimensional boundary that it emerges from are equivalent."

This seems a little like selling bottled air. Let me make some spacetime for you.
Oh look, there's a empty spot in the Universe that doesn't have any spacetime. We should fill it.
Got a project that needs extra spacetime? Well, look no further. We make the best quality spacetime available anywhere, period.

-Will

 

[Toril Toran]

I think the guy that wrote that has watched The Matrix one too many times.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Wouldn’t wave collapse explain the uncertainty principle? There are perhaps several possible states exist, until it is observed and then it is reduced to one?

As far as I'm aware there is no way to falsify the competing interpretations (Copenhagen, Everett, Bohm, usw.) experimentally to deduce which one is likely to be correct. The uncertainty principle actually arises from Fourier analysis of the wave function. Restricting the measurement of a variable such as momentum in the frequency domain broadens the width of the measurement of the conjugate position variable in the spatial domain. There are similar relationships between energy and time and between 4-momentum and space-time position (also individual spin components and total spin). Pop-science explanations usually go with the "observation purturbing the measurement" explanation, which isn't incorrect, but neither is it the fundamental derivation.

However, I caution that it is more than 45 years since I studied this subject, so I don't consider myself an expert.

 

[Toril Toran]

You certainly sound like one.
I am just a layman so most of this discussion goes over my head.

 

[Will The Serious]

Part of the point of this thread is an attempt to boil some of this esoteric science down to basic concepts and straight forward logic and simple math, when necessary. I prefer general concepts to high order Mathematics for understanding.

For example, we can show how multi-variable calculus or multi-dimensional vector analysis is done by doing the math and showing a consistent answer, or we can talk about how we can break down the parts into one dimension, do the simplified math, change the axis and repeat another one-dimensional reduction to eventually arrive at the answer. Which explanation would lead to the best understanding? The math is just math, and it will lead to answers, but the logical description of what the math is doing, in my opinion, makes it easier to grasp.

-Will

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Probably best to nominate some popular science books on the subjects that will give a general overview. Translating the mathematics into step-by-step English descriptions would probably take up at least an order of magnitude more space than the equations. For serious study by an amateur, I'd suggest starting with Leonard Susskind's theoretical minimum books, but those require at least an A-level* understanding of pure and applied mathematics.

* The US equivalent is Advanced Placement perhaps - pre-university at least.

 

[Toril Toran]

Over my head, I think.
I just ponder and philosophize what could be.

Do virtual particles have/give off energy? They must when they annihilate each other?

Since it is going on all around us, could this be used as an energy source one day?

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Over my head, I think.
I just ponder and philosophize what could be.

Do virtual particles have/give off energy? They must when they annihilate each other?

The books have to balance in the end, but virtual particle interactions allow energy to be borrowed for very short periods of time - uncertainty principle again.

I'd also suggest the Great Courses lectures on mathematics and physics, which are a much gentler approach to the subjects. There are also many YouTube videos of varying quality, but some are very good.

Brian Cox's and Jeff Forshaw's pop-science books on physics are also very good - much better than I am at putting difficult concepts into ordinary English.

However, one has to beware of simplistic explanations of some physical principles. Why aeroplanes fly is one example where the usual explanation is wrong.

The physicist trying to create space-time from scratch
Allow me a moment to laugh.

"SPACE-TIME may not be fundamental. Instead, according to the holographic principle, it emerges from something deeper, like a 3D hologram emerges from a flat surface. The principle says that space-time, and by extension gravity, arises from quantum entanglement.
...
according to the holographic principle, is enough to encode all the information that describes the universe within. This “holographic duality” says that space-time and the lower-dimensional boundary that it emerges from are equivalent."

This seems a little like selling bottled air. Let me make some spacetime for you.
Oh look, there's a empty spot in the Universe that doesn't have any spacetime. We should fill it.
Got a project that needs extra spacetime? Well, look no further. We make the best quality spacetime available anywhere, period.

Well, it's another analogy experiment, as has been performed for black holes and bubble universes, where physical systems share similar behaviours even though one would think they are radically different. They provides insight into how reality might behave under conditions that we can't currently measure. The universe seems to have quite a few such analogies - another one being between phase transitions in solid state physics and phase transitions in the early universe. We don't know that holographic principles such as anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence are applicable to our universe, but the duality has provided many useful insights. I wouldn't dismiss the experiment as nonsense just because one doesn't understand the mind-bending physics that underpins it.

 

[Will The Serious]

I wouldn't dismiss the experiment as nonsense just because one doesn't understand the mind-bending physics that underpins it.

I don't dismiss the experiment as nonsense. I expect the experiment to be very real. It is true that I don't understand it, and it is true that, to me, it sounds like nonsense. It is because I don't understand it, that I don't dismiss it. But, it is worth a laugh before moving on to understanding. It sounds like instant H2O tablets; just add water.

-Will

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

The experiment does sound outlandish and it is easy for an outsider (which I consider myself now) to think it looks like a scam. However, obtaining money for research is not easy, so the proposal will likely have been closely scrutinised. Such experiments are never that expensive anyway when compared to some big projects that get approved.

 

[Will The Serious]

There are writings that come down from the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, Perhapse Babylon, as well. Parmenides of Elia wrote a description of his decent into Tartarus where he met The Goddess. She revealed to him the secrets behind the Universe. This was not an uncommon story. This kind of wisdom often came from the realm of the dead and usually a goddess or woman who gave this information. The Greeks would "incubate" in caves below ground, to travel to the lands of the dead. Mount Etna was a major center for such activities. Returning from this place was thought of as returning from the dead. There are those who tie these ideas to the story of Lazarus returning from the dead.

I had my own dream in which I met this goddess and she stood by a curtain/door, behind which was access to know the fundamental structure of all things. She pulled this curtain back, opened this door (both were one and the same, curtain and door). I was surrounded by all the Universe. The stars, celestial bodies, elements, pin points of distant light in the black space of the Cosmos. When she opened the curtain, I knew I would know what lay behind it all, like the scaffold and bracing of a theater set, but what I saw behind the curtain was nothing. It was more nothing than conceivable, the goddess, the heavens, the door/curtain, all disappeared and I woke up just when I realized I, also was nothing.

This is the reason the hermetic societies, such as the Pythagorians did not allow the uninitiated to know their teachings. It was too horrifying to allow the unprepared to see.

-Will

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I had two separate dreams about what I now interpret as the nature of reality when I was under general anaesthetic as a small child. That's quite odd as my understanding is that you're not supposed to dream under anaesthesia - emergence delirium is possible but not REM sleep.

One dream was that reality consists of vast numbers of what looked like soap bubbles floating in a dark void with each bubble containing a universe. A disembodied voice explained to me that "This is how things are." Nothing was visible within the bubbles - just swirling interference fringes on their surfaces as you see on soap bubbles. I'm not sure where the illumination was supposed to be coming from so that I could see anything, but it was a dream, after all.

The other dream was that everything that happens is the result of processing a vastly long tape through a tape head and then I got stuck onto the tape and processed into oblivion by the tape head - the whole thing being accompanied by weird sounds similar to those used in David Lynch's Eraserhead.

These experiences were in the 1960s - before I'd heard of bubble universes, the holographic principle, Turing machines and David Lynch or seen Eraserhead. The shock of recognition when I did encountered these things was almost visceral.

Most people should avoid telling their dreams to others as no-one wants to know. I only thought to mention these because they were so strange and that I can remember them. Any other normal dream I forget within minutes of waking. For most people, experiences during REM sleep do not get transferred to permanent memory because of relatively low levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine (aka noradrenaline) during the sleeping state - one of its functions being to enhance the formation and retrieval of memory.

I'm not saying my experiences have any validity - they were probably just weird hallucinations that I retrofitted to stuff I learnt later.