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

[Asbo Zaprudder]

This is an interesting take on how and why no two observers may be able to make their subjective experiences agree if there is no such thing as a single objective reality.

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Perhaps we could model subjective conscious experience as a quantum wave function. If this were more fundamental than the quantum fields of QFT, it might be close to the concept of a "soul" - although it might conform more to concepts in Hinduism and Buddhism than in the monotheistic Abrahamic religions. It might also explain the Mandela effect.

"You say Mandela, I say mandala, let's call the whole thing off."

Perhaps one shouldn't Rashomon to judgement.

 

[Will The Serious]

This is an interesting take on how and why no two observers may be able to make their subjective experiences agree if there is no such thing as a single objective reality.

What about quantum entanglement of multiple consciousnesses (consci(ae), consciousi(ae), conscia?)? If there cannot exist two equal perceptions of a single objective reality, there may exist an entangled perception between two percievers. This could explain phenomena such as mass hallucinations.

-Will

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

What about quantum entanglement of multiple consciousnesses (consci(ae), consciousi(ae), conscia?)? If there cannot exist two equal perceptions of a single objective reality, there may exist an entangled perception between two percievers. This could explain phenomena such as mass hallucinations.

I believe "consciousnesses" is the plural form.

The word "perceivers" follows the spelling rule "i before e except after c". Words where that rule doesn't apply include species, science, sufficient, society, seize, vein, weird, heist, their, feisty, foreign, and protein. (A list I nicked from Wikipedia.)

As to your speculation, I have no idea. If no theory can be developed that makes a falsifiable prediction, it's metaphysics. I have no clue how consciousnesses get entangled. The whole idea smells somewhat of solipsism.

 

[Will The Serious]

It is solipsism, a legitimate philosophical position of epistemology, but not much value for scientific inquiry. However, it may provide a framework within which the limits of science experimentation can be conducted.

-Will

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Well, I hope these guys don't ruin their careers by chasing what to orthodox scientists appear to be fantastical, even heretical ideas. If you'd asked me a year or two ago, I would have been sceptical as well, but now I think pursuing outlandish notions is not ridiculous given the bizarre nature of quantum mechanics. As long as no-one expects me to understand or explain any of it...

 

[FlyingLemons]

Physics seems to have been stuck in a rut for decades - possibly due to incorrect conceptualisations and inadequate mathematics. I'm hoping that LLMs will provide new insights, but perhaps Stephen Wolfram is correct and we're bound by the limits set by computational irreducibility.

Mostly because theoretical physics (at least in fundamental high energy physics and early universe cosmology) has been stuck on the hook of "If the math is beautiful, it must be right" leading to bad ideas like supersymmetry hanging around far longer than they should, even when they disagree with experiment.

People, for careers and emotional reasons, are unwilling to throw them away.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Mostly because theoretical physics (at least in fundamental high energy physics and early universe cosmology) has been stuck on the hook of "If the math is beautiful, it must be right" leading to bad ideas like supersymmetry hanging around far longer than they should, even when they disagree with experiment.

People, for careers and emotional reasons, are unwilling to throw them away.

I share Eric Weinstein's scepticism regarding QFT and the Standard Model, even though I don't really understand them nearly well enough and some people denounce both him and his notion of geometric unity as fraudulent. The general feeling I get, to adapt the purported comment of Emperor Joseph II of Austria, is "There are simply too many fields".

So much time and effort has been invested over seventy plus years that it would be be very embarrassing to admit that the theories are the latter-day equivalent of Copernican epicycles, if not quite as wrong as Ptolemaic epicycles. Where are Kepler and Newton when you need them?

 

[Will The Serious]

Where are Kepler and Newton when you need them?

Newton, Pascal, and Kepler got together one day and decided, out of boredom, that they might all enjoy a nice game of hide-and-seek. Kepler says, "I'm it. I'll count to ten, then whoever I find last gets to name some new laws."
Kepler closes his eyes and starts counting, "one Mississippi, two Mississippi,..."

Pascal takes off straight away to find a good place to hide.

Newton simply pulls a piece of chalk and a ruler from his pocket and proceeded to draw a square on the ground measuring it carefully, one metre long by one Metre wide.

When Kepker opens his eyes and looks around, he sees Newton standing in the center of his square.

"I found Newton!" Kepler shouts.

"Not so," replied Newton. "You have found one Pascal. A Newton per square Metre."

-Will

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

`

Newton, Pascal, and Kepler got together one day and decided, out of boredom, that they might all enjoy a nice game of hide-and-seek. Kepler says, "I'm it. I'll count to ten, then whoever I find last gets to name some new laws."
Kepler closes his eyes and starts counting, "one Mississippi, two Mississippi,..."

Pascal takes off straight away to find a good place to hide.

Newton simply pulls a piece of chalk and a ruler from his pocket and proceeded to draw a square on the ground measuring it carefully, one metre long by one Metre wide.

When Kepker opens his eyes and looks around, he sees Newton standing in the center of his square.

"I found Newton!" Kepler shouts.

"Not so," replied Newton. "You have found one Pascal. A Newton per square Metre."

-Will

If Newton and Pascal had bet about who would win, would Pascal's wager be forfeit?

If Newton moved five metres to draw his square, and he performed that motion by the time that Kepler had counted to five Mississippi, would he also be five Joules and one Watt? Getting rather crowded in that quadrate outline...

 

[Will The Serious]

If Newton and Pascal had bet about who would win, would Pascal's wager be forfeit?

There's still a Newton in there somewhere, hiding, perhapse in the Invisible College. One would have to use force to isolate Newton into the open.

-Will

 

[publiusr]

In this model—consensus is a weapon of mass distraction

An interesting conversation here

Alena Tensor - a new start for unification and explaining the Dark Sector - Cosmoquest Forum

Hi everyone, The idea I discussed with you in the ATM thread a long time ago (about 12 years) has resulted in the third scientific paper that finally solves the 100-year-old puzzle of physics, unification. Or at least there is much evidence to suggest so. Source: Ogonowski, Piotr, Skindzier...

forum.cosmoquest.org

On SETI

Advanced Civilizations Could be Indistinguishable from Nature

Can civilizations really expand technologically until they build Dyson Spheres? Or do they need to conform to biospheres to survive?

www.universetoday.com

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Re the Alena tensor:

A method to straighten curved space-time

One of the greatest challenges of modern physics is to find a coherent method for describing phenomena, on the cosmic and microscale. For over a hundred years, to describe reality on a cosmic scale we have been using general relativity theory, which has successfully undergone repeated attempts...

phys.org

Frontiers | Developed method: interactions and their quantum picture

By developing the previously proposed method of combining continuum mechanics with Einstein’s field equations, it has been shown that the classic relativisti...

www.frontiersin.org

I am none the wiser. Although it sounds interesting, I just don't have the time or the energy to go down that rabbit hole.

 

[publiusr]

Now there is a finding with regards to a particle that only has mass when going in one direction:

Particle that only has mass when moving in one direction observed for first time

For the first time, scientists have observed a collection of particles, also known as a quasiparticle, that's massless when moving one direction but has mass in the other direction. The quasiparticle, called a semi-Dirac fermion, was first theorized 16 years ago, but was only recently spotted...

phys.org

 

[Will The Serious]

The team's analysis showed the presence of semi-Dirac fermions at the crossing points. Specifically, they appeared massless when moving in a linear path but switched to having mass when moving in a perpendicular direction.

Does this change in state, based upon a direction of travel, indicate some form of absolute or universal direction? Is the direction dependant upon the relationship to the observer, or to the initial direction of travel or to a direction relative to the Earth's magnetic pole, or to the particle's current state? Does the mass less state return when the particle returns again to its original direction of travel? In a 3D coordinate space, a particle can make a perpendicular change in direction on two different axis without returning or doubling back upon its previous directions. What happens when a particle gains mass by turning 90° on the XY plane, then turns 90° again on the XZ plane? Does it double in mass, loose its mass again, or remain unchanged with regard to its mass?

-Will

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

The article is describing a quasiparticle, which models the collective behaviour of a group of particles in a material as though they are a single particle. If you like, it's akin to referring to the behaviour of holes when discussing the physics of semiconductors. The material in this case is a semimetal crystal. The direction is set by the applied magnetic field, which is very strong - up to 17.5T or roughly the magnetic field strength used in MRI scanners. It's certainly an interesting discovery and might have practical applications some day - but we're not talking about real particles here - as much as electrons can be considered real considering they're modelled as field excitations surrounded by clouds of virtual particles.

Physicists Find Particle That Only Has Mass When Moving in One Direction

Scientists have made a satisfying and intriguing physics discovery some 16 years after it was first predicted to be a possibility: a quasiparticle (a group of particles behaving as one) that only has an effective mass when moving in one direction.

www.sciencealert.com

https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.14.041057

 

[publiusr]

Even weirder

Scientists observe 'negative time' in quantum experiments

Scientists have long known that light can sometimes appear to exit a material before entering it—an effect dismissed as an illusion caused by how waves are distorted by matter.

phys.org

 

[Will The Serious]

Scientists have long known that light can sometimes appear to exit a material before entering it—an effect dismissed as an illusion caused by how waves are distorted by matter.
...
When light particles, or photons, pass through atoms, some are absorbed by the atoms and later re-emitted. This interaction changes the atoms, temporarily putting them in a higher-energy or "excited" state before they return to normal.

In research led by Daniela Angulo, the team set out to measure how long these atoms stayed in their excited state. "That time turned out to be negative," Steinberg explained—meaning a duration less than zero.

To visualize this concept, imagine cars entering a tunnel: before the experiment, physicists recognized that while the average entry time for a thousand cars might be, for example, noon, the first cars could exit a little sooner, say 11:59 am. This result was previously dismissed as meaningless.

What Angulo and colleagues demonstrated was akin to measuring carbon monoxide levels in the tunnel after the first few cars emerged and finding that the readings had a minus sign in front of them.

The explanation lies in quantum mechanics, where particles like photons behave in fuzzy, probabilistic ways rather than following strict rules.

Instead of adhering to a fixed timeline for absorption and re-emission, these interactions occur across a spectrum of possible durations—some of which defy everyday intuition.

Critically, the researchers say, this doesn't violate Einstein's theory of special relativity, which dictates that nothing can travel faster than light. These photons carried no information, sidestepping any cosmic speed limits.

Steinberg acknowledged the controversy surrounding their paper's provocative headline but pointed out that no serious scientist has challenged the experimental results.

"We've made our choice about what we think is a fruitful way to describe the results," he said

"Negative time" doesn't seem to accurately represent the described phenomenon. If one could measure changes in the energy state of the photon and the photon appeared to return to a previous state as it passed through matter, counter to some new state it takes on shortly after exiting the matter, then maybe negative time might apply.

The suggestion here is that energy is sometimes lost when matter has light travel through it. That makes sense in a probabilistic quantum universe, but in the end the sum total of energy would be accounted for. Could there be an "attitude" with which a photon can pass by an excited atom and steal some of that excitement? Can we measure changes in the energy state of a photon separate from its travel energy? Might some photons have more or less energy than others, even though they all travel at the same speed? Maybe photons can carry information like a payload, dropping some off and picking more up as they travel. If the initial early photons took information or energy away from the atoms they passed on their way through the matter, like a mail train hooking a sack of letters off the station's mail post without slowing down. The photons would leave that matter with less energy than before they passed, but now there's an empty hook (so to speak) upon which to catch new mail from the next train.

-Will

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

You guys need to read Feynman's popular science book about QED.

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Will The Serious]

Super Radians.
I'm very new to this concept and it doesn't seem to have a broad scope for possible applications to me, but there are some fascinating ideas here.

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OK, In my physics class, my professor talked briefly about the idea that water can heat up well above 100°c without boiling. He explained it, but I can't say I remember his explanation. My own thought, which I suspect is exactly the same as his without the Physics language, is that microwaves agitate the water molecules in a synchronous motion such that they do not bump into each other a their oscilations increase. When you introduce a spoon into your hyper-heated mug, you disturb that synchronized vibration and the water will boil outside of the energy field of the microwaves.

This seems like what may be occurring in the described experiments. I'm unsure as to whether the scientists are saying they have found examples of synchronization in free-space, or just theorize it's possibility. There are a couple of ways I can imagine this happening. One is as I have just described. The other is that non-synchronized atoms interacting with photons may filter themselves out of the system like hitting a group of pool balls with a cue ball. The faster moving balls that travel on a different direction from the collective, exit the vicinity leaving only those balls that are traveling in synch to remain together.

What are the possible applications for synchronized atoms?

-Will

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

The phenomenon you mention is superheating, where phase transition is supressed by removing environmental triggers such as nucleation sites. It's not related to the amplification phenomenon that the video describes, although, of course, charged particles trigger localised boiling in the superheated liquids (usually liquid hydrogen) in bubble chambers.

Astrophysical masers are already a known thing and they don't require a resonant cavity similar to the optical cavity found in a laser. However, this video suggests that perhaps there might exist circumstances within sufficiently transparent matter containing molecules with electric dipole moments, where reinforcement could happen, although this is not thought to be the case for megamasers in active galactic nuclei. It's an interesting thought though. Megamasers have been observed for hydroxyl (OH), water (H2O), formaldehyde (H2CO), and methine (CH). I think all of those molecules have electric dipole moments, but I haven't checked. Certainly, water and formaldehyde do and the known electronegativities of the atoms in OH and CH would suggest that they do.

I don't think the synchronisation implied is bulk motion of the lasing medium (although I might be wrong). I think it just means that under the right conditions, the electric dipole of the molecules conspire to support reinforcement of the photonic signal as a cavity resonator or optical cavity would. Manmade cavities are designed to have a large Q factor*, meaning a beam undergoes many oscillation cycles with little attenuation. The result is that the spread of output frequencies is small compared to the resonant frequency of the cavity.

* The quality factor or Q factor is a dimensionless parameter that describes the degree of underdamping of an oscillator or resonator.