[notime] Previous 'No Time' correspondence - Is a shadow a 2 dimensional object?
Daniel Schroder
dan.schroder at hotmail.com
Wed Aug 19 07:59:30 MST 2015
Hey everyone--
Just wanted to share the latest piece I wrote. It's basically an interim column contemplating the big bang, before I try to tackle Rob's official no-time/no-motion theory for a second time, through the lens of the "Tesseract" at the end of the film Interstellar.
I'm just an amateur that's been writing to about 30 friends via email for years, about weird/paranormal/existential science topics. Please forgive any lack of context in this and subsequent re-postings...thanks.
--Dan
----------------------------------------------
As a follow-up to a couple of science columns ago where we showed how
the traditional understanding of the big bang was deeply flawed -- but
didn't offer much in the way of a solid alternative -- let's try to keep
chipping away at "the beginning." The beginning of our third
dimensional (+ time) existence seems important enough to revisit as many
times as necessary.
With the no-time/no-motion theory still
fresh in our minds, let's roll on out like Guy
Fieri on his way to a diner...
South Beach Science 8.18.15 - Interstellar, Vol. 4
One
of the big, looming facts that physicists are forced to consider when
postulating on how our universe came to be is how perfectly the initial
expansion of mass and energy had to be tuned/balanced/calibrated in
order for an inhabitable universe to have come into existence.
The
last time we were on this topic, we focused on how the distribution of
the cosmic background microwave radiation (lovingly renamed
"temperature") in the universe was distributed too evenly, such that the
original big bang theory was no longer feasible. There must have been a
secondary, accompanying event to normalize the distribution, which
physicists commonly refer to as "inflation."
Today, let's try
to forget about the big bang and inflation for a moment, in terms of
guessing what the universe's behavior was when it all began. Don't
worry about what it looked like or if ridiculously smart people can
really "rewind the tape" all the way to the big bang or not on the
chalkboards of MIT and Cambridge.
Instead, let's focus on the scientifically-accepted fact that such an exact
initial expansion/(explosion strength) was necessary to achieve the
delicate balance that would allow globs of mass to successfully clump
into stars, planets, moons and assorted space rock.
Here's now physicists have been known to explain it:
If the theoretical initial explosion happened to be just a tiny bit MORE powerful than it turned out to be, everything would have been expanding outwards too fast
for globs of mass to coalesce and clump into something meaningful.
(Think Sandra Bullock and George Clooney helplessly floating away from
each other without enough Gravity or other forces to give them a chance to ever hug again -- in the absence of jet power and friction.)
If the theoretical initial explosion happened to be just a tiny bit LESS powerful than it turned out to be, everything would have been expanding
outwards too slowly for globs of mass to get far enough away from
each other before coalescing and clumping. The mass of the newborn
universe would have ultimately "hugged it out" too much, turned into one
giant mass, and eventually collapsed on itself.
Our physical universe is basically the ultimate teeter totter balancing act.
When using the word tiny
in terms of how exact the power calibration of the explosion had to be
at the beginning for the teeter totter to balance, we're talking in the
ballpark of a one-in-a quintillion chance. It's actually even rarer than that.
A
million has six zeros, and a billion has nine. A trillion has twelve
zeros, and a quadrillion has fifteen. We're talking eighteen zeros,
friends! The chances of what we're experiencing today being the result
of a single random initial explosion/expansion are less than
one-in-1,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Another way of looking at
this is that on average, it would take about that many -- a quintillion
-- "big bang attempts" before the universe we now know would have had a
50/50 chance to take shape as it ultimately did. (Not to mention the
subsequent billions years of rock-hugging and celestial marination
before there would be life.)
Maybe there were about a quintillion
natural or intelligent big bang attempts. Maybe there were many fewer
attempts. Maybe there was only one. That's what we're trying to figure
out :).
There are (snort laugh) "roughly" a quintillion grains
of sand on Earth, if you were to count each one on each beach or sandy
area on the planet.
You'd have to pick the one lucky
grain of sand on all the earth's beaches on the first try. That's how
crazy a single big bang being both random and successful would be. Way
past bat poop crazy.
Or maybe there was a natural or intelligent
phenomenon that essentially repeatedly tried to impregnate our
dimensions with a new physical existence for say -- ninety times --
before striking the balance just right and giving birth to a sustainable physical universe.
Ninety is a fun number because it allows us to put this long-shot in terms of the worst scratch off lotto ticket imaginable!
I
could give you six winning numbers to match, and then individually
number every grain of sand on earth. Then I'll let you ("scratch off")
pick any fifteen grains of sand on earth. To win, in your fifteen
choices, you have to pick one of the six lucky numbers that would allow
life to exist thirteen billion years later should you pick right. Okay,
play...
Did you win? Um...no, you didn't.
Here's another less-convoluted metaphor:
In the excellent movie Whiplash,
a fancy pants jazz band conductor asks a drummer to follow his exact
tempo. He barely gives him a quick "aaand a one..two.." with an
accompanying baton flick each time, and then repeatedly yells at the
drummer for being too slow or too fast.
Most moviegoers
listening to the drum tempo with our naked ears can't perceive the
drummer's tempo being slow or fast. The supposed slight tempo problem
is perceptible only to Law & Order's Dr. Emil Skoda, who apparently moonlights as a jazz band conductor.
Here's the point:
It's
really hard to notice that the tempo is wrong, but it's believable
within the plot that this conductor is really that freaking talented and
he's perceiving the error. But if a drummer's tempo were a quintillionth of a second slow,
even the fanciest a-hole jazz band conductor's brain wouldn't be able
to sense it. The tempo error would be the equivalent of falling one
second behind after you were 31 trillion years into the song. That's a
long-ass song. Hopefully there's a long Prince guitar solo mixed in there somewhere.
Now
that we understand the scale of how improbable our human existence is
from a purely random/organic/scientific standpoint if there has only
been one random/freak-occurrence big bang attempt, let's try to come up
with a couple of reasonable paths of belief:
1) There were
many, many, many "big bang attempts" - and finally there was one that
started 13.8 billion years ago that was ridiculously perfect enough to
eventually lead to life.
There are a few problems with this
belief, other than the obvious stretch that there were quadrillions of
big bang attempts before the universe got lucky.
My first
question for physicists and anyone else who argues for this position and
still believes that time exists is: where the heck are all these other
universes that didn't collapse on themselves but just expanded too
quickly for mass to clump?
Those ice-cold, lonely universes must have been (and still be) taking up a lot of space somewhere for
eons and eons. They can't be the almost infinite parallel (to ours)
universes we contemplate the existence of, because there's no life on
them. They couldn't have been sucked into a different dimension that we
can't sense, because then how come we didn't get sucked into that same
different dimension? Because we were expanding less rapidly from our
particular big bang? None of this makes any sense.
Second, if
you believe that time exists, and that some Darwin-adjace progression of
endless big bang attempts finally led to our physical universe in this
dimension, then when did those attempts start? Were they just like
rapid fireworks that happened quickly one after another about 13.8
billion years ago before we got our one lucky iteration? Or are we
talking billions of years of natural trial and error before our 13.8
billion year modern era?
Regardless of which way time-believers
answer the question above, when did "time" begin? And how was it
progressing while nothing was actually happening "before" the big bang
attempts commenced?
Just like some of us have seen the light
and now believe that motion does not exist because time doesn't, the
reverse holds true for anyone who thinks that there was time passing during a state of nothingness
before the big bang attempts began. You can't have it both ways,
time-believers. You can't say that there was "a beginning to time," and
it took place when the (successful) big bang attempt happened.
Either time has always existed or it has never existed.
Nobody
on either side of the (time exists/time doesn't exist) argument is
diputing the fact that time is a measurement of change. Whether that
change is taking place on the second hand of a clock/watch, or with our
long glimpses of the Sun as Earth rotates. You can't have time without
change.
If you believe that time was flipped on for the first
time somewhere in between the first big bang attempt and the successful
one, then do you concede that time could theoretically be flipped off
again should our physical universe ever collapsed on itself and return
to a pre-big bang state of nothingness? If so, you're saying in effect
that the change or lack thereof is the time, in the ultimate tail-wagging-the-dog metaphor.
So
if you're with me that path #1 (quadrillions of big bang attempts) is
completely implausible in a world where time is real and implausible regardless,
try this next "Equal Opportunity Theory" on for size...it requires no
prerequisites on either the "time exits" or "intelligent design/natural
occurrence" fronts:
2) On exactly one occasion, two or more higher dimensions crashed into or
"crossed the streams" with each other, resulting in a single big
bang/inflation event and the existence of our physical universe.
The
big difference between this one and #1 is that it goes a long way to
getting around our one-in-a-quintillion problem. For us laypeople who
have always struggled to conceptualize the big bang because it seemed so
fake right off the bat with its "there was nothing, and then there was
something" initial two steps, welcome to a new and refreshing way to
view the possible birth of the place where we exist!
>From within
our little simplistic bubble of a universe with only three dimensions
and a possible time constraint, great human minds in 2015 can seemingly
mathematically prove that our incredibly vast reality has expanded
outwards from something much smaller than a single atom. These humans
have chalkboards, chalk and highly sophisticated brains, so we're not
here to doubt them.
For simplicity's sake going forward, let's
call the tiny, tiny thing or area of space that was much smaller than a
single atom: "nothing."
So the "nothing" is still the same
"nothing" that our quintillion-to-one dilemma begins with, except this
time we're not saying that our colliding higher dimensions were a single
big bang attempt. And we're not saying that higher dimensions rubbed
into each other a quadrillion times before the third dimension got
lucky.
We're saying that everything in dimensions higher than
ours was and is indisputably "real," and in some fashion that we can't
yet grasp, had already BEEN fine-tuned to the tune of a
one-in-a-quintillion chance.
The magic happened before our
third-dimensional universe was created with a big bang-type event. Or
if time doesn't exist, has always been happening.
Try to stop
thinking of our universe as something that was built from scratch and
required amazing precision to be sustainable enough to eventually lead
to life. And start thinking of our universe as a
projection/shadow/byproduct/derivative/"new point of view" of the real everything.
You
know how mixing red paint and blue paint will make purple paint? Think
of purple as a color that didn't exist until the first time red and
blue were combined, be it accidentally or purposely. Now think of
dimension four (D4) as red and dimension five (D5) as blue.
You
don't need to combine red and blue a few times or a few quadrillion
times before you get lucky and produce purple. Luck is not involved,
just like "at the beginning" of our universe it wasn't. You could say
that D4 and D5 randomly intersected/touched and farted out our purple
D3. Or your could believe as I do that our souls or God proactively
mixed red and blue
Or you could take it even a step further,
and say that our purple universe was inevitable, because D4 and D5 are
like the red and blue plastic translucent "lenses" on 3D glasses. And
the whole secret to the physical universe's behavior is the cycle in
which light leaks down to us here from swiss cheese-type holes on the
virtual roof of our third dimension that we call "stars." Refracting
in such a way that our physical universe is just a giant pulsating realm
that happens to have been expanding for the past 13.8 billion years and
allowing us to watch one mediocre 3D Marvel film after the next.
You could take God completely out of the equation and still get excited by the phrase "let there be light."
You
could re-read the last few paragraphs from a "what if the no-time,
no-motion theory is true?" perspective and realize that they make even more sense.
Or you could just wait until we finally spoil Interstellar
next "time." Because Christopher Nolan has already provided us with the
ultimate metaphorical visualization for how time doesn't truly exist.
I suspect that we will have to fully understand 'no-time' before we can truly conceptualize the beginning.
Coming in Interstellar, Vol. 5: The Tesseract
*South Beach 3D Peace*
P.S.
H2's The Universe is in its seventh season of greatness. All
fifteen episodes of season one are available on Netflix. This includes
"The Microscopic Universe" episode about subatomic physics that spawned
the piece on the subject of wave-particle duality, and the "God and The
Universe" episode that inspires today's offering. You can also see
random episodes for free (but usually with commercials) by installing
the History Channel app on your smartphone.
There's something nice about watching The Universe
while you're also deep in the weeds of thought on subjects relating to
the true nature of our existence. And it's also a standalone
informative and entertaining show, even if you don't personally care to
venture as deep into existential gibberish as we often do here.
Date: Sun, 9 Aug 2015 17:03:38 +0200
From: jeannekamikaze at gmail.com
To: akinetochronism at robsworld.org
Subject: Re: [notime] Previous 'No Time' correspondence - Is a shadow a 2 dimensional object?
Well, being a computer graphics guy, I find it easy to think of a shadow as the projection of an object onto one or multiple planes. In fact, that's how old games implemented shadows: they would draw the geometry twice, once to get the object rendered on the screen, and a second pass with the object's transform multiplied by a projection matrix that would smash the object onto the ground. By this definition, shadows are planar / 2-dimensional objects.
One can then grab two 3d objects and arrange them so that their shadows partially overlap, or so that one shadow completely contains the other. The shadows occupy the same physical space, but the "real" 3d objects from which the shadows are created do not (or at least not necessarily). By extension, the 3d objects can themselves be projections of higher-dimensional objects. The 3d objects can then be made to overlap, without making any assumptions on whether the higher-dimensional objects from which they are created are themselves overlapping. Additionally, two overlapping, higher-dimensional objects can spawn non-overlapping 3d objects by using different projection functions for both. So the fact that two objects overlap or not in one dimension does not say anything about those same objects overlapping in higher dimensions.
On 9 August 2015 at 16:23, Robert Vaessen <notime at robsworld.org> wrote:
All -
As I mentioned in a previous post - I’m planning to re-post some of my previous ‘No Time’ conversations in the ‘Akinetochronism’ forum. Here’s an old email from Mike D. It’s a good example of non-elastic thinking. Some people simply can’t think outside the box. They are constrained by traditional thoughts on physics and they feel that they must restrain others from thinking different. I’ve received many spiteful emails over the years (perhaps you have as well) - Thankfully they haven’t deterred me from expressing my personal opinions in a way that doesn’t disparage or insult other people. Your opinions are valuable - Please feel free to disagree with my ‘No Time / No Motion’ ideas, but lets keep the conversation civil.
In the email below - Does this person argue that existence is limited to objects with three dimensions? Would anyone care to argue how a shadow doesn’t exist? As far as I can tell, a shadow can be sensed with our ability of sight, and it can be measured to have at least two dimensions (height x width). Doesn’t that in fact make it a 2 dimensional object? As a matter of fact, I can’t think of any other ‘object’ or class of objects that satisfy the requirements for something being two dimensional. Can you think of something (other than a shadow) that has two measurable dimensions, but not three?
The discussion regarding 2 dimensional objects led me to speculate that there are in fact ‘higher’ or multiple dimensions. That the actions of higher dimensional objects or beings may in fact have an effect upon us. Can multiple objects occupy the same physical space? Here I was attempting to demonstrate that objects in different dimensions can occupy the same physical space - provided they are separated from the other objects by their residence in another dimensional realm. This is an instrumental part of my ‘No Time / No Motion’ ideas. All these possible matter states occupy the same physical space. They’re separated from each other in a multi-dimensional array of possible matter states. I envision it more as a probability state or matrix than actual physical copies (with very minor differences) of each possible matter state.
When a node (matter state) is examined/observed/processed the probable/possible matter state is resolved. A collapse or resolution of molecular constituents occurs, and we observe the matter state that defines the node that we are observing. Does reality coalesce from a multi-dimensional quantum foam as we observe our environment? As we focus our senses or process the particulars of a particular nodal position we bring our reality into focus with a deterministic result.
- Robert
Email from ‘Mike D’ - May 26, 2006
Really think about this...
(Quoting Robert Vaessen: http://www.robsworld.org/notime.html>) "The shadow occupies
the same physical space as the solid object without displacing it (No
sidetracking on the other effects at this point). So here we can see
that multidimensional objects can coexist simultaneously within
the same space. A 2 dimensional object and a 3 dimensional object
can occupy the same physical space."
Of course a shadow doesn't displace anything... a shadow does not
exist. A shadow does not occur in the same space as the object
blocking the light. A shadow occurs when an object blocks protons from
continuing on their path. The shadow is merely an area that is not
being illuminated by light.
It is irresponsible to post something like your "Time does not exist"
page on the Internet. People might actually read it and believe it.
Not that you are wrong, who really knows, but the content is atrocious.
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