castel,

I would take issue with the idea that "dimensions are the unchanging realities."

If we consider the evolution of the concept, dimensions originate as a modeling tool. They are based on geometric coordinates. As they were applied in real world situations, such as geography, it became evident such models were inherently flexible, such as a straight line in space and a...

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castel,

I would take issue with the idea that "dimensions are the unchanging realities."

If we consider the evolution of the concept, dimensions originate as a modeling tool. They are based on geometric coordinates. As they were applied in real world situations, such as geography, it became evident such models were inherently flexible, such as a straight line in space and a straight line on the earth's surface were not the same thing. As topography became ever more complex and we started laying holographic spaces on top of one another, dimensionality multiplied. The fact remains though, they are a model of reality, not some mathematical basis for it. Your coordinate system and your neighbor's could very well produce completely different perspectives of the same space, so wouldn't there effectively be a three dimensional coordinate system for every point of reference and thus space is infinitely dimensional?

Now consider how it is that time is treated as a dimension, rather than a dynamic process: The basis of human knowledge and causal logic is the linear narrative. Whether the ability to tell a coherent story, or construct a rational argument, it is the ability to draw out the series of consecutive steps. This is the basis of every discipline you can name, whether it's history, math, literature, science, etc.

The problem is that this is an observation of the process, rather than participation in it. We think of time as though it were a book, going from beginning to end, with each step following the previous. The dimension of time then, is like the frames of a film, with each step as its own unit and we, or the light of the projector, goes from one to the next.

Consider though, how the process of time actually happens, as we are physically participating in it: There is this sea of energy all around us and we move through it, as it swirls about, we consume information carrying doses of energy and out of them, process conceptual units of thought. Then more information/energy pours in and we have to transition to the next thought. So for our minds, time is that series of thoughts we process. The larger reality is less linear and more cumulative though. While we must mentally maintain a coherent stream of consciousness in order not to become completely disoriented, the environment isn't always so cooperative and frequently relevant and necessary information isn't provided in a linear fashion. For that reason, our brains have two sides. The rational, left brain is a form of clock, that coalesces information into a reasonably coherent train of sequential thoughts, while the emotional right brain is more of a thermostat, in that it is constantly acting on and reacting to the cumulative energies and processing the information at a subconscious level, then feeding what is deemed most important to the conscious brain in order to steer the physical actions.

So for this subconscious emotional brain, reality is not a neat sequential series of constructed perceptions, but a mass of input that must be edited quickly and mostly ignored. Its main area of concern is not consideration of past events and planning for future ones, but merely processing what is constantly present. Instead of being the frames of the film, all neatly laid out in a series, it is more like the projector light, flashing on what is in front of it, as this information streams by, from being in the future, to being in the past. The need to sequence is a consequence of our mobility and need to navigate. Plants have very effective thermostats to monitor their physical reality, but no central sequencing function because they don't have to move. That sequencing function is a higher order developmental trait.

This dichotomy plays out across much of our conscious existence. Men tend to be more linear, while women tend towards a more cumulative view of life. Western religions tend to be more action oriented and based on narrative tales of moving through context in search of ideals, while eastern religions tend to be more contemplative and observant of natural processes as they happen, rather than being the agent of change. Also they tend to worship the ancestors which are their foundations, rather than worshipping ideals to which they aspire/wish to travel to, as western religions do.

So it happens they have opposing views of time, with the western view being that future is in front of the observer and the past behind, because that is how ones motion carries ones perspective. The eastern view is of the past in front of the observer, because it has already happened and can be seen, while the future is behind, because when one is not moving, but witnessing, the information of events goes by, on to other places and observers.

I do agree that space is fundamental, as both absolute equilibrium state and infinitely boundless. I don't know that I would consider it a substance though, but permeated by substance. As you say, it isn't space which bends, but the matter traversing it. There are two, somewhat contradictory, descriptions of Relativity, which seem to co-exist without being fully acknowledged. One holds that space is completely relative and it is only the relative motion of one frame to another which distorts the perception of rates of motion, aka time, in each other. So that if two frames moved by one another at C, it would only appear the other frames clock has stopped. The other description holds that a clock in a frame at rest actually moves faster than one in a frame affected by velocity, acceleration or gravity.

In the second, space acts as a form of equilibrium state, such that anything moving through it will have their atomic motion slowed, since the combination of external velocity and internal activity cannot produce any motion exceeding C. Thus something traveling at close to C will still measure light traveling at C because their own sense of time has been slowed. Since clocks of GPS satellites must be calibrated to their gravitational fields and accelerated frames, it would seem there is a real effect and not just perception of other frames. A possible experiment would be to scatter clocks out in space and determine which runs fastest. This clock would then be the one closest to the pure equilibrium of space.

I think the first is wrong. It would mean another reality could be passing through ours as a form of light and we would be passing through theirs as light. Obviously difficult to disprove, but if the second description is true, then the first cannot be. Someone with more knowledge might tell me where I'm wrong on this, but so far it's been a point which receives little response.

Which is to say that I many regards, we are in agreement, but I think some concepts, such as dimensionality and especially the dimensionality of time, fall in the category of emergent models/language tools, rather than aspects of a more fundamental reality.

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Edwin,

(I realize you probably prefer Gene, but Edwin's an old family name, brother, cousin, uncle, grandfather, great...)

Doesn't solve the duration problem, as in?

Consider it from my point of the dimension of time going future to past, rather than traveling the dimension from past to future: The clock ticks. Duration isn't it moving along a fourth dimension to the next...

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Edwin,

(I realize you probably prefer Gene, but Edwin's an old family name, brother, cousin, uncle, grandfather, great...)

Doesn't solve the duration problem, as in?

Consider it from my point of the dimension of time going future to past, rather than traveling the dimension from past to future: The clock ticks. Duration isn't it moving along a fourth dimension to the next tick, but the effect of that first tick fading away, like ripples on a pond and then preparing the action of the next tick. Duration isn't a vector, but a cumulative process. It is only when we try to think of both ticks in some form of order that the vector and the linear conception of duration arises. The hamster isn't going anywhere. It's just spinning that wheel.

As for whether particles are waves, or waves are a bunch of particles, it seems to me that particles, as they are described, amount to tiny vortices and are more a function of polarities, rather than what we might think of as mass, but I haven't studied it enough. My approach to physics is peeling away as many layers as I can comprehend and knowing when I'm getting lost.

As for the fuzzy part, think of a Planck unit: Presumably it is the smallest possible measure, but in order to actually be a measure, we would have to define its parameters, which would require an even smaller measure, no? So it would have to be fuzzy, right? It just seems to me that when you push the concept of measurement to its limits, it naturally breaks down. This seems to be the problem with Quantum theory.

As for being a Unitarist, is that based on the concept of unity, or unit, because they are profoundly different. Unity is a state of connected equilibrium, while a unit is a defined set. Which is not unified, because it differentiates between what is inside and outside the set. Confusing these two is the primary fallacy of monotheism. The unified state of the absolute is basis, not apex. It is source, not ideal. A spiritual absolute would be the primordial essence of life and being from which we rise, not a moral and intellectual ideal from which we fell. Good and bad are not a metaphysical dual between the forces of light and darkness, but the basic biological binary code. Amoebae are attracted to the beneficial and repelled by the detrimental. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken, yet there is no clear line where the chicken ends and the fox begins. Life is a process of creation and consumption as it bootstraps itself upward. Between black and white are all the colors of the spectrum, not just shades of gray.

Organized religion was originally polytheistic. That is because gods were what we would call memes today. Basic concepts to which the larger group accepted, such as the singularity and status of the group one is immersed in, geographic and astronomical features, seasons of the year, cultural activities, such as celebration, war, death, sex, sleep, illness, etc. All the myriad connections between these concepts naturally lead to a pantheistic network in a mythology of allegorical relationships. This pantheistic wholism is difficult for many to grasp today, let alone thousands of years ago, so it was natural to have this state defined as a unit and then to give it some form. The adult human male being the logical default option, but as an ideal it overlooks the regenerative process by which the old die and are replaced by the next generation and so monotheism doesn't naturally recycle itself, as the various forms attest.

I tend to avoid religious discussions, since minds tend to be set, but this seems similar to your views, though from a sociological, rather than physical perspective.

Also, a Big Bang model of the universe is unit based, not unity based, since it posits the entire universe as a single unit and the mind is naturally drawn to the possibility of others, as is arising in multiverse proposals.

Ask yourself a simple question about geometry: Is zero, in geometry, the initial point, or is it the blank state?

By and large, zero is generally considered the initial point, but as I argued with dimensionless points, this is not logically so. In reality, zero in geometry should be the blank state. This neutral field is the fundamental unity. It is the absolute of space. Geometry doesn't create space with all its dimensions, but only defines it.

I think with your conscious field theory, you are adding an emergent property by ascribing it volition. Yes, we cannot truly have physical consciousness without the manifestation of will, but that asks: Will against what? That is the initial division. We as mortal, mobile beings cannot function without divisions, in order to distinguish, to create, to progress, etc, but I think if you really want to jump off into the void, much like the eastern mystics, you need to see even beyond volition, beyond the attraction of the good and repulsion of the bad. Not to say you want to stay there long and you won't come back quite the same, but it does put everything in its context.

You are thinking of consciousness in terms of the point, the singularity. What I'm asking is for you to think of it in terms of the unbounded state. It isn't unity in the sense of a central entity, but a network of connectedness. Much more of the original polytheistic entities in a pantheistic context. Tribal gods and guardian angels, Gaia and Apollo. Coming and going, birth and death. The fact is that while we might recognize the sense of self in others, that doesn't always make it a connection. Especially if these entities have reason to compete, since there is not a sense of fundamental loss, should one be lost, as the self always wins and becomes stronger. As they say, the winners write the history books. It is a bottom up process and every living being is a complete line of connection back to the origin of life on this planet, but in every generation, many who start life, fail to pass it on and their connection is broken. Not trying to be harsh, but this is a discussion of how the laws function. This is why you need to distinguish between a unit and unity.

I like your idea of consciousness as a field that is stronger in the human brain and weaker in less complex contexts. You compare it to gravity, but another comparison might be focus, as in a lens. We are a focusing of this field of consciousness, compared to a tree, which would be rather unfocused consciousness. In a sense, these are opposite, but complementary descriptions, since gravity is a concentration of mass, while focus is a concentration of energy. Gravity would represent the multiplying structural order of thought, while energy would be the expanding vitality of raw beingness.

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Edwin,

Sound's like you are dropping the conversation. Sorry to hear that, as the discussions on fqxi have been a bit thin lately and I haven't found any sites quite like it. I suspect things will liven up when they start the next contest though.

I must say we do hold fairly opposing positions on the validity of the Big Bang model though, but it doesn't look like I'm convincing...

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Edwin,

Sound's like you are dropping the conversation. Sorry to hear that, as the discussions on fqxi have been a bit thin lately and I haven't found any sites quite like it. I suspect things will liven up when they start the next contest though.

I must say we do hold fairly opposing positions on the validity of the Big Bang model though, but it doesn't look like I'm convincing you and I see too many holes between all the areas of elaborate maths not to think a profound bias towards definition has us wrapping up a theory of the universe a little too quickly. Having followed the evolution of the theory since I was a teenager in the seventies and having started to question it in the late eighties upon learning expansion and gravitational contraction have to be balanced and discussing it on the internet from the mid nineties, I find it to have the momentum of a movement, in which believers rise and doubters are excluded.

In that regard, you might want to examine just what parts of the theory you like and why, because they will necessarily become tangled with the parts you don't like. This is from Andrei Linde's website: http://www.stanford.edu/~alinde/

"Inflationary theory describes the very early stages of the evolution of the Universe, and its structure at extremely large distances from us. For many years, cosmologists believed that the Universe from the very beginning looked like an expanding ball of fire. This explosive beginning of the Universe was called the big bang. In the end of the 70's a different scenario of the evolution of the Universe was proposed. According to this scenario, the early universe came through the stage of inflation, exponentially rapid expansion in a kind of unstable vacuum-like state (a state with large energy density, but without elementary particles). Vacuum-like state in inflationary theory usually is associated with a scalar field, which is often called ``the inflaton field.'' The stage of inflation can be very short, but the universe within this time becomes exponentially large. Initially, inflation was considered as an intermediate stage of the evolution of the hot universe, which was necessary to solve many cosmological problems. At the end of inflation the scalar field decayed, the universe became hot, and its subsequent evolution could be described by the standard big bang theory. Thus, inflation was a part of the big bang theory. Gradually, however, the big bang theory became a part of inflationary cosmology. Recent versions of inflationary theory assert that instead of being a single, expanding ball of fire described by the big bang theory, the universe looks like a huge growing fractal. It consists of many inflating balls that produce new balls, which in turn produce more new balls, ad infinitum. Therefore the evolution of the universe has no end and may have no beginning. After inflation the universe becomes divided into different exponentially large domains inside which properties of elementary particles and even dimension of space-time may be different. Thus the universe looks like a multiverse consisting of many universes with different laws of low-energy physics operating in each of them. Thus, the new cosmological theory leads to a considerable modification of the standard point of view on the structure and evolution of the universe and on our own place in the world. A description of the new cosmological theory can be found, in particular, in my article The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe published in Scientific American, Vol. 271, No. 5, pages 48-55, November 1994. A nice introduction to inflation was written by the journalist and science writer John Gribbin Cosmology for Beginners . The new cosmological paradigm may have non-trivial philosophical implications. In particular, it provides a scientific justification of the cosmological anthropic principle, and allows one to discuss a possibility to create the universe in a laboratory."

Admittedly I don't know enough about vacuum instability to defend it, but I do think the universe is a field effect, with areas of expansion balanced by vortices of contraction and this fundamental dichotomy manifests on many levels, such as the expansion being an "entangled wave state," while collapse results in digitized quanta/particles and that's why, when we try measuring precise energy levels, the process of doing so requires creating the collapse, thus we only "see" particles, while waves remain not quite real. I could go on, but don't want to try your patience, as most professionals wouldn't take the time to understand what I'm trying to say in the first place.

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Hi Don,

1. True, particles are never at absolute rest (absolute zero temperature); however, relativistic rest mass allows us to compare energy content between masses. Special relativity's conclusion, E_0 = mc^2 is based on the rest mass state. The "lowest mass" is zero; energy exchange particles (bosons) are massless. When special relativity is generalized to general relativity, we find...

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Hi Don,

1. True, particles are never at absolute rest (absolute zero temperature); however, relativistic rest mass allows us to compare energy content between masses. Special relativity's conclusion, E_0 = mc^2 is based on the rest mass state. The "lowest mass" is zero; energy exchange particles (bosons) are massless. When special relativity is generalized to general relativity, we find that the two statistical models (bosonic and fermionic) describe one world that is static in time (timeless), and another that is time dependent, which general relativity successfully describes together as an interaction of matter and spacetime that describes the universe as "finite but unbounded." General relativity only fails at the cosmological limit, where a singularity of infinite energy density is theoretically unobtainable in such a world. Einstein would have liked to construct a theory in which mass is merely the consequence of field interactions, and GR was meant to be only a step toward that goal.

Einstein was steeped in classical mechanics, though, and well understood Ernst Mach's mechanical model in which every particle motion is dependent on the motion of every other particle -- so that if one knew the initial state of the system, every subsequent state could be calculated. In Mach's model, space plays no role, and time might be seen as in the context of differing ratios among invisible "gears" that drive particle motion. Mach never did accept the atomic model, in which atoms are made almost entirely of empty space, and neither did he conceive that there are no closed, isolated systems in the universe to which his model could apply. Einstein took Mach's mechanics, coined the term "Mach's Principle," and showed that while neither space nor time have an independent reality -- allowing that spacetime (Minkowski space) is physically real, Mach's model is satisfied for general relativity without superfluous assumptions. But again -- there's that sticky cosmological problem, in which the only known recourse is to eliminate space and time (get rid of the infinitely dense singularity) and go with a quantum origin ("roll the dice").

This latter is what your lambda-hopping idea does -- avoids the singularity, in that a particle changes position without changing structure -- and I know that's why Lev likes it. It is equivalent to saying that a faster than light particle can be defined as one that changes direction without changing velocity; that's a true statement, yet we have no physical reason to believe that a particle of nonzero mass in a curved trajectory does not accelerate. You have to eliminate mass from your model altogether (if it is to be consistent with SR), and when you do that, you have a continuous wave function, not the hopping one.

2. Aspect's experiments validated what we already knew -- that in order for quantum theory to be coherent, nonlocality must be preserved at any scale. Quantum theory would be in serious trouble if Bell's inequality were not violated. Space and time play no role in the experiments, however, except in the sense that spacetime is shown to affect only local interactions (classical physics is local), and not quantum mechanics.

3. You're confusing "point mass" which is a quantum concept, with "mass point" which is classical. Yes, all measurements in GR are between mass points, as in all other classical theories.

Tom

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