Thinking Straight About Curved Space

[Obvious Leo]

At a rate of one year per year but it sometimes feels faster than that!

I know how you feel because I'm pretty sure I've got a few years head start on you. However this wasn't the point I was trying to make. Is it not the case that if a single photon within you moves a single Planck length then you are no longer the same nix?

[nix]

Is it not the case that if a single photon within you moves a single Planck length then you are no longer the same nix?

let's take out the double negative:" Is it the case that if a single photon within you moves a single Planck length then you are the same leo"? (By the way you might enjoy Feynman's lecture on gravitation I just noticed its on you tube under the "character of physical law")

[nix]

Q :" Is it the case that if a single photon within you moves a single Planck length then you are the same leo"?

There are a number of problems lurking... are we talking about personal identity (what it is to be a person?) and all the philosophical debate that has raged there?

I suspect from your writing that you want to answer that you are not the same, that you are a not a "being", but are a "becoming" and so a continuing process of change... That is an existential position I have sympathy with. But I don't feel this has to be anchored in physics, and that doing so somewhat clouds the issue because physics is a different sort of enquiry: its concepts and the "rules of the game" there do not map onto the sort of questions you are asking of it.

I don't know how to answer the question; enquiry as to the physical basis of personhood and identity cloud the issue. If you were asking "is a certain collection of physical stuff the same if its components were shuffled about", even that is problematic if the shuffling brought forth new qualities (say a phase transition for example) then it is not the same, but in other circumstances where no new phenomena can occur then it is the same. You don't have to invoke the planck length; are you the same if you move one meter to your left? How much of you needs to be surgically removed before you cease to be the same? Are you the same after digesting your latest meal and so incorporating the molecules from the food as part of your body?

You want to use the planck length,L, as the smallest possible physical distance and light as the fastest physical velocity, C, to say
the smallest physically meaningful time is L/c and that change occurs on that scale. But no chemical reactions respond on that time scale, (the fastest chemical processes are thirty orders of magnitude slower than this) and any physical changes that I would recognize as meaningful in a debate on "have I changed?" are considerably slower than that.

[Obvious Leo]

There are a number of problems lurking... are we talking about personal identity (what it is to be a person?) and all the philosophical debate that has raged there?

No. Such a discussion is not irrelevant to my philosophy but it is not the specific point I'm trying to get at.

I suspect from your writing that you want to answer that you are not the same, that you are a not a "being", but are a "becoming" and so a continuing process of change... That is an existential position I have sympathy with. But I don't feel this has to be anchored in physics, and that doing so somewhat clouds the issue because physics is a different sort of enquiry: its concepts and the "rules of the game" there do not map onto the sort of questions you are asking of it.

Now we're getting somewhere at last. Physics is indeed a different sort of enquiry and I've tried to stress all along that I don't take issue with the enquiry that physics poses for itself. Neither have I ever suggested that the epistemic models of physics are in any sense "wrong" when examined within the parameters of such an enquiry. What I'm saying is that the problem of physics is not a problem of physics at all but a conceptual problem related to the way in which we as humans think the world. I'm taking this different line of approach by internalising this personal narrative and looking at the universe from inside out. I'm certain we can agree that physics always approaches its defined tasks by placing the observer outside of his observation and examining reality from the outside looking in. When we do this we immediately freeze-frame our observation and find ourselves analysing a snapshot. This is not the real world. When we look at the moon we are not looking at the real moon but a holographic representation of the moon as it WAS. The moon is continuously becoming a different moon and the only meaningful statements we can make about it are always 1.3 seconds out of date. In the case of the moon this time interval is of no great consequence but in the case of a distant galaxy it means that we can in fact make NO meaningful statements about it. The bloody thing might not even exist any more. Physics is modelling the universe in the language of objects moving in space but because the speed of light is finite this is a flawed narrative. This is purely the world of the observer who has frozen his observation into a single snapshot by spatialising time.

This is not bleeding edge physics which contradicts any commonly accepted facts but this is an entirely different way of interpreting these facts. We know from GR that every single physical entity in the universe can only meaningfully be said to exist in its own moment NOW and that this truth must obtain all the way down to the Planck scale. When I claim that the universe exists ONLY in the time dimension I am making an ontological claim and when you make the counter-claim that the universe exists in a continuum of space and time you are making an epistemological claim. These claims are not mutually contradictory but can be made to complement each other if we accept Leibniz's notion of the relational space rather than Newton's one of the physical space.

It frustrates me that you can't see this but I can well understand why this is so. Clearly you have a sophisticated understanding of the epistemology of physics and it is a simple truth of cognitive neuroscience that neurons which fire together wire together. You have embraced this flawed narrative because it it is written in a language which is familiar to you, the language of Newton's classical mathematics.

You want to use the planck length,L, as the smallest possible physical distance and light as the fastest physical velocity, C, to say
the smallest physically meaningful time is L/c and that change occurs on that scale.

No I don't. I used the Planck length only because it is a concept which I knew would be familiar to you. In a spaceless model the Planck length is not a valid construct because matter and energy only exist in the time dimension. All of our familiar concepts of distance are purely observer constructs and the smallest possible unit of physical reality becomes a time interval. All the intractable questions of locality and non-locality in QM simply vanish and "quantum" entanglement becomes a perfectly straightforward phenomenon demanded by GR. No more spooky action at a distance.

any physical changes that I would recognize as meaningful in a debate on "have I changed?" are considerably slower than that.

Let's keep it simple. When a photon within you does anything at all you are a different physical entity. That is a FACT. What happens further up the chain of process is a whole nuther story.

[nix]

Nicely said and I agree with most of what you say here but I don't despair that because we see distant galaxies as they were rather than as they are that we can say nothing useful about them and we will just have to disagree on the ontology of a spaceless universe. I think we can say we gave the topic a good airing!

A lot of the stuff on the physicists use of models and of using well established principles to rule out certain models can be found in the you tube messenger lectures by Feynman on "the character of physical law" which I just came across. Although these are from about 1965 they are still worth a look being by an unusual and very creative theoretical physicist who knows the subject inside out!

[Obvious Leo]

Nicely said and I agree with most of what you say here but I don't despair that because we see distant galaxies as they were rather than as they are that we can say nothing useful about them and we will just have to disagree on the ontology of a spaceless universe. I think we can say we gave the topic a good airing!

A lot of the stuff on the physicists use of models and of using well established principles to rule out certain models can be found in the you tube messenger lectures by Feynman on "the character of physical law" which I just came across. Although these are from about 1965 they are still worth a look being by an unusual and very creative theoretical physicist who knows the subject inside out!

Very few physicists have ever given a public lecture or written a book that I haven't come across at some stage in the last 40 years, nix, so I very much respect what you're saying about Feynman. Wheeler is also high up on my list of genuises but these guys are telling a different story from me. They're telling the story of the universe which can only be understood in the language of mathematics. You do me a disservice when you allege that I don't understand this story but I have no interest in defending myself on this point because I'm telling a rather different story which is completely compatible with it. We've wasted a lot of intellectual effort in this thread by talking across each other when our stories are actually grounded in totally different conceptual magisteria.

It's important to me that you try and see it my way, nix, because I've gained the impression that you are quite receptive to the idea that the noumenal and phenomenal approaches to the nature of existence must necessarily give rise to completely different procedures of thought. From my earliest explorations into the philosophy of physics I was determined to prove that the nature of existence could only be understood by examining our universe from the inside looking out for the simple reason that the observer is necessarily contained within his observation. We are nothing more than the sum of the emergent properties of matter and energy configured in a particular way so any conclusions which I could arrive at regarding the nature of my own existence must also apply to the nature of the existence of everything else in the universe. In fact I go so far as to claim that this is a statement of the bloody obvious, despite the fact that Descartes and Newton saw things differently.

What then is the nature of my own existence? This is a question I can answer with an absolute certainty. My own existence can only be defined in terms of a journey of matter and energy through time. It this is true for me then so it must be true for everything that I observe around me because I know perfectly well that there's nothing particularly special about ME. Everything I see around me must likewise be on a journey through time. I live in a beautiful part of the world and when I sit on my front verandah I can see for miles. Everything I see is moving through time in its own referential frame and the further away the object of my observation appears to be then the further its referential frame is from mine. If I sit outside on a clear night I can see objects with the naked eye which exist hundreds of years in my own past and yet these objects exist exclusively in their own present. If I had a gee-whiz telescope I would be able to see objects which exist almost 13.8 billion years in my own past and if I had an impossible telescope I would be able to see 380,000 light-years beyond these most distant of objects and witness this cycle of our universe coming into existence at the big bang.

If I had such impossible long-range vision would I see the universe exploding into existence from a point? Like fuck I would!! I would see the universe vanishing back into a point because I am watching the history of the universe in reverse. This is the ding und sich.

[nix]

I just came across this lecture "Space-Time, Quantum Mechanics and the Multiverse (Nima Arkani-Hamed) " on you tube (from oxford physics dept) where the death of space-time is discussed (see t~33min forward) you might not have seen this one. The speaker is a very stimulating theoretical physicist from Princeton center for advanced study who gives a talk the general public could follow (math free).

[Obvious Leo]

I just came across this lecture "Space-Time, Quantum Mechanics and the Multiverse (Nima Arkani-Hamed) " on you tube (from oxford physics dept) where the death of space-time is discussed (see t~33min forward) you might not have seen this one. The speaker is a very stimulating theoretical physicist from Princeton center for advanced study who gives a talk the general public could follow (math free).

Thanks, I'll look it up. I'm sure that you'll already be aware that I'm not the only one who is convinced that the holy grail of unification will only be possible after the spacetime paradigm is superseded. Just in the last decade Lisa Randall, Jakob Bekenstein, Brian Greene and Frank Wilczek have openly expressed this opinion and Lee Smolin has been banging the same drum forever. Carlo Rovelli, Paul Davies and Sean Carroll have voiced many doubts about current theory and we can never know from one day to the next what Max Tegmark might be thinking. The string theorists are in full retreat and everybody is now just standing around scratching their heads and wondering what's next. The troglodytes with their heads in the sand are an endangered species in physics because the tide is turning against spacetime in a big way. As I've said often enough, a hundred years is far too long for theoretical physics to remain conceptually stalled, especially in an era when such massive intellectual and material resources have been directed at it.

It doesn't make sense, nix. This is not a problem which will yield itself to yet more extravagant mathematics. This is a problem which has to be taken right back to the drawing board and the physicists are going to have start listening to the philosophers.

[nix]

This is not a problem which will yield itself to yet more extravagant mathematics. This is a problem which has to be taken right back to the drawing board and the physicists are going to have start listening to the philosophers.

Well it seems you may be wrong there: I have just finished watching "Nima Arkani-Hamed Lecture: Day 2 ICTP PIO Published on 13 May 2013" from imperial college (a 7 day course he gave there in 2012 all of which is on you tube). This lecture is a direct bridge between your position and my own in this thread. At a point about halfway through the lecture you will find him asserting that the picture that has developed from the theoretical structure is that time is somehow primal and that space is an emergent property (but so to is gravity which you wont like!). The whole talk is fascinating and emphasizes the observer problem in quantum mechanics as it appears in the attempt to unify QM and GR...(but in a way which makes sense to a physicist and accounts for the effectiveness of both QM and GR in their own regions of applicability- so no throwing babies out with bathwater!).

It is good on what sort of questions will even make sense to ask in a unified QM-GR model of nature.

At the end of the lecture there is a discussion with the audience of physics students and faculty which is worth listening to carefully for the assessment of string theory/ particle theory conflicts of the 1980's!

[Obvious Leo]

- so no throwing babies out with bathwater!).

I use this exact phrase on a number of occasions in my synopsis. I often stress that it is quite unnecessary to throw the baby out with the bathwater because a true unification model will not only unify the current epistemic models but will also offer a viable explanatory paradigm to underpin them. The reason why these models are incompatible with each other is because such an ontological underpinning does not currently exist. Therefore this is a metaphysical problem more than it is a physical problem and nowadays most of the leading theorists are aware of the fact that the "observer problem" is what continues to lie at the heart of it. Paradoxically this was specifically recognised as being the case almost a century ago.

[nix]

- so no throwing babies out with bathwater!).

I use this exact phrase on a number of occasions in my synopsis.

True and I agree with your comment in the last post, however the baby is quantum uncertainty, that will remain at the heart of any new vision (see the after dinner comments The Doom of Space Time (Dinner at the University of Oxford) - Nima Arkani-Hamed from about 15min onward ,you tube again for a very nice fairy tale...).

[Scott Mayers]

Let me respond with the following consideration of your model.

If I understand correctly, you assert that space is expanding (I agree cf Hubble etc) but you assign this space some sort of material property which somehow acts as an agent to produce both matter and possibly radiation (here I disagree, but let's go along with the hypothesis). The radiation emitted from that new matter which was "produced", occurs by this matter, in an excited state relaxing to a ground state and emitting the radiation. So you say you should see uniform radiation arriving here on earth from every direction just like the CMBR. OK but let's go on. The emission from each point in space by this process must be equivalent to every other point in space. lets assume for simplicity that only one frequency is emitted by the process, f1, What would I expect to see in a detector which can measure intensity of light at different frequencies?

The detector will sample all light coming in from a small solid angle. The number of emission points seen increases with (dist)^2 from the detector but the intensity of light from each point falls as (dist)^2 so each distance from the detector contributes the same intensity of light (number of photons, I) to our signal . The light from more distant sources, emitted before that from closer sources, will be red shifted (to lower frequency than f1) by an amount proportional to the distance (Hubble's law- now well established by empirical measurements). So the spectrum I will see in my detector (graph of I(f) vs f) will be a flat line I(f) = constant from the highest frequency f1 to the lowest frequency (highest red shift detected). If instead of a single emitted frequency the radiative process from the "new matter"gave a whole range of frequencies with different intensities (for example a black body spectrum of frequencies expected if the matter and radiation were created in thermal equilibrium say) What would my detected signal be? Well every shell of emitters at a given distance from the detector would contribute the whole spectrum but red shifted proportional to the distance, and the sum of all these contributions would be the observed spectrum. Again we get a flat graph of I(f) vs f. This is a prediction of your model which can be tested against the empirically observed spectrum of the CMBR. We already know the result, The CMBR is not a flat line expected from the steady state hypothesis but a black body curve predicted by the hot BB model.

No, you don't understand me correctly since you assume expansion of space requires it to directly imply that it consists of energy. While energy and matter is derived from spacial expansion, its initial information is NOT energy or matter. But what it is, is the precursor to what will become matter which will then enable energy afterwards. [Energy is a measure dependent upon matter existing]

I can't respond further here because I'm concerned about giving too much away before assuring I get the credible authorship that I'd lose to others who'd assuredly exist and conveniently 'borrow' them as their own!

[nix]

Let me respond with the following consideration of your model.

If I understand correctly, you assert that space is expanding (I agree cf Hubble etc) but you assign this space some sort of material property which somehow acts as an agent to produce both matter and possibly radiation

Scot: "No, you don't understand me correctly since you assume expansion of space requires it to directly imply that it consists of energy. While energy and matter is derived from spacial expansion, its initial information is NOT energy or matter. But what it is, is the precursor to what will become matter which will then enable energy afterwards. [Energy is a measure dependent upon matter existing]

I can't respond further here because I'm concerned about giving too much away before assuring I get the credible authorship that I'd lose to others who'd assuredly exist and conveniently 'borrow' them as their own!"

The analysis I give assumes nothing except as you say "matter and energy is derived from spacial expansion" which is what you assert (and what I disagree with). This assumption alone allows us to ask what the spectrum of the background radiation will be if such radiation originates from the steady state expansion. The prediction is an inevitable consequence of your model. You cannot have background radiation from your model at all unless it has this predicted spectrum.

[nix]

The reason why these models are incompatible with each other is because such an ontological underpinning does not currently exist.

I think ontology is a bad place to start for posing science questions. As you have asserted that we should be concerned with ontology rather than epistemology in some earlier posts and because you have an understanding of fractals I use the following example to suggest ontological questions should not take priority over epistemological questions:

Remember the Koch curve? This is "made" by drawing an equilateral triangle with side length L. Now erect a similar triangle of side L/3 on each of the sides, at the midpoints and side to side with the original triangle. Now do the same again erecting triangles of length 1/3(L/3) on each straight bit, repeat again with (1/3)(1/3)(L/3) triangles, continue this process of adding 1/3 scaled down triangles at each step n times (where n tends to infinity)...Consider two possible questions:

1) Does the resulting figure, resembling a snowflake "have " a perimeter length, Lp , i.e. a unique property of the figure? (an ontological question).

2) Given a ruler of particular size,r, what length will you measure the perimeter to be? (an epistemological question)

The answer to Q1 is NO it doesn't have a unique perimeter length. For a fractal curve "perimeter length" is not something that the figure has independent of the way of measuring it! (you get a measurement that keeps increasing if you measure with higher and higher resolution i.e. using a smaller measuring stick gets you a longer value for the perimeter).

Science concerns itself with questions of type 2; they are well defined and meaningful questions. It seems like asking for a clear ontology of QM (and GR) is like insisting that length has no meaning unless questions of type 1 are answered with a yes.

[Scott Mayers]

Let me respond with the following consideration of your model.

If I understand correctly, you assert that space is expanding (I agree cf Hubble etc) but you assign this space some sort of material property which somehow acts as an agent to produce both matter and possibly radiation

Scot: "No, you don't understand me correctly since you assume expansion of space requires it to directly imply that it consists of energy. While energy and matter is derived from spacial expansion, its initial information is NOT energy or matter. But what it is, is the precursor to what will become matter which will then enable energy afterwards. [Energy is a measure dependent upon matter existing]

I can't respond further here because I'm concerned about giving too much away before assuring I get the credible authorship that I'd lose to others who'd assuredly exist and conveniently 'borrow' them as their own!"

The analysis I give assumes nothing except as you say "matter and energy is derived from spacial expansion" which is what you assert (and what I disagree with). This assumption alone allows us to ask what the spectrum of the background radiation will be if such radiation originates from the steady state expansion. The prediction is an inevitable consequence of your model. You cannot have background radiation from your model at all unless it has this predicted spectrum.

What you don't understand is that the expansion of space does NOT directly produce energy nor matter and why you can't measure this in the same way. I do believe that it is what the source of gravity is though, making it a measurable concept alongside of expansion itself.

I can't here argue what exactly the radiation is. I don't find this discovery fascinating since it is too probable to have been predicted under many different models. To me it is the type of general prediction that is nearly inevitable by the same standards as a Nostradamus one. That is, when or where many people make many predictions, some are so inevitable to be 'true' and irrationally grant credit to the ones who 'predicted' it. I also believe that considering the complex history of the last century regarding many interrelated issues, there was an intentional political need to find ground in a BB type of model over the Steady State theory. It stinks with reasonable suspicion. The very fact that it is also so remote an issue that requires more than the average person's capacity to determine the nature of the scientific arguments for it, it adds a convenient means to prevent others from challenging it.

Also, this justification was not simply about proposing a positive prediction by the Big Bang supporters (confirmation), I'm still confused at why anyone would declare this as an absolute disproof of Steady State as I don't see this theory dependent upon whether there is or is not background radiation. A Steady-State type of theory happens to leave no room for a god and I believe this is the most significant reason it has not been preferred.

So far, with my present understanding and nature of being a skeptic, I have more justice to question the Big Bang as anyone has the right to question the nature of gods. Yet, we are imposed as a society to simply default to believing in a Big Bang cosmology without questioning until you've had an eight-year investment in the very institutes that foster it. If the average person -- and I'm more ahead of it than the average -- has as much justification or even more to default to doubt unless proven by each person investigating. It is also just like what a religious person might demand of one to be qualified to question their god by demanding one read their scriptures from beginning to end in order to be qualified.

If you want, I'd like to hear your own intellectual steps in thought that actually convinced you of the Big Bang AND a disproof of Steady State by contrast.