I got this letter in the mail the other day:
I Don’t know if you Exist But I Do! I bo not Agree with your Articl and I Do not Beleave that “MOMBO-JOMBO” if you do … Well! it’s Disturbing thought But I know How to Deal with it! I will Not let the Wolb Disiper under My Nose But if you Do I cant say I’m sorry!
Sincerely
a ten year old who knows a little more than some Pepeol!
George Wing
ps. some peopl Have a little to Much time.
In response, of course, to the NYT story about Boltzmann’s Brain. George’s father Michael, a high-school science teacher, was moved to send it along (and gave me permission to post it), suggesting that “maybe it is really a Boltzmann brain speaking.”
To which I can only respond: awesome. A fourth-grader reads an article in the Science Times, and is so moved by outrage that he pens a stern missive to the scientists quoted? It’s not very often that you have a chance to inspire a young mind like that, even if you do inspire him to berate you.
Of course, George did fall into a slight trap with respect to the logic underlying the article. But that’s okay — he’s only ten years old, and there are plenty of grownups with Ph.D.’s in physics who fell into the same trap! The trap is to imagine, despite explicit disclaimers to the contrary, that the Boltzmann’s Brain argument goes something like this:
Certain cosmological scenarios predict that it’s more likely for a brain like yours or mine to arise as a random fluctuation, rather than through orderly evolution.
Isn’t that cool????
That’s really not the argument that anyone is trying to make. Rather, it goes like this:
Certain cosmological scenarios predict that it’s more likely for a brain like yours or mine to arise as a random fluctuation, rather than through orderly evolution.
Our brains aren’t like that.
Therefore, those scenarios are not correct.
It’s kind of an old-fashioned argument. Take a theory, use it to make a prediction, the prediction isn’t correct, and therefore the theory has been falsified! Rubs a lot of people the wrong way, but it works for me.
Other critics are uncharitable for different reasons. For example Don Walton, founder and president of Time For Truth Ministeries:
I believe the accusation leveled against the Apostle Paul by Festus in Acts 26:24 — “much learning is making you mad” — is most apropos for today’s cosmologists.
Hey, question my existence and suggest that I have too much time on my hands, fine — I can deal with that. But comparing me to Saint Paul? That is a low blow, sir. And somewhat unprecedented.
When you’re ten years old, you don’t have to be right — you should be curious and passionate, and George definitely is on the right track. I look forward to recruiting him to grad school some day. For the grownups I have less hope.
While reading about unparticle stuff recently (either in New Scientist or at physicsorg.com, the point was made that since photons don’t have mass they are scale invariant. Thinking about the potential fractal nature of said photons, I wondered if both the cosmological state of everything accelerating away, as well as the quantum state of entanglement were just appearances based on scaling issues.
Reading JM’s comments about simultaneous contraction and expansion of the universe brought this same fractal image to mind.
Hag,
I didn’t read his books, but from the interviews I did read, it seemed that his description of time is dimensional, in the sense that all points in time co-exist and any particular point in time is simply a subjective reference point, as with spatial perspectives. My point is that the only physical reality is the existing energy and whatever form it currently manifests. That different points in space require some measure of time to communicate doesn’t necessarily make time a fundamental dimension. Rather it is a measure of the motion in that space, just as temperature is another form of measurement.
Lawrence,
I realize quantum entanglement isn’t evidence of a transfer of force. That’s the whole mystery of it, that there is no time for this transfer. What makes sense to me is that these two measurements of separate particles are actually measurements of different points of some deeper wave phenomena, such as two radios equidistant from the transmitter will play the same sounds at the same time. The question then, what deeper levels of wave transmission are we missing that might provide some relation between collapsing and expanding space.
Sandy,
That was an intriguing article and it makes one wonder what the LHC will find.
It seems to me that since we don’t know the state of an entangled pair until we do a measurement, we really aren’t getting any secret knowledge about the other half of an entangled pair when we do perform the measurement.
The entangled pair just represent a new object that we know nothing about until we perform the measurement
LC wrote: “Quantum wave equations are completely deterministic. There are really no stochastic processes in quantum mechanics…….but how these probabilities obtain is because we observe quantum systems under incomplete circumstances. ”
Are we back to believing that we live in a completely deterministic universe? My existence isn’t a happy accident? I really don’t want to give that one up! Of course, the amount of information we would need to correctly characterize the complexity of all the minute forces at work would BE all the information in the universe. So, you could never have a model smaller than the actual thing.
Sandy
Lawrence is correct, but you are correct too. QM is a deterministic model that accurately describes nature. Nature itself is not deterministic.
In principle you could create a stochastic model of nature; and in fact, many simulations of natural processes are stochastically modelled with computers; but they have their own complexities, and the fact that there is a deterministic model that describes nature so well is interesting
Sandy,
As Stephen Wolfram put it, “You need a computer the size of the universe to compute the universe.”
If on the other hand, the universe is infinite and what we percieve to be the edge of time is simply a horizon line of how far light travels before it gets too redshifted, so that we are bombarded by information from a 14 billion lightyear radius, that would be fairly indeterministic. It might make us slaves to the universe, but then we affect what affects us, so it’s a symbiotic relationship.
LC,
Appreciated your remarks on entanglement. As spooky as it seems, the principle follows logically- and technologically from the SR/GR/QM models- the experimentally validated fact of entanglement is evidence of a very important conceptual link between the models, and the veracity of the concepts.
JM,
“Actually I am arguing with the description of time as a form of metadimension, where all events exist, much as different points in space can co-exist. Given that it’s the energy that’s conserved, it is the same energy that manifests as successive points in time, so it requires the dissolution of past events for future events to take their place.
The story is that it was Edgar Allen Poe who first proposed that space and “duration” are the same.”
It is interesting- and I believe, significant- that time is usually treated as “space-like” in GR…with good success and no reduction in the accuracy of measurement. This relates to Poes’ interesting assertion that space and duration are the same…though I’m not sure he was the first to have the idea.
Just the fact that the speed of light separates events the way it does suggests that time is, in some way which is difficult for us 4D observers to understand, “spacelike”..that “time” relates to the overall geometry of the universe- and cosmic structure (patterns of energy density concentration existing at invariant frames and within a manifold of some kind).
Its a hard pill to swallow, I know, but as we observe planets around stars two thousand light years distant, we observe both star and planet as they existed two thousand years ago. I cannot see that we have a choice in this matter…information and complexity in the universe are conserved, and with appropriate technology and/or within an appropriate geometry exist eternally intact…and could be retrieved.
Best, Sam Cox
Something is wrong, none of this is right! We have been hit by something, somekind of cosmic anomily, time travel has occurred we have been knocked into an imaginary state.
Are you all sure that there is no object that is heading for us, it will be tiny about the size of a car but has the mass of our star and fast enough cut through our atmosphere in about a 2 seconds. Whatever it is, it is massive in mass and momentum. It has a pathway to follow, but it could drag me with it; I dont want to go back, I can’t go back. What do I DO? I have asked this question because you lot seem to have all the answers!
I am not god, I am not the one! I am me, a man; a real man, but something about the last 7 years is definatly not real and its flowing from the future.
Sam,
Temperature can also be a very precise measure of motion and it can be relativistic with regards to volume of space. If a certain level of energy is contained in a specific volume of space and this space was increased, the drop in temperature and density of the energy can be predicted, but that doesn’t make temperature equivalent to volume. Time is the same. As duration it is a measure of motion, not the basis for it. If it wasn’t an effective and accurate form of measurement, it wouldn’t be very useful.
Qubit,
Get your brain thinking about something else. When you’ve finally focused on that, try thinking of some other thing. Just keep doing that until you get a lattice of thought patterns and use that as your control to measure what it is that is bothering you.
We can see a pattern of planets and stars the way they existed two thousand years ago written in photons. That much of the energy and information is conserved. It is far less than the actual energy that made up the planets and stars. We can’t retrieve the actual planets and stars. I think JM has it right. Time is the result of motion. And conservation of energy is a novel argument against a persistent now.
It seems a much simpler description of the universe to say there is likely a finite amount of matter/energy with an infinite number of possible states and interactions; rather than that there is energy persisting in a possibly infinite and persistent present.
Sandy,
I think one of the reasons people focus on the concept of now as a point in time is that motion is primarily at the speed of light and our brains don’t totally process it in real time, as the information/energy would just be a blur. So the mind is a process of conceptual flashes, like frames of film. As we get older and more focused, we process these flashes faster and time seems to speed up. A good analogy is that our shutter speed gets faster. An interesting example of this may be a study I read of some years ago, about chain crashes in fog that was done in England. What they found was that as fog settled onto traffic, people would inexplicably speed up. My theory is that as their information intake was reduced, they subconsciously sought to increase it by increasing their speed. Just a theory.
As a measure of motion, it would be meaningless to think of time as a point. Just as with temperature, the only absolute is zero, which is the complete absence of any motion in both cases.
I do think an infinite universe is the simpler description. Every point in space would be receiving energy from all directions and radiating it in all directions, thus creating a cycle of perpetual conservation of energy. With a finite universe, it would be subject to entropy and radiating this energy away, as the open Big Bang model proposes. This then requires an explanation for how the original source came to be. A closed BB model might say it does eventually collapse back together, but this argues for endless loops of time, ie. eternity. What if this process lost a little energy each time? Other dimensions, whatever. It would still be subject to entropy and eventually fade away. The only way to get around entropy is not to have a closed/finite universe in the first place.
Yeh, your right John, but I just can’t help myself. Reality is shit! I live in two worlds one that’s in my head and its story that been running for what seems like two universes, and then there is my life. My life does not seem like my life at all, I don’t remember ever having ability to think in anything other than pictures so the pictures I turned into a story, that story is amazing! Its always evolving and at certain times the two turn into one, pulling them apart is easy, I just prefer not to.
It just looks like your trying to understand my story. The problem is that language is a real problem for me, so I am never going to be able to tell or prove to you, that you are just looking at me!
If I were you, I would also spend an eternity trying to figure out, what it is i am, because “I” am amazing!
Qubit
Party on dude
Qubit,
Read my post #48. Your external reality is that structured reality that seems to be squeezing the life out of you, as it falls away into the past, as your internal reality rushes blindly into the future. If you want to connect to the eternity(but only if it really is bad, otherwise..) don’t try and make sense of what you are told about the structure and order, insitutions, logic, top down rationality, but try and plug into the raw energy motivating it. It’s like winter and spring. The order and structure is the hard shell of winter and the energy is the raw burst of growth of spring that breaks through, constantly pushing at the weak spots, like grass pushing through the concrete. The source of life is the essence out of which we rise, not an Ideal Form from which we fell.
I have this saying that I can never feel sorry for myself because I read the paper every day. Our personal realities are like bubbles of awareness. Some rise to the surface, many are jostled around in the middle and most are ground into fertilizer at the bottom. Mother Nature creates life in order to consume it, giving sustenance to the next stage, as life bootstraps itself upward. If you want to escape your bubble, short of suicide, than try plugging into other people. Living beings consciousness exists as a sort of electrostatic connection between their interior and exterior reality. Have you ever seen or felt those spots in your vision? Feel your gaze controlled by subconscious attraction and rejection? Felt someone looking at you and turn to realize someone was? We can build $20 radios that can translate electromagnetic waves into forms of communication. I think that at some point in the future, we will be able to do some of this by mental control. I think one of the main reasons we don’t do it already is because it does interfere with our ability to function autonomously. As a young child, I found that I had to consciously shut out the mental spillover from my siblings in order to develop my own ability to think. Since I ride horses for a living, I’ve spent my life plugging into primitive minds. Civilization may claim to have the answers, but it is just hard crust on a raw beingness. The price we pay for being able to feel in the first place is that a lot of it is pain. Get used to it and develop thicker skin, cause it isn’t going to change.
As for the partying, hangovers happen.
An interesting article on the relationship between being and thinking;
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05well.html?em&ex=1202533200&en=eed03831444e3786&ei=5087
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