Fewer people are probably familiar with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” than they are with the reversed-time novels by Martin Amis, Kurt Vonnegut, or Lewis Carroll. But don’t worry, you will be!
In this case, the protagonist is born as an old man who grows younger with time, eventually dying as a baby. His father, not to mention the hospital staff, are somewhat nonplussed at his birth.
Mr. Button’s eyes followed her pointing finger, and this is what he saw. Wrapped in a voluminous white blanket, and partly crammed into one of the cribs, there sat an old man apparently about seventy years of age. His sparse hair was almost white, and from his chin dripped a long smoke-coloured beard, which waved absurdly back and forth, fanned by the breeze coming in at the window. He looked up at Mr. Button with dim, faded eyes in which lurked a puzzled question.
“Am I mad?” thundered Mr. Button, his terror resolving into rage. “Is this some ghastly hospital joke?”
“It doesn’t seem like a joke to us,” replied the nurse severely. “And I don’t know whether you’re mad or not—but that is most certainly your child.”
The cool perspiration redoubled on Mr. Button’s forehead. He closed his eyes, and then, opening them, looked again. There was no mistake—he was gazing at a man of threescore and ten—a baby of threescore and ten, a baby whose feet hung over the sides of the crib in which it was reposing.
No word of what Mrs. Button had to say about the whole affair.
Fitzgerald’s story takes a different approach to running the arrow of time backwards: Benjamin Button has experiences and memories that are completely conventional (although, for expository purposes, he is born with a full vocabulary), while his physical body ages backward.
The reason why I know everyone will be hearing about the story is that “Benjamin Button” is being made into a feature film, directed by David Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en) and starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. Major photography has been completed, and it’s currently in post-production, scheduled to be released late in 2008. Major Oscar buzz.
Leaked photos seem to indicate that the film will portray Benjamin as being born baby-sized (albeit old and wrinkly), rather than as a full grown human being. Different actors will be used to portray Button’s reverse aging at different stages of his life, while CGI effects insert Brat Pitt’s face onto each body.
Sean, I don’t know whether anyone else has mentioned it or not. In a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, The Other, the protagonist is an old man who has a conversation with a young man sitting beside him. At the end, the old man realizes that he is talking to the person whom he was fifty years earlier. I thought you might be interesting to you.
Another story that may not have been mentioned is “The Time of Passage” by J.G. Ballard, in, I believe, a collection Chronopolis. Again, like Fitzgerald, it is basically a story of a life in the world where everyone is moving backwards and explores the emotional responses of the characters to such momentously sad occasions as marriage, loss of memories in childhood, and birth.
Philip K. Dick’s Counter-Clock World was similarly structured, in that things run backwards, but people’s memory seems normally chronological. There’s a very disturbing passage at the beginning of a cemetary patrol finding that someone in a grave has come back to life. This is normal — all graves have loudspeakers installed so that the newly undead can call for help. While the police officer calls for someone to come dig up the grave, he unsmokes a cigarette: Smokers buy used butts, and puff them back into full cigarettes. Later, I think they are unrolled, moistened, and gradually tranformed back into tobacco plants.
Plot devices of this kind are a staple of Dick’s work. I think Now Wait For Last Year, for example, had similar ideas, but I don’t remember quite how they work in that case.
I think an episode of Star Trek had a race with a reverse aging process which caused some confusion.
Has anyone mentioned David Brin’s SF novel “The Practice Effect” ?
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_Effect ]
If not, they have now!
Didn’t the old “Mork and Mindy” TV show (from the mid ’70’s, staring Robin Williams) also have a reverse aging plot line? Mindy gave birth to a baby who turned out to be an old man (Jonathan Winters)who lived his life in reverse.
I think this was about the time the show started really going downhill.
Sean, you really are into this!…and fascinating it is.
I was looking a a picture of a beautiful, newly born baby in Newsweeks recent article on surrogate motherhood and once again marveled about this matter of being born…and of course dying. I’m pushing 70 and living with MS, diabetes and Prostate cancer, so needless to say, I comptemplating the latter more than the former!
The fact that birth and death are morphologically so different points to a definite arrow of time. If time, like space, is marginally closed…and it well may be, what we observe about our own lives may offer clues to the true nature of existence.
One of the questions we ask- and never receive a complete answer to, from the time we are 7 until we are 70 is: “Where did I come from?” Anybody who thinks the answer is summed up in sexual relations is deluded…the question is much more profound than that. It is likely our personal origins have roots in the development of the universe itself.
The DNA in our bodies, while it has been profoundly re-arranged over the past 3.2 billion years, is still the same substance and essence of life it always has been. In that sense, the biological material in our bodies has not known death in 3.2 billion years, almost 25% of the time since the big bang. No wonder death, as obvious as it is, is incomprehensible to us!
Like consciousness itself, the development of life has been gradual…we probably could not pinpoint the exact time in the development of life where the inorganic could have been said to become organic and the inorganic become life…though we could use some arbitrary yardstick- as abilty to reproduce.
The point is that the inorganic world, while not conscious in the sense we are, is nevertheless organized and complex…a complexity which obviously begat complexity of yet a higher order and eventually led to us. If the inorganic was not organized and complex we would not be around describing same with “the laws of physics”.
We observe not only processes which lead to chaos-increase entropy- in the universe, but processes which do work…are constructive- decrease entropy. These forces exist together, just as tectonic and gradational forces exist together on the surface of the Earth. From our present frame of reference, we observe a second law…overall entropy seems to be increasing, with only small islands of well protected complexity in the unverse, but this observation, for very good reasons which I will but touch on later in this note, may be misleading.
Early man refused to accept the permanence of death. This intuitive belief in continued existence after death led to Platonism…and eventually Einstein.
If we remember this bit of history of science, we can see that human intuition, while unscientific and clouded by mysticism, cultural bias and error, nevertheless has an element of underlying “saavy” which in a general way has guided the origin and development of modern science. Mankind (at least the ones who placed food and items of living in graves!) had and has a skeptical nature, a taste for “proof” and “truth”.
The fact that observation is linked to actual existence has profound implications about our own “situation”, directly relates to possible space/time periodicity in universal development and implies engineering stability in the universal structure…stability which could well explain what we observe.
We tend to forget, but growing up as a child…getting used to life in this particular space/time continuom is a frustrating, complex and quite difficult task, which is so difficult it requires mentoring. Animals which do not care for their young must reproduce in huge numbers and consign most of their young to the food chain.
If consciousness shifts at “death”, getting used to that new situation would take getting used to, too. However such an adjustment would be easier than childhood, because in such a “hemisphere” gravity would plainly be seen as a fictitious force…it would hold us to the Earth, yet dropped objects would return to our hands and accidents would undo themselves- as in Allice in Wonderland.
If there is no awareness of another 4D particulate “Hemisphere”…reawakening as a child into a universe which is almost but not quite identical because of servo-mechanism input in the prior cycle, would be essentially replicating our eternal existence with the rest of the universe…with only tiny phylogenic change.
I believe that non-existence after death is the easiest idea…basically, “and so what”. It means nothing, there is nothing we could do about it anyway, and is an easy and obvious answer. Yet non-existence is not compatable with what we now know about the link between observation and existence or the nature of the univeral structure.
I think the final thing we must consider is the nature of the GR concept. There is nothing outside a GR universe…it is everywhere…nothing can really go anywhere to escape it. Such a structure stongly implies rigid conservation laws, matter and energy, entropy- and information/complexity. The technological veracity of GR coupled with the incredibly complex universal structure we observe lead to what I feel is an easy conclusion about the permanence of existence.
One assumption that seems to be common to all these stories is that activities in the other three dimensions are exactly reversed when time goes backwards. Is there any physical reason for this effect? Is there not enough randomness in nature that reversing time might lead, for example, to a unique year 2000, in which Dubya was not selected as president? Which makes a lot of what has happened throughout the world in the last eight years also not happening? If so, would this not be an argument for the irreversibility of time’s arrow?
Hoi polloi physics.
Everything we observe about our macroscopic reality indicates that time has a single, single-process irreversible direction.
Any form of spherical or curved geometry incorporates mathematically irrational pi. The first thing I reminded my geometry students of with regard to formuae which incorporate pi, is that the the answer to any attempted measurement is always off (low- in the same direction) depending on the number of decimal places we use in our figure for pi. When a universe structurally based on spherical geometry returns, it probably does not return to exactly the same place.
However, the “return” is so close and almost perfect, that it confers an engineering stability on the system which makes possible the storage, conservation and increasing phylogenic development of complexity. This still leaves the universe with a 2nd law, but at least that law doesn’t rage like “A fox in the proverbial henhouse”. The universe compensates for its tendency toward disorder by increasing in informational complexity…it is gradually becoming more complex at the sacrifice of a modest increase in thermal entropy. Hence, it continues to exist. This type of process explains why we exist and are able to discuss these matters!
In fact, the fact that the universal geometry incorporates pi probably makes motion, change and time possible. That motion and change in 4D is observed to occur, is proof positive that the universe does indeed have a dynamic component…it is NOT completely static. Einstein reminds us that time, mass, and the three spatial dimensions observed from particulate frames all vary with this process we call “observation” and the coordinates from which we observe.
This preferred direction of time and relativistic change is completely consistent with what we observe in our macroscopic and sub-microscopic reality, however CPT symmetry in the sub-microscopic must also have significant implications insofar as the structure of the universe is concerned. The fact that an arrow of time is obvious primarily in the macroscopic realm, while most of the universe by mass is sub-microscopic implies that the “arrow of time” is a frame of reference phenomenon only and is not structurally applicable cosmologically.
It is logical to expect certain violations of CPT symmetry IE Chirality in the universe. If the universe is observed from multiple (foundationally 2) 4D particulate matter/antimatter cross sections, it would be impossible for the physics to be identical as observed under “over the horizon” condiitons. The phases and states of matter would be different, thermal entropy would progessively gather (decrease) and informational entropy would increase in one hemisphere and the reverse in the other, with periodic changes in particulate polarity in each “hemisphere”.
Remember a GR universe is never completely singular. It is always everywhere. When one 4D “hemisphere” collapses, as in an hour-glass, the other 4D “Hemisphere” takes the place of that part of the universe approaching singularity- and conserves its informational complexity. The “big bang” in one Hemisphere would only be a particulate polarity reversal and gradual almost impreceptable shift in entropy direction in the other. I narrate taking the frame of observing coordinates.
The actual proper-time pulse of the general universal mass probably takes place from material to anti-material (at the baryonic quark level everywhere), at a rate of 2.8 trillion cycles per Earth second. Because of the spin of the photon, and the fact that we electromagnetically (photonically) cross-read the universe in extreme gravitational time dilation, we detect only one particulate and vast 4D cross-section of the universe at a time…the other is “over the horizon” and detectable only by mass, power spectrum and particle accelerator measurements.
The purpose of this conceptualizing is to visualize a universe which matches the conceptual parameters of our well verified models and results in conditions within the universe which make possible the existence, conservation and extension of information and complexity- without resorting to infinities and vast numbers of undetectable parallel universes.
As mentioned, if we simply extend the well verified models we have at our disposal, we may be able to experimentally verify the cosmological reality we can project from these models…a universe based on finite mass, unbounded and marginally closed spatial extent and an extremely limited and a small, but general and well defined dynamic component.
Sam,
So if this dynamic component is manifesting a series of configurations, these events go from future potential to past circumstance? So that macroscopic dimension of time is actually coming towards our point of reference, much as those islands came toward you, traveling from the future into the past?
Or is that direction the other way around and it is we who travel from the past into the future? In a relative world, isn’t it both? We travel down the road, as the road passes under us.
Hi John,
If the universe experiences a coordinated and general quantum proper time matter/antimatter pulse at the quark level, each cycle would be (as observed at that level of scale), a perfect duplicate of the former.
Just as we have CPT symmetry in the sub-microscopic with only a few chiral phenomena, at its heart the universe in this scenario would be a very rigid place- but at our macroscopic scale we could still observe a definite and very convincing arrow of time, which is real to us…we live or die by the time process we observe.
Any other hemisphere, like the opposite side of a merry go round, if we could observe it from our present coordinates, would seem to be experiencing time reversal, but actually what happens there in geometric inversion (enantiomorphy) is just a continuation of the same process we are experiencing. When we throw a ball up in the air, we expect it to come down…free fall in one direction and free fall in another direction.
By the way, I have had questions about the pivotal role of pi in the universe. Pi is after all a mathematical artifact. A wheel is a wheel. A circle is a circle. The key is that pi only becomes important when we measure, and we live in a universe which only exists as it is observed and measured. In GR, we observe from the center of the geometry, yet exist on the circumference (4D event particulate event horizon surfaces). Our observing, measuring and relating relationship with the universe, and our existence as material beings makes pi very important.
The process by which coordinate shift of perhaps the diameter of an atomic particle at each pulse (in the macroscopic) affects the universe and effects phylogenic change is of course, unknown. So is the extent to which our “choices” in life affect the overall increase in universal informational complexity.
One thing is for sure. The universe may be awesome, but it is very mechanical, even if we have a personal relationship with it! We experience cause and effect constantly, and inhabit an engineering envelope which if we push, we pay the price. If we drive around at 100 MPH we cannot expect the universe to deliver us from folly. The universe is quite feral and demanding in many respects.
I had a near death experience once from dehydration and was asked if I had some mystical experience. I told the person that as a pre-med student, everything seemed to shut down pretty much as I expected…I lost control of my bowel and bladder, my eyesight browned out and I heard a buzzing in my ears…etc.
If we have another set of particulate coordinates waiting for us, I feel certain that our existence there will be just as mechanical and particulate as the one we now enjoy…although I would suspect we would have to get used to the feeling of being held in a vise…choice as we now know it could be limited or non-existent.
Sam,
I certainly agree that time is a macroscopic effect, similar to temperature, but I think that the other side of this effect is as I’ve been describing, that reality is fundamentally dualistic between the energy and the information, whether it’s expanding energy and collapsing mass, the two hemispheres of our brains, or even the conservative civil consolidation, vs. liberal social expansion of politics, there are two sides of every coin, even though we only see(or see through, in the case of the brain) one at a time.
I have to agree that those near death experiences are like having the plug pulled on the television, although I’ve apparently continued to function for a short time afterward. I guess this is because the memory isn’t properly stored. Which is to say that all those other times I don’t really remember are a form of death. Information falls away into the past….
I think there is a little wiggle room with a mechanistic determinism, because measurement is digital, but reality is analog, so there is always some immeasurable wobble in the rotation. That we should try to pin pi down is simply evidence of the tendency to seek answers in the detail and ignore the overall. Our very sense of individuality is a function of focus, yet our connection to the whole is in the totality.
Hi John,
“that reality is fundamentally dualistic between the energy and the information,”
You refer elsewhere re death, to “pulling the plug” and I don’t think that analogy is inappropriate at all. Like appliances which have batteries to retain stored information during intermittant power failures, the body has mechanisms to prevent immediate loss of vital information-storing mechanisms, in the event of temprorary problems… IE the brain, in case “power” can be restored.
It is important to note the necessary relationship between energy and information. I’m very leery of the mystical…with all the counterintuitiveness of SRT/GR/QM and the Schwarzschild geometry, to add ghosts to the picture seems a bit too far fetched! We, and everything else living are conscious to the extent that our biological particulate complexity interacts with electromagnetic energy.
I think considering the relativistic state of modern physics, it would be hard to regard anything about the universe to be deterministic, yet at their conceptual heart, all the models are just that, and this deterministic reality is a fundamental stabilizing principle in the universe.
Duality keeps coming up…some would say, rearing it ugly head. I don’t see duality as philosophically or scientifically offensive, and I too, like you have noted similarities between the physical and social sciences…though that is definitely not hard science, yet…just interesting to note and ruminate on.
I said that the universe can be boiled down to energy plus a set of contraining principles, within which energy has formed densities and evolved compexity.
On the one hand, we have the feral universe, which while it makes our existence possible, is cold, inhospitable and quite unforgiving…I use that word “unforgiving” in an engineering sense, which reminds us that the semantics of the natural sciences intertwines with that of the social sciences!
On the other hand, we have the collective consciousness, in which the eternal photonic matrix…the electromagnetic spectrum interacts with with all past, present and future existing particulate complexity. The unique combination of particulate, energy density complexity with the electromagnetic spectrum bequeaths our individual identity, because of our personal coordinates, yet the relativistic nature of light makes us, as individuals a part of all consciousness which preceded, exists with us in the present, and will follow us in the future.
The collective consciousness is anything but feral, because it is a reflection of the way life has developed and coped with challenges over eternity, yet how it
actually affects us is conjectural. I’m not going to take the time to look up the correct spelling of serindipitous, but at higher levels of consciousness especially, there is the possiblity that beings are positively and constructively influenced by the electromagnetic energy by which we interact with our own particulate identity.
“That we should try to pin pi down is simply evidence of the tendency to seek answers in the detail and ignore the overall. Our very sense of individuality is a function of focus, yet our connection to the whole is in the totality.”
I’m not really nit picking here, just pointing out how the roots of our existence may be found in simple mathematical relationships inherent in the geometry of the universe….our very existence is made possible by a rather simple set of underlying and ordering principles- plus a very specific amount of energy.
I failed to note in my previous remarks that, if the universe could be reduced to a geometric point of infinitely small size, pi would probably be of little significance as well. However at a certain level of scale, any energy density eventually becomes singular (the Planck Realm) and event horizons form. These event horizons give the universe measurable parameters…the universe is not infinitely reducable…the “failure of reductionism”. Since the Planck Realm exists below 10 to the minus 33rd CM, the universe itself, by its very nature, when measured and observed by consciousness, is affected by the mathematical irrationality of pi. To say it another way, the universe has great resolution- to 33 places…but pi is irrational to thousands of places, perhaps infinitely, so the nature and structure of the observed universe is affected by the mathematical irrationality of pi.
Very interesting comments, John
It’s obviously “time” for the classic time reversal limerick (not an ET original to be sure)
There once was a lady named Bright
Who traveled much faster than light
She left the next day
In a relative way
And returned on the previous night
e.
Sam: ” had a near death experience once from dehydration and was asked if I had some mystical experience. I told the person that as a pre-med student, everything seemed to shut down pretty much as I expected” may I state that any NDE is actually the very first experience of LIFE, not actually death?
The human brain functions by energy and absorbs energy, the very first “image” recorded by the brain happens to be of the journey down the mother’s birth ing channel?..ie..you are being transported within the confined liquid womb, to that of an open space gas environment.
The “NORMAL” statement of NDE is of a :Dark surrounding tunnel volume, with a small speck of light at the end of it, the approaching light gets more intense until it bursts forth and encapsulates every thing. This is really just the very first EVENT recorded by the brain, sorry for those spiritually minded people, but it is STILL an awsome event.
The importance of the very first recorded brain event, is often replayed at times of extreme stress or danger, or event imminent death events, like a sort of precognitive “saftey valve”, nature provides a lasting memory process that makes transitional moments less boring?
Sam,
The concept of feral is a matter of perspective, that of broad perspective for that which is singularly focused on its own survival, yet all of us fall into that category out of necessity on occasion. As you point out, the universe can be a harsh environment, but it is the universal nature of the energy which composes it that is the basis of the unity of consciousness. On the other hand, the focusing and ordering of this energy that is the cause of our mental abilities and the essential impetus for evolutionary advancement, because of the inherent competition it entails, the end state of this concentration are the political wars and economic bubbles which our ambitions create. The result is a cycle of expansion and contraction, growth and collapse, each one providing lessons and opportunities for the next cycle to carry the process a little further. So the concept of good and bad are subjective. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken. Wars are considered the ultimate evil, yet they are a product of human success, as humanity conquers the earth and finds itself its own most effective predator.
The next stage of progression will have to find a way to incorporate this entangled duality into a conscious understanding so that we can grow with it and not simply be controlled by it. The next step in understanding nature and steering its power to our long term benefit.
Elliot,
In a universe where actually attaining the speed of light will put you everywhere, all the time, with respect to everything else, I hardly think super-luminal speeds are necessary! Basically, I would believe, “arriving the previous night” has more to do with the geometry of the universal structure, and the way energy densitities (from the photon on up) relate to one another within that structure.
The electromagnetic aspect of our existence puts the far reaches of the universe at our fingertips. The energy density, particulate part of our existence keeps our feet firmly planted on the ground! Relativistic change affects everything up to the exact speed of light. After that, the universe is photonic.
This brings up an important conceptual point. When the mass of any energy density of any size attains the speed of light, its mass, as generally considered, becomes infinite. However this is not true in a universe of finite mass. In such a universe, the energy density we select attains the mass of the universe itself…it becomes one with the whole entity, a very different conceptual idea.
Einstein considered both infinite and finite (mass) models for the universe, but his original grand proportion fits only a universe of finite mass, because the proportion will not admit infinities! He only half laughingly joked that only two things in the universe were infinite, human folly and the universe…and he was not sure about the latter.
Those proposing a universe of infinite mass use E sub 0…a massless photon and make other adjustments. However the solar calculator in my desk performs tasks under the influence of photons, in fact, the fact that photons do work is a “fact of life”. Schwarzschild’s photon is 0+…of tiny but measurable mass, and thus, itself has the ability to do work. However the Schwarzschild “mirror” geometry, works from a geometric point, a point mass…a “naked singularity” without a functional event horizon. Scale in a universe with energy densities mandates event horizon formation at an experimentally proven location in the geometry. Thus in a universe of finite mass and functional event horizons, Schwarzschilds geometry must be slightly modified to incorporate a measurable Planck Realm.
A very abreviated (and partial) summary of SR as it applies to the speed of light is as follows: as the speed of a spacecraft relative to the point of departure increases, the mass of the spaceship increases relative to that location, and viewed from the point of departure, the amount of fuel necessary to continue to accelerate the spacecraft near the speed of light would increase. In the spaceship, nothing would seem to be different at all. The same amount of fuel used to accelerate us at 1G when we left, would continue to do the job all the way to the other side of the universe…but when we looked outside, WOW!..would the universe look funny!
Paul,
As soon as the hospital got some liquid into me, I revived and actually went home the same day! In no way am I sure I would not have observed “further developments” had I been nearer death than I was. My pants sure were a mess! However, many people die instantaneously…they have no near death experience at all. The real question to me is whether our consciousness is a permanent, if changing fixture of the universes existence.
John,
When I use the word “feral”, I do so understanding the semantic limitations of that word…just as many other words. Semantics and the communication of meaning are some of the greatest of challenges we face as conscious beings. 60% of all communication between humans is non-verbal, a fact which really came in handy as I travelled in areas with 20 different languages!
However technical conceptual communication is especially difficult. We have to use adverbs and adjectives, prepositional phrases and interjections all over the place to effectively communicate.
Using a word like “feral” is bad to start with, because it implies what we call in Englsh composition, a “personification” of the inanimate unverse. I used to grade students down for that kind of stuff! Strictly speaking, feral refers to an animal, a domestic animal, which has been forced to fend for itself and has become wild. I meant to imply a certain domestication of the universe…it is friendly in the sense that did it not exist as it does, we would not exist. The universe is “wild” in the sense that it has, insofar as living beings are concerned, certain very unforgiving characteristics. It’s kind of like, “no slight intended Sam, but you are dead”, if I run into a tree at 100MPH. We can’t run to the universe and expect it to protect us if we play with crocodiles or swim with sharks. Knowlede and experience help, but sooner or later, if we push our engineering envelope, we get hurt.
I think one of the serious problems with religious thinkers is that they try to put their diety outside of a universe where nothing, by defintion is outside. They also personify the inanimate, and worst of all use appeal to diety in a plea for protection when education, even common sense would be more rational options. Most objectionable of all, cultures use their concept of diety to control and manipulate.
There well may be a collective consciousness in the universe. If there is, there may well be factors other than chance operating in the universe, and those factors would be serindipitous(ly) good, since we would be influenced directly and indirectly by everything consciousness in the universe knows, past present and future.
When I taught binomial expansion, I always warned the students to throw the coins on the floor and flip them many different ways so that the results would be random…and we could contruct our tables with increasing numbers of events and watch our results for each fractional term approach certainty…as well as the obvious fact that the sum of the fractional terms in any binomal expansion model always totals 1 (certainty) in the first place! Math is so tautological!
Students would sometime test their instructor by not flipping their coins randomly. When they showed my their outlandish results, they looked like the cat that ate the canary! We used Chi Square(d) to show them that in addition to the basic binomial expansion model, we could use other models to clearly indicate whether factors other than chance had been operating in their experiment, and that those models too had geometric aspects.
Paul Davies in his book a few years back pretty much evaluated the universe using “Chi Squared” with the idea of venturing an opinion as to whether factors other than chance had and have been operating in the cosmos. I honestly don’t agree with his conclusion that: “We are truly meant to be here”, but believe that what we have learned about the universe in the last 100 years strongly implies that factors other than chance have been and are operating in the universe. The reality of consciousness itself strongly implies that existence REQUIRES factors other than chance operate if the universe is to continue. SR/GR/QM and Schwarzchild conceptually suggest that the universe is organized to selectively encourge events of certain kinds, and discourage randomness- even though in the eternal past, the universe was likely a much more random affair than now.
Sam,
it was just a limerick.
e.
Sam,
As a comparision of energy/mass to consciousness/intellect, I’ve wondered whether we are concentrations of something far more etherial, much like the amount of energy stored in mass is enormous. It would explain why we cannot perceive any sense of awareness beyond obviously animate entities, yet still exist as a larger, interconnected organism, a Gaia model.
The problem with language isn’t just its limits, but also its lack thereof, but than it is a process and not an entity. What I was taking from the term ‘feral’ was how we seemingly apply it to what has returned to what we might consider wild, yet the same (a)moral plasticity manifests in many of our normal societal interactions, from Wall St. to Washington and many places inbetween. My larger point is the way that systems tend to self destruct, as their strength and definition turns to rigidity and limitation. Life overcomes this by regeneration, but as the individual entities, we don’t appreciate the necessity of the process. A discussion I’ve been having elsewhere concerns the nature of money and how it functions as a medium of exchange and public utility, but we primarily think of it as a store of value and personal property. The result being reoccuring credit bubbles as wealth concentrates, yet must be redistributed through lending in order to keep the system functioning. The result being a further concentration of wealth as interest is compounded, even to the point of indebting public institutions. Eventually the credit bubble bursts, the economy crashes and we have to build it back up again. If we understood it as the function of government that it is, than the cycle of wealth accumulation might be better managed to build a more fundamentally healthy society. Yet the political dynamic is managed by those who prefer to keep the status quo. In terms of a convective cycle, wealth is like water that evaporates up and precipitates back down, but the current system holds as much as possible up in the clouds until the ground is parched, than drops it as a deluge that does as much damage as rehydration. By understanding the cycle, we could direct it to where it might be the most effectively used.
Wouldn’t a photon with mass in an infinite universe still create event horizons, since it would constrain how far light could travel?
Sean: If it is not on the list already, you may want to add “Hyperion” to the list of books with incompatible arrows. Specifically, The Scholar’s Tale: “The River Lethe’s Taste is Bitter” is a tragic story about a man who has to watch his daughter age in reverse, every day waking up one day younger. It is, in my opinion, the best of the six stories in the book, and one of the more heart-wrenching sci-fi stories that I’ve read.
Why non-linear equations are cool
http://www.newcomensengine.com/2008/04/soylent-green-is-people.html
Hi Elliot,
I had a response all set up, minimized it to check a couple of things- and lost it! So lets try this again!
Your post was very appropriate. If tachyons are found, we may have evidence for a universe with an “umbilical”…not closed as the GR concept proposes. This would solve certain engineering problems, and of course create others!
The speed of light in a vacuum as observed at our frame of reference is measured constant to at least 10 decimal places. However, the speed of light could and can vary…especially light can be made to slow down. Of course from the frame of reference of a photon itself, being a part of a vast entangled matrix, there is no speed of light at all. A photon coming out of my lamp is entangled with, and the same as the photons coming out of the lamp of an observer on the other side of the universe.
I used that particular illustration from Special Relativity because I wanted to lead into a good illustration of Einstein’s intuitive genius in conceptually moving from Euclidean Special Relativity to Global General Relativity.
We look at the thought experiment of the accelerating spacecraft that I briefly described and imagine that while the relativistic effects have been certainly verified in many ways, a thought experiment is really, just a thought experiment.
The shocker is that while the thought experiment is a simple illustration of an effect of Special Relativity, according to General Relativity such effects, on a much vaster scale are the essence of the world you and I live in. One of the key insights of Einstein in generalizing his relativity concept was that gravitational and non-inertial frames (our accelerating spaceship) are identical. Standing on the surface of the Earth under a constant acceleration of one gravity produces the same kind of relativistic effects (though more complex) as living in a moving spacecraft undergoing a constant acceleration of one gravity!
We need to remember that even under the slight gravitational attraction of tiny energy densities and experiencing the small accelerations due to gravity that they produce, applied constantly, relativistic effects would appear in their vicinity in only a small fraction of cosmological time- 13.7 Billion (Light) Years. To use the Earth’s gravity as an illustration, the acceleration due to gravity on our planet would produce relativistic effects as people living on the Earth observe the universe in just 20 years or so.
Einstein thus correctly concluded that the world we observe is created by and the result of relativistic effects. Information and complexity- what we call “particulate” reality- is perched on 4D event horizon surfaces at the edge of the Planck Realm. While we exist because of the information on these event horizon surfaces, (the geometric circumference), we observe reality remotely electromagnetically and photonically from the center of the geometry, many orders of magnitude removed form our actual essence.
Were the mass of the universe infinite, energy densities of the universe would forever approach, but never actually reach the speed of light (approach the particulate event horizons)…what we observe would linger on the event horizons forever. In a universe of finite mass, energy densities all simultaneously attain the speed of light, become photonic, and reverse “hemispheric” polarity at the same time, which happens to be the age and maximum observed size of the universe. This is NOT coincidental. The actual observed passage of time from macroscopic scales is a result of the finitude of universal mass and is defined by the gravitational time dilation formula.
The fact that what would, at fist glance seem impossible, or only possible in the distant future (our accelerating spacecraft approaching the speed of light) is actually not only possible, but the basis for our existence, has led me to conclude that anything in this universe which can be done, has already been done and exists at some coordinates in the cosmos. The entangled photonic matrix and the collective consciousness, in coordination with eternally stored particulate information, as I pointed out in a previous post, interact serendipitously over eternity to gradually decrease informational entropy (make the universe more complex) at the sacrifice of a slight overall increase in thermal entropy within the system.
It would seem that the SRT/GR cosmological configuration could not be ultimately eternal, but I’m personally not hasty to draw such a conclusion. Rather I prefer to consider the system as existing exactly the way Einstein conceived it, and leave it to future generations to work out the mechanisms of the universal evolution and determine how informational complexity could increase with a gradual increase in thermal entropy without de-stabilizing the cosmos. I am also inclined to feel the answer the latter question relates to increasing the longevity of existing organisms…the cosmos dare not tamper with the young without risking overall instability.
I would imagine you are starting to see just how thought provoking a short post like yours can be! Of course Sean knows that well. That is why he starts threads like this one!
John,
The massed and the mass-less photon have interesting conceptual histories. The massed photon, so far as my research indicates, demands a universe of finite mass. Those interested in infinite universal models usually use a mass-less photon. An infinite universe with a massed photon would tend to be too crowded to be observed as having vast fields (space) with only a small percentage of baryonic energy density.
The main problem with the mass-less photon is the fact that photons, both as particles and waves, do work, however infinite universe models in general have problems, which I think are more serious than those with GR style closed systems of finite mass. Also, as I have pointed out, the universe itself, by the way it is measured and observed, gives strong indications it is finite in mass and marginally closed in space and time…though of course space is necessarily observed as flat in a GR universe.
Interesting thoughts! I can tell you are interested in conceptual links between the natural and social sciences!
Best Wishes….
Sam Cox – (re 22)
Let me reiterate and clarify the physical part of your comment. I will leave the non-physical parts alone (“collective consciousness”, “entangled photon matrix”, “eternity” and so on).
The locally measured speed of light in free space (c) is assumed to be a universal constant. Free space, or perfect physical vacuum, is defined as not a medium, and has (by that definition) a refractive index of zero.
Light travels slower through a medium (i.e., non-vacuum), and can be slowed down to a crawl through media with extremely large refractive indices. This does not affect c, the photons are no longer travelling through free space.
Causal interactions mediated by photons can be delayed by expanding space along the geodesic (“shortest path”) from source to destination. This still does not affect c; the photons are still travelling through free space, but the distance itself has grown.
Finally, in GR, distant measurements of the speed of light depend on acceleration; e.g. light in lower gravitatonal potentials will appear to travel more slowly and light in higher gravitational potentials will appear to travel more quickly. However, light in free space in the same gravitational potential will always be measured at c.
These statements are consistent with observations of (among other things) the Hubble flow, gravitational lensing, observations of astrophysical ASE bodies, as well as terrestrial experience with diamond, glass fibre and analogues with even higher refractive indices, terrestrial surface-orbital interactions as with GPS, even sea level-11km measurements involving aircraft, and earth-surface mars-surface moon-surface signal comparisons.
Photons have zero rest mass. This means that the combination of the energy (E) and momentum (p) of a photon is identical to its mass (m) in a frame of reference in which the photon is at rest. In particle physics we deal with invariant mass, which is the mass of a particle that remains the same in all frames of reference; in practice invariant mass and rest mass are synonymous. Photons have zero invariant mass, but have both momentum and Energy. In free space the relationship is E = pc, as for any particle in SR, E^2=(mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2. “Relativistic mass” as a synonym for “energy” is something which should be avoided because of the tendency to confuse people. It is thus energy (former “relativistic mass”) that distorts spacetime, not rest mass.
The zero rest mass of photons has been derived experimentally. The Standard Model and gauge theory (which is important in Lambda-CDM) also predicts a massless photon, and this prediction is sufficiently critical to warrant experiments aimed at setting ever better upper limits to the mass of a photon. Repeatable experiments as of now show an upper limit of approximately 1e-52 kg/photon (or 6e-17 eV/c^2 per photon).
Lambda-CDM is well supported by observation and is consistent with particle experiments. It is not an “infinite” universe, yet requires a massless photon.
In general, any predictions requiring a photon with nonzero rest mass are on shaky ground because of experiments in quantum electrodynamics validating gauge symmetry in electromagnetic interactions. Symmetry works only if the carrier particle (the photon) has exactly zero rest mass. Carrier rest mass limits interaction distance. The electromagnetic interaction range is very large (i.e., to at least the observational horizon, ~~4.3e26 m), and retains an inverse square relationship even at large distances.
A nonzero rest mass would necessasrily limit the distance at which the inverse square relationship holds true. (For example, in the Standard Model, the weak interaction is mediated by the heavy W and Z bosons (in the high tens of GeV/c^2 per boson), and has a very short range (1e-18 m)).
Finally, “space is necessarily observed as flat in a GR universe” is hard to reconcile. Within the observable universe at the largest scales, spacetime appears flat. In practice we use an FLRW model for the universe , since it leads to reasonable approximations of calculations taking into account visible and dark structures at the largest scales. However, it is not *necessarily* true in order to preserve local physics.
GR does not require flatness on any scale; it is in fact a tool which is useful for analysing and predicting behaviours in non-flat spacetime (otherwise, we’d just use SR). It does not require that the universe have a closed topology at the largest scales, and in fact there is substantial observational evidence in favour of a very flat or very slightly open topology at the largest scales.
“I can tell you are interested in conceptual links between the natural and social sciences”
Who isn’t? One recurring problem is that specialists on one side or the other tend to make wild speculations in areas in which they are not exceptionally well informed. Often these wild speculations have been tested and retested for decades and found to be inconsistent with reality as we know it. This is true in both directions. It’s somewhat sad (and obviously frustrating) that many of these speculations are on their face reasonable, logical extrapolations of well-tested, well-understood theories that apparently lack sufficient predictive power to derive the implications of the speculations to the point where they at least seem a little less wild…
Sy,
This is a point I keep raising with regard to the concept of “expanding space,” as used by Big Bang theory to explain why we are not at the center of the universe, due to other galaxies being redshifted directly away from us. I keep pointing out that if space itself is expanding, than the speed of light would increase proportionally, otherwise it is an increasing distance of stable space, not expanding space. If it is only increasing distance, then an expanding universe model would mean that we are at the center of the universe. It has been my contention that redshift is due to an opposite curvature of space then that caused by gravity and these opposing curvatures balance out, leaving an overall flat space.
So would light traveling at c actually constitute a particle/photon, or is this a consequence of measuring? To use an analogy, if we were to describe a lightning bolt in terms of the spot it grounds at, we might understand it in terms of that spot and think of it as a ball. Could photons be something similar; The spot where the energy of the wave of light grounds to the contact field? This could help explain how it is massless, other than momentum and energy. That they have specific energy could be a function of transition. Similar to the size of a drop of water being determined by surface tension and gravity, not that water has to be that exact amount.
I do realize I’m applying other fields to physics and cosmology, but for someone who does take an interest in the broad range of human endeavor, some of the models being used in these fields have characteristics of a kluge, where patches are added to match theory with observation, yet cause more problems further along the process. The tendency to engage in this goes to the subconscious level and prevails across many aspects of human, as well as physical behavior, where pressure builds until a phase transition point is reached and the structure implodes or explodes.
Sy,
Thanks for taking the time to summarize all this. I think you clarified and defined these issues very well. If course when my solar calculator works, we are not dealing with photons at rest, but it is very obvious why cosmologically photons would overall be “at rest”…and should conceptually be considered that way. I especially appreciated your final comments on cosmological speculation and extrapolation.
When I spoke of GR requiring “the flatness of space” I was not referring to GR itself, which is, as a concept global and curved by its very nature, but rather the way the observer sees space in that kind of geometry.
Sam Cox