Entangled Gravity

 Hi!  Long time no Nois...
Something about getting a baby at 63 and having a 12-y-o at 75 tends to absorb all available energy...

Wait!  I was talking about absorbing all available energy in the last "Gravity" post in 2011.. "Keep on keeping on".  I promised a couple of posts but never wrote them... ugh...

I have been watching YouTube posts by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder and watched her recent post about quantum physics being non-local ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpkgPJo_z6Y ).  I posted a comment to her post that seemed to be a perfect starting place to continue the conversation about gravity and our existence.  So, this post is basically a copy of that comment.  Enjoy.  Nois

Comment posted 04/18/2024:

I tried hard to not make this too long... sorry...

During Grad school, I learned about the Dirac Delta function and Fourier Transforms, but I had little understanding of what they meant.  For the next 5 years, I taught math at secondary schools and sadly had to turn my brain off to do that.  Then I worked in geophysical exploration and thanks to geophysicist Qz Yilmaz (SEG), I finally visualized those deltas and transforms!  Wow!

15 years later I was a software QA and had been reading about physicists who believed gravity was instantaneous.  If I understand right, Einstein's thinking was that gravity is a virtual force that is just the effect of the interaction of the warping of time-space by matter.  If so, then it could be instantaneous...  

I was thinking through all of this while driving across Trail Ridge Road in Colorado, USA, back to our campsite, My 3-year-old asked if we were going to our tent?  Yes.  How do we know the way?  We follow the road.  How does the road know the way?  It knows because it is already there --
BOOM!  Brain exploded... The time-space warps are already there.

30 years later I blogged about combining all of this and realized that the book "Holographic Universe" (Talbot, 2011, HarperCollins) was saying what I was thinking... information-theory-wise, every point in the universe has the phase/amplitude information to create the entire universe.  I see the information from each point relative to our respective locations, which forms my reality. 
I observe, therefore it is.

I think entanglement is just like gravity.  All of the particles in the universe are just waveforms, and all our sense of reality is the interaction of the electrical fields and gravity of those particles, and those forces are just how we describe those wave interactions -eh?  All of space is empty.  

If a collision can create a waveform that manifests as 2 particles where one has +spin and the other has -spin then that characteristic would be true whenever and wherever they go.  I suppose you could say that they have a probability distribution in the sense that the polarities could change with time but always be opposite.  So, if you actually observe one of them, then the other will be the opposite (just like Sabine's envelopes.)  However, if you find a way to flip one of them, you must interact with the generating waveform, which will automatically and simultaneously flip the other one... no longer scary.  : )

How does every point in the universe have its information updated instantaneously?  That discussion is another long post. I remember Feynman said there is only one electron in all of time and space - eh?  Imagine building that electron waveform with Dirak Delta spikes.  It would only take one...

I said this would be long... thoughts?  
Sabine, Thanks for your amazing posts!  Charlie

Keep on keepin' on...

Keep on keepin' on...
I now want to turn to momentum, velocity and the speed of light.

A useful metaphore may not be perfect, but it should help one to visualize many properties of a system. Our slice-time worm metaphore has allowed us to perceive a 4D universe and how time can be expressed as a space dimension, which lead to visualizing time travel... not bad! There are many things about our existance that do not have very good explanations, so our attempts to visualize them do not really leave us any worse off then we were at the beginning! Like gravity, momentum is exactly such a phenomanon. We have been able to describe the properties of momentum for a long time, but what "causes" it? Why should something at rest tend to stay at rest and something in motion tend to stay in motion?

Lets see how our Worm motif can help us visualize momentum. Remember when we talked about fixed points in the future and how we can be predestined without limiting us in the present? Well, you will need to exercise that thought a bit now. We have practiced visualizing our rib-slice-worm (RSW) in time. And practiced thinking of the RSW already existing in the future and possibly being able to move in the past. Lets play with that image a bit. Visualize yourself running down a straight section of trail and then see your RSW extending through time over that frame. Your RSW is sort of tilted in the direction that you ran and is fairly straight. Imagine the RSW being flexible, but somewhat stiff. Once you bend it in the direction down the trail, you are actually bending it in the future. Once it is bent you do not need to apply more force to make it "move", so you can just let time pass and it will express itself as moving forward through time.

Of course, we can not actually expect our RSW to float down the trail without some effort, because we still need to hold ourself up by moving our legs under us, overcoming wind resistance, avoiding obsticals and etc. However, if I was running on ice and then suddenly stopped running, I would continue to move forward until the reduced friction of the ice finally slowed me down. I can visualize the bent worm as being the means of creating the tendancy to keep moving and I can visualize my interaction with all of the surrounding worms as being the means of slowing me down... as I bend my worm into the future I must displace a lot of other future worms and I have limited energy to do that. Eventually the interaction with the other worms will cause me to "slow down" because I will then stop pushing the other worms around.

The other worms are exibiting the other property of momentum... they want to stay at rest because if they move they must push a bunch of other worms around... see? Moving through them into the future forces them to be displaced, which takes energy. If I stop appying energy, as when I stopped running, I eventually slow until my motion matches the motion of all the other worms around me. The concept of actually being "at rest" is sort of silly when you think about it... am I not on the surface of the earth spinning around 24,000 miles a day (1,000 mph)? Am I not circling the earth's orbit every year? Am I not moving with the solar system around the center of the Milky Way Galixie? What is "still"? Basically, we think of ourselves being at rest when we are matching our motion to the motion of all the other worms near us - see? If we ever find ourself in open space, with relatively few other worms around us, then we would expect to bend our worm and then sit back and move along into the future with almost no further expendature of energy. Of course we would surely find ourselves caught in some cometary eliptical orbit destined to return right back to the starting place! Can you see that creating a huge spiral racing across slice-time? At this point in my musing, I tend to think about the future "narrow gate" I need to pass through as a destination that is narrow, but accessible from anywhere in my 3D brane rather than as being some actual 3D locatiion. I can only visualize that in 4D space.

Now suppose we keep putting in more and more energy so that we go faster and faster. What will that look like? To me, I see my high velocity worm bending flatter and flatter to my "now" time surface. That means that for each slice, the next slice has to be displaced farther as I stack them up. It makes sense to me that there would be some limit to how far I could displace the slices, and that it would take more and more energy to accomplish that displacement. (Stay tuned for the next post when we will follow a single atom through time.) When we were thinking about time travel we visualized bending our RSW into an S shape in time. At the top and bottom bends of the S the direction of movement is flat, so that might cause a contradiction to the limitation of velocity except that the actual length of level travel is vanishingly small. It is like the moment in Calculus where the slope is 0, but it is exactly 0 for 0 time, so it does not actually violate the law! I love Calculus!

We will turn to the meaning of mass in the next posts and why it might be that mass increases with velocity. For now, just think about accelerating a particle. As velocity increases, the particle's mass increases, it shrinks and it takes more and more energy to accelerate it. I have read that one way to visualize the limitation of the speed of light is to imagine it taking more and more energy to accomplish the acceleration until it takes all of the energy in the universe to accelerate the tiniest particle to the speed of light. Like a nuclear reaction converting mass into energy, I would need to convert all of the mass in the universe into energy to accelerate that one particle... which would own that energy as mass but have vanishingly small length! Wow! If you packed all of that mass-energy into a single point and then it exploded, that would be a really Big Bang... ya'think?

It is sort of like the old saying that we know more and more about less and less until finally we know absoutely everything about nothing, at which point we also know absoutely nothing about everything!

(Hummm... So, why can light travel at the speed of light?)
Nois

Rectilinear or serpentine?

Rectilinear or serpentine?
What? What now, Nois?

OK, OK, back to time travel in a minute... First we have to talk about snakes, and worms. They have various modes of locomotion, including Rectilinear and Serpentine. Actually, several of the other modes are just variations of these. Think of the last fishing worm, or night crawler you saw... not too bad a memory I hope... remember how they seemed to stretch their head out in front of them, then they latched on up front and started to move the center part of their body up by the head, then they brought the tail end up to the rest of the body... repeat. Snakes can also do that, and they also bend their bodies into S shapes and propagate that S along their bodies, which propells them forward in serpentine mode.

OK, so why, the biology lesson? Well, If our rib-slice-worms (RSWs) are going to travel in time, they need to have a mode of locomotion - right? I have thought quite a bit about these two modes and would like to explore each of them a bit. Much like the Worm metaphore for 4D existance, I am not proposing this as a practical method, but rather as a means to visualize a system where one can visualize something that is nearly impossible to visualize normally. Let's see if it helps us visualize time travel without accidentally killing grandma...

Lets talk about serpentine locomotion first. From the perspective of classic syfy, this is time travel via the RSW metaphore. If you think about "Back to the future" Michael's RSW would need to bend back on itself so that his worm could go back below the "now" surface. To get a grasp of this, think about our Flatland friend's worm. What would happen as we watched him if his slice-time worm bent enough that he made an S curve instead of just going straight up and if part of that S went below the surface of the water. Would you expect that to damage him in any way? Nope. Well, we would have to assume that he was flexible enough to stretch that far and that it does not rip him away from future "fixed points" that had to happen. Of course, we also need to allow him to move in the "past" as we discussed last post. In the current metaphore, we said that the "worm" was only self aware at the surface of the water. If, so, then we could end up in a situation at the current surface, where there would actually be 3 instances of a conscious self - up, down, up! However, with those rules, the time traveler would not be consious when he was back visiting grandma! Not exactly what I had in mind! The time traveling worm would not bother grandma a bit and would not cause any significant trouble in the past, because he already clearly exists in the present and future... eh? If the worm stays bent like that then eventually the "now" surface cones up to the top of the S, then that stream of consiousness would suddenly end and the second "up" going self-aware would sort of "take over" as the future instance. That would explain some really odd days where I can not remember doing something that I clearly did, or remember doing something that I can see that I did not do! How about you?

Maybe I am a snake in time! If a tenticle of a hydra bent down and then back up, would we expect that to damage him, the other tenticles, or significantly change the rest of the hydra higher up... nope.

Rectilinear motion is another interesting option! In this case, there is only one instance of consiousness... that is a good thing! However, there is an odd twist coused by the 'now" surface again. Lets suppose that the worm is able to stretch and squeeze himself like the worm. That would effectively take the "now.1" slice into the past or future and move some other "now.n" slice to the "now" surface. However, while the future slice was visiting the "now" surface, he would be self-aware. If he moved back to his normal surface and then eventually that became the self aware surface, he would remember being there in the past. Cool. Also, all oh his slices would experience passing through the "now" surface, so there would be an accelerated time passage for him during the move. Time would rewind very fast if he stretched the other way.

Another possiblity is that there is only one slice who is the designated driver, in that he is self-aware no matter where he goes along the time line. I find this possibility more appealing, and it fits with the syfy story lines better too! In this model, I am consious when I meet my grandma! I suppose I would have to be unconsious in the now... my wife would say she finds me drifting in another plane fairly often, so maybe that is it! I do not know what phenomanon makes me self-aware at the now surface, so I can not speculate what the rules might be for the traveling worm slices.

This experience seems similar to me as the "accedent awen" (1) I have experienced several times. Take for example a time when I witnessed a broad side collison. I was driving along a 55 mph road in North Denver in the inside lane when the light in front of me turned yellow. I made an instant decision and stopped. At exactly the moment I stepped on the break I heard the car that was behind me in the right lane accelerate to go on through the intersection. We all make those choices every time we drive... I thought they were pushing it, but hey, each person knows themselves and their car's abilities. I watched as the right lane car slowely approached the intersection. Across the intersection in the left turn lane was a car waiting to turn. When they saw me slowing to stop, they hit the gas and slowely began to turn. I was amazed to watch as the slowly turning car moved in front of the slowly crossing car to my right... why did they not both just stop! Oh well, I thought, they are going so slow, there will not be much damage... the crossing car hit the turning car on the right rear and that car spun around at least once, ending up going backwards back across the median on the other side of the intersection and into the the path of the oncoming traffic. Luckily, they were all slowing to stop at the red light and there was no additional damage. I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw the two drivers come out of both cars un-hurt... they were both mad at the other... but safe!

Wait a minute... play that back... that makes no sense. How could there have been such a forceful collision if they were moving so slow? Then I realized that I was awen... I call it being "accident awen" (1)-- that state of mind where time slows down and you experience everything in slow motion. (Some writers describe a battle awen where a warrior is able to fight better than 10 opponents because they see the opponents moving in slow motion while the opponents see them moving with lightening reflexes.) The police gathered my information as a witness, then went to handel the situation. When the policeman returned he explained that neither driver saw the other because my car blocked their vision... makes sense. He had one question for me... Did the car in the right lane enter the intersection before the light turned red... did it? Well, unfortunately, I reviewed the tape in my head several times and I never noticed the light change - duh!!! The police man sent me on my way... probably very frustrated.

So, my time travel question is, how did my brain know to go into the awen state so that I would watch the accident happen in slo-mo? Some researchers have said that our brains actually record all of those details all of the time and we arrange them to suite (Temporal Binding). So we are always assembling un-synchronized events into coherent sequences, so can easily perceive evereything in slo-mo. I don't know... not very appealing to me. I do not think I was remembering the slow-mo, I think I actually experienced it! Another school of thought (e.g. Kappa Effect) is that we can actually speed up or slow down our perception of time by how many incidents we perceive per second. So, if we want time to pass quickly, we can just become unaware of our surroundings and go into "limbo". I have a hard time doing that! About the only time I can stop my brain from whizzing around is to be fishing (and recently when barely running!)! Not sure Why! Also, if I want time to slow down, I just start to notice as many detials as possible. The mind perceives that time is passing slowly because it assumes a certain habitual rate of instance notices per second - see? This leaves me cold too because I still want to know how I knew to start watching, or perceiving those details? Others say that the adrenalin rush we have in danger slows down our perception of time.

Now, with our current RSW time travel metaphore, this is fairly easy to explain... Either I have some part of me that is a little bit aware of the future (remember when my Flatland friend agreed that he must have a little wafer thickness in time?) or I am able to slip back just a bit in time so that I can relive that snipet in slo-mo. I have thought about this a lot, and I really can not think up a better explanation... I can travel in time! And I do it on a fairly regular, but mostly unconsequential way. Suppose I was able to "change the past"... wouldn't I have told myself to look at that light?

Then again, it is possible that hearing that driver rev his engine right when I stepped on my break is what caused my mind to start recording in high-def and my perception to be in slo-mo. That would fit the second school of thought about the speed of time passing, and eliminate my time travel explanation... but, if so, wouldn't I be awen a lot?.. Like everytime something triggers my spider sense? Oh well... no easy answer here...
Nois

1. I am not referring here to the Awen of Welsh poetic inspiration, but related to it. You know how it feels to be "in awe" - right? That sort of breath stopping emotion that can comes from various sources... fear, grandness, majesty, power... accidents. Well, if you fall you are fallen - right, or If someone takes you, you are taken - eh? So if you are in awe, you are awen - see? In the Arthurian novels of Stephen A. Lawhead, he uses the term as I have - a state of mind. He talks often of the battle awen.

Why a Hydra? Why not a coral reef?

Why a Hydra? Why not a coral reef?

Because we did such a great job of finishing off the 300 year old argument about predistination and free will, I thouht we would tackle something simpler this post... time travel! Pretty scary with all the worry about accidently killing your gandmother while traveling to the past! Ah, but we must be brave! Our time-slice worms give us a totally different way of visualizing this interesting question... will we ever travel in time? This is too complex for one post, so we will talk about our "Past" paradigm first.

We already discussed this a little in the post "More Time for Nothng" . If our flatlander had no thickness in "hight," which was his "time," I would not be able to see him from his 2D brane! We agreed to consider him to be a thin wafer, rather than a 0-thickness surface. Then we tok little wafer snap shots of him and stacked them up to make a 3D worm from our 2D friend. Similarly, we took 2D wafer slices through our torsos to make 3D worms from ourselves and visualized a "hydra" creatures all the way back to Adam! Wow! a 12 billion bud hydra! (6 billion are "dead") We basically traded our "height" dimension for our "time" dimension.

As we grew our rib-slice-worm (RSW) I recommended that you visualize letting the "past" part of your worm sort of trail behind you as you rose through "time". This allowed us to visualize our RSW but leads to an interesting question... what is it like "down there?" In our usual paradigm of "past" we would need to think of the human-hydra as a coral reef stem - frozen like solid stone! Instead, we never gave it a thought, so our hydra was living and moving... hummm... interesting... Did you ever wonder if the past could be anything other than frozen?

I have a big problem when people, especially governments and the media '"rewrite" the past, and that is not what I am talking about! That is making the written record disagree with what happened. What I am talking about is actually changing the past! That is a very difficult paradigm shift, so let yourself relax a bit. Lets do what we did with the billion slice-space worms and concentrate on one simple example... like you! Your RSW that is. Remember when we visited flatland and watched our amoeba friend's slice-time worm move? He sort of twisted round, as worms do, but I did not mention at the time that if the part of him that was down in the watery past moved, it would be changing his past?. Right now, my RSW is pressed up against the back of my chair. Before that, I was in the kitchen. So my RSW went from the kitchen to the chair to come to the chair. Now, suppose I walked to the TV and then to the chair... Well it might not make any difference at all, but then again it could be like the buttefly Effect... suppose that during that act I saw an ad on TV that I would not have seen if I went to that chair... how far upstream would that change propagate? Hard to tell isn't it? It could totally change my life, or it might not cause any sgnificant change.

To me, the solution to this dilema is also the solution to the clasic problem about accidently killing your grandmother. Think about a hydra floating around in the water. The tenticles can float up and down, tangle together, unwind, etc. The do not damage each other do they? Suppose a tenticle hooked onto a twig. Would the rest of the tenticle have to stay froxen in the pond so that it did not pull the tenticle off the twig? Of course not! It is free to wiggle around. However, it does not wiggle around too hard and certainly not enough to hurt itself! So, why can't our RSWs worms wiggle around as long as they do not hurt themselves, including not doing something that significantly alters events? This is exactly the kind of flexibility I talked about last post about predestination... I can be soverignly passed through a future narrow gate without freezing me in time-space. I am free to wiggle around and am totally responsible for where I wiggle! So, for this post, I am just wondering if I could also do that in the past... see, if a 4D creature watched me he would just see me wiggling in time just like I watched my flatland friend's worm wiggle around.

Try that vision on for a while. We will do some real time travel next post.
Nois

Predestination and free will, at the same time...

Predestination and free will, at the same time...

When we imagined our torso rib-slice-worm (RSW) for the last post we ended up with an incredible picture of humankind all the way back to Adam! All of the hydra stalks were cross connected and twisted around each other in an amazing tangle. But we failed to think about one aspect that our 3D flatland visitor saw immediately when he looked at the amoeba... the amoeba was really a worm that stretched below (past) and above (future) the slowly rising water in the drum. For some reason, the worm was only self aware right at the water/air interface! However, the 3D visitor saw all of the worm at once... as a creature in time.

In Frank Herbert's sci fy clasic "Dune", he visualized time as a billion pre and post possibilities intersecting at now. I am not proposing the same concept, but it is a somewhat related thought. Instead, I am visualizing a creature, which exists in time-space as a billion, stacked up time slice worms. Again, we pick one slice to help visualize this creature, say, the rib-slice-worm (RSW). We spent a lot of time visualizing this guy last post and even saw him as a bud off an Adam Hydra, attached finally to the dust of the new creation. But, try to make this next leap in the visualization... Think of yourself as the 3D visitor to Flatland who could see the 3D amoeba-worm stretching both above and below the water's surface. To the time-free 4D viewer, our human worm creature already exists in the future, just as it exists in the past! Whoa... stop a while and let that soak...

My RSW is only self aware at the past/future interface just as the Flatland amoeba worm was self aware only at the water/air interface! This view of my RSW has some interesting consequences. For this post, we will only think through one of them. How do you feel about predestination? In Christianity there has been a "war" of sorts for a long time about predestination and free will. Some of the major lines of reasoning became focused in the teachings of John Calvin (Calvinistic) and Professor Armineas (Arminian). While there are various points of difference, one major one is the difference in how they see predestination and free will. After all if we are predestined to sin, then how can we be held accountable for that sin? Can we not see God as having freedom in time so that he can look "up" through the future to see me accept Christ as savior and Lord? So, I am predestinated because that is what God sees. Or, from the other side, God is soverign and he knows his children from the foundation of the universe. They are soverignly elected, and therefor arrive at the moment of rebirth. Those who are not the elect do not go through the "narrow gate". Both of them are free to choose to sin, and are fully responsible but the elect have their debt "paid in full". (if you want more details there are at least 300 years wourh of books and other writings on the subject! Eternal secutity can take a whole nother life time to ponder...)

Hummm... all of that would have seemed very hard to visualize just a few weeks ago, but now that you can view your RSW, you can see that in fact, both are true at the same time! Problem solved! God sees the entire creature from the foundation of the universe to the Adam-bud to the me-bud. God may soverignly pass my RSW through the narrow gate while I maintain full free will and responsibility for what my worm does on the way there... see? This image was an incredible reliefe 25 years ago when I was struggling with these two different theologies! Both schools seemed to have right ideas and both seemed to have weak ideas. I have never been able to give enough context to explain it to more than a few people, so hopefully you, gentle reader, are now among the group who sees this! Ordinary thought just does not allow one to think about predestnation and free will at the same time, but with our new time creatures, it is a synch! It is all just a matter of perspective!

In Watchman Nee's classic "Sit, Walk, Stand" Nee also touches this truth. He describes the believer as simultaneously seated with Christ in the heavenlies, walking through a messy life, and standing on the power of a choice for Christ all at the same time! You can visualize that easily if you think of your RSW existing at all those points already. Years later when I was talking to my daughter about how a road knows the way back to the tent, I answered "It knows because it is already there." This is also that kind of vision - see it?

I can not end this without relaying my favorite Calvinistic/Arminian story... Oh no... there he goes again... This is from a neighborhood Reformed Prespretarian (Calvinistic) pastor who was talking to us as we were thinking about changing churches. John Calvin and John Wesely (Arminian) both died, and were walking up paths to heaven. As luck would have it the paths they were on joined and as soon as they saw each other, there was great rejoycing! "John! how good to see you!" "No, John, it is my pleasure! How delightful!" (sure, they talked like that...) They continued their rejoycing and reminiscing as they walked up the path. Soon, they came to the walls of Heaven, and they saw the Pearly Gates. They stopped. Wesely looked longingly at Calvin... Calvin nodded as in final agreement... there, above the gate, was an inscription: "Whosoever will may come!" They embraced, and continued on arm in arm. They entered heaven and started to walk from the gate a bit down the street of gold. Suddenly, Wesely felt Calvin tug on his sleve... They both turned around and stared back at the Pearly Gates. There above the inside of the gates was another inscription: "Known from the foundation of the universe!" It was just a matter of perspective.
Nois

Adam... the hydra...

Adam... the hydra...

OK kids... now we are going somewhere... all the way back to Adam. If you have enjoyed the mental gymnastics so far, I hope you will get a good work out this time. We are going to abandon the photo-flattening and go back to the micro slice technique.

Remember when we took the micro slices through two fingers and visualized the time snakes created as we stacked up copies from the same finger locations over time? As your fingers moved through time and space, their worms moved around in the slice-time space we created in our imagination. OK, so now instead of a finger, think about slicing right through your torso... right about at the bottom rib... Can you imagine that slice? Take another now... another... another... stack them up... What do you get? Yep, a really wormy worm this time, complete with innards! Try to visualize your rib-slice-worm (RSW) for a minute or two. Hopefully by now you can see yourself stretching through time. Imagine the slices from the previous moments sort of trailing off below you as you rise through time while unfurling your RSW like a rope.

Now, here's the real fun. I want you to travel with your torso RSW back through your day. Imagine similar torso RSWs of the people you saw -- the guy who cut you off in traffic, the person walking down the hall in front of you, the person you passed going the opposite way. Imagine all of those worms, but don't even try to imagine all of the other objects around you! You could hurt yourself! Can you do that for a day's worth of time? Sure, it is OK to leave out some detail... just see the basic idea. My worm went from the bed to the shower, then down to put some flaky stuff down a tube, then into the car, and in to work after dropping off my girls at school... oops there go their worms! I walked back and forth to the coffee station, sat at my desk, came home, drove out to get some sandwiches, sat at home here typing, then soon back to bed... quite a worm-day! If I allow myself to imagine the bed's worm, it is pretty stable, so it is just a stationary surface in time. My worm was on it, then did all the daily stuff, then plopped down right back on the bed surface again... can you see it? Sort of like ivy attaching to a trellis, then going out and then attaching again further up... What does yours look like? Try to see just the rib slices stacked up... can you see the worm? Work at it! How does it look when you breathe? Now you are getting it!

OK now, Please allow me to assume that Adam was a real, actual, person who was the real actual first man, personally crafted by God in the garden. For some, that is probably an even harder stretch than visualizing their RSW! Do it anyway, it will do you good to think through this. So, travel back in your imagination all the way to Adam. God got some dust, a little spit, breathed in the air (spirit) and poof... Adam! For our purposes now, we do not need all of Adam... we just need his rib-slice. Ah, you are getting ahead of me - eh? OK, go ahead and imagine his RSW for a little while. Got it? Well, as many of you know, it was not long and God decided to complete the creation by making Eve. He did not make her in the same way, but instead he took a rib from Adam! As luck would have it, it is exactly the rib that we sliced through to make Adams RSW! Cleaver of us.

But wait... if he took the rib out of Adam to make Eve, then Eve's RSW is actually sort of a bud off the side of Adam's RSW! Imagine That! Whoa, that is an odd creature indeed! Eventually there were other, child worms. how would they occur? Well, I suppose one would have to make slices at different places than the rib, but I just picked that rib-slice out as an example... remember all of the billion slices are there stacked up all through the time we see. We just picked one as an example to make it easier to visualize. So, make an Adam slice and an Eve slice in appropriate places and let yourself imagine that sequence... oops getting pretty racy on the old blog...

So... if you are back... with me... Did you see a tiny Adam-cell-worm move across, join with an Eve-cell-worm, making it's own worm, then bursting forth to continue on as a separate, but time-connected little, growing bud? Good. Now, continue to imagine that for a few generations... How about a thousand years? It gets pretty tangled and interconnected - eh?

When I first thought of Adam this way I tried to figure out how to describe it to the few people who would listen to me... thanks son!... about the only thing I could think of was a hydra! That is not an especially good metaphor, particularly if you visualize the mythological hydra that Hercules fought!!! Or the constellation!!!

No, No, NO, I am talking about the little pond creature! See some here http://www.fishpondinfo.com/animals/micro.htm

and here http://www.scientificillustrator.com/illustration/microscopic/hydra.html

.
Even that is not very good, and only good for a few child-buds, but it might give you a little help with this!

The scripture says that we were in Adam from the beginning. I think that this visualization gives an interesting insight to that truth. When I think of my RSW (and necessary others...) stretching back through my life, budding from my mother and father, from their parents, on... and on... What an amazing creature! ...All the way back to Adam... standing there in the garden... Eve is reaching for that fruit... I am silent... (Larry Crabb, "The Silence of Adam")
Nois

Flat Like Me...

Flat like me...

Did you like being a worm? Maybe not so much? A billion worms?... ah no thanks... Before we move on, lets try a different analogy and see how that goes. Basically, to visualize the time dimension via a 3D worm, we need to loose one of our 3 dimensions. Previously, we did that by making thin slices, but there is more than one way to flatten an amoeba!

Lets do a little mental exercise to warm up! To start, either commit to a 2 hour experiment, or warm up that imagination... (Did you actually slice that carrot for my earlier post?) Now, get a brekfast bowl and a small cup. put the cup upside down in the bowl and set it somewhere warm. Now go to the freezer, get an icecube and put it on top the cup so that you can see it. Now, go away! Not too far... Every 10-15 min come back and look at your time traveler. Is it the same each time? Is it changing? It is melting you say? Well what would you expect ice to do over time!

Alright... rewind that sequence in your mind. Imagine each visit to the cube as a photo. (If you need to, consider repeating the experiment and actually taking a series of digital picutres with your cell phone.) All a photo does is capture a projection of a 3d objct onto a 2D surface, so it is an alternate way of creating a "slice". (A movie creates a series of 2D projections of 3D objetcts.) Finally, if only in your mind, print out and glue those pics to some cardboard, cut them out and stack them up like we stacked the carrot slices. Voi la, we saw a 3D icecube became a 4D time traveler, then a 3D worm! See? In order for us to visualize the 3D worm, we had to morph the icecube to a 2D surface, then grow the worm from slices. Our worm is hard and has sharp edges near the base. As we go "up" in time his edges get more round. We see him get narrower and rounder, and then eventually he disapears. Got it?

If we want to consider the liquid water too, then the worm is even more interesting. It has a fairly solid tapering core with probably some little "streams" that would be like branches ending in pools that would be sort of like leaves. Of course, over time these leaves join together into a pool... so we end up with one big leaf and no trunk, like high up in a tree. The water leaf eventually evaporates and we may get some individual pools which eventually disappear. Think about the last few pictures. We go back to some individual lobe-leaves with each one disappearing... finally only one, the tallest one, left... then gone. The whole thing might end up looking sort of like a broccoli stalk!

Now, put your hand back in front of you, but this time, just take a picture of it. Play the same print/glue/cut/stack game as with the ice cube and you end up with a different kind of you-worm. You can let this one move too, like we did with the earlier finger worms. Also, if we are cleaver, we can always take the picture from the front of the hand and glue it to the pile with a little tilt as well as a side-to-side movement. Now we have a really interesting worm!

What do you get if you wigggle your fingers? Ooey gooey...
Nois

I am a worm too...

I am a worm too... G'Day time travelors!

You h-a-v-e been traveling in time since the last post - eh? Remember our amoeba/wafer/worm friend who was slowly changing awareness-slices at the surface of the water as the rain slowly filled his 50 gal drum universe? How about you... are you a worm? Before you can start to wriggle around in time you need to figure out what carrot slices of youself would be like.

Alright. Here we go... take your hand and place it in front of you while making a victory V with your pointer and middle fingers. Use a microscopic double-bladed Samurai sword to remove a thin slice across those 2 fingers and pop them into a vat of nutrient solution so that they stay alive... aw come on! Ain't ya got no imagination??? OK, this seems a bit too barbaric, so, use some kind of Star trek transporter slicer to make a copy of each slice instead.

After a split second, take another pair of slices and stack them on top of the others. Supposing our copier allows us to keep doing this, what do we end up with in the vat? Right! 2 worms! Each new slice attaches to the previous slice and we would get worms just like our amoeba friends worm. If we take slices in more places, how many worms could we get? If we did a Plank length minimum slice we could get billions! If we slice closer to the base of the V, we would get an odd worm with 2 round lobes and a thin fleshy membrane connecting them. If we slice through our torso we would get a great big oval worm (some people have bigger torso worms than others!) Having any luck visualizing this? Give it some time. (They have actually done this sort of thing with cadavers "frozen in time" see 1 and 2 below to help visualize this. Remember that all of those slices are frozen at one time while ours are the same slice over and over at different times.)

What good is a 3D worm that can't move??? Remember how we allowed the flatland amoeba to move by stacking his carrot slices not quite straight? Lets do that with our finger worms. Before we make our next slice, we are going to move our hand slowly and then attach the new slices onto the worms offset to the side just the same tiny amount. Again, assume the worm can just seem to bend. As your hand moves in time, the finger worms just bend to the new positions. Careful, don't cross your fingers! You will get the worms all tangled up! Fun eh?

Alright... a final visualization for this post. If we wanted to, we could copy/slice our entire body and stack all billion worms up in a giant vat (again, see 1 and 2 below). Then, if we wanted to, we could grab all of the slices at one time-slice-level and stick them all back together to make a "me". If each time-slice-level was only self-aware when hooked together, and if we could grab/stack/attach them to make my "me" very quickly, that could actually be me!

Now, suppose they were not actually stacked separately, but rather all stacked together while also being sorted into worms... Huh? How could you do that??? Well, you can't without another dimension, but you can't grab/stack/attach them either, and we did not let that stop us! Lets just say that I am either the series of 3D "me"s that I see, or a billion worms depending on the perspective I want to use at the moment. Let that image soak for a bit. Happy stacking!
Nois.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_Human_Project
2. http://www.dhpc.adelaide.edu.au/projects/vishuman2/VisibleHuman.html

Before you can fly...

Before you can fly...
So, you want to fly in time? Before you can fly, you have to wriggle... ugh... like a worm? What's that got to do with time travel???

To get started, lets do a little culinary chore... slice a carrot, thin... not to the Plank length, but make them thin... got it? (Are you just doing this in your head?? OK! If you can handle it...) Now, take all those slices and stack them back up to make the carrot again. Does that seem like a waste of time? Then, just consider it an investment in your education!

I need to tell you something about my flatland friend... he is not actually flat, nor is he a wafer like I discussed last post. You were not ready to see him at that point! What he thinks he is is not at all what he is... sounds familiar to Nois readers - eh? He thinks he is a disk, and we said (and lied) that he is really a wafer, but he thinks that only because that is all he can perceive. He has 2D perception after all! Even if he agrees that he has a little thickness in time, he has no idea what he actually looks like to me in 3D... he is a worm!

Say what??? OK, visualize this... you remember how I put the pencil into his 2D brane, then pulled it back out? He just saw a series of disks, but I saw the entire pencil. In exactly the same way, he sees himself as a disk, but I see a worm! To make this a little easier, lets loose the pond analogy, and put my flatland amoeba friend on the surface of some water in a 50 gal drum. It is gently raining and the drum is slowly filling with water. Now, think of my friend as a worm like creature who actually is attached to the bottom of the drum and extends up through the water and into the air. Thing is, he is only aware of himself at the surface of the water... I do not know why... this is just an analogy, not a theory of existence! (Hummm... maybe it is the interface change from water to air... from past to future...)  I am free to move around and see him all the way from top to bottom, but he only sees himself as a disk at the water surface.

You can think of his surface existence as the thin disk we talked about before and think of the rest of him as all the other carrot slices of him. For him, the passage of time is the rising of the water and the perception of himself at a new level. I see him at all the points in "time", but he only sees himself at one time +/- a bit. Get the idea? You will probably need to stop a few minutes and let that soak in...

Back? What happens if you do not stack the slices quite straight? Now stretch that brain a little more... lets let him move around a bit... say 1 inch West. What does that look like to him? Not too exciting. He just takes his little disk-self and uses his little flagilla to scoot himself across the surface of the water. I, on the other hand see something completely different! I see this worm creature flex and bend himself so that the place where he comes out of the water is 1 inch west.

That may seem the same to you, but it is drastically different in terms of it's logical consequences. We need to pursue this bunny trail some more, but enough brain stretching for one post.
Nois

More Time for Nothing...

More Time for Nothing...

OK, Time travelers... ready for the ultimate skinny? Suppose someone asks you how far it is around a lake while you are running.  You may be tempted to say something like "Oh, it is about 1-and-a-half miles." That would not be any fun! So, instead answer with a question, like "Gee, mister, how big a ruler should I use?"   Assuming you do not get punched out, you will probably be ignored and left alone, permanently... by that person anyway.   However, on the rare occasion that some brave soul rises to the bait... "How about paces." I gladly answer "Just about 1800."

Now suppose we ask a more serious question.   How far is it around the lake if I use a meter stick? How about a 1 Foot ruler?  How about a 1" measure? A 1/2" measure? A 1/4" measure?... A .0000001" measure?  Would all of those come out the same?  You are measuring the same lake - right?  But, do you get the same answer?  No.   Now wait a minute... what do we mean by "around the lake"?  Clearly if I drew a line around the lake and just measured the same line with different measures it might be pretty simple... so lets keep it interesting and say that you measure as close to the water line as possible... now answer the question... Visualize it... Not so easy.   Not even if you froze te water so that it stood still!  If you read my earlier posts about existance you know that I think there is no right answer because neither the pond, nor the ruler, nor I exist.   However, aside from that, lets talk about what we perceive to be real.   Is there a right answer to how far is it around the lake? I suppose you can chew on that a while... ya'know that little pebble you ignored with the 1' ruler? Don't forget to measure around it with the .1' ruler! Tricky!

Mathematicians spend a lot of time thinking about really big and really small numbers... sort of the ultimate extreme athletes!  Maybe we could get a "right" answer to the above question if we had the ultimate shortest measure. Some gague and string theories adopt the Plank length (1.616252(81)×10^35 meters) as the ultimately shortest short... Which is related via the speed of light to the shortest time interval, the chron.  To illustrate, think about thin tall things.   Take a square that is 1" by 1".  By definition, it has an area of 1 square inch.   Now, lets squish it so that it is only 1/2" wide, but with the same area... sure, it has to be 2" tall (2 * .5 = 1). Now squeeze it until it is 1/4" wide... yep, it will be 4" tall.   See the game? So, let's get really crazy and squeeze it until it is 1/10000000000" wide.  Sure, simple, it is 10000000000" tall.  Seems easy, but can you answer this question... How tall is it if I squeeze it to 0" wide? Is that even possible? Is there a "Tallness" that would still give 1 square inch? Well... generally we just avoid that question... Some like to talk about infinity, but usually the answer is "You give me the width and I will give you the height."  The hight gets as tall as it needs to get - See?  So, if we use the Plank length as the utimate skinny, that little square would be 1.616252x10^35 meters tall! (About 10^32 miles!)

Lets take our ultimate skinny measure and travel back to the 1880's to see what our Flatland friend is up to...

E. Abbot Abbot's stories of the Flatland folk had to deal with an issue of thinness in regard to the 3D visitor who reveals himself to them. Lets just talk about me and my pencil the day after I put it through my 2D friends living room and then pulled it out! He thought he was going crazy!   From my perspective, it seemed very easy!   But I had a different problem... I could not seem to see him very well in his space.   When I got down close to the pond surface, everything just seemed to disappear! Try this experiment... get a piece of paper and a pencil. Draw a light, straight, inch-or-so pencil line on the paper and look at it... any trouble seeing that?  Nope. Ok, now lay the paper on the table and get down close to the surface... can you still see it easily? yes? OK, get closer... Closer... you see? After a bit you can not see the line at all!

I had that trouble with my friend!  If I entered his space I saw nothing!   So, answer me this... How thin is that pencil line?  The thickness of the image on the Shroud of Turin is 200-600 nanometers (http://www.shroudstory.com/) - Is a pencil line that thin?  However thin it is it is too thin to be viewed easliy from the surface it is on.  So, as EAA said in Flatland, the creatures had a little thickness. OK, that is cool! Let's say that!

Lets think about me in my 3D world and about some 4D creature coming to visit me. Lets also suppose that the 4th dimension we both have but that I do not perceive the same, is time! If he comes into my world will he be able to see me? I think not, or at least not easily.   I think that if he is "above" or "below" my time he can see me just fine, but as he gets close to my 3D "brane" he would have more and more trouble seeing me! Just like I have trouble seeing the pencil line on the paper or seeing my Flatland friend.  (We will talk more about time as a space dimension next post.)

Now, that leads to an interesting question... do I have a little thickness in 4D just like the Flatlander has a little thickness in 3D?   I often visualize our universe as the surface of a slice through time where the stuff "below" is the past and the stuff "above" is the future.   After our above discussion, maybe it can not be a surface, but rather a thin wafer. Hummmm... does that mean that I exist now but also a bit in the past and a bit in the future? Maybe that is how we are able to remember things and predict events.

If we only preceived "Now" what would the past mean?  See?   Wouldn't it be hard to live in a world where we could not infer where a ball would go when we threw it?   Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principal says about the same thing... you can not know both the location and the momentum of a particle with ultimate precision.   If I slice the location of the particle too thinly, I can not measure it's velocity! I can not predict it's path. I need a little thickness to take the measurement.   Similarly, in time-talk, we can infer instantaneous velocity, but we can not measure it - we need a little time to do the measurement.

If the Plank-length-chron is an actual smallest thickness in time, then I have a thickness in time! Then what happens if I leave my 3D prison brane and learn to fly in the 4th dimension? Am I traveling in time?  EAA's Flatlander learned to fly in 3D... maybe there is hope for me in 4!    Nois

How does the road know the way?

Having established that I do not exist (see earlier posts),  I would now like to tern to some amazing consequences of the fact that we are not what we perceive ourselves to be.  One of the most amazing things to me is that we think we know so much about our world and the universe and yet we do not know the simplest things.  Take gravity for example.  There are many theories of what gravity is, and there are pretty thorough descriptions of how gravity works, but really... no one knows what it is!

What... I thought that since that apple hit Newton on the head we figured out what gravity is... nope!  They can not even agree if gravity happens instantaneously or if it has "gravitons" that must travel at the speed of light.  Humm... how can we do rocket science if we do not understand gravity???

When my 14 year old was 3 we were on a trip to Rocky Mountain National Park.  We had several of our extended family in Colorado and sort of made a tent city!  One afternoon some of us decided to take a drive over Trail Ridge Road to visit Granby.  That was a fun time and on the way home almost everyone "punched out".  My wife was driving and I was riding shotgun... trying to keep my eyes pried open to support her and keep her awake.

After we reached the high point on the ridge and started down I was thinking about the discussions I had been reading about the speed of gravity.  One would think that such a basic question would have an obvious answer... unfortunately, it seemed to have several obvious answers and was intuitively obvious to 3 different groups!  So, they seemed to dismiss each other as incompetent, or dumb... sad thing science...

Suddenly, I heard a small voice from way in the back of the mini van... "Daddy, where are we going?"  I did not want to disturb the sleepers, so I just quietly said "Home."  I heard no more, so I went back to my musing.  In a few minutes, again I heard, "Daddy?"  "Yes."  "Are we going to our house, or back to our tent house?"  I was amazed!  This little one really had a grasp of things!   She was clearly thinking through things as we watched the glory of God's creation streaming past our windows.  "We are going back to our tent house."  Silence... Musing... Silence... "Daddy?"

"Yes."  "How will we know how to get back to our tent house?"  Now I was really awake.  This little one was capturing all of my attention.  What was going on in that pretty little head?  I thought about the scene from "The Hiding Place" where Cory's father decides to only answer the direct question and not weigh the little one down with a long drawn out answer that would be far beyond the question.   So, I just said "We will follow the road."  Silence... Musing...  "Daddy?"

"Yes dear?" "How does the road know the way to the tent?"  ... a 3 year old? I thought for only a second, but for some reason, I felt like I was wading in a river and just stepping into a hidden pool that was much deeper than I was ready for.  "The road knows because it is already there."

I am not sure if she said anything else... my brain was about to pop out of my scull... that was it!  Gravity acted instantaneously, because it was just the expression of the interaction between things that were already there... sort of...  I could not focus what I was thinking... it was just out of reach... but I knew the vision was the key.  Over the next 11 or so years I remembered that moment in the car, the tiny voice  and the feeling of wondering if I would loose my balance as I stepped into the deep pool in my mind and drifted the rest of the way on the road back to the tent house.

I will try to unpack this a bit in a few posts.  I will touch on Fourier transforms, Cheerios, Entropy, Holograms and a few other bushes to run around. While I have read several books, articles, web sites since that day, I do not know of anyone thinking in exactly this way... so here it goes... baring my soul... be gentle.

I do not exist - Condensate

My earlier posts established that I am insane... and you are too... as a matter of fact, I proposed to you that I do not exist... and neither do you.  I promised 4 simple arguments... First, my perception of me... is all in my head!  There is no objective evidence that I exist... my brain is totally isolated from what it perceives.  My argument from the Microscope showed that we are composed of transient stuff... what am I anyway?  Even my bones are totally new every 3 years.  The third argument went from the Cosmic "soup" of stars dense enough to fill high magnification photos, to the vast empty space between the sub atomic particles that compose every object around us.  That chair you are sitting on does not exist... it is just micro dust specs with thousands of times the empty space between.  Or, is it...

In my last existence post I mentioned that the teachers who showed me that my chair did not exist still lied to me!  Even the molecules, atoms, electrons, protons and neutrons do not exist!

What???  It is even more amazing that this was known long before I was born in 1949!  For example, The foundations of quantum physics were laid back in the 20's.  Heisenberg stated his famous Uncertainty Principle in 1927.  One simple example of this is trying to find the location of an electron.  The energy you use to observe the electron, moves the electron so that it is no longer there!  You can measure velocity or position, but not both at the same time.  Another example that I use all the time is tuning my guitar using beat frequencies.  I start by tuning one string to some source, then use that string to tune a second string.  I press the string to a fret so that the two strings play the same pitch.  Then I listen.  If I hear a beat in the sound, I tune the second string until the beat slows down.  In order to tune the string perfectly, I would need to wait forever to prove that there was no beat!  So, I just get it slow enough that I make it faster if I try to get it closer.

All sorts of strange things happen in the realm of quantum physics.  Another example is the double slit experiment.  Back in 1803 Thomas Young explained the phenomenon where light passes through two slits and forms an interference pattern on a screen behind the slits. What should particles do?  If you shoot bullets at a slit in a steel wall, you see a line of bullet holes in the screen behind the wall.  OK, so make two slits, and what would you see?  Yep, 2 lines of holes, each neatly behind the 2 slits.  Easy!  We use electron guns to make (now old style) TV displays (cathode ray tubes).  So, lets shoot electron "bullets" at 2 slits... we should see two neat lines of "electron hits" behind the slits - right?  However, we do not!  Instead, we see electron hits in an interference pattern just like the light made!  What?  The electrons behaved like waves, not like particles.  Some described the electrons as merely "probability" distributions, and others talked about the paths they took.  For example, in 1948 Feynman published his "Path Integral" explanation.  Basically he said that the particle traveled all possible paths to it's destination!  Weird!  More double slit into.

 Of course, one of the most amazing and famous things that was stated around this time was Einsteins formula, E = MC**2 (1917).  Basically, it says that matter and energy are interchangeable!  If you think of that in light of our discussions of particles and waves, you must deal with the fact that those particles we perceive are just a manifestation of the energy that composes them.  If you want to visualize the universe as starting in a big bang, then think about it as God imagining a 4-dimensional (at least) space, then thumping it with a big old finger to instantly create "all the stuff that ever was and ever will be"... stuff = matter = waves = energy.  The wave-particles are all held together by electro/magnetic/atomic force to cause us to perceive them as solid objects... Can you feel the vibs yet?

So, we can not figure out where an electron is, and we see that it behaves as a wave as well as a particle and is just a manifestation of big bang energy.  So basically, we can visualize the electron as "popping in and out" of existence in the vicinity of the nucleus of an atom in one of the discrete bands determined by its quantum state sort of like it would appear randomly in an interference band behind two slits.  The other building blocks of the atoms, the neutrons and protons are made from bosons that behave in similar ways to the electrons, so you see... even the subatomic particles do not exist!  So, the atoms do not exist... so I do not exist!  Simple - eh?

Now for a final example, lets get to the condensate... back in 1924-25 Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein imagined a very odd behavior of matter.  They said that if matter could be cooled to near absolute zero, the atoms would become totally indistinguishable!  Basically, thy would become a glob, not individual anymore.  As it turned out, we did not get to observe this behavior until 1995, right here in good ol'e Colorado at CU.  They used the wave troughs of laser light to grab the atoms, and thus, cool them, and an electro-magnetic field to lock them into the center of the beam so that they could not bounce into other atoms and heat up again.  When they accomplished their goal, they saw the phenomenon. The atoms got "fuzzier" and "fuzzier" until they just merged together into one condensed blob!  Double weird!!  Atoms are not the nice little solar systems we were told about, are they?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose-Einstein_condensate   More details http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/2242

Well, you may not think these  arguments have been simple as I promised, but I think I can summarize them simply... I do not exist because...

- My perception of myself is based on a remote sensing scam.   My brain interprets sensations that come in from remote sensors via electrical impulses and does not actually experience any of the things that it perceives.  That does not prove that I do not exist, but it opens the possibility that I might not exist.

- Any Microscope shows that my body is not any thing like I think it is!  It is a battle field of microscopic beings, worms, mites, foreign cells, and many other things and even the part that I think of as "me" is constantly refreshed, even including my bones within 3 years!  After I die, liquids and gases are released as the soft stuff rots until only a tiny collection of minerals is left behind.

-- The Cosmos is a soup of particles called stars with vast intervening empty space... ah... except the 2 Hydrogen nuclei per cm**3... Then, zoom down to the super-microscopic world of atoms and we find the same thing... tiny specs of "matter" with comparatively vast volumes of emptiness between them... basically, the chair you are sitting on is nothing but empty space with some specs held together by electrical force.  Go ahead... jump up and down on it...

-- Finally, that solar system picture of the atoms was false too!  Not only are the atomic components made from other, smaller entities, but those entities do not behave like particles at all!  They flip in and out of existence and can not even be located!  How can they make something that does exist?

Like me for example, I do not exist.  At least not in the way that I perceive myself to exist...  not in the sense that I am sitting here on my non-existent chair, typing with a non-existent keyboard a non-existent message... oh bother...

The only thing that finally relieved my tension, felt from childhood, of realizing that I did not exist was finally figuring out that I did exist!  I exist in exactly the way that the creator created me to exist, and how He designed me to perceive my existence.  I think I said it simply in an earlier post... I am a figment of His imagination, not mine.  Sorry Rene... He thinks, therefore I am.

Ac 17:28 - for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, `For we also are His children.'  (NAS - CrossWalk online Bible)

I do not exist - Cosmos

It has been a while since I wrote about existence...  does being too tired and frazzled support that I exist or that I do not exist???  (Theo... I know I can not be a figment of my own imagination... but maybe I am a figment of someone else's imagination... they think, therefore I am...)

I started this train of thought by demonstrating that I am not sane... I do the same thing over and over again expecting a different result - I expect hot water when I turn on the hot water spigot... are you sane?  Then I said that I would give 4 simple arguments that I do not exist... and neither do you...

The first argument had to do with physical perception.  Our perception of the environment is a remote sensing scam!  Our brains could be hooked up to synthetic sensors and we would not even know it!  (Matrix movie stuff!)  The second argument had to do with a microscopic view of our bodies.  We never think about the fact that we are mostly water, Hydrogen, CO2, and Nitrogen.  When we die, we basically drift away - literally!  Moreover, while we are alive we are a huge collection of "stuff" that is not us (like little eyebrow worms) and the fact that all of the molecules in our bodies, including our bones are totally replaced at least every 3 years!!!

OK, so I do not exist in the way that I think I do when I look in the mirror - eh?  So, now let's look farther.  The 3rd argument I promised was Cosmology.  You know, Carl Sagan's star stuff. "The cosmos is all the stuff that ever was or ever will be."  Really?  Let's think about how empty the cosmos is.  They say that the best vacuum producible on earth barely approaches the vacuum of space.  Yet, since 1960 Robert Bussard and other dreamers have been looking at an ionic propulsion system that carries energy (nuclear), but no "fuel" to eject to propel the space craft.  Instead, the craft would use an electrostatic field to suck in ionized interstellar hydrogen molecules (2 per cm³).  The engine would use another strong electromagnetic system to eject the ions out the back or form a fusion reaction and eject the hot, heavier combinants.  (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A600436, http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Bussard-ramjet) Wow!  They are counting on there being a lot of "stuff" out there!

Another blogger posted a few weeks ago about black holes from "badastronomy.com" (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/10/30/ten-things-you-dont-know-about-black-holes/ (I was sure it was Stapler, but search and Google can't find the post!)).  If you were to fill a sphere as big as the orbit of Pluto with air, there would be enough mass to be a black hole!  So, while black holes are the densest thing we know, if we look at them as being everything inside the event horizon, then they are very non-dense!  We think of air as being light and with no substance, yet air holds up a super-cargo plane!

We think of space as "empty", but is it?.  We visited the Mount Palomar observatory in California.  We sat on a half-room sized bench which we later found out was a replica of the mirror!  We looked at an amazing series of photos taken by the telescope.  They surveyed the sky with low magnification and picked the dimmest frame, say f1.  Then, they bumped the magnification up and surveyed that frame to select the dimmest sub-frame f2.  They bumped the magnification again and surveyed f2 to find it's dimmest sub-frame, f3... etc.  through an amazing series of, as I remember, 12 frames.  The amazing-est thing is that once they were "blown up" each frame was just as "busy" with "stuff" as the original!  The sky is a dense soup of stars !!!  Yet it is empty...   The last frames showed mostly far away galaxies and quasars!

Did you see the amazing photos that made the email rounds last year showing the relative size of the various planets and stars?  It showed our tiny sun was a single pixel on Antares (http://www.webxact.co.uk/2008/08/these-pictures-will-humble-anyone.html).  Even though we think of the earth as huge and the sun as very huge, there is so much empty space between us and the moon that it takes days to travel there!  Even at the speed of light it takes 8 minutes to get from the sun to the earth!  It would take 4 years to get to our nearest neighbor star.  Our solar system, our galaxy, our cosmos is just a bunch of specs held together by gravity.

So now, lets look closer.  How about that table in front of you?  It is solid - right?  It is probably strong enough that you would sit or even stand on it... but, does it exist?  I mean in the way you perceive it?  Take a microscope and bump up the magnification.  At not very high magnification, the surface is no longer flat, but is a rough landscape of knotted strings!  Bump up the focus more, and the strings become coils of connected dots.  Further, and the strings are only specs connected by strong electric fields.   Actually, the molecular particles are even smaller, relative to the "orbits" of the electrons than the vast separation of the planets in the solar system! (http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/nuclear/nucuni.html)  What??? that table is like empty space!  It is just a bunch of specs held together by electrical attraction!!!  When did you think of that last?  You have know that since elementary school, but do you see that when you perceive that table?  Nope.  But really, that table does not exist!

The first time I realized this was when I was about 12.  I was on one of the very few, long driving trips I took with my parents.  I was reading Jules Vern's "Around the world in 80 days", a great science fiction story, which got me into the mood to think... OK, so I was dozing off... We had been studying molecular structure at school (No one told me it was a lie!  Next argument about waves...) I remember looking at the plastic cover on the back of my dad's seat and imagining it being a sea of vibrating, spinning, crashing atomic particles... quite an impression!  If you know me, think about me growing up "knowing" that the chair I sat in did not exist!  Now I make more sense to you - eh?  Feel the vibes???

It is actually amazing that we do not just slip through each other, drift right through the earth, or fly apart!  Then, there is the issue that the protons, neutrons, and electrons don't exist either... but that is another day, and another post.  I do not exist - Condensate.

Male and Female... why???

Ge 1:27 - So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (NIV)

Right up there with "Why do I exist?" There is the question "Why did God make women? (or men)"  Some like to think about why God made mosquitoes, but I guess women are more interesting to me...

Really, it is sort of odd that he made Adam and then said "It is not good for man to be alone."  Did he make a mistake?  All the other times he said "It was good."  It seems to me that God had not completed his work with Adam.  Oops.. now I am back to why he made me... ah Adam...  It was very early in the bible, but rather late in the creation:  late in the 6th day.  After that even He had to take a rest!

In Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible he notices that God changes from "Let there be..." to "Let us make..."
"In the former he speaks as one having authority, in this as one having affection; for his delights were with the sons  of men, Prov. 8:31. It should seem as if this were the work which he longed to be at; as if he had said, "Having at last settled the preliminaries, let us now apply ourselves to the business, Let us make man.""

So, if we take Henry's view, God provided all the rest of creation as a setting for his real purpose - to create His image in man... male and female he created them... back to that now... why male and female?  Why did it take 2 creatures to image God?

(NIV)
25. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

26. Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."

27. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

As I pondered this last week.  I was thinking about carving... give me a minute...

A while back we took a driving trip up through South Dakota.  It was the first time I saw Rushmore!  We spent a night in Custer and visited the "National Museum of Wood Carving".  That was really cool and contains many amazing works by Dr. H. D. Niblack who worked closely with Disney on many projects.  http://www.blackhills.com/woodcarving/tours.htm.

They had classes about wood carving and one of the pamphlets showed some of the creative "simple" techniques to make a successful image.  Most things have simple keys once you see them.  With carving and sculpting, one way to proceed is to work in 2 dimensions at a time.  Imagine that you have a saw blade and you move the wood long that blade using a jig so that it follows the profile of an existing 3D object - like a face.  Put the original into a holder and a blank into another holder.  Move the jig so that the profile of the 3D face is cut into the blank.  Flip it over and do the back of the head.  It will not make much sense if you look at it from the front or back, but if you look from the side, you will clearly see the figure.  Now, rotate the blocks so that the two sides of the head are cut.  Now look!  It makes sense!  There is a lot of trim work to do, but you have the basic idea.

It is too hard for everyone to have the jigs and power saws, and besides, this is supposed to be carving! So, what they do is have 2 outline pictures of the original one from the side and one from the front.  Mathematically, these are two projections of the 3D object onto a 2D space. The carver first cuts the block to match one profile, then turns it in the hand and works on the other profile.  Unlike the saw technique, they constantly rotate the wood and jump from one projection to the other, but it is the same idea.

Now... back to the Adam/Eve thing... starting to get my thought?  The 2D image of the carving could not contain enough information to image the 3D shape, so they provide 2 different perspectives.  The thing that clicked into my brain last week is that this is one reason why God made both Adam and Eve to display his image!  So, he used 2 images to display himself more completely in our space!

The animals have male and female too, but I was not just thinking about the physical image although the carving example is just physical.  His image is not just the physical aspects but his very nature. There is more to me that just my physical 3D/4D projection in this universe.  Even so, our set of dimensions was incapable of displaying his image.

He says that when we marry we become one flesh.  What an incredible blessing and responsibility it is to bare his image and what a great work it is to ensure that my marriage also displays him in a more complete way.

btw... I use CrossWalk for most of my online bible work.  Check it out!
http://www.crosswalk.com/
http://biblestudy.crosswalk.com/

I do not exist... Microscope

Ok... So we know that we are insane and we know that we can not prove that we exist by our perceptions because that is all a "matrix" like remote sensing scam... Right?  If any of this is not clear to you, try going back a few posts (Don't you hate be'n dumb, I do not exist)

I mentioned that I could think of at least 4 simple arguments that I do not exist.  The Matrix thing was one.  A mosquito senses me totally differently than I sense me... Who is right?  Neither of us experiences the reality of what we perceive but only an affect of that reality.  So, now I want to move to the next argument... my microscopic self.

I really do not need to go very far to find out that I am more than what I thought I was.  Some say that right now I host thousands of varieties of parasites eating my flesh.  (check out  http://www.essortment.com/all/humanbodyparas_rayv.htm )  Everything from internal worms, external worms, mites, bacteria, fungi... the list seems to never end!  Not all of them are harmful, and I even take a dose of live intestinal "bugs" regularly.  So, is that what I see in the mirror?  No wonder I am not happy in the morning...  Most of these guys can be seen with a microscope.  But how about going a bit smaller...

What about the chemical nature of me?  In the great series of books by Dr. Paul Brand and Phillip Yancy I learned a lot about my body.  ("Where is God when it hurts" about leprosy, "Fearfully and Wonderfully Made," "In His Image")  Dr. Brand said that every molecule in my body is different every 3 years.  What???  How about bone?  Yep, the blasts tunnel through, the clasts fill the holes back up with brand new stuff, and I have a new me.  Incredible!  That made me change my thoughts about burial.  I used to think that I should keep all of my parts together, ya know?  But... what parts are me?  All of the parts are swapped out all the time!  (The Druids put their friends bodies up on a high platform where the scavengers could eat the flesh.  When only bones remained, they buried everything but the skull which they kept around so that they could remember their friend... "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him."  (Shakespeare, Hamlet))

Now, speaking of death.  Think a minute.  My body is 65% water... so that is not going to stick around for long.  Bye bye me...  There are the Big 4 (including the the water) Oxygen (65.0%) Carbon (18.5%) Hydrogen (9.5%) Nitrogen (3.2%).  Wow... that sounds like plastic to me.  ( http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/1999-05/927309210.An.r.html).  So, lets see... basically, 96% of my body will float away as CO2, H2O, Amonia, N2 and other smells.  The rest is just "trace minerals" like Calcium (1.5%) Phosphorus (1.0%) Potassium (0.4%) Sulfur (0.3%) Sodium (0.2%) Chlorine (0.2%) Magnesium (0.1%) Iodine (0.1%) and Iron (0.1%), plus a few others.

Did you ever think of your self as a pile of ashes help together by water, carbon, and Nitrogen?  God just breathed on a bit of dust ya know...  I remember Bill Cosby had a shtick about  a dead guy.  Cosby hated it when people at funerals always said "Doesn't he look like himself?"  He hoped he would not!  He thought they should have a recording going that was made by the person before their death.  "Hello, this is Bill.  Don't I look like myself?"

Anyway, surely you can see that I am not what I believe myself to be.  I am not a collection of chemicals... they change all the time.  I am not even just myself... I have millions of friends eating me alive - ugh.  So, what am I?  Am I a program encoded in my DNA?  If my hip bone is constantly changing, why does it keep looking like my hip bone?  So, am I my hip bone, or am I the code that constructs the hip bone?  I certainly do not think of myself as a program, but now I can not think of myself as having a hip bone either.

Yikes... Now, not only can I not sense myself, I actually know that I am a collection of constantly changing stuff!  I am certainly do not exist as the me I see in the mirror - right?  Maybe I should move on the the other 2 arguments - the Cosmos and the Condensate.  We shall see if I exist there.

I do not exist

I do not exist... neither do you.

Does that make you feel any better about being insane?  (If  you  think you are not insane, please go back 2 posts and read "Don't ya hate be'n dumb?")

There are many stories about those who argue about existence.  One story goes that 2 philosophers were arguing through dinner.  One held that nothing exists, so the other one began to eat the first one's cake.   "Hey! That is my cake!" he protested.  "How can that be if nothing exists?" the other answered and finished the cake.  I searched a bit but was not able to remember or find who the antagonists were.  If anyone knows, please post a comment to remind me!

Another story is about the "The head whacker society."  The whacker looks for someone who thinks he does not exist, and proceeds to whack him on the head with a board.  Of course the target protests, but the defense is that the wronged party does not exist, so there is no crime.  This story was part of a radio ministry illustration.  The point was that if a person believes that there is no objective reality, then they would naturally believe that there is no objective right and wrong - everything would be subjective.  Every man would be a god unto himself.  If I do not actually exist, than Christ's sacrifice is for nothing and God's truth is not absolute.  If I believe God does not exist, then I really am insane... or deceived.  In that sense, I believe that I exist.  There is reality.

Never-the-less... sorry to say it, but that which we perceive of what exists, does not exist! Say What?  I believe that I exist, but I do not believe that I am physically what I perceive myself to be... is that any easier?  Let's try to get our heads around this idea.  I can think of at least 4 simple arguments that "I do not exist" as I perceive myself to be.  The first one is illustrated by the movie "The Matrix".

Think about it... My brain, which perceives my existence, does not experience anything.  It can not feel, react to light, react to motion, smell, hear, taste.  Nope... it is all remote sensing.  Once a brain surgeon gets through the skin, he can perform surgery with no further anesthesia because the patients brain can not feel!  I think that is what resonates with me in the movie... I can not know... for sure...  How can I know that I am not plugged into some matrix?  In the movie there was an occasional glitch in the matrix that gave some evidence that the people in the pods were not experiencing reality.   In our perceived world, there are no such hiccups, but perhaps that is because our programmer is better than the evil ones in The Matrix.  My existence is just perceived by this blob of gray stuff that interprets signals from some remote sensing devices... scary...

"Wait", you say, "just because I can not prove that I am accurately perceiving reality does not prove that I am not."  I agree.  This argument is simply to set you up for the other 3.  I want to put you into the right frame of mind... so to speak...

Consider this... Many bugs do not see the visible light spectrum.  They perceive reality totally differently than I do.  Have you seen those IR cameras shots displayed on a video monitor so that you can watch yourself?  My family recently spent an hour laughing at each other and our selves with the funny eyes, bright and dark patches in odd places... you know...  but to a mosquito, that is what they think is reality.  So, you see, there is some reality that is radiating energy.  I perceive the energy that is in the visible light spectrum while the mosquito perceives the energy  that is in the IR spectrum.  Both of us are only experiencing an effect of the reality, not the actual reality.  Is either receiver accurately perceiving the reality?  See what I mean?  How do I know that I am what I perceive myself to be?  Tricky, isn't it?

Next - from the Matrix, to the Microscope, to the Cosmos, to the Condensate... hold on...