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
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Saturday, April 24, 2010
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
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
Thursday, April 22, 2010
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
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
Saturday, April 17, 2010
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.
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
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Time to write about time...
Time to write about time...
If you are waiting with bated breath for my next post about gravity... sorry... you will need to wait. I have started to write a few times, and I just can not do it without taking you off on another bunny trail that I walked before I had the gravity epiphany while talking to my 3-year old. The trail I am talking about is TIME! I suppose I must say that time does not exist either, just to be consistent. However, like my existance, I believe that time exists, but not as I normally perceive it. This insight will take a few posts to unpack, as will the following discussion about gravity. It should be interesting though... would you like a way to visualize time travel? Would you like to see how you can have predestination and free will at the same time? Be brave and read on.
I need to keep these posts shorter than my ones on existance, so I will make them into shorter chunks. Hopefully you will not run out of interest before you run out of text. This first one will introduce Flatland, then from there we will talk about a rain barrel, then about Adam, the hydra; then about time travel and changing the past. Eventually we will end up back at the Galactic Hologram, finally to Einstine's rubber sheet, and to gravity. Here we go.
As a graduate studant in Math at Colorado State University several professors mentioned a little book called "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions" 1884, by Edwin Abbot Abbot an English schoolmaster. Even without reading it, the ideas excited me because they gave me a tool to visualize 9 dinensions! Say, what... how could that be? Well, you see, if I can be in 3 dinensions, and can under stand how a 2-D creature can visualize my 3-D world, that helps me to visualize a 4-D world... see? Then on to 9 or farther!
Here's the basic idea... Imagine a little 2-D sort of creature... I sometimes think about an amobea living on the surface of a pond... not perfect, but it is something I can see in my mind. Suppose he wants to build a house... what would it be? If we assume that he and his fellow creatures can not swin dowm from the surface or up into the air, then, all he needs is a little ring of algae stems with a little hinged one for a door! As far as he is concerned, when he closes that door he is completely safe and can not be seen or see out.
So, let's suppose he "gets up" in the morning and goes outside. Suddenly he is terrified to see a little black dot appear out of nowhere! then it grows into a hard, black disk. Of course he only sees a black line, but he is used to moving around an object to figure out it's shape. Then, it changes into a brown, fuzzy disk that grows and then into a red disk. Just as quickly, it goes back to the black dot and is gone. Scary! What he does not know is that I just put a red pencil down into the water near his house and then pulled it out. Stop a while and visualize that sequence in your mind... what does it look like to me. What does it look like to him?
That night I rocked his world... I put the pencil into his "house"... he did not sleep any more that night!
So, how would a Flatland Jesus walk through the walls? He would have freedom in other dimensions, so he simply goes up or down a bit, moves over the closed stem walls, and moves back to flat-D. Voi la! He is inside a locked door...
How would that look if I was a 3-D creature with a 3-D house and someone with freedom in time simply went "up" in time moved over inside my locked house and them came back to my time... are you getting it? Don't have nightmares. Nois
If you are waiting with bated breath for my next post about gravity... sorry... you will need to wait. I have started to write a few times, and I just can not do it without taking you off on another bunny trail that I walked before I had the gravity epiphany while talking to my 3-year old. The trail I am talking about is TIME! I suppose I must say that time does not exist either, just to be consistent. However, like my existance, I believe that time exists, but not as I normally perceive it. This insight will take a few posts to unpack, as will the following discussion about gravity. It should be interesting though... would you like a way to visualize time travel? Would you like to see how you can have predestination and free will at the same time? Be brave and read on.
I need to keep these posts shorter than my ones on existance, so I will make them into shorter chunks. Hopefully you will not run out of interest before you run out of text. This first one will introduce Flatland, then from there we will talk about a rain barrel, then about Adam, the hydra; then about time travel and changing the past. Eventually we will end up back at the Galactic Hologram, finally to Einstine's rubber sheet, and to gravity. Here we go.
As a graduate studant in Math at Colorado State University several professors mentioned a little book called "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions" 1884, by Edwin Abbot Abbot an English schoolmaster. Even without reading it, the ideas excited me because they gave me a tool to visualize 9 dinensions! Say, what... how could that be? Well, you see, if I can be in 3 dinensions, and can under stand how a 2-D creature can visualize my 3-D world, that helps me to visualize a 4-D world... see? Then on to 9 or farther!
Here's the basic idea... Imagine a little 2-D sort of creature... I sometimes think about an amobea living on the surface of a pond... not perfect, but it is something I can see in my mind. Suppose he wants to build a house... what would it be? If we assume that he and his fellow creatures can not swin dowm from the surface or up into the air, then, all he needs is a little ring of algae stems with a little hinged one for a door! As far as he is concerned, when he closes that door he is completely safe and can not be seen or see out.
So, let's suppose he "gets up" in the morning and goes outside. Suddenly he is terrified to see a little black dot appear out of nowhere! then it grows into a hard, black disk. Of course he only sees a black line, but he is used to moving around an object to figure out it's shape. Then, it changes into a brown, fuzzy disk that grows and then into a red disk. Just as quickly, it goes back to the black dot and is gone. Scary! What he does not know is that I just put a red pencil down into the water near his house and then pulled it out. Stop a while and visualize that sequence in your mind... what does it look like to me. What does it look like to him?
That night I rocked his world... I put the pencil into his "house"... he did not sleep any more that night!
So, how would a Flatland Jesus walk through the walls? He would have freedom in other dimensions, so he simply goes up or down a bit, moves over the closed stem walls, and moves back to flat-D. Voi la! He is inside a locked door...
How would that look if I was a 3-D creature with a 3-D house and someone with freedom in time simply went "up" in time moved over inside my locked house and them came back to my time... are you getting it? Don't have nightmares. Nois
Monday, July 20, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
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.
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.
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)
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