I experience a recurring dream: In the dream I am aware of an object (house, flower, doesn't matter). That object is vanishly "small." I consider the object. Then as I understand the object a new version of the same appears behind it. It is ridiculously "large." Going back and forth between this small and large version of the object makes my head hurt. The only way I can describe it is to say that my mind "glitches." It is a very peculiar feeling. I've had this glitch in waking times, but not very often. If it lasted more than a second it would be debilitating...
These dreams started for me very early on. Like in kindergarten times, as best I can fix them. That's way before I ever knew what a "fractal" is. That freaks me out a little bit.
I wonder: is nature recursive? We know recursion lends itself toward explanations of objects we see around us. Nature seems at its core a "feed-back" system. But the math we use to model these objects is not something which scales naturally.
What does the computational system of the universe look like? How does it work? I'm thinking that our mathematics needs to incorporate recursion as a basic given. Not as something we afix later on (in advanced computational science, at best). Consider the amount of precision required to perform an "integration." Can the universe really compute with infinite precision? Or is it limited to quantized interactions? My bet is on a fixed amount of computational power and hence precision to the world at large.
I wish I knew more math... :)
Thursday, September 8, 2011
On Multi-Dimensional Time, Time Quantization and the Nature of Reality
That's a pretty audacious blog post title...
By way of background: I've been wondering for some time how a photon "experiences" the universe. That has lead me to reading up on quantum physics, relativity, string theory, and the "arrow of time," among other things. I'm not even close to pretending I understand all the evidence and current theories. I got into physics basically by wanting to know how the universe really works. I did study physics in college (as a minor), but I didn't do all that well. I always thought I was seeing equations fit to evidence, especially in undergraduate thermodynamics. That's what scientists do, fit experience to their ability to make predictions. It's fine, but I always wanted to get to the core of things.
Anyway what I'm curious about is something which follows from relativistic treatment of energy vs. mass. It seems to me that photons are basically frozen in time, "to us." Yet if you were a photon what would your experience of the sub-light-speed world look like? It seems obvious to me, though it is just a leap of faith, that photons themselves transit "time." Yet in a different way...
So, questions, suggestions, hypotheses:
Can a particle move in "space" but not in "time?" If so could that knowledge be used to explain wave/particle duality? What about the ability to explain quantum "probabilties?"
Regarding wave/particle duality: let's imagine that a photon is trapped to only explore time dimensions orthogonal to "ours." By doing so it seems apparently frozen in time. To us. But what about its interactions with other photons (apparently travelling non-orthogonal bases re: each other)? Can we explain the apparent ability of photons to the see the "future" as a compression in our time-basis? How can a time-static (in our basis) particle do anything other than experience all of our times at once? That's the idea...
Regarding probabilistic outcomes in quantum physics: "Probabilities" suggests to me too little information to make specific predictions. Can we use the notion of multi-dimensional time to help understand the empirical evidence we see for probabilistic particle-particle interactions? In essence we may never be able to reach the information needed to make non-probabilistic predictions for specific interactions. But knowing that the time-frame interactions involved are the reason for that uncertainty seems to be a potential step forward.
It seems interesting to me to consider the notion of multi-dimensional time. I haven't got a clue as to how to wonder about this more rigorously, though. One extra topic which I believe fits into the notion of how reality "works" is drawn from computational theory: recursion. We know that the world is a giant feed-back system. But is it quantized in terms of information? Is there a finite amount of information and thus computational ability present in the workings of the universe? I have a few thoughts on that but generally speaking it feels to me like the universe cannot be capable of supporting an infinite level of precision. And so everything is quantized...
By way of background: I've been wondering for some time how a photon "experiences" the universe. That has lead me to reading up on quantum physics, relativity, string theory, and the "arrow of time," among other things. I'm not even close to pretending I understand all the evidence and current theories. I got into physics basically by wanting to know how the universe really works. I did study physics in college (as a minor), but I didn't do all that well. I always thought I was seeing equations fit to evidence, especially in undergraduate thermodynamics. That's what scientists do, fit experience to their ability to make predictions. It's fine, but I always wanted to get to the core of things.
Anyway what I'm curious about is something which follows from relativistic treatment of energy vs. mass. It seems to me that photons are basically frozen in time, "to us." Yet if you were a photon what would your experience of the sub-light-speed world look like? It seems obvious to me, though it is just a leap of faith, that photons themselves transit "time." Yet in a different way...
So, questions, suggestions, hypotheses:
Can a particle move in "space" but not in "time?" If so could that knowledge be used to explain wave/particle duality? What about the ability to explain quantum "probabilties?"
Regarding wave/particle duality: let's imagine that a photon is trapped to only explore time dimensions orthogonal to "ours." By doing so it seems apparently frozen in time. To us. But what about its interactions with other photons (apparently travelling non-orthogonal bases re: each other)? Can we explain the apparent ability of photons to the see the "future" as a compression in our time-basis? How can a time-static (in our basis) particle do anything other than experience all of our times at once? That's the idea...
Regarding probabilistic outcomes in quantum physics: "Probabilities" suggests to me too little information to make specific predictions. Can we use the notion of multi-dimensional time to help understand the empirical evidence we see for probabilistic particle-particle interactions? In essence we may never be able to reach the information needed to make non-probabilistic predictions for specific interactions. But knowing that the time-frame interactions involved are the reason for that uncertainty seems to be a potential step forward.
It seems interesting to me to consider the notion of multi-dimensional time. I haven't got a clue as to how to wonder about this more rigorously, though. One extra topic which I believe fits into the notion of how reality "works" is drawn from computational theory: recursion. We know that the world is a giant feed-back system. But is it quantized in terms of information? Is there a finite amount of information and thus computational ability present in the workings of the universe? I have a few thoughts on that but generally speaking it feels to me like the universe cannot be capable of supporting an infinite level of precision. And so everything is quantized...
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