The SR, GR and QM universe is so logically counterintuitive, it seems almost anythng could be true. Intuition is important in conceptualizing, of course, but relying on intuition, or worse, common sense, can be like building ones house on the sand!

Actually it’s not counterintuitive. The intellectual mind is a linear narrative, so describing time as a linear dimension is profoundly intuitive. In fact, it is Edgar Allen Poe, the narrativist, who is given credit for first proposing space and ‘duration’ are the same effect. The primary artifacts of our collective inquiry, from the Bible to Big Bang Theory, are build on this beginning to end construct. So saying it’s all ‘written in stone’ is a logical conclusion, but doesn’t this quantum decoherence across time contradict the principle that energy is neither lost, necessarily to the past, or gained, necessarily from the future?
The basic principle of relativity is that neither the point of reference, or the frame of reference is absolute, but that they move relative to one another. The scenery moves past you, as you move through it. But somehow it becomes my hobby horse when I try applying this very basic principle to the apparent dimension of time and observe that events go from being in the future to being in the past, as the content of this dimension goes from past to future, yet it is perfectly logical to propose multiple universes in order to explain this one.
So, yes, I do wonder who is crazy.

Appreciate the clarifications, thanks.

The interesting thing about the explanation for Time’s Arrow is that it points to bizarre constructs such as other universes and time moving backward (all clearly well beyond what we see and observe in this universe). Similarly, String Theory points to ELEVEN dimensions and parallel universes.

To me, this leaves the door wide open for a Spiritual dimension to our existence.

A1: I wrote that more as a way of analogy. However, one can work general relativity with complex variables or higher up with quaternions. In a more direct way complex variables play a central role in quantum mechanics.

A2: The branch cut is a discontinuity associated usually with the integration of a function around a pole.

A3: This is a subtle issue. If you look at the 1984 paper by Hawking & Hartle they compute the amplitude for a transition to a deSitter space using complex variables. They do some pretty ornate integrations by “skating on the complex plane.” So behind the scenes complex variables do play a role, particularly when quantum mechanics is thrown into the mix.

A4: We don’t sense imaginary quantities directly, but we can infer them. A wheel rolling on a flat surface might be one analogue of this, where with every 2-pi rotation it marks out an equal length. In electronically modulated music where there is a phase shift in a note is close to an example. Another is a note where the harmonics which make it up are modulated. This gives the auditory perception of an sequence of notes ascending a scale, but it never really does. It is an acoustical analogue of the Escher drawing of the cyclical waterfall or monks climbing a staircase that closes on itself. The illusion is an artifact of projecting down to two dimensions, and we know that there must be something similar to a branch cut which creates a stack of these staircases linked together to make sense in three dimensions. In such projections there is a “blow up of a point” which plays a role similar to a singularity.

These waves are classical waves, though mathematically we often write them according to complex variables. The analyst then does a “take the real part” at the end. Quantum waves are complex valued, but observable aspects of QM are determined by the modulus square of these wave functions.

A5: The model is really purely mathematical. If it has some applicability to physics it is used.

Lawrence B. Crowell

LOL. We all feel the need to push the envelope, without popping it. Problem is, eventually it does pop and we are continually picking up the pieces and trying figure out how they went together, if they ever did go together. As the old saying goes; Open a can of worms and you need a bigger can to get them back in. It’s all about the journey, because there is no destination.

The SR, GR and QM universe is so logically counterintuitive, it seems almost anythng could be true. Intuition is important in conceptualizing, of course, but relying on intuition, or worse, common sense, can be like building ones house on the sand!

By the way, everything you say and do…your thoughts and expressions, are important in a determinstic universe. What you write, you literally write “in stone”. What we believe may be inconsistent- or consistent- with the nature of reality, but somehow it has a place in the overall process of discovery.

I’m reminded of the really weird ideas of Sir Isaac Newton on religion, and the strange ideas of Hoyle and Dirac. Their strange ideas were just a part of their being human. Everybody, including non-scientists, has strange ideas. In a way, we “brainstorm” our way through life! Our life makes sense to us, at our frame of reference, but to others we seem, at least- different! I’m reminded of the old Pennsylvania Dutch saying: “I think everybody is crazy but me and thee…and sometimes I wonder about thee!”

Since you did read it, I’ll let it slide. Like everything else, our thoughts and expressions end up fading away fast enough anyway.

The issue of deity, I suppose, is how we deal with that.

My current email, which Sean has, is samacox@comcast.net. I made a brief reply to your note and saw it was not on the thread…but no big deal. I was just basically agreeing with your feelings about momentum. I already said my piece about diety, which of course is the subject here…

The thread continues to be interesting…

Q1. How can you define another “baby universe”? I thought by definition, the universe was infinite, and so this is an inherent contradiction. Where would the physical “boundary” between our universe and this “baby universe” occur?

——————–

I can think of one simple model which might help visualize this. There is a construction in complex variables call Riemann sheets. A complex plane with some function that is multiply valued around a pole after a 2-pi rotation around the plane “jumps” to another complex plane. This jump is called a branch cut. Then on the second complex plane the function upon a 2-pi rotation jumps to a third one and so forth. These complex planes are infinite in two dimensions, but there are an infinite number of these. One might think of an infinite stack of CD on a rack, but where the radius of these disks “goes to infinity.”

These planes are connected by this branch cut, which serves in a sense as something similar to a singularity. In fact these occur with a path around a singularity. So we might think of these planes as connected to each other through these singularities. In a more complicated situation such as cosmologies these universe are connected by singularities, such as black hole interiors and the initial singularity of a cosmology. We then of course have to throw quantum mechanics into the gemish so these singularities are in some ways associated with amplitudes for spacetimes and fields. Further, all of these singularities might in fact be the same singularity, but with different quantum amplitudes we observe in each specific instance that obtains, whether that is a black hole, the big bang or maybe a quantum fluctuation of spacetime.

Lawrence B. Crowell

Q2: See here.

Q3: No, I wouldn’t assume that. It might be a reasonable starting point, but we should keep an open mind.

Seems our last two posts were lost. I backed up mine and sent it to your email, but it was a Micronesia address, so you may not get it.

Sam,

Keep in mind that we’re still just little flowers that pop up out of the dirt, scatter a few seeds and fade away. And lucky to do that. It’s not that I’m not sympathetic to death, but I find that like much of everything else, the more we sensitize ourselves to it, the more sensitive we are to it. So I just try sensitizing my self to what matters and be as objective as possible about the rest. Which isn’t to deny the reality of pain, but the price we pay for feeling is that lots of it is pain.
As the old Animals song, ‘When I was Young’ said, “I was much older then.” The older we get, the more we appreciate the overwhelming nature of change and how the world we are born into dies off, to be replaced by what was growing up in the cracks as we focused on those solid parts in between.
One of the main reasons physics interests me and yet I disagree with its fundamental assumptions is because of this intent focus on those hard parts we think of as the physical, yet, even the most basic insights of physics suggests they are illusionary and a function of process, not the cause of it. It’s the same basic assumption of Ideal Form, as monotheism. We focus on the point at the top, not what creates and defines it. It’s like looking for meaning in the perfect pearl and not appreciating oysters. So far as physics has been able to show, reality would simply disappear if motion were to stop, yet we can only look for what must be doing the moving. There are religions and philosophies from throughout history and around the world that have figured this out, that it’s really about the verb, not the noun, yet we still insist on breaking rocks into ever smaller pieces, trying to find the smallest possible unit.
So I find the more I live in terms of context and process, the more I find I’m connected to and part of the world around me. Then the temporal and spatial limitations that set the parameters of personal reality become part and parcel of the process in which definition and limitation are two sides of the same coin. If we were not mortal, we couldn’t exist.
As for family… hmmm. You might say the parents viewed large families as a necessary right of passage and while they devoted their lives to raising us, survival of the fittest was never far from the surface. Being younger and introspective, I’ve kind of spent my life burrowing down into things to see what makes them tick, not climbing to the top, like most, so there is a bit of head scratching when it comes to relations.

One very positive thing…I travelled and worked when I had the chance. As I look back, there are few regrets. One of the attitudes of the Pacific Islanders I knew, which gave me solace was their utter contempt for death (Mala). Death was something we faced evey day, in a hundred different ways, and if it happened, we mourned, had a big feast in the memory of the departed and got on with our lives.

I cherish my large family and relish the memory of my experiences. However, learning (in a special way) the meaning of love, loyalty, respect, interdependence, forgiveness, courage and the importance of being a “kind” person…these lessons have given meaning to my life.

I’m inclined to believe that the universe is both field and quantum/singularity, (if SR/GR/QM are all correct anyway) and that the way singularity and field are proportioned and observed depends on the manifold coordinates from which we select to observe them. Energy density is related to momentum-and influences space-tme curvature in a definite and predictable way.

I’m 67 and the longest lived guy in my whole family just barely made it- he was an amputee diabetic- to age 77! I’m keeping that in mind in my planning.

Old Mother Nature gives us our day in the sun and it can be fun, but thinking there is something to hold on to is the one hand clapping.

Cancer doesn’t seem to be a big issue in my family. Seems like we die of other things first. My mother almost made it to 80 though. I’d lost 5 cousins by the time I was thirty. Here’s a memorial to one of them. He’d have been someone you would have liked;

http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.html?topic_id=481027&tn=0&mr=0

I still think the universe makes more sense as a field, than a singularity, though.

When I came back from the islands in 03 my PSA was 20.5. They found a small Gleason 9 cancer about the size of a fingernail on the left lobe of my prostate. Dr Strong down in Naples said he thought the tumor was no longer organ confined but we did our best anyway.

I had 3D conformal radiation in Tampa plus a Paladium 103 seeding. For 3 years the PSA stayed down below 1, and then started to take off again. I had another biopsy series, CT scan with contrast and Bone Scan last fall and all were negative, but the negative results in this case were bad, not good news.

The source of the increasing PSA had to be outside the prostate. An early bone scan cannot show cancer in the groin…the whole area is too bright even on a normal scan. Mine has jumped to the pubic arch, and we expect it to proceed from there. Androgen deprivation will hold it a couple of years.

We will try intermittant androgen deprivation to try to extend things, and maybe I’ll get a GVAC vaccination…then Taxotere. After the first couple of years, the bone pain gets pretty uncomfortable, and there is always the potential for bone fractures and more spinal problems. My dad lasted 7 years on Estrogen, we may try that too, somewhere down the road.

In our family (thank goodness) prostate cancer goes to the bones, not the rectum. However, in the final stages it migrates to the brain. The doctor says I have 4-8 years. The main hedge is the fact that Gleason 9 cancers are very aggressive.

Make sure you check your PSA’s at least annually! I had a biopsy when I was 50 because of the situation with my father, but paid no attention to my health while I was overseas for 8 years…glad I came back and got attention when I did, or I would be in much more immediate trouble!

Lawrence, appreciated your comments. I’ve been out there researching and found some of the same stuff (I’m sure) with which you are familiar!

Since they are all well field verified, the connections between SR/GR and QM are very important to our conceptual understanding of the nature of reality. We know that QM operates within a manifold, an obvious GR connection. We know that both GR and QM are conceptually deterministic, and that the wave function of the universe, quantum entanglement and such principles tie in with many of the characterisitics of the GR geometry- with its invariant frames and space time curvature. The SR tranforms are impprtant too. The equivalence principle is the starting point for our study of instantons, monopoles and related phenomena, and indicates that momentum is the basis for our perception of mass in the universe…which brings us once again to holography.

Talk about impressive virtual reality! This universe obviously developed naturally…it is far too “wild” to be in and of itself the construct of deity. However, we definitely have a lot in common with other information and complexity in the universe, and in that sense we are not alone. Information and complexity developed in all its awesome beauty within the constaints of the universe, and has obviously taken advantage of every aspect of those constraints to assure and insure its continued collective existence.

A great thread!