People often talk about timelines as branching structures, etc., saying that every choice (whatever that is) makes a new timeline which branches off from this one. Though I disagree with this idea, it is interesting that people never look at the other natural branching structure: trees! They record time in their structure, by tree rings. Nature seems to do things in the most efficient (and obviously natural) way possible, and living things make a record of time itself. What if matter in general does this too? Your thoughts, please. /ttiforum/images/graemlins/smile.gif
Time?
- Thread starter TimeLord
- Start date
Ok, I'll start.
Tree rings exist as discrete rings in the trunk of a tree and record (approximately) the number of years the tree has grown. Atoms of matter also have discrete bands, called atomic orbitals. Perhaps the innermost electrons, being of higher binding energy, are also "older" in the sense of being a little bit in the past. And what about when you go even further within matter?
Tree rings exist as discrete rings in the trunk of a tree and record (approximately) the number of years the tree has grown. Atoms of matter also have discrete bands, called atomic orbitals. Perhaps the innermost electrons, being of higher binding energy, are also "older" in the sense of being a little bit in the past. And what about when you go even further within matter?
I guess it's ulimately a matter of how matter is arranged. That's how we determine that time has passed anyway. Without perception of space, there would be no time. But that's not much help, is it. /ttiforum/images/graemlins/smile.gif
I know that the quantum numbers are supposed to be the only things determining the state of matter at the small scale. The reason I present this idea is because *something* has to account for time. I'm not attached to any idea, though, so feel free to tear it to shreds.
I don't like to speculate on black or white holes, because there's no way I can experiment with them. They seem like more speculation than anything.
paladius
Temporal Navigator
Many things in nature do record time like you say. Atoms, record time by showing what/how many orbital rings are stable at the moment. 15+ billions years ago, hydrogen and few other element were stable. A Billion yrs ago, elements like carbon and gallium became stable (and the number of e- orbiting them). Today we have Copernicium stable. In a billion more yrs there will be more stable elements. Thus our periodic table of elements is a record of time.
The analogy is great. When looking at time from the 5th dimension, you see it as if you cut a tree and can count the rings. From our daily lives, we only see the outer shell, thus present. We can remember what previous outer shells looked like (our memory). When time traveling, you essentially cut the tree, look at the rings, decide where you want to go (what ring/year) and then you re-grow the tree to that point in time. This, as in reality, suggests you can only travel through time from present to past, unless you have another way to view something that has not yet happened....as we don;t know yet what will happen.
Provided you could travel into future, that would logically suggest either infinite universe theory or destiny. Destiny, as in reality, suggests the system is closed loop and cyclical.
Fun huh?
The analogy is great. When looking at time from the 5th dimension, you see it as if you cut a tree and can count the rings. From our daily lives, we only see the outer shell, thus present. We can remember what previous outer shells looked like (our memory). When time traveling, you essentially cut the tree, look at the rings, decide where you want to go (what ring/year) and then you re-grow the tree to that point in time. This, as in reality, suggests you can only travel through time from present to past, unless you have another way to view something that has not yet happened....as we don;t know yet what will happen.
Provided you could travel into future, that would logically suggest either infinite universe theory or destiny. Destiny, as in reality, suggests the system is closed loop and cyclical.
Fun huh?
I just realized something. If one were to believe this stuff about worldlines and that a choice creates a new worldline, we must realize that a choice is really just an impulse; a force. So then, any physical record of time must be a record of forces, not necessarily matter itself.
I do not know. But since it was printed on the Internet back in 2007 for a brief period of time, you will have to ask Dr. David Deustch there about his Oxford Team and him proving it mathematically, as what the article stated. It is listed somewhere probably here, and I do not have the link anymore, nor do I know if it is up, although I did not really find a science paper on it, but then there is more than just arXiv.org website for professional papers.
Is it The Structure of the Multiverse? The subtitle says "The structure of the universe is determined by information flow." It's dated 2001, but I didn't see anything on his site from 2007. Thanks for the reference.
Also, I really am interested in what all of you have to say. I just am displeased when people stop short of giving an explanation, or when they make vague comparisons of themselves to buddha or einstein or whatever else they feel is above other people. /ttiforum/images/graemlins/smile.gif
Also, I really am interested in what all of you have to say. I just am displeased when people stop short of giving an explanation, or when they make vague comparisons of themselves to buddha or einstein or whatever else they feel is above other people. /ttiforum/images/graemlins/smile.gif
Darby
Epochal Historian
You're correct about spacetime events probably leaving some sort of evidence that we call information. Roger Penrose is working on a theory of cosmology that may or may not be correct (even according to himself) that is designed to see what happened "before the Big Bang". He's proposed a cosmology that has neither a Big Bang nor a Big Crunch that, if correct, should have left traces in the CMBR in the form of circular ripples that formed before what we view as the Big Bang event. The ripples would have been caused by the final evaporation and explosion of the remaining black holes in the universe once the positive cosmological constant expanded the universe so much and for so long that all of the neutrons and protons in the universe decayed leaving nothing but photons and the average temperature of the universe was less than the average temperature of the last BH's - sometime about 10^100 years from now (or some time about 20 billion years in the past). The crux of the conjecture is that to construct a clock of any sort you need mass. With no mass left in the universe (only photons and other massless particles) there is no clock in the universe. Without a clock the universe can start over because massless particles don't care what time it is (they travel along lightlike edge of lightcones).
So that we're speaking one consistent language we probably should drop the term "worldline" when taking about the multiverse. In particle physics a worldline is a trace through a lightcone that represents the history of a particle rather than some other universe.
One thing that is always missed by Internet posters when talking about the Many Worlds Interpretation (multiverse) is reiterated in Deutsch's paper that you referenced:
These "parallel worlds" would have no effect on one another. In other words you can't get there from here. You can't travel to them, visit them or appear here from one of them and they don't "leak" into this universe (no quantum interference). That makes sense. If they could leak back into this universe and they are created by events in this universe you end up with a runaway feedback loop. If nothing else the math blows up into results full of infinities - which is precisely what the MWI attempts to avoid. Results that indicate infinite mass, infinite energy, momentum, etc. are unphysical, i.e. wrong.
I have conflicting ideas about this. First, it seems reasonable since relativity affects both mass and time simultaneously; also, mass determines how fast separate things go if they have equal energy & momentum. However, what about light? Light still has a speed, even if no mass, and speed is dependent on time. So I'm not really sure about this one.
I know that free neutrons decay, but do protons? I thought they were stable. However, there are many things I don't know.
Regarding the other point, I'm not a supporter of the many worlds interpretation of time travel.
I had another idea. You know how atomic orbitals are said to have both spin up and spin down electrons balancing each other out? Well... If the world existed on a sheet of paper, then an object that rotated through a plane orthogonal to that sheet would intersect the paper at two points, and it would appear to be oriented in opposite directions at the two locations. So at one point, it'd be spinning clockwise, and at the other it'd be spinning counterclockwise. What if it's the same with atoms? Maybe the two electrons (or one) revolve in a 4th (or higher) dimension and we only see its intersection with 3D space. I know this isn't a great explanation. What do you think?
Darby
Epochal Historian
TimeLord,
If you look at a lightcone you see the areas where travel is timelike (sub-luminal velocity), spacelike (super-luminal velocity) and lightlike (the speed of light). Lightlike travel is along the edge at 45 degrees relative to either the space or time axis.
Normally you see space represented as a flat plane cutting across the cone. That's the plane of simultaniety where, if you ignore special relativity, all events on the surface of the plane occur at the same time. The plane is a representation of space.
But that isn't how it is actually presented in the expanded theory (Special Relativity). The plane is curved such that at the edges, where you are traveling at the speed of light, all of the planes converge and follow the lightlike 45 degree line along the edge of the cone. The translation of this is that photons can access all of space in zero time because they travel at the speed of light. Another way of looking at it is that spacetime, for photons, is a point, not a line.
And that's the crux. In the far distant future, 10^100 years from now, when all of the protons, neutrons, blackholes - all matter - has decayed to photons everything left in the universe travels at the speed of light. Everything is traveling along the lightlike edge of the lightcone. There is no clock because all of spacetime is instantly available to every photon.
Photons are very different from massive particles like protons and neutrons. Photons do not obey the Pauli Exclusion principle. Photons like to simultaneously occupy the same quantum state. That's why we can have lasers. It's the definition of laser light.
Now, if everything left in the universe is a photon and if photons try to all occupy the same quantum state the picture that emerges is that no matter how much space has expanded if you look at the lightcone the photons are all simultaneously occupying the same state. And, of course, the entire energy of the universe is held by those photons...all of it.
If they all occupy the same state and if they hold all of the energy we have a name for this situation. We call it a singularity. We now have, in theory, the Cosmic Egg. The "old" universe doesn't disappear or expand forever but it is reborn in a flash of energy that we call The Big Bang. How long does it need for this to occur? Zero time - because that's the only time left in a totally photonic universe. It's a metastable situation that only needs some "twitch" to break the tenuous symmetry for the Big Bang to recur.
If you look at a lightcone you see the areas where travel is timelike (sub-luminal velocity), spacelike (super-luminal velocity) and lightlike (the speed of light). Lightlike travel is along the edge at 45 degrees relative to either the space or time axis.
Normally you see space represented as a flat plane cutting across the cone. That's the plane of simultaniety where, if you ignore special relativity, all events on the surface of the plane occur at the same time. The plane is a representation of space.
But that isn't how it is actually presented in the expanded theory (Special Relativity). The plane is curved such that at the edges, where you are traveling at the speed of light, all of the planes converge and follow the lightlike 45 degree line along the edge of the cone. The translation of this is that photons can access all of space in zero time because they travel at the speed of light. Another way of looking at it is that spacetime, for photons, is a point, not a line.
And that's the crux. In the far distant future, 10^100 years from now, when all of the protons, neutrons, blackholes - all matter - has decayed to photons everything left in the universe travels at the speed of light. Everything is traveling along the lightlike edge of the lightcone. There is no clock because all of spacetime is instantly available to every photon.
Photons are very different from massive particles like protons and neutrons. Photons do not obey the Pauli Exclusion principle. Photons like to simultaneously occupy the same quantum state. That's why we can have lasers. It's the definition of laser light.
Now, if everything left in the universe is a photon and if photons try to all occupy the same quantum state the picture that emerges is that no matter how much space has expanded if you look at the lightcone the photons are all simultaneously occupying the same state. And, of course, the entire energy of the universe is held by those photons...all of it.
If they all occupy the same state and if they hold all of the energy we have a name for this situation. We call it a singularity. We now have, in theory, the Cosmic Egg. The "old" universe doesn't disappear or expand forever but it is reborn in a flash of energy that we call The Big Bang. How long does it need for this to occur? Zero time - because that's the only time left in a totally photonic universe. It's a metastable situation that only needs some "twitch" to break the tenuous symmetry for the Big Bang to recur.
Thanks for the clear explanation. I have a question: If photons exist in all of space at once, why does it take time for a photon to go from one point to another?
It seems to me that Einstein's religion caused him to try to reconcile physics with the torah ("Let there be light" = "big bang"). It just seems forced. Did I miss something?
It seems to me that Einstein's religion caused him to try to reconcile physics with the torah ("Let there be light" = "big bang"). It just seems forced. Did I miss something?
No, not "The Structure of the Multiverse" but this one from Sept. 25, 2007:
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/09/n--one-of-the-m.html
at another website than the original one found at.
The Oxford team, led by Dr David Deutsch, showed mathematically that the bush-like branching structure created by the universe splitting into parallel versions of itself can explain the probabilistic nature of quantum outcomes.
(plus the rest of the article)
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/09/n--one-of-the-m.html
at another website than the original one found at.
The Oxford team, led by Dr David Deutsch, showed mathematically that the bush-like branching structure created by the universe splitting into parallel versions of itself can explain the probabilistic nature of quantum outcomes.
(plus the rest of the article)