by John B. Merryman.
I would first admit that I don’t have a lot of formal education. As a younger child in a horse racing family, there wasn’t much attention to education. I was more curious than competitive, so I found it more effective to be a worker and let my mind do as it wished, than focus on the infinite ins and outs of racehorses. As I was usually tired in my free time, reading became my habit.
Being practical minded, I was not overly social, as people are too intense to take in more than small doses, so my reading gravitated to ways to better understand why the world works as it does. What is this God thing? What are the absolute and the infinite and how do they relate? Why do people spend their lives focused on very narrow channels, when there was so incredibly much to life? Those sorts of issues.
One of the first things I realized is that there is just too much detail to life to even imagine absorbing it, so it became a matter of understanding the patterns that flowed through reality, leading me to a basic interest in topics like philosophy, science, physics, as well as politics and history, as expressions of these patterns.
I’m probably boorish, but I wasn’t impressed by various such aspects of our culture. Philosophy, for instance, seemed mostly garbled. More of a top down attempt to define what should rise from the organic processes, rather than really trying to understand the how and why of those processes. “New Age” efforts to introduce Eastern philosophies to Western audiences seemed better suited to my more nature oriented, contextual experiences of life, where I was more into the habit of melting into the background and the animals I was raising, than having to understand this focused, idealized, granulated, digitized, atomized, individuated concept of reality, that ever more dominates society.
For example, what we experience as the “material,” is at base, the friction and reaction of opposing forces. While Western thought assumes that ultimate, singular stage, Eastern thought is more about opposing poles.
Just because everything is connected, doesn’t make it singular, just networked.
Where I really began to think that even theoretical physics wasn’t putting the pieces together, was in reading Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time.” He made a fairly simple observation, referred to as, “Omega=1.” That the expansion of space is balanced and matched by the contraction of gravity. What???? If it balances, why would overall space expand?
Evidence of this was apparently shown by the COBE and WMAP satellites.
It seemed something basic was being ignored and it tumbled around in my mind for years. Wouldn’t some sort of convection cycle make more sense, given what is collapsing into galaxies is matched by what is expanding between them? That Hubble had actually found the Cosmological Constant. What Einstein proposed to keep gravity from collapsing space.
Working through this problem, the issue of time arose: Doesn’t it really go both directions? While we go past to future, don’t the markers of the process, the events, go future to past?Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. There isn’t some absolute scale of time, as Einstein observed, yet it seemed the physical explanation for the math of Relativity, the fabric of spacetime, seemed more convoluted than necessary.
Consider the 1st law of thermodynamics, the conservation of energy; If it is being conserved, doesn’t that effectively mean it is always and only present? So other points in time wouldn’t exist, if the energy had essentially moved on. The event of hitting the ball can’t co-exist with the runner running the bases, because the cause created the effect and the energy was transformed into it.
This would make time an effect of this physical dynamic, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. We could use ideal gas laws to correlate temperature and pressure with volume, but no one calls them the 5th and 6th dimensions of space!
It is that because we are mobile organisms and necessarily focused our biological sentience into the navigation process, that we naturally experience life and reality as a sequence of events. Which is attenuated by narrating our journeys to one another and building civilizations out of the collective knowledge, making this sequencing foundational to us, but not necessarily the larger world.
Having spent my life with four footed prey animals, with eyes more to the sides of their heads, because it is as important to know what is coming their way, as where they are going, I also tended to develop my peripheral vision and turn down the more judgmental functions of my mind, in order to more clearly appreciate the depth of this environment I am part of.
The more I did that, the more I tended to see these thermodynamic flows and swirls, from reflections of light to the galactic inertia of rock, all as their own clocks, frequencies, metabolic rates. Naturally I sensed this same dynamic in the human cultures with which I had to contend. The positive and negative feedback, the beliefs and cultures building up and breaking down. The bubbles and foam of cresting current events and fads. The deep gyrations of business and politics.
Then there was the theoretical physics presuming to explain this activity, by focusing on ever smaller quantized and digitized units, or the broadest universal scales. Neither of which seemed to relate very well to this swirl of activity in the middle.
Is reality ultimately composed of information and quanta? What about the energy driving it? As these organisms, we have a digestive, respiratory and circulatory system to process the energy driving us on, while the central nervous system is only processing the distilled information used to navigate our progress. Basically motor and steering functions. So yes, naturally the mind focuses on the information, but it seems a pretty blind bias to assume the energy, the motivation, is only emergent from these forms. It would be like assuming the drive of emotion rises from the sorting of reason, not the other way around.
As those with some familiarity of how time is currently being explained know, it is reduced to what amounts to a static dimension of events and the fact of it flowing causally, from past to future events, is dismissed as only emergent with the 2nd law of thermodynamics, that these bits of information become more distributed. No. Time is asymmetric because what is measured, action, is inertial. The earth turns one direction and switching direction would not be a simple proposition.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it. Aka, causality and conservation of energy.
The simultaneity of the present is dismissed by arguing that different events are observed in different order, from different locations, thus all events exist out on the time dimension, but this is no more consequential than seeing the moon as it was a moment ago, simultaneous with seeing stars as they were years ago. It is the energy being conserved, not the information.
The present is not a dimensionless point between past and future, but configuration of the energy, whether it’s as a rock floating in space for billions of years, or light flashing across the same space. Its changing form is what creates time.
No amount of mathematical faerie dust is going to have us time traveling through wormholes in the fabric of spacetime.
Information is not the territory, but the map. It emerges from the energy. Like the cresting of waves gives rise to frequency and amplitude. The reason things often look blurry is because the motion is integral to the configurations of form, not that we haven’t studied the forms close enough.
As the time dimension is only an effect of change, what about space being dimensional? The three dimensions really are the xyz coordinate system and that is a mapping device. Like longitude, latitude and altitude. Mapping devices are effective tools. Nothing more and nothing less. Money is an effective tool, but which we’ve come to treat as a god, or an addiction. It seems to be habitual.
If we remove all physical properties from space, then only the non-physical properties of infinity and equilibrium remain. Infinity because there is nothing to bound it and equilibrium is implicit to GR, as the frame with the fastest clock and longest ruler is closest to the equilibrium of the vacuum. The absolute zero of empty, unmoved space.
So space is the absolute and the infinite.
What fills space is energy and mass. Energy radiates to infinity, or as far as possible, while mass collapses to equilibrium, or until all energy is lost and radiates back out. Those vortices at the center of the cosmic convection cycles of galaxies, where all is cancelled. All networked by the light, as their own collapsing nodes of order.
Which gets back to that whole cosmology thing. Apparently the principle of falsifiability doesn’t apply to cosmology, because whenever there is a gap between prediction and observation, some enormous new, otherwise invisible force of nature is inserted to fill the gap.
For those of you mostly living in the normal world, this would be like an accountant finding a gap in the books, inserting a figure and calling it “dark money.” Then everyone else runs around trying to find this invisible money, because the accountant must know what they are talking about, so raising questions would only be a sign of your own ignorance.
Before Inflation, Dark Matter and Dark Energy were proposed, there was another, original patch applied to Big Bang Theory. When it became apparent this cosmic redshift was increasing with distance, at the same rate, in all directions, it created the effect that we appear to be at the center of this “Bang.” So then it was changed from an expansion in space, to an expansion OF space, because “spacetime!” Presumably then every point would appear as its own center.
What seems to be totally overlooked is the basis of the premise of spacetime is that the speed of light is always measured as a Constant, in any frame. Such that in moving frames, the ruler is compressed, the clock is slowed commensurately and the measure of light is Constant.
If the light is being redshifted, obviously it is not Constant to intergalactic space, as it must be taking longer to cross, in order to be redshifted.
So two metrics of space are being assumed, based on the same intergalactic light. While I mostly get ignored in making this point, one of the main arguments made against it is that light is only measured locally, while this is galactic expansion. The inchworm crawling across an expanding balloon analogy. Which is total bs. Both the balloon and the inchworm are based on the same light. The redshifted spectrum against the speed of this light being observed is still the basis of the doppler effect. The expansion is still relative to the speed, in order to redshift. The argument is that the universe expands. Relative to what? Obviously relative to the speed of the light crossing it, in order to redshift. That would mean the speed is still the denominator and thus the actual measure of space, not the expansion.
I have to make this point about five different ways, because those indoctrinated into this belief are not able to question it and will make any possible argument against it. Such as that the speed of light is not always the same, as it can be slowed in some environments. Which is also beside the point, as this expansion, based on the spectrum, is still relative to the speed. There are assumed to be more lightyears, as the universe expands. If it was “spacetime,” aka General Relativity, wouldn’t the speed of light have to increase, not more light years, but expanding light years, as the space expanded, in order to remain Constant????
We are at the center of our point of view, so an optical effect would make more sense and it has been shown that multi-spectrum “packets” of light do redshift over distance, as the shorter spectrums dissipate quicker, but that raises questions of whether we are sampling a wave front, or observing individual photons that have traveled billions of light years, which goes back to the whole “information rules” issue, as quanta are assumed to be irreducible and not just the smallest measurable units of energy.
If redshift is optical, than the cosmic background radiation permeating space isn’t evidence of some primordial event, but the light of ever more distant sources, shifted off the visible spectrum. The solution to Olber’s paradox; Why the sky isn’t lit up by infinite sources of light.
Given the next generation space telescope, the James Webb, is designed to explore this energy, it is my prediction that it will find it to be a network of ever further sources, not originating as one. Will cosmology change, or just come up with another fix?
I realize I’m beating my head on the wall with this, as belief trumps logic, when it comes to the masses of people. Once an idea is set, changing it is generational. Eventually some generation of cosmologists are going to tire of chasing multiverses and start to ask real questions. But if you want a paycheck in the business today, don’t stray too far from what your teachers teach.