Poll 76 - No Space, No Time, No Mass

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyXLYckyoF8

Poll 76:"From a photon's point of view there is no space, no time, no mass. Light does not exist within the world of spacetime and matter."
Poll ended January 8, 2011. 70.2% agreed, and 29.8% disagreed.

As you can probably tell as we look at this current crop of poll questions, I became quite fascinated with the ramifications of my Light Has No Speed entry, and each of these poll questions are looking at the same idea from a number of different perspectives. Where am I heading with this? In 2011, I've been repeatedly showing the following diagram, which is a way of thinking about how gravity and light interact to create our constantly evolving "now" within the fifth dimension. And as I keep returning to, Einstein himself eventually agreed with the proposition that the field equations of gravity and light for our reality are resolved when they're calculated in the fifth dimension. Coincidence? I think not.



One of the most important ideas that spring from this diagram might be that it's more accurate to think of light and our universe's duration as residing within the fifth dimension. Does that mean time is a direction in the fifth dimension? In a way it does, but since we're already calling the first four dimensions spacetime, does that make any sense?

My answer to that conundrum is that words like "time" are the same as words like "up" or "forward". They represent directions, not specific dimensions. Time is a way of describing change from state to state, and those changes make just as much sense whether they're viewed from the direction of "time" or "anti-time". Is "up" a direction in the 3rd dimension, or is it "forward"? Either could be true, it depends upon your frame of reference. And can the direction of "up" point at only one thing? Likewise, can the direction of "time" point at only one thing? Again, what these directions are pointing at depends upon your frame of reference.

But as we discussed with the above poll question, the photon's ability to travel at the speed of light puts it within a specific space where there appears to be only one possible set of states from the beginning to the end of the universe, which would be at "right angles" to our spacetime, where the star ten light years away emitting a photon and that photon hitting your eye are, from the photon's point of view, simultaneous.

This takes us back to the hard determinist viewpoint that there is really only one world line for our universe, and our free will is only a useful illusion, nothing more. In the past I've said that's the difference between the "one world line" that seems to be the fourth dimension, and the "fifth dimension probability space" that we are really navigating within.

So. Is "time" a direction in the 5th dimension, or is time in the 4th? Either can be true, it all depends upon your frame of reference.

Next week, we'll continue this discussion as we look at a new video - The Quantum Observer. Coming up next - Are We Each in Our Own Filter Bubble?

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

New video - Photons and Free Will

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABh5j2yA_mE

Next - Poll 76 - No Space, No Time, No Mass

Möbius Strip Roller Coaster!

Can you picture it? Somebody should make a möbius strip roller coaster, where the cars are zipping around on both the top side and underside of the track! You'd be upside down much of the time of course, so it wouldn't be for the faint of heart. Could be quite a spectacle! Does such a thing already exist or have I stumbled upon a new idea here?

This idea occurred to me as I was answering a question posted to me on YouTube about whether a "flatlander on a möbius strip" is kind of like looking out at the track in front of a roller coaster. With the 2D flatlander example, he's twisting and turning in the next dimension up, but unaware of this additional motion. But what is the corresponding "next dimension up" for we human beings? Here's the answer I gave.

Yes, we're made out of 3D atoms and molecules, but we can't move without using time, so you and I are really in the fourth dimension, traveling in a specific direction which we call "time". My point is that as we travel in the fourth dimension we would be like the flatlander on the möbius strip - we can think we are traveling in a straight line, but we're really branching and twisting in the fifth dimension.

But wait, doesn't that mean the flatlander can't move without using the third dimension? And if we live in "spacetime", is the flatlander really in "planetime" or some such term? That's certainly true. As I've always said with this project, it's quite useful to say that "time" can be thought of as a direction in the next dimension up to whatever spatial dimension you're considering, but saying those words doesn't always clear things up for people. These are the kinds of language traps we can fall into when we're talking about "time" in the context of spatial dimensions. Am I a 3D creature or am I a 4D creature? Depends upon the frame of reference you're using, either is true in its own way.

But I'd still like to see somebody build a Möbius Strip Roller Coaster!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next - New Video - Photons and Free Will

Poll 75 - Waves, Curves and Frames

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSqU4ypIPNw


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVkdfJ9PkRQ

Poll 75: "Before" our universe and 'after' our universe are both the same thing - the indeterminate state of enfolded symmetry. Likewise, this is what we get to when we try to view smaller than or 'between the frames' of our planck-unit-sized slices of spacetime."
Poll ended December 12 2010. 79.1 % agreed, while 20.9% did not.

Last week we looked at my new video for "Is Spacetime Flat or Curved?". Really, this poll question is about the same idea: I support the scientific viewpoint which says that our universe is not really infinite. Rather, it's finite but unbounded.

Let me try to sum up my position again here.

3D is space without time. We can't move within space without using the fourth dimension, so whenever we talk about moving through space we're really talking about moving through spacetime. Some physicists say our spacetime is absolutely flat, and some of those physicists use that as a way of saying that if you could travel far enough you would get to the Earth that is just like ours and see another "you" who did something different when they got up this morning.

I say that's counter-intuitive, but I also understand why it receives some support because it places the "you" who did something different this morning in another universe that is equally deterministic to our own, where you believe you chose one action or another this morning with your free will, but in fact you're in the one single universe where you were predestined to make the choice you made, and we each live in a grim universe where we really have no control over what we're going to do or what's going to happen to us.

Coincidentally, the cover story of the New Scientist magazine that just arrived in my mailbox was about free will. Here's a video they published about the discussion of whether free will is an illusion:


Some scientists who support the idea of there being a slight curvature to our space time use this analogy: if our observable universe were the size of a quarter, the entire finite but unbounded universe of our spacetime would be the size of planet Earth! This is a good way to visualize the scale, but when we do so we have to remember that we're talking about 4D spacetime, rather than a 3D physical object like a planetary sphere.

Here's where that slight curvature of our spacetime takes me in my thinking. To me it makes more sense to say that if we travelled through our 4D "finite but unbounded" spacetime universe with its slight curvature, we'd eventually end up travelling through the absolute zero, the enfolded symmetry that's "outside" our system and after an additional 13.7 billion year journey, end up right where we are now: right here and right now. But if we had adjusted our trajectory ever so slightly in the fifth dimension, we'd have reached the parallel universe where we got up and did something different today.

So I would say that other universe is directly adjacent to ours, and the choices that we make with our free will are us navigating through our fifth dimensional probability space, with a combination of our choices, the actions of others, and random outcomes.

By the way, I posted a link to the above New Scientist video on my facebook page, and it generated lots of spirited discussion. Here's a link to the many dozens of comments posted there.

I'm very pleased that 79% of the visitors to this blog were willing to support this idea, that the quantum wavefunction of our universe includes a "null" point where everything cancels out, and not only is that both "before" and "after" the life of our universe, it's the explanation for why it's impossible for there to be anything smaller than a planck length: because that ultra-small measurement takes us to exactly the same place that the ultra-large measurement of our entire universe from its beginning to its end as a single data-set takes us to: the point of indeterminate size.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Mobius Strip Roller Coaster!

Proof That Spacetime is Flat?

As a followup to my last entry (Is Spacetime Flat or Curved?), here's a very nicely presented youtube movie which demonstrates why cosmologists believe the WMAP data shows the universe is flat to within a small margin of error. As I've said many times before, I believe that margin of error is eventually going to reveal that there is a slight curvature to our spacetime, but if you watch this video you'll see a good explanation of the opposing viewpoint.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqb1lSdqRZY

Next - Waves, Curves and Frames

New video - Is Spacetime Flat or Curved?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7iFXPU_1YE

Next: Proof That Spacetime is Flat?

Poll 74 - Twins, Photons, and Mass

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iACKDPXtH4

Poll 74 - "One twin stays here, the other travels by near speed of light rocket, returns to earth in 60 years looking not much older. This thought experiment shows us that a photon (traveling at the speed of light) has no experience of time: it has zero duration." Poll ended November 14 2010. 83.8% agreed, while the remaining 16.2% did not.

The Twins Paradox, as this is often called, comes from Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. I remember as a child watching a Wonderful World of Disney episode which included an animation about this concept and thinking it was impossible. How could it be that one twin gets in a rocket ship, the other stays home, and yet when the rocket twin returns he still looks the same age while the twin who stayed home now looks old? I really had a hard time with how strange the whole idea seemed to be.

And yet if you take the logic of this paradox even further, you arrive at the amazing conclusion we first looked at in Light Has No Speed. The faster you go, the larger the disparity between your experience of time and those who you leave behind: but the rocket ship twin will never be able to travel right at the speed of light, because it would take an infinite amount of energy to move them. Even traveling at near the speed of light, as we describe in this poll question, would require unimaginably large amounts of energy to push the rocket ship twin along.

So how does a photon travel at the speed of light if it takes an infinite amount of energy to reach that speed? It's because photons have no mass.  Here's a quote from the NASA website about this:

 "Photons do not have mass, but they do have momentum. The proper, general equation to use is E^2 = m^2c^4 + p^2c^2 So in the case of a photon, m=0 so E = pc or p = E/c. On the other hand, for a particle with mass m at rest (i.e., p = 0), you get back the famous E = mc^2." 

Here's one more interesting idea about all this - photons have no mass, but they do carry energy. E=mc^2 is often used to show that there's an equivalence between mass and energy. The exact number varies according to the assumptions used, but as you'll see at this U.S. Department of Energy web page, if you were to take the energy planet Earth is receiving from the sun and convert it to mass, it works out to over 2 kilograms per second! That's a bit of scientific trivia I hadn't come across before.

So, to get back to the poll question: isn't it quite a leap to go from the twins paradox to the idea that light has zero duration? I'm thrilled that almost 84% of the visitors to this blog were willing to come along for the ride to make that leap with me. And I'm hoping it's because many of you saw and approved of the ideas presented in this video for my blog entry published around the same time as this poll question, Light Has No Speed.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksTngIWRnWs.

Next up is the new video for Is Spacetime Flat or Curved. Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next - Is Spacetime Flat or Curved?