Reality: Mother Nature Is A Bitch

Coming to terms with your reality is hard enough under ordinary circumstances, but Mother Nature’s a bitch and likes to baffle us with one hand in the observed reality this-is-nuts cookie jar while giving us with the other hand her middle finger by ignoring a more theoretical alternate reality common sense cookie jar, just to make life difficult and hard to understand for us mere mortals.

There are seemingly zillions of things that are theoretically proposed yet which makes no sense in our reality. The classic modern example is String Theory which requires six additional spatial dimensions apart from latitude (north-south), longitude (east-west or left-right) and altitude (up-down) you are familiar with. But there’s also a whole pot-load full of observations and experimental reality which equally makes no sense.

Some parts of reality have been demonstrated to death as reality yet as Mr. Spock would have it, are illogical.

For example, there is a trilogy of generations of the elementary particles. For example, there’s the electron, the heavier muon (father or son to the electron) and the even heavier tau (the electron’s grandfather or grandson). Now you’d think their relative masses would bear some sort of logical relationship like 1,2,3 units or 1,2,4 units or 1,3,9 units. But no, it’s all ad hoc like numbers determined by three spins of the roulette wheel though with vastly more numbers. Now this wouldn’t be too bad if the muon and the tau particle actually did anything. They can be created, but they decay and go ‘poof’ so quickly that they play no active role in any reality dealing with life, the universe and everything. This is the first impossible reality, or an alternate reality, you need to accept before being served breakfast.

There’s matter or mass that interacts with electromagnetism, the sort of stuff we know and deal with every day. You are that sort of matter. But, reality also has it that there is matter or mass that does NOT interact with electromagnetism, like light. You can’t see this matter. It’s invisible matter. It’s called Dark Matter. If you had a ‘basketball’ made out of Dark Matter and it was a foot in front of your face, you couldn’t see it even in a brightly lit room. That’s nuts. This is the second impossible reality, another alternate reality, you need to accept before being served breakfast.

Dark Matter makes up roughly 23% of our universe, but that doesn’t mean that 77% of the universe is composed of I’m-made-of-that normal matter. In fact only 4% of the universe is normal stuff. The remaining 73% of the universe’s stuff is Dark Energy. You can’t see Dark Energy either, but then again you can’t see most forms of normal energy either so that in itself does make Dark Energy any sort of an alternative non-intuitive reality. Why Dark Energy belongs in the realm of alternate reality is that it’s a ‘free lunch’; it’s something-from-nothing. That’s because although the Universe is expanding, its volume is getting bigger, the density of Dark Energy remains the same. Translated, as time goes by, the Universe contains more and more of Dark Energy. Where does it come from? Apparently it originates out of even less than thin air. This is the third impossible reality you need to accept before being served breakfast.

When you look around your room at all of the familiar objects contained therein, you pretty much think of stability. The objects don’t pop in and out of existence willy-nilly; all of the bits and pieces that make up the objects equally don’t pop in and out of existence willy-nilly. If you put one of your knick-knacks on a weighing scale, the weight stays constant. That’s reality. Alas, at the micro level, the quantum level, bits and pieces do just that – they pop in and out of existence seeming at random. They’re called ‘virtual particles’ since they don’t stick around long enough to contribute anything to your nick-knacks. They originate from the vacuum energy; the quantum jitters. The guts of the phenomena are that all space is permutated by energy. There’s no such thing as an absolutely pure vacuum. Energy can be converted to mass. When that happens, two virtual particles are created, equal and opposite – one matter, the other its antimatter counterpart. They quickly recombine, go poof, and return the energy borrowed to create them in the first place back to the vacuum energy bank vault. So, you have solid reality – you have nebulous virtual reality. This is the fourth impossible reality you need to accept before being served breakfast.

  

The observed value for the vacuum energy, confirmed by experiment, and the predicted or theoretical value for the vacuum energy differ by 120 orders of magnitude, so real reality and theoretical reality are on near opposite sides of the universe! Mother Nature has a sense of humour. This discrepancy is the fifth impossible reality you need to accept before being served breakfast.

Matter-Antimatter is one of those reality symmetries beloved by physicists. Theory predicts, indeed demands that at the moment of creation (that Big Bang event) matter and antimatter would be formed in equal amounts. Unfortunately for physicists, but fortunately for you, other life, the universe and everything, there’s not a heck of a lot of antimatter around. Why? Who knows? It’s the case of the missing antimatter: whodunit? It’s like tossing a balanced coin a zillion times and coming up with a zillion matter heads and no antimatter tails - Something’s screwy somewhere. This is the sixth impossible reality you need to accept before being served breakfast.

Gravity reality and quantum reality exist as two separate and apart realities. There’s no doubting the reality of each. However, as both are part and parcel of our natural Universe, you’d think that there would have to be some reality connection between the two. There’s not. To unify the two is the Holy Grail of physics; a Nobel Prize is a certainty for accomplishing it. Alas, it appears that flapping your arms and flying to the Moon is a more realistic objective. This is the seventh impossible reality you need to accept before being served breakfast.

Wave-particle duality is one of those quantum realities that quantum physicists tear their hair out about because it just doesn’t jive with real reality where bullets don’t wave all over the place and sound waves don’t behave like bowling balls. To make a very long story short, little fundamental particle bullets, like electrons, when fired at a target with a barrier but also with an opening in front pass through the opening and impact the target in just one place: so far, so good. However, when these little electron bullets are fired at the same target, with the same barrier in front, only now with two openings, the impacted target shows a smear of  areas of high impacts (plural) alternating with areas of near zero impacts – a classic wave interference pattern. This also happens when the electron bullets are fired at the double set of holes in front of the target one at a time! It’s like the electrons ‘know’ when there’s just one hole, or two holes in front of the target, and change their behavior from bullets to waves accordingly. Thus, the description of wave-particle duality since particles behave like waves and waves can behave like particles.  This is the eighth impossible reality you need to accept before being served breakfast.

The observed speed of light is constant – 186,000 miles per second. That in itself isn’t so bad, except the speed of light is REALLY constant and that is counter intuitive based on everyday experiences where velocities can be added and subtracted. If a train is moving eastwards at 100 miles per hour, and someone on the train throws a baseball at 100 miles per hour in an eastwards direction, an observer on the outside railway platform will clock the baseball as moving at a velocity of 200 miles per hour in an eastwards direction. If the baseball is thrown westward at 100 miles per hour, the outside observer will see the baseball apparently standing still and floating in midair as the train thunders past. If you now substitute a light beam for the baseball, when beamed eastwards you’d think the beam’s velocity would be 186,000 miles per second plus the 100 miles per hour of the train, and if pointed westwards the velocity would be 186,000 miles per second minus the 100 miles per hour of the train as viewed by that person on the railway platform. Negative! The beam of light viewed from inside the train, outside the train, or from a jet plane in the distance will be 186,000 miles per second. Now that’s a constant! Unfortunately, the counterintuitive aspects don’t stop there. To accommodate that quirk, something else has to bend, and that something is actually a trilogy: to an external observer, as you increase your velocity your mass increases; as you increase your velocity your length shrinks; as you increase your velocity time (rate of change) slows down. So, if you could travel at the speed of light, your mass would be infinite; your length would be zero; and time would stop for you. That’s why you can’t travel at the speed of light. All of this has been absolutely verified by experiment, but still, it’s the ninth impossible reality you need to accept before getting your breakfast.   

The Twin Paradox: Following on from the above, say you have a twin sister. Say you decide to boldly go and take an interstellar voyage to some stellar system thousands of light years away, travelling at velocities some considerable fraction of the speed of light. Your twin sister stays put on Terra Firma. Because you’re going closer to light speed than your stay-at-home twin, time passes at a slower rate for you. So by the time you return home, though you still are relatively young, say still of childbearing age, your twin sister might now be a great grandmother!  It’s a form of time travel to the future at a faster rate than just getting there the usual way, at one second per second. And so it’s the tenth (and for now last) impossible reality you need to accept before getting your breakfast.   

A Multiverse of Braneworlds: Part Two

For millennia, New Age devotees have related observations of nebulous exotic entities from apparently alternative realities like Parallel Universes that have made a crossover into our reality. Rational people suggest that’s just so much bovine fertilizer. Or is it? Perhaps theoretical physics and String Theory might just support such an exotic scenario, the scenario of the Braneworld.  

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

Anomalies aside, another 3-Braneworld could be, well millimeters away from our 3-Braneworld along with their ‘shadow entities’ or ‘higher beings’ or ‘aliens’ and we’d never know it except through their gravitational contribution, what we call ‘Dark Matter’ which, because it doesn’t actually exist  in our own 3-Baneworld universe, can never have its identity ‘discovered’ in our labs or high-energy particle accelerators like CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

It should be pointed out that even though two 3-Braneworlds could be millimeters apart, they are not intersecting, just as your home and your next door neighbor’s home don’t overlap. 

So another question obviously arises. If our 3-Braneworld in that five dimensional space-time Bulk is in extremely close proximity to another 3-Braneworld also in that five dimensional space-time Bulk, and there’s gravity twixt them and us, well, what happens when two 3-Braneworlds collide in the higher dimensional Bulk?

If two 3-Braneworlds are attached by sharing gravity via those open strings, then they in fact can collide. It’s our Big Bang event of 13.7 billion years ago explained. The Big Bang was just a massive supply of kinetic energy supplied at one location; one set of coordinates, caused by our 3-Braneworld impacting another 3-Braneworld at that one specific point. The two 3-Braneworlds then rebounded, but of course could collide again at a later (unpredictable) date. It’s an interesting variation on the concept of a Cyclic Universe.

The standard 3-Braneworld model likens them to very flat and thin rubbery membrane sheets parallel to each other, sort of like thin LP albums cheek-by-jowl with only tiny separations between them on a shelf. They can approach (under gravity), collide (not everywhere at once as they are not 100% mirror smooth due to random quantum fluctuations if nothing else) then rebound. I think that’s imposing a rather artificial and rigid set of conditions though I gather if you crunch the numbers two membrane thin and parallel 3-Braneworlds are the most likely and stable geometric configuration you can get (but I still think that’s unsatisfactory). Normally when you think of something like the Universe, and something that’s expanding, you think of round things – not flattish membrane sheets. So how about an elastic balloon-ball analogy?

Say we have two 3-D elastic balloon-balls in 4-D ‘space’ (I think they actually call this hyperspace as well as the Bulk) or a five dimensional space-time realm. There could in reality be a dozen 3-Braneworld balloon-balls all in close proximity, but two’s enough for now to illustrate things. These 3-D elastic balloon-balls in collision can expand and contract and ripple, though they remain tethered together by those spring-like interbrane forces (those open string gravitons).

Each 3-Braneworld balloon-ball has a mix of radiation, matter and Dark Energy which dominates that balloon-ball in turn as the 3-Braneworld evolves cyclically by experiencing a collision, the Big Bang; an expansion; dilution of each component element in turn – otherwise called entropy; cooling; and contraction back to its original state ready for another collision and Big Bang. That term entropy is nothing more than the concept that order tends towards disorder, or in other words, all that original high ordered radiation, matter and Dark Energy becomes more disordered and all ends up ultimately as a uniform but very dilute ‘soup’ until the next injection of kinetic energy – the next collision and Big Bang in an endless cycle.

So, the story thus far: Two 3-Braneworld balloon-balls in higher dimensional space-time (the Bulk, which isn’t a static ‘observer’ but an active participant in these events), slowly, ever so slowly start to gravitate towards each other, slowing but surely picking up speed over time. Okay, so they approach each other under their joint mutual gravitational attraction. They hit (that’s our Big Bang); they ring or reverberate like a bell; they compress and each balloon-ball heats up die to that initial compression and expands; the two balloon-balls rebound but quickly slow, stop and set the evolving conditions in each balloon-ball recycle back for a repeat performance.

Another way of putting that evolution is that the kinetic energy of motion resulting in the Big Bang event at time and point of collision was converted to radiation, matter and Dark Energy which then dilutes over time as the 3-Braneworld expands, finally cools, slows down, contracts back to it’s original balloon-ball configuration.

Those extra-dimensional spring-like dynamics keeps the 3-Braneworlds apart but tethered though both are individually expanding or contracting or rippling and both are on the rebound from the other. When things settle down, and maximum entropy rules the roost, they can come together again still connected to its neighboring counterpart by those open graviton strings.

Fly-In-The-Ointment #1: Even if other entities are just millimeters away in their 3-Brane Universe, they are as separated from us by the five-dimensional space-time Bulk as we are from them. How can they use gravity to get from their 3-Braneworld to its next door neighbor 3-Braneworld (that’s us) through higher dimensional space-time? One can’t just hike across gravity like it was a bridge. There’s gravity between the Earth and the Moon but you can’t walk-the-walk between the two.

How then does an otherworld, a 3-Braneworld ET or the ‘higher beings’ that exist there get to our 3-Braneworld and then appear as those New Age ‘shadow beings’ from those mystic Never-Never Lands they like to go on, and on, and on about? Well, about the only viable scenario I can think of is excessive gravity translates into Black Holes which can, in theory, translate into Wormholes (for lack of a better word or concept) and Wormholes can be used, in theory, as a transit system. On the plus side, entities intelligent enough to manipulate gravity to create a wormhole transit system with entrance and exit portals will have no need of intergalactic or interstellar spaceships and million year journeys.

Fly-In-The-Ointment #2: String Theory, Branes (“p” or otherwise), the Bulk (or hyperspace), etc. well it’s all just pure (and highly technical) mathematical theory. There’s not one shred of experimental evidence; there’s not one single run on the board that Strings and Branes exist. Till some theoretical physicist turns experimental physicist and hits a homerun, well I’m afraid all of the above will have to reside in New Age La-La Land, however fascinating the scenarios are.

A Multiverse of Braneworlds: Part One

For millennia, New Age devotees have related observations of nebulous exotic entities from apparently alternative realities like Parallel Universes that have made a crossover into our reality. Rational people suggest that’s just so much bovine fertilizer. Or is it? Perhaps theoretical physics and String Theory might just support such an exotic scenario, the scenario of the Braneworld.  

Question: Might 3-Braneworlds equal Parallel Universes (or in mystic-speak Astral Planes; Alternative Realities; Spirit Worlds; Parallel Realities; Higher Planes of Existence; Higher Dimensions; Portals in Space-time, as well as a host of related New Age claptrap phrases that non-New Age squares indeed call claptrap) from which come ‘higher beings’, ‘astral entities’, our ‘enlightened space brothers’ or even plain ordinary everyday run-of-the-mill aliens.  

You cannot have nebulous otherworldly beings, or alternate reality entities, without having an alternative place or reality or an otherworld(s) from which they come from visiting from and call home. Higher planes of reality and associated phrases have been called so much poppycock and confined to the rubbish bin, but perhaps prematurely.

Well, String Theory comes to the rescue, if not for the benefit of New Age gurus, then for cosmologists and theoretical physicists. But perhaps we can kill the two birds with the one stone as it were.

It all starts with String Theory. Now you probably think of the elementary particles, if you think of them at all, as very tiny little billiard balls. However, some bright sparks decades ago came up with an alternative. Instead of a zoo full of different types of little billiard balls, there were tiny vibrating strings. How they vibrated determined what kind of elementary particle it was – one good vibration/second might be an electron; two good vibrations/second a positron; three good vibrations/second equate to a neutrino, etc.

Strings could either be open (like an ordinary piece of string) or closed loops like a circle or ellipse; somewhat like a doughnut.

Now these strings are one-dimensional. But there can be two-dimensional Stringy objects, called Branes, short for Membranes. In fact, Branes became the generic name for all structures in String Theory, usually identified as p-Branes (weak pun) where the “p” stood for the number of spatial dimensions. So a 1-Brane was a string; a 2-Brane was a membrane; a 3-Brane was akin to our own version of reality. A 3-Brane is commonly referred to as a 3-Braneworld.

Oh, there’s a catch. In order for String Theory to theoretically work, there has to be extra dimensions (I can hear New Age mystics cheering now), in fact nine spatial dimensions all up, plus the one dimension we call time. So, in fact you could go all the way up to a 9-Brane. Again all p-Branes have an extra time dimension as well tagged on. All up, that’s six more spatial dimensions than we are comfortable with, but they tend to be out-of-sight and out-of-mind. Most extra dimensions are extremely tiny and curled up and hiding in-between the bits and pieces, the flotsam and jetsam of the quantum realm. But one extra dimension could be extremely large indeed providing the space all else, like 3-Braneworlds, is housed in.

Now 3-Braneworlds have to exist in higher dimensional space, like a 4-Brane which we can’t traverse. It’s just akin to how a fridge magnet is ‘trapped’ on a 2-D fridge surface (a 2-Brane plus extra time dimension) yet resides within a 3-D (3-Brane plus additional time dimension) space. Or, to use another analogy, a 2-D shower curtain hangs in 3-D space but the water droplets are confined to the 2-D shower curtain surface. We’re confined to a 3-D universe ‘surface’ (3-Braneworld plus one time dimension) but that resides in a 4-D (4-Brane plus one time dimension) volume. To cut to the chase, lets just call that what our spatial 3-Braneworld universe reside in a realm of five space-time dimensions. That realm has been given a name – it’s called the Bulk. Why it is called the Bulk I have no idea, but that’s what it is named.

I’ve notched the Bulk up to being a five dimensional space-time (out of a possible ten), but it could just as easily I guess be the tenth space-time dimension (9 spatial and one of time). It doesn’t really matter since we can’t directly see it, taste it, touch it, hear it or smell it, be it a 4-Brane or a 9-Brane. But regardless, the absolute key point is that gravity can connect 3-Braneworlds via the Bulk whether the Bulk has a 4-Brane, 5-Brane, 6-Brane, 7-Brane, 8-Brane or 9-Brane spatial dimensionality.

So much for the background theory: now, the interesting bit is what if our universe were in fact, in reality, really a 3-Braneworld (plus a single dimension of time) residing in 4-Brane spatial volume, or the equivalent, a five space-time dimensionality (the Bulk). What if in fact there were other 3-Braneworlds (each with a time dimension) residing in that same 4-Brane (plus time dimension) volume of five dimensional space-time (the Bulk). Because of that residing (or hiding) in a higher spatial dimension, two 3-Braneworlds could exist within millimeters of each other, unseen, separated by the Bulk. Why unseen? It’s back to those tiny open and closed strings and where they call home.

Closed strings are confined to our own 3-D or 3-Braneworld universe (like water droplets on that shower curtain) where they appear as those elementary particles that are associated with electromagnetism like photons and electrons, as well as those particles part and parcel to the strong and weak nuclear forces. These three forces are the quantum forces that rule our roost. If closed strings are the case for neighboring 3-Braneworlds, then we can’t see them because their electromagnetic (light) particles, photons, are forever confined and trapped to that 3-Braneworld and never reach us. Other 3-Braneworlds are invisible to us. That leaves the fourth force, the non-quantum force, gravity.

Open strings are the force particles of gravity, called gravitons. Open strings can exist with one string end attached to our 3-Braneworld, the other string end to an alien 3-Braneworld. Open strings, in other words, could cross the Bulk from our 3-Braneworld to another 3-Braneworld and be attached to both. In other words, gravity is our best bet means of detecting other nearby 3-Braneworlds. But you can’t see gravity, so our neighboring 3-Braneworld is for all practical purposes is still invisible to us. However, you can ‘see’ the effects that gravity has on objects you can see. You can’t see the gravity that controls the flight of a baseball, but you can see the effect of gravity on the baseball.

Postulating a nearby 3-Braneworld explains a trilogy of puzzlements. One is Dark Energy, one is Dark Matter; the other third is why gravity is so weak relative to the other three fundamental quantum forces (electromagnetism; weak and strong nuclear)

The Mystery of Dark Energy: If two 3-Braneworlds are in close proximity, attached by gravity, then they could have a close encounter of the ka-boom kind. We might term that ka-boom a ‘Big Bang’. If the Big Bang was an actual collision between two 3-Braneworlds (known as the Ekpyrotic Universe scenario), causing a ripple and expansion effect, then Dark Energy is that left over residual oomph, the continuing shock wave of the Big Bang which comes to the fore and dominates the Universe when the initial radiation dominated epoch and the following matter dominated epoch begin to thin out or dilute as the Universe expanded. In this scenario however, we have to have Dark Energy eventually thin out, dissipate and fade away too.

The Mystery of Dark Matter: In order to explain various rotational anomalies of the galaxy, ours and others, additional but unseen matter with associated gravity has got to exist – it’s either that or we have to drastically revise the laws of gravity as we currently understand them and no scientist is wiling to tilt at that windmill. Unfortunately, this postulated additional matter isn’t akin to normal matter which you can detect because you can see it. We can’t see this additional matter which is postulated, indeed nearly required, to exist. That’s why it is called ‘Dark Matter’, though a better term might be ‘invisible matter’. However, if a nearby 3-Braneworld universe shared its gravity with us, via those open graviton strings that transverse the Bulk, well that explains the ‘need for extra gravity’ to explain rotational anomalies and thus eliminates the need for the theoretical un-matter-like ‘Dark Matter’.

The Mystery of Weak Gravity: Gravity is the 98-pound weakling force relative to the trio of Charles Atlas quantum forces. Why has always been a total mystery that theoretical physicists have had to deal with. Open (gravity) strings in the Bulk explain why. Closed strings are confined to our own 3-Braneworld. We feel their full strength. However, our open string gravitons aren’t confined to our 3-Braneworld. Our gravity is diluted by spreading out into and throughout the Bulk and also attaching to other 3-Braneworlds. That’s why it’s the 98-pound weakling.

Another mystery is to answer the question, if our 3-Brane universe is expanding, what is it expanding into? Well, it’s expanding into that five space-time dimensional Bulk. 

To be continued…

There’s No Free Will

Just about every human on Planet Earth holds near and dear to their worldview that they have control over their own lives, or at the very least control over their own mind. Even if you live in a dictatorship or you are a slave or a prisoner you have free will of the mind. You can’t go to jail for what you’re thinking. But wishing or believing or faith doesn’t make it so and there are many scenarios that render your alleged free will to the state of an illusion, if not a delusion.

Here are a few reasons why your alleged ‘free will’ is in fact an illusion at best; a delusion at worst.

* We’re all simulated beings living in a virtual reality obeying the commands of the master computer software program. Characters in a video game do what they are programmed to do, no more and no less.

* God lied! All our strings are being pulled by outside evil (satanic, demonic, etc.) vs. good (angelic) forces. Humans are trapped in the middle of this tug-of-war, mere pawns for the larger forces at work. But as someone once told me, “I have free will because I take responsibility for my own actions”. Well actually that’s just those goody-goody-two-shoes angels pulling your strings. And if you argue in court say that “the devil made me do it”, well that’s probably spot on the case. The devil should be on trial, not you!

* Make of this what you will, but many people who report having involuntary visitations by otherworldly entities, be they described as aliens, shadow ‘people’, beings from other dimensions or parallel realities, etc. note that they were compelled against their will to carry out the wishes or instructions of these entities who have complete, total, absolute control over their human victims. If you have free will, it apparently can be overridden, but then that’s known from case studies in hypnoses. 

* Classical physics rules! Cause and effect rules! Causality rules, OK? All the laws, principles and relationships of classical physics were established and set in motion at the moment of creation (the Big Bang event) and all follows as clockwork (Newton’s point of view) from that in a totally deterministic way as far into the future as you care to calculate. The clockwork, causality rules universe of which you are a part, means no free will for you.

* Quantum physics rules too! Quantum physics apparently has no causality (Einstein disagreed) which immediately sets my teeth on edge, but that’s another matter. Quantum physics is expressed in probabilities, like either/or. Since your brain which houses your mind isn’t exempt from quantum physics (nothing is exempt anytime, anywhere, anyhow), all those billions of either/or quantum physics reactions collectively can give rise to all the apparent free will choices you apparently have at your command. It’s all one massive superposition of state after another after another as your mind lurches from one decision to the next. But whether it’s one either/or or the sum total of billions of either/or probabilities, the possibilities are still finite. You may not do the same thing twice in identical scenarios, but that’s not your free will, just the coming to the fore of one of those random probabilities that result from all those either/or possibilities inherent in quantum physics that hold sway over your mind, which, if truth be known, is comprised of the same matter and energy regimes that are the realm of physics, classical or quantum. 

* Your body cells, tissues, organs, organ systems on up the line are all on biochemical autopilot. No free will need apply. So why should your brain, housing your mind, be an exception to the rule? Your mind is not a something which exists independently of your body.

* Your ‘conscious’ decisions are by-products of what’s already happening within your subconscious. Our subconscious mind comes to a decision before we are consciously aware of it as has been demonstrated by actual experimentation.

* If you accept the probability of a Megaverse, a conglomerate of the Multiverse, with each individual universe having associated Parallel Universes and an infinite space (volume) and time (thus eliminating the awkward questions of ‘what’s beyond’ and ‘what was before’) then every possible timeline and history and scenario has happened – an infinite number of times. An infinite number of you have made every possible decision you can possibly make, compatible with the laws, relationships and principles of physics, an infinite number of times. How do you reconcile free will with that?

* Any competent neuroscientist worthy of their salt and status can stimulate parts of your brain using electromagnetic (EM) energy and get a physiological response, like your fingers twitching, ditto your arms and legs flapping like puppets on a string, your head turns and your posture changes - all grist for the neuroscientist’s mill. What you experience under the EM stimulation is the urge to do it (say tap your toe) and then you do it but you do not get the urge to, nor perform the action, voluntarily or willingly. Someone else, in this case the neuroscientist, is in control. That applies equally to your emotions as well as your movements. Stimulate this brainy bit and you cry; here and you laugh; somewhere else will hit your guilt complex, etc. What makes you, you, is just being reduced to the basics of electrical signals.

Conclusion: You are a part of life, the Universe and everything, or, to shorten things, a part of Mother Nature. Mother Nature operates on a select number of non-negotiable laws, principles and relationships, starting with the most basic of elementary particles and forces and working on up the line. No correspondence will be entered into or answered by Mother Nature. As such, you dance to Mother Nature’s tune. Do not attempt to change the tune and adjust reality. She controls the horizontal; She controls the vertical; She controls all that you see and do. Mother Nature is a bitch, but there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.  Myth busted!

But, and there’s nearly always a ‘but’, while ‘free will’ may well be, and probably is, an illusion (or delusion), it does have practical applications in the real world (like forcing one to be accountable for their actions) and thus is a concept unlikely to bite the dust anytime soon. It’s akin to the notion that God may not, and probably does not exist, He forms a useful function in society by keeping a lot of people here on Terra Firma employed!

P.S. If there is such a thing as free will, why is there such an obesity epidemic? You’d think one of the last things people would want to look like is blubber personified. But what do I know? Maybe roly-poly is the latest in body fashion statements!

Further Reading:

Harris, Sam; Free Will; Free Press, New York; 2012:

Natural Philosophy: Some Random Thoughts

There’s nothing too controversial about the idea that other universes in a Multiverse could have differing laws, relationships and principles of physics than our own. It’s one way of explaining why our Universe is a Goldilocks Universe. If you have billions and billions of universes each with a unique or differing set of laws, relationships and principles of physics, well probability suggests that one universe should just right for life – a Goldilocks Universe. Since we can only exist inside a Goldilocks Universe, well that explains that. But what if the laws, relationships and principles of physics in our Universe changed over time, or over space, or both! Then it’s probably time to turn out the lights, shut and lock the lab door and go home. It’s time to find a new career. But amazingly, there is (controversial) evidence that that is just that. Physical constants aren’t. 

oooooOOOOOooooo

If whatever powers-that-be are simulating our universe, then they could be simulating others as well – a simulated Multiverse! And each and every simulated universe of that Multiverse could have simulated parallel universes. That’s a simulated Megaverse!

oooooOOOOOooooo

One of the 64,000 $64,000 questions: Can you pour stuff down a Black Hole indefinitely, or does the Black Hole have a finite capacity and ultimately or eventually will have to spew stuff out the ‘other side’ (i.e. – producing a White Hole) as you keep pouring in more and more and more? I’d wager the conservation relationships and principles of physics and chemistry hold sway here. What goes in ultimately comes out. That doesn’t mean there’s not a temporary holding vessel. Or, in more human terms, you fill what’s empty; you empty what’s full, but in-between those two there’s storage in the stomach and the intestines; the lungs and the bladder.

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You are all no doubt well aware of the General Theory of Relativity which holds that light (in a pure vacuum) always travels at constant velocity (300,000 km/sec), no matter what frame of reference you are viewing that light in – totally contrary to experience and expectations, but true nevertheless. That translates into length and mass and rate-of-change (time) all being variables, variations depending on what frame of reference you are in. Light of course is one manifestation of the electromagnetic force. That suggests to me that magnetism must also propagate at 300,000 km/sec. Two north magnetic poles or one north and one south magnetic pole, suddenly brought into existence, 300,000 km apart, won’t feel any mutual repulsion or attraction respectfully until one-half of one second after-the-fact, when the two forces meet in the middle and start doing their thing.

But that constant speed of a force, must equally apply to gravity. If the Sun were to suddenly in a split of a split of a split second vanish, it would be eight minutes before Planet Earth would be rudderless, or rather orbitless. No matter what your frame of reference, you’d ‘see’ gravity propagate outwards at 300,000 km/sec. The same must apply to ‘dark energy’, that anti-gravity force. I imagine the same would apply to the propagation of the strong and the week nuclear force as well.

Of course one cannot turn on and turn off gravity (or the strong and weak nuclear forces) like you can a light (or radio, UV, IR, etc.) beam or magnetic field, which is a bit of a bummer in testing the relativistic properties of a gravity beam.

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Quantum physicist Erwin Schrodinger had a lot of trouble accepting some of the weirder philosophical concepts inherent in quantum physics. Specifically, that something, a fundamental particle like an electron, could both be, and not be, at the same time – in a state of superposition – that was only resolved when an observation or measurement was made. Schrodinger decided to replace the electron with a cat-in-a-box that was in a superposition of states being both dead and alive at the same time, the resolution of either/or decided when an observer actually observed the cat-in-the-box.

Now my idea is to replace the cat-in-the-box with you-in-a-sealed-room in a 50/50 dead/alive state of superposition. To someone not in the room, you are both dead and alive at the same time – until they take a peek in your room and at you. The question is, you know perfectly well you are not both dead and alive at the same time; you are your own observer. Presumably the cat is its own observer, and by extension an electron is its own observer. But how can an electron be self-aware? 

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Gravity; it’s what holds you firmly to Terra Firma. If I ask you what holds you firmly to Terra Firma you’d answer “gravity”. But if then asked to explain exactly what it is and how it works you’d be stumped. Giving the Newtonian equations makes predictions but doesn’t give explanations.

However, there are two explanations for gravity if I read the textbooks correctly.

Gravity Is Just Another Force: Firstly, there are in this worldview four fundamental forces: the electromagnetic force, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and gravity. Forces have accompanying elementary particles witch convey the force. In the case of the electromagnetic force, the particle is the photon. The particle associated with gravity has been dubbed the graviton. Unfortunately, it has never (to date) been detected. Now the central issue here is try as they might, physicists cannot unify the four forces into one whole, called a Theory of Everything or TOE*. Since everything should be related to everything else, gravity should be, if not a brother or sister to the other three force-related siblings, at least a kissing cousin. Alas, it’s an unrelated hermit that wants no ancestry with the other three.

Gravity Is Just the Geometry of Space-Time: The second is that mass ‘tells’ space-time how to warp, and warped space-time ‘tells’ mass how to move – seemingly experimentally verified more than several times over. The movement of mass in warped space-time is what we interpret as the ‘force of gravity’, but gravity is actually the actions of mass moving in space-time geometry. If gravity is just geometry and mass deviates from the straight and narrow path because lots of other mass has warped space-time from the flatland Great Plains to the peaks and valleys of the space-time Rockies, then there’s no apparent need or reason that I can see to unify gravity with the other forces and their particles. There is no graviton. If there is no causality link with the other three (quantum level) forces, there’s no need for a TOE. There’s no need to reconcile the 98 pound of weakling gravity with the Atlas physiques of electromagnetism, etc. 

Gravity is highly anomalous. Apart from the fact that gravity is the 98 pound weakling of all the forces (you can pull a paperclip up into the air with just a tiny magnet even though the entire Planet Earth’s gravity is tugging back); and that the graviton hasn’t been spotted anywhere, anytime, anyhow; and that TOE is a no-go; but lastly there are those cosmic twin anomalies, Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

We can’t see, or even detect directly, 96% of the Universe! We have no idea what 96% of the Universe is composed of. If that’s not anomalous, I don’t know what is. Both however have revealed themselves indirectly via their gravity (in the case of Dark Matter) or their antigravity (in the case of Dark Energy). Some of that ‘missing’ part of the Universe is matter of unknown composition, but like all good matter, has gravity. It’s the gravitational effect on matter we can see that gives the game away. Some more (way more) of that ‘missing’ part of the cosmos is Dark Energy which is that unknown stuff which is accelerating the expansion rate of the Universe and if that’s not anomalous, I don’t know what is since by rights the expansion rate of the Universe should be decelerating under the force of gravity. The fact that it’s accelerating suggests that Dark Energy is a form of antigravity, a repulsive force driving things apart at ever faster and faster rates. Though antigravity is really outside the accepted realm of physics (though not sci-fi), there is a symmetrical parallel with the electromagnetic force, which is both attractive like gravity (north pole to south pole) and repulsive (north pole to north pole, or south pole to south pole).

So, gravitational anomalies abound.

*The exception is that the highly theoretical (read purely mathematical) String Theory, Superstring Theory or M-Theory can produce a TOE. The downside is that it takes a whole potful of highly theoretical (read purely mathematical) extra dimensions of which we have no awareness of and can’t (yet) detect. That’s just a bit too ad hoc for me, though many a theoretical physicist goes to sleep by counting their strings instead of their sheep.

UFOs and Our WW2 Atomic Bombs

A rarely seen, ‘long lost’ Walt Disney UFO documentary titled “Alien Encounters from New Tomorrowland” hosted by Robert Urich, is a program that’s pro-UFO as in UFOs being the product of extraterrestrial intelligences. Unfortunately, though while I have relatively little bone to pick with the general content, it did repeat what IMHO is a fundamental error which is the relationship between our use of nuclear weapons in WW2 and the arrival of the aliens (if aliens there be) in 1947. 

One common mythology surrounding the rational for UFOs arriving at Planet Earth in 1947 has to do with human civilization advertising itself to the cosmos as the nuclear new boy on the block in 1945. Planet Earth becoming a nuclear power would obviously be upsetting to extraterrestrials, so the mythology goes, akin to how countries like the United States, Great Britain, Australia, etc. get nervous about North Korea or Iran going nuclear. However, unless aliens were already in spitting distance of Earth*, that scenario (the link between 1945 atomic blasts and the 1947 arrival of extraterrestrial UFOs) is blatant nonsense for several reasons - distance and glare.

Now I like the UFO ETH (ExtraTerrestrial Hypothesis) as much as the next person, but our WW2 atomic bomb explosions are not why they’re here, initially or otherwise.

Let’s start with distance. I assume any extraterrestrial intelligences will be housed on a planet around a star. The nearest stellar system to Earth is the Centauri System, Alpha Centauri, etc. Unfortunately, the Centauri System is over four light years away, and that’s your best case distance scenario. Light, including the flash from an atomic bomb, travels at one light year per year. So, a 1945 atomic blast wouldn’t register at the Centauri System until latter 1949, or several years after the initial 1947 origin to the modern UFO phenomena.

But that’s not the end of the distance issue. Even if our hypothetical Centauri aliens saw those WW2 atomic blasts from a planet around Alpha Centauri in 1949 our time (those four years it took that atomic light to reach the Centauri system starting out in our 1945), they, the aliens, still have to travel from their Centauri system to our solar system and Planet Earth. They can’t do that in less than four years. We couldn’t do it (Earth to Centauri) with our current rocket technology in under 10,000 years! So, even assuming our alien friends could rocket at the speed of light, and that’s a hell of a big assumption, they ain’t gonna get here until 1953 minimum in response to our 1945 atomic bomb explosions, even if they leave their Centauri system post haste upon viewing our use of nuclear technology. That’s hardly the 1947 when the modern UFO era started.

Secondly, there’s glare. Viewed from even the nearest Centauri System, the separation of Planet Earth from the Sun is so small that Earth would be 100% lost in the glare of the Sun, just like you probably couldn’t see a BB just immediately off fractionally to the side of a powerful spotlight. Now the light from an atomic bomb is miniscule relative to the faint sunlight reflected off by Planet Earth itself, our planet itself lost in the far, far, far brighter light emitted by the Sun itself. Translated, there is just no way to see the flash of a WW2 atomic explosion from over four light years away, and that’s assuming the alien home planet is even that close. So, something’s screwy somewhere and that something is the assumed relationship twixt the arrival of the ‘flying saucers’ in 1947 and the start of our nuclear era in 1945.

Distance and glare collectively rule out aliens arriving on Earth in 1947 due to having witnessed a 1945 atomic bomb explosion, unless of course they were already within spitting distance.

So there is however that pesky Star Trek scenario (see below) that aliens just happened by sheer coincidence to be nearby when we advertised our destructive atomic bomb technologies big time. However, IMHO, the odds that aliens would just happen to be in the neighbourhood when our first atomic bombs went off is as likely as you being at ground zero when something extraordinary dramatic event happened. It might happen once in your lifetime – say you were in the bank when the bank robbers rushed it. But if your lifespan is paralleled with the duration Planet Earth has been around to date, what odds that the bank robbery (the parallel to the WW2 atomic blasts) and your presence in the bank (the parallel to aliens being in the neighbourhood) would coincide? Aliens passing by could be at any old time in Earth’s general history, just like your banking visits could be any old time in your general history. But the atomic blasts, and the bank robbery, were at one very specific time. Yes, the two timelines, the general and the specific, might intersect just so, but you’d probably be safer betting your money on the lottery than betting on that likelihood.

You might argue that perhaps aliens a long time ago set up nearby automatic on-station monitors to monitor for that very event – Earth’s transition to a nuclear planet. However, it would still take four years for that automated message to reach the hypothetical aliens around the Centauri system, and of course the time needed for the trip from Centauri back to Earth.

Myth busted.

*Akin to how the Vulcans happened to be passing by in near Earth space just as humanity set off its first warp drive signature attracting their attention as related in the film “Star Trek [TNG]: First Contact”.