Most physicists don’t have much of a philosophical streak. Most philosophers don’t usually have the technical background to come to terms with modern physics. Whether physicists or philosophers, they don’t promote ideas far outside their subject’s standard model. It’s not usually considered a wise career move. I have no academic career to damage, so I’m going to combine physics and philosophy and think way outside of the established box. It’s going to be physics ‘explained’ by appeal to the Simulated (Virtual reality) Universe scenario.
Continued now from Part One…
# ALL THINGS [NOT] TRANSPARENT
The standard macro analogy to an atom (nucleus and electron cloud surrounding it) is trying to picture a gnat (the nucleus) in the middle of Westminster Abbey with a cloud of bacteria (the electrons) around the walls, ceiling and floor and thus surrounding the gnat. In other words, there’s a hell of a lot of empty space inside your everyday atom. That might suggest that electromagnetic radiation, photons, would have no trouble in passing right on through an atom without intersecting anything and thus being hindered on its uninterrupted journey.
So why isn’t everything transparent? Why doesn’t light go right through you? Why are some things transparent (air, glass) and some things (of equal density and thickness) opaque for a specific wavelength/frequency of ‘light’ (light here being not just visible light but infrared light and radio light and microwave light, etc. not that the energy value of the photons of ‘light’ should matter since it is traveling through what’s for all practical purposes ‘empty’ space). Further, photons have no electric charge properties that would hinder their passing straight through your average atom.
A quick anomalous point – light passes through air. You can look clear through roughly 100 miles of atmosphere and see the sun and moon and stars, etc. Add a bit of smog or fog and things get a bit on the opaque side, yet the overall thickness and density of the clear air, or air-smog mix, isn’t drastically different. It’s still 99.99% empty space. Something’s screwy somewhere unless of course there’s additional programming that counters the scenario.
# SYMMETRY & PARITY
One of the fundamental bedrocks beloved by physicists is their love of symmetry, especially with respect to time, charge and parity.
Physics should work as we know it whether time is considered positive or negative***. It doesn’t matter if you go 50 miles per negative hour for 10 negative hours, you still travel 500 miles. Or, imagine two electrons (call them A and B) traveling towards in time, each approaching the other. When they get close enough, they will repel each other (both being of the same negative charge) by exchanging a virtual photon. But which electron emitted the virtual photon? It might have been A to B forward in time, but it is just as probable that it might have been B to A backwards in time. It’s symmetrical either way you care to look at it. And of course any negative time that’s squared in any equation reverts to positive time.
Physics and chemistry should work as we know it even if positrons (antimatter electrons) ‘orbited’ around nuclei comprised of antiprotons and antineutrons (collectively anti-nucleons). So charge is symmetric.
Parity is your left-right mirror image. Physics should remain the same when viewed in a mirror. Mirror light still comes out of a mirror image flashlight; gravity still makes mirror image apples fall to the mirror image ground. The distinction between left and right should hold no sway in physics. Unfortunately, while charge and time are totally symmetrical with respect to the operations in physics, there’s an ‘oops’ in parity. The ‘oops’ is not in electromagnetism, nor in gravity, nor in the strong nuclear force (which hold the nucleons (protons and neutrons) in a tight embrace in the nucleus. Parity however is not conserved in weak nuclear force interactions. Physicists might say that Mother Nature has a slight bias towards the left; some theologians might suggest that God is a weak lefthander; I might put it that our Supreme Programmer introduced into some software subroutines a code favoring a slight left-handed slant.
So symmetry holds in 11 out of 12 cases – four forces (electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and the weak nuclear forces) times three symmetry operations (time, charge and parity) with only the parity of the weak force being the odd one out. There’s something screwy somewhere!
# UNIQUENESS
In the macro world no two ‘identical’ products, inanimate or animate, are actually identical down to the Nth detail – not even identical twins. But in the micro world that’s not the case. All photons are identical, even when they have differing energy levels. All heavy hydrogen atoms are identical, ditto so are all those up-quarks or tau neutrinos. Why this should be so is not readily apparent from first principles on up the line. However, it’s easy to code any particle, and whenever that code appears, you have an identical particle appear.
# CHEMISTRY
It’s not at all clear (to me at least), how the rather limited properties we associate with electrons, neutrons and protons, can, just by changing their relative numbers in association with each other, morph into all of the wide variety of properties associated with the chemical elements.
Further, it’s not at all clear (to me at least), how the properties of the chemical elements can ‘combine’ to form molecules with vastly differing properties from those of its parents. For example, a yellowish and to us poisonous gas (chlorine), plus an explosive (in water) silver metal (sodium) can morph into properties we associate with a whitish quasi-translucent solid crystal - table salt (sodium chloride).
Further again, it’s not at all clear (to me at least), how memory and creativity (and not just in humans) can be stored and manipulated in terms of chemistry, organic chemistry, biochemistry or neurochemistry. Of course it’s easy to encode ‘memory’ into software and with the rise and rise of artificial intelligence, can creativity be far behind?
# FRACTAL COSMOLOGY
Though bordering on the fringe, some bona-fide astronomers strongly suggest from both the observational and the theoretical point of view that the extreme large-scale structure of the cosmos exhibits a fractal pattern (and there is some extensive literature on the subject). To me however, fractals are primarily a mathematical construction; the product of a mathematical mind, and as such, if there is a fractal cosmos, that’s very strong evidence for a Supreme Programmer.
# CONCLUSIONS
It’s just about time here to cite Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law, which notes that “any sufficiently advanced technology (i.e. – a Supreme Programmer, for example) is indistinguishable from [quantum physics] magic”.
To his dying day, Einstein insisted that there were hidden variables that would, when discovered account for those various quantum anomalies – quantum magic. Those hidden variables would ultimately unite quantum physics with classical physics. Unfortunately for Einstein, experiments have since ‘proved’ that there are no hidden variables of the type Einstein had in mind. That’s because IMHO the hidden variable, which Einstein couldn’t have envisioned in even his wildest imagination, is the Supreme Programmer who creates our Simulated (Virtual Reality) Universe.
Not only can the Simulated (Virtual Reality) Universe scenario account for the above hardcore but seemingly magical anomalies in physics (and chemistry), but perhaps the Supreme Programmer left us these clues, inadvertently or deliberately, such as, in the macro world, those enigmatic crop ‘circles’ for which no other theory makes any absolute sense, common or otherwise.
***Not to be confused with the concept of running a film backwards.
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