There are many Big Questions in science, many of which go back to the ancients, even back into prehistory in all probability. One of the best modern set I’ve found recently were sidebars in a book by Emeritus Professor of Physics at the Open University, Russell Stannard. These are my answers, thoughts and commentary to those Big Questions. Many readers might have ‘fun’ trying to come to terms with these in their own way based on their own worldview.
Continued from Part Two.
Q. Does the loss of simultaneity for events separated by a distance invalidate the notion that only the presence exists?
A. This is one of those ‘paradoxes’ of those Theories of Relativity whereby, since things are relative, to one observer A happens before B; to another observer A and B are simultaneous happenings; and to yet a third observer, B happens before A. Since all observers are correct according to their specific frame of reference, the concept of ‘now’ is flexible. There is no absolute ‘now’. Another example is that whatever you observe, you observe ‘now’ yet what you observe actually happened in the past. The sunlight you see ‘now’ is now eight minutes old. However, it’s quite conceivable that you could instigate a universal ‘now’ and freeze the universe by snapping your fingers “STOP NOW”. That “STOP NOW” message would propagate instantaneously throughout the entirety of the universe. You, being immune from that “STOP NOW” command, would be free to navigate and explore the cosmos and see the universe as it appeared at that one ‘now’ instant – ‘now’ being of course the present. Only the present, the universal snapping your fingers ‘now’ exists. The interesting thing is that ‘now’ is such a short interval that your definition of the length of ‘now’ is vastly longer than what ‘now’ exists in in reality.
Q. What is time?
A. Time is a not-thing. Time is a concept that resides in the mind and cannot be detected with any of your senses. Time has no physical properties. Time is mathematics (a human invention), a way of measuring a particular thing. That thing is change, or rate-of-change. If there is no change, it is meaningless to talk about time. Time does not exist independently of change.
Q. Does the perceived flow of time require there to be two types of time?
A. The two types of time in question are physical time (the tick-tock of a clock; the cycle of the lunar phases) and mental time (where an hour can seem like a minute; a minute can seemly last for an hour). So there is real time, and subjective time. But time in any guise is a not-thing; an illusion; a concept. Only change is real and the rate of change, real or perceived, is what we call time – physical or mental. One could, if one wanted make a variable rate of change into a constant. Normally we hold physical time as a constant – tick-tick-tick-tick – at a rate of one-second-per-second (or one-day-per-day, etc.). We can count the number of ticks between say two red cars passing by on the road in front of our house. But you could say the interval between any two red vehicles is a constant. It is one unit or one tick per interval of red car time. That means that everything you associate as being regular like one-second-per-second or a 24-hour-day would become irregular. One ‘day’ might equate to 100 red car interval ticks. The next ‘day’ it might be 200 red car interval ticks long (since there happen to be double the number of red cars passing by on ‘day’ two as compared to ‘day’ one). If you define a ‘day’ as say 100 red car interval ticks, then ‘day’ two above would really be ‘day’ two plus ‘day’ three. Well, you can see how that sort of reckoning would screw up your biological clock! You’d have a ‘day’ off work between 1000 and 1100 red car interval ticks; the next ‘day’ off work between 2000 and 2100 red car interval ticks, etc. In the case of the 1000-1100 interval, that might be a long and restful ‘day’ but the 2000-2100 interval could be extremely short! You could do the above time experiment, at least as a silent and private intellectual exercise. Otherwise people would carry you off to the funny farm! However, if time were really real, then time couldn’t be manipulated as per the red car interval example. But time isn’t real so you can twist it around your little finger. Thus, the flow if time is indeed perceived, but that doesn’t make it something of substance. So, one kind of time, two kinds of time – it’s irrelevant.
Q. How are we to understand the built-in creativity of the physical world?
A. Human beings are highly creative beings. We create 2-D and 3-D art and architecture; sports and games; music and storytelling; designing experiments; create new food recipes, create computer simulations, etc. We love to indulge in the ‘what if’ game. Apparently so does the Universe! From a primeval ‘fireball’ of elementary particle ‘soup’, the cosmos created forces and fields, atoms and molecules, and stuff and structures* like galaxies and stars and solar systems full of planets and associated debris, but from our biased point of view or perspective the Universe created life and us. If this creation in particular was inadvertent, it borders on a near miracle given all those pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that have to come together just so. If life was a deliberate creation then you are down to postulating either an infallible supernatural deity (or deities) or a probable flesh-and-blood and fallible Supreme Programmer.
· But not just galaxies but spiral galaxies and barred galaxies and elleptical galaxies and irregular galaxies; not just stars but dwarf stars and giant stars and neutron stars and quasars and Black Holes and binary star systems too as well as stars that burp and stars that explode; not just planets but gas giants and icy giants and rocky planets (and I’m sure there’s no planet ever envisioned by any science fiction writer that doesn’t have a real counterpart somewhere out in the cosmos).
Q. What significance, if any, ought we to attach to the self-ordering nature of matter?
A. The cosmos is a highly ordered place. The only real question is why it is so. There are roughly about 60 elementary particles (and antiparticles) grouped into three generations. There’s no theoretical reason why there couldn’t have been trillions of elementary particles grouped into hundreds of generations, or no generational structure at all. The fundamental particles can only combine in just so many ways – you can’t have an atom consisting of one neutron, 5 protons and ten electrons. Atoms can only combine in just so many ways. There are a lot more ways atoms can’t combine than ways they do. The same applies for molecules combining. The ancients noted this ordering by suggesting that everything has its natural place in the cosmic scheme of things. Solids (earth) seek ground level; liquids (water) go down too but rest on top of solids; gases (air) hover above solids and liquids and heat (fire) tries to rise through gases and occupy the top rung. The planets don’t orbit the Sun in a square orbit one year, then switch to a rectangular orbit the next year and switch again to a triangular orbit the year after that. The lunar cycle follows its steady rhythm; ditto night follows day that follows night that follows day, etc. Thunder follows lightning. Plants grow upwards while plant roots grow downwards. In other words, causality operates. If you have X, Y follows (but not A, B and/or C). So the fact we have ordering is significant. But, consider this. Software is the same. Your PC is predictable. If X, then Y (but not A, B and/or C).
Q. The problem of understanding things in themselves.
A. No matter what sort of thing you wish to describe, its properties, you eventually exhaust appropriate concepts and language to dig any deeper. You often hit an ultimate barrier when you come up against the ‘what’ and ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions. We know there is gravity but ‘why’ gravity at all and ‘how’ does gravity actually work. We know an electron has a negative electric charge of one unit but ‘what’ exactly is electric charge and ‘why’ does the electron have the value of electric charge that it has. The problems disappear if one suggests well, this is the programming, the software code that gives us the illusion of all things gravitational and another software code that determines that there be an negative electric charge on an electron and what the value is, also properties that are totally an illusion, or virtual reality. Ultimately those ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions like why introduce gravity and why have an electric charge can best be answered by those who do the (supreme) programming.
Q. Why are there three generations of particles?
A. Only the bottom generation of particles plays any role in our day-to-day perception of life, the universe and everything. The second and third generation have bugger-all to do with life, the universe and everything. There is something screwy somewhere! Mother Nature went over-the-top and made way too much of a good thing which is not how we tend to view Mother Nature. Mother Nature is frugal, not extravagant. However, all these additional generations of particles might be the consequence of programming. Natural or software, it’s a mystery that has no obvious rational explanation which suggests to me the irrationality of intelligence. A common theme when it comes to intelligence is that if it is worth doing, it is worth overdoing.
Q. Can we ever be sure that GUT is correct if we cannot experimentally test it at the appropriately high energy?
A. A GUT is a Grand Unified Theory, some sort of unification between the three quantum forces – the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and electromagnetism. One suspects that at the time of the Big Bang event all three forces were unified, only separating or undergoing phase transitions into distinct entities as the universe expanded and cooled. Unfortunately, the energy levels at the point of the Big Bang are such that they are beyond our abilities to achieve and thus any GUT cannot be experimentally confirmed, only theoretically ‘confirmed’. So, if there are competing GUTs, it will be difficult to separate the men GUTs from the boy GUTs. No, unless there’s a breakthrough in experimental high energy physics, the answer is “no”.
Q. Shall we ever be able to verify proton decay?
A. If protons theoretically decay, akin to how neutrons can decay, and you have a large enough collection of protons (that’s easy to accomplish) then it is a straightforward exercise to verify proton decay, even if on average it takes any one proton trillions of years to go poof since if you have trillions of protons on hand, you should see several go poof every year. Such experiments have come up empty. Protons don’t decay so there’s something screwy with the theoretical concept somewhere.
To be continued.
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