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. 

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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!

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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.

Three Jokers in the Deck of Physics: Part Two

In physics you have four fundamental forces and four fundamental dimensions and two fundamental types of stuff with associated properties and fates. In each case you have something, the odd one out – the one that is not symmetrical – the jokers in the physics deck.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

4) What are the relationships between the three jokers?

Recall that there’s gravity (which refuses to be unified with the other three forces of nature); time (which carries you along for a wild and woolly one-way ride whether you like it or not); and entropy (which in the final analysis is going to make a real irreversible mess out of you).

*Gravity [+] Time: This is a lopsided, unidirectional relationship. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity tells us that the higher the gravitational field, the slower time passes. So, clocks at the surface of the Earth will tick-tock ever slightly more slowly than identical clocks that are on the Moon which has lesser gravity relative to the Earth. However, the passage of time influences gravity not a bit. Gravity gets neither stronger nor weaker with the passage of time.

*Gravity [+] Entropy: Gravity has no apparent broad-brush effect on the natural decay of the Universe from order to disorder. Entropy in turn can’t affect gravity because gravity itself just is; it has no more or less order today than it did yesterday. However, when gravity becomes extreme, say when you form a Black Hole, what you get in the centre, the heart of a Black Hole, is a singularity which is about as uniform a bit of stuff as you are ever likely to encounter. Well, uniformity is in fact the highest state of entropy – maximum disorder – that you can obtain. You can’t get more disordered than something which is 100% uniform, for example like the ultimate ‘Heat Death’ of the Universe referred to above. A singularity has no structure, no architecture, and no distinguishing features that can further degrade into something even more disordered and bland. 

*Time [+] Entropy: Time flows in one direction; entropy flows in one direction. However, in some cases, one can change the direction of a small bit of entropy albeit while adding to its general unidirectional flow in a broader context. For example, one can assemble a jigsaw puzzle, going from an initial disordered state to a more ordered state. However, that’s at the expense of energy expenditure on your part, ordered energy that has been transferred now into energy (of heat, movement, etc.) that’s no longer available to you after-the-fact – an overall increase in the disorder of the Universe even if a small part of the Universe, the completed jigsaw puzzle, has locally reversed the general trend. That’s not a trade-off that’s possible with time. You can’t grow a bit younger at the expense of making something else grow a bit older a bit faster. 

5) So which one (if any) is the greatest joker of them all?

*Gravity is weird. Unlike say electromagnetism, you can’t shield yourself off from gravity – there’s no barrier you can put between yourself and gravity (and thus help reduce the daily wear and tear on your body or improve your athletic skills). Since its range is infinite, there’s no escape. However, it does drop off in intensity via the inverse square law relationship. That is, if you go twice as far away from the source, the force is one quarter of what it was. If you go three times farther away, the force is but one-ninth; four times farther away, one-sixteenth, and so on. You can also ‘cheat’ gravity by living on a lower gravity object, like our Moon (one-sixth Earth’s gravity) or on an asteroid. Even though gravity dominates the entire Universe; holds stars and solar systems and galaxies even clusters of galaxies together in its embrace, and even though there’s no shield that cuts it off, if you hate gravity that much, there’s a solution. You of course could just fall in gravity’s well of attraction indefinitely, and as long as you’re falling, you don’t experience or feel any gravity. You are weightless. Translated, go into orbit and experience Zero-G. Orbiting is just indefinite freefall under gravity’s unrelenting pull.  Or, one can seek out the gravitational equilibrium point between two high gravity objects where the gravity of the one matches the gravity of the other. For example, there’s a point between the Earth and the Moon where the gravitational attraction of the one equals and balances the attraction of the other. However, this is only a quasi-solution because there are lots of other objects also coming and going and orbiting around and their ever shifting locations and their gravity disturbs that otherwise pristine point that would exist for all eternity if just those two objects existed. Alas, life’s not that simple. Still, to a first approximation, it’s a solution for gravity haters.

However, gravity probably isn’t the ultimate joker in the physics deck. That’s because there does appear to be at least a quasi-symmetrical counterpart, an ‘antigravity’ of sorts, called “dark energy” (or “funny energy”), also known or related to Einstein’s Cosmological Constant (revisited); quintessence; or quantum fluctuations. Dark energy is a repulsive force that is apparently causing the expansion of the Universe, contrary to commonsense, to ever accelerate. Also, physicists are 100% convinced that gravity can be, ultimately must be, unified with the other three forces. There is no logical way, it is in fact unthinkable, that there are two sets of software running the cosmos, unless of course the cosmos we think of as real is just a simulated, virtual reality universe that resides on someone’s (or something’s) super-computer.   

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*Entropy is not quite the ultimate joker either since local pockets of entropy can be reversed at the expense of increasing entropy outside of that local pocket. Your life and activities are one constant battle trying to reverse local entropy, but all that is at the expense of increasing entropy (via expending your store of energy) in the broader arena called the cosmos. You’ll win all the battles, except the last, but those local reversals were fun while they lasted.

*Time is the ultimate joker in that it’s unidirectional everywhere for everyone and despite all the speculation about physics allowing time travel to the past, well there really does appear to be, in astrophysicist Stephen Hawking’s phraseology, a “Chronology Protection Conjecture” making the Universe safe for historians. Apart from that, we just don’t see time travellers from the future coming around to gawk at their primitive ancestors.

But even if you could go back in time, it achieves nothing for you personally. Time travel to the past, even if possible and when postulated in the popular or technical literature, you don’t anti-age. If you time travel back to the year of your birth, you don’t revert back to being a baby again. You still retain your before-the-fact actual chronological age, and you just keep on ageing, ever ageing at one second per second.     

Now time, rate-of-change can slow down for someone undergoing high and constant acceleration and/or being in the presence of or experiencing a very high gravitational environment. That was postulated by Albert Einstein and has since been experimentally verified many times over. The fly in the ointment is that the slowing down of time, the slowing down of rate-of-change, is only from the point of view of an external observer. The person undergoing the acceleration, or experiencing a high gravitational field, still notes their own personal time ticking away at the usual rate of one second per second.

Time is absolutely the one thing in physics you have no control over. Nothing you do will ever alter your personal rate-of-change (ageing) at that rate of one second per second. And that’s the unfortunate bottom line.

In conclusion from this little, admittedly layman’s analysis, you can escape (even if not shield yourself from) gravity’s joker; you can reverse your local entropy joker; but you are absolutely powerless against the ultimate joker, time.

I’m not entirely sure what the actual significance of any of this is, but if there is none, that still leaves behind some rather amazing asymmetrical facets that’s part and parcel of our Universe. However, as we’ve seen, the trio of jokers have relationships between them (time and entropy are obviously connected; ditto gravity and time; and gravity can freeze entropy at say a singularity that lies at the heart of a Black Hole). Ultimately there’s still a lot yet to be learned about the nature of gravity, entropy and especially time, and why these pieces of the cosmic jigsaw don’t seem to fit all that neatly into the overall puzzle due to their asymmetrical relationships within that broader cosmic context.

Physics: Is There A Fifth Force?

Physical forces rule our cosmos, and since we’re a part of the cosmos, they govern our existence as well. Even if we’ve never studied physics, we all know about gravity, and to a lesser extent, electromagnetism. We don’t tend to have any obvious day-to-day perception or connection with the two nuclear forces, but rest assured, if they didn’t exist, you wouldn’t either. Is that it, the sum total of all the forces that rule the Universe?  Perhaps there awaits the discovery of a fifth, or more forces - or perhaps not.

We know a great deal about the various forces that control our Universe – there’s gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force (which binds the atomic nucleus together) and the weak nuclear force (responsible for radioactivity). Are they collectively adequate to explain life, the Universe and everything – especially life?

Coming to terms with (for lack of a better phrase) a fifth force, call it a ‘life-force’, I would have to superficially agree that assuming the existing four forces (and their associated particles) aren’t sufficient to adequately explain life, evolution, the mind, memory, sleep and dreams, musical creativity (be it bird songs, whale songs, or human songs), a sense of self, intelligence/intellect, morality, emotions, curiosity, and all those other bits and pieces we associate with living things, then we may indeed have to postulate yet another force – a ‘life-force’.

In other words, is there a fifth force needed or required to bridge the gap between non-life and life? Finding another force in the Universe isn’t all that unprecedented – I mean we didn’t know about the nuclear forces until the (roughly) third decade of the last century, less than 100 years ago.

Many cultures have or currently think there is a ‘life-force’, some sort of mystical vitality force or unspecified bio-energy fields, that’s required to breathe life into otherwise inanimate objects, objects otherwise composed of the same sorts of chemicals that make up rocks and things. It tends to be a relatively New Age or Eastern (Asian) philosophy. However, believing in a fifth force, a ‘life-force’, and proving it are two entirely different things. Biologists, biochemists, etc. haven’t exactly rushed to update their textbooks with a chapter on a ‘life-force’ that underpins their field of study.

But if there is some sort of ‘life force’, then presumably it ultimately can be detected and measured. There would also have to be some sort of ‘life force’ particle – all the other universal forces have associated particles (electromagnetic forces have the photon particle; gravity has the theoretical graviton; the strong nuclear force has gluons). Of course, such a force particle may have properties that are beyond our technology to detect – so far anyway. By analogy, there are lots of massive particles theoretically postulated to exist by particle physicists. Those ultra-massive particles are theoretically predicted via the concept of super-symmetry (SUSY). But, even if SUSY is correct, our atom smashes or particle accelerators don’t yet have the required energies to produce them and thus verify the SUSY particle theory.

Unfortunately, I’ve yet to come across any scientist, say a physicist or a cosmologist that speculates on there being yet another unknown physical force in the universe (as opposed to a ‘life-force’, which of course would also have to be a physical force, a physical property of the Universe). Finding a Theory of Everything (TOE), the Holy Grail of physics that unites the existing forces as separate manifestations or phase transitions of one ultimate force, is proving hard enough with only four forces to deal with. A fifth force would surely put the cat among the pigeons! You’d need to ask yourself would this hypothetical fifth force operate over long distances (like gravity and electromagnetism), or tiny distances (like the two nuclear forces). What would be the properties of any associated particle(s)? My knowledge and abilities aren’t adequate to figure all that out, but perhaps there are those who might like to run with the idea.

Okay, an elusive and theoretical ‘life-force’ aside, following some speculation on the nature of ‘dark energy’, that force which is causing the expansion rate of the Universe to accelerate, I strongly suspect that ‘dark energy’ implies the existence of a fifth force in our Universe. Recall that the four known forces are 1) gravity; 2) electromagnetism; 3) the strong nuclear, and 4) the weak nuclear. The strong and weak nuclear forces operate on much too short a distance scale (atomic lengths) for either to account for ‘dark energy’. “Dark energy’ operates over large scale distances. ‘Dark energy’ is unlikely to be electromagnetic in nature – otherwise it wouldn’t be ‘dark’ (photons anyone?). ‘Dark energy’ could hardly be due to gravity (pull pressure) since ‘dark energy’ is antigravity (push pressure).  Now the theoretical particle that is assumed to convey the gravitational force is called a ‘graviton’. Perhaps there is such a thing as an anti-graviton particle, but then we haven’t even trapped a graviton yet – it’s still a beastie in the crypto-zoology realm of theoretical particle physics, so an anti-graviton is heaping speculation on another speculation. Anyway, if one assumes that none of the known forces adequately accounts for the nature of ‘dark energy’; then the unification of physics, the Holy Grail ‘Theory of Everything’ has gotten near infinitely more complicated!  All of this sounds like a good area for observational cosmologists and theoretical particle physicists to have a serious chinwag over several rounds of drinks to come to terms (if possible) with the elusive elements – extra types of forces and the associated matter related particles that convey those forces.