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[Bohm2]

The only other point I'd make is that this is a genuine scientific hypothesis because it yields testable predictions which contradict those of the spacetime paradigm. These relate to the phenomenon of "quantum" entanglement, which has nothing to do with the rest of the quantum mechanics nonsense but is a straightforward prediction from GR.

I don't follow this. How is quantum entanglement a straightforward prediction of GR?

[A Poster He or I]

The balloons I blow up are 3 dimensional, so unless the universe exists as a membrane on the outer edge of an expanding sphere I'm not sure how the 2 dimensional balloon makes sense. Does the 3D balloon not have a center? A spherical one would, and are the dots not equally growing in distance relative to the central point as you blow air into it, with minor discrepancies I suppose.

it seems too simple an analogy for me to apply to such a seemingly complicated notion as the universe.

reflected_light,

Don't be so quick to dismiss the balloon analogy. It is actually quite helpful for understanding an expanding universe from the perspective of Einstein's General Relativity (from which the Big Bang was first extrapolated) as GR is generally understood (Obvious Leo presents a different understanding of it. I'm only going to discuss the traditional picture so you can better assess his views).

GR says our universe is a 4-dimensional space-time continuum. We can't "see" the Time dimension (though we can sense its passage); we can only see the 3 other dimensions of Space. Now switching to the balloon analogy, we are accepting that in the balloon universe, one of the spatial dimensions doesn't exist (namely, depth or height) and the Time dimension is going to take its place. So the balloon universe has only 3 dimensions, 2 of space (length & width) and one of time (the "depth" direction). The spatial dimensions are confined to the balloon surface membrane. Living as a 2-dimensional person here, everything is totally flat because we cannot see in the Time direction. But space-time as a whole, is the WHOLE balloon, including the depth direction (Time, in this analogy), which means the center of the universe does exist, but it is a TEMPORAL center (i.e. it is at the center of the balloon, accessible only via the Time direction), so it cannot be found anywhere on the balloon surface (that is, anywhere in Space).

When the balloon expands, the suface (Space) expands everywhere, so all points are moving away from each other, spatially. Yet the actual direction of expansion is outward, away from the balloon's center, which in this universe is not a spatial direction. The universe is expanding in the time direction.

Now apply the analogy to the real world described by GR: expansion is in the direction of time (the 4th dimension), not in any of space's 3 directions. The center of the universe is in time, not in space. Or, you can say that any and every point in space is the true center of the universe, just displaced in time by 13.7 billion years, when the big bang is thought to have occurred. The universe would then be a hypersphere (a 4-dimensional sphere)***, not a sphere like you're thinking.

***(Technically, this is true only for "positive" curvature of space-time. GR allows for other shapes besides a hypersphere, if curvature is not positive).

[Obvious Leo]

So is there a method exempt from the limitations of human perspective?

No. Knowledge is meaningless in the absence of comprehension and comprehension is a function of mind.

How can you say that what we observe is an "illusion"

I specifically don't and take pains to stress this point. An observation is not an illusion but rather a construction, which means we don't observe reality but rather we specify it. Kant 101.

How do you know if you have made the right assumption?

You never can, even in principle. However the scientific method means that our assumptions can be tested, but only if we ask the right questions of the model we devise to describe the conclusions we draw from our assumptions. Therefore our assumptions can always be proven wrong but can never be proven right. In principle the unasked question always exists. However it doesn't exist in modern physics because the spacetime paradigm is accepted as canonical doctrine. This means that physics is not a science but a branch of mathematics and thus physicists are not scientists but model-builders. They've reached the end of the road that this method leads to and now need to re-examine their foundational assumptions.

I agree that the balloon analogy is of limited value in the spacetime paradigm but it does have some utility in a spaceless model. Once again the dots on the balloon represent the galaxies but the skin of the balloon represents the time "dimension". ( I use the quotation marks because the word dimension has a different meaning in a spaceless model because it doesn't use a Cartesian co-ordinate system. Dimensions are bi-directional but time is uni-directional.) In a spaceless paradigm only the skin of the balloon exists and the inside of the balloon does not. However we can think of the inside of the balloon as the past because that's where the skin used to be. You think of the balloon as time continuously coming into existence because reality is not what IS but what is BEING MADE. However that's about the limit of the utility of the analogy and I don't really like using it because it ignores gravity. To incorporate gravity into it is possible but then you'd have to imagine a ballooon with bumps on it, where some parts of the balloon expand faster than others. I played with the idea for a while and eventually sacked it, not because it doesn't work but because it's too difficult to visualise. The black hole regions of the balloon would barely move at all because black holes age very very slowly compared with other cosmic regions.

I don't follow this. How is quantum entanglement a straightforward prediction of GR?

I should have phrased this better. It is a straightforward prediction from GR if we chuck 3 dimensional space out of it, which reduces it to the model of "sublime austerity" that Wheeler yearned for. I'll briefly explain how it works.

In a spaceless universe all motion is in the time dimension only and the time dimension is moderated by the cosmic metronome, gravity. This defines reality as that which is continuously coming into existence, driven by that tireless workhorse of the universe, entropy. Because the gravitational field is continuous all the way down to the quantum level we can see that reality comes into existence at a non-constant speed, which gives us the notion of the speed of time. The speed of time is synonymous with the speed of light which ironically makes the speed of light the most non-constant speed in the universe. Einstein was a man with a robust sense of humour and I reckon he'd have a good chuckle about that because his entire house of cards is founded on the opposite assumption. In fact he was nearly there before Minkowski twisted his remarkable mind into a pretzel.

Consider the semi-silvered mirror, the classical example to explain entanglement. A photon of wavelength x strikes the mirror and splits into two daughter photons, each of wavelength 2x. The original photon has quite literally been split in two and each daughter photon contains half the energy content of the original. One of the daughter photons passes through the mirror and the other is reflected, but in an ordinary benign gravitational field the two daughter photons travel from the mirror at almost exactly the same speed. I say almost the same because it cannot be exactly the same in a quantised reality where time and gravity are quantised equivalently and inversely. Because the daughter photons are travelling at almost exactly the same speed we can see that they will remain very closely co-located in the emerging time "dimension". We can loosely say that they are travelling forward in time almost simultaneously. If we were to place our mirror in intergalactic "space", where the gravitational field is almost homogeneous, the photons would remain very closely co-located for a very long time indeed, probably for millions of years, but they would continue to ever so gradually move apart. This is entanglement and in the spacetime paradigm this creates the illusion of superluminal information transfer. This time I use the word illusion more literally because there's no such thing as a superluminal speed. Information can simply pass between the daughter photons at the normal speed of light because in fact they're not very far apart.

I fully realise that this is not an easy notion to get your head around because our intuitions of space are all-pervasive. Our minds have evolved to convert temporal intervals into spatial distances and this was an important evolutionary milestone because without this ability our world would be incomprehensible. As an aside, it is no coincidence that no cyclops has ever evolved and all organisms with sight have binocular vision. Without binocular vision an accurate spatial construction of our temporal world would be impossible, but we fall into grave error if we therefore assume that the space which our minds construct has any ontological foundation. This is the mis-assumption of spacetime.

Spacetime does not model the real universe but rather a holographic representation of it. The observer observes a hologram and this can only ever be an approximation to reality because the speed of light is finite. The closer the observer is to his observation the more accurate his hologram will be and in our everyday lives near enough is good enough because the speed of light is bloody fast. However it remains true that it is utterly impossible for the observer to observe the real world.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.


...........from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

Regards Leo

-- Updated July 23rd, 2014, 8:11 am to add the following --

Thank you Mr a posteriori for playing the devil's advocate and presenting the position of the scientific orthodoxy. I didn't bother doing this because my mind now rebels every time I think about it. Like the Moving Finger I've moved on, but I still regard it as important to understand the history of cosmology.

Regards Leo

[reflected_light]

A poster he or I, to accept the balloon analogy as a representation of the universe would also mean one accepts that there was a beginning to the time dimension, and perhaps that, even if just for a moment, there may have been no time at all.

[A Poster He or I]

Obvious Leo,

Your conception of a 2-dimensional time/gravity universe continues to intrigue me with your description of quantum entanglement being due to a close temporal evolution of the quanta involved. But it does generate questions, of course.

1. In our experience, entanglement is considered to be a rather delicate, rarified situation. Outside of the laboratory, quantum correlation is not seen in random sampling, for example. This is usually assumed to be because quanta have had their entire existence to absorb and reflect the phase-correlations of all the quanta they have ever encountered, meaning that any cosmic-scale correlation of quanta is indistinguishable from a jumbled randomness. But in your scenario, EVERY quantum is being newly created with each passing moment (granted at different speeds due to gravity differentials), and would be correlated by default with every other quantum created in that moment (unless I've completely misunderstod you). Shouldn't we encounter more obvious correlation between quanta in Nature, then?

2. Since, in your scenario, we observers are spatializing Time, what is the actual status of splitting 2 photons sent hurling in opposite spatial directions where space-like separation can be achieved (i.e. light-speed signalling is eliminated as a possible explanation for correlation). Obviously, achieving space-like separation is irrelevant in your scenario, but I cannot understand what actually becomes of the concept of direction in your scenario. I can see that it is we who project a Cartesian coordinate system upon experience, but by that same experience, these coordinated movements work for us to acheive our objectives. Is everything--even the results of our measurements--so thoroughly "coloured" simply by how we set up and interpret our experiments?

[Obvious Leo]

Your conception of a 2-dimensional time/gravity universe

I don't mind having my grav/time continuum described as 2 dimensional as long as we maintain the important qualifier. These are not Cartesian dimensions because time moves only forwards. In my own mind I think of the universe as one-dimensional with a speed regulator. I hope that makes sense but since you clearly know a fair bit of physics I'll dare to try my hand at describing this mathematically, which is not my long suit.

I regard the universe as itself becoming, a notion lifted directly from Plato. This defines reality as a process and therefore the mathematical tools I need to model it are the tools of non-linear dynamics, sometimes known as complexity theory. I'm not particularly fluent in the language of mathematics but I'm thoroughly conversant with its philosophy so I'm going to have to try this verbally rather than with equations. I imagine the universe as an entity continuously coming into existence and this is the central thrust of my entire philosophy. We can think of the emerging universe as a wave, somewhat analogous to the electro-magnetic wave which then becomes an emergent consequence of it. This wave emerges at the speed of light/time and is comprised of a vast number of mathematical points which I define as the quantum moments Now. These are not precisely the same thing as Planck intervals but they emerge at a similar speed, in the order of 5.4 x 10⁴⁴ Moments/sec. (AS MEASURED LOCALLY). The quantum moment Now has only two physical properties, these being its information/energy content and the duration of its existence, as determined by gravity. Effectively what happens is that the quantum moment Now becomes its own next quantum moment Now with a different information content determined by the behaviour of the other quantum moments Now on the emerging grav/time wave. Therefore the quantum moment Now acts as a binary logic gate and thus conforms strictly to Boolean law. This is reality in the making at the fundamental level and all the particles, forces and fields we observe are nothing more than mathematical descriptions of this process. They are our own conceptual creations and cannot be said to exist in the sense that we imagine them.

This introduces the principle of emergence and the vast bulk of my philosophy deals with how complex structures emerge in nested hierarchies of informational complexity, for which I use the imagery of the Russian matryoshka dolls. It's not easy to sum up my life's work in a few paragraphs but the best way to think this through is in the mathematical language of computation. We say that the quantum moments Now encode for the sub-atomic particles which encode for atoms which encode for molecules which ultimately encode for life and mind. At the more fundamental levels of complexity, the sub-atomic particles, atoms and molecules, the hierarchical levels are very clearly defined but as we consider more complex emergent structures they become rather more arbitrary. This an entirely self-causal process with no teleological implications and it ultimately explains the very existence of the universe itself. It defines the universe as self-causal, which is entirely analogous to the cyclical bang/crunch cosmology which rapidly gaining favour in the world of physics. My universe is a Universal Turing Machine, the Universal Reality Maker which programmes its own input, but I use the word "programme" very loosely here. The universe is not programmed but rather it programmes itself, as all complex non-linear entities do. John Conway's Game of Life is easily the simplest mathematical paradigm to model this.

I hope that this goes some way to answering your perceptive questions but I can't really answer them in the language in which you've framed them. Sub-atomic particles are not quantum entities and you frame your questions in the language of quantum mechanics which is a wholly epistemic paradigm. What I'm trying to get at here is the ontology that underpins it.

But it does generate questions, of course.

I would expect nothing less.

quote="A Poster He or I"] quantum correlation is not seen in random sampling,[/quote]

Randomness does not exist in this paradigm but causation is a rather slippery beast to grab hold of in non-linear systems because it operates both top-down and bottom-up.

But in your scenario, EVERY quantum is being newly created with each passing moment (granted at different speeds due to gravity differentials), and would be correlated by default with every other quantum created in that moment (unless I've completely misunderstod you).

You're nearly there but you must regard the quantum moments Now as discrete mathematical points with their own temporal referential frame. There is no co-ordinate time or universe time. The observer problem was created by Minkowski, who wanted to observe the universe from the outside looking in. The universe has no outside so we must observe it from the inside looking BACK in time. The observer is contained within his observation, which leads to paradoxes aplenty in the spacetime perspective.

I cannot understand what actually becomes of the concept of direction in your scenario.

Neither can I. The concept of direction disappears in the absence of a Cartesian co-ordinate system and our minds are simply not equipped to cope with it. This aspect of my model is still a work in progress but a visual conception of it is impossible by definition. I have no doubt that it can be expressed mathematically but I freely declare myself unqualified for the task. Constructs such as "direction", "space" and "distance" are hard-wired into us and I very much doubt that it would ever be possible to achieve a mental map of the universe without them. Which brings us back here.

So is there a method exempt from the limitations of human perspective?

No.

Is everything--even the results of our measurements--so thoroughly "coloured" simply by how we set up and interpret our experiments?

Yes, this is unavoidable. However if we're working from a non-linear paradigm most such variables are controllable.

I very much doubt that I've answered all your questions but I stand willing to have a crack at anything you choose to throw at me. I've been working on this for forty years and I doubt that you could catch me off guard, but that's exactly what I want people to try and do. I harbour not the slightest nuance of doubt about my model but I'm continually looking for new ways to explain it. This cannot occur without the minds of others because that's the essence of non-linearity.

Regards Leo

-- Updated July 23rd, 2014, 11:47 am to add the following --

Although this model of quantum gravity is free of paradoxes it's not free of head-spinning conclusions. Here's a neuron-frazzler. You are gravitationally bound to the surface of the earth because your feet lie in the past of your head.

Sleep well.

Regards Leo

[reflected_light]

If my eyes were on my feet instead, would my head then be in the past? Or are you saying the slightly stronger gravitational force on my feet compared to my head creates a temporal delay? I do wish I was more educated in this field, it is intriguing.

[Obvious Leo]

If my eyes were on my feet instead, would my head then be in the past? Or are you saying the slightly stronger gravitational force on my feet compared to my head creates a temporal delay? I do wish I was more educated in this field, it is intriguing.

I chucked the last bit in as an afterthought and not without some mischievous intent. EVERYTHING you observe lies in your past and the location of your sensory organs is irrelevant. If your eyes were in your feet you'd simply be looking at the world upside down and it would be up to your brain to figure this out. In fact the way the human retina is constructed you do perceive the world upside down. It's a very grainy image which even the crappiest of cameras could outperform and it comes in only three primary colours. This information is then presented to the brain upside down via the optic nerve with a bloody great hole in it where this nerve connects. The brain then constructs its image from this very sketchy information and presents it to your consciousness in exquisite detail, without the hole, the right way up, and in full glorious technicolour. Your brain is a remarkable piece of kit.

Obviously the same gravitational rules apply to inanimate objects, such as the chair you're sitting on. The feet of the chair lie in the past of its backrest. This might all sound rather weird but it's completely uncontroversial and perfectly in accord with GR.

Regards Leo

[reflected_light]

If the eyes first see, and then the mind perceives, are the eyes then in the past?

Your idea seems to join spatial and temporal dimensions together, quantified not by distance but by time, and governed by the forces of gravity. Close?

In your universe is time travel possible? Is there even a past to travel to?

[Obvious Leo]

If the eyes first see, and then the mind perceives, are the eyes then in the past?

In a sense. The latest developments in neuroscience have been greatly accelerated by the invention of MRI imaging. It takes approximately 200 milliseconds for an image presented to the retina to be processed into a coherent representation for the pre-frontal cortex, which is more or less regarded as the seat of consciousness, inasmuch as we can conceive of such a thing in a non-linear network. I prefer to speak of such things in terms of executive function. See Libet. This image-processing is a computation and computations are temporal phenomena. The more complex the computation the longer it takes and in this sense the brain is no different from your desktop computer. In most other senses it is profoundly different.

Your idea seems to join spatial and temporal dimensions together, quantified not by distance but by time, and governed by the forces of gravity. Close?

Not close. The spatial dimensions simply have no ontological status whatsoever. Space does not physically exist and I intend this statement to be taken literally. If it doesn't physically exist it can exert no physical influence on the behaviour of matter and energy. Bloody obvious, n'est ce pas? Try telling it to a physicist!

In your universe is time travel possible? Is there even a past to travel to?

We travel in time every moment of our lives but only in the forward direction. We travel within time (not through it) at the fixed rate of 1 sec/sec, as measured locally. The past does not exist but it makes perfect sense to say that the past used to exist. The future does not exist either but it also makes perfect sense to say the future will exist. Only the present moment actually exists and this is why I named my philosophy the philosophy of the bloody obvious. I'm buggered if I can see how anyone could find a logical flaw in this argument, and yet the spacetime paradigm denies that this is so without offering such a counter-argument. That's why it makes no sense.

Regards Leo

[Mgrinder]

The balloons I blow up are 3 dimensional, so unless the universe exists as a membrane on the outer edge of an expanding sphere I'm not sure how the 2 dimensional balloon makes sense. Does the 3D balloon not have a center? A spherical one would, and are the dots not equally growing in distance relative to the central point as you blow air into it, with minor discrepancies I suppose.

it seems too simple an analogy for me to apply to such a seemingly complicated notion as the universe.

The center of the universe is everywhere and nowhere, heh. Wherever you are, you are in the "center" of the universe. All galaxies are moving away from us, the farther away they are, the faster they are going. That sort of puts us in the "center" of the universe. However, if you went to a faraway galaxy, you would see our galaxy, the Milky Way, receding from you at a very fast rate. According to you in the faraway galaxy, all other galaxies are moving away from you. So you would consider yourself to be in the center in your faraway galaxy, and I would consider myself to be in the center in my galaxy.

Who is right? Both and neither. The universe is a hard place to understand.

[Obvious Leo]

Wherever you are, you are in the "center" of the universe.

Precisely. The "centre" of the universe is YOU.

The universe is a hard place to understand.

This the myth I'm trying to dispel and I have the two greatest physics thinkers of the 20th century in my corner. Einstein and Wheeler were both convinced that simplicity is truth. Einstein famously said that if you can't explain your model simply it means you don't understand it well enough and it should therefore be possible to explain the universe to a barmaid. Wheeler said on many occasions that when we finally get to the truth the universe will reveal itself to be an entity of sublime austerity. Speaking solely for myself, I've been convinced of this since my childhood. Ever since I sacked god, in fact.

Regards Leo

[Mgrinder]

The universe is a hard place to understand.

This the myth I'm trying to dispel and I have the two greatest physics thinkers of the 20th century in my corner. Einstein and Wheeler were both convinced that simplicity is truth. Einstein famously said that if you can't explain your model simply it means you don't understand it well enough and it should therefore be possible to explain the universe to a barmaid. Wheeler said on many occasions that when we finally get to the truth the universe will reveal itself to be an entity of sublime austerity. Speaking solely for myself, I've been convinced of this since my childhood. Ever since I sacked god, in fact.

Regards Leo

At it's core, physics is based on simple postulates. And it does strive to figure out what is going on through simple models, and it is true that these explanations are worth a lot. All this is true, I agree. However, that does not mean physics is easy. It takes years of math training even to understand what the simple things are that being postulated. IT is difficult to understand the model of the universe we now use, even if it is simple in some respects. Simple does not mean easy. Feynmen discusses this, better than I just wrote, I think in his feynmen lectures, or perhaps a different lecture, I can't remember.

[Obvious Leo]

I agree completely and I never said physics was easy. I merely said that the universe was simple and there's a world of difference between these two notions. What I'm presenting here is not a physical model but rather a metaphysical model with physical consequences and it is not designed to replace the epistemic models that physics uses. My objective is to place these models in their correct conceptual context. Ultimately it would be my hope that by doing so the comprehension of our universe should be accessible to anybody with the curiosity to understand it, not just a handful of supergeeks who speak through machines with their eyelashes.

Regards Leo

[Vijaydevani]

The balloons I blow up are 3 dimensional, so unless the universe exists as a membrane on the outer edge of an expanding sphere I'm not sure how the 2 dimensional balloon makes sense. Does the 3D balloon not have a center? A spherical one would, and are the dots not equally growing in distance relative to the central point as you blow air into it, with minor discrepancies I suppose.

it seems too simple an analogy for me to apply to such a seemingly complicated notion as the universe.

The expansion of the universe is supposed to be such that the space between galaxies more than 4 gigaparsecs away from each other expands, or rather the actual scale changes over time. Galaxies less than that distance away are not not affected by the scale change. So everywhere in space where matter is separated by a distance of more than 4 gigaparsecs ( that is 4X 1 billion x 19 trillion miles), the SCALE changes over time. Say for example at time t=1 the distance between two galaxes more than 4 gigaparsecs away is represented by a scale of x. then at t=2 the scale ITSELF changes to x+y. Very counter intuitive but that is how it is supposed to work. And that is why there is supposed to be no center to the universe.