#similar concepts to string theories and quantum gravity

[art-of-mathematics]

Thought experiment regarding non-linear causal nets using an analogy of "dynamical chess"

Imagine a flexible chess board where each move of the chess figures alters the board. And each alteration of the board has effects on the figures as well, causing alteration in the behavior of the figures [a.k.a. the rules each figure has as a pre-defined rule]. | (That's entanglement of feedback-loops.) - This leads to chaotic behavior, making predictions even more difficult and "turbulent".

[This sort of chess is like the interaction between spacetime and matter.]

Following a helpful quote by John Wheeler:

"Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve."

- John Archibald Wheeler, Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics

---

Why do I use the neologism "non-linear causal nets"?

There is a kind of idiom-like brabble, called "causal chains". It states a linear string of cause-and-effect. This is often far too simplified for explaining real-life phenomena, because often there are far more causes to an effect than just one. There happen many "causal chains" simultaneously, so to speak. These causal chains are entangled. Multiple of such linear cause-and-effects are entangled, until they are no longer a linear-string or multiple linear strings, but a complex web. Each causal chain alters each other. That is basically a fundamental principle often recognized in quantum mechanics - interference.

It describes conservation of momentum in an analogy-based and merely imagination-based language of knots and loops, similar to some approaches of string theory and (loop) quantum gravity.

Information weaving

"Information weaving" might be the silly name I would use for that collection of conceptions and re-interpretations.

"Information transforms" in this conception are weaving patterns. In concrete, these are interaction patterns like

- replication of interaction pattern (like law of inertia)

- and interference/alteration of interaction pattern (momentum).

These two transforms are the two primary transforms. You can combine them and create all possible sorts of patterns.

Furthermore,... these relate to addition and multiplication of imaginary numbers, resulting in either a translation or a rotation in the complex plane... These might relate to the information transforms stated above.

But the research regarding this is really difficult and curently my mind is too sluggish and too over-crowded to compute it well enough.

It might take some years until it's less mad nonsense.

...

Spacetime as emergent property of entanglement

I enjoy the project It from Qubit and Polymath Vijay's interpretation that spacetime is emergent due to entanglement.

In my interpretation/analogy of "information weaving" time is a string, and space is the web consisting of that string. Space and time are hence "two aspects of one and the same thing".

This is especially interesting if you consider the difference between a time and a space dimension.

A space dimension has two ways of propagation, so to speak: left-right, top-down, before-behind... (to put it in plain words)

When it comes to the time dimension, I consider it to have only one propagation direction: The future, like in the conception of the arrow of time.

But here it becomes complex. Since time is "mono-directional", say, it has only one direction to propagate towards, it might interact with itself - via feedback-loops. This results in literal entanglement if you consider the arrow of time to be a simple string. Loop, knot and weave that string/arrow with itself and you might have spacetime as a complex result, so to speak.

In regards to quantum entanglement and superposition this interpretation might make sense as well, but I am not far enough with my research about that topic to summarize it coherently.

Furthermore, you can also define quantum gravity as the "degree of clotting": or, say: Let's interpret gravity as a principle of clustering: Areas with more density gain density, and areas with less density lose even more density, to reduce gravity to its primary principle.

Gravity is hence a re-distribution, a re-ordering of matter, or information, so to speak...

In regards to my information weaving conception, quantum gravity defines the density of information. It also defines how information re-distributes itself over time.

How the clustering happens depends on the patterns of interaction. And the patterns of interaction are affected by clustering as well. (Leading us back to Wheeler's quote above... )

What is "information"?

I regard information as an interaction pattern, a pattern in the web of causal nets, so to speak.

...

This is all a bit difficult to summarize. I will visualize it once I have summarized the parts of it well enough.

---

That was my literally chaotic thoughts as of today. It's a bit (/very much) incoherent.

#from the backyard of my theoretical bullshittery factory #information weaving #it from qubit #quantum gravity #analogy #analogies #chess #dynamical systems #non linear causal nets #entangled #entanglement #causality #cause and effect #conservation of momentum #quantum mechanics #information #quantum information theory #quantum information #quote #wheeler #spacetime #space #time #relativity #chaos theory #chaos #interaction patterns #math #mathematics #thought experiment

[thefirstknife]

assuming we get one last darkness subclass what do you think it would be?

i honestly dont know myself. Strand kinda came outa nowhere and most ppl assumed Green = Soulfire/Corruption myself included (im not coping I'm not wailing at no Toxic/Corruption class😭😭)

I really wanted the poison subclass to match Thorn and Osteo and Necrotic Grip :(

But then again, it seems like Darkness subclasses are drawing from the same overall source and poison doesn't really fit. Both stasis and strand draw inspiration from real world phenomena and physics. There is a lot about stasis in the Witch Queen Collector's Edition in relation to entropy and quantum physics:

The Stasis crystals aren't water ice. Obvious enough, but I thought I'd get it out of the way. The extraordinary property of Stasis is its ability to create ordered structures from chaos—it doesn't care what kind of matter is available; it just sucks entropy out of the system until it's got a crystal. The crystal's not exactly chemical. The normal electromagnetic interactions between atoms are suppressed in favor of something weirder.

+

The actual structure of the crystal is... hard to characterize. The mass has some spooky quantum characteristics, behaving like a superfluid condensate complete with vortices, so it's hard to get information on specific areas—you get domains of the crystals behaving as single particles.

There's more in this particular passage and elsewhere in the CE, and it's all related to really complex physics and theories that go almost entirely beyond me after a certain point. But the common idea is the same; stasis is not ice, stasis is not just random element they chose, there is a theme about physics, entropy and origins of the universe.

Similarly, strand seems to be coming from a similar place. Specifically, string theory. Now, we don't know nearly enough about strand right now so this is all speculative, but the imagery and wording on strand stuff seems to be drawing inspiration from this:

In physics, string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how these strings propagate through space and interact with each other. On distance scales larger than the string scale, a string looks just like an ordinary particle, with its mass, charge, and other properties determined by the vibrational state of the string.

If this is indeed the theme of Darkness subclasses, and it definitely seems to be, I suspect the final Darkness subclass might be related to gravity. I would certainly hope so, as gravity is one of the most common forces related to Darkness and the primary force used by Darkness to do pretty much everything.

It's possible that gravity will remain just this fundamental force that is is, that governs all other forces that end up being Darkness subclasses (both stasis and strand also relate to gravity) so it won't be something we get to use. In that case, it could be some other physics-related concept that is closely tied to gravity.

I would personally love to get gravity though. It would probably be too big to be a subclass on its own so I suspect we'll get something tied to it, but damn. I would love me some gravity.

#destiny 2 #darkness #stasis #strand #lore vibing #ask

[scifigeneration]

Appreciating the classical elegance of time crystals

Structures known as 'time crystals' -- which repeat in time as conventional crystals repeat in space -- have recently captured the interest and imagination of researchers across disciplines. The concept has emerged from the context of quantum many-body systems, but physicists have now developed a versatile framework that clarifies connections to classical works dating back nearly two centuries, thus providing a unifying platform to explore seemingly dissimilar phenomena.

In a crystal, atoms are highly ordered, occupying well-defined locations that form spatial patterns. Seven years ago, the 2004 Physics Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek pondered the possibility of a 'time analogue of crystalline spatial order' -- systems that display sustained periodic temporal modulations in their lowest-energy state. The concept of such structures with an oscillating ground state is highly intriguing. Alas, not long after the idea has been published, it was proven that such time crystals are not possible without breaking fundamental laws of physics. Not all was lost, though. Subsequent theory work suggested that when quantum many-body systems are periodically driven, then new persistent time correlations emerge that are evocative of Wilczek's time crystals. These driven systems were dubbed 'discrete time crystals', and in 2017 the first experimental realizations of such states were reported in ensembles of coupled particles (ions, electrons and nuclei) that display quantum-mechanical properties.

A not-so-brief history of time crystals

Before long, astute observers spotted distinct similarities between discrete time crystals in quantum systems and so-called parametric resonators, a concept in classical physics reaching back to work by Michael Faraday in 1831. The connection between these two bodies of work remained, however, opaque. Now, a new framework goes a long way towards lifting the ambiguities surrounding the similarities between periodically driven classical and quantum systems. Writing in an article published today in the journal Physical Review Letters, Toni Heugel, a PhD student in the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich, and Matthias Oscity, a Master student there, working with Dr. Ramasubramanian Chitra and Prof. Oded Zilberberg form the Institute for Theoretical Physics and with Dr. Alexander Eichler from the Laboratory for Solid State Physics, report theoretical and experimental work that establishes how discrete time crystals can be generated that, on the one hand, require no quantum mechanical effects and, on the other hand, display genuine many-body effects, which is a characteristic of discrete time crystals reported in quantum systems.

Many ways to subharmonic frequencies

There is one obvious similarity between classical parametric resonators and experimentally realized discrete time crystals in quantum many-body systems: Both display emergent dynamics at frequencies that are fractions of the drive frequency. In the context of discrete time crystals, the emergence of oscillations at such subharmonic frequencies breaks the temporal periodicity of the driven system, providing a form of 'time analogue' to crystalline spatial order, where the symmetry of space is broken. In classical parametrically driven systems, subharmonic frequencies appear in more familiar ways: A child on a swing, for instance, modifies the centre of gravity at twice the frequency of the resulting oscillation; or the ponytail of a runner oscillates at half the frequency of the vertical head movement.

But do these dissimilar phenomena have anything to do with one another? Yes, say the ETH physicists. In particular, they pinpoint where many-body aspects appear in classical systems. To do so, they considered classical nonlinear oscillators with tunable coupling between them.

Unifying framework for periodically driven classical and quantum systems

It is well known that for certain driving frequencies and strengths, parametric oscillators become unstable and then undergo a so-called period-doubling bifurcation, beyond which they oscillate at half their driving frequency. Heugel, Oscity and their colleagues explore what happens as several such oscillators are coupled together. In calculations as well as in experiments -- using two strings with variable coupling between them -- they find two distinct regimes. When the coupling is strong, the two-string system moves collectively, recreating in essence the movements of the child on a swing or the ponytail of a runner. However, in the case of weak coupling between the strings, the dynamics of each string is close to that displayed by the uncoupled system. As a consequence, the coupled oscillators do not bifurcate collectively but bifurcate individually at slightly different parameters of the drive, leading to richer overall dynamics, which gets ever more complex as the systems get larger.

The ETH researchers argue that such weakly-coupled modes are similar to the ones that emerge in quantum many-body systems, implying that their framework might explain the behaviours seen experimentally in these systems. Moreover, the new work prescribes general conditions for generating classical many-body time crystals. These could ultimately be used to both interpret and explore features of their quantum counterparts.

Taken together, these findings therefore provide a powerful unifying framework for periodically driven classical and quantum systems displaying dynamics at emergent subharmonic frequencies -- systems that have been so far described in very different contexts, but might be not that dissimilar after all.

#science #science news #time crystals

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

THIS IS HOW A “FUZZY” UNIVERSE MAY HAVE LOOKED ** Synopsis: Scientists simulate early galaxy formation in a universe of dark matter that is ultralight, or “fuzzy,” rather than cold or warm. ** Dark matter was likely the starting ingredient for brewing up the very first galaxies in the universe. Shortly after the Big Bang, particles of dark matter would have clumped together in gravitational “halos,” pulling surrounding gas into their cores, which over time cooled and condensed into the first galaxies. Although dark matter is considered the backbone to the structure of the universe, scientists know very little about its nature, as the particles have so far evaded detection. Now scientists at MIT, Princeton University, and Cambridge University have found that the early universe, and the very first galaxies, would have looked very different depending on the nature of dark matter. For the first time, the team has simulated what early galaxy formation would have looked like if dark matter were “fuzzy,” rather than cold or warm. In the most widely accepted scenario, dark matter is cold, made up of slow-moving particles that, aside from gravitational effects, have no interaction with ordinary matter. Warm dark matter is thought to be a slightly lighter and faster version of cold dark matter. And fuzzy dark matter, a relatively new concept, is something entirely different, consisting of ultralight particles, each about 1 octillionth (10^-27) the mass of an electron (a cold dark matter particle is far heavier -- about 10^5 times more massive than an electron). In their simulations, the researchers found that if dark matter is cold, then galaxies in the early universe would have formed in nearly spherical halos. But if the nature of dark matter is fuzzy or warm, the early universe would have looked very different, with galaxies forming first in extended, tail-like filaments. In a fuzzy universe, these filaments would have appeared striated, like star-lit strings on a harp. As new telescopes come online, with the ability to see further back into the early universe, scientists may be able to deduce, from the pattern of galaxy formation, whether the nature of dark matter, which today makes up nearly 85 percent of the matter in the universe, is fuzzy as opposed to cold or warm. “The first galaxies in the early universe may illuminate what type of dark matter we have today,” says Mark Vogelsberger, associate professor of physics in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “Either we see this filament pattern, and fuzzy dark matter is plausible, or we don’t, and we can rule that model out. We now have a blueprint for how to do this.” Vogelsberger is a co-author of a paper appearing in Physical Review Letters, along with the paper’s lead author, Philip Mocz of Princeton University, and Anastasia Fialkov of Cambridge University and previously the University of Sussex. Fuzzy Waves While dark matter has yet to be directly detected, the hypothesis that describes dark matter as cold has proven successful at describing the large-scale structure of the observable universe. As a result, models of galaxy formation are based on the assumption that dark matter is cold. “The problem is, there are some discrepancies between observations and predictions of cold dark matter,” Vogelsberger points out. “For example, if you look at very small galaxies, the inferred distribution of dark matter within these galaxies doesn’t perfectly agree with what theoretical models predict. So there is tension there.” Enter, then, alternative theories for dark matter, including warm, and fuzzy, which researchers have proposed in recent years. “The nature of dark matter is still a mystery,” Fialkov says. “Fuzzy dark matter is motivated by fundamental physics, for instance, string theory, and thus is an interesting dark matter candidate. Cosmic structures hold the key to validating or ruling out such dark matter models.” Fuzzy dark matter is made up of particles that are so light that they act in a quantum, wave-like fashion, rather than as individual particles. This quantum, fuzzy nature, Mocz says, could have produced early galaxies that look entirely different from what standard models predict for cold dark matter. “Even though in the late universe these different dark matter scenarios may predict similar shapes for galaxies, the first galaxies would be strikingly different, which will give us a clue about what dark matter is,” Mocz says. To see how different a cold and a fuzzy early universe could be, the researchers simulated a small, cubic space of the early universe, measuring about 3 million light-years across, and ran it forward in time to see how galaxies would form given one of the three dark matter scenarios: cold, warm, and fuzzy. The team began each simulation by assuming a certain distribution of dark matter, which scientists have some idea of, based on measurements of the cosmic microwave background -- “relic radiation” that was emitted by, and was detected just 400,000 years after, the Big Bang. “Dark matter doesn’t have a constant density, even at these early times,” Vogelsberger says. “There are tiny perturbations on top of a constant density field.” The researchers were able to use existing algorithms to simulate galaxy formation under scenarios of cold and warm dark matter. But to simulate fuzzy dark matter, with its quantum nature, they needed a new approach. A Map of Harp Strings The researchers modified their simulation of cold dark matter, enabling it to solve two extra equations in order to simulate galaxy formation in a fuzzy dark matter universe. The first, Schrödinger’s equation, describes how a quantum particle acts as a wave, while the second, Poisson’s equation, describes how that wave generates a density field, or distribution of dark matter, and how that distribution leads to gravity -- the force that eventually pulls in matter to form galaxies. They then coupled this simulation to a model that describes the behavior of gas in the universe, and the way it condenses into galaxies in response to gravitational effects. In all three scenarios, galaxies formed wherever there were over-densities, or large concentrations of gravitationally collapsed dark matter. The pattern of this dark matter, however, was different, depending on whether it was cold, warm, or fuzzy. In a scenario of cold dark matter, galaxies formed in spherical halos, as well as smaller subhalos. Warm dark matter produced first galaxies in tail-like filaments, and no subhalos. This may be due to warm dark matter’s lighter, faster nature, making particles less likely to stick around in smaller, subhalo clumps. Similar to warm dark matter, fuzzy dark matter formed stars along filaments. But then quantum wave effects took over in shaping the galaxies, which formed more striated filaments, like strings on an invisible harp. Vogelsberger says this striated pattern is due to interference, an effect that occurs when two waves overlap. When this occurs, for instance in waves of light, the points where the crests and troughs of each wave align form darker spots, creating an alternating pattern of bright and dark regions. In the case of fuzzy dark matter, instead of bright and dark points, it generates an alternating pattern of over-dense and under-dense concentrations of dark matter. “You would get a lot of gravitational pull at these over-densities, and the gas would follow, and at some point would form galaxies along those over-densities, and not the under-densities,” Vogelsberger explains. “This picture would be replicated throughout the early universe.” The team is developing more detailed predictions of what early galaxies may have looked like in a universe dominated by fuzzy dark matter. Their goal is to provide a map for upcoming telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, that may be able to look far enough back in time to spot the earliest galaxies. If they see filamentary galaxies such as those simulated by Mocz, Fialkov, Vogelsberger, and their colleagues, it could be the first signs that dark matter’s nature is fuzzy. “It’s this observational test we can provide for the nature of dark matter, based on observations of the early universe, which will become feasible in the next couple of years,” Vogelsberger says. IMAGE....A simulation of early galaxy formation under three dark matter scenarios. In a universe filled with cold dark matter, early galaxies would first form in bright halos (far left). If dark matter is instead warm, galaxies would form first in long, tail-like filaments (center). Fuzzy dark matter would produce similar filaments, though striated (far right), like the strings of a harp. Image courtesy of the researchers

#space #science #Astronomy #physics

[dearyallfrommatt]

I’d be off like a shot.

I love Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Genuinely, like I love banana pudding & cat-head biscuits. I have to sometimes physically restrain myself from reading, watching or listening to it again. I am rarely successful.

 I have owned some copy or another of the books since I was 12, which means going on 33 years. Someone made me copies of all the recently (ish) released audio dramas, from HHGTTG to Mostly Harmless which are different from the original radio broadcast as well as the LPs released in the ‘80s. I have digital copies of the BBC TV show from the ‘80s and own a copy of the audio transcripts. Somewhere I have copies of the three-issue comic book DC put out in the early ‘90s. Here’s a link to the fiendishly hard computer game that was stupid hard back in the days before bigger nerds had the internet to you how not to suck at fiendishly hard video games.

 I’m not kidding, that thing’s a booger. It’s a text-based game that follows Adams’ squirrelly sense of logic and humor. Furthermore, if you’re very well versed in HHGTTG lore and, especially, the book, it’ll screw with your head. I’d say pound-for-pound the hardest free computer game.

 The 2005 movie was... okay. I’ve never seen anything else Garth Jennings has directed nor, to cut the bull, can I with certainty tell you what makes for a good director and what doesn’t make for a good director. I just know it didn’t work on me. And, yes, I understand the concessions made in getting Hollywood to make the damn thing - like the romance subplot that doesn’t exist in other formats because that’s the joke - and I understand the changes in aesthetics that a modern movie required. I read somewhere that almost every glaring change in the movie - i.e., the romantic subplot - was done by Douglas Adams. The emphasis on the Ultimate Question, the Point-Of-View Gun gag that fell flat, that whole business with John Malkovich, all that was done by Adams.

 So it didn’t fly with me, others enjoyed it, and on the whole, I don’t find it a disgrace like, say, Blues Brothers 2000 or how all these sad bastards claim the new Star Wars movies do them. By itself and on it’s own, it’s a perfectly fine movie, whereas Blues Brothers 2000 just sucks out loud.

 Everyone was fine. I’ve grown to tire of Martin Freeman since, which is nobody’s fault but mine. And while I appreciate that Arthur Dent being the last person that should be travelling the Galaxy in search of excitement and adventure and really wild things is part of the joke, but he was a bit much. Mos Def was fine, Sam Rockwell was okay. Zoey Daschanel was adequate. Alan Rickman gave Marvin the best voice since Steve Moore. Along with Stephen Fry as The Book, the only ones that equaled the radio originals.

 I’m probably one of the few fanboys who are less concerned with/entertained by the whole concept of The Ultimate Question than I am by how Probability or, for that matter, Improbability affects sentient beings. We move freely in three dimensions and in one direction in the fourth. However, the fifth dimension, Probability, moves around us and is beyond our control. It’s beyond anyone’s control. We’re constantly caught up in it and can’t get free.

 That sort of outlook - plus a healthy dose of Marvel Comics - definitely influenced my future scientific interests. Don’t get it twisted, I do not have sufficient Latin to speak with authority on these matters and I could totally be getting it confused with fiction or, indeed, my own imagination.

 Like String Theory. Depending on how you approach it, String Theory says there are at least 10 dimensions, all curled up into each other once you get past spacetime. Best I can tell, this is more a mathematical tool than something that could be considered a perfect representation of reality. Like the Holographic Principle or Loop Quantum Gravity, physicists use these as mathematical paths to try to figure out how to combine the Standard Model and Quantum Mechanics to where it makes sense. Otherwise, it’s dividing by Zero.

 And again, it’s fun to think about. Since Many-Worlds Theory is gaining another look as of late, if Sean Carroll’s to be believed, it fits in with that, as well. But actually, it fits with the Copenhagen Interpretation as well, since Probability figures in to something not really existing until it’s observed and what that suggests on a philosophical level.

 MWT is even more fun, since it argues that what it could have been before observation still exists anyway, just in a different dimension or universe or however in the hell they figure that works. It’s all a matter of Perception or, indeed, Probability that determines what “exists”. While it’s entirely possible I am completely misunderstanding modern arguments, all that “existence” is happening all the time. The Matrix, Maya, all that stuff is real. And not real. Or whatever.

 The Ultimate Question does have its charm, don’t get me wrong, but I think the rest of the joke sort of gives the answer. Forty-two, that’s the Answer. That’s the joke. The Answer’s silly because the Question is meaningless. Life, The Universe and Everything just is.

 It’s molded other aspects of my personality and beliefs, as well. An absurdist, borderline nihilist view of existence. The never-ending search for a good laugh in the face of all that’s absurd and nihilistic. The idea that there’s no one, really, in control of it All and, indeed, if there actually is, they’re if not incompetent and silly, they’re beyond comprehension. A galaxy and existence that’s more ridiculous than I can even imagine and simply beyond my ability to wrap my head around it. The emphasis on having fun and dealing with the moment because the future is malleable and the past is unreliable. The bizarre cruelty of life that is nevertheless extremely funny at times. And what the hell, might as well enjoy yourself because no one will do it for you.

 Plus it’s colored my tastes in science fiction, particularly stuff that takes place IN SPACE. I have no truck with Star Trek’s order. The galaxy is an unruly, anarchic place and anyone who tries to put it in a a proper manifest is pissin’ in the wind. The Vogons ring more true than the Federation ever has. The guy just trying to get from point A to point B is more interesting than a Chosen Hero any day of the week.

 Furthermore, since I read that first book back in 1987, I’ve longed for an actual Hitchhiker’s Guide. I forget what it was called, but when a dictionary-slash-encyclopedia cartridge came out for the GameBoy, I searched desperately for one. I’m not even sure it was released. Apparently you can do something similar with a 3DS but I don’t know.

 I put off getting a cell phone for the longest time, but even the burner flip phone I had was like finding out Spider-Man was real. And a smartphone? Get out, son, I have a Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Earth and you can’t tell me otherwise. Why we as a culture don’t appreciate that we’re all carrying super computers in our pocket and what all that allows, and instead use it take pictures of our food and insult each on Twitter depresses me to no end.

 That’s too bad, really, ‘cause I have a Hitchhiker’s Guide, buddy. The Big Trip proved that, as I would plan my days through whatever I was able to find whenever I stopped and looked it up on my smart phone. It gave me direction and answered my questions. Once or twice, it kept me from panicking. Plus, it played music.

 And if someone made a Guide for the Galaxy, I would be off like a shot. I might leave Momma a note, but the rest I wouldn’t even look back. And I’d definitely love to be a roving researcher for them so, you know, give me a call.

#books #authors #reading #living in different worlds #these are a few of my favorite things #the movie is never as good as the book #The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy #Douglas Adams #The Eagles

[sciencebulletin]

Appreciating the classical elegance of time crystals

Structures known as time crystals, which repeat in time the way conventional crystals repeat in space, have recently captured the interest and imagination of researchers across disciplines. The concept has emerged from the context of quantum many-body systems, but ETH physicists have now developed a versatile framework that clarifies connections to classical works dating back nearly two centuries, thus providing a unifying platform to explore seemingly dissimilar phenomena. In a crystal, atoms are highly ordered, occupying well-defined locations that form spatial patterns. Seven years ago, the 2004 Physics Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek pondered the possibility of a time analogue of crystalline spatial order—systems that display sustained periodic temporal modulations in their lowest-energy state. The concept of such structures with an oscillating ground state is highly intriguing. Alas, not long after the idea was published, it was proven that such time crystals are not possible without breaking fundamental laws of physics. However, subsequent theory work suggested that when quantum many-body systems are periodically driven, new persistent time correlations emerge that are evocative of Wilczek's time crystals. These driven systems were dubbed discrete time crystals, and in 2017, the first experimental realizations of such states were reported in ensembles of coupled particles (ions, electrons and nuclei) that display quantum-mechanical properties. A not-so-brief history of time crystals Before long, astute observers spotted distinct similarities between discrete time crystals in quantum systems and so-called parametric resonators, a concept in classical physics reaching back to work by Michael Faraday in 1831. The connection between these two bodies of work remained, however, opaque. Now, theorists have developed a new framework goes a long way toward lifting the ambiguities surrounding the similarities between periodically driven classical and quantum systems. Writing in an article published today in the journal Physical Review Letters, Toni Heugel, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich, and Matthias Oscity, a student at the same institution, working with Dr. Ramasubramanian Chitra and Prof. Oded Zilberberg from the Institute for Theoretical Physics and with Dr. Alexander Eichler from the Laboratory for Solid State Physics, report theoretical and experimental work that establishes how discrete time crystals can be generated that, on the one hand, require no quantum mechanical effects and, on the other hand, display genuine many-body effects, which is a characteristic of discrete time crystals reported in quantum systems. Many ways to subharmonic frequencies There is one obvious similarity between classical parametric resonators and experimentally realized discrete time crystals in quantum many-body systems: Both display emergent dynamics at frequencies that are fractions of the drive frequency. In the context of discrete time crystals, the emergence of oscillations at such subharmonic frequencies breaks the temporal periodicity of the driven system, providing a 'time analogue' to crystalline spatial order, in which the symmetry of space is broken. In classical parametrically driven systems, subharmonic frequencies appear in more familiar ways: A child on a swing, for instance, modifies the centre of gravity at twice the frequency of the resulting oscillation, or the ponytail of a runner oscillates at half the frequency of the vertical head movement. But do these dissimilar phenomena have anything to do with one another? Yes, say the ETH physicists. In particular, they pinpoint where many-body aspects appear in classical systems. To do so, they considered classical nonlinear oscillators with tunable coupling between them. Unifying framework for periodically driven classical and quantum systems It is well known that for certain driving frequencies and strengths, parametric oscillators become unstable and then undergo a so-called period-doubling bifurcation, beyond which they oscillate at half their driving frequency. Heugel, Oscity and their colleagues explore what happens as several such oscillators are coupled together. In calculations as well as in experiments using two strings with variable coupling between them, they find two distinct regimes. When the coupling is strong, the two-string system moves collectively, recreating in essence the movements of the child on a swing or the ponytail of a runner. However, in the case of weak coupling between the strings, the dynamics of each string are similar to those displayed by the uncoupled system. As a consequence, the coupled oscillators do not bifurcate collectively but bifurcate individually at slightly different parameters of the drive, leading to richer overall dynamics, which grow ever more complex as the systems get larger. The ETH researchers argue that such weakly coupled modes are similar to the ones that emerge in quantum many-body systems, implying that their framework might explain the behaviors seen experimentally in these systems. Moreover, the new work prescribes general conditions for generating classical many-body time crystals. These could ultimately be used to both interpret and explore features of their quantum counterparts. Taken together, these findings therefore provide a powerful unifying framework for periodically driven classical and quantum systems displaying dynamics at emergent subharmonic frequencies—systems that have been so far described in very different contexts, but might be not that dissimilar after all. Provided by: ETH Zurich More information: Toni L. Heugel et al. Classical Many-Body Time Crystal., Physical Review Letters (2019). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.124301 Image: Quasi potentials of six parametric oscillators with weak all-to-all coupling. Stable solutions are located at the minima. The balls indicate the symmetric solution, where all oscillators are in phase.(Screenshot from accompanying animation) Credit: ETH Zurich/D-PHYS Toni Heugel Read the full article

[sciencespies]

Ask Ethan: What Does It Mean That Quantum Gravity Has No Symmetry?

https://sciencespies.com/news/ask-ethan-what-does-it-mean-that-quantum-gravity-has-no-symmetry/

Ask Ethan: What Does It Mean That Quantum Gravity Has No Symmetry?

A diagram used to prove that quantum gravity cannot have any global symmetry. Symmetry, if existed, could act only on the shaded regions in the diagram and causes no change around the black spot in the middle. The shaded regions can be made as small as we like by dividing the boundary circle more and more. Thus, the alleged symmetry would not act anywhere inside of the circle.

Daniel Harlow and Hirosi Ooguri, PRL, 122, 191601 (2019)

If you want to fully describe how the Universe works at a fundamental level, you have to look at it in two different — and incompatible — ways. To describe the particles and their electromagnetic and nuclear interactions, you need to use the framework of quantum field theory (QFT), where quantum fields permeate the Universe and their excitations give rise to the particles we know of. To describe how every quantum of matter and energy moves through the Universe, we need the framework of General Relativity (GR), where matter and energy define how spacetime is curved, and curved spacetime tells matter and energy how to move.

Yet these two theories are mutually incompatible; to make them work together, we’d need to develop a working theory of quantum gravity. Yet a new paper, just published, has Alex Knapp puzzled, leading him to ask:

What does it mean that quantum gravity doesn’t have symmetry?

It’s a fascinating find with big implications. Let’s find out what it means.

Feynman diagrams (top) are based off of point particles and their interactions. Converting them into their string theory analogues (bottom) gives rise to surfaces which can have non-trivial curvature. In string theory, all particles are simply different vibrating modes of an underlying, more fundamental structure: strings. But does a quantum theory of gravity, which string theory aspires to be, have symmetries, and by association, conservation laws?

Phys. Today 68, 11, 38 (2015)

When you hear the word “symmetry,” there are probably all sorts of images that pop into your mind. Some letters of the alphabet — like “A” or “T” — display a symmetry where if you drew a vertical line down their centers, the left sides and the right sides are symmetric. Other letters — like “B” or “E” — have a similar symmetry but in a different direction: horizontally, where the tops and bottoms are symmetric. Still others — such as “O” — have rotational symmetry, where no matter how many degrees you rotate it, its appearance is unchanged.

These are some examples of symmetry that are easy to visualize, but they’re not exhaustive. Sure, some systems have no differences from their mirror reflections, known as a parity symmetry. Others demonstrate rotational symmetries, where it doesn’t matter what angle you view it from. But there are many others, all of vital importance.

There are many letters of the alphabet that exhibit particular symmetries. Note that the capital letters shown here have one and only one line of symmetry; letters like “I” or “O” have more than one.

math-only-math.com

Some systems are the same for matter as they are for antimatter: they exhibit charge conjugation symmetry. Some systems obey the same laws if you evolve them forwards in time as they do if you evolve them backwards in time: time-reversal symmetry. Still others don’t depend on your physical location (translational symmetry) or on when you’re viewing your system (time-translational symmetry) or on which non-accelerating reference frame you occupy (Lorentz symmetry).

Some physical systems have these symmetries; others don’t. Dropping a ball off of a cliff obeys time-reversal symmetry; cooking scrambled eggs does not. Flying through space with your engines turned off obeys Lorentz symmetry; accelerating, with your engines firing at full power, does not.

The DEEP laser-sail concept relies on a large laser array striking and accelerating a relatively large-area, low-mass spacecraft. This has the potential to accelerate non-living objects to speeds approaching the speed of light, making an interstellar journey possible within a single human lifetime. The work done by the laser, applying a force as an object moves a certain distance, is an example of energy transfer from one form into another. An accelerating reference frame is an example of a non-inertial system; for these systems, the Lorentz symmetry does not strictly hold.

© 2016 UCSB Experimental Cosmology Group

It isn’t just physical systems that can obey (or disobey) symmetries. Whenever you have an equation (or a quantitative theory in general), you can test them to see which symmetries they obey and which ones they don’t.

Within various QFTs, for example, particles experiencing the electromagnetic force obey parity, charge conjugation, and time-reversal symmetries all independently of one another. Electromagnetism is the same for particles regardless of their direction of motion; the same for particles and antiparticles; the same forwards in time as backwards in time.

Particles experiencing the weak nuclear force, on the other hand, violate parity, charge conjugation, and time-reversal individually. Left-handed muons decay differently from right-handed muons. Neutral kaons and neutral anti-kaons have different properties. And the decays of B-mesons have time-asymmetric transformation rates. But even the weak interactions obey the combination of all three symmetries: if you perform an experiment on a particle in motion that moves forward in time and an antiparticle with its motion reflected moving backwards in time, you get the same physical results.

Changing particles for antiparticles and reflecting them in a mirror simultaneously represents CP symmetry. If the anti-mirror decays are different from the normal decays, CP is violated. Time reversal symmetry, known as T, is violated if CP is violated. The combined symmetries of C, P, and T, all together, must be conserved under our present laws of physics, with implications for the types of interactions that are and aren’t allowed.

E. Siegel / Beyond The Galaxy

Within GR, various spacetimes obey different sets of symmetry. The (Schwarzschild) spacetime describing a non-rotating black hole exhibits time-translation, mirror, and full rotational symmetries. The (Kerr) spacetime describing a rotating black hole exhibits time-translation symmetry, but only has rotational symmetries about one axis.

The (Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker) spacetime describing the expanding Universe, on the other hand, has a slew of symmetries it does obey, but time-translation isn’t one of them: an expanding Universe is different from one moment in time to the next.

If you had a static spacetime that weren’t changing, energy conservation would be guaranteed. But if the fabric of space changes as the objects you’re interested in move through them, there is no longer an energy conservation law under the laws of General Relativity.

DAVID CHAMPION, MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR RADIO ASTRONOMY

In general, these symmetries are profoundly important to our understanding of the Universe, and have enormous additional implications for reality. You see, there’s a brilliant theorem at the intersection of physics and mathematics that states the following: every unique mathematical symmetry exhibited by a physical theory necessarily implies an associated conserved quantity. This theorem — known as Noether’s theorem after its discoverer, the incomparable mathematician Emmy Noether — is the root of why certain quantities are or aren’t conserved.

A time-translation symmetry leads to the conservation of energy, which explains why energy is not conserved in an expanding Universe. Spatial translation symmetry leads to the conservation of momentum; rotational symmetry leads to the conservation of angular momentum. Even CPT conservation — where charge conjugation, parity, and time-reversal symmetry are all combined — is a consequence of Lorentz symmetry.

Quantum gravity tries to combine Einstein’s General theory of Relativity with quantum mechanics. Quantum corrections to classical gravity are visualized as loop diagrams, as the one shown here in white. Whether space (or time) itself is discrete or continuous is not yet decided, as is the question of whether gravity is quantized at all, or particles, as we know them today, are fundamental or not. But if we hope for a fundamental theory of everything, it must include quantized fields.

SLAC National Accelerator Lab

Some symmetries are inherent to specific QFTs or to QFTs in general; some symmetries are inherent to specific solutions in GR or to GR in general. But these two descriptions of the Universe are both incomplete. There are many questions we can ask about reality that require us to understand what’s happening where gravity is important or where the curvature of spacetime is extremely strong (where we need GR), but also when distance scales are very small or where individual quantum effects are at play (where we need QFT).

These include questions such as the following:

What happens to the gravitational field of an electron when it passes through a double slit?

What happens to the information of the particles that form a black hole, if the black hole’s eventual state is thermal radiation?

And what is the behavior of a gravitational field/force at and around a singularity?

To address them, GR and QFT individually are both insufficient. We need something more: an understanding of gravity at the quantum level.

A hologram is a 2-dimensional surface that has information about the entire 3-dimensional object displayed encoded in it. The idea of the holographic principle is that our Universe and the quantum field theoretical laws that describe it is the surface of a higher-dimensional spacetime that includes quantum gravity.

Georg-Johann Lay / Epzcaw / E. Siegel (public domain)

We don’t have a working theory of quantum gravity, of course, or we’d be able to understand what symmetries it does (and doesn’t) exhibit. But even without a full theory, we have a tremendous clue: the holographic principle. Just as a two-dimensional hologram encodes three-dimensional information on its surface, the holographic principle allows physicists to relate what happens in a spacetime with N dimensions to a conformal field theory with N-1 dimensions: the AdS/CFT correspondence.

The AdS stands for anti-de Sitter space, which is frequently used to describe quantum gravity in the context of string theory, while the CFT stands for conformal field theory, such as the QFTs we use to describe three of the four fundamental interactions. While no one is certain whether this is applicable to our Universe, there are many good reasons to think it does.

In the Standard Model, the neutron’s electric dipole moment is predicted to be a factor of ten billion larger than our observational limits show. The only explanation is that somehow, something beyond the Standard Model is protecting this CP symmetry in the strong interactions. We can demonstrate a lot of things in science, but proving that CP is conserved in the strong interactions can never be done. Which is too bad; we need more CP-violation to explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry present in our Universe. There can be no global symmetries if the AdS/CFT correspondence is correct.

public domain work from Andreas Knecht

The new result, which is very far-reaching in its implications, is this: within the framework of AdS/CFT, there are no global symmetries. The paper itself, published on May 17, 2019, is titled Constraints on Symmetries from Holography and was written by Daniel Harlow and Hirosi Ooguri. In particular, it showed that — again, within the context of AdS/CFT — that the following three conjectures are true.

Quantum gravity does not allow global symmetries of any type.

Quantum gravity requires that any internal gauge symmetry (which implies conservation laws like electric charge, color charge, or weak isospin) is mathematically compact.

Quantum gravity requires that any internal gauge symmetry necessarily comes along with dynamical objects that transform in all irreducible representations.

Each of these deserve elaboration, but the first one is the most powerful and profound.

Different frames of reference, including different positions and motions, would see different laws of physics (and would disagree on reality) if a theory is not relativistically invariant. The fact that we have a symmetry under ‘boosts,’ or velocity transformations, tells us we have a conserved quantity: linear momentum. This is much more difficult to comprehend when momentum isn’t simply a quantity associated with a particle, but is rather a quantum mechanical operator. This symmetry, if the holographic principle is correct, cannot exist globally.

Wikimedia Commons user Krea

All three of these conjectures have been around for a long time, and none of them are strictly true in either QFT or GR (or any form of classical physics) on their own. The classic arguments for all of them, in fact, are rooted in black hole physics and are known to require certain assumptions that, if violated, admit various loopholes. But if the AdS/CFT correspondence is true, and the holographic principle is applicable to quantum gravity in our Universe, all three of these conjectures are valid.

The first one means that there are no conservation laws that always necessarily hold. There might be good approximate conservation laws that are still valid, but nothing — not energy, not charge, not momentum — is explicitly or strictly conserved under all conditions. Even CPT and Lorentz invariance can be violated. The other two are more subtle, but help extend global symmetries to local conditions: they held prevent things like the instantaneous teleportation of electric charge in one location to another, disconnected location, and require the existence of all possible charges allowed by the theory, such as magnetic monopoles.

In 1982, an experiment running under the leadership of Blas Cabrera, one with eight turns of wire, detected a flux change of eight magnetons: indications of a magnetic monopole. Unfortunately, no one was present at the time of detection, and no one has ever reproduced this result or found a second monopole. Still, if string theory and this new result are correct, magnetic monopoles, being not forbidden by any law, must exist at some level.

Cabrera B. (1982). First Results from a Superconductive Detector for Moving Magnetic Monopoles, Physical Review Letters, 48 (20) 1378–1381

The three quantum gravity conjectures that are demonstrated to hold for a holographic Universe have been around, in some form, since 1957, but they were only conjectures until now. If the holographic principle (and AdS/CFT, and possibly string theory, by extension) is correct, all of these conjectures are necessarily true. There are no global symmetries; nothing in the Universe is always conserved under all imaginable circumstances (even if you need to reach the Planck scale to see violations), and all non-forbidden charges must exist. It would be revolutionary for our understanding of the quantum Universe.

Despite the results and implications of this study, it’s still limited. We don’t know whether the holographic principle is true or not, or whether these assumptions about quantum gravity are correct. If it’s right, however, it means that once you include gravity, the symmetries that we hold so dear in the physics we know today are not global and fundamental. Paradoxically, if string theory is right, our expectations about hidden symmetries revealing themselves at a more fundamental level are not only wrong, but nature has no global symmetries at all.

Send in your Ask Ethan questions to startswithabang at gmail dot com!

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[2whatcom-blog]

Discovered A Quadrillion Methods for String Concept to Make Our Universe

Physicists who've been roaming the "landscape" of string theory--the house of zillions and zillions of mathematical options of the idea, the place every answer gives the sorts of equations physicists want to explain reality--have stumbled upon a subset of such equations which have the identical set of matter particles as exists in our universe. However that is no small subset: there are at the very least a quadrillion such options, making it the most important such set ever present in string idea. Based on string idea, all particles and basic forces come up from the vibrational states of tiny strings. For mathematical consistency, these strings vibrate in 10-dimensional spacetime. And for consistency with our acquainted on a regular basis expertise of the universe, with three spatial dimensions and the dimension of time, the extra six dimensions are "compactified" in order to be undetectable. Totally different compactifications result in completely different options. In string idea, a "solution" implies a vacuum of spacetime that's ruled by Einstein's idea of gravity coupled to a quantum area idea. Every answer describes a singular universe, with its personal set of particles, basic forces and different such defining properties. Some string theorists have centered their efforts on looking for methods to attach string idea to properties of our identified, observable universe--particularly the usual mannequin of particle physics, which describes all identified particles and all their mutual forces besides gravity. A lot of this effort has concerned a model of string idea through which the strings work together weakly. Nevertheless, prior to now twenty years, a brand new department of string idea referred to as F-theory has allowed physicists to work with strongly interacting, or strongly coupled, strings. "An intriguing, surprising result is that when the coupling is large, we can start describing the theory very geometrically," says Mirjam Cvetic of the College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Which means that string theorists can use algebraic geometry--which makes use of algebraic strategies to deal with geometric problems--to analyze the assorted methods of compactifying further dimensions in F-theory and to seek out options. Mathematicians have been independently learning among the geometric varieties that seem in F-theory. "They provide us physicists a vast toolkit", says Ling Lin, additionally of the College of Pennsylvania. "The geometry is really the key... it is the 'language' that makes F-theory such a powerful framework." Now, Cvetic, Lin, James Halverson of Northeastern College in Boston, and their colleagues have used such strategies to determine a category of options with string vibrational modes that result in an analogous spectrum of fermions (or, particles of matter) as is described by the usual model--including the property that each one fermions are available in three generations (for instance, the electron, muon and tau are the three generations of 1 sort of fermion). The F-theory options discovered by Cvetic and colleagues have particles that additionally exhibit the handedness, or chirality, of the usual mannequin particles. In particle physics lingo, the options reproduce the precise "chiral spectrum" of normal mannequin particles. For instance, the quarks and leptons in these options are available in left and right-handed variations, as they do in our universe. The brand new work exhibits that there are at the very least a quadrillion options through which particles have the identical chiral spectrum as the usual mannequin, which is 10 orders of magnitude extra options than had been discovered inside string idea till now. "This is by far the largest domain of standard model solutions," Cvetic says. "It's somehow surprising and actually also rewarding that it turns out to be in the strongly coupled string theory regime, where geometry helped us." A quadrillion--while it is a lot, a lot smaller than the dimensions of the panorama of options in F-theory (which ultimately rely was proven to be of the order of 10272,000)--is a tremendously giant quantity. "And because it's a tremendously large number, and it gets something nontrivial in real world particle physics correct, we should take it seriously and study it further," Halverson says. Additional examine would contain uncovering stronger connections with the particle physics of the true world. The researchers nonetheless must work out the couplings or interactions between particles within the F-theory solutions--which once more depend upon the geometric particulars of the compactifications of the additional dimensions. It might be that inside the house of the quadrillion options, there are some with couplings that would trigger the proton to decay inside observable timescales. This might clearly be at odds with the true world, as experiments have but to see any signal of protons decaying. Alternatively, physicists may seek for options that notice the spectrum of normal mannequin particles that protect a mathematical symmetry referred to as R-parity. "This symmetry forbids certain proton decay processes and would be very attractive from a particle physics point of view, but is missing in our current models," Lin says. Additionally, the work assumes supersymmetry, which implies that all the usual mannequin particles have companion particles. String idea wants this symmetry with a purpose to make sure the mathematical consistency of options. However to ensure that any supersymmetric idea to tally with the observable universe, the symmetry must be damaged (very similar to how a diner's number of cutlery and consuming glass on her left or proper facet will "break" the symmetry of the desk setting at a spherical dinner desk). Else, the companion particles would have the identical mass as customary mannequin particles--and that's clearly not the case, since we do not observe any such companion particles in our experiments. Crucially, experiments on the Massive Hadron Collider (LHC) have additionally proven that supersymmetry--if it's the right description of nature--is not damaged even on the vitality scales probed by the LHC, on condition that the LHC has but to seek out any supersymmetric particles. String theorists assume that supersymmetry is perhaps damaged solely at extraordinarily excessive energies that aren't inside experimental attain anytime quickly. "The expectation in string theory is that high-scale breaking, which is fully consistent with LHC data, is completely possible," Halverson says. "It requires further analysis to determine whether or not it happens in our case." Regardless of these caveats, different string theorists are approving of the brand new work. "This is definitely a step forward in demonstrating that string theory gives rise to many solutions with features of the standard model," says string theorist Washington Taylor of MIT. "It's very nice work," says Cumrun Vafa, one of many builders of F-theory, at Harvard College. "The fact you can arrange the geometry and topology to fit with not only Einstein's equations, but also with the spectrum that we want, is not trivial. It works out nicely here." However Vafa and Taylor each warning that these options are removed from matching completely with the usual mannequin. Getting options to match precisely with the particle physics of our world is among the final targets of string idea. Vafa is amongst those that assume that, regardless of the immensity of the panorama of options, there exists a singular answer that matches our universe. "I bet there is exactly one," he says. However, "to pinpoint this is not going to be easy." Read the full article

#2what.com #particles #solutions #string #theory

[shirlleycoyle]

Physicists Are Studying Mysterious ‘Bubbles of Nothing’ That Eat Spacetime

The universe might be on track to eat itself from the inside out.

Luckily for us, physicists studying the phenomenon, called “spacetime decay”, believe this is very unlikely. Still, the possibility is interesting enough to explore in mind-boggling detail, covering “bubbles of nothing” in spacetime, hidden extra dimensions, and a hypothetical observer hitching a ride on the outer surface of our universe.

The idea that in specific scenarios the universe would be entirely destroyed by an expanding bubble of nothing has been around since 1982, when theoretical physicist Edward Witten introduced the possibility of the universe eating itself in a paper in Nuclear Physics B journal. He wrote: “A hole spontaneously forms in space and rapidly expands to infinity, pushing to infinity anything it may meet.”

Given that a bubble of nothing has not in fact destroyed the universe, neither in the 13 billion years before Witten published his paper nor in the 38 years since, it would be reasonable for physicists to push it down the research priority list. But three physicists at the University of Oviedo in Spain and the University of Uppsala in Sweden argue that we can learn important lessons from an all-consuming, universe-destroying bubble in a wonderfully titled paper, “Nothing Really Matters”, submitted to the Journal of High-Energy Physics this month.

In particular, understanding the conditions for spacetime decay through a bubble of nothing is a step towards connecting the best theories about the tiniest building blocks of the universe—strings—with theories about space and time itself.

The unstable universe

It's commonly understood that a vacuum is a region of total emptiness, so it’s confusing to think that our entire universe which contains planet earth, distant galaxies and everything in between is almost entirely a vacuum. But the fact that our universe is mostly vacuum is part of the reason it exists in a relatively stable state.

In quantum field theory, which connects quantum physics and the dynamics of spacetime, a vacuum is better understood as the lowest possible energy state. “Excited” quantum states with energy above a vacuum state don’t stay excited for very long, and tend to quickly decay down to lower energy states by emitting photons and other packets of energy. Vacuums don’t have lower energy states to decay down to, and so exist happily in a stable state.

Since most of our universe is a vacuum and already in the lowest possible energy state, we shouldn’t have to worry about spacetime decay. In theoretical physics, however, assumptions like that are rarely stable themselves.

In the early 1970s, a few Russian physicists separately explored the idea that there’s a middle ground between a stable vacuum and an unstable non-vacuum: a vacuum-like state which seems stable because of the very long time period it will stay in this “metastable” state before decaying. Now referred to as a “false vacuum”, the suggestion was an attempt to resolve inconsistencies in theories about early conditions in the universe, the effects of gravity, and cosmological observations.

“[A bubble of nothing] describes a possible channel for 'universe destruction;' in that the bubble of nothing expands and can 'eat' all of spacetime, converting it into 'nothing'"

Although the new concept of a false vacuum was suggested to describe only a transition period before the Big Bang, more recent research into the Higgs Field (a quantum force field famously detected by particle accelerator CERN) suggests we might still be living in a false vacuum after all, since what was previously thought to be the stable (lowest energy) state of a Higgs field might not be the lowest energy state.

The possibility that the stability of our universe is a very long illusion has opened up looming questions about how and why the delicate false vacuum might decay. One answer is through a "bubble of nothing."

Infinite nothing and hidden dimensions

A bubble of nothing is one example of a "spacetime bubble" where spacetime has different properties inside and outside the bubble boundary. Other types of bubbles might have different strengths of dark energy inside and outside the bubble, for example, but bubbles of nothing have no interior at all, says paper author and researcher at Uppsala University, Marjorie Schillo.

If a bubble of nothing spontaneously forms in false-vacuum spacetime, it will grow and eventually swallow the entire universe. “[A bubble of nothing] describes a possible channel for 'universe destruction;' in that the bubble of nothing expands and can 'eat' all of spacetime, converting it into 'nothing.'” says Schillo.

But why would a bubble of nothing form in the first place? The answer lies in string theory, a popular and successful candidate for a “theory of everything” which postulates tiny entities called strings with properties that other fundamental particles don’t have. In particular, strings have a vibrational state which accounts for quantum gravity. In other words, the theory integrates phenomena in quantum physics with the behaviour and effects of gravitational fields. This result is much-sought after, and is a significant reason why string theory is so popular.

Such a tantalizingly complete theory relies on several assumptions that are not guaranteed. The maths of string theory only works if there are more than four dimensions: three spatial dimensions, a time dimension, and then lots of other dimensions that are so small that they can’t be detected, only derived mathematically. In string theory, the geometry of our universe only appears to be four dimensional spacetime because the extra dimensions are tightly compacted and hidden.

For mathematical reasons that are almost too technical to explain in words, bubbles of nothing won’t form in four dimensional spacetime, but they will form in “stringy” multidimensional spacetime. One model of stringy spacetime is called a Kaluza-Klein vacuum, and in this model the probability of a bubble of nothing destroying everything is one (i.e. certain) across an infinite space. Physicists actually aren’t sure if our universe is an infinite or finite volume, but reassuringly, the result that bubble-of-nothing universe destruction is 100 percent certain is seen as something to rectify, not something to worry about.

“It would be interesting to work out under what conditions an observer could 'ride' on the bubble of nothing and see a universe that is similar to the one we live in"

As Czech string theorist Luboš Motl notes in a surprisingly funny blog post, a bubble of nothing catastrophe should be used to rule out descriptions of our universe, since if it was going to happen, it should have already happened.

“We don't know whether our spacetime is exactly stable. It is plausible that it is threatened by a cosmic catastrophe,” he writes. “But because the Universe has lived for [around 14 billion years]… we know that the probability of the birth of a deadly [bubble of nothing] shouldn't be much larger than [an extremely tiny number far less than one]."

He goes on: “If a theory predicted a (much) larger probability density of a lethal destructive tumor, it would also predict that our Universe should have been (certainly) destroyed by now. But it wasn't so the theory would have a problem.”

Schillo agrees. She says that her research into bubbles of nothing aims, in part, at establishing what the implications are for string-theoretic descriptions of the universe, given that spacetime decay via a bubble of nothing is very unlikely.

“It is important to understand these decay channels because if we want a stringy vacuum to describe our universe, instabilities like the bubble of nothing must be either extremely rare or absent,” she says.

Riding on a bubble

The bubble of nothing serves another purpose, too. Schillo and others believe that the mathematical description of a universe-destroying bubble of nothing could also be used to model the origin of the universe.

The behaviour of a rapidly expanding bubble of nothing is a good approximation for the early inflation of the universe. More specifically, the outer surface of a growing bubble of nothing would look very much like the creation of the universe, if it were possible to watch universe creation from the outside.

This may sound far-fetched, but it’s a key focus of theoretical physics and early universe cosmology. “One of the future topics of research that I am most excited about is looking into the 'universe creation' aspect of this work," Schillo said.

“It would be interesting to work out under what conditions an observer could 'ride' on the bubble of nothing and see a universe that is similar to the one we live in," she explained. "Because the bubble expands, such an observer would see an expanding universe, and this could explain the observed dark energy.”

So, you definitely don't have to worry about a bubble of nothing gobbling up all of spacetime. But if you’ve ever wondered what the universe looked like when it first exploded, it’s certainly worth keeping up with bubble research.

Physicists Are Studying Mysterious ‘Bubbles of Nothing’ That Eat Spacetime syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[art-of-mathematics]

Ambigram Invertium

The point of invertium in my concept of information weaving is a threshold of simultaneous inversion of extreme states of information density, like an information singularity that annihilates its own information weaving pattern (like a wool ball of information (that us like a more-dimensional manifold) turning into a sole line of string (pure form of a sole imaginary number, 0-D, so to speak)), and re-arranges (begins to re-uncoil itself) - working like ironing quantum foam to become smooth again - so it can re-fold and re-uncoil itself - like a reset button of ripples in spacetime (the more rippled and fuzzy the denser the information density, and increasing gravity as information clustering mechanism, as well as heat and entropy (seen as activity and interaction/interweaving coefficient - so to speak)...

As a singularity is an extreme form and anomaly of density in General Relativity, the critical density threshold, and what happens with information there - in a concrete manner- might be explainable by using that information-theoretical inspired concept of interpretation... It has similarity to string theory, but I dunno if it is the same. Let's say it is merely similar.

#information weaving #invertium #singularity #black holes #quantum gravity #string theory #gravity #general relativity #informazion theoretical approach of quantum mechanics #quantum mechanics #analogis #analogy #ambigram #ambigrams #duality #food for thought #my research stuff #... or such idk #physics #theoretical physics #math #mathematics #information density #it from qubit #from the backyard of my theoretical bullshittery factory #artsy approach to math #art and science

[thessauruss-blog]

This is how a “fuzzy” universe may have looked

Dark matter was likely the starting ingredient for brewing up the very first galaxies in the universe. Shortly after the Big Bang, particles of dark matter would have clumped together in gravitational “halos,” pulling surrounding gas into their cores, which over time cooled and condensed into the first galaxies. Although dark matter is considered the backbone to the structure of the universe, scientists know very little about its nature, as the particles have so far evaded detection. Now scientists at MIT, Princeton University, and Cambridge University have found that the early universe, and the very first galaxies, would have looked very different depending on the nature of dark matter. For the first time, the team has simulated what early galaxy formation would have looked like if dark matter were “fuzzy,” rather than cold or warm. In the most widely accepted scenario, dark matter is cold, made up of slow-moving particles that, aside from gravitational effects, have no interaction with ordinary matter. Warm dark matter is thought to be a slightly lighter and faster version of cold dark matter. And fuzzy dark matter, a relatively new concept, is something entirely different, consisting of ultralight particles, each about 1 octillionth (10-27) the mass of an electron (a cold dark matter particle is far heavier — about 105 times more massive than an electron). In their simulations, the researchers found that if dark matter is cold, then galaxies in the early universe would have formed in nearly spherical halos. But if the nature of dark matter is fuzzy or warm, the early universe would have looked very different, with galaxies forming first in extended, tail-like filaments. In a fuzzy universe, these filaments would have appeared striated, like star-lit strings on a harp.   As new telescopes come online, with the ability to see further back into the early universe, scientists may be able to deduce, from the pattern of galaxy formation, whether the nature of dark matter, which today makes up nearly 85 percent of the matter in the universe, is fuzzy as opposed to cold or warm. “The first galaxies in the early universe may illuminate what type of dark matter we have today,” says Mark Vogelsberger, associate professor of physics in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “Either we see this filament pattern, and fuzzy dark matter is plausible, or we don’t, and we can rule that model out. We now have a blueprint for how to do this.” Vogelsberger is a co-author of a paper appearing today in Physical Review Letters, along with the paper’s lead author, Philip Mocz of Princeton University, and Anastasia Fialkov of Cambridge University and previously the University of Sussex. Fuzzy waves While dark matter has yet to be directly detected, the hypothesis that describes dark matter as cold has proven successful at describing the large-scale structure of the observable universe. As a result, models of galaxy formation are based on the assumption that dark matter is cold. “The problem is, there are some discrepancies between observations and predictions of cold dark matter,” Vogelsberger points out. “For example, if you look at very small galaxies, the inferred distribution of dark matter within these galaxies doesn’t perfectly agree with what theoretical models predict. So there is tension there.” Enter, then, alternative theories for dark matter, including warm, and fuzzy, which researchers have proposed in recent years. “The nature of dark matter is still a mystery,” Fialkov says. “Fuzzy dark matter is motivated by fundamental physics, for instance, string theory, and thus is an interesting dark matter candidate. Cosmic structures hold the key to validating or ruling out such dark matter modles.” Fuzzy dark matter is made up of particles that are so light that they act in a quantum, wave-like fashion, rather than as individual particles. This quantum, fuzzy nature, Mocz says, could have produced early galaxies that look entirely different from what standard models predict for cold dark matter. “Even though in the late universe these different dark matter scenarios may predict similar shapes for galaxies, the first galaxies would be strikingly different, which will give us a clue about what dark matter is,” Mocz says. To see how different a cold and a fuzzy early universe could be, the researchers simulated a small, cubic space of the early universe, measuring about 3 million light years across, and ran it forward in time to see how galaxies would form given one of the three dark matter scenarios: cold, warm, and fuzzy. The team began each simulation by assuming a certain distribution of dark matter, which scientists have some idea of, based on measurements of the cosmic microwave background — “relic radiation” that was emitted by, and was detected just 400,000 years after, the Big Bang. “Dark matter doesn’t have a constant density, even at these early times,” Vogelsberger says. “There are tiny perturbations on top of a constant density field.” The researchers were able to use existing algorithms to simulate galaxy formation under scenarios of cold and warm dark matter. But to simulate fuzzy dark matter, with its quantum nature, they needed a new approach. A map of harp strings The researchers modified their simulation of cold dark matter, enabling it to solve two extra equations in order to simulate galaxy formation in a fuzzy dark matter universe. The first, Schrödinger’s equation, describes how a quantum particle acts as a wave, while the second, Poisson’s equation, describes how that wave generates a density field, or distribution of dark matter, and how that distribution leads to gravity — the force that eventually pulls in matter to form galaxies. They then coupled this simulation to a model that describes the behavior of gas in the universe, and the way it condenses into galaxies in response to gravitational effects. In all three scenarios, galaxies formed wherever there were over-densities, or large concentrations of gravitationally collapsed dark matter. The pattern of this dark matter, however, was different, depending on whether it was cold, warm, or fuzzy.  In a scenario of cold dark matter, galaxies formed in spherical halos, as well as smaller subhalos. Warm dark matter produced  first galaxies in tail-like filaments, and no subhalos. This may be due to warm dark matter’s lighter, faster nature, making particles less likely to stick around in smaller, subhalo clumps. Similar to warm dark matter, fuzzy dark matter formed stars along filaments. But then quantum wave effects took over in shaping the galaxies, which formed more striated filaments, like strings on an invisible harp. Vogelsberger says this striated pattern is due to interference, an effect that occurs when two waves overlap. When this occurs, for instance in waves of light, the points where the crests and troughs of each wave align form darker spots, creating an alternating pattern of bright and dark regions. In the case of fuzzy dark matter, instead of bright and dark points, it generates an alternating pattern of over-dense and under-dense concentrations of dark matter. “You would get a lot of gravitational pull at these over-densities, and the gas would follow, and at some point would form galaxies along those over-densities, and not the under-densities,” Vogelsberger explains. “This picture would be replicated throughout the early universe.” The team is developing more detailed predictions of what early galaxies may have looked like in a universe dominated by fuzzy dark matter. Their goal is to provide a map for upcoming telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, that may be able to look far enough back in time to spot the earliest galaxies. If they see filamentary galaxies such as those simulated by Mocz, Fialkov, Vogelsberger, and their colleagues, it could be the first signs that dark matter’s nature is fuzzy. “It’s this observational test we can provide for the nature of dark matter, based on observations of the early universe, which will become feasible in the next couple of years,” Vogelsberger says. This research was supported, in part, by NASA. Read the full article

[dorcasrempel]

This is how a “fuzzy” universe may have looked

Dark matter was likely the starting ingredient for brewing up the very first galaxies in the universe. Shortly after the Big Bang, particles of dark matter would have clumped together in gravitational “halos,” pulling surrounding gas into their cores, which over time cooled and condensed into the first galaxies.

Although dark matter is considered the backbone to the structure of the universe, scientists know very little about its nature, as the particles have so far evaded detection.

Now scientists at MIT, Princeton University, and Cambridge University have found that the early universe, and the very first galaxies, would have looked very different depending on the nature of dark matter. For the first time, the team has simulated what early galaxy formation would have looked like if dark matter were “fuzzy,” rather than cold or warm.

In the most widely accepted scenario, dark matter is cold, made up of slow-moving particles that, aside from gravitational effects, have no interaction with ordinary matter. Warm dark matter is thought to be a slightly lighter and faster version of cold dark matter. And fuzzy dark matter, a relatively new concept, is something entirely different, consisting of ultralight particles, each about 1 octillionth (10-27) the mass of an electron (a cold dark matter particle is far heavier — about 105 times more massive than an electron).

In their simulations, the researchers found that if dark matter is cold, then galaxies in the early universe would have formed in nearly spherical halos. But if the nature of dark matter is fuzzy or warm, the early universe would have looked very different, with galaxies forming first in extended, tail-like filaments. In a fuzzy universe, these filaments would have appeared striated, like star-lit strings on a harp.  

As new telescopes come online, with the ability to see further back into the early universe, scientists may be able to deduce, from the pattern of galaxy formation, whether the nature of dark matter, which today makes up nearly 85 percent of the matter in the universe, is fuzzy as opposed to cold or warm.

“The first galaxies in the early universe may illuminate what type of dark matter we have today,” says Mark Vogelsberger, associate professor of physics in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “Either we see this filament pattern, and fuzzy dark matter is plausible, or we don’t, and we can rule that model out. We now have a blueprint for how to do this.”

Vogelsberger is a co-author of a paper appearing today in Physical Review Letters, along with the paper’s lead author, Philip Mocz of Princeton University, and Anastasia Fialkov of Cambridge University and previously the University of Sussex.

Fuzzy waves

While dark matter has yet to be directly detected, the hypothesis that describes dark matter as cold has proven successful at describing the large-scale structure of the observable universe. As a result, models of galaxy formation are based on the assumption that dark matter is cold.

“The problem is, there are some discrepancies between observations and predictions of cold dark matter,” Vogelsberger points out. “For example, if you look at very small galaxies, the inferred distribution of dark matter within these galaxies doesn’t perfectly agree with what theoretical models predict. So there is tension there.”

Enter, then, alternative theories for dark matter, including warm, and fuzzy, which researchers have proposed in recent years.

“The nature of dark matter is still a mystery,” Fialkov says. “Fuzzy dark matter is motivated by fundamental physics, for instance, string theory, and thus is an interesting dark matter candidate. Cosmic structures hold the key to validating or ruling out such dark matter modles.”

Fuzzy dark matter is made up of particles that are so light that they act in a quantum, wave-like fashion, rather than as individual particles. This quantum, fuzzy nature, Mocz says, could have produced early galaxies that look entirely different from what standard models predict for cold dark matter.

“Even though in the late universe these different dark matter scenarios may predict similar shapes for galaxies, the first galaxies would be strikingly different, which will give us a clue about what dark matter is,” Mocz says.

To see how different a cold and a fuzzy early universe could be, the researchers simulated a small, cubic space of the early universe, measuring about 3 million light years across, and ran it forward in time to see how galaxies would form given one of the three dark matter scenarios: cold, warm, and fuzzy.

The team began each simulation by assuming a certain distribution of dark matter, which scientists have some idea of, based on measurements of the cosmic microwave background — “relic radiation” that was emitted by, and was detected just 400,000 years after, the Big Bang.

“Dark matter doesn’t have a constant density, even at these early times,” Vogelsberger says. “There are tiny perturbations on top of a constant density field.”

The researchers were able to use existing algorithms to simulate galaxy formation under scenarios of cold and warm dark matter. But to simulate fuzzy dark matter, with its quantum nature, they needed a new approach.

A map of harp strings

The researchers modified their simulation of cold dark matter, enabling it to solve two extra equations in order to simulate galaxy formation in a fuzzy dark matter universe. The first, Schrödinger’s equation, describes how a quantum particle acts as a wave, while the second, Poisson’s equation, describes how that wave generates a density field, or distribution of dark matter, and how that distribution leads to gravity — the force that eventually pulls in matter to form galaxies. They then coupled this simulation to a model that describes the behavior of gas in the universe, and the way it condenses into galaxies in response to gravitational effects.

In all three scenarios, galaxies formed wherever there were over-densities, or large concentrations of gravitationally collapsed dark matter. The pattern of this dark matter, however, was different, depending on whether it was cold, warm, or fuzzy. 

In a scenario of cold dark matter, galaxies formed in spherical halos, as well as smaller subhalos. Warm dark matter produced  first galaxies in tail-like filaments, and no subhalos. This may be due to warm dark matter’s lighter, faster nature, making particles less likely to stick around in smaller, subhalo clumps.

Similar to warm dark matter, fuzzy dark matter formed stars along filaments. But then quantum wave effects took over in shaping the galaxies, which formed more striated filaments, like strings on an invisible harp. Vogelsberger says this striated pattern is due to interference, an effect that occurs when two waves overlap. When this occurs, for instance in waves of light, the points where the crests and troughs of each wave align form darker spots, creating an alternating pattern of bright and dark regions.

In the case of fuzzy dark matter, instead of bright and dark points, it generates an alternating pattern of over-dense and under-dense concentrations of dark matter.

“You would get a lot of gravitational pull at these over-densities, and the gas would follow, and at some point would form galaxies along those over-densities, and not the under-densities,” Vogelsberger explains. “This picture would be replicated throughout the early universe.”

The team is developing more detailed predictions of what early galaxies may have looked like in a universe dominated by fuzzy dark matter. Their goal is to provide a map for upcoming telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, that may be able to look far enough back in time to spot the earliest galaxies. If they see filamentary galaxies such as those simulated by Mocz, Fialkov, Vogelsberger, and their colleagues, it could be the first signs that dark matter’s nature is fuzzy.

“It’s this observational test we can provide for the nature of dark matter, based on observations of the early universe, which will become feasible in the next couple of years,” Vogelsberger says.

This research was supported, in part, by NASA.

This is how a “fuzzy” universe may have looked syndicated from https://osmowaterfilters.blogspot.com/

[deythbanger]

Bible Arguments 14

By DeYtH Banger "And if a nonbeliever replies honestly, “I don’t know why there is something rather than nothing,” believers will crow: “Aha! You don’t have an answer, and I do!” This is known as a “god of the gaps” argument, or an argument from ignorance. Any mystery can be “solved” without doing any work, simply by plugging the hole with magic. But let’s be charitable and fair. On its face, the question is not necessarily religious. The motives of those who ask, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” may be honest and sincere, and even if not, that alone is no reason to dismiss their conclusion. Since something cannot come from nothing, their argument goes,…" - Dan Baker "If there is nothing, then there has to be something. So, “can something come from nothing?” really means “can something come from something?” and that is a no-brainer. “Can something be what makes it different from what it is not?” “Nothing” is just a word we use to identify absence. It is a concept, not a thing. The concept of absence can apply to things that are real as well as to things that are imaginary. The absence of Neanderthals and the absence of leprechauns arenot measured the same way, but they end up the same. Absence is absence. Since “nothing” is a concept, and concepts are a result, not a cause, of a brain, asking if something can come from nothing is like asking if a brain can come from a thought it is thinking." - Dan Baker "Why do we assume that reality, unmanaged, collapses to nothingness? Is it like gravity? The path of least resistance? From whence comes the great power of the void? (And if the void has this power, then it has something.) Perhaps it is the other way around: the great power of matter and energy is holding back the void. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” Aristotle thought. But that all seems pretty silly, because something/nothing is not a proper yin/yang. They are not balanced opposites of a composite whole. If they were, then zero would be the reciprocal for every other number and math would be meaningless. But one thing we do know—and if there were a god, he/she would know it too—is that something indeed does exist, so there is no argument. Reality has not decayed into nothingness, or remained in such a state, not in the natural world or the supernatural world (if there is such a place). In fact, if there were truly nothingness, there would be no reality at all, natural or supernatural. We are aware of the reality that something does exist. That’s what reality means. Whatever the Theory of Everything (TOE) turns out to be, there will come a point where we simply have to refer to a brute fact—perhaps strings or branes or quantum wave potential, or something else. That is exactly what theists do when they refer to their brute fact of…" - Dan Baker "Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking thinks our entire universe, not just particles, has arisen from the void. “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” Hawking writes. “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going." - Dan Baker "Therefore, nothing exists. Putting the two bad-grammar arguments together, we could prove that God is Utter Nothingness…" - Dan Baker "In the beginning there was nothing. God said, “Let there be light!” And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better.” —Ellen DeGeneres20 Notice that when we ask “can something come from nothing?” we are playing a loaded game similar to “who caused the thunder?” We are swallowing the claim that something, anything, always has to “come from” something or someone else. If we do that, we are forced to look for a “what” or a “who.” When we ask “can something come from nothing?” what do we mean by “come from”? I think there are two normal usages of that phrase: impersonal and personal. In ordinary usage, “comes from” means something physical and impersonal. A house “comes from” lumber or stone or building material. The lumber comes from trees, the stone from quarries, the bricks from mud, the nails and hardware from metal. A tree comes from a seed, the stone and metal comes from physical processes in the earth and the stars. And so on. These are all sufficient answers. So asking where the universe “came from” in that sense would be asking for the location of a huge quarry or forest of materials from which the construction materials…" - Dan Baker "…cause of its own existence and even the cause of the existence of God. (Not supernatural, but “naturalsuper.”) I have no reason to believe that contrived scenario, but it is no less fantastic than theism…" - Dan Baker "God is a spirit. —John 4:24 There is no good reason to believe in a god, but if such a being exists, he also should ask himself, “Why am I here? Why is there a god instead of no god?” Most believers will claim that a god would never ask where it came from because a god is a great spirit outside of nature. The “great spirit” is above the law: you can’t haul in the king for questioning, they insist. A spirit, they say, unlike us physical creatures, can indeed exist without an explanation, timeless, causeless, not needing a frame of reference or context. They imagine that there are actually three states of existence: nothing, something, and spirit. It is spirit that mediates between nothing and something, they claim. Spirit can cause something to come from nothing. God was looking around one day, saying, “There is nothing, and I don’t like it, so I am going to turn nothing into something. Fiat lux ex nihilo. Lo, behold, now something exists!" - Dan Baker "A spirit, whatever it is, must be either something or nothing. If it is not something, it is nothing. By the way, if God is defined as “a spirit,” then spirit is something that God is made of. So spirit is not God. It is something more basic, otherwise God could not be “a spirit.” Some believers will reply that a spirit is indeed “something,” but it is not “something natural.” The question “can something come from nothing?” really means “can something natural come from nothing?” The supernatural or spiritual realm (which they have conjured out of nothing) is exempt from the question, they insist. Their three states of existence really are: nothing, nature, and spirit. We are natural creatures asking a natural question—a question about the entire notion and existence of “natural”—and the only sensible answer, they claim, must come from outside." - Dan Baker "If nothing comes from nothing, and if God came from nothing, then God is nothing. Most believers insist that that is equivocating. We can’t compare God and the universe like that. God is a special case: he is great and personal and powerful and, unlike the impersonal lifeless universe, he has the ability to create himself. But how does that help their argument? If they say that “nothing comes from nothing” really means “nothing except God-who-is-great comes from nothing,” well there you go. They are back to question begging, inserting the conclusion into the premise. What could be a clearer example of circular logic? If you already believe in a god before you make the argument, then you don’t need the argument at all. It should be discarded. If believers agree that they don’t need the argument, but think that we atheists do—as a tool of evangelism—then they still need to convince us to embrace their “except God” qualification before we can get the argument off the ground, and if we did, we wouldn’t need the argument because we would no longer be atheists." - Dan Baker "He is the Creator. He is all-powerful. The king does not ask “who is above me?” God is “I am that I am” who needs no explanation. But when believers say God is “big” and “powerful,” what do they mean? Those are words of dimension, force, and time. Can the word “big” mean something without measuring along dimensions? Can the word “power” be understood without plotting work across a span of time? If God is truly outside those dimensions, then what does it matter if he is called “big” and “powerful”? Those words have no meaning outside of the natural world, if it is possible to be “outside” of the natural world." - Dan Baker "We may as well say “God is bliphish and pomthical.” God talk is nonsensical. He is the holy iDot. If God is truly outside of somethingness, he is nothing at all…" - Dan Baker "“Without God, We Are Nothing.” Pell was the Archbishop of Sydney. Today he is Number 3 at the Vatican, as the prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, Pope Francis’s new finance ministry. If anyone is an expert in the faith, it would be “His Eminence Cardinal Pell.” (I couldn’t bring myself to use that title: he called me “Dan,” so I called him “George.”) During the debate, he used the word “spirit” and “spiritual” a number of times, so during cross examination, I asked him this question: Dan: Can you define for us, using positive terms, what is a “spirit,” and how that would differ from nothing at all? George: I just said that I can’t define “God,” but I can say something useful about “spirit.” I believe in the reality of love. I believe it’s a spiritual quality. I believe honor is something that is real. Disgrace is real. Forgiveness is real. Something spiritual is invisible, but sometimes it can be very powerful. The love of a husband and wife, the love between parents and children, they are probably the most important realities in many people’s lives. They are spiritual realities. Dan: Let me follow up. I can define all of those things, like love, family, and feelings, in purely natural terms, as functions of an organism. But why were you not begging the question by saying that the definition of “spiritual” is love, which is spiritual? I want to know what it is. Does it occupy space? Does it occupy time? Does it have a weight? Can you measure it along a dimension? How would you know that your “spirit” is not just a concept as opposed to an actually existing thing in reality? George: Well, you can’t measure a spirit. It is certainly not material. But the examples that I have given are very real and very powerful. Once there was an Australian poet who said that sometimes people can be at a concert and be like dogs at a concert. They hear every sound but have got no understanding of the music, because the music is something that is spiritual and beautiful and real. They can’t be reduced. They are connected with physical activities, but they can’t be reduced to those physical activities. So I’m a dog, but I take that as a compliment. Notice that Pell said “spirit” is immaterial and invisible and can’t be measured, but it has power. Does he not know that power is measured materially? He sidestepped telling us what a “spirit” actually is. When believers are asked to define what “spirit” actually is—not to list synonyms like ghost, vision, or poltergeist; or attitudes like enthusiasm, love, emotion, or determination; but to describe the actual substance of the entity—they always define it by what it is not: intangible, noncorporeal, immaterial, ineffable, non-natural. (They might even say “the spirit is the ethereal essence.”) They never tell us anything positive. " - Dan Baker "Even if spirit does exist in some unknowable way—in spite of my impertinence in asking for a definition—what do believers mean when they say it is “outside” of nature? Exactly where is that? If a spirit is outside of nature, it still must be somewhere, in a region “beyond.” And that is still a place. Something might indeed be outside our own observable universe in the wider cosmos, but how can anything be outside of nature? Universes within the multiverse would certainly be outside of each other, but they would still be part of the natural cosmos. If we don’t have a coherent definition of “outside of nature,” then it is meaningless to suggest that that is where the spirit or supernatural exists. Some think that to be outside of nature is to be in another dimension. But that is incoherent. Dimensions are used to measure natural things. Dimensions are what we mean when we say something is natural: the object occupies space and time, which are charted in four dimensions, at least. The amounts of space and time that an object occupies are measured along those dimensions compared to other objects, or the distance between other objects, which…" - Dan Baker "“Can something come from nothing?” might be unanswerable because it is unaskable. Logically, mathematically unaskable…" - Dan Baker "“What is s/0?” Don’t even try to reply. It is not a valid question. The reason we cannot divide by zero—the reason it is a nonsensical question—is because “divide” means to “share.” It’s where we get the phrase “divvy up.” How can three children share twelve cookies? By giving four cookies to each child. But if you don’t have any children who want the cookies, then it makes no sense to talk about sharing the cookies. You can only share (divide) when you have a positive nonzero number of divisors (children). If the number of numerators (cookies) is negative, we are talking about sharing a debt, which is the same thing in obverse. If the number is zero, we can’t…" - Dan Baker "Ultimately, when the cause or source of the cosmos gets down to the simplest brute fact—when the divisor finally shrinks to one—the question will be “what is something divided by one?” The answer will be “itself.” Since believers think “God divided by one” is a valid question while “God divided by zero” is not, why do they not allow me to think the same of the cosmos? There actually is a sneaky way to do an end run and “divide by zero” without causing a crash, and that is to divide zero by itself. This is a trick because we can’t actually divide by zero, and would never need to, but based on the axiom that any number divided by itself (n/n) is 1, we might logically (not mathematically) conclude that 0/0=1. This checks out because 1x0=0. So if 0/0=1, then “nothing from nothing” equals something. Something from nothing. If nothing truly existed (0/0), it would be something…" - Dan Baker

[wikipress01]

Read Stephen Hawking’s final theory on the Big Bang

Before he handed away in March, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking had printed greater than 230 articles on the start of the universe, black holes and quantum mechanics. It seems he had another theory left in the locker.

On Wednesday, the Journal of High Energy Physics printed the British scientist’s final ideas on the Big Bang, the main theory for the way the universe started. The new report, co-authored by Belgian physicist Thomas Hertog, counters the longstanding concept that the universe will increase for eternity. Instead, the authors argue the Big Bang had a finite boundary, outlined by string theory and holograms.

Wait, what?

If you requested an astrophysicist at this time to explain what occurred after the Big Bang, he would seemingly begin with the idea of “cosmic inflation.” Cosmic inflation argues that proper after the Big Bang — we’re speaking after a teeny fraction of a second — the universe expanded at breakneck pace like dough in an oven.

But this exponential growth ought to create, resulting from quantum mechanics, areas the place the universe continues to develop eternally and areas the place that development stalls. The consequence can be a multiverse, a set of bubblelike pockets, every outlined by its personal legal guidelines of physics.

Diagram of evolution of the (observable half) of the universe from the Big Bang (left) to the current. After the Big Bang and inflation, the growth of the universe regularly slowed down for the subsequent a number of billion years, as the matter in the universe pulled on itself by way of gravity. More just lately, the growth has begun to hurry up once more as the repulsive results of darkish vitality have come to dominate the growth of the universe. Image and caption by NASA

“The local laws of physics and chemistry can differ from one pocket universe to another, which together would form a multiverse,” Hertog stated in an announcement. “But I have never been a fan of the multiverse. If the scale of different universes in the multiverse is large or infinite the theory can’t be tested.”

Along with being troublesome to help, the multiverse theory, which was co-developed by Hawking in 1983, doesn’t jibe with classical physics, particularly the contributions of Einstein’s theory of normal relativity as they relate to the construction and dynamics of the universe.

“As a consequence, Einstein’s theory breaks down in eternal inflation,” Hertog stated.

Einstein’s theory of normal relativity says area and time aren’t mounted, however bending to the forces of gravity. But the idea doesn’t match with quantum mechanics, the quirky physics that offers with the smallest of issues — subatomic particles.

Einstein spent his life looking for a unified theory, a option to reconcile the largest and smallest of issues, normal relativity and quantum mechanics. He died by no means having achieved that purpose, however leagues of physicists like Hawking adopted in Einstein’s footsteps. One path led to holograms.

The new theory

Last July, Hawking and Hertog offered this new theory of the multiverse throughout a convention at the University of Cambridge to rejoice Hawking’s 75th birthday.

Their concept hinges on the so-called “holographic principle” As its title suggests, the precept argues that the universe is a hologram. The precept hails from string theory, the department of physics attempting to make normal relativity and quantum mechanics coexist.

Hawking and Hertog’s new theory performs off this concept, suggesting the world as we all know it may be lowered mathematically right into a simplified model of itself…

String theory stipulates the world is manufactured from strings, present mathematically as 9 dimensions of area and one dimension of time. You’re conversant in the first three dimensions — size, peak and depth — and hopefully the fourth, time.

But a kind of strings dictates the presence of gravity. Remove it, and gravity not exists.

Hawking and Hertog’s new theory performs off this concept, suggesting the world as we all know it may be lowered mathematically right into a simplified model of itself — that may be expressed with out gravity. It’s nearly like a 3-D projection being defined in 2-D — or a hologram. (There’s really proof that the world works this manner).

Now, think about you have been to do the similar factor for time: take away the string that governs it. This types the foundation of Hawking and Hertog’s new theory.

Why it issues

If time is a detachable string, then there may very well be locations or moments in the historical past of the universe that function with out it.

In Hawking and Hertog’s latest theory, time is the fly in the ointment, maintaining cosmic inflation from aligning with normal relativity. So they handled the moments after the Big Bang, when inflation occurred, as a timeless state. In essence, they’re saying this era of inflation operated exterior the bounds of Einstein’s relativity.

That, in flip, would scale back the variety of native legal guidelines governing the universe and convey scientists nearer to a unified theory.

This idea contradicts an concept that Hawking proposed many years in the past: that the starting of time had no boundaries. “Now we’re saying that there is a boundary in our past,” Hertog stated. In different phrases, that boundary is the absence of time proper after the Big Bang.

Their report stated these calculations tame the multiverse, creating an easier and extra constant construction of the universe.

“We are not down to a single, unique universe, but our findings imply a significant reduction of the multiverse, to a much smaller range of possible universes,” Hawking stated in an interview final autumn.

Some physicists level out that the Hawking-Hertog theory is preliminary and must be thought-about hypothesis till different mathematicians can replicate its equations.

You can choose for your self. Hawking’s final paper is open-access and obtainable for obtain at the Journal of High Energy Physics. Or you may learn a preprint model of the piece down under, courtesy of arXiv:

Source hyperlink from http://www.wikipress.co.uk/science/read-stephen-hawkings-final-theory-on-the-big-bang/

[kleeirwin]

BECAUSE YOU ASKED " AM I CORRECT IN ASSUMING THAT THIS THEORY IS A SCIENTIFICALLY BASED FORM OF MATHEMATICAL PLATONISM?"

Our philosophy and the ideas in the What Is Reality movie have some relationship to Mathematical Platonism. And though our view of the universe as information could be encoded as a number, and look like Platonism...this would be too deterministic.

Our philosophy is separate from Mathematical Platonism, as explained in the Third Ontology. We are talking about a language, not a number. We can see it as a set of numbers, but something is choosing which one (in some context/scale…) from the set of possibilities. This ‘chooser’ is a ‘conscious entity’, expressing freewill, even if this may be very different from a human consciousness.

The "stuff" of the universe is less abstract in our view than the "ideas" of Platonism. We are more similar to string theory or loop quantum gravity. Energy, matter, and spacetime are made from something, which is not energy, matter or spacetime, but information which, we believe, is possibly encoded as a network of connections (I often refer to this as a type of "neural network"). The concept of ‘Space as a network’ could be described by mathematical Set theory as explored by Stephen Wolfram. So a kind of Platonism upgraded by Frank Wilczek, as quoted in the movie;) Here is a link to 'The Code Theoretic Axiom: The Third Ontology' video/paper. This provides an in-depth answer to the question.

#klee irwin #quantum physics #Quantum Gravity Research #mathematical platonism #string theory #loop quantum gravity #physics #science #code

[art-of-mathematics]

Understanding fourier transform through the back door haha

I don't know, but putting the pieces together is so fun. Recently I found what diffraction actually is, how it relates to interference, and simultaneously Gaussian standard distribution was stuck in my mind. Interestingly I have been playing with Fibonacci numbers and the result just looks like probability distributions of the double slit experiment/ diffraction-interference pattern. Haha

Maybe I'm just being silly, but it is so neat to find similar patterns all over again and again.

It also fits with the animations I have in my imagination, which might make sense of - yes - quantum mechanical behavior in general. Regarding elementary particles as a dynamical information geometry makes more and more sense the more I dig deeper into the underlying issues.

It might make sense in my concept of 'information weaving' and butterfly progression (self-interference pattern) and might also allow a concept of a certain space-time loop (similiar like ones imagined in loop quantum gravity). It may sound like a fusion of LQG and string theory in some sense. But the only principle I took from string theory was the uttermost basic definition relating to the fractal-like pattern of nestedness/recursion (The attributes of elementary particles have to stem from an inner principle). Unlike in string theory, the "strings" (which are also responsible for the attributes of elementary particles in my interpretation) are no physical elements in my hypothesis, merely a weaving of mathematical information. Physical reality can be regarded as a certain weaving sequence of mathematical information, hence quantum mechanical superposition and entanglement can be regarded as a moment when mathematical reality weaves itself, (self-interference). One might consider information weaving as weaving of imaginary numbers. To follow the beauty and elegant simplicity of the imaginary number system it makes sense that an imaginary mathematical reality can turn into a real physical reality, as every second power of i is a real number.

Furthermore it might also explain what the wave function and especially its collapse actually is. The wave function collapse is the self-interference. And interestingly, if we consider emergence as a factor we can also say that elementary particles "emerge" their attributes with every interaction/interference; Much like a chaos attractor whose deviations from the mean get smaller and smaller and emerge to a binary more deterministic bahavior, leading to the efficiacy of the laws of classical mechanics.

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