Programmed Reality

A great article in Scientific American, "A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity," is well worth the read.  

Locality in physics is the idea that things are only influenced by forces that are local or nearby.  The water boiling on the stovetop does so because of the energy imparted from the flame beneath.  Even the sounds coming out of your radio are decoded from the electromagnetic disturbance in the air next to the antenna, which has been propagating from the radio transmitter at the speed of light.  But, think we all, nothing can influence anything remotely without a "chain reaction" disturbance, which according to Einstein can not exceed the speed of light.  

However, says Quantum Mechanics, there is something called entanglement.  No, not the kind you had with Becky under the bleachers in high school.  This kinds of entanglement says that particles that once "interacted" are forever entangled, whereby their properties are reflected in each other's behavior.  For example, take 2 particles that came from the same reaction and separate them by galactic distances.  What one does, the other will follow.  This has been proven to a distance of at least 18 km and seems to violate Einstein's theory of Special Relativity.

Einstein, of course, took issue with this whole concept in his famous EPR paper, preferring to believe that "hidden variables" were responsible for the effect.  But, in 1964, physicist John Bell developed a mathematical proof that no local theory can account for all of Quantum Mechanics experimental results.  In other words, the world is non-local.  Period.  It is as if, says the SciAm article, "a fist in Des Moines can break a nose in Dallas without affecting any other physical thing anywhere in the heartand. "  Alain Aspect later performed convincing experiments that demonstrated this non-locality.  45 years after John Bell's proof, scientists are coming to terms with the idea that the world is non-local and special relativity has limitations.  Both ideas are mind-blowing.

But, as usual, there are a couple of clever paradigms that get around it all, each of which are equally mind-blowing.  In one, our old friend the "Many Worlds" theory, zillions of parallel universes are spawned every second, which account for the seeming non-locality of reality.  In the other, "history plays itself out not in the three-dimensional spacetime of special relativity but rather this gigantic and unfamiliar configuration space, out of which the illusion of three-dimensionality somehow emerges."

I have no problem explaining all of these ideas via programmed reality.

Special Relativity has to do with our senses, not with reality.  True simultaneity is possible because our reality is an illusion.  And there is no speed limit in the truer underlying construct.  So particles have no problem being entangled.  

Many Worlds can be implemented by multiple instances of reality processes.  Anyone familiar with computing can appreciate how instances of programs can be "forked" (in Unix parlance) or "spawned" (Windows, VMS, etc.).  You've probably even seen it on your buggy Windows PC, when instances of browsers keep popping up like crazy and you can't kill the tasks fast enough and end up either doing a hard shutdown or waiting until the little bastard blue-screens.  Well, if the universe is just run by a program, why can't the program fork itself whenever it needs to, explaining all of the mysteries of QM that can't be explained by wave functions.  

And then there is "configuration space."  Nothing more complex than multiple instances of the reality program running, with the conscious entity having the ability to move between them, experiencing reality and all the experimental mysteries of Quantum Mechanics.

Hey physicists - get your heads out of the physics books and start thinking about computer science!

(thanks to Poet1960 for allowing me to use his great artwork) 

Tags: nonlocality, non-locality, quantum mechanics, programmed reality, many worlds, parallel universes, entanglement, relativity, special relativity, physics, computer science
Categories: Philosophy | Programmed Reality | Quantum Mechanics

Here's an interesting idea.  To avoid an impending disaster, all you have to do is forget your past.  So says physicist Saibal Mitra at the University of Amsterdam.  Even changing the past seems to be possible, believe it or not.

His idea is predicated on accepting our old friend, the Everett interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, aka the Many Universes theory.  According to Mitra, if the collective observers memory is reset prior to a cataclysmic event, such as a species ending asteroid impact, the state of the universe becomes "undetermined."  As a result, it has an equal likelihood of following any of the many subsequent paths, most of which should have nothing to do with an asteroid impact.  And so, by selectively forgetting our past, we can avoid certain doom by starting with a clean slate of future outcomes.  See this New Scientist article.

There is something unsettling about the logic, but his paper seems to be on firm footing: http://arxiv.org/abs/0902.3825.  And the implications are fascinating.  Not happy with how last year's Superbowl turned out?  Keep a single copy of the event, erase everyone's memory, replace all archived bits of history relating to the game, and then we can all sit back and watch the recording again.  Mitra says if we do that, there's a good chance Arizona will win.  Watching the same tape!  Well, maybe not the same tape.  Because once the universe became undetermined again, the physical tape could have encoded any number of outcomes.

This a vaguely reminiscent of "Last Thursdayism," which is one of the possible aspects of Programmed Reality.  Once the universe is reset from an observational standpoint, we would never know the difference and an entirely different future course of events is possible.  If you make the restart point somewhere in our current past, then the recent past can be changed too.  Programmed Reality explains it all! 

Tags: everett interpretation, last thursdayism, quantum mechanics, programmed reality, parallel universes, many worlds, mwi, reverse causality, retrocausality
Categories: Philosophy | Programmed Reality | Quantum Mechanics

It turns out that it is very likely that an unseen world is occupying the same space that we do.  What goes on there?  Are there Bizarro humans living with Bizarro pets in Bizarro homes, working at Bizarro jobs, just like we do?

Astronomers who have studied the motion of galaxies and clusters of galaxies have noticed that such large astronomical objects rotate too fast for the amount of matter inferred by their size, distance, and luminosity.  Further, in order for the universe to be flat, as it is observed, there must be much more matter than is currently visible.  In fact, by some estimates, observable matter only accounts for less than 1% of the mass of the universe.  The rest, therefore, must be dark – hence the name “dark matter.”  Many varieties of dark matter have been proposed, including exotic dark matter consisting of various high energy loose particles such as neutrinos and theoretical particles called WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles).  Also in the menu of candidates for dark matter are big chunky masses called MACHOs (massive compact halo objects - don’t astronomers have a great sense of humor?), which include brown dwarfs, planets, or black holes.  Certain studies of the structure of the early universe, however, have demonstrated that MACHOs can not account for more than a fraction of the total dark matter.

As a result, WIMPs are winning the battle.  Anomalous scientific results from Results from ATIC (Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter in Antarctica, PAMELA (an Italian space mission called a Payload for AntiMatter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics), and INTEGRAL (a European Gamma Ray satellite, INTErnational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory) ) are starting to narrow down the kinds of particle that could be responsible.  See Kaluza-Klein particles for more (also see New Scientist article).

Interesting, this has some fascinating implications.  The fact that WIMPs don't interact means we don't even know they are there.  Because the measurements imply that they are integrated into our space just like ordinary matter is, they are effectively right next to us and we have no way of detecting them.  

But what form are they in?  Is it a sea of particles?  Or do they clump like ordinary matter?  The answer appears to be the latter.  According to Hubble data, dark matter clumps at all magnitudes (see Science Daily article), which means it looks pretty much like ordinary matter.

What does all this mean?  All indications are that there is tons (figuratively speaking) of invisible, undetectable material existing right in our own space.  In fact, by all accounts, there is about 7 times as much as our common ordinary matter.  For all we know, there are dark desks, dark Volvos, and dark versions of Donald Trump's hair.

 
Tags: dark matter, parallel universes, parallel worlds, wimps, machos, bizarro, cosmology, dark energy
Categories: Cosmology | Particle Physics | Programmed Reality