Time Beyond the Big Bang?

06.05.06 Every so often a new hypothesis comes along that has more than just great descriptive powers, but the capacity to expand the human imagination as well. A cyclical universe based on string theory is an especially intriguing example because it postulates time extending beyond the fiery Big Bang event, typically considered the beginning of time, space and everything else. This idea emerges from the need to explain the cosmological constant found today that is much smaller than calculations predict.

"Ever since the 1960s, people assumed that the big bang was the beginning of time, because the laws of physics seem to break down there," says Turok. But the equations of string theory tell a different story, allowing time to exist before the big bang, he says.

According to Steinhardt and Turok, today's universe is part of an endless cycle of big bangs and big crunches, with each cycle lasting about a trillion years. At every big bang, the amount of matter and radiation in the universe is reset, but the cosmological constant is not. Instead, the cosmological constant gradually diminishes over many cycles to the small value observed today.

... "This is an ingenious solution," says cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, US. But he points out that there are other cosmic coincidences that the cyclic model cannot explain, like why the size of the cosmological constant is so similar to the density of matter in the universe today.

Turok says that he and Steinhardt will be looking at that problem next. "This is an initial attempt to go beyond Einstein's theory of gravity," says Turok. "It would be surprising if we solved everything first time."
Cyclic universe' can explain cosmological constant, New Scientist, May 4, 2006.

Thoughts on Time Travel

03.12.03 Our traditional conceptions of time travel are deeply flawed, and thus when examined closely reveal only contradictions and paradoxes if put into practice. For instance if someone goes back in time, would they then be creating their own time machine? Or what if they kill their grandparents, or, well… you know the stories.

Reverse time travel would definitely do strange things, but not the paradoxes that clichéd science-fiction often use as plot-devices. In the process of going back in time it would reverse causality too, so instead of flipping a switch to turn on a light you would flip the switch after the light is on. This is one of many reasons why time travel backwards is simply not possible, the structure of time is a connected and limited by the structure of space. Further the flow of time is connected to the expansions of the universe, and also if that expansion were to reverse so would our arrow of time.

Small fluctuations, random vibrations even down to the quantum level, are inherently unpredictable and lead to a vibrant and dynamic flow of time and events, thus even going back in time and restarting would not see the same course of events; nothing is pre-determined, although at a macro-scale certain events are certainly more likely than others. But this is not the same as lack of free-will or predestination. Randomness is created by heat because it is the heat that causes molecules and atoms to move around, so literally the chaotic nature of our reality (entropy) is a product of some mere three degrees Kelvin that our universe is currently warmed to. Freezing a set of atoms down to absolute aero, meaning no heat at all, creates a strange form of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate. The atoms merge into one solid block that is indistinguishable – without heat all matter turns into a single solid atom of … stuff.

So we have to think of time like space, the two are inter-related dimensions. Change time, change space or change space, and change time too. If the universe expands then time expands, if the universe is contracting so does time. And it would be very intriguing if a separate region inside our universe were found to be contracting instead of expanding, but this is very unlikely, and even if it occurred there’s no guarantee that travel would be possible between the regions.

Reverse causality would be a profoundly bizarre thing to experience from our perspective, but in practice it may seem just as normal for your cup of water to get hot before you push the start button on the microwave oven, instead of after as we’re used to. Even thought and action would be reversed, so during backwards time travel your thoughts would come after your action connected to it. Given this strange state it would seem to me that even if backwards time travel could be done it would probably erase memories and maybe other things as well but whatever happened it would not be as neat and painless as stepping into a booth and setting a clock, at least not while still being able to remain attached to your own space-timeline. Otherwise, if possible at all, you could go back in time but you’d be completely separated in space as well from your original universe so again no information would ever be transferred in a way that it could be used – and the laws of physics win again.

Forward time travel is much easier, just speed up! Anything traveling near light speed will continue at normal time, but everyone else will seem to you to be going much slower and will age millions of years when you come back from your relativistic travels. So even at much slower than light speed travel those speedy astronauts in their space craft zipping around Earth right now are maybe a few seconds younger than the Earthbound rest of us. But the value of this sort of ‘time travel’, if it can be called that, is fairly limited. In fact the harmful radiation exposure from space travel negates any life-span extensions! Amazingly enough, travel faster than light (FTL) is possible but it cannot ever convey any useful information at that rate. In other words FTL, as we know it, is not what anyone would consider to be useful. An interesting book on this topic is, Faster Than Light – superluminal loopholes in physics, by Nick Herbert PhD, 1989.

So, as far as we are concerned when it comes to time it's safe to state that the magnitude can change but not the direction. The only way to change the direction of time would be to change the characteristics of space. If matter could be removed from the universe, black holes perhaps, then the gravity could be reduced and the universe might shrink. But even if possible, that’s one incredibly inefficient, and probably suicidal, way to try and reverse time.

Things That Keep Me Awake At Night

22.09.02 CERN's particle accelerator in Switzerland has accumulated enough anti-hydrogen to conduct some basic experiments concerning the properties of anti-matter. Even though many people thought that anti-matter was a new creation, it's not. Rather, the news is the quantity of it.

I got to thinking about something else though. Every book on particle physics I've read has operated on the assumption that anti-matter is a mirror refection of matter, meaning that it's the same stuff but it has opposite charges. This seems simple enough, but as we probably all know, when anti-matter meets regular matter they instantly annihilate with the release of a flash of energy. This, after all, is the attraction of matter/anti-matter as a future energy source because it's a perfect transfer, you don't lose anything in the conversion process. But this is the part that is perplexing because if matter and anti-matter were really exact copies then they both should simply vanish upon contact without any energy release.

Any equal quantity (x) of matter combined with an equal quantity of anti-matter yields nothing but a certain amount of energy. The math looks like this (-x) + (+x) = 0 + energy, but as we all know the actual math equation is just (-x) + (+x) = 0. Where does the energy (in this case gamma rays) come from?

Matter is equivalent to energy, the two are interchangeable according to the equation E=mc2. And the conservation laws tell us we can never get something from nothing, but neither can we lose more than we have to begin with. In other words the two parts on either sides of the equals sign in the equation must be equivalent. Given that, from everything I know it seems we have a problem here because the matter/anti-matter equation is telling us that (-1) + (+1) = 1 (or some positive amount >1)

Either matter-antimatter interactions don't follow conservation laws, like everything else known to us, or there's a fundamental difference between the two types of matter that seriously contradicts established physics. Even if you say the energy comes from the bonds between the particles, you have to postulate that some part of the antiparticle is the same as a regular particle meaning the two types are asymmetrical. I don't see any other way to cut it.

Am I missing something? Anyone have any ideas? Hopefully CERN will figure this out, one way or the other; the results may be surprising.

We already know that matter and anti-matter do have an asymmetry called Charge Parity (CP) violation. But that just says that matter and anti-matter are not created in equal quantities. If at the start of the universe equal parts had poured out, then the universe would consist entirely of energy.

High Energy physics has found more than one of these near symmetries, it's enough to drive one mad in frustration because we shouldn't find any. The universe is really symmetrical but those extra dimensions all curled up (nearly) beyond measurement do exert an influence on our level, hence the near symmetries. Add in the extra dimension and it does become symmetrical.

Cosmological Life

01.01.01 Life comes from space, carried on comets, or at least that's where I would start looking. Most likely a virus or similar ultra-simple basic self-replication device. But life doesn't live in space, it just hibernates and passes through, and like a virus it needs a habitable realm to spread and live. And I think we'll find that life can only take hold on habitable planets or moons during a very narrow time window. Like the egg that forms a barrier upon fertilization. The Earth, for example, quickly formed an atmosphere around four billion years ago, which would then vaporize any life entering the atmosphere. And also we know that early Earth was bombarded by comets giving it large quantities of water. Panspermia, that life is omnipresent has some problems because after all wouldn't we find it? More likely it's out there but either localized or rare, meaning thinly spread. Still, life had to start somewhere and this concept merely makes it more possible by including the vastness of space (and especially those warm interstellar clouds of chemicals) as breeding ground. Abiogenesis is about the only non-supernatural hypothesis around. And at present no one really knows exactly how it did or could happen. But accidents do happen even when the chances are billions to one, as long as the accident is self-replicating it will propagate.

Special creation and the tautology of the absurdly simple

One sees the universe as being custom crafted, being made for human inhabitants (by God). That's illogical reasoning. The reason everything seems so 'special' is because if it wasn't we wouldn't be around to contemplate it! If the universe was made of black holes no life could be in it to marvel at those black holes. If the universe was all energy, no life would be in it to contemplate the all energy universe. Things are as they are because they must be that way for us to be around to see them, not because of any detached, supernatural beings fickle whims. And this is not the anthropic principle either, human perception, indeed all life is secondary to the issue.

As our scientific knowledge has increased so has our concept of scale as we humans fit into the larger picture. At first it was just the tribe, then the continent, then planet Earth, then the solar system with Earth as the center, then Copernicus showed the sun was the center of the solar system, then we thought the Milky way galaxy was all that existed, then galaxies turned into just another smaller component of the larger whole, the Universe. But it doesn't stop there by any means, for what we see to exist requires other universes, a universe of universes and a probability or evolution of sorts on a meta-universal scale. As humbling as it is the scale and perhaps significance of humanity shrinks in accordance with the magnitude of our knowledge. Universes are like grains of sand on the beach, or stars in our sky, or atoms in our body. How high does the meta scale climb? Will we ever know? All I can conclude for now is that's definitely a niche for the philosophers! Finally, if you want a theological scale-conundrum to ruminate over ask yourself who created God?

Heavy Gravity

14.01.00 Anyone who’s followed recent theoretical musings on the lifecycle of the universe knows about the dark matter debate. Fundamentally, the problem is that a deficit of matter appears to exist in the universe to account for the gravitational mechanics that are observed. Thus one conclusion is that large quantities of unknown or undetected matter must exist to account for the structure of the known universe. It could be simple, like neutrinos (if they have enough mass and quantity), or something totally unknown yet. But one answer I haven’t seen explored has to do with black holes. Since black holes suck in matter and energy without producing anything at all in return, then logically the universe today has less matter and energy than it did 10-15 billion years ago when it started out. And since the observed distant universe is farther back in time, perhaps the mass-gravitational characteristics of our universe are changing. This is actually fairly profound because it could mean that the very laws of physics are changing as well.

But in order for this hypothesis to work it would require many black holes or a few very large ones gobbling up matter and energy never to be seen again. This concept is increasingly plausible especially with the discovery of both naked black holes and stranded black holes outside galaxies. It seems that black holes may be much more abundant than previously thought. These two discoveries alone will significantly alter our ideas on the destiny of our universe.

...if the strong nuclear force had been slightly weaker, the universe would have been composed of hydrogen only; slightly stronger, and all the hydrogen would have been converted to helium. Slight variation in the excess of protons over antiprotons - one billion and one to one billion- might have produced a universe with no baryonic matter or a cataclysmic plenitude of it. Had the expansion rate of the universe one second after the big bang been smaller by one part in a hundred thousand trillion, the universe would have recollapsed long ago. An expansion more rapid by one part in a million would have excluded the formation of stars and planets.
From: Wrinkles in Time, by G. Smoot, p.293. / 21.02.98

Everything explained

13.06.98 Quantum mechanics has a very difficult time explaining why things happen even if it can predict what will happen. I have a problem with all the current theories, such as the many-universes, because they all are unnecessarily complex. It seems more likely that the nature of quantum reality is fundamentally very simple, even if doesn’t necessarily appear that way. We need to go back to ‘Occam's razor’, the simplest answer is the most correct. Modern quantum science’s second error is the assumption that the descriptions of quantum systems are mutually exclusive, that only one explanation is valid, but they may not be! Perhaps it’s all just different facets of the same object.

The first point to explain is time. Time is a human limitation on our perception of reality; we can’t know it all, only a tiny bit. The sense of matter, energy, everything is merely looking at the same object from different angles like rotating a die we see different numbers but it’s all on the same object. Time is just a perception of different sides sequentially ordered. We cant see the whole cube at once but we can see the parts if they are spread out on a historical timeline!

Now if this dimensional analogy is extended to create an object with infinite sides , like a sphere, that is our universe. It’s impossible for us to see each side but we can know one tiny, tiny part at a time.

Evolution, life, death, it's all a path of connected scenes forming the facets of the infinitely sided object. It makes sense (history, future etc.) to us because it follows the line of most probable events. Nothing changes, all is as it ever will be, every possibility exist simultaneously. So, going back to the dice analogy with something like evolution, or our own lives, are just looking at the dice multiple times. Overall any number on the slide show is random but the whole number set follows a probability; two dice average out to a most common number of seven.

This is fractal geometry at work because it mimics the quantum reality that we measure. In other words if we look at a small enough unit (one frame in the film) it becomes random and unpredictable, quantum uncertainties. But the larger structure follows statistical patterns, it’s ordered and predictable, like life systems.

The number seven is the equivalent of our universe, the one we see with the Hubble telescope and the electron microscope. Our whole universe is a completely normal average occurrence, we are 7! Small scale randomness, i.e. the snake eyes or the double sixes, are here too but they don’t dominate, they just add color to the 'painting'.

So if nothing really changes who defines the order of the slide show? Who or what determines the pattern of time that we perceive? I think it’s a combination of group perceptions spread by communication and solipsistic interpretations. Think about it though, can anyone feel exactly the way I feel, to feel what I feel?! No! all perceptions are inherently individualistic. Everyone has their own reality. The simplest solution to the problem of group perceptions is to just eliminate the group. After all every sense of reality ultimately boils down to personal perceptions, feelings and sensations. Everything is me, I am the universe; reality is my own filmstrip.

Next comes the question why is everything the way it is? Why does time follow an order a repetitive pattern? All reality is tautology! I perceive time thus what I see in the universe (how everything evolves) supports this reasoning of time scale. Evolutionary structures are statistically the most probable method of creating a perception of time. None of this is good or bad, it’s just statistics; it’s all the number seven.

Everyone gets into the philosophical argument over what created the universe, or how did universes begin evolving? It’s irrelevant; creation is a meaningless concept to the meta universe(s). The structure consists of nothing and everything superimposed simultaneously! This hyper-structure that our universe exists in isn’t some grandiose concept or a playpen for God, it’s really a fantastic simplicity that stunts comprehension. All that is, will be, or can be, is nothing more than a minimal fundamental duality. It’s a unit that consists of a ‘-’ and a ‘+’, a yin and a yang or a 1 and a -1.

This is everything:

( 1 + -1 )
minus the parenthesis of course!

or just
0

Every universe that has lived and died and reproduced all at compressed to instantaneousness. The amazing complexity of what we see is nothing more than a portion of the ultimate mathematical simplicity, a singularity. Complexity is just a fraction of simplicity! Commutatively, the sum of all complexity is simplicity. That's it right there!! The sum of all complexity is total simplicity. ‘Everything’ is ultimately just a portion of ‘nothing’.

The most ridiculous collective myth is that everything means something, that a purpose and a goal exists. The truth is that nothing has substance outside of the fraction of a second that is consciousness! Matter, time, and energy are just reflections of higher dimensionality. Just as we can’t comprehend a 2-D reality neither can we understand how a 5th or 6th dimensions functions.