The Deduction of the Theory of Everything

Discussion in 'General Philosophy' started by SciWriter, May 5, 2012.

  1. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,028
    The Deduction of the Theory of Everything

    1. There is existence; we are in it. While we are only privy to what is formed within our brains, we know there is a reality ‘out there’ because our senses take it in. This point is made since some say that reality is a projection; however the projector would still have a real existence.

    2. The base, root existence could have no prior existence making it up, leaving only nonexistence to constitute it somehow. Either existence or nonexistence is the basis of all.

    3. The basis of all, then, is either a thing or no-thing, each necessarily eternal and everywhere.

    4. The basis of all must be eternal, of forever duration, for it would not be the basis of all if another basis was before it.

    5. The basis of all must be infinite, of everywhere’s extent, for it would not be the basis of all if another basis was outside it.

    6. A lack of everything (nothing) did not happen, for there is existence.

    7. We cannot say that nothing begets nothing, for we do not know what the lack of anything could or couldn’t do. We can say, though, that it has no ‘what’ (contents), no where (place), no laws, no math, no known constraints, not anything to it, etc.

    8. Either (A) the basis of all is a base existent, which is necessarily a thing, or (B) the basis of all is nonexistence, a no-thing.

    9. The basis of all must be the simplest state, because it wouldn’t be the basis if it could be decomposed further. We do also see that composites are formed of simpler and simpler things, down unto the minuscule.

    10. There can be no cause for the basis of all, since, again, then it is not the basis of all, so, it is necessarily causeless. We do see cause and effect above and beyond it, though. For the causeless, we have to find something other than cause and effect, such as an equation, perhaps.

    11. For (A), the base existent thing would have to be unbreakable, as it could have no lower parts, and also unnamable, since it was never made, having been around forever. We don’t see a way that a thing could be already made and defined in its particulars without ever having been made and defined as such. This is not to say that there couldn’t be many, different base existents, this being separation instead of unity. We also don’t see what could have decided the total amount of instances of the base existent(s), nor why they would be workable as they are, rather than inert. This leaves the notion incomplete, and so it cannot become right until its incompleteness goes away. Incomplete notions are always wrong, if only by the virtue of their incompleteness. Having an infinite regress of smaller and smaller things does not help the incompleteness problem, but only adds to it.

    12. For (B), having the basis of all being nonexistence, the base existent(s) would have to have been created from it. not being eternal in themselves, but this is not to say that they are not ever being created, as well as canceling back into nonexistence. A great support for this notion is that there is literally nothing to make anything of, that is, no other thing could contribute to the creation of the thing of the base existent(s), and so it appears inviolate, having no way around it.

    13. We still don’t know what a lack of anything could do, for sure, all in all, even if we propose that it is lawless, and so anything goes, but we do know for sure that existence had to come from it, as there is no other source. Evidently, the notion of a lack of anything, or nonexistence, is not what we thought it was.

    14. Since the basis of all is causeless, it is the Prime Mover, using similar language, having only itself as its precursor, and requiring nothing but itself before it our outside of it.

    15. We could say that ‘possibility’ or ‘potential’ wouldn’t need anything before it but the same, but we don’t really know what those are, but we surely know that existence is here, and thus that it was indeed possible, and perhaps even mandatory.

    16. To decide (A) from (B) more work is needed. In (A) we have infinitely old base existent(s), as indestructible, and it seems we can go no further about it. For (B), we can proceed, and so if that pans out, we can forget about (A), and would have to, anyway.

    17. To see if existence can happen within nonexistence, we should have both a physics/philosophic representation of it and a confirmation by observation—that there is a zero-sum-balance of opposite polarities making up nature that nullifies all of existence in the overview of totality. I have a list that I keep adding to.

    For example, and this is probably not a real biggie on the list, there are opposites on the color wheel (each color not in its opposite), such as red/green, violet/yellow, and blue/orange, as well as all colors appearing in the rainbow, black being no colors, and white being all colors together. This just happens to match, respectively, Christmas colors, early spring colors, autumn colors, summer rainbows, night, and day. The list is presented after all of these points.

    18. So, there seem to be balances of opposites everywhere in nature, and thus taking them all together, maybe some more than others, they might cancel out to nullify all of existence, overall, but not in practice if a lack of anything (nothing) is a perfectly unstable situation that cannot be or stay.

    19. Nothing is the simplest state, so maybe it is somehow perfectly reactive. We do note that simpler and simpler actual things do readily go through changes of phases and combinings and recombinings, and that higher and higher composite complexities become more stable, but not that they are everlasting or even close to it.

    20. Since nothing is a lawless state, it may produce all sort of variations of things, every so often producing these in the low probability event of an entire universe, which has to still happen sometime, in Eternity’s waiting room, and so it was that the mixtures in our universe were such that life could arise, although perhaps life being few and far between the billions of stars and galaxies and taking billions of years, even so, on our planet, this world also being in the right place to avoid total extinctions. The near extinctions, in which 95% of all life was extinguished actually helped us along by making openings for our forebears to evolve.

    21. A nervous, shrew-like creature, upon seeing that the dinosaurs were gone, said, “Hurray! Now I can evolve!” (Not really the speaking part.)

    22. So, during eternity, and throughout infinity, everything happens everywhere, even many times over. There are many Austin’s, John, and Melanie’s, and always were, and ever will be.

    23. Due to determinism, brought about by cause and effect, there will always be exactly what will be.

    24. The same with there being no free will, for will must depend on something, which is also how we want it to be. While learning can enlarge the will, to a new fixed state, there may be some who cannot learn, and so the knowing that there is no free will causes the further learning by us to have compassion for those who may be stuck in some way or another.

    25. What good is existence if we are just a kind of tourist along for the ride, which also seems that our consciousness is, too, the subconscious analysis being completed beforehand? Well, it all still appears novel to us, and enjoyable, plus we have our own meaning out of it through existence while we live through our infinitesimal parentheses in the entire Eternity, which eternity of happenings everywhere has no real meaning overall at the ultimate level. It couldn’t be any other way, and we wouldn’t want a certain meaning forced on us anyway. So, in a way, it is a liberation, yet the sum information content of everything is the same as of nothing, which is zero. It’s like the Library of Babel that contains every possible book, even ones of gibberish. We wouldn’t know which variation of a book is right, because none are right and none are wrong. There is another Library of Everything next door to the Babel Library. It is a small, empty hut, containing nothing.

    24. What is life? To know the answer, one must live it fully.

    25. To replace cause and effect at the base level, where anything goes as the ultimate chaos of no laws, we could use just that—the disorganized law of no laws; but the source is still Nothing, and so it ever has to amount to nothing; so, an equation is the replacement—the zero-sum balances of the sum-things produced, and this leads to the necessity for the conservation of energy, momentum, charge, baryon number, and angular momentum, and perhaps more.

    26. Nothing is the Prime Mover, requiring nothing but itself. The nonexistence of Nothing is perfectly neutral and symmetrical, while existence within nonexistence must be polar and asymmetrical for it to nullify itself back to nonexistence, yet, that doesn’t happen, for Nothing is perfectly unstable It would take a God to hold it together.

    27. Nothing cannot be, so something must be. There is no choice, no option, and thus no Decider.

    28. If there can be one universe, then it seems that there could be others, as neither its time nor place seems special. Earth is not the center of the solar system, the sun is, and the solar system is not the center of the galaxy, but on an outer arm, far away from the maelstrom at the core of the galaxy, and our galaxy is not the center of the universe, and the universe is probably not at the center of the multiverse. And humans have only been around for a relatively short while. There are 50-80 millions species here; we are but one of them.

    29. Without the moon, the Earth would have wobbled like a top. Things are just right here, such as the food chain, our few miles of livable atmosphere, a bit of fresh water, bacteria—the true Kings of the Earth, inside us, making for digestion, and much more, etc. If any important link gets disrupted, we could be doomed.

    30. There are trillions of stars, and no one seems to know why. Perhaps there needs to be such immensity because the infinitesimal is so small, as a balance, both seemingly unbounded. Or perhaps we could only find ourselves in a universe that was so large that at least some small amount planets would give hope for life, even beyond the fact the the universe has the right ingredients to begin with. Because we made it, we can always look back and expect to see what some might think were fortuitous happenings, like that the Earth didn’t get completely blown away by huge asteroids, or that the dinosaurs died out to pave our way, or that two chimp chromosomes fused to make new chimps that were incompatible with the old chimps; but, again, since we are here, we already know, even without looking back, that history had to go our way.

    31. Evolution also selected for the notion of agency in nature, right or wrong, as a fine short cut for things having real agency, and some people carried it on into nature spirits and myths. It became better to suppose a bush rustling in the night from the wind to be of a bear’s doing, for it was better to be wrong than become dead, and so we invented ghosts and more.

    32. People thought simply in the old days, likening the big Myth to that of the family structure, life coming from life, with a strict father figure commanding, but they couldn’t conceive that if life needed Life before it so then would Life need LIFE before it even all the more, or they didn’t care, since they had gained comfort from the belief.

    33. Look for higher evolved life in the future, not in the past, for that would even be at the complete wrong end of the spectrum.

    34. Humans may not be well made to survive in space or on other planets, since we were fine-tuned by evolution for this world, but if we don’t colonize space, then that may be the end of us, if we even make it that far, but, whatever will be will be, even to infinite precision, and that is fine, that what gets done depends on what goes before. And no one would even want all kinds of happenings going on without cause.

    35. The universe is expanding, and this expansion is accelerating, unless there is some other reason for the red-shift, like photon decay, that has now sped up, and so, fairly for sure, the final fate of the universe will be to die out by so much dispersing that even one photon will not know of any other one.

    36. So, the universe is ever winding down, like a spring unwinding, but this is what made for energy being able to accomplish things, it being restrained by slow and patient time so that everything didn’t all happen at once in some flash of a big mess.

    37. Consciousness is a fundamental property of organized matter that cannot be further reduced to elementary properties. Not all neurons are involved in consciousness; for example, not much of the vast retinal/vision system, and many other areas whose injury or impairment does not stop consciousness.

    Consciousness is further seen to be of a brain process because the following can stop consciousness: Anesthesia to the brain cells; a blow to the head; sleep; too much poison/drugs. We can also probe the brain to make conscious visions appear.

    38. Free will = none; it is fixed, although dynamic, via learning, and still fixed, in between, and at any instant. We believe that we have free will because of the sense of agency, the feeling that we willed an action. The feeling of agency is nothing but a conscious percept, with an Neural Consciousness Correlate that can be studied like any other. The brain makes decisions before the conscious mind is aware a decision has been made. This tells us not how decisions are made, but that decisions are made before we become aware of them and that agency plays no role in making them. The agency aspect of free will is orthogonal to how decisions are made.

    The main reason why the will cannot be free is that it depends on prior things. A will that depended on nothing would be a mini first cause that had nothing to draw on. The opposite of ‘determined’ is ‘undetermined’. We wouldn’t want that even if it was an option; yet, some want free will to be so.


    39. Time is distance, and distance is the difference of space(s), that is, between here and there—the movement of something. This makes space the difference of time. So, time is a difference dimension, not a compositional one. One form of time is the displacement caused by motion. Is there another form, having to do with the 4th-dimensional aspect of time? It seems that time is the dimension that bounds, not extends, 3-dimensional space.


    Together, we have spacetime from space and time. Spacetime is the internal product of space and time, they seemingly woven together, but spacetime is also the product of energy and distance, for energy occupies space, or energy is space, the influences of E/M defining it.

    Is space*time the same as energy*distance?

    It is if energy = time*distance^2, energy spreading in time as the square of the distance. Space*time (ddd*t) = energy*distance (tdd*d).

    The speed of light seems to be absolute and so is the absolute dimensional equivalent between space and time, as distance(space) and time.

    Spacetime = time*distance^3, and so if c, the speed of light, has the dimensional units of of distance/time, then, solving for the external All, we have tddd * d/t = dddd, or distance^4, giving the All, which has no time, since it canceled out, a hypercube.

    We might have said time*distance^3 is distance^4, if time is distance, but distance^4 seems to be an external view, and, so, internally we seem to need time*distance^3, in which relative time exists. Time may be more of a subfield. Einstein thought that something had to give, and that was time, so he didn’t have it as absolute, as time being distance would have made it.

    If space’s three extents are defined by summation, then only one degree of freedom is left for a difference operator, namely time, to perform the utter nullification of space, since there is only nonexistence (nothing) to make anything of, and so the 4th dimension of time must have a polarity of a positive and negative axis, such as the polarity of charge that we see energy has. So, the second form of time could be charge. The 4th dimension, then, is not composed of points, as are the other three, but represents the points’ 4-dimensional deflection, which is a difference of position.

    c, the speed of light, underlies the dimensional relationship between time and distance and between the external hypercube view and the internal spacetime view, as,

    Distance^4 = c(time*distance^3),

    for c can be no only than what it is, as absolute.

    Energy density would be the 4th-dimensional slope of space.

    Just as Planck’s constant is the 4-dimensional quantization of photons, elementary charge is the 4-dimensional quantization of matter particles.

    The Cosmos in its external totality must be neutral and symmetric, to sum to nonexistence, whereas its internal composition must be polar and asymmetric, to have existence within nonexistence.

    C
    h
    S p a c e
    r
    g
    e​


    Note: Because spacetime is 4-dimensional, we have to get used to thinking of that extra dimension of time, even though our ‘now’ is only three-dimensional, for it has no ‘time’ to it, as when time stops in movies and everything freezes in place.

    Time is not just a difference of space but of spaces. Time, as any higher dimension does, touches all lower dimensions, but it also moves along as its own dimension, so, somehow, think of many 3D-spaces stacked up into that next dimension, like a stack of infinite 3D-spaces pancakes with no height limitation, and that is what time is a difference of, or see time as covering two different slices of an Einstein 4D Block Universe, as a 4D ‘distance’.


    40. Gravity seems to be the odd-man out of the four fundamental forces, but I think it stems from all of them, in a blend. The strong and weak nuclear forces, which some call sub-nuclear, oppose each other, as the strong force promotes stability, while the weak force promotes changeability. It’s a fine situation because then things are not so frozen that they cannot change, and not so wildly changeable that things cannot stick together. There are many such balances in nature. The electric and magnetic forces are not oppositional but completely two-way transitional, each giving rise to the other in turn, in a self-regenerating wave. Gravity is still AWOL, apparently not having a way to fit into this fine oppositional/transition scheme; however, what if it was the effect of all the forces together?

    41. Perhaps from the driving apart of virtual particles by inflation faster than they could cancel out, the universe was born. The the basic particles formed stars, which produced some more of the (lower) atomic elements, supernovae spewing out the rest, which atoms formed into molecules, plants, and then into cells, and life, in some of which consciousness emerged, which allowed us to actionize without moving, and also know about what was going on around us and in us.

    We became—because stars died. We are the universe come to life. It only took 13-14 billions years. Cosmic and biological evolution is one really slow dog.

    42. Neither “from nothing” or “stuff having been forever” is ‘god’, even being the furthest from it, and, also, since either situation is eternal, there was no creation of the situation, and thus no Creator.


    Recap:

    The basis of All can only be the simplest possible state. Higher things cannot exist until the parts are put together. This includes beings, and so they cannot be the basis of All, fundamental and absolute, etc., as the original basis and giving rise to all else. This basis could have had no creation, for then it wouldn’t have been the basis at all.

    “Consciousness making all” could not be the case, for then light would not be mostly cut off every time one closes their eyes, since, then, all should really continue on, via consciousness; however, the blind cannot see and the deaf cannot hear. We have senses because there is something “out there” to take in.

    Either (1) the basis of All is Nothing, since there is nothing to make anything of, or (2) the basis of all is an eternal thing, because something cannot be made from Nothing.

    There you have it, so, the true TOE is contained in one of the above; thus, we have localized the TOE, which is amazing in itself.

    The basis cannot be composite, or it wouldn’t be the basis, as its parts would be more basic; so, it is the simplest. Even though both (1) and (2) may seem to have problems, we know, for the right one, that these would not be real problems, but misunderstandings, for one of them must be true. A thing cannot be already forever and eternally be already made and defined without even having been made and defined, for then why is it how it is in particular? What would be the source from which the most basic thing could be made when there is no other thing to make it of? How could something arise from not anything? Something has to give, and at least we already know that, for one of the cases must be true. Perhaps not just one kind of basic thing comes to be, but all variations there of, and some of these recipes work and some don’t. By way of empirical observation we note that higher things come from simpler and simpler things, and that there is a balance of opposites making up nature.

    If the basic things were made, there is literally nothing to make the basics of. This is something that we know is true long before its proof, given the ‘if’. So, one is inclined to think that the basics are and were eternal, unless Nothing can make things.

    Apparently, a lack of anything (nothing) would be a completely and perfectly unstable situation. To confirm, we look at simpler and simpler things and see that they are less and less stable, readily changing, recombining, and/or going through phase changes, even to the point of popping back out of existence. Nothing is the simplest state, then, if it could even get close to being, but it cannot, making the near-nothing of the quantum fluctuations/uncertainty/tunneling the simplest state that can be and stay.

    Energy or substance forever being so has a problem, which is that there would have been no point at which its total amount could have been determined by being decided. Why not a bit more or a bit less of it?

    QED: Nothing cannot be, so something is, but it must balance to Nothing, but only in the overall view.

    Each proposition gives a little: sum-things ever arise, and always did, forever, as pairs of opposites, constituting a zero-balance overall. Existence is of nonexistence; they are one and the same.

    This All has no limitation of extent or duration; else it would not be the All if something was before it or outside it. Everything happens, everywhere and always. Stuff is forever, but it is not the same exact forever enduring stuff. Nothing still cannot be, yet it still plays a role in the Why, What, and How of all things.

    The zero-balance necessity begets the conservation laws of energy, momentum, and angular momentum—of point-of-view invariance, as discovered by Noether.

    There is action and reaction; conservation cannot be violated. Every particle is exactly at the place it should be at, and can not be even an iota off of its mark, as well as its energy-mass, etc. All credits and debits must sum to zero, to infinite precision. There is no skimming off the top.


    The list of balances:

    1. The positive kinetic energy of stuff vs the negative potential energy of gravity.

    2. Positive vs negative polarity of electric charge.

    3. Matter vs antimatter.

    4. Everything vs nothing, each holding the same information content.

    5. Fields of space vs particles in space, fields making particles maybe, and perhaps particles making fields.

    6. The largest infinity vs the smallest infinitesimal, with our finite reality at the mid-point.

    7. The eternal future vs the eternal past, with our ‘now’ at the mid-point.

    8. The strong nuclear force vs the weak nuclear force, the strong for stability, the weak for changeability.

    9. Light making matter vs matter making light, each requiring the other to be previous.

    10. Stellar ignition perhaps requires previous star material.

    11. Electric force transforming into magnetic force into electric force, etc., as a self-regenerating wave

    12. ‘Now’ becoming ‘past’ and transforming into ‘future’ via movement of matter through space.

    13. Standing waves going both inward and outward at the same time, if they do.

    14. Compression to nothing vs dispersion to nothing.

    15. Positive vs negative curvatures of space, if there be such.

    16. Virtual particles popping in and out of existence, always in pairs, with not enough energy to create them, to boot.

    17. Two and only two stable charged matter particles in free space, the electron and the proton, and no uncharged matter particles. Only one stable energy particle in free space, the photon, neutral (or both positive and negative together), and no charged energy particles.

    18. Color wheel opposites.

    19. Male/female.

    20. Mass/energy transition.

    21. Wave/particle transition.

    97. General efficiency, such as only three primary colors making up all the rest.

    98. All oppositional-transitional schemes joining, such as the 4 fundamental forces having the strong vs weak in opposition and the electric to magnetic in transition, being having space vs matter in opposition and past to future in transition.

    99. On/off, here/there, up/down, and all that kind of stuff.
     
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,028
    Anybody?
     
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. Emil Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    2,801
    I would start with something simpler.
    The human mind cannot conceive the infinite, so infinite can not be known.(Or only I cannot conceive the infinite.)
     
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. AlexG Like nailing Jello to a tree Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    4,304
    Extra large family size word salad
     
  8. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,028
    You didn't undo anything.
     
  9. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    6,152
    Very supersized. I'll just pick a topic at random.

    Consciousness is obviously a brain function, but it also goes to sleep, and even in vegetative state the body can live on.

    It seems to me to be nothing more than a specific biologic activity. It has all sorts of survival advantages in dealing with competition for food, habitat and mate. More advanced traits--other behaviors, emotions, reason, etc.--have certainly aided the human population explosion.

    What if it's just another automaton that is so complex and intangible that it seems like something special?
     
  10. NietzscheHimself Banned Banned

    Messages:
    867
    Most of what anyone says makes perfect sense. Instead of blaming people for attempting to fit "thoughts" into imperfect unimaginable words you should try to translate words by imagining the initial thoughts?

    Pretend someone other than yourself is capable of actual thought. Your a moderator now you have to try and understand people. Otherwise your going to drive yourself crazy and I'm going to help.
     
  11. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,028
    Consciousness seems to have use for scenarios for actionizing before committing to the action, as well to to know what is going on externally and internally.


    What about stuff forever vs. a balance of nothing? One of them is the TOE.
     
  12. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    6,152
    OK, my point was just that since it's an evolved ability, it seems to have everything to do with survival, as the survival issues get more complicated in higher species, so consciousness rises to meet that niche. From that point of view, consciousness wouldn't necessarily have anything else to do with the bigger picture.

    If spacetime was created in the big bang, then we are left to consider a state "before" time and space were created. This timeless realm, if there is such a thing, would have to have the property that it always was and always will be - eternal and static. If it's also devoid of space, then it would appear to contain nothing. Put them together and you get nothing forever. Yet this is initial state from which the universe apparently split off in the big bang.
     
  13. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,028
    True, it is a part of what lies between, having evolved with life. Not fundamental, as in First, but perhaps guaranteed to become of a higher brain's process.


    I would think so. Good analysis. There seems to be some problems with the notion of actual stuff of mass-energy having been around forever. We can both try to resolve those, as well as finding out more about a balance of opposites.

    The TOE is in hand (astounding), but which TOE it is?

    We can still proceed by noting what the two TOEs have in common, for example, that the basis of all had to be eternal, ruling out the creation of it, which gets rid of a Creator, but more importantly, in the bigger picture of the real, gets us thinking about the implications of an eternal system as ever being its own precursor.
     
  14. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,028
    I found this on the internet, by Eddie Current:

    The Pythagorean theorem works in three dimensions, too. If you see a blimp in the sky, you can calculate the exact straight-line distance to the blimp by knowing its altitude above the ground (the value z), as well as how far east-west (x) and north-south (y) you'd have to go to get right under the blimp:

    x2 + y2 + z2 = d2

    where d is the distance to the blimp. I don't have a 3D diagram, but you can prove it for yourself with a little effort.

    Now it gets interesting. This trick extends to four dimensions. Time is typically cited as the fourth dimension. Does the decidedly non-geometric idea of time work into the Pythagorean theorem? Incredibly, it does — but first, you have to convert the time measurement into a distance-like measurement. Then, the total distance you’re calculating is the spacetime distance in the bizarre four-dimensional world where east-west, north-south, up-down, and earlier-later mean the same thing, only in eight different directions. Represented by the letter s, spacetime distance (also known as a Minkowski interval) is determined by an amazing formula. Let’s break it down:

    x2 + y2 + z2 – (ct)2 = s2

    As before, x is the distance (for example) to the east, y is north, and z is up, but we’ve added a fourth term for time (t), which gets multiplied by a constant, c. Notice the minus sign before the term for time. When it comes to distance through spacetime, elapsed time counteracts spatial distance, and vice versa: If we travel a distance through space, and do it in a very short interval of time,* the distance traversed is effectively reduced. This is why a space traveler could reach stars across the galaxy within their lifetime if they got close enough to the speed of light. Time goes in the opposite “direction” of space!

    That constant, represented by c? It’s the same c that represents the speed of light in equations such as E = mc2. What better number to convert units of time (seconds) into a distance-like measurement — after all, we know that for light, there are 186,000 miles per second. See what Einstein did there? The speed of light is more than just a speed; it’s a universal conversion factor that turns time into a distance-like measurement. By treating time as a negative and multiplying it by c, we can exchange time and space in our formulas as readily as nature exchanges them. That’s what special relativity is all about.

    It’s as if the presence of mass causes “zero” to pull apart into the familiar ideas of spatial distance and temporal duration, like taffy. But since the universe is by definition everything there is, you have to be inside the universe to witness this incredible stretching apart of zero, to experience space and time as different things. If you were taking in the all-seeing “God’s-eye view” from a timeless, spaceless, massless perspective outside, you would see the same thing the speed-of-light traveler sees — nothing. To witness the action, you have to be inside the theater, in your seat.

    Space and time cancel out to exactly zero for the universe as a whole. But that’s just one example of the zero-sum nature of the physical world. A few others:

    • The kinetic energy of everything in the universe is exactly balanced by the gravitational potential energy of everything in the universe. The latter is expressed as a negative number, just as time is in the spacetime formula. A while back Alex Filippenko, who’s a familiar smiling face to science-TV geeks, co-wrote an essay about how this means the universe may have come from “nothing at all.” Like the pulling apart of space and time, kinetic energy and gravitational potential were also pulled apart in the Big Bang.

    • For similar reasons, the net charge of the universe is generally believed to be zero, with the number of positively charged particles equaling the number of negative. (This is unproven.)

    • Certain pairs of phenomena, like electricity and magnetism or mass and the curvature of space, are linked such that they seem to keep each other in check. The great physicist John Wheeler was fascinated by these “automatic” connections, pointing out how they are constrained together by zero sums, the way the ends of a see-saw are always the same total distance from horizontal. “That this principle should pervade physics, as it does,” he asked in 1986, “is that the only way that nature has to signal to us a construction without a plan, a blueprint for physics that is the very epitome of austerity?”

    On the one hand, it’s surprising that quantities totaling zero show up again and again in nature. But on the other it makes sense, if the universe is a closed system incorporating everything there is. As a teen I remember being into the Taoist idea of Yin and Yang — I thought that in the final analysis, the universe as a whole couldn’t be anything but perfectly balanced. On a level deeper than I imagined, I may have been right.


    * Slow speeds (which mean long elapsed times) cause the time part of the formula to overwhelm the space part, resulting in large spacetime distances. Spacetime distances only get small when you approach the speed of light, for example, covering 186,000 miles in 1.1 seconds — then the (negative) time part almost cancels the space part.
     
    Last edited: May 7, 2012
  15. universaldistress Extravagantly Introverted ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,468
    Hi Sciwriter (I am sure you will forgive me my reply. It is made with the utmost respect and admiration

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    )

    Long time no read. We have danced this dance before. And again, I will not be drawn out on my complete theory but I will interact with you on this topic again as there are new members here now, and they may wish to chip-in.

    Now we all know that what you present here is an exercise in logic, but one where you make the calls and turn left or right depending on your own direction. I am sure there are many points here that many people would love to break down and analyse and question/contest. I will try to not do this but instead approach on a broad base.

    Infinity requires no beginning no matter how much a human mind wants it to have one. Infinity is what it says on the tin: Infinit(e/y).

    If infinity is infinite (if you are going to accept the concept, then you have to accept there is ALWAYS something else/something more) then there is always something else to constitute this or that.
    How can something not arise from something? It surely can’t. Why fight with or try to reduce the true potency/truth that the word/concept infinity is?

    Yes. NO beginning, NO end. Everything has existed forever. Embrace Infinity.

    Just because we can’t see something, doesn’t mean the definite boundary lies at the boundary of the present boundary?

    It doesn’t need to be so/decided. It just is, and always is. Why attribute human needs to categorise and contain onto a concept which precludes such girding by its very nature of definition. Set the mind free of its desired confines . . .

    To say that your/our middle is THE middle is highly assumptive. If infinity exists then there is no middle. One cannot see infinity from one point in space/existence. Infinity can only be seen if it is seen from everywhere at the same time. This is the “Infinitum Leap” that is needed to appraise its truth majesty.

    And one can use this idea as an analogy on which to approach all concepts in existence. See all subjects from all or as many sides as possible to get closer to the truth . . .
     
    Last edited: May 8, 2012
  16. universaldistress Extravagantly Introverted ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,468
    Jesus. Why don't you try to approach some topic of this thread . . .
     
  17. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,028
    In either case, of stuff forever vs of nothing, the basis is eternal, whether it is the stuff of mass-energy or a distribution of nothing into that. Infinite extent would apply to both, as well, as totality would have no bounds

    What is the overall amount of stuff? In one case it is zero (nothing) in sum, but infinite as it is, perhaps, and in the other case (stuff forever) it is infinite, since no decider, I guess. So, this is about the same. Maybe infinite mass-energy in infinite space.

    One problem with eternity and infinity is that the definition is ‘that which cannot be attained’, so that is kind of a paradox, at least for things…
     
  18. universaldistress Extravagantly Introverted ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,468
    Hi Sciwriter

    I must apologise for the stream of thought that is to follow. It is incoherent, but follow-able, just about

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!



    1, Nothing, by its own definition, doesn't exist . . .
    2, How can something not be made of something?

    One can't encompass all of infinity. Even if one could have infinite potential, as in grow/expand for an infinite amount of time/space, one would never attain/encompass all/infinity (as one starts from a fixed, nucleated position). For a person locked within your "infinity" they would never be able to realise that they were locked within your, not infinity, but: infinitely expanding zone, but they would perceive it to be a true infinity (unless they could expand at a faster rate and reach the frontier of your expansion). So from a POV a non-infinity can be regarded or concluded as an infinity. But does this mean that infinity doesn't exist? For one to expand infinitely there needs to be an infinite space to expand into, unless the space you expand into is also expanding just quickly enough for your expansion to not reach said boundary. However, if there were to be a limit, it would be reached and infinity as a concept could be shelved. I would suggest, that logically, one can't shelve infinity until it can be proven that existence is finite.

    Not sure that I have said all I want to in that last paragraph, but maybe you could fill in any gaps?

    I think one of the problems with our attempts to comprehend infinity is we tend to have this "mandelbrot-zoom-esque" vision of OUR own outward and unending journey, as we try to visualise. But I would say that the whole humanoid-pov system of thought is kind of counterintuitive to the true handling of infinity and its corollarised threads. One can't take on infinity, anymore than one can visualise many multiple-dimensional theories without trying to translate them back into 3/4D. Starting from the human/nuclear POV is not a position one can take, or allow to dictate comprehension, when tackling infinity, I feel.

    Instead, I would say, one should try and accept the concept that infinity is actual, in all directions: Infinite time, Infinite space, Infinite inframacro 3D upscaling, Infinite inframicro downscaling. I don't personally see any other logical route, logically.

    I said before, try to see all of infinity at once (as an attempt to visualise I suppose): "Infinity can only be seen if it is seen from everywhere at the same time. This is the “Infinitum Leap” that is needed to appraise its truth majesty." But seeing everything within infinity (as I describe it) from everywhere in infinity, does seem to be a concept too far. As a concept (seeing infinity as I suggest) one can kind of process it through the mind, think that one has a handle on its suggestion. But to try and visualise it is to try and drag it back down into the human 3/4D framework. A seeming impossibility.

    Can one think of infinity without one’s being asserting its constant zoom function?

    Maybe the pardox isn’t wrapped up in infinity itself. Just wrapped up in our attempted comprehension of its physical system, and the conjectures it sustains? The paradox being our ability to comprehend the concept of infinity without being able to wholly visualise it. Or the paradox being our inability to see infinity as a whole despite the fact we all are, as individuals, even when separated, infinite in scope. Ok, if one’s perception zooms out then one’s physical self becomes a dotted mote of shrinkage and gone. But if one’s perception zooms in and down through scale, forever one’s perception would travel, just like a Mandelbrot zoom. I am aware that mathematics has infinities in different forms; different boundaries used as appellation and designation. But for me, the holy grail (being something I believe in despite its lack of evidence!) is maybe one day being able to grapple and fully comprehend . . .

    . . . had to stop . . .
     
  19. Cyperium I'm always me Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,058
    I like this, thanks!
     
  20. SciWriter Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,028
    Darn!

    As there may be no limit to the large (a black hole forms?) or to the small (Planck size?), then this may be what infinity is (potential infinity?).

    Real things don't seem to be able to be infinite (complete solidity?) just as they can't seems to go to infinitesimal infinity (zero?).

    We truly don't know what a lack of anything would entail. No laws to it. We might consider it (nonexistence) to be eternal and infinite, as only a no0thing could be.

    We are still stuck with the hard fact that there is literally nothing to make anything of.
     
  21. Rav Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    2,422
    I'm just going spew forth some related thoughts, which might seem barely intelligible to some, but will hopefully be interesting enough to others to stimulate some further discussion.

    Laurence Krauss implied in a recent public discussion with Dawkins that the ancient philosophical concept of absolute nothingness is pointless to work with, because it's not something that's real. I totally agree with him. It's an absurdity. An abstraction gone wrong. The idea that you can remove everything from reality, including the basis of reality itself, doesn't make any real sense. There must always be a basis. Some sort of absolutely fundamental state, if you like, out of which something of substance can emerge. This is a type of nothingness we can work with. In fact it's the only sort of nothingness that can exist.

    Further, while the properties of physicality that give rise to the descriptive laws of physics might be absent from this fundamental basis of reality, the basis must be such that it is possible for such properties to emerge. Let's use string theory as a hypothetical example (I agree that it's merely theoretical and highly speculative at this stage, but it will serve to illustrate my point nonetheless). If particles are, in fact, quanta of energy with different modes of oscillation, yet can pop into existence out of nothing, there must be something about this nothing that determines that only quanta of energy oscillating in particular patterns can pop out of it. In other words, just as the emergent properties of a complex system can be said to derive from an underlying set of much simpler rules, the emergence of a quanta of energy oscillating in a particular manner must be a natural consequence of the nature of that which lies behind it's emergence. In this case, nothing. So while this sort of nothing may be without substance the way we're used to thinking about it, it can not be an absence of some underlying, fundamentally basic principle.

    Even if we embrace a many worlds approach, which may seem to allow us to avoid the implication that 'nothing' is something in particular, and is instead just an unstable state from which any configuration can emerge, potentially resulting in universes that are unimaginably different from our own, we still have a nothingness that can not be void of some fundamentally basic principle, because in each universe it is the author of a particular subset of possible phenomenon. All we end up with is a bunch of underlying 'nothings' with their own particular fundamentally basic principles. In other words, different nothings.

    Further, is there a distinction between the nothing we're referring to when we're talking about quantum fluctuations in the context of pair production in an already existing universe, and the nothing we're referring to when we talk about the quantum fluctuation that gave birth to that universe in the first place? If it's the same nothing, then the many words approach has obvious problems if we also hold that nothing is not something in particular. In other words, how can nothing, if it only spits out random universes, be subsequently continually spitting out compatible substance into that same universe all the time? Can a specific portion of nothing become localized, or connected to a particular universe somehow? Why is our nothing only spitting out stuff that results in our laws of physics? One possibility is that the existing properties of our universe play a role in determining that. But wouldn't this imply that 'nothing' is part of an ongoing, two way, causal relationship, with our universe, and perhaps an infinite number of others?

    That's all for now. I want to continue, but this post is already long enough. I'll just wait to see how the discussion unfolds.
     
  22. universaldistress Extravagantly Introverted ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,468
    Don't worry. I am already pushing the boundaries as regards this discussion (ie breaking the boundaries of my thought, in this specific direction. You kind of have that ability Sciwriter. You are a true peer who can cause/push me to think about things I never have before. That is where my real respect for you comes from

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    ). However, I would say that for me to go where I think you want me to go, within this discussion, would be to ‘paint-out’ my own theory of everything. And I don’t feel comfortable enough with that prospect, at this time. To finish the sentence: “But for me, the holy grail (being something I believe in despite its lack of evidence!) is maybe one day being able to grapple and fully comprehend the seeing of infinity in its entirety all at once: “ But I suppose my theory does kind of approach that idea, in a roundabout way; though have never focused on this inflection to date, not specifically.

    Tip of the iceberg.

    No zero.
    Infinity is, no doubt, sectioned off.

    It may very well be eternal. But only within one’s brain. For it will never be seen in any other way, except within the human imagination, by its definition. Other speculative ideas of infinity, here, may possibly be reachable by supra-transcendentalism gone maximum. If a concept is definitely physically unreachable (nothing), why entertain it? I would say that the expanse of infinity is all physically reachable, in time . . .

    Everything is made of MOSTLY nothing, as far as leading lights can tell. But to date, nothing has been seen to be made of Nothing; forgive the pun.
     
  23. universaldistress Extravagantly Introverted ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,468
    Hi Rav. As you have probably gathered, I am in no way a proponent of the existence of Nothing. Nothing is nothing. By its own definition it doesn't exist. Logically, nothing doesn't compute. Logically, something has to be constituted out of something else. I embrace a kind of pure Infinity, philosophically.

    What of the concept of protomatter? You suggest a nothing that has certain characteristics or propensities in its influence of matter to coalesce out from it. I would say that that kind of nothing is not nothing; and instead I would call it an altered state of matter, as in protomatter state. Are you suggesting that the state from which matter and energy sources is not a physical realm, as in a realm that exists? And instead is a state that itself does not exist, but is able to become existing? I find this logically off-putting.


    Again. What you call nothing, is not a nothing, as it has some kind of organisational pressures exerted on it, or exerting from it. Either way this requires your nothing to be a something? For me, assuming there is such a thing as nothing is a fundamentally illogical leap, unless one assumes a negative. It, in my mind, is far more logically acceptable to assume that the one, main, pure infinity is actual. Also, we tend to assume that our universe is some kind of segregated bubble, when it may indeed just be an area of expansion within an infinite sea of normal matter?

    This assumes a model, where stuff is being spat out from something other than what is already contained within this matter-space, is a reality. Doesn’t sit well with my 3d sense of space.

    Why assume it is a nothing, when it would seem far more logically fulfilling to just assume an altered state of matter/energy/protomatter/other-matter?

    Again we are knocking on the door of my theory of everything.

    Sorry guys. I think 10 cans of Bud after finding out your girlfriend is carrying your baby, is enough to frag any mind (my head is too fuzzy); I will return.
     

Share This Page