Welcome to the "Free Speech" page of my website. What that means is that I can write anything I want here, because I own this website. You don't have to read it if you don't want to. If you choose to read further, then you have the right to agree or disagree with whatever I have written. However, this is not a blog! You do not have the right to voice your disagreement here on my website. Go get your own damn website.
I do, however, welcome your comments in private email. Send your opinions to freespeech@sterlingphotoart.com and I guarantee . . . absolutely nothing! I will probably read your email (unless your subject line is something like "Enhan$e your $exual APPEAL" or "Highest A1 Good Quality Watches!") but there are no guarantees that you will be able to convince me that your agreement or disagreement is valid (your chances are better if you agree with me) or that I will even answer or acknowledge your email. But, who knows? . . . maybe yours will be the email that opens my eyes and changes my life forever. For the most part, if you are friendly and coherent then I will be more than happy to consider your opinion. If it is relevant and makes a valid (in my opinion) contribution, I might even post it on this page.
This is probably going to be pretty boring stuff for most people anyway. I am very interested in physics right now and I plan to voice my musings and speculations on that and other subjects in this space.
Warning: This page has little or nothing specifically to do with the photography aspect of my web site. If you are only interested in photography, then you should hit the "back" button on your browser now.
Note: The entries on this page are in chronological order. If you are interested in only the most recent additions, then scroll down to the bottom of the page. This page was last updated 01/10/2010.
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Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Let's start with some "mind expansion":
Have you ever thought about how fast the "speed of light" really is? In order to gain an understanding of the speed of light, it will be necessary to relate it to something a little more ordinary, such as the speed of an automobile . . . something we already have a "feel" for. The speed of light is approximately 186,000 miles per second, and we'll say (for the sake of round numbers) that the speed of a car is 60 miles per hour. This means that a photon of light, in one second, travels as far as it would take you almost 18 and a half WEEKS to drive in a car (and that's driving 24 hours a day, seven days a week, non-stop, without even taking a bathroom break!) That's over a third of a YEAR of non-stop driving, just to cover the distance that light travels in ONE SECOND!
That, by the way, is approximately equivalent to driving around the world seven times.
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Einstein wondered what it would be like to travel along with a photon of light. This speculation eventually evolved into his famous theories of Relativity, but what does Relativity say about the original speculation?
First and foremost, according to Relativity time comes to a complete stand-still for an object that is traveling at the speed of light, such as a photon, while the rest of the universe spins merrily along. From the instant it is emitted by an electron to the instant it is absorbed by another electron, no time at all passes for a photon. Both instants are the same instant! For a photon that was emitted in the Big Bang and that doesn’t happen to encounter an electron until the "end of time" (whatever or whenever that may be), all of time occurs in one instant.
Therefore, from the reference frame of a photon the dimensions of space and time that we experience have not expanded. All four (three space and one time) dimensions are "tightly curled up " (to use terminology that I have seen used in descriptions of String theory). In other words, every electron is physically "connected" to every other electron and the travel-time between any two electrons, even if they are separated by many light years of space and time by our reckoning, is always zero from the reference frame of the photon!
I propose that there is another space dimension (for a total of five dimensions, four space and one time) which is tightly curled up from our reference frame, and through which propagates the "spooky action at a distance" influence of quantumly entangled particles. That is why quantum entanglement effects seem to happen instantaneously even though the entangled particles may be separated by huge distances.
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I just finished reading The Fabric Of The Cosmos by Brian Greene (2005, ISBN 0-375-41288-3) and I highly recommend it, if you are interested in that sort of thing. It's along the lines of A Brief History of Time (Stephen Hawking, 1988, ISBN 0-553-05340-X) but is more current and includes superstring and M-theory.
Also highly recommended is The Theory of Almost Everything (Robert Oerter, 2006, ISBN 0-13-236678-9).
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Friday, July 25, 2008
I just rediscovered a piece of "creative writing" I did back in 2001, in which I revealed the already accomplished take-over of the world by M____S___ Corporation. (At the time there was still something the citizens of the world could have done to fight back. Unfortunately, it is now far too late to do anything about it, because D__ is no longer at the heart of W______, therefore B___'s free program can no longer wrest control of the world back into the hands of the people.) If you would like to read it, click here.
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Saturday, July 26, 2008
Quantum Mechanics seems to be telling us that in order for something to exist there must be an awareness (or "consciousness" if you prefer) of that existence. This implies that an awareness of some kind either preceded or coincided with the formation of our universe. The former, in turn, implies a "creator" of some kind (or at least a pre-existing "observer") while the latter implies that consciousness is somehow an inherent property of the universe itself.
If, however, quantum effects can propagate backward in time (and delayed-choice double-slit experiments seem to indicate that they can) then perhaps it is our own awareness, propagating backward through time to that very first supposedly quantum event initiating the Big Bang, that causes the collapse of the probability-wave that eventually becomes this universe populated by conscious life forms such as ourselves.
This seems to be somehow tied in with the Anthropic Principle. If, for example, the laws of physics require a backward-in-time propagating awareness in order for the initial probability wave to collapse and become a universe, then the only universe that can form is one in which the laws of physics allow the existence of conscious life forms. Not only that, but it also requires a universe in which the laws of physics are such that the quantum effects of that consciousness can travel backward in time.
Wow . . . talk about pulling yourself up by the bootstraps!
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August 4, 2008:
Here is a quote from Andrei Linde in "Inflation, quantum cosmology, and the anthropic principle", Science and Ultimate Reality, (Cambridge University Press, 2004) which may have helped inspire the above speculation, since I read the book quite some time ago (but just now rediscovered the quotation):
"We were accustomed to believe that the main purpose of physics is to discover the Lagrangian (or Hamiltonian) of the theory that correctly describes our world. However, the question arises: if our universe did not exist sometime in a distant past, in which sense could one speak about the existence of the laws of Nature which govern the universe? We know, for example, that the laws of our biological evolution are written in our genetic code. But where were the laws of physics written at the time when there was no universe (if there was such time)? The possible answer now is that the final structure of the (effective) Hamiltonian becomes fixed only after measurements are performed, which determine the values of coupling constants in the state in which we live. Different effective Hamiltonians describe different laws of physics in different (quantum) states of the universe, and by making measurements we reduce the variety of all possible laws of physics to those laws that are valid in the (classical) universe where we live."
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September 1, 2008:
Here is a quote worth sharing:
"Life's journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting '...holy shit ...what a ride!'" --George Carlin
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September 17, 2008:
Astronomers tell us that 85% of the matter in the universe consists of "dark matter" and that only 15% is the ordinary kind of visible matter that makes up galaxies, stars, planets and you and me.
They know this because of the way stars orbit within galaxies and the way galaxies move within galactic clusters, because this dark matter interacts gravitationally with everything, just like ordinary matter.
Robert Oerter, in The Theory of Almost Everything (p. 224), says, "All of the galaxies we see, with all of their stars, planets, and dust clouds, are only a sort of scum on the fringes of enormous, invisible clouds of dark matter."
He goes on to say, "Observations indicate that our own galaxy is full of dark matter, too.
We are presumably surrounded by it at all times, yet we have never detected it except by observations of distant galaxies."
But, if our solar system is filled with dark matter, why are the orbits of the planets around the Sun not affected by its gravity?
If we are "presumably surrounded by it at all times" why are we not affected by its gravity?
Our solar system must be devoid of dark matter, or nearly so, or we would see the effects of its presence in the orbits of the planets and in the effects of gravity right here on the surface of the Earth.
Perhaps there is some mechanism which drives dark matter away from stars like
our Sun, or clears dark matter from the vicinity of orbiting planets. If so, then we
may be living inside a "bubble" of dark-matter-free space which is floating in a dark matter "sea".
Perhaps most or all stars are at the center of similar bubbles of dark-matter-free space, in which case they really are like "the foam that rides the crest of waves of the dark matter in the cosmic ocean" as physicist Pierre Ramond puts it in
Journeys Beyond the Standard Model (p. 41).
This "mechanism" which removes dark matter from the vicinity of a star like our Sun could be something like light pressure, but it could not
be light pressure, for if dark matter interacted with light then we would be able to see it! Perhaps dark matter, whatever it turns out to be, is something that interacts with neutrinos, in which case "neutrino pressure" could be the mechanism that drives it away from stars.
Hypothetical weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, are one candidate for dark matter, and one candidate for WIMPs is the neutralino, a particle predicted to exist by some Supersymmetry theories.
Could neutralinos interact with neutrinos in such a way as to make them
susceptible to "neutrino pressure" from a star like our Sun?
Another possibility could be the same gravitational (since we already know that dark matter interacts with ordinary matter gravitationally) mechanism which clears meteoric material away from the vicinity of orbiting planets, although it is hard to see how this would work since dark matter presumably doesn't interact with ordinary matter in any way except gravitationally, and therefore could not be "swept up" by an orbiting planet the way meteors are.
This method would have to rely solely on gravitational "ejection" of the material from the solar system.
It would seem, then, that this mechanism would leave behind at least five or six
times more dark matter than there is meteoric material in the solar
system. I don't know if that much residual dark matter would be enough for
us to detect through its gravitational influence, but it seems likely to me that
it would.
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October 6, 2008:
Everything I have read that talks about higher space dimensions assumes those dimensions are smaller than the three space dimensions we live in (as in string theory, which says there are six additional space dimensions, all tightly curled up into a space so small that we cannot detect them).
And, if you ask a physicist what our universe is "expanding into" he will tell you that that is a meaningless question . . . that our universe is not expanding "into" anything because there is no "space" for it to expand into; that space itself is expanding, and that because our universe is curved, there is no boundary for anything to be "beyond".
But this is wrong! Residents of "Flatland", living on the two-dimensional surface of an expanding balloon, might think that, because their two-dimensional universe has no boundary, it also has no space beyond which it can expand . . . but we know their balloon is expanding into the third dimension, which is much
larger than the two dimensions of their curved and expanding universe!
Our universe also is curved, is expanding, and has no boundary, but our universe has three space dimensions, and so it must be expanding into a fourth space dimension which is much
larger than the three space dimensions that we are familiar with
(contrary to what I wrote here on July 22nd)!
Not only that, but because Relativity says the speed limit of C is only for objects traveling through the three dimensions of space (and one of time) that make up the
space-time continuum of our universe, I propose that there is no such speed limit in the fourth space dimension . . . hence the inflationary period of our universe's Big Bang era was able to proceed at speeds well beyond C, because our three-dimensional space itself (not the objects imbedded within that space) was expanding into the fourth space dimension.
Likewise, quantum entanglement effects must travel through this fourth space dimension and therefore are able to
propagate instantaneously rather than being constrained to light speed.
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October 13, 2008:
We are such a laughably pathetic bunch of monkeys that it makes me want to cry!
There are several groups of us who claim to be in contact with an all-powerful Supermonkey who lives in the sky and who supposedly watches over us and protects us from "evil".
Yet they cannot explain why this Supermonkey doesn't use its super powers to end our suffering and misery here on Earth, because (they say) its "ways" are "mysterious" and it is not our place to question them.
Another group thinks they are so smart that they claim to have a theory that explains almost everything that exists in our universe, while in the same breath telling us that
85% of our universe is made out of some substance that we know absolutely nothing about!
And the vast majority of us just don't seem to care one way or the other. We go about our lives lying and cheating and stealing from one another, wasting our precious resources and polluting our environment, killing one another and making baby monkeys as fast as we possibly can, blissfully unaware of the fact that the entire Human Race is on the very brink of lying, cheating, stealing, wasting, polluting, killing and procreating ourselves right out of existence!
So, what can we do about this sad situation?
Well, the group that claims to know almost everything . . . physicists . . . are on the right track.
At least they are trying to understand the situation, and they have a methodology for gaining knowledge that works, even if they sadly overestimate the actual extent of the knowledge they have gained.
The other groups . . . the ones who claim to have an inside track with the Supermonkey in the sky and
say that we shouldn't ask questions . . . well, they are just part of the
problem.
The bulk of the problem, and the only potential solution, lies within the vast majority of us:
We need to wake up and smell the bullshit, folks, before we bury ourselves in it!
Knowledge is the only real road to salvation, and the acquisition of knowledge is the only thing that will set us free!
Blindly following millenniums-old mythology and dogma will only ensure our ultimate extinction.
And while a "Theory of Almost Everything" that blithely ignores 85% of the everything that it is trying to explain may not be the answer, the methodology by which physicists gain the knowledge that that theory is based upon . . . science! . . .
is the answer.
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October 18, 2008:
To "expand" upon what I posted here on October 6, it seems to me that there must be another time dimension as well as the larger space dimension I speculated on earlier. Within our known 4-dimensional spacetime the speed that everything travels is fixed at C, with velocity through space being inversely proportional to "velocity" through time, therefore the speed limit of any spacetime continuum must depend upon properties of both its space and its time dimensions. If speeds can exceed C in the larger space dimension of my earlier speculation, then they must also be able to exceed C in whatever time dimension is associated with that space dimension. Since we already know that nothing can exceed C in our known time dimension, then there must be a different time dimension associated with the additional space dimension if we are going to allow greater than C expansion of our universe during inflation.
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November 23, 2008:
I am convinced that the very existence of our universe requires consciousness.
It is a deeper, more fundamental requirement even than the quantum mechanical requirement for an observer in order to reduce a wavefunction . . . it is a basic philosophical requirement: How can something be said to exist if there is no awareness of that existence?
Even the phrasing of the question implies a consciousness in order to do the asking: How can something "be said" if there is no one to do the saying?
It is akin to the "tree falling in the forest" question, but it goes way beyond the question of making a sound with no one around to hear it.
If there is no consciousness, anywhere, in order to be aware of its existence, how can there even be a tree, or a forest . . . or a universe that contains a tree and a forest?
What "meaning" does existence have if there is no consciousness to be aware of it?
What meaning does "meaning" have without consciousness?
If there were no consciousness, anywhere in the universe, then there would be no universe!
Perhaps Descartes should have said, "Sum, ergo cogito" . . . I am, therefore I think!
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November 29, 2008:
I encourage anyone who is interested in the above speculation (dated Nov. 23, 2008), and especially anyone who doubts its verity or who thinks I am totally off my rocker, to read the essay "Law Without Law" by John Archibald Wheeler. It can be found in the book Quantum Theory and Measurement by J. A. Wheeler and W. H. Zurek (Princeton University Press, 1983, ISBN 0-691-08315-0).
A brief excerpt:
"What we have the right to say of past spacetime, and past events, is decided by choices - of what measurements to carry out - made in the near past and now. The phenomena called into being by these decisions reach backward in time in their consequences as indicated in fig. 8, back even to the earliest days of the universe. Registering equipment operating in the here and now has an undeniable part in bringing about that which appears to have happened. Useful as it is under everyday circumstances to say that the world exists "out there" independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld. There is a strange sense in which this is a 'participatory universe.'"
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December 6, 2008:
On the same subject (consciousness as
a requirement of existence) the following quote is from the book Other Worlds
by Paul Davies (Simon & Schuster, 1980, ISBN 0-671-42227-8) Pg.
132-133: "In (Eugene) Wigner's interpretation of quantum theory, the minds of sentient beings occupy a central role in the laws of nature and in the organization of the universe, for it is precisely when the information about an observation enters the consciousness of an observer that the superposition of waves actually collapses into
reality. Thus, in a sense, the whole cosmic panorama is generated by its own inhabitants!
According to Wigner's theory, before there was intelligent life, the universe did not 'really' exist."
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December 15, 2008:
Yet another book recommendation: For a very readable, non-mathematical and highly persuasive account of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum theory, Schrodinger's Rabbits by Colin Bruce (Joseph Henry Press, 2004, ISBN 0-309-09051-2) is a must read! Bruce has a unique knack for coming up with analogies that make quantum processes easily visualizable, and this book will add to your understanding of all things quantum, even if you are ultimately not convinced the Many Worlds Interpretation is correct.
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January 31, 2009:
Having exhausted most of the less technical physics books in the library, I decided to turn my interest to philosophy. After attempting, and failing, to complete a half dozen or more books on philosophy, I have come to the conclusion that "philosophers" in general are a bunch of idiots who argue endlessly and pointlessly about things which they know nothing about, while laboriously attempting to conceal that lack of knowledge through the use of obscure and Brobdingnagian (as an example) terminology which no one but another "philosopher" can decipher.
What follows are a number of quotes which echo my newly formed opinion on the subject of philosophy and philosophers:
"Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love."
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, German social philosophers, revolutionaries.
"Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems."
Henry B. Adams, U.S. historian.
"If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show."
Timothy Leary, U.S. psychologist.
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February 25, 2009:
When we learn how to use quantum entanglement to "see" beyond the limitations imposed upon us by the speed of light, then and only then will we begin to understand the true magnitude of the vastness of our universe.
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April 25, 2009:
We are like a microscopic colony of bacteria living in a drop of water who, after developing a "bacterial civilization" and "bacterial science", think they have learned everything there is to know about their drop of water and therefore "The Universe" (except for those few niggling little inconsistencies that keep cropping up that can't be explained by current "bacterial theory" but that almost certainly will be very soon . . . ) -- who have absolutely no way of even knowing about the immense universe that exists outside their tiny little drop of water.
There are distances and times so far beyond our tiny little "known universe" that it simply boggles the mind of any human who even tries to comprehend the sheer vastness of it all . . .
Mathematicians have come up with numbers that are so huge that they can only be expressed as "10 to the (exponent upon exponent upon exponent, etc.)". It has been pointed out that these numbers are so large that it doesn't even matter what units of measurement one is using -- inches and light years become virtually indistinguishable at these magnitudes. I believe that these numbers accurately reflect the actual size of our universe, not only in space (which is perfectly allowed in the Inflationary Big Bang theory) but also in time.
I can imagine forces acting (on what?) over such gigantic space and time scales that our entire universe enjoys, by comparison, the tiniest microscopic little flicker of existence, much like the fleeting temporary existence of a virtual particle that appears out of the vacuum due to quantum uncertainty, then winks out of existence again before conservation laws can be violated. Indeed, our currently accepted cosmological model suggests that the universe did begin as a quantum fluctuation!
Einstein once said, "The most incomprehensible thing about our universe is that it is comprehensible." I disagree. I don't believe we can comprehend the true nature of the universe any more than the aforementioned bacteria could comprehend our local cluster of galaxies. I agree with Haldane: "The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
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August 19, 2009:
I propose that consciousness, or "awareness" as I like to call it, is a fundamental property of our universe. Whether it is an inherent property of space-time and/or mass-energy, or an emergent property born of entropy and chaos and complexity, or has some other undreamed of origin, is irrelevant. To deny that it is a property of the universe is to deny our very own existence. Therefore, without attempting to explain it, we must accept awareness as an
observed property of the universe.
In fact, there is scientific evidence to support the proposition that awareness is a fundamental property, in the theory of quantum mechanics. There, the probability-wave function that is the quantum mechanical description of anything or everything in the universe, or even the entire universe itself, does not "collapse" into an actual existence unless and until it is "measured" by some sort of consciousness (according to some interpretations). Therefore, the universe could not even exist if there were no consciousness or awareness around to make the "measurements" required to collapse its probability-wave function into actuality.
I realize this is highly speculative, but, again, I am not attempting to explain consciousness. I am only pointing out that it need not be a uniquely human quality. Awareness, or at very least the potential for awareness, belongs to the entire universe, not just to the microscopic speck of it that we call human.
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January 9, 2010:
A "Flatlander" living in a two dimensional universe that happened to be curved through a third dimension would not be able to directly perceive that third dimension, although he could perhaps deduce its existence by measuring certain angles or by noting some otherwise unexplainable accelerations and concluding that his two dimensional universe is curved.
Likewise, we are often told that we live in a three dimensional universe that is curved through a fourth dimension which we call "time." Einstein very accurately described a detailed picture of this four dimensional "spacetime" and explained gravity as a consequence of its curvature caused by the presence of mass (General
Relativity or "GR").
However, this suggests to me that our four dimensional spacetime is curved through a
fifth dimension, which we cannot perceive, for the following reasons:
1. We can directly perceive all four of our spacetime dimensions. We perceive three of them as space and the fourth as the passage of time,
2. All four dimensions of spacetime are curved by the presence of mass, not just the three space dimensions.
This is described in detail by GR.
This fifth dimension that I am postulating could not be one of the many so-called "tightly curled up" dimensions described by string theory.
The fifth dimension I am describing would have to be large . . . in fact it would have to be large enough to
accommodate all four of our spacetime dimensions. Just like a three dimensional universe that contains a globe is larger than the two dimensional surface of that globe, or a four dimensional "spacetime" that contains a history of an event is larger than the three dimensional "space" that contains only an instantaneous snapshot of that event, my postulated fifth dimension would have to be much larger than the four dimensions that
it contains.
Our entire four dimensional spacetime universe would be only the surface of an "object" that is contained within this five dimensional universe.
It would perhaps contain many such objects!
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January 10, 2010:
Every electron is connected, via photons both emitted and absorbed, to every other electron in the universe both past and future.
Total energy is conserved. From the POV of a photon, the dimension of time does not exist since the photon travels only at the speed of light.
Therefore, from the photon POV, all electron emissions and absorptions happen simultaneously and at a single point in 3D space (effectively 3D space also does not exist from this POV).
Therefore, every electron is one and the same from the photon POV. This
implies that there really is only one electron.
Wheeler was right!
Furthermore, every electron is also connected to every other electron through quantum entanglement.
This connection is not limited by the speed of light. It is, as far as we can tell, instantaneous within the four known dimensions of spacetime, perhaps even traveling backward in time.
It is unclear to this writer what the implications of this are at the present time.
Speculation: Could quantum entanglement be mediated by the exchange of tachyons?
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Copyright (C) 2010 by Jeff Sterling