The unification of physics

How does science work? And what's all this about quantum mechanics?

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Obvious Leo
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The unification of physics

Post by Obvious Leo »

I know that long posts can be a turn-off for most people so I propose to do this essay in digestible bite-size chunks. I invite comment but I don't need anybody to tell me I'm full of shit because I can prove every word I say.

2015 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Einstein's General Relativity (GR), widely regarded as the most important scientific theory in the history of the human species, an opinion with which I concur. However the publication of this paper also marked the beginning of a quest which has thus far proven to be utterly fruitless, namely a search for a model which can unify three different models of physics into a single coherent whole. The other two models in this unholy trinity are Special relativity (SR) and Quantum Mechanics (QM), which has subsequently been enfolded into a more inclusive model of the subatomic world know as the Standard Model of Particle Physics (SM). I will continue to use QM as the designation for this theory on the understanding that QM is encompassed within this broader SM paradigm.

Firstly it must be stated quite emphatically that these three pillars of physics cannot possibly all be correct because they are mutually exclusive. Physicists are stuck with the absurd conclusion that nature operates according to a different suite of laws at different scales of reality and they also know perfectly well that this conclusion must be bullshit. Einstein famously said that "God does not play dice with the universe" and nowadays there are very few physicists left who would not agree that Einstein was right. The same laws which govern the behaviour of matter and energy at the subatomic scale must govern it at the cosmological scale or else our universe would be incomprehensible, which contradicts the evidence.

The truly worrisome thing about the three pillars of physics is their astonishing predictive authority. Each of these models yields predictions which have been empirically validated to such an extraordinary level of precision that the entire technological revolution of the 20th century is founded upon them. For many decades physicists were so bewitched by the success of these models that they managed to persuade themselves that they must be in possession of some "Ultimate Truth" about the nature of the universe. In other words they ontologised their tool-kit, but a hundred years on this is no longer looking quite so clever and the better thinkers in the high places of physics are at last starting to ask some pointed questions about their a priori assumptions.

In my philosophy I show that the problem in physics goes all the way back to Newton and his assumptions about the existential nature of space and time but in this essay I propose to merely point out why the three pillars of physics are incompatible with each other. It all went pear-shaped from the outset for Einstein because the worm in the apple is SR, the story of the twins and the bloke who can traverse the entire universe in a single lifetime if only he had a fast enough spaceship. SR is absolutely riddled with such absurdities so why did it not occur to somebody that this model might be bollocks? It bloody well occurred to everybody that this had to be bollocks, Einstein most particularly, but all this was conveniently ignored because SR gave us E=mc(2) and with this we could make atomic bombs, amongst other things. Who needs a universe which makes sense as long as we have models which we can use to make clever gadgets? This became the operational methodology for physics known as model-building, sometimes also known as "physics is what works", which was further summarised as "shut up and calculate". Niels Bohr said it best.

"It is not the role of the physicist to determine what the universe is but merely to determine what he can meaningfully say about its behaviour".

Niels was a smart bloke so everybody who followed in his footsteps immediately decided to ignore him. They wouldn't shut up and calculate and now they're further away from a unification model than they've ever been before. In their logical positivist zeal they turned their backs on millennia of philosophy and decided that their maps would be synonymous with their territories. By doing this they were completely unable to understand the nature of their unification problem. Understanding what the universe is is not a physical question but a metaphysical question and thus beyond the remit of the physicist. Bohr tried to warn them but they weren't listening.


.....to be continued
petm1
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Re: The unification of physics

Post by petm1 »

It all went pear-shaped from the outset for Einstein because the worm in the apple is SR, the story of the twins and the bloke who can traverse the entire universe in a single lifetime if only he had a fast enough spaceship.
Thinking that you can jump back in time, instantaneous travel, instead of just prolonging you duration in the present is the flaw in my mind. Remember the photon may be unchanging in time while it travels in space but relative to us it is alway traveling through time in the present and shows us the past. That blackness of space is a sea of photons even if we can not see it because we only see the ones we interact with. In my minds eye you can solve this by realizing the interaction of our two yardsticks, the photon and my ruler, that always works out to the speed of light through space is not energy meeting from two different directions but are traveling the same direction in time and recombining in the present.
Obvious Leo
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Re: The unification of physics

Post by Obvious Leo »

petm1 wrote:speed of light through space is not energy meeting from two different directions but are traveling the same direction in time and recombining in the present.
Yes. Essentially this is what entanglement is and in the case of photons this is why the information transfer between entangled photons appears to be instantaneous. In fact it isn't perfectly instantaneous because of minute variations in the strength of gravity but in a benign gravitational environment it is very nearly so. In the spacetime model this is seen as superluminal travel, and thus verboten under SR, but this in fact is not the case. Superluminal travel remains impossible so the mass/energy equivalence principle remains axiomatic and this apparent paradox is simply an observer effect. However it was this exact paradox which convinced Einstein that his own SR model was not a true physical model, a fact which he had already proven in GR without realising it. By the time the EPR paradox became an issue for physics the entire simple logic of relativity had been distorted beyond the reach of human reason by the metaphysical absurdity of a curved space. There still exists no sane explanation for entanglement which doesn't invoke the invisible hand of the supernatural and this problem has now gotten a hell of a lot worse because it has since been many times shown to occur in physical entities with mass. Bell's inequality theorem is an enlightened procedure of thought which actually demonstrates that questions of locality and non-locality are in fact meaningless and not evidence of hidden variables in operation as is widely supposed.
Obvious Leo
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Re: The unification of physics

Post by Obvious Leo »

The flaw in SR is that it represents time as a spatial dimension when such a proposition is patently absurd and it is this single logical fallacy which accounts for every single paradox and absurdity in physics. The most obvious of these logical absurdities can be found in QM. Even those who don’t know much of physics will have heard of the uncaused random events implied by QM, the cat that can be simultaneously dead and alive and the particles which can be in two different places at the same time. These absurdities merely scratch the surface of the counter-intuitive bollocks one would need to swallow were one to take QM literally but luckily only the most fundamentalist of physics fruitloops are still inclined to do this nowadays. The more enlightened way to think of QM nowadays is simply to define it as nothing more than a mathematical tool which is used to codify a particular procedure of thought used in the interrogation of a subatomic system.

Although this is a far more sensible approach to physics from the point of view of a philosopher it doesn’t actually solve the problem which the physicists are so desperate to solve. QM is entirely predicated on SR and not on GR and that’s where the problem lies because SR ignores gravity and therefore QM also ignores gravity. This alone is complete and adequate evidence that QM cannot possibly be a model of a physically real world any more than SR can be because there is no region in the universe where gravity is absent. In the technical language of physics SR is actually defined as a special case of GR in a “flat space” and a “flat space” is a space without gravity in it. The problem here is sticking out like dog’s balls because QM is therefore assuming that gravity does not exist inside an atom but offers no explanation for how this could possibly be so. QM and GR cannot possibly be made compatible with each other because each proceeds from a different assumption about gravity and SR can never be compatible with GR because SR models a universe without gravity in it.

These are basically the irreconcilable differences between the three pillars of physics which a unification model will be required to resolve and in a hundred years absolutely no progress has been made towards resolving them. Physics is staring at a brick wall and its model-building methodology is entirely to blame for this. Building onto a model which is a crock of shit is always mathematically possible, as Ptolemy demonstrated with his geocentric cosmology, but there comes a time when the mathematical extravaganza thus contrived must collapse under the weight of its own virtuosity and this is essentially what’s happened to physics over the past half-century. Physicists are now forced to consider the existence of an infinite number of universes just so that they can account for the existence of this one. They wasted forty years looking for an explanation for the subatomic particles in an arbitrary domain of hidden spatial dimensions without actually understanding that a spatial dimension is a mathematical object and not a physical one. Ontologising the toolkit has proven to be a tactic of stultifying hubris for which history will judge the geeks unkindly.

Time is not a spatial dimension but a fractal dimension and once this is understood the unification model of physics lies hidden in plain sight like the elephant in the room. Exactly 100 years ago this year Einstein found the very truth he was looking for without ever actually realising it. Time is not interwoven with space at all. Time is interwoven with gravity.
Philosophy Explorer
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Re: The unification of physics

Post by Philosophy Explorer »

Leo said:

"...because there is no region in the universe where gravity is absent." I call this into question. First I would ask how do you know? We still haven't seen all the way out to the edge of the universe (if the universe is finite).

We're not even sure about the nature of gravity, i.e. is it a wave or a particle? You characterized it as energy. Light is energy which travels through space as an electromagnetic wave meaning it can't fill all of space (since new space is continually created) and the same would hold true for gravity (btw I googled about gravity filling all of space with no straightforward answer).

PhilX
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Re: The unification of physics

Post by Dalek Prime »

Leo, I'm trying to understand, so pardon the lay question. In a vacuum in distant space with nothing around, where is the gravitational effect coming from? I always understood that a mass causes this. How is this possible with negligible surroundings? What am I missing, or not seeing?
Philosophy Explorer
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Re: The unification of physics

Post by Philosophy Explorer »

Dalek Prime wrote:Leo, I'm trying to understand, so pardon the lay question. In a vacuum in distant space with nothing around, where is the gravitational effect coming from? I always understood that a mass causes this. How is this possible with negligible surroundings? What am I missing, or not seeing?
Dalek,

I can't answer your question. However physicists do say there is no empty space.

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Obvious Leo
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Re: The unification of physics

Post by Obvious Leo »

Philosophy Explorer wrote:"...because there is no region in the universe where gravity is absent." I call this into question. First I would ask how do you know? We still haven't seen all the way out to the edge of the universe (if the universe is finite).
That there is no region in the universe where gravity is absent is axiomatic because it is a function of time. When you speak of the "edge" of the universe in this way you make a spatial projection of a reality which is quite meaningless. If the universe has an edge in the sense you imply then what lies beyond it? The same logical inconsistency applies to the notion of an "expanding" universe. As philosophers we are perfectly entitled to ask "expanding into what?" and it was for this reason that the physicists decided to sack the philosophers. This question has no answer because the universe has no outside. The universe is indeed finite in terms of its matter and energy content, as is shown by Olbers paradox, but there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that it is temporally finite. In fact the very idea of a universe with a beginning is a metaphysical absurdity because it requires the invention of an external causal agent to account for its existence. This is a very ancient metaphysical principle called ex nihilo, nihil fit and no logician in the history of philosophy has ever managed to lay a glove on it.
Philosophy Explorer wrote:We're not even sure about the nature of gravity, i.e. is it a wave or a particle?
Neither. it is a property of time, with which it bears a precise mathematical relationship which is inversely logarithmic in its nature. This was demonstrated by Einstein in GR and has been empirically verified countless times. If it wasn't so then the GPS in your car wouldn't work and you'd drive into the ocean. Trying to model gravity as a force simply doesn't work and the physicists stopped trying to do it decades ago.
Philosophy Explorer wrote: You characterized it as energy.
No I didn't. Gravity is not energy.
Philosophy Explorer wrote: Light is energy which travels through space as an electromagnetic wave
This is the very proposition I refute. Space is merely a mathematical co-ordinate system and thus has no physical properties, therefore nothing can travel through it because this denies the cardinal physical law of reciprocal action. Light travels only through time and the spatial extension we attribute to it is merely an observer effect. Its electromagnetic properties are not in dispute but in a spaceless universe electromagnetism is an effect rather than a cause and thus is a purely epistemic construct. The same goes for the strong and weak nuclear forces. These apparent forces are the emergent consequences of the non-linear relationship between gravity and time at the Planck scale. However I'm getting a bit of ahead of myself here because this is quantum gravity and the very unification of physics which I'm planning to get to.
Philosophy Explorer wrote:(btw I googled about gravity filling all of space with no straightforward answer).
That's because no such answer exists. No physicist would claim to know what gravity is. Most have a pretty good idea of what gravity does but absolutely none of them know how it does it and this is what all the fuss is about. We all know bloody well that the apple will fall from the tree but there is in fact no physical mechanism to account for this blindingly obvious truth and no sign of such a mechanism on the theoretical horizon. To say that the models of physics have a gaping great hole in them is an understatement of considerable proportions.
Dalek Prime wrote:Leo, I'm trying to understand, so.pardon the lay question. In a vacuum in distant space with nothing around, where is the gravitational effect coming from? I always understood that a mass causes this. How is this possible with negligible surroundings?
This is by no means a foolish question, Dalek, but it is one which was satisfactorily answered by Newton's inverse square law of gravitational motion. This law has undergone some refinements over the years but it has been validated countless times and has never been seriously questioned. The motion of every single entity in the universe with mass affects the motion of every other physical entity in the universe with mass in accordance with this law and in physics as in metaphysics the word negligible is NOT synonymous with irrelevant. An apple falling from a tree on earth has a causal effect on the motion of every other physical body in the universe and this causal effect is translated through time at the speed of light. It may sound weird but it's a completely uncontroversial proposition in science and absolutely true. Gravity is a fundamental property of the universe and there exists no place where one can hide from it.
Obvious Leo
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Re: The unification of physics

Post by Obvious Leo »

Something which I forgot to mention but which is important to what will follow in this essay is the technically correct name for this type of universally interactive motion.

It is called CHAOTIC motion or NON-LINEAR motion and you may find it helpful to google some information on this so that you understand how this kind of motion differs from our everyday understanding of linear motion. I propose to show that it is this sort of motion which governs the behaviour of subatomic particles within the atom rather than the absurd idea of random motion which is the way the atom is modelled in QM. This is a profoundly important step on the path to a unification model for physics because thus far motion on the cosmological scale has always been modelled differently from motion on the subatomic scale and every physicist in the world actually knows deep down that this simply cannot be possible. This is what the quest for the holy grail of physics is entirely all about.
Scott Mayers
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Re: The unification of physics

Post by Scott Mayers »

Leo, it might help if you digress to introduce the concepts of determination, indetermination, etc. These seem to be the biggest distinctions of problems relating to the varying theories. Chaos Theory is one which proposes some 'initial' point where optional lines can digress from; Fate (theory) is a type of opposite to which various possible source routes converge to an 'end' point. For Chaos theory, the initial point is relatively "indeterminate" forward in time only from that unique point and then once such 'option' is taken, each line is determinate thereafter. For Fate, the end is predetermined but the optional routes taken to that point are many. So from the end-point in Fate, determination is forward but looking back, indetermination (of route) exists.

I think both directions count but believe I think I know your position. What I'm not sure of is if you consider the Butterfly Effect as sound as this perspective takes each point as valid, not just ONE absolute initial state. Some also believe that NOT ALL points count as initial states (most QM supporters) such that only special things like photons act as such points.
Philosophy Explorer
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Re: The unification of physics

Post by Philosophy Explorer »

Obvious Leo wrote:
Philosophy Explorer wrote:"...because there is no region in the universe where gravity is absent." I call this into question. First I would ask how do you know? We still haven't seen all the way out to the edge of the universe (if the universe is finite).
That there is no region in the universe where gravity is absent is axiomatic because it is a function of time. When you speak of the "edge" of the universe in this way you make a spatial projection of a reality which is quite meaningless. If the universe has an edge in the sense you imply then what lies beyond it? The same logical inconsistency applies to the notion of an "expanding" universe. As philosophers we are perfectly entitled to ask "expanding into what?" and it was for this reason that the physicists decided to sack the philosophers. This question has no answer because the universe has no outside. The universe is indeed finite in terms of its matter and energy content, as is shown by Olbers paradox, but there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that it is temporally finite. In fact the very idea of a universe with a beginning is a metaphysical absurdity because it requires the invention of an external causal agent to account for its existence. This is a very ancient metaphysical principle called ex nihilo, nihil fit and no logician in the history of philosophy has ever managed to lay a glove on it.
Philosophy Explorer wrote:We're not even sure about the nature of gravity, i.e. is it a wave or a particle?
Neither. it is a property of time, with which it bears a precise mathematical relationship which is inversely logarithmic in its nature. This was demonstrated by Einstein in GR and has been empirically verified countless times. If it wasn't so then the GPS in your car wouldn't work and you'd drive into the ocean. Trying to model gravity as a force simply doesn't work and the physicists stopped trying to do it decades ago.
Philosophy Explorer wrote: You characterized it as energy.
No I didn't. Gravity is not energy.
Philosophy Explorer wrote: Light is energy which travels through space as an electromagnetic wave
This is the very proposition I refute. Space is merely a mathematical co-ordinate system and thus has no physical properties, therefore nothing can travel through it because this denies the cardinal physical law of reciprocal action. Light travels only through time and the spatial extension we attribute to it is merely an observer effect. Its electromagnetic properties are not in dispute but in a spaceless universe electromagnetism is an effect rather than a cause and thus is a purely epistemic construct. The same goes for the strong and weak nuclear forces. These apparent forces are the emergent consequences of the non-linear relationship between gravity and time at the Planck scale. However I'm getting a bit of ahead of myself here because this is quantum gravity and the very unification of physics which I'm planning to get to.
Philosophy Explorer wrote:(btw I googled about gravity filling all of space with no straightforward answer).
That's because no such answer exists. No physicist would claim to know what gravity is. Most have a pretty good idea of what gravity does but absolutely none of them know how it does it and this is what all the fuss is about. We all know bloody well that the apple will fall from the tree but there is in fact no physical mechanism to account for this blindingly obvious truth and no sign of such a mechanism on the theoretical horizon. To say that the models of physics have a gaping great hole in them is an understatement of considerable proportions.
Dalek Prime wrote:Leo, I'm trying to understand, so.pardon the lay question. In a vacuum in distant space with nothing around, where is the gravitational effect coming from? I always understood that a mass causes this. How is this possible with negligible surroundings?
This is by no means a foolish question, Dalek, but it is one which was satisfactorily answered by Newton's inverse square law of gravitational motion. This law has undergone some refinements over the years but it has been validated countless times and has never been seriously questioned. The motion of every single entity in the universe with mass affects the motion of every other physical entity in the universe with mass in accordance with this law and in physics as in metaphysics the word negligible is NOT synonymous with irrelevant. An apple falling from a tree on earth has a causal effect on the motion of every other physical body in the universe and this causal effect is translated through time at the speed of light. It may sound weird but it's a completely uncontroversial proposition in science and absolutely true. Gravity is a fundamental property of the universe and there exists no place where one can hide from it.
For me Leo, gravity is a form of energy because it has the capacity to do work.

Saying that gravity is a function of time still doesn't mean that gravity is all over the universe as we still haven't observed the entire universe. Furthermore we still don't know what goes on inside of black holes.

PhilX

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Obvious Leo
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Re: The unification of physics

Post by Obvious Leo »

Scott Mayers wrote:Leo, it might help if you digress to introduce the concepts of determination, indetermination, etc. These seem to be the biggest distinctions of problems relating to the varying theories. Chaos Theory is one which proposes some 'initial' point where optional lines can digress from; Fate (theory) is a type of opposite to which various possible source routes converge to an 'end' point. For Chaos theory, the initial point is relatively "indeterminate" forward in time only from that unique point and then once such 'option' is taken, each line is determinate thereafter. For Fate, the end is predetermined but the optional routes taken to that point are many. So from the end-point in Fate, determination is forward but looking back, indetermination (of route) exists.

I think both directions count but believe I think I know your position. What I'm not sure of is if you consider the Butterfly Effect as sound as this perspective takes each point as valid, not just ONE absolute initial state. Some also believe that NOT ALL points count as initial states (most QM supporters) such that only special things like photons act as such points.
Your points are sound ones but you surely aren't suggesting that the motion of cosmological bodies is anything but chaotic? If you are I suggest you consider a scenario like the late heavy bombardment period of the early stage of our solar system formation and how over time this has resulted in the relatively stable orbital periodic motion of the planets as they currently are. This is a perfect model of chaos on an easily understood scale and scaling it up to a galactic or intergalactic scale is a perfectly logical extrapolation which should be relatively easily understood even for a layman. This model needs no mathematical treatment of chaotic principles at this cosmological scale because I'm rather searching for a more intuitive way of arriving at the same end. You are quite right when you say that I am just talking about the butterfly effect writ large and to understand this is not difficult. If a big enough rogue object were to hurtle into our solar system from interstellar space then all the current planetary orbits would be affected accordingly, perhaps even sending our beloved earth crashing into Jupiter. So much for Kepler's beautiful "laws of planetary motion" which are then shown to be a useful tool of approximation only for as long as something doesn't come along to fuck it all up.

Your last point about the initial states is a more complex one because it refers to the big bang and perhaps the most significant flaw in all of the modelling resulting from GR. The initial singularity assumptions derived from gravitational collapse are now thoroughly discredited but the low entropy final state is still assumed in the quantum field assumptions of black hole theory as well as of the current big bang cosmology. I realise that your multiverse hypothesis is predicated on this assumption but I propose to show that a high entropy big bang is a better fit for the evidence available to us, namely that the universe is not devolving from the complex to the simple but in fact it's going the other way around from the simple to the complex. A high-energy high entropy big bang in the pre-matter phase is thus a proposition which suggests itself and is not a difficult one to think through. The diffuse plasma ball needs simply be thought of as being in a state of maximum although not infinite disorder instead of one of maximum order, a supposed order which cannot possible be explained. As you can see this is a diametrically opposite assumption from the "initial conditions" assumption of current physics but I'll remind you that this assumption is derived from a model which is known to be false and not from any empirical evidence and certainly not from any logical process of deduction. As a philosopher of theoretical physics it is such a logical process of deduction which I use rather than an inductive inference from a theory which has been shown to be inapplicable in a high-energy high-gravity environment.
Philosophy Explorer wrote: For me Leo, gravity is a form of energy because it has the capacity to do work.
No it doesn't and this is the problem which physics is confronted with. Einstein's geometric space is unquestionably an improvement on Newton's flat space but gravity remains unquestionably a non-mechanical action-at-a-distance paradigm. Einstein was keenly aware of this and made it perfectly plain that for this reason spacetime must NEVER be regarded as a physical model but only as a mathematical representation of such a model. He started looking for a resolution to the action at a distance problem immediately after the publication of GR and spent the next 40 years of his life in this quest but failed dismally. Interestingly not long before he died he revealed that he suspected he'd been using the wrong mathematical tools all along which is precisely the reason why Poincare rejected the Minkowski formulations of SR. Poincare had started laying the groundwork for a new system of mathematical modelling by attacking the ancient three-body problem of gravitational motion but he died before he managed to get very far with it. However the work which he began has now evolved into a very sophisticated and mature branch of mathematics called fractal geometry.
Unsurprisingly using fractal geometry is the only way of modelling a chaotic system and it is used in every science which studies naturally occurring systems except physics. It goes without saying that every science except physics makes sense.
Philosophy Explorer wrote:Saying that gravity is a function of time still doesn't mean that gravity is all over the universe as we still haven't observed the entire universe.
What are you implying? Do you suggest that there are regions of the universe which exist outside of time? This is both a scientific and philosophical absurdity which needs no refutation for want of any sense value.
Philosophy Explorer wrote:Furthermore we still don't know what goes on inside of black holes.
This is a rather more interesting comment because the father of black hole physics, Steven Hawking, recently came out with a statement effectively casting doubt on his entire oeuvre of work in this field. His collaborator in the early years, Roger Penrose, had already come out with a similar statement decades ago but that Hawking should make such an admission is of considerable significance. He even went so far as to suggest that there may not even be such a thing as a black hole but he certainly seems very sure that they're basically back to square one with many of their original assumptions regarding these enigmatic entities. My spaceless universe model neither rules black holes in or out because it is yet to be mathematically formulated but it certainly doesn't depend on them to be viable. However what it does depend on is the big crunch, the big mama of gravitational collapse which marks the end of one cycle of the universe and the beginning of the next in the highest possible entropy state.
Philosophy Explorer
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Re: The unification of physics

Post by Philosophy Explorer »

Leo said:

"What are you implying? Do you suggest that there are regions of the universe which exist outside of time? This is both a scientific and philosophical absurdity which needs no refutation for want of any sense value."

I was referring to those portions of space void of matter or that we haven't observed. Without matter, where does the gravity come from?

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Obvious Leo
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Re: The unification of physics

Post by Obvious Leo »

Philosophy Explorer wrote: I was referring to those portions of space void of matter or that we haven't observed.
A space void of matter is NOTHING and nothing does not exist by its very definition. If nothing was something then it wouldn't be nothing. This is what Leibniz was banging on about in his argument with Newton, an argument which he should have won because he was right and Newton was WRONG. However I have canvassed these metaphysical arguments about the ontological status of the Cartesian space more fully in the thread "Where is Here?" and I don't propose to repeat myself by revisiting them here. The Where is Here thread has now got rather long but I suggest you take the trouble to read through it so that you can get some idea of the metaphysical foundations of what I do in fact propose to do here. I don't deny that it's a conceptually challenging exercise to contemplate a spaceless universe but if the models of physics are ever going to be unified into a coherent whole that's exactly the bullet which needs to be bitten. The simple truth is that space and time are not interwoven at all but are in fact mutually exclusive. I suggest you also read this.

https://austintorney.wordpress.com/2015 ... n-de-jong/
Philosophy Explorer wrote:Without matter, where does the gravity come from?


Surely you're aware of the fact that galaxies move around the universe relative to each other in clusters, super-clusters, super-super clusters, super-super-super clusters etc until we can't fit any more supers on the page. These galaxies are often separated by millions of years of empty "space" but they still affect the motions of all the others. The fact that this occurs is beyond dispute but how this actually mechanically happens is completely unknown and the very point of this entire story. This unification paradigm gets rid of action at a distance. It does so at the expense of our traditional understanding of space but it has the conceptual compensation of reassuring us that time is exactly what it appears to be.

However I've given it some thought and decided to take Scott's advice and begin at the beginning for the sake of clarity. The essence of my story is an exploration into the nature of determinism and in a sense this means going all the way back to the big bang. However I'd suggest another couple of homework assignments to your interest while I consider the simplest and least technical way of telling a very simple but highly nuanced story. Understanding a fractal universe will be a hell of a lot easier if you get some insights into John Conway's Game of Life and how such a process can be enfolded into the more holistic model of the Mandelbrot set. You don't need to try and follow all the highbrow mathematics of these models but a basic grasp of the general principles is probably mandatory. There is ample online source material for this.

I'll be spending the day with my grandchildren tomorrow so the next gripping instalment of this essay will have to wait. Even the ToE is less important than my family.
petm1
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Re: The unification of physics

Post by petm1 »

The edge of my universe from the outside point of view is the atoms that make up my world and from the inside POV we have the CBR, of course, both of these views ar looking back in time. The View of the apple falling to earth shows gravity as an attractive force, looking back in time the way we do, but the equally valid view of the Earth dilating out to the apple shows our true motion into the future and gravity as a repelling motion. I too think of gravity as temporal motion and In my minds eye it is Time that is the only dimension and space is a subset of it. Einstein did not need an aether because he already had it by describing a twist in time tied into a point in space where one clock could count existence in the present. Looking back into the big bang and realizing that we are watching a white hole, a focal point of a single dilating energy, that makes up all of our focal points today. In the early universe when the one focal point broke into all of the existing focal points we must have had exponential growth. The dilating momentum of matter we measure as mass is the same uninterrupted energy flow back to Big Bang. Looking out into the past and not taking into account our motion into the future is the missing link and if we had never had sight we would all agree that gravity is just us dilating into the future.
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