Abstract
Let’s summarize what we’ve covered so far. For a very long time, we’ve operated under two basic assumptions. One is that all space is fundamentally invariant, i.e., its characteristics persist independent from anything we might do to it. The other assumption is that the universe is fundamentally deterministic meaning that if we had enough information and initial conditions and enough of the rules worked out we could predict everything, everywhere.
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Notes
- 1.
A good example is in AC circuits, where the resistance of a certain element changes with sensitivity to changes in the frequency of the circuit in such a way so as to not be predictable without imaginary numbers. I like this example, because it’s not too far off from what we’re going to do next.
- 2.
In fact, we can extend this to more than just vision, this is also how measurements work, which is akin to saying this is how observation works, which, if you recall all the way back to our first chapter, is what is physically located at the center of our time—distorted marble. So just like that we can envision a clear argument that our universe, or at the very least any interaction with it, is fundamentally discontinuous.
- 3.
By the way, this is a new feature of many high-definition televisions, often referred to as frame interpolation. It generally makes the resulting image smoother, like a day time soap opera.
- 4.
This delay is precisely what we will use later to rebuild our modern image of the universe and laws which are defined intrinsically.
- 5.
Remember how I warned you that the temporal horizon is tricky because it’s inverted? The faster the frames, the more cameras we use, the slower the resulting image. Interacting with the past requires that you very quickly slow things down—smoothing out local fast motions exponentially fast. Think of a tunnel getting tighter and tighter while slowing down an object falling into it without damaging it’s surface. That’s what we’re actually doing when we look at the very small (or very old), but it’s hard to tell apart from the camera set up we grappled with before, which is essentially the inverse process.
- 6.
I have to be careful here because there are actually lot’s of ways of looking at atoms, and some of them involve cooling things down in laser traps, while some don’t “see” the atom at all, only detect them, but all of them have to collapse time and space scales in an enormously difficult way. None of them (that I know of) have single-atom detectors, they instead all involve ramping up a signal iteratively until it’s large enough for us to detect, much like the 1023 cameras. What’s more, even if they didn’t, we could still make the argument that the forces barreling up out of the atom are phantom forces that sink into, or retreat from, the atom as fractals without definite position, but we’ll get back to that.
- 7.
Where the observable universe is everything that can be measured, so falls within a vast measurement which begins with the big bang and ends with a slow sigh.
- 8.
Again, the word non-local might replace the word field-like in this statement depending on who you talk to. There is plenty of evidence demonstrating that QM is non-local, and Bell’s theorem is generally considered proof. There are, however, people still holding out for slightly different interpretations, but all experimental evidence points towards reality being fundamentally non-local, and QM effects being reproducible at all scales. Check out Bohmian mechanics and pilot-wave theory for an alternative interpretation. I personally wonder if there are ways to combine both without breaking faster than light rules, but it will require reformulating what our understanding of light is. I’ll talk more about it in Chap. 6
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Bascom, G. (2017). Narrative Energy. In: On the Inside of a Marble. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60690-3_4
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