Abstract
Talking precisely about the universe in terms that come from rules solely deriving from inside said universe is difficult, to say the least. This funny conundrum, namely one of not being able to separate the observer from the observed, is a central tenet for almost all the concepts in this book. When we look at time and try to deconstruct it, it is difficult because it has become tangled with space, when we try to deconstruct space it is somehow acquired a messy tangled relationship with time, and when you try to untangle them as a unit, we find that they depend on reference frames which are tangled as well!
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Notes
- 1.
Which should sound a lot like quantum mechanics to us by now.
- 2.
By jumping back into our old hierarchically well-composed universe.
- 3.
If we expand the definition of our universe to include all of time however, things get a little more tricky. Now we’re in danger of stating tautological truths in complicated ways, much like how string theory seems to allow for an infinite number of realities, or that some other set of universes could explain some of the basic fundamental attributes of our universe we see here. We’ll discuss these theories in more detail in the final chapter.
- 4.
As we’ll see in later sections, however, we do get to use the source/sink trick in a slightly more complicated way, resulting in a pretty wildly new understanding of the fundamental forces.
- 5.
In fact, Einstein told him that his math was great but that his physics was terrible, because the notion of a single, dense, hot point that all time traced back to was so at odds with his own personal view of the universe, even though it was his own theory that led to Lemaître’s work and subsequent interpretation. By the way, Einstein made another similar mistake regarding the cosmological constant, which ended up being wrong and then right again (except it got a negative sign about 20 years ago), which is where dark energy enters the picture. We’ll get back to that in Chap. 6
- 6.
Do you see what the cracks might refer to yet? Remember how it is very difficult to talk about cracks until after you know the crack is somewhere in the marble? We’re going to exploit this difficulty to build up our modern laws, one by one, finally giving us a new definition of all things fundamental.
- 7.
Or maybe even a marble which was heated rapidly but then left to cool.
- 8.
Locally.
- 9.
And this correction, if it couples to some other correction nearby, could be a real particle like a photon or an electron, but if it doesn’t couple to anything nearby, i.e. it’s a trick due to problems with how things move around, then it’s a virtual particle and (probably) corresponds to one of the four fundamental forces. We’re going to spell it out even further in the next chapter.
- 10.
By relativity.
- 11.
I suspect this distinction is why people often think QM relies on some sort of magical observer. We’re going to talk about this later, but as it turns out information relies on the inability of the universe to talk to itself instantly just as much as light and fundamental forces, and as such the speed of information transfer is also the speed of light, which is the speed of gravity, and, of course, the upper limit to momentum.
- 12.
This would be the same thing as asking for a set of all sets, by the way.
- 13.
Involving Gödel , Einstein, and Heisenberg to name a few.
- 14.
Kind of like Wile E. Coyote running over the edge of a cliff and ‘forgetting’ to fall. The time it takes light to propagate is the time that the universe has ‘forgotten’ to tell us that the particles are no longer in the correct place, or containing the correct momentum.
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Bascom, G. (2017). A Universe Far from Equilibrium. In: On the Inside of a Marble. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60690-3_5
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