The Universe - An Effect Without Cause by Philip Gibbs

Hi Phil,

Good to see you here, and with an interesting topic. Personally; I'd scrap matter first, and I think time may be more fundamental than space, but I do believe the fabric of space is an emergent property of deeper realities. So; we'll probably have some points of agreement when I am done reading.

Good Luck!

Jonathan

I disagree with your statement that Einstein and Heisenberg were "met with strong resistance from the ruling guard of physicists". On the contrary, acceptance of relativity and quantum mechanics was extremely rapid. The papers were published immediately, and they were quickly followed by other papers by big-shots. The authors were promoted to being at the top of the profession. There may be other examples of new ideas being slow to catch on, but it is hard to imagine radical new ideas being adopted any faster than relativity and quantum mechanics.

Dear Phil

Dear Professor Price

I will try to show concrete difference between the 2 approaches:

Parmenides and Heraclitus.

Suppose two options with the same content:

1. The written book (past,present,future)

2. The audio-recording of the same book.(We live in the listeniing regime,CD now spinning, rotates)

Written is Parmenides.

Audio-recording is Heraclites.

At first sight two approaches, Parmenides(book) and Heraclitus(audio-book) in a one picture seems as a schizophrenia. As Niels Bohr said:

"There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true."

The Complementarity is also applicable here as well.

It seems to me Julian's approach look like Parmenides.

Let's look at the dilemma Parmenides vs Heraclites on the other side, namely, deterministic and probabilistic approach.

Here, the first relates to determinism, the second to the randomness and free will.

As one wise man told "Randomness is lack of our Knowledge."

Advantage of Parmenides is knowledge of whole book.

Advantage of Heraclites is hearing of sounds of audio-book in concrete moment and free will and enjoy it.

Aharonov's fair view, he says, "is somewhat Talmudic: everything you're going to do is already known to God, but you still have the choice."

Just in case."Everything in the future is a wave, everything in the past is a particle.(Dyson)

Only posible reconcilation between Parmenides and Heraclites is the Cyclic Universe in modern Penrose version of old Heraclitus version.

IMHO all is flow in one cycle,but all cycles repeat itch other,despite the violation of 2 law of thermodynamics.We don't now duration of one cycle and whether it makes sense asked this question.Does the Universe is hologram?

I would like reminding you one quote: "If we are going to restore causality, we shall have to pay for it and now we can only guess what idea must be sacrificed."(P.A.M. Dirac, Directions in Physics, 1978) Lectures delivered during a visit to Australia and New Zealand August-September 1975

My concept of time can explain, why some time we must forget about time.

To my opinion i guess what supposed to be Dirac. "Time" is the name of Sacrifice .

All the best

Yuri

Hi Roger,

There were plenty of physicists who accepted the new ideas quickly but my point is that some of the older generation did not.

Relativity did face some opposition and was not widely accepted until the eclipse of 1918. Even then there was sufficient doubt that his 1921 Nobel did not cite relativity. Some older physicists such as Poincare did not accept his claim that the ether did not exist. There are many well documented doubters and debates. It was a radical claim. He was accepted back into accademia in 1908 three years after his mirical year, not all that quick, but his contributions to atomic physics and quantum theory were enough to ensure that, plus of course there was enough acceptance from his own generation of younger physicists.

As for Heisenverg, although quantum mechanics itself was accepted very quickly the uncertainty principle is another story. Most of the physicists of the 1925 quantum revolution were young and many accepted it without question but some older physicists such as Einstein certainly did not.

Hi Jonathan, good to join you here.

You seem to be in good company if you think time is more fundamental than space. Smolin, his followers and many cosmologists seem to agree. But I don't. I have tried to argue (in limited space) that relativity means we have to treat them as being on the same level and causality is not required as a basic principle. I know this will be met with resistance but that is what makes it a worthy assumption to question

My first thought was to write about emergent space and time but I decided against it. Firstly because I already covered that in my previous essays. Secondly because I think it is too widely accepted already. It is still an assumption of currently established physics that smooth spacetime is fundamental, but it is no longer an assumption of many people working in quantum gravity. Still I am sure an interesting essay can be written about it and there are some here who have done that. I have a lot of reading to do.

I think qubits could be fundamental but are they constituemts of matter and spacetime or are both things lost? That is just a quastion of semantics.

The paradox of this essay topic is that if you talk about something that most agree with you will probably score lots of points, but the topic invites us to try and argue for something that many people may not yet be ready to accept.

In my humble opinion Philip's point of view close to Spinoza's philosophy a religion of nature.Nature - is the cause of itself(Causa sui)

Yuri, that is not quite what I am saying. I am saying that we do not need to look for a cause of the universe, all we need is a consistent theory of how it works and produces the correlations we observe. To say that the universe cuases itself would be to acknowledge the need for a cause, even if it is not an external one. I am not doing that.

O.k Phil

How about great follower of Hume (quoted by you) Ludwig Wittgenstein's view of causality?

Do you agree with him?

"A necessity for one thing to happen because another has happened does not exist.

There is only logical necessity." (Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, 6.37) Harper Collins Publishers.

Dr. Gibbs,

"It will be an acausal universe in which space and time are emergent. With them will come locality and causality, also both emergent features of the theory."

Emergence is acausal?

James

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Max Planck quote:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck

Better trandlation from the Germany:

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents; it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that it opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning.

Dear Philip Gibbs,

I admire your mastery of most current fields of physics, and accept that you are extrapolating many current avenues of thought to their extreme consequences. To some degree this resembles climbing up the rope and then pulling the rope up after you, which might be consistent, but is probably not physical. The artificial structures, such as Lattice Gauge Theories, were built on the foundation of temporal causation, and now seem to wish to throw away this foundation, to end up dependent on their own progeny, which 'emerge' from your interpretation of these structures.

You note that "causality is never experienced directly" and one "can never prove it definitively." Do you claim that consistency can be experienced directly or proved definitively?

A final question I have is whether you hope, by throwing away temporal causality, to open things up to "free will" or simply hope to span the universe with a six inch net, declaring that nothing exists smaller than six inches?

It's an impressive essay -- good luck in the contest.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

I submitted an essay yesterday. I argue that locality and unitarity are relaxed. Unitarity is the time translation of a particle by a Hamiltonian H. Of course we also have interaction Hamiltonians as well, where we compute Greene functions and propagators. This tends to define often what is meant by causality in physics: a propagator within or tangent to a light cone. Without unitarity our standard notion of causality is lost.

Oh BTW, I have never had a tooth cavity in my life. I think genes play some role in that. My wife is far more fastidious about dental hygiene than I am, and we continually sink lots of money into her teeth 

Spacetime must in some ways be emergent. The Planck length L_p = sqrt{Għ/c^3} is such that metric elements g(L, L) := 1is such that its variation δg(L, L) ~ δL/L becomes comparable to the classical definition of the metric as L --- > L_p. The meaning of a distinct light cone becomes lost near the string or further the Planck scale.

Cheers LC

Philip,

Having followed your work, leading up to the discovery of the Higgs, I certainly respect your knowledge of physics. I must say though, that I'm one of those cranks who think much of the last century has been a wild goose chase. Intuition is a slippery fellow and we never quite know when it slips in unnoticed. We perceive time as a sequence of events and physics, in all its mathematical precision, re-enforces this assumption by treating it as a measure of duration. Logically though, it is not that the present that moves from past to future, but the changing configuration of what is, that turns future into past. To wit, the earth doesn't travel/exist along some vector from yesterday to tomorrow, tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates. It is not theory, but observation. Duration only exists within the present, not external to it.

The cat is not both dead and alive, because it is the collapse of probability which yields actuality.

Time then is an effect of action, similar to temperature. One is rate of change, the other is level of activity. Affect one and you affect the other. Say by accelerating atomic structure close to the speed of light and its level of activity slows, thus its rate of change slows.

We could use ideal gas laws to correlate temperature to volume, much as we use C to correlate distance and duration, but we don't because we understand temperature is a measure of action. While temperature underlays much of our biological and environmental functions, time, the sequence of events, from narrative to causality, underlays our mental functions. Not only is it intuitive, it is the foundation of knowledge.

So now our greatest minds have spent the last century constructing a modern form of epicycles, conceptually similar to the original. Instead of the sun appearing to move, it is the present which appears to move.

Feel free to ignore the point. Just about everyone else does.

Poincare was actually bolder than Einstein, and rejected the aether beforehand. Poincare had the Lorentz group, spacetime, etc. The real reason that special relativity took off in 1908 is because that is when Minkowski's paper was widely circulated, not because of reluctance to accept Einstein's ideas. Minkowski spacetime became popular very rapidly.

Also, you do not convince me to abandon causality, but of course the purpose is to challenge our assumptions so you must expect people to disagree with your essay.

Dear Philip,

I could not follow many of the learned technical arguments you put forth concerning the very important concept of causality, but am impressed by your tracing its treatment historically in philosophy and physics.

In my own simple-minded way I am loath to let go of causality, both intuitively in general, and specifically within the structure of my Beautiful Universe Theory which describes a Universe operating locally and causally through a simple transfer of angular momentum in an ether lattice, like some 3D abacus. In my model both space and time are emergent. And so is the concept of quantum probability.

In such a model the sense of your statement that "If time is emergent causality can be emergent too" would become: "in a causal network, time is emergent".

with best wishes,

Vladimir

Your Wittgenstein quote is more in line with what I have been saying but I dont want to gte caught up in the way philosophers use particular words like "necessity". I have concentrated on temporal causality in my esay. i.e causality in time where a past cause is related to a future effect. There is also a kind of logical causality that is a seperate but related concept. It is closer to the idea of reductionism in physics but also appears in mathematics where they try to reduce everything to axioms. I think that ultimately this form of causality fails as well and logical consistency is a better concept. The essay by Ellis is more about that kind of causality if you are interested in it.

Yes I am prepared for some disagreement and relish the opportunity to debate it.

Poincare was an interesting case and is often misunderstood. People have quoted his writings pre-1905 in a way that make it look like he preempted Einstein. However, if you study his philosopjhical position of "conventionalism" more closely you find that this was not quite the case. He recognised that a preferred reference frame may not exist in nature but he thought that it was right to define one by some convention. It is a peculiar mid-way philiosophical position that is hard for us to appreciate with our hindsight. That is why it is often misunderstood.

In special relativity it seems like a pedantic distinction but his position on non-euclidean geometry was that if someone proposed a non-euclidean geometry for space it would make no sense because you could impose a Euclidean geometry by convention and it would be better because it was simpler. It is true that you can do that and locally GR can be reformulated as if spacetime is flat and gravity is like any other force, but we dont consider that simpler. Fruthermore it takes away the possibility to consider spacetimes with different topologies. I think Poincare would have ultimately seen the light because of that but he died before the implications of GR became clear.

Yes, emergence is acausal. I find it hard to give a more elaborate answer because I dont know if or how you see it as causal.