The Universe - An Effect Without Cause by Philip Gibbs

PART 2

Statement 2:

"I think it is clear that space and time will be the first casualties of this revolution. They will become emergent properties of a deeper reality. That is the easier part but with them, locality and causality must also fail......... So let me state my thesis. I don't think that science needs temporal causality at the most fundamental level. The universe does not need a cause at the beginning of time."

Response:

Yes, indeed. Time, space, locality, and causality are shown to completely dissolve or dilate at relativistic speeds (V~C) and remain limited to only the non-relativistic Newtonian frame of reference (Velocities much smaller than speed of light C). My paper - " From Absurd to Elegant Universe" shows that the observations of the universe and galactic expansion can be predicted without an absolute cosmic time and without any past, present, or future evolution of the universe. The fundamental assumption of an absolute Cosmic Time or clock (and hence, past, present, and future) is shown to be WRONG since it does not support the universe and galactic observations and leads to unexplainable paradoxes and inconsistencies. The current operational (Newtonian) definition of an absolute time and space is only good enough for the worldly and solar system related physical phenomena and not valid at the universe scale. The paper also demonstrates that the operational worldly definition of time can reveal only 4% (material-only) reality and unable to explain the majority 96% (dark energy and dark matter) of the universal reality. The classical time is the time that is experienced in the Newtonian frame (V much smaller than C) and no-time or fully dilated time is observed in the relativistic frame of a light photon (V=C). In between these two states, there are infinite number of intermediate clocks and times (V between 0 and C). Moreover there is no synchronicity among these clocks, hence any moment (past, present, or future) of time in one clock does not have any correlation or relevance to a moment in any other clock or frame of reference.

In summary, past, present, and future moments (even though experienced as a stubborn reality in the classical world), and hence "Causality", have no meaning at all from a universal point of view. Causality seems to represent a limited concept that is shown to be valid only in Newtonian or classical frame of reference. Numerous successes of the widely accepted theories - quantum mechanics and general relativity, against experiments limited to the worldly and solar system have blinded us to misapply or impose an absolute operational time and causality on all observations causing the current paradoxes of physics and leading to an absurd universe.

Statement 3:

"Even in theories of cosmology, models that preserve causality are now becoming prevalent. Eternal inflation, cosmic evolution, baby universes, colliding brane-worlds, a quantum fluctuation from nothing, Cycles of time. All these fanciful sounding ideas are constructed to avoid the initial event at the big bang where otherwise time seems to start from nothing. Cosmologists don't want to accept a universe that begins with no cause."

Response:

Yes, indeed. In my paper, the fanciful ideas - Big Bang, Eternal inflation, cosmic evolution, baby universes, colliding brane-worlds, a quantum fluctuation from nothing, Cycles of time etc. are shown to be mere artifacts of the missing deterministic physics (GNM) of the spontaneous decay of particles. The universe observations can be predicted on the basis of a NON-CAUSAL free-willed or spontaneous decay of a particle.

Statement 3:

"Causality gives way to consistency.

If causality is not the basic principle of science then what is? The answer has to be purely consistency"

Response:

Yes, indeed. The new physics of spontaneous decay provides CONSISTENCY of applying the universal laws of conservation of mass, energy, momentum, space, and time to reveal a consistent set of all relativistic states of reality in the universe without the need for many fancy, incredible, and unverifiable concepts mentioned above as well as many others such as - multiple universes, multiple dimensions, anthropic principle, unknown and unproven particles/strings/anti-matter etc.

In summary, the framework of a universal theory proposed in your paper is strongly vindicated via a real comprehensive theoretical model - GNMUE described in my paper.

I would greatly appreciate your review and welcome any comments on my paper -" From Absurd to Elegant Universe".

Best Regards

Avtar Singh

Dyson continued his rebel way:

"I like Bohr's division, because it allows the possibility that gravitons may not exist. If the scope of quantum theory is limited, gravity may legitimately be excluded from it"

"I feel the same way about gravitons"

Freemen.Dyson The scientist as rebel Random Hause Inc.p222

Philip,

A question regarding causality:

Say I throw a ball, accepting my throw is acausal to the trajectory of the ball, isn't the ball traveling the earlier part of its path causal to the continued travel of the ball? As Newton said of inertia, "A body in motion stays in motion, unless acted on by another force."

Now take that to the LHC: With those particles traveling around that track, wouldn't the same issue arise? Isn't their trajectory and momentum causal to their continued travel? Isn't the collision causal to the spray of subatomic particles and their paths of travel?

It just seems to me that if we eliminate causality, then any coherent function is just happenstance and we are dealing in a realm of mystery far beyond logic.

It seems more likely there is an acausal break in your chain of reasoning, given the amount of debate the issues raised tend to engender.

James,you asked:

What is the cause of our ability to interpret photon data and attach meaning to it?

I think that the more accurately and generally the question posed by Einstein:

"What I am really interested in is knowing whether God could have created the world in a different way; in other words, whether the requirement of logical simplicity admits a margin of freedom."

As translated in Max Jammer, Einstein and Religion (Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 124

I hope the science will find out the answer.

Yuri,

Thank you for your response.

James

Our universe exhibits a very strong causal nature as you describe but the point is that this is emergent rather than fundamental. We observe that past causes have future effects but this is not built into the laws of nature. It is a statistical phenomenon governed by the second law of thermodynamics which is an emergent law valid for macroscopic processes. It works only because of the influence of the past big bang singularity which was constrained to have a low entropy due to fundamental symmetries in the laws of physics. The entropy of the universe then increases with the flow of time away from the big bang.

If we lived in a universe with an equally big singularity in the future then it would be a very different place. We observe influences from the future as well as the past and it is unlikely that life could evolve in such a universe. As it happens the cosmological constant means that the universe expands rather than collapsing in the future so the universe works in a way that is suitable for life.

Our brains are computers that have evolved to suit our environment and the nature of physical law is built into the software of our mind. We have string intuitive notions of time, space, causality, locality etc. This makes us think that these things are fundamental and cannot be different. To understand the universe properly we must strip away these programed concepts and build our picture of the universe from scratch using only logical consistency and observation to understand how it works. Of all the programed concepts causality is the one that is hardest to put aside, yet with clear thinking we can easily see that it is not part of fundamental physical law and is emergent.

David Hume and others who influenced him or were influenced by him were deep thinkers who could understand the necessity to seperate our programmed thinking from what we really experience. Hume recognised that we really just observe correlations and that causality is emergent, even if it is a very strong illusion that influences everything we do. It is remarkable that he could understand this long before the laws of thermodynamics and the nature of space and time were better understood. It is rather sad that although the laws of nature support his thinking, most people still do not recognise that causality is a concept programed into the mind and only exists as an emergent law of nature.

Einstein was influenced by Hume when he gave up the absolute nature of space and time. He realised that Hume was right that these things are programed into our thinking. We can overcome this programming by using only logic and careful observation to establish that space and time are not absolute. Physicists who have come to understand relativity in an intuitive way have succeeded in reprogramming their minds to some extent.

However, Einstein did not get what Hume said about causality and most physicists still fail to understand it. This is fine for most scientific endeavours but if we want to understand the foundations of natural law we must overcome this way of thinking and not be misled into imagining cyclic universes or evolving cosmoses. These do not come from observation or from logical thinking. They are just a product of thinking influenced by software that runs our brain which evolved to fit the emergent nature of the universe.

Thanks for the tip. I will try to find a copy for holiday reading.

In my last essay I described the universe as a quantum computer processing strings of qubits. The qubits and the stringy relations between them are fundemental in my opinion, but everything else is emergent. Space and time emerge and with it the quantum computer like structure with quantum code error correction that keeps the universe stable and coherent.

Our brains are also like computers (classical computers this time) but nobody sat down and wrote the prgrams and typed in the intial data before pressing the return key. Our brains evolved to run the way they do in response to our environment and this is possible because of the second law of dynamics which is an emergent law. The program structures which run the universe emerged much more quickly in the initial instant after the big bang, but it was not set in motion by some cause. The low entropy nature of the big bang is just due to the symmetries of nature that are manifest in the singularity and spontaneously broken as time progresses. This is all emergent from one overall block view of the universe with no causal input.

Unitarity and locality are good ones to regard as emergent. I agree.

Unitarity just says that probabilities add up to one so if you have one state which evolves to another this has to be an exact result. You cant lose some of the probability. However, the fact that one state can evolve into another is itself emergent along with the meergence of time so unitarity emerges in conjunction with that.

Unitarity is reversible so it does not tell us that cause precedes effect, just that the total information is preserved whichever direction you go in. I this sense temporal causality is distinct from unitarity and emerges seperately, but the two things are related.

Phil

Who coined term "emergent"?I can't grasp clear senыe this word.

I knew it, but for me it is not enough.I know more about emergency vs reductionism dilemma.I don't understand why space -time can be emergent phenomenon.

Anderson: "The central theme of emergence over reductionism: that large objects such as ourselves are the product of principles of organization and of collective behaviour that cannot in any meaningful sense be reduced to the behaviour of our elementary constituents." The origin of this idea is Anderson himself, in a widely quoted article from 1971 - "More is different."

See: http://www.tkm.kit.edu/downloads/TKM1_2011_more_is_different_PWA.pdf

Even the great guru John Wheeler relied on the phrase.

Dear Doctor Gibbs,

With all due respect, it is your right to think that human brains are like computers, it is my right to know that my brain is nothing like a computer. As I tried to explain in my essay Sequence Consequence, I can only really see what I am looking at here and now. I can only really hear the noise that is in earshot here and now. I can only really smell the fragrances near my nostrils here and now. I can only really taste whatever I put in my mouth here and now. I can only really feel whatever is touching the sensitive surfaces of my body here and now. No clock will ever be built that could accurately record what time it really is now and realistically distinguish that real time from when then ends. No computer will ever be built that could really calculate the boundary line of here and satisfactorily indicate where there ceases. Reality can only take place here and now. Mathematics is only a pretentious religion that uses meaningless symbolic numbers.

Joe Fisher

Dr. Gibbs,

"It is rather sad that although the laws of nature support his thinking, most people still do not recognise that causality is a concept programed into the mind and only exists as an emergent law of nature."

I don't think it is sad. I think it is good to depend upon and learn from empirical evidence and avoid philosophical drifting. Not time nor space nor cause nor intelligence are natural parts of physics equations. The equations of physics are not about the nature of the universe, they are about patterns in changes of velocity of objects.

James

To my opinion dichotomy "emergency vs reductionism" can be united by bootstrapping idea:top-dawn & dawn-top.

Surprisingly, the container(space-time),theoretical content(fermions-bosons), casual content (energy-matter) obey the same law 3:1.

http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/946

James

I put my post yesterday to your essay about fundamental constants.

There is my point of view.

Philip,

Thank you for the reply. I don't know if you read it, but the point I made further up the thread is an observation about how our intuitive sense of time did escape notice and is built into current physical theory. We perceive time as a sequence of events and physics, in its mathematical precision, re-enforces this perception by treating it as a measure of duration. It is not that the present moves from past to future, but the changing configuration of what is, turns future into past. For example, the earth doesn't travel/exist along some vector from yesterday to tomorrow, tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates. Duration only exists within the present, not external to it.

So when we measure from one event to the next in the sequence, the prior event is only a small fraction of the potential lightcone of causal input into the second event.

If you consider the implications of treating time as an effect of action, ie. rate of change, then the physics is fundamentally dynamic, not essentially static points of measure.

It is when we try to impose that external timeline, either conventionally, as in QM, or as part of a spacetime geometry, rather than letting it emerge out of action, that problems occur.

The cat is not both dead and alive, because it is the collapse of probability which yields actuality and clock rates differ because there are different rates of change in different environments, not because they travel different time vectors.

Dear Philip:

EMERGENCE vs. CAUSALITY

Phil/Yuri: I would appreciate your feedback on the following conceptual representation:

Emergence implies appearance over time and space. What emerges was not existent before it emerges to be noticed or seen. Hence, emergence implies a kind of evolution of greater complexity over time. Since time and evolution are implied, emergence can be easily confused with causality. What emerges from some earlier state seems to be causal and effected by an external cause.

I would like to suggest EQUIVALENCE (aka complementarity) rather than EMEGENCE to represent a non-causal or free-willed phenomenon or event. Because EQUIVALENCE exists independent of time as an eternal law, it is non-causal. For example, an entity exists in EQUIVALENT states of wave and particle; a wave does not EMERGE from a particle or vice-versa. As I have described in my paper - " From Absurd to Elegant Universe", various relativistic states of the mass-energy-space-time continuum of the universe exist as EQUIVALENT states and not EMERGENT states evolving in time and space. Only those states (V much smaller than C) wherein the relativistic effects are negligible are experienced as Newtonian or CAUSAL states. In the limit, when V approaches C, pure non-causal state of fully dilated mass, space, and time exists as the pure kinetic energy (also known as dark energy). Hence, so-called dark energy is not an EMERGENCE from matter state but an EQUIVALENT state free from time and causality.

Regards

Avtar

Hello ,

the computing is a human invention, the Universe , no !

of course the informations can be correlated with good superimposings but we have several limits and incompleteness.But this incompleteness needs a pure rational road, a pure dterminism in the calculations.You cannot invent false laws.Just for a kind of mathematical plays implying confusions. The maths are there to help us to better understand our physical laws.They are not there to imply the confusions and still less for investors. After we shall ask all :but why this plaenet does not turn correctly. If already the high spheres are corrupted by an ocean of confusions. Oh My God, but what is this circus ?

That said,The artifial intelligence seems possible, and still more with biological superimposings and some algorythms. The informations are fasinating indeed.

Regards

John thanks for your comment. I agree aboiut our intuitive sense of time. I will read your essay later. I have a lot to get through