Hi, Interesting and unique approach. I agree that 'change' is a very valid way to look at nature and the universe, in so many different ways, most of which you identify! But I have sense that those intelligent aliens may have influenced your thinking for the better. Certainly the one I 'interviewed', or who communicated subliminally seemed to suggest change may be valid for ALL physics; c changing to new LOCAL c in moving systems, i.e. QM particle states being CHANGED (+ to -) by A&B's detectors 'flipping' them (explaining 'entanglement'!) etc. There may be even more to change than you suggest! But you DO suggest our 'foundations' may need to be changed. Well done. A novel and interesting approach which may be right on target.
Is Change All We Can Know?
Dear MagnoliaCentipide,
Thanks for your comment and sorry for the late reply. What you say reminds me that the most important things in most people's lives are their friendships and personal relationships. I like the philosophy of John MacMurray which suggests that if science has a point, ultimately that point should be about improving what is really important to people, i.e., friendship. I haven't really considered how muddling science up with technology might play into all of this and lead to the crackpot theories and social distrust you mention, and it all sounds really interesting. I'm hoping your essay might have something more to say about it and and will give it a read to find out!
Dear CoralBear,
Thank you for making some really important points which is I have also really struggled with. Our science is based around the idea of things and that idea is deeply set in our psychology, and ,because of this, when I started thinking about change I thought that that the perceptions in our consciousness, such as red, were 'things' and were code for what was going on in the real world outside our heads. Then I realized they could be a code just for change, so, for example, when there is a change of a particular frequency in my brain I might experience red. Red then remains a 'thing' that is code for a certain type of change, i.e., red is my human experience of change. But then I thought that as red seems to have no other properties, or perform any other function than describing change, that describing it as 'a thing' doesn't really add anything, and it would be simpler to just say that red is change. In a similar way, one might ask what it is that is changing in the world outside our heads. So, you might then say that is the 'aether' that is changing or 'the CoralBear field' that is changing - but these ideas don't add anything new so one might then wonder if they have any value at all. This realization was a sort of epiphany for me, as it led me to think that 'things' aren't actually necessary to describe our world and, bizarre as it sounds, instead of experiencing things, we experience change. However, if you prefer to think of red as 'a thing' I think that is perfectly justifiable. I also agree that change has to take place in a space, so you also need the idea of space as well as change. I can understand it when you say objects in the outside world are what really exist, so, for example, a table is what really exists. But a table consists of empty space and point particles. You can imagine those point particles being 'something' but I would say it is equally possible to describe them in terms of the changes they cause, i.e., solely in terms of change. You might think that this is all just a matter of definitions, but it turns out that describing physics in terms of change gives a completely different picture of the world we live in, which I have found refreshing and revealing (but I am biased!). This is especially so as it then seems possible to describe the world without all the weird conclusions that come from describing it in terms of things.
The article on structural realism (which I didn't know anything about) looks really interesting and I will look at it carefully as I sure I could learn something from it.
Thank you, and also thank you LilacSeahorse for your further comments, I am very tempted to try the Ganzfeld experiment! I think the link between consciousness and neural activity is fascinating and hides some deep secrets!
Dear ThistleLion,
Thank you - I think you are the first person to ever say my ideas might be 'on target', so I feel quite overwhelmed!
I'm glad you mentioned entanglement, as I think it's yet another area where using change to describe physics gives a completely different understanding of what is going on. If you imagine change in the world being like waves in a pond, with different waves in that pond will be crossing each other and either adding or subtracting from each other at different points in the pond, then, in a sense, all the waves are entangled with each other. It is this kind of entanglement that is absolutely key to the operation of a theory of change. However, the current understanding of entanglement depends on there being 'things' with certain intrinsic properties that move from A to B, and, for quantum theory to be true, this assumption unavoidably leads to very weird conclusions, for example, that information can pass instantaneously between two particles, whatever distance separates them. However, by using the idea of change along with the idea that the mathematics of quantum theory is describing that change (and so dispensing with the idea of 'things') it seems possible to reach an understanding of entanglement that is not the least bit weird and where there is no instantaneous transmission of information, although I realize a much deeper analysis would be required to make this sound at all convincing! However, I truly believe that a new approach using the idea of change could solve many of the fundamental problems in physics in a straightforward way while avoiding the need for many of the 'magical' conclusions that basing physics on the study of 'things' has required.
Anyway, thanks for your comments which are much appreciated.
P.S. I'm glad I'm not the only person who talks to aliens!
An interesting essay, but I found it a bit unfocused. What does it actually mean to base science on the idea of "change," e.g., how might science be different, what different actions would scientists take? The essay raised these questions and seemed to promise answers at the beginning, but ended by just saying science surely should be different, but in an unexplored way.
E.g., at one point, the essay addressed the material issue that it's hard to describe what subatomic particles actually are, but then said it's easy to describe them in terms of change, because "change is what is directly experienced by human beings as perceptions." But change at the level of subatomic particles is no more "directly" experienced by humans than the material realities of particles are; a person seeing a sunset can be said to experience the changing electromagnetic fields or experiencing the arrival of physical photons, but neither explanation is immediately evident to the untrained eye seeing the sunset. If mere experience is not enough for science (and I don't think the essay is claiming that) then how does it actually help to focus on "change" rather than on "things"? At the end of the day, you're making theories that go beyond your individual experience, and it doesn't seem to matter to me if those theories start with this nebulous idea of change or with theorizing microscopic objects.
7 days later
Dear LilacPig,
Thanks for your comments. I suppose I would say 'things' are definitely nebulous as they cannot be directly experienced (we only experience a model in our brain of that table over there, not the table itself) but change is not nebulous as it can be directly experienced, especially if you accept that all our perceptions actually are change (or at least represent change). As far as subatomic particles go, all I am saying is that Einstein couldn't say what a photon really 'is' and I think, likewise, if he was alive now, he wouldn't be able to say what a quark or any other subatomic particle 'is'. However, I can say exactly what I mean when I talk about change, for example what I mean by a change in position, even if that change in position is so small that I can't actually see it. Also, I think it is fair to assume that our perceptions are related to changes in our brain cells, and, as these cells are incredibly small and the things that are changing (like the position of sodium ions across the cell membrane) are atomic in size, I think our perceptions could well reflect some extremely small changes, i.e., perhaps we can, after all, directly experience extremely small change.
As to the point of having a theory of change, I would say it makes things much simpler: instead of umpteen particles and several forces all in a four-dimensional spacetime, there is just change moving at a single speed from place to place in a three-dimensional space, along with the ceaseless appearance of new change. It also removes much of the 'weirdness' associated with theories based around 'things', for example, that a 'thing' can be at one place when detected and then, in a way, everywhere at once in-between detections. Finally, the practical point would be if it was able to make better predictions than a theory of 'things', but I guess that remains an 'if'. The point for me is that I enjoy thinking about it - and I'm quite happy to accept that it could well all be nonsense!
I agree: Change is the ultimate basis of our perception and reasoning. Nobody will be able to refute this. In so far we may see here standstill in the progress of most fundamental basics of science. However do you agree with Shannon, on that the past is something that can definitely not be changed, and accordingly past and future are quite different from each other. The presentist view ignores this challenge to the set-theoretic fundamental of real numbers.
Here is my nit and it is a big one. The idea of "change" means that there is change as to the , say the parameters of nature, i.e. say the fundamental constants of nature.
What evidence is there for this ?
That is my nit in a nutshell. The bromide of 'acceptance of change' sounds euphoric and a panacea, but in reality change in physical models comes out from the "irresistable force " meeting the immovable object. I.e. if you want a great example of this, look at the 19th century Ultraviolent catastrophe which eventually frustrated Planck into his black body spectrum. This only after the 19th classical physics laws were shown as worse than useless
Every single advance in physics has come from the WTF mode of, "dear this ain't working" clash between an old model and then DATA which flatly contradicted the old model.
That has been a given for over 180 years and it is going to be the same in the future. I.e. we do not get an idealized "acceptance" of change for its own sake. What we do get is that we find that what we THOUGHT was true, simply blows it as far as what we OBSERVE
The latest WTF moment we have will be eventually say when people GET IT, that ahem SUSY, as romantic as it sounds does not have EXPERIMENTAL data sets supporting it directly. I like GW physics. The issue of if we have massless or massive Gravity remains a hotly contested area (classical versus heavy gravity). How many of you have heard of spin 3/2 Gravitinos directly OBSERVED
Well we DO NOT HAVE DIRECT confirmation'
This is what made the Higgs discovery so welcome and fantastic. It was and is observed directly
Bonus points , do we have HIGGSINOS, or say Susy partners of the Higgs directly oberved?
Ahem, NO
And this is the same banging ones head against the wall datum, in a dance which is how we stubbornly blunder from one insight to the next
Hello AzureFlyingfish.
I enjoyed your essay and agree with the concept that the fundamentals of changing should be included in science.
Therefore, I highly appreciated your essay. In addition, I was struck by your idea of fractals in the discussion, which is implemented in my essay, which provides experimental evidence of the fractality of the structure of matter. In my opinion, it is an irrefutable fact that only as a result of changes in the fractal structure of matter, photons are formed that we can observe.
For example, it is a fact that all background radiations and phenomena in the Universe follow in frequency and size through 1/(πα)=43.6 times, which is the law of fractality of matter elements in all scales of the Universe.
Regards.
Dear GambogeSheep
As regards time, if I have it right, the standard way of thinking about time comes from the theory of Special Relativity. Einstein's explanation of the equations of Special Relativity requires different observers to have different experiences of which events are simultaneous, and the logical outcome is that events cannot then be labelled as being in the past or in the future, i.e., an event cannot, in itself, be in the past or in the future, and that label can only be given to it by a particular observer. Practically this works perfectly, which is why it has been generally accepted, even though it is a rather weird idea. However, as I discuss in my essay, if Nature actually were to consist of fundamental parts that all travel at the same speed, then the equations of special relativity would result (you will need to take my word for this as the explanation is far too long to write down here!). This approach then allows all observers to have the same experience of simultaneous events, and so agrees with our own personal experience that there is a definite past and a definite future. It also doesn't have the weirdness of Einstein's explanation. So, by invoking Occam's razor (that the simpler of the two explanations is probably the correct one), I have to agree with you that, most likely, there is a definite past and a definite future, and that Einstein, although he was definitely right about the equations, was probably wrong about the physics underlying those equations.
As regards set theory and numbers, I think it ignores the importance of the calculating process when it comes to mathematics. So the calculating process requires moving things around in the real world (electrons in calculators, for example), and, because of this, mathematics actually reflects what is happening in the real world. I, therefore, see mathematics as a practical way of modelling the real world, which is why I think it is so important in physics.
Dear MagnoliaCentipede,
How interesting! I see physics like a giant jigsaw puzzle. At the moment, from a distance, the puzzle seems to fit together , but when you look at it more closely, some pieces of the puzzle seemed to have been rammed into place. You then try to rearrange the puzzle to get a better fit, but to do that you don't actually need new experiments, as there is already plenty of experimental results to work with. The WTF moment would be if suddenly all the puzzle pieces all fitted simply and perfectly together. That would be really satisfying! But then I would have nothing left to think about - Ouch!!!
Dear CeruleanJackal
I like very much the idea of the fractal basis of matter. My favourite book is Feynman's 'QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter' where he explains the basis of quantum theory. What surprised me is that he is able to explain quantum theory accurately (pointing out the things he left out) with remarkably simple calculations. However, to get a result using the theory, such as the probability of a photon going from A to B, requires doing the same simple calculations repeatedly, and the more the calculation is repeated the more accurate the result. It is having to do these simple things repeatedly that ends up in complexity. Feynman spends some time in the book showing how to calculate the fine structure constant (and explaining what it is) but again it involves doing simple calculations repeatedly. There is a classic computer simulation called 'The Game of Life' by John Conway where simple rules applied repeatedly can produce all sorts of interesting patterns on a computer screen. Interestingly some of these patterns can reproduce themselves and also die out - just like in real life! Fractals are a similar idea in that simple rules repeatedly applied can produce beautiful patterns that constantly enlarge. So, I agree with you - quantum theory definitely suggests matter is fractal, in that many repeated and simple calculations are required to predict the behaviour of matter, and as matter, in a sense, is simply the sum of its behaviour (i.e. the way it interacts with us or our experimental apparatus) it IS those repeated (fractal like) calculations. In my essay (and I appreciate your comments) I thought that possibly as little as two rules were required for the 'Physics Game of Life' - 1) Change goes from place to place, and 2) New change appears. That would be real simplicity in that those two rules would then explain (i.e., predict) everything, including, mass, energy, forces, and possibly even the toroidal gravitational fields you discuss in your essay, but maybe an explanation that simple is a little optimistic!