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kroner wrote:space doesn't move either... so it's impossible for one to space travel?
thingnumber2 wrote:um, I dunno if this has been said or not...but we will never invent anything to time travel...I mean, if we did, where are the people from the future? should they be here?
Sicofonte wrote:SLURP, SLURP, SLURP...
Badger (rklenseth) wrote:kroner wrote:space doesn't move either... so it's impossible for one to space travel?
The thing is that space and time are all one in the same. Hugh Everett's multiverse explains pretty clearly how this works. It is not space or time that travels, it is we that travel. But all points of time exist at the same time but in different universes.
Multiverse Theory
This essay deals with the modification, for magickal uses, of a
cosmological and quantum mechanical theory known as Multiverse or
Many Worlds theory. The original theory is credited to Hugh
Everett III, a graduate student. In 1957, concerned with the
differences between the Newtonian and Quantum Mechanical models,
Everett suggested the Many Worlds theory. The Many Worlds, or as
I'll now refer to it, the Multiverse Theory helps to solve a
problem with the quantum wave function.
We can understand the Quantum Wave Function by analogy. A
fundamental principle of quantum mechanics (Heisenberg's
Uncertainty Principle) states that you cannot know the position
and velocity of a particle at the same time. In other words, you
can know how fast an electron is moving or its whereabouts but
not both. If your friends call you from Columbus, Ohio, and you
live in New Orleans, Quantum Mechanical Uncertainty, in an
extreme analogy, means that they can't tell you how long it will
be before they arrive because they only know where they are, not
how fast they're driving. If your friends call and say we're
heading towards you at 75 miles an hour but they don't know where
they are, you're not much better off. The usual argument is that
my analogy refers to the macro level, where Newtonian Physics
operate, not the micro, where quantum mechanics does. This is
kind of a pathetic fudge by modern scientists. I'm meant to
believe that the laws of physics are different at the levels of
the very small and the very large than they are at the level of
the everyday. In fact, even in the simple driving analogy your
friends only have a rough estimation of where they are or how
fast they're traveling. Only if they stopped moving could they
tell you exactly where they are. Only if they checked their
speedometer would they be able to report how fast they're moving.
But by the time they'd reported how fast they were driving they
would no longer be exactly where they said they were.
Fortunately your friends, like the rest of us, deal in
approximations. If you know they've just left Columbus you can
get an idea of the time they'll reach New Orleans. Science is
less forgiving but in much the same way as our guess of when your
friends will arrive, the Quantum Wave Function is a formula based
on the probability that a particle moving at a certain speed will
end up in a certain place at a certain time.
It is, of course, very much weirder than that.
Here's a fine definition of the Quantum Wave Function:
The wave function, also called Schrodinger's Equation, is a
mathematical description of all the possibilities for an object.
For example, we could imagine the wave function as a deck of 52
cards where each card is a yet unobserved quantum state. The
deck has 52 possibilities so the wave function has 52 humps.
In quantum theory, all events are possible (because the initial
state of the system is indeterminate), but some are more likely
than others. While the quantum physicist can say very little
about the likelihood of any single event's happening, quantum
physics works as a science that can make predictions because
patterns of probability emerge in large numbers of events. It is
more likely that some events will happen than others, and over an
average of many events, a given pattern of outcome is
predictable. Thus, to make their science work for them, quantum
physicists assign a probability to each of the possibilities
represented in the wave function. (1)
By analogy I know that it takes me around 10 to 12 hours to drive
from my house in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, to my friend Gary's
house in New Orleans. I make this prediction because patterns
of probability have emerged as a result of the number of times
I've made the trip, the map trip mileage guide suggests it, my
friends who've made the trip tend to concur, etc. In other
words, because I can draw data from a sufficiently large series
of events I can make a prediction based on statistical
probability.
So far so good. Unfortunately, the equations of the Quantum Wave
Function only work if all other probabilities of a given event
are also real. Quantum Mechanics has proved in experiment after
experiment that the universe does not act according to the
Newtonian model. Quantum Mechanics also suggests that for a
probability to manifest itself in the universe that humans
observe, the existence, somewhere, of all the other probabilities
is required. In the universe revealed by Quantum Mechanics,
switches are both on and off; electrons are in more than one
place at the same time; subatomic particles do communicate
instantaneously (apparently violating Einsteinian physics); a cat
could be both dead and alive. In fact all these events have been
empirically proved, except, alas for cat-haters and the curious,
for the last. Proving these anomalies in the lab was not only
counter-intuitive but deeply problematic, undermining both the
Newtonian and (to a lesser extent) the Relativistic view of the
universe. In other words the possibilities, to continue my
Florida to Louisiana driving analogy, that there are universes
where I never get to Gary's house in New Orleans, where it takes
me 24 or 36 hours, or where I say, Fuck it, I'm flying, and get
there in a couple of hours, are all actualities. These aren't
exactly strange possibilities and I can easily imagine them.
Quantum mechanics can find no reason why these probabilities (and
much, much weirder, ones) should not exist, and some compelling
ones why they should. Not the least reason is that String Theory
strongly suggests the universe is fundamentally a mathematical
construct. String Theory is an attempt to develop a theory of
quantum gravitation which would bridge the problems between
Quantum Mechanics and Relativity allowing a TOE (Theory of
everything): the Scientific Holy Grail.
Scientists are fond of Occam's Razor; they dislike an
unnecessary multiplication of entities, or in normal language
they prefer simpler to more complicated solutions. So, for many
years, quantum scientists, particle physicists, cosmologists, and
neuroscientists, have attempted to shift discussion of the
problem of the unimaginably large series of universes that
quantum wave function equations require to abstractions
hopefully too complicated for anyone to examine them, such as
Hilbert space. Hilbert space is an infinite, abstract and
(usually said in a mumble) real dimension within which all the
probabilities allowed by the quantum wave function formulae
exist. Decoherence is the term used to describe the process by
which events present themselves in our quantum branch of Hilbert
Space. Events somehow decohere into this particular dimension,
the dimension of the real, in other words, the dimension of the
observable. Because quantum mechanics has been such a rich field
in the practical development of modern technology, only recently
have investigations into quantum states, that is, other parts of
Hilbert space, become more popular, despite the generally
repressed recognition that we exist in a subset of Hilbert space.
The notion is slowly slipping into the public consciousness,
appearing even in popular movies like Men in Black.
In addition, why a particular probability manifests appears
chaotic. Science, and our perception of life, is rule based and
ordered. To state that a particular probability manifests because
we observe it is circular and doesn't get us too far. The entire
universe has to be both chaotic and ordered, but ultimately based
on rules. Even Chaos Science, which enjoyed a brief but
interesting vogue, defined Chaos as order at a level of magnitude
too great for (current) instrumentation. Chaos Magick, despite
the name, is built around this concept (otherwise its techniques
could only work on a purely random basis). True chaos, non rule
based phenomena, is no more possible than absolute order.
Consequently an initial assumption in science is that the
universe is a rule based phenomenon.
The kludge around the contradictions between Quantum Mechanics
and the Newtonian world view rests in the proposition that events
differ between the subatomic and the real world. This
intellectual sleight of hand presents a problem: it splits a
unitary universe into macro and micro events running on
contradictory rules. Actually it's worse than that as
cosmological data start to support quantum observations, it's
micro, macro, and cosmological. The quantum wave function, which
determines which event will be observable out of an infinite
series of probabilities, is inherently ordered and deterministic,
rotating through time in an abstract infinite and real dimension:
Hilbert space. An event is just one probability which decoheres,
or becomes observable through our instrumentation. Everett
suggested that the solution to what happened to all the other
probabilities, which, according to the quantum wave function are
real, even though not observed, is to recognize the universe, or
more precisely Hilbert space, (of which our universe, at this
instant, is a subset or quantum branch), as infinite.
Everett's theory has been assailed repeatedly but, in one form or
another, is what most quantum physicists now believe. There is a
close to infinite (approximately 10 to the 10th to the 118th)
number of universes, all coexisting in one instant. They contain
all possible arrangements of matter allowed by quantum mechanics.
Each universe contains the manifestation of a probability. Time
is a way of arranging these universes in sequence. Each universe
is also static. It is a snapshot of a particular arrangement of
matter. Change does not really occur but the enormous number of
ways that the universes can be sequenced makes the multiverse
endlessly interesting. What appears real is only a small slice
of the entire multiverse. With the mind of a Buddha, a Creator
God, or a Cosmic Consciousness, all possibilities would be
simultaneously observable.
Curiously enough, cosmology has also come out in favor of an
infinite universe. When Everett wrote, the universe
cosmologically appeared to occupy a much smaller space. The
Hubble Deep Space photographs have shown a mind boggling number
of galaxies and a great deal of data suggests the distribution of
matter in the universe is uniform. This means that it is
unlikely that there is some point where the galaxies thin out to
nothingness or some wall appears, with graffiti scrawled across
it: THE END OF THE UNIVERSE. Einsteinian physics suggests space
might be curved, which would certainly allow for a finite
universe but there has been little proof offered. In an infinite
universe, again, all probabilities, all arrangements of matter
allowed by the laws of physics must exist. The main difference
between the cosmological theory and the quantum mechanical is
only in the distance your copy resides from the you you know. In
the cosmological theory the copy lives beyond the observable
universe. In Everett's theory your copy lives in Hilbert Space
and might even be occupying the same physical space as you do.
There are two more arguments in favor of the multiverse theory.
I suggest you check May 2003's Issue of Scientific American,
appropriately entitled - Infinite Earths in Parallel Universe
Actually Exist. (2) The ones I've mentioned are the least
controversial.
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