Insight

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Aletheia
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I am going to start by attempting the impossible, and then get deep.

I'm going to try to improve on an explanation of physics given by Richard Feynman.

In this clip, the interviewer asks Feynman about magnets:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM

and Feynman gives a very interesting answer (as he always does).

He starts off by talking about 'why' questions, and that one can answer them at different levels, and how one can answer them depends on the frame of reference used - what the questioner already understands.

The purpose of giving an answer to a 'why' question is to relate something that the questioner is unfamiliar with to something that they are more familiar with - to provide an analogy.

And he then goes on to explain that when someone asks why magnets behave as they do, it is cheating to use rubber bands as an analogy because if they then ask why, in turn, rubber bands behave the way they do, the answer (once you get down to the atomic level) is the electro-magnetic force (ie the same thing that you were being asked to explain about magnets in the first place) - which would be circular reasoning.



The problem is that our experience of the universe is filtered through the narrow window of our human sense organs. We don't see the full electromagnetic spectrum, just a narrow band between 400 and 700 nanometers. We don't see very faint objects (like most of the stars in the sky). We don't see very small objects (the naked eye rarely notices anything under one tenth of a millimeter).

So, when we look about us, we don't see action-at-a-distance. Every causal interaction we see is touch. A chair moves because we push it with our hand. A deflating balloon moves a feather because the contracting rubber skin increases the air pressure inside it and the 'wind' resulting from the air equalising the pressure moves the feather because the air is lots of small molecules whizzing around and these get expelled from the balloon very fast and transfer momentum when the knock into the feather. All touch.

But that's an illusion, caused by our limited perceptions. In fact the reverse holds. Everything happens by action at a distance. And these forces are very strong. If your computer monitor lost half its protons, and your head lost half its electrons, your head would be propelled towards your monitor so fast it would crush your skull. And this force is there, acting on your head, all the time, even now as you read this.

So why hasn't your skull been crushed? Because there is another force, pushing it away, and these two forces cancel out. That's how the universe is arranged. Action at a distance, but forces that balance except at close range making it seem that interaction only happens at close range. Magnets seem surprising and non-intuitive to us because they are an exception to this. In magnets the iron crystals are lined up in a synchronised way, rather than randomly, leading to the two forces not balancing out exactly. When you squish two magnets together and feel a 'push back' in the fingers holding them, that net force you're experiencing is the slight imbalance between two very large opposed forces that exist not just between the two magnets, but also between the magnets and your head, the magnets and your computer monitor, and the monitor and your head.

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Ok, time to get deep:

To our limited perceptions, we observe certain regularities about our universe, which we think of as 'rules' or 'laws'. We think time flows from 'past' to 'present'. We think every effect in the present has a cause in the past.

But that's not necessarily how things actually are. That's just how they look in our frame of reference - a sequential cascade of information storage in our brains. Time, to a physicist, is just a fourth dimension. Stephen Hawking talks about the Causal Arrow of Time.

If you stand on the beach, looking out to see, it appears that large mounds of water, called "waves" are rolling towards the beach at high speed. But that's an illusion. The mounds of water are actually oscillating up and down, not moving in towards the beach. The appearance of inwards movement is due to the timing of the successive peaks, and that fact that one bit of water looks much like another bit.

You can get the reverse effect if you look at the silhouette of a long passing train through a narrow gap in a fence. It looks like a single roof going up and down, because the darkness hides that it is a succession of similar carriages of different heights, not a single carriage changing size. You get the same thing with strobe lighting.

Now imagine a hypersphere passing though the room you're standing in, moving in the dimension that you can't see (you can only see 3 of its 4 dimensions). You wouldn't see any sideways movement. To you it would look like a small sphere appears, then grows, then shrinks, the disappears.

And we can look at time the same way.

Instead of thinking of the Earth as being a series of 3D 'stills' in a film, with the 3D objects moving in time, we can think of it as a frozen 4D object. It would be like the train being still and the observer with a fence picking the fence up and walking down the length of the train while peeking through the gap. The view would be the same, the illusion of movement would be the same, but the train itself wouldn't be changing and if the viewer could work out how to walk in the reverse direction, 'time' would appear to reverse.

With me so far?

Ok, so now for the insight...



People ask about the "first cause". "How did the universe get created?", they ask. There's always a cause, so what caused the universe to exist? What happened before the universe was born?

But these concept of "before" depend upon time being a long straight line. Think again of the hypersphere model of time. The illusion of time passing is due to the asymmetry of thermodynamics. But if we could approach the hypersphere like our train walker, we could choose which angle to approach it from. It makes as much sense to ask "What is the event at the end of the universe that will trigger it to exist" as it does to ask about the 'start'. They are just different sides of a 4D object, like a christmas tree bauble with a colour gradient on its surface. It doesn't matter which side we approach it from. All that changes is the entropy 'colour' we see first.

It is like Feynman's magnets. We've been tricked by our limited perceptions into assuming that the universe works one way, when that's just a symptom of something deeper.

So that's why something came from nothing.

It didn't.

The whole concept of "come" is wrong.
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