Does Spacetime Exist?

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Challenging question. Phillip Pullman wrote a series of novels collectively called "His Dark Materials", they even made a movie from the first book "The Golden Compass". Anyway, in that series Pullman envisions consciousness as "dust" and alludes to dark matter as consciousness's habitat.

But I think that consciousness resides in the same place as the information to be found in objective reality (which reality, by the way, we can not experience directly, because we are locked in subjective consciousness). Where does information reside? Perhaps it resides in the objective world until a conscious observer measures it into his subjective world, computes it, and generates a reaction back into the objective world.

John Archibald Wheeler is famous for his phrase "from bit to it", meaning 'from information to substance'. I think that consciousness resides in the information world. I think that Plato meant the information world when he talked about "the world of perfect forms". Roger Penrose appealed to Plato's world in his books on consciousness "The Emperor's New Mind" and "Consciousness and the Universe". So we live in a world that consists solely of information that our consciousness infers based on the outside world's actions on our physical senses. The blind men and the elephant parable is applicable.

So how can information become substance, the 'bit' become an 'it'? Well, what is substance? If we take 'substance' to mean something that we can measure with our physical senses, it is whatever our consciousness deems it to be based on its interaction with our senses. So in a sense, we haven't any objective idea about what substance is. We're locked in subjectivity. So matter becomes substance to us whenever we measure it to put information into our neurons. We manipulate information and arrange it in new ways and take action on the outside world with it. 'Bit' becomes 'it'.

Here's a story. A blind girl told me about a friend of her's whose vision had been restored. This friend could not tell the difference between a sphere and a cube until she felt it. She had never learned to use her vision to differentiate pointiness from smoothness. The way that we perceive the world is learned. It need not be the way the world really is. Evolution only demands that we survive. There is no objective truth, space, time, matter, or energy, there is only our interpretation of information that our world passed to us through our senses.



Exactly. For me, The Mandlebrot Set illustrates this when you compute its fractal (graph). Here's a quote from James Gleick's book 'Chaos'' pg 224.

In Benoit Mandlebrot's first crude computer printouts, a rough structure appeared, gaining more detail as the quality of the computation improved. Were buglike floating "molecules" isolated islands? Or were they attached to the main body by filaments too fine to be observed?

With more iterations of the program loop and a finer printout, it became clear that the fractal was one unit, with the 'floating' units attached by fine gossamer lines. The function was one unbroken unit. If we could figure out what the function for the universe was, and had an eternity to loop through computation of the function for zillions of input values, would we end up with one unbroken unit as the universe? I think fractals and the Mandelbrot Set in particular have something to say about that.



Berkeley denies the objective physical world. I do not. I just point out that we can never experience the real world first hand. It always begins with our consciousness taking an action on the physical world, and trying to determine the meaning of the reaction of that physical world upon our senses. We have only 5 senses. Russian playwright Chekhov, in "Cherry Orchard" opined that there may be 99 possible senses of which we possess only 5. Our senses pick up the information we need to survive in our environment; they do not necessarily detect all the information there is to be had.




Sometimes all we can do is talk in analogies. It does get hard to think when you remove space and time from the picture. The way that I visualize the big spaceless timeless picture is by imagining it as a zero dimensional point. You could say my view is that the big bang never happened. Everything is still concentrated in a zero dimension point.

And here's a thought; energy is equivalent to mass by E=MC^2, yet mass takes up space but energy does not. Well, how's that possible?

And here's an enigma for you to chew on, sailamont. It's similar to the double slit experiment (dual wave particle nature), where an unobserved stream of photons interferes with itself on a photographic plate, but an observed stream of photons does not interfere with itself (consciousness collapses the wave function). JA Wheeler takes the experiment a step further.

from: http://www.unt.edu/rss/class/rich/misc/JohnWheeler.html

" Suppose that on Earth, some astronomers decide to observe the quasars. In this case a telescope plays the role of the photon detector in the two-slit experiment. If the astronomers point a telescope in the direction of one of the two intervening galaxies, they will see photons from the quasar that were deflected by that galaxy; they would get the same result by looking at the other galaxy. But the astronomers could also mimic the second part of the two-slit experiment. By carefully arranging mirrors, they could make photons arriving from the routes around both galaxies strike a piece of photographic film simultaneously. Alternating light and dark bands would appear on the film, identical to the pattern found when photons passed through the two slits.

Here's the odd part. The quasar could be very distant from Earth, with light so faint that its photons hit the piece of film only one at a time. But the results of the experiment wouldn't change. The striped pattern would still show up, meaning that a lone photon not observed by the telescope traveled both paths toward Earth, even if those paths were separated by many light-years. And that's not all.

By the time the astronomers decide which measurement to make ? whether to pin down the photon to one definite route or to have it follow both paths simultaneously ? the photon could have already journeyed for billions of years, long before life appeared on Earth. The measurements made now, says Wheeler, determine the photon's past. In one case the astronomers create a past in which a photon took both possible routes from the quasar to Earth. Alternatively, they retroactively force the photon onto one straight trail toward their detector, even though the photon began its jaunt long before any detectors existed.

It would be tempting to dismiss Wheeler's thought experiment as a curious idea, except for one thing: It has been demonstrated in a laboratory. In 1984 physicists at the University of Maryland set up a tabletop version of the delayed-choice scenario. Using a light source and an arrangement of mirrors to provide a number of possible photon routes, the physicists were able to show that the paths the photons took were not fixed until the physicists made their measurements, even though those measurements were made after the photons had already left the light source and begun their circuit through the course of mirrors."

It is because matter (ie. particles containing mass) is composed of energy in the form of light strings (per String Theory). These energy strings are constantly vibrating, rotating, spinning, etc at such high speed that they appear as solid objects, when it fact they are not. (They are hollow at the center.) It gets even more complicated when you consider mass-less particles (like neutrinos) because they do not have a complete string to work with. It is the closure of the strings that arise to what we consider properties of mass. E=mc^2 relates how much energy is required to compose a mass particle from electromagnetic energy in a conversion reaction. An electron would require 511 KeV (low x-ray region) of energy to be formed, the same amount as a positron. Both protons and neutrons require more energy due to larger masses, also with the corresponding amounts for their antimatter components. In nuclear reactions (both fission and fusion), the energy comes from particle masses being converted back into electromagnetic energy directly. We can convert mass into electromagnetic energy (E<=mc^2), but we have yet to fully be able to do the reverse (E=>mc2, to create matter directly from electromagnetic energy) in a controlled manner.

Although I like String Theory, it is fundamentally wrong on something important that I can perceive. Because of this, I have been working for the past two years on a theoretical physics paper to make the corrections. It is a bit long (40+ pages right now) and I keep finding new things that tie into the material. My intent is to have it published in a peer reviewed journal in the near future. However, I have to work my way up the ladder to even get there (scientific publishing can be a long, long journey to undertake).

Thanks for your reply, Chemist. The question that I was considering was this: If mass and energy are inter-convertible, why does mass take up space but energy does not take up space? What is it about mass that causes it to occupy space? Why can't mass coexist with space? I ask this question because I am considering the possibility that space-time is a chimera built by human consciousness.

I have heard that the Higgs Boson gives mass to energy. When energy is converted to mass, space disappears to accommodate mass. So how does the Higgs convert energy to mass? Is our idea of mass wrong? We perceive mass by our senses and equate it with our imaginings of solid things like rocks and trees. But if I were not locked up in side my head, what might mass really be? Could it be a rapidly spinning, rotating loop of light that can be felt with my finger, just the way I can perceive magnetic energy by playing with magnets?

I have heard amazing things about string theory; that Einstein's equations pop out of it and such. So I think that it says something about the real world, even though it eludes empirical testing. You say that the strings are made of light. This is the first that I have heard that, but let me run with it a little. Since light is energy and a photon is not massive, I wouldn't suppose that these strings take up space. But if they do not take up space, how do they associate with the Higgs to get mass and thus occupy space? Such things cause me wonder about our idea of space-time. Does it physically exist or is it a product of consciousness?

You mention that you disagree with some of string theory and are writing a paper. Is it possible to put your idea into words?

I'm weighing in on this in hopes QuantumChemist will either correct me, or provide more information. From what I have read/heard, the boson itself does not give mass to energy; the boson is a vibration in the Higgs field, and it is the field which gives mass to energy. A particle's mass is determined by the strength or weakness of its interaction with the Higgs field. The analogy is of a material permeating a space, and for some particles the material is more viscous than it is for others, meaning that some particles require more energy to move through the material than other particles do. The 'energy required to move through the material' is the analog of energy required to overcome inertia, i.e. mass.



I have never heard that strings are composed of light. I have heard quite the opposite, actually: that, if string (M) theory is correct, the strings and branes are fundamental components of our universe, which would effectively mean that photons are composed of strings. When I google "light string" I cannot find very much about it, although I have a tendency to think when QuantumChemist said "light strings" he/she meant a technical term in the field of string theory rather than strings made of light. Is it not true that one cannot really ask of what strings are made, because they are by definition fundamental and therefore 'strings are strings', so to speak?



I second that motion.