Think of the Three Musketeers "All for one, one for all."- the Fourth is the Psychological Arrow of Consciousness.
On Oct 14, 2011, at 12:36 PM, Jonathan Post wrote:
You have my permission to post the attached (46 KB Word file)text of
that chapter, on stardrive.org, with an explanation that it is an
excerpt from one of the 3 novels that I've written within the past 2
months And, please, a hotlink to this summary of who I am in Science
Fiction.:
http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/authorsP.html#JonPost
Previously, at Jack's request, I showed you a draft of a serious
Math/Physics paper of mine, "Preliminary Notes on Classical and
Quantum Dynamics of Fractal Particles in Conventional Fields, and
Point Particles in Fractal Fields, Draft 10.0 of afternoon 27 April
2010, 46 pp., 10,850 words.
Now please allow me to give you a tutorial, part 1 of several, on Time
Travel, embedded cunningly in my unpublished Science Fiction novel
"Pirates & Dinosaurs"
20. TARDIS
“With all due respect, madam,” said pirate captain Scatty Vickerman,
“Your explanation of time travel was as garbled as that of your ivory
tower professor boss.”
“I’m the practical one on the team, as number two,” said Dr. Assebraker.
I won’t critique the Captain on board his own ship,” said Feconey
Cuzzin. “But I get your drift. But that metaphor of time flowing
like a river. It does not, you know. Time and tide wait for no man.”
“Quantum time waits for no cosmos,” she said. "The intriguing notion
that time might run backwards when the Universe collapses ran into
difficulties about 40 years before my time. Raymond Laflamme, of the
Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, carried out a new
calculation which suggested that the Universe cannot start out
uniform, go through a cycle of expansion and collapse, and end up in a
uniform state. It could start out disordered, expand, and then
collapse back into disorder. But, since the COBE data show that our
Universe was born in a smooth and uniform state, this symmetric
possibility cannot be applied to the real Universe.”
“Universe expands and collapses?” said Scatty Vickerman.
“”I’ll get back to that,” said Dr. Assebraker. “Physicists have long
puzzled over the fact that two distinct ‘arrows of time’ both point in
the same direction. In the everyday world, things wear out -- cups
fall from tables and break, but broken cups never re- assemble
themselves spontaneously. In the expanding Universe at large, the
future is the direction of time in which galaxies are further apart.”
“Galaxies?”
Sarfatti Comment: In the hologram theory the alignment of these two arrows is trivial. Also the special initial condition of the universe is trivial as well. We have both a past and future boundary hologram screen (2D surrounding surfaces - us at center) as given by Tamara Davis - the pixelated computing past particle and the future event horizons respectively..jpeg)
The Bekenstein-Hawking area-entropy saturates at least for our future deSitter horizon
We are the interior bulk 3D hologram image projections clashing both past and future in the here-now in sense of Yakir Aharonov's overlap of history and destiny state vectors. However we also need macro-quantum coherent signal nonlocality beyond orthodox quantum theory for the whole madcap idea to work. Crazy indeed. Crazy enough to be true?
N.D. Mermin wrote: "Why has the Aharonov group been confusing some of us in this way for two decades? There is a clue in the final section of the authors’ PHYSICS TODAY article, where they talk about the flow of time. There they suggest taking seriously the idea that time “propagates forward from the past boundary
condition and backward from the future boundary condition.” If you believe that, then conventional use of tense is indeed obsolete and distracting, and using the subjunctive mood in counterfactual statements becomes problematic."
Obviously Mermin does not take this way of thinking seriously. Pity. Modern cosmology shows our past particle horizon must have a boundary condition as well as our future event horizon. If they are fractal, then all scales from Planck to Hubble are involved. Indeed, the physics on both of these 2D hologram screens is Bohm's Implicate Order with us as hologram images in the bulk 3D interior's explicate order. Seth Lloyd also thinks these observer-dependent pixelated surface horizons are computers - presumably quantum and possibly conscious?
Aharonov wrote: "However, as Mermin certainly knows, analyzing sentences in isolation without the many clues found in context doesn’t do them justice. The initial setup is indeed elementary, and we put in all the details, so it is hard to see how it could be misinterpreted. The situation becomes far more interesting and surprising, though, when weak measurements are taken into account; to ignore them, as Michael Nauenberg and Art Hobson did, is to completely miss the point. We believe that no true understanding of quantum mechanics can be obtained without taking weak measurements seriously."
PHYSICS TODAY OCT, 2011 LETTERS
Now, obviously at the Alpha Point of Inflation our entropy is 1/4 Planck area. As the observable universe expands the interior bulk 3D volume increases. Hence the thermodynamic arrow and the cosmological arrow are trivially in the same sense. Similarly, our future event horizon is the Wheeler-Feynman total absorber. Hence all three arrows, cosmological, thermodynamic, electromagnetic are all marching to the same drummer in lock step. The repulsive dark energy field causes the area of our future horizon to saturate at ~ 10^123 BITS. - END OF SARFATTI COMMENTARY
“Big clusters of stars. Like Magellan’s clouds. Not clouds at all,
if you have a strong enough telescope to observe.”
“Whatever,” said Vickerman. “But the clumps of stars get farther
apart? Big deal. They are dispersing, like a fleet breaking apart
during a storm.”
“No, actually,” she said. “The space between the galaxies is
stretching. As if you had to navigate on a spherical Earth of
smoothly increasing diameter.”
“Nightmare,” said Feconey Cuzzin. “The world is not growing or shrinking.”
“I know,” she said. “And I know that you know. But I’ve got to use
metaphors since, as Gage told you, you guys don’t have the
mathematics. With allude respect to your spherical geometry to plot
your courses. Anyway, many years ago, to me, many years hence, for
you, Thomas Gold suggested that these two arrows might be linked. That
would mean that if and when the expansion of the Universe were to
reverse, then the everyday arrow of time would also reverse, with
broken cups re-assembling themselves.”
“Broken cups don’t glue together well,” said Feconey Cuzzin. “If I
shatter a wine glass with a pistol shot, you’d have a hard time
melting the glass back together.”
“Exactly,” said the blonde scientist/head of Security. “More recently
to my era, these ideas were extended into quantum physics. There, the
arrow of time was linked to the so-called ‘collapse of the wave
function’, which happens, for example, when an electron wave moving
through a TV tube collapses into a point particle on the screen of the
TV. Some researchers have tried to make the quantum description of
reality symmetric in time, by including both the original state of the
system (the TV tube before the electron passes through) and the final
state (the TV tube after the electron has passed through) in one
mathematical description.”
“TV?”
“Television, and it didn’t use vacuum tubes since before I was born.
No matter. Murray Gell-Mann and James Hartle then extended this idea
to the whole Universe. They argued that if, as many cosmologists
believe likely, the Universe was born in a Big Bang, will expand out
for a finite time and then recollapse into a Big Crunch, the
time-neutral quantum theory could describe time running backwards in
the contracting half of its life.”
“Big Bang?”
“Yes, you know how a bursting shell flings shapnel in all directions.
We know that the universe seems to have been born in a hot, bright,
explosion.”
“Fiat Lux,” said Scatty Vickerman. “Let there be light. Genesis.”
“Oddly enough,” she said, “The Bible was right about that.
Unfortunately, Laflamme then showed that this would not work. He
proved that if there were only small inhomogeneities present in the
Big Bang, then they must get larger throughout the lifetime of the
Universe, in both the expanding and the contracting phases. ‘A low
entropy Universe at the Big Bang cannot come back to low entropy at
the Big Crunch’ He found time-asymmetric solutions to the equations --
but only if both Big Bang and Big Crunch are highly disordered, with
the Universe more ordered in the middle of its life.”
“One of your people,” said Feconey, I think it was the girl with the
German name, Sigmunda, used the phrase ‘midlife crisis.’”
“Alright,” said Assebraker, “My point is, observations of the cosmic
microwave background radiation, the light of creation stretched to a
part of the spectrum you can’t see with your naked eyes, shows that
the Universe emerged from the Big Bang in a very smooth and uniform
state. This rules out the time-symmetric solutions. The implication is
that even if the present expansion of the Universe does reverse, time
will not run backwards and broken cups will not start re- assembling
themselves.”
She noticed that his face twitched very slightly when she said the
word “naked.” That confirmed her hunch that he was sexually attracted
to her.
“Is time travel possible?” said Scatty Vickerman. “I don’t dispute
the evidence of my senses. Your machines with technology centuries
beyond my world, the thunder lizard. Yet the idea is not new in
fantasy literature. In Norwegian, for example, ‘Anno 7603’, by
theplaywright Johan Hermann Wessel, published about a decade ago,
1781, I think.”
“Right,” she said. “That was fiction about going from the present very
rapidly into the future. This became a popular notion for
storytellers after your era. The first fiction depicting time travel
from Present to Past: ‘Missing One's Coach’, anonymous, Dublin
Literary Magazine, 1838, which sends the narrator back a millennium.
Future to Present: ‘An Uncommon Sort of Spectre’, Edward Page
Mitchell, 1879. Or should I count the Ghost of Christmas Future in
Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’ (1843)? Past to Present: ‘The
Hour Glass, Robert Barr, The Strand magazine, December 1898.”
And these used fictional Time Machines?” said Scatty Vickerman.
“No, that’s a more subtle idea,” she said.”7 years before H. G. Well’s
‘The Time Machine’, that Gage told you about on the island, there was
‘The Clock That Went Backwards’, by Edward Page Mitchell, The New York
Sun, 18 September 1881. We call that genre ‘Science Fiction.’”
“Science Fiction,” said Feconey Cuzzin. “I don’t have the spare time
to read such fairytales, even if I had access to the stuff you guys
always quote from, written in my future.”
“My main point is,” said Dr. Assebraker, it turned out not just to be
fiction. In one of the wildest developments in serious science for
decades, researchers from California to Moscow in the deacdes before I
was born, started investigating the possibility of time travel. They
were not, as yet, building TARDIS lookalikes in their laboratories;
but they have realised that according to the equations of Albert
Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the best theory of time and
space we had until the Grand Unification of the 2030s, there is
nothing in the laws of physics to prevent time travel. It may be
extremely difficult to put into practice, people began to believe, but
it is not impossible.”
“Einstein, you’ve mentioned,” said Feconey Cuzzin. “TARDIS?”
“TV,” she said. “Never mind that for now. It sounds like science
fiction, but it was taken so seriously by relativists that some of
them proposed that there must be a law of nature to prevent time
travel and thereby prevent paradoxes arising, even though nobody has
any idea how such a law would operate. The classic paradox, of course,
occurs when a person travels back in time and does something to
prevent their own birth
-- killing their granny as a baby, in the more gruesome example, or
simply making sure their parents never get together, as in ‘Back to
the Future.’ It goes against common sense, say the sceptics, so there
must be a law against it. This is more or less the same argument that
was used to prove that space travel is impossible.”
“The captain is still dubious,” said Feconey Cuzzin. “But I accept
the notion that something more energetic than gunpowder could put men
on the Moon. You said that your brother lives in Tycho City, and your
people told me that’s the name of a colony on the Moon, in a crater
named after Tycho Brahe.”
“Exactly,” she said. “So what do Einstein's equations tell us, if
pushed to the limit? As you might expect, the possibility of time
travel involves those most extreme objects, black holes.”
“Gage tried to tell us. “There was an English rector who had the idea
first, in our past…”
“Yes,” she said. “A black hole is a volume of space where gravity is
so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape from it. This
astonishing idea was first announced in 1783 by John Michell, an
English country parson. Although he was one of the most brilliant and
original scientists of his time, Michell remains virtually unknown
today, in part because he did little to develop and promote his own
path-breaking ideas. “
“Michell was born in 1724 and studied at Cambridge University, where
he later taught Hebrew, Greek, mathematics, and geology. No portrait
of Michell exists, but he was described as ‘a little short man, of
black complexion, and fat.’ He became rector of Thornhill, near Leeds,
where he did most of his important work. Michell had numerous
scientific visitors at Leeds, including Benjamin Franklin, the chemist
Joseph Priestley (who discovered oxygen), and the physicist Henry
Cavendish (who discovered hydrogen).”
“The range of his scientific achievements is impressive. In 1750,
Michell showed that the magnetic force exerted by each pole of a
magnet decreases with the square of the distance. After the
catastrophic Lisbon earthquake of 1755, he wrote a book that helped
establish seismology as a science. Michell suggested that earthquakes
spread out as waves through the solid Earth and are related to the
offsets in geological strata now called faults. This work earned him
election in 1760 to the Royal Society, an organization of leading
scientists.”
“Michell conceived the experiment and built the apparatus to measure
the force of gravity between two objects of known mass. Cavendish, who
actually carried out the experiment after Michell’s death, gave him
full credit for the idea. The measurement yeilded a fundamental
physical quantity called the gravitational constant, which calibrates
the absolute strength of the force of gravity everywhere in the
universe. Using the measured value of the constant, Cavendish was able
for the first time to calculate the mass and the average density of
the Earth. “
“Michell was also the first to apply the new mathematics of statistics
to astronomy. By studying how the stars are distributed on the sky, he
showed that many more stars appear as pairs or groups than could be
accounted for by random alignments. He argued that these were real
systems of double or multiple stars bound together by their mutual
gravity. This was the first evidence for the existence of physical
associations of stars.”
“But perhaps Michell’s most far-sighted accomplishment was to imagine
the existence of black holes. The idea came to him in 1783 while
considering a hypothetical method to determine the mass of a star.
Michell accepted Newton’s theory that light consists of small material
particles. He reasoned that such particles, emerging from the surface
of a star, would have their speed reduced by the star’s gravitational
pull, just like projectiles fired upward from the Earth. By measuring
the reduction in the speed of the light from a given star, he thought
it might be possible to calculate the star’s mass.”
“Projectiles fired upward from the Earth,” said Feconey Cuzzin.
“That’s the first common sense thing you’ve said in a while, Pray
continue.”
“Michell asked himself how large this effect could be,” said Dr.
Assebraker. “He knew that any projectile must move faster than a
certain critical speed to escape from a star’s gravitational embrace.
This ‘escape velocity’ depends only on the size and mass of the star.
What would happen if a star’s gravity were so strong that its escape
velocity exceeded the speed of light? Michell realized that the light
would have to fall back to the surface. He knew the approximate speed
of light, which Ole Roemer had found in the previous century. So it
was easy for Michell to calculate that the escape velocity would
exceed the speed of light on a star more than 500 times the size of
the Sun, assuming the same average density. Light cannot escape from
such a body, which would, therefore, be invisible to the outside
world. In my day we would call it a black hole.”
“Be that as it may,” she continued, glaching at the cannon size and
placement, “since Einstein's theory is a theory of space and time, it
should be no surprise that black holes offer, in principle, a way to
travel through space, as well as through time. A simple black hole
won't do, though. If such a black hole formed out of a lump of
non-rotating material, it would simply sit in space, swallowing up
anything that came near it. At the heart of such a black hole there is
a point known as a singularity, where space and time cease to exist,
and matter is crushed to infinite density. Roger Penrose, later of
Oxford University, proved that anything which falls into such a black
hole must be drawn into the singularity by its gravitational pull, and
also crushed out of existence.”
“But, also in the 1960s, the New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr found
that things are different if the black hole is rotating. A singularity
still forms, but in the form of a ring. In principle, it would be
possible to dive into such a black hole and through the ring, to
emerge in another place and another time. This ‘Kerr solution’ was the
first mathematical example of a time machine, but at the time nobody
took it seriously. At the time, hardly anybody took the idea of black
holes seriously, and interest in the Kerr solution only really
developed in the 1970s, after astronmers discovered what seem to be
real black holes, both in our own Milky Way Galaxy and in the hearts
of other galaxies.”
“This led to a rash of popular publications claiming, to the annoyance
of many relativists, that time travel might be possible. In the 1980s,
though, Kip Thorne, of CalTech, one of the world's leading experts in
the general theory of relativity, and his colleagues set out to prove
once and for all that such nonsense wasn't really allowed by
Einstein’s equations. They studied the situation from all sides, but
were forced to the unwelcome conclusion that there really was nothing
in the equations to prevent time travel, provided (and it is a big
proviso) you have the technology to manipulate black holes. As well as
the Kerr solution, there are other kinds of black hole time machine
allowed, including setups graphically described as ‘wormholes’, in
which a black hole at one place and time is connected to a black hole
in another place and time (or the same place at a different time)
through a ‘throat.’ Thorne described some of these possibilities in a
book, Black Holes and Time Warps, which was packed with information
but far from being an easy read. Michio Kaku, a professor of physics
in New York, came up with a more accessible variation on the theme
with his book Hyperspace, which, unlike Thorne’s book, at least
includes some discussion of the contribution of researchers such as
American Dean of Science Fiction Robert Anson Heinlein to the study of
time travel. The Big Bang, string theory, black holes and baby
universes all get a mention here; but it is the chapter on how to
build a time machine that makes the most fascinating reading.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have a copy?” said Feconey Cuzzin.
“I’ll have my people print you one,” she said. “Give it to you next
time we dine, on the island. ‘Most scientists, who have not seriously
studied Einstein’s equations,’ said Kaku, ‘dismiss time travel as
poppycock.’ And he then goes on to spell out why the few scientists
who have seriously studied Einstein’s equations were less dismissive.
My favourite page is the one filled by a diagram which shows the
strange family tree of an individual who manages to be both his/her
own father and his/her own mother, based on the Heinlein story ‘All
you zombies --.’ And Kaku’s description of a time machine is something
fans of Dr. Who and H.G. Wells would be happy with:
‘[It] consists of two chambers, each containing two parallel metal
plates. The intense electric fields created between each pair of
plates (larger than anything possible with today’s technology) rips
the fabric of space-time, creating a hole in space that links the two
chambers.’
‘Taking advantage of Einstein's special theory of relativity, which
says that time runs slow for a moving object, one of the chambers is
then taken on a long, fast journey and brought back: Time would pass
at different rates at the two ends of the wormhole, [and] anyone
falling into one end of the wormhole would be instantly hurled into
the past or the future [as they emerge from the other end].’”
“Dr. Who?” said Feconey Cuzzin.
“The one with the TARDIS,” she said. “And all this, it is worth
spelling out, has been published by serious scientists in respectable
journals such as Physical Review Letters (you don't believe us? check
out volume 61, page 1446). Although, as you may have noticed, the
technology required is awesome, involving taking what amounts to a
black hole on a trip through space at a sizeable fraction of the speed
of light. We never said it was going to be easy! So how do you get
around the paradoxes? The scientists have an answer to that, too. It's
obvious, when you think about it; all you have to do is add in a
judicious contribution from quantum theory to the time travelling
allowed by relativity theory. As long as you are an expert in both
theories, you can find a way to avoid the paradoxes.”
“It works like this. According to one interpretation of quantum
physics (there are several interpretations, and nobody knows which
one, if any, is ‘right’), every time a quantum object, such as an
electron, is faced with a choice, the world divides to allow it to
take every possibility on offer. In the simplest example, the electron
may be faced with a wall containing two holes, so that it must go
through one hole or the other. The Universe splits so that in one
version of reality -- one set of relative dimensions -- it goes
through the hole on the left, while in the other it goes through the
hole on the right.”
“Quantum Weirdness,” she said. I’ll get back to that. Pushed to its
limits, this interpretation says that the Universe is split into
infinitely many copies of itself, variations on a basic theme, in
which all possible outcomes of all possible ‘experiments’ must happen
somewhere in the ‘multiverse.’ So there is, for example, a Universe in
which the Labour Party has been in power for 115 years, and is now
under threat from a resurgent Tory Party.”
“How does this resolve the paradoxes? Like this. Suppose someone did
go back in time to murder their granny when she was a little girl. On
this multiverse picture, they have slid back to a bifurcation point in
history. After killing granny, they move forward in time, but up a
different branch of the multiverse. In this branch of reality, they
were never born; but there is no paradox, because in the universe next
door granny is alive and well, so the murderer is born, and goes back
in time to commit the foul deed!”
“Once again, it sounds like science fiction, and once again science
fiction writers have indeed been here before. But this idea of
parallel universes and alternative histories as a solution to the time
travel paradoxes began being taken seriously by some (admittedly, not
many) researchers, including David Deutsch, in Oxford. Their research
deals with both time, and relative dimensions in space. You could make
a nice acronym for that -- TARDIS, perhaps?”
[end chapter; use the following in an another chapter. Too much talk.
I like to alternate action scenes with discussion scenes]
{break here 9:50 a.m., Friday 14 Oct 2011}