Everybody's talking about dimensions, as if they always existed. Which they did, of course, as real places that exist - always did exist - to be in. Probably all at the same time, truth be told. But our take on dimensions has been somewhat self-limiting so far. Can't be that we're stuck in one place in the Multiverse, after all, otherwise we wouldn't experience remarkable shifts on our world-line and the unexpected hand of Fate would hardly get a look-in. The possibility that every single thing can be unique wouldn't be allowed, and the moments we live through would be... well, more predictable. But they're not, and they can't be repeated, and Infinity won't go away.

Standing in a field looking out at the landscape it struck me today that this height-breadth-depth thing was just an illusion, like so many other facets of life, and that 3D could as easily be curled up into a dimension as those 'other' dimensions are curled up in Kaluza-Klein, and the string theory that science people can't agree on says that everything is energy, after all, wherever you sit in 'de Sitter' space. We don't need to think too deeply about it for it to be true. When you get to accept a principle, it tends to stand awhile as being accepted. 

Say we are bunched up into a single dimension with 3D as a construct that enables us to function as living entities... that the Brane is a single dimension in an infinite Bulk of dimensions and exist within it at the speed of light. Our brains and motor networks function at the speed of light - does this not make sense? Yes, the constant could be relative - you've no idea how fast you're going if whatever's next to you is travelling at the same speed. Sure, we know how fast the planet spins and how fast it's supposed to circumvent the Sun but in relative terms this gets us nowhere in determining the speed of the energy we're made of. While we're wrapped in 3D thought there's also the matter of time, the annoying fact that it pulls us along in one direction only, and while we're checking how fast we're moving through it we've no idea where we are. While when we step into Mindfulness, meditate or sleep, we've no idea how many moments pass because we're focused on What Is, not on Time.

So naturally the Uncertainty Principle underpinning all of the above pulls everything up short, demands independence in its right to make everything a single, unique model and refuses to confine itself to electron experiments. Meanwhile you live your life, look at it from inside-out (as you can't see yourself as others see you, no matter how much you'd love to be Observer all the time), and take the cards as they are dealt with little or no choice as to what they will be, because quantum uncertainty leaves little to chance and everything to random decks, with space in between for Creation, as we've seen.

The last piece of the puzzle should have physicists reaching for notebooks, but never mind, eh, that once you add Gravity to the Standard Model it reverts the maths to Infinity. And that you have to Renormalise things to make them fit the classic boxes, as a matter of convenience, while Creation and Infinity and whatever you want to call God aren't interested in our convenience, they are going to exist by their own parametric rules.

Think about it. Time has you moving in one direction. 3D has you trapped in an illusion of being in a single place at a single point in time. You know it's not true. We don't feel moments, they're gone in a nanosecond and even the memory distorts according to the information available. Please, step outside the box. Unravel our relationship with dimensions. Give everyone a chance to sing, because it's a human right, and it only takes a handful of physicists to make a quantum leap in accepted understanding. 

​We need you. We need you now. Time waits for no man, and right now, we need to know how best to use what there is left of what we have.

The Speed of Light - it's everywhere. Constantly in-your-face, it's the speed limit nothing can break, it's a measurement of spacetime, and it's something that photons themselves don't experience at all. Check out this article from 2014 in Phys.org - to quote author Fraser Cain:
 According to relativity, mass can never move through the Universe at light speed. Mass will increase to infinity, and the amount of energy required to move it any faster will also be infinite. But for light itself, which is already moving at light speed… You guessed it, the photons reach zero distance and zero time.
Note the words "according to relativity". Relativity doesn't help anyone get rid of those pesky infinities that keep turning up in quantum calculations. Relativity says that wherever or whatever you are, you're relative to something. And in the quantum world, the most significant relationship relating to reality is that of the observer with the subject. 

​Time has a special relationship with light. For brief elucidation on that relationship, see this article on space-time. And for more fun with Infinity, see here. If you type "infinity in quantum equations" into your search engine, you'll find lots of scientists claiming lots of different things, including the option that infinity doesn't exist.

One day, there's going to be a revelation. A big announcement to tell us that the Solar System has been expanding, along with the rest of the Universe, all these billions of years and that Mars was here before us. There was life on Mars, they'll say with all the conviction of the deeply shocked, when Mars was here in the Goldilocks Zone, which of course it isn't now, and never can be again, its time here in Fairytale Land past and gone, dust to red dust.

We're going to learn that Venus is next in the procession of precessions and will arrive in the Goldilocks Zone we now inhabit in roughly six billion year's time, with luck before the Sun loses its capacity to sustain life and in good time to make the most of all that methane churning around. Venus is literally a fire of storms, a methane melting pot of global proportions - that's why it flashes different colours in the night sky.

Of course, such an announcement would put deep dents in certain belief systems and rock boats in powerful waters, so no need to hold our breath - it might never happen, not in our lifetime. For planets to pass through Goldilocks Zones and enjoy a few millennia of life-bearing idyll would mean most (if not all) solar systems spawn life at some point, so there'd be nothing unique about us at all, except perhaps our quaint take on the laws of physics - adhesion to the Standard Model plus Planck constraints and light-speed busily limiting potential for advances of mind.

A vacation in the Goldilocks Zone may be relatively short-lived, and if we don't use our time well, well, we've wasted it.

This place where dreams are made of, 93,000,000 miles from the Sun, is a bit of an enigma. You won't find NASA being pinned down to a distance definition. On Quora, the fuller answers are a bit baffling but there's a general consensus that it stretches between Venus and Mars. Wikipedia is a bit more helpful. Whatever the case, we don't need to worry about it. Porridge will still be porridge. The question of when the porridge arrives given the options of a 5D continuum is much more relevant than whether it's real or not. Knowing how to live life in the Multiverse must surely be a valuable tool to have, and let's face it, we're all trying to free ourselves of something.

Coincidentally, the Moon is exactly the right size to afford a total eclipse. Exactly the right size. Given a 92,466,000 mile gap between Moon and Sun, that's a pretty neat trick of relativity. All the possible options in the Universe - we get landed with that one. Hail Griffin, he showed us all the way, and did we listen?
Are we not listening still?
Perhaps we never will.

There will be scientists visiting (thank you for coming ^) putting all this down as Woo, incurable sockpuppetry, charlatanism and all kinds of other isms in fear and trepidation of answering difficult questions. Maths doesn't cut it all the time, it's great in a Pi but put maths into quantum porridge and it's going to be lumpy, as you've all proven beyond doubt to everyone including yourselves. Some scientists might feel a bit sick at having some non-scientist sticking their nose into dimensions that don't concern them, but that's only because they're afraid of having to visibly think hard, dump the sums and not know the answer immediately. No self-respecting scientist betrays the mathematical grail in front of others.

Our place in the Multiverse is of humongous importance, and proportionally the greatest riddle we may ever have to solve. How we improve relations with our planetary cohabitants and what comes of understanding how to handle our reality better is anybody's guess, but for sure, only physics can lead the way. Even if it is only our physics, unlike anyone else's - out there where we don't dare go yet there may be all kinds of other physics waiting to get heads around. However many heads you might have. Handy to have three if you want to save time tasting things. 

Scientists say the Uncertainty Principle is simply a case of not being able to take two measurements at the same time. Brian Cox called anyone who thought differently a "purveyor of tripe" and many other orthodox positivists would say the same.

If you really think the fact that we are all unique, every grain of sand and snowflake is unique but it can't have anything to do with Uncertainty, I'd venture to say you were wrong, and Heisenberg might even agree. 

Image credit: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-multiverses-measure-problem-20141103/

​Electrons are fuzzy things, not pinpointable because they don't really live like that - they zing their way round and through several dimensions at once and somehow land up here long enough to fend off the pesky Positrons. So not being able to pin down an electron, which is where this whole uncertainty-principle thing first started, is one thing. Not being able to pin down anything at all is more like it.
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There's talk about ever-decreasing circles when things get worse on repetition; they made a TV show about it in the Eighties. Does that mean our discourse follows ever-increasing circles when things get better? I've had a few scenarios shadow me through life that I'm clearly supposed to learn from, and right now I'm studying geometry in the context of application to such things as sunflowers.
The Fibonacci sequence, being what you'd call 'irrational', is there in nature at every turn, from shells to pine cones, with the ratio between the numbers of the sequence being known as the Golden Ratio, being represented by the Greek letter Phi, and being everywhere we look. 

On the trail of evidence for natural geometry, it came to my attention on looking for examples of irrational numbers that (coincidentally or otherwise) Schroedinger's Wave Equation is also represented by the Greek letter Phi; in Comments to the link attached, you'll find Jonathan noting that It is commonly believed that waves make up the sub-atomic particles which may be the reason why Schroedinger (or someone) chose it to apply to quantum field theory. However, as evidenced by the Wiki entry here on what's called the 'Schroedinger functional', anything that doesn't readily lend itself to renormalisation is still finding it hard to be fashionable.

Schroedinger devoted himself largely to causality and chance (or lack of it) in natural law, and a comprehensive precis of his thought process can be read here. His dwelling on such matters led him to create a wave equation which smoothly evolves through time, just as the Fibonacci sequence smoothly evolves the growth and development of natural things like thistles, roses, and spiral galaxies. The unpopularity of Schroedinger's wave equation in preference to something that can be algebraically calculated in avoidance of those pesky infinities (noting that in Wiki's Fock space definition the author doesn't even mention Schroedinger) says a lot about the mind set still prevalent in quantum mechanical fields, and not a lot about the logic of applying schemes universally adopted by Nature to the quantum paradoxes pondered upon by Man. Men, then. Usually, anyway.

What does this mean for us? That depends on your intuitive relationship with coincidence, or any leaning you have towards synchronicity being circumstantial evidence for powers greater than our own. Fibonacci, Schroedinger and other minds of historical note have been pondering and surmising on the underlying laws of nature for a long time now, and with quantum mechanics at the front of our potentials for New Physics, there's no time like the present for linking the facts as they stand with the fortunes inherent in our own world-line. Time is in reality a far cry from the lineage of onward-marching arrows we mistook for something other than entropy - the wave form we ride may well perpetuate in resonance to the Fibonacci sequence and be dancing merrily to Schroedinger's tune. Would this make sense of life's events coming back to haunt us from time to time? Could it be that what we are given (to experience) and what we learn as a result are in keeping with a pattern at the baseline of creation? For it seems to me that every time we dovetail a piece of life's puzzle with a quantum mechanical principle, we come up with freedoms of infinite probability and an allowance in the small print to accept things as they are, no need to struggle against What Is. Life is hard enough without taking the full weight of its variables on our own shoulders. Some things, they say, are meant to be. Why stop at Some, when the irrationality of All is so evidently preferred by Nature?

Bias being a tendency to shift current in a certain direction electronically, or for fabric to lie in a certain way haberdasherally, in terms of human relations it's described by the online dictionary as, "inclination or prejudice for or against one person or group, especially in a way considered to be unfair." An overview of bias and how it becomes embedded lies behind the picture looking suspiciously like a Fibonnaci spiral.
When it comes to science, and quantum physics in particular, we have a situation wherein one group of people (those who write and understand equations, let's call them the EQ) are biased against another group of people (those who neither write nor understand equations, the Non-EQ) resulting in a seemingly unfair tendency for the EQ to dismiss the thought processes and ideas of the Non-EQ based on inability to do maths. As someone who only knows their native language might find themselves dismissed by someone who doesn't speak it. Bias can produce dark dangers of its own.

The EQ argument goes that an argument must be logical, empirical, and mathematically sound before it can even be a point worth making. Logic is mathematical, logic circuitry methodical, as in semiconductors. Now that quantum computers have flown into orbit, classical logic gates now have quantum counterparts, only a quantum logic gate is not restricted to 1 or 0, but has free rein in superposition, and a quantum computer can even produce entangled states. Reading a popular entry on their measurement, the author says that, "This type of value-assignment in theory occurs instantaneously over any distance and this has as of 2018 been experimentally verified for distances of up to 1200 kilometers.[8][9] That the phenomena appears to violate the speed of light is called the EPR paradox and it is an open question in physics how to resolve this. Originally it was solved by giving up the assumption of local realism, but other interpretations have also emerged." 

Other interpretations? Follow the link and you will find it most elucidating, citing as it does seven challenges to scientific interpretation of quantum mechanics, boiling down to the fact that you can't really measure the immeasurable. Oxford Physics lab is making a fair feast of efforts in researching new technologies, though, as linked behind their picture. But we still find that, fundamentally, mathematics doesn't cut it when it comes to quanta, for the world as seen from a quantum perspective doesn't conform to classical physics, and never has, which is why it's always been a problem that can never go away.

Seasons don't go away either. As we get older, we see more patterns in the changing year, we know when a season comes early or late, we sense the shift from summer to autumn, winter to spring. We observe environmental alterations, such as loss of wildlife and climactic warming. We don't need to apply these things to mathematical formulas to know and accept that they are there. So why is the bedrock of our existence so apparently dependent on calculus for its definition?

"There's nothing logical about magic," someone recently said to me. Yet the odds against our lives existing at all are somewhat other-worldly, and not just in the probability of being resident in a Goldilocks Zone. The chance of a universe setting up its construct to support life as we know it in the first place is apparently unfathomably unlikely. Logically we could argue that it's illogical that we are here. But the earthbound mind that cannot bring down an ethereal argument into an empirical formula collapses its packet into What Is, to question it not, or at least no further than necessary in order to make the maths work. Infinity will always be a problem underpinning quantum processes, which is why an EQ has to resort to renormalisation as frowned at by Feynman, who called it "dippy", even though his diagrams are all over it, and if you want to know about renormalisation this insight from Physics Forums as probably as good as it gets.

With issues like infinity, non-local entanglement (which laughs at the 'constant' of light speed), uncertainty (preventing true measurements of anything on the move), and superposition (the two [or more, depending on how finite things are] states that anything is in at any given time) struggling with duality (you're made of particles right now, but aren't you a wave form when you're not looking?)... well, the constraints on which maths so fervently relies don't look very solid from where I'm standing. I don't have the answers, I just think about this stuff, a lot... as you can tell, it's been a few years now and the bias against free thought is still rigorously maintained, its only defence seemingly being as someone commented at me, "there's no language other than math," not that such an argument sounds very logical, but then, am I missing something?

Entanglement is no new kid on the block but it hasn't said much yet, other than through Einstein. LiveScience gives the run-down behind the spooky image here.
The trouble with this phenomenon is that it doesn't have a relationship with time. Entanglement is an instantaneous, simultaneous response to stimuli shared between two particles (or two bodies of material, for it's being shown to occur in larger things than first thought) irrespective of distance. And that causes a few headaches with the equations.

Last month the first-ever photograph of an entangled photon pair was promoted as a herald to new types of technology. You can read the review from Science Alert behind the picture of said pair.
​The big question is, how does anything get entangled in the first place? Is there a definitive point at which things are entangled, or is it a case, being devoid of any conditional time measurement, that entanglement occurs in advance of its physical evidence? Are these photons (and all other entangled things) destined to be cleaved together and subsequently find each other so paired? Could entanglement, per se, be a real-life physics love story? This is not such a stupid question. For people get entangled just as particles do. Love can lead us a merry dance for a lifetime, and when it does, there's nothing you can do about it.

When you've experienced entanglement.... you know when you've been Tangled. A study on the effects of consciousness applied to entanglement is previewed behind this beautiful image of tangled balance. On the understanding that the phenomenon is not confined to subatomics, but applies on the grander scale of Everything, the job at hand would seem to be to get the symmetry of our entanglements right, which is a bit of a tough call when you consider the flotsam our minds have to deal with in everyday living. Photons might not have much to think about in the course of their lives, but they live beyond time, without considering matters of constraint, and they continually give themselves up and pull themselves back to freedom in their eternal dance with electrons. Is that so very different from the relationships we have with those people to whom we would consider ourselves most entangled? Probably not. The matter of life after matter is another topic for hot debate, but  photons can speak for themselves. 

Personally I don't see the Entanglement conundrum going underground any time soon. In fact we could be right on the cusp of New Physics, a revolutionary era mooted by the latest generation of scientific thinkers who are quietly considering the implications of oscillation as we speak. While academics seek holy grails among darknesses in the universal soup, entanglement could come to mean more than the sum of spacetime. It could mean the beginning of the end for the Standard Model. About time too.

Much is being made of Time at the moment, as the idea of retrocausality takes hold and quantum computers take steps closer to reality. Those now-familiar Advanced and Retarded waves are crashing together in a sea of Presents while we bob along our personal time tunnel blind to the future, tied to the past, doing our best to make life work. Meanwhile, science hears calls to relax its grip on the oars of positivism, the swell of social tide lending weight to the metaphysical in time for religion and politics to reveal certain unpalatable truths.

This era, the likes of which have not been seen in our lifetime, stands to carve the last of our testaments on the planet, for Fermi's Paradox has caught us up. Money has us cornered and there is nowhere to run, save into its clutches or away from civilization, as a hunted animal must face its fate or disappear from its tormentors.  

Personally I've just had a run-in with Time - read about it here. This experience adds to the stack of events on my world line demonstrating metaphysics first-hand, and I'll not be alone among the myriad of people caught by similar happenstance, some of whom report their encounters on social media while most in probability keep it to themselves. Clarion or sentinel, the feeling grows that we're on the edge, something has to break and we are part of that something, waiting, watching, longing to dance, fearing the fall but knowing we're going anyway, maybe to be the last of our kind.

"Now a new revolution is on the verge of answering that question, based on insights from the other great physics surprise of the last century: quantum mechanics. Today’s revolution offers the potential for yet another rewrite of space-time’s résumé, with the bonus of perhaps explaining why quantum mechanics seems so weird." quantum mechanics seems so Read the full story where the world falls into a black hole.

When you thought Time couldn't get any weirder beyond the idea of past and future co-existing and imparting equal influence on the present, you now have to consider entangled time, where the presents of aeons long past are meeting those existing now, time after time, if you like, a swathe of light cones promising that, just as suspected, everything under the sun has been done; we relive a turmoil of past and futures no market could ever hope to harvest. 

Behind the man walking the invisible bridge you'll find more elucudation on entangled time. Fair enough, methinks, that spooky actions at a distance should prove as omnipotent as the Uncertainty Principle, waving from the rafters where none have gone before save those who've already crossed the great divide - colonists not remotely concerned with the Kardashev scale who've already made the jump to zero-point would know better than to interfere with the likes of us. We're still busy crossing the sea of Time as we know it, from life as we know it to something else, something more or something less, a classic case of relativity in juxtaposition.

Independence in the Universe is eloquently captured by this Royal Society article whose author has entangled the nature of non-locality with our relative position in spacetime. We're alone in our motion through systems of life, even if the fusion of quantum-mechanical states ensures we're all in this together. We have to work hard to get our own handle on our version of What Is with the tools at our disposal, reliant on science to hand us the subtle knives sharp and ready for use, as essential staff would serve the surgeon while he works, oblivious of the moral implications, on a detail salvaging more than the sum of the parts on which he operates. The collective seeks a positive outcome, as the surgeon seeks to save life, and there is no going back to the innocent oblivion from whence we came, there is only the certainty of entropy to insist we stay true to the forward track. I'll join you there - love you being here, for we are legion if there is only one of us.

​Fermi's Paradox suggests the death of civilizations is a commonplace event. There are no civilizations left alive in the Local Fluff close enough for us to find or communicate with, but there are probably billions gone before in their Goldilocks Zones, and billions to come ad infinitum. We're still wondering about the infinity of the Universe and we might well wonder forever more. 

Fermi's contribution to the world of quantum mechanics is vast, but his input to the paradox bearing his name is slight. It's said that he engaged in a conversation in the summer of 1950. Michael Hart put the idea to paper in 1975 that civilizations reach a point of singularity wherein they self-destruct, so the chances of two civilizations of similar technological advancement existing in the same galactic neighbourhood are too slim to be potentially possible.

We can clearly see we're careering towards such a singularity, ourselves, on this planet - the unstoppable race towards Doomsday not slowing up any time soon, about to cross the inescapable line with you and me as bystanders, watching it happen in slow motion, like the spagettification of a lifetime into the last dense drop of quark-gluon plasma a Singularity has to become before... before the laws of physics break down and we don't know what happens next.

Yet even Royalty has no advantage in pulling the stops on the system of self-destruct, because we are effectively in our own black hole in spacetime, from a ‘consciousness' point of view - there will be little left of what we know when that point is reached. Meantime, we've got to go through spaghettification which could mean anything to us in relative terms, since inside the event horizon time passes just the same as it always has, relatively speaking. Only the observer sees you locked in a warp of infinity. The same infinity that scientists try all the time to get rid of. Anyone noticed time speeding up?

Here we are then, merry observant spaghettifees watching renormalised disaster strike from all sides and helpless to do anything about it. Except think. We can think all we want, intelligent beings that can comprehend a Universe. Think ourselves into being a bit more double-slit, where choices are made in advance of probability and wave forms can take you for a different kind of ride. ​​

A physi-activist declared I didn't understand quantum physics but was prepared to twist it toward what he called my 'confirmation bias'. I quoted Feynman's "if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't" line, and gave a link to LiveScience where scientists disagree over what quantum mechanics even means! The activist then pronounced himself thus (without bleeps):
"as a physicist, I f*king know what quantum theory is, it is you that don't. When we joke about not knowing,, it is our joke. Our joke is not your proof."    
Behind the picture, a link describes how a plasma ball works

I'm shamelessly using this incident as an introduction to a post on Parity Violation, and will seamlessly weave in references to intolerance as they arise in application of key-to-screen.

Linked to the indeterminable equation here, you'll find explained that certain types of interaction seem to be common and others forbidden. Laying down the law is fine when you're conserving numbers in leptons and baryons, but actual life and death (decay) of a particle with mass leaves it subject to options, thus uncertainties (not mentioned). The 'totalitarian principle' blanket-assumes that every process that is not forbidden must occur, while processes that are forbidden also occur - a lot of those due to interface with the weak force involving the W particle. Strange things can happen with strange quarks in weak interaction.

Now I've been making noises for a long time about quarks and neutrinos interacting. At SQM2019 (the write-up is in the main menu), two variant hypotheses were put to me, one being that the quark sector does not engage with the weak force, and the other being that quarks are subject to weak-force interference. One is right, the other is wrong. As regards parity violation, quarks are all over it, but specific references as to which quarks do what are notable by absence, because it's not the kind of thing you can see happening for real, it's something you have to assume, and assumption, especially in physics, is dangerous...

...the kind of anomaly that happens when physicists dismiss (with bared teeth) observations and indications from people with no formal training in equations. Understanding the math or not understanding the math doesn't negate our being atomic, composed of quarks. Scientists insist we only contain Up and Down quarks, yet that violates a flow of quark oscillation, and such a limit discounts any interface a body of matter could have with the weak force. In the equation 'dimensionless' appears - that absence of dimension relates directly to energy (e).
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Linked behind this picture of a colliding gold atom is a story from the RHIC.... the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven. In 2005, a team seeking to recreate early-universe versions of quark-gluon plasma found that the state of matter they produced was more like a liquid, in which quarks and gluons move together exhibiting a fluid motion that is "nearly perfect - meaning its viscosity is close to zero, or friction-free." This 'highly coordinated manner' of movement harks to the system in our brains, where coherent water moves in a similar way through microtubules. Scientists (in other fields) have found quantum processes at work in there, but of course, one could always say that was a different science. Anyone can cite differences to excuse lack of tolerance to another way of thinking. 
​

Renormalisation is one of my pet hates. Mathematicians need it to get rid of infinities. My view is that if infinities arise in the equation, there's something to be said for them, and they should be respected rather than refused a place in the schematics of scientific enquiry. Parity violation is simply the refusal of particles to behave as mathematicians think they should, and the more evidence coming to light for violation, the happier I am, for eventually it's going to come down to nature versus nodal systems, the points of intersecting interest science-to-science, and those findings that break the Standard Model are not going to come easily against a tide of intolerant activists fiercely protecting their Principles like tormented dragons over mountains of treasure stolen and claimed, but never theirs to own. Dogspangling, as it were.