Suddenly, it's mid October. All of a sudden, top physicists are coming out with ideas which break ground way beyond Standard Models and constraints and constants, digging into depths of what might actually be beneath the surface of quantum quandaries with a realisation that the underlying truth could be very simple. Exposing complications as a ruse to encourage less psychologically advanced life forms not to bother looking too hard at the mechanics of the Universe, these blue-sky scientific thoughts signify a major shift in the way things are seen. Not before time. Advancement is necessary, if we are to survive the abyss of self-destructive doom. But it could be, given the evidence yet to come, that our entire fate is predetermined, and that we have as much to do with turning social and environmental tides as the Yaxley switch on your washing machine has to do with getting clothes clean.
Image credit NASA, Hubble and @TheUniverse1981
Gerard t'Hooft is a Nobel prizewinner who has come out in support of quantum undertow. He believes that the plethora of paradoxes and particle spins is a surface commotion covering a deeper magic, a simplicity we have yet to consider. Physics has an unhappy habit of throwing out babies with bathwater and then rummaging about in the sewer for them later. In the 1960s a scientist named John Bell questioned the fact that particles operate in co-ordination with each other over universal distances (non-locality, or entanglement, are the laws at work here) and postulated that this would not be possible without some form of communicative mechanism between them.
Since the arrival of the Higgs Boson, there has been a lot of excitement about a Higgs Field, and we've only to go back to Tesla in the 1930s to find that he and his contemporaries called this field ‘the ether'. This is where the term ‘ethereal' came from. Gerard t'Hooft has leaned towards superdeterminism to explain the non-locality problem. Superdeterminism pulls tight the ‘sum over histories' mechanism popularised by Richard Feynman, and claims that the ordination - or pre-ordination - of every event is traceable to its history in the early formation of the Universe. This means that each non-local happening (every time two particles separated by distance respond in tandem, in other words) is simply the playing out of a game mapped indelibly a long, long time ago.
Frank Wilczek is a true bluesky thinker who's come up with some radical new takes on what spacetime looks like. The connection he's made between crystal lattices and time is revolutionary, and underpins the sense we instinctively have that time is a malleable commodity. On the surface it appears to be regular and flat, so regular and flat in fact that we can measure it to incredible precision. But what we are really tracking with the clock is the movement of the earth around the sun, and this is only a small portion of what time actually is (the easy bit, as far as measurement is concerned). Hidden aspects of time will doubtless conform to the Uncertainty Principle (the one universal constant we can positively rely on) and Wilczek's work with crystalline lattices shows that sub-atomic structures are indeed illustrating this very supposition.
T'Hooft says that, "Everybody in our universe has a common past, and so they are correlated. The photons emitted by a quasar are correlated with the photons emitted by another quasar. It's not true those quasars are independent." This view of universal photons is akin to the way water systems work on our own planet. There's only so much water within the Earth's atmosphere and it goes round and round in constant motion. The molecules in your bath may once have coursed down the Amazon, and the chances that two or three of those molecules in your bathtub actually did so are rather high. Water holds memory, so on its travels it's picking up information about the planet all the time. This, standing things to reason, is how we instinctively know what it going on at the planetary level and why we are panicking about ‘the state of the world' while news channels are determinedly trying to secure our focus on Afghanistan, or Syria, or wherever else they want our attention to be rapt at the time. We know there's a bigger picture - that while we're forging battles with each other our greedy over-consumption represents a battle of its own against a passive opponent. This makes for a vast amount of stress and guilt in society that can't be accounted for by taking surface snapshots, and while all this is going on in our own backyard you could rightfully ask why we should be concerned about the Universe at all.
The reason why we need to be concerned about the Universe is that the Universe is stuffed full of very useful information, and the more access we gain to that information the more we learn about ourselves. As the photons, electrons and neutrinos course to and fro across its expanse, they are gathering information which at present we are not collectively party to. If we are to gain ascension from the measly egotistical claim that we are ‘higher forms of life' and start to be able to actualise that claim with any kind of reasonable conviction, we have to start with a deep understanding of how our minds operate in collusion with the forces at work on a larger scale than Planck and stop harping on about ‘mental illness' as though people who think with more than the sum of their brain's parts are somehow misfits of society who don't belong in the grand equation. John Nash became a very public living proof that the mind is more flexible in stature than physicians would have us believe.
Image credit NASA, Hubble and @TheUniverse1981
Gerard t'Hooft is a Nobel prizewinner who has come out in support of quantum undertow. He believes that the plethora of paradoxes and particle spins is a surface commotion covering a deeper magic, a simplicity we have yet to consider. Physics has an unhappy habit of throwing out babies with bathwater and then rummaging about in the sewer for them later. In the 1960s a scientist named John Bell questioned the fact that particles operate in co-ordination with each other over universal distances (non-locality, or entanglement, are the laws at work here) and postulated that this would not be possible without some form of communicative mechanism between them.
Since the arrival of the Higgs Boson, there has been a lot of excitement about a Higgs Field, and we've only to go back to Tesla in the 1930s to find that he and his contemporaries called this field ‘the ether'. This is where the term ‘ethereal' came from. Gerard t'Hooft has leaned towards superdeterminism to explain the non-locality problem. Superdeterminism pulls tight the ‘sum over histories' mechanism popularised by Richard Feynman, and claims that the ordination - or pre-ordination - of every event is traceable to its history in the early formation of the Universe. This means that each non-local happening (every time two particles separated by distance respond in tandem, in other words) is simply the playing out of a game mapped indelibly a long, long time ago.
Frank Wilczek is a true bluesky thinker who's come up with some radical new takes on what spacetime looks like. The connection he's made between crystal lattices and time is revolutionary, and underpins the sense we instinctively have that time is a malleable commodity. On the surface it appears to be regular and flat, so regular and flat in fact that we can measure it to incredible precision. But what we are really tracking with the clock is the movement of the earth around the sun, and this is only a small portion of what time actually is (the easy bit, as far as measurement is concerned). Hidden aspects of time will doubtless conform to the Uncertainty Principle (the one universal constant we can positively rely on) and Wilczek's work with crystalline lattices shows that sub-atomic structures are indeed illustrating this very supposition.
T'Hooft says that, "Everybody in our universe has a common past, and so they are correlated. The photons emitted by a quasar are correlated with the photons emitted by another quasar. It's not true those quasars are independent." This view of universal photons is akin to the way water systems work on our own planet. There's only so much water within the Earth's atmosphere and it goes round and round in constant motion. The molecules in your bath may once have coursed down the Amazon, and the chances that two or three of those molecules in your bathtub actually did so are rather high. Water holds memory, so on its travels it's picking up information about the planet all the time. This, standing things to reason, is how we instinctively know what it going on at the planetary level and why we are panicking about ‘the state of the world' while news channels are determinedly trying to secure our focus on Afghanistan, or Syria, or wherever else they want our attention to be rapt at the time. We know there's a bigger picture - that while we're forging battles with each other our greedy over-consumption represents a battle of its own against a passive opponent. This makes for a vast amount of stress and guilt in society that can't be accounted for by taking surface snapshots, and while all this is going on in our own backyard you could rightfully ask why we should be concerned about the Universe at all.
The reason why we need to be concerned about the Universe is that the Universe is stuffed full of very useful information, and the more access we gain to that information the more we learn about ourselves. As the photons, electrons and neutrinos course to and fro across its expanse, they are gathering information which at present we are not collectively party to. If we are to gain ascension from the measly egotistical claim that we are ‘higher forms of life' and start to be able to actualise that claim with any kind of reasonable conviction, we have to start with a deep understanding of how our minds operate in collusion with the forces at work on a larger scale than Planck and stop harping on about ‘mental illness' as though people who think with more than the sum of their brain's parts are somehow misfits of society who don't belong in the grand equation. John Nash became a very public living proof that the mind is more flexible in stature than physicians would have us believe.
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