f your destiny is to figure out what's really going
on in the world, it will happen while you're in the shower
and you can't write it down.*
This is called an aqueous epiphany or AE, and it's been happening since Archimedes. His task was to solve the question of whether a crown was pure gold or not. Since the X-ray fluorescence spectrometer had not yet been invented, Archimedes gave up and took a bath, during which he figured out a solution using water displacement to measure its specific gravity. He famously exclaimed “Eureka!”, which means “If only I had a goddamn pencil, I could have whipped up an XRF machine 2230 years early!”
Try writing down your epiphany with all this going on
One AE that many people have is that we're all living in a computer simulation. This often occurs to people when their favorite political party is ascendant and they're doing well financially. The human brain just can't take that kind of stress and assumes that it can't be real. In this case, it's called impostor syndrome. Other times, the flood of contradictory stories coming from the media creates a sense of unreality.
But why would somebody go to all the trouble of creating a convincing simulation exactly like the one they already had? They'd learn nothing. It's far more likely that programmers would simulate a world where they could learn something, which is to say a world as different as possible from their own.
The defining characteristic of our world is that events occur sequentially in time, which means there is irreversible cause and effect. Thus, the world most likely to benefit from a simulation would be one where there is no time and therefore no causation. If time didn't exist, they'd have no need for logic. The idea of creating syllogisms and doing calculations would be incomprehensible to them. They'd also be unable to feel emotions of any kind, because emotions are produced when a physical organism needs to create an event in the future. If so, our purpose in this simulation would be to experience what would happen if such things as time and causality and emotions and reason actually existed.
Beings from an alien dimension would want to experience this, not for fun but for insight. No doubt they don't have any showers there either, leaving them with no means of obtaining an aqueous epiphany. Granted, if they didn't have logic or math, then creating a computer simulation in which those things exist would be challenging. But maybe not impossible.
A movie is a good partial example. Everything is scripted; there is no cause-and-effect. No matter how many times you watch it, the characters always do exactly the same thing.
Cosmogenesis
I mention all this ‘cause and effect’ stuff because of a recent paper where two authors claimed to have produced the Schwinger effect using laser beams. The Schwinger effect is a hypothesized creation of particles in a strong electric field (1016 volts/cm, which is way beyond anything we can produce). I think the paper is wrong; their signal is only 120 photons which they say are “scattered” from a background of 2×1012 photons. That's an incredibly small signal and a lot could have gone wrong.
Scientists have claimed to see analogous effects in physical models like graphene, but it has never actually been observed.
The Schwinger effect sounds like creation from nothing, but in fact it's pulling things out of the quantum vacuum, which is something else entirely. The vacuum that we call empty space is not “nothing.” It participates in pair particle production and its properties set the maximum velocity of light. How it does these things is unknown. Science is only beginning to theorize what space actually is.
The question we'd all like to know is how the universe came into being. Popular science literature has unfortunately spread the idea that it was caused by a quantum fluctuation, a fairly big one to be sure, the implication being that the universe, including time and space, spontaneously formed out of nothing. If true, it would have meant that effects can occur without a cause. That would imply that there could be a universe where time and causality don't exist, only ‘quantum fluctuations.’ You can almost see the theorists' hands waving as they use the term.
Needless to say, people have calmed down a bit since then. Philosophers in particular have a lot of trouble with the idea that an event, especially such a big one, could occur without time: an event is by definition something that changes over time. Most physics textbooks, including Weinberg's Cosmology and Dodelson's Modern Cosmology, avoid the topic altogether and spend most of their time on cosmic inflation and baryogenesis. They'd probably say that we can really only speculate.
* This happens because the universe knows you can't write it down. If you had a pencil with you, it wouldn't happen. Unless, of course, you took the pencil into the shower to try to prevent it from happening. The universe always knows if you're trying to trick it.
jul 06 2024, 3:39 am
