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Where Is This Video?
The reducibility of our body to elementary functions and forms does not necessarily have to reduce us to forgeries. There is another possibility, which is that there is something to be forged that is precisely the opposite of a copy. As hinted at in the video, each experienced moment is a kind of unrepeatable performance. Instead of focusing on the absence of a concrete physical object, we can look at the aesthetic content of the experience itself as the concrete phenomenon – not a simulacrum (pronounced sim-you-lah-crum) but a localized fragment of authenticity itself. Is color basically a bad copy of white light? Is the universe basically a bad copy of nothingness?
Humans are not bad copies of anything, but the degree to which we are unique snowflakes is relative to the proximity of our scope of consideration. Within our own frame of reference, we are absolutely unique. Within a social frame of reference, we are stereotyped culturally. Moving out from the human context, an individual human becomes more and more generic – a mammal, an animal, a biological organism, a chemical reaction, etc. This variance is, in my view, what the universe is ‘made of’, so that no one context of description is the final ‘real’ description.
In other words, this commentary is literally “here”, and that video is actually “there”, and that is what relativity ultimately means…perception itself – awareness, is the ultimate frame of reference, and without perception, there is nothing to frame.
Nothing is an o…
Nothing is an object in its own frame of reference.
A simple thing to say, but the implications are profound when taken literally. I do take them literally, so that like time and length, objectivity itself is relativistic*. There are no truly objective objects, only experiences which are frozen by distance and unfamiliarity. What is truly objective is, ironically, subjectivity. The sense of perceiving and participating, while nested in an elaborate way for human participants, is, in my view, the simplest possible phenomenon within which all other phenomena are described. The capacity for experience is absolute and irreducible, even though the capacity for human qualities of experience is contingent upon a Matroyshka doll nesting of continuous non-human experiences.
*I call this variation of object and non-object qualities by proximity and similarity ‘eigenmorphism’ (proper form).
Tessellated Relativity
Whether it is material movement across space or sensory excitement through time, energy must always be a verb. We call it force or work, but that is a shortcoming of the Western fetish for nouns. Really, in my view all energy must be a *forcing* or *working* verb. While I fully appreciate the accusation that this is naive realism, I suggest that this is a foundational symmetry which can be inverted only for figurative purposes. No real energy should be considered noun-like, and all standard model visualizations which contradict this should be regarded as unreal. For this reason, I think that the assumption of the photon as an entity is an obstacle to rehabilitating the standard model to one which integrated the physics of privacy. In an ironic twist, we will have to re-educate ourselves to get used to the idea that the qualia of light and color is real, and photons are imaginary descriptions from an impossible frame of reference (the voyeur public subject).
What are the consequences of energy like? Radiance. Flow. Waves. What are waves? Either a frequency through time or a repeating shape across space. We know, however, that we don’t see photons as oscillating shapes, we see them as a shining, glowing, reflecting, or gleaming in our vision or a warming or burning in our feeling. That’s all about time. Looking at the sun, the intensity increases over time as our retina becomes more and more stimulated. The same is not true of mass. Mass ‘just sits there’ at some position in space. Unlike looking at the sun, the intensity of mass does not increase by itself over time, but rather it increases inversely to distance through space (gravity).
In a post energy particle model, mass and energy modify structures (matter in space) and qualify experiences (sensation through time), and are not free standing quantities emerging from a vacuum. Mass is convergent on a point within a structure, and energy is divergent from c (non-space, non-time) as a frequently recurring stimulus. I was thinking of calling this module of MSR “Tessellated Relativity”, as the inertial frames swing spacemass-ward and time-energyward, yielding the position v momentum exclusivity.
If that’s all true – and I think that it might be on the right track, then it can be used to illuminate the workings of how qualia and sensitivity are equivalent to transparency/entanglement with larger frames of time and higher spatial perspectives.
Happy New Physics
This is an attempt to model my understanding of some aspects of Relativity as it stands now. I make no guarantees of its accuracy or completeness, and I’m not trying to ‘do physics’, but rather to attain a simple grasp of how the concepts of relativity work together. (Feel free to correct me of any glaring errors though).
On the right, there are three atoms, a heavy, medium, and light one. I’m using Uranium, Iron, and Hydrogen just to keep it simple, again, I don’t know what to expect realistically to a Uranium atom that is near an Iron atom which is accelerating with a Uranium atom in the same inertial frame, but I’m including heavy and light atoms just so the difference between fission and fusion can be compared.
On the right side of the diagram, I’m contrasting how it is that both fission and fusion release “energy” (pointed arrows) but in opposite ways. Fission is when a heavy particle is accelerated until its nuclear configuration destabilizes, producing smaller particles and losing resting mass in the process. It takes mass-energy to maintain a large nucleus so there is a release of energy since the sum of the before mass is greater than the sum of the after-mass. Mass can be thought of as the sideways view of energy, cutting across space horizontally rather than longitudinally through time. Energy takes time, as it is momentum: a vector of changing distance over time. Mass requires more of a spatial notion of position or invariance which is publicly measurable at any given instant, rather than a shared history over time.
Fusion, of course, is about lighter particles being accelerated until their collisions cause nucleons to share a nucleus, delivering an energetic bang for the opposite (and seemingly paradoxical) reason. Particles which are lighter than iron ‘want’ to form larger particles, so that even though they are not freeing up energy from not having to hold together a giant nucleus, they still free up even more energy from not having to hold themselves together, by themselves. It could be said that matter loves company, but hates crowds. When matter frees itself from overcrowding or isolation, all of the matter senses the difference and responds by imitating that sensation.
In my example, I am trying to show what happens when an ideal Iron particle (Fe) is accelerated all the way to the speed of light. I’m not sure if that is a realistic scenario, but I am reasoning that since some of the matter as well as mass can be lost in nuclear reactions, it is plausible that such an atom would be converted into energy directly. By showing the Fe particle get narrower, I am trying to show the Lorentz contraction and time dilation, as they would appear from another inertial frame. When all of the mass is converted to energy upon hitting c, what that means to me is that the 4D total potential future of the atom collapses into an instantaneous change in the surrounding atoms.
The loss of 4D time and and 3D matter comes across as 2D a wave of synchronized celebration in the form of acceleration of all matter which is affected throughout the cosmos. When we see a star, it is the molecules of our brain and eye which are, in my view, locally responding to the event which seems remote from our experiential frame of reference. When we go to measure photons, it is my hypothesis that we are actually measuring the local instrument’s description of the event, rather than an independent particle/wave. I think that light may be how matter looks and sees – a sensation and a signal, not something traveling literally through space. The aggregate effect/affect of the (figurative) wave of common sense can be quantified as C² – the range of the effect as a form-function delocalizes. Every inertial frame which can witness the annihilation of a form-function (a presence with a future) manifests that action as an equal and opposite reaction in proportion to its relation. The closer (more local) you are to something which delocalizes, the more powerfully localized you become and the more possibilities there are for a continued future. This is sort of a hybrid of Darwinian and Marxist physics. Collective sharing of sacrificed energy for private gain.
This leads into an even more esoteric discussion about the nature of matter as spatio-geometric qualia and energy as tempo-algebraic ‘phoria’. The next phase is to detail the how qualia and phoria (sensory-motive and mental-emotional) phenomena can be integrated more concretely, such that space, time, entropy, information, matter, and energy can be seen as divergent properties of pansensitivity, which is non-space, non-time, non-entropy, non-information, non-matter, and non-energy, non-vacuum. Pansensitivity is absolute fullness, composed of what can be called qualia, phoria, psyche, nous, significance, and motive. I could be more delusional than usual, but this seems to be coming into a clearer and more communicable synthesis which might be eventually work as a true theory of psychophysical unity.
The Lowdown on Empty Space and the Speed of Light
Your task is to explain why are you trying to buck the mainstream view that space has qualities. I’m no acolyte of the mainstream but I do recognize the need to explain deviations therefrom. It so happens that there are good reasons why today’s view is that empty space has physical qualities. The main shortcoming of the mainstream view, from my viewpoint, is the artificial and unnecessary light speed speed limit. Einstein hypothesized a universe with such a limit without ever even suggesting why such a limit makes any sense. And the problem is: it doesn’t.
I think that Einstein hypothesized a speed limit in the universe because he understood or intuited that speed itself is a continuum between stillness and the opposite of stillness, rather than an unbounded scale. He saw that light does not behave like anything else – that it had properties which made it unlike things which can accelerate. Velocity is (not unrelatedly) like ‘straightness’ – there is an upper limit on how straight something can be, how little something can weigh, and the extent to which a signal can be unambiguously present or absent at a given location at any given moment.
What he did not see, IMO is that light is only one kind of signal – one way that the universe makes sense of itself. The speed of light is the speed of space, or perhaps, the speed of ‘here’, and it scales up in proportion to larger scaled ‘here’s. Light, or ‘sense’ or ‘universal public signal’, actually has no speed at all, unless you mix reference frames and thereby measure a large frame from a small one. The degree to which light has a speed is the ratio between the scale of the measurer and the scale of the measurement.
The mainstream view that space has qualities makes perfect sense when we misunderstand and overlook the role of sense in signal production. Rather than extending the relation that living things have with light (or sound, smell, thought, etc) to the microcosm, we have so far only consider the *apparent* relation that non-living things have with each other, which is limited to touch. We have yet to entertain the notion that microphysical phenoemena are, in some sense, seeing each other and signaling each other directly, and thereby creating ‘space’ and ‘time’ on the macrophysical level, from our perspective. From the microphenomenal level, it might appear just the opposite, that spacetime is being created from above, on higher levels. Both are probably true and untrue to a similar extent.
There is no reason to believe that space has properties except to maintain the assumption that physical processes are unconscious and isolated. When we hold that belief, we are forced to take a phenomenon which is transdimensional, and flatten it into a finite number of topological fields in which forms can touch each other directly. That’s a great way of doing the math so that we can predict and control the conditions of (relatively) inanimate objects, but it falls apart when we try to include more subtle sense-making phenomena.
I’m fully aware, of course, that this is a radical conjecture. My position is not that this is a complete theory or that I know how it must work, but that it is a theoretical possibility which could work, has not been explored, and should not contradict any observation of physics made thus far
Light Has No Speed
At least not in the way that most people would think of it, if they did ever think of it. There is a speed at which a state of illumination radiates from molecule to molecule or body to body which depends on physical qualities of the bodies in question, but I think that it is correct to say that light does not travel ‘through’ a vacuum at all, but figuratively jumps from within bodies sympathetically through perception and imitative participation. It is the behavior of matter which waves and scatters, not independent projectiles or structures of any kind. Light, warmth, color, motion, are experiences, not objects.
Albert Einstein postulated that the speed of light with respect to any inertial frame is independent of the motion of the light source, and explored the consequences of that postulate by deriving the special theory of relativity and showing that the parameter c had relevance outside of the context of light and electromagnetism. After centuries of increasingly precise measurements, in 1975 the speed of light was known to be 299,792,458 m/s with a measurement uncertainty of 4 parts per billion. In 1983, the metre was redefined in the International System of Units (SI) as the distance travelled by light in vacuum in 1 ⁄ 299,792,458 of a second. As a result, the numerical value of c in metres per second is now fixed exactly by the definition of the metre.
I’m not an expert by any means, but the thing that makes light interesting is in the first sentence above: “the speed of light with respect to any inertial frame is independent of the motion of the light source”. This is that business of how velocities are added among moving objects, but not with light. Light is always faster than any object, no matter how fast the object is moving. Light is not just the fastest thing, it is the thing that defines faster-than-anything-elseness.
What I think special relativity tells us is that contrary to this conception of light,
what is actually going on looks like this:
This is the tricky part because although my rendition of the entire beam appearing instantaneously is, I think, correct within this hypothetical setup of a human scale train, if this train were millions of times larger, then it could be argued that the beam would actually grow non-instantaneously compared to a human sized observer (i.e. miniscule). Rather than thinking of being able to see light moving, I think we have to anchor ourselves in the fixed Einsteinian constant of c, and understand that the latency which we observe (in a radio transmission between a distant spacecraft and the control center on Earth, for example), is not the result of waves of ‘energy’ traveling through space from antenna to antenna, but rather a reflection of the relative scales of the events involved. When we talk to the spacecraft we have to use a much larger ‘here-and-now’ compared to our own native human scaled time, so that the nesting of smaller and larger nows is reflected as scaled experiences of delay. This is just how matter makes sense of itself on different scales. It is not the speed of light, it is the speed of speed or the speed of sense, matter, or time.
The picture that I propose would be more accurate is this:
As our naive perception suggests, there is no concretely real ‘beam’ of light, rather there is a spot of light present at the target, as well as an illumination at the flashlight source, and in our eyes, and (not pictured) in our upscaled human mind.
In other words, when we think of light as having a speed, we are not really understanding the full ramifications of special relativity and are merely projecting our Newtonian-Cartesian prejudices onto something which is not classical. The reason that it is not classical, however, I propose, is because visible light is not a projectile at all, but rather access to visual sensitivity, i.e. an extension of self-experience to incorporate the appearance of non-self in the visual range of percpeption (as opposed to tactile, aural, olfactory, emotional, or intellectual).
*gifs cannibalized from here.
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