Faisal’s Web Site - irrational_physics
Sunday, 15 January 2006
Irrational Physics: Bounce. Bounce.
We think of matter as vibrating point charges, or possibly vibrating loops of energy. What if this is wrong – what if matter is a vibration. Not a vibrating thing – the vibration itself.
I’m not sure what that means, though. A vibration of space? A vibration of energy in space? Energy is space? If you have a bunch of cloth and part of it is rumpled, it seems like there’s something solid there, and you can move things around, but as you stretch out the cloth there’s nothing there.
Saturday, 12 February 2005
Irrational Physics: The most common thing in the universe is space
I’ve been thinking about this one a lot lately: there is a lot more space than matter in the universe. What if space is more relevant of an actor than we thought? What if quantum uncertainty is inherent to space, not matter? Etc.
Tuesday, 2 September 2003
Irrational Physics: A google of universes
The New York Times has an article on recent meanderings in string theory, dark energy, multiple universes and the anthropic principle. I continue to not like string theory. But it does get me thinking. What if the universe isn’t growing, but matter is shrinking?
Monday, 4 August 2003
Irrational Physics: No such thing as a moment in time?
Someone’s got a new theory: there’s no such thing as an instant in time. I like this, intuitively, if there’s no such thing as a precise position or a precise velocity, how can you have precise time (in fact the first two might imply the third). Further, if it is correct then I’m guessing you can toss string theory – you only need it to deal with the conflict between relativity and quantum physics when dealing with relativisitc speeds on the planck scale. But such things don’t happen if time isn’t precise enough to bring them into conflict.
Wednesday, 23 July 2003
Irrational Physics: Evidence for dark energy’s repulsion
New Scientist has an article about experiments verifying dark energy’s repulsing properties. This was tested in the galaxy rather than out, which has interesting implications - it seems that the energy would be more densely bound near gravitational sources?
Saturday, 24 May 2003
Irrational Physics: More experiments in superluminal light
The Economist has a story about light travelling faster than the speed of light, although the story appears to actually have to do with which parts of a lightwave travel at the speed of light and which parts do not (and appear to be irrelevant to special relativity).
Tuesday, 11 March 2003
Irrational Physics: The observably finite universe after all?
The New York times reports on new observations regarding cosmic background radiation and discusses the implications for the shape of the universe. If this is true then it throws all sorts of theories into doubt, recasts the need for inflation, “and more”! Thoughts: Can you have multiple parallel dimensions? Would energy waves looping back into the universe create any kind of interference pattern when they cross back over themselves? (That last one is kind of ridiculous, but I’m still trying to wrap my head around this.)
Monday, 10 March 2003
Irrational Physics: Meta – iPhysics
iPhysics (Irrational Physics) is an experiment in non-linear thinking. I’m recording random musings on the nature of reality, for posterity and perhaps for contemplation. I doubt any of these bear much resemblance to what’s actually going on (although the notes in “The births of multiple universes” seem to bear similarity to some recent theories - seeing the theory come out about 6 months after I had the thought was part of what inspired me to start recording things). Below are three random thoughts I had over the past year. I’ll post more as I think of them. Feel free to mail me your thoughts (please note whether you’d mind it being published and if so, attributed).
Irrational Physics: The births of multiple universes
Assume for the sake of argument that any given region in space will grow to the point that there is an external event horizon beyond which objects fall out of reach (see Steven Weinberg’s “The Future of Science, and the Universe”). Were this the case, would you see a collapse of the contents of a given set of objects within the event horizon after everything fast enough or distant enough to escape had escaped. Would this collapse look like one supermassive black hole and would that black hole, absent any possible outside influence, eventually explode into its own new universe?
Irrational Physics: Elementary particles
There is a theory which states that the reason we have particles the way we do is that any universe in which all particles behaved differently in the slightest way would not wind up with the universe we have today, but there may be other universes in which particles and forces have different properties. Question: what if we actually did start with a universe in which there were all sorts of particles with different forces (i.e. you could have an “electron” with all sorts of different options for charge and mass") but the “it only works if the numbers are this way” collapsed the universe of particles into the limited subset we see today. By way over overextended analogy, think of “life” simulations which tend to collapse to a small number of self replicating surviving objects while everything else is wiped out.
In this scenario, “electron” is not really an elementary particle from the beginning of the universe, it’s just one of the classes of particles which survived to the later stages of the universe. Ditto all other particles.
Follow-on question: what sorts of interactions would cause the sort of cancelation and annihilation of all but the existing particle/force combinations and would there be any observable evidence available today?