The Quantum Universe

Thanks redfred.. This idea is expounded on greatly in the subsequent replies. You got straight to the point right away. Thanks.

It's been a good read getting through the replies and has reminded me about the importance of repeated failure. Just ask any lottery winner.

I'm just irked.. or at least semi-irked by the way so much "scientific" reporting is deliberately distorted and comes across a factual to the average reader. At a time when science scores are low and interest in the sciences is low among many of our youth it doesn't help when we are bombarded with what amount to bougus (clickbait) viewpoints that poison the truth.

...ok.. okay.. that may be a bit over the top, but I've enlarged my viewpoint to show greater detail.

carry on. coffee time

I like to keep it simple, because the theory of the 'big', and 'small' are so different, where do you start? " The universe is a song that responds while dancing" N. H. I personally like the A that is tuned to 432.

I will have to confess - I'm not able to picture a 5th dimension. I can accept that the idea exists as words or numbers, but if I try to form a mental image of it, the whole thing just collapses. So theories like this one don't really do anything for me. Physics is only fun if I can make some kind of movie out of it. Like your 'dust mote' idea... now that's a good one.

I liked the Fifth Dimensions. Here's a picture for you.

You probably meant this theoretical and mathematical work.

I had an after-hours chat with a physicist many years back on four, five and higher dimensional work. He pointed out that most people grasp four-dimensional spacetime without a problem even though the multiple dimensions must use completely different standard units. Depending on your choice of coordinate systems (Cartesian, Polar, Spherical, etc.) the first three dimensions might not even use the same reference unit either. Therefore the standard unit for a fifth or higher dimension can just be different from the other three dimensions, like roll, pitch, angular momentum, energy or mass.

Yes indeed a great band!

If the (other) fifth dimension could be explained as a purposeful entity I would have no problem with units that apply... a conceptual purpose though is the minimum I need to get a grasp.

Maybe the fifth is where all the dark matter is hiding? I did read the bit about gravitons, being indicated by LHC as furtively ducking into the fifth. But I don't really get why a fifth would be necessary to these (or other) particles. Just a cursory read of the explanations/speculations? in your link, I also don't get why something like magnetic fields/force would need another dimension to explain it...

Just getting back to the band, if the fifth dimension was posited as "immortal soul" I might be persuaded to think about (or listen to) that for an hour or two. Nothing religious, I just mean "awareness" or anything else that isn't perfectly happy confined to the existing four dimensions..... I could entertain it.

Considering I spent most of the day struggling with two dimensions.. just two! while the third had to be used for pacing back and forth, and the fourth trickled on at an alarming rate.. I could use the fifth as a distraction...

"Maybe the fifth is where all the dark matter is hiding?" Well, some fifths are clear. But, don't try the whole fifth at once. Try it a shot at a time. When that dark matter gets converted to dark energy, it could overwhelm you if you overdo it (It's better with a mixer).

Other than that, it COULD take you to another dimension in funky-time.

"The Dust Mote"

Before any good movie is a good book. I'd better get to it.

It has taken 6,000 years or so, for information to go from clay tablets to the WWW. How information is used is the power of brains. Dealing with the past, the present, and the future is quantum energy that the conscience mind is made of. Human minds can go back and forth in 'time' , and have always used information to explore the universe. Some exploration is real discovery, some exploration is just grant money. The cream rises to the top and human conscience will put it into the 'information' universe. Maybe the conscience mind is the universe.

If the conscious is the universe then ... ok.. I'm not even going to start on that one.

It was not posited in #4 that 'conscious mind' might be the universe.

"... Maybe the conscience mind is the universe. ...."

.

This would seem to argue for multiverse paradigm, as conscience varies so widely from individual to individual.

Humans, as far as we know, are new in this universe, relatively speaking. We can't be expected to know a lot, and certainly very little about things that don't register with our 5 senses. It's very hard to explain color to a person born blind, and that's from somebody who can see. Imagine if you too were born blind; where would the concept of color come from? Scientific inquiry? What a long road that would be.

We just discovered fire a few seconds ago...

I like being 'new' in this universe, and knowing what to do about energy and how to use it, would (I think) be the same even if we were 'old'. 'Life' is not new to the universe, in my estimation. Curiosity is the key, and resides in us, even if we are deaf and blind. I am glad that it is a long road, and that the future is full of purpose.

I'd just as soon believe in a tesseract as described by Heinlein. Seems more plausible to me.

Hooker

I agree with most of what you said. This is not a new theory. I doubt if any of us will ever know if it is true. It reminds me that the great Stephen Hawking made the idiotic statement that scientists would soon know everything there is to know.

"... Stephen Hawking made the idiotic statement that scientists would soon know everything there is to know...."

Can you provide a link documenting his stating such?

The closest I can find is:

"... “knowing the mind of God is knowing the laws of nature.”
“My prediction is that we will know the mind of God by the end of this century,”..."

.

Knowing the laws of nature by the end of the 21st century is different than soon knowing everything there is to know.

I think it was on the TV show NOVA a few years ago. Maybe you will like these ones from brainyquote.com:

"There are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature."

"We think we have solved the mystery of creation. Maybe we should patent the universe and charge everyone royalties for their existence."

"God may exist, but science can explain the universe without the need for a creator."

"The past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities."

"Nothing cannot exist forever."

"The missing link in cosmology is the nature of dark matter and dark energy."

'.. the ultimate laws of nature'... wow... not even close IMO!!

You can tinker with DNA, but nobody's creating life here any time soon.

They can't even predict the weather fgs. ROFL

Somewhat analogous to the health/nutrition/lifestyle stories that appear in the press on an almost daily basis. Many of them contradictory.

'... she commented that while they did not achieve their original aim they had learned much about what is not possible and they could apply this learning ...'

Reminds me of a quote from Thomas Edison that would apply here, ^{as well as just about all other developments,} it goes something like this;

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

And it is so true about what you learn from ways that don't work, but can work else where.

Here's another quote....

"One's worse experience, is usually your best, but it may not seem that way at the time your experiencing it." phoenix911

This is just another in a long line of guesses and theories.

Take the " Big Bang " for example.

The general idea was that a long time ago, there was a big empty space and then there was this big explosion that filled that empty space with stuff. Common questions :

A. What was in the empty space.

B. How big is/was the empty space.

C. Where did the stuff come from that filled the empty space.

D. What caused the explosion.

E. Etc.

Just like many other things, lots of guesses, which of course isn't really that bad. It gives us humans something to do and occupy our time.

When you say the general idea, I don't know whether you mean you share those ideas.

But (according to science) A and B are wrong. The big bang did not explode in pre-existing space, it created space as it went along.

Not only did the big bang create spacetime itself, but whatever, if anything that existed prior to our universe being created is outside of the spacetime of our universe. By definition, things outside of our universe do not affect things inside our universe

Here is a nugget of thought. Each dimension has a personality associated with it, and each dimension is in 'tune' with the personality. Life in this dimension has different tunes at its beginning, and beginning human life made music to explore for harmonics. The space in between notes is as important as the note. This search for perfection created the maths and symbols so others may follow. This quantum universe is what it is. Nicola Tesla, and others, put forth a formula which, I think, explains very well the frequency of this universe. 3, 6, 9, and vortex maths, fit into the narrative of the golden ratio and the creator. Out of all the frequencies in our dimention, earth finds itself in tune, or comfort zone. Harmonics and resonance came with this dimention, our perception of this dimension is just that, a perception. The search for harmony, in this orchestra, is the right way forward.

Nothing has a beginning or ending, there is just a change of state. Yes, there was something before the start of our universe and there will be something long after it's gone.

The second law of thermodynamics says the entropy is always increasing. Thus ultimately all matter and energy in the universe will become the random background heat of the universe. This is known as the Death Heat of the universe. But this status would closely resemble the conditions that are supposed to have existed prior to the big bang, so is the whole system cyclic and if so what lit the match? Now let us assume that some areas in the universe attain death heat sooner than others. Would gravity then be the strongest force in those areas? Would that create the conditions where instead of expanding that area of the universe started to contract. We know that some areas of the universe do contract, we call them black holes. There appears to be a maximum size/mass for black a hole. When it goes beyond that size (for instance when two black holes collide) does it then explode (similar to a localized big bang) and the expansion conditions return to those we observe in our sector of the universe. Is the universe analogous to a room filled with balloons where air can pass from one balloon to it's neighbor? As one expands another contracts. Hubble's theory that the universe is expanding would hold true for this part of the universe but not for the universe as a whole. The overall size of the universe would remain constant so the question of what the universe is expanding into goes away. The missing energy might be explained by the amount that resides in the contracting bits but my mathematics is not up to confirming that.

I am just flying a kite here, but if this turns out to be the correct solution, please can I have my name included on the Nobel Prize. I could use the cash.

I'm just sharing the ideas as I was taught in school, things change, as examples: where are the moon bases ? Cars that get 100 mpg ? The longer lasting light bulb ? We'll the last one became the led.

You don't have to go to intergalactic space to find "stuff that we don't understand". Quantum physics has a lot of puzzles that can be reproduced in any physics laboratory.

Electrons shot at a barrier with two slots form a banded pattern on the screen behind the barrier. This happens even if the electrons are shot one at a time. We have formulas that tell us the probability an electron will appear at any particular location, but no one really understands how an electron can go through two slots to produce this pattern. This is just one of the quantum paradoxes. It gets worse!

We can "shut up and calculate" and get the right answer, but we are like an automobile driver that has no clue of what's under the hood or how an automobile works. It's not very satisfying.

"We can "shut up and calculate" and get the right answer, but we are like an automobile driver that has no clue of what's under the hood or how an automobile works. It's not very satisfying."

If you think that's bad..... Every time a new child is born, another little alien has to be dealt with. Who really knows what's behind those little eyes?

I've wondered about this stuff too. My opinion is that the present theories have too many ifs, ands, buts, exceptions, maybes, etc. A proper theory should be "elegant;" that is, relatively simple--if we can call Einstein's Theory simple! Thus, we haven't gotten there yet, and may not be very close.

I've also wondered about 4 spatial dimensions (4 mutually perpendicular axes)--time would be a 5th dimension. You can explain most religious miracles with a 4-dimensional space. It's a mind stretcher!

Why must a proper theory be elegant? The universe is obviously very complicated and very puzzling and at times seemingly contradictory. Every time somebody tries to simplify the universe to a small set of rules comprehensible to anyone they demonstrably get it wrong.

As for 4 spatial dimensions, consider Edwin Abbott Abbott's book from over a century ago on precisely this idea of beings residing in fewer dimensions than we do here. I know the book is actually a political analysis masquerading as a geometry analysis but it appears that few people today can even understand the presented facade.

My point here is the multi-dimensional mathematical rules of matrix linear algebra does not care if anyone can envision what a tesseract looks like to us any more than Abbott's hypothetical plane limited triangle citizen can understand how a cube passing through that plane can change between a triangle and square depending on where the plane intersects.

It's only elegant with the equations balance out... it's when the variables don’t match, are missing or misinterpreted that it becomes chaotic.

I guess you don't like conversion constants.

Only on projects when more then one unit-type of measurements/constances are being used simultaneously on different equations to achieve one overall goal.

I think there was some reference to this book in the 4-volume set World of Mathematics which I received in high school--late 1950s, so it's been around a while.

I firmly believe that the 'frequencies' of the universe are (and have been) finite. Searching for the maths that put these into terms that we can understand, has been elegantly put forth in the idea of 'hertz'. Cycles per second, has a speed associated with it and can be seen as a sign wave. When we tune a musical instrument, we do so at our choice, and usually to something comfortable. I think that the universe has different tunings dependent on where. Earth has, to me, a comfortable resonance (for a reason) of about 528 kh. This all is within our dimention, which passes through us. I could care less about the complex maths that have been written, listening puts things into a real perspective, and allows life to follow a course. Some 'out of tune ' courses don't end up well.

There could very well be more than 3 spatial dimensions and we wouldn't notice. The extra dimensions could be "rolled up". The classic example is a rope, which from a distance appears to be one-dimensional. But up close, the rope can be seen to have a surface.

"The ant's view of space

Only if you look closer you will notice that the rope has a certain circumference - a two-dimensional surface. Insects such as the aforementioned ant, which move on its cylindrical surface, will experience their surroundings as two-dimensional: at every location, they can move in two sets of directions, not just one: backwards and forwards along the rope (blue double arrow), but also orthogonal to that direction, along the rope's circumference (red double arrow):"

http://www.einstein-online.info/spotlights/hiding_extra_dimensions.1.html

My speculation: If a particle's path were not only through the 3 normal dimensions but also through one of these rolled up dimensions, it would appear to us to periodically appear and disappear. Could this explain why particles in motion have wavelike properties?

As one who spent a large part of my career dealing with CNC machining and robotics I've often wondered why we don't describe the classic 6 degrees of freedom as 6 dimensions; 3 linear and 3 rotational.

The 3 linear are described as dimensions. Why not the 3 rotational?

Hooker

Maybe because any given point can be described in any of 3 coordinate systems: Cartesian, Cylindrical, or Spherical. The latter 2 involve rotations.

Well, come to think of it, in CNC, one common notation system uses X, Y, Z, I, J, K.

I, J, K actually defines a vector in which a milling tool is pointing with the X, Y, Z being the origin.

I suppose that's nothing more than a refinement of 3 dimensional space. I need to ponder that a bit more.

Hooker

That would be a good example of 6-dimensional space, with 3 of infinite extent and 3 rolled up (e.g. 30 deg = 390 deg = 750 deg ...)

But, "rolled up" around what? If it's rolled up around one of the x, y, or z axis of space, then it must come in a set of three (one for each axis). And still, I'm not sure how to avoid seeing that as just another place along one of the original 3 axes. How is this more than just an optical/spacial illusion? How can anything be rolled up around a one-dimensional line/axis? That's hard to imagine.

Where exactly is this extra "space" located? Does that "roll" contain the entire length & width of each axis (variable) according to the size of the universe?

Dimensions can be either infinite or finite. A plane is 2-dimensional and infinite, a cylindrical surface is 2-dimensional with one dimension infinite and one finite, and a spherical surface has two dimensions that are finite. If a dimension is finite, moving in that direction, you come back to where you started, and that dimension is rolled up.

If there were another dimension rolled up, say to subatomic size, I think it would be undetectable.

Going back to the rope analogy, each point on the one-dimensional rope is really a circle around the rope.

Think of 3-dimensional space, only each point is really a tiny loop. That would be a single rolled-up dimension. If each point were really a tiny sphere, the would be two rolled-up dimensions. That's about as far as I can visualize!

"...3-dimensional space, only each point is really a tiny loop."

Then that must mean there's an infinite number of dimensions? Each loop must be discrete unto itself, right? A loop can't be joined to another one adjacent to it and still be finite?

All this just takes me back to my original conundrum, that an extra dimension (or ten) that are 'rolled up' doesn't seem purposeful enough to be realistic..

Unless of course, we're just waiting for 'someone/thing' to pop open the umbrella...

Aspirin or paracetamol, anyone? ��

For any number of vectors in 3-dimensional space, only three orthogonally independent unit vectors are needed to (reach) any real point in that 3-D space, because all other vectors are dependent vectors.

So, maybe ''dimension'' isn't the proper thing with which to be concerned...

Such vector-triples could be viewed as components of a generic thing called ''space'', abbreviatable by ''S'', which could be associatable with things called ''real space'' and ''imaginary space'' , which could in turn, be abbreviated by ''R'' and ''I'', respectively...

When describing things changing with time, those things could be described as existing in ''Time-space'', abreviatable as ''T'', also with real and imaginary time components...

When describing any one of the several forms of energy, they could each be described as a particular form of ''Energy-space'', abbreviatable as ''E'', also with real and imaginary components, such as electrical energies, etc...

And, who's to say that there isn't such a thing as ''Mass-space'', abbreviatable as ''M''...

And so on, with other dimensions, (some yet to be discovered ?) which could be similarly abbreviated as ''O'' ...

Thus, it could be more appropriate to speak of independent, and dependent, sub-dimensions of a ''S-T-E-M-O-R-I-continium'', and that we still have relatively very little understanding of of how they really ''work''...

So, don't be surprised if (Hobb's Bosons) subsequently turn out to have sub-particles, etc...

"the quantum universe ,...Its mind melting for a reason". That's why I go back to music as a way to put things into perspective. (Einstien and others used it). It is the search for perfection. Frequency, hertz and ratios have collected us all, like it or not. Maybe the human conscience are the only dimensions that really count.

Another simple way to look at an expanding universe is to imagine, " for the balloon to get bigger, the lungs have to get smaller ". N. H.

Niel Harris?

Nissim Haramein

I presume you are talking about Nassim Harramein.

This explains so very much.

Nassim (the hobbitt), and Higgs, the Boson are in quite a tussle. But I think that by building bigger and bigger machines to find smaller and smaller things, the cost is not in mr. Bosons favor.