Time, Physics, and Metaphysics. A Parody.

by Louis B. Shalako

c2010

All Rights Reserved

Max Planck said at certain levels, for example at very short distances, or very high temperatures, under all sorts of unusual conditions; the regular laws of physics just don’t apply anymore.

While most believe that time cannot be changed, sometimes cause and effect don’t mean much because effects sometimes happen before their causes. It is generally believed that the universe is infinite in time. It has lasted forever and will go on forever.

As a philosopher, I find myself defining my terms with ever-greater precision. So one has to ask, what is the difference between infinity and forever?

There are those who believe in creation by God in six days. Some scientists have speculated about a continuous creation. Stephen Hawking described time like an anaconda, one that has swallowed a pig. He likens us to microbes, as if humans were e. coli in the belly of the pig—no matter how far we look, no matter which direction, we will never see anything more than the inside of the belly of the pig. He even speculates that the anaconda might swallow several pigs in succession, each of them traveling down the body of the serpent. It has been speculated that time might run backwards if and when the universe begins to contract back to its point of origin.

No matter what you know about a system today, you have no way of predicting what it will be like tomorrow.

Was the universe created by vacuum fluctuations, where particles appear out of nowhere, and then subside, and energies go back to a zero state, with the universe going on unchanged?

Some speculate there are multiple dimensions in space-time. My favourite is the fifth dimension, but some believe there are nine, eleven, or even twenty-six dimensions, and in truth the likelihood is that there are an infinite number of dimensions.

If a particle appears from ‘nowhere,’ and then disappears again, where did it come from? Where did it go to? Did it come from ‘null-space?’

There is no such thing as empty space. It has been supposed there is some kind of universal frame, a vector rigging field which pervades all of space. The term neo-ether has been used to describe the invisible something that fills the universe. We have to accept the notion that something exists everywhere. Some kinds of data remain forever unknown, for example the proofs of the existence of God. The ontological argument is that God cannot be proven not to exist; so therefore He must exist.

If you put a slot in a bead, and make a moebius strip out of paper, and put a dot of ink on the bead, and then thread the bead onto the strip; you will note that after one revolution the bead is rotated 180 degrees. In order for the bead to return to its original position and orientation, it must go twice around the loop. A geometric circle has 360 degrees, for an electron it apparently has 720 degrees.

A force is that which makes things do things. There are so far only four known forces in the universe. These are the electrical, of which magnetism is a manifestation; then there is gravitation, which is different from magnetism. Then there are the weak and strong nuclear forces. It is theorized that all these forces existed as one super-force in ‘Planck time’ at the moment of creation, which is described in event terms at something like 10 to the minus 54 seconds after the Big Bang.

With the Planck force, there would be more energy than you can safely imagine.

Wormholes have been described and accepted theoretically by scientists. They are about 10 to the minus 33 centimetres in diameter; with a duration of 10 to the minus 43 seconds. You can create a wormhole by heating a volume of space to 10 to the 27th degrees Kelvin or compressing some matter down to the black hole or neutron star densities.

(Don’t try this at home.)

Heisenberg stated the ‘uncertainty principle.’ It is a statement of probabilities, and uncertainties. You know the electron must be there, but you can never say where it will be at any given point in time.

According to the Feynham diagrams, when a particle goes from point A to point B, it splits into two and one of them must being going into a separate universe. Essentially what he’s saying is that a particle can be in two places at once—something even a ghost can’t do. A diagram of all possible paths the particle may take looks like a girl’s braid of hair. Just as when you sprinkle iron filings around a magnet, revealing magnetic lines of force, it has been postulated that there are temporal lines of force.

If you follow the lines of force—i.e. timelines, no problem. If you cross the temporal lines of force, energy builds up and a puncture is made in the fabric of time. At some point there is too great an imbalance in the system, but reality heals the wounds made in itself.

An object crossing time lines builds up potential as it moves. The pull of an object snapping back to its own time would release a huge amount of energy in the space-time continuum or matrix. Hence the mass limitations, which permits only very small objects such as the particles mentioned in the vacuum fluctuations part of our theory. Time is subjective, perhaps even imaginary. Time is closely linked to our perception of it, although many would tell you ‘there is only one moment’ is a fundamental truth. This is the ‘past is gone, the future never gets here’ line of thought. Perception is reality, truth very often depends on who you ask—or who is asking.

If you burn 100g of matter, you may well end up with 10g of ash, and release 90g of gasses, which should be confirmed by Avogadro’s Law. If you put 100 Newtons of energy into a system, you shouldn’t get any more than 100 Newtons out of it. A body at rest tends to remain at rest unless some external force acts upon it.

Does time follow the laws of conservation? One might assume that it does, however, if we know anything at all about the universe, is that ‘anything is possible.’

This may be written as a corollary of Murphy’s Law; “If anything can happen, it probably will eventually,” in a universe where nothing is impossible. If we believe that the universe sprang forth from a singularity, either time existed before it, or it was created at that moment. Also, was space created at this time? Or did it exist previously, therefore giving the new universe somewhere to expand into? If space existed previously, what existed outside of the point of singularity?

If time sprang forth from the singularity, there is no such thing as a parallel universe, they must all be on a slight angle from each other, although there might be an infinite number of alternate universes. Each of these would be reality to an observer encapsulated within them. At one time, philosophy and mathematics were closely linked, but they have tended to drift apart. In a world of increasing specialization, no one has the ‘big-picture overview.’ This is indeed unfortunate.

A friend of mine once went to the library and took out a book on metaphysics. He returned it a day later, and the librarian asked him what was wrong with it.

“The damned thing’s all about religion,” he told her.

Recently Stephen Hawking postulated that the universe might have come into being without help from God. Yet a news report in the last year or two noted that scientists, I think this was at CERN, were looking for 'the elusive God-particles,' which may help to account for the breakdown in conventional physical theories at the quantum or nanoscpoic level.

What if time exists in discrete, 'quanta' or particles, particles which share some of the characteristics of a wave?

Is time a dotted line, and if so, what happens in the gaps?

(Editor's Note: Compiled from sources. Louis really isn't that smart.)