by Duane N. Burghard
©2014
(Note to readers! I am currently (Summer 2015) working on a fairly major expansion and rewrite on this essay, which is by far the most popular one I've ever written. Look for it this fall right here on my blog).
(Note to readers! I am currently (Summer 2015) working on a fairly major expansion and rewrite on this essay, which is by far the most popular one I've ever written. Look for it this fall right here on my blog).
How do space and time really work? How do they interact with our conscious minds? Why do we perceive the universe the way we do? Questions like these have fascinated me over my entire lifetime, but I am especially fascinated by this one; why do some people seem to have as yet unexplainable oddities in their human experience as they relate to space and time? I don't know the answers to these questions, but I have spent no small amount of time looking for them and today I'm going to share some thoughts on what I've found.
In my first blog post, I wrote about discovering Facebook back in 2009 and how one of the best things about it was the opportunity to reunite with old friends. What I didn't mention in that essay was that, as I reassembled my friends from elementary school in particular, I noticed a really interesting pattern. In our early notes to one another, my friends and I often shared bits of things that we remembered about each other as children. What was interesting was that almost everyone remembered the same thing about me; my imagination. What I wonder now, in light of what I plainly concede might be nothing more than the modern products of that very same imagination and nothing more, is whether I actually just had and have a great imagination, or if there was and is something more.
To explain how I have come to see and understand space and time the way I do it is necessary to synthesize some pretty deep ideas, so arrogant as this may be, let's start by seeing if we can tackle the nature of space and time in one paragraph.
When it comes to the nature of space and time, my primary influence is a British astrophysicist from Cambridge named Julian Barbour. In 1999 Barbour wrote a book called The End of Time. Knowing my fascination with the subject, my wife and Mother-In-Law bought it for me for Christmas that year and were, as a result, subsequently subjected to a lot of "yes!" and "that's it!" comments from me as I sat and read. Barbour argues that time doesn’t really exist at all. Time is essentially an illusion, a fictional construct. Fortunately, there is a relatively easy way to grasp this concept. Barbour argues that every single moment is a specific, single, contained reality, very much like a picture. We perceive “motion” (time) in the universe for the same reason we think we see motion when we watch television. When we watch TV or a movie, as most people know, what we’re really watching is a series of still photographs being flashed before our eyes at a very rapid pace (approximately 24-30 frames, or pictures, per second). Our brains take in all of those pictures and “stitch them together” creating the illusion that images move on the screen. Barbour argues that the universe is much the same way, and that our consciousness is traveling through these instantaneous moments and simply stitching the changes between them together and creating the illusion of motion and time.
So to understand how I perceive the universe, think of yourself as a drop of water falling down towards the very top of an opened umbrella. Each moment event is represented by the tip on the top of that umbrella and each spine on my metaphorical umbrella represents a potential path from that moment (and the number of paths or choices is obviously variable based on the specifics of the moment in question). The pathways from the tip and along the spines are like hollow strands of spaghetti (like a tube), and once your drop of water (your consciousness) hits the top of the umbrella, you follow one of the many strands along one of the spines of the umbrella (again, each spine representing a possible outcome for that moment event). At the end of each spine of the umbrella, the spaghetti tube falls to the top of another umbrella (the next moment that proceeds from the path of the spine of the previous moment), and what we define as our lives is merely a hyper specific trip down a very particular path of spaghetti tubes from one umbrella (moment) to the next. So basically what I'm saying is that our lives are akin to going down the tubes ... which should be easy for many of us to relate to.
Now here's where it gets a little weird (I know, only now?!). I believe that each potential result of a moment happens (which is to say that each potential path does get followed). I have chosen not to get too distracted in this essay by branching off and having a detailed discussion of multiverse theory (though, hopefully obviously, in a nearby universe, I have made the opposite decision and as a result this essay is a much longer one over there ... you're welcome), however, if you want to get a grip on where I stand on the multiverse, I strongly recommend the article "Parallel Universes" by Max Tegmark in the May, 2003 issue of Scientific American. Obviously different choices in one moment can lead to a partially or entirely different set of choices in the next moment (or some later following moment) in the next universe over. Sometimes events may cause a re-collision of tubes (the same ultimate result with no other changes), other times they may get progressively farther apart. Additionally, different choices in one moment can lead to a different number of potential choices in parallel universes (so umbrellas in the next level down won't necessarily all have the same number of spines).
If you're not confused yet, I'll help by adding another piece. My theory is that, for reasons I don't understand but accept based solely on perceived observation, the umbrellas can twist. As a result, the strands of spaghetti can get all intertwined.
Which brings us to the really weird part. My theory is that the outside edges of the spaghetti tubes represent the borders of our conscious perception of the universe, but the thing is, like many things in the universe, the strands just aren't built very well, which is to say that, for some of us, they're full of stretched out holes (it is also possible that they're full of holes for everyone, but some of us just have a better ability to see them than others). The vast majority of the time, the holes don't really allow your mind to perceive anything else because a given hole in your strand of spaghetti doesn't line up with anything other than the outer skin of one or several other strands of spaghetti (you don't see anything beyond your wall because there's nothing to see but another wall). But every now and then, the holes line up, and every once in a great while they line up long enough for us to gain some perception of an alternate universe. Given the multiverse theory that I accept (which states that the very nearest parallel universe is no closer than 1 times 10 to the 10th to the 28th power meters away ... again, see Tegmark's article for the science behind this) the only possible way that there can be any information transfer would require that these holes are actually wormholes that fold the vast distance in space between them. I don't have an explanation as to why this would be, but frankly cosmology is a science that doesn't answer the "why" question nearly as often or as well as many of us would like and the idea seems at least as plausible to me as a variety of others in the field.
If my explanation is correct (or correct enough), the holes in a given person's strand could occasionally line up with a variety of parallel worlds, some very similar and some pretty dis-similar. But the thing about spaghetti is that once two strands are entangled, they often kind of stay that way, so in theory a person able to perceive the holes would eventually get the chance to have multiple looks at the same parallel world. Imagine a parallel world, for example, where Archduke Franz Ferdinand is not assassinated and the July crisis of 1914 never happens (Princip either doesn't kill Ferdinand or is stopped). As a result, the war doesn't happen or plays out very differently. Without World War 1, Germany might not be punished and Adolph Hitler never becomes more than an agitated Austrian artist, meaning that World War 2 also doesn't happen (or doesn't happen at all the same way). This doesn't mean that there aren't other conflicts and other results at all, but it does mean that such a parallel Earth would historically evolve quite differently (there is an entire genre of fiction literature that surrounds this concept called alternative history ... I often wonder if these authors are making their stories up or if they've simply gained a small amount of access to the world they write about ... perhaps they think it's just they're imagination and they're not even aware that this is how the idea came to them). Are my highly detailed dreams just the random compilations of inputs I don't recall that get written off as simply having a great imagination, or am I "cheating", am I really simply reporting the results of occasional glimpses of other Earths?
But while that idea is interesting, it's just plain crazy to a lot of people and there's not a lot of science to back it up, so let's ignore the holes in the strand thing for now (fair enough since most people obviously can't consciously see beyond the borders of their strand anyway) and let's look at some of the truly bizarre oddities of life within our strands.
We've talked about time to this point as a flow between moments, and we've done that because that's the way it seems to work for the vast bulk of us the vast bulk of the time. But if time isn't real, if all events are equally real and simply happening in different spaces (and indeed physics seems to make an argument for that ... by the way, if you want a better explanation than I can give you, I recommend an episode from Season Two of Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman called "Does Time Really Exist?" ... the episode also includes an interview with Julian Barbour), then why does everything happen in order? I don't think it does. I agree that most of us perceive it that way most of the time, but clearly it's a rule that can be violated, maybe not at the Slaughterhouse Five level, but at least a little bit.
Dean Radin, an engineer and faculty member at Sonoma State, did a somewhat controversial study a few years ago at the Institute for Noetic Science in which he attached skin conductors to individuals to measure their stress levels while showing them images, some emotionally charged, some not. The data from these experiments consistently showed that people began to biologically react to the emotionally charged images several seconds before they appeared. The implication of Radin's work is that at least some information is somehow "leaking" backwards in time. Many of us are familiar with that sense of intuition, and it seems rational to believe that sometimes that may be nothing more than random, but if time isn't real, it makes perfect sense to me that some information about another event might find its way backward up a strand; we might perceive it the way we might hear the noise of something we're moving towards as we travel down a tube, and our inability to perceive it clearly also makes sense since it is at a "distance" down the strand ... as a result our conscious minds process the information as little more than a vague sensation that's rarely useful). Somewhat similarly, Professor Darrell Bem at Cornell University did a study in which individuals showed a slightly higher ability to chose between two curtains (one blank, one with an image) when the image in question was erotic. I should note that Bem's findings have been criticized by, among others, my former neighbor and good friend Jeff Rouder (who I've known for many years as our youngest daughters are best friends). Jeff is a nationally renowned Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Missouri who applied something called a Bayes Filter to Bem's data which he said eliminates the statistical variance. To me though, whether Radin and Bem are entirely correct or not is less relevant than the fact that clearly our minds are processing more information than we are fully consciously aware of, and the degree to which we are aware of the information we are receiving does seem to vary significantly from person to person. As a result, it does seem reasonable to me that what people might consider to be paranormal (with respect to the perception of space and time at any rate) is more likely to be merely a minute genetic mutation of some kind (probably a subatomic glitch in our brain, basically a defect).
For those whose minds are not yet reeling, I will leave you this week with one more possibility. It is also possible that nothing I've written above is relevant to our universe, and that's because it, and our perception of it, is entirely the result of a computer program. For those who didn't see the movie "The Thirteenth Floor" several years ago, the idea is that our universe is a super massive computer simulation and we are simply programs in it. And the laws of physics? Programmed. I have often wondered about this idea. As I have now publicly admitted to friends, I remember vividly waking up on the morning of October 17th, 2000, and hearing about the death of Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan. I had two unshakeable sensations that entire day; first, that there was something very wrong with the universe, that something (Carnahan's death) had happened that didn't actually ("really") happen; and second, that even though I could remember the previous day and every day prior to it for almost the whole of the 35 plus years I had been alive, somehow that day seemed like it was the very first day of the entire universe. Perhaps I was right. Perhaps our universe is nothing more than a computer simulation that was written to play out a "what if" scenario by historians FAR into the future. It's possible, but if so, the good news is that we may not have to wait long to find out. I'm referring to an experiment called the Holometer Experiment that's just started at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The Experiment will attempt to determine whether our perception of a three-dimensional universe is just an illusion. The possibility that our universe may be basically a computer program (or hologram) is a pretty well accepted theory, but to me, the real question is this; if our universe is merely a simulation and we do figure it out, will our knowledge of that fact "ruin" the game and end our universe?
Who knows ... after all, it could just be my imagination.
In my first blog post, I wrote about discovering Facebook back in 2009 and how one of the best things about it was the opportunity to reunite with old friends. What I didn't mention in that essay was that, as I reassembled my friends from elementary school in particular, I noticed a really interesting pattern. In our early notes to one another, my friends and I often shared bits of things that we remembered about each other as children. What was interesting was that almost everyone remembered the same thing about me; my imagination. What I wonder now, in light of what I plainly concede might be nothing more than the modern products of that very same imagination and nothing more, is whether I actually just had and have a great imagination, or if there was and is something more.
To explain how I have come to see and understand space and time the way I do it is necessary to synthesize some pretty deep ideas, so arrogant as this may be, let's start by seeing if we can tackle the nature of space and time in one paragraph.
When it comes to the nature of space and time, my primary influence is a British astrophysicist from Cambridge named Julian Barbour. In 1999 Barbour wrote a book called The End of Time. Knowing my fascination with the subject, my wife and Mother-In-Law bought it for me for Christmas that year and were, as a result, subsequently subjected to a lot of "yes!" and "that's it!" comments from me as I sat and read. Barbour argues that time doesn’t really exist at all. Time is essentially an illusion, a fictional construct. Fortunately, there is a relatively easy way to grasp this concept. Barbour argues that every single moment is a specific, single, contained reality, very much like a picture. We perceive “motion” (time) in the universe for the same reason we think we see motion when we watch television. When we watch TV or a movie, as most people know, what we’re really watching is a series of still photographs being flashed before our eyes at a very rapid pace (approximately 24-30 frames, or pictures, per second). Our brains take in all of those pictures and “stitch them together” creating the illusion that images move on the screen. Barbour argues that the universe is much the same way, and that our consciousness is traveling through these instantaneous moments and simply stitching the changes between them together and creating the illusion of motion and time.
So to understand how I perceive the universe, think of yourself as a drop of water falling down towards the very top of an opened umbrella. Each moment event is represented by the tip on the top of that umbrella and each spine on my metaphorical umbrella represents a potential path from that moment (and the number of paths or choices is obviously variable based on the specifics of the moment in question). The pathways from the tip and along the spines are like hollow strands of spaghetti (like a tube), and once your drop of water (your consciousness) hits the top of the umbrella, you follow one of the many strands along one of the spines of the umbrella (again, each spine representing a possible outcome for that moment event). At the end of each spine of the umbrella, the spaghetti tube falls to the top of another umbrella (the next moment that proceeds from the path of the spine of the previous moment), and what we define as our lives is merely a hyper specific trip down a very particular path of spaghetti tubes from one umbrella (moment) to the next. So basically what I'm saying is that our lives are akin to going down the tubes ... which should be easy for many of us to relate to.
Now here's where it gets a little weird (I know, only now?!). I believe that each potential result of a moment happens (which is to say that each potential path does get followed). I have chosen not to get too distracted in this essay by branching off and having a detailed discussion of multiverse theory (though, hopefully obviously, in a nearby universe, I have made the opposite decision and as a result this essay is a much longer one over there ... you're welcome), however, if you want to get a grip on where I stand on the multiverse, I strongly recommend the article "Parallel Universes" by Max Tegmark in the May, 2003 issue of Scientific American. Obviously different choices in one moment can lead to a partially or entirely different set of choices in the next moment (or some later following moment) in the next universe over. Sometimes events may cause a re-collision of tubes (the same ultimate result with no other changes), other times they may get progressively farther apart. Additionally, different choices in one moment can lead to a different number of potential choices in parallel universes (so umbrellas in the next level down won't necessarily all have the same number of spines).
If you're not confused yet, I'll help by adding another piece. My theory is that, for reasons I don't understand but accept based solely on perceived observation, the umbrellas can twist. As a result, the strands of spaghetti can get all intertwined.
Which brings us to the really weird part. My theory is that the outside edges of the spaghetti tubes represent the borders of our conscious perception of the universe, but the thing is, like many things in the universe, the strands just aren't built very well, which is to say that, for some of us, they're full of stretched out holes (it is also possible that they're full of holes for everyone, but some of us just have a better ability to see them than others). The vast majority of the time, the holes don't really allow your mind to perceive anything else because a given hole in your strand of spaghetti doesn't line up with anything other than the outer skin of one or several other strands of spaghetti (you don't see anything beyond your wall because there's nothing to see but another wall). But every now and then, the holes line up, and every once in a great while they line up long enough for us to gain some perception of an alternate universe. Given the multiverse theory that I accept (which states that the very nearest parallel universe is no closer than 1 times 10 to the 10th to the 28th power meters away ... again, see Tegmark's article for the science behind this) the only possible way that there can be any information transfer would require that these holes are actually wormholes that fold the vast distance in space between them. I don't have an explanation as to why this would be, but frankly cosmology is a science that doesn't answer the "why" question nearly as often or as well as many of us would like and the idea seems at least as plausible to me as a variety of others in the field.
If my explanation is correct (or correct enough), the holes in a given person's strand could occasionally line up with a variety of parallel worlds, some very similar and some pretty dis-similar. But the thing about spaghetti is that once two strands are entangled, they often kind of stay that way, so in theory a person able to perceive the holes would eventually get the chance to have multiple looks at the same parallel world. Imagine a parallel world, for example, where Archduke Franz Ferdinand is not assassinated and the July crisis of 1914 never happens (Princip either doesn't kill Ferdinand or is stopped). As a result, the war doesn't happen or plays out very differently. Without World War 1, Germany might not be punished and Adolph Hitler never becomes more than an agitated Austrian artist, meaning that World War 2 also doesn't happen (or doesn't happen at all the same way). This doesn't mean that there aren't other conflicts and other results at all, but it does mean that such a parallel Earth would historically evolve quite differently (there is an entire genre of fiction literature that surrounds this concept called alternative history ... I often wonder if these authors are making their stories up or if they've simply gained a small amount of access to the world they write about ... perhaps they think it's just they're imagination and they're not even aware that this is how the idea came to them). Are my highly detailed dreams just the random compilations of inputs I don't recall that get written off as simply having a great imagination, or am I "cheating", am I really simply reporting the results of occasional glimpses of other Earths?
But while that idea is interesting, it's just plain crazy to a lot of people and there's not a lot of science to back it up, so let's ignore the holes in the strand thing for now (fair enough since most people obviously can't consciously see beyond the borders of their strand anyway) and let's look at some of the truly bizarre oddities of life within our strands.
We've talked about time to this point as a flow between moments, and we've done that because that's the way it seems to work for the vast bulk of us the vast bulk of the time. But if time isn't real, if all events are equally real and simply happening in different spaces (and indeed physics seems to make an argument for that ... by the way, if you want a better explanation than I can give you, I recommend an episode from Season Two of Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman called "Does Time Really Exist?" ... the episode also includes an interview with Julian Barbour), then why does everything happen in order? I don't think it does. I agree that most of us perceive it that way most of the time, but clearly it's a rule that can be violated, maybe not at the Slaughterhouse Five level, but at least a little bit.
Dean Radin, an engineer and faculty member at Sonoma State, did a somewhat controversial study a few years ago at the Institute for Noetic Science in which he attached skin conductors to individuals to measure their stress levels while showing them images, some emotionally charged, some not. The data from these experiments consistently showed that people began to biologically react to the emotionally charged images several seconds before they appeared. The implication of Radin's work is that at least some information is somehow "leaking" backwards in time. Many of us are familiar with that sense of intuition, and it seems rational to believe that sometimes that may be nothing more than random, but if time isn't real, it makes perfect sense to me that some information about another event might find its way backward up a strand; we might perceive it the way we might hear the noise of something we're moving towards as we travel down a tube, and our inability to perceive it clearly also makes sense since it is at a "distance" down the strand ... as a result our conscious minds process the information as little more than a vague sensation that's rarely useful). Somewhat similarly, Professor Darrell Bem at Cornell University did a study in which individuals showed a slightly higher ability to chose between two curtains (one blank, one with an image) when the image in question was erotic. I should note that Bem's findings have been criticized by, among others, my former neighbor and good friend Jeff Rouder (who I've known for many years as our youngest daughters are best friends). Jeff is a nationally renowned Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Missouri who applied something called a Bayes Filter to Bem's data which he said eliminates the statistical variance. To me though, whether Radin and Bem are entirely correct or not is less relevant than the fact that clearly our minds are processing more information than we are fully consciously aware of, and the degree to which we are aware of the information we are receiving does seem to vary significantly from person to person. As a result, it does seem reasonable to me that what people might consider to be paranormal (with respect to the perception of space and time at any rate) is more likely to be merely a minute genetic mutation of some kind (probably a subatomic glitch in our brain, basically a defect).
For those whose minds are not yet reeling, I will leave you this week with one more possibility. It is also possible that nothing I've written above is relevant to our universe, and that's because it, and our perception of it, is entirely the result of a computer program. For those who didn't see the movie "The Thirteenth Floor" several years ago, the idea is that our universe is a super massive computer simulation and we are simply programs in it. And the laws of physics? Programmed. I have often wondered about this idea. As I have now publicly admitted to friends, I remember vividly waking up on the morning of October 17th, 2000, and hearing about the death of Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan. I had two unshakeable sensations that entire day; first, that there was something very wrong with the universe, that something (Carnahan's death) had happened that didn't actually ("really") happen; and second, that even though I could remember the previous day and every day prior to it for almost the whole of the 35 plus years I had been alive, somehow that day seemed like it was the very first day of the entire universe. Perhaps I was right. Perhaps our universe is nothing more than a computer simulation that was written to play out a "what if" scenario by historians FAR into the future. It's possible, but if so, the good news is that we may not have to wait long to find out. I'm referring to an experiment called the Holometer Experiment that's just started at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The Experiment will attempt to determine whether our perception of a three-dimensional universe is just an illusion. The possibility that our universe may be basically a computer program (or hologram) is a pretty well accepted theory, but to me, the real question is this; if our universe is merely a simulation and we do figure it out, will our knowledge of that fact "ruin" the game and end our universe?
Who knows ... after all, it could just be my imagination.
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