As someone who takes a bit of interest in physics but has pretty limited knowledge, I’ve been pondering over some physics concepts that are often referred to as “counter-intuitive” or difficult to make sense of… eg the double slit experiment or time dilation or questions like “what exists beyond the edge of the universe?” etc.
In an attempt to feel more comfortable with the uncomfortable nature of these questions and ideas, could it be possible that the universe is a bit like Microsoft Excel (bear with me).
In Excel, you can take some “raw data” (typical raw data might be some columns and rows of numbers etc), and then you can generate charts/graphs based on this data. Eg, you might generate a bar graph. You could generate a pie chart, etc.
If someone were to point to the bar graph and say “what exists in the empty space between those bars?”… you could confidently say “nothing… this is just one possible visual representation of this data set over here” (pointing back at the raw data). The question of “what exists between each bar” is effectively a meaningless question. Similarly, if you take the pie chart, one might ask “what exists outside the pie?”. Again, the answer is “nothing”. If all you knew about was the pie chart, if that pie chart was your entire visible world, then trying to understand how “nothing” exists beyond the edge of it could be tricky. But with the context that the pie chart is just a visual representation of a raw data set, the idea is, I feel, much easier to grasp.
That got me thinking that our universe, as we see & observe it. Could what we see and observe in our universe be just one possible visual representation of the universe’s “raw data set”? When we conduct experiments like the double slit experiment or ponder what exists “beyond the edge of the universe”, we could be asking questions, or attempting experiments, that go beyond what our visual representation of the universe is capable of handling or showing.
This makes things like the double slit experiment, time dilation etc much easier for me to “grasp” or accept.
I’m looking for some sources that explore this kind of idea… does this idea have a name? Is it a studied field?
I don’t think what you describe is really a good conceptualization or metaphor for the idea of the shape of the universe, and I don’t know know what it would contribute to anything like the double slit experiment, time dilation, etc. What problem are you trying to solve with your metaphor? That is, what does your idea of Excel bar graphs suggest to you that, say, the analogy of a 2-dimensional universe as the surface of an expanding balloon does not?
I’m not sure I understand the analogy and even if so, this might not help, but I think we already do what you’re suggesting.
For example, we now understand that only about a 5% of the universe is visible or baryonic matter. Everything else falls under the less than descriptive rubrics of dark energy and matter with the split being roughly 5:2 (nearly 70% vs a bit more than 25%).
As for multiple representations, we know that on the subatomic level, particles can exist in many mutually exclusive states simultaneously (superposition) and can travel separate paths simultaneously (coherence). Yet it’s not really accurate to say that they’re in all the same states or places at once so technically they’re not in any - or both. The wave function that describes them is agnostic and simply assigns probabilities to states so to some extent, it depends on how you want to look it.
So on one level you have a universe that is completely bizarre and counter intuitive - one that does not respect concepts like causality or even temporal order - and on the other, one that seems to be its polar opposite. And while there are still a few hold outs that believe that quantum mechanics and the wave function aren’t “real”, it’s starting look less and less likely that this will turn out to be true.
This is a good example of what to me is a poor analogy.
A balloon is a three dimensional object. There IS something inside a balloon, and not “nothing”. My movement in the universe feels nothing like being stuck on a curved plane, etc etc..
No because the effects that give rise to those phenomena don’t survive the transition to the macroscopic world without a great deal of effort and even then only for incredibly brief periods.
Beyond that, you probably don’t realize it, but you’re moving in the direction of trying to explain quantum phenomena via hidden variables - which is really just another way of saying it seems so strange because there’s more there that we don’t understand. Unfortunately that option has been conclusively refuted.
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A balloon is a three dimensional object. There IS something inside a balloon, and not “nothing”. My movement in the universe feels nothing like being stuck on a curved plane, etc etc..
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Only because you’re imagining the balloon as embedded in a three-dimensional space. There’s no “inside” to that balloon for the same reason that there’s no four-dimensional “meta-up” direction in ordinary three-dimensional space. If you don’t like that analogy, fine— it’s just an analogy— but I’m not sure what your different idea about raw spreadsheet data contributes.
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My movement in the universe feels nothing like being stuck on a curved plane, etc etc..
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Neither does your movement on the (surface of the) earth, but you’re stuck on what’s effectively a curved plane.
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“Spooky”, “bizarre” or “seemingly random” behaviour could be explained as expressions of the limitations of what is our perception of the universe.
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What’s the difference between that and just saying, “A wizard did it”?
On the contrary, my experiences moving around on the surface of the earth feel exactly like what I would expect if I was moving around the surface of a curved plane.
brownsugar: If you mean The Life of Psi from Physics World, yeah, that deserves to be read a few times since the concepts there come up over and over if you like to read about this stuff.
There’s also a book that provides an introduction to some of the math (The Theoretical Minimum) but I’m stalled on that for the time being. It’s actually remedial math for quantum mechanics which, when you think about it can be a little intimidating, but that shouldn’t stop anyone.
The lead author is Leonard Susskind who is the **plumber **who fathered string theory and famously won a long running argument with Stephen Hawking. That’s why I think anyone who wants to understand should be helped to and why I don’t have much patience for people who have no patience or deliberately try to talk over everyone’s head.
There is a simple way to remove (or at least transmute) the action-at-a-distance spookiness present in one slit/two slit experiments, or Bell’s Theorem. I mention it at SDMB once a year or so, though am always ignored after a few charges of ignorance are filed.
The very name of the solution – reverse-time causality – is so provocative that Huw Price, in his book Time’s Arrow and Archimedes Point, usually refers to it instead as “advanced action.” A photon traveling from one polarizing filter to another doesn’t “know” which filter is in the past, and which in the future. Once you accept this, “paradoxically spooky” quantum experiments become mundane.
Price points out that many physicists (Hawking, Bell, Feynmann, Wheeler, some at SDMB, just to name a few) are well aware of this concept, but still reject it. I have no expertise but my intuition tells me that the 20th-century rejection of “advanced action” will be seen some day as a big blind spot.
For what it’s worth, I’ve had a similar gut feeling for some time. I disagree with the other poster that implied that this would necessarily be a “Hidden Variable” idea; at least, not in the sense that Bell’s Inequality addresses. I feel intuitively that this would actually head towards a “Riddled Basin” type of solution that effectively skirts Bell altogether. Has there been any progress towards applying Bell’s Inequality under the Riddled Basin assumption?
There IS something between the bars as well. But it’s completely irrelevant to the information contained in the graph. Same with the pie. And the point of the balloon is precisely that “trying to understand how “nothing” exists beyond the edge of it could be tricky.” At least when explaining what an expanding and curved space-time “is”.
Your analogy may have meaning to you, but I have to add my voice to those saying they don’t understand what you’re trying to do. If it’s simply to visualize that we don’t know everything, then the analogy is flawed since the nothing in the graphs doesn’t have meaning, information content or influences the interpretation, except in the sense, of course of making the bars not-infinitely tall.
And as has been mentioned science tries to explain the observed with what’s outside our everyday world all the time with dark matter, dark energy and string theory with 11 dimensions.
I hadn’t heard of that one but you were proposing it as a solution to the issue presented by Bell’s theorem. They fall into those 2 categories. If you don’t know, it’s not important.
We think of the world as a 3-minensional place, becuase that is how electromagnetic radiation travels, and everything we know about the universe is mediated through our interaction with the EM feild. Our brain interprets all these photons in such a way to create a representation of 3-d space in which we move and live.
There really is no way to conceptualize something else, it doesn’t fit into the 3-d world we have already conceptualized.
See the holographic principle for another way of trying to wrap your head around how the universe can be represented.
Once you realize that your intuition and gut can’t figure them out, that’s when you have to start trusting the math. It may be that we will eventually learn to conceptualize quantum concepts and such the same way we can with Newtonian, but I think we would have to start at a much younger age, before the world representation becomes too set.
True, humans have evolved to interpret Earth. But what does that mean?
We see only a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum, that portion which is least filtered by the atmosphere. We live in a constant gravity field, and would find greater or lesser local gravities to be odd. We live at non-relativistic speeds. We move as if we were on an infinite flat plane. We think solely in terms of three spatial dimensions.
The universe contains huge amounts of reality that doesn’t conform to any of these. We had to discover the entirety of the electromagnetic spectrum by experimentation and then produce the math that connects it. We’ve had only 12 humans walk around in a different gravity field, although a larger number have experienced free-fall. Only recently have we developed measuring instruments sufficient to proving that clocks do not agree when moved into different reference frames and then brought back into one. The geometry of a spherical earth is not the same as a flat plane, and what we conceive of as a straight line can be shown to be longer than the corresponding arc of the great circle that connects any two points. Some theories suggest that several additional dimensions lurk in every point of space.
It seems pretty silly to say that the minute percentage of reality we experience with our senses and the “common sense” we extrapolate from them is true and the rest of the universe is an artifact. It has to be the other way around. Our limited perceptions are just that: limited. We are so limited that we can’t even find good analogies to everyday behavior for the way that non-human matter interacts. The two-slit experiment shows that particles have properties that we don’t even have a good name for. Wave-particle duality is an expression showing that we can’t think outside of familiar waves and particles even though photons and electrons and the rest are something else entirely.
You can get past this, although knowing the math and seeing what emerges from it is unfortunately the only good method of doing so. Resorting to everyday analogies will never be sufficient. Not being able to grasp what the math says is always going to be the norm. The only failing would be to declare that the experiences of being a limited human trump the math. Reality is much bigger, longer, wider, deeper, and amazing than the speck that is earth. We have to accept that and find a way to come to terms with that hugeness.
