The Armchair Physics Thread

[Auburn]

What if space is expanding because energy and space are interchangeable? And the universe's energy is slowly being converted into space?

What if there is no dark energy, and there is only this effect as a consequence of entropy? And as the universe ages, more energy turns from waves to space fabric itself?







this thread is for uneducated plebeians like me to post uninformed hair-brain ideas/hypotheses about physics!! to be debunked by greater minds

 

[nanook]

That means we will run out of energy? It's going to be like universal alzheimers? Sucks to be god then. What if our ideas about energy and matter are Ni informing us about what is happening to our own vitality + brain matter?

[BIMG]http://i.usatoday.net/community/_photos/alzheimers-topper.jpg[/BIMG]

yeah, i know, sorry for derailing. i may be rather too fantastic than too ignorant for physics. both actually.

 

[Auburn]

To complement the OP line of thought...
What if energy particles are actually space folded over itself into knots? Like making a knot out of a blanket. And so when the knots are 'teased out' it causes more surface area in space..

[bimgx=450]http://imgur.com/nUt5Qbp.png[/bimgx]


Oh oh oh, and what if gravity happens because as these knots form, they pinch/subtract space around them, causing an effect like this...

...where there's a deficit of space around a particle, which causes things to fall into it. hence explaining gravity too.

 

[JR_IsP]

A physics thread

Well, even when there are (real and even used by scientist) reactions to transform energy into matter (or viceversa), I'm not pretty sure if space van be related to energy too.

I mean, the vaccuum have particles and energy on it, google the cassimir effect... However, I find kinda hard to believe the energy-space transformation theory.

On the other side, what you did with particles and gravity is kinda close to what really happens

Imagine a giant rope, this rope is a field (like the magnetic field), the knots on that field are particles. We call them bosons. Those are the "carriers" of the force.

Think of money, for example. If I have a sheep, you want to buy it, you pay me with money, then I give you the sheep. Think about what happened. At first, you had money and I had the sheep. Then, you gave me money and you got the sheep.

Now, you can't trade sheeps usually, right? You trade them for money, and money can be traded for almost everything. Money would become the carrier of the force in this case, the Economic force? Whatever.

Electromagnetism is just like that. Electrons have some electromagnetic momentum (sheeps), and they can trade that for photons (money). When a photon hit an electron, it gains electromagnetic momentum, and when that momentum is lost, a photon is emitted (beatiful, isn't it?)

Since not every particle is affected by gravity (they need to have mass), not all knots would warp space, but some would (it's like having different ropes, one for gravity, one for electromagnetism... and son on).

Don't take that as the bible, I don't have the physics grade (yet), but I hope it helped

 

[Auburn]

Well you likely know more than me!
I'm just shooting from the hip.

And yea, if I understand correctly the Casmir effect happens because apparently empty space still has quantum fluctuations. Even when stripped of all matter. Also called "Vacuum Energy" right?

I mean, think about what that means. It means "empty space/vacuum" has energy and is innately bubbling up like a boiling pot at the quantum level, apparently for no reason, as i think Lawrence Krauss says in his book "A Universe from Nothing". There's an interchange there between space/energy already.

On your point about currency, agreed. And if the universe had a sort of convergent, "single" origin.... from which an energetic equation unraveled itself into various paths, then isn't everything/anything ultimately interchangeable at the deepest root level?

I don't see why the currency metaphor must stop at energy. If so it suggests that the universe has two always separate aspects; space and energy. And that the two are not reducible back to the other.

This would be an interesting implication. Because it would mean our universe has two equally inexplicable facets to it -- two gods of different origins -- which have come together in a sort of dance to produce what we see. Maybe "space" was what always Was... before Anything... and then matter was a foreign or spontaneous Introduction.

Except I find a single-equation universe makes a bit more sense. Where all is part of a single whole, and that currency is... (if we knew the Theory of Everything) fundamentally translatable to any aspect of the universe we see.

I'm in need of some fact checking though, any physics buffs around?

 

[Grayman]

Theoretically all mass is decaying, nuclear decay, leading to the big freeze. Basically mass energy comverts to other forms of energy. E=MC2 But i am not sure that could cause the expansion because the decay is a 'half life' with each decay being half what it was before.

 

[JR_IsP]

Well you likely know more than me!
I'm just shooting from the hip.

And yea, if I understand correctly the Casmir effect happens because apparently empty space still has quantum fluctuations. Even when stripped of all matter. Also called "Vacuum Energy" right?

I mean, think about what that means. It means "empty space/vacuum" has energy and is innately bubbling up like a boiling pot at the quantum level, apparently for no reason, as i think Lawrence Krauss says in his book "A Universe from Nothing". There's an interchange there between space/energy already.

On your point about currency, agreed. And if the universe had a sort of convergent, "single" origin.... from which an energetic equation unraveled itself into various paths, then isn't everything/anything ultimately interchangeable at the deepest root level?

I don't see why the currency metaphor must stop at energy. If so it suggests that the universe has two always separate aspects; space and energy. And that the two are not reducible back to the other.

This would be an interesting implication. Because it would mean our universe has two equally inexplicable facets to it -- two gods of different origins -- which have come together in a sort of dance to produce what we see. Maybe "space" was what always Was... before Anything... and then matter was a foreign or spontaneous Introduction.

Except I find a single-equation universe makes a bit more sense. Where all is part of a single whole, and that currency is... (if we knew the Theory of Everything) fundamentally translatable to any aspect of the universe we see.

I'm in need of some fact checking though, any physics buffs around?

"Currency"

I forgot that word

It's pretty much like that, there is nothing really empty in the universe, just this boiling quantum soup of particles around.

Unlike most people think, modern physics is far for having all the answers, The dark Energy theory is what the title says, a theory.

Now, I agree with you, since matter and energy are related, why not space? Why energy cannot be converted into space or viceversa? Those are really good questions.

Theoretically all mass is decaying, nuclear decay, leading to the big freeze. Basically mass energy comverts to other forms of energy. E=MC2 But i am not sure that could cause the expansion because the decay is a 'half life' with each decay being half what it was before.

Well, yeah, matter decays, but not everything. Radioactive decay is like building a house of cards, you need energy for building it, and with little or no triggering, it just falls into pieces when it's too big.

That's what happens with radioactive isotopes and elements beyond the Uranium. Their nucleii are so big and heavy that it's like a huge house of cards, it's so big than the electromagnetic charges aren't balanced, this difference makes the nucleii to divide into more stable ones (sometimes it decays on other decaying elements before reaching stability). These final isotopes are virtually stable.

The thing is, that the "half life" of some isotopes (oh, those are atoms with different amount of neutrons but with the same amount of protons) are too long that we think the natural state is decaying. Also the Sun radiation estimulates decaying reactions, so we live on a radioactive place.

Now, the Big Freeze by itself is something else, also requiring a post, I'll do my best (inserting a spoiler for not making this too damn long).

Spoiler

To understand The Big Freeze, we need to forget about the whole "cold" concept. There are no coldness in the universe, just different amounts of heat. The more heat, the hotter, the less heat, the colder.

Now, what is the heat then?

Heat is the cinetic (aka, movement) energy of particles. The more the particles move (and therefore, faster), the more heat.

There are certain points when the heat and the pressure in the outside make particles behave some way or another, you know, the classic solid, liquid and gaseous states of matter. If you make the particles of a gas move each time more, it would eventually reach a point where electrons have so cinetic energy that they just escape the electromagnetic orbit around the nucleus. This is plasma, and it's of what the stars are made (especially hydrogen and helium plasma).

But what happens if we make particles move each time slower? There would be a point where they stop moving.

You can't be more cold than this, because the particles aren't moving at all.

This is the true Absolute Zero. And it's around -273 C (or -459 F). You can't go below this, and it's also impossible to reach.

Why? Because energy behaves like an asymptote here, I mean, you'd need more energy to decrease the heat each time, more and more and more and so on. You'll need infinite energy to reach this point. That's why fortunately, the universe need to be "hotter" than that. (Even if we'd reach this point, electrons would have no energy no continue oribiting around the nucleus, so matter would collapse.)

So, we now know that there is limit temperature, but we still don't know what the Big Freeze is.

What happens when your hand are cold and you put them on your face? Try it.

You'd be able to feel how the hands are cold but your face is warm, and if you let your hands enough time, both of your face and hand would have the same temperature.

Heat flows, from the hotter places to the colder ones. Entropy arises from here.

Cool, right?

Hmm, not that much.

The universe had the original heat contained when the Big Bang happened,
and because (at least so far) there are no other universes to interact with,
we are doomed to all places of the universe (you, me, starts, planets, galaxies,
everything) to some day, reach a point where the temperature is the very same everywhere. And think of the huge size of the universe, in order to heat to be uniform, it needs to be equally distributed, and this means... just a liiiiiiiitle above the Absolute Zero.

Thermic death of the universe.

A Big Freeze.



But it won't be happening anytime soon, don't worry

EDIT: I actually enjoyed writing this post

 

[Grayman]

I was referring to the decay of particles not atoms. Beta-decay and proton-decay if proton decay can be proven to exist.

 

[JR_IsP]

Well, those nuclear reactions exist, but the Big Freeze doesn't involves them, it's a consequence from Entropy.

However, they are very interesting, but I need to do some research before fully understand them (I know the reactions, but I need to find out the why and how).

 

[sushi]

there is no such thing as a pure vacuum

Help me answer this question:

does space become time?

or does space become distance?

 

[Auburn]

Help me answer this question:

does space become time?

or does space become distance?

i'm a noob
with batshit theories
but the way i've explained the whole space-time co-dependency to myself is entirely geometric. lets see if it makes any sense.

I start with the premise:
---- particles already go at near the speed of light
---- the distance they can travel in a second can't exceed that
---- distance traveled horizontally counts as travel time, as does distance traveled in rotation

^ Above we see two examples.
Both are of an electron traveling around an atom.

Example #1: Just shows 1 revolution. The start and end point is the same. Lets say this takes 1 unit of "time"

Example #2: Shows the same 1 unit of "time" but this particle was zooming through space, so it only made 3/4 of a revolution.

Why?

Because both electrons actually did travel exactly the same distance, which is "10" in this basic illustration, as both were going equally as fast. But one traveled the distance in a circle, while the other traveled the distance in a vector, as seen by the orange line.

The second particle didn't "slow down" per se. It made 3/4 of a revolution by going at the same speed as the other one. But that last 1/4 revolution was taken up by making forward progress.

On a macro scale what this would mean is this atom apppeared to slow down, as it got faster. Scale this up to a whole human being, and the whole human being would have experienced 3/4 the "time" that the human in example 1 did.

But they both actually passed the same amount of "time'
It's just that one's molecules didn't rotate as much as the other's, because those particles were sacrificing horizontal travel distance for rotational travel distance.

 

[JR_IsP]

There's a little problem on explanation above... special relativity (warning: weird explanation incoming).

The speed of light is always the same in every referece system. All right, since atoms have mass they can't go to the speed of light, but think of normal everyday things, such as cars on highways.

Imagine first you're stood before the highway, you can see the cars go by, say the all go at the very same speed. You can see in one rail those going north (say) and in the other those going south. For you they're all moving at the same speed, but some in different ways, like 88 miles/hour.

Now imagine you're on one of the cars going north. For you the original observer is now going south at 88 miles/hour, and the cars in the same rail with the same speed are like frozen. Now, the cars going south are now traveling at 176 miles/hour.

I made a awesomely drawn diagram of this on paint.

It took me while to draw it, no complaining about it

Same as Case B could happen if you're on the cars going southwards.

The point is, that dependeing on your reference system (or what do you call rest), speeds can change, in this case, for example, cars originally going to 88 mph suddenly are going at 176 mph.

However, this is not totally true.

There is something called "the gamma factor", and it has to do with Lorentz transformations.... or in english, when you go near the speed of light, things could go weird.

Imagine you're on a train which is constantly accelarating, till reaching 99.9999% of the speed of light (remember things with mass can't go at the speed of light, it's impossible).

Common sense tells us that if you trow a ball on the train, and if that ball is going fast enough, the "total speed" of the ball (measured by someone outside the train) could be faster than lightspeed (say the train is going 1 mph below the speed of light and you trow the ball at 2 mph... common sense says the ball is now 1 mph above the speed of light).

I made another perfect paint illustration.

This is against relativity? How can something go faster than the speed of light?

The answer: It can't.

Kinda.

What's the simpliest way of speed? Say everything on the system is at constant speed, so we can say that speed is the distance traveled divided by the time it took. The more distance in the same time, the faster it goes. The more time it took for the same distance, the slower is goes.

There are no walls or something to stop the ball moving, but time, however... is relative.

From now on, forget about common sense and prepare for weirdness.

See, there are certain values on the universe the scientists agree to be constant, every single time. Such as pi, the physical constants (like the amount of heat produced by chemical reactions, the charge of the electron... and the speed of light). Notice time in no constant, it can be warped, like space too.

The speed of light must be constant in every reference system, no matter how fast you go, the speed is the same. This leads to counter-intuitive results, but that's another kettle of fish.

In this case, since the ball can't go faster than the speed of light, the ball's time must be slowed down. Why? Because for the ball not crossing the speed of light barrier, it needs to go slower.

You, who trown the ball, would see it traveling each time slower until it finally stops, in the moment it could cross the speed of light. For the ball, instead, everything is going ultra fast, and the whole history of the unverse are seconds for it. For the moment it stops for the outside world, the ball have already witnessed, in theory, an infinite amount of time.

Wait, what?

This is the weird way to prevent breaking the only true speed limit of the universe.

Now, you're also traveling almost at speed of light, so your time is also slowed down. In fact, a machine going almost at speed of light is perfectly suitable time machine, going to the future. Depending on how faster it went, thousands, or even million years could go by when for the inner time of the train, only days went by.

This is shown on movies like Interstellar or Contact.

It's not space becoming time per se, but it's the way in which time can be warped.

Also near blackholes, since the gravitational force is too huge, leading you to going near the speed of light, warps time like that... but maybe a video can be useful for this.

YouTube

 

[Grayman]

What made Enstien conclude that light speed is constant before we were able to test it with quantum clocks?

 

[JR_IsP]

Not pretty sure, physics are too technical before, but it has to do with some Maxwell equations (a brilliant physicist).

Since nor quantum or relativity were discovered, one of the consequences of Maxwell's equations is that light must be constant no matter where it moved. This stated light as waves.

Waves need something to travel into, right? Like air for sound, or the sea for everyday waves.

It was believed that the "aether" was on what the light moved, but experiments showed no evidence of this aether.

Also, as mathematical coincidence, Lorentz figured out his transformations (including time delay for not trespassing the speed of light).

So, Einstein didn't discovered the speed of light is always constant, but rather did it by years of scientific research before by a lot of people (and I mean, a lot... there's a whole wikipedia article about "The history of special relativity"... and it's too damn long and technical).

 

[Grayman]

Suppose there was an aether but not one that functions as they suspected where it was static but instead one that's effected by gravity. Gravity can change the density of the aether so that the frequency of light might be altered in various gravity fields. We can call this new aether spacetime.

 

[JR_IsP]

Eh, kinda. There are gifs down here, let the post load fow a while.

Gravity does affect the path of light and everything, but that's because objects tend to follow the most "straight" path, and since the space is curved because of gravity, this paths are called geodesics. Light, and everything else, travels by the geodesics.

We can appreciate here how the light path is affected by gravity, but since gravity also affects the other dimensions (we use 2 for curving in the third, like the diagram). In real life spacetime curvature is more like this:

And we can see how planets and everything else orbits on the geodesics as well here

Now, all right, spacetime can be considered as the aether (but it's really not), but can there be any waves? Yes, these are called gravitational waves, and it's when you out your finger on a tub and see waves moving around in the surface. The equivalent of "puting your finger" are events changing gravity drastically, such as 2 black holes colliding.

Moments like this are the reason of why I love physics so damn much. How can you not be amazed with these things?

 

[Grayman]

@Jr_Isp
The models used to 'describe peacetime are not consistent with reality. They are 2D with a curvature on the third. Reality is a 3D with a curvature on the time dimension. Aether density would be a 3D model with a curvature on density. The density is the space between interactions. Since time is nothing more than the measurement between two events it would make sense that as the space between two events increases time would seem to slow compared to an area where the space between two events lessened. See Higgs Field and how the interactions of particles with the bosons can effect the speed of those particles.

As to what this aether is... The original concept was based on the ocean. The ocean is made up of many different molecules and waves but is mostly water. From what little I could find, the Higgs Field related to spacetime as water is to the ocean.

 

[Artsu Tharaz]

Here's my armchair physicry:

Every choice we make, down to the quantum level, alters not just our immediate circumstances, but changes the entire course of the universe. Each quanta that went left instead of right, means that all of the other quanta in the universe also went left instead of right.

How can that be? That only your own choice changed the universe? It's the answer to the other minds problem, or at least part of the answer. Only your own consciousness is conscious, everything else exists mechanically, but in a different world [another mind] is all that is conscious. So your own consciousness dictates the entire universe.

So you ask: 2 people each make a decision, but it seems that they made the decisions independently. Does this mean that the decisions were actually one?

Well, from person A's perspective, their choice was independent, and they have no access to what was occurring within person B (actually, they do have a little bit of access). So how it works with two people making different choices: the universe diverges then into 2 different paths, with person A making a different choice in person B's universe than they did in their own. We are constantly moving away from everything else that it exists, because it flows into its own universe. We are also constantly shifting as a result of our choices.

Make any sense? ?

Note: this probably means free will is undetectable. From a scientific perspective, it would seem as though everything were flowing in unison, but actually the entire universe, including its projected past and future, are constantly shifting relative to the observer. So it is all one mind, the observer, making changes to the entire cosmos.

 

[JR_IsP]

That's pretty close to the copenhagen interpretation of quantum (you know, the observer determines the position)

If you like that I'm ok, but there too many philosophy in the implications.

I go with the multiple universes interpretation, but there's no actual way to proof it.

 

[Artsu Tharaz]

That's pretty close to the copenhagen interpretation of quantum (you know, the observer determines the position)

If you like that I'm ok, but there too many philosophy in the implications.

I go with the multiple universes interpretation, but there's no actual way to proof it.

It's mainly a result of philosophical introspection; there's actual quantum physics results motivating it but I'm largely ignorant of how that stuff works.

The problem is largely regarding the reconciliation with the all-encompassing nature of our consciousness (it seems as a unity, effected by something greater but containing all that is great within mostly well-defined bounds) with the true size of the universe.

It responds to that by saying: the consciousness is the all - the all that it seems a fragment of is actually an effect of the consciousness itself, rather than the contrary.

Then we get a paradox resulting multiple consciousnesses, but is there really anything to suggest that different consciousnesses exist simultaneously except for the rapid feedback that occurs through them? It could be that the same mind interacts with a lifeless copy of a consciousness from both sides, simulating all possible viewpoints of the universe at some point, each resulting in unique courses of the development of the universe lived in...

But what's the point of that? Are we to take it as a formula to godhood, in a recognition that one is all? It would give simultaneously infinite and miniscule importance to the present moment...

...the present moment actually not being a moment at all. Rather, the one body is extended through time and experiences past and future simultaneously in the form of a present moment, with present then becoming synonymous with existence itself.

So, we're already able to time travel, but that time travel may be confined for all we know to the tiniest amount of time possible - but probably we can go further than this and gain direct access to future states considerably far ahead of the present (through probabilistic accounts, but it is still "real").

...

So we have a self which interacts with a universe which is both alive and not-alive. It is the paradox of... belief in something which can never be experienced. Belief in other minds, belief in other times, this is all belief. If we were to strip down what he have before us, we would say that we are in a Descartian scenario where all we know is that what is is what we experience as being.

But belief still is. A belief in largeness, of the experience we have being a servant to a more encompassing experience. So we care for consequences. Our mind tells us to, because it feels the consequences become real, but the signals get crossed, there is all kinds of interference...

Again, a matter of seeing to the heart of the matter. Seeing through the layers of meaning until you arrive at what could never be argued away through a concern with universality, with truth. The truth that speaks and breathes...

The truth that is the Holy Will inherent to the mind of the instance of all, that Will which shapes the felt environment of the observer. The same Will which determines the future course of the universe, because that is the universe which is contained in the mind.

Yes, all that exists in the universe is that which has an effect on the mind, and is thus partly contained within it. We can then alter the magnification point to get a different viewpoint, but that viewpoint was contained within the initial viewpoint in some form...

...and I'm not happy with this post, but it kind of... gets at the strangeness of the universe. How strange it is, that anything could be, that we are embedded in this structure yet feel ourselves to be all important, and then the claim that maybe that's because we are. Maybe what we experience is not the world, but the world as it would be if lived through the mind of [you], and if you take yourself out of the equation, all that you projected ceases to be. It all vanishes. But it doesn't. Because there are other viewpoints. Fark.

 

[JR_IsP]

All right, but how can we be sure that there is another consciousness in the universe at all?

I mean, I could be hallucinating or in a simulation and everything would be exactly the same...

...right?

Wait... What is that unicorn over there doing with my lazer bear?

 

[washti]

THEY STROKE DICK ALMIGHTY