To Infinity and beyond

 I’ve had this statement on my mind for what seems an eternity – you know, like when we can't get a song out of our head. And sure it’s a classic Buzz line courtesy of toy story and itself a variation of "Beyond the infinite" as it appears as a title card in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s quite possible that Buzz is showing everyone that he can do the impossible and cross any asymptote, something that a curve approaches, as it heads towards infinity.

And, it’s that time of the year when one can get back into the business of writing, doing physics and thinking beyond the curbs and bliss of the daily grind. This means hard thinking; my hobby-horse, the nature of time. That illusion or a trick of mind that presents us with a persuasive, ever meandering, passage of time. Here I’m talking in the tradition of Plato, we find time, mathematics and all else on a higher plane that our mind sees into, by a process not unlike sense perception. And I suppose, the inter-play between time and space, the time-space manifold, Riemannian geometry is/was there for Einstein to see.

One of Gödel’s less well-known papers is a 1949 article called, “A Remark on the Relationship Between Relativity Theory and Idealistic Philosophy.” In this paper, Gödel attempts to show that the passage of time is indeed an illusion. The past, present and future of the universe are just different regions of a single vast space-time. Time is part of space-time, but space-time is a higher reality existing outside of time.

For many, including Gödel, mathematics, even the mathematics of the infinite, was an essentially empirical science. But when we begin to talk about infinite numbers that the trouble really begins. Cantor’s Continuum Problem is undecidable on the basis of our present-day theories of mathematics. For a Platonist like Gödel, this means only that we have not yet “looked” at the continuum in a hard enough way.

The weird implications of modern physics - reality itself may just be an illusion

For those working and studying modern science (especially in modern physics) will know just how very weird its implications have become. For instance, good old objects, things we can touch, smell and feel exist as a state of energy, while waves of probability spread throughout the universe. Existence itself may only be the vibrations on microscopic, trans-dimensional strings.

Attempts to solve problems in quantum physics often run into the problem of consciousness. Though most physicists try to sidestep the issue, it seems that there is a link between the conscious choice of experiment and the outcome of the experiment. In fact, reality itself may just be an illusion.

Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment, sometimes described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 to illustrate the weird implications of some interpretations (Copenhagen) of quantum mechanics when applied to everyday objects. The scenario presents a cat that may be simultaneously both alive and dead, a state known as a quantum superposition, as a result of being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur. In this scenario a cat in a sealed box, wherein the cat's life or death becomes depended on the state of a radioactive atom, whether it had decayed and emitted radiation or not. Accordingly, the cat remains both alive and dead until the box is opened and observed by a conscious being.

In my book, The Illusion of Reality: A Public Servant’s Secret Essays, I discuss the interplay of light with elementary particles; the idea of emergence as the arrow of time and the role the conscience mind plays in integrating, and creating reality. Much of the book is based on theoretical and mathematical conjectures – however, recent news may change all that. A team of UC Berkeley researchers published a study recently detailing a miniature invisibility cloak that can conceal objects using the principles of quantum mechanical - remember Harry Potter’s cloak?

Under the lead of Xiang Zhang, director of materials sciences at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and professor in the campus’s department of mechanical engineering, the team created the first model of the cloak six years ago. The previous design, however, presented limitations because it was made of a bulkier material and needed to have a fixed shape.

Based on a completely different design principle, the more recent experiment has been capable of concealing a particle that is microscopic in size, researchers said it may be able to cloak larger objects as soon as five years from now. 

According to Zhang, there are many potential future applications of the technology. It could eliminate blind spots by making metal frames of cars transparent. Alternatively, the military may be able to use the technology to hide planes or tanks. Wrinkles and blemishes could be concealed with a design that would mold to the wearer’s features.

Time and time again

For years - any opportunity I have to do any serious thinking typically and inevitably circles around time. What is it, was it always there, how do we perceive it, how is time intertwined by space (space-time) etc. And if we subscribe to Einstein's theory of relativity, there was no such thing as time before the big bang; there was no "before." Time (and space) started at a singularity (with the laws of physics broken down).

And more so, is time a feature of the universe that can be understood independently of a conscious being. That is, can we make sense of time when everything about time is perceived and processed through a lens of brain architecture?

We know for example time is processed across a a highly distributed system involving the cerebral cortex, cerebellum and basal ganglia. One particular component, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, is responsible for the circadian (or daily) rhythm, while other cell clusters appear to be capable of shorter-range (ultradian) timekeeping.

Different types of sensory information (auditory, tactile, visual, etc.) are processed at different speeds by different neural architectures. Our brain, it seems, has learned how to overcome these speed disparities, to create a temporally unified representation of the external world.

In the popular essay "Brain Time", by David Eagleman, he suggests that "if the visual brain wants to get events correct timewise, it may have only one choice: wait for the slowest information to arrive. To accomplish this, it must wait about a tenth of a second.  As long as the signals arrived within this window, viewers' brains would automatically resynchronize the signals". He goes on to say that "This brief waiting period allows the visual system to discount the various delays imposed by the early stages; however, it has the disadvantage of pushing perception into the past. There is a distinct survival advantage to operating as close to the present as possible; an animal does not want to live too far in the past.

Therefore, the tenth-of- a-second window may be the smallest delay that allows higher areas of the brain to account for the delays created in the first stages of the system while still operating near the border of the present. This window of delay means that awareness is postdictive, incorporating data from a window of time after an event and delivering a retrospective interpretation of what happened."

Competing models of time perception

Anyone that knows me will know my fascination with time. Not how we go about measuring time but time it self. Here there are 2 equally important paths of endeavor. One is that of a global scale and involves the very nature of the universe; Space-Time continuum and General Relativity.  The second is equally baffling – how does the brain code time.

There are multiple competing models of time perception with no real consensus. For example we know that the Suprachiasmatic nucleus uses environmental cues, most importantly light, to determine the time of day and year thus coordinating circadian rhythms. This however is more about tracking time and less about perception of time. Also, this may not be the structure that links events to time – i.e. history.

According to a recent MIT study groups of neurons in the primate brain code time with extreme precision. Institute Professor Ann Graybiel says “All you do is time stamp everything, and then recalling events is easy: you go back and look through your time stamps until you see which ones are correlated with the event,"

Neuroscientist Paul King of the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at UC Berkeley explains fast time interval estimation (sub-second) to be important for timing complex behavior and playing musical instruments. Slow time interval estimation may be important for planning the day, although daylight and hunger can provide cues. Intervals greater than a day may rely on observing the repetition of day-night cycles and seasonal changes.

The above diagram shows the accuracy of time interval estimation for humans and other animals, along with proposed neural mechanisms for each time scale. Slow time scales (hours) are at the top and fast scales (milliseconds) are at the bottom. It’s a fascinating model.

Psychology and world-view in the new science

The more we attempt to make sense of reality the more we appreciate that it is perhaps beyond human perception and intuition. In other words, our rational mind and common sense are just not capable of understanding the true nature of reality.

There was a time, a more naive time, when classical physics explained matter and energy at scales familiar to our experience. We began to think all that can be learned is learned. We even gave ourselves a suitably appropriate, although somewhat premature and greatly optimistic name for the period. It was the Age of Enlightenment.

In 1915, Einstein introduced a new way of looking at the physical properties of the universe (theory of relativity). The Newtonian constraints of absolute time and space were abandoned. Time and space were unified and made relative, it formed a continuum that curved and enfolded about itself. Gravity was a distortion of this continuum caused by the presence of mass.

And work examining the nature of the atom in the first few decades of the twentieth century first threated to undermine our understanding of a deterministic universe (Einstein for example was quoted as saying “I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice” and “God is subtle but he is not malicious” and then came the realization that we do indeed live in a universe underpinned by uncertainty and probability viz-a-viz Quantum Mechanics.

Theories that describe the behavior of matter and its interactions with energy on the scale of atoms and subatomic particles and how these phenomena could be related to everyday life is the realm of Quantum Mechanics. The problem with this theory is that it is hideously difficult to describe and more so difficult to understand.

As an example, until a subatomic particle (say an electron) is observed by a conscious being, that particle exists in potentia everywhere and everywhen in the entire universe. Upon observation this smeared out particle collapses to a single point in space for the moment of conscious observation. String these moments together one after the other and you create the illusion of time and a physical reality. So reality is not mechanical. There is room for activity of conscious human beings.

One of my heroes, Richard Feynman who incidentally won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in relativistic quantum field theory, Quantum Electro-Dynamics and no ordinary genius had this to say:  “I think it is safe to say that no one understands Quantum Mechanics.”

And he goes on; “One does not, by knowing all the physical laws as we know them today, immediately obtain an understanding of anything much. The more you see how strangely Nature behaves, the harder it is to make a model that explains how even the simplest phenomena actually work. So theoretical physics has given up on that.”

And in the 1960’s the label “Chaos” was coined by Jim Yorke and Chaos Theory became a field of study in mathematics, with applications in many disciplines including physics, engineering, economics, biology, and philosophy. Chaos theory studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, an effect which is popularly referred to as the butterfly effect.

It is in essence a reversal of the classical view that the physical laws are what count, and local disturbances are relatively trivial. In chaos theory local disturbances can be ultimately overwhelming and, just as important, we cannot tell when they are about to overwhelm us.

A strange concealed order has been revealed by chaos theory. If we run large numbers of variations of simple equations on a computer, patterns emerge. The most famous of these patterns is the Mandelbrot set. Every magnification of the pattern reveals more elaborate layers made up of shapes like gingerbread men linked together in swirls, repeating in more and more complexity. These patterns seem to illustrate infinity, and the gingerbread men seem to represent the incredible creative and energetic complexity of reality.

Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Chaos, (as well as String theory, Super String theory, M-theory and other emerging theories) the world is indeed stranger than anything our rational mind can grasp and the universe infinitely more bizarre. The more we learn about the universe the more illusory our universe seems to be. Reality is quite simply an illusion.

What I am reminded by this is the Eastern concepts such as those of the Maya, Zen and philosophies such as Samkhya, Vedanta, and Tantra, relating mind, matter and consciousness. Here there is an emphasis on proper life and spiritual self-realization. Seeking to liberate individuals from false beliefs and attachments and the belief that we are conscious because we are connected to spirit. Interestingly, if consciousness and matter are truly intrinsic to reality then what does that say to our sense of psychology, and how do we make sense of our world-view.