Is the Universe Timeless Unless Someone Somewhere Exists to See It? Explaining the Arrow of Time: Random Thoughts of a Lay Person

Leave a reply

I ran across the following article in Quanta Magazine:

“A Debate Over the Physics of Time

“According to our best theories of physics, the universe is a fixed block where time only appears to pass. Yet a number of physicists hope to replace this “block universe” with a physical theory of time, By Dan Falk, July 19, 2016“

___________________________________

By Michael R. Honig

The article is written, insofar as is possible, for the ‘lay’ person. If you are interested in such cosmological esoterica, it makes for interesting, if challenging, reading. I also highly recommend looking at the comments, which are uncommonly thoughtful and erudite.

The article made me think of some other possible perspectives.

At one point in the article, it is suggested “… although the universe appears continuous at the macroscopic level, if we could peer down to the so-called Planck scale (distances of about 10–35 meters) we’d discover that the universe is made up of elementary units or “atoms” of space-time.”

Rather than use an imprecise term like “atoms of space-time,” I might suggest theoretical Time Particles which we might call “Chrōnons”, if such particles might exist

Based on Heisenberg (as I understand it), I might posit that the Universe would be ‘timeless’ (no future, present or past) if no one existed to observe it. As some of the article’s commenters suggested, The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Schrödinger’s Cat may well explain the ‘arrow of time’. Once a thing is observed, the quantum ‘wave function’ (i.e., all possible outcomes) collapses into a single observed state. Thus, at the moment of observation, Schrödinger’s Cat lives or dies and becomes part of the present, and future, thus establishing time’s arrow in a forged path.

Where this starts to get even more interesting is the question of what happens if beings elsewhere in the Universe (ETs) observe an ‘event’, thus causing the quantum wave function to collapse and making the event become a fixed point of reality in ‘time’ before we humans observe it. Have the ETs established this fixed event in time for all beings everywhere in the Universe, or can other beings cause a different quantum wave function collapse and see/create different events in space/time which represents a subsequent and different observer’s reality?

What if observers of a particular event in time from different times and places in the Universe later meet to observe the event jointly? Will they see the same thing? Can Schrödinger’s Cat be resurrected if two observers from different points in time and space later come together to make a joint observation? If their observations originally differed and one saw the cat dead and the other saw the cat alive, what happens when they subsequently view the cat together?

Or, does the first observer in the Universe determine the fate of Schrödinger’s Cat for everyone, for all time everywhere?

Deep stuff. How can we possibly ever truly know, given the scope of the Universe in space and time?

Sincerely as puzzled as you,

Mike Honig

WaPo: “The messy political history of where we pee”, By Ana Swanson June 28, 2016

Leave a reply

Bathrooms: They’re more than just organically messy. They cause different societies no end of legal and social questions.

___________________________________________________________________

By Ana Swanson June 28, 2016
(iStock)

Until recently, few Americans probably thought of peeing as political.

But in the last few years, the issue of which bathrooms transgender people ought to use has become a big political question. The most contested law has been North Carolina’s requirement that people use restrooms in government-run buildings that align with the gender on their birth certificate. But many other cities and states are considering ordinances that would restrict or expand people’s bathroom choices.

To some, this might seem like an odd realm for political discussion. If you look at history, however, you soon see that decisions about public bathrooms – and in particular, the women’s bathroom — have always been linked with controversial ideas about gender, race and class.

Harvey Molotch, a professor of sociology and metropolitan studies at New York University, took me through the contentious history of women’s bathrooms in a recent conversation. Molotch was the co-editor of the 2010 book “Toilet: The Public Restroom and the Politics of Sharing,” an anthology of papers by sociologists, anthropologists, architects, historians and others about the unfamiliar and dramatic history of the public restroom.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. [Click here to read]

JPL News – Day in Review: Kepler’s Ongoing Mission, Searching for Far Out and Wandering Worlds

Leave a reply
4/7/2016 6:59 PM
DAY IN REVIEW
NASA JPL latest news release
Searching for Far Out and Wandering Worlds Astronomers have made great strides in discovering planets outside of our solar system, termed “exoplanets.” In fact, over the past 20 years more than 5,000 exoplanets have been detected beyond the eight planets that call our solar system home.

The majority of these exoplanets have been found snuggled up to their host star completing an orbit (or year) in hours, days or weeks, while some have been found orbiting as far as Earth is to the sun, taking one Earth year to circle. But, what about those worlds that orbit much farther out, such as Jupiter and Saturn, or, in some cases, free-floating exoplanets that are on their own and have no star to call home? In fact, some studies suggest that there may be more free-floating exoplanets than stars in our galaxy.

This week, NASA’s K2 mission, the repurposed mission of the Kepler space telescope, and other ground-based observatories, have teamed up to kick-off a global experiment in exoplanet observation. Their mission: survey millions of stars toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy in search of distant stars’ planetary outposts and exoplanets wandering between the stars.

While today’s planet-hunting techniques have favored finding exoplanets near their sun, the outer regions of a planetary system have gone largely unexplored. In the exoplanet detection toolkit, scientists have a technique well suited to search these farthest outreaches and the space in between the stars. This technique is called gravitational microlensing.

Gravitational Microlensing

For this experiment, astronomers rely on the effect of a familiar fundamental force of nature to help detect the presence of these far out worlds — gravity. The gravity of massive objects such as stars and planets produces a noticeable effect on other nearby objects.

But gravity also influences light, deflecting or warping the direction of light that passes close to massive objects. This bending effect can make gravity act as a lens, concentrating light from a distant object, just as a magnifying glass can focus the light from the sun. Scientists can take advantage of the warping effect by measuring the light of distant stars, looking for a brightening that might be caused by a massive object, such as a planet, that passes between a telescope and a distant background star. Such a detection could reveal an otherwise hidden exoplanet.

“The chance for the K2 mission to use gravity to help us explore exoplanets is one of the most fantastic astronomical experiments of the decade,” said Steve Howell, project scientist for NASA’s Kepler and K2 missions at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. “I am happy to be a part of this K2 campaign and look forward to the many discoveries that will be made.”

This phenomenon of gravitational microlensing — “micro” because the angle by which the light is deflected is small — is the effect for which scientists will be looking during the next three months. As an exoplanet passes in front of a more distant star, its gravity causes the trajectory of the starlight to bend, and in some cases results in a brief brightening of the background star as seen by the observatory.

The lensing events caused by a free-floating exoplanet last on the order of a day or two, making the continuous gaze of the Kepler spacecraft an invaluable asset for this technique.

“We are seizing the opportunity to use Kepler’s uniquely sensitive camera to sniff for planets in a different way,” said Geert Barentsen, research scientist at Ames.

The ground-based observatories will record simultaneous measurements of these brief events. From their different vantage points, space and Earth, the measurements can determine the location of the lensing foreground object through a technique called parallax.

“This is a unique opportunity for the K2 mission and ground-based observatories to conduct a dedicated wide-field microlensing survey near the center of our galaxy,” said Paul Hertz, director of the astrophysics division in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “This first-of-its-kind survey serves as a proof of concept for NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), which will launch in the 2020s to conduct a larger and deeper microlensing survey. In addition, because the Kepler spacecraft is about 100 million miles from Earth, simultaneous space- and ground-based measurements will use the parallax technique to better characterize the systems producing these light amplifications.”

To understand parallax, extend your arm and hold up your thumb. Close one eye and focus on your thumb and then do the same with the other eye. Your thumb appears to move depending on the vantage point. For humans to determine distance and gain depth perception, the vantage points, our eyes, use parallax.

Flipping the Spacecraft

The Kepler spacecraft trails Earth as it orbits the sun and is normally pointed away from Earth during the K2 mission. But this orientation means that the part of the sky being observed by the spacecraft cannot generally be observed from Earth at the same time, since it is mostly in the daytime sky.

To allow simultaneous ground-based observations, flight operations engineers at Ball Aerospace and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder will perform a maneuver turning the spacecraft around to point the telescope in the forward velocity vector. So, instead of looking toward where it’s been, the spacecraft will look in the direction of where it’s going.

This alignment will also yield a viewing opportunity of Earth and the moon as they cross the spacecraft’s field of view. On April 14 at 11:50 a.m. PDT (18:50 UT), Kepler will record a full frame image. The result of that image will be released to the public archive in June once the data has been downloaded and processed. Kepler measures the change in brightness of objects and does not resolve color or physical characteristics of an observed object.

Observing from Earth

To achieve the objectives of this important path-finding research and community exercise in anticipation of WFIRST, approximately two-dozen ground-based observatories on six continents will observe in concert with K2. Each will contribute to various aspects of the experiment and will help explore the distribution of exoplanets across a range of stellar systems and distances.

These results will aid in our understanding of planetary system architectures, as well as the frequency of exoplanets throughout our galaxy.

For a complete list of participating observatories, reference the paper that defines the experiment: Campaign 9 of the K2 mission.

During the roughly 80-day observing period or campaign, astronomers hope to discover more than 100 lensing events, ten or more of which may have signatures of exoplanets occupying relatively unexplored regimes of parameter space.

Ames manages the Kepler and K2 missions for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation operates the flight system with support from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

For more information about the Kepler and K2 missions, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/kepler