"The eye with which you look at reality, must constantly be changed." ...
- Soren Kierkegaard------------------------------------------
Time Might Not Exist, According to Physicists and Philosophers, But That's Okayhttps://phys.org/news/2022-04-physicists-philosophers.htmlDoes time exist? The answer to this question may seem obvious: of course it does! Just look at a calendar or a clock.
But developments in physics suggest the non-existence of time is an open possibility, and one that we should take seriously.
Physics is in crisis. For the past century or so, we have explained the universe with two wildly successful physical theories: general relativity and quantum mechanics.
Both theories work extremely well in their own right, but the two are thought to conflict with one another. Though the exact nature of the conflict is controversial, scientists generally agree both theories need to be replaced with a new, more general theory.
Physicists want to produce a theory of "quantum gravity" that replaces general relativity and quantum mechanics, while capturing the extraordinary success of both. Such a theory would explain how gravity's big picture works at the miniature scale of particles.
One attempt to overcome the conflict between the two theories is string theory. String theory replaces particles with strings vibrating in as many as 11 dimensions.
However, in the 1980s and 1990s, many physicists became dissatisfied with string theory and came up with a range of new mathematical approaches to quantum gravity.
One of the most prominent of these is loop quantum gravity, which proposes that the fabric of space and time is made of a network of extremely small discrete chunks, or "loops."
One of the remarkable aspects of loop quantum gravity is that it appears to eliminate time entirely.
Loop quantum gravity is not alone in abolishing time: a number of other approaches also seem to remove time as a fundamental aspect of reality.
... Suppose such a theory turns out to be correct. Would it follow that time does not exist?
It's complicated, and it depends what we mean by
exist.
... while we have a pretty good sense of how an object might be made out of fundamental particles, we have no idea how time might be "made out of" something more fundamental.
So unless we can come up with a good account of how time emerges, it is not clear we can simply assume time exists.
Time might not exist at any level.
... While physics might eliminate time, it seems to leave causation intact: the sense in which one thing can bring about another.
Perhaps what physics is telling us, then, is that
causation and not time is the basic feature of our universe.
If that's right, then agency can still survive. For it is possible to reconstruct a sense of agency entirely in causal terms.
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New Experiment Could Confirm the Fifth State of Matter In the Universehttps://phys.org/news/2022-03-state-universe.htmlAn experiment that could confirm the fifth state of matter in the universe—and change physics as we know it—has been published in a new paper from the University of Portsmouth.
Diagrammatic representation of the positron–electron annihilation process. (a) Standard positron–electron annihilation process that produces two 511 keV gamma photons only and (b) positron–electron annihilation process that produces two 511 keV gamma photons and two additional low energy photons from information erasure. Physicist Dr. Melvin Vopson has already published research suggesting that information has mass and that all elementary particles, the smallest known building blocks of the universe, store information about themselves, similar to the way humans have DNA.
Now, he has designed an experiment—which if proved correct—means he will have discovered that information is the fifth form of matter, alongside solid, liquid, gas and plasma."It doesn't contradict quantum mechanics, electrodynamics, thermodynamics or classical mechanics. All it does is complement physics with something new and incredibly exciting."
He said: "The information in an electron is 22 million times smaller than the mass of it, but we can measure the information content by erasing it.
"We know that when you collide a particle of matter with a particle of antimatter, they annihilate each other. And the information from the particle has to go somewhere when it's annihilated."
The annihilation process converts all the remaining mass of the particles into energy, typically gamma photons. Any particles containing information are converted into low-energy infrared photons.
In the study Dr. Vopson predicts the exact energy of the infrared photons resulting from erasing the information.
Dr. Vopson's previous research suggests that information is the fundamental building block of the universe and has physical mass.
He even claims that information could be the elusive dark matter that makes up almost a third of the universe.
Dr. Vopson believes his work could demonstrate that information is a key component of everything in the universe and a new field of physics research could emerge.
Melvin M. Vopson,
Experimental protocol for testing the mass–energy–information equivalence principle,
AIP Advances (2022).
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0087175---------------------------------------------
21 grams?---------------------------------------------
New Theory Suggests That Dark Matter Could Be an Extra-Dimensional Cosmic Refugeehttps://www.sciencealert.com/new-theory-suggests-that-dark-matter-could-be-an-extra-dimensional-cosmic-refugee/ampDark matter, the elusive substance that accounts for the majority of the mass in the Universe, may be made up of massive particles called gravitons that first popped into existence in the first moment after the Big Bang.
And these hypothetical particles might be cosmic refugees from extra dimensions, a new theory suggests.
... In a new study published in February in the journal Physical Review Letters, Cacciapaglia, along with Korea University physicists Haiying Cai and Seung J. Lee, found that enough of these gravitons would have been made in the early Universe to account for all of the dark matter we currently detect in the Universe.
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.128.081806The gravitons, if they exist, would have a mass of less than 1 megaelectronvolt (MeV), so no more than twice the mass of an electron, the study found.
This mass level is well below the scale at which the Higgs boson generates mass for ordinary matter – which is key for the model to produce enough of them to account for all the dark matter in the Universe. (For comparison, the lightest known particle, the neutrino, weighs less than 2 electronvolts, while a proton weighs roughly 940 MeV, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology.)
The team found these hypothetical gravitons while hunting for evidence of extra dimensions, which some physicists suspect exist alongside the observed three dimensions of space and the fourth dimension, time.
In the team's theory, when gravity propagates through extra dimensions, it materializes in our Universe as massive gravitons.
But these particles would interact only weakly with ordinary matter, and only via the force of gravity.
This description is eerily similar to what we know about dark matter, which does not interact with light yet has a gravitational influence felt everywhere in the Universe. This gravitational influence, for instance, is what prevents galaxies from flying apart.
"The main advantage of massive gravitons as dark matter particles is that they only interact gravitationally, hence they can escape attempts to detect their presence," Cacciapaglia said.
The fact that massive gravitons barely interact via gravity with the other particles and forces in the Universe offers another advantage.
"Due to their very weak interactions, they decay so slowly that they remain stable over the lifetime of the Universe," Cacciapaglia said, "For the same reason, they are slowly produced during the expansion of the Universe and accumulate there until today."
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... "Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore."
- Andre Guide
