vol 3: Development
Chapter 3: Physics
Introduction
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Introduction
The Bible
If we assume that the universe is divine, physics becomes the study of god's body. The body is the most abstract, that is the least complex, of the layers of complexity in the structure of the universe. Modern physics is concerned with particles, which form the alphabet of universal process, and the interactions of these particles to give the overall physical structure of the universe. Implicit in physics is the feeling that everything could have been otherwise.
Bible history tells us that it all began when God created the world:
'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, and God's spirit hovered over the water, God said, let there be light, and there was light. God saw that light was good, and God divided light from darkness. God called light 'day' and darkness 'night. Evening came and morning came: the first day. ... (Genesis 1:1-5)
A modern alternative to this story is the 'hot big bang theory' which works on the same general principle. Turner & Tyson The world started from something extremely primitive like chaos, void or vacuum, and grew into the world we know today. NASA, Cambridge University. The book of Genesis explains this movement as the work of a God. Here we study the idea that a divine universe creates itself. Both explanations reach back to the same mystery, but their implications for human life differ.
Physics
Here we suggest that the absolute duality between matter and spirit can be replaced with a spectrum, like the rainbow, running from the physical world to the highest manifestations of spirit. This spectrum is constructed by analogy to the quantum harmonic oscillator, which creates and annihilates the states of the universe.
Our model imagines the world as a space of all possible states. Only a tiny fraction of these states can be physically realized at a given moment, but the creation and annihilation of states enables the set of realized states to move around in the space of possible states.
We consider a state to be created (moved from possible to actual) by the acquisition of energy. To be is to have energy, which we see as a measure of the flow of action in the universe.
As physicists (and plumbers), we imagine the world as an infinite closed pipe system in which there is a ceaseless conserved flow of action. We assign the cardinal aleph(0) to this conserved flow. It is observable and can be measured (counted) with a fundamental unit, the quantum of action.
Accountancy
Physics and astronomy are among the oldest of sciences, but underlying them is the first (or root) science (recorded in clay tablets): accountancy. Accountancy deals with the conserved flow of value and its transformations between the money and the goods representations. Accountancy is the backbone of business, which tries to increase the overall flow of value by injecting new value into it.
The physical embodiment of value is action. The flow of action is observable, that is visible to us and measurable. It is the dynamic cardinal of the universe. We do not inquire about what the action is, but just treat it as a countable unit, a cardinal unit.
Christianity views the universe as an arbitrary entity, since God could have made it otherwise. By definition, however, there is only one god, since god is the whole. If the universe is divine, its design is not entirely arbitrary.
From a theological point of view, the only constraint on an observable god is that is be consistent. If the universe is divine we can look forward to the day when we understand why the universe as we see it is the only consistent universe, and that (consistent with its divinity) it fills the whole space of possibility.
The birth of physics
Our word physics comes from the ancient Greek word meaning the nature, inborn quality, property or constitution of a person or thing. Liddell. The Greeks struggled with the fact that the world is both constant and changing. Aristotle (384-322 bc) concluded that there must be two principles in the constitution of the world: one static, which makes things what they are, which he called form; and one dynamic, which could be moulded by different forms, which he called matter. Aristotle.
In modern times, the names have changed, but this duality in our conception of the physical world remains. The world as a whole is dynamic, pure action. But some things move more slowly than others and others appear not to change at all. This rate of change is correlated with energy.
Less energy means slower change, so that an eternal form may be imagined as a consistent structure without any energy at all, just a possibility. We can identify many stationary points in physical motion, such as the Newtonian constancy (conservation) of energy and momentum in closed systems and the relativistic conservation of four-momentum or space-time interval.
Only those features of the world which do not change can be truly written, since written symbols are of themselves unchanging. To change the writing we must erase and write again. The result is a kinematic representation of the world, like a movie, To a very good approximation, the laws of physics appear to stayed the same since the beginning, and so provide a firm foundation for finding the meaning of our lives.
The problem
Modern physics is a problematic blend of two theories.
Quantum field theory is particularly interested in structures and events occupying small volumes of spacetime. Physics expect to find meaningful structure down to the Planck scale of time, distance, energy and momentum. Planck scale - Wikipedia It expects to be able to explain this structure with a quantum field theory, a blend of special relativity and quantum mechanics. Zee
General relativity, on the other hand, is concerned with the large scale structure of the universe. Introduction to general relativity - Wikipedia General relativity is a 'classical' (pre-quantum) theory which is proving very difficult to bring into the quantum fold. Physics currently entertains a very wide variety of unifications, each with its advocates, but none with clear supremacy. Deutsch, Greene, Smolin. Unified field theory - Wikipedia
Between them, these two areas of theory underpin the standard model. Standard model - Wikipedia Here the task is reconcile these two theories by incorporating them into a broader point of view. We begin by establishing a correspondence between the universe seen by physics and the transfinite network we have chosen to model god.
Once this correspondence is established, we can begin to see the physical world as the hardware on which the spiritual world is processed. The root of this vision is the recognition that all information in our universe is represented physically by actions. Brillouin, Landauer.
(revised 22 Octobr 2008)
Further reading
Books
| Capra, Fritjof, The Tao of Physics: An exploration of the parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism, Shambala 1991 Amazon.com: 'First published in 1975, The Tao of Physics ... still stands up to scrutiny, explicating not only Eastern philosophies but also how modern physics forces us into conceptions that have remarkable parallels. Covering over 3,000 years of widely divergent traditions across Asia, Capra can't help but blur lines in his generalizations. But the big picture is enough to see the value in them of experiential knowledge, the limits of objectivity, the absence of foundational matter, the interrelation of all things and events, and the fact that process is primary, not things. Capra finds the same notions in modern physics. ...' Brian Bruya Amazon back |
| Deutsch, David, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes - and its Implications, Allen Lane Penguin Press 1997 Jacket: 'Quantum physics, evolution, computation and knowledge - these four strands of scientific theory and philosophy have, until now, remained incomplete explanations of the way the universe works. ... Oxford scholar DD shows how they are so closely intertwined that we cannot properly understand any one of them without reference to the other three. ...' Amazon back |
| Feynman, Richard P, and Robert B Leighton, Matthew Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics (volume 3) : Quantum Mechanics, Addison Wesley 1970 Foreword: 'This set of lectures tries to elucidate from the beginning those features of quantum mechanics which are the most basic and the most general. ... In each instance the ideas are introduced together with a detailed discussion of some specific examples - to try to make the physical ideas as real as possible.' Matthew Sands Amazon back |
| Feynman 1, Richard, QED: The Strange Story of Light and Matter, Princeton UP 1988 Jacket: 'Quantum electrodynamics - or QED for short - is the 'strange theory' that explains how light and electrons interact. Thanks to Richard Feynmann and his colleagues, it is also one of the rare parts of physics that is known for sure, a theory that has stood the test of time. ... In this beautifully lucid set of lectures he provides a definitive introduction to QED.' Amazon back |
| Genesis, and Alexander Jones (editor), in The Jerusalem Bible, Darton Longman and Todd 1966 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, and God's spirit hovered over the water.' (I, 1-2) Amazon back |
| Greene, Brian, The Elegant Universe: superstrings, hidden dimensions and the quest for the ultimate theory, W W Norton and Company 1999 Jacket: 'Brian Greene has come forth with a beautifully crafted account of string theory - a theory that appears to be a most promising way station to an ultimate theory of everything. His book gives a clear, simple, yet masterful account that makes a complex theory very accessible to nonscientists but is also a delightful read for the professional.' David M Lee Amazon back |
| Hawking, Steven W, and G F R Ellis, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time , Cambridge UP 1975 Preface: Einstein's General Theory of Relativity ... leads to two remarkable predictions about the universe: first that the final fate of massive stars is to collapse behind an event horizon to form a 'black hole' which will contain a singularity; and secondly that there is a singularity in our past which constitutes, in some sense, a beginning to our universe. Our discussion is principally aimed at developing these two results.' Amazon back |
| Hudson, Michael, and Cornelia Wunsch (editors), Creating Economic Order: Record-keeping, Standardization and the Development of Accounting in the Ancient Near East, CDL Press 2004 Amazon back |
| Liddell, Henry George, and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford University Press 1995 Amazon Book Description: 'Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon is the most comprehensive and up-to-date ancient Greek dictionary in the world. It is used by every student of ancient Greek in the English-speaking world, and is an essential library and scholarly purchase there and in W. Europe and Japan. The main dictionary covers every surviving ancient Greek author and text discovered up to 1940, from the Pre-Classical Greek of the 11C - 8C BC (for example Homer and Hesiod), through Classical Greek (7C - 5C BC) to the Hellenistic Period, including the Greek Old and New Testaments. Entries list irregular inflections, and together with the definition, each sense includes citations from Greek authors illustrating usage. The Lexicon is Greek into English only, as are other ancient Greek dictionaries. This is the market expectation among both students and scholars. In 1968 the Lexicon was updated with a Supplement, which was available as a separate volume (until 1992) or bound together with the dictionary. Representing the culmination of 13 years' work, the new Revised Supplement is a complete replacement for the 1968 Supplement. Nearly twice the size of the 1968 edition, with over 20,000 entries, it adds to the dictionary words and forms from papyri and inscriptions discovered between 1940 and the 1990s as well as a host of other revisions, updatings, and corrections to the main dictionary. Linear B forms are shown within entries for the first time, and the Revised Supplement gives the dictionary a date-range from 1200 BC to 600 AD. It is fully cross-referenced to the main text but additions have been designed to be easily used without constant reference to the main text.' Amazon back |
| Misner, Charles W, and Kip S Thorne, John Archibald Wheeler, Gravitation, Freeman 1973 Jacket: 'Einstein's description of gravitation as curvature of spacetime led directly to that greatest of all predictions of his theory, that the universe itself is dynamic. Physics still has far to go to come to terms with this amazing fact and what it means for man and his relation to the universe. John Archibald Wheeler. ... this is a book on Einstein's theory of gravity (general relativity).' Amazon back |
| Newton, Isaac, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica , Harvard University Press 1972 One of the most important contributions to human knowledge. First translated from the Latin by Andrew Motte in 1729, Amazon back |
| Pais, Abraham, 'Subtle is the Lord...': The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford UP 1982 Jacket: In this ... major work Abraham Pais, himself an eminent physicist who worked alongside Einstein in the post-war years, traces the development of Einstein's entire ouvre. ... Running through the book is a completely non-scientific biography ... including many letters which appear in English for the first time, as well as other information not published before.' Amazon back |
| Pais, Abraham, Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World, Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press 1986 Preface: 'I will attempt to describe what has been discovered and understood about the constituents of matter, the laws to which they are subject and the forces that act on them [in the period 1895-1983]. ... I will attempt to convey that these have been times of progress and stagnation, of order and chaos, of belief and incredulity, of the conventional and the bizarre; also of revolutionaries and conservatives, of science by individuals and by consortia, of little gadgets and big machines, and of modest funds and big moneys.' AP Amazon back |
| Smolin, Lee, The Life of the Cosmos, Oxford University Pres 1997 Jacket: 'Smolin posits that a process of self-organisation like that of biological evolution shapes the universe, as it developes and eventually reproduces through black holes, each of which may result in a big bang and a new universe. Natural selection may guide the appearance of the laws of physics, favouring those universes which best reproduce. ... Smolin is one of the leading cosmologists at work today, and he writes with an expertise and a force of argument that will command attention throughout the world of physics.' Amazon back |
Papers
| Groblacher, Simon A, Tomasz Paterek, Rainer Kaltenbaek, S caronaslav Brukner, Marek Z dotukowski, Markus Aspelmeyer, Anton Zeilinger, "An experimental test of non-local realism", Nature, 446, 7138, 19 April 2007, page 871 - 875. Abstract: 'Most working scientists hold fast to the concept of 'realism'--a viewpoint according to which an external reality exists independent of observation. But quantum physics has shattered some of our cornerstone beliefs. According to Bell's theorem, any theory that is based on the joint assumption of realism and locality (meaning that local events cannot be affected by actions in space-like separated regions) is at variance with certain quantum predictions. Experiments with entangled pairs of particles have amply confirmed these quantum predictions, thus rendering local realistic theories untenable. Maintaining realism as a fundamental concept would therefore necessitate the introduction of 'spooky' actions that defy locality. Here we show by both theory and experiment that a broad and rather reasonable class of such non-local realistic theories is incompatible with experimentally observable quantum correlations. In the experiment, we measure previously untested correlations between two entangled photons, and show that these correlations violate an inequality proposed by Leggett for non-local realistic theories. Our result suggests that giving up the concept of locality is not sufficient to be consistent with quantum experiments, unless certain intuitive features of realism are abandoned.'. back |
| Hamilton, William Rowan, "On a general method of expressing the paths of light, and of the planets, by the coefficients of a characteristic function", Dublin University Review and Quarterly Magazine, 1, , 1933, page 795-826. 'What then may we consider the highest and most general axiom, (in the Baconian sense) to which optical induction has attained, respecting the rules and conditions of the lines of visual and luminous communication? The answer I think must be, the principle or law, called usually the Law of Least Action: suggested by questionable views, but established by the widest induction, and embracing every known combination of media, and every straight, or bent, or curved line, ordinary or extraordinary, along which light (whatever light may be) extends its influence successively in space and time: namely that this linear path of light, from one point to another, is always found to be such, that if it be compared with the other infinitely various lines by which in thought and in geometry the same two points might be connected, a certain integral or sum, called often Action, and depending by fixed rules on the length, and shape, and postion of the path, and on the media which are traversed by it, is less that all the similar integrals for other neighbouring lines, or, at least, possesses, with respect to them, a certain stationary property.'. back |
| Lloyd, Seth, "Rolf Landauer", Nature, 400, 6746, 19 August 1999, page 720. News and Views, Obituary: 'Landauer based his research on a simple rule: information is physical. ... Landauer's work showed that the apparently simple and unproblematic statement of the physcal nature of information had profound consequences.' . back |
Links
| Cambridge University Cambridge Cosmology Cosmology, black holes, cosmic strings, inflation, quantum gravity. back |
| International Astronomical Union IAU: Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams 'The Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams (CBAT) operates at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, under the auspices of Commission 6 of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) ... The CBAT is responsible for the dissemination of information on transient astronomical events, via the IAU Circulars (IAUCs), a series of postcard-sized announcements issued at irregular intervals as necessary in both printed and electronic form, and (as of 2002 Dec. 20) occasionally via Central Bureau Electronic Telegrams (CBETs). back |
| Introduction to general relativity - Wikipedia General relativity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'General relativity (GR) is a theory of gravitation that was developed by Albert Einstein between 1907 and 1915. According to general relativity, the observed gravitational attraction between masses results from those masses warping nearby space and time. Previously, Newton's law of universal gravitation (1686) had described gravity as a force between masses, but experiments have shown that Einstein's description is more accurate. What is more, general relativity predicts interesting new phenomena such as gravitational waves. . . . ' back |
| Landauer Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process Rolf Landauer: Abstract: 'It is argued that computing machines inevitably involve devices which perform logical functions that do not have a single-valued inverse. The logical irreversibility is associated with physical irreversibility, and requires a minimum heat generation, per machine cycle, typically of the order of kT for each irreversible function. The dissipation serves the purpose of standardizing signals and making them independent of their exact logical history. Two simple, but representative, models of bistable devices are subjected to a more detailed analysis of switching kinetics to yield the relationship between speed and energy dissipation, and to estimate the effects of errors induced by thermal fluctuations. back |
| NASA Microwave Anisotropy Probe 'The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe is a NASA explorer mission measuring the temperature of the cosmic background radiation with unprecedented accuracy. This map of the remnant heat from the Big Bang provides answers to fundamental questions about the origin and fate of our universe.' back |
| Planck scale - Wikipedia Planck scale - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia In particle physics and physical cosmology, the Planck scale is an energy scale around GeV (corresponding to the Planck mass) at which quantum effects of gravity become strong. At this scale, the description of sub-atomic particle interactions in terms of quantum field theory breaks down (due to the non-renormalizability of gravity). That is; although physicists have a fairly good understanding of the other fundamental interactions or forces on the quantum level, gravity is problematic, and cannot be integrated with quantum mechanics (at high energies) using the usual framework of quantum field theory. . . . ' back |
| Robert K Englund Proto-Cuneiform Account-Books and Journals in Michael Hudson and Cornelia Wunsch, eds., Creating Economic Order: Record-keeping, Standardization and the Development of Accounting in the Ancient Near East (CDL Press: Bethesda, Maryland, USA) pp. 23-46. back |
| Standard model - Wikipedia Standard model - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'The Standard Model of particle physics is a theory that describes three of the four known fundamental interactions between the elementary particles that make up all matter. It is a quantum field theory developed between 1970 and 1973 which is consistent with both quantum mechanics and special relativity. To date, almost all experimental tests of the three forces described by the Standard Model have agreed with its predictions. However, the Standard Model falls short of being a complete theory of fundamental interactions, primarily because of its lack of inclusion of gravity, the fourth known fundamental interaction, but also because of the large number of numerical parameters (such as masses and coupling constants) that must be put "by hand" into the theory (rather than being derived from first principles) . . . ' back |
| The National Academies Cosmology: A Research Briefing 'Cosmologists work to understand how the universe came into being, why it looks as it does now, and what the future holds. They make astronomical observations that probe billions of years into the past, to the edge of the knowable universe. They seek the bases of scientific understanding, using the tools of modern physics, and fashion theories that provide unified and testable models of the evolution of the universe from its creation to the present, and into the future.' back |
| Unified field theory - Wikipedia Unified field theory - Wikipedia, the fre encyclopedia 'In physics, a unified field theory is a type of field theory that allows all of the fundamental forces between elementary particles to be written in terms of a single field. There is no accepted unified field theory yet, and this remains an open line of research. The term was coined by Albert Einstein who attempted to unify the general theory of relativity with electromagnetism. A Theory of Everything is closely related to unified field theory, but differs by not requiring the basis of nature to be fields, and also attempts to explain all physical constants of nature . . . ' back |
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