Another Interlude: What do Gravity Waves Mean?

Just read the typically excellent articles in Science News on the recent confirmation of gravity waves. The merger of two black holes that triggered the waves that reached earth some 1.3 billion years later converted three solar masses into sufficient energy to send a tiny but measurable ripple to the two LIGO detectors. The total energy released “exceeded that of all the stars in the universe combined.” But as SN notes, the gravity waves did not travel through space – as does light – but as a wave in the fabric of spacetime itself traveling at the speed of light.

It is worth pondering the fact that gravity and light – both seemingly very different types of elementary vectors – both travel at the same finite speed. What is it about the universe that is revealed by the cosmic speed limit of 186,000 miles per second that even gravity obeys?

I've previously suggested that the speed of light measures “our awareness of the distance traveled within spacetime” and that “the speed of light may actually be the speed of consciousness.” At the speed of light, time stops. Someone surfing a photon would be everywhere that photon would ever be at the same moment. We experience the universe as spacetime. We move through it while, in a sense, the universe itself must exist all at once outside space and time. Lots of scientists are looking at ways to use string theory or supersymmetry, positing extra dimensions and multiple universes, to try to explain our universe through what might seem an updated version of efforts to find how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. (Regrets to St Thomas, whom I follow in the thought that when you reach the end of reason, it's a finger pointing to god.) But these efforts beg a question: whatever theory they come up with, why would the cosmos be that way? Reality may not be an infinitely peel-able onion. The fact remains that we live in a universe where even gravity takes time to travel as perceived by us. (I suppose a surfer riding that gravity wave would also be everywhere that four-dimension wave would be at the very same moment.)

Why ask what all this means? The notion of deriving meaning from the fact that we exist and in a world that seems perfect for us is basic to humanity. But beyond this, facing up to these questions may be the way forward to a new science. This would not mean abandoning quantum physics and relativity but thinking our way through them without trying to find dancing angels.

Light Music

Been reading Light Music, a 2002 sci-fi novel by Kathleen Goonan. Like most good science fiction, it takes some central bit of science or technology and extrapolates it. Light Music contemplates a juxtaposition between string theory and consciousness. Now string theory has taken some hits recently as analysis of the Higgs field seems to rule out the simpler, more elegant, versions of supersymetry. But Goonan paints a picture of consciousness, residing somewhere in the extra tiny dimensions postulated by supersymetry, as a kind of energy acting on the universe through matter as a kind of string vibration, a kind of music, as photons of light are vibrations of electro-magnetism. Thus Light Music. Very interesting speculations.

In this space, I've suggested that consciousness is primordial, that it does not rise from matter, or any particular organization of matter, but may indeed be prior. That consciousness – our individual experience of it – may be bound up with light, which is its “speed.” So picture consciousness as vibrations in (of?) spaces too small for us to observe – at or even smaller than the Planck length – intersecting the fields and particles of matter and energy we can measure and manifesting as observation. Yes, a “ghost” in the machine, taking the form of mind when the organic substrate is complex enough to give rise to such. Collapsing the wave function and exercising choice, self-generating music out of our individual being, a lifetime symphony.

Just another rumination.

Beyond quantum physics? Needed, a new Einstein

I've been thinking about consciousness and quantum reality for some years now.  Come to a few conclusions that have flowed into these ruminations:

First, seems to me that consciousness is primordial, i.e., to originate from the same source as the material universe that is the subject of modern physics.  Or to put it differently, to be unexplainable as a mere manifestation of some complex process of matter.  Consciousness is a property of the universe just as material existence appears to be.  Indeed, it may be that consciousness is prior to matter, that the ghost in the machine came before the machine.

Second, that the universe must be understood as something both eternal - the speed of light to itself is instantaneous - and immersed in time via our individual consciousness of it.  The universe is something that exists all at once in time and space.  It is we that travel through it at a speed - the flow of time - that leads us to measure light at 186,000 miles per second.  Individual consciousness seems to be attached to material processes that result from the Higgs field having given certain particles mass, that is, that slows them down from the instantaneous propagation of light and other mass-less particles.  Connected to these "slow particles," we experience time.

And now a third thought, too preliminary to call a conclusion.  That modern quantum physics while powerful and beautiful, is somehow fundamentally wrong.  Quantum physics is essentially a quantitative, numerical understanding of reality.  It offers probabilities and predictions flowing from a mathematical model of reality.  It has been amazingly accurate, predicting particles and properties then confirmed through experiment.  But more recently it seems that reality conforms too accurately to the standard model of physics.  The Higgs mass so far is exactly as predicted and now it seems the electron is perfectly spherical rather than dipole.  Both results appear to rule out the simplest models of super-symmetry (which already proposes more dimensions than the four we experience).   Super-symmetry is the effort to extend quantum physics into a theory of everything, accounting for all particles as well as gravity, dark mass and dark energy.

The latest news on the Higgs seems quite revealing.  Its mass (125 GeV) seems to be exactly where it should be for the universe as we know it to exist.  If it was much stronger, nothing much would form beyond hydrogen and helium because the particles that make them up would be so tightly bound that heavier elements - and us - couldn't form.  If it was much weaker, nothing could hang together and yet again, nothing much - including us - would form.  The Higgs - like Goldilock's porridge - is just right for us.  This is enough of a conundrum, why should it be just right for us?  But there also seems no reason - absent a super-symmetry explanation - for the exact value that the Higgs does have.  It seems to be a "given."

Quantum physicists still have hope.  There are more elaborate models for super-symmetry, less simple, less beautiful, more dimensions.  And some suggest that the Higgs has different values in the many multi-verses of which our universe may just be one.  So we happen to live in one with just the right value because in most of the others we could not exist.

Quantum physics is already a bit Rube-Goldberg.  The multi-verse proposal is more so.  Occam's Razor suggests there must be a simpler way.  It might be useful to again consider Einstein's dictum that "God does not play dice."  His theory of relativity did not flow from math but from a profound insight into how time and space relate.  Yes, math flows from it but relativity is an understanding of time and space as one thing and gravity as resulting from its curvature.  Quantum physics and relativity remain trains running on different tracks.  We may need a new Einstein to put everything on one.  Someone who can provide a deeper insight into why the universe is the way it is rather than look to mathematics to explain everything.

The Higgs and Time

It's coming up on a year now since the confirmation of the Higgs particle and field. This was an exciting reaffirmation of the Standard Model of modern particle physics. But after a year of refining measurements, it seems the version of the Higgs found fits too well with the current model and offers no hint of any unexpected strangeness that could lead physicists to further insights and discoveries. The Higgs mass has been determined to be 125.7 GeV (gigaelectronvolts). Quite remarkable measurement but one that agrees so perfectly with the Standard Model that it leaves little room for current theories that tried to go beyond it to a more unified physics. Most varieties of supersymmetry and string theory – the simpler, more beautiful ones that physicists prefer – cannot meet the constraints imposed by the Higgs value. The current model cannot account for gravity or relativity and can't explain dark matter or dark energy. This means that while it can explain very well 5% of the universe, it cannot say a thing about the remaining 95%.

But it may be even more interesting to ponder the fact that the particle that gives other particles mass also has a mass. The Higgs field interacts with some particles (the quarks) and gives them mass while others (neutrinos and photons) are lightly or un-affected and have little or no mass. But if the Higgs interaction gives mass, what gives mass to the Higgs? This is another of the strange places that our modern science leads us. (Are you watching St. Thomas?)

Mass may also be at the root of time. Things with mass cannot travel at the speed of light and therefore exist immersed in time. Things without mass do travel at light speed and therefore are not subject to time. It's as if mass is really a measurement of the degree to which stuff is trapped in time, separated out of what would otherwise be an eternal now. Or to put it another way, introducing mass is a way to throw things out of heaven and down to earth?

Maybe Reality Is Not An Infinitely Peelable Onion?

Science is the search for rational understanding of nature and the universe achieved through replicable observation.  2012 has seen a fundamental advance in the effort to achieve an ultimate understanding of physical reality and the cosmos with the discovery of the Higgs boson.  In July, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN found direct evidence of the Higgs.  Since then, further LHC data appears to place the Higgs more firmly in the Standard Theory that unifies three of the four fundamental forces (electromagnetic, weak, strong and gravity).  Perhaps equally significant, however, is what LHC seems not to be finding - evidence supporting Supersymmetry, the only candidate theory physics has to unify all four forces and explain the dark matter that seems key to holding galaxies together.

Supersymmetry posits an unseen partner particle for every particle now known to science.  Supersymmetry is a basis for string theory, which directly seeks to account for quantum gravity.  With evidence for supersymmetry and string theory, we would have a unified theory of forces and particles, uniting the big and the small and explaining "everything."

Trouble is that those particles that LHC could be finding if the simplest versions of supersymmetry were predictive don't seem to be there.  This does not rule out more complex versions of the approach but modern physics has generally been guided by the notion that the simple is most beautiful and the beautiful is more likely to be true.

But its not the details of the current state of physics that I want to talk about here but the very quest for an ultimate understanding, one that explains everything we can see and know by some set of fundamental scientific laws and equations.  The notion that everything has an ultimate explanation, according to a laws-based structure that puts everything in its place, cannot logically be true.  Any explanation of what is by another set of what-ises begs the question of what explains those.  Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem puts this nicely:  “Anything you can draw a circle around cannot explain itself without referring to something outside the circle – something you have to assume but cannot prove.”

The menagerie of particles now known by science includes all sorts of particles with mass (fermions) and those without (bosons).  The smallest fermions include quarks and leptons.  Supersymmetry and string theory seek to explain all these particles by placing them within a frame with many other particles and dimensions that we cannot observe and for which we so far have no evidence.  Meanwhile, an extension of string theory - superstring theory - seeks to explain the Big Bang and space-time by positing other things we cannot observe:  colliding branes.

Let's suppose that we find evidence of some form of the supersymmetry and superstring theories, i.e., that they are "true."  What will explain them?  What will account for whatever laws and equations that seem to predict everything else we can observe?  Where do the laws that govern lawful action come from?  As Gödel proved, nothing can explain itself.

Perhaps, Plato was right.  The cosmos is made up of Forms.  What if the basic building blocks of existence - the bosons and fermions we observe, the structure of space-time, the Higgs field that creates mass, the gravity that pulls mass so tightly that it releases the energy of life in the middle of our sun - all these, just are? 

The explanation of everything is either infinitely recursive - each peel of the onion of explanation simply uncovers the next layer to be explained - or the ground of everything is/was simply there.  Either way, it makes science no less important and useful but not necessarily the answer to all questions and especially to those most human of all questions - why are we here, where do we come from and for what ends?