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?

Deep Time

Went walking today through the nearby woods. As I've been watching a Nova series on the evolution of life as shown in Australia, I started thinking about deep time. Actually, I started thinking about trees and green plants, as I was surrounded by them. And about an image from that TV show showing what the first land plants must have looked like 475 million years ago. The were like simple, tiny mosses and lichens. In the time since, they've become all the plants we see today. 

Reconstruction of Cooksonia

The earth – and solar system – are some 4.6 billion years old. The age of the universe, according to the latest information from the Planck satellite, is around 13.8 billion. The most simple forms of life on earth go back at least 2 billion years. The Ginko tree is 200 million years old. What do these numbers mean to us? We have become used to reading about hundreds of billions and even trillions of dollars so we feel comfortable, perhaps, with thinking of just a few billion here and there. But look at a forest and think about the time it took to make it what we see. Read anything about the latest discoveries of our DNA and how the supposedly “junk” part actually helps orchestrate a vast and complex dance of proteins that make us what we are. Or about the complexity of the human brain, only a million or so years old. How long did it take from the first stirrings of life – tiny bits even without cell walls – to everything alive we see? Each change taking countless generations of random mutation and natural selection. Stare down that long hallway home and that is deep time.

Go further back to that Big Bang of 13.8 billion years ago. At the first moment, everything was the same burst of energy. Light didn't escape into space for over 300,000 years. But within the tiniest part of one second, the Higgs Field manifested and gave form to the elementary particles of the universe. Over the next billions of years, the energy and matter of the universe cooled and condensed into atoms, molecules, stars, galaxies and us. If we define life as that which exists and changes, the universe has been alive since the beginning, evolving complexity and becoming so many things. Look down that hallway, to the light at the bedroom door and that is deep time.

Quantum Being

Reading in La Roy Ladurie's excellent study of the people of Montaillou, came across his observation on the musings of these 14th century peasants on freedom of will, do we have it or not? Began thinking of this question in light of my musings on the speed of consciousness. I had suggested that the speed of light is actually a measure of time, the time it takes us to leap from one moment of existence to the next. Light itself has no speed since at its "speed" as we measure it, time does not exist. Light relative to itself is everywhere it will be at the same moment. The universe it illuminates is therefore that which exists across all time at once, the universe as an eternal whole. Our consciousness – embedded in matter and not traveling as light – experiences time and sees light crawl along at so much slower than infinite speed.

Could freedom of will exist if a timeless universe also exists? If everything that has happened, is happening and will happen “already” exists in the same instant of creation in the Big Bang, what could be new? Are we conscious beings just crawling along lines that already exist, just following what is already fated to happen?

Being is an interesting word. It can be both verb and noun. I can be something, I can be being sad or happy. I can have a state of being, we can talk of human and supreme beings or even alien beings. Being is simply the condition of existing, of having existence. But does a rock have being? It does exist but would we say that a rock is being anything. Even just being a rock? Being implies something more, it suggests a subjective agent, someone who is being. Only something that is being could also be conscious. Consciousness is the awareness of a being. The speed of time is the pace of a beings movement through moments.

Back to freedom of will. We certainly feel, at least some times, that we have it. Life can be so complicated with so many random seeming events and difficult choices to make that it is hard to believe that it has all already been written. Sure, sometimes it seems we have no choice but to have done what we have done but in reality at each moment, we can decide among almost anything. How to square this with a relativistic universe in which the true speed of light is instantaneous and in which everything has already happened?

What if being is quantum, both particle and wave? Each of us are particles. We move through a material universe with time. We are attached to particular assemblages of matter we call bodies. We observe and act within the time-bound material world and with our wonderfully complex brains our consciousness blossoms into self-awareness and thought. Being also exists as a wave. We would not necessarily be able to understand that, as such being – accompanied by an experience of everything at once – is not easy to grasp. But such being – being beyond time – would not become aware of the particles of being before (or after) they acted because before and after would not exist. In other words, there is no text for us to follow, no “fate” which limits or determines our actions, because what we do can be known only as we do it. If the eternal, timeless universe is one conscious thought of being, it is nothing but what we particular beings immersed in time have made of it. We collapse the wave function.

Just a thought.

The Speed of Consciousness

I've been thinking about consciousness and reality for many years now and have come to believe that the most reasonable hypothesis is that reality is intimately related to consciousness and that consciousness is at least as primordial as matter and energy. Along the way, I've imagined the universe from the point of view of a surfer riding a photon created in the Big Bang. Because at the speed of light time stops, that “surfer” will be everywhere the photon will ever be in the same instant. From that vantage point, time does not exist and one can imagine the universe, from its moment of creation to its end, as a single crystal containing all of spacetime.

Today I was wondering about the speed of light and what exactly it means. One of the odd things about the speed of light is its value, 186000 miles per second. Why is it exactly that and what does it mean that light has a “speed” when, from the point of view of light, it is instantaneous. Perhaps the speed of light is not its speed at all but rather the speed of time? We experience time as a wave, passing from past to future with its crest being the present moment, our now. I've been reading Montaillou – about the life of a village in southern France in the early 14th Century – and felt myself looking through a portal into the lives of people far away in time, in many ways so different, but also real breathing humans just like us. Of course, when these people were alive – when they were riding the crest of time – theirs' was now. We now ride the wave but it will continue beyond us. Perhaps it is time itself that moves through the crystal universe? We see light moving at some speed only because that is the speed with which time can record its own passage.

It may seem strange to think of time moving with some speed. Whether spacetime is quantum or analog is now much in debate within physics, as well as what the smallest moment of time or unit of space may be. But according to relativity, the speed of light is both a measurement of space and time. The total distance between two points in spacetime must be conserved within the limits of the speed of light. Between two objects at rest to each other, the distance is almost entirely one of space because their speed relative to each other is functionally zero. Two objects moving relative to each other at some speed will have part of their distance in space and part in time. At rest or at low speeds, the distance in time may be negligible. But an extreme example is the case of the two twins. One twin stays at home on earth and the other travels to a nearby star and back at the speed of light. At the speed of light, the distance of the trip is experienced mostly as time. When the twin returns to the spot where he left, he has barely aged while his twin is an old man. What is being measured by the “speed of light” is really the relationship of time and space.

What is it that is traveling at the speed of light? It's not really time but our awareness of the distance traveled within spacetime. The speed of light may actually be the speed of consciousness. By this I mean the speed of our crest of awareness through the timeless, eternal crystal universe. Whatever consciousness caused the Big Bang, determined the value of the Higgs boson and the parameters of physical reality, and dumped itself into that reality may have wanted a long vacation. At the “speed of light” – really the speed of the wave of consciousness that sweeps through creation – the lifetime of the expanding universe (expanding due to dark energy) should be counted in tens of billions of years. An infinite string of nows flung like pearls upon the wine dark sea.

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?

Obama's Watershed Victory

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President Barack Hussein Obama made history for the second time on November 6, 2012. The first time, in 2008, he became the first non-white to win the American Presidency. But that was mostly due to the appalling situation that George W. Bush had created – endless war and economic catastrophe – and the eagerness of the American public to change course. This time Obama won election on his own, by putting together the first winning coalition built upon the tremendous diversity of American society. Romney won the white vote. But Obama won the vote of blacks, hispanics, women, gays and the young, and of big city/suburban dwellers and the “47%” that Romney mistakenly wrote off early in the campaign.

Clearly, many Obama supporters were also white, just not the older, rural, male and richer ones that were the core of Romney's support. Obama won the election because he gained the votes of the diverse, urban America of the 21st Century. He did so because he is clearly in tune with that diversity and because of a sophisticated (and unfortunately expensive) political machine that was able to target and enthuse the many and varied slices of our social, economic, cultural and regional complexity.

The Republican Party clearly understands none of this. Instead of seeking to embrace this emergent diversity, the Republicans made war on it by targeting the black man elected in 2008. Unspoken racial fears still present in much of that section of the white electorate that remains solidly Republican allowed the small government, no-tax-increase fundamentalists to appear to have a solid political base. The rich, white “one-per-centers” making up the Republican elite of office holders and donors sought to build upon this by frightening just enough additional voters to unseat the President they sought to demonize with charges he would make the US into “Greece.” It turned out that this was not enough to win over all those real people with real concerns and hopes not addressed in such simple terms.

The Republicans instead should have sought to seize at least some of the new ground before it became more solidified for the Democrats. In a way, they were fortunate to have finally settled on Mitt Romney – former governor of Massachusetts, a northeastern “blue” state – as their candidate. After his nomination, the ever-mutable Romney could have used his fabled “etch-a-sketch” to begin redefining his party in the more moderate direction it needs to go to remain competitive. Romney is a rich man but Americans don't automatically hold that against anyone. Rich Republicans used to remember that the economic system that made them rich and keeps them rich doesn't, by itself, ensure the fairness and equal opportunity that alone produces majority support for that system. The Republicans needed to find an updated version of someone like Nelson Rockefeller, a true moderate who could project compassion and understanding of the social compact necessary to sustain democracy and yet also be rich.

Romney could have become the new and improved Rockefeller. This would have meant resisting currents that have been building since Goldwater and that eventually undid the moderate wing of the Republican party. Difficult, but a start could have been made, especially running with the incumbent facing strong economic headwinds. Instead, Romney chose to play it safe and instead solidify his (white) base by choosing to move to the extreme right and to pick as his running mate a poster boy for Republican fundamentalism. If Romney had moved earlier and more consistently toward the center, the Republican base would have had nowhere else to go. It still really, really wanted to get rid of Obama. Other Republican leaders could have fallen in line in the interest of winning this and future elections. But none of this happened. Romney's lack of political courage and his choice to run to his “base” led to his defeat and that of the party that jumped with him into the demographic wilderness.

Shed no tears for the Republicans. They have sought since 2008 to lie, bully and scare their way back into power without offering anything beyond fears about debt and big government. Twenty-First Century America is too large, diverse and complex to be governed with a simple no-new-taxes, small government catechism.

President Obama and the Democrats don't have have all the answers either and did not offer any new, big vision in this campaign. But Obama seems to understand that while government cannot and should not try to do everything, it must be a major part of the effort to manage our complexity. Government must help keep our society within the bounds of fairness and justice by providing our free-market economy the political structure (and infrastructure) necessary to empower it to continue to fuel our American way of life for all Americans.

Test Questions

Is man so important as to be the center of his own attention?  If so, why? 

Is there another way to be?  If so, what?