There is an unresolved issue at the heart of modern Physics.
Scientists can’t reconcile Einstein’s theory, gravity, and quantum physics. Quantum physics ‘works’ – delivers accurate results – but nobody really understands the underlying science. For example, entangled particles share characteristics – ‘spin’ is a concept they share, if it changes in one particle it instantaneously changes in the other. This change is immediate, regardless by how far the particles are separated. This implies an action faster than the speed of light, which is supposedly not possible.
You can enlarge the areas of lack of understanding – how exactly do electrons ‘change orbit’ – how exactly do particles ‘attract’ or ‘repel’ each other. And, at the photon level, what exactly is a photon? Is it a ‘blob of energy’, does it have a structure (let alone whether it is a wave or a particle). If you had something like light, but with an even shorter wavelength, could you use it as a scalpel, and dissect a photon. You can of course argue that our ‘sight’ is constrained by the wavelength of light, and by definition cannot ‘see’ anything smaller than a photon.
So, how can we ‘understand’ the phenomenon of something that travels faster than light, which in our current state of science is not possible.
It’s worth observing than this area of science appears to have ‘stalled’ – effectively no significant advances for a century. It’s as if our present state of thinking cannot resolve these mysteries. We can tidy them, find nuances, discover some more small particles, but no substantial progress since the 1920’s. There was a fashion for ‘string theory’ by way of example, but which hasn’t really progressed things. CERN may have ’made a lot of progress’ but no real breakthrough.
I was mulling this over the other day – I’ve had a long term interest in small particle physics since my son died in a car crash at age 16 – is there anything ‘beyond understanding’ that might open the door to another world.
One option is that there is indeed an answer to this scientific mystery, but we’re not quite bright enough to grasp it. Years ago, Einstein made his breakthroughs by being ‘bright enough‘ to see, question and understand things that were beyond the thinking of contemporaries. Likewise Hawking had the ability to think in a different league to others.
My immediate catalyst was a poem sent to me from my four year old grandchild – she’d used AI and some key words (grandfather, special day, Malaga) and created a good poem. Linguistically way beyond what she herself could write. Amazing!
And then think about computers that can teach themselves chess, and beat grandmasters. There are many areas where we can see that our level of intellectual operation is OK, but not amazing.
Think of a dog and his master (or goldfish in a bowl). The dog might be capable of seeing than the master can drive a car, It may think of it as almost a god like quality relative to a dog’s abilities. And of course it won’t be appreciating the complexities of the engineering built into the vehicle. The goldfish may well think of the world as round and wet, that food appears from nowhere, and not much beyond that.
We might take a slightly condescending view of the dog’s abilities and likewise of the goldfish. We are clearly in a better intellectual league.
But what if our scientific problem is really that we are just not bright enough to take the science further.
I am not suggesting a god, but what if there is a ‘being’ that is intellectually league’s above us, like a puppetmaster pulling our strings. Not only do they understand more than us, but maybe monitor or control it too?
AI and other things give a hint that there could be a world infinitely more sophisticated than what we perceive and understand. For example, that maybe could understand not only a little about genes and DNA, but actually completely understand all the processes in everybodies bodies. And predict with certainty which cluster of cells might turn cancerous and when. Likewise, totally understand the world’s climate, and predict all weather changes with total accuracy. Many things currently are based on ‘chaos’ theory and probability – for a trivial example think of the throw of a dice. What if a machine could exactly model all the variables, and thereby predict with utter certainty how the dice would land.
My thought is that there may be a world in effect beyond (above) our understanding. And in that world, understanding how communications can happen faster than the speed of light could be understood and explained.
So, I offer two thoughts. The first is that ‘all can be explained’ by a more intelligent being. The ability to think in more than three dimensions is an example – we can manage to think in three dimensions but trying to understand and think in more than three is difficult. Maybe the entanglement problem is trivial for a bigger brain (like Einstein outthought his contemporaries).
The second is that maybe this whole world as we see it, is just a low level plaything for some superior being. They created our world, a bit like letting us see the car, and drive it, but not giving us the information and understanding about the engineering.
So, a bit like the dog and the goldfish, we can operate in the world that we see and understand at our level. But actually there is actually much more to this world, that we can’t understand. But the ‘being’ does. The ‘being’ sees and understands a much more complex structure. Maybe manages much of it.
Maybe people’s search for a ‘god’ is an instinctive search for this being that understands more than we do.
All of it is complex, maybe the ‘being’ understands our world and possibly our universe. Maybe there are other beings for other universes. Maybe even they struggle to understand the origins of the universes, which requires an even greater intellect.
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