Monday, April 17, 2017

Mystification 01

What would timeless beings look like to us? We are time-bound, our thoughts, our perceptions, even our biology seemingly linked to the arrow of time. But timelessness might be a real thing and transfinite beings might be all around us. We would see them through our time-bound eyes. They would age, they would die. Except they wouldn't. It would be a trick played on us because we are embedded in spacetime, we are linked to the sensation of time. We would be incapable of seeing the timeless as timeless.

What's more, time is variable. Our sense of it is affected by the physical properties of matter. Gravity can distort time because it distorts spacetime and time is fundamentally linked to space. What people don't realize about this weirdness, it's been proven. Einstein's theory of general relativity has passed every last test put to it. From distortions in astronomical observations due to the curvature of spacetime to the slower decay of atoms when accelerated to a percentage of the speed of light, general relativity has passed the test. It's real.

It's also essentially timeless, since time is bound up with spacetime and highly malleable. Time does not exist as a separate dimension or quantity. Yet we are time-bound.

Where does time come from? Or our sense of it. Quantum entanglement, that spooky action at a distance predicted, and once again, proved to exist. Time, or our experience of it, is an emergent phenomenon...

What is an emergent phenomenon? Generally speaking, an large-scale event or object or aspect of existence derived from small components or tiny events. Like the giant termite mounds in Africa are an emergent phenomenon from the simple behaviors of the termites themselves.

Oh, man, have I gone far afield from from a little fictional thought experiment...not my intention.

Just this: we could not see the true nature of transfinite beings because of our time-bound existence. We would perceive the transfinite or timeless as temporal creatures like ourselves. We would see them age and die, even though they do not age and die. Inside the spacetime bubble of our universe, we are time-bound. But this is not true of outside observers. A tiny bit of this has been experimentally proven in physics experiments involving entanglement.

What we perceive as reality might not be...real.

To go into more detail would require hours of study and even then I might get it wrong. I just don't have the math (manifolds and topological space for instance, that goes way, way beyond Calc 3 and differential equations, the level at which I stalled out way back in college) and the knowledge of quantum theory (I stalled out at Engineering Physics II) to deal with it. My brain hurts.


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