What have you changed your mind about? Why?
To start this year in a good way, I refer to you to the superb texts in The Edge's last question: What have you changed your mind about? Why?, where specialists, scholars and known enthusiasts are telling what they are now seeing differently. Very interesting reading, I am at the 3rd page now.
A few texts are eye openers and very interesting reading to anyone who think no one changes their minds. It also led me to ask myself the question. As a computer programmer, I am not a real expert in many of the things I am about to say, but I don't really care, frankly, like Douglas Adams showed it, anyone can find the question to the answer in this world. And I certainly wouldn't be as pretentious as to say I am as good as some British girl sipping tea, but my opinions have at least the weight of 1 against 6 or so billion. It has merit.
The universe in a computer… Not! I used to believe one could create some 3D array and put all the particles there, in line and in shape. It has a few good points, gives a nice insight to some problems, but it wouldn't explain speed of our planet as compared to the galaxy. If it did, light wouldn't travel at the same speed in all directions. Hence, if a computer was to simulate our environment, it would do so by simulating all the individual particules. Then the interaction of these particles would lead to interesting problems, as the more particles there are, the more interaction they give to their surroundings, making the problem quite interesting to solve on a computer. The only approximation we can live with are with these interaction, as we cannot percieve the particles themselves in all their facets at the same time, so a computer could generalize these. It would mean all of our universe particles would be described in fuzzy logic. It's interesting, but thresholds are bound to err where we don't want. All in all, I find it very reductionnist to say our environment would be approximated in a computer. I used to think we could simulate the universe in a computer. Now I think we can represent a subsection of the universe in a computer, but we cannot get all the elements in there.
The expanding-contracting universe is black or white…. Not! The universe is in the big bang phase, or is in the big crunch phase. The universe is exo or endo. All the theories I hear are all as precise as black or white. My belief is we're in the middle of this all. If Big Bang there was, some of the ejected particles were ejected quickly at escape velocity speeds. Most of it were ejected slowly at crunchable speeds. There is a relatively new theory of ourselves getting slower and slower, and our universe running out of time. Let's suppose all of our references points are slowing, crawling to a halt. Let's suppose we are in this. If the universe doesn't do rounding errors, it will slow down indefinitely, and for some external observer, we would simply halt. However, we would as insiders never stop moving and what took 5 minutes before would take 5 hours, then 5 days, and so on, for the external entity. But it would never stop compltely, and it would be totally oblivious to us since the reference frame is changing. Why would this change? Because the universe as we know it is currently freezing. Why would the universe continue expanding and at a faster rate while we are freezing? Because there is a ring of very quick matter that is still relatively hotter that englobes our universe since the big bang (analogy to a bomb exploding, where the initial shock wave is times worse than what's inside), and these are in a faster time frame comparatively to us. Would time abruptly stop? No. In a frozen universe, we would have infinitely more time to move, making the point moot. In a crunched environment, we would be infinitely faster, meaning we would to infinitely more in infinitely less time. For someone outside, we would either stop moving or simply end up in some infinitely dense point. For us, it would be life as usual. A black hole is a perfect example of a big crunch, and someone inside would simply accelerate, but nothing would tear apart. I used to believe we were in a big bang or big crunch, I used to believe our time was expanding or contracting. I used to believe black holes would see a meltdown of matter. Now I believe since the reference is changing, we are also changing to adapt, which means we don't see a thing, I believe we might be in a black hole that is in the centre of the universe, and even if we weren't, it wouldn't change a thing for us. I now believe inside a black hole, we wouldn't be able to tell if the black hole would be collapsing or expanding, since our reference would change, making a black hole, a big bang and a big crunch look and feel exactly the same.
And as a statement to all the writers of the original Edge article, since the reading, my ideas have at least changed on one thing. I used to believe most scientists were so obtuse about their points, refining their original idea and polishing it to the delusional state, that eventually, although respected, their bubble would break when someone else would point out their fallacy, and repeat the process. I believe the original authors have shown they have the ability to do this questioning themselves. At least 20 pages worth of great people have this ability.
Happy new year to all, and if you want to answer the question yourself, I give this as a starting point of a writing chain. If you don't answer, some particle will decay strangely in the universe. I decided to write on the universe, but it can be on anything, really.
