Friday, May 11, 2007

this is different... thoughts regarding life the universe and everything

Serendipity is often very wonderful. The internet magnifies serendipity in a wonderful way, so it's wonderful all around.

I was reading some writings on math (which I do by no means purport to fully, or even mostly, understand) and this person is renowned for having great thoughts and having overcome extraordinary obstacles so it could only be very worthwhile to grasp just a piece of what he's saying, what he's put up on the internet to share with the whole world.

One of the things the author proposes is an Interesting Equation which raises an Interesting Possibility that is, uhm well: interesting.

Dealing with sound, and waves, and waveform pictures while you're doing electronic music, you are immersed in the physics of it and of course have no clue of that and don't care but it is all a part of it (well, it's all a part of everything, but you know what I mean). So you have an appreciation for waveforms and their interactions with one another, whether you recognize it as such or not, and even though this might only be insofar as when they are sounding better when mixed together a certain way. Really, all art is immersed in this, because color is a function of light which can be expressed as a waveform. And in turn all waveforms can be expressed as quanta or quantum particles but where is gets harder to grasp is, not because they are particles but because the notion of a 'particle' fits in the context of the theory-- as a meme that is appropriate for the conceptual/intellectual manipulation of the things that lead to an articulated understanding.

But the Interesting Equation simplifies in a way that is particularly elegant when one of the primary components is Four (4), and this stuck with me, because one of the things I do grasp about math is how much Four is, and Four is one of those things that, musically, is a very comfortable concept. So let's say Four is super duper special.

Today I was walking outside and I walked into a spider web. I thought about spiders, and about why the things that are called spiders spin webs. In terms of evolution, there are lots of different spiders, but very many of them spin webs, so it could be said that a key aspect of spiderdom, an essential aspect, is that one should spin webs. And I thought about, of all the things evolved and evolving, spiders being one and evolving for years and centuries, that most spiders did not evolve away from spinning webs. I picked up a bucket, which was inverted, and because it had rained heavily the night before some slugs and snails were clinging to the inside of the bucket to stay out of the rain, and I thought, despite years and centuries of evolution, snails and slugs are slimy: it's an essential part of them, they did not evolve away from it. The point is that there is some 'base assortment' of things, some starting points, for things to evolve, and I was curious about the mechanism for selecting that base assortment, what chose the 'catalog' certain like groups of living organisms-- was it all statistical? So this huge roiling primordial ooze/soup that nurtured life contained all the possible lifeforms, and through a process of selection the base assortment was formed, and from those the variations on the base models... man, that must have taken forever, but it didn't take forever, so there must've been there be some 'boundary' factors.

There is a thing that happens where your brain goes 'ok, I'm going to grasp this because I need to get this kid to a point where he stops wringing me out so I'll throw him a bone and give him a handle to hang the thoughts on because life goes on despite the fact this kid has a question and we got to get to work' and then I think in the context of my previous reading that 'feeding is a game' and it has a "winner and a loser" and so it seems like game theory would 'bind' the evolution of every possible thing from the primordial soup and then I'm back to the Interesting Equation, which has this super duper aspect of Four and was written by a renowned expert in game theory, because I need to get to work and this allows me to continue with the routine life important to my existence in my current manifestation/continuum.

So what are the Four Things? What is the Four? To have things you have to have the base assortment of quantifiable properties, so let's see if there are four quanta that we can name that form the base assortment of everything. The four are:

  • photons
  • gravitons
  • sub atomic particles (protons, neutrons, electrons, et al)or 'matter-tons'
  • time

    The thing with the quantum thing, where the whole idea is to measure stuff in quantities, to help understand them, is to help understannd. So this is where you think of waveforms as particles, because a waveform on a graph consists of points of measurement at a given time. And, because energy is mostly thought of as a waveform, and matter is mostly thought of as particles, at that point they become the same thing.

    Now, there are these fundamental quantities but in comparison to the Four above, several of them deal with the same one of the Fours, so they reduce-down/map-into one of the Four.

    Now, I know I don't mention space. I discarded space because it is always filled with some quantity of one of the Four. It is a function of the absence of one of the Four, not a fundamental thing.

    Time is more important, because Time has a progression, a motion and it is different in nature.

    My theory is that I don't think time is constant. I think it is winding down. A second long ago went by 'faster' than it does for us, but subjectively, it was the same. more stuff involving the other Three could occur in the same universally objective amount of time. In that way, time is more like an energy, like a byproduct of the interaction of the other three: it is how we perceive the interaction of the other three, but it is distinct so it is one of the Four. As an exercise, I'm doing this, because it is making me feel like I understand some new things, but only a little.

    I know that time and space are linked in an important way in relativity, etc... but the exercise is to think in a new way, so I am demoting space. There is no space, it's all full of the Four.

    Not thinking about the axes of a graph, but in the context of the interactions of the three in a universal time system, when "graphed" on some huge multidimensional system, a point in time is when the value of the Three Others was "this".

    Now somebody might say that all there is is subatomic particles, and time: "Photons, gravitons, they are a flavor of subatomic particle". (Maybe they already say that, what do I know, anyway: I make electronic music with computers). But, fine, that's ok: at some point the subatomic particles cross a boundary at which point they are less in the 'piece of matter' category and more gravity or light.

    So Four is interesting. This is interesting too: the Ulam spiral, which when extended indicates vectors of prime numbers along a particular axis. The "spiral" is based on a square (Four again) and the related vectors radiate in four directions from 'where it starts'. Let's make something sort of new, say, an 'Ulam cube': Let's stand up the Ulam square on it's edge, in an xyz representation, let's say all those primes are quantum measurements of one of the Four. Let's have Four all starting at the same place. Looking down from above, let's align them, N-S, E-W. NE-SW, NW-SE.

    So, what have we done? We've written a blog post.

    Ahh, serendipity.

    [edit] I'm adding a little more to this because as usual it is not as clear as I'd like, and of course there is mostly opinion, conjecture and hardly any proof, and any proof I might offer is backed by scant credentials.

    The square in the description of the equation is the d'Alembertian operator. This is important because it relates to Minkowski space which actually 'combines' space and time into spacetime, or space time continuum. What I'm thinking about is a condition where the milieu designated as 'space' part of space time (three dimensions) is not xyz but a milieu inhabited by gravitons, photons and subatomic particles, which move in time. And of course, by saying 'space doesn't matter in this course of thought' I am not thinking about anything new but that's ok.