Ted R's thoughts on nothing

[Ted Robinson]

I’m spanking new here and don’t know exactly where to start, but I’m 83 now and don’t have time to learn anything, so I’ll just leap in by noting beecee’s comment: “that because there are many unqualified people that come to a science forum to tell everyone participating, how mainstream science has got it wrong, and they have the answer!”  Well, by gum, I’m undoubtedly one of those, but then I’m a Life Member of Mensa, a member of ISPE, and was once Regent of the Triple Nine Society, so I must be smart . . . I think.  Anyway I can’t help responding to alexcouch’s observation “You can't really have nothing, cause if there is nothing, then why is there something within this nothing? There is matter within this void and that honestly doesn't make any sense.”

My personal thoughts on this might be uninteresting and ill-informed, but at least they’re long, and involve my take on nothing that is evidenced by entanglement.  Any self-respecting physicist would be reluctant to take this quantum business to some logical, albeit bizarre, scarily metaphysical, and, maybe for me personally, fairly original conclusions.  But bizarreness calls for thinking outside the scientific box, so it falls to we who are already outside that box to venture into the breach and follow those dots, then gird up for the guffaws that will follow.  But guffaws are not a problem if you don't need the acceptance that is otherwise necessary to stay inside the box.  Being guffaw-proof, I can take an uncompromising look at the weirdness of the origins that all these investigations seem to be pointing toward, except, what we might find is, there are no origins.  To understand this requires doing what is possibly impossible – to imagine Nothing, because therein lies, maybe, the origins from whence we stem.

 We need to start a possible new path in the middle of nothingness.  Trying to imagine nothing, though, usually ends up in frustrating visions of airless vacuums, or maybe just total blackness -- something along those lines.  Wrong approach, I believe, because those concepts still require space for them to exist within.  In nothingness space does not exist, right along with its companion, time, and those who spend their time pondering abstrusities, like what exists beyond our universe, need mental reconstruction in order to imagine nothing.  A Buddhist priest might come close to doing this during his cessation-of-thought sessions, one can’t really know, but that’s doubtful.  Nothingness is, for lack of a better word, or to invent a more exact word, unpicturable.

 I think we need to understand nothingness before we can understand how a universe that wasn’t there suddenly was there, because anything could exist, and happen, within complete nothingness, where nothing really happens and nothing really exists.  Non-existent inclusions would also take in dimensions outside our own, some of whose own mass and energy could spill into ours and provide weight and push in our universe which, being in separate dimensions, can't be seen or felt beyond these influences and are therefore called dark things.  Dark matter and energy might be explainable when, if, we can find a way to detect other quantum dimensions, provided that they're actually the cause, to determine their influence here.  Whether or not there is a Higher Intelligence is above my pay grade, but the energy and mass from interacting dimensions would probably not have been put here by anyone or anything in order to keep the celestial mechanisms spinning and the universe from imploding.  Although it matters not if these necessary implements arise from multi-dimensions, primordial black holes, massive interactive particles or whatever.  They all simply fall within the unlimited default possibilities that would avoid cosmic meltdown, although in an infinite number of other possibilities within nothingness, it actually does melt down.

No space, no time, nothing.  Blank.  Small quivers can start, or not.  The quivers beget illusions that can beget great landslides of anything and everything, including illusory existences.  But again, such quivers are only part of illusions that otherwise would require time and space that do not exist in fundamental nothingness.  The illusion of quivers, in scenarios like ours, bounce against each other and bunch into sudden -- sudden by our measurement of time -- cataclysmic explosions of existence, among a lot of other things that can happen, because within nothing there are of course infinite possible quivers.  In some dimensions, like ours, once separated those assembled quivers cool, get less agitated and split into different combinations and dimensions.  In other words they become the stuff of macro-physics, i.e.: the study of macro-on-macro interactions, interacting bubbles of nothing which we call particles, molecules, quarks, whatever.  Structures of molecules reacting to other molecular structures.  Bubbles of nothing reacting on bubbles of nothing, bringing forth its own observer-structures whose interactions with object-structures range from staring at the universe to running into brick walls.

Space and time are total illusions?  Our attention might need to be directed toward entanglement for an answer, where two companion particles react instantly to each other.  But it shouldn’t be a mystery that they can communicate instantly if it is understood that in underlying nothingness space does not exist for it to travel within.  Entanglement is the necessary stabilizing constant within the macro world of Albert Einstein’s local realism, which confines cause and effect within a world governed by the speed of light, itself bending and varying within its external environments.  The basic particles remain entwined and fixed in the opposite complementary polarizations needed to hold together these fundamental building blocks of our pseudo-material existence.

 Accordingly, the illusion, to exist, requires that the bubbles of nothing, particles, cannot be further divided at some basic level because eventually they would have to divide impossibly into nothingness.  They would divide down into the quivers of illusion that might be what physicists give the term "waves," and from there further down perhaps into vibrating strings that have no substance.  Quivers of nothing, in other words.  Waves are created from the quivers within nothing that collapse into bubbles of illusion, or particles, if someone’s around to observe them, which observers, as mentioned, are interacting structures of bubbles of nothing.  Further divisions are not possible in an illusion that depends on their indivisibility at some point to avoid disappearing into nothing, so fundamental particles only seem to be able to be divided further, but actually aren’t.  Entanglement tells us this, communicating instantly no matter how far apart they are, whether one is standing still and the other is on Einstein’s time-warping speeding train.

Einstein once described entanglement as “spooky action at a distance, but it isn’t spooky at all if quantum theory is carried to its logical conclusions, where time and space are not really available for anything to travel within.  From kleptoseconds to eternity, our standard conception of time is often carried into both secular and religious beliefs that do not make sense.  If one dies and goes on to eternal life, or when lovers are joined together for eternity, wouldn't one get tired of doing whatever they do for a thousand years in an eternal afterlife?  How about a trillion years, when our solar system has long since imploded and the expanding universe has left the skies black, which amount of time is still only an indistinguishable dollop within the concept of eternity.  Hanging around that long would bring a grander meaning to the word “tedium.”

Anyway, if the fundamental element of macro physics is nothing, what keeps the whole complex from falling apart?  As multi-worlders hypothecate, it actually does fall apart, all the time, in every way, every moment of every existence.  We continue on within the macro structure that we call the world, or the universe, that holds together by discarding its way through a gazillion or so probabilities, but we know only those that distill into our continuity in space-time.  Things like dark matter and dark energy are included in the probabilities necessary for macro physics and therefore they simply exist within the probability that works.  It’s up to the scientists to figure out how this came about through the distillation of all workable complexes, because without the filtered result that includes dark stuff the universe implodes and/or cannot perform its celestial gravitational dance.  Like the necessary weakness of gravity being the result of the intertransitioning of gravitons between this and other dimensions, other dimensions may or may not be the necessary inclusion for our particular dimension to function.

The end result, as we can see from the world around us, is that the distilled illusions come together, hold together and move forward together, and it all works, even though its base consists of nothing.  The quiver-waves collapse into functional illusions while all the possible non-functional scenarios are filtered out.  Life, as a result, carries on.

[Klaynos]

Hi Ted,

A few thoughts before reading what you've got here. 

1. There's no maths, physics uses the language of maths to make quantitative predictions. Without it you're just telling stories. 

2. That's a big wall of text, it's unlikely anyone is going to be bothered to read it. Especially after he preamble. 

3. The preamble is not positive. You've got to remember some of he smartest people who are alive have spent lifetimes on trying to understand this. Just being a member of mensa etc... Isn't going to swing it. I strongly suspect that people will read it and then not bother to read the rest. People in science care about the content not who's saying it. (see the logical fallacy of appeal to authority).

[studiot]

Good morning, Ted and welcome.

83 huh?
Well your typing fingers seem much younger.

This is in 'speculations' (perhaps it was moved?) but I don't see any speculations as defined here.

 

In particular I don't see a clear 'mission statement', backed up by a chain of reasoning from universally agreed facts.

So what exactly is your 'speculation' in condensed form please?

 

Please note some of your reasoning seems sound but you should avoid 'reality' or 'exists' which are metaphysical terms rather than scientific ones as they are imprecise and speculative in themselves.

[Ted Robinson]

Re: Klaynos response: The smartest people work with entanglement as a scientific phenomenon, but I see its instantaneity as a tell that fundamental space-time doesn’t exist.  Thus the “unpicturable” nothingness that would deny any origin at all, which leads into metaphysical areas where real scientists prefer not to tred.  But this kind of theory does not lend itself mathematical quantifications of course.  Very incidentally, Mensa, ISPE and the Triple Nine Society differ in that the latter two limit their membership only to those who would qualify in the highest 5% of Mensans (99.9th vs. 98th percentile).

·       Re: Studiot response:  Thanks very much to both of you for the responses and the thoughtful comments.  The definition of the word speculations might be, probably is, different than mine, but my mission statement, if it could be called anything that grand, would be to have those involved in such things to consider nothingness as the basis of existence.  The problem being that it might be almost impossible to imagine nothing – the elimination of all possible origins, the elimination of everything.  Unfortunately this leads into metaphysical areas, but I’m not at all sure whether that’s where all science will end up if we’re relentlessly logical.  Crazy idea, maybe, but when you’re 83 you get to say stuff like this.

[Klaynos]

13 hours ago, Ted Robinson said:

Re: Klaynos response: The smartest people work with entanglement as a scientific phenomenon, but I see its instantaneity as a tell that fundamental space-time doesn’t exist.  Thus the “unpicturable” nothingness that would deny any origin at all, which leads into metaphysical areas where real scientists prefer not to tred.  But this kind of theory does not lend itself mathematical quantifications of course.  Very incidentally, Mensa, ISPE and the Triple Nine Society differ in that the latter two limit their membership only to those who would qualify in the highest 5% of Mensans (99.9th vs. 98th percentile).

·    

This isn't a theory as modern physics would consider a theory. It's not even a hypothesis. We (the physics community) are working towards better mathematical models of cosmology. 

It's not incidental at all, it's completely irrelevant. 

[Area54]

Ted, I won't comment on your thoughts on nothing, as there would be nothing to say.

However, I shall challenge your (possibly self deprecating) remark that at 83 you don't have time to learn anything. I read recently of a researcher, a chemist, or biochemist, who at 103 was still publishing papers. I believe that gives you twenty years. Many people have packed an undergraduate, post-graduate and post doctoral career into twenty years. Just saying.

[Tub]

15 hours ago, Ted Robinson said:

  The problem being that it might be almost impossible to imagine nothing..........

......and, if i may add, by extension, " nowhere ". ( I'm assuming, perhaps mistakenly, that " something from nothing " includes " somewhere from nowhere " ).

It's easy to imagine " something " and " somewhere " as i can hold  "something " or go to/come from " somewhere ", but if i try to imagine " nowhere " or " nothing ", my poor brain just falls silent - is it possible to go to/come from " nowhere " and, if i put down my book, am i holding " nothing " in my hand?  And what about " never " and "none "? More questions than answers, sadly. In another thread, i suggested that " nothing " could be defined as that which has no  perceptible quality or quantity, so that's about as far as i can go for myself.

The only instance i know of " something " coming from " nothing " and " nowhere ", is Lewis Carroll's wise Cheshire Cat. As Alice said " Curiouser and curiouser ".

P.S. Who is your proof-reader, Ted? I have to admire your Orthography - defined, in Wikipedia, as " a set of conventions for writing, including norms of spelling, hyphenation,capitalization,word breaks. emphasis, and punctuation ". ( I bet you knew that already ). A lot of people, myself included, could learn from you - even at your age! 

[Ted Robinson]

First time I've heard the word Orthography, but no proof-reader needed.  One of my master's degrees is in journalism, and I was editor-in-chief of the UCLA Daily Bruin, etc., and so needed to discipline myself in the written word.  But as to real life, I spent most of it developing and acquiring real estate, mostly shopping centers, and became a zillionaire who now looks around for intellectual mischief to get into.  Happily so, having spent part of my adolescence with my Scottish immigrant family who during WWII needed to live in a converted chicken coop.

[hoola]

 Ted, my take on the question is that there was a void, and out of that void came chaos, from that came logic, from that came structured mathematics, from that came the this universe's description set, which accumulated in a singularity (a defacto ROM) for actualization of geometric reality within the mathematical bulk. Only when all the prior steps had been achieved (maturation), could the big bang (actualization) have happened . The starting "seed" information was that there was, and only could have been. 1 void....the only information possible to assign to the earliest situation, and marks the first appearance of  fundamental logic in the proto-universe. This "1" gave us the real numbers it's first identifier. The imaginary number system developed alongside the classic system, perhaps as a later manifestation due to it's more complex and foreign logic base, but both may have been present for maturation to allow the material universe to be sustainable. I also think it's possible that a math error or errors were made as the universe cobbled itself into existence, and that might explain the slight overabundance of matter over antimatter, and a possible reason for the "error correction" algorithm within the mathematics of QM (S. Gates).

Edited August 18, 2017 by hoola

[Ted Robinson]

Sorry for the delay in response.  Stuff gets in the way, but I actually didn’t understand the part about logic and structured mathematics coming out of chaos which then led into our universe’s description set.  Do understand the error-correction algorithm, how chaos could accumulate into a singularity and geometric reality.  Didn’t grasp what mathematical bulk, seed information, imaginary number system or first identifier are and am not sure how anthropomorphic (try saying that fast) words like logic and error can be applied to the universe.  In other words I pretty much got lost right after the words “there was a void” from which came chaos -- that part I get.  Age might be a factor here, though.  I need a nap.  Incidentally I notice that a number of submitters use the word “it’s” as the possessive form of “it,” which is like fingernails on a blackboard to namby-pamby nitpickers like myself.

[Mordred]

Ted there is an easy way to think of how QM treats spacetime.

The very minute you have a measurable volume, you have a field. A field is any collection of objects, events, coordinates etc. 

Under QM all fields have quantum fluctuations due to the Heisenburg uncertainty principle, so all fields will always have some energy potential.

In other words any measurable volume isn't nothing but contains the potential to perform work.

The word void doesn't exist in physics. One cannot have any volume that doesn't have some potential to perform work.

Edited August 20, 2017 by Mordred

[Strange]

23 hours ago, Ted Robinson said:

Sorry for the delay in response.  Stuff gets in the way, but I actually didn’t understand the part about logic and structured mathematics coming out of chaos which then led into our universe’s description set.  Do understand the error-correction algorithm, how chaos could accumulate into a singularity and geometric reality.  Didn’t grasp what mathematical bulk, seed information, imaginary number system or first identifier are and am not sure how anthropomorphic (try saying that fast) words like logic and error can be applied to the universe.  In other words I pretty much got lost right after the words “there was a void” from which came chaos -- that part I get.  Age might be a factor here, though.  I need a nap.  Incidentally I notice that a number of submitters use the word “it’s” as the possessive form of “it,” which is like fingernails on a blackboard to namby-pamby nitpickers like myself.

I don't think this is your age or lack of intelligence. I think that hole just posted a lot of incoherent nonsense. (And the stuff about "error correcting codes in QM" is just numerology. Or some other pseudo-science.)

[StringJunky]

On 19/08/2017 at 5:18 PM, Ted Robinson said:

 Incidentally I notice that a number of submitters use the word “it’s” as the possessive form of “it,” which is like fingernails on a blackboard to namby-pamby nitpickers like myself.

It's its.

[Lord Antares]

25 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

It's its.

He knows, he said ''it's'' was wrong.

[zapatos]

On 8/19/2017 at 11:18 AM, Ted Robinson said:

 Incidentally I notice that a number of submitters use the word “it’s” as the possessive form of “it,” which is like fingernails on a blackboard to namby-pamby nitpickers like myself.

Shouldn't the comma have been placed outside the quotes?

[DrKrettin]

4 minutes ago, zapatos said:

Shouldn't the comma have been placed outside the quotes?

Yes

[Tub]

Just now, zapatos said:

Shouldn't the comma have been placed outside the quotes?

I always thought so too, but i checked " quotation marks " on this great website and Ted's right. 

http://www.grammarbook.com/

 

[StringJunky]

25 minutes ago, Lord Antares said:

He knows, he said ''it's'' was wrong.

I was being humorous, I thought, by using two homonyms together.

[DrKrettin]

1 hour ago, Tub said:

I always thought so too, but i checked " quotation marks " on this great website and Ted's right. 

 

I disagree

[Tub]

6 hours ago, Tub said:

 To clarify: zapatos thought that Ted's use of a comma inside quotation marks was wrong -  he thought the comma should have been on the outside. I thought so too, but checked the grammarbook.com website which agreed with Ted's usage so i said Ted was right .......     

 

 

5 hours ago, DrKrettin said:

I disagree

.........and you may also be right, DrK. That website is an American website and, though its Rule 4 on quotation marks says that periods/full stops and commas etc.always go inside quotation marks, it adds a caveat that other countries use different conventions so Ted, in America was correct; if you're in a different country you are correct too, if you go by those different rules. Everybody's happy.  

http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/quotes.asp

Just to get back on topic, may i quote Oscar Wilde?  " I love to talk about nothing. It's the only thing i know anything about ". (Punctuated in England).

Edited August 21, 2017 by Tub
Wrong punctuation, lol.

[DrKrettin]

8 hours ago, Tub said:

Just to get back on topic, may i quote Oscar Wilde?  " I love to talk about nothing. It's the only thing i know anything about ". (Punctuated in England).

But not, unfortunately, with English use of uppercase letters. 

[Tub]

57 minutes ago, DrKrettin said:

But not, unfortunately, with English use of uppercase letters. 

Ha,Ha,Ha. Mea culpa.   

[StringJunky]

23 minutes ago, Tub said:

Ha,Ha,Ha. Mea culpa.   

Shift key needs cleaning underneath. I had to do mine yesterday.

Edited August 21, 2017 by StringJunky

[Tub]

1 hour ago, StringJunky said:

Shift key needs cleaning underneath. I had to do mine yesterday.

Yes, that must have been my problem too,otherwise i wouldn't have made any mistakes at all. Thanks for clearing that up, SJ - i feel completely exonerated now, lol.

[DrKrettin]

5 hours ago, Tub said:

Yes, that must have been my problem too,otherwise ... 

The spacebar could do with a good clean as well. 

Edited August 21, 2017 by DrKrettin