Member Steffen
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“The mathematical answer to the universe is derived from the most fundamental of understandings, mathematically speaking, that even a child could understand. It is also extremely anti-climactic. [1] and [0] cannot occupy the same space, because [1] ≠ [0]. [1] > [0], and ∞ lies between those two end points. The universe is attempting to resolve a mathematical conflict that has no resolution. [1]/[0]=universe. And that’s why we’re here.
In mathematics, curiously, [1]/[0]=undefined.”
The distance between 0 and 1 is not infinite, it is exactly 1. You can fit arbitrarily many subdivisions in there, sure, but that does not make the distance infinite. Unless you’re saying everything is always infinite, at which point, the term loses all meaning. And saying the universe is attempting to resolve a maths problem is a bit silly. Either 1) the universe was not created by an intelligent being, and is materialistic only, in which case mathematical problems are not first class entities, so the universe is not trying to resolve a numeric division; or 2) the universe was created by an intelligent being, and it is created logically and meaningfully. Except you insist on 3) it was created by an intelligent being as a computer to solve the division 1/0, which is quite frankly silly. Why would attempting to solve 1/0 give rise to humans, and create matter?
Before framing the universe as a mathematical problem, you should examine whether your preconceived notion of numbers and what division means, and of infinity, and how all these concepts relate to each other. Because at the moment, this all sounds like esoteric kabbalah. Especially saying something like “the universe is attempting to“, you are opening a can of worms in metaphysics. You are ascribing not just meaning to the universerse, but also consciousness and will. If you have a conscious universe which possesses a will, then I wonder why you dismiss an omniscient and omnipotent creator (evident from the way you talk about it and the claims you arrive at). I find it much saner to see the universe as dead in all cases, and either then say it was intentionally created by God or it was not created, but eternally exists. But in both cases, the universe itself should remain non-sentient and therefore not possess agency or will of its own.
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You understood that analog and discrete/digital systems are incompatible, yet you use 1/0 or “infinity” to describe motion. Division is derived from discrete problems. Analog situations cannot be put into numeric representations. So why even use the terms 1 and 0 and why refer to division? It makes no sense whatsoever. “Binary” is not the opposite of analog. Binary either refers to a base-2 number system, or a two-state/two-category system. Discrete is the opposite of analog.
I don’t get why you use conventional mathematical notation to talk about anything analog in a way that sounds like you’re not just talking about approximations. It would be much better if you came up with terms that exactly mean what you’re trying to convey. Maybe even come up with a mathematical notation for analogs. Because just referring back to the current mainstream math system and its concepts of 1) division, 2) numbers, and 3) infinity, you write something that means something completely different from what you’re trying to say. Infinite means unending. Number is etymologically related to counting. So infinite numbers or amounts or counts of something (waves, in your example), are an oxymoron.
I get that maths is convenient to use, but even just talking about numbers and infinities without setting up a proper framework first, especially in a context where discrete numbers are out of place, makes no sense. Either you reject discrete numbers for your physics and stop using them, or you are forced to use infinitesimals, but then you can’t use 0.
I’m sure analog mathematics systems could be established, and would probably be quite appropriate for modeling space and time. But they would be fundamentally different from our current mathematical system, I assume.
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Update: I previously didn’t consider that the forces themselves also seem to be acting with a speed of ±c respective to the emitter of the force, otherwise, it would not account for the speed limit of c on accelerators that pull particles instead of pushing them. So, the previous formula for the Doppler effect should only affect the field density, but not the effectiveness of the force applied to a particle.
A force moving with speed v acts upon an object moving with speed w with effectiveness e=(v-w)/v = (1-w/v). This means for faster velocities w>v, it has a negative effectiveness and slows down the object towards v. Thus, the new formula for the force applied to a particle should now be:
F = F'·f·e = F'·|1-v/c|·(1-v/c) = F'·±(1-v/c)²
where f=|1-v/c| is the perceived frequency/density of the field waves, and F’ is the original force/intensity of the force field, and e=(1-v/c) is the effectiveness of the applied force at the particle’s current relative velocity. The frequency is now an absolute value, since negative frequencies aren’t really possible, and the reversed force effect is now sufficiently described by the new term e.
The implication of this new formula would be that particles always are accelerated/decelerated towards ±c with respect to the force emitter.
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Hello Alexey,
I am new to all this, but what suggests the Earth is gaining mass? I do not think that even if it is expanding, it also has to be gaining mass in order to do so. After all, there could be things going on inside the Earth’s core that just lower the Earth’s density, thereby bloat it. Like bread dough that bloats on its own.
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Hello, Andy,
I’m new to this forum and I haven’t read all of this thread yet, but I noticed you treated space as if it was an object that could move, and contract, and not as a virtual thing/concept. How did you arrive at this assumption? I would like if you could clarify whether you are referring to the same concept as I do with that word.
To me, space, like time, is not a physical object. Rather, everything in existence has a location. Locations are not physical objects, but rather properties thereof. Space is merely the generalisation of all possible locations. It is a generalisation of properties, and not an object itself. This is why it has to be infinite, because the property of location is not conceptually limited to any range of (absolute) values.
To me, what you are referring to as space does seem more like something physical that permeates all of what I refer to as space, like a field, which assigns every part of space (as I mean it) a state of vacuum or matter (I’m over-simplifying things here for brevity), or maybe something which could be called an aether (although I am in no way familiar with other theories that use this name) which can take the form of vacuum or matter. I don’t think space (as I understand it) can move or stretch or contract, as it is nothing more than a coordinate system. However, if there is a field that permeates all of space, that should be able to move, contract, etc.
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To be more precise, my main point of contention against infinite levels of detail downwards in scale is that if you can always physically divide something into two halves, and you did that forever, you would arrive at potentially infinitely many mini-grains of sand from a single initial grain of sand. I must say I find the threshold explanation of photon emission pretty good, in that it unloads multiple units of light at once, and only does so once it overflows, instead of a single photon which is in multiple locations at once. But I would still insist that you can’t arbitrarily split a single luminous discharge from a single atom into arbitrarily many light particles. There should still be a finite number of them, and each of those “photons” should be indivisible. Because otherwise, even finite amounts of matter are made out of infinitely fine-grained “dust”, in infinite quantities. From a programming viewpoint, it simply makes no sense to require infinite amounts of data to represent the contents of a finite chunk of space (the position and velocity of each infinitesimal particle within that space).
Either I misunderstood David de Hilster when he spoke about it, and he just means there are probably multiple additional levels of finer scale to the universe that we do not yet know of, or he really means infinite subdivision of every particle exists, and everything is a compound particle of sorts. But you cannot have an infinite chain downwards of everything being compounded of something even smaller, like an infinite matroska doll, or at least it defies my imagination.
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It would be much more meaningful if he said what he meant using terms that are related to what he means. Because showing that between two values, you can always construct a value that lies between those, means nothing except that ratios can achieve arbitrary precision. No metaphysical insight about the nature of existence directly follows from that, at least for me.
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That is why I said: “I can easily accept that space has no boundaries, because space is the potential for the position of things.” The same goes for time. There is no reason to believe for time to be bounded (at least into the future — I find it hard to imagine time as not having a definite starting point, especially as a Christian it makes little sense to me, but it’s also immaterial whether there was or was not a definite start of time). So I fully agree that time and space should be infinite, or unending. Space is not an physical object in itself. So there is no reason why it should have a boundary.
My problem with infinite space as often proposed here is that it is often assumed to contain infinite fractal structures that have infinite size and infinite levels detail as you “zoom in”. That “the void” has no boundaries is perfectly reasonable to me as I do not think the void is a thing to begin with, and just like I initially came to disagree with Einstein because I refuse to believe that a void can be bent or distorted, I also think that everything by necessity has to exist within an infinite void, unless it is somehow looping around on itself or something, which is also absurd.
“I don’t know of anything that could prevent them going on forever. You might have referred to numbers which apply only to physical phenomena, for instance, instead of the abstract features of time and space.”
If you had a clock and started counting time, forever, you would never actually arrive at an infinite number. You would always be able to add another revolution of the clock to the count. So in that sense, infinity is again, just expressing the ability of time or space to contain arbitrarily large (but finite) values.
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I somehow cannot edit my previous post, so here is the edited version I was trying to make (I don’t really like the forum software of this website, it also gives me errors when I try to comment on people’s posts in the timeline):
Regarding semantics, I hope to one day create a real artificial intelligence that is not based on neurons, but on a large knowledge base, using deductive reasoning, statistical analysis, and other methods to answer a scientific query. Modern AI is basically a fuzzy and heavily compressed representation of knowledge, and it does not know exactly where it has its knowledge from, and also does not know nuance. Modern AIs are known to make up unfounded bullshit and only admit that once you really start digging into the reasons for why they made some claim. AIs can also be convinced of anything being true or false (besides hardcoded political viewpoints). I think a real computer intelligence must not accept that. It must insist on what it knows to be true, and reject what it can prove to be false. It should give confidence levels for answers and make its entire thought process inspectable to the user.
I hope to have basically an interactive encyclopedia of curated knowledge that can cross-reference itself in queries and try to solve questions about that knowledge base, outputting all the assumptions it made, all the data it used, every inferrence step it made, etc. to arrive at the given answer. Of course, such a system is only as good as the data you feed into it, but if you have a proper computer-compatible representation of knowledge, you can use it to make inter-disciplinary inquiries, and maybe even have the system look for conflicting data or weak points in claims made in its sources.
However, such a system is not suitable for conversations or image generation or anything like that, it would be more like a librarian or something. And since search engines have all been going down the drain, I think that would be a good alternative project.
And I think this maths project may just lay the perfect foundation for representing knowledge and reasoning about it in an unambiguous way, which is vital because the computer cannot handle ambiguities. So I will probably also have to add a relational reasoning discipline to my maths system, which handles not just boolean logic, but also concepts, hierarchies of concepts, properties of things, relationships between things, etc. It is probably impossible to extend this to handle arbitrary thoughts and concepts, since the computer has to learn all the consequences of a relationship between things. For example “Cain killed Abel” has many implications about both of them, and cannot just be viewed as an isolated fact. It implies the death and ceasing of Abel, for example. If I allowed arbitrary facts in my system, it would probably quickly lose its ability to reason correctly, as it could not draw all the relevant conclusions from the descriptions it has been given. So this encyclopedia is probably going to be purely about technical knowledge, and adding new concepts it can understand becomes increasingly complex.
Maybe I can come up with a system of unfinished chains of reasonings, though, which can at any time try to interconnect facts more and more. It will have to know which facts are relevant to something, though. But such a system would be able to learn a bit each time it is asked something new that it can answer. So, instead of a general or creative intelligence, I think the only intelligence computers should have is purely rational, and take established curated knowledge from humans as axioms, instead of trying to replicate full human intelligence.
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Regarding semantics, I hope to one day create a real artificial intelligence that is not based on neurons, but on a large knowledge base, using deductive reasoning, statistical analysis, and other methods to answer a scientific query. Modern AI is basically a fuzzy and heavily compressed representation of knowledge, and it does not know exactly where it has its knowledge from, and also does not know nuance. Modern AIs are known to make up unfounded bullshit and only admit that once you really start digging into the reasons for why they made some claim. AIs can also be convinced of anything being true or false (besides hardcoded political viewpoints). I think a real computer intelligence must not accept that. It must insist on what it knows to be true, and reject what it can prove to be false. It should give confidence levels for answers and make its entire thought process inspectable to the user.
I hope to have basically an interactive encyclopedia of curated knowledge that can cross-reference itself in queries and try to solve questions about that knowledge base, outputting all the assumptions it made, all the data it used, every inferrence step it made, etc. to arrive at the given answer. Of course, such a system is only as good as the data you feed into it, but if you have a proper computer-compatible representation of knowledge, you can use it to make inter-disciplinary inquiries, and maybe even have the system look for conflicting data or weak points in claims made in its sources.
However, such a system is not suitable for conversations or image generation or anything like that, it would be more like a librarian or something. And since search engines have all been going down the drain, I think that would be a good alternative project.
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Hey Jerry, thanks for the reply!
Yes! Mathematicians readily admit that they are unable to define what a number is. They mean multiple things by that, sometimes simultaneously: 1) The count of something. 2) A location on the number line. 3) a notation 4) the application of a mathematical function or formula 5) the result of the application of a mathematical function or formula 6) the limit of an infinite series. And probably many more things. Their mathematics is by now completely detached from its foundations, it’s a castle of ideas floating in the sky.
And of course their Platonism is not helpful either. In Plato’s idea realm, everything that can be imagined, exists independently of any observer. So the metaphysics of modern mathematicians is that they are merely peering into this other realm which is absolutely real, and no matter how absurd the things they define are, they are real in that world. Like negative numbers, imaginary numbers, and the even more weird number systems they came up with.
The proper mathematical metaphysics is that you are using your mind to describe concepts and representations of real things, and reason about the real world using your calculations. So using imaginary numbers and 4D spacetime, which are perfectly acceptable to exist within Plato’s realm, to describe the real world, is entirely inadequate. The wikipedia articles on mathematical constructivism, inuitionism, and formalism are very interesting to see just how fundamental the departure from reality and pracitcality is in modern maths. I don’t quite agree with intuitionists, though, as they say you cannot claim “a or (not a) = true” unless you know a. That line of thought completely denies categorical reasoning, which is too strict of a limitation, as categorical reasoning is required to even invent maths. But I still think that finitist, constructivist mathematics should be the core of everything, because we are finite beings.
I know a lot of folks here believe in a fractal universe, but I cannot accept that. Having infninite detail means you have within each finite chunk of space, infinite information worth of matter, which interacts among itself in infinitely detailed ways. I don’t think God has created a universe that has infinite^2 or more complexity. Unless God has more than infinite ability to think. At which point the words we use lose all meaning.
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@David I have to agree that it sounds most plausible that light “waves” are just periodically recurring clusters of emitted photon particles. The wavelength would be the time the emitting material needs to accumulate energy before it can emit a new photon particle. After all, the material loses excess energy when emitting light. The ability of the material to absorb external energy and expel internal energy should determine the frequency of emitted photons.
For example, cold materials emit infrared light, while hot materials emit visible red or even higher frequency light. The hotter a material is, the less energy it needs to absorb externally before emitting more photons, because its internal heat energy is also converted into energy usable for photon emission.
A wave would also be unable to transfer momentum, even if it were a longitudinal wave, as a wave passing through somewhere always reverts things to their initial position after affecting them. Thus, solar sails would be impossible using popular light waves.