grain of salt
Having completed all of my assessments for uni for this session, I can now sleep, watch television, read books and do a variety of other inane tasks without feeling as though my use of time could be more "efficient". In fact, since each waking moment of mine is no longer subject to hard-line time management, I was able to lie in bed watching Minority Report last night.
For me, it was an interesting coincidence that Minority Report happened to be showing, because I had recently been thinking about predictions of the future. Wouldn't it be cool to make, accurate, scientifically sound predictions concerning tomorrow's NBA draft? If that sounds odd, I was only thinking about this stuff because I was thinking about photons... if that too sounds odd, I was only thinking about photons because photons will play a particularly important practical role in my thesis which I've been thinking too much about lately...
Since I'm now sounding like a complete geek (at least I don't play Dungeons and Dragons, Herman), I guess I may as well explain. When Einstein was first getting into the scientific scene, everybody "knew" that light was a form of wave motion involving changing electric and magnetic fields. The work that Einstein received his Nobel Prize for (which set things in motion for the scientific world to be turned on its head) suggested that that light actually comes in definite packets, or quanta, and that light is not a continuous wave. These quanta of light are known as photons.
One particularly interesting thing about these photons is that time has no meaning for them. Relativity theory tells us that each individual has his/her own personal measure of time, depending on how fast he/she is moving. Moving clocks run slow, and the closer they get to the speed of light, the slower they go. Since photons move at the speed of light, time stands still for them. So, thinking about these photons and counter-intuitive facts about time naturally led to my thinking about the possibility of looking into the past or the future.
A lot's been made of the fact that Einstein's general theory of relativity can allow for time travel to occur. General relativity implies that there is a "curving" of space, and that there are different rates of time flow in different parts of the universe depending on the gravitational fields within the universe. Without going into the details, if you push Einstein's equations to the limit and take a look at black holes, the distortions of space and time caused by these things could let someone travel through time provided the technology to manipulate black holes were available. Though this sort of macroscopic level time travel does sound fascinating, it would be very difficult to achieve and is still very much a part of science fiction.
What can't be denied is that the general theory of relativity forces us to realize that our intuitive understanding of the world as a three-dimensional space in which there is a linear flow of time is only based on our limited experience of the physical world. Things called "space-time diagrams" can be used in relativistic physics to picture the interaction between various sub-atomic particles. An analysis of these diagrams tells us that particle interactions can be pictured as the same process evolving in different directions through time, and that the different interpretations are mathematically identical. It is believed that our everyday experience of the flow of time is linked to the expansion of the universe from a hotter to a cooler state.
So, to toy with time, do we need to be able to warp space-time, or travel at near light speed? Or is it possible to move beyond our everyday experience of time via other means? Listen to Buddhists, or most Eastern mystics in general, and you might just think so.
Going back to Minority Report, without reading too much into the movie it was interesting to see how it seemed natural that some people would deify the precogs in the story. It seems that we associate anything that extends beyond our everyday experience of the world with divinity. Buddhists aim to move beyond the suffering and frustrations of the everyday human situation, with the direct mystical experience of reality as the final goal. Could the modern scientific description of reality be the same reality described by Buddhists?
Louis De Broglie described our experience of space-time from the standpoint of moden physics as follows:
In space-time, everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the present, and the future is given en bloc ... Each observer, as his time passes, discovers, so to speak, new slices of space-time which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble of events constituting space-time exist prior to his knowledge of them.
Compare this to the following description concerning Buddhist meditation by Lama Govinda, and the parallels seem uncanny:
If we speak of the space experience in meditation, we are dealing with an entirely different dimension ... In this space-experience the temporal sequence is converted into a simultaneous co-existence, the side by side existence of things ... and this does not remain static but becomes a living continuum in which time and space are integrated.
Having mentioned all of that, would it be completely out of the question to suggest that through meditation practices, a state of mind can be achieved in which information regarding future events can be obtained? Though performing meditation for such purposes is completely frivolous and plays no part in the Buddha's precribed path towards the state of Buddhahood, such practices have indeed been perfomed. The physical manifestations (e.g. EEG) of the cognitive processes achieved during these meditation practices have been able to be manipulated in a manner such that visual images from the future are able to be generated. Though the precise means by which these manipulations are undertaken have been heavily guarded by researchers, several such images have been released to the public. The following image is of a newspaper article concerning one of the opening games from next year's NBA season:
As you can see, from this image it looks as though the Bucks are going to make Andrew Bogut the number one draft pick (and it also looks as though Phil Jackson won't quite cease his little jabs at Kobe Bryant). It should be noted that by having this image released to the public, the notion of free will heavily comes into play, which could end up producing a future different to the worldline suggested by the image. In fact, the predictions of the future from the generated image could be more accurately described as a description of a future reality, in which the details specified by the newspaper article have a good chance of taking place in this worldline. I won't go into the philosophical debates surrounding this line of reasoning in too much detail, but it basically involves Hugh Everett's Many World's Theory.
For me, it was an interesting coincidence that Minority Report happened to be showing, because I had recently been thinking about predictions of the future. Wouldn't it be cool to make, accurate, scientifically sound predictions concerning tomorrow's NBA draft? If that sounds odd, I was only thinking about this stuff because I was thinking about photons... if that too sounds odd, I was only thinking about photons because photons will play a particularly important practical role in my thesis which I've been thinking too much about lately...
Since I'm now sounding like a complete geek (at least I don't play Dungeons and Dragons, Herman), I guess I may as well explain. When Einstein was first getting into the scientific scene, everybody "knew" that light was a form of wave motion involving changing electric and magnetic fields. The work that Einstein received his Nobel Prize for (which set things in motion for the scientific world to be turned on its head) suggested that that light actually comes in definite packets, or quanta, and that light is not a continuous wave. These quanta of light are known as photons.
One particularly interesting thing about these photons is that time has no meaning for them. Relativity theory tells us that each individual has his/her own personal measure of time, depending on how fast he/she is moving. Moving clocks run slow, and the closer they get to the speed of light, the slower they go. Since photons move at the speed of light, time stands still for them. So, thinking about these photons and counter-intuitive facts about time naturally led to my thinking about the possibility of looking into the past or the future.
A lot's been made of the fact that Einstein's general theory of relativity can allow for time travel to occur. General relativity implies that there is a "curving" of space, and that there are different rates of time flow in different parts of the universe depending on the gravitational fields within the universe. Without going into the details, if you push Einstein's equations to the limit and take a look at black holes, the distortions of space and time caused by these things could let someone travel through time provided the technology to manipulate black holes were available. Though this sort of macroscopic level time travel does sound fascinating, it would be very difficult to achieve and is still very much a part of science fiction.
What can't be denied is that the general theory of relativity forces us to realize that our intuitive understanding of the world as a three-dimensional space in which there is a linear flow of time is only based on our limited experience of the physical world. Things called "space-time diagrams" can be used in relativistic physics to picture the interaction between various sub-atomic particles. An analysis of these diagrams tells us that particle interactions can be pictured as the same process evolving in different directions through time, and that the different interpretations are mathematically identical. It is believed that our everyday experience of the flow of time is linked to the expansion of the universe from a hotter to a cooler state.
So, to toy with time, do we need to be able to warp space-time, or travel at near light speed? Or is it possible to move beyond our everyday experience of time via other means? Listen to Buddhists, or most Eastern mystics in general, and you might just think so.
Going back to Minority Report, without reading too much into the movie it was interesting to see how it seemed natural that some people would deify the precogs in the story. It seems that we associate anything that extends beyond our everyday experience of the world with divinity. Buddhists aim to move beyond the suffering and frustrations of the everyday human situation, with the direct mystical experience of reality as the final goal. Could the modern scientific description of reality be the same reality described by Buddhists?
Louis De Broglie described our experience of space-time from the standpoint of moden physics as follows:
In space-time, everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the present, and the future is given en bloc ... Each observer, as his time passes, discovers, so to speak, new slices of space-time which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble of events constituting space-time exist prior to his knowledge of them.
Compare this to the following description concerning Buddhist meditation by Lama Govinda, and the parallels seem uncanny:
If we speak of the space experience in meditation, we are dealing with an entirely different dimension ... In this space-experience the temporal sequence is converted into a simultaneous co-existence, the side by side existence of things ... and this does not remain static but becomes a living continuum in which time and space are integrated.
Having mentioned all of that, would it be completely out of the question to suggest that through meditation practices, a state of mind can be achieved in which information regarding future events can be obtained? Though performing meditation for such purposes is completely frivolous and plays no part in the Buddha's precribed path towards the state of Buddhahood, such practices have indeed been perfomed. The physical manifestations (e.g. EEG) of the cognitive processes achieved during these meditation practices have been able to be manipulated in a manner such that visual images from the future are able to be generated. Though the precise means by which these manipulations are undertaken have been heavily guarded by researchers, several such images have been released to the public. The following image is of a newspaper article concerning one of the opening games from next year's NBA season:
As you can see, from this image it looks as though the Bucks are going to make Andrew Bogut the number one draft pick (and it also looks as though Phil Jackson won't quite cease his little jabs at Kobe Bryant). It should be noted that by having this image released to the public, the notion of free will heavily comes into play, which could end up producing a future different to the worldline suggested by the image. In fact, the predictions of the future from the generated image could be more accurately described as a description of a future reality, in which the details specified by the newspaper article have a good chance of taking place in this worldline. I won't go into the philosophical debates surrounding this line of reasoning in too much detail, but it basically involves Hugh Everett's Many World's Theory.
posted by Gene at 3:14 pm
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