I’ve read some interesting books in my time, assuming — of course — that “time” actually exists. As we pondered in my column — Is Time Truly an Illusion? — “Did time exist before the Big Bang, was time an emergent property of the Big Bang, is time just something that keeps everything from happening at once, or does time as a fundamental property simply not exist at all?”
The thing is that, if I’m following the arguments correctly, the majority of today’s physicists don’t believe in time as an independent, fundamental property or quality of the universe. In fact, it now appears that there really isn’t such a thing as space that “contains” things, and there isn’t really such a thing as time during the course of which events occur, all of which makes me think of the play on words, “Quarks, the dreams that stuff is made of.”
Sadly, much like Pooh Bear, I fear I am a bear of little brain. Happily, there are people with far bigger brains who are doing the heavy lifting with regard to questions of this ilk. For example, I just heard from the guys and gals at the University of Kansas (KU for short) that a research team led by Daniel Tapia Takaki, associate professor of physics and astronomy, has joined the ALICE experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
CERN, of course, is a European research organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world, with the participation of 1,927 members from 39 countries and 174 institutions. ALICE, an acronym standing for “A Large Ion Collider Experiment,” is one of the largest LHC projects (other programs include ATLAS, CMS, FASER, LHCb, MoEDAL, and TOTEM).
With regards to ALICE, Daniel says, “It was originally designed to answer the question, ‘What happens when the most dense and hottest matter waves of lead ions interact with each other?’ Tackling this question implies studying the primordial hot and dense matter of quarks and gluons, known as the quark gluon plasma, that is thought to have existed a few microseconds after the Big Bang.”
Daniel goes on to say, “We’ve been preparing experiments to observe fine features of the ‘glue’ that binds quarks and gluons together, to understand fundamental questions such as why quark and gluons are never found as free matter waves – a phenomenon called confinement.”
Funnily enough, I was FaceTiming with my mother about just this topic only the other day. Of course, communication with one’s mother can be a funny old thing on occasion. The question she actually asked was, “Did you comb your hair this morning before you came into work?” Reading between the lines, however, I could tell that what she was really wondering was, “Why are quarks and gluons never found as free matter waves?”
This is certainly something I’ve been pondering myself for quite some time, so let’s hope that Daniel and his team come up with the answers to these questions. I’m really hoping that we will discover whether or not space and time exist, or if we are merely bubbles in a sea of quantum foam, while I still have a corporeal presence in this plane of existance. Of course, if you already know the answers to these questions — or have any other thoughts on this topic — please feel free to share them with the rest of us in the comments below.
Although I am ignorant when it comes to a quark or gluon (never met one of them), when I stand back and consider the infinite universe, I do believe it is infinitely large and infinitely small. In the future, the research will be to understand all the hypothetical elements of today. At what point will the obsession to discover and understand the behavior infinitesimal elements stop? Will humans be willing to accept that at some point the research cannot possibly result in anything practical, and when they do, will they stop the research and call their mom to talk about the important things in the their personal life?
This is an interesting question — there have been many occasions when people have claimed we’ve discovered everything there is to discover — just before someone discovered something huge and new. On the one hand I wish we knew everything there is to know — on the other hand I’m glad that there is still so much mystery out there.
Maybe the continued research will lead to teleportation – imagine, we could get rid of all planes, trains, and automobiles. I would support that. Maybe it will lead to time travel – not a big fan of that though; however, I was just thinking today that it might be useful choose to go back in time once each day (back 10 minutes) to undo something stupid I said or did. That should have a positive effect on the universe and my relationship with my wife.
I’m currently reading “How to Invent Everything (A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler)” that is pretty interesting: https://www.amazon.com/dp/073522014X
If you time travel, do you need an COVID mask?
That’s a really good question — the problem about time traveling at the moment is that you could take COVID-19 back with you and decimate the past — but that goes for all sorts of modern pathogens — also, there may be pathogens back or forward in time that could negatively affect you — so, on the hole I think wearing a time-traveling mask is a good move if not a fashion statement.
Since we only “exist” in a simulation, the concepts of space and time are just variables in the simulation program. I don’t know how the variables are defined, i.e. number of bits (qubits?). If the number of bits is less than infinity, then we at least will know when the simulation ends. For us simulated meat bags, simple 32-bit variables defining time and space are way more than adequate for our puny life spans. As an aside, for a variety of reasons I suspect my avatar is being run on a Timex Sinclair. Sadly, the NumberOfHairFolicles variable is maybe 8 bits, at best.
Oooh — that’s a thought — maybe I could increase the value stored in my NumberOfHairFolicles variable. And, while I’m doing that, maybe there are some other variables whose values could benefit from a little tweaking.