Category: Life and the Universe

I told some people about my assumption that the speed of light is not constant, and one of them agreed that it might not always be constant for quantum particles, but the average speed of light in empty space is constant. But my question is – what is empty space? Can complete empty space really exist? Does quantum mechanics allow it? And if not – do all areas of space have the same level of emptiness? Do they all have the same average level of emptiness? Does the level of emptiness remain constant in time?

It appears to me that the level of emptiness (and the average level of emptiness) of space cannot be constant for all spaces in all times. Einstein’s relativity says that if one travels close to the speed of light, space shrinks in one direction. Since I assume complete empty space is not possible, at least not on the macroscopic level, at least not in this part of the world, then it appears to me that when space shrinks, the level of emptiness changes too, and the speed of light will not be the same as before?

What happens when one travels very close to the speed of light? Is it really possible to travel 20 million light years in less than one second? If someone travels that fast, how will it affect the speed of light? Space will definitely shrink, become more condensed, and we know that the speed of light in water is slower. Will he see the speed of light as a different speed in different directions? Will the speed of light in his direction become slower for him? And how will this affect Einstein’s formulas, such as E = mc²? Will they be affected too?

And what happens when galaxies drift away from each other? Is more space created between them? Is it emptier than before, or are new quantum particles created too? It appears to me that our perception of space and time are created by our definition of entropy, which is the level of uncertainty of what we know and don’t know. Is the average speed of light constant by definition, or can it be affected too? Can one be at more than one places in space at the same time? Can simultaneous events happen? Is it possible to change the past, go back and choose another future? I really don’t know.

Michelson and Morley didn’t check this. The speed of Earth is much lower than the speed of light as we perceive it, space seems to have the same level of emptiness in any direction. The speed of light, as they perceived it, was almost constant. Einstein concluded there is no aether. But Einstein believed in determinism. He didn’t like to think about God playing dice. Since determinism leads to a contradiction, Einstein’s relativity is not fully consistent. His conclusion may appear to contradict itself. Aether may appear to exist.

What happens when a photon moves from one place to another, for example in the double-slit experiment? It seems that the universe splits to two separate universes (or more generally speaking, to an infinite number of universes), each of them contains one possible option, and then merges again into one universe. When a universe splits, each universe will contain a photon who will remember its past but will not be aware of the other photons in the other universes. When universes merge, the photon will remember a combination of pasts and not only one past. Universes split and merge all the time. In areas of spacetime where there are more splits than merges, spacetime and entropy increase in time. In areas of spacetime where there are more merges than splits, spacetime and entropy decrease (and time goes “backwards”).

For any two given events in spacetime, the question whether one of them happened before the other one doesn’t have a deterministic answer – it depends who you’re asking. Deterministic logic proves itself to be inconsistent, so I will use nondeterministic logic, which can be seen as probabilistic logic too. Any two events in spacetime in any two universes can merge and become one universe, no matter how far they seem to us according to our imperfect logic. Illogical things appear to exist as well (of course, it depends how we define “illogical”). The speed of light is not constant, and therefore can be any speed. Light can go forward in time, or backward, or be at two places simultaneously.

Spacetime and entropy are just illusions. Imperfect assumptions. Everything can happen, and everything does. The number of universes is infinite. It is not a number, it’s a perception. All the universes can be interconnected sometimes, sometimes not. Other galaxies might be our galaxy from different angles or in the past or more generally speaking in different areas of spacetime. It’s like entering a room full of mirrors, and see infinite images of yourself from different angles. You can’t look too far, because light fades and some images are hiding other, more distant images.

Spacetime and entropy are how we perceive reality. We define “past” as the direction where there is more order, according to our perception, and therefore we can “remember” things in the past. The future is things we don’t remember, we don’t know for sure. But we can still make assumptions, and if we look at the past, we will see that some past assumptions appear to be true (according to our imperfect logic). There is no one past and one future, the number one (or any number) as a constant number doesn’t exist. The numbers of pasts and futures change all the time. In the future we will find out that some of our assumptions were true, some not, or actually – we will find out that any assumption is true or not.

The concept of “I”, as a single entity, doesn’t exist. There is no one “I” in the past, nor in the present, nor in the future too. There are infinitely many of them. If I met you tomorrow and then meet you again today, neither you nor I are the same people. We share some memories, some memories we don’t. But since we live in an area of spacetime where entropy appears to increase in time (that’s how we define time) and spacetime doesn’t shrink or expand too quickly, we find out that most of the time deterministic logic works well. Contradictions appear to be rare, although they do exist. Some people say they saw things which appear to be illogical. Nothing is illogical. Everything is possible in nondeterministic logic. Everything can exist.

Space, time and the speed of light are created by the entropy assumption – the assumption that particles are separate entities and therefore interact with each other in a probabilistic way. Their decisions are assumed to be independent, and this is true most of the time. But if two events in space are connected and occur at the same time (according to our definition of space and time), the speed of light between them can be infinite. When this happens, entropy decreases and we go backward in time.

Actually, the direction we go in time is not “forward” or “backward” but the number of directions is infinite. There are no roads not taken – we take all roads. When an object travels in spacetime, his time goes in a different direction than ours. Since nothing is deterministic, when he comes back he might remember things we do not. He might even see us in future – one of the futures – but there are many possible futures. Our future might turn out to be different than his.

The theory of relativity predicts that the speed of light in empty space is constant. Physical experiments, such as the famous Michelson–Morley experiment, confirm this. However, consider a theoretical experiment such as the double-slit experiment, built in such a way that there is a difference in distance between the two possible paths. According to Richard Feynman’s path integral formulation, or sum-over-paths, a quantum of light (a photon) can’t be seen as passing through one of the slits or the other, but both of them at once. Therefore, it will be considered as passing through two different distances at the same time, inevitably leading to a conclusion that the speed of light is not constant. This is what I call the paradox of the speed of light.

Why haven’t we seen this in experiments? I think because of the nature of light and the way we perceive it, its speed is always perceived as very close to a constant value, due to the probabilistic nature of waves in general, and the electromagnetic wave in particular. One of the reasons is because we always measure the speed of light for long distances, while what I describe is relevant to the tiny distances related to quantum mechanics. At the macroscopic level, indeed light seems to travel at a constant speed and also in more or less straight lines – according to light’s wave length and general relativity. But at the microscopic level (the quantum level) there is no constant speed. The speed of light, in this case, varies according to probability.

This means that spacetime itself might not be a constant thing at the microscopic level. I compare it to the surface of water in the sea. If electromagnetic waves can be compared to waves of sea water, then the spacetime itself can be compared to the water itself. The surface of water is never flat, when looking from close enough. But from a distance it looks flat enough (or actually a sphere around earth).

Does it mean a material object can reach or pass beyond the limit of speed of light? I think it does. If a particle can reach a speed close to the speed of light, if given enough energy, and when considering the wave features of particles and light – it appears that a particle with high energy is able to reach or pass the speed of light, under some circumstances. This might mean a particle can go back in time. For a massive body with many particles I think the chances are very low – almost zero – to do that. But for a tiny sub-atom particle I think it is possible, and the probability of it reaching the speed of light is high enough to actually allow this to happen once in a while.

The theory of relativity says that information can’t travel at a speed greater than light. The reason is because various events in the universe can be considered as simultaneous events, at least in some context of time (which vary from one observer to another). If two events can be considered as simultaneous events, information about one event can’t be known to the people at the other event – otherwise they will know that the other event has already happened. This will contradict the possibility of both events to be simultaneous. Therefore, the limit of speed of information in the physical world is the speed of light. The theory of relativity also says that matter can never reach the speed of light.

So there are generally three speeds in the universe – the speed of matter, which is always below the speed of light; the speed of light; and the speed of thoughts. Our physical body, as being built of physical matter, can never travel at a speed equal or greater than the speed of light. But information, including all forms of communication, is already travelling at the speed of light between us, using technologies such as radio waves, electronic communication and the world wide web.

But what about our thoughts? Are they also limited by physical boundaries? Look at the stars. Some of them are millions of light years away from us. Yet we can see them right now. It can be said that we see them as how they were in the past – we see their ancient history and not their state in the present. If a star who is one million light years away from us would explode – for example right now or if it has exploded last year – we will not know about it for the next million years. But we can still think about this star at the present and also at the future. We can think about it right now. We can think about the entire universe in less than a second. Our thoughts can transcend the speed of light. The speed of our thoughts is infinite.

Now, I have already demonstrated that the speed of light, according to its own time scale, is infinite. For light, the entire universe is a small instance in space and time. If we consider the speed of light as the speed of information, knowledge, and wisdom – it’s not surprising that the speed of light, in its own time scale, is the speed of thoughts. We are used to refer to ourselves as a physical body – and tend to refer to the limits of our physical body as our own limits. We consume food, water and air, we don’t live forever, we are bound to a small physical location in space. But if we refer to ourselves as our knowledge, wisdom and awareness – we can see that these are not limited by our physical body. They are not even limited by our physical universe. They are without boundaries and eternal.

If we consider our physical body as our hardware, and our knowledge and wisdom as our software – then while our hardware has limitations, our software does not. Our software can travel at the speed of light, and therefore – transcend all our limits of time and space. Our physical body, as a manifestation of us, is just an illusion. It’s not separate from the rest of the universe. The molecules, atoms and particles it is composed of change all the time. Our own self, or ego, as a separate entity from the rest of the universe is just an illusion as well. Space and time are a manifestation of our thoughts and are also illusions. The only thing which is not an illusion is our own existence in terms of eternal awareness or consciousness – what we sometimes refer to as Buddha, or Yehova.

According to modern physics, light is an electromagnetic wave in spacetime. Suppose that there is a star 20 million light years away from us, and a person is travelling there at a speed very close to the speed of light. Then, according to the theory of relativity, this person will get there at a very short time according to his own personal time. If his speed is close enough to the speed of light, he might get there in less than a second. This also means that the distance between this star and our planet is a very short distance for him. It’s can’t be more than the distance light itself can travel in one second – one light second.

Now, consider that light itself has a consciousness. When generalizing the laws of relativity to light itself, it appears that both the time to get there and the distance, in light time and light space, is zero. This means that if we look at the universe from the perspective of light itself, everything in the universe happens right here, right now. There is no space and no time from light’s perspective. The entire universe with all its galaxies is a small dot in space; it’s entire history and future are a small dot in time. The Big Bang is not an event in the past – it happens right here and right now. The end of the universe, whatever it is, is also happening now. It seems that light itself is very close to how we perceive Yehova – the one that exists everywhere, beyond limits of space and time.

If light itself is able to perceive space and time – if it has a life beyond a small dot in space and time – then it’s possible that our universe is just a tiny event in light’s life. Each second, each nanosecond in light’s time may be a new universe. Each nanometer in light’s space as well. It might live in a universe in which each particle or quantum event is a universe in itself. Each particle or quantum event in our own universe might be a universe in itself as well. Each particle or quantum event in our universe might have a consciousness.

Black holes are separate universes within our universe, in which time goes backwards and order increases in time. The second law of thermodynamics is reversed in black holes. What we perceive as future is the past in black holes – a singularity such as the Big Bang in our own universe is perceived in black holes as belongs to the past. However, from our perspective, this singularity in black holes belongs to the future. Because of this difference in the direction of time, we are not able to perceive what’s going on in black holes.

When the density of intelligence in an area of spacetime passes beyond some limit, time is reversed and a black hole is formed. Each black hole is a separate universe. When a civilization is advanced, it knows how to create new black holes (universes) in infinite numbers. These universes may be created to solve a problem, answer a question, or just out of curiosity. Within these universes life may be formed, and new black holes may be created ad infinitum. Our own universe may be a black hole in another universe, possibly created by intelligent life or civilization.

In each of these universes there exists an awareness or consciousness which is beyond space, beyond time. This awareness is what we call Yehova.

The concept of time machines is paradoxical. If we would be able to go into the past, we might have changed things which affects our past and our present, therefore creating a paradoxical endless loop. If we could predict the future, we would be able to gamble and win the lottery, or in any casino game. Therefore, it’s not possible to change the past nor to predict the future. It is possible to travel into remote future, using relativity for example – but it’s not possible to come back. Time, as we perceive it, is a one way direction – past, present, future.

I read two good books related to the issues of time:
1. A Brief History of Time (Hawking)
2. The Arrow of Time
(You can also read about it in Wikipedia)

I believe that the arrow of time as we perceive it, or what is called the thermodynamic arrow of time (the second law of thermodynamics), is not inherent in the physical world itself, but only in the way we perceive it. Therefore, it is possible to “go to the past”. But although it’s physically possible to go to the past, we will never be able to perceive it. This is because the way we perceive time. Our common sense just can’t handle such things, due to our biological limitations. But it doesn’t mean that’s impossible.

Uri