Jumped The Gun! (Part One) [No Rhyme Intended] {Hope You're Not Offended}

Welcome back everyone! I've decided that in honor of last month's tenth post on this blog, I will introduce a new type of post here! Hopefully everyone enjoyed the last post and if you want me to analyze particular works, etc. feel free to let me know (comment box is below every post as always)! But I've had a somewhat crazy idea over the past few days and I feel that I should share it with everyone. So I will put it up here and see what you guys think (and of course I will explain everything as necessary as I go). Most likely this will be a two part post, as it's a big idea (it's even going to be *dunhdunhdunhhhhhhhhh* MULTIMEDIA!)! So let's begin shall we?

First, let me explain why I named this post "Jumped The Gun!". Approximately two days after I started thinking about this problem, I noticed an article on the Popular Science website (http://www.popsci.com) detailing a new weapon introduced by the military. It is based on the concept that a high-powered laser will ionize the air that it passes through, essentially making it a perfect electrical conduit. The high-powered laser is then immediately followed by a massive release of electrical charge, forming a highly controlled lightning bolt. The bolt's easiest path happens to be the perfect line of ionized air particles, and so the lightning follows the path that the laser took, striking whatever the laser beam ended up on. It uses the same natural principles as lightning, except that lightning follows a randomized pattern and more or less only by coincidence. While fairly impractical, it is a really cool idea, and yet it doesn't quite get to the heart of my idea and the principles it uses. Let me premise my post by saying that I know perfectly well that if my idea had any feasibility, someone else must have thought of it before and discarded it.

So what is the concept behind the problem? Well let's consider one of my previous posts, where I discussed particle-antiparticle creation-annihilation (http://universalranking.blogspot.com/2012/02/continuation-theory-on-dimensional.html). I never fully discussed where the creation comes from beyond "random energy" but there is actually one key point that I should clarify. When I said energy, I really meant small quantized packets of energy, also known as photons! So when I state that particle-antiparticle pairs are spontaneously created from packets of energy, I mean that actual photons spontaneously "turn into" bits of matter. One of the most common of these pairs is an electron and a positron. The positron is basically an antimatter counterpart of an electron. It has the same exact mass, and the same magnitude of charge, but the alignment of the quarks is exactly the opposite of that of the electron and therefore the direction of charge is exactly the opposite (positive). When a positron and an electron come into contact, they annihilate (as stated in the "Continuation" post) and create (usually) a pair of photons. The exceptions to that case include though the annihilation to a single photon, but usually this only happens when the creation comes from a low-energy photon (more on why that is in a bit).

We are going to assume for this post that there is a single photon creating an electron-positron pair that immediately annihilates to another single photon (for simplicity's sake). And now we get to the multimedia!
Cue Diagram 1!

Yes, it's a hand-drawn diagram (only the best for the people that actually read this blog!)!

So before you confuse yourself trying to decipher what this is, let me make it easier. This diagram is known as a Feynman diagram and is used to show the interactions of particles through time. One thing to immediately note is the "Time" axis along the top pointing to the right. This means that the particle is changing as time passes, not necessarily as it "moves to the right". That is pretty much the only really difficult concept to wrap your head around which is not necessarily thinking of the particle moving. Theoretically it could be completely still in space but it would still be diagrammed as above. So what does this diagram show? It shows a photon suddenly turning into an electron and a positron, which then a little later collide together, resulting in another photon. For those who want a little more information, the Electromagnetic Interaction Vertex Strength is how relatively strong or likely the reaction will be compared to the other three fundamental force reactions (Strong Force, Weak Force, and Gravity). So the strength/probability of this electromagnetic interaction is about 1/137th of that of the strongest type of interaction force (the Strong Force). To give some measure of comparison, the strength of gravity relative to the Strong Force is about 1/(10^39) or 1 over 1 with 39 zeros after it!

So back to the point. This diagram shows what actually can happen to a photon randomly, and it is the case I would like you to keep in mind (refer back to the diagram if it gets confusing at any point). One difficulty with this scenario is that the photon has to have enough energy to make this happen (in more technical terms, the Energy of the photon [given by E = h * f , or Energy = Planck's Constant * frequency] must be at least twice the rest mass of an electron for the interaction to occur). The spontaneous creation of an electron-positron pair is not definitively known as of the present, however the annihilation is simply due to the fact that the electron and the positron are attracted to each other intensely due to their opposing charges. They therefore collide fairly quickly after the point of creation due to their close proximity. The only known instances of this principle being violated was detailed in the previous post (when the creation occurred on the very edge of a black hole). The point of all this was to set up and demonstrate what can and does happen in real life and the basis for my idea!

So here's the other part to consider in the idea. Electrons (and positrons), as well as being affected by electric fields, are affected by magnetic fields! However, whereas electrons (and positrons) are attracted usually in straight lines by electric fields, magnetic fields affect electrons in different ways. In this case, a magnetic field going away from the viewer at a 90-degree angle to the path of the electron (or positron) forces the electron in a curve (and eventually in a full circle if the magnetic field is strong enough and large enough to encompass the circular path of the electron) such as in the following way:

The small pluses on the square indicate a magnetic field going away from the viewer. If the pluses were replaced by dots, that would indicate that the magnetic field was going towards the viewer, and consequently the path of the electron would curve in the other direction. The path of an electron in the opposite direction of magnetic field as shown above would accurately represent the path of a positron in the magnetic field shown above. In simpler terms, the path of an electron and the path of a positron are exactly the opposite in the same magnetic field.

Here is where part one of this post ends. If you can catch a glimmer of where I am going with these ideas, feel free to speculate below or ruminate on it by yourself! As always, if you have a comment, a question, a suggestion, or any digression, let me know below or on Facebook! I will be glad to field any of the above (bonus points for rhyming).

If you like the new style of post (me sharing random brainchildren) then definitely let me know! If you hate it, let me know as well! Comments and questions are always appreciated and help me to expound on what I need to or to delve into new and exciting implications!

And finally I have a challenge for each and every one of the people that actually read this post. It is as followed and not meant to be an annoying solicitation. The frequency of my updates generally relates to my readership. I am encouraged when I see a spike in page views and the more I see, the more I feel obligated to update more often. So here's your challenge if you're reading this. Go out and tell one (or more if you want) friend that you think would be interested in this kind of subject matter about this blog. Give them the link to the blog. If you want to help out even more, tell them to tell one (or more) of their friend(s)! The more the merrier (and the more posts)!

As always, thank you all who read this, and I will update with the second part of this post (and the actual meat of my crazy and probably already-discarded idea) once I return from my Eurotrip!

--J

Just A Thought... (A Long Thought...)

Welcome back everyone! I'm sorry that I haven't updated in awhile (part lack of material, part being busy with everything else). So I've been thinking recently about the end of the universe, not the depressing kind of thinking either. More along the lines of modern thinking relative to how the universe moves within time and space. Now, there is a classic poem that hopefully will be familiar in some aspects. This is Fire and Ice by Robert Frost.



Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice. 

As wonderful as this poem is in the literary sense, it actually has some real-world implications. This poem is very apt to the universe's motion within spacetime. We know from studies of redshifting that every galactic body is moving away from us at an accelerating rate, but not in the conventional sense. To clarify, let me explain redshifting and the "conventional sense" of expansion.

Redshifting

The concept of redshifting is a bit tricky to understand without background knowledge of basic light and wave physics. But let's make it easy here. Light as we know it travels in two forms, depending on the experiment you perform. The first form is packets of light, known as "quantas" of light (hence where the term Quantum Physics was derived). These behave as singular particles, and have been known to experimentally exist. The quanta of light has a specific amount of energy which then defines other properties such as the color and behavior of the light. The second form is in a wave (think like a repetitive ocean wave), and travels as such. The size (amplitude) and frequency (how small the individual waves are) of the wave determine roughly the same properties as the energy of a quanta does. Redshifting concerns the second form of light as the properties of a wave can actually be affected by something that quanta cannot: the speed and direction of the source. Here's the easiest way to understand this. If you have ever paid attention to the sound of a firetruck as it moves past you with sirens blaring, you will probably be familiar with hearing the siren as higher in pitch as it comes towards you and then lower as it passes you. That is called the Doppler Effect and in more technical terms it means that the frequency of a wave (the pitch of the tone for a sound wave or the color of the light in a light wave for example) can be affected by the speed of the source in which the wave is emitted from. For sound it is fairly easy to change the pitch as sound moves through air at about 330 m/s whereas light moves through space at about 300 million m/s (a factor difference of approximately 10^6). A truck moving at 20 m/s affects the frequency of sound way more than the frequency of light. Make no mistake, the speed of the source does not affect the speed of the light, but it does affect the frequency. The frequency of sound affects the pitch (how high or low), and the frequency of light affects the color (a slower frequency means larger waves and more red color. A faster frequency means shorter waves and a more blue color.). There are other types of waves as well that are changed in different ways by the frequency, but here we shall only consider light. 

So what is redshifting then? Redshifting is merely another name for the Doppler Effect changing the frequency of light. This means when a source that emits a frequency of light moves away from the observer (e.g. us) the frequency of the wave decreases and becomes more red. So how does that help us? Well it is a very useful method to find out how fast something moves away from us. If the color of the light of a star or galaxy remained the same, we could say that the star or galaxy did not move relative to us. However we have observed that for many interstellar objects they actually seem to be redder over a period of time. What this means is that many stellar objects are moving away from us! But the interesting thing that the scientific community has noticed is that the degree at which these bodies become redder is not constant, but increasing, meaning that objects light frequency does not increase by a fixed amount, but an increasing one! This all amounts to the fact that the universe around us moves away from us at an accelerating rate. This is what redshifting is and why it is important.


Expansion
Now's the more difficult part, which is understanding what I mean by expansion. I will have to explain this better in another post as there are other important concepts to define but I will explain how this relates to the poem at least. When we normally say expansion, we mean things are moving away from each other in space. This would imply that all objects in the universe move away from each other in a fixed space. Strangely this is not true because it is not under this concept of expansion. Rather, it is not the bodies expanding in a fixed space, but fixed bodies in an expanding space! This is a strange concept to absorb, because it is hard to imagine that the bodies are moving, but not moving. It sounds like some really badly-worded Star Wars quote, but let's make it easier shall we? Imagine that you have a balloon, and you draw two dots on it with a marker maybe an inch apart. Now you blow up the balloon. The dots have not physically moved on the balloon, have they? No of course not! But you must admit that upon visual inspection they are definitely further apart from each other. That is because the actual space that the dots are in has expanded, which pushes them away from away from each other. If you replace the dots with two stars and the balloon with the universe, that is something close to what I am trying to explain. The universe itself is expanding, but the stars themselves are not actually moving away from each other (to get a little more technical, it is the dark matter and energy in the universe that expands in a very strange way that we don't entirely understand).


So what's the point of all this? Well let's take a look at the poem mentioned in the beginning of this post! When the universe expands, it also cools down (not as much radiation reaches the surfaces of planets, etc.). So when Robert Frost mentions the world ending in ice, it actually is somewhat apt to one way that the world (and the universe) is hypothesized to end, which is that the universe will expand so greatly that it will cool beyond the point that is sustainable for everything. So it seems that Robert Frost was not only a celebrated poet but also an unknown and unintentional physicist! The other concept of ending in fire is also apt, as there is another theory that the expansion of the universe will soon slow down to the point where the intra-galactic gravitational forces will pull all stellar bodies into one point, super-heating them and causing what could be considered an inverse of the Big Bang.


It truly is interesting to see how accidental and yet how acuminous it is. And hopefully you will be stunned at how much of an accidental and intentional genius Robert Frost was! And as always, leave any likes, comments, and/or questions you deign to do so! And thanks for reading. Hopefully I will see you soon in a new update!


--J

Multidimensional Philosophy

Let me just open with this to make it all clear: Humans from the minute they are born are trained to think in three dimensions. This is never intentional, but all the same it happens. Human eye perception is taught by getting infants to recognize objects through third-dimensional viewpoints. We develop a more acute sense of distance as time passes. We use corrective lenses to appropriately adjust our vision. We have difficulties seeing with crossed eyes. This merges into other senses such as hearing. We grow adapted to using the different signals received by our ears to more accurately pinpoint locations of sounds surrounding us. Basically we live in a three dimensional world. You probably are rolling your eyes or saying "Duh, 'cause we are." I'm not saying you're wrong. I wholeheartedly agree with you actually.

Here's where things get tricky. I've been thinking about time travel a lot recently and been considering principles  such as Causality and how they can be implemented/exploited. I'll explain in another post, but I basically have come up with a theory as to my idea why time travelling backwards cannot physically work without violating the core principles of Causality. What that essentially means is that you cannot travel back in time without having the possibility that you're actions will result in you not time-travelling backwards at the exact moment that you did in the "future". Confused yet? Just wait. The difficult part is that you now have to start thinking in a fourth dimension.

Technically there are two fourth dimensions. The first is the fourth spatial dimension which is incredibly complicated to explain in the third dimension (again, I will explain it in a different post). The second is something called a temporal dimension, or a fourth dimension relative to time. This is where it can be tricky,as we have to visualize what might be called a series of third dimensions, a chain if you will. But this is not a conventional chain. It's almost like a strand of fishing wire: you can't see the individual connections because they are so small, so the wire looks like a solid piece.

So now let's get technical.

Let's start with a somewhat simple exercise (well, at least relatively). Imagine a box on a flat surface (let's say for argument's sake a table). When someone pushes that box, what do we see? We see a box moving across a flat surface. We only see the box in what we call a singular instance at a time. We do not see any "lag". A way to conceptualize lag is to take your computer cursor and move it really fast across your screen. Depending on your settings you can sometimes see a trail of cursors behind yours. We do not see this with the box. No matter how fast you move it (within reason) you only see it one "box" at a time.

To begin to visualize the fourth dimension you have to alter the settings in your mind, if you will. You have to begin to add that lag for yourself. Now lets look at moving the box again. As it moves in your mind, take mental pictures every second. Overlay the images into one. You should end up with the same box replicated a number of times with a regular interval between each one. Now do the same process again, but take a picture every half-second and overlay it. Same box, shorter intervals between them. Eventually if you keep doing this over and over again, you will find something interesting. Let's assume the box is a cube of width 1 meter. If the box moves at one meter per second, and you take a picture every second, there will be no interval between each box instance. This results in a weird phenomenon. While the box physically exists each second, when you look at the overlay image there is one seamless box. No matter how much shorter you take the time intervals at that point there will still be the same box. This overlay image even with the smallest possible time interval is the fourth temporal dimension. It is the continuous box. If you practice this exercise you can start to build up perception in a fourth dimension. Eventually you can easily and effectively visualize something like your hand moving through space in the fourth dimension. It looks like a solidly-outlined blur.

But I'm going to throw a monkey wrench into it. You can't simply say that to reverse time travel you pick out that one particular slice of the rectangular prism. You can only assume that our prism is rectangular because of how you perceive the world now. Here's the thing: everything moves in the universe. Including earth. You might already guess what that means. Yup! As it slides across the table, it also moves in space. This could give a prism of many possible shapes depending on how the surface it moves upon moves in spacetime. So  that is the fourth dimension and the problems with simple isolation. If one were to try to pull a slice of that third dimensional existence, you can't merely calculate the position on earth. You would have to calculate where in the universe it was. I think that may be how it ties into Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Theoretically you can eliminate the tiny movement through spacetime by taking only a tiny time difference. But if the difference is exponential, then only that tiny time frame would give a definite an accessible distance away in spacetime (instead of across the entire universe). However I have reason to believe that that short time period falls in what I call the "instantaneous period" or the minimum uncertainty percentage allowable under Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle for time.

That is all I can say for now in my undeveloped theory's state. However I do believe that there needs to be a new field in physics to start to study human perception and its link with physics. I move that there be a new field entitled "Multidimensional Philosophy" which covers working on perceiving other dimensions. and getting past third-dimensional "training".

As always, thanks for reading. Questions and comments go in the comment box or in my Facebook inbox. Feel free to do either one!

--J