FAQ: Universe Version

I enjoyed Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson’s previous book We Have No Idea. They still have no idea, but have new questions to ponder in Frequently Asked Questions About The Universe. I’m finding it to be a drag, a sure sign when I start to skim to find an interesting nugget or two. Maybe it’s because I’ve read most of this physicky speculation before in some form or another. 

 

About two-thirds through the book, I found a few nuggets. Nothing ground-breaking, but interesting to ponder nonetheless. In “Will time ever stop?” the authors ask if Time will end at, well… some point in time. If time stops for everything, would we even notice? Probably not. You can’t tell if you can’t take note of any change. For that matter, we don’t really know what Time is. The authors do make the usual allusion to entropy (which my students find very fascinating when I mention this possible connection in my classes). But their more interesting and basic idea is that we assume time flows. We can’t imagine what it would be like for it not to do so. I hadn’t thought of that before, although I’ve seen “static” space-time block arguments.

 

In “Is An Afterlife Possible?” the authors mull the physics of heaven (or hell). They consider three “key elements that define a traditional afterlife”:

·      There’s a you that can outlive your physical body

·      That you is captured and transported to another location

·      You exist in that other location, still able to experience things forever

 

After dispensing with the purely materialist argument, they suggest that the you that can be “captured and transported” is information. This suggests that you can reduce the essence of you into bits and bytes. I have my doubts since I’m coming around to the idea that reductionist physics is a subset of non-reductionist biology rather than the other way around. Anyway, even if you could reduce your essence into information, the compression problem remains so you’ll have to cut out some stuff. Is an “average” you sufficient to rebuild future-you? And quantum entanglement suggests that in making future-you, past-you will likely be irreversibly changed. Then again, if no quantum information is ever ultimately lost, maybe a reasonable rebuild is possible and you can live forever. Sort of.

 

This of course brings us to the question we could exist in a simulation? Or if we’re living in a simulation right now? I’ll pause on that post until after I’ve watched The Matrix Resurrections, just released. (Reviews don’t bode well.) Instead I will briefly mention also enjoying their chapter on the strange nature of mass and its connection to energy, similar to Wilzcek.

 

P.S. See here for my previous post on FAQs, unrelated to today’s post.