Peering into the origin of time

One Reply to “Peering into the origin of time”

1. 1
   bornagain77 says:

   October 31, 2019 at 5:51 pm

   Towards the end of the article they concede that the ’emergence’ of time is still unresolved:

   Thus, physicists seek timeless math that generates what looks like a universe evolving in time.,,,
   Arkani-Hamed seeks a simpler, more purely geometric formulation of the math, which, if found, could offer further insights about the possible emergence of time and the principles that underlie it.

   As well, Entropy was not mentioned in the article. Which, given entropy’s rather tight correlation with time, is a strange omission for a paper to make that is claiming to have made significant progress on our understanding of how time could have possibly ’emerged’ in the Big Bang.

   As the following article states, “Entropy explains time; it explains every possible action in the universe;,,”,, “Even gravity,,,, can be expressed as a consequence of the law of entropy.,,,”

   Shining Light on Dark Energy – October 21, 2012
   Excerpt: It (Entropy) explains time; it explains every possible action in the universe;,,
   Even gravity, Vedral argued, can be expressed as a consequence of the law of entropy.,,,
   The principles of thermodynamics are at their roots all to do with information theory. Information theory is simply an embodiment of how we interact with the universe —,,,
   http://crev.info/2012/10/shini.....rk-energy/

   On top of the fact that “(Entropy) explains time; it explains every possible action in the universe”, Entropy is also, by a VERY wide margin, the most finely tuned of the initial conditions of the Big Bang. Finely tuned to an almost incomprehensible degree of precision, 1 part in 10 to the 10 to the 123rd power. As Roger Penrose himself stated that, “This now tells us how precise the Creator’s aim must have been: namely to an accuracy of one part in 10^10^123.”

   “This now tells us how precise the Creator’s aim must have been: namely to an accuracy of one part in 10^10^123.”
   Roger Penrose – How special was the big bang? – (from the Emperor’s New Mind, Penrose, pp 339-345 – 1989)

   “The time-asymmetry is fundamentally connected to with the Second Law of Thermodynamics: indeed, the extraordinarily special nature (to a greater precision than about 1 in 10^10^123, in terms of phase-space volume) can be identified as the “source” of the Second Law (Entropy).”
   Roger Penrose – The Physics of the Small and Large: What is the Bridge Between Them?

   In the following video, Dr, Bruce Gordon touches upon just how enormous that number truly is. Dr. Gordon states, “you would need a hundred million, trillion, trillion, trillion, universes our size, with a zero on every proton and neutron in all of those universes just to write out this number. That is how fine tuned the initial entropy of our universe is.”

   “An explosion you think of as kind of a messy event. And this is the point about entropy. The explosion in which our universe began was not a messy event. And if you talk about how messy it could have been, this is what the Penrose calculation is all about essentially. It looks at the observed statistical entropy in our universe. The entropy per baryon. And he calculates that out and he arrives at a certain figure. And then he calculates using the Bekenstein-Hawking formula for Black-Hole entropy what the,,, (what sort of entropy could have been associated with,,, the singularity that would have constituted the beginning of the universe). So you’ve got the numerator, the observed entropy, and the denominator, how big it (the entropy) could have been. And that fraction turns out to be,, 1 over 10 to the 10 to the 123rd power. Let me just emphasize how big that denominator is so you can gain a real appreciation for how small that probability is. So there are 10^80th baryons in the universe. Protons and neutrons. No suppose we put a zero on every one of those. OK, how many zeros is that? That is 10^80th zeros. This number has 10^123rd zeros. OK, so you would need a hundred million, trillion, trillion, trillion, universes our size, with zero on every proton and neutron in all of those universes just to write out this number. That is how fine tuned the initial entropy of our universe is. And if there were a pre-Big Bang state and you had some bounces, then that fine tuning (for entropy) gets even finer as you go backwards if you can even imagine such a thing. ”
   Dr Bruce Gordon – Contemporary Physics and God Part 2 – video – 1:50 minute mark – video
   https://youtu.be/ff_sNyGNSko?t=110

   In order to provide evidence that the Mind of God is behind the initial entropy of the universe, i.e. behind the ’emergence’ of time, I will appeal to the Quantum Zeno Effect and also to Quantum information theory.

   An old entry in wikipedia described the Quantum Zeno effect as such “an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay.”

   Perspectives on the quantum Zeno paradox – 2018
   The quantum Zeno effect is,, an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay.
   https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/196/1/012018/pdf

   Likewise, the present day entry on wikipedia about the Quantum Zeno effect also provocatively states that “a system can’t change while you are watching it”

   Quantum Zeno effect
   Excerpt: Sometimes this effect is interpreted as “a system can’t change while you are watching it”
   per wikipedia

   And here is a fairly recent experiment which verified the ‘Quantum Zeno Effect’:

   ‘Zeno effect’ verified—atoms won’t move while you watch – October 23, 2015
   Excerpt: Graduate students,, created and cooled a gas of about a billion Rubidium atoms inside a vacuum chamber and suspended the mass between laser beams.,,,
   In that state the atoms arrange in an orderly lattice just as they would in a crystalline solid.,But at such low temperatures, the atoms can “tunnel” from place to place in the lattice.,,,
   The researchers demonstrated that they were able to suppress quantum tunneling merely by observing the atoms.,,,
   The researchers observed the atoms under a microscope by illuminating them with a separate imaging laser. A light microscope can’t see individual atoms, but the imaging laser causes them to fluoresce, and the microscope captured the flashes of light. When the imaging laser was off, or turned on only dimly, the atoms tunneled freely. But as the imaging beam was made brighter and measurements made more frequently, the tunneling reduced dramatically.,,,
   The experiments were made possible by the group’s invention of a novel imaging technique that made it possible to observe ultracold atoms while leaving them in the same quantum state.,,,
   The popular press has drawn a parallel of this work with the “weeping angels” depicted in the Dr. Who television series – alien creatures who look like statues and can’t move as long as you’re looking at them. There may be some sense to that. In the quantum world, the folk wisdom really is true: “A watched pot never boils.”
   http://phys.org/news/2015-10-z.....-wont.html

   Atheistic materialists have tried to get around the Quantum Zeno effect by postulating that interactions with the environment are sufficient to explain the Quantum Zeno effect.

   Perspectives on the quantum Zeno paradox – 2018
   Excerpt: The references to observations and to wavefunction collapse tend to raise unnecessary questions related to the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Actually, all that is required is that some interaction with an external system disturb the unitary evolution of the quantum system in a way that is effectively like a projection operator.
   https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/196/1/012018/pdf

   Yet, the following interaction-free measurement of the Quantum Zeno effect demonstrated that the presence of the Quantum Zeno effect can be detected without interacting with a single atom.

   Interaction-free measurements by quantum Zeno stabilization of ultracold atoms – 14 April 2015
   Excerpt: In our experiments, we employ an ultracold gas in an unstable spin configuration, which can undergo a rapid decay. The object—realized by a laser beam—prevents this decay because of the indirect quantum Zeno effect and thus, its presence can be detected without interacting with a single atom.
   http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2.....S-20150415

   In short, the quantum zeno effect, regardless of how atheistic materialists may feel about it, is experimentally shown to be a real effect that is not reducible to any possible materialistic explanation. And thus the original wikipedia statement of, “an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay”, stands as being a true statement.

   On top of the Quantum Zeno effect, in quantum information theory we find that “one should bear in mind that an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object’s entropy is always dependent on the observer.”

   Quantum knowledge cools computers: New understanding of entropy – June 1, 2011
   Excerpt: Recent research by a team of physicists,,, describe,,, how the deletion of data, under certain conditions, can create a cooling effect instead of generating heat. The cooling effect appears when the strange quantum phenomenon of entanglement is invoked.,,,
   The new study revisits Landauer’s principle for cases when the values of the bits to be deleted may be known. When the memory content is known, it should be possible to delete the bits in such a manner that it is theoretically possible to re-create them. It has previously been shown that such reversible deletion would generate no heat. In the new paper, the researchers go a step further. They show that when the bits to be deleted are quantum-mechanically entangled with the state of an observer, then the observer could even withdraw heat from the system while deleting the bits. Entanglement links the observer’s state to that of the computer in such a way that they know more about the memory than is possible in classical physics.,,,
   In measuring entropy, one should bear in mind that an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object’s entropy is always dependent on the observer. Applied to the example of deleting data, this means that if two individuals delete data in a memory and one has more knowledge of this data, she perceives the memory to have lower entropy and can then delete the memory using less energy.,,,
   No heat, even a cooling effect;
   In the case of perfect classical knowledge of a computer memory (zero entropy), deletion of the data requires in theory no energy at all. The researchers prove that “more than complete knowledge” from quantum entanglement with the memory (negative entropy) leads to deletion of the data being accompanied by removal of heat from the computer and its release as usable energy. This is the physical meaning of negative entropy.
   Renner emphasizes, however, “This doesn’t mean that we can develop a perpetual motion machine.” The data can only be deleted once, so there is no possibility to continue to generate energy. The process also destroys the entanglement, and it would take an input of energy to reset the system to its starting state. The equations are consistent with what’s known as the second law of thermodynamics: the idea that the entropy of the universe can never decrease. Vedral says “We’re working on the edge of the second law. If you go any further, you will break it.”
   http://www.sciencedaily.com/re.....134300.htm

   And as the following article states, “Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,

   The Quantum Thermodynamics Revolution – May 2017
   Excerpt: the 19th-century physicist James Clerk Maxwell put it, “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.”
   In recent years, a revolutionary understanding of thermodynamics has emerged that explains this subjectivity using quantum information theory — “a toddler among physical theories,” as del Rio and co-authors put it, that describes the spread of information through quantum systems. Just as thermodynamics initially grew out of trying to improve steam engines, today’s thermodynamicists are mulling over the workings of quantum machines. Shrinking technology — a single-ion engine and three-atom fridge were both experimentally realized for the first time within the past year — is forcing them to extend thermodynamics to the quantum realm, where notions like temperature and work lose their usual meanings, and the classical laws don’t necessarily apply.
   They’ve found new, quantum versions of the laws that scale up to the originals. Rewriting the theory from the bottom up has led experts to recast its basic concepts in terms of its subjective nature, and to unravel the deep and often surprising relationship between energy and information — the abstract 1s and 0s by which physical states are distinguished and knowledge is measured.,,,
   Renato Renner, a professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, described this as a radical shift in perspective. Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,
   https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-thermodynamics-revolution/

   Why in blue blazes should the finely tuned entropic actions of the universe, entropic actions which happen to explain time itself, even care if I am consciously observing them unless consciousness really is more foundational to reality than the finely tuned 1 in 10^10^123 entropy of the universe is? To state the obvious, this finding of entropy being “a property of an observer who describes a system.” is very friendly to a Mind First, and/or to a Theistic view of reality.
   For instance Romans chapter 8: verses 20 and 21 itself stated, thousands of years before the 1 in 10^10^123 initial entropy of the universe, and the quantum Zeno effect, was discovered, “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”

   Romans 8:20-21
   For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

   “We have the sober scientific certainty that the heavens and earth shall ‘wax old as doth a garment’….
   Dark indeed would be the prospects of the human race if unilluminated by that light which reveals ‘new heavens and a new earth.’”
   Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824 – 1907) – pioneer in many different fields, particularly electromagnetism and thermodynamics.

   Psalm 102:25-27
   Of old You laid the foundation of the earth, And the heavens are the work of Your hands. They will perish, but You will endure; Yes, they will all grow old like a garment; Like a cloak You will change them, And they will be changed. But You are the same, And Your years will have no end.

   Thus, whilst the ’emergence’ of time is, as they themselves admitted towards the end of the paper, unresolved as far as their mathematics is concerned, if one is willing to follow the evidence from the quantum zeno effect and from quantum information theory to where it leads, then one is led inexorably to the obvious conclusion of “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

   Genesis 1
   In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

   Further notes on how consciousness and quantum mechanics are extremely tightly correlated:

   How Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness Correlate – video
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f0hL3Nrdas