Born to do Math 173 – Math versus Information Spaces
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/06/15
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What if math isn’t the way to understand the universe but spatial relationships are the way? Is there interchangeability here if at all?
Rick Rosner: I’ll tell you what I tell Carole when Carole wants to set up a separate savings account to make sure that we have money for something. It annoys me. I say, “It is all the same money.” No matter the account, we will not have more money if we put the money into another account. In this case, it is all the same. Math and spatial relations, and space, come from some optimization of relation of laying out relationships. The universe is a history of things being linked with each other. It is not just a history. It is a geography of things being linked to each other, relationships. Things like gravitation are indicative of this optimization process. Where there is some kind of rule in play, where you’re trying to minimize, if two things are connected, you want to minimize the total collection lengths. If things are connected to each other, then they should be spatially close to one another. There is a temporal aspect. In reality, we experience what we experience. The universe acts the way it acts. In a way, what we experience is a processing of a library of connections among the elements of the universe, the change over time optimized, at least as we experience it, to minimize unnecessary connection lengths.
Things that are related to each other are physically close to each other. You want to minimize the number of really long connections. This probably ties back into quantum physics because a long connection is just a connection or a relationship established at some point in time among two things moving relative to each other and has been uninterrupted for a really long time. For instance, something happens leading to a photon being emitted. The photon gets loose from the solar system. Once it is loose from the solar system, it is likely to go on and on and on for tens of billions of lightyears. Because it is light, that means tens of billions of years. That is a long-distance relationship between the photon and the thing that emitted it. You only have a long, long relationship because nothing detected the photon yet, not for 20 billion years. But the majority of photons are emitted in stars. They don’t even travel like a millionth of a millimetre before being detected or intercepted by matter. So, the vast majority of photons do not last long at all. They are indicators of really short relationships, which is at it should be. You want the universe arranged, so you’re not wasting your cosmic thread laying out all the super long-distance relationships. You want everything to be as short as possible.
It is conservation something. The universe is full of conservation principles. There are a least action principle and the least time principle for the transmission of light, which results in diffraction. When light goes from travelling through air or nothing into travelling through water, you’ve got a flashlight in the air. You shine it on a detector that’s underwater; the light beam travels through empty space, vacuum or air, until it hits the water and then the angle changes. It bends downward. If you do the mathematics, the bent path that light took or takes is the minimum time path because light moves more slowly in water. So, by travelling a little farther in air, so that it can travel less far in water than if it went in a straight line; light arrives quicker than it would – had it travelled in a straight line. It always takes the minimum time to get from emitter to detector. That’s one of the minimization principles of the universe. I would guess that the universe is kind of like an index, a library, of all the connections that have happened over its entire history. The library wants to help itself out by minimizing the duration and length of as many connections as possible.
From that, from this messing with connections, and also reinforcing connections, connections reinforce each other; the universe is defined by its history of connections. From this, it is all the same stuff. Space and math, and time, are all a result of this library-ing, this grouping of connections. To say more would mean that I am talking out of my butt, then it wouldn’t be productive.
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