Science requires openmindedness, otherwise nothing new would ever be learned or discovered.
Good to see you back, EP.
Okay, whaddayathink of this?
http://armageddonconspiracy.co.uk/The-Imaginary-Dimension%282112219%29.htm
Relativity: the Relationship between the Dimensional and the Dimensionless.
Now we are going to undertake something radically ambitious: to attempt to explain Einstein's special theory of relativity in a reasonably simple form. You can't expect to understand the universe unless you have some sort of feel for what Einstein said. We will be providing a unique interpretation of his theory, revealing the underlying reality that he missed.
Einstein uses little more than high school mathematics, but don't be deceived: his equations are awesome in their implications. Even if you find the equations trivial, you will never find the interpretation of the equations trivial. They truly reveal the Mind of God.
Einstein's great achievement was to place on a firm scientific and mathematical footing what mystics had long known, but hadn't been able to express in well-defined, unambiguous, rigorous terms. The beauty of mathematics is that it can be absolutely precise. With an astonishingly successful theory such as quantum mechanics, no one disagrees with the mathematics. What they argue over is how to interpret the mathematical equations, to describe what the equations mean in terms of reality. So, although mathematics can't unambiguously provide all of the answers - due to the difficulty in translating mathematics into non-mathematical language - it can provide a uniquely accurate framework in which to attempt to provide the answers. Words, intrinsically, do not have sufficient accuracy; only equations do.
Language is an imprecise tool. It's all too easy to misunderstand what someone has said. Words are loaded with ambiguity. Mathematics provides precision, but it does not provide unambiguous meaning. We have to apply that final layer, but at least mathematics gives us a platform with which we can all agree, even if we disagree over the next steps. In contrast, conventional religions provide no commonly accepted platform - do Muslims, Jews and Christians worship the same God, as some of them claim, or three utterly different gods, as others claim? It is impossible to define anything in conventional religion and impossible to reach any rational conclusions. That's why "faith" plays such a critical role. "Believing" is what you do when you haven't a clue how to analyze something mathematically.
But even scientists and mathematicians can have problems with reasoning. Even they can succumb to "common sense" that blinds them to the truth.
Brilliant scientists, for example, refuse to accept dimensionless existence where physical dimensions shrink to zero and time stops, and infinite quantities which they believe would somehow tear nature apart or render it incomprehensible. Yet, over and over again, the mysteries of life are seen to revolve around zero and infinity, which are just the flip sides of each other. But while science recoils from them in horror, modern mathematics takes them in its stride (although, historically, even mathematicians found them far more problematic than ordinary mathematical concepts).
It's often thought that mathematics deals with the hypothetical and physics with the real, but one thing is becoming relentlessly clearer: mathematics, the queen of science, is more real than physics. Physics is deceptively real i.e. it is more closely associated with our common sense, with the evidence of our senses, and less with true reality. It is the other way around with mathematics. When physics comes closest to true reality, as in relativity theory and quantum mechanics, it is astonishingly mathematical and counter-intuitive. Common sense simply vanishes - it can't help you at all in relation to relativity and the quantum world. If you can't get beyond your common sense, you will never understand these subjects. Why haven't physicists cottoned on yet? It is mathematics, not physics, that defines the laws of nature.
In previous articles, we discussed how quantum particles are so astoundingly small, so much smaller than any human mind could ever conceive, so close to being dimensionless, to being "nothing", that they cannot be properly understood unless it is recognised that they flicker between dimensional and dimensionless existence. We showed that infinity rears its head spectacularly in the case of black hole singularities and the Big Bang singularity, neither of which can be fully understood by physicists since singularities involve division by zero, thereby producing a result of infinity, at which point the laws of physics are said to collapse.
It's time to discuss another example of zero and infinity appearing in science, perhaps the most bewildering and profound example of all since, paradoxically, it involves an entity that we recognise as finite. With this entity, zero, the finite and the infinite come together in an astonishing way that may define the nature of existence. We are talking about one of the most bizarre phenomena of all - the speed of light.
The unique status of the speed of light is the centrepiece of Einstein's special theory of relativity. Although the mathematics of the speed of light can be described with tremendous accuracy, the "meaning" of light speed defies any straightforward interpretation. It might be said that all of the problems that bedevil fundamental physics flow from a failure to comprehend light.
Einstein's theory says nothing less than that all photons are, in their frame of reference, outside space and time. They don't experience the passing of time and they don't experience the traversing of any distances. The universe, for photons, is a mystical dimensionless point. Even if there were an infinite number of photons, they would all inhabit this inconceivable singularity beyond the reach of time and space.
Can you begin to see? The realm of light, as described by Einstein's supremely well tested equations, is astonishingly similar to what we have described as the r = 0 dimensionless domain: the realm of the mental. Immediately, the profoundest of questions arises. Are light and thought the same thing? Are photons, when considered from the correct perspective, mental rather than physical? When the sun shines on us, are we being bathed in the "thoughts" of the sun as well as its light? If photons do not experience space and time, and they do not have any mass, how else would you characterise them except as some sort of mind-like entities?
Yet no scientist would ever claim that photons are mental. Why not? Isn't that what Einstein's equations hint at? How can photons be real, physical entities if an infinite number of them can inhabit a timeless, massless domain of zero size? Descartes famously defined thinking substance ("res cogitans") as non-physical, without extension. What would he have made of photons? In their own frame of reference they too are without extension.
Scientists don't ponder such questions. They are too scared of where this train of thought leads - to religion, to souls, to God. Rather than take a God's-eye-view of the universe, they lock themselves into safe, common sense territory. They ignore how the world looks to a photon and focus on how the world looks to us. And thus they have turned away from understanding how the cosmos truly works.
The reality is that human beings are children of two domains - the dimensional and the dimensionless, r > 0 and r = 0. The attempt by science to restrict us to the r > 0 domain, the material domain of solid objects with mass, is the most catastrophic misjudgement imaginable, and actually refuted by science itself which consistently points to the inescapable reality of dimensionless existence.
It is that fateful error that has sundered science from religion. It is that fateful error that must be corrected to get the human race back on track.
