What is reality?

[Heddwen]

I watched this Horizon episode last night and understood every word of it LOL

I thought it was interesting that these mathematicians and physicists are researching the concept of reality/other realities and the concept of bilocation may not be such a far flung idea. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... s_Reality/

[skh]

Could you maybe summarize what it was about? BBC iPlayer only plays for people in the UK.

thanks

peace /|\
Sonja

[DJ Droood]

I couldn't play it either...perhaps the BBC is an alternate dimension.

[Explorer]

I'm downloading it through bittorrent, if you want I can put it on my webspace later and make the link available here.

[skh]

I couldn't play it either...perhaps the BBC is an alternate dimension.

Last I looked Canada wasn't part of the Empire any more -- have I missed something?

peace /|\
Sonja

[DJ Droood]

Last I looked Canada wasn't part of the Empire any more -- have I missed something?

DJ pulls a quarter from his pocket...yep...Liz is still glowering at me.....we are still under the yoke. I think the consensus is we will stay part of the Empire, but we are only going to listen to Kate.

[Heddwen]

After my first line this could be tricky!, please bear with me.

Quantum mechanics, particle physics, holographic projection from the event horizon of a black hole, expanded to a theory that says reality is a holographic projection from the edge of our universe. It also explores the possibility of parallel existences.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/xxgbn/

Thank you for letting me know Sonja, I'll bear that in mind in the future. Quite surprising really I thought that Aunty was available everywhere.

[Heddwen]

Thank you very much Nico for your kind offer

[Badger Bob]

I only caught a bit of it about the double slit experiment. This is the one where you shine a light at a mask with a double parallel slit in it so that the light is channeled through two "gates". Since light behaves like a wave you have two sets of wavefronts emeerging from two point sources, the wavefronts intersect and cause constructive and destructive interference which shows up as distinct bands or interference fringes on a screen placed a short distance away. However, we know that light is a particle, the photon, and so we should get just the image of the two slits, just two bands on the screen. The chap in the programme had an apparatus that fires single photons at the slit at a time and then built up a map of where they eventually hit the screen. Even when single photons are fired they act as if they were interfering waves but a single photon has nothing to interfere with, there is no other photon in the vicinity at that time. As far as I could tell his theory was that the photon travels in two separate realities, one hitting the left slit and the other hitting the right, these realities are still connected and so they allow the photon to interact with itself (interfere with itself ?!?) and create the familiar wavelike scatter pattern. He went on to say that if you detect the photon on the way to the slit, it only acts as a particle, not as a wave - observation alters the thing it is observing.

[Explorer]

Thank you very much Nico for your kind offer

Thank you for pointing it out!

good news, I downloaded it and it works, and I'm watching it now.
bad news, it is going to take a few hours to upload to my website.

Sonja said it may not be wise to post the link here in public, so anybody who wants to download it from my website, send me a pm and I'll give you the link when it is available.

[Mark B]

Thanks for the heads-up Heddwen. A very interesting program indeed

[Explorer]

Could you maybe summarize what it was about? BBC iPlayer only plays for people in the UK.

The first half hour is a bit slow, up to the classic two slit experiment of quantum mechanics. Which is fascinating, but pretty old news by now.

Then they have some theories, some more interesting than others.

There is one guy who thinks that reality is one big mathematical equation, because everything is described by math so nicely. A classic case of thinking backwards and staring at formulae so long that you lose sight of reality. It is like suggesting that gods exists because after praying for 24 hours a day it starts to seem that praying is the most common way to talk to gods, so they must exist.

And there is a guy who describes parallel universes in such a way that it sounds like something amazingly strange.
But if you realise, that every second the entire universe has changed from how it was a second earlier, so that there is a 'parallel' universe a second ago, so to speak, then you have arrived at the same concept without really blinking an eye. Except that he suggests that it doesn't only happen in the direction we call 'time', but also in another unnamed directions (dimensions). Which makes sense, but doesn't seem such a shocking revelation. And this is a pretty old theory also.

There is something about the holographic principle, which I didn't know. Which is fascinating, but also kind of depressing. The idea is that 'information' cannot be destroyed, and since black holes shrink and evaporate, there must be some way of saving the information of everything that fell in. The theory is that it is all encoded in 2D on the boundary of the black hole, the event horizon. And that the same principle applies for the Universe as a whole, that all information about its 3D contents is encoded in 2D on the outer layer.
Which basically means that everything inside it is a projection of that, a hologram. And they even found a way to test it, which is almost kind of scary to think about. I don't want to be a hologram ;-).

Okay... non-brits, it is on my website, pm me for the link.

[Heddwen]

Nico you're a star

[Explorer]

Nico you're a star

Thank you, I've been called worse lately .
Nah, I'm not, it is just that this subject interests me.

There is also some totally unscientific gut feeling here.
At my work at the observatory we regularly have colloquia, where astronomers talk about their theories and discoveries (I'm not an astronomer myself, I only make software for them).
Last year they explained about 'dark matter' and 'dark energy'. It was almost a shocking short talk that explained nothing, because the conclusion was that 95% of the universe was made of this stuff, but they had no clue what it is, or where it is, or how to observe it. Even the words 'dark', 'matter' and 'energy' are just wrong terms because nobody knows. They shrugged and said "we just don't know anything about what the vast majority of the universe is made off". Which was quite sobering.

This holographic principle somehow gives that same gut feeling. If all the 'real information' is plastered on the outside layer of the universe, and the rest is just its 'projection', then it somehow makes sense that apparently you can't detect 95% of everything. Because it doesn't really exist, it just seems that way.

But it is a bit of an unsettling thought also, that we could be just projections, like pieces of software that are about to find out that they are just software. (mmm, time to watch The Matrix once more perhaps .

One step further, that I don't even want to think about, if we are software, then who wrote it?

[Heddwen]

Well much better than my effort. ... and that really is food for thought. Big food.

I was just wondering whether the possibility of parallel realities here on earth would explain some of the glitches as explained in the film The Matrix. For example the cat/deja vu scenario is explained as a glitch.Does this mean that the possibility of ghosts, bilocation and other such phenomena could be when the hardwiring malfunctions? or there is an overlap of realities?

[DJ Droood]

Well much better than my effort. ... and that really is food for thought. Big food.

I was just wondering whether the possibility of parallel realities here on earth would explain some of the glitches as explained in the film The Matrix. For example the cat/deja vu scenario is explained as a glitch.Does this mean that the possibility of ghosts, bilocation and other such phenomena could be when the hardwiring malfunctions? or there is an overlap of realities?

Man, I wish I was smart enough to grasp this stuff beyond a "Star Trek" level...I could explain away all my screw-ups as a glitch in the reality system. "Sorry, that wat stupider DJ from the next reality over that misfiled that report....quantum stuff...."

[DaRC]

Reality is, I'm told, in the eye of the beholder

The other question (that I picked up from Bill bryson's excellent "A short history of nearly everything") is this -
do the bacteria specific to animal life serve us or do we serve them?

[Explorer]

Well much better than my effort. ... and that really is food for thought. Big food.

I was just wondering whether the possibility of parallel realities here on earth would explain some of the glitches as explained in the film The Matrix. For example the cat/deja vu scenario is explained as a glitch.Does this mean that the possibility of ghosts, bilocation and other such phenomena could be when the hardwiring malfunctions? or there is an overlap of realities?

What I do to get my mind around that is looking at time.
Now is NOW!!... damn, missed it, it slipped into the past and it is gone now. Or is it?

Because another way of saying the same thing is that that moment still exists, somewhere in the past. In that case both THEN and NOW exist simultaneously, but are in separate realities.
But we glide so naturally and effordlessly through time (or at least, that is how we perceive it) that nobody blinks an eye about it.
Travelling back and forth to these alternate realities, on the time axis, would mean time travel.

The concept of parallel realities is a bit similar, except that it is not about the dimension 'time'. Not about the dimension 'space' either, about something unnamed, another dimension.
There was this really weird scientific discovery that can be tested. That famous 2-slit experiment that you saw in the movie. It showed that particles can be in different places simultaneously, because one particle flew through 2 slits at the same time, they could see that because of where it ended up eventually. (in a wave pattern that only forms when stuff comes through 2 slits simultaneously).
And the really crazy thing is that that only happens if nobody watches, when they put detectors on the slits to see what really happens, then the particle only flies through one of the slits, as you would expect. (they call this effect of returning to 'normal reality' quantum decoherence).

This must have made some people totally paranoid. The idea that everything can be everywhere simultaneously when nobody looks, and once you turn your head it is back to where it was, totally nuts. It can be proven, but nobody understands it. (which is the opposite from religion, everybody understands it, but nobody can prove it hahaha).
They didn't just proof it, they actually made a machine that uses it, a Quantum Computer. I was baffled when I saw that. I does the fastest computations anybody could ever imagine, but the big problem with it that it only does that when nobody looks. Otherwise it stops, because of this quantum decoherence. That sounds even more crazy than talking to trees doesn't it?

I think that one of the theories that could explain what they see is multiple interacting realities, but to be honest, that is the point where I get lost also, I don't really know why that would explain it. But apparently there is indeed some overlap in realities then.

[Explorer]

Reality is, I'm told, in the eye of the beholder

The other question (that I picked up from Bill bryson's excellent "A short history of nearly everything") is this -
do the bacteria specific to animal life serve us or do we serve them?

Yeah. life is crazy also, I agree. Like we have foreign DNA in every cell of our body without which we couldn't exist. Mitochondrian DNA. But these are reproduced/living remnants of bacteria that we engolfed when we were still single cell organisms ourselves billion of years ago. And we share this with all animals, plants.. and mushrooms. So where do 'we' end and 'they' start huh?
(and when nobody watches, all bets are off, quantummechanical-wise... I need a drink).

[day_2k]

Hi all

Great thread, I saw the program too and having researched quantum theory, string theory, multiverse theory etc in the past the first half made sense to me (well about as much sense as it makes to anyone) It is a shame they didnt spend more time talking about the holograpic information stuff.. its an interesting idea but did anyone else think "hang on a min, something based on the edge of the universe that has all the information about who we are.. .sounds a bit creationist!!" also does this mean that the information is already there? does this include information about all the decisions we will make in the future.. ?

Its a shame we didnt see the result of the bounced light experiment that would test this holographic theory, it is interesting afterall that they say that holograms are a way of storing 3 dimensions on a 2 dimensional plate, so are we really 4 dimensions on a 3 dimensional field or something??

It left me with many questions, maybe becasue i didnt understand that section as well as i thought i had or maybe becasue it wanted to be thought provoking..

If i have misunderstood, someone please put me straight..

Dave