A Different Kind of Theory of Everything

A Different Kind of Theory of Everything

by Natalie Wolchover

“One of the amazing characteristics of nature is this variety of interpretational schemes,” Feynman said. What’s more, this multifariousness applies only to the true laws of nature—it doesn’t work if the laws are misstated. “If you modify the laws much, you find you can only write them in fewer ways,” Feynman said. “I always found that mysterious, and I do not know the reason why it is that the correct laws of physics are expressible in such a tremendous variety of ways. They seem to be able to get through several wickets at the same time.”

Even as physicists work to understand the material content of the universe—the properties of particles, the nature of the big bang, the origins of dark matter and dark energy—their work is shadowed by this Rashomon effect, which raises metaphysical questions about the meaning of physics and the nature of reality. Nima Arkani-Hamed, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, is one of today’s leading theoreticians. “The miraculous shape-shifting property of the laws is the single most amazing thing I know about them,” he told me, this past fall. It “must be a huge clue to the nature of the ultimate truth.”

Traditionally, physicists have been reductionists. They’ve searched for a “theory of everything” that describes reality in terms of its most fundamental components. In this way of thinking, the known laws of physics are provisional, approximating an as-yet-unknown, more detailed description. A table is really a collection of atoms; atoms, upon closer inspection, reveal themselves to be clusters of protons and neutrons; each of these is, more microscopically, a trio of quarks; and quarks, in turn, are presumed to consist of something yet more fundamental. Reductionists think that they are playing a game of telephone: as the message of reality travels upward, from the microscopic to the macroscopic scale, it becomes garbled, and they must work their way downward to recover the truth. Physicists now know that gravity wrecks this naïve scheme, by shaping the universe on both large and small scales. And the Rashomon effect also suggests that reality isn’t structured in such a reductive, bottom-up way.

A Different Kind of Theory of Everything

by Natalie Wolchover

Sci, You find the best stuff!!!!!!  Had to look-up the meaning of the Rashomon effect.

 In 2013, Nima Arkani-Hamed and Jaroslav Trnka discovered a reformulation of scattering amplitudes that makes reference to neither space nor time. They found that the amplitudes of certain particle collisions are encoded in the volume of a jewel-like geometric object, which they dubbed the amplituhedron. Ever since, they and dozens of other researchers have been exploring this new geometric formulation of particle-scattering amplitudes, hoping that it will lead away from our everyday, space-time-bound conception to some grander explanatory structure.

I read about the excitement of a few decades ago, regarding information encoded on 2 dimensional surfaces as as encoding 3D holograms.  A physics constant based on the volume of an 3 D abstract object.....you got to love it.

Sci, You find the best stuff!!!!!!  Had to look-up the meaning of the Rashomon effect.

I suspect I have a very generous daimon, at least in this regard.

I read about the excitement of a few decades ago, regarding information encoded on 2 dimensional surfaces as as encoding 3D holograms.  A physics constant based on the volume of an 3 D abstract object.....you got to love it.

Holography and the Holographic Principle: or why physics might entail some new reasons to take mind-body dualism seriously

Marcus Arvan

There’s a simpler way to put this: (A) the Holographic Principle (a hypothesis from physics) plus, (B) our ordinary-everyday conscious experience of the world as 3-dimensional (a simple, experiential fact) appear to jointly entail, (C) a kind of mind-body dualism. One simply cannot get a 3D hologram from physical information alone. You need a second, distinct medium outside of the physical information to read that information off, producing an image. But if this is right, then we might have some new reasons -- based on physics and ordinary-experience alone -- to think that mind-body dualism may be true.

Finally, I would like to suggest -- following some remarks I initially made in “A New Theory of Free Will” -- that perhaps something like this has to be true of any experienced 3D world.

To repeat an analogy that I used in that paper, suppose you wanted to know what materials and structures it takes to make a bridge. How would you figure it out? The obvious answer is: you’d try to build models of a bridge (and then a bridge itself), and see if the models work (good models reproduce the phenomena they are intended to model).

Now consider the following analogy. Suppose you wanted to figure out what it takes to make a reality— that is, a 3-dimensional world of objects to experience, navigate, use, etc. How should you do it? Here’s an obvious answer: try to make your own model of one! But now how? Well, we already know how. We’ve already created virtual worlds -- online, interactive environments with 3D virtual objects, people, etc., all of which we can interact with in real time. And what does it take to make such an environment? We've found that it takes two things: (1) software (i.e. information encoding “rocks”, “trees”, etc.), and (2) hardware (external processors to measure that information in real-time).

So, perhaps, if our reality is holographic, could this be because any 3D reality has to be holographic? Could it be that any three-dimensional world has to be constructed out of two things -- 2D information being read by an outside medium?