From Alexandra:
What blew my mind so much was that if you look at our universe’s beginning as a mere ripple in something larger that slowly oscillated into our Big Bang, not only are WE merely a speck in a vasty universe, but our universe is a mere speck in a much more vasty…something. I mean, whoa. And then the idea of how matter is encoded into the folds of spacetime, and how our perception of what we’re seeing in terms of time and light speed could be totally incorrect because of these folds, and how that can explain how the probe heading towards the sun is slowing down when we didn’t predict it would, because instead of traveling straight through space it’s having to navigate these folds of gravity, like a lure bobbing on the waves. I need some serious drugs to dig deeper into this.
My reply:
Different observers under different effects of accelerating forces already see such differing views of reality (with regard to distances and elapsed time, but also with regard to perceived forces on other objects [for instance, if you are traveling with two electrons and perceive them as stationary you see them repel each other, but if you see them zipping past you see them attracted to each other by the magnetic fields they generate as moving charges]) — well, we tend to (mistakenly, in my view) discount ourselves from the equations as sacks of mud propelled by self-willed spirits, but the photons and other particles that inform us also inform everything else in the universe and those things aren’t as easily confused as us. Causality itself is actually warped by the lens of warbling translucent structure and is literally physically different all the way into the past and all the way into the future as we simply walk around, just like a view into a holograph changes as you view it from different angles. Is the lion’s mouth in the image open or closed? Are the bird’s wings up or down? The image is simply undeniably different depending on where we stand, and, as consumers of light, the image is all we have to go on. That’s what holographs do.
Also our concept of gravity is permanently fucked and really needs to be discarded. Items leaving a gravity well leave under more acceleration than Newton predicted, items approaching a gravity well aren’t pulled in as strongly as predicted — there’s obviously at least one more variable. People have tried several times to explain it every time they’ve seen it — the mass/inertia-based hypercharge force, the expansion force/dark energy, gravitic “force lines”, presence or absence of dark matter — it’s exactly like when people had figured out that Ptolemy was wrong but Copernicus hadn’t come along yet to make the math all simple again by suggesting that the sun was at the center. Newton is our Ptolemy here. We love him too much to put a stake in his heart and cut his head off with a shovel, but his lurching stinking corpse is really ruining the party.
In my more mystical moments I feel it ought to be possible to push ourselves along the wall of the holograph in whatever direction we choose until the picture more resembles what we want to see. We’re already coasting along it in a time dimension at a pretty fucking huge clip (at least, all the way out on this edge of the hologram) and every choice we make and every causal interaction changes our trajectory a tiny smidge… possibly as much as a child dragging a line in the water from the deck of a cruiseliner changes its course, but sometimes a good deal more dramatically, I would think.
My point is if the collections of photons we call an image is our view of a holographic universe, than each separate collection (yours, mine, give or take another seven billion, and that’s just observers on our twirling rock) is completely, causally speaking, a completely different literal physical universe, with “uncertainty” being the quantifiable distance between my viewpoint and yours, or Heisenberg’s and his measuring device of choice. Is this the Copenhagen “many worlds” view? I still only see it as one so I don’t think of it as such….
But it does make it unimaginably big. Especially if there are more completely separate holographs. But that’s all extrapolation based on the big bang thing, which I’m not sure is the right explanation either….
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