The Superluminal Observer

From the "rebel physicist" at University of Warsaw, and posted back in 2020, here's an attempt to explain what it's like to be the object that moves faster than light. 

Three time dimensions, one space dimension: Relativity of superluminal observers in 1+3 spacetime

Dec 2022, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2022-12-dimensions-space-dimension-superluminal-spacetime.html

The Superluminal World - Stretch your brain into this, the collapse of 3D space into 1D, or rather the flip from space to time dimensions.

I don't know why we had to wait for someone to say this, but why not? Why can't superluminal objects exist?

What happens when we assume—at least theoretically—that the world could be observable from superluminal frames of reference? There is a chance that this would allow the incorporation of the basic principles of quantum mechanics into the special theory of relativity. This revolutionary hypothesis of prof. Andrzej Dragan and prof. Artur Ekert from the University of Oxford presented for the first time in the article "Quantum principle of relativity" published two years ago in the New Journal of Physics. the latest conclusion is in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, titled "Relativity of superluminal observers in 1 + 3 spacetime", and is authored by a group of 5 physicists.

In their latest publication in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, titled "Relativity of superluminal observers in 1 + 3 spacetime", a group of 5 physicists goes a step further, presenting conclusions about the full four-dimensional spacetime.

via University of Warsaw and Center for Quantum Technologies of the National University of Singapore: Andrzej Dragan et al, Relativity of superluminal observers in 1+3 spacetime, Classical and Quantum Gravity (2022). DOI: 10.1088/1361-6382/acad60

https://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1361-6382/acad60

Image credit: Neutron star merger - NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, CI Lab - 2022

https://phys.org/news/2022-08-neutron-star-insights-gleaned-gravitational.html

Post Script:

Time-synchronization is hard:

Network-crashing leap seconds to be abandoned by 2035, for at least a century

Nov 2022, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/network-crashing-leap-seconds-to-be-abandoned-by-2035-for-at-least-a-century/

International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM in its native French) just decided that Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, would run without a leap second until 2135. 

source link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/18/do-not-adjust-your-clock-scientists-call-time-on-the-leap-second

Leap seconds in 2012 and 2017 caused multi-hour outages at companies including Reddit, Qantas, and Cloudflare. Many companies implemented a version of "leap smearing" to smooth out a leap second addition into micro-seconds spread across the globe throughout a day.

The Shanzhai Sun

"Shanzhai" means "counterfeit goods," which is China's way of saying "Made In China"

Let's start with the story from a few months ago, where China plans to make artificial moons for nighttime illumination. Mirrors in outerspace that redirect sunlight from low earth orbit. Now they're looking pretty good on the nuclear fusion front, i.e., artificial suns.

Granted, you must take every headline about nuclear fusion as fake news, because we are unlikely to see its boundless surplus of power in our lifetime. Depends on who you ask though. At this point, a Chinese reactor is reaching 100 million degrees, which is way more than the Sun itself, but still only enough to maintain such a nuclear meltdown for 10 seconds.

Regardless of "when," folks like the futurist Isaac Arthur do a good job of explaining how this major shift in energy production can be used to transform our world. Megastructures that surround our entire Earth, or spaceships that span the Milky Way, all these things are possible with nuclear fusion as an energy source (some faster than light travel wouldn't help).

Bottom line, this gives a different meaning to the idea of China Fake. Also wondering what the plans look like for Fake Earth and Fake Humans.

Notes:
China's 'artificial sun' reaches 100 million degrees Celsius marking milestone for nuclear fusion
Nov 2018, ABC News

China is launching artificial moons in urban areas
Oct 2018, Astrononmy.com

Isaac Arthur's Science and Futurism Channel

Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, 2008
Chinese Science Fiction

China-Fake
2013, Network Address

On Closeness, Distal Perception, and the Medium

grandma's got a point

When people say, about the weather, “It’s close out”, meaning, “It’s humid”, it’s because some things, in a relative way, actually are closer.

Deep sounds, with longer wavelengths, like a rumbling train; and “base note” smells, with larger molecules, like the mercaptans of cigarette smoke, are – relative to our ‘normal’ range of distal perception – closer to us, because they can travel more easily on the excess moisture in the air.

With Wormholes or Without

Searching for the Quantum Origins of Space and Time
Renate Loll, Utrecht University's Institute for Theoretical Physics

Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, May 5, 2010

Renate Loll is interested in spacetime and quantum gravity on the Planck scale. She invents a universe that runs on Planck-scale building blocks. If she designs the universe such that she -disallows- wormholes, it scales up to resemble the familiar, classical world we know. As soon as she allows wormholes, however, that universe simply makes little wormholes everywhere - every available piece of quantum fluctuating spacetime will make a wormhole with itself, and as you feed  the universe more and more spacetime, it just makes more and more a big knot of wormholes all connecting to eachother. The "universe which is allowed to have wormholes" never grows, and every place is just one step from every other, and that creates a universe with a very large number of dimensions.

spacetime with wormholes
(as opposed to without)

That is all.

see her mindwarping wormhole simulation around 45minutes: [video]

Phantom Streets and Authenticity

In an article about a mysteriously undiscovered island in the South Pacific, scientists wonder what happened. Did mapmakers, perhaps, create the fake island on purpose, they ask, because -

...some map makers intentionally include phantom streets to prevent copyright infringements.



South Pacific Sandy Island 'proven not to exist'
BBC, 22 November 2012 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-20442487

Go Home Time, You're Drunk

Some places — labeled in red — have no time zone, and just observe Coordinated Universal Time, by default.

So this is what time zones look like in Antarctica
Robert T. Gonzalez, Jan 22, 2013
http://m.io9.com/5977955/so-this-is-what-time-zones-look-like-in-antarctica

time

The Big Heap, Time and Network Configuration

recursive painting

As Lee Smolin tries to ask us, to ask ourselves, if, for interpreting quantum cosmological theory, there may be available a language that does not presume that time and change have meaning, he conjures Julian Barbour, who argues that clock-time cannot work in a quantum theory of gravity.

Julian Barbour's Big Heap:
Time has no fundamental meaning at all.

The universe is a great collection of moments, each one a snapshot of the universe, a simple configuration of things. This collection of all moments is The Heap.

The Heap contains a great many moments, but there is no sense in which the different moments can be ordered in time. They simply just are.

The quantum state of the universe serves only one function, which is to give the probability that any given moment may be found in this collection.

All physical laws reduce to one question: A godlike being reaches into the heap and pulls out a moment. What is the probability that such a randomly selected moment will have some particular characteristic? To describe this, we need no notion of time or change. Nothing is changing in time because there is no time - the whole heap just is.

Each moment is structured as to give us the impression that other moments also exist. We have memories as evidence that can only mean that other moments must have happened in the past, like "time capsules" (Barbour) - aspects of the configuration of a moment that speak to us of other moments.

Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos, 1997, Oxford (p289)

Despite my paraphrasing, the words structure and configuration are used by Smolin, and hence, they do make us think about a big heap of things, or nodes, connecting to each other - a network. 

Filaments of Creation

Tom Theuns  /  Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, 2010

In this computer model of the early universe, gravity arranges matter in thin filaments.

ON GRAVITY:
since we're talking about quantum cosmology

In his book, Bursts, A.L. Barabasi forces us to re-imagine time. It is not made of regular intervals; that is to say, people do not ‘do things’ at regular intervals. Instead, people do lots of things in short bursts of time, and then go for long durations doing nothing at all.

Our use of/working with social computational dynamics is forcing us to fine-tune the resolution of our time structures, revealing something akin to Einsteinian space. Some kind of strange gravity draws near to it (timewise) the bulk of our activities.

Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi
aka Algo Rhythm
aka The Dimensional Liberator

ASIDE:
In logic, the time that an algorithm requires to complete cannot be measured, as it is not apparently related with our customary physical dimension.
(via wiki:Algorithm)

A.L. Barabasi, Bursts, 2010
A Bit on Networks
Bursts

(Another Aside)
...in a world of increasingly pervasive surveillance, location and identity are becoming all but inextricable:

New surveillance technology can track everyone in an area for several hours at a time
The Washington Post, Feb 2014

The Process of Creation

A composite false-color image of fire in space. The bright yellow traces the path of a drop of fuel, shrinking as it burns, producing green soot.photo: Paul Ferkul / NASA

When an artist creates a sketch of a work she intends to implement more fully in another medium, the sketch does much more than function as external memory to remind the artist what she intended. Rather, the sketch enters actively into the cognitive process of artistic creation.

As the artist works the sketch, erasing lines, drawing arrows, rearranging objects and so forth, the external object becomes part of her external mind, not just recording her thoughts, but transforming…

(Joseph Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions, p125)

In Space, Flames Behave in Ways Nobody Thought Possible:
Combustion experiments conducted in zero gravity yield surprising results
Ker Than, Smithsonian magazine, December 2012

Inside-OutsideVia the –membrane-, the cell controls exchange between interior/exterior to its own advantage in order to maintain a high level of internal organization, but in so doing it also requires reciprocation of the exterior – the two coevolve. (p155)
-Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos, 1997, Oxford
http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/10/inside-out-side.html

On Memory Non-Neuronal

Brainless slime mould has an external memory

By Ella Davies, BBC Nature

9 October 2012

Slime Mold_Paul Zahl-NG-Getty Images

clipped article:

"The whole organism is made up of bits of pulsating tissue, which are constantly expanding and contracting, using a similar mechanism to our own muscle cells," explained PhD student Christopher Reid.

"Each part changes the speed at which it pulsates according to what it can sense in the environment around it - for example food, light or heat - which are detected by chemical receptors on the cell's surface."

"The pulsating parts are also influenced by the throbbing of their neighbours within the cell, which means that they can communicate with each other, to pass information through the organism about what is happening in the environment outside. The different speeds of contraction directly influence which direction the cell will then move in."

"In essence, the slime mould is memorising where it has been - storing this memory in the external environment and recalling the information when it later touches the slime-coated area.

"For a single-celled organism, it has continually surprised researchers with its abilities, such as solving mazes, anticipating periodic events, and even making irrational decisions like we do," he told BBC Nature.

"It is truly a remarkable creature that is redefining our notions of 'intelligence'."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19846365

notes:

Slime mold uses an externalized spatial “memory” to navigate in complex environments

Chris R. Reid, Tanya Latty, Audrey Dussutour, and Madeleine Beekman

Behaviour and Genetics of Social Insects Laboratory, School of Biological Sciences, and Centre for Mathematical Biology, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia; and Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, UMR 5169 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Université Toulouse III, 31062 Toulouse, France

Edited by John G. Hildebrand, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, and approved September 7, 2012 (received for review June 24, 2012)

Abstract:

Spatial memory enhances an organism’s navigational ability. Memory typically resides within the brain, but what if an organism has no brain? We show that the brainless slime mold Physarum polycephalum constructs a form of spatial memory by avoiding areas it has previously explored. This mechanism allows the slime mold to solve the U-shaped trap problem—a classic test of autonomous navigational ability commonly used in robotics—requiring the slime mold to reach a chemoattractive goal behind a U-shaped barrier. Drawn into the trap, the organism must rely on other methods than gradient-following to escape and reach the goal. Our data show that spatial memory enhances the organism’s ability to navigate in complex environments. We provide a unique demonstration of a spatial memory system in a nonneuronal organism, supporting the theory that an externalized spatial memory may be the functional precursor to the internal memory of higher organisms.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/10/04/1215037109