Thought Experiments

Hi there.

Here’s a mental feast for you to enjoy in many small courses. I call it is seeing with God’s Eye.

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Imagine that instead of perceiving the passage of time as you do now, second by second, you could choose see the passage of time in different orders of magnitude.

You could choose to watch centuries pass like seconds. Or observe nanoseconds drag by like hours.

Now, imagine you could see every of these variable speed time frames moving at the same time. Everything happening all at once. Can you visualise that? Paradoxical perhaps, you ask; how can causality (the idea that things must happen in a certain order) not be violated by objects existing simultaneously, but out of phase within time?

Maybe they can, but we need to rethink what time is. Let’s do away with notions of right or wrong here and just totally lose the plot (the basis of any good thought experiment!).

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If causality is the arbiter of circumstance (as in, things have to happen because they have to come after causes) then perhaps time is a law that enforces causality? Sort of like the rails on a rollercoaster that keep everything travelling along at the right speed. Time ensures that causality doesn’t ever go ‘wrong’ and we don’t suddenly get cakes un-baking themselves or your tea un-brewing. That wouldn’t do in an ordered universe, after all.  We refer to the tendency for things to fall apart over time as entropy, and that the fact they do indicates that time has a direction. This is referred to as time’s arrow, and time’s arrow is always in the direction of your ice cream melting or surfaces in your newly cleaned house getting dusty…

Therefore, for causality to exist, we must have time.

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This examination of causality is here so that we have an idea of what we are doing away with in the experiment. Examining causality further is a threatening and fascinating detour in itself. I’m just going to say this is a ‘quasi- quantum’ eye that perceives the passage of time very differently. It is not restricted by trivial stuff like causality.

Hey, this is God’s eye after all!

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So, back to your view through the eye..

With God’s Eye, in whatever ‘playback speed’ you look at, you would find that everything on the earth is vibrant and alive, having it’s own unique movement and moving in it’s own time frame.

In the eye that drags out milliseconds for aeons, you could go back to what physicists call the Planck time and watch the forces and energies of the universe decoupling, changing phase and establishing themselves. You could watch the transition of the primordial fireball as it morphed from the infinitely small energetic dot into the wondrous universal playground we live in today. You could watch it as it expanded and its eventual fate (whatever that may be).

Interestingly, from our ‘current’ human perspective, the early cosmic genesis would happen so fast as to be completely imperceptible. Worse, to be present at the Planck time would probably result in some serious bodily damage  – imagine being killed by a wall of infinitely bright energy. Anyway..

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You may have seen a timelapse video in which the tidal motions of the ocean resemble the lapping of waves in the sea in ‘real time’ (God’s Eye sees beyond this real time nonsense). Perhaps you observed a flower that appeared to watch the sun rise and fall? Similarly, to see an individual rock in a longer time frame is to watch an object metamorphose, grow, collect new materials, change size and shape, form and re-form.

In the right timescale this rock may resemble something very much alive, travelling around the earth and shedding and gaining size and materials, such as other rocks, or lichen and moss. Perhaps like a human who moves home, who gains and loses body weight over time, or changes his or her clothing and hairstyle?

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What we perceive as ’still’ comes from our reference points. We are (relatively) frantic, fast moving and (comparatively) newly animated carbon structures, surrounded by a nursing home of very old and very slow moving heavier metals. Like hummingbirds whizzing around a tree, our perception of the timeline is blisteringly fast relative to much of the our surroundings, such as the geology all about us…

We see trees grow, but perhaps not at the speed trees ‘perceieve’ this growth. If a tree could ’see’, it may very well recognise humans as fast moving blurs that are quick to come and hack away with sharp, serrated instruments. Small, demonically fast and brandishing chainsaws!

If I were a tree I would be terrified.

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I’m a little uncertain about photons, a lead into Part 2….

Next time you see something that appears slow or unmoving, remember that slow is an attribute that is relative to your perception of time.

The photons that carry the imaging information which makes up your body  may ‘experience’ you as a totally static environment in which they play out. You know better. To you, they travel so fast as to be unperceivable. More paradoxically still, they are the means in which you perceive. You cannot observe a photon without interfering with it. You cannot know perception from a 3rd vantage point. How uncertain..

Scientists say that the observer and the observed are a closed system. Information transfers between the two parts – observer and observed, regardless. It seems to imply that we are all connected through information.

Let’s make a mess of this with words. To perceive perception you must use perception to perceive, and thus a truly objective state is impossible!  This is the uncertainty principle that Werner Heisenberg expressed so elegantly.

Within the message, is the messenger! Madness!

I’m going to try and expand upon this idea of how observation is part of the reality the eye in part 2 .

TLDR/Conclusion: Imagine you can see with God’s Eye. God’s Eye can operate outside of causality and does not affect the system in which it observes at all. It is completely detached from the bindings of the uncertainty principle and of time.

"In the strict formulation of the law of causality — if we know the present, we can calculate the future — it is not the conclusion that is wrong but the premise." - Werner Heisenberg