When the Time Dimension is Absent

[Zinjanthropos]

I don’t know how to ask this and I don’t claim to know anything about the subject. Was thinking of a photon travelling light speed and wondered if the time dimension is absent for that particle in our universe? IOW is light a 3D phenomena in a 3D+1 universe? If I was in a 2D universe would light look the same as we see it?

[C C]

I don’t know how to ask this and I don’t claim to know anything about the subject. Was thinking of a photon travelling light speed and wondered if the time dimension is absent for that particle in our universe?

Contrary to these titles, photons aren't conscious and couldn't experience time, change, etc to begin with, even if they were different particles that traveled a lesser speed.

How do photons experience time?
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/...ence-time/

When you move at the speed of light, this means the following:

• You absolutely cannot have a mass; if you did, you’d carry an infinite amount of energy at the speed of light. You must be massless.
  
  
• You will not experience any of your travels through space. All the distances along your direction of motion will be contracted down to a single point.
  
  
• And you will not experience the passage of time; you entire journey will appear to you to be instantaneous.
  

Does light experience time?
https://youtu.be/ZGoDK18b3LE

IOW is light a 3D phenomena in a 3D+1 universe? If I was in a 2D universe would light look the same as we see it?

https://phys.org/news/2012-08-d-world-in...aster.html

"It turns out that we can define a 2D world where light behaves much the same way as it does in our 3D reality — however, all the fundamental equations governing the physics of light become significantly simpler," Jarosz explained.

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Leonard Susskind (speculation): “The three-dimensional world of ordinary experience––the universe filled with galaxies, stars, planets, houses, boulders, and people––is a hologram, an image of reality coded on a distant two-dimensional surface."

The theory that the universe is a hologram explained in under 5 minutes
https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2018/novemb...ogram.html

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Life could exist in a 2D universe?
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/06...cs-anyway/

In recent decades, physicists have explored this question by investigating the properties of other universes to see whether complex life could exist in them. Their conclusion is that it could not exist in a universe with four dimensions, nor in one with more than one dimension of time. So the fact that humanity finds itself in a 3+1-dimensional universe is inevitable, they say.

This is known as the anthropic argument—the idea that the universe must have the properties necessary for observers to survive.

But what of simpler universes, such as one with 2+1 dimensions? Physicists have assumed that two spatial dimensions could not allow the kind of complexity to support life. They also think gravity would not work in two dimensions, so solar-system-type objects could not form. But is that really true?

Today, we find out thanks to the work of James Scargill at the University of California, Davis, who has shown against all expectations that a 2+1-dimensional universe could support both gravity and the kind of complexity that life requires. The work undermines the anthropic argument for cosmologists and philosophers, who will need to find another reason why the universe takes the form it does.

[Zinjanthropos]

CC..I claim to know nothing but I do get some of this stuff. The light speed barrier is fascinating because to me it separates our universe from something we have no idea of, perhaps another universe for all I know. Does that mean the Universe is kind of like a tv image restricted to the screen it’s on and for it to leave requires a leap into another dimension?

I also find it interesting that living things can glimpse or sense other dimensions. This 2D iPad screen I’m looking at right now for instance. Hard to imagine a 3D world where one can’t sense time or an opposite universe where only time exists.

The Holographic Universe theory reminded me of a Twilight Zone episode. With respect to The theory, Rod Serling in 1959 was ahead of his time when he wrote “The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sixt...ter_Shrine

[stryder]

I tend to think (in a philosophical sense) of a photon being a bit like a water droplet on the surface of water.

Sometimes a drop of water doesn't cause the very thin water membrane to break on either the surface of the water body or the droplet itself, instead it maintains being seperate and the droplet can travel across the surface for a duration before it eventually succumbs to gravity and breaks, becoming apart of the water body.

The reason for the seperation is down to a mixture of air gapping and likely electromagnetics (static electricity perhaps) or even sonar (soundwaves) and while the droplet is in motion for the most part it doesn't get absorbed (Although it might not always be the case, considering a water body can also be subjected to flow)

If you apply the same rendition to photons, then a photon is an ecapsulated packet of spacetime, that for whatever reason (likely polarisation from electromagnetics) has a membrane for the duration of it's movement, when it drops in speed (usually to collisions) it allows it's energy to be absorbed into the background (becoming apart of the background of waves)

It of course implies however that there must be a similar effect to the "airgap/static" effect to maintain a membrane. (probably electromagnetic polarisation)

[Zinjanthropos]

I tend to think (in a philosophical sense) of a photon being a bit like a water droplet on the surface of water.

Sometimes a drop of water doesn't cause the very thin water membrane to break on either the surface of the water body or the doplet itself, instead it maintains being seperate and the droplet can travel across the surface for a duration before it eventually succumbs to gravity and breaks, becoming apart of the water body.

The reason for the seperation is down to a mixture of air gapping and likely electromagnetics (static electricity perhaps) or even sonar (soundwaves) and while the droplet is in motion for the most part it doesn't get absorbed (Although it might not always be the case, considering a water body can also be subjected to flow)

If you apply the same rendition to photons, then a photon is an ecapsulated packet of spacetime, that for whatever reason (likely polarisation from electromagnetics) has a membrane for the duration of it's movement, when it drops in speed (usually to collisions) it allows it's energy to be absorbed into the background (becoming apart of the background of waves)

It of course implies however that there must be a similar effect to the "airgap/static" effect to maintain a membrane. (probably electromagnetic polarisation)

That’s good Stryde. Funny how sometimes you see an event but don’t question it. At least water droplet behaviour is something I can imagine a photon having.

Another thing about photons that bother me is if they actually accelerate but I suppose if they’re massless and time not a dimension of concern then they must have instantaneous speed of light upon creation. I also suppose a photon, because it’s massless, acquires infinite energy but not sure from where.

I assume then that the c barrier only exists for mass particles and would that automatically indicate this boundary exists between mass and massless particles, like two separate physical realms separated by a membrane?

[confused2]

No time??? Certainly electromagnetic waves (photons) behave like waves with highs and lows which change with distance (aka time in a 3D+T universe) .. unlike a bullet thing experiencing no time.
For more stuff google standing waves microwave ..
Here be popadoms in standing waves in a microwave oven ..
https://twitter.com/carolune/status/1113...64922.html

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What the Standard Model refers to as 'particles' aren't actually like particles - I don't think they are 'like' anything except themselves - I'm not sure anybody understands what they are or how they do what they do.

[confused2]

A fun feature of photons is that they only interact with themselves.
So a single photon has a probability of bouncing off the walls, all the walls of the oven. Where the probability of finding the photon from all the paths is at a maximimum is where the popadom gets cooked. Where the probability from some paths cancels out the probability from the other paths the popadom doesn't get cooked. Negative probability cancelling out the positive probability.

I sort of cribbed most of the next bit..
Why talk about probabilities when the wave function is the 'real' thing? Partly I'd need to do some homework or (better) let someone else talk about it. Also the wavefunction may just be a way to calculate things .. not actually 'real' at all.
Wavefunction..
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function

[C C]

[...] Why talk about probabilities when the wave function is the 'real' thing? Partly I'd need to do some homework or (better) let someone else talk about it. Also the wavefunction may just be a way to calculate things .. not actually 'real' at all. [...]

Yah, it's primarily those who advocate the many-worlds interpretation (like Tegmark and Deutsch) that reify the mathematical formalism. Though with all the other countless interpretations, it's probably not the only school of thought that bucks the anti-metaphysical "shut and calculate" dictum.

But taking quantum physics out of the picture -- or the attempts to merge the two (quantum gravity), and the imperative to treat the continuous nature of spacetime as "grainy" and other things at the tiny level... General Relativity practitioners model a particle and larger, complex objects as kind of like spaghetti strands stretching from their origins to their ends. Though again, if it was magically possible for a photon to think and perceive, it would still regard itself as having no such extended existence (at least as a sequence of differentiated events incrementally occurring or experienced in isolation from each other).

Robert Geroch ("General Relativity from A to B"): "There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves therein; nothing happens; nothing changes. [...] In particular, one does not think of particles as 'moving through' space-time, or as 'following along' their world-lines. Rather, particles are just 'in' space-time, once and for all, and the world-line represents, all at once the complete life history of the particle."

What is Space-Time?
https://youtu.be/-c8Lb44wOOQ

Max Tegmark: I really frankly think that Einstein's view of this is more natural. If I think of a particle in space moving in this direction, which we'll think of as time, instead of thinking everything moving. I can think of a spaghetti strand, you know, going in a straight line through space-time. If I have Earth and the Moon orbiting around it, this will make a spiral through space-time kind of like a rotini.

And if you have a really complicated thing like the solar system, that's a really messy piece of pasta. But in the end, all the information is of course encoded just in the geometry of these patterns in space-time. So in that sense you know what's in space-time. It's like you have the whole videotape of the universe. It's all in there.

Shut up and calculate
https://arxiv.org/pdf/0709.4024.pdf

Max Tegmark: ... it helps to distinguish between two ways of viewing our external physical reality. One is the outside overview of a physicist studying its mathematical structure, like a bird surveying a landscape from high above; the other is the inside view of an observer living in the world described by the structure, like a frog living in the landscape surveyed by the bird.

One issue in relating these two perspectives involves time. A mathematical structure is by definition an abstract, immutable entity existing outside of space and time. If the history of our universe were a movie, the structure would correspond not to a single frame but to the entire DVD.

So from the bird’s perspective, trajectories of objects moving in four-dimensional space-time resemble a tangle of spaghetti. Where the frog sees something moving with constant velocity, the bird sees a straight strand of uncooked spaghetti. Where the frog sees the moon orbit the Earth, the bird sees two intertwined spaghetti strands. To the frog, the world is described by Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation. To the bird, the world is the geometry of the pasta.

A further subtlety in relating the two perspectives involves explaining how an observer could be purely mathematical. In this example, the frog itself must consist of a thick bundle of pasta whose highly complex structure corresponds to particles that store and process information in a way that gives rise to the familiar sensation of self-awareness.

[confused2]

Hm. I've spent a few hours trying to interpret something I don't understand. I got nothing. Zilch.
To try to illustrate the depth of my not understanding I'd like to draw attention to an interferometer.
Back in 1887 Michelson and Morley built the biggest and best interferometer I know of. Although the experiment was intended to detect aether drift it is the interferometer itself that interests me.

The heart of the device is a beam splitter .. half the light is deflected by 90 degrees and half goes straight through. An individual photon has a 50-50 chance of straight on or deflected .. and they (this is where my reality falls apart) do both. They have to have gone both ways otherwise there would be no interference pattern.
Much simplified diagram here:
https://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics...iment.html
More detailed description here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelso...experiment
The actual path length (L in the simplified diagram) was 36 feet.
No lasers, no tricks, single photon interference (there's no other sort) 36 feet after the photon was 'split'.
Edit..
There are suggestions that it might be possible to get an interference pattern out of photons 'split' by gravitational lensing .. so billions of years ago. My guess is that it is simply a matter of finding the right (coincidental) setup of source and lens.