Tag Archives: photon

No Time, No Space, No Problem

Posted on by under Buddhism, Math, Science

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A riddle:

What is so small that you cannot measure any dimensions, and has no mass; you can fit any endless number of them in one place, yet it can extends across the entire universe with no time elapsing and with no intervening space; that exists in a real sense without space or time, yet it is real and you can experience it directly and your very life, your very existence, is dependent on it?

Maybe a thought fits that description? Or God, if you lean that way? Or Buddha Mind, or the 8th Riki, Alaya consciousness, the Akashic record?

Sure, seems to fit.

Or a photon. That fits, too. Light.

A photon, the force carrier of electromagnetic energy, that also carries energy from fusion reactions between atomic nuclei that occur, say in the sun, fueling photosynthesis at the base of the food chain (well, at least our food chain; other forms of life can depend, for example on thermal energy, for deep sea vents, but one can argue that is indirectly form nuclear reactions in the earths core). The infrared photon that you feel as warmth on your skin, and the higher energy  photons of visible and ultraviolet light that make vitamin D in your skin and gives some unlucky people a melanoma. The particle that powers the photoreceptors of your eye so that you see your loved ones  (well this is more complicated; as Buddhist philosophy makes clear there is sensation but then conception, discrimination, awareness. The photon is how you see your loved one but that is not just a matter of photons and photoreceptors. As cognitive psychology, neuroscience, quantum physics, the Lankavatara sutra and Biocentrism suggest, you project, of course, you are creating your world of loved ones. Well, we also chant in the Heart Sutra: except in emptiness where there is no sensation, conception discrimination, awareness. But I digress).

The photon can detected  in the detector of a double slit or interferometer experiment (though so can objects with mass, protons or electrons, atoms, Bucky balls, etc.) in physics that reveals to us the mysteries of non-locality and entanglement. A particle that is so focused and localized that it can knock an electron out of an atom (the photoelectric effect that Einstein won a Nobel Prize for), but that is just as much a wave without defined boundaries, until it interacts and is measured. A wave that can interact with endless numbers of other waves in the exact same place and time. A particle that can also be stacked in infinite numbers in the same time and place (a “lepton” with no dimensions, no mass).

A photon, the “particle” or basic unit (quanta) of light, does not exist in time or space.

The basic algebra of special relativity is clear and experimentally validated.

In the denominator of the Lorenz equation of special relativity for the effects on time and space for objects in motion (and vice versa; see, for example, the appendix in Biocentrism by Lanza and Berman) there is a mathematical term: the square root of 1, representing the speed of light (c) minus the relative speed of an object of interest (well, velocity (v) relative to the velocity of light, but no difference between velocity and speed here for us; velocity is speed with direction, and here that just says both the speed of light and the velocity of what we are interested in are moving in the same direction)  So, if we take the speed of light to be 1, the speed limit, and the speed of the object is some fraction of 1 (how fast it is moving relative to the speed of light), and that object is also moving at the speed of light (as it would be for a photon), the result is the square root of 1-1 = 0 in the denominator.

Well, you can’t divide by 0, it is not allowed they tell us, so right there we get a mathematical absurdity, as the photon does of course travel at the speed of light, it is light. In any case, any mathematical absurdity notwithstanding, as the denominator approaches 0, that is, the speed of the object approaches the speed of light, the time dilation approaches infinity as one expects when one gets some number over 0. 1 over a very small number is a very large number (1 over 1/2 is 2, that is, 2 halves make 1, and 1 over 1/10 is 10, as ten tenths go into one, etc., ad infinitum, as they say).

At the speed of light a tick to tock for that object, that photon, takes forever. The tick to tock can be any measure of “time,” which means in our experience any regular, repeating event we can observe (a tick-tock of the second hand on your antique pocket watch as the spring uncoils, the swing of a pendulum, the time of orbit of the moon around the earth, the half life of a cesium atom, the days of our lives, etc.). The tock never comes as long as the photon is free to do its speed of light thing.

That is the reason for the “twin paradox” you have probably read about that says that if a twin that goes on a journey in a fast moving spaceship, she is younger than her sibling left behind on earth upon her return. Equally there is a proportional length contraction; the faster moving object is squished. As pointed out in “Biocentrism” page 115, if you were to run across your living room at 99.999999% of light-speed, “your living room would be 1/22,361th its original size…barely larger than the period at the end of this sentence.” Yet to the inhabitants of that living room time and space would not respectively seem dilated and squished. “It’s all good,” they would say, “nothing different here in our friendly little living room.” Same for the twin in the rocket who didn’t age as much as her sister because the tick to tock took longer relative to her sister’s so less ticks became tocks, and who was similarly squished relative to the space experienced by her sister. “All good,” she would say. “Ticks become tocks, and I am not squished. Just as it ever was.”

Well, it’s not that simple; the twin on earth is essentially moving away from the twin in the spaceship just as fast as the twin in the spaceship is moving away form earth, just in the other direction; that’s relativity! The living room is moving just the same as you are, but in the opposite direction. Seems perfectly symmetric, so why don’t both twins or you and the living room have time dilation and length constriction relative to each other? How would that work?

The answer is that it isn’t perfectly symmetric for all entities involved. It is a question of how the system of two twins or the system of you and the living room got where they are: the twin in the spaceship accelerated relative to the twin on earth and you accelerated relative to the living room. The two twins both started in the same place and time but only one blasted off, accelerating into space, and you started at rest at one end of the living pumping your legs as you left off the starting block running. In both cases, the space-travelling twin and running you, used a different amount of energy from the other objects in the system to get things started, to get things moving. So it isn’t a perfectly symmetric situation in either case. [This energy portion can get us to that E=MC squared thing of general relativity and how a massless photon can effect space and gravity, but I digress]

Karma!

Back to the photon! Some small percent of the static on your car radio comes from photons that are almost 14 billion years old, as old as the visible universe we can measure. Yet for an object moving at the speed of light time dilates so much that a tick or tock takes forever. Tick, but no tock, not ever, until it slows down, say hitting your cornea then your lens then your photoreceptor if it is of certain wavelengths, or becomes static on your radio of photons with the energy of about 3 degrees above absolute zero). Almost 14 billion years? No tock, no worries, no passage of time, effectively no time. And space? The photon’s space is squished to nothing. No space. No time no space.

Only objects with mass can experience time and space. An object with mass cannot accelerate to the speed of light because the faster it travels the more the mass, as if it picked up mass with increasing speed like snowball effect in a cartoon as a rough analogy; as the snowball rolls down hill picking up more and more snow and getting larger and larger (ignore momentum and gravitational potential energy decreasing and kinetic energy increasing for the snowball speeding the snowball up for this analogy, maybe better think of you rolling a snowball along level ground, though that image isn’t as much fun or dramatic as a cartoon snowball rolling downhill picking up trees in the process, chasing our cartoon hero). So as an object with mass approaches the speed of light the mass of the object would approach infinite mass and so become harder to accelerate and eventually impossible, making the speed of light an unattainable goal (think of mass as a measure of inertia, i.e. how hard it is to get things going.).

That’s where the Higgs field comes in. That is mass. The moving object picks up mass in the form of Higgs bosons like the snowball above. So maybe Higgs is really the Un-God particle, the particle that gives us gravity, space and time. It gives us the experience of life and death.

No mass, no time, no space. The entire universe is here and now, quite literally for the ubiquitous photon and other massless entities (the photon is not alone, just the one we depend on in our lives on earth), there is no there or then.

So how big is photon, a wave, a quantum field, a particle that is without mass, the smallest thing, if thing it is (it isn’t, of course)? Smaller than can be, as it has no mass or dimension as a particle, yet as a wave it is larger than all that is, as a wave it has no bounds. At the same time, it is neither big nor small, since it does not exist in time or space. This is Indra’s net where all interstices are jewels that infinitely reflect all light instantly. Until it registers in your eye or as static you hear. Then it is in your massive world of the relative, of quotidian experience. Your eye that brings the photon released from a star light years away into temporal and spatial existence, mind creating a world of light! Until then, as far as you and that photon are concerned, the star had no existence in time and space.

Crazy world, huh?

 

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You Think You Can Find Here and Now?

Posted on by under Art, Buddhism, Science, Uncategorized

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A building in the former East Berlin

It is easy to see that our idea of the future is simply probabilities and assumptions. It is also easy to see the past is stories we tell ourselves and can’t be found except in effects in the present for which we assume causes in the past. Neither has firm, concrete, reproducible reality, even if they seem fair enough approximations for day-to-day activities and decisions. For “practical” purposes, you might say.

But we are aiming to be living in the here and now, right?

There is a now we experience of course, isn’t there?

Are you so sure?

No matter how brief, there is a finite time, a gap, between event and experience, stimulus and response, energy change and sensation and perception. One study says the brain can integrate a simple visual scene in as short a time as 13 milliseconds, though most studies have suggested it is closer to 100 milliseconds. I suppose there are many factors at play for a given scene and brain. It certainly feels instantaneous, but that’s what our brain does, of course. It fills in the gaps.

The same goes for any sense. Impulses from sense receptors release chemicals that then change the physiology of a nerve creating electoral impulses and ions race in and out of the nerve. That nerve then signals others, which end up in some brain center ,which then sends signals to multiple brains centers. Some time after that, you put words on it and tell yourself a story about what is going on. That takes longer than 13 milliseconds of course; words are slow cumbersome things even when you think them.

So by time you see, hear, smell, taste, feel, think something, it is already past and you are anticipating the future.

Can we know the now? Sure for practical purposes. We don’t want to get lost in futures that may never happen or obsess about a better past we wish we had, so paying attention to something that seems ongoing and most proximate seems a good idea.

But lets not fool ourselves. Most of what we call the present is really the past, and we are already dressing it up in words and stories and anticipating the future when we think we are in the now.

And related to perception and time, is space. We speak of space-time. The here and now. No now, does here get a bit slippery too? Of course it does. Here relative to what? We know space seems to bend, expand and contract given relative motion. That’s Einstein’s relativity and the details aren’t important for this discussion. But I think it is instructive to look at one of the most basic of all entities in science, the massless energy quanta of light, the source of all we see, the embodiment of what we think of as color, the force carrying transmitter of electromagnetic energy, the photon.

There are many ways to look at the phrase “name the color, blind the eye.” The most obvious is that when we dress up an experience in labels we loose the immediacy of the experience. We pigeon hole it for future reference, falling into a dualistic trap. It may be useful if you are trying to paint a picture and want to be efficient in choosing what tubes of paint to open, but that’s about it.

There’s another way that color is a dicey concept that I like, and I think it is very telling about how things work regarding our dream of time and space. You probably know about the Doppler effect; most up us have experienced a sound becoming high pitched as it races towards us (a siren, for example, or a car), then becoming a lower pitch as it races away from us. The waves of air that make up a sound are in effect compressed as that sound comes toward us, then stretch as it goes away form us.

So what is the sound “really”? Is the high pitch sound or the low pitch sound more real? Of course neither, they both are predictable effects of motion. But it does make it hard to talk about THE sound the car or siren makes (even not taking into account all the modifying features of the environment, the atmosphere, other sounds, your ears and most importantly, your brain that turns the energy pulses in the air into sound then tires to make snense of it and relate it to your prejudices and conditioning).

A similar thing happens with light. You may have heard of the “red shift” in the light from stars as galaxies race away from us. Well, this happens all the time. You can only speak of a photon of a given energy being a certain “color” if the object creating that photon and your eye are perfectly still relative to each other. If that object is moving toward you (or you to the object, or both to each other, doesn’t matter, the photon doesn’t care. Relativity and all that), it shifts to blue. If it is moving away from you, it shifts to red. Same photon, full spectrum. Sure, this effect is too small to percieve at most speeds, but it is real and universal. The photon is no one color, no independent color. It all depends on the relationship of the observer to the photon.

And of course we are always in motion. Breathing, heart beating, land masses moving, earth moving, solar system moving, galaxies moving all relative to each other, Indra’s net of interconnections.

No past or future, and even now is a dicey concept. No there, no here, no in between.

Are you sure about here and now? Sure we want, as the Zen saying goes, to occupy the ground we stand on. And we don’t want to miss what is in front of us worrying about the past or future. But do we really grasp the present? How many ‘presents’ make up the thought of a now? How many instants combine to make up a perception? Is ‘Be Here Now’ just another cockamamie concept we strive after using our dualistic notions? Can we hold on to the fleeting moment, trying to encompass it with our thoughts and feelings, our fears and hopes, without missing the next one? Are we impressionists, who see the ever shifting play of light but then try and nail it to a canvas to contemplate at a later time? The later time of our idea of now?

400px-Claude_Monet,_Impression,_soleil_levant

On the other hand, outside of our dualistic concepts, our sense of self and other, is there anything except now?