I honestly think this is what I love in sci-fi, some space opera most notably: whereas most stories are usually told in terms of space and time, sci-fi sometimes speaks in terms of scale, of orders of magnitudes — because space (I mean the cosmos, not the dimensions) is a natural playground for that.
Sometimes, when I ponder the discrepancy between quantum, or whatever's smallest, perhaps strings 'below' (in scale) or 'within' (physically), and the largest relativistic objects like "dark attractors" and meta-galactic structures (streams of 'dark matter', light nodes, etc)...
It almost seems like scale is but another kind of dimension in and of itself.
Like you've got spacetime at our human-ish scale (roughly 10 orders of magnitude smaller to larger around our size), and that spacetime behaves in a certain way, that probably Einstein describes accurately. Then you've got spacetime at smaller scales, below "quantum uncertainty" if we must place a limit, and there spacetime behaves in a much different way, the picture is very, very different.
And so there could be yet another spacetime at a higher threshold of scale, and intuition tells me it may be at the galacatic level already, because dark matter, rotation discrepancy, and those weird supermassive blackholes; the flow of galaxies, the meta-structure we see. Dark energy, if it's real, also begins at that scale (doesn't break galaxies apart, but makes holes bigger between them, the non-correlated enough sets).
Going from this idea to postulating disjointed (1+3) spacetimes forming, in effect in this example, 3x4=12 dimensions to explore mathematically, let alone physically, is a stretch which I'm certainly not willing to make (although I think that's what some string theories must reduce to, somehow, maybe reduced to a single unified dimension of time maybe?); no really this doesn't make sense in my head. It's pretty but nonsensical, like art I guess. Worth the sci-fi, not the studies.
But the feeling, the intuition really is that, and conveyed by these extreme zooming animations: a different scale means totally different phenomena, and no macro-system can be reduced to its parts in that view, nor can it be deduced from its parts (I mean, we can't even solve the 3-body problem, that's harsh on "scaling continuity" or smoothness, on the "linearity" of scales so to speak). A "basic" intuition I guess is that the 4 fundamental interactions have ranges, and kick in or out depending on a particular scale of the system.
What struck me was the link to Hoag's Object which came up a couple days ago. And that even though it's a bazillion miles away there's another much more distant ring galaxy that you can make out way in the distance beyond it in the picture.
monkeydust|6 years ago
K0SM0S|6 years ago
Sometimes, when I ponder the discrepancy between quantum, or whatever's smallest, perhaps strings 'below' (in scale) or 'within' (physically), and the largest relativistic objects like "dark attractors" and meta-galactic structures (streams of 'dark matter', light nodes, etc)...
It almost seems like scale is but another kind of dimension in and of itself.
Like you've got spacetime at our human-ish scale (roughly 10 orders of magnitude smaller to larger around our size), and that spacetime behaves in a certain way, that probably Einstein describes accurately. Then you've got spacetime at smaller scales, below "quantum uncertainty" if we must place a limit, and there spacetime behaves in a much different way, the picture is very, very different.
And so there could be yet another spacetime at a higher threshold of scale, and intuition tells me it may be at the galacatic level already, because dark matter, rotation discrepancy, and those weird supermassive blackholes; the flow of galaxies, the meta-structure we see. Dark energy, if it's real, also begins at that scale (doesn't break galaxies apart, but makes holes bigger between them, the non-correlated enough sets).
Going from this idea to postulating disjointed (1+3) spacetimes forming, in effect in this example, 3x4=12 dimensions to explore mathematically, let alone physically, is a stretch which I'm certainly not willing to make (although I think that's what some string theories must reduce to, somehow, maybe reduced to a single unified dimension of time maybe?); no really this doesn't make sense in my head. It's pretty but nonsensical, like art I guess. Worth the sci-fi, not the studies.
But the feeling, the intuition really is that, and conveyed by these extreme zooming animations: a different scale means totally different phenomena, and no macro-system can be reduced to its parts in that view, nor can it be deduced from its parts (I mean, we can't even solve the 3-body problem, that's harsh on "scaling continuity" or smoothness, on the "linearity" of scales so to speak). A "basic" intuition I guess is that the 4 fundamental interactions have ranges, and kick in or out depending on a particular scale of the system.
Scales are obsessing me.
daxfohl|6 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoag%27s_Object