This is just a thought, and I’m wondering if it makes sense to anyone else.
Can scale be considered a 5th dimension? Before the concept of spacetime became mainstream, we thought of space as consisting of 3 interwoven dimensions and time as another separate dimension. But with spacetime, we end up thinking of time as a 4th dimension that is interwoven with the 3 spatial dimensions, meaning essentially that the only difference between space and time is how we experience them.
Now the more I think about it, the more I see the same being applicable to scale - that is the dimension along which we place the size of things. So, for example, we say that planets, solar systems, and galaxies are at the end of the scale we label as “large” whereas atoms, electrons, and quarks are at the end of the scale we label as “small”. Is this a 5th dimension? It is interwoven with time and space - that is, for any value of scale (any size), that same value can be talked about at any point in space and at any point in time.
Of course, one might say that scale is nothing more than a certain interval of space - that is, distance, area, or volume. So scale is essentially a specific way of talking about space. But the same could be said of time. That is, time is just a specific way of talking about how things move through space. In other words, time is just what you get when things take on different values with respect to their spatial positions. But we still talk about time as a 4th dimension. Why not scale?
I think this is good suggestion. I think the key similarity between the four dimensions and scales is the extremes. Eg, whereas with time we have the big bang and the future, with scales we have the sub-atomic scales and the universe as a whole.
You can talk about time scales; geological time vs. fruit fly time. Some would argue that scales are subjective but, maybe so is space and time. When we were talking about light speed it occured to me that, to the light, there is no spacetime.
Makes me think about the big bang as a supratemporal ‘event’, necessarily an object perhaps; at the larges scale there is this ‘big bang’ object.
If what is exploding at the big bang is spacetime, then how are we to conceive of the ‘bang?’ If it is time itself that is expanding with space then it might be worth it to try to abandon the notion of ‘event’ as it is necessarily temporally biased.
It is easier for me to conceive of time ‘rolling in on itself’ during a period of hyperinflation; for some reason.
Well, i don’t know. There’s gotta be our perception of time, chemically based; then the time that things including us move in, if one is to assume we can talk about the truth of things. The latter would be the one that is like space; it’s the one i’m trying to condition, with space, when i’m thinking about the big bang.
If time ‘expands’ then ‘expand’ expands. I wouldn’t want to separate time from space if i’m accepting relativity. Einstein makes the point that spacetime is never empty; if spacetime is the gravitational field of an inert(ial?) object then it should not be conceived of apart from ‘it.’
When you think about that together with the point i made earlier about light experiencing no spacetime, it puts us right up next to each other. Cool.
Good idea. There are all kinds of abstract ideas you can develop if you start thinking out of the box. You probably read my reply in “what is an electron” to come up with this idea.
Great idea. It would certainly benefit from an idea like the one in this thread. When I think of scale as a dimension, I think of it as infinite, like space. When we talk about space, we talk about distant galaxies and galaxy clusters. We could even talk about a collection of galaxies so far out that they might be said to constitute their own universe. So I can see there being galaxy-like things and tiny “universes” below the level of electrons and other sub-atomic particles. As a dimension, scale wouldn’t have a limit (sure, you could talk about something being size 0, but it would still take an eternity to keep dividing a certain interval of space by half in order to approach size 0). It would sure explain a lot of the anomolies that pop up in quantum physics.
Well why not push it even further and just declare that size doesn’t exist ? After all we measure the size of anything compared to our own dimensions which we keep constant and arbitrarily assigned by natural evolution. What if we constantly varied our own dimensions so as that the size of anything we perceive results to be always constant ? What if evolution and some new laws of physics created us in such a way as being possible to contract and expand automatically from planck level sizes to billions of light years so that all we see remained a constant size ? Then all our references and measurements would no longer be size but other properties.
So maybe size should be eliminated from physics and we should see all physical details at a constant size therefore without any size since we couldn’t perceive size differences.
If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that we could assume everything in the universe is growing or shrinking at the same rate, and because we, the observers, would also be undergoing this change, we would never be able to tell. Well, this would make size relative, but it wouldn’t eliminate it.
Not really although that is a possibility. What I was thinking of is like seeing everything from a fixed size box (like a PC screen) where the zooming in and out of size is automatic and you always just grasp a constant box of changing information but unaware that a size zooming is occuring. You would just see changing information and discover the rules of the given universe without considering size or any kind of reductionism anymore. Things wouldn’t be composed of other things anymore but would have one constant size that changes the contents within that box according to how you interact with it.
Okay, so in other words, it isn’t so much that something like a rock is reduceable to atoms, but that a rock can become a collection of atoms. The “box” or “PC screen” is a little harder for me to conceptualize, but I assume it’s a general metaphore for the means by which we can observe or infer the atoms that the rock can become - like a thought experiment or the measuring equipment we use in the laboratory. This would be the “dial”, so to speak, on the PC screen that we can turn that moves the rock/atoms along this dimension and makes it change. Is this right?
If this is right, this is actually quite insightful… I like it.
Yes that is more or less correct. It is hard to look at physics and reality without thinking in terms of reductionism. We always see things that have reciprocal sizes and things being composed of other things. It is an automatic thought process or the way we automatically decode reality. This way of decoding that our brain uses is successful but it may very well be arbitrary.
In a future time when we will be able to directly design our own minds and manipulate our neural circuits to any degree we may be able to think outside of our “box” and no longer need to see things as being composed of other things or being larger and smaller. We may even be able to surpass mathematics and logic.
Actually reductionism deosn’t even exist. What does something being composed of something else really mean ? Only through given manipulations and interactions do we perceive reductionism, it is all relative to how we interact with reality.
We can push it even further and declare that time doesn’t exist but only a very large space of combinations exist. Time can be eliminated from physics if we see the complete history of a universe as a single combination of mass-energy that follows a sequence of quirk combinations. For example if the universe had only 2 states of mass-energy in 2 points of space all the possible histories would be 00 01 10 and 11.
Now extrapolate this to the entire universe with all the possible combinations of mass-energy as a frozen configuration, then all these configurations would be a single set of numbers in an abstract space. No longer any time dimension, what appears as a linear flow would simply be a jump from one combination to another. The jump occurs in zero time but the space containing all the combinations is very large. Even the laws of physics may be a quirk since we perceive just the combination corresponding to linear flows whereas in reality any sequence of combinations are allowed like a fish becomes a tree after a second of time and then a star and then a car, it would be a simple combination of mass energy expressing all possibilities no longer limited to our stupid little laws of physics.
Well, the main reason our neurons are wired together the way they are is that this seems to be the best way to ensure our survival. We don’t need to think logically or mathematically per se - just in our current environment. It’s fully conceivable that new environmental pressures might push our evolution in a direction that mandated deviation from logical/mathematical thinking, and there would be nothing wrong with this - what would be important is that it helps us survive.
I think the idea is very abstract and hard to grap but that is good, the harder and more abstract the better. And if something ends up being completely incomprehensible then so much the better. We must get out of the “box”.