Thanks for elaborating. I think you have some interesting thoughts in that.
Perhaps we’ll nail down entropy as a real property instead of just a statistical observation.
I like this one. I have been thinking about how we have introduced imaginary things like magnetic field as something real in the past, in order to find a missing link to explain interactions.
But maybe we’ll find that causality isn’t so solid, with time-like paths everywhere, and determinism only at medium scales.
Especially this one hits.
I have been thinking about these “chains of causes” for a bit now, and I’ve come to jokingly call them “threads of fate” or more provokingly “world lines”. I like the idea that much of the world is in chaos, but sometimes, strong causal links relate some parts of the past with some parts of the future, just like an invisible chain; just like a ray of sunlight through all the fog.
we have introduced imaginary things like magnetic field as something real in the past, in order to find a missing link to explain interactions.
I’d very much like to know when this happened. As far as I know, the magnetic field was pretty much the first field to be understood as such, and a quick search only turns up papers about measuring and modelling complex (imaginary) magnetic fields. Is this something like virtual particles?
“threads of fate” or more provokingly “world lines”
I have mixed feeling about these. In fiction where you can actually go back and try again or see the future with some level of accuracy, there could be some compelling stories about following the causal chain and finding the lynchpin of something, or the far reaching implications of a decision, or even recursive causal chain building rapidly switching between making minute changes and massive paradigm shifts. There are definitely stories that do this, where a fate is defined and then fought against or worked around, but particularly when causality and worldlines get mentioned I see a different idea called “cannon events” that I really don’t like. Where no matter what else happens this one person will die on a specific day, or the evil organization must be allowed to exist. It’s a big cop out that says “the status quo is already the best it can be, don’t go trying to change it”. Sometimes that’s just trying to justify why fictional Earth with time machines still has dictators and not a huge past interventionist problem, but other times it feels very arbitrary, like groundhog day but it’s just accepting death by banana peel into train. It’s less like a causality that can’t be changed and more like being noticed by a vengeful trickster god.
I think a world defined perpendicularly to our understanding of time would either have any changes fully integrated into the past and future (which could be a huge writing load in fiction) or have massive seams where one causal chain encounters another. The boundary between these areas might even be fraught with sudden energetic bursts, like solar magnetic field reconnection.
In everyday life though, I don’t think strong causal chains vs chaos means much. Both mean there’s something out of our control, and if we can’t change that it doesn’t matter why. Maybe there are great causal chains fixing the future in place, maybe the future is chaos becoming what it may, either way what happens still happened. A universe on rails or on dice doesn’t change how we live, how we struggle, or the choices we make, it’s our limits and eachother that define the space in which we cause change. Where that chain of causes started doesn’t change that we’re in it.
That’s so many ungrounded thoughts and opinions though! The topic of this comment thread has changed like 7 times, I’m just having fun at this point. =D
That’s so many ungrounded thoughts and opinions though! The topic of this comment thread has changed like 7 times, I’m just having fun at this point. =D
same for me :D
Sometimes that’s just trying to justify why fictional Earth with time machines still has dictators and not a huge past interventionist problem,
In fiction, the best way to resolve this I feel is to assume that nothing can be changed from before the first time machines were invented, because the first time machine sets something like an “anchor” that all other time machines can jump to.
I look at time in general a lot like water in a river. It flows from the river to the sea (no pun intended) only in one direction, but once it reaches the sea, it can move relatively freely in all directions. I think that time will lose its sense of unidirectionality at some point, but that’s solely my own hypothesis. I have zero evidence to back that up. It’s more or less based on the idea that time represents progress, and at some point our world will be “fully developed”, just like a child grown into an adult or an acorn grows into a tree. At that point, there is no more progress, and therefore, time kinda stops or becomes meaningless. Just that it happens at a cosmological scale, affecting all of humanity.
I think that time will lose its sense of unidirectionality at some point
I actually have no idea how to conceptualize this. Every theory about the far future I’ve heard has assumed that time will move forwards, even if there’s hardly anything happening. Would a point where time changes flow back propagate to cause universe destruction before that happens? Would dark energy just rip everything apart? Is time driven by dark energy? Would everything just stop? Would some component of space become the new time? The Lorentz diagrams, they do nothing! Penrose can’t save me now!
Thanks for elaborating. I think you have some interesting thoughts in that.
I like this one. I have been thinking about how we have introduced imaginary things like magnetic field as something real in the past, in order to find a missing link to explain interactions.
Especially this one hits.
I have been thinking about these “chains of causes” for a bit now, and I’ve come to jokingly call them “threads of fate” or more provokingly “world lines”. I like the idea that much of the world is in chaos, but sometimes, strong causal links relate some parts of the past with some parts of the future, just like an invisible chain; just like a ray of sunlight through all the fog.
I’d very much like to know when this happened. As far as I know, the magnetic field was pretty much the first field to be understood as such, and a quick search only turns up papers about measuring and modelling complex (imaginary) magnetic fields. Is this something like virtual particles?
I have mixed feeling about these. In fiction where you can actually go back and try again or see the future with some level of accuracy, there could be some compelling stories about following the causal chain and finding the lynchpin of something, or the far reaching implications of a decision, or even recursive causal chain building rapidly switching between making minute changes and massive paradigm shifts. There are definitely stories that do this, where a fate is defined and then fought against or worked around, but particularly when causality and worldlines get mentioned I see a different idea called “cannon events” that I really don’t like. Where no matter what else happens this one person will die on a specific day, or the evil organization must be allowed to exist. It’s a big cop out that says “the status quo is already the best it can be, don’t go trying to change it”. Sometimes that’s just trying to justify why fictional Earth with time machines still has dictators and not a huge past interventionist problem, but other times it feels very arbitrary, like groundhog day but it’s just accepting death by banana peel into train. It’s less like a causality that can’t be changed and more like being noticed by a vengeful trickster god.
I think a world defined perpendicularly to our understanding of time would either have any changes fully integrated into the past and future (which could be a huge writing load in fiction) or have massive seams where one causal chain encounters another. The boundary between these areas might even be fraught with sudden energetic bursts, like solar magnetic field reconnection.
In everyday life though, I don’t think strong causal chains vs chaos means much. Both mean there’s something out of our control, and if we can’t change that it doesn’t matter why. Maybe there are great causal chains fixing the future in place, maybe the future is chaos becoming what it may, either way what happens still happened. A universe on rails or on dice doesn’t change how we live, how we struggle, or the choices we make, it’s our limits and eachother that define the space in which we cause change. Where that chain of causes started doesn’t change that we’re in it.
That’s so many ungrounded thoughts and opinions though! The topic of this comment thread has changed like 7 times, I’m just having fun at this point. =D
same for me :D
In fiction, the best way to resolve this I feel is to assume that nothing can be changed from before the first time machines were invented, because the first time machine sets something like an “anchor” that all other time machines can jump to.
I look at time in general a lot like water in a river. It flows from the river to the sea (no pun intended) only in one direction, but once it reaches the sea, it can move relatively freely in all directions. I think that time will lose its sense of unidirectionality at some point, but that’s solely my own hypothesis. I have zero evidence to back that up. It’s more or less based on the idea that time represents progress, and at some point our world will be “fully developed”, just like a child grown into an adult or an acorn grows into a tree. At that point, there is no more progress, and therefore, time kinda stops or becomes meaningless. Just that it happens at a cosmological scale, affecting all of humanity.
I actually have no idea how to conceptualize this. Every theory about the far future I’ve heard has assumed that time will move forwards, even if there’s hardly anything happening. Would a point where time changes flow back propagate to cause universe destruction before that happens? Would dark energy just rip everything apart? Is time driven by dark energy? Would everything just stop? Would some component of space become the new time? The Lorentz diagrams, they do nothing! Penrose can’t save me now!