Saturday, April 15, 2006

Ultrastructures

Why is there a drive in the universe towards order? The most simple explanation is that if there wasn't, I wouldn't be able to be writing this. This argument smacks of solipsism, and solipsism does not make for good science. The fact remains that the current cosmology tends towards order- but does it do so regardless of the sophonts' ability to record it? Is there order without the observer?

In short, yes. In the multiple-universe interpretation of quantum physics, it makes sense for named entities to get as big and complex as possible. The more particles and complexity soemthing has, the more possible universes it may occupy. It's got a world -multiple worlds- open to it, and can choose the one it sees fit. Complex universes win.

Other possible universes, say, where fermions never glued together, would have no entity larger than a ray of light. Heat death on methamphetamines. So the entities from these universes don't have a very large span into other possible world. Massless, they can draw nothing to themselves, sort of like existentialism.

But this is, to some extent, rot. When you make everything out of photons the scale of complexity gets very small and very fast; compare, for example, the electric impulse to the neuron's action potential. A creature made out of photons and gravitons would see a rapid heat death universe as marvelously complex, or, would be horrified by the spectre of a solar mass. Only recently have we stopped making the same assumptions ourselves. My old anthro texts always declared base-10 mathematics as the stepping stone to civilization, when all it means is "I have 10 fingers and 10 toes". The perception of order is dependent on the existence of an internal order within the observer. Our inhabitants of the photonic universe live faster and smaller, but they may achieve greater levels of complexity due to the ease of information transfer from entity to entity.

So the drive to complexity remains somewhat mysterious. It's built into the fabric of four and five dimentional space. How did it happen? Or, taking this a step further, what if someone, somewhere in the future, had made sure that all possible universes had a tendency towards order, so that all possible universes would be knowable by the mysterious someone in Dimension X.

What if the organizing principle of the multiverse were somehow predicate on the existence of sophonts?

It's not that farfetched. Imagine you are an incredibly advanced civilization in a very distant possible universe, separated by incredible amounts of probability. Photonic unicorn land. You've built systems that span solar systems and galaxies or their equivalent. You've noticed, though, that the universe has a chronological end. It stops at some point. What do you do? Maybe you start experimenting on the fabric of space outside of the temporal dimension. What if, you think, I can modify myself so that I don't only exist here, but in all possible worlds?

Come get me now, Big Crunch.

To some extent everything exists in a number of multiple worlds. The bigger it is the more inevitable it is. Black holes exist in all possible universes from the moment of their creation. Primordial black holes exist in all possible universes for the duration of the universe. They are everywhere possible. It would be interesting to see a map of them, and perhaps divine the existence of structure and ultrastructure.

1 comment:

Yurubutu Gralb said...

find a mirror, lean yer head back. (How to find black holes)