Time Is Broken, According To This New Theory

in March of 1949 the British astronomer Fred Hoyle appeared on a BBC Radio Show talking about various theories of the universe Hoya was a believer in the steady state model of the universe meaning the universe had no beginning or end it always was and always will be but a new model had been gaining in popularity for a couple of decades one where the universe did have a beginning that it started from an infinitesimal point and expanded outward from there and continues to expand to this day and when talking to the interviewer about this idea he kind of flippantly referred to it as that big bang idea and the name stuck yes ironically the Big Bang was named by somebody who doesn't believe in the Big Bang and one of the reasons that Hoyle and many other people at the time didn't take this idea seriously was because one of the people who was behind this big bang idea was an astronomer and mathematician named George Lament more about him in a second astronomers knew the universe was expanding as far back as 1912 when vesto Slifer first measured the Doppler shift of a spiral galaxy that suggested that it was moving away from us later scientists like Alexander Friedman and Edwin Hubbell refined this idea and they found further evidence that the Universe was expanding but it wasn't until 1931 the lament became the first person to kind of look at that and say now hold on a second if the universe is expanding then that means that it used to be smaller than it is today and if you go back far enough to the very beginning that means that it would have shrunk down to an infinitely small point which means the universe had a beginning now all of this sounds reasonable enough the problem is that jars lamette looked like this he was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest and yeah this whole idea that the Universe had a beginning that it began with an explosion of matter and energy out of completely nothing sound is suspiciously biblical let there be light and all that over time as our telescopes have become more and more powerful we've been able to see further and further back in time to the earliest galaxies and lament has been proven more and more right but actually the general acceptance The Big Bang Theory is shockingly new it wasn't really until the 80s that it was really and truly embraced by scientists but still the Big Bang is messy and a lot of theories have been put forth to explain it many of which I've covered on this channel and there are still people who think that maybe there is a steady state explanation for the universe one of those explanations is called the causal set theory of the universe and it's pretty solid mathematically anyway and it could explain a lot of other vexing questions about reality so let's talk about it [Music] all right so I'm going to start by issuing my standard disclaimer for videos that talk about big cosmological questions uh especially ones that rely on advanced math to make sense Joe Scott is not a mathematician or a scientist he is merely a science Communicator with a giant forehead who finds these topics interesting please consider this video as a jumping off point for you to look further into this topic through far more reputable sources than a guy who graduated from a state college with a radio TV film degree as always links are down below so like all of these big cosmological mystery topics it all starts with the whole divide between quantum mechanics and general relativity thing you guys are smart and already know this I'll keep it short but quantum mechanics basically describes fundamental forces the behavior of particles like atoms electrons almost everything in molecular and submolecular Realms whereas general relativity underlies our understanding of space-time and gravity it treats gravity as a curvature in space-time created by mass but general relativity in quantum mechanics operate with very different rules and physicists have been trying to bring these two theories together for decades there are four fundamental forces of the universe and those are gravity electromagnetism the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force and gravity is only one of these forces that is not carried by a particle at least not one that we found yet so scientists have been searching for a theory of quantum gravity to solve for this problem especially around singularities like black holes because that's where general relativity pretty much breaks down and another Singularity that Tara's general relativity a new one is the Big Bang so yeah to figure out quantum gravity is to figure out nothing less than the beginning of the universe and over the years physicists have attempted this in a few ways one of which is string theory which is the idea that reality consists of infinitesimal vibrating strings that are smaller than atoms electrons quarks anything you can imagine really and according to string theory when the strings vibrate twist and fold they produce effects in several dimensions and then we interpret that as everything from particle physics to gravity many have Quantum Loop gravity this is a theory that's concerned with the quantum properties of space-time in other words in this Theory space time is quantized or built out of discrete chunks like imagine zooming into space-time according to Quantum loot gravity it wouldn't be a smooth motion it would Stutter from one space-time pixel to another time wouldn't move continuously it would work in quick little ticks of a discrete clock and this new Theory kind of expands on this idea and yeah it's called causal set theory in this Theory kind of like Quantum Loop gravity space time consists of discrete elements but these are called events that are related to each other through causal relationships meaning basically one event causes the next to happen and then the next and the next and so like if you can imagine a collection of dots on a piece of paper and then each dot represents an event in space time the lines that connect them represent the causal relationships between those two dots and if that event causes another event then another line will form and so on and this sort of lattice work of connections between the events is known as a causal structure now of course if you're talking about the tiniest discrete chunks of space-time you have to measure them in the tiniest measurements that we know of and that's plank length and plank time so with causal set theory plank length and plank time represent the smallest possible distances and times between space-time events but anyway you get the idea in causal set theory space-time is granular but what does that mean what that means is that singularities can't happen because the chunks of space-time can't get infinitely close together if there are no singularities that means there was no big bang the universe has always existed and time has no beginning steady state baby now there's an important thing to remember about this Theory and that is that we have no proof we haven't found evidence of these tiniest causal units which are called causets by the way it's kind of like string theory you know we've never found the strings but the math checks out same with causal set theory it's it's a mathematical construct and there's two things I can tell you about the math and causal set theory one it works two it's way over my head so let me explain it with a bunch of words that I found but don't understand okay so causal set theory at its core is based on a mathematical concept called partial order relation this is used to describe a set of events that have a cause and effect relationship with each other causal set theory Builds on top of partial order relation by defining a set of axioms which are rules for how it all works they basically Define the essential properties of the causal structure which I talked about earlier so one of these axioms is a requirement that the partial order relation be acyclic this means there can't be any Loops between the causal relationships between events another Axiom requires that the partial order relation has to be locally finite which ensures that the causal structure is not too dense or sparse there's obviously way more to it but yeah it's math based on partial order relation but if you want to talk about the elements of the causal set itself the causets we can refer to a paper by professor emeritus at Syracuse University Rafael Sorkin he describes kazettes as Point events that carry information saying quote for some pairs X Y of elements not for all we have the information that X comes before y or another case cases that X comes after y physically you should think of this ordering as a microscopic Counterpoint of the macroscopic relation of before and after in time for some events we know that they take place after certain other events he goes on to explain that the word causal comes in because we say that an event is later than another event if the latter could exert a causal influence on the former another way of describing it was laid up by Professor samadhi Surya in the journal Living reviews and relativity saying quote causal set theory is deeply rooted in the lorenzian character of space-time where a primary role is played by the causal structure poet importantly the Assumption of a fundamental discreteness in CST does not violate local Lorenzen variants in the Continuum approximation hang on a second now what all that means to my understanding anyway is that causal set theory works with lorenzian geometry this is what uses light cones to describe the geometry of light traveling through space-time you could say light cones are to Lorenz geometry what a circle is the euclidean geometry this means that kazettes can be mapped onto lorenzian light cones and what's cool about that is using this mapping we can study the implications of space-time's discreetness and how particles behave at high energies of the properties of black holes so there's a reason why this whole approach is popular to some physicists so there was a paper written on CST called if time had no beginning and in it the authors talk about how in order to explain physics before the Big Bang we kind of have to turn to quantum gravity which we still haven't quite cracked but they argue that using a causal set approach fixes that it doesn't have to explain the singularity because there is no Singularity this of course raises the question of how can there be passage of time if there's no beginning to it well they suggest that time can be explained in CST through the process of space-time growth or as the paper's co-author Bruno binto told life science in 2021 quote a huge part of the causal set philosophy is that the passage of time is something physical that it should not be attributed to some emergent sort of Illusion or to something that happens inside our brains that makes us think that the time passes this passing is in itself a manifestation of the physical Theory so in a causal set theory a causal set will grow one atom at a time and get bigger and bigger okay but what about all those observations I talked about at the beginning of this video that point to there having been a big bang in a universal expansion well their explanation is to say that basically from time to time in this infinite expanse of space-time random fluctuations and energy could sort of merge into an explosion of energy and matter kind of like a rogue wave in the ocean meaning if you could see for Infinity in this vast expanse over Infinite Space and Time you just see universes bubbling up in this Endless Ocean of quantum space-time foam but because of the speed of light none of them would be able to reach any others and none of us would ever know that any of these other universes were there kind of like a steady state version of the Multiverse now all of this sounds bonkers but I mean every theory about the beginning of the universe sounds Bonkers like this isn't the first theory that I've heard talk about the idea of quantum space-time foam bubbling up universes I mean you could go back to my video on The Prodigy universe theory where um the big bangings explained is a breakaway piece of quantum membrane that breaks off and and smacks into another quantum membrane like a wet towel that's how they explain it like like it's a wet towel hitting another Universe in the face seriously yeah and pretty much every explanation for the beginning of the universe the Mantra still seems to be give us one miracle and we'll take it from there so I don't know maybe it's not so weird that the most accepted Theory so far was created by a Roman Catholic priest but right now like I said this is all math it all still needs to be proven experimentally and to my knowledge anyway there are no experiments in the works to prove this just yet so we'll see so links are going down below for anybody who wants to dive further into this or maybe actually understands this way better than I did but you guys tell me what what does that mean to you to be in a universe with no beginning or end you know does it does it make you feel part of something infinite does it not matter because you got to get up and go to work tomorrow anyway talk about in the comments by the way there is one upside to a steady state universe and that's the fact that in an infinite never-ending Universe you'd have more time to craft delicious healthy meals with today's sponsor hellofresh granted your lifespan would still be the same but you might live longer if you ate healthier which you can totally do with hellofresh they've got a new Fresh and fit menu that's low on calories and fat super high on flavor or maybe you're busy don't have time for a big production in the kitchen well no worries there's Fast and Fresh recipes that can be whipped up in just 15 minutes and there's plenty of summertime options that are great for having people over throwing on a little music grilling in the 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the week stay safe happy July 4th for those who celebrate and I'll see you next Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 1,219,223

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: 6VYOchKiY0g

Length: 13min 18sec (798 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 03 2023