An Email Thread With My Dad About Gravity

An email thread with my dad about gravity

I liked your phrasing that that time cancels space.

And you indicated that wonderful diagram that shows space time invariance – helps people understand why you can’t go faster than the speed of light…. :

http://hubpages.com/hub/Minkowski-Diagram http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/st_diags.htm I’ve still been entertaining the idea that the universe is a kind of computational fabric where it takes longer to compute the interaction of many nearby objects.

Agreed it is a kind of bubble-gum theory because it doesn’t provide any substance behind what the computational fabric is. In a sense I’m just saying that the universe rests on the back of more turtles…

But I do find it interesting that

  1. we observe that time slows down when more objects are close together and that
  2. objects that are closer together take more work to predict the sum over all possible future outcomes of
  3. time and gravity are inter-related; slower regions in time are gravity wells.
  4. as you accelerate towards the speed of light time slows down for your frame of reference It just seems to me that these four facts must be related to each other.

If we build a computer that tries to simulate the outcome of an n-body interaction – from the vantage point of any one body it would take more or less computation depending on how far away proximate bodies were AND the velocity of that one body. If a billiard ball is near other billiard balls then computing forward possible outcomes of the intersection of that billiard ball and all other billiard balls takes more work. If say a billiard ball is accelerating towards the speed of light it has a collision cone that extends further and thus more possible interactions. So the number of possible interactions is a function of velocity and proximity. In the case of a computer this is expressed as cpu cycles. In the case of say a computational fabric it might be expressed as some kind of energy.

In a two body interaction time should slow down for both bodies participating in that interaction – it doesn’t matter which one is moving at light-speed or not – they both should be suffering increased computation to compute outcomes… I suppose that in reality the reason time slows down more for the fast moving body is that it is calculating a high number of proximate interactions with many many other bodies – whereas any body relatively at rest is only calculating interaction with the one fast moving body.

What I really like to speculate about – still – is that if this is so then maybe we can express gravity in terms of a side effect of time. Just as in communities there is a social gravity – that if you are near lots of other people there’s an inclination to get kind of trapped or stuck by that community – there may be a truism that holds true in ordinary interactions of objects. That the property of gravity that we see is nothing more than a predictable side-effect of computational density slopes.

I had several thoughts about how if there was a computational slope – say the gradient between a black-hole/sun/other-stellar-mass and outer space – that particles might get mired in the downward-facing side of that slope. I thought that perhaps the slow facing side would have fewer possible outcomes so the net sum of outcomes would be a propulsive force towards the downward side… Alternatively I thought virtual casmir forces might act less often on the downward side; again creating a virtual force on the particle…

It doesn’t really answer what is time in any way. I suppose we could say that each particle has a fixed energy which it can use to solve possible interactions, and if it exhausts that energy then it can’t do any more interactions with the universe for that ‘round’… but it doesn’t explain what that energy is or where it comes from… or how it is carried and transmitted… or why particles would want to solve interactions at all…

Anyway… still wish I’d see some real research on this. Thinking of asking a physicist if there’s any way to bolster this idea.

I guess it would mean that gravity waves are not possible – nothing carries them. That might be one measurable effect. Also it would mean that there is no such thing as anti-gravity – so anti-matter would fall down.