30 December 2010

Axel’s Universe And Some Silly Thoughts About Time

Even though I never wear a watch, I am surrounded by time everywhere. I have, also, always been fascinated by the idea of time – What exactly is time? What does time mean? Why does it go forwards as a natural progression and not backwards or sideways?

I love the story of John Harrison, who in the 1730s and 1740s invented two perfect precision instruments for keeping time, which (and this is the weird part) were needed to solve the issue of longitude or the position of objects on earth around its axis rather than from North to South. Then there is Alfred Einstein who reinterpreted the way we need to think of the world and the universe as being a matrix of space-time rather than just space on its own, and that objects with mass morph the geometry of space-time, so creating forces that we sense as gravity, hence we must always consider everyone’s personal timeframe when making scientific observations. Also, I used to puzzle over a stopped clock in the quad at Cotton House of Rugby School and wondered then (as I still do now) whether a stopped clock is more correct than one that is slightly incorrect in time, i.e. is a clock that is correct fleetingly twice in every 24 hours more accurate than one that is never correct but is always just out? The standard answer is the almost correct clock as it is correct ± a bit, but I think it is probably more important to be right twice in every 24 hours than never accurate. Finally, I have never forgotten an answer by British Rail (or maybe it was the London Underground, so I ironically did forget some of it!) to the question of why British Rail minutes varied in length, being that British Rail minutes were not about standard time minutes but were estimates related to distance. Then we measure the distance to stars in light years and not kilometres nor in time, so we are continuously mixing and matching time with distance.

For me, time is real quandary, a hidden framework that shapes our reality, which even now we do not fully understand. I think it may be the key to reality and how we should conceptualise everything in the universe. However, we are obsessed by hours, minutes and seconds as a way of diarising meetings and phone calls, rather than seeking to understand time as part of the matrix; time has shape and how we observe reality is modified by time.

We feel and experience time only as one fleeting dimension – the present – however the past is behind us and the future before us, even if as human beings we cannot comprehend these times as dimensions as they do not fit within our sensory model of reality. We see light, hear sound waves and feel physical objects and energy like heat and the wind, but as for time we do not sense it except as part of the ageing process. In fact, when we feel something or hear someone talk to us or taste a perfect chicken tikka masala or watch Usain Bolt run the 100 metres, we are sensing a past act, and so at the point of physical sensation, you had actually already touched that object or your friend had finished speaking or that molecule of spice flavour had moved away from your taste receptor and Usain Bolt had finished that muscle movement. What we call the present is actually history by the time we sense it, however here on earth the impact of that petit morceau of time that we are out by is so miniscule as to be irrelevant; however, you can sense this weirdness by switching on a live football match on Radio 5 Live and then having the match simultaneously on the television in another room, so during the 2010 World Cup I could hear a goal being scored on the digital radio in the kitchen then charge into the TV room and watch the goal about to happen. I accept the science behind that timing difference is different from what I have been talking about, but I use it to illustrate the weirdness of time as a concept. Or to use a spatial analogy, I remember once getting a new pair of glasses and walking out of the optician and falling straight off the kerb like a drunk; the glasses had minutely changed my spatial model of reality and the road and the kerb had moved a small bit, yet my body had not had time physically to adjust to this change and the road was not quite where it used to be, so I was made to look the fool; however, the brain is an amazing thing and likes to reassert its model of reality, so within 20 minutes everything was back as it should be and I could walk up steps and jump off chairs without a care in the world.

However, now look into the night sky, you are looking at the history of the universe, so we are sitting (or standing) in the present, looking at the past and are in the future for those bits of reality sitting in the past. Doesn’t that mean that there is past, present and future co-existing simultaneously? As many have thought of the universe, so I sometimes imagine time as a sphere, where we sit as a dot on its surface – if you curve around that sphere on a horizontal line, then you have all the present realities, then if you go vertically upwards you move into future time or downwards into the past; however, this model of curved time suggests that future and past are simply directional and that they will meet and travel over each other back to our current position. Is this a flaw or is that what actually happens? And how many time dimensions are there – present and/or past and/or future? This is what you must conceptualise when you look into the night sky in the present looking at the past from the past’s future; in the end, we are not wired to visualise this, so it is well nigh impossible to comprehend as we go about our daily lives. I accept that this view of the universe is not considered credible by current physicists, but maybe it is crazy enough to be possible? And while it is basically irrelevant to worry about time as a dimension on earth as we live out our lives, it is crucial to an understanding of the universe and stuff that happens in these bigger time frames, so when you think about the distance to the Milky Way’s neighbouring galaxy, Andromeda, as being 2.5 million light years away and spinning at 225 km s^-1 at its centre, your timeframe becomes very important as when we see some light it is hugely old already and the positional shape of Andromeda now is completely different by 2.5 million years and the speed of 225 km s^-1; a day is a long time in politics and 2.5 million years is much, much longer! This really is the idea behind Einstein’s thinking on relativity, being you need to consider time when you make observations, collect measurements and then formulate hypotheses about data, or when you make predictions, errors will arise because you have not adjusted for the impact of time, and going back to the previous paragraph, time is personal to whoever (or whatever) is making those observations and their answer will be different from that of another observer. On earth, while making normal earth-based measurements, the differences have no impact, but at the miniscule scale of particle physics or the mammoth scale of stars and galaxies, time is so totally critical to getting a correct result.

In fact, we are a bit like the character in the Somerset Maughan story (if someone can tell me which story it is that will help as I have forgotten) who during World War 2 receives his newspapers to his remote Malaysian rubber plantation as bundles in the mail once a month, yet rather than go to the most recent date and read backwards, he stoically reads his newspapers in order but out of time and date. So the information he gleans from the newspapers is old and the politics of the world and progression of World War 2 has evolved by the time he gets his news, so how should he construct his socio-political model of the world. In fact, without current information can he construct a valid model for the world? The answer is no, but because he lives remotely without any other observer to dissuade him of his way of modelling his life, he can continue unchanged even to the point of dressing formally for dinner to eat on his own a British meal. How destructive instant communication is to those obdurate models of how to live and how frightened regimes like those in Burma and North Korea must be of information that can show citizens an alternative model for living?

So when you observe something a great distance away the actual time of that initial event must be considered, so time starts to impact your results and data, i.e. the light that you measure from Proxima Centauri is 4.2 years old or 3.97 x 10¹³ km away (39,700,000,000,000 km). Now that would be fine if everything were static and nothing moved or changed, but the universe is supposedly expanding, earth is spinning on its axis and around the sun and our solar system is spinning around the galactic centre of the Milky Way completing a full turn every 225 – 250 million years, which in turn is moving through the universe towards the Great Attractor; in fact, it means that the Milky Way is moving at 600 km s^-1 and so on earth we are moving at 51.8 million kilometres every day, which is not bad exercise for those of us, who just sit all day at a computer screen. So you cannot just ignore time, or the shape of time; but I still remain unsure as to what time really is all about.

Going back to British Rail’s idea of time, time is not really about standard “diary” time, but is perhaps about relative time between observers and observation points, while absolute time relates to the period of time from the start of the universe, i.e. big bang to the edge of reality, and continues to progress as more time is created every moment and so absolute time moves out from the creation point endlessly. However, at some point, the universe might collapse back in on itself, so would time then move the other direction and regress or at least progress in the opposite direction and would it then flow backwards (or become the new forwards)? I doubt this would mean that reality would wind itself backwards like an old movie reel, but rather the direction of time’s flow would be switched around. Reality is fractal, so any change in direction would simply create a new fractal reality, rather than everyone walking backwards and growing young again, however amusing that might be. Does this mean, however, that time is not absolute but totally relative and will go faster or slower, depending on the speed of expansion of a particular part of the universe, and did it grow more quickly at the start of the universe then become constant and perhaps will one day slow down to zero then switch directions? In fact, as you reach a black hole, you would appear to slow down in terms of time from the point of view of an external observer on earth until you became frozen in time even though (from your perspective) time continues at its normal pace, i.e. relative time is different for you and your observer.

As an aside, the speed of light, c, is used to fix time and so is the crucial constant, acting as the upper limit for energy, but why is it fixed at 299,792,458 m s^-1, i.e. it is fixed but why is not quicker or slower? Perhaps, it is fixed by the speed of expansion of the universe at its initial burst from big bang or the current rate of expansion of the universe, i.e. light cannot go quicker than time itself is made and the upper limit is set by the rate of expansion of universe. However, as speed is a function of distance and time, if the rate of creation of time changes then for c to remain constant the distance travelled must also change to ensure that the distance travelled per unit of time remains unchanged, so would the speed of light appear from an external observer’s perspective to fluctuate?

But this is all just conjecture and frivolous play rather than science, you say. I agree, but then I do not have a budget or the skill to use the Large Hadron Collider, so I shall live in my imaginary universe; it is far cheaper and involves venison casserole followed by chocolate rice pudding later, made by my own hands.

Let me go back to the idea of time; it niggles at my brain like the dog that did not bark in Sherlock Holmes’ “The Silver Blaze”. What if scientists are wrong about time? What if there is more than one dimension to time? What if time is not about standard time but is really a function of the flexibility or at least rate of expansion of the universe, or our reality model? How must we think about time when constructing a model for the universe? Did Einstein get it all correct or are we really still building our models of the universe like one of those beautiful brass mechanical models that showed the solar system using Ptolomaic model?

So what is the shape of time. The general shape of time is perhaps what is being measured by the double slit experiment, which is one of the most elegant experiments of all time. And while it was originally done by Thomas Young in 1803 with light and later brought into the quantum age by Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer in 1927 with an electron beam, it remains one of the most puzzling experiments of all time and opened up the Alice-like world of quantum mechanics. These types of experiment allow light, or a slow moving electron beam or indeed any small particle under the right conditions, to pass through a slit in a barrier and then an observation screen is placed a distance away where you can observe the patterns created by the light, or electron beam, as it impacts the screen. When there is only a single slit open, it merely impacts the screen with greater intensity at the centre and then fades as you move away from the centre. Now if you place two slits between the light or electron beam source and observe the pattern produced, you get a pattern of light and dark or higher and lower intensity. Finally, if you fire individual electrons or photons at the screen rather than a continuous stream, you still get this pattern of light & dark/higher & lower intensity. This is explained by the concept that light is a wave and that you are seeing the classic interference pattern of two waves as they meet and become more intense where they are in phase and less intense and cancel each other out where they are out of phase. But what of the individual electron/photon and why does an individual particle act as a complete wave as if it were a constant stream of particles or a wave?

While most scientists explain the experiment by stating that photons, electrons etc act as a wave under quantum mechanics and even a bucky ball of carbon can under the right conditions act as a wave, for me the experiment provides a glimpse of the shape of time. The future is a wave, which seems sensible as all things are possible in the future. Hence, to return to my piece of string from my previous blog, you can imagine all things being all probabilities on that piece of string from 0 through to 1 and then this rolls forward forever into the future creating the shape of a wave. However, this does not answer everything, for example why don’t all things behave in a quantum manner?

When I like Archimedes lie in the bath, I can look at the taps; if I close my eyes and then reopen them, they are still there, then if I close them for longer the taps are still there unchanged; if I close my eyes really tightly shut, then quickly reopen them, the taps are still there. If I get out of the bath, get dressed, go for a walk and then come back, the taps look and feel the same. Nor can I speed the taps up to such a great speed that they become like waves and become quantum objects. But why not? If quantum mechanics is to unify everything, then it should be able to answer that question as well as predict the existence of baryons, mesons and the colours of quarks, all stuff from an imaginary Alice in Wonderland world of complex maths and strange realities. Does everything need to be blasted at energies equivalent to 7 teraelectronvolts per proton to become real?

So why do objects persist and for that matter why don’t monkeys write Shakespeare and why don’t atoms zap off from my bath taps and zoom around the universe, but they stay put inside my tap or in my delicious cooking apples? The physicists answer would be that they might do all these things, but it is down to probabilities and you need to consider every possible position for those quarks, neutrinos, electrons and atoms in the universe, draw some Feynman diagrams and you will come up with the most probable position for those atoms, which hopefully are in and around my taps and apples rather than in the Small Magellanic Cloud. Now for me, that sounds like a lot of hard work, a bit elitist, as well as a slight cop out, i.e. we don’t know, but it’s a really hard sum that you would never, ever be able to understand!

I feel that something is missing in this analysis. It has perplexed me for ages, but I think one of the keys is how we view time. Objects like my tap and my apples have form, a history; they have a past and this impacts the future of those objects. So in the future the tap will still be a tap and the apple will remain an apple until I eat it and then it will be chewed and broken down into useful molecules for my body to process, or be excreted and then go through the cycle of life again. Time is more than just the future. I call this latency, or maybe it should simply be called the past.

So time has more than just the one dimension of forwards/ the future/ progression, and there is a trace at least of the past. I think it is more than a trace and that time has at least three dimensions of past, present and future, but (and this is key) time is not about standard time – that is a misnomer even if it is how we measure it. Time is a measure of something else in the universe, rather than the answer itself, a symptom and not the illness. The past acts like a drogue on the future, determining what happens in the present, so you must modify your understanding of reality to take into accounts these three dimensions of time.

Let me go back to time and how to conceive of it. Imagine the universe is a balloon and you blow air into it. As it expands, it stretches. Now there is physical shape to it and it is expanding just like the universe. Also, different points expand at different rates, so those further away expand more quickly and appear to be accelerating just like the universe. That is a pretty standard way of thinking about the universe. But there is something else happening – as you blow air into the balloon it stretches outwards and there is pressure that forces the balloon to expand outwards, but there is also resistance in the balloon that is trying to pull the rubber back in on itself bringing it to its starting position as an un-inflated piece of rubber. Now tie an end onto the balloon and get a marker pen – draw a dot on it, that is us and then draw a line around the circumference horizontally. That line is the present. Draw a line upwards, that is the future and downwards for the past. These appear to be directions, but that is not what I am thinking about; think of the forces that are acting – on the present line everything is experiencing an equal force, but there is a forwards force from the pressure of the air that is trying to push us upwards, while there is a downwards force that wants us to return to our starting position. So it is with time – as the universe expands, it forces us forwards, but we also have a force that is pulling us backwards, yet while the universe grows that expansion force is the stronger, but the regressive force is still there and it determines what happens to us in the future. Time is like these forces, i.e. a result of the air blown into the balloon rather than the energy source from the air actually being blown in, and so like British Rail it is really about distance from the start rather than a concept of seconds, minutes, hours, days and aeons. Perhaps, that is how to conceive of dark energy – we are on the edge of a balloon shaped time bubble and the dark energy is simply the air and energy generated inside the balloon or bubble that we cannot see because we are on the outside of the shape itself?

In fact, taking a step back, the Ptomalaic view of the universe is perhaps correct as reality is a bubble of time that emanates from us, the observer, to the beginning of time and back to us. It is like we are walking backwards into the future and looking around us to a snapshot across time, with time encircling us, with each of us at the centre of our own bubbles of reality. Because remember what we are looking at has already been and is not how the universe looks now, so the edge of time measured at 13.7 billion years is in fact half the answer as it will have expanded at least another 13.7 billion light years by now, which is comforting to know as it would be a little bit tedious if it was now collapsing in on us and time had stopped. In fact, time is created quicker than we observe it, so we age relative to the universe rather than stay forever young like Dorian Grey.

Returning to the double-slit experiment, the future is a wave of probabilities. This effectively is a truism stating that until something is known and becomes fixed in time it is unknown and unknown things that are fractal like time can be anything. However, when an event is observed, it becomes fixed in time and cannot change. Similarly, the past can be seen as being a wave pattern, because the possibilities are fractal and so anything is possible. However, I do not fully accept that model, as it is simply saying we do not know what happened in the past, so we must assume everything is possible until we can observe otherwise, but that does not mean my taps were not in my bath when I was not observing them nor does it mean that when my granny, Nora Steenberg, went for a walk on (say) 18^th April 1953 things were not where they should be for her reality even though she did not observe everything around her and note down the data. In fact, the past is different from the future as you could theoretically walk a set of data points from the present all the way back to my granny's walk in the garden, so long as you now the starting point, but you could not walk forward from the present as the future is not yet real. Things exist, stuff happens and all without the need for complex math.

For me, I visualise time as follows. The future is a multidimensional wave; the further away time is in the future the bigger the waves and the greater the potential for anything to happen, so an electron could be anywhere in the universe in 100 million years while anything could happen to Proxima Centauri and any planets, exoplanets or comets around it over the next 3 billion years. However, as something gets closer to the present and so closer to becoming fixed in time, the waves become shallower and fluctuate more, until they become a fixed point travelling in the past. So the future is a wave, where those waves become shallower the closer you get to the present, with the past being a line of points of immovable data points. Think of it like a piece of string stretching into the distance and attach it to a wall (although for time it would be attached to no wall and would move freely); you waggle the string until it starts to form a wave and imagine the waves are the future. Now, get a large funnel and have the wide open end pointing towards the end attached to the wall and have some dangling onto the ground behind you, noting that it needs to be a snug fit in the long tube bit. Start waggling again, then start moving forwards and have someone behind gently pulling the string through; the future is the wave pattern and this gets smaller with a quicker phase and the past is the line of string that just waggles a bit limply behind you on the ground.

The past acts as a break and pulls the future into a shape for your reality, so my taps do not suffer from randomly zooming off atoms and monkeys do not write Shakespearean sonnets or King Lear. The future takes it shape from the past and while anything is possible in the distant future what happens in the near future is largely determined by the cards dealt it by the past.

But why does the past act on the future? And why does the future have more of an impact on electrons than taps and apples? Perhaps it is a result of how the shape of space-time is affected by matter?

Perhaps we could rethink reality and reconstruct our model for the universe to incorporate time even more intrinsically than at present. Think of it like this - imagine you want to create the shape of an object in 3D space, but you only have a cross-sectional slice that is 1 cell thick all the way across and of a slice that is ⅓ from the end of the shape and sliced at a 30^o angle upwards; now imagine that object is an apple and you are positioned in one of the cells in the middle of the slice; would you be able to recreate the shape of the apple and explain what it was? Alternatively, consider the Mona Lisa, but imagine that you are placed somewhere within a slice that is 1 μm thick through the vertical strut of the wooden frame – could you reconstruct the shape and elemental structure of the Mona Lisa, and even if you were able to, would it be possible ever to recreate the face, piercing eyes and mesmerizing smile from your position within the structure itself? So not only would it be unlikely that you could determine the shape of the painting, but you would never get the point of it as you would never see the painting from the outside. It is as if you are on the comma on page 1006 of my copy of The Complete Works Of Shakespeare at the end of the line “Is this a dagger which I see before me?”[it does not end there] and trying not only to construct the physical shape of the book, but also learn all the lines and give me the meaning; I still do not understand much of what Shakespeare wrote and I can see the words, read the text, watch the play and be explained the meaning of the text through numerous critiques of his repertoire. And we seek to explain the universe.

Now there is a tricky problem - how to see what you cannot see? It is a bit like my apple thought experiment where you were focused on the chopping board and there were no apples on the board, but I asked you to count all the apples in the universe and everything still remains off your mental camera shot. Tricky and perhaps when you sit in the experimental field itself it is actually impossible at times to see what is around you, since you need to have a different sense of perspective and as for a stereogram you need to be outside the picture and must squint your vision to see new pictures pop out of the 2D image, and, even then, some people just can never perceive those hidden pictures; could you ever see the hidden picture inside the pattern if you existed inside the picture itself?

That is really hard to do, but now try and reconstruct the shape from a time morphed map of these objects. Imagine for each millimetre you move in a radius outwards from your starting point, you need to position each atom where it would be 500 years ago in time. When you have plotted each of those positions, you must now need to look at it and work out what the shape of the original object is, plus what laws govern it and what its meaning is. No way!

Now, let us move on to think about scale. I always think of how reality changes when you examine that simple geography question – how long is the coastline of Great Britain? The answer you were meant to give at school was 11,000 miles, but it really depends on the scale you are looking at it – so at the atomic scale it goes on forever while at the molecular scale it goes on for a long time, then at the human scale it is 11,073 miles, while at the universal scale it is but a mere pinprick. It is much the same with the core fundamental theories of physics – Newton’s law of gravity works at a human scale, while Einstein’s theory of gravity works for quantum field theory.

So what if time has a much more complex structure than we think. What if it works in reverse to how we see shape – so at small scales of shape it is effectively one dimensional and can be ignored but as you scale up it becomes like looking at a complex world of atoms and quarks. Because when we look into the night sky we are actually looking at a slice of time relative to us and not really a physical shape. Think about it – when we think of mass acting on us we need to consider where those objects are, however when you look into space you are seeing the universe as it has been, so to actually get how an object is acting on you, you must adjust its position to where it currently would be rather than where you can observe it now, which is actually in its past.

Maybe that is the problem – we have a spatial model for rationalising reality, so we are trying to force all our observations into that model, however we occupy a slice through time and not through space, so must adjust our observations to fit that world. Like Newtonian mechanics, it works within its scale frame, but not at small scales and not at larger scales, while Einsteinian theories of relativity appear to work for all of these scales. But perhaps even Einstein did not go far enough with how he visualised time impacting our space and instead we should think about how space impacts the structure of time.

Which brings me on to what is reality, or at least what is it that we are experiencing? And can we unify all theories of physics with some simple geometric ideas? I am sure I will be knocked down here for attempting to interpret how we think of the universe, but let’s just go for it and wait for my bubble to be burst. In effect, I am simply trying to interpret the maths that others have calculated but do not necessarily appear to understand why it works just that it does, however in trying to think it through I seem to have redefined the observable universe slightly as “time & space” rather than “space-time” (note the order of the words as that is key) and, where scaling up or down, to use time as the scale rather than a spatial scale. I am not sure whether that is what is meant by the maths nor if this is right or wrong or changes the way the maths can be looked at, but it works in my head, and may shed some light on what might perhaps be happening. Here goes:

Firstly, when you look and observe perhaps you are not actually looking at physical shape per se. When you look into the night sky or out at the world, you are not looking at a three dimensional spatial universe, but into time, where time emanates from the beginning of time to you as the observer, i.e. it is past time.

Secondly, each person, each being and each observer (animate or inanimate) views a different set of time that is unique to that observer.

Thirdly, past time is continuously being created and pushed out further as future time is converted into past time. This constant creation of new time extends the observable universe continuously outwards, or further away in time.

Fourth, the impact of time relative to space becomes stronger over longer time distances.

Fifth, mass creates three-dimensional space (and vice versa, perhaps). Three-dimensional space is relatively weak compared to time, reducing in strength the further from mass it is and collapsing in on itself without mass being present. Hence, each point of mass has space attached to it, which impacts and works on other fields of space attached to other points of mass, and these can accumulate and build up to build larger shapes of three-dimensional space.

Sixth, three-dimensional space operates like fields that are not destroyed but become weaker over longer time distances.

Seventh, as time is foreshortened and/or energy is increased, the observer’s field of vision shifts to the present, and then in theory would turn around further and for massless energy shift to the future, i.e. an imaginary speed greater than the speed of light.

Eighth, each time dimension has spatial dimensions attached to it depending on the levels of mass involved, so in past time there are the three dimensions that we expect, and in the present (at high energies, i.e. close to speeds of the speed of light), there are, also, perhaps three space dimensions, while in the future perhaps there are no space dimensions and no limit to the dimensions of time.

Ninth, past time is linear but for the present and future these may become multi-dimensional fields, i.e. a line for the present and then wave functions expressed over greater degrees of freedom.

Tenth, it is, therefore, not possible to determine the real physical shape of the universe as we can see only it as time through the lens of our three dimensional space.

Finally, all mass, energy and force can be explained through geometry and time and the interaction between these multidimensional shapes and time.

Philosophically, can this explain the universe and marry up with the maths and experimental evidence?

Take the human scale, the key physical theories are Newton’s theories and Einstein’s theories of relativity. This explanation of our time-space envisages that when we observe we are looking at time through a lens of space giving us a universe that over the small scale of solar systems is a three-dimensional shape that is impacted slightly by time, so per Newton you can largely (but not totally) ignore the time effect on the spatial force fields in our solar system. The shape of the solar system is determined by the mass of the sun, modified by the mass of the planets, moons, asteroids and other matter including living species and atoms. However, distant stars and planets have limited physical three-dimensional shape and so appear flat and have little spatial force effect on our solar system. In the space beyond our solar system, three dimensional space will effectively collapse to almost nothing as the impact of mass reduces, but as waves of spatial force flow through or mass energy shoots through the apparent void space could appear to spontaneously jitter into being; if other mass is around that momentary quantum jitter, more mass might accrete to the initial piece of mass within the small momentary piece of three dimensional space, so stars, galaxies and planets can begin to form. The impact of time is per Einstein and you need to take into account that time moves and that each observers’ timeframe is unique. As such, while time always impacts mass and three dimensional space, it only becomes apparent and needs adjusting for over larger distances or higher energies, i.e. time is the overarching shape that creates our universes but over short timeframes, mass and space dominate as the observable frame but you need always to consider and potentially adjust for the effect of time. This is gravity, i.e. gravity is a force deriving from the interaction between three-dimensional spatial fields, and relativity, i.e. time derives from the observer and when you have more than one observer you need to consider the relative impact of time on what each observer is seeing. So this idea does not deny these exist per scientific theory, just that I seem to see it from a different angle, i.e. time first, space second, which is against our cultural view of the structure of reality where we see space coming first and time coming second as an adjustment per special relativity.

Other issues include how many dimensions are there and what is mass. I will try and address these here.

The question of how many dimensions are there has been puzzling physicists for some time, partly as extra dimensions are very hard to conceive, but they are needed to help quantum field theory to explain the standard model of the physical world. From my proposal, there are really only two sets of functions – time and space. Time can be past, present and future, where we see the past in our daily vision of reality, but can only witness the present in rare occasions and never observe the future. Then I propose that within each set of time, you get its own dimensional shape dependent on there being mass, as intuitively there can be no more than three dimensions in our past time but maybe more in the present. So in the future where there is no mass, you will get no three dimensional space but also the shape of the time changes to never ending multidimensional fields of probability stretching forever and twisting and turning into every possibility, i.e. it has a new shape that differs from the past. The present is something very unique and precious that we do not normally see in our daily lives as we are always slightly out of time, but this is what I think you are seeing when scientists get close to the speed of light and very large energies and is where the future gets pulled through into the past. At the Large Hadron Collider, observers are looking into the present and hence witness reality coming into effect and so get some weird effects. To see into the future, you need to go faster than the speed of light and effectively be massless energy. So by saying that time has three distinct phases you can change the number of space dimensions to be different in each stretch of time and increase without any issue the number of dimensions that scientists are seeing and calculating, but how many there are and what they are can only be determined experimentally.

Now for some maths, although I can only hint at it as I am not a mathematician, but having thought about the universe, I suspect current maths is perhaps hinting at these thoughts and if not could be rationalised to take these thought experiments into account. Also, it is difficult to explain in words about multidimensional shapes, however in pure maths you can show this and perhaps that is what quantum field theory really means.

For example, David Toms at Newcastle University has determined the renormalization group function for the running electric charge in quantum electrodynamics as (Toms, D (2010) Quantum gravitational contributions to quantum electrodynamics, Nature, 4 November 2010, Vol 468, p 56 - 59):

β (E, e) = e³ – k²(E² + 3 Λ)e

12π²32π² 2

This equation means that while the electric charge increases as energy increases per the first term on the right hand side, but in the presence of no or a small value for gravity, Λ, the second term is negative and prevents the electric charge continuously increasing in energy and results in it falling to zero as gravity increases.

However beautiful these mathematical equations are, they still do not answer my original question of why do these forces occur or what is matter, or how did the universe begin and what are we seeing? They beautifully describe mathematical patterns of how to predict results in quantum force fields and particle physics, but they do not bridge that gap of understanding from the complex maths to explaining to the world what is happening, so for example Newton invented his version of differential equations to explain gravity and we all understand gravity even if the math is beyond us; similarly, Einstein was able to explain a complex concept without detailed math. Somehow, current quantum theory misses this simple idea and I worry that its sheer complexity hides the fact that something is missing, some piece of the jigsaw or at least that piece that opens up further understanding.

Now, I confess to being befuddled by the maths and I cannot give an answer as to how to unify all these forces. But I do notice something that unites them all; all modern physics is about shapes, albeit very complex shapes. It is about fields and symmetry, even though these include fields with infinite degrees of freedom and supersymmetry. So I propose that you can explain all of the structure of the universe and reality through understanding how time and space are constructed around everything and how these shapes interact with each other. If this is so, then what could the universe be like?

Imagine that the forces are simply the result of shapes and time interacting, so for example the weak nuclear force might just be the result of the three dimensional shapes caused by different particles interacting with each other just like gravity, so a weak force that weakens in strength with distance, with varying strengths between particles due to the different shape of the fields around each particle type. Perhaps, the electrodynamic force is created by this three dimensional shape spinning around certain particles, so different directions of spin cause different charges, while a mixture of the different speeds of spin and shapes of the three dimensional space actually arcing around the particle results in different strengths of charge, shifting electrons up and down energy levels; once again the strength of the electrodynamic force falls with distance between particles as the three dimensional shape around the particles reduces with distance. These forces are then connected to gravity via a scale change, as gravity is the result of the sum of all these individual small spaces around each individual mass creating a field of gravity that is built around the whole body of mass, so the strength of the force falls with distances. Note the consequence of this is that if gravity can reduce the electrodynamic force then so ought the weak nuclear force, which perhaps is why the weak nuclear force is weak as were it stronger than the electrodynamic force, then there would be no electrodynamic force and so no chemistry or biology or life. The strong force is more complex and results perhaps from the impact of time on each particle and its shape, so using my analogy from earlier of a piece of string being time – imagine two particles connected by a piece of string, then as the two particles get closer together the string becomes limp and so it weakens as the particles get closer together, but then as you pull them further apart the strength of the force gets stronger until it effectively no longer changes (until at some point it snaps releasing energy?).

So imagine the beginning of time, we might get the following pattern. At T=-1, there is no mass so the universe has no shape. At T=0, mass comes into being and space is created around the original body of mass. At T=1, you have one particle of mass and one unit of time, so there are no forces, as while you have space and time, there is nothing for these to interact with. At T=2, you have two particles of mass and two units of time, so you have strong physical attraction between the two particles due to the weak nuclear force and gravity resulting from three dimensional shape, which at this stage are the same, but you have no electrodynamic force as gravity is too strong preventing space from spinning and the strong force is relatively weak as both particles of mass are close together. At T=3, you have four particles of mass, and the weak nuclear force and gravity are still strong due to the high density of these mass particles but weakening as these points of mass become further apart, while the electrodynamic force is beginning to want to start spinning but is not yet able to. At some point, however, after creation, you reach a point where the weak force and gravity are weak enough to enable mass to be separated and the electrodynamic force can start being formed.

Then perhaps supersymmetry and high forms of dimensions as used by mathematicians and physicists to explain what they are doing are simply time and space folding up into (semi) stable spinning shapes that can persist on their own or more usually only when interacting with each other. So perhaps bosons, leptons and quarks are simply symmetrical foldings of time and space that are unstable unless together, so you would need to derive several unstable symmetries in the math that when you brought together would cancel out each others' instability (accepting that I postulated earlier that forces are the interactions between time and space rather than from particles called bosons). So what is matter? It might simply be time and space folding up into stable symmetries, i.e. it is the symmetries and dimensions that are important in themselves rather than being a mathematical nicety (or complexity). Then, antimatter and dark matter might be alternative symmetries that are less stable, where antimatter can be made stable in certain conditions, while dark matter might be all the unstable symmetries that come into existence but collapse into spaceless/shapeless/matterless time-space, i.e. I suppose flat, dimensionless "3 dimensional" space - the stuff that is everywhere but has no physicality.

So time is more important really than space and has a bigger impact on reality than space. Time works over long distances while space works over shorter distances. Space is formed by mass and becomes "shapeless" without mass, while conversely space can create mass. Matter is caused by space and time folding into stable symmetries, either on its own or in interaction with other semi stable symmetrical shapes; dark matter is space and time that forms in unstable symmetries and so collapse in on itself into shapeless "flat" space. Forces are caused by the interaction of space-space, space-time and time-time, taking into account shapes and spin. There is more than one time dimension and we see time through a lens of space, and each time reality is unique to an individual observer. We observe time not space, in fact we observe past time only (walking backwards into the future). Evereything is possible in the future while the present is forced into being by the latency of the past.

Finally, I can understand why maths is so key to this, as trying to explain this in words is well nigh impossible, so perhaps I need to get out some books in complex maths and get thinking, however I am not sure that current maths can quite meet the challenge and someone with more numerical ability will need to invent a way of describing reality, but it needs to be explainable to us ordinary folk. So I leave the world of cosmology to those wiser than me, which is nearly everyone else in the world.