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It should be noted that when you make reports, it is your responsibility to provide rational reasoning why something should be removed. Saying it simply breaks community rules is not always good enough.
Note: This is not a rule, but a helpful suggestion.
When posting images, you should strive to add alt-text for screen readers to use to describe the image you're posting:
Another helpful thing to do is to provide a transcription of the text in your images, as well as brief descriptions of what's going on. (example)
All five dimensions (three space, one time, one probability) exist as a solid unchanging block, an enormous, incomprehensible overarching solution to some equally enormous, incomprehensible mathematical equation.
And if you look at it from one particular direction it almost certainly looks like forty-two.
I'm curious about the notion of probability as a dimension, care to elaborate?
It's a fairly common trope in science fiction, and might even be science fact. The idea is that realities split from every decision point, some we're aware of and some - due to quantum fluctuations - we're not. Indeed, it might only be the quantum weirdness that's valid and human decisions are merely emergent phenomena.
If you take a look at any quantum experiment, you get things like particles interfering with themselves and apparently appearing in many places at once. Tissue thin neighbouring universes along some probability axis interfering with each other, one for each possible position of a particle, would explain what's known as the "many worlds interpretation". The MWI doesn't talk about a probability axis though. That's the fictional part until proven otherwise.
It would still be a dimension even if things were more discrete though. Like, separately identifiable parallel universes where no intermediates exist. Hopping from one to the other could still be interpreted as moving within some extra dimension, and there's nothing really stopping us from calling that probability.
Many Worlds is a rather bizarre interpretation.
\1) Even the creator of MWI, Hugh Everett, agreed that wavefunction is relative and wrote a paper on that, but then he also claims there is a "universal" wavefunction. That makes about as much sense as saying there is a "universal velocity" in Galilean relativity. There is never a mathematical justification for how there can possibly be a universal wavefunction. It is just asserted that there is. It does not fall out of QM naturally, a theory which only deals with relative wavefunctions.
This paper shows some technical arguments for the impossibility of a universal wavefunction:
\2) The EPR paper proves that the statistical predictions of QM violate causal locality (although not relativistic locality), and MWI proponents claim they can get around this by assuming that the statistical predictions, given by the Born rule, are just a subjective illusion. But this makes no sense. A subjective illusion still arises somehow, it still needs a physical explanation, and any attempt to give a physical explanation must necessarily reproduce Born rule probabilities, which as Einstein already proved, violate causal locality. Some try to redefine locality to be in terms of relativistic locality (no-communication), but even Copenhagen is local in that sense!
These papers show how interpretations like MWI simply cannot be compatible with causal locality:
\3) MWI proponents also forget that nobody on earth has ever seen a wavefunction. The wavefunction is just a mathematical tool used to predict the behavior of particles with definite values. The Born rule wasn't added for fun. Einstein had lamented at how if you evolve a radioactive atom according to the Schrodinger equation, it never at any point evolves into anything that looks like decay or no-decay. The evolved wavefunction is very different than anything we have actually ever observed, and you only can tie it back to what we observe with the Born rule, which then converts the wavefunction into a probability distribution of decay or no-decay.
If you throw out the Born rule, then you are thus left with a mathematical description of the universe which has no relationship to anything we ever observe or can ever observe. This lecture below explains this problem in more detail:
inhales
Time is a metaphor, a human construct that we've devised to explain how the quantum entanglements affect us. It's like how we use color as a way to describe how we sense a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum with our optical organs. Neither time nor color are "real" in the sense that you can find a physical atom of it, but still useful language to describe how we interact with the world around us.
Reminds me of Hawking's quote, never read the book so might be out of context, but I remember hearing it and thinking
This might suggest that the so-called imaginary time is really the real time, and that what we call real time is just a figment of our imaginations. In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down. But in imaginary time, there are no singularities or boundaries. So maybe what we call imaginary time is really more basic, and what we call real is just an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is like. But according to the approach I described in Chapter 1, a scientific theory is just a mathematical model we make to describe our observations: it exists only in our minds. So it is meaningless to ask: which is real, “real” or “imaginary” time? It is simply a matter of which is the more useful description. ― Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
I got to that chapter in the book (Chapter 10) and had to set the book down for a while. Not because it blew my mind or "expanded my understanding of reality", but because I though I might understand what he meant and knew that absolutely couldn't be the case.
The first 6 - 8 chapters are genuinely a great read, do a great job explaining all of the 'basics' of black holes at a level that most people can understand.
It doesn't matter if time isn't real, we are bound to it anyway.
Can confirm...
Nice. Pass it on, man.
The lack of chins is disturbing.
Its chin all the way down, baby.
I think that's called "balls"
ah, you mean Thanos !
Americans need representation somewhere, you know
This sounds like an idea called "eternalism" or "block time". I tend to suspect it might be the case just because it requires assuming fewer unique properties for the time dimension that aren't shared by space dimensions, but obviously that's not really evidence for it as such. It can be an interesting idea to think through the implications of though, whether true or not.
I really tried to understand how people obviously a lot more intelligent than I am actually believe this kind is stuff. It really breaks down for me when claims are made that past, present (debated now), and more specifically future is different based on the observer. Like yeah, it takes time for signals to travel, that in no way means something that hasn’t happened already has. We can observe things in the past, we can’t observe anything in the future. There’s no evidence that anything can be viewed in the future, it doesn’t make any practical sense to me.
So, what you're talking about (the past and future appearing different to different observers) sounds like a different concept to what this comic was about; if im understanding your meaning, that's something that comes up from relativity, and as such has a bit more grounding to it than any position on if other points in time exist somewhere else along a "time axis" already or if the future is truly unwritten. Either position on the nature of time will result in a universe that looks exactly the same from our perspective, and therefore can only be speculated on, but relativity makes physically testable predictions that can be experimentally verified. I can't really explain it adequately as I only understand the basics myself (though from what I know, nobody ever actually observes the future, its more that different observers see the time between connected events compressed compared to others).
For context this is one of the videos I watched that got me trying to understand, I’m not even sure I know enough to properly explain, it just didn’t sound reasonable to me. Like a lot of mental level flaws that makes me think I’m just not smart enough to understand.
I do appreciate the response, thank you!
Time is an illusion, lunch time, doubly so.
It's a 5 dimensional crystal, our experience is simply the refracted result of all matter/energy in the universe swirling about like water through a stream...
So we can all feel validated in our disappointment that our experience frequently feels like mild constipation while trying to figure out which, if any, of the yogurts offers decent nutrition and probiotics at an affordable price because your body f'n hates lettuce, which your friend tells you the doctor will tell you to eat more of and you should go see the doctor, but doctors are expensive and your insurance is a confusing pile of long-ass 20 page letters containing word salad drenched in legalese, each one telling you you are no-longer with this group, but now you are with that group and you don't even know where your doctor's office is anymore