Gravity is the absence of

This is a continuation of the time travel post. And this one is one I am probably very wrong it. Still it's a fun thought experiment so I'm putting it on here anyway.

So the question is: what is gravity? That's a hard question to answer due to the uncertainty of it and its strange behaviors. It seems to follow a certain set of rules: 1) It is very weak in small amounts but conversely it is strong enough to hold galaxies together; 2) It propogates outward at the speed of light; 3) Increases in speed also increases an object's gravitational mass; 4) Increases in gravity slows down time. There's probably more rules that it seems to follow but I certainly can't come up with them off the top of my head. These are the more important ones in this argument anyways.

Let's start with the idea, which makes things easier to explain. My though is that gravity, rather than being a form of energy, which some people theorize that it spans dimensions and time (like that movie Interstellar) to explain why it is so weak, is actually instead a vacuum or an absence of matter and energy, almost like the vacuum of space but different. How different you ask? We'll, for one thing, space isn't a complete vacuum. It might seem like to us because of how air and matter react to it but it actually has a lot of stuff in it just floating around. First being energy, e.g. the background radiation resulting from the big bang which permeates the entire known universe. Also now we are discovering the presence of dark matter. So no space is not a complete emptiness. But then the question remains then how is gravity a complete emptiness?

The answer is... it's not. Gravity is a force resulting from the absence of matter and energy in all its forms in a position in space. But again that doesn't seem to make much sense then does it? After all, planets have a gravitational force and they are definitely not devoid of matter and energy.

But that's easily explained. Rather than thinking of gravity as a result of the complete absence, it's better to think of it in degrees. As in the presence of matter causes a slight decrease in the concentration of existence, or matter/energy, in that particular position in space.

Perhaps it would be easier using Einstein's approach. He visualized gravity as a depression or dip in the fabric of space that pulls the surround matter and energy towards it. So my idea is that that dip in the fabric of space is caused by a decrease in the overall concentration of existence in the universe itself... If that makes any sense. A black hole would then be described as a complete absence of existence at that position. The best visualization would be like a whirlpool. A hole at the bottom of a body of water creates an absence of water which leads to water rushing around and around it to fill it up. And a large mass like a star or planet would simply be a dip in the lake that needs a greater concentration of everything in order to even it out. So this would explain why something with small gravitational mass makes a small dip and a large mass creates a massive gravitational well, and a black hole completely breaks it. This metaphor also kind of explains the presence of gravitational waves and how they can ripple through the universe. It's essentially the same as how the presence of a dip in the bottom of the lake and the resulting rush of water to fill it can cause a ripple in the water itself.

Of course that's the easy to explain part. The harder question is why is there a depression or dip in the fabric of the universe in the first place. The answer to this question starts with my time travel post.

If you'll remember my previous argument regarding the effects of the speed of an object and its correlation to the passage of time for that object. In essence, as an object moves faster through space, it requires more energy for the individual particles that comprise the object to move within the object. And because an object in the vacuum of space is pretty close to an enclosed system, it uses up its personal store of energy which causes those particles to slow down resulting in a slowing of its passage of time. And as a result, this creates what is a more absolute vacuum which is what gravity is. So as an object accelerates through space, it uses up more energy to maintain its consistent rate of change aka time. And in doing so, it generates a stronger gravitational field. This explains how an an accelerating object increases its gravitational mass and also slows down in time.

The other point of concern then is how objects in space have gravitational mass even when not moving. This is rather simple. They are always moving. Even when it seem be like they are standing still in space, everything is actually moving relative to the universe itself. Therefore they will always generates gravity by virtue of everything always being in motion.

Interesting side note: theoretically speaking, this means that if an object is not moving at all relative to the universe, it should have almost zero gravitational mass since the only cause of gravitational mass would be the movement of particles within the object. Which also presents another thought: if we can measure the rate of passage of time of celestial bodies compared to its physical mass in some way or possibly the correlation between an object's physical mass with its gravitational mass, we could then compare the differences between celestial bodies and presumably find the center of the universe since, hypothetically, only an object at the center of the universe where the big bang happened would have zero speed.

So that explains rules 3 and 4 but what about 1 and 2. Well that's simple enough too.

A single small object moving through space only has a small amount of particles in it to generate gravity. But as it moves through space, it will collect other objects which will increase the object's overall size and number of particles resulting in a stronger gravitational field.

As for rule 2... the speed at which a gravitational field propogates is limited by the maximum rate of change matter and energy can have which happens to be the speed of light. There you go. That takes care of all the rules.

Of course, this also begs the question of how the hell black holes work. Well, according to my theory, black holes are simply absolute vacuum in the fabric of the universe. Like if a large dip in space got compressed into a very small space. Coincidentally this is exactly how a black hole forms: when a large gravitational mass is compressed beyond its event horizon. Interestingly enough, if black holes are absolute vacuums in reality, this also explains why smaller black holes are not self-sustaining. In fact, we are actually able to create miniature black holes using particles accelerators but they very quickly dissipate. It's almost as if the black holes were quickly filled. Hmm. Yes. But of course, celestial black holes are simply too big to be filled by the influx of reality.

As for how a black hole forms and what Hawking radiation and quantum mechanics has to do with all of this? Well it'll take a greater mind than mine to figure that out.

So in conclusion, my idea is that gravity is not a form of energy and is merely a result of a absence or a vacuum of matter/energy/existence in its most absolute sense. If taken a little further, you can also use this idea to explain why the universe is expanding at an unreasonable rate. It's entirely possible that there is simply an absolute nothingness outside of the universe, which makes it like the vacuum of a black hole. Which means that the gravitational pull of that nothingness is what's causing the universe to expand at an increasing rate. It's not that there's no gravity to pull the universe back together, it's simply that the gravity outside of the universe is much much stronger. The best way to visualize this would be if the universe was like a balloon filled with the air of reality. Since the outside of the universe balloon has no air of reality, the vacuum/gravity causes the universe balloon to expand, just like a real balloon would if taken to the vacuum of space. I just hope the universe balloon doesn't just pop like a real balloon would. Could you imagine what a mess that would make?

Time travel is impossible

Now this is another thought that has a lot of implications. If this were true, that means all those time travel movies like Looper, Hot Tub Time Machine, Back to the Future, and even the new Avengers movie would be impossible. And, truth be told, after I came up with this, how those movies approach the concept of time travel became really really annoying. So if you don't want to be constantly annoyed by their interpretations of time travel and just enjoy the movies as they are, then please do not read on. Or you can just learn how to turn off your brain. That works too. It's just want I do after all. Endgame was just too good to pass up.

To understand how I came to this conclusion, you have to first identify what time actually is. Popular media sees time as a separate thing that we move through as if it's a river that has a set path with a before and after. They describe it as the "arrow of time". Wikipedia describes it as the progress of existence and events. Even things like the ideas of fate and destiny seem to play into this by saying that things will happen a certain way no matter what you do as if the future is already preordained. Because of these concepts that time is set or already written or whatever, we get the conclusion that with certain technology, magic, Delorean, or Pym particles as in Endgame, we are able to manipulate our position in that time stream to do whatever.

That's probably wrong, or most definitely wrong if what I came up with turns out to be true.

Time is not a separate thing from space. It does not exist as record of events or whatever. In fact, the term space-time is literally used to describe the effects of gravity and light speed travel. Just by the existence of that term in the scientific community, it's obvious that space and time are connected, or more likely one and the same.

In fact, time can be thought of as a quality of space, a dimension of space if you will. We already know the three obvious dimensions of space: width, length, and height (or x, y, z). So time could be seen as a 4th dimension in additional to the other three. Actually, this is one of the more prevalent views of what time is so I'm not going to take credit for that but I can build on it, though I don't know if other people have already thought of this (read the disclaimer).

To better understand how time works in relation to the other three dimensions, let's take a look at an object: the Moon.

The position of the Moon in space is its three dimensions. We have to clarify what the Moon is in relation to though. Let's say the Earth for simplicity's sake. It's current position above Earth would provide us with the three dimensions of x, y, and z, which then you can plot on a graph paper. But the Moon is constantly moving around Earth, right? And how do you graph that? That's right: by create a 4th dimension that plots the next position the Moon occupies a second later (or minute or hour or whatever). Thus time as that 4th dimension can be seen as the change in the numbers of the other three dimensions.

So what does that mean? It means that time is simply the change of the position of an object in space. If you are familiar with higher level mathematics, time is delta (Δ), aka the change of a variable. Just as change is a quality of the variable so too is time a quality of space. You cannot separate the two.

In essence, the passage of time is simply the collective change in position and state of every particle and energy of every object in the universe. So what we see as a singular event in time is not one single thing.

This line of reasoning can explain (a bit) why as the speed of an object increases, time for it slows down.

First, we have to clarify what the time of an object actually means. Time for an object is not necessarily just its position in space we understand it in the conventional sense. We have to look a bit smaller in the atomic and subatomic. Because of the simple fact that while an object may be standing still, the atomic and subatomic particles that make up the object are still moving. In essence, we have to examine the change in position of every basic component of matter of an object to measure its time. Which is why when measuring the position of an object, we have to clarify what we are measuring it in relation to.

Using the Moon as an example, if it becomes frozen in the sky, its position in relation to Earth is no longer changing. But Earth is still moving around the Sun and the Sun is still moving around the galaxy center and the galaxy is moving through in the blackness of space. So, in essence, though the Moon is frozen in its position relative to Earth, it is never actually frozen in relation to an absolute position in space and it's never frozen in time.

Now back to my explanation of why time for an object slows down as it approaches the speed of light. The speed of light being the maximum speed matter can move through space.

First of all, now that we understand the concept of time (assuming that I'm right of course). the faster an object moves through space, the faster it is changing. And similarly the faster the subatomic particles that make up the object is moving along with the object. So when the object is moving at the speed of light, it's not that time has stopped for it. It's simply that all the subatomic particles that make up the object can no longer move relative to each other.

To better clarify what that means, think of this example from Futurama. The Planet Express ship was going at maximum speed when it accidentally shot Bender from its cannon. So Bender was going faster than the maximum speed of the ship, making it impossible for the ship to catch up.

Now, let's say that the ship was going at the speed of light. Is it then possible for Bender to be fired from the cannon and reach a speed faster than the speed of light? The answer is no. Similarly, when the object is already moving at the speed of light, the particles that make up the object cannot move any faster, even if only in relation to each other. So essentially, the movement of the object through space is like the Planet Express ship and the particles that make up the object is like Bender. The particles have already reached the maximum rate it can change through space and it becomes frozen in relation to other particles within the object. In essence, it becomes frozen in time from the perspective of the object.

This raises an interesting question of then why an object starts slowing down before it even hits the speed limit of matter. And this can be explained by the fact that it takes more energy to move an object through space the faster it goes, and it takes an infinite amount of energy to move an object at the speed of light (remember this because we're coming back to this point). So just as it takes energy to move an object through space, similarly it takes energy to change a particles position relative to each other. When an object as a whole is already moving at a certain speed, to change the position of the particles within the object relative to each other would require more energy. And within the closed system of an object, there is only a finite amount of energy available. Which means that the energy requirements of the particles of an object accelerating is also increasing beyond the ability of the energy of the closed system of the object to provide for it. So the rate of change of the particles within the objective relative to others would have to slow down to compensate.

That means that when an object is already moving at the speed of light, which requires an infinite amount of energy (as we have previously stated), it would require even more energy than that to move the individual particles of an object in relation to each other. Thus they become frozen in relation to each other, and thus frozen in time (but not really since its position in space is still changing).

So that's my explanation for how accelerating to the speed of light slows down time. TL;DR: It doesn't. It just slows down the speed of the individual particles within an object, which makes it look like it slows down time.

Then this raises another question: If the movement of an object through space requires energy to do so, where is the energy coming from that's enough to move the planets and stars through space? Simple. Gravity, heat, and the Big Bang.

The Big Bang obviously was the start of all this and with the massive amount of energy and mass it sent out, it was and obviously is enough to keep everything in the universe moving along even after all this time. Then we have heat. Thermal energy would keep things moving at a molecular level which you can observe just by the fact that the absence of thermal energy would mean that the object is frozen and its particles do not degrade. Finally, you have gravity. Gravity is a strange one since no one is quite sure what it is really. I have some theories myself but that's for another topic. It allows for the movement of celestial objects along with the original energy from the Big Bang. There's probably other sources of energy that ensures the continued change in the positions of a particle, such as electromagnetism but I don't want to go into those too much since I don't know anything about that.

Anyways, we get back to the question of why then is time travel impossible.

If you take into consideration my explanation that there is no such thing as the "arrow of time" or a uniquely separate thing that we exist in, then things are easier to explain. Instead, time is simply a collection of changes that each particle of each object goes through. That means that in order to travel through time, you have to change the dimensions of each particle of each object, along with the corresponding state of energy, in the entire universe to a previous state. Imagine how much energy that would take. If you were to do so with only a localized space, such as the Earth, then you have to calculate the specific position of each particle and energy that comprise everything on the planet as they exist relative to each other. That still takes a lot of energy. But then you would have the issue where everything besides the Earth is in a separate time frame such as the stars, the sun, the Moon, and the other planets. This would cause massive issues with navigation and measurements. Now if you did this with respect to the entire solar system, that might be a bit better but the navigation by the stars and corresponding sciences would still be messed up.

Also you'll notice that my prior discussion hinged on the phrase "relative to each other". If we used the absolute position of a particle in space to change time on Earth, we'd disconnect ourselves from the solar system and the galaxy due to that fact that we are constantly moving through space even as we speak. Then our last absolute position in space as of a second ago is some thousand or million million miles in another direction. That's not to mention how you would even calculate our absolute position in space considering the universe is constantly expanding at a rate faster than light.

So, in conclusion, it is not possible to travel through time because time doesn't work like that. So no, we would never experience anything like time travelers coming back to visit us. This is why no time travelers ever show up to a time traveler's party.

In terms of popular media, movies like Back to the Future or Looper would be impossible as attempting anything like what they describe would require a near infinite amount of energy that no flux capacitor would be able to provide. This would also mean that something like jumping back in time to change your own past would be impossible since doing so would require you to move the particles that comprise you to a previous state as well, and you can't do that since the particles that make up you are in you right now. This renders the entire premise of a lot of time traveling movies entirely moot as the time traveler would not be able to meet their younger self.

Interestingly enough, this also means that the movie, Dr. Strange, has the best interpretation of the manipulation of time in its depiction of the time stone. Spoiler alert. Towards the end of the movie, Dr. Strange uses the time stone to reverse the damage that was done to section of the city by the bad guys and it's shown as reverting the damaged buildings and injured people to a previous state. If you think of it as simply moving the particles and energy states into a previous configuration, it makes perfect sense. It even makes sense that the time stone would have enough energy to make such changes to a localized space. Good movie.

What this means is that in order to bring something to a previous state in time, you must be able to reverse entropy. And the only record of anyone being able to do that is God.

Okay. I think that's pretty much everything. That's a lot to handle but time and time traveling is a complicated subject so maybe this clears some things up.

Or I could be completely wrong about this whole thing. Who knows.

Reality is not real

Let's start with a good one.

It's in the word, right? "Real" is a part of "reality". It should be as simple as that. But it's not.

Here's question. If a tree falls in the woods and there's no one (animals, people, cognizant life, recording devices, etc.) around to hear it, does it make a sound?

The obvious answer is: Yes, what the fuck kinda stupid question is that? Something hits something and it makes a sound. What the fuck doesn't?

Okay, so put aside the snark and let me ask this then: How do you know? Can you confirm it? Are you one hundred percent sure that it made a sound? How would you even find out if there was nothing there to confirm it?

In fact, this is a philosophical question that has been asked for a long time and the answer is: You can't be sure. Because of the fact that when you look at the obvious answer, you are operating on the assumption that the rules of the world are consistent. But what if they aren't? What if the reality we perceive is not the truth of the reality that exists.

For example, our senses are certainly not a perfect representation of what reality is.

Our eyes can perceive only three colors: red, green, and blue. The multitude of colors that we can see are derived from those three. Dogs have different color sensing cells in their eyes so they see colors differently. Whereas a mantis shrimp has a dozen different color sending cells in their's. So they see things really differently. So who the fuck sees the real reality? May be no one.

Perhaps, the best and simplest place to start to explain is with a movie that everyone has seen, and if you haven't you should: The Matrix. Spoiler alert for those of you who haven't seen it. The Matrix is of the latest reiterations of one of the oldest philosophical mysteries of all time. The problem of the mind and the body and their relationship. I won't get into it too much since that's an entire topic in of itself but I bring it up because The Matrix provides a very profound simplistic take on the nature of reality. Namely, that what we perceive to be real, really isn't.

At the beginning of the movie, Neo finds himself living a simulated life as a Mr. Anderson. He finds things being just slightly off but isn't quite sure what. It's only when he takes the red pill offered by Morpheus, named after the god of sleep and dreams, that he is able to wake up from the Matrix and see the false reality for what it is. And the movie provides a great explanation for how easy it is to actually fool or senses. After all, everything that we perceive is comprised of electrical signals in our brain, sent from our eyes, nose, skins, muscles, etc. So theoretically, if you are familiar enough with which part of your brain handles which senses, it's entirely possible to stimulate those parts of the brain in just the right manner and cause us to hallucinate. Take that thought just a bit further and you can see the Matrix as being an entirely possible thing.

So is it possible then that we ourselves are in some sort of Matrix? Well, you can't really answer that question until, like Neo, you step out of the Matrix. How the hell do you do that? Who the fuck knows.

But this is only one possibility of how our perception of reality is not necessarily real. There's a lot more.

Another possibility is that you, as an individual, are simply having a dream and your entire life as you know it will disappear and fade away once you wake up. Yes, I know that it's a TV trope but that only shows how prevalent the idea is in the collective consciousness. And it's been around for a while now.

Back in the old old days, there was a famous Chinese philosopher that once had a very very vivid dream. I'm sure that everyone has had those sort of dreams where it seems so real that you swear that it was real even after you wake up. Well, this philosopher named Chuang Tsu woke up from this dream where he was a butterfly and asked himself a question: "Was I a man that dreamt himself a butterfly or am I a butterfly that dreams himself a man?" How the hell do you answer that question?

In fact, this sort of thought is still something that happens nowadays. There are plenty of cases where people have woken up from comas and experienced depression because they lived an entire life in that coma and lost it all when they found out that it wasn't real. To them, they've lost parents, family, spouses, friends, and children. I'm sure that all of you have experienced something similar where you have a dream where something happened and after you wake up, you're still feeling pissed off or sad because of it. I know that I have.

So then, this begs the question of whether or not the life you are living now is all a dream.

Maybe or maybe not. But let's move on to another possibility.

There's another line of thought that posits that we are all in fact computer simulations of life that were never alive in the first place. This is a more interesting one in that if you believe that it's possible then you'd believe that there's a 99.999999... percent chance that it's true.

Let's start with an assumption, as all of these things do, that given enough time our computer technology will be advanced enough to completely and one hundred percent accurately simulate all the laws of physics and reality a la The Matrix. If you take a look at the progress that we've been making in the videogame department, that seems entirely possible. So sometime in the next several decades or centuries, we may reach the point that we can create an entire universe in a computer simulation down to the smallest subatomic particle. If that happens, it's entirely possible then that artificial intelligent life will arise in the simulation, or that we might create them ourselves.

If the computer simulation with life in it is entirely accurate then it's possible that the living AI in the simulation will then develop its own technology to the point where it can create its own simulation of the universe that will then develop its own life which can then develop its own computer simulation. And then this goes on and on and on ad infinitum.

I think there was a Rick and Morty episode on this very topic but I don't think they did much to explore the nature of reality.

Now add to this train of though one more assumption: that there is only one real reality. If this is true, which is a big if, what are the chances that we exist in one of the infinite number if simulated realities versus being in the one true reality? That's right, there's a 99.99999... percent chance that we are a computer simulation.

Scary thought, right? But all of these theories are based on assumptions. If one of these assumptions is proven to be false somehow or someway, then the theory would go kaput.

Besides, there's no real reason to think to much about them as they certainly have no bearing on everyday life. Nonetheless they are still interesting thoughts that are fun.

Intro: the why and the how

So the question that everyone inevitably asks when something happens is "why?". It's not an unexpected question nor is it unreasonable. It's simply a part of human nature to seek out explanations and to make patterns out of the world around us and of ourselves as well. It's the reason we do a lot of stuff. Like the names we come up with for things, why we analyse dreams, make up with categories, do science, and even believe in things like religion, spirituality, magic, and so on. In fact, it's one of the defining characteristics that make us human. I read somewhere (see disclaimer at the bottom) that despite teaching apes sign language so that they can communicate with us, there's one thing that they never used it for: asking a question. Apparently, they never considered that we might know something that they don't. Which is an interesting thought if it's true. Is this propensity to wonder why then the one thing that separates us from animals? Some number of years ago, they (again see disclaimer) said that what made us human was the ability to use tools. Apparently, that turned out to be a bunch of bullshit. Just take a look at all the videos of birds, apes, and various other animals that use tools of some sort. And since that didn't make us human, we have been asking that question since... and probably some indeterminate amount of time even before then. But I digress.

To answer the question of why I'm even writing this in the first place... It's quite simple. I want to. That probably doesn't satiate your curiosity though. So to elaborate, I think a lot. Probably too much as you can see by that paragraph you just read. And I want to write it down. Having to keep these things in my head is somewhat annoying and just talking about it can't satisfy my need to introspect. So writing it down allows me to stop thinking about it so much and lets me criticism myself. How fun!

The other question then is how I came to decide to write a blog on it, which, now that I think about it, is just a roundabout way of asking why. Whatever. The reason for this is because I'm cheap. I'd rather not spend money if I don't have to. Just having to register an easy-to-remember web address had cost me more than I'd have liked. I had initially thought to actually create a website to go along with it but apparently that'd have cost even more. So this is my compromise. Now this reasoning only applies to the initial format of this thing, whatever it is, in its blog form. In the future, who knows what I might do with this. And then I'll have a different reason for it at which point I may or may not update this part. Who knows. I certainly can't predict the future.

As for some other things to keep in mind, you will, or may already have, noticed that my grammar is off or that what I write doesn't make a lot of sense. As I've hinted at before, I'm writing this to myself and I am writing it as if I were speaking to myself. Now whether or not the voice doing the speaking is or is not myself or who I think myself to be is a whole nother question. I don't want to get too much into that. Maybe later though.

The name. Why did I come up with that. As with any idea, this was not the initial iteration. I wanted it be unique and original and interesting and easily remembered and a lot of other things. Some of those did not pan out. The original and unique part being a few. If you search/Google/Bing/duckduckgo "house of thoughts", there's a lot of them. There's even a blog already with that name, though it's empty as I write this. So I resolved that issue by adding "a" in front of that. As for the "house of thoughts" part, my explanation for that only came about after I named it. I justified it after the fact because it sounds cool. This blog/whatever is a collection of ideas that generally has little practical use in everyday life. But thinking about some of them too much can actually be troubling, resulting in things such as depression, anxiety, existential dread, nihilism, or possibly unfettered curiosity that might lead to inappropriate and useless life choices. So compartmentalizing these ideas in a mental "house" where you can lock it up and have the choice of entering it or not, can be helpful in dealing with their implications. Sometimes the best way to not stress out about something is not to think about it. 

Now that's out of the way, it's time for the disclaimer.

Disclaimer:

What I write in here are my thoughts and opinions only. Even when I quote other people or experts, they are quotes of what I remember and how I interpret them to be. DON'T TAKE IT FOR GOSPEL. I cannot stress that enough. I am not an expert in any of this. Which is to say that I am making much of this up as I go along. In fact, I might be completely wrong about a lot of this stuff. If anyone wants to know more, look this up and do your own research and make up your mind. This is also part of the reason I'm not bothering to introduce myself. My history and identity do not matter and should not have any influence on what I write in here. If the only reason that you think about the ideas that I'm writing about is that I have a degree or certification or license or whatever, then you're doing it wrong. You should be considering the thoughts and ideas herein on their own merits. The other reason being that I don't like to talk about myself. I know that that's not exactly a satisfactory answer but I'm not budging on that. That's also a part of having good boundaries. If you're still not satisfied and it's annoying you, now's a good time to practice a skill that'll help you with all the weird things I'll write about: don't think about it.

You will notice that you cannot comment on here. The reason being that some of these ideas are confusing, distressing, and controversial. And I don't care to get into arguments about them. Again, if you have questions about them, do your own research and make up your own mind. I'm not here to tell you how to think. I can barely figure out how I should think.

Also, please note that this is always a work in progress. I will constantly update each and every idea as more things come to me, including this intro and disclaimer.

Now that that's out of the way, let's have some fun.