Not long ago, I touched upon a subject which I find really interesting, it involved a different view about the world we live in, how we experience "time" as humans, and how it might be an emergent property.
This time, we will take a look on a different view, a more daring one, so to speak. One where researchers suggest that the universe actually bends the laws of physics themselves over time, perpetuating itself by the constant adaptation of its own physical laws.
So without further ado, let's get into it!
An autodidact is a person who has learned a subject without a teacher or any formal education. Someone who is self-taught!
From all various walks of life, history is filled with examples of such people. Scientists, engineers, inventors, actors, musicians, and many more. Some of whom you can read about in this wikipedia list.
A new entrant to the list however, might get added:
According to a new research published not long ago to the pre-print arXiV server (The work has not been peer-reviewed yet), The great cosmos might be constantly learning by itself how to evolve into a more stable state.
The paper which was authored by some researchers at Microsoft and scientists from Brown University among others, suggests that all of the laws of physics we see or measure nowadays are laws that have worked themselves out and emerged over time. If we want to grasp how these laws of physics evolved, they said, we should apply Darwinian natural selection to cosmology.
If in biology there are questions on why these species and not others? something the Darwinian perspective showed that to understanding the complex and detailed stories which explain why a particular species likely emerged. It is necessary to know the general principles which apply to all biology.
Then maybe a similar approach of why these laws in physics? Might prove useful.
Seeking a mechanism by which physical laws can change and evolve would be a first step, then we can search within such setting about why would our present laws be the more likely ones and not others that seem equally consistent mathematically.
We present an approach to cosmology in which the Universe learns its own physical laws. It does so by exploring a landscape of possible laws, which we express as a certain class of matrix models. We discover maps that put each of these matrix models in correspondence with both a gauge/gravity theory and a mathematical model of a learning machine, such as a deep recurrent, cyclic neural network. This establishes a correspondence between each solution of the physical theory and a run of a neural network.
You can read the full abstract in their paper
Let me explain a bit! As the universe seeks stability over time, the much simpler and basic laws of physics it relied on in the early time evolved to become much more sophisticated. Why do we still have dogs and cats in the world, but no dinosaurs? Dogs and cats proved to be adaptable to their environment (and cute 😊) so they successfully passed on their genes. The same might be true for the universe by analogy.
The only difference is that the universe doesn’t have to compete with other universes, but just needs to keep going.
Imagine an early version of the universe where, for example, gravitational attraction between objects was a more primitive concept. In that case, Newton’s law of gravitation is not true yet. In this day, that law does explain why the moon’s surface gravity is about one-sixth the gravity on Earth, as the moon is far less massive. But in this more simple version of the universe, maybe gravity was a more static concept, and gravity on the moon and Earth were the same. You can apply the same thinking process to the other laws of physics.
When we refer to laws of physics changing, or being different in different regions of spacetime, we are speaking in the language of effective field theory, which is to say we assume that the laws relevant for low energy physics can involve collective coordinates, emergent, renormalized and averaged fields, and also can be dependent on effective coupling constants whose values depend on the values of fields, as well as on temperature, density etc. More generally, we adopt the useful idea that the world can be analyzed in terms of a hierarchy of levels; the degrees of freedom and the regularities described at each level appear to observers there to be stable and unchanging or slowly changing. At the same time, when expressed in terms of the degrees of freedom and laws of a lower level, they may seem emergent and variable.
You can download and read the full paper over here.
"Over time, that system will teach itself, and some fundamental laws will arise.” Janna Levin, a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University, explains.
The paper tries to blend cosmology with biology. “We ask whether there might be a mechanism woven into the fabric of the natural world, by means of which the universe could learn its laws” the authors say.
In other words, some universal law might transcend all the scientific fields. Which means that the laws of physics, as we know them, could be subject to higher-order laws of the universe that control them, and that we can't even comprehend.
Towards the end of the ~79 pages long paper, the scientists admit that they are trying to take the first steps toward the formation of a new theory. “This paper is intended to launch a new program in theoretical physics and cosmology, whose aim is to investigate a novel conception of the laws of physics. One in which laws
evolve, but evolve by learning”, they wrote.
While this might be a crazy one, theoretical physics needs radical ideas, an out-of-the-box thinking approach, and that paper might be an invitation to explore, because we do find ourselves confronted by a crazy universe. As many other ideas that come and go, chances are, it may not lead anywhere interesting, but possibly it will inspire some real breakthrough, and maybe it leads somewhere even the authors of that paper couldn't possibly imagine.
Thank you all for reading. It was an interesting paper I came across, which is somewhat related to the subject concerning time and how it probably is an emergent property, you can read about that one in a previous post of mine, if you want.
While it was a view which I don't necessarily hold, I did find what they theorized in that paper intriguing and interesting. That view isn't even entirely new, it existed since the late 1800s, you can find a reference about that in their paper also.
Hope you have enjoyed reading, and as always,
Until next time 🙋♂️
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Nice very good :D.
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That definitely is an interesting perspective.
It certainly is, thank you for stopping by.
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