Introduction

Three Quarters of Reality

Since 1905 with the publication of Albert Einstein’s “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” aka Special Relativity, the world has known that unlike our sensory experience of living in three dimensions, we in fact live in a four dimensional universe which Einstein labeled “Space-Time.”

Even the general public is pretty cognizant of this fact despite the difficulty of actually conceptualizing what that means.  But this difficulty in conceptualization is not limited to the general public.  Physicists are also human beings who live in what “feels” like three dimensions, and though they competently calculate using Einstein’s four dimensional mathematics, they seem to have difficulty grasping and working with the actual complete implications of this impossible to visualize reality.

Even Einstein himself, who is famously quoted as having said, “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion,” fell prey to the same inability to draw the proper conclusions from his own theory.

The source of this conceptual difficulty is based in two separate issues.  The first is the issue of dimensions itself. 

To illustrate, imagine living in “flatland,” a two dimensional universe.  The universe seems to consist of a plane stretching in all directions to infinity.  You are a dot, capable of moving in any direction on the paper-like universe. 

Now imagine that a three dimensional sphere passed through flatland.  What would you experience?  Out of nothing a dot would suddenly appear.  The dot would swell into an impenetrable circle that grew and grew until it suddenly, for no apparent reason, began to shrink and shrink before winking out of existence.

Assume you are the greatest physicist in flatland.  How would you try to explain the “spooky” and “paradoxical” phenomenon you had just witnessed?  What if you discovered a way to make the sphere pass by any time you performed a particular experiment and watched it over and over and over?  What conclusions (that made any sense at all) could you come up with?

Before performing the experiment, did the dot actually exist or did performing the experiment bring it into existence?  What strange physical law caused the circle to grow and then shrink?

Through observation you had learned the mathematics that could describe precisely the operation of the appearance, growth and disappearance of the circle.  You could predict to a thousand decimal points what would happen each time you performed the experiment.  Would you be able to understand what was actually “in reality” happening?

If you were even greater than Einstein you would come up with the seemingly insane theory that the universe had a dimension beyond the familiar two and that in the incomprehensible three dimensional universe there was an impossible to imagine object that passed through your limited, two dimensional experience of reality.   

This is a metaphor for how the “Mass of Nows” theory explains the seemingly paradoxical “weirdness” of quantum mechanics.

In the four dimensional universe described by Einstein, particles exist as waves throughout the entire four dimensional space-time.  This is a critical axiom upon which quantum physics is built.  What the Mass of Nows posits is that it is the experience of these four dimensional waves in our seemingly three dimensional universe that causes them to appear as particles, rather than as waves when we observe them.

The second source of conceptual difficulty we have with Einstein’s space-time is that time doesn’t feel like the other three dimensions.  While the other three dimensions just sit there, allowing us to move in any of the three directions, time seems to flow in one direction over which we have no control.  Known as the “arrow of time,” this unidirectional aspect of time is completely unlike the other three dimensions and makes it difficult for us to accept it as being just one of four equal dimensions.  Something is different about time.

As quoted above, Einstein believed that this difference was a mere illusion, but neither he nor anyone else has ever successfully explained how this illusion arose or why.  Numerous theories have been developed, none of them satisfactory.  The most widely held belief is that the arrow is caused by the second law of thermodynamics, i.e. entropy.  But this theory fails on its face because the second law predicts that entropy should increase in both temporal directions from the present, so where’s the arrow?

The Mass of Nows posits that the arrow of time arises from the force of electromagnetism, (light) the same force that knocks down our experience of the universe from four dimensions to three.

An underappreciated aspect of Einstein’s theory of special relativity is its assertion that everything is hurtling through the four dimensions of space-time at the speed of light.  Motion through the three dimensions of space reduces our motion through time, but the two will always add up to the speed of light.  Light itself, (electromagnetic waves) use up all that speed through their motion through space and thus have no motion through time.  A clock on a light wave will not tick.

Because the addition of motion through space and motion through time must always add up to the speed of light; and because the speed of light is the limit of speed through three dimensional space, it is impossible for speed through time to have a value of less than zero.  If we were to move backward in time it would have a negative value and would require us to exceed the speed of light in order for the sum to equal the speed of light.  The arrow of time is thus a direct consequence of Einstein’s special relativity.

We exist in a world built out of the force of electromagnetism.  It is the force that makes solids feel solid.  It is the force that allows us to see the solids made solid by the same force.  It is also the force that puts a speed limit on solids moving through space and gives an arrow to the direction of time.

This is what creates the “illusion” that Einstein was referring to.  It is illusory in the sense that it doesn’t allow us to directly experience the underlying reality of four-dimensional spacetime.  It is not illusory in the sense that our world as we experience is built out of electromagnetism.  It’s truly a “world within a world” in that sense. 

As you read this book it is important that you bear these two sources of conceptual difficulty in mind.  It is what has prevented our scientists from answering the greatest remaining questions in physics that we know of today.  It is so important that you do this that I recommend re-reading this introduction until you are sure you have a firm grasp of the concepts.  By doing so, you will find yourself seeing the fallacies in current physical theories as we review them even before I point them out.