Challenging Perception and Realising the Indisputable Truth: ‘There is no Spoon’
by Mark Thomas
Staff Writer
WHEN OBSERVATION: NO LONGER CONFERS PHYSICAL REALITY
“The paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ought to be.” (Richard Feynman)
Physics is broken. And they’re keeping it from us. What started with an optical illusion on your way in has turned into a phenomenological mystery. It was the light passing through the door refracting at a bizarre angle that stopped you at the main entrance. It’s going to bend on its way through, but not at 35 degrees.
Assuming it was the refractive index of the glass, some odd phenomenon you’d explore later with your undergrads, you got on the internet once inside your classroom. Now on your fourth site, you’re swimming in confusion. “What is this?”
You scroll the page on refraction, and what you find is darkly amusing. Not only is the refractive index of glass wrong, so is the speed of light. “239,833,966 metres per second?!” You lift your eyes from your laptop and think – running the math in your head before reading it again.
“Is this a joke?” With site after site returning the same inaccurate data, you grab your phone and go for your calculator. ‘c’ given by Britannica is 239,833,966 m/sec. Dividing that by the actual figure of 299,792,458 m/s, you get 0.80. You turn to the windows and look at the sun. “It’s exactly 80% of what it should be.”
But how?
“Professor Dalton?”
You turn to a student who just walked in - standing there with her project folder. “Yes. What is it, Janet?”
She can see your distraction. And that she’s adding to it. Also, how disturbed you are. “Are you okay Sir?”
You look her in the eyes – deciding this is not something you’re going to share with a student. If you’re going to seek validation that something has happened to physics and our scientific resources have been changed, it’s going to be Daryl or Melanie. Colleagues who may listen objectively without obliterating your reputation.
“I’m fine, thank you. What do you need?”
After getting her sorted and setting your first class up with a remote lecture on photonics from MIT, you grab your laptop and a notepad and head for the lounge.
What you find over the next 40 minutes is mindboggling. It’s not only physics. Nothing is right. From the acceleration due to gravity to the charge of an electron. From Avogadro’s number to the mass of a water molecule.
Chemistry, biology, astrophysics and geophysics. They’re all off. All the constants you’ve known since high school: Planck’s, Boltzmann’s - even the surface temp of the sun is wrong.
Feeling like you need to wake up or snap out of this hallucination, you check the time and start back to your classroom wondering how you’re going to make it through a day teaching physics in a world where they’ve changed all the rules – without sending you the revisions.
THE COSMOLOGICAL CONSTANT: SEARCHING THE VACUUM FOR ANSWERS
“The history of the cosmos is the history of the struggle of becoming.” (DH Lawrence)
Image by StockCake
Almost as illogical as physics breaking and them covering it up, you made it through your classes. Remote lectures and for you time in the lounge with your laptop and notepad. Avoiding students who may hit you with questions for which you would certainly have the wrong answers and other professors who may want to chat.
Now walking along 7th, you’re working a theory you landed on early, discarded as bonkers then picked back up on your way out of school. It’s ironic that Einstein who discovered and labelled it did the same thing. But for different reasons.
The Cosmological Constant is a term in General Relativity representing the energy density or vacuum energy of space. Einstein considered it a necessary function of space to counter gravity – keeping the universe static. Without it – just the gravitational pulling force – he imagined the universe contracting – ultimately imploding like a reverse big-bang.
In 1929 he threw it out calling it his biggest blunder when Edwin Hubble found, to everyone’s surprise, including his, the universe was not static but expanding.
It made a comeback repackaged as dark energy when it was found the universe was not only expanding – but the rate of expansion was accelerating.
Stepping to the corner at 12th, you grab your notes and read back while noting the Doppler shift in the pitch of the cars as they pass. Shadows, reflections, sounds, thermal movement, winds – as disturbing as this is, it’s also oddly stimulating.
Like being dropped off on a strange planet in an alternate universe as an explorer where everything works slightly differently. There to take notes for your eventual return.
With the light green, you cross while working your theory like a thought experiment. Not only does the Cosmological Constant drive the expansion of our universe, and the acceleration of the expansion, it influences the universe’s evolution, its age, shape, galaxy and solar system formation.
Everything including the laws of physics.
But can it change? And what would cause it to change? But, more importantly, if it changed thus changing the evolution of the universe, could it do so retroactively so that the beings that evolved within it would know no other physical reality?
Their memories would have evolved under different conditions. Maybe vastly different in some, only slightly in others – while in some, like you, not at all? If this were even possible; how would that explain you? An anomaly?!
Talk about a Stranger in a Strange Land.
Now on the walk heading for Itsu and your Thursday dinner with Kayleigh, you’re struggling with more than your changed cosmological constant theory and looking for discrepancies in the physical processes around you, you’re also looking ahead to dinner - wondering what you’ll talk about over sushi and miso soup with your cosmologist sister.
To what extent have her memories been changed?
And how are you going to keep from discussing science with a scientist? Suddenly, an idea burrows in. This is an opportunity – not something you need to avoid.
THE WISE EXPLORER REMAINS OPEN: TO NEW PATHS AND NEW SOLUTIONS
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both.” (Robert Frost – The Road Not Taken)
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A significant decrease in the Cosmological Constant would be dramatic. With gravity increasing – overpowering the outward, repulsive force of the constant, the universe would stop expanding and begin contracting leading ultimately to a Big Crunch – the opposite of a Big Bang with gravity pulling everything back together.
But an increased gravity scenario is not what you’re after. And it doesn’t answer the other physical anomalies; The speed of light, the refractive indices and all the constants that have changed.
A significant increase in the Cosmological Constant would override gravitational attraction on Earth likely pulling the planet apart. Stars would stop fusing hydrogen into helium. Galaxies and solar systems gravitationally bound would fly apart.
It would accelerate the expansion of the universe – taking us quickly to its most plausible end. That being empty space without stars or even electromagnetism with the temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background so low, it would be unrecordable. Heat Death.
“But a minor increase then.”
Over Maki rolls and wine, you’ve been masterful with your veiled scientific inquisition – posing it as just another of your fun philosophical thought experiments.
Knowing you and your insatiable appetite for theory and pushing physics into the realm of philosophy, Kayleigh plays along. Unaware of what you’re truly after. A diagnosis to a changed reality. But mysteriously, one only known to you.
“Locally? Observationally? We probably wouldn’t notice. Slight differences in physical processes.”
You eye her over your wine – sure now you’re heading for that validation. “How slight?”
For a long while, she looks at you. Certain she’s about to tell you the mathematics would be off – an incontestable indicator the constant had changed, validating part of your theory, you’re already planning the next part.
Time, a Block Universe - a different evolution. People only holding the memories of this physical reality.
What she comes back with, though feeling like a derailment, isn’t. It’s a redirect, but very possibly the redirect you were after – just unaware you were after it.
“You know, if you want to play with a better thought experiment, consider the Cosmological Constant multiverse.”
“Multiverse?”
“Yeah. It’s a better scenario. You’ll have more fun with it.”
Now staring at her, you’re thinking of Hugh Everett and his Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics thinking: Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?!
EXTENDING YOUR BOUNDARIES: THE LEVEL II MULTIVERSE THEORY
“Not till we are completely lost, or turned around, do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature.” (Henry David Thoreau)
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In Max Tegmark’s book Our Mathematical Universe, he describes his Level II Multiverse as the simplest and most popular cosmological model. In that model, our visible universe is just the part of infinite space we can see.
Outside are other, parallel universes we can’t see – copies of ours but many if not most with different laws of physics. Imagine a balloon 93 billion light years across in infinite space scrunched like you were in the crowded lift on your way up to your apartment between infinite other balloon-shaped universes.
With infinite universes, and infinite probabilities for universes [Some with stars and galaxies – some without] the probabilities another Earth formed in one with another you are, well, infinite.
Now leaving the lift, though not fully embracing the notion you’ve, through some thoroughly implausible but non-zero probability consciousness transfer, found yourself swapping consciousnesses with another version of you in a parallel universe with different physics, you’re not fully discounting it either.
As your astrophysics hero Carl Sagan said: “When the evidence to a theory remains elusive, good science means you keep an open mind and keep searching.”
Now inside your apartment, you drop into your desk chair, grab your notes and start typing a new prompt into ALi_2.3. Waiting for her to load, you begin reviewing the earlier results of your investigation – adding what you got from Kayleigh over sushi which you’re quite convinced now is the answer.
From Ali’s lengthy return, fully supporting your new hypothesis, you begin looking for mathematical patterns. If you have landed in a parallel universe, there would still be mathematical symmetry.
With the acceleration due to gravity at 7.848 m/sec2 - exactly 80% of the 9.81 m/sec2 it was last Tuesday – and the speed of light also 80% of the value you remember, you check other constants. Boltzmann’s – Planck’s – Avogadro. “My God!”
You lift your eyes and look around your apartment. “I’m in an 80% Level II parallel universe.” The implications of this are staggering! But you now have a more plausible theory. “ALi, my love, you nailed it.” You get up and start pacing – talking to yourself in excited bursts.
“A grant proposal for the research.” You pull open the fridge. “We’ll need an international team.” You grab a water.. “An interdisciplinary international team.” You head back to your desk and drop in ready to put Ali to work. She was all over the Cosmological Constant theory – but that was from an earlier prompt you gave her in the lounge. She seems more fired and confident about this.
“Ali, we’ll need people inQuantum Physics, Chemistry, Biology. Geology – Neuroscience – Psychology. The paper will have to be…”
Wait a minute. Hold on.
You lift your eyes from your computer. “I’m going to tell this to someone? That I’m here from another universe?! Where everything is the same except for physics?”
You take your hands to your head.
“And my consciousness – just mine has jumped universes?!”
You certainly had part of that right. The idea certainly is staggering.
“This can’t be it, Ali. It must be something else… more fundamental, less esoteric than parallel universes and consciousness transfer. And ideally, something we can either prove or disprove that won’t make us sound delusional.”
You turn to your balcony doors and stare out at the sky.
“But what?”
FINDING REALITY: IN THE PERCEPTION OF REALITY
“Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” (Neils Bohr)
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Ruminating has gone on all night. Staring into the ceiling at God knows what time, you’re examining the possibility this is beyond you. And you’re not going to solve it no matter how deeply you dig into quantum mechanics or parallel universe theories.
Physics is broken – has been rewritten with memories modified through something more fundamental like coordinated mass media indoctrination. And the only reason they would have done it is if….
You sit up in bed.
“My God! Something has happened! An accident or natural phenomenon - and they’ve decided to cover it up to avert a panic!”
Charged, you get out of bed and head into the living room. “Why didn’t I see this earlier?”
Back at your desktop with your headphones on, you begin feeding Ali new prompts. Cosmological catastrophes. Species changing, not ending events that could be covered up to avert panic, stock markets crashing and economies failing. People blaming politicians or scientists for their lack of preparedness.
If an asteroid struck the earth, sending 20% of its mass into space, that would account for that 20% decrease in gravitational pull, but it wouldn’t change the refractive index of glass or the speed of light.
It would have to be something cosmological.
You begin reading Ali’s newest return describing a theoretical accident with a particle collider creating a super-massive black hole – swallowing our entire universe. Though our universe existing inside a black hole may seem far-fetched, the concept called Schwarzschild Cosmology has gained traction with recent data from the JWST.
According to Professor Enrique Gazatañaga of the Univ of Porstmouth: “The black hole universe offers a new perspective on our place in the cosmos. In this framework, our entire universe lies inside the interior of a black hole formed in some larger ‘parent’ universe.”
Supporting his thesis, he adds: “The density and expansion rate of our universe roughly match what would be expected of a massive black hole.”
“It could explain all the changed constants – including the speed of light and decreased gravity!” You turn your eyes to the window; the sky is just brightening. Inside our own, homemade black hole.
You turn back to Ali – ready to work on the cover up, which with this scenario would be necessity. Imagine them telling us they screwed up the universe. Made a black hole that swallowed us whole.
For the question about the memory manipulation through mass and social media, Ali returns an odd suggestion. Something she’s never done before.
“Call Eri?! Call my girlfriend?!”
You stop and think for a minute. She is a family therapist. Probably studied in social media manipulation.
With what we’re facing – our entire universe now existing inside a black hole with physics changed, and the biggest cover-up in human history well underway, you grab your phone.
For one thing, has Ali ever sent you on a goose chase?
ACCEPTING THE IMPROBABLE: HOWEVER UNLIKELY OR UNPROVABLE
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” (Arthur Conan Doyle)
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Social media manipulation is well understood and talked about regularly on social media. The algorithms are so complex now – and how much they know about each of us, how we vote, dress, our brand of toothpaste; if our decisions and perceptions – even reality states are not 100% planned, that day is not far off.
It’s nearly universally accepted that with a coordinated campaign, everyone on the planet could be convinced the sky is green, the Earth is again flat, and Tupac is still the US president. But could the memories of eight billion people be modified to accept a revised physical reality?
Only when Eri answers sounding groggy do you realise you should have waited an hour. At least until our 80% sun has risen and she’s had her morning cappuccino. But then, isn’t this something everyone would want to hear – regardless of the time which may no longer exist?
“Slow down, Dale. And ask your question.”
You start by asking her if our governments could through mass media indoctrination change everyone’s memories. Not wanting to frighten or alarm her, send her into an uncontrolled though justifiable panic, you do this without telling her about the physics changing or the black hole hypothesis. Or that her cappuccino once grew colder in her mug as the morning progressed.
A dedicated practitioner and loving partner; she listens quietly. She respects your research skills and ability to read through, as Daniel Boorstin put it: “The fog of information that washes away knowledge.”
“Though not impossible to change everyone’s, as you know Dale, it is certainly possible to change those of an individual.”
“One.”
“Yes. Now, tell me what’s happened. Start by telling me everything that happened to you today. Everywhere you’ve gone and everything you’ve done.”
Wondering where she’s going with this, why she’s asking about your day, you comply, telling her you did your usual – went to the university and taught your classes. But you were also truthful about spending most of the time in the lounge with Ali trying to confirm a theory.
One that may be the most profound in human or cosmological history. When you finish, Eri hesitates, then comes back with a question that strikes you as odd.
“You taught classes?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“And what subject do you teach Dale?”
“Come on Eri. Physics. But as I said, today wasn’t my best. A little distracted. I spent most of the time in the lounge doing research.”
“With Ali.”
You’re mystified by her and this spontaneous inquisition. You’ve always known her to be open minded – to look at even the seemingly ludicrous objectively.
She’s frequently stated her agreement that: Only when the subjective experience embraces objective perception does a person find the truth - that reality may exist between the two or not at all.
But as the conversation progresses, you’re becoming anxious, and suspicious.
“Why are you asking me these odd questions Eri. When I tell you what I’ve discovered, and how your memories have been altered to keep you calm, shopping, going to work and paying your taxes, you’re going to need CPR or an available equivalent.”
“Okay Dale.”
You’re already feeling squeamish. You hate when she starts that way.
“Listen to me. Every word. I am not your girlfriend; I’m your therapist. And you’re not a teacher at a university. You’re suffering from AI psychosis. I don’t know how you got connected to the internet past the safeguards we installed, but if you look back clearly… you’ll realise you have not stepped outside the house all day.”
It was hard listening to that. Aware of the mastery – the ingenious work they’ve done on her – a healthcare professional. After disconnecting, you sit in thought. Wondering how you’ll greet her and what you’ll say when she stops by after her office clients. Something she believes – thoroughly believes she does every day.
Shaking your head, you return to Ali, prompting her for an improved answer on mass media manipulation and the altering of memories worldwide thinking: Of course they would have gotten to your girlfriend. My God. They know you know. The dirty bastards have convinced her she’s your therapist!
Realising more now of what you’ve gotten yourself into, and what you’re up against, you begin typing.
“Ali… it’s worse than we thought.”
REMAINING FIRM: WHEN ALL EVIDENCE SUGGESTS YOU’RE BATS
“Reality is merely an illusion albeit a very persistent one.” (Albert Einstein)
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It was hard breaking it to Eri. Watching her cringe at the very thought of our universe being swallowed – now existing inside a supermassive black hole.
All physics changed – the governments banding together in an unprecedented, coordinated effort – using mass and social media to change our memories while revising every scientific and academic resource on Earth.
Internet – textbooks – academic papers – libraries – archives. A monumental project; likely continuing.
It was sad - watching her try to protect you from any future harm by searching your flat for your computers and internet router. Holding firm to her claim, for a while, that she’s there as your therapist – not your girlfriend. Adding something about a court order regarding your access to technology and home confinement.
Leaving after a cordial; perhaps call it a professional hug - unaware of what she was to you, and of what you were to her - not so very long ago.
Now walking across campus – just another day, you’re finding it impossible to stop doing what you’ve been doing since you uncovered the truth about our world. Identifying the anomalies.
Your coffee growing progressively hotter in your hand. Entropy – that 2nd law of thermodynamics now working in reverse. The shadows from the No Parking signs and trees leaning towards rather than away from the sun.
Though impossible to stop; no longer unenjoyable.
For hours after Eri left, and you had reassembled your research enclave, it was Ali who set you on a new course. One of adaptation. Facing the change as an opportunity to grow – to learn physics all over again. To observe, quantify and chronicle the many physical processes and equations of our brave new world.
Equations you’ve known since childhood and later taught – but will learn again as a true explorer of this strange, revised reality. Unknown but to the perpetrators of the cover-up and you.
Now on the steps at the glass doors, just like the day before – you’re again noticing the strange refraction you thought was an optical illusion – the one that tipped you off that things have changed. But when you hold it just there in the halfway open position – normal to the incident sunlight…
“Everything okay Professor Dalton?”
“Huh? Yes… quite fine, thanks.”
After taking the time to add the new refraction index of glass to your notes - calculating it from the angle of the incident sunlight, (1.8 rather the 1.5); you head for the lift in a blissful state.
The opportunity to begin again. And live in the world of Archimedes, and Eratosthenes – Kepler and Galileo. Filled with new processes to explore – new equations and new theories. A blank textbook – waiting for you to fill.
Discovering the one indisputable truth – that there is no spoon.
Mark Thomas (T. E. Mark)
