6 ms·

Life is a braid in spacetime

101 points by edem 11y ago

lifeisstillgood 11y ago
Simply beautiful thoughts. I love the idea that the atoms of our bodies are replaced over the years - that no part of me today was a part of me in my twenties - and this concept, the braid in spacetime, puts it more eloquently and more bravely than I could think. It's great to be able to take words written by some guy on another part of the world and have them rearrange my brain and my thoughts - this is beautiful.
- earlyriser 11y ago
  I like the naiveté of this comment, it reminds me what HN used to be, a place for wonder and discovery. Thanks for your comment.
  - lifeisstillgood 11y ago
    Makes me wonder what I was smoking ... I must get some more ;)
- keithpeter 11y ago
  Thinking of lifelines in space-time got me through some dark times years ago. Have a look at Primo Levi's The Periodic Table - the book is a collection of biographical essays each themed with a chemical element. The last essay, Carbon, tells the story of a single carbon atom over the years. Another perspective.
- 3pt14159 11y ago
  Actually there are parts of you that were parts of you in your twenties. Some of the brain cells, some of your heart cells, and if you are a woman, your eggs. Unless you are talking about how matter pops in and out of a apparent reality, in which case we're going too far down for me.
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    If you are left only with some of your brain cells and some of your heart cells and if your are a woman your egs, are you still an aware human being? You and other people are missing the point of the perspective and on top of that you are even admitting that even what you claim is constant isn't really when it comes down to it (matter popping in an out). The insight is of course that things are always in flux and that they are much less "solid" than they might look. You are obviously free to dismiss this as interesting but I find it hard to swallow this kind of "the hole in the cheese" comments. It's everything thats wrong with critical thinking.
    - maddayou 11y ago
      You wrote an interesting comment, shure around the cheese-holes there is "taste" but let me ask: Do You Braid For Me ? Do You Braid For Yourself Too ;) Meanwhile: http://i.imgur.com/m1x2MtU.png http://i.imgur.com/m1x2MtU.png
  - pre 11y ago
    The cells persist, but the atoms that make up those cells are still replaced over time.
    - 3pt14159 11y ago
      Source?
madaxe_again 11y ago
He does make the rather blithe assumption that mathematics is somehow real, and not an idiopathic artefact of our cognition, as much as the apparently respectively static and dynamic nature of space and time that he notes most posess. Perhaps mathematics is also a stubbornly persistent illusion. Me, I see the universe as information, and everything else flows from that. We are needles scratching out the tune from a hyperdimensional record. Our mathematical laws may well be encoded within that information, or are representative of symmetry within it, which is also reflected on the structures and strictures of our minds, but I see mathematics as effect rather than cause - not that there's really such a thing as causality, either, if you stop thinking of "the arrow of time" as being a thing other than how we experience spacetime. Causality is as human an invention as sunrise. Then again, I'm assuming that information can exist. Perhaps it's turtles^W simulations all the way down.
- walod 11y ago
  When you say "information" what do you mean exactly? I can see information as a set of constraints that arises in the system due to how it evolves, and that those constraints enable structure to emerge, and that with the law of conservation of energy no energy can be created or destroyed, it means that all those structures can only do what they can do, any deviation from the constraints will require new energy or removing energy from the system to alter the course. I like your needles - hyperdimensional record analogy. I would say mathematics encodes for and predicts a certain set of constraints, but we can never be sure we have observed or found the most fundamental constraint, and so to us, an incomplete mathematical 'law' will look like it needs energy added or removed to fit with the real world, but in reality it's just a constraint somewhere that we haven't seen that will readjust the series. All of this is kind of written on a whim, I'm not sure I thought it through enough :
- visarga 11y ago
  > Me, I see the universe as information, and everything else flows from that. I admire the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness (by Giulio Tononi) a lot. It provides an impressive intuition pump towards the nature of consciousness and the necessary conditions for it to arise. It also goes much deeper than "consciousness is a complex pattern in space-time", by detailing "what does it mean to be complex?", what kind of complexity leads to consciousness and how can we compare various systems to see their degree of consciousness/complexity. The IIT surely does not give a definitive answer on consciousness, it is not even able to compute an approximate complexity score for the human brain, and doesn't explain why complexity is linked to consciousness in the first place, but it helps us see in many directions where we could only stumble in darkness before.
dahart 11y ago
The idea of "spacetime" makes a fun narrative, fun thought experiments, and interesting ways to graph and visualize events. But many physicists wish that popularizing this concept would stop and go away, because it is misleading. There is both evidence and theoretical work demonstrating that time, unlike the spatial dimensions, is not a choice when it comes to direction of travel, and never will be. The definition of time as a numerical order of change in space is replacing the 106-year-old concept of time as a physical dimension in which change runs,” Sorli said. “We consider time being only a mathematical quantity of change that we measure with clocks. This is in accord with a Gödel view of time. By 1949, Gödel had produced a remarkable proof: 'In any universe described by the theory of relativity, time cannot exist.' Our research confirms Gödel's vision: time is not a physical dimension of space through which one could travel into the past or future.” http://phys.org/news/2012-04-physicists-abolish-fourth-dimension-space.html http://phys.org/news/2012-04-physicists-abolish-fourth-dimen... Edit: previous thread on HN re this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3842734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3842734 Sounds like some think this phys.org article is BS. I don't know, I am not a physicist. But I have been wondering for many years whether it makes sense to treat time as a dimension. I assumed it made sense in relativity study, and has been mistranslated in popular science culture as a thing that somehow opens up the option of time travel.
- Ono-Sendai 11y ago
  My take on it is that special relativity provides no evidence that time is an extra dimension (like the spatial dimensions) in anything but a mathematical sense. General relativity however has quite a lot of effects that mingle together space and time in various ways, so I'm still thinking about that one.
  - RivieraKid 11y ago
    > no evidence that time is an extra dimension (like the spatial dimensions) in anything but a mathematical sense What do you mean by time being an extra dimension in non-mathematical sense? Dimensions and space are mathematical concepts.
Kristine1975 11y ago
How long until Greg Egan writes a novel based on this concept? It should be right up his alley.
- stuxnet79 11y ago
  Interesting that everyone automatically defaults to Greg Egan when thinking of hard mind-bending sci-fi that explores concepts like these. I don't even remember how I got into Greg Egan, but do you have any other favorite authors who play with concepts like these? In my head, Greg Egan is filed under the "Math-Fi" directory, as that's what I generally associate him with but he's very well versed in pretty much everything (Biology, Physics, etc).
  - Kristine1975 11y ago
    >but do you have any other favorite authors who play with concepts like these? Maybe Philip K Dick, although his books are not exactly hard science fiction. But they explore the nature of reality in often mind-bending ways.
Wayin 11y ago
This is purely commercial balony
drostie 11y ago
Speaking as a physicist, I in general like this article, however there is a nasty technical point to make, which is that if you actually use distance units to measure time, we look like the "inanimate object, simple pattern", not the "living object, complex pattern." Moreover the "death, disintegration" slide is not going to be what you look like unless you happened to be in the vicinity of a bomb at your death. Still the question of how we reconcile our sense of ourselves as speech-act-performing free-will-having conscious-feeling observers embedded in a changing world, with a relativistic perspective which says "there probably isn't one constantly-updating 'present' because a 'present' can be any hyperplane between two light cones, and therefore we can never have any physical basis to choose one as the correct one," is one of many really important philosophical questions that I think are important, though not really my domain.
- tmsam 11y ago
  As a trained, but non-practicing, physicist, I would like you to elaborate about your first paragraph. I am used to using units where c=1, I think that is what you are referencing: a "meter" of time is the time it takes light to go a meter (which is to say, a very small amount of time) and so a second is 3x10^8 m. I don't see how this changes the pattern we would make in spacetime. If we assume no one ever moves (a nice physics-y approximation), but the particles that make them up do, so I don't see why we wouldn't look like the middle pattern while alive. Then after death, the disintegration is exaggerated, but again, it seems more-or-less right to me. What am I missing?
  - drostie 11y ago
    Because the timescales that you're "moving" on are very long from a relativistic perspective. If we localize you in spacetime you're maybe a meter long in one direction, two meters in another, half a meter in a third, and... 30,000 km in the fourth. If we look at you on the nanosecond timescale that you need to see time as "meters" we find that except for, say, electrons' worldlines about the nuclei, your worldlines are very much all parallel to each other.
sgt101 11y ago
Physics is a description, maths is the best method of describing things in physics, but when things head to infinity it's a sign that the descriptive system is breaking down. Time real, neither the past nor future exist.
mbfg 11y ago
I'll buy that your spacetime braids disintegrate at death altho i'd think they be more like the parallel braids of a stone, not like those shown helicoptering out as in the picture. But as for birth, clearly your start branches off of the braids of your mother. and so start immensely tangled to begin with.
vortico 11y ago
I'm studying topological quantum computation, and in this field one considers particles confined to 2 dimensions called anyons. As a collection of anyons move around, the paths they take in spacetime "tangle together" and have the structure of an element of the braid group (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braid_group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braid_group). Two anyons cannot exist at the same place and time, and thus their world lines cannot pass through each other. This is useful, since any sort of physical error in the system will preserve its braid structure, saving the need for quantum error correction. This article is mostly fluff (except for the two diagrams, whose captions contain more content than the article), but I'm sure it makes an interesting read for those wishing for light philosophical thought rather than deep and novel technical concepts.
- musicaldope 11y ago
  Any in-depth and technical sources you'd recommend?
  - vortico 11y ago
    Alexei Kitaev's original paper in 1997 which started the field, and the overview by Freedman, Kitaev, et at. 2008 are a good start.
Mz 11y ago
Of course, this begs the question of "How does this empower me to create a more glorious life?" Perhaps the takeaway is that I am not a brain in a body moving through the world to do things. Instead, I am a mind and these patterns swirl around me and come and go and my awareness drives decision-making as to how to interact with these swirling, complex braids. Then, being the architect of the future is more like knowing where to put your finger. Done right, this looks like magic.
foma 11y ago
A wonderful picture of space and time. My religion fits very well with the concepts of fate and destiny suggested by this picture. Our benevolent creator has for us woven a fantastically complex braid and I am humbled by the chance to take it in. Busy busy busy

101 points by edem 11y ago

Simply beautiful thoughts. I love the idea that the atoms of our bodies are replaced over the years - that no part of me today was a part of me in my twenties - and this concept, the braid in spacetime, puts it more eloquently and more bravely than I could think. It's great to be able to take words written by some guy on another part of the world and have them rearrange my brain and my thoughts - this is beautiful.

earlyriser 11y ago
I like the naiveté of this comment, it reminds me what HN used to be, a place for wonder and discovery. Thanks for your comment.
- lifeisstillgood 11y ago
  Makes me wonder what I was smoking ... I must get some more ;)
keithpeter 11y ago
Thinking of lifelines in space-time got me through some dark times years ago. Have a look at Primo Levi's The Periodic Table - the book is a collection of biographical essays each themed with a chemical element. The last essay, Carbon, tells the story of a single carbon atom over the years. Another perspective.
3pt14159 11y ago
Actually there are parts of you that were parts of you in your twenties. Some of the brain cells, some of your heart cells, and if you are a woman, your eggs. Unless you are talking about how matter pops in and out of a apparent reality, in which case we're going too far down for me.
- ThomPete 11y ago
  If you are left only with some of your brain cells and some of your heart cells and if your are a woman your egs, are you still an aware human being? You and other people are missing the point of the perspective and on top of that you are even admitting that even what you claim is constant isn't really when it comes down to it (matter popping in an out). The insight is of course that things are always in flux and that they are much less "solid" than they might look. You are obviously free to dismiss this as interesting but I find it hard to swallow this kind of "the hole in the cheese" comments. It's everything thats wrong with critical thinking.
  - maddayou 11y ago
    You wrote an interesting comment, shure around the cheese-holes there is "taste" but let me ask: Do You Braid For Me ? Do You Braid For Yourself Too ;) Meanwhile: http://i.imgur.com/m1x2MtU.png http://i.imgur.com/m1x2MtU.png
- pre 11y ago
  The cells persist, but the atoms that make up those cells are still replaced over time.
  - 3pt14159 11y ago
    Source?

madaxe_again 11y ago

He does make the rather blithe assumption that mathematics is somehow real, and not an idiopathic artefact of our cognition, as much as the apparently respectively static and dynamic nature of space and time that he notes most posess. Perhaps mathematics is also a stubbornly persistent illusion. Me, I see the universe as information, and everything else flows from that. We are needles scratching out the tune from a hyperdimensional record. Our mathematical laws may well be encoded within that information, or are representative of symmetry within it, which is also reflected on the structures and strictures of our minds, but I see mathematics as effect rather than cause - not that there's really such a thing as causality, either, if you stop thinking of "the arrow of time" as being a thing other than how we experience spacetime. Causality is as human an invention as sunrise. Then again, I'm assuming that information can exist. Perhaps it's turtles^W simulations all the way down.

walod 11y ago
When you say "information" what do you mean exactly? I can see information as a set of constraints that arises in the system due to how it evolves, and that those constraints enable structure to emerge, and that with the law of conservation of energy no energy can be created or destroyed, it means that all those structures can only do what they can do, any deviation from the constraints will require new energy or removing energy from the system to alter the course. I like your needles - hyperdimensional record analogy. I would say mathematics encodes for and predicts a certain set of constraints, but we can never be sure we have observed or found the most fundamental constraint, and so to us, an incomplete mathematical 'law' will look like it needs energy added or removed to fit with the real world, but in reality it's just a constraint somewhere that we haven't seen that will readjust the series. All of this is kind of written on a whim, I'm not sure I thought it through enough :
visarga 11y ago
> Me, I see the universe as information, and everything else flows from that. I admire the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness (by Giulio Tononi) a lot. It provides an impressive intuition pump towards the nature of consciousness and the necessary conditions for it to arise. It also goes much deeper than "consciousness is a complex pattern in space-time", by detailing "what does it mean to be complex?", what kind of complexity leads to consciousness and how can we compare various systems to see their degree of consciousness/complexity. The IIT surely does not give a definitive answer on consciousness, it is not even able to compute an approximate complexity score for the human brain, and doesn't explain why complexity is linked to consciousness in the first place, but it helps us see in many directions where we could only stumble in darkness before.

dahart 11y ago

The idea of "spacetime" makes a fun narrative, fun thought experiments, and interesting ways to graph and visualize events. But many physicists wish that popularizing this concept would stop and go away, because it is misleading. There is both evidence and theoretical work demonstrating that time, unlike the spatial dimensions, is not a choice when it comes to direction of travel, and never will be. The definition of time as a numerical order of change in space is replacing the 106-year-old concept of time as a physical dimension in which change runs,” Sorli said. “We consider time being only a mathematical quantity of change that we measure with clocks. This is in accord with a Gödel view of time. By 1949, Gödel had produced a remarkable proof: 'In any universe described by the theory of relativity, time cannot exist.' Our research confirms Gödel's vision: time is not a physical dimension of space through which one could travel into the past or future.” http://phys.org/news/2012-04-physicists-abolish-fourth-dimension-space.html http://phys.org/news/2012-04-physicists-abolish-fourth-dimen... Edit: previous thread on HN re this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3842734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3842734 Sounds like some think this phys.org article is BS. I don't know, I am not a physicist. But I have been wondering for many years whether it makes sense to treat time as a dimension. I assumed it made sense in relativity study, and has been mistranslated in popular science culture as a thing that somehow opens up the option of time travel.

Ono-Sendai 11y ago
My take on it is that special relativity provides no evidence that time is an extra dimension (like the spatial dimensions) in anything but a mathematical sense. General relativity however has quite a lot of effects that mingle together space and time in various ways, so I'm still thinking about that one.
- RivieraKid 11y ago
  > no evidence that time is an extra dimension (like the spatial dimensions) in anything but a mathematical sense What do you mean by time being an extra dimension in non-mathematical sense? Dimensions and space are mathematical concepts.

Kristine1975 11y ago

How long until Greg Egan writes a novel based on this concept? It should be right up his alley.

stuxnet79 11y ago
Interesting that everyone automatically defaults to Greg Egan when thinking of hard mind-bending sci-fi that explores concepts like these. I don't even remember how I got into Greg Egan, but do you have any other favorite authors who play with concepts like these? In my head, Greg Egan is filed under the "Math-Fi" directory, as that's what I generally associate him with but he's very well versed in pretty much everything (Biology, Physics, etc).
- Kristine1975 11y ago
  >but do you have any other favorite authors who play with concepts like these? Maybe Philip K Dick, although his books are not exactly hard science fiction. But they explore the nature of reality in often mind-bending ways.

Wayin 11y ago

This is purely commercial balony

drostie 11y ago

Speaking as a physicist, I in general like this article, however there is a nasty technical point to make, which is that if you actually use distance units to measure time, we look like the "inanimate object, simple pattern", not the "living object, complex pattern." Moreover the "death, disintegration" slide is not going to be what you look like unless you happened to be in the vicinity of a bomb at your death. Still the question of how we reconcile our sense of ourselves as speech-act-performing free-will-having conscious-feeling observers embedded in a changing world, with a relativistic perspective which says "there probably isn't one constantly-updating 'present' because a 'present' can be any hyperplane between two light cones, and therefore we can never have any physical basis to choose one as the correct one," is one of many really important philosophical questions that I think are important, though not really my domain.

tmsam 11y ago
As a trained, but non-practicing, physicist, I would like you to elaborate about your first paragraph. I am used to using units where c=1, I think that is what you are referencing: a "meter" of time is the time it takes light to go a meter (which is to say, a very small amount of time) and so a second is 3x10^8 m. I don't see how this changes the pattern we would make in spacetime. If we assume no one ever moves (a nice physics-y approximation), but the particles that make them up do, so I don't see why we wouldn't look like the middle pattern while alive. Then after death, the disintegration is exaggerated, but again, it seems more-or-less right to me. What am I missing?
- drostie 11y ago
  Because the timescales that you're "moving" on are very long from a relativistic perspective. If we localize you in spacetime you're maybe a meter long in one direction, two meters in another, half a meter in a third, and... 30,000 km in the fourth. If we look at you on the nanosecond timescale that you need to see time as "meters" we find that except for, say, electrons' worldlines about the nuclei, your worldlines are very much all parallel to each other.

sgt101 11y ago

Physics is a description, maths is the best method of describing things in physics, but when things head to infinity it's a sign that the descriptive system is breaking down. Time real, neither the past nor future exist.

mbfg 11y ago

I'll buy that your spacetime braids disintegrate at death altho i'd think they be more like the parallel braids of a stone, not like those shown helicoptering out as in the picture. But as for birth, clearly your start branches off of the braids of your mother. and so start immensely tangled to begin with.

vortico 11y ago

I'm studying topological quantum computation, and in this field one considers particles confined to 2 dimensions called anyons. As a collection of anyons move around, the paths they take in spacetime "tangle together" and have the structure of an element of the braid group (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braid_group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braid_group). Two anyons cannot exist at the same place and time, and thus their world lines cannot pass through each other. This is useful, since any sort of physical error in the system will preserve its braid structure, saving the need for quantum error correction. This article is mostly fluff (except for the two diagrams, whose captions contain more content than the article), but I'm sure it makes an interesting read for those wishing for light philosophical thought rather than deep and novel technical concepts.

musicaldope 11y ago
Any in-depth and technical sources you'd recommend?
- vortico 11y ago
  Alexei Kitaev's original paper in 1997 which started the field, and the overview by Freedman, Kitaev, et at. 2008 are a good start.

Mz 11y ago

Of course, this begs the question of "How does this empower me to create a more glorious life?" Perhaps the takeaway is that I am not a brain in a body moving through the world to do things. Instead, I am a mind and these patterns swirl around me and come and go and my awareness drives decision-making as to how to interact with these swirling, complex braids. Then, being the architect of the future is more like knowing where to put your finger. Done right, this looks like magic.

foma 11y ago

A wonderful picture of space and time. My religion fits very well with the concepts of fate and destiny suggested by this picture. Our benevolent creator has for us woven a fantastically complex braid and I am humbled by the chance to take it in. Busy busy busy