Time Arrow as Trace of Energy (eBook)

Foreword

I wrote this book because, due to my experience with nature, I became convinced that science, with all its significance and successes in modern life, and with all the fascination it radiates, has come to be on a problematic course. It is a wrong path which, in my opinion, has serious consequences for society, education and the development of bio-analog technologies.

A century ago, within the framework of quantum theory and Relativity Theory, science began to accept irrational scientific ideas and conclusions that are contrary to human experience and to apply them to many natural phenomena. This created an environment of tolerance for “non-understanding”. This “non-understanding” now permeates science as a web of established theories that contradict human logic. This overriding of human reason could be a cause that prevents us from logically recognizing upcoming problems and also from successfully reproducing the fascinating energy technologies of biology. It could also distract us from the fact that a convincing idea of nature must also include an explanation of intelligence and consciousness and their evolution. Without a research strategy based on rational principles, we will never properly understand the reality of our universe, nor why evolution has given man an instinct for rationality and confidence in causality.

The reality in today’s science tells a different story. The trend towards irrationality is underpinned by an increasing number of abstract and largely opaque physical-mathematical models. More and more incomprehensible theories are currently being proposed to further support the irrational construction of knowledge. Everything in our real environment changes in one direction, following a time arrow. Only the current natural sciences describe and explain the building blocks of nature as time-neutral and design their fundamental laws in such a way that they are reversible in time. Conceptions of non-causality, of effects without causes, of non-locality, of objects simultaneously located in two places, and of an empty space manipulating movement and time are already established. There are others, include the Big Bang scenario about the origin of the universe, mysterious energy appearing from nowhere, an enormous inflation of empty space, and time travel. Dark matter, dark energy and an ever faster expanding universe with galaxies whose flight is approaching the speed of light are currently confusing our ideas. Does nature really behave that strangely, acting as a “block universe”, where time is an illusion? Are essential fundamental mechanisms of nature really illogical? Or is it, as I suspect, that science relies on irrational explanations because it does not know any other answers while insisting on a time-neutral world? If this is so, science is really on the wrong path; it is drawing the universe as it does not really exist.

As a boy growing up in a small mountain village in the region called Friuli, located in north-eastern Italy, I learned early that there was little future in cultivating this harsh, rocky land. The alternative was to leave the place and learn a modern profession. Because I was fascinated by nature, I wanted to understand it. That's how I became a natural scientist. Science gave me satisfactory answers to many questions. At the same time, however, it created deep confusion as it also insisted on irrational explanations for relevant fundamental mechanisms.

Is nature really irrational in its approach to such fundamental phenomena as causality? Are space and time really interwoven and manipulated by matter? Can energy and particles actually emerge from nothing? If this fundamental irrationality were part of nature, why don’t we experience illogical situations in any of the fantastic technological developments in living nature? There, everything that was discovered and investigated is ultimately logically understandable. There is no room for irrational mechanisms. Were such mechanisms invented by physical science due to lacking comprehension?

If one assumes that irrationalities arise from a lack of information in connection with scientific theories, then one has to deal with the applied notion of energy. The reason is clear: Information requires energy. If information is missing, then energy is missing or it is not being handled properly. It can be concluded that essential theoretical models concerning energy-relevant issues are incomplete or wrongly designed. Passive energy and time neutrality also seem to lead to a dead end because energy turnover generates movement and change. The search for inconsistencies in our established energy concept thus became the key to my intellectual challenge and the basis of a working strategy.

So in this book I will begin with a brief excursion into the history of scientific thinking about energy. I discovered a contradiction in it and so I propose a change in the idea of how energy behaves. Energy should not, as currently defined, only have the ability to perform work. Rather, it should also have the tendency or intention to do so. This seems to be only a small transformation, but in reality it is a radical change in the fundamental models of thought. It’s a change of paradigm. We then no longer have to deal with a time-neutral world in a state of equilibrium, in which all fundamental processes in time are reversible, as has been scientifically formulated so far. Instead, the world becomes fundamentally irreversible, following an energy-driven time arrow. Everything is oriented in time. Energy turnover produces action and “effects” the progress of time. Time is a flow of action. This is what determines the “before” and “after” in our world and ultimately makes possible the self-organization of energy and matter, the creative power of our universe, through processes of feedback in the first place. Time would thus not only be a development in the direction of greater probability, greater disorder, as it is assumed today in physics, but the effective time arrow would be the trace which the energy, the energy turnover, left behind, leaves behind or will leave in the environment. Such a time arrow does not function with an “disinterested” energy; instead, it requires dynamic energy properties. I will actually show that the very fundmental principle of least action, which forms the basis of many laws of nature, leads to exactly the same conclusion of a directed world and a time arrow as trace of energy when mathematically reevaluated and dynamically understood.

If one consistently explores different areas of natural science with this idea in mind, one realizes that one after the other of the existing irrationalities and paradoxes ceases to apply and can be eliminated. A key element here is also the necessary reinterpretation of the particle-wave dualism in quantum physics. The dynamic property of energy causes matter to change from particle form to wave form. However, the quality of the energy in a small particle and in a widespread wave is not identical. Here I uncover a fundamental error of traditional quantum theory. Energy is distributed in the waveform and needs information to be transformed back into the concentrated particle form. I call this information about the energy distribution in a modified, dynamic quantum state the “information image of matter”. It must be provided to maintain a “dynamic” particle-wave duality, contains energy and, because it surrounds all particles, turns out to be the phenomenon of gravity.

Following from this, this information about matter eliminates previously incomprehensible irrationalities. Surprisingly, it can also explain the always-constant speed of light as a local phenomenon of light. The necessity of postulating a fourdimensional space-time world that is also supposed to manipulate reality and to control the speed of light is eliminated. This amazing result removes further irrationalities. As a consequence, the cosmic redshift of stellar light and the Big Bang explosion of the universe are investigated under the above-mentioned conditions and understood in a simple way. Spreading, propagating light generates entropy, i.e. it loses usable energy, which dynamic quantum physics allows, but not the historically grown, time-neutral one. This will make it possible to propose an alternative model for the formation and function of the universe, an “image universe” for the 500 billion galaxies identified to date.

The topics considered also deal with evolution and the question of how spontaneous mutations can lead to highly developed, intelligent life in the long term. The conclusion from my studies is that, contrary to the currently predominating understanding, biological evolution has a goal. This goal is determined by the tendency of self-organized systems to maximize their energy or entropy turnover. Genetic mechanisms overlay and had to cope with this directed characteristic of life.

This makes the remarkable dynamics of nature much easier to understand and it can be explained above all by rational models of thought. This result gives credibility to the proposed dynamic understanding of energy and nature and opens the way to a new front: our mind and consciousness can be understood as a straight forward consequence of dynamic energy and the time arrow. Dynamic energy and the urge of self-organized systems towards maximum energy turnover enable the self-organization of information and thus generate a kind of “living information” of consciousness and mind. We are dealing with a hierarchy of information processing that is above that of pure computing as we know it from computers. In the end it can even be...