Can something happen without anything else causing it?
This is a concept that has been discussed for a long time ; you are in good company contemplating this fundamental paradox.
What prompted you to ask this question? 🤔
Trying to sleep
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I’m imagining a middle school student answering a homework question about Newton’s laws, and people are responding with, “Well what’s your reference frame? Consider Virtual Particles in Quantum Theory.”
That strongly depends on your reference frame. As in, what system are you looking at? Where are you drawing your box? If your box is around the entire universe, then yes, every action is a reaction stemming from the big bang, with very few notable exceptions pertaining to black holes that I wont go into.
However, if your reference frame is a hand and a ball, then the hand pushing the ball is an original action, the ball moving its reaction.
What if the ball was talking shit?
Or if the ball was thrown at them…
What do you mean about the black holes?
It’s also worth noting, I think, that the universe might be spatially infinite, which makes “box” a funny way of saying it.
Well, its kind of a matter of debate really on the black holes, and its in regard to the law of conservation of information. I’ll freely admit, we are getting to the edge of my understanding here, but essentially black holes very nature of being inescapable by anything means that information, once inside, is permanently lost.
The reason hawking radiation was such a big deal is that it found a way for this information to potentially be released into the universe once again. That radiation is actually a pair of “virtual particles” (which aren’t real particles, more a mathematical trick to describe complex interactions between different fields and their particles). One of the particles “pops in” to existence on the inside of the event horizon and one on the outside, thus separating the pair. One falls in, one escapes. But since they didn’t annihilate the energy that the now real particle has must come from the black hole, hence, the energy has escaped the black hole.
Now, is that “action” a reaction, or is it a brand new action with no inciting incident? I dont have an answer, and its up to speculation because hawking radiation may or may not even exist. But its our best guess.
I mean, action and reaction aren’t rigorously defined concepts. When a nucleus spontaneously decays, you could just as well say that’s an action with no reaction by that measure, but it happens all over the place. Vacuum polarisation from an electromagnetic field is even closer.
While I would agree, both of those are theoretical - just like my example. The truth is we haven’t, and can’t, test these things and see their mechanisms take place because of their timescales. But it is a really fun thought experiment
The hand was guided by neurological impulse
Not if your chosen reference frame is a hand and a ball, as per the example
I mean aren’t you saying: “Something can happen without a cause if we just ignore the cause.”
I read ops question as about reality, not hypothetical universes that contain a hand that moves a without an arm or brain attached.
This isn’t the Addams Family.
I get the confusion, but a reference frame is a very important limitation for calculating what you need. Its not about whether the arm exists behind the hand, but whether its effects are important for the calculation.
For the sake of the hand pushing the ball, its not. Only the momentum of the hand and the inertia of the ball are important.
I understand very well, and also understand anyone with the capacity will understand the frame of reference doesn’t explain the phenomenon. It’s how we went from four corners to heliocentrism to galaxy, universe, and multiverse.
The neurological impulse is not part of the frame of reference, just the hand. That’s the point of a frame of reference.
Don’t leave us hanging! Go into it!
In physics, we can’t really consider the universe to be deterministic at the quantum scale. We only think it must be when we try to look at particle interactions as a scaled down billards game.
It appears that every action is a reaction (or to use the more customary terminology, every action is an effect of some number of causes, and is in turn a cause for some number of effects).
However, it must either be the case that there was a first action, which would necessarily be an uncaused effect, or that time is either a loop or is infinite in extent, such that there is no beginning and thus no need for an uncaused effect.
And none of those possibilities is really intellectually satisfying, so it’s an open question (which doesn’t stop people from insisting on the nominal truth of one or another of them).
And even with the loop or eternal universe, you can ask where it came from. Like why is it there, and not nothing?
Thanks for putting so much effort in your answer. If you think about it, it’s kinda scuffed and you either end with existence is not possible or there was an action that was not caused by one. Just like you said.
This is the kind of paradox that leads us (I mean humans more generally) to look for some fundamental assumption we’re making about time that will turn out to be wrong. I assume that’s true although I wonder whether it’s literally impossible for us to even imagine how time “truly” works, let alone measure it.
Only the second time is a re-action.
Why did the first thing happen on its own though?
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Even the standard formulation of newtonian dynamics admits nondeterminism. (This requires a non-Lipschitz setup to work; and in any case it doesn’t describe the world we live in. Also it’s a mathematical description, not the real thing.)
Technically, yes.
Norton’s dome - Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton’s_dome
There are some good videos out there that can explain it a bit better than this
Wow, I’d never heard of that.
I wonder if there’s a quantum mechanical equivalent you could make. This has the loophole that we don’t live in a purely Newtonian universe.
Many of the interpretations of quantum mechanics are nondeterministic.
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Relational quantum mechanics interprets particles as taking on discrete states at random whenever they interact with another particle, but only in relation to what they interact with and not in relation to anything else. That means particles don’t have absolute properties, like, if you measure its spin to be +1/2, this is not an absolute property, but a property that exists only relative to you/your measuring device. Each interaction leads to particles taking on definite states randomly according to the statistics predicted by quantum theory, but only in relation to things participating in those interactions.
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Time-symmetric interpretations explain violations of Bell inequalities through rejecting a fundamental arrow of time. Without it, there’s no reason to evolve the state vector in a single time-direction. It thus adopts the Two-State Vector Formalism which evolves it in both directions simultaneously. When you do this, you find it places enough constructs on the particles give you absolutely deterministic values called weak values, but these weak values are not what you directly measure. What you directly measure are the “strong” values. You can interpret it such that every time two particles interact, they take on “strong” values randomly according to a rule called the Aharonov-Bergmann-Lebowitz rule. This makes time-symmetric interpretations local realist but not local deterministic, as it can explain violations of Bell inequalities through local information stored in the particles, but that local information still only statistically determines what you observe.
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Objective collapse models are not really interpretations but new models because they can’t universally reproduce the mathematics of quantum theory, but some serious physicists have explored them as possibilities and they are also fundamentally random. You assume that particles literally spread out as waves until some threshold is met then they collapse down randomly into classical particles. The reason this can’t reproduce the mathematics of quantum theory is because this implies quantum effects cannot be scaled beyond whatever that threshold is, but no such threshold exists in traditional quantum mechanics, so such a theory must necessarily deviate from its predictions at that threshold. However, it is very hard to scale quantum effects to large scales, so if you place the threshold high enough, you can’t practically distinguish it from traditional quantum mechanics.
I think a lot of proponents of objective collapse would pick a bone with that, haha, although it’s really just semantics. They are proposing extra dynamics that we don’t understand and can’t yet measure.
Relational quantum mechanics interprets particles as taking on discrete states at random whenever they interact with another particle, but only in relation to what they interact with and not in relation to anything else
What’s the definition of interact here? Does it have an arbitrary cutoff like in objective collapse? You can make a non-separable state as big as you want.
This is also the first I’ve heard anything about time-symmetric interpretations. That sounds pretty fascinating. Does it not have experimenter “free will”, or do they sidestep the no-go theorems some other way?
So saying we stick with objective collapse or multiple worlds, what I mean is, could you define a non-Lipschitz continuous potential well (for example) that leads to multiple solutions to a wave equation given the same boundary?
I think a lot of proponents of objective collapse would pick a bone with that, haha, although it’s really just semantics. They are proposing extra dynamics that we don’t understand and can’t yet measure.
Any actual physicist would agree objective collapse has to modify the dynamics, because it’s unavoidable when you introduce an objective collapse model and actually look at the mathematics. No one in the physics community would debate GRW or the Diósi–Penrose model technically makes different predictions, however, and in fact the people who have proposed these models often view this as a positive thing since it makes it testable rather than just philosophy.
How the two theories would deviate would depend upon your specific objective collapse model, because they place thresholds in different locations. For GRW, it is based on a stochastic process that increases with probability over time, rather than a sharp threshold, but you still should see statistical deviations between its predictions and quantum mechanics if you can maintain a coherent quantum state for a large amount of time. The DP model has something to do with gravity, which I do not know enough to understand it, but I think the rough idea is if you have sufficient mass/energy in a particular locality it will cause a “collapse,” and so if you can conduct an experiment where that threshold of mass/energy is met, traditional quantum theory would predict the system could still be coherent whereas the DP model would reject that, and so you’d inherently end up with deviations in the predictions.
What’s the definition of interact here?
An interaction is a local event where two systems become correlated with one another as a result of the event.
“The physical process during which O measures the quantity q of the system S implies a physical interaction between O and S. In the process of this interaction, the state of O changes…A quantum description of the state of a system S exists only if some system O (considered as an observer) is actually ‘describing’ S, or, more precisely, has interacted with S…It is possible to compare different views, but the process of comparison is always a physical interaction, and all physical interactions are quantum mechanical in nature.”
The term “observer” is used very broadly in RQM and can apply to even a single particle. It is whatever physical system you are choosing as the basis of a coordinate system to describe other systems in relation to.
Does it have an arbitrary cutoff like in objective collapse?
It has a cutoff but not an arbitrary cutoff. The cutoff is in relation to whatever system participates in an interaction. If you have a system in a superposition of states, and you interact with it, then from your perspective, it is cutoff, because the system now has definite, real values in relation to you. But it does not necessarily have definite, real values in relation to some other isolated system that didn’t interact at all.
You can make a non-separable state as big as you want.
Only in relation to things not participating in the interaction. The moment something enters into participation, the states become separable. Two entangled particles are nonseparable up until you interact with them. Although, even for the two entangled particles, from their “perspectives” on each other, they are separable. It is only nonseparable from the perspective of yourself who has not interacted with them yet. If you interact with them, an additional observer who has not interacted with you or the three particles yet may still describe all three of you in a nonseparble entangled state, up until they interact with it themselves.
This is also the first I’ve heard anything about time-symmetric interpretations. That sounds pretty fascinating. Does it not have experimenter “free will”, or do they sidestep the no-go theorems some other way?
It violates the “free will” assumption because there is no physical possibility of setting up an experiment where the measurement settings cannot potentially influence the system if you take both the time-forwards and time-reverse evolution seriously. We tend to think because we place the measurement device after the initial preparation and that causality only flows in a single time direction, then it’s possible for the initial preparation to affect the measurement device but impossible for the measurement device to affect the initial preparation. But this reasoning doesn’t hold if you drop the postulate of the arrow of time, because in the time-reverse, the measurement interaction is the first interaction in the causal chain and the initial preparation is the second.
Indeed, every single Bell test, if you look at its time-reverse, is unambiguously local and easy to explain classically, because all the final measurements are brought to a single locality, so in the time-reverse, all the information needed to explain the experiment begins in a single locality and evolves towards the initial preparation. Bell tests only appear nonlocal in the time-forwards evolution, and if you discount the time-reverse as having any sort of physical reality, it then forces you to conclude it must either be nonlocal or a real state for the particles independent of observation cannot exist. But if you drop the postulate of the arrow of time, this conclusion no longer follows, although you do end up with genuine retrocausality (as opposed to superdeterminism which only gives you pseudo-retrocausality), so it’s not like it gives you a classical system.
So saying we stick with objective collapse or multiple worlds, what I mean is, could you define a non-Lipschitz continuous potential well (for example) that leads to multiple solutions to a wave equation given the same boundary?
I don’t know, but that is a very interesting question. If you figure it out, I would be interested in the answer.
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Are we looking at the physical universe, or are looking at psychology, or philosophy contexts?
All of them
Yes and maybe not then. Look at Newton’s law, even it deals with psychology if not physical action and realize that we (under some theories) have free will to make the actions that will cause those. So something will happen to make you (or someone else) do an action and even if you (or they) don’t like it it happened. You can look at it from 1000 angles but either way someone with that personality would make it happen that way.
So gotta just accept, it is what it is, try and make it better and I hope it works out. Mean unless you can see the future and change things, we all are who we are, may. It be worth knowing or hanging out with but somebody probably made something you don’t want to happen, happen. C’est la vie.
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I’ll try to bridge science, philosophy and spirituality, as I usually do. To me, there aren’t clear boundaries between them bc, to me, they’re highly complementary: Science offers the skeptical-empirical rigor and materiality, Philosophy offers the paradoxical questioning and Spirituality emerges from subjectively perceiving the previous two.
I start with the hypothesis that the universe always existed. In such a case, the Big Bang isn’t the beginning: rather, it’d be some kind of cyclical cosmic phenomenon where matter and/or the fabric of spacetime continuum collapse (due to expansion) only to explode and expand again. This would respect the Laws of Thermodynamics (and Lavoisier Principle) because there’s no energy nor mass being created nor destroyed, just transformed, endlessly. Big Crunch deserves mention bc it’s exactly what it’s about.
There’s also the controversial theory of Zero-sum, where the universe doesn’t actually exist. It may sound crazy (We are existent… or are we? Vsauce song starts playing), but it would also respect the aforementioned laws: there’s no need of creation or destruction if the overall sum of everything equals to a round nought.
We could also mention the Multiverse theory, String (M-Theory), and Big Bounce. In such a scenario, this universe is just one of countless universes, so the factor sparking it into existence would be outside it, thus outside (beyond) space and time.
The latter takes us into philosophy, the Aristotle’s Prime Mover. It could be seen as the “thing” beyond this universe, except that it isn’t a “thing” because it has no “thingness”, but this lack of “thingness” would imply non-existence, except that it’s not something nonexistent either. Here is where human language struggles to define it: language requires “thingness” and temporality, yet the Prime Mover has neither (and it isn’t an “it” so it could “have”).
This takes us to spirituality. Many religions oversimplify this as “creator deity(ies)”, and many (if not all) religions tend to give it agency and shape. While I do have some religiosity (Luciferianism) and tendency of personification (e.g. Lilith as both a red-haired woman and an owl), I also hold the belief that cosmic forces have no particular form, it’s just me trying to give some Order to Chaos… And that’s what the whole existence seems to be about: Ordo ab Chao, a cosmic, eternal tug-of-war where it’s guaranteed that the “sparks” of cosmic order will eventually decay back to a soup of primordial chaos, only to the very chaotic nature of this soup to emerge order again. It’s akin to a Double Pendulum, where sometimes the apparent rhythmic motion vanishes into chaotic motion just for the rhythm to unexpectedly reappear later, but it’s just the Cosmos: endless and uncaring about lifeforms, for life is just stardust.
I could explain more, but I’m limited to 3000 chars so I must end: Cosmos always existed and never existed.
Good text 👍 Faster to read through than it looks. The result probably is that we just don’t exist 🙂
The only candidate for that ever being observed is the collapse of quantum wavefunctions, and there’s interpretations where that’s not really random either. Everything else we’ve ever measured is definitely totally deterministic.
And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_fluctuation
Edit: I guess it’s these two are kind-of the same thing
Though those aren’t really proven real: From that same Wikipedia article:
Although widely used, they are by no means a necessary feature of QFT, but rather are mathematical conveniences — as demonstrated by lattice field theory, which avoids using the concept altogether.[citation needed]
Getting back the the top question, if everything is a result of something, what started it all?
What happened right before spacetime?!
Spacejam.
MJ dunked us into existence? Unorthodox belief!
What is the salient meaning to something that has literally no connection with the past? Wouldn’t that be tantamount to a “proof of god” situation just expressed in different terms?
🤷
