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This article is from WeChat official account:Lonely Brain (ID: lonelybrain), author: Yu old in Canada, drawing from the title:” creed “

upper part

one

Do you want to break the Rubik’s Cube world record?

As of December 2018, the third-order Rubik’s Cube has restored the official world record, which is 3.47 seconds for China’s Du Yusheng.

Even if it’s amazingly fast, you still have a chance to pass him, and the tricks are so strange that the experts can’t figure out the routine.

In fact, this is a true story. An overseas man used a cheating method to achieve this: he shuffled a puzzle that had been restored, recorded the process, and played the video upside down.

An interesting detail is that the cheater specially arranged for one of his roommates to walk backwards behind him. So when you see this video of “breaking” the world record, everything is perfect.

two

Almost all “true stories” in success studies are based on similar principles: first shoot well, then draw the target, and then vividly tell the second creation.

The mystery novel first designs the modus operandi, then bury the clues, and then the author reverses it and uncovers it bit by bit, and abuses readers from the perspective of a genius detective.

Explosive articles first dig out tears and grooves, and then make up stories and piling up the truth.

The magician first thinks through the machineClose, and then reverse the design of rendering methods, divert eyesight, and create dramatic effects.

As smart as Amazon, when the person in charge is required to submit a project proposal, he writes the press release he envisioned. This is a more sophisticated reverse operation of “causal reversal.”

More Nolan, used time in the movie to bring people into the illusion of cause and effect and fate.

The deep mechanism of this kind of magical effect is to use the human fascination and illusion of cause and effect.

Why does a little cheating on time have this miraculous effect?

three

Time and causality seem to be the factory settings of mankind and the world.

Let us hide in the dark like detectives, take photos of the suspect’s daily behavior, and then post them on the wall for analysis.

If one thing happens, each moment corresponds to a photo, the reality is the quick release of this series of photos. When we capture “time” and put it to justice, the world is a bunch of still photos.

Combine many tiny quantities into a smooth variable, which gave birth to calculus.

A lot of stop-motion photos were strung together into a roll of film, and people invented the movie.

Time determines the order of these photos.

Furthermore, time gives these photos a causal relationship to the event.

What you are doing at this moment seems to determine what will happen next, which is the so-called “cause determines consequence”.

This is the magic of causality constructed by time.

But in reality, how many causes and effects are real and how many are fictitious? How many (such as Amazon’s press release mechanism) that are fictional and then real?

If time does not distinguish between past, present and future, do these causal mechanisms still exist? Why is time like an arrow shot, moving in one direction so firmly?

Who gave time direction? If time has a direction, why the Rubik’s Cube cheating at the beginning of this article can’t be seen at allflaw?

In that case, who can prove that time in this world has not been cheated?

four

What exactly is time? We are accustomed to time, but very few people can make it clear.

Time has the following definitions from different perspectives:

1. Literary time

For example, the time in “Reminiscence of the Years”, “What matters is not how it happened, but how to be remembered”.

2. Cultural time

The time cycle pattern of “reincarnation” is common in various religions, and Christianity brings “linear” irreversible time.

3. Philosophy Time

Philosophers say that time is full of contradictions, so it will not be real.

4. Management time

Time is an eternal topic of management. For example, the time management priority matrix, the “important things first” in “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, the “Time Initiative” in “Don’t Let the Monkey Jump Back on the Back”, and the OKR method from Intel, etc. Wait.

5. Scientific time

This is a wonderful and bewildering discovery process: Newton’s absolute time, Einstein’s relative time, the elusive time in quantum physics, the time closely related to entropy in thermodynamics, the creative time when life appears, chaos and The arrow of time.

Plato, a liberal arts student, Einstein, a science student, and both students believe that truth is not affected by time. In order to touch the truth and truth of the world, the illusion of time must be broken.

Newton described the world with decisive and reversible laws of time. In his formula, time has no direction. Scientists believe that time is absolute, and the speed of time is the same everywhere in the universe.

With incredible insight, Einstein pointed out that the speed of time is determined by two factors: speed and gravity. Today, many years later, our mobile phones still rely on his formula to achieve accuracynavigation.

“Einstein believed that existence is four-dimensional, it is the existence in the four-dimensional space-time combining three-dimensional space and one-dimensional time, rather than a three-dimensional space and its evolution in time.”

Even so, Einstein did not question the one-way nature of time. He also doesn’t believe in the “unpredictable” quantum theory that cannot be explained by cause and effect.

Is time just an ultimate illusion?

It seems that all real things, such as truth, justice, and scientific laws, exist outside of time.

However, the world seems to have become more complicated and chaotic.

The Nobel meeting in 1989 discussed a challenging topic: the end of science.

The organizer of the conference wrote: “There is more and more feeling like this…Science can no longer be regarded as a unified and universal objective effort.”

They went on to write: “If science only engages in universal laws that are’super-historical’, and ignores social, temporal, and local things, then we cannot talk about something other than science itself. The truth is true, and science is just a reflection.”

Nobel laureate Prigogine wrote in the preface of “The Arrow of Time”:

This sentence opposes “super-historical” laws and temporal knowledge. Science is indeed rediscovering time, which in a sense marks the end of the traditional view of science. But does this mean that science itself is over?

But where is the time?

Is time a thing or a concept?

Five

Let us return to an intuitive real world that can be “experienced”. Here interweaves the time in the traditional physical sense and the psychological time of personal experience.

In our secular space, time is linear, at a constant speed, and has the function of “autopilot”.

These seem to be several default mechanisms of time.

Mechanism 1: Time is linear

Time flows in one direction and is divided into “past, future, and present”.

Hawking gave three pieces of evidence:

First of all, there is a personal sense of time-we perceive the increase in age, the process of perceiving the occurrence of events, and the duration of a specific time.

Secondly, there is “time” in the universe-starting from the Big Bang, through the expansion of space, until it is finally destroyed in the Great Contraction.

Finally, there is time for the second law of thermodynamics-a basic law in physics, which says that all evolutionary processes in the universe will slowly lose energy and gradually become weaker, developing from an orderly state to A state of entropy or disorder.

We are upset for the past, anxious for the present, and panic for the future. But who divides time into “past, present, and future”?

Is “past” an asset? We are tortured by “sunk costs”. Most of the past are not worth maintaining, including your words, your “correctness”, your deeds, and your reputation.

Only truth and love are worthwhile, but memories need not be maintained.

For now, we have never been able to see through or grasp.

KahnemanIt is short-sighted and arbitrary to think that “every sight is everything”.

The anxiety about the future comes from emotional fear and lack of intellectual calculation power.

I can’t keep the past, I can’t see it now, and I can’t reach it in the future.

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Mechanism 2: Time is constant

No matter how powerful people are, they must sit on their ass.

No matter how rich, the speed of time is the same as yours. Even if he has a private jet.

But in terms of personal experience, why is time getting faster and faster?

The common explanation is “cardinal number method”. A one-year-old child grows to two years old, which is equivalent to doubling his life experience.

The older the person’s age, the greater the base, and the smaller the relative change, so time seems to pass faster, reaching its peak at the age of 60.

Why is there a midlife crisis? Because it’s right in the middle.

There is a joke: when your market share exceeds 50%, you can’t double it.

But some people have always been youthful. The watershed here is, which one will you have in the future or in the past? Some people are dead at the age of 20, and some people can still marry a 20-year-old at 80.

You can easily see in the crowd, which people belong to tomorrow, who are intoxicated in the past, and who are stuck in today and cannot extricate themselves.

There are also studies that show that people have the same perception of the length of time units of one week, one month, one year, and ten years. So the above “base number method” may not hold.

The sense of time in personal experience is indeed “relativity”. For example:

• When you are on vacation, the first day of novelty feels very slow, and the repeating time later is very fast;

• The more a person experiences, the longer he will appear to live.

Seven

Mechanism 3: Time is autopilot

Even if you do nothing, time will drive automatically and take you to the future.

Or just leave you in place.

The sun rises as usual, the earth rotates, the person you hate is still being hated by you, and the person who loves you may no longer love you.

Your organs, your subconscious mind, and most of the physiological functions of the human body can accurately drive automatically over time.

It is said that Jack Ma and a friend visited Li Ka-shing once and asked: Why can Li Ka-shing diversify, invest in everything, and succeed in everything, but other people want to do everything but fail?

Li Ka-shing replied that when doing business, you must remember that you must always have one product on hand to make money when the sky falls.

In short, you want to have a business that autopilots with time.

Like Buffett said: I make more money with my ass than with my head.

How many Chinese individuals and entrepreneurs ultimately rely on those properties as their main assets, whether they are actively or passively purchased.

eight

John Franklin was a British navigator and leader of a polar expedition in the early 19th century. The novel “Discover Slowness” says that he is a very slow person, with very slow brain and limbs.

He can’t participate in all kinds of ball games because those sports are too fast. Even his father called him an idiot for his slowness.

After becoming a sailor, during a voyage, John Franklin noticed the beam of light around the lighthouse. Other sailors only regarded these beams as a moving range of illumination, and he regarded them as an expanding comet tail.

He believes that he must have a broader vision than the people around him, and he can capture many small moments. In photographic terms, John Franklin was able to “delay the exposure.”

“Because his perceptual response is too slow, many sequential events happen to him at the same time.”

Eventually John became a famous polar explorer and also served as governor. Captain John relied on his slow but careful way of thinking to save the lives of all the crew many times.

I have noticed this type of people around me. They are not smart and slow to respond, but they can think comprehensively and patiently. I call it low thinking rate, but high thinking rate.

This aspect is a bit like Li Changho, a stone Buddha, staying like a wooden chicken, born to overcome the inertia of time, produce a slow motion effect, and strangle opponents like a python.

It’s a bit like the story of the ancient marksman Ji Chang: staring at something, and then looking bigger and bigger.

If the swindlers and magicians mentioned at the beginning of this article cheat by reversing the cause and effect of time, then the great people and successful people in this world have also discovered the “loopholes” in the mechanism of time and realized certain Kind of arbitrage.

• Buffett has extended time and is considered a supporter of Newtonian mechanics;

• Simons of the Medal Fund shreds time, and his quantitative trading may be classified as quantum physics;

• The smart founders of companies such as Meituan and Toutiao are all true stories of “delayed gratification”.

The legend of commercial success does not rely on time to apply magic, but time makes magic appear.

In essence, it depends on insight. If AI plays chess, it just calculates far and calmly.

Almost all insights are based on time as the key thinking element.

They are all time hackers.

(or no number).

Master: The author Ted Jiang’s point of view is that you either foresee the future and give up free will; or you remain ignorant of the future and retain free will.

Lonely Brain: More than ten years ago, I wrote in my little book “The Age of Adversity” that two gods cannot play Go. A game where each other knows where the other hand is going. What’s the point?

This is the second most important thing I learned from Go: exploring the unknown world.

Master: Fate makes everyone think they have made a free choice.

Humans need to have a linear sense of time to arrange our experience, make survival possible, and make us feel free will.

The French philosopher Henry Bergson believes that our consciousness has developed an ability to “shield” the past and the future, focusing our attention entirely on the present. Its function is:

“Turn off” our attention on other information to help us focus our energy on the actual survival business.

The strange thoughts that “past, present, and future” happen together are useful for writing science fiction novels?

I wrote in the article “Hand Cutting”:

In 1985, Intel wanted to exit the memory bar market and enter the chip business, but the decision was very difficult.

Grove asked Moore, the co-founder of the company: What would he do if we two retire and a new CEO takes office? Moore replied without thinking: He will quit the memory business.

In this famous case, Grove used a way of thinking called “hand cut” in Go.

As mentioned earlier, unlike chess, there are more stones on the Go board, and the “past” will not be taken away (unless it is raided), so we can edit any

• In the race with Achilles, the tortoise sets off first;

• When Achilles started, the tortoise had arrived somewhere along the way.(let’s call it point A); p>

• As Achilles ran much faster than the tortoise, he quickly reached point A;

• However, when he ran to the place, the tortoise had moved farther away. We called it point B;

• When Achilles ran to point B, the tortoise had climbed farther to point C;

• This process keeps repeating. Although Achilles keeps chasing the tortoise, the gap between the two is constantly narrowing at each stage, but the former can never surpass the latter.

This question is actually quite “windy”. Although we can use the following method “simple” to break:

1. Newtonian physics method: The relative speed between the two is greater than zero, so Achilles will soon catch up with the tortoise;

2. Geometric progression method: After accumulating a series of infinitely long numbers, the sum is not necessarily infinite. To give an example of a series: 1 + 1/ 2 + 1/ 4 + 1/ 8 + 1/ 16 + 1/ 32 … the sum is getting closer to 2.

3. Calculus: In Zeno’s paradox, two different time measures are actually used. One is a regular clock and the other is a Zeno clock. The book “Introduction to Mechanics” gives the answer.

4.The smallest unit of time method:Quantum physics tells us that time, space, and energy are not continuous, but have a smallest unit. The minimum time involved in physics is Planck time, which is 1E-43 seconds (ie 10^-43s). There is no shorter time to exist. Planck time = Planck length/speed of light. So the tortoise does not have time that can be subdivided infinitely.

Even so, when you interpret Zeno’s “paradox” again in your mind, your intuition will still feel: He said it makes sense, how does Achilles surpass the tortoise?

Why did Zeno create this paradox? It is related to time.

Plato talked about “existence” (being) and “general” in his book “Dimayus”( becoming) the difference:

• The “existing” world is the real world, “this world is eternal and unchanging, and it is known by wisdom through argumentation”;

• The “general” world (the realm of time) is the “object of opinions and irrational feelings” , Both birth and death, has never been completely true.”

Parminidis before Plato believes that reality is neither divisible nor timeless. Zeno is a student of Palminidis. He created the famous paradox and teased us for thousands of years, just to overthrow people’s “traditional” concept of time.

two

Newton said in “The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy” (hereinafter referred to as “Principles”): “Absolute, true, mathematical Time, due to its own nature… and any outsideThings go by irrelevantly and evenly. “

The time in Newton’s equation is an undefined primitive quantity. This time is absolute. Any event has a certain position in space, and it happens at a certain moment in time.

In order to accurately describe the motion of an object, Newton invented calculus: Knowing the path of continuous motion, find the speed at a given moment(differential method) ; Know the speed of motion to find the distance passed in a given time (integral method).

The time of Newtonian mechanics has no direction. A ball can hit the wall or pop out of the wall. For each solution of Newton’s equation, reverse the time direction to get another solution.

Newton did not answer why time is moving forward.

But does this question need to be suspected? Can a person grow in reverse? Can the broken mirror be reunited? Can a vase that has fallen on the ground bounce back to the tabletop and return to its original shape?

With regard to time, another characteristic of Newton’s equations is that they are “decisive.”

As we learned in middle school physics, regardless of the position and speed at the initial moment of observation, the behavior of the system is deterministic for the past and the future. Thanks to this, we invented cars, trains, launched rockets, and landed on the moon.

“Determinism” is a direct inference of the mathematical structure of Newton’s equations.

The French mathematician Laplace hypothesized in 1814: “The demon” knows the exact position and momentum of each atom in the universe, and can use Newton’s laws to show the entire process of cosmic events, the past and the future.

“We can regard the current state of the universe as its past effects and future causes. If a wise man can know the forces of all natural motions and the positions of all natural objects at a certain moment, if he can also Analyzing these data, the movement of the largest object to the smallest particle in the universe will be included in a simple formula. For this wise man, nothing will be ambiguous, and the future will only appear in front of him like the past.”

Determinism is related to the “law of cause and effect”. The law of causality says that every event has its cause, and the event itself is its result. Different from simple cause and effect, scientists remove the interference of time through appearance, and explore the true principle of the operation of this world through the law of causality.

three

Einstein’s bold imagination of time surpassed any human being in history.

At the age of 26, he destroyed Newton’s concept of absolute time and made a revolutionary re-evaluation of reality, giving time and space a new meaning. This is the “theory of relativity”.

Such a young legend seems unimaginable today. In fact, quantum theory had a nickname of “boy physics” in the mid-1920s, and too many key figures were young people: Heisenberg was 23 years old, Pauli was 22 years old, and Dirac was 22 years old.

Why did Einstein initiate the three major revolutions in the physical world?

Poincaré, one of the greatest mathematicians of the time, was the inventor of the term “relativity”. (relativity).

Lorentz himself, not Einstein, wrote the Lorentz conversion formula.

Lorentz wrote: “The main reason for my failure was that I stuck to the idea that only the variable t can be used as the real time, and my local time t’ can only be used as an auxiliary mathematical quantity.”

Yang Zhenning has a wonderful comment on this: “Lorentz has mathematics but no physics; Poincaré has philosophy but no physics. Einstein insisted that simultaneity is relative, which opened the way The new physical door of the microcosm.”

But what kind of brain is needed to dare to question peopleKind of primitive ideas about time?

Einstein’s theory of time bending is even more incredible. After lonely and difficult thinking, he realized that time is bent by heavy objects, and it is the bending that causes gravity.

He finally completed the general theory of relativity: the degree of curvature of space-time is determined by the distribution of matter in the universe. The greater the density of matter in a region, the greater the curvature of space-time.

Described in a qualitative way, this law can be expressed as: Everything tends to go to the place where time passes the slowest-gravity will pull it to that place.

There is a video on YouTube in which a foreign professor simulates the theory of general relativity with tight sheets. A heavy ball, assuming it is the sun, dents the bed sheet. Then throw a handful of beads to simulate a planet and rotate along the inner wall of the sinking “trap”.

So, the apple fell to the ground not because of the mysterious power at a distance, but the earth distorted space and time, which caused the apple to fall in.

The time around the black hole slows down, which is vividly shown in the movie “Interstellar”. Cooper took a spacecraft to fly near the black hole Kagunduya. Due to the “time slowing effect”, he only grew older for a few hours, and 80 years have passed on Earth.

Although Einstein shattered almost all human common sense about time and completely updated the world system established by Newton, there are two points that he is consistent with Newton:

1. He did not consider the “time arrow”, and Einstein’s time has no direction;

2. Einstein still adhered to the Newton-like law of cause and effect.

On March 15, 1955, “the man who knew Einstein best” Besso passed away. Einstein usedHis strong belief in “the laws of physics has no timeliness” tried to appease the family of his friend Besso.

Now, he is one step ahead of me, leaving this strange world. But this does not mean anything. For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present, and future is nothing more than an illusion, although this illusion is sometimes stubborn.

He added another sentence: “Beso bid farewell to this strange world, only a little earlier than me.”

One month later, Einstein passed away.

four

Einstein’s photoelectric effect theory greatly promoted quantum theory. He also won the Nobel Prize. However, he was anxious and uneasy in the second half of his life, always emphasizing that the theory of light quantum was only a temporary assumption.

Quantum theory is a desperate risk for scientists.

In order to derive his laws, Planck had to assume that the energy carried by electromagnetic radiation is a portion, which he called quantum.

Schrodinger got an equation, which contains a brand new mathematical quantity-“wave function”. The wave function considers the dual nature of microscopic particles and describes all their possible behaviors.

But Schrodinger himself did not know the meaning of wave function in physics. The common sense and images that we can perceive in reality, just like our intuitive “experience” of Newton’s formula, cannot be found in quantum theory.

Born’s hypothesis is to interpret the wave function as a certain “probability amplitude” to calculate the probability of finding a particle in a certain area of ​​space. He believes that the square of the wave function gives the probability of finding a particle at a specified place and time.

whileHeisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” asserts that in the subatomic field, it is impossible to accurately know the position and momentum of an electron at the same time. This is incompatible with classical physics.

Heisenberg said that the basic mathematics of quantum theory does not need to correspond to anything we are familiar with. The work of quantum theory should directly predict observable things, such as the color of light emitted by hydrogen atoms. It should not be expected to provide a satisfactory inner picture of the inner workings of the atom.

In quantum theory, causality has been re-evaluated.

Although he has made great contributions to quantum theory, Einstein does not support abandoning the law of causality.

Einstein’s point of view is:

• Quantum mechanics is not really basic mechanics, but a method of statistically explaining the unknown. It is a mathematical method.

• Although we don’t know why for the time being, at a deeper level, there must be a certain principle that strictly follows the law of cause and effect.

In an article he wrote to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Newton’s death, he said:

“The essence of Newton’s theory may provide us with the power to restore the harmony between physical reality and the most profound feature of Newton’s teachings—strict causality.”

Bohr emphasized the huge difference between general relativity and quantum mechanics:

1. General relativity uses pure space-time coordination and absolute causality to describe the world;

In quantum images, the observer interacts with the system and is a part of the system.

2. Spatio-temporal coordination representative location. Causality depends on an accurate understanding of how things develop, especially how their momentum changes. Classical theory assumes that people can know both at the same time;

Quantum mechanics tells us that the accuracy of space-time coordination comes at the cost of the uncertainty of momentum and, consequently, the uncertainty of causality.

Quantum mechanics believes that the passage of time is determined by the following very simple thingsAny process that occurs naturally in an isolated system must be accompanied by an increase in the entropy of the system. When the entropy reaches its maximum value, the time evolution of the isolated system stops, and the system is in its most disordered state. At this time the system has exhausted all its ability to change-it has reached thermodynamic equilibrium.

“Entropy” measures the variable ability of a system, which is closely related to time. The increase in entropy is a signpost for time.

Why does heat run from hot objects to cold objects, and not the other way around?

Boltzmann discovered that the reason is surprisingly simple: it is completely random.

Carlo Rovelli wrote in “Seven Minimalist Physics Lessons”:

Boltzmann’s explanation is very subtle, using the concept of probability. The heat running from a hot object to a cold object does not follow any absolute law, but the probability of this occurrence is relatively high.

The reason is: From a statistical point of view, the atoms of a fast-moving hot object are more likely to collide with the atoms of a cold object and transfer some energy to it; while the probability of the opposite process is very small.

The energy is conserved during the collision, but when a large number of accidental collisions occur, the energy tends to be evenly distributed. In this way, the temperature of the objects in contact with each other will tend to be the same.

It is not completely impossible that the temperature of a hot object and a cold object does not drop but rises after contact, but the probability is pitiful.

Introducing “probability” into the core of physics and directly using it to explain the basis of thermodynamics was initially considered ridiculous, so no one took Boltzmann seriously.

In the world defined by Newton, mechanics has no timeliness. The entropy in thermodynamics adds a scale to the advancement of time. In this way, we can finally say that the universe is truly evolving.

Next, humans will gradually discover that not only complex systems, but also the simplest case in physics, will be open in the future.

Thermodynamics give time direction, but it also makes the world seem more chaotic.

six

Prigozine told aboutSimov’s science fiction novel “The Last Question”:

“Can we overcome the second law of thermodynamics one day?”

World civilization is constantly asking about a giant computer.

The computer replied: “Insufficient information.”

Billions of years have passed, stars and galaxies have died, and the computer directly connected to space-time continues to collect data. Finally, there is no information to collect, and there is no longer anything;

But the computer still calculates there, looking for correlations there. Finally it got the answer.

There were no people who wanted to know the answer at that time, but the computer knew how to overcome the second law of thermodynamics.

“So light appeared…”

For Asimov, the emergence of life and the birth of the universe are “anti-entropy” and unnatural events.

Boltzmann said that in a gas filled with molecules, highly ordered structures will disappear randomly over time.

In this way, how does life come into being?

Darwin said, why nature can prioritize some rare events (variants), thus gradually evolving more and more complex life forms . In his theory, the driving force for change is random events.

This seems to contradict Boltzmann’s theory.

The explanation of the scientist is: We must regard the incomparable complexity of life as the result of the self-organization process.

Before the emergence of life, if there is a proper feedback mechanism in the original muddy soup, the general conditions for self-organization will be mature.

Experiments have shown that nucleic acid has the most important property of self-replication: in the pure chemical mixture of nucleic acid raw materials, more nucleic acid will be formed.

Nucleic acid controls the design of life. In DNA and RNA are genes, which give specific instructions verbatim to build proteins for life on our planet.

The evolution of DNA and RNA can be used as a molecular clock.

Dawkins described the ability of DNA to replicate itself in his “The Selfish Gene”:

We are all “survival machines”, our sole purpose is to protect genes, which is to make the same DNA chain, that is, the genes contained in these giant molecules-the blueprint that determines our appearance and personality, more Self-replicating.

In “self-organization” and “chaos”, time shows its direction again.

So far, two seemingly contradictory forces are intertwined, “decisiveness” is not everything, and “randomness” is not directionless.

Highfield concluded:

The future is not uniquely fixed by the present or the past. Strict determinism must be overturned;

It is replaced by the following worldview: it is consistent with our experience of the world, and the future in it is open.

This new view truly combines two opposite and indispensable concepts-opportunity(probability) and necessity< span class="text-remarks" label="remarks">(decisive).

seven

Let us return to a personal perspective from the magnificent vision of tracing back “scientific time”.

Of all the scientific concepts related to time, the parallel universe is perhaps the least reliable.

In order to “solve” the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, Everschert proposed another bold approach in 1957.

In the Young’s slit experiment, which of the two slits did the photon pass through? Copenhagen explained that this is based on probabilityThe rule of choice for irreversible collapse.

However, Evershett said, electrons do not choose slits, but the universe.

When choosing one of the slits instead of the other, the universe splits in two. The chosen slit depends on which universe we are in. Since then, the two universes have completely separated, and the more they are divided, the universe will split once for every measurement.

Everschett believes that every universe is as real as ours. The most absurd dream you have may happen in another world.

An observer who is defined in a certain universe, every time he makes a measurement, the whole universe sprouts numerous new universes (I.e. “multiple worlds”), each new universe represents a different and possible observation result (for example, a living or dead Cat).

There is no collapse of the wave function, only the endless proliferation and germination of the newly branched universe: there is no need for an observer outside the universe.

In the endless universe, is there really a space-time and civilization parallel to us? Will I, who drifted away at a certain moment, be forked to another parallel universe? How are my children in another world?

I am not a mystic and have little interest in parallel universes. But I like the metaphorical value of parallel universes.

If the “tree-like split graph” of the above parallel universe is crossed, we actually get a decision tree or probability tree model.

For example, if we throw a dice, if the six sides are exactly the same, the result can only be one face up (exclude the possibility of a single point standing ). So, since the possibility of each face up is the same, when one face finally faces up, where does the possibility of the other face up go?

We can imagine that when the dice are randomly thrown out, in terms of their future state, six parallel universes appear. In the end we only observed one of them.

We understand the branches of the probability tree as the various possibilities of something, described in a literary way, that are all n parallel universes that may exist.

Is probability an objective thing or a subjective imagination? That is: Does probability exist in reality or in human brains? It is quite interesting and effective to use the idea of ​​parallel universe to form the intuitive feeling of “probability”.

In this way, we firmly grasped the quantified figure of the “uncertain” in the different future time trajectories.

Where does the living experience of time passing come from?

Carlo Rovelli wrote:

I think the answer lies in the close connection between heat and time: only when heat is transferred, is there a difference between the past and the future. Heat is related to probability, and probability determines: Our interaction with the world around us cannot be traced to the smallest details.

In this way, “the passage of time” appears in physics, but not in accurately describing the true state of objects, but more in statistics and thermodynamics. This may be the key to the mystery of time. “This moment” is not more objective than “here”, but the micro-interactions within the world prompt a system (such as ourselves) to have time inside. Sexual phenomenon, this system only interacts through countless variables.

In the following explanation, Carlo Rovelli hypothesized some kind of super-sensory creature:

Our memory and consciousness are based on these probabilistic phenomena. If there is a super-sensational creature, then for it, there is no “passage” of time, and the universe will be a whole piece without past, present, and future. But because of our consciousnessDue to the limitations of, we can only see a vague picture of the world and dwell in time. Please allow me to quote a sentence from the editor of this book: “What is unclear is broader than what is clearly seen.” It is this vague observation of the world that gave birth to our notion of the passage of time.

Does this make everything clear? No, there are still many problems to be solved. At the intersection of gravity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics, many issues are entangled, and time is at the center of this mess. We are still groping in the dark. We may have begun to understand quantum gravity, but it also only combines two of the three pieces of the puzzle. We have yet to find a theory that puts these three basic understandings of the world together.

eight

Although it seems that Einstein was defeated in the “battle” with the Quantum School, I approve of his “unambiguity” in pursuing the truth and his belief in the “God of Nature”.

“Reductionism” and “Evolutionism” are not two sides of the coin. If an “evolutionist” does not possess the basic scientific literacy of “reductionism,” then he is not a scientist. I don’t know any scientist who has made great achievements relying on metaphysics, whether it is in quantum theory or today’s complex science and other fields.

No matter how counterintuitive it seems, quantum theory is still strictly based on mathematics, observed and tested by laboratories, and applied to reliable engineering in the real world.

Aloof, silly and mysterious, may be able to draw a lot of “smart” and “harmonious” conclusions, but it is meaningless.

We can’t go to the opposite side of the scientific camp because of the “law of causality”.

We should just realize that we must keep an open mind and not be troubled by all weird things.

This is also the secular inspiration of quantum theory to everyone who cannot understand it.

Einstein firmly believed that the concept of causality is the cornerstone of physics.

He once proposed that “probability itself may need to be regarded as the fundamental and fundamental physical property of the atomic system” so that Planck’s law can be obtained “in a surprising, simple and general way” The derivation.

I don’t think that Einstein, who once overturned the concept of time with the greatest intuition in human history, lost his imagination. IHe just felt that he was unwilling to give up using a human brain to perceive phenomena and formulas that had been verified in the laboratory.

He said in a letter to Max Born in 1920:

Causal things also make me miserable. Can the quantum absorption and emission of light be imagined in the sense of a completely causal condition? Or will it leave a statistical residue? I must admit that I lack the courage to be sure here. But I just gave up complete causality very reluctantly.

Einstein is definitely not defending the causality and determinism of appearance. In a letter to Besso, he wrote: “I feel that the eternal creator of the mystery (that is, God) gave us the real The joke has never been understood by us.”

nine

For the philosophical thinking of the law of causality, it is necessary to talk about Newton’s opponent in calculus, Leibniz.

Leibniz believes: “Everything in the universe completely relies on its own internal procedures to operate, and is perfectly coordinated with everything else-there is no causal relationship between them.”

Leibniz’s “Scheduled Harmony”Theory:

If there are two compact clocks that are exactly the same, and set to the same time, then we will see that the time is the same at each moment. But they are still “causally separated” from each other, and the connection between the two is because their internal mechanisms have been externally coordinated.

Each individual object runs its own internal program, yet everything is so perfectly related or harmonious that there seems to be a causal effect between them.

In Leibniz’s eyes, the watchmaker is God.

In order to construct the cosmological theory, Leibniz formulated a set of guiding principles called the “law of sufficient reason”. This law holds that in the process of constructing the universe, there must be a reasonable reason behind every obvious choice; every question shaped like “Why the universe is X instead of Y” must have an answer.

In Leibniz’s eyes, everything in the world is not simply listed in space, but immersed in a network of relative relationships. It is these networks of relative relationships that define what is space, not space. Determine the relative relationship.

Hume’s view seems even stranger: nothing can be explained, and you cannot even make reasonable predictions about what will happen, even what will happen in the next few seconds.

Hume discovered early on that our perception of causality in the world depends on our emotions, customs and habits, not on reason, nor on abstract and eternal laws of nature.

Hume believes that most people believe that as long as one thing comes with another thing, there must be a connection between the two things, making the latter appear with the former.

It came after that, so it must come from here.

This idea still holds true today. Just because of the time sequence, we can be confused by various tricks and form the illusion of “cause and effect”.

Hume’s analysis shows that human beings have an instinct to rely on causality. This instinct comes from a habit developed in our nervous system. We cannot remove this habit in the long run.

In the book “On Human Understanding”, Hume argued that all human thinking activities can be divided into two types: the pursuit of “the connection of ideas” and “the actual truth.”

Compares two ways of thinking for us:

• One way is to think outside of time;

• One way is to follow time thinking.

Thinking outside of time means that truth is beyond time and even beyond the universe. Socrates said that all discoveries are nothing but memories of past lives.

Thinking closely with time is a kind of relationalism. Relationism believes that the most true description of things is to indicate the connection between things and other things in the system.

Dirac speculates: “The laws of nature at the beginning of the universe may be quite different from the laws of nature today. Therefore, we need to admit that the laws of nature will not remain unique in all time and space, and they will gradually evolve over time. “

Wheeler wrote: “There are no rules in the world—except for this rule.”

It seems that the theory of evolution is everywhere.

Personally, these two kinds of thinking have a strong taste of chicken soup.

Personal thinking outside of time: Have ideals, visions, principles, values, beliefs, and maintain a certain constant certainty in life;

Personal thinking closely following time: Face the uncertainty of life bravely, accept randomness and ups and downs, and regard it as the necessary price of life.

Living in the gap between opportunity and danger, exploring in certainty and randomness, is the human experience.

From the daily time of “one-way, constant speed, automatic driving” in the first part of this article to the thrilling and legendary scientific time in the middle part, time is no longer simpleOur life background board is not only a huge pointer to this universe, but contains all the secrets.

next part

one

If you can predict the future but cannot change everything, how will you spend this life?

You will marry a man, even if you knew that you would break up later; you will have a daughter, and you know everything that happened during her growth, including her being injured when she was three years old and quarreling with you during adolescence , Graduated from university, and, died of rock climbing at the age of 25. No matter how much you love her, the reality is happening exactly like the script you’ve seen in advance.

This is the story of “The Story of Your Life”. I especially like this novel by Jiang Fengnan. The text is so good that the adaptation of the movie “Arrival” cannot be seen.

The theme of the book is free will (determinism), language and the Sapir-Wolf hypothesis. After the linguist encountered the alien heptagram, he learned the language of the Tas and gained the ability to predict the future.

The language communication with aliens is extremely difficult, and the breakthrough came from the heptapod barrel redoing a physical experiment demonstrated by humans. This is what you and I learned in junior high school: the refraction of light.

You should remember the main points of this experiment:

1. A beam of light passes through the air and enters the water. Because the refractive index of water is different from that of air, the direction of the light is changed;

2. When light goes from A to B, the path chosen by light mustOf course it is the fastest one.

So, why not just walk in a straight line with the dotted line as shown in the figure below?

As shown in the above picture, the dotted line is shorter than the actual distance traveled by the light, but the part in the water is longer than the actual line. Since the speed of the light in the water is slower than in the air, although the distance is short, the time is on the contrary Longer.

But, why not make it more refracted like the dotted line on the right side of the figure below?

Compared with the actual line, this second theoretical line has less part in the water, but the total length is much longer than the actual line. If you take this route, it will take longer than the actual route.

To sum up, the truth can be stated as: The actual route chosen by a beam of light is always the fastest—this is the “Fermat’s Law of Least Time”.

The question is here: How do you design your own route before light goes from A to B?

In the novel, there is a climactic dialogue. The heroine, I, a linguist, discussed “Fermat’s Law of Least Time” with the physicist Guere, who later became “I”.

I: “I also want to ask you about Fermat’s law. I think it’s a bit weird here, but I can’t tell what’s wrong. This law doesn’t sound like the law of physics at all.We all know, long before it sets off. right? “

Guy Lei: “Let’s put it this way, it’s impossible for this light to embark on a journey rashly and make adjustments after going out for a while. The road that needs to be re-adjusted will never be the path that takes the least time. This light must be before it starts. Complete all required calculations at the beginning.”

I muttered to myself that this beam must know in advance where it will stop before it chooses a path. What reminds me of this, I know very well. I looked up at Gueret: “This is what I always find weird. I am very upset.”

Scientist Feynman explained this with the method of “path integration”. In his calculation theory of light refraction, all routes are possible; the classical route is just more probable than other routes. In other words, what nature allows us to calculate is only probability.

The light we calculated in the middle school textbook is just a simplification.

Quantum randomness has shaken a cornerstone of physics since Aristotle-the law of cause and effect. For example, the source of tension in the story in “The Story of Your Life”: We have always believed that any phenomenon or thing must have its cause.

If this kind of randomness is applied to macroscopic human affairs, it is the so-called “summing of history”:

All other choices of historical events(such as Napoleon’s victory in Waterloo, or Kennedy avoiding the assassin’s bullet) are It may happen, and every historical event will have an amplitude associated with it. We will add up these amplitudes (that is, add all those arrows Get up).

Reality lies between “tidy and continuous integrable systems with proportional causes and effects” and “non-integrable systems in which everything depends on other things, and nothing can be underestimated”.

Ivar Ekeland wrote:

“The world has no causal chain, and events are not arranged linearly, so that the former is the cause of the latter, and the latter is the result of the former. Each event is like a tree trunk, extending the net-like roots toward the tree crown. To the future.

Any event will never have only one reason: the more you look forward, the more you can find any specialThe more antecedents of the incident. There will never be only one result: the farther you look towards the future, the wider the net opened by a single event. “

If you can predict the future but cannot change everything, how will you spend this life?

In “The Story of Your Life”, “I” chose to face all this. Even though “I” has known all this for a long time, I still look forward to it every time I open a good or bad hand, like a girl on a date.

The “I” in the novel subconsciously still wants to change and prevent certain “things that are already known”. As a result, “I” overprotects the child, but strengthens her rebellion, thus strengthening the risky child death The fate of adventure.

Will you choose to have this ability? You know that your child will die in the best years, will you still “make love, make you” with the man you know is destined to leave you?

In the flat time, under the action of the second law of thermodynamics, which is the only time to point, we are all destined to die. How are we different from the protagonist in the novel?

No matter how much we love our parents, they will leave. No matter how innocent and cute our child was when she was young, she would go through puberty and date a bastard who you know in your heart that you just want to sleep with her.

In the language system of the alien heptagram, the past, present, and future are presented at the same time, and the “arrow of time” seems to disappear.

two

Time connects the two greatest mysteries of nature: the mind and the universe.

Huxley said: “The most fundamental and interesting problem among all human problems is to determine the position of man in nature and his relationship with the universe.”

There are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and the number is approximately equal to the number of neurons in our brain.

We have similar deep doubts about the universe and ourselves:

Who are you? Where do you come from? Where are you going?

People are not so confused about the real existence of “self-awareness” as they are about the real existence of “time”. However, what “self-awareness” is, like what “time” is, is a fascinating and abusive secret.

Generally speaking, our brain is composed of a “fast system” and a “slow system”. The former is responsible for emotions, while the latter is responsible for reason; the former is responsible for intuition, and the latter is responsible for deep thinking. The two are intertwined, influence and transform each other.

Emotions and emotions are thought to come from the jungle age, are quick decisions made independently at a low level, and are a survival mechanism.

Like time’s “autonomous driving”, humans and animals can also perform super-autonomous driving on their physiology. In contrast, the resulting side effects on the civilized era are really nothing.

There is no chip in the brain, or the brain itself is a super chip. There are various feedback loops in the brain, like a society, each module is arguing with each other non-stop.

But why can you clearly feel an “I”, as a single, unified whole, making all decisions continuously?

Scientists say that this is an illusion caused by the subconscious mind and the mind. The brain is just explaining, giving a reasonable description of the chaotic internal disputes. Just like the successful biographies of people who won the lottery, the brain made up the illusory story of “I am the best, I have done everything”.

A company that is chaotic even has a CEO. The chief executive officer of the brain is located in the frontal lobe. When the CEO takes over the autopilot of the brain and controls the direction and speed, the “self” will appear clear.

So, is this conscious “self” and the unconscious “self” when the mind is absent, the same person?

Furthermore, if the human society is a super ant colony, is there a bird’s-eye view person observing a certain kind of intelligence that the people on earth cannot perceive themselves? What about this bird’s eye view?

Questioning whether “free will” exists is probably one of the coolest things the brain does.

Just like among your friends, only the smartest will question whether they are a fool.

Ribert’s experiments show that the brain’s decision is actually about 300 milliseconds earlier than people realize the decision.

In other words, the brain decides first, then explains.

Just like when you buy something, you first want it, and then find yourself the “logic” (excuses) to buy. In this way, “be yourself” seems to be empty talk, but the truth is “you are being yourself”.

We can’t help but return to the previous part, the discussion about “determinism”. According to Laplace’s theory, all future events are determined by the laws of physics. Then, are all our behaviors also determined?

If you are sitting in front of a nonsense person, you can go up and give him a mouth, and then say: Look, my self-awareness is still in my hands.

However, what I call the “determinism” of individual fate does not mean that every word and deed is set, but that:

A person is like a coin, which seems to be able to roll freely when it is tossed, and it can randomly present a certain side when it falls. However, the final statistics of fate always strictly follow the probability of “50% heads up”.

Determinism itself does not exclude “possibility” and “opportunity.” But the distribution probability of a person’s fate seems to be “decided”.

In reality, it seems that you can call the shots every second, but the real world is like a wall made of cotton, with no response. Is this the price we paid for “autonomous driving”?

Time flows quietly, and fate cannot be reversed. Both of these seem to be unfree to free will.

Let us recall the key feature of quantum theory: it deals with possibility, not certainty. This is not because we lack knowledge, but because certain aspects of nature are fundamentally controlled by the laws of probability.

Who is controlling the probability of brain decision making? Who is determining the probability distribution of fate?

Eccles believes that the heart-brain interaction is similar to the probability field of quantum mechanics. It has no mass and no energy, but it can effectively act on the process of synaptic transmitter release. He pointed out that the heart-brain interaction is a kind of information flow, Not energy flow.

Will the role of “uncertainty” and “opportunity” left by quantum mechanics arouse people’s hope for “free will”? Schrodinger thought this was just an illusion.

In short, the book “Opportunity and Chaos” believes that it is the complexity of this universe, or more precisely, our own complexity, that makes our free will a meaningful concept.

I agree with the two propositions of the author of “Consciousness and Brain”:

1. You are not aware of most things that happen in your mind;

2. Even if you are sure that everything is under your control, the zombie actor actually controls most of your life.

But I am not pessimistic about “free will” because of this.

Dante wrote, think about your source: you were not born to live like beasts, but to pursue virtue and knowledge.

The long years of the birth of life and the journey of human suffering have all destined that the purpose of “self-awareness” is not to survive and fill up, but to seek love and truth, and to pursue meaning that cannot be defined.

three

Wittgenstein said: “Without philosophy, ideas will be blurred. The task of philosophy is to make ideas clear and give clear boundaries to ideas.”

I replaced “philosophy” with “time”: Time gives clear boundaries to ideas.

If a person wants to be happy, reason is more important than smart. If you want to achieve life’s achievements, treating time scientifically and rationally is far more important than IQ.

In terms of time that seems to be indistinguishable to everyone, different people adopt differentThe time strategy has led to a completely different fate.

If you want to control your own destiny, first you must control your time.

If it is true that action is indeed faster than thought, as the scientist’s experimental conclusion said, then time is the “converter” between action and thought.

The corrective exercise is 1/4 second ahead of conscious perception. This may be decisive for the world-class 100-meter race. This meant that his consciousness had already run several steps when he heard the starting gun.

Such unconscious actions can be achieved through training. Athletes, stock traders, artists, and entrepreneurs will use similar training to form conditioned intuition and actions.

The boundary between time and thought also integrates two seemingly opposite abilities:

1. You need to be able to control “zombie-like” conditioning and automatic driving;

2. You must be able to fully utilize the subconscious and autonomous driving functions of your brain and body.

four

The magic of life algorithms is almost all realized through time. Why do most people live a mediocre life in their entire life?

The reason is that they gave up or sold two rights at a low price:

a. Probability weight;

b. Time rights.

Exercising the right to time, a positive example is “delayed gratification”. The world’s richest man is none other than Buffett, Gates, and Bezos.

The essence of delayed gratification is to achieve””Probability rights” and “time rights” are not discounted. A negative example is the pursuit of “instant gratification”, such as a gambler.

On the one hand, there is the fear of time, on the other hand, the fear of probability, and both are the fear of future uncertainty.

Time is the “tool of crime” of probability. For example, if we look at the Bayesian formula in two dimensions from only a certain slice of time, it is actually just a simple calculation of the four arithmetic.

However, after the time dimension was added, a connection was established between slices and slices, and magic appeared.

Time is the executor of the law of large numbers.

• The algorithm of time: you in the past, you in the present, you in the future.

Captain John Franklin in front is actually able to superimpose the past, present, and future together and think from the overall situation. This is not a special function, but a way of thinking that everyone can learn.

Time links the freeze-frame universe scenes with (or no) causality, which determines what we can do with time.

• Probability and fatalism: If you can traverse, you cannot change your own destiny.

Only when you have freedom of will, can you achieve freedom of behavior and change your destiny.

Five

The so-called fatalism is this: You cannot change the future, because your changes are also part of the future.

Russian theoretical physicist Novikov proposed the rule of time paradox in the 1980s: Novikov’s principle of self-consistency.

This principle states: Only a causal cycle of consistent events can occur.