Heaven cannot exist......or... maybe there is more than one.

[argonsagas]

It is not a long article, but,the subject is VERY interesting .

It does not address the infinite number of possible details or variables, nor does it attempt to deal with the very limited perception abilities of even our most educated men or women, as it accepts that multiple universes are possible.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/20/special-series/michio-kaku-multiverse-reality.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab

[Gorminrider]

paywall. but I'm roughly familiar... I muse that dreams are intersections....

[rphillips]

Tried a few times, when I click the link it wants me to put in a bunch of info. & it seem to sign me up for $1 pr wk. ... I'm out !!

[Cipher]

Tried a few times, when I click the link it wants me to put in a bunch of info. & it seem to sign me up for $1 pr wk. ... I'm out !!

THE BIG IDEAS: WHAT IS REALITY?
In a Parallel Universe, Another You
As they probe the secrets of the cosmos, scientists question whether our reality is but one in a multiverse.
Give this article

The orbits of stars near a black hole in the Milky Way galaxy.
The orbits of stars near a black hole in the Milky Way galaxy.Credit...-/Agence France-Presse, via European Southern Observatory/Afp Via Getty Images

By Michio Kaku
Dr. Kaku is a physicist.
June 20, 2022
This essay is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What is reality? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.
When I was 8 years old, a revelation forever changed my life.
The year was 1955, and newspaper headlines announced the death of a renowned scientist. A photo accompanied one article, showing his office desk strewn with papers and books. As I recall, the photo caption noted that among the stacks of material was an unfinished manuscript.
I was captivated by this discovery. What could be so challenging that this man, often hailed as one of the greatest scientists of all time, could not complete this work? I had to find out, and over the years I visited libraries to learn more about him.
His name was Albert Einstein. His unfinished work explored what would be known as the theory of everything, an equation, perhaps no more than an inch long, that would allow us to unify all the laws of physics. It would, as Einstein had hoped, give us a glimpse into the mind of God. “I want to know his thoughts,” he famously said. I was hooked.
Today, many of the world’s top physicists are embarking on this cosmic quest, whose far-reaching reverberations span our understanding of reality and the meaning of existence. It would be the crowning achievement of thousands of years of scientific investigation, since ancient civilizations also wondered how the universe was created and what it is made of. The ultimate goal of the theory of everything is to combine Einstein’s theory of relativity with the bizarre world of quantum theory.
In essence, the theory of relativity delves into the cosmos’s most massive phenomena: things like black holes and the birth of the universe. The domain of relativity is nothing less than the entire cosmos. Quantum theory, on the other hand, explores the behavior of matter on the most minuscule level. Its domain encompasses the tiniest particles of nature, those hidden deep inside the atom.
Unifying these two spheres of thought into a single and coherent theory is an ambitious undertaking, one that builds on and adds to the work that Einstein began. But to do this, scientists must first determine a crucial truth: where the universe came from.
This is where our two spheres of thought pointedly diverge.
If we subscribe to Einstein’s relativity theory, the universe is a bubble of some sort that is expanding. We live on the skin of this bubble, and it exploded 13.8 billion years ago, giving us the Big Bang. This birthed the singular cosmos as we know it.
Quantum theory is based on a radically different picture — one of multiplicity. Subatomic particles, you see, can exist simultaneously in multiple states. Take the electron, a subatomic particle that carries a negative charge. Wondrous devices in our lives, such as transistors, computers and lasers, are all possible because the electron, in some sense, can be in several places at the same time. Its behavior defies our conventional understanding of reality.
Here is the key: In the same way that quantum theory forces us to introduce multiple electrons simultaneously, applying that theory to the entire universe makes us have to introduce multiple universes — a multiverse of universes. By that logic, the solitary bubble introduced by Einstein now becomes a bubble bath of parallel universes, constantly splitting in two or bumping into other bubbles. In this scenario, a Big Bang could perpetually happen in distant regions, representing the collision or merging of these bubble universes.
Image
Albert Einstein with J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb, in 1950.
Albert Einstein with J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb, in 1950.Credit...Gertrude Samuels/The New York Times

In physics, the concept of a multiverse is a key element of a leading area of study based on the theory of everything. It’s called string theory, which is the focus of my research. In this picture, subatomic particles are just different notes on a tiny, vibrating string, which explains why we have so many of them. Each string vibration, or resonance, corresponds to a distinct particle. The harmonies of the string correspond to the laws of physics. The melodies of the string explain chemistry.
By this thinking, the universe is a symphony of strings. String theory, in turn, posits an infinite number of parallel universes, of which our universe is just one.
A conversation I once had with the theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg illustrates this. Imagine sitting in your living room, he told me, listening to the radio. In the room are the waves from hundreds of different radio stations, but your radio is tuned to just one frequency. You can hear only the station that is coherent to your radio; in other words, it vibrates in unison with your transistors.
Now, imagine your living room is filled with the waves of all the electrons and atoms vibrating in that space. These waves might hint at alternate realities — ones with, say, dinosaurs or aliens — right there in your living room. But it’s difficult to interact with them, because you don’t vibrate coherently with them. We have unfastened ourselves from these alternate realities.
There’s an exercise my colleagues and I sometimes present to our Ph.D. students in theoretical physics. We ask them to solve a problem by calculating the probability that one will wake up on Mars tomorrow. Quantum theory is based on what is known as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, allowing for a small probability that we can exist even on distant places like Mars. So there’s a tiny but calculable likelihood that our quantum wave will tunnel its way through space-time and wind up there.
But when you do the calculation, you find that for this to happen you’d have to wait longer than the lifetime of the universe. That is, most likely you’ll wake up in your bed tomorrow, not on Mars. To paraphrase the great British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, reality is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
It’s been more than six decades since Einstein’s death, yet I keep going back to that photo of his desk that I saw as an 8-year-old, the work he left unfinished and its profound implications. In the quest to meld two opposing perspectives of the universe, we’re left with a host of deeply unsettling questions. Might we also exist in multiple states? What might we be doing if we had chosen a different career? Married someone else? What if we could somehow change important episodes in our past? As Einstein once wrote, “The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Maybe there are copies of us living entirely different lives. If this theory of everything is correct, then perhaps there is a parallel universe where we are billionaires plotting our next escapade, or where we subsist as vagrants desperately searching for our next meal. Who knows? A simple quantum fork in the road might have made all the difference.
Michio Kaku is a professor of physics at the City University of New York and the author of “The God Equation.”

[Gorminrider]

Imagine sitting in your living room, he told me, listening to the radio. In the room are the waves from hundreds of different radio stations, but your radio is tuned to just one frequency. You can hear only the station that is coherent to your radio; in other words, it vibrates in unison with your transistors.

...a nice way to put it. If you add that quanta are waves until "observed" to manifest as particles, it somewhat explains the tuning, your transistors and much else.

But it all gets thick pretty quick. I've heard an idea where all electrons are the same electron being everywhere at once, ..it being being beyond the grasp of time itself? etc etc etc.

[argonsagas]

More on the subject or General Relativity

From CNET

This is too long for a single post, so I will make it two pa5rts
You will still need to use the link to see the graphs/photos, etc.

https://www.cnet.com/science/features/enter-the-general-relativity-rabbit-hole-decoding-a-theory-that-deconstructs-space-and-time/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Enter the General Relativity Rabbit Hole: Unraveling Einstein's Theory That Deconstructs Space and Time

A deep dive into our universe's most paradoxical and confusing, yet elegant and shatterproof theory.
monisha-ravisetti
Monisha Ravisetti
June 21 2022 at 9:01 a.m. PT
11 min read

More than a century ago, Albert Einstein conjured the hypothesis of all hypotheses -- an idea so extraordinary that it would relentlessly echo through the vast directory of human thought.

It would alter the fundamental tenets of science, inspire the most mind-bending technology, help capture the glory of black holes, motivate authors to write prodigious novels, and stimulate directors to turn deeply metaphysical ideas into film.

It was a concept that would test the limits of our imagination and a puzzle that would force us to rethink the notion of time.

In 1916, Einstein announced his holy grail theory of general relativity.
The condensed version

Basically, Einstein realized that space is much more than the "space" we live in and that time transcends the clocks we've invented. Rather, he theorized, the two are physically entangled.

Space is like a canvas on which our past, present and future are woven -- and it can fold, twist and ripple like silk. There's no beginning or end to this fabric of space and time, or as he called it, spacetime.

We can't exactly see the spacetime continuum because it's part of a realm imperceptible to human eyes: the fourth dimension. But we can deduce its existence, as we can feel its effects. One of those effects you're no doubt familiar with -- gravity. But there are other effects too, like time moving slower depending on where you are in the universe and space-borne magnifying glass phenomena dubbed gravitational lensing.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. It's no problem if pretty much all of that flew over your head.
einsteinloc

Regardless of when your indoctrination to general relativity camp was -- even if it was five seconds ago due to my jam-packed intro -- I'd bet you thought it sounded bizarre. I mean, it involves premises like the fourth dimension and an invisible fabric. It projects weird outcomes like wormholes and nonlinearity.

You wouldn't be alone in your skepticism. General relativity was once dismissed as delusion, "totally impractical and absurd." Yet, it remains one of the most elegant theories concerning our universe.

So much so that it's often considered an unbreakable truth.
Welcome to the fourth dimension

As three-dimensional beings, we tend to think about the universe in intuitive terms.

A one-dimensional object makes sense to us. That's a line. Two dimensions are also easy to understand. Pac-Man. And three dimensions -- tulips, Tic Tacs and iPhones -- are all comprehensible. But when we get to the four-dimensional universe, our intuition disappears.

In 3D, we have an X axis for length, Y for width and Z for depth. In 4D, there's a fourth axis: Time.

But trying to think about 4D space, for us, would be like Pac-Man trying to understand 3D space. That would hurt his brain because there isn't a Z axis for Pac-Man like there isn't a time axis for us. Technically, Pac-Man's view of everything would be a giant line, similar to that of characters in the novel Flatland.

However, Pac-Man's difficulty with perceiving 3D space doesn't mean 3D space can't exist. We're living in it. In fact, he's living in it.

Likewise, 4D space exists whether or not our minds can enter it. We even call on the time axis unknowingly when we ask someone to meet us in a coffee shop at 2 p.m., for instance. We give X, Y, Z and time coordinates.

So as you read this, remember that everything we're about to discuss regarding general relativity lives in 4D. Fortunately, even though we can't mentally picture the fourth dimension, we can mathematically calculate it.
The elevator experiment

You've probably heard the age-old adage that Isaac Newton was sitting underneath an apple tree when a delicious fruit fell onto his head, and voila, he discovered the mysterious force of gravity pulling stuff down to Earth.

Einstein had a (very) different take.

In a nutshell, Einstein realized gravity isn't quite as mysterious as it's chalked up to be. It's a lot like a regular old force we are used to. We use it nearly everyday -- driving to work, running around, or perhaps kicking a soccer ball. It's called acceleration.

Einstein's famous elevator thought experiment helps illustrate this connection.

Imagine a nonmoving elevator on Earth and an accelerating one somewhere in space, traveling upward with a force exactly equivalent to the force of gravity (9.8 meters/second^2). If there weren't any windows on these elevators, how could you tell if you were in the space one or the Earth one?

Well, Einstein said, you couldn't.

Modifying that a little, what if you had to figure out if you were in a non-windowed elevator that wasn't moving in space and one on Earth that was falling, so you were experiencing weightlessness? Could you then? Nope.

Weightlessness on Earth in the presence of gravity feels just like weightlessness in space in what we'd normally consider zero-gravity.

This is called the equivalence principle.

So, the only plausible explanation for "gravity," Einstein said, is it isn't what we think it is. And, whatever it really is, probably has something to do with acceleration.

Then, after a little (no, a lot) more thinking, he concluded that gravity is not a force at all. It's the product of objects interacting, while accelerating in different directions. OK, let's back up a little bit so our brains don't explode.

Here's one way to think of Einstein's conjecture: Things aren't pulling things down; things are holding things up.
You're falling right now

If a ball were rolling toward a cliff, Newton would say the ball was about to stop moving in a straight line because gravity would pull it down. To Newton, the ball would soon fall off the cliff because of an elusive gravity force.

Einstein, on the other hand, would say the ball has always been falling -- it's just that we only notice such "falling" when it passes the edge of the cliff because that's when nothing will be pushing, or accelerating, up on it anymore. Bear with me. Here's an analogy.

Imagine holding a glass of water. The glass, in a way, is constantly stopping the water from falling to the ground. You probably wouldn't say the glass is exerting an invisible force on the water to pull it down, right? It's the same idea. General relativity just takes it a step further.


You're falling right now. You just can't tell because the chair you're sitting in is stopping you from reaching the ground. The floor of your room is stopping you and your chair from reaching the Earth. And the literal Earth is stopping you, your chair and your floor from "falling" through space.

Everything is always in a constant, natural free fall, Einstein realized, yet sometimes that free fall is interrupted. And such interruption, to us, feels like the force of gravity.

It's all... wait for it... relative.

OK, you might still be on that bit about Earth stopping you from falling through space. If Earth weren't there, wouldn't we be floating around like astronauts on the International Space Station?

This brings us to part two of general relativity: The oceanlike fabric of spacetime sort of redefines the notion of falling. Brace yourself, things are about to get trippy. The next thought experiment might seem unrelated to what we've just discussed, but trust me, it'll come together.
The gravity trampoline

Picture a trampoline.

If we put a bowling ball into this trampoline, it'd roll to the middle and make the stretchy material warp inward. Now imagine putting a marble onto this curved fabric. It'd roll down the curve and stick to one side of the bowling ball. The trampoline is the fabric of spacetime, the bowling ball is Earth, and the marble is you. And once again, I'm scaling the fabric of spacetime down by dimensions because we can't really conceptualize the fourth.

Anyway, according to Einstein, anything in the universe with mass warps spacetime sort of like the bowling ball warps the trampoline. Black holes warp it a whole lot, Earth warps it somewhat, the moon warps it a bit and even you warp it a teeny tiny amount. The more massive the object, the greater the warp. And the greater the warp, the stronger the "gravity."

Now imagine that each grid-line in this image is a cable line that has a car, within which some item is traveling.

This item is always "falling" along the line. If Earth were removed from this picture, the cable line would be straight, so the item would move in the direction we consider "forward." But there's Earth, denting the cable line inward and bringing the object on that line along with it.

So, if space didn't have any objects, Einstein said, a sole item in the cosmos would theoretically continue falling freely along an unwarped trajectory. But the universe is filled with objects. So spacetime is completely warped. And everything "falls" along those warps. Even ISS astronauts are falling freely, because they're following some sort of gravitational warp.

But if you're still scratching your head, American physicist John Wheeler once perfectly explained general relativity in 12 words: "Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve."

There you have it. That's general relativity. But the madness doesn't stop here. Part two follows...

[argonsagas]

Part two

Consequences of general relativity are arguably even more bizarre than the theory itself. Don't forget, the spacetime grid is made out of, well, time.
Time is an illusion

In Christopher Nolan's 2014 film Interstellar, something really weird happens when Matthew McConaughey's character, Cooper, visits a planet orbiting close to a black hole.

"Seven years per hour here," he said, before exiting his spacecraft. This simply meant that for every hour on this planet, seven years will pass by on Earth -- and sure enough, when Cooper gets back to Earth after exploring for a couple of hours, decades have gone by.

All that drama was a product of none other than general relativity. Or more specifically, time dilation.

This aspect of general relativity treads into a greater idea Einstein also came up with, called special relativity. We won't go too deeply into special relativity, but what you need to know is that it says light always travels at a constant speed. No matter what.

Light on a train moving at 40 miles per hour will travel at the same speed as light on an airplane moving at 500 miles per hour, and both of those will travel at the same speed as light coming from a star on the other side of the galaxy. As you can imagine, when you take into account the spacetime continuum, this leads to some weird stuff.

Think about the trampoline again. No bowling ball. Say it'd take 10 seconds to roll a marble to the other side. OK, add the bowling ball. The trampoline is now stretched out. Rolling a marble across this warped trampoline would take, maybe, 12 seconds to account for the new area.

With this analogy, you might see how heavier objects create a more massive curve, and therefore greater "area" for an object to travel across. But remember the light rule? Light must always travel at a constant speed, so it can't be affected by the warps.

But obviously, light traveling through a spacetime warp is crossing a longer distance than light traveling through empty space. So, if not speed, what changes? Well, after fiddling with relativity equations, you get the answer to be... time.

Time gets altered to account for the speed of light's constancy.

In short, time moves slower as a gravitational field in spacetime gets stronger. Yes, really. Even though it's an incredibly minuscule difference, we have proof of this. After a six-month journey, astronauts on the ISS aged 0.007 seconds slower than they would've if planted on Earth. This is also why we have atomic clocks that can account for time dilation impacting GPS satellites, for instance.

And with regard to Cooper, someone on Earth would observe time moving slower for him while he's on the black-hole-planet -- such that only one hour passes for every seven years on Earth. There are a few other ways that time dilation occurs due to general relativity, but this one gives you the general gist.
Wormholes and black holes

Ready for some Star Trek-style thoughts?

What would happen if we folded the trampoline in half, like a piece of paper? Theoretically, you'd be able to punch a hole through the fabric. Hmm. Unfold the trampoline, and you'd see two holes quite far away from each other. Fold it back, and they touch. That's a wormhole.

While the trampoline is folded, a marble wouldn't need to travel from one side to the other. it could potentially just punch through to the other side in less than a second.

Some experts argue that the fabric of spacetime could, theoretically, "fold" like that, especially near a super warped area such as regions around black holes. And if that's true, maybe we can travel across the universe in an instant.

OK, before you get excited, though, we have no evidence for such a "fold." This is just speculation. But on the bright side, there are some crazy spacetime-warp consequences we do have evidence of.

We've gone over the fact that black holes are a big player in the general relativity game, but let's zoom in to the voids for a moment.

Because these leviathans are among the most gravitationally strong objects in the universe -- some have masses equal to billions of times that of our sun -- they don't just warp spacetime. They twist it and turn it so strongly that the fabric nearly shatters. And around here, time doesn't just slow. It stops.

But even as little 3D humans, we can watch the show.

In 2016, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, or LIGO, detected a binary black hole system, or two black holes orbiting each other. The voids' spiral sent actual ripples through the fabric of spacetime, like the way dropping a rock in a pond would send ripples across the water. Exactly as Einstein predicted decades ago. This was the first direct proof that spacetime is indeed a moldable sheet.

Since then, scientists have even managed to take two photographs of black holes in the universe, and both of these images show what warped spacetime near these abysses really looks like. There's a ring of photons around each one that literally follow the black hole-induced warp-lines.

Not so impractical, not so absurd

Even aside from such concrete, visual proof of spacetime, mathematically speaking, experts have tried time and time again to find a flaw in Einstein's general relativity equations. And time and time again, they've failed.

General relativity appears to be so immutable and crucial for our universe that even cosmic phenomena as gravitationally extreme as neutron stars -- so dense that a teaspoon of one would equal the weight of Mount Everest -- seem to abide by its laws.

The idea of gravitational lensing, which is a magnifying effect of warped spacetime near highly massive galaxy clusters, has become practice among astronomers looking at faraway stars and galaxies.

A once "totally impractical and absurd" hypothesis has turned out to be one of the most fundamental truths of our generation.

General relativity states there's a fourth dimension that crochets together space and time, deeming linearity an illusion for our 3D minds, producing the far-fetched possibility of wormholes and creating a foundation for gravitational waves reverberating throughout the cosmos.

And, for now at least, it's airtight.

[Rob S.]

"In 1916, Einstein announced..."

I thought it was 1905.

[GS1150Pilot]

Michio Kaku is a badass, and quantum theory and the theory of relativity should absolutely make us wonder, because they are about wonder. That having been said, even if there are other "you's" in other existences does no more to prove the existence of a heaven than the single "you" who wrote the headline. But a question, Ron: Are you cool with polytheism?

[argonsagas]

Michio Kaku is a badass, and quantum theory and the theory of relativity should absolutely make us wonder, because they are about wonder. That having been said, even if there are other "you's" in other existences does no more to prove the existence of a heaven than the single "you" who wrote the headline. But a question, Ron: Are you cool with polytheism?

Your oft-stated opinion is that no god exists anywhere, and polytheism is not a subject that weighs on my mind, but I will respect the query anyway, and to that end I must ask: In polytheism, is Satan considered a godl?

[GS1150Pilot]

Your oft-stated opinion is that no god exists anywhere, and polytheism is not a subject that weighs on my mind, but I will respect the query anyway, and to that end I must ask: In polytheism, is Satan considered a godl?

LoL. let's set aside that fallen angel with the Arabic name as whatever he might be. It is clear that even the Israelites had a concept of polytheism, but don't dance around it: Are you okay with the Christian god potentially rubbing elbows with Odin and Ra?

[argonsagas]

LoL. let's set aside that fallen angel with the Arabic name as whatever he might be. It is clear that even the Israelites had a concept of polytheism, but don't dance around it: Are you okay with the Christian god potentially rubbing elbows with Odin and Ra?

Well aimed, dear sir! !

The only possible answer is yes, as they "potentially" rub elbows every week.

[GS1150Pilot]

LoL. Okay, Ron.

[Rob S.]

Well aimed, dear sir! !

The only possible answer is yes, as they "potentially" rub elbows every week.

They're all part of a coffee klatch that meets at Wendy's Sunday mornings. Einstein is also a member, but he sits on a different plane.

[argonsagas]

They're all part of a coffee klatch that meets at Wendy's Sunday mornings. Einstein is also a member, but he sits on a different plane.

Rob, you got a good pun, followed Mason's lead and kept it tied to the thread substance as well!
Take it from someone who loves puns: that was really well done!