what does one do with thoughts that are like "way out there"?

Date: 2020-08-04

what does one do with thoughts that are like “way out there”?

or what do you do after you have them? or before you have them?

the situation is: I had a thought really late at night (it’s like 4.30am when I’m sending this) and it seems good or groundbreaking or whatever. realistically i can only presume it has issues.

my concern is that i can’t tell (without more thought) if the idea is good or not - and I don’t want to throw it out if it is good. i don’t want to ignore it or throw it out just because i’m tired / a bit intoxicated / whatever when i thought of it. if i throw it out it should be because it’s a bad idea! but how could i not be overreaching and (probably?) wasting my own time?

I ask this with the benefit of hindsight (I’m writing this intro section just before sending): is there anything more to do than just writing it down?

to sorta answer my titular question:

first thing I’ve done is start to write this email b/c I didn’t know what to do.
But the next thing was writing out the idea as an example.
- i’ve managed to write down something I think is coherent, so that’s good.
it’s taken about 40 min, which TBH i don’t think is too bad considering.

am I being reasonable spending any time on this at all? Like if this stuff is ~always going to be wrong it’s a waste of time. but it’s also really fun thinking about this stuff and i’m reluctant to give it up.

example

consider conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) and everette’s many worlds (as put forward by DD in BoI). i (attempt to) give a short overview of CCC in the next section.

in EMW / MWI, the idea that universes are fungible is really important; it’s the reason for interference. fungible universes aren’t ‘located’ anywhere relative to eachother, they sort of exist ‘on top of’ eachother or something; at the very least they coexist. do we have a reason to believe anything in particular WRT ‘the location’ of these universes?

I ask because I don’t know why this would be wrong:

our universe is infinite in space, like the reality we exist in (in some objective sense) is literally comprised of infinite mass spread over infinite space. an event horizon exists outwards due to the dark-matter-driven expansion of space (or spacetime, I’m not clear on that but not sure the distinction matters here). this gives rise to stuff like the cosmic event horizon (16b light years for us) and the particle horizon (46.9b light years for us).

The particle horizon differs from the cosmic event horizon, in that the particle horizon represents the largest comoving distance from which light could have reached the observer by a specific time, while the event horizon is the largest comoving distance from which light emitted now can ever reach the observer in the future. (wikipedia)

cosmic horizon ~ away from us; particle horizon ~ towards us.

some bits of space-time are bits we can’t observe. some bits of space-time we can’t observe are the size of the observable universe. for an infinite space-time there must be infinitely many such bits. so, by the same logic¹ with which we get fungible universe in MWI, we get fungible regions of space-time in an infinite universe. regions of space-time outside of any causal connection to us are indistinguishable from different universes².

why wouldn’t fungible regions of space-time act like fungible universes?

does MWI actually need multiple universes or is one infinite one enough? can we even tell the difference? (by my argument above: no – i think?)

footnotes

one difference in the logic is that the number of universes in MWI is uncountably infinite, but (I think) the number of regions of fungible space-time might be countably infinite b/c any division of space is countable. like we can’t pull an irrational numbers esq trick, can we?
are they?

conformal cyclic cosmology

wikipedia’s opening statements:

The conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) is a cosmological model in the framework of general relativity, advanced by the theoretical physicist Roger Penrose. In CCC, the universe iterates through infinite cycles, with the future timelike infinity of each previous iteration being identified with the Big Bang singularity of the next.

my summary

conformal cyclic cosmology is in essence the idea that the state the universe is in at the big bang is indistinguishable from (and fungible with) the state that the universe is in after a really really long time (like 10^{10^{10^{10^{10^1.1}}}} years or seconds or whatever).

when those two states become fungible we get another big bang. sounds remarkable, why?

keep in mind atomic stuff is essentially point-like. the key idea is that you can’t tell the difference between a really tiny universe with a slow speed of light and a really big universe with a fast speed of light. I think this is basically “scaling time”; but it’s hard to say what “scaling time” means without being circular, so IDK.

but the essence is that the becoming indistinguishable is important for the transition from one epoch to the next (i.e. the next big bang happens).

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