The perception of motion is a funny thing. It requires a frame of reference. When you are on a train, the trees appear to move. But are they, really? Instead it is you, the observer, who is in motion. But … are you, really? In motion relative to what? Are you not like the trees? By that, I mean you might appear to move from one frame of reference (a person standing on the platform back at the station), but appear to be stationary from another frame of reference (a person with you on the train). In fact, there could be a third frame of reference from which you would appear to be moving backward (a person on a faster train).
In a holographic universe, what is the proper frame of reference?
If the planets are in motion, who is observing them? Is the observer in motion, too? In motion according to whom?
When Mercury is “retrograde,” we know it’s an optical illusion whereby the planet appears to move backward from the perspective of the Earth. But why should one portion of one planet’s motion be an optical illusion, and not the whole of all the planets’ motions?
Cognitive science is telling us something rather shocking, and we have yet to absorb its shock. If the material world is emergent, physical reality is A) Not what it appears to be, and B) Not responsible for causality. Here is a brilliant video by Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist at UC Irvine.
Don’t have time to watch the full 38 minutes? Start at 16:06 and just watch three. Don’t have time for that? No problem, just read this (18:22):
“Spacetime is doomed. There is no such thing as spacetime fundamentally in the actual underlying description of the laws of physics. That’s very startling, because what physics is supposed to be about is describing things as they happen in space and time. So if there’s no spacetime, it’s not clear what physics is about.” — Nima Arkani-Hamed, Cornell Messenger Lecture 2016
Perhaps the planets appear to move in the same way that trees appear to move when we’re on a train. Just as it is not the trees that move, but rather the train; it is not the planets that move, but rather the earth. But … is the earth really moving? Moving relative to what? What is the frame of reference? Who is the earth’s observer?
Ideas about the death of spacetime are not fringe. Stephen Hawking’s Holographic Principle (you can’t store information inside a volume of space, only on its surface area); Donald Hoffman’s Interface Theory (explained elegantly above); Emergence Theory as it is applied to physics (Klee Irwin, Raphael Bousso, Gerard ’t Hooft, Fotini Markopoulou, Erik and Herman Verlinde): these are some of our best and brightest minds, leaders in their fields, men and women who have been bent over their desks for decades.
We take what our eyes deliver to our brains as frank information. I believe it is not frank information; it is being filtered through a lens. The speed of light. The greater the degree of curvature of the lens, the faster the speed.
Why is everything in motion? Perhaps because energy that has been compressed to the density of matter wants to fly outward; and matter that has been exploded to the speed of energy wants to fly inward.
I believe the competing tensions of the Big Bang (time’s backward direction) and Time (time’s forward direction) hold the universe together and apart.
