This is my third attempt to write about the Universe but it is really difficult to keep my writings coherent on such topics. I also find it a challenge to write things as simple as possible. While I am not smart, I made up for that with raw persistence.
The Universe is super weird. For example, let’s say you are in Singapore and you took a plane to go around the entire planet and back to Singapore. That takes some hours to travel, even if you are in a really fast plane. Can you imagine how it feels to be in Singapore and travel the entire circumference of the planet and back to Singapore in just 1 second? Now, imagine travelling around the world 716 times in a single second! And that’s what a neutron star can do.
Here is where things get interesting. At one point, you are connected to that Neutron Star PSR J1748−2446ad. The theory goes that at one point, back to the singularity (the big bang), we all existed as a single point. The entire Universe exists as a single point back then. In fact, the atoms that made up you and I once came from stars. In fact, I suspect that we are all still connected in ways that is beyond our understanding. This thought was provoked because of things like the Higgs field, quantum entanglement, dark matter/energy. These concepts are outside the point I want to make so I will skip them.
In order to understand the Universe, we need to learn its language. And that language is Math. Math is the reason how scientists were able to predict things ahead of time. The guy who invented the Periodic table realize that there are some elements that they don’t know yet (back then), but according to the trends of the atomic weight, there should be the existence of these elements. And true enough, these unknown elements were discovered one by one later. This is similar for things like the Higgs Boson, which was predicted in 1964 by Peter Higgs and only discovered recently. Scientists were able to make these predictions because the language of the Universe is consistent. And if you know Albert Einstein’s famous E = mc2 equation, then you can see how Math explain the physical laws of the Universe. If you are able to understand the patterns and the Math, then you can understand the workings of the Universe and even predict things well ahead of time.
In fact, Math is so powerful that Bill Benter made billions from horse racing from mathematical analysis of the game. The MIT Blackjack Team made millions from card counting. Understanding these things made me love probabilities and statistical analysis because they help me make better decisions in life.
And that brings me to the point I really want to make. If Math has been so good at explaining how the Universe works so far, would you accept something impossible to understand, but was predicted by Math? Because this brings me to the String Theory and M Theory. Such theories predict that there are 10 or 11 dimensions of reality. And because we are trapped in the 3 or 4 dimensions, it is impossible for our minds to conceive how the upper dimensions are like.
If you are interested for an easy way to understand this, here is a video about life in Flatland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO1y-Tm8dSI
In other words, we are trapped in a dimension just like the fictional people of Flatland, except we are in an upper dimension above them, but trapped nevertheless. There are some people like Elon Musk who thinks we are living in a simulation. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it is an interesting thought.
I wasn't aware that Elon Musk thought this, but I suppose that could explain what seems to be an uptick in favor surrounding the theory. I have always thought it was an interesting theory in that it cannot necessarily be proven or disproven. One thing that seems to be given, though, is that we have both analog and digital objects in our reality. I wonder if any digital solution could perfectly simulate an analog behavior as well as whether or not any analog solution could perfectly simulate a digital behavior. That isn't to say that something simulating us would have to be strictly analog or digital, but I digress. I should imagine that humans were analog, but have you ever watched someone read? I've always imagined that reading was a fluid analog action, but when reading, a persons eyes clearly and quickly move one word at a time, almost digitally.