Our universe is a ridiculous place. It’s where all the silliest things we’re aware of happen. And chief among the silliness is the wacky idea of time.
Don’t get me wrong, the metaverse is a strong second. Especially Meta’s agonizingly dysfunctional approach to building it.
But time’s even stranger than changing the name of the world’s most widely-known technology company to something that literally means “self-referential.”
Time is the opposite of self-referential. If it exists in a tangible, physical form, then we might be living in a simulated universe — our own bespoke layer in the metaverse. This might sound weird, but it’s actually pretty intuitive.
In this scenario, for whatever reason, someone or something created a simulated reality and put us in it. This reality is made of discrete chunks of spacetime. From our point of view, this spacetime is the bedrock of our universe. From the creator’s, it’s the bits that make up our data.
This all begs the question: what if time doesn’t exist? What if time is just a measurement and we’re living in base reality? If that were true, we’d have to figure out what reality is actually made of.
And that’s where physics concepts such as string theory, parallel universes, and dark matter come in. They’re all theoretical ways of explaining away the need to describe the universe in the kinds of terms we can intuit and recreate.
It’s a much more interesting article, however, if we take a leap and assume that time does exist.
We’ve covered the concept of timespace as discrete chunks extensively here at Neural.
However, let’s suffice in saying that there’s no empirical definition of time that would satisfy our desire to determine its place in our universe.
We’ll have to view the concept of time from a more measurable frame of reference.
Let’s imagine a one-second video of a dandelion swaying in the breeze.
Even though one second is a very short duration, it’s still plenty of time for our eyes and brains to pick up on any motion and figure out exactly what’s going on.
Go ahead, try it: close your eyes and try to picture a swaying dandelion as you count a full “one-one thousand” in your head. See? It’s doable.
If your imagination were a standard, typical HD TV, it would be displaying that video at a refresh rate of 60hz. And if the video were recorded under the most common settings it would either display at 24 frames-per-second (FPS) or 30.
If we assume the universe is made up of discrete chunks of spacetime, we can theorize a maximum frame-rate.
Unfortunately we don’t currently have any way of estimating how many FPS the universe or base reality runs at. We can talk in terms of measurements, such as the speed of light or the size of a Planck unit, but we can’t be sure either of those perceived extremes represent true limits in the universe.
No matter what, we’re stuck dealing with assumptions because of our limited perspective.
Reference:
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