Something from Nothing

On the off chance a Physics geek reads this, I ask for a comment if they have an answer. I sent this to a geek friend hoping he had an answer. It goes:

Are you aware of any physical theories that posit that what we call matter-energy is in fact made up of nothing? Ie, a quantum of mass or energy must be made of something but that something is indivisible. But what if it is in fact divisible to nothing? What if the stuff that makes up matter-energy is itself simply spacetime wrinkled up in some way?

To go back to the Greeks, if a magic knife could cut something in half indefinitely eventually what would be left? Nothing but nothing that is in fact there. What could it be? If matter is basically energy trapped in a way, bundled up, then what is energy if not motion? Anything energetic is a vector, at least within itself. If an electron holds still, nonetheless within it, subparts of it are all moving around. Where there is no motion there is no energy. All forms of energy require motion at least within the energized thing.

So the very smallest possible amt of energy would be abstract motion itself: movement with nothing moving. A true abstract vector.

But surely something must be moving or else how is motion manifest? Possibly it is spacetime itself in motion. A wrinkle in it of sorts. The wrinkle is shifting positions. That is energy. A lot of these little wrinkles glommed together form something we may say is massive like a quark or electron. Very little mass but mass nonetheless.

Jam enough of these bound-up wrinkles together and you start getting things you can measure. The diff ways they are bound up determine their properties. Hence diff kinds of massive particles or kinds of energy too.

Question is then, what is spacetime if it can be used to build matter-energy? Is spacetime our "ether" after all?

Still doesn't explain where spacetime itself came from. But could help with explaining gravity and give us a unified field theory. What is the mysterious unifying field? Spacetime. It'd help explain ZPE and ZPG too. So ever hear of such an idea in a physical theory?

Reincarnation Freaks

Been watching the Ancient Aliens episode on reincarnation and decided to share my thoughts.

The way I see it, you can approach it as a religious matter or as a scientific one.  The religious approach tolerates a great deal of speculation.  For example, most religions suggest a transmigration of souls.  The soul of a person departs from a body and either chooses to go to or is assigned a new body some time in the future, usually pretty soon after death but not always.

This approach requires the existence of a soul though.  "Soul" is defined differently among religions but typically it is said to be eternal and indestructible except via divine force.  Given an eternal existence span it may be suggested that a soul is simply a vehicle or container.  In it resides things making up "self-hood" including memories, traits, values, likes and dislikes, emotions, etc.  Since all of these things are, over an eternity, unlikely to exist indefinitely, the self if made up of that stuff is actually ephemeral and volatile.

If I start with a soul that has X features described Y way but a million years later my soul is better described as having B features described C way, then over a million years it looks like I have changed completely -- except for the vehicle carrying these traits.  Then that'd arguably be my immutable and eternal soul if for example my taste for chocalate at some point became an aversion to it over the course of a million years.

Anyway, the religious approach allows for things like souls.  And all kinds of other things.  You can speculate forever.

Now why do people think reincarnation is a thing?  Mostly because there are people who at very young ages have memories of other people's lives, ostensibly of "their" lives -- previous lives.  There is no doubt there are literally thousands of documented examples of people having vivid and verifiable memories of events and places they cannot possibly have.

The other way to look at reincarnation is scientific.  Sciences looks for reasonable explanations for phenomena.  By "reasonable" it means an observable, measurable cause and effect relationship.  Further, science utilizes the approach of minimal causation.  This isn't a matter of faith but an inference based on observation.  Nature tends to conserve effort and energy, tending to use the least amount of both necessary to get anything done.  This is just a manifestation of natural forces like gravity and entropy.  Nothing mysterious there.

This tendency in nature is sometimes personified as Occam's Razor which says that the simplest explanation for something (ie, the one most conserving of energy and effort) is probably the correct one.  Probably.  No guarantees but probably.

Applying these ideas to the matter of reincarnation, we'd ask ourselves, what is the simplest or least complicated explanation for the phenomenon we call reincarnation?  This phenomenon seems to be just this: there are people who possess memories that seem like they should belong to someone else who is also dead.  Further, the person FEELS like these memories are theirs -- their personal memories acquired from actual experience.

If we're going to be minimal about it, we might theorize that what we call reincarnation is this: the transfer of memories from one manifestation of a human being to another after the death of the first person via a means not yet known, and further, the receiving person also is given or creates an impression that the memories are in fact his or hers.  In short, the new person gets some number of the previous person's memories and further gets the impression the memories are in fact their own.

If that is true, it explains reincarnation without asserting a soul exists.  But it still leaves a lot of unanswered questions.  For example, why do only some people remember things from some dead person's life, and not others?  And what is exactly the nature of a memory about something, as it must be something more or other than neural energies in our brains?  What is the mechanism of memory transference and why bother having it?

There are more questions like this even with the minimal explanation.

Possibly the truth is somewhere between the minimal explanation and some religious one.  But one thing's true: we still don't have any concrete answers.