What is U? A Christmas mind game?

[wolram]

It may be hard to understand, but the be all an end all is its Christmas, i will tell you guys
what U is all about when i finish my mind game , in the mean time celebrate.

 

[marcus]

So the shortest day came, and the year died,
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive,
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - Listen!
All the long echoes sing the same delight,
This shortest day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, fest, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

The Shortest Day, by Susan Cooper from this website of (mostly Celtic) seasonal poetry:
http://www.minogue.com/holiday/poetry.html#short Welcome Yule, wolram

 

[wolram]

As a serious foot note, do you think dimensions are primary?

 

[marcus]

As a serious foot note, do you think dimensions are primary?

No, I think they are emergent from more fundamental thingumjiggies at a microscopic level. I'm serious of course.this happens in Loll legoblock path-integral model. I am not saying Loll is right. I just mean it is one rather good model where macroscopic 4D spacetime EMERGES at large scale, as a kind of average, over a more chaotic fractally micro-shape assembled dynamically from little jaggies.

And the microscopic dynamics doesn't HAVE to produce any particular dimensionality. It doesn't even have to produce a whole number dimension. It can be dimension 1.9 or 2.4 at very small scale---and not look like a smooth manifold at all. But at larger scale the beautiful appearance of a smooth 4D manifold emerges as a kind of illusory mirage.

I think that is what we live in. And I think it is as beautiful and as interesting as it is possible to imagine.

The particular jiggy-jaggies down at Planck scale or below which give rise to spacetime and matter (and which embody all fundamental law) do not have to be what Loll says. In fact she says her legoblocks only approximate the micro-real in the limit as they get smaller---so she is not saying what is down there, only suggesting a way to approximate it in the limit. And her approximation could be wrong too!

What I am saying is this is the KIND of thing that I suspect is right, whether or not this particular approach is.

So my answer, at least this Christmas eve, to your question is NO I do not expect there is smooth manifold with fixed integer dimensionality like 3D or 4D down there at the fundamental level. My idea of spacetime is more like a glittering Christmas tree or a wheeling flock of birds. With dynamical micro degrees of freedom that cooperate to make a nice place to live in.

 

[wolram]

No, I think they are emergent from more fundamental thingumjiggies at a microscopic level. I'm serious of course.

So now all one has to do is work out how the thingumjiggies made some thing out of nothing, the thingumijgges being nothing of them self's, which is total nonsense.

 

[marcus]

there was a BOUNCE wolram
that is what the Shortest Day is about

there never was a moment of time with no before
there never was a moment of time when jaggies had to hop out of nothing.
In My Humble Opinion, wolram, In My Most Humble Opinion.

There ain't no nothing.
It was always.
Happy Christmas. You do a good job, and it has no job description.

 

[wolram]

there was a BOUNCE wolram
that is what the Shortest Day is about

there never was a moment of time with no before
there never was a moment of time when jaggies had to hop out of nothing.
In My Humble Opinion, wolram, In My Most Humble Opinion.

There ain't no nothing.
It was always.
Happy Christmas. You do a good job, and it has no job description.

Well , nothing is hard to think about, but we are on the same path, although mine is more logical, LOL.