The Property Of Infinite Uncertainty: Part 4. The Physical World of Things

[myselfaswell]

The Property of Infinite Uncertainty

 

Part 4: The Physical World of Things

 

Hello everyone, I hope you’re all well.

 

By this point it’d be good if you’ve read Part 1, Part 2 and read through Part 3, if not just follow the links.

 

As you’ve read, our very existence in this universe and the existence of the universe itself is located very much on the completely absurd end of the spectrum. But moving on from that, and accepting that the universe is actually a real thing, we see a universe that is based entirely on the property of infinity. Every single thing that exists in this universe has an infinite quality to it. Or, as I have taken to describing, everything has a property of infinite uncertainty.

 

 

It’s an important term to use as it helps to better describe how our world and the universe actually function. The term applies to everything that exists from the smallest of the small things to the largest of the large. It applies to the physical and the non-physical.  Simple objects, such as those described herein, as well as complex systems. There isn’t a single thing that exists that does not have some infinite uncertainty, or infinitely uncertain property to it. It also applies to what some might define as “constants”, making them not constants, the speed of light is a good example of that.  But most importantly of all, it opens the door to probability.  That probability is crucial in providing the continuous and essential cycle of creation and destruction that is the life blood of our existence.

 

The Smallest of The Small

 

Looking ahead then to defining what exactly is the property of infinite uncertainty, and it’s infints, we’ll start with the smallest of the small.

 

So it’s hello particle physics and quantum mechanics, LOL. Now before you crash your face into what ever device you’re reading this on, because stuff like this sets off some sort of natural narcoleptic reflex. Or before you give your arm a bad case of whiplash reaching for the home button, I can tell you I’m not going to bang on about this for long. It is really important though that it’s understood that from the smallest of the small that we have the property of infinite uncertainty, so please, just stay with it for a few minutes.

 

Firstly, I need to address any possible confusion between what I’m talking about, vis-a-vis, The Property of Infinite Uncertainty and the Uncertainty Principle of quantum mechanics.

 

 

In a nutshell there is a concept in quantum mechanics that was first introduced by Werner Heisenberg in 1927, and it is called the uncertainty principle. It was, in a more basic form, originally proposed back in 1807 by a french dude called Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, but that’s another story. Anyway, specifically, the uncertainty principle states that it’s impossible to know, with any reasonable precision, the values of a pair of physical properties of a particle at the same time. So, for example, if you want to know where a particle is and what it’s momentum is with any precision, you can’t. You can only know one or the other. And, it would seem, that this is not a result of errors introduced as a result of any measurement technique. It just is what it is, in theory anyway. It is also made very clear that this phenomenon exists only at the sub atomic level and no further.

 

That’s the uncertainty principle.

 

All of that may well be true and I have no reason to doubt it. The point that I am making with the property of infinite uncertainty is that none of the values of any property can be known in an absolute sense at all, ever, in the real world that is.  Those property values are Infints and are defined by such things as distance, XYZ dimensions, time, speed, any force, temperature, and on and on that goes, it's a long list. Basically anything that you would consider to be a unit of measurement. Whether you’re just trying to know one property at a time or everything simultaneously, it cannot be done. And there’s a reason for that.

 

In a slightly larger nutshell, there are a number of separate problems to deal with when it comes to identifying the actual absolute physical properties of particles, or anything else for that matter. When we look at what current particle theory tells us, we see a world that is constantly on the move. There is no point in time when these tiny little vibrating wave-like things are just sitting around twiddling their thumbs. As a result of that continuous infinite variability one can only say that they do not have a determinable absolute quality to them. They are entirely probabilistic. They exist within a maximum and minimum range of possible existence.

 

Technically speaking, the range within which things exist is potentially gargantuan, but not infinite. There is a limit whereby the entropic state of a thing will remove the ability to describe a property or function of a thing. For example, if I have a chair made of 10 pieces of wood and I dismantle it and lay all the pieces down, I no longer have a chair, I have 10 pieces of wood that have the potential to be a chair. For the purpose of practicality, readability and this post not dragging on forever we need to limit the idea of that entropic state to what would ordinarily be experienced in day to day life on this planet.

 

 

There is also the issue of precision, which is infinite. Regardless of how small a number you think you’ve gotten to, you will always be able to add another onto the end of that. What that means to us then, in a practical sense, is that we live in a world of truncated approximations.

 

Please note, if that’s all making about as much sense as a random letter drop from a can of Heinz Alphabetti Spaghetti, please don’t give up, things will get much much clearer really soon.

 

Measuring The Unmeasurable

 

Then we move onto the next problem. The measurement.

 

Before I rip into this next part I will give you a bit of information about my professional background. I was, for more than 25 years, an Engineer & Surveyor. Cutting a long story short, I could be described as being a professional measurer for more than a quarter of a century. On the back of that I am acutely aware of precision, accuracy, and more importantly, error and it’s propagation with respect to measurement and the statistical analysis thereof. And I can tell you with absolute confidence that what you think you measure about a thing, and what a thing actually is, in reality, are not, never are and never will be the same thing, ever. With your measurement all you’ll ever have is a truncated approximation, highly precise no doubt, but a truncated approximation nonetheless.

 

Moving swiftly along then, to the measurement of the physical properties of particles, and all other things. A measurement is fundamentally incapable of identifying the absolute physical properties of a thing. That’s because the measurement is itself constrained by the infinitely variable un-measurable properties of the un-measurable particles that make the thing you’re measuring. That is to say that the method of measurement is equally probabilistic and indeterminable, in an absolute sense, as the thing being measured.

 

So what we end up with then is the entirely probabilistic physical property of a thing, which we have no hope of ever knowing absolutely. And, a measurement of that probabilistic property, which is itself a probabilistic and indeterminable thing. I hope you can see the problem.

 

And so that’s where and the property of infinite uncertainty and infints exist.

 

• The property of infinite uncertainty is the range between the maximum and minimum values of a property attributable to a thing, which we can never know.
  
• The infint is the absolute value of a property, at any specific time, within the range of the property of infinite uncertainty, which we also can’t know
  
• This is all completely unitless and scalable, albeit from a relative point of view.
  

Phew.

 

At this point I should say that any of this infinite variability in the built environment, for example, does not, obviously, exclude the possibility of having some level of confidence and determination of the properties of a thing. That you are reading this is sufficient demonstration that we can have some confidence of the existence of, or nature and measure of the physical properties of things. Buildings and bridges, for example, being designed, built and still standing are a sufficient demonstration of that existence.

 

All that is true, but it is all an existence that is probabilistic. Everything exists within a range of possible existence, not an absolute existence. Sure enough the range of this probabilistic property, in the built environment, is small, and it has to be. You can’t suddenly have things like bricks, or anything else for that matter suddenly doubling in size. A functional universe wouldn’t exist if that chaos were the reality.

 

On and on it all goes, on and on even into the vast depths of the universe. Hopefully by now you’re seeing where it is that the property of infinite uncertainty exists, in a physical sense. So time to move on. Over the next few passages I’m going to provide a few examples that demonstrate the various uncertainties and complexities that I have just described. They are real world examples that may help people understand this infinite variability malarkey a little more clearly, and it’s worsening complexity.

 

The Built Environment.

 

Now that we’ve identified the indeterminable probabilistic fundamental nature of things at the smallest level of quantum physics, I’m going to scale that up a bit into the real world that we interact with. I could have done this a bit more gradually and moved from say quarks, to electrons, to atoms, to molecules and then onto our world that we can see and use, but I suspect some of you would have needed serious medication intervention by the midway point. So no, I’m not going to do that. Don’t mention it.

 

In the interests of moving on in the simplest way then, and for the purposes of this first example, I would like you to visualise a stainless steel bar, 1 meter long. You’re also going to need to imagine a crazy accurate measuring machine too, I’ll leave that bit up to you. But you are going to need it, as I’m about to show that things get even more complicated and uncertain as we move into our real world.

 

 

For reasons that we've covered, we now know that the length of the stainless steel bar is fundamentally un-measurable.  But there is an additional reason that the bar is un-measurable and that is, in this example, because of temperature. As a direct result of temperature, the steel bar is constantly moving, vis-a-vis, it has a coefficient of thermal expansion.  So then, looking at the practicalities of this setup, we have the un-measurable complexities of the property of infinite uncertainty and now we have the un-measurable complexities of temperature. The introduction of temperature, which is an Infint, adds a variable factor of expansion or contraction to the steel bar thus rendering that completely un-measurable for an entirely different reason.

 

Again, and just to be clear, at this point we are again talking about very small amounts, but they are measurable with your crazy accurate measuring machine. Sure enough the length of the bar has changed, the warmer it gets the longer and fatter it gets, and the colder it gets the shorter and thinner it gets. It’s not much, but it’s not zero. And that happens every second of everyday 24/7/365.

 

A similar thing can be said about weight. Gravity, which directly affects the weight of things, is not constant. Gravity is an Infint, just like temperature. So the weight of anything measured is little more than a truncated approximation of it’s absolute value, with respect to a nominated standard value. The proof of that, I can tell you, is that the same sack of potatoes is heavier in the Andes than it is in Hudson Bay, Canada.

 

And so goes the world and universe of tangible things.

 

Accounting for The Unaccountable

 

With all of that in mind then, I’d like to give you this last example so as to explain graphically the accounting for the property of infinite uncertainty.

 

I’d like you to picture a hill. It’s a nice hill with grass all over. The hill is not too high and not too steep. At the top of the hill there is one single solitary tree. It’s a chestnut tree, and the name of the hill is Windy Hill. The time of the year is rapidly approaching autumn and you’ve been asked to identify and report on the exact location, on the hill, that each of the leaves from the chestnut tree are going to land, before they fall from the tree.

 

You set off on your mission then, only to realise, and that doesn’t take you long, that it’s an impossible task. It’s an impossible task because of the infinite uncertainty inherent in all the things you’re measuring. The wind, the strength of the grip each leaf has on each branch, the aerodynamic property of each leaf, how the leaves interact with each other as they fall and the timing of when that happens. The value of gravity at the hill top ….. the list goes on and on …. and on. So you give up and decide to just report on the extent, the area, in which the leaves fall.

 

 

Being as dedicated as you are to your job, this goes on every Autumn for ten whole years. It’s at the end of this time you think you’ve got more than enough information and long since concluded that there is no answer and there’s never going to be one. So, satisfied with what you now know, you pack your bags and head off with your report.

 

 

In the presentation of your report, what did you find then? Well, it’s pretty straight forward. Some years you found the leaves spread wide across the hillside, and other years, not so much. You also found out that you can’t provide an answer, there is no answer, there is only a statement that can be made about the probability of where the leaves might land in any given year and, after only ten years, it’s a statement made with little confidence.

 

What you can say with confidence though is that you know what the measured infints were year on year and from that you derived the range within which the leaves fell over the last ten years and, subsequently, you have now defined the current measured infinite uncertainty of the area within which the leaves will fall.

 

While all of these measurements and the determination of the range of infinite uncertainty are truncated approximations, not absolute values, they stand as a demonstration of what I’ve said. In that, it is obviously possible to obtain a measure of the physical properties or nature of things. And this applies to everything in the universe, the stainless steel bar, the sack of potatoes, everything. In some things the range is witheringly small and in others it may appear to be gargantuan, but it is there nonetheless.

 

Complexity of Complex Systems

 

The last part of this look at the physical world with respect to the property of infinite uncertainty deals with organic stuff. Life to be more precise.

 

It would be fair to say that describing how the property of infinite uncertainty fits in here is a challenge. Not because of the possibility that it’s not there, but because we are now dealing with excruciatingly complex systems. We’re dealing with systems that have such complexity that it is a fair statement to make that even after the centuries of accumulated knowledge of these systems there is still insufficient knowledge to accurately describe how it is that they function in their entirety.

 

We know that every single particle, atom and molecule, that make life, have a property of infinite uncertainty. But, the challenge is how to demonstrate, in a meaningful sense, the manner in which biological systems express that accumulated property of infinite uncertainty. In doing so, or at least attempting to do so, I’m going to use the example of the genome and reproduction.

 

We are told that the genome contains the entire genetic information of an organism. Each organism has it’s own unique genome containing all of it’s hereditary genetic information that gets passed from generation to generation. That’s all fair enough, but I would like you to consider the following passage.

 

Imagine a couple whom have decided they want to have some children and that their first born is a boy. Some two years after this birth the couple have a second child and it too is a boy. But the second boy does not look like the first boy, there are some significant physical differences. Why is that? If we existed in a deterministic universe, without a property of infinite uncertainty, should it not be that both of the children look exactly the same, after all, the genetic material from the mother and father remain the same. At the very least, if we were living in a deterministic world, the two children should have striking similarities. Even accounting for factors such as what the mother ate during pregnancy and all other similar things affecting blood chemistry one would expect to see striking similarities, yet most of the time we don’t.

 

The absence of those similarities would indicate that there is a probabilistic property to the entire process of reproduction and the reason there are limited similarities is because of the property of infinite uncertainty.

 

Every particle, atom and molecule each have their own range within which they exist and contribute to the successful, or sometimes disastrous, creation of the eyewateringly complex system that is life. They can coalesce in many different configurations as a result of their individual property of infinite uncertainty. This is generally successful, creating larger more complex biological structures each of which carries it’s own property of infinite uncertainty.

 

This is of course all complete biological speculation on my part. We’re told that the human genome is by no means the longest and yet those organisms with longer genomes do reproduce with striking similarities between offspring. Take the Marbled Lungfish, for example. Its genome length completely dwarfs the human genome, yet they all look the same, or do they?. It could be that the lung fishes’ genome contains a lot more meaningless DNA, and is therefore meaningfully less than the human genome. Or, it could be that it’s just me being speciesist.

 

Those Marbled Lung fish all look the same to us.

 

What It All Means

 

What is the point of all of this then?  Well, apart from what I've written the answer is really very very simple.  The Property Of Infinite Uncertainty provides for probability that does not exist in a linear deterministic existence.  That probability, which is incalculable, provides opportunity for events to happen, events that are absolutely critical to our reality, and pretty much everything else as far as I can see.  They are critical to an absolutely necessary process of creation and destruction that serve as a foundation for everything in our existence.  That creation and destruction provides for renewal and regeneration, and that is the one thing that complex systems rely on for their successful continuation.  Without that process, or a restriction thereof, as I will demonstrate in the future, complex systems such as humanity will initially stagnate, it will then wither and it will die

 

Happy days, but not really.

 

So then, as you’ve read, I have demonstrated that the property of infinite uncertainty has a direct and meaningful impact on our world and ourselves. It’s clear that in the built environment, the impact is small, as it needs to be, but it’s not zero. In environments beyond that, nature for example, the infinite uncertainty can be huge, gargantuan even.  One things is for sure though, all of those infinite uncertainties, big and small, contribute to the creation and destruction the renewal and regeneration of our reality.

 

Anyway, as limited as this little post is, that pretty much covers it for part four of The Property of Infinite Uncertainty, with respect to the physical world, I suppose. There is so much more that could be written to provide a deeper, broader understanding of how the property of infinite uncertainty directly contributes to a viable and meaningful universe. However, I suspect this article is already into the TL:DR category, so this’ll be just about the end of that.  But if you do have any questions, please ask away I'm happy to expand on what I've written to continue the discussion.

 

In part five I’m going to cover the most important aspect of the property of infinity, and the reason for starting all of this in the first place. That is, what happens when it gets turned off or highly restricted?  In the meantime, take it easy and never forget, we only get one chance at this life, or maybe it’s heaps.

 

Yeah, those humans all look the same to us.

 

Thanks for reading

 

[myselfaswell]

Well, this had an awesome reception, LOL.
 
Up for 4 days and only 18 views, now 19. Somewhere around 4 of those are me checking for errors and what not. So about 15 people have viewed this in 4 days, and I imagine no one has actually read the whole thing.
 
Unsurprisingly, it is disappointing, but also totally hilarious. Truth is, as I’m writing this, I’m still laughing.  That most people haven’t even bothered to check the thread out to see if it’s even shit or not, that’s hilarious.
 
It should come as no surprise then, given the hilarious lack of interest, with this thread and the last thread, Part 5 will not be a posted. I’ve got better things to waste my time on.