The world according to W.J.Sidis
“A fundamental conclusion of the new physics also acknowledges that the observer creates the reality. As observers, we are personally involved with the creation of our own reality. Physicists are being forced to admit that the universe is a “mental” construction. Pioneering physicist Sir James Jeans wrote: “The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.”
(R. C. Henry, “The Mental Universe”; Nature 436:29, 2005)
“Useful as it is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.”
John Wheeler
Can time be measured with anything that doesn't involve space?
The basic tenets:
- If it's irreversible, it's not a dimension. Therefore time is not a dimension, it's our way of dealing with our causal nature.
- Universe and matter have no beginning or end. Animate and inanimate matter coexist. Life doesn't spring out of inanimate matter under certain conditions (UV, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, trace elements, etc.), as traditionally viewed. Super long molecules (polymers) don't make matter alive.
- In the reverse universe, time reverses and the second law of thermodynamics works in reverse.
- We are only capable to perceive one universe - the "positive" one. That's why today we can only speculate about undetectable (dark) matter and energy.
- Causation comes from our bicameral brain (W.J.Sidis lived before J. Janes published his work on the matter). Laws, including "fundamental laws of physics", "evolution is just that way", come from us. The universe doesn't have laws or purpose, or order. We have.
- We, the living, recognize other life, animate matter. Speaking chemically, there is no difference between animated and inanimated matter. Atoms and molecules don't make anything alive. Teleology does.
- What happens to life when we die? When the Second Law takes hold of the matter? Does life persists, inhabit other, previously inanimate matter, or transform energy into the useful one? Can energy be alive? Can life be of energy only, without matter?
“Any momentary condition, of the universe may be regarded either as the cause of all future conditions of the universe or as the effect of all past conditions. And not only can a given momentary condition of all particles in the universe determine one and only one possible effect, one and only one possible future; that same given momentary condition (position and velocity of every particle) could only have been caused by one possible past series of conditions. Hence it is just as possible to trace our causal relations step by step backward, as it is to trace them similarly forwards.”
“Now, to take the more concrete method, that of observing the reverse universe, either by reversing any common occurrence or else in observation by reversing a motion picture film, etc. We have “already seen that a reversal of such an incident as a ball rolling down a flight of stairs becomes, in the reverse universe, the following: the floor and the stairs successively throw the ball upstairs; the ball itself aids the process by giving a jump, as it were, each time it lands. This would give the floor, stairs, and ball somewhat an appearance of being alive. In fact, in any case, all ordinary physical objects will act in the reverse universe somewhat as if alive. Instead of rivers running down to the sea, we would have in the reverse universe the situation of seawater rejecting its salt and then jumping up the river channel to the source, where the water, separating itself first into drops and then finally into molecules, makes a final jump up to the clouds; in other words, the water is constantly jumping upwards, as though of its own violation, and aided at each step by the ground pushing it upwards or even throwing it up. Here again, there is an appearance of life in objects that we would certainly, in our universe, consider as dead.”
“This theory of life is strictly mechanistic in so far as life is assumed to operate solely under the physical laws applying to the motion of particles, which laws are sufficient to determine a complete chain of causation. On the contrary, physicists, confining their observation entirely to inanimate matter, have reached the conclusion that there is a further physical law, the so-called second law of thermodynamics, which is suspended by living phenomena. There is according to our theory, this essential difference between living and non-living phenomena; and this difference would supply the basis for the idea of "vital force." Thus the two theories of life can be reconciled.”
“We can say, in the first place, that every physical law is reversible, or rather, to be more accurate, that if any physical law is true, its reverse must also be true.”
“In other words, we have such things as a negative or a positive event giving rise to another event of its own kind; but with only positive causes, a negative result would hardly be expected to arise. If we identify the negative tendency with life, the statement reduces to this: All life comes from some living cause.
“According to our hypothesis, life always has existed and always will exist under all conditions in some form, though that form may be quite different from any form of life that comes within our experience.”
Written long before the discovery of black holes:
“If we take 18,000,000 as the approximate number of visible stars, and allow about 9 times as many that are dark or too faint to be seen, and take as an average speed of proper motion of the stars 10 miles per second, then, if we suppose that every star, on entering the Herschel drum, with the dimensions we have supposed, flares up as a result of the change from negative to positive, such flareups should happen, on the average, a little more frequently than once a year. This is indeed the “average frequency of the appearance of temporary stars, and it is remarkable that most temporary stars appear to be near the surface of the Herschel drum. Accordingly, we may take this as the general explanation of temporary stars.”
“We have seen that the structure of the universe, according to the theory of reversibility, is that it consists of irregularly shaped sections, alternately positive and negative. In the positive sections, all heated bodies give out radiant energy, according to the second law of thermodynamics. In the negative sections, on the contrary, hot bodies, instead of giving out light or other radiant energy, would tend to absorb it and convert it almost entirely into heat, thus heating themselves up with light received from outside sources. This is in strict accord with the reversal of the second law of thermodynamics.”
“Thus, while all living substance is sensitive to the past, all lifeless substance is similarly sensitive to the future. This is indicated in ordinary physical objects by the fact that it is easier, where both are unknown, to trace the future than the past.”
“The body can feel what is going to happen, not indeed what is going to happen to it, but what is going to happen as a result of it; and the moment the event happens, all is forgotten, as it were, that is, no resulting internal condition is noticeable. In pseudo living organisms, special lifeless organisms built up by living surroundings to resemble in certain respects the living beings that we see, these phenomena will, in the more complex cases, be specialized into a nervous system. Thus the phenomena under the positive tendency, and in particular in the pseudo-living organisms, that are analogous to feeling, refer not to past causes, nor indeed to future causes (this not being the true reverse of past causes), but to the direct reverse of past causes, namely, to future effects.”
“To the pseudo-living organism, the past has the same vagueness and uncertainty as the future has for us, though some dim guesses as to the past might conceivably be made by the pseudo-living mind.
But it still remains true, that if we were transported into a negative section of the universe, though the pseudo living organism would appear in shape, substance, structure, etc., exactly like the living organisms we are accustomed to, yet we should not recognize the existence of sensitivity or mental phenomena in them at all, and they should appear to us as lifeless bodies, which indeed they are. They would appear to us merely as extremely well-preserved corpses. And, because we cannot feel what the pseudo-living analogue of a mind would conceive as a stimulus, and would not react to it, those organisms would similarly think of us as dead.”
Memory
“This matter brings up the question as to how the pseudo-living analogue of a mind, this "machine for doing nothing," would conceive of its own portion of the universe. In trying to solve this question, we must remember that its memory is directed not toward the past but toward the future; because, memory being but the stored-up feeling in a higher form of development, and feeling being that of reserve energy, it follows that feeling and energy must, in any organism, be directed towards that direction in time in which that organism had less reserve energy, and away from that direction of time in which the organism acquires more available energy.”
“An organism conceives, therefore, of the flow of time, in the inverse direction to that in which its memory is directed, that is, in the direction of time in which that organism builds up reserve energy into available energy. Or, since organic phenomena are found in the minority tendency of a given section of the universe, such an organism must conceive of time as flowing in that direction in which the majority tendency, that is, the general surrounding world, decreases the amount of available energy and increases the amount of reserve energy. In other words, an organic being, whether living or pseudo-living, must conceive of time as flowing in such a direction that the second law of thermodynamics prevails, independently of whether that conclusion is correct or not.
Second Law of Thermodynamics is a mental law
"This arises from the fact that the pseudo-living organism, though existing in a world in which the second law of thermodynamics is regularly reversed, does not perceive its surroundings as they are, but, on account of the fact that it is not life, but reversed life, it perceives the world as reversed in time, its perceptions form a sort of time-mirror, which would thus produce the illusion of reversal, with the result that such a perception would show the organism itself as alive (not as a pseudo-living organism) and the surrounding world, which is really alive, as lifeless and as following the second law of thermodynamics.”
“Thus there is actually no way for us to tell whether we are living organisms in a positive universe or pseudo-living organisms in a negative universe; in both cases, the former would be the apparent situation. Under the conditions under which a complex organization like a mind can be produced, that mind must conceive of its surroundings in such a way that the second law of thermodynamics would follow. It may be that the law is or is not a physical fact in that particular part of the universe, but conceiving of things in that manner is a necessity for an organized mind. In other words, the second I aw of thermodynamics is not a physical but a mental law.”
Direction of time
“There is no really essential difference between the forward and backward direction in time, any more than the difference between right and left is an essential one. Time is really a two-direction phenomenon, and the two directions are practically interchangeable, instead of being a single direction flow with one”
“Occasionally, in moving pictures, in order to get an effect which cannot be obtained in actuality, such as a man going up a smooth vertical wall, the device of reversing the reel is used. In watching the picture produced by such a reversed reel, an apparently unnatural effect is noticed, though it is difficult to say what is so unusual about it. For instance, in one case, a motion picture represented a number of persons diving into the ocean from a high springboard and finding under the water something that frightened them. They were then represented as immediately jumping backward out of the water onto the springboard. This last part of the film was obviously a reversal of the part representing the diving; but it was noticeable that there were circular water waves converging towards a center before anyone came to the surface, and just as the waves came to the center to produce a big splash, the undercurrents brought the people to the surface while, instead of jumping, the picture represented them as being splashed by the water into the air. The people themselves, on the other hand, lost in this reversal all appearance of activity; around them, the water and everything else was jumping and moving, they were being moved in a passive way, as though the water and springboard were living and they were dead.”
Life always existed
“One tendency is as universal as its opposite. Life must be found everywhere, under all conditions, precisely as lifeless bodies are. There is no spontaneous generation of life, and therefore life can be traced back as far as we can trace back the matter of which the solar system is made, that is, to an eternity past.
“On the contrary, in the pseudo-living organism, the similarly complex and specialized process will merely produce reserve energy for the outside world to use, and any mental process in such organism could only refer not to the past causes but, like all feeling under the positive tendency, to future effects, which, however, would be felt as stimuli and not as effects; for the object itself would be under a strain as if stimulated. In other words, this pseudo-living mind, this machine for doing nothing as effectually as possible, could only perceive and remember the future, and would conceive of that future as the reverse of what it really is, namely, as a stimulus instead of effect.”