I just checked on my QWERTY key board: the dash (“-“) is just after the zero on the first arrow of chicklets. I could not resist typing it a certain number of times to draw “ a dash line”:
---------------------------------------
I never thought of the dash as an interesting subject for thoughts until a Ph.D. student asked me if she needed to use a dashed line to show her fit of scattered data, proving her model correct (Fig. 1). At first I said yes but then asked “what difference does it make whether it is a continuous line or a dashed line”, and she answered: “the dashed line is because I am not sure my model is the only one correct”.
Figure 1
The dashed line is the best-fitted line passing through the data points (the triangles). This line is determined through regression analysis. The use of dashes instead of a continuous line is supposed to express the fact that we are not certain of the true relationship between the X and Y variables.
Now, this was three years ago, and I had long forgotten the… philosophical implications of the use of the dash… when I saw on ARTE, the other day, the movie NEW YORK, NEW YORK by Scorsese. De Niro’s character was annoying from the start: charming but with no restraints, young, handsome, playful but mostly cocky and full of himself, the kind of flirty men I never liked (especially when it worked). I almost stopped watching the movie. But then came a sequence out of nowhere, which I now call “its dash-moment”, which profoundly affected me, not only became the reason I continued to watch the movie to the end, but then became an obsession to explain it, make sense of it, reviving it in my head for many of its details, transforming me as a pushy Jimmy Doyle (De Niro’s character) to my audience.
Interestingly, that sequence in the movie has nothing to do with the rest of the movie, it could be cut out and no one would even notice it, and this is what obsessed me. Its presence appeared timeless, spaceless, incomprehensible, yet it was one of the most intriguing cinema scenes I had ever encountered, not just for the scene itself, although most beautifully filmed, but mostly because of the uncertainty of its meaning and of the questions it raised about its presence, about its usefulness, about its value and… about physics in general!.
Jimmy Doyle gets out of the dancing room where all the soldiers are celebrating with loud jazzy music the end of the war. It is night outside, the music has silenced off as Doyle stepped up a few stairs to reach a passageway, may be the platform over a train track since one hears the rumbling noise of passing trains nearby. De Niro has stopped and is leaning over a ramp. We see him from behind, with light shining on his hair and his Hawaiian shirt, he is looking down in silence at two ballet dancers (one is dressed as a sailor) swinging slowly around each other, moving so gracefully without any music on as invisible rumbling trains flash their presence in the background. The two ballet dancers are detached from the story line, float in their own universe, come from nowhere and cease to exist at the end of this short sequence which lasts less than one minute out of a movie of 157 minutes; this happens when Jimmy Doyle decides to stop watching as the dancers had disappeared in the shadow. End of the dash moment.
Why is there such a sequence in Scorsese’s movie? Is there a message? Is it supposed to represent Jimmy Doyle’s dream? We don’t know, it is unclear and the answer will remain uncertain. The remarkable fact about this “dash-moment” is that it is there in the story line and becomes a dash linking the sequence before it and the sequence after it, no explanation.
Maybe it is like a piece of “junk DNA”, which is junk only when its presence remains unexplained; its insertion is uncertain and remains speculative, let’s put it as a dash, yet it is a link that can be individualized, studied, analyzed and is part of the whole. Notice that I have purposely included a dash between the words “dash” and “moment”; this is to point out this aspect of the use of a dash: “un trait d’union” in French, a segment of union, like a symbol for “et” or “and” in French and English, respectively. A dash unifies, couples up two things and its use prevents describing the union, which remains undefined: this is what interested me: it’s there but it’s not descriptive, it is like the dashed line of the Ph.D. student fitting her data: it fits the data but it also conveys that it is uncertain.
So, the use of the dash appears to symbolize two meanings, the notion of a union and the notion that it is not well defined, that it is uncertain. In the dash-moment of New York New York, both meanings are present: the sequence is a link and its presence is at minimum unclear, and perhaps this uncertainty is crucial to the whole story, we just don’t know, like for the junk-DNA. We will get back to that uncertain meaning in the movie later.
Now think of Time-Space, with a dash between Time and Space. We know from Einstein that this is different from Time Space, without the dash, which Newton and Galileo knew well as independent concepts, with two independent units, the second and the meter. No problem to describe events in Time and Space by providing coordinates in space and their evolution in time. In that pre-Einsteinian’s physics, time was an index attached to the space coordinates. But Einstein defined the Time-Space with a dash, and this became a new entity where space and time were no longer independent, they were linked by the dash. Time was no longer an index, it was part of a “time-space” with 4 dimensions. Yet the concept remained fuzzy, in a certain sense, by the absence of a new unit to define it, Einstein preferring to stick to seconds and meters, 2 independent units. The brilliance of Einstein was to postulate that a certain ratio of space and time could be used as a universal reference, instead of defining a new unit for Time-Space. Einstein chose the speed of light in vacuum to become the universal constant linking Time and Space and postulated that this parameter remained constant regardless of the motion of the frame of reference to measure it (special relativity theory). From now on the description of events could only be done in Time-Space where the time and space aspects of the events were affected simultaneously and interactively, this was a revolution in thinking!
Notice that in the title of the blog I did not use the dash between Time and Space and instead wrote: Time vs Space. The “vs” stands for “versus” as if time and space were involved in a lawsuit, in opposition. This is another symbol, of course, and perhaps this symbol gives a different explanation of the dash in Time-Space than the Einsteinian dash which one could represent as Time ↔Space, while the Newtonian view would definitely be Time ≠ Space. The dash is definitely a good symbol since it remains undefined, as we said: Time-Space.
Another revolution had taken place a few decades before Einstein (~1865), with the description by Maxwell of the propagation of charges in terms of the interplay between the electrostatic field E and the magnetic field B, unifying the two, and assimilating the universal ratio of E and B to the speed of light, an extraordinary achievement which made its way to posterity as “the Maxwell equations of electromagnetic wave propagation”.
Let’s go back to the dashed line represented at the beginning of the blog: one idea is that it is a succession of dark segments on a white background with a design pattern linking the segments (I have drawn a straight line, but could as well have drawn a curve, a circle for instance: Fig. 2).
 |
| Figure 2 |
The “profile of the curve” (a circle in Fig. 2) is a collective property of the segments, it describes their inter-relationship, this could be quantified by an equation if we wanted to (note that the equation of the dashed line is more difficult to write than with a simple continuous equation). The dashes are immersed in an ocean of background. It does not say anything about the background and is independent of it: For instance, the background could be a structure-less homogeneous medium totally independent from the dashes, unaffected by the dashes nor by their collective coupling as a profile. The only uncertainty I see would be if I choose the color of the background to be exactly the same as the color of the dashes, then I would not see anything, even if a structure existed. So the first possibility for Fig. 2 is that there is one entity, the dark dashes, with a profile, and a uniform background, different than the dashes but undefined, and homogeneously structure-less.
For instance, consider Time as the background and Space the profile of dark dashes. From Einstein we now know that the background influences and is influenced by the dashes, and we have found a link to relate the changes, say the length of the dashes influences the contrast between the two colors, with even the possibility that for a continuous set of dashes (describing a continuous circle) the background and the dash colors are the same, all black, creating a singularity, an uncertainty. This is the kind of physics which relativity has used to quantify our world, the world of describing things existing in space against an infinite, undefined and structure-less background, time, with the need to rescale the units to define space and time as a way to make the propagation of light a constant, regardless of how we measure it. We can easily acknowledge the success of this approach, but we also know that things are not so simple since the theory of relativity creates singularities, such as the Big Bang and Black holes, is not compatible with the quantum effects of nature at the infinitely small scale of particle interactions, and leads to admit the existence of black matter and black energy which have only one thing in common: their uncertainty!.
In this Einsteinian’s physics of Time-Space, the use of c, the speed of light, as the universal constant couples up time and space like twins living simultaneously yet intrinsically linked. But there may be more to it.
Heat comes into play in the interlacing (entanglement) of Time and Space.
A second possibility about the dashed line is that it an interlace of successive dark and white segments, the black and white segments being of the same nature (dashes), with the same profile, differing just by another property, their color. So now I have two entities, the dark and white dashes, and a background. In this context, one can visualize two sets of interlaced identical profiles shifted by one segment along the profile line, the white and the dark profiles. If the color of the white profile is switched to dark, one now discerns the collective profile without ambiguity. On the other hand, if it is the color of the dark profile dashes which is switched to the color of the white dashes -which is the same as the color of the background - one no longer sees any structure at all, nothing. Finally, if the colors are permuted (white ↔dark) at the same time, introducing the notion of simultaneity, the profile is visible as a dashed line, but it is not exactly the same dash line since the position of the segments has moved one dash step to the side. This “phasing’ of the dashed line is central to the idea of “propagation” , as we shall see, to create time-space storylines (profiles).
In what I call the Dual-Split physics representation of the world, Time is two things: it is the background (like it was explained in the previous paragraph about relativity) and it is also the white dashes which couples up with the black dashes. And, to understand this duality of Time, and its interlace with Space, I need to introduce another essential element, heat, because the duality between time and space is not simply dimensional (such as in the description of their dependence in the special relativity equations) it is also diffusive, which expresses the fact that the interlace coupling is function of the non-equilibrium state it generates. This is formulated in terms of heat in classical physics.
To make a long story short: 1. the background Time applies well to special relativity, 2. the white dashes come into play as you enter the quantum world, and 3. heat must be incorporated in the definition of Time-Space through the dual-split equations. These 3 statements summarize a different representation of things: Time vs Space instead of the currently established Time-Space, which may naturally lead to a quantum world, a dash world, where Time, Space and Heat are intrinsically entangled, heat being there to dissipate the structural difference between Time and Space compensations, in the absence of propagation, a competitive mechanism.
I illustrate this in Fig. 3, and also by giving a trivial Dual-Split analytical representation of a dashed line, as an example.
 |
Figure 3
|
Here I have used the red color to render visible the dual-aspect of the black and white dashes; in fact, the red represents the white dashes of the black circle. I have also changed the radius slightly so that I could better individualize them. As you can see, I have made them with the same profile but with a different layout of dashes, a different density, although they represent the white dashes of the black circle. How is that possible?: well, this is because of the nature of the dual-split reality, by definition. There are circumstances for which the interlacing of the dashes is perfectly synchronized, and in such cases, the duality is transparent, invisible, no heat, just propagation, but one can also build a totally new physics on the idea that the two interlaced dashes are coupled but different, making very apparent the very nature of the dashes and of their entanglement. In such a case, a dissipative component-heat- must be incorporated in the Time-Space interlace structure, leading to the definition of an entangled Time vs Space network.
Now consider the two following coupled equations:
Y= (m X + p)d
Y= (m X + p)(1-d)
With d = a profile of (0,1)put in series and, therefore, (1-d) a conjugated profile of (1,0). In other words, d can only be either 1 or 0 (Kronecker’s number).
This is a trivial set of dual-split equations. The solution, Y+Y, as the profile of 0,1 is scanned, displays a series of black and red dashes, whose length is determined by the profile structure, black for d=1, red for d=0.
Figure 4
The interlacing between the white (here red) and dark dashes is through the d profile, and, obviously, the sequencing structure is perfectly synchronized since the d and (1-d) profiles are conjugated. But we could use this principle and make things more complex, such as defining Y as a rate of change of a variable which could be a function of X and of the color of X depending on the profile. The profile for Y and for Y could also be different, with respect to its sequencing structure. This is the case for the black and the red circle in Fig. 3. We could also define a dissipation factor to couple the two equations, based on whether the length of the dashes interlaces perfectly (defining an equilibrium condition) or overlap (which we would associate with the generation of “heat”).
OK, I agree, all of this is totally unclear, but the beauty is, it’s because it’s a dash, and thus needs to remain undefined, uncertain!
The mission: create a new writing of physics where Time, Space and Heat are all integrated
New generations of scientists should tackle this: can we quantify a new physics where Time integrates its two dual roles, both coupled with space, but differently: Time-Space like in the special relativity and Time vs Space to describe quantum physics for which Time and Space are not only interdependent but two aspects of the same stuff, like the E and B fields of Maxwell’s unification of electromagnetism, interlaced with each other and interlaced with heat, i.e they define an entangled Time-Space web which serves as the cradle to propagate story lines vs build inertia.
Web Horizontal structuring: propagation of time-space stories and the flow of time
Let us illustrate how “time” naturally comes into play from the previous description of the dashes for which the “simultaneity” (synchronization) of the choices available creates events that give the impression that time flows (past--> present--> future). For instance, if the colors are permuted (white ↔ dark) but not simultaneously, i.e. at different times, the result will be either no structure, a full line or a dash-line, with 2 switches between these configurations, resulting in a dynamic structure, something which changes in time. One sees that the concept of time was naturally introduced in our discussion as soon as the simultaneity of activating the color change became an option (because there are 2 interlaced collections of dashes) : the dashed line can be considered as a state in time of an activation process which consists of switching on and off the color (black or white) of a given set of segments of the profile; or, even more generally, not a given set of segments, but simply individual segments of the profile. If the successive segments are activated to be all ON or all OFF at the same time, we have either a full lighted line or no visible line at all. If the successive segments are activated out of phase with respect to their next neighbor (when one segment is on the next one is off), one obtains a scintillating dash line, one that gives the impression that a signal is propagating along the profile, in other words the orchestrated sequencing of an event (a solution) describes the idea that it is propagating in time, i.e that time flows.
This idea is put into practice to light up sophisticated dashboards such as the news bulletin boards in Times Square, New York where one can read the news by following a set of activated LED dash segments forming a succession of alphabet letters coherently lighted up to give the impression that the letters are translated to the left at the speed of an average reader’s reading rate. The reader has the impression that words are written on the news board and that they are moving sideways. He is still, the words are moving like time flying by.
The dashboard is composed of about 100 dash-cells, each identical and made up of linked dash LED segments which can be light up individually to form, collectively and specifically, a letter. Once an individual letter is formed in dashboard cell No 1, at the far right of the dashboard, its activation remains stable at that given place of the dashboard for a short given duration before it is replaced by a different activation of the LED dashes forming another letter; meanwhile dashboard cell # 2, the cell to the left of dashboard cell #1, is now activated with the same activation of its LED dashes to read the same letter, giving the impression that it has moved to the left, and it also remains activated for a short duration etc.
In a sense, by combining, sequencing and synchronizing the activation of dash segments in a variety of ways, one can obtain sophisticated levels of organizations which we call structures. The alphabet is a list of symbols which organize into words, which themselves organize into sentences which describes stories about time and space. Stories are structures of time-space.
A sophisticated 3D array of “bit-dashes” make up the screen of the computer I am typing this text with, and the synchronization of the activation of these dashes provides another source of time-space storylines. For instance, I can play the DVD of NewYork, New York by Scorsese and see the succession of images which tell the story of Jimmy Doyle and Francine Evans (Liza Minnelli).
Web vertical structuring (inertia): Fractalian dashes.
Another degree of freedom about the dash is its “shape”: a short segment, as we have shown so far, or a dot as a bit-dash for video screens. But the list does not stop there: one can imagine an oscillating dash segment, one that changes its length around a mean value with a certain amplitude and frequency; or the dash could be conceived curved, an arc or a sin wave segment, a polygon etc. In fact, and this is developed in the next paragraph, a dash could be a story of dashes of its own, an activated state visible when the profile of its own dashes has synchronized to become a full line, a fractalian transmission ( a mechanism which may be at the origin of “inertia”, the creation of matter). Could the dark dashes have different “shapes” than the white dashes, which would express what we mean by “color change”, a symbolic property we used to differentiate them? For instance, one can say the dark dashes are submitted to a field S whereas the white dashes have a field R, each field affecting the intrinsic property of the dash, say its oscillating length frequency and/or amplitude and or phase. But each state of the dashes (S/R) is connected to its fractalian sub-structure. One can see that we could easily build a giant dash storyboard with several layers of dashes and transmission mechanisms either “horizontally” (within a layer, say S/R) or “vertically”, trans-layers, affecting the fractalian sub-states. Only the lack of imagination can limit our dash-world. In physics, our restriction is that it needs to describe reality.
 
Figure 5
On the top and on the bottom graphs we have the same red/black profile structure, but the dash is different in both. The dash on the top graph is an integrated solution of the 5 dashes which represent its structure at the bottom. This is in that sense that it is a fractal. When all the dashes of its structure are activated like in the graph at the bottom, then the dash changes the size of its own storyline, which is shown at the top. This new storyline is susceptible to change on its own, locking the substructure solution as a new dash.
Scorcese’s Fractalian vision.
The fractal character of the dash is surprisingly observed In Scorsese’s movie: the scene described in the dash-moment , the swing and chase of the man and woman dancers in a rumbling background sequenced by the flashes of light is the condensed story of Jimmy and Francine in the movie, the chase and the swings to find each other and break up, with the surrounding life noise as background, the music background, the flashes of the ups and downs of their success. The movie storyline makes them meet, live their difficult passion, separate and attempt to reunite and disappear from our view like a couple of dancers in the dash-minute moving across the scene, finally disappearing in the shadow. Could this be the meaning of Scorsese’s dash-moment? Is Scorsese a Mandelbrot’s fan who integrated the whole storyline of his movie in the dash-moment sequence?
Is Scorsese the most brilliant physicist alive without knowing it, a Monsieur Jourdain de la Science (Moliere)?
We classically view the time-space of Einstein as a giant mat with a grid of cells, like a stretched fisherman’s net which is curved here and there by the weight of big balls positioned on it, the stars and other celestial objects: the image is powerful to explain gravity. But this image of time-space is clearly simplistic because it does not say what the grid structure is supposed to represent: is it the vacuum of Maxwell’s equations? If it is the case, is the vacuum structured? Say the net is supposed to represent the world where light propagates and the big ball represents a big chunk of condensed matter which we know is made up of atoms coming together. This chunk can be characterized by its inertia.
To use the simplified language above, assume that inertia, at the level of the big chunk of matter, results from the recursive interweaving of several fractal layers of storylines integrated as a new storyline (a stable new dash) embedded in the tissue of the web time-space, generated from it and still fully part of it. The evolution of this modified dash world by the integration of past solutions is what we call gravity because it involves the whole time-space story. Gravity essentially says: you are dealing with the whole; the influence of the past history on the present of the entangled Time-Space network defines the laws of gravity and explains its origin.
This statement about gravity assumes that we have understood the inter-dash layer structuring which creates inertia. Gravity laws derive from the description of the competition between structuring the web horizontally or vertically, leading to a variety of Time vs Space entangled web structures, the infinite diversity of solutions being the consequence of the dissipative nature of the entanglement.
The ama-layer of dashes: the cradle.
It might be simpler and more founded (to understand gravity) to concentrate first in describing well the first layer,” the ama-layer of dashes”, Maxwell’s layer, which is the layer where the Time and Space dashes are interlaced (entangled) with no inertia, no fractal structure. We need to understand the propagation of light (electromagnetic waves) in this layer and describe the conditions which lead to the creation of a profile, a storyline, i.e. we need to specify which solutions of synchronization of time and space dashes fluctuations succeed in creating storylines.
For this, we need to write in the Time-Space dash world new equations of propagation of light (no inertia), and explain why and how it is equivalent to Maxwell’s equations defining the electromagnetic field dynamic interplay of E and B when transposed in the terms of classical physics. The challenge is a new tour de force which will do to Time-Space what Maxwell did to E and B, the fields defining the forces coupling charges at rest (electrostatic) or in motion (electrodynamics). Once he has done that, this new Maxwell demon will surely explain in terms of the dash-physics why the duality particle-wave is intrinsically and fundamentally linked to the nature of the electromagnetic concept (the need to define and couple two synchronized fields, the electrical, E, and the magnetic, B, fields). And perhaps he will demonstrate that the quantum world particle-wave duality is another expression of the propagation of the electromagnetic wave due to Maxwell’s compensation between E and B, itself the consequence of the Time vs space entanglement structure!.
Let’s say it: the mathematical reconciliation of magnetism and electricity by Maxwell was so powerful and so beautiful that it stalled the search for a quantum time-space explanation to structure the vacuum fluctuations.
The Fractalian description of the dash of dashes to define inertia
In the ama-layer the synchronization of the activation of dashes creating a storyline results in the formation of a stable new dash which carries the information of its structure and participate in the elaboration of a new profile of horizontal dashes, i.e. a new storyline with a different dash structure, thus explaining the 1st step of inertia, i.e. the elementary mechanism of particle creation. Particles are generated by a synchronization of the time-space resulting in a stable storyline (profile of dashes). Different stable storylines create different inertia stability thus different particles. So the quantum world, the stabilization of time-space into inertia, must be understood first in terms of the entanglement between Time and Space. The Time and Space structuring of the special relativity and of the General relativity would then emerge naturally from the understanding of the Time vs Space entanglement view applicable to the ama-layer and to the understanding of the fractal generation of multi-layers for the stabilization of more complex inertia structures (such as atoms).
In the debate concerning the alleged incompatibility between the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, Bohr 1, Einstein 0. “God does not play dice,” said Einstein, but the playground of time-space is a huge dashboard, quantum wins.
Gravity: past vertical solutions are integrated into the Time-Space entangled web structure.
In this context, gravity would be understood as the influence on the ama-layer ’s horizontal structuring of the presence of stable dash solutions resulting in inertia (synchronization between the fractal layers providing a vertical structuring ). In simplistic terms, gravity is due to the interweaving of past solutions into a unique Time Space entangled network.
Note that a new expression of light propagation in the context of a different understanding of the interactions between time and space might reposition the questions about black matter and dark energy which emerge from our present understanding of time and space and the propagation of light signals to us, which is the way we analyze our cosmos and determine its structure. It is clear that if we have failed to fully understand light and light radiation (in terms of Time-Space dash physics), this would cause a problem to properly quantify the stars and the galaxies rotational speeds (for dark matter) and their expanding distances (for dark energy), and perhaps explain why we have been forced to introduce some fitting parameters to make the whole story stand: Isn’it why some physicists claim that the black matter and the dark energy concepts are just fitting constants, and thus should only be described by…dash lines…like in Fig.1?
And now, drum beats, please: the moment of truth has arrived:
Is this blog #25 a dash-moment? A junk DNA link between blogs 24 and 26?
|
