That the time and space we see all events within are generated has implications for physics. Instead of space being the ultimate container, it is itself contained. Instead of our universe beginning with a big bang, it began as a little rip. Instead of space being empty, it is full. But the quantum network needs a protocol to work reliably, just as our networks do:

QR2.4.1 Space is a Surface

QR2.4.2 The Little Rip

QR2.4.3 Transfer Errors

QR2.4.4 The Pass-it-on Protocol

QR2.4.5 Empty Space is Full

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A movie can fast forward to future events or flashback to past events, so if our world is virtual, can it do that? It could, but reverse engineering isn’t about speculating what could be but explaining what is. In this case, that quantum events generate time explains how it slows down, but no evidence requires a past or future to exist now. This gives what philosophers call presentism, that only the present exists, so to worry about the past or future is to worry about what is imaginary. We deduce that time extends, but only know the past from the present and the future is uncertain, so a time like ours only requires the now and we infer the rest. A constantly active quantum network can create the present but beyond that, it can’t store what it does because it is too busy doing it (2.1.4).

The quantum network can’t record what it does but in a way, the physical world does just that. Observing a physical event is like querying a database to get the latest update, as it is essentially a report on myriad quantum events. This report can reflect the past, as brain memories today can recall yesterday’s events, and dinosaur fossils today reveal can what happened long ago. Our DNA stores not only the choices of our ancestors, but of all life on earth. Genes (Dawkins, 1989), norms (Whitworth & deMoor, 2003), and memes (Heylighen, Francis & Chielens, K., 2009) record past biological, cultural, and ideological choices, so physical events record quantum history.

How then did the quantum network begin space and time? Physicists propose that our universe began with four equal dimensions, until the first event turned one into time and the rest into space, to break that symmetry (S. W. Hawking & Hartle, 1983). But what were those initial dimensions? Physics has no abstract property that can turn into space or time, but a network does.

The connections of a network can represent two spatial dimensions in a plane, and connect a cube to represent three, so with enough connections, it can represent four dimensions. A quantum network with four degrees of connection allows four equivalent dimensions, any of which can become space or time. If our space is based on three orthogonal rotations, and our time on another rotation, Hawking and Hartle may be correct. Reverse engineering allows equivalent quantum connections to generate the dimensions of our space and time.

It follows that our world has no absolute time, only network cycles that imply time, and it has no absolute space, only network transfers that imply space. Time passes as light completes cycles to reach us, and distance extends as it completes transfers to reach us. Time and space are then outcomes not causes, so space can contract and time can dilate, as relativity experiments confirm.

We deduce a dimension of time but all we know for sure is the present. The quantum network creates the here and now and we do the rest. Physical presentism is not only that we should live in the present, but also that we should theorize in it, because nothing else really exists. It implies a Physics of Now (Hartle, 2005), p101, where only the present exists. We can predict the future and deduce the past, but only based on the present. Likewise, only events here let us deduce galaxies that would take a million years to reach. When we abandon the idea that reality is a space-time block, all that remains is the ever-present here and the eternal now.

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That time, the measure of all change, can itself change defies logic, but Einstein showed that time can dilate, so how can the measure of change itself be changed? In calculus, a change in time is dt/dt, which is a constant, so time itself shouldn’t change. That it actually does has led some to conclude that time and space aren’t as fundamental as Newton thought:

“… many of today’s leading physicists suspect that space and time, although pervasive, may not be truly fundamental.” (Greene, 2004), p471.

If time isn’t fundamental, it could be generated, which could explain how it changes, This allows us to reverse engineer time, but to do so, we must specify its nature. In traditional thought, time is:

“… a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.” M. Aurelius, Meditations, Book IV, (43).

If time is like a river of events, those events specify time, so a time like ours requires events that are:

• Sequential. Events occur one after another.
• Lawful. Current events are based on past events.
• Indeterminate. Future events vary in unpredictable ways.
• Irreversible. Events that have occurred can’t be undone.

That time is like a river requires physical events to be sequential, lawful, indeterminate, and irreversible, so the quantum events that generate them must be the same. If quantum events aren’t sequential, the physical events they generate won’t be either. If quantum events aren’t lawful, the physical events they generate won’t be either. If quantum events aren’t indeterminate, the physical events they generate won’t be either. If quantum events aren’t irreversible, the physical events they generate won’t be either. To create a time like ours, quantum events must be sequential, lawful, indeterminate, and irreversible, but are they? Quantum theory gives the answers.

Sequential

Events are sequential if one event follows another, like a river flowing, and quantum theory tells us that quantum waves:

“… evolve to a finite number of possible successor states” (Kauffman & Smolin, 1997), p1.

If one quantum event follows the next, in succession, they must be finite. In an infinite sequence, one event can’t follow another because there are always other events between them. In quantum theory, each event is a discrete step, so they follow each other sequentially. If quantum events are sequential, they can generate a time that is sequential, like ours.

Lawful

Events are lawful if current events are based on past events, like a river flowing, and quantum theory tells us that quantum events evolve lawfully. Quantum waves spread, overlap, and collapse to physical events only as quantum laws permit, so physical laws can arise from quantum laws. If quantum events operate lawfully, they can generate a time that flows lawfully, like ours.

Indeterminate

Events are indeterminate if they can’t be perfectly predicted from past events, like a river flowing, and quantum theory tells us that physical events are choices. A choice, by definition, has a known before but an unknown after as before the choice, the options are known but the choice result isn’t. If the result of a choice is known beforehand, then it isn’t a choice, so a choice is an indeterminate event. In quantum theory, a photon wave approaches a screen then collapses at a point chosen from the possibilities, in a physical event. No physical history can explain where the photon will hit the screen, so it is a choice. Quantum theory adds that every physical event includes such a choice, so if our world is a quantum machine, it is one with:

“…roulettes for wheels and dice for gears.” (Walker, 2000), p87.

Where and when quantum collapse occurs is random because no physical history can explain it, but the resulting physical event still has a lawful history. If quantum events choose physical events, they can generate a time that is indeterminate, like ours.

Irreversible

Events are irreversible if they can’t be undone, like a river flowing, and quantum theory tells us that quantum collapse is irreversible. All the equations of physics are time reversible, so reversing time doesn’t break any physical laws, so why isn’t our time reversible? Quantum theory doesn’t say why quantum collapse can’t be undone, but if quantum waves are processing waves, it could be because a collapse is a reboot.

When you turn your phone off, then on again, it reboots. It restarts everything from scratch, so any work in progress is lost, unless you saved it. Normal phone events are a sequence so they can be undone, but a reboot can’t be undone because it wipes the slate clean, to start a new sequence. The events before a reboot are gone forever, so it can’t be reversed, just as when quantum waves collapse, the previous wave disappears instantly, so there is no past to revert to. This suggests that quantum collapse is a reboot. If quantum collapse is a quantum wave reboot, it can generate a time that is irreversible, like ours.

In conclusion, if quantum waves spread on the network until a point overloads and reboots in a physical event, quantum reality could generate a time that is sequential, lawful, indeterminate, and irreversible, just like ours. Such a time implies a physis of now.

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An object that constantly exists in space has left and right parts so if it constantly exists in time, it could also have past and future parts. Minkowski interpreted Einstein’s relativity to be that objects exist in a spacetime matrix at (x, y, z, t) points where t is time, and so travel along four-dimensional world lines in space and time. This allows a block theory of time, where the present is just a slice of a larger block of past and future events, giving a time capsule that could be browsed like the pages of a book (Barbour, 1999), p31. If matter exists on the landscape of time, then time travel is indeed possible because the past and the future exist right now.

The equations of relativity allow time travel, but that doesn’t make it so, because equations aren’t theories. For example, the equations of movement assume that all of an object’s mass exists at its center of gravity, but it isn’t actually so. It follows that when physicists say time travel is based on general relativity, they mean it is based on Minkowski’s interpretation of it, which is a mathematical model not a theory.

Actually, no physical evidence at all supports time travel, and assuming it is so creates unsolvable paradoxes. For example, Minkowski’s interpretation allows closed time-like curves, where an object’s world line returns it to its start point just as an object can return to where it was in space, but this means it can collide with itself! A block theory of time allows the following paradoxes:

• The grandfather paradox: A man travels back in time to kill his grandfather, but then couldn’t be born, so he couldn’t kill him. Backward time travel lets an entity prevent its own cause, so causality breaks down. It follows that there can be going back in time or causality, but not both.
• The toast paradox: I go forward in time to see myself having toast for breakfast, then return, but next morning I decide not to, so I didn’t go forward in time. Forward time travel assumes a fixed future so it denies future choices. If life is a movie already made, the future is predefined, so random events can’t occur, but they do. It follows that there can be going forward in time or choice, but not both.

Going back in time denies causality, and going forward in time denies choice, but physics requires both. Without causality, it must allow magic, but it doesn’t, and without choice, it must deny randomness, but it doesn’t. Physics rejected Newton’s idea that reality is painted upon the canvas of space, and making that canvas spacetime doesn’t improve this. After all, if we ever learn to travel in time, wouldn’t we immediately go back in time to fix past errors? Like the multiverse fantasy, time travel is great science fiction but poor science. It follows that if physics accepts causality and choice, it must deny time travel.

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If objects in our world exist constantly, by themselves alone, their time should pass absolutely, at a fixed rate regardless of events. In contrast, if objects in our world are virtual, their time will pass as their pixels are generated, so if we pause a game, the screen freezes and time in that game stops, until it is restarted again. In a game world, time passes as game events occur.

For example, Conway’s Game of Life produces pixel patterns  that arise, change, and vanish, to simulate how living things arise, change, and die in our world (Figure 2.10). If we pause the game, its time stops, and if we restart it, its time carries on. The lifetime of a pattern is then the number of game events that it exists for. Time in a virtual world is measured by its events just as we measure our time by atomic events.

Now suppose that a pixel pattern repeats for twenty minutes of our time, is that its lifetime? It might seem so, but if the game runs on a faster computer, that pattern might only repeat for a few seconds. To us, it lives less, but the number of computer events is the same. The lifetime of a game entity doesn’t change when it runs on a faster computer, because the events completed are the same. The same pattern run by two computers, one fast and one slow, has the same game life, even though we see different times.

This can explain Einstein’s twin example. Relativity predicts that a twin who travels in a high speed rocket for a year could return to find his brother is an old man of eighty. Neither twin would know that their time ran differently, but one twin’s life could be nearly over while the other’s is still beginning. Yet the eighty-year-old twin wouldn’t be cheated, as he still got eighty years of heart beats, and grandchildren to boot. The twins would only realize that their time had passed differently when they met again, to find themselves at different ages. Relativity predicts that our lifetimes can change just as lifetimes change in Conway’s Life, so our time can change as it does in a game world!

When people first hear that our time changes, they think it is a trick, that only perceived time changes, but it isn’t so, because it is the time measured by clocks that changes. For example, accelerating short-lived particles can double their observed lifetimes. Speed shouldn’t change how time passes in an objective world, so why does it change how time passes in our world?

To understand this, consider a computer game where events occur on the screen one after another. In a big battle, when a lot of events occur quickly, gamers expect the screen to slow down when the computer has a lot to do, because drawing more events on the screen takes longer. The battle event sequence stays the same, but the screen lags when more events occur.

This suggests that time slows down when objects go faster in our world because the quantum network has more to do. Each point of the quantum network has a finite capacity, so it can only generate life events at a certain rate. If movement also uses that capacity, increasing the rate of movement will decrease the rate of life events, giving a trade-off between an entity’s lifetime and its speed. If an object goes faster, its life will run slower to compensate, so its time slows down.

Just as a game slows down when there is more to do, so our lives slow down when we move faster. In Einstein’s example, the rocket twin’s life ran slower because the quantum network had to manage his movement as well, so he only aged a year, but his earth twin had no such load, so eighty years of life passed in the usual way. In our world, going faster makes life go slower, as it dilates time, but does this make time travel possible?

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Time is something we all understand until we try to explain it to another who doesn’t. As Saint Augustine wrote over eight centuries ago:

“What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I do not know.” (Chadwick, 2008).

Today, time is still in many ways a mystery. Some physicists say that is a dimension, but why then can’t we move back and forward along it, as we do for the dimensions of space? Others say that time itself can change, to flow slower or faster, but what does it change with respect to? Surely not itself, as that seems illogical. This section addresses such questions by reverse engineering time:

QR2.3.1 Time Dilates

QR2.3.2 Time Travel

QR2.3.3 Specifying Time

QR2.3.4 A Physics of Now

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Objects tend to move in a straight line, defined as the shortest distance between two points. The general term is geodesic because on a curved surface like the earth, the shortest distance between the poles is a curved longitude. A geodesic is a straight line on a curved surface, but why do objects move in straight lines in the first place?

Billiard balls on a table are said to move in straight lines by a property of matter called inertia, the tendency to continue in the same direction. Inertia then makes an arrow shot into the air fly up. But then it falls to the ground, so Newton suggested that a force from the earth pulled it down, called gravity. The arrow then moved according to the forces of inertia plus gravity, with space just a passive context. In classical physics, inertia makes objects move in straight lines unless another force is acting. It followed that inertia and gravity, both properties of matter, determined how objects move.

Einstein then showed that gravity works by curving space, to alter the geodesic, so an arrow fired into the air actually still moves in a straight line. We see a curve because space itself is curving, just as a globe longitude is curved but still the shortest distance between the poles. If the earth curves space around it to cause gravity, the moon then orbits the earth because that is its straight line. This changes the logic, as now gravity isn’t a force acting on an object, but a change in space that alters what a straight line is. It follows that inertia could also be a property of space, not the object itself.

How a wave moves on a network depends on how it is passed on, so if space is a network that transmits waves, light moves in a straight line because that is how it is passed on. Light then moves in a straight line because of space, and continues to do so unless something alters space. To understand how this could be, suppose that:

“A point in spacetime is … represented by the set of light rays that passes through it.” (S. Hawking & Penrose, 1996), p110.

If these rays represent the connections of a point to its neighbors, its possible transfer directions are a sphere around it. But if a photon is a transverse wave, it can only move at right angles to its vibration direction, so its directions are a circle not a sphere. Hence, every photon has a polarization plane at right angles to its vibration that limits how it moves through a point to a planar circle (Figure 2.8), as it must enter from and exit to points on that circle. Planar circles simplify how photons are passed on by a point, just as planar anyons simplify the quantum Hall effect (Collins, 2006).

Why then does light move in straight lines? For a network, the shortest path between any two points is the one with the fewest transfers, which is also the fastest path. For a wave spreading in every direction, the fastest path to any point is a straight line. Light will then move in a straight line to any point if it always takes the fastest route, which it does.

Chapter 3 gives the details, but essentially light travels in a straight line because its waves take every path to a destination and the first to arrive triggers a physical event. It follows that light moves in a straight line by a property of space, not itself. Chapter 4 extends this conclusion to matter objects, and Chapter 5 explains how gravity alters space, as Einstein said. The classical view that things move by their own inclination within a space of nothing is thus replaced by the view that they move according to how the network of space passes them on.

In conclusion, a quantum network can generate a space like ours based on rotations. The resulting polar space explains how space expands, how objects move, and how light vibrates, better than the linear space of Euclid. If the geometry of the universe is based on circles not squares, then for a point, planar circles specify how light is passed on and transverse circles specify how it vibrates (Figure 2.9). In the next section, transverse circles define time, just as planar circles define space.

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Light travels in empty space but how can a transverse wave do that? Sound is also a wave, but there is no sound in empty space because there is nothing to transmit it. Yet light from the sun and stars still reaches us across the emptiness of space, so how can a wave do that without a medium?

Consider a wave travelling across a pool surface. The wave moves because the water moves, but a cork floating on the pool just bobs up and down as waves pass it. The waves don’t push the cork along because the water doesn’t move in the wave direction, it moves up and down. What moves as a wave isn’t the water, but it’s up-down surface displacement, so when a pebble drops on a still pool, that displacement spreads as waves. Waves spread when a surface vibrates up and down, so shouldn’t light be the same?

A transverse wave is one that vibrates at right angles to its movement direction. Water waves are transverse waves because the water moves up and down as the wave spreads horizontally. Light is also a transverse wave even though it moves in three dimensions not two. It is said to have no medium because materialism calls empty space nothing, but if space is a surface, then light could vibrate on space.

The theory of relativity agrees that our space is a surface because it lets space curve, and complex number theory adds that light vibrates in a dimension outside space. If these theories are correct, then the surface of space can host light as a transverse wave. Light travels in a vacuum, so it either vibrates nothing at all, which denies how waves work, or it vibrates something. The simplest option is that light is a vibration on the surface of space itself.

Why then don’t we see light waves moving up and down, as water waves do? We know that light vibrates, but a ray of light seen from the side doesn’t seem to move up or down. This is expected if the dimension into which light vibrates is sequestered from our space (Randall, 2005). Everything we see is based on light but a transverse wave can’t leave the surface it vibrates on, so we can’t use it to see what happens outside space. It takes reverse engineering to deduce that light vibrates on space.

But what exactly moves when light moves? According to physical realism, nothing can, but the alternative explored here is that the quantum network does. Maxwell’s equations describe light as an electromagnetic vibration orthogonal to space. Let this vibration be the quantum network setting a transverse circle of positive and negative displacements on the surface of space. If they complete at the same point in a cycle, it is a null process, or empty space, but the same process distributed over two or more points can be a wave of light (Figure 2.7). Chapter 3 gives more details, but essentially light is a positive-negative surface displacement, just as water waves are. What moves when light moves is then what we call quantum processing.

Quantum waves spread on the quantum network, and light is their simplest form, but what actually are they? Schrödinger called them matter density waves, because they predict where matter exists, but quantum waves aren’t made of matter. Born called them probability waves, because their amplitude squared at a point is the probability that matter exists there, but a probability is just a number. We expected the ultimate reality to be made of matter, but instead have found just waves. The quantum waves that predict physical events have no mass, momentum, velocity, or any other physical property, but they can manifest as space, light, and matter, as will be seen.

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If our space is a surface, it must be contained within a larger space. This idea arose in physics over a century ago, when in 1919, Kaluza derived Maxwell’s equations from Einstein’s equations given another dimension. He essentially unified quantum theory and relativity, but another physical dimension was impossible because another it would make gravity vary as an inverse cube, so the solar system would collapse. Physical realism required any other dimension to be physical, so Kaluza’s promising discovery was ignored. Bearing this in mind, when mathematicians later discovered that light could be explained by a rotation into a fourth dimension, they were careful to call it imaginary, so complex numbers were accepted.

Klein then tried to rescue Kaluza’s extra dimension by suggesting that it was curled up in a tiny circle that went nowhere, so it existed but did nothing, but this was also ignored. Years later, string theory resurrected his idea to explain its extra dimensions, but couldn’t explain why nature has extra dimensions that do nothing but make our equations work.

But if physical space is itself a surface, these confusions disappear. Instead of an extra dimension inside space, there is a dimension outside space by which it is observed. Just as a two-dimensional screen needs a third dimension to be seen from, so our space needs a fourth dimension to be seen from. Hence, some physicists now suggest that our world is a “slice” of a higher-dimensional world:

“Physicists have now returned to the idea that the three-dimensional world that surrounds us could be a three-dimensional slice of a higher dimensional world.” (Randall, 2005), p52.

They note that this extra dimension is sequestered from our space, so it doesn’t alter gravity or charge (Randall & Sundrum, 1999). If there was another physical dimension, we could walk out of this world, but we can’t, any more than an avatar can leave a game screen. We are contained by space, like goldfish in a bowl, so for us it is the ultimate container, but space as a surface means that it is also contained within something else.

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In the derivation of polar space, the number of steps in each rotation is finite, so it is a discrete rotation. A discrete rotation must have a finite number of steps, so a triangle is made by three rotation steps, a square by four, a pentagon by five, and so on (Figure 2.6), where these N-rotations approximate a perfect circle as N increases. More rotation steps seem better because they allow more interaction directions, but wargamers use hexagons not octagons because a board of octagons has gaps in it. Hexagons fill the surface completely but octagons don’t, so the former are preferred.

In general, a rotational space based on a large N, as expected here, will have gaps in it, so not all paths will be reversible. Taking a route in reverse might not return to the exact same point, though it would be a true vicinity. A polar space with holes in it would allow particles to pass right through each other! Does this property then exclude a discrete polar space from describing our space?

It might seem so, but quantum theory describes quantum entities as probability clouds not billiard ball particles. When these clouds collide, they overlap an area, so a space with a few holes in it doesn’t matter. If quantum entities are probability clouds, a polar space with gaps in it still works.

For a polar space, the circle of neighbors around a point will be a finite number N, so it will have that many transfer connections. If each connection is a direction, this predicts that a point in space has a finite number of directions, so direction, like length, will be quantized, as a minimum Planck angle [Note 1]. Experiments with high frequency light could test wheter quantum events have a minimum Planck angle.

[1] If a point has N neighbors in a circle around it, the minimum Planck event angle is 360°/N.

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