No Causes And No Effects

Science, in its quest to shed light on the true nature of reality, has for hundreds of years held the belief that the law of causality lay at the foundation of all there is.

_{Eternity - Image by QAuZ - source: Deviantart}

And this should not surprise anyone; everything that happens has a cause. And causes precede effects in time; first I push you, then you fall in the water. This everyday experience we have with causes and effects has ingrained in us a deep belief that everything in life and the universe obeys the fundamental law that nothing happens without a cause. If you want to move something, you have to make it move; you kick a ball to make a goal.

Here on earth, where there's friction, the ball will stop moving eventually, score or not. In friction-less space however, the ball would just keep moving and wouldn't slow down. If something has no end, does it need to have a beginning still? Doesn't the law of conservation of momentum make it possible to believe that stuff just moves in the universe? That a state of movement is the natural state? That stuff simply moves until something causes it to stop?

In this friction-less world we could predict with great certainty and precision the location, speed and direction using Newtons laws. The equations used to do these predictions work in both ways, from the current location, speed and direction you can also calculate where everything was in the past. It's what the whole Big Bang Theory is based on: we observe that the universe is expanding with everything moving ever further away from everything else, and can therefore reason that in the past everything must have been awfully close to each other up until the point that everything's contained in an infinitely small region of... well maybe not space but nothing? We can even calculate how long it's been since then, approximately 13.8 billion years, but at that point knowledge stops.

_{Best-Ever Snapshot of a Black Hole's Jets - source: Wikimedia Commons}

This is the world ruled by cause and effect: it's what we all know and feel comfortable with. But... Imagine a super intelligence, a supercomputer that knows the current position, speed and direction of every particle in the universe, that super-intelligence would know everything about everything both in the past, present and future. This super-intelligence would see a four-dimensional space-time universe in which past, presence and future are not linked by causes and effects, but by certain patterns called the laws of Newton.

Just like numbers, on a line of integers the 1 follows after 0 which follows after -1, we don't say that -1 causes 0 which causes 1. They just form a pattern in which one happens after the other and we know the entire pattern given a starting-point and some rule to reach the next element in the pattern. This is a fundamentally different way to look at the world and one that's counter-intuitive for most of us. But it is the world of quantum field theory. And this is where things get even weirder...

Quantum field theory (QFT) is the most fundamental physics theory we have and is accepted among most particle physicists and cosmologists, and it says that the reality that's out there is completely different than what we are able to observe:

QFT treats particles as excited states of an underlying field, so these are called field quanta. In quantum field theory, quantum mechanical interactions among particles are described by interaction terms among the corresponding underlying quantum fields.

_{source: Wikimedia Commons}

Simply speaking this means that for every fundamental particle there is in the universe a field; there's an electron-field, a photon-field, a neutron-field and so on. And what we observe is just these fields in so called excited states. There's also one somewhat special field: the Higgs field. The Higgs field provides mass to all other particles by interacting with their respective fields and not interacting with particles that don't have mass.

In the equations of these quantum fields there's no notion of causes or effects. Time is present in the equations but it has no particular direction and space is not present in the equations, which would make space an emergent property of the more fundamental elements. However counter-intuitive this all might seem, Quantum mechanics is the most successful theory we have in terms of making predictions (I mean, the Higgs Bozon was predicted long before it was shown to exist, as were many other elemental particles) and making ultra precise calculations in the "real world".

A lot of this is based on the work of Sean Carroll. For those of you for who are interested to hear a lot more about QFT and its implications for our understanding of reality I'll link his Google Talk called "The Big Picture":

_{Sean Carroll: "The Big Picture" | Talks at Google}

Okay, I'll leave it here and hope I haven't caused you a headache ;-) I'll be back here tomorrow, as I am now and as I was yesterday; following this pattern it's evident that you'll be back here with me, dear reader, and I'm grateful for that. Until then, keep the momentum and keep steeming!

Recent articles you might be interested in:

Latest article >>>>>>>>>>>	Post-Truth Society
Free Speech vs Reddit	Three Billion Heartbeats
Love & Hate	Time, Space & Common Sense
The !pancake Earth	Remember The Lemmings!

Thanks for stopping by and reading. If you really liked this content, if you disagree (or if you do agree), please leave a comment. Of course, upvotes, follows, resteems are all greatly appreciated, but nothing brings me and you more growth than sharing our ideas. It's what Steemit is made for!

I am a proud helpinaut! @Helpie is looking for new members! Helpie has been growing nicely and we are always on the lookout for new valuable members. We are very supportive and community oriented. If you would like to be scouted for @helpie , please drop a comment on THIS POST or contact @paintingangels on discord at paintingangels(serena)#3668.

Just for Full Disclosure, I'm invested in these crypto-currencies:

Bitcoin | Litecoin | EOS | OmiseGo | FunFair | KIN | Pillar | DENT | Polymath | XDCE | 0x | Decred | Ethereum | Carmel | XYO