The Beginning (written for Physicists, with some updates)

The beginning of the universe is a great story to tell, however, the history of how physicist found the current theory of the beginning of the universe is very interesting as well. Let’s add in another spice to this. Religions in general also said something about the beginning or non-beginning of the world. Being a Buddhist, I would like to see how well does Buddhism fair in this respect in light of the current cosmology.

Too often have I seen religious people trying to use science to strengthen their case of their own religion, only to be read by a scientist to be criticized that the theory of science that they are using is outdated or worst, misrepresented.

I hope not to fall into their company, but to be fair to both Physics and Buddhism, I shall attempt to present each from their own point of view and not use one to prove or disprove the other. Yet, if I slip up somewhere, I’m sorry.

First we start with Buddhism, since many of you are not familiar with Buddhism compared to cosmology.

In Buddhism, there is this Kalama Sutta (AN 3.65) in which the Buddha told the people of Kalama village that there are ten specific sources which knowledge should not be immediately viewed as truthful without further investigation to avoid fallacies:

1.       by revelations,

2.       by traditions,

3.       by rumor, gossip, hearsay,

4.       by scriptures,

5.       by logical conjecture (alone),

6.       by it is a point of view or common sense,

7.       by having considered the reasons (philosophical dogmatism),

8.       by agreement with one’s own theories,

9.       by experts,

10.    by the thought “this completive is our teacher” (authority).

when you know for yourselves that,

•       these qualities are skillful,

•       these qualities are blameless,

•       these qualities are praised by the wise,

•       these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness,

then you should enter & remain in them.

In science, theories must be verified and vetted by the experimental or observational data.

So you can see that Buddhism is much more interested in teaching the avoidance of evil, the doing of good and purification of mind. This is the central teachings of Buddhism. Why so? Because there is kamma and rebirth.

Take for example a quote from this sutta (SN 15.13):

From an inconceivable beginning comes transmigration. A beginning point is not evident, though beings hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving are transmigrating & wandering on.

Because beings undergo rebirth due to ignorance and craving, the central teaching is to recognize that there is suffering in life which is to be understood. And the cause of these suffering is due to ignorance and craving which is to be abandoned. The abandoning of the cause would lead to the end of suffering which is to be attained and the way to the end of suffering, morality, mental development and wisdom is to be developed.

True to its spirit of asking us not to just believe but to investigate, the Buddha repeatedly ask his disciples to practice meditation or mental development so as to be able to see into the workings of the mind and past lives to directly verify for ourselves the truth of kamma and rebirth. Before that, it remains a working hypothesis for those with faith to start on the journey.

So questions like is there a beginning is of no importance to Buddhism as the Buddha said that one would die before those things are answered, emphasizing that he is only interested in leading people towards the end of suffering, not philosophical questions.

Thus conventional wisdom in Buddhism would itself be enough for a Buddhist to not be bothered by the development of cosmology in Physics. However, as I am both a Physicist and a Buddhist, this is of some interest to me.

Specifically the problem is: If rebirth requires a physical universe for beings to be reborn into, then Buddhism requires a beginningless model of the Universe.

Now let’s look into the cosmology picture of the beginning.

In Physics, the idea that there was a beginning came about in a hard fight in the field of cosmology. After Einstein admitted that the universe is not static, calling his modification of the equations of general relativity his greatest blunder, there are 2 main schools of thoughts.

First is the steady state theory says that the observation that the universe, which is infinite, is expanding because it has always been expanding. The constant density can be explained away by matter spontaneously coming into existence so that the universe is always in this state, and therefore have no beginning.

Second is the now familiar big bang theory. It says that if the universe is expanding now, then it must have been in a state of very high density. Extrapolating back in time, we get the beginning of the universe when the density goes to infinity. The universe is of zero size. Now the figure is 13.8 billion years ago. And the moment of the big bang is called the singularity. The ridiculous state of the universe where most laws of physics break down.

Now if this article, or dialogue between Buddhism and Physics were to occur at that time, then Buddhists most likely predict that further observations will eventually support the steady state theory. After all, the Buddha himself said that there is no way to conceive of a beginning.

The Buddhist point of view towards the beginning is that if there is a effect, there must be a cause. And tracing back to the cause, it is an effect of another cause. Repeating this formula, how could we have a first cause without something causing it to happen? [1]

In almost the same sense, this is the physics dilemma too with the big bang theory. Once you are at the singularity, what caused it to expand in the first place? What guarantees that all the laws of physics that comes after is conducive for a life bearing universe? [2]

I for one am glad I wasn't an active engaged physicists Buddhist at that time. Or else I would have a great punch in the face to my faith when experimental evidence supports the big bang theory and the steady state theory has died down.

This story above tells us of the danger of trying to mix up science and religion, using science to support or to disprove religion.

When the big bang theory won out (due to many observations, google it yourself), physicists have been working on the details of almost every part of the evolution of the cosmos. Even up to now, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN would be recreating the conditions near to the big bang and exploring the new physics there (restarting around 2015).

The largest problem so far is the combination of the 2 main pillars of modern physics: General relativity and Quantum physics near the singularity. Both theories disagree with one another and seem to predict that the laws of physics break down near to the singularity, so we can predict everything that happened, until near the Plank scale. There the theory of quantum gravity is needed to explain away the ridiculous singularity that General Relativity predicts. [3]

There are two possible contending quantum gravity theories currently popular and both of them predict a different scenario to replace the singularity. They are the

·         M-Theory, the 11 dimensional form that combined 5 string theories (everything is made up of strings of Plank length). M-theory contains branes (fundamental things that are more than just one dimensional) too. It is general relativity in the language of quantum fields.

·         Loop quantum gravity, that spacetime is made out of quantized loops; it is quantum theory in the language of General Relativity.

There were proposals of how the universe will end and the natural combination of one of the most symmetrical way for it to end is the big crunch plus the big bang, producing a big bounce. It requires that the universe is dense enough so that gravity will pull everything back together again in the reverse of the big bang into a big crunch. Then by some magic of Loop quantum gravity, after passing through the Plank scale, a super repulsive gravity is generated, hence the cause of a big bang can be explained, and there can be no beginning to the universe, or series of multiverses.

It's a beautiful theory that can fit right into Buddhism. And if Buddhist happens to cling on to this idea, they will soon be disappointed as well. However, the theory of the infinite big bounce has a theoretical flaw.

Entropy does not get reversed during the phase of the big crunch. The arrow of time is still toward disorder. Eventually, with each new universe, the entropy will increase and makes the next cycles longer and bigger. As the previous cycles are shorter, there will be a beginning. However, stronger than this flaw is observational data.

Data from 1998 observation suggest that the universe is not showing signs that it is slowing down, but rather it is accelerating out at an increasing rate. [4] Thus creating the need for postulating dark energy as the source of this repulsive force. Eventually our universe most probably will die by the big rip, where everything expands out faster than the speed of light.

Now I’ll present three different possible theories of beginningless universe and a closed universe with a beginning in cosmology literature.

First, the inflationary universe theory is required to explain why is the cosmic background radiation so smooth and why don't we find monopoles amongst other stuffs. According to it, the universe expanded faster than the speed of light for a while near the singularity and then stopped and expanded at the slower than the speed of light rate. Most inflation theories allows that some parts of the universe to keep on inflating while some other parts stop to create a universe. Thus stretching this back to the past and to the future, we get an infinite series of multiverse with no beginning and no end. In fact there’s a recent paper of possible observational data for this model. [5]

Second, the Baum-Frampton model gives an application of how a model of dark energy can lead to a sudden turnaround of a small patch of universe to a small volume, which has its entropy reset (by throwing out most of the stuffs in the universe) and then inflation restarts the cycle. This also produces more universes for each cycle. If there is an infinite amount of universe, then there would be no primordial universe. [6]

Third, the Steinhardt-Turok model. This model is based on M-theory and assumes that our universe lives on a 4-dimensional brane that can collide with another universe of 4 dimensional brane in a higher dimension. Each brane is infinite in volume thus allows for the accelerated expansion. In fact the expansion would clear the universe to vacuum again before gravity pulls two neighboring branes to another collision, producing the Big Bang. The collision would also explain away the things that standard cosmology uses inflation to explain. Since this cycle can repeat indefinitely, there is no beginning to this multiverse. [7]

Finally, in the book The Grand Design, the authors said that because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going. [2]

However the discussion is far from ending in cosmology, [8] argues that there is a beginning for eternal inflation, cyclic evolution, and the emergent universe. [9] replies that for all practical purposes, the universe is past eternal. This is because of future eternal universes, we are like the people far on the real line, even if the universe started at time zero, and we can’t see the beginning.

In conclusion, for physics, the field of cosmology is far from dead, it’s just the beginning to gather more and more accurate data for precision cosmology.

From the side of Buddhism, there is no practical need to care about these models too. The best consistent model for Buddhism would be the Baum-Frampton model for predicting that the universe expands and contracts (there are other Buddhist texts that says the world expands and contracts), yet taking the lesson from the story above, I would not put down any money to bet that this model will ultimately win out amongst others. Who knows what’s the next top model in cosmology is?

So, for Buddhist, the conclusion is the same as always. Paraphrasing Richard Feynman, shut up and meditate.

Bibliography

[1]	Dalai Lama, The Universe in a single atom, United States of America: Morgan Road Books, 2005.
[2]	S. Hawking and L. Mlodinow, The Grand Design, Bantam Books: United States of America, 2010.
[3]	S. Hawking and R. Penrose, "The Singularities of Gravitational Collapse and Cosmology," Proc R Soc A, vol. 314, pp. 529-548, 1970.
[4]	Riess, A. G. and others, "Observational evidence from supernovae for an accelerating universe and a cosmological constant," Astron.J., vol. 116, pp. 1009-1038, 1998.
[5]	S. M. Feeney, M. C. Johnson, D. J. Mortlock and H. V. Peiris, "First Observational Tests of Eternal Inflation," Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 107, no. 7, p. 071301, 2011.
[6]	L. Baum and P. H. Frampton, "Turnaround in Cyclic Cosmology," Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 98, no. 7, p. 071301, 2007.
[7]	P. J. Steinhardt and N. Turok, "Cosmic evolution in a cyclic universe," Phys. Rev. D, vol. 65, no. 12, p. 126003, 2002.
[8]	a. [hep-th], "arXiv:1204.4658".
[9]	a. [hep-th], "arXiv:1204.5385".

Artificial Intelligence & Cases of Rebirth

Well, strictly speaking, artificial intelligence is not under Physics purview, and cases of rebirth are not needed in the study and practice of Buddhism. Yet, both are quite close to Physics and Buddhism respectively and both are related and very real.

The current field of artificial intelligence is very obvious in terms of the voice activation control. Just look at Apple's Siri.  Sorry, I'm really lazy to explain the basics of A.I. which I don't think I have enough knowledge of anyway. There is this Turing test and Cleverbot. Well, not the best conversationalist, but still she gives unexpected answers sometimes. The point that I want to make is, that as computers and technology improve, as the internet gets more and more information from us, as the research in A.I. increases and gets better and better....

Eventually, we can see the top down and the bottom up approaches may make up something that resembles humans. Especially if we add in one more technological advance called quantum computer. There has been some speculations that human brains and thinking involves something quantum-like, and thus making a quantum artificial intelligence may have a better chance of it getting to one stage we call self-awareness. Where it is an another being, with feelings and free-will, not just complicated expressions of trillions of lines of codes.

Buddhist psychology may offer some help in this regard where the mind is analysed in terms of four aggregates: Feelings, perception, mental formation and consciousness. Each of these maybe programmed separately, but also somehow fits in together again. If a knowledgeable Buddhist is working on A.I. development based on Buddhist psychology, that is.

Anyway, let's say that one day we have a real self-aware A.I. What will it be like? In Buddhist terms: Can it gain enlightenment? Is it fundamentally different from us because it can think in parallel, and we can't? Does it have until 8 consciousness (Mahayana concept)? Or just 6? Does it even suffer like us?

A more interesting question is: what if the self-aware A.I. is just like the case of rebirth?
Here are some videos of these case studies in case you're unfamiliar.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCcmr6UeNSY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir9Xs1Q9T5g
In case this happens, then A.I. or robots are just new bodies and consciousness for beings to be reborn into.

Then, can we differentiate between the A.I. who undergoes rebirth and A.I. that does resemble humans but are fundamentally different because they do not suffer like us. (No craving.) Yes it seems quite easy to differentiate them then. Maybe the Buddhas and Bodhisattva may manifest into them too! Interesting ideas for science fiction.

Ultimate and conventional Truth- Lagrangian, Noether's Theorem

Today in my Advanced Dynamics class, in the process of showing Noether's Theorem, I found an interesting connection with Buddhism and the play of different generalized coordinates that you can put in the Lagrangian.

The power of the Lagrangian way of doing Classical Mechanics is that one can choose any generalized coordinates to solve the same problem, so some coordinates maybe more suitable to the problem than others. Also if the Lagrangian does not have explicit dependence on one particular coordinate (called cyclic coordinate) in the chosen generalized coordinates, then there will be something that is conserved. Specifically, it's the conjugate momentum of the Lagrangian with respect to the cyclic coordinate. If the generalized coordinate is chosen badly, then one might not see this symmetry and the conserved quantity may not be so obvious.

Let's call the generalized coordinate that we can see the symmetry directly as Q, and the one that we cannot, let's call it q. It might be for example that although q does not reveal the symmetry directly, but the equation of motion that it generates from the Lagrangian might be simple and usable in our everyday life. And the Q form of the Lagrangian might be more troublesome to interpret in its equation of motion form, so a transformation to the q view would make the equation easier to work with.

This is what I see as the duality between conventional truths and ultimate truths as well. (Do note that there is a range of q and Qs, but there is only one ultimate truth, and the conventional truth maybe many, but should not be too complicated either.)

So in the conventional truths, (coordinate q), there exist you, me, I, the car, etc... which makes everyday living and talking (equations of motion) smooth and easy. Yet in this view, we cannot see the conserved quantities of everything. That's where the ultimate truth comes in (coordinate Q) wherein the true nature of the situation is revealed and we see impermanence, non-self and subject to suffering in all things (timelessly-corresponding to the conserved quantities) and yet it is not convenient to operate in purely ultimate truth view. One would have to say: "this 5 aggregates has arisen the wish to go to abandon some water at the particular location wherein the electromagnetic waves are shielded from the light receptors of other 5 aggregates." which in conventional terms is: "I would like to go to the toilet."

Physics and Buddhism, internalization

http://ngxinzhaomonk.blogspot.sg/2012/12/physics-and-buddhism-internalizing.html

Continuing from the link above,

The more textbooks of physics I'm reading, the more I feel that Physics is indeed not in the paper, or books, or even the form of the equation or maths. You can have a totally different way of formulating mathematics and writing down the equations, but the concepts will have to be there, the computational abilities of equations has to be there. So in other words, we are playing with our minds, our intellectual mind if you will.

The reason we write it down is for unambiguous communication and to compute. To show my point of Physics is a mind made object and exercise, show all these complicated looking equation to a normal five year old, they can barely make out the symbol for addition, and a few numbers if there are some in there, but other than that, it's all jargon to them. So we need to teach them how mathematics is done on Earth and then they learn those and the physics concepts, and the derivations, and finally when they look back at the same equations 18 years later, meaning is assigned to the pattern of inks on a paper.

The pattern of ink itself did not change, it is the mind of the Physicist that changed. Therefore Physics lives inside the collective consciousness of all Physicist. If all human beings one day go extinct, but our records of Physics and mathematics and language still exist, and one day some intelligent alien discovered the remains of our civilization and learn our knowledge, then Physics lives on in their mind.

Yet, they will also have to do the same experiments as we did to verify the results of our claims, follow the maths or translate it to their own mathematical symbol, however they write it as, and then they can fully fill in what is Physics in our world now.

The same is true for Buddhism. (I shall be using these brackets for the analogy for Physics)

The Dharma lives in the Sangha, for as long as there are beings who are enlightened in the world (knows how to do Physics, all of the core Physics...or derive all the equations of Physics from the still unknown theory of everything),  the Dharma is still very much alive and doing it's job of liberating people. The Sangha learn about the Dharma, and then practice, realize and share the Dharma.(Physicist learn, do physics, that is realize more of the world than we previously did and then teach people about it by publishing papers, sometime even more, by writing popular books, teaching in universities, etc...)

The same thing happens when all the Dharma disappear in the world, it can be rediscovered by a Buddha and re-spread the message out to the world. One will have to do all the Morality-Mind-Wisdom training in order to fully realize the truth. (The experiments of physics and the theories behind it.)

So the Dharma is very much a mental phenomena. Not to test on the intellectual skills, but to cool it down, to calm the mind, so that it can be sharpen and then penetrate to the truth of life and suffering. (In contrast, physics needs the intellectual mind to create and think of concepts that might model the world.)

So maybe the fusion of both ways to use the mind can help in Physics? Because it is known for a long time now that the active intellectual mind making philosophy and fabrications (like this blog) is a hindrance to the real practice in Buddhism.

Also, for the formula: To learn (same to learn), To practice by upholding morality (getting the basic physics concepts right), and meditation (Doing the maths correctly), To realize wisdom or insight, of getting to know things by ourselves (Doing the experiments and getting new theories never before seen in the world), To share (Publish papers!).

5 Powers

Being a full time theoretical physicist is very similar to being a monk practicing Buddhism.

1. Both are in the mind. It doesn't matter how much stuffs you read, the words, equations are just that, they translate to what you understand in the physics case, and what you realise in the Buddhism case.
2. You have teachers to teach you. Full time. Physicist works under a prof, until they trained up for a few year and go build their own team. Same thing with Buddhist monks, well, just that Buddhist monks don't call it teams. And both get paid/ offered donations all day for this mental activity. One in terms of money, the other food and other supports.
3. Both requires the usage of the 5 powers: Mindfulness (the present awareness of what we are doing), Concentration (the discipline to sit down and calculate/meditate), Energy (the effort to remain on an object/ mathematical equation), Faith (trust in the teacher to follow and guide you), and Wisdom (knowledge of basic Physics/Dharma, and realizing it via direct experience/ mathematical equations.)
4. And the outcomes: Both emphasize on teachings, on value transmission, on transmission of understanding, of realizations. Both are best started while young too.
5. The goals: Enlightenment, complete and full liberation for Buddhism, and for Physics? I'm still searching, is it for the love of it, for the sheer joy that I do it? Or for the benefit of future engineers which may not even be within my lifetime, or is it for accurate Science-Fiction writing, or just to teach? I suspect it should be because that Physics itself, the equations, and the understanding that comes with it is so beautiful that one cannot resist but to want to devote one's whole life in answering the deepest physical questions of the universe.

Buddhism and Science related stuffs on my other blog

This is some posters that I've made, notice that poster no. 4 has been made into a post here. The rest are still pending.
http://ngxinzhaomonk.blogspot.sg/2010/02/buddhism-and-science.html

This is one of the few of those feelings posts I'll be making more of:
http://ngxinzhaomonk.blogspot.sg/2009/11/parallels-between-buddhism-and-physics.html

This is strictly not physics, but it does concord with how should we do mind science:
http://ngxinzhaomonk.blogspot.sg/2012/02/meditators-are-real-psychologists.html

This is another one on time, I should rewrite this, it's becoming unreadable.
http://ngxinzhaomonk.blogspot.sg/2009/09/1-mahakappa.html

Life-span of Materiality - Virtual particle lifespan

In the Abdhidharma Class (by Dr. Mehm Tin Mon) that I'm still attending, we have finally come to the chapter where the cognitive series is explained.

In there, the smallest unit of time for consciousness to arise and pass away is 3 submoments = 1 thought moment. A thought moment is so fast that in a wink of an eye, or a flash or lightning, there can be a trillion thought moments which had come and gone. There can be about 250 eye-winks in a second. Then a conservative estimate of a thought moment is that it's at least as small as a femtosecond, if not smaller.

For those unfamiliar with the measure of time, please refer to the table from wikipedia.

Factor (s)	Multiple	Symbol	Definition	Comparative examples & common units	Orders of magnitude
10−44				5.4×10-20 ys = 5.4×10-44 s: One Planck time tP = ≈ 5.4×10-44 s,[1] the time required for light to travel one Planck length, is the briefest physically meaningful span of time. It is the unit of time in the natural units system known as Planck units.	10−20 ys, 10−19 ys (10−44 s, 10−43 s)
10−24	1 yoctosecond	ys[2]	Yoctosecond, (yocto- + second), is one septillionth (short scale) of a second.	0.3 ys: mean life of the W and Z bosons.[3][4][a] 0.5 ys: time for top quark decay, according to the Standard Model. 1 ys: time taken for a quark to emit a gluon. 23 ys: half-life of 7H.	1 ys and less, 10 ys, 100 ys
10−21	1 zeptosecond	zs	Zeptosecond, (zepto- + second), is one sextillionth (short scale)of one second.	7 zs: half-life of helium-9's outer neutron in the second nuclear halo. 17 zs: approximate period of electromagnetic radiation at the boundary between gamma rays and X-rays. 300 zs: approximate typical cycle time of X-rays, on the boundary between hard and soft X-rays. 500 zs: current resolution of tools used to measure speed of chemical bonding[5]	1 zs, 10 zs, 100 zs
10−18	1 attosecond	as	One quintillionth of one second	12 attoseconds: shortest measured period of time.[6]	1 as, 10 as, 100 as
10−15	1 femtosecond	fs	One quadrillionth of one second	cycle time for 390 nanometre light, transition from visible light to ultraviolet	1 fs, 10 fs, 100 fs
10−12	1 picosecond	ps	One trillionth of one second	1 ps: half-life of a bottom quark 4 ps: Time to execute one machine cycle by an IBM Silicon-Germanium transistor	1 ps, 10 ps, 100 ps
10−9	1 nanosecond	ns	One billionth of one second	1 ns: Time to execute one machine cycle by a 1 GHz microprocessor 1 ns: Light travels 12 inches (30 cm)	1 ns, 10 ns, 100 ns
10−6	1 microsecond	µs	One millionth of one second	sometimes also abbreviated µsec 1 µs: Time to execute one machine cycle by an Intel 80186 microprocessor 4–16 µs: Time to execute one machine cycle by a 1960s minicomputer	1 µs, 10 µs, 100 µs
10−3	1 millisecond	ms	One thousandth of one second	4–8 ms: typical seek time for a computer hard disk 100–400 ms (=0.1–0.4 s): Blink of an eye[7] 18–300 ms (=0.02–0.3 s): Human reflex response to visual stimuli	1 ms, 10 ms, 100 ms
100	1 second	s		1 s: 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom.[8] 60 s: 1 minute	1 s, 10 s, 100 s
103	1 kilosecond (16.7 minutes)	ks		3.6 ks: 3600 s or 1 hour 86.4 ks: 86 400 s or 1 day 604.8 ks: 1 week	103 s, 104 s, 105 s
106	1 megasecond (11.6 days)	Ms		2.6 Ms: approximately 1 month 31.6 Ms: approximately 1 year ≈ 107.50 s	106 s, 107 s, 108 s
109	1 gigasecond (32 years)	Gs		2.1 Gs: average human life expectancy at birth (2011 estimate)[9] 3.16 Gs: approximately 1 century 31.6 Gs: approximately 1 millennium	109 s, 1010 s, 1011 s
1012	1 terasecond (32 000 years)	Ts		6 Ts: time since the appearance of Homo sapiens (approximately)	1012 s, 1013 s, 1014 s
1015	1 petasecond (32 million years)	Ps		7.1–7.9 Ps: 1 galactic year (225-250 million years)[10] 143 Ps: the age of the Earth[11][12][13] 144 Ps: the approximate age of the Solar system[14] and the Sun.[15] 430 Ps: the approximate age of the Universe	1015 s, 1016 s, 1017 s
1018	1 exasecond (32 billion years)	Es		312 Es: Estimated lifespan of a 0.1 solar mass red dwarf star.	1018 s, 1019 s, 1020 s
1021	1 zettasecond (32 trillion years)	Zs		3 Zs: Estimated duration of Stelliferous Era. 9.8 Zs:the lifetime of Brahma in Hindu mythology	1021 s, 1022 s, 1023 s
1024	1 yottasecond (32 quadrillion years)	Ys		1.6416 Ys: Estimated half-life of the "stable" 20983Bi radioactive isotope. 6.616×1050 Ys: Time required for a 1 solar mass black hole to evaporate completely due to Hawking radiation, if nothing more falls in.	1024 s, 1025 s, 1026 s and more

And the smallest lifespan of rupa, or materiality is 17 times longer than a thought moment! Materiality is always arising and dissolving at all times, with one submoment arising, 49 submoments lasting, and 1 submoment dissolving. From there on, we can have a parallel comparison with physics.



The video above shows that we can see into the femtosecond realm. Literally. And this shows that the shortest measured period of time is 12 attoseconds. 

So physics has made stride into realms previously thought to be inaccessible. Clearly we don't see thing arising and dissolving at that time scale, so we'll have to push the concept of the thought moment back up to smaller intervals of time. What's the smallest in Physics? It's the theoretical Plank time~\(10^{-44}\) s.

Well, so let's try it this way first, in quantum physics, there is also the concept of foam particles, of virtual particles-antiparticles pair that arises and annihilate each other on the order of time allowed by the energy-time uncertainty relations

$$ \Delta E \Delta t \geq \frac{\hbar}{2}. $$

This reads the bigger the mass (by \(E=mc^2\), also energy) of the virtual particle pair, the shorter the time it is allowed to exist. What do we have to play with? Let's start with the current fundamental particles as in the standard model:



So for an electron (the lightest lepton that's not a neutrino), of mass times \(c^2\) is 8.18710414 × 10^-14 joules, the time allowed for virtual positron and electron to exist is roughly \(t \sim 10^{-22}\) s. Divide that by 51, and we get about the upper limit for the estimate of the length of a submoment \(t\sim 10^{-20}\) s.

For the more massive particles like the top quarks, the time is around \(10^{-29}\)s. Thus lowering the limit for the submoment to 2 orders of magnitude less. Why stop there? Why not proceed a little bit more?

So let's just say that the submoment is the smallest unit of time there is, Plank time. Order of magnitude of -44. Thus the smallest unit of time for virtual particles to exist is of the magnitude of -42. And translating to the biggest mass this fundamental particle can take, is: \(m\sim 10^{-10}\)kg. Take note that \(m\sim 5 *10^{-8}\)kg. for the unsuspecting case of just pure physics, having not taken into account the factor of 51 in the calculations.

Maybe future particle accelerators( To test for that, we might need a galaxy sized particle accelerator!) will determine if we can made it through to that high mass or can we go beyond, in that case, maybe our minds are not limited by even the laws of physics!

Some unanswered questions are: do these arising and dissolving of materiality occur in normal "stable" particles in physics? I need to study Quantum Field Theory deeply in order to start answering that.

And what does this tell us about Loop quantum gravity which seems to act on scales of \(10^{-45}\) for Super inflation era? 






Also, the teachers told us that if we meditate well, we'll be able to see these smallest units of thought moments clearly. Is the mind the ultimate particle accelerator? Maybe particle physicists should spend more time meditating and find it out within their lifetimes instead of hoping for a future galaxy sized particle accelerator.

Anyway, this post has outlived it's usefulness, time to dissolve it.