random memes }

Metaphors and reality

Physics is taught and understood through a series of metaphors. Events and processes beyond the range of human perception and experience are are described and understood via metaphors. If the metaphors are close enough to reality, then we are able to derive useful results. When the wrong metaphors are in use (and this happened before) the science ends up in a blind alley.

There is always a chance that some of our present metaphors are wrong (or at least a poor choice). There is a distinct chance that at some point Physics will run up against an aspect of reality that cannot be expressed - even via metaphor - in terms digestible by the human mind. Some of our science may already be up against just such a limit. At some point the human mind will have to evolve to something greater, before further progress can be made.

A few more metaphors that may or may not prove useful....

The prior speculation leads to some derivatives.

If when looking far out into the universe we can see all distant present variants that do not change our present sum, then the further out we look the "fuzzier" the image would appear. If this were true (a very big if) then the distance to which we could see clearly would represent the distance to which some sort of fairly-immediate interaction is possible. (Hello warp-drive?)

If the weave-of-variants metaphor is in fact a good match to reality, then the diffraction pattern observed in the classic double-slit experiment may represent an interaction between photons across the weave of variants. In effect a single photon takes every possible path, each in it's on variant, and interaction across variants establishes the diffraction pattern. (Though interaction-between-photons is itself a metaphor of which I am wary.) Are there other interactions across variants? Is this metaphor in any way testable or useful?

Again, without some sort of test, the above are no more than speculations.