42 research outputs found
Time as an Illusion
We review the idea, due to Einstein, Eddington, Hoyle and Ballard, that time
is a subjective label, whose primary purpose is to order events, perhaps in a
higher-dimensional universe. In this approach, all moments in time exist
simultaneously, but they are ordered to create the illusion of an unfolding
experience by some physical mechanism. This, in the language of relativity, may
be connected to a hypersurface in a world that extends beyond spacetime. Death
in such a scenario may be merely a phase change
Knotty inflation and the dimensionality of spacetime
We suggest a structure for the vacuum comprised
of a network of tightly knotted/linked flux tubes formed in a QCD-like cosmological phase transition and show that such a network can drive cosmological inflation. As the network can be topologically stable only in three space dimensions, this scenario provides a dynamical explanation for the existence of exactly three large spatial dimensions in our Universe