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.

 
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.