One thing to keep in mind about models is that they are inherently static, as our minds only really work with stable concepts, otherwise it is static whiteout, like leaving the shutter on a camera open.
So a pertinent question might be to ask what biases this creates in an inherently dynamic existence? We see images, not the light flashing around faster than we could ever cognitively process it.
Wouldn’t the energy be more real than the forms, contrasts and frictions we perceive? Consider a wave; We see frequency and amplitude, but they are not the energy driving it, only the forms emergent from the limits of this energy.
Yet some theorists assume it is the information that is fundamental. “It from bit.”
As biological organisms, we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, while the central nervous system sorts through the forms precipitating out of the environment, so there is a cognitive basis for this bias, but the larger fact of the energy shouldn’t be ignored. Consider that galaxies are energy radiating out, as mass/form coalesces in. Would it create a false view of the cosmos, if we only considered the forms energy projects, rather than there being an underlaying dynamic that coalesces as form? For instance, “packets” of light do redshift over distance, because the higher frequencies dissipate faster, so if what we are observing is a sampling of a wave front, not individual photons traveling billions of lightyears, it would lead to a very different cosmology, than the one we have now. Yet that would raise the question of whether quanta of light are fundamental, or only the smallest measurable units of the energy.
Another issue would be of time. As mobile organisms, we experience our reality as a sequence of perceptions, so we think of time as the point of the present moving past to future. Physics codifies it as measures of duration and treats it as a dimension, similar to linear distance. The result is a very convoluted modeling of time, that assumes the events to be more real, out on the timeline, than this state of the present, that we experience.
Yet if we considered time in terms of change turning future to past, it offers a very different concept than the narrative dimension. Duration being the present physical state, as the events rise and fall.
A view that is logical, if counter intuitive. Potential>actual>residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There would be no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it, aka, causality and conservation of energy.
Energy, being “conserved,” is always and only present. It is those forms it manifests that come and go. We think of the past as set, yet it does not physically exist, as the manifesting energy has moved onto further configurations and even any effort to remember and store it affects how it is configured. So the “pile of sand” isn’t being added to, just shifted around.
As effect, time is like temperature, pressure, color and sound. Think frequencies and amplitudes.
Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don’t call them the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of thought.
As the article points out, our models are limited and we should keep those limits in perspective. Epicycles were a brilliant mathematical modeling of the cosmos, but they were not good physics, because what was assumed was wrong, not because they weren’t detailed enough.
I suspect we are not done with tearing down old models. Even if various professional reputations are at stake.
