In _Mind Children_ (one of the appendixes, I think), Hans Moravec
provides a model of the universe as a spherical gas bubble where time
runs more slowly toward the center, due to increased mass and gravity,
while interactions speed up towards the periphery due to higher
frequencies.
Moravec suspects that we live in the (Slow-Zone?) 'V world', where
volume or space dominates our activities, but there may be more advanced
entities dwelling in the 'F world' transform (Transcend?) of our
universe where frequency dominates:
<As our universe gradually expands, the wavelengths of the background
radiation increase. As the wavelengths get longer and longer, the
relative rate of time flow in the F world slows down. Any inhabitants of
F would be ideally situated to practice the 'live forever by going
slower and slower as it gets colder and colder' strategy proposed by
Freeman Dyson ["Infinite in All Directions", 1988] ... In the past,
shortly after the big bang, when the universe was dense and hot, the F
world would have been a lively place .... The first microsecond of the
big bang could represent eons of subjective time in F. Perhaps enough
time for intelligence to evolve, realize its situation, and seed smaller
but eventually faster life in the V space.>
Also of possible interest for this thread, is Rudy Rucker's 7/95 _Wired_
(that's the one with the egghead picture of Richard Dawkins on the
cover) interview with Russian physicist Andrei Linde, now at Stanford,
who is involved in simulations of a fractal, self-replicating,
inflationary universe as opposed to the more orthodox Big-Bang
scenarios.
Linde talks about scalar and vector fields and how the Higgs field
creates "domain walls" within our universe such that there could be
slightly different instantiations of the laws of physics within each
domain. While Linde thinks it is possible to create "baby universes",
he believes that the only way we could move into them would be by
encoding ourselves into their physical laws and then letting them evolve
independently. He says there is no way to pass between universes or
communicate with other universes except by creating them and encoding a
message in their physical laws. He suggests that "our universe was
created not by God, but by a physicist-hacker".
Mark Crosby