Reality

 I've been mulling over a bunch of stuff about the nature of reality lately. You know, basic stuff. 

I watched the Veritasium video about "Gravity is not a force", and the point being that "sitting still" on the surface of a planet (or other gravity well) is actually acceleration. Not that it's similar, but that it is. So I was thinking about how it might actually be acceleration - eg space is flowing through you, into the gravity well, so something must keep accelerating you upwards blah blah. But of course that sounds more like a constant velocity, so wouldn't explain it. Also I totally realize that the 4D spacetime model really does "explain" all of this, but I also don't believe that there can be only one model (myth). 

Meanwhile somehow I got from there to gravitational time dilation being a computational resource drain. More stuff to "run"? Frame rate slows down. No need to slow down the frame rate of something else (far away) that is observing, it's just the complicated area over here does. . . everything. . . slower. I am by no means the first person to think of this. I've seen it brought up online a few places, with some good counter-arguments. But there's something compelling about it. And this is not a "simulation theory" thing. Computation doesn't imply simulation. 

So this kind of leads to mass just being a side-effect of internal complexity. Or, maybe more accurately, internal time-variant complexity. Photons? nothing going on in there. Every single photon in the universe simply is what it is. Even with quantum effects, it doesn't matter - everything about the photon that can be known is known at the point that it hits something else. 

What other particles have no mass? gluons. Gravitons are thought to be massless, if they exist. People thought neutrinos were probably massless, but now not so much. 

Massless particles like photons and gluons "cannot" decay. One explanation for this is because even if the initial particle is at rest (relative to you), the decay products must be moving (else they'd be in the same spot as the original, and well that would be awkward). So they have movement-energy, so their mass-energy must be lower than the original particle's, and nothing can have negative mass-energy.

Another way of looking at it: particle decay requires internal time-variant complexity. As much as quantum effects hide it from us, something is going on in that neutron that leads to it decaying at that time, and not this time. And this isn't time-invariant like a photon; we can sense the passing of a neutron (it'd be hard; a proton is easier, though much less likely to decay) before it decays. We can keep sensing it, right up until it does decay. 

So what happened with neutrinos? turns out they don't decay, but they do change "flavors" as they fly through space. This feels similar to particle decay to me. There's something going on "inside".  

Another tangent of looking at it: the internal state of a neutron is interactive. If it's bound up in a nucleus, it doesn't decay. I really don't know the ins and outs of what makes this true, but it must have something to do with the comforting gluon exchange with its other nucleo-neighbors. Interactive -> computation. A photon's interaction with the universe is all "external". It carries a state with it, that never changes (it has time-dependent values, but the formulas which determine those values for a given time are fixed). From a computing standpoint, a photon might as well be an index into a really big lookup table. "I just got hit by photon <giant number here>, let me look that one up. . .ok it had this energy and that polarization etc". You can't say that about a neutron; it may decay before it even runs into something capable of doing that lookup. It's got some sort of internal frame loop that a photon doesn't need. 

I haven't figured out how this might apply to special relatively yet. Oh, and also this is all focusing on the time dilation effect of gravitational "fields", but not on the actual, you know, gravity part. Except something vague along the lines of "well if everything is really a wave, then if the frame rate of one side of your wave slows down compared to the other side, isn't that maybe going to bend the wave's propagation?". I guess that essentially means, time dilation itself is the primary effect, and the "bending space" part is just secondary to that.