Login or
create account to post reply or comment.
Fred Dobbs wrote on Jun. 25, 2013 @ 14:46 GMT
Here is abstract from the Nature Communications paper:
"The idea that events obey a definite causal order is deeply rooted in our understanding of the world and at the basis of the very notion of time. But where does causal order come from, and is it a necessary property of nature? Here, we address these questions from the standpoint of quantum mechanics in a new framework for multipartite correlations that does not assume a pre-defined global causal structure but only the validity of quantum mechanics locally. All known situations that respect causal order, including space-like and time-like separated experiments, are captured by this framework in a unified way. Surprisingly, we find correlations that cannot be understood in terms of definite causal order. These correlations violate a 'causal inequality' that is satisfied by all space-like and time-like correlations. We further show that in a classical limit causal order always arises, which suggests that space-time may emerge from a more fundamental structure in a quantum-to-classical transition."
Here is a link to the actual paper:
Quantum correlations with no causal orderThe most important point is that a causal order (and time as we know it) emerge in the classical limit. Ideas which actually provide insight into how what we call time arises are of great interest.
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Jun. 26, 2013 @ 02:03 GMT
Fred,
If we think of time not as a linear progression from past to future, but change causing future to become past, it does make a lot more sense. Then time is not a factor, but an effect.
Cause and effect is not sequence, but energy transfer. Yesterday doesn't cause today, rather light shining on a spinning planet causes events called days and they go from being in the future to being in the past. In this sea of energy, there are myriad relations and how we subjectively interact within them does affect our perceptions of ordering.
report post as inappropriate
Lawrence B Crowell wrote on Jun. 25, 2013 @ 18:39 GMT
The interior region of a Kerr-Newman black hole permits closed timelike curves. This region might be a mathematical fiction though, for the interior horizon that bounds this region exhibits a UV divergence. The breakdown of causal order does occur in general relativity where the curvature of spacetime is so large that a region can in effect curl up on itself. The ambiguity over whether event X is prior to Y or visa versa occurs classically for events X and Y on a spacelike interval. An observer on one frame can observe a different ordering of these events. These events though do not have a causal relationship, or at least field propagators and other constructions do not permit this to be causal.
My
essay proposes how three causally linked events in one null direction can have an ambiquity with respect to which can communicate to the other along another null direction if an event horizon is present. This is not quite the same physics proposed here, but does appear related.
LC
report post as inappropriate
Florin Moldoveanu replied on Jun. 25, 2013 @ 20:07 GMT
Hi Lawrence,
Check out my new blog: http://fmoldove.blogspot.com/ I'll slowly introduce a new QM interpretation based on my QM reconstruction result: http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.3935
Florin
report post as inappropriate
Lawrence B Crowell replied on Jun. 25, 2013 @ 21:21 GMT
Florin,
This all looks interesting. Your paper is a somewhat more formal version of what Vic Stenger does. He has a number of popular books out and I believe in the supplementary section of his book “Quantum Gods,” a book that kicks against quantum quackery and mystical mumbo jumbo based on QM, he has a derivation that is similar to the start of your paper.
I am not a big...
view entire post
Florin,
This all looks interesting. Your paper is a somewhat more formal version of what Vic Stenger does. He has a number of popular books out and I believe in the supplementary section of his book “Quantum Gods,” a book that kicks against quantum quackery and mystical mumbo jumbo based on QM, he has a derivation that is similar to the start of your paper.
I am not a big upholder of quantum interpretations. I have to read your blog page in more detail, but I notice that you make reference to MWI. The big problem I have with MWI is contextuality. The observer is free to orient a Stern Gerlach apparatus in such as way that a measurement selects an eigenbasis. Quantum physics is perfectly unitary with respect to a vector on the Bloch sphere. QM makes no such distinction. Yet with MWI the world is split off into branches according to this selection. I find that other interpretations I have looked at seem to have weaknesses.
The elliptic composability seems to indicate, from my first blanche on this, that the quantum wave is neither epistemological or ontological. I have had similar thoughts, and I think the America philosopher Willard V. O. Quine was onto something with his idea of relative ontology.
I do though have a bit of an idea, which is that relativity and QM are categorically similar things. Measurements in QM always (or almost always) involve energy. Electrons pass through an asymmetrical magnetic field to split spins according to energy, or a particle hits a photoplate and there is a chemical change (enthalpy etc) in an emulsion and so forth. Yet QM is funny with respect to energy, and correspondingly time. We have the uncertainty relationship ΔEΔT ~ ħ, but this emerges from Fourier analysis where the energy E = ħω is such that a Fourier sum or integral is from 0 to ∞. With momentum and position there are classical corresponding Poisson brackets and Fourier sums are from -∞ to ∞. There is also no such thing as a time operator, for such would prevent a discrete energy spectrum and prevent the energy from being bounded below. General relativity has a similar “energy rule” which is that T^{00} >= 0, or that there is a lower bound to energy. A spacetime which violates this rule has a quantum source that is unbounded below.
I will comment on your blogs before long. I have a number of things I need to attend to this week before I can think too much about this. I am reviewing a paper on general relativity that is rather complicated.
Cheers LC
view post as summary
report post as inappropriate
Florin Moldoveanu replied on Jun. 25, 2013 @ 21:57 GMT
Lawrence,
I do not propose MWI but a similar idea. To make it airtight I need to solve 3 technical problems one of which requires deeper advances into the infinite dimensional case updating the Grothendieck group to a Hopf algebra and this is highly nontrivial. Another one is deriving Born's rule but I think I have a very good handle on it.
In the end I hope to show how QM is fully intuitive and follows from very natural physical postulates. I am also expanding QM beyond C* algebras into the Hilbert modules territory and I hope to arrive at the Standard Model in Connes' formulation in a very natural way.
I am looking forward to your comments, but in a few days I will be going on vacation overseas with probably spotty internet access and I will not be able to reply right away or write new posts for my blog (I'll be back middle of July).
Best,
Florin
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe wrote on Jun. 25, 2013 @ 23:15 GMT
While the scientific community dismisses quantum interpretations as "quantum mumbo jumbo", one must remember that scientists are fallable and are capable of misunderstanding nature. The two slit experiement continues to baffle science; the big bang appears to have come from nothingness (according to science). Furthermore, the wave-function which appears to be connected to particles (bosons/fermions) and geometry (two slit diffraction), yet is ignored because we can't measure it. But does that truly mean it does not exist? I would say doubtful.
It is more likely that the big bang came from a very special type of nothingness. A nothingness very similar to wave-functions (in that we can't detect it) yet is quite capable of manifesting a big bang.
I think this is an inescapable conclusion.
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe replied on Jun. 26, 2013 @ 01:14 GMT
A big bang from nothingness is a sure bet that there is a lot more that we can't see or measure. There is a lot more to the universe and the laws of physics that is beyond our reach.
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Jun. 26, 2013 @ 02:14 GMT
Jason,
Just as a thought experiment, what if the something from nothing is just quantum fluctuations in areas where there is very little of anything. Thus it would occur most often in intergalactic space, creating the effect of expanding space. Since this is balanced by gravity, gravity is the corresponding collapse of this fluctuation. Since we can only detect light that travels between galaxies, the light from the most distant galaxies travels across this positive fluctuation, creating the impression of expansion, but we neglect to add the contraction of gravity that keeps space overall flat.
Just a thought experiment, but one which doesn't need inflation or dark energy, or possibly even dark matter.
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe replied on Jun. 26, 2013 @ 03:11 GMT
John,
I take Hubble redshift at face value. In other words, I believe that photons really do redshift as a linear function of how far away their source is. I interpret the cause differently than the text books. I assume the vacuum of space is filled with wave-functions (existent things). I think that photons travel along these wave-functions. Since the big bang was an outward explosion, I'm not surprised that galaxies are still moving away from one another. This ocean of wave-functions has to compensate for the expansion of the universe (universe getting bigger). It does so by elongating all of the wave-functions in the quantum vacuum (increasing their wavelength). That's how I look at it.
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Jun. 26, 2013 @ 09:31 GMT
Jason,
Which goes to another point I keep raising; If space is what you measure with a ruler and the intergalactic ruler is lightyears, how is it that this expansion is presumably to be measured in increasing numbers of them? It would seem this is an expansion IN space, not OF space, as measured in lightyears. If there is this stable metric of space, how is it that every point is the center and not just one point?
What does get overlooked is that galaxies are not just inert points of measure, presumably they are gravitational wells, presumably curving/pulling space in.
And of course, radiating light back out across that void of intergalactic space.
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe replied on Jun. 26, 2013 @ 18:40 GMT
John,
I think nature uses a trick to measure space and time, a trick never thought of by the scientific community. The trick goes like this. Wave functions are existent, but are unmeasurable. The vacuum of space is filled with wave functions of all EM frequencies/wavelengths energies and directions. These wave-functions are intrinsically the cause of the speed of light, permittivity and permeability of free space. These wave functions are entangled into a "weave of space-time" which give it a gravitational constant as well. The evolution of time is emergent from all of the wave-functions. Inertia is just the effect of one's particles using a particular set of these wave-functions. Einstein equivalence forces are the effect of transitioning from one set of wave-functions to another set (with a different momentum).
The wavelengths of the whole range of frequencies in space-time establish a standard of length/distance for nature. These wave-functions oscillate and therefore establish a progression of time. Since all standard model particles are just creations of wave-functions with energy, like kinks in a string, then time is automatically built into the particles via its group of oscillating wave-functions.
A sufficiently advanced civilization would be able to build a hyper-drive space-ship that can detach its particles from the space-time continuum ()sever the connection to the wave functions of the space-time continuum). It then becomes an object in hyperspace, subject to the laws of physics of hyper-space (faster c). The space-ship would just vanish. Hyperspace has its own clock and laws of relativity.
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe replied on Jun. 26, 2013 @ 19:03 GMT
A detection of gravitational discontinuities might be a way to detect the use of hyper-drive technology. If a 100 ton space-ship suddenly vanishes from the space-time continuum, then so too will its gravity vanish as well. It would have to. Otherwise, we would be able to watch this gravitational halo traveling across the universe at multiples of the speed of light.
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Jun. 26, 2013 @ 20:28 GMT
Jason,
If you sever the connections, you "un-kink" the string and the particles are just their constituent energy? It seems to me the result would be to just radiate away, like ripples on a pond.
As for the point I keep trying to make, that the theory of an expanding universe contradicts its own premise by relying on a constant speed of light, no one refutes it, but no one accepts it. As I recall, Lawrence has been about the only one to even try, by arguing C is only measured locally, which is obvious, as we have no interstellar or galactic measuring devices, but the point is we use lightyears(aprox 6 trillion miles) as the cosmic ruler. Space is what you measure with a ruler. Anyone care to argue that? So if intergalactic space expands, wouldn't that mean the unit used to define it should expand as well? Otherwise it isn't expanding space, but an increasing amount of stable space, ie. an expansion IN space, not OF space. This isn't theory or experiment, just clarifying the concepts being used.
2+2 does not =5. This is a very naked emperor.
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe replied on Jun. 27, 2013 @ 01:25 GMT
John,
I agree with Lawrence that the speed of light is measured locally. In fact, I believe that the speed of light, permitivity and permeability exist as characteristics of existent wave-functions. This way, a quantum physicist might calculate a wave-function for a quantum system, but some invisible phenomenon of nature, at the quantum level, actually behaves like the calculated wave-function. That same invisible phenomenon might be small, but it interacts with others like itself in the quantum vacuum. Over the distance of a light year, I think there are invisible wave-functions that pop into existence (and then vanish); such wave-function phenomena should be highly reactive and responsive to the changing conditions of the world (like opening and closing of slits). They would be conductors of energy (like EM waves), but there existence is ghostly. They are there to facilitate the laws of physics.
As horrific as this idea sounds to atheists, it's almost as if some creator of the universe, God, decided to make the laws of physics operate in a certain way, and then used a spirit like thing (the wave-function) to enforce the existence of the laws of physics. Beyond that, there is no natural reason why the physics constants (h, c) would be what they are. I'm not so sure that G isn't an emergent quantity based on the "aetherial material" used to create space-time.
Now that I've put forward a magical (God did it) explanation, I assume someone will shoot back with a logical/natural reason why singularities just come out of nothingness.
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe replied on Jun. 27, 2013 @ 01:31 GMT
What is the aetherially ghostly invisible substance that space-time geometry and wave-functions are made of? To me, it looks like some kind of magic or miracle that the scientific community ignores.
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Jun. 27, 2013 @ 02:30 GMT
Jason,
I agree with Lawrence as well, but it has nothing to do with disproving my point.
Singularities drew out of a mathematical description of gravity, so think about gravity for a moment. It pulls you down to earth, but if you were to go to the very center of the earth, you might be crushed to a point by all the actual pressure, but wouldn't the actual effect of gravity be centrifugal, rather than centripetal, since the mass would all be above you? Now take that to the center of the galaxy and what do you have; A very tight vortex that is shooting jets of electrons out the poles. It seems to me that this singularity isn't some collapse into another dimension, but a torsion/tornado like process that is ejecting whatever falls in, back out across the universe in some larger cycle of collapsing mass and expanding energy.
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Jun. 27, 2013 @ 02:40 GMT
Not to mention dwarf stars that suck in mass into a very rapid spin, until they reach a certain limit and explode.
I think gravity is not so much a property of mass, but an effect of energy collapsing into mass and then into ever denser concentrations of it. When mass turns to energy, it releases pressure, so wouldn't energy collapsing into mass create a vacuum? They can't find dark matter, but there is excesses of cosmic rays in the perimeters of galaxies and those stars on the perimeters tend to be light in metals.
report post as inappropriate
Georgina Woodward replied on Jun. 27, 2013 @ 02:54 GMT
Hi Jason,
if space-time is the output of data processing, as I'm sure it must be, then the stuff that it is made of is the same stuff as the things in it. That is to say if it is electrical activity in the brain or computer that is making things apparent then it is also fabricating the spaces between. So too for wave functions, as theoretical things they can be thought about or written.
Niels Bohr said "There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract physical description."
Information is distributed in uni-temporal space though and the many possibilities that might be observed become the one observation that is made through observer participation. That's not Many Worlds becoming one macroscopic world but only persisting data from what was, being selected and formed into an image reality, (space-time) manifestation output.
What is space made of? is a different question. Seems to be called the Higgs field nowadays. I only understood what that meant when I saw a Higgs particle being referred to as the quantum of ubiquitous resistance. I really don't mind what it is called, its that something rather than empty vacuum.
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe replied on Jun. 27, 2013 @ 03:16 GMT
Hi Georgina,
I don't think space-time is the output of data processing (e.g. 1's and 0's). I think space-time and the quantum vacuum are made out of something that is clearly beyond human experience. If I said it was aetheric and spirit-like, that would simply mean that I can't touch it or confine it, yet it has properties (c, h, G...) and does things like produce standard model particles and gravity. Do you know why physics is a "solve the boundary conditions" kind of process? Because I honestly think there is a ghostly -like phenomenon that pops into existence that satisfies the physical boundary conditions. This ghostly like phenomenon allows particles and space-time geometry to exist. Such a phenomenon is dynamic to changing boundary conditions. The wave-function and particle wave duality give us a good idea that this must be how physics is manifesting. So it wouldn't be stacked E8 hyperspheres. And it's not nothingness. Nor is it the manifestation of logic as quantum mechanics kind of scoffs at logic.
John,
I have to think about it.
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe replied on Jun. 27, 2013 @ 08:34 GMT
The universe is a big place. There is a good likelihood that we're not the only intelligent lifeforms out there. What are the chances of there being an intelligent species that figured out how the laws of physics are implemented? Why the physics constants are what they are? Could such an advanced civilization exceed the speed of light?
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe replied on Jun. 27, 2013 @ 09:30 GMT
If science cannot explain how the laws of physics are implemented, then, whether you like it or not, whether you are atheists or not, you are subject to the laws of the Creator, the laws of God.
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Jun. 27, 2013 @ 15:56 GMT
Georgina, Jason,
Why not at least consider how some of the agreed on points might fit together?
Einstein argued the contraction of mass points under the influence of gravity is a collapse of space. To balance this effect, so the universe doesn't contract to a point, he added the cosmological constant. While this was rejected when other galaxies were discovered to be redshifted, it has ben resurrected by redshift not matching basic Big Bang theory. So we say the galaxies are moving apart because the space inbetween them is expanding. Yet it seems to be forgotten that galaxies are actually contracting space and according to both theory and measurement by COBE and WMAP that these are closely balanced, resulting in overall flat space.
Yet because it is now a given that the universe began at a primordial point and expanded out since, there is no consideration of how these matching effects of expansion and contraction might most effectively fit in a larger cycle.
With all the attention given to symmetries, you would think this most obvious and evident relationship would get some consideration, but not if it conflicts with any ideas careers are built on.
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe replied on Jun. 27, 2013 @ 19:50 GMT
"Yet because it is now a given that the universe began at a primordial point and expanded out since, there is no consideration of how these matching effects of expansion and contraction might most effectively fit in a larger cycle."
John, Georgina,
Gravity and anti-gravity most definitely deserve some attention. If we could manipulate gravity, we would resolve the energy problems of the world. But that's not what science does. Science is an institution for promoting cynicism and anti-God/anti-hope rhetoric. The idea that scientists would try to figure out how the laws of gravity are implemented is utterly beyond their cynical point of view.
It would serve the needs of the world if the money allocated for scientific research was spent on buying lollipops for the children of the world. According to science, things like honor, integrity, love, virtue, goodness and sacredness do not exist and are not worthy of our efforts.
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Jun. 27, 2013 @ 23:02 GMT
Jason,
Now you are getting a little cynical about science. Why? Because it also has its pluses and minuses. Just like many things, it gets trapped in it own feedback loops. The current contest is a good example of how it is falling into the same deconstructionist loop, as it goes from information about reality, to information is reality, that swallowed philosophy. Then those who may try to break out of the cycle get accused of not being purists, failure of nerve, not "getting it," etc. for questioning the direction the crowd has gone.
It is in many ways, a gravitational contraction and the only thing that can escape gravity is energy and light.
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe replied on Jun. 27, 2013 @ 23:03 GMT
Simple question: what is the natural process that sets the physics constants like c, h, G, etc...
If you don't know, then maybe God picked them?
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe replied on Jun. 28, 2013 @ 01:30 GMT
John,
I'm cynical about science because it's hard for me to emotionally grasp the fact that science is an imcomplete description of reality. In a debate about evidence and what can be measured, science crushes religion, spirituality and values. I was raised as a spiritualist and a Theosophist. It is those values that give me hope and a reason to behave acceptably. But as science and atheism destroy the synaptic pathways of my beliefs, there is nothing to stop me from being rude to my neighbors and my loved ones. If there is no God, no purpose to life, no meaning, no value, then "brotherly love" and basic human decency deteriorate. I can't go 24 hours without hearing some disparaging remark about the religious life or having a relationship with God or believing in UFO's. I was very rude to an elderly lady, this morning, because my beliefs and values are being destroyed by scientism. Have you ever noticed that famous psychics and mediums like John Edwards and Silvia Brown try very hard to make people feel better about death (afterlife)? Whether they are in contact with something real or are merely creating the illusion of hope, they are giving happiness and joy to people. In contrast, there are intellectual snobs, trolls and rotten people who disparage the whole subject because it doesn't give scientific evidence or "information content".
And while scientism is spreading its "spiritual disease", physicists are ignoring, ignoring, ignoring the existence of unseen and unmeasureable phenomenon such as wave-functions.
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Jun. 28, 2013 @ 02:36 GMT
Jason,
I have to say, I decided a very long time ago, that I would be the person I want me to be and it had nothing to do with any organized religious ideas. It doesn't mean I'm any kind of saint. It just means that, for better or worse, I'm honest with myself. I realize that most people become indoctrinated into cultural systems long before they are in a position to question them, while I was able to juggle various worlds enough to find some space of my own. The fact is there is no list of absolute good and bad. It really is a matter of being able to sense what you should do and working toward it, even if it doesn't always seem to make sense. A God would have to be an absolute, but absolute is basis, not apex. It is the essence from which we rise, not some ideal from which we fell. When you really learn to connect and combine that essence within yourself and within others, it will be an adventure, rather than a destination. There will always be sorrow, but it is a consequence of loss and in order to gain anything, you have to be willing to accept that you may lose it. Pain is the price you must pay for being able to feel in the first place.
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe replied on Jun. 28, 2013 @ 03:20 GMT
John,
I am a spiritualist, Theosophist and a new ager. I would like to have some kind of spiritual relationship with God/Jesus. But to tell you the truth, there are aspects to that religion that I can't stand. I can't acheive a religious high by stepping on gays & lesbians. I don't want to have to steal someone else's freedom so that I can have a feeling of joy or peace of mind.
What I do is different. I can get a spiritual high by contemplating the existence of UFO's, space-aliens, and some intergalactic community of technically and spiritually advanced worlds. Unfortunately, the physics constants are not cooperating. The physics constants are definitely a buzz kill for me and my spiritual high. So I've thought a lot about this. What does an advanced alien race have to do to overcome the speed of light restriction, so that they can reach earth, abduct humans and do what aliens do?
Answer: They really have to figure out how the laws of physics and the physics constants are being implemented, so that they can change those values. I keep trying to suggest this physics forums, but this stuff is significantly more advanced than what science can do now. So does this make me nuts? Or does the physics community have to explain why the physics constants are what they are?
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Jun. 28, 2013 @ 16:11 GMT
Jason,
It reminds me of an old line by Richard Bach, "Argue your limitations and they are yours." If you are looking for freedom and want to find it by escaping the planet, you are banging your head against a very hard wall. Maybe you should start questioning why you chose that goal. I used to be equally fascinated by such technical means, but eventually found the boring stability I wished to escape to be the illusion. Now it seems I'm mostly doing my best just to maintain some sense of sanity and stability. An analogy I use is that when you are young, you think of the seasons as summer and winter, because you are pushing the boundaries, but when you get older, it is spring and fall, because you are seeking balance. Put this in terms of the scalar vs the vector of time and temperature. So often we think in linear terms, one thing after another. Yet the larger dynamic is more expansion/contraction. In technology, everyone is looking for the next big thing, as though it were a linear leap ahead, while the cumulative process is bunches of similar advances, supporting one another. I think too much of our physics is trying to plot out these linear progressions, particles, trajectories, collisions, super symmetric particles to balance, strings, etc. I think when we finally sit there scratching our heads as to why there is nothing beyond standard model, we have to begin to sense all the connective tissue that is very much there, the waves, etc. but doesn't leave such clear distinct signals. When we can get beyond all this physical quantization, then maybe we might start to get beyond the spiritual atomization.
It won't be about escaping the planet, but finally understanding it as a whole. We have a bit more banging our head against the wall though.
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe replied on Jun. 28, 2013 @ 22:35 GMT
John,
When Stephen Hawking declares that no God is needed to create the universe, he is mistaken for the following reasons. There is no reason why anything at all should suddenly, magically, pop into existence. If the universe was made out of superstrings or m-branes or E8 spheres or something else, then one can always ask: where did these superstrings or m-branes or E8 sphere come from? How did they get their properties? How did they get their physics constants? If universes could just pop into existence for no apparent reason, then physicists would be wizards and Stephen Hawking would hold the Elder Wand. And I would be a magical pink unicorn.
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Jun. 29, 2013 @ 10:47 GMT
Jason,
I'm not Hawking and while I only see the need for physical cause for physical effect, the issue of consciousness needs some deeper explanation, I make the effort to try to understand how and why you see the world the way you do. What I want to know is why you cannot understand why I see the whole expanding universe theory as complete nonsense. Nothing personal, but I have the same problem with most of the people here and cannot understand why. Even when I point out to those who might have some powers of reason that have not been completely drowned in rote memory that arguing space is a measurement, that intergalactic space expands and that the measure of intergalactic space remains stable is complete and utter nonsensically contradictory stupidity, it just doesn't seem to register. I feel like I'm running around trying to shake some life back into zombies. Religious fundamentalists have nothing on cosmologists when it comes to unshakable faith.
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe replied on Jun. 29, 2013 @ 17:01 GMT
John,
Are you saying that the expansion of the universe doesn't make sense? Why wouldn't it expand? 14 billion years ago, the universe started out the size of a pea. Now it's really really big. According to Hubble's law, galaxies are redshifting away from us as a linear function of their distance. That sort of implies that they're moving away from us. And why wouldn't they move away from us? The universe exploded into existence.
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Jun. 29, 2013 @ 17:37 GMT
Jason,
Have you really followed the evolution of this theory, or do you assume it is just factual? It's based on two observations and various patches to explain observations that don't agree with theory. First off, it is to explain why the light of distant galaxies is redshifted, since it is assumed they travel as point particles and the only way to redshift would be for the source to...
view entire post
Jason,
Have you really followed the evolution of this theory, or do you assume it is just factual? It's based on two observations and various patches to explain observations that don't agree with theory. First off, it is to explain why the light of distant galaxies is redshifted, since it is assumed they travel as point particles and the only way to redshift would be for the source to recede. Yet why would light travel as a point particle and not expand out as waves when released, with the point being a function of its absorption by atomic structure? It has no internal attractive force to hold it together.
Here is an interesting explanation for how light would be redshifted as a sample of a wavefront.Another reason given is that it explains the cosmic background radiation as residue of the initial stage, but if light is simply redshifted by distance, this radiation would be the solution to Olber's paradox, the issue of why the entire sky is not light from ever more distant sources in an infinite universe.
The reason why the issue I raise is important is because redshift is directly proportional to distance, so if it is a conventional expansion IN space, this would mean we are at the exact center of the universe. So the idea is that it is an expansion OF space and every point is the center of its view of the universe. Yet if space is a stable medium, as implicit in a stable speed of light, this doesn't work, as space is not "expanding," as measured by the speed of light.
Then there is inflation, dark energy and dark matter, all major fudge factors to explain why observation and theory don't match. Usually when the observation doesn't match the theory, you reconsider the theory, not just accept that 90% of the universe is invisible and it all expanded out to many times its visible size in a fraction of a moment. If redshift is an optical effect, ie. a function of light expanding to fill space, there is no need for dark energy to explain why the rate of expansion doesn't match prediction. If what we have is a cosmic cycle of expanding energy and collapsing mass, there is no need for inflation to explain why the background radiation is so smooth. It might simply be due to a phase transition level at 3.7k, above which quantum particles start to coalesce out of this radiation. Sort of like a dew point. As for dark matter, is gravity simply a property of mass, or is it an effect of this energy condensing into mass, creating a vacuum?
The fact is, that whatever the story, one shouldn't argue that space is what you measure with a ruler, then say intergalactic space expands, yet the ruler we use to judge it remains stable. If that was schoolwork, you would get a big fat F.
view post as summary
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe replied on Jun. 29, 2013 @ 18:16 GMT
Well, we can't trust a simple ruler because general relativity messes with distance and time. Personally, I advocate that space-time itself is made out of the wave-functions of electromagnetic frequencies. I visualize that all possible E&M frequencies, wavelengths, and vectors have a wave-function that exists as some undetectable set of waves that stretch all across space. When the universe expands, these wave-functions expand like springs. If there happens to be a photon (quanta of energy) traveling at the speed of light along this wave-function, then the photon will naturally redshift because the wave-length of the wave-function is expanding because space-time is expanding because space-time is made out of wave-functions. Do you get what I mean? The universe expands because the big bang was an explosion (outward traveling) not an implosion. If space-time doesn't expand with it, then there will be patches of universe without any space-time in it (which we don't observe). Space-time has to expand because galaxies are flying apart. Since space time is made out of wave-functions, then the wave-functions have to increase their wave-length.
So I guess you agree that the universe is expanding. But you don't agree with the details like inflation theory and dark energy. Is that what you mean?
BTW, dark energy is just the gravitational effect of all this stuff we can't see at all. It's invisible.
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe replied on Jun. 29, 2013 @ 18:32 GMT
Clearly the laws of physics are incomplete. If they were complete, then life would be fun and meaningful. Since life is so dreary and cynical, then something is missing. Life is supposed to be joyful.
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Jun. 29, 2013 @ 20:43 GMT
Jason,
It isn't so much about the actual physics, as it is about the argument put forth contradicts itself.
Gravity is described as a contraction of space because the mass points used as measurement draw together.
The argument for redshift being due to the actual, physical recession of the source is basic doppler effect. For example, if the train moving away has a lower...
view entire post
Jason,
It isn't so much about the actual physics, as it is about the argument put forth contradicts itself.
Gravity is described as a contraction of space because the mass points used as measurement draw together.
The argument for redshift being due to the actual, physical recession of the source is basic doppler effect. For example, if the train moving away has a lower pitched whistle, it isn't because space is being stretched, but because the distance is increasing. Space that was in front of the train is now behind the train, as it moves through space. This effect wouldn't be detectable if space was actually being stretched, because the reference is increasing as well. The railroad tracks, the air, the light would all be stretching.
So lets accept space is what you measure, but the problem here is that light doesn't remain a point when it is released, it expands like gas to fill the space and so space, as measured by light, expands, just as space, as measured by mass, contracts.
So we have these galaxies that are gravitational vortices, drawing mass into them, as well as the measurements defined by this mass. They then radiate out enormous amounts f light, radiation and other forms of cosmic rays, that can travel as far as at least 12 billion lightyears on the visible spectrum, possibly much further on the infrared. So what we have are these cycles of expanding radiation and contracting mass. The reason they balance out is because they are two sides of the same cycle.
Since the light eventually contracts back down into mass, the "dark matter" is actually the contraction due to the light effectively "gluing" everything together. Remember the reason for proposing it is because the whole galaxy spins relatively evenly across the whole diameter, when it would seem the center has much more mass and would therefore spin faster, so what is needed is some attractive force holding it together, most likely electrostatic in nature, the "light" as glue. Your "unseen wave functions."
view post as summary
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe replied on Jul. 1, 2013 @ 01:31 GMT
John,
I don't know what to say. The universe is bizarre in its behavior. There is only so much that we can understand from our planetary point of view about the universe. I don't know which assumptions are actually wrong. Maybe there are important things that exist that haven't been measured or can't be measured. Or things that can be measured, like quantum states, are not involved in...
view entire post
John,
I don't know what to say. The universe is bizarre in its behavior. There is only so much that we can understand from our planetary point of view about the universe. I don't know which assumptions are actually wrong. Maybe there are important things that exist that haven't been measured or can't be measured. Or things that can be measured, like quantum states, are not involved in primary causal relationships for quantum field dynamics that we have no direct experience with. I think that at some point you have to make a choice about whether you are a pesimist, and you beleive there is nothing beyond what is measureable, or you're an optimist and believe there are more dynamics that are presently out of reach to science.
For example, there could be quantum entanglement wave-function structures that were created at the time of the big bang, that we are totally oblivous to, yet they could be effecting quantum eigenstate measurements in some way that is predictable to alien intelligences, but not to us.
Quantum mechanics and quantum entanglement leave huge gaps for people with imagination to come up with scenarios and ideas. For instance, could there be quantum entanglement life forms that flit around the universe, being unbound by the speed of light c, unbound by energy, yet they can reach into our standard model existence with wave-function like tendrils, and push our atoms around for there own purposes. It would be this invisible thing trying to interact with our standard model reality.
Or perhaps the whole issue of consciousness comes down to "who or what" is receiving the "feeliness" attributed to the undefinable quality of consciousness. Maybe there are qantum entanglement lifeforms that can translate the neurological/electro-chemical storm of a brain into meaningful experiences like love, that can experience the color "blue" and the sensation of being one with all things (which is what entanglement is suggestive of).
Whether someone is a cynical atheistist or an optimistic person of faith, we know that the biological body dies. What we don't know is the extent of true reality. We don't know how much is beyond our limited existence.
view post as summary
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Jul. 1, 2013 @ 17:54 GMT
Jason,
You lay out two moral positions; pessimist and optimist. Now consider in objective terms the characteristics you assign them. The pessimist is someone who is intellectually conservative and will only accept what is repeatable, measurable, distinct, etc. While the optimist is always willing to look beyond the known, expanding out further than distinct structure, knowing that to limit reality to what can be measured is self referential defeatism.
Now think of this relationship in terms of the two profound physical processes, that of structured, gravitational mass and entangled, expanding radiant energy. Now consider the ways that the discipline of physics effectively limits its ability to describe reality by insisting that only the structured and measurable side of this equation is real and the other is statistical, to the point of insisting light can only travel as point particles and thus can only be redshifted by recession of the source.
If we look at it as one cycle of energy expanding out over billions of lightyears and mass contracting into structure over tens of millions of lightyears, it provides an infinitely dynamic process and conceptual framework for understanding reality. All of it, from emotions to galaxies.
The arrow of time for structure is to contract into the past, while the arrow of time for energy is to expand out to the future. As the present, that energy which is dynamically manifesting, moves onto the future, while the forms manifested fall into the past.
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe replied on Jul. 1, 2013 @ 23:07 GMT
John,
"If we look at it as one cycle of energy expanding out over billions of lightyears and mass contracting"
"The arrow of time for structure is to contract into the past, while the arrow of time for energy is to expand out to the future."
What you're talking about sounds like yin & yang. Expansion & contraction, past & future, ... I totally agree that there is this pervasive yin/yang quality to the universe. And I agree that both pessimism & optimism have their place. But for me, my yin/yang, with regard to pessimism and optimism, is out of balance. I need more optimism.
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Jul. 2, 2013 @ 03:11 GMT
Jason,
It is a matter of what you chose to be optimistic about. It would seem humanity is engaged in an extreme case of overreach and times are likely to get even more interesting. We have had the party and now it looks like hangover time. One main reason for studying and understanding nature is to be able to see beyond and put in context current circumstances. Would you prefer pink ponies and happy faces? Not knowing what is coming? Or that your ability to understand allows you some degree of objectivity in even the most extreme circumstances? As I tell the young people I know, what your generation has in store will allow a lot of opportunity for character building. The fact is as individuals, we are all mortal and are designed that way, yet all are motivated by the same elemental spark of awareness. We are living through a stage that will have a big chapter in the history books and really don't have any option other than dealing with it as best we can. Just as with current physics, there is a lot of stuff that will get washed away when the bubble starts to pop, but what remains will be a stronger foundation because of it.
report post as inappropriate
Anonymous replied on Jul. 2, 2013 @ 03:39 GMT
Talking of optimism, I have bought another book to read "What are you optimistic about, today's leading thinkers lighten up." Edited by John Brockman, 2007.
Has over 150 entries it says, so plenty of reasons to be cheerful.
report post as inappropriate
Georgina Woodward replied on Jul. 2, 2013 @ 04:03 GMT
John Brodix Merryman replied on Jul. 2, 2013 @ 11:03 GMT
Georgina,
Brockman does come up with some intriguing topics and people to respond to them. To be my somewhat cynical self though, not only is it likely easier to be optimistic when you are one of society's thought leaders, but it probably would be considered a personal and professional requirement. To the people who know me, I have a reputation as an alarmist concerning the status quo and completely
pie in the sky when it comes to solutions. The last few years though, they tend to take me more seriously about the problems, if not what to do about them. That is the nature of swarm intelligence though. All the ants head of in different directions and the ones that find the food become the leaders. When the old sources of food run out, new directions have to be found. Today there is a lot of linear projecting, from infinite economic growth, to multiverses, which has little basis in physical reality, but those in power do not want to accept that cycles turn and what had been a stepping stone to progress can become a stumbling block to further progress.
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe replied on Jul. 2, 2013 @ 19:41 GMT
John, Georgina,
I have felt drawn to quantum entanglement as some kind of magical force that permeates the universe. Would there be ghosts that truly exist, then vanish when a skeptic is near, they would be made out of quantum entanglements and have fingers that reach into our standard model existence and nudge our particles for their own mysterious purposes. Apparently, quantum entanglement is needed to hold DNA together.
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/419590/quantum
-entanglement-holds-dna-together-say-physicists/
I probably had ancestors 100,000 years ago that talked to spirits who helped the tribe find food, fresh water and survive the elements. Perhaps they made a difficult life more bearable and interesting.
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Jul. 3, 2013 @ 02:23 GMT
Jason,
One of the problems I raise in my "it from bit" entry, that since energy manifests information and information defines energy, as energy is conserved, old information is erased as new is recorded. No telling how our distant ancestors thought or what concepts mattered to them. We even forget alot of what was common knowledge from quite recently, as those of us more than a few decades can attest.
One thought though, since I was a kid, I've found what people refer to as "floaters," those spots, squiggles, lines, etc, that move around in our vision, seem to have distinct conscious manifestations, both of what is going on in my own subconscious and of input from other's attention, both people and other life forms. Some years ago, I happened to be reading a story on ancient cave art and they had various pictures of the drawings, many of which are abstract and possibly rudimentary forms of language. Yet some of them seemed to clearly be impressions of these optical effects that I see. One example that comes to mind is the classic representation of the heart, which is formed if you take a circle(a soul) and run a line(Cupid's arrow) through it and pull in one direction.
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Jul. 3, 2013 @ 11:28 GMT
Jason, thanks for the link. It was an interesting read, though I think the premise is an enormous steaming pile of nonsense.
The author in one short sentence admits the only thing that makes the premise even plausible: "They say that one line of evidence is that a purely classical analysis of the energy required to hold DNA together does not add up." Of course it doesn't -- and can't -- because biological systems are thermodynamically open. One can't simply calculate the binding energy of cellular atoms and add it to the electronic energy of molecular exchanges and throw in some kinematic and dynamic effects and call it "the sum of energy that holds DNA together." The equations are nonlinear, notoriously hard to solve. The researchers are apparently assuming that DNA is nothing more than static discrete coding information that would degrade over time (by Shannon entropy) without being entangled in some mysterious way. Not necessary -- nonequilibrium thermodynamics sufficiently explains the phenomenon.
What we already know at a classical level, is that it is only necessary and sufficient that the energy input to a biological organism exceeds the throughput such that the entropy generated is less than the input, a requirement that keeps the system from going to equilibrium. This is true of all biological life on Earth, which is powered by the Sun, and which we can calculate to arbitrary accuracy. That is the energy that continuously holds DNA, and all the other elements of biology, together. No discontinuous mystical quantum incantations required.
Tom
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe replied on Jul. 3, 2013 @ 20:14 GMT
Hi Tom,
" This is true of all biological life on Earth, which is powered by the Sun, and which we can calculate to arbitrary accuracy. That is the energy that continuously holds DNA, and all the other elements of biology, together. No discontinuous mystical quantum incantations required."
The fact that electric charge needs virtual photons to do something specific seems like magic to me. It looks as if virtual photons are compelled by magic (not accident) to uphold Maxwell's equations. I thought that virtual photons (virtual particles in general) were carriers of quantum values that were under the command of some powerfully magical being. I thought that Maxwell's equations were the magical command that virtual photons have to obey. Is there evidence to the contrary?
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Jul. 4, 2013 @ 01:01 GMT
(Reposted to correct thread)
Hi Jason,
"Is there evidence to the contrary?"
Because science is a rationalist enterprise, judgments of reality are based on positive correspondence between abstract theory and physical result, not on the absence of evidence. Would you have it another way?
Tom
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe replied on Jul. 4, 2013 @ 03:16 GMT
Tom,
Science is a precursor to engineering. It's for the best that it works as a rationalist enterprise. I suppose in a 100 years, a thousand years, ten thousand years, science will get around to unlocking the nuts & bolts of where the physics constant come from. By then, there will be hyper-drives, gravity drives, free energy and all that.
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Jul. 4, 2013 @ 14:18 GMT
Hi Jason,
You write, "Science is a precursor to engineering." Yes, the sense that science is a sufficient though not necessary condition for engineering. Engineering is neither necessary nor sufficient for science.
I agree with you on the impending growth of technology. With the way in which information availability and usage is accelerating -- I consider that few in 1850 envisioned automobiles as manifest in only a half century, and few in 1950 would foresee the information revolution a half-century later. Now in less than a quarter century from that point, we should find ourselves poised for the next great transformational technology.
If we can refrain from blowing ourselves up first -- as the Drake equation informs.
Tom
report post as inappropriate
Jason Mark Wolfe replied on Jul. 4, 2013 @ 19:05 GMT
Hi Thomas,
"If we can refrain from blowing ourselves up first -- as the Drake equation informs."
During the cold war era, the world was fascinated by nuclear war. But I think we've out grown that. From my perspective, I think it's a race against resources. I think there is a chance that humanity could overcome the physics constants. But we have to do it before we run out of resources. A population of 7 billion people means there are a lot of really really smart people. But these levels of population are not sustainable unless we can obtain resources from asteroids and other planets at low cost. I know science scoffs at the UFO reports of triangular space crafts doing impossible things like breaking the sound barrier without creating sonic booms or recombining with other space-crafts in ways that contradict all that we know about building spacecrafts. I for one think these are demonstrations of what alien technology can do. They are probably projections of visual images from outside of space-time. That's why they don't disturb molecules of air. Alien-UFO phenomena may or may not be human imagination. But since we got it, we should use it. Why not ask ourselves about the physics of traveling outside of the space-time continuum? That is the only way to travel across the galaxy.
Our resources will only last for so long, and then, it will be the big crunch of population.
report post as inappropriate
hide replies
Lawrence B Crowell wrote on Jun. 26, 2013 @ 02:10 GMT
Florin,
I happen to be working at the moment on a cobordism between subspraces with knots that form a portion of a subchain of a manifold. This is Grothendiek's theory of categories and groups. The subchains are knots, and in the Jones polynomial defines Hopf links.
Spacetime has within it all quantum field theoretic data when curvature is present.
Cheers LC
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray wrote on Jun. 26, 2013 @ 12:02 GMT
"For instance, if you input 1, 2 and 3 into the box and get out 3, 5 and 7, you could calculate that the box multiplies by 2 and adds one."
This assumed result highlights one of the problems with experimental mathematics. The black box might just as well interpret {1,2,3} as the set {6} and output {3,5,7} as the set {15}, implying 2{X} + 3.
Classical arithmetic rational functions do not necessarily apply to the behavior of linear superposition.
Tom
report post as inappropriate
Robert H McEachern wrote on Jun. 26, 2013 @ 23:01 GMT
"A key idea to achieve such a situation involves the fact that quantum mechanics allows objects to exist in superposition, so that they can be in two or more contradictory states simultaneously;"
QM does not *allow* objects to exist in a superposition, or otherwise. Objects exist however they exist, irregardless of the existence of the Theory of Quantum Mechanics. QM merely *describes* objects as existing in a superposition. However, the fact that such descriptions are both possible and accurate, does not imply that the objects actual exist as a superposition. Superposition is merely a sufficient description, but it has never been demonstrated to be a necessary one, or that objects actually exist in a superposition.
Rob McEachern
report post as inappropriate
Eckard Blumschein replied on Jul. 28, 2013 @ 09:07 GMT
Dear Rob,
I appreciate your intention to reveal the mistake behind the maneuver. Yes, a description that does allow something impossible might be simply wrong or at least incomplete. Let's investigate in all directions. I see a plausible flaw in the lazy convention of current mathematics to superimpose the limit from the right and the limit from the left to the middle value of both values. Look at Fig. 3 of
my previous essay .
Xour ally,
Eckard
report post as inappropriate
doug wrote on Jun. 30, 2013 @ 14:41 GMT
Thank you for a great article -
Article excerpt and CIG commentary:
It’s well established that the physical aspects of quantum experiments, such as a particle’s position or momentum, are not well defined before they are measured. (CIG commentary : that is because they are literally in their spatial state; MTS)
A key idea to achieve such a situation involves the fact that...
view entire post
Thank you for a great article -
Article excerpt and CIG commentary:
It’s well established that the physical aspects of quantum experiments, such as a particle’s position or momentum, are not well defined before they are measured. (CIG commentary : that is because they are literally in their spatial state; MTS)
A key idea to achieve such a situation involves the fact that quantum mechanics allows objects to exist in superposition, so that they can be in two or more contradictory states simultaneously; for instance, an electron could be in two different places at the same time. [CIG commentary: Electron is not, nor is anything else, in two places at once (except perhaps my dear wife); the electron has become spacially manifested in accordance with CIG (explanation of double slit), and the "probability" is real and spatial, only collapsing when the particle is measured ( it must be stopped to be measued) [ try and capture the particle moving (an impossibity) and you will find a much larger spatial field (thus the perception of superposition).
It won’t be easy mixing up spacetime itself in an experiment. "It’s one of the weakest points of the whole thing, we are not sure how you can perform these quantum resources," says Brukner..... [CIG commentary: Use the CIG Bruckner]
0.02762u = 25.7MeV= 14,952,942.08 pm cubed of space
(Mass) (Energy) (Space)
Follow Lorentz transformations for rates of travel less than "c"
"Where there is a different time there must be a different
place. Where there is a different place, there is a different
space. Where there are different spaces, there are different
volumes. CIG theory explains the creation of new volumes of
space created as the result of different times imparted onto
the world universe and as a direct result of the relativistic
nature of nature."
Time dilation interpreted (a true and real nature) as new space [ this is where the expanding Universe comes from] Answer to Red Shift anomalies as well.
The concept of the Big Bang, as CIG employs and extends it, is applicable to each stellar mass (star and/or galaxy cluster, etc.) as well as each atom. One can easily recognize that their is little to distinguish the three (Big Bang, our own sun, any given atom). All three offer up their own space and time, that prior to CIG, has only been applied to the Big Bang itself] [the parameter property that offers up the space and time (spacetime) is mootion (which came first, the cow or the bell). The interplay between mass(matter) and spacetime is the percentage of "c" travel. MTS
My quote of the day: "If it looks like a BIG BANG, and sounds and smells like a BIG BANG it is a BIG BANG, no matter how small it is"
The mattr becomes the space. The curvature becomes the matter. Matter does not warp spacetime, it is spacetime.
The fabric of Spacetime does not tell matter how to move, it is the matter.
Cause and effect.
Effect, cause ??
That there may be an appearance of effect before cause may be attributable to overlapping spatial matter manifestations. (i.e. take CIG theory, two electrons for instance, let them be their larger spatially manifested selves, then let these two fields overlap).
Peter - if you read this, I apologize - I am falling behind and have no time left to formally enter into the essay, any essay.
Thanks for your statement that you may take another look at CIG.
If you haven't the time, just think about, "if matter turned spatial as it traveled, and even more spatial as it traveled even faster, what could then this expalin" . Then, compare against what I have attempted to offer thus far.
Dr. Bruckner - thank you for a great article; you may be very busy, but try and learn CIG. Lots of postings here and there on this site as well.
www.CIGTheory.com
THX
doug
view post as summary
report post as inappropriate
doug wrote on Jul. 2, 2013 @ 02:54 GMT
CIG Commentary: Time ticking is rate dependent. Matter turns to space; space turns to matter; In between is Dark Matter and Dark Energy; Standard Model, etc. etc. All explained rather simply.
CIG is a quantum gravity theory.
Pure gravity = black hole = zero rate = M side of equation = full curvature
(spacetime has turned into the black hole)
Vacuum energy = pure space = "c" travel = S side of equation = no curvature
[Matter (black hole) has turned into open spacetime with little curvature]
The matter is the spacetime.
CIG offers the material quantification (CUPI) as well.
MTS (where M = matter (mass), T = % "c" and allowable in both forward /reverse vector time (I believe I set forward vecor time arbitrarily as zero to "c"), and S = space)
The fabric of spacetime varies, fully curved at rate zero. Here then, quantum meets classical.
RT = D not true: Duration (RT) + CIG (new space & I want my equation!) = true distance equation
Excerpt:
A successful theory of quantum gravity would merge quantum theory with Einstein’s theory of general relativity to describe every interaction in the universe that we know about, from the subatomic scale to the cosmological. One of the biggest obstacles has been that general relativity and quantum mechanics treat time very differently. In the former theory, time is another dimension alongside space and can bend and stretch, speed up and slow down, in different circumstances. Quantum theories, however, usually assume that time is set apart from space and ticks at a set rate. Theories of indefinite causality tackle this mismatch head-on, by questioning what time is at a fundamental level.
END EXCERPT
Peter - too late for this essay. I'll try and get a jump start on the next.
I think I can actually get by the forms & rules. It won't be essay though.
Hope all is well!
Fireworks = many Big Bangs = newly created space = CIG Theory at work
THX
doug
report post as inappropriate
doug wrote on Jul. 2, 2013 @ 12:13 GMT
My equation: MTS
Transfers mass to spatial volume.
In accordance with: 1u (atomic mass unit) = 541,380,958.7 pico meters cubed of space
Offers the full spectrum of matter/space: black hole to space
In between is dark matter, standard model, dark energy, etc. etc.
Works on the very small quantum scale, and the galactic as well.
T = time = % "c"
M = mass (matter)
S = Space (vacuum energy)
spacetime, time, space, mass, energy, matter, dark mtter, dark energy, standard model, electrons, protons, etc. all rolled into one equation
Explains: dark matter, dark energy, double slit, complimentarity, horizon problem, red shift, expanding universe, and much more
MTS : an active equation
I'm having a little problem fitting in the electromagnetic spectrum into the picture. Any ideas?
I realize it travels at "c" and so offers up space (wavelength ?), but how does amplitude and density (frequency ?) fit into the MTS equation ?
Any guidance would be appreciated. Question to the community: Please respond by offering a non-mathematical offer of reality as regards how CIG may interpret the electromagnetic spectrum. I have some ideas but they need clarification.
Thanks Aunt Bee
This is Mayberry isn't it?
THX
doug
report post as inappropriate
Rodney Bartlett wrote on Jul. 20, 2013 @ 08:22 GMT
Speaking of blurring cause and effect - I'll address the subject "Human involvement in the retrocausality of gravity, electromagnetism and matter".
The gravitational waves of space could have a frequency even greater than gamma rays (This is because nearly all of gravitation’s energy goes into the “organized energy” forming a particle, which then re-emits some of that energy at...
view entire post
Speaking of blurring cause and effect - I'll address the subject "Human involvement in the retrocausality of gravity, electromagnetism and matter".
The gravitational waves of space could have a frequency even greater than gamma rays (This is because nearly all of gravitation’s energy goes into the “organized energy” forming a particle, which then re-emits some of that energy at reduced electromagnetic frequencies, including those of gamma radiation. (see the related "What the Null Energy Condition (And When it May be Violated) Tells us About Gravitational Wave Frequencies in / for Relic Cosmology?" by physicist Andrew Beckwith - http://vixra.org/abs/1106.0034)
When converted into lower frequencies, they'd produce the electromagnetic wavelengths which Einstein's paper (“Do Gravitational Fields Play An Essential Part In The Structure of the Elementary Particles?” – a 1919 submission to the Prussian Academy of Sciences) suggests interact with gravity* to form particles of matter. At this point, the progression is from a) gravity to electromagnetism to matter. Yet an article I wrote "Modern Science Emphasizes Mathematics. What the Universe Looks Like When Logic is Emphasized (Maths Has a Vital, But Secondary, Role in This Article)" - http://vixra.org/abs/1306.0180) progresses from b) gravity to matter to electromagnetism, and also speaks of c) electromagnetism to gravity to matter. G-EM-M or G-M-EM or EM-G-M? Surely there’s contradiction and paradox in these statements? No. As the abstract states, this is a result of a feedback loop … retrocausality, as quantum entanglement is called when applied not to space but to time. This retrocausality is accomplished by means of humans travelling into the past of this subuniverse and applying the electronics they’ve developed to the period existing 13.8 billion years ago. Addressing a), gravity and electromagnetism combined to form the matter composing these people, whose ancestors developed the electricity and magnetism in computers. Addressing c), this electromagnetism created gravity (by using BITS to copy the principle of magnetism attracting and repelling, before pasting that principle into gravity – the basic physical source of all attraction and repulsion, and thus of the strong force and dark energy); and their interaction formed matter (could the unified gravitational and electromagnetic fields be the mass-producing Higgs field?). Addressing b), the gravity originating humanity’s matter was responsible for that matter emitting electromagnetism. Maybe hidden variables called binary digits (binary digits would be the hidden variables which Einstein said carry extra information about the world of quantum mechanics … and complete it, eliminating probabilities and bringing about exact predictions) could permit time travel into the future by warping positive space-time. And maybe they'd allow time travel into the past by warping a 5D hyperspace # that is translated 180 degrees to space-time, and could be labelled as negative or inverted. (The space-time we live in is described by ordinary [or “real”] numbers which, when multiplied by themselves, result in positive numbers e.g. 2x2=4, and -2x-2 also equals 4. Inverted “positive” space-time becomes negative hyperspace which is described by so-called imaginary numbers that give negative results when multiplied by themselves e.g. i multiplied by itself gives -1.) The past can never be changed from what occurred, and the future can never be altered from what it will be. Both are programmed by the 1’s and 0’s.
# This 5th-dimensional hyperspace would be tinier than a subatomic particle, like the dimensions invoked by string theory (about 70% of space consists of dark energy, according to the WMAP and Planck space probes – which is interpreted in this article as 70% of a particle also consisting of dark energy since “space-time itself plays a role in the constitution of elementary particles and the nuclear forces” (see paragraph above about Einstein’s 1919 submission to the Prussian Academy of Sciences). This dark energy can be associated with hyperspace and its binary digits, so a) 70% of a particle is composed of hyperspace, and b) the extra dimension exists everywhere in space occupied by particles (also everywhere in “empty” space, where binary digits are referred to as Virtual Particles). With a single extra dimension of astronomical size, gravity is expected to cause the solar system to collapse (“The hierarchy problem and new dimensions at a millimetre” by N. Arkani-Hamed, S. Dimopoulos, G. Dvali - Physics Letters B - Volume 429, Issues 3–4, 18 June 1998, Pages 263–272, and “Gravity in large extra dimensions” by U.S. Department of Energy - http://www.eurekalert.org/features/doe/2001-10/dbnl-gil05310
2.php However, collapse never occurs if gravity accounts for repulsion as well as attraction on both subatomic and astronomical scales (accounts for dark energy and familiar concepts of gravity, as well as repelling aspects of the electroweak force such as placing two like magnetic poles together and attracting electroweak/strong force aspects).
* How is passing starlight deflected towards the Sun? The refracted gravitational wave heading for the sun “captures” [2.2] the light from distant stars that appear close to the rim of the sun before the gravity wave’s diverted to the centre of our star (string theory predicts that gravity’s gravitons interact with light’s photons). Acting as a gravitational attractor, the refracted wave carries the light with it as it bends towards the sun’s centre. The light is not carried all the way but breaks free since photons have their own energy and momentum. However, the light is carried far enough to be deflected a tiny amount from its original path. According to Newton’s 3rd Law of Motion (to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction), the light will be deflected toward the sun by an equal and opposite amount to the gravity wave’s deflection to the solar interior. “Opposite” means the light wave travels away from the sun at approx. 186,282 miles per second and the gravity wave travels into the sun at the same velocity. “Equal” means, since experiments have shown the bending of starlight to be 1.75 seconds of arc (in geometry 60 seconds = 1 minute, 60 minutes = 1 degree, and there are 360 degrees in a circle), the refraction of gravitation from the solar rim is also 1.75 arcseconds (as density increases the deeper the gravity wave goes, the greater its refraction becomes).
[2.2] Gravitons and photons interact via Einstein’s mass-energy relation. A gravitational wave acts as an attractor and captures light by feeling friction with the mass-energy of the photons. This causes gravitational refraction or bending in which part of the gravity pushes a photon by travelling in the direction of the centre of each photon in the light (once it reaches the centre, the 3rd Law of Motion accounts for the photons’ reaction of being attracted to the gravitons). Compared to the other forces we know; gravity is incredibly weak and the weak “equal but opposite” reaction cannot overcome the heaviness of macroscopic objects which consequently don’t float off towards the gravity doing the pushing. Photons, when pushed towards the surface of Earth, are so tiny and light that they do recoil from the push – they “reflect”.
view post as summary
report post as inappropriate
Manuel S Morales wrote on Aug. 14, 2013 @ 11:53 GMT
Excellant article!
The topic of which I have a personal stake in by conducting a 12 year experiment which I have recently concluded. The second application of these findings I used as the basis of
my 'It form bit' essay entry.
I find it curious how we insist upon understanding nature from our perspective of second cause which I term as effectual causality, i.e., how observed or measured effects cause effects.
Food for thought:
Why is it that there has never been, or ever will be, an experiment conducted without a selection event first taking place? Yet the study of physics postulates its principles as fundamental based on a methodology which ignores first cause?
I find such a core contradiction most puzzling. What I find even more puzzling is why partitioners of the art do not? Perhaps John Archibald Wheeler put the situation at hand in proper context when he stated, " . . . we will grasp the central idea of it all as so simple, so beautiful, so compelling that we will all say each to the other, 'Oh, how could it have been otherwise! How could we all have been so blind for so long!'"
Manuel
report post as inappropriate
John R. Cox wrote on Aug. 14, 2013 @ 18:32 GMT
Nature presented me a random example of quantum causal probability recently when I had shoveled almost a ton of no. 9 gravel onto my little old Gimmie p-u and spread it on the off street parking area allotted my eff. apt. so I would have about half to one inch of cover over bare clay for parking and a little pleasant "patio" under the trees at the back of the lot.
9's are smaller than pea gravel and not as uniform in size and tend to be flatish. When soil is wet they tend to float to the top as the mud finally dries. Walking on such skim cover is like a fine pebbled beach. They stay generally in place but are of course unstable. A couple weeks after application and able to sit and have a cigarette with my coffee ( I'm an old guy ) work on my truck and otherwise disturb the surface, I was sitting, sipping and licking my wounds while admiring the nonhomogeneous carpet of stone. There, three feet in front of me were seven tiny pebbles all in a line as if a child had arranged them at play. Smaller first of four left to right in ascending size and all flat and elongated, barely touching, then a tiny one roundish, then the longest oblong and the string ending with a large flat roundish pebble slightly less in diameter than the oblong.
Effectual causality? as Manuel Morales has just termed it. And yes, a second order effect. But of What?!
report post as inappropriate
John R. Cox wrote on Aug. 14, 2013 @ 19:22 GMT
OOPS. I neglected to note that in the random arrangement of pebbles the long axis of the oblongs were all perpendicular to the line of sequence, and though tiny in size it was visible that the centers of all pebbles were in close alignment. It was not as if the edge of a shoe had dragged them all into end to end alignment.
report post as inappropriate
Marcel-Marie LeBel wrote on Aug. 25, 2013 @ 21:52 GMT
Cheating the Causal Game.
I personally like causality. But causality is in most cases the wrong word to use because we mean only the ordering of events, some unrelated. This ordering is done by the observer. It has nothing to do with how the universe works by itself. Causality should be understood as a propagating driving force. Kick the ball! Light a match! But these examples...
view entire post
Cheating the Causal Game.
I personally like causality. But causality is in most cases the wrong word to use because we mean only the ordering of events, some unrelated. This ordering is done by the observer. It has nothing to do with how the universe works by itself. Causality should be understood as a propagating driving force. Kick the ball! Light a match! But these examples too may confuse the issue because in these examples we are the cause via some mechanical force. The real causality is the one internal to events that we do not control and that have made this universe. By this I mean “causal spontaneity”. What is the phenomenon behind this causal spontaneity? Because it is spontaneous, causal spontaneity is irreversible. Best example is the gravitational fall. Events related by causal spontaneity have a specific ordering in time because time is the driving force for their ordering.
We think about ordering in time and assume time just as a convenient metering device. But time, or more specifically its rate, is the cause for the ordering rather than just a silent metering partner. In gravitational fall, the object spontaneously moves towards the ground, following a path of decreasing time rate. In other words, it tends to exist more where time runs slower. The internal cause for this spontaneous fall is that existence is more probable where time is running relatively slower. In a sense, something “exists more” in one place if it stays there longer than anywhere else. Given access to slower time, this is where it is going to exist more or go. We may clock the fall of the object, but the time that matters to the object is the rate of passage of time. In superposition, the electron is not in two places at the same time; it just spends more time in two specific places than anywhere else including travel time. We may say that the electron’s existence is spread between these two places and the probability of finding it will be greater in these two places. In the case of the falling object, and because of the time rate gradient it is in, its existence is non-uniform and more probable toward the ground and less probable toward the sky. Spontaneous events show us an irreversible ordering based on the passage of time, itself spontaneous and irreversible.
In conclusion, cheating causality may do good for computing but it is not the way to quantum gravity. For me, the differential probability of existence of a particle (quantum) in a time rate gradient (GR) is as good as it will get for quantum gravity.
Marcel,
view post as summary
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Aug. 27, 2013 @ 15:40 GMT
Marvel,
Gravity is a curvature of more energy vs. less volume. Ideal gas laws as applied to mass. What if it is an effect of the electromagnetic attraction of electrons and protons en mass? As they start to attract positive and negative in bulk, it builds up energy, but it reduces volume. So gravity would not so much be a force in itself, rather the vacuum effect of opposite charges coming together to first create hydrogen atoms and then more complex chemistry. Consider that when you break the atom, it creates pressure, like a bomb. This pressure isn't considered a force in itself, but an effect of releasing the energy in the atom. So the opposite, getting the energy into the atom, would have a naturally opposite effect.
That way, you don't need gravitons and gravity waves, etc. And it models geometrically as a curve.
Regards,
John
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Aug. 27, 2013 @ 16:04 GMT
Marcel,
You wrote, " ... causality is in most cases the wrong word to use because we mean only the ordering of events, some unrelated. This ordering is done by the observer."
Yes, the ordering is done by the observer; however, an observer cannot order unrelated events. All events -- i.e., the interaction of physical influences within causal range of the observer, are related to the observer. Events that are timelike separated are not related to each other, yet the observables are always related to the observer ("All physics is local," according to Einstein's relativity).
"It has nothing to do with how the universe works by itself."
If physics is observer-dependent (which is true of both relativity and quantum mechanics) it has everything to do with how the universe works by itself. The question is whether the observer creates the universe by the act of observing (becomes entangled with the quantum wavefunction) or passively observes physical interactions. This is the problem that Joy Christian has solved, by explaining quantum correlations in a classical framework; the moon really is there when no one is looking.
"In a sense, something 'exists more' in one place if it stays there longer than anywhere else."
Not according to relativity. Anything with mass exists longer the faster it moves -- the truth of which which is borne out by experimental evidence; highly energetic cosmic ray particles
(muons) live longer than their Earthbound cousins. Massless particles are always in "one place" -- the universe -- and not affected by time inetervals.
Tom
report post as inappropriate
John R. Cox wrote on Aug. 26, 2013 @ 21:26 GMT
Marcel-Marie LaBel
A splendid incite! Thank-you for your post on 8/25. Now if you can persuade the relationists to look inside the Glass Onion, the quants to pause dicing it, and the neo-classicists to understand that it is THE ABSORPTION LINES that Doppler shift! we might get on with solving the zero point particle problem.
report post as inappropriate
John R. Cox wrote on Aug. 27, 2013 @ 16:57 GMT
Tom Ray,
I think you are missing the point of departure in Marcel's comments, in fact you are paraphrasing his criteria of deduction rather than direct observation.
Please look again, his insight (gad! incite! duhh) is nicely succinct and goes to relativistic time being essentially the prime mover in gravitational fields. The expression has the form of linear algebra rather than curvilinear geometry.
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Aug. 27, 2013 @ 17:56 GMT
"The expression has the form of linear algebra rather than curvilinear geometry."
No difference between the two, John C., for a relativistic model. We know that space is mostly Euclidean and that curvilinear motion is constant. Some day, I am going to give up correcting the astounding lack of knowledge of people who continue to hold forth on relativity in this forum. Being the OC dyslexic I am, though, it's hard.
Tom
report post as inappropriate
John R. Cox wrote on Aug. 27, 2013 @ 18:56 GMT
That's what I said, Tom. "Rather than" not different from.
If you take a great circle arc from GR and roll it out flat on the workbench you have a linear function which is the same relationship. Like a common bi-metal spring with the same energy content as would be necessary to apply to straighten it out. What Marcel points to is a linear projection which would resemble a spiral in energy distribution instead of a continuous curve.
Further, e=mc^2 @ c. 'Infinite mass' is the math line of reason to explain the limit of acceleration to classical mechanics which does not have interconvertability of mass and energy. Relativisticly at light velocity mass is no longer mass to be 'infinite', its energy. Don't need that much education to understand that, Sheldon.
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Aug. 28, 2013 @ 02:59 GMT
John C,
From Marcel's post;
"But time, or more specifically its rate, is the cause for the ordering rather than just a silent metering partner."
What if time is not this primary cause, but is simply a form of measure? As I argued previously, the earth is not traveling some fourth dimensional Newtonian flow from yesterday to tomorrow. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates. Change creates time and time measures change.
Sequence is not causal, whether it's done by the observer, or by nature. Yesterday doesn't cause today. It is the sun shining on a spinning planet which causes this sequence of events called days. Just as one wave doesn't cause the next, but wind blowing across the water.
It is that we, as single points of perspective, experience action as an equally singular narrative and human civilization is largely a function of the fact we manage to remember the more notable experiences of that sequence of events. But the narrative and causality are only minimally related.
Contrary to Wheeler, causality is due to exchange of energy, rather than the descriptive qualities of information.
The issue then becomes how to explain gravity as something other than caused by a mathematical model in which the measure between events is somehow more foundational than the processes creating those events.
Regards,
john M
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Aug. 28, 2013 @ 12:25 GMT
"Don't need that much education to understand that, Sheldon."
Well, I'm already in for a penny so I might as well be in for a pound. I'm afraid that one does need "that much education" to learn what the special and general theories of relativity allow and disallow, if one wishes to invoke those principles.
One of the disappointments in my years of participating in these FQXi forums, is that the affiliated experts -- some of them Nobel laureates at that -- stay away from the blog and forum discussions. It isn't hard to understand why -- once they give a proper explanation of solidly known physics, they are assaulted, bombarded, with all manner of nonsensical explanations for why "mainstream" physics has it all wrong. Who has time for that?
Although not a member of this group,
Robert M. Wald is one such esteemed expert. I think the link evidences his talent as an educator as well -- he explains among other things, the common misapplication of linear algebra to general relativity. If I had my wish, every first year teacher of college physics would write his or her syllabus from Wald's outline, preferably for a two-semester course. At the top of his list of teaching resources is Einstein's classic, *Relativity: The Special and the General Theory*, which I have myself recommended several times in this forum. I deem it essential to understanding the more sophisticated material of Wald, Ellis, Hawking, Geroch, Thorne, et al.
Tom
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Aug. 28, 2013 @ 13:25 GMT
Tom,
I, for one, am eternally grateful for your patience in taking the professional side of this argument. I can well understand why others in the field don't see it as worth the considerable time and effort. It is difficult to be in for a penny and not be in for a pound.
Only had the time to glance at that paper, as today is the day the child is to be dumped off at college.
I still see it as a situation where the intense focus has resulted in a form of myopia, to where some significant problems are being brushed aside, but eventually they will have to do a real bottom up review. If not this generation, then the next. As they say, change happens one funeral at a time. This amount of change might take a number of funerals.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Aug. 28, 2013 @ 17:13 GMT
Thanks, John. I would like to say that my patience is a result of intellectual discipline rather than a mental infirmity. That's just the way it is, though.
I'm no physicist, and I know I make mistakes that no professional physicist is likely to make. I do read and research continually, though, and I try to keep up. And yes, leading edge knowledge and mathematical techniques do progress over the generations -- that's just more reason, in my opinion, to get fully grounded in the fundamentals of classical mechanics and field theory, up to relativity.
Best wishes for your daughter's college career. Hope it's not too hard on your wallet. :)
All best,
Tom
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Aug. 29, 2013 @ 00:47 GMT
Tom,
Mine probably has something to do with trying to overcome mental infirmity. Having run though my share of cat's lives, there have been a fair number of head bangs and when you have to put your own hard and software back in order enough times, the basics are on speed-dial, even if the complex all runs together.
The kid is a wiz in her own right. Full scholarship(per year) to Johns Hopkins. Wants to be a pediatric neurologist. (Nothing personal, but it really is nerd city down there. I find I'm becoming even more of a homebody up here on the farm.)
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Aug. 29, 2013 @ 11:20 GMT
John,
It's interesting to me that you would associate your way of thinking with head bangs. I was already 60 years old before I found out that my dyslexia is probably the result of a traumatic automobile accident when I was three years old. Of the occupants of our vehicle -- my stepfather, mother, infant child and me -- all were seriously injured (baby killed) except I, who was thrown from the car and apparently suffered only a gash at the back of my head, which was closed in the emergency room with sutures. It was a hard blow, though, because I remember losing consciousness and recovering while rolling down the grassy highway embankment.
Up until that few years ago, I had no idea that dyslexia can be caused by head injury in childhood. The site of my injury, though, exactly corresponds to the right brain tasks that I have always had difficulty with, though less extreme as I have gotten older.
Off topic, so I'll keep it short.
Tom
report post as inappropriate
hide replies
John R. Cox wrote on Aug. 28, 2013 @ 16:26 GMT
Tom
Thanks for the link to Wald.
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Aug. 28, 2013 @ 17:15 GMT
You're certainly welcome, John. It may be the least technical piece from Robert Wald that one will ever read. :-)
Tom
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Aug. 29, 2013 @ 00:49 GMT
I will have to read it. The country going to war again, as the financial crisis seems ready to heat back up, is diverting though.
report post as inappropriate
John R. Cox wrote on Aug. 28, 2013 @ 19:00 GMT
All
Perhaps it's in the more technical extensions that I'm not equipped to digest,
but in all my reading whether QM, S&GR, and Classic (Galilean to modern) I have never found a graphic representation of the structure of electromagnetic waveform, other than of Maxwell's equations plotted on perpendicular planes.
I think its important because without some physical structure I can't see how interference can occur in interferometers but not in spectrometers, and in mass spectrometry of distant sources the shift of absorption lines doesn't get filled in. Seems there would have to be a very distinct coherence. Any links?
Aristotilian logic yes, but please no neoclassic rays shooting out of my eyes.
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman wrote on Aug. 29, 2013 @ 02:57 GMT
Tom,
While I've only given the paper by Wald one compete read through and a little reviewing, a few points;
Most of it is an entirely reasonable description of how to mathematically model complex actions; curvatures, vectors, tensors, etc. But then it breaks from this and doesn't clarify how one gets to ideas like block time, black holes, singularities, etc.
So the only...
view entire post
Tom,
While I've only given the paper by Wald one compete read through and a little reviewing, a few points;
Most of it is an entirely reasonable description of how to mathematically model complex actions; curvatures, vectors, tensors, etc. But then it breaks from this and doesn't clarify how one gets to ideas like block time, black holes, singularities, etc.
So the only real point of significance it makes is that General Relativity refutes the notion of simultaneity. Yet simultaneity is a notion, intuition if you will, based on the idea of a Newtonian universal flow of time, which really isn't applicable if we view time simply as an effect of action. There is no universal flow, as every action is its own clock. There is only the presence of a lot of activity and any measure of universal rate of change would be proximate or statistically averaging, at best.
So in order to refute a flawed intuition, we must be forced to accept that all events exist in some "blocktime" vector? One which is clearly, in Wald's exposition, only a modeling of action in the first place.
Earlier you seemed to agree that quanta are not just dimensionless points, but as specific amounts of energy, can expand, or contract. Now if you were to mathematically model the space described by masses of such quanta, then in areas where their volume is contracted and their energy correspondingly is elevated, the effect of gravity wouldn't be a "force," but the vacuum resulting from less volume/concentrated energy. Just as the pressure resulting from dispersed energy/expanded volume is not a force in its own right.
This would curve light just fine, as it is also composed of quanta, as well as explain why clocks run at different rates.
Would you have any source which does try to explicate exactly why this mathematical treatment of action requires physical blocktime? This one doesn't cover that and that is where my problem with the premise arises.
Regards,
John M
view post as summary
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Aug. 29, 2013 @ 10:28 GMT
John,
I think
Paul Davies is the best plain-language source to explain how physics treats time. The deep nature of time is still an open problem.
Best,
Tom
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Aug. 29, 2013 @ 10:47 GMT
Tom,
If time is an open problem, then why are you so resistant to considering my observation that by primarily treating it as a measure of duration, physics only assumes and re-enforces the individual perception of a sequence from prior to succeeding events/past to future, rather than explore how these configurations come into being and are replaced/future becoming past, other than that I'm far less of a member of the club than you?
I realize it seems like an extremely trivial point, but that doesn't mean it and its consequences can't have been overlooked. If I throw a ball up in the air, knowing only the direction and momentum, where it lands can be fairly accurately predicted, but that doesn't have to mean the arc of its trajectory is somehow permanently etched in some eternal geometric configuration.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Aug. 29, 2013 @ 10:49 GMT
Considering that if I first spin around and then close my eyes before throwing it, the trajectory, according to QM, exists in some super position of all possible trajectories. ;-)
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Aug. 29, 2013 @ 11:29 GMT
" ... that doesn't have to mean the arc of its trajectory is somehow permanently etched in some eternal geometric configuration."
How do you know that?
Tom
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Aug. 29, 2013 @ 15:42 GMT
Tom,
It ties into information theory. If the same information can be recorded on any medium, say a song on a vinyl record, cassette tape, or cd, then logically the same medium can be used to record different information. The vinyl repressed, the cassette or cd rerecorded.
The question is whether they can store different information at the same time. That does depend on how you define both the information and how it is accessed. Such as a holograph, where different angles form different images, but that is as much a function of how the information is perceived, as how it is recorded.
Now say the medium is me throwing a ball up in the air. Effectively the information of it leaving my hand is recorded over by it flying through the air, as that is recorded over by it hitting the ground, since the medium is the ball and it can only manifest one position, since it is only one ball. So in order to progress from one configuration to another, the prior must cease to exist.
Now like the holograph, different perspectives can yield different information. Say you are several hundred thousand miles away, with a very good telescope, watching me throw that ball. Given the finite speed of light, you will be seeing it leaving my hand, at about the same time as I'm watching it fly through the air. Yet just as I only see it at one position at a time, so do you, even though it is delayed by consequence of your more distant perspective. This does not mean the ball exists in some super-position, or is eternally extended along this trajectory, only that information is both a function of transmission and reception.
Otherwise I don't see any realistic physical explanation for how it can actually exist all along some time vector. If you have some explanation that sounds reasonable, I'm all ears, but just putting the math up on a pedestal and insisting it explains all, without showing how, doesn't count.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Aug. 29, 2013 @ 16:42 GMT
John,
"The vinyl repressed, the cassette or cd rerecorded."
Right. That doesn't mean the prior information is destroyed, though. Do you know how your computer hard drive memory works? -- overwriting with new information doesn't make the previous information disappear; it's just jumbled up and can be recovered by another algorithm. Now maybe you want to say that smashing the hard drive renders the information unrecoverable; however, that begs the question. In principle, software can run on any substrate, so whatever nature records is recoverable in principle -- that's what Hawking's solution to the black hole information paradox is all about.
"So in order to progress from one configuration to another, the prior must cease to exist."
To reemphasize: that's begging the question.
Best,
Tom
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Aug. 30, 2013 @ 00:11 GMT
Tom,
As well as the trajectory of the ball can deduced from where it landed. The question isn't whether evidence of the past ceases to exist, but if the events of which the past consisted have been replaced by the fact the physical reality is now manifesting this present configuration. There is certainly lots of evidence of past events, but the very fact these traces do exist in the present means they are no longer as originally produced. Those layers and layers of historical evidence are proof time is a dynamic process, in which that evidence and memories continue to be altered, effectively pushing the events further into the past.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Aug. 30, 2013 @ 05:35 GMT
" ... if the events of which the past consisted have been replaced by the fact the physical reality is now manifesting this present ..."
Still begging the question, John, any way you rephrase it.
You are assuming boundaries between what you call past, present and future that have no physical basis. The configuration space of events doesn't know the difference.
Tom
report post as inappropriate
Eckard Blumschein replied on Aug. 30, 2013 @ 07:33 GMT
John M,
You wrote: "General Relativity refutes the notion of simultaneity." Hm, can a theory at all refute something? Any simultaneity is called a convention as to justify Einstein's misuse of Poincaré synchronization.
I understand that you and many others intend to arrange with the dominant acceptance of Einstein's theories. Are you consequently "forced to accept that all events exist in some "blocktime" vector?" I think so. In my previous essay I uttered the hope that Michelson's non-null expectation could be flawed. Having quantified the flaw as too minute, I admit, I was wrong. Please read the endnotes in my current essay.
Tom wrote: "The configuration space of events doesn't know the difference."
He is quite right, however, may we really equate reality and configuration space?
Regards,
Eckard
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Aug. 30, 2013 @ 10:29 GMT
Tom,
I'm not assuming any boundaries more substantial than a horizon line. With time as an effect of action, how do you draw solid boundaries between where a moving object was, is and will be? Would you expect a measure of temperature, also another measure of action, to be infinitely precise?
The problem is the fourth dimensional model of time is trying to overcome the problems inherent in Newtonian time, but modeling the measure of duration as part of some foundational geometric structure creates serious problems as well.
Eckard,
I can try. Nothing more, nothing less.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Aug. 30, 2013 @ 10:53 GMT
Tom,
Speaking of horizons, consider the transition from one day to the next; Locally it is from 11:59:59 pm to 12:00 am, but globally it is 24 hours.
Time is fluid, so our conception of it needs to be as well.
Regards,
John
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Aug. 30, 2013 @ 13:06 GMT
John,
As Eckard validates, if you don't deny relativity you have to accept what the theory says about time.
"I'm not assuming any boundaries more substantial than a horizon line."
When you stand on the Maryland shore facing East, does Europe not exist at the same moment you are looking in that direction? Does the horizon which Europe lies behind rotate to meet you, so that...
view entire post
John,
As Eckard validates, if you don't deny relativity you have to accept what the theory says about time.
"I'm not assuming any boundaries more substantial than a horizon line."
When you stand on the Maryland shore facing East, does Europe not exist at the same moment you are looking in that direction? Does the horizon which Europe lies behind rotate to meet you, so that you pleasantly find yourself in Paris if you stand still long enough? Only in a different inertial system, high above the shore -- could such a phenomenon happen for you. And even at that, you would have to invest energy in keep your vehicle in the same spot.
"With time as an effect of action, how do you draw solid boundaries between where a moving object was, is and will be?"
*Physically*? I wouldn't draw such boundaries. Time isn't an effect of action; time and action are related by very specific mathematical quantities of distance and duration, which is why the Minkowski space is a good choice to model dynamical and kinematic systems of events. If we wish to extend relativity, we don't wave a magic wand and say that we are going to preserve relativity, but do away with distance and duration. That doesn't work -- and can't.
I think, as I've said before, that brain science is the next big frontier of physics research. It is here, in the discrete relations among neurons in a connected network, that the quantum measurement problem really matters.
"Would you expect a measure of temperature, also another measure of action, to be infinitely precise?"
Isn't that what WMAP and its predecessors are all about? John, the reason that your ideas of time and temperature are unrelated to anything physical is that you think of temperature as something physically real -- while it is only a measure of averaged particle motion within arbitrary boundaries. The WMAP results assume the boundaries at the big bang and the present state of the universe. So our measure of temperature is at least as good as the accuracy of our probes, though never without boundary conditions.
Best,
Tom
view post as summary
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Aug. 30, 2013 @ 14:54 GMT
Tom,
You have it backward. My point is that I don't see time as "physically real." No Newtonian flow, no fourth dimension, no blocktime. It is just an effect of activity, ie, change, as temperature is a scalar measure of the energy effecting activity.
If I "stood still," would first go through San Francisco, then Tokyo, then Istanbul, before getting to Paris.
I don't see how accepting part of an argument means I have to accept every conclusion drawn from it. It would be a version of reductio ad absurdum.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
Anonymous replied on Aug. 30, 2013 @ 15:26 GMT
John,
I am well aware of swimming in FQXi against the Lorentz/Einstein/Davies stream. The latter quoted Einstein: "Two events that occur at the same moment if observed from one reference frame may occur at different moments if viewed from another."
My endnote demands to simply restricting the consideration to just one frame of reference. Well, there is no preferred frame of reference. However, once the reference (in case of numbers the number one) has been chosen, it is not allowed to choose one more reference.
Perhaps you will spontaneously agree that something that happens at the Mars does not depend on how much delayed it is observed at different locations of the universe.
Unfortunately those like Hilbert (who intended to be more than a mathematician) and Davies (who misled you) think of time as laid out in its entirety. Accordingly, even engineers like me were forced to always perform FT by integrating over time from minus i to plus infinity. This is not reasonable.
Meanwhile I revealed decisive mistakes related to the denial of the distinction between past and future and the belonging history in mathematics and physics.
Eckard
report post as inappropriate
Anonymous replied on Aug. 30, 2013 @ 16:56 GMT
Eckard,
You and I are in agreement that time is a(measure of a) dynamic process and not a static state. Unfortunately the physics community has invested generations believing otherwise.
Consider the whole Big Bang cosmology is built on this notion of spacetime, yet even I can see it makes no sense to say space expands, yet retain the constant speed of light as cosmic ruler. If space is what you measure with a ruler, is it what remains constant, or what expands?? They both can't be the denominator.
Tom,
I'm not doing away with distance and duration, only making the point they are apples and oranges. Distance is a measure of space, but duration is a measure of action. Action occurs in space, but creates duration. Just like it creates temperature. You could use ideal gas laws to correlate temperature and volume in a similar fashion. Constrain a quantity of energized gas to a smaller volume and it raises the temperature in a proportional manner, much like squeezing a balloon will cause it to puff out between your fingers, but would that make temperature some fourth parameter of volume? It's basically the same sort of logic being used to correlate distance to duration.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
Eckard Blumschein replied on Aug. 31, 2013 @ 07:24 GMT
John M,
May I ask you how accurate the largest distances of stars were measured? I found at http;//christiananswers.net/q-eden/star-distances.html larger than 15 billion ly. While the error of parallax method (for small distances) is given as 10%, Cepheids are a category of stars whose actual brightness is allegedly "well known". Perhaps, the redshift method is even less certain. How accurate were the measurements when Hubble came up in 1923 with his expansion law?
My primary concern is the perhaps relativistically calculated Doppler effect. See my current discussion with Pentcho.
Eckard
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Aug. 31, 2013 @ 14:40 GMT
Eckard,
While I'm in no position to verify the measurements used, I would argue those galaxies discovered at over 13 billion lightyears out had to have taken longer than the few hundred million remaining to have coalesced and ignited out of intergalactic gases, considering the (hypothesized) inflation stage presumably left this material fairly distributed. It takes our galaxy 225 million years just to make one revolution.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
Anonymous replied on Aug. 31, 2013 @ 17:31 GMT
John M,
Because I never dealt with the matter, I erroneously wrote 1923 instead of 1929. Your argument looks serious to me. I wonder how the priest Lemaitre was able in 1927 to measure the distance of galaxies by means of the discovered by Slipher in 1912 redshift. Wasn't the hypothetical recession velocity v rather just calculated from GR? While the redshift can be measured, I wonder how both v and Hubble's constant, i.e. the distance, can be simultaneously derived from it if there is no sufficiently accurate alternative to measure the distance. Maybe, the Big Bang theory arose from catholic guesswork and was acknowledged by Einstein as confirmation of his theory?
With r = v/c and f_measured/f_original = f (f is smaller than 1 means redshift), I calculated f = 1-r for the ordinary Doppler effect but
f = (1 - r)/sqrt(1-r^2) for the relativistic Doppler effect, which implies a larger f for the same r or a smaller r for the same f.
Eckard
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Aug. 31, 2013 @ 20:50 GMT
Eckard,
What first clued me into the possibility that alot of cosmology and eventually physics, was far more handwaving than anyone is willing to acknowledge, was the fact that expansion and gravitational contraction are opposite effects and quite possibly perfectly balanced, a fact borne out by observation of the background radiation by COBE and WMAP. If they balance, then where is the...
view entire post
Eckard,
What first clued me into the possibility that alot of cosmology and eventually physics, was far more handwaving than anyone is willing to acknowledge, was the fact that expansion and gravitational contraction are opposite effects and quite possibly perfectly balanced, a fact borne out by observation of the background radiation by COBE and WMAP. If they balance, then where is the additional expansion for the universe as a whole to expand? The argument then became that inflation actually expanded the whole universe so large that the observable part only looks flat because it is just a small part.
The logical conclusion, by anyone not beholden to orthodoxy, is there is some form of convection cycle of expanding radiation and collapsing mass, such that what falls into galaxies is eventually radiated back out in some form or another and the cycle starts again. Since the universe is infinite, entropy doesn't apply, since it's not a closed set. Energy lost is replaced by energy gained and this whole galactic cycling is little more than vacuum fluctuation on an infinite scale.
All this obsession over black holes is further nonsense. What exists are gravitational vortices that eventually spew out whatever falls in. Either radiated out as it heats up, starlight, etc. or finally shot out the poles as cosmic jets. Smaller examples, such as binary star systems, eventually blow up when the absorbing star gets too dense.
Remember that if you were to drill a hole down to the center of the earth, you wouldn't find a gravitational singularity. In fact, the gravity, pulling from all directions, would cancel out. (Of course you would be crushed by the pressure.)
Essentially you would be in the eye of the storm. So why wouldn't the same principle work for galaxies? If you were to fall into the black hole at the center of the galaxy, would you fall through some wormhole into another reality, or would your constituent ions be shot out the pole in some quasar? Eventually to be cycled back into another gravitational vortex.
I think alot of this goes back to our rejection of space as anything foundational and insistence on the point as source of all structure.So everything becomes points and measurements between points. Anything else is just derivative.
Quanta are quanta of energy, not information. What if they could vary in volume? Release a photon of light and does it simply travel off in a single line, or does it expand out to fill space? If it expands, it is still the same quantity of energy, so the "temperature" drops, according to the laws of thermodynamics. In my
discrete vs analog entry I compared this to a dripping water faucet. As you tighten it, first the water becomes a thin stream, then starts to drip. Since the drips are the same size, due to surface tension, the quantity of water is reduced by them getting further apart. Think of this in terms of light from a distant source, where it is so far away, only single quanta of light are registering. Wouldn't the result be a redshift of the pattern, as the light is reduced to single quanta and the time between each gets longer? Remember redshift is entirely proportional to distance and the effect is that we appear to be at the center of the universe. A logical solution is some form of lensing effect, not the sources actually receding. Then you don't have to argue space expands, yet still have a constant speed of light against which to measure it.
Also, when these quanta of energy are condensing back into mass, the effect is reversed and a vacuum forms, ie. gravity.
I could go on, but this is a
better article.
Regards,
John M
view post as summary
report post as inappropriate
hide replies
Darrell Burgan wrote on Aug. 30, 2013 @ 05:24 GMT
It seems plausible to me that time is actually an emergent property, something we observe as a result of causal relationships. The trick is to think of casual relationships outside of a chronological ordering.
Imagine a universe that is vast but finite - both in terms of the smallest distance and in terms of the largest distance. Given that, it is possible to write down a diagram that represents a snapshot of all possible states of the universe as a big graph: each state is a node and the causal relationships between the states are edges.
There is no way to tell if two events that are not directly causally related to each other happen before or after each other. Nor is there any indication of how 'long' any state exists or how long it takes for one state to 'cause' another. It's just one big logical graph that shows the gigantic-but-finite web of relationships.
Given such a graph, if we make just two assumptions, I believe an arrow of time naturally emerges:
1. Every state must have at least one cause.
2. No state can participate in its own causation.
Setting aside the question of "where did the first state come from", it seems plausible to me that our perception of time is merely the way our minds interpret this web of causation. There is no 'before' or 'after', only causation.
It is tempting to think of two states that are directly causally related as having an ordering, but what if the 'caused' state has more than one 'causing' state? For example, if state C is caused by both state A and state B, perhaps we can infer that C occurs in some sense 'after' A and B. But can we infer that A and B are synchronous?
Anyway it is fun (at least for me) to think about, and it seems that causality is very deeply related to both time, and probably entropy as well. Could it be that both of those concepts are merely emergent phenomena from some deeper logical causal theory?
report post as inappropriate
Eckard Blumschein replied on Aug. 30, 2013 @ 07:11 GMT
Yes Darrell, the order goes on to emerge,
I even blame anything around Hilbert's finitism including the notion state for what is called the crisis of physics. I was born because my mother A (Annemarie) met my father B (Blumschein). Were they events in the sense of a Hilbert space?
The question of "where did the first state come from" implies the assumption that there was a first state and in logical consequence there will be a last state. I consider such rather religious questions futile while the alternative idea of an open in the sense of infinitely extended and therefore never fully predictable world fits better to feasible science. Let's accept one boundary as relevant for physics, the border between past and future and nothing in between.
Instead of blindly trying to separate causality from temporal order, I recommend to clarify first that abstract time must not be confused with the measurable elapsed time of reality.
Eckard
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Aug. 30, 2013 @ 10:36 GMT
Darrell,
The problem I keep pointing out is that we model time as the sequence of events we encounter/past to future, but the cause is changing of the state/future becoming past. For example, the earth is not traveling some fourth dimension from yesterday to tomorrow, but tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates.
Meanwhile cause is not due to temporal sequence, but exchange of energy. Yesterday doesn't cause today, nor does one wave cause the next. The sun shining on a rotating planet and wind across the water create these cycles of action.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
John R. Cox wrote on Aug. 31, 2013 @ 16:27 GMT
A friend sent me this web address http://wtkr.com/2013/06/07/this-video-of-sand-will-blow-your
-mind because she simply thought it far out. It's a clean production presentation of a Chladni plate experiment which is generally viewed only in relation to acoustic behavior of harmonic resonance. It is also a visual demonstration of continual symmetrical generation of causal order producing complexity in a closed system which in its profusion devolves into decoherence with boundary conditions resulting from the underlying symmetric generation of order. It sure helped me understand what this article is about, and the great thing for me is that it's intuitively visible. Okay. Now I understand what superposition means. Causal decoherence and wave function operating simultaneously.
report post as inappropriate
Anonymous wrote on Sep. 1, 2013 @ 19:20 GMT
John Merryman,
....doesn't clarify how one gets to ideas like blocktime, black holes, singularities, etc...
Wald does make the subject of the theory accessible, and while the paper is on the topic of teaching the subject with its various emphasis on math and co-ordinate methods chosen, the primary emphasis is that the theory is just that. It is not like you apply the theory to something, the theory is constructed entirely onto itself, not in any sort of co-ordinate system, Maybe like a Rubic's cube, you apply the something you are investigating onto the theoretical model and your mechanics of doing so sort out the colors onto each face.
Blocktime was really Minkowski's idea and Einstein considered it as a convenient way of diagraming.
jrc
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Sep. 1, 2013 @ 20:16 GMT
Excellent summary, John C. Coordinate free geometry (general covariance) seems old-fashioned to many these days. That's why I keep emphasizing the necessity to understand classical mechanics from the ground up -- I don't find any other way to make sense of general relativity without that background.
Best,
Tom
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 1, 2013 @ 20:44 GMT
John C,
If it's just a convenient way of diagraming, I certainly have no problem with that. Conventionally it is what is called narrative. History, if you prefer. The question is whether it exists in some genuinely physical sense, or not. Is there some metaphysical fourth dimension that with the proper bending of spacetime, we could time travel through some wormhole? Or is it just a modeling of the dynamic process by which the particular configuration we currently experience came to be, and where it logically might be heading? Thus what is past and what might happen in the future have no physical presence, because the medium to manifest this information is currently forming what is present?
REgards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
Anonymous replied on Sep. 1, 2013 @ 21:06 GMT
John Cox (jrc),
Perhaps you meant Minkowski came up with spacetime, not blocktime. If I recall correctly Minkowski, who was Einstein's teacher of mathematics and had blamed him for often skipping his lessons a lazy dog, gave nonetheless credit to Einstein for having provided the basis when he announced a merger of space and time to spacetime in his famous speech.
Doesn't blocktime mean an a priori given timescale extending from minus eternity to plus eternity? Descartes and later Fourier provided belonging mathematics, and Heaviside added the trick of continuing the measured data by setting the necessarily unknown future ones equal to zero and then splitting the block-function of time into even and odd components.
Incidentally, when Fourier investigated heat conduction in a loop, this was equivalent to the actually infinite repetition that now requires integration from minus infinity to plus infinity. Such general covariance is obviously an absurd model because it ignores that future data are not yet available for sure in advance.
Eckard
report post as inappropriate
Jim George Snowdon wrote on Sep. 1, 2013 @ 22:49 GMT
Hi John,
If I may quote from your last post, "Thus what is past and what might happen in the future have no physical presence, because the medium to manifest this information is currently forming what is present."
I would say it like this, `The past and what might happen in the future have their physical presence in the present, the medium to manifest this information currently forms the present."
Jim George Snowdon
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 2, 2013 @ 00:32 GMT
Jim,
However it works for you to describe it. Just so long as there are no wormholes back to the seventies, other than in memories, music and whatever else hasn't been scrapped.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
Jim George Snowdon replied on Sep. 14, 2013 @ 19:18 GMT
John,
As you might recall, I don`t think that time exists as a real thing or force in reality. There is no such thing as time, to worm through.
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 14, 2013 @ 23:14 GMT
Jim,
I wouldn't go so far as to say there is no such thing as time. Rather it is an effect, much like temperature. Could life exist without either time or temperature? We are a far more complex effect. That doesn't mean we are not real.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
Jim George Snowdon replied on Sep. 15, 2013 @ 17:16 GMT
John,
"Could life exist without either time or temperature?"
Life does exist without time being a real thing. We don`t need time to exist as something real. All we need, and have, is duration elapsing.
In our conscious experience of duration elapsing, we assume time is passing, as if time itself were something real.
The Earth`s rotational motion is the fundamental physical mechanism responsible for maintaining our confusion over the nature of time.
We have motion in our timeless universe.
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 16, 2013 @ 21:35 GMT
Jim,
And that motion creates change. We don't have a changeless universe, or there would be no motion.
Regards, John M
report post as inappropriate
Jim George Snowdon replied on Sep. 17, 2013 @ 21:25 GMT
John,
I don`t think that time exists as a real force or thing. I do think that we have motion in our timeless Universe. We have change in our timeless Universe.
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 17, 2013 @ 23:33 GMT
Jim,
And time is both an effect of and way to measure that change. Much as temperature is both an effect of and way to measure thermodynamic activity. One is sequential and the other is scalar measure of activity.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
Jim George Snowdon replied on Sep. 20, 2013 @ 00:19 GMT
John,
Time is a measurement system that actually measures duration elapsing. The measurement baseline is the constant period of the Earth`s rotational motion.
Duration elapsing is what our clocks measure.
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 20, 2013 @ 02:18 GMT
Jiim,
I think we both appreciate duration as the effect of stable perception in a dynamic context. Otherwise physical reality only exists as what is referred to as the present and duration is the process occurring in the present between particular events.
The challenge here is how to get beyond the very strong psychological presumption of narrative as foundational, given that it is...
view entire post
Jiim,
I think we both appreciate duration as the effect of stable perception in a dynamic context. Otherwise physical reality only exists as what is referred to as the present and duration is the process occurring in the present between particular events.
The challenge here is how to get beyond the very strong psychological presumption of narrative as foundational, given that it is foundational to the very concept of personal experience.
It is not that physics doesn't understand this, but that they still focus on the measurement of duration, because it is a simple factor that can be calculated. Here is an interesting description of the situation from an entry in the Questioning the Foundations contest, by
Edward Anderson;
"``It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction at which we arrive through the changes of things." Ernst Mach [1]. *What* change? Three answers to this are `any change' (Rovelli), `all change' (Barbour) and my argument here for the middle ground of a `sufficient totality of locally relevant change'"
Even though there is the Machian recognition of time as effect, yet somehow a simple measure of this effect is what is incorporated into 'spacetime' as foundational. As I keep pointing out in these discussions, we think of time as that progression from past events to future ones, that we experience as a necessary function of only existing in the present. Yet the larger dynamic is that these events form and dissolve into the next, thus it is the future becoming past that is the larger reality.
Then the various seeming absurdities in physics, such as clocks running at different speeds and reality branching out into multiworlds, are explainable. Clocks run at different rates because they are all physically different processes, much as some things move faster than others. As for multiworlds, when you go from an ordered past into a probabilistic future, it does branch out into possibilities, but when it is the collapse of these possibilities, yielding actualities, ie. future becoming present, the branches come together. It is the actual collapse of the wave function.
Safe to say, this idea gets quickly filtered out by those who have spent their lives studying the geometry of spacetime, with its assumption of a causal property.
Regards,
John M
view post as summary
report post as inappropriate
Jim George Snowdon replied on Sep. 24, 2013 @ 23:36 GMT
John,
The Earth`s rotational motion is the fundamental physical mechanism responsible for maintaing our confusion over time.
At the Equator, we travel at a rotational surface speed in excess of 1,600 kilometers per hour. We all see the effects of the Earth`s rotational motion, in seamless harmony with our clocks, on a daily basis. The constant rotational speed of the planet permeates life on Earth.
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 25, 2013 @ 02:49 GMT
Jim,
One even more basic feature to keep in mind is that as predatory creatures, we are very focus oriented, with our eyes in the front of our head. So we are biased toward a very linear view of reality. Reality, on the other hand, is non-linear. So we are a single entity moving through a dynamic ecosystem. Therefore we are generally focused on singular aspects of this reality, like particular objects, events, processes, measurements, concepts, etc, rather than just being generally aware of the situation. Yes, this leads us to the complex understanding of reality that has created human civilization, but, like the spinning planet, introduces particular biases into our thought processes at a foundational level. Consider how plants essentially just expand outward and prey animals have eyes on the sides of their heads to give them greater situational awareness and while they possess far less analytical abilities, generally have faster reaction times. Now consider how we think of the more contextual side of our minds, the instinctual and emotional, in terms of the heart and the gut. As a pump, the heart is constantly expanding and contracting, creating a rhythmic cycle, while the gut is our own internal ecosystem.
So we are constantly trying to distill this dynamic reality around us and in us into some narrative/linear sequence in order to understand it. Thus the primacy of the temporal effect.
Now this is not to say we shouldn't try thinking linearly, but a lot of these conundrums would make more sense, not vanish, but make more sense, if we begin to understand our forward, focal bias in context.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
Jim George Snowdon replied on Sep. 26, 2013 @ 02:40 GMT
John,
"but, like the spinning planet, introduces particular biases into our thought processes at a foundational level."
I agree, the spinning planet does introduce particular biases in our thought processes at a foundational level.
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 26, 2013 @ 03:12 GMT
Jim,
Though what limits us, also defines us. Take away all biases, lens, limits, mediums, contexts, etc. and you just have a flatline.
Nothing and everything can seem the same, when it all balances out.
Chasing infinities isn't necessarily the shortest route to absolutes, but it is still educational.
Regards, John M
report post as inappropriate
Jim George Snowdon replied on Oct. 15, 2013 @ 22:33 GMT
John,
Our reality is a spinning planet. The Earth`s constant rotational motion and it`s environmental effects, are provable, natural, and right.
When we sleep, we break conscious contact with `time` and the Earth`s rotational position. The first thing we do when we awake, is to check the `time`, the Earth`s current rotational position. I imagine many of us have a clock in the bedroom.
We assume that `time` itself is passing, rather than assume that it`s only a case of duration elapsing.
We do have the choice to assume either.
As you said earlier, "the spinning planet, introduces particular biases into our thought processes at a foundational level."
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Oct. 15, 2013 @ 23:31 GMT
Jim,
I think the effect of being awake is that it focuses our consciousness in one direction and that when we are asleep the various parts of our awareness tend to start interacting. That there is a natural element of schizophrenia to our sub-conscious that bubbles up in our sleep.
'All for one, one for all."
Physically, socially, culturally there are an incredible number of factors which make us who and what we are. We are our definition. Start picking at that structure and it can get quite interesting. Not always in a good way. You start to understand why people cling so totally to belief systems which seem ludicrous from another perspective. Yet we do have to keep exploring who and what we are, or stagnate and die anyway.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
hide replies
John R. Cox wrote on Sep. 2, 2013 @ 03:29 GMT
Thanks All, I avoid stirring up a hornet' nest (or bother) unless it's in a doorway I wish to enter.
Much thanks Tom for the Wald link. And yes the classic foundation is necessary because after all it was Maxwell's discovery of the natural relationship of c and the proportional strength of mutual electromagnetic inductance-reactance that is the inconvenient fact.
Take it a little...
view entire post
Thanks All, I avoid stirring up a hornet' nest (or bother) unless it's in a doorway I wish to enter.
Much thanks Tom for the Wald link. And yes the classic foundation is necessary because after all it was Maxwell's discovery of the natural relationship of c and the proportional strength of mutual electromagnetic inductance-reactance that is the inconvenient fact.
Take it a little easy with me guys (and dolls) I had to tell the spouse of my algebra teacher when he'd call Saturday evenings at the end of the month that Mom and Dad were both up at the shop, many times they were and me too. Then through Wednesday I'd work into evening Mondays, late Tuesday nights and many Wednesday nights straight through. At 15 I couldn't integrate that with learning to demonstrate proofs and stay awake at the same time. That's why I've come here, it only costs me part of $25 a month.
I'm not sure if general co-variance is the same or used differently in engineering (Lewie wouldn't hang a stick of conduit without a spirit level) and GR. From Wald it's more clear than the elevator car that the theory model is it's own co-ordinate system. And it can not be said that the EMR-IR proportion is 'caused' by light velocity being that value anymore then it can be said that light velocity 'causes' that proportion. What can be said is that a direct measurement of field strength in earth bound electro-mechanical devices is meaningful to the application of electrical strength or magnetic strength, but that the proportionate difference with vary with whatever application. So the calculus of comparing electric to magnetic strength is made the same way those respective field strengths are measured, against their own type of field. Maxwell's analysis (10% inspiration - 90% perspiration) of thousands of Faraday's meticulously recorded data of experiments found that in all cases a comparison of magnetic field strength between two fixed points, induced by the electrical field strength between two identical fixed points was precisely 'c'.
General covariance is the sliding scale that maintains that measurable proportion. If light velocity were not invariant then then neither would be the comparative field strengths in any application. Electro-dynamics, thermo-dynamics, materials and processes would be chaos.
As for Minkowski and blocktime, I may be jumbling things, Eckard, but Minkowski spacetime is a scale set as one second is equivalent to 3^10 cm which preserves the natural relation of 'c' at light velocity as a direct proportion of EMR field strengths. But doesn't that create a universe as 'blocktime'.
Where did the Time go, John? What will the future hold? That is the continuum.
The math terms are new and strange to me but I can fully understand the meaning of a zero length tangent to curvature, especially if has an indefinite internal vector. That's where you pull your measures from. The usual problem is not having one and have to push the dumb end of the tape into a corner so you have to kind of guess how much off it might be because of the hook on the tip. If you're going for the diagonal of a square frame or what is supposed to be square you can generally judge what the angle is going to be. But if it's skewed much and you have to drag it into line so that the building loads will all help keep it all pinched together, then you only know what angle you want to make and can't predict really how much off your tip will become once you get it close to square, and you have the same problem pulling the diagonal off the other corner. That all comes from having to build to an imaginary grid. At present you just have to design for live loads. But as to what causes things at this moment, is more definite than predicting what those causes now will produce next moment. How that's done for predicting the path of near earth asteroids or the emergence of some kind of order out of chaos... is still a first water mystery to me.
This is a bit longer than I'm easy with, but I guess I asked for it. jrc
view post as summary
report post as inappropriate
Eckard Blumschein replied on Sep. 2, 2013 @ 15:49 GMT
John C,
Minkowski's light "cones" do perhaps deserve a closer look. Let me first simplify them by summarizing x^2+y^2+z^2 in the squared radial distance r^2.
I quote from http://www.iep.utm.edu/proper-t/ : SR connects three distinct quantities to each other: space (r), time (t), and proper time (tau): (r/c)^2 = t^2 - tau^2.
Minkowski borrowed this concept from Einstein but did not have an explanation for his strange hyperbolic metric -+++ and died soon later from appendix.
I understand that one has to choose one and only one point r=0 in space and the natural point t_elapsed=0. See my second endnote.
Incidentally, already Leibniz Leibniz denied that classical physics requires any concept of absolute position in space, and argued that only the notion of ‘relative’ or ‘relational’ space’ is required. I share his view in this respect.
Eckard
report post as inappropriate
John R. Cox wrote on Sep. 2, 2013 @ 04:59 GMT
I bungled a sentence in my last post. It should read: it can not be said that the EMR-IR proportion is 'caused' by light velocity being that value, anymore than it can be said that light velocity is 'caused' by that proportion. jrc
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman wrote on Sep. 2, 2013 @ 10:43 GMT
John C,
Does the earth travel Newton's flow, or Einstein's fourth dimension from yesterday to tomorrow, or does tomorrow become yesterday because the earth rotates?
The question is whether there is some underlaying property called time, or is it an emergent effect of action?
It might seem little different mathematically whether you measure between the crests of two waves/distance, or the rate by which they pass a marker/duration, but much can hide in small differences.
Consider that epicycles were mathematically effective for the very logical reason that we are the center of our own point of observation; We still see the sun moving across the sky. Sometimes though, the way nature puts reality together and how we observe reality are not the same thing.
Mathematics is conceptual reductionism. We use symbols to identify concepts, rather than the phonetic vocalizations of conventional language. With reductionism, you end up with the skeleton, not the seed. When you try to reconstruct reality out of just the hard parts of measurement, it doesn't necessarily explain where it comes from in the first place. Math is a tool, not a god. We can curse the gods, but as you well know, tools can be misused.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
John R. Cox wrote on Sep. 2, 2013 @ 15:11 GMT
John M.
Well put, I would agree on reductionism and math being a tool(s) in general and yet it can reduce concepts only to a point of comparison not 'the seed'. I wonder if that is because I can't remove my human being, from any sort of equation whether argumentative or (rudimentary) math.
I have to go with General Relativity on orbital motion. Newtonian methodology gets close but...
view entire post
John M.
Well put, I would agree on reductionism and math being a tool(s) in general and yet it can reduce concepts only to a point of comparison not 'the seed'. I wonder if that is because I can't remove my human being, from any sort of equation whether argumentative or (rudimentary) math.
I have to go with General Relativity on orbital motion. Newtonian methodology gets close but the predictability of GR in particular of the tiny discrepancy between Newtonian prediction and observation of the precession of Mercury's orbit is inarguable. GR works better. I'd like to learn a bit about MOND however, but what I've found so far is all about arguing it's viability from highly evolved mathematical cosmological models and what I need is a general definitive synopsis to know where to start.
I think the start line on the conceptual plane of yesterday, today and tomorrow has to be today. We really don't know why time extends, but to me it is a fundamental property of existence and I see much of the debate about it being emergent or non-existent as being a mathematical expedient of political science, not hard science. It was business and emergent industry that brought Newton out from the experiments of a few obsessed aristocrats and parlor tricks of the idle rich because business was exclusively owned by them. The three hundred years of dynamic scientific/industrial revolution which resulted has biased scientific thinking towards what business is willing to pay for. Energy. I think that the arguments of time emerging from energy is due to business wanting more time to generate more energy.
Today, for myself, I wish to find meetings of minds to inform myself of what technical limits of definition of terms, firstly in language, are generally agreed upon in convention. How Tom or Eckard ascribe such terms as 'general covariance' might be somewhere around what I think it to means, but I am limited by my own ignorance. To my understanding relating to a fairly limited range of ponderings over magnetic and electrical behavior, I would call 'general co-variance' something like the scale of time and the scale of space are mutually variant due to the natural relationship of light velocity and electric and magnetic fields constance of proportion. But it would probably take more column space than I think polite in a forum. Later jrc
view post as summary
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 2, 2013 @ 18:04 GMT
John C,
Here is an interesting interview with someone who has deep knowledge of reconciling theory with reality.
While I don't have much use on an emotional level with big business, or government, etc, on a conceptual level, I like to keep them in context. They are not wild speculative theories, but are the result of human society dealing with the facts of nature on a very foundational level, as those which become divorced from that reality rather quickly find themselves in hot water and victims of economic darwinism. So don't dismiss the idea that "time is money"/energy, too quickly. If nothing moves, there is no change, so whether or not change creates time, or time creates change, if there is no change, there is no measure of time and physics operates under the assumption that what cannot be measured doesn't exist. So no change, no time, however you explain the relationship.
report post as inappropriate
Eckard Blumschein replied on Sep. 3, 2013 @ 08:41 GMT
John M,
While I agree with much of Carver Mead's views, I don't consider the silicon cochlea by Mead and Lyon successful. I am also skeptical about Mead's attribution of the putative time symmetry in the quantum world to coherence. Well, one could infer from coherence over a certain timespan that no change is to be expected. However, didn't the notion time loose its meaning for this expectation because nothing happens? I consider a strict distinction between past and future nonetheless necessary.
Eckard
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 3, 2013 @ 10:35 GMT
Eckard,
I certainly agree about the optics. Sigma built a camera based on it, on which I wasted close to a thousand dollars, about ten years ago. It was a flop.
As for time, they all try incorporating that past to future vector, with the resulting mathematical addenda.
What I do like about his ideas is that quanta expand to fill their container and contract when balanced by their polarity. I think that eventually gravity can be derived from this, on mass scales. What is gravity, other then a scalar vacuum effect induced from more energy occupying less volume. Just as releasing these quanta en mass creates serious pressure. Think atomic shock waves.
Like temperature and I argue, time, it is not so much a force requiring its own particles, waves, fields, dimensions, but is an external effect of that electromagnetic attraction and contraction.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
John R. Cox wrote on Sep. 2, 2013 @ 20:31 GMT
John M. & Eckard
JM thanks for the Carver Mead interview link. ditto on the zero point particle issue.
Eckard - proper time (tau) - how is that used? Does it refer to the time parameter of a general spacetime, or to a wavetrain of light in the general frame? My wonderment is that we can't assume that there is any particular metric of scale to describe an arbitrary length of interval for the sake of measurement on a continuum. But that doesn't mean we can assume time and space once tangled up together don't operate as if they each had a physical property of scale. If time scale were the same as space scale would duration expand? would direction extend? Yet intuitively, that is what seems to be the product of blocktime. Perhaps Kalusa's 5th dimension is an underlying covariance of scale between time and space. Ask Tom Ray if he thinks that makes any sense. HEY!! you fellows have the math! maybe someday they'll tell stories about the discovery of timespace! I'm going to take a break. Problem with relativity is that it warps my head before space warps. jrc
report post as inappropriate
Marcel-Marie LeBel wrote on Sep. 11, 2013 @ 01:56 GMT
John Brodix Merryman
Gravity is .... On this, I agree with Bill Unruh as he describes it below:
(Time, Gravity, and Quantum Mechanics Bill Unruh 1993)
“A more accurate way of summarizing the lessons of General Relativity is
that gravity does not cause time to run differently in different places (e.g., faster far from the earth than near it). Gravity is the unequable...
view entire post
John Brodix Merryman
Gravity is .... On this, I agree with Bill Unruh as he describes it below:
(Time, Gravity, and Quantum Mechanics Bill Unruh 1993)
“A more accurate way of summarizing the lessons of General Relativity is
that gravity does not cause time to run differently in different places (e.g., faster far from the earth than near it). Gravity is the unequable flow of time from place to place. It is not that there are two separate phenomena, namely gravity and time and that the one, gravity,affects the other. Rather the theory states that the phenomena we usually ascribe to gravity are actually caused by time’s flowing unequably from place to place.”
T.H. Ray
1 The Sun rises and birds sing. There is an order but no direct causality.
2 “...whether the observer creates the universe by the act of observing (becomes entangled ..” You don’t need entanglement for that. We create it all.
The whole universe is just a big black silent mush of vacuum and EM radiation. Scarry to most. Our reality, light, colors, sound, space, etc. we make it all up, and physics essentially starts from there and tries to keep it around in order to do just that; physics. Everything you perceive as real is illusion. What is real is not perceived but can be figured out. We are perceptual and the universe is operational. The moon is a perception. But for the universe, every particle making the moon is away in time from each other (nothing instantaneous), therefore the moon is just an aggregate of matter across time i.e. not an object or something all at once in one place and one moment. We create and perceive the concept of object.. No “Joy” on the object. This aggregate only becomes the “moon” object when we perceive and conceive it as being there, entire, in one place and one moment. Get it? This is the kind of concepts you have to see past the illusion and understand the simple mush of the universe; what is it made of and how does it work; the substance and cause behind it all.
3 You confuse “exist longer” with “exist more”. The first is about lasting longer (I know about muons) and the second is about a higher probability of existing or moving towards a region, a rather metaphysical concept that physics conveniently replaces by “probability of finding” it there.
Cox,
“that it is THE ABSORPTION LINES that Doppler shift!” Come again?
TH Ray,
“We know that space is mostly Euclidean” First, there is no space, lines or geometry as they are convenient projections. Secondly, in this context, using the word “is” should be reserved to serious metaphysicists who actually understand and mean it. All other should actually use the words “appears to be” as a wise cautionary approach. The use of the word “is” commands that the user addresses what “is by itself” and not what is created by the observer.
Cox,
“...instead of a continuous curve...” Right! The curve is the integration of the change of position in different times... We may trace the path but the curve does not exist per se.
*** There is such a confusion about time !!!!!!!!!!!!!. The human time is in block i.e. we all get to Christmas at the same time, so we have block past and block present. The Einstein saying about “time is an illusion” is about that block time. Time passes at different rates here and there so no common block past and present, that is the illusion . Time is universal and does run everywhere. Its just that it is not running at the same rate everywhere! Take a fast plane a few times and you will still get to Christmas at the same time as the others! Only your own time was modified (so little).
Burgan, (IMHO)
States compare to local time evolution, which is an explosive process, spherical.
A stable state is in logical existence according to local time and shows no motion (no unsymmetrical existence)
Unstable states are in illogical existence according to local time and show motion (unsymmetrical existence), motion being the sign of an illogical state in the spontaneous process of resolution.
Marcel,
view post as summary
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 14, 2013 @ 23:11 GMT
Marcel,
It is a fact that our reality is what we experience, so the question is whether our experience creates some basic distortions that can be unraveled. An obvious example is the appearance of the sun traveling across the sky. For most of human history it was quite obvious the earth we stand on is the "firmament" and it was equally obvious the sun does move across the sky. Now we have a better understanding of our position in the cosmos.
Today it is equally obvious that time "flows" from past to future. Newton declared it an evidently universal flow, which Einstein amended to say it flows faster in some conditions than others.
Yet how could it be any other way?
Our experience is as singular entities, moving about in a larger, dynamic context. So while we function linearly, our situation is non-linear and reactive to our actions. Such that in a very physical level, our context effectively goes the opposite direction, in a very distributed fashion. So as we bounce from one event to the next, it really is in a larger equilibrium. What is the effect of this? The form changes, even if it does with a large amount of regularity, as one day follows another. So, as I keep asking, does the earth really travel this "flow of time" from yesterday to tomorrow, or does tomorrow become yesterday because the earth rotates?
All we see and all we can measure is action, so is time a measure of action, or is action an effect of time?
Of course, we still see the sun move across the sky and the ground seems endless...
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Sep. 17, 2013 @ 17:09 GMT
Marcel,
I missed seeing this. You write, "This aggregate only becomes the 'moon' when we perceive and conceive it as being there, entire, in one place and one moment. Get it?"
I get it, and answer 'so what?' One may create a moon in one's mind that corresponds to the moon external to one's mind. And? You are confusing metaphysical philosophy which has nothing to do with physics -- and metaphysical realism, which is the physics of objective reality.
" ... there is no space, lines or geometry as they are convenient projections."
Yes? Projections of what from where? Bon chance.
Tom
report post as inappropriate
John R. Cox wrote on Sep. 11, 2013 @ 04:12 GMT
Marcel
"that it is the absorption lines that Doppler shift"
The absorption of frequencies showing up in spectral analysis as gaps in the otherwise continuous (sic) visible spectrum, are the reason that we can determine that an attenuation of wavelength has occurred. The emission source does not emit those frequencies that it absorbs. In a spectrograph the full range of visible spectrum is present from a 'white light' source such as a distant galaxy, but those frequencies that are not emitted are gaps in the attenuated wavelengths. Hence an absorption line of an element that would be in the region of 'green' at the emission source, or laboratory, is 'shifted' towards 'yellow' when the distant source is receding from our observation at a significant rate of speed. The attenuation is of all frequencies emitted and so in the case of red shift, ultraviolet wavelengths are attenuated into visible violet and the far end of red is attenuated into infra red. The diffraction element in the instrument does not distinguish that, only the gaps of non-emitted frequency wavelengths.
I comprehend what you have said of Bill Unruh's work, I see he's quite prolific. I think where it is misunderstood conceptually is that it approaches the BETA function of the Fitzgerald Contraction from the perspective of light velocity being the benchmark from which a survey is protracted; whereas Lorentz explicitly reformulated it to protract from relative rest towards light velocity, and had stated his premise based on his theoretical prediction that an electric charge if contained in a smaller volume would exhibit greater mass. Your own application of Unruh to causality goes to density of energy in a rest mass, where Lorentz did not consider density in relation to velocity. jrc
report post as inappropriate
John R. Cox wrote on Sep. 14, 2013 @ 23:21 GMT
Jim on 9/14
"I don't think time exists as a real thing or force in reality."
Aside from causality, if time must be inconsequential because there has yet to be a successful rationale that explains irreversibility as a natural function, the results from General Relativity are simply irrelevant.
It is not simply that in GR if space curves then what do you do about the space it's curved out of ? ... that's not the space it refers to. You have to envision the theory model being it's own co=ordinate system, not in any particular reference frame. Then anywhere in space localized conditions have a conceptualized framework on which to construct a realistic model.
Gravity is nature's way of conserving space. Removing 'force" is one thing, it's the product of mass and acceleration. Removing 'time' removes the rationale of conservation of space. Pretend there's more space in the universe than there is time to accommodate it all at once. Seen from that perspective... well...oppps.... that thing do kinda curl up on itself, don't it ! It's not the same thing as a mote of dust landing on freshly laid natural varnish so hard that it pushes out a wave and makes a fish-eye. Gravity isn't 'taking away' from space, it's giving it room. jrc
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 15, 2013 @ 00:25 GMT
John C,
This effect has do to measuring mass points, which do draw together. Yet what expands? Radiation. When you actually consider any gravitational system, it is not a neat inward flow, but leaks radiation, often tremendous amounts. Which eventually cools and then....
The situation with math is that as conceptual reductionism, various aspects of the larger reality have to be cut/distilled/chipped away, in order to examine the parts you want to see. It is a necessary aspect of knowledge, but then when these "hard parts" get treated as somehow more real than the soft parts, things start to not make sense.
Regards,
john M
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Sep. 15, 2013 @ 10:20 GMT
John C,
"You have to envision the theory model being it's own co=ordinate system, not in any particular reference frame. Then anywhere in space localized conditions have a conceptualized framework on which to construct a realistic model."
My hat is off to you, John C, for being the one voice who actually understands the principles of Einstein's theory, in this morass of confused rhetoric.
Best,
Tom
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 15, 2013 @ 10:59 GMT
Tom,
To which Einstein felt compelled to add the cosmological constant, in order to counteract the effect of gravity, when radiation would seem to have all the properties of already doing so. Remember it is by the redshift of light that space is said to expand and if this is actually due to a function of distance, since it is proportional to distance, then there are a lot of loose ends which could be tied up to other loose ends and we wouldn't need to keep adding garbage out.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Sep. 15, 2013 @ 12:23 GMT
John M,
See my post in the "Disproofs ..." thread 15 Sept 10:09 GMT. Please reply here, however, rather than there.
Best,
Tom
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 15, 2013 @ 23:56 GMT
Tom,
And I think the common field source is the field, ie. space, not a singularity, but I'll spare us both.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Sep. 16, 2013 @ 12:48 GMT
John, you're conflating two entirely different things. The singularity at creation (big bang) speaks to all space, time, and matter-energy compressed into an unimaginably dense state. A singularity in geometry, is space collapsed to a point; i.e., a local region of a plane or spherical manifold (in general relativity, a black hole with a theoretical singularity at its center).
There are no singularities in quantum mechanics, because the model is two-dimensional. That's why it is described in complex Hilbert space, which is a 2-dimension space.
Quantum field theory singularities are conical, i.e., like the "gravity wells" at malls and science museums that you let coins roll down. That's not exactly space collapsed to a point, though one doesn't know where the point ends and the 1 or 2 dimensional space begins.
So yes -- the common field source is believed to be the quantum field, which is an extension of general relativity. We've always known -- even Einstein knew, and wrote about it extensively -- that general relativity, while mathematically complete, is an incomplete description of physical reality *because* it could not prevent the formation of singularities.
Best,
Tom
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 16, 2013 @ 15:11 GMT
Tom,
The only two actual physical black holes/singularities that come to mind are galactic cores and binary stars. Galaxies certainly radiate lots of energy before whatever left falls into that core and then there are the jets of cosmic rays and plasma bubbles coming out. While binary stars eventually go supernova, when they reach a certain density/size. So it does seem to me, the infalling side of the equation is only half the picture. I just can't get worked up over a model which ignores half the action.
As for the whole Big Bang scenario, no one has yet explained to me the logic of arguing space expands, yet still assuming a constant speed of light. How can you denominate the distance in constant units and then say space itself is expanding, not simply that the distance is increasing? Doesn't anyone remember elementary school math when they get to the complicated stuff? If two galaxies are x lightyears apart and they expand to being 2x lightyears apart, your denominator is the stable units of C. Your expansion is the numerator. It is not expanding units. It is an increasing number of stable units. None of this "the light's just being carried along by the expansion nonsense." Remember, even Einstein said, "Space is what you measure with a ruler." and the ruler, the denominator, the units the space is being denominated in, are lightyears!!!!!!
If the theory can't even correspond to the most basic math, why bother trying to argue over all the handwaving that comes after?
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 16, 2013 @ 15:20 GMT
"general relativity, while mathematically complete, is an incomplete description of physical reality *because* it could not prevent the formation of singularities."
"the infalling side of the equation is only half the picture."
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Sep. 16, 2013 @ 15:20 GMT
"If the theory can't even correspond to the most basic math, why bother trying to argue over all the handwaving that comes after?"
John, the scientific handwaving at least corresponds to the math. What does your handwaving correspond to?
Best,
Tom
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 16, 2013 @ 15:38 GMT
Tom,
Another point to consider about black holes and gravity; If you were to tunnel to the center of the earth, would you find a small singularity there, or would it just be lots of pressure and heat, since the gravitational attraction would all be outward to all the mass surrounding you? Even if you reached the center of the sun? Why wouldn't this principle apply to the center of the galaxy?
Gravity as a singularity seems to be an artifact of modeling it from the surface/a point outside the actual gravitational center. The center seems to be the eye of the storm, rather than an infinite regression.
Regards, John M
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 16, 2013 @ 15:41 GMT
Tom,
This isn't some game of schoolyard, 'Well you are too!" I asked a simple question, how can it be argued that space expands, if the theory still uses a constant measure?
Regards, john M
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Sep. 16, 2013 @ 17:59 GMT
"The center seems to be the eye of the storm, rather than an infinite regression."
John, the eye of the storm *is* an infinite regression.
"I asked a simple question, how can it be argued that space expands, if the theory still uses a constant measure?"
I gave you a simple answer: relativity.
Best,
Tom
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 16, 2013 @ 21:23 GMT
Tom,
Not only do storms radiate their energy back out, witness the damage, but large hurricanes spawn tornados, somewhat similar to galaxies spawning solar systems and solar systems spawning planetary systems.
Since my basic understanding of relativity very much does not explain how space can expand, irrespective of the speed of light, maybe you can enlighten me.
Now the basic premise is that nothing can exceed the speed of light in a vacuum, yet light is slowed in other mediums, but since any clock in that medium is also slowed, it still measures the same. This effect also applies in a gravity field, yet this is supposedly not due to any physical medium, but the curvature of "spacetime." Such that in a gravitational field, not only are distances shrunk, but time is slowed as well. Eventually, by the edge of the black hole, time is practically standing still. Close enough?
So if you are to put this principle in reverse and say that space expands between galaxies,
presumably the clock should speed up as well!!! In that case, even though it is expanding, we will still get the same clock reading. x lightyears will always be x lightyears. But no, the ruler is not being stretched, just more units are needed. x lightyears becomes 2x lightyears. That's not relativistic. That's simply further apart!
I wait to be enlightened.
Regards, John M
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Sep. 16, 2013 @ 21:46 GMT
"I wait to be enlightened."
That's stating the obvious, John. You might try cracking a book.
I'm reminded of a student who excitedly approached his yogi master after many years of practicing his quest for enlightenment, reporting that he managed the feat of teleporting himself across the river. "What?" answered the wide-eyed teacher, "Didn't you know you could cross on the ferry for ten cents?"
I can't teach you anything you could learn for yourself, if you wanted to.
Best,
Tom
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 16, 2013 @ 23:27 GMT
Tom,
So in other words, you don't have an explanation for why what would seem a simple increase in distance is considered an example of relativity?
Why do you assume I haven't read anything? Do you think the idea just popped into my head? I have certainly raised this issue with a fair number of people and the most I get is some lame story about how the light is being "carried" by the expanding space. Doesn't anyone know what a denominator is?
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Sep. 16, 2013 @ 23:47 GMT
"Why do you assume I haven't read anything? Do you think the idea just popped into my head?"
It might as well have.
John, expanding space is a solution to the equations of general relativity. Understand that, and you will understand why I say it's easier to learn the math than wait for things to pop into your head. Science isn't about enlightenment -- it's about objective knowledge.
Best,
Tom
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Sep. 16, 2013 @ 23:53 GMT
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 17, 2013 @ 02:30 GMT
Tom,
Thank you for coming up with something to work with. Can you cut and paste the part to resolve this issue and explain it in some depth. The math is above my level, but I'm just not seeing where the relativistic clock rate is being affected by this expansion of, rather than in, space.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 17, 2013 @ 03:10 GMT
Tom,
Just to clearly state the issue, so there isn't anymore beating around the bushes than necessary;
Clock rates slow as gravity contracts space/time. Correct/not?
So if space expands, how/where do clock rates increase/expand?
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Sep. 17, 2013 @ 12:07 GMT
Sure, John.
"Clock rates slow as gravity contracts space/time. Correct/not?"
Incorrect. A clock is any regular process (e.g., oscillation of an atom under constant conditions; or the pendulum of a grandfather clock) by which we measure the passing rate of time in a given local inertial frame, by counting beats. If we remove an identical atom, or clock, further from the influence of...
view entire post
Sure, John.
"Clock rates slow as gravity contracts space/time. Correct/not?"
Incorrect. A clock is any regular process (e.g., oscillation of an atom under constant conditions; or the pendulum of a grandfather clock) by which we measure the passing rate of time in a given local inertial frame, by counting beats. If we remove an identical atom, or clock, further from the influence of the gravity field where we first synchronized the beats, and then bring the clocks back together, we will find that the clock that traveled outside the local frame has recorded fewer beats than the one that stayed at home. Why?
Newton showed (by the calculus he invented), from Galileo's results, that free falling bodies accelerate in a gravity field independent of their inertial mass, according to the rate of change squared. This applies whether the bodies fall in a straight line toward the center of the Earth, or in a curved trajectory -- so we can consider the local gravity source as a flat plane in which gravity accelerates bodies vertical to the plane, never horizontally.
Einstein found that because this vertical acceleration is indistinguishable in principle between some force pushing bodies upward and another force pulling bodies downward -- there is equivalence between inertial mass and gravitational mass, and therefore between gravity and acceleration.
This being true, then, a clock at rest in a gravity field, keeping time at a constant rate, when moving in the opposite direction of gravitational acceleration *must* record a slower rate the further it moves from the field -- because the increased rate caused by gravitational acceleration (rate of change squared) is in a sense "undone" by motion against the gravity field.
One might ask reasonably -- as perhaps you are -- why the moving clock doesn't simply return to its prior state of timekeeping when it rejoins the stay at home clock, so that we could never tell that the time changed at all? The answer is -- it does return to its prior state of local timekeeping. We know the moving clock has become "younger" than the Earthbound clock, however, because its *record* of beats is out of sync with the other. By accelerating against the gravity field, it gained time compared to the stay at home clock.
This relative gain/loss of measured elapsed time values tells us that time is not absolute. Gravity doesn't contract spacetime; gravity affects the trajectory of particles in spacetime.
"So if space expands, how/where do clock rates increase/expand?"
Only locally. "All physics is local," as Einstein said. If an observer were watching time pass on the face of the traveling clock, she would see that her own rate of time in that inertial frame is consistent with the clock time. An observer watching the Earthbound clock would see that his own time is consistent with his clock. Because all motion is relative, though, the Earthbound observer can say that the moving clock is slow compared to his own -- no, says the traveling clockwatcher, it's *your* clock that is slow there on Earth. And both are right.
Not until the clocks are brought back into the same inertial frame can we know that true time dilation has occurred -- the traveling clock really moved slower than the one that stayed at home. So long as the two clockwatchers were in relative uniform motion, their clocks were perfectly synchronized even though they each claimed the other's clock was fast or slow. Why?
Here, finally, is where space, speed of light constant, and the FRW metric come in.
Time dilation cannot be separated from length contraction when we speak of real measurement parameters. The contraction of time and space is covariant but not symmetric -- "We measure time with clocks," said Einstein, "We measure space with rods." You can do the calculation, and find that at about 85% of the speed of light, a body is contracted to about one-half its length at rest.
This is why special relativity as a bedrock physical principle finds that physical influences among bodies cannot exceed the speed of light in a vacuum. Colloquially speaking, there is more space in the universe than time, and always will be; space can expand indefinitely, and bodies will never exchange physical influences faster than the speed of light. And because there are no isolated inertial systems, locality is preserved as complementary to special relativity everywhere in the universe.
General relativity extends and generalizes special relativity because it recognizes that there are no actually rigid rods. So when we speak of a metric, whether FRW or any metric measure, we need to simplify the measure to a flat space that accommodates the measure. Study 4.5 of the attachment, and you should understand why. To get a little technical, briefly:
One thing that even experienced teachers of general relativity often get wrong, is in describing the shape of the Riemannian manifold as curved space. Einstein's choice of the four dimensional Riemannian geometry, however, actually characterizes the space as a pseudo-Riemannian manifold of Lorentzian metric properties -- this is very important, because it tells us that the flat plane metric of Euclidean space applies all the way to the cosmological limit. (It also opens the door to more sophisticated topology, such as Joy Christian's, which we'll save for another time and another thread.)
All best,
Tom
view post as summary
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Sep. 17, 2013 @ 15:49 GMT
Having now carefully read section 4.5, I would feel ashamed if I didn't recognize and credit its author, Andrew Hamilton at the University of Colorado. Fantastic job!
Incidentally, Prof. Hamilton is a fellow of JILA, the same lab where Deborah S. Jin is doing groundbreaking work in condensed matter physics.
Colorado and JILA -- you rock!
Tom
report post as inappropriate
Anonymous replied on Sep. 17, 2013 @ 18:04 GMT
Working on this, but rushing off now. Stand corrected on the first part. I thought the GPS clock goes faster, since it isn't slowed by gravity...
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 17, 2013 @ 18:40 GMT
Tom,
Scratch that previous. Forgot to post it and am now back..
GPS clocks are faster...
A point about gravity, basically these measurements are done on the surface and I've heard that if you dropped something through a hole through the earth, it would accelerate to the midpoint and continue through almost to the other side before turning back. Wouldn't the gravitational...
view entire post
Tom,
Scratch that previous. Forgot to post it and am now back..
GPS clocks are faster...
A point about gravity, basically these measurements are done on the surface and I've heard that if you dropped something through a hole through the earth, it would accelerate to the midpoint and continue through almost to the other side before turning back. Wouldn't the gravitational attraction of all it passed by start to drag on it?
I'm still not seeing where what seems to be a basic doppler effect of recession is especially relativistic. I do remember the history of how it came to be, that first it was simply considered an expansion in space and the redshift was simply the doppler effect of these galaxies flying away from us. Then when it was observed that all those distant galaxies were redshifted proportional to distance, with no apparent lateral motion, so it would have to mean that all those distant galaxies were moving directly away from us, so we appeared to be at the center of the universe. Then it was described as a relativistic effect and not just an expansion in space, but an expansion
of space, in order for us not to be at the center of the universe. Yet it does seem the same conventional doppler effect is still being used to explain the redshift, without any corresponding temporal relativistic effect.
Consider:
"This is why special relativity as a bedrock physical principle finds that physical influences among bodies cannot exceed the speed of light in a vacuum. Colloquially speaking, there is more space in the universe than time, and always will be; space can expand indefinitely, and bodies will never exchange physical influences faster than the speed of light."
What is a vacuum, as in speed of light in a vacuum, if not a constant? If "space" can expand, why doesn't the "vacuum" expand as well, thus the speed of light keeps up with the expansion of space? It really goes to my point. The space between those two galaxies is expanding, but the "vacuum" is not, because it takes more time for the light to cross this distance???
Sorry if this is a disorganized post, as I'm trying to organize it in my head...
Regards,
John M
view post as summary
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Sep. 17, 2013 @ 22:32 GMT
Sorry, John. We're not on the same page. In the same chapter. Or the same book. If you just want to riff, that's fine -- just don't expect me to play any more backup.
Best,
Tom
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 17, 2013 @ 23:29 GMT
Tom,
If you can point me to the book which describes how that "space" and "vacuum" are separate properties, I would appreciate it.
As I said, sorry that post was a bit of thinking out loud.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
Eckard Blumschein replied on Sep. 18, 2013 @ 07:55 GMT
John M,
As to second Tom:
In what are vacuum and space considered different? An early book explained this already in the title: Otto de Guericke: "Experimenta nova ut vocantur Magdeburgica de vacuo spatio". From this notion "empty space" you might infer that vacuo is a particular property of the subject spatio. Space (spatio) may or may not be empty (vacuo).
Of course, even empty (from matter) space may be imagined to contain e.g. electric fields that were already demonstrated also by Otto Gericke in 1660.
Michelson showed in 1881 that (more or less) empty space does not contain a light-carrying medium that was imagined to be in motion relative to earth.
Regards,
Eckard
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Sep. 18, 2013 @ 10:31 GMT
John,
Eckard is right. Furthermore, both Descartes and Einstein repeated the aphorism, "There is no space empty of the field."
Tom
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 18, 2013 @ 10:56 GMT
Eckard,
I realize space can be occupied. You and I occupy space. The fact is that the vacuum, empty space, that which light crosses at C, is thus being assigned a very specific dimensionality. You wouldn't say the vacuum expands or contracts relative to C, otherwise there would be no constant. Now if you and I were to walk away from each other, is that an expansion of space, or is it just increasing distance?
Consider the space between those galaxies is being denominated in lightyears, ie. if the universe expands to twice its current size, they would go from being x lightyears apart, to 2x lightyears apart. The distance is being denominated in the stable unit of lightyears. The numerator, x, 2x, is how many of these stable units there are between those points. There is no stretching of those units, only an increasing number of them.
At the top of this particular thread, John Cox made the following point; " You have to envision the theory model being it's own co=ordinate system, not in any particular reference frame."
The fact is that C, the speed of light in a vacuum, is the reference frame, the denominator, so space, the distance between you and I, or two galaxies billions of
lightyears apart, is denominated in that stable reference frame.
Space is what you measure with a ruler and the cosmic ruler is C.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Sep. 18, 2013 @ 11:35 GMT
" ... the cosmic ruler is C."
No it isn't. John, I am disheartened that I spent hours researching and trying to simply the facts for you -- even directly answering your specific questions in a way that I thought you could understand -- only to have you ignore it and continue to just pontificate on anything that happens to enter your head.
Tom
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 18, 2013 @ 16:05 GMT
Tom,
Thank you for the effort, but if I may review some relevant parts of the conversation;
I said, "Clock rates slow as gravity contracts space/time. Correct/not?"
To which you replied, " If we remove an identical atom, or clock, further from the influence of the gravity field where we first synchronized the beats, and then bring the clocks back together, we will find that...
view entire post
Tom,
Thank you for the effort, but if I may review some relevant parts of the conversation;
I said, "Clock rates slow as gravity contracts space/time. Correct/not?"
To which you replied, " If we remove an identical atom, or clock, further from the influence of the gravity field where we first synchronized the beats, and then bring the clocks back together, we will find that the clock that traveled outside the local frame has recorded fewer beats than the one that stayed at home. Why?" "...because this vertical acceleration is indistinguishable in principle between some force pushing bodies upward and another force pulling bodies downward -- there is equivalence between inertial mass and gravitational mass, and therefore between gravity and acceleration."
Yet this is not my point. Yes acceleration will increase the drag and further slow the clock, but I did not say acceleration, I said gravity and a stronger gravity field does slow a clock, relative to a weaker one, so when you compare a clock already in a higher orbit, it runs faster than one on the ground.
"Time dilation cannot be separated from length contraction when we speak of real measurement parameters. The contraction of time and space is covariant but not symmetric -- "We measure time with clocks," said Einstein, "We measure space with rods." You can do the calculation, and find that at about 85% of the speed of light, a body is contracted to about one-half its length at rest."
Presumably then, the clock rate is slowed to about half its sped at rest. Yes/no?
"This is why special relativity as a bedrock physical principle finds that physical influences among bodies cannot exceed the speed of light in a vacuum."
So what is this vacuum, if not empty space?? I don't think this should be considered some kind of trick question or ignoring your considerable efforts to explain. Pardon my ignorance, but I cannot see what the difference is and it is a question you are not addressing directly.
Regards,
John M
view post as summary
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 18, 2013 @ 16:10 GMT
Tom,
One more question;
"You can do the calculation, and find that at about 85% of the speed of light, a body is contracted to about one-half its length at rest."
What is this "at rest," if not inertial to the aforementioned vacuum?
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Sep. 18, 2013 @ 16:24 GMT
"Yes acceleration will increase the drag and further slow the clock, but I did not say acceleration, I said gravity and a stronger gravity field does slow a clock, relative to a weaker one, so when you compare a clock already in a higher orbit, it runs faster than one on the ground."
Just the opposite, John! Moving clocks run slower than clocks at rest. This one example among many serves to evidence that you haven't read one damn word I or the sources I referenced wrote. You have no idea what relativity says or how it works, and yet you continue to hold forth on your contrary notions.
" ... a question you are not addressing directly."
That's just the thing, John. I (or at least Andrew Hamilton)addressed ALL your questions DIRECTLY. At this point, I am convinced you are just messing around, with no serious interest in the actual physics.
Best,
Tom
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 18, 2013 @ 18:43 GMT
Tom,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_drift "For instance, the clocks in GPS satellites experience this effect due to the reduced gravity they experience (making their clocks appear to run more quickly than those on Earth) and must therefore incorporate relativistically corrected calculations when reporting locations to users."
Sit back and read what I wrote. I said gravity, not acceleration.
Maybe we should just drop the actual question.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
Akinbo Ojo replied on Sep. 18, 2013 @ 19:13 GMT
John,
Visited the wikipedia site and I have asked before: Which planet's gravitational field's clock was used to determine that light would cover 299792458m in one second?
On a different planet, with a different gravitational field intensity and thus a different clock, will this value be the same?
On a planet collapsed to a black hole, GR tells us it would take an infinite time for light to cover same 299792458m distance. So the mathematics of gravity slowing clocks is correct, even if there may be other physical explanations for the phenomenon.
Regards,
Akinbo
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Sep. 18, 2013 @ 19:34 GMT
Aknibo,
Yes and if we reversed this principle and said space expands between gravity fields/galaxies, then wouldn't time presumably speed up as well? But it doesn't, because the basis of this concept is the physics, not the mathematical principles. The medium slows the clock rate, but there is no negative medium on the other side of the vacuum, that would cause the speed of light and thus time to go faster. So we need to explain gravity as a consequence of the physics, not the mathematics.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
hide replies
John R. Cox wrote on Sep. 16, 2013 @ 13:45 GMT
Tom,
Thanks for the encouragement, my Mom liked to joke saying I was slow but good with my hands. In all the rehash of foundational precepts, which were quite advanced in their day, it's easy to loose sight of just how targeted to the state of knowledge those enduring ones really are. I find myself always saying, "Now John, can you really make that fit what you want to think today?"
jrc
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Sep. 16, 2013 @ 19:09 GMT
John C, there are advantages to being "slow," aren't there? (I am, too.) You have a delightful way to express the primary role that theory plays in the quest for objective knowledge.
Best,
Tom
report post as inappropriate
Peter Jackson replied on Sep. 18, 2013 @ 11:35 GMT
J.C./Tom
Well done jc. You've just got Tom to agree a description equally valid to both interpretations of Einstein's fundamental theory ("entirely contained within the postulates" 1952.).
"You have to envision the theory model being it's own co=ordinate system, not in any particular reference frame. Then anywhere in space localized conditions have a conceptualized framework on which to construct a realistic model."
In the common doctrine (1) we have a local framework ('at rest') to work with, and simply ignore any other such local frames, which is convenient as otherwise they might prove problematic. We assume then that as many as we wish can simply 'co-exist.
The discrete field interpretation (2) follows Einstein's ultimate 1952 concepts more closely (i.e. 'small space 's' in motion with large space 'S', 'Infinitely many 'spaces', in motion, and Bodies not 'in space but spatially extended' etc.).
This allows the interpretation to then ADMIT other inertial systems, and indeed infinitely many of them, all equivalent. They are simply arranged hierarchically with the same structure as 'Truth Functional Logic'. All parts of compound propositions must be resolved within the LOCAL proposition, which may be part of another proposition. Simply treat all 'Inertial systems' as closed 'propositions' (mutually exclusive) and a natural logic appears, proving SR.
What is more, SR then has a mechanism to implement it (scattering at particle c) and is entirely compatible with a better understood Copenhagen interpretation of QM (but only for observers made of matter). All evidence equally supports both models. Even the LT has a consistent mechanism (as published), and empirical problems for SR (FTL) are removed.
Now Tom, or anybody, please offer any scientific (rather than just belief based) reason why option 1 has any advantages over option 2.
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Sep. 18, 2013 @ 12:18 GMT
" ... please offer any scientific (rather than just belief based) reason why option 1 has any advantages over option 2."
Okay.
"(1) we have a local framework ('at rest') to work with, and simply ignore any other such local frames, which is convenient as otherwise they might prove problematic. We assume then that as many as we wish can simply 'co-exist.'"
Peter, relativity is coordinate free. It is not "problematic" that every local inertial frame is independent of every other, because all physics is local. Inertial frames that are timelike or spacelike separated are precisely reconciled to a common spacetime locality by the Lorentz transform. If this is not "scientific" to you, good luck falsifying it.
"The discrete field interpretation (2) follows Einstein's ultimate 1952 concepts more closely (i.e. 'small space 's' in motion with large space 'S', 'Infinitely many 'spaces', in motion, and Bodies not 'in space but spatially extended' etc.)."
This a completely superfluous assumption to the physics of relativity and as such has no meaning. As I told you, it is simply a restatement of Mach's principle that all motion is relative. That is also scientific.
Tom
report post as inappropriate
John R. Cox replied on Sep. 18, 2013 @ 14:14 GMT
Pete,
I'm a little fuzzy about the distinction between 'optional interpretation'.
It still goes back to the method of the math. GR dispenses with force on the grounds that we have not established a unification between gravity and EM. It is not a contradiction by Lonesome Al to then say 'there is not a region in space that does not have a field'. Force is the product of mass and acceleration and GR relies on both but does not employ the product. It is thereby through acceleration that the math describes the surface as a boundary of a boundary which is shrinking to describe gravity geometrically, not as an energetic dynamic. In concept gravity is not mass/energy taking up space which must then push outward, it describes gravity giving way to 'flat' space as the reason why discrete fields aggregate into greater masses. And Einstein was painfully aware that the math did not extend down to a scale where energy can be described as gravitating into mass. I think what Tom tries to get through, is that GR is firstly a General Theory (and) of relativity (comes later). It's your own personal mind-held computer.
also I just posted a correction about the refraction delay. jrc
report post as inappropriate
hide replies
Peter Jackson wrote on Sep. 18, 2013 @ 14:08 GMT
Tom,
So again you provide no scientific falsification. You simply;
1) Re-state the other interpretation, which we both already well know.
2) Re-state that all else (i.e. consistency with observation - of FTL, plasma refraction etc.) is 'superfluous' to that interpretation.
Well of course it is. That wasn't what I asked, or the important matter. You were supposed to be 'comparing' the models scientifically, not just 'chanting' what you believe. If that's all you have then you've failed.
I see no logic or evidence for your views (all evidence applies to both). You also seem to remain head-in-the-sand about the apparent FTL motion
report post as inappropriate
Peter Jackson replied on Sep. 18, 2013 @ 14:17 GMT
...dammit, I used the 'up to' arrow again and it chopped the post. It was the irrefutable proof of FTL quasar pulses, at up to 46c I referred, which are fatal to SR if you are correct. Is that what you want?
Do you really believe that is; "not problematic" and that the solution to it (also deriving the LT) will prove entirely "superfluous."?
I can find no logic or reason for your view whatsoever, and you haven't offered any.
Peter
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Sep. 18, 2013 @ 14:33 GMT
" ... . It was the irrefutable proof of FTL quasar pulses, at up to 46c I referred ..."
Sigh. Peter, this is no refutation of special relativity. Even if the quasar jets are actually traveling faster than light speed (a big if) one would still need show that quasar events are exchanging physical influences with other bodies in the universe at a speed greater than light.
There is no "proof" at all in a scientific theory, let alone "irrefutable." A theory only lives or dies on its correspondence to phenomena, and special relativity shows such strong correspondence.
I suggest you take your own wise advice to slow down and think.
All best,
Tom
report post as inappropriate
Peter Jackson replied on Sep. 18, 2013 @ 15:43 GMT
Tom,
Aha! Too fast twixt parry and lunge! you have just described and adopted the foundational proposition of the Discrete Field Model.
"one would still need show that quasar events are exchanging physical influences with other bodies in the universe at a speed greater than light."
So who was it who didn't slow down enough? ..not I Monseur Ray!. We now see you never did understand the proposition as you clung onto another!
One would not; "need to show...exchanging physical influences" at all to support the DFM or to show the assumptions "surrounding" SR as inconsistent, because even 'apparent' superluminal speed is not permitted using those assumptions. But where we DO agree is that there is no 'actual' superluminal propagation.
This is where the well understood 'two fluid' plasma mechanism does it's job, which is the physical modulation of all EM wave propagation to the speed c with respect to the rest frame of that particle. If you read the PRL/MNRAS quasar jet analysis I posted you'll have seen the derivation of the 'hypersurfaces' which do this, and the 'cancellation' of plasma charge over the Debye length, (annihilation) well known in plasma as the instantaneous 'virtual' electrons. The mechanism avoids the whole prospect of "physical influences" between "bodies."
I think our difference is Tom that I do real 'science' (study and analyse data and findings), not just 'theory'. I then don't have to rely on any 'beliefs.' A pure theorist must select his own 'theoretical' foundations, so he feels challenged when they are.
Feeling challenged does not encourage objective scientific analysis. Chanting the same beliefs as you have is 'tiresome' to use your word, as you know from Pentcho. You don't need to feel challenged.
Peter
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Sep. 18, 2013 @ 16:01 GMT
"I think our difference is Tom that I do real 'science' (study and analyse data and findings), not just 'theory'. I then don't have to rely on any 'beliefs.'"
Peter, you are welcome to show by your study and analysis that your findings are not superfluous to the theory of special relativity.
You claim not to falsify special relativity out of one side of your mouth, and out the other you claim that special relativity is not consistent with your analysis of the data.
Just what is it? -- is the real science of special relativity true or false?
Tom
report post as inappropriate
John R. Cox replied on Sep. 18, 2013 @ 17:06 GMT
Tom, please advise,
Did this current clamor arise from Pete putting forth his DFM? ...and is your point being that it's okay to assume that a GUT exists, but firstly you have to adequately define it geometrically such that it (as a model) will concisely apply to any size quantity constituent of any discrete mass of energy, before you can determine how individual discrete fields will interact... without which there is no possible correlation to SR geometry. It simply devolves to picking out points from a manifold that match some observation or another that obtain a 1:1 relationship. (?) Agreed, jrc
report post as inappropriate
Thomas Howard Ray replied on Sep. 18, 2013 @ 17:14 GMT
There's really no clamor, John C. Peter simply wants to impose information, by inductive inference, onto special relativity which it neither requires nor can accommodate. The theory is already complete.
It doesn't have anything to do with a GUT or with DFM, whatever that means.
Best,
Tom
report post as inappropriate
hide replies
David Barnett wrote on Oct. 23, 2013 @ 10:48 GMT
The equations of Quantum Mechanics are time symmetric [if you are pedantic, QPT symmetric!]. As such, deciding between cause and effect may be just a matter of convention.
Consider a pair of >0.511 GeV photons colliding. There is a chance of creating an electron-positron pair. Subsequently, the positron from one of these creation events, encounters another electon and they annihilate to a pair of photons.
Did the creation of of the positron cause the subsequent annihilation event? OR was the annihilation event the cause of the prior creation of the positron?
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Oct. 23, 2013 @ 11:10 GMT
David,
The problem is time is an effect of change, not the cause of it. Energy exchange is cause, not sequence. Sequence is pattern. One wave doesn't cause the next, nor did yesterday cause today. Wind across the water and the sun shining on a rotating planet create these sequences of temporal patterns.
It's not that the present "moves" from past to future, but this constantly changing reality turns future/potential into past/residual, as form emerges and dissolves.
So all we have are patterns emerging from 360 degrees of cause and fading as the process continues.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
Barry Weprin, Richmond CA wrote on Nov. 2, 2013 @ 23:21 GMT
Does time exist because the universe is being created moment to moment by the action of the the subatomic world, that brings together all that we experience?
Like pixels on a TV screen, the atoms interact to create the forms that appear and disappear but only the "screen" exists. The arrow of time is the Unierse' tendency to create stabie matter.
report post as inappropriate
John Brodix Merryman replied on Nov. 3, 2013 @ 16:36 GMT
Barry,
"Like pixels on a TV screen, the atoms interact to create the forms that appear and disappear but only the "screen" exists."
Basically.
The problem is that as individual beings, we exist as particular points of reference, so we experience a sequence of subjective events(past to future) and it is only when we step back and observe the spectrum of activity creating and dissolving these occurrences(future becoming past) that the process is more real than the narrative.
Physics loses sight of this dichotomy when it focuses on what can be measured, so then time becomes units of duration, rather than the dynamic activities being measured. Measures of distance and duration are quite similar, whether you are measuring between crests of waves(distance), or the rate they pass a mark(duration), it seems only matter of whether the unit is extended, or moving in extension, but one is a basis of action and one is an effect of action. Yet if you only think of it as past to future, it has no physical explanation, no dynamic, since that is the process of future becoming past. Then the only obvious connection becomes this similarity between measures of duration and distance, so you have 'spacetime,' with its 'blocktime' interpretation of events existing in this eternal geometry.
Regards,
John M
report post as inappropriate
DURGA DAS DATTA. wrote on Jun. 30, 2016 @ 11:29 GMT
Let us imagine a fish in a pond . The fish can see the grass roots rotating when it reach a swirling area of the pond. If it goes deep down, then it will feel an increase in pressure of surrounding. So the condition of water causes the feelings in a fish. In our very big universe , we also live in a pocket where the space fluid around us is swirling to give a picture of planetary orbits. ...
view entire post
Let us imagine a fish in a pond . The fish can see the grass roots rotating when it reach a swirling area of the pond. If it goes deep down, then it will feel an increase in pressure of surrounding. So the condition of water causes the feelings in a fish. In our very big universe , we also live in a pocket where the space fluid around us is swirling to give a picture of planetary orbits. Einstein call this curvature of space. We do not know what are the constituents of the super fluid around us. We also feel a pressure like fish and call it gravity. Newton gave us equation to calculate gravitational effect and that works for our day to day observations. The action of gravity at a distance is unwanted proposition and thinking gravity as long distance force between bodies may not be required. Einstein just considered curvature of space effect as gravity. Then why the concept of any force effect or rather potential in space or gravitational field. There is no logic except for may be default calculations of tensors. The simple concept of gravity has been complicated . Then comes the idea of a quantum gravity marrying with GR of Einstein. Both the theories have their own flaws in visualizing concept of time. How they can be married without a understanding of time. No body ever thought of gravity as emergent force at two levels. One is classical at molecular level and other at quantum at Planck level in reaction with color charge quarks. Graviton has been wrongly prescribed without mass by standard model . But graviton has mass and it is performing the directional push at molecular level for classical gravity and again mono magnetic coupling effects with quarks inside proton and neutron for quantum effects. The out come is that we do not have to assume a strong nuclear force and gluons for keeping the quarks together. There is no strong nuclear force but quantum gravity serve the purpose. For that we require 750 proton mass for a graviton and a mono magnetic coupling. The whole outlook on two profile emergent gravity mechanism will change our understanding of the universe. I am attaching a paper for interested scientists and truth seekers to come out from the concept of gravitational waves and LIGO SCIENTISTS MAY BE INTERESTED TO STUDY FURTHER THE RIPPLES THEY WRONGLY DESCRIBING GRAVITATIONAL WAVES AND TO UNCOVER TRUE NATURE OF QUANTUM GRAVITY.
view post as summary
attachments:
5_New_Physics_with_Emergent_Gravity_Mechanism._1.doc
report post as inappropriate
Login or
create account to post reply or comment.