I think it’s important to understand the nature of time. That’s because I think it leads to other things. I also think you can gain an understanding of the nature of time by being empirical. For example we use phrases like time flows and time passes, but when you look for the empirical evidence of time flowing or passing, you can’t find any. That’s because there isn’t any. I can hold my hands up a foot apart and show you the gap, the space between them. In this respect I can show you space, so space is empirical. I can also waggle my hands and show you motion, so motion is empirical too.
But I can’t show you time
But I can’t show you time. I can show you a clock, and you might point to the big hand and the little hand and say that’s the time. But what am I really showing you? A box with two moving pointers that go around and around, that’s all. This is the nub of Einstein’s operational definition of time. It’s in his 1905 special relativity paper on the electrodynamics of moving bodies. He talked about trains and clocks, and said this: “Now we must bear carefully in mind that a mathematical description of this kind has no physical meaning unless we are quite clear as to what we understand by “time”. We have to take into account that all our judgments in which time plays a part are always judgments of simultaneous events. If, for instance, I say, “That train arrives here at 7 o’clock”, I mean something like this: “The pointing of the small hand of my watch to 7 and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events””. This was in a paper about moving bodies. A train is a moving body, so is the big hand of a clock, and so is the little hand of a clock. And the crucial point is that the time is nothing more than the position of the hands. I know that might sound simplistic, but get your magnifying glass out and take a cold hard look at what clocks do.
What clocks do
Open up a clockwork clock and you’ll find a mainspring and a gear train, with an escapement to keep the gears turning at a constant rate. One of the gears is connected to the big hand, another to the little hand. All the clock is doing, is “clocking up” some kind of regular cyclical internal motion:
Clockwork gif from the Popular Mechanics article Building a Clock by Eric Limer
All clocks do this. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a Victorian pocket watch with a spiral spring and cogs, a quartz wristwatch with a piezoelectric crystal and electronics, or an atomic clock with caesium atoms and microwaves. A clock is some kind of machine which somehow counts or accumulates some kind of regular cyclical internal motion and shows you some kind of cumulative display that you call the time. The gears move so the hands move. Or electrons move and a liquid-crystal display changes. Or something else moves and changes. Whichever way it’s made, a clock is in essence a motion accumulator. It doesn’t literally measure the flow of time. A clock is not some cosmic gas meter. Open up a gas meter and you’ll find gas flowing through it. Open up a clock and you won’t find time flowing through it. All you’ll find is some kind of regular cyclical internal motion. Tick tock, tick tock, the internal mechanism of a clock isn’t called a movement for nothing.
Time does not flow
The notion that time flows is just a figure of speech. Rivers flow, currents flow, blood flows. These things flow because something moves. Water moves, hearts move, people move. The Earth moves, the stars move, the galaxies move. Everything moves, and you can see this motion because light moves to your eye and electrochemical signals move in your nerves and brain. Because photons and electrons and other things move. But you can’t see time flowing. That’s because it doesn’t. Nor can you see it passing. That’s because it doesn’t. The passage of time is just another figure of speech. Footballers pass, buses pass, kidney stones pass. But there is no physical thing called time that actually passes. Instead things move. Things like planets and planes and pendulum clocks.
Time exists like heat exists
That’s not to say that time does not exist. I think it’s best to think of it as something like heat. Heat exists. You know this, especially if you’ve ever burnt your hand on the stove. However heat isn’t fundamental, it’s an emergent property of motion. In a gas the molecules move freely as per the kinetic theory of gases. The temperature of a gas is effectively a measure of the average kinetic energy of its molecules. The faster they move, the hotter the gas:
GNUFDL translational motion gif by Greg L, see the Wikipedia temperature article and Wikipedia Commons
If you examine one molecule, it has no fundamental property of heat or temperature. However if it and the other molecules are moving fast, the gas is hot. This macroscopic property is perfectly real, and it’s why we can cut steel with an oxy-acetylene torch. Time is something similar. Whilst temperature is an average measure of motion, time is a cumulative measure of motion. And time exists like heat exists, because a hundred years t will kill you just as surely as a hundred degrees C.
The arrow of time is an abstract thing
But whilst heat really does flow, time doesn’t. There is no river of time flowing from the past to the future. That’s just an abstract concept for which we have no scientific evidence at all. There’s no real direction of time either. Yes, there’s an inevitable sequence to events, because if you don’t move from A to B you can’t move from B to C. But there’s nothing flowing from past events to future events. People talk about the arrow of time which points from the past to the future, and they talk about entropy. But entropy is merely “sameness”, associated with available energy, wherein energy-density tends to even out as we do work. Entropy increases, but the direction of this is as abstract as the direction of cooling in your cup of coffee. You cannot point in this direction, so there is no arrow of statistical mechanics in any real sense. I can point forwards in space, but you can’t point forwards in time. That’s because the future isn’t a place you can point to. It’s a name we use for the state of the universe after everything has moved. Yes, people say motion is a change in position with respect to time. But when you measure the motion of an object, you use a clock, and that clock merely features other things that move. So you end up saying motion is a change in position with respect to some other change of position. That’s circular. So it doesn’t make sense to say you need time to have motion, not when you can see it’s the other way around. Say it how it is: motion is a gradual change in position. Don’t describe something you can see in terms of something you can’t.
Abstraction can get in the way
This is particularly important in physics, where abstraction can get in the way of understanding. Einstein hinted at this in 1908 when he said “since the mathematicians pounced on the relativity theory I no longer understand it myself”. I think he was referring to his former teacher Hermann Minkowski. You’ve doubtless read Minkowski’s Space and Time which starts like this: “The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality”. Minkowski said this in September 1908. In January 1909, less than four months later, he was dead. He was only 45. I think that if he’d lived longer physics would be different today, because I think he would have seen that the union is between space and motion, not between space and time. But we are where we are, and nowadays some physicists talk about Minkowski spacetime as if it’s the black stuff between the stars. It isn’t. It’s a mathematical model that combines space and time into a single “continuum”. It’s a four-dimensional manifold made up of three spatial dimensions plus the time dimension. We can drop one of the spatial dimensions to depict it:
A manifold is a “topological space”. It’s essentially a mathematical map. It maps out the block universe, which is utterly static because it models space at all times. It’s like you film a red ball with an old-style movie camera, then develop the film, then cut it up into individual frames and form them into a stack. There’s a red streak through the stack. This red streak is the ball at all times, but it isn’t moving up the stack. In similar vein there is no motion through the block universe. That means there is no motion in spacetime. The motion of an object through space “over time” is represented by a world line. But the object isn’t moving up its world line. There is no plate-of-the-present moving up the block universe either. And you cannot look up to the clear night sky and point out a world line. Or a light cone. Or a reference frame.
The map is not the territory
All these things are abstract things, not things that exist. When you are trying to understand those things that do exist, it is important to avoid being distracted by the things that do not. Your reference frame is little more than your state of motion through space. When you accelerate we say you change your reference frame, but it’s not like changing your socks. You’re changing your state of motion, and as a result your measurements change. Your measurements of space and time change, and to make sense of that, we refer to special relativity which in turn refers to spacetime. But it is important to be aware of the distinction between space and spacetime. We move through space, but not through spacetime. Spacetime is the map, but the map is not the territory. Ours is a world of space and motion, not some static mathematical manifold of world lines and light cones. A clock doesn’t really measure the distance between two spacetime points, just as it doesn’t really measure the flow of time. It merely clocks up local motion. That’s all there is to it. It’s as simple as that.
Time dilation
That’s not to say special relativity is wrong. It’s right. Time dilation is perfectly real. We have good scientific evidence of that. Clocks go slower when they’re moving fast, for a very simple reason. I think this is best explained using the parallel-mirror light clock, which features a light beam bouncing back and forth between parallel mirrors:
Public domain image by Mdd4696, see the Wikipedia time dilation article
The scenario is that you and I are identical twins, and we each have a parallel-mirror light clock. You stay on Earth whilst I go on a fast out-and-back trip in my gedanken spaceship. After I’ve landed back on Earth we compare clock readings, and we find that my clock went slow compared to yours. That’s easy to understand when you appreciate that my clock reading is just the number of times light bounced back and forth between my parallel mirrors. Yours is the number of times light bounced back and forth between your parallel mirrors. My light moved diagonally whilst yours moved up and down, so my clock reading is less than yours. My local motion was of necessity reduced by my macroscopic motion through space, because the maximum motion is the speed of light c. You could see this if you had a gedanken telescope, and could watch me zooming across the night sky. You’d see my light beam bouncing back and forth between my mirrors, but because you’re panning, you wouldn’t see my light moving in some zigzag fashion. It would look like it was moving straight up and down. Like your own, but slower. It’s slower by something called the Lorentz factor. Amazingly enough, this is derived very simply from Pythagoras’s theorem. Take a look at the simple inference of time dilation due to relative velocity on Wikipedia:
Public domain image by Mdd4696, see the Wikipedia time dilation article
The hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle represents the light path. The base represents my speed v as a fraction of c. The height gives the Lorentz factor, which can be written as √(1 – v²/c²). If I could somehow travel at .99c, the Lorentz factor would be √(1-.99²/1²) = √(1-.98) = √(.02) = .1414, which is a seventh. So my clock clocks up one year while yours clocks up seven. The Lorentz factor is that simple, and it applies to everything because of the wave nature of matter. Robert Close talked about this in the other meaning of special relativity. We can make electrons out of light in pair production, and we can diffract electrons. Remember what Feynman said about around and around, and think of electron spin as light going round a circular path. Then look at it sideways like this: |. Then set it moving so that the circular path looks like a helical path. Sideways on, it would look like this: /\/\/\/\. It’s just like the light bouncing back and forth between the parallel mirrors, and it’s why time dilation applies to electrons and other particles too, and me, and you.
The twins paradox
This is why if you and I were identical twins and I take the fast out-and-back trip through space, I come back younger than you. But note that this scenario isn’t the twins paradox. That’s where you and I pass each other in space, and you look through your telescope to see my time going slower than yours, and I look through my telescope to see your time going slower than mine. People think this is a paradox, but it isn’t. When we’re separated by distance I look smaller than you and you look smaller than me. But we know about perspective, so we don’t shout paradox! Nor should we when we’re separated by motion, and my time looks slower than yours and yours looks slower than mine. It’s just another type of perspective. Time is relative because motion is relative. Your time is your cumulative measure of local motion. So when you move relative to me, your time is relative to mine.
The time dimension is not the same as the spatial dimensions
This is why the time dimension can be likened to the spatial dimensions. However it’s important to note that it isn’t exactly the same. In special relativity it’s distinguished by a minus sign in the t term in the spacetime interval. This is written as ds² = -cdt² + dx² + dy² + dz², and it is said to be invariant. It’s the same for both my parallel-mirror clock and yours, because our light-path lengths are the same. The time dimension is also different because time is a dimension in the sense of measure, not in the sense of freedom of movement. It’s a measure of how much local motion occurred inside our clocks, nothing more. Hence I can hop forward a metre but you can’t hop forwards a second. Because you can’t move through a measure of motion. That’s why you can’t move through time. You can’t move through spacetime either, because there is no motion in spacetime. Some say you can’t move at all, which is what eternalism says. The opposite view is presentism, which is more in line with Einstein’s 1905 operational definition. It’s also in line with his 1949 view. Palle Yourgrau wrote about that in A World without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein. It’s an interesting book. It even mentions time travel.
Time travel is science fiction
Talking of which, I love films like Timescape, 12 Monkeys, and Déjà vu. They feature time travel, as do many more. I love them even though I know that time travel is science fiction. I love them even though I know why time travel is science fiction, and why time travel to the past is out of the question. It isn’t because of the grandfather paradox or the chronology protection conjecture. It’s because we don’t even travel to the future. Travelling to the future is just another figure of speech. Yes, you may have seen Stephen Hawking saying you can travel to the future on a superfast train:
Still from Stephen Hawking – Train Ride to the Future from into the universe with Stephen Hawking
But you aren’t really travelling to the future. Instead you’re affected like the parallel-mirror light clock. As the train speeds up, the local rate of motion in your body and brain has to reduce. If it didn’t, adding your local motion to the train motion would mean the total motion exceeds the speed of light. That can’t happen because of the wave nature of matter. So you’re time dilated, that’s real enough. But you aren’t travelling to the future, any more than I am sitting in my chair. I’m not travelling to the future at one second per second, and you aren’t travelling to the future at seven seconds per second. You’re just living your life in slow motion for a while. And whilst you’re doing that, I can watch you every inch of the way. You can look out the window and watch me every inch of the way too. You don’t disappear up some time tunnel to start living your life in the middle of next week. You’re living your life in slow motion so you effectively fast-forward through the week. Like bullet time in reverse. Then when you step off the train it’s me who meets you at the station. I don’t miss you by a week. You slowed down your time by slowing down your local motion, that’s all.
The stasis box
It’s not unlike those films or TV programs such as a kind of stopwatch where the protagonist has a device that can stop time. If you look carefully, you’ll notice that what the device really does, is stop motion. One such device is the stasis box. When I put you inside, everything stops. Electromagnetic waves don’t propagate, electrochemical signals don’t travel in your nerves and brain, and electrons don’t move. So you can’t see, you can’t hear, and you can’t even think. Hence when I open the door a week later, to you it’s like I opened the door just as soon as I closed it. It would feel like you’d “travelled” to the future in an instant. But you didn’t move, you were totally motionless. Instead everything else moved. Yes, the stasis box is science fiction too, but don’t forget that we can freeze embryos today. Someday we’ll perhaps be able to freeze an adult and thaw him out with no damage and no loss of memory:
Cryogenic vats image from the Cryonics Institute
Then you could “travel to the future” by stepping into a glorified freezer. But you aren’t really travelling to the future. The freezer is like the stasis box, but it works at the biochemical level rather than the subatomic level. Either way, you aren’t moving. Instead everything else is. The crucial point is that there isn’t really any travelling forward through time. There is no way you can move to get to next week. The Earth turns seven times, then it’s next week come what may. There’s nothing you can do about it, whether you’re sitting on the superfast train or in your armchair at home. You can’t travel to the future just as you can’t climb to a higher temperature. There is no cosmic rewind button. And there is no way you can move such that all other things not only move back to where they were, but never moved at all.
Closed time-like curves do not permit time travel
So don’t think that closed time-like curves permit time travel. Because they don’t. Because spacetime models space at all times. So there is no motion through spacetime. So there is no motion along a world line. So there is no motion around a world line that curves full circle. See A World Without Time again. See page 142 where Palle Yourgrau says Wheeler conflated a circle with a cycle:
Fair use excerpt from Palle Yourgrau’s A World Without Time : The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein
He’s right. If your world line was a 24-hour closed time-like curve, it wouldn’t be time travel, and it wouldn’t be Groundhog Day either. It would be more like Mayfly Day. You hatch from an egg, you live, you lay that egg, you die. You live only once, for 24 hours only, and yours is a life without cause and effect. That isn’t like the real world at all.
Wormholes are science fiction
In addition, don’t think that you can travel through time by going through a wormhole. Yes, some physicists talk about traversable wormholes, and say you can use wormholes for time travel. Others say they’re associated with black holes, and say all you need is some negative energy, and you’ve got yourself an Einstein-Rosen bridge:
GNUFDL wormhole image by Kes47, see Wikipedia Commons
The trouble is that there is no negative energy, just as there are no negative pencils. There are no Einstein-Rosen bridges either. If you’ve ever read Einstein and Rosen’s 1935 paper you’ll know it’s about the particle problem in the theory of general relativity. They talked about a mathematical representation of space wherein a particle is represented by a bridge connecting two sheets. It isn’t anything to do with the popscience wormholes you read about today. They grew out of David Finkelstein’s 1958 paper past-future asymmetry of the gravitational field of a point particle. He was talking about point particles and antiparticles, and saying an antiparticle was some kind of white hole, which it isn’t.
There is no time travel
Bear all this in mind next time you read some book by some celebrity physicist claiming that backward time travel is governed by the laws of quantum gravity. Because it isn’t. Ditto if you see some celebrity physicist waxing lyrical on the Discovery Channel about how to build a time machine. Because you can’t. Because time dilation is a reduced rate of local motion, and things can’t go slower than stopped. Which means that there is no need for any chronology protection conjecture, and no need to worry about the grandfather paradox. Because motion is motion whichever way it goes, and there is no such thing as negative motion, just are there are no pencils that are less than zero inches long. You can’t travel back in time, or forwards, because time is merely a measure of motion, and motion is travel, and you can’t travel through travel. All you can do is step into that glorified freezer or slow your life down some other way, then wait for the world to change.
Why clocks go slower
You might feel a little sad that time travel is science fiction. But there’s something that more than makes up for it. Something that’s glistening down there in the smouldering ruins of the TARDIS. Something shiny. Pick it up and dust it off, and you find it’s a key. A golden key. It’s the key that opens all the doors in physics, and it’s this: clocks don’t go slow because time goes slow. It might not seem like much, but it is. That’s because it applies to all types of clocks, including optical clocks. Think on this: if your clockwork clock was going slow, and I told you it was because time was going slow inside that clock, you’d laugh in my face. Because you know full well that if your clockwork clock was going slow, it’s because the clockwork was going slow. In similar vein an optical clock doesn’t go slower when it’s lower because time is going slower inside it. It goes slower for another reason entirely.
Explanation of space and time in dense aether model http://aetherwavetheory.blogspot.cz/2009/05/awt-and-definition-of-space.html
Hello Zephir, how are you keeping? You’ll be pleased to know that Newton thought of space as an aether. See Opticks query 20: “Doth not this aethereal medium in passing out of water, glass, crystal, and other compact and dense bodies in empty spaces, grow denser and denser by degrees, and by that means refract the rays of light not in a point, but by bending them gradually in curve lines?” So did Einstein. So did Schwinger and others. See the quote by Robert B. Laughlin here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories#Quantum_vacuum
Read Olivier Costa de Beauregard’s book, “Time: A physical magnitude” – that’s what I agree with. thanks
I took a look:
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https://www.amazon.co.uk/Time-Physical-Magnitude-Studies-Philosophy/dp/9401081956
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At £109.99 I guess I won’t be buying this one! There were a number of websites that offered a download, but there was always some catch.
“That’s where you and I pass each other in space, and you look through your telescope to see my time going slower than yours, and I look through my telescope to see your time going slower than mine”
Hi John, The Twins paradox isn’t that. Instead the twins paradox is when one twin goes to, say a star at close to light speed. Then he turns around and comes back. The paradox is as follows. The travelling twin returns younger, even though, from the perspective of each twin, they have *both* been moving – relatively to one another – at close to light speed.
See Wikipedia: “The paradoxical aspect of the twins’ situation arises from the fact that at any given moment the travelling twin’s clock is running slow in the earthbound twin’s inertial frame, but based on the relativity principle one could equally argue that the earthbound twin’s clock is running slow in the travelling twin’s inertial frame”.
“Time travel is science fiction” – all you need to travel through time is go faster than your surroundings and hey presto, you’re in the future (relative to your surroundings). Travelling through time in the opposite direction is, according to the laws of physics as currently formulated, science fiction – unless you allow for Quantum Mechanics and the uncertainty principle, where quantum systems can perform time travel tricks, as measured by experiment.
Remember the stasis box. You don’t really “travel” to the future, You aren’t moving inside that stasis box. Instead, outside that box, everything else is. (I’d like to say I could stand there looking through the porthole looking at you all frozen in stasis for a week, but light doesn’t move, so I can’t). As for quantum mechanics, I take a “realist” view, and view the delayed choice quantum eraser as a mere trick. Not time travel.
What qualifies as time travel is semantics. I say that we time travel when we move because that’s how I interpret the lorentz contraction. You say we do not due to the stasis box. It’s a fun philosophical debate 🙂
As for quantum mechanics, you have to consider that the uncertainty principle means that particles not only an uncertain position / momentum, but also an uncertain time / energy – and therefore particles must by logic – travel through time relative to one another.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is just a wave thing. See Wikipedia: “It has since become clearer, however, that the uncertainty principle is inherent in the properties of all wave-like systems,[8] and that it arises in quantum mechanics simply due to the matter wave nature of all quantum objects”. It’s the wave nature of matter, that’s all. That’s why we can diffract electrons. Waves in the ocean don’t travel through time relative to one another. Nor do seismic waves in the ground. And nor do waves in space.
We discover time has only mathematical existence, namely, time is numerical order of events which run in space. One can move in space only and not in time. In space is always NOW. http://article.sciencepublishinggroup.com/pdf/10.11648.j.ajmp.s.2016050401.11.pdf
One day Amrit, everybody will be on this same page. The page where it starts. Let’s hope it’s sooner rather than later.
“In space is always NOW” – not according to Einstein it isn’t! 🙂
Hi John,
here you are now. I always liked your answers in physics.stackexchange a lot, because they go beyond just citing formulas and the “shut up and calculate” that most others prefer in their answers (even for non-quantum questions) . I wonder why they suspended your account. As far as I understand it, you don’t disagree with the formula stuff, but I guess your interpretations, your understanding, of the formulas is deemed non-standard.
Well, lets come to “time”. You say the progression of time is intimately linked to the speed of light, agreed! You describe time as motion and compare it to heat and I nearly agree. But while heat depends on the mean-square of the speed of the involved particles, time, i.e. $d\tau/dt$ rather depends on the variance of velocities of a bunch of photons if you treat them as point particles. Which is why $d\tau/dt=0$ if an object moves at the speed of light: all photons (and possibly other “particles” with zero mass I guess) then have identical velocity (i.e. absolute value =c and identical direction), so their variance is zero. The derivation of $c d\tau/dt = \sigma(v_i)$ is rather simple: http://www.pifpafpuf.de/2017-11/More-Time-Again.html#phyicstime .
I find this “mechanical” equivalent for time quite convincing:-)
P.S. Would be great if you could activate MathJax on this site.-)
Harald: I think it was because my answers were very good, with excellent references. So much so that a resentful cabal saw me as a threat, conspired to downvote, and then suspended me on specious low quality grounds. Not good. But all too common I fear. I am reminded of peer review by Nick Kim:
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Yes, I think time is straightforward. It beats me why people make such a big mystery of it. It’s almost as if physicists these days are peddling myth and mysticism instead of offering answers. IMHO the important thing is that when you understand time, you understand that the speed of light is not constant. Then with a little light reading of the Einstein digital papers, you understand gravity. Then you understand that curved spacetime isn’t curved space, so you ask yourself what is. There’s this step-by-step logical deduction that takes you places. See the other articles.
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PS: I’ll take a look at installing mathjax. I see there is a plugin for it. But right now I’ve got to cut the hedge before it gets too hot!
PPS: Mathjax installed!
you kind of lost me, when you said “I can point forwards in space, but you can’t point forwards in time.” + “Don’t describe something you can see in terms of something you can’t.”; that’s a cyclop[s]ian way of looking at it… if one puts in enough words, one could do the same “explaining away” with the other 2 basic quantities of interactions in space (“length” and “speed” that is); what is “forward” anyway, in a Copernican universe???
… and that I say besides the fact, that I would otherwise be inclined to agree with you, that circular definitions are [somewhat] flawed (but then again: maybe inevitable, once one touches upon the fundamentals of that what is knowable? – it’s not like there is an absolute canon of terms one can rely upon and which are beyond reproach (as far as criticism and skepticism go), self-reliant and eternal) — or let’s say: “problematic” (like when defining the speed of light via hard definitions of time and space which, in turn, are “measured” via light[years] and “atomic” clocks – i.e. circular reasoning; tautologies). — What’s knowable anyway? – what’s “knowledge”? – what’s “truth”? – that, my friend, is definitely a concern for philosophy, not science… science deals with [so called] “facts”, for which the principles of observation and [therefore] measurement have to be “known” [+handy] in “advance”, be that via induction, consensus, or epiphany or – whatever! … it’s good to keep an open mind, but you are scratching the limits of what is possible to be answered from “within” physics, rather than – beyond.
besides; I suspect “time” being a “quality” of “space”, a [modus operandi of] falling into the unfolding [so called] “spacetime” of the universe, as long as that “expansion” can and will go on, and whatever (allegedly obscure (“dark”) thing [that]) drives it will be depleted … but then again: what do I know! – Que sais-je?
“All these things are abstract things, not things that exist.” – so is mathematics. What’s your point? – it’s almost as if you refuse to quantify time, as it would take away the concept of “free will” or the heart-warming mystery of a non-deterministic future or — whatever! If space is “real”, so is the “dimension” that bridges one end of it to the other over a course of action (which does not automatically imply, that it could be reversed!). There are moments when “factoring out” time will be useful (i.e. yielding bits of knowledge), and moments where it will not…
[- posting this before moving on in the text; which may be deemed a bad reading-habit… but I have this bad habit, anyway (and can’t shake it), which is called “thinking for myself”; and too much of that at the most inappropriate moments. — “Müßiggang ist aller Philosophie Anfang. Folglich—ist Philosophie ein Laster?” (F.N., Notebooks, Frühjahr, 1888, 15 [118]) -]
PS: a better argument could be had, still, on behalf of your position, from a memory/history pov — probably; as time being the experience of experiences, of the data-collecting mind; the librarian (“us”) musing over the library-index, thinking it to be a thing of itself; meta-experiences for meta-physics… my point still stands, but it would be a better entry-point to a discussion about this special quality of problems; and it would still be a problem from the domain of philosophy, rather than physics…
If I lost you when I said I can point forwards in space, but you can’t point forwards in time, then think about science deals in facts. Remember that I can show you space and motion, but you can’t show me time. And that when you look inside a mechanical clock, you don’t see time flowing through it.
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I think there’s more that’s knowable than some people think. And that William Kingdon Clifford more or less nailed it with his space theory of matter. I don’t think I’m scratching the limits of what is possible to be answered from “within” physics here. I think I’m only scratching the surface. This is where it starts, with time. After you understand that, you understand that the speed of light is not constant, then you can understand gravity. Then when you understand that a gravitational field is not curved space, you ask yourself what is?
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My point is that the scientist should be empirical, and not allow himself to be distracted by abstraction.
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Philosophy is not a vice. It isn’t necessarily a domain that is distinct from physics either. Ask any physicist with a PhD.
“Remember that I can show you space and motion, but you can’t show me time. And that when you look inside a mechanical clock, you don’t see time flowing through it.”
I like that logic; “I cannot smell air – therefore it can’t be real” (sorry, I just cannot resist the urge; I honestly mean no offense by this!)
I can show you time; but it is directly pointing away, when I show it, in the line of sight; you look through the dimension, rather than onto it, when looking into deep space. There: you have it! – you can’t ever zoom out of it, to look onto it’s extension; that’s sadly how things work…
“And that William Kingdon Clifford more or less nailed it with his space theory of matter” – I’m still reading; again, my apologies, for posting before having reached the end, Bad habit, no doubt about it. But some things I just have to get off my chest (or whatever that thing’s called at the upper end of my neck), before moving on, for a semi-fresh start…
“Then when you understand that a gravitational field is not curved space” – o/c not! – it’s curved time! – “space” only behaves in such a way as it was curved with it (or rather: the things within it, behave in such a way, to make that impression), and, as special beings, we are more prone to see the secondary, perspective-phenomenon, as the real one; oh… that isn’t what you meant 🙁
“My point is that the scientist should be empirical, and not allow himself to be distracted by abstraction.” I really don’t think that that’s what you meant to be saying; (also I think, that what I commented on, concerning “mere philosophy”, was necessarily what you meant to say with that) You rather seem to value (that’s my impression), thinking for oneself and understanding in-depth (which naturally inclused “theorizing” – in order to narrow down other people’s theories we try to understand; learning is recognizing patterns – by comparing it to known patterns…), where others only cling to mathematical formulas, like some disabled person to a wheelchair (was that a sideblow on anybody? – I don’t know…), or the proverbial grudges… empirical is to only see w/o interpretation, pure and mindless; which always ever happens in a fairy-tale world of true-vacui, timeless pictures and perfect observers…
Btw.: you mentioned some book about physics getting lost in mathematics? – sure I kept it as a link, somewhere… something about “physicists getting hung up on beauty” (as in elegant formulae)… I think I’m gonna read that, but I think the author is wrong to suspect “beauty” as the driving force. I think it’s fear. The taste for expressing everything in terms of math-formula is that of a fearful kid who cannot cope with the world. Which isn’t meant as an insult, as thinkers, in general, are more prone to vita contemplative rather than vita activa, and phobic-behavior or at least careful hesitation naturally comes with that — or rather: may be it’s prerequisite in many cases. But among all kinds of thinkers, in my experience, “born” Mathematicians are usually worst in that regard. If there ever was a generral study on mathematicians, shyness, reluctance to act, proneness to precaution-measures that others would deem ridiculous – I am sure such study would find some great trend in said flock of people . . . Math-formulas are often — like grudges/preemptive weaponry, depending on the respective circumstance/needs; something to hide behind from criticism (and to absolve oneself from pesky necessities, like the need to think for oneself, be quick on one’s feet, reevaluate held believes); something to adhere to like the proverbial “argumentum ad auctoritatem” (math IS an authority! – but today it rules over physics [it seems] like a despot, via the inept and semi-intelligent who see it as their best clutch for power!), something even for the lame and the slow and blind to cling to in a desperate attempt to keep their head above water . . . And that’s not saying, that they are generally useless; them being weaponized rather proves their power; but power can always be misused, and even paralyze the user…
“The height gives the Lorentz factor, which can be written as √(1 – v²/c²).” – does it, though?
If light travels at a not-absolutely-constant speed (at least according to the gravitational potential it is moving at; something you allude to, in another article), while we measure it’s speed -always- from our limited perspective (which may skew the picture systematically), shouldn’t it at least read “c₀²” (like in “c = c₀(1 + Φ/c²)” )?!? – which, in turn, would have important repercussions on past-day speed-of-light experiments(*), from before special-relativity-theory…
The Lorentz-transformations keep giving me headaches; to me, it seems, by transforming what is happening, one is dodging – for convenience – what is really going on. But I am esp. confused by the notion I picked up elsewhere (in explanations concerning the M.Morley-experiment), that time and space are distorted in the direction of “ether-drift” ONLY. – which the paragraph I pointed to, seems to deviate from.
Sorry, again, for asking ignorant questions…
Also: “Remember what Feynman said about around and around, and think of electron spin as light going round a circular path.” – doesn’t that directly contradict something you wrote elsewhere, about “light clocks” (thereby equated to time itself, which it was supposed to merely “measure” – which you rattled against) not really going faster at higher altitudes? … think about it this way: if all processes are, via spin, and movement of electrons “similarly” to light slowed down/sped up via gravitation, doesn’t that mean, that time (or the “flow” thereof) itself was running slower/faster under these conditions, for all particles therein (in the given [particular] frame of space-time that is)**; it’s quite impossible, to throw out time like some sort of merely abstract category if it can, from the perspective of “stuff therein” be more or less. Something that is 0, cannot be multiplied to be anything but 0 . . .
Also: “In space is always NOW” (not your statement, but still) – no. SpaceTIME is always HERE AND now! (If “Space is always now”, then [it logically follows that] “Time is always HERE”!) … as soon as we look far away from that tiny quantity that we can grasp, into the depth of space, we are looking into the past . . . Not sure, why so many people seem to have a problem with that “4dimensional map”, as it does not automatically(!) follow, that it perfectly outlined the future and everything in it with it (if that was their concern); or that life was something free-willing and creative to begin with, that would feel horribly demeaned by such a perspective; it would not… only our romantic sentiments are!
[- boy… not even halfway through; already I feel like a nuisance; esp. since pausing for 24h -]
*) speaking of which… Did you ever come across “Gezari”, by any chance? There are two papers of his (strongly linked together, one heralding the other) I read very recently, that got me intrigued; esp. considering some of the papers he alluded to (esp. “Consoli and Costanza (2003)” – suggesting, in essence, that past ether-drift-experiments (read with some adjustments?) did in fact suggest a certain ether-drift of 204±36 km/s), which I, sadly, cannot find/access.
I mean this: arxiv.org/abs/0912.3818v2
And this: arxiv.org/abs/0912.3934v3 (did he make an error? – I don’t quite get why he exchanged the formula, towards the end… did I miss the explanation? + how did Neumann (2008) & Murphy (2008) calculate D_LB & D_BR ?!?)
**) What’s “space” anyway, with (/if it had) nothing “in it”? – again: the same logic with which you start to undercut the reality of time works for space itself just as well; same with looking-into-the-past-with-every-use-of-a-teleskope . . .
“The time dimension is also different because time is a dimension in the sense of measure, not in the sense of freedom of movement.” – again, some flawed logic. If dimensions are only dimensions, because one can “move” (what even is movement?) through them, then there is a 4th dimension, that naturally follows out of the 3, that one can be caught up in (!) at “any given moment” (to bind together all states of that slate, all single incarnations; “One ring to rule them all”); You know: I’m kind of inclined to say “you are not even wrong!”, with these sorts of statements – in the proverbial sense. Well… you kind of are, as you have to turn to and turn away from, the thing you try to explain away in order to explain it away. So — you ARE?! Time is not one of the 3 dimensions we can directly observe, in a still-frame. If that’s where you are coming from: gotya! — but that still-frame is an abstract idea in it’s own right (we wouldn’t even “see” anything to begin with, if time would not connect us to the past still-frame we want to observe!), which you generally tend to degrade (“abstraction”, that is)… I’d also give you, that it’s debatable, if time was really just “one” dimension to the other 3, an equal fourth sibling from the “space-time” quadrupled; an argument could be made, that it was at least 2 dimensions (or more? – or a half?), of height of potential and depth of field, which transform into one another in a – possibly – non-linear way. But that’s pure speculation.
PS: gotta love these:
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“It’s a measure of how much local motion occurred inside our clocks, nothing more. Hence I can hop forward a metre but you can’t hop forwards a second. Because you can’t move through a measure of motion. Hence I can hop forward a metre but you can’t hop forwards a second.”
I really really do think, that all these arguments, for why time wasn’t what everyone was allegedly convinced it was, were leading up to something important you have to say — but I really really am not buying it; the arguments just do not work.
I cannot hop forward a second as much as I cannot quantify a feeling, touch the wind or eat a thought or — whatever! … as it is the wrong procedure “to get there”; it happens anyway, unless I die within 0.9999 of a second, w/o delay, like being disintegrated on a molecular level or something; other than that time will just hop me over there on itself. I cannot vacate the total space I am occupying (yeah yeah; I can lose some weight; stop pressuring me!); nor can I prevent my future me to occupy a space just like that when the time comes for it to just “be”; I’ll fall into that existence by mere virtue of being “now” (and, like I said: not immediately dying in the mean time).
“That’s why you can’t move through time. You can’t move through spacetime either, because there is no motion in spacetime.” — entirely tautological reasoning. – besides: you most definitely cannot move through time, either, as that involves -you guessed it- TIME. Strictly speaking: “you” can’t do anything. You are hear and now, for that split of a second. “your body” will move on, to manifest your future “you”, which will be, again, a momentary event of thought. Your memory will make, that that future you will believe in the continuity of the self, constituting life [as something “more” than just a long line of biochemical processes]. The “identity” of a person is a fiction of our imagination, as a useful outline to cope with the world, just like separating it into useful objects and tools serves us to make ourselves feel at home in that fiction. – but does any of that mean, that the idea of “self” and “Identy” was obsolete in it’s entirety? Just because something “isn’t quite” what some people naively make it out to be, doesn’t mean, that the opposite of said skewed believe was reality. – now… maybe my arguments will “make as much sense” to you, as yours make to me; and that you see me trying to communicate something to you, that seems flawed; even if you can guess (or not?) that there’s an important thought wrapped inside of that set of arguments; and it will all seem futile…
“Philosophical presentism is the view that neither the future nor the past exist” – as a German, I feel like seconding that thought… it really makes for a much smoother cop-out for any sort of blame being put on me for whatever suppsoedly happend some 70 years ago… rather than having to explain that even my grandparents were much too young to had have a stake in – whatever that was? – I just pull that get-out-of-jail free card. Facts are pesky to communicate; all encompassing philosophical principles, however, can be bullet-proof, like religious believes…
Now, on a serious note: that idea is both self-consistent and flawed. A piece of logic that is detached from any sort of further investigation, or connection to reality (be that “something that really is”, or a mere “fiction thereof”). It’s basically un-falsifiable (“not even wrong”); like Hawking-radiation (“Just you wait a quadrillion-years, till the first black holes have reached their end! – you’ll see! – great big lights going off, everywhere! – until then, you cannot prove or disprove it, therefore it is true!”) Again: this idea is self-consistent, and similar thoughts have come to me also, at times. But as far as theories go – it’s an island, with no bridge connecting it to the rest of the observable universe… Philosophy can be like that at times. Just look at Berkeley’s materialism for that matter…
…but I’ll try to resort to more well-behaved questions rather than relentless second-guessing (sorry about that), and more “self-apparently” constructive criticism (if there even can be any), from hereon out. 🙂
x) the train to the future – I gotta ask: doesn’t that violate the “no preferred frame of reference”-conjecture? – the time of the guy in the train will look going slower from the armchair-observer; while from his own perspective, it should be the armchair-sitter who’s actually aging slower; which means, even with all that being said, there is no “going to the future”, neither via warping there, nor via time-capsule or super slow-mo living…
Again and again I realize, that while there is good evidence for General Relativity, in the precession of Mercury and starlight being bend around our sun as witnessed during that famous sun-eclipse (1917? – certainly repeated afterwards) – special relativity cannot quite claim the same for itself (it rather seems like an abstract, that dodges the understanding of the real phenomena in relativistic movement). I’ve actually never seen spacial dimensions of fast moving objects getting shortened in the direction of flight, or proof that time really does run slower for that. It’s a nice, intriguing theory… but I keep seeing the thought-experiments being recycled and reworded, time and time again, w/o any real world examples (though I find that even more important for the second postulate, of invariant light-speed) . . .
If you are still reading what I write, but don’t care to comment on those many paragraphs with “stupid” questions, at least this here, I hope, getting an answer to. :/
y) “Someday we’ll perhaps be able to freeze an adult and thaw him out with no damage and no loss of memory:” – that’s also science-FICTION. Any attempt to freeze a person will ultimately destroy pretty much all the cells in his body, as the water freezes, and ice-crystals rip open the cellular walls… good luck with waking up with that!
I’d rather have my mind being loaded into a computer, to emulate it’s processes and for “my self” to be preserved in that, as some not-entirely-artificial “AI”, freely roaming the web + beyond — rather than having the “luxury” of dying of frost-burns, some time in the far future. Even though, technically speaking, that “self” wouldn’t really be “my self”; it would be a copy, whilst I would still be standing on the outside, looking in, thinking “if only!”… or maybe I’m lucky, and Helios finds me. Or Daedalus…
z) concerning “closed time-like curves”: in that wiki-link it says: “and since then other GR solutions containing CTCs have been found, such as the Tipler cylinder and traversable wormholes. ” — I hate it when they do that. “[solutions…] have been found” — as if there was a real finding rather than just a model (the average reader hardly distinguishes between “solution for a real life problem” (e.g. “IT-solutions”; as they are often advertised everywhere) and mere “mathematical solutions” to work on paper) that has no basis in reality. Mathematical shenanigans, overstated for means of wishful thinking… Sometimes it’s just a matter of wording; but it betrays the mindset of the author (like with wikipedia), and thus forms the mindset of many readers, who then get out of the article thinking (for instance) white holes were real…
aa) “He’s right. If your world line was a 24-hour closed time-like curve, it wouldn’t be time travel, and it wouldn’t be Groundhog Day either. It would be more like Mayfly Day.” – wouldn’t it be more like a cut-out portion of spacetime, like a miniature-[island-]universe within the universe, w/o any causal connection to “the outside” (and as such entirely w/o consequences for the outside, also; which may as well be synonymous with “non-existent”! – “unreal”!)? – but then again, I am not reading the math…
ab) ” You live only once, for 24 hours only, and yours is a life without cause and effect.” – cough “Lost Highway” cough (ever seen that movie?)… not that I truly want to recommend that, or bring up another “[mathematical] solution” like a Möbiusschleife…
ac) “all you need is some negative energy” – reminds me of Hawking-radiation. “Negative energy particle” … oh, those painful facepalms… “there is no such thing as negative energy” (S.Hawking)… he wrote so himself (I may be paraphrasing), in one of his books. Funny how that goes…
ad) “paper past-future asymmetry of the gravitational field of a point particle” – behind “paper” I only get a google-search (which works for me, but not sure you intended that to be the actual link? – or is this for legal concerns???), the other one again does not let me view the actual paper.
ae) finally, I am finished!
Boy… some misunderstandings and redundant criticism may have been avoided, if this article was titled “putting the fiction in science fiction” or “Why time-travel is pure popscience”… something to that extend.
af) “You might feel a little sad that time travel is science fiction.” I never felt like this. I see scifi for what it is: science-fiction! – if that works on the premise of some science-mumbo-jumbo thrown in to gaslight critical thinking just enough for time travel to be real, or for wormholes designed for faster-than-ilight travel opening up a door to some Lovecraftian hellish other dimension (“Event Horizon”)… it still beats being told, that “love” can “bridge space and time” (“Interstellar”), or that skyscraper-high war-robots can fly into space in a matter of seconds, with their spacesuit-wearing pilots incapable to breath, while those same robots can handle the enormous pressure on the bottom of the Mariana-trench (don’t even ask, if you have to; just be glad, that you dodged that logic-bomb)…
anyways… no offense! – if you are even still reading this, sorry for the loads of text.
If you actually did read it, though, I still hope you can take something away from it, non-the-less. As I was actually meaning well, with constructive criticism, on some of the introductory arguments you gave…
PS: I enjoyed the bottom third much more than the other parts…
where did my last reply go? -.-
was it auto-marked as, because of the frequency? – or am I blocked?!?
Or did you manually erase it? -.-
It was actually the most positive of all the replies; but now it is as if it didn’t even happen… very disappointing!
No, you aren’t blocked. Perish the thought! Your last reply went into the bin. I can’t see why. I had a bad attack of pharmaceutical spam a while back, and still have a long blacklist of words like “viagra”. Anyway, I have now restored it. Apologies for not replying already, I was busy at the weekend and now I’m at work. I’ll respond later.
Yes, the height gives the Lorentz factor. It really is Pythagoras’ theorem at work.
Yes, when you include gravity you need to include that Φ term, but this article is talking about SR.
Lorentz transformations ought to be a headache in terms of length contraction, because you don’t get shorter when you move fast. But it’s no problem re time dilation.
Re electron spin, think of a helical spring. When you stretch it out, from the side it looks like the zigzag path of the parallel-mirror light beam. There’s no contradiction. Imagine you can watch the zigzagging light beam through a telescope which is panning from left to right. In your field of view you see the light beam moving straight up and down at a slower rate.
Re “In space is always NOW”, the map is not the territory. We live in a world of space and motion, not in some 4D spacetime.
I don’t know about Gezari I’m afraid.
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You can feel the air blowing in your face.
Sorry, I don’t understand what you said about “I can show you time”.
A gravitational field isn’t curved time! It’s inhomogeneous space.
Sorry, but I meant what I said about being distracted by abstraction.
Yes, I value thinking for oneself and understanding in-depth. A mathematical formula isn’t enough.
The book I mentioned was Sabine Hossenfelder’s. See this.
IMHO the driving force is beauty, not fear. See the monopole article, which I posted today.
Yes, I think maths is sometimes the basis for handwaving and smoke-and-mirrors from people who peddle Emperor’s New Clothes.
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Yes, the time dimension is different because time is a dimension in the sense of measure, not in the sense of freedom of movement. I can move in the space dimensions. You can’t do that in the time dimension. It’s that simple. Don’t overcomplicate it.
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You can’t hop forward a second but you can touch the wind – just stick your hand out of the window. As for feelings and thoughts, they are qualia. They’re nothing like time.
Not being able to move in spacetime isn’t tautological. Spacetime models space at all times. So it’s totally static.
You can’t move through time but you can move through space. Don’t try to block that out by talking about your body, thought, and memory, or about identity and self.
The future does not actually exist, it’s just the name we use for the state the universe will be in once things have moved. The past is the name we use for the state of the universe prior to things moving to their current location. Don’t worry about being German. People are very good at being foolish, especially when they are convinced they are somehow superior.
What idea is both self-consistent and flawed? I am not a fan of Hawking radiation.
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The train to the future doesn’t violate the “no preferred frame of reference” because it’s accelerating. It’s like the twin who travels out and back.
I share your sentiment re length contraction. In fact I would say fast moving objects get lengthened, not shortened. But that’s no reason to doubt time dilation. Check out muon decay. Muons last longer when they move fast.
Yes, freezing adults is science fiction.
So is uploading your mind into a computer. It won’t preserve you. A copy is not you, just as your twin is not you.
Yes, a solution might have no basis in reality. I have previously used the example of a negative carpet measuring -4m x -4m.
Yes, if your world line was a 24-hour closed time-like curve it would be like a universe within the universe with no causal connection to “the outside”.
No, I’ve never seen Lost Highway. And after reading about, it I don’t think I want to.
Wait until you read what I say about Hawking radiation. You will be pleased.
I’ve changed the hyperlink on “paper” preceding past-future asymmetry of the gravitational field of a point particle
All points noted re “Why time-travel is pure popscience” and “love” can “bridge space and time” (“Interstellar”) et cetera.
As for the last third, try reading it all again, in a week.
*sigh*
You aren’t even reading, what I actually wrote.
“So is uploading your mind into a computer. It won’t preserve you. A copy is not you,…” — read again. I can hardly even skim through your answer, let alone finding anything useful in there, if you don’t even read what I wrote in the first place. One cannot answer what one did not pay attention to. :l
I basically skipped the middle part, and am at a loss, to muster the perseverance, to read and reply for real.
Ever since you mistook mentioning of “c0” being the same as to necessitate that gravity ITSELF was to be taken into account, I lost confidence in this… I never said such a thing! – All was trying to allude to [carefully], was an inconsistency of yours, where you treat speed of light as variable (see other article) when it fits your ideas, and as invariable when it does not . . . like is the norm with so many others. It’s really tiresome… -.-
“[…] try reading it all again, in a week.” – dito. If you don’t feel like actually doing justice to what I wrote then, well… there’s that. If I did not make myself clear, I am sorry, non the less. As I said, english isn’t really my first language, so any bumps in the reading experience (of that which I wrote) may lead up to greater misunderstandings, thanks to the loss of flow; it’s understandable, but with that also… probably useless :l
*disappointed*
I really wish you would have read those 2 Papers by Gezari I linked to… as I would really like to learn, if there ever actually where any experiments to prove, outside any lab (closed frame of reference…), w/o any pre-conceived notion that it “Must be such and such” — if “c” actually WAS invariable. For I am suspecting, more and more, that it is not. In terms of gravity you already concede that — but in terms of special relativity, the opposite was suddenly true. Whenever speed of light is deemed invariable, it’s obvious, that it is made to save-guard the continuity of ongoing research; which is the opposite of scientific.
Maybe there is no objective way to ever test that; and the meter being defined by the speed of light being defined by the meter, may just be the circular reasoning most feel we “HAVE TO” resort to, in order to have a basis (any basis) for solid scientific findings and theories … but there’s that — it’s a purely opportunistic form of pragmatism). So, as a pyrrhonean I am having my doubts, non the less. As I do about dark energy and dark matter, the phologistons of our day and age. And Hawking-radiation…
Have a good one! :l
Sorry you didn’t like my reply CG. But cross my heart and hope to die, I read through your comments carefully, step by step.
Newton and Einstein proposed no theory of space or of time. Their theories only proposed a way of transforming from one coordinate frame to another. For all anyone should care, they were both simple geometers. But I would say the most important aspect of this means of measurement is the concept of wave and particle, they are diametrically conjugate aspects of the one theory. The idea that “particles” are “points” with coordinates while waves are de-localized packets whose position and momentum is determined by way of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Relationship. This concept is not true. There are only waves… particles are an abstraction whose limits are absurd contradictions of real world physical measurement theory.
The most fundamental principle are not those of Einstein (or even Newton) but the Quantum Principle, the quanta is a packet, to deal with quanta as particles is entirely incorrect. Waves have a near field and a far field region and there is a gradation between the two called the Fresnel region. Everything is fine as long as the distance between points is greater than the Fundamental Resolution Limit 0f The Theory. This limit in nature is the quanta. It is legitimate to measure to smaller dimensions that the size of quanta, but it will produce incorrect results in the Near Field (Evanescent Field).
Einstein’s Relativity was the last really great Classical Theory, as it stands it is incompatible with Quantum Theory because it admits to no level of quantization.
The underlying theory of everything is a quantum theory. This is an undisputed truth, a point of truth that this discussion has not addressed. Classical Theory is simply an emergent theory related to the behavior of the Quantum Theory in the Far Field Limit. For example the Theory of Classical Electromagnetism speaks of the Speed of Light. Current Mathematical Pedantism admits nothing within the near field limit for ideal point particles. The quantum theory has been hijacked by an incorrect particle theory, which is only the dressing of “strings” or “branes” by “particles”. These vibrating branes are part of Quantum Theory not String Theory (read Zweibach’s Book: A First Course in String Theory). Testing a string theory whose basic limiting features are those of quantum theory is the correct approach. Of course it will not advance until this artifice of dressing strings with particles, as if they were baubles on a Xmas Tree, is fully understood to be a load of you know what.
I could show you a thousand experiments which show this ideology or outright belief (of strings) is incorrect because the limiting case of String Theory is not Quantum Theory and Quantum Theory is not the current limiting case of String Theory. The false logic begins with the definition of particles. There is really only one kind of mathematical particles, the point particle, all other systems of particles are not true particles but extended objects. Let be be clear… Quantum States are extended objects, a quantum state does not have a value at a point, on the other hand a “point particle” does have a value at a point but it is never an extended object and by extension can never represent the quantum state which is a state in quantum superposition. Our physical attempts to turn every extended object into a “point particle” is a basic logical folly. It just doesn’t work.
It does this by having a Speed Of Light (SOL) defined Internationally to be (not actually being) a fixed number of meters per second (not rounded off… but an exact number). While defining the SOL to be that accurate is a fine thing but when it comes to errors… the errors begin to occur when you measure distances less than a meter where the speed of light varies in the near field while traversing to the far field…. the SOL in the range shorter than the wavelength of the light (which is the important property) ranges from C → Infinity as S → 0. This has been determined in the laboratory. For example if the wavelength of light is a kilometer (such as in certain kinds of long wave transmitters like the old Omega Stations used in earlier submarine communication) the properties of the near field are non-continuous near it’s origin. Electromagnetic forces in the near field are defined by the virtual photons to be found there. This virtual photon field does not exist outside the evanescent range due to a long range vanishing longitudinal mass term. If you supply this mass term energy to the field in the evanescent range, the virtual photon can “transition” to a real photon. This is the Dynamic Casimir Effect.
What physics is having a big problem with is understanding that the classical limits of point particles are not the limits of quantum particles. “Real particles” are currently defined by quantum states when they collapse, and the enduring state is a wave not a particle… wave being an extended non-localized wave packet. The wave can occupy space non-locally, while a point particle cannot be used to describe the wave. The particle concept was once useful but only up to a point when it failed to advance the classical theories it was supposed to describe. The size of a wavepacket depends entirely on how it is measured. If I have a probe of a certain size and it is smaller than the wave (think of the rolling waves, the surf at the beach, trying to measure the position of the wave there). You cannot describe the wave with a single coordinate set (x,y,z,t). It is debatable how you should do this operation at all. So the abstraction of the point particle to a wave allows an abstraction to occur…. it has a number of “idealization” which make no contact with reality. The world of collapsed wavefunctions is the effect of measurement in the larger emergent classical Universe, it is only one of many possible Everett Worlds. Subsuming all Classical worlds is the quantum superposition of states in the de-localized wave. The wave and the particle are the two extremes of the one phenomena, but only the wave has a theory of how to deal with waves at distances shorter than a wavelength. There is no way to deal with “point particles” because the abstraction of points does not have a “near field”.
The ability to form closed timelike loops in a rotating wave equation is a concept that is well understood in Fourier Theory. As well as the closed spacelike loops which form “pocket universes”. Particles do not have a closed loop form, they are simple points, regardless the attempt made by using Feynman Diagrams to deal with the contrary point of view which is a packet which contains many frequencies that truncate the wavelet internally with closed loops ranging from the fundamental frequency defined by E=hf to the other thousands of internal rotating wave equations at ever higher frequencies. It is a pity that CG was not able to completely express himself and you were not being open to the idea enough to listen to what he was really saying here because it is clear that these ideas are pretty complex but they all exist in the Laboratory with real experiments to prove them.
Classical theory describes space by having an absence of particles and particles being the ‘epicenters of activity” as points at which events occur between the measurements there is nothing being measured so the wavepacket is in superposition of states and is expanding to fill the space. The space being filled is a quantum cavity and resonant cavities are the basic phenomena that is being dealt with here. Photons are the product of resonance in quantized spaces. This has a rotating wave equation solution. No measurement is continuous, continuous measurement is forbidden by quantum theory and when the measurement is repeated below the wave limit measurement only resets the quantum state to it’s previous value. This causes time for that event to “stand still”, actually it simply “repeats” in the same way the spin echo from an NMR is forced to repeat by way of a quantum resonance. What happens to other events (such as those being experienced by an experimentalist who is doing the measurement). The Quantum Zeno Effect is a well known “stasis field”. Measuring the wavpacket causes it to collapse into a point where the measurement is taking place. The event can occur nowhere else other than the place it is being measured. If the wave starts to expand again it can be collapsed back into it’s previous state if the period of cycle redundancy is shorter than it’s ability to progress in space a significant portion of a wavelength.
It is important to understand when the quantum wave equation is replaced with the time dependent (cyclical) Rotating wave Equation – Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_wave_approximation. That is where time like loops can appear in standard Fourier Theory in free space.
Good Elf: see Quantum electrodynamics in the 1920s for some history on the point-particle electron. Pauli and the Copenhagen cabal referred to Yakov Frenkel’s 1926 paper on the electrodynamics of rotating electrons, which said the electron will thus be treated simply as a point. They ignored work by Mie, Schrodinger, Darwin, and others which made it clear that it wasn’t a point particle. They also refused to countenance any understanding of the reality.
You are correct of course. The electron is not a point particle, particularly while existing in a superposition of states and at low temperatures and energy (not at the LHC for example but in a Low Temperature Lab), we know that the internal “finite sized” quantum state of the electron and any quantum “elementary particle” is the twisted strip model of J.G. Williamson and M.B. van der Mark, “Is the electron a photon with toroidal topology?”, Ann. Foundation L. de Broglie 22, 133 (1997). The electron in a quantum superposition state has even been ‘photographed’ so it is certainly not a ‘point particle’. The above RWA case is only applicable in fundamental confined single quantum states of electrons in an cold atomic system in a quantum superposition and not in very dynamic ‘classical systems’ where symmetry is broken (such as at the LHC). This is not the region of weak electromagnetic interaction but only occurs in the region where the strong electromagnetic interaction is applicable (strong confinement). In the Ultra-strong Interaction region the RWA has no known equivalent and breaks the asymmetry of the ‘Cooper Pair’ (single pair of non-coherent independent electrons in a shell) a pair which are independently a simple ‘twisted strip’ model each (the dressed quantum states in an atom are left and right hand polarized so the weak photonic response is the normal EM interaction of emission and absorption of single photons).
If the state is subjected to a confined RWA resonance, opening up the Auger Recombination Effect to behave symmetrically regarding time, then you are in the Feynman-Stueckelberg Mirror Region of particles-antiparticles. Check out this reference: Physicists solve the mystery of vanishing particles in graphene – MIPT – 19 June 2018. The signature is clearly that of matter -antimatter annihilation, where holes and their electrons (excitons) behave identically like electron-positron pairs. Of course there is no particle-antiparticle but the appearance of a single rotating wave in superposition and it is an end-to-end Ultra-strong Type II Quantum Vortex, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_vortex. This is the region of the Electromagnetic Ultra-Strong Interaction. This is the symmetrized Bivector Interaction and not the Four-Vector Interaction. The broken symmetry is symmetrized when an event is recorded during a superposition of quantum states inside an ‘Electromagnetic Kerr Black Hole with Spin’ where the spatial and temporal coordinates are rotated relative to their normal directions such that time and space can occupy similar equivalent states, this is the accessible Block Universe of “Eternalism”. Of course it is not a “single state outcome” but all possible simultaneously available states and the state “of choice” becomes the outcome state. This experiment was performed at the X-Ray Laser Lightsource at the Stanford SLAC Facility and reported in 2016… see: Breakthrough Quantum Cat Experiment Captured On Camera – Gizmodo – 24 Sept 2016 See: http://gizmodo.com/breakthrough-quantum-cat-experiment-captured-on-camera-1786923180. The theory of what happens inside the Black Hole is already understood to be a kind of ‘time machine’ for ultra small quantum regions while in a superposition of states… something you probably do not currently believe in but I think you should because of a number of leading experiments occurring at lower energy than that occurring in accelerators. Outcomes of events are “evenhanded” regarding the symmetrized time coordinate which may be another ‘spatial coordinate’ in the ‘Block Universe’. Every sub-atomic particle is a kind of ‘Quantum electromagnetic Black Hole’, a quantum vortex bubble, but only while in a superposition of states, you do not see these events in accelerators due to extreme localization of events at the quark scale. But typically at room temperature (and far below) and also in zero gee the quantum state (the rotating wave) is a finite size… as demonstrated at the Drop Tower at Bremen (and I imagine… in Bose-Einstein Condensates now in orbit on the ISS). The size of these quantum states expand to fit the ‘cavity’.
I also do not want to get into the debate as to what exists at the “bottom” of a “Black Hole”, it is so stupid a question that it should not need an answer… it regrettably does… but please not here.
Yet the emergence of antimatter from inside these “Ultrastrong Casimir interactions” of the Deep Strong Coupling Regime has been recently observed. This is similar to the forces observed in super-powerful rare earth magnets, but in the generalized electromagnetic field.
Time is due to the entanglement connection between a sequence of entangled events. These connections are “Optical Wormholes”, photons existing in two separate places at the one time connecting photonic events together. They represent weak electromagnetic interactions between entangled photon pairs. The experiment clearly demonstrates a Page & Wootters, Quantum Time Mechanism, for the evolution of Time (so time is not a “flow” but advances by steps, due only to entanglement correlations between events). See: Physicist Proposes Solution to Arrow-of-Time Paradox – PhysOrg – 27 Aug 2009. Lorenzo Maccone. “Quantum Solution to the Arrow-of-Time Dilemma.” Physical Review Letters 103, 080401 (2009). Quantum time: Experimental multitime correlations – EV Moreva MGenovese – 24 Oct 2017.
So much to talk about Good Elf. I hope I’ve covered some of the things above in some of my other articles, such as
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https://physicsdetective.com/the-electron/
https://physicsdetective.com/the-positron/ and
https://physicsdetective.com/black-holes/
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I talk about Stueckelberg in https://physicsdetective.com/quantum-electrodynamics/. I also say the positron is a time-reversed electron, but only because it has the opposite chirality. If you could film an electron’s spin, then play the film in reverse, it would look like the positron’s spin. But the positron isn’t actually an electron travelling back in time. There is no travelling in time, neither forwards nor backwards.
Fascinating descriptions Good Elf. I like your descriptions because they agree with my basic tenet that points are an abstraction of spaces. Every space has centre of gravity, energy or effort. It is a correct but abstract view of the real situation that is described by the extent of the actual situation. The point transmitter is a useful abstraction but the more real viewpoint must admit, if there is something, it must have extent. You can’t fit some energy into no space. I don’t know if you were aware that from the point of view of computer science variables are spaces. The developing world of computer science and object orientation is based on the fundamental unit of the simplest quantity as a space. Everything builds up from there. Hence, we find that emerging models of complex systems are intuitively more compatible with your view of the world than you would expect if the computer scientist had achieved a model of a point particle. They don’t do it that way, so it works better. Thanks again for the descriptions and the insights they comprise.
Hi John and Andy,
This site has issues regarding a suitable mark-up language, it is difficult to overcome this limitation. John’s other site is easier to manage in regard to illustrating physics theory. See: http://physicsdiscussionforum.org/index.php
Thanks for your perspectives on these matters. Regarding John’s issues, I fully concede that the treatment of particular concept of Time as a kind of Space is very important, despite the distractions of so many different voices in the Science Media, if you listen to those that are reporting on the results of experiments, you will get a semi-consistent point of view. On the other hand John’s insistance on a POV regarding “particles” traveling back or forward in time must be discarded, I have never said anything is “traveling” as a physical principle at all. We live in a Block Universe of Eternalism… all possible events in all time and space exist within an “eternal” framework, in that sense all that link them together is pure quantum entanglement existing “through the Bulk” formally understood to be “Einstein’s space-time”. The energy of this background “Dark Energy” state is identified by all as being related to the problem of the Vacuum Energy of the background quantum state. The measurement of the vacuum energy requires quantum confinement.
When you say “But the positron isn’t actually an electron traveling back in time. There is no traveling in time, neither forwards nor backwards.”.
I partially agree but that is because time is only a series of loosely connected discrete events, and as events laid out in the Block Universe they “exist” in a “Map” of the Universe that is bigger than the one we currently see. Everything is actually waves, and all “waves” are delocalized, there are no “ideal particles”, so point particles would imply infinite energy density localized at a point, and having no dimensions. Discussion of “travel” is an inadmissible concept as long as you first do not concede the existence of an extra space we are not accounting for, in that sense “travel” is simply proceeding from one event to the next in spacetime which is not “classical space. In between “points” in classical space and classical time is via quantum entanglement and the vacuum energy state is the quantum state in a quantum superposition of all possible states. When you make a measurement a choice is made in the vacuum energy density redistributing the vacuum density properties. this is the state of wavelike particles whose composition is simply that vacuum energy density state. What a a single observer does not measure is not “entangled with his vacuum energy density”, and from the perspective of that observer, other observation at that time and at that “classical point” in space simply do not exist.
This idealization of “points” moving is an absurdity and requires all point theory to be re-normalized by dividing finite volumes in space through by infinity to defined finite energy densities. There actually exist only pseudo-particles that are at one end of a spectrum of properties between fully wave-like and “fully particle-like”… the latter cannot fully locally exist because no “particle” can be specified in space and time to a greater extent than allowed by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. So all particles (electrons, photons etc), and all “waves” are confinements of a more general Quantum Wave Function that fills the vacuum all space, a background “continuum” that cannot be measured called the Superfluid Vacuum. As a superfluid the properties of the background obey the properties of the Beckenstein Bound in Quantum Information Theory. The contents of any volume of space are defined on the surface of an enclosed 2D sphere. So there is no need for a “Black Hole” to contain an empty central portion, only a lower dimensional surface-like ‘hole”. We easily mistake the Universe to be the inner contents of a “hole” but actually we exist only in the “holes” surface… it’s AdS/CFT Surface. The Universe is a “Black Hole” and the information content is fully described by the inner surface of this “Black Hole”. If you went to any laboratory in the World where they do Condensed matter Experiments, this is accepted theory already and it already obeys these rules. I say this rule extends to all matter at our level of the Universe because it is a wave not a particle. The Universe is a series of wavelets not particles and the wavelets are punctures in spacetime we call “Black Holes”… according to Ashoke Sen. If you need some verification there are hundreds of papers, both experimental and “philosophical”, they must be sorted for being realistic or not, and they cover all the things nobody is speaking about to the general public who are the ones paying for all this very technical researcher.
A de-confined quantum particles occupy whatever space is allowed to it, that space is able to be partially controlled through temperature and being in a micro-gravity or in free fall. Another strong confining principle is the process of measurement. The classical measurement forces the quantum wave to become semi-classical through the active specification of some of the measurable parameters. Once it is measured it has become a classical event. The act of “measurement” entangles the measurer to the measured event as a classical parameter of the space by way of the entanglement. While it is possible to specify a Classical Position in Time and Space this set of coordinates are not specifiable beyond a certain level of precision. Once you grasp that it is clear that all “particle” descriptions ignore the “near Field” (Evanescent Field).
Everything “happens” in the near field, particles are emitted and absorbed energy is exchanged… etc. All measurements are made in the near field. Classical Theory does not “admit” the near field since all measurements are made at single points.The near field is a source/region for all virtual particles and in quantum theory they are entirely non-local. Think of a wave at the beach, the height of the wave depends on where you measure it and when you measure it and it’s location depends on how it is localized when it “breaks”. There is no single figure to describe a complete wave, but we have a means to measure particles at “points”. They are “virtual” because beyond their virtual range, their influence is strongly limited and vanishes quickly, the total energy is reflected back into the resonant source that produced them. Within the near field the Speed of Light rises towards infinity back toward the source, but this is a wave velocity not a group velocity. For most of this theory, treat the carriers of the electromagnetic force as virtual photons (lower energy ranges). That is the force you feel when you press your fingers together or the force you feel when you bring a strong bar magnet to a piece of iron… photons are in the “virtual” range and their exchange is not able to be measured using conventional classical technology. For example – bar magnets do not glow in the dark (do not emit real photons) even though their influence is felt over extended distances.
On the other hand all “classical forces” are externalized into far field forces. These virtual photons have a small mass (in certain theories these might also be considered as being de-confined Neutrinos which have spin half but also have a very small mass). It is a relative negative mass or negative energy, it’s projection into a instrument leads to the energy being always measured as positive. It is an energy that is necessary to convert the virtual photon into a real photon. This is known as the Dynamic Casimir Effect. Neutrinos are also notoriously difficult to measure because they are in a state of quantum superposition and entirely de-confined. Add the fact that they have this negative energy requirement in order to be measured by real classically confined measurement instruments. Ordinary photons do not have this problem.
As a pair of de-confined neutrinos they form a Boson, as a dressed state they would be a Cooper Pair of Neutrinos, but the “point particle” Neutrino does not exist, they are actually waves having a slight negative energy and range as a “particle”. But all “particles”, even photons, travel as waves while being in a superposition of quantum states.
Therefore they also have a fixed range. In that evanescent range (which is a scale) the energy is negative relative to the Universe around us… they exist partially inside a wormhole. Give the virtual photon the necessary energy gap and the photon escapes the near field as “real” photons. This is called the Dynamic Casimir Effect. You can identify these photons when you work in the near field of a radio transmitter where there are unbalanced forces emerging from the locally resonant quantum field.
This “positive time and negative time” point of view is an older one that has been largely ignored. It is one I have been very interested in for nearly two decades now and in some respects it is an idea that is having another resurgence in science circles. We all know about the Feynman-Steuckelberg Interpretation of Time. If not you can look it up here in Wikipedia Link: Feynman-Steuckelberg Interpretation of Time and Antiparticles… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiparticle#Feynman%E2%80%93Stueckelberg_interpretation
It is a valid interpretation as good as any other one that interprets “time” as a kid of physical dimension. It is all in the analogy. Not all analogies are equivalent. For example the David Bohm view of Quantum Mechanics is a “stalking horse”, however some very smart people still consider it to be a valid point of view. Of course it is not because of this most important aspect of quantum physics that forbids two diametrically opposite views of a particle at the one time as a wave and as a particle. The “ideal” particle point of view is totally experimentally unsustainable. So you rule this notion out as a candidate. You can apply the same principles to the other interpretations of quantum mechanics and apply the same rules (one by one) and then you rule in or out depending on whether they satisfy the rules of experimental procedure and their outcomes. See Link:
https://physicsdiscussionforum.org/download/file.php?id=1346
You quickly arrive at theories of time and space being the underlying issue regarding the fundamental errors in most interpretations. Space time symmetry is not a symmetric property of the Classical Universe but in the Quantum Universe of the superposition of states it works perfectly. However it is a property of the Universe that cannot support measurement from a Parallel World whose properties are not directly measured. See Physics World Article: Our universe has antimatter partner on the other side of the Big Bang, say physicists – 02 Jan 2019. Link: https://physicsworld.eom/a/our-universe-has-antimatter-partner-on-the-other-side-of-the-big-bang-say-physicists/
They do not say it openly (Neil Turok of the Perimeter Institute) but the approach is entirely time symmetric in the way that particles and antiparticles are antisymmetric in the Feynman-Stueckelberg Theory. Unfortunately when I say “symmetric” I mean when it is in the superposition of states. While in quantum superposition,the state becomes “symmetric” in that all equivalent states are symmetric but this does not mean they are all the same, given a particular prior Classical State, a subsequent Quantum State evolves from the parallel Everett States in quantum superposition. The measurer of the outcome state “choose” from this suite a single candidate for many. The act of measurement (or observation) used to be termed a collapse of the global wavefunction. This is not possible, every event in the universe, when measured , does not collapse the entire Universe, just a small “localized region” that we call a quantum state, that state may or may not be localized in space and time in the way classical states are localized spatially or temporally. No-locality is a feature of these “collapses”. A delocalized state shares that one state in many places at the one time because quantum entanglement is not one to one it is also one to many and many to one relationship, but when we choose an outcome state, at one point in space and in time, it is then found at one Classical Place. Because the Universe is “entangled”, which is a way of suggesting that the Universe os Holographic, the knock on effect is a cascade or related phenomena not an isolated event, but the observer can only record one outcome, other quantum isolated observers ‘see’ different outcomes that are Holographically related, think of those Holograms which are animated when you rotate them around a laser source, a girl “blows a kiss” as a sequence of Holographic Images existing in the ones place but seen by different sequential observers as a sequence of separate “events” as “motion”, or this is one observer moving his point of observation relative to the other observations? The Holographic image is fixed in time (fixed for all time – it’s a photographic image), the motion of the girl is an illusion due to seeing different images existing in the one space at the one time, that is what a hologram does. It also happens to provide stereoscopic pairs to allow the observer to see the image in three dimensions. The one observer cannot tell anything about other possible observations in co-tangential Everett Universes… but they are there all the same. These other Universes have cohorts of holographically linked events. I am not suggesting these Universes are all identical or equivalent. They’re not… two dimensional stock film containing silver grains are a “limited information storage media”. The Universe is far more subtle, the media in this case is the Background Superfluid Vacuum Theory Media which is spacetime. The linkage in quantum entanglement space is through the Bulk where history is recorded permanently.
Elsewhere other entangled events are happening across space and time, but not to that one observer. One Classical Observer leads to one Classical Group of Properties. The actual measurement itself determines the nature and “place” in time and space of the Classical Properties of the single Classical Outcome. But other properties in the Holographic Universe in quantum superposition also exist in that one space, but cannot be seen due to being linked to a different Berry Phase.
Time is the process of linking events in space through quantum entanglement. But particles are only the “dressing” we apply on the wormholes connecting the events in spacetime. This Nature Image shows how we correlate ‘Black Holes” and “Quantum Entanglement See:”…
https://physicsdiscussionforum.org/download/file.php?id=1345
Ashoke Sen believes everything fundamental in the Universe is a “Black Hole”. I think that is the answer to the overall problem, there are many experiments at high and low temperatures that show the Universe is a superfluid. The Universe is in accord with the Superfluid Vacuum Theory. See Link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfluid_vacuum_theory
The Universe is “dual” around the temperature of absolute zero and also at “infinite temperature”… Quark-Gluon Plasma. The temperature really does not matter at since we are discussing “Electromagnetic-Weak-Strong Black Holes” not the Gravitational (Cosmic) Black Hole, the exchange of “heat” requires the exchange of photons to transfer energy. The Spacetime background states (not the quantum foreground states that are sensitive to entropic phenomena) is immune to any temperature phenomena, that is the quarks and electrons and other fundamental “particles”. Entropy “spoils” this time symmetry. But it is fully restored when the quantum states return to quantum superposition. Quantum Entanglement is not through space it is through space-time… the Bulk… that way these wormholes are similar to vortex excitons (electron – hole pairs). Matter – Antimatter Recombination from the “Antispace” is an experimental fact, this is why Turok is beginning to come around and revisit Feynman’s old idea again. We have been using “holes” in electronics for the better part of 70 years. The “electron” and “positron” are just opposite ends of the “hole”. Pairs of electrons and pairs of “particles” and “antiparticles” are entangled if they are associated with the one initial source and they are Holographically related to the wavefunction of all other electrons in the Universe. In quantum entangled superposition they are are “Cooper Pairs”.
“I don’t know if you were aware that from the point of view of computer science variables are spaces. The developing world of computer science and object orientation is based on the fundamental unit of the simplest quantity as a space.”
Agreed. Certainly I do know that. And the ideas are not “abstract” except to those who reject the idea that our “space” is also an abstract space and we “join the dots” in our set of points. The way these points join up define a visible and measureable Universe. But there is a lot of space between those points for the Universe ot be a “Hologram”… not of light but of waves in the quantum field. Taken to the limiting case, the picture of sub-atomic waves in a quantum spacetime “Bulk” is in superposition and when an observer “measures” his environment, that is selects from the available states to be found there, a classical world evolves. All quantum theory and all classical theory agree there is fundamentally only one theory and that is quantum theory, and classical theory evolves from it though the process of quantum to classical emergence. Our judgements and observations are based on this “emerged reality” but this reality of physical particles has emerged from the background vacuum state through confinement. A single observer sees one “reality” but another similar observer having a slightly different quantum phase sees another reality because he/she selects a different possibility from that holographic background. A single observer cannot measure both vacuum background at the one time… except in super high energy experiments at SLAC where this background generated all these alternatives simultaneously.
Our Universe has a finite amount of information. Some reckon it to be about 10^80 states. We have a theory of numbers that has an infinite precision. But as a practical limitation, there is a cut-off in the practical value the Universe uses to generate “waves” which is called the ultra-violet divergence limit. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_divergence The measurement of numbers beyond a certain precision cannot proceed because this information content of the Universe is band limited to this fixed figure (whatever it is). Even a single number of pi with an infinite precision is not supported by this Universe’s vacuum. This insists that between the numbers that are “permitted”, due to a global quantization, there are many more number (perhaps an infinity), in the vacuum, differing only through a quantum phase. Attempts to increase the precision of such numbers only changes the outcomes not the number of particles and their precision. These other “worlds” are similar in information content to our world when viewed classically but all worlds share the one quantum superposition of states.
Breakthrough Quantum Cat Experiment Captured on Camera – Gizmodo – 2309-2016 Link: http://gizmodo.com/breakthrough-quantum-cat-experiment-captured-on-camera-1786923180
Quantum Phenomena Modeled by Interactions between Many Classical Worlds – HMWiseman – PhysRevX – 2310-2014. Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.4.041013
And a lot of other stuff.
They’re very very long Good Elf, with lots of hyperlinks, and they fall foul of the spam filter. I’ve approved them, but I have to say this isn’t really the place for them because they are absolutely massive and they aren’t about the nature of time. Please start threads as appropriate on http://physicsdiscussionforum.org/
Mathjax uses dollar signs around an expression:
$A + B = C^2$
I think you are in need of professional help since you suffer from illusion that you understand physics better than people who study it and work as physicists. Being banned on stackexcange wasn’t enough of a clue?
Ah, Aleksandar Milinković, science nerd, militant atheist, respects all things that hold true under scientific scrutiny. Your answers on quora suggests you don’t respect things that hold true under scientific scrutiny. I don’t need professional help thanks. And I’m not banned on physics stack exchange. See this: https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/76162/john-duffield
John directed me here after reading Julian Barbour’s The End of Time.
I am not a physicist. I am professionally interested in the technologies of modeling decisions and uncertainty, so the wave function is a metaphor for me. Barbour has an accessible discussion of the wave function – especially when he describes Schroedinger’s approach to modeling what happens in a cloud chamber when a small quantity of radium is placed in it. Since quantum is a linear theory, the alpha particle emission – from a random atom in the radium – makes a linear change to the wave function that models the (local) state of the cloud chamber. This change causes an ionization of a random hydrogen atom. The wave function has a new feature that increases the “probability” of events in a narrow cone, and so forth. This model describes a causal sequence of completely random “nows”, for which the reversal is only one possible sequence from an essentially infinite sample space.
This version of “time’s arrow” is much more interesting than the thermodynamic one, since it does permit the gradual appearance of locally complex and stable arrangements of matter / energy at low temperatures.
Here is another paper along the same lines as Times Arrow: https://phys.org/news/2020-03-symmetry-laws-physics.html. It posits 3 black holes in orbits around each other, and introduces variability on the order of the Planck Length. In such a case, time cannot be reliably reversed. To my mind this means that the time reversal of any physical process is impossible. No matter what the math says.
I suppose electron-positron annihilation is the time reversal of gamma-gamma pair production, Alan. But there’s no way you can make time go backwards. Motion is motion. There’s no such thing as negative motion. History cannot be reversed.
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As for the physorg article, I don’t know how a black hole can follow the usual rules for gravity. An electron falls down because spin is real. And because a gravitational field is a place where there’s a gradient in the “coordinate” speed of light. But a black hole is a place where the coordinate speed of light is zero. And light can’t go slower than stopped. So there’s no mechanism that I can see wherein a black hole falls down. Or orbits another black hole.
See Sabine Hossenfelder’s blog article Do we really travel through time with the speed of light? She says yes, we do travel through time at the speed of light. I have just added this comment to her blog:
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This blog post is totally wrong. Spacetime is an abstract thing that models space at all times, and as such it is absolutely static. There is no motion in spacetime. So if you arrange things such that you’re not moving through space, you aren’t moving through time either. It’s a “lost in maths” fallacy to think you are. Especially since time is just a cumulative measure of local motion through space.
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Will my comment see the light of day? Answers on a postcard please.
I was just thinking, and i know that the thoughts were then, and this is now, but still… If you could somehow disassociate yourself from the map which is spacetime, could you not ‘reconnect’ at any location? Time travel is not possible, because time is … What?… From ‘inside’ time, you cannot time travel, but from the outside? Sure, we’re ‘time dependent’ in that nothing happens to us without that perceived ‘motion’. If we take a tiny bit of what it takes to keep us functioning and ‘alive’, and carry it along with us, then we can intersect the ‘map’ in any location, but we won’t ever arrive where we were when we left, originally. It’s kind of like a line of dominoes, which when tipped, fall in sequence. Even if you start with the same one, you’d have to tip it in exactly the same way, to get the same result. If you aren’t the person (temporally) as the one who tipped the domino in the first place, then it won’t be the same action, and the results will vary. (now the worst part) If you then try to go where you started, the changes you made will be on the other result, and you won’t see them, so, for you, time is unchanged. This has to be, since the fall of the dominoes determines who and where you are, and also determines when and if you discover how to become time independent, thus becoming able to move in the first place. While you can change time and events for the entire universe, it can’t include you, because you have to “be there” to start the change. The fiction writer will say that “so long as it does not effect your personal space, you can make changes that you can see”, but this isn’t true, because of the ‘butterfly effect’. The tiniest change will impact you, if in no other way than to alter the speed and intensity of a sneeze across the room, when you haven’t yet entered the space, but that’s enough. Any change, no matter how small, and distant, will alter the ‘now’ of your existence, and that will make a new sequence of events, which don’t include the ones in which you were born/reared. It’s kind of hard to internalize, but it’s valid if you do the math.
Victor, utmost apologies, your comment went into my spam folder, and I haven’t checked it recently.
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No, sorry, you can’t ‘reconnect’ at any location. Spacetime is the map, but that map is an abstract thing. It does not actually exist. It’s an abstract thing that models space at all times, and as such is a “static arena”. You can’t connect to it, or reconnect to it, because we live in a world of space and motion, and the map is not the territory. Time travel is not possible because time is a cumulative measure of motion, that’s all. You can’t literally move through a cumulative measure of motion just as you can’t literally climb to a higher temperature. That’s it. All the rest is fantasy I’m afraid. It makes for great science fiction movies, but not good science. Because once you see time for what it is, you know that the speed of light varies with gravitational potential, just like Einstein said. After that, it’s like pulling a thread with Einstein’s name on it, and out comes a string of pearls.
I was intrigued by the article as it reflects my intuitive problems with time dilation. However I think there are a couple of flaws in the reasoning. 1:The mirror analogy doesn’t really work with a change in gravity. 2: the mirror clock analogy also doesn’t work in the following case. Assuming the earth with two people was accelerated in a certain direction. Then one person speeds away from the other person is reverse direction of the speed of the earth. The time of the speeding person in reverse direction should increase rather than slow in the mirror analogy 3:it seems to me that clocks don’t work because of motion, but because of a rate of motion (speed) which is very different because tIme is an essential component in rate of motion. My interpretation of time as we are accustomed to is basically the ‘speed’ at which matter interacts. The time that we currently use would therefore be a derivative of matter and ‘speed’. Where the latter would be using a different ‘time’ base/reference that may (or may not) experience time dilation. Because current time would be a derivative of ‘speed’ ( change in motion) it can automatically not go lower than zero.
Sorry to be slow replying Robert.
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Yes the mirror analogy doesn’t really work with a change in gravity. For that you need the parallel-mirror gif in the next article. It does work for the “twins” situation, because both of them see the other’s clock going slower than his own. That’s the paradox, but it isn’t really a paradox, it’s just a form of perspective – when we’re separated by distance we each see the other as smaller than ourselves. As for your point 3, clocks do work because of motion. You can see the motion of the cogs and gears in a clockwork clock. But you can’t see time. You should try to be empirical about this sort of thing. Don’t dismiss what you can see because you believe in something you can’t.
Assuming you have two clocks based on a pendulum and a set of parallel mirrors. Both pendulums swing one meter and the parallel mirrors are 1 meter apart. One pendulum completes its swing in 150,000,000 roundtrips of light between the mirrors (1 sec). The other pendulum completes one swing in 1,500,000,000 roundtrips of light between the mirrors (10 secs). Both pendulums have the same motion yet will indicate different time. Therefore the rate of motion matters and the rate of this motion is defined by something related to what we call time.
The rate of motion certainly matters. But that motion doesn’t depend on time. It’s the other way round. A pendulum clock features a “movement”, which is a device that converts each swing of the pendulum into the ongoing motion of cogs and gears, and eventually the motion of the hands of the clock. The thing you call the time is just the position of the hands. Then if the pendulum swings slower, the clock goes slower. For a quartz wristwatch, there’s a crystal instead of a pendulum, and electronics instead of a movement, plus a digital display rather than moving hands. But the principle is the same.
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Note though that the rate of a pendulum clock depends on the local force of gravity, which relates to the local gradient in gravitational potential. See the plot here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_potential. The rate of other clocks depends on the gravitational potential at the clock location, not the gradient in gravitational potential. So if you synchronised a pendulum clock and an optical clock at the surface of the Earth, then if you descended or ascended you’d find that the clocks didn’t stay synchronised.
I was trying to make a slightly different point. Maybe a different example is better. Assume that an airplane flies in circles around the earth with an observer stationary on earth. To simplify the problem the observer is on a mountain top at the same elevation as the airplane flies and the airplane flies over the poles so both gravity and earth rotation is the same for observer and pilot in the airplane.Because of the airplane’s speed the clocks on the airplane will go slightly slower than on earth. Einstein’s explanation for the clocks going slower is because the time goes slower in the airplane ( time dilation), My theory (which I think matches yours) is that the clocks are slower because the rate of motion of matter in the airplane has slowed down and as result the mechanical parts move slower, the crystals vibrate slower and the transition frequency in the atomic clock is lowered slightly. The result of this explanation is that time is replaced with rate of motion. The problem with this is that rate of motion is defined as change in position in space per unit of time, so you are replacing time with a time derivative, which does not get rid of time itself. However I was wondering if this explanation could be useful anyway. The rate of motion can never be negative so going back in ‘time’ is therefore automatically not possible. Also I was wondering if it would be possible to replace time with rate of motion in Einstein equations, so it would give a similar end result but is based on a different perspective which could possibly result in more insight in Einstein’s equations.
I agree with all that, Robert. Yes, the clocks are slower because the rate of motion of matter in the airplane has slowed down and as result the mechanical parts move slower, the crystals vibrate slower and the transition frequency in the atomic clock is lowered slightly. Yes, time is replaced with rate of motion. However motion is what it is. You can see it. So there’s no point defining it in terms of something you can’t. Motion is what it is, when we describe some rate of motion, we derive that “unit of time” from something else that exhibits some rate of motion. Yes, I agree that the rate of motion can never be negative so going back in time is automatically not possible. Good stuff!
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Maybe it is possible to replace time with a rate of motion in equations. Replacing t with something else might help, or getting rid of it altogether. I’m not sure if it would help enough though, because educated people can be very obtuse about this sort of thing. I’ve had some astonishing conversations about the speed of light varying with gravitational potential. Some, especially those with a PhD, will absolutely insist that it doesn’t, even though Einstein said the speed of light varied year after year. Even though the evidence of optical clocks etc makes it crystal clear. Sometimes it’s as if there’s nobody home.
I discovered a new simple time formula. As it is known, every simple
physics formula explains a law of nature. My formula says, ‘In a
physical event there is always as much time as the energy amount. That
is, “The more energy there is, the more time there is.’’ And vice
versa. Please can you evaluate my website and
articles? my website timeflow.org and three articles,
https://magneticuniverse.com/discussion/307/timeflow-theory-by-salih-kircalar
Special Relativity Theory (SRT) equations revealed that mass and time are
proportional.
t / t’ = m / m’
My ‘Timeflow’=’Time’/’Energy’ Formula makes a small but important
contribution to this. It expresses that the relation of mass to time is equal
to the amount of mc2 energy of the mass, which is 9×10’16 s or
2,851,927,903.26… years for 1 kg of mass outside the gravitational fields.
Very small free particles in space must be observed by organizations such as
NASA or ESA, only then my proposal will be verified.
In addition,The flow of the thought energy intensity in our brain is
body pain, unhappiness and boredom, joy, happiness and love,
sleep, and finally death, respectively, from high energy to low
energy. At the moment
to sleep, if we had a good sleep, our thought energy is very close to
zero or zero. When the energy flow intensity increases in our brain,
according to the ‘Timeflow Formula (Timeflow=Time/Energy). The
timeflow will slow down. As the energy density (power) decreases, the
timeflow will accelerate. In the case of sleep and death, the timeflow
will be infinite. The timeflow formula explains very clearly and
simply that this situation, which is perceived as psychological time
is actually a purely physical event. I think it would be very useful
for psychology experts to evaluate the ‘Timeflow’ Formula and the
philosophical interpretation of the formula.
What essentially was a mechanical clock? It was a simple abstraction of the fact that Earth spins and rotates around the Sun. Therefore, no clock, mechanical or otherwise, even in principle, can ever measure anything that is physically real any more than the merry-go-round can:
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In physical reality, any clock is merely an arbitrary frame of reference, with its frequency of elementary event of physical change. And such frequency of elementary event of physical change is subject to influences from interactions with other physical phenomena. There are no ideal, zero-dimensional, point-like clocks physically possible. By definition and by nature, clocks are 3-D physical devices, like a Cesium atom. Cesium atoms do not measure anything.
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Einstein’s close friend, Kurt Godel, in relation to GTR, logically demonstrated “time” having a non-physical nature, but it was universally ignored at the time, and ever since:
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https://quantumantigravity.files.wordpress.com/2021/06/godel1949.pdf
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” It is a widely known but little considered fact that Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel were best friends for the last decade and a half of Einstein’s life. The two walked home together from Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study every day; they shared ideas about physics, philosophy, politics, and the lost world of German science in which they had grown up. By 1949, Godel had produced a remarkable proof: In any universe described by the Theory of Relativity, time cannot exist . Einstein endorsed this result-reluctantly, since it decisively overthrew the classical world-view to which he was committed. But he could find no way to refute it, and in the half-century since then, neither has anyone else. Even more remarkable than this stunning discovery, however, was what happened afterward: nothing. Cosmologists and philosophers alike have proceeded with their work as if Godel’s proof never existed -one of the greatest scandals of modern intellectual history. A World Without Time is a sweeping, ambitious book, and yet poignant and intimate. It tells the story of two magnificent minds put on the shelf by the scientific fashions of their day, and attempts to rescue from undeserved obscurity the brilliant work they did together.” — https://www.amazon.com/World-Without-Time-Forgotten-Einstein/dp/0465092942/
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From Einstein’s secret private diary :
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” While sitting on a bench in the Zurich’s park, I asked myself: What kind of physical stuff could my spacetime be made of? Well, it is only logical that spacetime is simply made of space and time. And what is time made of? Time is made of seconds. And what is space made of? Space is made of cubic meters. Because we use time and space in mathematical equations describing real physical phenomena, so let’s hope that space and time are real physical entities, too. Therefore, the physical substance that space and time are made of are physical meters and physical seconds. This way spacetime is physical, but it is not made of any typical, nor exotic, matter, or energy, like the Aether. Bingo. I have it both ways !!! And to add the insult to injury, I will turn time into the fourth dimension of space, just because it will be simpler and more elegant. Besides, my deep intuition tells me that God followed this principle to create the Universe. So, don’t blame me, because you will go to Hell. Praise the Lord! Amen.” — https://quantumantigravity.wordpress.com/unzicker/
Zbig: I referred to Palle Yourgrau’s book A World without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein.. I’ll reply to your comments in detail over the weekend. Meanwhile, I will say this: I think space exists, and motion exists. But I also think time is merely a cumulative measure of motion. It’s real, just like heat is real, because 100 years t will kill you just as surely as a hundred degrees C. But it isn’t something you can move through. Ditto for spacetime. So spacetime is abstract mathematical thing, and so is a reference frame. The map is not the territory.
Why Space and Time Are an Illusion ?
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” Alexander Unzicker is a theoretical physicist and writes about elementary questions of natural philosophy. His critique of contemporary physics Bankrupting Physics (Macmillan) received the ‘Science Book of the Year’ award (German edition 2010). With The Mathematical Reality, Unzicker presents his most fundamental work to date, which is the result of years of study of natural laws and their historical development.The discovery of fundamental laws of nature has influenced the fate of Homo sapiens more than anything else. Has modern physics already understood these laws? Many puzzles formulated by Albert Einstein or Paul Dirac are still unsolved today, in particular the meaning of fundamental constants. In this book, Unzicker contends that a rational description of nature must do without any constants. A methodological and historical analysis shows, however, that the underlying problem of physics is deep, unexpected and fatal: the concepts of space and time themselves, the basis of science since Newton, could be fundamentally inappropriate for the description of reality, although—or precisely because—they are so easily accessible to human perception. A new understanding of reality can only arise from mathematics. By exploring the three-dimensional unitary sphere, which could replace the concepts of space and time, the author presents a mathematical vision that points the way to a new understanding of reality.” — https://www.amazon.ca/Mathematical-Reality-Space-Time-Illusion/dp/B0849ZXQB1/
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In general, I agree with Unzicker, albeit I need to read his book, yet, to examine his specific argumentation.
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On this blog, we are all sufficiently convinced that “time” is not an autonomous physical entity in its own right, separate from other physical phenomena, and neither such that could essentially be measured in a physical sense.
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So, what about space, then ?! What is the nature of space?
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Would you agree with Unzicker that space is an illusion?
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