Killing Time

Hi Lawrence,

I actually understand a relatively large proportion of what you are saying here. Which is unusual.It is a really interesting problem isn't it.

It has seemed to me that the quaternion arrangement of space AND time has a relationship to underlying physics (of nature and QM )that space-time does not because they share the regular continual change rather than variable time of relativity.

I think that's also relevant to what Joy Christian has been doing lately. The arrangement is, to me, like superimposing different "times" (arrangements) into one spatial model but differently to space-time.I talk very briefly about why I think that works in my essay. The space we -inhabit- can be well described the Newtonian way but the space-time we -observe- is not Newtonian but emergent from data processing,in my opinion. That is in part what my essay is about. I hope it will allow some progress on understanding the reason behind a lot of difficulties.

The relativity of simultaneity is a direct consequence of Einstein's 1905 light postulate:

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~djmorin/chap11.pdf

p. 9: "Consider the following setup. In A's reference frame, a light source is placed midway between two receivers, a distance L' from each (see Fig. 11.4). The light source emits a flash. From A's point of view, the light hits the two receivers at the same time, L'/c seconds after the flash. Now consider another observer, B, who travels to the left at speed v. From her point of view, does the light hit the receivers at the same time? We will show that it does not. In B's reference frame, the situation looks like that in Fig. 11.5. The receivers (along with everything else in A's frame) move to the right at speed v, and the light travels in both directions at speed c with respect to B (not with respect to the light source, as measured in B's frame; this is where the speed-of-light postulate comes into play). Therefore, the relative speed (as viewed by B) of the light and the left receiver is c+v, and the relative speed of the light and the right receiver is c-v."

If Lee Smolin, Julian Barbour, Craig Callender and others hate the relativity of simultaneity and dream of absolute simultaneity, they will have to analyse a text like the above one and admit that, with respect to B, the light does not travel in both directions at speed c. Rather, with respect to B, the light travels at c+v to the right and at c-v to the left. Then the relative speed (as viewed by B) of the light and the left receiver is c, the relative speed of the light and the right receiver is c again and ... ABSOLUTE SIMULTANEITY IS RESTORED:

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/ias/earlycareer/events/time/programme/julian_barbour.pdf

Aspects of Time, Julian Barbour, Warwick, August 24th 2011: "Was Spacetime Glorious Historical Accident? (...) ABSOLUTE SIMULTANEITY RESTORED!"

http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/148

"Many physicists argue that time is an illusion. Lee Smolin begs to differ. (...) Smolin wishes to hold on to the reality of time. But to do so, he must overcome a major hurdle: General and special relativity seem to imply the opposite. In the classical Newtonian view, physics operated according to the ticking of an invisible universal clock. But Einstein threw out that master clock when, in his theory of special relativity, he argued that no two events are truly simultaneous unless they are causally related. If simultaneity - the notion of "now" - is relative, the universal clock must be a fiction, and time itself a proxy for the movement and change of objects in the universe. Time is literally written out of the equation. Although he has spent much of his career exploring the facets of a "timeless" universe, Smolin has become convinced that this is "deeply wrong," he says."

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

Lawrence,

I have reported your post for making fallacious and libellous personal comments about me. Watch carefully what you say about my work and about me personally. You are of course free to criticize my work, but you are by no means free to make personal comments about me based on a scandalously manufactured tabloid-style gossip.

Joy Christian

Georgina,

This does have a quaternion interpretation. Noncommutative geometry can be cast into that form with Clifford algebra. I have recently worked this through with an SU(2,2) ~ SO(4,2) isometry for AdS_4. This contains Sp(4,2) with the remainder as the terms which absorb Goldstone meson in the Higgs mechanism. This lays the foundation for a geometric quantization of a D-brane. This is part of a paper I hope to send off this next week and will be a reference for the FQXi essay.

I think it best to keep JC's stuff removed from this site.

Cheers LC

Einstein's 1905 assault, then things get worse in 1915:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-time-an-illusion

Craig Callender in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: "Einstein mounted the next assault by doing away with the idea of absolute simultaneity. According to his special theory of relativity, what events are happening at the same time depends on how fast you are going. The true arena of events is not time or space, but their union: spacetime. Two observers moving at different velocities disagree on when and where an event occurs, but they agree on its spacetime location. Space and time are secondary concepts that, as mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who had been one of Einstein's university professors, famously declared, "are doomed to fade away into mere shadows." And things only get worse in 1915 with Einstein's general theory of relativity..."

Craig Callender,

Is it so difficult to be frank and explain that Einstein did away with the idea of absolute simultaneity by advancing his 1905 false light postulate?

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

Georgina,

Did you submit an essay to this competition? I haven't seen one with your name on it, and I just now looked again.

jcns

Hi J.C. N Smith,

Yes its written but I just need to tidy up some issues to do with fully and correctly citing references/background resources for it to be acceptable. So hopefully it will appear in the next week.

Georgina,

Great! I look forward to reading it!

jcns

Rods and clocks were procrusteanized so that Einstein's 1905 false light postulate could become compatible with the relativity principle:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1661/1/Minkowski.pdf

MINKOWSKI SPACE-TIME: A GLORIOUS NON-ENTITY, Harvey Brown and Oliver Pooley: "It is argued that Minkowski space-time cannot serve as the deep structure within a "constructive" version of the special theory of relativity, contrary to widespread opinion in the philosophical community. (...) What has been shown is that rods and clocks must behave in quite particular ways in order for the two postulates to be true together. But this hardly amounts to an explanation of such behaviour. Rather things go the other way around. It is because rods and clocks behave as they do, in a way that is consistent with the relativity principle, that light is measured to have the same speed in each inertial frame."

The wavelength was implicitly procrusteanized as well:

http://www.hep.man.ac.uk/u/roger/PHYS10302/lecture18.pdf

Roger Barlow, Professor of Particle Physics: "The Doppler effect - changes in frequencies when sources or observers are in motion - is familiar to anyone who has stood at the roadside and watched (and listened) to the cars go by. It applies to all types of wave, not just sound. (...) Moving Observer. Now suppose the source is fixed but the observer is moving towards the source, with speed v. In time t, ct/(lambda) waves pass a fixed point. A moving point adds another vt/(lambda). So f'=(c+v)/(lambda)."

f, c and (lambda) are the frequency, speed of light and wavelength as measured by an observer in the frame of the source: f=c/(lambda). f', c' and (lambda)' are the frequency, speed of light and wavelength as measured by the moving observer: f'=c'/(lambda)'. Special relativity predicts:

f' = (c+v)/(lambda) for any waves

c' = c+v for any waves but light waves

c' = c for light waves

(lambda)' = (lambda) for any waves but light waves

(lambda)' = c(lambda)/(c+v) for light waves

Weird isn't it? Perhaps absurd?

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

Brendan Foster,

Please restore my posts - I don't keep a record and there were a few ideas and references I don't wish to lose.

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

Brendan Foster,

In the posts you deleted I was (re)introducing absolute simultaneity in the simplest possible, in a sense natural, way, in sharp contrast with Julian Barbour's convoluted approach. So your irritation is understandable (you are Barbour's collaborator aren't you) but still your reaction was highly unethical.

Please restore my posts - I don't have copies. If reposting is impossible for some reason, just send them to me by email. You are not entitled to remain the only consumer of the information in my posts.

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

Brendan Foster,

Are you going to restore my posts? At least you could reply - I am not a cockroach.

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

Just a note to remind forum users that posts that do not attempt to directly address the content of the article or an existing post may be marked as spam and removed.

Wait, doesn't that mean this post should be removed? Oh, what a dilemma.

In my posts I discussed the transition from the relativity of simultaneity to absolute simultaneity (that is, from Einsteinan time back to Newtonian time). Obviously this "directly addresses the content of the article". Please restore my posts, Brendan Foster.

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

Maybe, we should not slay sensible reasoning. Maybe, we can cross Cauchy's and Killing's horizons rather than the Cauchy horizon and the Killing horizon.

My previous essay tried to remind of the possibility for proper domesticating the i in ih_bar.

Eckard

Kate Becker wrote: "Time used to be straightforward. To Isaac Newton, time was an absolute, like the tick-tocking of a great cosmic clock. In his theory of general relativity, though, Einstein threw out that cosmic clock and replaced it with a new and pliable notion of time. To Einstein, time could speed up or slow down..."

An example of a clock running slow in a gravitational well:

http://student.fizika.org/~jsisko/Knjige/Klasicna%20Mehanika/David%20Morin/CH13.PDF

David Morin: "The equivalence principle has a striking consequence concerning the behavior of clocks in a gravitational field. It implies that higher clocks run faster than lower clocks. If you put a watch on top of a tower, and then stand on the ground, you will see the watch on the tower tick faster than an identical watch on your wrist. When you take the watch down and compare it to the one on your wrist, it will show more time elapsed."

Is that true? Will the watch on the tower show more time elapsed? Einstein and Morin say "yes" but what does Nature say? Banesh Hoffmann suspects Nature of saying "no":

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Its-Roots-Banesh-Hoffmann/dp/0486406768

Banesh Hoffmann: "In an accelerated sky laboratory, and therefore also in the corresponding earth laboratory, the frequence of arrival of light pulses is lower than the ticking rate of the upper clocks even though all the clocks go at the same rate. (...) As a result the experimenter at the ceiling of the sky laboratory will see with his own eyes that the floor clock is going at a slower rate than the ceiling clock - even though, as I have stressed, both are going at the same rate. (...) The gravitational red shift does not arise from changes in the intrinsic rates of clocks. It arises from what befalls light signals as they traverse space and time in the presence of gravitation."

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

Kate Becker wrote: "Yet for all this strangeness, quantum theory held on to a thoroughly Newtonian picture of time - "The same one Einstein wanted to get rid of," says Anderson. "General relativity and quantum theory developed at almost the same moment, but they moved in different directions away from Newton," Anderson points out. So while general relativity offered a new and plastic version of time, quantum mechanics adhered to the old standard."

There are extremely simple scenarios allowing one, if not to make a definitive choice between the "new and plastic version of time" and the "old standard", at least to see the seminal difference between them. For instance, the classic derivation of time dilation presupposes a light beam travelling vertically, between two mirrors, on a train:

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~djmorin/chap11.pdf

p. 12: "In B's frame [that is, as judged by an observer on the ground], the train moves at speed v. The path of the light is shown in Fig. 11.9. The crucial fact to remember is that the speed of light in B's frame is still c. This means that the light travels along its diagonally upward path at speed c. (The vertical component of the speed is not c, as would be the case if light behaved like a baseball.)

If light does behave like a baseball and the vertical component of the speed is c, the "old standard" is correct. If not, the "new and plastic version of time" is correct.

Another scenario:

http://www.usna.edu/Users/physics/mungan/Scholarship/DopplerEffect.pdf

Carl Mungan: "Consider the case where the observer moves toward the source. In this case, the observer is rushing head-long into the wavefronts... (...) In fact, the wave speed is simply increased by the observer speed, as we can see by jumping into the observer's frame of reference."

If this is valid for light waves, the "old standard" is correct. If this is not valid for light waves, that is, if, although we jump into the observer's frame of reference, we don't see any increase in the wave speed, then the "new and plastic version of time" is correct.

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

Good Morning Edward Anderson,

As a Pico-Physicist I don't see any compatibility issue between the two natural phenomenon - natural quantization and heterogeneity in space introduced due to presence of matter leading to gravity affect.

I would like to invite you to review my essay on 5-Dimensional Universe at

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1326

I look forward to your comments and evaluation of the essay.

Thanks & Best Regards,

Vijay Gupta