Killing Time

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.

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

note: This is from a article I posted on my blog in 2010.

The greatest problem with current physics theories is that they consider time as if it were a property of physical reality.

Time is a relational concept which is made to allow us to compare events with periodic and cyclic systems; in other words, clocks. But time has time any more effect on reality than the clocks that are used to measure it? The fact, when you think of it, clocks don't really measure time.

Take an event consisting of the fall of an object from a point to "a" to a point "b". When we say we measured the time it took for that event to happen, what we actually did is count the number of cycles (seconds, or fraction of seconds for instance) from when the object was dropped from "a" and stopped the count when it reaches point "b". So we don't actually measure time. What we do is simply count the number of cycles the clock's mechanisms go through over the course of the event.

There is no reason why time should be anything more than a relational concept, a useful relational concept I admit, but only a concept. Yet time, physicists will argue, is necessary to the study of nature.

Every process, every event, transformation or phenomenon appears to happen in time. Without time, it is believed, the Universe would be static. Worse, there would be no Universe at all. What we fail to understand is that affirming the necessity of time is like saying that the atoms in the Universe could not exists without the number systems we use to count them. The argument is akin to the solipsistic argument that reality cannot exist without an observer (which is something many quantum-physicists actually try convince us of).

So let's make things clear for a start. Planet Earth, the solar system, our galaxy, our Universe existed before there were people to observe them and before the concept of time, which is a construct of the observers, was invented.

So what does it mean that time really a relational concept? What it essentially means is that there are no physical interaction between a phenomenon and the number of cycles of the periodic system we may compare it to.

You'll notice that I didn't say there is no interaction between the phenomenon and the periodic mechanism. What I said is that there is no interaction between the phenomenon and the abstraction that is a number. That said, there is a very simple test to determine if a notion is a property of physical reality or if it's merely a concept. The test is one of necessity.

For the sake of argumentation, let's assume that time is a fundamental property of physical reality. If time is a fundamental physical property of reality, then the existence of time must be an axiom essential to any theory of physical reality. What this implies is that it should be impossible to describe any physical phenomenon without the use of time. Impossible! Are you sure?

A principle of strict causality which describes physical phenomena as sequence of events related through causality doesn't require the concept of time. Even concepts such as motion and speed can be described without ever using concept of time.

In fact, the only indication that time may be physical is the effect of time dilation. Time dilation is the inevitable consequence of two axioms: the constancy of the speed of light and the continuity of space. But it can be shown that if space is discrete,than there is no need to resort to the concept of time dilation to explain the constancy of the speed of light.

Then, if time is not an essential axiom, it follows that time is not a fundamental property of physical reality. As a consequence, time is nothing more than a relational concept.

In my opinion, we need to make a distinction between reality and representations of reality by models or concepts. I think we're confusing the two when it comes to time.

I think that is nicely written Daniel.

Thank you Georgina. I still wish I had taken more time to edit it (ie. then instead of than), but the important thing is clarity.

Hmmm . . . strange, but the last time I read the article 'Killing Time' the topic of the article had something to do with the nature of time. I left a post (subsequently removed) which suggested that anyone interested in slaying the dragon of time might want to look at an essay offering another paradigm for the nature of time. How, exactly, did that fail to address the content of the article? Would it have been more acceptable if, rather than referring readers to an essay on the topic, I'd run on at length in this space regurgitating ideas on the nature of time which interested readers would have found by going to the referenced essay? That approach struck me as being wasteful of readers' valuable time and your valuable space.

jcns