Thank you Asghar for your nicely balanced 5-7-5 syllable haiku as per request!
It is indeed important to get away from oneself and its obsessive musings ... let me leave the monitor and enjoy tha magnificent pattern of clouds outside.
Vladimir
Thank you Asghar for your nicely balanced 5-7-5 syllable haiku as per request!
It is indeed important to get away from oneself and its obsessive musings ... let me leave the monitor and enjoy tha magnificent pattern of clouds outside.
Vladimir
Vladimir,
Welcome, this entaglement with the outside:
In the afternoon,
Patterns of high, musing clouds;
Circadian swallows
Hi Vladimir,
I'm sorry to be late joining the crowd in adding my thanks to you for a job well done in presenting an interesting, well written, and nicely illustrated essay tackling some key topics which are badly in need of tackling.
I was particularly struck by the clear, concise presentation of your Q2: Does Time Really exist? This is a topic near and dear to my heart, as you will discover if you find time to read my essay here, Rethinking a Key Assumption About the Nature of Time.
I'll be going back and looking at your essay and your references in greater detail. For now, suffice it to say thanks again!
jcns
Paul
We are only after the "physically existent phenomenon". If the dimensions of a rod reflect the "sensation of space", then, should not the relativity-inflicted physical dilation on clocks/atomic clocks, reflect some "sensation of time"?
Anon
"We are only after the "physically existent phenomenon".
Absolutely, and that is the whole point. Having eradicated all metaphysical possibilities, we have two knowns: 1 Physical existence is independent of sensory detection. 2 Physical existence involves alteration. This means physical existence is a sequence, and that can only occur one at a time, because the successor cannot occur unless the predecessor ceases. In other words, there is a definite physically existent state as at any given point in time (timing, a point in time, ie the unit of timing, being the fastest rate of change in reality).
Now, this involves a vanishingly small degree of change and duration, but it must be so. Otherwise physical existence cannot occur. The key point here being that it reveals the falsity of attributing the concept of time to being a characteristic of a reality (ie a physically existent state). It is concerned with the difference between realities, not of a reality. Physically, there is alteration, and the timing system calibrates the rate at which that occurs.
The concept of space is different in that it does correspond with a physically existent phenomena. Space per se, does not exist, physically existent phenomena do. Space is a correct way of conceptualising the relative size/shape of any given physically existent phenomenon. That is, it conceives of the 'occupation' of 'spatial points' bt any given physical phenomenon (a spatial point being determined by the smallest existent phenomenon in reality), ie relative 'spatial footprint'.
Paul
Thanks JCN SmithI
I have read your well-written and interesting essay on Time and commented there on it.
Vladimir
Thank you Asghar for another beautiful haiku.
Steve I am glad to say that this year you sound happy and optimistic and encourage you to create your own poetry and physics blog - helas! my French is very limited although I love the language of Fermat, Descarte Fresnel and Poincare. Good luck.
Vladimir
Dr.Smith,
Some cosmologists have heve been considedring for a while the universe as a configuration space in a sort of Darwinian evolution with some quantitative predictions . This evolution reflects/represents time - the operational time, that is controled by the laws of physics such as its dilation in the SR and GR. Of course, here as you say, the present, the past and the future do have their individual significance.
There is no time dilation in SR. Einstein defined SR as involving:
-no gravitational forces
-only motion that is uniform rectilinear and non-rotary (which is in effect, stillness)
-fixed shape bodies at rest (no dimension alteration)
-light which travels in straight lines at a constant speed (no curvature)
There are many quotes to substantiate this. In other words, SR is not 1905. It evolved as a resolution of the "apparently irreconcilable" (page 1 1905) issue between the two postulates (section 7 SR & GR). In simple terms, light is in vacuo, objects are not, in 1905. So they cannot co-exist. In SR everything is 'in vacuo'. In GR, nothing is.
Paul
Thanks Asghar and Paul for your discussion about time. Whatever SR says or was interopreted as later, it 'works' vide the extensive experimental evidence. In my view however it is not time itself that dilates (or not) but clocks move slower (or do not). In other words I like to interpret SR as affecting physical properties (length of a rod, rate of rotation of clock gears etc.), not the dynamics of space and time dimensions as Einstein and Minkowski proposed in "spacetime".
Vladimir
What works is not SR. I can only ask you again to please read my post 13/7 11.24 (and then 11/7 19.33) in my blog. After all, it was you who said a cold case review was an "excellent" idea.
Now, clocks are just objects. So if objects are subject to dimension alteration then so too are clocks. That does not mean that timing has altered, as you say. The issue is, was the Lorentz concept of dimension alteration correct, because that is what really underpins Relativity. The subsequent explanations of it (courtesy of Poincare & Minkowski) are incorrect, because they did not understand time. And then Einstein substituted light speed for distance in an incorrect way in an expression of time. Which is why, apart from the fact that the variance (ie in dimension), if indeed there is one anyway, is attributed to the wrong factor (ie time and observation), light speed keeps occurring in so many equations. Because another fundamentally obvious question is: what has light got to do with it? And the answer to that is invariably, nothing. It has no physical association whatsoever. But it does so happen to be the physical phenomena which enables sight. However, even that is a coincidence, the first mistake was not based on that. Though it has provided a 'get out clause' to the subsequent jumble, ie it's all to do with observation and timing.
Paul
Paul we are having a heat wave here and with all these posts and fqxi articles (and my age) I really cannot contribute more meaningfully. I hope you found some of my responses encouraging and ask you to leave it at that for the time being. I will just respond in a general way to your last post: in my theory and some others light is 'all there is'. You obviously have different views but that is fine - I by no means am any sort of authority! Thanks for your understanding and good luck with your research and the contest.
Vladimir
Well, despite that I don't approve of Alexander's solution to the Gordian knot problem, and that there are technical errors in your version of relativity theory -- Vladimir, I have to give you kudos for an entertaining, readable and enjoyable essay! (As always, I love your art.)
Tom
Thanks Ray for reading my essay. The Alexandrian solution was a poetic take on my essay by a friend - it may be more accurate to say it is a virtual cut of the mental Gordian knot to clear a century of conceptual cobwebs before starting again from zero patiently tying a new and simpler knot! If you have time I would appreciate if you can briefly outline the technical problems with my relativity version. I still have to work out the details so it is by no means a complete theory just intuitive notions. I think it might work in the context of a dynamic universal lattice where energy is transmitted locally from node to node at a maximum of c but at slower speeds when the nodes have greater potential as in a gravitational field.
Cheers!
Vladimir
Vladimir
I enjoyed your essay, and have come back to it several times. The analogy about the 'badly designed building' was apt, and the seven questionable foundational premises were insightful. You are clearly very handy with the pen and brush, and the diagrams added interest.
So I thought that the paper was a good summary of the problems confronting physics, and the several areas where its premises may be wrong. I guess the next question would be, How does one go about fixing these problems?
Thank you
Dirk
Thanks Dirk,
I am glad you read the paper and enjoyed the illustrations ( Fig. 1 was made using Adobe Illustrator - I would never have gotten the lines so clean with pen or brush - the rest were pencil drawings). As I argued with Asghar in these discussion I believe geometry is paramount to imagine physics so the visual imagination helped the physics. In your essay too you made nice diagrams illustrating your concepts. I would go even further and say if one cannot picture it it is not a good foundation for a physics theory!
My recipe for reconstructing physics is in my Beautiful Universe Theory but it is just a an outline road map that needs a lot of development. One can check some of its claims in a preliminary way by computer simulation. Wish I had the skills.
Best wishes
Vladimir
Vladimir
In your last post on George's blog, you draw our attention to your paper, a Beautiful Universe Theory.
Your underlying principle is: "understanding nature at its own level is a necessary step to pave the way for further theoretical, experimental and technological discoveries". Absolutely.
Your start point is: "It is hypothesized that the entire universe is made up of an ordered lattice of identical spherically-symmetric charged nodes that are smaller than the smallest known nuclear particle, but are on a similar scale to it". OK.
But, the real question is how does physical existence occur in this circumstance? Spin, even if it involves just orientation on a spatial point, rather than alteration of spatial position, involves change. A change of what, to what? So, what constitutes any given physically existent state? When, and in what state, can any given node be said to have physically existed? Is it on completion of one spin, half a spin, what? Because the problem is that, by definition, any given node cannot physically exist in more than one physical state at a time. It cannot be half way through a spin and at the same time have completed one, or whatever.
This might sound dreadfully philosophical, and indeed annoying, but actually it points to the most fundamental physical point of all. We can never know, neither is science concerned with, what might be 'really' happening. We are part of the reality we are trying to establish knowledge of, and we cannot transcend our own physical existence, other than by invoking beliefs. So, we know there is something existing 'out there' ('out' being external/independent to our sensory detection systems, ie sight, hearing, etc). To be 'out there', it is physically existing, and it cannot do this in different physical states at the same time. In other words, there must ultimately be discreteness. Continuousness in physical reality means that one, and one only, physically existent state occurs, and it never ever changes.
Now, there is then an argument about 'cause'. Because the question arises as to why this node is spinning, how does it get charged, etc. But, cause must have correspondence with some physically existent phenomenon. It is not some 'mysterious' process that has no physical basis. Which then brings one back to the same logical point, ie how does 'cause' exist? Personally I would suggest that the physically existent state of any given 'cause' delineates what constitutes physical existence as at any point in time. In other words, there is a tendency to think of thing (and even the smallest thereof, like your nodes) being the equivalent of physical existence. And then something else causes alteration, but the physicality of this can somehow be ignored in terms of defining what was in existence as at any given point in time.
In sum then, reality is an unbelievably fast movie. But there are ultimately 'frames', because you do not get a movie without them, and we have one. We certainly do not have a still photo.
Paul
Paul
Thank you for your message . I know you are concerned with what physical reality is and whether we understand it or not. This philosophical question (and you cannot deny it is one) somehow exercises you unduly. In my case I have bypassed the whole issue of what 'actually' goes on in Nature. I have presented a model and my attitude is - if it functions in a way that is close to how Nature does so (in other words predicting the results of experiments etc.) that will be wonderful - if not then that's it the model does not work.
There you see why speculating on sematic issues of reality is absolutely of no interest to me and does get rather annoying when repeated so and at such length. I do not belittle the importance of your approach and I know there are whole university departments devoted to these questions, but I think it is wasted on us 'nuts and bolts' physics people here who just want to get the scenario right. Please try to understand.
And yes yes the movie frame idea is a good way to describe events but only if each frame encompasses the entire Universe.
Best wishes
Vladimir
Vladimir
It was not a philosophical question, it was a physical one. I too "have bypassed the whole issue of what 'actually' goes on in Nature" (well actually, eradicated). I said so, ie " We can never know, neither is science concerned with, what might be 'really' happening. We are part of the reality we are trying to establish knowledge of, and we cannot transcend our own physical existence, other than by invoking beliefs. So, we know there is something existing 'out there'..". That is why it was a physical point.
I also have to stress that my comments were not about the content of the model, as such. I just used it to comment how physical reality occurs and the notion of sequence/discreteness.
"And yes yes the movie frame idea is a good way to describe events but only if each frame encompasses the entire Universe"
And why doesn't it? What in practical, not metaphysical, terms is an issue to actually directly experience can be resolved (or at least attempted to be) with hypothecation. There is nothing else left then.
Paul
Paul
I learned a new word from you, hypothecate, thanks.
If the movie frame encompasses the universe, a concept I like and inherent in my theory, the universe is then absolute. This goes against the idea of inertial frames that Einstein propo-- hypothecated.
Vladimir