Thank you, yes, sorry - there's clearly more to your view than my initial picture of it. Will look some more I have time, rushing to get on a plane tomorrow.
Best wishes, Jonathan
There May Be a False Assumption in the Minkowskian Geometry That Led to Block Time, Which Disagrees With Quantum Theory on Whether the Future Already Exists - A Short Look Through the Clues About Tim
[deleted]
Dear Doctor Kerr,
As a layman, I found your splendid readable essay actually compellingly understandable. In my essay Sequence Consequence, I have taken a position diametrically opposite to the Minkowski spacetime one by insisting that one real Universe could only be existing once here and now. You state: "The readings on clocks and the motion of light at short range might give the impression of general simultaneity links across space. But long range simultaneity might be more hypothetical, and not real in any active way." There is a problem here in that all supposedly separable scientifically fabricated phenomena are automatically corrupted by the insertion of measuring identical unit standardization. Science is a religion that uses numbers.
[deleted]
Jonathan,
Thank you very much.
Dear Jonathan,
Yes, I appreciated why you were cautious, that was not a criticism. As you note in response, so many critics go 'full speed ahead, damn the torpedos' that it was both unusual and refreshing to find caution in overthrowing a century old accepted paradigm.
I am pleased that you will read my essay. Unlike the nature of time (perhaps the final mystery) the nature of the wave function may be succumbing to measurements and even, to some degree, to logical analysis. Just as the implications of block time lead to many hard-to-accept conclusions about secondary issues, the concept of 'superposition and collapse' have led to hard-to-swallow implications, as I note on one of the more recent comments on my thread; 'down the rabbit hole'.
Edwin Eugene Klingman
Dear Jonathan Kerr
Nature of time differs as the paradigm of universe we assume changes, in that the emergence of discrete time in accordance with plank time varies. In virtue of this, I think, Minkowski space is expressional only in lambda-CDM cosmology, in that the observer is 0-D; and not with paradigms that have premise of cyclic time.
With best wishes
Jayakar
Thanks Pentcho,
I should mention that what I thought you asked me was about how to interpret GR. Both Morin and Hoffman were also talking about that, their disagreement was simply about how GR should be interpreted. It's very often a matter of taste, but in my view motion through time is sometimes rather edited out of the interpretation, where it can be without compromising GR, perhaps because block time leads to the idea that motion through time doesn't exist.
But if you think GR is or may be wrong, then reading their work may not help - it might only help in trying to understand GR better. If you want to go outside GR, then it might be more relevant to look simply at the experimental evidence, and other ideas that have been put forward. I hope this helps, best wishes,
Jonathan
10 days later
[deleted]
Dear Jonathan,
As your essay demonstrates the question of time is undoubtedly a major stumbling block when trying to simplify and unify the theories of physics. What if time is not a dimension at all, but is imposed on physics by us, sentient beings with memory who saw the world around us change, and needed a book-keeping method to label the different states of this world? A timeless universe works quite well from the point of view of physics if all changes are local linear and causal as in some models like mine. It is only when we try to measure things that relativity enters the picture, but SR is not the only possible relativity!
For example let Lorentz transformations regulate the length of measuring rods, not of space itself (as in SR) nor time itself contract, just clocks slow down. It can be argued that Einstein did no service to physics by declaring the speed of light constant. This made measurement absolute, but the universe became relative. More sensibly let the speed of light have a maximum but be otherwise variable (measurement is relative) while the universe is absolute - ie a universal 'now' can be imagined. Einstein himself said that a variable speed of light is required in GR.
A timeless universe seems feasible in Beautiful Universe Theory , and was discussed in my fqxi essay Fix Physics! - I will be happy if you have a look at these qualitative and speculative papers.
With best wishes,
Vladimir
Hello Vladimir,
Good to read your essay, and there's a lot that I agree with there. Also entertaining and funny, the architecture analogy, and relevant as well.
As you say, we need a paradigm shift, with new fundamental principles, from which we rebuild. But how to see which starting point? I can show a few pointers, and that it has to be entirely new.
There are around ten different ways of seeing current physics, and the difference between them is often simply the order in which we put things. This concept is fundamental, while this concept is emergent, and further up the food chain. The speed of light is constant, and we adjust everything to that. Or the speed of light is variable, and we put something else underneath it. These alternatives are often equivalent, and we have a puzzle that can be rejigged into various different arrangements, but none necessarily leads to real progress.
It's easy to say let's cut through the Gordian knot, if we can't decide which of the loose bits of string coming out of it should be worked from. But I say if you look carefully, there are clues as to what the starting point should be, and they should lead (to make a truly mixed metaphor) towards a new set of concepts that will be like a sword to cut through the whole knot.
The deepest cracks in our present picture are the very places where the best clues are to be found about what the real picture should look like. Time is the deepest crack in our picture. Things really don't match up there. This crack has been papered over until recently, but now we're having to look right into it instead, because of quantum gravity.
You say time isn't real, and that only the 'now' exists. Most people who say time isn't real say the opposite - that the 'now' doesn't exist. Block time, which comes unavoidably out of Minkowski's geometry, has led many to think time doesn't exist in the sense that motion through time doesn't exist. Instead, they think every 'now' moment exists at once, and they all sit there alongside each other in a block. That's the standard GR view, in as far as there is one. It isn't talked about a lot, as you need at least one unexplained illusion to make it work.
But the differences in time rate in different places look very real, and are not addressed in either of these views. I've studied the idea of an illusion, it doesn't work, for several reasons. I say that motion through time has to be real, and in my essay I've shown that one of our two pictures of time has to be ruled out, as they can't co-exist.
What I'm saying to you is that if you try ruling out block time, and say that the rules about simultaneity at a distance are slightly different from what we think (which is very possible as we don't understand time, but have depended on assumptions about time in Minkowski's geometry), then you get a picture of a dynamic universe, in which motion through time is real.
So in the deduced picture motion through time is somehow real, and to me this view has been arrived at via a very logical sequence of reasoning, as in my essay - you can test every step on the way. And in this picture time seems to run at different rates in different places, so that should be the starting point, and to me it seems much more likely to lead somewhere than other starting points that lead off from here...
Hope this is of interest, best wishes, Jonathan
PS I didn't say that time is or isn't a dimension. I'm just looking at the clues and drawing conclusions, trying to limit the possibilities.
Dear Jonathan:
I like your essay. I think you present an interesting analysis of a concept that is very muddled. In particular, I was glad to see you repeatedly bring up the problem with the supposed illusion of time in a block universe. You might like my favourite quotation from Milic Capek, which I think expresses this problem beautifully:
"We shall deal only briefly with an extremely serious epistemological difficulty which arises when time is deprived of an ontological status and reduced to a mere appearance. For in relegating time into the phenomenal world an intolerable dualism is created between the realm of appearances, occurring in time, and the realm of timeless noumena. All static systems from Parmenides to Bradley and McTaggert are plagued by the same problem: If true reality is timeless, *where does the illusion of succession come from?* If time has no genuine reality, why does it appear to be real?
"No solution can be found which would not introduce surreptitiously the reality of time *somewhere*. If the illusory reality of time is nothing but a gradual rising of the curtain of ignorance which separates our mind from the complete and timeless insight, then at least *this process of rising is still a process which unfolds itself gradually without being given at once*; but, by conceding this, we admit the reality of time either in our mind or *between* our mind and the allegedly timeless reality."
For it is this surreptitious element of "time" that enters into the description of a block universe that leads to the intolerable dualism that you've also discussed, which leads to all kinds of paradoxes in working with and interpreting the theory. As you've correctly noted, "in taking that view, the number of phenomena that must be demoted to unreal is large. It amounts to anything that could be called a *process*, and that includes a lot of our world."
But, for this reason, I also think that your description of a block universe doesn't get all the way down to the heart of the issue with it, although I'm certain you do know what that issue is. You described: "The universe is a motionless 4-dimensional block, with no moment called 'now' moving through it anywhere. Instead it has many events and equally important 'now' moments, all sitting alongside each other in a static spacetime grid. This unchanging object it is just *there*." But the thing is, that although we can't avoid the use of verbs in describing what a thing "is", every verb that is used in describing a block universe actually falsely represents it. It's a true dilemma, and I'm not saying anyone could describe a block universe better than you have, but I think that any description of a block universe, which will inevitably require words like "is", needs to be supplemented by saying something like "although we say that a block universe physically 'exists' in its absolute entirety, from the beginning to the end of all four dimensions of spacetime, 'existence' is clearly the wrong word to use in describing a block universe, because although it contains within it a timelike dimension, it no more 'exists' in a temporal sense than a block of wood that comes in and out of existence in an instant; it is temporally singular."
And this is really why any attempt to reconcile the illusion of time with the block universe, as in perdurantism, is a false-start. And it's also the biggest indication that the block universe theory has to be incorrect, because no matter how we try to avoid it, we do commonly get a sense of temporal existence that can't really be reconciled with that singular block. Since the requirement of a block universe can be deduced directly from special relativity theory, something must be wrong at the heart of the theory.
This is all very closely related to the problem that's at the heart of the essentially paradoxical notion of time travel, in which science fiction writers begin with the idea of things actually existing throughout spacetime, (sort of) as in a block universe, but then allow that the events in that "spacetime" are also able to change. Clearly, the notion of a physically existing spacetime that changes requires another temporal dimension---and this is where that surreptitious Newtonian concept of an absolute time comes in; i.e., because the changes that are thought to be able to occur within spacetime, due to a time traveller's influence, are also thought to simultaneously effect all of spacetime. If you could go back in time and kill your grandfather before he met your grandmother, then you never would have been born, so you clearly can't do that---a well-known paradox. But as I see it, my grandfather doesn't exist before he met my grandmother: the event is no longer real. What's real is my typing this right now, which will be past, and therefore unreal, when you come to read it.
Elsewhere on this blog, you've made comments that indicate to me that you think I haven't carefully thought this problem through, and that you think I've been too quick to suggest what I think lies at the heart of the problem with the relativistic implication of a block universe, when I say it is the problem that, along with the assumption that there can be no privileged observers, it is the interpretation that synchronous events, described by constant values of the time-coordinate in any frame, truly occur simultaneously according to observers who remain at rest in those frames---which is what leads directly to the *inference* "that an event can be both past and future in two different viewpoints". Or else, when I say that there must instead be an absolute (global) simultaneity-relation amongst *all* observers in a three-dimensional enduring (i.e., flowing) universe.
This is a difficult stance to argue for, which involves not only having to reconcile with the principle of relativity and the relativity of simultaneity, but also having to justify the need to forsake the principle that there can be no privileged observers (which seems to agree so well with both the principle of relativity and the Copernican viewpoint), and show that the scientific evidence does actually support this.
This is what I concentrated on accomplishing in my essay; but I assure you that I have subjected the problem of the nature of time to rigorous analysis, dedicating nearly eighty pages of my (184 page) thesis to an analysis of the historical, philosophical, epistemological, and physical factors associated with this great problem. Although it may appear that I have presented something that simply works (I can hope you at least saw it that way), I have by no means simply chosen, without a great deal of thought, to reload assumptions that were previously cast off with good (but I think imperfect) reason. This is my response to your remark that "In relativity I'm often suspicious of views in which the weirdness in the theory is removed by pointing out errors that everyone else failed to see for a century. Usually when physicists allow a theory to be weird for that long, it's because they couldn't go anywhere else, and not from lack of trying."
You also wrote to Edwin: "I felt that unlike many, you were grasping at an underlying reality by looking at the clues. That's what makes a paper of interest to me these days, if it's looking for ways forward for physics - it's not enough for it to be trying to rejig existing theory into something it wasn't before. Like you, in my essay I'm grasping at an underlying reality by looking at the clues, and the real clues are external things like observations, not internal things like elements of existing theory.
"To me, for an approach to be relevant in the present situation it also has to be open to there being bits of the jigsaw missing, that we haven't yet found. Many of the essays I've read have implied within them the idea that the pieces we have are enough to finish the puzzle, if we can only organise them in the correct way. And yet a careful look at the clues shows that this idea is unavoidably wrong - new conceptual elements are needed."
I agree with you here, except for the part where I fear you're considering me with the "many" who are unlike you. To use your analogy, if we think of physics as closing in on the completion of one area of a puzzle (say, just for instance, with about ten pieces left to put together), you know that without fitting the remaining loose pieces into the puzzle correctly you can only jam about half (say, five or six) of them in the remaining space. These few pieces are all connected at points, and touch on the completed part that surrounds them in a number of places, but the picture is obviously imperfect and sparse. However, the pieces that have not been carefully fit into their right places *can* be put there by taking a careful look at their shape; but this may require one or two of the other pieces that were set aside because they didn't fit when the first five or six were jammed in without enough care.
Just because I have, in my essay, attempted to take a piece of the puzzle that I think was out of place, and fit it into its correct spot, that should not be taken to indicate that the argument has implied within itself "the idea that the pieces we have are enough to finish the puzzle." To my notion, space-time is, by the definition I've given of an enduring three-dimensional universe, *not* real. It is a graduating map of the events that occur in the universe, which contains within it the effects of things that occurred in the (absolute; purely *ideal* or mental) past. Now, in general relativity, space-time is described as a four-dimensional physical field that is moulded by mass which in turn follows geodesics, so that there is a reciprocal interaction. "Space and time are now dynamic quantities: when a body moves, or a force acts, it affects the curvature of space and time---and in turn the structure of space-time affects the way in which bodies move and forces act. Space and time not only affect but are also affected by everything that happens in the universe."
In my opinion, this quotation from A Brief History of Time poses just as paradoxical a notion as the theory of time travel---which Hawking also considered realistic enough, according to standard relativity, that in 1992 he invented the chronology protection conjecture. For the idea is the same: four-dimensional space-time exists, and bodies dynamically move through it, shaping it moment-by-moment in their presence. Since it is in fact space-time that's warped in the presence of gravitational mass according to general relativity theory, then according to the cosmological interpretation of relativity that I've discussed in my essay, all that might actually be warped is the perception of that unreal coordinated map of events.
If we choose to postulate absolute time in place of the postulate of the absolute world (according to Minkowski, since the relativity-postulate "comes to mean that only the four-dimensional world in space and time is given by phenomena..., I prefer to call it the *postulate of the absolute world*"), at the sake of having to accept that there *is* a fundamental rest-frame in our Universe, as cosmology came to demand anyway, many of our previous notions will have to fall. But the empirical facts still have to remain the same, so it's true that we will still have to reconcile the physical theory---our interpretation of the mathematics---with the evidence. Therefore, this requires a certain amount of "re-jigging" in order to maintain consistency.
I hope you don't mind this long note: I've found both your essay and your comments to be thought provoking, and I had a lot that I wanted to say in response. I hope you've found my comments to be thoughtful, and that we can continue to have intelligent discussion if you've got anything to add or criticise in response. I think we do have a common goal in mind; therefore, for now, I'd like to leave you with a quotation from Bertrand Russell, which I included in my thesis as an epigraph to the chapter "Against Einstein's Relativity: A Doxographical Analysis":
"I cannot believe---and I say this with all the emphasis of which I am capable---that there can ever be any good excuse for refusing to face the evidence in favour of something unwelcome. It is not by delusion, however exalted, that mankind can prosper, but only by unswerving courage in the pursuit of truth."
Daryl
Dear Jonathan
I liked your clever explanation above about the order in can which one takes up various assumptions and try to make them fit together. One can term it your Theory of Theories. But surely not all starting points are equal or even will work at all in some cases? The resulting theories are subject to certain criteria - that they work in all levels, obviously, but also that Occam's Razor applies - how simple will the resulting scheme be? And even Beauty (Dirac's own criterion on whether a theory is correct). For example of the latter : SR is beautiful in its own little sphere of applicability, but it becomes ugly when it complicates things like GR for no good reason. Starting out that a speed of light is constant creates complications down the line it is not a good starting point.
The crack about the Gordian Knot was a poetic comment on my article by a friend, but I see that I should have qualified it as such. Physics works well enough now not to attempt to destroy it in one sweep, without building an alternative theory!
About Time: Starting out with Minkowski spacetime is a non-starter for me. I will keep trying to make sense of the starting points I have assumed in my theory and see where it leads. If there is no time dimension one can say that everything is simultaneous - is that what is meant by block time?
Thanks, and with best wishes,
Vladimir
[As Daryl's post was also added to the discussion on Edwin Eugene Klingman's page, my post is here and there too:]
Thank you Daryl for your kind and interesting comments on my essay, also the same to Edwin. Daryl, I wasn't referring to your essay before, having only flipped through it until just now. I think it's very good, and unlike many of these essays, I agree with you about some things.
I don't see the linguistic thing you mention as a problem with block time, it might be a slightly different use of the word 'is', but to me the question of whether or not we have the language to describe it doesn't affect the question of whether block time is true or false.
I don't agree with a universal present moment - I think the concept of simultaneity at a large distance is always questionable. In Newtonian time it has some meaning, in Einstein's version it has less. I think it has even less than that - no meaning beyond the light cone. The reason is that in the universe we have different time rates locally. Relating them clearly doesn't work in different frames, as I mentioned in the essay. They're thought to be relatable in the same frame, but we can't easily check that.
Two clocks a million light years apart and not moving in relation to each other might keep the same time and run in sync. But that doesn't prove simultaneity. It just proves that two local time rates at a distance are in step with each other. To me relating the times of events with meaning is saying that an event is before another one if it can affect it by getting a light signal there in time to influence it. That means within the light cone, at short range.
This would explain why block time is wrong - what led to it depends on long-range simultaneity having enough active meaning to allow an event to be in the past to one observer but in the future to another. Without that, there's no block time, and a lot of the confusion about time goes away. Hope this makes sense...
Best wishes, Jonathan
Daryl and Jonathan,
Thanks for these comments. I had been tending to take the view that time is 'emergent' somewhat in the sense of Julian Barbour's essay in which one can simply 'factor out' time and retain only actions and distances as in his equation 5 (page 8) and his final equation. But that seems to reduce everything in the universe to 'local' action, and I now think that that is just not sensible. In fact, I suspect it essentially demands simultaneity. I have not put the effort into this that either of you have, so I cannot defend this idea as well as either of you, but I'm pretty sure that Daryl's 'Cosmic time' or 'flow of time' is on the money. This semi-infinite universe cannot possible hang together as local actions and local distances with time only a way to keep local score.
Best,
Edwin Eugene Klingman
I have read a conversation with Julian Barbour in which he says motion through time must be caused by some sort of psychological illusion. To me that approach fails in trying to interpret gravitational time dilation, and tends to need a second illusion, interacting with the first one, when interpreting motion time dilation. Two interacting illusions does not make for a good explanation.
It is also denying the problem, and rather like marking the unexplored areas on a map with 'here be illusions' (just as the old map makers marked unexplored areas with 'here be dragons'). Barbour says time is 'nothing dressed up in clothes', like the emperor's new clothes. He's looking at it mathematically, but it's a conceptual problem - initially anyway.
To me the thing that is like the emperor's new clothes is the fact that the illusion approach dismisses the laws of physics, and hence physics itelf and much of our world, as an illusion. Some people have simply pretended not to see the problems with block time, because like the emperor's new clothes, it has been the standard view, to be accepted. Only recently have we been questioning it, because we need to if we are to get to quantum gravity.
Best wishes, Jonathan
Hi Jonathan and Edwin:
The local reconciliation of temporal passage that's supposed to come from denying a metrical relation between events that exist outside one's past light cone is Howard Stein's thing. However, as Craig Callender pointed out in "Shedding Light on Time", by positing that "at least one event in the universe shares its present with another event's present", which he considers to be "the thinnest requirement one could put on becoming", "Stein's 'possibility' theorem [is transformed] into a 'no go' theorem for objective becoming in a Minkowski spacetime". Basically, what this means is that if we can say that *even just one event* exists at some metrical distance outside the light cone of another event---like, for instance, the emission of a photon by the Sun anytime in the past or future eight minutes---Stein's theorem tells us that the common way of describing what is "present" in relativity theory demands a block universe.
I believe in the existence of Physical Reality, despite the fact that I can't know what simultaneity-relation describes the sapcelike surface that exists at any instant as I'm looking at my watch, because every experience I've ever had in my life tells me it's there. Therefore, although we can't scientifically prove or disprove its existence, I think a pure verificationist way of looking at things is the wrong approach. It doesn't lead to any clear understanding of things, but only allows some people the opportunity to wave their hands or shrug their shoulders.
Therefore, given Stein's theorem, and the fact that I believe the Sun exists now---as in, I believe there's a well-defined spacelike metrical distance between the Sun and me now, which has a different length (and, e.g., isn't synchronous) in different coordinate frames---even though I won't see what it looks like now for another eight minutes---I completely agree with Roger Penrose's remark, when demonstrating his own version of the Rietdijk-Putnam argument in The Emperor's New Mind, where he notes that whether one uses observers' light cones or their simultaneous spaces makes no difference at all to the conclusions. ("Some relativity 'purists' might prefer to use the observers' light cones, rather than their simultaneous spaces. However, this makes no difference at all to the conclusions.")
As to denying the relevance of coordinating distant spacelike events with a metric, that is not something that should be done lightly, and I think it just leads down a rabbit hole. All of science is based on the use of a metric---rather than a more general abstract topological space---to describe "distances" between two events, and there's a mountain of scientific evidence to support the fact that, regardless of which coordinate system is used, there is a Lorentzian metrical relation amongst all space-time events. This is the very reason why proper times are measured differently by observers in relative motion, and there is indeed a well-defined metrical relation between them according to relativity theory. Therefore, in relation to my above remarks, I think it's just wrong to argue that this metrical relation should somehow only crystallise when events enter one's past light cone, which is what I can only take your comments to mean.
I've already noted elsewhere on this blog a very relevant observation that Tom Ray made in his essay: 'One recalls that prior to Descartes, all geometry was done with compass and straightedge---all "here" and no "there." Only with the development of analytical geometry were we able to identify relations between numerically distant points and a local coordinate system.' I don't understand why you would *want* to reject this. I agree that it seems to be hard to reconcile it with relativity without concluding that there has to be a block universe; but if you'd rather accept instead that it does work---and I'm certain that it does---I think you'd see that the interpretation of the emergence of relativistic space-time that I've described in my essay really works. The key assumption is that the metrical relation amongst events in space-time has to be Minkowskian, just as it is in the block universe theory.
The linguistic thing is essential to forming a clear understanding of the problem, and how the theory works; and there are in fact important distinctions that need to be made between the meanings of *two* words in order to understand how special relativity can be reconciled with a flowing present. First and foremost is the copular verb: as Steven Savitt argues (see the top paper) it's really through a carelessness with the word "is" that McTaggart was able to show, even from a Newtonian perspective, that the past, present, and future are all equally real. According to presentism (which McTaggart tried to argue against), the past and the future do not "exist" in the same sense as the present, which is all that's supposed to be real. Instead, the past and future exist, according to the presentist viewpoint, *ideally*---i.e., brains, photons, computers, books, etc., existing in the present, carry, or form ideas about what was in the past or will be in the future. This is an extremely important distinction to make, because confusion does arise when one thinks of the real present as somehow flowing through the space-time continuum of events, with any particular event in the future existing as such until it eventually becomes present, then past---even if we're thinking of this sense of "existence" as something abstract---and it's only amidst such confusion that arguments like McTaggart's (or, e.g., those of Huw Price) prevail.
But when one thinks of the present as enduring, with the ideal past emerging in its wake, as an unreal thing about which records exist in the present, and the ideal future as something that's anticipated in the present, there's no reason to think of McTaggart's argument as anything more than a misuse of semantics. As I noted before, it's also this way of thinking of all events throughout (space-)time as existing in some way that can be travelled to, that leads people to time travel paradoxes.
This presentist thinking makes perfect sense from a Newtonian viewpoint. But relativity throws in another monkey wrench, because what is meant by "time" is---at least in one sense---not universal. Two events that occur at the same "time" according to one observer will happen at different "times" for another observer, and clocks will tick at different rates. For such reasons, it's difficult to see how it could be possible to reconcile a view that everything only exists "now" with relativity theory. The way to do this, I've argued, is to first make note of the distinction between space-time, as a four-dimensional *ideality*, and an enduring three-dimensional *reality*---a flowing Heraclitean present, with an absolute time defining an absolute simultaneity-relation, and associated sets of events that *truly* occur simultaneously, in a Newtonian sense. These events obvously then have to be said to occur at the same "time"; however, as described in different relativistic space-time coordinate systems, viz. those used by observers with non-zero absolute motion, the events that occur at the same "time", in the pre-defined sense of simultaneity, will not occur at constant values of the time-coordinate.
Therefore, along with the distinction that I think needs to be made between the "existence" of "ideal" past and future and a "real" present, I think it's also very important to make a distinction between events described as "synchronous" in a given frame occurring at the same "time", and events that truly occur "simultaneously", at the same cosmic "time".
Best,
Daryl
Jonathan:
I typed up my previous comment before seeing this one, so I added it there. I agree with what you're saying here about people pretending not to see the problems associated with a block universe, and chalking things up to illusions. I think this happens because people don't want to change the basic way they think about the theory. The problem with that, I believe, is that the basic way people like to think about the theory---as dynamical---is demonstrably incompatible with what the physical theory has to say about the way they like to think about the theory.
Daryl
Hello Daryl,
in reply to your last two posts, I agree with the latest one, that people don't want to change the way they take SR.
They take SR with spacetime, and yet spacetime may be entirely wrong. It is impossible for anything to move through spacetime, almost by definition. Spacetime distances include imaginary numbers, which people accept in an 'emperor's new clothes' kind of way. But this may have no physical meaning. And, for instance, an event 4 minutes ago on Mars has zero separation in spacetime from right now where you are on Earth. All this may have no physical meaning. And because it leads to block time which requires illusions, spacetime is very questionable.
Spacetime hasn't been tested, and like string theory, it can't be tested. Suppose it's entirely wrong - imagine sweeping it away. We'd be looking for missing pieces of the puzzle in a new landscape. Much of our present conjecture would be irrelevant.
You talk about relating things in space, but the issue is, can we relate things in time? That's what we don't know - we know a lot more about space. We have reason to think we can't relate things in time as we have been doing, because look where it led - it led to block time, which doesn't work with the real world we observe. So time may be different. It may be meaningless to relate points in time at all. We don't know. All out attempts to relate points in time may have failed to work. But within the light cone, light signals give us an alternative method, meaningful, but perhaps just a crude approximation, perhaps also ultimately irrelevant to the way time really is.
Best wishes, Jonathan
Hello Vladimir,
sorry, I didn't find your reply until just now. Thanks. Block time has time as a dimension, and the universe is a frozen 4-dimensional block. This comes out of Minkowski spacetime, and causes so many contradictions that something else may well be needed.
I wouldn't try to remove the Gordian knot of this puzzle without replacing it with something else, as you say. But I've mentioned a few clues about what the starting point might be, and it seems to me that motion through time must be real somehow, so that could be a starting point. This general avenue is comparatively unexplored, as block time has drawn attention away from it. So that's my area of interest... good luck with your work, both artistic and scientific.
best wishes, Jonathan
[deleted]
It seems to me, an admitted lay observer, that the basic problem you demonstrate between block time and time in motion gets down to causality versus conscious. If the universe follows a set of cause and effect and consciousness is not real, then the future can be predicted - aka block time. If consciousness is real (separated from what we understand to be the physical universe), then it seems to me that consciousness, unpredictable as it is, interjects an unknown factor of causation into a otherwise predicatable cause and effect physics equation, and the future is unknown, thus supporting a time in motion theory.
Hello Chris,
thanks for your comment. It seems to me you're talking about the question of whether consciousness affects what happens in quantum theory. As I mention in the essay, I think when you have an unsolved mystery, the first thing to do is to admit it's an unsolved mystery. How we should interpret quantum theory is an unsolved mystery, and like with the mystery of time that I've looked at here, the good thing about facing up to the fact that we don't know the answer, is that you can then start working things out about what kind of answer it might be. That's like looking at the holes in the jigsaw, and allowing for them, and trying to guess what they look like.
With quantum theory, some (such as Eugene Wigner) say that consciousness is involved in the answer at some deep level. Personally, I think not, but it's an open question.
You seem to think that idea and cause and effect can't both be true, and you put cause and effect with block time. But block time removes cause and effect, or threatens to, because without motion through time, and a sequence of events with one event preceding another, it's hard to see how cause and effect can happen.
That's what I've argued, and I think cause and effect is unavoidable - it happens without the intervention of human consciousness. The landscape of this planet was being shaped by natural forces a long time before humans evolved here. And when they did, all of their science was based on cause and effect.
But consciousness is still real, it just doesn't act instead of cause and effect. That's how I see it anyway, hope this makes sense...
Best wishes, Jonathan