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

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

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

PS. You seem to think the question of whether or not the future exists depends on whether it is predictable. But it isn't about that (and even a predictable future doesn't necessarily have to exist yet).

It's about whether the future actually exists already for other reasons. In block time, it exists already because all of time is already laid out, like a dimension. I've tried to show by reasoning that this can't be the case.

Hello Chris,

you have it right where you say that in relativity speed affects the passage of time. Where you mention time travel, I'd say don't think about that for now, it's confusing everywhere you find it, from physics to hollywood. And we don't know if going back in time is possible. Also leave many possibilites to one side, and many universes, which are also confusing ways of looking at things, and they're not backed up by experiment.

What we do know, from experiments, is that motion through time has its rate affected by objects moving through space, as you say. The trouble is, the same theory that tells us that, in the way we interpret it at present, also produces a picture of the universe frozen up, called block time, with all of time and history already laid out like a dimension. And that picture seems to tell us that this motion through time (that varies its speed) can't be real.

But we observe this apprent motion every day, or seem to. There's a sequence to events somehow. No-one has found a good explanation for this apparent motion through time, but the standard view, in as far as there is one, is that it doesn't exist, and that it must be some kind of illusion. But physicsts don't normally look closely at the possibility that it's an illusion (it seems to go outside our field), so instead that idea often gets swept under the carpet. In my essay, I've looked at this idea of an illusion, and found that it doesn't work easily at all.

I've argued that only one of the two pictures of time we know of can be real, the frozen universe, and the moving through time universe. Thinking about possible future events, one of these pictures means we're contributing to shaping what happens, as we seem to be. That's the one with motion through time. In the frozen universe of block time, we're not, because all events in history are already set in place, and they already exist.

But there's a lot of evidence for cause and effect, and motion through time. The block time picture goes against an enormous amount of evidence and obsevation, and if only one of the two pictures of time can be true, as I've tried to show, then block time would remove the laws of physics, and really the foundations of science. That's a high price to pay, just to have our present interpretation of relativity exactly right. I've argued that it might be slightly wrong, and that this would remove the problem. It would also mean that we can be affecting events, as we seem to be.

Best wishes, Jonathan

Hello again Pentcho,

it can be a matter of taste what constitutes the core of a theory, but it is comparatively clear what has been confirmed by experiment. In SR a key part of the core is the time dilation equation, from the Lorentz-Einstein transformations. This has been confirmed many times, a good example being the experiment with muons at CERN in 1976, in which travelling near to c led to the fixed lifetimes of the muons being multiplied by around 29.3.

This looks like time itself being affected, because the lifetime of the muon in its restframe had been measured accurately before then. And as Einstein arrived at time dilation from a fixed speed of light (which was also implied in Maxwell's equations), this looks very much like confirmation for that whole part of SR. There are many other experiments, see

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/experiments.html

and for tests of light speed from moving sources

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/experiments.html#moving-source_tests

I always hope people will admit the clues we have and get on with solving the puzzle, instead of trying to deny them, get around them, or just to ignore them. Even clues that look very weird can turn out not be quite so weird once the puzzle is solved, as past experience has shown.

The constant speed of light in relation to motion time dilation seems definite to me, but in relation to gravity it's not so certain. Einstein suggested a variable speed of light in a gravity field well after SR, in 1911, during a transitional phase when he was trying to splice SR with gravity. And others have done the same - experimental results in relation to a constant speed of light within a gravity field are more ambiguous.

But returning to what you mentioned in your post, it's very clear that spacetime hasn't been confirmed, but that the core, or some of the core, of SR has. The spacetime interpretation of SR is untestable, incomplete at best, and a cul-de-sac that has caused a century of confusion at worst.

Best wishes, Jonathan

This page has links to several hundred experiments that have confirmed the core of special relativity:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/experiments.html

I'm not going to discuss them all with you for many reasons, including some that have exclamation marks. One reason is that I don't know if even that would convince you of what we know clearly from experiment. Some people don't want the clues, they don't want to know what's out there. Instead they want to fit some other idea to the world at any cost.

Being right doesn't make Einstein divine, a lot of people are right about a lot of things. And a lot of people are wrong about a lot of things, and they frequently include people who deny SR. As you can see from my essay, I'm not one to follow blindly - I've questioned many things relating to SR, including Minkowski's work, which Einstein took onboard, and believed. He's not a sacred cow to me, and I think he was wrong about some things. But look at that page with the experiments, you look through them. It just is like that - we don't know why, but it is.

Best wishes, Jonathan

Hello. Not sure if it's Chris or someone else, welcome anyway.

There are so many things you haven't understood in your post that it's hard to know where to start. You seem not to understand the physics at all, which would fit with... your having studied history, not physics. So let's talk about history first, at least you'll understand me. I agree that a linear view of history is sometimes a very bad idea. It implies a progression, and that can involve a bias towards various economic views of the world that may not be good for people psychologically. (Some economic systems, for instance, require growth constantly, and that can be unsustainable, which can eventually be bad for the planet and people in a number of ways.) And in a more general way, change for its own sake is not always good.

Then there's what I was saying about physics, which is nothing to do with that, or anything you mention in your post. Every single bit you mention, more or less without exception, you have misunderstood, so it might be better if we just leave it, but I'll try a little.

When I say 'the nature of time', I'm not talking about cultural ideas. I'm talking about the actual physics of time. I'm going to talk about what happens in one room, because otherwise you might start relating it to human history and culture again. If I move my hand past my face at 6 km per hour (about walking speed), I'm seeing it in slightly slow motion. it has been slowed down by a factor very close to 1, 0.9999999999999999845, so very slightly. This isn't noticeable, but we measure it accurately in laboratories.

Nobody knows why - we're trying to find out. We have a lot of clues, and the essay you read is about looking at them, and trying to work out what's going on. One of them is that the present interpretation of special relativity suggests motion through time doesn't exist. But no-one has been able to explain why we still seem to observe a sequence of events every day. In the one room I'm talking about (so you won't start relating this to history again), events appear to happen in an order - one event follows another. This allows cause and effct to happen, and the person in the room seems to be able to affect events. If she puts the kettle on, she can make a cup of coffee, and so on. No-one knows why we appear to experience a flow of time, or if you like, a sequence of events. But the standard view, in as far as there is one, is that it is an illusion. But no-one can explain how such an illusion might work.

Where I say time is a conceptual problem, I mean within the physics. I mean that it's not a mathematical problem initially, it's on the conceptual side - that is, it's a problem with the interpretation, ie. the conceptual picture we use, that is, Minkowski spacetime.

When I say "It's hard to argue that the future already exists at larger scales, but not at smaller scales", I'm talking about a specific problem in physics that you haven't understood, about the difficulty we have relating what happens at a small scale and what happens at a large scale. Each is described by a different theory, and we have trouble making ends meet.

And it goes on, there were several other points you hadn't understood.

Looking at this sentence "The "block time" you described, that there is no future, may or may not be new to modern science, but has roots in many old philosophies, sciences, beliefs, such as Taoism.", this has more than one error in it. Block time says the future already exists, not that there is no future. You can't start relating it to other ideas until you understand it, and even then it's not backed up by experiment, so it's not a good idea to do that. And it doesn't 'have roots' in those ideas. If you must grab things and loosely relate them to other ideas (which you do quite a few times in your post), then at least do that with solid physics that has been confirmed by experiment - there's plenty to choose from.

I hope this helps to make a little sense of it. Physics isn't a loose discipline where you can loosely throw one idea at another and say they go together. If you're interested, I suggest you start looking at physics from the beginning - this isn't the right place to start. Or read more about the cultural side of time, which has plenty of literature about it, and which seems to be your area of interest.

Best wishes, Jonathan

Hello Pentcho,

In most areas of science people are simply trying to find out the truth. But there are a few areas where sadly people have a bias about what they hope to find.

In those areas, to put it mildly, you can't believe all you read on the internet. Relativity is one of them. In areas such as that there are people trying to show the standard view to be wrong, for reasons other than scientific ones. Yes, in the case of relativity there's bias in both directions, so you have to check everything carefully, but the people trying to deny SR are sometimes cleverly distorting the facts.

I think you have been taken in by these websites you read, and they can't be trusted. Whether or not Eddington got a measurement wrong, we know the restframe lifetime of the muon. Modern measurements are where you should look, and there was one made at NIST in 2010, in which they measured the time dilation of a moving object, at a speed of only around 10 m/sec. There have been other experiments recently which confirm SR very accurately, and our conversation is going to be unscientific if you don't look at them. Try this one:

Chou, C. W. et al, Optical clocks and Relativity, Science 24 Sept 2010: Vol. 329 no. 5999 pp. 1630-1633

In fact, I suspect it might not really be a discussion of physics even if you do look at the evidence. But I'd like to warn you about these websites you read, and help you to be more aware of the pitfalls in the landscape. Physics is very hard even if you get all the clues in front of you. If you don't, it's impossible. So you must work hard to get at the real clues, check everything you can, then you can try to solve these puzzles with some chance of success.

The only other thing to say is that as you know, I believe SR to be right but the spacetime interpretation to be wrong. This can explain some of the confusion about SR, but not all of it. Some people are against the physics establishment because of what it represents to them, rather than for better reasons.

Good luck, Jonathan

Yes, there are many who take both to be right, and quite a few who take both to be wrong. But if in fact neither of these approaches is accurate, and instead the theory is right but the accompanying picture is wrong, then an interesting new landscape appears, which is comparatively unexplored. It may hold answers that haven't yet been found. Thanks for the discussion,

best wishes, Jonathan

Of course Minkowski spacetime is not a deductive consequence of any part of SR. A good relativist would never claim that it is, but people often imply it. It's just that spacetime looks like it might well be true, and if you make time a dimension as similar to the other dimensions as possible (and it still isn't very similar), then you get what looks like a few things clicking into place. And what comes out works very well mathematically, and allowed us to simplify many theories.

But there are probably humdreds of other possible interpretations of SR out there, well - ones that look possible initially. But when you pursue them, you might find contradictions come out around sixty years later, as we did with spacetime.

As I said, physics is full of equivalence. Often more than one conceptual picture can be described by the same mathematics. The mathematics of SR is like Pythagoras' theorem - three speeds are in the same relationship as the three sides of a right angle triangle. No-one knows why.

best wishes, Jonathan