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. 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

Hello Yuri,

thanks, will read your essay.

Hello Pentcho,

It's you that must be joking! You're saying that you can rule out ALL possible interpretations other than spacetime? How do you know? What kind of thinker would say that all possible interpretations, including all as yet unknown and unimagined ones, are ruled out? John Norton certainly isn't saying that, he's a reputable scientist.

He's also very careful not to say that spacetime is an unavoidable consequence of SR. He implies it, but he doesn't actually say it. Look at his careful wording. First he says SR gets 'expressed geoetrically' that way. That says nothing much at all. Then he says:

"So if we mean a spacetime that also behaves the way special relativity demands, then we have a Minkowski spacetime".

The word 'demands' might seem to imply that it's an unavoidable consequence. But the initial phrase "If we mean a spacetime that..." gets him out of saying that it's unavoidable - he knows very well that it isn't, and there's no way he's going to say that. Because according to what he says, if we mean a particular spacetime that suits SR, then we mean Minkowski spacetime. But of course, if we don't mean a spacetime at all, then we can have another interpretation for SR.

I should say, as I did in the essay, that it's impossible to disconnect block time from spacetime. The Rietdijk-Putnam argument is a rigourous proof that one leads to the other. But it's very possible to disconnect SR from spacetime, although they might not tell you that.

Best wishes, Jonathan

Thanks, and for your positive reply there. Look forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes, Jonathan

Hello Gurcharn,

thank you for your kind comments on my essay, I'm glad you appreciated it.

To me, the arguments about relativity are off the point unless they mention existing experimental results. We all know the concepts are sometimes counter-intuitive, that means nothing. Things often 'confound common sense' and still turn out to be true. The stale old debate about how to take SR is a dead argument to me, it has been largely won by SR supporters, who have a lot of experimental results to back up their position. This page has links to several hundred experiments, and I don't discuss anti-SR stuff unless people have gone through them:

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

I think much of the confusion arises because the interpretation is wrong. But the actual theory is unavoidably right. How you frame it doesn't necessarily matter, people have been going round in circles with that for most of a century. I'd say look at the experimental results, and try to come up with an interpretation that fits them. But don't criticise it - the experiments show that something like that is true, whether you believe it or not. But we have absolutely no idea what SR is describing. It's describing something, we just don't know what.

Best of luck to you... Jonathan

Hello Yuri,

thanks. These papers suggest that there may be influences on the present from the future, but how can one suggest something like that without first putting forward a conceptual picture of time? Time does certain things, we know exactly what it does, but not why. To me something physical is clearly going on, and I think a reliable conceptual picture is needed before anything else - and it must be one that fits the clues well.

Our present interpretation of what we know about time has major problems (see my conversation from today and yesterday with George Ellis on his essay page, who thinks the same, and has argued very strongly that standard block time is wrong). But the spacetime interpretation tends to deflect people from investigating these questions, because what we observe then looks like something unassailable to do with the dimensions, and wrapped up in the nature of the time dimension somehow.

But without a reliable conceptual picture of what the equations are describing, why try to guess what time might or might not do? People who look only at the mathematics might do that, some tend to work as if they have the whole picture in front of them already.

Anyway, that's my take on it. In the second paper you refer to, they suggest drawing a card and using it to decide how to operate the LHC, and they say this might make it shut down totally. I'm not objecting to this on the grounds that it's a form of gambling, but the LHC was very expensive, and if they think that will happen, they shouldn't risk damaging it. There has to be a cheaper version of this experiment.

Best wishes,

Jonathan

Hello George,

Thank you for your kind comments on my essay. My complements again for arguing very strongly for a flow of time in your arXiv paper earlier this year. The Schrödinger type thought experiment you devised comes near to showing that the future has to be unfixed, and that's a real achievement.

Best wishes, Jonathan

[To anyone interested, the discussion has been on George's page, from 9th September, and some of the points in and surrounding my essay get summed up there.]