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

Dear Jonathan,

I have read your essay and I appreciate your novel viewpoint. Even though our views regarding SR may not fully coincide, I agree on the main thrust of your argument regarding time. All authors in this contest have presented their viewpoints in different styles. In the grand maze of the unknown it is important to consider all possible alternatives and different viewpoints for building a consolidated common approach. I wish you good luck in the contest.

Recently, I have noticed some wild variations in community rated list of contest essays. There is a possibility of existence of a biased group or cartel (e.g. Academia or Relativists group) which promotes the essays of that group by rating them all 'High' and jointly demotes some other essays by rating them all 'Low'. As you know, we are not selecting the 'winners' of the contest through our ratings. Our community ratings will be used for selecting top 35 essays as 'Finalists' for further evaluation by a select panel of experts. Therefore, any biased group should not be permitted to corner all top 'Finalists' positions for their select group.

In order to ensure fair play in this selection, we should select (as per laid down criteria), as our individual choice, about 50 essays for entry in the finalists list and RATE them 'High'. Next we should select bottom 50 essays and rate them 'Low'. Remaining essays may be rated as usual. If most of the participants rate most of the essays this way then the negative influence of any bias group can certainly be mitigated.

I have read many but rated very few essays so far and intend to do a fast job now onwards by covering at least 10 essays every day.

You are requested to read and rate my essay titled,"Wrong Assumptions of Relativity Hindering Fundamental Research in Physical Space". Kindly do let me know if you don't get convinced about the invalidity of the founding assumptions of Relativity or regarding the efficacy of the proposed simple experiments for detection of absolute motion.

Finally I wish to see your excellent essay reach the list of finalists.

Best Regards

G S Sandhu

Whether the Future Already Exists....

I think generation #2,generation #3 are the effect of Influence from Future, just hints from the Future.

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9607375

http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1919

Hi Jonathan

I agree with what you are trying to do. As stated on my thread, I don't believe simultaneity is of importance; what does matter is that block spacetime has a future boundary that keeps moving so that the spacetime block grows. It's a way of putting the two times you mention together.

Best wishes

George Ellis

George:

You're Sleepwalking. You're clinging to an operational definition of simultaneity that's inconsistent with your model, and claiming that simultaneity doesn't matter, and the corresponding argument from special relativity---that the relativity of simultaneity implies a Block Universe---doesn't matter, while promoting a theory that's inconsistent with the definition of simultaneity that you're using. In an EBU, events that occur at the evloving *present boundary*, the surface S(tau), at the same value of tau, can only be defined as *truly* occurring simultaneously, despite the fact that those events don't happen at the same "time" (i.e., synchronously) in the coordinate system carried by an observer who moves through the evolving surface S(tau). An EBU defines an absolute simultaneity-relation amongst the events that occur at the evolving present boundary, which stands in opposition to the operational definition of simultaneity. Therefore, you can't define "simultaneity" operationally *and* claim that simultaneity just doesn't matter in the EBU scenario, because an EBU demands a different definition of simultaneity than the one you're saying doesn't matter. For logical consistency, the EBU's implicit definition of simultaneity needs to be reconciled with relativity, and particularly the relativity of synchronicity.

On your site, you wrote to Jonathan that "Block time is fine if it has a future boundary that keeps changing - that resolves the puzzles you point out in your essay." You also wrote that "What matters is... what happens in terms of interactions between events on different worldlines, which are mediated by timelike and null curves. Spacelike surfaces and instantaneity do not enter into it." What is it---an evolving spacelike boundary S(tau) or not? You can't just have your cake and eat it, too.

Jonathan:

You keep saying that you're only interested in arguments that can be supported by experimental evidence. In your response to Gucharn Sandhu above, you wrote that "To me, the arguments about relativity are off the point unless they mention existing experimental results." You keep saying this, but you refuse to consider my argument which claims empirical support for rejecting the relativity of simultaneity (which leads to spacetime, or a block universe) in place of absolute simultaneity. I've said here repeatedly that, despite common insistence since Newton's time that absolute space and time can't be observed, we do actually observe an absolute state of rest cosmologically, at least as long as the expansion scenario is right. At the very least, we can say that cosmological observations are *far more* consistent with an absolute background rest-frame, and corresponding absolute space and time, than they are with an Einsteinian picture where there is no true simultaneity and time is entirely observer-dependent. But that's just the nature of science: we can never prove the principle; we only determine which principles are the most consistent with the evidence. Just because we can't detect absolute space and time through local experiments, where we only measure relative durations and lengths, does not mean we should deny the former, which *is* evident through the cosmological data that have slowly accumulated over the past ninety years. I've described in detail why this is so in a response I left Peter Jackson on my site on Aug. 30, 2012 @ 23:29.

I'd just like it if you'd stop presuming (e.g., as per your last post to me on Edwin Eugene Klingman's site) that I've not sought empirical support for my argument, and if you do disagree with me that the cosmological data constitute experimental evidence in favour of a cosmic rest-frame, then state why that's so instead.

Hi Jonathan,

Thanks very much for the response. I completely agree with you about SR, and not disregarding it just because some aspects are counter-intuitive. I also think it's the correct description of physical phenomena in its domain of relevance, and only wish to reconcile a different interpretation with the mathematical theory, which I see as being more consistent with all the experimental evidence. Thanks for your reassurance that you see my argument as taking experimental evidence into account. I agree with you that the standard interpretation is incorrect, while the physical description may well be right.

I think you've hit on an important point in your comment to George on Sep. 10, 2012 @ 20:33, where you wrote that "Because motion through time is not an illusion (in your view and mine), it needs a physical mechanism to explain it. And that mechanism should fit the clues well - it should show why motion through time is slowed down in certain situations, and why the equations that describe how it is slowed down apply." I've got a different idea about how this explanation can be realistically achieved than you, which I didn't discuss in my essay. I'll maybe try to show it to you sometime. Although our ideas about how to reconcile a flow of time with the theory are different, as we've previously discussed, I do appreciate your opinion.

Regards, and best wishes, Daryl

"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,"

Jonathan, Daryl,

Sometimes the best mysteries are when the answer is hiding in plain sight. It's not that the present "moves" from past to future, but that what exists changes, creating current configurations out of constant interaction. Not the earth traveling a fourth narrative dimension from yesterday to tomorrow, but tomorrow becoming yesterday because the earth rotates. The present is simply what physically exists and its action. We think of it as a dimensionless point between past and future, but 1) There is no such thing as a dimensionless point. Anything multiplied by zero is zero. It is a mathematical convenience. A dimensionless point is as real as a dimensionless apple. 2) Also if you were to truly freeze time, then the very action causing it would cease to exist. It wouldn't be a snapshot of reality, but a state of absolute zero. It's just that light is very fast and we need to sense it in very brief frames in order to see clearly.

Duration isn't a timeline external to the present, but what is present between measured events.

Clock rates vary because levels of activity vary in different environments. Gravity and velocity slow and warp atomic activity and structure, which explains both time dilation and length contraction. This argues for space as an inertial state as evidenced by centrifugal force, which is the effect of inertia on spin. That is another topic though.

A faster clock isn't traveling into the future more quickly, but into the past, since it is aging faster.

We are not building up an immutable past, as George Ellis and Joy Christian have argued, because with every passing moment, prior events recede ever further into the past, altering any conscious or physical record of them. Remember reality is relativistic! There is no objective perspective, so the past is as much a construct of subjective perspective as any currently observed event! So adding events to the past doesn't push the present into the future. It pushes prior events further into the past!

This argument against simultaneity because perception is relative is nonsense. One might as well argue that since the people of Kansas City learned of Lincoln's death before the people of San Francisco, he must have died earlier from the perspective of KC. All observations are in the future of the event.

That damn cat is not both dead and alive, because it is the collapse of future probabilities which yields current actualities. It is only due to QM using an external timeline that a determined past is projected onto a probabilistic future. While the laws governing any outcome might well be exact(or they wouldn't be laws), the total input into any event cannot be known prior to the event, because the lightcone of input is only completed by the event.

As you read these words, you progress from prior to succeeding words. Much as the hands of a clock move from one mark to the next. That linear narrative is the basis of our intellect. From the dawn of life and mobile organisms, we move along a singular path, encountering sequences of events. Does that mean sequence is fundamental, or only fundamental to perception? Does yesterday cause today? Or is that as sensible as saying one rung on a ladder causes the next? Now my typing on these keys does cause letters to appear on the screen, because there is a definitive transfer of energy from the action to the consequence. Just as it is the energy of the sun shining on a rotating planet which causes the sequence of events called "days." The future is not where the information points, which is only referential to the point of perception, but where the energy goes.

We create knowledge inductively, future becoming past, but use it deductively, projecting the past onto the future.

Jonathan,

I'm sorry if I missed your rebuttal. Your last comment in the previous discussion thread was;

"Author Jonathan Kerr replied on Aug. 7, 2012 @ 12:57 GMT

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"

Since you didn't specify whether the observers were moving toward, or away from each other, only that they were passing, I assumed you meant toward each other.

Apparently I caused some offense and will not bother you further.

Further note; Yes, you did say "slowed down," so I should have inferred redshift.

Jonathan,

I wasn't trying to give offense and if I may seem presumptuous, it is because I do see it as an important point. Having been flipping through the conversations, it seemed as though your discussion with Daryl was circling around this point and I thought I'd offer it up again, since you hadn't seemed to have digested it the first time. Your response though, to take a minor feature of the larger argument, assert it's wrong without specifying why, than dismiss the entire argument on that basis, is the usual reaction I get from those who think there are no fundamental issues to discuss and only another particle, field, dimension, epicycle, string, membrane, energy, etc. is all that is required. Since you see no reason to enlighten me further and I obviously don't impress you, further conversation would seem fruitless.

I would add though, that the doppler effect is one of those issues physicists like to use, then deny the implications. Specifically, if cosmic redshift is due to recession of the sources, it is doppler effect, but than to say that since we appear to be at the center of this expansion, it must be an expansion of space, not an expansion in space doesn't make sense, because a constant speed of light is still used.

If two galaxies are x lightyears apart and we say that after y billion years, they will be 2x lightyears apart, that uses the speed of light as a stable measure of space. How can there be a stable measure of space, if space is expanding? The train moving away down the track doesn't stretch the track, but the train moves along that stable distance. The same applies to galaxies. If they are moving away in stable units of distance, how can it be said that space is expanding? Of course, when I raise this point, the usual reaction is similar to your response; I'm too naive to understand and the enlightened minds cannot be bothered to cure my stupidity.

That's why I try not to bother the believers and only discuss such issues with skeptics.

Regards,

john

Jonathan,

The story of the twins is analogy. Everything is built up from quantum processes, from chemistry, to biology, to mechanical clocks, so if the quantum rate runs faster, as on gps satellites, then everything emerging from these processes runs faster as well, including metabolism, thus one twin ages faster.

I'm just not sure how my use of a common analogy disproves the observation that tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates.