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Tom,

The issue isn't whether Relativity is mathematically accurate, but whether spacetime is a valid physical reason. Spacetime is to Relativity what giant cosmic gear wheels were to epicycles; A physical explanation drawn out of mathematical patterns. Is there something we are missing. I'll post a further response on the cosmology thread Zeeya started recently, later in the day.

As for Albrecht's discovery and any other equations leading to multiworld scenarios, in most other disciplines, there would be a strong tendency to go back and pull apart the math, when the answers start going haywire.

"Spacetime is to Relativity what giant cosmic gear wheels were to epicycles; A physical explanation drawn out of mathematical patterns."

Huh? It's actually a mathematical pattern drawn from physical explanations. Your conclusion (and confusion) comes from not understanding the mathematical structure or its origin.

Tom

I should proofread better. When I said "Is Albrecht's model compatible with the conventional big bang cosmology of general relativity? We already know that's compatible with the many worlds hypothesis ..." I meant to say:

"We already know that it (Albrecht's hypothesis) is compatible with the many worlds hypothesis."

Tom

John,

So to what extent does Julian Barbour agree with your notions?

Tom

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Tom,

I can't comment on Albrecht's hypothesis since I don't know it. But I can comment on what I mean by 'metaphysical': "beyond the physical". Thus, 'metaphysics' is knowledge of "what is" beyond our senses.

Why is this relevant to your love/hate relation with "The End of Science"? Because such behavior by physicists and intolerance to diverse views (Joy Christian's for example) is very characteristic of "religious wars". And all religions are metaphysical as they all seek to know "what is" the Universe.

Because such knowledge is fundamentally based on "belief", the truth of such knowledge can only be 'true' if everyone believes in that truth. Thus we get personal attacks, intimidation and persecution of those that think differently. We've seen this movie before!

Read my essay, The Metaphysics of Physics., for more of my thinking on this.

Constantinos

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Tom,

The point is that spacetime is conjecture..

I doubt Barbour has any opinions on my views. Any communications I've had with him have concerned his views, of which I see as making the same basic mistake as most other models: By treating time as a measure of sequence, it only emphasizes the static sequence over the underlying dynamic process.

Que horror, disbelief, etc.

doug, Edwin, Paul,

I agree with an accident. Set up some frames of balls and try 1,000bn times to get them to end up at the same space time points. My £10m says you won't do it!

doug. Pass me some CIG. I'm tearing it all out! I think we should distinguish between DEther and distance. (I've just now re-christened ether so it's really the Dark Energy that all current theory relies on). It can now have a local kinetic identity just like matter (so we can now have a QV, Higgs field etc). The problem SR had with it is removed along with the 'absolute' frame AE assumed it needed. Matter and DEther can then move. It can then thin out, but em fluctuations propagate at c locally within it, modulated by the shocks at the 'domain limits'. No violations at all then. Is there anything about that which you find scientifically incorrect? It seems Tom doesn't dare try to handle it as he's seen it's dynamite and may be in denial. I think it's just overindoctrination as I don't have Tom down as an acid tripper! (2 new words in a day!!)

Edwin, Always a lovely breath of fresh air, and some logical sense. Thank you.

Paul, Closing in but no choccies yet. Far simpler ending. Read page 42 2nd para of the current Physics Today Edwin refers to and see if you can think and visualise dynamically. It shows how observer frame matters. It's all about evolution of interaction over non zero time and with media motion.

Best wishes

Peter

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Another way of looking at this is to say that until we understand how time works, we'll potentially get nonsense out of any attempt to draw a conclusion from a train of thought like the one Albrecht has pursued. Time is QM is different from time in GR, and we don't know why, or why they're in disagreement in places. We also don't know why we seem to observe a flow of time. Put those together, and it's a lot.

So although Albrecht may have got some real conclusions out of his reasoning, he might also have got nonsense - for some reason that we don't yet understand. We don't know enough to know. The mistake people commonly make is to assume that the framework we have is solid enough to use in this kind of way - they have been told that it is, and underneath they believe it.

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    Paul,

    So essentially he places light at the center and molds a geometric frame around it, a bit like epicycles places the earth at the center and builds a geometric frame around it? His absolute frame isn't spacetime, but light. So the idea of blocktime as "physically real" overlooks this basis?

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    Anonymousse,

    What if we simply do away with time as fundamental and let it emerge as effect, similar to temperature. Then it wouldn't be a vector along which the present moves from past to future, but the changing configuration of what is, that turns future into past. So in QM, it isn't moving along that single external timeline from a determined past into a probabilistic future, but is the occurrence of events collapsing probabilities into actualities. With relativity, it is nothing more than frequency and quite logical that each clock is recording its own rate of change. There is no vector external to the present, because duration is not external to the present. It is the state of the present between the occurrence of events.

    We experience it as a sequence of events, but then we still see the sun as rising in the east, moving across the sky and setting in the west.

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    Hi John,

    What if we simply do away with time as fundamental and not let it emerge? What if we have motion in our timeless Universe? What if our clocks only measure durations elapsing?

    Kostas,

    " ... 'metaphysics' is knowledge of 'what is' beyond our senses."

    I suspected that's what you meant. It isn't what I mean, however, nor what science and non-theist philosophy means. There may exist things one cannot sense; short of mystic revelation, though, one cannot have knowledge of them.

    Though Aristotle's metaphysics, from which the idea originates, is concerned with 'incorporeal being' that can't be sensed yet exists -- whatever actual knowledge we have of the world is sensuous.

    What philosophers call "metaphysical realism" OTOH, allows objective existence of unmeasured (though not unmeasurable) objects.

    I find Albrecht's program objective and consistent with metaphysical realism.

    Tom

    "The point is that spacetime is conjecture."

    Only one who doesn't know the fundamentals of relativity could make such a statement. It puts you in the company of Pentcho Valev and others who simply deny the science.

    John, I found it startling that you invoked Julian Barbour to support your relativity denial, since his program is the most fundamental relativity research possible.

    Tom

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    Jim,

    That's basically what clocks do, but the arrow of time emerges from the non-regularity of action. Otherwise there would be no arrow of time, just cyclical metronomes.

    As effect, it's like temperature, color, etc. Given we are a much higher order effect, if they didn't emerge, neither would we. In fact knowledge, being largely based on narrative and cause and effect logic, is emergent from the effect of time. That's one reason why it seems more fundamental than temperature, though the ambient energy of thermodynamics is conceptually more primal than the change of time.

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    Tom,

    I have no problem with relativity as math, I just don't think the "fabric of spacetime" is "physically real."

    After all these years of debating this, is it really that hard to see I distinguish between the two? To go back to one of our much earlier discussions, the math of epicycles was quite accurate for its day and could be made as accurate as any model out there, for the very real reason that we are the center of our view of the universe. Much as driving, from one's perspective, it is the road moving. The sun still appears to move across the sky and it can thus be mathematically modeled that way. That doesn't mean Apollo's chariot, or cosmic gear wheels are real, just because the math works. Nor is there a real four dimensional spacetime, with all the wormholes, blocktime, multitudes of present moments, etc. that this theory allows. Change is fundamental to physics. It is not an illusion. The events are ephemeral. They don't exist in some eternal blocktime. Ockham's razor weighs strongly against it. It is a belief system and the fact many otherwise smart people believe in it, doesn't make it real.

    Who knows though. Maybe I'll fall in a wormhole one day and find it really is Wonderland, but I don't really want to go there. I like the little bit of sanity I've managed to carve out of this crazy world.

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    Tom,

    "'metaphysics' is knowledge of 'what is' beyond our senses"

    This describes "atoms" as well as "spirits". And that's the problem with 'metaphysics'. Since one man's "atoms" is another man's "spirits". To a mystic, modern physics is as nonsense as mysticism is to a physicist. This is the reason (i.e. the 'metaphysical nature of physics') why so much bitter opposition, intolerance and down right persecution exists among physicists; while lacking among mathematicians. Mathematicians do not claim any knowledge of what is the Universe. Any claim of such knowledge I say is metaphysical. And ALL metaphysical claims ultimately fail.

    You write, "There may exist things one cannot sense". What we cannot sense is not the issue for me. Rather, our claim such nonsensical knowledge is sensible I find flawed. I can restate this as follows. There is nothing real about any theory! It's all an elaborate 'made-up story'. Where physicists fail, imho, is in believing their theories are real.

    From my brief reading of this article on Albrecht, I agree there are no fundamental physical laws that can describe the Universe. To believe there are is no less absurd than believing you can truly know another human being. Such laws as we understand may indeed depend on our sense of time. As 'time' is what gives 'existence' to everything that is for us.

    In my essay, The Metaphysics of Physics., I argue we can end the metaphysical in physics if Basic Laws are mathematical truisms we use in our analysis of our measurements. Planck's Law, for example, I show to be just such mathematical truism and not a physical law per se.

    Constantinos

    John,

    I'm with Jim George. We've greatly overcomplicated the simple concept we call 'time'.

    Identical clocks, of any type, only tick at different rates if they are moving different physical conditions.

    The REAL PHYSICAL truth is only then motion. The only other realisation needed to resolve every other mystery is then that the emissions representing 'DURATIONS' have physical representations, and are ALSO liable to changed due to differing physical conditions.

    So an emitted one second light pulse will be found different when measured against the ticks of an identical clock in motion relatively. Yes/No?

    This is because the 'wave'(length) is varied by the interaction, in all cases.

    Please explain to me what mysterious phenonomena is there in the universe that this simplified understanding does NOT fully explain? Think it through and let me know. I predict you'll find there are none.

    Peter

      "Ockham's razor weighs strongly against (spacetime)."

      Absolute nonsense, John. Please, learn how the extension and unification of physical theories has actually evolved.

      Tom

      Edwin,

      The anisotropic CMB pattern prediction and derivation is included in this 2010 paper, both specific and implicit, here;

      Helical CMBR Asymmetry, Pre-Big Bang State, Dark Matter and the Axis of Evil.

      If the Milky Way is positioned say half way up the left hand outflow arm and slightly off centre, with a precession based hellicity similar to Centaurus A, the complex asymmetric flow pattern (characterised as heat in the graph) is perfectly reproduced. I can think of no other possible way it could ever arise. If you can do let me know. I await your numbers.

      The good part is that when we get it all wrong it seems we may get more go's. Luckily for us!

      Very best wishes

      Peter