Good Paper. Starts off slow, repeats the same stuff about Wheeler found in other essays in this contest. Then goes on to discuss our language issues with the notion of time, and makes some rather interesting points.

I wholeheartedly agree that Minkowski spacetime does not exist. However, the relationship between space and time does exist down the single direction of propagation of quantum particles, not in some empty manifold we call Minkowski space. "Elements of reality" are therefore bounded by the emitter and absorber atoms. This is where an "interval" in time can be considered. In section 3, your claim that "no interval of time exists..." needs a reference.

I am not convinced by the world-line argument. This is just another attempt to regenerate a form of simultaneity surfaces. World-lines do not exist unless something travels along it. I do not find the argument for block universe compelling, even if it is a dynamically warping and molding thing.

The section on Minkowski space was a little jumbled and confusing.

I enjoyed the description "relativity of synchronicity." Very nice.

This is a strong entry and I gave it a good rating. The author would have done better with a shorter introduction and a focus (in two sections) on the Newtonian and Einsteinian inconsistencies in the relativity of synchronicity, then in the concluding section added the claims of novelty that he wished to make.

All in all, a worthy paper I will look forward to reading other works from this Author.

Daryl,

Good luck on the trip. Not a problem getting back to this. Patience is a necessity. Not that I always have any, but I'm good at keeping myself distracted.

Hello Daryl

Richard Feynman in his Nobel Acceptance Speech (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1965/feynman-lecture.html)

said: "It always seems odd to me that the fundamental laws of physics, when discovered, can appear in so many different forms that are not apparently identical at first, but with a little mathematical fiddling you can show the relationship. And example of this is the Schrodinger equation and the Heisenberg formulation of quantum mechanics. I don't know why that is - it remains a mystery, but it was something I learned from experience. There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn't look at all like the way you said it before. I don't know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature."

I too believe in the simplicity of nature, and I am glad that Richard Feynman, a Nobel-winning famous physicist, also believe in the same thing I do, but I had come to my belief long before I knew about that particular statement.

The belief that "Nature is simple" is however being expressed differently in my essay "Analogical Engine" linked to http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1865 .

Specifically though, I said "Planck constant is the Mother of All Dualities" and I put it schematically as: wave-particle ~ quantum-classical ~ gene-protein ~ analogy- reasoning ~ linear-nonlinear ~ connected-notconnected ~ computable-notcomputable ~ mind-body ~ Bit-It ~ variation-selection ~ freedom-determinism ... and so on.

Taken two at a time, it can be read as "what quantum is to classical" is similar to (~) "what wave is to particle." You can choose any two from among the multitudes that can be found in our discourses.

I could have put Schrodinger wave ontology-Heisenberg particle ontology duality in the list had it comes to my mind!

Since "Nature is Analogical", we are free to probe nature in so many different ways. And you have touched some corners of it.

Good Luck,

Than Tin

Hi Daryl,

Very nice. I agree entirely that no time, no existence! And if you want to talk of existence better you analyse space separately from time instead of using space-time. Exist appears over 80 times in your essay. I wonder what you will say if existence/non-existence can be implemented as a binary choice since you have properly defined what existence means. In a way my essay tries to make something out of this Bit.

All the best in the contest. To be well rated. Almost flawless.

Akinbo

    6 days later

    Hi Daryl,

    Your essay is an interesting read.

    I have one question, though. On page 9 you write at the end: "the former interpretation ... ultimately disproves itself by contradiction". From the context I understand that by "the former interpretation" you mean Einstein's interpretation of relativity. Correct me if I'm wrong. But if so, could you elaborate on that? How do you derive a contradiction from Einstein's relativity? Do you mean logical contradiction, or do you mean that it yields a contradiction with an assumed meaning of a term, that is, with a meaning that you give to some term?

    I'm interested in the answer.

    Best regards,

    Marcoen

      Hi Daryl,

      Thanks for introducing yourself at the conference this week... and for the interesting conversations!

      And while our disagreements *have existed*, I'm getting the feeling that we have many fewer disagreements that *exist*, and perhaps only modest disagreements *will exist* in the future.

      Or, in my language, perhaps our views "are" converging. (if not our terminology...) :-)

      Interesting essay... although I'm afraid I don't have much more to say about it that I didn't tell you in person, or in discussions on my page.

      All the best!

      Ken

        Hello Daryl,

        I've lost a lot of comments and replies on my thread and many other threads I have commented on over the last few days. This has been a lot of work and I feel like it has been a waste of time and energy. Seems to have happened to others too - if not all.

        I WILL ATTEMPT to revisit all threads to check and re-post something.

        For now I will rate your essay very highly and hopefully get back to comment later.

        Hopefully all the posts will be able to be retrieved by FQXi.

        Best wishes,

        Antony

          Dear Antony,

          Thanks so much! I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to respond to your earlier post before now, but thanks very much for what you wrote there. I'm glad you liked my essay so much, and really appreciate your comment!! I've been really busy the past few weeks, on top of which I was staying in places with really poor wifi, so wasn't able to contribute to the contest much. I've read a few essays today, and yours was the next on my list after the one I'm currently reading, so you can expect to hear from me soon.

          All the best,

          Daryl

          Hi Ken,

          Thanks for dropping by and commenting. Yes, it was really nice to meet you at the conference. I agree that while our views remain ontologically very different, they are physically (i.e., not just empirically) equivalent, which from my point of view is a really good thing. As you know from my essay, and our discussions on- and off-line, that means something to me because I think (and I think you agree) that a lot of people on both sides of the dynamical/adynamical divide have the physical picture completely messed up--e.g., growing block-ers, and people who think of consciousness as crawling upwards along world-lines, or of the block as warping and changing, etc. It's good to have a consistent interpretation of the physics!

          No worries about not commenting on the essay directly here. I think we've sufficiently hashed out our views for now, although I do hope to keep in touch, and look forward to more discussion with you about the nature of time in the future.

          Good luck in the contest, and best wishes!

          Daryl

          Dear Marcoen,

          Thanks for reading my essay. You've asked a very good question, which puts me on the spot for having made a very strong claim at the end of my essay, and requires me to be accountable for it, although I had hoped it was justified sufficiently well from what I had previously written in the essay.

          I think Einstein's deduction of the relativity of simultaneity is more of a reductio ad absurdum than the derivation of a truly interesting result because he begins with the operational definition of simultaneity, and eventually shows that this is relative, which comes to mean that not only is each particular instant so described "simultaneous" in the representative frame, but really the whole block of events that occur throughout eternity has to be simultaneous all at once.

          The standard argument for this is given, e.g., in Ken Wharton's essay, and I've argued against that both here in my essay and again at length on Ken's page. Furthermore, since any meaningful definition of "simultaneity" at an instant already assumes a dynamical passage of time, I've argued for a different position in which passage is really fundamental, whereas Einstein began his first relativity paper by defining "simultaneity", and then went on to derive a picture in which the definition is meaningless anyway, for all intents and purposes.

          I hope that clarifies what I meant by that statement.

          All the best,

          Daryl

          Dear Yuri,

          You know, there is a sense in which I agree with that. Thanks for stopping by and commenting. I hope you liked the essay.

          Daryl

          Dear Akinbo,

          Thanks very much for your comment. Sorry it's taken so long to reply, but I've finally managed to read your essay. I thought your analysis of monads was very interesting, and I really liked the way you handled your discussion of historical philosophical views on the topic. I think it's really important that anyone who stands on the shoulders of these giants should know what they were actually thinking and how they arrived at their ideas, since textbooks often either misrepresent things, or just leave out the original reasoning entirely.

          Regarding your question about existence/non-existence as a binary choice, I think our views are very different on that point, although I can appreciate what you're going for. It's just that I do think a continual passage of time is fundamental, and prior to any particular thing existing. I can think of a three-dimensional set of monads existing, like the "one-dimensional" set you've drawn at different stages in the two figures in your essay, but I can't think of those two instants if the monads don't exist. And in order for objective time to pass uniformly throughout the Universe, which is what I've argued for in my essay despite relative proper duration, etc., I don't think random discrete particle creation and annihilation in the Universe could be the cause of this uniform absolute duration.

          That's why I think 'it from bit' has to fail, despite the possibility that bits (monads) are the fundamental building blocks of everything in the Universe. But I'm no stick in the mud, and as I said I can appreciate your position, and I enjoyed your essay.

          Best of luck in the contest,

          Daryl

          Hi Daryl,

          Your essay is an interesting read.

          I have one question, though. On page 9 you write at the end: "the former interpretation ... ultimately disproves itself by contradiction". From the context I understand that by "the former interpretation" you mean Einstein's interpretation of relativity. Correct me if I'm wrong. But if so, could you elaborate on that? How do you derive a contradiction from Einstein's relativity? Do you mean logical contradiction, or do you mean that it yields a contradiction with an assumed meaning of a term, that is, with a meaning that you give to some term?

          I'm interested in the answer.

          Best regards,

          Marcoen

          Dear Daryl,

          No worries glad to help.

          I can appreciate the situation as I was stuck in the middle of Bulgarian countryside a few weeks ago, with very weak intermittent wifi too!

          Also Portugal where I had to read while in cafes - much to my wife's disapproval ;o)

          FQXi seems to have fixed the current bug - seems it was a server migration issue.

          The earlier rating drought was also a drama on here too! haha.

          Hope you like the essay, if you do get the chance - as it isn't very mainstream. No problem if you don't.

          Best wishes,

          Antony

          Hi Daryl,

          I very much appreciate your close analysis of time, existence, and our models for it. There is one point I would like to pick up on.

          > If true reality is timeless, where does the illusion of succession come from?

          I have an answer to this implied in my essay Software Cosmos, in which I develop a computational model that addresses several outstanding cosmological puzzles. I hope you get a chance to read the essay, as it provides a specific model for the observer's account of "being" in space and time as well as the timeless realm that links these separate accounts into a coherent whole.

          My conclusion (perhaps this will be clearer after you see my model) regarding the "problem of now" is: If we accept the simulation paradigm, then we can think of the physical world as a layer of a multi-layer system. The physical "material" layer operates by the well-defined rules of physics that incorporate concepts of space and time.

          But Mind could operate at a different layer than Matter. Conventionally, Matter is taken as the ground of being, and life and mind seen as emergent. But what if it is the other way around? In a model in which Mind and Life are below Matter, then the phenomenology of "now" can be understood in reference to agents in those layers viewing the dance of matter in space and time.

          Hugh

            Hugh,

            I like that quote from Capek, too. I think it addresses a significant issue with relativity. I am puzzled by your comment, though, because this is an issue that I went on to directly address in my essay, and you've said nothing about that. I don't think reality is timeless, and I think succession is very real, due to a fundamental passage that I attempted to reconcile with relativity in my essay. If your model is both timeless AND incorporates a dynamical flow of consciousness, then I fear you've got an idea like Weyl (there's a famous quotation by him in my essay as well), which is really five-dimensional.

            Regards,

            Daryl

            Dear Daryl,

            We are at the end of this essay contest.

            In conclusion, at the question to know if Information is more fundamental than Matter, there is a good reason to answer that Matter is made of an amazing mixture of eInfo and eEnergy, at the same time.

            Matter is thus eInfo made with eEnergy rather than answer it is made with eEnergy and eInfo ; because eInfo is eEnergy, and the one does not go without the other one.

            eEnergy and eInfo are the two basic Principles of the eUniverse. Nothing can exist if it is not eEnergy, and any object is eInfo, and therefore eEnergy.

            And consequently our eReality is eInfo made with eEnergy. And the final verdict is : eReality is virtual, and virtuality is our fundamental eReality.

            Good luck to the winners,

            And see you soon, with good news on this topic, and the Theory of Everything.

            Amazigh H.

            I rated your essay.

            Please visit My essay.

            Dear Daryl,

            - - - - -You said also that you thought you had provoked anger in me, and I'm sorry that you misunderstood me. I only wanted to explain why I disagree with a statement you made. - - - - -

            Don't worry , no problem

            - - - - -There is definitely a lot that I could say about your post, but I'll only address a few of them. The inference that there is dark matter and dark energy in the Universe is not due to calculation mistakes. The mathematical derivation of the model is sound, and the fit to the data is very good. I actually think the mathematical form of the model is correct, but that it's based on a completely wrong idea. I indicated why in my pervious essay, but the detailed reasoning and analysis is in my dissertation. I think the inference that the cosmic expansion rate is being influenced by exotic energy sources in our Universe is wrong, and that the particular expansion rate is observed because of a well-defined geometrical background structure. - - - - -

            They are due to calculation mistakes only. We can sit together and discuss, even after the essay contest is over.

            - - - - -You also said that there are no differential equations in your model. Do you suppose there is no change of any sort in reality? Because that's all a differential equation describes. - - - - -

            Differential equations are not necessary here. Linear equations are sufficient.

            - - - - -And finally, I'm surprised that your model isn't isotropic. Since we actually do observe large scale isotropy, the fact should be difficult to reconcile with a non-isotropic model. - - - - -

            Isotropic models collapse to the common center of gravity.( Universe doesn't collapse.) They will get singularities. Universe is lumpy. You will find voids as big as 1/3 size of universe.

            Thanks for the live discussion!

            Best

            =snp

            Dear Daryl,

            interesting essay but more importantly I read your comment of Sean Grybs essay.

            Therefore I thought that you are maybe interesting in a geometric approach to the accelaerated expansion. May I point your interest on my essay?

            Best wishes

            Torsten