Time is the denominator of existence, and bits come to be in it by Daryl Janzen

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

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

Dear Daryl,

now I rated your essay with a very high note.

All the best

Torsten

Dear Daryl,

Nice meeting you to in Munich. Thanks for the post.

Let's keep in touch. My email is: sean.gryb@gmail.com .

Cheers,

Sean.

Daryl,

I'm certainly more than willing to continue that particular conversation.

About where I left off;

"It is still the same problem; The coordinates grow further apart, while the speed of light remains constant. Which is the measure of space in this equation and which is the distance being measured?"

On another note, I'm currently engaged with Tom Ray, at the contests thread, over how this contest can be used as the basis for some sort of proceedings or publicizing the efforts made. So since it seems to be devolving into one of our usual spats, maybe you would like to innocently steer it back onto the subject of how to make the topic topical to a broader audience.

Regards,

John

Hello Daryl,

I've just seen your reply on my thread. I'll ponder the question and re-read your essay in that context, then get back to you. As I said above, it's a great approach to consider time's role in reality!

Regards,

Antony

Hi Daryl,

I've read over your essay several more times.

You wrote:

"If time objectively passes in the way that I've described, as opposed to not passing at all (in the case of a real block universe), then the usual justification for the collapse scenario is invalid, because it takes reality to be synchronous in general reference frames".

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by collapse scenario. Is it wave function collapse? However, I like that you've examined relativity so critically, especially the example of the sun 8 minutes away. Are you saying that reality doesn't exist because of relativity?

Please excuse my ignorance here, as I think you've a very good essay and I'm just struggling with the above question a point a little.

If you can clarify or give an example, I'd love to discuss further!

Best wishes and thanks for the comments on my thread.

Antony

Hi Antony,

Sorry for not responding right away. I actually had the reply started, but then my computer began acting up so I restarted it. Then I got sidetracked.

Regarding "collapse scenario": No, I meant gravitational collapse scenario. A standard example is in Hawking and Ellis, where they consider spherical collapse by examining a situation in which one of two observers initially outside, heads in while the other stays put. If you have access to the textbook, it would help. Basically, everything in that description assumes things are happening as Eddington-Finkelstein advanced time passes; i.e., they describe the passage of time according to the description, in the context of an Eddington-Finkelstein foliation of space-time, which is not justified.

This has been the standard way of conceiving of black holes and gravitational collapse since Finkelstein's paper was published. Kip Thorne gives a good description of this in Black Holes and Time Warps. He says Evgeny Lifschitz told him once that the paper was a revelation to everyone at the time, that it was like a fog was lifted (or something to that effect), and that it's what convinced Wheeler, Landau, et al. that black holes exist.

In my opinion, this is an instance where physics took yet another wrong turn, and plunged further down the rabbit hole. Einstein had set everything going in that direction with the relativity of simultaneity; but at least he had understood the consequence of that. Time can't actually "pass" as described by whatever foliation you want to assume. If you assume relativity describes reality as what's described as synchronous in whatever frame you choose to look at, then reality is all of space-time--all of eternity--all at once, and time doesn't pass at all. There can be no dynamical flow of time if you also want to agree with Einstein about the relativity of simultaneity. Ken Wharton's essay makes this point as well, except that he's okay with it.

The thing about me is that I'm not. So to answer your question about the Sun: No--I'm very much a realist, and more than that I believe that physical reality can truly make sense. Ken doesn't care about making any sense, as long as there is objective reality: he thinks he gets off on a technicality any time anyone starts talking about consciousness and things "making sense", because that gets into philosophy of mind rather than physics. I think conscious experience is empirical evidence that can be interpreted correctly or incorrectly, just as much as any other more hard-won bit of evidence, such as the evidence of a 125 GeV particle; and I think a theory that runs completely against conscious experience should be denied just as much as one that might require that a 125 GeV particle absolutely can't exist, because the scientific evidence now indicates that one does exist. Ken thinks it's enough that the world according to his view should "save the appearances", just as the Ptolemaic model was supposed to "save the appearances"; but I think there has to be something wrong with any theory that doesn't explain why we should expect the appearances to be as they are. As I understand it, this is our main point of disagreement.

Now, the way for relativity to make sense is to assume that time truly passes and simultaneity is absolute, regardless of the fact that simultaneous events won't be described as synchronous in just any given reference frame.

But I see that I failed to make this point obvious in my essay. The structure of the essay was as follows. I first of all wanted to take a neutral stance on the relativity of simultaneity, and argue that in no sense does space-time exist; that the dynamical existence of space-time that warps and changes and gets holes punched in it and all of that constitutes five-dimensional physics. That if you want Einstein's version of simultaneity, you end up with Ken's view of reality, which is not dynamical. In this view, nothing can really exist, because the timelike dimension in the description of all the events that are supposed to occur, is supposed to be all real all at once, and time isn't supposed to pass.

Therefore, I argued that in order for anything to actually exist, and for time to really pass, we need to assume an absolute simultaneity-relation amongst the events that occur. And then I showed how that would work relativistically, by looking at a classic thought-experiment. The synchronous events in Henri's frame of reference didn't really occur simultaneously. According to Albert and Henri both, the Sun really exists "now", which is the same thing for each of them; but at any instant, the set of events that occur at the same time as described in Henri's proper coordinate system doesn't coincide with that "now", which is an instant of absolute time--a three-dimensional slice of his description of space-time that extends throughout his "past" and "future". I think I did a really good job of showing this in the thought experiment in my previous essay.

Anyway, the thing regarding black holes is that if you're going to assume that relativity gives the metrical relation between all the events that occur as a three-dimensional universe exists and time passes, then you can't also assume that reality is three-dimensional synchronous space in whatever frame you choose to describe things in, which evolves as time passes. Because if you want to assume that, relativity comes to require the reality of the entire block.

But that is exactly the interpretation that's made in order to justify saying black holes presently exist.

I hope that helps. Please keep asking if you're at all unclear on my position. I really appreciate having the opportunity to explain what that is.

All the best,

Daryl

Hi Daryl, Tony,

I really like Daryl's statement:

"The way for relativity to make sense is to assume that time truly passes and simultaneity is absolute, regardless of the fact that simultaneous events won't be described as synchronous in just any given reference frame."

Simultaneity is the fact, synchronicity is the communication of the event over distances at the speed of light, obviously synchronous only for equidistant observers, or other equivalent special relations between frames.

I have put enough thought into it to convince myself that there's absolutely no way our universe could "hold together" in stable fashion for 14 giga-year unless simultaneity spans the universe. This is why the "ict" formalism is appropriate (despite MTW). The orthogonality of time is a different order of orthogonality than that between the three spatial dimensions. Thus the signature: (-,,,).

I also agree with Daryl's realist position that things should "make sense". I've often heard that "our brains evolved" in the classical world and we shouldn't expect to make sense of a quantum universe, or relativistic universe, etc." But if consciousness is as I propose in my essay, an inherent property of creation, then one would expect things to make sense.

I've begun reading a new book, "Bankrupting Physics" by Unzicker and Jones, which I recommend other realists.

Thanks for keeping comments going after the voting has closed.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Dear Daryl

I'd like to thank you for your recommendation to read Einstein's discussion of space. I hadn't read that passage in the past but I was aware of his view. After I read it, my picture of Einstein's view of space is more comprehensive. As he himself recognizes the metric field gives meaning to his notion of physical space.

In recent years, there is a vivid discussion about the nature of space among physicists and philosophers of physics. As you may know the debates turns around two currents, namely, substantivalism and relationalism. The general consensus is that the space of GR is seen as a substance more than a relation. This is because the manifold and the corresponding metric play the role of a background. In relativity space-time is more like a substrate for fields and particles. As you and Einstein argued, physical meaning of space, that is, its substantiality arises from the metric field. So, under this view, it seems to me that you defend the idea that this kind of space-time itself must represent an absolute frame of reference, am I right? As a plus, I have noticed that space in relativity is never considered as an absolute frame of reference (I still don't understand why).

So far so good. Now, I'd like to point out some of the ontological differences in the notion of space, according to relativity and to those like me who assume space as a medium. In relativity space is some sort SUBSTRATE or container, where particles and fields are placed. As you say, the metric field gives meaning to space, if there is no matter and no metric field, then there is absolutely nothing. So, the Minkowski metric represents a special case of "gravity" that has constant coefficients in the metric field. Despite this, space continues to be a substrate, a background. One of the properties of this space is that it is permeable to fields and particles, both of them are seen as of different nature to space. In contrast, my view of space is different. For me space is a material medium and the laws of continuum mechanics rule its behaviour. Since space is a medium, it is not permeable to fields and particles, instead, as any other medium, it is dispersive and dissipative. As it has been shown, Maxwell equations can be derived from this assumption. The properties of this space affect the propagation of light and particles as well. The other significance difference is that fields are states of the medium (just as Maxwell devised it) and particles are not separate entities of space (just as quantum field theory strongly suggests). From this view, particles are seen as excitations or resonances of space and therefore, as in your case, space constitutes an absolute frame of reference. This view, opens the door to the unification of physics because particles are seen as part of space. I believe that this notion of space, has more advantages over the "traditional" one.

Since there are not many options to conceive space, one conception or the other should be the "right" one. So, given this notable differences, I'd would like to ask you your opinion about the notion of space as medium. I'm curious if it sounds reasonable to you or if you have any objections or critics. I'd be grateful if you could give me your comments.

I'd be looking forward to receiving your reply.

Regards

Israel

Hi Edwin/Daryl,

I'll take a look at this book! It is indeed good to continue discussions. I'm still re-reading essays and the many, many comments.

Antony