Readers' Choice: Cheating the Causal Game

John,

As Eckard validates, if you don't deny relativity you have to accept what the theory says about time.

"I'm not assuming any boundaries more substantial than a horizon line."

When you stand on the Maryland shore facing East, does Europe not exist at the same moment you are looking in that direction? Does the horizon which Europe lies behind rotate to meet you, so that you pleasantly find yourself in Paris if you stand still long enough? Only in a different inertial system, high above the shore -- could such a phenomenon happen for you. And even at that, you would have to invest energy in keep your vehicle in the same spot.

"With time as an effect of action, how do you draw solid boundaries between where a moving object was, is and will be?"

*Physically*? I wouldn't draw such boundaries. Time isn't an effect of action; time and action are related by very specific mathematical quantities of distance and duration, which is why the Minkowski space is a good choice to model dynamical and kinematic systems of events. If we wish to extend relativity, we don't wave a magic wand and say that we are going to preserve relativity, but do away with distance and duration. That doesn't work -- and can't.

I think, as I've said before, that brain science is the next big frontier of physics research. It is here, in the discrete relations among neurons in a connected network, that the quantum measurement problem really matters.

"Would you expect a measure of temperature, also another measure of action, to be infinitely precise?"

Isn't that what WMAP and its predecessors are all about? John, the reason that your ideas of time and temperature are unrelated to anything physical is that you think of temperature as something physically real -- while it is only a measure of averaged particle motion within arbitrary boundaries. The WMAP results assume the boundaries at the big bang and the present state of the universe. So our measure of temperature is at least as good as the accuracy of our probes, though never without boundary conditions.

Best,

Tom

Tom,

You have it backward. My point is that I don't see time as "physically real." No Newtonian flow, no fourth dimension, no blocktime. It is just an effect of activity, ie, change, as temperature is a scalar measure of the energy effecting activity.

If I "stood still," would first go through San Francisco, then Tokyo, then Istanbul, before getting to Paris.

I don't see how accepting part of an argument means I have to accept every conclusion drawn from it. It would be a version of reductio ad absurdum.

Regards,

John M

John,

I am well aware of swimming in FQXi against the Lorentz/Einstein/Davies stream. The latter quoted Einstein: "Two events that occur at the same moment if observed from one reference frame may occur at different moments if viewed from another."

My endnote demands to simply restricting the consideration to just one frame of reference. Well, there is no preferred frame of reference. However, once the reference (in case of numbers the number one) has been chosen, it is not allowed to choose one more reference.

Perhaps you will spontaneously agree that something that happens at the Mars does not depend on how much delayed it is observed at different locations of the universe.

Unfortunately those like Hilbert (who intended to be more than a mathematician) and Davies (who misled you) think of time as laid out in its entirety. Accordingly, even engineers like me were forced to always perform FT by integrating over time from minus i to plus infinity. This is not reasonable.

Meanwhile I revealed decisive mistakes related to the denial of the distinction between past and future and the belonging history in mathematics and physics.

Eckard

Eckard,

You and I are in agreement that time is a(measure of a) dynamic process and not a static state. Unfortunately the physics community has invested generations believing otherwise.

Consider the whole Big Bang cosmology is built on this notion of spacetime, yet even I can see it makes no sense to say space expands, yet retain the constant speed of light as cosmic ruler. If space is what you measure with a ruler, is it what remains constant, or what expands?? They both can't be the denominator.

Tom,

I'm not doing away with distance and duration, only making the point they are apples and oranges. Distance is a measure of space, but duration is a measure of action. Action occurs in space, but creates duration. Just like it creates temperature. You could use ideal gas laws to correlate temperature and volume in a similar fashion. Constrain a quantity of energized gas to a smaller volume and it raises the temperature in a proportional manner, much like squeezing a balloon will cause it to puff out between your fingers, but would that make temperature some fourth parameter of volume? It's basically the same sort of logic being used to correlate distance to duration.

Regards,

John M

John M,

May I ask you how accurate the largest distances of stars were measured? I found at http;//christiananswers.net/q-eden/star-distances.html larger than 15 billion ly. While the error of parallax method (for small distances) is given as 10%, Cepheids are a category of stars whose actual brightness is allegedly "well known". Perhaps, the redshift method is even less certain. How accurate were the measurements when Hubble came up in 1923 with his expansion law?

My primary concern is the perhaps relativistically calculated Doppler effect. See my current discussion with Pentcho.

Eckard

Eckard,

While I'm in no position to verify the measurements used, I would argue those galaxies discovered at over 13 billion lightyears out had to have taken longer than the few hundred million remaining to have coalesced and ignited out of intergalactic gases, considering the (hypothesized) inflation stage presumably left this material fairly distributed. It takes our galaxy 225 million years just to make one revolution.

Regards,

John M

A friend sent me this web address http://wtkr.com/2013/06/07/this-video-of-sand-will-blow-your-mind because she simply thought it far out. It's a clean production presentation of a Chladni plate experiment which is generally viewed only in relation to acoustic behavior of harmonic resonance. It is also a visual demonstration of continual symmetrical generation of causal order producing complexity in a closed system which in its profusion devolves into decoherence with boundary conditions resulting from the underlying symmetric generation of order. It sure helped me understand what this article is about, and the great thing for me is that it's intuitively visible. Okay. Now I understand what superposition means. Causal decoherence and wave function operating simultaneously.

John M,

Because I never dealt with the matter, I erroneously wrote 1923 instead of 1929. Your argument looks serious to me. I wonder how the priest Lemaitre was able in 1927 to measure the distance of galaxies by means of the discovered by Slipher in 1912 redshift. Wasn't the hypothetical recession velocity v rather just calculated from GR? While the redshift can be measured, I wonder how both v and Hubble's constant, i.e. the distance, can be simultaneously derived from it if there is no sufficiently accurate alternative to measure the distance. Maybe, the Big Bang theory arose from catholic guesswork and was acknowledged by Einstein as confirmation of his theory?

With r = v/c and f_measured/f_original = f (f is smaller than 1 means redshift), I calculated f = 1-r for the ordinary Doppler effect but

f = (1 - r)/sqrt(1-r^2) for the relativistic Doppler effect, which implies a larger f for the same r or a smaller r for the same f.

Eckard

Eckard,

What first clued me into the possibility that alot of cosmology and eventually physics, was far more handwaving than anyone is willing to acknowledge, was the fact that expansion and gravitational contraction are opposite effects and quite possibly perfectly balanced, a fact borne out by observation of the background radiation by COBE and WMAP. If they balance, then where is the additional expansion for the universe as a whole to expand? The argument then became that inflation actually expanded the whole universe so large that the observable part only looks flat because it is just a small part.

The logical conclusion, by anyone not beholden to orthodoxy, is there is some form of convection cycle of expanding radiation and collapsing mass, such that what falls into galaxies is eventually radiated back out in some form or another and the cycle starts again. Since the universe is infinite, entropy doesn't apply, since it's not a closed set. Energy lost is replaced by energy gained and this whole galactic cycling is little more than vacuum fluctuation on an infinite scale.

All this obsession over black holes is further nonsense. What exists are gravitational vortices that eventually spew out whatever falls in. Either radiated out as it heats up, starlight, etc. or finally shot out the poles as cosmic jets. Smaller examples, such as binary star systems, eventually blow up when the absorbing star gets too dense.

Remember that if you were to drill a hole down to the center of the earth, you wouldn't find a gravitational singularity. In fact, the gravity, pulling from all directions, would cancel out. (Of course you would be crushed by the pressure.)

Essentially you would be in the eye of the storm. So why wouldn't the same principle work for galaxies? If you were to fall into the black hole at the center of the galaxy, would you fall through some wormhole into another reality, or would your constituent ions be shot out the pole in some quasar? Eventually to be cycled back into another gravitational vortex.

I think alot of this goes back to our rejection of space as anything foundational and insistence on the point as source of all structure.So everything becomes points and measurements between points. Anything else is just derivative.

Quanta are quanta of energy, not information. What if they could vary in volume? Release a photon of light and does it simply travel off in a single line, or does it expand out to fill space? If it expands, it is still the same quantity of energy, so the "temperature" drops, according to the laws of thermodynamics. In my discrete vs analog entry I compared this to a dripping water faucet. As you tighten it, first the water becomes a thin stream, then starts to drip. Since the drips are the same size, due to surface tension, the quantity of water is reduced by them getting further apart. Think of this in terms of light from a distant source, where it is so far away, only single quanta of light are registering. Wouldn't the result be a redshift of the pattern, as the light is reduced to single quanta and the time between each gets longer? Remember redshift is entirely proportional to distance and the effect is that we appear to be at the center of the universe. A logical solution is some form of lensing effect, not the sources actually receding. Then you don't have to argue space expands, yet still have a constant speed of light against which to measure it.

Also, when these quanta of energy are condensing back into mass, the effect is reversed and a vacuum forms, ie. gravity.

I could go on, but this is a better article.

Regards,

John M

John Merryman,

....doesn't clarify how one gets to ideas like blocktime, black holes, singularities, etc...

Wald does make the subject of the theory accessible, and while the paper is on the topic of teaching the subject with its various emphasis on math and co-ordinate methods chosen, the primary emphasis is that the theory is just that. It is not like you apply the theory to something, the theory is constructed entirely onto itself, not in any sort of co-ordinate system, Maybe like a Rubic's cube, you apply the something you are investigating onto the theoretical model and your mechanics of doing so sort out the colors onto each face.

Blocktime was really Minkowski's idea and Einstein considered it as a convenient way of diagraming.

jrc

John C,

If it's just a convenient way of diagraming, I certainly have no problem with that. Conventionally it is what is called narrative. History, if you prefer. The question is whether it exists in some genuinely physical sense, or not. Is there some metaphysical fourth dimension that with the proper bending of spacetime, we could time travel through some wormhole? Or is it just a modeling of the dynamic process by which the particular configuration we currently experience came to be, and where it logically might be heading? Thus what is past and what might happen in the future have no physical presence, because the medium to manifest this information is currently forming what is present?

REgards,

John M

John Cox (jrc),

Perhaps you meant Minkowski came up with spacetime, not blocktime. If I recall correctly Minkowski, who was Einstein's teacher of mathematics and had blamed him for often skipping his lessons a lazy dog, gave nonetheless credit to Einstein for having provided the basis when he announced a merger of space and time to spacetime in his famous speech.

Doesn't blocktime mean an a priori given timescale extending from minus eternity to plus eternity? Descartes and later Fourier provided belonging mathematics, and Heaviside added the trick of continuing the measured data by setting the necessarily unknown future ones equal to zero and then splitting the block-function of time into even and odd components.

Incidentally, when Fourier investigated heat conduction in a loop, this was equivalent to the actually infinite repetition that now requires integration from minus infinity to plus infinity. Such general covariance is obviously an absurd model because it ignores that future data are not yet available for sure in advance.

Eckard

Hi John,

If I may quote from your last post, "Thus what is past and what might happen in the future have no physical presence, because the medium to manifest this information is currently forming what is present."

I would say it like this, `The past and what might happen in the future have their physical presence in the present, the medium to manifest this information currently forms the present."

Jim George Snowdon

Jim,

However it works for you to describe it. Just so long as there are no wormholes back to the seventies, other than in memories, music and whatever else hasn't been scrapped.

Regards,

John M

Thanks All, I avoid stirring up a hornet' nest (or bother) unless it's in a doorway I wish to enter.

Much thanks Tom for the Wald link. And yes the classic foundation is necessary because after all it was Maxwell's discovery of the natural relationship of c and the proportional strength of mutual electromagnetic inductance-reactance that is the inconvenient fact.

Take it a little easy with me guys (and dolls) I had to tell the spouse of my algebra teacher when he'd call Saturday evenings at the end of the month that Mom and Dad were both up at the shop, many times they were and me too. Then through Wednesday I'd work into evening Mondays, late Tuesday nights and many Wednesday nights straight through. At 15 I couldn't integrate that with learning to demonstrate proofs and stay awake at the same time. That's why I've come here, it only costs me part of $25 a month.

I'm not sure if general co-variance is the same or used differently in engineering (Lewie wouldn't hang a stick of conduit without a spirit level) and GR. From Wald it's more clear than the elevator car that the theory model is it's own co-ordinate system. And it can not be said that the EMR-IR proportion is 'caused' by light velocity being that value anymore then it can be said that light velocity 'causes' that proportion. What can be said is that a direct measurement of field strength in earth bound electro-mechanical devices is meaningful to the application of electrical strength or magnetic strength, but that the proportionate difference with vary with whatever application. So the calculus of comparing electric to magnetic strength is made the same way those respective field strengths are measured, against their own type of field. Maxwell's analysis (10% inspiration - 90% perspiration) of thousands of Faraday's meticulously recorded data of experiments found that in all cases a comparison of magnetic field strength between two fixed points, induced by the electrical field strength between two identical fixed points was precisely 'c'.

General covariance is the sliding scale that maintains that measurable proportion. If light velocity were not invariant then then neither would be the comparative field strengths in any application. Electro-dynamics, thermo-dynamics, materials and processes would be chaos.

As for Minkowski and blocktime, I may be jumbling things, Eckard, but Minkowski spacetime is a scale set as one second is equivalent to 3^10 cm which preserves the natural relation of 'c' at light velocity as a direct proportion of EMR field strengths. But doesn't that create a universe as 'blocktime'.

Where did the Time go, John? What will the future hold? That is the continuum.

The math terms are new and strange to me but I can fully understand the meaning of a zero length tangent to curvature, especially if has an indefinite internal vector. That's where you pull your measures from. The usual problem is not having one and have to push the dumb end of the tape into a corner so you have to kind of guess how much off it might be because of the hook on the tip. If you're going for the diagonal of a square frame or what is supposed to be square you can generally judge what the angle is going to be. But if it's skewed much and you have to drag it into line so that the building loads will all help keep it all pinched together, then you only know what angle you want to make and can't predict really how much off your tip will become once you get it close to square, and you have the same problem pulling the diagonal off the other corner. That all comes from having to build to an imaginary grid. At present you just have to design for live loads. But as to what causes things at this moment, is more definite than predicting what those causes now will produce next moment. How that's done for predicting the path of near earth asteroids or the emergence of some kind of order out of chaos... is still a first water mystery to me.

This is a bit longer than I'm easy with, but I guess I asked for it. jrc

I bungled a sentence in my last post. It should read: it can not be said that the EMR-IR proportion is 'caused' by light velocity being that value, anymore than it can be said that light velocity is 'caused' by that proportion. jrc

John C,

Does the earth travel Newton's flow, or Einstein's fourth dimension from yesterday to tomorrow, or does tomorrow become yesterday because the earth rotates?

The question is whether there is some underlaying property called time, or is it an emergent effect of action?

It might seem little different mathematically whether you measure between the crests of two waves/distance, or the rate by which they pass a marker/duration, but much can hide in small differences.

Consider that epicycles were mathematically effective for the very logical reason that we are the center of our own point of observation; We still see the sun moving across the sky. Sometimes though, the way nature puts reality together and how we observe reality are not the same thing.

Mathematics is conceptual reductionism. We use symbols to identify concepts, rather than the phonetic vocalizations of conventional language. With reductionism, you end up with the skeleton, not the seed. When you try to reconstruct reality out of just the hard parts of measurement, it doesn't necessarily explain where it comes from in the first place. Math is a tool, not a god. We can curse the gods, but as you well know, tools can be misused.

Regards,

John M

John M.

Well put, I would agree on reductionism and math being a tool(s) in general and yet it can reduce concepts only to a point of comparison not 'the seed'. I wonder if that is because I can't remove my human being, from any sort of equation whether argumentative or (rudimentary) math.

I have to go with General Relativity on orbital motion. Newtonian methodology gets close but the predictability of GR in particular of the tiny discrepancy between Newtonian prediction and observation of the precession of Mercury's orbit is inarguable. GR works better. I'd like to learn a bit about MOND however, but what I've found so far is all about arguing it's viability from highly evolved mathematical cosmological models and what I need is a general definitive synopsis to know where to start.

I think the start line on the conceptual plane of yesterday, today and tomorrow has to be today. We really don't know why time extends, but to me it is a fundamental property of existence and I see much of the debate about it being emergent or non-existent as being a mathematical expedient of political science, not hard science. It was business and emergent industry that brought Newton out from the experiments of a few obsessed aristocrats and parlor tricks of the idle rich because business was exclusively owned by them. The three hundred years of dynamic scientific/industrial revolution which resulted has biased scientific thinking towards what business is willing to pay for. Energy. I think that the arguments of time emerging from energy is due to business wanting more time to generate more energy.

Today, for myself, I wish to find meetings of minds to inform myself of what technical limits of definition of terms, firstly in language, are generally agreed upon in convention. How Tom or Eckard ascribe such terms as 'general covariance' might be somewhere around what I think it to means, but I am limited by my own ignorance. To my understanding relating to a fairly limited range of ponderings over magnetic and electrical behavior, I would call 'general co-variance' something like the scale of time and the scale of space are mutually variant due to the natural relationship of light velocity and electric and magnetic fields constance of proportion. But it would probably take more column space than I think polite in a forum. Later jrc

John C,

Minkowski's light "cones" do perhaps deserve a closer look. Let me first simplify them by summarizing x^2+y^2+z^2 in the squared radial distance r^2.

I quote from http://www.iep.utm.edu/proper-t/ : SR connects three distinct quantities to each other: space (r), time (t), and proper time (tau): (r/c)^2 = t^2 - tau^2.

Minkowski borrowed this concept from Einstein but did not have an explanation for his strange hyperbolic metric -+++ and died soon later from appendix.

I understand that one has to choose one and only one point r=0 in space and the natural point t_elapsed=0. See my second endnote.

Incidentally, already Leibniz Leibniz denied that classical physics requires any concept of absolute position in space, and argued that only the notion of 'relative' or 'relational' space' is required. I share his view in this respect.

Eckard