Readers' Choice: Cheating the Causal Game

Tom,

As well as the trajectory of the ball can deduced from where it landed. The question isn't whether evidence of the past ceases to exist, but if the events of which the past consisted have been replaced by the fact the physical reality is now manifesting this present configuration. There is certainly lots of evidence of past events, but the very fact these traces do exist in the present means they are no longer as originally produced. Those layers and layers of historical evidence are proof time is a dynamic process, in which that evidence and memories continue to be altered, effectively pushing the events further into the past.

Regards,

John M

It seems plausible to me that time is actually an emergent property, something we observe as a result of causal relationships. The trick is to think of casual relationships outside of a chronological ordering.

Imagine a universe that is vast but finite - both in terms of the smallest distance and in terms of the largest distance. Given that, it is possible to write down a diagram that represents a snapshot of all possible states of the universe as a big graph: each state is a node and the causal relationships between the states are edges.

There is no way to tell if two events that are not directly causally related to each other happen before or after each other. Nor is there any indication of how 'long' any state exists or how long it takes for one state to 'cause' another. It's just one big logical graph that shows the gigantic-but-finite web of relationships.

Given such a graph, if we make just two assumptions, I believe an arrow of time naturally emerges:

1. Every state must have at least one cause.

2. No state can participate in its own causation.

Setting aside the question of "where did the first state come from", it seems plausible to me that our perception of time is merely the way our minds interpret this web of causation. There is no 'before' or 'after', only causation.

It is tempting to think of two states that are directly causally related as having an ordering, but what if the 'caused' state has more than one 'causing' state? For example, if state C is caused by both state A and state B, perhaps we can infer that C occurs in some sense 'after' A and B. But can we infer that A and B are synchronous?

Anyway it is fun (at least for me) to think about, and it seems that causality is very deeply related to both time, and probably entropy as well. Could it be that both of those concepts are merely emergent phenomena from some deeper logical causal theory?

" ... if the events of which the past consisted have been replaced by the fact the physical reality is now manifesting this present ..."

Still begging the question, John, any way you rephrase it.

You are assuming boundaries between what you call past, present and future that have no physical basis. The configuration space of events doesn't know the difference.

Tom

Yes Darrell, the order goes on to emerge,

I even blame anything around Hilbert's finitism including the notion state for what is called the crisis of physics. I was born because my mother A (Annemarie) met my father B (Blumschein). Were they events in the sense of a Hilbert space?

The question of "where did the first state come from" implies the assumption that there was a first state and in logical consequence there will be a last state. I consider such rather religious questions futile while the alternative idea of an open in the sense of infinitely extended and therefore never fully predictable world fits better to feasible science. Let's accept one boundary as relevant for physics, the border between past and future and nothing in between.

Instead of blindly trying to separate causality from temporal order, I recommend to clarify first that abstract time must not be confused with the measurable elapsed time of reality.

Eckard

John M,

You wrote: "General Relativity refutes the notion of simultaneity." Hm, can a theory at all refute something? Any simultaneity is called a convention as to justify Einstein's misuse of Poincaré synchronization.

I understand that you and many others intend to arrange with the dominant acceptance of Einstein's theories. Are you consequently "forced to accept that all events exist in some "blocktime" vector?" I think so. In my previous essay I uttered the hope that Michelson's non-null expectation could be flawed. Having quantified the flaw as too minute, I admit, I was wrong. Please read the endnotes in my current essay.

Tom wrote: "The configuration space of events doesn't know the difference."

He is quite right, however, may we really equate reality and configuration space?

Regards,

Eckard

Tom,

I'm not assuming any boundaries more substantial than a horizon line. With time as an effect of action, how do you draw solid boundaries between where a moving object was, is and will be? Would you expect a measure of temperature, also another measure of action, to be infinitely precise?

The problem is the fourth dimensional model of time is trying to overcome the problems inherent in Newtonian time, but modeling the measure of duration as part of some foundational geometric structure creates serious problems as well.

Eckard,

I can try. Nothing more, nothing less.

Regards,

John M

Darrell,

The problem I keep pointing out is that we model time as the sequence of events we encounter/past to future, but the cause is changing of the state/future becoming past. For example, the earth is not traveling some fourth dimension from yesterday to tomorrow, but tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates.

Meanwhile cause is not due to temporal sequence, but exchange of energy. Yesterday doesn't cause today, nor does one wave cause the next. The sun shining on a rotating planet and wind across the water create these cycles of action.

Regards,

John M

Tom,

Speaking of horizons, consider the transition from one day to the next; Locally it is from 11:59:59 pm to 12:00 am, but globally it is 24 hours.

Time is fluid, so our conception of it needs to be as well.

Regards,

John

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

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

Excellent summary, John C. Coordinate free geometry (general covariance) seems old-fashioned to many these days. That's why I keep emphasizing the necessity to understand classical mechanics from the ground up -- I don't find any other way to make sense of general relativity without that background.

Best,

Tom

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