Readers' Choice: Cheating the Causal Game

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

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

John C,

Here is an interesting interview with someone who has deep knowledge of reconciling theory with reality.

While I don't have much use on an emotional level with big business, or government, etc, on a conceptual level, I like to keep them in context. They are not wild speculative theories, but are the result of human society dealing with the facts of nature on a very foundational level, as those which become divorced from that reality rather quickly find themselves in hot water and victims of economic darwinism. So don't dismiss the idea that "time is money"/energy, too quickly. If nothing moves, there is no change, so whether or not change creates time, or time creates change, if there is no change, there is no measure of time and physics operates under the assumption that what cannot be measured doesn't exist. So no change, no time, however you explain the relationship.

John M. & Eckard

JM thanks for the Carver Mead interview link. ditto on the zero point particle issue.

Eckard - proper time (tau) - how is that used? Does it refer to the time parameter of a general spacetime, or to a wavetrain of light in the general frame? My wonderment is that we can't assume that there is any particular metric of scale to describe an arbitrary length of interval for the sake of measurement on a continuum. But that doesn't mean we can assume time and space once tangled up together don't operate as if they each had a physical property of scale. If time scale were the same as space scale would duration expand? would direction extend? Yet intuitively, that is what seems to be the product of blocktime. Perhaps Kalusa's 5th dimension is an underlying covariance of scale between time and space. Ask Tom Ray if he thinks that makes any sense. HEY!! you fellows have the math! maybe someday they'll tell stories about the discovery of timespace! I'm going to take a break. Problem with relativity is that it warps my head before space warps. jrc

John M,

While I agree with much of Carver Mead's views, I don't consider the silicon cochlea by Mead and Lyon successful. I am also skeptical about Mead's attribution of the putative time symmetry in the quantum world to coherence. Well, one could infer from coherence over a certain timespan that no change is to be expected. However, didn't the notion time loose its meaning for this expectation because nothing happens? I consider a strict distinction between past and future nonetheless necessary.

Eckard

Eckard,

I certainly agree about the optics. Sigma built a camera based on it, on which I wasted close to a thousand dollars, about ten years ago. It was a flop.

As for time, they all try incorporating that past to future vector, with the resulting mathematical addenda.

What I do like about his ideas is that quanta expand to fill their container and contract when balanced by their polarity. I think that eventually gravity can be derived from this, on mass scales. What is gravity, other then a scalar vacuum effect induced from more energy occupying less volume. Just as releasing these quanta en mass creates serious pressure. Think atomic shock waves.

Like temperature and I argue, time, it is not so much a force requiring its own particles, waves, fields, dimensions, but is an external effect of that electromagnetic attraction and contraction.

Regards,

John M

John Brodix Merryman

Gravity is .... On this, I agree with Bill Unruh as he describes it below:

(Time, Gravity, and Quantum Mechanics Bill Unruh 1993)

"A more accurate way of summarizing the lessons of General Relativity is

that gravity does not cause time to run differently in different places (e.g., faster far from the earth than near it). Gravity is the unequable flow of time from place to place. It is not that there are two separate phenomena, namely gravity and time and that the one, gravity,affects the other. Rather the theory states that the phenomena we usually ascribe to gravity are actually caused by time's flowing unequably from place to place."

T.H. Ray

1 The Sun rises and birds sing. There is an order but no direct causality.

2 "...whether the observer creates the universe by the act of observing (becomes entangled .." You don't need entanglement for that. We create it all.

The whole universe is just a big black silent mush of vacuum and EM radiation. Scarry to most. Our reality, light, colors, sound, space, etc. we make it all up, and physics essentially starts from there and tries to keep it around in order to do just that; physics. Everything you perceive as real is illusion. What is real is not perceived but can be figured out. We are perceptual and the universe is operational. The moon is a perception. But for the universe, every particle making the moon is away in time from each other (nothing instantaneous), therefore the moon is just an aggregate of matter across time i.e. not an object or something all at once in one place and one moment. We create and perceive the concept of object.. No "Joy" on the object. This aggregate only becomes the "moon" object when we perceive and conceive it as being there, entire, in one place and one moment. Get it? This is the kind of concepts you have to see past the illusion and understand the simple mush of the universe; what is it made of and how does it work; the substance and cause behind it all.

3 You confuse "exist longer" with "exist more". The first is about lasting longer (I know about muons) and the second is about a higher probability of existing or moving towards a region, a rather metaphysical concept that physics conveniently replaces by "probability of finding" it there.

Cox,

"that it is THE ABSORPTION LINES that Doppler shift!" Come again?

TH Ray,

"We know that space is mostly Euclidean" First, there is no space, lines or geometry as they are convenient projections. Secondly, in this context, using the word "is" should be reserved to serious metaphysicists who actually understand and mean it. All other should actually use the words "appears to be" as a wise cautionary approach. The use of the word "is" commands that the user addresses what "is by itself" and not what is created by the observer.

Cox,

"...instead of a continuous curve..." Right! The curve is the integration of the change of position in different times... We may trace the path but the curve does not exist per se.

*** There is such a confusion about time !!!!!!!!!!!!!. The human time is in block i.e. we all get to Christmas at the same time, so we have block past and block present. The Einstein saying about "time is an illusion" is about that block time. Time passes at different rates here and there so no common block past and present, that is the illusion . Time is universal and does run everywhere. Its just that it is not running at the same rate everywhere! Take a fast plane a few times and you will still get to Christmas at the same time as the others! Only your own time was modified (so little).

Burgan, (IMHO)

States compare to local time evolution, which is an explosive process, spherical.

A stable state is in logical existence according to local time and shows no motion (no unsymmetrical existence)

Unstable states are in illogical existence according to local time and show motion (unsymmetrical existence), motion being the sign of an illogical state in the spontaneous process of resolution.

Marcel,