Block time: Why many physicists still don't accept it? by Hrvoje Nikolic

To Clinton Miller's interjection on my essay and his own essay on the Posts of the essay by Dr. Nikolic , is proving to be like cross talks on the phone! Let us work out adequate separation in such Postings , as issues discussed by many of the authors are invoking 'consciousness' of the observer of scientific phenomena. In my view, consciousness too has different levels and dimensions too. There are interactions between individuals and then possible interaction with cosmic/ all pervading consciousness with independent individuals. Non-physical nature makes it difficult to define the possible modeling parameters for ' consciousness'. Personally, it is dangerous to do work out modeling parameters, as significant unknowns are likely to be left out. An innovative scientific methodology is to be worked out carefully introducing well thought out 'concepts', linking physical with the non-physical. There are some Yoga concepts to approach the Truth, developed by an Indian Saint PATANJALI thousands of years back, that i have quoted in my essay and the attached manuscripts to provide the holistic approach!

To Dr. Nikolic;

i have conjectured about the nature of dark matter in my essay. Also, i have attempted an explanation for initial inflation of the universe in a trillionth part of a second through 'negative' gravity of primordial dark matter constituents. nature dictates the interactions as per its intelligent design and physics job is just to explain the observed. Physics developed thus far may find it difficult to dictate explanations for some unexplained phenomenon. Thus a logical holistic approach may well help build on our current methodology in sciences! The Unified field may well be postulated to pre-exist the Big Bang with an intelligence to design the Universe(s). I have conjectured extremely heavy but neutral quarks to form the primordial matter which decayed very very fast under that extremely strong Unified field. The other forms of fields components emerged as per the requirements of that intelligent design. This may be also considered as the ever-existing pure/cosmic consciousness, which remains unaffected through physical creation of the Universe(s).

Hello Mr. Nikolić,

i'm slowly working my way through the papers here.

i enjoyed reading yours. i appreciate that you kept it not too technical. communications is getting to be an issue. people in science spend all their lives studying what they need to know just to get to talk about something specific, there winds up only two or three others in the whole world to chat with about it. not good. especially considering how much info there is out there these days. getting complicated. which brings me to...

two names for time may indeed be a useful pedagogic tool.

but i'm concerned about the potential for complicating things more rather than simplifying/clarifying the situation.

re:

"But is a measure of time the same thing as time itself?"

no, it isn't. think about the characteristic properties of what gets measured and what is used to measure it. would you use a clock to measure a desk? no, of course not. what are you measuring? and what is it about a clock? do you set the clock down next to what you're measuring and mark off it's width? no. what is it about a clock that provides a unit of measurement (this was more obvious before digital clocks came along)? i don't know how we'd go about measuring time itself. as you said, in physics, it just is.

you might enjoy reading some of the observations on the origins of the notion of time in 'some thoughts on time' elsewhere here.

yes. consciousness. needs study. i'm noting this to be a recurring theme in the papers here.

maybe wisdom would be good too, but that doesn't appear to fall within the purview of physics. ;-)

i seem to have a very different picture of consciousness than you apparently envision it.

i have it being both effected by and effecting the external 'reality'. what enabled you to move your body to type the words, 'unmatter cannot influence matter' while identifying consciousness as unmatter?

this is an issue for physics.

in order to study consciousness, however, physics will in some way have to objectify 'unmatter'.

that's going to be tricky.

Pitkänen's paper here gets into it a little, but it's not easy to follow. i'm not terribly up on string theory, and he's got this blend with quantum stuff...

looks like a couple of others here get into consciousness specifically also, but i've not gotten to them yet.

i seem to have consciousness (not to be confused with conscious awareness) as being remarkably aware of a tremendous amount of information, that one of it's most important functions is actually to filter out most of the material as personally irrelevant, presenting a 'news brief' on the fly to conscious awareness of that which is of greater personal interest. part of you is aware of the color of the chair you sit on, the whir of the cooling fan on the computer, maybe the tick of a clock, and other stuff that's near by you at this moment and if you stopped to think about it you could probably name a lot of items and characteristics of your immediate environment without even looking, but your conscious awareness doesn't need to know all that right now. so it gets filtered out of the data being presented. that's a small example. i seem to have consciousness at it's heart a vast sea, quite possibly extending to the ends of time/space (that's not actually as far as it might seem, takes a shortcut through i). just that we don't need to know that much. there are also some advantages on occasion to 'pretending' to be dumb. surprises can on occasion be fun (that first meeting with a special someone) and would you really want to consciously know how you're going to die? somewhere within us, i have reason to believe we all do know such things.

i don't know if i'd say that free will is an illusion, but it certainly has it's limits. in any instance, while we may have multiple options for actions, we are invariably limited to actualizing only one action in any given instance (i don't see how i can both sit down at the computer here and walk out the front door at the same time), whatever that choice may be, which makes each moment unique. it looks like determinism because of this uniqueness of a moment, but seems to be something of a blend of intersecting influences, including our own 'free will'. a 'negotiation' of sorts. significantly enters into crossing busy streets and such.

:-)

matt kolasinski

Dear Dr.nikolick and Mr. Clinton Miller,

we all need to keep this essay postings confined to the text/ posting on this text. However, consciousness has come out to be a major 'expanding paradigm' in presenting our scientific essays on 'The nature of Time'. The hope should be to go a step further in modifying the currently accepted 'Methodology of Science'. It requires wide acceptance amongst us, public as well as scientists in the mysteries of the Universe. May i request the authors of these essays from the western part of the World to become aware of the deep philosophical insights the Asian philosophers tto. For example, the originator of Yoga, very popular these days in the western world too, Rishi Patanjali who formulated a manuscript nearly 4000 yrs. back on ' Yoga Shastra '. Medicinal and health preservation aspects of Yoga have already been admitted all over the world. The problem is that Yoga needs to be correctly implemented in practice and only approved Preceptors/trainers should be accepted by public. However, the other benefit of Yoga practices often remain hidden, its capacity to control the human mind, make it calm. This aspect can improvr the human personality and capability to much higher levels of consciousness, as intrinsically it improves the interaction between individual and cosmic consciousness, unifying nature with humans!

Dear Dr.Nicolic,

I have offered an explaition of 'our subjective experience of time' in terms of cosciousness in my write up dated 20th October, under my paper titled "Ultimate Reality and Non-Material Origin of Universe". Please see it for your comments and questions if any.

Consciousness/nothingness/perfect silence seem to create things physical, how we can't know through present science methodology.Human mind involves consciousness in its operation and thus the brain gets involved too with consciousness. Some time back, Prof Eccles of Oxford University Professor of neurology was quoted as believing that the neurons in the supplementary motor area ( SMA ) of the brain were seen to get activated by external influences (outside the human body). He postulated a non-physical covering for the SMA that keeps a record of all such interactions and also does not die with the human body. Strangely, there is an Indian belief in incarnation where the rebirth of the soul of a dead person is supposed to carry the gist of one's actions in the past lives , called the SAMSKARAS. Thus, there are mysterious aspects that are not that easy to comprehend in the methodology of Science that has been worked out and believed strongly thus far! Here, i happen to cover partly the comments made by P.N. Tiwari in his posting above.

I write to comment that I argue in my FQXi essay contest paper that there is a direction of time in QFT (which might be said to be because of the positivity of the Hamiltonian, but I would prefer to say that it is because the algebra of observables is not invariant under time-reversal). This perhaps has something small to say about your comments on page 3 of your paper, "Both the "future" and the "past", as well as the "presence", are there, without any of them being less certain or less real then the other". I note that your sentiment that "Moreover, any attempt to define "future", "past", and "presence" in an observer independent way destroys the mathematical structure of the theory in an artificial and arbitrary manner" could be said to underlie the argument of my paper.

I apologize that I'm asking you to read my paper, "The direction of time in quantum field theory", on your comment thread. I found your paper interesting.

On a small detail in your paper, you comment that "In modern science, a positivistic philosophy dominates", however I believe a gradual shift can be detected amongst those who are more positivistic to accommodate the post-positivist critique of Quine, Feyerabend, Lakatos, and Kuhn, and of more recent writers, particularly the issues of theory incommensurability, the pessimistic meta-induction, the underdetermination of theory by evidence, and theory-ladenness. Although post-positivism is rightly criticized as non-constructive, nonetheless there is now broad acceptance that theoretical models are not as securely grounded by an observation language as a positivist would claim. I observe also that a Platonist view of Mathematical Physics is a common impulse in Physics, which I consider to be under-represented in positivism. Whether someone is willing to take seriously an effective field theory view of Mathematical models could be thought of as an acid test.

You also comment that "According to positivism, it does not make sense to discuss about something unless it can be empirically experienced", to which we could add that according to post-positivism, it does not make sense to discuss something unless we can place it in a larger theoretical context. For example, the edited volume "Models as Mediators" takes as its theme that we can only discuss anything in the world by constructing a thought-model that mediates between our sensory experience and what we say about it.

The paragraph of yours from which I'm quoting continues to ask "So, how to make positivism compatible with the requirement of objectivity?" and offers that "The answer is - by measurement." I think this is too brief to do proper justice to the distinction between inter-subjectivity and objectivity, either of which, I would say, is a sufficient requirement for science to be possible.

These are larger issues than we are asked to address for this essay contest, however, and are rightly small issues in your paper.

Best wishes,

Peter Morgan.

dear Dr. Nikolic,

Many posts have come up on your essay, without any response post from your goodself. May be wisdom is downing on you through silence thus far. Let it be shared with the commentators for their benefit! The choice however rests with you alone.

Dear Narendra Nath,

There are two reasons why I don't respond to the comments.

First, with some of them I completely agree and I have nothing new to say.

Second, some of them are purely philosophical, so I don't want to dwell into purely philosophical debates.

Thanks for the response. Philosophical comments on ' consciousness' deserve comments as many of the essays including yours, dwell on this non-physical parameter while dicussing ' The Nature of Time '. Your comments will benefit we all who are participating through various postings. In fact my own essay ' Mysteries of the Universe- a perspective' may benefit from your enlightening comments. Even the youngest among us, Clinton Kyle Miller may desire your intervention in an explict way than mere approval!

In my essay, I mainly discuss the block-time picture of the universe in classical (i.e., non-quantum) physics.

Yesterday I have finished a paper (not an essay, but also not too technical) in which the block-time way of thinking is used to propose a simple solution of the problem of time in quantum mechanics. You can download it from

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0811.1905

Comments on that paper would be wellcome as well.

Hrjove,

Has Ken Wharton seen your arXiv paper? I think your equation 6 might be of interest, for treatment in the 4-volume.

Tom

Hi Hrvoje,

Great essay! I agree with just about everything in it, but I still can't quite imagine telling my students that time in physics has little to do with their notion of time (even though it may be true!). (Your arXiv paper, on the other hand, I'm having some problems with; I'll email you those comments separately once I have time to write them up.)

You mentioned in the comments of my essay that there are now "two" block universe essays -- are there really only two? I haven't yet read most of them, of course, but I was hoping there would certainly be more than just two! (I thought Carlo's essay, at least, should fit in this category.)

And, since I know where you're coming from on the physics side of things, I just have to ask... Are you imagining that the Bohmian quantum potential is what you call "unmatter" in this essay?

I also discuss Bohmian QM in my own essay, and conclude that it's the *best* standard interpretation, but the ontology of the quantum potential remains my main concern; I don't see how it can fit into the block universe. Related to this, I'd be interested to hear what you think about the portion of my essay concerning configuration space.

Cheers,

Ken

Hrvoje,

"On the other hand, unlike time, pime does not lapse or flow. Pime simply is, just like space. In this block-pime picture of the universe, there is simply no room for a pime-travel paradox [11], just as there is no room for a space-travel paradox."

What about Polchinski's paradox, for example?

"Now we are finally ready to answer the question posed in the title of this paper. Why many physicists still don't accept the block-time picture of the universe? This is because they use the same word "time" for two different entities. One of them, that we still calltime, is indeed incompatible with the block-time picture. The block picture refers only to the other, now called pime. All the confusion stems from a tacit assumption that these

two "times" are the same, while they are not."

Exactly, I agree.

Great essay,

Mark

The sensing of physical time in Physics gets messy when one takes it as the fourth dimension in space/time picture. It gets tied to 'c'. The same is no longer seen to be constant if one believes cosmolgy eperiment on the light coming from an object 12 billion years back. It came out to be slightly more, over and above the measuremental errors of the day. If one goes back further to within fisrt billion years of our universe, my essay indicates the likelihood of a still higher value for 'c'. Everything is fine if we confine ourselves to more recent times. The implication is that Physics is not the same for the earlier times of the universe. What we have worked out now holds good in more recent times? If 'c' changes, time scale need to change too. For the possibility of multi-universes, the picture can be still more open. The dimensionality aspect for the gravity as conditioned by quantum aspects really throws another challenge for the concept of time within and outside of a system involved!

Dear Hrvoje,

Well written and interesting exposure! Congratulations!

After reading your essay I tried to test your proposal of pime/time difference in practice. I had to meet somebody at noon, and I took the subway. During this trip, I checked the time when I left home, the time at the subway's clock, the time when the subway arrived at the destination station, and again when I arrived at the meeting point. I used my table clock, my phone clock, the subway clock, and I also compared with my friend's clock. Were all these times, or "pimes"? My understanding is that all these devices measure physical time.

During the travel in the subway, because I was a little late, I was anxious, and the time seemed to flow very slowly. When I returned home, I could be relaxed and read from a book, and the same time in subway seemed to me much shorter. So, this was the subjective time. But the subway clock showed the same time lapse in both cases.

When I was traveling in the subway towards the meeting point, somebody asked me "what time is it". Of course, the question being about time, I should have answered "the time is flowing too slow, I am in hurry". Instead, I decided to simply tell the "pime" showed by my cell phone, to keep the appearance of a mentally sane person.

People use the term "time" when they really discuss about pime. When they ask "what time is it", they expect you to tell them the "pime". They use instead of the term "time" in your acceptation, the term "subjective time", or "psychological time".

I would say that I see another difference between the frozen time and the flowing time, which you felt, and you may or may not succeed in expressing, but I failed in perceiving it from your essay. In Tegmark's formulation, is the difference between the "bird view", and the "frog view". Is the difference between a flatlander, and a visitor from the 3-rd dimension. Of course, physicists do this by their imagination, not by traveling in other dimensions.

The pime is viewed geometrically, as a 1-dimensional structure. The psychological time is 0-dimensional - is the experience of the present. To put all the 1-dimensional information in a 0-dimensional structure, we admit that the time is changing - it is flowing.

I believe that it is the switch between "bird view" and "frog view" responsible for the confusions about time which you are trying to solve by the introduction of the new term "pime". "Pime" is the time in the "bird view", and "time" is in the "frog view".

Best wishes,

Cristi Stoica

"Flowing with a Frozen River",

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/322

Ken,

You are right that a many-particle wave function lives in the 4n-dimensional configuration spacetime, not in the 4-dimensional spacetime. I also agree with you that it is a puzzle that needs a better understanding. This is something that I am working on, but at the moment I do not have a completely satisfying answer.

Mark,

I discuss the paradoxes of the Polchinski type in more detail in Ref. [12].

Essentially, they are resolved by observing that only self-consistent solutions of the equations of motion are solutions. If some initial condition does not lead to a self-consistent solution, then such an initial condition is simply impossible. This is not in conflict with free will if you assume that a true free will does not exist. But even free will can be introduced consistently, by proposing that free will does not choose initial conditions, but self-consistent solutions themselves.

Cristi,

You have presented a nice explanation of the difference between pime and time. Thanks!