In the Kyoto lecture of 1922, Einstein said:
"There is an inseparable relation between time and signal velocity."
Wikipedia states that: "The signal velocity is the speed at which a wave carries INFORMATION.
It describes how quickly..."
"...a MESSAGE can be communicated between two separated parties."
An "informationalist"-- as I understand it-- might read the above paragraphs in the following way:
In nonstandard analysis, Robinson taught us about languages and models.
Looks like there is a model in these paragraphs.
But it would be the first step in informationalism to think-- instead-- about languages and SITUATIONS.
As in: "situation theory" from Jon Barwise's book "The Situation in Logic."
(Robinson and Barwise were friends long ago at Yale.)
Back to "the situation":
"What type is it?"
If you ever read The Informationalist's Handbook, that is the very next question.
Well-- to support all this talk about "information," "message," "sender," "receiver," and so on, there clearly must be an "information channel" in this situation. It must be -that- type of situation. Otherwise, how would the information be transmitted, how would the message be carried?
The term "information channel" comes from Barwise's second to last book, the one with Jerry Seligman: "Information Flow: The Logic of Distributed Systems."
On the cover, there are diagrams of information channels between pieces of office equipment.
Diagramming tools, of course, were in-scope for that workshop with Barwise--
"'Business Applications of Situation Theory:
Algebra, Relativity, Diagrams, and Situations' at Work"
You can imagine the T-shirts.
I've still got one around here somewhere. (A colleague had paid a friend to do the artwork. It's Alice in the Red Queen's race.)
To understand TIME in his own mind, Albert Einstein went outside himself to imagine clocks, situated on machine bases if you will.
It's always been opaque to me as to how this imaginary apparatus of clocks and rigid rods puts into operation anything like the most profound idea that Einstein had ever had about time:
"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once."
If we only had just one more model of time!
Then we could compare it against Einstein's, above, and see which model comes closer to this deep, intuitive insight.
Here's how I found such a model--
There were millions of dollars at stake in a monster manufacturing line. Nobody could say for sure whether or not it would work. It did look great in blueprint form. And in those days, it actually was a blueprint!
So they did an RFP for a computer simulation from a local conveyor company. But I told them I could get it done in half the time.
So I wrote the purchase order for Smalltalk80, which had just come on the market no more than a couple of months previous.
Then I went to OOPSLA in San Diego, got another Smalltalk80 with every class for every queuing mathematics, semaphores, scaleable parallel computing system, everything you needed to write a multi-threaded, parallel simulation.
This became a diagramming tool I then used to draw the Petri net of the manufacturing system. Each Petri net transition would generate it's own code. I could just point and click, to add code to a transition here, a transition there. There were hundreds and hundreds of transitions. But really, it was just a small net.
Here's the problem I ran into:
Say I had a conveyor feeding parts into a press. In the real world, they can back up till everything stops. But in the very first stages, what my Petri nets would do is just keep feeding every part into the press as soon as it came along-- destroying all my simulated work!
So to every transition in the simulation, I added a "feedback loop." It was an INFORMATION CHANNEL.
The feedback loop held a place for a game coin.
When it finished its work, each transition in the net would place a coin in it's own feedback loop slot. It was the SIGNAL "ready for more work."
Only when that SIGNAL existed, could a part then move into the press.
(Moving a part into the press somehow "removes" the coin.)
Those were the rules.
I had to give the press some simulated TIME so it could do its work.
And to give it that TIME, I had to:
"Keep everything from happening at once."
*****
"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once."
Now, we have another model for comparison.
So here are two models for saying some things about TIME:
1. Clocks on bases of rods sending signals
2. State transitions with feedback loops to "self," running an algorithm in a simulation that "keeps everything from happening at once." I.e, a STREAM.
It looks like #1 is better for a model to say things about "coordinate time."
While #2 is better for saying things about "proper time."
As I understand it, so far in GR, proper time is DEFINED based on coordinate time. Here, both would be "independent" processes.
That would pretty much be like Bohm and Hiley's statement about the Born rule-- that the two sides of the equation are two "independent concepts."
Here then, the two independent concepts are "coordinate time" and "proper time."
To an informationalist, the defining equation for proper time based on coordinate time now looks like an "infomorphism," like the Born infomorphism.
But an infomorphism can exist only if an information channel exists.
There needs to be an information channel so the defining equation of proper time from coordinate time can become a transmission of information.
Please see previous post-- objects (using language about coordinate time) and processes (using language about proper time) both swim in a stream. The stream affords the information channel.
