daerengD Time Paradigm by Brian Beverly

Doug, thanks for pointing out the two essays I enjoyed them. Do you have any other ones you liked?

Dear Brian,

It is so pleasant to see the response of young person who is working hard to earn his living in order to pursue Graduate studies. i wish you all luck in Physics as i feel sure you will make a mark to raise present day stagnant Physics through freshness of ideas. Besides my essay kindly see one by another young man, Kyle Miller on Here and Now. The future of Physics in young men like you is bright.

Though you satisfied me partly but you refrained from providing your opinion on Entropy, in contrast to the common belief that it represents the state of order/disorder!

Although you wrote some queries that are not concerned with theme here, if i find time,i shall communicate with you on Internet ( my ID is ).However, i like that you giving respect to"KARMA" means ' Actions'. It may surprise you that this very word has been emphasized by Krishna in the scripture ' GITA/Bhagwatgita' where he extols that the Dharma or religion of a person is what he practices in his Actions and not what he professes or belongs to on virtue of Birth! Pure consciousness for you as an 'atheist' is all powerful, timeless non-physical entity that can be considered to have generated the physical universe and all its contents and still permeate the entire Creation! i have attempted to bring such holistic considerations to science, based on my own experiences as a scientist second, human being first.

Hi Brian,

There are so many good ones, I hate to try to choose, but three I've mentioned before are Rovelli's, Gibbs', and, my favorite so far, Lynds', but I really like Gambini's too. Then there is Carl Brannen's, Kiefer's, Pitkanen's, Prati's, and many others, like Sherbon's. I'm afraid I'm going to leave out someone. There are so many good reads.

It almost goes without saying that I have also enjoyed the essays of those most vociferous in the forums, like McGluken, Merryman, Le Rouge, Nath. Of course, there's this one by Stanbridge - what do you think of that?

Clearly, I'm not done. I've got many more to go and many I want to re-read. How about your recommendations, Brian?

Brian,

I neglected to mention Tom Ray's essay. I'm sure I've left out others too. It's hard to keep track. I probably should gen up a spread sheet with some sort of matrix evaluation to help me keep track of all the goodies!

Dear Brian,

Please use your own judgement instead of others recommendations. In fact, i was not expecting such suggestions in the postings. Unfortunetely, our bias plays a role that 'good science needs to avoid'. Best of luck for you and appreciation for your post on my essay!

Oh man! Twenty new essays in today, just under the deadline! I checked the names for someone familiar, and to my great surprise and delight, one of them is by Hestenes!

It's a doozy!!!!!!!

Doug, there are so many new essays! I have been obsessed with time for a long time. The good news is reading so many essays on the nature of time has cured my time addiction. Although the essays have driven me to drinking and rants about eigenvalues.

A good comic about the grandfather paradox:

http://abstrusegoose.com/80

Here is an awesome idea about changing the way humanity thinks about time. I just finished his book I highly recomend it:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/stewart_brand_on_the_long_now.html

Hi Brian,

I enjoyed reading your essay and find it highly original. Also, I only learned about the concept of derangement through your essay.

I do have a question: Wouldn't according to your idea an unstable charged particle decay faster in a strong field than in a weak field because there are more source charges contributing to the field, hence a greater number of possible derangements?

I have written an essay as well, which you can take a look at if you like. I appreciate tough questions.

Armin

Armin,

Thank you for the comment; I'm glad you found it original and learned about derangements. The big idea is time = change. I assumed the universe has some fundamental objects with no internal structure. Without any internal structure there can be no internal change. Therefore such objects would only experience change by interactions outside of themselves. I took a combinatorics course a year ago and I think combinatorics is an important but often neglected theoretical tool. Combinatorics seems to naturally fit with entropy and my idea for time.

I also like tough questions because it makes good ideas stronger and eliminates the dead ends. If my approach is wrong I don't want to waste my life pursuing it.

I'm not sure I fully understand your question or the consequences of it. Are you implying the quantum Zeno experiment? In it a collapse of the wavefunction prevents the decay of a radioactive isotope until the "measurement" ceases.

Brian,

Thank you for your comments on my essay. I will respond to them there.

I see space (or at least distance) as an equal partner when considering time and change because without it, I cannot visualize how it is possible for change to occur. In other words, the consideration of a "before" and "after" requires in my view a locational background through which these notions become meaningful, but I think I am becoming a bit philosophical.

I am taking thermodynamics/statistical mechanics this term and I think I tend to agree that combinatorics can be a useful tool in physics (although I have not taken a course on this).

When it comes to receiving constructive criticism you are fortunate to possess the wisdom that eludes many people who are much older than you.

wrt to my question, I was not referring to anything as sophisticated as the quantum zeno effect. Let me give a simple example to illustrate what I mean:

Consider the muon. As far as we know, it is a fundamental particle and therefore, by your idea, it can experience time only by means of its interactions outside of itself. Here I will consider interactions with an electric field, since the muon carries a non-zero electric charge. It is also unstable, and therefore the decay time (when considering a large sample of muons) can act as a clock.

Scenario 1:

Consider a muon that travels through a field set up by two identical electric charges q1 and q2. For simplicity assume the charges are equidistant from the Muon. There are two arrangements associated with the electric field sources(q1,q2) and (q2,q1) which are derangements of each other.

Scenario 2:

Consider a muon that travels through a field set up by three identical electric charges q1, q2 and q3. For simplicity, again assume the charges are equidistant from the muon (they would have to be in a plane perpendicular to the muon's direction of motion). There are six arrangements associated with the electric field sources (q1,q2, q3) (q1,q3,q2) (q2,q1,q3) (q2,q3,q1) (q3,q1,q2) (q3,q2,q1) which can be divided into three deranged pairs.

There are more derangements associated with the second scenario. Here each individual combination has only one derangement but with n(q)>3 it can have more than one.Would it therefore not be expected that the average decay time of a large sample of muons passing through a field created by more source charges i.e. a stronger field be shorter than that of one passing through a weaker one?

Armin

Dear Brian,

i enjoyed our exchange of posts on your original essay that i enjoyed very much. Wish you all the success in your upcoming Graduate School studies. i will be happy to interact you through e-mailing if you too care. My ID is .

It is always nice to interact with youngsters like you who like to follow an innovative approach instead of just following the beaten pathways in science. i am convinced the future of Physics that is a bit stagnant currently , is bright in the hands of youngsters like you. You have my vote! Best wishes, Narendra Nath

Narendra,

Thanks for all your encouraging comments. For some reason your email address did not make it into the above post. I worry that people will stop bouncing ideas off each other when the contest is over. I am also interested in nuclear physics, especially fusion. I'm sure our friendship will continue to flourish. You or anyone else from the contest can contact me at:

derangedphysicsnerd@gmail.com

Armin,

I agree space and time are linked and therefore "change" in space must always occur. I relate to the fact that absolute zero can never be reached. Temperature is related to motion in space and it is impossible to stop all motion.

Ah, thank you for clarifying your question. I was very liberal in my use of the word fundamental. Muons do decay into electrons and neutrinos but I usually think of space itself as quantized and fundamental.

In both scenarios you touch on the key idea you mention identical particles, however, my core idea was fundamental but different interactions. I like to think of walking in a solid black room then imagine passing through a permeable wall into a white room. Both rooms are empty there are no clocks on the walls and both rooms are different and distinct from each other. If I kept walking from room to room my concept of time and distance would be the number of times I measured change.

I think in the scenarios the force carrying particles must also be included. I have been thinking of trying to divide the derangements according to their particle spins. I know that by the exclusion principle two electrons with the same quantum numbers can not occupy the same orbit. Perhaps the exclusion principle is woven into the fabric of space-time?

I forgot to mention the point....you regard q1 and q2 as identical therefore the derangement q1q2 and q2q1 are identical and are both mircrostates of the qq macrostate. In the second case all the derangements would be microstates of the qqq macrostate.

Hi Brian,

Thank you for clarifying the point I raised. I am a little unclear on the following points, though:

-do you consider particles like electrons protons etc. as fundamentally indistinguishable or distinguishable?

-is you room example a metaphor for the quantization of space? what are the room colors metaphors for?

As you likly know, the Pauli Exclusion principle is a direct consequence of the antisymmetrization requirement, so that would seem to be a suitable point of attack. Also, if you want to incorporate spin into your theory, you will probably have to address the spin-statistics theorem. There is a book edited by Julian Schwinger that has Pauli's original paper in which he derives his principle (as well as Feynman's original papers on path integrals) and which you can buy from amazon for under 5 bucks (excl. S&H). It is called 'Selected papers on Quantum electrodynamics'. It may be good resource for your efforts (I am certainly glad I bought it)

Armin

I never tried to picture a proton or electron, for years it was only a philosophical idea. Then I found the derangement which fit and also looked similar to the time evolution of the wavefunction. As I played with it I saw it worked with entropy and the collapse of the wavefunction. The goal was to create a mathematically simpler wavefunction with a conceptual idea of time. I started with a philosophy followed some mathematics and there is the smallest chance it is important to physics. So I'm not sure what I would consider fundamental obviously protons have quarks and this quickly leads to discussions on nuclear forces. A string theorist would tell us the strings are fundamental and all the particles that we observe are vibrational modes of the fundamental strings. I was thinking of Fermi-Dirac/Bose-Einstein statistics which may give me some insight. After all both statistics are related to entropy, quantum mechanics and the exp(-n) function.

Brian,

I don't think that it is absolutely necessary to have a picture of atoms in order to be able construct a useful scientific theory about them. Look at how 'easy' it is to picture the wavicles of quantum mechanics! (There is actually a QM text book called the "picture book of quantum mechanics"; while I have not read it, I think the concept is intriguing.)

But even without a picture, one can still assign certain properties to them, and it seems that for your idea the property of distinguishability (or lack thereof) is going to be an indispensible part.

I agree that intuitively it seems that there may well be a place for the concept of derangement in boson/fermion statistics, but as I found out this semester, this subject is too abstract for my taste to cause me to become as passionate as I am about the foundations of qm and relativity, which is what it would take to compel me to look for such a place.

Armin

Agreed, the next aspect to focus on is the distinguishably. Seeing as how you took thermo this semester I'm not surprised you dislike the FD/BE statistics. They are usually covered at the end, are poorly explained and the student is exhausted. The only thing I pictured and tried to explain was the properties of the probabilistic wave aspect.

Brian

Brian,

I thought I'd post this in response to a comment of yours on George Ellis' discussion;

"George,

"I think that "infinity" (i.e. a quantity that can never be attained or measured) is a mathematical concept that cannot occur in the real physical universe."

If I may paraphrase this, it would seem to say that because infinity doesn't have measurable boundaries, i.e, is not finite, it doesn't exist?

If I may extend this logic a little further, it could be argued that nothing has finite boundaries, as everything, you, me, the moon, are nodes in some larger network. Even defining the entire universe runs up against dark energy and matter, the possibility of other universes, worlds, dimensions, etc. What came before the Big Bang, where the energy of the universe goes next etc. It would seem quite difficult to argue the entire universe, if it is defined as singular, isn't also some node in a larger network.

So it would seem that no thing has absolutely finite boundaries. Does that mean that nothing is "real"?"

Infinity does consist of any number of measurable quantities, but without an overall description of them. There is no "God" perspective because an objective perspective is an oxymoron.