The Nature of Time

Ilgaitis,

Information is all we have about ourselves, our world and the universe. But we know the rest of the world and the universe exists independent to ourselves e.g. because we don't choose to be maimed and killed in car accidents, and we don't choose to drown in a tsunami. However, we are not 100% independent of the world and the universe, because we realise that we are part of the world and the universe.

Information is what is represented symbolically e.g. as words, sentences and equations. These symbols representing information are written on paper, spoken as soundwaves, or stored and manipulated in computers (where the representations are re-represented as binary digits). We can assume that, underneath all the representations, is something real: something that is not a representation. Law of nature relationships, mass, velocity, space and time are real. However, it is clear that mass, velocity, space and time are relationships, and relationship between relationships.

As observers, information is our context with respect to the rest of the world. Information is not relationships between things (e.g. observers, chairs and piles of sand are things). Information is relationships between our knowledge of things. If there is such a thing as objectively true information, it is not useful to us: the only useful information is contextual information.

Lorraine

Dear Edwin Eugene Klingman,

I asked "how to unlearn Maxwell's hypothetic (light carrying) medium?". When Einstein himself uttered: we don't need the ether, this additionally contributed to massive distrust among the 100 authors who naively focused on paradoxes that are deeper rooted in Maxwell's hypothesis of a medium analog to air that carries sound. Why was the ether felt as an indispensable credo to Lorentz? Shouldn't he have realized that acoustic media are subject to various physical influences on the wave speed, e.g. what gas, temperature, pressure, wind, etc. while electromagnetic waves may propagate within empty space with universally constant speed c?

You mentioned (on p. 14) that Einstein referred to "Fizeau's experiment upon which I [Einstein] based my special theory of relativity". I overlooked this detail. Can you please give a reference?

More than a decade agoI attended a conference in Pine Mountain which is not too much remote from your residence (in Huntington/Alabama?). Meanwhile I didn't even leave my home in Magdeburg for properties near Berlin. So there is no chance for a face-to-face conversation.

I am however ready to take issue concerning what I consider to be better explained including the 2c fallacy.

My very best regards

Eckard Blumschein

Hi Lorraine,thanks for sharing your ideas,it is well explained.Regards

Hi, Lorraine

This is the best explanation of the information which I have ever read.

Best regards

Ilgaitis

It is well explained but we need to rank and differenciate the informations.For example we have primordial informations in our quantum series implying properties.We have the binar informations invented by us the humans and we have informations due to communication and encodings in brains.That permits to better understand the consciousness even in considering the 3 main systems.

"Existence" takes meaning from its logical opposite, nothingness.

Existence from nothingness is not possible because of the rule of non-contradiction.

But, between "existence" and "nothingness", a dynamic process can happen, which is neither.

So, we have a dynamic process. Starts as a small point. But look out the window and it is a big universe. This process is spontaneous (nobody is pushing) and generating (makes more units of itself, not superimposable= big universe). A spontaneous and generating process is .... An explosive process. The Big Bang was not an event. It was the beginning of a spontaneous process that is still happening right now.

The whole universe is made of this substance-process which, in its simplest form, we call TIME. This is why, as we know, at the atomic and sub-atomic level everything moves, jiggles, vibrates, ... by itself.

Dark matter is just this time process clumping on itself and giving the impression (effect) that we interpret as the presence of some unseen dark mass...

See my last essay for more details

Marcel,

Correction:

I meant Huntsville, not Huntington.

Steve and Ilgaitis,

Thanks for your vote of confidence in my description of information. But please note that my view of information is not physics' view of information.

I distinguish:

1) information, which has inherent context with respect to the rest of reality; from

2) A) coded representations of information (e.g. words, numbers, equations, binary digits are coded representations), and B) mathematical calculations of probability performed on coded representations (which results in a number i.e. Shannon information), where both A and B are symbolic representations which have no inherent context with respect to the rest of reality.

I'm saying information is an observer's subjective experience of relationship and context, where this relationship and context is real: it is not a symbolic or coded representation of relationships and context. Physics is saying that information is objective facts, symbolic representations without context.

Physics' view of information is muddled, and somewhat mystical, because physics fails to distinguish between information and coded representations of information. Physics usually believes that coded information IS information. And physics contends that numbers that have no context, can have "surprise value" or equivalently "reduction in ignorance/uncertainty", and that this surprise value is a feature of information.

P.S.

Computers use electricity and integrated circuits on silicon chips to represent zeroes and ones and represent Boolean AND/OR/NOT logic.

In quantum computers, quantum states are used to represent the quantum version of zeroes and ones; and special quantum logic gates/circuits are used to represent a special, looser, quantum logic, which provides the correct solutions with only a calculatable probability.

We use these quantum states to represent a code, so that we can do certain types of mathematical calculations.

But these quantum states are not actually a code. So, notions like the "computational capacity of the universe" [1] are completely misguided.

1. "Computational capacity of the universe" by Seth Lloyd, October 2001, https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0110141

Hello Lorraine,

You are welcome,I like read your ideas and thoughts.

Best Regards :)

Dear Edwin,

Let me go on preferring to trust in what you ascribed to HH on your page 20: "Michelson's experiment(s)is taken to imply that there is no ether. ... One paradox is (already) too much."

Your Cooperstock paper deters me by using various tensors and the notion spacetime.

While I am not at all interested in em propagation in a medium, AE is ascribed also on p. 20 to state: "Fizeaus's experiments and stellar aberration were the phenomena upon which I most strongly based my theory".

What about your correct attribution of gamma to energy, i.e. v_squared, not to v. I found in the four annus mirabilis papers:

Photonic effect

Brownian motion

Special Relativity

Mass-energy equivalence

nothing that justified SR. On the contrary, the first page of SR indicated to me that AE was aware of the issue v vs. v_squared.

We should deal with more issues in which we agree.

My best regards,

Eckard Blumschein

In reply to Eric's original query; there is a precise match!

You appear to be talking about theories of Quantum Gravity or Geometrization, Eric. There is some resemblance with the conditional application of direction in CDT (Causal Dynamical Triangulations), where adjoining geometric segments must have the same time direction. But I see a pretty precise match with a recent paper by Paola Zizzi, which talks about a specific configuration of gates constructing spacetime in the early universe, in the context of a Quantum Growing Network.

Entangled Space-Time is found at arXiv:1807.06433

I hope the paper above is relevant to this discussion. I only discovered this thread today, but I recently submitted a paper for publication on the origin of time. So I think I might have something worthwhile to say. But I will wait until I've looked through the many interesting comments above. I intend to rejoin this conversation in earnest, when I have a little more time to spare.

All the Best,

Jonathan

Hi Jonathan,

Happy to see you again,thanks also for sharing your paper.You are relevant.BestRegards

the only time is NOWAttachment #1: 1_How_many_Models_of_Time_do_we_need_in_Physics_-_personal_copy.pdf

Dear Edwin,

In order to check whether the Lorentz gamma is actually a time transformation, I looked into en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Lorentz_transformations and found confirmed that not Einstein but Lorentz dealt with Fitzeau and aberration:

"In order to explain the aberration of light and the result of the Fizeau experiment in accordance with Maxwell's equations, Lorentz in 1892 developed a model ("Lorentz ether theory")."

"Similar transformations were introduced ... by Lorentz (1892, 1895) who analyzed Maxwell's equations, they were completed by Larmor (1897, 1900) and Lorentz (1899, 1904), and brought into their modern form by Poincaré (1905) who gave the transformation the name of Lorentz.[13]".

My best regards,

Eckard Blumschein

Information is not objective [1]. Information is the only possible knowledge that components of the universe can carry i.e. incomplete subjective knowledge of their context within the system.

This contextual information is not about relationships between the components of the system; and obviously, information has nothing to do with binary digits, which have no inherent context, and which can only ever symbolically represent information.

Contextual information is about relationships between categories of knowledge, where "lower-level" categories of knowledge are e.g. mass, position, velocity (speed and direction) etc.

But seemingly, time is a primitive "higher-level" category of knowledge, which can only be acquired via algorithmic analysis of "lower-level" information. Living things acquire sophisticated "higher-level" knowledge about their context, which is necessarily built upon analysis and synthesis of "lower-level" information. But one must ask: what is the use of this "higher-level" information if the information is not associated with "higher-level" outcomes i.e. outcomes that can't be provided by law of nature relationships?

1. The Quantum Question of an Objective Reality, by Gabriella Skoff, 21st March 2019: "The researcher's findings suggest ... that in quantum physics there is no objective reality; that reality itself is observer-dependent... this conclusion ...calls the concept of objective fact--the very pursuit of science itself--into question." https://projectqsydney.com/2019/03/21/the-quantum-question-of-an-objective-reality

More correctly, time is a "higher-level" category of information, which can only be acquired via algorithmic analysis of "lower-level" categories of information, where the quantities/numbers applying to these categories have changed. The sense of time is due to the sense of change.

Some people would claim that this number change needs no explanation: that (what we would represent as) number change is just what the universe does, end of story. But this type of defeatist attitude is contrary to the spirit of physics. And in fact when looked at closely, number change is quantum: there is no smooth number change in the universe. This raises the question: should the numerical outcomes of quantum events be seen as "higher-level" outcomes, as opposed to the "lower-level" numerical outcomes that are due to law of nature relationships?

Eric Aspling,

Re "Understanding the Irreversibility of Time":

Algorithmic information IS one-way information.

Dear Lorraine,

Your answer is incomplete. Algorithm is sequence of operations in time. There is other way: analog computing. In this case information is distributed in space and one gets result simultaneously.

Best regards

Ilgaitis