Hello Mr. Tyson,
i experienced your paper as thought provoking.
re:
"It may be initially difficult to think of motion in terms of an instantaneous velocity that exists only in the present. To aid our thinking, I would suggest a new quantity which I call "urge" (u). It can be thought of as a property of a particle that describes its ..desire,, to be somewhere else at the present instant. (I'm not intending to be anthropomorphic here-it is just the easiest way to describe this.) It is a property like mass and charge, except that it is a vector property, having direction as well as quantity. It has both an lower limit and an upper limit. The lower limit is zeroo since negative urge, like negative velocity, is simply positive velocity in a different direction. Its upper limit is the "utgency of light" (i.e. the speed of light). This is a constant which Einstein found to be fundamental, and itself suggests that motion or urge is fundamental rather than time."
but that 'urge' of light would appear to exist only in our perception. form a photon's perspective, traversing from a star some 5.4 billion light years away to the point where it intersects with the retina of your eye while out stargazing one evening occurs instantaneously - there is no velocity in the instantaneous - from the perspective of the photon, there cannot be said to be any velocity, and thus no length here. your perception of space and velocity appear to be a figment of consciousnes.
this appears to leave only consciousness and events therein, occurring in the present, in the set of that which can be said to exist.
i like it. :-)
btw... what is 'present'? my understanding of the term is that it is a short space of time between the past and future, but you've apparently done away with past and future, so 'present' remains undefined - is this a temporal location? can't be a temporal location, since time is just in the imagination. where is it from 'now'? where does it exist? is it fundamental? 'present' compared to what? what evidence do you offer for the existence of 'present'? did Newton have a 'present'? if so, is it still present? if no, where is it? what happened to it? what is 'velocity' in 'present' - if that is an instant, there can be no velocity (as seen with the photon) - anything at a given instant has s specific location and cannot be said to be moving (see Zeno's arrow paradox). what is 'velocity' (urge) in 'present'? how do you quantify 'urge'? noticing that the only place i seem to be aware of any 'present' is in my consciousness...
anyway, it's great to know that time doesn't really exist. i'll remember that if i ever happen to be terribly late for work some day in a future the only existence of which is in my imagination (so, when i get there, it can't be real).
i believe it was your expressed intent to be thought provoking.
a fun read.
thanks
:-)
matt kolasinski
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ..."
-Isaac Asimov