• [deleted]

Essay Abstract

Complex time, with real (sequential) and imaginary (simultaneous) components facilitates the requirement of an observer to collapse the wave function of the universe. The end state informs the beginning. The infinite configurations of virtual n-dimensional space-time offer a fecundity of choices with consistent and persistent histories of our familiar four dimensional space-time. The future becomming the past is cuncurrent with the collapse of the wave function, both in a global sense and within us, a collection of localized and individuated observers.

Author Bio

Jim Stanfield is an associate engineer at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Passtimes include photography, writing, and mycology.

Download Essay PDF File

  • [deleted]

Jim,

Wow.

  • [deleted]

great reading for a layman

7 days later
  • [deleted]

Thank you for your kind words.

  • [deleted]

Jim,

I like your essay for three reasons; First you naturally appreciate the point I focused on in my essay, that time isn't a meta dimension from past to future, but is the effect of future potential collapsing into past circumstance. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates. Not the earth travels along a fourth dimension from yesterday to tomorrow.

Two; You really make an inspired effort to explain consciousness functioning as an integral part of reality and not just a by product or external element. Personally I find both atheism and monotheism to be equally limited. We are far too primitive to really delve very far into the issue of consciousness, other than to say it's as fundamental to biology as gravity is to mass. I think the only real hope for humanity is to continue up the scale of fractal evolution and transition from being top predator in the global eco-system to central nervous system of the global organism. This would require serious changes in thinking and attitude on many levels. The approaching world crisis might offer an opportunity though. Shock Doctrine on many levels.

Third; It's very well written, developed, accessible and informative.

  • [deleted]

Hello James,

Your essay does apparently not satisfy the desire of experts for highly speculative theories to pretend unifying QFT with QG as if the topic was quantum physics and not the nature of time.

However, it also fails to be as utterly unwelcome as the essay of mine.

Nonetheless, you are an engineer like me and should therefore be able to understand or refute my reasoning concerning some overlooked details with complex representation of physical quantities.

Regards,

Eckard Blumschein

  • [deleted]

Eckard,

Your essay was one that I read with interest as it dealt with imaginary time. And I would place it easily within the top half of those I read. There are so many excellent ones it will be difficult to pick only three.

I am afraid that I am not qualified to confirm or dispute your math but it seems sound enough to me. So much of it revolves around interpretation. In math classes we are taught to ignore the imaginary solutions as unphysical. But complex math reveals a deeper level of reality that spills over to the physical world in so many ways that it can not be dismissed so easily as non physical.

Don't feel so bad about your essay. You got it out there. It got read. I, for one, liked it! I think the most useful thing about this essay contest is that it provides a forum for a huge spectrum of ideas, from the conventional to the radical at every level of difficulty. It was a great learning experience for me to write mine and another great learning experience to go through as many of the others as I was able. I wish I had time to read them all.

Jim

  • [deleted]

Hi Jim,

Great essay. I particularly admire the fact that you recognize that certian theories of time are not compatible with relativity. That is the central theme to the first part of my essay. People have been asking me how my theory compares to many others out there. The best way I can convey how my view of time compares to other theories is to show you what I recently wrote to Carlo Rovelli on his thread:

-----------------

You argue that the origin of time variable features are not mechanical, rather - emergent at the thermodynamical level. Do you have any thoughts as to how velocity or gravity affect the time dilation of these thermodynamical activities? It seems to me that despite all of the essays, with so many different opinions of time's true nature - we have only two possible fundamental starting points:

1) That the thermodynamical activity, or motion (or what I refer to as fundamental behaviors in my essay) is used as a measurement of "time" but plays a more passive role because these behaviors exist "in" time and their behaviors are just a visible symptom of what "time" they existed in due to their local environment.

Or

2) What we perceive as time is a macro effect of the most fundamental behaviors among particles, forces and fields. These behaviors define time and in fact are time. Now, if the most fundamental behaviors can all be accurately described as motion, then - okay. But if some behaviors on the quantum level no longer make sense to be described as motion, then it is safer to refer to the fundamental activities as "behaviors."

For those who commit to the first possible starting point, they would not appear to be in conflict with special relativity - namely Galileo's principle. The existence of time would be part of the metric that particles and forces exist "in." There would exist Einstein's inseparable connection between time and light signal velocity. There would be no "mechanism" - instead, the relative nature of time would just be a co effect of velocity and/or changing gravitational position. Time would exist as a mysterious entity (or co entity) and more questions would certainly need to be asked as to how we could get closer to determining its true nature.

For those who commit to the 2nd possible starting point (which is the one I am committed to) that motions or behaviors define time and in fact are time: Let's take a system with all of its fundamental behaviors and increase its velocity. These behaviors slow down. If the behaviors themselves "are" time and then become altered as a consequence of their increased velocity- then we need to revisit special relativity. Something is happening on the physical level that we currently don't have a description for.

----------------

Also, I posed this question to Julian Barbour (who has written a great essay)in response to a statement he made in his essay:

--------------------

If the universe can tell perfect time and could be considered the perfect clock, how would that assumption be affected if it is determined that there is no absolute age of the universe? If I am living on a far away galaxy accelerating at a much faster velocity than ours - then (assuming I take enough vitamins to live through the whole process) how old do I think the universe is from my perspective? Or, how old is the universe to me if I am near a black hole or better yet - If a very long time ago I watched the big bang from a safe distance (where my gravity and velocity would be very different compared to being "inside" the universe) how old would I think the universe is right now? Who would be correct?

-----------------------

I know it is difficult for many people to imagine not having a "time" somewhere in the mysterious background that particles, forces and fields are expressing their behaviors "in." I am just the opposite. I say: imagine taking away all of the particles, forces and fields along with the behaviors they engage in and tell me what is left to be considered a flow of time. If there is absolutely nothing, then there is nothing to express time. In my opinion, we should try to narrow to the most likely possibilitles that describe the nature of time and build from there.

Take care,

CJ

  • [deleted]

Chris,

You ask very provocative questions!

When I started my essay on time (about a year ago), I was very perplexed. Well into it, I at least thought that I had made a start. Now, after reading a good share of the essays on this site, I am as perplexed as ever.

There are many good insights here; many ways of looking at time. As you mention, one of the main threads relates time to motion is space. This, I think is a valid and fundamental approach. Every one of our clocks seems to embody this mechanism. There is the ephemeral time of the stars, the pendulum, a weight on a spring. Energy flow in the form of electromagnetic waves gives us the oscillation of an LC circuit at its characteristic frequency and in the quartz crystal of a digital watch. Deeper yet is the interplay of the permittivity and permeability of free space with the speed of light. Lights¡¯ smooth and regular transitions as it cycles between electric and magnetic field oscillating in phase space sets a speed limit for all motion. This gets us into the structure of that ¡®free space,¡¯ the mysterious vacuum. Presumably, the structure of the vacuum relates to the structure of space. From Newtonian mechanics through GR we have this cyclical sine curve; smooth and differentiable; deterministic and understandable, except for one thing; the mystery of what mechanism sets this speed of light. My first guess is that the structure of space sets it. But how? Abstract relations have no speed limit. It must be physical.

Wild conjecture and a hunger for an answer leads me to brew a hearty stew from the various available ingredients: superstrings vibrating in compactified orbafolds at the Planck scale being T-Dual with the curvature of space at the cosmic scale. Could something be oscillating within this specific structure to set the speed of light?

At an even more fundamental level, I think, time is dependent on physical being. The notion that time started at the big bang permeates our thinking. What seem to be the four fundamental attributes of being are mass, energy, space and time. Pairing them in one way, mass-energy and space-time, gives rise to General Relativity. The alternate pairing, mass(* velocity)-space and energy-time, gives rise to Quantum Mechanics. One pairing is commutative, the other is not. That a pair of virtual particles could discontinuously spring into being for a maximum time inversely proportional to it energy can also be taken as a fundamental clock. It also begs the question of that mysterious act of becoming.

As all roads lead to Modesto, I am constantly being led back to the notion of duality (my favorite tool for understanding anything and everything), and particularly, the primary duality of non-being and being.

Thinking works by comparison. For any attribute that can be assigned to the universe as a whole (or anything in it) the dual (opposite or conjugate) attribute must also be assigned as a background against which it is compared. Both halves of the duality must be present to unify the whole. Here is an example: Is the universe symmetric or asymmetric? It is both. With respect to the three mirrors, charge, parity and time (CPT), the universe is assumed to be perfectly symmetric. But with respect to the three taken in pairs or singly, there is an ever so slight asymmetry. Then on the macroscopic scale, entropy renders time almost totally asymmetric. And there seems to be an even more fundamental asymmetry. Through duality being implies non-being but non-being does not imply anything.

At one point, I had myself convinced that the continuity problem (and Zeno¡¯s paradox) was a non issue. GR space is smooth and differentiable; there is a derivative at every point. And even on the quantum scale, I thought, surely even if space is quantized at the Planck scale, uncertainty at that same scale would smooth out the granularity and make it continuous.

Duality throws the continuity of the universe into question. At its most fundamental level it is a unity. However, no physicality accrues to this undifferentiated whole. The act of becoming, non-being into being, is, I think, irreducibly discontinuous and discrete. How does nature jump this gap? By a quantum leap.

So, final answer on the nature of time: Fine tuned into the physical structure of space there is a characteristic frequency of becoming, ¥Äe ¥Ät ¡Ã ©¤/2. This may very well be the fundamental clock.

But there are many types of clocks: The oscillation of a photon, the electron pulsing around its atom, chemical clocks, geologic clocks, biological clocks; each clock relative to the process it is embedded in. Cyclical clocks tick sequential time but they do not explain every aspect of being or becoming. For a more complete view, I think we need a dualistic time, not in the sense of opposites but in the conjugate sense. A complex time.

To your one-or-the-other argument I would add this third possibility that it is both. There are many clocks of both types. At the speed of light, time becomes simultaneous, just like space. Dr. E¡¯s MDT is a fascinating explanation of why that would be. As time is relative, age and lifespan is also relative. For an eye-opener, do the time dilation calculation for the farthest galaxy out for the two cases where the earth is approaching and then receding as we go around the sun. The formula is in Brian Greens¡¯ ¡®The Fabric of the Cosmos.¡¯ Look at a muon hitting our atmosphere.

I agree with you that if you take away the particles and fields there would be no physical time, or at least the real (sequential) part of it. But the imaginary (simultaneous) part would remain.

The real component, which we sense so easily in an intuitive way, where each element of position and momentum collapses irreversibly into the past where it projects, or casts its shadow, into the future by limiting what can happen next. But there are many possibilities which still remain in superposition.

To speak metaphorically, the collapse of the wave function of the universe is ongoing. The ¡®now¡¯ rides the avalanche of discontinuous ticks of collapsing sub-wave functions forming the ordered and unique sequence of the past. The future is the sum over histories of all the multiverses yet in superposition; the un-collapsed portion of the wave function. The few remaining photons at the end of time, still entangled from the big bang, report back what has gone before. From the fecundity of infinite possibilities, the eigenstate that is holographically fruitful is chosen. These metaphors might capture this discontinuous, simultaneous and spontaneous side of nature that no differential equation can.

All the best.

Jim

  • [deleted]

I would like to comment the formatting problems and add a few notes to my previous post.

The formatting of the formula to what I called the characteristic frequency of becoming, which is just the energy-time formulation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principal (delta E times delta T is greater than or equal to h-bar/2) got clobbered when I posted it. I guess I will use plain text for my posts from here on out. The real equivalents to the virtual particles have the same energy.

On obvious aspect of the relativity of psychological time is that we have a sense of time that is inversely proportional to our age. When we are ten years old, one year seems so long to us because it represents ten percent of our years. When we are fifty, it seems a lot shorter because one year, and correspondingly months, weeks and days, represents only two percent of the time we have experienced. The respective difference in hours, minutes and seconds seems not to change that much because our wake-sleep cycle resets that internal clock.

I am surprised that so few people are into the principals of dissipative systems and self-organized criticality. To me, it is every bit as important as GR, QM and entropy in explaining our universe.

The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in describing physical reality is matched by the unreasonable expectation of mathematics to provide a final answer. Not withstanding the incremental progress that the insights of new ideas such as Dr. E's MDT provide, there is a fundamental gap between GR and QM, which I believe will never be resolved. Gravity will not be quantized. It is geometric and continuous. For it a block time suffices. But a closed block time is a static time. Nothing would ever change in a purely block time. For the dynamism and sequentiality of time as we intuitively know it, there needs to be a spontaneous element of discontinuous becoming. As different and incompatible as they are, we need both GR and QM, and viva la difference.

I would like to propose an experiment. It is a variation on the Young's two-slit experiment. With a suitable laser as a light source, replace the two slits with a hologram. Set up one or more cameras focused on the holographic image. In a totally darkened room, turn down the laser to the point that it is firing one photon at a time. The most direct way of determining a correct exposure would be to keep the shutter open for as long as it would take the equivalent number of photons to accumulate to produce a conventional exposure of that holographic image. In verification of the original two-slit experiment, the single photon should take all possible paths and interfere with itself to produce an interference pattern and reconstruct the 3-D virtual image.

I wish everyone a happy holiday season.

Jim Stanfield

  • [deleted]

Jim,

Here is a simplistic model; Non-being and being are space and motion.

The being of motion emerges from the non-being of space as polarity.

Time implies a fundamental linearity to this activity, but there is no linearity to non-being, so in mass these relationships tend toward a non-linear equilibrium.

Non-linear motion is scalar, i.e. temperature, pressure, etc.

Between the linear ticks of a clock is non-linear activity. So while units of time may be discrete, they are perpetuated by non-linear activity. As all this linear activity exists in an equilibrium, it cancels out to non-linear activity.

Space is described as dimensional, but that is essentially a linear description, as it is explicitly direction and distance. A non-linear description of space is volume.

The same logic that equates linear units of activity (time), to linear space (dimensions), could also equate non-linear activity (temperature/pressure), to non-linear space (volume). Just as time is described as a fourth dimension, temperature would be an additional parameter of volume, since the temperature and/or pressure of a given quantity of energy is affected by changing its volume, just as units of time change relative to velocity.

So it is a fluctuating vacuum, with dimension and volume describing the vacuum and time and temperature describing the fluctuation. Space and motion, non-being and being.

Now for cosmology; This fluctuation causes space to effectively expand for the energy crossing it. The further the energy travels, the more the effect is compounded, so that the redshift is increased relative to distance. Eventually the source appears to recede at the speed of light and this creates a horizon line for visible light, although black body radiation can cross it.

While space expands, it is also infinite, so the build up of energy creates vortices into which accreted energy/mass falls, until it breaks down to an entangled energy field and expands back out as light, seeding the vacuum with more energy.

The expanding energy/light is the present moving from past structure to future potential. The collapsing mass/gravity fields describe the units of time going from being in the future to being in the past.

Dr. E's expanding dimension of time is light. Einstein proposed the Cosmological Constant because gravity caused the structure of space to collapse. Energy moves from one unit of time to the next, while these units start in the future and recede into the past.

Just speculating....

  • [deleted]

Hello Jim & All,

I greatly enjoyed your essay!

It is great in scope and ties a lot together, asking all the right, honest, natural questions; and providing common sense contemplations and answers.

Welcome to the Hero's Journey--the fellowship of immortal souls!

I think you'll enjoy my podcast:

http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail1887.html

MDT allows us to get around Lockwood's reasoning on p. 2 of your essay, as MDT stipulates that the past is not real, but for in space-time diagrams, which are human constructs that were built upon not realizing that x4=ict implies that the the fourth dimension is moving, or dx4/dt=ic.

Indeed--a photon tells us as much! For a photon stays in one place in the fourth expanding dimension, while also defining a probabilistic spherically-symmetric wavefront expanding at c in our three spatial dimensions! How could this be, unless the fourth dimension was expanding in a spherically-symmetric manner? Well, Einstein almost wrote this with x4=ict. All he had to do was write dx4/dt=ic, which also accounts for quantum mechanics' nonlocality and entanglement, time and all its arrows and assymetries across all realms, entropy, and Huygens' and Heisenberg's principles.

In your conclusion you talk about the collapse of the wave function. In the photon's case, what this represents is a localization of the photon in the three spatial dimensions. The expansion of the fourth dimension is inherently nonlocal, and the photon surfs this fourth expanding dimension--dx4/dt=ic, and so it appears as a spherically-symmetric expanding wavefront of probability. (Please see attachement#1). Nonlocality and entanglement naturally descend from MDT.

All wavelike behavior comes from the fundamental wavelike behavior of the fourth expanding dimension. (Please see attachment #2)

Any clock which relies on changes in energy is inherently a light clock, and if we keep in mind that allphotons of energy surf the fourth expanding dimension at c indepentent of the velocity of the inertial frames, then light clocks in moving frames will be seen to run slower. (Please see the treatment in attachment #2)

So it is that MDT sets both the velocity of light c and Planck's constant, by proposing that the fourth dimension is expanding at the rate of c, relative to the three spatial dimensions with a wavelength of the Planck length. And too, MDT allows us to derive Einstein's Principle of Relativity from a deeper principle, along with time and all its arrows and assymetries, nonlocality, wave-particle/space-time/mass-nergy duality, entropy, and Huygens' and Heisenberg's principles.

Thanks for your essay and words!

Best,

Dr. E (The Real McCoy)Attachment #1: 1_MDT_PERVADES_NATUREIMAGINARY_NUMBERS_IMPLY_PERPENDICULARITY.pdfAttachment #2: 19_MOVING_DIMENSIONS_THEORY_EXAMINES_THE_GRAVITATIONAL_REDSHIFT_SLOWING_OF_CLOCKS.pdf

  • [deleted]

Hello Mr. Stanfield,

trying to get through reading the papers here in order of appearance. i'm jumping ahead a little to yours after first having had my attention drawn to this paper from your comments posted at:

Temporal Platonic Metaphysics by Aleksandar Mikovic

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/345

the following:

"I am drawn intuitively to the special case where D = 8 and N = 4 yielding four regular and four imaginary dimensions."

i have an interest in this also, for my own reasons.

you might find:

www.espresearch.com/espgeneral/doc-SpeedOfThought.pdf

of interest, if you get the time. maybe after the contest; it's not one of the entrants here.

lots of reading here. yes, lots of great ideas; yes, hard to settle on only 3. not personally concerned - we're all winners here as i see it. :-)

no, i didn't personally have anything to do with writing the Speed of Thought paper.

but Mr. Targ happens to live there in Palo Alto. (i see you work at LSAC)

you might also enjoy the FMBR (http://www.fmbr.org/), a little group that meets in the area started about 20 years ago by Bill Gough. you may know of him, he used to work at SLAC also.

from comments above, re:

Wild conjecture and a hunger for an answer leads me to brew a hearty stew from the various available ingredients: superstrings vibrating in compactified orbafolds at the Planck scale being T-Dual with the curvature of space at the cosmic scale. Could something be oscillating within this specific structure to set the speed of light?

good question. a physical effect requires a physical answer. best bet i've found here on that appears to be a scaling principle.

see:

The progression of time as a cosmological process by Johan Masreliez

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/343

and the suggestion that this scaling would generate a sort of vibration.

put that together with:

Time and Quantum - Musings about the Quantized Nature of Becoming by Chi Ming Hung

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/340

and you've got something of a quantized McGuken

who i've not yet seen how to get quantizations out of.

i haven't gotten to Crowell's yet myself:

Time as a Universal Scaling Principle by Lawrence B. Crowell

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/370

there's a couple of others that mention scaling also.

but Masreliz' paper's pretty beefy, with some predictive comparison graphics for support.

having said this, i guess maybe i'd better actually get your paper read here.

looking forward to it.

:-)

matt kolasinski

  • [deleted]

Dear Jim,

What an excellent essay submitted so late that may have deprived many in public as also other authors to have read it in full. i for one feels that you have covered the entire background from science rather well. Though you tried to discuss 'consciousness' specifically towards the end, it remained limited as you could not go further into its philosophical and or spiritual (humanity) aspect. This is the usual restrictions all authors may claim from their respective angles, least of all you. As the discussion period is more or less over and voting too ends in 6 days, may i just make some comments for you to contemplate further:-

1. A part of consciousness is related to the body ( brain) but there is an external component of it for an individual too. A proof of it exists when the Nobel winning neurology Professor Eccles of Oxford found neurons in the SMA of the brain to get activated when the same was not expected under experimental conditions. He attribute such activity to outside interactions.He further conjectures that there exists a non-physical shield around SMA part of the brain that records such interactions. The latter record does not die with the death of the body,as this information continues to remain recorded in that non-physical covering!

2.Rational Uncertainity has been claimed as 'highest truth'. Do you believe that science can ever reach absolute reality, being confined with dualities of various sorts, we can only approach better and better relative truth/reality?

3. There is a quote from Pitanjali, Indian philosopher cum originator of Yoga techniques way back over 3000 yrs. back. In one of the verses that i have quoted in my essay he states ' the cognizer, the process of cognition and the object of recognition need to become one to realize the truth'. The cognition is more than an ordinary observation . It involves 'discriminatory observation'. Thus, this quote goes beyond the observer/observed uncertainity of quantum physics.

4. you rightly indicate about an external individuated observer and an internal unindividuated non-local observer. The former you call 'consciousness'. May i say that the totality of 'consciousness' are both. The only thing that the former dominates usually. But it is possible for a human to raise his level of 'consciousness' to higher level in order to strengthen his overlap with the latter type of 'consciousness'.Patanjali talks about it in his Yogshastra when discussing the various distractions suffered by the human mind, when overcome one can reach the higher level of self-consciousness.

  • [deleted]

RE: Moving Dimensions Theory & Quantum Mechanics

Hello Matt,

You write, "Time and Quantum - Musings about the Quantized Nature of Becoming by Chi Ming Hung

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/340

and you've got something of a quantized McGuken

who i've not yet seen how to get quantizations out of."

Attached Matt, please find a document which shows how all quantum behavior is inherited from the nonlocal expansion of the fourth dimension at the rate of c, in units of the Planck Length.

String Theorists have tried for over thirty years to get rid of the problems of point-like particles by suggesting that particles are one dimensional strings, or 2d branes, etc. This has cost us billions of dollars, and has resulted in frozen physics.

Moving Dimensions Theory unfreezes time and physics by proposing that the fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions at the rate of c.

While space is continuous, the fourth dimension has a wavelike character with a wavelength of Planck's Length, making it impossible to measure anything with perfect certainty; thusly making points of spacetime, as well as points of space and points of time, impossible to define.

The nonlocal, wavelike qualities of the fourth expanding dimension easily solve all the problems of string theory and loop quantum gravity, while also providing a more fundamental *physical* reality from where all of relativity--and Einstein's Principle of Relativity--can be deduced from a more fundamental principle--a hitherto unsung universal invariant, or dx4/dt=ic.

All of relativity, and its implications including E=mc^2, is derived from MDT in my paper, beginning with a 4D universe in which the fourth dimension is expanding at the rate of c: dx4/dt=ic. This invartiant expansion, underlying all motion and entropy, unfreezes time, and shows that time, as a "secondary concept, a derived concept" naturally emerges from a deeper physical reality--a fundamental invariance: dx4/dt=ic which is the deeper source of the velocity of light's invariance: c, and all the dualities--space/time, mass/enegry, wave/particle. And too it shows that nonlocality and quantum mechanics' probabilistic nature naturally emerges from this same deeper principle, as the fourth dimension inherits nonlocal properties via its expansion, which grants all particles nonlocal wave-like properties.

So it is that the EPR Paradox is resolved as we are liberated from Einstein's/Godel's block universe. MDT provides a fundamental framework for all of QM and relativity, while also granting us free will and explaining entanglement and length contraction with the exact same principle, from which time, and all its arrows and assymmetries, naturally emerges, along with entropy.

And too, concerning Dark Matter and Dark Energy; perhaps the vibration of spacetime itself could account for this.

Einstein's General Relativity already demonstrated that dimensions can warp, bend, and move, and MDT extends this simple princple, postulating that the fourth dimension is expanding at c relative to the three spatial dimensions, manifetsing itself as a spherically-symmetric expanding wavefront with a wavelength of Planck's length.

MDT jives perfectly with the Casmir Effect and Hawking Radiation. More on this in the upcoming MDT book: HERO'S JOURNEY PHYSICS!

Consider the equations:

dx4/dt = ic (MDT's equation, underlying relativity)

and

xp - px = -ih (fundamental to quantum mechanics)

Both equations contain "i". Both equations represent the fact that something is *physically* changing in a manner perpendicular to our three spatial dimensions.

dx4/dt=ic posits that the fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions at the rate of c.

xp - px = ih

also shows that spacetime is changing--the fourth dimension is expanding in units of Planck's length--in a manner perpendicular to our three spatial dimensions, as both x and p are measured in our three spatial dimensions; and yet, when one considers xp-px, one sees a quantity lying beyond our three spatial dimensions!

This is because the fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions in units of the Planck Length, as shown in the attached document.

So it is that dx4/dt=ic shows that the fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions at the rate of c.

And xp-px = ih shows that the fourth dimension is expanding in units of the Planck Length.

MDT's postualte: The fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions at the rate of c in units of the Planck length.

Best,

Dr. E (The Real McCoy)Attachment #1: MDT_MOVING_DIMENSIONS_THEORY_EXAMINES_THE_GRAVITATIONAL_REDSHIFT_SLOWING_OF_CLOCKS.pdfAttachment #2: 3_MDT_PERVADES_NATUREIMAGINARY_NUMBERS_IMPLY_PERPENDICULARITY.pdf

  • [deleted]

Dear James,

I enjoyed reading your essay! It is well documented, and explains well some issues related to time, consciousness, QM, and reality.

Best wishes,

Cristi Stoica

  • [deleted]

James, I'm sorry that I just got around to reading your essay. It's excellent, and so rich with history and background that every paragraph could be an opening to the chapter of a book. If you ever decide to write it, I can guarantee at least one reader.

You and I (my essay, "Time counts") agree on the physical utility of complex analysis and imaginary time.

Just one thing--I wonder if, for a physical theory, "countably infinite" might be a better choice of words than "transfinite." The latter seems more apropos to abstract set theory.

All best,

Tom

2 years later

Dear James,

I hope you may find the anthropocentric view of everything presented in my essay 'The chip in the brain' to the current contest interesting. Please take a look.

Peace, love & progress!

Michael T Deans

Write a Reply...