• [deleted]

Dear Frenchman,

Since we agree in important issues, I will tell you that both me as a German and you as a Frenchman do not not have a perfect command of English. Maybe, this contributes to the lacking awareness of the majority to what we have to announce.

I do not understand your word Looming. One says that something looms when it appears as a tall, unclear shape, often in a frightening way.

You are calling it "the" key point that mirroring creates redundancy. I am claiming having found several obvious mistakes. The most uncommon insight of mine is perhaps that our usual notion of time is secondary with respect to the primary because reality bound already elapsed time.

If you have any question or comment to the attachment to my last post, please tell it to us. I will include it in the second part.

By the way, we should not suspect Professor Rovelli a conjurer just because his name reminds of circus. And besides Descartes, there are many other very famous French mathematicians who are related to how we deal with time. Let me just mention a few: Buridan, Fermat, Laplace, Fourier, Cauchy, Dirichlet, Meray

Thank you in advance,

Eckard

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- In the nautical language 'looming' is a mirage.

- P. Fermat is no doubt a better Scientists than R. Descartes; he is pointing for example some mistakes of Galileo that Descartes did not even noticed. But I am afraid that the influence of Descartes on European Science was far more big than Fermat.

Therefore Descartes is more complete than Newton or Huygens. You can compare his metaphysics to his science easily, what is more difficult with Newton. The big change that is determining Rovelli and C. Stoica is in Descartes' method already. Before Descartes -Galileo for instance- Scientists had a Metaphysics that they were extending to Physics. Big change is that -starting from Descartes- Physics becomes Metaphysics (Proved by the fact that Newton or Einstein became sort of new Saints.)

Why? Because Descartes wanted to forget Time and speed that is to say Metaphysics in his ballistic Science! The today entanglement is coming from the willing of Descartes to be clearer. Splitting Physics from Metaphysics he contributed to kill the second one and to the big confusion in Modern Physics that is breaking the surface here because Time question is like Pandora's box.

Behind Einstein's Algebra there is an attempt to put more Time or Idea or Metaphysics in Science that some Scientists or Ingeneers do not even see.

In the LHC experience one want to understand the World with ballistic laws what would have been for sure a shock for Descartes or Newton.

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I was told, Fermat invented what led to dx/dt when he calculated extrema. This was 35 years before Newton in 1629.

Metaphysics originally meant an addition to physics.

Aren't functions of time and functions of frequency/energy equivalent?

6 days later
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Dear Eckard,

i have just gone through your postings and have yet to go through the full text of the essay. May i say that i am fully with you and Frenchman, Le Rouge , with whom i had interactions on my essay too. Let me say that innovations are something that are hard to digest by the conventional carrer scientists or even other professionals. if you permit i have bad experiences of many rejections in my professional work. i have a strong tendency towards enginnering in Physics and have 3/4 Patents too. Very rarely mt normal Physicists colleagues say that you are doing 'useless'things and even wasting your time. But i have noted at my age (76 yrs. ) that persistence pays, more if it gets coupled with humility and silence against 'casual' criticism. Please continue with what you are sure of as if nothing matters in this world but sincere work, diligence in a selfless manner. No sermons, please excuse me. Carlo has beaten me in votes and i am very happy for it, please blieve me. Nature is far far above science/rechnology and so is humanity. et us bow before the Nature and its secrets and continue to unravel these 'secrets ' to the best of our ability and experience.

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Read the text of the essay. To me, it is a nice exposition. i use to wonder why when we use Maths in Physics faithfully, we neglect the unphysical solutions. Are we missing something in the process? i also wonder about the significance of numbers in Physicsreality. To me there are just two numbers and the rest are all derivable from these two, 0 and 1, either through summation or raising the power. In this context, i wonder what is the significance of exponential? I realized that is what is a fact when a quantity decreses or increases under pure random or 'chance' environments. About negative numbers, in Physics, we start to talk of 'vacuum' as containing all such negative energy states that are full.Only a vacancy in any of these appears as a physical reality--Dirac.Thus, we see greated significance for what we mean by the number 0. We can't call it as nothing in Physics. Vacuum is not nothing. It has a meaning. Even, physically can we ever attain perfect vacuum? Does it exist even in our universe where apparently there is no matter! In the atom alsowe have a similar sitaution. Only the nucleus is occupied by mass and the rest is very very good vacuum, for all practical purposes. Then, see the particle structure as the Theory of Strings/Super strings. It is just vibrations and nothing else. Thus mass/energy are just mere vibrations in space, nothing concrete as we imagine as an ordinary person. Thus, everything appears to be all 'illusionary' What is the reality! May be there is a non-physical thing called 'consciousness'. It becomes physical as soon as it vibrates, otherwise it remains unobservable! We all know of 'awreness'. may i say that 'consciousness' has various levels of 'awareness', even beyond what we humans feel through our body sensors through the brain. i also wondered what the term 'mind' means. The only way ican understand is to go beyond the ususl human sensors, as mind is not analogous to any body organ. Let me say, the mind projects our individual consciousness that has extension beyond our body too. Thus, there will be lots of individual consciousness and these exist along with the 'pure' or vibration-free consciuosness.

These are all conjectures too, as science can never confirm something that is non-physical in nature!

in typing i commit many spelling omissions that may be excused!

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Dear Narendra Nath,

Thank you for reading my essay. You wrote: "I use to wonder why ... we neglect the unphysical solutions." You did not write I used to... Perhaps, I have to apologize for not clearly enough explaining that the differential equations do not at all correctly describe the basic relationship in reality. Any step min a process in reality is the sum of already real influences.

Therefore, reality is most closely described by integration, not by derivatives. Abstraction from reality to the abstract "physical" quantity time gets rid of the so called arrow of time. The abstracted Christian time is negative BC and positive AC (after birth of Christ). I hope that at least non-Christian scientists will admit that this choice is arbitrary.

The price for such decision at will is ambiguity. That's why the advanced solution is unrealistic and must be excluded.

With pleasure I would like to add scores of further comments after this detail has been fully accepted.

Regards,

Eckard

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Dear Eckard,

i have put up a response to your post on my essay site. Hope it makes up any misunderstanind,as i feel alike with you. Let us understand that our imagination demands 'absolute truth' but science can only provide better and better relative truths. In fact science ends when the absolute truth is realized!Let us persue both and remain as broadminded as we possibly can. This will help in uniting us all and realize that universal love is the most sacred thing that exists in the universe.

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Dear Narendra,

As Popper pointed out, falsification is mostly more reliable than verification. In this sense I hope to have provided at least an attempt to solve some putative enigma.

What about universal love, do you know G. E. Lessing's "Ringparabel"?

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This is a reply of me, Eckard Blumschein, to what Narendra wrote in his thread. Those who might feel offended by criticism on religions should not read it.

Was there really a creation = Big Bang? Is there a block universe? Does spacetime include future time?

Religions suggest a confirming answer. We all learned to integrate from minus infinity to plus infinity.

Let me start with Adam and Eve. I see this story perhaps wrong for meanwhile evident genetic reasons and just an illustration for the idea of an almighty god.

Religion tells that god created the man as a copy of himself. Actually men created the understandably instrumental idol god like a copy of a superman.

My point is the perverting confusion in this case. Likewise the elapsed time and an abstract time were confused. Infinity alias eternity was attributed to god. The tangible elapsed time was perverted to something allegedly illusionary. While nobody has problems to understand that his own age steadily increases, the usual abstract notion of time has reached priority and dominated even modern physics regardless of the fact that it cannot be measured at all.

What about eternity, the religions attribute it only to god. Anything else is declared doomed to die. Indeed, life of any individual and any physical object is limited. Death and life mutually complement each other. Religions asked for a perverse while understandable from intention question: Is there life after the death? They even suggested eternal life in heaven or rebirth.

In all, religious tenets have proven to freeze obviously wrong ideas that have a clearly intentional background.

Isn't the desire to foresee future understandable? Isn't it tempting blurring the difference between past and future?

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hanks , Eckard for your interactions. All my best wishes in your endevours.

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While I respect the role of religion in social life, I cannot confirm any reproducible evidence and positive significance of the belief in god for physics.

11 days later
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Dear Elliot,

As promised, I will reply here for the sake of readability.

Having experienced bad things due to a „heroic thinking leader of a nation", I do not share the widespread desire to idolize people. On the contrary, I suspected Minkowski was not as sure as he pretended to be about his two symmetrical cones.

I agree that the laws of physics will certainly be valid for future time as they obviously were for past time too, at least as far we can judge from all experience available to us. However, the naked laws alone do not yet represent the world. At least equally important are the so called influences, coefficients, and some restrictions that went astray when the originally integral relationships were reduced to differential equations. There are no influences from future, and we have to exclude unphysical mathematical solution, in particular advanced ones.

While Schwarzschild himself did not interpret his odd solutions as anti-worlds, I see so called Rosen-bridge marking the broken border between serious work and slippery fiction.

What about manipulations including time reversal, this is only possible for abstract time:

Differential equations like L d^2 i(t)/dt^2+ R di(t)/dt + 1/C i(t) = 0 have two solutions. One is the reasonable retarded one. The other one increases with growing time and must therefore be excluded. For R=0 both solutions coincide, i.e., i(t)=i(-t).

In reality, future will rarely exactly mirror the past. Perfect T-symmetry rather indicates the unavoidable redundancy within a complex time-domain.

Those who are still reluctant to swallow that there is a natural origin zero of elapsed time not just in the real world but also in any anticipated future might get aware that t in any calculated function f(t) is never larger than t.

Your baeztime-quote mentioned Zeh who right now and here takes issue against putatively superluminal tunneling.

Why are you not ready to accept that complex numbers are mathematical tools rather than something with a particular meaning in reality? They do not suddenly pop out. Except for heuristics, one should know what one does. Well, x+iy denotes a possible complex plane. However, do you need the imaginary unit in order to express the orthogonality between x and y or between x and z or between y and z? Incidentally, the functions sin(wt) and sin(3wt) also fulfill the condition for orthogonality.

You repeatedly quoted Einstein: "One has to keep in mind that the fourth coordinate u is always purely imaginary". Isn't this rather a matter of taste? Does a builder need the imaginary unit as to measure (3 m)^2 + (4 m)^2 = (5 m)^2?

Again, I cannot confirm that ict is based on a transform into either complex time domain or complex frequency domain. While omega and t constitute a Fourier transform pair as well as a cosine transform pair, c is constant.

Nonetheless, I expect the unilateral imaginary fourth coordinate of possibly connected location to be similar to some extent to imaginary resistance, which cannot be transformed back into reality but has a non-fundamental physical meaning among other mutually related quantities. The different signs of imaginary resistance correspond to contrary physical phenomena.

Regards,

Eckard

7 days later
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Hey Eckard,

I want our discussion of complex analysis on as many essay forums that will allow it. The measurement problem in physics is where it is implied that imaginary time is ordered:

(...[-itn,...,-it2,-it1,0,it1,it2,...,itn]...)

The mathematical axioms tell us that complex numbers can not be ordered.

Order Axioms:

1) A number can not be less than itself

2) x > y, x < y, or x = y

3) if x > 0 and y > 0, then xy > 0

4) if x < y, then for all z, x + z < z + y

5) if x < y, then for all z, xz < yz

set x = i and y = 2i and z= 2 + i

1) makes sense

2) i < 2i makes sense

3) a bit tricky:

0 = 0 + 0i and i = 0 +1i therefore i>0 and 2i>0

(i)(2i) > 0 ---> -2 > 0 FALSE!

4) 2 + 2i < 2 + 3i (complex # is of the form a + bi)

5) This is the key axiom!

xz = what exactly? xz or x*z (* is complex conjugate i*=-i)

If we distribute xz as we do for real numbers then axiom 5 is false. If we take the complex conjugate x*z then axiom 5 is true.

Quantum mechanics relies on C* algebra which is ordered. What is the big idea of C* algebra? C*C, multiply a complex number by a complex conjugate and you end up with a real order/countable number.

By the axioms of math the measurement problem does not exist in physics.

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I almost forgot I found an interesting paragraph on Wolfram's mathworld:

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ComplexNumber.html

"Historically, the geometric representation of a complex number as simply a point in the plane was important because it made the whole idea of a complex number more acceptable. In particular, "imaginary" numbers became accepted partly through their visualization. Unlike real numbers, complex numbers do not have a natural ordering, so there is no analog of complex-valued inequalities. This property is not so surprising however when they are viewed as being elements in the complex plane, since points in a plane also lack a natural ordering."

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Brian,

If the dilemma between either poor time resolution or poor frequency resolution was due to complex representation, then it would be restricted to complex Fourier transform. However, this is not the case. Uncertainty also belongs to the real-valued cosine transform.

By the way, I would like to add to 2) x > y, x = y, x < y the so called 4th logical possibility x || y.

Already Brouwer claimed that trichotomy does not hold for real numbers. The notion real number has been rubber-like defined as to cover the quite different meanings of rational and irrational numbers.

That's why I suggested to call the uncountable numbers, which can be thought to constitute the genuine continuum every part of which has parts, "irreal" instead of real.

Incidentally, Cantor used his first diagonal argument in order to demonstrate that points in a plane are countable according to his definition. He "ordered" the rationals.

I found out that the decisive distinction to be made is between continuum and discrete points. Functions of a quantity that related to a so called conjugate one like e.g. radius to wave number or elapsed time to frequency are continuous in one domain while necessarily discrete in the complementary one and the other way round.

As I already mentioned elsewhere I do not have problems with complex representation but would appreciate you to explain to me why Einstein believed that Ritz was wrong when he stressed that the future cannot influence the past.

Curious,

Eckard Blumschein

Don't worry about the

5 days later
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Thank you Brian,

You put two replies as pdf on your thread.

I am not sure, maybe the agreement to disagree was indeed based on mistakes on both sides.

Ritz was obviously correct in that the future cannot influence the past while his own theory was flawed.

Einstein was obviously correct in that entropy can be explained by the combination of a huge number of superpositions and appropriately calculated by means of probabilistic methods although he later uttered god does not play dice.

However, I consider it Einstein's mistake to assume in 1907 a model for solids composed of harmonic oscillators, oscillating forever. This belief hindered him for his lifetime to get rid of the notion of an eternal and a priori god-given time.

When I briefly looked at http://www.science.uva.nl/~seop/archives/fall2005/entries/time-thermo/

I was disappointed because apparently nobody so far was ready to distinguish between the physically real past time and the abstract notion that is usually called time.

Maybe, I will find something that comes close among the tensed theories of time.

Best regards,

Eckard

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Eckard,

I was surprised that Einstein argued that the arrow of time was due to probabilities too because he said "god does not play dice". Maybe it was because he became famous for relativity? Although it seems he felt a stochastic model for time is correct. As far as harmonic oscillators going forever this does in principle not happen. As the temperature cools a Bose-Einstein condensate will form. The oscillators are not an example of perpetual motion. Could you please clarify the difference between past time and abstract time?

Brian

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Brian,

Let me begin with your question. I consider the order of all those events for in principle known that might have been contributed to the process of concern. This process can for instance be you or a measurement actually performed by you. In this sense, your past time is measured as your steadily growing age. Notice: It relates to the very moment from which you are looking back. While this choice is highly uncommon in science, I consider it the natural scale because it always includes anything that already got reality relative to your perspective. Any forecast does not matter if one relates to traces of events having influenced reality. You cannot shift this scale. It belongs to the process "you".

If you made a model of this order or more likely are using a model made by others, then this model of your past is something different. It can be compared with a movie of your life. Abstract time includes abstract past but it is not restricted to it. Future is always just an abstract model.

I consider physics naive as long as it does not distinguish between the reality itself and the more or less matching models of it.

What was the reason of so called crisis of banks? Overly intelligent, horribly clever people took the future for reality. They ignored that economy is not a closed system and therefore not a predictable one.

Einstein believed in "deep" laws of nature to be discovered. While he quickly grasped ideas by Boltzmann, Lorentz, Planck, etc., he firmly believed in causal order. It was Planck who made Einstein famous.

You are correct, in reality perhaps no oscillator will oscillate for ever. Therefore cosine and sine functions are merely approximations of reality. Any life is a span between birth and death. How much of it is already real past depends on the point of view.

Eckard

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I will start with your first question, the problem with the banks was the central banks and greed. I still am not sure I understand the differene between your two descriptions fo time. Cosine and Sine are approximations but to what order of their taylor expansion?