What is ultimately possible in physics depends on foundations and philosophy by Peter Lynds

Hi dear Peter ,

Happy to see somebody who has the same age than me ,34 hihihihi

It's a well explained essay about the philosophy of physics and the rules of fundamentals correlated with our realities .

I liked a lot the words you use

"You could say people didn't really think the theory was true because they had rejected the idea

of truth in science. Truth in science must mean correspondence to reality, or it means nothing."

Good luck for the contest

Steve

Dear Peter

Yes, the question of whether a theory's physical foundations and assumptions actually correspond to Nature or not is of great importance for development of physics.

We have to search the process "perception - processing in the mind - experience"

My research shows that space-time is basic mind frame in which we process perception of physical change that run in timeless cosmic space where physical time is run of clocks.

Main stream physicists say to me that searching the process "perception-processing-experience" is the question of philosophy of physics. It it not. It is core question of theoretical physics. I'm happy our essay opens this tabu theme of physics.

yours amrit

Peter,

A well-written and informative essay. Interesting points about the need for theory to match whatever is the fundamental description of nature.

Sorry, I have to agree with Hawking--science is not a quest for reality (which is indefinable, at any rate, in any way that can be called objective)--science possesses the quality of metaphysical realism (Popper; Realism and the Aim of Science). Its only claim is a demonstrated correspondence between theory and result (measurement, as Hawking said); published, peer-reviewed science is no more than this.

You ask of what value is it?--knowledge, for the sake of knowledge alone, is sufficient.

Tom

Mr. Lynds,

Thank you for an interesting essay. Given your expressed views on science and you predilection for quoting Einstein, I was surprised not to find another apropos quote which I've seen attributed to him: "Mathematics are well and good but nature keeps dragging us around by the nose."

In light of the fact that you've obviously given a great deal of thought to the topic of time, I'd be interested in your reaction to the essay which I've contributed to this year's collection: 'On the Impossibility of Time Travel,' as well as on another, earlier essay which may be found here. I realize that there is much reading to be done these days with so many interesting essays having been submitted to this competition (the total was 113 at my latest count), but when/if you find an opportunity, I'd welcome your thoughts.

Cheers

Dear Peter, nice to meet you again this year though you came very late. Somehow i get worried when some claim to sense reality. To me it seems to perfect to be approached fully. What we do in sciences is to go on getting better and better picture of reality but its absolute form is beyond us. We have been created in th euniverse 13.7 billion years old, only few thousand years back. How we came into being and with what logic of evolution still needs to be ascertained. Cosmolgy to me seems to have all the hidden truths. It is still a very subjective study though conventional Physics has become far more objective. For humans both objectivity and subjectivity play a part as derived from our emotional and rational mind. Although science is attributed to be all objective, i wonder if the emotional content cam be eliminated completely. We may use whatever words we like but then to me , silence contains all the true knowledge. How it get to approach it is a challenge. Order contains noise but not the converse and so also is the nature of silence!

It is all philosophical , please excuse me but Physics was a discipline of Philosophy in the times Einstein did his Nobel prize works. he also admitted in private that the path breaking ideas that came to him were not a part of his own thinking process. these appeared all of a sudden. the only hting he did that he comprehended their import sand had the tools of Maths available to him , to implement the same quickly enough! Let us be humble and compasdsionate in search for the best possible relative truths in understanding our universe and processes taking place in nature. Finality as an aim will be dangerous for Physics itself.

Peter

1. You write "Einstein's .... (snipped) .... coupled with a very

high proficiency with mathematics" WRONG.

MInkowski rated him lazy at maths. Einstein had to recruit helpers to assist him uncover and use the necessary maths for GR. In his own papers the maths of the Photo-Electric effect, Brownian motion, etc is high school stuff. the maths of SR is junior high level. For his post GR papers (EPR etc.) again he had helpers for the maths.

2. I agree with your general position but my essay provides a different take on it. e.g. for me Instants are unavoidable - ask anyone. The problem is how to effectively formalise what we know to be real.

3. You are too gushing about Einstein - like nearly everyone. (Now that statement is a good way to upset people round here !). He used his authority to promote Minkowski's maths into the "reality" of 4D Space-Time continuum. Given the basis of your paper and criticism of S-T you should, as I do in my essay, recognise a major mistake on his part.

4. You have not come to grips with the two types of existence / reality and confuse or conflate them. The mental / Platoist = epistemic that enables our logical and mathematical models; and the experiential based physical / empirical = ontic that provides the physical principles. In my essay I focus on this issue: The Rational & The Reasonable.

I enjoyed your paper.

Peter,

You wrote "...if one doesn't believe that science is a case of an assertion correctly corresponding to reality or not, there is not necessarily a need that a theory be accountable to it."

On the contrary, correspondence between theory and result (measurement)is all the scientific content there is. Belief has nothing at all to do with the subject. Einstein, in fact, ridiculed "merely personal belief."

Tom

Peter

Thanks for a prompt reply.

1. You agree there are 2 different modes of existence - but your essay does not make the necessary distinction. A difference without a distinction is the inverse of a common error, but still an error.

2. We disagree about the reality of "Now". You "think" it does not exist. That is a mere Platoist conclusion. I, and you, and everyone knows empirically that we are different now than we were before and we will be different after. The only path from before to after is through the now. Empirically we can and do only measure in the now. Every measurement in science has a specific "Now" designation called the Time of the observation. Take away "now" and science as the study of ordered quantified empirical reality collapses. Empirically the existence of Now is undeniable. Only philosophers like you and Einstein would be so bold / daft as to formalise it out of existence.

3. Your response ends "If instants don't exist, neither can the present." This is formally Rationally / logically correct - but only "If" they don't exist. In which case refer to (2) - they do exist. With an incorrect premise anything is possible - I think that is philosophy, isn't it ?

Terry Padden was again (but hopefully is no longer) anonymous.

Dear Peter,

May be you do not consider my post of Oct.8 as of any significance towards your own essay.But i still curious to your response, but you have the right to ignore the same!

Peter,

Glad to see your entry, I was getting worried.

Einstein saw space and time as a philosophical (mathematical) conundrum. His way around this was to "axiomize" physics the way that Euclid axiomized geometry. He stole a potent technique from those tricky mathematicians.

He did this by declaring space as that which is measured by rods and time as that which is measured by clocks. Now if the question is asked (on the classical scale) is space and time "real" we can say who cares we have rods and clocks "Shut up and calculate!" (to quote Feynman).

On the quantum mechanical scale rods are no longer a good measure because we have entered the land of wavelengths where the concept of a rod gets fuzzy. And without rods clocks cannot be built. In my opinion we desperately need someone to declare one or two good axioms for QM like Einstein did for classical physics. You may be the man!

Don L.

Thanks for your thanks, but no specific response to my comments of Oct 08 , was it? i too have been wondering about the concepts of space and time. But some persons confuse these concepts with measurements of length by rods and of time by clocks. Concpts do not depend on such things. Thes eare not physical materials that you are making measurements on. You tackle the masses that exist in space, which is massless. Similarly, you watch the motion of masses and then use time as concept to describe it through measurement.

I am eliciting from you about the nature of space, curved or rolled or what ever you wish to represent it by! i am worried about the homogeneity or inhomgeneity of bot spave and time. What happens when such distortions may take place. May i draw your attention to several mysteries that are not getting tackled by physics/cosmology about the early universe close to Big Bang. What i feel is that the Physics we haqve worked out in past few hundred years simply is not valid for the extremely violent times of the early universe when temperatures, density and pressures were enormously large. I personally feel convinced that LHC or any other accelerator that we may build in the near future, may not simulate such conditions ever. The only hope lies with precise and accurate cosmological measurements pertaining to that period. That may well help revolutionize physics. i expect quantum and inbetween quantum and classical physics of the day to dominate then. Also , gravity interaction with quantum aspects and the' mesamorphic 'region as proposed by Tejinder Singh in his essay, may be valid there.Further , i postulate that the nature of Gravity is also very mysterious and it may wekll be changing as per the demnds of nature then. It is only later that gravity has stabilised after about the first half a billion years to what we call its nature in Physics of today. For example, it may well be highly repulsive to result even in the extremely fast inflation from Big bang to the initial size of the universe, before the dark energy associated accelerated evolution of the universe visible started. Even the dark matter which is non-baryonic in nature exerts a differnt repulsive gravity force on the visible baryonic matter to result in the expansion of the universe that is taking place.

Yes lal these are conjectures but do these seem to be illogical and incorrect to make. After all , even the strong nuclear force has to be highly repulsive to conform to the demands of nature by way of non- collapsability of the nucleus to a point. The same is true for nucleons themselves when they get formed by quark / gluons boundness. Free quarks do not exist in visible worls but they may well have existed in the early universe!Excuse me for any spelling mistakes,as the post has become long, hopely eliciting concrete response, instead of thanks.

Hello Peter,

I enjoyed both your 2008 and 2009 essays, probably because I identified very closely with the principles espoused in them, particularly those relating to the "nature of time".

In relation to recent comments above, can I say that I think, in a sense, you and Terry are both right in your debate about the existence of "the present/now". I agree with you that any notion of an instant or a "now" in the temporal sense, or indeed any interval or magnitude *represented* as time, has no physical reality. The convention of "past, present and future" is just a human construct. On the other hand, Terry is right to say that we need "now, before and after" to do physics *as it is currently formulated*. What I think needs to be done to provide the ordering that Terry requires, is to fundamentally change the *representation* of the ordering/descriptive procedure. This in turn requires a different *formulation* of our theories, in terms of the only things we can *actually* measure, mass/energy and motion/change.

As you have, quite rightly I think, stated in your essay, a kind of "evolving configurations block space" can be modelled without recourse to notions of "time" and recognising that our clocks only measure spatial displacement. A particular "time" can and should be represented only as a particular configuration. To make this relativistic of course would require a reformulation of Lorentz transformation with the "t" coordinate replaced by some sort of "dual" relative displacement of spatial coordinates.

Your discussion of thermodynamics in section 5 was telling I thought. At the quantum scale there are no little signs with arrows saying "this way to before" or "this way to after". There is only time symmetric, unitary evolution (ex boundary conditions) constrained by the physical laws (causes). When we make a "measurement", we are just part of a new configuration and what we are really saying is that, the system observable has "this value" when the system/apparatus has "this combined configuration" and so on. We say that subsequent measurements are "later" because of the entropic correlation between our brain processes and perception of "time advancing" and the evolving system. We have been indoctrinated by our use of clocks!

In regard to representing particular "times" as particular configurations, may I encourage you to read the essay by J C N Smith "On The Impossibility Of Time Travel" and discussion thread thereof, for a clear statement (at least in the essay!) of a basis for something like the reality you are getting at.

Anyway, I just think that yours & Mr Smith's ideas can be the way to a deeper understanding of objective reality to the extent that we can ever, in principle, subjectively make contact with it, if people (with far better minds than mine!) can develop a purely spatially based representation of our "time" quantities, "nows" etc. Have you yourself, or anyone that you are aware of, seriously attempted this? What progress might be made if Feynman's ideal of "replacing all time quantities with spatial ones" is realised. We might then instead have "Speak up and calculate differently!".

Thanks for the essay and good luck!

Cheers

Roy

Peter

I will RE-read section 3 - but probably don't have time to read the old one.

Peter

I have Re-read section 3. in it you write in quotes below

1. "Relativity tells us that all times in the universe, past, present and future, are all laid out together in a fixed, four-dimensional space-time block. This follows as a natural consequence of the lack of a preferred present moment in relativity, with judgements of simultaneity being relative."

This is NOT TRUE. I have had to point this out to several authors here. The authors of essay 555 (Michael Silberstein & Mark Stuckey) acknowledged their error after i pointed it out. Please see that correspondence so i don't have to repeat myself. (You may even enjoy the repartee)

You are just repeating the party line. It is propaganda; not truth. Everyone is indoctrinated to believe it. Please don't.

2. "However, this "block" view of time seems to be very much at odds with how we as people seem to experience the world, where, subjectively, time seems to flow. "

Replace "seems" with "is" and delete "seem to" and this sure is the TRUTH.

3. "More often, however, people just accept that motion and change are illusions".

You must know lots of strange people. I must get out more. No one I have ever met, outside of a misconceived or misunderstood journal paper, doubts the reality of motion and change.

4. "However, as long as one recognizes that instants, the instantaneous, and space-time points - all static, discontinuous entities - do not actually exist,"

What is that "recognises" covering up ? A great big assumption that you are making, based on the fallacy of (1) !