Regarding the Ballad of Pentcho and Eckard (8/19/13) Einstein related his epiphany of SR as time stopping at light speed. While this is true for an observer at light velocity it cannot be true of time itself. Rather the Equivalence Principle must be interpreted as the faster an observer goes, the more closely he-she approximates the limit velocity to which time can extend. Otherwise EMR would have to create more time to be able to continue in its propagation.
Hi John Cox,
Isn't Epiphany a Christian festival held on January 6th which commemorates the arrival of the three wise man who came to see Jesus Christ? I wonder, why did you write epiphany instead of Epiphany? Did you intend ridiculing Einstein?
A ballad is a long song which tells a story in simple language. Why did you use this metaphor in connection with my rather short post of Aug. 19?
I don't share Einstein's (and your) opinion that time is stopping for a hypothetical antenna/receiver which is thought performing a relative motion away from an antenna/sender.
Eckard
Yes, Eckard.
Webster also defines epiphany as (2) a manifestation, esp. of divinity. The Eureka moment if you will. Pardon my quip of 'Ballad' referring to the disagreement between you and Pentcho Valev, There is an old country-rock song about a deal in Mexico that went way south, titled The Ballad of Poncho and Lefty.
As I said, I do not agree with the metaphor that Einstein employed, time 'stops' for no man. It is independent of the emitter. My point I seemed to have failed to make is that light velocity is that specific velocity and an observer approaching that limit would experience time seeming to extend less quickly. Fitzgerald remarked that the speed of light was 'astonishingly' low, which given a common Newtonian belief of it being instantaneous, the M&M results and the calculated distance to the sun would have been astonishing to many at the time.
The gist of my remarks were that time is local to any discrete mass, and our human experience is a second order effect in aggregate. But also that time itself in relation to gravitational domains apparently has an upper limit to the rate of its extension. Corrections to synchronization for SR and GR effects in Global Positioning satellites * Peter Galison; Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps - Empires of Time pp287-89* are more proofs of both theories. An observer, human or otherwise, cannot exceed the upper limit of velocity to which time can extend but that does not mean that time always extends at equivalent light speed. The common joke that the speed of time is one second per second is true enough in any gravitational reference. That said I'll risk outcry by suggesting that some value might be found in a mathematical construct where the 'speed of time' is equivalent to escape velocity of the local gravitational reference.
Thank you for your explanations, John.
Poncho does hopefully not remind too much of Sancho Pansa. Being a lefty (in the sense of left-handed) is something that I share with Einstein, and, if I recall correctly, also with Obama, Clinton, Bush, and others.
I do not imagine time propagating.
Eckard
My Bad, Eckard,
I do tend to be glib among a few friends with eclectic tastes, but must apologize for not thinking. This site is so generally well spoken that I forget that it is a truly international audience and what might be quickly grasped as a playful use of words culturally for me, can be gibberish to others. Also I'm an old dog and computerized communication is a really new trick, I'll try to be more careful in my choice of words.
I do like this thread, the concept of time being a fundamental constituent of natural physical reality is neither radical or revolutionary to me, perhaps because I came to physics more from a philosophic approach than mathematic. I've therefore given some serious thought over the years as to why physics has come to think of time as something other than a natural phenomenon, and in truth it took me a long, long time to realize that conceptually the reason why I struggled to understand many aspects was that generally physics has treated time as a quantum or relativistic effect, or a manifestation of abstract mathematics.
Long before Newton the old questions of time arose as to whether it was like a river carrying us along with it, or was it like a static state which we move through. Both concepts have problems but there seems little else to choose from. And the roots of arguments for 'non-real' time can be found in those problems. The river of time implies that someone has passed this place before it is being written by me, what intersections with that can there be? multiverses become a possibility. If it is static why can't we move around space and eventually wind up back here now? quantum entanglement comes to mind.
So the right question to ask is: what have we been missing? What nuance can be distinguished? I long ago thought that times arrow flowed past us yet carried us along at our own pace, not that we are tethered to an anchor other than our own relative mass. Time has become fundamentally localized for me, and I have no difficulty in imagining it continually recreating in seeking equilibrium with space yet also existing in a static distribution of continuum variation of rate of extension. That probably sounds pretty weird.
John,
We experience time as a sequence of events and in its mathematical reductionism, physics treats it as a measure of interval. It might seem little different whether you simultaneously measure between the peaks of waves/distance, or as they pass a marker/duration, but with the first, you are measuring space and with the second, you are measuring action.
Is time the frame of action, like space, or an effect of it, like temperature?
Does duration transcend the point of the present, or is duration simply what is present between the occurrence of events?
Now ask yourself, does the earth travel this duration from yesterday to tomorrow, or does tomorrow become yesterday because the earth rotates?
People spent a long time trying to figure out how it is that the sun moves across the sky, before realizing it was the earth moving the other direction.
Regards,
John M
Thanks, John Merryman,
for the specificity of argumentative questions you pose. I would qualify my response by referring to your preface that "physics treats (time) as a measure of interval". I do not reject that but neither do I accept it as exclusively so. It is the prevalent paradigm in assignment and generation of values in quantitative analysis, but imposes a number line on all such operations.
If I may briefly digress, a fairly recent book 'Where mathematics come from, how the embodied mind brings mathematics into being' (my library lend receipt doesn't list the authors and I've forgotten) presented research showing that precognitive infants have the innate ability to immediately distinguish 1, 2 and 3 objects, and slightly less readily 4. Also infants can readily distinguish between those numbers of objects. It seems we are genetically predisposed to cognitively develop math as a construct of interval and object.
We also possess a capacity, perhaps instinctively, to perceive continuous, nonsegmented motion or change. It is this paradigm in which I find time most accessible. A number line can be applied to it but is not a necessity. Quantitative analysis can be made by rational comparative proportion with space and energy.
I could launch into a wordy monologue but prefer to be welcome, so I'll concisely reply to the questions from a paradigm of continuum.
Time is a frame of action along with space, but covariant in scale. That
covariance induces action of time to extend seeking equilibrium with space, and energy is emergent from the stress between the rigid covariant scales, like temperature.
Duration is more difficult to express as it can be a zero point determined as an instantaneous rate of time extension of any value between nil and light velocity. That point however, is manifold of the existant velocity, the relative energy density proportional to that velocity, and the location spatially along a radial length of a rest mass of energy determined as an exponential function of the difference between the simultaneous existant velocities of nil and light velocity producing a distribution of energy in a continuum of density variation across the mass-energy volume.
So while duration could be said to transcend the point of the present, it is finite as a manifold point of occurrence between relational proportional values.
Energy emerging continuously from the spacetime covariance maintains a cohesion as a discrete mass though the lower energy density values of multiple masses may overlap and meld without loss of cohesive integrity. Those lower density limits can prescribe comparatively vast volumes so in aggregate it is quite applicable to operate in a paradigm of object/intervals as the individual discrete particles can fit right into a number line. The composite field on energy of the sun must reach at least as far as the aphelion of the longest period comet. Hope this was somewhat comprehensible.
John (Cox),
Let's be careful in thinking rather than in the choice of marginal words. You were musing about the question whether time "was like a river carrying us along with it, or was it like a static state which we move through". Admittedly, I don't consider such metaphors. When I was teaching EE students for more than four decades, I used the notion of time as a measure how distant from moment of consideration something will be in the future with the option to arbitrarily shift the point zero of reference. When I dealt with auditory perception, I got aware that only data from the past are available in the moment of consideration. Accordingly I mimicked the auditory function with reference to the (moving relative to the usual scale) "now" because the ear does not know our agreement on Christ's birth midnight in Greenwich. It works based on elapsed time instead.
Let me try and explain why I prefer only one ubiquitous time everywhere instead of a different local time for every inertial system:
Well, I meanwhile distrust the ideas by Lorentz/FitzGerald and fellows because they tried to rescue a guess that was disproved by Michelson. However, there is a compelling reason too:
The measure time is only valuable if it correctly reflects the relationship between earlier and subsequent events, in other words: causality. Any cause precedes its effect. There is no preferred origin in space. Any spatial distance between two locations is positive.
Eckard
John,
I think I get the gist of it.
When I say the "point of the present," it is open to interpretation. I only see the essential reality as energy in space, so if it exists, it is "present." This is difficult to define as a point, because a point in time implies instantaneous and if we were to actually freeze the action, there would be no change and thus no time.
I recall some years ago an experiment done on these large desert ants, where, after locating food, some had their legs clipped and others had tiny extensions glued on. Those with shorter legs stopped before reaching the food and those with longer legs walked past it. The conclusion drawn was that they counted steps as a navigation function.
E.O. Wilson, on the other hand, described the insect brain as a thermostat.
I think both are true, in that the left brain serial function is a form of counter/clock and the right brain parallel processor is a form of thermostat. This allows the individual to both process the larger environment wholistically and to navigate a particular path through it.
The problem now is that our logic function is largely a serial process, ie. narrative and cause and effect, while the scalar side is dismissed as intuition and emotion. Intuition is simply our cumulative experience reacting to current circumstances and we each have different experiences, so intuition is not just some generalized instinct, but built on the entire body of one's knowledge.
Consider that physicists have a body of knowledge that determines how they respond to fresh input and currently it has them seriously off into fantasy land, so we do need to go back and examine where the "junk in" is, that is causing this "junk out."
Often new ideas just "spring out of nowhere," but that is the scalar function. Much as pressure on a balloon will cause it to pop at the weakest point, so to does this process lead us to the nuances of the larger picture.
I have in these discussions tried making the argument that time is much more like temperature than space, as an effect of action. Time is to temperature, what frequency is to amplitude.
Temperature gets dismissed as a statistical average, yet particles are exchanging energy and seeking that entropic medium, incorporating new input in the process. Meanwhile, time, as the sequential basis of narrative and causal logic, is elevated to foundational property.
Sequence is not causal. Yesterday doesn't cause today, anymore than one rung on a ladder causes the next. Energy exchange is causal. The sun shining on a rotating planet creates these events called days. Just as wind on the water causes waves. So measuring from one event to the next is not indicative of some foundational geometry of the universe. Like temperature, it is simply a measure of change caused by action.
Regards,
John
Like temperature is a scalar measure of action, it is simply a measure of change caused by action.
"Time is to temperature, what frequency is to amplitude."
John, I think because I am myself dyslexic, I continue to be fascinated with how you go on creating logically coherent narrative from false premises. That's what Pauli meant, I suppose, by "not even wrong."
Wave frequency and amplitude are independent. Frequency is actually the inverse of time . That is, a time unit is defined by counting a number of wave cycles, oscillations between up and down amplitudes. Amplitude describes the energy content of the wave. We can have high frequency/low energy waves and low frequency/high energy waves.
Yes, I know you'll have some explanation to follow that makes sense to you. It won't make sense to physics, however, because it's very fundamental logic that if "time is to temperature what frequency is to amplitude," the only possible conclusion is that time and temperature are independent.
Tom
We all know what time is until we try to explain it.
Tom,
I really would like to say; Oh wow! I see your point! But I just don't.
When did I ever say frequency and amplitude are not independent? Turn up the volume on your radio and it raises the amplitude, but doesn't affect the frequency.
You also seem to be agreeing that frequency is the basis of how we measure time.
The "energy content of the wave" is a scalar measure of energy. Yes, temperature isn't a single wave, but I'm not saying amplitude is temperature, I'm saying time is to temperature what frequency is to amplitude. Frequency and amplitude are characteristics of wave action, while time and temperature are far more generalized effects. We can certainly have change and thus the effect of time, without there being any regularity to it. In fact, if it was only regular frequency, there would be no "arrow of time," only a metronome.
And one reason I like you is because I know you will never agree with anything I say. If you did, it would likely kill the conversation.
Regards,
John M
John, your assumption is entirely equivalent to assuming 0 = 1. Your argument is disconnected. It's a mystery to me why *you* don't see that.
Best,
Tom
John M and John C, respectively,
Temperature has an absolute point of reference: zero.
CF v. Weizsaecker referred to Aurelius Augustinus when he wrote the sentence you quoted. He argued that there was no time before God created the universe. Mockers added: Before He made the Big Bang, He made the hell for those who are rising insubordinate questions.
I consider only the duration of an already finished process, i.e. the time that has already elapsed, as an unchangeably fixated measure, as something that can be measured, in principle. The usual notion of time has been an abstracted, flipped and arbitrarily shifted measure.
It is certainly tempting and possibly rewarding for theoreticians to conjecture that the measurable duration of oscillatory elementary processes relates to expectation values and the transfer between kinetic and potential energy and return. However, I did not came across to any fertile and provably consistent suggested mechanism. I doubt that we need such speculations at all.
On the other hand I am sure that it is not necessary to integrate from minus infinity to plus infinity as to calculate the frequency spectrum of measured data. Future data are not available in advance. Expected future influences did not yet become real. Nice theories by Descartes and Fourier (who were still on search), Einstein, Hilbert, Minkowski, and many others do not overrule that experience.
Eckard
We've been circling our wagons around measurement of time, rather than the thread from Lee Smolin's book. Is time existential or emergent? "GO!"
Tom,
You don't argue with what I say, but your model of what I say, aka. the strawman argument.
I suppose it is a natural consequence of seeing only the model as real.
Regards,
John M
Eckard,
Nor did we need those cosmic gear wheels to explain the motions of the sun, planets and stars.
Regards,
John M
John C,
I just don't quite know what to make of your seeming request to push the reset button on this discussion. Personally I think I make a very basic and elementary argument that we are too focused on the sequence of time/past to future and incorporate it into elemental theories of nature, rather than the dynamic by which future becomes past. You are certainly entitled to disagree. I'm sure Tom would like the company, but for me to reset, I would simply have to repeat the same points, since you give me no clue as to what you do or do not understand and what you agree or disagree with.
Admittedly I tend not to engage some of the more abstract debates over the nature of time, for the simple reason I feel most of them are efforts to correct flawed initial premises, but I don't think this is an overly complex point, so it really shouldn't be difficult to engage, if one is willing to consider the logic.
Regards,
John M
John M.
I quite agree that we can become too focused on heuristic definition of the transitional aspect of time, and your comments make a good point of departure.
Smolin's book argues for a return to treating time as existential and I very much agree. Too often I read partial quotes out of context to support arguments for one or the other preference for relativistic or quantum interpretation and from that a pronouncement that 'time does not exist'. Shrodingers cat doesn't just say that a quantity can be thought of as either a particle or a wave, it is an affirmation of Heisenberg's principle and that physical phenomenon exist
as both a continuum state and a discrete quantity. I have commented on Evolving the Arrow of Time that the quantum might be found as a break from the continuum rather than a break in continuous change, that is at a point of intersection of a line tangent to a curvature of spacetime.
It is in the choice of axioms in constructing expression mathematically in both quantum mechanics and relativity that we find a mathematic proof of some conclusion or another which then is trotted out to "prove" that time is something other than fundamentally existential. But even in arithmetic the rules for multiplication and division of/by zero are arbitrary simply for the purpose of preserving the associative, commutative, and distributive properties of mathematic operations. In Eddington's 1920 defense of relativity, 'Space, Time and Gravitation' he says quite frankly not to try to find any relationship with the physical in the assignment of a different sign for the fourth term, it is simply by changing that sign that the math can distinguish that term as being 'timelike'.
Quantum mechanics treats time as if it were Newtonian and Relationists point to Einstein saying that the Newtonian paradigm is a 'stubbornly persistent illusion' and both then say 'A Haa! Time is an illusion! when in truth its only in the choice of axiom. That's the very definition of ad hoc-proctor hoc.
As to what 'I' think... if we compare the qualitative properties of how we use space, time, and energy in conventions of units and measure, we find that energy is polymorphic, whereas both time and space do not transmute into something else. Relativisticly, time and space undergo transformation of only the dimensional length. To my mind that argues strongly for space and time being existential and energy being emergent.
Thanks, hope I've made myself reasonable clear. Can somebody tell me how I can expand a recent comment on the Article Page so that I can refer to it without clicking back to "read all comments", when I do that it deletes what I've already written in the Comment box. Thanks, jrc.
