Real-Time Physics

Thomas Ray

John,

"As I keep arguing against the many words model, is that it inserts time as that line from past to future and so you have the features of a determined past being applied to a probabilistic future, rather than simply letting the actions run in their own time free dynamic and the effect of time emerging from the results."

The many-worlds interpetation of quantum mechanics doesn't have anything to do with time evolution. It follows rather closely the mechanics of classical randomness -- i.e., rather than a collapse of the wave function from many probabilities into one certainty, it allows many certainties from random branching of binary alternatives.

"Those quantum particles don't have any past of future, they only have momentum."

How does one know that?

"Just totally get rid of any concept of time when thinking about that level."

Then why did you intoduce time evolution at the beginning?

"Its only when you step back and think about where they were and where they might go next, that you have time. There is only that quantum presence, not present. It doesn't collapse, because space doesn't collapse, so one configuration of that quantum presence leads to another."

How does one step outside the universe?

Best,

Tom

Eckard Blumschein

Peter,

What argument of Tom do you refer to? Well, I didn't answer his question about prediction. PreDICTION and forSEEing are of course only possible on the logical level of abstract time, i.e. the usual one, not on the level of what is called e.g. a life transmission or real-time. Nature including our own senses cannot forecast or predict anything. I know that this distinction is perhaps too hard to grasp for those who were trained to confuse map and territory. This does not imply that the scale of so far elapsed time is unnecessary which is unilaterally extended and which permanently separates the unchangeable past from expected and open to influences future. For the reason that there is no preferred location, this applies for any location in space.

Eckard

pjackson

Eckard,

I meant you can't falsify 'no natural zero'.

The far more important consideration which holds the key to the whole thing is however different; It is that we CAN demonstrate that there is a single RATE of time in all inertial frames.

The signals I discussed carry the information on that 'rate' when emitted, and always propagating locally at c, but if the observer is in a different state of motion to the clock, then the signal will be Doppler shifted.

Doppler shift of time signals = apparently different 'rate of time'. Not a REAL difference, just a Doppler shift of some EM waves.

That understanding alone clears away 90% of the nonsense disguising nature.

If you now re-read the last post it will also make good sense. (which Tom cannot then deny - except by 'denial').

Peter.

John Merryman

Tom,

" it allows many certainties from random branching of binary alternatives."

Didn't we just have a debate over the principle of least action? Don't the paths not taken mean they did not fulfill the principle? There are many 'alternatives' and fewer actualities.

"Collapsing the wave function" doesn't so much create 'reality,' as it choses one path over another, for the test in question. Our reality is 'the test in question,' so the alternatives become effectively immaterial, if not actually so. Its like logic gates, the closed ones don't go anywhere.

"How does one know that?"

Can they observe their own progress? Self aware quanta?

"Then why did you intoduce time evolution at the beginning?'

Where have I ever called it anything other than an effect and measure of change? Evolution is up several levels of complexity. Most change is cyclical.

"How does one step outside the universe?"

I guess that very much depends on how you define the universe. For instance, if it is all that exists, then non-existence would presumably be outside of it.

Though that wasn't what I meant by 'step back.' For one thing, since I said 'space doesn't collapse,' I'm not removing any spatial context and since I'm also assigning it a 'quantum presence,' that stays as well. So what I'm talking about stepping back from are all the levels of complexity built on that essence. This would be any kind of linear change, ie. evolution, history, etc. Therefore any complex structures that require such a building process. Leaving just that bubbling stew of a fluctuating vacuum.

Regards,

John M

Eckard Blumschein

Peter,

My topic is real-time and its natural zero, the now, between past and future. If you were really much more intelligent than those who don't agree with you then you didn't support Tom and didn't write "you can't falsify 'no natural zero'". Zero of what? Elapsed time has a natural zero while common time requires an arbitrarily chosen one. Neither Tom nor you or anybody else have any argument against this simple fact: As does a distance in space, the time elapsed after an event can by definition vary between very large and zero but never become negative.

It might be a moot point which consideration "holds the key to the whole thing". What thing should we refer to? Isn't the question important whether ordinary time or elapsed time is a not yet abstracted quantity that immediately belongs to reality? I see it undeniable that ordinary time is a abstracted from elapsed time notion. The abstraction stripped off the tight to reality. The abstracted time can be shifted, flipped, or otherwise manipulated. Nobody can change the already elapsed time, e.g. his own age. Only elapsed, i.e. past time can be measured.

I came to this simple but compelling insight when I dealt with auditory function in contrast to the ridiculous practice to arrange with non-causality in signal processing. The natural solution to frequency analysis is not so awkward as to arbitrarily choose what is required for a Fourier transformation and then being forced to relocate the chosen window after a while. It doesn't yield non-causal results. Auditory function rather resembles a cosine transformation of the permanently changing function of elapsed time. MP3 also benefits from use of cosine transformation.

What about your topic, I would like to first of all ask you for objections against my definition of the speed of light propagating in vacuum given in the endnotes of my last essay. How do you define this speed?

Eckard

John Merryman

Akinbo,

Having discussed it with JCN and our seeming agreement, one way to think of this is that rather then time being the present 'moving' from past to future, it is the changing configuration of what is, that turns future into past. For example, it's not the earth traveling some dimension from yesterday to tomorrow, but tomorrow becoming yesterday because the earth rotates.

As energy is presumably ultimately conserved, it just keeps changing, since it is the nature of energy to act. Keep in mind that the second law refers to a closed system, but if the universe is infinite, then any energy radiated from one area moves to another and any area is surrounded by others radiating energy toward it. Energy naturally coalesces as positive and negative attract, but this leaves a vacuum of empty space, which then attracts surrounding energy, pulling on those particles...

Regards,

John M

Thomas Ray

"Didn't we just have a debate over the principle of least action?"

You must have had that debate with yourself or someone else, John. Not with me.

"Don't the paths not taken mean they did not fulfill the principle?"

No.

"There are many 'alternatives' and fewer actualities."

Not at all. You still don't get it.

All along, John, in your subsequent answers here, and elsewhere, you simply assume things not in evidence either real or theoretical. And the meaning you assign to them, is all in your personal belief -- not argued, not deduced.

If nothing is outside the universe that so obviously "exists," then what could possibly be outside except non-existence? That's naive realism, in all its varnished glory.

Not picking on you, John. There are plenty here and elsewhere who share that view.

John Merryman

Tom,

"You must have had that debate with yourself or someone else, John. Not with me."

Have you been having trouble remembering where you put things lately? You might want to go back and reread this thread.

So you hold one view that says there is only one path between two points and one that all possible paths happen? Interesting. Is one the particle path and one the wave path? Of course, then there is the relativistic view that nothing actually moves, all these paths just exist in that fourth dimension.

"Not at all. You still don't get it."

I don't have a problem not getting your model(s) of reality. No one is going to pay me to sit around and dream up multiple alternate realities. Unless I am seriously physically aware of what is going on in my situation, I could get quite hurt. That naive non-linear awareness serves me just fine. No other universes required.

Regards,

John M

John Merryman

Eckard,

Possibly you could re-enforce your observation about elapsed time, but pointing out future events are those for which the lightcone is not yet complete and since information cannot travel faster than light, the actual occurrences cannot be known, even in theory, so the future cannot be determined.

Regards,

John M

Thomas Ray

"No one is going to pay me to sit around and dream up multiple alternate realities."

Too bad. You'd be a billionaire.

John Merryman

Tom,

Why thank you! I do have an overactive imagination, but it is also corrosive. I seem to like breaking up my own ideas, as much as creating them. The tendency to expand is matched by the inclination to contract. The whole desire to live, but obsession with mortality thing.

Whatever is left is waiting...

Actually I don't really find the idea of being over rich, that appealing. Not only are there endless strings attached, but I have the sense the wealth bubble is blowing itself up so large, that when it does pop, even many of those perched on top will find themselves lost in the ripcurrents. The riding the tiger thing.

Regards,

John M

Eckard Blumschein

Akinbo, John M,

Do we really need to know the reason why a reason precedes its effect? Sorry John, I dislike your statement that tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates. Why should just the motion of our earth something that rules the whole universe? According to current knowledge the rotation of earth does not provide the most accurate measure of a timespan.

Akinbo, in that you are certainly quite right: As did JCN Smith in the paper you pointed to (BTW: It was easily available to me after I corrected the link), one has to distinguish between what he called "the notion of a particular time and the notion of elapsed time". Smith already understands that only the latter is measurable. I am trying to convince you all that the usual alias particular time was created by abstraction, reversal, and continuation of the positive by definition elapsed time.

I even appreciate Tom's as fierce as helpless resistance against any distinction between past and future. He tries to defend a position that is intrinsically linked with Einstein's special relativity and Minkowski's spacetime. Tom is correct in that the currently tense-less physics contradicts to the inclusion of the now into it. Such consequence seems to be missing in papers by George Ellis as well as JNC Smith and even in some of your utterances.

Eckard

Eckard Blumschein

John M,

Elapsed time in reality includes all measurable in principle i.e. past in the actual moment time. I your suggestion to add future time to it not reasonable. Future time does only exist on the level of abstraction. i.e. on a logical level that has no immediate connection to reality. On this level, there is both past and future time. The merger did destroy the link to the now.

You wrote: "Possibly you could re-enforce your observation about elapsed time, but pointing out future events are those for which the lightcone is not yet complete and since information cannot travel faster than light, the actual occurrences cannot be known, even in theory, so the future cannot be determined."

I see Minkowski's "lightcone" in so far complete on the level of abstract time as it illustrates the limitation to the transfer of signals by the limited velocity of light. However, it cannot show that past time (elapsed time) is originally something different from abstract time. Perhaps you meant that the so called future world-line cannot yet be know in advance. That's true for reality.

I didn't make an observation. I just successfully used the simpler because real-valued cosine transformation instead of the complex-valued Fourier transformation. Of course, the mathematics did not become much simpler. I see the main advantage in the disappearance of stunning non-causality and other counter-intuitive flaws. If my reasoning is at variance with theories then I suspect that they might be wrong, even Einstein's block universe.

Eckard

John Merryman

Eckard,

"Perhaps you meant that the so called future world-line cannot yet be know in advance."

That's my basic point. The idea is that the four dimensional spacetime is based on that universal speed limit of light and it is then by this universal limit that the future cannot be known. It refutes its own blocktime.

Regards,

John M

John Merryman

Eckard,

I only use that as an example of how we perceive time, vs. how it is caused.

On a related aspect, consider how civilization has altered the length of the month, from the natural cycles of the moon, to units of the year. It is a consequence of our desire to universalize and synchronize the passage and measures of time, yet it further divorces it from the underlaying basis on all the various motions and actions.

It's bit like how we have to synchronize our lives to those around us and our environment, in order to function. Think how jet lag throws off that biological clock. Not to mention trying to function in another society that has other views on time. Consider how much our religious and political traditions are a function of narrative. It has been my impression that monotheistic cultures have a much more linear concept of time, while eastern cultures have a much more cyclical concept of time.

Regards,

John M

Eckard Blumschein

John,

Future "worldlines" could be calculated on the illusory condition that the world was an exact, entirely known, and simply enough one-to-one mathematical model of itself. I rather trust in Popper who considered the world open.

Regards,

Eckard

[deleted]

Instantaneity is consistent with real time, and it does make time important in physics.

Inertial, electromagnetic, and gravitational equivalency and balancing clearly requires invisible and visible space in FUNDAMENTAL equilibrium and balance in conjunction with half inertia and half gravity and the MIDDLE distance in/of space.

This is fundamental to physics and to unification in physics.

Eckard Blumschein

John M,

Time is not a perception. Elapsed time and a timespan, i.e. the difference between two values of elapsed time are physical measures while the common timescale is an abstraction from elapsed alias past time.

Only those who are trying to deny the now, as e.g. did David Hilbert, Albert Einstein, and Thomas Ray, are interested in considering the now as an illusory perception. The natural zero of elapsed time got lost with its abstraction from reality.

Time is also not caused by the morion of earth although our ancestors oriented their measurement of time on observation of sun and moon. The perhaps oldest picture of the sky with golden sun, moon, and stars on a disk of bronc, which was found in Nebra near to where I live, is several thousand years old and belongs to an equally old observatory. Awareness of causality and of the repeating rather than cyclic measure of one day from rise to fall of the sun is certainly much older.

Regards,

Eckaed

[deleted]

Instantaneity is FUNDAMENTALLY involved with real/actual time and with unification in physics. The ultimate unification and understanding of physics combines, balances, and includes opposites. This may be applied to time and instantaneity. Instantaneity is consistent with real time, and it does make time important in physics and physical experience. Indeed, time AND space FUNDAMENTALLY incorporate, include, involve, and are consistent with instantaneity. This is consistent with the physical description that is presented in the next paragraph. Physics and physical experience happen in and with time.

FQXi.org, can you please make this a blog or discussion please? THE ABOVE PARAGRAPH IS FUNDAMENTAL/FOUNDATIONAL TO TIME, PHYSICS, AND PHYSICAL EXPERIENCE.

John Merryman

Eckard,

When I first came across complexity theory, that balance between order and chaos seemed an aspect of past and future, with the present as that state of complexity between them. The interplay seems woven through so many of the concepts and their contradictory, feedback loop type issues, The wave collapsing/not collapsing, etc. We seem permanently balanced on that edge. Unstable, but unescapable.

Regards,

John M

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