Readers' Choice: The Crystallizing Universe

Suppose the disk is labeled thus, but its record is blank. To the observer (the one who plays the disk), this would differ from a disk full of information ... how?

Tom

The wording "crystallizes from past" is not appropriate.

The wording for crystallisation is always that a crystal

crystallizes from liquid/melt (=less ordered) phase.

So the analogy affords to say: the past (= fixed)

crystallizes from future.

Kate Becker wrote: "The view that the past, the present and the future are of exactly the same physical character seems to be supported by Einstein's special theory of relativity..."

This view is DEDUCED in Einstein's special theory of relativity, and if you don't accept it, you should suggest which of the two postulates - the principle of relativity and the principle of constancy of the speed of light - is false. Any different discussion amounts to crimestop:

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17 George Orwell: "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

Clue:

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Its-Roots-Banesh-Hoffmann/dp/0486406768

"Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann

"Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had suggested in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one, the second principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding train can do far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the speed of the particle is not independent of the motion of the object emitting it. And if we take light to consist of particles and assume that these particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to Newtonian relativity and thus automatically account for the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as we have seen, Einstein resisted the temptation to account for the null result in terms of particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian ideas, and introduced as his second postulate something that was more or less obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether."

I like the idea of christallisation (entropy?) of reality, but in fact it is not so very much different from the many worlds theory, the difference is in my opinion that there is only ONE past, but the possibillities of the future are endless, therefore the free will is introduced, you can wonder if this "free" will is appliccable for an individual observer in one experiment or observation, there are 6,5 billion other observers around us , each of them "realising" or in this case "cristallizing" a now moment, all these together form the universe we live in, (the cd is not written by only one).

I should like to add a little thought experiment :

A photon travels in our universe at the speed of light (time is not passing), by accident it passes the border of one of the paralel universes that surround us, in this paralel universe the speed of light is higher as in ours, observers in this universe are not aware of our photon because of the little difference in constitution, our photon travels on with 2 times the speed of light , i.e.time is going back for our photon and it returns in his past being being our Universê the moment before it moved to the paralel universe, what happens ?

1. we will never observe the photon disappearing

2.our neighbours will never observe the so called black matter photon

So in both universes no one can observe anything, there is no cristalisation of any past possible.

In this thought experiment however black matter and dark energy is explained for both universes.

to be continued

Wilhelmus

When Einstein declared "the separation between past, present, and future an obstinate illusion" he made two horror mistakes at a time.

The metaphor by Ellis nicely illustrates what Claude Shannon correctly described: Past and future are fundamentally different from each other.

Einstein's denial of the separation between past and future has been a requirement for the round-trip synchronization he adopted from Poincaré.

Neither Einstein nor Ellis clarified what they meant with the notion present. The present does not at all qualify as a physical quantity because it is used in a deliberately imprecise manner as to possibly include parts of past and future at a time.

Eckard

Tom,

How? Oliver Heaviside created a clever decomposition of the missing future into even and odd components as to prepare it for complex Fourier transformation. Even ones get real parts, odd ones imaginary parts. A lot of redundant symmetries arose.

Eckard

It has nothing to do with past or future. It has to do with observer entanglement with the wave function. The interaction of the observer with the hypothetical CD will change history. So the ostensibly well ordered historical events recorded on the disk will not be distinguishable from random or pseudo random events at the point of interaction.

Tom

Tom,

Maybe some theorist are even using the good old notion history in a sense that essentially deviates from the original one. My old fashioned dictionary tells me that history always refers to the past.

Doesn't ostensible mean not actual but alleged or pretended? The real numbers are ostensibly well ordered. However, being uncountable they do not fit on a CD.

So far nobody managed to changed history. Nothing can predict all future data for two different reasons: At first there is no known end of time, and secondly the variety of possible influences is also unlimited. Why do you refer to an entanglement of an observer with a wave function? Isn't any object under observation independent from any ideal observer? Isn't the suggested interactive CD just ridiculous?

Eckard

Very interesting article by Tony Rothman in American Scientist:

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2011/3/the-man-behind-the-curtain

"What's more, by resorting to a classical optics analogy of the experiment, authors are forgoing any explanation whatsoever. "Explanation" in physics generally means to find a causal mechanism for something to happen, a mechanism involving forces, but textbook optics affords no such explanation of slit experiments. Rather than describing how the light interacts with the slits, thus explaining why it behaves as it does, we merely demand that the light wave meet certain conditions at the slit edge and forget about the actual forces involved. The results agree well with observation, but the most widely used of such methods not only avoids the guts of the problem but is mathematically inconsistent. Not to mention that the measurement problem remains in full force.

Such examples abound throughout physics. Rather than pretending that they don't exist, physics educators would do well to acknowledge when they invoke the Wizard working the levers from behind the curtain. Even towards the end of the twentieth century, physics was regarded as received Truth, a revelation of the face of God. Some physicists may still believe that, but I prefer to think of physics as a collection of models, models that map the territory, but are never the territory itself. That may smack of defeatism to many, but ultimate answers are not to be grasped by mortals. Physicists have indeed gone further than other scientists in describing the natural world; they should not confuse description with understanding."

Another clue:

https://webspace.utexas.edu/aam829/1/m/Relativity_files/RitzEinstein.pdf

Alberto Martinez: "In sum, Einstein rejected the emission hypothesis prior to 1905 not because of any direct empirical evidence against it, but because it seemed to involve too many theoretical and mathematical complications. By contrast, Ritz was impressed by the lack of empirical evidence against the emission hypothesis, and he was not deterred by the mathematical difficulties it involved. It seemed to Ritz far more reasonable to assume, in the interest of the "economy" of scientific concepts, that the speed of light depends on the speed of its source, like any other projectile, rather than to assume or believe, with Einstein, that its speed is independent of the motion of its source even though it is not a wave in a medium; that nothing can go faster than light; that the length and mass of any body varies with its velocity; that there exist no rigid bodies; that duration and simultaneity are relative concepts; that the basic parallelogram law for the addition of velocities is not exactly valid; and so forth. Ritz commented that "it is a curious thing, worthy of remark, that only a few years ago one would have thought it sufficient to refute a theory to show that it entails even one or another of these consequences...."

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

Dear Pentcho,

Thank you for the link to the Physics in Perspective paper. You might be surprised, I wrote an unpublished manuscript "A still valid argument by Ritz". While you seem to entirely agree with emission theory, I merely consider Lorentz transformation and Poincaré "synchronization" most likely wrong. I was surprised that already Planck and Boltzmann disputed the issue of past and future. The latter committed suicide instead of admitting being possibly wrong. Why did not Planck or somebody else came to the conclusion to distinguish between abstracted usual time and measurable elapsed time? Do you have further information on this?

Regards,

Eckard

Joy Christian has written an interesting paper Absolute Being vs Relative Becoming on this topic.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Please read my comment on it from Apr. 14 on topic 963.

Eckard

The block universe with a dynamic occurrence of time, or this crystallizing of time in various present periods on a spatial sheet of 3-dim, invokes a funny thing. Quantum mechanics is noncontextual in that the basis of vectors is not determined by anything in quantum mechanics. It is selected for by the experimentalist. Hence the contextual aspects of a quantum measurement are what quantum interpretations are centered upon. In the Copenhagen interpretation (CI) the cut is the classical-quantum dichotomy. Of course for this to be "absolute" you need an apparatus which is absolutely non-quantal, meaning its mass must be infinite, and you need an infinite number of experiments. That is fictional of course. The many worlds interpretation (MWI) indicates there is a splitting off of world according to eigenbases selected. The idea is then that the world continues to be quantum mechanical. However, that is still funny, for the world is split off according to the contextuality of the wave function decoherence, or equivalently by the eigen-basis chosen by the experimenter. So this too is not a complete picture.

Quantum interpretations attempt to reduce the mysterious nature of quantum mechanics to our classical understanding, which has an intuitive sensory aspect to how we perceive the world. Yet at the end if the universe is entirely quantum mechanical it is unlikely that any of these schemes can ever work completely. The hidden problem is that QM is inherently noncontextual, but how we interpret QM is contextual. This is a contradiction.

With the block universe it seems reasonable to say the progression of time involves decoherent events, or what has been called wave function collapse. Yet in a subtle way this model has the above contradiction, just as does MWI or CI. This suggests a number of things. I think the primary one is that quantum cosmology should not focus primarily on the issue at all. The question is with the equivalency between quantum entanglements and spacetime configurations. I further suspect this issue of what constitutes a present time and issues of a "flow of time" may simply not be appropriate questions to ask. This may be similar to tinkering around with aether theories and the like before 1905.

Cheers LC

Yes, the fact that quantum measurement unavoidably depends on classical parameters breeds consequences that are frequently swept under the rug of metaphor.

This was the case in suggesting the history of the world on a DVD (or any finite instrument). I agree with the question of equivalence between "... quantum entanglements and spacetime configurations."

That would necessarily move the problem to n-dimension Hilbert space and the string theory extension of quantum field theory. One does not encounter the histrionic objections to "mainstream science" in physics forums outside this one. As elusive as the answers are, the basic formalisms are correct.

Tom

The main point of a physical theory is to make predictions about measurable observables. The question on how we perceive time does far not a measurable quantity, at least at this time. We might even imagine there are intelligent life forms on other planets which perceive space and time in very different ways. If a quantum gravity theory is arrived at it might from there tell us about how it is we observe time, at it might be a dynamic block or crystallizing world. On the other hand it might not do that, but still gives answers to question or problems that have some measurable observables which can be probed.

Cheers LC

LC, You wrote: "The main point of a physical theory is to make predictions about measurable observables. The question on how we perceive time does far not a measurable quantity".

I see any performed measurement of time not a question of perception but clearly related to two more or less distant events in the past.

If someone attributes traces to the past then he considers the past as part of the abstract notion time that includes both past and future. Actually measurable are only the traces of past processes. This memory of traces altogether constitutes the unchangeable reality called the past in the sense of a contextual entity of partially predictable influences.

Is it correct to attribute observability to a concrete physical quantity? Definitely yes inside a model, however definitely no in reality. Predictions are more or less uncertain.

Eckard

Because English is not my mother tongue, I wonder why you wrote "far not". May I understand "not far" as almost?

Eckard,

The perceptions we have of space and time are in a way mental constructions. Barbour argues that time does not exist due to the fact the ADM Hamiltonian and momentum constraints NH = 0, N^iH_i = 0 have not time content. This extends to the Wheeler DeWitt quantum version HΨ[g] = 0. The set of diffeomorphisms of the theory are removed on the moduli space, and so identification of Diff(M) with time can't be established. However, I could equally suppose that time is a one dimensional space with a fibration of three dimensional manifolds we think of as space. I can further work out how these two pictures are in fact quantum complementarities.

In either case what we call space and time are not written in concrete at all. They are an aspect of an external degree of gauge freedom, or a coordinate choice on a frame bundle, which are chosen by the analyst or observer. They are not at all gauge covariant, and hence really do not constitute anything which can be called physically real. They are artifacts of a gauge choice, or in some sense constructed by the observer. In effect we "make them up."

As for the "far not," that is a mangled re-edit. The sentence "The question on how we perceive time does far not a measurable quantity, at least at this time," probably should read "The question on how we perceive time does not so far address a measurable quantity, at least currently."

Cheers LC