Readers' Choice: The Crystallizing Universe

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

Is the future a less ordered phase or does it simply not exist? I see prediction like something imagined by means of extrapolation the basis of traces.

Who feels himself crystallized from his grandchildren? Perhaps "crystallizes from the past" should be replaced by "resulting from influences", which of course belong to the past.

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

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

LC, Now I understand your sentence. Thank you. I even understand that Lorenz gauge condition is Lorentz invariant.

However, my caveat cannot be understood within the restriction to models of reality instead reality itself. A year is a reasonable objective measure. The number of years elapsed since my birth does not depend on any arbitrarily chosen gauge. Gauge redundancy and gauge arbitrariness do not matter in reality.

I agree: We made up what we are calling time.

However, the just elapsed time is an objective and measurable positive quantity with a natural reference point: Now.

Likewise, any shortest distance between two points in space cannot be negative.

Obviously my caveat is most fundamentally at odds with a lot of non-commutative, non-abelian theories that refer to the usual abstract and arbitrarily chosen notion of time which is not immediately linked with reality: Block universe, Poincaré synchronization, Lorentz transformation, Minkowski metric, Weyl's Eichinvarianz, ...

Regards,

Eckard

Supersymmetry is a way of interchanging internal symmetries with external symmetries. The internal symmetries are local gauge changes which introduce forces. External symmetries are the Lorentz group of boosts and rotations in spacetime. We are all familiar with the idea that internal symmetries are fictional: Take an electromagnetic vector A and add a gradient of some scalar A' = A gradX and we then have that the magnetic field B = -curlA' = -curlA - curl gradX, and the last term is zero. The difference is that with the external symmetries we have a sense of them and an arrangement of objects and ourselves with respect to each other in a spatial arrangement. Yet if internal and external symmetries are interchangeable it must mean their physical statuses are equivalent.

We are all familiar with curved spacetime, after all general relativity is nearly 100 years old now, but in fact we see little immediate presence of it. The curvature of spacetime due to Earth's gravity is 10^{-27}cm^{-2} --- tiny. By the same token we hardly have much sense that space is just a configuration variable for fields, and time is a parameterization of fields --- which are Lorentz covariant. Black hole change things a bit, for the observer outside the black hole witnesses physics according to an S matrix with a different domain than an observer who falls in with the quantum field of interest. The two observers witness the process according to entirely different representations, and yet in the end the core physics is the same. What is different is how the physical fields are "dressed," or should we say the particular moduli used.

In analogy with the dressing of quantum states and moduli, I could tomorrow put on a suit and head out to work. I could instead try something a bit different and put on a women's suit dress. The difference is superficial, for it is how the material folds and hangs on the underlying frame that is different --- the basic frame is the same, nothing fundamentally is different. Yet we tend to see the clothes, how the quantum states are dressed or the phase of the entanglement, as equal to the underlying quantum bits. Space and time share this property of being like the clothes.

Cheers LC

LC,

All your reasoning fits to the currently mandatory assumption of a block universe which is for instance explained in an extensive while nonetheless not convincing to me manner by Lebovitz in http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Time%27s_arrow_and_Boltzmann%27s_entropy

Lebovitz admits that his view is opposed to the camp of "those who regard the passage of time as an objective feature of reality, and interpret the present moment as the marker or leading edge of this advance."

Lebovitz continues: "Some members of this camp give the present ontological priority, as well, sharing Augustine's view that the past and the future are unreal". Unfortunately I did not manage to convince proponents of this view that the present is a deliberately imprecise notion.

Lebovitz adds: "Others take the view that the past is real in a way that the future is not, so that the present consists in something like the coming into being of determinate reality". I see this view in accordance with Claude Shannon and the only reasonable view. I just wonder why apparently nobody dealt seriously with it.

Isn't my reasoning extremely uncommon but a bit more consequent and compelling? We both may agree on that the usual notion of time is just a mental construct while admittedly a very successful one. However, isn't it based on experience? Experience is necessarily restricted to the belonging past. Future events evade observation and measurement. Therefore, there is NO flow of time but a steady growth of elapsed time.

Reality is not invariant under shift. Invariance, covariance etc. are based on abstraction and therefore restricted to models. Physicists should learn to correctly interpret the results of their calculations.

Elsewhere I fond the utterance: "Mathematics dictates physics." I would like to object: It does definitely not dictate reality if its essence is its freedom.

Regards,

Eckard

Block time only makes sense in a classical setting. The idea of the crystallizing block time, or dynamics block time, involves the reduction of quantum states so that the present is something that is materializing. The hitch with this idea is that it means there is some contextual aspect to how quantum states decohere. In a measurement this contextual framework involves the eigenbasis the observer chooses according to how she orients an apparatus. Yet we know that quantum mechanics is non-contextual. This is one problem with the many world interpretation MWI). MWI posits the splitting off of the world according to separate eigenstates, but this can only happen in a contextual framework. Yet if the world is fully quantum mechanical there is no such context by which it splits itself off. So MWI buries the quantum-classical dichotomy more apparent in the Copenhagen interpretation in this subtle contradiction. This is the problem with the whole model here.

My main point is that we impose time as well as space onto the universe. What is physically relevant are the obstructions to flatness which might occur, which we call curvature. These are chosen according to the particular frame we elect to work in and observe the universe. There is no physical prescription which tells us how space is laid out or how time is to organize event in space.

Cheers LC