Video Article: Evolving Time's Arrow

Craig Callender,

Do you really believe one can move to Newtonian space and time and absolute simultaneity without questioning Einstein's 1905 postulates?

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Simultaneity-Routledge-Contemporary-Philosophy/dp/0415701740

Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy)

Craig Callender: "In my opinion, by far the best way for the tenser to respond to Putnam et al is to adopt the Lorentz 1915 interpretation of time dilation and Fitzgerald contraction. Lorentz attributed these effects (and hence the famous null results regarding an aether) to the Lorentz invariance of the dynamical laws governing matter and radiation, not to spacetime structure. On this view, Lorentz invariance is not a spacetime symmetry but a dynamical symmetry, and the special relativistic effects of dilation and contraction are not purely kinematical. The background spacetime is Newtonian or neo-Newtonian, not Minkowskian. Both Newtonian and neo-Newtonian spacetime include a global absolute simultaneity among their invariant structures (with Newtonian spacetime singling out one of neo-Newtonian spacetimes many preferred inertial frames as the rest frame). On this picture, there is no relativity of simultaneity and spacetime is uniquely decomposable into space and time."

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

The lecture is interesting. I will need to read the literature on this to get a better idea. As I see it the propagation of a spatial surface involves hyperbolic 2nd order DE or Sobolev conditions. The propagation of a null sheet on a null sheet is odd of course, for the data on the null sheet remains there, and this pushing of a null sheet this way results in this splitting. This is a case of a parabolic DE or Sobolev condition. If one pushes a 2+1 spacetime surface along a spatial direction this is an elliptic DE "evolution." It is difficult to see how these all can be equivalent. What amounts to Cauchy data in the three cases have different types of norms on their domains of support.

LC

It is always the same question : "Is there life after death" , never people ask me "Was there life before birth", we are trying to find answers for the first question because the future has more value as the past, but in fact by investigating the second question we could also find the answers for the first one...

keep on thinking free

Wilhelmus

Time is a numerical sequence of change. Changes in the universe have its numerical sequence. Change n is followed by change n+1; change n+1 is followed by change n+2 and so on. Time that we measure with clocks is a numerical sequence of changes: n, n+1, n+2 and so on. The smallest unit of time is a Planck time, the largest is one year. Changes do not run in time, time is not a physical reality, in the universe time is exclusively a mathematical quantity.

see this link

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/10/spacetime-has-no-time-dimension-new-theory-claims-that-time-is-not-the-4th-dimension-todays-most-pop.html

Relation between physical time and psychological time shows there is no physical direction of time, in the universe time is exclusively a mathematical quantity. Only psychological time has an arrow - "from the past to the future".

In the universe is always now.

FQXI spend 2 millions dollars on time research without coming to this conclusion ?!

Strange, so much investment and so little result. The problem is in the fact you think time is a physical reality....there is no evidence for that ?

yours amrit

see file attachedAttachment #1: Relation_between_physical_time_and_psychological_time.pdf

I follow you on the minimum time as the Planck time, but why the other end is one year ? tOne year is a very local period that has no physical maximum borders, 1 turn around the sun is of no importance when we study the whole universe. please explain.

see also my essay

keep on thinking free

Wilhelmus

Anonymous, time exists in the universe.

It has no physical properties

time is a numerical sequence of changes.

So time in the universe as a physical quantity has only mathematical character,

universe runs into "eternal here and now"

for more see my home page: www.spacelife.si

yours amrit

It seems clever philosophers of physics have all adopted the Newtonian space-time but also realize that the explicit rejection of Divine Albert's Divine Theory would prevent them from offering non-trivial solutions to the problem of time:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026831.500-what-makes-the-universe-tick.html

"It is still not clear who is right, says John Norton, a philosopher based at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Norton is hesitant to express it, but his instinct - and the consensus in physics - seems to be that space and time exist on their own. The trouble with this idea, though, is that it doesn't sit well with relativity, which describes space-time as a malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter."

http://www.humanamente.eu/PDF/Issue13_Paper_Norton.pdf

John Norton: "It is common to dismiss the passage of time as illusory since its passage has not been captured within modern physical theories. I argue that this is a mistake. Other than the awkward fact that it does not appear in our physics, there is no indication that the passage of time is an illusion. (...) The passage of time is a real, objective fact that obtains in the world independently of us. How, you may wonder, could we think anything else? One possibility is that we might think that the passage of time is some sort of illusion, an artifact of the peculiar way that our brains interact with the world. Indeed that is just what you might think if you have spent a lot of time reading modern physics. Following from the work of Einstein, Minkowski and many more, physics has given a wonderfully powerful conception of space and time. Relativity theory, in its most perspicacious form, melds space and time together to form a four-dimensional spacetime. The study of motion in space and all other processes that unfold in them merely reduce to the study of an odd sort of geometry that prevails in spacetime. In many ways, time turns out to be just like space. In this spacetime geometry, there are differences between space and time. But a difference that somehow captures the passage of time is not to be found. There is no passage of time."

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

I agree up to the statement "physical processes have directionality". Shouldn't we add that they are only imaginable if we demand causality in the sense of interactions here and now of causes leading to irreversibly attributable results even in case of seemingly periodic processes like chicken and egg? Logics of common sense is able to strictly obey this. For that, perception, cognition, feelings, emotions and the like do not matter at all. Of course, predictions are valuable.

Causality implies directionality. Instead of pointing to various arrows of time I prefer speaking of the unique arrow of causality. The second law of thermodynamics is therefore secondary.

My denial of mysticism must not be mistaken as denial of chance or as distrust in probabilistic models. On the contrary, it corresponds to the idea of an open, not yet determined future in contrast to the anticipatory block-universe of spacetime.

Concerning the theoretical basis of spacetime I would like to ask for comments on this.

Eckard Blumschein

John,

Look at the page, find in the middle the address bourabai.narod.ru/shtyrkov/shtyrkov.pdf again, click on it, and enjoy reading the paper Observation of Ether drift in Experiments with Geostationary Satellites. As far as I can judge, it does not look like a poor translation but rather like written immediately in eloquent English by a true expert.

Enjoy,

Eckard

That is, clever philosophers of physics are in a catch-22 situation: The Einstein-Minkowski space-time, the relativity of simultaneity, the block universe etc. have become unbearable and yet without Divine Albert's Divine Theory most of the work in the area would prove pointless. I suspect even presentists would not be quite happy with the official demise of relativity:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/2308/1/presentism_and_qg_vp_3_dd.pdf

PRESENTISM AND QUANTUM GRAVITY by Bradley Monton, Department of Philosophy, University of Kentucky: "I am a presentist: I believe that only presently existing things exist. Contrast presentism with eternalism: the eternalist believes that past, present, and future things all exist. Assuming that there are three spatial dimensions, the eternalist believes that the universe is fourdimensional, and while there are different events in different regions of this so-called "block universe", the universe as a whole does not change. The presentist, in contrast, believes that the universe is three-dimensional. (...) The point of this paper is not to argue for presentism, but to defend presentism from a particular type of argument that is often taken to refute it. The form of the argument is as follows:

(1) Presentism is incompatible with relativity theory (usually the focus is on special relativity).

(2) Relativity theory is our most fundamental theory of physics.

(3) Presentism is incompatible with our most fundamental theory of physics. (From (1) and (2).)

(4) Presentism is false. (From (3).)

(...) But regardless of the strength of the arguments for presentism, the presentist is not required to endorse a non-traditional understanding of relativity. The presentist can simply say that presentism is incompatible with special and general relativity, and hence special and general relativity are false."

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

Hi Amrit,

I read your paper (relation between Physical time and Psychological time) and visted your website. Your ideas have great paralels with the reality-view that I devellopped untill now. As a matter of fact you also take the base of the Planck length and time. You say that a photon does not move in time, it moves in quantum vacuum, but before you pose that it moves from Planck distance d1 to d2, so you mean here that every planck distance is located in quantum vacuum, this is a proposition that in my view is arbitrary, tyou are treating here the term of quantum vacuum like an intermediaire, almost like ...... I "solved" this problem by stepping into a fifth non causal dimension, the so called TOTAL SIMULTNEITY (see my essay, link above). The what you call "neuronal activity of the brain" is what I call CONSCIOUSNESS, consciousness is the intermediare between this fifth non causal total simultaneity and our causal 4D deterministic phychological time experience, so our consciousness lets emerge awareness of the physical universe.

You say that you can only travel in time in a psychological way not in a physical way, here we agree and disagree because I think that time travel is possible ,for example you go back in time and then in some way you are moving to a pralel universe, if you kill there your grandfather , you will not originate in that paralel world on the original world (where you came from) your grandfather is not killed , so everything is just fine, it is your consciousnes that has found this paralel world ads a "new" starting point of your life-line (compare it with the time lines in a block universe, vevery new block gives choices of new directions of life-lines.

I hope you will read my essay also, and comment it

wilhelmus.d@orange.fr

keep on thinking free

Wilhelmus

"Heresy" in Einsteiniana's schizophrenic world:

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Simultaneity-Routledge-Contemporary-Philosophy/dp/0415701740

Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy), Craig Callender et al: "Unfortunately for Einstein's Special Theory, however, its epistemological and ontological assumptions are now seen to be questionable, unjustified, false, perhaps even illogical. (...) It is remarkable that the Special Theory has thus far managed to survive largely unscathed the collapse of its essential epistemological underpinnings. One wonders how this can be so. (...) Physicists would be at a loss as to how to proceed if they rejected the Special Theory as unjustified, since they (for the most part) believe that this would require them to reject QFT. In the light of this dependence on Special Relativity, physicists are not likely to abandon it unless it is observationally disconfirmed and there is an observationally adequate theory available to replace it. In fact, there is a theory that is not merely observationally equivalent to the Special Theory, but also observationally superior to it, namely Lorentzian or neo-Lorentzian theory. Lorentz's theory is regarded by many physicists who have studied Lorentzian theory, such as J.S. Bell, to be observationally equivalent to the Special Theory. However a Lorentzian or neo-Lorentzian theory is, in fact, observationally superior to the Special Theory (a fact that Bell, surprisingly, did not point out), since a Lorentzian theory, in contrast to the Special Theory, is consistent with the relations of absolute, instantaneous simultaneity..."

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

Wilhelmus

There is no such a thing or event as TOTAL SIMULTNEITY.

In the universe events follow each other......not in time, in quantum vacuum only.

And time is a numerical sequence of events in quantum vacuum.

Time is real, in the universe time is a mathematical sequence of change.

Sure gravity is an event related to the density of quantum vacuum and is immediate....so has no numerical sequence...

yours amrit

The only problem with SR is that people do not get it. Craig Callender is one of them.

Yours Amrit

Hi Amrit, : you say : in our 4D causal universe ther is no such thing as Total Simultaneity. That is right. Becuase Total Simultaneity is a step further as our time arrow universe, it is the scale (behind the Planck Wall) where string physisists create their 11 dimensions, where Loop Quantum Gravity originates, so is my view of Total Simultaneity. I am not saying that I am right neither are the others it is just my way of thinking in this era with the facts that we know at this very moment, perhaps in the future we all will say "nonsense", but that era has not arrived yet, so please to understand the idea read my essay (see above).

keep on thinking free

Wilhelmus

Craig Callender does get special relativity and knows it is false but this "theory" is like the old rat in "The Little Prince" - Einsteinians will always reprieve it since it is "the only one" they have:

http://faculty.spokanefalls.edu/Prince/chapitre10.htm

"Hem! Hem! dit le roi, je crois bien que sur ma planète il y a quelque part un vieux rat. Je l'entends la nuit. Tu pourras juger ce vieux rat. Tu le condamneras à mort de temps en temps. Ainsi sa vie dépendra de ta justice. Mais tu le gracieras chaque fois pour l'économiser. Il n'y en a qu'un."

http://www.angelfire.com/hi/littleprince/framechapter10.html

"Hum! Hum!" said the king. "I have good reason to believe that somewhere on my planet there is an old rat. I hear him at night. You can judge this old rat. From time to time you will condemn him to death. Thus his life will depend on your justice. But you will pardon him on each occasion; for he must be treated thriftily. He is the only one we have."

Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com

string theory is a theory of a black cat in a black room and cat is not there

yours amrit