Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: chimera on 13/06/2005 22:30:48
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gsmollin pointed me to this interesting article/website:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-bebecome/
One of the few and rare collections of all main current scientific and metaphysical/philosophical viewpoints regarding the strange phenomenon of Time.
All the people in the piece except Mr. Stein have it wrong in my view, different reasons, some to do with mathematics, others with semantics, and Mr Stein has a problem of seeing the 'now' as one contiguous thing because this contradicts Einstein's relativity, which says things are not so linear.
In short, it boils down to comparing a lightcone of event in space-time with an empty glass, and by gradually filling it with water, you see the 'progression' of time. Wrong, because the surface is a smooth thing, while Einstein says this cannot be.
Now enter DoctorBeaver's Stella: fill the glass with beer, and the analogy is suddenly correct - the foam is the future, the 'solid' beer is the past, and that 'undecided' bit in the middle slowly rising upwards is the 'now'.
So Einstein defines the glass and the general 'level' of the beer, but quantum mechanics 'decides' how the bubbles burst, statistically speaking.
[examples of errors in the above link:
McTaggart is wrong I think because the copula 'is' can be used differently like in the examples 'it is raining' and 'seven is prime'. Unlike they do in the text where they replace 'is' with 'be' for some obscure reason , just remove the 'is' -> it 'rains' = ok, but seven 'primes' = not. You see *a* difference - one of several possible, even. Equally, a raindrop does not rain all by itself, and primality likewise is bit of a nonsensical concept when talking about one individual integer
Also there is a list of 3 examples with 'it is a fact that'. Wrong. Replace with ' it is an *observed* fact that' and you'll see why nr. 3 makes no sense.]
added: for those few interested souls, an equally rare introduction into the maths of foam, which in its pure form can be treated as (Voronoi) polyhedra.
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.smu.edu%2Fmath%2Fresearch%2Ffoam.jpg&hash=fccc573bbc36c5ce7f4c8521df791348)
http://www.smu.edu/math/research/foam.html
and a full thesis pdf on the same subject.
http://eprints.maths.ox.ac.uk/archive/00000034/01/breward.pdf
Not easy, don't say I didn't warn you... [:)]
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Ah, got it: seeing Minkowski space purely as a vector space is incorrect, I think:
"There is an alternative definition of Minkowski space as an affine space which views Minkowski space as a homogeneous space of the Poincaré group with the Lorentz group as the stabilizer." (wiki on minkowski space)
Now this is interesting. If there is a continous 'reality update' process going on, it's most likely a pointwise affine transformation along the Euler line of the above Voronoi's.
http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/docs/reference/CRC-formulas/node15.html
http://www.leptonica.com/affine.html
(the last link gives a neat real-world example, and shows the diff between pointwise and sequential very well)
and fortunately, all the math involved describes processes that conform pretty neatly to what we see happening and already have puzzled out so far, and that's always nice. It's in no way contradictory to anything previously done.
Would be a nice feather in Lorentz's hat, mostly, I think. Wonder what he would think of my (upcoming) little Affine Shearing Liquid Crystal Cosmos model... [:)]
So could gravity somehow be the 'driving' engine behind time? I'm somehow convinced those two are much more involved with each other than anyone dares to think. How can a 'purely' 3d 'attraction' be involved in the happenings in another 'dimension' altogether? Yet somehow I think that's what they do. They are the only two one great 'unknowns' left, and the reason might well be our stubborn immediate dismissal of this simple relation, because of our 3D 'hangups'. We kind of separate the two immediately in our mind, and never the twain shall meet again, or something. We are mentally truly stuck in 3D, it seems. If you check the difference between pointwise and sequential affine transforms you can see that it looks like our history of things is a sequential representation of a pointwise process. That is always inferior and does not describe well what's happening, resulting in a lesser quality rendition. Our brains are not suited to see it as a pointwise process - or at least not all of the time.
Saying time 'matters' a lot might be the biggest single understatement EVER.