[Farsight]

Before someone goes out and spends money on a book that's been poorly reviewed, I would suggest they read up on it. This seems like a pretty good review: http://www.ams.org/notices/200707/tx070700861p.pdf

I'm afraid it isn't. Stachel muddies the water and evades the essential point in order to defend an unsupported position via circular argument.

Also, you certainly have very little evidence for telling people that the mainstream view of time is "wrong."

I've given ample evidence in Time Explained. If you disagree, try to show where the evidence I offer is incorrect.   

What you're claiming is philosophy with no mathematics to back it up. Science is about making predictions and observations...

As I've said, the mathematics is unchanged. And it certainly isn't philosophy, it's phenomenology. Because science is about observations, and there are no observations whatsoever to support the idea that time flows or that we travel through it. If you beg to differ, I challenge you to offer some. 

The validity of a theory is based on how well it seems to model reality and how well it matches experiments. Your philosophy doesn't offer any predictions, so it isn't science.  It's not even clear that it's consistent with the mainstream view of time as a dimension of space-time. Therefore, claiming that your philosophy is a scientific fact supported by evidence is misleading.

No it isn't misleading, and again it is not philosophy. The observational evidence tells us what's scientific fact, and I adhere to it whilst adhering to special relativity. See page 31 of The Meaning of Relativity where Einstein says "The non-divisibility of the four-dimensional continuum of events does not at all, however, involve the equivalence of the space co-ordinates with the time co-ordinate". I'm giving you the science. The flow of time and travelling through time is the philosophy that leads to the reductio-ad-absurdum of the grandfather paradox.

Time travel isn't mainstream, JP. It's science fiction. The "stasis box" is science-fiction too, but it's useful to point out the obvious: get in the box, and the "stasis field" prevents all motion, even at the atomic level. So you can't move, your heart doesn't beat, and you can't even think. When I open the box five hundred years later, to you it's like I opened the box as soon as you got in. You "travelled" to the future by not moving at all. Instead everything else did. And all that motion, be it the motion of planets or people or atoms or light, was through space.

[Farsight]

If A is a function of B, B is automatically a function of A. The justification is inescapable.

Not so. The temperature of a gas is a function of molecular motion involving an average. The opposite is not true, because a single molecule has a velocity, not a temperature. Your assertion puts cause on an equal footing with effect, and places emergent properties on a par with fundamental properties. It doesn't hold.

[PhysBang]

If you disagree, try to show where the evidence I offer is incorrect. 

Over the breadth of the internet there is a veritable book about how wrong your argument is.

The funniest is that the same "mathematics" that you use to show that time is circularly defined shows that space is circularly defined and shows that every physical quantity is circularly defined. But philosophers of science have known this for decades if not centuries.

The best argument against your argument is that you ignore your own circularity as pointed out by your favourite source for quotation  mining: Einstein. As Einstein points out in 1905, we cannot provide a measurement of space without providing some definition of what it means to be "the same time" as different points that are separated by a distance. Only once we do that can we have a real physical definition of measured distance and only then can we have a definition of motion and at rest. But Einstein also points out that we are perfectly free to chose from an infinite number of ways of setting up, physically, what is "the same time" at different distances. This means that there are an infinite number of measurements of space and thus an infinite number of ways of defining any given motion (or even whether or not there is motion). But we cannot have a physical idea of motion without some previous definition of space and time. This is just the conceptual facts.

Just because what we metaphorically call "movement through time" and "movement through spacetime" is different from what we call movement through space does not obviate us from actually understanding what these phrases mean and it does not make the science and philosophy behind the real meaning of the phrases incorrect.

One incorrect idea about relativity that has its origin in the popular press is that relativity tells us that the universe changes when we are in motion. This is incorrect. In different circumstances, certain descriptions of the universe might be easier to describe or be easier for us to describe using certain measurement devices, but these descriptions are correct regardless of the motion or not of any given observer. To claim that the universe changes because of an observer is incorrect. It is just as incorrect to say that anything changes for a given observer or particle because they are in motion. Time goes on for any given particle just as it always does, what changes is the relationship between events as timed out for one description and events as timed out for another description. Without accepting this, the mathematics of relativity theory simply does not work.

Finally, what Einstein believed or did not believe about relativity theory is irrelevant. What matters is the actual science as handed down to the scientific community and as tested over and over again by careful study. That theory is not a theory without time, it is a theory with a very special relationship between space and time. To trust one's knowledge of this theory to comeone unwilling to actually learn or discuss the mathematics is foolish.

[Geezer]

If A is a function of B, B is automatically a function of A. The justification is inescapable.

Not so. The temperature of a gas is a function of molecular motion involving an average. The opposite is not true, because a single molecule has a velocity, not a temperature. Your assertion puts cause on an equal footing with effect, and places emergent properties on a par with fundamental properties. It doesn't hold.

Farsight:

Apparently my opinion on the subject of functions is a commonly held belief. As Wikipedia is not necessarily the most reliable source, feel free to identify any errors in the following, or did you mean to say something other than "function" when you said that time was a function of motion?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_(mathematics)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_function

Perhaps you can also reduce your statement regarding gas molecules to a mathematical relationship so that we can test its validity?

[JP]

Also, you certainly have very little evidence for telling people that the mainstream view of time is "wrong."

I've given ample evidence in Time Explained. If you disagree, try to show where the evidence I offer is incorrect.   

When you have to defend your theory with "show me where it's wrong," it's not a theory.  There's a reason that scientific theories are required to make mathematical predictions that are then verified by experiment.  You still have no mathematics and no physical theory.  You're giving us quotes from a variety of sources with no mathematics to back them up and asking us to overturn a successful theory that has plenty of mathematics and nearly a century of successful quantitative predictions. 

Finally, what Einstein believed or did not believe about relativity theory is irrelevant. What matters is the actual science as handed down to the scientific community and as tested over and over again by careful study. That theory is not a theory without time, it is a theory with a very special relationship between space and time. To trust one's knowledge of this theory to comeone unwilling to actually learn or discuss the mathematics is foolish.

I agree with PhysBang 100% on this.  Einstein also disagreed with quantum mechanics, and yet it would be absurd to claim quantum mechanics was wrong because Einstein once said so.  Quantitative predictions backed up by experiments are needed, not quotes.

[Farsight]

Geezer: you brought up "function", not me. I only used the word in response to your usage. I said time is an emergent property of motion like heat is an emergent property of motion, time being a cumulative measure whilst temperature is an average.

When you have to defend your theory with "show me where it's wrong," it's not a theory. There's a reason that scientific theories are required to make mathematical predictions that are then verified by experiment. You still have no mathematics and no physical theory. You're giving us quotes from a variety of sources with no mathematics to back them up and asking us to overturn a successful theory that has plenty of mathematics and nearly a century of successful quantitative predictions.

I'm certainly not asking you to overturn relativity. I've already said that the mathematics is unchanged. What I'm asking you to do is look at the scientific evidence and appreciate that there is no evidence for travelling through time. The mathematics doesn't support it either, because we plot lines in Minkowski spacetime rather than moving through it.     

Finally, what Einstein believed or did not believe about relativity theory is irrelevant. What matters is the actual science as handed down to the scientific community and as tested over and over again by careful study. That theory is not a theory without time, it is a theory with a very special relationship between space and time. To trust one's knowledge of this theory to comeone unwilling to actually learn or discuss the mathematics is foolish.

I agree with PhysBang 100% on this. Einstein also disagreed with quantum mechanics, and yet it would be absurd to claim quantum mechanics was wrong because Einstein once said so. Quantitative predictions backed up by experiments are needed, not quotes.

What Einstein believed about relativity is most certainly relevant! And I'm  not doing away with time, I'm saying it exists like heat exists, but isn't something you travel through. Observations and scientific experiments back ME up, not time machines. Note that Einstein didn't disagree with quantum mechanics, he was in on the ground floor in 1905. That's what he got his Nobel Prize for. What he disagreed with was the Copenhagen Interpretation, the "meaning" of the mathematics. 

[Geezer]

Geezer: you brought up "function", not me.

Farsight: Then why did you say "time is a function of motion, not the other way around" here? Was that just a "figure of speech" too?

One doesn't need a new terminology for this, just an adherence to the observational evidence and an appreciation that some of the things we say are figures of speech, because time is a function of motion, not the other way around. 

[Geezer]

Looks like this is going nowhere. Thread locked.