Slashdot Mirror
Physicist Claims Time Has a Geometry
sciencenews writes to tell us that a physicist at Stanford has just recently published a peer review website for several physics lectures focusing on a single underlying idea that "time is not a single dimension of spacetime but rather a local geometric distinction in spacetime." The science is presented quite clearly and originally uses GPS systems as a point of focus. From the article: "Not too long ago, people thought the Earth was flat, which meant they thought that gravity pointed in the same direction everywhere. Today, we think of that as a silly idea, but at the same time, most people today (including most scientists) still think of spacetime as if it were a big box with 3 space dimensions and 1 time dimension. So, like gravity for a flat Earth, the single time dimension for the 'big box universe' points in one direction, from the Big-Bang into the future. A lot of lip service is given to the idea of "curved spacetime", but the simplistic 3+1 'box' remains the dominant concept of what cosmic spacetime is like."
Is available at the author's website, timecube.com.
I always knew my high school geometry teacher came from another dimension.
"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so."
Agreed. I wondered why a physics professor would take the time to make an obvious and meaningless point such as this (I'm not trying to be mean here, just honest). But a Google and Stanford directory search reveals that he is NOT A PROFESSOR (which he never claimed, Slashdotters just assumed). He is an "Affiliate", which probably means that he's an employee. In fact, it appears that he is a patent examiner from Oakland, CA.
I was pointing out his employement as a patent examiner as an explanation of why he might not know all that much about general relativity, but I just now realized how ironic that is.
In my experience, scientists who work with such issues are quite clear on this point (and, so far as I can tell, have been for eighty some years).
But for other sorts of scientists (e.g. biologists), engineers, and the rest of us, who only need to calculate things to five or ten decimal places or so, assuming that the time points in the same direction throughout the area of interest (and generally that space is flat and such) is reasonable--so reasonable, in fact, that we'd be nuts not to work with that as an assumption.
If I'm tracking the migration of some sort of beetle or planning a system of trusses to support a load or deciding if I should walk or drive to the store for milk, I would have to be mad to start out treating spacetime as a fine-grained network of plank-scale events with information flow between them determining the local geometry of space time (and thus the direction of time). Likewise with the effects of nearby astronomical bodies--if they were big enough and close enough to seriously distort spacetime I'd have a lot bigger problems to worry about. On average, to the level I'd ever need to deal with in these sorts of cases, it is now and the future is coming up later and the past is what already happened.
--MarkusQ
Only Time will tell...
teehee~ (sorry.)
"I'm a Laver, not a Phyto[plankton]"
When this story gets duped, I'll be looking for this exact same comment.
And my response to it.
I was brought up in a conservative, FSM-fearing family. All my life I believed that the FSM was the one and only divine creator, and that only through His Word I could reach salvation (stripper factory and beer volcano)
/. for leading me to the path of enlightenment.
Yet, today, as I read the teachings of Dr. Gene Ray for the first time, I finally saw the TRUTH. I have been lied to all my life but my anger only feeds my love for the Cube. We are all sinn^H^H^H^H stupid and only through the glorious Time Cube can we reach the ultimate, 4-corner, polar smartness.
Thank you
Actually this is a guess... I'm calculating that this is 5 seconds after that "discovery of geometric space-time" article was posted back way in 2006.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well I read the article and went through the power point presentation using Open Office :-)
I must admit, I'm convinced that time is different depending on where a person is. I know it for a fact 'cause where I'm sitting it took FOREVER to work through that presentation! Ugggghhhhh....
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
This might work in theory, but I've never observed it.
What? You've never experienced deja-vu? That's what happens when you see the same cat twice, or something like that.
What? You've never experienced deja-vu? That's what happens when you see the same cat twice, or something like that.
Thought I saw it on an old bottle of soap.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Just raise the taxes on crack.
that the Timecube is *not* a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Most likely, Timecube is the 4th dimensional manifestation of FSM (or other way around. I wonder if hyperstring ... eh, hyperspaghetti theory has to do with it)
Can I get a research grant now? Kthx.
I think this guy was a patent examiner too.
Wow, what is the coincidence that you would have linked to exactly the same guy that the parent did!
http://physicsmathforums.com/showthread.php?t=56
Tied Up & Strung Out: Hollywood String Theory Movie!!! Looking For Extras!!!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
ALL TIED UP & STRUNG ALONG, a movie about String Theorists and their expansive theories which extend human ignorance, pomposity, and frailty into higher dimensions, is set to start filming this fall. Jessica Alba, John Cleese, Eugene Levie, Jackie Chan, and David Duchovney of X-files fame have all signed on to the $700 million Hollywood project, which is still cheaper than String Theory itself, and will likely displace less physicists from the academy.
"As contemporary physics is about money, hype, mythology, and chicks," Ed Witten explained from his offices at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, "The next logical step was Hollywood, although I thought Burt Reynolds should play me instead of Eugene Levy."
Brian Greene, the famous String Theorist who will be played by David "the truth is out there" Duchovney, explained the plot: "String theory's muddled, contorted theories that lack postulates, laws, and experimentally-verified equations have Einstein spinning so fast in his grave that it creates a black hole. In order to save the world, we String Theorists have to stop reformulating String Theory faster than the speed of light. We are called upon to stop violating the conservation of energy by mining higher dimensions to publish more BS than can accounted for with the Big Bang alone, and I win the Nobel prize for showing that M-Theory is in fact the dark matter it has been searching for."
Greene continues: "At first my character is reluctant to stop theorizing and start postulating, but when my love interest Jessica Alba is sucked into the black hole, I search my soul and find Paul Davies there, played by John Cleese. I ask him what he's doing in my soul, and he explains that the answer is contained in the mind of God, which only he is privy too, but for a small fee, some tax and tuition dollars, a couple grants here and there, and an all-expense-paid book tour with stops in Zurich and Honolulu, he can let me in on it. And he shows me God in all her greater glory, as he points out that we can make more money in Hollywood than writing coffee-table books that recycle Einstein, Bohr, Dirac, Feynman, and Wheeler. I am quickly converted, and I agree to turn my back on String Theory's hoax and save Jessica Alba."
But it's not that easy, as standing in Greene's way is Michio "king of pop-theory-hipster-irony-the-theory-of-everything- or-anything-made-
you-read-this" Kaku, played by Jackie Chan. Kaku beats the crap out of Greene for alomst blowing the "ironic" pretense his salary, benefits, and all-expense paid trips depend on. "WE MUST HOLD BACK THE YOUNG SCIENTISTS WITH OUR NON-THEORIES!! WE MUST FILL THE ACADEMY WITH THE POMO DARK MATTER THAT IS STRING THEORY TO KEEP OUR UNIVERSE FROM FLYING APART, OUR PYRAMID SCHEMES FROM TOPPLING, AND OUR PERPETUAL-MOTION NSF MONEY MACHINE FROM STOPPING!!" Kaku argues as he delivers a flying back-kick, "There can be ony ONE! I WILL be String Theory's GODFATHER as referenced on my web page!! I have better hair!"
But Greene fights back as he signs his seventeenth book deal to make the hand-waving incoherence of String Theory accessible to the South Park generation, senior citizens, and starving chirldren around the world. "Kaku! Kaku! (pronounced Ka-Kaw! Ka-Kaw! like Owen Wilson did in Bottle Rocket)," Greene shouts. "It is theoretically impossible to build a coffee tables strong enough to support any more coffee-table physics books!!!"
"Time travel is also theoretically impossible, but there's a helluva lot more money for us in flushing physics down a wormhole. Nobody knows what the #&#%&$ M stands for in M theory ya hand-waving, TV-hogging crank!!! Get it?? Ha Ha Ha! We're laughing at the public! We're the insider pomo hipsters! Get with the gangsta-wanksta-pranksta CRANKSTER blin
You know when you fall down? Well, the part when your head hits the ground, you know that part, that comes after you're mostly done falling? Well, that part confuses me. And there's some kind of relationship to distance, because the further I fall, the more confused I get when my head hits the ground. I have verified this through empirical testing, although lately, I've been unable to commit all the resulting data thus obtained to long term storage.
Well, uh, I am interested in your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newletter.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.