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
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.