Slashdot Mirror


First Experimental Evidence That Time Is an Emergent Quantum Phenomenon

KentuckyFC writes "One of the great challenges in physics is to unite the theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity. But all attempts to do this all run into the famous 'problem of time' — the resulting equations describe a static universe in which nothing ever happens. In 1983, theoreticians showed how this could be solved if time is an emergent phenomenon based on entanglement, the phenomenon in which two quantum particles share the same existence. An external, god-like observer always sees no difference between these particles compared to an external objective clock. But an observer who measures one of the pair — and so becomes entangled with it--can immediately see how it evolves differently from its partner. So from the outside the universe appears static and unchanging, while objects that are entangled within it experience the maelstrom of change. Now quantum physicists have performed the first experimental test of this idea by measuring the evolution of a pair of entangled photons in two different ways. An external god-like observer sees no difference while an observer who measures one particle and becomes entangled with it does see the change. In other words, the experiment shows how time is an emergent phenomenon based on entanglement, in which case the contradiction between quantum mechanics and general relativity seems to melt away."

530 comments

  1. Hmm by wenchmagnet · · Score: 5, Insightful

    First time I've seen no comments show up a few minutes into a Slashdot story going up.

    Are most other people, like me, scratching their heads and trying to wrap their minds around this? :)

    1. Re:Hmm by AbbyNormal · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You must be new here.

      --
      Sig it.
    2. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yep.

    3. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Give it time...

    4. Re:Hmm by Cryacin · · Score: 5, Funny

      You see, the story had not yet been entangled, so to the outside observer, there was no change.

      --
      Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
    5. Re:Hmm by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 1

      The summary mentions "God" or "Godlike" about three or four times. I think most people have figured out the "twist" in this particular quantum press release -- I mean experiment.

      --
      May the Maths Be with you!
    6. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Most of them are still trying to figure out the info on the relevant Wikipedia pages, ya know, so as not to sound too stupid when commenting here :-)

    7. Re:Hmm by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

      The aliens had to make us believe in gods so we'd eventually figure out how time works. "It was worth the price." - Darth Albright

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    8. Re:Hmm by In+hydraulis · · Score: 2

      I find articles like this one to be the most interesting content that pops up here on Slashdot, even if I can't wrap my head around it.

      Equally fascinating: http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/09/14/1822201/study-our-3d-universe-could-have-originated-from-a-4d-black-hole

      Can these two ideas be conciled?

    9. Re:Hmm by msauve · · Score: 5, Funny

      The headline should be really about the creation of a Godlike observer, which was a prerequisite for this experiment.

      --
      "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
    10. Re:Hmm by slashmydots · · Score: 0

      I can't get over how the definition of entanglement means both particles do EXACTLY the same thing. Not one acts differently and the difference is time. Plus, all matter in the entire universe is entangled and the entanglement never fails and we cannot detect the other particle for some reason? That's an awfully big pile of nonsense.

    11. Re:Hmm by bain_online · · Score: 1

      Well that didn't stop you (or me) from commenting.

      --
      BAIN http://www.devslashzero.com
    12. Re:Hmm by Chrisq · · Score: 1

      First time I've seen no comments show up a few minutes into a Slashdot story going up.

      Are most other people, like me, scratching their heads and trying to wrap their minds around this? :)

      No - time just came to a halt as the emergent digression of entangled pairs was affected by so many observers contemplating the fact.

    13. Re:Hmm by dbIII · · Score: 4, Funny

      The headline should be really about the creation of a Godlike observer, which was a prerequisite for this experiment.

      Let's give Mr and Mrs Norris a bit of privacy for that one.

    14. Re:Hmm by hodet · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's because the subject takes time to digest and respond to intelligently. As opposed to the usual "NSA is Monitoring My Brain" headline. It's nice to see this type of article, it's what brought me to slashdot so many years ago. I still come everyday hoping to see more stuff like this.

    15. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      how can the entanglement fail if it is static and there is no time? such as the article proposes.

    16. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The headline should be really about the creation of a Godlike observer, which was a prerequisite for this experiment.

      ... sorry, what do you want me to observe

    17. Re:Hmm by I'm+New+Around+Here · · Score: 3, Funny

      No, dammit, that's me!

      --
      If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
    18. Re:Hmm by I'm+New+Around+Here · · Score: 1

      Wait for it...

      --
      If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
    19. Re:Hmm by cold+fjord · · Score: 5, Funny

      Dude, most people here have big enough egos as it is without referring to them as "god like," even if you do it indirectly.

      --
      much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
    20. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wait, you're saying we slashdotted quantum mechanics itself?

    21. Re:Hmm by Chrisq · · Score: 1

      Wait, you're saying we slashdotted quantum mechanics itself?

      yes .... what worries me is what the "God like observer" will make of it!

    22. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Plus, all matter in the entire universe is entangled and the entanglement never fails and we cannot detect the other particle for some reason? That's an awfully big pile of nonsense.

      "Nonsense" of course meaning "I'm not smart enough to make sense of this."

    23. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why can't we be like Greek pantheon and less like christianity?
      FSCK DA MONOTHEISTIC RELIGIONS!

    24. Re:Hmm by I'm+New+Around+Here · · Score: 2, Funny

      You want to be like the Greeks, and can't even say the word "FUCK"?

      What the fuck is wrong with you?

      --
      If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
    25. Re:Hmm by jalopezp · · Score: 2

      Ah yes, their entire experiment was a farce and you have just caught them! No doubt your highly analytical mind was able to see past what these researchers' colleagues and reviewers thought to be science, but what you have now uncovered to be naught but a pile of nonsense. I can't wait until tomorrow when all the world's newspapers print headlines of your great acumen.

    26. Re:Hmm by FatLittleMonkey · · Score: 1

      That doesn't work. It we "halted" time then there'd be no delay. The article and every comment on it would appear simultaneously.

      --
      Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
    27. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Says the guy who couldn't find the login button

    28. Re:Hmm by Sockatume · · Score: 1

      No more than the creation of a godlike observer is necessary for testing for hidden variables in QM.

      --
      No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
    29. Re:Hmm by Burpmaster · · Score: 3, Funny

      You want to be like the Greeks, and can't even say the word "FUCK"?

      What the fuck is wrong with you?

      Don't you mean "What the FVCK is wrong with you?"

    30. Re:Hmm by Andrewkov · · Score: 5, Funny

      I'm a Godlike observer, but only when I have mod points.

    31. Re:Hmm by wagnerrp · · Score: 1

      That's Latin. Greek has completely different characters.

    32. Re:Hmm by pscottdv · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The theory requires no outside, God-like, observer, nor does it propose one. The point is that time is measured by "events" and "events" occur when the quantum states of two systems become entangled, but only to the systems that became entangled. To an "observer" that has not become entangled, a system is static and no event has occurred.

      In the Copenhagen interpretation, one would say that according to the entangled observer the "wavefunction has collapsed" whereas according to the unentangled observer, it hasn't.

      --

      this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice

    33. Re:Hmm by I'm+New+Around+Here · · Score: 1

      No, that's Roman.

      --
      If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
    34. Re:Hmm by VanGarrett · · Score: 1

      No, no, no, he wants to run a file system check on them. Something's hanging a boot time.

    35. Re:Hmm by luckymutt · · Score: 4, Funny

      That doesn't normally stop anyone from commenting.

    36. Re:Hmm by GarethIwanFairclough · · Score: 1

      Don't you mean "What the FVCK is wrong with you?"

      That's Roman/Latin iirc.

    37. Re:Hmm by chill · · Score: 1

      No, that would be the Romans. Latin doesn't have the letters U or J.

      I don't believe Slashdot can render Greek letters.

      --
      Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
    38. Re:Hmm by number6x · · Score: 0

      That is strange.

      The author could have said 'Chuck Norris like' just as easily.

    39. Re:Hmm by almitydave · · Score: 2

      Well ain't that like the pot calling the kettle an anonymous coward.

      --
      my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
      I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
    40. Re:Hmm by justthinkit · · Score: 1

      Don't you mean the "expriment"? The incredible number of typos in that article, starting with its first sentence, does not fill me with confidence about how well it has been reviewed by others.

      --
      I come here for the love
    41. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Mr Norris does nod need any Mrs to do that, he can easily perform the task on his own with his left hand (and playing Rachmaninov with the other).

    42. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That "whoosh" was an entangled particle flying over your head.

    43. Re:Hmm by corbettw · · Score: 1

      Whatever you say, Voltaire.

      --
      God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
    44. Re:Hmm by mcgrew · · Score: 1, Insightful

      It was very early in the US and very late in Europe when the story broke.

      Yesterday there was a story posted at slashdot that asked if your thermostat had free will. I think this answeres the question -- no. Not ony does you thermostat not have free will, neither do you.

      The new problem was that time played no role in this equation. In effect, it says that nothing ever happens in the universe, a prediction that is clearly at odds with the observational evidence.
      <snip>
      But the results depend on how the observation is made. One way to do this is to compare the change in the entangled particles with an external clock that is entirely independent of the universe. This is equivalent to god-like observer outside the universe measuring the evolution of the particles using an external clock.

      In this case, Page and Wooters showed that the particles would appear entirely unchangingâ"that time would not exist in this scenario.

      Free will is an illusion.

    45. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      And if you become entangled with one of the comments, your Godlike status disappears.

      Slashdot: 1; Quantum Mechanics: 0

    46. Re:Hmm by metlin · · Score: 2

      As someone with mod points, I almost modded you -1 Troll for kicks, but my god-like powers of self-control kicked in.

    47. Re:Hmm by fuzzlost · · Score: 1

      This. Back in the day *cough* I was able to spend significant amounts of time reading Slashdot, especially the comments. It was great for topics I was interested in, but didn't know much about; the comments contained a huge wealth of knowledge that I could digest and that gave such insight into the topic, even if I didn't fully comprehend the TFA (not that I ever actually read those articles... *cough*).

      If only we could have more articles like this. Maybe we'd have those discussions again...

    48. Re:Hmm by hAckz0r · · Score: 1

      First time I've seen no comments show up a few minutes into a Slashdot story going up.

      Are most other people, like me, scratching their heads and trying to wrap their minds around this? :)

      That time delay is due to the resultant Gravitational Time Dilation, caused by the gravity of the scientific implications.

    49. Re:Hmm by pz · · Score: 5, Interesting

      If time is an emergent phenomenon, then how does the first event happen? If time does not yet exist, then there is no was to distinguish an event. By the parent's suggestion, time can only be propelled forward when already in motion, by the contribution of each new event. The very ideas of "first" and "new" presuppose the existence of time, and thus despite this likely significant scientific work, we continue to have a tautology until an instantiation somehow starts things off.

      We are still, also, a long way away from understanding what causes wavefunction collapse, since the notion of observation is clearly ludicrous: there are no observers in the center of the sun, or on the far side of Jupiter, as two minor examples.

      --

      Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
    50. Re:Hmm by Remus+Shepherd · · Score: 5, Interesting

      In the Copenhagen interpretation, one would say that according to the entangled observer the "wavefunction has collapsed" whereas according to the unentangled observer, it hasn't.

      I prefer the Copenhagen interpretation, but this experiment is also interesting if we use the Many-Worlds interpretation. Then the God-like outside observer sees every possible quantum state and all of its outcomes simultaneously, as if they all have already happened. That sounds to me like a recipe for strict determinism.

      --
      Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
    51. Re:Hmm by chuckugly · · Score: 2

      I had to unzip to allow a godlike observer to have a look - now people can comment.

    52. Re:Hmm by Internetuser1248 · · Score: 2

      If time is an emergent phenomenon, then how does the first event happen?

      Funniest thing I have seen all day, and I watched the surgeon simulator video so that is saying something.

    53. Re:Hmm by cyberchondriac · · Score: 1

      You want to be like the Greeks, and can't even say the word "FUCK"?

      What the fuck is wrong with you?

      Don't you mean "What the FVCK is wrong with you?"

      No, that would be Roman.

      --

      Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
    54. Re:Hmm by Internetuser1248 · · Score: 1

      Well it changes the definition of free will slightly. If you take the many universes approach as suggested above then we have the emergent illusion of time and therefore the emergent illusion of being able to choose which perspective of the universe we experience next. It also means that the words 'free' and 'will' have no objective meaning. Subjectively however I find it useful to believe in such illusory things as my own existence, time, causality, etc. and within this logical framework which I use most of the time I have free will.

      It is just as true to say 'free will exists' as it is to say 'parallel lines cross at infinity'. Within a certain logical framework it exists. Furthermore without any logical framework at all no language has meaning, let alone truth, and no coherent thoughts are possible. In fact everything anyone ever experienced is an illusion, and therefore it exists as such.

      In case this was not clear I am disputing your first claim (that the reader does not have free will), and agreeing with your second one (that free will is an illusion). I also see them as directly contradicting each other.

    55. Re:Hmm by temcat · · Score: 1

      It just happens, and then we get to know it was first and describe it in words implying time?

    56. Re:Hmm by romons · · Score: 1

      The theory requires no outside, God-like, observer, nor does it propose one. The point is that time is measured by "events" and "events" occur when the quantum states of two systems become entangled, but only to the systems that became entangled. To an "observer" that has not become entangled, a system is static and no event has occurred.

      In the Copenhagen interpretation, one would say that according to the entangled observer the "wavefunction has collapsed" whereas according to the unentangled observer, it hasn't.

      How can an observer know anything about it if he doesn't observe it, and thus become entangled?

      --
      Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company -- Mark Twain
    57. Re:Hmm by taiwanjohn · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I can appreciate the "get off my lawn" sentiment as much as the next guy, but honestly I don't feel the /. experience has degraded that much since the old days. Is it different now from when I joined 15 years ago? Yeah, sure. But so am I. So's the world.... So what?

      The thing I find consistent about /. and which keeps me coming back here is that I know I'll (almost) always find something interesting here, often something very interesting and/or enlightening. Sure, I may occasionally bitch and moan about the dupes and the mods, etc., but when I see a story that looks interesting and has a "healthy" discussion going, I'm pretty confident that reading that discussion will give me some new insights or information that I hadn't heard of before. Offhand, I can't think of many other "popular" websites I could say the same about.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
    58. Re:Hmm by dinfinity · · Score: 1

      No doubt your highly analytical mind was able to see past what these researchers' colleagues and reviewers thought to be science

      You have no idea what arXiv is, do you?

    59. Re:Hmm by alexgieg · · Score: 2

      That sounds to me like a recipe for strict determinism.

      Many-World is in fact strictly deterministic. It's considered one of it's advantages as QM becomes just like everything else in Physics.

      Notice that strict determinism doesn't affect subjective free will. Instead of being a property of the world free will becomes a property of your internal representation of the world, pretty much like colors don't exist in the world, only in your brain, what evidently doesn't make them any less real for you and for anything you do based on them "being there".

      --
      Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
    60. Re:Hmm by sglines · · Score: 1

      In other words: If a foo shits in the woods and there is no one there to smell it, it didn't happen.

    61. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Paul was trapped in the eventuality, but there is another way his children can take, namely the Golden Path. The Golden Path is dangerous. It does not involve cats in containers or funny pictures, like a safe path would.

    62. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      More like the Kumquat Haagendasz.

    63. Re:Hmm by Pino+Grigio · · Score: 1

      Well, now I'm really confused, so thanks for your +5 insightful comment. The reason I'm confused is because I was under the impression that the Schrödinger equation evolves over time. Someone needs to back right up and explain how it "looks static" in the content of General Relativity.

    64. Re:Hmm by Pino+Grigio · · Score: 1

      When you say "colours don't exist in the world", you're making a category error. There are neural correlates of your phenomenological experience, but you can't say that the colour is the neural correlate. Something more is needed to explain your conscious experience of it and it's possible that something does not supervene on the physical at all (Chalmer's Hard Problem).

      I do love physics, but I also despair of the strict Logical Positivism and just shut-up and calculate attitude of many physicists. I like the idea that even after you've described all of the forces, particles, fields and laws of physics, there is still something left to explain. I quite like the Mary's Room thought experiment as a way of presenting the difference (although there are objections to it, as there always are with these things).

    65. Re: Hmm by cripkd · · Score: 1

      The first event... Remember the Big Bang? When space and TIME began?
      As for observers in the center of the sun... Superposition maybe? I don't think QM says observers are needed. It just says what happens if they happen to ... observe.

      --
      Curiously yours, crip.
    66. Re:Hmm by pscottdv · · Score: 1

      The Schrödinger equation does evolve over time. But the Schrödinger equation is a non-relativistic approximation which does not even attempt to incorporate gravity. This story is about the Wheeler-DeWitt equation which is much more fundamental than the Schrödinger equation.

      --

      this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice

    67. Re: Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      observer refers to something interacting with the system causing the collapse. it could be another subatomic particle or even a photon. or gravity waves...

    68. Re:Hmm by pscottdv · · Score: 1

      The paradox comes about because I used the word "observe" in two different contexts. From the abstract: "We implement this mechanism using an entangled state of the polarization of two photons, one of which is used as a clock to gauge the evolution of the second: an "internal" observer that becomes correlated with the clock photon sees the other system evolve, while an "external" observer that only observes global properties of the two photons can prove it is static."

      --

      this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice

    69. Re:Hmm by pscottdv · · Score: 1

      Maybe, but I don't think so. I did some work in this area for my MS.

      --

      this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice

    70. Re:Hmm by pscottdv · · Score: 1

      If time is an emergent phenomenon, then how does the first event happen? If time does not yet exist, then there is no was to distinguish an event. By the parent's suggestion, time can only be propelled forward when already in motion, by the contribution of each new event.

      All I can say is that the Page-Wooters paper suggests that time does not, in fact, work this way and this current paper, if correct, provides evidence that Page and Wooters may have been right about it.

      --

      this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice

    71. Re:Hmm by Pino+Grigio · · Score: 2
      Well, that's a great shame. Whoever wrote the article on Wikipedia made no attempt to explain it in layman's terms. I give you:

      In quantum gravity, the Wheeler–DeWitt equation[1] describes the quantum version of the Hamiltonian constraint using metric variables. Its commutation relations with the Diffeomorphism constraints generate the Bergmann-Komar "group" (which is the Diffeomorphism group on-shell, but differs off-shell).

      Years of study no doubt required in order to even attempt to understand what that's all about!

    72. Re:Hmm by HiThere · · Score: 2

      And to me it seems that the statement "Colors exist in the world", intending to exclude perception of the world, doesn't make any sense. Photon energies exist in the world, but they aren't colors. Colors only exist in the context of perception.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    73. Re:Hmm by HiThere · · Score: 1

      I don't like the idea of determinism, but that doesn't prove that it's wrong. And even if it's correct, Chaos theory means that you can't predict the system from within it.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    74. Re:Hmm by msauve · · Score: 1

      "Page and Wooters may have been right"

      I think the fact that Google is a success shows that Page (and Brin) were right, and Woot being purchased by Amazon shows that the Wooters were right, too.

      --
      "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
    75. Re:Hmm by pscottdv · · Score: 1

      Years of study no doubt required in order to even attempt to understand what that's all about!

      For someone who understands the time-dependent Schrödinger equation? Not so many years more years.

      --

      this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice

    76. Re:Hmm by Pino+Grigio · · Score: 1

      This reminds me somewhat of Laurence Krauss running around television studios plugging his new book, "A Universe from Nothing". The premise is clearly nonsense, depending on your definition of nothing. Likewise, the idea that conscious experience does not supervene on the physical is also clearly nonsense, but only if your mental model of consciousness only allows the kinds of regularities (like photon energies) that you can measure and write a short-hand for, to exist. I like to think some things, like consciousness, transcend Human understanding. Neural correlates of consciousness probably don't though.

    77. Re:Hmm by Darinbob · · Score: 1

      Slashdot comments occasionally take time to emerge.

    78. Re:Hmm by Scarletdown · · Score: 1

      The hardest thing about mating with an alligator is not dealing with its bite, but lifting up its tail. I then made a wallet out of its vagina.

      -- Crocodile Dundee

      You earned a D- in biology, Mr. Dundee. A female alligator has a cloaca, not a vagina.

      --
      This space unintentionally left blank.
    79. Re:Hmm by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 1

      ...but my god-like powers of self-control kicked in.

      Perhaps *you* have such powers of self-control, but I don't know about God(s) in general. Have you ever seen a platypus?

      --
      It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    80. Re:Hmm by alexgieg · · Score: 1

      There are neural correlates of your phenomenological experience, but you can't say that the colour is the neural correlate.

      Certainly, as I cannot say that there is an external world at all if I take a strict Kantian perspective. But there are advantages in being a strict reductivist in addition to a strict determinist: assuming these things to be so you open the doors to studying them as if they were so without placing restrictions upon your research. If dooooooown the line we find something, anything, that can't be reduced, then well, we admit it and move on. Otherwise, why do so? Additionally, if reality reveals itself as reductionist all the way down so that subjective experience is pure physics, that opens another door, that of cognitive engineering, leading us to an extremely rich future in which we become machines and/or virtual personalities, physically immortal, with fully upgradeable minds able to run on a myriad of hardwares rather than being restricted by whatever non-reducible substratum we were born with, gaining new carefully projected subjective phenomena to go along an ever expanding sphere of raw data with which to interact with, unrestricted and unrestrictable.

      If reality turns out to be neither reducible nor deterministic then, well, I'll lament for everything humanity could have become but never will, remaining forever trapped into an uncrackable black box of irreducible, unknowable, noumenal monads...

      --
      Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
    81. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      On the contrary, not only does quantum physics not explore the nature of free will, but, its existence (or lack thereof) probably has nothing to do with whether or not an observer can impact an entangled particle. It also probably does ;) Queue discussion about brains being quantum computers by people who know nothing about quantum computers or brains, lol.

    82. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      the center of the sun or far side of Jupiter is likely entangled with something within observation

    83. Re:Hmm by Pino+Grigio · · Score: 1

      Yes. I'm not against reductionism or determinism in the sense that it's the only way of establishing regularities. Without it science wouldn't exist and we'd still be ignorant trolls scratching around in the mud. Although I do read a lot of utter rubbish about artificial intelligence (my college major). For the example you give, I don't believe it would be possible to do with silicon. Whatever physical mechanism (we'll call it "potentially tractable mystery X") is involved in instantiating conscious experience would have to be replicated in the target "machine". I don't believe it's enough to simply simulate it with some system. I'm definitely not a functionalist in that sense.

    84. Re:Hmm by alexgieg · · Score: 1

      I don't believe it's enough to simply simulate it with some system. I'm definitely not a functionalist in that sense.

      The problem with this is ethical. If we disregards that a sufficiently simulated mind is a mind, we can do to it whatever we want and it won't be considered the monstrous act it actually (IMHO) is because we'll rationalize as "yeah, it is screaming in utter agony and being driven mad, but that's just an appearance, there's no one there really suffering, at all".

      The p-zombie concept leads to that, and in a very nasty way. With it you can have someone that is down to their individual particles entirely human, indistinguishable from any other, all the while negating that it has any consciousness even when she implores you to believe she does, because she lacks (the p-zombie theorist can affirm) conscience.

      I prefer the phenomenal approach without dwelling into epiphenomenal reasoning, as it's simply much more humane to do so: if it looks like a duck...

      --
      Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
    85. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How so? Doesn't chaos theory allow for a bifurcation point from which order emerges as a state on one side and increased entropy (perhaps) allows for chaos on the other? Humans perhaps are at this bifurcation point, both in the history of the universe and in the constructions of our own minds/brains. We can see the order in the chaos, and the chaos in the order, and thus, even though it may be deterministic on one hand, it is not yet determined or completely random on the other/s. A universe where relativity and QM can coexist, and, incidentally, a universe where an observer whose mind/brain operates at that bifurcation point is a prerequisite for the ability to observe (and therefore predict it), an observer that, incidentally, would have to exist inside that universe so that the forces of both may act upon it to enable such an optimal position... Not god-like at all, but.....here we supposedly are...

    86. Re:Hmm by Pino+Grigio · · Score: 1

      We don't disregard it but I think before we do it, we need to come up with a test to determine whether or not it is actually a mind in the sense that it has conscious experiences like we do. That is an extremely hard thing to do. Coming up with an ethical system for how to treat it isn't hard once you've established it is conscious. For example, we don't allow open season on people who are asleep, do we?

    87. Re:Hmm by alexgieg · · Score: 1

      We don't disregard it but I think before we do it, we need to come up with a test to determine whether or not it is actually a mind in the sense that it has conscious experiences like we do.

      The problem is that the epiphenomenal concept admits of no such test. It states that you can have two entirely identical material configurations with absolutely no differences, neither in their materiality nor in their behaviour, in fact two absolutely identical clones acting and behaving in exactly the same way, and one could have the epiphenomenal attribute of consciousness while the other didn't. Were I to ask to "Pino Grigio Conscious" and "Pino Grigio Non-Conscious" anything and both would provide the same answers. Were I to look at their brains under a tunneling microscope and I'd see both working in exactly the same way. And yet, the epiphenomenalist states, one of them could be doing everything unconsciously, mere movements of matters, while the other would be conscious.

      This must be so, argues the epiphenomenalist, because if you could find any difference, then this finding, being material, would mean that conscience is phenomenal, not epiphenomenal, and thus physical. Since the whole effort of epiphenomenalist is to affirm conscience as something beyond physics, there's nothing physical, including air moving though a lump of matter shaped as vocal chords (hence the futility of asking questions) that could be used to detect that which, by definition, is entirely beyond physics. For if it could be detected then that'd show that consciousness is indeed physical, as it could be causally found in and through phenomenal matter.

      --
      Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
    88. Re:Hmm by swalve · · Score: 1

      It's all green and scaly on the inside.

    89. Re: Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Perhaps all possibilities already exist to the God-like observer, like an enormous fractal already expressing all possible reality. It doesn't change for "Him" because everything that May or has happened to us is already expressed.

      I always thought of time like one of those midevil tapestries the show the story of an entire battle in its weave. From the outside you can see start to finish, but from within the weave you experience it as a sequence of events.

    90. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dude

      Cowabunga, dude!

    91. Re:Hmm by shadowofwind · · Score: 1

      We are still, also, a long way away from understanding what causes wavefunction collapse, since the notion of observation is clearly ludicrous: there are no observers in the center of the sun, or on the far side of Jupiter, as two minor examples.

      As a mathematical convenience, the system doing the measuring is conceptually separated from the one being measured. There being an 'observer' just means that there's a physical interaction, it has nothing to do with the presence of a scientist.

      I think that the system itself, even though non-coherent, is still in an indeterminate state relative to anything outside the system though, and that the philosophical implications of this aren't generally recognized. Most people think of wavefunctions as being collapsed or not collapsed in an absolute sense, but I don't think that's right. They're collapsed for things they're interacting with, or else there wouldn't be chemistry, but the whole system is still in a complicated indeterminate state from an outside standpoint, even though it can't be described by a single coherent wavefunction.

    92. Re:Hmm by shadowofwind · · Score: 1

      Whoohoo. First time I've ever encountered anyone else who recognizes this. Likewise with sound.

    93. Re:Hmm by maxwell+demon · · Score: 1

      Yeah, for observing hidden variables, an NSA-like observer suffices. ;-)

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    94. Re:Hmm by hawkinspeter · · Score: 1

      The author originally did use "Chuck Norris-like", but Chuck found out and kicked him back in time to change it.

      --
      You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
    95. Re: Hmm by jxander · · Score: 1

      Slashdot can't render English Unicode properly. Greek doesn't have a prayer.

      --
      This signature is false.
    96. Re:Hmm by mcgrew · · Score: 1

      It is indeed interesting. If time doesn't exist to an outside observer, neither does free will, but since time is an emergent phenomenon, free will would be, too.

    97. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If time is an emergent phenomenon, then how does the first event happen? If time does not yet exist, then there is no was to distinguish an event.

      If I understood interpretation well, there are no events, unless observer is taking part in them. It is a zero-sum game information-wise and for everyone out of the game total information is exactly zero all the time.

      In other words, God has voluntarily locked himself out of omniscience, at least on everyday basis as we experience knowledge (of events). Whatever happens between entangled actors stays between them (orgy of sin ensues ... film at eleven). God doesn't play dice, we do. God knows (sets?) the odds.

      But I haven't even mentioned time yet: it appears so that the time is nothing else but information ("events") flow. Futurewards lies Unknown, where Information comes from. Pastwards lies History, data that used to be Information in its youth. All this exchange of information doesn't happen without entanglement of quantum particles, on basic, micro level.

      The question which emerges in my head right now is: what about relativistic distance/time duality now that we have another time/information duality? What is c and is there another such constant which binds information and time like c binds distance and time? Is that Planck's constant? Is there a third constant which determines relation between c and h?

    98. Re: Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Men think epilepsy divine simply because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end to divine things." The hard problem is only hard because neuroscience is hard. I don't believe in qualia and I think consciousness is a natural phenomenon that will one day be wholely explained by neuroscientists.

    99. Re:Hmm by rocket+rancher · · Score: 1

      Well, that's a great shame. Whoever wrote the article on Wikipedia made no attempt to explain it in layman's terms. I give you:

      In quantum gravity, the Wheeler–DeWitt equation[1] describes the quantum version of the Hamiltonian constraint using metric variables. Its commutation relations with the Diffeomorphism constraints generate the Bergmann-Komar "group" (which is the Diffeomorphism group on-shell, but differs off-shell).

      Years of study no doubt required in order to even attempt to understand what that's all about!

      Actually, a pair of undergraduate classes in abstract and linear algebra thirty years ago is all that I'm going on, and it seems adequate to get the gist of the Wikipedia article. Admittedly, I had to look up Bergmann-Komarr (I'm not a physicist; the dynamical evolution of Einstein's differential equations describing GR have only a limited, abstract appeal to me!) , but abstract groups in general, along with commutations, diffeomorphisms, and Hamiltonians were covered at the freshman level. So months, not years. :)

    100. Re: Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Midevil?

    101. Re:Hmm by warpuck · · Score: 0

      Agree after reading this my brain has become more convoluted

    102. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ~
      sv_cheat 1
      god :)

    103. Re:Hmm by niftymitch · · Score: 1

      First time I've seen no comments show up a few minutes into a Slashdot story going up.

      Are most other people, like me, scratching their heads and trying to wrap their minds around this? :)

      Sort of -- it takes time to digest this stuff.

      I got stuck on "melt away".
      I thought for sure the correct process was -- sublime.

      --
      Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
    104. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ...Offhand, I can't think of many other "popular" websites I could say the same about.

      Clearly you are not familiar with TMZ.com...

    105. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You earned a D- in biology, Mr. Dundee. A female alligator has a cloaca, not a vagina.

      Once you have some cloaca, you never go a-backa. // Sorry.

    106. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We are still, also, a long way away from understanding what causes wavefunction collapse, since the notion of observation is clearly ludicrous: there are no observers in the center of the sun, or on the far side of Jupiter, as two minor examples.

      Most physics is spelled in terms of energy. Information needs some non-zero energy to be transmitted/received, but can also be carried by high energy stuff. Decoupling a transmission from its carrier is what I'd call to observe. It may imply some computing within the observing system, but in no way implies that an observer is human.

    107. Re:Hmm by HiThere · · Score: 1

      The universe clearly has a large number of points within it where results are sensitive to initial conditions. And the results interact. This is clearly true in, say, the genetic code, to pick something below human scale, in the spin of a die, to pick something at human scale, and in the multi-body problem, to pick something larger than human scale.

      They don't need to be random to be unpredictable. Note that the time scale tends to be inverse to the size scale. so we appear to be able to predict planetary orbits, but we can't project them indefinitely into the future. 100,000 years is not a problem, but a few million is. We have reason to believe that at some point the Earth's orbit will become unstable, and it will either leave the solar system or be swallowed by the sun (presuming the sun doesn't change)...but we can't tell either which, or exactly how long it will take. But it won't be within a couple of million years, unless there's an effect from outside the solar system. (If Nemesis existed, it might produce such an effect, but it appears to not exist, and it's arguably outside the solar system.)

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    108. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's what i meant..

    109. Re:Hmm by Holladon · · Score: 1

      The Greek "u" doesn't look very different from an English "u" anyway. It's just pronounced differently. Fookin' ancient Greeks!

    110. Re:Hmm by RespekMyAthorati · · Score: 1

      . And yet, the epiphenomenalist states, one of them could be doing everything unconsciously, mere movements of matters, while the other would be conscious

      It's not as simple as that.
      Many epiphenomenalists simply dismiss the whole issue of whether the entity is truly "conscious" or not as irrelevant sophistry.
      Since no one can know whether another entity is having conscious experience
      (you could be chatbot, for all I know), you may as well just ignore the whole concept.

    111. Re:Hmm by alexgieg · · Score: 1

      you may as well just ignore the whole concept.

      IMHO instead of ignoring it's better to just assume they are conscious. This way if they actually are you don't risk doing something that'd be cruel, and if they aren't, well, no gain but also no loss. :-)

      --
      Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
    112. Re: Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In one of his cosmology lectures (available on YouTube), Leonard Susskind posits that prior to the Big Bang, space inflated by at least e^60 with each growth spurt lasting one length of plank time. Can the theories of inflation and time emerging from particle entanglement mutually coexist?

    113. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't think you read his entire comment.

    114. Re: Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You should know that.

    115. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Frank Herbert would applaud you if he heard that. You could only do better by using the word "boredom".

    116. Re:Hmm by mcswell · · Score: 1

      "In Latin, Jehovah starts with an 'I'." --Indiana Jones

    117. Re:Hmm by kalqlate · · Score: 1

      But the Many Worlds interpretation is also the one that works best with Special Relativity which directly implies that all of time, thus all of the branching possibilities of QM, exist simultaneously. The passing of time is then an illusion perceived as real by the function of human memory. All of time is "now". We each presume that we are in a stream of time because at any given instant, the contents of our perception and memory give us the illusion that we have progressed here to this "now", when in actuality, this "now" and all "nows" are pre-existing, as if the universe along one given pathway is a 4-D crystal, and infinitely dimensional across all possible pathways. (The evolution (entropy) of the universe has all played out in a frozen instant.) The really difficult part for a human mind to realize is that there is no "now" pointer causing them to perceive that this is "now", nor is the pointer moving forward to the next "now" to produce the passage of time. Each mind exists and is experiencing all moments in time simultaneously as "now". That one feels that ONLY this moment IS "now" is completely an illusion, as all moments are in the same timeless instant giving one the feeling of "this moment is 'now'". So, strictly deterministic, yes, but infinitely varied.

    118. Re:Hmm by kalqlate · · Score: 1

      I said: "Each mind exists and is experiencing all moments in time simultaneously as "now"." That should be: "Each mind exists and is experiencing all moments in time simultaneously across all quantum possibilities as "now"."

    119. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      since the notion of observation is clearly ludicrous

      An observer is not a guy in glasses with a clipboard named Nelson.

      Place yourself in the center of the sun, you're entangled with a particle.. me...

      We're just hanging out... in the center of this sun..

      Pretty quickly somebody's gonna interact with one of us or both of us.. if the latter is the case, we both say "oh my, i had no idea you were there!" if the former is the case, one of us says "Hmmm, you've changed, you're diff.. WAIT A MINUTE, THERE'S ANOTHER PARTICLE HERE!!!!!"

      Pretty quickly somebody's gonna interact with one of us or all three of us.. if the latter is the case, we all say "oh my, i had no idea you were there!" if the former is the case, one of us says "Hmmm, you've changed, you're diff.. WAIT A MINUTE, THERE'S ANOTHER PARTICLE HERE!!!!!"

      Fairly quickly, since there's so many damn particles in such a small area, the universe will literally "unfold into existence around us"

      whoa, Keanu.

      Anyway.. Nelson, that observer you want to imagine, never picks up on any of this shit going down until he observes the star in his Galileo-style telescope... or gets bombarded by a photon.. neutrino.. graviton.. from that system....

      Until he interacts..

      He will.. eventually...

      not sit in the center of the star and hold the hand of one of the original particles (you and me)... but he will interact with the system and "become entangled with us"

      New Physics:

      I am a particle.. if you're not doing anything with respect to me, then you don't exist to me. (Kevin Bacon Rules apply, and "in the beginning" we ALL gave Kevin an big ol' hug at the "dawn of creation", so... You ARE doing something with respect to me, i just haven't checked your cosmic Facebook in an eon or two.

      If i interact with NOTHING, then there is NO TIME. not.. "i can't measure time because i have no benchmark", but THERE IS NO TIME.. there's nothing to change the state of my system. Nothing "happens".

      A "God-like observer" is a theoretical construct strictly for discussion of what happens in systems we don't observe... something that allows me to talk heresy like "imagine a one particle system that interacts with absolutely nothing" since that shit just doesn't happen* (*that shit probably happens). By definition, anything we OBSERVE, we INTERACT with* (*probably not always true).. This is why mathematicians are gods, and someone can site the obligatory XKCD, which, if you've never read, i have just created into your existence.

      You're welcome.

    120. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      (which incidentally it is what we DO when we KNOW which path to follow, like knowing simultaneously that jumping the ledge is splat as if it had already happened, and turning around is another day back in the office, for instance... )

    121. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The legions of paid shills showed up after you joined.

      Before then, all the shilling was done for love, not money.

    122. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      oh dear, that is deliriously hilarious. /fanboy mode off

  2. Time by MrKaos · · Score: 1

    All this time travel stuff gives me a head ache!

    --
    My ism, it's full of beliefs.
    1. Re:Time by Cryacin · · Score: 5, Funny

      At least this time they're not pointing loaded guns at cats.

      --
      Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
    2. Re:Time by DeathToBill · · Score: 5, Funny

      Time is an illusion. Lunch time doubly so.

      --
      Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
    3. Re:Time by wagnerrp · · Score: 1

      Can we at least poison them?

    4. Re:Time by RMingin · · Score: 5, Funny

      "Time, we know, is relative. You can travel light years through the stars and back, and if you do it at the speed of light then, when you return, you may have aged mere seconds while your twin brother or sister will have aged twenty, thirty, forty or however many years it is, depending on how far you traveled. This will come to you as a profound shock, particularly if you didn't know you had a twin brother or sister."

      --
      The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
    5. Re:time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      God, can we all agree that Doctor Who is awesome, and STOP posting this on EVERY article involving time?

    6. Re:Time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I see, you have done it, you have seen it, and you have a twin brother or sister, and you were shocked...

    7. Re:Time by mcgrew · · Score: 1

      "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." -- Douglas Adams

    8. Re:time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Thanks, Doctor. Your explanations are always the most enlightening.

    9. Re:Time by tom17 · · Score: 1

      Drink up, the world's about to end.

    10. Re:Time by Sockatume · · Score: 1

      If you travel for light years at the speed of light, then from your perspective as passenger it still takes years. The issue with relativity is that for the people at rest with respect to you, it seems even longer.

      --
      No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
    11. Re:Time by Valdrax · · Score: 1

      If you travel for light years at the speed of light, then from your perspective as passenger it still takes years.

      Whose years? After all, you can travel for years from the perspective of the people left behind and a short time from your own.

      Why would you assume the one that would make the author wrong instead of the one that would make him right?

      --
      If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
    12. Re:Time by Holladon · · Score: 1

      Don't worry; it already did.

  3. First Post! by Fieryphoenix · · Score: 5, Funny

    But only from the point of view of an external god-like observer.

    1. Re:First Post! by ArsenneLupin · · Score: 1
      Indeed.... :-)

      Next time, just be faster!

    2. Re:First Post! by slashmydots · · Score: 1

      Well...if the scientists can pretend to do it in an experiment.

    3. Re:First Post! by Conspiracy_Of_Doves · · Score: 3, Funny

      Faster by which reference frame?

    4. Re:First Post! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Einstein proved time is irrelevant so why bother?

    5. Re:First Post! by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 1

      What a tiny, weak god is your god!

      --
      (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
    6. Re:First Post! by Thanshin · · Score: 1

      His tiny, weak, god moved his post to fist position.

      I'm yet to see a mightier display by any of the "official" gods.

      The only coherent position is to immediately adopt godlikeobserverism as the one true religion.

    7. Re:First Post! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Funny because Fist Post...

    8. Re:First Post! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      No - from the point of the god-like observer, nothing changed. You didn't ever post anything.

    9. Re:First Post! by RicktheBrick · · Score: 1

      So I guess this means everyone should do whatever they want since god can not detect any change in the universe. I guess this goes along with the story of Adam and Eve since god did not detect that they had eaten the forbidden fruit until he came into the universe to talk to them. Stupid Adam and Eve! they would have gotten away with it if they had just acted like nothing had happened.

    10. Re:First Post! by TopherC · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What I can't yet understand is how this experiment helps validate the theory of time as an emergent quantum phenomenon. It seems more like a demonstration than an experiment to me. What alternative theory is their experiment excluding?

      I'm a physicist but that doesn't mean I understand any of this QM stuff. I have a feeling this is a little like experimentally demonstrating Bell's inequality -- one can do experiments whose results are consistent with predictions of QM, and in ways that one might expect other general classes of theories to differ even though you don't have a specific alternative theory to exclude. Most experiments are like this really. But in the case of this time-entanglement experiment I really don't see room for alternative predictions. I think the paper's title acknowledges this: "Time from quantum entanglement: an experimental illustration" (my emphasis).

      I'm not saying that the experiment is in any way unhelpful or bad. It's a great idea, but I would not go so far as to say that this is "experimental evidence."

    11. Re:First Post! by marcello_dl · · Score: 2

      > god can not detect any change in the universe.
      No, a theoretical external observer who looks at things the same way we do, does not detect change. That this encompasses the concept of God is to be demonstrated.

      On a side note, Christians will quote Mt. 10:30 and say their God is quite capable, and others may object that a hypothetical creator of an abstraction is not bound by the rules of the abstraction itself, so you cannot exclude any capability.

      --
      ---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
    12. Re:First Post! by mcgrew · · Score: 1

      But only from the point of view of an external god-like observer.

      Nope, only within this universe... and you missed it. TFA says that to an external observer, there is no time, only quantum entanglement. So to an outside observer, there is no first post; everything happens at once.

    13. Re:First Post! by Jmc23 · · Score: 1

      Wrong. God is everywhere in every single religion. Hence a 'god-like observer' is a term only a scientist with no understanding of god could make up.

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
    14. Re:First Post! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But only from the point of view of an external god-like observer.

      First = "Preceding all others in time, space or degree"
      From the point of view of an external god-like observer you never posted anything. It is just an illusion.

    15. Re:First Post! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Fist position? Is that a Freudian slip?

    16. Re:First Post! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Illustration is probably a better word for it. Sticking a clock in it presupposes that not only is there time, but the human conception of it is accurate enough to measure whether or not time can emerge from the entanglement thingy. Whereas, if time were really independent of human conception, it would not require a clock other than the actions of the particles themselves. But, if we didn't observe those actions Ow, my head hurts. Screw the damn tree-sound crap.

    17. Re:First Post! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wrong. The Greek gods lived on Mount Olympus and were not omnipresent. Same with the Viking gods, except they lived somewhere else.

    18. Re:First Post! by Fieryphoenix · · Score: 1

      The (somewhat fuzzy) comedic premise of my jest is that all our posts in this thread are entangled and all appear to be the first and only post. Yes, there is a little bit of stretch to get there, but it seems most readers made it there just fine and got their chuckle. Better luck next time.

    19. Re:First Post! by shadowofwind · · Score: 1

      OK. Though if you have an idea about how something can be understood, and you successfully use that idea to describe an event or process, that illustration amounts to a kind of evidence that your idea isn't grossly wrong, even if it doesn't prove it to be better than alternative descriptions.

      I see that you've been reading slashdot longer than me, but for the six years I've been doing it, the summaries are almost all wrong. The distinction between evidence and illustration, while important, seems small to me in that context.

  4. Depends on the parser by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's not a 'problem of time' &mdash, it's a 'problem of validation' &mdash.

    1. Re:Depends on the parser by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      For future reference — mdash is &mdash; not &mdash.

    2. Re:Depends on the parser by DeathToBill · · Score: 2

      ACs never did have a sense of humour.

      --
      Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
    3. Re:Depends on the parser by almitydave · · Score: 2

      It's not a 'problem of time' &mdash, it's a 'problem of validation' &mdash.

      No kidding!

      Line 6, Column 30: & did not start a character reference.

      --
      my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
      I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
    4. Re:Depends on the parser by TangoMargarine · · Score: 1

      Why would he put em-dashes there in the first place?

      --
      Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
  5. whoosh over my head by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    does that mean if one of those fairy tale beings did create everything then he / she / it cant see a thing and nothing ever changes in its creation?

    No wonder the faithfull dont get answered

  6. Instead of likening things to rocket science by sandytaru · · Score: 5, Interesting

    We need to start likening things to quantum physics. At this point rocket science is frikkin' easy compared to all this quantum stuff.

    Until quantum entangled particles gets harnessed into the faster than light communications they've talked about over the years, no one will really care anyway.

    --
    Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
    1. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by MadRocketScientist · · Score: 5, Funny

      We need to start likening things to quantum physics. At this point rocket science is frikkin' easy compared to all this quantum stuff.

      Sheldon Cooper would agree:

      Missy: Yup, I’m always bragging to my friends about my brother the rocket scientist.
      Sheldon: You tell people I’m a rocket scientist?
      Missy: Well yeah.
      Sheldon: I’m a theoretical physicist.
      Missy: What’s the difference?
      Sheldon: What’s the difference?
      Missy: Goodbye Shelly.
      Sheldon: My God! Why don’t you just tell them I’m a toll taker at the Golden Gate Bridge? Rocket scientist, how humiliating.


      On a related note, maybe it's time for me to change my username...

    2. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by georgeb · · Score: 2

      On a related note, maybe it's time for me to change my username...

      Agreed. It's way too ambiguous. Are you a rocket scientist that's mad or are you studying mad rockets?

    3. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by Spiked_Three · · Score: 2

      I blame KSP.

      Seriously, orbit physics is now part of a computer entertainment game.

      And yet, US children keep getting dumber on average, WTF?

      --
      slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
    4. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's worse than the "large dry dog food" bin at Food City. There are so many permutations on those four words that I have no idea what's being sold.

    5. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by Gilmoure · · Score: 1

      Maybe he's just angry.

      --
      I drank what? -- Socrates
    6. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by jandrese · · Score: 2

      Children have forever and always been getting dumber. People look at their kids and go "Damn, I wasn't that dumb when I was that age!"

      --

      I read the internet for the articles.
    7. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Until quantum entangled particles gets harnessed into the faster than light communications they've talked about over the years, no one will really care anyway.

      If the "they" you refer to means physicists, then the talking about "faster than light communication" amounts to them for years saying it is not possible via quantum entanglement (unless quantum mechanics was fundamentally wrong and gets replaced with some unforeseen theory in the future). If the "they" refers to non-physicists saying it is possible, then you already have people who care, but apparently don't pay much attention.

    8. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by Amouth · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If you don't nurture them then yes they don't grow. You don't have to force things on them but rather encourage their natural want to learn.

      Now having a child (3 years old at the moment) i'm amazed at how quick they can learn, and feel sorry for children who's Parents don't interact with them and teach them. Too many parents want the schools to do everything for them, yet it is what they do outside of school which has the greatest impact to what they learn.

      We are lucky, we don't say "Damn, I wasn't that dumb when I was that age!" instead my wife and I both go "Damn, he is smart, smarter than either of us at that age." and as long as we keep constantly feed him new ideas and information and reinforce it he will continue to be smarter than we were or are.

      Again, just for the soapbox, the fact that children on average are getting "dumber" is completely the fault of their Parents.

      --
      '...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
    9. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by motorhead · · Score: 0

      My dogs just like the gooey quantum centers.

      --
      Employee Of the Month - Cyberdyne Systems Corporation - September 1997
    10. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by cpuffer_hammer · · Score: 1

      Mutually Assured Destruction, you need to be a bit mad to work on rockets that are M.A.D

    11. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by camperdave · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Sadly, it's becoming well nigh impossible to find a decent chemistry set, electronics kit, meccano set, or even a generic Lego set. Everything is either excessively "safened" or themed to the point of monotony.

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    12. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The funny thing about this is that toll taking on the Golden Gate Bridge was automated last year. There were probably still toll takers when that script was written. It's like some kind of quantum joke now.

    13. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by disposable60 · · Score: 1

      Thing is that a failure at Rocket Science tends to make rather a loud noise, a big mess and severe-to-fatal injuries.
      Quantum Science failures don't make good television.

      --
      You're looking for quotes? See my journal.
    14. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So, make a kit up yourself. It's not rocket science.

    15. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sadly, it's becoming well nigh impossible to find a decent chemistry set, electronics kit, meccano set, or even a generic Lego set. Everything is either excessively "safened" or themed to the point of monotony.

      True dat. We spent considerably more money than we should have had to when we found generic Lego sets at Disney World-- we couldn't find 'em anywhere else. Everything in the regular stores is themed and has weird special parts, to the point that you can't build anything but the item on the box.

      All I WANTED was a big-ass tub of Legos. Luckily, we eventually found them and bought two.

    16. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by ColdWetDog · · Score: 1

      Nah, as long as you can make Thermite from common household items, all is good.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    17. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Quantum Science failures don't make good television.

      and people tend not to like dead kittens

    18. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm given to believe that if humans eat the "large dry dog food" they develop the ability to infer meaning from context. If it doesn't work that first time, just keep at it. You'll come along shortly.

    19. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's not dead when you don't look. ;-)

      But then, something you are not allowed to look at isn't exactly great for TV. :-)

    20. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by Jmc23 · · Score: 1

      Only one of which makes sense to humans.

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
    21. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by sandytaru · · Score: 3, Funny

      You mean it's not quantum physics. Ahem.

      --
      Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
    22. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by tom17 · · Score: 1

      Arrrgh, this is thoroughly pissing me off too. Do you have any info on the sets you got?

      The best I have found so far is the technic lego sets that have 'build 3 models' options. That or the HUGE expensive kits that STILL only build 2...

    23. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by camperdave · · Score: 1

      But then, something you are not allowed to look at isn't exactly great for TV. :-)

      Really? It doesn't seem to be doing Chris Angel, or all those ghost hunting or conspiracy shows any harm.

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    24. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      For the record, faster than light communication is still regarded as impossible within modern physics.

    25. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by sandytaru · · Score: 1

      Ebay has a lot of "vintage" Lego sets for sale. I'd run some Lysol over them before giving them to a child, but they're otherwise much less expensive than the "build X and only X" kits.

      --
      Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
    26. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by SleazyRidr · · Score: 1

      Yo, we gots some mad rockets up in this bitch.

    27. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by Khashishi · · Score: 1

      The evidence shows the opposite. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

    28. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by marcosdumay · · Score: 2

      Well, we don't have those now (but they were already watered down - literaly, in the case of the chemistry set - by my time, are you sure you are not romanticizing it?), but now we have PCs, arduinos (or Pis if you need something faster), and 3D printers.

      Yeah, they are not the same thing, but I guess that's exactly the point.

    29. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by blueg3 · · Score: 2

      People keep saying this.

      Amazon sells large boxes of generic Legos. It also sells the same electronics and chemistry kits I played with as a kid. Beyond that, it also sells actual lab equipment, chemical reagents, breadboards, soldering kits, and electronic components.

    30. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by khallow · · Score: 1

      I don't know if it's still true, but I was able about ten years back to order generic legos directly from the manufacturer. And I must admit to loving the weird special parts. Get enough of them together and you can do some freaky things with them.

    31. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Take it from me, if you start likening too many quantum physics things your facebook friends will just stop paying attention to the things you liken.

    32. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm not travelling all the way to the Amazon to get a chemistry set.

    33. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by rgbatduke · · Score: 3, Interesting

      And don't forget the joy of pouring over the counter muriatic acid on aluminum foil, how easy it is to make a surprisingly potent explosive out of over the counter batteries and hydrogen peroxide, how much one can learn about orbital and collision dynamics playing Angry Birds Space, and the fact that kids now have nearly instant access to all of human thought and knowledge not actively covered by copyright (and summarized access to much of that!).

      What they lose from not building a crystal radio or tinkering with cars (that have grown so complex that they are sadly no longer particularly tinkerable) they gain building a functional social network and tinkering with electronic devices that were pure science fiction for the first half of my life. To the extent that complexity of environment stimulates growth of intelligence as a possible partial explanation of the Flynn effect (and more, there are other metrics) children today grow up in very complex environments and do different things within it than we did.

      It is thus silly to judge one generation in terms of the metrics of a previous one, especially a previous one that grew up in an entirely different political/historical context. Most of us would truly suck at stalking a deer armed only with a bow we made ourselves using nothing but a stone knife and arrows tipped with arrowheads we chipped out of river rocks. Most of us would simply die if we were dumped into the wild to survive a winter. We are therefore idiots by the standards of, say, 12,000 years ago. I suspect most of us would struggle with political dynamics from the feudal era and would rapidly find ourselves enslaved or hung if dropped into the world 1000 years ago. My own kids don't appreciate the stresses associated with growing up in the middle of a cold war that meant that every day there was a finite chance of the world of the survivors of a nuclear exchange regressing 1000 years overnight. I struggle to appreciate the stresses THEY experience growing up in a world that increasingly concentrates power in a hidden class of elites that have turned government into theater and that manipulate world-spanning conflicts between insane mythologies or hypothesized world-spanning disasters into excuses for concentrating ever more wealth and power in the hands of a criminal class that grew rich on laundered money in my lifetime.

      rgb

      --
      Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
    34. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by dargaud · · Score: 1

      I just had a kid (last week) and I like any^H^Hmany^H^Hsome parents I wonder about the best way to educate about science and stuff. Classic. But I've been wondering if QM is so hard because it is counter-intuitive with our day-to-day interaction with a classic-physics world. What if we could teach QM to a kid and only QM...? Even in day-to-day interactions. Obviously I don't see a way to do this but I recently saw (on /. ?) a videogame where the physics engine follows many of the tenets of QM. What if you stuffed a kid in the simulator after birth. Would you get the best nobel prize ever ? Or most likely a drooling psycho. Yeah, yeah, I'm not up for the father of the year award...

      --
      Non-Linux Penguins ?
    35. Re:Instead of likening things to rocket science by tnk1 · · Score: 1

      I was just talking to my seven year old nephew about math and I described to him a Linear Algebra problem. He didn't understand it. What are they putting in the water these days to make kids so dumb? It's probably all dem vaccines. And sugar.

  7. In other words by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    The universe is big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.

    1. Re:In other words by JustOK · · Score: 1

      Well, not a ball as such, bit like a ball.

      --
      rewriting history since 2109
    2. Re:In other words by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 2

      Just imagine a banana. Right, now forget that, because it's nothing like a banana.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    3. Re:In other words by tom17 · · Score: 1

      Nope, try imagining an ebony bath full of fine dry sand and then video it as the sand drains out. Then play the video backwards and watch the sand filling the bath. Like that, yes.

  8. the discoverer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    this is a great discovery for mdash

    1. Re:the discoverer by TapeCutter · · Score: 2

      Mdash is still just a theoretical particle, they haven't actually detected mdash yet.

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    2. Re: the discoverer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Here's one: —

    3. Re:the discoverer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Then why did they execute mdash for treason?

  9. god-like vs. measuring observer by genji_IT · · Score: 2

    what exactly is the difference?

    1. Re:god-like vs. measuring observer by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 2

      what exactly is the difference?

      When people ask me why I'm a theological noncognitivist, I ask them if their God needs to be omniscient and omnipotent in every universe in an infinite multiverse or if it'd be OK if thier God is a pimply-faced youth in another.

      Typically, they have no idea what I'm talking about, and probably just assume I'm nuts.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    2. Re:god-like vs. measuring observer by lxs · · Score: 5, Interesting

      A god-like observer can observe without interacting. Back in reality every observation is an interaction.

    3. Re:god-like vs. measuring observer by DeathToBill · · Score: 4, Funny

      Just ignore him... NURSE! He's out of bed again!

      --
      Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
    4. Re:god-like vs. measuring observer by Sockatume · · Score: 1

      One is used as the model for the underlying behavior, one describes the observations we would make.

      --
      No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
    5. Re:god-like vs. measuring observer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Of course. See Fringe, for example. The damn Observers interfered and fucked everything up royally.

    6. Re:god-like vs. measuring observer by cascadingstylesheet · · Score: 1

      A god-like observer can observe without interacting. Back in reality every observation is an interaction.

      OK ... then what the heck is scientific about speculating about something that by definition either doesn't exist or can't practically participate in the experiment?

    7. Re:god-like vs. measuring observer by Rob+Riggs · · Score: 1

      I'm sure he's exactly as Michelangelo painted him on the Sistine Chapel's ceiling in one of the other universes. And one of those universes in our multiverse is a place called hell.

      It is a solid, falsifiable theory. At least as solid as any of the other multiverse theories I've come across so far.

      --
      the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
    8. Re:god-like vs. measuring observer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      God: Come round to my place and watch the universe!
      You: It looks like it never changes.
      God: Cables broke! Waiting on UT to fix it 14 billion years now.
      You: Have you tried restarting your router?
      God: Bad idea lost some data 14 billion years back but why not give it another try?

    9. Re: god-like vs. measuring observer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      When people ask me why I'm a theological noncognitivist, I ask them if their God needs to be omniscient and omnipotent in every universe in an infinite multiverse

      God can be whatever you want in the imaginary universes that you've created. They don't really exist.

    10. Re:god-like vs. measuring observer by Nerdfest · · Score: 1

      My understanding is that we recently discovered a means to measure quantum events without affecting them by using some secondary effects. Effectively, it's now possible to observe in a 'god-like' way on a small scale.

    11. Re:god-like vs. measuring observer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A God-like observer is as possible as a computer user. The computer can make fine, precise calculations at breakneck speed with arbitrary precision and chaotic results. The user watches helplessly, able to see the results, but not affect them in any meaningful way.

    12. Re:god-like vs. measuring observer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This isn't speculating about the existence of a god-like observer. The expression is just a fancy way of talking about the complete state of a system, which we know exist but cannot access. Another example is "playing chess with god" which is just a fancy way of saying "against perfect play".

    13. Re:god-like vs. measuring observer by camperdave · · Score: 3, Interesting

      A god-like observer can observe without interacting. Back in reality every observation is an interaction.

      OK ... then what the heck is scientific about speculating about something that by definition either doesn't exist or can't practically participate in the experiment?

      Are you kidding? Godlike observation - to observe things exactly as they are without interfering in the outcome - is the goal of all science.

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    14. Re:god-like vs. measuring observer by Gavagai80 · · Score: 1

      Yet there's no reason to think things can exist independently. Everything is relational. Something that doesn't interact with anything in any way becomes non-existent. Our need to imagine that it would still exist and that there can be independent things is most likely just a human conceptual limitation resulting from our evolution.

      --
      This space intentionally left blank
    15. Re:god-like vs. measuring observer by Jmc23 · · Score: 1

      Perhaps you need to freshen up your understanding of falsifiable?

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
    16. Re:god-like vs. measuring observer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I guess he can observe without observing too then?

    17. Re:god-like vs. measuring observer by camperdave · · Score: 2

      Yet there's no reason to think things can exist independently.

      So, the question of whether a tree falling in the woods makes a sound if there is nobody there to hear it is moot, because without anyone there to hear it, the tree wouldn't exist at all? Schroedinger's cat isn't both alive and dead, it isn't even in the box?

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    18. Re:god-like vs. measuring observer by Rob+Riggs · · Score: 1

      Perhaps you need to freshen up your understanding of falsifiable?

      Perhaps you need to tune up your sarcasm detector?

      --
      the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
    19. Re:god-like vs. measuring observer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Godlike observation - to observe things exactly as they are without interfering in the outcome - is the goal of all science.

      Also, according to the Heisenberg Uncertaintly Priciple, an impossibility.

    20. Re:god-like vs. measuring observer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If the box exists, so does the cat. If the forest exists, so does the tree. However, if the tree exists, that does not mean the forest does. And if there is a cat, that does not mean there is a box. Although.... One cat dying in a vacuum... One tree falling in a vacuum.... By definition, and relation, existence may emerge. But NOT simply by naming or describing it does it come to exist ;)

    21. Re:god-like vs. measuring observer by Jmc23 · · Score: 1

      No. It seems you need to freshen up on your understanding of sarcasm as well.

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
    22. Re:god-like vs. measuring observer by camperdave · · Score: 1

      Godlike observation - to observe things exactly as they are without interfering in the outcome - is the goal of all science.

      Also, according to the Heisenberg Uncertaintly Priciple, an impossibility.

      The Uncertainty Principle comes about because we DO interfere with the outcome when we observe things. Godlike observation would not suffer that weakness.

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    23. Re:god-like vs. measuring observer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Schroedinger's cat isn't both alive and dead, it isn't even in the box?

      You just made your first step in understanding street con physics.

  10. What I got from the article: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    From the outside, the universe looks like a photograph.

    I hope we're hanging on a nice wall.

    1. Re:What I got from the article: by JustOK · · Score: 3, Funny

      we're probably folded up in some fat guy's wallet.

      --
      rewriting history since 2109
    2. Re:What I got from the article: by metlin · · Score: 1

      He's not fat, he just looks big boned to an outside observer.

    3. Re:What I got from the article: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As long as we're well hung.

      I mean hung well.

      I mean... Crap, now I suppose I need to backstep Seven days...

  11. This has practical applications by NEDHead · · Score: 1

    For example, when I am hard at work, and my wife thinks I am goofing off...

  12. Time Out Of by mdsolar · · Score: 1

    is better than Out Of Time.

    1. Re:Time Out Of by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hardly. Out of Time is a great album.

  13. I think... by Skiron · · Score: 0

    After reading a lot on this is that sometimes an issue becomes a problem without reason.

    Now, time is ONLY a man made measure - a measure between events. Nature/the universe doesn't know what time is nor cares about it. It is only us humans that need to try to explain time dilation and various other 'time issues' to make the maths work. Remove time, and I bet it will balance these equations.

    Time cannot run backwards,as there is no such thing as time except in the human brain and the human concept of measuring changes.

    1. Re:I think... by dingen · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What? Of course time isn't man-made. Why would you say only man cares about time? I'm pretty sure plants and animals are also happily perceiving the passage of time.

      --
      Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
    2. Re:I think... by DeathToBill · · Score: 1
      --
      Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
    3. Re:I think... by Rude+Turnip · · Score: 2

      That's entropy, not time.

      It's very possible that the development of language in humans sort of locked us into the concept of time. For further reading, some of which sounds insane, look into pigeons and their homing instincts to see how other animals aren't necessarily perceiving time in the way that we do.

    4. Re:I think... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ye I agree, time seems to be the speed of everything reacting etc, and time dilation is when something affects that speed for some reason (slower reactions means slower time)

    5. Re:I think... by Skiron · · Score: 1

      I don't think so.... the main point is 'over the passage of time...' - but time is only a human concept. Plus I wouldn't trust wikipedia anyway with all the nonsense on there.

    6. Re:I think... by Skiron · · Score: 1

      Yes entropy, but time is perceiving a measure between different states of it (but I doubt animals do anyway, I mean, does a pigeon know how old it is?). Time is just like a tape measure - just a way to measure different states between events. i.e. supposedly before the big bang, there was no time, as effectively there was no events.

    7. Re:I think... by Skiron · · Score: 1

      No, remove time from the observer and the one doing something. Both events will happen at the same speed, but it is only the 'time' measure that is wrong because humans have to measure it.

    8. Re:I think... by LateArthurDent · · Score: 5, Informative

      After reading a lot on this is that sometimes an issue becomes a problem without reason.

      Now, time is ONLY a man made measure - a measure between events. Nature/the universe doesn't know what time is nor cares about it. It is only us humans that need to try to explain time dilation and various other 'time issues' to make the maths work. Remove time, and I bet it will balance these equations.

      Time cannot run backwards,as there is no such thing as time except in the human brain and the human concept of measuring changes.

      Nature doesn't care about time? Tell that to the laws of thermodynamics. Entropy only goes one way.

      If you watch a video of a ball rolling on a desk, you can't tell just by the video whether time has been reversed. The physics governing that motion don't care about time. If you watch a video of an egg being shattered, you'll know when the video is reversed. You know all the contents of the egg can't spontaneously get back together as time moves forward. That would be going to a much more well-ordered state.

      Also, the GPS device you use to triangulate your position and navigate to your destination? Well, consider that relativity tells us that the satellites zooming up above us have slower ticking clocks. They're actually moving through time slower than you are, and our current GPS accuracy wouldn't be achievable if we didn't take that into account.

    9. Re:I think... by vettemph · · Score: 1

      THIS!
          There is a bunch of debris in the universe. It bounces of each other, it gets stuck to each other, it vibrates at various rates etc....

      Not until there was conscience, a memory of events being chained together, was there 'time'.

      --
      The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
    10. Re:I think... by jandrese · · Score: 3, Informative

      GPS is about the only consumer use system that has to deal with not only general relativity, but also special relativity.

      --

      I read the internet for the articles.
    11. Re:I think... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Now, time is ONLY a man made measure - a measure between events.

      And distance is only a man made measure separating locations and events. And temperature is only a man made measure between objects, and voltage is only a man made measure...

      Might as well say every description used by people is made by people. What would it means for nature to "care" or "not care" about time? Nature does what it does, and via observation we develop a description of that. Time, along with everything else in physics and other sciences, are part of that description.

    12. Re:I think... by slashdime · · Score: 1

      What a stupid assumption. You're arguing over the definition of entropy vs time, yet you conveniently throw in your own strict definition of time "perceiving a measure between different states of it" makes no sense. What different states? Is there a countable discrete set of states that a being can be in? Do all beings get different sets of states?

      One of the the criteria of all life is adaptation: The ability to change over time in response to the environment. This ability is fundamental to the process of evolution and is determined by the organism's heredity, diet, and external factors.

      There's time for you. Why does a pigeon need to specifically know how old it is? All a pigeon needs to know is whether he's hungry, and that after he's eaten, he's not hungry. You cannot have cause and effect without time.

    13. Re:I think... by Bucc5062 · · Score: 1

      My horses would beg to differ. They very well know the meaning of time. Every morning at @ 6:30 they are lined up in their stalls waiting for breakfast. If I am late by even 15 minutes I get grief from at least one horse (the older mare is annoyed, but just looks at me funny). In the afternoons when I drive in to the farm, the horses know to line up at their stalls and if I'm not out within 15 minutes I get grief. Oh, they understand time, truly they do. Position of the Sun? No for they do this summer or winter. Stars? Same thing, Somehow they just "know" based on some rhythm of time/life. All's I know is, don't be late with food or the next rider may not be so pleasant.

      --
      Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
    14. Re:I think... by Agent0013 · · Score: 1

      If you watch a video of a ball rolling on a desk, you can't tell just by the video whether time has been reversed. The physics governing that motion don't care about time. If you watch a video of an egg being shattered, you'll know when the video is reversed. You know all the contents of the egg can't spontaneously get back together as time moves forward. That would be going to a much more well-ordered state.

      Perhaps in a very short clip you would not be able to tell the direction of time when a ball is rolling on a desk. But with sensitive enough detection or a long enough desk, you would see the speed of the ball slow down due to friction effects like rolling resistance and air resistance. This slowing effect would tell you which way time went. If the desk was not perfectly level then that would throw things off but you might be able to tell the difference between deceleration due to friction and acceleration due to gravity. The rate of change may not be the same as the equation for acceleration due to gravity is squared and the formula for friction effects is a direct relationship.

      --

      -- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
    15. Re:I think... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      While I don't disagree with your larger point, the egg/entropy thing is a poor example because there's an alternate explanation: namely, that the observer "knows" the egg-shatter video is backwards because gravity's moving the wrong way. Even reverse-shattering an egg is theoretically possible, if the egg's bits were perfectly arranged in the final "shattered" configuration and gravity were reversed (as in, the video were shot upside-down, basically). It's extremely unlikely that you'd get the arrangement perfect, but it's possible. In that sense, the egg-shatter video is no better than a video of a ball spontaneously rolling downhill when released from a hand - it could just as easily be a time-reversed upside-down video of a ball rolling downhill into a hand, using unnatural catching motion of the hand that looks like the motion of a throw.

      The entropy argument has real merits, but it almost never applies literally and perfectly in the macroscopic world where it's so easy for humans to manipulate entropy in either direction.

    16. Re:I think... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Time only exists in the physical realm. Your higher-Self has nothing to do with the physical realm, because it exists in a dimension outside of time and space. This is where all of the arguments happen about whether or not time exists at all. Our conscious participation in the physical realm fluctuates, as does our experience of time.

      One thing that always bothered me was when scientists say how old the universe is, and they give it in Earth years. Meaning that the Earth has gone around the sun so many billion times, when we know it's not true. However, we feel that we should have a static time system by which to relate events. It's understandable, but it's not a correct way to think about the universe as a whole. In fact, Here on slashdot, I submit to anyone that cares, that time is like energy and cannot "run out". That is, if we're still going to call it static time.

      Also, if any of these scientists claim to be able to see things from "outside the universe" or "god-like perspective" then just stop listening to them.

    17. Re:I think... by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 1

      Computational theory shows time must exist. Thereare certain complexities that simply cannot just appear -- there is no sbort-circuit calculation significantly better than try all possibilities. This requires a computational model with at least a finite number of steps per a finite unit of time.

      You simply cannot get to the answer by any short-circuit formula or calculation. A universe without time would have to perform such a calculation via magic. Which would be an interesting implication.

      Anyway, such devices can and are constructed and run on such problems, and solutions achieved. Ergo time, the substrate for this computational model, must exist.

      Someone go formalize that and write up a paper with me as lead. Make sure you misspell my name right.

      --
      (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
    18. Re:I think... by DeathToBill · · Score: 2

      Okay, to explain more fully: The second law states that entropy always increases over time (in a closed system). So nature very much does care about time - the progression of the three-dimensional state of the universe depends on the progression of time.

      The direction of time is not arbitrary or human-defined. The other three dimensions are arbitrary, so far as we know; it doesn't matter whether you define those three dimensions relative to earth or the sun or the galaxy or whatever, and it doesn't matter which way around you define them, the behaviour of the universe will be the same. Your frame of reference when observing the universe doesn't matter, so long as you allow for its motion and rotation relative to other things.

      But time is not like that. Time progresses in one direction in our perception and the behaviour of the universe would be fundamentally different if it progressed the other way. Entropy would decrease with time instead of increasing with it. The progression of physical laws would be different.

      Also the assignment of units to time is not arbitrary. That is, we are not free define time completely arbitrarily. Just as we are not free to define distance arbitrarily. We can't say that the distance from the earth to the moon is the same distance from the earth to the sun just because we say so; there is some fixed, underlying measure of distance and something that is one metre long in one place will still be one metre long when you move it to another place. In the same way were are not free to take any two non-overlapping segments of time and define them to be equal. The relationship between duration in time and distance in space is fixed by the speed of light, which is an absolute constant (in a given medium). So light will take the same time to travel along that one metre object wherever it is in space and whenever in time it happens, no matter how we attempt to redefine duration. Our concept of seconds is merely a scaling of the time light takes to go a given distance.

      --
      Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
    19. Re:I think... by fatphil · · Score: 2

      Animals do have some concept of time, as they have the concept of both position and velocity, and can extrapolate the relation between the two over time. For example, a dog can instinctively judge its jump so that it intercepts a thrown frisbee, likewise birds of prey hunting birds or fish.
      They may not be able to cogitate over the concepts they use, unlike us humans, but they can certainly put them into use.

      --
      Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
    20. Re:I think... by Bob9113 · · Score: 1

      Why would you say only man cares about time?

      This is dreadfully misogynistic, but I can't resist: Surely you have heard women say, "I'll be ready in two minutes, I'm just picking my shoes..."

    21. Re:I think... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The word time is a human concept. That the period between events is measurable is an inexorable fact. The whole experiment is logically flawed anyway. The "god-like observer" would have to be outside of time to see everything at once. Since humans are not outside of time, they cannot actually fill the role of "god-like observer". We can't even reasonably concentrate 100% on two things at one time.

    22. Re:I think... by Bengie · · Score: 1

      But the Big Bang was an event. How does an event-less system have an event that creates events?

    23. Re:I think... by Khashishi · · Score: 1

      Actually, entropy is a fundamentally subjective concept. For human practical purposes, it is objective and measurable and always increases, but for an omniscient god, entropy is zero and does not increase.

      Recall that entropy is log(the number of microstates in a macrostate). A macrostate is generally chosen to be a group of states which we can't tell apart with our limited experimental capabilities, or a group of states which are free to mix together in an experiment in an uncontrolled manner. For God, a macrostate is a microstate, and everything is controlled.

    24. Re:I think... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      and a male observer will be waiting an eternity with the woman still not having picked any shoes.

      so i believe that shows the article is spot on.

    25. Re:I think... by TangoMargarine · · Score: 1

      He's not saying there's a set number of states. A state is just a snapshot, for the purposes of this conversation one noticeably different from the other.

      --
      Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
    26. Re:I think... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      well clearly this has a simple solution...but it only works for spherical desks in a vacuum...

    27. Re:I think... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't think so.... the main point is 'over the passage of time...' - but time is only a human concept. Plus I wouldn't trust wikipedia anyway with all the nonsense on there.

      So what you're saying is that humans, and human concepts, are not part of the universe?

    28. Re:I think... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      you didn't rtfa did you?

      they aren't so much saying that time doesn't exist. they are basically saying that time only exists for those entangled in the universe...which would include whatever is doing your computations

    29. Re:I think... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There's no difference entropy-wise between an exploding egg and a rolling ball. Both objects are compelled to go only one way by entropy.
      However, we have absolutely no evidence entropy cannot be reversed universally, but we do have evidence entropy can be reversed locally (life).

      Anyways, congrats to the scientists for rediscovering advaita knowledge!
      Indeed, spirituality teaches that truth can only exist in the contradictory and paradoxial. Truth and knowledge is not linear, but multi dimensional.

      Captcha: osmosis

    30. Re:I think... by Jmc23 · · Score: 1

      No, they're writhing 4d worms existing at all points. You just perceive them as subject to time.

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
    31. Re:I think... by Jmc23 · · Score: 1

      What's your point? Didn't you just illustrate that women don't care about time or its proper measurment?

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
    32. Re:I think... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nature doesn't care about time? Tell that to the laws of thermodynamics. Entropy only goes one way.

      Time doesn't go either way. It's merely a comparison of two states: now and now. In between the instances when you read those two 'now's, the entire Universe completely changed states many billions of times over. It's decay and growth over the course of the entire Universe and the nothingness beyond everything. You might argue that reversing all of the decay and growth in the entire Universe would be reversing time, but no, it wouldn't. The Universe already changed, and the new changes to reverse the old changes didn't prevent the original changes from happening.

      If you watch a video of a ball rolling on a desk, you can't tell just by the video whether time has been reversed. The physics governing that motion don't care about time. If you watch a video of an egg being shattered, you'll know when the video is reversed. You know all the contents of the egg can't spontaneously get back together as time moves forward. That would be going to a much more well-ordered state.

      You don't need to know that the video has been reversed because that is, once again, a concept of something that doesn't physically exist. What happens in reality is that the video plays frame by frame, always changing frame. A frame in reverse is still a frame that is shown. Changing the order of the frames or randomizing them doesn't change the fact that a frame was shown, and playing any other frame even from the opposite end of the list of frames will never stop that previous frame from having been shown.

      Also, the GPS device you use to triangulate your position and navigate to your destination? Well, consider that relativity tells us that the satellites zooming up above us have slower ticking clocks. They're actually moving through time slower than you are, and our current GPS accuracy wouldn't be achievable if we didn't take that into account.

      No. In the first place, relativity only accounts for about 30 cm (12 inches) of accuracy, which is only what a satellite would be out by if it couldn't communicate to the ground stations regularly over the course of the day as they normally do. In the second place, accuracy of GPS is in the meter range. Not nano-, not micro-, not even milli-. "Real-world data collected by the FAA show that some high-quality GPS SPS receivers currently provide better than 3 meter horizontal accuracy." It gets down to about 0.9 meters of accuracy. That's 3-10 feet of accuracy without augmentations (that is, connecting to a ground station and checking its position against other satellites to confirm the "correct" time), or 3-33 times the relativistic effect. The rest of the accuracy gains are from the aforementioned augmentations which bring it down to 5 cm. Relativity makes things "better", not "perfect", and the augmentations make relativity worthless.

      The reason why clocks appear to slow down at high speeds is that the atoms in the clocks used for the experiments are simply decaying less (because they expend less energy at higher altitudes and higher speeds) than ones that didn't get to move so fast. Because the timing of a second is measured in the half-life decay, any changes to that decay rate will also throw off the clock itself. Mechanical clocks have numerous moving parts that get thrown off by the change in speed, and even electrical clocks still have to deal with changes in the oscillator speed and material resonance.

    33. Re:I think... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Okay, to explain more fully: The second law states that entropy always increases over time (in a closed system). So nature very much does care about time - the progression of the three-dimensional state of the universe depends on the progression of time.

      Which could as well be: "We perceive time to go into the direction of increasing entropy." The difference between past and future is the difference between what we remember and what we do not remember. Memory is information, which is linked to entropy. So the whole "direction of time" may actually be just a "direction of entropy", without anything fundamental about the direction of time. Indeed, one might even imagine some alien world where time is perceived to go in the opposite direction.

      Note that the standard argument for increasing entropy already is asymmetric in time. If instead of asking "what is the most likely entropy in the future" you ask "what was the most likely entropy in the past", you get that up to now the entropy most likely decreased. That is, if only looking from the present time without adding a time direction bias right into the argumentation, the most likely situation turns out to be that we are currently at the peak of an entropy fluctuation, with higher entropy both in the past and the future.

    34. Re:I think... by Jmc23 · · Score: 1

      You're too funny. You actually seem to believe that space exists.

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
    35. Re:I think... by Jmc23 · · Score: 1

      Um, we have two brains. It's very easy for us to concentrate on two things at once. Whether the other brain knows about what the other one is doing, or perceives the same way, is a different story

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
    36. Re:I think... by ByteSlicer · · Score: 2

      Well, consider that relativity tells us that the satellites zooming up above us have slower ticking clocks.

      Actually, the GPS satellite clocks run 38 microseconds faster than ground based clocks.
      This is because they are not moving fast enough (special relativity: faster means slower clock) to counter the general relativistic effects (stronger gravitational field means slower ground clocks).
      Both clocks seem to be slower for an observer in free space.
      http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html

    37. Re:I think... by ByteSlicer · · Score: 1

      The reason why clocks appear to slow down at high speeds is that the atoms in the clocks used for the experiments are simply decaying less (because they expend less energy at higher altitudes and higher speeds) than ones that didn't get to move so fast. Because the timing of a second is measured in the half-life decay, any changes to that decay rate will also throw off the clock itself. Mechanical clocks have numerous moving parts that get thrown off by the change in speed, and even electrical clocks still have to deal with changes in the oscillator speed and material resonance.

      As I explained in a reply to the parent post, GPS clocks are actually faster than ground clocks.

      Furthermore, atomic clocks don't use radioactive decay. Instead they include an atomic oscillator inside an electronic circuit so the whole oscillates at a very precisely defined frequency. The oscillation comes from Cesium/Rubidium atoms with electrons that move from ground energy levels to an excitated level and back. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_clock#Mechanism

      The reason why clocks appear to slow down is because time is relative, and depends on the relative speed (special relativity) or the difference in gravitational field strength (general relativity) of the observer and the observed.

    38. Re:I think... by DrJimbo · · Score: 1

      Even reverse-shattering an egg is theoretically possible, if the egg's bits were perfectly arranged in the final "shattered" configuration and gravity were reversed (as in, the video were shot upside-down, basically). It's extremely unlikely that you'd get the arrangement perfect, but it's possible.

      [...] The entropy argument has real merits, but it almost never applies literally and perfectly in the macroscopic world where it's so easy for humans to manipulate entropy in either direction.

      The entropy argument applies more literally and more perfectly than almost any other argument about anything. Your argument based on something that is "extremely unlikely, ... but possible" is at best utter nonsense. I could say it is extremely unlikely but possible that I will guess the keys to all the encryption used throughout the world and also have Scarlett Johansson fall in love with me and marry me on the same day. But all of that is much more likely to happen than for you to ever make a self assembling egg. Your notion of what is "theoretically possible" is not at all the same as what a physicist (even a theoretical physicist) means by that term.

      As for human manipulation of entropy, we can't, not globally. We certainly can't make self-assembling eggs. Your equating the likelihood of a self assembling egg and a reversed video that shows a ball rolling up-hill shows a breathtaking lack of knowledge about physics and probability.

      Duty Calls!

      --
      We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
      -- Anais Nin
    39. Re:I think... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "If you watch a video of an egg being shattered, you'll know when the video is reversed."

      Yes, that's true, but only because that is the way you remember it.
      If you have no memory, time is meaningless.
      With no memory, everything is just 'now'.

      Now... now... now, now, now... now, now... now.

      The universe simply 'is', and all there is, is 'now'.
      Only through memories can we 'know' things.

      The processing of memory, and our relation with it are highly underrated.

      Associative memories are why we have consciousness.

    40. Re:I think... by blueg3 · · Score: 1

      Other way around. Special relativity deals with the behavior of fast-moving objects and is relevant to a number of engineering problems. General relativity deals with the behavior of objects in gravitational fields and for the most part can be ignored in engineering, but not in GPS.

    41. Re:I think... by HiThere · · Score: 1

      You don't even need to be animate. "Observer" is just something that exchanges energy with the thing observed. A photon makes a dandy observer (and it's what they used). Personally I tend to think photons move to fast, and generally prefer electrons, but it's a matter of taste, and what you're trying to do.

      P.S.: IANAQP.

      P.P.S.: I am not a Quantum Physicist.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    42. Re:I think... by LateArthurDent · · Score: 1

      But with sensitive enough detection or a long enough desk, you would see the speed of the ball slow down due to friction effects like rolling resistance and air resistance

      Well, yeah, but that's entropy again. I was considering a frictionless desk in a vacuum :)

    43. Re:I think... by LateArthurDent · · Score: 1

      Well, consider that relativity tells us that the satellites zooming up above us have slower ticking clocks.

      Actually, the GPS satellite clocks run 38 microseconds faster than ground based clocks.
      This is because they are not moving fast enough (special relativity: faster means slower clock) to counter the general relativistic effects (stronger gravitational field means slower ground clocks).
      Both clocks seem to be slower for an observer in free space.
      http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html

      You are absolutely right. I appreciate the correction.

    44. Re:I think... by Trax3001BBS · · Score: 1

      Wrong.

      ie: Second law of thermodynamics

      Yep it's official I'm getting old. When I was growing up there were just two laws of thermodynamics:
      1) you can't get something for nothing
      2) Nor can you break even

      Then they slipped in the 0 (Zero) law now called Zeroth apparently because they couldn't
      go lower than 0 without looking foolish and added a third law; for a total of 4.

    45. Re:I think... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "If you watch a video of a ball rolling on a desk, you can't tell just by the video whether time has been reversed."

      While I read this often this is only correct if you ignore all thermodynamics and ignore any friction.
      Friction and similar effects will slow down the ball in the direction of time and accerlerate in the other time driection.

      For example if you look at an elastic collision you can easlily determine the direction of time, because of the (small) energy loss where kinetic energy was converted into thermal energy.

      Only in idealised pure newton dynamics you cannot determine the direction of time. Once you take the full picture into account (thermodynamics and entropy) you can.

      This is a very crucial problem because the second law of thermodunamics basically says: The world is a computer computing something. The number of bits in the universe is rising with time. While quantuum physics says: All evolution is unitray and the direction of time has no meaning - there is no loss or gain of information at all.

      Typically this paradox is solved by the "magical collapse of the wave function". But this just comes down to admitting that we do not understand this.

      The most promising idea from my point of view is Gerard ’t Hooft's recent papers, where he shows that a celluar automaton might lead to the observed quantuum effects. The topic is quite delicate, but he claims that we only observe entaglement and unitarty, because we look at the wrong "things" (use the wrong basis).

      From my understanding the "things" we look at (particles, time, space, strings whatever) might be something like a fourier transformed version of the things the automaton really computes. Propably the ontological basis is based on more fundamental "things" like causality. This might be related to Causal dynamical triangulation where time and space (and everything else) are also just an emergent phenomenon of causality.

      If causality is more "real" then time and space this might also explain some of the non localities in quantuum physics. In the classical world none of this matters, because of the huge causal interaction of everthing we get our classical world with proper time and space.

      Actually if Gerard ’t Hooft's (and I have reasons to believe so), quantuum computers cannot work on a bigger scale. Since the unitary evolution is not ontological in this case, the bigger the quantuum computer becomes, the less the evolution is unitray and we get wrong results. Since I (for various philosphocial, physical and mathematical resons) do not "believe" in quantuum computers, I think this ideas are extremely interesting.

       

    46. Re:I think... by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 1

      For example, a dog can instinctively judge its jump so that it intercepts a thrown frisbee, likewise birds of prey hunting birds or fish.

      It's not instinctive. Dogs have to learn it just like humans do. They usually learn it more easily than most humans, but they still have to learn. Get yourself a puppy. They're downright clumsy. Which is adorable, of course.

    47. Re:I think... by fatphil · · Score: 1

      I did remove that word. I did want to get across the concept of it not being purely a product of artificial and externally-imposed training. So it came from within the dog, it was an exercising and honing of a skill that its species had an intrinsic capability to perform, presumably as it has an evolutionary advantage - I'm guessing for hunting air-bound critters. I.e. that combination of awareness, perception, cognition, reaction, and coordination was in its genes.

      Like the ability to grip and lift a mug of beer to my lips, and then go 'aaaahhhh, that's tasty!' - it's coded in my genes. No amount of training would have me eating nettles like a goat.

      I couldn't think of a better single word than "instinctive", so I put it back in.

      --
      Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
    48. Re:I think... by Rude+Turnip · · Score: 1

      My cats and dog know exactly when to eat and line up to get snacks. Those are all entropic measurements and knowing your circadian/metabolic rhythms. If you know your body well enough, you'll feel its different states and you can call it a time, but it's still boils down to entropy.

  14. get unentangled already by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    time is a figment of your pitiful human imagination.

  15. twisted article. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Well there's two minutes of my life I'll never get back.

  16. Time is dependent on observation? by Covalent · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I read this essentially as saying that without an observer, time does not exist. Essentially, a "god-like" observer does not observe any change unless he or she becomes entangled in the universe he or she is observing. That universe, therefore, is without change, and therefore timeless. However, observers that are entangled within the universe (as we are), observe change and thus the universe (to them) has time.

    This sounds a fair bit like some of the effects of relativity (on the train the shots appear simultaneous...on the ground they do not).

    What is most intriguing to me, though, is that if the universe is both timeless (from the outside) and has time (from the inside), is it possible for us to gain the outside perspective (or any information about that timeless perspective). This shouldn't necessarily be impossible - we would need to not become entangled in the thing we are trying to observe (which we can easily do). Perhaps observing the surrounding universe would give unentangled information about the experiment in question, and thus give us a glimpse of the future?

    --
    Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
    1. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I read this essentially as saying that without an observer, time does not exist. Essentially, a "god-like" observer does not observe any change unless he or she becomes entangled in the universe he or she is observing. That universe, therefore, is without change, and therefore timeless. However, observers that are entangled within the universe (as we are), observe change and thus the universe (to them) has time.

      It's even sillier than that. From TF Abstract:

      We implement this mechanism using an entangled state of the polarization of two photons, one of which is used as a clock to gauge the evolution of the second: an "internal" observer that becomes correlated with the clock photon sees the other system evolve, while an "external" observer that only observes global properties of the two photons can prove it is static.

      So, surprise, an outside observer who can only access invariant quantities of the 'toy universe; (so that the interaction is 'non-entangling', meaning it's not breaking the existing entanglement[*]) will observe ... invariant quantities. Well, I'll be damned! It's the chicken that emerged from an egg that emerged from a chicken! Emergence ahoy!

      [*'Nevermind the question of how that 'go-like' outside-the-universe observer interacts with the Universe.

      The thing is, not everything that's been pushed into arxiv is publishable quality (hence their attempt with the endorsing system). Wake me up if this toy thing gets peer-review approval for publishing. If it ever does, I'll write a competing article stating that time emerges from symmetry breaking and sidestep this whole fancy-pants 'entanglement' label (should have a better shot at being published imho)

    2. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      we would need to not become entangled in the thing we are trying to observe (which we can easily do)

      We can only do this for particles that we entangled ourselves. This is why they were able to be a "god-like" observer in their experiment, but they cannot apply the same trick to observe arbitrary things.

    3. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by DeathToBill · · Score: 1

      The article is TL;DR (I assume...) so instead I'm going to pontificate on my own ignorance. I know, I know, call me a karma whore...

      Anyway. I'm not clear how this conception of a god-like observer who does not observe time and for whom the universe remains static differs from the very old theological idea of time as a property of the created universe which then doesn't apply to the creator who, necessarily, exists apart from the creation. Is it that the god-like observer is not able to observe time? Or that the god-like observer observes the universe as a four-dimensional object, seeing all of time at once, rather than observing a three-dimensional slice at successive points on the fourth dimension?

      --
      Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
    4. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by MozeeToby · · Score: 5, Informative

      Just keep in mind that an 'observer' does not mean a conscious entity. An observer, in the quantum mechanical sense, is more accurately an "interactor", as in anything that interacts with it. Which, when put into those terms, their thought process in this paper is much clearer: without interaction there is no way to determine if time has passed, if there's no way to tell if time is passing... it may as well not be.

    5. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I read this essentially as saying that without an observer, time does not exist. Essentially, a "god-like" observer does not observe any change unless he or she becomes entangled in the universe he or she is observing. That universe, therefore, is without change, and therefore timeless. However, observers that are entangled within the universe (as we are), observe change and thus the universe (to them) has time.

      This sounds a fair bit like some of the effects of relativity (on the train the shots appear simultaneous...on the ground they do not).

      What is most intriguing to me, though, is that if the universe is both timeless (from the outside) and has time (from the inside), is it possible for us to gain the outside perspective (or any information about that timeless perspective). This shouldn't necessarily be impossible - we would need to not become entangled in the thing we are trying to observe (which we can easily do). Perhaps observing the surrounding universe would give unentangled information about the experiment in question, and thus give us a glimpse of the future?

      Is that not exactly what budhism says? Dont get entangled in the universe and you will live forever?

    6. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by Bob9113 · · Score: 1

      The article is TL;DR (I assume...)

      ahhahaahhahaa -- "You mean I have to click on the link and look at the article to know if it's going to be too long to read? [rolls eyes]" I can just see Zooey Deschanel doing her whole "look at me and how cool I am not caring whether you look at me and think I'm cool" thing delivering that line with a dismissive subtext of, "I'm way too cool to waste my time finding out whether the ramblings of some 'theoretical physicist' are too long to be worth my time. I live in real physics, every day, thank you; I think I know how time works."

      You got me laughing so hard my eyes were watering. Thanks! :)

    7. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by DeathToBill · · Score: 1

      Well, this is /. after all. You're welcome.

      --
      Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
    8. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by Bob9113 · · Score: 1

      Thanks for being a good sport. I had added a whole paragraph about, "I understand what you mean in context and I'm not trying to bash you, just playing..." but it made the post feel clunky.

    9. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So what you're saying is scientists suck at the written and spoken word? :)

    10. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by TangoMargarine · · Score: 1

      Sounds like a good theory to allow time travel, too! :D Assuming "being timeless" doesn't have a nasty effect on human biological functioning or something...

      --
      Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
    11. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I read this essentially as saying that without an observer, time does not exist. Essentially, a "god-like" observer does not observe any change unless he or she becomes entangled in the universe he or she is observing. That universe, therefore, is without change, and therefore timeless. However, observers that are entangled within the universe (as we are), observe change and thus the universe (to them) has time.

      It would be more accurate to say that to an outside observer, all possibilities exist at once. A good analogy is to look at a bookshelf which contains a series of novels- to you the entire story exists without change, all at once- the story only begins to flow when you actually read it. It gets more complicated than that of course, in that the real universe contains not just the one story, but all possible stories, but from the point of view of someone inside the universe they only see one of them.

    12. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by fa2k · · Score: 1

      What is most intriguing to me, though, is that if the universe is both timeless (from the outside) and has time (from the inside), is it possible for us to gain the outside perspective (or any information about that timeless perspective).

      This appears to be what they did in the experiment, albeit for a very simple system of two photons

    13. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If the universe appears static to an outside observer, what do they see? Would they see the universe as an infinitely dense point at the moment it came into existance, or some later state? Is the universe only static while they observe, then as soon as they turn away it continues evolving?

      Captcha = Wire Tap !

    14. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by Jmc23 · · Score: 0

      Haven't USian Republicans already achieved this? If they don't get involved then that wonderful country they believe in still exists.

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
    15. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by Jmc23 · · Score: 1

      to the creator who, necessarily, exists apart from the creation.

      Just wondering where you got this tripe from? Sounds like 17-18th century philosophy. I'm pretty sure there's not a single religion or spiritual viewpoint that believes that.

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
    16. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by Jmc23 · · Score: 1

      no

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
    17. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by fuzzlost · · Score: 1

      Thanks for the explanation, that makes so much more sense now.

      Do you, by chance, know why the term "observer" was chosen?

    18. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by zdepthcharge · · Score: 1

      Traveling back in time would only be possible if time was a background condition of the universe and not an emergent property. I don't have time to write out a proper explanation, but you can understand this if you understand what's involved in entropy.

    19. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by shadowofwind · · Score: 1

      I'll get modded to oblivion if anyone sees this, but I get objectively verifiable premonitions in dreams that can't plausibly be extrapolated from past experience. This happens occasionally to a lot of people, though most scientific types who have experienced it are shy about talking about it. Like most other personal characteristics there's a distribution of tendencies, with a few people being way out on the tail. How it works I have no idea, but it works somehow.

    20. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by DeathToBill · · Score: 1

      Eh? Anything else is just incoherent. A creator couldn't be part of what he created, could he? So he must be something other than what he created. Perhaps "exists apart from the creation" didn't convey this as well as it might have; I didn't mean that the creator is completely disconnected from the creation, but that his existence is not as part of the order he created. That's not necessarily to say he wasn't created himself in some wider universe.

      If you want an IT analogy, if the universe is just a big simulation being run in a computer somewhere, then that computer can't itself be part of the simulated universe.

      --
      Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
    21. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Just keep in mind that an 'observer' does not mean a conscious entity. An observer, in the quantum mechanical sense, is more accurately an "interactor", as in anything that interacts with it. Which, when put into those terms, their thought process in this paper is much clearer: without interaction there is no way to determine if time has passed, if there's no way to tell if time is passing... it may as well not be.

      So, there should be a fundamental theoretical limit to precision of clocks (regardless of underlying principle on which they work) then, because they must be somehow interacting with the world.

    22. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by TangoMargarine · · Score: 1

      I was picturing forward time travel, actually. You would basically "skip over" the intervening time period...although if you're timeless, how you would manage to time your reentry into the universe to hit the right destination is rather problematic.

      --
      Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
    23. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by Jmc23 · · Score: 1

      Ah, so the tripe is straight from your own mouth. Perhaps you should actually read some spiritual/religious texts? The greatest perversion comes from the catholic church, but the bible says differently, but pretty much every other teaching is that everything is awareness/god. Yoga explains the big bang as the breath of god, god divides to know himself and then slowly regroups to become one again, and then the next cycle begins.

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
    24. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Time does not exist without observation, only present state exist. Without memory of the past you cannot perceive any changes and therefore have no notion of time. Future does not exist yet, it is your imagination and deduction from past+present. Basic stuff.

    25. Re:Time is dependent on observation? by Sky+Cry · · Score: 1

      So universe is lazy-evaluated?

  17. Godlike attributes by Rande · · Score: 1

    When they say God must be omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent...I ask 'isn't 2 out of 3 good enough'?
    The 3rd is a bit wishywashy anyway. What's benevolent in the opinion of some people won't be in the eyes of others.

    1. Re:Godlike attributes by Bongo · · Score: 4, Funny

      He is all those three, plus one more: omnihumorous.

      We just haven't got the punchline yet.

    2. Re:Godlike attributes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually some people haven't gotten the punchline yet.
      Have you noticed how wires get tangled up when left by themselves? There you go God is a big troll.

    3. Re:Godlike attributes by Quirkz · · Score: 1

      I think monotheistic cultures lose something by not having a trickster god. There's a pretty good collection of evidence that, if there's a divine force and they're actively promoting anything, humor is a significant part of it.

    4. Re:Godlike attributes by epine · · Score: 1

      What's benevolent in the opinion of some people won't be in the eyes of others.

      You, sir, have not the faintest inkling of a shred of understanding of quantum superposition in the non-hands of an omniscient, omnipotent non-being.

    5. Re:Godlike attributes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      We are the punchline.

    6. Re:Godlike attributes by Bongo · · Score: 1

      Yes, there's all that monotheistic obsession with making the world into a utopia, of only we just all followed the plan.

      Those who've seen the outcome of those plans are the ones laughing hardest.

    7. Re:Godlike attributes by Bongo · · Score: 1

      Every mirror is a joke machine.

    8. Re:Godlike attributes by motorhead · · Score: 0

      "God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire

      --
      Employee Of the Month - Cyberdyne Systems Corporation - September 1997
    9. Re:Godlike attributes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Just to note, the three "omnis" are a construct/summarization originating within the Catholic Church, and you will find this nowhere in scripture.

      There are, indeed, arguments against this notion (such as doing logically self-contradictory things), which are often presented with a certain air of triumph by atheists. However, belief in this is irrelevant to theism per se, and in no way a "must". "Extremely knowledgeable, extremely powerful, and extremely benevolent" works just fine for all relevant theological purposes.

    10. Re:Godlike attributes by Jmc23 · · Score: 1

      except of course that several books speak of omnipresence in the bible and Jesus himself mentions the all pervasiveness of God within the world and ourselves and how we are part of god. Not sure how the catholic church kept Jesus words "I'm just human" and still managed to convince everybody he's the only son of god, but that's sheeple for you.

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
    11. Re:Godlike attributes by disposable60 · · Score: 1

      He is playing to an audience afraid to laugh.
          -- Voltaire

      --
      You're looking for quotes? See my journal.
    12. Re:Godlike attributes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Really? It seems to me that the popular monotheistic cultures all have trickster gods. For example: Plants an apple tree; tells some guy not to eat the apples. Creates all the creatures; plants fossil evidence for evolution in the ground. Creates man in his image; Snooki.

    13. Re:Godlike attributes by Pfhorrest · · Score: 1

      By that standard the 1st is a bit wishywashy too. All knowing? But what's true in the opinion of some people won't be in the eyes of others...

      --
      -Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
      "I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
    14. Re:Godlike attributes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Apparently you haven't been paying attention.

  18. time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    i know time is like a big ball of wibbly wobbly..stuff...

    but this is saying that time doesn't exist until it does. that's why observing a black hole, nothing ever falls into it, until you look away. so i gues this does make sence, but i cant see how MY 4th dimension is sometimes here and sometimes not.

  19. i wonder.. by Connie_Lingus · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...how this is related to the fact that the speed of light is the only true (known) constant in the universe.

    for example...you are on a train going 50 km/hr north...you throw a ball 30 km/hr north and the ball is now going 30 km/hr north relative to you and 80 km/hr to a stationary observer...standard stuff.

    BUT...you are on a light beam going 0.5c (half the speed of light) with a flashlight in your hand...you turn on the light...how fast is that light coming out of your flashlight going relative to you and our stationary observer?

    well...relative to you its going...the speed of light...to the observer?

    this is where it all gets weird...to the observer its going..the speed of light!

    how can this be, slashdotters?

    --
    never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
    1. Re:i wonder.. by green+is+the+enemy · · Score: 1

      I think the nature of light has everything to do with our perception of time. According to this story, we perceive time by being entangled with the universe. The main way we interact with the universe is through the electromagnetic force, or basically through photons. We should be approaching your question from the point of view of the light itself and then deriving what it means for a massive object to "move." If time is emergent, then motion is also an emergent concept. The photon's wavefunction might be the fundamental concept here. I'm not a physicist, so can't take this train of thought further..

    2. Re:i wonder.. by ElectricTurtle · · Score: 1

      The mass of photons is near nothing, so they don't have the boost of inertia that the ball, being a normal material object, has. It's also worth noting that the speed of light is only constant in a vacuum. Light can be made to go slower or even faster based on its medium and other conditions (temperature, etc.).

      --
      I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
    3. Re:i wonder.. by BitZtream · · Score: 1, Informative

      Uhm, the speed of light isn't at all constant, no more than the speed of sound is. The speed of light changes depending on the medium it is in, just like everything else.

      how can this be, slashdotters?

      Because you utterly fail to understand what you're talking about. This behavior is also no different than sound. They behave identically.

      If you turn on the flashlight while traveling at 0.5C the light would travel away from you at 1C anyway, making a difference of 0.5c and causing all sorts of blue shift. You (as are most people with a poor grasp of these physics because of some shitty analogy someone used to explain it to them) are making the common mistake that the person with the flashlight in hand would think the light is traveling at 1c away from him (total of 1.5c) but they wouldn't see any such thing.

      And then there is time dilation, which makes it all work out.

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
    4. Re:i wonder.. by Convector · · Score: 1

      Minor quibble: You cannot be on a light beam going half the speed of light because the light beam, by definition, is moving at the speed of light.

    5. Re:i wonder.. by PopeRatzo · · Score: 1

      our perception of time.

      That's the whole thing right there. Our perception of time might just be an evolutionary artifact, like the nail on your little toe.

      Me, I'm with with the Tralfamadorians. We don't "see time" just like we don't see as many colors as geckos.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    6. Re:i wonder.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It's worth considering that the ball thrown on the train is also subject to relativistic effects, its just that the effect is so small that the Newtonian physics that you have used to describe the motion of the ball are 'good enough' for most practical purposes.

    7. Re:i wonder.. by Richy_T · · Score: 1

      Uhm, whut?

      I think it's you that needs the remedial class.

    8. Re:i wonder.. by thrich81 · · Score: 4, Informative

      There are other physical constants, too. The charge of the electron for one and Plank's constant for another. The reality of a 'physical constant' is that it is just a ratio of one measured quantity in the observed Universe to another measured quantity that is always the same, so is sort of a conversion factor between physical observables which are somehow tightly related (not a great explanation, I know).
        As for your light from the flashlight story -- there is no easy explanation because the easy explanations all depend on things behaving as we have grown up observing and internally modeling them in our low energy, slow speed existence. The explanation is just that at high relative speeds between observers the measurements of time and distance mix into each other such that each observer will always observe a light beam (in a vacuum) to be at 1.0c no matter what the speed of its source. A slightly deeper explanation is that time and 3 dimensional space form a four dimensional manifold (fancy name for something which local coordinates can be mapped to a flat space) in which the mix of time and space dimensions depends on the motion of the observer (actually reference frame of the observer). Relativistic effects are beyond the classical existence we model in heads growing up and so require math to take us beyond intuitive notions, that's about all I've got on the issue.

    9. Re:i wonder.. by tonywestonuk · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Speed is Distance / Time.

      Your watch measures time, so you can use it to calculate how fast the light comes out of your torch by timing how long it takes to travel a distance, and you have a meter stick to measure just that.

      When you are traveling fast, your watch slows down, and your meter rule gets shorter. However you don't notice this, as your own internal body's clock slows, and you yourself gets shorter in exactly the same proportions. But, when you measure the speed of light, coming out of the torch, now with your slower watch, and shorter meter stick, everything just adds up and you calculate the light to be traveling at the speed of light, EVEN THOUGH, the light, relative to you is now traveling just .5c.

      The person you have just passed sees your watch, and meter rule, and thinks you've made a mistake, because your rule is longer and your watch ticks slower. He sees you measuring the speed of light coming from your torch. To him, he sees the light is coming out of your torch at .5c, but can see you (inaccurately) measuring it....and working it out to be 1c because you've measured it over a shorter distance using a slower watch.

      When he measures the speed of the light coming out of your torch passing him, he also works it out to be going at light speed.

      So there you go. There is no paradox. Light is going at the same speed regardless of if you are moving or not. The only difference is that your movement causes things like slowdown of time, and length change, which means that you are unable to calculate the "proper" relative speed of light, which would be .5c.......any attempt at measuring it, always comes out at 1c.

      OR.....the more usual way of putting it is just make the speed of light constant, regardless of your speed, and alter the other things such as time, and length, to make your speed calculations always come to 1c.

    10. Re:i wonder.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you are on a light beam moving at 0.5c what makes you think that turning on a flashlight will present photons traveling twice as fast? The medium that keeps you at 0.5c will keep the flashlight photons at 0.5c.. To you the flashlight just won't work.

    11. Re:i wonder.. by tonywestonuk · · Score: 0

      things getting shorter causes magnetism.

      Imagine a piece of copper wire, and electrons flowing down it, and another piece of copper wire a short distance away, with electrons traveling in the opposite direction. the amount of electrons in each wire per inch = the amount of protons per inch, so there is no static electric charge or attraction between the two wires.

      HOWEVER, because the electrons on wire 1, 'observe' the protons in wire 2 traveling in the opposite direction, they see them move closer together due to this things getting shorter phenomina. when they move closer together, more can fit in the same place, and so the wire appears to wire 1, to become more positively charged than it really is. because electrons are attracted to positive charges, they experience an electrostatic attraction to the wire.

      And, that, is what magnetism is. Its simply caused by the effects of relativity on the electrons in a moving current.

    12. Re:i wonder.. by c0d3g33k · · Score: 1

      Firstly, turn your "Condescension" knob to "OFF", please. It is totally uncalled for, and you parenthetically point out why in your little rant. You (as most people with a deep need to feel superior to those whose less enlightened because they had the misfortune to have only a shitty analogy as the basis for understanding a subject) act as though everyone should have an experts view of physical phenomena that aren't readily observable in everyday life.

      Secondly, so what would a traveler on a ship traveling at, say, 99%C, see? Would the lighting conditions on a ship would be increasingly distorted as the velocity approached C? The way the shitty (to use your eloquent term) descriptions of near-light travel explained things, it was the universe outside the viewport that was distorted, because they were effectively stationary relative to the traveler (and the local light source). Just as travelers on a fast moving train (or airplane) can still speak and hear normally though sounds outside are doppler-shifted, the naive interpretation is that conditions on a ship moving at near-light speeds would appear essentially normal.

      What say you, your brilliance?

    13. Re: i wonder.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      You (as are most people with a poor grasp of these physics because of some shitty analogy someone used to explain it to them) are making the common mistake that the person with the flashlight in hand would think the light is traveling at 1c away from him (total of 1.5c) but they wouldn't see any such thing.

      Yes they would see it traveling away at 1c - but the velocities don't sum like that. Due to time dilation, you're also experiencing time at a different rate than a stationary observer. The net effect is that you both see the light traveling at 1c.

      To extend the analogy, suppose both people also have a stopwatch which starts timing at the exact moment when the person who's moving at 0.5c fires a pulse of light in the same direction as his movement. After the observer's stopwatch has reached 1 second, freeze everything and see where everyone is. The person who's moving at 0.5c has moved half the distance light travels in 1 second, obviously; about 149 896 km. The pulse of light has moved twice as far, about 299 792 km.

      To the outside observer, the light has traveled 299 792 km in 1 second, i.e. it is moving at 1c.

      The moving person, saw it travel only half as far relative to him - only 149 896 km - yet, because he's experiencing time at a different rate, his stopwatch has only ticked off 0.5 seconds. So from his perspective, the light has traveled 149 896 km in only 0.5 seconds, i.e. it is moving at 1c.

    14. Re:i wonder.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      " Our perception of time might just be an evolutionary artifact, like the nail on your little toe."

      Since evolution is a dynamic process, how could it have existed before time was evolved?

    15. Re:i wonder.. by AdamHaun · · Score: 1

      You (as are most people with a poor grasp of these physics because of some shitty analogy someone used to explain it to them) are making the common mistake that the person with the flashlight in hand would think the light is traveling at 1c away from him (total of 1.5c) but they wouldn't see any such thing.

      No, the GP is correct. Both observers see the light moving at 1c relative to them, even though they're moving relative to each other.

      --
      Visit the
    16. Re:i wonder.. by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 3, Informative

      how can this be, slashdotters?

      It just is. Best not to think about it.

      (the following has turned into far more of a ramble than I first expected. I hope at least some of it makes sense)

      But, if you must, it helps me to remember that the only absolute is spacetime. How you divide that up into space and time is dependent on your path through it.

      If you were asked to divide a field into a coordinate grid, you might choose an arbitrary direction and then divide it up left-right and forward-backward from there. Someone else might face a different a direction and do the same thing - a different grid, but also a perfectly valid way to divide up the field.

      So it is, sort of, with spacetime. But we don't choose our direction - instead it depends on our motion. If you're moving relative to another person, a bit of what they'd call space overlaps with a bit of what you'd call time, just as in the field where a bit of what they might call left-right overlaps with what you call forward-backward. There's a negative sign in the equations somewhere that puts the brakes on things though, and means you can't accelerate to the speed of light relative to anyone else without expending an infinite amount of energy. In Greg Egan's Clockwork Rocket series, the negative sign acts is switched with a positive one, so it's more like the easy-to-imagine field, and by accelerating one can completely swap what your home-bound friend would call time for a spatial dimension. Once they have accelerated enough, the travelling explorers can continue to experience time while none at all passes on their home planet. I think the implication is that by accelerating yet further, one could easily travel back in time. In fact, the danger in the story is from objects - quite possibly another otherwise perfectly ordinary solar system - travelling at right angles to the protagonist's home system - effectively at infinite speed.

      The next brain-melting thing to consider is that, perhaps, everything moves at the speed of light - not through space, but through spacetime. But because most of the stuff we're familiar with - the Earth, the stars, etc - shares roughly the same path through spacetime, we don't experience it like that. All of our speed is taken up with travel into the future. We could swap a bit of it for travel through space if we accelerate. Without relativity, you could expect to travel for ten years there-and-back-again and find that ten years have passed at home. If you consider the simple field "swap" situation, you might conclude that by swapping some of your travel through time for travel through space, you'd find yourself less far into the future when you got back. But then that niggly negative sign comes into play - it makes me think of time as sort of 1/space - which means you actually find yourself more far into the future when you get back. Hence the twin paradox, where you find your Earth-bound friends have aged more than you have.

      In the case of the photon, which uses up all of it's speed travelling through space, no time ever passes for it.

      Any questions? No? Good. I'm off to catch up on the few hours of sleep I missed last night. Does it show?

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    17. Re:i wonder.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Light can also go faster and slower while in a vacuum under different gravitational fields. Otherwise we wouldn't have gravitational lensing. But if c is constant, then this implies that time also goes faster or slower under different gravitational fields. So time, wherever you go, does not progress at a uniform rate.

      So c would be c, wherever you go, but even with an atomic clock, 1 second on Alpha Centuri wouldn't be the same as 1 second here. (But relative to wherever you measure that second, it seems all the same. It's only when you get a chance to compare clocks, etc.)

    18. Re:i wonder.. by alexo · · Score: 1

      I find the following even more confusing:
      An object A moves at 0.9c relative to point X, in a given direction.
      An object B moves at 0.9c relative to point X, in the opposite direction.
      What is the velocity of A relative to B?

      If the answer is less than c, consider the following:

      What would be the distance between A and X after 1 second? After 2 seconds?
      What would be the distance between B and X after 1 second? After 2 seconds?
      What would be the distance between A and B after 1 second? After 2 seconds?

      Can anyone point me to a good explanation?

    19. Re:i wonder.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm surprised no one corrected your second paragraph. Your speed addition formula is more than a century out-of-date. According to special relativity, 50 km/h + 30 km/h = 79.9999999999998969768... km/h. Once you accept that, the rest will be easier to accept.

    20. Re:i wonder.. by camperdave · · Score: 1

      We don't "see time" just like we don't see as many colors as geckos.

      Geckos? meh!

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    21. Re:i wonder.. by Connie_Lingus · · Score: 1

      And then there is time dilation, which makes it all work out.

      bingo! we have a winner. you *did* know that I already knew the answer, didn't you??

      ...and that's where TFA gets interesting...if time is just an artifact of quantum entanglement and these experiments can explain 1. why QE seems to be the only phenomenon where photons act on each other faster then the speed of light and 2. why the speed of light is the only universal constant, they could very well have discovered something very significant.

      --
      never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
    22. Re:i wonder.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Uhm, the speed of light isn't at all constant

      Since you're going to picking on small things. Light does not travel through a medium, only the information about the photon that entered the medium does. The photon itself gets absorbed and the information about the photon gets conserved in it's super-position, and this information moves through the medium. The speed at which a photon moves is always c, but the speed at which the information about the photon can change.

    23. Re:i wonder.. by skirmish666 · · Score: 1

      The velocity of A _relative_ to B is velocityA+velocityB. There's no rule in physics that says two photons travelling to a common point from opposite directions are slowed down relative to each other.
      If I can see two lights located one light second away from me in opposing directions and they're both turned on simultaneously the photons that reach me will both arrive at the same time, one second after they're turned on. They're moving at light speed relative to the medium they're travelling through, not each other.

      --
      Sigger than your average
    24. Re:i wonder.. by Vitriol+Angst · · Score: 1

      Since you are accelerating to .5C the TIME for you is moving slower for you than it is for people not accelerated.
      Thus, when you turn on your flash light, you experience it traveling at 1C because you are moving slower (and aging at a lower rate). The outside world sees an object going .5C and a light beam going 1C -- the difference is all equivalent because of the time dilation.

      However; what about the light you send behind you, and what about a complex system where objects within Galactic clusters that are moving at a high speed? When you add more vectors to the problem, it's hard to say WHAT acceleration actually is. The "energy" is accounted for because the light going behind you is Doppler shifted to a lower state (called red-shift). But the relative speed is maintained.

      For instance; if I'm traveling up a fast river, in a motor boat -- I'm making slow progress versus going down stream relative to the land. But the amount of water rushing past me is the same or MORE when I'm going upstream. While there are quite a few people who don't "get" the basics of relativity, I'm not so sure that even more advanced people in Physics actually get how the model breaks down when you cannot define "acceleration." Because acceleration is relative, relativity is also relative -- but not in a way that is intuitive. Einstein talked of the fabric of space-time stretching but I don't think that actually deals with to objects with different relativistic speeds FROM different relative systems interacting. Space time needs to be curved in different amounts depending on the relativity of the objects within it.

      The entanglement phenomena being discussed here I think isn't sufficient to prove time -- only that entanglement may show entropy and non-entanglement may not -- which has huge implications.

      It solves the problem for non-rational relativity. Meaning; how can you have different effects based on an objects acceleration if they share the same "space/time" location?

      This means that we may not "see" space itself because we are not entangled with it -- it's a solution for "dark matter" -- but really, Dark Matter is fudging with particles so that nobody has to admit that we have an Aether. A concept that Einstein destroyed but has created new phantom particles every year since. Electricity and Light have nearly the same speed under ideal conditions without resistance, so it stands to reason that the medium being "stretched" is the un-entangled observer effect of a medium that is involved in the transmission.

      To put this another way; If I'm in a river that is so large I cannot see land, I don't "see" the current I'm in. No matter the direction I go, I expend the same energy, I can only SEE my progress relative to other objects -- and if all of these are on the same massive river, that becomes undefined. However, things "entangled" with the river (in the river itself) can see the affect of driving the boat in different directions.

      I've thought for some time that future advances in FTL and quasi fantastic concepts like Force Fields will involve finding a way to entangle and manipulate space.

      >> But I still don't see how this discovery necessarily means that Time results from entanglement.

      --
      >>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
    25. Re:i wonder.. by sjames · · Score: 1

      That's exactly backwards. The observer in motion with the flashlight would see the light traveling away from him at 1C no matter which way he pointed the light. Otherwise, there would exist a privileged frame of reference.

    26. Re:i wonder.. by Vitriol+Angst · · Score: 1

      The problem here is that the ruler actually grows LARGER when you accelerate to .5C -- at least as far at outside observers are concerned. Particles accelerated to nearly the speed of light grow larger. Hence, all the particles in the Ruler object would grow larger.

      And yes, TIME does explain the light moving at .5C away from you and the outside observer sees it moving at 1C. But if you point your flashlight behind you, then the light is "stretched" such that it moves away to an outside observer from that point at 1C -- but to your internal point of view?

      Light DOES NOT move at .5C whether it is moving in front of you or behind you as you travel at .5C. What happens is that space stretches behind and compresses in front -- but in a complex system it would both stretch and shrink AT THE SAME TIME. So in a linear example -- Relativity is sound. To think of it in multiple vectors, it requires each object to have it's own "system" of relativity -- which the concept of Entanglement being discussed seems to do a better job of resolving for me.

      --
      >>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
    27. Re:i wonder.. by cellocgw · · Score: 2

      The basic answer and explanation is that the answer depends on your frame of reference. There's nothing in special (or general) relativity that stops the distance between A and B, as observed by a static spot X from increasing at 1.8*c. A and B don't see that; and more important, no information is transmittable from A to B (in any reference frame) faster than 1*c .

      --
      https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
    28. Re:i wonder.. by Rockoon · · Score: 1

      ..and then that same GP dives into a lot of not-correct, tho.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    29. Re:i wonder.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sorry but your aether theory has been disproved in 1887. The velocity of A relative to B is (0.9 + 0.9)/(1 + 0.9*0.9) ~= 0.994475c.

    30. Re: i wonder.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That is way more complex and inaccurate than what's actually going on.

      Light attempts to travel at its maximum velocity for the medium that it's in (no, I haven't yet found anything on why light does that). Therefore, the person moving at 0.5c has no bearing on the light's initial acceleration or its final speed. The light will always appear to be going 1c in a vaccuum because that's the maximum speed that light can go in that medium.

      There is no perspective difference, and there is no time dilation. The observer with the stopwatch will always record the light travelling 1x the distance of the speed of light in 1 second because that is how far light travels in 1 second. The outside observer will likewise always see the light travelling 1x the distance of the speed of light in 1 second because that is how far light travels in 1 second. Observers do no change this. One reference frame compared to another doesn't change this.

      The guy with the stopwatch could have been standing still and the light still would have gone 1c in 1s. The outside observer could have been (theoretically) traveling at 5c and he would still see the light go 1c in 1s.

    31. Re:i wonder.. by thrich81 · · Score: 1

      Not much of an explanation but the formulas are here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity-addition_formula
      For observer X, objects A and B are moving at 1.8c relative to each other; as other posters pointed out there is no prohibition on this, but observers on A and B cannot observe each other separating that fast. According to my math (from the reference above) they observe each other traveling at 0.994c relative to each other. Your distance questions above scale accordingly -- the distances are different for the different observers.
      There is no trivial, easy explanation, it's just that an observer's measures of distance, time, and velocity are not independent and for high measured relative velocities the measures of time and distance are mixed together differently for observers moving relative to each other. The basic equations of Special Relativity aren't that hard to work through, you just have to do it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity). There are geometrical explanations (spacetime as a manifold upon which the observed coordinates depend on the observer), but they are not trivial enough for a /. explanation either.

    32. Re:i wonder.. by tonywestonuk · · Score: 1

      The thing is.....Light *has* to be coming out of the torch at .5c, according to the observer who sees the torch traveling also at .5c. He sees the torch, and the person traveling along at .5c, trying to measure the speed of light. He sees the light leaving the torch at .5c. so, if he sees the light leaving the torch at .5c, the *only* way he can work out why the guy traveling at .5c measures the light, he perceives traveling at .5c, going at 1c is by taking into account the time dilation and length contraction.
       

    33. Re:i wonder.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This finally explains the Steve Miller song! "Time keeps on slipping into the future"

    34. Re:i wonder.. by Viol8 · · Score: 1

      "In the case of the photon, which uses up all of it's speed travelling through space, no time ever passes for it. "

      I've often wondered about this - If no time passes for a photon, how can it interact with anything? Interactions require a non zero amount of time to occur.

    35. Re:i wonder.. by khallow · · Score: 1

      The next brain-melting thing to consider is that, perhaps, everything moves at the speed of light - not through space, but through spacetime.

      Kaluza Klein models basically have this property with everything moving through a higher dimensional space (5, 10, and 26 dimensions being popular) at the "speed of light", but which are constrained at the macroscopic level to four dimensions, which are what we observe. When they are, some of those things appear to move slower than the speed of light, because more of their paths are in the alternate dimensional directions.

    36. Re:i wonder.. by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

      Ah, well, now, there you've got me. Mind you, what interactions does a photon undergo? They get emitted and they get absorbed, but what else can they do?

      ---

      I'm quite pleased to say that after dribbling out the above I did some speculative topic-directed pseudo-random research (Googling) and came across some more ideas in the same vein. Apparently photons really don't do anything except get emitted and get absorbed, and (so I read) between those two events they don't exist.

      To the photon, its emission and absorption are the same event (travelling at c, they don't even have a "concept" of spacetime for events to occur in). Mapped into our frame of reference they become different events, but since the only way to detect a photon is to adsorb it (it says here) they are indistinguishable from non-existent while "in flight."

      My melon is now well and truly twisted.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    37. Re:i wonder.. by camperdave · · Score: 1

      I never really understood why they explain the twin paradox the way they do, since it doesn't present any paradox at all, just one twin aging more slowly than the other. The real paradox comes in when you can't tell which twin was stationary and which was moving, because in that case each twin will see themselves aging differently than the other.

      Suppose Larry and Ralph both get into spaceships. Being adventurous rocketeers, they decide to buzz Midway station in opposite directions but at the same speed, Larry travelling to the left, and Ralph to the right. Furthermore, they decide that once they get all lined up and underway, they aren't going to use their rocket motors any more. Since neither Larry, Ralph, nor Midway Station are experiencing any acceleration, each will be in an inertial reference frame.

      Larry sees both Midway and Ralph moving to the right, with Ralph travelling twice as fast as Midway Station. So Larry sees the clock on Ralph's ship ticking slower than that of Midway Station, and both clocks ticking slower than his own. Similarly, Ralph sees both Midway and Larry moving to the left with Larry travelling twice as fast as Midway Station. Ralph sees Larry's clock ticking slower than that of Midway Station, and both of those clocks ticking more slowly than his own. Meanwhile Midway station sees both Larry and Ralph's clocks ticking equally slowly.

      So, Larry says Ralph aged less, and Ralph says Larry aged less. Both are right. This is the paradox.

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    38. Re:i wonder.. by CoolGopher · · Score: 1

      The next brain-melting thing to consider is that, perhaps, everything moves at the speed of light - not through space, but through spacetime. But because most of the stuff we're familiar with - the Earth, the stars, etc - shares roughly the same path through spacetime, we don't experience it like that. All of our speed is taken up with travel into the future. We could swap a bit of it for travel through space if we accelerate.

      Thank you! That's the first coherent explanation I've read that allows me to reach some sort of understanding of this!

    39. Re:i wonder.. by Nemyst · · Score: 1

      "The speed of light", outside of pedantic Slashdot comments, is usually an accepted shorthand form for "the speed of light in a vacuum", just like "the speed of sound" would be "the speed of sound in air at STP".

    40. Re:i wonder.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That attack was uncalled for. The post you are complaining about was reasonable. Yours was not.

    41. Re:i wonder.. by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

      So, Larry says Ralph aged less, and Ralph says Larry aged less. Both are right. This is the paradox.

      But it is just an apparent paradox, isn't it? If Larry and Ralph then turn around and both head back to the station for a space beer, they'll find their clocks are in agreement. If on the other hand only Ralph turns around and catches up with Larry, their differing frames will account for any differences in their clocks once they meet up.

      While they're spatially separated simultaneity goes out of the window a bit, doesn't it?

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    42. Re:i wonder.. by Viol8 · · Score: 1

      Ah , but absorbtion and re-emission isn't an instantanious process especially if its energy is use for something else - eg moving an electron to a higher orbit. Even if it didn't its still takes a finite amount of time which is why light travels slower in non vacuums than in a vacuum.

    43. Re:i wonder.. by camperdave · · Score: 1

      So, Larry says Ralph aged less, and Ralph says Larry aged less. Both are right. This is the paradox.

      But it is just an apparent paradox, isn't it? If Larry and Ralph then turn around and both head back to the station for a space beer, they'll find their clocks are in agreement. If on the other hand only Ralph turns around and catches up with Larry, their differing frames will account for any differences in their clocks once they meet up.

      Well, that's the big question, and I haven't seen anyone really address it. It's always stated that the travelling twin winds up aging less, but they never seem to get to the next stage of the paradox, which is, from the "travelling" twin's point of view, he is the one that is stationary and the other twin is the one that is moving.

      While they're spatially separated simultaneity goes out of the window a bit, doesn't it?

      No, it's not the separation that messes with simultaneity, but relative motion.

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    44. Re:i wonder.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We could swap a bit of it for travel through space if we accelerate. Without relativity, you could expect to travel for ten years there-and-back-again and find that ten years have passed at home. If you consider the simple field "swap" situation, you might conclude that by swapping some of your travel through time for travel through space, you'd find yourself less far into the future when you got back. But then that niggly negative sign comes into play - it makes me think of time as sort of 1/space - which means you actually find yourself more far into the future when you get back. Hence the twin paradox, where you find your Earth-bound friends have aged more than you have.

      I agree almost completely, but I don't think "swap" is good description. You swap nothing, you always have one single modulus of your velocity vector, and it's c. However if your velocity vector is at an angle to velocity vectors of most of your surrounding, then you drift away as time passes - you experience moving, having (spatial) speed. You don't swap, you slant.

      Also, you are not "more far into future when you get back". It is quite the opposite, to them back home you are from the ancient past.

    45. Re:i wonder.. by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

      Ah , but absorbtion and re-emission isn't an instantanious process

      There may be a finite time between the two but why can't the individual events themselves be instantaneous?

      Photons don't go slower in a medium because they're being continuously absorbed and emitted - or so I heard. It's something like: in a medium the wavefunctions of travelling light wind up interfering with each other in such a way as to produce the overall effect of a slower speed through the medium. I got a bit lost during that particular YouTube video, I'll admit.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    46. Re:i wonder.. by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

      but they never seem to get to the next stage of the paradox, which is, from the "travelling" twin's point of view, he is the one that is stationary and the other twin is the one that is moving.

      In the "classic" twin paradox only one twin undergoes acceleration (at at least three points his journey - launch, turn-around and return), which is what breaks the symmetry between them.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    47. Re: i wonder.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wait a second. (See what I did there?) I'm confused by your explanation. Can you write your explanation with the person who's moving firing the pulse of light in the opposite direction of travel? Upon initial inspection it seems like his watch would then have to be ticking faster than the stationary observer (what does stationary even mean in this context, though?) so I feel I must be looking at it the wrong way.

    48. Re:i wonder.. by Vitriol+Angst · · Score: 1

      To the outside observer, it contracts, to the person in the ship moving .5c it expands. To any observer outside the universe and "not entangled" -- nothing expands or contracts and likely they don't even recognize we exist. The expansion or contraction has to be a factor of TIME.

      Then there is that issue with particles expanding when you accelerate them,... I have a feeling that has a bit to do with how gravity relates to acceleration.

      --
      >>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
    49. Re:i wonder.. by Vitriol+Angst · · Score: 1

      And if you consider that anything like a light moving away from an object LOOKS like it is moving at 1C, regardless of the speed of the object, the closer the object is moving to the speed of light, the smaller this gap (but the greater the blue shift). So if both the object and the light are moving 1C they compression of the image would approach 0.

      However this just seems to be "how things are seen" but not an actual state. The object could become more massive as the particles gain mass, which translates to size when approaching very high speeds.

      --
      >>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
    50. Re:i wonder.. by camperdave · · Score: 1

      Sorry, but that's not a good enough explanation, for a number of reasons: First, the acceleration events can be eliminated by doing flyby events and simply transferring the clock readings of events; Second, the accelerations would be the same for a short trip and for a long trip, however the dilation effects are more pronounced on a longer journey; Third, from the "travelling" twin's point of view it is the "stationary" twin that experiences the acceleration, just like from the raindrop's point of view it is the ground that is accelerating up to meet it.

      So, it is not the acceleration. Something else is in play here.

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    51. Re: i wonder.. by Freebirth+Toad · · Score: 1

      To extend the analogy, suppose both people also have a stopwatch which starts timing at the exact moment when the person who's moving at 0.5c fires a pulse of light in the same direction as his movement. After the observer's stopwatch has reached 1 second, freeze everything and see where everyone is. The person who's moving at 0.5c has moved half the distance light travels in 1 second, obviously; about 149 896 km. The pulse of light has moved twice as far, about 299 792 km.

      This "freezing" doesn't make any sense without measurement. The photons of the light pulse aren't anywhere until they are detected. So imagine setting up a 149896 km long "racetrack", with the "nonmoving" observer at one end and a light pulse detector at the other.

      The moving person, saw it travel only half as far relative to him - only 149 896 km - yet, because he's experiencing time at a different rate, his stopwatch has only ticked off 0.5 seconds. So from his perspective, the light has traveled 149 896 km in only 0.5 seconds, i.e. it is moving at 1c.

      His stopwatch would say that 1/sqrt(3) seconds [0] had passed, but because the racetrack appears to be moving towards him at 0.5c, it get Lorentz contracted to (149896)*2/sqrt(3) km. Both observers agree that the "moving" observer is halfway down the racetrack when the light pulse finishes, so this means that the "moving" observer sees the light pulse travel a distance that is half of the racetrack's apparent length.

      So he measures the speed of the pulse to be (0.5*(149896)*2/sqrt(3) km) / (1/sqrt(3) sec) = 149 896 km/sec.

      [0] The formula for this is very non-intuitive. Look at the first equation block here.

    52. Re:i wonder.. by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

      Sorry, but that's not a good enough explanation

      Well excuuuse me for not being Carl Sagan...

      First, the acceleration events can be eliminated by doing flyby events and simply transferring the clock readings of events;

      Supposedly paradoxical equally slow tick rates will be determined by each traveller on a flyby, but to compare the final amount of time dilation at least one of them will have to turn around to meet up with the other and compare clocks again. If they execute symmetrical manoeuvres to meet up, their clocks will match when they meet - but if they don't, as is the case with the twin paradox, the clocks won't match.

      Second, the accelerations would be the same for a short trip and for a long trip, however the dilation effects are more pronounced on a longer journey

      Okay, perhaps what I really meant was that the accelerations are more of a demonstration of the asymmetry between the twins. The amount of time spent travelling relative to the stationary - non-accelerating - observer (and the relative velocity) is what determines the amount of time dilation, and the acceleration is what causes all of the relative motion to occur.

      Third, from the "travelling" twin's point of view it is the "stationary" twin that experiences the acceleration

      Nope. The travelling twin experiences his own acceleration - he'll be pushed back into his seat - from which he can determine that the stationary twin is not experiencing any.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    53. Re:i wonder.. by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

      to the person in the ship moving .5c it expands.

      Are we talking a ruler co-moving with the person inside the ship? In which case, it won't seem to expand to them at all. It'll stay exactly the same.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    54. Re:i wonder.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Planck's constant: the unit of quantum action.
      Plank's constant: the certainty that there's a knot right where you need to drive a nail.

  20. Entangled particles everywhere? by tippe · · Score: 1

    Here's a perfectly stupid question that probably does a good job of highlighting how little I know about this topic: So they are saying time is an emergent property that occurs when only one particle out of a entangled pair is observed. Does this mean that all objects in our universe must therefore be composed of particles that are somehow entangled with other particles located elsewhere (since all of the objects that we observe appear to be subject to time)? Even when we perform measurements at a particle (e.g. atomic) level, individual particles themselves appear subject to time (e.g. radioactive decay, formation or breaking of atomic bonds with other particles, change in energy levels, etc). Does this mean that there isn't such a thing as a non-entangled particle (or they must be exceedingly rare), since all particles that we've ever interacted with change or can be made to change?

    "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics" --Richard Feynman

    1. Re:Entangled particles everywhere? by mx+b · · Score: 1

      Maybe the particles entangled with the ones that make up my body form my doppelganger. I see that guy everywhere. He even has the same car I do!

    2. Re:Entangled particles everywhere? by Jmc23 · · Score: 1

      Sure there is. When particles decide to untangle they just pop out of existence from our viewpoint. QM isn't static, stuff disappears and reappears all the time.

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
    3. Re:Entangled particles everywhere? by slew · · Score: 1

      So they are saying time is an emergent property that occurs when only one particle out of a entangled pair is observed.

      I'm not a physicist, but as I understand it, it's a bit subtle, but one way to think about what physicists are saying that from the reference point of an external observer that is not entangled with particles, the entangled states don't evolve/change relative to each other, which is kind of a fancy way of saying that relative dependence on time for that state from the reference point of of the external observer has come to a stop. This might be an interesting way to think about why they remain entangled state until observed.

      From the reference point of particles/observers that are entangled, their states can evolve/change separately which is kind of a fancy way of saying that since the fact that they can change, means that time has emerged.

      The concept apparently was illustrated as follows...

      Two entangled photons are created and passed through a polarizer. When an "observer" measures the polarization of one of the photons, the experimenter becomes entangled with it and when it measures the second photon, it can observe the change of polarization of the second photon relative to the first one and thus relative time has emerged as a consequence of making two measurements.

      If the "super-observer" does not measure the polarization of an individual entangled photons but merely some global property of both photons (e.g., kind of like "net" polarization, but more complicated than that some tomography of states), the "super-observer" doesn't become entangled with individual polarization measurements and to that "super-observer", the photons remain in an unchanging entangled state from the "super-observer's" reference point. That is another way of saying that time or time-evolution has not emerged yet from the viewpoint of the "super-observer" relative to the photons in the entangled state.

  21. Oh well by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 0

    Arxiv submissions are better than more bitcoin stories, I suppose...

    --
    #DeleteChrome
  22. Oh Your Fine God indeed by mdsolar · · Score: 2

    Worth reading what C. S. Lewis attributed to George McDonald in "The Great Divorce" for some speculation on this same issue.

  23. Objection by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "In the first, the observer measures the evolution of the system by becoming entangled with it. In the second, a god-like observer measures the evolution against an external clock which is entirely independent of the toy universe."

    "In the first set up, the observer measures the polarisation of one photon, thereby becoming entangled with it. He or she then compares this with the polarisation of the second photon. The difference is a measure of time."

    Dubious claim; "... entirely independent of the toy universe." "... then compares this with ..."

  24. Time travelling summary by nitehawk214 · · Score: 1

    Did the summary time travel to repeat and restate the "An external god-like observer sees no difference..." sentence?

    --
    I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
  25. Brain hurts. . . . by Iridium_Hack · · Score: 1

    Aspirin, please.

    1. Re:Brain hurts. . . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Aspirin, please.

      I had to bump up to hydrocodone, myself. Now I feel like a god-like observer...

  26. Quantum stuff is too weird by Russ1642 · · Score: 1

    Even though I trust that the scientists have a decent idea of what they're doing, any story that involves quantum mechanics just sounds like bullshit. This is simply a result of the way it needs to be dumbed down to be understood at all. It's just too weird for me so it sounds like something Data would say, just a bunch of buzzwords.

    1. Re:Quantum stuff is too weird by EmagGeek · · Score: 1

      It both sounds like bullshit and not like bullshit, until you listen to it. Then, it'll sound like one or the other.

    2. Re:Quantum stuff is too weird by Rockoon · · Score: 1

      The key to understanding something already understood by others is to learn their terminology. Each term is used (and perhaps invented) for a reason, so understanding is often simply a matter of learning those reasons. Also look to what terms have been abandoned, and learn why they were abandoned so as not to fall into abandoned conceptions. Finally, consider that the common everyday-usage of a word may not apply within a given field of study (ex: 'observer')

      For example in the world of computer science, software optimization division, people once concerned themselves with instruction cycle counts. People doing to same thing today concern themselves with instruction latency and throughput instead of cycles. 'Instruction cycles' are an abandoned conception in the field, while the terms 'instruction latency' and 'instruction throughput' are used for important reasons that would need to be learned if you wanted to become an expert. Other important terms in this field that once were not are 'locality' and 'dependency.' And as I said, you cannot always take the terms at the face-value of everyday-usage. The software optimization gurus idea of 'locality' is (currently) different from quantum physicists and soccer moms.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
  27. where god-like is a synonym for does not exist by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    really poor choice of words, what they mean is a theoretical observer that can't exist which makes observations of the location of things without interacting with them in any way - this does not happen and can't happen. This observer is not god-like in any way according to the description of anyone throughout history who believes in a magical sky-fairy. It is omniscient, but not in the way any religion describes their deity. The only attribute this hypothetical observer shares with any described deity is the lack of existence.

  28. Not a bug by blackfeltfedora · · Score: 1

    ....it's a feature.

  29. So... Parmenides was right after all? by adonoman · · Score: 1, Interesting

    This sounds a lot like what he was saying 2500 years ago.

    From Wikipedia:

    In "the way of truth" (a part of the poem), he explains how reality (coined as "what-is") is one, change is impossible, and existence is timeless, uniform, necessary, and unchanging. In "the way of opinion," he explains the world of appearances, in which one's sensory faculties lead to conceptions which are false and deceitful.

    1. Re:So... Parmenides was right after all? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      '2500 years ago'? What's that? Might as well say 'a moment ago'

    2. Re:So... Parmenides was right after all? by devent · · Score: 1

      I'm really annoyed by people who quote some ancient philosopher that thought about something 2000 or 3000 years ego and thus was somehow "right" ahead of modern science. It's the same as quoting the bible of one passage of to wash the body and to proclaim, see the bible knew 2000 years ego about germs.

      For a scientific claim or fact you need more then just a nice idea. Did Parmenides also prosed an experiment to test his hypothesis? Did Parmenides made any predictions that are testable? Did Parmenides made a testable theory? How do Parmenides propose to test that existence is a) timeless, b) uniform, c) necessary and d) unchanging?

      I could come up with 100s of ideas about time, space, our existence and so on, and by pure chance I would be right on something. That does not mean my ideas have any scientific value.

      --
      http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
    3. Re:So... Parmenides was right after all? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I could come up with 100s of ideas about time, space, our existence and so on, and by pure chance I would be right on something. That does not mean my ideas have any scientific value.

      Strange notion. Are you saying that considering a plausible notion arrived at by inference rather than scientific method, to then be tested "earlier rather than later" as a hypothesis, wouldn't accelerate science? Odd in that you've just eliminated how all science actually works.

      Also, you haven't shown actual evidence there are hundreds of things Parmenides got wrong, to counterbalance this one he got right. You're injecting hopeful assumptions in a very unscientific way. But, that's okay, it's obvious why you are doing it.

    4. Re:So... Parmenides was right after all? by Jmc23 · · Score: 1
      Just to make you happy, Yoga 'discovered' this millenia before Parmenides and they did come up with experiments.

      What's more annoying though is people like you who seem to think we were just dumbasses without any clue to find truth (which science doesn't) in the past before the holiness of science.

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
    5. Re:So... Parmenides was right after all? by adonoman · · Score: 1

      He obviously wasn't "right" in the sense of having anything useful to say about the world in any scientific sense - I would have thought that goes without saying. I just found the parallel amusing. You're reading a bit too much into an off-hand comment.

    6. Re:So... Parmenides was right after all? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I see you're quoting Parmenides. Honestly I thought it was Laozi at first. I don't have the text but I think Laozi may have beat Parmenides to the conjecture.

    7. Re:So... Parmenides was right after all? by devent · · Score: 1

      Hm it's very difficult to be "obvious" on the Internet. If you write like "Parmenides was right after all?" and "This sounds a lot like what he was saying 2500 years ago", then I could have been deceived that you really believe that. Comparing with the current article of "Time Is an Emergent Quantum Phenomenon" I don't think that Parmenides was writing about that.

      Anyway, sorry for the misunderstanding.

      --
      http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
    8. Re:So... Parmenides was right after all? by devent · · Score: 1

      Can you be more specific? What did Yoga, "the physical, mental, and spiritual practices [to attain] state of permanent peace" discovered and what actual experiments did Indian monks do?

      --
      http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
    9. Re:So... Parmenides was right after all? by Jmc23 · · Score: 1
      No. That's like asking me to summarize the library of congress in a slashdot post. Just not possible.

      You might want to look into it yourself with the original documents and not new-agey crappy western interpretations.

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
    10. Re:So... Parmenides was right after all? by devent · · Score: 1

      Democritus came up with the Atomic hypothesis 2600 ego, but it was not only the 18th and 19th century when we finally had a fundamental understanding of chemistry and not until the 20th century when the atomic particles were discovered. Democritus not really accelerated anything, I would be surprised if the scientists that discovered everything even red anything about Democritus's Atomic hypothesis.

      No, I wrote I can come up with 100s of things. And yes, without experiments a hypothesis will stay a hypothesis. It's nice to have a hypothesis but without experiments that are actually showing that the hypothesis is correct it's meaningless.

      For example, base on the evidence of our solar system I can create the hypothesis that there must be other solar systems that have habitable planets like our earth. And that those earth like planets have green plants and animal life. But without actually seeing those planets and see that on those planets there are green plants and animals, the hypothesis is useless.

      Of course a hypothesis is the first step in science. The next step is to conduct experiments and to create a theory.

      --
      http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
    11. Re:So... Parmenides was right after all? by adonoman · · Score: 1

      Fair enough, and judging by some of the other responses, you were justified in your interpretation. I guess I overestimate /.'s rationalism. To be clear, I don't attribute Parmenides with any great insight into the quantum nature of the universe, anymore than I think that Democritus had any clue about what we've come to call "atoms". That being said, the line of reasoning on "what is" vs. "what is not" does have some interesting things to think about if time is indeed an emergent phenomenon.

  30. Schrödinger's cat by mindwanderer · · Score: 1

    Wanted: dead and alive.

    --
    :wq
  31. Time is just an illusion by little1973 · · Score: 0

    I firmly believe that time does not exist. It is just a creation of the human mind as we are aware of the past, the present and the future.

    Yeah, I know about "time" slows down in a strong gravitational field or if you approach to the speed of light. But "time" slows down for you (which you do not notice of course) because the particles in your body do not have "time" to interact with each other. I mean, they are busy going into a particular direction and cannot go into another one as the resulting speed vector would be greater than c.

    If there is no interaction between particles then there is no change in their states and the result will be as if "time" stands still.

    The problem is, as you can notice in my explanation, that such words like "change" and "speed" implicate time. But that does not mean time is a real physical dimension. Reality does not execute our equations in order to work.

    --
    Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
    1. Re:Time is just an illusion by dokebi · · Score: 1

      Actually, memory and the perception of direction of time are fixed.

      So you know that entropy in the universe is always increasing.

      You also know that in order to create memory, one must use energy to record that memory. This can be rearranging magnetic tape from random state to an ordered state, or rearranging your neurons to for memory. Any action that creates memory (or reduce local entropy) uses energy and thus increase global entropy.

      Ok, so, in order to remember the past, your perception of time must be moving in the direction of increasing entropy.

      Now imagine the direction of time is reversed, and think about what you'd remember going backwards in time.

      --
      In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
    2. Re:Time is just an illusion by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's ridiculous. Time exists, or we wouldn't have interaction between particles. Time is related to the measurement of movement through space.

    3. Re: Time is just an illusion by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm confused. First you say that time is an illusion. Then you say that c (distance divided by time) is a hard limit. If time is an illusion, then why is c the hard limit for distance divided by something that doesn't really exist?

    4. Re:Time is just an illusion by Jmc23 · · Score: 1

      No, no they are not. How do I know this? Well, because I used to have no sense of time or the ability to remember chronological sequences of anything. I would add that sometimes I get confused between past and future but then your linear mind would just think I'm crazy.

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
    5. Re:Time is just an illusion by Jmc23 · · Score: 1

      ah, so you invented another measurement to prove that time exists.

      --
      Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
  32. circular reasoning? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I read about this emergency of gravity. There they assume E=mc^2 and some other stuff and then derive general relativity. But in Einstein's theory E=mc^2 is derived. So is there some kind of circular reasoning in the emergence theory???
    And with this time business? First we had "things change with time", now we have "time is a measure of change". Could someone explain this to me, please?

  33. Age old question answered? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So, due to entanglement, if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear it.. It really doesn't make a sound!

  34. Generalized Master Equation... by rgbatduke · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Most of this has been known and stated fairly clearly in the quantum theory of open systems for some time now. The Nakajima-Zwanzig (generalized master) Equation is derived based on the assumption of a "universal" quantum description that is partitioned into "system" and "everything else", with a projection of all dynamics from everything else onto the system variables. The universe is, of course, completely deterministic, but entropy (and hence "time" as an arrow) enters the system from the incomplete information available on the system "bath", everything else.

    The proper treatment of this completely eliminates the common quantum "paradoxes" such as Schrodinger's Cat because one can clearly see where one makes an incorrect assumption about the possibility of quantum entanglement of the cat and the microscopic decay process independent of "everything else". The entire "system" consisting of cat and box is coupled to the rest of the Universe and the apparently "purely random" decay that creates the supposedly tangled state that is resolved by opening the box is continuously resolved because the box and all of its contents is already tangled, so to speak, with everything else. It also helps to properly view and include time-reversibility in the description and not treat the quantum process of measurement non-relativistically and semi-classically. The same thing is true of the EPR paradox -- if it is treated relativistically there can obviously be no such thing as wavefunction collapse per se with some sort of transluminal communication of phase information, because the time reversal of this process makes no sense at all. The GME resolves this entirely because it correctly describes the infusion of classical entropy in a measurement process from the bath in an e.g. thermodynamic state within e.g. the random phase approximation.

    Personally, I think the Nakajima-Zwanzig treatment and master equations are one of the most neglected areas of quantum theory, often completely untaught in graduate-level quantum series. It is one of the better ways to rigorously derive things like spontaneous emission and in the process explain a lot of things about the process that are otherwise mysterious, such as how "exponential decay" arises from the coupling of a two-level quantum emitter to a multimode bath (and how it does NOT occur if one, for example, couples a two-level quantum emitter to a single field mode). Loudon has a nice discussion of this point, and Agarwal describes the application of the GME to spontaneous emission including radiative shift. The outcome of this approach in quantum mechanics is often to transform exponential processes that typically move one out of the basis one begins in almost instantly (entanglement) to projective dynamics within the basis and with e.g. discrete dynamical transitions replacing cats that are half dead or half alive in an entangled state, a Langevin approach where the actual system really does either kill the cat or doesn't, at a particular time, with the correct probability distribution for an ensemble of diabolical cat-killing engines, because the rest of the Universe always functions as a "measuring apparatus" -- one cannot "disentangle" the cat, the poison, the radioactive source from the Universe by merely putting it in a box, and at the instant of the cat's death the future time evolution of the entire Universe is unique to this and only this outcome.

    You can see some small part of the malaise that infects the terminology of quantum theory in the phrase above: "An external god-like observer sees no difference" -- the hardest single thing one has to deal with when correctly considering the quantum description of the Universe is the notion that there is no outside, most especially no outside from which the inside can be "seen". Seeing is the exchange of information, mediated by a field interaction. The Universe cannot possibly be "seen from the outside" because if the "outside" in question can see it at all, it is a part of it. It cannot

    --
    Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
    1. Re:Generalized Master Equation... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Great, but is there a circular reasoning in the emergence theory og gravity?

    2. Re:Generalized Master Equation... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is that experiment where you randomly generate jibberish and see if anyone bites, right?

    3. Re:Generalized Master Equation... by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 2

      " The universe is, of course, completely deterministic, but entropy (and hence "time" as an arrow) enters the system from the incomplete information available on the system "bath", everything else."

      Saying that the universe is "completely deterministic" is rather disingenuous, considering the fairly huge amount of evidence to the contrary.

      "The proper treatment of this completely eliminates the common quantum "paradoxes" such as Schrodinger's Cat because one can clearly see where one makes an incorrect assumption about the possibility of quantum entanglement of the cat and the microscopic decay process independent of "everything else". The entire "system" consisting of cat and box is coupled to the rest of the Universe and the apparently "purely random" decay that creates the supposedly tangled state that is resolved by opening the box is continuously resolved because the box and all of its contents is already tangled, so to speak, with everything else."

      You take the Schrodinger's Cat "paradox" far to literally. Old Ernst intended it as a thought experiment, not a real one. And in that experiment, the contents of the box were presumed to be "disconnected" from the rest of the universe... any form of entanglement whatsoever. Your argument relies on re-defining the whole problem to fit your explanation. (Readers should also note that Schrodinger originally intended the "paradox" to be a bit of satire, poling fun at the whole "collapse of the wave function" idea of quantum entanglement.)

    4. Re:Generalized Master Equation... by adonoman · · Score: 2

      Out of genuine curiosity, can you point me to evidence showing the universe is non-deterministic? I'm not sure how one would go about making that kind of observation.

    5. Re:Generalized Master Equation... by radtea · · Score: 1

      Although I agree this is a fruitful and valuable approach to these problems, it seems to me to side-step the fundamental question, which is, "Why is there a classical world at all, or why is it only the classical world we are conscious ofl?" That is, why is consciousness in particular restricted only to the awareness of one particular entangled state, when all of them exist at the same time?

      Decoherence approaches don't actually address this question. They simply take for granted that the only way we can become aware of the existence of quantum physics is via interference phenomena, and once coherence is lost due to entanglement with external sources of entropy, the possibility of awareness of the multiplicity of states necessarily vanishes.

      But why is this a necessity? That is, why aren't we consciously aware by means other than interference phenomena of the underlying quantum-mechanical laws that govern the world of our experience? Is there something about the physics of consciousness that makes it so relentlessly classical? (I take suggestions that there is anything particularly "quantum" about consciousness, from Penrose to Chopra, as being obviously wrong-headed: the brain is a highly dissipative system.)

      --
      Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
    6. Re:Generalized Master Equation... by rgbatduke · · Score: 1

      I'm not certain what you mean when you say "all of them exist at the same time" -- it is this that I would assert is NOT in any meaningful sense the case. I take it we are in agreement that "the wavefunction of the Universe" must be a zero-entropy stationary state, and that all discussions of entropy involve some mix of our inability to determine its precise description (ignorance) plus a very fundamental issue with information theory wherein one cannot, in general, represent the state of any physical system more compactly than a self-representation -- it takes more "stuff" to store a precise representation of the state of an object even classically than the stuff consisting of the object itself. This is one of several reasons that it is useful for physicists to study information theory and encoding -- in a very deep sense the problem of constructing a complete physical theory of everything requires an understanding of the limitations of encodings in general, because we have to somehow construct a (sufficiently complete) representation of system A in the "stuff" of system B, which typically requires both an efficient encoding scheme and sufficiently large state space in system B.

      Then it all makes a reasonable amount of sense -- in order to encode even partial information about any part of the Universal state in some other part of the Universe, one requires precisely the sort of things that computer scientists worry about: One cannot do a good job coding binary information at a level like 1 bit per electron (using single electron spin) because the system is under normal circumstances too susceptible to noise associated with our fundamental lack of knowledge of quantum microstate of the entire system. That is, there is damn well entropy in the form of our ignorance whether or not there is "real" entropy, and the entropy associated with mere lack of knowledge works just as well as the other kind to screw up information stored at the truly quantum level.

      This requires us to use "large numbers" of quantum particles to store even elementary bits of information, to waste a huge amount of the CONCEPTUAL capacity of the device in what amounts to redundancy associated with state coherence sufficient to survive long enough to permit the stored bit to be read again and otherwise manipulated with reasonably deterministic dynamics. Indeed, there are some lovely theorems and connections between bit-level storage of information, its stability, temperature, and entropy -- switching REQUIRES entropy in all physical systems we know of (so far) that are capable of encoding and storing information at the bit level:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle

      The issue of whether or not this is true for so-called "quantum computing" -- reversible dynamics computing involving entangled states that are protected from entropy by means of careful isolation (and involving processes that can complete inside the coherence time of the compute element given that isolation) opens up at least the possibility of some sort of "consciousness" that could be supported within a quantum entanglement, but personally I think this is pretty absurd. Again, as computational systems scale up in the number of components involved in any kind of computational transaction, they become increasingly susceptible towards the bleed-in of the great unknown state outside of the components themselves which BEHAVES like local entropy increase and effectively destroys the stored information by irreversibly conveying it into the external Universe whose state beforehand we do not know so that we cannot even in principle recover it. Since "consciousness" -- as far as we can tell or understand at this time -- absolutely requires rather huge numbers of switching components, immense amounts of sufficiently stable information storage, complex but moderately deterministic feedback loops, and more -- think of all of the structure in the wetware of your brain or in the hardware of a com

      --
      Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
    7. Re:Generalized Master Equation... by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

      Out of genuine curiosity, can you point me to evidence showing the universe is non-deterministic? I'm not sure how one would go about making that kind of observation.

      A few hundred libraries full of philosophy books.

      The evidence that the universe is non-deterministic is all around you. After all, science says that what you perceive with your own eyes, by definition, is "objective". (That's where the word "objective" came from.) Therefore, despite some flawed arguments to the contrary, there is lots of objective evidence that you have free will, which is contrary to the concept of determinism.

      Also, many quantum events are probabilistic, not deterministic. You can pick up almost any authoritative book on quantum mechanics to prove that one.

    8. Re:Generalized Master Equation... by rgbatduke · · Score: 1

      Or, you could pick up a book on quantum physics (which I teach from time to time, BTW) or take a course or two on statistical mechanics (which I've done a career's worth of research in) and note that quantum field theory is microscopically reversible, and that since reversible dynamics is precisely the kind of dynamics that doesn't change entropy, the entropy of the Universe is really unchanging at the microscopic level of description. That doesn't make it predictable, but it does mean that if you want to understand entropy you have to understand things like the Nakajima-Zwanzig construction and why quantum filtering experiments are unpredictable without actually entailing a change in the information content of the Universe.

      There is a difference, my friend, between deterministic and predictable. There is an entire literature on deterministic (classical) chaos, how reversible microdynamics in classical physics nevertheless leads to non-computable classical trajectories because we cannot specify microstate to infinite precision. Most of that reasoning applies to the utterly deterministic time evolution built into quantum theory. An isolated system in a quantum stationary state is if anything MORE deterministic than a similar classical system.

      You might want to read Susskind's lovely book on Quantum Wars -- it is pretty much devoted to the notion that a consistent physical theory must be microreversible and have zero (and unchanging) entropy.

      rgb

      --
      Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
    9. Re:Generalized Master Equation... by gdr · · Score: 1

      Here's a good place to start.

    10. Re:Generalized Master Equation... by rgbatduke · · Score: 2

      Except that this doesn't address whether or not the Universe is non-deterministic. It addresses whether or not one can perform a certain set of measurements on a tiny subset of the Universe -- where we could then spend a lot of energy speaking about just what a "measurement" is and how to define it and build an algebra associated with it -- and then make a unique prediction about the outcome of a second set of measurements made in the future. Or, we could find a copy of Julian Schwinger's classic book "Quantum Kinematics and Dynamics", which lays out the axiomatic basis for Quantum Mechanics better than anyone else I've ever read in his first three chapters (where the first two chapters are titled "The Algebra of Measurement" and "The Geometry of States", saving us all that work).

      We could then take note at some point that measurement is an irreversible process in physics. That's basically one way of viewing the point of Schwinger's THIRD chapter. We could also take note that we make all sorts of mistakes when we assume that time has some definitive arrow when analyzing microscopic events, because the underlying microscopic equations are time-reversal invariant.

      Bell's inequality makes sense only when one considers a strictly time-ordered sequence of irreversible measurements with an assumption of locality. If one tries to analyze the time reversal of the series of measurements, where we know that every single interaction involved is time-reversal symmetric so that the system must evolve back from a supposedly classically resolved state in the detectors to the specific entangled state in which it began, we begin to see why it can be perfectly correct and yet have nothing to do with whether or not the Universe is or isn't deterministic. We may not know the phases and states of all of the interactions and objects in the detectors used to perform the measurements, but we can see that what we interpreted as as a classically irreversible process is really reversible, and the apparent change in entropy is illusory and a consequence of our ignorance of the fully entangled, time-symmetric state of the detectors with the fully entangled state of the system!

      But it is a lot easier to just consider a closed quantum system -- the density matrix of your choice. Put it in an initial state. Time evolve it. Show me something indeterminate in its time evolution. Time evolution is unitary and reversible, classically or quantum mechanically. Bell's inequality is the moral equivalent of the paradox of friction as a "non-conservative force" in a classical universe where only conservative forces exist -- it is much more a statement of probabilities and incomplete information and if you look hard enough, you find that where you thought entropy was increasing, it's only increasing when you integrate/sum over all variables for which you have incomplete information.

      So I absolutely agree that we cannot predict the outcome of many quantum experiments, but that is not because they do not (or will not) have a definite, unique outcome, not does it mean that two Universes prepared in exactly the same initial state will every evolve into different states. As I point out, try it! Take two density matrices for closed quantum systems! Show me how the same laws of nature and e.g. the Heisenberg description cause them to evolve into different density matrices. Then we can talk about "evidence" for non-determinism.

      Of course if you want to claim that the consistent laws of physics themselves are incorrect, so that physics really is non-deterministic, well, good luck with that. That's the part that is very difficult to challenge empirically, because we whenever we check (as closely as we can check) that's not what we find, and isn't what the theory of quantum mechanics actually says.

      rgb

      --
      Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
    11. Re:Generalized Master Equation... by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

      "There is a difference, my friend, between deterministic and predictable."

      Of course there is. Even people who believe in predetermination do not claim that everything is predictable. (Obviously that's not a comment on physics.) But if you are using the word "deterministic" in a way that includes probabilistic, then we are using the word two different ways, which could explain the misunderstanding here.

    12. Re:Generalized Master Equation... by rgbatduke · · Score: 1

      I'm sure that this is right, which is why I tried to point it out. That is the point of the Nakajima-Zwanzig projection-valued operator. There is a nice 1999 paper by Breuer, et. al. that you can retrieve from Google Scholar or arXiv that walks one through the derivation of the quantum theory of open systems, including examples and a fairly nice discussion of how the open system can be reduced to one that has Markovian dynamics (for weak coupling or strong coupling to only a few degrees of freedom). It doesn't spend as much time discussing the full non-Markovian integrodifferential solution as it might, but it still is a really nice short paper that walks you through the partitioning, projection, and various ways of treating the "bath" (rest of the quantum Universe) stochastically because of its MISSING INFORMATION, not because the original density matrix was itself necessarily indeterminate.

      The point, in the end, is that probability in quantum theory comes from mere ignorance, precisely the same way it appears in classical theory, not because quantum theory is fundamentally indeterminate. This is a widespread error, although to be honest I don't hear it made often by physicists, who understand, if they don't always specify in conversation or discussion, that the "probability" that enters an experiment involving e.g. a filtering apparatus does so because of the unknown quantum state of the filtering apparatus and a perturbative separation of the interaction of the "system" with the apparatus "bath". It absolutely pervades the public semiclassical perception, though, and even physicists who (if pressed) understand that quantum theory is not intrinsically indeterminate all agree that measurement is! In precisely the same way that I am certain that all of the air in the room is not going to bounce just right and end up as a blob of liquid air in one corner, I am certain that things like quantum decay in a weakly coupled vacuum are purely probabilistic, because we do not know all of the state and phases of the rest of the Universe that relativistically represents that vacuum.

      In this regard, note especially the discussion of the Jaynes-Cummings model in the paper. My own interest in the subject arose back when I worked in quantum optics and developed a Langevin (Markovian) set of coupled stochastic ODEs that could be used to trace the microscopic dynamics of an collection of driven two-level atoms coupled to radiative decay field modes (the "bath") inside a resonant cavity. Jaynes was a reigning deity of both information-theoretic statistical mechanics and quantum optics, and his insight into the correct description of spontaneous emission (and construction of a computable model of same) is still in my own mind at least a great achievement.

      rgb

      --
      Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
  35. Candidate for "god-like observer" by Empiric · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Jesus said: If they say to you: Whence have you come?, say to them: We have come from the light, the place where the light came into being of itself. It [established itself], and it revealed itself in their image. If they say to you: Who are you?, say: We are his sons, and we are the elect of the living Father. If they ask you: What is the sign of your Father in you?, say to them: It is movement and rest.

    --Thomas

    Sometimes, this is almost too easy.

    --
    ~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
    1. Re:Candidate for "god-like observer" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl_thomas.htm

      Also look up on: advaita

      Captcha: reinvent

      Yes, indeed. Or, as I prefer, being perfectly comfortable both in spiritual and scientific perspectives: RECONFIRM! :-)

    2. Re:Candidate for "god-like observer" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't really understand this...

    3. Re:Candidate for "god-like observer" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The Bible anticipates every scientific discovery. The only reason scientists understand how the universe works before theologians is because science is pretty efficient at what its doing while theologians haven't made as much progress interpreting metaphors in the Bible quickly.

  36. Just your regular optimization by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    No point in rendering frames if no one is looking....

  37. The Analogy Needs an Analogy to Simplify It by srobert · · Score: 1

    I love it when the scientists try to distill their work for the layman and resort to these sorts of explanations. In this case, here's what I got from the summary. The universe was full of things. God wanted to measure one of the things and when he did so an unmeasured "control" thing popped into existence because of some sort of uncertainty principle. In fac, the control popped into existence for each of the things in the universe. So every thing was now a pair of things, one from the universe where one or more things was measured, and another in the original, unmeasured universe, and the divergence of the properties between the pairs of things is what we experience as time.

  38. Of course... by argStyopa · · Score: 1

    ...one might point out that this bears a striking resemblance to some primitive religions that assert that their gods exist "outside of time". I mean, for something as fundamental and invisible as the linearity of cause/effect to be questioned by primitive peoples so far as to postulate beings outside of it is rather...sophisticated?

    --
    -Styopa
  39. Wife manipulation by wbr1 · · Score: 1

    So, when I have a honey-do list, I can say "It is getting done!, You are just not entangled enough in the processes to see it," while I continue to drink my beer?

    --
    Silence is a state of mime.
  40. If a tree falls in the forest by MobyDisk · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If a tree falls in the forest and no one observes it, how long did it take to fall?

    1. Re:If a tree falls in the forest by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      If a man talks and no woman hears him, is he still wrong ?

    2. Re:If a tree falls in the forest by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It depends if it falls on a cat.

    3. Re:If a tree falls in the forest by Luyseyal · · Score: 1

      Apparently, since we're inside the universe and there's a ground and you can measure gravity and mass, you can come up with an estimate. However, if you were an outside observer making only global observations about the tree-falling universe, nothing has changed.

      -l

      --
      Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
    4. Re:If a tree falls in the forest by twosat · · Score: 1

      One of the most famous of the late Monsignor Ronald Knox's witticisms was a verse built on the Berkleyan idea that things exist only when they have an observer:

      There once was a man who said: "God
      Must think it exceedingly odd
      If he finds that this tree
      Continues to be
      When there's no one about in the Quad."

      This promptly drew the anonymous reply:

      "Dear Sir, Your astonishment's quite odd;
      I am always about in the Quad;
      And that's why the tree
      Will continue to be
      Since observed by Yours Faithfully, God."

    5. Re:If a tree falls in the forest by raorajesh · · Score: 1

      If a tree falls in the forest and no one observes it, how long did it take to fall?

      It took as long as it took for the tree to fall

  41. "Problem of time" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This article sounds like a bunch of doubletalk.

    "attempts to do this all run into the famous 'problem of time' — the resulting equations describe a static universe in which nothing ever happens"

    This isn't a problem. It's a logical conclusion based on the Rietdjik-Putnam argument: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rietdijk%E2%80%93Putnam_argument

  42. Find a new measuring place by Galaga88 · · Score: 5, Funny

    The problem is that they keep formulating and performing these measurements where the scientists work.

    Everybody knows time doesn't pass at work. If they'd re-run the experiment under a rainbow or with a beautiful woman they'd find that time passes far too quickly in fact.

    1. Re:Find a new measuring place by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So... I'm walking under this rainbow with a beautiful woman in my knapsack and some crazy scientist runs past with a stopwatch, chasing a cat with a laser pointer strapped to its head. Now what?

  43. Yup. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I read the article. And I can definitely say, that I know some of those words.

  44. Full circle. by jacekm · · Score: 1

    The Holy Church always knew, that for God like observer time is not an issue.

  45. Re:An external god-like observer? OMFG, really? by kilfarsnar · · Score: 1

    "An external god-like observer" sounds like major woo-woo red alert all mind poop shields on full verification required.

    It's a thought experiment, relax. Surely we can all agree that God can exist as a theoretical construct. Some would say that's the only way he can exist.

    --
    "What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
  46. Re:Niice ! by kilfarsnar · · Score: 1

    You're hawking that shit here?

    --
    "What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
  47. Ob. HHGttG by swm · · Score: 1

    Time is an illusion; lunchtime, doubly so.
    --Ford Prefect

  48. Post-calculus mathematics by nbritton · · Score: 1

    After reading the summary I was reminded of how calculus was developed to account of real world observations.

    "the resulting equations describe a static universe in which nothing ever happens."
    "So from the outside the universe appears static and unchanging, while objects that are entangled within it experience the maelstrom of change."

    This sounds akin to trying to use pre-calculus mathematics to describe the movement of heavenly bodies, circa 1500s. Those answers were in plain sight the whole time. This also appears to be in plain sight, but we have yet to developed enough tools to see it. It is beyond the level of rationalization of any human in history at this point, so we will need to create new ways of tackling complex problems as well.

  49. Entanglement Questions Concerning Article by Common+Joe · · Score: 1

    I have a question for those smarter and more knowledgeable than I am. I read the article and I get the following impression: When we see two particles "entangled" (before the experiment occurs), we become the god-like observer. When we observe the particles as a pair after they pass through the birefringent plate, we continue to see them as an entangled pair. We keep the god-like observer state. However, if we measure just one of them after they pass through the birefringent plate, we become entangled with them and time pops out as a property.

    Question 1: Is my impression correct? (If not, correct it.) Question 2: Is it possible to measure both as a pair (keeping the god-like observer state) then measure only one of them afterward to get the time difference between the two? Or does the initial measure after the experiment is over re-entangle us? What happens if we measure that second time?

    1. Re:Entanglement Questions Concerning Article by Common+Joe · · Score: 1

      I know it’s poor taste to reply to your own thread, but after more thought, I’ve come up with more questions. I suppose these are more philosophical. I ask for forgiveness in advance.

      1) Is the Big Bang nothing more than our universe going through the equivalent of a birefrigent plate? If so, does this mean that our universe existed “before” the Big Bang? That brings me to my next question.

      2) In the experiment, we are a god-like observer with time surrounding us. We make sure particles are entangled BEFORE they pass through the plate. (There is a time factor here even if time doesn’t seem to be a factor between the particles.) We send entangled particles through the birefrigent plate and we know that the entangles particles now have a different state. When we observe the particles as a pair AFTER they pass through the plate, does this mean that the observer was always in some sort of entanglement with the pair of particles (and not just a single particle)? Is this some kind of different entanglement? If so, does this imply that time always exist even between universes? (Gads... I hope I made some sort of sense in this question. It’s kind of hard to ask.)

      3) Can a solid particle and a photon be two sides of the same coin? This experiment seems to imply that all particles / photons are exactly the same for the god-like observer (since different properties fall out only when observation takes place). That could mean that particles and photons are truly one and the same thing. Or perhaps this means that the god-like observer cannot observe the differentiating properties without become part of that universe that he created and that’s why everything looks the same?

      I have a thousand more questions and I wish I could understand the math behind all this. This kind of stuff has always excited me and I always want to know more. Unfortunately, as I indicated in the parent post, I’m not gifted enough nor educated enough to understand like other can. I’m destined to always be just an ignorant observer (har har) without truly understanding what is going on. For that, if any of my questions seem too trivial, I ask you to just forgive me.

  50. time is a human construct by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    uh, duh...time doesn't exist outside of the human experience.

  51. Speed of light delays by tepples · · Score: 2

    Speed of light delays in gigahertz CPUs are special relativity. Speed of light delays in transoceanic online gaming are special relativity. Speed of light delays between the stock exchange and the high frequency trading equipment is special relativity, but that's not "consumer use" except that HFTs are using the consumer.

    1. Re:Speed of light delays by indeterminator · · Score: 1

      I think plain old Maxwell's equations are sufficient for understanding cases two and three. For modern CPUs, I'm not sure, but I'd guess quantum effects have bigger influence than special relativity there.

  52. Wait a second... by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 1

    For that proof to work, wouldn't you need to test both sides of the hypothesis -- the entangled observer AND the god-like observer? While the work is impressive, it doesn't actually show what it claims. Doesn't this just confirm that we see entanglement because we are part of the system and not outside it?

    The math may work, but that doesn't mean the model is correct. Back when the world view was that the earth was the center of the universe, there were complex formulas that described the motion of the planets in the sky. The math was correct, even if the model was at fault. To fully test this model, at least as proposed, one would need both an entangled observer and the god-like observer.

  53. Steps to repeat experiment.... by technomom · · Score: 3, Funny

    Step 1. Become Godlike ....

    1. Re:Steps to repeat experiment.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That requires lots of head shots.

  54. pseudo-science .. modern astrology ??? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    More pseudo-science circle jerking -- "Eh, its a living..." (as Bugs Bunny used to say).

    Seriously does any of this have any relevance to anything practical in the real world ???

  55. They go at it the wrong way! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Sounds more like an ever iterating fractal function.

    The universe is the function and we are experiencing part of the output.

  56. How??? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How did they measure the "static" particles? Is not the idea of being an external observer, and seeing everything static, that makes you....static? And once you try to "observe" the static particles, you are becoming entangled in them so you are not anymore external observer??? (now i have an headache)

  57. God vs God-like by SpaceCracker · · Score: 1

    So, is the god particle created by god or intelligently designed by a god-like observer?
    In the latter case it might be better called the god-like particle...

    Are there any other situations in the wannabe-objective science of physics where some deity is involved?

    Are atheists supposed to start worshipping a god-like observer?

    I'm kinda lost...

    --
    sigo ergo sum
    1. Re:God vs God-like by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm a god-like observer. Worship me!

  58. !div0 by EmagGeek · · Score: 1

    If these scientists are correct, then it is also possible to divide by zero, because bogodynamic quantum entanglement coefficients become both observable and reversible in the magnetoreluctant quasistatic interface between the non-observed static universe and the observed temporal-dynamic universe. Crossing this entanglement boundary requires continuous and differentiable traversal of an asymptotic gravitational cotangent function in the real plane by a moving observer.

    Clearly this results in a !div0 error.

  59. I love that phrase: by rnturn · · Score: 1

    ``the maelstrom of change''

    Pretty accurate description of life around my house.

    --
    CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
  60. Re:An external god-like observer? OMFG, really? by Jmc23 · · Score: 1

    Especially those that see him as an anthropomorphic straw man! You know, those autistic science pedants. Makes him easier to set on fire.

    --
    Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
  61. Godlike observer revealed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1
  62. No by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Wrong answer. Go back and check your work.

    Tip: Science is where you propose a reasonable hypothesis and observe data. It is not random and wild speculation that you imagine in your mind.

  63. Say what? by WaffleMonster · · Score: 2

    In this case, the observer cannot detect any difference between the photons without becoming entangled with one or the other. And if there is no difference, the system appears static. In other words, time does not emerge.

    This is the kind of in your face bullshit I have come to expect from a certain crowd of attention whores who regularly abuse terms like phase velocity and negative absolute temperatures to attract undue attention to their Sci-Fi ish ramblings which in reality are quite mundane.

    Why yes dude you can't make a measurement without effecting what is being measured... newsflash from a century ago.

    Since you can't measure something without changing it... you make the following jaw dropping assumption "And if there is no difference" to get to your assumption..

    "the system appears static. In other words, time does not emerge."

    "In other words" if you ASSume there is no difference time does not emerge.

  64. Re:"an external god-like observer" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So your talking "sudo" or "su" right?
    What's more god like then admin................

  65. Metagod by rsborg · · Score: 2

    As someone else with mod points, I almost modded you +1 Funny , but my god-like powers of commenting kicked in.

    --
    Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
    1. Re:Metagod by Nemyst · · Score: 1

      By commenting, you stop being a Godlike observer and interact with the system, changing its state. Hence, you can no longer use your other Godlike powers.

  66. I like the idea of causal time! by Bliiixt · · Score: 1

    An interesting post this one is! Given a spacially closed universe we can observe (measure) its inertia says Julian Barbour in his lecture... (I would suspect "deduct from the model" is better here than "observe" but never mind). Moreover it seems (in the world of Julian) that we can "observe" the inertia while I note that he adds that one and only one inertia of the total universe is possible (in the spatially closed version) which transforms "the" inertia to an (one) inertia... (Namely zero... If we add the innertia of all its parts the sum is zero... Plausable! Zero needs no direction... and just try to intuit direction outside the universe...) A very interesting comment by Julian is that "something must go in for something to come out". What goes in in his world are the angles... Then one in the audience asks about matter as one of the parameters in an equation Julian has on his slides... This is where it stumbles a bit... We are reminded about old Aristotle, form and matter... Never mind finding weaknesses in Julians talk, he is covering very much in a short time.... Which brings us to the subject matter... TIME We can, it seems, mesure time only by logging shape differences... It (the measurement.. not time itself.. probably...ehhh) is not thus like we usually intuit it, a count of identical cycles of some physical thing. Now, in steps the idea of time being observable as change only internally (in the universe) . The God-eye sees no change (old metaphysics has it that God sees it all at once..). Well thanks for that! I conclude that I am IN the universe since I can observe change... It gets even more interesting! Seemingly we can prove the internality of time with quantum physics by (1) observing one of two entangled particles and (2) observing "it" (or rather the "whole" wave) globaly from the outside... But didn't we just learn that the observation, global or not, entanngles the measurement with what is measured? Besides, the qunatum-people mostly forget to mention that lab-observations are of different particles.. you simply can't observe the "same" particle (unchanged, un-re-entangled) twice.You deduce the state it was in while changing it by observation... This doesn't add up in my little besserwisser world... But the whole idea here is that time is change of which we are part... by consciousnes or "obeservation"... That's inspiring! To think is to be!

  67. lost me at 'god' by globaljustin · · Score: 0

    An external, god-like observer always sees no difference between these particles compared to an external objective clock. But an observer who measures one of the pair

    I like where these guys are going. Really do. Time needs to be wrestled down and pinned to a board like a butterfly, IMHO...so good for them for thinking outside of the box.

    I can't give their ideas any serious creedence b/c they take a 'thought experiment' approach to testing a hypothesis.

    since when is 'god-like observer' a scientific term???

    that's just the start...the whole methodology of trying to solve a huge problem of physics by making a linguistic analogy then testing that analogy...it gives usable data but it's a broke version of the scientific method

    again...I'm happy their work exists and it makes usable data...hope they get a big NSF grant...

    time is our observation of change in the universe

    as best we can tell, things change uniformly (time passes the same for everyone)...except the rare times when they don't ;)

    IMHO we need to get past our limitations of testing...like physical lab limitations like how CERN can do things FermiLab can't do b/c of size.

    We are *always* going to have some limitation there...so lets make a theory that predicts by using other means *as well*

    My idea: Time = Gravity

    we only know both exist b/c we observe physical changes in the universe...we don't know the true nature of 'gravity' as a force b/c it has no particle to 'carry' the force

    time also has similar characteristics...as I said above, time is the observed change in the universe...is there any change in the universe that gravity is not part of?

    let me ask again: true or false: gravity as a force is present in every interaction in the universe

    what do you think?

    --
    Thank you Dave Raggett
  68. they lost me at 'god' by globaljustin · · Score: 1

    The Analogy Needs an Analogy to Simplify It

    exactly...hilarious...i lol'ed

    IMHO the whole methodology of hypothesis testing of taking a question of Physics (or w/e) and making some analogy to something humans physically interact with to contextualize it...then test the analogy as a hypothesis

    analogies cannot be hypotheses

    they actually test something in the lab, so the data is potentially useful...but for other researchers...not to prove/disprove their own hypothesis

    --
    Thank you Dave Raggett
  69. Quantum particles share the same existence? by codeusirae · · Score: 1

    "if time is an emergent phenomenon based on entanglement, the phenomenon in which two quantum particles share the same existence "

    What?

  70. Schrodinger's grad student by jpvlsmv · · Score: 1

    We're all familiar with Schrodinger's cat thought-experiment, right? A quantum phenomenon may or may not kill a cat in a sealed box.

    This article seems to suggest that the meta-experiment-- Lock a grad student in a sealed box with the boxed cat, and have him observe the condition-- has implications about the nature of time.

    Consider instructing the grad student to write a PhD thesis based on what he observes of the lifespan of the cat (check on it every minute). When we (the unentangled observer) open the box, we may find either a complete or partially-written thesis, or a live cat. The quantum state of the box-grad-box-cat system is in the superposition of states that correspond to the progress of time within that system, but that progress is completely unobservable from outside the box, regardless of how God-like the outside observer is.

    Now compare the state probabilities recorded by two outside observers in relative motion. They will not agree on the amount of time that has elapsed inside the box, but must agree on the probabilities involved (otherwise there would be a preferred reference frame). So they would have to agree that time in the box doesn't exist.

    Unfortunately, I don't have the background to make this thought experiment mathematically rigorous for publication.

    1. Re:Schrodinger's grad student by socceroos · · Score: 1

      Isn't this flawed? Sorry if I'm way off track, but surely lack of measurement does not conclude non-existence?

      Take two completely disconnected observers monitoring the same system. Given the layered nature of observations, one observer (A) sees X and measures Y, but the other observer (B) sees X and W so measures Z. The current definitions I see flying around would suggest that observer A can correctly conclude that W doesn't exist because they measured Y. However, observer B can correctly conclude that W and X exist because they measured Z.

      How can we suggest that time doesn't exist outside entangled entities?

      Apologies for the Reddit reference, but if you could explain it like I'm 5, then I'd be grateful.

  71. Chicken or Egg by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This seems too much like the Chicken or the Egg question, of which came first.

    If Time is a product of the quantum event, then how did the event happen if time did not exist? Those events would have to take time yes?

  72. Time goes slowly, so slowly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Time goes slowly, but it actually goes "backwards".

    You're looking at it wrong.

    Just think of time from the perspective of Monday, or while waiting for a bus.

    Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to deal with observations that have occurred over decades ...

  73. Total Perspective Vortex by Khashishi · · Score: 1

    So, instead of being an infinitesimal speck living on a microscopic pale blue dot orbiting a typical star among zillions in the infinite cosmos, we are an infinitesimal speck living on a microscopic pale blue dot orbiting a typical star among zillions in the infinite cosmos which are just a blob of entangled probability in the infinite possibilities of the timeless everything, which looks like any possible timeline, depending on which clump of probability you look at.

    If I really understood that, I think I'd go insane.

  74. Does This Mean... by avgjoe62 · · Score: 1

    that we can finally stop killing all of those cats in all of those boxes?

    --

    How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?

  75. Connection to the Turing Free Will Article? by shoor · · Score: 1

    There was a slashdot article about a Turing Test for Free Will not too long ago http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/10/21/199213/physicist-unveils-a-turing-test-for-free-will/

    I made a post there, but it was late and I didn't realize I wasn't logged in so it was lost as an anonymous coward post (Probably just as well. Like I said, it was late.) Anyway, along comes this post about Time as 'emergent'. So, for a 'Godlike' observer, the Universe is Static. I see a connection to the Turing Test Free Will article, but can I explain it now that it's morning and I've had my coffee. Only one way to find out:

    If for a Godlike observer there is no time, then everything is predetermined. It's like that Calvinist notion that if God is omniscient then He must know the future, and know who will go to heaven, etc. But that means people can't have any effect on the future, no true Free Will, only an illusion of it.

    This would also be evidence for 'Superdeterminism' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism/.

    I personally find these thoughts leading to the idea that the universe might be a kind of rule 110 machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110. I like the idea of Free Will, but this doesn't cause me a lot of angst over Superdetermism because, supposing the universe is a sort of rule 110 thing. Within universe, you have to live it out and the future becomes the past. No matter how far you go in the Future, that will eventually be the fixed, immutable Past. But you will have 'lived it', and nothing could have worked it out and predicted it ahead of you. Even this Omniscient God (if there were one) could only 'know' the Future by cranking up some meta out-of-universe computer, to speed up the computation and beat the regular old Universe to some future point, but then the version of me running in that meta computer would be doing the living so it wouldn't matter. God or the Master Programmer or whoever could still only know me by waiting for me to live things out for myself.

    --
    In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
  76. you heard it here first by hypergreatthing · · Score: 1

    Gravity is also a product of quantum entanglement on a universal scale.

  77. Oh dear by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That is the worst interpretation of quantum physics I've ever heard. Ok, not the worst. There are all those "reality only exists when we observe it!" But, well that's almost this really. What a stupid paper.

  78. How this doesn't contradict Relativity? by master_p · · Score: 1

    Since time is an emergent property of entanglement, and since particles can be entangled no matter what the distance is between them, then there exists a common clock for entangled particles, thus proving that the theory of Relativity is wrong, since these particles can be light years away.

    If the above is not correct, then entanglement must break at the point of one of the particles exiting the light cone of an event, and after that there cannot be a common clock between them.

  79. Oh that's why by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    He is not entangled... That's why the God has been so silent lately, from his god-like observation point nothing is happening down here! That also mekts away the gap inbetween science and religion! Good Lord!

  80. Looking more likely by Gripp · · Score: 1

    This is actually the second bit of recent news that supports the same notion. https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20130917-a-jewel-at-the-heart-of-quantum-physics/ is the other. Neither time or location are important to the math, which is a shocking result.

  81. again by Msdose · · Score: 0

    If the universe is recycled infinitely and unfolds the same way each time, then nothing ever changes.

  82. The quantum mystery industry by RaccoonBandit · · Score: 1

    Slashdot seems to frequently report on some ground-breaking new discovery in quantum mechanics that is presented along the lines of "physics had it all wrong for the last hundred years, but now we have finally found the truth, at least until next week when another big truth comes out".

    Someone publishes a paper with a fancy title or abstract on arxiv, although most claims in it are actually subtle, include certain assumptions and are firmly based on a line of research that has been going on for some time. Then a couple of days or weeks later some popular articles announce the great revolution in physics, loosely based on aforementioned paper, that is subsequently forgotten again and it turns out physics has not been revolutionised.

    Meanwhile ten million internet users each come up with their own interpretation of what it all means and why they're right and everybody else is wrong. Inevitably, the words "god" and "consciousness" come up. I know it is the internet, but this doesn't happen in other areas of scientific enquiry in nearly the same way.

  83. ACIM by Nova · · Score: 1

    Never thought I'd be quoting from "A Course In Miracles" on Slashdot, of all places. But a few of the more open minded readers may find the below interesting:

    “The world of time is the world of illusion. What happened long ago seems to be happening now. Choices made long since appear to be open; yet to be made. What has been learned and understood and long ago passed by is looked upon as a new thought, a fresh idea, a different approach. Because your will is free you can accept what has already happened at any time you choose, and only then will you realize that it was always there.” (ACIM, M-2.3)

    "What God did not create does not exist. And everything that does exist exists as He created it. The world you see has nothing to do with reality. It is of your own making, and it does not exist." (ACIM Workbook-pI.14.1:2-5)

    The above quote is useful to understand this one: “In order to understand the teaching-learning plan of salvation, it is necessary to grasp the concept of time that the course sets forth. Atonement corrects illusions, not truth. Therefore, it corrects what never was. Further, the plan for this correction was established and completed simultaneously, for the Will of God is entirely apart from time. So is all reality, being of Him. The instant the idea of separation entered the mind of God's Son, in that same instant was God's Answer given. In time this happened very long ago. In reality it never happened at all.” (ACIM, M-2.2)

    Not trying to "spiritualize" quantum physics, simply to point out some potential similarities. Spiritual masters such as the historical Buddha and Jesus had an interesting insight into the same kind of questions that modern physics is only starting to explore.

  84. Quantum Indeterminacy of Emergent Spacetime by Trax3001BBS · · Score: 1

    Guess it's all a matter of the equipment used and various other parameters; better known as wait for a second opinion.

    The emergent gravity (Induced gravity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_gravity) captured my attention, and I came across this reference
    The bottom line being:
    "The effect can be viewed as sampling noise due to the limited degrees of freedom of such a theory, consistent with covariant bounds on entropy."
    http://arxiv.org/abs/0710.4153

  85. Also destroys "spooky action at a distance" by Doghouse13 · · Score: 1

    If accepted, this contains the idea (and evidence) that simply measuring a particle results in the observer becoming entangled with it. I've been pointing out for some time that so-called "spooky action at a distance" potentially melts away if the observer becomes entangled with the particle he measures, as follows:

    • - One observer measures one of a pair of entangled particles, and becomes entangle with it (and, by implication, with the other particle)
    • - At some other, indeterminate time and location, a second observer measures the other particle, becoming entangled with it (and, by implication, with the first particle and the first observer)
    • - The two observers now compare their (entangled) results - which, being entangled, cannot help but correlate

    Viewed in that way, no "probability wave" collapsed, nor did any signal travel at greater than the speed of light - let alone (as seen from some frames of reference) backwards in time. Entanglement forced, as seen by the entangled observers, two matching results.

  86. ...seriously? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Your notion of "observation" is what is truly ridiculous. Quantum theory does not require a literal observer, as in a person looking at stuff, only some separate system that somehow interacts with another. The observer is just one type of such system, the one that causes more trouble in a day-to-day basis for an experimenter.
    Please educate yourself on the subject before you say such nonsense.

  87. To an external observer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    All comments that has ever been or will ever be on /. have already happened including your witty retort to my post here.

  88. This is not new! by SORlN · · Score: 1

    For an outside observer time is constant. For the one barely holding it ... in front of a toilet door ... time is passing slowly ... for the one behind the door ... Anyway ... you get the ideea ;)

  89. BC AD TERRORISTS doing science is not science. by Ruralhack · · Score: 1

    Using technology as the System Design force of nature we're born is different than a BC AD TERRORIST Scientist doing "science". The System Design Illiterate time ignorant Scientists suffer from an objectless application of alphabetic technology. What's wrong with humanity is mechanical.

  90. Clocks by Boldizar · · Score: 1

    So, in summary, time measures clocks rather than the other way around.

  91. i'm simply dazzeled by a flash of insight by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    honestly, for a physicist like me, this would simply be amazing stuff

  92. If light were aware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How long would those eight minutes from the sun to the Earth seem?

  93. God & Time by broadriver · · Score: 1

    This is very interesting. The god-like observer is unaffected by the passing of time. One may infer from this experiment that God exists outside of time and that time is a created force. And, this goes along with the future-history account of the end of time in Rev 10:6.

  94. Could Time Travel be far behind by TimeHorse · · Score: 1

    [Please excuse my kurtness but my real response was lost when I clicked options and then saved so I have to retype this from memory.]
    I'm just saying it reminds me of the Relativistic Light Curvature experiments by Professor Ronald Mallett at UConn-Storrs. I know it's not a direct match between quantum entanglement and relativistic light curvature, but you never know if the two concepts could end up paying off. I will say that clearly even if we have a Unified Definition of Time between the Quantum and Relativistic world through a use of defining time through isolated systems, but we still have Gravity to contend with so we're not done with the Unification of Physics yet. But as for Professor Mallett's work, I will say in the end it's better to let him do his experiment and fail that to spend time deriding him because you think it won't work.

    --
    Time Lord, Dark Horse: The Techno Mage of Gallifrey
  95. Black Hole? by javierfd · · Score: 1

    Maybe the time-dilation effect produced by a black hole is produced by the atoms falling in the hole being disentangled, so , for us, it becomes more and more static, but inside, it keeps the time running as normal, just is being disconnected from the rest of the universe.

  96. Healthcare.gov by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Then Obama should re-write all the code for healthcare.gov since he could take forever but time would not pass.

  97. Making sense. by neoshroom · · Score: 1

    It makes a certain sense to me. Indeed, I suspect it made sense enough to Newton as well, since his notes discuss what a static universe would look like:

    At the end of the 9th key.
    If th' whole worlds nature were but one
    Merely by one figure shown
    And Art could nothing els invent
    The world no wonder could present
    Nor nature plainly be exprest
    For which let God be ever blest.

    --
    Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
  98. reminds me of something that occurred to me once.. by jsh1972 · · Score: 1

    Long ago, shortly after completing Roger Penrose's "the Emperor's New Mind", so the subject matter was still turning over in my head, I had the idea while half asleep that all existence was a hugely infinite array of potentials and possibilities, and that among countless permutations was a single particular configuration, that included the physical constants as we know them and the world line of each individual particle, that fit together in such a way to perfectly describe the physical universe as we know it, and as a conscious virtual being in this universe, considering the notions of which I am writing, OBSERVES the truth of the ideas he just had, collapsing the wavefunction and bringing into physical being, well, everything. I love when books carry into the half awake half dream state!

  99. Narcissus by dragga_09 · · Score: 1

    so ummm like yeah: We're all fucking crazy.

  100. Misplaced emphasis by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    GPS is about the only consumer use system that has to deal with not only special relativity, but also general relativity.

  101. time? by duhjim · · Score: 1

    time is number gone / to Hell and all of nature / its flesh in ruin.

  102. Deterministic Universe? by bactus · · Score: 1

    Does this mean that the Universe might be deterministic from the perspective of an untangled external observer?

  103. TIME IS AN EMERGENT PHENOMENON by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So in essence, it is all in the mind of the observer entangled with the phenomenon. No entangled observer, no time, right? Could it be that the universe and everything in it are in the minds of the observers as some have posited?

  104. So Time is a bug, not a feature? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Figures... Universe was designed by the lowest bidder. :P