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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."
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? :)
All this time travel stuff gives me a head ache!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
But only from the point of view of an external god-like observer.
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.
The universe is big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.
what exactly is the difference?
From the outside, the universe looks like a photograph.
I hope we're hanging on a nice wall.
For example, when I am hard at work, and my wife thinks I am goofing off...
is better than Out Of Time.
See: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4369251&cid=45211293
Well there's two minutes of my life I'll never get back.
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.
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.
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.
Wrong.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
...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.
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
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.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
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.
Worth reading what C. S. Lewis attributed to George McDonald in "The Great Divorce" for some speculation on this same issue.
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.
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.
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
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.
Aspirin, please.
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.
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
....it's a feature.
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.
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.
Wanted: dead and alive.
:wq
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.
Here's one: —
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.
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.
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*!
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?
No point in rendering frames if no one is looking....
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.
...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
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.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one observes it, how long did it take to fall?
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.
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.
The Holy Church always knew, that for God like observer time is not an issue.
"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)
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
You're hawking that shit here?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
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
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.
Time is an illusion; lunchtime, doubly so.
--Ford Prefect
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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..."
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
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.
Step 1. Become Godlike ....
But the Big Bang was an event. How does an event-less system have an event that creates events?
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.
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
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.
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
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
well clearly this has a simple solution...but it only works for spherical desks in a vacuum...
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.
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.
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.
Pretty accurate description of life around my house.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
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.
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.
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.
http://xkcd.com/505/
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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!
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
"if time is an emergent phenomenon based on entanglement, the phenomenon in which two quantum particles share the same existence "
What?
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.
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.
that we can finally stop killing all of those cats in all of those boxes?
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
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)
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.
Gravity is also a product of quantum entanglement on a universal scale.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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:
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.
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 ;)
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.
So, in summary, time measures clocks rather than the other way around.
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.
[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
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
so ummm like yeah: We're all fucking crazy.
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.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
time is number gone / to Hell and all of nature / its flesh in ruin.
Does this mean that the Universe might be deterministic from the perspective of an untangled external observer?