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Time Doesn't Exist
Meshula writes "An interesting article suggesting that time is an illusion of perception has appeared at
New Scientist.
"...quantum mechanics supports it. In 1929, the British physicist Nevill Mott and Werner Heisenberg from Germany explained how alpha particles, emitted by radioactive nuclei, form straight tracks in cloud chambers. Mott pointed out that, quantum mechanically, the emitted alpha particle is a spherical wave which slowly leaks out of the nucleus. It is difficult to picture how it is that an outgoing spherical wave can produce a straight line," he argued. We think intuitively that it should ionise atoms at random throughout space.
Mott noted that we think this way because we imagine that quantum processes take place in ordinary three-dimensional space. In fact, the possible configurations of the alpha particle and the particles in the detecting chamber must be regarded as the points of a hugely multidimensional configuration space, a miniature Platonia, with the position of the radioactive nucleus playing the role of Alpha. "
It's worth a read.
"
"Down among the dancing quanta
Everything exists at once"
(from Transverse City)
In Slaughterhouse-five the main character learns from the tralfamadorians that time does not exist as we know it. Tralfamadorians can look at time like humans look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains.
"Such as it is, such as it was, such as it always will be..."
If that isn't the best description of life on this planet then I don't know what is!
First off, don't be rude.
Second, I suggest you reread your post, as you completely contradict yourself.
Time is just way for our human brain to quantify length between one event and the other.
All you have said here is time is the amount of time it takes for something to happen. That's recursive, therefore non-definitional. What the paper is saying is time is an artifact - an illusion created by the fact that your state at one point in "Plutonia" contains information also contained at another point. So if I hurt my hand yesterday, I remember hurting it because that event changed something specific in my brain, which is carried on to a seperate point in "Plutonia" space. Carried on is a poor choice of terms, thoughm as it implies direct dependence. A better way to think of it is that the probability of one point being in a certain state is determined by the probability of another point in Plutonia space. There is a chance whatever part of my brain holds that memeory won't hold it tomorrow, but that chance is so small it hardly ever happens.
so how do I go about ignoring this whole thing we call "time" and go back and get a '57 Chevy right off the production line?
I mean, theory is great, don't get me wrong, but I want practical, like a car with damn big fins on it.
Felix.
It's all an illusion...comon didn't you see the Matrix. : ) See the bots let us make the movie becouse they are about to reveal the truth and they wanted to soften the blow. We are all just a bunch of batteries.
This actually came from Julian Barbour "The End of Time" on The Edge, Sept. 21. More there than in the article. http://www.edge.org/
Eh I saw this last night. Any show on PBS will be repeated at least 15 times before the month is through.
I don't think this guy is a kook at all. From a cursory review of the sci.physics tree on deja.com he appears to be taken seriously. Are any of you actually physicists or merely opinionated. I seriously doubt that the majority of people calling Julian Barbour's reputation into question here are in any way qualified to make that judgement (not speaking specifically about the above AC just calling into question the reputation's of those who are casting aspersions). In the interest of full disclosure I am not a physicist and am in no way qualified to judge this man's ideas.
Wasn't that strange? I wondered if anyone else would notice that. I think he had to have imitated sagans vocal style on purpose. Or else sagan was an agent of the matrix.
I'm not sure if I understand exactly what you mean in your argument against the article, but:
/your/ universe moving forward, is actually instantaneous recalculations of new states. These seem to be reconciled with each other, to NOT contradict each other.
"One solution to this has been to say that the wave collapses in =this= universe, but that there are as many universes as possible states."
Doesn't this statement match perfectly with the author's idea that our universe is just a certain state amongst many other states, given by a probability cloud? You seem to agree with him that there are many states, of which our percieved universe is only one. He is just saying these myriad states are given by a probability cloud, and that was we percieve as time in
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Oh yeah?!
3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679 8... (101 decimals from memory)
Geekier than thou! ;-P
/Dervak
At some point it becomes impossible to think about physics questions without being struck by the philosophical implications. However in this particular case the question of whether time is "real" or merely an exercise in human perception has been a batted around for a long time.
Think for a moment about a mechanical computer. One that perhaps even happens to be sentient. This computer works by a complex gear mechanism that is driven by being moved forward on a track.
So as the black box moves forward along the track, the mechanical action drives a complex gear train that allows it to think. Since it thinks, it perceives itself, and it perceives itself to exist in a single dimension. It thinks that "right now" is the present, what it will think when it is a mile down the track as the future, and what it thought when it was a mile back as being in the past. Furthermore, a mechanical interlock prevents it from rolling backwards, or travelling back in time.
An outside observer can tell that "time" is just an illusion of the machine's motion down the track. However, because of the inherent nature of the machine, to it time is an inescapable quality of existence.
We are that machine. The track is the chemical reactions that take place in our brain and allows us to think. These chemical reactions are, thanks to thermodynamics and entropy, non-reversible. They only work as me move forward in time and that defines the nature of our existence.
BTW: This was not my original idea, go read Bertrand Russell
For the glib take on the above read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
I have held to this theory for quite some time now.. The only difference is that instead of saying time does not exist, I re-define time to fit the theory.. Length, Width, Height, Time... its not Rocket Science. hehehe... he said "time".. hehe.. My High School Physics teacher taught this theory..
If Monkey See, Monkey Do... then who was the first to throw poo?
It's beyond the realm of quantum mechanics to prove whether or not time exists. QM just assumes time is constant.
With QM in its current state, we'll never be able to prove whether Julian's Theory is true, solely because of the initial assumption that QM makes. If QM assumes time is constant, how can it be used to show it doesn't exist?
We know for a fact that time is NOT constant. Time is warped by such things as acceleration and gravity.
This is the primary reason that Quantum Mechanics and Relativity are fundamentally incompatible theories. QM explains the probabilities that occur in the interactions between particle-waves, but it does not begin to explain what "time" is, or what "gravity" is! Relativity shows us that time and gravity are very connected. What we need here is *GASP* a Grand Unified Theory!
So far, Superstring Theory is the closest thing yet, because it's compatible (so far) with both quantum physics and relativity.
An excellent book on this subject is "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Green. You'll find that time does exist, as one of eleven dimensions, but the notion of space-time needs to be changed.
On a more philosophical note... time MUST exist, in the same way that everything else "exists." It can be argued that space and time are merely a matter of perception, so that if something is perceived, that's all that's required for existence. As morpheus said, "How do you define 'real?'"
Does it really change anything as far as we're concerned to prove that time doesn't exist? It's just a theory. Theories are just there to make sense of observed behavior. Superstring theory is one of those, although so far nobody's been able to come up with an experiment to test it. So right now, it just works... in theory. Or something.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Time is just another spacial dimension.. We already know (if we believe Einstein) that space can get warped pretty good by this kind of stuff (and gravity as well).
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
In fact, I just traveled 30 seconds into the future waiting for /. to respond.
Why would it have to start anywhere? So you can set your absolute time clock? If it exists at all, time is certainly relative.
In other words, your "many universes" still presuppose some absolute time, through will all universes travel in parallel. The author, from what I can tell is saying that, although there ARE an infinity of universes/states, they do not move in time "independently" of each other, but instead are just probabilities paths. There is nothing preventing THIS universe from becoming ANOTHER universe in your scheme, because according to him all universes/states are just probabilities, and one can /possibly/ move from any state to another.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
What the hell am i looking at? When does this happen in the movie?" "Now, your looking at now sir, everything that's happens now, is happening now." "What happened to then?" "We past then." "When?" "Just now." "We're at now, now" "Go back to then." "When?" "Now." "Now?" "Now." "We can't." "Why?" "We missed it." "When?" "Just now." "When will then be now?" "Soon." "How soon?"
Ender
Nothing to see here
From which school did Einstein earn his PhD?
:)
Not saying this guy isn't a crackpot, I just think that giving him that label due to the lack of a PhD is taking the easy way out.
i completely believe you... but the point was, is that this isnt a "new" or "revolutionary" concept. You pointing out that it's been around longer than augustine, emphasizes this point.
I find it amazing that people are still working on this, when it has been solved years ago...
... hi bingo
For an "independent theoretical physicist", he sure doesn't know his math. "Dimension" is not necessarily synonymous with "number of coordinates". Triangle-land WOULD be 3-dimensional if it weren't for the "geometrical restrictions" that the author carelessly dismisses -- for example, (1, 2, 3) is not allowed in triangle-land.
In fact, 2 vectors are all we need to represent all possible triangle configurations. If we have 2 vectors, x and y, then one side has length ||x||, one has length ||y||, and the 3rd side has length ||x-y||. Therefore, triangle land is spanned by the vectors (1,0) and (0,1), and thus it has dimension 2.
Because of these pesky geometrical rules, the configuration space for a finite number of particles is not quite "hugely multidimensional", but is actually "3-dimensional".
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
I think you are missing the point of the article. It is trying to point out that time may not actually exist. That time, as we perceive it, is only a series of previous probabilies in this probability space called the Universe.
The arrow flying towards you will continue on it's path because there's a high degree of probability that it will do so. There is a transition over the multidimentional space surrounding you and the arrow because of these probability waves.
You perceive the differences (as he mentioned in the article) and say one happened in the past and the other in the present. You can even calculate with a high degree of accuracy (but not complete accuracy) that the arrow will strike a certain place on the target (hopefully now you). These perceived differences are time to you and me, cause we're 3-dimentional beings.
Now, the whole argument with the Alpha particles was that Heisenberg thought that all probabilities occur at a quantum level. So there would be a spheroidal wave emitted from the atom. However, there isn't, because we only see on track in the cloud chamber (notice, this is at the atomic level...not something as big as an arrow). The solution was to view the emition of the alpha particle as occuring in n-dimensional space. We see our 3-dimensional view of it and, for us, it looks like a straight line cause that's what where the probability is greatest for us.
As he mentioned, it would be nice to get rid of time altogether, since it seems to break down when we get back to Time 0 (the Big Bang). I'd like to see the math of this...
This reminds me of something I was thinking about awhile ago.
I don't have the exact details as my physics book is not handy -- but I was studying the general relativity equations, and I decided to calculate what the distortion of time was for a particle of light in a vaccuum. Of coursre, light moves at the speed of light, c. So if you plug in c and solve the equation, you get division by zero. But if you take the limit of this value, you notice that it is approaches infinity. The divide by zero error is just a minor inconvenience that our mathematics model imposes.
So, I concluded that from the point of view of light, time is stopped eternally.
Interesting. It made me envision the universe as a static thing that I am moving through frame-by-frame, and envision conciousness as the entity that was guiding me through the universe, frame-by-frame.
The collapse of the wavefunciton isn't some sort of "Please save us from this craziness" cry for help that frightened physicists in the '20s postulated, it's a necessary part of the model to come close to matching reality.
There never was, there isn't and there never will be anything else but the present. Things change, not time. Thins change in the present. People get old in notime. The beginning and the end of the world is now.
It certainly seems more reasonable than the Copenhagen Interpretation. BTW, I remember also reading about another collapse interpretation that also did away with the observer/measurer; the basic idea was that the Scroedringer equation described the average/longer term wave behaviour, but that it masked shorter term fluctuations that included a very low probability of (spontaneous) collase. For entities at the level of subatomic particles, this doesn't really change much, but on a classical scale the probability of some wave collapsing in a very short time becomes almost certain, and causes the collapse of the entire thing...
Thanks for the link - I'll finish reading it.
M$ is phasing out the whole Time and Date nonsense with windows 2000. that's why in a recent interview when asked if windows 2000 would ship on time, steve ballmer said "That's not an issue."
If this is correct, then several hard questions like, "if I traveled back in time and met myself, would I remember having done it before I left," "...could I become my own father," "... if I killed myself, would I cease to exist" etc. become very easy to explain.
;^)
You would remember having met yourself, since returning to any point that you had previously passed through defines that point as a place where there are two of you: you the way you remember yourself and also the "time traveller you" with the memory of yourself being that way. It's not hard to see why this is a requirement: if you weren't in two places at once when you got to that point the first time, then you can't actually arrive back at the same point.
It also wouldn't be inconsistent to become your own father - simply returning to the old path through platonia at a previous point and marrying your mother while continuing along the same path would be sufficient. Of course, your father would have to remember being you, and you'd have some severe deja vu to deal with as you raise yourself.
This brings up other problems, though. This means that time travel as we have typically conceptuallized it would be extremely difficult. To re-enter history where you remember it you would have to exactly match your velocity through platonia (direction and speed - there's no guarantee that once you start time travel that you're travelling at the same speed as the rest of us!), or else you will end up in a different reality than the one you experienced first. This is how you would explain killing yourself in the past - the positions in platonia where you had killed yourself are in a different location than where you experienced it before (ie. living to travel back in time) and the time travelling version of you would continue on its way, wondering why he still existed. The path you follow through platonia would look like a loop with just a few points of intersection, after which the paths diverge again. This could become very confusing if you ever returned again to another point in platonia further along your original path of travel; you'd wonder why you weren't dead anymore and if feeling guilty were justified.
Logical extensions to this "time-travel" (if it can be called that anymore) scenario include the possibility of travelling to a "place" where you don't remember your past anymore, or to another "place" where people remember you doing something that you never did and won't ever remember doing. They might even have proof that you did it! For example: in their memory you committed a crime, they caught you on tape, and you left to go time travelling, and then the "real" you comes time travelling into their police station - bad luck. This follows from the assumption that there is no place in platonia that you couldn't theoretically go, provided that you exist at that point.
You would need a good map of platonia to do this successfully; I don't think I 'd want to try for it otherwise. Too much opportunity for confusion. To be honest, though, I find this both appealing and horrifying from a religious standpoint. My religion teaches that God sees all of time spread out before Him from eternity to all eternity; if He did have a complete map of platonia then it would be easy for Him to be able to make that claim. On the other hand, having Him "know the end from the beginning" as other scriptures suggest implies that He perhaps controlls our path through the infinite possibilities, which contradicts the notion that I am free to do what I want or accountable for my actions. This discussion can become very interesting extremely quickly. I'll probably spend a good bit of time thinking about this in the near future... assuming that I can really call it that
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
--
Let's not all suck at the same time please
Let's not all suck at the same time please
Oh YEAH! I already wrote a paper on this... and brought it up on slashdot a while back in a thread. And several people were calling me absurd. Oh well... Silly me.>:)
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Basically we are reconciling the problems of our presuppositions by remodelling the universe into some bizarre conceptual form so that it adheres to what we observe. If the concept of time is introducing inconsistencies in what we observe, we must remodel our concept of reality to abandon it. On the surface the physics remain the same, but we have to do something fairly funky with the universe to explain it.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Time is an illusion, lunch time doubly so. - Ford Prefect : Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy
If you'd study some of the eastern religions/philosophies, you'd know what I'm talking about.
That hat must taste good about now...
Why did I come to work early this morning? In fact, why am I putting in any time at work at all, if there isn't any?
I would consider these questions more, but I'm going home...
human://billy.j.mabray/
human://billy.j.mabray/
"Every good system has a backup." -- Dale Hanchey
Because it didn't have shit all over the place.
Whoooa...PUFF PUFF PASSS....whoooa
My project isn't overdue, the client has just narrowed his perception of the universe to three dimensions.
-
<SIG>
"I am not trying to prove that I am right... I am only trying to find out whether." -Bertolt Brecht
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
He did earn a doctorate from the University of Zurich.
:)
That'll teach me to try and be a smart ass before I've had my coffee.
The reason why you figured it out is becuase Einstein already figured it out when he said "Time and space aren't conditions in which we live, but modes in which we think."
Perhaps I should not have used quotes, because that's from memory... but it's pretty close.
Assuming time doesn't exist, why is it that I always get to work late? Is it that I'm already at work and exist at home simultaniously (and thus I really am not late)? If so, they're not paying me enough!!
--
According to their website, Time was first published in 1923.
Of particular note:
1) A person who says that he's seen microwaves go faster than the speed of light.
2) Wormhole theory (with lots of chats with Hawking)
3) If you've ever seen the light experiment where a light source goes through two slits in a wall, causing the light to split, you'll be curious to see what happens when they let only one photon at a time go to the wall. The result? Same as if you let all the photons through. Bars of light.
-Mark
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
I have been toying with the concept of no time for quite some years. I have not, however, gone about it in a mathematical sense. I approached this subject through a model.
First, we can all agree that time follows the same trichotomy axiom that the number line uses.
if x is an integer, then x must be
1. less than zero.
2. zero
3. greater than zero.
if x is a point in time, then x must be
1. less than present time (commonly referred to as the past).
2. present time.
3. more than present time (commonly referred to as the future).
But this requires time to be infinite, which contradicts the idea of an initial time. This means that time is arbitrarily large.
What follows is the key. Since we cannot know if x+1 exists, then part 3 of the axiom fails. Further, we can only experience the present, meaning we may not have truly observed the past. This causes enough doubt of part 1 to lead to failure. Thus we either have no time, since time must fall into the axiom, or time was not properly defined by the axiom and we only have the present time.
That's been my theory about the whole thing. I may be wrong, but I did get a kick out of reading the article this morning that says I may be right as well.
ALL HAIL BRAK!!!
how can I get to work? In order to move from one location to another, I need to have time:
distance = rate x time
If I can't get to work, I can't earn money. If I can't earn money, I can't own a computer. If I can't own a computer, how the hell am I going to read Slashdot?
Try to answer that universal question!
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
I know in my expirience, people (esp. scientists) love to use the expression, "Time/Everything is relative so..." to prove just about any point they want in a conversation. Now I can correct them and say no what doesn't exist can't be relative. I have been trying to figure this one out for a while, it is a somewhat old idea, and it's just plain confusing. I guess someone was smart/bored enough to finally gave at least some proof to it. Oh, yes and that junkmail email address does work, its just the address I use if I post anything, anywhere.
Actually, what he's talking about is configuration space (the space of just positions of particles, in which a quantum wave function is usually defined) not phase space (positions and momenta in classical physics, or the Wigner function in quantum physics). The argument is gone into in some depth in the "one comment" link above - basically what we think of as effects of time (motion, interactions, etc) is somehow embedded in the configuration of particles rather than existing separately.
The interesting difference here from the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (though perhaps implicit in that) is a symmetry in ambiguity between past and future. If you go with Barbour's "Now", there is no well-defined past (rather there are many past Now's that could lead to the current Now) and similarly there is no well-defined future (there are many future Now's that could come from this one). Except that still somehow involves a path through the Nows, which Barbour disavows. But somewhere you have to explain our conscious awareness of time - perhaps that's where the solipsism comes in...
But the idea of there being no unique past makes a lot of sense actually. I do find this a very interesting approach, even though I really still don't understand it.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Why would a 4D creature be stretched out throughout all time? We are 3D creatures, but that doesn't mean that we're stretched out throughout all 3D space - we exist in only some of it. Why wouldn't a 4D creature exist in only some part of time (much as we do)?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Agreed, collapse is a namby-pamby way of explaining things - I'm more convinced by the Bohm-de Broglie interpretation. Probably the point I was alluding to is that entanglement (whether from "collapse" or just plain non-local Hamiltonians) brings down the dimensionality of the state space, i.e. it reduces the number of dice that God gets to play with.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Abian presented the theory that time and mass are equivalent on sci.math and other scientific newsgroups. Basically, he thought that mass is consumed in creating time. Here is a summary of how he came up with this. (No real experimental data -- just a few necessary assumptions mathematically manipulated to make a coherent theory.) He extended his theories further to get the idea that:
1) We should make massive changes to the earth to make it a better place
2) We should bring Venus into a near-earth orbit so we can try out these changes on it first
3) Some of the changes we should make are getting rid of the moon and un-tilting the earth
He also had some non-crackpot mathematical writings on set theory.
For reasons known only to him, James "Kibo" Parry has collected some of Abian's postings, and his own responses to them.
If you were a 4Der you'd exist as a single entity stretched out from the dawn till the end of time. Your present self would simply be your 4D selfs shadow. Similar to how your own shadow is a 2D representation of your 3D self.
it maybe too way out, and depends on your definition of 'exists', but as for objective reality you will find things changing but you can't find a thing or process you can label 'time'. So lets differentiate between 'rates of change' and some subjective metaphysical framework of measuring that change and comparing it with other changes. Part of this confusion, which seems to be rampant here, is the use of 'distance' in physical space as an ANALOGY of change, which we call time, which includes Einsteins use of the "4th dimension", which has some very good uses, but also creates some problems, notably the perennial problem of 'time travel' - which is clearly confusing traveling thru space with something that, uh, doesn't exist! That also relates to the physics problem of the 'direction' of the arrow of time. I can move back and forth in space, but 'time' just inexorably chugs on like an unstoppable juggernaught. Why CAN'T I 'travel' in time? This is also such a fundamental conception (space as an analogy of rates of change) that I suspect it is wired into the brain to happen automatically w/o consciously thinking, maybe related to motor function as an animal moving or running must look ahead and plan for 'future' movements, as in a few movements I'll be over there and must act accordingly, perhaps to escape a predator. Those that couldn't see the near 'future' were eaten. Anyway, those of a more religious or metaphysical persuasion will understand (probably why it isn't flying here, heh) - there's been books with names like The Eternal Now etc. (it doesn't exist in print either :)
In sum, memories exist, the past doesn't; everything is changing, but tomorrow never comes.
Time exists in natural reality as much as centimeters, yen, or yardsticks do. If 'time' existed as an objective reality independant of the human (or animal for that matter) brain why would the bureau of standards have to erect expensive radio stations linked to extremely stable regularly changing events like cesium atoms to tell us what it is? Why would there be so many different calendars pegged to largely arbitrary events, like some dude's birthday or the founding of Rome or whatever.
BTW, be sure to get NIST's Internet Time Synchronizer and bug them to make a Linux version. I use it all the, ahem, time to keep these lousy PC clocks somewhere in the vicinty (isn't that a spacial term meaning close?) of a standard. And another thing: why do we keep having to add leap years and leap seconds to keep us earthlings synchronized with astronomical events like the transit of a particular star on a slowly slowing earth if the time we're so familiar with actually is an absolute?
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Do you live to bring M$ into everything? If you hate them so much...why do you let them consume so much of your time?
very enlightening article even though some of the "science" was....a bit flimsy. obviously the author is hitting on a good idea, but the explanation was a little less than desired. still much enjoyment in reading the article. hope to hear more brilliance from the author soon. gotta go....wait time doesn't exist so i can sleep late.
Quantum theory talks about numerous probability waves, all of which overlap. When you describe an object in QM, you describe ALL possible behaviours and outomes. However, when you perform an observation, only one of those is ever observed.
This is untrue. It also shows an incomplete understanding of quantum mechanics. (My understanding isn't complete either....)
Go back to the famous double-slit experiment. If you have an opaque barrier with two slits in it, and you shine a beam of light (stream of photons) at the barrier, you get an interference pattern. That is to say, the photons act like waves -- starting at the exit points of the slits, they propagate outward. When the waves intersect, the result is the sum of the amplitudes (which are signed, remember) -- the waves may reinforce each other or cancel each other out, in a periodic pattern.
But what happens when you emit a single photon at the opaque barrier? Newtonian physics would have you believe that the photon will go through one of the slits and then continue onward. But this isn't what happens -- instead, you still get an interference pattern! The single photon acts as though it were just a very short stream of photons. Or in other words, the single photon goes through both slits and interferes with itself.
But in addition to this, we can see that observation plays a key role in the outcome of the experiment. Now this is where it gets interesting (to me). If you place a sensor at one of the slits, which is capable of determining whether the photon is going through that slit, then the outcome of the experiment changes. With a sensor on either of the slits, when you send a single photon at the barrier, you don't get an interference pattern any more. The act of observation influences the behavior of the particle which is observed. When the sensor is in place, the photon stops acting like a quantum mechanical wave, and instead acts like a solid object, either going through the first (monitored) slit, or going through the second slit, at random.
Even if the bubble of cosmos we inhabit is unbounded, it has a Value associated with it that represents the total Entropy in which it is embedded. This may be seen as a replacement for Newton's Framework of Time containing the mechanism of the Universe. If this value is referenced (or "paged") by each transaction, there is both sequence and snapshot value incorperated in every action, micro and macro cosmic. This is what "time" is. Experienced Duration is decoupled from Time. Ever attend a whole lecture that sounds like this stuff I just said?
Look at it like this.
Without time, we couldn't see anything, feel anything, hear anything, smell anything, or even taste anything.
Velocity is based on time, so nothing will move.
Light and sound move on a basis of velocity....therefore......
All in all.....nothing would move and nothing would exist. (provided time doesn't exist.)
time is that which I measure with a clock.
First of all, life does not decrease the overall entropy of the universe (although it does locally). And you can't say 'locally is good enough for me', since without a source of low entropy (for life on earth read: the sun), life would come to a standstil.
I don't know, but probably somebody has done the statistical mechanics of superclusters, and I would be highly surprised if they decrease the entropy of the universe.
Lastly, I think that the entropy of black holes is actually huge (Stephen Hawkings has calculated this stuff). So it does not vacuum entropy away. Also, black holes can actually evaporate (in 100 billion years or so), again this was discoverd (invented?) by Hawkings. This doesn't do much for entropy reduction either.
I didn't forget it.
1) If time doesn't exist then the problem doesn't exist either. There is just the discrete set of matter and energy that is right now.
2) If time does exist (it doesn't) then the infinite amount of matter makes conservation really easy - the amount can never change.
BTW: Energy is also imaginary. It's only required if you are forced to push matter around in time.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
I could have sworn cheese was the most powerful force in the universe.
Behold the power of cheese!
Well, according to this article: http://www.physicsweb.org/article/world/12/10/2 he does have a PhD, for whatever it's worth. I kind of respect people who try to do physics as a hobby, although it's hard to imagine that anyone could have enough spare time or resources to make a significant contribution. Let the guy have his fun, what's the harm in it?
First of all you'd need 12 numbers, not 10 to describe the location of 3 points in Newton's universe. Maybe he assumes that all 3 points exist at the same time. But he should state these assumptions, especially in an article about time.
In Newton's universe, there is absolute time. So if you're specifying the the state of the universe at a particular time, why would you want three separate times?
His rules for Triangle Land would sweep out a plane, not a pyramid. Maybe he's leaving some other assumptions out. It would be useful to see the diagram he refers to to find what defines the axis extending from his Alpha point.
You just failed to understand what he was saying. Okay, imagine a standard a set of standard xyz axes. The x axis is the distance between particles 1 and 2, the y axis is the distance between 1 and 3, and the z axis is the distance between 2 and 3.
So the point (x, y, z) is a point in Triangle land, for all positive x, y, z. Which means that Triangle land is composed of the entire first octant of a standard 3 dimensional space, with each point representing a possible state. The 'apex' is at (0, 0, 0), which is where all particles exist at the same point (or more specifically, where the distances between the particles are all zero).
His mention of a particle's spherical wave function misses the point that the function breaks down when observed. It then takes on a single value. The path taken by the Alpha particle sweeps out a sphere until you look. It then becomes a particular path. Schrodinger's Cat only exists as a wave function until you open the box. After that it's just an ordinary cat.
I don't think you understand the uncertainty principle very well. For a wave-particle, the product between the uncertainties of the position and the momentum can never be below a certain value. So the more you know about the position, the less you know about the momentum.
But a straight track in a cloud chamber imples that you are learning both position and momentum, since you can extrapolate the rest of the track from a small part of it. This is in direct contrast with the uncertainty principle.
What if this theory gave a theoretical basis to something that could not be predicted from existing theory, rather than observation? The author suggests that maybe this model will permit the cosmological constant to be derived theoretically. IANATP (I Am Not A Theoretical Physicist), so I can't speak to just how easy/likely/possible this would be, but if this does turn out to be the case it would be a point in favour of the theory.
BTW, it seems strange to me to use the word "predict" in relation to a theory that abolishes the concept of time. When a scientist speaks of "prediction", she usually doesn't mean a statement about an event that will take place in the future, but rather a statement about an event whose outcome is unknown from the point of view of the predictor. This applies to all future events, but it also applies, at least imaginatively, to any past event whose actual outcome was not taken for granted when the theoretical "prediction" was made. Maybe a word like "idiodiction" would capture the idea better.
"The deep-fried Mars bar is a symptom of a wider crisis." -- Nutritionist Ann Ralph, on the Scottish diet
The measurements from a single time point are not enough to fix the state of the weather model, so the model state is estimated from all the data gathered over a 24-48 hour period. One approach (4D-var) is to run the model forward, note the differences between the predictions and the observed data at each stage, then propagate these difference fields backwards in time to produce an improved estimate of the initial conditions. After several trips forward and back, the model should coverge to its best estimate of the historical path.
Cramer's model is rather like that: the measurement system is a vital boundary condition which changes our best estimate of the entire history, so Cramer assimilates it by propagating the mismatch backwards and forwards to convergence. This is a great way to picture the Copenhagen interpretation, underlining its insistence that an experimental quantum mechanical system is not completely specified until the macroscopic measurement apparatus is specified.
But I do prefer to think of TI as how an imaginary computer might cope with assimilating the asynchronous information into a model, rather than having to invest too much ontological reality into his 'propose' and 'accept' waves.
For myself, I believe the most fundamental thing about QM is that it forces us to abandon the idea of a space-time of completely independent points -- the universe just doesn't contain that much information -- and instead there is always a sharing of information between a point and its neighbours. So I'm not too bothered that there appear to be, at the least, a non-local superselection rule connecting a quantum object and its measuring device. Treating them as probabilistically independent is an approximation -- useful, but wrong.
If we now alter our approximation to reflect the interdependence, we should not be surprised that we must also alter our best estimate of what the test object is doing/has done. But this is a sudden change in our knowledge (epistemology), not a sudden change in reality (ontology). Doing so, we will infer a new, consistent trajectory for the combined object+apparatus system, which is just like the final version of history left in Cramer's TI, once all the to-ing and fro-ing is done: a smooth, deterministic evolution, without any sudden jumps or discontinuities, and no identifiable quantum measurement 'event'.
((Footnote: to hedge my bets, I should also say that I'm quite impressed by Zurek's decoherence calculations, which I suppose support MWI; though I'm not sure whether they help much with EPR))
Hasn't anyone read that book? All this stuff is explained in detail, and IMHO, quite satisfactorily.
You can buy the book from amazon.
Don't forget The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory" by Brian Greene. It's amazing.
There are *no* areas in Classical General Relativity when time ceases to exist.
If somebody has a relative velocity with respect to you near the speed of light (only massless things can actually have a relative velocity of the speed of light) the you will percieve time to move slower for that person, just as they will percieve time to move slower for you.
Again you will percieve time to move slower for sombody that is closer to a strong gravitational field than you are. If you take the limit of infinite space-time curvature then this looks like time stops. (But also the theory breaks down - while you can learn a lot by modelling black-holes etc by singularities, a singularity in the thoery does mean that you are applying it outside it's range of strict applicability).
Neither of these is time *not existing*, at the most looking like it's stopped, but the concept still makes sense. Even if there is something 'more fundemental' explanation of what time is, the evidence for the current models is so strong that that the new explanation will have to look just like the old one in most situations we can observe (just like special rel looks like newtonian mechanics if you move slowly enough).
Sorry for being so pedantic.
>>Meaning that there would be an infinite amount of matter spread across the so-called space-time continuum. Now that's an ugly situation.
>Only if the universe is infinite.
Or if time is infinite.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Hmmm.... Wasn't there a patent clerk around 1905 who published some physics papers, that he did sort of as a hobby, while he wasn't busy reading patents.
I think his name was Albert something....
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Benjamin(sp?) Franklin did most/all of his studies as a hobbist and he's lauded as a world renown scientist. There are others as well, but I don't feel like spending time to list them all.
>Each observation collapses the wave function, ..
>resetting the clock, and it is possible by this
>means to delay indefinitely the expected
>transition to the lower state.
So if you watch a pot closely enough, it really will never boil?
AHA! So God DOES roll dice! heh
One obvious feature of a universe like this would be that time travel of any kind would be impossible. There would be an infinite number of states you could have come from or could go to.
So our parents were right when we asked why something was and they said "because it just is". Maybe they should have said "because anything else would be much less probable".
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
If the integral (as you put it) describes what we observe better, isn't it a better candidate for "reality" than the function itself?
Though to say one describes reality better than the other suggests that they aren't the same function at all. I think there's something else going on here. My take (though IANAP) is that he's saying that influence (rather than use the loaded phrase cause & effect) doesn't follow time, though it may appear to. To put it in terms of integration, time is not the apropriate variable to integrate with respect to, which is why there's a difference between the integral & the function itself.
Though frankly, he lost me when he started talking about a meaning inherant in a particular configuration, and how that meaning contributes to our perception of time.
But that doesn't mean time doesn't exist, at least any more than "Wigner's Friend" does. In multi-space (or whatever the term is) we may proceed through all possible trajectories, but in experiential space, we only live in one of them. True, there is probably a branching tree of "I", each with different "leaves" (i.e., where I am right now). But that doesn't invalidate the others. It just means that I don't percieve them. But it also doesn't invalidat my perceptions.. They aren't here. They have "split the scene". And they won't be back (unless it's a lattice instead of a tree, in which case I won't be aware of the re-joining).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I read the article, and attempted to wrap my mind around it throughout the day. The point is, if this is true, and time really *doesn't* exist in the purest sense of the word, it doesn't really matter. Time, throughout history, has merely been a convenient way for us to measure length between things.
:)
Consider that "time" is different at every single point in the universe. We, on earth, measure time by how long it takes the earth to turn around once, and complete its orbit around the sun. When we say that a year on say, Mercury would be X days long, we are completely wrong. If beings lived on Mercury, they would measure "time" differently. The same with any other planets in other solar systems. They'd use their sun.
To sum it up, I don't have that deep an understanding of astrophysics, so I can't understand this fully, but it seems to me that even if this is true, it just doesn't matter.
-- Simon Speichert
"Time is an arbitury concept created by man to regulate the illusion that he calls reality"
Famous quote by some one. Anyone know who?
I haven't seen anybody recite the reason proposed by the experimenter who performed the photon interference pattern "trick". Interestingly, it was his theory that the interference (for the single-photon demonstration) was actually being caused by photons from parallel universes, as I recall.
Your last paragraph is pretty much correct. There are some quite plausible and insightful ways of looking at the wave-particle duality, which many physicists reject simply because the math is even tougher. People like Barbour fall into the "post-physicist" category of people who got into physics, decided they were more interested in cosmology than, say, improving the yield of atomic weapons, and watched their grants dry up (that's my guess, anyway). In any case, the opinions are different, but the equations are the same.
De Broglie (that's right, the original wave-particle guy) interpreted the interference pattern in a fairly straightforward way: each particle has a wavy sort of "force field" around it which interacts with itself and other particles' "force fields" and produces a number of weird effects, notably that particles tend to fall into wavy interference patterns all by themselves. More interestingly, particles seem to undergo chaotic, seemingly random "quantum jumps" when their wave functions get into a tangle, and one doesn't need a lot of random functions from nowhere to explain the behavior (it's deterministic, just like old-time physics).
Unfortunately, the upshot of the mathematics turned out to include non-local effects (eg the quantum FTL "communication" everybody here likes so much), and the theory was ignored. In the years since then there have been quite a body of results showing that the Bohm-de Broglie interpretation makes sense, but the math is too complex to be useful - so the main interest is to philosophers and cosmologists, and a lot of physicists just sort of shake their heads when questioned about the details of QM, and rail on about crackpots whenever someone throws an equation they can't solve.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
We have grown so used to the concept of space-time that Einstein brought about that it seems very strange to go back to thinking of just space. But what Barbour is talking about (as far as I can tell) isn't exactly "just space", it's more the "phase space" in which every particle in the universe can potentially take up every possible position - as he says, if there are only 2 particles this gives a 1-dimensional universe, with 3 particles you have 3 dimensions, with 4 six dimensions, and in general with N > 4 you have 3 N - 6 dimensions. For a universe with 10^70 or so particles, we're talking about a 3x10^70 dimensional universe. And it's even worse than that in a sense because the number of particles is not some fixed number, but can itself be any number from 1 to infinity - and it's still worse when you get into the extra dimensions of string theory etc - a very strange space for our universe to live in!
Now how is this actually relevant to reality? Quantum cosmology is still a very speculative field - it may make some testable predictions about black holes, but I suspect there's not going to be much about it we can really experiment with for at least a few hundred, and maybe thousands of years. It's a fun area to play. What does it actually mean that "time is nowhere to be found" in the theories? It either means that what we experience as time is somehow deeply embedded in the configurations of particles in space itself (which is what Barbour seems to be trying to argue) or else it means the theory is wrong or at least incomplete. Personally I'd not be surprised if these theories, elegant as they are, are still incomplete. But it's certainly interesting to discuss the implications if they are right...
Energy: time to change the picture.
There was an interesting short story by Robert Henlein with a similar theme. (I can't remember the name of the story now, but I believe it was the first story he ever published).
The premise was that we are 4 dimensional creatures, extruded into a worm-like shape along the time dimension, with the beginning of the worm marking our time of birth and the end of the worm marking our time of death. A guy in the story figures out how to measure the length of this worm using a method analogous to echo sounding, letting him predict the time of people's death. Very interesting reading, and there may be some truth in it.
Here's my (only semi-serious) theory:
Our univers is just the graph of a four-dimentional equation on God's TI-89 calculator, which He is doing for His CSci class on simulated universes. While we preceive time as moving forward, to Him it is just one of the four dimentions of the graph.
He hits clear and graphs the function again with slightly different input. He decides to make gravity repulsive rather than attractive. He finds that this creates a universe devoid of life. "Doh! I'm gonna fail this exam," he thinks.
-Kenton Varda
This might be slightly off topic, but since we are disscussing time, has anyone heard theory about the quantization of time? My thoughts:
Assume that space is quantized, and that there is an upper speed limit to the universe (light?). Then the smallest amount of time possible is the time it takes light to travel the smallest distance possible in space. Any believers?
Ah, not so young grasshopper.
Hate to tell you this, but
> Consider this. If both past and future time exist and the objects that existed in that time also exist in
> those times then every moving particle in the universe is essentially a string of matter extending across time.
> Meaning that there would be an infinite amount of matter spread across the so-called space-time
> continuum. Now that's an ugly situation.
You have forgotten a key element in the whole equation of matter. In short, the law of conservation of energy and matter would cut out that argument.
ALL HAIL BRAK!!!
Do I have 3 Windows machines running alpha debuggers updated daily, and yet not reboot for weeks at a time? you sir, are a shithead.
You wear your shoes on your feet and hamburgers eat people.
Ahhhh, gotcha.
Does this mean I've fallen for a joke, and I've once again made a fool of myself by giving a serious answer to a satirical question?
-----
...and can be found in "The Past Through Tomorrow", a collection of his shorter stories (also featuring the story "Methuselah's Children", which is I believe the first appearance of Lazarus Long)
Jay (=
Time is an illusion. It prevents from all things happens at the same time. Greetings from Brazil ! Roberto Valle rvalle@compuland.com.br
Papers like this are great and everything, but they lack substance, specificly because all reasoning is done on a philosophical basis.
He explains his reasoning for thinking that time is a state of mind. He includes references to quantum mechanics and the universe on a cosmological scale, but when it comes down to it, its philosphical reasoning. Logic is great. Nothing could be done without logic. However logic requires specific facts and examples to back it up. I consider this philosophy because all it does is tell you to look at the universe in a certain way, and maybe this will explain certain things but offers no real evidence for why they would be explained.
Here's a question that pops up in astronomy a lot that I consider to be on the same level (some what) of this paper: "Are there alternate universes?"
The answer is simply that: If there are alternate universes, and they influence our universe in any way, then that makes them part of our universe. However if there are alternate universes, and they don't influence us in any way, then they don't exist in any respect to us, and are therefore not worth worrying about.
The point of this analogy is that the question causes you to look at the universe a certain way. This certain point of view is completely void of any facts or proof that would uphold their model of the universe.
I feel this paper or essay or exerpt (or whatever it is) is the same thing.
In reality, if you read his bio, the 'patent clerk' bit was more the hobby9 especially in his bosses opinon ;-), done so he could put food on the table (and have a table to go under it).
'not yet employed in a professional capacity' 'hobby'
OK, so am I the only one with a headache after reading just the /. synopsis?
Let's face it, time must exist, I didn't just type that tomorrow now did I?
Well, it's *one* way of interpreting the model to fit our percieved reality... there are also things like the many-worlds interpretation which avoid collapse entirely... There's also the fact that QM is a incomplete theory (not a GUT), so who knows what may be missing...
...
;-)
Here's a totally alternative Thursday afternoon theory for you, coming from a mad.scientist
Maybe there's no collapse, but subatomic particles are simply the attractors of the universe's quantum dynamics?! No navel/keyboard blurring there!
This guy's been doing the circuit for his new book.
There is an interview and a discussion of his stuff at
Edge.
Spaceballs! Oh shit, there goes the planet.
Q: What time is it when an elephant sits on your watch?
A: A high probability of a subsequent state-path in which you purchase a new watch.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
not sure if anyones mentioned this yet, but EDGE has a feature interview with Mr. Barbour on their site at the moment. interesting read if you're intrigued by his concept....
Oh no...question too deep...must...stop...pondering...or...brain...will ...implode...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The minor one's been mentioned already - independent theoretical physicist - but let's give the benefit of the doubt here. Not being employed might be a choice.
But the major trigger is the following: he spends most of the press release explaining configuration space, yet the stunning claim is about time or its absence. Configuration space is standard stuff. Physicists use it all over the place. They use it with time; they use it without time. The use of configuration space, alone, doesn't explain anything towards getting rid of the time dimension.
Conclusion: he's obfuscating the question. He has an idea, perhaps, but he doesn't want it examined too closely.
It started at the big bang, or the Alpha position of the timeless universe. I'm now confused about the Alpha point now, though. If there is no time, who's to say that the universe actually "started" there...and why would that be? Couldn't it theoretically "start" from any state?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Unfortunately, while it was a spectacular success for string theory, it's also been pretty much the only success of string theory.
'Course, it's tough stuff -- if Ed Witten has problems with the math, then what chance do us mere mortals have?
"Time" does not exist. The concept of time is simply observations of the motion of particles.
The moment "now" is an infinitesimally small line between the future and the past. If you make the moment "now" smaller and smaller, it disappears! No "now", only what is coming and what has been.
Yes, you can measure "time" by saying that "let N vibrations of this Cesium atom equal a unit called 'second'". Then at some point, set the counter to zero and measure it again after some event has happened. Then divide by N and you get "seconds", ie. the "time" which elapsed during that event. This result is always relative to the point when the counter was zeroed, and is therefore not an absolute value. Thus there is no absolute time, ie. there is no global accumulator so to speak which would just tick on and on. Thus the concept of time is artificial, and time does not exist.
better yet...read 'godel, escher, bach' by douglas hofstadter and be convinced there can be no theory of everything...
If you want to read an in-depth interview with Julien Barbour about this topic then I suggest that you visit this site:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_ culture/barbour/barbour_index.html
And for those who are so quick to knock on the author's credentials I remind you that some of physics greatest contributions came from an obscure patent clerk. Besides, Barbour's background hardly seems to be that of a dilettante's: http://www.julianbarbour.com/biography. html
Arguments as to the nature of time based on notions from calculus make the a priori assumption that time is isomorphic to a continuum of points. The best you should try to argue is that IF time works the way YOU think it does, then this guy is wrong.
Prove that time exists? Hmm... OK, consider the following.
:) It is the existence of time that allows me to consitently find my car without having to check each of these locations every time I need to go somewhere.
:)
:)
Without time, it is impossible to describe the location of any object. Let's use my car as an example. My car is located in the third parking space from the front door of my office. That description of location is meaningless, however, without time. 12 hours ago, that same location was an empty slab of concrete. 1000 years ago, that location was most likely a patch of prairie grass. When I get ready to go home, it is not enough to know that my car is in that location, I need to know that it is in that location at 5:00pm tonight.
12 hours ago, my car was outside my girlfriend's apartment. 6 hours ago, it was parked in my driveway. 20 minutes from now it will most likely be in a McDonald's drive-thru.
Now, I like my girlfriend and enjoy spending time with her. My car makes it much easier and faster to get to where she is. I believe I've demonstrated pretty well that finding my car relies heavily on the existence of time. Therefore, if you want me to accept the idea that time does not exist, along with the resulting negative impact on my sex life, I'm going to need some VERY solid proof indeed.
OK, so that doesn't actually PROVE the existence of time. That's OK, I'd say that given the wide acceptance of the idea that time exists, the burden of proof in this matter falls on the shoulders of the "time doesn't exist" crowd.
There is no time, its just the Matrix telling you there is
Okay, someone go right ahead and correct me if I simply misunderstand what is being said in the article.
But if I do understand, it seems to me as if there is still some basis for measuring time. The author mentions that the universe is simply the transition from one state to another, and history is the record in the present state of what has happened.
But we still have time -- I can look at my watch, and find how long it takes for me to get from point A to point B. Could it be that under this theory we are simply measuring time as a number of state changes? That is, an event that takes twice as many state changes takes twice as long to occur.
If so, what's the difference between this and current theories? If not, I fail to understand how the author can explain stopwatches.
my roommate and I had a lengthy discussion the other day. We were stoned of course :)~ and were discussing space... it is infinite right? well, what if it isn't? what does the end of space look like?
:)
its affect was something similar to what I got when I read this... My brain started spinning and I had to sit down heeh, problem with today was, I was sober...
hehe
Although I'm arguing that the above metioned article is or isn't valid science, I don't
/. editors can pass this #1 criteria... /. editors on this point)
think that being a physicist has any very much to do with the ability to judge "newsworthiness"
of scientific blurbs that occur in mainstream press articles that have no details provided,
unless, of course, if he/she is involved with that research.
A particularly astute visionary, Richard Feynman (who by the way was also a physicist) observed
that often what passes as scientific judgement is often a thinly diguised religion.
As evidence, he observed the written record of the discovery of a "new" particles in the literature.
Basically, looking back he discovered that early experimental results that could have indicated the
existance of such particles were routinely dismissed as experimental error. After more
"support" for the particle existed, the experimental error started to be tracked and
eventually a "new" paradigm emerged.
Feynman surmised that there would have been even more historical reasearch to support the "new"
paradigm earlier, but noted that some researcher often "threw-out" experiments that didn't verify
their theories or fit their agenda. So much for the integrity of scientific judgement.
That's not to say that scientists (or physicists) are alone in this type of behaviour, it's human.
It's only natural to have such a filter. Since there is only a finite amount of time in a day,
people often build up "BS" filters that help to keep them from wasting time in probablistically
non-productive pursuits.
On the other hand people with journalism training tend to recognize this type of bias and tend to be
better prepared to compensate for it. So IMNSHO, I think a person with a background in journalism
who also happens to know a bit about science is much more qualified to be a science editor.
(BTW, that's not me...)
I'm not saying that having a physics background isn't useful, but I seriously doubt that physics
background alone make anyone more qualified to be an editor than your typical techno-geek that
watches the discovery channel on a regular basis and is a sceptic and has good BS detector.
(and that's not me either...)
However, having said that, techno-geeks that watch the discovery channel aren't necessarily qualified
to be editors (or physicist) either, it's just that neither is a very good indicator of being a
good editor.
But people who can critically read and comment on things that they vehmenantly disagree with,
well, that's a good start... However, the ability to take criticism because you know that not
everyone will agree with your decision to run with an article, that's probably the #1 criteria...
From what I've seen so far most of the
(having edited a newspaper before, I can definitly sympathize with the
-slew
(oh yeah, I studied physics too, but not volunteering for any jobs...)
dude einstein and hawking have been hinting at this for years. just read "a breif history of time". it's all there for you. I belive neither of them just came out and said it because of the drastic effects it would have on people. Just how either of them outright saying god doesn't exist would scare tons of people, and enrage many others. Einstein was Jewish, and when he realised that some of his predictions made it impossible for a god to exist he changed them, and they no longer make sense. probably in fear.
You quite obviously didn't get it.
I like this idea - Time is kinda like fuel for the universe. Without it, the universe is just up on blocks in a garage somewhere, a useless, static lump.
But put some Time in the tank, start the engine with a Big Bang, and you've got yourself a happenin' Universe - at least until Time runs out!
I read the article a few times, and as far as I can gather it's the typical result when someone is asked to write an article on a narrow theoretical area for a wide audience - the basis of the theory can't be explained in a single article with no equations, and the explanation that is included ends up sparking more obfuscation than enlightenment (maybe he did target it for slashdot after all).
The basics I get are that 1) the first section is "configuration space for dummies", a quick definition by example which unfortunately neglects to mention that this is a fairly standard construct for anyone doing QM with more than one particle. 2) He's mainly pointing out that QM has a lot of dirty underwear, in that it runs everything as a function of time and classical space, even when relativity made these parameters look pretty subjective a long, er, time ago.
The common interpretation of QM is that the future is fuzzy, but the "collapse" of the wave function makes the past totally fixed! So, time is not merely a coordinate, but a magical quantity that does what no physicist has ever done: make the $%^% randomness go away. That, from the standpoint of symmetry, is suspicious. It means that QM isn't time-reversible, the way our old Newtonian equations were.
I believe he focuses on configuration space in order to point out that a single state of the universe could have arisen from multiple past "timelines" through the space, so in fact the oft-quoted and difficult-to-refute "many worlds" interpretation, which is really the "many futures" interpretation, could be turned around to include a "many pasts" interpretation as well. The result is not that time is removed from the theory, but that it's less of a unique absolute, i.e. it's not the magic quantity that makes indeterminacy collapse into definite, immutable history the way Ye Olde Copenhagen interpretation does.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
There's actually a footnote that says this is sometimes referred to as the Watched Pot Effect :)
This article doesn't sound very new especially since I've played with ideas like that since high school and everyone knows there are no original thoughts...
Simply step back from physics etc. and consider a really basic idea:
All state of "conscieness" is embedded in tangible parts of the universe. [Eliminate religious nonsense in other words (see bottom)] If that is the case then it has the following neat effect: time doesn't need to exist, there are simply little bundles of state that encapsulate within them "now" - including what we percieve as the past. The "future" is irrelevant.
And to top it all off it explains why being this point in existance we "think" we "experience" time. It also explains why we can't interact with other "universes", seems to explain some of the issues that exist in quantum physics, explains why determinism/non-determinism upset so many people, and to top it all of explains why English is a very broken language - it has verbs. (Yes yes useful abstractions that they are.)
[Oh and since we're talking old theories: God does exist. He is an idea that many people believe in and as a result can actually have real impact, the way any firmly believed idea can.]
If Time doesn't exist then DEFINITELY trees do NOT make a noise if they fall in the forest and nobody is there to listen. Its all a perception thing. when i'm right i am sooooo right *5* *5* -bobby
Potatos! They are the secret masters of reality.
Yes I know its the penultimate of AC trolling, but I'd like to offer at least one definitive spelling of Shilosdinger. Here goes:
Schrodinger (with 2 little dots over the "o")
I don't know why the the little dots over the "o" are there in Scrotadinner, but his parents must of thought it important at one point (in time). Please be more careful next time you spell Schrodrieinger.
This sounds like universal solipsism. Instead of "I am the Universe", he proposes that "Universe is one".
Barbour comes across as someone who has a pet theory and has been spending an inordinate amount of time persuading himself of its viability. His 'appeals to authority' are unconvincing.
By avoiding causality and fate in his discussion he has sidestepped the most interesting implications of his proposal. I suspect that the reason is that he does not like where that avenue of thought leads.
I'm unimpressed. We had better late-night bull sessions when I was in university.
I saw the Nova episode last night. The guy in question, I forget his name, claimed that he was able to transmit information at superluminal speeds via quantum tunneling.
The microwaves were not being sent thru a different medium but were being blocked. Yet because of tunneling, a signal was observed on the blocked path prior to the signal being observed on the unblocked path.
His results are, as you might imagine, somewhat controversial.
Steve M
Great!
Now I don't have to pay off my student loan.
Well, that sort of skips over the problem. If all the "memory spaces" are congruent, then time has an arrow, and is effectively linear. In teh terms of the article, if the shape of the multispace is such that only one path is possible, then all memories are congruent, and that explains the match between perception and quantum probability. This, however, would be wrong.
Anyway, what happened to quantum causality. Doesn't that make an arrow. Anyway, I think this was interesting, and empty.
A few thoughts on some comments in the article:
Does time really exist?
Well, I contend it does, but you can subscribe to whatever you like.
TIME seems to be the most powerful force, an irresistible river carrying us from birth
to death. To most people it is an inescapable part of life, a fundamental element of the
Universe.
True enough, once you start reading TIME magazine, it's an addiction. You see it's colourful
pages as a child, and rip them out to your parents dismay. And if you are important enough,
they will write about your death. TIME has many readers, and probably likes to think itself a
"fundamental element of the Universe". But I disagree.
But I think that time is an illusion.
Hmm, that would be tricky, a 3D holographic magazine perhaps?
---
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
Meaning no disrespect to Hemos, CmdrTaco, etc., etc., Slashdot realy needs a "science editor." Someone with an appreciable knowledge of science. This article is quite a heap of crap, from a scientific methedology standpoint (to say nothing of the lousy "physics" involved).
Anyway, most of the time, the /. editors put decent ideas and stories up, but from time to time, things like this get through. This story is filled with misinterpretations and omissions of quantum and general relativisitc theory.
One does not have to know evrything there is to know about all fields of science to determine what is valid, but one needs a basic understanding of each fields underlying principles as well as the use of scientific reasoning. These skills and knowledge one can learn from a decent undergraduate eduaction in the "hard sciences" (Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Astronomy, etc.). An undergradute eduaction in these fields is not the ONLY to recieve this knowledge, either. They are just the ones classically recognized as providing a decent platform onto which one can learn about other types of science. The anaylitical skills learned from these fields allow one to anaylize other's scientific arguments based upon their scientific merit and reasoning.
I would like to propose that, in particular, Physics gives an excellent background on other sciences as well as the needed training in scientific reasoning. Hey a guy can have a small bias can't he? :-) Anyway, the concepts learned in an undergraduate physics program have applications in almost every scientific and engineering field (uh oh, I said the dreaded E-word :-) One learns about the scientific method, Newtonian Mechanics, Thermodynamics and energy, Quantum Mechanics, Electricity and Magnatisim, Materials Physics, and Relativity. This stuff won't tell you everything there is to know about Biology, Chemical Engineering, Computer Science, or whatever, but it does get you quite a bit along the way.
I am sure other disciplines teach the analytical thought processes and most of the topics I mentioned. However, physics is the study of how everything works, so it is kind of broad :-)
Anyway, I'm sorry if I sound like a snot. I'm not trying to berate other sciences. I actually think that the skills any science teaches are essential in being able to discern what is valid and what is not, at least from a scientific viewpoint.
As you can probably tell, I am a physicist. I am at the Depatment of Physics at Case Western Reserve University. Email me if you want. It should be easy enough to figure out my real address. I'll get off my soapbox now :-).
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
I just flipped through my quantum books and can't find a reference for it, though. It sounds like I'd have better luck with the solid state or Atomic&Molecular books. Anyway, I still think that while resorting to an everything is always a probability smudge is a simple and pretty view, it doesn't feel fundamental.
OTOH, I'm not a Nobel Laureate yet, so who am I to talk? :-)
Perhaps you don't need to consider the rotational momentum. I seem to recall that there is some doubt over what current theories predict for universes that contain one rotating object (somethimes seen as a rotating bucket filled with water, alone in the universe. Will the water form a parabola?). This is, I think, Mach's Principle and there is/was some debate about its meaning.
The author's concepts are still in the fuzzy and less than well-defined state. Let me see if I can clarify.
;) and manipulate. The concepts of the three dimensions or and other measurable event is merely our brains labeling of the interaction of particles to increase or decrease the probability of different configurations of Platonia.
The author is stating that the universe exists not as a stream of connected events but as a steam of collapsed probability waveforms. Whenever any observer takes a measurement of a now the waveform collapses to a specific set of platonia (the author's title for all set of all possible configurations of all particles in the universe). Since we as living things are, fairly constantly, observing the universe at large, the waveforms collapse at very similar configurations. Our brains (adapted to find patterns in chaos to enable us to have the evolutionary advantage of reasonably predicting the future for extremely short intervals) to link the events together as a causality stream. When in fact the most that causality is, is the maximizing of certain probabilities that we commonly associate with other events.
In truth our perception of space-time itself is nothing more than our brain linking measurable qualities of macroscopic configurations of particles into a framework we can understand (well most of us
And now the poor attempt at the math.
Each configuration of set P(Platonia) has associated probality p(for sake of arguement lets assume that it is an adaptive value) and a series of measurable qualities Mn that define obeservable phenomenom for a given now. so that
pn=Pn/(Mn-M(n-1))
Mn=E[all measurable qualities of all particles in the universe for any given NOW].
So that for
(Mn-M(n-1))
as the perviced time between any two observations decreases delta M decreases and approches zero yielding an almost certainty.
(of course some of you who actually got past mor than the first year of calculas can elaborate. )
Weird_one
---------
Then again I could just have been hallucinating.
"Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy
This isn't a new perception, nor is it anything out of the ordinary. Time is one of those things that exists however, despite whether you think it fundamental does or not. It's like telling a kid that has already burnt themselves by touching a hot pan handle that it's not really the pan handle being hot, it's the fact that you touch it and it conducts. A better article to go over could have been chosen.
Light is NOT RELATIVE!!!!
Um. This entire theory is really old ('50s) and has been the subject of countless sci-fi stories, treated in many different ways. I would assume geeks everywhere have alreayd read this theory, which BTW lead to much more interesting treatments.
It's also mostly innacurate, being 10% physics, 90% philosphy.. It's a nice intro to some concepts, but don't beleive it's the gospel truth. (espeically since there is no gospel truth in this area).
Ahhh. The Objectivity of the Scientific Establishment. "He disagrees with us, therefore he's a kook".
if time doesn't exist... why is it every 4 hours windows reboots itself? you can set your watch by that $hit.
Stupid people do stupid things... Smart people outsmart each other... --System of a Down
I've never understood/accepted the supposed increase in entropy (2nd law). It seems to me that factors such as gravity, and nuclear fusion, not to mention the more interesting self-organizational behaviours of matter (such as the emergence of life) tend to make the universe clumpier and more structured rather than less so. Plus if the big bang is cyclic, wouldn't that rather put a damper on this "law"? And what happens when stuff gets sucked into black holes - nature's entropy vaccuum cleaners, perhaps. Seems more like a rule of thumb, applicable in certain circumstances, rather than a "law". Call me King Canute.
"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so".
Douglas Adams saw this one coming -- THHGTTG
First some background. It is clear to anyone who has studied Special Relativity and/or Quantum Physics that the "common" perception of time just doesn't work. Special Relativity shows that two events that are simultaneous according to one person are not simultaneous according to a person with different motion. Quantum Physics shows that, on a subatomic scale, time is non-linear, and can even be percieved to run in reverse.
It's clear that we need a new concept of time that incorporates what we currently know. Barbour offers us one. It's not earth shattering, since it offers no new verifiable predictions, but it's a viewpoint that might just help someone else come up with something earth shattering. Rather than standing on the shoulders of giants, he peeks over and takes a picture so the rest of us can see.
----
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Now, *how* the universe could have started with such an incredibly low entropy (== high order) is anybody's guess;
There is a very elegant argument about this in Penrose's "The Emporer's New Mind". Essentially, he shows that the probability that the Universe would start with such low entropy is much higher than the probability that the solar system would just spontaneously come into existence. He uses this to justify presenting another mechanism involving gravity tensors in which low entropy is a consequence of general relativity, not a statistical phenomenon.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
I don't think you can dismiss Barbour's ideas so easily. The nature of time is something you have to consider very carefully in quantum gravity. Rovelli has written some papers stressing this, and why he thinks it is problematic to consider time as a variable in QG. I know that other quantum gravity guys don't dismiss Barbour as a kook (e.g. Baez and Smolin), and actually Smolin respects Barbour greatly.
So, we have this particular interpretation of QM contradicting thermodynamics?
>why do we keep having to add leap years and leap seconds? ..."
Without GPS, you can determine where you are on the planet by sighting astronomical objects. Lattitude is easy. Longitude is easy IF YOU KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS. Without leap seconds and leap years, the clocks and calenders would slowly drift.
"In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII was informed by his astronomer, Christopher Clavius, that the first day of spring had fallen on March 10 of that year. Since the first day of spring had fallen on March 21 in 325 A.D. when the Council of Nicaea had established the dates for the holidays in the Christian calendar, Gregory felt it was important to put the seasons back in the same places in the calendar. He therefore declared that the next day after October 4, 1582, was October 15, 1582. He also adopted a revision in the calendar
Details at http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/leapsec.html maia.usno.navy.mil/leapsec.html www.as.wvu.edu/~jel/skywatch/skw9602a.htm and www.mitre.org/research/y2k/docs/LEAP.html or do a google search on leap seconds and leap years.
Which is exactly what I describe. The first case, you are not observing the photon directly, so the probability waves don't collapse. In the second case you are, so they do.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If that is true, then perhaps Asimov should get some credit for thinking up the "Prime Radiant" from the Foundation series. If you're curious about details, I suggest you check out Asimov's last book: Forward the Foundataion, which gives insight.
Basically, for those without the time, the Prime Radiant was a device that implemented complex chaotic equations to describe current events around the galaxy and predict -- with extreme accuracy -- the probability of a certain event occuring in the future.
Interesting, and worth a read!
Posted by the Proteus
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
The guy just seems to be trying to say that he thinks of the universe as a very large state space with a probability assigned to every possible configuration of particles. OK, fine. But what do the probabilities mean? Probability of what? That a particular point in configuration space will follow another? Oops, that can't be it, since without time there is no sequence of events, no matter what the frame of reference. Therefore nothing can ever "happen". Kind of boring, if you ask me. So at this very point in nontime, I exist with a lot of false memories and a lot of evidence to corroborate them, but no time to contemplate them. Survey says...Kook! Now a more realistic theory is that our "universe" is but a speck of dirt in the hair of a very big Border Collie who is about to get a bath.
I haven't believed in time as something real in ages (no pun intended). Actually, I first got the idea watching an episode of DS9 where the subject was raised by some alien. At most, I would accept the idea that time is a consumable - once you use it, it's gone. No going back to check on it later or jumping ahead to see how it's progressing. Kind of a bummer from the time-travel perspective, but it really sorts out some tough issues.
Consider this. If both past and future time exist and the objects that existed in that time also exist in those times then every moving particle in the universe is essentially a string of matter extending across time. Meaning that there would be an infinite amount of matter spread across the so-called space-time continuum. Now that's an ugly situation.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
I'm not saying that thats true, I'm just giving an example that I believe. Now, tell me this: how do you prove that time exists?
What quantum mechanics rests on is the fact that there is a fundamental limit to our abilities to observe events in the universe; that at some scale, we simply can't make the observation and so the best we can do to describe the situation is describe the probability distribution of the quantity. That doesn't mean that the particle doesn't have an absolute position and momentum or whatever; it just means that we can't know what those values are.
Now, from that perspective, we don't need a "probability mist" hanging over Platonia. We can have an crystalline set of configurations with infinite resolution in measurement. Now time can again be a path traced through this configuration space; what's changed is that the path itself is now described by a probability distribution. For any given instant of time, there are a infinite number of configurations that the Universe could be in, but we simply can't discriminate between them.
As far as I can tell (and, admittedly, I'm much better at probability theory than I am quantum mechanics), this is an alternate explanation that accounts for everything the author brings up, but doesn't require the rejection of time. Which isn't new; philosophers have been banging around the concept of "a frozen instant of time with created memories" for centuries, as far as I know.
A last point (this is way too long, I know): The author claims that a Universe-without-time is better than Universe-with-time because we don't have to explain away the existence of the arrow of time. It might be true that it's hard to explain why our Universe is the way it is (which I don't happen to believe: see the weak anthropic principle), but the author doesn't explain why, of all possible states, Platonia would choose to fall into this highly ordered configuration with such an elaborate "artificial past." To my mind, that's as much of a deus ex machina as the arrow of time itself.
fools! pi is 22/7 btw who was that guy who suggested pi should be 3?
This is all very interesting, and in some sense it makes sense. Time is a rather awkward idea. The idea that time might not exist is rather convenient, since you don't have to explain how it exists.
However, in the end, the arguments are not really physical, and even if the universe exists in one state, causality and the perception of time still exist. If the universe clumps together in a causal way, without time then there is some force driving that behavior, which one might call time. So you are just calling time another thing.
There are other problems, as I see it. The universe must exist only at the latest point in time. We have to assume that the universe exists only in its latest point, and history is apparent. From our observations of the universe, it's going to last whole lot longer. Any idea that the universe exists only now at this particular, random time is awkward, it is like the assumption that the earth is the cener of the universe.
If what's happening now doesn't exist, but only exists in the context of the future universe, then we either have to accept that the universe is static at this particlar random moment, or that it exists at some much later time.
Our role in this universe is quite small and insignificant, and every trace of our existnce is likely to be erased by entropy at this much later time. Therefore we can't exist at all, since our role is meaningless and undecerable from the universe. But we do exist and continue to exist.
The other result of this is that as we look back in time (as historians) we see fewer and fewer things, as a result of entropy erasing information. However, this theory indicates that not only do things appear to not have existed, but they never existed in the first place. Perhaps this is reasonable; it sounds a lot like Schrodinger's cat, but it seems as if it should be an effect that would be hard to miss.
All in all, it's a nice idea, but until it predicts anything, it really isn't that useful, since it is so counterintuitive, and requires a rather egocentric view of the universe. Besides, I'd hate to think that my only existance is while I'm writing an article to slashdot.
Something vaguely like what you suggest is described by John Cramer's The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. The collapse of the waveform is still real, but I think you may find it more palatable.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
His argument, concerning straight tracks, are this kind of error. He's looking for the integral of a probabalistic wave (as he's looking over a period of time), but he's getting the raw, collapsed wave instead. If you look in the wrong places, you are bound to not find what you expect.
When you receive a radio wave, you don't collapse that wave into a photonic particle (which is what the radio wave is, if it could be collapsed). For a QM probabalistic wave to collapse into a particle, you must do more than measure it's existance--you must measure it in such a way as to force a measurement of it as a particle.
And that's just it: if you simply look at the release of an alpha particle by itself, it should produce a uniform ionizing radiation "sphere" around the decaying atom. A cloud chamber does not inherently differentiate between a unform sphere of radiation (a wave) and a decay particle, so simply observing with a cloud chamber should not force the probability function to collapse.
What the article suggests is that it is the interaction between the alpha particle and the cloud chamber, rather than simply the observation done in the cloud chamber, which forces the probability function to collapse.
Overall, I have no problems with time, at least at a quantuum mechanical level, not existing except as a consequence of the configuration of the probability cloud. Just as I have no problems with the atoms of my body being nothing more than a consequence of the spacial collapse of a very large probability cloud. It all seems real, and it's the perception of reality around me that's important to my day to day life.
I haven't gotten all the way through the article yet, but I have a question...
He seems to be saying that there is no history, on many Now's. How can that be? If I take a picture of someone running, I have captured a few Now's (the blurred image of the runners arms or legs).
What am I missing?
-Joe
I've been saying this for years... Meanwhile this also makes the common sci-fi theme of time travel impossible, and reclassifies many sci-fi classics as Fantasy...
I actually suggest we squelch all such jokes with responses like the previous. No one should be telling time related jokes without bringing into question the perceived nature of time, after reading this article. I think it's way funnier to watch the somewhat bewildered looks on people's faces when your punch line contains the words "Quantum" "Probability Mist" and "Platonia."
"Anyway, what happened to quantum causality. Doesn't that make an arrow."
Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
For a further look into the phylosophical ramification of Quantum Mechanics, check out:u mnietzsche.htm
http://www.msubillings.edu/modlang/bplank/quant
Just because I like to deconstruct things doesn't make me a Deconstructionist.
I believe "TIME HAS NO MASS" was from Alexander Abian. I used to spend quite a bit of time in that newsgroup. I imagine some of the old sci.physics regulars are now /. regulars as well. The "no time" issue was one of the topics that was tossed around quite a bit. It seems a little sexy when you first consider it but then you start contemplating atomic clocks and how all of our lives are "synchronized" to some extent where we can plan things in the future with other people and *poof* are actually able to meet at the same time and place. There is obviously some factor that is syncing our elementary particle's entropy. Call it time, call it chicken space, call it whatever you want but it *exists*. And saying it's some extra-dimensional event acting invisibly on our 3-space doesn't change this. It's akin to hitting a flatlander on the head with a cube and saying "there you go!". I understand what he was saying about the leaking nucleus. From our perspective the nucleus is at point (x,y,z). Something happens at (q,r,s,t,u,v..) which interperets to (x(n),y,z) in three space. Somewhat interesting but worthless unless some sort of experimental hypothesis were presented to reveal further aspects of this uber-space activity. Even if this were succesful it *still* wouldn't invalidate our need for a time measurement. Our world is *saturated* through and through with this artifact of the universe called "time".
Time is God. or at least what most people think of it as. They are nearly interrchangable. "It is all done through X." "X is all-powerful. all-knowing, and everywhere."
They are both understood at about the same level "God does not Exist!!" (That's was the major philosophical break for thr ren.). The given of the equation.
That's my personal philosophy at least, it goes on, but not here. Gotta website comin' soon...
+&x
One of the problems with the intersection of the Internet and theoretical physics is that you get to hear about every kook's favourite invention - any sci.physics people remember the TIME HAS MASS guy?
Is this authour a known kook? The "independant theoretical physicist" tag on the end of the article does nothing to re-enforce my confidence.
However, the visualization of "triangle land" is interesting, and logically consistant. Assuming a fixed number of "particles", Platonica (as a spacial definitition) makes sense - the space defined by the interrelationships of all particles to all other particles - is also logically consistant (if complex!)
If there's nothing a more qualified physicist can find obviously wrong with this theory, it seems worthy to persue it further.
I don't think anyone is claiming that time is an abolute, because it clearly isn't. Nor is there much claim that time is a "thing." Time is an idea (just like width or height or depth) used to measure a difference between two conditions.
As for leap years/seconds, that has nothing to do with time itself, but is an artifact of an inaccurate calendar system, change in the speed of the earth's rotation, and the inaccuracy of our measuring devices. For a while we had no leap seconds, they just changed the length of a second to match 1/86,400 of a day, but i think that stopped many years ago as atomic clocks were developed. It's unrelated to the notion of time itself, and is stricly a human convention.
mew
How do you see that, precisely..? I guess I have to turn on my television for once for this one..
~ Kish
But then again, the moderators in here think User Friendly is funny.
The concept that matter spacetime can be represented as "rotating" in four dimensions isn't all that farfetched--as an object devotes more of its being to change in spatial position, its internal processes appear to "slow", reflecting a rotation out of time.
Now, I'm bullshitting out of my ass here, but it's a convenient way to think about time dilation.
Anyway, my main argument against a timeless universe is that it makes some tremendous assumptions about the information storage content of the universe. If anything can travel "backwards" in time, all particle states would have to be remembered in one form or another. One would be able to store an infinite amount of data on a single floppy by merely constantly rewriting the disk and using timeseeks to access previous disk states.
However, there is no conceptual problem with particles, structures, or even objects moving forward in time but with all subatomic processes moving backwards--we can watch, in forward time, video playing back in reverse and yet not suffer a time paradox. Reactions are simply occuring backwards. There is evidence that reactions occur backwards, but saying that they're reactions from the future moving back to the past requires far too many presumptions about the structure of the universe.
Enough from me for now.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Think big bang. Think all of reality in a peapod. Time is still. Or is it. Boom, everything starting spreading, growing, like a little flower.
Now think about the sign we have for infinity. ya'know that twisty thingy. Now look at all the patterns of life in death in nature. Fron half-life to earthquakes (hehe). Now think of black holes. Sucking in everything, even other black holes. mmm, black holes. Now think of matter all compacting to one space, one time, one peapod. Rinse, repeat.
Throw in free will and chaos (quantum craziness) and you have a hell of a fun game.
Coming soon to your Playstation10^9
+&x
I said {NT}
+&x
The Dancing Wu Li Masters
by Gary Zukav ISBN 0-688-08402-8
It's a very easy-to-read introduction to the concepts of Quantum Mechanics.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The only question, then, is how do you define this sequence of probabilities of state space? If they are different points within the same space, then you have a parametric sequence/curve. Is it something like x(1), x(2), x(3), x(4), ....x(i),...? If so, then how is this any different from x(t) where the sequence index is what we call time? If the sequence exists, then the index must exist, and we can call that index time!
Also, consider the simply thought experiments (and actual experiments) from special relativity that relate to simultaneity of events, whereby two events appear to happen at the same "time" to one observer, but at separate "times" to another observer who is in relative motion. The phenomenon is very real and must be explained by the laws of physics. Were the two events both present together (simultaneous) or not? Which observer is correct? In order to make everything work out correctly, you must have spacetime. I would like to see how the author would treat the problem of events (points in state space) which appear "simultaneous" (existing together) or not, depending upon which frame of reference you are in!
[Python character="Gumby"]
Doctor! Doctor!!! My brane hurts!
[/Python]
--
"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." - Douglas Adams (as Ford Perfect)
IANAS (I Am Not A Scientist)
I've been saying that time doesn't exist for ages. The idea of time exists, and it is a concept we humans have introduced to make some sense out of the world we live in.
How have I come to this conclusion? Errr.. well.. I figured it out a long time ago, and I can't remember why..
;-)
This article is lame, how can you have evidence of something that does not exist? Change is time, and we have evidence of change.
Also, take into consideration all those distant galaxies out there at the edges of the universe, all moving AWAY from us. They all are moving from a common point, therefore that disproves that time does not exist. If time did not, then these things would be moving in all directions, just like any other particle does. These galaxies are the exception to the rule that proves there is time. At one TIME these galaxies were at an origin.
EverCode
So, does this alter the practice of creating a 'first post' post?
- Darchmare
- Axis Mutatis, http://www.axismutatis.net
- Jeff
This seems to be the gist of what you're saying, anyway. Every single tenet of modern science was first proposed by somebody who was considered a crackpot. This fellow claims to have modeled this problem and come up with consistent results. Instead of attacking his credentials, which seem reasonably legitimate to me, shouldn't you actually look at the modeling he did and see if you can poke a hole in it? A critique that is not based on science doesn't make sense here - do you want so badly for him to be wrong that you feel you must try to debunk him even if you reasoning is not sound?
Interesting. I wonder what Hawking has to say about it? Read Hawking's lecture on warping time: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/hawking/warp.html
oh well i guess if time does not exsite you cant... but if time does not exist and i get paid by the hour, then i am not getting paid, hence i am not going to work, so i get to play slashdot reload all day! YES WHAT FUN!!!!
http://www.newscientist.com/nsplus/insight/time/se cond.html
Chek out this article regarding what you just said.
Yes...smoke weed to accelerate and pop some 'cid to slow...
What I find really amazing is that we are now able to have such powerfull physic studies, we can simulate big-bang situation in particules accelerator or "simply" design transistors of incredibly small sizes... biology and medecine looks so primitive in comparison. We are getting closer everyday to the master of time and space, and we still don't have a definitive cure against the flu, let alone AIDS or cancer.
Yes! I finally have someone who at least partially agrees with me :) BTW: feel free to skip this if you don't want a headache, its hard (though not impossible) to comprehend!
First off, time does not exist. What people normally view as time is actually just the result of friction and pressure inside a clock, not some astral stream of lumineferous (or whatever the spelling is) ether. Secondly, time doesn't not exist either. What people assume when they are told time doesn't exist is that our universe would cease to exist because of several factors that hurt to think about. Time is imaginary, just like non-bloated M$ products!
Due to the fact that time is not real, it is then possible to both exceed the speed of light AND actually reach infinite speed; that is, the speed at which a particle must occupy every point in the universe thus skewing most accepted quantum mechanical perceptions. I must still look into this further to figure out what is really happening, but it is impossible for normal energy/matter to attain infinite speed.
The big bang was not the start of the universe, unless what we think of as the universe is actually a bubble contained in a seperate universe, but rather the result of matter finally becoming infinitely (or near inf.) compact and then blasting outward with incredible force.
Also, as for the unifying theory, I think that if matter and energy are considered the same but with different values of frequency (think of a sine wave, matter has condensed wave, energy is non-condensed). The quantum mechanical view that matter and energy are interchangable is wrong (I think), instead, they are the same thing and one can be modulated to be as the other. Thus light energy could become solid under the correct circumstances.
Everything here is still unproven as of this post. If I manage to work up the proof, you will obviously be hearing more of it.
Since high school physics, i've held a similar view that the time doesn't really exist. I have this feeling time is an ad hoc mathematical attempt at relating the distance of particles of mass/energy, having no real significance of it's own.
;)
:)
Consider my Gedankun(sp?) [thought] experiment. Imagine if you will there is a closed volume of space light years away from here. Let's say it's a room. And in that volume of space, I was able to remotely create matter. And I chose to copy you. An exact copy of you. Every biological cell, every neuralnet, every molecule, everything. Down to the last quark. Including the watch that you are wearing. And let's suppose your super-duper-uber-swiss G-FORCE quartz watch said 11:27PM and 11 seconds.
But instead of creating your clone instantly, let's say that I decided to wait a few million years. And only then I created your perfect clone, which for the sake of argument is now you.
Although several million years has passed, the instant you have been created, your super-duper reliable watch will say 11:27PM and 11 seconds. Exactly. And in that new room light years away, all you will sense is that you have been teleported instantly, experiencing no passing of time.
I argue that there is no real or practical difference in terms of the time that you were here, or millions of years later and light years away, there. You can't distinguish or characterize anything about the time that has passed. Time is both meaningless in a universal sense to determine and irrelevant with respect to your own state.
Or how about this. This is my "VCR" theory reinterpreting the significance of time.
Imagine if you will that I have chosen to use THIS very instant as a reference point. Let's say it's 5AM Thursday precisely. Now we can let a few seconds pass, or few days, years, whatever. Now imagine that I had this magic VCR that could control everything. And I mean EVERYTHING.
So, let's suppose I then chose to hit the REWIND button! The instant I hit the button, every single particle/quark/waveform in the universe literally starts moving backwards. Physically, chemically, etc. Somehow, every atom eventually makes it's way to exactly where it was 5AM Thursday, and the VCR starts to play again.
There is nothing that could ever be done to meaningfully represent or calculate the absolute time. We realize 5AM isn't really 5AM. But with respect to the universe, the distinction is utterly pointless and meaningless.
What defines the "instant" of time is the spatial relationship of every particle/waveform/quark making up our cells, our lungs, our watches.
In fact, how does one define/measure time? By using a moving physical event, whether it be the shadow of the sun, pendulum of a clock, or decay of an atom. And ultimately, time becomes only a representation of the spatial relations of moving particles. It is this "snap-shot" giving the position of matter/energy defining a given instance that is arbitrarily measured and named in "time."
I have many more twists and analyses of such situations, but I think I bored you guys enough! I'm not even sure im making sense anymore... but i still have a shitload more to say. Time to go do some homework, watch tv and look at porn...
there is no time.
only matter.
ergo time does not matter.
he wasn't referring to the time on your watch stupid. He was referring to the perception that time.. (you know like those lame time travel sci-fi shows) actually can exist after it has passed. Time is just way for our human brain to quantify length between one event and the other. Like how long it took for you to drive to work
Actually, his equation is not really correct, but a nonrelativistic approximation that must be replaced by other, more complicated equations/techniques (e.g. Dirac equations, Feynman diagrams) if more accuracy is desired.
The only "real" things that we can hang our hats on are the"collapsed views" - they are the the only verifiable part of the universe we will "see" - at any scale, and with any kind of instrumentation. A "collapsed view" is simply another term for a measurement of the universe. All we can ever have knowledge of is a collection of measurements. The equations of quantum mechanics and its "wave function interference", etc are just mathematical constructs to help up calculate the probability of what we will measure next. What happens between measurements is something we will never know.
Actually, it wouldn't diffuse :-)
But it is very easy to think that it would, from the typical undergraduate wave mechanics course -- I know I did!
The very first exercise everyone does is to show how a gaussian wavepacket inexorably spreads out; and then after that the only localised states you ever encounter are bound states, with the quantum object penned in by an ever growing potential -- which seems quite inappropriate for a macroscopic object, because the potential would have to be enormous.
However, in fact quantum mechanics doesn't predict that everyday objects should diffuse off to infinity; and the reason why is a purely wave thing -- it works just as well for sound and vibration. Finding this out probably gave me a bigger shock than any other misconception I suddenly realised in my undergraduate physics course, and I think it's something which is criminally under-emphasised in the teaching of wave mechanics: you don't need quantum measurement to explain why apparently free macroscopic objects are localised.
The revelation was a phenomenon discovered by Philip Anderson in 1958 in a paper he called "Absence of diffusion in certain random lattices". (They later gave him a Nobel prize for it.) Anderson's result was that the eigenstates of quantum objects actually are spatially localised, even for very small absolute differences in the potential function (much less than would be needed for a bound state), if the potential is not smooth but disordered.
In fact it is now known that in 1D and 2D any magnitude of disorder, however small (so long as it persists throughout the surface), will produce exponential localisation. And this is not some strange quantum phenomenon; it happens for any waves -- the same mechanism for example can cause vibration energy to get trapped in a small part of a large engineering structure. In 3D a rule of thumb is that the energy will be unable to diffuse away if the effective scattering length is less than one wavelength (the Ioffe-Regel criterion).
Now for a macroscopic object, the de Broglie wavelength is very very small. But I think the effective scattering length is even shorter. The key is the disorder of the object itself. Even if each of its constituent particles are experiencing quite small local potentials with a slow spatial variation, these all have to be added together to give the potential seen by the centre of mass. Even quite a gently changing potential has spectral power implicit in the higher modes of its fourier transform; but adding together all the different contributions effectively amplifies and phase randomises these frequencies. So the potential the centre of mass sees will have real high spatial frequency oscillations -- it won't be smooth at all!
That is why the effective scattering length for macroscopic objects in a typical environment is in fact even shorter than the de Broglie wavelength; and thus why the "good quantum states" for my monitor, my keyboard and my navel are all very strongly Anderson localised.
I think Wheeler (to whom this article often refers) will go down in history as one of our greatest scientists and thinkers. He's produced a lot of radical, some would even say visionary, ideas about cosmology and reality, a lot of stuff that many consider on the fringe of mainstream physics. This is mainly due to the fact that if a theory cannot produce any testable predictions, it is not taken seriously -- and that's the way it should be. Unfortunately, we just don't have the tools today to examine and test much of his theses although, as this article points out, this is slowly changing. I suspect that his is a mind much ahead of its time.
REAL- anything that exists within the subjective reality of the perciever.
Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious animal on earth.
at great danger to myself and others, i have pioneered an effective scientific method for exiting time. since time is a delusion, my method is psychological rather than physical. the only caveat is that getting back into time is extremely difficult. for the relatively low cost of all of your earthly possesions (you won't be needing them) i am willing to share this information.
Re. no. 3,
If you think its kewl that you get an interference
pattern when you send one photon though at a time,
then you'll be delighted that the same thing happens when one sends one electron through at a time. That means the electron goes through both
slits, just like the photon. But since we are more used to thinking of an electron as a single
particle it always struck me a stranger.
In fact, quantum mechanics says that if we would
perform the same experiment with a bowling ball
(and we had a few billion years to perform the
experiment) the same interference pattern would
emerge.
Physicists don't understand the universe. All
they understand is how to approximate some of the
universe with some tough mathematics.
How so? If anything this make 'time' travel easier since all you have to to is figure out a way of altering the probability cloud so you are interacting with a 'previous' configuration. 'Course this is still a pretty big 'you only have to', but at least there is a non-zero chance you'll be able to to it. ;)
I wish someone would explain this to my boss.
My cat raises hell at 6:30 every morning until I feed him. Maybe he ought to know about this too.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
time, dimensions it so confusing time for bed
Come on, lets see ay do it.
Why doesn't this work? Simple. This is simply a misunderstanding of Calculus. Mind you, as calculus hadn't been invented then, they can be forgiven for misunderstanding it. As dt approaches zero, dx/dt approaches the true rate of change at -that point-. It's an instantaneous rate of change, so you don't see the effect of it, for that instant, but it's still non-zero, so an effect will occur.
How does this apply here? Here, the reverse has happened. This guy is looking at the INTEGRAL of time, and confusing that with time itself. If you take a line, and integrate it, you will get an area. An area isn't a line, and does not visibly consist of lines, but a simple differentiation will show those lines must exist.
His argument, concerning straight tracks, are this kind of error. He's looking for the integral of a probabalistic wave (as he's looking over a period of time), but he's getting the raw, collapsed wave instead. If you look in the wrong places, you are bound to not find what you expect.
IMHO, this is very poor science. Any school-age kid who's done maths has done calculus, and knows this very simple pitfall. There is NO excuse for it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The standard sorts of arguments concerning the reality of time in the philosophy journals usually reference the work of McTaggart, a turn of the last century scottish philosopher.
Of course, some of these ideas go back to the pre-Socratics, but McTaggarts contrast between tensed and untensed theories of time has had a major influence among philosophers and philosopher-physicists (here I would suggest looking up some of Abner Shimony's work collected in his _Towards a Naturalistic World View_
--Paul
uh if time doesn't exist it cannot be zero, because zero exists... an empty set is what you'd have. This means that you can't have distance/zero which you used in your formulas... nother thing the c in e=mc^2 is the speed of light in your form of the equations you replaced m which is mass with the velocity equations. I'm sure you meant it the other way around. Sorry to knit pick.
A: all 1 million molecules randomly distributed throughout the piston
B: all 1 million gas molecules very close to the bottom of the piston
The chances of situation B occuring by chance are exceedingly small, and were probably caused by compression of the piston or so (and the piston was expanded and immediately after that the snapshot was taken). In any case, moving from situation A to B by chance alone can safely be ignored, so time B is before time A. That's all there is to it; all the other laws of nature appear to be time-invariant.
Now, *how* the universe could have started with such an incredibly low entropy (== high order) is anybody's guess; fact is that the total entropy keeps increasing, and that's what we observe.
Now, you can play word games using the anthropic (!= entropic !!) principle: if the universe did not start with such a low entropy, who would have been there to observe it and argue about it on slashdot :-) So perhaps that's where the beholder bit comes in. But I should read the original I suppose.
I thought this guy was a crackpot (and he may be), but he came to the same conclusion from a psychological perspective at the turn of the century. Memory is an illusion created by the mind. Check it out.
reality is not a useful thing?
I for one couldn't live without it...
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
The fact that the author's book is published by Cambridge Univ. Press tells me that he is no hack.
There are a lot of interesting people like Paul Erdos at the bleeding edge.
My first year physics prof at Tufts U. shared a Nobel Prize for something he worked on in his basement during free time completed unrelated to his main research topics.
Since a lot of great physics is done in the early life of a physicist, it is not surprising that there is a lot of amatuer flavor to it. Many of Einstein's ideas leading to relativity were framed when he was 15 or 16 years old.
That article was highly interesting. Tell me though, as you read the discussion of how we perceive time and motion, was anyone else thinking what I was thinking? "Infinate Improbability Drive"! Movement by altering the probability mist of the Platonic landscape. Make the improbable more probable and suddenly your there. No 'movement' needed at all. Hmm... Ok, Mr. Douglas Adams, maybe that flying thing has some potential after all. ;)
From the article:
ie. The anthropic principles states that the universe is the way it is because if it wasn't there wouldn't be anything in it (ie. us) able to ask the question: "Why is the universe the way it is?" But the author of the article has apparently not noticed that his solution to the problem amounts simply to a modified anthropic principle which could be stated thus "Time doesn't exist. To explain why we perceive time (that is the passage of time in a particular direction)we must formulate the hypothesis that the universe exists in such a way as to allow beings (ie us) to perceive it as passing in a particular direction." Grant that the question of the direction of the arrow of time is a sub-question of the question "Why is the universe the way it is?" then generalize suitably and the authors arguments amount to a reformulation of the anthropic principle!
Personally I think the idea (not the authors formulation, but the idea itself) has merit,if only because it is supported by Wheeler and DeWitt and by Stephen Hawking (Anybody ever read A Brief History of Time?)
But then what do I know? I never did complete that Physics degree (the possession of which, as one respondent has pointed out, is usually a good indicator that a person has some idea of what they are talking about). And my logic may be faulty (nope, no Philosophy, Mathematics or Computer Science degree either.)Actually, if you believe in the non existence of time, can you, in so far as you adhere to that belief, be said to think "logically" at all? Both logic and our perception of time are ways of making sense of the universe; further, logic is of necessity a linear process, one thing following "logically" from another; so is our perception of time. But time ( or our perception of it) is seemingly more basic than logic, and couldn't it be said that the linearity of logical processes is a product of the linearity of our perception of time? A syllogism could be set up as follows:
Logical processes are modelled on the linearity of time.(ie one event leads to another corresponds to one proposition leads to another)
Given that (if you are still with me. Ahem!)then if you believe conscientiously that time is an illusion you can't, in good conscience, say that you think logically or even allow yourself to think logically!Time doesn't exist or the linearity of time is an illusion.
Therefore logic isn't valid.
Well it's something to think about anyway....
This "time doesn't exist" thing really puts a damper on a very large and hilarious group of jokes. For example, "What time is it when an elephant sits on your watch? Time to get a new watch!" Will now have to be updated to "What time is it when an elephant sits on your watch? An interesting article suggesting that time is an illusion of perception has appeared at New Scientist...". I suggest that , as mature adults, we squelch this discovery for the good of all mankind, so our children and our children's children can enjoy this diverse category of jokes.
I think you got this wrong.. e = m * c^2 m == mass, not distance mass would still exist in according to this theory, and c^2 is just a constant
Does Newton's absolute time exist? No This is a major point of Relativity. This guy seems to want to replace 'time' with an ordered squence of 'NOWS' that have a cause and effect relationship to each other... I think I've heard of that concept before... thinking... oh yeah, that's TIME! Sheesh!
Einstein predicted (and was later proven) that time (or the rate at which things change) changes relative to the gravitational field you're in. If that's not a concrete proof of the existence of time, what is?
Science-Fiction has discussed this for decades... Time is most probably an illusion of perception caused by that dimension being "larger" than what our minds are willing to perceive. The proof just shows how much smarter SF guys are. ; )
Science-Fiction has discussed this for decades... Time is most probably an illusion of perception caused by that dimension being "larger" than what our minds are willing to perceive. The proof just shows how much smarter SF guys are. ; )
There is one thing we should note. This sillyness
seems to have appeared in a populist "popular science" magazine. Well I'm an anti-peer-reviewing partisan but sincerly this article makes me think
if I'm not too radical...
However the problem is that for the last years peer-reviewing has exactly allowed such pieces of crap to go floating around. Some time ago I saw several "serious" articles with a respectable peer-review stamp that made me scare.
The general pattern of these things is exactly the way that this article was written. Amid theories and controversies, to form a "theoretical body" with a superficial taste of being complete. To achieve such objective, authors cleverly manipulate facts by patching holes with less known hypothesis and theories. They do not invent them. They just pick up one or other relatively unfortunate idea that was dropped some years ago and process a few "modernisations".
The whole problem is exactly on these modernisations. In general they have nothing in common with Science. They are just clever "phraseologic" implants that, among the whole theoretical building, hide they lack of scientific basis.
Meanwhile, the article could have had a few interesting points. Time capsules could be a very interesting idea. In some aspects I consider that our Universe could have such things. However among this whole crap they loose any concept. Petty.
PS For those who get scared about time. Remember that it is time that makes you alive. Because YOU ARE TIME...
c is the speed of light right? So then your three equations would be: e = m * infinity^2 = infinity (right?) e = m * 0^2 = 0 e = m * 1^2 = m Doesn't matter for the first two (same answer), but it does for the last one. In this case none of them seem really right. Guess we'll never know what happens when we compress a ball of Uranium.
I've come for the woman, and your head.
This is what really bothers me about theoretical physicists who delve too deeply into philosophy. We are mere mortals. We are simply incapable of knowing reality. Our "reality" is determined entirely by what we perceive. Who cares whether or not time "really exists?" The concept of time is nonetheless valuable for predicting events and manipulating our environment. I intend to go on using my perception of time to solve problems until someone comes up with a better approach!
At the quantum level, things seem to operate differently, of course. The observations we make indicate that a probabilistic view is more useful in that scope. Fine! While that casts some doubt upon our deterministic intuition, it does not immediately negate the usefulness of time in other settings.
The attempt to determine reality is futile. The author should redirect his energies toward discovering some USEFUL physics.
Time is an illusion,
Lunch Time, doubly so.
(Slartibartfast, THHGTTG)
--------------------------------
Cool! That means that I must have been imagining all that crappy journalism!
Makes me feel better about the world that Time never existed.
Ive just read through the comments, and found the one interesting that stated that time equaled the distance from the point alpha. I like that idea, because it works quite well with thermodynamics, as Entropy correlates with the sum of the distances from alpha. At least that was what I think.
And on the posts that said it was bad science, I have to say that it is just a hypothesis, and never claims to be more. In that respect its a bit like god.
There is no scientific method to determine if there is time I know off.
The Wheeler-DeWitt equation is wrong. Wheeler and DeWitt don't believe it anymore (and yes I've heard both of them talk about it). DeWitt thinks it may have still been an okay jumping off place but it's got about as much validity in trying to describe the universe as Newton's laws have in describing black holes or objects moving near the speed of light.
I think you can find a real statement of how useful this article is by looking at the bottom:
The author of this article, Julian Barbour is an independent theoretical physicist who lives near Oxford, UK
Note this man does not have any professional credentials listed. If he actually works at a university with a degree in physics I'd eat my hat.Tired of crackpots who haven't earned a PhD... Maybe this guy is the replacement for Abian (the time has mass guy on comp.sci.[physics,astro] who died fairly recently)
Brett
Hmm - it would seem there can be no crypto in Platonia since randomness appears to have been thrown out the window in this essay. I guess I'm off to write my 10-line 3DES cracker...
TIME IS ILLUSION
ENERGY IS ILLUSION
WE ARE ILLUSION
ONLY CHAOS IS REAL
ONLY CHAOS IS REAL
--------------
Heldon - Richard Pinhas : New Album soon....
http://www.multimania.com/schizotrop/
This concept really isnt new. St. Augustine pondered the nature of time in "Confessions". He concluded that the only thing that is real is the present, that the future is only a figment of our imagination, and that the past is just a memory, neither really existing, so if there is no future, and no past, how can time exist?
So this concept isnt really new.. or surprising to me. actually, augutines views made an awful lot of sense...
see what i get for a nice jesuit education?
... hi bingo
Now does not exist. Now is simply something invented by humans, and the definition of now changes for every person. For example: "Right Now, humans use airplanes to fly" (as opposed to a common space flight somtime in the future). Anyone who reads this article gets a different thought of what the now in that is. For some people, it might be this year, for some, it might be since 1923. Now only exists in a given persons head, so it doesn't really exist.
Now for time, that doesn't exist either. How do we measure time? In minutes, hours, days, months, and years. How is that time derived? Because of how often our world turns (the sun rises), or how quickly it orbits around the sun. What was time measured in before the Milky way galaxy existed? (It's about 6 billion years old, the universe is speculated to be about 12 billion years old). Time was not measured before the Earth and the Milky Way galaxy existed, so time never really existed then, and it doesn't now.
I know time exists. I just wasted 10 minutes of it writing this post (hope the boss doesn't get too upset).
NT is based on the premise that anyone who can manipulate a mouse can administer a system. Huh?!?
If time is real, when did time start?
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
If I told you temperature does not exist, because heat is nothing more than a measure of the avarage kinetic energy of the particles that compose an object, which quantum mechanically should be described as a linear combination of an (almost) infinite number of wavelengths and can not be measured directly, would this be posted on slashdot as a great new scientific insight, or would I be advised to stick my head in an oven at various temperature settings, to see if I can spot some of those wavefunctions?
Consult with enough physists and you'll find pretty much every opinion under the sun. However, the most promising approach for a TOE (Theory of Everything) is String Theory. Quantum mechanics has to ignore gravity to work - kind of like putting one's head in the sand. For a real interesting read try:
The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian R. Greene
This new popular guide to string theory is absolutely essential reading. There have been transformative theoretical discoveries made by string theorists in the last few years -- insights that have changed the way theoretical physicists think about spacetime, about strings, and the role played by black holes and other black objects. String theorist Brian Greene has both the technical expertise and the artistic flair to compose a compelling and highly readable portrait of the "cutting edge of the cutting edge" in theoretical physics.
A singularity, where the Curvature of space is infinte and there exists something with a volume of zero and infinite density. Time and General Relativity Break down here.
Velocities at the Speed of light, time dialation becomes infinte and time stops for anything with a velocity of c.
From what i can understand from this article is Time does not exist on a Universal scale, it is kind of like the homogenity of the universe. 'The universe is symmetrical only on a universal scale'. In other words time exists when your reference frame is smaller than the whole universe.
However, If Time just dosent exist, i wasted allot of nothing on a paper on singularities which is compleatly misguided as of this new (wait it can't be new b/c there isn't time) research.
Argh i'll prolly have to fit something on this in my conclusion,
oblisk
P.S. Thank god for the slowness of radical ideas acceptance in science.
------------------------------------
What is left over after we eliminate concepts & words from our experience? Surely there is light, direct perception, intensity, and concentration. Still, I'm getting lost because I have started using words again. Maybe the way out is to use paradox?
Fortunately, quantum physics offers a suggestion: Heisenberg's uncertainty principle limits the precision to which position and momentum can be known for any object. But what if you attempt to measure the position and momentum of your own mind? Doesn't the uncertainty principle only apply to *separate* observers?
Surely, you should be able to do this because you are yourself, right?
Can you try to say more about your reasoning and how it connects to the article?
Here's a brief explanation of the article:
Consider the set of all possible configurations of all particles in the universe. (He names this set Platonia.) Arrange the set so that configurations which are similar are close to each other. In other words, the configuration where I've just gotten out of my chair is close to the configuration where I'm about to get out of my chair, but they're both really far from the configuration where I'm on an airplane flying to Bombay.
He then defines the "arrows" of time as a straight "track" traced between different configurations. Each configuration contains data which has records of "the past"-- other configurations on the same track. Essentially he's changed the definition of the Universe. What we consider "the universe" is a single element of the set he names Platonia. But he names Platonia the universe-- the set of all possible particle configurations.
Let me use his arguments to prove that distance doesn't exist. "Consider what we think of as points on the real line. The point 1 and the point 4 have a distance of three. But there's really an infinite number of points, and they're all connected. I will define the real line R as a point. Distance has no meaning to the real line so distance must not exist! What we think of as distance is really just the separation between two different instantiations of our point R." Technically stated this is true. He's redefining terms in such a way that they're no longer meaningful.
On the bright side, if he could get from "Time doesn't exist" to "consider a set that contains the concept of time", he might be able to theorize something useful.
I'm going to comment on his credentials in a later post...
-Ted
Ok, what he seems to be saying is that every possible configuration of the universe has some probability, which is determinable by plugging that configuration into some equation (who knows what this thing looks like).
Now, in the set of all possible configurations, there are bound to exist configurations that LOOK as if they are a time evolved state of another confuration. In other words, state B is configured in such a way as it appears to contain information imparted by a previous state A.
But in 'reality' they are merely two status in the 'mist' which have some finite probability of 'existing'. String enough of these states together in a sequence and you get his 'time capsules'.
Ok, interesting mind candy, but it does not seem like there is much here to chew on for the real physicist. My understanding of physics is that is about the production of mathematical models which should predict the real, observed behavior of physical systems.
The progression of time is an observable. Just about every observation one could wish to make will involve time, whatever it is, even if it is an 'illusion'.
If you were to produce a theory that did not contain time you would have to demonstrate how time appears to come into being in some special cases (and demonstrate it a little bit better than with some speciously reasoned 'time capsule' argument), and demonstrate that your model not only describes all currently obsevable physical behavior properly, but in some way BETTER than other models.
-josh
From my handy Quantum Mechanics textbook: ... As it turns out, the experiment is impractical for spontaneous transitions, but it can be done using induced transitions, and the results are in excellent agreement with theoretical predictions."
"In 1977 Misra and Sudarshan proposed what they call the quantum Zeno effect as a dramatic experimental demonstration of the collapse of the wave function. Their idea was to take an unstable system (an atom in an excited state, say) and subject it to repeated measurements. Each observation collapses the wave function, resetting the clock, and it is possible by this means to delay indefinitely the expected transition to the lower state.
_Introduction to Quantum Mechanics_, David Griffiths, pp. 383-4
I don't think (intuitively or otherwise) any such thing. It is true that the particle exists as an expanding spherical wave, but as soon as you measure its position it becomes localized. From that point forward it exists as a new expanding spherical wave centered on the new position where it was last measured. Thus, its probability of suddenly appearing on a distant (for example, diametrically opposing) point on the original spherical wave is infinitesimal. That wave simply no longer describes the particle.
The practical upshot is that viewed as a series of snapshots in the macroscopic world the particle does what you expect; it sets out in some direction and occasionally interacts, possibly changing direction after each interaction. It is only in between the macroscopic observations that quantum mechanical ``weirdness'' is happening.
-r
The author's reasoning seems incomplete in some ways.
First of all you'd need 12 numbers, not 10 to describe the location of 3 points in Newton's universe. Maybe he assumes that all 3 points exist at the same time. But he should state these assumptions, especially in an article about time.
His rules for Triangle Land would sweep out a plane, not a pyramid. Maybe he's leaving some other assumptions out. It would be useful to see the diagram he refers to to find what defines the axis extending from his Alpha point.
I'd say he's still firmly in Euclidean space however uncool that may be these days.
His mention of a particle's spherical wave function misses the point that the function breaks down when observed. It then takes on a single value. The path taken by the Alpha particle sweeps out a sphere until you look. It then becomes a particular path. Schrodinger's Cat only exists as a wave function until you open the box. After that it's just an ordinary cat.
He seems to be stirring a lot of concepts together, but instead coming up with chocolate chip cookies he ends up with a gooey mess that we can't sink our teeth into.
I'd say the topic was time, but the substance was bogon.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
"Time was not measured before the Earth and the Milky Way galaxy existed, so time never really existed then, and it doesn't now."
:)
How exactly does the failure of the human race to measure and categorize something constitute proof that it doesn't exist?
By your logic, the Universe can't possibly be 12 billion years old, since we weren't around way back then to give it a name.
I also see no way to conclusively determine that time was not measured before the Earth and Milky Way existed. Certainly not measured by humans, but that does not prove, in and of itself, that it was not being measured.
"Now for time, that doesn't exist either. How do we measure time? In minutes, hours, days, months, and years."
How do we measure distance? In inches, feet, yards, and miles. Or in millimeters, centimeters, meters, kilometers. Or in light years, parsecs, astronomical units, the list goes on. These units of measurement, just like our units for time, are simply a convenient way for our human minds to think of these concepts. Whether or not we have applied labels to something has no impact whatsoever on whether or not it exists.
Although, your logic could save us a tremendous amount of time and effort on SETI and the space program in general. If we simply define anything we don't know about as not existing, we can safely abandon these programs and reclaim our rightful place as the "center of the Universe."
It's really (well, more accurately, that is) 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375 10
check out here as one of several pi repositories.
make world, not war
Or is that the other way around?
The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is unstuck in time; i.e., he jumps backwards and forwards in time.
The best part is the Trafalmadorians' description of human perception of time, something like strapped to a locomotive barreling forward with nowhere to look but ahead...
I thought the straight lines in Wilson Cloud Chamber were the effect of dual nature of light. It has been said about a century or so ago that light posesses both wave and particle nature. So photons are zero rest mass particles with energy E=hv. So if they are prticles then they would have straight paths. Lasers are phase coherant photons travelling in a straight line. Maybe Im missing something but photons are not too different from subatomic particles (they also have dual nature). FT
In Slaughterhouse five (Great Book) the protagonist becomes "Unstuck" in time by an interaction with an alien colony whose perception of reality is based on fundamentals which see time as one big spacious present. The reason we have linear time in our world is because that is what we have been taught to believe since the beginning for us. However in other places in the universe, isolated from the reality of our wold, time could be percieved very differently. We build our own reality around the rules that we are fundamentally forced into. Now if time being linear is not a fundamental rule, maybe we have just told ourselves that it is and so we follow it. However, it is concievably possible that someone could break free of that reality, of that belief. Then time would no longer be linear for them. They would percieve the world they know through a completely different set of blinders.
If people are interested, there's an interview with the author in the ezine Edge. Correct me if I'm wrong, but can someone explain to me what the significance of his interpretation is? Look at it, all I can see is a coordinate transformation from extrinsic linear 3D space to intrinsic circulinear chaos space. I'll try and exaplin with an analogy.
/. Edge claims to include the luminaries of the day (including your favorite bully boy) and exists as a broadcast forum for these "great digerati" to ennunciate their thoughts and spread their "wisdom". On the other hand /. is a rowdy cocktail party where everyone and their 2 cents is allowed a say. Which is better? Does it depend on whether you're already an "elite" or part of the unwashed masses? Oh well, enough mumbling for the day.
From the measured exterior world, the alpha particle moves in a straight line from the atom. Now from the point of view of the atom, which we can approximate as a spherical point, it can exist in multiple orientations. So if you imagine a sphere spinning randomly around with the number of potential states away from the point the alpha particle split being the linear dimension (ie radius away from sphere), then the alpha particle does appear as a spherical wave.
If there are any physicists out there, can you explain what the significance of what the author is on about? Most people accept that derived order of knowledge is medicine - biology - chemistry - physics - mathematics, but beyond mathematics lies philosophy. For example, if we map the chaotic spherical world to Linux hacker community (a collection of independent free agents) and the extrinsic structured view to the Gartner viewpoint (see previous story) with a single "standard" then you can explain the discrepencies between the 2 points of view. Although the look and feel of Linux is quite variable, it is based on a sonsistent set of principles (file & devices) and based on this framework it is easy to extrapolate to the rest of the world. Thus a Linux hacker, wven when faced with an unknown system, knows roughly where to look for things and can usually ramp up the learning curve fairly quickly. On the other hand, the Gartner worldview only sees the exterior pretty GUI, not understanding that underneath is a mish-mash of concepts and APIs pretending to move in formation. Thus it is a extrinsic view (speaking as a voice for the Fortune500 wannabes) whereas Linux is a multistate intrinsic view with a wavefront of acceptance among individuals that is expanding exponentially. Thus it is fundamentally the difference between single-user (monopole) and multiuser (chaotic wave) disruptive event. If you're an established business interested in saving costs, then a single training interface is considered "superior". If you're a struggling ISP trying to stave off the arrival of the big guns, then having the flexibility to find a niche is more important. Different strokes for different people.
The mindset between the single vs many is also reflected in the difference between the ezines "Edge" and
LL
If speed is distance travelled over time, and time doesn't exist, we get a Division by zero error.
Now we can assume distance/zero = inifinity, in which case
e = c^2 * infinity = infinity
Or we can assume distance/zero = zero so
e = c^2 * zero = zero
I think our best choice is distance/zero = 1 so
e = c^2 * 1 = c^2
Work for Change & GET PAID!
Thanks for parsing this, for a minute I thought you were Not A Retarded Slashdotter.
I almost didn't take your post seriously.
So time doesn't exist... That would explain how time seems to speed up when your having fun and seems to slow down when your bored. If the illusion of time is caused by memory, and assuming the brain can only store a finite amount of data/second, when exciting things are going on we have more detailed but fewer records causing the illusion of less time. When things slow down and change less, we have less detailed (because there is less change and less new stuff to store), and more frequent records, causing a perception of "more" time.
Without any scientific proof we can concieve that time only exsists as a human concept. Truth and Justice also fall into the catagory of metaphysical concepts, none of which exist anywhere but in our heads. Groups of people decide upon a measure and off they go.
This was a History lesson for me, that not every `ingenious' new idea is a new idea, or even ingenious. I suggest to the writer of this article that he review scientific history and rethink his arguement. Not only is this `crackpot' theory old and beaten to death, but his arguement is flawed in that throughout all of his own examples of how time is all a circuit of `Platonia's Nows' he is unable to escape circuitous logic. He cannot even describe the universe or his probability mist without reverting to conceptions and interpretations of time which he has been struggling to refute. The fact that this article was posted so blazenly as a new scientific theory by newscientist.com hints at the fact that they aren't interested in real science, but rather an interpreted medium whereby they can attract readers with intruiging metaphysical theoretical babbel. Since I have never read any of their other articles, I must delay judgement on this.
I still like to come up with crackpot theories, but I give the suggestion of subjecting these theories to informed and knowledgable people before releasing them to the general public as real scientific theory.
Daedalus III
Your last 5 digits of pi are wrong. Should be 37510.
I wonder how this theory explains time dialation which has already been proven by 2 sync'd atomic clocks. One travels around the world and one stays in place. When they are both checked again, there is a very small difference between the two clocks. This is interesting because if time does not exist, and one clock is measuring at a certain rate and the other is at another rate... what keeps track of the different rates? If not time, could it be related to space and velocity... BUT velocity wouldn't exist either... it is a function of time, and we created the measurements... man... my brain is fried... I would like him to try to answer this one...
Sure, maybe the solar system didn't exist billions of years ago, but there are other, more universal reference points (like the halflife of some radioactive material for example). It's impossible to speculate about before the Big Bang though.
I've always felt that the mainstream Quantum Theory interpretations are way too conservative, and seem to be driven by a desire to make the percieved classical world real.
;-)
IMNSHO, Schroedringers equation describes the world - period. The collapse postulate is bunk, as only serves the purpose of supporting the classical view.
The correct "interpretation" of Quantum Theory is therefore that the world actually is an evolving "probabalistic" wave equation. As classically scaled creatures, our classical perceptive systems naturally see a "collaped" view (although if reality there is no collapse), and the path of time we experience is just the history of this percieved collapsed event history.
There again, I might be wrong!
i have problems with quantum mechanics itself. it revolves around probabilities on the molecular level. it's very thought out guess work, but it's still guess work at best.
this article refers to particle experiements performed by Mott in which unexpected results/properties were found. based on the data from the experiment, it appeared as if the particles behaved in a mannor that did not fit the traditional paradigm of physics. and since the data can't be wrong, and the scientist is a god and knows all things, even the unseen, the obvious solution was that the traditional physics model was wrong. enter quantum mechanincs.
god was created to explain the unknown.
so was quantum mechanics.
at the very least this article could explain, then, just what the property of reality that we call time really is.
also, if there is no time, what exactly does this mean? that all things happen at the same time? does this mean that 10 years from now i'll be the same age that I am now? aren't half-lives calculated using time? among 12 billion other things. so just how does this theory of "time doesn't exist" apply to those situations as well?
or does time just not exist on the subatomic level?
a little more explanation, with some examples and such would help a lot.
otherwise i'll submit my own paper to new scientist or whatever it is, stating that i can bend space with the help of a gumby figure. who cares about proving it. i just need to say it.
the article was weak.
Actually the definition of half life is the "chance" that a given particle will decay. There is a "chance" that the particle will not decay. This chance doesn't prove the existance of time, on the other hand it shows that time is merely a measurement of the chain of events that lead up to the current Now. At any given Now, the decaying particle is in a given state. Noone knows the exact next state of that particle, because of this "chance". If they could quantifiably predict the next state, then an argument could be made for time existing...since they can't...time's existance can't be argued like that...
So, if time doesn't exist, then can I say I worked more hours for MSU than 29? And when they question it, point them to this? Also, does math exist. I would think that if time doesn't exist then many areas of mathematics do not exist either. Especially those damn story problems. Anyway, I agree with the one poster who said that time doesn't exist, but the IDEA of time does. That's my thoughts on the subject.
./brm
This article has all the ear marks of a crack pot theoretical physicist whom no one listens to.
The author of this article, Julian Barbour is an independent theoretical physicist who lives near Oxford, UK.
First, notice how he's not actually working at any university, but cites that he "lives near Oxford" as if that makes him smarter. He also does NOT state what kind of degree he has and where it's from. (Not that degrees make one smart, but when the rest of the article is suspect, the degree is too.)
Consider this paragraph:
The notion of time as an invisible framework that contains and constrains the Universe is not unlike the crystal spheres invented centuries ago to carry the planets. After the spheres had been shattered by Tycho Brahe's observations, Kepler said: "We must philosophise about these things differently." Much of modern physics stems from this insight. We need a new notion of time.
He's basically saying, "You might think I'm crazy but I'm really as insightful as Kepler! Save yourself the embarassment and support my ideas now!" Of course, Kepler actually came up with real equations, and Kepler's Laws provided meaningful insight into planetary motion. This article's author has not provided anything useful.
Here is the best support he can muster from other physicists:
Americans Bryce DeWitt and John Wheeler combined quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of general relativity to produce an equation that describes the whole Universe. Put into the equation a configuration of the Universe, and out comes a probability for that configuration. There is no mention of time. Admittedly, the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is controversial and fraught with mathematical difficulties...
Wow, his best cite is contraversial and came up with a useless mathematical equation. He's really just using the idea that for any configuration of the universe, there is a probability that it exists. (But doesn't his article state that all configurations of the universe exist? We just experience them one at a time? Hmmm, sounds like a contradiction...)
The feeling I got from reading this article was that the author wasn't taken seriously by the academic community because his ideas are some subset of: {Trivial, Unprovable, Useless}. If this is an average article for Julian, then I agree with the academics.
-Ted
How does meditation affect the perception of Time? According to Thoreau, the world is both infinitely large and small; The vast universe and a single pedal of a flower.
If Time doesn't exist, then our perception of time varies from person to person. Does meditation actually allow one to 'slow' down his/her life? Compare a highly skilled artisan, for example. He has put his "Time and Energy" in learning that skill. Each minute of education becomes increasingly more focused/magnified. If you magnify a line, don't you begin to see the dots. If you focus/magnify your life, does that mean that in essence you've slowed down your life? In contrast, a person who chooses not to study, learn... could be considered one who skips through life (sort of like skimming a rock across the surface of water); in the end, this person might look back and wonder where it all went. Does this make sense?
I can't believe this article was posted. It says absolutely nothing. All it does is suggest that we view space in some hugely complicated way. It doesn't give any suggestion of the BIG EQUATION that's going to solve everything. It doesn't solve any of the problems of space and time.
It's not even consistent with quantum mechanics or general relativity, as it claims. Quantum mechanics views a system in a Hilbert space, which is totally different from a physical space of separations. A consequence of General Relativity is that there is no cartesian embedding space for curved space-time. This is to say, the curvature of space and the local nature of our perception of time make it impossible to describe space-time in any absolute frame - there is no way to account for the interactions between particles. The way this doesn't fit with that guy's view is that every particle's relative VELOCITY (which contains the notion of time) enters into its interactions and is indispensable in describing the particle physically, and there is NO ABSOLUTE WAY of describing the relative velocity of every particle relative to every other in a simple, time independent coordinate system.
And what about pair creation and what goes on in accelerators? Particles DO come out of nowhere, at the cost of some energy. Do we then add more dimensions to our space on the fly, or are the dimensions of every possible particle that will ever be (an uncountable infinity) already there?
If you want to know something about space and time and physics, find a good book or read a respected journal. This author likes to name drop, but the article is garbage. Just because a theory is really complicated doesn't mean that it's profound.
Number of Dimensions = (Number of Eyes + 1)
Human:
Evolved Human:Common Arachnid:
My plan is to use spiders to predict the future of the stock market, and grow rich off of as of yet unknown bio-medical research groups. The spider tells me that any company that engineers "crop-protecting superbugs," is a good bet.
But...perhaps I have said too much...
-AP
...then that invoice I just sent to the agency must be fraudulent.
/. , er, work.
But then, of course, as time is money, if time doesn't exist then money doesn't exist either, so I guess I can't be sued for claiming non-existent renumeration for non-existent time spent on
I'll stop before this gets even more Douglas Adamsish. (Universe - size: infinite, population: none, currency: none etc.)
[AC to protect the guilty]
Don't let the article confuse you. Just becaue it has new scientist stuck on the bottom, doesn't mean that whatever is described in it is in fact the universe.
The writer proposes a mathematical model that doesn't have time in the equation. Instead it describes 'states', or 'sets of probabilities'.
This could be a perfectly valid model.
Statistical thermodynamics is a very successful model for describing and calculating/predicting properties and behaviour of matter, with the use of equtions that are sets of probabilities of configurations, and do not include time. That doesn't mean that the model requires that individual particles that compose a piece of matter do not have a place or a displacement over time. It is just a model that does not include these properties.
If i recall correctly, the uncertainty principle doesn't require that a particle does not have a place and a velocity at the same time. It just describes how and why both these properties can't be determined to arbitrary precision at the same time.
-----
When I smoke p*t, these thoughts usually make sense. Expanding my mind is cool :-) No flaming please, I can lit the smoke myself.
www.6502asm.com - Code 6502 assembly or.. DIE!!
Well, bear in mind that concepts like "curvature of space" (and maybe even "time") are part of the general relativity model - they do not necessarily describe reality itself, nor have any direct correlate in quantum theory or the unified superstring (I forget the more correct/up-to-date name) theory. In the same way that curvature of space is a useful abstraction of the mass behaviour of gravitons (whose existence, btw, is actually predicted by superstring theory), quite likely time is in fact just a useful abstraction of some more fundamental reality/model.
Which caps one of his early paragraphs, implying that space is not observable. (So he can go on to argue solely in terms or particles.) Space is as observable as anything else around us -- namely by its effects on objects. Witness light bending around a star, witness clocks running slow by an amount depending on what direction they fly around the earth (with or against its spin). Space is as real as you or me.
With this dismissal of space he goes on to focus on Quantum Mechanics solely:
But we know that classical physics is wrong. The world is described by quantum mechanics-and in the arena of Platonia, quantum mechanics kills time.
He then goes on to state that in Platonia, the complete collective of states of possibilities -- the set of all futures, all pasts, all other 'nows' -- are being experienced (somehow, he doesn't say what mechanism exists to do so, but implicit in having different probabilities for each "now capsule" there must be some way for those probabilities to take effect, which in our normal universe requires time.) This in itself reintroduces time into his Platonia. All he's done is to push the problem off to a different level. But let's ignore this for now.
Unless I'm missing something, he also gets rid of any physical level correlation between which "now capsules" take effect. We instead have:
Just as the structure of geological strata and fossils seem to be evidence of a past, our brains contain physical structures consistent with the appearance of recent and distant events. These structures could surely lead to the impression of time passing. Even the direct perception of motion could arise through the presence in the brain of information about several different positions of the objects we see in motion.
Which I take to mean that he thinks we're extrapolating the past from our memories that exist now, and (in my timeline) one second from now I may have a different past, because the memories are provided by the new "now capsule."
So, great. Let's assume that. Why is the universe predictable, then? Why are there laws of physics at all? This structure he's put forth allows all sorts of things to happen, not just the standard observable laws of physics. Where did the structure come from in the first place? 'Always has been, always will be?'
So maybe there isn't any correlation between now capsules; he pretty much implies that. But if there isn't, then that means that the laws of physics must apply *inside* the now capsule, which gets us back to our current Universe, leaving us wondering why anything obeys any laws of physics at all.
And what defines the extents of these now capsules? Why haven't we gotten stuck in an infinite loop somewhere in the probability space? (The fact that I keep thinking time is passing shows we haven't found some equivalent 'least energy' point in the probability mist overlaying Platonia; had we, the universe as we know it would stop -- perhaps because Its Destiny Has Been Fulfilled?) And while we're talking about the mist, what are the rules governing its distribution, its relation locally to other parts of the mist? Did it just appear fully formed, Athena like? (It must have, or it then would be evolving, which reintroduces time into Platonia yet again.)
If we take his principles as the foundation of spacetime, then we are left needing to explain far more in terms of why the Universe does what it does. Even if it's all a figment of our imaginations, we still then need to explain why our imaginations obey QM, GR, and thermodynamics, all of which would have to be scrapped and rewritten in his world.
What a quack.
There really should be a different picture for articles like this. Maybe a pair of dice or a roulette wheel. Certainly Einstein's likeness should not be used, these kinds of arguments always rubbed him the wrong way. Sure we can predict the universe through statistics, kind of like how economists predict the market, but this leads to little understanding, and a universe without order. I liked the discussion of the cosmological constant the most. Didn't Hubble's discovery of the expansion of the universe, remove the need for a fudge factor in the field equations? Didn't Einstein call the introduction of a "Cosmological Constant" into his equations, the single greatest blunder of his career? Fringe physics is always a good read though, it should just be located next to Starship Troopers in the bookstore.
Since the state of the current universe is just dictated by the physical arrangement of particles in this uber-universe, and our thoughts and memories are stored as well, it does not matter if the different "now's" are in any way similar or consecutive, since our whole entire notion of the "past" would be dictated by the particular state we are in. In other words, kind of like injected memories (ever see Dark City?).
CaptSwify wrote:
Now for time, that doesn't exist either. How do we measure time? In minutes, hours, days, months, and years. How is that time derived? Because of how often our world turns (the sun rises), or how quickly it orbits around the sun. What was time measured in before the Milky way galaxy existed? (It's about 6 billion years old, the universe is speculated to be about 12 billion years old). Time was not measured before the Earth and the Milky Way galaxy existed, so time never really existed then, and it doesn't now.
By this logic, my nose does not exist because I'm not measuring it. (The fact that I can see it does not qualofy). Even if I was measuring it, it wouldn't exist because I'd be measuring in centimtres, which are derivead arbitrarily from an estimate of the distance from the equator to the north pole through Paris... (although now it's a certain number of laser osscialtions at a certain frequency, but the formal definition includes references to time.)
The word "Duh" springs to mind.
Julian Barbour makes some interesting conjectures. His best point is that we need to philosophize a new notion of time. Scientists would generally be better scientists if they resorted more often to philosophical approaches to developing their theories. Take sauropods, for example. Paleontologists will tell you that their huge bulks lumbered slowly around at 1 km/h dodging t. rex and munching on tree tops. Or they might claim that they spent their lives wading in shallow seas while munching on seaweed. But to any philosophically-minded person, it's obvious that they more closely resembled giant ducks, floating and paddling around on the water's surface. At least, t. rex is now allowed to sprint with his tail uplifted rather than lumbering slowly with his tail dragging in the sand. Progress.
The issue about the alpha particle in the cloud chamber is a completely bogus interpretation of quantum waves. The fact that the particle interacts with matter to become VISIBLE in the chamber collapses the spherical probability wave at the cost of uncertainty in the particle's momentum (due to collisions with other particles). Although the idea of history being recorded in the configuration space is interesting, it still really does not properly address the issue of time. In fact, there is no substantive argument anywhere. In classical physics, there is what is know as the Virial. Basicly, the evolution of the system is determined by integrating over all possible paths and minimizing the energy of the integral to determine the correct path. Thus a concept of time and evolution of the system arises from from things NOT inherent to the configuration space they describe, thus fundamentally flawing the aguments they are making.
die
You set up coordinates that are relative to an arbitrarily fixed point in spacetime. You can then apply various formulas on those coordinates to determine various physical traits (velocity, acceleration, momentum, etc.)
This metaparadigm is unspoken but taught from day one in schools, as a means to describe reality. It's nothing revolutionary, although calling it "Platonia" is kind of neat.
The world is described by quantum mechanics
Only at a certain scale, above which coordinate based Newtonian physics takes over.
Mott pointed out that, quantum mechanically, the emitted alpha particle is a spherical wave which slowly leaks out of the nucleus. It is difficult to picture how it is that an outgoing spherical wave can produce a straight line," he argued. We think intuitively that it should ionise atoms at random throughout space.
Wave-particle duality is a well-known paradox. The setup of your experiment influences your results.
With higher dimension equations, time gets refitted into space in odd ways. While a reconsideration of time with our three-dimensional perception of reality is apparently necessary, I wouldn't say time is 'dead' (at least in the author's sense).
no, at time t=1 n1=x1,y1,z1 n2=x2,y2,z2 n3=x3,y3,z3 hence for once instance in time with three ojects in 3d space you only need 10 numbers in the set to describe it, if you used 12 numbers, you would be repeating the time variable, and would have redundant information.
who said "Time is what it says on the clock", or something to that effect?
>Actually the definition of half life is the >"chance" that a given particle will decay. Wrong. It is the _time_ for half of particles to decay. Or _time_, when probability of a particle to decay reaches 50%. >This chance doesn't prove the existance of time It is _based_ on the existence of time.
>Actually the definition of half life is the >"chance" that a given particle will decay.
Wrong. It is the _time_ for half of particles to decay. Or _time_, when probability of a particle to decay reaches 50%.
>This chance doesn't prove the existance of time
It is _based_ on the existence of time.
Please, people, do *not* confuse the probability wave of a particle with the particle itself. And second: Quantum mechanics itself is not very accurate, take quantum electro dynamics (QED) instead. For those who can read, but can't do math, there's a very fine book about QED written by Richard Feynman himself ("QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter", for $27.65 at amazon.com; if you are interested in that matter, get it or lend if from your public library soon).
Basically, the "slow spherical wave" creeping out of a radioactive nucleus is the probability function - does it emit now or later? The actual process of emiting the particle is completely unknown to the observer, and he has no means to determine it in advance. The current theories, QED including, completely side-step this issue. They can tell you with high accuracy about the likelyhood of radioactive processes, and they also can tell you with high accuracy about the energy and the path such an emitted alpha particle has, but they can't tell you more in advance. All these theories even have problems with rapidely changing settings of the experiments, because they simply don't talk about that.
Time is no more an illusion than space, energy, or force.
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"