TIME EXPLAINED (v2.1)

[hardkraft]

It's true that we tend to see only what we can and want to. I for instance never accepted gravity, and never understood why people drop things onto the floor whereas I simply keep them at hand floating around in the air. For those interested, it's quite easy: Just choose the next time slice carefully, a slice where things don't follow geodesic avenues.

We don't pick slices since we live in all of them at once. Well, maybe not all of them since our time here is very limited. We also can't live in the "other" direction of antigravity because it so happens that that direction is also anti life and anti memory like I tried to illustrate in my previous post.

Originally Posted by Buffy
Occam's Razor folks....I'd love to know why you guys seem to be making this all a much more complicated issue than it needs to be.

What would Occam's Razor do about the crosses? Cut them to pieces and speep under a rug?

Antimatter once postulated for the backward-in-time-traveler championship, but in a block world nothing moves up or down or sideways because everything is frozen

Everything is frozen on a film yet we can see a direction in it.
I thought about the antimatter but there is so little of it and the experiments didn't show anything out of the ordinary, outside it being anti of course

[InfiniteNow]

Hardcraft,

Please remember to indicate whom you are quoting.


Don't enjoy much hitting the back button to find out.

[Buffy]

Originally Posted by hardkraft

I don't really remember what Hawking said about the directionality of time but if it was that we are being carried by the torrent of the 4-th dimmension and we as 3-d creatures can't do anything about it because that's how the time works then it's not much of an explanation, it's more like a description.

Well, I just mentioned the description, I'll have to look it up, but no it is indeed a "why it does it." But of course you're right to dismiss it out of hand: Yah, Stephen is *such* a simpleton!

Originally Posted by hardkraft

With the introduction of time slices you can picture that "time" doesn't have a direction however each slice still looks different and you can track a progression.

I see you don't like the idea that it just goes in one direction. Some people still have a problem with Einstein's speed of light speed limit too, and there have been endless proposals for why Uncle Albert was "wrong." Many of these are facinating of course as exercises, but until they start showing some sort of superior explanatory power, they're still just more complicated ways of explaining reality to *allow* the possibility of physical light speed, which seems to be the only goal...

Originally Posted by hardkraft

These differences can only be accounted for by laws, whatever they might be.

<gilbert_and_sullivan>Whatever they might be! </gilbert_and_sullivan>

Originally Posted by hardkraft

Let's say we start with a uniform universe and introduce a law that forcess all the matter to go to the "left" and settle there...

Settle where? Time doesn't settle! It keeps moving! Its a freight train of love! No seriously, this line portrays the usual misunderstanding of time as *something that moves* which it does not. It does not "move" any more than the length dimension of a 2x4 "moves along that dimension." *We move* through time, unidirectionally and at a fixed speed (unless we accellerate our reference frame of course!), but time is just the meter stick!

Originally Posted by hardkraft

So if nothing else the idea of time slices at least seems to make it easier to understand why the laws work the way they do and why whe can have memories of the past and therefore perceive time.

Maybe for you, but to me its just added a layer of complexity to the idea that its a dimension and I move along it.

We don't need no steeenking time slices,
Buffy

[hardkraft]

Originally Posted by Buffy

Settle where? Time doesn't settle! It keeps moving! Its a freight train of love! No seriously, this line portrays the usual misunderstanding of time as *something that moves* which it does not.Buffy

This thought experiment was not meant to illustrate the workings of time but how an arbitrary law can foster memories only when read in one particular direction and that's why we have memories in only one particular direction. And yes, you are correct, things don't fly to the left and there is no there there to settle on ... At least the last I checked ...

And time slices are cool. You should like them too since you are such an Occam's Razor lover. Isn't it easier to accept a world composed of a finite number of slices than an infinitely divisible one? They also get rid of the idea of moving time that you so hate. Time slices could be your new meter stick. It's not a 2x4, I know but come on, try a slice, you'll like it

[Boerseun]

Sorry - been away for a bit, only caught up now...

Interesting comments, all. But I have one thing bugging me still, apart from the fact that I don't buy the "there is no time, only motion" bit (I can't see motion defined without time being in the equation).

The smaller we probe, things tend to get fuzzy. This is because of the limiting nature of the wavelength of light. So we switch to using light with a shorter wavelength to probe our sample. Eventually we end up using electron microscopes instead of light, so that we can see ever smaller things. And so on. And eventually we get to the Planck length, at which point the universe starts to "pixellate" like a .jpg file if you keep on enlarging it. And it's at this level where its said that we're living in a "block" universe, if I'm getting it right.

Quick analogy: If the best tool you have is a backyard microscope and you look to the surface of Mars, you'll see icecaps and surface streaks. But it'll be pretty fuzzy. Are you going to conclude that the surface of Mars is, indeed, fuzzy, because all the evidence point in that direction, or are you going to conclude that seeing as you can enlarge the picture (you have been doing so, proceeding from eyeball to binocular to telescope) and everytime you do so, it becomes more detailed and sharper, that Mars is not fuzzy, but you're simply lacking in equipment?

Same with the nature of matter. We infer the fuzziness starting at the Planck length, because we can't measure the time it takes for anything to happen to a precision greater than the time it takes a photon to travel the planck length - because we're using photons to measure it. We can't see the details on the surface of Mars to a precision greater than what our crappy backyard telescope would allow, because we're using our crappy backyard telescope. Using our crappy backyard telescope as the final yardstick, would deny the existence of all the surface features on Mars.

We are inferring properties to Nature based on the limitations of our tools. In my opinion, the fact that we can't measure shorter than Planck length says nothing about the properties of matter at smaller scale than the Planck length. It does, however, say a lot about the tools we're using. And inferring the 'blockiness' of Nature at the Planc scale, or the pixellation of time, is simply jumping to conclusions. But that's just me.

[Farsight]

hardkraft, I refute it thus: SLAP. Sorry buddy, but that was my hand. Now tell me there is no motion.

Turtle: Willco re the Buckminster Fuller material. Thanks.

Leo: Hi. Farsight here. I have a problem with rotation and the planck length. I can't quite put my finger on it, but maybe Boerseun's post applies. No block universes here please, those slices are slices of a length that's merely in your head.

Buffy: Well said about the snapshot.

All: the point of all this is where it leads. Here's an example: you know spacetime curvature? Well, there isn't any. There can't be. There's no fundamental time, so the stuff out there is space not spacetime. The curvature is the path followed over the "course of time". It's the effect, not the cause. To find the cause you take the time derivative of the curvature. You get a gradient. A tension gradient called gravity, orthogonal to the stress of matter/energy. Voila, I give you the secrets of the universe toppling like dominoes right under your nose!

http://hypography.com/forums/search.php?searchid=127969

[hardkraft]

Yeah, I have to take some of the stuff back. After further consideration I can see that reading the "time" in reverse would not reverse the laws of physics, it would simply break them and make everything illogical, at least to us. My simple thought experiment worked only because it was, well, simple.
The "slices" however are not so easily refuted. They would have to be directional though and you wouldn't be able to travel in reverse through them. In that case it doesn't really matter if they are created all at once at the beginning or one by one as the need arises.

And Popular, how is your formula for the curve that objects follow any different for the formula of curvature of spacetime. At least with the spacetime we have something "tangible" to imagine.

[Leo]

Originally Posted by Popular

Leo: Hi. Farsight here. I have a problem with rotation and the planck length. I can't quite put my finger on it, but maybe Boerseun's post applies. No block universes here please, those slices are slices of a length that's merely in your head.

Hi Farsight/Popular. I raised the block universe thing only to show that the concept is not easily defendable, and is probably a child of cinematography and Lorentzian boost taken literally. Regarding rotation, Pauli rejected the notion of particle spin at the beginning because it implied superluminal velocities, but this is not what you have in mind, is it? If we assume that rotation is necessarily a product of at least two interacting elements, then what happens if the interactions are quantized? Is this what bugs you?

Originally Posted by Popular

All: the point of all this is where it leads. Here's an example: you know spacetime curvature? Well, there isn't any. There can't be. There's no fundamental time, so the stuff out there is space not spacetime. The curvature is the path followed over the "course of time". It's the effect, not the cause. To find the cause you take the time derivative of the curvature. You get a gradient. A tension gradient called gravity, orthogonal to the stress of matter/energy. Voila, I give you the secrets of the universe toppling like dominoes right under your nose!

Yes, that's the scheme R.L. Collins gets out of Newtonian gravity combined with relativistic mass/inertia/energy. Time dilation and Lorentz contraction follow nicely out of it. He doesn't seem to mention that they arise as naturally also for moving bodies in the absence of a gravity field. So yes, bendings and slants are probably just metaphors.

EDIT: I disagree with Collins' simplistic method for deriving Lorentz contraction, which leads to isotropic contraction. The directionality of gravity and/or motion has to be taken into account to explain the anisotropy of energy exchange and matter shape change. This doesn't invalidate Collins' general view though.

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by hardkraft

This thought experiment was not meant to illustrate the workings of time but how an arbitrary law can foster memories only when read in one particular direction and that's why we have memories in only one particular direction. And yes, you are correct, things don't fly to the left and there is no there there to settle on ... At least the last I checked ...

Then>>>

Originally Posted by Popular

No block universes here please, those slices are slices of a length that's merely in your head.

I watched a PBS special last night which centered on the search for life in space and I heard something quite surprising. Not being adept at chemistry perhaps it's common knowledge, but taking the above two quoted statements together it seems germane.

To whit, all proteins that originate from living things are left-handed. Given that right-handed proteins do exist, maybe our thinking about time and physical properties is biased in a limiting way by our inherent protein structure. So positing, we can no better understand it than putting our right hand into a left glove.

[Buffy]

Originally Posted by Turtle

...maybe our thinking about time and physical properties is biased in a limiting way by our inherent protein structure. So positing, we can no better understand it than putting our right hand into a left glove.

My goodness! What, pray tell, do handedness of proteins have to do with time? We can build organisms with such proteins, are you saying such beasties go backwards in time?

Always buttering the bottom of the toast,
Buffy