Pardon me if I go out on a limb in this post but some of what you are both saying sets Einstein's nesting problem up like a golf ball on a tee, and assuming my poor one-eyed depth perception allows it, I'd like to club at it with a baseball bat.
Taking the longer background view, we're traveling a path where Descartes idealized space in the image of the cube then Newton and navigational history added absolute time. Einstein and others came along to qualify that time is relative and merged time with space just as others peered into the fabric a bit more to discern some of the multiple quantum states.
Very roughly, here we all are, using a faster version of the global Guggenheim printing press, and, locally, here in the jcs-online niche we are trying to factor in and/or illuminate the what and how of ~consciousness within modern science.
In the storyline I am advocating, here on the cusp of quantum gravity, there is an almost unspeakable underlying general principle supporting reality being nested fields within nested fields. And notice that this image is different and meant to be, let's call it, "inward" from our familiar views where time or space-time is a so-called fundamental dimension.
To get to and consider Einstein's nesting problem(s), though, we first need to shift over to reality being nested fields within nested fields and then look a little closer at what he keeps claiming are clocks, yardsticks and observers and observers' frames of reference.
Do you see the problem or opportunity yet?
As nested fields within nested fields, the observer has a different energy and frequency from the clock but the observer also contains the idealized distinctions or associations (nested fields within nested fields) of "clock" and "time" and "observer".
Yes, to the extent that variable mass-density and and mass-energetic equilibrium are influential and interactive as physical measures attest, there are interactions. But conclusions or idealizations regarding "time" are obviously only artifacts of each observer's ~consciousness (or nested fields within nested fields), as it ~always is.
To the extent that ANYONE can follow these strings of words, the integration of or nesting of ~consciousness within physical theory may be better seen by asking: "Where is the initial occurrence or proof of the equation of quantum gravity?"
The answer, of course, is somewhere within someone's ~consciousness.
And I would say it is first within our internal analog math/language before it's expressed in symbols or words. We bobble along in the variable mass-density and nested multiple quantum states and at some intersection, someone will express the core expression or reflection, which will smoothly replicate within other participants' internal analog math/language.
A similar, somewhat hypnotic trance occurs each time the storyline of relativity is re-counted, re-read, remembered or re-told. As the story progresses proteins are formed and folded, revising and re-nesting associations, within, or coincident to our local frame of reference. ...Incidentally, this nesting issue may be seen as a more appropriate explanation for the lack of preferred reference frame in the relativity stories. There is no preferred frame of reference, only each observer's embedded frame of reference at the different sites or locations/conditions of mass-density/quantum gravity. [Thus the hint to strike appropriate resonance points in the nested structured frequencies...]
That is, with reality as nested fields within nested fields, in effect what Einstein does or did (with him logically coming from the Cartesian-Newtonian non-nested model), is he turns the nested fields within nested field somewhat like inside-out. The imagery sort of works in an introductory manner and doing so illuminates curvature and equilibria, but it still leaves us with quantum imagery separated from relativistic imagery and these both separate from the ~consciousness imagery. (Although BOTH are formally entangled within and have dependencies upon the so-called observer and/or observation -- AKA, ~consciousness.)
Nested fields within nested fields clears this all up for everyone and paves the way for a more coherent, more unified scientific model.
Best regards,
Ralph Frost
http://frostscientific.com
With joy you will draw water
from the wells of salvation. Isaiah 12:3
--- In jcs-online@yahoogroups.com, "Edwards, Jonathan"
>
> Dear Verna,
> Maybe I should start with a thought on Ralph's thought.
>
> R:Is it fair to say that apparently, there is a considerable amount of confusion and a distinct lack of clarity in present leading-edge science relating to "time"?
> Jo: I think that may be right and right up to the top of 'leading edge science'. For Barbour and Smolin to come to diametrically opposite conclusions is suggestive, but I think it's worse. I rather suspect that right up to the top human minds are, so far, incapable of grasping the nature of this problem because they are so programmed to believe in something called time. I strongly suspect that there is something called time, or more probably two things that together are time but neither is the least bit like what we currently think of as time. It may be presumptive to suggest that even the top physicists cannot grasp time, but then Einstein could not grasp the reasons why quantum theory does make sense. The worry is that this is a way of thinking that only a very few people can ever re-programme their thinking out of and then only partially grasp the alternative. The alternative will never become received wisdom because 99.99% of people could not make sense of it. Daunting.
>
> The chink of light is that we have at least seen a problem. It does seem that the human brain has a module that allows for reprogramming of its own hardware if it finds inconsistencies. What is less clear is how deep this reprogramming can go and whether it needs to be done before age 25, or whether, strangely, it can only overcome instinct after 55!
>
> The slipperiness of time is illustrated by the misconception that time is slowed for someone moving fast. As Barbour points out, for A an B moving fast **relative to each other** (which is the only fast there is) B's clocks tick too slowly as judged by A ***but*** A's clocks tick too slowly as judged by B. Neither set of clocks is 'going slower than the other'. The easy response to this is that this is just about what clocks seem to be doing, no different from the platform seeming to move from the train or the Doppler effect. What about what the time really is at each place? What about the speed the clocks are really going at. Surely it must be the same after all? This is where the bottom falls out of our conceptual balloon basket and we see to our horror that this question HAS NO MEANING. And what is more anyone who really understood what physics was about should have known that all along. I have a strong suspicion that the counterintuitive message of special relativity actually has rather little to do with the constancy of the speed of light. It isn't actually any different from platforms seeming to move or the Doppler effect. It was not SR that made the world weird, it was just someone working out the maths for a theory that made predictions about time in different places. Any theory about time in different places generates this weird world in which time cannot be what we always thought it was. And there are reasons for thinking that Einstein never actually understood the message of his theory - if he had he would not have talked about people riding on photons. He would have realised that it would only seem to someone else that the man on the photon's clock had stopped completely and that, yes Chris, that makes no sense at all. Daunting.
>
> So I fear Errol is right Verna: "I think you will have to give this argument up, Verna. " There is no Godclock that says 'what time it is everywhere'. And this is not because of Special Relativity, it is because that sort of time is a convenient myth.
>
> A few comments on specific points:
>
> V: Well, Jo, I do not like the timeless block universe model. I see the Universe unfolding
> Jo: Yes, I agree, but my point was that the Minkowski block works fine for what it was supposed to do and that should not be confused with the philosophical interpretation that it implies nothing 'happens'. After all it is NOT a 'timeless' model, it has time. The importance of the Minkowski framework is that it makes space and time one inseparable metric and that looks solid. The sequence or becoming aspect of time is a completely different issue.
>
> V: My irritation comes about when it is put forward that there is no ‘moment’ at which the Universe in its entirety simply _exists_,
> Jo: But, with respect, Verna, you have not given any case for your belief in this instant. You want to think that and get irritated when people disagree but philosophy is surely not about what we just want to believe. If anything it is about discovering that what we want to believe does not add up and accepting that things may be stranger.
>
> V: if the Universe does not have _an_ existence, then everything in it exists separately and at different moments , and this makes my, or your, or anyone’s, existence subject to randomness, and we lose object constancy immediately.
> Jo: I cannot see why randomness comes in. I am not sure what object constancy would be but if it is that something can be both observed to be so and observed to be not so, we have no danger of that as long as the laws of dynamic connection hold. (The laws of physics are only laws of dynamic connection. Any concept of time that had your instants would not be a physics concept.)
>
> V:This relativity extends to observers who are not in motion
> Jo: But that is the catch, all motion is relative, nobody is 'in motion' or 'not in motion'.
>
> V:I am Kantian in respect of perception and the world-in-itself, because I cannot believe that our restricted senses are the _only_ way of ‘knowing’ the world-out-there, so there is almost inevitably (though not absolutely certainly) something of the world which is beyond the perceptual world we live in.
> Jo: And the trouble is that we now know Kant was wrong - there are no Godclocks. Knowing does not just involve senses, it involves the inferential mechanisms provided by our brain circuitry. There was at one time a fashion for calling electrons 'unobservables'. The idea was that we could see elephants but not electrons. This is nonsense because when we see an elephant all we are getting is messages from electrons (photons). We can know about anything that we can infer the existence of - like Higgs bosons, even if we only know them because of a statistical analysis of thousands of photographs in which no one photograph can be said to be of a Higgs boson. But the idea that there is some way of knowing other than inference using something like brain circuitry, assisted by megacomputer circuitry at CERN, is very dangerous. What could this 'knowing' mean? Certainly not knowing. What sort of process would it be? It sounds suspiciously like Godspying woo-woo to me I am afraid.
>
> BW
> Jo
>
No comments:
Post a Comment
Leave a comment