Ground-breaking work in understanding of time

Eurekalert ^ | July 31, 2003 | Brooke Jones

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so very much for the excellent post!

But the question I wonder about is, because the human mind needs to work this way, and thus must impose itself in this manner on reality, could this then mean that somehow we are making reality “fit” our categories instead of the other way around? And if this is so, then could it be possible that there are aspects of reality that must remain forever unknown to us on principle, because we have no other method by which to engage or deal with them, given our present state of consciousness and our resulting notions WRT the problem of Time?

I believe there are aspects of reality which remain unknown to us on purpose. Our minds have difficulty with four dimensions as it is. Our eyes are not made for higher dimensional perception. Pondering extra spatial dimensions requires an almost out-of-body awareness, even more so extra time dimensions.

The Curse of Dimensionality (pdf) Therefore, I conclude that we do indeed “make reality ‘fit’ out categories instead of the other way around.”

Personally, I rather “shun” the idea of understanding myself as a “composite” built entirely out of the activity going on in a multiplicity of fields.

I agree. In this case, the sum of the parts does not equal the whole and looking at it that way is misleading, IMHO.

But “shunning” is silly, if what I wish to “shun” is the actual truth of reality: Which surely seems to be that I am composed of a multiplicity a different fields (or “ontological levels”). Truth is truth! My “opinion” of it matters not in the least.

Again, I agree. It will take a lot of courage on the part of integrative scientists to let go of the material landmarks and put it all at risk. The only parallel I can think of off-hand is the reaction one has the first time he dives in open, murky water. Suddenly he not only doesn’t know where land is, but he can’t tell which way is up without looking at the bubbles. But with high risk comes high reward.

Here’s what I wonder about, as it seems particularly related to our understanding of time. Isn’t in a certain sense something that is “universal” effectively “timeless?” In the sense that it never does move from past to present to future, it just IS? Just as physical laws themselves are effectively “timeless?” They do not build up randomly over a long chain of causation; they are that which constrains apparent randomness into the forms we see all around us; and without them, there could be no forms? It probably sounds pretty “Greek” to simply say that universals are timeless on principle – which in a certain way gives them a value as some kind of order of “time” – so to speak (if only to indicate negatively what is not subject to temporal change).

In my view, time and space are like two sides of the same coin. Both are created as the universe expands, and they can be transformed (Construction of the Lorentz Transformation). That is the difficulty I was having with the above article. Time (space/time) is already relativistic. The more interesting speculation was yours! Is time multi-dimensional?

If the answer to your question is affirmative, then the four dimension worldview (3 spatial plus time) can be seen as a fixed block and within the extra-dimension of time the entire panorama is revealed, i.e. beyond any conceivable timeline. This rings true to my Spirit and fits nicely with the Tegmark musings on a Level IV multi-verse of mathematical structures. IOW, instead of a separate universe per mathematical structure as Tegmark proposes, an extra dimensional time within which the mathematical structures exist.

The article on gravity raised even more flags for me – in particular, could dark energy be a manifestation of extra dimensional dynamics? It might help explain why dark energy, which is 70% of the mass of the universe, has not been detected in laboratories.

It may also help explain some of the apparent superluminal anomalies such as the Feynman one you discussed:

Plus Richard Feynman has suggested that, at state vector collapse, one of the photon pair “must calculate” all possible routes to find its photon twin before it actually settles on one. This seems a little nutty to me (maybe he was speaking tongue-in-cheek); but if it’s true, it seems that calculation must proceed at a rate faster than the speed of light; for on state vector collapse, the photon twin “instantly” gets the same “information” as the original photon. So I don’t see why there cannot be “superluminal” velocities; especially if the field in which they are taking place is substantially “out of time” – and thus not constrained by our ordinary notions of space and time.

Indeed, simultaneous “action at a distance” seems to require some kind of field or substrate that is not constrained for space and time.

Please let me know what you think of the articles after you look them over this weekend. I think you are “onto” something here, betty boop.

I’ve been thinking about writing a short article on the universality of consciousness as a potential fundamental field or principle of the Universe, based on some recent papers I’ve read from Raman, Rifat, and Grandpierre, that might shed further light on these issues, and perhaps aid in focusing our present speculation further.

That’s a great idea! I look forward to your article! Right now, I’m considering whether an extra time dimension would be the residence of the neshama. Hmmmm…

Thank you so very much for all these thought-provoking ideas! Hugs!!!

[AndrewC]

I hear that drowning, or oxygen deprivation is a pleasant experience.

It depends. Hypoxia can be insidious so it does not always raise red flags. I can say that it is not unpleasant for me, at least as experienced in an altitude chamber.

[mikegi]

It just occurred to be what this is. A few years back, Alan Sokal spoofed the Lit. Crit. crowd by writing a nonsensical article on quantum gravity and getting it published in a respectable Lit. Crit. journal. This is their revenge. They write a lame rehash of Zeno's paradox, use some obscure New Zealander as a front, and get it published in a physics journal with a, let's be kind and say liberal, editorial policy. In a few days, they'll hold a news conference and announce that physics' air of superiority over the humanities is entirely unjustified, and that physicists can't recognize BS disguised as physics. Or that payback's a bitch.

Bingo! There is no content in the paper as far as I can tell, just a bunch of technical sounding mumbo-jumbo. The key to your observation is at the bottom of page 4 where Lynds destroys all of the quantities in physics (momentum, energy, etc.) and finishes on page 5 with "Moreover, the universe's initial existence and progression through time would not be possible. Thankfully, it seems nature has wisely traded certainty for continuity".

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your post! I defer to your knowledge of the classics.

With regard to my use of the names Aristotle and Plato, I probably should have clarified that I was speaking in terms of mathematics.

Max Tegmark: Parallel Universes

According to the Aristotelian paradigm, physical reality is fundamental and mathematical language is merely a useful approximation. According to the Platonic paradigm, the mathematical structure is the true reality and observers perceive it imperfectly. In other words, the two paradigms disagree on which is more basic, the frog perspective of the observer or the bird perspective of the physical laws...

The Platonic paradigm raises the question of why the universe is the way it is. To an Aristotelian, this is a meaningless question: the universe just is. But a Platonist cannot help but wonder why it could not have been different. If the universe is inherently mathematical, then why was only one of the many mathematical structures singled out to describe a universe? A fundamental asymmetry appears to be built into the very heart of reality.

For Lurkers interested in the Hawking/Penrose debate:

The Nature of Space and Time

Hawking on physics and reality:

These lectures have shown very clearly the difference between Roger and me. He's a Platonist and I'm a positivist. He's worried that Schroedinger's cat is in a quantum state, where it is half alive and half dead. He feels that can't correspond to reality. But that doesn't bother me. I don't demand that a theory correspond to reality because I don't know what it is. Reality is not a quality you can test with litmus paper. All I'm concerned with is that the theory should predict the results of measurements. Quantum theory does this very successfully....

Roger feels that...the collapse of the wave function introduces CPT violation into physics. He sees such violations at work in at least two situations: cosmology and black holes. I agree that we may introduce time asymmetry in the way we ask questions about observations. But I totally reject the idea that there is some physical process that corresponds to the reduction of the wave function or that this has anything to do with quantum gravity or consciousness. That sounds like magic to me, not science.

Penrose on physics and reality:

Quantum mechanics has only been around for 75 years. This is not very long if one compares it, for example, with Newton's theory of gravity. Therefore it wouldn't surprise me if quantum mechanics will have to be modified for very macroscopic objects.

At the beginning of this debate, Stephen said that he thinks that he is a positivist, whereas I am a Platonist. I am happy with him being a positivist, but I think that the crucial point here is, rather, that I am a realist. Also, if one compares this debate with the famous debate of Bohr and Einstein, some 70 years ago, I should think that Stephen plays the role of Bohr, whereas I play Einstein's role! For Einstein argued that there should exist something like a real world, not necessarily represented by a wave function, whereas Bohr stressed that the wave function doesn't describe a "real" microworld but only "knowledge" useful for making predictions.

Bohr was perceived to have won the argument. In fact, according to the recent biography of Einstein by [Abraham] Pais, Einstein might as well have gone fishing from 1925 onward. Indeed, it is true that he didn't make many big advances, even though his penetrating criticisms were very useful. I believe that the reason why Einstein didn't continue to make big advances in quantum theory was that a crucial ingredient was missing from quantum theory. This missing ingredient was Stephen's discovery, 50 years later, of black hole radiation. It is this information loss, connected with black hole radiation, which provides the new twist.

[Nebullis]

There is no content in the paper as far as I can tell, just a bunch of technical sounding mumbo-jumbo.

Although the paper to which the post refers is not yet available, it's probably just a rewording of the Zeno paper online. In which case, there's not much to it.

[Nebullis]

Hypoxia can be insidious so it does not always raise red flags.

That's true. The out of body or near death experience is a sure tip-off, but not everybody will experience that. And for some people a delusion is not recognized as such.

[mikegi]

Although the paper to which the post refers is not yet available, it's probably just a rewording of the Zeno paper online. In which case, there's not much to it.

Here's a link to the paper: Time and Classical and Quantum Mechanics: Indeterminacy vs. Discontinuity in PDF. It's not simply a rehash of Zeno but says that in relative motion there isn't a precise position at a particular instant of time, etc. I guess I still don't get the significance of the paper.

A far more significant paper is Dodd's Compton Effect analysis which basically destroys the concept of a photon as an object (particle or otherwise). It shows how a free electron absorbs a fixed amount of energy and momentum from a classical circularly-polarized electromagnetic wave, independent of the wave's intensity (leading to E=hf and p = hf/c). The intensity of the wave determines the amount of time required to absorb this "photon" of energy/momentum.

There is one physicist that I know of who has the potential to bring this analysis to the forefront of physics: Princeton's Kirk McDonald. I enjoy reading his papers and he has been studying em-electron interactions intensively. He uses classical em to analyze his experiments - finding the limits of applicability, etc - then proceeds to muck it up by transitioning to QM. He won't make the jump to declare the photon dead as an independent object - it's like a giant elephant sitting in the middle of his papers that he won't acknowledge.

[Nebullis]

Thansk for providing that link. I skimmed the paper and was similarly not impressed. I appreciate you input!

[betty boop]

Things could occur by jumps. There might be a system where one measures the position of a particle and "later" does another measurement for which the particle is somewhere else. (This describes discrete space.) Were time discretized, one could look a the "fundmental clock" and only see discrete units. There would be no experiment that could give a result that was between one tick and the next. If the resolution were fine enough, all of ordinary dynamics can be recovered (and there would be no obvious experiment that could distinguish a really fine discretization from a continuous theory).

Very interesting speculation, Doc. Indeed, if the "resolution were fine enough," discrete "jumps" would look like a continuous process to us. But you suggest there's no "obvious" experiment that could be performed that would allow us to distinguish between the two theories.

But if "there would be no experiment that could give a result that was between one tick and the next," then how could we then demonstrate instances of cause and effect? If the two ticks are separate from each other, how could they affect each other?

Additionally, time divisions could be only countable but dense rather than continuous...the Riemann integral is sufficient for such cases. Continuous time requires a Lesbegue integral. I'm not sure there's an experiment that shows one rather than the other to be "correct."

Thus we have two seemingly mutually exclusive theories and no obvious way to tell which is "correct." (Unless we say that time, like physical particles, has both a discrete and a wave form.)

Maybe these theories aren't testible in themselves, and the only way we can verify or falsify them is to load them into the assumptions of planned experiments and see what happens. But there's a problem even there: How would we know what the experimental results really mean if our assumptions haven't been "validated?" (And then, an even more extreme question: are they even susceptible to validation, in the scientific sense?)

I guess all this shows that "mind" and "matter" interact and can and do modify each other.... And then, perhaps there is the question of what "mind" wants to do here: recover traditional dynamics, or explore the fundamental structure of reality. I suppose motivations get loaded into our assumptions very early on; but this is rarely obvious.

Human beings get a whole lot "right." But sometimes, I wonder how, and why that is....

I wonder if you can help me understand the manner in which a discrete time division would display "density?"

Thank you so much for your fascinating and thought-provoking post, Doc.

[Steve Van Doorn]

thanks

[betty boop]

I believe there are aspects of reality which remain unknown to us on purpose.

This is a very great caution, Alamo-Girl. I'm going to have to give that a lot of very serious thought.

Thank you so much for your observations and analysis! And also, as ever, your generous help and encouragement! Will dive into those papers you bumped me to now, to catch up on this mysterious "dark matter...!"

Thanks, A-G, with HUGS!

[edsheppa]

And if his theory makes no predictions that differ from "traditional" math/physics, then on what basis is his system to be preferred over the "traditional" one?

If it were to open up new intuitions, even if completely equivalent, it would be useful even if not necessarily preferred.

But frankly, it sounds to me like the usual crank bullshit.

[edsheppa]

If the resolution were fine enough, all of ordinary dynamics can be recovered

Aliasing leading to either an upper bound on possible frequencies of radiation, or at least indistinguishability beyond some frequency, would be an effect not in conventional physics.

[Doctor Stochastic]

It's trivial to see that the first of the (curse of dimensionality) guy's pictures looks random and the second doesn't. It's obvious that he want's to define "random" as something different from what the rest of the world means. He is confused by the terms "random" and "equally distributed." A random choice of points will be equally distributed but it will not be expected to be the most equally distributed set of points in a region.

I did use the term "Curse of Dimensionality" in my dissertation about 30 years ago. I think I got the term from Bellman.

[Doctor Stochastic]

I figured out an experiment that may allow one to tell whether things are discrete or continuous. I'll post the description later. I can't remember the form of the specific equation I want to use so I'll have to work it out again.

[Sam Cree]

bump

[Doctor Stochastic]

That's one effect. I have another which I'll post later.

[Yeti]

In contrast, an earlier referee had a different opinion of the controversial paper. "I have only read the first two sections as it is clear that the author's arguments are based on profound ignorance or misunderstanding of basic analysis and calculus. I'm afraid I am unwilling to waste any time reading further, and recommend terminal rejection."

The referee was right.

I was fortunate to have been exposed to delta-epsilon proofs with my first calculus class, and although the guy was not a good teacher, I am at least glad about that exposure. Infintitesimals and limits are difficult concepts for many to grasp, and I think this fellow has confused himself by trying to make it up on his own rather than understand what has already been found.

[betty boop]

I figured out an experiment that may allow one to tell whether things are discrete or continuous. I'll post the description later.

I'm looking forward to it, Doc.

[js1138]

If frequency of radiation tracks energy per photon (going way over my head here) There would be an upper limit limit.