Time, Mechanics and Zeno Undergo Major Revision

spacedaily.com ^ | 13 Aug 03 | Brooke Jones

[RightWhale]

Is this mainstream yet?

[RightWhale]

Please call the usual suspects

[ecomcon]

What do you mean? I thought we already did this.

[Constitutionalist Conservative]

seems set to change the way we think about the nature of time and its relationship to motion and classical and quantum mechanics

What's this "we" stuff? How do they know what I think about the nature of time and its relationship to motion and classical and quantum mechanics?

:-)

[.cnI redruM]

I must admit, I am humbled. That's about 3 bong hits away from actually making sense. No wonder my career in physics end in an undergraduate minor.

[Libertarianize the GOP]

http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/bump-list

[avg_freeper]

I thought Newton dealt with Zeno's Paradox quite well actually. Anyway, I believe this article deserves a posting of the flap rabbit picture.

[KarlInOhio]

[RightWhale]

What's this "we" stuff?

No kidding. I knew a kid in 3rd grade that got stuck on Zeno's paradox then and he still ain't right in the head. When he tried out for Little League pitcher, they had to send him home because his pitches never reached homeplate. We had a bag of baseballs and he had thrown half of them before we wised up. That's about 25 baseballs and they're probably still there getting closer and closer to homeplate, but after all these years it's hard to tell if they're moving at all.

[RightWhale]

This same article was posted here a while ago , but since the title was somewhat different, a search did not find the earlier article. This time it came from a space news site, so this probably means NASA will investigate. NASA has a department for antigravity research and other edge sciences just in case they turn out to be useful in some manner for space propulsion. Of course none of it has worked out so far, but it's only a few $million here and there, NBD.

[talleyman]

How do they know what I think about the nature of time and its relationship to motion and classical and quantum mechanics?

The rabbit told them what the aliens said.

[ecomcon]

LOL

[Paradox]

While Zeno's Paradox has made the history books, I STILL prefer to be no mans property (unless you count taxation as slavery...)

[RightWhale]

But that's not all. Then this happened:

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Dim Future for the Universe as Stellar Lights Go Out

The universe is gently fading into darkness according to three astronomers who have looked at 40,000 galaxies in the neighbourhood of the Milky Way. Research student Ben Panter and Professor Alan Heavens from Edinburgh University's Institute for Astronomy, and Professor Raul Jimenez of University of Pennsylvania, USA, decoded the "fossil record" concealed in the starlight from the galaxies to build up a detailed account of how many young, recently-formed stars there were at different periods in the 14-billion-year existence of the universe. Their history shows that, for billions of years, there have not been enough new stars turning on to replace all the old stars that die and switch off. The results will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on 21 August 2003.

"Our analysis confirms that the age of star formation is drawing to a close", says Alan Heavens. "The number of new stars being formed in the huge sample of galaxies we studied has been in decline for around 6 billion years - roughly since the time our own Sun came into being." Astronomers already had evidence that this was the case, mainly from observing galaxies so far away that we see them as they were billions of years ago because of the great length of time their light has taken to reach us. Now the same story emerges strongly from the work of Panter, Heavens and Jimenez, who for the first time approached the problem differently and used the whole spectrum of light from an enormous number of nearby galaxies to get a more complete picture.

Galaxies shine with the combined light of all the stars in them. Most of the light from young stars is blue, coming from very hot massive stars. These blue stars live fast and die young, ending their lives in supernova explosions. When they have gone, they no longer outshine the smaller red stars that are more long-lived. Many galaxies look reddish overall rather than blue - a broad sign that most star formation happened long ago.

In their analysis, Panter, Heavens and Jimenez have used far more than the simple overall colours of the galaxies, though. The spectrum observations they used come from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the volume of data involved was so vast, that the researchers had to develop a special lossless data compression method, called MOPED, to allow them to analyse the sample in a reasonable length of time, without losing accuracy.

---

Please inform Greenpeace that it doesn't really matter after all.

[Bedford Forrest]

"No kidding. I knew a kid in 3rd grade that got stuck on Zeno's paradox then and he still ain't right in the head. When he tried out for Little League pitcher, they had to send him home because his pitches never reached homeplate. We had a bag of baseballs and he had thrown half of them before we wised up. That's about 25 baseballs and they're probably still there getting closer and closer to homeplate, but after all these years it's hard to tell if they're moving at all."

Excellent, most excellent.

[mikegi]

Here's a sort of spin-off on Zeno:

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It is impossible for a differential equation to indicate cause and effect without involving instantaneous action at a distance

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For example, one of Maxwell's equations for a plane wave is dE/dx = -dB/dt. Does this equation say that a change in time of B at a point **causes** a change in E with distance??? Then there's the counterpart to this equation: c^2 dB/dx = dE/dt. Does this say that a change in E with time **causes** a change in B with distance?

A lot of people think so, even the supposedly great Feynman: "It is impossible for them to disappear. They maintain themselves in a kind of dance - one making the other, the second making the first - propagating onward through space". This the "rolling wave" description of Maxwell's Equations.

But, how can this work? How does a value at a point *know* that it is changing with time? It can't because it would instantaneously need to know two things: what it was before and what it is going to be. Worse still is to add on the idea that this change at a point with time *causes* a change in something else with distance.

[Another bong hit]

So, is it possible for a differential equation to indicate cause and effect?

[B-Chan]

The really interesting thing about this is the effect it could have on space travel if applied. For example, we “know” that no spacecraft (or any other entity whose rest mass MR > 0) can achieve an instantaneous velocity V in any frame of reference such that V = c where c = the speed of light in vacuum.

But if there really IS no such thing as “instantaneous velocity”...

[RightWhale]

That isn't really action at a distance. It is measurement along two dimensions, along the axis of time and along the axis of space. Movement on one axis, mathematically speaking is accompanied by movement on the other axis, mathematically speaking. Not causation, but confusion; one is the time equivalent of the other, and the other is the space equivalent of the first. Measurement is a process, so physical quantities are inherently processes. B and E are one thing seen as separate processes, just measured differently because there is more than one way to measure things.

[RightWhale]

That's why NASA should spend some money on this, hire a physicist, and mabe a philosopher, too. Maybe there is no such thing as epitachysis and we can skip all the fire and smoke belching machinery at Cape Canaveral and just go directly to the proper velocity depending on mission requirements

[wildandcrazyrussian]

I'll have to check this out, since it is right up my alley! Actually, I thought a long time ago that the resolution of Zeno's paradox had to do with the "Planck distance" (10 to the minus 43rd power of a meter), a unit for which smaller units of length have no meaning in a quantum-level kind of way. But this guy seems to be saying something different.