The Many Directions of Time

http://www.stanford.edu/~afmayer/ ^ | 1 February 2006 | Alexander Franklin Mayer

[ckilmer]

Alexander Franklin Mayer Theoretical Physicist and Cosmologist

1 February 2006

Welcome!

For a number of months now at Stanford University (Physics), I have been quietly working on a book entitled The Many Directions of Time, which I anticipate will go to press in 2006. Here you will find a preview of related 'digital lectures' that have been created to appeal to a wide global audience including topic experts as well as students, amateur astronomers and scientific professionals of all varieties.

The Introduction (17 PowerPoint slides) will take you less than 10 minutes to go through and should convince you that the larger body of work (Lectures 1 and 2) are very much worth your while to investigate.

The lectures are based on a single underlying idea that drove the insights they contain: that time is not a single dimension of spacetime but rather a local geometric distinction in spacetime. While this may seem very esoteric, it is actually quite simple.

Not too long ago, people thought the Earth was flat, which meant they thought that gravity pointed in the same direction everywhere. Today, we think of that as a silly idea, but at the same time, most people today (including most scientists) still think of spacetime as if it were a big box with 3 space dimensions and 1 time dimension. So, like gravity for a flat Earth, the single time dimension for the 'big box universe' points in one direction, from the Big-Bang into the future. A lot of lip service is given to the idea of "curved spacetime", but the simplistic 3+1 'box' remains the dominant concept of what cosmic spacetime is like.

Imagine that 'the arrow of time' in the Universe, like gravity on Earth, is pretty much the same everywhere, yet also different everywhere relative to everywhere else. That means that the 'arrow of time' points in different directions in spacetime depending on where you are, so time has a geometry just like space has a geometry. The novel idea that there are an infinite number of time dimensions in the Universe revolutionizes gravitational theory and much of modern science with it. A number of outstanding scientific mysteries are definitively solved, including observations that lead to the concepts of 'dark energy' and 'dark matter'. You will know what these are after you read the lectures.

My pending personal URL is alexandermayer.com, which currently redirects to this Website. The draft release was on 27 December 2005.

[King Prout]

There are numerous scientific tests that have been conducted that prove that thought is instantaneous and thus "faster than light".

cite a small sample thereof, please - last I checked, neuronal transmission rates were substantially less than the speed of light, even before factoring in the slowdown caused by the synaptic chemical bridges.

a sample of three well-conducted and peer-reviewed studies supporting your assertion would suffice.

thanks.

[Doctor Stochastic]

There is no particular reason why reality should conform to math.

However, when doing (applied) math, one is obligated to make the math conform (as much as possible) to reality.

[timer]

Yeah, as Right Whale goes mumbling off into the distance, trying to figure out the time prize...maybe I can point my W=P/momentum remote control at you, hit the pause button, and wa-la, you wake up in 2041 and collect your $10,000 in USWAS bills...wanna go? hmmm, west texan...I was once a texas architect, 20 years ago; even had an adopted brother, Jim Lee, who was born in west texas, did 2 tours in 'nam, died 4 years ago and buried there in a military grave. Life wasn't very kind to him...typical for 'nam veterans...

[taxed2death]

Buried deep within Ingo Swanns website are numerous government funded experiments very well documented....double blind tests etc...
www.biomindsuperpowers.com/

[taxed2death]

"a sample of three well-conducted and peer-reviewed studies supporting your assertion would suffice."

they are in there....

[King Prout]

thank you - I shall look into them.

[taxed2death]

it's a long read...
but he really seems to have all his ducks in a row.

As to whether one believes in RV or now... is a whole different discussion. What caught my eye was his depiction of the surface of many planets etc.... described right down to a tee...twenty five years before our first probes made it out there.

[King Prout]

this doesn't look promising, honestly.

which of the plethora of articles on that site do you believe bears most closely on the topic at hand (the measurable velocity of thought)?

[taxed2death]

I'll see if I can wade through some of it tonight and get back to you tomorrow.

[King Prout]

first hit:

http://www.biomindsuperpowers.com/Pages/SuperpowerSeries5.html

"By far and large, people tend to deal only with the end-products of biomind processes -- because on average the processes which produce the end-products are so rapid that they do not enter awareness as discrete sensations.
The speed we would be talking about here is "instantaneous," especially regarding the basic five physical senses. Our responses to the end-products are also quite fast -- mostly so, at any rate.
In other words, our biomind systems can, in a split second, processes from signals, through signal (sense) receptors, thence through a large number of information transducers -- and do all of this between eye-blinks with time to spare."

bald assertion, without data or definitions or testing parameters

continuing...

[King Prout]

next hit, same article:

"But this indicates that something other than our intellect can process incoming signals, can think and make deductions and decisions.

*

And indeed, those who have studied such phenomena beneath their surface apparencies are obliged to attribute this kind of activity to the autonomic nervous systems of the biomind.
The autonomic nervous systems are deemed entirely physical in nature -- but as such, they apparently can ACCURATELY process information-signals with a rapidity and elegance not entirely characteristic of the intellect itself.

*

Biologically speaking, the autonomic nervous system is relatively well understood, except when it comes to something such as the jumping thing. For it is not understood at all how the autonomic systems can FORESEE. And, furthermore, not only foresee, but assign meaning to what is foreseen.

*

Hence, an entire category of very specialized phenomena is missing here, or at least is submerged beneath the collective terms of intuition and gut feeling and which themselves are not inspected very deeply.

*

But the jumping thing vividly demonstrates that our biomind organisms possess subtle superpower sensory receptors and sensory transducers which our intellects are not at all aware of.
And I, for one, am completely comfortable in calling anything a biomind superpower which gets me automatically out of the way of being clobbered."

error. error. error.

case in point: visual data goes through at least eighteen different processing phases before it is integrated into the intellectual construct we call conscious awareness. several of these processes pass through the limbic system via the amygdala, and can trigger automated responses to stimuli known (though experience or instinct) to be threatening without the conscious mind ever being involved.

fast... way faster than deliberate action... far from "instantaneous"

continuing...

[taxed2death]

Wow. You're a heck of a speed reader! :)

Ok, you win....LOL

An interesting read regarding what takes place "behind the scenes" of consciousness is a book by Evan Harris walker called
"The Physics of consciousness". He ties together the nuts and bolts of what takes place when someone "thinks" like no one else I've ever read. He's a Physicist and takes you step by step through his theory and I think his book is worth a look.

[King Prout]

hehhehheh

I've had lots of practice

don't mistake me - I do not dismiss outre potentialities of the human mind/spirit/soul.

I just strongly dislike imprecise application of such concrete and absolute terms as "instant" or "all" or "none"

[Wolfstar]

Time is merely a construct of perception.

Time is merely a construct of human perception.

[Wolfstar]

This process we call time and it is measured by the rotation of the earth and its revolution around the sun. Time isn't a perception. It really exists.

Time is also a perception. We humans measure time by the period of our planet's rotation around its axis, the moon's rotation around our planet, and our planet and moon's rotation around our star (sun).

Using the same standards of measure, time is different for each of the planets that rotate around our sun. Each one has it's own period of rotation around its axis and period of rotation around the sun. Some have moons, some don't. We have one moon, and our calendars are based on our lunar cycle. Therefore, if we were able to live on each of the planets, our perception of time would be different.

Time is also a perception based on the human experience of living linear lives from birth to death. We think in terms of starting and ending points, and progression. However, it's entirely possible that there is no absolute beginning and no absolute end in the universe.

[RightWhale]

I have the Almagest right here. In it Ptolemy proves the earth round and suspended in space. Granted, he placed it in the center, which is not entirely unjustified.

[King Prout]

hell, casual inspection of imperial and reagal statuary and regalia from rome on through to today makes it quite clear that *educated* folk knew quite well that the world was a sphere.

"orbis terrarum"

kinda hard to dispute that kind of evidence.

this leaves aside the demonstrable FACT that the idea that the medieval world believed the earth was flat is a MYTH concocted in the 1800s by some frenchman and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

[King Prout]

time is a direct function of motion over distance, irrespective of perception.

[RightWhale]

They had a few other things going back then and shortly before then. Phlogiston, aether, the Watchmaker, Nature abhors a vacuum; up until Mersenne it was thought by some that cannonballs flew in a straight line to the limit of their flight and then dropped straight down. As late as the 1930s some believed they could derive all of nature's laws from math.

I don't particularly want to go over old ground, but it might be mentioned that Goedel demonstrated, using Einstein's canonical relativity, to Einstein, that if time travel is possible, and Goedel proved it is per relativity, then time is not. Goedel also proved that math is ultimately not provable. Some may wish to give further determination to that last.

[inquest]

[Not too long ago, people thought the Earth was flat,]

I'm not pleased by any reiteration of that particular irrational and easily debunked fallacy

It may not be as fallacious as you think. Keep in mind that "not too long ago", there was a very vast gulf between what educated people knew and what the great mass of everyone else thought. Although it truly is a fallacy, for example, to say that Columbus set out to "prove" that the earth was round, nonetheless I wouldn't be surprised if there were more than a few sailors on his ships who really did have a few jitters about possibly sailing off the edge of the earth.