Posted on 02/05/2006 1:48:11 PM PST by 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.
There's a fairly compelling article on the subject which makes it plain tha there is no evidence in support of the contention that anyone thought the earth was flat.
I rather foolishly did not archive the link, but one of the Big Dogs on the FR science wing can probably give it to you.
If you examine the trajectories of cannonballs, that's not an altogether inaccurate description. Because of air resistance, they far more closely resemble that description than the Newtonian parabolic description.
many people have believed many a stupid notion to be fact, true.
so why'd the author pick the one such notion which seems least likely to have ever been commonly believed by thinking men?
on to other things:
How am I supposed to credit the assertion that the ancients believed the moon actually changed its shape during its phases? To my naked eye, the sphericity of the moon is quite evident through all of its phases save the three nights of its full illumination, as are the various mare. Surely, in earlier eras with cleaner air and less "light pollution", the sphericity would have been as evident if not more so. Yes, my eyes are abnormal, but not freakishly so. Surely there were ancient observers with such eyes and FAR more interest in the subject.
Time is not necessary to describe the trace of a cannon stone, although the cartesian approach is based on overlaying coordinates in terms of time. For Descartes motion was required, however the primal question of how thought activates the muscles still remains to be explained at all except in terms of a parallel phenomenon. Neither psychology nor animal physiology have crossed that barrier.
This discusses it generally: Flat Earth (Wikipedia). About three centuries BC, Aristotle argued convincingly that the earth was a sphere (although he was wrong about some other things). Eratosthenes correctly determined the size of the earth, at least two centuries BC.
um... seems an impossible statement - without a timeline, the points of the trajectory could show up anywhere. there is always a temporal sequence in such a graph: where it was, where it is at t=x, and where it is headed next.
They could see the entire round face of the moon through all phases. Oddly, they did not extend this observation to the planets, nor to the question of whether the earth or the sun is at the center of the solar system. When the phases of Venus were finally noticed, an intermediate chart was drawn up showing Venus and Mercury to be circling the sun and the rest circling the earth still. This same idea could be extended now to revise the concept of a [unexplained] wobble in the earth being responsible for the precession of the equinoxes.
there was a topic-specific article concerning the origin of the myth itself. I really wish I had archived it :(
well, with my naked eye I can tell when Jupiter and Saturn (especially Saturn... damn, what a flashy bastard that one is) are closer or farther away from here, but I cannot distinguish their sphericity.
I seldom see Venus.
I don't recall much of my bare-eye observations of Mars.
but, dammit, the Moon is BACKLIT by scatter from Earth, exhibits graduated spherical shading, and its larger craters remain visible at all times. I simply cannot believe that observant thinking men ever believed that it actually changed shape in its phases of illumination.
Then there's the word "Mediterranean", which, as applied to that sea, is definitely suggestive of flat-earth thinking.
I think that had less to do with a mental block on the part of the scientists, than with a desire to avoid getting into hot water with the ecclesiastical authorities.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. --- Douglas Adams
yah, if you go back far enough and cast your net wide enough, you'll find records of mythology explaining the world rides on the back of a giant turtle.
so what?
when anyone summons the myth of flat-earthers, they mean medieval europe.
you know it.
I know it.
the author knew it.
let's not indulge in spin, 'k?
that's the one.
the version I was originally directed to was not hosted on FR, but it is identical.
drat: washington irving, not hawthorne.
memory serves ill, now and again, eh?
Time is, indeed, a function of motion over distance. We humans percieve a day to be 24 hours, weeks and months to be as they are due to the lunar cycle, and years to be 365 days all due to our measurements of the motions of our earth, moon and sun.
However, time is also perception. We have a different perception of time when we are children, for example, than when we are elderly. We have a different perception of time when we are busy and rushed than when we are lazing about.
Our perceptions of time are fixed to a 24-hour day, a seven-day week, and a 12-month year, as well as to our practice of numbering years, and by the knowledge that our lives are finite.
If we were born on an orb that does not rotate around its axis and/or rotates around a huge planet instead of around a star, our perceptions of time would be different because we would measure it differently.
From the Grand Master's archives: The Myth of the Flat Earth.
Memory is a most fickle mistress!
I have the link to the original somewhere amidst my 7,564 webpage bookmarks, but I'm not quite sure where. If I track it down, I'll post it to you.
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