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.

[AntiGuv]

A ha! Your link is served.

[AntiGuv]

Oh wait. Never mind! That's a different one, but still a good one.

[PatrickHenry]

Another service of
Darwin Central
The conspiracy that cares

[Lx]

Sounds like:
http://www.chucknorrisfacts.com/

[King Prout]

that's a different one (the link AntiGuv provided is to a duplicate of the one I read some time ago... I recognize the exact language of several paragraphs).

quite good, so my thanks.

[inquest]

You said earlier: "there is no evidence in support of the contention that anyone thought the earth was flat." In the spirit of your own tagline, I was just clarifying things a little.

Hell, I once thought the earth was flat, when I was, like, 3.

[King Prout]

I disagree.

we define hours, days, years as we choose.
how long they seem to be does depend on perception.

however, the distance travelled by a mass with a velocity and vector cares not a whit for our perceptions, definitions, or origins, and thus forms the sole utile benchmark for time.

[King Prout]

ok, I'll humor you ;)

can you provide *evidence* that, at 3, you thought this?
can you provide evidence that, at 3, you *thought*?

[King Prout]

yanno, I loathe discussions like this, as they inevitably lead to odd and annoying thoughts, such as:

can space, itself, move?

a senseless question, in a Cartesian model, wherein "space" has no "itself" to relocate, but... add in Casimir Force and perhaps it grows some merit.

stuff like that makes my head hurt.

[inquest]

Er, umm, I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you ;-)

[King Prout]

I have the flu.
death holds less fear for me than it otherwise might.

[NicknamedBob]

"... I once thought the earth was flat, when I was, like, 3."

I never thought the Earth was flat, -- until I went to Kansas.

[King Prout]

I never thought I'd died and gone to Limbo... until I drove through Kansas.

[RightWhale]

The thread is far afield. We should be discussing the myth of time, but we are mired in analogous situations in the thinking of this and that. Fact is, we welcome any distraction rather than bust our brains over the nature of time.

[King Prout]

time seems to stand still, irrespective of velocity, when driving across Kansas

[Constantine XIII]

1) Bucket

2) Rope

:P

[NicknamedBob]

Time is where the wax went, when the candle burned down.

[King Prout]

but... RW maintains that travel is an illusion, so the wax couldn't have gone anywhere, so that can't be it ;)

[RightWhale]

Sorry I haven't kept up with this. The power has been out several times today, snow in the transformers, and I have been outdoors enjoying the freak summer weather. +25 today! Does Nature also not care what season it is?

[RightWhale]

All is vanity.

Be sure your travel companions are suitable to be buried with because one of these times you won't be coming back.
--J. Derrida