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.
Mind is not in itself limited. The tiny drops of the ocean of mind that we each possess for a while are not limited either, as a piece of infinity is still infinite.
We are all demiurges. As such, we can't help screwing up the work, even with the best of intentions. Somebody out driving at night in the rain probably has his priorities twisted.
RW,
While I cannot claim to know what became of the fingertip after it flew off into the food preparation area, I can look at my finger and know the tip NOT there. I can speculate that it was almost certainly consumed and recycled by a series of organisms, probably starting with a human diner of the meal being prepared at that place and time, but I *KNOW* it is not at the end of its parent finger.
I can tell you where and when I lost the knife. I don't know where it IS at the moment, but I know quite a few places it is NOT.
From my current perch I can peer into my kitchen and know by direct observation (as well as indirect satellite cues, concerning the behavior of my cat) that I am NOT in there.
Eastern piffle is amusing, but don't think to dispute even limited empiricism with it - piffle is a very inutile tool for such a task.
Albert Einstein - "Herr Drill, your buttocks look like two cheesecloths full of instant mashed potatoes."
Neils Bohr - "Ja, vhat Einstein said."
Well, it was more impressive when they said it in German.
You could probably fill up a swimming pool by spitting in it, but don't bring that prowess to a forest fire.
Our minds are the equivalent of the vacuum tube diodes of the first computing machines, in comparison to where we would need to be to travel mentally.
Mind is unlimited, but our minds aren't. But don't let me hold you back. Keep exercizing your mind.
plants have hydraulics, photoreceptivity, and diurnal metabolic cycles.
show me the studies shoing they have thoughts. sounds like BS.
I also have physicists to cite. Some of my physicists are still alive last time I checked. The Arrow of Time is right up there with other common sense misconceptions.
Well, Dude, your mind can be elsewhere, but can it do anything useful there?
Another nervous system anomaly might be observed in microbes, single cells, that have no brain, yet have behavior.
This is merely a manifestation of our lack of understanding of the cellular nature of memory operations. We still have much to learn about how brains, and cells, store information.
We're still trying to get around that relativity problem. It wasn't Einstein's fault, but Minkowski who put the three spatial and one temporal dimension solution out there. We have been trapped in this backwater solar system ever since. A century is long enough, let's get going.
I'm willing. Why else would I be designing starcraft?
Right. We have a pretty good idea of what doesn't work. Thing is, discussion gets cut off instantly when it comes to FTL, so hardly anybody is working on it. Forget it, impossible, dreamer, etc. Of course, some try anyway, but they propose only what we already know doesn't work and are correctly ID'd as crackpots.
Generation ships are a tacit acceptance of someody else's imposed limits. So are warp drives. Got a feeling that once we see how to do it, everybody will say, of course, what's the big deal?
counter-experiment:
take four groups of 100 newborn kittens.
1. one group is your control group. raise normally.
2. the next group is to be locked in steel drums with no visual references or stimuli.
3. the third group is to be locked in steel drums with an absence of vertical visual references but a presence of horizontal visual references.
4. the final group is to be locked into steel drums with an absence of horizontal visual references but a presence of vertical visual references.
5. no other factors shall be different between these four groups.
6. after 90 days, expose all specimens from the four groups to a normal environment containing both vertical and hrizontal hazards. Observe their behavior.
* the control group will be normal, the second group will be essentially blind, the third group will bump into vertical objects but have no difficulty jumping up on tables, and the last group will not bump into vertical hazards but will be unable to negotiate changes in elevation (like stairs)*
7. after studying their behavior, kill half of each group and dissect their brains. note any differences in the composition of the hypothalamic juncture of the optic nerves and the development of the occipital lobes.
8. using that data as a benchmark, now vivisect the remainder and expose them to visual stimuli as you observe the activity of those same regions in their living brians.
If you replicate this study (yes, it has been done) you will have replicated one of the earliest empirical proofs of the hardware-bound nature of intellectual processing, and demonstrated one of the most profound examples of deliberate stimulus-based synaptic pruning.
can't do this to humans, of course, but the biology is grossly similar and there is plenty of data suggesting the principle holds across all data processing and cognitive functions.
sorry, dude, but your mind is your wetware.
plants don't have wetware.
they thus do not have "thoughts"
You wouldn't be able to come back, but what's the big deal about that? If you don't want to miss something here, either take it with you, or don't leave.
I still don't have much confidence in being able to navigate at that speed, though.
In any case, I think we ought to build what we can. One of my ideas is to send robot ships out, with which we can communicate. When they get far enough, we send the information needed to build a clone with our knowledge, so that that entity would have traveled at the speed of light.
There is no connection between the mind and the structure it supposedly resides in. How does a thought cause a muscle to contract? Maybe that's a wrong question. Maybe the neuron causes the muscle to contract at the same time it causes the thought. How could a neuron cause the thought of FTL flight when that is impossible on the face of it since no muscular contraction can make it happen? What could posses the neuron to make the muscles buy Hegel's Encyclopedia from Amazon in anticipation of reading Hegel's refutation of Newton and all Newton's minions ever since?
Relativity is simple geometry. Why should the universe care at all about our simple geometry? That's a loaded question and supposes the universe has mind. [which it obviously does]
You seem to set much store in trying to iron out the wrinkles of the Universe with your Philosophy Iron.
Take Einstein's famous equation, for example. It is childishly simple to relate, unless you expand it to consider the differences between a mass at rest, and that same mass at great speed. Then it starts looking like a standard physics equation.
But it is still childishly simple. Let's provide Gallagher with a really humongous Sledge-O-Matic, and we'll set up as his target a very tiny bit of mass.
Now after his spiel, Gallagher rares back, swings with a mighty force, and instantly transforms that little bit of M into a rapidly expanding plane of energy -- at the speed of light, and of course, squared.
See? It's simple. All of it is.
In a way it is encouraging to find any interest in freshman physics on a politics forum.
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