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.
OK, Take me back 40 years. Then take me forward 80 years
if there is no motion, does time exist?
Time is merely a construct of perception.
I read this article before I decided not to open it.
George Allen: "The future is now."
At a basic level time exists, otherwise everything would happen at once.
We use a time system based on the rotation of the earth and also its revolution around the sun to measure time, but never the less some thing that we call time exists. It's not simply a matter of perception.
Maybe this brings modern science one step closer to understanding how the act of flying round the earth very fast results in travel backwards in time. But im not holding my breath - if superman wanted us to understand time travel he would have surely told us himself.
BTTT
Chuck Norris once kicked a man so hard that his foot broke the speed of light, went back in time and killed Amelia Earhart flying over the Pacific Ocean.
Whbat can possibly have led this physicist to guess that time is geometrical at all?
Just collectibles ~ that's all I need to know about.
If only we could see we are everywhere always. Travel is an illusion.
L
It does.
There is nonuniformity, but space and time are not the real dimensions.
My point was for that which cannot perceive time, it does not exist. Only intelligence can perceive time, depending on the dimension in which the intelligence exists. In a 2D universe, a 3D object makes no sense. in a 3D universe, a 4D object can only theoretically defined. An electron is a good example, as we can know where it is, and when it is, but not both at the same time.
Huh.
I'm going to walk down the lane to pick up yesterdays mail.
Are you saying that I won't really move, but that instead the earth, and all the rest of you poor saps will be forced to turn? The mailbox will slowing come into sight as I turn the world under my feet?
Yikes. Sounds like hard work.
How do I get out of this gravity well?
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