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.
Have they observed enough high energy neutrinos yet to prove it ?
BUMP
an interestingly vague job title. I wonder what it means. I'm guessing that "student" and "professor" are excluded as possibilities. Maybe he's a lab technician. Somebody has to keep all those inclined planes in good working order....
"Time is the because with which some dolls are stuffed." - ee cummings
This statement:
"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'."He's searching for conditions that explain the currently inexplicable. This is the equivalent of leaving a constant in your formula which absorbs all the discrepancies of your calculations.
Intuitively, I think it helps to explain the incredible size of the Universe, in comparison to its relatively young age. Now, if I can just have someone explain the explanation...
That made up physics is getting the topic nowhere.
Seems the way we think of time is supposed to be analagous to the way we think about distance. Now, consider that just because we can put a geometry on cartesian coordinates doesn't mean there is anything geometrical about space, or time. All this neat ink on paper linework hasn't got us anywhere near FTL travel. We need a new ideogram, Einstein had his 100 years with no result.
String theory has run into a kind of foggy, mucky swamp lately. Progress just isn't happening like it was hoped.
Eternity is not "infinite time"; eternity is the absence of time. Time is a constraint placed upon the temporal creation. It has a beginning, and an end. (It has a beginning of logical necessity -- think it through an you (the Royal 'You') will see the logic -- unless it is cyclical, which is less of a rational construct than an eternity sans time, in which "yesterday, today, and forever" are all "at once".)
So, having agreed :) that time does have a beginning, it only makes sense that this beginning occured within the context of a "timeless" eternity.
A useful thought, thanks.
Our traveling faster than light will turn out to be the equivalent of cartoons showing the two-dimensional image lifting off of the page to move through a three dimensional reality.
If the author's thesis is correct, entities at opposite ends of the Universe could be moving in opposite directions of time. Regardless of that, however, each would still be moving away from the center.
Essentially, in Cartesian coordinates, we would draw our diagrams from left to right of increasing time, and they would draw theirs from right to left. But we will never run across these backward-travellers, because we would never reach them.
That's a consequence of the definition, not the definition itself. The scientific definition of energy is the capacity to do work, and work is defined as a force applied through a given distance. And force is defined as that which causes mass to accelerate, and that means time has to be a factor.
Math is the problem. There is no particular reason why reality should conform to math.
ping!
You sound like a modern public school teacher.
That's one of the many faces of energy. Mechanics is not the whole story anymore.
Yes, I taught high school. Wasn't recently, though.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.