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.
In your philosophy, is not math more real than reality?
Reality has umbras and penumbras. Math has points and lines, and in fact, the only true equalities to be found.
I keep running out of time
No. The realest thing in my world is law. That is one of the few things we have somehow created all by ourselves.
Surely you must at least be speaking of Scientific Law.
Created law as in that which men live by is no more real or permanent than the dew of the morning.
Civil law is as real as it gets. When I drive my ford down the road into town, where other people see trees and sidewalks, I see legal property lines. Real estate is called real for a reason. It is real, maybe the only reality.
Oh man, are you delusional!
There is not past or present, only an infinitesimal tiny ever-present present.
I am an attorney, if that makes me delusional.
>At a basic level time exists, otherwise everything would happen at once.
And it does.
There exists only a constant present.
See? There is only now. The future is a guess, and for that matter so is the past.
In American Plains Indian society, crossed sticks on the teepee’s entrance were a “lock.” You could not enter.
Our civil law “property rights” are just as flimsy, especially these days. The legal fabric of our property protection is threadbare and dry-rotted.
Hardly more substantial than cobwebs. I’ll stick to my created realities, thank you. One of these days, I might get somewhere.
Property rights would be strong as steel if you were the 'right' kind of entity. Even the ACLU protects corporation property rights.
Don't be too angry; after all, somebody stole his capital letters and punctuation.
It's still the scientific definition of energy, unless there's a more updated one that you can cite.
Time is nature's way of making sure everything doesn't happen at once!
Mark
Interesting. Sounds like how the 'five different theories' problem of String Theory was solved; all part of the same theory, but looking at it from different directions.
The TIME PRIZE : $10,000 in small, unmarked bills in a brown paper bag to the first person who demonstrates a time event that is not a kinetic energy event...
Yeah, but you're only renting real estate from God (or the supreme being of your choice, or the universe), you don't really own it.
The trick is that the bills are all from the United States of Western America del Sur year 2041.
I'm not pleased by any reiteration of that particular irrational and easily debunked fallacy, and its inclusion in the intro to what purports to be scholarly work causes me to view that work's claims to scholarship with great suspicion.
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